GUEST EDITOR: GRACE CAVALIERI

Grace Cavalieri is the author of twelve books and chapbooks of poetry and eighteen produced plays. Her latest book of poetry is Cuffed Frays (Argonne House Press.) She's written texts and lyrics performed for opera, stage and film.
She has written librettos and songs with composer Vivian Adelberg Rudow.
Her recent book Pinecrest Rest Haven (the Word Works) was produced as a play in NYC, 2001. This marks her 18th play on American stages. Her current play "Quilting the Sun" enjoyed a reading by its NYC cast at the Smithsonian Institution's Natural History Museum, 2003. It will be mounted in NYC in 2004. Her forthcoming book of poetry is in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, the first woman writer of serious prose in the English language.

Grace has produced and hosted "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio for 25 years presenting 2,000 poets to the nation; She now broadcasts the series annually from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite. The programs are archived in George Washington University's Gelman Library; and in the Library of Congress.

Grace has received the Pen-Fiction Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, and awards from the National Commission on Working Women, The American Association of University Women, plus many others. She received the inaugural Columbia Merit Award from the Folger Library Poetry Committee for "significant contribution to poetry." She has enjoyed the kindness of several Writing Fellowships.

Grace Cavalieri is President of the Washington based organization The Bunny and the Crocodile Press (since 1977). Its media arm is Forest Woods Media productions, producing cultural programs for radio and television. She was an original founder of The Washington Writers Publishing house in 1976, and served as an editor until 1985. It is still thriving today with 100 titles to its credit.

Cavalieri teaches poetry workshops throughout the country. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland with her husband, sculptor Kenneth Flynn. They have four grown daughters.

--------

The following poems are from a forthcoming book by Grace Cavalieri -- These poems are in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, 18th century literary figure, who was the first woman author to write a book of serious prose; and wrote the first considered work of feminism in the English language.

A TRIP TO BATH, 1778

Each evening brings its papers.
The Widow Dawson
Has me where she wants me,

Bathing her and reading to her
So that a widow who cannot love
Will never die, (would she kindly

But luck is not good wings,
Is it, that can fly for you.)

Flamboyance, we will put in
The bread locker so
The table will be cleared for the flour,

And every hour
unless otherwise indicated,
I make my choices which
At night burn exactly like

The candle, its savvy
Conclusion, its struggles,
Its unavoidable

Responsibility to stay alight.
Every third Sunday
My morning free,
I walk
Down the hill before dawn, I write.

--------

CLERGYMAN CLARE

Son, Husband, Teacher,
What shall I call you then?
Precise movements larger than life
Your teaching me words, their clarity,
The present assumes the past

Our growing understanding of how words are made

Ashes of complex systems

Why we wish to be heard
Why we wish
To argue
How we bridge to other people's minds

Your hands

Saving the colors you taught me to read

When you scratched your glasses that first day
Leaning over me

Watching an ant crawl. You said "Mary, it's about seeing."
Then you wrote a set of words:
Largire Lumen Vespere

Goodbye, it is easier to leave than to be left.

Love

Mary

--------

I SHALL PRETEND TO BE SOMEONE ELSE.

My friend Fanny Blood makes me smile.
She said what good is my new dress
If my face has frowns
And wrinkles itself downward.
I said I would just as soon
Push my body in some cave
To become part of the stone.
She suggested otherwise --
That I push Gilbert Imlay
In front of a rushing carriage --
And then walk away in my new finery.
She added that it would not be my guilt,
That it would be God's choice whether he lives or dies.
All I would have done is the pushing!
She is such a cheerful friend.
She wipes the world off me, rubbing a dirty cat.
When Fanny is gone,
The bad song hums again.
Since people hate this masculine woman
Who left her daughter -- when Death
Comes close --
What will they do with my tears?

--------

              
I ACCEPT A PATH WITH STRANGE SIGNALS

People brush my footprints away.
Tea alone today then my walk the V shaped sky
The brown hawk luminous green on the pigeon in the countryside
A field of dry sunflowers

God allows this walk so, tell me then…
How much should a person be listened to?
How much…

My room inside so small, tonight cool air outside,
Only a window between.
Spirit that feels like terror - Love that is hooked to hate -
These make up my surface.
It will break open to a knowing you would not want to hear.

A flower is called 'the end of things.' I want it, still.
I will leave this house of anger and close the door behind.

I remember a black butterfly shining so blue
I thought it was a bluebird.
Being happy in spite of pain,
That's what God is. Or maybe the pain is God's way.
For without misery, I would not know Him.

--------

OVERHEARD TODAY

A vicious sound,
"Famous Lady with her book
Telling us how to act…"

I could not hear the rest
And leaned in closer
To the murmuring

Until she straightened.
And then I saw she spoke of me!
Mary Wollstonecraft.
She held my book

"Vindication…" and shook
It at her partner.
My face flushed.

Were it a man speaking
I would not crumble
But now I fear my dream

Is uninhabitable.
We, all women, are in danger
Unless we pick the

Bough from the tree ourselves.
Yet a stranger was condemning me
In a public place.

Why not grant me
The courtesy given male authors,
'It is controversial' -

Her fury ascends in my body.
She said I made her quest for survival
All the worse!

Because I can read and write?
Does that give me a masculine mind?
Or just a mind?

--------

WHAT IS IT THAT GOD DOESN'T NOTICE? SO MANY OF US!

Under the cool sheet of the night
The rind of the day
Protects my pulse (heart looks for an escape)
While in a room While in a boat While in a meadow
I am always the worst thing alive.

Maybe I will cut the moorings, the green squares
That make England, the straight lines that are France,
But how? I live like a stand of birches, line after line…

Tomorrow I will stop moping about the house
No reason to be melancholy again
Night and day.

Yet I want to be what I want,
To be valuable to myself,
To live in the best way I know how,
To feel more than buttons and bows.
I touch my hand and see its bones, strong hands.
They could catch a ball higher than Ned Junior can.
I'm not so bold as to say I want to be a man
But I have a masculine mind - You'll never see me cry,
Not when others are around, at least.

Mary, Listen to yourself.
Surely the villain inside you will
Speak without mumbling so you can hear
What you do wrong.

--------

 DEAR GILBERT

What the living do is die, what the lonely do is love.
God took your words, my dear, and poured them over broken glass.

You think the earth is planted in you name over and over
Well
I think the world is torn soil
And my name seals the open veins.

The clothes of this world are our words. God made us in body
 
And then left us to our own,
To clothe ourselves

Our language is what we wear, the stories of the world.

Gilbert, you can not steal my cloak.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: ROBERT SARGENT

Robert Sargent is a well-known Washington, D.C. poet. He has published eight books: Now is Always The Miraculous Time (1977); A Woman from Memphis (1979); Aspects of a Southern Story (1983); Fish Galore (1989); The Cartographer (1994); Stealthy Days (1998); The Jazz Poems of Robert Sargent (2000); Altered in the Telling (2001); and Wondrous News (2002). He has also published in many literary journals including Antioch Review, New York Quarterly, Sou'wester, Poetry Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, College English, Poetry East, Pembroke Magazine, and Poetry.

He has been active in Washington poetry affairs, including the presidency of Washington Writers' Publishing House, Board Member of the Word Works and The Bunny and Crocodile Press and long time member of the Capitol Hill Poetry Group. In 1996 he received the Columbia Merit Award from The Poetry Committee of the Greater Washington, DC Area. He has read his poems many times before DC audiences.

He is the father of three children and is interested in jazz, art, and philosophy.

--------

THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB

A soldier, ordered to ascertain if the man
hanging up there was dead, found that he was
by spearing him in the side. No movement. Blood.
This was according to scripture. The season was Passover,
and at that time a lamb is sacrificed.
Surely, according to John, a greater enactment
of that old rite had this day been accomplished.
Jesus became the Holy Lamb of God.

