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\VATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream September, 1992

'VATER 'VA YS: Poetry in the Mainstream Volume 13 Number 8 September, 1992

Richard Alan Spiegel & Barbara Fisher .- Co-Editors Thomas Perry, Intern

Sheryl L. Nelms 4 Sr. Mary Ann Herin 26-27
Susan Packie 5-6 Laurel Speer 28-29
Ida Fasel 7-11 John Grey 30
Terry Thomas 12-21 Albert Huffstickler 31-40
Sylvia Manning 22-25 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 10304·212i 1992 themes from The H. R. Factor by David Fisher to be published by Bard Press.

Fal11992.

© 1992, Ten Penny Players Inc.

HEAD UNDER GLASS ·,SHERYL L. NELMS

circling the Santa Fe Museum I keep .coming back

to that hole

imagine the hurt

of that Hohokam Indian as the abscess grew down through his bone

a gnarled brown man

squatting there against that mudded wall sucking a wild licorice root

to deaden the red thumping

4 .

infection finally eroding his skull

till he became this showpiece

a grizzled grin

freeze framed in glass

staring down all who peer at his holed

head

LABELERS'AND LABELEE - SUSAN PACKIE

She came . Her lack of ability Bodies and souls
From Trinidad-Tobago She bitterly protested With cognition?
The woman In her too-British accent They never thought of
Far older than her years Her uri-English grammar that
She yearned She threw herself These labelers of
To help people In the faces thinking
To bind up their wounds Of her detractors Being the truly
To go to nursing school What did it mean, anyway Non-cognitive ones
So she enrolled This cognitive reasoning
In a college program They accused her
Designed expressly Of lacking
To impress her How could you
With her inferiority Minister to people's
5
'. (_ J

OLIO - SUSAN PACKrE

Zebra couples,

hybrid children,

dating, mating,

polka-dotting playgrounds. Children of mixed races intermingling with pure breeds, if, indeed,

there are such things. Some dots and stripes appearing In eyes blue or brown,

hair blond or red,

6 bones thin or thick,

skin white or black; some dots and stripes disappearing

until the next generation when hybrid couples beget their zebra children latent or blatant,

today or tomorrow:

an interracial olio of kin.

THE GlRL IN THE MOTORIZED WHEEL CHAIR -IDA FASEL

She had torn her skin on her spiral notebook

She sped into the elevator and spun around

and as the door closed called out

Thank you

and smiled

Where could she get a band aid?

Basement box, I told her.

Other than that she was fine

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VOUCHING FOR ADAM ~ IDA F ASEL

I like to think of myself againstman's manifest. in this

(once more) refined age as God's Bill of Rights, his protection.

8

I don't know

exactly how you go about it. I keep the volume down.

I say

Do not believe I do not believe. And it's not

enough.

THE WAKING· IDA FASEL

I always thought there was nothing under the sun better than sun. If I woke

to a gray day, I immediately plunged down an elevator shaft. A bad habit

this hunger for a clear sky and full light! Some things don't need brightness

to be deep causes of joy:

a violin string that gives you Brahms, a piece of jade that takes you

from its cloudy surfaces

into the mysteries of celadon, steep itself the greatest mystery, all the house lights off.

Under its eaves you lose yourself in inner space. You meditate rest

and wake as if from death, day after day with a feeling of freshness new to life. Aren't you an immortal then? .

Isn't that enough to make

the grayest weather a ballet partner, the soul of courtesy,

catching your leap impeccably, raising you surely,

sharing the altitudes with you?

10

PRESCRIPTION - IDA FASEL

Give up coffee, the doctor said. He meant it.

I left the office vowing I wouldn't. Not much to give up, you'd think, compared to real addictions

like writing or drugs.

But next morning

I went without, and the next. And I can tell you

the mountain is cast in sheer rock but designed to make you feel good in the end

with finger grips pierced for blood.

. '

II

BETTY BREAKFAST ~ TERRVTHOMAS .

She serves up the jump-start meal-grub to plug woodsmen into

chain saws and miners into metal. The kettle's always boiling,

black coffee or blacker tea

for workers toiling much like Betty. Heady smells, thick as molasses, promise flapjacks, and sausage smoke curls thick as pig",cry's tail.

Pale eggs pop, splatter

and bubble into sunny sides up, wet as Betty's smile, or over easy - her day's toil.

lZ

Tart as Florida's orange import, she still sports a heart big

as agrapefruit--and can cook to boot. "A little short this week, Clyde?

