Ironhood E-Book

Raymond Luczak

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 82

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

"This book sees all. Not everything, but all. There's a difference." --John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate
In Ironhood, the acclaimed poet Raymond Luczak recalls the neighbors and shopkeepers he once knew while growing up in Ironwood, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. They included a scruffy man who smoked cheap cigars while tending to his fragrant backyard garden, a cat-eyed woman who stood watch over a sea of typewriters, a bald jeweler whose dexterous fingers repaired a watch's minuscule innards, and tired cashiers in red smocks who dreamed at the western edge of town.
"These poems are an antidote to the language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a place much mythologized, but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision." --M. Bartley Seigel, author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold
"We meet the shops, landscape, and people of a working-class Iron Range town barely touched by waves of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is an incisive exploration of growing up in a small town, where one can be suffocatingly known and intimately estranged at the same time." --Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and the Rust
RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of 38 books, including Animals Out-There W-i-l-d, once upon a twin, and Compassion, Michigan. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
From Modern History Press

Leseprobe

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luczak, Raymond, 1965- author

Title: Ironhood : poems / Raymond Luczak.

Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Modern History Press, 2025. | Series: Yooper Poetry Series ; 4 | Summary: “Ironhood is a lyrical memoir-in-poems that revisits Ironwood, Michigan, through the eyes of a Deaf, gay child growing up amid hardship, estrangement, and resilience. Luczak transforms memories of family, classmates, and small-town life into vivid portraits, balancing grief and alienation with wonder, defiance, and the enduring power of poetry”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025038975 (print) | LCCN 2025038976 (ebook) | ISBN 9798896560128 paperback | ISBN 9798896560135 hardcover | ISBN 9798896560142 epub

Subjects: LCGFT: Autobiographical poetry

Classification: LCC PS3562.U2554 I76 2025 (print) | LCC PS3562.U2554 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23/eng/20250903

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025038975

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025038976

Author’s Disclaimer: It has been over 40 years since I lived in Ironwood, Michigan. Although almost every person named in the book has died, it has never been my intention to defame anyone while trying to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them.

Ironhood: Poems

Copyright © 2025 by Raymond Luczak.

All Rights Reserved.

Book #4 in the Yooper Poetry Series

979-8-89656-012-8 paperback

979-8-89656-013-5 hardcover

979-8-89656-014-2 eBook

Cover design: Mona Z. Kraculdy

Cover photograph: Unknown

Author photograph: Raymond Luczak

Published by

Modern History Press

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

5145 Pontiac Trail

[email protected]

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Toll-free 888-761-6268

Distributed by Ingram Group (USA/CAN/AU/EU)

Eleanor Dallatorre Fraites

(1919–1999)

&

James P. Albert

(1958–2021)

Images from top to bottom: Downtown Ironwood, Year Unknown (Vintage Postcard, E.C. Kropp Company). Downtown Ironwood, Looking West on Aurora Street, 1990s (Raymond Luczak).

Contents

I.

One Day a Spaceship Will Land Right Here in Ironwood

II.

Mrofchak’s

The Bump in Front of Mrs. Kichak’s House

How Late the Night

Zarimba’s

Ada Marecki Valko

That One Time I Fell Asleep in the Garden Behind the Three-Stall Garage

Segueing

Colonial Skateland

Rosie Gust’s Polka Dance

The Watchdog

A. Lanfear Norrie School

Bricks Across West Oak Street

The Tire

The Curve

Lake Superior District Power Company Parking Lot

III.

The Winds of Ironwood

That One Time I Got Startled in Johnson Music Store

McLellan’s

Diamond Shoppe

News Record Printing and Supply

The Unfurling

The Lighthouse

Joseph S. Kutniewicz

1000 North Hemlock Street

Riggs Office Supplies

Unstrung

The Substation

Fur

Charles (“Chuck”) Lewinski

The North Country Sun

IV.

Mansfield Street Viaduct

Sacrifices

Nameless Men Wearing Those Caps

John (“Curley”) Krainak

My First History Teacher

Ronnie’s Camera and Sound

The Loner 1980

Raymond F. Burchell, D.D.S.

Modern Portrait

Pamida Discount Store

Gogebic County Fairgrounds

Tumbleweeding

Jacquart’s

Eleanor Dallatorre Fraites

James P. Albert

V.

Buttercups

Acknowledgments

Images clockwise from top to bottom: Chicago and Northwestern Railroad Depot, 2011. Pocket Park, Downtown Ironwood, 2025. Suffolk Street, Looking North, 2025. Ironwood Memorial Building, 2025. Norrie Park, 2014. Street Corner, 2017. Statue of Angel, All Saints Catholic Academy, 2025 (Mark Ehrke). House, East Aurora Street, 2025 (Mark Ehrke). Below the section number: Behind the former News Record and Printing Supply, 2025 (Mark Ehrke). Smiling Tower, 2011. Flag, 2014. Closeup of World War I Doughboy, 2014. All photographs are by Raymond Luczak unless otherwise noted.