I was fourteen when I fist heard of this.
I'd been Episcopalian, accustomed to
the sober singing of the Church of England.
Now, in a new small town, I was shifted to
the Methodist Church. Better that than nothing,
my mother said. But what a revelation
came when the singing started! Here was no
restrained "Abide with Me." Rather hymns
like "Love Lifted Me," and "The Old Rugged Cross,"
a strong compelling beat, almost finger-snapping,
and in the slow upswelling unison of voices,
I heard, "There is power, power,
wonder working power,
in the precious
blood
of the Lamb."

--------

GREGOR MENDEL

Born in Moravia, Austrian priest.
Planted peas in the 1860's of various kinds:
white blossoms and violet, tall ones and short,
the peas, wrinkled or smooth.

Pollinized them himself, with instruments.
Used little bags to keep the insects away.
Recorded the offspring, how they varied,
the color, the height, the smoothness.

Years and hundreds of pea plants later,
he knew how it worked. Based on factors, he called them,
what we call genes. He published his findings.
No one paid attention.

Time passed. He died. And some years later
his laws were rediscovered. Now he is honored,
the father of genetics. And we think, too late,
the neglect, the bitterness of it.

Still, he'd had those warm spring days,
working outside, the smell of the garden,
a breeze some days, the peas growing up
in a white and violet profusion,

and the well-kept notebooks, entering the data,
noting the ratios, how the new figures
supported those previously entered, everything
becoming increasingly clear.

--------

MAY MILLER

May Miller was talking to someone, her husband had died,
and there was the problem she had of going back
into the world, at 85 not so easy.
Alone, activities savorless.

She said, lips pursed, stubborn, "When I feel despairing
I think what Bud would say, he was my rock:
'Don't make a dramatic thing out of it.' Then,
I go on out."

--------

NINETY, NOT SEVENTY

Recently I met a stranger. We were seated.
He was trying to guess my age, by appearance,
conversation, my reaction to questions.
He considered, finally came up with, "I'll say seventy."
But then I had to get up and walk into the next room.
When he saw my pause on arising, my shaky start,
my six-inch shuffling steps, holding on to the furniture,
he changed his mind. "Go on," I said, "Say it."
I finally got him to say, apologetically,
"Well, O.K. Ninety not seventy."

--------

A LAMENT FOR WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE

In that picture by Leutze, you modeled as Washington
        Crossing the Delaware,
Erect in the bow of the small crowded boat,
        Ice all around you, to dare
An audacious stroke for the small republic.
        Forward! Avaunt despair!
That's what we have left of you, Worthington Whittredge,
        Attractive to public stare,
And not your paintings, the beautiful landscapes
        On which you lavished such care.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: KENNETH CARROLL

--------

WHY THIS WORK MUST BE WRITTEN AND READ
2000 Hurston Wright Award Keynote

Because 15 year old Cherise had not called me to say that her friend Nikki, the angry stick of a little girl who terrorized my writing workshops at Barry Farms public housing projects, had plunged a knife into the heart of a 14 year old girl. I had to read of Nikki's crime from the pages of the Metro Section before Cherise confirmed it.

Cherise had called to ask if we could start up the writing club during the summer. She had called because she had not learned the high art of cynicism. She believed, she would later say, that maybe the killing might not have happened if we had the club going. Sure I've often said that writing has saved me-that literature had rescued me from the despair and pathology of poverty. But mostly I say this quietly, to fellow believers, and arts funders. I believe my own words as an artistic ritual, a mantra to fight my own well founded internal pessimism. Like the great American classical musician Charlie "Yard Bird" Parker who professed Bebop as his religion, literature is my religion; reading confirms my belief; writing is my prayer.

I am an ex-Catholic who now believes, depending on the day and hour, in the holiness of art while recognizing its ability to profane. Artists are a special brand of irreligious folks who can still participate in ritual long after the dwindling of our faith. I have always believed that zealots who run around screaming about the salvation that comes with their beliefs are really trying to drown out the persistent voices in their brains that doubt that salvation. These voices of doubt that incessantly thump in their head like bad disco music require such wailing, like the cowardly lion in the Wizard Of Oz chanting, "I do believe, I do believe." And yet, as almost a cliché of the contradictions and complexity of the artist, I do believe and don't believe at the same time. I am the cynical zealot, hedging my faith with science and the ever unfolding reality of this existence.

I am at lunch when Cherise calls. She is the designated spokesperson for the teen writing club. Besides she knows my home number by heart. I am reading the Washington Post and talking to myself between bites when I read the story of the murder. 13 year old stabs 14 year old to death in Barry Farms. The word tragedy had become as useless as the police and politicians in limiting the horrors of a city gone violently mad. This tragedy carried out by a 13 year old caused even the jaded editors at the Metro section to put it above the fold. It had not crossed my mind that I could know the little girl who did this. It certainly did not enter even a realm a fantasy that I could have taught her. But quiet as kept, even cynics want to believe. The difference between the cynical artist and the screaming zealot is that the artist will not deny those voices that keep insisting that maybe this is all bullshit. One pretends such belief is easy with religion, the other believes religion is the evidence of non belief.

I try to make Cherise understand why we can't be there through the summer months, I tell her about non-profit budgets and what it costs to run programs year round. What I don't tell her is that perhaps even with the money, we would have taken this break. Used this time to put some distance between our own fractured lives and the fractured lives of the people we serve. But She knows that I am a softie. Maybe she knows only a zealot would come to the projects armed with 200 years of Black literature and proclaim it a salve against the economic social inevitability that threatens to turn her, with all her potential and possibility, into her mother, whose life is a testament to unfulfilled dreams. The other writers who teach the club with me have scattered to the four corners of the earth for the summer. Bruce Duffy the novelist and Lila Wallace grantee is running around Afghanistan with the Mujahueddin for a Life Magazine piece. Toni Blackman, founder of the anti-sexist, anti-violence Hip Hop Arts Movement is in NY trying to force her way into the rotting folds of the music business, and DJ Renegade, the itinerant poet, guerilla intellectual, and auto-didactic is God knows where. So Cherise calls me. The DC native who, as poet Reuben Jackson describes in one of his poem, "Where do your parents vacation, on the front porch he replies." I'm always here.

I tell her to gather the members of the club, that I will meet with them for a workshop to get ourselves together for the school year. I am fine with spending the two or three hours and large pizza it takes to appease them for a month until we return. I will give them all long range assignments, knowing only one of two will complete them. I ask her to update me on each member of the Barry Farms Teen Writing Club. She tells me about Chante', the extrovert my mother would have labeled "fast" and about Dante', the gay choir boy who smokes PCP. About Tony and Phillip who will sell crack before they get their GEDs or their first legal jobs. She does not mention Nikki, the angry 99 pound contrarian, who takes our praise of her poetry as an insult. The first time I stood her up to celebrate her poetry in the club she did not return for two weeks. The instructors all learned to take her hastily written poems without comment, though Toni kept telling her it was okay for her to succeed, to laugh, to be good at something. By the time we break in late June for the summer, Nikki seemed to be believing her, now smiling reluctantly at the hint of approval. I have read books, mostly about boys, who were not hugged or given positive affirmations as babies and children and who became pathological murderers unable to find joy even in praise and companionship. I mentioned this to my other colleagues in reference to Nikki and they dismissed my concern quickly, believing that our teaching had broken down her formidable defenses, allowing her to discover the innate beauty and talent she possessed. What I realize now is that we needed to believe that. How could we believe anything else and keep returning week after week?

What about Nikki, I ask. "They locked her up yesterday," says Cherise. "Who took her" I reply, already starting my denial. "She killed that girl, it was on the news."

As irreligious and anti-ritualistic as I am, I take myself through an elaborate ritual of denial. Refusing now to believe what I'm reading or hearing. In the paper, the reporter gives her proper name of Niceshia. There are at least 50 derivations of Nikki in the projects and I go through this linguistic role call before Cherise's quiet insistence forces me to admit: I have taught poetry to a murderer. I have sat next to her, allowed her play with my African pouch, given her money for food, given her books by Lucille Clifton and Eloise Greenfield, and have tried to believe that children like her could be insulated from hell with paper. I piece together the predictable history of Nikki: mother on drugs, father absent, raised by grandma, angry at them all. I wonder about the 14 year old victim, know without knowing, that her background is similar to her killer's, know they must have attended the same school, the same classes together, rode the same buses. I do not ask myself the dumb rhetorical question why, instead a Buddhist saying comes to my mind: "If God Allows such misery to exist-he cannot be good; If he is powerless to prevent it-he cannot be God."

