Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I didn’t want to take a trial. I was scared to take a trial, so I took a year. Legal Aid told me
I might get a two to six if I lost the trial. That’s a lie. I could have got the maximum. He
just wanted me to take the trial. Lower East Side José Rivera, STREAMS 2, 1988
Sweet mothers, jail moms,
with stomachs big and round,
full of so much life
in such a place, a state of
bars and slamming doors,
hard core times; young mothers,
babes with babies, pretty moms,
used and abused. Jailed mothers,
hope your babies stay free..
Young Mothers in Jail Dorothy Jaspers, STREAMS 3, 1989
WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 19 Numbers 2/3 February/March, 1998
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Assistant
contents
Herman Slotkin 4-6 Joy Hewitt Mann 26-29
Johnny Jackson 7-9 Joan Payne Kincaid 30-33
Geoff Stevens 10-11 Rachel MacLean 34-36
Tyrone Garvin 12-14 Barbara Fisher 37-40
Big Ant 15-17 Richard Alan Spiegel 41-49
Ida Fasel 18-23 Albert Huffstickler 50-51
Johanna Herrick 24-25
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
© 1998, Ten Penny Players Inc.
Punishment - Herman Slotkin
4
When they have sprung the trap,
thrown the switch,
fired the gun,
pressed the plunger,
will the punishment finally be enough?
5
Who’s Listening? - Herman Slotkin
When the chimneys of Auschwitz sent smokes and smells around the earth,
I prayed for an end to killing and revenge.
Nobody answered.
7
but I do
know about a beat up face.
Night
after night
the blood
trickled
down
my mother’s face.
Night after night
I hid from the fear
that I could not erase.
And behind my mother’s smile
was a frown
and a pain that I ignored.
And so
8
The beating continued
until he
stabbed her
and then
he watched her
blood
and tears
fall down
for the
last time.
9
Geoff Stevens
Prison exists
both sides of the bars
how long is life?
10
Geoff Stevens
Behind bars
there is time
and space
to squeeze through;
don’t wait until
you grow big
as prison can become congenital,
something in the cells.
11
Life Struggles - Tyrone Garvin (aka Mark Holden)
12
In the bed one night I heard a scream.
I got up and looked around.
No one was there.
14
Alone - Big Ant
17
Where the Light Falls - Ida Fasel
Georges de le Tour, The Newborn Child, Rennes
Abruptly, out of the immense dark,
a small circle of light picks out three,
holds them as they are, not still lifes
but pulsations of still life, awesome
as a Hebrew letter coming to a point,
softer, gentler, more iridescent spelled out.
A cameo carved with two women and a child.
Townspeople. The artist’s mother
and his wife. Any older woman, mother, child.
Anne directing the light to fall on Mary
and hold in her gaze the child in her lap.
They look as if they had been to a shrine
and wear its medal of pilgrimage in their face.
18
Woman, behold thy son:
head in the full force of light,
eyes closed, nose a lump of unformed clay,
sleeping mouth open to what dreaming? --
swaddled or shrouded, destined
to live his death forever alive,
mysterious as the sperm of spirit
that brought him into blood.
22
She is too tall for the frame
and bends her head to him.
Only a gleam from the candle
reaches his gaunt eyes meeting hers.
In that still moment of the brush
does her open hand hovering over his head
reinforce her rebuking tongue or resist
the old conjugal need to touch?
23
This time, different for sure - Johanna Herrick
25
Nevada Tickets - Joy Hewitt Mann
The fat lady and her daughter
lean on the counter, peeling
Nevadas, throwing winners
toward the store owner,
tossing losers at the basket
and missing.
I balance three cans of cat food,
four litres of milk
in my arms, clutch
a ten dollar bill in my fist.
The milk is cold against my chest
the money softening, but
they want their winnings in tickets.
26
The owner counts them out
by twos. I shift foot to foot
as milk bags slip lower, catching my breath
like the first movement of an unborn child.
They laugh.
I wait
while they close a deal for chips
and pop and a carton of cigarettes and
squeeze side by side through the door.
I smile at the woman behind the counter.
“Welfare cases, “ she snorts.
28
Her hair is caught on icebergs,
lifted by Arctic terns to float
above the frigid clouds;
in jungles it rests on flowers two feet wide
that smell of her flesh, rides
on panthers
black fur rippling like liquid coal, padding
with the sound of a baby’s breath.
29
All You Need
Joan Payne Kincaid
31
Babies - Joan Payne Kincaid
33
Mother with Child - Rachel MacLean
36
Rhetorical Questions -- Barbara Fisher
37
I’ll work out a payment plan
After all they did save his life
40
Musings -- Richard Alan Spiegel
Last Thursday
I drove out to Rikers Island
to meet with teachers
students and the principal
who was making
pancakes for the paras.
42
Island Academy
is a prefabricated rectangle,
a warren of classrooms
and offices
with a bubble
for the c.o.
43
And that force directing each motion
to turn in upon itself without
opening the self to another's
grasp -- must contend with a counter force
turning on the outside of the act
and closing upon the gesture's aim.
44
There are frequent exemptions
flung shivering into the dreadful
uncertain. Memories hold
the times she would dance upon a whim,
take pleasure for her comfort,
and weep her passage in ecstasy.
Those who
are expelled
from their class
or barred entry
to their school
will still be taught.
45
After hiding under
tables and over-
turning desks, he
came with me
to the computer lab
to tell his story.
Then he wrestled
with his
printed words;
struggling
with characters
in context.
46
With uncertainty I trace your form
dissolving into random day dreams,
into a tense soft sung turbulence
bleeding through the silent and still touch
where I lose myself in curves of light,
planes of pressure, and the open chord . . .
47
Your city, with her sorrows
in hiding like fugitive lovers
who look out soot paned windows
on ambiguous grey stained courtyards
abiding lost years' secrets,
borrows solace from urban jug bands.
48
Working in acryllics, she once
painted - on the bathtub in the kitchen
of the railroad apartment
we sublet on East Fifth Street
near Avenue A - flower petals,
49
Common Ground - Albert Huffstickler
Everybody thinks that he’s the only one that’s flawed
or that he has a particularly magnificent and disgusting
flaw that no one else could possibly have or even imagine.
And, of course, that flaw is a secret that must be kept
because to divulge it would mean instant and total rejection.
So we each sit there in his cave holding tightly to his
secret -- which, of course, we pretend we don’t have -- and
then talk about other things, the weather, our favorite
movie star, or better still, we watch TV and don’t talk
at all. And all this time we’re guarding our secret flaw
for fear that the other person will discover it and all
hope of intimacy will be forever and totally destroyed.
Meanwhile, of course, any hope of intimacy has vanish.
What to do? What to do? It never occurs to us to simply
50
blurt it out. No, that would be too disgusting, too
shameful. Instead, we let the moment slip. And one
moment slips into another and we’re tobogganing into
nowhere. And still we sit and nurse our awful secret while
our dreams at night get stranger and stranger and our dreams
by day get lonelier and lonelier until we’re the only person
left in the whole world. And all this happens without it
once occurring to us that the other person might be equally
flawed and equally alienated and just waiting for someone
to come along who is also flawed enough to understand. No,
it never once enters our mind that that fluidness and that
alienation of which we’re so ashamed just might be a bond,
that if all of us are alienated, then alienation itself is
a part of our common ground.
51