One Day a Spaceship Will Land Right Here in Ironwood

One day spacecraft creatures

completely foreign to us

will land right here in Ironwood

and find us humans quite peculiar

from the way we wear hoodies,

mom jeans, and snowmobile boots,

noting how some of us inhale

weird white thingies in our mouths,

puffing off an odd scent that lingers.

If they’re lucky, they’ll land here

in the summer when the greenery throws

shade on every sidewalk crack

clogged with cigarette butts

where dogs sniff before choosing another

tree to inspect and spray piss.

They’ll notice the lushly-lined cave-ins

bordering the southern side of downtown,

wondering what had transpired there.

Or maybe not: They may have reasons

completely beyond our comprehension

for their visit. Maybe we’re just research,

something like how we’ve been trying

to probe further into the stars

with our powerful-but-never-enough telescopes

for answers that take years to decode

and dissect in a language of wonder

before the meaning is lost forever.

*

Will our extraterrestrials hover up and down

Aurora Street, from the old Pamida

perched on the western end of town,

passing St. Vincent de Paul’s Store

and the Flagstar Bank? Would they even catch

a whiff of Joe’s Pasties drifting in the air

while vrooming up to the Carnegie Library

on the eastern end of downtown?

Would they have the ability to scan back in time

the ghost skeletons of stores and movie theaters

long gone and yet as if they’re still in place,

waiting to be seen again by the X-ray eyes of nostalgia?

Would they marvel at the sight of men and women

donning gloves and hats and overcoats and boots,

and shaking their heads at the dizzying heights of snowfall,

slowing down the streetcars jammed on the rails?

Would our visitors look even further back to see the unruly

men not knowing English and yet desperate to work

for pennies an hour down in the pits of iron ore,

its residue a fatal kiss that could metastasize

deep in the lungs, sparking a nasty cough after another

until nothing more could be done but to lay there,

trying not to see the eyes of Death hovering,

an unscented cloud snaking around those awaiting

the last breath of such broken husbands and fathers,

still aching for a gasp of their Old World,

and then back to the pits of hell for more.

*

If our extraterrestrials didn’t have the ability to time-travel,

would they wonder about the loneliness

of repurposed storefronts having seen better days?

Would anyone recall stores like McLellan’s,

Johnson Music Store, and Carlson’s Supermarket?

All of them are ghosts, repainted and restructured inside,

filled with trinkets of dust and memory.

That’s assuming, of course, that they’ll easily grasp

the concept of capitalism and its effect on the environment,

especially when Ironwood’s mines run dry,

when its inhabitants seek employment elsewhere,

when footsteps begin to sound hollow in downtown.

Would our visitors even speculate who we are?

Just what would they communicate about us

back on their home planet? Would they agree

with our strangely contradicting values, or would they

harumph at our behavior with the sadness of superiority?

Or would they become our new immigrants,

ready to save our planet from its inevitable demise?

Or have they come here to mine the last of our resources

to save their own kind from dying?

*

Would our extraterrestrials be able to convey images

of this downtown, proliferating like asteroids spewing

forth one pawnshop after another,

with an occasional rifle shop for good measure,

like there’s one right next to a dentistry,

and a Ben Franklin crafts store,

filled with relics that seem commonplace

enough not to seem so holy and respected?

Yet it’s the largest store in downtown.

And what’s this about a tattoo shop,

its array of sterilized tools and fat binders

swimming with design possibilities?

Would our visitors speculate why

anyone would want to inject ink into their skins?

Aren’t intact bodies sufficient enough?

Why are we so inefficient with our modes of travel?

All those cars and trucks parked on the street

seem so slow. How is it possible

that we haven’t yet cracked the elegant formula

against gravity? Look at our visitors.

Their vacant eyes may look unsettling to us,

but we forget how we may look unsettling to them,

which brings us back to the question of how

we are leading our lives right here in Ironwood.

Images clockwise from top to bottom: West Oak Street, Looking West, 1990s. Norrie School, 1990s. Woods Across the Street on West Oak Street, 2017. West Oak Street, Looking East, 1990s. Power Lines, West Oak Street, 2017. All photographs by Raymond Luczak.

Mrofchak’s

after Joseph W. Mrofchak (1929–2015)

Suited up and clean-

shaven, he knew how to

cut my vision into angles,

refracting from silk

into seams that en-

twined perfectly

into plaid. His ties

sheened and shimmered

like pantyhose

in the heat of light

spilling between

the heavy curtains

that shielded us

from the mannequins

sporting the latest

blazers with nary

a price tag in sight.

Seeing him patrol outside

from inside the doorway,

he was the first man

who impressed me

not with his suits

but with his bearing:

crisp but never over-

bearing or demanding.

He knew how to crack

a necessary smile,

a well-practiced handshake.

He also understood the weight

of first impressions,

which he handed to me,

only that he didn’t know

how much it’d weigh

in the grubby hands of

a deaf boy who had

thought the whole world

of his purple girl’s bike

soon to wonder

whether he’d even find

his own path.

The Bump in Front of Mrs. Kichak’s House