No trouble -- pay me come Monday."

r

BOULEVARD BARNEY - TERRY THOMAS

You've seen him at street corners -a scarecrow frozen by life

with his slack face pointing at ... nothing. Haunting alleys and our sensibilities

he paws through discarded dreams and last night's bouquet. His companions call him Barney Retardie, but if you catch

his eye you'll see wounded intelligence hidden behind a glazed gaze. Days

pass eternally as he shuffles for space among the ocher ragged figures. If you offer money, he'll only snort -- death rattle of pride -- and slap your hand away.

IJ

Stay on the periphery of his consciousness and you might hear his tales of vagabond ventures and a family missing for years; there are tears in thosewordsbut

save your pity for the other bundles

of brave bones -- Barney is benighted

and only fights his dragon in memory.

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'.'

THE BREAKFAST RIDE -TERRY THOMAS

The line forms early for this attraction and only clever foot action gets you past

dry cereal. Sometimes it takes two tickets to break into the biscuit, eggs, and

imperial tea section. If you have a predilection for hot trips then you have

to nip nimbly by steam, cream and pastes-fast as you can. The man who dallies over shallow mirrors and dull steel will only

feel silly and wave to those with the roller coaster gravy, while he c1u.tches cold

cake crullers. Dull as bath water,

clean bu t at the edge of the scene, you can

'. '

(5

-- _-

only hope for porridge thicker than corton candy--dandy in warmth but only slightly past the penny arcade. The eatery express-those boarding, house smug smiles while the envious fade from the fodder fast

lane. Tokens are scarce in the rooming herd, so wake early and collect extra for haste.

16

REO PAINT PEOPLE· TERRY THOMAS

Maritime Archaic -- ancient Indian sailors traversing

the North Atlantic coast.

Ghosts painted in red ochre, bleeding into the sand,

oozing. heritage at beach

cairns and pottery heaps.

After seventy five hundred summers archaeological plumbers are sou riding deeps;

your colored sleep provides images for dreamers of the

long ago. Rowing barks in bird feather fetish your wet wandering sorrows fancy .-

we wonder whether sand and surf will echo our chancy voyage

after tomorrow's tides return.

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Not Georgia, oozing heat

in slippery sultriness, Nor Virginia,

sweet and damp~earthy,

drenched in jasmine. But my Southern belladonna,

bringing cool class

to a Northern lounge.

Honey, suckling a highball,

peering through condensation-tracing her initials on my glassy psyche.

DIXIE NEEDS ICE· TERRY THO~IAS

[S

ELECTRIC ICE CREAM - TERRY THOMAS

When I was a boy and addicted to country vanilla -that chilly topping to a sultry Sunday--

brawn and breach were the final ingredients

added to the mixing. You cranked 'til

you rotated with your short gasps,

sucking ice and bleeding brine into

the afternoon, or you straddled the

canvas saddle, cold and desire striking you numb.

The motor hums and the dasher turns in my mind.

IS

But curing was the toughest part.

You say -- rubbing sore arms and working your mouth around words, tongue tingling and slick with anticipation. Behind your eyes a white expanse vibrated with a sugary sureness. The first bite

fused your teeth, an icicle stabbing into

your head, but tasted a bit of love and muscle.

The motor hums, the dasher scops and I unplug my memory,

FADED PHOTOGRAPH - TERRY THOMAS

A young man crouched by a toddler framed

in pine needles --

feathered by a green oxidation (light burn of sun and seasons).

A filmy curtain seems drawn over the C'NO. Today, sharp lines print one face

and the other views the world with a woman's gaze.

The little girl clutches a- basket of eggs --

burning brightness shining from her eyes; round face

softening and blurring at the edges.

Pride and innocence are caught forever in time's instant. Crinkled eyes savor the

flavor of the past; he remembers

the day but not the feeling of youth.

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FOR HELEN OF OUR CITY - SYLVlAMAi~NING

I worry for Helen

as I would for my daughter. (She too chose costumed movement in childhood's chaliced day

[Q say about her being.)

I worry for Helen

who daily moves along our city's streets, dancing often to nonsong, an

arcane beat, from a different place -- or from this same as ours, but entered by a different gate. Blocking herself

in choreography. Insane.

Friend poet who knew Helen

previously says she cannot create moments consecutively. It is that,

her only problem.

I understand him

Yet worry on for her, who in that long song-filled moment, childhood, chose movement of her whole self (not just

her pencilled hand across

a sheet of rag or tree,

which normalcy allows and practically is free.)

