WORDWRIGHTS #13 • Summer 1998 Edition • $4.95 US • $6.50 Canada
POETRY by Michael Colonnese • Brian Fugett • Vivekan Don Flint • Howard Gofreed • Brian C. Hamilton • Paul Humphrey • Sonia James • Dora R. Malech • James McKenna • Doug McNamee • Mark Mitchell • Jean Nordhaus • Jude Nutter • Gigi Ross-Fowler • Len Schweitzer • Karen Sosnoski • Gary Stein • Hillary Tham • Markku Thiel • Deborah Tobola • Patti Trimble • Ken Waldman • Mary Westcott • traci m. williams
PROSE by Karren L. Alenier • Colleen Anderson • Donya Currie • F. J. Ferreira • Ruth Moon Kempher • Jim Patterson • Paul E. Perry • Len Schweitzer
SPECIAL FEATURE: WordWrights receives ‘‘The Poet & The Poem Award’’ for Literary Excellence
FRONT COVER: Dora Malech
HOME
A Poem by JUDE NUTTER
The Paramedics
What does it mean that one of us drives home
through the early morning and pulls his wife
from their bed where she is sleeping and kisses
her, hard, on the mouth—hard, to prolong his own
silence, and then without undressing makes love
to her with such ruinous hunger she is almost
afraid; or that one of you doesn’t make it
home but stops instead at a bar in an unfamiliar
town that she has driven to on purpose
in an attempt to believe she still has choices,
and drinks until she feels no longer alone
with the things she has not chosen to remember, or
until she allows some man to persuade her back
to his bed, display and unbolt her body and give her
that elision which arrives at moments
of high importance; or that one of us,
in the back of an ambulance with a gunshot wound
she knows won’t make it, reaches out on impulse
to touch her partner, her gloved hand leaving
a blood print across his chest, and him leaning
into her, kissing her back, because they can’t get
close enough, often enough, to reinvent the wholeness
of the body; and that after the shift this continues
when they go home together and undress slowly
and stroke the other’s body all day, unashamed
of their own sorrow, as if sorrow might be
a place they could inhabit; or that one of us,
after restocking the ambulance, waits in the rig
with the lights turned off because he likes
the cathedral sadness of it and how a small light
from outside on the glass doors of the cabinets
and on the equipment makes, like prayer,
a great distance in him; that sometimes he is a man
emptied of everything but his own need?
A Poem by LEN SCHWEITZER
Toward A Resurrection In Clay
Into the hot gloaming
I strode with Shelley’s muse,
the wild West wind.
Gilded pines thrashed above,
like so much barley or wheat.
I dug this hole
behind the blackberry bramble,
then laid the brown tabby
down.
In small ceremony for tattered
roadkill,
thorns had pricked my hands.
I’m a cold champion for speedy
decomposition.
Wicker coffins for people.
Pyres for heroes.
Animals receive a spadeful of
darkness. No caskets.
No sarcophagi to ward off eaters
of the dead.
Return to Earth and, today,
allow the fen its repast.
An excerpt from a story by COLLEEN ANDERSON
Water Jumping Out of a Pond
I always had something in my hands. A pebble, a bit of fuzz from the lining of my jacket, a firefly lighting my cupped palms like the inside of a cool, green cave. The world came to me first through my fingertips, and then I brought it to my ears and eyes and mouth—took it in, as they say. It seems ironic: to get to the deepest memories, I must empty myself and wait for the tingling at the very edge of my body.
On that day, the thing in my hands was a piece of construction paper. My fingers were smaller then, alert and tender. The paper plush, woolly, familiar as a cat.
It was a Wednesday afternoon. We were in the cafeteria, which was also the gymnasium at Pritchard Elementary. The cooks were cleaning up the kitchen after lunch. That’s how I know it was a Wednesday, and an afternoon: the sounds of Bibby and Maude, our school cooks, clattering pots and pans in the kitchen behind the stainless steel counter where where we’d filed past, an hour earlier, to receive plastic sectional trays of canned corn, mashed potatoes, hot dogs, chocolate milk in cartons, and one of Bibby’s enormous, yeasty rolls. That was the menu for every Wednesday, and the whole place still smelled like hot dogs.
