WORDWRIGHTS #3 • Summer 1995 Edition • $3.95 US • $4.95 Canada
POETRY by Ally Acker • Grace Cavalieri • Denise Duhamel • Sunil Freeman • Jim Henley • Rod Jellema • Barbara Lefcowitz • J. Patrick Lewis • Errol Miller • Sharon Negri • M.A. Schaffner • Naomi Theirs • Marie Paclicek Wehrli
PROSE by Andrew Case • Sunil Freeman • Joanne M. Glenn • Jeff Minerd • Terence M. Mulligan • Richard Peabody • David Sosnowski
GUEST EDITOR: Sunil Freeman
FRONT COVER: M.A. Schaffner
HOME
A poem by Jim Henley
The Huck Finn Thing
As head of the Flat Mars Society
I made my third appearance in a year
on a talk show out of Phillie. In the green room
the makeup woman frowned and said, ‘‘Don’t I know you?’’
But it had been six months, a hundred shows,
since I’d been on promoting Massage for Whales—
a hundred shows, five times that many guests.
I said, ‘‘I have a familiar face,’’ which she
complimented for its worry lines,
and assured me, ‘‘You’ll do fine,’’ like good cashiers
say, ‘‘Thanks for shopping with us. Come again.’’
It was while taking questions from the audience
that I decided to do the Huck Finn thing.
In Utah, at a movie star’s resort,
low clouds closed off my valley, and the snow
fell like excelsior that would pack the world.
I propped my skis into a cross, the rude
sort of X on which highwaymen were broken
along the caravan routes. Then I hiked
to where a confederate had left his car.
By the time the search parties had given up
I was sealed into an apartment in Manhattan.
For three days, my Elves kept me informed,
brought me rumors and papers. When I saw
my Times’ obit, I shouted: ‘‘Look! I got
as many column inches as my dick!’’
I also kept a checklist with three columns.
The first read ‘‘Friends,’’ the next two ‘‘True’’ and ‘‘False.’’
When I first started hoaxing I really believed
that one or two spectacular examples
would demonstrate forever to the public
that all the antennae and the printing presses
made up a blind, all-consuming maw,
and we got what came out of the back end.
But just like superheroes whose comic books
last more than a few issues, it transpired
I’d taken on a neverending job,
so I scaled back my ambitions. I’d be the thistle
whose painful lesson to the bovine is
not to crop indiscriminately, and
cow by cow, I’d teach the entire herd.
But that hope dimmed too. Even though the bee
may raise boils on the bear’s nose, the honey still
ends up as offal, and the hive, torn leaves.
When the Times’ editor answered the phone, I said,
‘‘I have a headline to suggest: UNLIKE
GENERALISSIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO,
[here I gave my name] IS NOT STILL DEAD.’’
They made me come down to the office! I
strode into a blustery March, and down to the subway,
with my birth certificate and driver’s license,
exulting, as the building’s double doors
swung open at my tread on the pressure plate.
The editor nodded and said, ‘‘This is a first.’’
‘‘This is a joke,’’ I told him. ‘‘When I was dead
nobody made me prove it.’’ He just shrugged:
‘‘People die all the time. They mostly don’t come back.’’
Suddenly my mind was back outside of Provo
in the grey hours of late afternoon,
the skiing trails taking the grey of the clouds
from which snow falling was grey out of grey.
The only luster was the wax on my skis.
The myriad flakes summed into the mounds
that dragged against my heavy, skiless boots.
And I knew my death was plausible—not outlandish
like Women Who’ve Been Kidnapped by their Accountants,
but like those women looked right after taping,
makeup running from hot lights, their bodies
similarly limp, slumped into cushions.
A poem by J. Patrick Lewis
Rust
It was somebody’s white idea of paradise, the gauzy fifties in Gary, Indiana. Tell someone you grew up there,
and right away they break into that idiot musical garyindianaindianaindiana, as if Robert Preston could lead
a sweetwater band a block down Broadway south of Jefferson without getting both legs broken. It was war.
I still remember how they wasted three Negroes—coloreds even then—in the rust gut of the country.
Geraldo Ratfuck Jerome lost a brilliant pair of sprinter’s legs when a daydreamer college boy fork-lifted twelve tons
of steel onto them one summer. Bejesus Boone pimp-walked in purples, juking every sweet sister in the down-draft
of his flutter-by. But nothing could return the memory bank of his brain when the only person armed in the nickel
& dime armed robbery of Fernandez Liquors was Mrs. Ruben Fernandez. Tennessee white boys, dumb as stones,
lived to rile Big Dick Robinson. One night in the Tube Works, the shower room a cloud of envy, Big, who’d taken abuse
for months, bet ten rednecks the impossible. A paycheck said he could loop it over his belt and tie it in a knot.
Nature said no. Still, the mill hands rocked back on their heels at the black and tan specter rising slowly above a buckle.
Which is as far as it would go before they kicked him witless and left a freak nigger for dead. He wore a tilt in his spine
for his troubles, still does at eighty-five. Boss Steel’s hobbling, too, karateed by a Japan-knee—an old welder’s joke,
the welders usually half-tanked on Hamm’s and anger. Slag, rail, and billet mills are dead. The coke mill’s down to day-turn.
All the major companies have changed their names, as if, says my father, who gave them half his waking life,
that could wash the stink away. Across the years Big Dick Robinson, the great ghost of Gary, grew a foot and a half in our dreams.
A poem by Marie Pavlicek Wehrli
Josef Dream-Travels Toward Prison Time
When the winds shift east
Josef dreams he has boarded the train.
The first afternoon he shuns meals,
writes tickets, complains about the traffic,
noise frozen against the temples of his head.
Autumn. What attracts is the dark
worm holes in the shrunken apples,
the cavernous tunnel buried somewhere
within the center of his chest,
between his breasts, bored into the rib hold,
his empty room.
Breaking bread
the second day
he composed a song
scored the cover of the seat behind him,
scurried through memories of his beloved spires,
fingers lifting into dusty Fall light.
Rising to drink from the fountain
in the narrow hall outside his door,
he threw back his head
as the car winced forward,
held his ticket to his palm,
swallowed the water metallic to his tongue.
Outside the sun dusted early morning Prague
spires and towers, the roofs gleaming
as the train lurched northward now.
Strings of sky filled his room,
rested for a moment on his hands.
What he takes with him,
only words and stones and twigs of breath,
the memory of his wife, heat, bridges,
folded into his palm.
What is outside is all metal
and hard and shiny.
What remains in here, inside,
is all music and warmth and water,
the eye and the lip.
As the train moves on,
he sees his wife beckoning from a distant car,
a spoon in one hand,
a branch in the other.
Before he awakens his children will sing out
from beyond the split floor boards
and the ruins of burnt out kitchens,
bread in their fists,
the open O’s of their mouths
spouting wisps of smoke.
