Dec '03 [Home] Degrees of Apprenticeship:  Hunter Program Profile by Donna Masini

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A The Damned ~ Magdalena Alagna | Fingernails:  A History ~ Tomara Aldrich | Listening to Lorca ~ Meena Alexander | Waiting to Get to Old Age ~ Sarah Antine | The first time I sat at the piano in Carmen's house ~ Marisabel Bonet | The Heart of Silence ~ Waltrudis Buck | The Sudden Mud-Dogging Death of the Palmetto Homecoming Queen ~ Ashley Crout | A Woman Is a Gallery She Can't Stop to View ~ JoAnne Growney | Syllabica ~ Dress Rehearsal ~ Gabrielle LeMay | Theory of Flight ~ See Above ~ Jan Heller Levi | I Never Want To Go When It's Time ~ "The Part of Myself That…" ~ Kate Light   Image:  Steve Hopps B Three Card Monte ~ Slowly ~ Donna Masini | The Myth of The Grim Reaper ~ What I Know of the Story ~ Amy Meckler | 52 Pints of Blood ~ Meditation on the Study of Semiotics ~ Shelagh Patterson | Song of the Firemoon ~ The Day the Sun Rises Twice ~ William Pitt Root | Drive ~ Margaret R. Smith | On the Trip You Took to Find Out Whether ~ Nicole Tavares | Sci-Fi Valentine ~ Ultraviolet ~ Kimberly Jaye Thatcher | On Your Parents' Stoop ~ We Went to the Moon ~ Wendy Wisner Image:  Dennison Tsosie Contributor Notes The Damned Magdalena Alagna I read scout manuals to learn knots. In the hardware store, I finger thicknesses of rope. He only gets to second, but I know how To tie up a boy like braciole. Mildew faint in the sheets and a Lugosi poster on the wall. Panties in place. Blood beating in my face. He won't let me cinch his wrists with My knee socks, flung on the floor, Cable-knit snakes. I'm a witch though I was Baptized Catholic. Is it my soul that flutters when we touch? Good-bye, little skin veil, Tiny tyrant. I go To my sacrifice singing. ~ . ~ Fingernails: A History Tomara Aldrich Someone showed how to grow them long, file them to sculpted points. Not my mother, hers trimmed and clean, never long, never painted, like her face, much like mine, unmade. My sister grows hers longer rounded. Mother says she was born like that, tiny perfect, like fingertip pearls, they've always been that way. I learned to bite around them; nibbling, afraid of leaving jagged edges; I chew at my lip too, unconsciously, when I'm nervous, and when things are very bad, the inside of my lower lip is raw, as if I'm working my way into something better, just beneath red, into something redder. I don't know who told to push the cuticles down, to reveal the whitish half moons at the root of each, or if it was my mother's mother who said each white mark blazed beneath is the sign of a boyfriend to come, or when she told me or why I still count them, wondering where those boys are, or why some are ridged vertically, like tiny valleys, others hold bumps beneath that I cannot see, but feel when I hold them to my lips, warm with cool tips and smooth, I press them gentle, when I think when I write when I worry. And I cannot say if my sister or mother or grandmother ever looked into her palms and found the reversed braille of her own fists held so tight, the marks so deep, she can almost read the red. ~ . ~ Listening to Lorca Meena Alexander Color of Home I met you by Battery Park where the bridge once was. Invisible it ran between the towers. What made you follow me, O ghost in black cutaways? Dear Mr Lorca I address you, filled with a formal feeling. You were tongue tied on the subway till a voice cried out: 34th Street, last stop on the D. It's the Empire State, our tallest again. Time to gather personal belongings, figure out redemption. You leant into my ribs muttering: Did you hear that, you seller of salt and gatherer of ash just as your foremothers were? How the world goes on and on. Have you ever seen a bullfight? What do you have strapped to your back? Then quieter, under your breath: Let's survive the last stop together. I knew a Hindu ballerina once. Nothing like you, a quick, delicate thing. I walked with her by the river those months when English fled from me and the young men of Manhattan broke cherry twigs and scribbled on my skin till one cried out—I am the boy killed by dark water, surely you know me? Then bolt upright you whispered: Why stay on this island? See how it's ringed by water and flame? You who have never seen Granada— tell me, what is the color of home? ~ . Casida of a Flowering Tree Go to Monticello, tell me who's buried under the flowering cherry tree. Is it Jefferson's daughter with honey colored hair? Or Jefferson's son who served his father burst figs on a blue veined plate, then crept into the old