WATERWAYS:

Poetry in the Mainstream

September, 1989

"All. gutters are as one

To that old race that has been thrust From off the curbstones of the world ... "

WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream

Volume 10, Number 8 September, 1989

Barbara Fisher & Richard Alan Spiegel--- Co-Editors

Thomas Perry - Intern Contents:

Page Joanrie Seltzer

Joan Payne Kincaid Gertrude Morris

Arthur Winfield Knight Kit Knight

Rose Romano

Ida Fasel

David Chorlton

Subscriptions - $20 for 11 issues; Sample copy $2. + .55 postage.

Checks payable to Waterways(393 St. Paul's Avenue, Staten Island, N.Y. 10304). Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a SASE.

1989 is devoted to "The Ghetto" by Lola Ridge and the responses by other poets to her words ©1989, Ten Penny Players, Inc.

4 5 6-8

9-13 14-15 16-17 18-24 25-27

Anne Shelley Albert Huffstickler Wael Abdelgawad Mary Schafer Susan Packie Susan Luther

Sister Mary Ann Henn Lowery McClendon Hilary Tham

28-34 35-40 41-46

47 48 49-52 53-54 55

56

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OUT OF ALASKA (OCTOBER 1988) - Joanne Seltzer

There are some who think trapped whales aren't worth saving and that the Eskimos should have slaughtered them

instead of opening air holes in the ice.

There are some who think humanity deserves part of the effort expended on three whales.

There are some. who think the rescue mission failed because the smallest whale died and the others

had battered noses and a hard swim ahead.

But some of us think the incident brings hope

to our sick planet and her inhabitants.

Perhaps men have an instinct for compassion which can be used against the destructive urge

that kills, rapes, mutilates, firebombs and pollutes.

Perhaps ice, to a gray whale, is a ghetto.

~ I

EVENlNGS - Joan Payne Kincaid

r In certain seasons

you can see themraccoons

emerging their masks from gutter sewers

to shriek

backyard dogs' all night barking then return

through gutter refuges taking night with them

5

AVENUE H R Gertrude Morris

These are the ruins of childhood: a window's eye blind with tin, broken sills where no one leans, the guts of dream spilled out.

This is the place

where boys swam naked in the river, I stole an iris that was like a face;

the gardener ran out and spanked me.

But 0, the springs were full of violets and peddlers sold marigolds,

the only sounds on summer mornings: clop, clop of horses' hooves,

bells, the cry of "I cash clothes."

All that was real melted away,

my father's ghost walks crooked floors. The sweet streets where I fought

with "immies,' (munition for baby wars.) are ruined like these

w here I pick my way--

through no man's Avenue B.

6

I remember their" stories

., "

wintry afternoons in Grandma's house

of childhood, ~e voyage to this place, ' Velvel the family drunk,

Aunt Celia who married in a hurry.

These photographs are all that's left, hope and innocence fading to brown,

beloved immigrants -- again.

OLD PHOTOGRAPHS - Gertrude Morris

They are hopeful and innocent

.' in sepia cardboard clothes worn hands formally on knees, their first pictures in

America.

One by one they dropped away

" like coin out of worn pockets;

Grandpa's red beard pointed to Heaven, Aunt Eva primped up plump as a bride, Dad; a "small, withered bird.

Here's one of mother before I was born: a gentle beauty in a long dress

sitting on a rock, cheek to cheek,

with her best friend Fanny.

7

In her green time she's forever eighteen, forever surprised

by green old age.

FOREVER GREEN - Gertrude Morris

She was eighteen

the summer she ran barefoot down the hill

to swim in the lake.

It was mid-summer,

the moon was a Peeping Tom in a tree.

For years

she went from boy to boy, too many to remember, too many to name.

She remembers

they,: swam naked in the rain.

8

BEAR RIVER TOM S:MITH: VANITY ~ Arthur Winfield Knight

I've never needed a gun

to keep the peace in Abilene.

N a one believed

I could maintain law and order with my fists,

but I've done it

without drawing a gun.

Hickok wore two

and they ran him out.

Some people say I'm vain, but what's wrong

with doing a job right

and feeling good about it?

When I go to arrest

two homesteaders

at the edge of town

one of them shoots me

in the chest.

