In one of Philadelphia’s gentrifying areas, below the underfunded rail at the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington, there is a door engraved with the letters “NCDL.” Barely visible at night, despite a clown illustration around it, this door doesn’t adequately warn the coulrophobic. Its location is itself a sad joke: going off the rails, clowns have improvised ways through socioeconomic transformations on the margins of mainstream entertainment while navigating cultural perceptions. Yet, inside you will find a clown-themed bar in which clowns survive only as decorations, a museum serving clown-inspired cocktails (like the zesty “Clown Punch”). Unless you go on a night that includes a Clown Slam: the slutty Christmas clown concerned with rent prices, the clown underperforming because he had “bad Chipotle,” the clown injecting pathos into the question “What happened to the milkman?”—who knows what you will find. The scariest thing that could happen is leaving with aspirations to be a clown.
Christos Kalli is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Muzzle, Ninth Letter, Adroit Journal, National Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, Faultline, and minnesota review. His reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, World Literature Today, and Poetry Northwest. Visit him at christoskalli.com.
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