man's room to stroke a coverlet seamed with silk? Glass ornaments from Paris hurt his fist. The house threaded with weights started to float. The young man wept till his tears flowered in Cordoba. I have written about him in the song you read as a child. The one with the line —at five in the afternoon. Don't you recall? ~ . Central Park, Carousel June already, it's your birthmonth, nine months since the towers fell. I set olive twigs in my hair torn from a tree in Central Park. I ride a painted horse, its mane a sullen wonder. You are behind me on a lilting mare. You whisper — What of happiness? Dukham, Federico. Smoke fills my eyes. Young, I was raised to a sorrow song short fires and stubble on a monsoon coast. The leaves in your cap are very green. The eyes of your mare never close. Somewhere you wrote:  Despedida, If I die, leave the balcony open! (Prior publ.:  Festival Catalogue, Poetry International 2002, Royal Festival Hall, London.) ~ . ~ Waiting to Get to Old Age Sarah Antine I told you to move me so close to the light that it's dark. I haven't recorded a thing; my mind, a cup filling with minutes. —The old woman's words take up space in the room; I have to move over. She is remembering the same story with emphasis as if it were the first time she repeated it after years, as if it just occurred to her. of all the stored memories, this one is playing again recorded over the rest of her life. as long as it's a happy story— but it isn't; it ends with her husband shaking the hand of Moshe Dayan at the Wailing Wall, you know, my husband, he died. then, I'm alone —how can that be?—sitting on a wheelchair with her legs still crossed the front page of the newspaper is news again. The workers must be in a context of what she remembers, so I'm someone from her synagogue. Women had to sit in the balcony, you remember? or else, who are you, why could you be here with her in this sentence? She tried to make her stories stick to someone, preserved as they once were. It is eyesight it is insight, I've become an old woman, seeing my childhood again and —I can't remember a thing. ~ . ~ The first time I sat at the piano in Carmen's house Marisabel Bonet I lifted the darkness over the keys and bared their whiteness— traced the pattern of fat whites, thin blacks, but left my fingers hovering over the keys. I sent my feet down to the pedals, swaying in the bench to a mazurka I could hear only in my mind, until that pantomime music took over and my fingers finally depressed the keys, travelling to both ends of the piano and back. This is how Emilia found me when she entered the room with what she introduced to me as music sheets, papers dotted by so many tiny dark notes, and she filled the piano with nocturnes. ~ . ~ The Heart of Silence Waltrudis Buck The stillness stunned her. It changed after the divorce. It became blacker. When she entered the room she would stand and listen for it. There was a rattle in it a scream so still she could hear the stars spin. When she was a child she played with her dolls. They were as tiny as her fingertips. She sat them precariously on furniture made of matchboxes, then concentrated with all her might to penetrate into the dollhouse where she heard a song of safety. When she was twenty she fled into the noise of the city and lived in a furnished room. She painted in oil, was busy with books and sex and learning the art of acting. Men looked on her as a morsel, but her body was alien to her. For a while the silence subsided. Once she was married the stillness seeped back. Pressing against her ears, it coiled around her neck like a pinching collar. She slept long hours. It frightened her to be a mother. Sometimes she caught snatches of the dollhouse song when she played with her child who sang in her own nebula a song of unimaginable beauty but remained unreachable like everybody else. Now when she listens she hears nothing. Only the whoosh of indifferent distant winds. Such comfort, she says. To know for sure. I should have known. I knew it all along. ~ .