I keep coming,

beating him to the ground, putting the cuffs on,

but his partner has an axe.

Even a big tree can be cut down, and the toughest man

has to fall. I know that,

even if I've never admitted it.

Everyone said

a crazed Texan would shoot me someday when I tried

to take his gun away

(there might be

some glory in that)

but a sodbuster ... Hell,

I hate dying like this.

9

BEATING JANINE ~ Arthur Winfield Knight

"I had a dream about you," J anine said.

Every semester or two

there's a coed who wants to sleep with her professor,

so I thought, Oh oh.

"In my dream we drove to the mall and. when we got there

you began beating me

for some reason,

and I was screaming for you to stop,

but you wouldn't

and the people there just kept watching."

J anine had been molested by an adult baby sitter

who was a friend of her mother's from the time she was 10

into he"r mid-teens,

and she was seeing a therapist.

I told her,

''I'm not a violent person."

"No," she said. "I guess not," almost disappointed, I thought.

10

Earlier in class, she'd asked how long I'd been married. Maybe she thought

I was ready for a change after 12 years.

"What do you think.

the dream means?" she asked. "Will you tell your wife?"

J anine wore a pale blue sweater and pale blue pants,

and her books were crushed against her breasts.

"I'd better go," I said, leaving her there in the hall. Unbeaten.

11

FRANK JAl\1ES: THE BOMB - Arthur Winfield Knight. I forgive all those people

who tried to kill me,

who wanted to lock me up. For that matter,

there's nothing to forgive. They were just doing their job. But I can't forgive the coward who shot Jesse in the back,

or the Pinkertons

for throwing the bomb into our mother's house. They blew off her right hand

and -killed a nine year old;

my half-brother

never got to grow up.

Robert and Allan Pinkerton claim it wasn't a bomb,

hut it blew up,

it exploded. BOOM.

Sounds like a bomb to me-the lying bastards--

and it did to the jury

that indicted them for murder but they had power, money, , so the case never came to trial. They can call me an outlaw,

but they can't call me a murderer. J esse and I never maimed women or killed innocent children. .

COLE YOUNGER: THE WHY OF IT ~ Arthur Winfield Knight

I don't know

if I can explain the why of it.

I rode with Quantrill beneath the black flag so long ago.

We'd fight all day,

the blood from our wounds seeping into the earth.

Union and Confederate dead were everywhere. The wheat that next summer was red.

that's how you got your name-but I never saw you again.

Time passed us all by. I never married.

Now I'm back in Missouri, but that's a long way

from Oklahoma,

and I'm an old man. Tired.

We had to grab

what love we could get. When you were born,

I told Belle

you were as pretty as a pearl--

Even if we managed to meet, what could I tell you, daughter? "I'm sorry, Pearl. rye never been

a father to you.

It's too late to be

a father to you now."

1/16th IROQUOIS ~ Kit Knight

Reading a book of Indian poetry (Adrian Louis is a half-breed),

I am reminded

of my dad's grandfather. I don't know his name nor did I ever hear any stories about him. I presume his squaw-mother was taken

by a white; maybe she went happily, tho. I don't know and it doesn't matter. By the time any Indian signs got to me, the blood had shifted.

My mother's fair Ukrainian looks prevailed in me. I've driven

thru neservations and been amazed by the squalor; I'd wonder,

"Wf;1y don't they leave? Later,

once ] got a feeble grasp

on economics, I understood part of the tax-fxee reason. But it's more,

much more, 14

a bone-sharp sense of tradition and feelings of home and hopeless~ess. Louis left his Nevada Paiute tribe

and reservation for decades. Earned an M.A. from Brown in Rhode Island. Ivy League. But he came back.

Adrian doesn't know why

but he had to come back .

to his people; he only knows

he's an Indian born on Indian land. Reading his poems

on the cheap-liquor-soaked pages the author says,

again and again,

fire water is responsible

for Indian problems. He doesn't know why his people drink, only that they do. Endless liquor stores have given his people

"courage and death."

Louis says, "There's something about being an Indian ... something in the heart." And I sense

my great great grandfather;

whose name I don't know,

would have understood.

