Halloween In New England by Peter Dellolio

homage to “Gas” by Edward Hopper

Today we should think of what a dented orange gasoline can would look like somewhere on a road in New England.  It is sometime in the 1940s and it is Halloween and there is a blue and white gas pump at the filling station where the can sits next to a yellow wooden rest room.  It is Halloween night on a country road and the office window is open and there are soft waves of big band music coming out of the large brown radio next to the red cash register.  We should recognize the thundering paper as cavernous empty old shopping bags.  Five children have already cried Trick or Treat!  The manager smilingly dumps heavy clusters of candy into each child’s bag, echoing the kettle drum from the jazz orchestra while his helper augments the effect by giving the empty gasoline can several rhythmic taps. The brightly lit office is a gigantic geometrical owl and the children follow their father’s flashlight as it slices up the breezy black road.

Born 1956 New York City. Went to Nazareth High School and New York University. Graduated 1978: BA Cinema Studies; BFA Film Production. Poetry, prose-poems, fiction, short plays, art work, and critical essays published in over 80 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Poetry collections “A Box Of Crazy Toys” published 2018 by Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions; “Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces” published February 2023 and “Roller Coasters Made Of Dream Space” published November 2023 by Cyberwit/Rochak Publishing. Chapters from his critical study of Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock’s Cinematic World: Shocks of Perception and the Collapse of the Rational) published in The Midwest Quarterly Literature/Film Quarterly, Kinema, Flickhead, and North Dakota Quarterly since 2006. Dramatika Press published a volume of his one-act plays in 1983. From this collection, The Seeker appeared in an issue of Collages & Bricolages and Stopping On One’s Way was recently published in Synchronized Chaos Journal. Contributing editor for NYArts Magazine, writing art and film reviews; also wrote monographs on several new artists. Co-Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Artscape2000, a prestigious, award-winning, art e-zine. Taught poetry and art for LEAP. He is an artist himself: https://www.saatchiart.com/peterdellolio.com. His paintings and 3D works offer abstract images of famous people in all walks of life who have died tragically at a young age. He lives in Brooklyn. @CrazyToize

Painting – Edward Hopper. Gas. 1940 

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