WORDWRIGHTS #4 • Fall 1995 Edition • $3.95 US • $4.95 Canada
POETRY by Joanna Biggar • Jamie Brown • Eleanor L. Cunningham • Ann Darr • Patricia Davis • Carol Edelstein • Patricia Garfinkel • Joy Jones • Pete Lee • Laura MacCleery • Lou Orfanella • Deborah Sheppard • Dennis Sipe • Rhonda Williford
PROSE by Joanna Biggar • Marie Calvino • Nancy Galbraith • James Goliard • Kaldun Nossuli • Robert M. Reinsel • Peter Vilbig
GUEST EDITOR: Joanna Biggar
FRONT COVER: James Goliard
HOME
A poem by Rhonda Williford
Harvest
If I could harvest you
it would be for light—
these are the stalks
my eyes are gathering
for that dark day coming—
with the stiff legs, the soft-edged
bites all ending in the same
stale taste. Knowing
this is a voyage that stops,
at least before another spin
into light, I’m saving
all this now light, your light.
I’m collecting from the stems
of your hair, those wild ferns
falling out of place, jutting out
from under your smooth
combing—you have no idea
the sprouts from order are the tasty
portions, how they keep
repeating their fresh, newly-bitten
flavor, how I plan to keep them
repeating. I shove each one
into my sly pocket. Years later,
in a dark night, maybe blind,
I’ll unwrap the colored candies
from deep in my duster pocket,
rammed down so far, so tenderly,
they’ll seem like new-cut gems
releasing light compressed over years—
like your body now releases,
uncurling all at once
to your full height—
first, the slate-blue you harvested with—
those two small birds caught
in flight, and, by that tag of the rainbow,
the red of a shirt you wore
with its subtle webbing,
the white mesh of supple hairs
on the brown lanks of your tanned arms—
all these prism-rays of a voyage worth
having made. Here is the finish—
we already hold it, our touches sliding
away like slick, warm morsels—
only glints of light sinking in
as traces. They keep sinking
until we’ve taken in so much
that spilling over
into that dream of next light
will seem no more
than walking a new row
of a garden we’ve tended for years—
ready for harvest, illuminated.
A poem by Dennis Sipe
My Hero Says To Turn Back While There Is Time
(For Bukowski)
I caught up with him with a few days to spare.
He’d been dying with a whore in Houlten, Maine
and was about to fill in his brackets.
‘‘So you found me on my deathbed how fucking poetic.’’
‘‘I want you to know what your words mean to me.
You see I write too and’’
‘‘Sure you do. Everyone does.
Rich bitches are the worst, looking for fulfillment,
looking to line up words like they matter.
But they can’t pay the price.
Everyone has a story.
But it would be a better story if you would
get the hell out of yourself and live it.
Words will never save anyone.
Christ knew that so he got his hands fishy.
Take my words.
Take Poe’s words.
Take Robinson’s words.
Take them all.
If I told you they were leeches with sweet numbing juices you would not listen.
Too bad.
It could save all the lost unravelling junkie years
you have left.’’
Prose by J. Goliard
The Two Cocktail Question
Free Advice For The Mescalero Indians Of New Mexico: Get some dogs, a shovel and a really big freezer. Also, if your town starts to smell like dirty socks—move.
I have begun this essay in response to the news that some Native Americans in the southwestern United States are hoping to make big bucks by turning over their hard won land to the federal government for the purpose of storing nuclear waste. Regardless of how the controversy is resolved, or how much money does or doesn’t change hands, there will remain a sense of desperation on all sides of this issue.
Listen.
Several years ago, while a member of the musical duet, The Pheromones, I found myself playing a gig at Richland Community College in Richland, Washington. Until our trip to Richland, any thoughts I had about the State of Washington were of fog-draped cities, snow-covered volcanoes, and very big, very old trees. We saw some big mountains and trees but mostly what we found was smaller mountains covered with tree stumps, the barren high-desert and the stink of dirty socks. Richland, you see, is located in the southeast corner of the state, far from any mountains or trees, miles above sea-level, and adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Reservation, for now probably the biggest known nuclear waste dump in the world.
We were prepared to not like Richland. We brought our own water. The first thing we noticed as we rolled into town in the middle of the night was that the place smelled like the inside of one of Dennis Hopper’s Nike’s. As though the whole town were involved in some sort of cult-like nocturnal aerobic ceremony which must have concluded minutes before our arrival. When I asked people the next day about the odor in the atmosphere, they looked puzzled. (Much the same way New Yorkers do when you mention the quality of their atmosphere. New Yorkers say that there is no smog in New York City, although they will concede that it has been overcast lately. ‘‘Haze,’’ I think, is the word they use. They presume that it emanates from the steamy, primitive, provincial inland regions. All you can really do is humor them.)
Richland, as you have already surmised, is a misnomer; a very bad bit of subliminal municipal name-giving perpetrated, I’m sure, to put people, and I mean innocent, decent, churchgoing, taxpaying, Winnebego- riding, map-reading, voting Americans off its foul-boot-stench. I mean, you look at the map, and there, like some national park, is a big square patch that reads ‘‘U.S. Dept. of Energy Hanford Reservation,’’ right next to a little town called ‘‘Rich land.’’
Rather like The Meadowlands.
Now, if you live in an Alternative Universe—you know, the one where Jack and Bobby Kennedy spent sixteen years in the White House? Where Martin Luther King was secretary of state? Where there was no Viet Nam War and therefore no huge Military Industrial Complex sucking up our GNP? Where the Cold War ended by treaty after Jack Kennedy’s reelection in 1964? Where there was no Johnson Nixon Ford Carter Reagan Bush or Clinton? You know, that Alternative Universe where E.F. Schumaker’s Small is Beautiful idea didn’t seem foolish in the hands of Jerry Brown and Fred Harris and where we spent the 70s and 80s designing and implementing an alternative energy strategy that by the mid-90s was fully operational? Where enough food is grown safely in the ocean to feed the entire planet and where solar panels ring the earth?—Well, if that’s where you live then you might look at the square patch on your Atlas of the United States and say, ‘‘Oh, The U.S. Dept. Of Energy Hanford Reservation! That’s where all those way-cool windmills and solar collectors are assembled! Let’s take the tour!’’
[continued in WORDWRIGHTS #4].