I tell Cherise I will call her back. I hang-up the phone and rummage through photos of the writing club. There is Nikki, young poet, brown and cherubic as any angel. Victim and victimizer in one form. In the photo she is exactly like the others; laughing or bored, writing or distracted. No hint of disaster. Now she is evidence contradicting my tenuous beliefs. I conclude between tears that art cannot save these children and cannot keep them from being murderers, or addicts, or pregnant teens, or all of the above. It cannot save them from themselves or their parents or the racist nation amused or annoyed by their lot. I start writing a poem that apologizes to Nikki and the murdered girl for my failure and the failure of literature to save them.

Then I remember Cherise's voice. Her response to this horrific was not to call a pastor or a politician, but a poet. Camus reminds us that "great religions are not identified by the questions they answer, but by the questions they inspire." The reason we must write and read these stories is because someone needs to believe in them. They are the faithful who, like the woman in Mark, Chapter 5, are healing themselves through their beliefs. These stories that have won the Hurston Wright Award are the stories that Cherise and others will read-and will believe. The way, thirty years ago, in another housing project, I found Baldwin, Baraka, Sanchez, and a new religion.

When I read Tayari Jones I hear Toni Cade Bambara saying, "Atlanta bring out your dead." When I read Selly Thiam I hear Audre Lorde saying, "But I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed, see causes in colour as well as sex." Faith Adiele reminds of Wole Soyinka saying "As an artist I can smell the reactionary sperm years before the rape of a nation takes place."

These writers are now a part of the new generation of holy scribes whose work bows not before king or ideology. They serve the truth as they know it, preaching to the converted and unbeliever alike. They teach us that the complexity of our existence makes room for the child who chooses murder as a tool and the one who chooses art.

Three years later and Cherise still believes that something we taught in those writing clubs will save her or at least provide her with a tool she did not have before we met. She is now a mother herself and works for me occasionally as she tries to balance college and parenting. Other members of the club have graduated high school, entered college, been arrested and released. Nikki has returned to Barry Farms, forgiven at least by the city for her crime, and daily walks past the tree planted for the girl she murdered. She will not come to the writing club and barely acknowledges the other members on the street. I don't know if I've seen her, if I've walked past her or she's ducked me. Cherise tells me she's different in look and attitude, that she hangs out with older kids and doesn't attend school. I've asked them to ask her to contact me. I still want to give her my poem of apology. I still want her to believe in the redemptive power of this literature. I still want to see her smile, however reluctantly at her own creation. Most importantly, I still need to believe that the world can be changed by creation as powerfully as by destruction. I still need to believe that lives can be positively changed, one book, one child at a time.

--------

BEWARE THE DOG
(for poet Lori Tsang)

"The dog that chases its tail, will be dizzy."
                                                        George Clinton

be wary of the dog that bites its own ass
chasing its tail with da masters' tales
tales dat go like dis:

say you poet, asian-american, flipped with
carribean rhythms, spiced with blues
& negro college pathos
say the hood you live in blacker than
kings charcoal, flavored with the newly
arriving latin tinge

say your running partners,
your main apple-scrapples,
colleagues & friends,
ex-lovers & mothafuckas
the folks you wake up at 1 a.m.
with rhymes that don't scheme
& plots that plod
say all them be black as Langston Hughes

say they all split to this cave once a year
where they go to heal & write
& fuck & drink & whine & howl
at the white moon that hangs over
their country (your country too) like
the ghosts of all those ever lynched or denied
for being other

say you think you know something bout that moon too
say you got history you need to heal from & even this
cave of dogs admit you can write
say you thinking that black writers would
never ever want to be the masters' dog
would never ever want to be that thing that
makes flesh mightier than spirit & action
that turns the pathology of skin color
into iron bars & governors standing
like bulldogs in front of school houses

"Don't let nobody tell you that a dog won't bite."
                                                        Traditional Blues

say you be wrong,
say you a get a call from a poet
black as stanley crouch
who tells you, in even, snarling tones
that black folks can be white supremacy too
even if its supremacy-lite
even if they really are just running dogs
no reason to be wary if you da master
cause they clear in their fogginess
that they cave just for negro writers
not writers who for anything,
just Negroes, half-Negroes, quarter-Negroes
Negroes who think they injuns, Negroes denying their whiteness,
Negroes claiming they new-found blackness, Negro academics,
homo/hetero/bi Negroes, republican Negroes, anti-Negro Negroes
just skin color & make-believe science
they just got to keep you out cause
maybe you part of the infamous asian horde
& they ain't yet considered the question of chinks
& spics & injuns who know something bout that low hanging moon
 (angel island poets need not apply)
they ain't considered the question of chinks who may be
more negro than the negroes they got

so say you say, what the fuck
you know what this is:
we back to the one-drop rule
we back to paper bag tests
we back to creole niggas & imitation of life
& that white moon hangs a
little lower when you get
that call saying all you ain't is
more important than all you is

those dogs now howl in impotent imagery
& you are left to wonder
why you wanted to join
their cave in the first place?

--------

GAMBLER'S FALLACY II
(for my children)

Self-serving bias- This is a judgmental bias whereby people tend to deny responsibility for failure and take credit for success. Failure is often explained with reference to situational factors, and success with reference to dispositional qualities. For instance, success at the poker table may be attributed to skill, and failure to bad luck.
                                                                                             -- Harold H. Kelly

instead of my father's hands
i was left with my father's hand
left to play through his long odds:
over reliance on luck
myopic masculinity
addiction to selfishness

it was never about the money,
even as an seven year old I knew that,
we, his children were bad luck
obstacles obstructing desires
not as exciting as a chance at a winning hand
lottery numbers, a full glass of intoxicant

it is the addict's egotism
the gambler's fallacy that thinks the
seven year old should understand his pain
should understand if the hand of his father
is not there to throw or catch a ball
should understand if the hand of his father
clutches a pair of jacks with more tenderness
than he has ever held the singular you with

what I wanted was my father's smile,
the tears he shed only after peeling away
the metal with alcohol
I did not want to be a momentary
distraction from his compulsion

but I was.

Still I waited patiently for
my father to love me more than
he needed the sickness

in silence and distance I forgive him
but with dread wonder;

how do I not become the absence that haunts me
when I know I am as afraid as my father was,
as selfish too

My father would not take these odds
I'm willing to wager all on my family,
the 18 year who calls from college to say "whatup dad"
the 4 year old daughter who holds my heart in her eyes
the 2 year old with my name & my gap-tooth smile

I hold them in my hands lovingly,
wildly, like smiling jokers
In a stacked deck.

--------

PANELS

I Old school
when my presentation starts
the man in the first row,
tosses his arm in the air like we are
at a 1980s hip hop party

his off white arm stabs the dullness
of the morning like Illinois corn
searching the heavens for sun

when I am finished he grabs the microphone
like a hungry rapper eager to spit lyrics
he wants to know if my presentation
means I'm one of those blame america
firsters, if I'm one of those…

yes, yes I say, quoting old school rapper spoonie g
I cut him off at the predictable,
explain to him that I have been blaming
america since the first black body leapt
overboard to a bitter freedom in the atlantic
since my father was declared 3/5ths & my
mother reduced to a womb to find pleasure in
& a spine to build a nation on

blame, I tell him is how the oppressed
make sense of history, & the babblings
of history professors & would be white rappers
who attend conferences like these
I have been blaming america, I tell him,
since Kurtis Blow's ancestors were busting rhymes
on the underground railroad.

 
II Good white lady

At the F. Scott Fitzgerald conference
the good white lady interrupts my lunch
with the preamble, "my best friend is black."

