WATERWAYS : poetry in the Mainstreamf WATERWAYS: Poctry in the Mainstream | June 1995 and Iam waiting for the discovery ofa new symbolic western frontier Lasresce Rertingheti ax excerpt from "Oral Messages" 1WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream Volume 16 Number 6 June, 1995 Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher Thomas Perry, Assistant contents Matt Dennison 4H. Edgar Hix 15-16 Gerteude Morris 33-35 Sc. Mary An Henn, 5 Lyn Lifshin Kic Knight 36-39 Ida Fasel 6-7 Joy Hewitt Mann Duane Locke 40 Geoff Stevens 8-9 WillInman Ruth Daigon 41-45 John Grey 10 Joan Payne Kincaid David Michael Nixon 46 Sylvia Manning 11-13 “Terry Thomas Albert Hufistickler 47-56 Giovanni Malito 14 Charles Pierre Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions ~- $20 a year. Sample issues -$2.60 (includes postage). Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self addressed envelope. Waterways, 393 St. Pauls Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10304-2127 © 1995, Ten Penny Players Inc. 1995 themes excerpted from Lavirence Ferlingherti: A Coney Island of che Mind. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghest, Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 2You Are My Sunshine Matt Dennison The pors, the pans, the walls ‘The young mother smiles at the babe in her arms ‘The first, the last, the only Luxury item she will ever possess.Standing on ‘Tipzoe Sr. Mary Ann Henn New to the world she reaches for her mother's hand so high above her Innocence flows from her eyes from her smile "Let's go slow" her mother whispers but her feet patter quickly away She doesn't speak English yet.Growing Up Ida Fasel What is growth beyond the mark crayoned on the kitchen wall? Almost 13, I was raised to a level of vividness with a novel I took in secret, in person, like Jo March, to the Daily Kennebec Journal, the only publisher in town I knew of. Twas tall for my age and in my mother's hat-with-a-veil taller. But not tall enough. When after the diploma, after storming heaven with Plato and Brahms, 6 did I get to know what I had only learned about? In my brush with life bucking the hostile voices, taking tawdry jobs, turning the cheek, having the good strong words, never speaking up. ‘When J was carried over the threshold of intimacy nobody told me it was a toll bridge to be paid for with many crossings ahead. ‘When did I come into adult feelings? Te took so long for the fine sense of heart and mind as one to wrestle with pure concentment and win.Running Stream Ida Fasel Beams of sun, gleams of water: marsh marigolds along the banks of the stream that ran by our house -- the hidden beginning to show golden nuggets of great radiance, gifts of May to open and share with a breeze like gossamer and water's gentle undertone. In summer months I took measure of their thriving, Then the stream silenced in sand., The blossoms Jost their necessary watery floor. How did I know I stood in a holy place? In the midst of over-and-done with Iwas given thoughts of over-and over-again. The familiar wonders about me remain a mystery but still hold the light they cast upon a pattern beautiful and orderly as an Amish farm: eternal life ever present in the come-and-go of time,Obelisks Geoff Stevens Chiselling wind whetted by the rain has cut the hillstone left the sculptured granite cores to frown out upon fields of farms, their moorland grass squared off by walls of rocks. Monuments to time, the weathered shepherds stand and count the flocks of clouds that drift across the sky, and nod acquaintance to the Georgian farmhouse, each casement window a stare-back and unyielding eye.In Dead of Night Geoff Stevens In dead of night impenetrable black forests of clouds fill the sky obliterate all sign of life ~ except for yourself; you are cut off by the sea on whose waves the moonlight bobs like blossom scattered ona lawn beneath a cherry tree. Mountain land cut like a saw-edge jaws its teeth in shadow from across the bay.Walk Home from the Store Christmas Eve, 1993 John Grey ‘The lake, a ward of its thick floor of ice. ‘Trees, bare and denuded, bony as an old man's fingers, the ones I keep a secret from the cold in these new lambskins. From the store, past the second last house, snow, that great democratizer slows us to the same speed. David is concerned for my health, this mechanism that, when pressed, still propels me forward. 