Helen needs a theatre, has to use the streets. Needs the boards,

uses asphalt for her aging feet. Follows urban flotsam down her childhood's pure rnindstream,

I worry for Helen as for any artist without what she needs. Helen, daily dancing,

throush the vounz old acre

I:) . J 0 Q

of our city's streets.

Oct. 5,1991

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PRAY WITHOUT CEASING AND IN YOUR CLOSET, TO BOOT SYLVIA MANNING

This is where I do not come out.

Like the elderly woman in my mother's congregation, fundamentalist, who would not get off the toilet until

Jesus in his very carnal personage should come for her ,.,

(How dare they la ugh after decades of their telling her to believe it?)

Z4

r

But this is where, like her, I do not set my head again to face the world outside this space I'm in.

I have these things that really are here. ]\."'0 more.

I have pictures here

from magazines: Jesse Jackson's portrait; a photo of the Dali Lama. 1 have: shoes, Goodwill dresses, my basket of bandanas. Some boots of red rubber got cheap from Sears, years ago.

U neil the rain stops, anyway. Until my many naked selves stop their tearing.laughter,

This is where I am

where I do not come out.

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-

AND LET THERE BE LIFE-:·SR. MARY ANN HENN

What color were the ashes

that God mixed up to form Man?

If they were black

did they pale

through black

brown

red

yellow white

Z6

or was Adam white

and his descendents darkened from white yellow red brown black?

what color was

Adam, anyway? Why doesn't the Bible say?

Z7

za

WET NURSING UNDER LOUIS SEIZE - LAUREL SPEER

This is a dispassionate report. This is history.

The French had a system.

Everyone benefited except the victims. Village wet nurses found through agents didn't always have milk.

But they needed the fees.

So they deceived, fed the baby animal milk (unpasteurized)

or pap made of water and boiled bread (mold overlooked) or crammed wailing mouths with rotted rags, sat them

in human waste, suspended them on hooks

in unchanged swaddling bands. Dysenteric fevers killed tens of thousands.

Anyone who survived this weeding had no Rousseauesque memories of plump warm breasts,

abundant founts of security

or country living.

first published in The Pittsburgh Quarterly

29

KATHY - JOHN GREY

The space between hair, soft neck, delicate shoulder arch and

the tingling glow-worm curve. of your earring's bottom edge:

this is where light slips through

but only when you bend towards me to whisper your current version

of what I am into my lips, a female starling feeding words back to its helpless chick, and that light,

30

the flicker of everything in this noisy bar that is not you, misses

its one chance to find my eye as more of you fills up my face and I

gladly know the supple geometry

of your mouth, your nose, your cheeks, pressed against my flesh

as a better way of seeing.

Joanna Nelson was here August J 8, J 985

This is to certify

that Joanna Nelson waited for the bus

at the Highland Mall stop and saw fit to declare it

to all and sundry

with a felt tip pen

on the wal! of the shelter, declaring a fact

while creating a mystery as women are so often prone co do.

MARKli\GS - ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER It won't last.

Felt tip ink weathers and fades, smears too.

You can hardly read the date.

In a month it will be gone. No record will remain

of Joanna Kelson's sojourn

at the Highland Mall bus stop and we'll be the less for it.

We need to know that. \Ve need to remember

before all our personal records are washed away

in a tide of computer printouts.

31

\Ve need to find Joanna Nelson before it's too late.

We need to find out

who she is and what she did at the Highland Mall bus stop On Aug. 18,1985.

We need to do it now. It just may be

the most important thing in the world.

Where are you, Joanna Nelson?

\Ve need to see your face.

Sept. 14, 1985 at the Highland Mall Bus. Stop Austin, Texas

First published in Slipstream, #11, 1991, Niagara Falls, t'iY

3Z

THE PLACE WHERE YOU WAITED - ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

I'd come halfway.

The wind was blowing the rain through me-

iey needles injecting frailty-

and it seemed that I was not walking to just any place down that broad street[win lines of darkness chat never seem to converge in the distance-

but to the place where you waited-if I could JUSt keep going.

Above me, the sky a giant black speaker that announced doom at regular intervals, and I trudged on because I'd come this far and could not go back-

no, would have gone on anyway to that place where you waited,

jigging the little step I jig when my legs get stiff from the cold.

No, I'd have gone on because I had [0,

had to believe that there was a place where you waited in this world

and that it could be reached if I JUSt tried hard enough and did not (urn back.

, c.

33

The lights burned into me and the cars sprayed icy water down my legs. I stumbled and caught myself, jigged on, head down, hunched under it, all of it, my whole life, and went on, cold to the bone.

