April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Rice Balls: New York, 1983
Your skin is yellow and you
weigh about 100 pounds.
Your face is gaunt and your
eyes bulge out of your head
like the eyes of fly. You are
inert, wasted and wasting.
You got the flu but it wouldn’t go
away and then came the lesions,
first on your shoulder then your
chest and now they cover your
torso like you’ve been leeched in
the Dark Ages. You took yourself
to the ER where you lay on a
gurney in your own shit for hours
and then you were put in isolation,
told you have AIDS and now
you will never be touched by
an ungloved hand again.
And it keeps getting worse.
Your veins burn from one medicine
while your brain is being eaten
alive by some virus only birds get.
Meals are pushed into your room
by terrified orderlies but you
can’t bear to eat them because the
lesions are in your throat too. Your life
has become some medieval nightmare
and apparently you are going to
expire in absolute agony.
It is the reverse trajectory of
The Wizard of Oz where you
are thrust backwards into a
grim black and white world
forever banished from the
vibrancy of your beloved
New York that you chose
like a promised land.
Only a month ago you were at
home in your 5th floor walk-up
with the slanted floors and
high ceilings in Little Italy
where a fat lady with big red
hair sat outside your window
at a card table selling rice balls
out of tin foil pans. She made
them in her tenement kitchen and
would show up everyday at 3 yelling
Rice balls, come and get ‘em!
just when the local school lets
out with the mostly Chinese kids
whose mothers were there to get them,
and no one was speaking English.
The rice ball lady had a broom the
handle of which she would wave
and poke at people, mostly Black
people, when she didn’t like them.
Once you called the police to
report this and they just laughed
when you told them where
you lived.
And now, nothing is left of you but
this wasting, gasping, collapsing, fevered
body well on its way to becoming a
corpse. The doctor tells you, through
his surgical mask, that you are
‘putting up a good fight’ but you’d
like to hit him with the handle
of a broomstick and finally
buy one of those rice balls.
Playlist
Somewhere between Marianne Faithfull
and Leonard Cohen I decide to add
Burt Bacharach to the playlist I am making
the first few notes of Jackie DeShannon’s voice
singing What the World Needs Now bounce around
the airy room – living room dining room and kitchen
all in one – and can be heard outside by the pool
which is being heated because the nights are still chilly
and cannot be heard by our old dog who is fast asleep
on the rug by the fireplace having given up hope
for a ride in the Jeep his favorite thing
and then there you are standing next to me with
your food-stained blue cooking apron on and your even bluer eyes
and here we are carrying on waiting for house guests to arrive
so I wonder what I will play next and I think
perhaps Jimmy Webb might be right his voice plaintive
and unadorned singing Wichita Lineman the song he wrote
I need you more than want you and I want you
for all time yes that should do the trick
hold everything together and be soft enough to
not wake the dog.
by Jay Kidd
Jay Kidd is a student at the Writers Studio in New York, studying with Philip Schultz. His poem “Lost Time” recently appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I’ve miles to go but I have no pony.
My hair is braided into a donkey whip.
Flies buzz around your sweet tongue, honey.
I see you lying in a squeaky dry ditch.
Do you taste iron between your teeth?
Feel your lousy hair lice crawling creep?
You’re home now waiting for a stall with heat.
(She bought you baggy pants dangling to your feet)
You’re 62, slow as forgotten gumption
You say: “I don’t run much but I’d like to have that option.”
I don’t care about your Red Heels of Freedom.
You’re a fat wood louse. With a license to run.
(If I care about your cares will you care for me?
Say you could care less about carrying me?)
You say happy’s being where you want to be.
Sorry baby this song’s about me.
With a little application you could appliqué me.
Happenstance evidence, happenstance happy.
You can watch my life flash before your eyes.
With a dubbed in soundtrack, repeating your lies.
I could embroider tomorrow on my hands in red ink.
Carve “RIP Mr. Icky” over the bloody sink.
And with eighteen spider webs to bandage my hands
I’d stop up your mouth and silence your laugh.
It’s a heavy little bubble your hollow mind.
It’s a steady little rumble that holds my time.
Slumgullion curmudgeon your little stove sings.
The tractor’s in the shed. The chainsaw has wings.
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Shadow is substance. There is cold in shadow. The mean radiant temperature (MRT) in the cold of Vermont is assuaged by the cloudless sky. The dark side of the moon. Bluing shadows of noon, speak dawn song briefly, trampled down meadows… In the sky, two contrails, forming moisture in the air, blinding refracted rays, take the same direct path Westerly from the Azimuth downward into tendril branches. Quickly, they disperse, drifting, ice crystals, fading, two stringy vapor trails per plane. The sun is the same sun in the Yucatan 365 days ago, closing the eyes, conjuring a state of mind, serene, sand sticking to the soles of feet, green (manifold), blue (limned) and reflections on wavering aquamarine (temporal). Elemental: attraction, compulsion, the freedom of unscripted plans, what is there, unknowable at the time, is not there now. (Her life, her death). Color is light. Lie in the shade of a palm tree.
Lids, red, veinous, and in shadow. Without shadow light will burn. Without the unknown (dark), the knowable would not be symbolic (mother and child), symbiotic, enigmatic. (“Apollo has come and gone. But the fact that a dozen men have walked upon its surface does not make the moon one bit less puzzling to the scientists.”i) Earth’s knowable surface is a site of proud and wasteful surcease and macrobian fruitfulness. Earth: a blue ball sling-shot through an irrelevant arc, opposing, di-polarized from a dust bunny satellite, sustained in electromagnetic wave energy, a codified mystery naively trained and honed in on, until the end forever: gas, fire and collapse, without shadow.
i Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Yellow Sprouts”
by Robert M. Detman
Robert M. Detman has published fiction in The Antioch Review, Santa Monica Review, Evergreen Review, Wisconsin Review, elimae, Word Riot and elsewhere.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Two strangers fuck you into existence.
Then they tell you they love you.
They tell you they love you and then some.
“Weedee doodee doodee deee.”
“Pee on the potty.”
“Learn your tables of arithmetic.”
“Clean up your room.”
“How much pain I suffered putting you into this world!”
“Don’t get that girl pregnant.”
“Do you think that car runs on thin air?”
“Don’t become like your father!”
“Don’t listen to your mother!”
“When will you get a decent job?”
“Are you working on my grandchildren yet?”
“Why don’t you show some respect?”
“Is that why I worked my ass off for you?”
“You have it so easy. When I was your age…”
Blah, blah, blah.
You watch them all this time.
They claim they know you.
You wonder who they are.
Then they die.
Then you do.
by Nolan Keating
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The truth? I couldn’t wait to split. Picture
a birdcage strung up on baroque unwritten codes
— like living in a police state, I told the serpent
when we ducked out for a cigarette
one night near the end, just before it all
blew to smithereens, just before my lewdness
cracked the perfect and perfectly boring landscape
(a top-ten “Places to See Before You Die”)
mapped in majolica on the tiled floor of Anacapri:
a paradise of rivers and islands, flowers and fish,
and all His weird experiments (zebras, giraffes).
I was incidental there, a thorn in someone’s side.
In the far corner — you have to lean in close
— the exiled Crown of Creation and I, his rib-bone,
trying to cover ourselves with ferns and fronds.
Observe how my long hair hides my smile.
Wouldn’t smoking be divine after sex?
the serpent asked me once. What’s that? I said.
by Jo Ann Baldinger
Jo Ann Baldinger lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poems, practices yoga, and tries to be patient. Her poems have appeared in Cirque, Verdad, Blue Mesa, Tsunami, and Onthebus.
