TCNJ

31 SPRING 2021 TM: In "A Field of Finches," you played with space. Why did you choose to write it that way? GC: That's a very enlightened ques- tion. I think the aesthetics on the page are very important and space says a lot. To me, this poem was about breath and sound. And the birds singing. But also, it was about loss. They gave their eyesight so they would sing more sweetly. I found that penetrating. And there's just something about those spaces that honor that. Like stopping a moment and saying a prayer almost. TM: Tell us about yourself. You are a Jersey girl, right? GC: I was born in Trenton, yes, 1932. We lived in the western part of Trenton, not the Italian section. That was unusual for a native-born Italian. We lived in the more Jewish and Anglo area. I never knew why until after my father died and I found out he was Jewish. My father's side, they were very intel- lectual — doctors, lawyers, and physicists. My mother's family, they were all from Sicily, and they were entrepreneurial because people had to make a living. So there was a class difference in a way. My grandmother owned The Venice Restaurant on Warren Street. It was the first Italian restaurant in Trenton. So there was all our Italian-ness. Every word in "Tomato Pies" is from my blood. My grandmother was the first feminist I ever knew. She had seven children and started the restaurant in a man's part of town. She never held me on her lap or baked a cake. But look what she did. TOMATO PIES, 25 Cents Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother's restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey. My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

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