~ The Sudden Mud-Dogging Death of the Palmetto Homecoming Queen Ashley Crout In a trash town where masculinity is drawn in direct ratio to tire height, it is a stunt of endurance to drive wet ground into mud with your truck. Then the fast Carolina heat dries these vandals of the plowed field solid as crops in the topsoil. Certain tore-up drunk traditionalists, rutted and stuck, radioed for a tow from the deflated football jock and his rescue wrecker — our high school homecoming queen sitting Olympian in his extended cab. She was used to heights; the slightest girl, she was the point of the cheerleader pyramid, the one they could toss off, collapsible, at the rally. This particular July she was straddling the 8-ball gear shift and searching for a song on the radio while they attached the rope taut to the trailer hitch and struggled Sisyphean for traction on the incline. But the weight stretched the metal, and the tired hitch broke off still tied in the lifeline and swung its wrecking ball through the truckıs back glass through the gun rack through the picture of a deer drinking from a stream and struck her — her eyes stuck open to the tassel swinging slightly from the rearview mirror, to the muddy field, to the boys from the auto club, the ones she dipped snuff with behind the gym, or sucked their dicks but wouldnıt let them come. She said God while they ran for the ambulance (Her mother would tell the church later that she was praying.) — her eyes wide as a pageant contestantıs and glassy with death like fake diamonds — she finished the word:  damn. ~ . ~ A Woman Is a Gallery She Can't Stop to View JoAnne Growney                I One summer evening in the eighties— an interview with Jackie O. What's your greatest achievement? I'm proud that I stayed sane. What lies in your future? To learn how others see me.                II So, it's come to this. Sitting under a tree in a state park in Oklahoma, I find a seashell, pick it up and hear a voice, You are just like me.                III Everyone's met someone from out of town who says, My friend X in Baltimore is just like you. Same hair, voice, and posture. Even your gestures are the same. I want to meet my double, to ask her, Does your body hum beneath your thoughts? Am I an easy imitation? What's the cost of being me?                IV At family reunions, my uncle showed old films. Restless me before the camera, darting, stopping. Young, natural — more lovely than she knew — but what's the use to know her since she's gone. My mother made much of helpful little girls. Praise still persuades me; I work hard for words withheld. On the road from my house to hers, a truck covers me with shadow.                V The rim of darkness against sunlight reminds me how things disclose at borders with their opposites. I weave a blanket of words. Prepared for everything. Unknown. ~ . ~ Syllabica Gabrielle LeMay      For William Pitt Root Go home and write a syllabic poem, you say— and I feel the walls squeeze tighter around me, tho I could always make the line lengths longer in terms of syllable count, but I don't because it's too damned hard to keep track of all those syllables, they zoom around in- side me like bees, perhaps the same bees that live in Lyn Lifshin, drive her diction, sting her to action, shock her into writing like she dances, twirling out of one world into the next, her battered old ballet slippers tappety-tap- ping in time with her typing… I wish I could dance like Lyn, but all I can do is watch her, study her imagi- nation, drink it in, close my eyes and dream of vast open sky and bright, white-capped sea until my own lucent, hot-wired words lift like birds and crash through these ersatz walls and fly away. (Prior publ.:  The Olivetree Review) ~ . Dress Rehearsal Gabrielle LeMay      …women are all female impersonators.           —Susan Brownmiller, Femininity The curtain rises slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, gathering momentum as my feet, en pointe in red satin shoes, are subtly revealed…ankles, calves, backlit just enough so that you can't quite identify the color of my skin…thighs, hips, the stiff ruff of sequin-dusted tutu jittering, panting cinched waistline, bust, shoulders rounded up in flesh-and-spirit armature to animate my raised, arched arms, reaching for something just above the fringe that is now gliding up past my turning head…you can't see my face yet, but if you wait, you'll surely see exactly what you've come for: that jade-shag fieldful of steaming horses, a zookeeper or two, star-crossed lovers, a small flight to Oz, anything you want— but don't ask me to give it to you; all I can do is provide you with your mask— the curtain now up as far as it will go— I reach to you with it; can you see it start to frown? that masterpiece of sleight-of-face that's yours and yours alone. (Prior publ.:  Rattapallax) ~ . ~ Theory of Flight The Adopted Daughter's Version Jan Heller Levi Plane, I was born on you, and I remember. Flying bus, stork, I swam in your arms, swayed, rocked. I was cooed and swaddled. I gazed up into my parents' faces, the clouds, and blinked with pleasure. And if this be testimonial