Issue 28 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

f J *~z:.J*

COLUMBIA
A Journal of Literature and Art

Editor-in-Chief
LORI SODERLIND
Executive Editor
GREGORY COWLES
Poetry Editors
DAVID SEMANKI
TRACY SMITH
Managing Editor
AMY SHAFRON
Prose Editor
ELIZABETH HICKEY
Assistant Managing Editor Circulation Manager
BAILEY FOSTER DIANA WETHERALL KATZ
Special Events
SALLY HURST
Production Manager
EMMELINE CHANG
Editorial Board
NEIL AZAVEDO
SHAYNE BESCHTA
TINA CHANG
MARY ROTHWELL DAVIS
MEG GILES
BRYANT PALMER
Grants Coordinator
ELLEN UMANSKY
Prose Assistant
DAN COLLINS
Graphic Designer
JOHN EMERSON
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART is a not-for-profit literary journal
publishing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by new and established writers. It is
edited and produced semiannually by the students of the Graduate Writing
Division of Columbia University School of the Arts and published at 415 Dodge
Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027. Annual subscriptions are available
at $15.00. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed,
stamped envelope.
Cover Photograph: Marie Brooks Dancers at the Schomburg Center, 1994, by
RICARDO JEAN-PIERRE. Courtesy of PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTER OF HARLEM
1997 COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART
Every ten seconds I almost start to ask.
—MICHAEL LOWENTHAL

The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For Advisement: ALICE QUINN
For Editorial Assistance: BRUNO NEVASKY, DAVID LEHMAN
AND JACKSON TAYLOR
For Benefit Readings: SHEILA KOHLERJAN MEISNER,
RICK MOODY AND TRIAD
For Production Assistance: LINNE HA
For her long-time support: SIRI VON REISS
Excerpt from The Heart is an Instrument by Madeleine Blais used
with the author's permission.
Table of Contents
SPECIAL SECTIONS
Turning Points
WENDY WASSERSTEIN
JIM SHEPARD
MADELAINE BLAIS
ARTHUR MILLER
JOAN DIDION
Writing from Prison
ROSANNA WARREN Introduction
MICHAEL WAYNE HUNTER Sam
KATHERINE ALICE POWER Precious Pleasures
J.L.WISE JR.
BENJAMIN LAGUER
SUSAN ROSENBERG
A Tribute to
Joseph Brodsky
WITH SUSAN SONTAG, MARK STRAND,
TATYANA TOLSTAYA AND DEREK WALCOTT
No Brownstones, Just Alleyways
& Corner Pockets Full
Serpants of the Heart,
Angels of the Soul
Memoir: The Airlift
Academy of American Poets
College Prize Winners 187
38
39
40
41
42
57
59
74
75
78
81

Poetry
KRISTIN W. LEE
SUE KWOCK KIM
A.V. CHRISTIE
MATTHEW BROGAN
MATTHEW ROHRER
MATTHEW ROHRER
ERIC GAMALINDA
NINA BOGIN
JUDY MICHAELS
REETIKA VAZIRANI
DZVINIA ORLOWSKY
BARBARA TRAN
AMANDA SCHAFFER
BARBARA HAMBY
WILLIAM TROWBRIDGE
Order Ecstasy God Angel
Nocturne
Remedy
Camp Holiday
Belongings
The Sexual Benefits
of Upright Walking
The End of Empire
Beautiful Things
The Amaranth
Record of Boats
Letters to Theo
The Afterlives of Saints
The Book of the Dead, Revised
for the Skeptical Reader
The Naming of Trees
The Plateau
Thicket
Somewhere in the Forest of
Wild Hands
Nikos of Caravy Street
Love Cycles
Emigration
Outsider
Pleasant City, Ohio
Turnpike Vending Machine
Afterwards
Hebrew School
Wart
Your Demons
8
IO
12
13
H
16
18
20
44
47
49
5i
52
53
55
85
87
89
92
94
96
98
99
100
103
MYRA SHAPIRO
ROBERT WRIGLEY
ART HOMER
MICHAEL ANANIA
MARC COHEN
GEORGE LOONEY
DlANN BLAKELY SHOAF
MARTHA RHODES
Fiction
LISA GLATT
MICHAEL W. COX
MARIAN RYAN
Nonfiction
MICHAEL LOWENTHAL
ANDREW SCHWARTZ
Photography
RICHARD ROTHMAN
PATRICK O'HARE
The Knowledge That I Have
Everything in the Garden
On An Island In The River
After A Flood
Summer 1992, Sarpy County
Some Other Spring
Somewhere Along the Road
Without Demur
The Drama of the Human Body
Chorale
Disguised
Destined
Two Ghosts
PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTER OF HARLEM
Waste
Oak Park, Illinois
Mrs. Gomez Says
106
141
142
144
145
148
151
155
157
158
21
29
161
Snapshots of an AIDS Virgin 107
Partings 120
130
136
170

KRISTIN W. LEE
Order Ecstasy God Angel
l.
The red abacus is passed around. It is supposed to be a key but
looks like the universe itself to you.You take it. It cannot possibly
represent anything other than itself. Which might be anything
you think of.
2.
The red flower. An abandoned brick school with white marble
steps.Your friend's mother had to scrub the steps with a toothbrush
if she wanted to be a cheerleader. A sloping hill sloping
down with sheep spilled all over it.You look closely and they are
ugly and alive. And fields, and a river that must flow toward and
away from you and will never notice you in any exact way.
3.
The white face. The hands. The gravestones of people who
founded this town, dark red and warm. You almost stayed with
him here. You must never be with him again. He will stay with
you, reminding you that you also pissed on the graves and nearly
loved him.
4.
This dog is stupid. You have wandered in the fields alone with
her, though she does not belong to you.You would never call a
dog that stupid your own. Once she snuffed through three feet
of snow to get to something she considered beautiful This was
somewhere else, at night. She found what she needed, and rolled
in it, her gawky dark fur quietly joining itself into points like a
star, a star you would cut out of gold paper. You thought you
would be in big trouble later when she shook all over the house.
When she got up the place she'd been in the snow was beautiful
to you.

SUE KWOCK KIM
Nocturne
Because these are not the nights of empty hands,
because these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
when I look- at you,
I wish I could give you
the landscape in my soul, invisible
as the wishes I follow to your mouth—
an ocean mounting within me, the drowsy foam
and drone of velvet waters washing us closer
and farther apart, always both at once,
murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone.
You cannot see the waves breaking against welted shoals,
but in the rocking of our chair, maybe you hear
the whispering of the sea, biting acetylene,
or cries of tern and gull, brine-stung; maybe you hear
the uncaged waters gasping against hasp and hull,
salt fumes hissing, scalps flensed from bile-dark brine.
In your shirt's rustling, I hear sailcloth in wind,
ropes lashed and pulling against the mast.
In our chair's rasp against pine boards, I hear
the creak of oarlocks, a broken scull scraping against keel.
I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt,
as I rock into your torso, your human shore.
Come nearer, nearer,
for I want to see what you see—
Dress me in burlap and bone,
wrap me in musk and dulse, in human moss,
shine me in a lighthouse's scalding gold;
comfort me with wine and sole, come to me
with a severed branch of coaal, a fistful of wet wings;
sing me the gauze of dusk and salt, nights full of sulfurous foam,
lead me through the narcotic dark to a bed
of coats, your stubbled face grazing my throat,
for I want to feel your eyelids touching my lips when I sleep,
I want to feel the bones of your silence pressing against my own.
I cannot see what you see, but I will paint you
a world in green, the color you most love:
I will weave you a pillow with aloe and flowering lime,
bring you armfuls of wild mint, basil and rain-soaked grapes;
I will make you a city where you may eat
fantastic foods of your invention, where you may look
at green wind moving across a deep green sea.
Because I cannot know how long the shore we make together
will hold us, let me lie within your arms
before the waves tear you from my side,
before the shattering tide returns,
when we'll remember the indifference of the sea.

A.V. CHRISTIE
Remedy
So my day begins with snake venom, drops
of elm on the tongue. It is my simple luxury
to stop on a word: summons or halcyon.
Press into the wind. Just so, I outline my lips
slowly with countless reds. Just so, I count
my breaths. The meadowsweet tincture
may bloom in me.
You go off in a tie
with an elegant pattern, travel downtown
to the big goings on, join in
with crisp, white shirts and broad shoulders.
At work in a gold-plated building, you
make up the skyline—that crowded
and impressive outcropping—you belong
to the procession up steps and between columns.
On holiday we walk far apart
along the adamant cliffs above which entreats
an ocean. Tonight the harbor bell salves
the darkness. As you sleep, I think of it ringing
the next round. Tomorrow we will kneel down
at the tidal pool, to see anemones,
their silent explosions, and starfish
of incomparable turquoise and amethyst—
we will point to the same thing, healing
into the mutual.
Camp Holiday
I watch you put the children beneath the dark
of their cardboard boxes; in a small pinhole of light
they think they might see the sun going away.
At night the words come at me
like wayward feathers from a poultry truck
I followed all through the valley—spinning
into air. Words, the right words to say
to slake the something you want, to whet
the inarticulate. Wouldn't we like to put the children
on their amber buses home and then walk across
the shade where squirrels rest then continue on
like script. And we would walk to the railroad tracks,
walk beyond, and right out of our lives—leaving
the net swaying, new words sweet on our tongues.

Belongings
I put aside the swim team ribbons,
crimped and shimmering, the varsity letters
like thick carpet over your wild heart.
I could string them to your memory, lift you
high on the breeze for everyone to see. It would be easy.
A shaking of heads, words like shame or fine young man.
They wouldn't know how you clung to a bar
all afternoon, hung there until you couldn't feel your arms,
at Stanley Junior High, a new Iron Man
No, these honors flash a long tail of hurt in the sun.
Better to use them like shining lures, like junk
that catches the fish's eye, to troll the silence.
In your bottom drawer I find the heavy box of bullets,
spill them, a school of minnows on the rug.
I want your tallest fishing rod.
I want the few glittering feathers left
from your fly tying. How the hooked insects appeared
in your hands, a little thread and there were wings.
And give me the blues harp. You had it a long time.
I smell your cigarettes when I breathe in,
and again in the flat wail of the tune.
We make our own stories
of where these things have been, how very close
or in just what inner pocket you kept them.
I keep the cardboard scrap. On it a quick list
before one of your disappearances: matches, peanut butter,
hard boiled eggs, cigarettes, twine, matches.
This can mean what I want—bonfire, plea,
you repeatedly cradling the wan flame in your hands
and standing against the wind
I reach down to your underwear, limp on the floor;
I take them—a litter of blown flowers—
and throw them away.

MATTHEW BROGAN
The Sexual Benefits Of Upright Walking
It involves hidden ovulation
and the freeing of the hands
for the invention of gifts
which may help to explain
the practice of marriage
but it's only a theory
and it could have been something else
like the heat or the arrival of mountains
after all it was a long time ago
and there's not much to go on
but the gossip of bones.
The End Of Empire
In an office crowded with
primitives, two strangers
discuss the plate tectonics
of desire and grow bored
with afternoons in Levittown
and other forms of loneliness.
He brings her names
and she makes a record
of his smiles. The sunlight
falls like a sacrifice
and horns get caught
in the blades of a fan.
She reclines to hear his
confession. The gods
are made of wood and stone.

MATTHEW ROHRER
Beautiful Things
Most of us are beautiful.
There are those of us who are too tiny,
who are jelly, who have no faces,
who don't care.
When we say something is beautiful
we mean we can laterally bisect it.
The moon for instance has the day side and the night.
A manta ray has two black wings.
A girl's face has one green eye, one nostril up-turned
like one half of a ski jump, 16 teeth,
and then again.
A peach has two soft sides, two halves of a poisoned seed.
Even the five-pointed starfish fits into our group.
The best time to bisect a starfish is at night
after a shipwreck when they grip the shore.
They are the hands of sailors who didn't make it.
The Amaranth
is an imaginary flower that never fades.
The amaranth is blue with black petals,
it's yellow with red petals,
it's enormous and grows into the shape
of a girl's house,
the seeds nestle high in the closet
where she hid a boy.
The boy and his bike flee
the girl's parents from the tip
of the leaves, green summer light
behind the veins.
The amaranth is an imaginary flower
in the shape of a girl's house
dispensing gin and tonics
from its thorns, a succulent.
This makes the boy's bike steer
off-course all summer, following
the girl in her marvelous car,
the drunken bike.
He was a small part of summer,
he was summer's tongue.

Record Of Boats
Sardinian sailors reeled in the creel,
whistling a section from a longer composition
they didn't know.
Sea exited itself and dallied with brilliance,
then rained back into the sailors' blush wines.
"A hard day is never done," said the oldest,
because you never catch up. Once I fell asleep
on the waves, where I stayed for hours, soaking up time
and when I woke up I sank straight to the bottom."
He had a sardine in each pocket
for a game he played by night
and he emerged from his berth empty.
I record all of this for you who have never lived
in boats. I don't expect you to believe how easy
life is, how each sunrise fills you blue.
Or how creatures sometimes swim upright
on their tails towards you from all sides,
bearing news.
LISA GLATT
Waste
SKIPPER AND I ARE HAVING problems. He's dissatisfied. It's all
there in Skipper's face, in his flushed, unshaven face, all the problems
we are having, all his dissatisfaction. He bites his lower lip
and scrunches his eyes together and doesn't even look like Skipper.
We've been together for six years with good sex two to four times
a week and decent conversations, then last Sunday morning over
coffee and bran muffins, his face changes shape; he's hard to recognize.
Really. And he looks at me and blurts out that he's never
been happy with me, that I've never made him completely happy.
He says that I've never fully satisfied him, sexually, that is. I tell
him that he's the best sex I've ever had and beside that, there's love
here. Right, I tell him, right? And Skipper looks over my head,
out the window, maybe at the oak outside the window, and says
nothing.
Later, that same Sunday, Skipper returns from grocery shopping,
and I'm standing in the kitchen pouring wine into glasses,
wearing his favorite black teddy. I help him unpack the groceries
and feel silly putting away milk and onions and cheese in such an
outfit. Skipper sets the toilet paper on the table. I hand him the
razors and soap. It's fine, he says, you look great. But his face looks
weird, like he doesn't mean it.

We sit on the couch, drinking. Skipper doesn't look any more
familiar and I don't feel any less silly. This was a bad idea, I say, and
remind him of what he said earlier.
What can I do? What do you want me to do? I say, and as
soon as the words leave my lips I regret them.
You could pee on me, Skipper says, if you loved me, you
would pee on me.
Skipper thinks all our problems stem from the fact that I refuse
(have always refused) to pee on him. If you did this one thing for
me one time, Skipper says, you'd see that it's OK, you'd see me love
it, and that would make it OK for you, better than OK. Skipper
says that he's never loved anyone as much as he loves me and that
he's never asked anyone else for urine. And that's why, Skipper
says, he's never been peed on. It doesn't occur to Skipper that the
other women that he slept with, but didn't quite love, might not
have peed on him either; I am the only woman in the world selfish
enough to refuse him.
Debra would have peed on me, Skipper says, nostalgically.
Then why don't you ask Debra? Why don't you call Debra
right now, this minute, and ask her? I say.
Because I didn't love Debra the way I love you, he explains. I
didn't trust her the same way.
Maybe you should have, I tell him.
Pee isn't such a big fucking thing to ask for, Skipper says. And
he puts his wine down and walks to the den.
A couple days later I'm eating lunch at Sam's Seafood with my
best friend Claire. Claire has just finished telling me about her
new lover, Lilly. Lilly, Claire says, is the most gifted woman in the
world. Lilly, Claire says, is the most generous. No one gives like
Lilly, she says, winking. Good, good, I say absently, and I must look
upset—maybe my face too is changing shape under all this pressure—because
now Claire won't let up. What's wrong with the
two of you? she keeps saying. And I surprise myself when I blurt
out, Skipper wants me to pee on him, he's always wanted me to
pee on him. I tell Claire that Skipper's blowing this pee thing out
of proportion, that he's blaming my refusal for his every unhappiness.
Claire is trying not to laugh. She raises the napkin to her
mouth and pretends to wipe something away. And the laugh is
there, there in her napkin.
Is this funny? I say. Claire, what the hell's so funny. Skipper's
face is all skewed up into a stranger's face, he wants my urine, and
you're laughing.
I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, Claire says.
I tell Claire that I can't pee on Skipper, that I can't imagine
my life without him, but I can't imagine peeing on him either. If
I peed on him, I say, I wouldn't be able to look at myself, talk to
my mother on the phone, or pee the same way again.
Claire puts the napkin in her lap. She leans in. Maybe there's
something else wrong with the two of you, maybe Skipper's using
this pee thing as an excuse to leave you, maybe it's symptomatic,
she says.
He really wants me to pee. He's wanted it from the beginning.
You just don't know, I tell her.
The waiter pops out of nowhere and sets two bowls of creamy
soup in front of us. He smiles oddly at me, like he knows, like he
stood somewhere listening.
Can I get you anything else? he says. Perhaps some water?
I think I see a smirk. We're fine, I tell him.
Did he hear us? Do you think he heard us? I ask Claire.
Who?
The waiter, did he hear what we were saying?
Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter.
But if he heard...
Claire interrupts me then and says, You can't worry about
what people think. You just can't worry. She picks up her spoon.
I read about a man once who would only have sex with his wife
if she barked like a dog. Imagine, barking like a dog—for your
husband, she says.
This is different, I say.
Maybe, she says.

The first year Skipper and I were together, I thought he
would grow out of this urine thing. I thought it was more a fantasy
than something he really wanted. The night he brought it
up, we were in bed, my head on his stomach. I was looking at the
wall, noticing the cracked, yellowish paint. If this room's going to
be our room, I said, we should paint it. What do you think of
one red wall?
Red walls drive people insane, he said. It's been proven.
What about a rose color then—a pale, pale red?
Maybe, he said. And moments later, with his hand in my hair,
he asked, What do you think about urine?
Urine?
Urine.
We were at that stage in our relationship where I wanted so
badly to be loved by him, and said things, not necessarily reflecting
my own feelings, but things meant to please, to entice, and to
mystify him.
I've never thought much about it. What about it?
Do you think it's ugly.
Not really ugly. Necessary, I said, urine is necessary.
Do you think it's sexual?
I'm not sure. It might be sexual.
And later, watching him sleep, watching his tough jaw, his
barely open lips, I remember thinking, this man wants my urine.
And I was oddly flattered—that he would want even my waste. I
thought him not a freak, but an enigma. An enigma, however, I
would refuse and refuse and refuse. An enigma I am still refusing.
Had he insisted that night, I might have crouched and let go,
might have balanced my eager hips above his stomach or crotch
and given him that. But he did not.
After lunch Claire and I stand outside Sam's.
Is this about control? Claire says. Is this about staying pretty?
You don't understand, I say. It's something Skipper wants that
I don't want just as badly.
It'll be OK, Claire says, holding my shoulder.
He's growing a beard, I say.
I thought you hated beards, she says.
I suppose it could be wbrse. Skipper could ask me to kill
someone. Or he could ask me to tie him up and stick pins in his
feet. Or he could ask me to bark before sex, bark like a dog.
Demeaning, that's what barking like a dog is. And I suppose peeing
on him isn't half as ugly as him wanting to pee on me. You
don't want to pee on me, do you? I asked him a year ago. No, he
said, I just want to be peed on. Still, I'm not about to pee on anyone,
not even Skipper.
Skipper says that I won't pee on him because I'm worried
about society, what the world thinks, what the world would think
if I peed on him. He says people are miserable, that they shoot
each other on freeways, torture each other in dark rooms, judge
each other for all bad reasons, and all he's asking for is a little pee.
He says people think and worry too much about what others are
doing in bed, and the reason, he says, is because they're so dissatisfied
with their own sex lives and worse, he says, they hate their
bodies and their bodies' functions.
Peeing, Skipper says, is a glorious function, and you're too
fucked up worrying about the world to enjoy it.
It's just not sexual to me, I say. It's waste, I remind him.
You've been poisoned, he says.
When I was in college I dated a bartender named William.
William was six feet tall with brown, curly hair, and older—nearly
thirty. His hands were smooth and tan—the fingers long and
elegant. I sat at his bar one night and watched him pour drinks; I
was excited by those fingers.
I was twenty and all my friends had boyfriends. I wanted
a boyfriend. I wanted more than anything for William to be
my boyfriend.
On a Friday night I went to William's apartment to watch
movies. He'd promised me a musical and what I got was a
lengthy porno film. Near the end of the film, a naked woman lay
on wet grass, in the middle of a meadow maybe, and a man in an
orange cape, carrying dynamite, approached her. The woman had
yellow hair that fell across her cheeks. Hair like straw. And the

26
man stood above the woman, looking down at her, at her naked
body, at her straw hair. He said one word. Open, he said. He
stuck the dynamite inside the woman and began to whistle. He
lit the dynamite. The dynamite sizzled and crackled and the man
continued whistling.
I sat on the couch next to William in my short, black dress,
watching him watch the woman, watching him watch the dynamite,
listening with him to the sizzling and crackling. When the
woman blew up, the caption read: The Big Bang. And William
laughed and laughed, a big, deep laugh from the bottom of his
guts. I hated him then. I felt the hate on my face. It was hot and
scarlet; I thought he could see it. I tried hard to wipe the hate off
my face, hoping William would like me. Would touch me. Would
be my boyfriend.
He started grabbing at me, at my neck and hair, at my skirt.
And I was dry inside, all dry, no matter what William did with
those elegant fingers. And I remember thinking: We are ugly
and deserve each other; we deserve this. And I helped him with
my zipper.
When I tell Skipper about William, Skipper shakes his head.
This urine thing is not about violence, he says. I don't think sticking
dynamite inside a woman is sexy. Don't confuse me with that
bartender.
There are lines I don't want to cross, I say.
I am not that bartender.
I know, Skipper.
I don't want to hurt you.
The man in the movie whistled, I tell him. I think it was The
Star Spangled Banner.
On Saturday night Skipper and I have dinner at Claire's. With
Claire and Lilly. We eat bread, salad, and pasta. White sauce. Claire
is glowing, there is a red ring all around her. I look at Lilly and
wonder if she knows Skipper wants me to pee on him.
I watch Claire watch Lilly.
I watch Lilly watch Claire.
Skipper leans toward me. Part of love is objectification, he
whispers emphatically. *
I drink glass after glass of wine. Every glass is a preparation.
I'm ready for a fourth. I follow Claire to the kitchen. I ask her to
open another bottle. She's wonderful, I say, you've never looked
rosier. Do you like Skipper's beard?
I think it looks good, she says. But you hate it, don't you?
I'm going to pee on him tonight, I tell her.
Are you sure? Is that OK for you? If not...
Tonight, I interrupt her, is pee night.
Is that enough?
Pee night, I repeat.
Why are you drinking so much?
Preparation, the peeing person must prepare, I say, and I laugh,
all the way back to the table, I laugh.
On the way home, in the car, I am not laughing. I am looking
out the window at the road, at the black trees. Skipper has one
hand on the wheel and one hand on my thigh.
What if I wouldn't fuck you, what if I loved you, lived with
you, did everything sexually for you, but wouldn't fuck you?
Would you stay with me, would you be satisfied? he asks.
Yes, I say.
But would you miss it, the fucking part? Would you want me
to fuck you?
It depends.
Would you try to talk me into fucking you?
Yes, I tell him.
We are in bed. The pillows are fat against the headboard. The
sheets are white. Crisp. Skipper is naked. I wear a blue silk gown.
I am kissing his neck and ear. He is touching my hair, moaning
softly.
What do you think about urine? I ask him.
I lay him down on his back. I drink the glass of water I've
brought into the bedroom. I drink it down, simply, easily. I set the
empty water glass on the nightstand. Skipper is breathing hard

28
now, astonished. I am crawling on top of him, enjoying this. I start
to lift off my gown.
No, he says, leave it on.
I pull the gown up, gather it at my waist. I crouch above his
stomach, near his crotch, and let go.
As the hot urine falls from my body onto his body, down the
sides of his body, on the white sheets, I am overcome with anger.
I try to stop peeing, I try for the sake of us to stop, to stop this peeing,
but I cannot.
And moments later, Skipper is on me, moving inside of me.
The gown is wet and tight and tangled about my waist. I am looking
at the empty water glass. Skipper is looking at my cheek, kissing
my face—grateful. I feel his beard, his red and brown beard, his
new beard. The room is pungent. My gown is pungent. Thank
you, Skipper says, thank you. And as I move with him, loving him,
I am leaving him. I will leave him. It's as sure as anything.
MICHAEL W. COX
Oak Park, Illinois
SO THERE WE ARE KNEELING ON THE BED, I mean right in the middle,
when Baldwin's kid steps into the room. Baldwin's body goes
rigid, then he pushes me away.
What are you doing? says his son.
Nothing, Baldwin says, trying to adjust his clothes, We're not
doing anything, his voice high pitched, choked, like he might cry.
You are too, says the kid, who's maybe six, maybe seven — I
can't tell, not having been around kids for so long a time.
Baldwin jumps up and turns his back to us. He's still wearing
his trenchcoat, dressed like some goddamn spy who likes to keep
things fast, efficient.You can see his elbows flying around there and
he's bending over, moving like one of those escape artists you see
in the streets, locked up in cheap chains and squirming on the
pavement, an empty hat hoping for money. What the hell are you
doing home anyway, Baldwin shouts over his shoulder. Then he
turns angrily and faces his kid. Baldwin's belt's only half in place,
a shirttail working through his fly.
The kid looks angry, too, like this primal scene is working on
him.Ten years from now he won't remember the details, I bet, but
he won't forget the feeling of this day. He starts breathing like a
locomotive, like a bull that snorts in some Warner Bros, cartoon.

