WORDWRIGHTS #14 • Fall 1998 Edition • $4.95 US • $6.50 Canada
POETRY by Joanna Biggar • Philip Bufithis • Cap’n Clark Cable • Grace Cavalieri • George Durham • Ramola D • Robert Eastwood • Marc Harding • Joanathan Hayes • Margaret J. Hoehn • Philip K. Jason • Kay Meier • Miles David Moore • M.A. Schaffner • Sharon Schaller • Kate Shunney • Dennis Sipe • Barbara Smith-Alfaro • Rose Solari • Adele Steiner • Eileen Tabios • Donna Vorreyer • Robert Carl Williams • Andrena Zawinski
PROSE by Jodi Bloom • Dan Bogey • Brian Christopher • Jamie Holland • Alisha Karabinus • Jim Pritchard • Diana Spechler • Treena Thibodeau
SPECIAL FEATURE: The WordWrights "Megalomaniacal Muse Tour"
HOME
A poem by DENNIS SIPE
DEER CARCASS AT MIDDLE FORK
I am housesitting and watching three dogs:
Danner, a German Shepherd,
Geische, an Australian Shepherd,
and Dewey, a Golden Retriever.
They found a deer carcass near the house.
Dewey, the youngest, brings cracked joints of marrow,
a jawbone, and a hoofed piece of leg to the door
with great trembling pride.
When I let them out to go at night
I know they are rolling on frozen flesh
and gnawed-on bones, beyond the edge of cast light.
I can’t find the carcass.
It’s too cold to smell it.
They won’t take me to it like Leigh Ann, the owner, said.
They know I want to find it and burn it.
My friend Sheila says they meet at the carcass
and laugh dog laughs at me and my useless little nose.
“Maybe a dog suit,” she suggests.
But I know Danner, Geisch, and Dewey would be suspicious
and make me do a lot of things to be in their club.
They would run me all over the property,
and out into the Hoosier National Forest.
They’d run me through salt creek a few times.
It would never work.
But I need to burn the deer carcass.
These are smart dogs that work for Paws With A Cause—
helper dogs.
Another friend, after listening to me describe
all the things they can do, asked “why do they need you,
can’t they take care of themselves and the house.”
After three days I have lost a lot of hope
and I fall asleep listening to Lester Young
in the Amish rocking chair beside the hearth.
Then Danner, Geische, and Dewey surround me
and run into my dreams and lead me out.
“Come” they say together in a chorus, “come.”
They take me to the deer carcass.
Sheila drives up.
She follows me with my can of gas and box of matches
“I didn’t dress for a deer burning
and just what would you wear to one.”
“Skins,” I answer.
We come upon a pile of brain tanned buckskin robes
and trade our clothes for them.
To use only the gas would be wrong.
We gather sticks into a pyre.
I drag the carcass over and lay it on.
I pour a little gas over the kindling
to represent the little bit of a man
who pulled the trigger in a sloppy way
that tore open the young deer’s hind quarter
and left it driven alone by pain
through scrub oak trees in a limping lope,
down through a draw braided with pine,
across the creek and up the dirt road
into the bushhogged yard with thicket swirls
where it hid and died for long time.
We step back as fire begins to suckle air and thin wood.
Sheila sits and wraps her legs around a drum.
She beats out a time,
above time, below time, through time,
around time in a spiral.
And deer come out of the woods to dance.
Dead elk, grizzlies, and wolves
come out of the woods to dance.
Men, women, and children come out of the woods
and lay their anger down and forgive us for what our blood
did before we were born, and dance.
Then Danner drums, and Geische and Dewey prance.
I take Sheila’s hand and forget I cannot dance.
We remember our little hearts, our little smiles,
our little big eyes
and there is no wanting or not wanting between us.
We laugh perfectly with tears as we twirl
and there is a healing in this world.
A poem by MARGARET J. HOEHN
ON BECOMING PART OF THE LANDSCAPE
After Edward Hopper’s ‘‘House by the Railroad’’A man rises in the darkness for years, taking
the same trains to work and back again at dusk,
past warehouses, apartments, smoke
stacks billowing their gray city dreams,
images smudging together the way the days do.
But one morning he glances up from his paper
and this changes everything, irrevocably.
The blurred landscape passing the windows
reduces itself to the pure lines of utter emptiness;
the horizon brightens with a radiance so vacant
it could tear the sky apart. There is such beauty,
such clarity in this luminous absence.
And suddenly he knows how much he loves these light,
motionless days that neither start nor end.