15

first printed in the Russion River News, Guerneville, Ca., March 9 • March 15, 1989

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO ~ Rose Romano

So the author explains that the reason Italian immigrants were so often exploited is that they were used

to being exploited. They had always lived in slums; they were content to live in slums forever. Even

the padrone, his paesano, explains the author, said the Italian immigrant is so easy to exploit

it would be a shame not to.

The book jacket assures me that

the author, in his day a hundred

years ago, was a liberal and wrote

in defence of all immigrants and

poop people. Although new understanding, the book jacket e~Jllains, prevents us from considering rum a liberal today, he's worth

:veading as aground breaker. This .is pFogress.

16

BALANCE ~ Rose Romano

Surrounded by the Mediterranean, there is no water in the shacks of the peasants. A water bucket balanced on her head, a black scarf circling her creased olive face,

one hand shielding her eyes

from the surr-Iooking for water is

a woman's job=she walks one mile, two miles, three miles. She walks

down one flight, two flights, three flights of loose and creaking steps-getting the water is a woman's job-~ one hand protecting her nose and mouth from the smells, a black scarf circling her creased olive face, a water bucket balanced on her head. Surrounded by the homes of the middle class, there is no water in

the tenements of the poor.

17

People of the Book

arrival after arrival

one by one, your bodies exacerbated, parchmented removed like props

from dark into the dark

People of Memory

Bach, Goethe, Schiller; Liszt who lived and worked

in beautiful Weimar

bei Buchenwald

beautiful buchenwald

you must have asked

What difference had they made? -your looted souls glass crazed by fire, live nerves to ovens

a lift to toss and fill

the gullies of this chosen earth.

CADMIUM YELLOW- Ida Fasel

you must have asked What good the leaning late and reading;

to be the riddance

of those you helped exalt?

People of the Promise you must have thought those silent mornings the world was ending

but not in massive flames as astronomers said, your uneven faces mounted on barbed wire tipped back to sun

Where you were remembered

only to be added to and taken from, you knew the sun was dying cold.

People of Patience,

you changed the tone, you brushed in a little cadmium yellow

and held the fading warmth

like small regards. The Word rebounds.

FOR THE TIME BEING ~ Ida Fasel

All night he skirmished.

Words in his head tossed and turned. He slept sporadically, resumed

as if he'd never left off, picked

and switched and knew for the time being what had to stay, what had to go.

At his desk

he made the big gesture slashed out of print

"We must love one another or die."

He sank its absence deep in our flesh, Auden, why?

why?

CUTTING EDGE - Ida Fasel

The sticks and stones you throw break my legs and arms. In time) in the great dilemma of getting along,

I walk to what I love, I embrace again .

•

The names you lay on me with a laugh from your lofty self-feathered nest

grind me down. I hurt inside, unhealable. The culmination of taunt is holocaust.

21

SUBWAY RIDERS ~ Ida Fasel

Is there justification for a culture

that encourages such uncheerfullives? I make random stops from face to face. Human beings have such a wide range of sensibility--sight for distance,

sound for close-in, soft for comfort, smel1 for quality, taste for useful,

muscular for dancing, imagination-partnered. Why so early on a clear morning this uniform look of wariness, this inmost fear?

I THOUGHT I SAW A LIGHT - Ida Fasel

I read in a learned journal that pepper was the motive for finding America.

I'd rather believe it. was Pilgrims and Puritans

who came for religious freedom. I'm still looking.

It is not good, said God early, for man to be alone.

But what can I do?

I go from church to church and don't find any

to be free in.

WHERE YOU WILL FIND ME ~ Ida Fasel

I read somewhere that Lafayette took back to France

enough American soil to be buried in.

I'm as taken with the soil around my house, and my house steadily sinking into it, sometimes noisy, more often

g1iding like night, like a river

to its source,

among my relationships the one

most promising to stay with me to the end.

A 'little .known jewel -- how I danced when I made the postal zone secure with the last payment.

So~ethi?g interesting is sure to happen,

Allee said, My house confirms, '

llieaking roof, cracked furnace,

broken water main.

Mid-morning or in the early hours of afternoon my house is in the pure process

of attending to my needs.

At peace. And puts my mind at leisure with a lion's share of deep silence

that wipes out the wanted sign:

a grappling hook for the sands of time. What would be the point of it? --

the best moments oblivious of the clock. I stop wanting to change the world.

stop asking why the world was created in the first place, stop trembling at death.