IT
(2
<
o
30
I'm telling Mom, he shouts, and apparently it's not exactly the
right thing to say to Baldwin, whose face loses its color.
What would you tell her, he says, like it's a dare and it's two
six-year-olds having it out right here in front of me. I roll my eyes
toward the window and the hazy sky, see a jetplane heading for
O'Hare. I try to picture things from Baldwin's point of view, think
what it's like to have your kid catch you fucking some teen-ager
at mid-morning on a business day. It's a stretch, though, because
even if I ever do have kids, Baldwin's not exactly the kind of Dad
I'd want to be.Then from the corner of my eye I see a paperweight
fly across the room, see it catch Baldwin right in the shirttail, the
kid standing now by Baldwin's desk and staring at his felled prey.
Baldwin s now on his knees, his cheeks turning from green to red,
his teeth chewing his fat tongue. They just stare at one another.
So should I leave you two alone or what, I say.
Go sit in the car, Joe, Baldwin says in some red-faced, tonguechewing
voice not his own.
No one does or says anything for a good five seconds. Baldwin
and his son drill each other with thick pupils, and then he looks
my way, his eyes fix me this time. I said, Baldwin says, sounding like
I'd better get my ass in motion, for you to get in the car — that
same purple tone, the words with spaces between them. I straighten
up fast, stand up and walk past the kid. Talk to you later, I say,
as much to his kid as to Baldwin, pulling the door shut as I exit,
thinking this shit is not my problem.
I walk down the stair with all its plush carpeting, head off
through the kitchen and grab myself a Danish that's sitting on the
table —just lying there, round with plenty of gooey sugar smeared
across it, cream cheese filling. It's calling me, so I take it through
the kitchen door and on in to the garage, which smells like gasoline
and motor oil, dried grass on the underside of Baldwin's riding
mower, from when the grass was growing still. Not like now,
all the snow lying there on top of everything. I tell myself, as I get
inside the car, I wish I had some water.
Baldwin's Lexus has two thousand controls on the driver's
panel, like maybe this thing would fly if you drove it down a runway.
It's white, the whole thing. White outside and pale interior,
pale carpeting, pale seats. The whiteness catches what little light
there is seeping in through $ie bottom of the garage door, and
after a minute—after eating that Danish, too (and wiping my
hands on the side of the car seat)—my eyes adjust and I get to
study all the tools Baldwin keeps inside his suburban garage. StufF
for his car—jumper cables, a battery recharger, cans of motor oil—
and for the lawn, the driveway—blacktop, snow blower. And
there's kid stuff in that garage, too, the tricycle, the training
wheeled bicycle, and hanging on the wall the junior trail bike with
fat tires, there's even another big fat parking space for his missus's
car, with nice, dark oil drips lying beneath where her car's engine
goes. I'll have to tell Baldwin—when he comes down from telling
Junior some big lie about what daddy was doing with that nice
young man—say hey, you know, you should crawl under your
wife's oil pan and take a look. She's leaking, pal, and bad, too, it
looks like. And I'm thinking about what it is she probably drives
when Baldwin bursts through the doorway into the garage, looking
like something very awful has just happened. He leaves the
garage door wide open and he's got his keys in his hand and jumps
inside the car so fast he doesn't bother trying to shut his door. He
grinds the engine, keeps the key going too long in the ignition.
You'll get fumes inside your house, I say.
Doesn't matter, he says, flooding his engine.
Stop that, I say.
What? he says above the racket.
Stop grinding the fucking engine. You're killing your car.
But he doesn't stop, and I have to reach over and turn his key
hand back, make his stop with the engine.
Baldwin's shaking all at once, and then he wraps his arms
around his trench-coated self and says I killed him, I killed my son.
He rocks back and forth, touching the steering wheel almost and
then rocking back in the seat until his haircut touches the headrest.
There's a flood of light coming from the kitchen that illuminates
the front end of the car, striking the far wall of the garage,
too, and I see his cutting tools then, the stuff he uses to trim his
lawn, to cut it, slash it. Maybe he burns it, for all I know, looking
at the big gasoline can in the corner, uses those controlled burn

n:
o
come the fall, maybe, and if I went outside to his back yard right
now and shoveled away all the snow, maybe I'd find some burned
grass, brown, curled at the end. I'd tear some away with the shovel,
sure, but there'd be enough still on the ground so you could tell
how he did it, controlled the growth, I mean. Kept things from
getting out of hand.
How? I say, hearing myself say it, like my head is inside a drain
pipe and my voice comes from outside myself.
With the pillow, he says. Over his face.
Where?
On the bed.
The bed we were on?
He nods.
Are you sure you killed him, I ask.
He doesn't answer. He rocks instead. Touching the headrest,
then the steering wheel, the headrest again. He looks like a goddamn
bob, or like one of those Bozo balloons little kids slap
away at.
I'm thirsty, I say.
He tells me the glasses are in the cabinet to the left of the sink.
I say thank you and he says you're welcome as I step outside the
car. Inside I turn out the kitchen light—it's too bright somehow.
Baldwin has one of those Price-Pfister faucets. I drink water and
realize it's the first water I've had all morning, so I tell myself I've
got to watch that sort of thing, tell myself water is important, you
can't drink too much, and what you don't need you get rid of
down some alley. Maybe you hit the John at the public library if
they don't know you, don't think you're up to something in there
that might disturb the patrons. Joe, I hear Baldwin say from the
garage. The rest of the house is eerily quiet, and I don't much like
it. Joe? he says again, this time •with a question mark after my
name. I can't keep myself from wondering about the kid.
As I pass through the hallway the phone rings twice and then
the answering machine comes on. It's Baldwin's missus and the call
is for little Robby—not for Baldwin who should be at work.
Mommy says to little Robby she's sorry he got sick this morning
after Daddy went to work and she's sorry she couldn't stay home
with him, she had to be at work first thing but now her boss has
said she can come home so**now she is in fact coming home and
she will pick up orange juice and Pop Tarts at the store so little
Robby can eat those and feel all better. She sounds like a nice
woman, really, probably a good mom but for this morning's lapse
of no babysitter on too short a notice.
I walk up the stairs, taking my time, not wanting, really, to get
to the top too fast. I start noticing the family portraits as I go up,
noticing that there seems to be a portrait of the three of them—
Baldwin, his wife, their son—for every birthday the kid has had,
like the stairwell is their monument to his aging. Each picture is
the same pose, Mom to little Robby s left and Dad to his right,
cake out front, all three of them working at the candles with their
lips. The table is the same one as downstairs, the pictures being
snapped, I guess, by whatever, muchacha it is that Baldwin is not
paying Social Security on that year. The pictures go only halfway
up the stair and stop at seven candles. On the second floor there
are four rooms, each with its door pulled to. I am holding back on
going into Baldwin's room, since, really, I can do -without seeing
his son lying there, his eyes open, maybe, or maybe closed. I push
wide the door anyway and look at the bed, see that it's empty. Oh
that's the bed all right, it's all messed up from where I was on it
before, and there's a fat pillow, dead center, but no sign of little
Robby. I walk around the bed to look at the side against the wall,
thinking that somehow Baldwin must've knocked the kid to the
floor, but again there's nothing. Then I'm on my knees looking
under the bed, on the off chance that maybe in his dying throes
Robby crawled under there, if such a thing could ever be. I try not
to get spooked, wondering if Baldwin has dragged the kid somewhere,
tried to hide him, maybe, but the closet is empty except for
Baldwin's clothes, nice suits, all Brooks. Wing-tipped shoes line the
floor. The next room I try is the room of Baldwin's missus, and
somehow I'd missed that, that the two of them kept separate
rooms. It's woman's stuff, all of it, her dresser lined with bottle after
bottle of perfume, make-up, and pills, at least a dozen prescriptions,
Valium, Librium. Now it's a kind of tour I'm on, the guest
room next, pictures of old folks who are doubtless little Robby's

IT
o
34
grandparents, both sets looking like Chicago Gothic. Last comes
Robby's room. I push the door open slowly, see that he's sitting
before his homework desk nice and wholesome, not propped up
by a crazed father or anything like that, but alive and breathing,
staring, of all things, at a picture of Baldwin dressed in a baseball
uniform, his bat cocked, his eye looking right into the camera's.
Don't burn your eyes out, kid, I say, and he turns and looks at
me with dry eyes, though his nose is bleeding.
I'm pretty glad to see that Baldwin was altogether wrong
about having killed the kid. I figured he hadn't really done it—he's
the type who gets worked up a lot, the type who'd not remember
right a scene where he's trying to suffocate his own kid.
How come, he says.
How come what, I say.
How come you know my father?
He's just a friend, I say, and Robby looks at me hard, so I try
again: He's just a man I met, that's all.
I get him a Kleenex from his desk and hand it to him and tell
him to wipe, which he does, which gives him something to do and
so he seems to feel better, a little more in control maybe. He drops
the Kleenex into a little trash can beside his desk. He looks at me,
afraid. He looks away and runs his hands across some books on his
desktop, and then Robby tells me what I already know, that Daddy
put a pillow over his face. He tells me he had to lie very still, so
Daddy would take the pillow away. He tells me he had to lie that
way for a long time, till Daddy screamed goddamn and then ran
from the room, all this in a kind of robot voice. He wasn't really
sick this morning, he tells me, he only pretended.
You're pretty good at pretending, I say, smiling a little.
What do you mean? he says.
Well, I say, you fooled mommy this morning about being
sick—Robby nods and grins—And you fooled Daddy just a while
ago, in his room on the bed—
But then Robby's eyes grow wide like tangerines, so I ask him
quickly about that picture of Baldwin, ask Robby does he play
ball, too, and if so what position. I mean, what can you say to a kid
who's been killed and come back? Not really killed, of course, but
the things inside him have been. He starts telling me he only plays
whiffle ball out back sometimes with dad, who plays in a summer
league for his company.
Yeah, I say, it's probably a swell way for dad to meet other men,
and by the look on Robby's face, I can see he has half an idea what
it is I mean, and he doesn't look too happy. It's just a joke, Robby,
I say. I say I didn't mean it, but he keeps looking at me like he
knows I did.
I tell Robby why doesn't he just hang out up here for a while,
and I tell him, too, that his mom called a few minutes ago and said
she'd be home soon. I tell him she's bringing Pop Tarts and orange
juice, and for half a second he looks happy. Just stay up here, I say.
You can maybe hide in your closet, if you want, till your mom gets
home.
He looks scared for me to be leaving, but I pat his head and
take off, wanting to get to the garage before Baldwin has had a
chance to do anything really stupid. He's shut the kitchen door,
I find when I get down there, and I open up the garage and see
that the room is very dark. I run my hand along the wall until I
find that light switch. He's sitting on the floor, right where his
wife's car goes, doubtless ruining his coat by wiping his ass along
the oil stains.
So what are you doing?
Take my keys, he says.
He's holding them in the air for me.
Why should I want to do that, I ask, and he tells me he's thinking
of driving out to the Eisenhower the •wrong way and running
head-on into a truck.
What kind of truck, I say, but he doesn't answer my smart
remark. The keys rattle in his hand, impatient for me. It stinks in
here, I think, it smelling like every kind of engine fluid a garage
could have.
Inside the kitchen I open wide the back door and the window
above the sink, to keep the smell from getting inside the rest
of the house. All this life-saving starts making me tired, so I find a
cup and pour myself some cold coffee from the Mr. C, put that in
the microwave on two minutes. Baldwin walks in just before the

in
O
o
coffee is done, looks at me, turns toward the cabinet to find himself
a cup and, indeed, he's oiled not only the seat of his trenchcoat,
but the elbows, too. Don't worry, I say, you can write it off
on your insurance.
He whips around, stricken, and I realize he thinks I mean his
son.Your coat, I say. I mean your goddamn coat. Oh, shit, Baldwin,
don't cry.
I don't cry, he says.
No, I say. You just look like you're about to ninety percent of
the time, and then he looks even more hurt, if that's possible.
The microwave beeps and I walk over to get my coffee, take a
sip—it's good, definitely not just something from out of a supermarket
tin can. It's hot against my tongue, and Baldwin's keys dig
into my leg inside my pocket.
I called for you, he says to me. I called for you twice, but you
didn't answer.
I had things to do, I say, blowing on the coffee.
But you did hear me calling you, he says.
Sure, I say. The first time you said just my name, kind of flat.
Like this: Joe. The second time there was a question to it: Joe?—
like that. Did you need me or something?
Baldwin's holding an empty cup now and is looking at me.
You know, I say, back in old Greece they had to take their kids out
to some mountain and chain them to a rock or something. I guess
they didn't have pillows back then, huh?
He rears back and flings the cup at me. I watch it sail past and
hear it break against the wall. I think to myself I doubt they let him
pitch out there in summer league. Not with a sissy throw like that.
I sip my coffee, ignore him.
Your wife'll be home in a few minutes, I say.
She's at work, he says dully.
Not, I say. She's coming home any minute. She left a message
on the machine saying so.
He knows I'm not lying.
You'd better think up some story, I say. About the boy, I mean.
Baldwin walks over and sits, heavily, at the breakfast table. He
puts his head in his hands, having to hold it up.
Boy, I say. I'm glad I'm not you. He looks about to cry again,
but he was being truthful when he said he didn't cry, because surely
he'd cry now, being so needled by me as he is. I actually start to
feel sorry for the sonofabitch. I can't quite bring myself to tell him
his son's as good at pretending as he is, but I figure maybe I can
edge somewhere close to the truth. So, Baldwin, I say.
Yes?
I take it you wish you hadn't done what you did.
Yes, he says, the single word sounding about as profound as it
can, being said as it is by someone so despairing.
Do you believe in miracles, Baldwin? I ask him.
He thinks about it. He thinks for a long time, then finally he
says no.
That's too bad, I say. Too fucking bad. I finish my coffee. It's
cold by now, all the cold air coming in from the kitchen door and
window. Then his wife pulls in the driveway, right on cue. You can
just see the top of her car from where I am standing, and then the
garage door rolls open, and a wall of cold air and engine fumes
races through the kitchen and out the door, the window. I reach
into my pocket and grab Baldwin's keys. Here, I say, tossing them
— they hit him in the face, but he doesn't seem to feel it. Oh, shit,
I say, I thought you'd try to catch them. He just sits there looking
like someone who thinks he killed his son, a drop of blood now
on his cheek. I walk to the back door as I hear his wife's car door
opening, and I can see by his face he thinks that I am taunting
him.You're so fucking cruel, he says to me.
Baldwin, are you home? his wife, from the garage, calls out,
and I trot out the doorway into their snowy backyard. There's a
whiffle bat leaning against the side of the house, and a lump of
snow beside it that probably hides the ball. I make my way around
the side of Baldwin's garage and out onto the shoveled suburban
sidewalk, the rush of Chicago-bound traffic coming from the
thorough-fare at the end of the street.

Turning Points
Knowing that success in the arts rarely comes without struggle, COLUMBIA
asked some accomplished writers if there had been moments in their careers
when the future was uncertain. Following are some stories of these "turn-
ing points."
WENDY WASSERSTEIN
AN EARLY PLAY OF MINE, Uncommon Women and Others, was returned
"postage due" to me from a theatre. At that point, I decided to
take physics at Marymount College and begin a long haul to
becoming a psychiatrist.
Happily, I have no capacity for physics and even more happily,
a theater in New York, Playwrights Horizons, called me to say
they'd like to do a reading of the play. Andre Bishop, the literary
manager of that theatre, and I have had a professional relationship
now for twenty years. He has produced six of my plays.
Wendy Wasserstein is a playwright whose works include The Heidi
Chronicles, which earned the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, the
Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and other awards; and The Sisters
Rosensweig, which received the 1993 Outer Critics Circle Award and a
Tony nomination.
JIM SHEPARD
IF I WERE FORCED to identify the one pivotal moment in my early
career that put me on the road to the kind of financial wrack and
ruin that mostly comprises the fiction writer's life, I'd cite a
Christmas gift I received while still in sixth grade. My parents,
anxious that I should go to college (only one member of my
extended family had done so at that point) believed that lots of
reading at a young age was the key, and that nonfiction books were
the most useful, since they provided the information. That
Christmas, a friend of the family, Joe Favale, gave me a present that
puzzled me: a boxed set of J. D. Salinger. There were no illustrations
on the covers. The titles were baffling: Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters? And once I flipped through them, I realized they
were fiction.
Once I read them, I realized something else: they aspired to do
more than the fiction I'd read up until that point. I'd read literary
things, as well, like The Odyssey and Dracula, and Poe, but these
books were different: they featured a world that sounded familiar,
an idiom I recognized. Could people really write this way? Up
until that point, I'd loved to write and had never imagined that
what I could write could ever be thought of as Literature. After
that point, there was always that new—and unbelievable—possibility.
There have been numerous writers whose work I've come to
cherish more than Salinger's. But he was the first to set me in that
direction. And there have been countless friends and benefactors
who've assisted my career since Joe Favale. But without Joe, there
might have been no career. I thanked him officially in the dedication
of my first novel. I take this opportunity to thank him again.
Jim Shepard is the author of four novels: Flights, Paper Doll, Lights
Out in the Reptile House, and Kiss of the Wolf. His most recent book
is a collection of short fiction, Batting against Castro. He teaches at
Williams College.

40
MADELAINE BLAIS
THE BOSTON GLOBE REMAINS IN MY MIND the model of a great
newspaper for writers of feature stories. There is respect for prose,
for the simplicity of language but also for its richness. ...Why didn't
I hitch my star to the Globe indefinitely? Like most young
people starting out I had one major asset going for me, my impatience,
and one going against me, my impatience. The fire in my
belly threw out indiscriminate flames. I wanted to make the leap
from correspondent to staffer more swiftly than the management
there thought agreeable. I left for a much less interesting job at a
fashion paper. Instead of covering select people, I was now covering
hemlines. ... Eventually I was fired, on the grounds that my
pantyhose surveys were "not sufficiently in-depth quality to warrant
continued employment."
I think at one point I had applied at every major daily
between Portland, Maine, and Miami, Florida. I once submitted
what I considered to be a beautifully pasted scrapbook to a newspaper
which not only declined to hire me but also failed to return
my clips for over a year despite my weekly entreaties. I waited and
waited. Finally, in a miracle of belated efficiency, there arrived in
the mail the outdated collection of what I considered my finest
flowers. I opened it up and settled down with a cup of coffee to
look at myself in the mirror of my prose. A note from one editor
to another fluttered forth.
It said:
"If this person possesses any talent, I fail to see it."
Madelaine Blais is a professor of journalism at the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst. Her most recent book, In These Girls, Hope Is
a Muscle, was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award.
ARTHUR MILLER
THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK, my first produced play on
Broadway, lasted five or six performances. I resolved never to write
for theatre again and indeed proceeded to write a novel, Focus. But
John Anderson, a critic, invited me for a drink and said the play
had "an overcast of tragic feeling that nobody can fake." I kept
coming back to that and let myself into All My Sons. That remark
was a turning point.
Arthur Miller is the author of numerous plays, including "Death of a
Salesman"and "The Crucible."

JOAN DIDION
1 MADE NOTES—a plan for a piece, actually—on the back of a press
release in the Louisiana Superdome on the last night of the 1988
Republican convention. I had a piece on the 1988 campaign due
almost immediately and not the least idea how to do it. Rather
desperate, I sketched out this general idea of how to structure it.
The fact that there is a quote from William Bennett on the right
side of the page suggests that I was doing this while he spoke, but
I have no real memory of this.
The idea was this: There would be an opening section (block
1), including the stats on participation etc. I see I had some notion
of pointing out how American presidential elections resembled
power exchanges in El Salvador, "with the virtue of being nonlethal."
This I seem to have blessedly abandoned. Block 2 would
be the "agora" aspect, the marketplace, i.e. the conventions. Block
3 would have to do with the campaign press, Block 4 with the
traveling campaigns. Block 4A would be a short block on polling.
Block 5 would pull it together.
After I finished the piece, which was called "Insider Baseball"
and appeared in The New York Review of Books and later in After
Henry, I framed this sketch as a reminder that I could, if I had to,
write a piece I didn't think I could do. It has been in my office
ever since.
Joan Didion is a journalist and novelist. She has published several collec-
tions of essays chronicling life in America, including The White Album
and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Her latest novel, The Last Thing
He Wanted, was published by Alfred Knopf.
i 1
- J'. I
,v> -
o*
(P^e^
J"
i yi i ' m-w.-H
A page from the notebook of Joan Didion
©Joan Die

ERIC GAMALINDA
Letters to Theo
1.
Theo: This summer I fear
I shall go mad
with love
for all things simple,
mortal, brave.
The fireflies rise
in the gloaming,
it is an explosion
so sad and quiet
the whole world is compelled
to watch and be still.
I want to send you
this silence,
the bold fires in the mountains
and the way they torch the earth,
the way things turn luminous
and entire unto themselves.
They will tell you
what to look for.
They will tell you once in a while
the earth is kind
to those who know it is,
and we are subject
to absolute kindness.
It is good
to believe in it,
to know we are not special
but necessary,
like light or water,
to let our lives go
as they must,
to know our place
the moment we get there.
2.
On another day
I found a bird's nest
and brought it back to my studio.
For days it sat at my window,
and the sun and the wind
nourished it as though
the nest itself were still capable
of nourishing.
A week later it began to unravel,
the twig frame coming apart
to reveal hidden fiber,
a bed of leaves, the patterns
of weaving. The more I tried to fix it
the more it fell apart,
and so I left it alone to fulfill
its inevitable decay.

And all the questions one would expect
from this experience came to mind:
Who had lived there?
Do their memories contain
lost sunlight, and this softness?
Do they leave to let things
fall apart? And how can I save them,
when they never come back?
3.
It is impossible to count all the trees
felled by lightning. This evening
a storm is moving in
with the stealth and grace
of a thief, and the colors
of the fields soften
in its wake. This is how the earth
prepares for upheaval—
a nervous vigilance,
an act of surrender.
Tonight I will stand by this window
to watch those veins of lightning
pulse in the sky. Is it the danger
inherent in them that makes them
so beautiful, or their distance?
I am writing this
from the end of the world.
The sky bursts into flames.
Finally, I possess nothing.
The Afterlives of Saints
Suppose the laws of warfare were based on miracles,
and they chained and licked the bodies of saints
so the Etruscans could not use them. Suppose
the best weapons did not function from belief
but custody, and those who possessed them
had, like Saint Francis, the potential of stigmata,
the gift of tongues. For even he was a self-promoter,
boasting to birds of the ever-after in which
he was talisman and trophy. And suppose a fair maiden
would become the wraith of salvation, her body
perfectly embalmed, but when they opened her grave
her marvelous longevity gave way. The fact is that
Saint Clare embodies what has become of Assisi,
where tourists tear out a piece of the landscape
like the pietra serena chipping away.
Not too long ago her body lay on a bed
of violets, themselves impervious to decay.
Then air and moisture, the bustle of human ordinariness,
intervened, and all that is left is a life-like replica
in which bone fragments quietly work their wonders.
Faith has a way of distorting the senses,

making the world more intricate than it already is, more
mirabile dictu. Even now armies still ransack
the catacombs of the elect, and in the chapels the healing
happens insidiously, perfected by repetition.
Because the most we ask for is that the saints be true.
We are driving away from the scene of the crime,
stealing a glimpse in the rearview mirror. Assisi
is an undulation of opal-colored light, no more than
a wavelength, a mirage. This is the way history and memory
invade each other, like wars waged after visions.
Look back once, see how the view melts into the crags,
and how time fades like the frescoes of Cimabue.
The Book of the Dead,
Revised for the Skeptical Reader
This could be the pitstop of the world,
dusk-lit and brooding, everyone a stranger
but their faces still uncannily familiar,
the way faces always look familiar to people
running from the past, or the law.
I could wake from a dream of saving us all,
cupping blood and wine in my hands,
or walking on water. This could be
my repertory of miracles, minor, selective,
unimpressive but for a few. I am writing to you
from the other side of the world.
Here morning comes sixteen hours late,
it comes in the wrack of the A train
whose doors open up to a Cuban emigre,
his voice hoarse from singing, his soul muscular
from too much love. I find myself always looking out
for places too quiet for my own good,
the way God is silent to let us think he isn't there.
I think I will stop believing in God someday,
and in his stead a churning fog will shield us
like a globe, half alive but not enough
to warrant supplication, just strong enough
to protect us from radiation and rain.
I am writing to say I will step out
into the flat light of noon to find my place
among the indifferent, the poets and beggars
of my generation. If I've said this before,

and I believe I have, ignore this warning,
bear your life like a legal document,
believe in the cold blue air
that cradles the skull, that fills the lungs
of the newborn and coaxes it to cry.
This is something I wrote in the interstices
of living, my life looking over my shoulder
and telling me to get on with it. This is something
I will never send you, because words like love
and quiet and afternoon have no meaning
where you are, because they are no longer
necessary. I think there must be towers there
of glass and smoke, and bridges that shoot into air,
and small towns where people look
exactly as they did in photographs
taken twenty years ago.
The Naming of Trees
for Carlos Angeles
The jacaranda in bloom
is changing the landscape of Los Angeles
like a tagger-in-reverse: one
that says, Enough of desecration.
Time for quiet grandeur. Make room.
And everything falls into place,
moved by devices even now still difficult
for us to understand. Summer
is another country, they are happier there,
they mark time not by seasons but by the ease
these lilac-colored petals nosedive
to the pavement. If we could assemble the world
just as effortlessly there would be no need
for words. Inexplicable.
But this is how we survive.
You've seen them come and go,
the beautiful, flaming ones.
In this city whose streets
no longer confuse you, renewal comes
as a matter of choice. Although
it is impossible to ascertain
its exact coordinates, home is that place
you are continually born into,
that you leave with no regret,
that grows smaller each time you return.

NINA BOGIN
The Plateau
—-from 'Three Walks: the Plateau ofVandoncourt"
Grey silence. Edges of mist
where the forests end.
I walk between rows
of apple trees on the still-green
winter grass. Everything is swept clean.
Not a single windfall apple
remains. Only stiff branches,
and trunks, wrapped in blue lichen.
Two crows, on treetops.
Small pale birds below.
Then the near cry
of an unseen hawk. The rasp
of a jay in reply. Later,
circling back, I see a swirl
of sparrows cross the plateau,
looping up, down, on byways of air
only they know the shape of. I take
other paths, trying to make sense
of the signs around me,
to leave myself aside
and see things as they are.
Thicket
—-from 'Three Walks: the Plateau ofVandoncourt"
The back land is a wild
of thicket, bristling with
briar and blackthorn,
sullen thistles.
You can't get an arm
or leg in edgewise.
The hedge sticks
its tongues out at you.
What you cut down
grows back twofold.
You must dig down
into the marrow
and wrench out each
irascible root-stump
and each forked,
barbed runner
until you reach
the original root wedged
so deep you must wrest
the very birth from it.
And behead every volatile
thistle, and burn each fistful
of seeds. Then burn
the earth itself until,

scorched and black, it is pure.
Here, on conquered
land, the green
of civilization will grow.
Or you can leave the thicket
as it is, untamed,
its own fortress, governed
by laws whose language
you can't know. But not
necessarily enemy.
In the new order, a thicket
may be what protects you.
JUDY MICHAELS
Somewhere in the Forest ofWild Hands
The children enumerate houses—
igloo, teepee, longhouse, cabin,
skyscraper, shell, cocoon,
"Grave," she says, she is ten
and leads them through the forest of wild hands
to a clearing.
They are thrilled. They are pure vibrato.
How did she think of that?
And I wonder should we all go back to butterflies,
or chrysalis, a pretty word,
and what happened to Charlotte when she wove
her sac of spider eggs?
"Grave," she says.
Discovery has so many colors.
Who in here has visited a grave?
I leave it alone, but think how long
a tuning fork will vibrate.
Some day, deep in her own woods
she will think "house," she will think "grave,"
and go with mop and broom, boxes and tears
to her mother's
in search of a clearing.

