Eric Burger

February 2004 | back-issues, poetry

A Breakdown, Television Style

Look, I know how it is: you are quivering
with untapped energies.
All you need

is to share them. So you call your brother,
Gabe, but for the millionth time
he’s too busy – this time,

with Jello. Coffee. The fine Colombian
might soak up some of your disappointment.
No Good.

And your wannabe-fashion-model leap
from boxers to briefs hasn’t changed a thing.
Now there’s only one place left to go

but the cat looks away
and will not warm your ankles.
From deep within comes a rumbling

and it won’t settle into that familiar
low-grade discomfort.
There is sharp pain: your soul

sears through your side
and streams off into a cold night
receptive only to radio waves and satellite signals.

The delirium tremens of the mind
set in. You flick on the TV. In Star Trek
Scotty is sweating

with a wrench. The warp drive
is whining in the engine room.
Three crew members are in mid-teleport

between a beastly threatening world
and the Enterprise. Their atoms hum around
seeking their places. Some talking head genius

from a self-help program flares up from memory:
“a breakdown is when you no longer
know your own form.”

The script of your mind flatly states,
“Two options: Girlfriend or Mom.” You choose
the latter because this is important

but all she can do is tell you about the drapes.
You crumble in on yourself
like some futuristic home on fire in a `50’s B-movie.

Thank God for the TV.
It speaks eloquently for you: half the code
for Lieutenant Dekker got lost in space

and the thing that came through shrieked. All lungs, all throat…

June’s Pantoum

The kids are stir-crazy from stale air.
They go outside and sink lawn chairs to the bottom of the pool.
Someone should holler then towel off their wet heads
but there is no mother, no father, here.

The older kids drown lawn chairs in the deep end
while the four-year-old tugs at a poolside table.
There is no mother, no father, here.
The four-year-old has nearly a thousand words and one of them is flower.

The four-year-old tugs at the table but it won’t budge.
The older kids turn on the hot tub, march her over to it.
It’s a boiling vat, they say. She has just under a thousand words.
She doesn’t understand. She thinks it will transform her into a queen.

Prentending they’ll let go, they lean her over the foaming water.
She sees a queen with a bowl of stemless white roses.
She needs to be the queen. The queen gets the big flowers.
In her dream the big flowers slip away as they reach down to her mouth.

She sees a queen and the big flowers lean down to the queen’s lips.
Only the queen can have their attention.
The impossible flowers melt away when they reach for her mouth.
Her mouth is open. And she waits.

Taking Charge

One of those houses so fired with light
from the street it looks like there’s no floor
but an opening to some glaring absolute.

A woman stands and cuts onions there.
Muscles flay her forearms, underscored
by light. She thirsts and salt rides light
down her throat. Still green plants sweat.

The lights says this is a woman I own.
Say SCREW YOU. Hands on hair. SEE ME DANCE.
Not good enough. Not good enough. No.

Cords clutch her neck and she twists light into chance.
They whirl in the windows and it looks like love.
Love twists that pale house into pure hair.
She whirls out light. She whirls light from her hair.

Rhonda Ward

January 2004 | back-issues, poetry

[b]Dance, Amari[/b]
[i](for Amari Diaw)[/i]

Do not untie your hair, Amari. Do not,
for perfect plies and pirouettes, turn
from native locks or wish for whiteness.
Kick up your thick-boned legs in cultured
protestation. Avoid unbraided simulation.
Take first position, stand on pointed principles.
Deconstruct the dance politic.

Amari Diaw is a four-year-old, African-American resident of New Bedford, MA, who faced being banned from her dance school recital in the summer of 2003 because she wore braids which could not be “slicked back and pulled into a bun.”

Missing Limbs

Mostly she misses
his left leg
shorter than the right
the bend in his right knee
when his left leg fell into step
the thirty-degree angle
the wrinkle in the leg of his pants
the perfect point of the crease
as he stepped into his
right-legged stride
the rise and fall
the space between
the space
the leg
the war
the life
the loss

Between School and Home

School is behind me, home before, and between,
this blue-black face with red-pink lips
and weekend breath catcalls from across the street.

His hat-wearing swagger balances on the breeze,
outstretched arms, bent knees. Bloody eye whites
drink me in as if I were the brown-bagged bottle
he wears in his pocket with lint and loose change.

He does not need to say what he wants. I am nine
and already a woman (that’s what my mama told me
the day I woke up —cut’, screaming for an ambulance).

I am all bright-eyed, new-woman fear;
and the Samaritan arrives only after my socks
have fallen under the explosion of my bladder.

I walk quickly the rest of the way. Home,
I hole up in my room, say nothing to no one.
But nights I dream, scream, wake, remember.

[b]Ain’t No Mountains in the Ghetto[/b]

I ain’t got no garden. All I got
is this stretch of dirt in my shortcut,
a few weeds peekin up in cross-eyed patches
lookin like they wanna be
cabbage or greens.

Ain’t no mountains in the ghetto.
I do have a purple dress, though, that I look majestic in
if I do say so myself.

Rollin plains and fields? Forget it.
Only things rollin round here is them pieces of candy wrappin
and cigarette butts movin along on a whim of the wind
on they way to the gutter.

But beauty ain’t lost on ghetto folk.
We got us a foreign language we speak in English.
We got hair–natural, fried and curly.
We got soul food, and double-dutch.
And purple,
we got purple.