10 From buried front yard, old Joe Barnett lightens to the lack of cars, shakes his shovel like a pillow. A kind word forms in his jaw and his mouth adapts accordingly. And we are all dressed the same here, parkas, gloves and jeans. Our elothes kowtow to the family resemblance even if we don't. Lam retracing steps, they make new ones. Our tracks, deep and glistening, new as babies, . know no difference,In 1922 Sylvia Manning mama was born and so was the town's textile mill and so was mitleown on its own by the Guadalupe her dad pushed a canteen cart, with hot dogs or such, something workers could chew down without leaving their alleys during the Depression when milltown rats (as they were known) aceded credit to feed cheir families he workéd in the dye room, red-headed Irish rake of a grocer by then, running credit slips on and on for a living while mama by then who was old enough to make change worked the counter of the grocery, ace her pay in candy when things got slow when the thread mill closed in Belton whole families walked to Big Mama's (her mother's) milltown, hoping to get on with any room -- Wcard room, dye room, weave room, shipping room, seven o'clock, eleven o'clock, three o'clock shift or double-time her dad ran off with another red-head once, once the Depression ended and he relaxed from hot dye and no cash so that Big Mama came into her own then, began to manage things, began to hold tent meetings for a betzer millcown, more Calvinist, which was where you brought us back to, Mama, which was where I got my own sense of time which was where one day when nothing else would do you walked across the street to ask for work behind the steel doors with 1922 overhead and so the mill let us live, sent me to school, blasted shift changes into our inner ear, let workers go out white with fibre in their pores, poured dye into the river, made it indigo blue, and last of all, the month you died, sent you an $8.25 retirement check. 12 eeeNote to Explain Sylvia Manning Why I'm sick this morning is my learning they're still ki mountain lions in Scart County. (Ihave seen the hired killer.) Lam trying getting down to the essence of the pain in the ridges of my shoulder. ing Tam trying to recover froma wound-like piece of pain in the stretches of my flat skeleton. And 1am telling you I did not know after all this time but] know now that in Texas we kill cougars to this day in Starr County, and this explains it. June 9, 1992, Palmview 13From the Rocks Giovanni Malito A lone gray bird, outrider to fleet of slow-moving clouds, dim-dips, flying in shadows out over the growing darkness of advancing stars and storms. It saunters into the wind, the rain and the vast pit ofa great dark world where fogs do battle and the mists rise. 14 Ina rapture of flight on wings eager and palpitant it glories in chance between the long borders where foam and drift are the waves sundered. A lone gray bird, plunges and then rises from the waves that rear but crumble. There is a movement that dangles from its mouth, alone gray fish Thad seen from the rocks.Starship Portal H. Edgar Hix Twant a window into the night; the silent night whose angel stars sing no songs, fulfill no prophecies. Inecd a window into the night that is space where the billion billion stars are immortal days. Iwill sing no songs into that silence. My wordiess eyes will be praise enough when I have a window flecking her hair with stars and mirroring my face into the Black.Holy Night H, Edgar Hix Night without aliens. No UFOs Only stars. Silent stars like politicians telling us everything they want us to know, nothing they'd rather keep to themselves.“These Julys Lyn Lifshin fling back the smell of light in the grey living room light moving over the chocolate and pistachio comedy and tragedy lamp and the broken vase pussy willows hung on in suspended as the hot musk ssemed, Only the Campus theater was ait conditioned. I folded shorts all week in my uncle's department store where a fan didn’t do much, shifted my weight, checked twice a day hoping it would go down. I wondered if the darks haired man from the apple orchard would stop in for men's work boors, if I could pull my waist into 18 inches, not pass out. And when I might have something to write aboutBack in Providence Lyn Lifshin leaves on cobblestone long enough ago I could have a daughter older than I was, swirl around my ankles again and I think this was the first city I read my poems aloud to any one in, said to another graduate student they were Dylan Thomas’ pocms, mixed a few of my own in. 18 Tried to straighten long mahogany hair ina tub we lazer put dishes in, the spaghetti and lamb chops staining porcelain as the last year downs my dreams in a bed and breakfast of soft mauve and white braided rugs. My mother is suddenly heavy, with some thing growing in her belly, a new sister wanting to come to my house to live and tho somehow I know she is supposed to be very ° sick, I can'c see it or sce how not to say yes to her as I do to what I'm waiting to slam back to me from those days I'd drive a borrowed Chevy to this town on Friday. But its only the leaves, the hill the crunch of what is lapping at my ankles, I still taste smoke, sec lights of buildings where you can'c tell much as outlines dissolve"The Woman Who Starts the Film at the Portrait Gallery Lyn