Writing from Prison
Introduction
The Larger 'We'
THIS ISSUE OF COLUMBIA JOURNAL APPEARS at a moment when more
than a million people are incarcerated in the United States. It is
also a period when correctional policy is growing more punitive.
Many of those programs which have helped prisoners to re-enter
social life in a civilized way—the programs in higher education—
have been swept away by the amendment to the 1994 crime bill
which bans the federal Pell grants to prisoners for post-secondary
education. As for the prisoners, they have a harder and harder time
being heard in the melee, because the grants that used to support
the publication and distribution of prison writing have largely disappeared.
It is all the more significant, then, when literary journals reach
out to inmate writers across the country, men and women in
institutions as diverse as San Quentin and M.C.I. Framingham,
and present such a variety of work. The pieces which follow do
not make easy reading. Rage, self-righteousness, and violence are
on display here, along with strivings toward humane connection
and reconciliation. These writers bring news: news of the hidden
soul of the United States. Not many readers on the outside will
welcome this news; it is too painful, too sordid, apparently too
hopeless in its depictions. As art, it can be jagged and raw. But this

is just why "we"—notice the simple assumptions in that pronoun—need
to attend to it: because the true first person plural of
our country, the real "we," includes prisoners.The imprisoned and
the "free" mirror one another: we are connected by the violence
in our families, in our streets, in our institutions, in our minds, in
our hearts. Putting people behind walls does not erase them from
the psyches of their surviving victims or their executioners. Until
we know ourselves as the larger "we," we will not begin to grow
toward peace.
By writing well, by presenting small truths clearly and starkly,
the writers in this issue contribute to the painful knowledge that
will attend the birth of our better, communal self. It's the observed
details that move me most in these pieces: the ice hanging from
the wings of the transport plane in Susan Rosenberg's "Memoir:
The Airlift"; the impacted syllables in J.L. Wise Jr.'s "No
Brownstones, Just Alleyways & Corner Pockets Full" ("where
corn-row weaved/cornbread & swine fed/bow bellied
hoochies/double-dutch into labor"); the dialogue wrung out of
the action in a story from San Quentin, "Sam," by Michael Wayne
Hunter; the beautifully observed green bean which Katherine
Alice Power holds out as an offering to the reader in "Precious
Pleasures." From dark places, these writers extract a promise. As
Benjamin Laguer writes, "We can be better than who we are."
—ROSANNA WARREN
MICHAEL WAYNE HUNTER
Sam
WHILE TRUDGING FROM THE EXERCISE YARD TODAY, I Saw in the distance
a tall, thin, green-clad black man, and thought for a heartbeat
that it might be Sam. But if it's Sam, I chuckled, silently, grimly,
I should just forget about my legal appeals because I'm dead
already. But then if the ghosts really exist, I reflected further, I suspect
that they tend to hang out in places like the dungeons of the
castle that I call my home, San Quentin's Death Row.
My first encounter with Sam, I was leaning against the yellow
cinderblock wall that separates the condemned-men exercise yard
from the world, and contentedly puffing on a rollie Bugler cancerstick.
As I pulled the smoke deep into my lungs, I felt real good
about the kick-butt workout routine that I'd just put in on the
weight pile. Stretching my arms out slowly, I hid behind my 187
sunglasses while feeling the sun's rays softly massaging my sore
muscles. I was waiting to be called by the guard conducting recall.
When my name pierced the air, it would be my turn to move to
the yard's gate for handcuffs.
Penetrating my happy fatigue, I heard the murmuring of other
dead men complaining: "Da canine's fuckin'it up! Jesus Christ, the
damn five-oh can't even git the mothuh fuckin' list raht!"
Laughing at the curses, I watched the rookie canine struggle
on and on with the yard recall lists. It didn't even flash in my head

IT
0.
tc
6O
for even a half a beat to help the mutt out, wasn't my day to baby
sit any infant coppers.
"Can'tja read!" bellowed an irate, pot-bellied sergeant while
stomping out of the condemned-men cell block and advancing on
the hapless puppy cop. "Whad da hell do dey teach ya at da ahcad-emy,
ennyway?"
The baby guard that I came to know as Sam answered quickly
in a half-strangled voice. "Of course I know how to read. The
inmates aren't coming to the gate when I call their names."
"Call 'em twice!" snapped the sergeant. "Dey don't show, write
'em!" Spinning on his patent leather heel, the top dog walked.
My amusement over Sam's inexperience changed to anger in
a quarter-beat, the next day, when I found out that I was "confined
to quarters."Turned out, Sam had claimed that I'd screwed up yard
recall by not coming to the gate when he called me — a damned
lie. Then, out of the kindness of his Kool-Aid pumping heart or to
cover his butt, the mutt had written me a "rule violation report."
When Sam walked by my cell during yard release that day, I
called to him in my most tactful, diplomatic manner. "Hey, fuckhead!
What's your mothuh fuckin' problem? You blow the gig
and you write me! For Christ's sake, yard recall ain't rocket science.
What're ya, anyway? Another example of affirmative action
gone wild?"
Sam hesitated, then looked like he was going to flee the scene.
If he did, there wasn't much I could do about it, locked in my cell
and all. But to his credit, he stepped to my bars and said softly,
"wasn't just you, I wrote Anderson, too."
That's when my fury jumped from a rolling, boiling three to a
nine-plus — pretty near nuclear explosion ground zero time. For
you to comprehend the full depth and intensity of my emotion,
you'd have to understand prison from the inside. Describing doing
all-day-long behind bars in a hard-core prison is a lot like explaining
sex to a virgin. Words, pictures, diagrams just ain't a real good
substitute for the real thing.
Anyway, San Quentin had been rocking and rolling for
months. Whistles, alarms going off all over the place, violence as
common as the cockroaches crawling around on the peeling, faded
walls. Almost daily, you'd see a bleeding body lying on an orange
stretcher en route to the hospital or morgue. So many guys had
been going down stabbed, shot, that the entire prison had been
locked tight one out of every two days for the past year.
Six weeks before the prison officials assigned to my housing
unit had called the leaders of different gangs together, allegedly
to try and work out a truce. At the conference, a Mexican gangbanger
pulled out a shank, and yanked and cranked it into the
body of a black leader until he was dead while the badges ran
for cover.
Rumors (rumors I believed) abounded around the prison that
the killing had been engineered by a high ranking Mexican-
American prison official, and the state legislature was holding
hearings to determine if this was true. If you weren't aware of the
racial tensions, you were too stupid to be walking around inside
the walls of SQ without training-fuckin'-wheels.
White guards had offered me weapons if I'd agree to hit black
or Mexican gang-bangers. The canine would offer to search me
himself to make certain that I got the shank to the exercise yard,
and even guarantee a warning shot from the mutt with the assault
rifle on the catwalk. In theory, the warning would give me a
chance to drop the shank, go to the ground, and keep from getting
my head caved in with a bullet. Didn't really buy the warning
shot deal. Figured that once I made the hit, the canine with the
assault rifle would bust open my skull with a .223 and laugh his
ass off about the stupid dead-man who believed in free passes and
other such fairy tales.
A man would have to be a fool not to believe that black coppers
weren't making the same offer to black prisoners, and
Mexican coppers to Mexican prisoners. The badges fill our heads
with their personal brand of vitriol, supply the implements of
destruction, and then we get locked down again and again and
again while they pull down the lock down overtime pay.
Now, amid all that craziness, I got a black canine telling me
not to take it personally that he wrote me up on a bogus beef, cuz
he wrote another white prisoner too. Shit! Ain't that stupid, just
look this way, man!

o in
a:
Q_
62
After lasering the canine with hate-filled eyes for a moment, I
said, "Whatta coincidence, yah bagged two white guys." Then I
just turned and walked to the back of my cell. Ain't got nothin'
more to talk about, but payback can be a bitch screamed through
my brain, as I considered tagging the mutt through the cell's bars
with a spear when he passed my way again.
Spinning to make good his escape, Sam suddenly stopped and
spun back to the bars. "I want to tell you something," he whispered
at me. "Come back to the bars, man."
"Go to hell," died in the back of my throat as I heard something
in his voice that moved my feet reluctantly toward him.
"Probably won't come as a news flash to you," Sam mouthed
quietly,"but I'm brand new, fresh out of the academy. Didn't know
what I was doing with the yard lists, and when the sarge jumped
on me for messing it up, I told him the very first thing that popped
into my head. Told him that you guys weren't coming in when I
called your names.
"When the sarge told me to write the inmates who didn't
show right away at the gate, I panicked; then I just pointed to
two names at random. You know I don't know your names, yet,
or the color of the men behind the names.You got to believe me,
it wasn't a racial move.
"Yeah," he said, "I should of come clean with the sarge, but
I'm still on probation, and I really need this job. Need the pay
check—bad!
"If you want," Sam sighed,"I'll go tell the sarge right now that
I screwed it up, and get you back on the yard list. But I'd really
appreciate it if you'd let it slide for today. I'll owe you one, okay?"
Funny thing, the truth; you don't hear it often anywhere, in
prison it's pretty damn near extinct. But when truth rings out, it
rings clear, and sounds so beautiful that it's real hard to disturb
the melody with a bunch of petty static. "Okay man," I heard
myself answer as if from a distance while I wondered where my
voice was taking me. "I'll get with Anderson and quash it with
him too, but you owe me. I don't jus' want an extra raggedy
lunch bag sometime."
"Deal," came from behind flashing teeth and the canine was
gone. *
On the yard the next day, I told Anderson that Sam had blown
it, but I didn't think it was racial, just a new cop tripping all over
himself. Even as I quashed it with Anderson, I wondered what the
hell I was doing, but continued squaring the beef anyway.
After jawing for awhile, we both finally said the usual thing.
The man can't give us back the day he stole from us—fuck it! I
didn't bring up the deal I'd cut with Sam. I doubted in the clear
light of a new day inside the grim confines of San Quentin that
the mutt would pay off, and besides, Sam owed only me. Anderson
had nothin' comin' from my deal.
Guards on their nine month probationary period are moved
all around the prison, and just fill in •wherever a badge is needed,
so I didn't see Sam very much. When our paths did cross, we'd just
nod in that ritualistic way that people do when they know each
other's faces, but aren't close. Never did we speak about his debt to
me.
A year later. On the exercise yard, a Mexican hit-man conjured
a shank out of nowhere, and tried to drive it through my
sunglasses, into my right eye, and what passes for a brain deep
inside my skull. Luckily, I was wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers, not the
cheap knock-offs, but the real deal. Instead of falling apart, the
shades took the blow, deflected the blade upward, and it stuck into
the bone above my right eye socket, just below my eyebrow.
The next few moments were highly confused and I don't
remember much. I was raining blood from my eye socket and
blows filled with evil intent from my fists, when I heard the
mechanical clack of a bullet slamming into the chamber of a
canine's assault rifle. Even in the fog of my pain and rage, I realized
that if I didn't stop fighting, in less than a beat a .223 would
be tracking toward my skull. Quickly, I raised my hands and
backed off the assassin. That weekend my wife came to SQ and
cried when she saw my patched eye. "Have you ever noticed," she
whispered sweetly in my ear, "that all the tough guys end up as
basket cases or dead? Maybe the fact that you're neither yet just

o in
E
h
IT
64
might clue you that you're not all that tough. Why don't you use
your head for something besides something hard for the guards to
bang bullets off of?"
I always listen to my wife, nothing wrong with her brain if you
set aside her poor judgement when it comes to men; otherwise,
she's just about perfect. So I started thinking for perhaps the first
time in my life, and wondered where in the hell were all my
homeboys while I was getting blind-sided, tagged in the eye, and
bleeding all over the concrete? If they'd a been the calvary, none
of the stagecoaches would've ever gotten through. I didn't ask
them though, they'd have some damned excuse—prison's full of
them.
Although my eye and vision returned to the same as they'd
been before the hit, my view of my homeboys was changed forever.
Oh, I still hit the iron with the fellas, but when the workout
was done, and the bars were back in the pile, I started doubletying
my shoelaces and heading out to play basketball with the
black guys. At first, it blew the minds of my homies, but I just didn't
give a damn. I wanted to find out who the hell were some of
the other guys that'd been hanging out on the condemned exercise
yard with me for years that I didn't know a damned thing
about. So I just told my workout partners, "Don't beat on my trip,
and I won't beat on yours."
"Yah git in trouble out there, ya on your own!" snarled one of
my putative buddies.
Think, I been on my own for quite awhile but jus' didn't
know it 'til now, flashed through my brain. But I just nodded and
went to hoop it up.
On the round-ball court, I'd hear some trash talk, but it was
mostly directed at my two-inch vertical leap. So I got white man's
disease, but I can put the damned rock into the hoop at least one
shot out of every ten or twenty or maybe a few more.
One bright, shiny day, I was having a monster day on the
court. I was in the zone, everything I tossed toward the bucket
was falling in. Mook man, who was guarding me, couldn't believe
it, and seemed even more delighted about it than me. The man
didn't guard me too tough, probably just figured that I'd chill and
start banging bricks off of the side of the rim—as usual.
Out of nowhere some psychotic on the sidelines hollered, "Ay,
Mookie! Don't let that white boy tear you up! You're making a
muthah-fucking all-star outta the wood!"
Everyone laughed, but the Mook Man. Thought about telling
him it was just my turn for 15 minutes of fame, but the game started
up again before I had a chance.
Catching the ball in the lane, I felt Mook Man's body on mine
for the first time that day, crowding me for the ball. Flashing an
up-fake at him, I showed him the ball. When he soared into the
air, I spun the other way, and softly laid it into the' hoop.
Next play, Mook Man caught me in the forehead with his
elbow. Wincing in pain, I rasped out, "Hey, Mookie, it's only a
game, man. No one's makin' a living out here."
"Men playing," Mook Man glowered at me. "Can't take it, get
your punk-ass to your end of the yard," he bit off the words as he
violently gestured toward the white boys against the far wall.
Flashing my eyes around, I saw that all of a sudden I was alone.
No one, not a single soul, was meeting my eyes. I'd seen these
looks before in the county jail. The deputy dawgs would slam a
score or more guys into a tank built for a dozen. Jammed in like
rats, the pack would begin to form, and all of a sudden someone
would become a non-entity as the mob got ready to roll. If the
victim fought back, he'd just get beaten. If he laid down, it was all
about the gang bang rape scene. After awhile, I came to realize that
this wasn't about sex, it was about anger, evil, and most of all,
power.
I'd never been a member of the mob, nor the object of it, but
I always wondered why some guys didn't fight. Now, as I looked
around at the faces, some of them stony, some reflecting excitement,
others mirroring a flicker of shame, I understood the paralysis
for the first time. When you're the object of the mob, you feel
totally isolated, and absolutely disconnected from humanity. Your
brain feels hypnotized like a rabbits eyes frozen in the glare of
headlights just before it goes one-on-one with two tons of rolling
General Motors steel and loses. Big.
As my eyes continued to move to each of the black men
around me, I found that my hand was involuntarily rubbing the
scar above my right eye. I then heard a voice and was startled to

66
discover that it was mine. "Forget it," I said in an eerily normal
tone of voice. "Let's play ball."
Next play when the ball went up, I got up as high as I could
into the air and ripped my right arm towards Mook's skull.
Realizing in mid-flight that I couldn't soar high enough to tag
him, I snatched his shoulder, and yanked him down to the concrete.
Landing lightly next to him, I booted him in the side while
snarling, "you git the fuck offa da court, asshole!" Just stay down,
man, I implored Mook in my mind as I stepped to the side.
Rolling with my kick, Mook Man bounced to his feet, fast,
real fast. Throwing a right hand that barely missed my jaw, as I
jerked my head in the other direction, his fist smacked hard into
the side of my neck.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spied that Mook Man's homeboy,
JT, 6-feet, 3-inches tall and 250 pounds of weight-driving
muscle, was pounding directly toward my body. Spinning away
from Mook to face his homie, I knew that it was futile. JT's just
too damn big for me! Bracing myself for the avalanche, all of a
sudden JT's past me, and he snatched up Mook Man like he's a 2year-old,
and simply walked away with him.
My mind blown apart by JT's move, my eyes took over and
immediately flicked up to the gun canine on the catwalk. As I
watched, the badge swung the business end of his assault rifle
towards the yard. Behind the mirrored sunglasses, I saw the
canine's face—it was Sam. Standing, quietly , I waited to find out
what he was going to do about what just went down.
Sam looked at me, and then his eyes moved to Mook Man
who was walking the other way as JT intently packed words
through his ears and into his head.
"Rough ball game," Sam called from the catwalk. "I'm calling
on the radio for escorts to take you and Mookie to your cells. Get
your stories straight in case the sergeant interviews you. No
punches, no fight, you were just playing a bit too rough. You with
me or you want to spend the next six months in the hole?"
Damn! A free pass! The notion rocketed through my head. As
I collected my workout clothes getting ready to leave the yard,JT
came at me, blotting out the sunlight with his huge, ebony self.
"Mook cheap-shotted you, and got his lumps to make it square.
Now, it's over, man. No reason to start a war over a petty scuffle."
"I hear that," I answered as I nodded my agreement while
starting to figure that this might work out.
Escorts made the scene. Handcuffed, I walked into the condemned
housing unit. Kidnapped, I'm not taken to my cell.
Instead, the escort canine took me to a black cage outside the
sergeant's office and locked my body inside.
Pulling off my state issue t-shirt, I put it down on the slimy
floor that smelled of urine, settled down, and leaned against the iron
grillwork. I figured that the sergeant must've been monitoring the
radio, and when Sam called for escorts, the sergeant intercepted the
escort canines and had us brought here for "investigation."
I've been through this before, the sarge will keep us locked in
the cages for a couple of hours to soften us up. The canines figure
that the wait will prey on our minds while we wonder what
they're getting ready to do to us. I always try to argue to myself
that since I know and understand their tactics, they won't affect
me. That's an argument that I always seem to be losing. Sitting
with my eyes hidden behind my sunglasses, I just kept telling
myself, Worry about what you can control, homeboy, and forget
about the rest.
Sergeant Dana walked by me, and strode into her office. I've
known her for a couple of years, she was one of the first female
guards at San Quentin, and she's also openly lesbian. Sergeant
Dana belongs to a leather-wearing, Harley-riding biker club called
"dykes on bikes," and she never misses a Gay Pride parade in San
Francisco. For her to survive and make sergeant in the hostile,
macho male environment of San Quentin is quite an accomplishment.
She did it by being flat out smarter and better at her job
than anyone else. Personally, I've got respect for the sergeant.
My thoughts of Sergeant Dana were interrupted by the sight
of Sam marching towards her office. Evidently, she'd called him
down from the catwalk in order to make his report in person.
Seems like the female canine is her usual efficient self, I reflected.
May as well get comfortable, I yawned and stretched my arms,
going to be locked in this cage awhile.

0
m
a
GL
z
o

Q_
7°
know at SQ. Things change fast, and you can find yourself up to
your ass in trouble—quick.
Looking around, I saw that Mook Man hadn't made it to the
yard, and my nervousness jumped and multiplied by ten.
"Where's Mookie?" I asked JT in a soft voice.
"The lieutenant found him guilty."
"What the fuck!" I snarled. "How could the LT find him
guilty, and give me a free pass?"This looked bad, real bad. It looked
like I'd rolled over on Mookie, and given him to the man. Never
should've talked to that bitch! Should've stayed the hell out of the
damned office, I swore to myself, and taken the chance that the
badge would send me to the hole for refusing to interview.
"Not the fight,"JT explained with a grin. "Mookie was found
guilty of disrespectin' Sergeant Dana."
Relaxing with these words, I laughed and clued JT exactly
what Mook Man had said to the sarge.
"The boy will never learn," JT mused with a shake of his head,
"but disrespect's only a traffic ticket. He'll be out in a few."
After the weights, I hesitated before I went to play ball. After
a moment, I joined the game. Like they say around this dungeon:
"Show no fear, there is no fear." That, like most things they say
around here, is full of crap, but nothing went down except the ball
falling through the hoop.
Eventually, Sam fell by my cell and said, "We're even."
"Yeah, we are," I smiled back at the sunglasses before he
turned and walked.
A couple of months later, Sam was serving breakfast on my
tier. For some reason, Sergeant Penny was firmly on his ass, giving
Sam all kinds of conflicting orders about how to deliver the food
to the cells.
Finally, Sam hollered at the top-dog, "I'm the food officer and
I'll hand out the issues any way that I see fit! Replace me or get
off my tier!"
Sergeant Penny's whiskey red face flashed a brighter shade of
scarlet, and then he nearly ran off of the tier.
When Sam arrived at my cell, I was laughing and pointing
at him.
"What's your problem?" Sam snapped.
Reminding him how hff'd panicked the first time that he'd
been jumped on by a sergeant, I contrasted his reaction then to his
words of a few moments ago. In a beat, we were both laughing,
tears streaming down our faces.
After that day, Sam started dropping by my cell from time to
time. Met his parents, his wife through the photos in his wallet,
and his words. I learned how tough it was for him growing up in
the inner-city of the flat-lands of Oakland. Sam talked with pride
about the first house that he'd just bought with his wife in the
same neighborhood they'd grown up in.
"Now that you're making money," I remarked, "Why don't
you get out of there? Move on out to the suburbs."
"Wouldn't want to do that," Sam replied. "Our house is close
to the church my family's always attended, and besides, a lot of
people in the community helped me when I was a kid. If it hadn't
been for them, I'd probably be locked up or dead. No one and
I mean not anyone makes something of themself in the ghetto
alone. For each kid that succeeds down there, you'll find at least
one person that reached down and pulled the child up and out off
the misery. You just don't do it all alone.
"Now; it's my turn to be there for some of the kids that're trying
to make it. I want to be a role model. Not by being a cop," he
hastened to add, "but simply by being a man that gets out of bed
every morning, goes to work, and takes care of his family."
There was a strong sense of determination and pride as Sam
talked about his life. It occurred to me that he really did need his
job that day long ago when he wrote me the "rules violation
report."
One day after one of our many conversations, I found to my
surprise that I didn't think of him as a cop or a black man anymore;
he was just Sam.
Sam asked me once, "What're you doing in here? You don't
seem to belong on Death Row."
Real uncomfortable with the question, I finally answered
slowly, softly,"Guess no one was ever there to reach down and pull
me out, Sam."

o in
a.
0.
X
o
u.
In response, he simply nodded his head and never brought the
subject up again.
A couple of years ago, I was leaving the exercise yard during
yard recall, and Sam was once again running the lists. "Yah sure it's
my turn ta come off, man," I teased softly, "Don't wanta catch a
write-up."
Sam's voice turned serious as he asked me, "Do you think
they'll kill Bobby?"
Bobby Harris had an execution date, the first one in
California since the five-year moratorium on the Death Penalty.
"Don't know," I answered. "He's got a hearing in a couple of
weeks. We'll just have to wait and see."
Shaking his head, Sam said solemnly, "Don't know about
working here if they start killing you guys. Don't want to support
my family on thirty pieces of silver. My wife's praying for Bobby,
don't want to see anyone die."
Voice shifting to a lighter tone, Sam remarked, "You look thin,
man.You eating all right?"
"Can't buy me off with a lunch, man!" I teased him some
more. "Told you that. I'm okay," I added. "Just shed some pounds
runnin laps around the yard after weights."
"Don't know, your arms are smaller," Sam persisted. "Look at
them compared to The Edge's arms."
"The edge has huge arms," I protested.
"Yeah, he does," agreed Sam with a smile, and then he turned
back to calling condemned men off the Death Row yard.
The next day, a canine dropped by my pad, banged on my bars
with his baton and then said in a serious tone of voice that quickly
drew my feet to the front of my cell, "Sam's wife wanted me to
talk to you."
"His wife? You sure?" I wondered in surprise.
"Yeah, Sam's dead," the canine told me as he began to explain
what had happened.
Sam had invited some guards to fall by his house for a gettogether.
There was food, dancing, and a good time was the plan.
Some young men crashed the party, but Sam and his wife didn't
care about the intrusion. Matter-of-fact, they welcomed the gatecrashers
inside their home*" until one of the twenty-year-olds
pulled out a crack pipe and fired it up.
Sam didn't make a big deal out of the drugs, but he did ask the
young man to leave, and all of his buddies decided to fly away with
him too.
When they had just left, a stone crashed through the front
window of Sam's home. Quickly, perhaps without thinking, Sam
and his fellow guards went out to confront the young men. Shots
were fired by both sides, and Sam lay dead on the street.
After hearing the story, I flipped on my television for the
news. Sam's death got 30 seconds on the local news •while Bobby's
possible impending execution was analyzed in detail for five minutes
on the national network news.
When I turned off the television, I just kept hearing over and
over again Sam's voice saying, "Yeah, he does." The quick throw
away line, the last line he ever spoke to me.
More years gone by. Bobby was executed two years after
Sam died.
JT was identified as a "known gang member" and shipped to
a cell so deep inside they have to pump in sunlight.
Mook Man was shot and killed by a white canine during a
fist-fight with a white prisoner in the yard.
Me? Guess I'm about the same, except that I don't play basketball
anymore.
Michael Wayne Hunter is a prisoner on Death Row at San Quentin
Prison in California.

