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Click on the blue title to go to poem 60 Jack Turtletaub American Spring 1968 61 Chris Tusa My Grandfather’s Hands Prozac 62 Charles Harper Webb Two Bicycles Post -Partum 66 Martin Woodside Lewis, alone, hotel room. Music No Sleep in Bucharest 67 Kelley Jean White In Memory of Body Donors 11. Eye 12. Smoke 70 Cecilia Woloch Who Reminds Me of You, When You 82 Lisa Siedlarz - Clarinet My Grandmother's Funeral American Spring 1968 They shot Martin last night on his balcony -a motel in Memphis. One man-if he was a man- with a sniper’s rifle and a secret, hateful smile spawned a red tide, triggered another Egyptian uprising but no rapturous crossing. Rage exploded from the catacombs: biblical resentments, shiploads sold for chattel and the Jim Crow laws. After the marches, looting and riots storms that raged for nine more weeks an angry loner terminated the dead president’s brother at mosquito range in a hotel kitchen preventing a Presidency and stunning the nation, jolting us against our nature from our stubborn complacency so that I , too, worried to my 13-year-old bones when the shooting might stop, the campuses bloom in a season of learning -students quit their barricades- and like a peace song on the radio, our boys fly home from Vietnam. Still, my parents made their way each morning to work -I to grade school- before the nation’s evening ritual: turning the dial on the television to see what dreams had died today. Chris Tusa Bruised and bloodshot these heavy callused hands once pulled weeds
from the tangled earth, yanked vines and rope, shoveled black dirt. In the sun they held knives glowing, gripped the necks of whiskey bottles.
At work, they jerked wrenches, rusty crowbars, read lug nuts like braille.
In the dark sweat of the barn they fell hard on the backs of horses, pulled calves
from the clenched hips of cows, snapped the necks of chickens. At night they cupped in prayer.
Balled into fists they clutched axes, dug graves, wrestled with wheelbarrows, split lips.
Now, soft as the wings of angels, they sleep, folded forever across his sunken chest.
PROZAC Divine and white, Charles Harper Webb
They lie collapsed against each other in the shed: chrome corroded, tires flat. Annie's pedals have pried apart Jim's spokes like prison-bars.
Five years have fled since the couple huffed up Adams Hill on roads so thin "two anorexics couldn't squeeze by," Jim swore, teetering
on finger-thin tires while the roaring breath of Humvees blasted him. She hates this as much as I do, he'd think as, flushed and sweating,
Annie dropped onto their couch with a long sigh. Happy couples play together, her self-help books cried. So every weekend, with Jim grousing
behind, she'd pump off somewhere as doggedly as she powered him to the altar: as if strong legs, fierce hope, devoted love could make him give up
other women, lay down his guitar, get a real job, and help her make the family she never had. He'd fled his own at 17, and couldn't fathom why
she wanted to bike to the beach, where he gaped at string bikinis, and she ran over a sand-pail, fell, and cracked her wrist. He winces to think
of this the way he does remembering that couple they found tangled in a tandem bike: the woman's leg snapped; the man out cold. He sees them now
as clearly as he sees that female curves, which he'd thought were shaped for his delight, evolved to trick men into fathering. With Annie
gone, he'd meant to toss out her bike, too. There were so many things he'd meant to do . . .
Post–Partum
He's optimistic Sunday morning when his wife says, "Come on— let's do something fun." "The Impressionist exhibit's here," he tries. "Fun, " she tells him. "I said fun."
She works hard with their infant son (not that he doesn't, shoveling beef-with-vegetables, struggling to catch falling lamps before they smash that soft-skulled head). He'd love
to give his wife some fun. But when she says, "Nothing I think of sounds like fun," he re-floats the Impressionists. "Okay," she sighs, "we might as well."
He'd rather cast a woolly-bear to rainbow trout on this March afternoon, eighty degrees, light breeze rumpling what's left of his hair; but he can't abandon his wife
to their young one. So he guides her to Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's sunflowers, Cezanne's garden, Degas' gauzy ballerinas, Caillebotte's rowing men. "One wrong move,
that guy's in the Seine . . ." he says, hoping the double-bladed oars and thin scull, barely balancing, remind her of Maui kayaking, pre-parenthood. But her feet ache,
and the boy's fussing—again. Staring at a life-sized portrait of a French actor as Hamlet— she sneers, "He looks like fun." Soon after the painting was done,
the placard states, the actor died poor and embittered because, though critics loved his hyperbolic style, the public jeered. His Lincoln beard and ballooning
doublet do look ludicrous—as, say, a man rushing a stroller past great art on a sparkling spring day, son a raspy siren, wife not having fun. Trudging outside
toward their car, they pass tar pits where a life-sized model mastodon is being sucked down while mate and baby spectate from tall grass on shore.
The only thing that holds his heart up now seems centered in those tipsy boats, those long-dead oarsmen that Caillebotte painted so well.