Lifshin with her grey bun and cane, poking thru the back row of fold up chairs Monday at 12:27. The wood in her hand could be the bow ofa ship parting water, some thing mowing grass. She's a wonian ona covered wagon bending prairie grass no one's moved thru as she unlocks a drawer the projector's in fills the room with Japan or an Indian legend of a fickle woman who's punished, given a man made of rags to love who meks as she tries to touch him, asks if the volume isok backs outas if lip reading the samurai's last words only she can run backwardsThe Mad Girl's Ruby Lyn Lifshin came, like the white cat she wanted on her sixth birthday, to the door almost on the day she was born give or take about 4 weeks. Aruby Friday, her ankle a welt of garnet on the way to therapy past tables meceors could have fallen on the white linen of spelling an s.0.S. so she Stops, 20 sucked coward a table of rings jasper and tigers eye cool in her palms as granite, jasper and onyx the back of her knees sweating she sits in black grass surrounded by the stones clumps of frozen blood or tears mixed with wine the ruby stains her fingers puts the color of lips on her Knuckles a frozen rose her mother always wanted to get named her Rose Devorah fora grandmother with some thing in her throat, Devorah of the roses, a ruby birthday, took her daughter at 6 to Ruby Fu's where she flooded rice with soy sauce aclot of rose glass, deeper than quartz she can see her mother beaming over the tables past amber from Poland could it be ruby for so little she swallows puts the ring she won't take off even when it snags lambs wool and rubbed cozton, a last chunk of sunset a piece of something torn. With a loop the mad girl holds ruby to the light sees pale blowches the black unfolding like some photograph in a dark room pan flares flames like the ones that make those she's attracted to unique, has their own beauty, is proof they're real 2aPeter Tripp Joy Hewice Mann He did it for a high cause, MS or something, stayed awake two hundred hours, they said, and the doctors were always in attendance, checking heart, Jungs and blood pressure. The first day was the hardest and he almost fell asleep, but then he couldn't have slept if he wanted to, after that. It was the worms, you see,spun cobwebs in his shoes and he coulda’ figure where they came from until he saw the doctor's tweed coat Iewas made of worms, furry ones, enwwining in themselves like an orgy of lovers, and it was then he knew the doctors were after him, maybe they’ were worms themselves or monsters of another sort, but what ever they were, he knew it was @ plot, and they were after him, and in the end he went quite insane. T've always thought that if I could get by on less sleep, I could write more poetry. I've always meant to try it, and maybe I will. Poets are insane anyway, aren't we?Coffee Ceremonies Joy Hewitt Mann Hiroko slips across the kitchen floor on toes of ive towhere the coffee waits, lights a Vantage, reads the paper her breath a whisper while her husband sleeps. Sitting in a zaisu she wonders who she is, drinks anocher coffee, does her face at the table while she watches cable TV and drinks another coffee. "Today" is on; * 24 today goes on and on, ballecjazz, fast lunch coffee, th friends, tofu soup and English classes, swimming lessons, does her face again, goes shopping and home to clean the house... published in Japanophile, 1993 as 'American Geisha’The Day I Got My Wings Joy Hewitt Mana These surnmer migrations were the reluctant eases of my childhood, threading through the eyes of aunts, and uncles and cousins owice-removed, our way ouc west routed north to catch the cheapest rates at cheap motels where Mother loved "eating out’, my father sending back my hardboiled eggs (Lliked chem soft inside) that I'd have eaten raw if only the waitress -- and everyone -- wouldn't have looked at me so. Twas thirceen. Cousin George -- fourteen -- was in the john when I stumbled from his family bed, pushed the unlocked door, and collided with his eyes. A song throbbed in my trembling nest and 1, unsure as a newformed bird where its home should be, wanted frantically back into my shell of innocence, and George — fourteen -- lingered a little before he slammed the door.be still and know Will Inman newest frontier is frstest: center self: here genesis begins again and again, reaching infinite oUT, coiling infinite 1N: our sometime healing may be found in out-there pieces, yet wholeness moves tivo ways at once inspiral breathsurges from center, god cannot restore one who is not one with all that is and who is one with all needs no restoring, but no, never shzink back wanting, you always and already carry all that is past, all that now is, all shaping yet to be, listen to that inmost beat of skywi never did not know. 26 gs you will hear what's known in you you dida't know you paradox