KATHERINE ALICE POWER
Precious Pleasures
One dozen cuts of just-tender bright green beans
(the taste of summer startles me
from twelve minutes at a prison lunch table
to Willamett Valley evenings
shaking and picking Blue Lakes with you)
ten thick cut carrot rounds, served hot
three mallard ducks against the eleven a.m. sky
on Thursday
three friends sharing coffee
after Jello-doused, white frosted cake
from a lady magazine
Last night Hazel cooked for me in Brattleboro,
"Life Soup" she called it.
She blessed sauteeing onions,
chopped in a good bunch of kale
and two Yellow Finn potatoes,
and thought of me in my prison.
Too much like a spirit known by hunters
I have come to live
on the smoke offered by believers
and the occasional perfect green bean.
Katherine Alice Power is serving twelve years at MCI Framingham in
Massachusetts. Her imprisonment is related to Vietnam War-era protests,
and her writing on the subject is restricted as a condition of her sentence.
J.L. WISE JR.
No Brownstones, Just Alleyways &
Corner Pockets Full
I.
Hot bothered nights...
street corner hype &
neon signs winking to def jams'
rhythms jumping
the juke joint;
Mad Dog
T-bird
& greasy fatburger's stench
reeks from sweaty pores
of nickel dime poolhall hustlers
busting ning-balls &
OOPS
upside the heads of
bluesed-out screwballs;
where fanged flies on a mission
ignore the
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
signs
like kamikaze daredevils
free-basing poppies &
practicing the serious art
of hari-kari;
a 15-story highwire act featuring
odiferous mongrels howling unmolestedly
off key
in schoolless breezeways up 14th St.

sporting flat-top fades on second grade
boys rolling dice
drunks
cursing like Popeye the Sailorman
& breaking down gats & Macs
as a skillful trade;
where cornrow-weaved
cornbread & swine fed
bow-bellied hoochies
double-dutch into labor.
Salvation dies too many deaths
in this pale faceless metro
where first-of-the-month checks
arrive a little & too late again
straight shooters
"jingle it, baby..."
& face-cracking Wet Willies
flood Afrika's blood.
II.
The buck stops here
headlining Monday's toilet paper
after rendezvous in pissy gangways
between swingblade strawberries
doing their best James Cagney
impersonations &
undersexed
overweight
outraged corporate America
(The Brave?)
ganked
stunted
jacked & permanently dissed
screaming for mercy
911
(it's a joke in our town!)
frigid wives
& the AIDS Hotline;
where storefront philanderers
preach 666 Hail Marys
in atonement for satisfying sins
with an idea when the indoctrination
began
but none of where hell or this alleyway
end
determined to discover brownstones
still
in corner pockets full.
Hot bothered nights...
but unstrange bedfellows.
J.L. Wise Jr. is serving time at MCI Framingham in Massachusetts.

BENJAMIN LAGUER
An excerpt from the essay
Serpents of the Heart,
Angels of the Soul
PRISON LIFE TODAY is UNDENIABLY MORE Orwellian in objective and
design than George Orwell could have ever imagined. Every
aspect of the inmate s life, from his calorie intake to how much
toilet paper he consumes per defecation, is the subject of some
form of scrutiny. And that is not all. Prison officials calibrate the
inmate's external realities; inmates are awakened in the middle of
the night and no one ever sees them again. Rumors are allowed to
spread like wildfire over how many more will disappear in the
night. Tribalism among inmates of different ethnic groups is fostered
in order to prevent the population from being of a single
mind on issues affecting their lives.
Suicide attempts in prison today are almost a daily occurance.
The paltry Mental Health staff is booked for months in advance.
So unless one dismantles a shaving razor and presses the blade deep
into one's neck (not just pressing the blade, but enough for the
guard to see blood starting to pour out), one has no chance of seeing
a mental health professional.
Three times a day, every day of the week, inmates can be seen
walking, like a small army of ants, toward the hospital building. The
most common prescriptions dispensed in prison are not for physical
ailments, but are psychotropic pharmaceutials which keep the
inmate mind from facing reality. It is as if the prison psychiatrist
has, singlehandedly, the power to dispense more mercy than the
prison chaplain. These inmafSs return to their cells as happy as
children returning home from the corner candy store. They lay in
their beds, and do not awake again until it's time for more sweets.
Every telephone call an inmate makes is wire-tapped by some
faceless security operative, who does nothing else but sit in a dark
room replaying the conversations of otherwise legally presumed
civilians. And no probable cause is required.
A few days ago I wrote a friend a letter in which I tried to
explain how life in prison has changed: "It used to be that I could
sit in the prison yard, against the fence, and talk myself back in
memory—command frozen memories to unfreeze from their stillness,
but no more. In the same way the spirit of the American
neighborhood has changed, as it must, but for the worse, so has the
spirit of this far away corner of the earth."
I realize now that I was probably only half right. The spirit of
the American neighborhood has changed, as it must, but not for
the worse, as I had written. Crime is less of a concern today than
it has been in years for the American neighborhood. What has
actually turned for the worse is my own reality in prison.
Prison conditions are worsening because the evil which once
roamed free in the American neighborhood reigns, now, behind
the sealed space of this prison.
Prisons need not be these Orwellian houses where men and
women are stripped of every basic human instinct, but for the fact
that we can be better. Nor should prison be a place in which mental
terrorism can be viewed as necessarily justifiable for meeting
greater ends.
As the 21st century nears, prison officials take much pride in
the fact that physical torture is no longer practiced. What may not
be obvious to the naked eye, though, are the wounds of mental
torture—a kind of more profound and lasting consequences—
being inflicted in the name of public safety. We can be better than
who we are.
A few weeks ago an oldtimer took me aside in one of the
prison's walkways and told me, after which he walked away, "In the
heart of every criminal is a secret garden, a sort of small paradise

o

o
in
IT
CL
82
civil defense maneuvers, and for the shipping and handling of federal
prisoners. We drove through the Harrisburg airport, around to
the back. We were screened and checked at the gate and waved
through. As we passed through the rows offences and barbed wire
I thought, "Dual function, to keep us in—and keep the rest out."
My thoughts were a jumble and I was sad and afraid. Sad because
this was my departure from the past, from what I knew in my life.
I was leaving the East Coast, my family, my friends, my compatriots,
the turmoil of the trial, everything that was familiar even
though distorted by the extreme circumstances of capture. Going
to what? To where? To be with whom? To serve 58 years in prison
in a future so unknown it was alien even to think about. And what
of the resistance, and what of the movement? I didn't know. The
military presence and police intimidation was not what I feared;
rather it was the unknowable future, the isolation, the slow death
of vindictive prosecutions, which produced the deepest of aches.
We drove onto the runway towards the plane. Its stair was
down; ice hung from the wings. Ringing the plane were prison
guards and U.S. Marshals. They all had shotguns or automatic
weapons cradled in their arms. As I looked at them I thought of
the U.S. Marine Corps marching slogan that was so popular during
the Vietnam War: "This is my rifle, this is my gun, one is for
shooting, the other for fun." I thought many of these men, these
police, had been in Vietnam. I knew that their training dictated
that if anything went down they wouldn't hesitate to act. The first
one who would be shot was me, to protect themselves from their
unforeseen, unknown enemies, to prevent my escape and deny my
freedom, to destroy those who would free me. In that split instant
of surveying the scene, the full military nature of the transport hit
me. The sheer overkill of the firepower would be directed at us, at
the prisoners.
Then I saw a line of men standing perpendicular to the tail of
the plane. There were about 60 of them, all in short sleeved khaki
shirts and pants .They were wearing blue prison-issue no-lace slip
on sneakers. They were handcuffed, chained and freezing.
Different ones of them stamping their feet, jumping up and down,
blowing air that formed frost.They were overwhelmingly men of
the third world. The majority of them were black, African-
Americans. They had been removed from the plane in order for
me to be put on. They stood in the cold, no warm clothes, in
chains, surrounded by white men with weapons. Time stopped.
And the memories of the first funeral of a black revolutionary that
I ever attended filled my head. The fury of the oppressed against
racism and genocide is like thunder, and the will to survive is the
strongest on earth, but when it is not organized, not directed, it
becomes self-inflicted and misguided. These were my thoughts as
I looked at the men. Most of them were in their prime. We were
standing there in the cold, caught, waiting for the rest of our lives
to go on.
I felt a unity with the men, despite the divide bet-ween us.
They black and me white. I felt a bond because as I peered
through the distance to see each man's face I knew it was their history
as black people that placed them there, and it was the history
of black people that in a different sense had placed me there,
too. It was the middle passage 400 years ago where it all began, and
now waiting to enter the modern slave ship, we were mid-journey
in this struggle to survive and live. That day at the first airlift I ever
took, seeing that row of men standing and waiting for "the
Terrorist," brought my life into sharp relief. Knowing that they
were waiting for my arrival, were forced to stand there, freezing,
made me furious. All the sadness evaporated instantly. I went hot
in the cold morning. The marshals had surrounded me, hustled me
out of the car, almost picking me up, to get me to the stairs, and
on the plane. For hours I had not said a word, not uttered a sound,
through the entire drive, but as I stood up from the car I found my
anger. It replaced all the uncertainties. With my anger, I found my
voice. I yelled to the men standing there. And for one short
moment, the chains, the guns, the cold and agony receded into the
background: "I am sorry these police made you wait in the cold,
brothers! I'm sorry!"
I yelled: "They didn't need to do that!"
A man on the line yelled back: "Aren't you Susan? I was with
Ray at MCC!"
"Yes!" I called."! am!"

o
in
ir
Q.
z
o
84
He turned to the others and said, "She ours! She's Black
Liberation Army!" Another man yelled: "Thank God for the
BLA! Don't worry Baby! The more they fear you the more they
respect you!"
"We will win one day!" I yelled. "Maybe not now, but one
day!" A third man said,"I know about Assata! Don't worry!"
This yelling exchange took only an instant but in that brief
moment the marshals turned their weapons first on me, and then
on the line of prisoners. They began to drag me towards the plane.
At the top of the stairs I turned to look once more at the dreary,
bleak northeastern landscape, and the cold wind hit my face hard,
as tears streamed down my cheeks.
Susan Rosenberg is serving a 58-year prison sentence for illegal weapons
possession. A self-proclaimed revolutionary since the late 1970s, she had
worked with the NewAfrikan and Puerto Rican independence movements
and the May 19 Communist organization, an outgrowth of the Weather
Underground. When she was arrested in Cherry Hill, NJ. in 1984, she
was 29 years old.
REETIKA VAZIRANI
Nikos of Caravy Street
Nikos, she said, don't kill yourself-—
or what will I tell your father?
He will beat me like he beat Ansey,
take my blue organdy dress,
he will raise up my mourning like a kite
above town, and he will work me,
tell me again how he likes his crabs—
cooked in salt and butter—such a bore!
Give it some thought, Nikos,
you were always the selfish one—
hogging the tailor's time at Easter
when others needed their suits—
bribing the butcher for your favorite cut of meat.
What about Nisseem?
What piece of mutton did he ever get?
So tell me Nikos, what •will it be?
Are you coming to Andrade's for dinner,
or what shall I say?
Ah, Nikos, he didn't feel up to it—
it is too hot for Nikos to put on his shirt.
Ah Nikos, you are a bum!
Now get up. Get up before I tell your mother
and she comes rushing in here with her broom!
Get up Nikos, I am turning the iron up to silk—
give me your shirt, and take off those trousers so I can crease them.

Who ever heard of a man lying around
in his best evening trousers?
These you put on for someone else's funeral—
Tarik, for example. Now Tarik deserves to shoot himself.
Yesterday he seduced Laleh—
tomorrow Angelina.
Get up Nikos, don't think Tarik hasn't winked at me.
He calls here you know.
He calls and asks me, So
is Nikos dead? Has the poor creature stabbed himself?
There you are!
Who cares for you Nikos de Mecina? One minute
left for dead,
the next putting on your after shave.
Love Cycles
You enter your trousers,
jangle your keys,
shoes scuffle down the steps
morning of these
brief stays. It is so nice
to have seen you,
and I'll see you later
I don't have to
sigh nor rely on a
slightly aggrieved
prolonged parting. I feel
fine, not bereaved,
just like a summer day
and day after.
Nothing distracted us.
Phone, nor chatter.
Steadied, our glances stopped
cocktail hour
rovings. I pictured you,
and there you were
a part of who I was
awhile. Your mere
presence invited me

B«
though nothing's clear
past today if endings
loom; but I find
myself richer, unsure,
and fortified.
Emigration
1.
No packing list, and no money. Who can take them?
But I want the gold tasseled chaise
I lounged on those nights of havoc
speaking with you on Avenue Foch,
Maria Callas, about a heart's dryness,
a loss of verve; the deeps of talent, glamour
not plumbed. Wanting Onassis even when your strewn
scales were their own fleet.Voluptuous. Rough.
I want a recording of that horrible Medea.
I mean, Maria, your impractical love for Jason.
Cravings. Radha wandering with her love for Krishna
A cowherding girl, penniless, electric!
2.
Duvet cover, lamp, world: biography of Auden —
thing was to love one's neighbor....I strayed
to planes, trains, you, clothes; we aimed at a style.
Wasn't it a carapace for our fragile conversations?
/ meant to call you, but I lost myself at the mall.
Friday at noon, the fine weekend, driving fast and not speaking.

Toothbrush, toothpaste, boarding pass, magazine,
and the handbag stuffed with maps, postcards.
Alex, did I ever mail you my best greetings
from climates which hinted at something divine?
3.
We wore cigarette leg pants in melon silks
at the dress store, took our breaks
in the stock room and talked about cosmetics,
made extravagant wishes to forgo
at these religious times—but I'd like a lipstick
even now: bronze mica frost with a dark brown liner.
I'll bring you some Jean Rhys. And what shade of rouge!
Which red lacquer?
Tia, from the shoestore, size two petite jacket,
you come too. And you, always -window-shopping your mind,
Hazir; so bring your steamer trunk
as if it's old days on the Cunard,
and emboldened by our emigration we wave from the rail.
4.
Late dinners at Brasa off the downtown mall
where we keep on eating mussels
and talking about the day, and did I say
I played it like a wild card?, each shell
wet on our fingers, tossed off as at the coast
where we go for the tide's erasure. Bye, sailor,
for what do I know now? Maybe the beach,
collecting her wet skirts on my chaise. Salutations
time and fine weather. Good morning
and good evening from a lighted coast!

DZVINIA ORLOWSKY
Outsider
1.
I remember English stuck in my throat,
Mrs. Longbone's tobacco breath
as she leaned over me,
her finger jerking across the page
as if dragging something
on a leash.
2.
My parents were immigrants, not me
who had a penny first given
then taken away
for every English word
spoken in the house.
They gave it instead to the bank:
a large ceramic dalmatian—
happy wide dog tongue,
opulent black dots.
3.
What a relief to be excused
to clean blackboard erasers,
to switch on the large vacuum
in the boiler room
covering its bristled mouth
with my hand.
I'd wait for it to wheeze
its angry high pitch.
Then I'd let go.
So many of us in that room
and one opened window—
black asphalt,
a single unconjugatable
declaration of weeds.

Pleasant City, Ohio
We love to return
to these streets, trees,
the corner's one functionless hydrant
inspected last
by someone who died upstairs, smoking in bed.
The occupants of the white house
once lived in,
(barely recognizable),
look slightly retarded,
pulseless,
out on the porch swing—
the way we imagine
we would've eventually looked
had we stayed.
Here our coronation begins.
Where, after, do we turn,
dragging our pelts behind?
Where is that car overturned
killing the teenagers
on the way to the rock concert?
We were never that popular.
Yet, at the town's cemetery,
the dead are eager.
See the one with the hat?
See the one holding the stone?
There are more.
A breeze arrives from another
unmarked town, vacant acres,
a few cows tacked in place.
We love to come home for a visit,
look nervously at our watches—
our intelligent brilliant lives
so far ahead of us,
they've already been claimed.

Turnpike Vending Machine
Pocket-knife-corkscrew-fork ensemble
outfitting even the smallest breakdown,
I want you,
your dangers fanned out, displayed,
graceful utility, poised
as a hummingbird—
hormone on a slim chain,
I ache to close you, put you
to bed.
Who thought they understood me well enough
to suggest sex
for a quarter—
a vinyl rain bonnet
meticulously folded—
a single gargle of mouthwash,
that scarlet dress I haven't yet bought
but wear as skin— all those, available here,
multi-colored spools of thread
and compact needles
I'll need to maintain it...
Take my money,
though I have none,
spent on family,
my daughter asleep in the car,
my son full as a tick
on Snapple.
Even so,
extra money should provide extra optionsa
rabbit's foot, well-manicured;
a spare chess piece—
queen—just in case
luck turns,
hungry, greasy, looking for you.

BARBARA TRAN
Afterwards
His crib sat in the corner of the room.
He cried but no one heard.
The music came to me in a symphony
of colors, one on top of another,
mutating. My only explanation
came in sleep. The answers
in dreams. In a knock on the door.
I saw the scythe in his smile.
April brought the sun and his first step.
For a day, I thought perhaps I'd live.
But he fell on his knees, banged
his chin. My son now
is learning to swim.
The boy vanishes in water
like sleep. Then nothing is heard.
Life is a reflection
that ripples with each memory.
the sea is lifted with each kiss.
This boy that cried like a girl
abandoned in the mountains of China.
The snow, an endless blanket.
With his arrival, they called me darling,
sweetheart, poor thing, honey, mother.
I answered to nothing.
AMANDA SCHAFFER
Hebrew School
The day they taught that heaven was made
of equal parts, water and fire,
the leaves were plummeting red, red
with no address. No streetcar came
and I was lost, wondering how
fire bloomed inside a waterfall,
insistent petals opening red,
or how the damp could be drawn
through veins of fire while the timid
leaves that once fed themselves on red
light detached around. The rabbi
didn't know if heaven had come
before earth or if the molten
core that spins freely, a second
earth inside this one, was made
from heaven. Berries shook,
droplets from the bushes. That same day,
we read how the sons of Aaron
snuck out into the wilderness
after learning Torah all day.
Curious, they played with incense
in the censers and tried to make
a strange fire and were consumed.

BARBARA HAMBY
Wart
No girl ever sat on her pink and white canopy bed
and said, When I grow up I want to be a stepmother,
because in fairy tales the operative adjective is wicked,
and though she's sometimes a queen, she's the one who makes
the girl or someone very much like her scrub floors and eat
poison apples or drives her and her little brother out
into the woods and into the oven of the wicked witch,
probably a stepmother herself or with stepmother potential.
And there are the warts. Most stepmothers have a wart or two,
verruca in Latin, on the ends of their noses mostly
or their chins with hairs growing out of them, and one
suspects clustered on the outside of their hearts.
A wart is one of the most interesting of external cellular
protuberances. My doctor told me that he often gives children
five dollars to cure their own warts, and it usually works.
My mother-in-law tells of taking my husband when he was
a four-year-old to a conjure man in south Louisiana.
She says the old man took her little boy into his cabin
and talked the warts off his hands. My own warts are or were
on the bottom of my right foot: one of the most difficult things
I have ever done is to walk into an Italian pharmacy
and say, "Ho bisogno di una medicina per una verruca
della pianta del piede," the woman behind the counter
giving me such a look as could cause a marchesa to crumble
and then scuttling behind a curtain to confer with someone,
returning with a tiny yellow tube of foul-smelling goop.
I spent half an hour with my dictionary translating
the instructions that came in seven point type, though actually
the warts went away when months later I read they were easily
cured by over-the-counter medication. Doctors! Pharmacists!
I was cured by a book. When I was first married, I read
everything I could about being a stepmother. All the books said,
I was lucky to have two boys because they wouldn't be inclined
to compete with me for their father's affection.
Like most pronouncements, I found this to be
true and untrue at the same time. When you are a girl
you never think you will marry more than once. I remember
my oft-married sister saying before her third wedding,

"Never the bridesmaid, always the bride." What is wicked?
And what good? A good man can be tedious, a spiteful woman
lovely, or any combination you can conceive
because it's surprising how much you can love a child
who is not your own, want so much for his happiness
and yet not want to have a child at all or really anything
more than the warts, buboes, moles that cover you like
an ermine
cape, your tiara, so to speak, the thing that makes you queen.
WILLIAM TROWBRIDGE
Your Demons
In the novel 1984,
Winston Smith's were kept
in a top-secret room
at Big Brother HQ: Room
101. "What's in Room
101?" half a Greek chorus
I'm throwing in here
sings. "What you fear
most," intones the other
half. Imaginative as a fishwife,
Winston's psyche bought
something right off the rack:
rats, famished rats. Might
as well have been snakes
or roaches. The guards applied
a stretched out catcher's mask,
stuffed it with rats, which
they had plenty of, and that
was that: he spilled his guts,
as they love to say whenever
they can, those who build
rooms like 101 and put people
in them just for reassurance
that no one's an exception
to their mean-child's view
of every soul on earth.
Their favorite's the part
where Winston bellows
denouncements of his

true love, volunteers to pull
the switch. "Some fun,"
grins little Adolph
to little Joseph, dropping
the cricket into the can
of fire ants."Lookit it
scream."
But we don't really
need Big B. and his copy cats,
what with our Port-A-101's—
not to mention 102's,
120's and so on—right
inside our heads and filled
with things that make rats
seem like long-tailed
bunnies, things that travel
in a synapse and feed off
the sticky palm trees
of our innards. They think
they love us, though
it's stalker's love, flip
side of an inclination
to run us through
a Veg-O-Matic. They
flush when our inhibitors
zonk out from too little
sleep, too much booze,
or just the right-sized
home or office shit storm.
They can hardly wait
till bedtime, asking the hour,
faking yawns. Some dwarf
the Pyramids, some need
elevator shoes; some
look like dog-sized fleas,
some like a youthful Hepburn
(or, depending on your slant,
a silver-templed Tracy). What's
more, the old vets can
shift shapes faster than
a diplomat. Most arrive
tailor-made, though we
never ordered them,
and loyal as bloodhounds,
to the death. Next time, when they
start their mews and sniggers
and you see one wearing your face
turn its moony head inside
out, don't give in: act
nonchalant. Command
their respect.

MYRA SHAPIRO
The Knowledge That I Have Everything
in the Garden
At 10:30 last night on 1st Avenue
a man in a black jacket
a tall man with a mustache
was picking out a cantaloupe.
O New York! You give me
63° and a whole moon
in November, pyramids of fruit
stacked up on the sidewalk
and my friend, I'm walking with
my arm around my friend,
coming from a play
that had 11 women talking
with a love for household lamps,
snakehandling, plastics
as an image of eternity, and, right here,
on your east side
a handsome man giving his nose
to the sweetness of a melon.
MICHAEL LOWENTHAL
Snapshots of an AIDS Virgin
Never
1988. FIRST HIV MEMORY. I am nineteen and have recently told
my mother that I'm gay. I still expect conflagration, Mommie
Dearest.
We sit at the kitchen table, Mom's famous rosemary chicken
on our plates. She clears her throat politely. "I just hope you're
being careful," she says. "You are being careful, aren't you?"
Such a calm, caring inquiry injects terror like adrenaline.
Silence equals death, my T-shirt proclaims, but there are some
things I'm not ready to talk about.
A leg-and-thigh combo appears in my hands, half-eaten, slippery
with juice. If Mom won't follow the script, I will. I lift the
chicken and hurl it across the table. Grease splatters on her blouse.
Flecks of rosemary stick like shedded eyelashes.
My mother fishes the chicken leg from her lap with stiff fingers,
like a specimen awaiting dissection. "Mi-chael," she says in
two haughty syllables. She returns the meat to my plate and never
mentions the subject again.
Pure
My homosexuality has been more theoretical than practical,
give or take a few adolescent fumblings. I've never fucked or been
fucked by a guy. I don't consider myself at risk.

If)
a
<
z
V)
108
Then I meet Chris. We're both leaders of the gay student
group; we know we're supposed to be role models. Our second
date is a trip to the pharmacy to buy a box of Trojans and a tube
of KY.The clerk looks at us strangely as she rings up the bill. Men
don't usually go Dutch on condoms in small-town New
Hampshire.
We never discuss it, but after the first time, we abandon the
Trojans. The tube of KY is tossed out, barely used. It turns out
Chris has never fucked or been fucked either. We're Ivory soap
fags: 99.44% pure.
Raise your hand
Fast-forward: college graduation; first anniversary with Chris.
I purport to be an activist now, an expert on HIV issues. I help
start the local ACT UP chapter. I distribute condoms to high
school students and get chased away by the red-faced principal. It's
kind of fun.
When the AIDS Quilt comes to town I volunteer, handing
mini-packs of Kleenex to men who are crying. I go to a lecture
coinciding with the Quilt display. Raise your hand if you know
someone HIV-positive, a man says from the podium. Now keep
your hands raised if you know someone who's died.
I hoist my hand high in the air, unable to face the embarrassment
of admitting my inexperience. This is worse than survivor
guilt: I haven't outsurvived anyone with AIDS, I don't even know
anyone with AIDS. I am an AIDS virgin.
You're lucky, friends tell me. Be thankful. And I know I
should, but the feeling of fraudulence is overwhelming.
I convince myself I'm not lying. I do know HIV-positive people:
my sister's ex-roommate, to whom I must have said hello at
least twice; the man who guest lectured in one of my college classes,
whose hand I shook afterwards; the hunky Roto Rooter man
who is whispered to be sick.
And I do know people who have died. Theres...wait. Does
Ryan White count? Rock Hudson? How about this: I know someone
who knows someone who knew that film critic, Vito Russo.
I am lying.
Friendship
I answer a call for submissions for a gay anthology. The editor
responds at once, curious about my rural address. He is John
Preston—a writer, pornographer, ex-hustler who lives in
Portland, Maine. We become instant giddy pen pals, bonded by
our eschewing of urban gay ghettos, our hopeless devotion to the
Red Sox. Soon the letters are written every day, sometimes
twice. John learns I arrive at the office at 9:30; at 9:35 each
morning he telephones.
John has published essays about being HIV-positive, so I don't
have to ask about his status. We enter the friendship knowing that
its circumstances may change radically at any time.
Simple
Two more uneventful years of monogamy. Chris and I have
discussed having a more open relationship, but given the limited
options in our small town, it's been a pleasantly academic discussion.
Then I'm assigned a business trip—a conference in Norfolk,
Virginia. Chris knows there's a Navy base in Norfolk, knows my
fetish for crew-cut sailor boys. The day before I leave he asks if we
can clarify our boundaries.
The rules we settle on are pretty simple: no sucking or fucking
other guys without a condom.
At a bar in Norfolk I meet Steven. He's not Navy, but his head
is shaved. We dance until 3 a.m., hands in each other's pants, and
when the bar closes we go to my hotel. He strips to his silk gstring.
He kisses me hard, then shimmies down and rims me. I'm
on the edge of asking if I can fuck him. Every ten seconds I almost
start to ask. But the condoms are in my toiletry bag, on the dresser
across the room. It seems so impossibly far away. We jerk off and
come on each other's stomachs.
Not this soon
April, 1993. John and I are both in Washington for the gay
rights march. He has a suite at the Madison Hotel and invites people
over for a pre-march fag buffet: fancy cheese, Bloody Marys,
red-skinned grapes like candy.

no
in
Q
When I knock on the door of his room, a stranger lets me in.
John is collapsed on a chair in the corner. His face is ashen, his eyes
grotesquely puffed. A cane and a set of crutches are propped
against the wall.
"My God! What happened?" I ask, rushing to him. I try to
think of terms I've read in books and magazines: pneumocystis
pneumonia, peripheral neuropathy. I'm not ready for him to be
sick, not this soon.
"Keep it down," John groans. "I feel like shit."
He tells me what happened, wincing just to get the words out.
He was at a club, dancing the night away. He had a few drinks, but
didn't think much of it.
When he woke up this morning, his ankle was swollen big as
a duckpin bowling ball. He must have sprained it dancing but been
too drunk to notice.
John puts his palm to his forehead dramatically. "I haven't been
this hung over in years."
Swipe
Six months later we're at the Ramrod, Boston's leather bar, at
a publication party for John's latest dirty book. John still rides on
his reputation as a fierce S/M top, but now he dresses in khaki
slacks, cashmere sweaters, penny loafers. After too many drinks, I
find myself on the floor with five other guys, surrounding John's
feet, paying homage to the master.
"Yeah, lick those Bass Weejuns," he says, and we break up in
laughter. I take a final swipe at the leather with my tongue.
John returns from the weekend in Boston feeling under the
weather. He thinks it's probably the flu.
Pretend
An acquaintance tells me about a training program for medical
students, a new tool to make them more sensitive about HIV
She knows I'm gay and she's certain my input will be valuable.
It's a "patient simulation." I'm to play the part of Theodore
LaCroix, a married man with two children, who has had secret and
unprotected gay sex. Now he's worried about his persistent cough.
I'm supposed to act nervous and guilty, drop a.few hints, and see
if the med students can come up with the diagnosis.
No problem, I think. I know all about pretending to know
about AIDS.
I walk into the seminar room and face six eager would-be
doctors. I cough and wince, hem and haw. They never even ask
about "my" sexual history.
The real me has a bad case of conjunctivitis. One of the students
gets wrapped up in the drama and forgets I'm just a standin.
He asks how long my eyes have been red.
"Don't worry," I say. "I've seen a doctor about that."
When the HIV diagnosis is revealed, the students are full of
questions about testing, drug treatments, disability. They ignore
their tutor and turn to me for answers. I recite facts and figures I
more or less remember from reading the AIDS advice column in
the Advocate. I tell them how horrible the epidemic is, how it has
devastated entire communities.
Sweat stains seep under my arms. I'm terrified someone's
going to ask how many friends I have lost.
Indulge
December 11, 1993. John's birthday. He's turning forty-eight,
exactly twice my age.
I'm about to call and wish him a happy happy when a FedEx
package arrives. Inside theTyvek bag is a shiny gold box, the name
Godiva in fancy script. Four gift-wrapped pounds of designer
chocolates.
The note from John explains it was a birthday gift from his
friend Anne, but he can't eat any of it. His flu has turned into
sweats, weight loss, fatigue. The doctors have just diagnosed him
with the latest affliction: reflux disease, a problem with the
esophageal sphincter. He's not supposed to ingest chocolate or
anything with caffeine.
I call John to thank him. I say I'll buy him a new box for his
next birthday. Surely by then he'll be able to indulge again.