I half remember my grandmother speaking of an apple --

Seek-No-Further she called it.

You cannot buy it any more by that name but in my house, a way in, a way out,

the planting goes on,

HOME ADDRESS - David Chorlton

My address is a habit.

I wake up in familiar space and live from room to room while home

is a word that governments seduce us with. Living anywhere

means sharing imperfections . . Local colour is fugitive.

It no longer matters

where my house is; the exchange rates of the world keep changing

and investors

beat the earth down

to develop it. Foreign policy pollutes us. Winds do not cleanse the wastes they carry, and people keep moving like industrial rains.

25

-David Chorlton

stoz den rigel fur die tar - Walter von der Vogelweide

Comb back the straw from the eyes of your house. Trim the vine

in your courtyard; this summer

the storks will raise their young on your chimney, while corncobs hang on the white

side walls, where

the old lady crouches in her long black dress. Give her some wine

and a basket to mend.

She is too old for carrying sticks, but listen when her lips uncurl and the mossy street

becomes a thoroughfare again. Follow her

to the apricot trees, the rushes .

and her wooden pew. Throw the shutters back for sun to warm her quilt.

When she has talked the herons back to their place at the lake,

she sinks beneath

the feathers in mid-sentence. Clear your table to its bones

and bolt the door.

Eat the smoked eel while it lasts.

26

HAND TO IIAND - David Chorlton

A field worker shields his eyes with one hand raised

against the light

and shade

Time runs through his hands and he cannot hold it,

but passes

disappearing beneath him into alkaline soil.

He pushes back

and dedicateshia fingers

to the earth. When he cannot speak the common language,· he shapes words with them

what he must to the next man, then breaks off

a mouthful of whatever is left for him-:" r

..! '-' J. -I- ~

and eats in silence. .

There are no seasons in his palms, only the weight of crops.

SHIFT - Anne Shelley 1.

My mother was pale as the moon in the city of our childhood.

She drifts in my mind,

beautiful, tranquilized,

her eyes

the color of lime.

We had books of paper ladies with pages of clothes to cut; being oldest

I scolded and bossed; I rook the prettiest

movie star dolls,

Audrey and Lana and Doris. Rita was dressed for a prince;

tiny paper tabs held her tilted crown.

We'd forget the real world, those long afternoons;

the slam of the front door left princesses scattered

on the basement floor.

We'd run

up to our rooms.

She filled her pockets with dreams the colored pebbles and pastel pills

of silent time and long, secret days.

When we were small, my sister and I played dolls.

Baby we liked best, mother doll was resting

there :were lovely porcelain faced children to bathe, powder and dress;

hut no daddies I can remember.

We feared our father's neon fury.

2.

I lived in interstices crouched for flight -

storms were unpredictable, fiercest at night,

Upstairs,

so scared my bed seemed to turn upward, until it was a ferris wheel,

swaying.

Holding tight, I'd wait for the turning ring of light, the purple bulbs,

to bring me back to safety.

Sometimes, a group of cops my father liked, gathered in the kitchen.

They wiped brass badges,

dipped whisks in tins of funfluiri cleaned their black, shiny weapons.

Careful night housekeepers, sharing whiskey, their deep, weary voices drifted upstairs.

I'd reel dizzily-to supper testing for neon sputters,

~< and find my father, I r~' 'dishing up mashed potatoes. 'Do you want butter?" <

My father's temper tantrums and cold silences, saturated the air with the violence of the city,

the mystery

of his swift brooding

lingered.

Dnce, he brought a puppy home,

but it lay under the bed

.rying, covered with cigarette burns. ~e took him away, unnamed.

r'hat kind of hell did our father find

I. _. when he tucked the shivering creature

nside his blue coat?

[e never would say. I guess he wanted to lave something.

1

I My mother stayed-hidden, like the cataract eye

if a cloud covered moon

her light was evasive and far.

was looking for a star.

I started courting attention of anger

the heataneuvering

a Vietnamese street child.

Smart,

I could push my father

into burning rage. A victory, lthought.

I slept with pillows over my head, I slept on pillows of resentment

30

3.