to technology, let it be so for you, plane, who swept me up and carried me again twenty-four years and one hour 24 minutes later from gate to gate to Suite 1101 West, M.D. Anderson Cancer Hotel, my mother's black breath puffing into the Houston manic air-conditioned air, my father shooting faster than Zeus's bolts across the room to turn off the TV since that Sixty Minutes interview with the women in the hospice for the terminally ill has "nothing to do with us, absolutely nothing to do with us," while my mother, politely dying in the bed over by the window, agrees. Now I have luggage that has become ordinary. Now I read magazines 17,000 feet above the earth. Now I pee into disappearing turquoise water. Now handsome voiced men reassure me about turbulence. Plane, I was born on you, and I remember. Though they say this is impossible I remember your fleecy seatbacks against my cheek, the cheery ladies pushing feasts of celebration down a narrow aisle. On a plane, out of a shining womb in the sky, I came into my life. Thus it is ordained I should sing the plane's praises, hosanna of its study span and various devices all the days of my life, or at least my mother's life, which, like the plane, defies time and space., for does she not still come to me in my dreams more flesh and normal white blood count than anything on this earth? And for this fact, and for her question of twenty-four years, and for the theory of flight that put seven non-stops, daily into the metastasizing heavens and back down to Texas, I bless my strange birth and bless most its vehicle. Thursday afternoon, Houston, the excavators drop their picks and shovels down her throat. Thursday evening, my parents call New York. No need for you to come, my mother says in her scorched voice, let's see what the doctors say tomorrow. I sleep and dream. The doctors came to me with their long necklaces dangling. I wake, call, say I'm not waiting. There's a midnight flight that gets in at eleven. Oh, she says, and then oh again, and then my mother, who was never greedy, who never in her life asked for any more than she was given, including a child born out of her own womb, then my mother asks, oh, do you think you can get here any sooner? ~ . See Above Jan Heller Levi      for and after Clemens Umbricht Serifs, wicked angel wings in the morning paper. Optional: a pair of glass resting in a telephone book. Put your mother in the kitchen boiling a single kernel of rice, add one yolk of one egg to your lecherous satchel and get the hell outta there— there's a thick hotel, maybe, calling you, maybe a bugle dress leering out of the drafty closet in a room on the 3rd floor. It's got a parking lot view but this is no time to be fussy. This is the moment of lead, remembered if outlived as freezing persons recollect— The music they'll play at your funeral is playing now, but it's not your funeral, someone plagiarized your audio mix. And that kernel—the one that was almost lost—you start seeing it again in every show don't tell. There's a shroud floor, a paper hut, and a woman. She's sitting on a stool. I don't know, maybe she's waiting. Maybe she's stirring. There's a neighborhood with six mowed lawns in a row, and in the seventh, a man with his dog, resting. I don't know. I don't know what anyone before me said or did. All I know about this earth is that one comes and one hurts. ~ . ~ I Never Want To Go When It's Time Kate Light I never want to go when it's time to go; I want to hang back, to read a book, or make another line rhyme. I always think that what I really need is there in the place that I am leaving, not waiting in the new place I ached to go to. I go, but with a kind of grieving, saying, Why'd I ever wish to shake things up, when things were really fine? To be with him I always had to yank my roots, I always had to pull my bones by heartstrings, to tear my spine from land to land; sometimes I walked a plank to reach that world, and breathe, and write these poems. ~ . "The Part of Myself That…" Kate Light is what everyone talks about getting in touch with. And they're reaching inside to talk to some child that can't get out, or some tyrant that they1re impeaching. So we're filled with tyrants! who've been leechiing resources from the innocent, the gentle, the well-meaning—so the healers have been teaching. I listened. Once I loved a man so much his ways became mine, and I took his pain to be my own. That psyche had a brutal touch. But I lost him to the rain, Let's not get sentimental. Now we've two egos, all unmarried; and love's this body that won't stay buried. [Poetry B]