Q
<
112
Shopping two days later, I see a smaller box of Godivas on sale
for something like thirty dollars. I realize I couldn't afford to
replace John's gift. It doesn't matter; he never has another birthday.
Some of my best
I publish an article about the medical school simulation, about the
odd experience of pretending to be sick when John really is. A
radio producer in Boston reads the article and is intrigued, wants
to do a live phone interview.
The night of the program, I'm in Portland visiting John, who
is feverish and unable to leave his apartment. I visit once a week
now, relieving Tom, John's best friend and primary caregiver.
The radio station calls twenty minutes later than they said they
would. I can hear commercials playing in the background. Then
the host's voice cuts in. We're on the air.
"Welcome back. We're here with Michael Lowenthal, an
openly gay, HIV-positive man who lives in rural New
Hampshire...."
At first I'm so flustered I think he's right: maybe I am HIV-positive.
This is the punishment for playing sick, for purporting to know
sick people. I never should have raised my hand at that lecture.
The host babbles on, and I struggle for the chance to jump in.
Finally he pauses for a breath.
"Thanks for the intro," I interject. "But I think I should tell
you that I'm not HIV-positive."
The host apologizes. He's mortified.
"No, that's OK," I say, "I'm glad not to be."
As soon as the words escape, I worry. Did I sound AIDS-phobic?
Did I seem to be gloating? Some of my best friends are HIVpositive,
I want to say. I'm here right now, taking care of John.
But I don't say anything. Some of my best friends are not
HIV-positive. John is the only one.
Impossible
A year has passed since Norfolk; there have been one or two
other flings. I can't think of a time when I could have been
exposed, but Chris and I use condoms now, even with each other.
I imagine how embarrassing it would be to test HIV-positive after
pretending to be, then being outed -wrongly on the radio, then setting
the record straight about my viral purity. I sign up for a test at
the local hospital.
The woman on the phone makes it sound like Mission
Impossible: "You'll walk into the lobby and there will be two
unmarked telephones. Pick up either one and dial extension
663. Tell the person who answers what you are wearing. Then
continue forward to the waiting area. Sit down and wait till
you're approached."
On the appointed day I follow her instructions, hearing Peter
Gunn soundtrack music in my head.
I speak into the secret phone:"I'm wearing jeans and aT-shirt.
It's blue."
I'm sitting in the waiting room. Then, a tap on the shoulder.
"Michael?"
"Richard! Hi. It didn't occur to me it would be you."
It's the biggest hospital for a hundred miles, but this is still a
small town. Gay men know one another.
Dr. Richard leads me back to the examining room, chatting
about the AIDS vigil we both recently attended. Then he turns
professional. "The first thing you should know is that here at
Hitchcock, HIV testing is" — now, a big smirk — "completely
anonymous." I grin back at him and begin recounting the details
of every sexual encounter I've had in the past twelve months. I
haven't even told this stuff to Chris. Dr. Richard tries to look
uninterested. He dons latex gloves, stabs my arm, draws a vial of
darkening blood.
Regrets
John gets sicker and sicker. He is diagnosed with MAI, then
lymphoma of the stomach.
He calls me in the middle of the day. "You're going to be so-rry,"
he sing-songs like a bratty schoolkid. "You're going to re-gret it."
"What?" I say. "What are you talking about?"
"When I'm dead, you're going to wish you had slept with me."

V)
Q
114
That's it
Three weeks after my test, I drive back to the hospital for the
verdict. I park and open my door just as another car is pulling up
next to me. It's Dr. Richard, King of Coincidence. We shake hands,
then he says "Oh," and pulls a slip of green paper from his pocket.
"No problem," he says. "Simple as that."
"Really?" I say. "That's it?"
He flashes a wink. "That's it."
Dr. Richard shakes my hand again, then strides into the hospital.
I stand in the parking lot, clutching the test results like a Get-
Out-of-Jail-Free card. Why don't I feel like I've won anything?
Fantasy
A friend who's lived for years in San Francisco—in the Castro,
the heart of the epidemic—visits for a quick overnight. It's unclear
if we're friends or, you know, friends. I offer him the couch or half
of my double bed. He opts for the bed.
He has an incredible body, rippled and lean. I can't believe my
good fortune. We tug down each other's Jockeys, I nibble on his
nipples. I am touching my fantasy-come-to-life.Through it all my
dick stays shriveled to Lilliputian proportions. I blame it on too
much rum at dinner and fall asleep.
Disappointed
Just before getting sick, John had finished a how-to book on
male prostitution, based on experience gained in his oats-sowing
years. Among his helpful hints for the •working boy: If the customer
looks disappointed when you drop your trousers, reassure
him by explaining, "It's a grower."
The night of John's seizures, we're in the emergency room.
John is on the stretcher, comatose. Tom and I huddle and make
plans for bringing him home. We decide he needs a condom
catheter to keep things from getting messy.
The nurse opens the drawer, pulls one out, and teaches us how
to roll it onto John's dick. Something doesn't look right. The rubber
hangs loose as a grown woman's stockings on the skinny legs
of a child playing dress-up.
"Medium's too big," she says, "I guess I'll have to find a small."
Just when I think I've conquered the urge to giggle, Tom leans
over and whispers, "It's a grower."
Damned
April 28, 1994. I am back at home, having left John and
Portland the previous afternoon. The call comes at six in the
morning.Tom and I can't find much to say, so he just gives me the
list of people to inform of John's death.
First on the list is John's publicist, whose job — as repeatedly
ordered by John over the past three weeks — is to call the New
York Times. (When AIDS activist Michael Callen died a few
months earlier, the Times ran a long obit and a photograph. John
would be damned if he got less attention.)
Crash
The night before the funeral I crash with a friend in the
Portland Holiday Inn. Unexpectedly, another guy asks if he, too,
can share the room. Neither of us knows him well, but he was a
friend of John's. There are two king-sized beds, so it shouldn't be
a problem.
We turn in early, anticipating a long and draining next day. As
we undress, we debate who will pair up and who will sleep alone.
The third guy, impatient, strips and sprawls on the bed nearest the
window. He rubs his crotch seductively.
Soon the three of us are going at it, a tangle of limbs. "In
honor of John," we agree between kisses. "It's exactly what he
would have wanted."
But what would John really have wanted? To live. To go back
to that night—or was it during the day? in a club? at the piers?—
when he was infected.
I extract myself from the sweaty bodies and retreat to the
other bed. I nod off to the sloppy sounds of fucking.
Gospel
The next morning, it's tense in John's apartment. I'm panicking
because I can't find my tie. There are dozens in John's closet,

in
Q
116
many of which I remember seeing him wear. I grab a blue one
with tasteful red polka dots and cinch it tight around my neck. I'm
already wearing a pair of Calvin Klein underwear John gave me.
Closing the closet door, I look down and see a row of shoes. I recognize
the Bass Weejuns from the night at the Ramrod. Could it
have been less than seven months ago? I lift the loafers to my face
and inhale, remembering the gritty taste of leather.
The service is at St. Luke's Cathedral, high Episcopal. The
Bishop of Maine is there and reads a passage from the Gospel of
John. I think about the gospels of our John: his porn stories, his
how-to book on hustling. This is my first AIDS funeral. Even if I
didn't know John, I'd be able to tell it is an AIDS funeral because
of the strange mix of people. White-haired relatives in floral print
dresses mingle with hairy-chested men in leather vests. I've read
about this in gay novels as a poignant metaphor.
When communion is offered, the leathermen kneel before the
minister. This is my body; this is my blood. How many of these
men, I wonder, once knelt in front of John?
Laid to rest
After John is cremated, we split the ashes in two. Half goes to
Tom, half to John's mother. She wants to erect a headstone in the
hometown family plot. Wouldn't it be cheating, she wonders, not
to bury some actual remnant beneath the granite marker? I resist
making a joke about John getting his ashes hauled again.
Five months to the day after John's death we assemble in
Medfield, Massachusetts. There are perhaps twenty people in
attendance: John's family, the members of his parents' bridge club.
The presiding minister is Alan Hinand, husband of Gail Hinand,
on whose typewriter John composed his S/M novel Mr. Benson fifteen
years ago — before there were any AIDS burials.
John's brother Marvin has brought John's dog, Vlad the
Impaler, whom he has now inherited. Vlad is aViszla, the hunting
breed of the Hungarian nobility, and his genes make him endlessly
rambunctious. When the service ends, John's sister Betsy and I offer
to walk Vlad to give Marvin a break. We cross the lane to the Blood
family plot, where her and John's maternal ancestors are laid to rest.
Vlad hoists his leg and drenches the central headstone in piss.
"Piss and blood," I say. "John would have loved it."
Betsy petsVlad's tail. "Arfeast he knows his own."
Likely
Chris moves to San Francisco. I move to Boston. A trial
separation.
I sleep with Jeff, a waifish nineteen-year-old. He's just out of
the closet and he's never been fucked — the exact stage I was at
when I tossed rosemary chicken.
Jeff decides he wants me to initiate him, as long as I use a condom
and pull out before I finish. When we do it, I'm as hard as
I've ever been. It's the first time I've slept with someone less likely
than I to have been exposed.
Predictive powers
A week after we bury John's ashes, I'm asked to review David
Feinberg's book, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging
AIDS Clone. One of my best friends has died of AIDS, I tell
myself. Of course I'm qualified.
Just as I'm finishing, I get a call from my friend Michael. David
Feinberg is really sick, he says; he doesn't have long to live.
Remembering how much a notice of one of his books had
cheered John when he was in the depths of sickness, I decide to
send my review directly to Feinberg.The only thing I'm worried
about is the last paragraph. "When David Feinberg dies," it reads,
"an event which seems sadly likely in the near future, this book
will remain as a smoking gun, an unsettling accusation."
Three days later the phone rings at five minutes past midnight.
"Hello, this is David Feinberg," says the voice on the other end.
"I'm just calling to tell you that you have amazing predictive powers.
You know that line at the end of your review? 'When David
Feinberg dies, an event which seems sadly likely in the near
future...'"
I panic. Is he furious or just having fun? I take a risk. I try to
sound funny.
"You're not calling me from the Beyond, are you?"
"No, I'm in my apartment. But I just got out of the hospital.
I feel like crap. Hold on. The nurse is starting theTPN drip. You

in
o
118
know, at the beginning of the year I weighed 145 pounds? And
now it's 104 point 5. He's such a hunk. The nurse. We're flying to
L.A. this weekend for Carrie Fisher's birthday party. Michael
Dorris said he wanted to be Santa Claus: If there was one thing I
could have, what was it? I told him I wanted to meet Carrie
Fisher. He doesn't even know her, but he worked it out.
"I'm signing up for all the credit cards and insurance I can
now, and I'm only paying the minimum. My ex-boyfriend just
charged $7,000 on my credit cards. He's horrible. But he has the
sexiest answering machine message in the world. You should call
it. Do you want to call it right now and then call me back? Here's
the number."
His mildly demented ramble lasts half an hour. I want it to
seem odd that this total stranger has called me from his deathbed
to blather about movie stars and boyfriends from hell, but somehow
it's not. I just accept it.
Thinning
Three weeks after the phone call, David Feinberg dies.
I visit my old place in New Hampshire for the weekend and the
hunky Roto Rooter man stops his van to say hello. His cheeks are
pockmarked with something like a fungus and his hair is thinning.
At a black-tie fund raiser back in Boston I sit near the radio host
who eight months earlier "outed" me as positive. He coughs
throughout dinner. He has The Look.
My ex-housemate Susan calls to report that her friend Mark's
MRI confirmed the toxo diagnosis. Mark's lover Steven is doing
better, she says, but the running sore on his ankle won't heal.
This all happens within two weeks. What's going on? I think. I
don't even know anyone with AIDS.
Practical
Chris returns from San Francisco and moves back in with me.
Unpacking, he notices the stash of condoms in my top dresser
drawer. He adds his own to the pile. He brings out three different
bottles of lubricant and places them by the side of the bed.
It's been five and a half years since our first trip to the pharmacy,
the unused tube of KY. Now we're so much more practical.
Not anymore
My new pen pal Andrew, who lived in Manhattan in the 70s
and has watched almost all his friends die, asks in a letter if I had
any experience with AIDS before John. I write back confessing
my fraudulent past.
His response: "You have (Now) Experienced It. As Reagan
said of redwoods: 'You've seen one, you've seen them all.' I mean
the experience, while unique each time, is also numbingly uniform.
You're not a virgin anymore."
Better
1983.1 am fourteen. HIV is not yet called HIV, and in any case
I haven't heard about it. I haven't even figured out that I'm gay.
Laura and I are alone in her parents' bedroom. We have agreed
to be each other's first. I roll the condom on and enter her, one
smooth push till our pelvises bump together. She gasps and traps
me with her ankles, ready for the love-making to begin. But my
adolescent body can't control itself; I finish before she's even
exhaled.
I pull out and leap off the bed, bound into the master bathroom.
"Hey? What are you doing?" she calls after me, her voice
stretched thin with disappointment.
"I'm putting on another one," I answer, fumbling with latex.
"If we try again, I'm sure I can do it better."

I2O
ANDREW SCHWARTZ
Partings
THE LAST TIME I SAW BERNARD, when he was seventeen and I was
not quite thirty, we walked around my neighborhood in lower
Manhattan. Brick buildings darkened in a cold, wearing drizzle.
We shared the only meal we had ever shared, eating at the counter
of Ray's Pizza on sixth Avenue, and then we walked out to the
piers that sit along the Hudson River.
The piers were broken down there, cracked blacktop and
thick splintered poles that smelled of Cuprinol. Chain link fences
stumbled towards the water, sliced open and bent at various points
of entry. Gay male hookers huddled in cars that day, alone or with
tricks, but keeping out of the rain.
As we walked together, I felt larger than Bernard, and was
aware, suddenly, of his small frame, maybe five-feet-five, a hundred
and thirty pounds at best. His skin was dark, a loam-colored
brown, his eyes hooded and heavy lidded. I knew I was leaving
New York for Oakland in a few weeks, and neither Bernard nor I
pretended we'd write each other.
I watched drizzle blister blacktop. I felt his eyes on my face.
Nearly two years earlier, upon returning to New York after ten
years of living in Vermont, then California, I'd taken a job as a
social worker. I was assigned to a program which found work for
T
learning disabled teens. We offered city employers free, part-time
labor for three months, after "which time they were expected to
put our kids on their payrolls. Some did, many didn't. Almost
without exception, the jobs were menial and our agency paid
minimum wage.
Bernard entered the program in the middle of my first year
there. He lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn,
near J.H.S. 57, where my father had taught and been an assistant
principal for many years.
Sometimes when I looked at Bernard, I'd recall a day—I was
seven, maybe eight years old—when my father brought my brother
and me to work with him. The association was natural, because
Bernard and my father were so unalterably connected to that
place. So when I looked at Bernard, some days I'd recall a hot
spring morning arriving in Brooklyn. There were people on the
stoops, women with babies, young men in cut-off shorts and sport
shirts, tube socks pulled up to their knees. As we walked from the
car toward the school—my father, my brother and I—we formed
a cocoon of silence within the street noise. Things slowed down.
My head moved from side to side, watching.
There was recognition in the faces of the people on the street.
Arms raised and waved. One woman hung her torso from a highup
window; her hair was pulled back, she was wearing a man's
undershirt. She shouted and smiled.
When finally I turned to my father, he was waving too, and
smiling. I remember his blue sport coat, how tall he seemed, the
proud smile on his face as his two worlds met.
Sound finally pierced the cocoon. "Mr. Schwartz," they were
saying."Hey, Mr. Schwartz.Those your boys, Mr. Schwartz?" In my
memory, the voices and the faces seemed venerable, without guile,
though perhaps I was too young to understand differently.
At school, in my father's office, we met William Holloway,
called "Moochie," and Solomon, who's last name I never heard or
certainly have never recalled. Moochie was stocky, handsome,
richly colored. He sucked his thumb and played handball for the

122
team my father coached. Solomon was taller, thinner, lighter
skinned, with a dark mustache at age thirteen. These two would
be our guides for the day, our companions.
The phone rang in my father's office, and his face assumed a
demeanor I had never seen before. His forehead creased and he
spoke crisply into the receiver.While still on the phone, he looked
up briefly to wave and to wink at us as we walked out the door.
As best I can remember, we spent the morning in the gym,
just the four of us, shooting baskets, maybe even playing two on
two. I remember sitting on the side, watching Moochie and
Solomon climb the ropes in their white tee-shirts and silky shorts.
They were nice to us and they clearly loved my father. For years
afterward, when I spoke of them, I echoed the affectionate, admiring
tones with which my father spoke of them.
Except for the fact that he'd dropped out of school and had
been arrested a few times, Bernard reminded me of Moochie and
Solomon. The two other social workers in my program and I all
liked him immediately. We liked his smile: cruel, charming and
mischievous. We liked how he rarely mouthed sentiments he knew
we wanted to hear. There was no bullshit in him, a quality which
when you turned it over revealed an endearing innocence. There
was a day, at lunch, when I marched the whole program—10 or
12 kids and the social workers—to a park on Eighth Avenue/
Some of the boys and I played basketball against the workers on
lunch break from a nearby hospital. After the first game, Bernard,
who kept getting the ball slapped from his hands, sat out. On a
bench at the edge of the park, he rested alone, ignoring the game
and the others while staring out at the passing cars and people, one
hand curled through the metal fence, the other clenched in a fist
on top of his thigh.
We had a hard time placing him in a job. There aren't many
employers who will hire a kid like Bernard. Despite our training,
he'd come to interviews dressed in warm up suits and sunglasses,
refusing to look employers—mostly older white men—in the eye.
He'd mumble and stare at the floor and this, perhaps understandably,
scared them and convinced them Bernard was no good. They
had visions of everything disappearing from their stores one night.
H e wanted to be a porter, which meant cleaning and waxing
floors, since he'd done well=*m those machines at our training
school. But he went months without an interview until I found
him one with a company that worked out of the Bronx. It would
have been a crazy commute—an hour and a half subway ride from
Brooklyn into lower Manhattan, from the downtown bridges
through Midtown, Harlem, Washington Heights, and on into the
Bronx, with my contemporaries, my peers, all those suits and ties,
ignoring him, shoving Wall Street Journals in his face, and women
in bow-tied dresses and Reeboks reminding themselves not to sit
too close or catch his eye—yet I'd been unable to find anything
else and he said he'd be willing to do it.
The office was right down the street from Yankee Stadium.
Bernard and I rode up there together. It was a quiet, pleasant ride,
the train dimly lit and rocking. When we got out of the station,
the day was warmer than when we'd left.Walking down the street,
Bernard stayed close to the walls of buildings, running his hand
against the marked-up brick and concrete.
We rang the bell of an apartment building, rang it a number
of times; though I'd confirmed the interview the previous afternoon,
no one answered, no one came to open the door. Mostly in
silence, we took the train home.
It was awhile before we found him another interview, six
weeks, maybe two months. Finally, we were able to place him at a
hardware store on the Upper West Side. It was still a crazy commute,
but it was the right place. Stan, the owner, was a young, nononsense
guy with a good heart. The employees were older, family
men from Puerto Rican Harlem. They seemed immediately to
connect with Bernard. The place smelled slightly of metal, of
cleaning fluid, of old wood; timeless smells, comforting and familiar.
Each time I visited him there, each time I spoke with his boss,
I felt encouraged. Bernard was making the long commute every
day, staying late, working hard. The owner, though it was illegal,
paid him something extra above our minimum wage. When the
three months were up, Bernard was hired, part time.
The job lasted: four days a week, five hours a day and there
was talk of, in the summer, moving him to full time. Maybe it was
wishful thinking on my part, but Bernard seemed happier. On

124
Fridays, when he came in for the scheduled group sessions, (this
was not required; he was officially finished with the program), he
was our model for the other kids. He'd stand against a wall, slightly
superior, folding his arms across the chest and nodding a lot in
general bemusement. He never said much, but he came.The other
clients all knew he was working.
Then, long after I'd started worrying about other kids, other
problems, I got a call from his boss. Bernard hadn't shown up for
work the day before, hadn't called, and wasn't there on time that
day. Did I know anything? I didn't, but I promised to call Bernard's
mother and get back to him.
I got a hold of his mother, but she didn't know anything.
Bernard hadn't come home. She figured he was staying at a
friend's; at least, that's what she told me.When she hung up, I tried
to think of where else to call, but I knew none of his friends, was
unaware of the rest of his family. I suppose it crossed my mind to
call the police, but I didn't. Suddenly struck with how little I knew
of his life, I felt a helpless void, the sense of a connection that could
never be made.
I don't know that I thought of it then, but months later, as I
wrestled with how to spend my own working life, I made the
inevitable comparison to my father's experience. I wondered
about the connections he'd made, those people on the stoops in
Bedford-Stuyvesant Stuyvesant, their voices and faces floating
across memory. My father's entire working life was spent with kids
like Moochie and Solomon and Bernard. Twenty some years later,
did they remember my father's name? His face?
And what about him? He'd spent so much time, so many
years with those kids. I remember asking once, just a few years
after meeting Moochie and Solomon, how they were. My father
grimaced and told me he'd heard Moochie had been involved in
a rock throwing incident at Boys High, and it was apparent how
the knowledge pained my father, how it meant somehow that he
had failed, though it may have meant nothing of the sort.
Years later, I wondered if the pain left a scar. I wondered what
place, what section of my father's soul, had been reserved for
Moochie and Solomon, for those people on the stoops, all those
young men and women he'd spent his days with?
Bernard shuffled into my office on the following Monday. I'd
been moved recently and I was working at a desk in a large, newly
carpeted room with five other job developers who worked for programs
separate from mine. The room felt cavernous and I felt out of
place, surrounded by people who'd been doing social work for
years. Phones rang, coffee cups steamed; there were lipstick stains on
the Styrofoam and the two job developers behind me, both women,
were talking about their college-bound daughters. Their voices
sounded like the mothers of friends I'd grown up with on Long
Island, not at all like city people who could wrestle with employers
and help our clients get a foot up in a difficult job market.
My desk wasn't the first one Bernard had to walk by and he
stood in the entryway to the room, shifting from one foot to the
other, waiting for me to look up, nodding when I did. I felt like
an enraged father. I rose from my chair, my neck thick and hot
against my collar. Bernard took a step back as I rose, and that reaction
stopped me. I sat back down. With a hand motion I indicated
the chair next to my desk.
He wouldn't sit. He stood next to the chair, kept his brown
hooded jacket on and told me he'd spent the weekend at Rikers
Island prison. He and his posse had gone to the movies. They
walked by a girl in an aisle seat, near the back, and grabbed her
purse. They got caught. That quick, that simple. He handed me a
card with the name of some parole officer and asked if I'd call him.
"What do you want me to say?" I asked.
Bernard shrugged, but kept his eyes on the bristling blue carpet.
He honestly didn't know; I think he just figured he needed
someone to speak for him.
"Did you call Stan? Tell him about his?"
Bernard smiled at me indulgently, as if to say, "Come on. You
think he's givin' me my job back after this? I'm done."
I don't remember the exact sequence of events that followed,
but Stan didn't fire him. Instead, he went to court for Bernard and
helped keep him out of jail. I talked with Bernard's parole officer
a number of times on the phone. I remember the man's cynicism,
how he clearly thought Stan and I were two stupid, bleeding
hearts, how he knew for sure where Bernard was going to end up.
I hated the guy. I'm sure Bernard hated him.