Defiant, unhealed, I stayed away. My own children played and fought and grew. I wondered

at their laughter and their own secret weather. They flew on visits. Telephoned.

At last, in summer, we went together.

Memories are a sleight of hand. A trick of light. Persiphone,

came up for air-she burst through the land, and brightened the earth into spring.

Demeter was not the mother she remembered.

Seasons slide and slip.

The boys and I take the trip to an island we have never seen.

We ride a ferry to their grandparent's new home.

31

The wooden pier is festive, My father, waiting in the car,

seems frail. Mother, cheerful, in Levis, greets the boys.

I am alone in fear.

My father walks past my window checking fruit trees.

He looks restless, bored.

He has chores for the boys but they ignore him, playing frisbee.

His warnings are blown away, caught by rustling grass.

I feel strange and useless.

My father, too, appears to be a guest.

This green space dissipates his force.

He has no grace in loss.

The kids feed gulls with hot dog rolls, tall and unfamiliar. I lean on the rail [middle aged daughter,

'now mother to these leggy boys.

Warer thoughts.

Mother seasons the countryside.

She has risen like a yeasty loaf, tall and blonde and fragrant.

There are guest towels

in the room she has chosen for me.

I can't find anything they used to own.

Angry and petulant, playing to indifferent trees, he seems a failed comedian full of growing hostility

jokes drowned out by rustling leaves.

t

His baggy shorts and lmobby knees remind me that powerful men

need uniforms.

Ridiculously, he kicks a plum tree ..

Ancient rages have left patches on his skin

the sun won't touch. There are pale spots on his hands and his forehead

is a red-ringed map.

He chops

great piles of pine

as if winter is always in summer,

as if there is a ravenous furnace in the scrub.

There are mountainous stacks of split wood, great pyramids, everywhere.

Inside, my mother snips the .heads off broccoli Mozart plays.

I place pears and apples

in pottery bowls.

:"Vv:-.&~""'·-":eIZ"'V-~'VI;;II"''Q'g-vu'·.l'PO.l_:J:.''tI·;-· -------------

My mother pulls the tide.

The old carny man

folded with the circus

He fixes a drink.

I think I love him.

I wake at dawn

to the sound of his ax. the loss

he can scarcely comprehend scattering

into

splinters.

314 McKENZIE - Albert Huffstickler

That old house on McKenzie Street in Sante Fe

where Jan and I lived in 1969 is going to fall down one of these days No, it won't fall down. It's adobe.

I will sink slowly back into the earth and all those memories with it. Or no, it will probably be bull-dozed down and a condo put up

or a shopping center

and all those memories will be down there in the ground with people walking over them without even knowing it-and caring less, wouldn't even care if they knew

because people have their own business to get on with

and their own memories to worry about because life has to get on

and who cares about a bunch of memories that aren't even memories anymore but simply earth.

Time is going to bury Jan and me and all that we were in Santa Fe or anywhere else.

And I don't even know why I'm thinking about it except that I'm back in Santa Fe and it's autumn

and the air is crisp and clear just as it was then .

and I happened to walk by that junky old-house today which is an architect's office now and it looked just like it

did then .

except that they'd torn down the little wooden garage on the side and you can't help thinking about things when you walk by a

place like that- .

which is how I came to sit down in the Taco Bell on the comer (which was there in 69) and order a cup of coffee and write this. And now that I have, I'm going to forget Jan again and go on

about my business because life has to get on, doesn't it?

That's what it's about, isn't it?

And I certainly didn't come to Santa Fe to think about Jan-but that's really beside the point because you can't do anything

about memories anyway because even if you forget, houses don't forget

and even when the house is gone, there's still the earth

and the earth never forgets anything, ever. .

. first printed in Rhododendron, Salt Lake City Utah, Winter 1989

36

FlltST DAY AT THE FURNITURE FACTORY ~ Albert Huffsticlder It was a long day.

I'd spent it hauling boxes on a handtruck from the plastics department to assembly.

I'd caught the 6:30 bus at the Mall near my apartment, transferred in town and was barely on time.

I rode bus number 13 and was assigned to department 76. It was September 13. An auspicious beginning.

Sometime during the day it started to rain and it rained intermitently from then on.