All the coldness of my life focussed on that tiny pocket in my chest that held my heartjigged on numb now but still caring, your face swimming up to me out of the rain, the wind a banshee shrilling in my ears,

jigged on, a Chaplinesque figure, minus cane,

braving the elements, chanting your name

till it smoked on the air around me and blew back warm in my face as I jigged on to that place, that certain place

where you waited.

first printed in Fennel Stalk, No. II, 1991, Phoenix, Arizona

34

CAPTIVE - ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

The girl in the glass jar is dying because she can't be touched. She looks so beautiful and small, so exposed and vulnerable,

so naked and so very lonely.

]:\;0 one can reach her

and there's no place to hide. She is a victim of all eyes while her own shine

with a raw sorrow not unlike rage. Her body writhes with need.

Her fingers tear her flesh.

Her breasts weep blood.

She is my truth this hour.

She is the nature of my dilemma. I stand and watch her die.

Her spirit passes me leaving

as wind stirs a candle.

I cannot move.

I "van t it co rain.

Feb. 14, 1982

FiTS( published in Bullhorn, 1992, E.Palo Alto Ca.

35

" t.

MOTHER AND SON· ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

They're bonded. It's hard to tell

if he's pushing her or she, sitting erect and imperial

on her wheeled throne, is drawing him along behind her.

He's big, over six feet.

He could make two of her but he never will.

All our tragedies

aren't war and pestilence. 36

The soul imprisoned in its own quandaries makes no headlines. I doubt that even God wonders

what that link boy thinks about

lying in his large trundle bed at night

caught between sleeping and waking.

Cafe du Jour Sept, 5, 1988

THE SOLDIERS WHO BORD ME - ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

He soldiered on. She soldiered on.

They soldiered on together yet apart.

Later, I blamed them for doing

just about everything they had to

but without harmony. Now I look back

and am amazed at how clear each of them was in himself,

how very c1earlike a line drawing by an old master or like

an old tintype

where each figure stands rigid, alone,

frozen before

the camera's naked lens.

first published in The Cafe Review, v.2, no.l Z, 1991, Portland Me.

'. I

Ji

SUSTENANCE - ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

Back before our City Fathers destroyed the old Woolworth's downtown (and I wonder if they know that on their comer of Hell, aWoolworth's stands, a perfect replica of the one they destroyed. And if they know that, I wonder if they know that the lunch counter there will be featuring a Special-of-the-Day and they're it - deep-fried.)

"Veil as I was saying, back before it was destroyed, that old Woolworth's lunch counter had a fried chicken basket and it was good! Two pieces of chicken, a great mass of french fries, and a roll for something like $1.69.

And I remember when I was working til noon one Saturday at Woodward Furniture Factory after a full five days, I stopped off there when I changed busses downtown and I couldn't get past that sign- that beautiful glowing basket of chicken. And 1 didn't know if I was tireder than I was hungry or hungrier than tired but I knew I had [Q have that chicken.

38

So I went in and sat down at the counter, dirty and sweaty and woeful, and I ordered me a Fried Chicken Basket and coffee and when it came, I saw sitting next to me a big bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce and I thought, "Now, that ought to be good." There's something about being tired that makes you want hot stuff so I doused that fried chicken liberally with Louisiana Hot Sauce and it was good. It was delicious! I ate every bite. I ate every french fry. Then I sucked the bones. Then I ate the roll. Then I drank all my water and asked for some more and drank that. Then I put sugar and cream in my coffee and lit a cigarette and sat there smoking, floating in a sea of tiredness, the most blessed among the blest. And then I had a second cup of coffee and smoked some more and then floated out to the street and caught the bus and went home and took a bath and made another cup of coffee then slept the rest of the day.

And that's all there is to this except that I still remember- that was 1973 - and nights sometimes when I'm really tired, I'll fall asleep and dream of fried chicken drenched in Louisiana Hot Sauce. I'm dreaming of it now. I think that's what they call Inspiration.

first published in Hammers, rna, 4, Evanston, II, 1991

CROCKPOTS WERE MADE FOR LONELY PEOPLE· ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER

You see, you can put something on in the morning before you leave the house-

a chicken, pinto beans, chili maybe - and when you walk in the door that evening, there's this lovely aroma to greet you. It's the next best thing to having someone

there cooking for you. You feel blessed.

40

And you feel doubly blessed when you don't have to cook anything, just serve it and eat it. .

I hope you're writing this down

because

it's something you'll want to remember. II: will help you with your loneliness. And that's what we're here for, isn't itto help each other with our loneliness?

first published in Two Twenty-Four Poetry Quarterly, Spring 1992, Cayucos, Ca.

7