126
Late that -winter, I quit my job at the agency, wanting more
time to finish up the M.F.A. degree I had started. Quitting was
easy for me to do, casual as a sneeze. There would be other jobs
when I wanted one. I borrowed money from my father and proceeded
to spend my days producing clumsy, self-absorbed stories
about my childhood.
So the irritation I felt when, a few months later, Bernard quit
his job at the hardware store, strikes me as unfair. He claimed he
didn't want to make the commute any more. Fair enough. There
were other jobs, right? One of the counselors I'd worked with
called one day to let me know Bernard was coming by for a visit
and did I have some free time?
He looked fine, his complex charm undiminished. He wore a
red terry cloth hat and had a girl with him, who seemed solid and
intelligent. We fussed over him. As we did, it became clear he
wanted another chance to work and didn't know where to find it.
Somehow, because he was no longer officially in the program, and
neither was I, I got hooked into trying to find him a new job, one
in Brooklyn, or at least downtown.
I knew someone who ran a city messenger agency from the
government offices near Wall Street. He'd hired a few of our kids
in the past and they'd worked out all right. I called him and when
I told him about Bernard, he asked me to write a letter of recommendation.When
I didn't hear anything for weeks, I followed up,
walking into my contact's office one afternoon in the spring.
It was the last thing I could do for Bernard. I was tending bar,
teaching writing at a local high school, finishing my master's
degree. And, out on Long Island, my father was dying of cancer.
Most afternoons I'd ride the Long Island Railroad out to my
father's house and we'd take short, painful walks around his neighborhood.
Desperate to record all I could, to create indelible mental
pictures, I noted the brown lawns emerging from winter, and
the street trees which were finally beginning to age. I studied the
grimace on my father's face, the way he, teacher forever, instructed
me on how to deal with all the practicalities of his death.
He walked slowly, stopping occasionally to wrap his arms
around his stomach. His hair was almost fully gray then, and he no
longer bothered to comb it neatly over his bald head. Long strands
would blow in front of his eyes and he'd push them away, the
movement oddly reminiscent^ef a '50s teenager. He was 63 years
old, and would live only another four months.
"One of you kids should take the car," he said one time. On
another day: "I made a list of all the bank accounts. Here," and he
thrust a folded piece of a paper into my hand. On yet another day,
he showed me a poem he wrote, a surreal fantasy about leading my
brother, my sister, and me into battle against his disease. I said little,
just listened mostly, and fingered the papers, the scrawl of his
pencil on the list of bank accounts, the clumsy typing of the poem.
Now I cling to those mental pictures I created, but it's a misguided
clinging because it's rare that I can use them to fully conjure
up my father. What works, instead, are walks, the sense of
movement, the way a splash of wind off the bay can bring with it
the whole picture of the man, the sound of his voice, so startling
that I have to stop and remind myself where I am. So it's movement
that works, movement that shatters time, a law of physics that
somewhere along the way I must have learned and forgotten.
I have no memory of my father using those walks to discuss
teaching or kids, though it was during those same months I decided
I wanted to teach. But I think as he got nearer to death, my
father's vision must have narrowed, all he could see was the tightest
circle of his life, the darkness creeping in towards the center like
a movie screen fading to black.
And because I was caught in that same film frame at the time,
Bernard, I confess, did not have my full attention. As I waited in
the hallway of that government office, I felt nervous, put upon,
overwhelmed all at once. It seemed desperately important that
Bernard get this job.
My contact's office was windowless and small, with stacks of
paper exploding across his desk. In the middle, a computer winked
in fluorescent green. I watched his pale, pock-marked face as he
attempted a smile and told me he couldn't hire Bernard. There
were no openings. Besides, there was the record.There were other
kids, more deserving, who had a better chance of working out. I
made some weak protest, but eventually gave up. Bernard would
have to be on his own.

IE
That's how I ended up walking around by the piers along the
Hudson, mouthing overused words at someone I hardly knew. We
talked about practical things. He admired the apartments in my
neighborhood and I explained what they cost each month, the
length of time, the amount of hard work, the crap he'd have to put
up with if he wanted someday to be able to live there, to even
afford the 12 by 15 studio my wife and I lived in for two years.
But he knew all that and I didn't really have to explain.
Eventually, we reached the subway stop a block from my
apartment. We stopped speaking, clasped hands, and Bernard disappeared
down the stairs. Around me, New York swirled with rain
and cars and people hustling by, their coats or newspapers curled
over their heads like the hoods of monks.
Time shattered.
Bernard disappeared down the stairs.
Steam escaped from vents on the street. Metal wheels
screeched.
And he was gone.
Photography

130
RICHARD ROTHMAN
ARTLESSNESS—A FREEDOM FROM PRETENSE and guile, buoyed by
simplicity—is a creative virtue more commonly ascribed to poets
and novelists than to photographers. All too many new pictures
seem either to tell a narrow version of someone's narrow truth or
to present, for shock value, a fully contrived lie. Genuineness for
its own sake is rare, and when it appears in an artist's work, you
want to draw it in like oxygen.
Richard Rothman's exquisite gelatin silver prints are so full of
this kind of oxygen that they can get you high. Since 1990, he's
been clunking around New York City's outer boroughs and the
half-wilds of New Jersey in an old Datsun, hunting up back yards,
front porches, and vacant lots on which to train his vigilant eye.
The subject is urban nature (usually its neglect), and the treatment
is clear-eyed and unsentimental yet sympathetic. "Schist, South
Bronx" conveys abandonment with an upthrust rocky plot of land
surrounded by creeping growth; graffiti, beer cans, and dark apartment
windows attest to a human presence. In "Sound Wall, Queens," a
denuded sycamore stands defiant on a Queens sidewalk before a windowless
office building and a concrete sound wall; the power lines
are as oppressive as the cold, rectilinear facades, while the wavy line
carved into the wall, meant to echo nature, winds up mocking it.
Rothman's expressiveness is comfortable in this sort of quick,
sharp essay, but it flowers fully in his more complex tableaux, such as
"McDonald's with Tiered Landscape, Red Hook" or "Graves,
Queens" (not pictured here).The latter shows a patchy, run-down
graveyard, bisected by a concrete walkway; an unforgiving porcelain
sky straight out of the most poetic Civil War photographs lords
over the land. The tenor of bleak naturalism brings to mind Crane
or (perhaps more precisely) Zola: a seamless example of Rothman's
naturalness and devotion to detail—thanks to which qualities the
imagination can wondrously unfurl and inhabit each new place.
—ANDREW LONG
Schist, South Bronx, igg2
© Richard Rothman

: ." i' I'.'p 1 •• • .
Landscape, Coney Island Housing,
© Richard Rothman
McDonald's with Tiered Landscape, Red Hook, 10,92
' Richard Rothman

Sound Wall, Queens, 1995
G Richard Rothman
Flowering Tree with Support, Underpass, Queens, 1992
> Richard Rothman

i36
PATRICK O'HARE
IN THE INQUISITIVE WORK of Patrick O'Hare, we are made to hold
back and simply look. The urban glimpses which follow are just
that: glimpses. We should expect no drama, no decisive moment,
no epiphany to arise from the people in them. We catch these odd
moments of O'Hare's in the same casual way we would ourselves,
without aesthetic posturing. We might with some embarrassment
stumble into a bathroom where a man is naked, bathing, and as we
turn to leave him alone, notice "Jesus Saves" written on the
wall.This cliche of modern life recalls similar pictures from the last
30 or 40 years.
One might hope to see new photographers surface with a
fresh intensity of purpose, but usually documentary photography
is like written journalism, where the words conform to a given
format and are not themselves to be noticed.
This is somewhat of an exaggeration, for to some extent a
photographer's style is pivotal to how we read photographs. In the
case of Patrick O'Hare's work, as well as other photographers
working in a similar way, the issue of style becomes tricky. O'Hare
seems to avoid the issue by adopting a dozen different styles all at
once, each familiar and valid from a century of such photography.
Because of this, the viewer no longer looks for O'Hare's particular
view of the world, but instead simply looks at the subjects,
in all their range and peculiarity. O'Hare's 12-year work in
progress, "Prayers on the Edge of America," documents the connections
between social and racial groups in upstate New York and
in New York City. The ability to show us so many different things
and in so many different and rather interesting ways is O'Hare's
gift. The photographer vanishes—this is not only interesting, it is
appropriate and welcome.
—WILLIAM JAEGER
* r , >
Patrick O'Hare

Funeral, Chinatown, New York City, igg4
c i A \r v-~ u
©Patrick O'Hare
©Patrick O'Hare

a:
b
G
X
3
ROBERT WRIGLEY
On An Island In The River After A Flood
A TV antenna and a portrait of Jesus,
his halo hung on the mast like a horseshoe,
and here, a window looking down
into sand. Imagine
one of the dead, like you or me.
Either he's glad for his widow and the new man
she's loving, or he doesn't care at all,
the torment of the flames drowning
the torment of the heart.
There's a pontoon of more or less
equally broken off two-by-fours
either side of the sash,
but nothing can explain how
it might have come to rest
on a swatch of sand no bigger
than a sleeping dog,
among the hard and river-pounded rocks.
Imagine giving up all hope.
This morning when I stirred
the smell from the bed was of only me,
and the hateful sun kept coming
through the bedroom window
like a god. There are little men
who believe in policies, and athletes
as perfect and useless as swans,
just as the glass in the window
remains unbroken, for all the good it does.

ART HOMER
Summer 1992, Sarpy County
No one conies home in this heat. The roads
fill with honest dust we shake from our
feet like pilgrims. Only guests, tenants
of shade and breeze work hard at belief.
Boats lever form and oar in light's face,
the broken line where what cloud there is
slips into solid blade and handle.
Water, sky's torn skin, leaks images
and steals heat. This is the flaw we love
in strangers, forgive so often we
lose parents, children, whole families
town doctors pronounced O.K. Father's
heart was not sound as they'd said, fainting
spells fatal. Paint and the remaining few
bathers peel at the main attraction:
phony beach and light house built before
the war. Miles of landbound corn ignore
the lack of wave, the forlorn beacon
warning only tractors of the blue
land ahead.When relations gather...
(to eat and honor the dead? ..."it would please
your mother...") under the locust tree,
wish for flood. No locust swarms will glove
this land, drive farmers out. It's been ages
since such luck, the local stock grown dull
on milo and church. Three heifers tease
their bulk through a stock pond's dark surface.
Hogs never chew the cud of their grief,
but swallow earth whole, on the one chance
they'll be spared to breed another dour
profit for the dead man's son to hoard.

MICHAEL ANANIA
Some Other Spring
after Teddy Wilson
"You know how it goes," he said—
the quick shift of light and dark
the day itself like music, playing,
an instance of balance, presumed,
like the moment, entirely imagined,
then seen, when the ball hesitates,
spinning, against blue sky, bright day,
its first green drawn along dark branches,
the arc of so much to account for in time,
time in his left hand's intermittent
certainties, the right airborne, at play.
MARC COHEN
Somewhere Along the Road
Toward the next tower,
Stendahl sat on Juniculum Hill
looking down upon Rome
bathing in the spirit of his beloved Italy,
he who was at once both proud and embarrassed
by his heritage and native France.
Walking through the glass door
was like walking through a voice;
a violin perched on a piece of blue ice
like a parrot. Smoke was shimmering.
Who was it that said:
"Never inquire about the purity
of a hothead's sentiments or private cartography"?
The wiles of the wind, the feebleness of pure effort,
matter very little. Besides, the lunch bell has rung.
Stendahl said: "Rome weighs heavily upon me,"
and I said: "The day weighs heavily upon me."
I no longer have to hold onto myself with two hands,
but my unknown city scatters in the breeze,
lost among results and decisions.
So tell me, pretty one,
are you sad by nature then,
or by virtue of the course of events?
The grim and gloomy are linked to funnier fates.
I cannot preserve my anger, can you?

Isn't sadness just a poor excuse for anger?
Or is anger a poor excuse for sadness?
Solitary and crazy,
isolated as a monk,
I let go of those questions
and tried listening to Bruckner,
his "Romantic" Symphony, the 4th, I think,
but his grief was too repetitive, too noisy.
I was reading Stendahl.
He had just admitted to having been cruel,
and still being cruel. (It is said
that kidney stones are the mother of all cruelty.)
Susan and my mother have told me that I, too, am cruel.
They may be right.
I'm also told there's no reason
to feel disappointed,
though I've had little success.
Once, in 1988,1 was extremely ambitious.
Miraculously, the carnations haven't withered or wilted.
Stendahl was "a man apart,"
writing, as many do, with the tattered hopes
that he'd be discovered, understood and embraced
in the next century. As for now,
there's a new order to things—
witness the snowflakes yesterday,
big as silver dollars
and floating as if they were suspended in air.
It was the last Friday of March,
one day after, two days before.
The hours passed slowly; the minutes were unkind.
Still, by the time The Eagle was ready to fly
I had come to the gradual realization
of exactly what not to do.

Without Demur
Must unburden but can't.
Am fooling myself and others
but fooling no one
or making them very suspicious.
Bessie the car's front bumper
was hit pretty hard the other day
while parked in the King Kullen lot.
Want to do some damage also—
someone's going to have to pay.
Ought to leave Carthage,
go to Milan like Augustine—
try to latch onto
some speck of love—
maybe ask Him for help—
learn to pray then praise.
Seems a bit picayune.
but there's dishes in the sink
and the bed's not made.
The squirrels aren't baffled
by the plastic dome
on the bird feeder pole.
Clouds dispel shadows
while the truest truth falters
when examined under the light.
What about the violet vault
in the pitch-dark?
Will you remain silent forever?
Summer rinses out all the romanticism.
Autumn handles all the needy exhibitionist shit.
Winter is the icy realist
and Spring doesn't even exist.
but if it did, it wouldn't care
whether it's arrogance or ineptitude
or a little of both—
the lesson's in the learning—right?
Grief remains preoccupied
with what is lost or could have been.
Fold a mother's tear like a shirt
and put it away in a drawer
and don't wear it or forsake it
unless it's a question of survival—
and there are brooding alligators
in the swamp.
They don't make years like 1955 anymore—
just ask Glenn Gould
or listen to the debut recording of that year—
his speeded-up and excited performance
of the Goldberg Variations by Bach.
Confront Mr. Sartre of Nausea fame
and ask: "Can you imagine

after all we've been through
not being able to vomit?"
Is there anywhere to be found?
Anyone to know?
Wouldn't it be redundant
if God struck your new home or friend
with lightning?
"Have gun will travel."
Must long to return
to the scene of the crime—
make it good.
Must destroy to preserve—
not say: "I agree but can't."
GEORGE LOONEY
The Drama of the Human Body
After Tiepolo's Christ Calming the Storm
One sailor holds the boat down, the scars
that almost form a name on his arm
trembling. He's more afraid of Christ
than the storm, of how his hands seem to
become wind. The way the hands of a man
in a small town in Ohio moved over
a woman's bruised and naked body,
how even wind would have been a curse
as he drove the railroad spike through
her skull. The sky's unknowable,
and the canvas curving toward Christ's body
is just a gesture Tiepolo used
to let us know the wind isn't done
with cursing the dour men whose scars
could almost be tracks held together
with spikes that rust in backyard gardens.
Once, I helped a woman dig rocks out
of what would be a garden with herbs
that could heal wounds or calm storms. We made
love in the soil we had just turned over,
blacker than any part of the sky
Christ faces down in this painting. Later,
when we found a baby bird in the road
she asked me to carry it over
to the immaculate golf course.
My hands could have been wind around
that body, or a wound in the air

that would haunt the bird even after
it learned to fly. The calloused hand of
the cursing, drunk sailor in the back
of the boat inTiepolo's painting
could almost be a bird, a tern maybe,
or maybe a gull with a ringed beak,
dark wings and a scar along its chest
where a boy had carved initials. Maybe
the hand of that sailor touched the body
of a woman with the memory
of wind. And maybe the man in that
Ohio town whispered a blessing
into the woman's cold ear. Maybe
his voice was a distant storm across plains
where the grasses spoke her name and promised
to cover every wound. Christ said he would
build his church on a rock, but there are rocks
everywhere. And I'd rather think of
any bird, even a sparrow, than
the three rocks they found in her vagina,
no matter what they meant. Tiepolo
was a master of composition and color,
the drama of the human body.
In a broken Ohio town, police
photographed a woman arranged so
her body would absolve every sin
the wind had confessed. The man who
composed her stiff form had hands tattooed
with calm skies until almost no skin
was left. Maybe rocks seemed the only penance
he could offer, her body, laid open
to the west wind, an altar. Maybe
Christ talked to the men while his hands erased
what the sky had written. Maybe
he told them of a woman who believed
with her hands, how her faith was a language
of silence and form, how you could tell
it was faith by the way the signs lingered
in the air for actual seconds
after her fingers had closed back
into fists to punctuate the sentence
in which she said she loved what your voice did
to her skin, how it was a storm
she imagined watching from the porch
where you had first touched. Stories are stones
we place in perfect alignment with the wind.
Somehow it always seems there's water
nearby, an ocean or maybe one
of the great lakes. Erie, say, and now
it's Ohio again, and in some dark house
in that state a man's mouth turns a woman's skin into
a sound that could move any heart, even
the hearts of men whose skin's an illusion
of pigment on canvas, to love this
tableau vivant that has nothing to do
with tattoos or rocks no one deciphers.
Even in Ohio, pleasure's possible, and love
can be as simple as a woman
with hands that can calm a wren long enough

to carry it from the house it flew into
by mistake. The menTiepolo placed
in the path of the storm believe the future
is a white linen with the image of
a man, maybe this man whose hands are
apostrophes that take possession of
what they have followed all their lives,
everything they've believed in and told
stories of. The tattoos on the hands of
the man who placed the rocks inside
the woman on the outskirts of an Ohio town
couldn't calm his hands, or keep his heart,
carved with the initials of a man
his mother cursed every day, from being
a complaint even sleep couldn't quiet.
In his dreams, his heart took the form of
a quarry. All night there was the sound
of blasting in his chest, and in the mornings
there was trembling smoke and the wailing
of some bird gone deaf to its own cry.
Sometimes it's easy to get trapped in
the wrong place, like the men in that small boat
in Tiepolo's painting, like the woman
who thought the tattooed hands of the man
in the bar were works of art. that hands
that were canvases would feel good on
her skin, that the sky she touched behind
the drifting gulls was clearing up, that
the storm was over, no wind left to speak of.
DlANN BLAKELY SHOAF
Chorale
A sack of rotting apples dizzied Schiller's brain
as he wrote, drunk on scent
and words, those now-unread plays, even Wilhelm Tell recalled
only for its hero, whose arrows sang through air
to find their red, heart-shaped targets.
My friend fills her syringe while I search for my car keys, turn
to see the needle plunged
into her left thigh: "diabetes," she tells me
en route to the cafe, means "siphon," the body
melting down to water;
"mellitus" describes the sweet smell of the patient's urine.
Pouring vials near an anthill was the ancient test
for this disease; if the ants swarmed,
the prognosis was coma, followed by that deepest sleep,
sugar levels risen
so high they thrum the blood to stasis. In August,
when her lover went back home to his wife, my friend
skipped one shot, two, skipped meals
to binge on twelve-hour naps, waking to nibble candy
and hear, through the thin walls, an elderly neighbor
playing sonatas. "Ode to Joy,"
Schiller's most famous work, though we nearly lost the lyric
in Beethoven's grand chords,
the 9th symphony composed after his ears closed
to all but music, as my friend's eyes closed to all
but the black-winged angel.

That neighbor heard no footsteps or rattle of plates for days,
worried enough to call and ask if I had keys:
even outside the dark bedroom
we smelled the perfume of—roses? No, fruity and cloying,
like a sack of apples
left to rot. The ambulance crew filled a syringe
on arrival trained for signs of blood-sugar soared
sky-high. "Dumb thing to do,"
my friend says, scanning the menu and sipping Diet Coke,
and I'm not sure if she means the man or her try
at self-destruction, drowning
in a forbidden rapture. The last time I fell in love
I played Beethoven
so loud that pictures trembled and china rattled
its shelves, Chorale's strings and winds and horns confirming
that joy—-freude, freude—
is what we all desire, that while deep-kindled by the scent
of hair, or the brief feathery touch of a hand,
or the sight of a parted mouth,
desire arrows its way into the brain till flesh and mind
become as one, singing
our unrequitable ache to drown in sweetness.
MARTHA RHODES
Disguised
Bark-stripped and leafless
They're roped up in my cellar
All are young, all are male
I've taken them from parks
Neighbors' lawns, and sidewalks
Little saplings, unprotected
Except sometimes iron grates
Sheltering their roots; I take them
At night, occasionally by day
Disguised as a city worker
Their limbs, their small
Round trunks so precisely
Snapped apart, oh
My sweet syrup'd darlings
Whom no one will look for

Destined
Even eight years after your death
I wait for the night you phoned me
while your baby lay blind in your arms,
her brain drowning, that sac
at the nape of the neck—
and you begging me to end her life
that night, then.
Yet she would die
two days later, who had been
a terribly sick child,
surely destined to drown
of her own fluids,
but had she?
you silent thereafter,
had she
how did she
did you?
And when you drowned in that pond
a decade later, you children
as witnesses, I envisioned
The lilies and baby
sucking you down while I,
at surface, lost hold. Yes,
I am waiting for the night
you called so I can tell you
I could have ended her life
before you even asked. I could
have done it, Lucy,
and I would now.
Two Ghosts
To the woman I said,
"Margaret, you're looking well. Better than ever."
Her eyes were Pennsylvania field green
and her mouth was no longer caked white,
as when she was alive, a heavily drugged
librarian, drooling and stiff-armed.
To the man I said, "You, too, look well.
Haven't we met before?
Was it you I blind dated
at the kosher deli on 2nd Ave?
Aren't you, weren't you, Avram's older brother?
Didn't I read that you..."
The two side-stepped toward and around me.
They encouraged me to touch them, shake
their hands, one hand at a time.
Their skin wasn't cold, wasn't clammy.
Neither could talk to me aloud
but they did encourage me
to listen in on their thoughts, both
thinking at once, She's not looking well.
She'd look better if she were like us.
So ashamed, I looked down.

She's so ashamed, I heard them think.
Years ago she enjoyed men and bourbon,
men and waltzes, evening breezes,
the smoothness of her own skin,
tall sea grasses.
Now on that sofa she forgets
her arms and legs are attached to her.
They are cold, doughy things.
Let's take her with us.
Thinking extraordinarily loudly then,
She must learn to walk sideways
toward and around.
The rest will come as naturally
to her as it did to us,
the two of us flying from the same bridge,
at the same time, one from the high level,
one from the low, both of us bare-foot,
our socks neatly rolled into our shoes
and left under the guardrails.
Mid-air, we met for the first time,
nearly colliding—under water
we held hands, swallowed water,
swallowed air.
MARIAN RYAN
Mrs. Gomez Says
WHEN WE'RE LYING IN OUR BEDS AT NIGHT and Grandma is smoking
cigarettes in the kitchen, me and Trina talk about our mother.
Mommy left us for J.R., she says.
I say, Shut up.You don't know what you're talking about.
Do you think she starved to death? Trina asks. Do you think a
doctor came and took her away and put needles in her arms full
of sugar. Like before?
I don't answer and Trina starts to get mad. So I turn on the
light and I make a list. Where Mommy could be:
I put: Texas. The rain forest. Arkansas. Paris. Faraway places.
Someplace Mommy can't get back from. Trina shouldn't get her
hopes up. If our mother was coming back, Grandma would tell us,
like people say, like Mrs. Gomez next door says. I just wishTrina'd
go to sleep.
No, Trina says. It's J.R. She went with J.R.
You can't always fool Trina. I don't say anything.
But she's coming back, I know it. Maybe they're at Disney
World, having a honeymoon.
For six months? I say.
Maybe she is in the hospital.
For six months? Why doesn't she call us?

in
o
162
Shut up, Minerva, Trina says, and goes to smack me but I duck
and she just ends up knocking over the lamp. When it crashes to
the floor, Grandma comes in shaking her head and mussing her
curlers. She grabs the lamp and sings one of her songs from the
doorway: Good night ladies, good night gentleman, good night
everyone, I have to leave you now. . . .
Then she's gone and everything's dark except for the streetlight
and the crack of light under the door. Trina always has to
ruin everything.
She likes to make things up, too, bad things that happened to
her in school, so I never know if they really happened or not.
Sometimes, even though it's dark, I can tell she is crying. I guess
those stories are the true ones. She sounds clumpy like her voicebox
has glue in it. Then I listen very quietly and try to concentrate.
But sometimes if she's just telling stories, I look out the window
and watch the people go in and out of Mr. Alfaro's bodega.
Sometimes there's a lady who's skinny and tired-looking, with
long hair and black leggings like Mommy's. Trina thinks maybe
she's her, or knows where she is, and she reaches over and waves,
and taps on the screen. Once the lady looked up and waved back.
But then she shrugged and walked away.
Trina is getting weirder since Mommy went away, and she's
always making up stories. I never know what she's going to do. I
can't just go with my friends whenever I want to. I have to look
out for her.
When Trina falls asleep I lie here and keep wondering.
Grandma starts humming, louder than usual, when you ask
her about Mommy. I don't want to make her sad, so I have stopped
asking. But Trina still doesn't know any better.
Grandma, do you miss Mommy? she asked last night at supper,
right when Grandma was chewing her macaroni and cheese.
Macaroni and cheese is gloppy, so Grandma got to pretend
that she couldn't talk for a while, her tongue was too busy scraping
melted cheese and pieces of macaroni off her teeth. Then she
took a big drink from her glass of water, many swallows, and
looked down at her plate.
Yes, dear, we all do, she said.
Then she jumped up and put on Live at Five, even though she
says it's bad to watch TV while you're eating dinner. There was a
story about a policeman who got shot in our neighborhood somewhere,
and Grandma shook her head and kept smoothing her napkin
at her throat.
Trina likes to pretend she's an actress, or a doctor, or a burglar
in a ski mask. I don't pretend anything, except sometimes when
Gloria Gomez's mother asks me how I am, when she asks about
Mommy. Then I say good things, only good things. But when she
asks me, Do I like it here, I say, NO, Mrs. Gomez. No, I don't.
Mrs. Gomez is big as our refrigerator. We can hear her busy
voice from Grandmas apartment all the time. Mrs. Gomez's
kitchen is right behind ours, and she's always in there, talking. She
talks even when her kids Gloria and Alicia, I know for a fact, are
not there. Mrs. Gomez is always making things with her electric
beaters. Cookie dough and mashed potatoes and mushy peas for
the foster baby she has.
Mrs. Gomez never goes out except to the grocery store. She
walks down the street in her slippers, and her ankles are all swollen
and bruised. She says somebody hit her with their shopping cart,
and now she's going to be rich from all the money she gets from
that person ruining her legs.
Your mommy ain't no great shakes, she says. You lucky she
gone. Lucky you got this good grandma. Forget that mommy.
A long time ago, I used to be all mad when she said that, but
now I try to do like Mrs. Gomez says. Sometimes I cheat, though,
and look through Grandmas dresser for pictures of my mother. In
my shoebox I have a picture of me and Mommy. J.R. took it while
I was in the bathtub. I'm lying on my stomach and there's my head
sticking up with a soap-beard on my chin, and my butt is sticking
up, too, looking ridiculous. There's Mommy's arm, resting on my
back, kind of limp and scrawny like those stuffed snakes in a can
you see in magic shows.
When Trina was really little, Mommy used to cry a lot, before
she was with J.R. Once she said she wished she could run away. I
heard her on the telephone. One time I came home from school