At 4 o'clock, quitting time, I was already thinking of a hot supper and bed

but then they asked me to work over till six and since it was my first day, I didn't want to say no.

By 6 o'clock I was really tired and it was raining again.

The old buildings looked like grey consumptive ghosts in the fading light as autumn dark fell through the rain.

The bus passed at six on the dot so I ran for the front gate near the road.

It was closed. I learned later that they always locked it at 4. So, rather than miss my bus, I climbed the fence--

which was OK except that I caught my shirt on the barbed wire at the top

and when I landed with a thud on the other side, my shirt was

missing a sleeve and my arm was bleeding.

And the bus was gone.

So] started thumbing with the rain coming down harder than ever and the carlights slashing the darkness as they whizzed past me

spraying light and water.

[ waited a long time in the dark with the rain seeping into me. Finally a Chicano in a pickup stopped and, though it was out of his way, dropped me in town:

and ill stumbled into the Greyhound station, got coffee and sat there smoking and shivering,

peenng out at the world from the dark cave of my skull, or

wondering what the poor people were doing.

First published in Rhododendron.Salt Lake City, Utah, WInter 1989

GUADALUPE ST. ~ 38TH TO 45TH ~ Albert Huffstickler

They should call it the Avenue of Despair. Echoes of the Avenue of Martyrs in Taos

where Michele and I lived behind the Governor Bent Museum in '68. But the light so clear there while here a cloud

seems to hang perpetually over the State Hospital on one side

and, on the other, a flotsam of cheap motels and ragtag businesses: tattoo shop, garage, pizzeria, filling station --

each building draped in its own particular solitude, the figures on the corners slouched heads down

as though oblivious to everything, but returning long enough from wherever to bum a cigarette as you pass.

I know it all, have lived it, know

the core of emptiness inside each heart.

Fratrats pass in their chromed cars -- gilded ignorance -and all the people just driving from here to there

not knowing they are passing an island

. cut off from the mainland of daily existence by an ocean of fatigue and suffering.

39

t doesn't matter: they couldn't help.

rhere are climbing red roses all along the fence of the hospital. 'hey gleam in the morning light like hope--

living contradiction to all that surrounds them. could stop here.

's a beautiful Mexican girl behind the counter

Winchell's, where I sit writing this .

• ...,u.v .... .., of Shiprock, New Mexico, where I sat for two days " .... .LL.A.L!'> a beautiful Indian girl

counter of the bus station lunch room. once I was like them, you see--

deemably lost--

W's laid on me never to forget.

a part of my honor, my intactness to remember always t terrible hole where the heart should be.

so I walk down Guadalupe to Whintell's from time to time . . is a pilgrimage through a lost land,

ritual journey that I name:

Remembering of My Lost Brother.

first printed in Concho River Review, v. 2, no. 2, Fall, 1988, San Angelo

ENDLESS CITY ~ Wael AbdelGawad

By rights it should have been the gloomy imagination

of an ancient necromancer, predicting the end of the world

in a city of eighteen million mouths, but it was reality

with a lampblack carbon topping, clinging to the island

of Paseo de Ia Reforma

on a pounding electric midnight, watching four Mexican children with painted white faces, clothing stained and torn,

a layer of gray dirt

upon their dark brown skin, encircling their necks,

crawling up to their matted hair, standing on each others' backsjuggling rubber balls for a few

41

pesos - and the balls kept dropping in the rumbling, crushing avenue.

She said, wiping greasy hair, their names were Jose, Alberto, Simon and herself (Maria!) holey grin so pretty

beneath the smeared paint

as she admired my hi-tops. Could she have them!

pointing like a citizen

who knows her rights thoroughly at miniature feet

in strips of blackened, ragged cloth.

They were happy with us, and for a short while,

as we sparkled and wondered about life in L.A.

breathing fire

the Virgin Mary

42

.'

43

("She doesn't exist!" says Maria) my white cap

and the nature of God,

the world was not so pathetic; not so harsh; and the love between six strangers

was expansive and clean.

A peculiar feeling bloomed in me, impervious to the choking brown air, heavy with the mechanical wheezing

of this dying plateau, and the constant hooting of the running cars that circled us

like animals,

that fate,

for twenty three years,

had been leading me to this moment:

That I had been born to meet these stunningly beautiful children

on this tiny consecrated island

in this endless city.