generates out of nothing: nothing thac is CAN be, yet here ies: we stretch our skulliibs, heartminds, sweating impossibles that keep affirming us to our thing really new works in how we Jearn to look, SEE, listen, HEAR what never was not. we only now discover out limits ace only us, what jacob’s ladders, what bridges, what pace probes, what BE STILL AND KNOW that furthest out-there blooms lotus in our deepest breath. September 4, 1994, Tucsonthe woods beyond the clearing Will Inman. (for Albert Hufftictler) Huff has his own way of knowing. He peels off externals. Layers and layers. He goes in until chere is no more out to go into. Then he starts pecling layers on the other side of IN, the place we call ZERO. The CLEARING. He even had a stroke to help him go beyond where poets are supposed to be able to go. Those inmost layers, ‘THE WOODS BEYOND THE CLEARING, he opens up but does not shed, he enters but does not violate. He's not only discovering,he's creating that other, that most most IN, that anti-gravity real dimension. It's the place dreams have roots in, where they come from to show us what we call REAL is not the only real there is. Huff is at home there, even if he has to go off balance in this world to get that far down deep into that other place. Ltry to go with him. but I don't yet have a wand he calls his cane and I keep forgetting to take off my shoes. May 5, 1995, TucsonSongbirds Joan Payne Kincaid Wait for some Messiah of animals and habicats while no one hears their final songs. 2930 Storm Terry Thomas A storm is coming in. Nerves hum like my old fence, bearing against gusts, dust driving gray spikes into wormed holes. Clothesline pole vibrates, evil tongue undoing cotton and silk innocence. Bums beg shelter, pelted with summer icc, but it's nice to have company in the closed kitchen. Listen, the wind tells tall tales, hail punctuating short sentences; we're penned ia this small room,breathing out on the loudest ticks from the old clock. "Say, doe, could we have some coffee?” Istir wind-scoured hands, slow with fixings, in no hurry..done. "Thanks, mister. Sure hits the spot.” But I hardly hear, listening carefully to that loose shingle chortling neglect, forgetfulness in peaceful hours. Over my boy's room, blown away too young, debris now in some big city. Pity we dida'c fix it together, (damned weather ~ damn me for neglect). Bet it'll come lopse, pushed away, careering into the next county. "Another cup buddy? Certainly nice of you to put me up. Nasty out there." Is he in some shelter? ...out of harsh words, wounding winds? Look at my short-time guest for the first time. Young, under lines, grime and too much time on the road. "Tell me, son, where is home?"‘Tuning Forks Gharles Pierre ‘The sailors are all ashore these days, and the emptiness they feel is expressed in silence. ‘There is no great voyaging over uncharted oceans now that the globe has become so familiar. Tonight, the ships drift almost unnoticed at their moorings, in stillness so complete that not even a lapping sound can be heard. 32 Yer high above the water, at the tops of the mastheads, the rigging of each craft rings ever gently through the d rings through the life of chis night, metal tines striking the mast, sounding the possible routes of uncharted passages. ‘The definite, constant pitch of each musical cone, the stark logic of our art, complete in itself, now fills the harbor, gracing the dark.Lost...Lizard Gertrude Morris when the pet lizard hiding in the convertible couch given to the salvation acmy was found sunning itself there on the window sill they thought it was aplastic toy but when it moved the police were called was it returned to the owner of the couch given totheaspoa or was itheld as an illegal alien wathey didn't say (from a news item) 3334 Coyotes Gertrude Morris Iewas hunger drove them down from Westchester along the parkway to the Bronx. ‘Three we know of. The first found run over on the soft shoulder. “There had to be a second (they mate for life.) Te was found in Van Cortlandt Park shot to death. If they were a pair there had to be cubs denned somewhere whimpering for the smell of her_nuzzling blindly for the soft furred breast. ic was hunger drove-them.canis latrans: coyote A third was captured in video browsing the graves of Woodlawn perhaps onthe scent of a vagrant vole a fat rabbit or plethora of pigeon frothed in gore. But what a skinny cannis latrans. What a sack of bones. No plumey tail. More squeak than howl. A starving dog scattering meager scat over bones too deep to dig. Wolf Dog Iwould save you if I could. I would release you far from highways parks and cities of the dead far from the hunting and the howling. (from a news item)36 ‘Wale Whitman Sees the First Women of War, 1861 Kit Knight Yankees say the Civil War began with the 33 hour cannon duel over Fort Sumter, But no one died