UI
T.
O
o
164
and this lady was waiting with Trina and she said Mommy was in
the hospital. Then me and Trina had to stay with a strange family
until she got out. But whenever our mother took us to the park
or made us dinner or played Parcheesi with me she looked happy.
When she brushed my hair my scalp got tingly and I liked the
whooshing brush running down my head. Sometimes it got electric,
and my black hair stood up around my face, like a wreath,
Mommy said. Like a black chile ristra.Then I would slide underneath
the sheet and cover my face so I couldn't see Mommy leave.
She gave me a long bath, the last night she was with us. Trina
was in bed, and everything was quiet without J.R.'s music.
The steam stuck to Mommy's face and ran down in little puddles.
She choked on a laugh and put her tongue out sideways to
catch the water. I laughed too, though I knew that something was
not very funny about her smile. Then the dirty water was coiling
down the drain and I was shivering on the bath mat. She left me
in bed and didn't brush my hair. She didn't wake us up for school,
but when me and Trina went to the kitchen, all the cereal boxes
were down on the counter. She forgot to leave a note.
Sometimes Trina wants to go back there, to our apartment on
Houston Street, but I say no. She says she knows how to get there,
and she'll go over on Gloria Gomez's bicycle.
Do you think she still lives there? Trina says. Without us?
No way. You know how dumb that is? Dumb dumb dumb.
Maybe we're lucky, I said once out loud. That's what Mrs.
Gomez says.
Mrs. Gomez likes to have me and Trina over for dinner. Trina
never wants to go because she hates it when Mrs. Gomez pries.
She does a lot. Now girls, don't you worry. She says our mother is
gone for good.
Don't you like it here? she's always asking. Her chin wobbles
when she gets going.You got that nice playground downstairs, that
nice grandmommy. Better off without that bad mommy.
Go fuck yourself! Trina said last week. Mrs. Gomez made
Trina go home and I had to eat there all by myself.
Look, Minerva, Mrs. Gomez told me, I don't believe in telling
kids no fairy tales. You never going to see that mommy again.
But when Mrs. Gomez is not mashing something up or making
a casserole of cream-of-something soup, she's sitting under her
hair dryer, reading newspaper stories about aliens. Once I said, but
Mrs. Gomez, there are no such things as Martians, and she rolled
up her paper and got ready to slap me with it, before she stopped
and made the sign of the cross.
Don't you be a busybody, Minerva. I know it's just stories. I
don't go around believing them. Like your crazy-loca sister.
This is the real world here, she says. Mr. Gomez not coming
back, and neither is your mommy. Maybe they end up together.
Mommy had very tiny ears, small and close to her head.
Sometimes I dream about those ears and wonder how she could
hear out of them. They were baby ears, Grandma says. She was
always cold—except for when it was a hundred degrees in our
apartment, and then her and J.R. went around in their underwear
like me and Trina. In the winter she turned on the oven and put
on her parka and tried to get warm.
Sometimes I think I just dreamed my whole mother.
Mr. Alfaro's bodega has a black-and-yellow sign and some
nights when I wake up with the streetlight shining up at us, I see
the skinny woman with the leggings down there, but I don't tell
Trina anymore. The lady is a skinny-malink, like Grandma used to
call Mommy.
The moon fits in my pocket, Trina says when she wakes up
and starts drawing in her book for school. She looks weird, a little
like a skinny-malink, too. A bag of bones.
Trina likes the moon when it rises high over the projects. She
likes the sound of the cricket grinding his lazy legs in the airshaft,
and taxis honking really loud.
She likes the glare, evil-eyed, she says, of ambulance lights
flashing.
I say, Do you want to be an ambulance driver when you
grow up?
She says,Yes, maybe. . . Or else a doctor. Then I can use those
big cotton balls, the ones that smoosh between your fingers. I can
wipe them across cuts, across boys' scraped knees, and I can use a
big set of tweezers to pull out splinters from under their finger-

It)
O
O
166
nails, or to pull nails out of the bottoms of their feet. I'll have some
big spools of long black thread that I can sew into their skin, like
spiderwebs. And I'll have those big, long needles that look really
scary, but when the little girls and boys cry out, when they scream
and wiggle, I'll say, No, no, It's okay, It's not going to hurt.
I'm afraid Trina will never go back to sleep, but she does, and
I watch out the window for the skinny lady. The moon is climbing
above the projects like a baseball sailing through the air,
straight for my head, like the one Justice Cesar threw at me on the
schoolyard. I see the stitches in the baseball moon, a curving sewnon
smile. In the kitchen I hear Grandma humming to the radio.
At night, she never goes to sleep.
Gloria Gomez's mother says there's no place but here. All
those pictures in the encyclopedias at school are a lie and the
bridge across the river just leads to nowhere, leads to another
bridge that loops right back in.The avenues are big and blank and
gray and full of empty lots behind chain-link fences.
Yesterday Trina and me were walking home from school and
there was this big orange cat dead in the street. The same color as
the yellow lines that mean, Don't cross. Trina yanked my arm and
jumped up and down, saying,What is it? What is it? Then a big city
bus swerved outside its lane and its tire slammed right over the
body of that cat.
And Trina was staring, but not at the cat. She pointed to the
bus window.
Minerva! That's her. Mommy-
And I said, Trina, you stupid, it's a cat.
The bus closed its doors and pulled away, and she let go of my
hand to run after it. Stop! I yelled. Don't be stupid. But she kept
going, and people were turning around, so I dropped my bookbag
and went after her.
Trina ran for a block, screaming, Stop! Bus driver! until a lady
with a baby stroller and a little dog got in her way and Trina got
all tangled up in them and fell down.
She sat and cried and screamed at the top of her lungs, like she
used to do when she was first born. Right there on the corner, the
one by the dry cleaners, and she made me Hail Mary with her
before she'd get up off the ground. Go away! she yelled at the lady
with the baby and she pushed the dog so it fell over. Get up, I
hissed at Trina, or you'll be sorry.
You'll be sorry. That's what I say when I want to warn her, like
I did when Justice Cesar was going to try and push her into a
manhole down by the Graystead Hotel. Plus you can't go around
screaming at strange ladies on the bus and insulting strangers.
Good grief, Trina, I said, you're going to get yourself killed.
She wouldn't stop talking about it for days, mommy-mommymommy.
She told Grandma, who listened very patiently, but I
could tell she thought the whole thing was crazy, just like I did.
Crazy-loca, Mrs. Gomez says.
Kids make fun of us, like Gloria and Alicia, because I take
Trina everywhere with me. They say Trina's a baby. To tell the
truth, I don't always want Trina hanging around me, but I don't
want her not hanging around me either. Not around this block.
She acts like the chalk body outlines in front of the projects are
big hopscotch boards, and she slides right under the yellow police
tape. She doesn't care the ground is the same crusty-red as the
bricks in our building.
If I don't look out forTrina, she'll be making things up all over
the place. She is always pretending. Mrs. Gomez disapproves of
that, and won't have none of that in her house. Trina is stupid, too.
Not stupid like dumb, but she doesn't know how to be careful.
And she is very stubborn. Got scraped knees half the time because
of the way she makes me drag her across the sidewalks, and I'm
always in Mr. Alfaro's buying a new package of Band-Aids.
I come up the elevator because Grandma says don't take the
stairs. The elevator has puddles of pee in it again but at least it's not
hijacked by the boys on 5.Trina's home in our room writing stories
in her book. I say, Trina, you can hardly even spell CAT, but
she sticks out her tongue and goes back to her story. She's doing
it with crayons. Most of her big deluxe boxful are bitten off.Trina's
always going around with wax on her teeth, like Grandma gets lipstick
stains. Burnt sienna when she's been coloring tree trunks,

ID
N
kl
o
168
carmine when she did a valentine for Grandma. She tried to hide
the one she did for Mommy, but I found it under the mattress
when she was brushing her teeth. Trina talks to herself all the time.
This helps me keep track of her. Mrs. Gomez believes Trina is truly
crazy. Loca.
Since we've been at Grandma's, Trina has gotten a lot bigger
than she used to be. Big and fast, and now she likes to speed
around the kitchen with a wooden ruler beating on cockroaches.
I can't do my homework. Cut it out Trina, I tell her. Cut-it-out.
But she doesn't. When I start to yell Grandma comes in humming
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah and puts a stop to it, but
every other day Trina is there swatting the gold-flecked formica
and the shadowy walls. Unh! Ah! She makes big dramatic groans.
If she gets a bug she tries to sneak it off to our room in an envelope,
but I say, No way. Soon they'd be piling up under her mattress
with Mommy's valentine.
Trina keeps praying every single night, out loud, for Mommy
to come back, and now she says, Minerva! I saw her!
You're a stupid-o, Trina. Remember the bus lady?
No. It was. It was her. She was all hard and plastery, like the
statues at St. Theresa's up by the altar.
I keep on doing my math homework, but Trina won't shut it.
She tells how the lady fell on the ground and cried so her face was
all pink.Trina is getting all out of breath. I'm sitting there with my
mouth all twisted around, because now it's obvious that Trina has
gone loca for sure, she imagined some monster woman who had
a tantrum on the playground.
Then she says, she smelled sweet and dusty like she always did,
like our kitchen on Houston Street.
Everyone knows my sister is a crazy girl—but, when she said
how the lady smelled sweet and dusty, like piecrusts in the oven,
like J.R.'s little cigars, I think—maybe—Trina could be right.
But she wasn't skinny? I ask.
She shakes her head.
But Mommy was skinny, I say.
Grandma is in the kitchen, singing to her radio show: K-K-K-
Ka-tie, beautiful Katie, is the only only girl that I adore. . .
Maybe she was a ghost, I say. Or an alien. Not really our mother.
Maybe someone else is out mother.
When the m-m-m-moon shines. . .
You're crazy, I say.
. . .over the moun-tain. . .
Crazy-loca?
Yes, I say, just like Mrs. Gomez says.
. . .I'll be waiting at. . .
I am, Trina says.
. . .the k-k-k-kitchen door.
Yes, me too, I say. Maybe.
We decide to ask the Ouija board, Was she our mother?
We close our eyes and do not look, but when we open them,
our fingers are over "No."
I go out at recess to see the lady. She wore a brown coat and
she walked with a little limp. That's what the playground mother
tells me about the lady that came to talk to Trina. This neighborhood
is not so good. You never know what could happen.
Policemen get shot in the back and the boys are nasty and the
other day someone robbed Mr. Alfaro's store with a gun.You can't
just talk to ladies on the playground. I told Trina, but she doesn't
listen. I think she's sorry she ever told me about the plastery lady
who smelled sweet and crumbly and cried a lot. Which I know
cannot be Mommy, because our mother was so skinny, she didn't
have a shadow. The schoolyard lady can't be her, she's too big.
Mommy hates brown, she doesn't limp, and she doesn't have messy
hair, like the lady. Mrs. Gomez, you are right this time. My sister is
completely loca.
I stand behind the dying old oak tree with its few stingy buds,
next to the lunch lady. She's trying to fit behind the trunk, too.The
ground is hard and lumpy from the tree roots and they push up
through the blacktop in front of us. The bell just rang but Trina's
hanging around by the fence, looking down the street. She has a
certain sense, a way of knowing things that isn't normal. But it
doesn't always work.

i7o
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographic Center of Harlem
THE LENS CAN CHANGE THE WAY one sees the world; it can bring
fresh vision to an environment seen perhaps too long in the same
ways—or simply not seen at all. Such is the case at the
Photographic Center of Harlem, where COLUMBIA was astounded
to discover children as young as age five studying the craft of photography.
Dozens of students have been trained at the center since
1988.The results are not what an outsider might expect. The photographs
these children have made are professionally crafted, with
creative perspectives and a vibrancy which show what one might
find in an urban community, if one knows where—and how—to
look. The center's trademark is a series of portraits, taken •with a
cloth backdrop at the Harlem studio, and at local churches and
soup kitchens. Seen in succession, these portraits have a leveling
effect. All who sit before the camera are viewed in the same light,
literally and figuratively, for perhaps the first time.
As to the effect of this photography on the students, Director
Jim Belfon has within his vision a future of artistic expression,
and the potential of careers, for the children in his community.
•WL 'W
Asamoa, iggi
© Yao Dinizulu/Photographic Center of Harlem

Give Thanks, igg4
immy Belfonjr./Photographic Center of Harlem
Reflections of Mothers Day, 1995
© Lateef Taylor/Photographic Center of Harlem

In the Flow, igg2
im Belfon/Photographic Center of Harlem
A Tribute to Joseph Brodsky
1940-1996

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and began writing
poetry at the age of 18. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized him as
one of the most gifted lyrical voices of his generation. In 1964 he
was convicted of "social parasitism" and sentenced to five years of
hard labor in the Arctic. His sentence was commuted two years
later as a result of international and internal protest. In 1972, he
became an involuntary exile. He came to the U.S. and in 1977
became an American citizen. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature. In 1991 and 1992 he served as Poet Laureate
of the United States. Joseph Brodsky died in Brooklyn, New York
on January 28, 1996.
The following reflections on Brodsky's life and work are
edited remarks from a tribute held on October 29, 1996 at
Columbia University.
Susan Sontag
Joseph Brodsky was firs* of all a poet. As an anxietyconsumed
writer of prose, of course I've always been ready to
defer to the nobler genealogy of the poet. And this deference—
or envy—Joseph did everything to encourage. "Susan, Susan," he
declaimed early on in our long friendship (we met early in 1976,
four years after he came to the States): "Poetry . . . aviation.
Prose . . . infantry."
He was also a fascinating prose writer. This is not rare among
poets. Indeed, poets have written some of the best prose of our
century. Think of Rilke, of Mandelstam, of Tsvetayeva. Recall
that the most important 19th century English literary critic—
Coleridge—was a major poet, as was the single most influential
20th century critic and essayist in the English language—T.S.
Eliot.
Many of the preeminent poets of the 20th century have been
powerful essayists, and Brodsky—along with Auden—is among
them. Many of the qualities of his poetry are also in his essays: the
velocity, the intensity, the self-confidence, the extraordinary power
of association and generalization. The essays range widely, as did
his references and sympathies: Brodsky was a true cosmopolitan,
in the tradition of two of his Russian poet-forbears, Mandelstam
and Tsvetayeva. The great Latin poets and Dante were as present
in his mind as the classics of 19th and 20th century literature. Like
Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva, he was a writer who exemplified
Goethe's notion of world literature and the values that go with it
(as opposed to nationalist projects for literature). I strongly urge
you to become acquainted with this Brodsky, the essayist who proposed
vigorous line-by-line readings of favorite poets such as
Auden and Frost, and composed summative essays on other
beloved poets from Ovid to Cavafy to Akhmatova.
Joseph Brodsky did not write only about literature, of course.
He was a passionate observer of the world, a constructor of historical
fables, and a marvelous memoirist. These essays and chronicles
were always very argumentative, witty and fast. He is wonderful
on the subject of exile, on the complexity of the situation
of being in exile. On this much-written-about topic, he

o (r
m i0.
LJ
m
O
I78
doesn't say anything obvious. He's splendid on cities: Petersburg/
Leningrad, Rome,Venice. And on travel itself—a great subject for
him as for me. We talked a lot about travel, which seemed to precede
or to follow naturally from conversations about books and
writers we both loved.
Oddly enough, though he spent most of his adult life in the
United States, Brodsky didn't write about America. It seems odd
because he knew the country very well. Auden is supposed to
have replied when asked (some years after he became a citizen in
the early 1940's) if he thought he was an American: "No, but I'm
a New Yorker." The quip doesn't apply to Brodsky, although he
had an apartment in New York for most of the quarter of a century
he lived in the United States and was thoroughly at home
here. Perhaps because, unlike Auden, Brodsky didn't start his life
as an American in New York City, he had more feeling for the
country as a whole. He began with four years in Michigan; he
spent time in California and Washington D.C.; he taught for some
years (part-time) in western Massachusetts—not to mention all
the other states, most of the fifty states, I would guess, where he
alighted for shorter teaching stints and poetry readings. Brodsky
was grateful and generous to his adopted country. Unlike Auden,
he did think that, by becoming an American citizen, he was
becoming an American. Does that say something flattering about
us?—that this is a country to which a great foreign writer could
emigrate, continuing to write mainly in his own language, and
feel quite at home. I doubt it could happen in any other country
in the world.
Susan Sontag has published three novels: The Benefactor, Death Kit,
and The Volcano Lover; a play, Alice in Bed; a collection of short
stories I, Etcetera; and six books of essays, including On Photography
and Illness as Metaphor. Her new novel, In America, is to be published
in 1998.
Mark Strand
I met Joseph shortly after ^he'd given a reading at the New
School in 1972. There was party at Richard Howard's apartment.
I went up to him and I said, "Mr. Brodsky, I'm Mark Strand, I sent
you a New Year's card last year, did you ever get it?" He said yes.
Then he quoted one of my poems to me. I was astonished, both
by his generosity and his marvelous memory. I had the impression,
then, that he probably knew more about my poetry, since he could
remember it, than I did, who could not remember it. During our
long friendship he and I would talk on the telephone and read
each others poems to one another and offer advice. I took Joseph's
advice frequently. He, however, only rarely took mine. Just think
of what a great poet he might have been!
He was a great poet, and had, for someone who came to
English as late as he did, an unbelievable certainty about what he
was up to. He seemed to know, from the moment he got here, just
what American poetry was. None of my acquaintances knew what
it was.They were hoping it had something to do with them. Now,
a lot of people say that Joseph was a superb poet in Russian, which
I believe, but I don't know Russian. I know English, and I thmk
he's a superb poet in English, but a different kind of poet than one
usually makes a case for. The very things in his poetry that an
English or American reader might find fault with are the things
which I am personally attracted to and which I find give it its
strength. It's hard to describe the state of American poetry when
Joseph entered it; a relentlessly autobiographical poetry was being
written, and still is, a poetry of metonymies where a slice of life
can seem an adequate representation for the whole of life. Joseph
was a poet of a different stripe, a metaphorical poet who made up
a world through which the so-called real world was revealed.
Sometimes his made-up world wore the decor of ancient Rome,
or Cape Cod, or Mexico.
I think that Joseph differed from most of his American contemporaries
because he was so enamored of tropes and puns and
playing with language, the very things that American poets at the
time felt falsified their poetry, Joseph seemed to think it validated
poetry and I think Joseph was right.

o
CD
x
0.
UJ
180
A lot of people complain about Joseph's rhyming, but his
rhymes are only partial rhymes. Imagine somebody speaking with
Brodsky's heavy Russian accent. I don't think heard those rhymes
the way we hear them, so I think his choice to write slant rhymes
accommodated the mispronunciation that came with his accent.
And so his choice was a shrewd one. And I for one believe his
rhymes are delightful. When you grow up in a language you have
such conventional notions of it. You always take the plainest, clearest,
simplest way. Joseph had any number of alternatives. Because
he hadn't grown up in the language, his choice, his range of
options, was greater than that of a native speaker, and it created a
kind of oddness, brilliant and unforgettable.
It's true sometimes he sounds like Auden, and I think sometimes
he even sounds a little like Emily Dickinson, though some
people will say that's going too far. Maybe he's a cross between the
two, with Thomas Hardy thrown in. I want to say another thing
about Joseph in translation. We usually say someone is translated
into English, or someone into Russian, and its very unfair, because
someone is really translated into the idiom of the translator. So
there's something too general about saying Brodsky into English.
The fact is that Brodsky translated Brodsky into Brodsky, Russian
Brodsky into English Brodsky. He knew what he was doing.
Mark Strand was raised in the United States. He is the author of nine
books of poems, the most recent of which, Dark Harbor, was published in
1993. His book of short stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, was published in
1985. In 1990 he was chosen by the Library of Congress to be poet laureate
of the United States. He is currently the Elliott Coleman Professor
of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University and visiting professor in the
Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Tatyana Tolstaya
Being Russian, of course, f do not have a very clear idea of
what English poetry is as a special thing—because I believe that
poetry in each language takes very different forms, and has certain
idiosyncrasies that just cannot be translated. English poetry has
something special in it that is very much based on the English language—which
is, to say the least, peculiar. English has lots of short
words, and a very strange accentuation for the Russian ear, which
I can hear while listening to poems being read today. And many
other times when I have had the chance to listen to English poetry,
I always wondered, What is it that I miss and that others obviously
do not miss? I don't know: maybe I am completely deaf, but
there is something I cannot grasp. So I guess you have to be born
into the English language, or live here for a very long while, or
have a very special talent or whatever, you name it, to be able to
understand what to do with poetic English in order to be an
English language poet. I don't know it.
But I have another advantage, and it's a very strange advantage.
I understand Russian poetry. I understand the rhythms of Russian
poetry. I understand something that Joseph understood, and
though I am not quite able to get what is so specific in English
poetry or to have shared that with Joseph, I have an idea how he
perceived English poetry.
There is an ongoing dispute, and some people go so far as to
deny the greatness of Joseph as a poet in English. They say perhaps
in Russian he is great, but in English something lacks or something
is odd or something is strange. Maybe. I am not the one to judge.
If you think it's wrong, it's wrong. I am not the one to judge. I have
just heard this opinion many times. Perhaps I know something
about it, having a Russian ear to poetry, a Russian eye, maybe. I
tend to read poems that were translated by Joseph himself from
Russian into English; I tend to read them in a Russian way, with
Russian accentuation, with the accents that find themselves in the
same places and coming in the same order as a Russian person
speaking English would find. So for me that is another kind of language.
You as Americans are not aware of that: it's Russian English.
And I feel comfortable with it when I see it on the page.
iS

a
0
ir
m i
a.
LJ
U!
0
182
Joseph couldn't erase thirty Russian years. He learned English,
right, and he had a wonderful memory, an unbelievable memory,
but he couldn't erase the basics. He couldn't erase the fact that he
was born into the Russian language, that it was the first imprint.
The first words we hear when we are born into this world will
never be English. They will always be Russian. We were born into
this language. It has some very deep roots in our mind, in our
brain. Even in English, Joseph was basically a Russian poet.
One comment on rhymes. Again, the basic difference
between English poetry and Russian poetry is cultural, because of
the peculiarity of the English language—the short words, mostly.
It is difficult to have rich rhymes in English and to appreciate
them. I can allow you having the richer vocabulary all in all. I
know that English supposedly has more words than the Russian
vocabulary, but the rhymes are richer traditionally in Russian, just
because it is a cultural habit. The thing is, for Russian speakers,
writing a poem with no rhymes is a child's job, child's play. It's
easy, so it doesn't count. Very few great Russian poets ever tried
that. It is fancy, but it doesn't really work. To work towards the end
of each line, to show the rich and deep rhyme, is something very,
very important for the understanding of Russian poetry. It is
something that holds the whole structure and that's what Joseph
was doing. It is very painful for many Russian poets who know
some English, and who are translated into English, to realize that
the translators are not going to rhyme their lines. It is just painful.
It's something that you cannot just dismiss, you cannot agree to
that. So perhaps that is one of the reasons Joseph tried to keep
rhyming in English poetry.
I won't try to go into theories and to comment on what
Joseph's poetry is in Russian, what it represents, how it differs
from other ways of writing. I would say just one thing: it belongs
to the school, to the way of thinking and writing that introduces
prose into poetry, prosaisms into poetry, and does something,
impossible to explain what, that is magic, that elevates the most
prosaic everyday common language to the level of poetry. It is a
sort of transformation that happens. The classical approach to
poetry in Russian literature, which after all is 200 years old,
modern Russian literature is 200 years old, is to use the poetic
language. There is a poetic langtiage and a colloquial language. So
when you switch into the poetic mood, you use the poetic language.
The prosaic colloquialisms are not supposed to be there.
Though, as often happens, it is a paradox, the first poet who established
rules and norms, who gave the idea of great Russian
poetry and who is unsurpassed, namely Pushkin, Alexander
Sergeyevich, he was the one who started introducing colloquialisms
in the language of that time, in what was considered
poetic language of that time. Brodsky belongs to this particular
school, he introduces a lot of colloquialisms, but he does something
that makes them sound extremely poetic and profound.
How, I don't know. Because he's great.
Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad and graduated from Leningrad
University in 1974. Her first collection of short stories, On the Golden
Porch, was published in Russian in 1987 and translated into English
in 1989. A second collection, Sleepwalker in a Fog, was published in
1992. She is an associate professor at Skidmore College.
18

o
IT
CD
X
(L
O
-3
Derek Walcott
I met Joseph in Boston. Roger Straus was there, and Susan
Sontag. This was Robert Lowell's funeral. I was standing in the
pew and the service was going on, and I looked at this person next
to me and his face had a great profile but was very grimly set so I
began to think, This must be Joseph Brodsky. I knew of his attachment
to Lowell and I thought, Well, okay, if he's not going to cry,
I'm not going to cry—sort of a competition of being stoic.
That was the beginning of a lifelong , and to me beyond lifelong,
friendship. The thing about Joseph was that to me, and I'm
not an American, I'm coming from the Caribbean, he was a person
who was physically, more than anyone I've ever known or am
likely to know, physically a poet. By this I do not mean the smoking,
which was a part of the poetry—I have a phrase that he was
the biggest buyer of tobacco since Sir Walter Raleigh. With other
poets you feel or felt, Well, they do that, that's what they are. But
there was not one other person who was like that in the sort of
shambly groaning way that he had, not only that either, but simply
the occupation of poetry was a minute to minute thing.
For me, at my age, past forty and even more, that was astonishing
as an example. Poetry was something that sometimes you
turned off [and then you tried to turn it on, it wasn't clicking or
something, that was something]. [I think that has to do with his
poetry in the sense that] The intellectual energy he had, as all his
friends would attest, was phenomenal. His generosity was phenomenal.
He would say, for instance, Have you read Mark's new
book, and I'd say,Yeah, and what he would say would be not something
that had anything to do with Mark or with someone else, it
would be about poetry, and that was the phenomenal thing to me,
that that generosity was not personal. It was something beyond his
own love of the craft.
Mark has said it, Susan has said it, Tatyana has said it, and I
think I'm glad we're all saying it tonight: You don't read Joseph
Brodsky as you would read an American or English poet. You
don't. [He's not that.] But what any poet writing in English could
learn from Brodsky is something that had been forgotten in poet-
ry for a long time, and that was that poetry was an intellectual
argument as much as it as an emotional one, or perhaps less an
emotional one than an intellectual one. And what he continually
did, which was something that made me feel generally very stupid
in Joseph's presence, (not that he was a show-off, in the same way
as when I read Auden), was, You know, you really haven't been
thinking. You've been writing, glacially writing, it's fine, it looks
good, you have a kind of a reputation, but you haven't been working.
It was that vigor of Joseph's that made me pull myself up and
say, Look, you better see what you're thinking.
The introduction of that vigor, or reintroduction of it into
English verse, will gradually be discerned for what it is, because it
will be the same thing they're saying about his awkwardness,
except that this awkwardness is foreign. But I think that the awkwardness
one has in reading Joseph is the same kind of awkwardness
one might feel about, as some people did, about Hardy's
grotesqueries, Hardy's different awkwardnesses that made the scansion
of his verse to some poets, including Eliot, bad verse. Not that
Joseph wrote bad verse.
I'll give you an example of his generosity. In the book, A Part
of Speech, there's a credit, "Translated by Derek Walcott." Well, that's
silly, because I don't know Russian. The generosity of insisting that
that's what I did is part of Joseph's nature. I say 15, because it's very
hard to say was and I won't say was about him. Present tense is
what occupies poetry and the poet lives in the present tense
beyond his death. The reality of the translations ascribed to others,
whether to Dick Wilbur or Anthony Hecht or myself, is that
Joseph did his translations, he did them, and he did them with the
rhymes. And that happened a couple of times. I'm not saying that
it happened with "Letters from the Ming Dynasty"—but when I
was given that poem, he had already done it. What I brought to
it, I thought, was a steady collaboration of trying to get the meter,
and here is what was important: whenever the meter becomes predictable,
and musical, and given, so that the given ear, of listening
even to yourself translating, was one that accommodated a kind of
meter that said, This line sounds good like that, it would be a nice
"D
I
w 3
0
185