It seems as if everything in his life that has come before
was meant only to bring him here. So he leaves
the train for this place that has
nothing
but the sky and the half-lit ghost of a
house with its angular lines, its locked doors,
its windows that are closed to the world.
He knows the train will never come back, the house will
never be his, the land will always be stunted,
but he wants to be part of this land this house this sky that
never go dark. He has given everything for this.
So who among you has not stood at the edge of the world
radiant weeping
dizzy with
unrequited love?
An excerpt from a story by JODI BLOOM
THE SHANNON PROJECT
Jimmy couldn’t remember how he got Shannon Fein out of her den, away from “The Tom Snyder Show” and a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream, and into his father’s Ford LTD. He just remembered tapping on the glass. He remembered that Shannon jumped up off the brown plaid sofa and whirled around to the window and saw him there.
He had slipped out of his dark house and crossed the few feet of driveway and grass until he was situated in the bushes below the Fein’s den window. The curtains were parted and he had a decent view of his neighbor—wasted on dope, he figured. It was late on a Saturday night. On the TV, Tom Snyder interviewed Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone. Jimmy didn’t know who the black man with the big afro was, but even from a distance he could see that there was snot dripping down his face, and he looked wasted too, eyeballs rolling around in crazy spastic circles. After Tom finished with Sly, he interviewed a pair of men in dresses and huge pink bouffant wigs. They smiled and carried on like cartoon characters while Shannon sat mesmerized, spooning chocolate ice cream from the gallon container. That would be just like her—sitting there in the god damn middle of the night, watching some sick freaky shit on TV.
Jimmy didn’t really like Shannon Fein. She was one of those messed-up girls who smoked pot and hung out in the art room at school doing weird ugly paintings that would sometimes be on display at Eastland Mall student art shows. Her friends were all freaks too—a real bunch of losers. Still, the sight of Shannon, the way she walked and wore her clothes, was enough to drive any guy nuts.
He thought maybe she hated him, really he wasn’t sure. Years ago he’d made a successful career of torturing her and his own twin brother and sister, giving doll crewcuts or taking over the bank in their Monopoly games, ripping them off blind. He was pretty sure he’d made Shannon cry a few times, but the details were fuzzy. Then, something happened which Jimmy himself couldn’t explain.
Shannon outgrew his retarded sibs for one thing and stopped coming over to hang out with them. He couldn’t blame her for that. But when he and Shannon saw each other, around the neighborhood or at school, Shan-non looked at him this certain way and underneath hating him, he was pretty sure there was something else. The thing, whatever it was, was exactly what drove Jimmy Kleiman to walk out of his house at one a.m. on that particular Saturday night and take a chance tapping on the Fein’s den window.
From his position in the bushes, he watched Shannon’s mouth around the spoon, her pink tongue darting out to lick the chocolate goo that stuck at the corners. Shannon had a great mouth, with nice full lips. And it was easy to picture those lips closing in around... well, never mind. The third time the tongue came out and licked, he couldn’t stand it another second. Jimmy reached up and tapped on the glass, as soft as he could, so as not to wake up Mr. and Mrs. Fein.
He remembered something about the way she looked at him and the way she said, “Jimmy, you scared the living shit out of me,” or whatever—he couldn’t really hear through the glass. But, he remembered, she was smiling.
Then they were in his father’s car kissing. Shannon’s mouth tasted like a smokey mixture of what he figured to be pot combined with chocolate, not altogether unpleasant. She sucked on his tongue gently, sucking so gently it was almost painful.
“You’re really cute,” Shannon said, her breath on his face, her finger tracing over his nose. “I love these adorable freckles,” she laughed.
Jimmy wished girls wouldn’t talk while you tried to get down to business with them. He never knew what to say.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s good. I guess.”
Then he kissed her some more so she would shut the hell up. They made out for hours and afterwards Jimmy went inside and jerked off, his mouth and tongue sore, but in a good way. He had developed a masturbation ritual involving Playboy (older issues that his father wouldn’t notice were missing), Johnson’s Baby Lotion, and a 6 1/2 inch-tall plywood Statuette of Shannon Fein on her pink princess phone, nipples erect.
Jimmy had made the Statuette himself a few weeks ago, rescuing a reject photo from the trash in his dad’s basement workshop and hiding it in his bedroom. True, Shannon’s left eye was partially closed and she looked kind of goofy, but he didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that Shannon wore a white halter top in the photo, and her nipples poked out through that thin fabric like nobody’s business.
[concluded in WORDWRIGHTS #14].
