September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Angle of Repose[/b]
In the red light of highway protocol
All traffic stalled
A burnished wreck for sunset
Time to pause, as the book says, time to reflect.
Words come so easy till we know their source
And find it wanting-
In need of sympathy or recompense
Say, a fat check
For the fat man stricken in the road
Now out of body, now at the plastic faux pearl gates
Never having seen the equally fat toad
That sits in loam and gravel
Under the guardrail.
Sits. And waits.
Waits for the green light
Of understanding-nothing-being
The toad’s just a toad
And the fat man is dead.
[b]The Story[/b]
Mixed in some celestial silver bowl
the dark meat of our psychic turkeys
and the bowels of our cow souls
doled out cold in dollops dropped
about the land and sea and no one
knows, not even He, which plops
will rot, which plops will grow.
Or so it was explained to me
however many years ago, this recipe
for immortality, a la Voodoo Nanny
while I rocked on her bony knee
pondering the wrinkles of her breasts,
her Virginia Slims, the way she blew
the smoke over her shoulder, out of
harm’s way, took a sip of coffee and
always wiped her lips before she spoke
again, repeating the story just for me
Dark meat . . . silver bowl . . .
[b]Fifteen Minutes[/b]
until it’s time to leave for work.
I need to shower and shave
but won’t do either, though today’s the day
the boss makes her appearance and I’ll feel forced
to tell her “I know my face looks rough
right now, but in a week it won’t.
I’m growing my beard out for a while.”
She’ll understand. Last week she understood
my hesitation with the piss-test
surprised as I was
to be asked to drive the company van
to the clinic come 10:30 a.m.
So I took a couple of minutes
and rang up an orange juice, if she didn’t mind
and was off. Just about a half hour
to Bellingham Occupational Health wherein
I sat at least two and a half hours, reading
about the exploits of our CIA-
darling gone awry, Osama Bin Laden
my bladder swelling, ready to explode.
by Christian Peet (c)2002
([email]ranchproductions [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Notes:[/b]
Christian Peet is a Bennington graduate, winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a semester away from a Goddard MFA. Thus he has worked as a dishwasher/prepcook, carpenter’s apprentice, sheetmetal fabricator, hired hand on a goat farm, maintenance man, landscaper, and convenience store clerk. His screenplay for the short film Jack & Cat was just produced by 257 Films, and recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Dazzling Mica, Spent Angel, Eclectica, and The Adirondack Review. Christian lives in northwest Washington.
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
sitting on the front porch
I listen to the nuclear family
across the street meltdown
it’s Chernobyl, Rolling Hills Dr.
Wichita Kansas where life
moves like wheat in a high wind
a woman walking her dog
stops to witness the madness
as a man bursts from the house
he lugs a tattered tote bag
which he tosses into the trunk
of 1970’s vintage Americana
the broker from next door
steps outside drinking a beer
and shakes his head disgusted
we are all spectators
the man’s wife, carrying a child
runs out pleading to him
as he drives away, backfiring
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
I stand at the door to apartment four in the “blue building”, Emporia Kansas, address unimportant. Even at 20, I have the same nervousness of a teen on a first date. I swallow hard, putting on a fa�ade of confidence, and knock soundly on the veneer covered door.
At 17, I was a dreamer. I still am. The things I dreamed then accomplished or future goals; my dreams of today, goals of tomorrow. S was girlish at 20, a Disney aficionado, on the Student Senate at the local college, grounded. She was too good of a person to be dating a hotwired senior in high school hell-bent on escaping the midwestern cultural doldrums. In ways I never left.
During Christmas break, after my first semester of my second college year, I arranged to meet with S to renew our friendship, having seen each other once since we’d broken our relationship two years prior. An encounter so tension filled, it was hard to breathe. However, when she walked into the vestibule at my fast-food pocket-change job, every nerve in my body exploded and instantaneously prodded me for not being the person I am now, then. S was a woman.
S opens the door to her apartment and throws her arms around my neck. Well aware that I made the five hour trip from school to home late last night. Leaving after my last final and room check, finally passing the last exit out of Springfield at shortly after ten o’clock at night to make our scheduled lunch date.
“What do you want to eat?” S inquires. On our first date, I’d taken her to eat Chinese, managing to find a decent restaurant in the booming metropolis of 30,000. I smile at her; silently hoping the business was still there.
Driving down 6th Street, my car showing remnants of last night’s frenzied move. For a friend I am willing to do several things, but what I attempted the night before was insane. Driving on six hours sleep, after getting trashed on tequila the preceding night. But this is different, S graduates the next day, I leave for Michigan in a week, the next time we would see each other unknown.