then, Southerners call it ‘The War Between the States or The War of Northern Aggression. All Dixie wants is to be left alone with their fierce allegiance to states’ rights and their belief in slavery. The Brooklyn Standard sent me to Washington to report onthis first battle. We called it Bull Run and rebels called it The Battle of Manassas. And pecause of our industrial might--New York alone has more factories than all of the South--we expected a Union victory. Both armies were shockingly unprepared. Soldiers go into battle, but not till blood is spilled do they understand wounds and death, Manassas Junction is on Virginia soil and the defenders of home won. T watched the beaten and bewildered men in blue limp into this sogg; silent city; cheering crowds watched these soldiers leave. Now, we have over 1,000 men bleeding. More than 400 dead. As the ratcered remains stagger in, ewo aged ladies ~-beautiful--stand by a plank table handing out bread and making kettles of soup. The rain continues, all day, and the ladies continue, all day, silent, white-haired, giving food as tears stream down their cheeks. 3738 Dillinger's Niece, 1934: A Family Reunion Kic Knight Uncle Johnnie sed to buy me ~ penny packs of gum and both of us would lay on the floor--heads together-- seeing who could chew the most gum. I wrote him ten page letters while he was in prison, He knew when I got my first lipstick. Things happen in eight years. I guess things can get worse in this Great Depression; over a fourth of the folks can'tfind jobs. Ex-cons don't even count. Johnnie didn't have achance. Things happened. White sticking up a bank Johnnie told the people who entered that he was making amovic. He knocked over jails and mailed guns to prisons. Johnnie's skills were the stuff of legend. By the time he was named Public Enemy Number One, cops were affraid. When word gets out Johnnie is home for 2 visit, the police turn on their sirens six miles before they reach the farm. When Plainfield Rd. was widened, neighbors joked it was so John could leave faster. Two dozen of us were at the farm that day having apicnic. Grandpa continued wich his chores as Johnnie walked ~-a 43 cucked in his belt-- wich me, holding my hand and saying, clearly, he never killed anyone. Everybody knows who's staying here for the weekend. Even the bank president waved. Johnnie went to school with Owen, The FBI has an office in towa, Buc they're lower than a gophers gut and will wai dll i's right. A shot from behind. 3940 ‘The Face Duane Locke A nearby blue jay's sound secms distant at this time of year, a time when the sky shivers with silver rather than being fashionable in blue. Schoolyards with loose gray sand inside red bricks return and rain falls without being seen or leaving marks on the ground. A youth disappears into the surrounding air, Finds the hidden dampness cold. Hidden, the moisture that touches, thickens, congeals into the fine prine that is unseen on the document of his face.Detour Ruth Daigon she pilots the car up the cracked driveway into the street after the stop sign she changes her face and pulls into her other life every street's a new language with purple mouths of lilacs trees crowding horizons and mountains hanging in chains 4lwith a hand delivered from all heaviness she steers the car while her shadow on the windshield waits like an older sister the road snakes chead up the mountain tires hissing like wings steadily away from earth she's looking for a place where she can hear prologues of sun and rain where the dark eye of night closes where rivers have no permanent addresses she's looking for her wild-weed children all bark and wwigs 42 chirping through summer just about to become she's looking for the point where clock and compass meet then she'll sit i antique darkness drinking wine staring at the pa its waves drow she knows distance and numbers divide memory by half and by the time she's old there will be noching left to remember so she sits in silence the seat beside her empty and waiches the sky folding back fic g in salcand secretsBack Ruth Daigon Back reversing the flow pack through the looking glass up from the rabbit hole jn from out there, Back into the stunned silence of snow, a gray quiet a stripping clean to the roots and our breath making perfect circles. Back to Main Street with summer twilight spreading like fire in dry grass, the soft susurrus of a slow leak in the day. My hands stretching like ancennae now in this street now in that. Back to wrap that child's universe around me once again and warm this woman's frame.Penicillin Ruth Daigon whacif the bread box gives off memo: of that laboratory on Spadina Avenue and the bread becomes a special shade of green, don't throw it out. In honor of Sir Alexander Fleming, let it be. That mold's a miracle and if it smells so much the bercer. Strong cures give off strong