EAST BELMONT - Wael AbdelGawad

Every other house is boarded up, Strangled by dust and briars, Withered by the Valley sun.

Empty fields are scattered everywhere,

Mined with broken glass and guarded by the poisonous hulks of

Abandoned cars. .

In front of an apartment building With gaping holes in the walls

That might have been blown by artillery shells, Hmong children play beside a grey bin Overflowing with garbage.

Children everywhere: Hmongs, Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese. Don't mix them up or they'll get offended.

They play bolo-bong or dot the scissor jump or just Wrestle on the dirt-filled swimming pool.

But Hmong children never play war games.

44

A white woman with sagging breasts slouches on her doorstep and screams at the kids that their dad is going to

Chop off their arms if they don't get off the Harley,

She is wearing a halter top, and a bright red scar

Runs across her belly.

Blubber bulges over the waistband of cutoff jeans. Her legs are pocked with red sores and black bruises.

There is a church on almost every block.

Inside a house with floors of bare cement

and trash strewn across the packed earth of the front yard Is Debbie.

Twelve years old, with auburn hair and brilliant green eyes That make you stare when you first meet her.

She washes the dishes and through the kitchen window Watches Gregory, who is playing by himself in the road (Wearing only his diapers).

45

If Debbie were to come out

You would be shocked at the ugliness of her feet.

Ragged, dirt encrusted toenails, and deep open cuts all over Her calves.

"What happened to your legs?" you would blurt out, horrified, But she wouldn't tell you.

There are others in the yard: Nina, whose hair is always tangled In sticky clumps; Louisa, Maria, Ramon.

But Debbie with the amazing green eyes is the oldest, and the most Beautiful.

Their mother comes home very late.

Ramon sells dope in front of the Fresno Revival Center. They never eat breakfast.

4B

GIRLS I USED TO KNOW - Mary Schafer

She used to throw the dice

For the firemen on the corner. She had a pair of red shoes

And carried cocaine in her locket. Now she's holding up a bars tool Out in Hackensack.

Always late for the Early Bird Special Always early for Happy Hour. Talking the bartender's ear off

In her gold lame stretch pants.

Now she's drinking Mai-Tais,

But she used to drink whiskey

From a silver flask

Out by the tracks.

Smoked Camels with strangers Not too far from Hackensack. Stayed up with the moon

And spent her last dollar.

She ran wild

And chased every whistle.

Now she's holding up a barstool Out in Hackensack.

Well, she used to be a pistol And she had 'ern in her sights She used to stay out late

Every Friday night

She used to lose her rhinestones She used to wink her eye

She used to break their hearts When she'd meet them on the sly She used to do the cha-cha

She used to do it often

And she hopes they will remember When they're picking out her coffin

THE INVISmLE PEOPLE - SUSAN PACKIE

Maybe the census takers never count us

because we are forever riding the subways.

Maybe the politicians never see us

because we do not vote or demand benefits.

All that is certain is that tomorrow the same subways will still be there.

Maybe the rich

never acknowledge us because our presence is an embarrassment.

.J

Maybe we don't

look in mirrors because we are afraid nothing will appear.

48

IN THE INCORRIGmLE SPACE - Susan Luther

"Love then is the space of destruction." John Silk in, "The Measure"

1.

... too many children helpless

as twelve-year-old Anthony

defecating in diapers anchored with the largest safety pins available

flailing legs

and powerful fists dancing about the nurse's offered cup,

no sound recognizable, not

even a grunt. John, up the row in a crib-on-cart with bars higher than the nurse's head

spoon coaxed to pry clenched teeth

below brown eyes permanently rolled up to catch the moon

behind clipped, soft dark-brown hair.

who feeds him pap

from another spoon, wondering if his brain is more or less dead

than Anthony's, since John's long limbs lie docile and his ten-year-old body offers

From him

.t .. II •• "'1 .. 1'

49

lonly a sour-milk smell,

no words; no wail. Down the ward in his wheelchair, though,

big Tony lisps "Nurse, Nurse," bobs his head, eyes fixed on knuckles, has almost

!red himself. While black-eyed Ricky 'Gonzales. writes love-notes

'to her, the youngest, prettiest nurse, rolls his eyes and whistles at her ~hen she comes to change the sheets. fe reads and watches t.v., laughs

I at his own jokes .

as yellow urine

a catheter leading from his stomach to a plastic bag

drips its slow way.