Seated and ordered, I scan the zodiological placemat. I am the rooster; coo coo ca choo. Habit, I should have it memorized the number of times I have eaten Chinese. Conversation is sparse, typical–the look in S’s eye that she is busily processing something.
We eat, S sans chopsticks, talking about graduation and Grad school. Staring at a couple of years left of undergrad, I am hell bent to move on. Very familiar in attitude, some things never change. By the time proper fortune cookie etiquette has been established and the bill taken care of, I am sure S had figured out what was coming next.
As we get back into the car, I asked S if she has anything else on her schedule for the day. She’s cleared it. It had been her idea to do “something crazy” when we had gone on first date. What we ended up doing was walking around Peter Pan Park amidst the others enjoying the late August weather.
“I think I know where we are going,” S says it, but doesn’t completely blow the ego-trip I have developed planning this day out. I pull back on to 6th taking it to Prairie then South winding my way around. “Here we are,” S apparently navigating now, manages to get it out before I have a chance to say anything, while parking the car on a side street adjacent to the Park.
Even for May the air is brisk and the slight overcast makes it even cooler. I grab S’s present out of the car. At least she had not spotted it! We walk along one of the well-beaten trails that lead around the pond. At the end of the trail is an alcove with a bronze statue of William Allen White, our destination.
In August, the position of the sun while it sets allows it to shine through a clearing and shimmer on the pond’s surface. A perfect vantage point of this spectacle is from White’s alcove, and where S and I had ended up sitting the first time we visited the Park. I was blabbering on, shoving my foot in my mouth over ACT scores, when I saw S shift uncomfortably. My reaction was instinct; I brushed S’s hair away from her face and leaned in…
S is sitting right under the ledge she’d been dangling her feet over when our lips first met, as I hand her Disney gift bag. S digs through it: a CD, Introduction to Meditation by Alan Watts, my chapbook, Lifesavers, crayons, and lastly a bag of marbles for when she lost hers in Grad school. Laughing, S also pulls out a computer speaker cord that had managed its way into the bag during my hasty dorm room cleaning. Three shades of red and in tears, I laugh right along with her, reminding myself to have a serious rethinking of preparation skills.
I notice her shiver before she says anything, and am ready to leave myself. This time there will be no piggyback ride, no holding hands, just walking side-by-side S’s graduation present suspended from her fingers. The moment should be bittersweet, when we had left the Park 3 years prior we were on the ascent of a new relationship, now we are looking at undeterminable gaps in being able to speak face-to-face. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I could have changed, maybe made S my dream. Would it have matter? I shake my head smiling, knowing that S and I will always exist in points of time.
September 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
she is talking
about her thirteenth year
about her mother’s lover
the sound of his footsteps
as she lay in bed
the press of his weight
just outside her door
^
it’s the same story
told
a thousand different ways
it’s the boyfriend who
passed her on to his buddies
for beer or pot or a
new set of tires
it’s everything
she was forced to do
^
and she is talking
about love
she is saying
she believes
is saying she doesn’t
want to be alone
tells me she doesn’t
expect me
to understand
September 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
the truth of
the bleeding horse is this
there is no bleeding horse
there is your sister with her
boyfriend’s hands tight around her throat
there are the children
^
what she tells you is
[i]i love him[/i]
this and that he has
disappeared again
that a woman calls at least
three times a day asking for him
what she tells you is familiar
and it tastes of pain
^
and this is not the age of saints
the addicts won’t be saved
or even remembered
and she tells you [i]i love him[/i]
tells you she has seen the bleeding horse
in the first light of day
stumbling blind towards the interstate
tells you nothing but asks for money
^
the same story repeated until
the windows shatter
the hand of god
clenched into an arthritic fist
the room cold where the moon
spills across the floor and
she is saying some thing that
is being swallowed by the wind
she is home and
she is bleeding and there
are the children
they are saying your name
but you are gone
August 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
There are days
I want to sit with you
as children playing
in the dirt,
watch ants
busily working,
and listen to wind
brush aside branches
of trees the way
my hand moves
hair from my face.
The ground will reclaim
us someday,
when we can no longer
love like we are twelve.
As the ground reclaimed
Schliemann’s childhood
dream (treasure).
No, even great Achilles
mystic as he was
could not escape
reclamation.
And the ground
will reclaim our cities:
New York, Boston, Detroit,
my childhood home
in Kansas
where my friends
live their lives
on the same plot of ground
that will retake them.
Not death,
just breath–flash of light.
Acceptance,
the ground is willing
to reclaim
anyone; me
all I am
my words erased
when I no longer
have energy to speak
and I cannot hope
for more than this
day sitting
with you,
on the ground
(perhaps a sandwich
and lemonade).
What more could I hope?
except hope
our memory
will be remembered.