smells. In my singing season when I pass that building twice a day, I was * safe inside that charmed circle still protecting me. 44 Although L carry deep inside a medley of strong fumes, gailic to ward off polio, mustard plasters for pneumonia, fish oil to make me live hundred years, none have the magic properties of Alexander Fleming's mold. Itholds the flavor of conservatory corridors, Floodlights, applause, my own special mail box. And lately, it reminds me of quick springs, slow.autumas, my mouth singing in the winter.Friday Ruth Daigon Friday happens all at once. It wakes with soft stirrings and floats toward the husk of day. Friday tastes of apples and slivered almonds crunched slowly, che snick of seeds ‘Against tongues as juice trickles down. Friday serenades with violins and fresh cadences of sound, a day of cool amazement, deep breathing and litanies of light. On Friday, children leave school early, mothers wax floors and bake poppy seed cookies. Friday is a river of small shapes, snowmelt, sun- streaks and palmsmooth winds. After climbing Friday's tree, you can perch on the highest branch and all the astonishments wiap around you.46 ‘The Flak May Plant a War Inside Your Body David Michael Nixon Beware the swirling chunks of metal that float in every human landscape. Often they nestle near the bone, where no sharp knife can safely reach them, and there they ache on cold mornings, until the body longs to purge them, and so may launch a storm of metal bwisting toward every flying, crawling thing.Maintenance Albert Huffstickler Sylvia says that Tony is the best person at maintenance she ever saw. Sylvia and I talk a lot about maintenance, maintenance being all those things that you have to do to keep your life going so that you can use the litle time remaining to do what you want to or to pursue your real life's goal, which certainly isn't maintenance. Maintenance involves a lot of things; it's anyching that has to be done from going to work to buying groceries to cleaning house (occasionally), paying bills, fixing a lamp that doesn't work, replacing alight bulb, you name it. It's everything 47J || | that you don't particularly want to do and have to do anyway. And i's important. It's important because it keeps you going and so it's saying yes to life in a very significene way. I would guess chat half the people in asylums and on the streets are there not because they can’ do the imporcanc things but because they can't do the unimportane things: maintenance. Some days, it’ standing at the boctom of a very high hill and looking wey up to the top. There are fifty things you have to do and when you get done, then maybe you'll have a little time to do what you want to, So you either stand there at the bottom of the hill or you start climbing, And how do you climb? One step ata time. And when you getto the top, 48 there won't be any trumpets sounding or flags waving. There will just be chac little bic of time you can call your own. And the thing about maincenance is chat i's never done so the nex: day you got up and there's chat same very high hill co climb. And chat's it. Maintenance is how you pay your dues. If you're rich, you probably pay somebody else to do your maintenance. If you're not, you dog it on through because maintenance is the glue that holds your life together. And it’s the real secret of Zen because what Zen is saying is, "If you just get the bed m: enlightenment will take care of itself." And if you want to know how I figured all this oue, well, I gocit the same place Sylvia did: from Tony, wt Manana, Wimberly TX,Now. 1994_ 1 Never Slept in a Laundromat Albert Huffstickler [never slept in a laundromat put I hitchhiked once from L. A. to San Diego following a girl from Phoenix and, broke and not knowing what to do, hit on the idca of chrowing myself - on the mercies of some relatives who were not too glad to see me so I left and went back up the blue Pacific coast to L. A. and finally called home (collect) for money. Tenvy the people who do naturally the things I had to learn by sate— and continue to do by rote though it's easier now some days. Buc here's the ching: sometimes I'll see one of those people who do things naturally and he'll be sitting by himself staring off and he'll have this look in his eyes — bafflement, sorrow, fear-like he hasn't the slightest idea where he's going. And J want to walk up to him and just ask, "Did you ever sleep in 2 Jaundromac?" But I don't, of course. That's one of the first things I learned by rote: you don’t ask questions like that first appeared in Coal City Review Laweence KS 1994 49Reading at the State Mental Hospical Albert Hufis Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they act out Somethings they listen and act out. But when they listen, you can read anythin, they've been there. And the scarred, emotio’ lift to you like