I wonder now if the hundred dollar honorarium
& the soggy chicken Caesar salad
will worth be worth it,

I'm reminded of Baldwin's quote about civilizing savages
when after sitting, she politely & arrogantly
asks if she can sit
she ignores the open novel, my tense body language, my failure
to smile, the way good white masters must have ignored or discounted
the rumbling clouds of rebellion that shaded the faces of their servants

she confides that she cannot understand her best friend
who told her after 9/11 that she will never know what
it means to be black in america
this she says, breaks my heart, because I'm a good
white lady, who never sees race

she then asks me how can she convince other blacks,
like her friend, that they should forget the past
& hang their flags in support of their country

I poke at my salad, chew the chicken in my mouth
as if I'm contemplating some great thought
I drop my fork, stare deeply into the vacuum
of her blue eyes like oprah has taught me
I clear my throat as other "good white people" around our
table lean in to hear as if I'm the black e.f. hutton

tell your black friends to kiss your ass, I say
tell them that you are a good white lady, but emphasize white
tell them that good white men, north & south died for their sins
tell them, finally, that bwana knows best.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: JOSE' GOUVEIA

Jose' Gouveia is a Poet, Writer and Carpenter who writes and builds communities on Cape Cod. Being of Portuguese descent, Jose' is first generation American. He was born Joseph A. Gouveia in Taunton, Massachusetts on November 2nd, 1964, to an immigrant family very much determined to "Americanize" themselves and their children. Joseph took on the ethnic name of his grandfather, his "Avt", also an immigrant in this country, upon his death in 1992, having missed his funeral due to a short stint in the Sarasota, FLA House of Corrections, and after a vision in which his grandfather came to him in a dream. "Go enjoy your life as much as I am enjoying mine now," the poet was told by his Avt. Childhood memories of televised war and social unrest in America, as well as the immigrant's working class struggle, compelled him to write. Jose' has shared the sta! ge with the legendary poets Marge Piercy, Amiri Baraka and Martmn Espada. He has been published in: AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY; UNITY & STRUGGLE; DANCING ON WATER (and Editor); The Boston Poet; Cape Poet; X Magazine (Ghana); WOODSTOCK Poetry Anthology; The Stalking Tongue (Australia); Quill & Parchment; Verge Mag; Best of MAP of Austin Poets Anthology; and many other small press and online zines. He is the Artistic Director of the Cape Cod Poets Theatre and member of the biker poets club, The Highway Poets MC. Jose' also runs a monthly poetry venue at The Prodigal Son Coffeehouse in Hyannis and has served as the Poet-In-Residence at Cape Cod Community College. These venues serve the local poetry community and as fundraisers for local community charita! ble causes. The Poet can be reached at:
CapePoet@yahoo.com
 
www.geocities.com/gouveiapoet/Joe_Gouveia
www.CapeCodPoetsTheatre.com

 --------

GINSBERG IS DEAD

of my own stupidity
got arrested during
National Poetry Month for
driving under the influence

the bar was 3 blocks from my house,
anyway, I called the coffeehouse
so someone would bail me out

overhearing whom i had just called
the cops figured out my name
and immediately rode my ass about drugs;

"there isn't a poet on the planet not into drugs"
"we know you're into drugs, and we can go easy on you,
so c'mon, tell us, whore the 'other poets'?"

i told him Ginsberg is dead

--------

CRITICAL THINKING

(for my Portuguese Grandfather, my Avo', Jose de Gouveia)

My grandfather died during an election year
I couldn't be at the funeral being in jail
So instead I write this cellblock poem about

How every election year in Americo
I hear million dollar speeches by
candidates of political parties
having a ball on US
talking about the need of returning to
Good Ol' Days and Family Values

And I think of my Portuguese grandfather,
my Avo',
with the work ethic as his family's value
imprisoned at Ellis Island for illegal entry
left scrapping for life in a cell of family values
released and deported his own laboring expense 1940

Liberdade? Liberdade? !Nao Liberdade! !Opressao, Opressao!

Which has me recall primary talk of closing our borders
to those yearning for a piece of the land of the Free
those who steal jobs from 'native-born' Americans
And I see true justice here only true if retroactive

And I'm thinking about "For And By The People"
thinking how Democracy is best for the majority
leaving the minority engulfed in the most popular
fascist beliefs of the day left drowning in a
shining sea of constituted rights for which we are billed

Democracia, Americo? Americo, Democracia?

And I think of the homeless fighting off the cold
wonder who they vote for in their apparent need of
Family Values but remember Americans aren't allowed
to vote unless legal, have an address, and I see discrimination's
purple majesty carving His word out in white marble

And everywhere I see prejudice princes killing selfishly
in their own political names and causes perpetuating
sins of elitism and I wonder what those Good Ol' Days
must have represented if Civil Liberties for all had to be
fought for under Star-Spangled banners in these United States

!Americo, Americo! Liberdade, Americo?

Where again, Im thinking of my
Portuguese grandfather, my Avo'
this time getting into the country legally
six years later after a near decade absence
from his wife and kids
for the welfare of them
you bet he stole every job he could
in his Americanismo

Liberdade? !Trabalha, Liberdade, Trabalha!

I think of the double and triple shifts he worked
in woolen mills the beef, pork and poultry he raised
the plants he cropped the Port wine and Moonshine
He bled and smuggled the only way he knew how
In a country known as the home of the brave

Where somewhere an epitaph engraved in granite
mentions something about 'Liberdade' and asks you
give this stone-eyed goddess your hungry and your poor

So as I enter Lady Liberty's voting booth
I am not impressed by a torch held high overhead
nor waste my descendant's vote on the NEED
of returning to those Good Ol' Days or Family Values
or any such propaganda associated with the federalist lot
where the republic reserves the right to feed off excess

!Ai Jesus! !Propagandista! Liberdade? !Propagandista!

Propaganda it seems is made of imported ingredients
fostered by farmers working still in the till
buried long before they may freely reap their own harvest

And so I do not sing, "God Bless America" but rather
I pray that someday such blessings be taken away
from the speakers of such rhetoric, until they are made
to go work for it, in the manner in which my Avo' had to do
way back when, Senhor Politico, in your Good Ol' Days !Boas Festas!

--------

POET POET

hang yourself, Poet, in your own word, lest ye be dead

---Langston Hughes

Poet Poet on the wall
are ye the truest Poet of them all?

One hit poem Poet stop screwing yrself go make love
to someone else it'll impregnate ya with somethin' new

Prolific Poet keep writing in yr privates stop exhibitionism
readings of every word scribbled out loud in public

Public Poet get to yr private places you need
to experience adolescence all over again

In-the-Closet Poet beat back the beast of bedroom FEAR
and show us a living room image of DEATH

...Poet Poet...

Open Mic Poet stop thinking the world YOUR stage
and make YOUR poem OUR stage!

Feature-for-Pay only Poet remember it's not about
the money but Poet's gotta eat too...

Holy roller didactic Poet stop walking on water start
turning that water into wine before yr time

Coffeehouse Poet cut back on the triple espresso latte cappachino
long enuff to revolt instead of telling us about revolution

Academic Poet don't marry the Lady of Shalott in that
Ivory Tower necrophelia isn't good for tenure

...Poet Poet...

Slam Poet become the bull at the rodeo instead of the matador
at the bullfights and buck that monkey off yr back!

Beat Poet yr all dead beat poets now the rest are just
cheap imitations who should not try this at home

Confessional Poet get off the pissing pot and get on the pot
or get off the shitter others need the porcelian

Written Verse Poet get off the page and onto the stage
the illiterate world needs to hear what it cannot see

Spoken Word Poet shut the fuck up chuck your intonation is
making me sick and throwing off MY holy rhythm

...Poet Poet...

Jazz Poet stop sounding so blue your "IT" in this hide-and-go-seek game
of the world so stop hiding behind the muzak and blowin' yr own horn

Tradition Poet don't be worried over The WORD being cast out
of molds but rather cast out by the hands of yr own damned soul!

Poet Laureate spare me yr change and give me yr poor it's how I stay hungry
and tired of the same old riff raff year after year after extended year...