The sounds of clanking pans, water running, and Maude’s deep voice floated from the pass-through and got all mixed together, ringing and indistinct, in the cavernous gym. It wasn’t as loud as the din during lunch period; but any sound, in that room, expanded like gas and hung in the air.
There were nine of us, including our teacher and the woman who had come to help us write poetry. None of us had ever seen her before. She was stout and pink-faced, and her clothes were odd. She wore a long sweater the color of dried egg yolk over a grey skirt that fell almost to her fat little feet, and they were tucked into tiny black shoes with ankle straps. The shoes had mud on them from the parking lot. We’d had a lot of flooding that spring, and most people knew better than to wear dress-up shoes.
The poetry lady didn’t seem to have much common sense. To begin with, she had poetry-writing mixed up with art. She came in hauling a pudgy armload of supplies—packets of colored construction paper, some large poster boards, and a canvas bag full of felt-tipped markers and glue pens, which she dumped on one of the cafeteria tables. I said to Mrs. Taylor, “We’re supposed to be doing poetry, not art.” Mrs. Taylor shushed me. The woman arranged us around another table, three on each side. Mrs. Taylor pushed my sister Deeny’s wheelchair up to the end of the table. I had to sit next to Deeny because I was the only one who could understand her. Deeny’s head lolled back on her left shoulder, and she stared up at the steel girders above the gym. Every few minutes I had to wipe away the drool that trickled from the side of her mouth. Deeny was supposed to be in a special school for kids with cerebral palsy, but we didn’t have any special schools in Lincoln County.
I was glad of that, in fact. I wouldn’t have known who I was without Deeny. For as long as I could remember, Deeny and I had been more like one person than two. Her wheelchair, with its precious cargo, was an extension of my own self—not a burden, but a large, important privilege I rolled ahead of me. I was the one who brought the world to Deeny and carried her messages back; in return, she made me competent, inviolate. At twelve, I could dress and feed her, cook a meal, change the sheets on her bed, wash her hair. Our parents were proud of the way I took care of her, but I don’t think they understood how it was between us. We needed each other equally and fiercely. I tried not to think about the next year, when I would move up to junior high. All alone, without Deeny.
The poetry lady explained that we were going to make pictures out of torn construction paper and then write poems about the pictures. Her voice was giggly and nervous. She waved her hands around in the air and the words spilled out of her so fast that it reminded me of the way our chickens ran to the edge of the coop at feeding time. She glanced at Deeny from time to time, never for more than a few seconds, and smiled in an edgy way that clearly meant, what am I going to do with her?
It’s not easy to make a picture out of torn paper. If you want it to look like anything, you should use scissors. But the poetry lady said it didn’t matter what the picture looked like. “In fact,” she said, “I want you to try not to make a picture of any real thing. Just tear some shapes and arrange them in a way that pleases you.”
She looked right at me when she said it. I hated her. The hate made a contraction deep inside me.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered to Mrs. Taylor. She sighed and told me to be quick about it.
In the hallway, I loitered in front of the first grade classroom. Inside, the little kids were sitting in a half-circle on a square of indoor-outdoor carpet, listening to Miss Lassiter read a story. For a moment, I wished I could go in there, huddle down beside the little ones. That nobody would notice how tall I was. That I wouldn’t be missed in the gym. That Miss Lassiter would go on reading and then read another story, and I could forget about the poetry lady, and Mrs. Taylor, and even Deeny in her wheelchair, and nobody would make me tear paper or write a poem or do anything at all, ever again.
Outside the first grade room, twenty-four ladybugs made out of red paper plates hung from strings taped to the ceiling. I flicked my fingertip at the nearest one and made it spin.
An arm snaked out, circled my neck, and drew me against a body. It smelled bad. Clayton Gibbons. He was a big kid, already fourteen, who had been held back twice. Most of us were afraid of him. Clayton’s voice hissed in my ear: “I want to suck your tits.” His other arm, the one that wasn’t around my neck, reached in front of me and found the nipple on my left breast, or what was beginning to swell into a breast. He twisted until it hurt.
“Shut up. Let go of me. I’ll scream.” He let me go. I faced him. He leered.
“I want to,” he said.
“You’re too dumb to know what you want,” I said. “You just heard somebody say that. You’re an ignorant hick and you always will be.”
Clayton looked hurt.
I turned and marched into the girls’ bathroom. He didn’t follow me.
continued in WordWrights #13