[b]Portrait of the Porch in Summer[/b]

There are faded lines where he erased, then stretched,
the too-short porch, made the windows larger,
straightened the steps to the multi-paned door
on the two-dimensional replication of the latchkey
house where he returned sometime after three,

weekdays. The curtains are closed and still
behind shut windows. No breeze to blow
ghost sheers aside to sneak ripple glances
of the empty jar of promises he opened
each day to deposit jail-cell covenants
fragile as Dead Sea scrolls.

He draws a precise facsimile,
crayon memories of ten-year-old summers
sitting on the steps of the porch
chin shoved into the seat of his palm,
awaiting his father’s release.

[b]Gray Matter[/b]

Her hairline sits back from her face
Like moonlit fields of wheat far from a dusty road.
Wispy strands of gray.

Her brain is mixed, pulled,
twisted circus taffy. Her thoughts
transgress to how her husband

left without a word. She gave
her best to diapers and dinners.
There are only empty plates

and pans. In a bowl she mixes
colors—covers the gray.

[b]Remnants of the Other Evening[/b]

A nearly empty bottle of red wine
(you were worried sediment had settled at the bottom),
three or four dog-eared books of poems
scattered across the cocktail table,
butts of cigarettes from designer tin cases
smashed into tiny v’s and a roach in the ashtray.

You read [i]The Applecake[/I] as comfortable in your nudity
as in your ability to speak English.
I wore my nakedness beneath a veil of self-consciousness.

Earlier, you wrote of complications, later confessing
that you are prone to “falling in love.”
I would prefer to be a warm slice of Applecake–
on Sundays, when you have settled into the arc
of my ribcage, when the world has drifted out of thought
and serious complications wait just outside these walls.

[b]Observations on an Autumn Drive[/b]

Quaint cottages and people and commerce.
Trees, naked, ashen. Their branches remind me of withered fingers.
People hurry, walk with hands jammed into their pockets
leaning against the gusts.

Indian Leap, where feuding Natives took flight
like crows over bladed black rocks,
over the chasm of a rushing fall–
and died.

Tiny towns and semi-cities. Boarded up buildings.
Parishioners emerge from churches. Siblings skip
alongside the road, rosy-cheeked from Autumn’s sting.
They smile and call to one another, laugh.

Grand architecture in unappreciated places.
Dilapidated Victorians, restored Georgians,
white houses with black shutters and red doors.
Miles and miles of farmfields, razed. The acrid odor
of burning leaves.

Windmills and waterwheels. Cows with questioning eyes.
Inclines where the road seems to drop away.
A ray of light from a crack in a cloud.

© Rhonda Ward 2004

[b]Author’s Notes:[/b]

Rhonda Ward lives in New London, CT, in a tiny cottage facing the Thames River (pronounce the ‘th’ like an American and use a hard ‘a’). She writes about the everyday things that go by without a thought most times: simplistic life events told through the use of fine details. Rhonda’s dream is to help bring poetry back to the masses through the support and showcasing of local writers. Her work has been published in the award-winning [i]Beginnings Magazine.[/i]

Those days

January 2004 | back-issues, poetry

When we scrubbed our hands
with ash and water,
brushed our teeth
with fingers
and charcoal powder…

When we sat
in a semi-circle
on the kitchen floor,
raising a din
with spoons and brass plates
waiting for scolding amma
to give us food…

When we ran barefoot
on the dirt roads
after bullock carts
and horse carriages,
dodging cow-dung
as our feet pranced
or we plunged in the pond
with frogs, fish
and buffalos…

We were happy.

Ashok Gupta
as*******@******co.uk
May 1999

Hike to Gurkha Fort

January 2004 | back-issues, poetry

We hiked to Gurkha Fort
in the heat of mid-June,
Victor and I.

The stream had dried
into shallow pockets.
Clear sunlight shone
on rounded stones.

Little pink fish
gulped tiny mouthfuls,
darted pell-mell
trapped and starved.

They rushed for the bait,
the black barbed hook
pierced clean through
eager open mouths.

It was easy, so easy;
we caught so many
and cast them away
on our way back to school

by Ashok Gupta

Dadaji

January 2004 | back-issues, poetry

Children would run behind
Dadaji on his bicycle.
Children of the hut dwellers
and those from the bungalows.
Dadaji ,a huge figure in black
with days old salt-pepper beard
in his long flowing shirt
hanging from behind the seat
and white broad pyjamas.
He would paddle away
on the same path
day after day

They would scream and shout
gleefully- “Dadaji”, “Dadaji”
and chase him over long distances,
till he tired and balancing his bicycle on a foot,
took out from his pocket
peppermints of bright colours
and gave to the children.

Hardly would he have started again,
they would scream unsatiated-
“Dadaji”, “Dadaji”
teasing him
till he was too far from home to follow.

This was forgotten
and children went their ways.
I chanced upon Dadaji
sitting on a charpoy
outside a dilapidated hut.
I stopped uncertainly.

“Da.. .Dadaji”, I hesitated
He was paralysed on the right side
and couldn’t hear me
so I said a little louder —”Dadaji”,
my mouth close to his ear.

He turned to his side,
in slow halting motion,
took out a red peppermint
and placed it on my hand.

Ashok Gupta
Jakarta, Sept 2003