Chuck Salmons
Surviving the Eremocene
by Chuck Salmons
ISBN: 978-1-962405-32-4
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Chuck Salmons has served as a leader for the Ohio Poetry Association for more than a decade. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review, The Fib Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Main Street Rag, Pudding Magazine, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has published three poetry collections: Stargazer Suite (11thour Press), Patch Job (NightBallet Press), and The Grace of Gazing Inward: Poems in Response to the Art of Alice Carpenter (Dos Madres Press). Chuck received a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for poetry, and he performs with the poetry trio Concrete Wink. Find him at chucksalmons.com
How Not to Spell Cello
In our family the only instruments that mattered
were guitars and drums, maybe a banjo
plucked with perfection by Dr. Ralph Stanley
on my grandfather’s AM radio every Sunday
after service at Hilock Baptist Church.
Finer stringed instruments were expensive
things that other kids learned to play—
kids whose parents worked for banks and
accounting firms. Who could afford
dance lessons and ski club memberships
or listened to Händel, Bach, and Brahms.
Kids raised Catholic or maybe Episcopalian,
their sermons steeped in the beauty of
Latin chants and not hellfire, damnation.
They walked out of stone cathedrals
with stained-glass windows feeling purified.
We walked out of our chaste, white church afraid
even to ask real questions, the ones our
school teachers wanted to answer but
refrained for fear of retribution by parents
who saw education as a sanitized means to
an end where their children grab a diploma
and head either to recruitment office or steel mill.
My parents played Elvis, the Stones, Skynyrd.
No piccolos or violas in their tunes.
No cellos either, with or without an h.
When I stepped off the stage during fifth grade
spelling bee at Stockbridge Elementary,
I knew Adam Fisher would be the last student
standing. He would receive his trophy and
a handshake from the school principal,
and walk off the stage, into the arms
of his parents well dressed and quietly smiling
as if they had been moved by yet another
performance by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra.