D
O
IT
in
O
"3
186
line of English verse, not that you said that, that he would obstruct
it, he would block it, he would deconstruct it, he would violate it,
because it was too sweet, too easy.
The great poets bring something to verse—they bring prose to
verse. Wordsworth did it in the Lyrical Ballads and he was assaulted
for it. Other poets brought the power of fiction into the standardized
structure of verse. He was very casually brilliant and he
would say things like, "The difference between English poets and
American poets is that English poets are interested in the stanza,
the stanzaic shape." Therefore, this whole veneration of form,
which he saw in Hardy particularly, or the veneration of form
which he saw in Donne, and the way that his poems are architecturally
designed, this is part of the whole idea of structure that has
reinforced for me, at least, my own sense of what stanzaic responsibility,
and rhyme, and all the requirements of the effort of writing
verse thoroughly required, needed.
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia and was graduated from the
University of the West Indies. He is the founder of the Trinidad Theatre
Workshop, and his plays have been produced by the NewYork Shakespeare
Festival, the Mark Taber Forum in Los Angeles, and the Negro Ensemble
Company. Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished
foreign play in 1971. He has published four books of plays and
eight books of poetry. In 1992 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His
new book, The Bounty, will be published in February, 1997. He is a
Professor of English at Boston University.
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
College Prizewinners
In 1955, the Academy of American Poets established its
university and college Poetry Prize program at ten
schools. The Academy now sponsors annual prizes for
poetry at more than 150 colleges and universities
nationwide, and has awarded more than $300,000 to
student poets since the inception of the prize program.
Many of America's most esteemed poets won their first
recognition through a college prize, including Toi
Derricotte, Mark Doty, Tess Gallagher, Louise Gliick,
Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Li-Young Lee, Sylvia Plath,
Mark Strand, and Charles Wright. The academy and
COLUMBIA JOURNAL welcome the following 20 additions
to the college prize roster, selected from among
the winners of the 1996 prizes, awarded at schools
across the country.
18

PELIN ARINER
OBERLIN COLLEGE
Manti
Grandma pours half a bag of flour into the bowl,
white dust rises like wheat ghosts,
I put three eggs on the table,
they nod, saluting right and left.
Mother mixes salt and water in a cup, oblivious
to the song of the spoon.
Water softens the dough
flour makes it tight.
Grandma massages soft the shoulders of the dough
her agestained hands persuasive,
her crystal knuckles determined.
In the push and squeeze, the flip and mold
I catch my mother's eye.
She is kneading onions into the minced meat,
she tells me
"there is the feeling of being stolen from,
the helplessness of birth, who is this—
this pink and righteous thief?"
Grandma rolls out the dough, it expands
like a continent, amorphous, paperthin,
she cuts it into squares with a sharptongued knife,
we put meat into their middles,
they look like flowers.
Mother starts to boil the water,
we pinch the four corners of the squares,
hundreds of tiny sacks
on the silver tray
we pour them into the breaking waters.
STEPHEN BURT
YALE UNIVERSITY
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,
by Velazquez
Because her home is someone else's castle
She stands in our end of the picture, braced
Against her wet wood table and brass pestle
Where shadows splash diffuse
Stormclouds across the bonedry masonry.
Dismembered cloves of garlic that refuse
To grind themselves to paste
Tally before her like a daisyclock
the hours she has stood for, supervised
By an arthritic, pocked,
Sad woman mentioned nowhere in the Gospels—
The hours -which four perch, slim silver bells,
Have spent shinily pending
Dismemberment to feed a house of five
And God Himself spent lecturing to Mary.
Seen only through a drafty, shadechilled square
Hole cut into a wall,
Christ, Lazarus and Mary rest, secure
Sun, Mars and Venus of an orrery,
Resplendent in their sense of an unending,
Simple and categorical
Exemption from all earthly labor, granted,
However, only to the first
Dozen or so who have the luck to take

Advantage of His offer. For the rest—
Skeptics, the housebound, daytoday
Providers, younger sisters and the like—
The kitchen table and a sullen duty.
—So Martha thinks,
Looks bitterly to us in ruddy silence
Only because she has no one to thank.
She wants to be rescued;
Her full lips pursed, she looks about to cry
And won't do. We're her only audience,
Or else Velazquez is, who, not yet twenty,
Abandoned his Seville's
Provincial tutors and unleavened houses
To strut his brushwork for the court and King,
And brought Madrid this canvas
Recording the albedo of two eggs,
The weft of hair, the gamut offish scales,
And the halfstifled hopes of all the young
Who, while the bright elect practice, converse
And hope to be immortal,
Grind garlic, skin the fish and set the table;
Who, were the tables turned,
Might say their faith in art or faith or manners
Counts more than the dull skills they never learned,
Then sit down calmly and expect their dinner.
ROBIN DELMAN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
The Toymaker's Daughter Recovers
The moon anchors the street when I wade out
past the fever. A paper owl sits on a branch
and asks, "Who?" Momentarily the doll
can open and shut her eyes and raise both arms.
The monkey nurse sits at the bedside
and swabs her forehead with a washcloth.
Two bears on the shelf enact a Victorian marriage,
their legs just barely touching. The flywheel
that drives the tin peacock quietly
works its keywind economy. The monkey nurse
dumbly feeds the monkey child in her lap
from an empty bottle. Below the window,
a wooden figure steps out from under an awning
and shields his head as if it were raining.

ANN PELLETIER EATINGER
SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY
River Rafting
How much the Swedish Uncle weighed when dragged to the
doctor's office
next to the stream, springtime, what once was snow.
Alliteration lulls. Friendly yellow of the rafts.
All night water hurries. Thrashes.
Garden on Almonte Boulevard. Cyclamen in shade. Jasmine
fastened to stakes.
Growing up above the dead.
He disappeared below the surface with things still to say.
No—further ways of not speaking. Gasping, thrashing.
O, inner pink, place of fragrance.
Pulses stop not to push you away.
He said, there is nothing to prove. There was gentle pulling,
slacks, penis, water in certain thin rivers. Nothing.
No, I was not o.k., drowning the way I thought I wanted to.
My mind was changing. I found ways without speaking. I had
to hurry.
GRAEME FORDYCE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Wednesday the 13th
Dunblane, Scotland
The children wouldn't suspect
the turn of a schoolroom door
to let in a man with four hands.
Their headmaster tried to stem
six yearold blood, but the blain
put upon that Perthshire town
in the stolen air, flesh and stone,
will not soon heal.
Not there. In Los Angeles we
watch a teacher fall from the window
by Figueroa bullets. It makes more
sense. Or gangdeath in northwest
Pas, where palms bend their shags
a wind south of San Gabriel scree.
There's no answer to the parents'
dreadful raivel, not there.
This is your time, John Donne.
And I, one man a world span
away from his island, hadn't
a sneeze of the dun cold breath
whaisking the streets that day.

STEPHANIE GORDON
THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
Stealing Fire
Never mind that she said a cigarette fell
while she was reading Proust or Mario Puzo,
with whom she once laughed and drank wine
in New York City. Maybe she simply touched a match
to her pillow, as my sister claims, but by then
I'd learned my mother's way of making a good story
even better. The trick is to believe your own words,
because lying makes the truth more bearable.
My mother could make art of wrong numbers, a sidelong glance,
a chance encounter. Wasn't I born in the same hospital
as Clark Gable's son, same month same year? To my mother
that made Gable her lover. Once in London
my mother saw Elizabeth Taylor at high tea and could
scarcely move past her for the actress insisting
Call my agent, darling, for a screen test. My sister,
too, practiced this art. After the fire, she wrote me:
"Praise God I am alive!" although I later learned
she ran out the door long before danger. Mother had set
her bed on fire, Katie wrote, and locked the door.
Mother's reasons were simple enough: daydreams,
the amazing passage that causes the mouth to drop open
in awe, cigarette forgotten. But I knew then,
as I do today, that she stood under
the naked light bulb in her room and as
the flames race to the edge of the bed,
while hands frantically try, then pound
the apartment door, deep voices yelling,
there is a single suspended moment
before the battering ram splinters and splits the door
when the room fills with light, and she thinks I brought
this gift to the world, this fire I stole from the sun.
Her body is a radio of silver voices cutting in and
out, and her dark hair swings forward
and begins to singe as she says I am the fourth
who walked among the Hebrew children and
like them I too will burn and burn and not die.

CHARLENE SANG LEE
FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL UNIVERSITY
Old World Journey
There is a river flowing between
my ancestors, across the moon foreheads
there are swift lines of scholars
and God seekers
from two sea's distance,
think of our ancestors, Little Sister,
Sang mi ah, laid dead,
bowing to ghost fishermen
in ice ponds
their fishing poles
at a slightly sad angle
a shadow across
setting suns
Remember how Great Aunt chopped
the feisty chicken's neck
in half
with a single stroke
of the blood sharp cleaver,
how we watched unaware and
suddenly shocked
at the country way
of preparing dinner
When Johnny comes marching home,
we sang, climbing in our dreams
the vertical mountainside
Bong San
our eyes dead apples,
weary with journey
and hungry for collapse,
Great Aunt would have prepared
dinner, hot curry rice,
the stinging flavor would
cut our face and hands
burning the wind in our lungs
one method of her sweet love
and my link to her
through our blood
would give me power
This I will miss on my journey
back to the New World, as I sit on a pile
of sea ragged stones,
watching the sun rise and wave
rubbing my skin
with cold river water until
red with tears
Would I ever come back,
see her before she dies
and resolve our histories,
which swell with the
river's dying current?

ERIC MALONE
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE
After Winter
The horse stands at the orange gate
shaking his rusty head
as the barking dog shoots through the yard toward
the limits of the thin wire fence. I can't resist
the sun, so we take our conversation
out to the back deck where the tallest firs
move like paper straws in the wind. In my hands
is this landscape I'd forgotten.
the lines I've crossed, spending my first
winter in the small of the city, its grey crouched
in the rungs of my spine. I'm back
because I'm tied here. You say
you feel tired, but I revel in
the sun's attention, how last night it left
a pole of neon like a ladder to the mountain.
Where it began was unclear—somewhere
in midair, and you can't trust
what isn't grounded. You know spring is full
of snow that winter didn't bring, that tomorrow
it might hide the dusty road and cause the marble angel
to hover whitely where it presides
over the cemetery lawn. So you keep
and eye out for those first clouds while I run
in my mind through the dry white
fields as they looked this morning,
lit and no shadows crossing.
The horse stands like a vane, weatherwise,
and the dog runs crazy through his acre, leaping.

MALINDA MARKHAM
UNIVERSITY OF DENVER
To Negotiate Form
The air does not forgive,
does not part willingly for the body,
gauges the interrupt
by the noise it makes:
After a certain point,
the hands cannot be clean.
They have reached too many places,
demanded too much. Experience
harms you: strangers intuit your past,
the violence you crave
in limited strike, silence
creating a space that others
could fill with water,
with words. I cannot soak my face
under faucet, cannot swim.
Beneath that surface,
even the air bows
and relinquishes judge.
I have fidelity only to reaching,
abandon—reluctant—
the dignity of fulfill:
You can enter my mouth,
I cannot fill yours. Tonight,
let the air admit. Let my shape
fall through it: unattended, without guard.
The Prize in Memory of Anai's Nin
SHARA MCCALLUM
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AT ODLLEGE PARK
Sunset on the Wharf in Montego Bay
John crows fill the red sky. Coming in
closer with each swooping pass, they smell
the unsold dead to be discarded. Fishermen,
women with their wares, higglers pack up
as day light ends. My father's presence lingers.
With an eightyearold's eyes, I watch him poised
on one leg, frozen in the midst of motion. Right
leg straight, firmly planted in the soil. Left one
bent at the knee, stranded in midair. Walking:
the unfinished step he could not make.
My calling could not retrieve him from that place
he exchanged for me: no Daddy, Father, Allistaire,
enough to reclaim the eyes averted from my gaze.
What he saw, what he went toward, I was left
behind, pulling at his sleeve as people crowded to see
the spectacle: my father: standing grasshopper,
lotus flower against darkening seas, sand turning black,
grains disintegrating under the dying light of the sun.

ERIC MILLER
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Little Spider Bay Landscape
Ever wonder why they call that rock
metamorphic? Yes you're right
my grandmother is the process.
No you could not pull my grandmother away from
sunsets they pressed down on her and there was
no getting her out from under. Millstones, hear them?
Grinding the odor of pine.
It would be like
stripping up the outcrop between here
and Gooseneck Bay.
On the rock by the water she sat down.
Sentiment died like a fire.
Each nest was fitted into whorls of the spreading juniper
immovably as a sun in its fire. A knot in wood.
The water of the bay was filling up like a blood
bath with evacuated day.
She was spreading on the rock like moss.
Each sunset would sit down on the moss
as if to watch the sunset on softness of the moss
and soft as moss and took as long to grow its end
as moss and shadow sat on the rock in the bleeding veins
of the pine smell blood in the night lapping the rock.
The rock excuse me
which was the Throne of Night now
whose scepter is a bleeding pine
whose crest is the woodpecker's crest is the cry
of the woodpecker whose sliver enters
the palm of the bay where
loon like a pine torch dives after
the afterliving of the sun wreck.
Who can get those stars out of the cracks in the water?
The stars are like teeth in the smiles of the water.
Meet my grandmother Nox Perpetua.
You'll find her where the sun fell.
She is busy changing sentiment changing it
that's why her rock is called metamorphic.
The wrinkles in her palm are moving the ripples in the bay.

JEREMY SCHOTT
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
Absolution
My woods are riddled
with barbed wire and fragments
of old stone fences. This used to be
part of a whole
farm, fields rolled over the hills—
a patchquilt of corn
and wheat to the horizon.
The fencestones are rounded, taken
from streambeds and gullies—cold
as spring thawwater.
Nearly invisible, the stiff iron briars
of barbed wires lurk, snagging shoelaces
and pantlegs.
Beside the old boundaries,
maples have grown up.
Some forgive, taking the barbs
right up into their heartwood.
ERIN FERRETTI SLATTERY
HOLLINS COLLEGE
Duet
After they begin, you notice the piano's spine is worn,
splintered in patches, and the lidline vaulting into the light
on two tense hinges, converges at the leg, points to the apex
over the strings' shadow. Below, the ring of her hair
glints like a coin's rim, coronal, where it merges
with the profile just beyond your focus (following
the light along the lips) tilting past her plane of sight,
which sees, as he does, the cloth draping at her knee,
how the outline of his sleeve follows the length
of her right leg. When they lean into each other
with the hunch of understanding, consolation
(the allegory of notes behind the sound),
you feel the audience pull away from them, from each other,
like metal shards repelled by a magnet. You are still,
alone in your seat, too, wanting to bend like that
but not disclose how easily the grief could come.
The faster the music, the more their fingers branch, palms
spindling, arachnoid, pulling nets from the keys' crease
until the audience hates them for revealing
what it won't. You hate them
for making you know the man beside you, running his thumb
over the fabric on his knee, how he receives nothing
tonight from his wife but scorn
when he leans into her, thinking of Brahms.

DAVEY SPOLUM
CORNELL COLLEGE OF IOWA
Music for Strings in a Mildewed Room
The grief is growing in that room.
A chamber opens and seven men in waistcoats
flow in. Opening great panes of glass
they bend branches low securing them
with countless small cords to the floor.
The musicians labor over their instruments
bowing over them like immobile lovers.
Uncoiled from their scrolls the strings
are broken—the tines driven through the bodies
of the audience (the bowing never ceases).
The naked man in Bosch's "Musical Hell"
screamed shrilly when the thin golden strands
were strung through his face and all along
his spine, the body singing as it was stung.
The musicians begin again (passionately now).
But then everything stops
and they have forgotten exactly how to live.
SARA RUBY TCHOLAKIAN
SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
Mr. Apkar Zarian—
I will meet you at the plaza of the doves,
you will recognize me as the girl with the crimson
half mask and arched eyebrow,
at precisely the time the sun has fallen on the day of the fools.
I won't be there on any first.
I prefer purple and white flowers,
never roses, knotted in happenedupon string
gathered in an odd number.
Do not attempt to hold my hand,
I detest constrictions.
If you haven't anything witty or intellectual
to say to me,
come prepared with an esoteric fact about birds.
Under no circumstances attempt a bout at politics.
I suppose that you should know that I:
prefer breakfast for every meal,
smoke profusely even in public,
possess no interest in cooking,
lack the ability to laugh at matters
that simply are not funny,
do not know the line dance
and will perplex,
and in time undoubtably annoy you,
with the manner in which I speak.
I was never taught Armenian.

Although I was born with the child birthing hips
of my grandmother and her mother,
as for children of my own,
I no longer have any interest.
I can not see any reason to trouble one with this:
predestined
cardboard
cutout
of who they should be.
But as my father has told you,
I am resigned to live this charade.
All I ask of you,
is that when we meet in the plaza of the doves,
that you do not attempt to remove the crimson from my eyes, as
it will not please you
to find what is hidden underneath.
BRENNAN TRAVIS
VASSAR COLLEGE
Remembering
i
After jumping into the lake—
in the moment between air and water—
I believe my swim will be too fast
to be dangerous.
Then I'm ten feet down,
feet against the bottom.
As I open my eyes upward
I imagine the light above isn't sky
but the cold white of ice.
I bend my knees, push to the surface.
For a moment my fingers touch the frozen cover
and I move, trapped beneath the ice,
smudging the white. Casting a ghost shadow,
made only of my tapping.
II
We were skating—three figures on silver,
widening and drawing close again.
We must have moved above him, our runners on the ice,
long before we saw him. Still moving—
he might have been submerged ten minutes or more.
His darkness moved quickly towards us—
forehead caressing our tracks—
lips kissing the space of air between water and ice.
A friend, with more composure during tragedy, lifted her skate,
and hit the frozen lake again and again with her metal heel—
as his face rose and fell.

LYRAE VAN CLIEF
WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY
Incubus
I experienced an enthusiastic fit
long before I met him—five minutes
writhing on a church floor, openmouthed, heaving
air, rousing the congregation, shaking up
Mama, who witnessed and finally breathed
praises to the holy ghost when,
deliverance declared, I got up
with hope of the first easy sleep in months,
hope so good, I dozed as she drove home.
But the noise woke me up—
the sound of myself inhaling the night's
thick air in hungry gulps,
sucked across my tongue,
slurped down my throat before I could hold my own
breath. I knew—before my heavy lids flew open
shutterquick to see no more than the silent
black road curving homeward and
Mama's hands sure on the steering wheel—
the taste of revisitation.
When I met him—
when, finally, a stranger's familiar
kiss awakened me again,
I made love to him without
so much as an introduction. Instead, a search
for ruins which seemed to have vanished,
after hundreds of years, overnight sufficed.
I ignored heavyhanded clues for
the thrill of a wet field moonlit,
and a slipping that didn't feel soulfirst
at the time.

MAXIMILIAN S. WERNER
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
The Occidents
I never thought my father was a man
who knew horses until a morning
over a year ago when we stood inside
my uncle's corral, early eyed and thinking
if we were horses we would like now
to be let out on the land, moist and limbic
by Algarrobo and Mata bush.
When he teetered the beams that kept them in,
the horses scared down a road,
their hinds slick as blocks cut from the sea quarries,
a peach sweat beading their noses
the soft of salt water, and the two of us ran behind them,
doing all we could to seem human.
Contributors' Notes
MICHAEL ANANIA is originally from Nebraska. He currently teaches at the
University of Illinois in Chicago.
NINA BOGIN is an English teacher and translator in France. Winner of an
NEA poetry grant, she is the author of In the North (Graywolf, 1989).
MATTHEW BROGAN lives in New York City, where he is the program
director at the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in
Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA.
A.V. CHRISTIE'S first book, Nine Skies recently won the National Poetry
Series award and is due out this summer from the University of Illinois
Press. She teaches at Goucher College.
MARC COHEN is the author of Mecox Road (The Groundwater Press). He
lives in New York City.
MICHAEL W. COX is adjunct assistant professor of English at the University
of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. His stories have been published in Other
Voices and West Branch.
ERIC GAMALINDA was born and educated in the Philippines, where he
published three novels, a collection of stories and a collection of poems.
His work has appeared in places such as Harper's, Manoa, International
Quarterly and The Asian Pacific American Journal.
LISA GLATT'S first book of poems, Monsters and Other Lovers, was published
by Pearl Editions in 1996. She teaches at California State
University, Long Beach, and in the writer's program at UCLA.
BARBARA HAMBY is the author of Delirium (The University of North
Texas Press) and a recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Poetry
Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a 1996
Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.
ART HOMER'S latest books are The Drowned Boy (nonfiction, University
of Missouri Press) and Skies of Such Valuable Glass (poetry, Owl Creek
Press). He is a winner of a 1995 Pushcart Press Prize, and he teaches at
the University of Nebraska at Ohama.

Ill
o
2
en
ir
O
o
214
WILLIAM JAEGER is a photographer and critic who lives in Albany, N.Y.
SUE KWOK KIM is currently a student at Iowa's M.F.A. program. Her
work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New
Republic, Ploughshares, Prarie Schooner, Mudfish and other journals.
KRISTIN W. LEE'S work has appeared in Western Humanities Review and
b. magazine. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writer's Workshop.
GEORGE LOONEY'S first book, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, won
the 1995 Bleustem Award. He has received fellowships from the National
Endowment of the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches at
Bowling Green State University and edits Mid-American Review.
MICHAEL LOWENTHAL'S work has appeared in The Crescent Review and
Yellow Silk, and has been anthologized in more than a dozen books,
including Best American Gay Fiction 1996 (Little, Brown) and Men on Men
5 (Penguin/Plume). He now lives in Boston.
JUDY MICHAELS is a Poet in the Schools in New Jersey.
PATRICK O'HARE is pursuing a 12-year work-in-progress, Prayers at the
Edge of America, documenting the interaction of social and racial groups
in New York.
DZVINIA ORLOWSKY is a founding editor of Four Way Books. Her first fulllength
poetry collection, Handful of Bees, was published by Carnegie
Mellon University Press in 1994. She currently teaches poetry workshops
at the Boston Center for Adult Education.
MARTHA RHODES is the author of At the Gate (Provincetown Arts Press,
1995) and the forthcoming Perfect Disappearance. She is a member of the
writing faculty at The New School for Social Research.
MATTHEW ROHRER grew up in Oklahoma, and attended college in
Michigan, Ireland and Iowa. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas,
was published by WW. Norton last year. He lives in Brooklyn with his
wife Susan.
RICHARD ROTHMAN'S work is in the collections of the Brooklyn
Museum, Biblioteque Nationale de France, and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. He is working on a book of urban and suburban
landscape photography.
MARIAN RYAN grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Fordham
University. After several years in Mew York publishing, she moved to San
Diego where she edits children's books.
AMANDA SCHAFFER is a poet living in New York City.
ANDREW SCHWARTZ teaches writing at The University of California,
Berkeley Extension. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New
England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, Samisdat and the San Francisco
Chronicle. "Partings" is excerpted from a recently completed book about
teaching in a public high school.
MYRA SHAPIRO was born in the Bronx and returned to New York after
45 years in Georgia and Tennessee. Her poems have appeared in The
Harvard Review, The Ohio Review and Ploughshares. Her first book of
poems, I'll See You Thursday, was published by Blue Sofa Press.
DIANA BLAKELY SHOAF'S poems have appeared in Bloomsbury Review,
Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Parnassus, The
Southern Review and Pushcart XIX and XX. Her first book, Hurricane Walk,
was published by BOA in 1992.
BARBARA TRAN'S poems have appeared in a number of journals, as •well
as anthologies: Premonitions, a collection of new Asian American poetry,
and On a Bed of Rice. She is currently at work editing Watermark, a
Vietnamese American anthology, expected late 1997.
WILLIAM TROWBRIDGE'S poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming
in The Georgia Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Southern Review,
Colorado Quarterly and The Gettysburg Review.
REETIKA VAZIRANI is the author of White Elephants (Beacon Press, 1996)
which won the Barnard New Women Poets' Prize. New poems are
forthcoming in Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Literary Review and Manoa.
She teaches at the University ofVirginia.
ROSANNA WARREN teaches comparative literature at Boston University.
With Teresa Iverson, she edited In Time: Women's Poetry from Prison. Her
most recent book of poems is Stained Glass, 1993.
ROBERT WRIGLEY is a 1996-97 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives with his
wife and children in Idaho. His most recent book is In the Bank of
Beautiful Sins.