Street Poet go find a mountain to go tell it on cuz the corner yr standing
on is better suited for junkies in need of their fix

CyberSpacePoet get offline and reboot yr hard drive yr dotcoms
are becoming artificial pomes spreading virtual viruses

...Poet Poet...

Political Poet stop telling us about FBI files and JFK theories
the true conspiracy dwells within burn from the inside out!

New Age Wet T-shirt wearin Feminist Poet speak up please
Im having a hard time hearing what you are saying

Sober Poet go drink of the wine of Paradise and pass out in the depths
of the cave behind the shadow of yr Soul and write it down!!

Poet on tour go Toure de Force and let us know what came first
the chicken or the egg and if the rooster even god-damn matters!

Erotic Poet stop orgasming and go oral on me I'm still a virgin
Chrissakes and God knows my name ain't Mary but Joseph!

...Poet Poet...

Haiku Poet quit that short shit and give us a long piss about childhood
issues it'll make ya famous fr real don't'cha know...

Epic Poet say more with less show don't tell and Holy Jesus stop
putting I am hurdles in the track of yr run on sentences if ya know what I mean...

Heroic Poet chivalry IS dead let it stay that way it took eons to evolve
to this point in time don't fuck it all up now with nobility!

Word Warrior stay true to the MUSE keep yr rage on the page and get out
into the World with your WORD stay true to yourself and become a

POET, POET...

--------

FEATURED WRITER: JEAN EMERSON

Jean Emerson lives in San Jose, CA.
She earned an IMA from Antioch´s McGregor School in 1999.

For the past twenty years she has been active
in promoting writing by:
Encouraging writing groups,
Teaching memoir writing classes,
Teaching Poetry to the schools,
MC-ing open Readings, and
Serving as a featured reader in venues
in the Bay Area, Mexico, and Italy

She is the publisher of Jacaranda Press.

Her poetry has been widely published (The World and I,
Texas Observer, Passagers, Montserrat Review,
Salt Lick Press, Sulphur River Review, Caesura,
and others.)

Her Short Stories have appeared in various
college journals. Two of her stories have
received Phelan Awards from San Jose State University.

Published books

· Not Alone (Bell Bird Press)
· Cycles of the Moon Vine (Bunny and the Crocodile Press)

Books slated to be published in 2003
· Lessons from the Castle (Mellen Poetry Press)
· With a Little Help from My Friends,
   a guide for writing groups (the Bunny and the Crocodile Press)
  

--------

TUESDAY

In the classroom she searched her memory
The exact detail failed to come to hand
Everything hinged on one word
That single word
With a meaning that hung
Somewhere between lock step
And two burning desires

And so she folded the bright crisp paper
Again and again until it became
A world class glider with no memory
Of that small treachery
That word that slipped her mind

--------

SAN DIEGO SEA WALL, A PROSE POEM.

The breeze came off the bay to ruffle the fronds
of twenty varieties of palm trees and the orange
puffs of gum trees. Small tailored waves lapped
against rip rap at the foot of the granite of the
sea wall. He was wearing his Casual Fridays; she
her beige power suit. His voice rang with confi-
dence/compassion above tugs and gulls and the
traffic on Harbor Boulevard. “Her life…” He in-
dulged in a slight caesura to underscore his search
for meaning. “Her life is so…,” he said. As though
to underscore his point—the point about the abundance
of his caring, he pulled a hand full of copper coins
from the pocket of his chinos. “I feel so sorry for
her.” With an open hand, he flung them in the direc-
tion of a Styrofoam cup in the hand of a vagabondo who
sat hunched on a bench.“So sorry about…about her life,”
he declaimed, oblivious of the coffee splashing all over
the seated man´s faded dungarees.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: ILONA POPPER

Ilona Popper's first book of poems, Break, was published in 2002 by The Bunny and the Crocodile Press. Her poems have also appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Antietam Review, Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology, and other journals. Popper has performed her poetry at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD; Excavations: New Works in Language and Movement at the D.C. Arts Center and Creative Partners Gallery in Bethesda, MD; Takoma Coffeehouse on Montgomery County Cable Television; "The Poet and the Poem" on WPFW-FM. Recent work includes a poetry/dance collaboration of "Time Zone" with choreographers Therese Keegan and Lizard Walker-Keegan of Updraft.

--------

NATURE FOOTAGE

the wild dog
presses its bat ears back
buries its snout
inside the carcass
of a dead musk oxen

two lush furs
the rolled back chocolate pelt
of the ox and the shiny
straw-gold-black head of the dog
eyes shut
tilting its skull up
at the exact angle of a nursing pup

--------

 
LISTEN

        look you said
        snow turns blue
        in the shadows

I have made you this
with no easy way to make it
with nothing left
I took the colors
from myself
blue from the veins
in my skin
the red fell out of me
when the moon opened up
its solitary eye

mother
we baked the ginger in
baked the flesh dark
making ourselves a man
and a woman
in a great flat skirt
no legs
just a wide bell
her feet like clappers
at the bottom
and we made fir trees soft
with fallen snow

        look you said
        one drop of blue
        turns the icing
        into snow like snow
        in shadow snow
        at twilight in winter

the woman's the one
who wears the skirt
that's the difference

I saw she had no legs
just the bell skirt
even though I ran
outside in padded trousers
felt the cold along
the length of my thigh

the ginger lady
looked like Najmama
bun on her head
skin cinnamon sugar
before we baked her

but Najmama had legs like me
held the nylons up on her thighs
with strange round bands
her skirt fell over her knees
her two shins bent and shiny
like sycamore sticks

        listen you said
        you can hear the creek

mother
on summer nights
you'd go out to the dark
edge of the woods
we kids circling you
like fireflies
blind and helpless
with the smell of your mood
but I did not go all the way
down the path into the woods

        I went down to the creek you said
listen

your face flushed
eyes like turquoise
from some far away place
I felt you give your body
to the sound of water
leaving me
the only child old enough to know
you were listening to something
other than our voices

Note: Najmama is a child's mispronunciation of the Hungarian word for Grandmother, Nagymama, which is pronounced Nudjmama.

--------

 
SOMEONE

someone always cleans up after him

it's the only sign

no one steps
into his yard
the open gate swinging
the bottles and old wrappers
along the fence line

no one walks down
past whatever is rotting
in a bowl outside
the piece of screen on the ground
steps down the cracked basement steps
no one knocks at the door
and sees his mom
the baby and his brothers
no one comes to ask for him

no one asks for him
or gives him anything
that might change his life

no one seems to recognize him
sixteen now

so he shatters glass bottles
and grinds them into the walk
he and his friend
making screechy sounds
like hyenas mad for food
hammering the end of each bottle
against the cement
leaving the sharp barbed
pieces from around the lips of bottles
and hundreds of shards
so the corner walk
glints like a heap of
precious jewels green
and diamond white
in the sunlight
scales shed by some monstrous
animal

someone will pick up after him
curse him when they do
and he knows that then
when they pick these up
they will think of him
with his black cap over his eyes
he'll be someone then
they will feel him
as they stoop to clean up
bend and fumble
over these broken pieces

*

a squirrel jumps
from the roof
to thin branch
and hangs on
as the branch whips
from side to side
he clamps his paws around it
and holds very still
his heart booming close call
adrenaline flushing his veins
maybe he doesn't think about it
leaping to a thicker branch
bolting up to the roof
he flies out
to another limb very thin
and inches to the outer
leaves he eats the new red shoots
of the Japanese maple

--------

 
MY PARENTS ASK ME TO COME HOME

as if this were some sort of exile
as if I hadn't been there in a while

I was there at Easter
when was that?
two months ago

first mom gets on the phone
the yard man
took off too much
after trimming nothing at all
he hacked that great old azalea
down to twigs
 
but the birds came back to
the bush outside my study
one's sitting on her eggs right now
she's brown and small
you'll have to see her
tell me what kind she is

when will you get off?dad asks
do you mean when will I come see you?
yes

once he told me
I don't need to know about your life
you're a grown up
we love each other and
we have our memories
and Christmas and we
love each other

now he tells me
you are expert about so many things
I finally realized I want to know about

