WORDWRIGHTS #15 • Spring 1999 Edition • $5.95 US • $8.95 Canada
POETRY by Susanne Bostick Allen • Penny Bandy • Phyllis Berman • Cris Cassarino • Shirley G. Cochrane • Paul F. Cummins • Linda Nemec Foster • Lois Marie Harrod • M.J. Iuppa • Roy Jacobstein • Kambiz Naficy • Laura Pinto Orem • Catherine Richey • James Michael Robbins • Anne Rouse • Carole Shukle • Lucy Simpson • Ron Starr • Ronald Wilson • A.D. Winans • Bill Wolf
PROSE by Craig Etchison • Mark Forrester • James Genia • Julia Harvey • Terence Mulligan • Richard Peabody • Judith Podell • Nani Power • G.S. Smith • Patrick Smith • Clara Stites
SPECIAL FEATURE: WordWrights Editors Choose Their Top Ten Favorite Books: A Compilation of 200 Titles.
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An excerpt from a story by NANI POWER
THE BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS OF THE EXALTED
Mary Augustine de Louvres was born in a mossy ravine while her Mother lay dead, hit by a cattle cart. Legend has it she survived on her mangled mother’s breast, creek water and, later, the goat’s milk of an old farmer who heard her muffled cries.
She was sold by the farmer, who wanted to buy a Nubian goat, to an old whore named Troisgros, who thought she could make some money on her virginity. It was obvious to her that Maria would be lovely.
Unfortunately, she was wrong. Maria grew hideous, with a condition that rendered her skin with open, oozing boils. When considered for sainthood, most officials did not know of this part of her upbringing, obscured by the grander, more surprising history of murder.
Still, there was no question, she would become a saint.
Afterwards, she was the one people prayed to when they had serious, terrible skin conditions. Or if they lost an ear. When her sainthood appeared, they found her in the empty brothel, everyone gone, a sea of tattered, ragged, bloody ears on the ground, and Maria in a cold
[concluded in WORDWRIGHTS #15].
A Poem by ROY JACOBSTEIN
MAGNETIC FIELD
Thirteen years, Doug, you dumb fuck—
thirteen years ago, not on a day
like today, gray, planed by wind, held
hard in the vise of February, violet
worms clogging the sidewalk, the dank
air clotted with their earth-slime
stink, a day anyone could fathom sighting
down the wrong end of twin barrels.
No, one of those balmy days of blossom,
pregnant with rhododendron and redbud,
one of those days lovers crave. You should
know the eyelids Dad passed on to both of us
sag, Doug, just like his did, and the crows
blackening the sycamores still caw ought, ought
A Poem by A.D. WINANS
GRAND SLAM NIGHT
the lights are hot
the sweat beads bathe
his face like
a lizard’s tongue
the crowd is on its feet
screaming dancing whistling
clapping stomping their feet
to the piped in music of
a marching band
he’s making love to the mike
his words are thunder
Lightning bolts appear from
the cracks in the ceiling
the book pages are burning
in his hands
he’s gyrating on the floor
the crowd is begging for more
He’s running down the aisle
reciting the ten commandments
backwards
he’s back on stage
doing acrobatics
the audience is spellbound
the judges are writing down
their scores
he’s standing on his head
he’s trying to raise the dead
he’s brought in the pope
they’re doing a duet
the guy waiting his turn
looks white as a ghost.
A Poem by KAMBIZ NAFICY
BIRTHDAY GLOSSY
With their honeycomb hair;
tomato red lipstick that Elvis would have kissed;
and melon breasts bursting
the ribs of their pointed bras;
our mothers circle the table
and cheer with frozen laughter.
My chest rocks on Mother’s arm.
She hoists me up like a feather
balanced on a scale
to the sugared menagerie
where stallions gallop the polo field.
Marshmallow cheeks
and wide eyes blazing,
I smother teary candles with a puff.
Six wax pillars wrap the camera in smoke.
It’s all there in black and white.
The maids, our real mothers
melt like shadows on the walls,
their wild gypsy hair
hides in shame
under the dusty scarves of Islam.
Our fathers are out in the garden
squatting on silk rugs
around a sapphire pool of gold fish.
They’re smoking and cackling politics,
sucking Darjeeling tea
through melting sugar cubes
juggled on their tongues.
Behind the gray gate
with two white swans,
the one-hundred-year old gardener,
once a Cossack soldier,
casts opium bubbles swirling
in the glass belly
of his water pipe.
His two half-Russian brats scream
when Laurel and Hardy squeeze out of the projector.
The Samovars rock like steam engines
sweating leaves brewed for fifty.
I turned six hovering that cake—
in the winter of ’59,
when Persian mountains were covered with black-eyed poppies
and blind poets playing violins.
My picture still shines,
but father is gone,
mother is eighty,
and the country folded to a prayer.v
Eisenhower had an affair
with his woman driver.
It’s all there in black and white.