Across the hall five-year-old Kenny

and his girlfriend,

two precocious spina bifidas, carry on long conversations in adjacent beds. Not far

from them two-year-old, burned,

speechless Jimmy

smears his crib every night with doo-doo, giggling soundlessly to see the young nurse who hugs and loves him trying not

to make her own mess as she wipes his away. .

50

(He will be the only one

to get "well," to run grinning up and down the ward,

to play and hug her knees.

But whether Jimmy is ever to go home, or talk, or what sort of place

"home" might be, she does not know.)

2.

Once, when Jimmy lay in the recovery room after skin grafts

the nineteen-year-old nurse whispered to his round blue eyes

when they opened

how it was all right, how

he would soon be well ..

Whether he heard her, or

how much it finally mattered,

who can tell? Who can tell

how much her savingthese love-notes

meant to Ricky, whether Anthony or John or Tony ever recognized her, whether Kenny and his playmate felt a sorrow they couldn't say?

it possible to make a relationship of silence, of the desperate surmise of communication,

of the tenacious refusal not to believe that touch touches something, that eyes

How does one call to the human properly, or tend its forgotten lair?

Always

one hopes for some word, some signal,

even when one has climbed, and climbed to the top of'the lookout

and on the horizon

sees nothing, not even a gray wall of fog obscuring ocean,

no ray of light, no prospect anywhere, . no movement, nothing,

no vegetable or mineral presence, no living molecule,

can ease their animal spirits inward, as people used to believe, that the eyes' concentration

might ignite some buried, unstruck match

or cauterize .

whatever pain exists-if it exists--

that thought might make some dim augury of the rocky narrows

of conscious that might lie submerged--

not even a quiescent sea,

52

ALIENS AT HOME - Sr. Mary Ann Henn

Shorter than we they stroll about meeting our eyes

with a smile , . they're learning English learning our ways

a siren on the road

sends them into hiding even the church bells frighten them last night's thunder, lightning, wind sounded like shotguns

What is their story does anyone know? Two young mothers freed from prison in their country

is all we know why where

their children husbands are the facts of their escape are their secrets but why they should have to come home to a place so far

from home isn't easy tounderstand How can they smile so trustingly

GU1w:I'ERS ~ Sr. Mary Ann Henn

Gutters

rain and garbage drain

and we stand watching People from other lands

and we stand watching the poor and hungry and we stand watching Do they know

how rich we are Do they know

how poor they are

Do we know

how rich we are Do we know

how poor they are And we stand watching

r------· .

IN CLOSING (NOTE ON A GIFT) - Lowery McClendon

for Virginia

These days pass quickly But still we laugh.

We don't yet hear

The sun grumbling

Or feel the moon's pain.

One day you will read

These pages, we will be old .:

Will you remember the joy Of walking up stairways With the one you loved?

Will you hold dearly the memories Of hallways and stations,

And goodbyes we didn't believe? Will you laugh to think the city - We lived in was once so young?

55

SOAPBOX .. Hilary Tham

Let us push

the religion of football.

Let us convert the Jews, the Arabs, South Africans, white and black Russians, Americans north and

I south, the Chinese, everyone!

Each Sunday we'd watch the war games televised: American Eagles

VB. Soviet Raiders, Afghanistan Patriots VB. Pakistani Bengals, China Bears, Gennan Steelers, Argentine Cowboys, etc. Imagine the Arab Oilers playing

the Israeli Rams, with quarterback Boomer Esiason on a trillion dollar contract, throwing a.50 yard bomb on third down.

Territory to be wonllost

by game and rematch - it's uneconomical

to build new stadiums every hundred yards. We'll have women's games too for each "war" and screen all players sternly for steroids.

Each Country's GNP would soar

from TV rights and gate receipts,

Defense budgets 'slashed - footballs are

cheaper than "sparrow" missiles, even those purchased at inflated cost by war departments.

56

· ... ". "

~ j 1