--------

FEATURED WRITER: HILARY THAM

Hilary Tham is the author of 9 books of poetry and a book of memoirs & poems. Editor-in-chief for Word Works, Inc. a nonprofit poetry press, and poetry editor for Potomac Review, her poems & stories have appeared in Bridges, Delos, Minimus, Wind, Oberon, Piedmont Review, Poet Lore, Amaranth Review, Visions, Gargoyle, Runes, Frantic Egg, Word Wrights, et al. Her book Bad Names for Women won Third Prize in The Paterson Poetry Prize, and Second Prize in the 1988 Virginia Poetry Prizes. She teaches creative writing workshops in schools and has received numerous Artist-in-Education grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Kennedy Center. She has received Writing Fellowships from VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts), and a Jenny Moore study fellowship at George Washington University. VA. Nominated for Virginia's Governor's Awards for the Arts 2000, she also received a 2001 grant for Literary Excellence for Poetry from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She is Poet-in-Residence of Etz Hayim Synagogue, Arlington, VA. She's been featured on NPR and Maryland Public Television. Her most recent book is The Tao of Mrs. Wei, 2003.

--------

NAMES WRITTEN IN WATER OR THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN CIVILIZATION

I unconsciously absorbed the tenet that in order to be a Good Chinese Woman, I had to be the mother of sons. Though nobody spelled it out. This was imprinted on the air by the unspoken pity for a woman without this achievement. My mind rejected this as soon as I piece it out but my gut swallowed the poison whole.
        My grandmother said, "The good Chinese Woman practices The Three Dependencies: Depend on your father before marriage, depend on your husband after marriage, depend on sons in old age."
        Mother, having learned from painful experience that the second dependency was not reliable, told her daughters: "Study hard, get a good job, do not depend on a man to keep you. A man is like a puppy dog, chasing after every passing beauty."
Or she'd say: "A woman's heart is the bitter root she gnaws, watching her husband laugh and sport with his concubine. She gets no sympathy, only bad names like 'vinegar bucket.'"
        My reliance was based on Mother from my early years after I discovered she was the tensile steel in the family, the person who could and would meet our needs, whose word was her bond. Father was pleasant company, fresh as a breeze on a muggy summer's day, but his promises had the same airiness and lack of substance as summer wind.
        Both Grandmother and Mother agreed that it was important to find a spouse born under a compatible birth sign according to the Chinese zodiac, based on a cycle of twelve years.

        "The White Horse dreads the Black Ox,
          The Sheep and the Rat will part after one day.
          The Snake and the Tiger meet with swords,
          The Rabbit will weep with the Dragon.
          The Golden Cock claws at the Jade Dog
         And the Pig cannot rest with the Monkey in his tree."

According to the family almanac, I should have married a man born in the year of the Rabbit.
        "The Rat and the Ox are happy with hay in a barn,
         The Tiger will lie down in plenty with the Pig,
         Dragon will spread its wings with the Rooster.
         The Snake and the Monkey sleep soundly on the same branch,
         The Horse and the Sheep will graze gently together,
         The Rabbit runs in green fields with the Dog.

Instead, I married a Rooster-year man and am happy to prove the almanac wrong. But I have to credit our enduring compatible relationship to western concepts of loving and partnership. Had I married a Chinese man and been an Eastern wife, my husband would have loved other women easily and without guilt. Fidelity to a wife is not a Chinese virtue. As in many cultures, having many women is considered a manly attribute.
        In Chinese tradition, a woman is raised to be her husband's inferior, to be subject to his will, to practice the Four Virtues - CAWS: "Character (impeccable reputation for chastity and propriety), Appearance (modesty at all times), Work (proper housekeeping and child-rearing).and Speech (circumspection and respect at all times). A Chinese proverb (created by a man in defense of polygamy, I'm sure) says: "A good woman should not wed two husbands for who has seen a single horse carry two saddles?" It is not by accident that the Chinese word for mother is written by joining the ideograms for "horse" and "woman", both beasts of burden.
        "A maiden fair, just sweet sixteen... is more vicious than a hundred yaksha (demons)" says the monk in the Chinese classic, Hsi Yu Chi (The Journey to the West) in the chapter, "The Temptation of Pigsy". Mother warned us not to become like the lustful seductresses of literature. The good Chinese woman must strive to be a wise mother, virtuous wife and chaste widow, defining the limited sphere in which women were encouraged to excel. She told us stories of young girls widowed before they were twenty, who spent the rest of their long lives caring for the altar of their dead husbands. I said I thought that was a waste of their lives and Mother shook her head over my bad tendencies. Luckily for me, she said, I had no beauty or sexual allure to turn me into a sinful woman.
        In Chinese tradition, there are two types of women: the good woman, who practiced the Three Dependencies and the Four Virtues, and the evil woman, who used her beauty and sexual allure overthrows kingdoms and wipes out cities (ch'ing kuo,ch'ing ch'eng). A woman with a beautiful face was to be distrusted, for men were very susceptible to feminine beauty and women were considered weak in morals and integrity. "Ying hon lan kor mei yan kwan", (Brave hero rarely escapes beautiful woman's trap) was a favorite proverb quoted by men and women to explain and excuse male lapses. Chinese women like my grandmother and even my mother accepted this propaganda, this casting of blame on women for men's weaknesses.
        In the famous Ching Dynasty novel, Chin p'ing mei (Golden Lotus) [author unknown,] the heroine uses her delicate beauty and sexual lust to ruin herself and countless men. Golden Lotus is a lively spitfire who uses intrigue to claw her way to the top of her teahouse world. Her beauty is lovingly described, so are her sexual encounters in long pornographic passages. The anonymous male author justifies his prurient lingerings in prose by sprinkling them with self-righteous exhortations to his readers to practice virtue and avoid evil women.
        The most famous example of woman as femme fatale is the Lady Yang Gwai-fei, imperial concubine of Emperor Ming Huang of the Tang dynasty. She is immortalized in the long poem, "The Everlasting Remorse" by Po Chu-I (772-846) and in the drama, The Palace of Eternal Youth by Hong Sheng (1645 - 1704). The besotted emperor spent all his days and nights with her, building palaces and hot springs baths for her pleasure, devising gardens for her delight until the empire rose in revolt and demanded her death. She hung herself, a vain sacrifice, for he had lost the loyalty of his lords and finally ran upon his own sword. Famous in history and literature, Lady Yang was held up to us as a role model to avoid. However, I sensed an ambivalence behind my mother's warning words; I sensed that she admired, even envied Lady Yang for having what she herself lacked, the complete love and devotion of a man.
        The second stereotype of woman is as an extraordinarily sensitive and sentimental vessel yearning for love, languishing for her lover, with a great capacity for suffering and tears, noblest when she sacrifices her life for love. The most admired women poets are those who penned poems in this vein. Many such poems were actually written by men, speaking in the voice of the idealized woman. Men loved the romantic scenario of a beautiful woman pining for them.
        "Dewdrops like pearls upon the lotus leaves --
        In my folly I long to string them!
        You are inconstant as water
        Which flows off and back again.
        My cruel, faithless lover,
        You chop and change with the wind!"

                                -- Song (Ming dynasty)

        "With my peacock hairpin
        And my face powdered pink
        There among the blossoms I had my moment with you.
        You knew what I felt,
        And I was sure you loved me.
        Only Heaven can tell of such emotion.

        Incense burned to ash,
        Candle melted to tears --
        The one is just like your heart, the other just like mine.
        My pillow moist and clammy,
        My pretty quilt all cold,
        And I awake as the night-drum fades away.
                                Wen Ting-yun (circa 900 A.D.)