Lewis, alone, hotel room. Music.
Careful, the sky is old and wet with bitter words. With wooden oars slapping green creek. There were three of us in the canoe, not Lewis or Clark or an Indian Princess, but my mom of all people, and the story she tells has me feeling more Meriwether maybe bipolar, opium or murder ending up, either way, with his brains blown out on the Natchez Trace. Ending up alone. I know that room, small, dust-like, specializing in dust. You see we checked in with the usual angry silence my suitcase split open the single bed. Raised too high, the stakes, sunk too low, our canoe, holding water.
No Sleep (in Bucharest)
Bucharest is that kind of town, where you don't need a crime to make an arrest. The air itself is heavy with guilt or maybe just soot and smoke, the weight of all human moisture soaked up in the clouds, wrung out in torn tattered darkness. The sun was just an eyesore anyway, a blur of motoring sparrows. In the daytime, it's clear that everything we breathe has been smashed up or burnt down, in its own way recycled, smells and sounds marching on ward and out ward, down the open boulevard flanked by unruly weeds and communist bloc apartments, a kind of sacred space, gutted and reamed, filled to the brim with the hungry carping of riotous runaway dogs.
In Memory of the Body Donors
11. Eye.
We greet the First. The First greets us.
It’s the eye and the extended hand that attract children.
Which is more horrid? The glassied eye or the empty socket? (or the socket with muscle torn from the globe?)
Perhaps I turn to the glass cases for comfort. Their specimens are under control. But he’s broken the ankle. Cracked it off. It ought to be a smooth cut. I run my tongue over my teeth. The jagged edge bothers me. He should have made a precise surgical cut.
And the arm dissection’s too static. They should have made a wooden model of the hand. Let us touch it. Pull the tendons. Clack the little knuckle bones. I can’t resist pointing out the pulleys of the hand to the stranger beside me: look, they look like braids, woven, and see, the nails are there, long and yellow, dead. I think nails are always dead.
(There’s a kind of panic in the stranger’s eye. He turns, arm around his companion’s shoulders, ducking, bows her away.)
12. Smoke
Hello.
I might have run into, you ‘Smoker’ your one eye squinted shut, the apron of the omentum spread above your dangling balls
the cigarette prop? You’re to show us your gray lungs and teeth
but why the sideburn of salivary gland, the squeezed ear, the wooden cock, the peeled back patella?
(think of my father’s body on the table: his smoker’s lungs, his old athletic knees—
he wanted to teach- yes, he remembered the dignity of the hands unfolded in the empty basement room of a Sunday at my dissection table.
He never would have consented to his skinned genitals on public display
and the cigarette? God help me not a cigarette glowing lit in his deadman’s hand)
Who Reminds Me of You, When YouCould
Any old man, back to me, slightly stooped, walking along beside the road, half-turning but not quite turning around to catch me watching him because he is vanishing, already, already seems to himself like a ghost and could be you, those wasting years when the world let go of you, let go — and the numb sun shone like a halo, too bright through all the sparse white hairs of your head.
Lisa Siedlarz is editor of next year’s CRR, here are samples of herwork. Clarinets
I know a Polka in four beats, my feet in two. Notes from the clarinet: Warsaw Park with Grandpa. Dancers gathered in the heat of music, we’d spin, weave, three steps and whirl. His lead firm, we’d Polka. Music’s
shadow moved us, we’d throw back our heads, spin and laugh. The rush left us breathless. We lived to dance in this red and white park. Motion spilled out the doors, life suspended those countless Sundays, we were tireless.
In 1990, Grandpa’s heart attack quieted my feet. In spite of his passing, music and dance still spins at Warsaw Park. Watching dancers, clarinets coax me closer. I know how to Polka. Two beats and I remember heat, Grandpa’s hand on my back.
On the Day of My Grandmother’s Funeral
I sat in the second pew in St. Stanislaus Church. Your coffin’s funeral pall stark white, a golden cross lashing the center like a burn. Father Szyzka stood
solemn faced, as altar boys rang chimes and incense cloyed breath. Four days ago, you were lying in bed as Dad rushed us out the door to a Christmas party.
He disappeared while Santa sat us kids on his knee, one by one, pulled out promises of good behavior, rewarding us with gifts wrapped in red and gold.
I was ten. Dad did not let me go to your wake. Or to the cemetery where people stood around your coffin that was shiny as sap, golden. Or red.
No. Golden, because you told me once that yellow was your favorite color. Just before they slid you into the hearse, I plucked a yellow rose from your coffin.
Clutching this de-thorned, severed rose, I was sent directly to school. In the classroom, the rose wilted, plastic cone on its end leaking. My hands, too, unable
to contain my sobs. Sister Ludmila sent me to the bathroom with Denise Bowles, who hugged me like you used to, Mema. Every sunny day, blooming forsythia, a reminder.
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