WORDWRIGHTS #1 • Winter 1995 Edition • $3.95 US • $4.95 Canada
POETRY by R.D. Baker • Anne Carpenter • Sunil Freeman • Ron Goudreau • Elizabeth Hazen • S.L. Hester • Larry Hill • Susan Holliday • Frances LeMoine • Kendall Nordin • Michael Reinke • Art Schuhart • Sophie Zager
PROSE by Joanna Biggar • Sunil Freeman • Lisa Goldberg • Elizabeth Hazen • Reuben Jackson • Saul Kerns
EDITOR: R.D. Baker
FRONT COVER: Elizabeth Hazen
HOME
A poem by Elizabeth Hazen
Suede High Heels in a Ditch
The last time I saw
her she was wearing the same
dress I had worn
the day before, only
much better than I.
She crossed the street
and the sun glimmered on her
hair. Something like a halo appeared
over her head. She didn’t
even wobble in high heels.
The next time I heard
of her she was dead on the roadside,
supple body now a stiff board.
I pictured a mannequin
wearing my dress, (only hers was pink
instead of white) and suede
high heels flung down
in a ditch. In my mind she had changed
very little. Rosy face
pale, full lips
blue. Shadowed lids closed
forever. The sun hidden
behind lavender clouds.
No light
on her hair anymore.
A poem by Ron Goudreau
Lying in Bed
The head finds its shape in its depression in the down:
ovoid, it makes the eider fan out and under bone, clump;
the ear’s arabesques furrow the feathers;
the hair spreads.
The body’s back or side shapes and re-shapes,
shifts the covers curled or folded or tussled.
In their hillocks,
darker and denser than their spread over the hip,
is the topography of places molded
in someone’s childhood:
Places with names like Madagascar or Nicaragua
with figures that don’t belong there
like Flash Gordon or a doll in a Balenciaga.
The covers resonate with their inhabitants,
their dales or wavelets reconfiguring each night.
And like ones once of wool,
but now some chemical drawn and fibrous
in a delicate cross-hatching of sheared velux,
they shape to me, or us,
those places and people intact
dreamed during days quotidian,
and will again,
just the way, underneath,
the sooty earth re-enacts.
An excerpt from a story by Lisa Goldberg
Narcissus
She sees him for the first time in a crowd at the school.
First she notices his way of holding himself, every elegant gesture composed and complete, the shoulders suspended as if from a wire, the head controlled and light, and she understands this movement. That summer she had practiced walking, and she knew how motion could affect people. Once, during the summer, a sweet boy had stopped her on the street and said, “I love your walk.”
So first she sees this suspension all around him. And she notices the color of his skin, it’s the kind of gold that bronzes in the summertime. His hair is a sandy blond, and curly. His eyes are wide, brown, and arrogant. Usually such eyes are blue. Like a kid, she thinks, Apollo. She can’t help noticing the careful tension of his hands.
This is in Florence, Italy, in the autumn. Mara has just turned 21. The days creep, although she knows—as she lies on her bed in late morning, watching dots of light penetrate the metal shutter—she knows that the globe is spinning a full rotation every 24 hours, and that only gravity prevents her from flying to the moon, but she cannot feel the pull, not in this ancient place, where the light, even in winter, contains a slow shade of yellow—where the older women all seem unbearably sarcastic and wise, in ways she is unwilling to understand.
She learns that he will be her art history professor. His name is Michael. She is waiting in line to buy books. He approaches.
He says, “Excuse me, I’m really in a hurry, I need to ask the cashier a question, may I cut in front of you?” His voice is tense and deep.
“I guess I have to, you’re my professor,” she tells him, and his face shines in quick recognition of her flirt.
She had never been to Europe alone before, always with family, and she had not known what to expect, had somehow pictured herself walking barefoot across a cold stone floor, past the dripping noise of a large fountain, in the dark courtyard of the house of a rich Italian boy. She thought she would wander around this dark house, learning the family secrets while they slept.
Instead, she lives in a dormitory. The boys she does meet limit their adventures to their cars. The houses seem impassive. She knows they are not. She fled all the way from Baltimore, to escape her Jewish family and her friends, and she finds herself yearning, at dinnertime, to share a small table, served by gentle hands, instead of the long tables in the cold cafeteria.
The dormitory also contains a courtyard. The students are not allowed to use it. One morning she glances out the window and sees a young father among the bushes, playing with his child.
She realizes: he’s married. He wears a simple gold ring on his left hand.
They take a field trip, and she misses a film class. The next day she pauses before leaving the classroom.
‘‘Those field trips interfere with my next class,” she says. “I’m not sure this class will be worth it if I can’t take the field trips.”
He gazes at her.
“It’ll be worth it,” he says. “We’ll work it out.”
And they do; after the next trip, to a cemetery, he offers to drive her back to school. Four other girls say they need rides also. That is fine with her. She sits in the back seat, wearing her sunglasses. It is a tiny, old, brown Fiat. They careen from the hills to the center of town. The girls are asking him about his life; some of them seem to know him, or about him. They are asking him about his Italian wife, his child.
“America seems like another life to me now,” he says. She listens and says nothing.
Continued in WordWrights #1.
