WORDWRIGHTS #17 • Fall 1999-Winter 2000 Edition • $5.95 US • $8.95 Canada
SPECIAL FEATURE: U.K. POETS Francesca Beard • Agnes Meadows • Ivan Penaluna • Josi Selby • Tim Turnbull • Tim Wells
POETRY by Joe Allen • Steven Anderson • Barry Ballard • Valerie Bandura • Madelyn Camrud • Pat Daneman • R. Virgil Ellis • Vivekan Don Flint • Bernadette Geyer • Dorothea Grossman • Bill Hemminger • Nancy A. Henry • Matt Hohner • Ruth Moon Kempher • Klipschutz • Lalita Noronha • Helen Padway • Roger Pfingston • Eileen Tabios • Rebecca Villareal • Ken Waldman • Ron K. Williams
PROSE by Richard Crews • Sharon Goldner • Susan Goldstein • Philip K. Jason • Bob Mentzinger • Lalita Noronha • David Overton • Andrew Pachuta
SPECIAL FEATURE: A Sampling of Poetry and Prose by some of the many WordWrights EDITORS: R.D. Baker • Hugh Biggar • Eugenie Bisulco • Jamie Brown • Elizabeth Hazen • Sarah Kain • Jim Patterson • Danny Rose • Irene Rouse • Mary Westcott
HOME
A Poem by KLIPSCHUTZ
THE TELEVISION EXECUTIVE'S NIGHTMARE
Hark! The Return of Spring—
another rerun.
Soon the Miracle of Fall, or else
my name comes off the door.
My ratings in the bedroom are in the dumper,
our dog won’t touch the sponsor’s product,
and the Libyans are selling counterfeit Neilsen boxes.
Our talk show host went Buddhist,
now he’s taken vows of silence. That Puerto Rican
kid who plays the Mexican,
what he’s asking for to renew his contract,
now that’s funny!
On a train back to see Mom,
gone these many years,
finally Away From It All:
the stalks of dancing corn,
they had faces—
for chrisesakes, they were auditioning!
Even they want out of the sticks.
A Poem by PAT DANEMAN
ANNIE
I gave her a straw-colored
name. I did want her
from the day she was born. I
knew her eyes would be
like darting bees, her hands like
perfect shells, cupped
to hold the small pearls of her
fingers. Her pink neck
would smell like blooming stock
and holding her would
be like kneeling down to pray.
Annie, who now is
almost twelve, is bony-kneed,
lank as wheat, like I
was at that age. She’s someone
else’s daughter, somewhere.
Nebraska? Maybe. She can
shoot a basket, catch
a frog. She knows how to hoe,
and she wins races
barefoot. And when she sits out
in their backyard swing
at dusk, letting her chocolate
ice cream melt, the gray
corn talks to her, bending past
the boundary of lawn
and field, slyly telling her
the other story of her life.
Excerpt from a Story by SHARON GOLDNER
MARLYS IN CAPTIVITY
Marlys Adelbaum is working her first crappy job since graduating college.
“You majored in English,” her roommate Arnette cracks. “What the hell else do you expect?”
Marlys works at a dinner theatre, answering phones, taking reservations, things like that. Then on the weekends, she acts as hostess before the show... “hello,welcome”...during intermission ... “bathrooms are to the right”...and after the show... “thank you, come again—our next performance will be our very own Miss Helga’s rendition of THE SOUND OF MUSIC: THE ADVENTURES OF ANOTHER NUN WHO LEAVES—Maria wasn’t the only talented sister.”
Miss Helga, the owner, manager, director, drama goddess, and any other title she wants to give herself, is a little piece of leather...skin brown and freckled where she allowed the sun to play among her pores for too long. Every morning from her bed she calls Marlys at the dinner theatre to make sure that Marlys is there. This is how Miss Helga punches Marlys in while she eats eggs, slippery and wet, yellowed up with butter... “Marlys, you there?”
Miss Helga has promised Marlys the world; the theatre world, that is, such that set design, lighting, and costuming will provide. But so far, she has not delivered. “Soon soon,” has become Miss Helga’s mantra for Marlys, when she sees that Marlys is ready.
The only thing, thus far, that Marlys has learned is how boring this job can be, and how it takes a certain kind of person to think it sophisticated to eat at a table, and then turn the chair around to watch the waiters and waitresses act in a show.
Everyone in Miss Helga’s theatre look upon poor Marlys as a handicapped fop whose only talent lies in taking down credit card information. That is what she has become to them in this little dinner theatre world... “Poor Marlys who really has no talent at all.”
After Miss Helga, there’s Guy. He’s the next musical theatre leader after Miss Helga. He is the musical director and conductor, though he plays other people’s music, composing nothing of his own. Miss Helga has practically adopted Guy, she loves him so, though there has been no legal paperwork. Miss Helga wants Guy to marry her daughter, but everyone knows that Guy is gay.
“Oh Miss Helga,” Guy bows. “I am not worthy,” is how he gets out of being marriage material.