broken, dis and there's a stillness someti lasting only for a fraction of a second maybe but we're all richer for it. Nothing's too heavy: ravaged faces rded flowers 50 ‘Then they got up and read their own stuff: rnostly moonjune, how I love you, how I cried when you left. One woman sang hers in a little-giel voice and afterwards on bree’ she was still singing in the background, asad litle voice chat went on and on, following me home and to bed and inco my sleep still singing and I don't remember what the words were but I chink she was teliing Life that she forgave it for what chey had done to each other. first published Arrowsmith No. 5, 1995, Bellaire, TX| aa Hallowecn Day, Ruta Maya Coffee House Albert Huffstickler I shall watch the seasons turn on the porch of Ruta Maya, turning into the early morning city. I don't know how the wind will be on this porch when winter comes. The sun was hot this summer so Tcame early. Now it's October, the days mild. Some days it rains. One night I read poetry here~inside— with the stars and the city night outside, people sitting on the porch smoking and talking, a small community formed of the city night, che scars watching benignly, not commenting. Tt was a good night. Now, this morning in late October, I sit warching the traffic bunch and flow, the air grey. My dead appear around me unsummoned-- as they always do this day. I bless them. ‘They bless me. Js chere anything you want?" they ask. I tell chem. They listen without comment and vanish without a trace. And I siton in grey October, anticipating winter, pondering 51a dream I had last night of a golden woman whose smallest movement I could feel in my space even when she was some- where else. And I ponder the beauty of chat and balance icagainst the feeling of invasion that comes knowing that someone is in your space without your bidding, While October moves greyly on to its death and I chink again how cold it will be on this porch in winter, think how the seasons turn with me on this porch and hover flickering 52 somewhere out on the horizon, a nameless flicker of light against the city's grey. And it will be cold, cold and it will come to me that Tl join my dead someday not coo far off. And how will that be? And will there bea golden presence in my space then--without my bidding? And what will she say? from Mysterious Wisteria , No. 8, 1994, Lorain OHHim and Jack Albert Huffstickler He said he was on the road because he was looking for a place where his demon couldn't find him. He said his demon was named Jack and the only reason he could find for that name was that it was always trying to jack him around and so far ithad succeeded. Jack had beaten his first wife bloody and he'd left 53with the law on his trail and he'd crossed half the country be- for he stopped and thought he'd found a place where Jack couldn't find him. He even changed his name--from what to what he didn't feel obliged to say-- and thought he'd finally gotten rid of him but then one day the guy he was washing dishes for in the kitchen of the Half-Moon diner 54 just looked at him the wrong way and Jack happened to have a chef's knife he was washing in his hand, He hadn'c stopped since he lefe there. He thought he'd just stay on the road. He didn't think there was any place he could go where Jack couldn't find him but maybe if he'd just keep going long enough he could outlive the son ofa bitch. from Mysterious Wisteria No. 8, 1994, Lorain OHThe Blue Peace Albert Huffstickler It-was early morning when Hennessey reached the Pacific, having climbed through layer after layer of smog, cluster after cluster of high tech storchouses and suburban sprawl. Suddenly, it cleared and he burst upward into mountains and light, a highway arching and turning above the sea. He pulled the battered, dusty Toyota into a rest area and just sat there. If there was a place beyond exhaustion, that was where Hennessey was. Fora long time, he didn't move, just sat there, eyes closed, His mind was totally empty. Hennessey knew that he was somewhere he had never been before, somewhere drugs could never take him.56 Finally, after hours it seemed, he climbed out of the car and walked over to the edge and stood scaring down into the ocean. And yes, ic was blue. The blue Pacific. The blue peace. Hennessey was weary to his soul. The sight of the blue waves lulled him, They seemed to wash their way inside him. The blue Pacific, The blue peace. Hennessey felc the blue peace inside him now and knew that it was this that he had travelled all those anguished miles for, He stood a while longer staring down, then turned and walked slowly back to the car. Climbing in, he started the engine, turned the nose toward che edge of the cliff and drove slowly over it, eyes fixed calmly ahead, stecring carefully all the way down to the blue waters. from Hung Ryse, V.1., No, 12, Seatcle WA 1994.