        The best loved novel in Chinese literature, A Dream of the Red Mansion, more commonly mistranslated as Dream of the Red Chamber , embodies all the "ideal womanly characteristics" in its heroine, Lin Daiyu. She embodies all the traditional Chinese male ideals of a good woman: she is delicate and frail, emotional and overly-sensitive; she has poetic talent (the one masculine domain permitted women), and sacrifices herself for love. As a teenager, I wept for Lin Daiyu's suffering. Later, after the ripples of the American feminist movement reached Malaysia, I grew impatient with her relentless moping.
        The third stereotype of woman, the cruel matriarch, makes life miserable for her son's wife. In The Bride of Jiao Zhongqing, also known as South-east the Peacock Flies, the female protagonist, Lanzhi, a beautiful girl, works hard and obediently in the house, yet her mother-in-law dislikes her and forces her son to divorce her. Lanzhi returns home where her brother forces her to marry again. She drowns herself and her husband hangs himself. This tradition of aged woman turned abusive when she achieves power is still a strong stereotype in the modern Taiwanese and Hong Kong novels and movies that my mother loves to read and rent.
        The accepted view was that women could not be trusted with power: that they could be virtuous only if they were carefully guarded from temptation and kept within bounds by wiser men. The pervasive view was that women would abuse any power they achieved by beauty or age or position, especially mothers-in-law.
        The role model my mother extolled constantly was that of the good mother who births a son and teaches him to be an upright man. Nobody remembers the name of General Yueh Fei's mother, but she is held as a role model for she taught her son integrity and love of country. Mother told us how General Yueh's mother wrote on his back, the verse, "Loyalty to country, obedience to the emperor" before she sent him to war. The part that moved me about the General Yueh story was where he was betrayed by envious ChenKwai. Mother remembered being taken as a child to view the General's tomb and beating the statue of a kneeling ChenKwai with her shoe. When I visited Hangjhow decades later, I was pleased to see the statue of ChenKwai just as mother had described it, kneeling in penitence before the General's tomb.
        My favorite stories were about heroines Mu-lan and Ying-tai. Mother told them to entertain us, not as teaching stories. Both Mu-lan and Ying-tai assumed male disguise, Mu-lan as a warrior to take her sick father's place in the army, Ying-tai as a scholar to further her studies. Both had to give up the pretense of being male and revert to traditional domestic roles.

        "Changing her battle armor
        For a maiden's dress,
        She pats her braids before the window
        And paints her eyebrows by the mirror.
        Then she goes to greet her comrades
        And all are amazed.
        'Twelve years we were together
        Yet never knew Mu-lan was a maid!' "
                        The Song of Mu-lan (circa 400 A.D)

Ying-tai fell in love with a fellow scholar and killed herself when her father married her to another man. Mu-lan's story had a happy ending perhaps because her prime motivation was filial piety and not personal rebellion, and filial piety is the principle on which Chinese society is based.
        Love of learning is not a womanly virtue by Chinese tradition, so Ying-tai's story ended tragically. On reflection, I think the story of Ying-tai was a teaching story after all - to dispel our illusions of free choice in life decisions or to make us grateful for our educational opportunities. "Education will give you a better life," Mother used to say, meaning that we would have better paying jobs. Little did she imagine how true her words were in a non-material sense.
        In his book, The Sibling Society, Robert Bly presents a disturbing and most believable picture of the world, in particular American society, as a culture where responsibility has been abrogated and everyone wants to be sibs to their children and parents, co-equal. No one wants to be adult with adult responsibilities to enforce unpleasant rules.
Women have always been the cornerstones of a civilized society, holding mirrors to their men so that they will want to tone down brutish urges to fit the image of hero in those mirrors and not disappoint their mothers, and wives. To ensure the work of civilizing men continues, I hold that women must reject the Three Dependencies. In societies where the Three Dependencies rule, where women have no influence on their men, the warrior cult declares civilization decadent and softening and ruthlessly seeks to render it extinct.
        I believe that we need to raise children with the Four Virtues as compass points so they do not become the lost generations - wandering from cult to cult looking for structure and meaning, sleeping on street corners, over-dosing on drugs for a temporary thrill. All the major religions of the world incorporate the Four Virtues in some form in their teachings. Applied equally to both sexes, and all ages, the Four Virtues (CAWS) -- "Character (standards of moral behavior, knowledge, integrity and principles ), Appearance (clothing appropriate for the occasion), Work (pushing the body and the mind to be productive) and Speech (incorporating truth and politeness, respect for others), are essential for the continuation of civilized society. Without these, civilization frays into tatters and disintegrates under the juggernaut wheels of those who can kill most easily.

--------

 
THE GIFTS OF MEN

Most women don't want
to be too tall
among men, they bend
the way light bends
entering water.
They look for camouflage -
a kitchen sink with dirty dishes
to wash, children to feed,
floors to scrub. They hide
their thoughts, feeling them
form and dissolve, inchoate.
Centuries of being told to stick
to what they do best, loving and
feeding men's stomachs, egos,
imprinted as precious possessions
bartered by fathers to husbands
who bequeath them to the care
of sons, women became experts
in cosmetics, jewelry, the waxing
of furniture, the genres of romance
novels, thinking only when invited
to think, squeezing feet into tiny
high heeled shoes, burying deep
unacceptable thoughts that they
are totems, bearing symbols,
a mink coat, diamond yokes,
to proclaim to the world, Here!
Here walks a successful man.

--------

 
THE MALE

The male is an easy loving thing
        is an easily loved thing
           like a new puppy
                   eager to please, ardent in adoration
        like Ezekiel preaching in the valley of dry bones.

Like that same puppy
        new returned from obedience school,
    or the kitten that smells on you
iridescent scales of fish, the male
                 feeling his way around your body, your heart,
        walks beside Woman leashing his gaze from others.

He has not Woman's memory
        that can remember without
             invention.
                Like a tree falling in the forest
        with no one to hear, her voice
        will become background music to his ears,
             a fly's weak buzz between window panes.

Why are the women lying down like fields
        while the wintry sun shines thin and bleak
             and the wind blows cold with the smell of snow?

His is the force of a storm,
        hard rain, the brevity of excess. His love
                  is like the peacock's tail
                roused by genetic code, driving
        to propagate itself against extinction.

The male burrows, impelled
like the wasp that lays its eggs
      in the flowering fruit of the fig,
and dies there in the fig.
The male struts his peacock walk,
        bows and dances to female rhythms, knows
      his loins will dance against hers, and flesh
will form and come alive
on the mounds in Death's Valley.
                                        
So the women lie down like fields
        while the wintry sun shines thin and bleak
             and the wind blows cold with the smell of snow.

--------

DIVORCE
        for Zach

Your wife has left you, you say.
Actually, she has made you leave her
the house, car, swimming pool,
beach condo, the children and half
your money.

Jauntily, you tell me you're fine,
got yourself a shopping list: new car,
new house, new woman;
but your eyes say you've lost
more than the things she's kept.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: ETHAN FISCHER

Ethan Fischer writes mystery plays for radio and poems for teething grownups. He helped found and still produces the long-running Rumsey Radio Hour, soon to be simulcast. He has published poetry, reviews, and interviews in numerous magazines and newspapers. Online visit his translations of Goethe, Trakl, and Rilke at St. Paul Arts & Press. His new book, Beached in the Hourglass, will appear this spring from The Bunny and the Crocodile Press. Ethan Fischer is senior editor of Antietam Review and teaches English at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Among his students are the stars of the void to come if we are not careful.

--------

TURNING NINE: THE LAST BASEBALL GIFT

My Rawlings G-6oo glove at last
smelling like new car leather cool
but stiff in the box or on my hand.
I challenged kid brother to catch.

Well up the street my friend's
glove had a shine and give
to it old completely loose
to catch any ball. He'd let
you feel the glove's fingers.

His name was Eric
really no friend this bully
who shunned the Jewish kids.
He and another boy bet dollars
on whether my sick dad would die.

My baseball glove loosened no doubt
but playing right field I wouldn't catch
many. I saved the nine candles all
summer. Daddy's heart blew out.

--------

ALTERNATE CHILDHOODS

near the Tree of Knowledge
being Mama's cactus growing

Papa Bird says: Stick to
formation flying son
don't complain

of heavy wings.
Doing what we do
will work out. It has to
really given half a chance.