Marlys’ problem with Guy is that somehow he knows that this is Marlys’ first crappy job. “She’s not in it for the long haul,” Guy says though a pinched nose. “I fear she is not one of us,” as if Marlys has received a vaccination against this musical theatre bug. “I heard her once, laughing with one of the chefs about how in the real world nobody stops in the middle of life to belt out a song.”
“The nerve” ripples through the establishment. That is when Miss Helga gets her idea.
“I will make Marlys one of us. I will teach her how to sing.”
On this one particular day, Marlys is stuffing flyers and licking them shut. Guy has taken away the wet sponge, complaining that it makes the envelopes bumpy. Marlys’ tongue feels thick and numb.
Miss Helga bobbles in. After all her years wearing heels, she has still not gotten the feel of walking. Instead, she throws herself forward, as if balancing herself on stilts.
“You’re here,” she declares, blowing the words out hard. She is poised on tiptoes, watching the reservations desk. She straightens out Marlys’ piles.
“Where else would I be?” Marlys responds, refusing to get behind on the rent, or listen to her mother rant on about Marlys’ old room at home sitting so quiet and empty. Hell-bent or move back home...Marlys has to stay completely still.
“Your music lesson will begin momentarily. First, I must check on things in the kitchen,” Miss Helga announces. “There have been too many flies.” She looks at Marlys as if it is the poor girl’s fault that the catering trucks leave the back warehouse door open to load and unload, while someone takes advantage to usher swarms of flies into the place. It never occurs to Miss Helga that the flies come inside themselves.
Marlys sits and waits, capturing another fly under a clear plastic cup she took from the bar. Marlys used to mind the winged anomalies but then she invented fly safari, so she doesn’t mind as much. “This is just a little escape,” she has said to many a fly upon release from the cup as she has eyed the front door herself before five o’clock.
On days when Marlys has been able to capture several flies under one cup she sometimes looks to the sky to see if God is watching her.
“I am lost,” she prays. “Could you maybe send down a map?” Marlys adds that she is willing to pay delivery charges but nothing ever arrives.
Miss Helga is back from kitchen check. She declares that it will be a shorter music lesson today because she has meetings with some grants people.
“I have to play struggling and in need of support. I need time to practice my faces,” she says. Her thin lips then disappear into the lines of her face.
“Do your scales, Marlys,” she commands.
And the singing lesson begins. Or it should. Marlys’ lips feel pasted on and bumpy.
“Do re mi, goddamnit,” Miss Helga sings it and then she talks. “What am I going to do with you? You can’t sing. You’re such a cabbage head. This is fruitless.”
Miss Helga turns on her heel, breaking it. She walks lopsided, out of that place. It never once occurs to her to simply remove her shoes and walk, evenly, levelheadedly, typically...
And Marlys thinks “bad Miss Helga bad...any good nutritionist knows not to mix fruit and vegetables...gas.”
On her way home from work, Marlys goes into a grocery store. She is there for the cabbage. She has never really bothered to look at them before being called one. They are thick, big, and their leaves overlap. Marlys is dismayed. Cabbage is definitely stupid-looking. Nevertheless, she buys one head, dressing it up when she gets home. She gives it eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and an old Halloween wig to wear. She names her cabbage head Bixby, and apologizes.
“You’re not so dumb,” Marlys says.
“You’re not so dumb either,” Bixby replies.
Marlys keeps him on the kitchen counter near where she had kept her complete set of cutlery, until Bixby expresses concern, eyes rolling on top of his cabbage head.
“I don’t like being close to things that cut,” he explains. “It’s too close to slaw.”
Marlys starts confiding in Bixby. They eat dinner together each evening...well, Bixby doesn’t eat... “My feeding days are done,” he sighs, thinking back on his days in a cabbage patch in some farmer’s field. But he gets pleasure watching Marlys, particularly when she chomps down on salad, crunching and grinding the lettuce... “Oh how cousin lettuce thinks he’s so much better than me, with his gourmet dressings and fancy restaurant names like Caesar and Cobb.”
Marlys’ roommate, Arnette, thinks Marlys is crazy. She doesn’t say it, but she casts Marlys and Bixby this look with her head held sideways and her lips pursed the wrong way like she’s a Picasso print. Her face is painted in thick cakey makeup so that nobody can see.
“What do you know, your head’s in the toilet all the time!” Bixby tells Marlys to say. But Marlys refuses...leaving pamphlets on anorexia support groups throughout the house instead.
“I liked you as a roommate because you never have a boyfriend. I never wanted the kind of interruptions that couples bring with them. You’re so strange I thought for sure you’d never find anyone and now look at you—you’ve got a cabbage head,” Arnette says, throwing the pamphlets aside and locking the bathroom door to puke up her snack.
And so it goes. For Marlys and Bixby. The relationship lasts far longer than he thought, for at least several weeks.
“I’m falling apart,” he tells Marlys after a particularly horrendous dinner theatre day. “It was inevitable, you know. A people and a vegetable.”
Concluded in WordWrights #17