Meaning Huck Finn your faith
in flight and you're kissing
Nina in the Buick now

gaining everything a boy
needs next to peace of
mind being that piece
of asinine proof: yes

Silverlake drive-in theater
Pittsburgh keeps our youth
as does the blue ambulance

my brother Mark takes girls in
to prom in park or on the ceiling
of our basement room the gas
hearth flames for dancing

where Deborah's dreaming
of me something more
than summer knew

a man who sleeps with
his books and tennis balls
who'll go to Yale and join
the band and march off

to Vietnam in time grown
sick of himself with women
and ready to learn death . . .

Well it didn't work out that way
and maybe he stayed home
and stayed young as Eve
often teased the snake
then spanked the boy
till he was breathing
hard his love for her.

--------

PROF. MEETS THE NEW, RETURNING

 
Some are lost although enrolled
like Ben in black, a pale Chaplin-
prince, stumbling out of doors--
And here Jena strides beautiful
in boots, wren light, her eyes
seeing my own youth cool
in a marinade of years--
She'll travel over the falls
of sleep and wake perhaps
with wealth, her jackal. Today
Ben & Jena want only the pizza
at Tony's, served in the yard.

Kids yell YES in the air promise-
crammed. Sun insinuates to warm
ribs & navel rings. Cat Tiger stalks
with no tail, with all time waiting
for him. I drink a pint of ale &
lean in the garden shade.

In a dust of hydrangeas,
Dawn & Jason move toward
a limit of their childhood. There
they wave from the gate that leads
from our tavern garden
to the street.

--------

RIMBAUD IN THE SUBURBS:
TOAST FROM A COFFEE CUP
--Je m'y habituerai.

All our formative
dreams create traffic--
all seeing roads take tolls.
Was Rimbaud right to stop
shaping chaos into poems?
That strain of wrestling fallen
angels to the ground would
have cost him eventually.
Still when old he might
have sung of calm or
complained of his
wayward bowels.
His wife would dip
candles in the kitchen
as Arthur, formerly the
voyant, fumbled for his
peepers, spilled coffee,
envisioned cable-tube-
remote-control-operas
while his teen children
laughed at his pipe-
dreaming and his
dumb, drunken
boat-tripping
with them.
All they
know
is irony
after all his
 i l l u m i n a t i o n s.
 
Update:--Today Rimbaud
coaches the young soccer
league, with his good leg
shows how to kick well
into a neighbor galaxy
while parents gripe.
He finds that time
may un-derange
all senses if we
live long enough
in Plato's cave
or subdivision
and survive
the mothering,
new Verlaines,
& shopping mall ennui.
Vite! est-il d'autres vies?

--------

MASTERING REGRET

Watch me
stab myself again
thinks Sam the circus
man behind glass.
Once he danced into
view on a white tiger
folks but now he stars
in the sideshow with his
3rd wife Bea the Bearded
Lady and their Reptile Kid.
Today Sam does self-surgery
with a dagger from Chagrin
Falls where from childhood
he would whittle himself
for fun. My Sam always
hurts said his mother.
In Ohio he grew up
hurting but hard
for gals to keep
their hands off.
Remember the guy
on TV with his head in
the she-lion's mouth as
Madonna mounted him?
Well he changed after
his head was sewed
back on and it's true
he went on all fours
and bucked riders off
at the rodeo. His ticket
sales dried up. Sam tried
teaching hoops to midgets
hoped to rejoin the circus.
Stabbing himself now Sam admits
is only an old magic trick.
The blade's not real
you see but just
a memory of steel.

--------

PARTY MENU
      "Sardine threatens, who knows it?"

Consider the sardine.
How free is a fish
forked from the can
to swim on a Triscuit?

Watch the watercress.
Will a rain forest grace
the Veal Oscar served
by Veronica Lake?

Study the soup.
For days it has held
bird captive to appetite
and the whine of children.

Mull the manflesh.
For years a brute will
lift weights to prove himself
unfit to be served.

Disregard the above.
Select the all soyburger.
Forsake the buffalo's breath
for a French-fry's nonchalance.

Dream of dessert.
It may never come that
sweet stretching of time
wherein family plays

forever. An event
to have lasting taste
can't linger like a guest
who won't kiss or go home.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE

In Haste I Write You This Note: Stories & Half-Stories won the premiere Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Competition (2000). Flying Time: Stories & Half-Stories (1992 & 1996) features four PEN Syndicated Fiction winners. Poetry collections: The Arc of the Storm (1998); Elegy for the Other Woman: New & Selected Terribly Female Poems (1996); Raking The Snow (won Washington Writers Publishing House 1981-82 poetry competition); Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country (won Great Lakes Colleges Association's 1975-76 "New Writer's Award"); chapbooks Wild Garlic: The Journal of Maria X.; and A Wound-Up Cat & Other Bedtime Stories. Manuscript of poetry collection Awaiting Permission to Land won the Anamnesis Award.

Individual publications: Poetry, The 90th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, American Scholar, JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association; New York Times, New York Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Nimrod, New Republic, Press, Canadian Woman Studies, Confrontation, Southern Poetry Review, Kalliope, Passager, Earth's Daughters, Ascent, Negative Capability; Life On The Line; When I'm An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple; Beyond Lament (poems on the Holocaust); numerous publications in the US and abroad. Editor, The Dolphin's Arc: Endangered Creatures of the Sea. Poems translated into a dozen languages.

Read at Library of Congress, Harbourfront, Folger Library, Writer's Center, etc., many colleges, schools and other venues across the USA, Canada, Australia, and under United States Information Agency auspices, in Russia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Brazil, throughout Far East. Leads creative writing workshops for adults and in the schools, occasionally translates and photographs professionally, and is VP for Fiction for the Washington Writers' Publishing House.

--------

OFFERING

When I walked to the pier you thought
I'd set off to check for crabs,
bail the half-swamped boat.
Both tasks needed doing.

No crabs in the trap, no bait left,
but I scooped twenty-three pails
of rain from the heaving hull
while she banged the dock.

What I was going for, in truth,
was to find a poem for you,
hoped a poem would find me
open as the pail or boat

or the lilies I passed,
enter me like a lover,
leave me fertile with verse.
All I found were these words.

--------

STAG IN MOONLIGHT

1.
Those old paintings
are romantic but hokey:
What stag would stand
long enough for his portrait?
And the moon keeps rising.

The painter can hold
only the notion
of a synchronistic
instant of perfection
which seldom lasts long

and may in itself deceive:
always some flaw,
antlers missing one point,
a patch of mange,
alone the Almighty is perfect.

Or like Audubon with his birds:
the artist may have shot, dined on,
stuffed and propped up
some buck in his studio. The real
stag stands in the artist's mind.

2.
Here, in this twilight moment,
a doe and newborn twins
gradually, like tide, graze to the edge
of the wooden bulwark
against the sea.

Heads down, legs splayed,
they balance against the moon,
half-full, already up
but as if dawdling still
to dapple waves and fawns.

3.
If you, my love, could see
the fawns siphoning teats,
white tails flicking,
skinny legs trembling,
you'd probably say

Pity it's not a stag,
too bad the moon is half-gone,
and the night is alive
with mosquitoes,
I must finish my book.

You can't waste time.
The deer filter through
bayberry bushes, briars.
The woods go black.
I slap at gnats.

4.
While trying to freeze
in awkward words
this long instant of perfection
am I doubling the moment,
cutting it into halves, or by half?

Yet like the deer
who will continue
eating our apples and grass,
acorns, flowers and herbs,
I am doing what I cannot help.

And because often you
would rather read about an event
than witness or live it
(tidier, cheaper, less risk),
someday you might read this poem.

--------

SNOW IN LENINGRAD

1.
Blizzard here in Washington, I'm shoveling snow.
My mind sifts snow in Leningrad, World War Two, the Siege,
as I try to track my Aunt Maria…She steps over snowy ruins

and people dead of famine, illness, shells. Bless early dusk and snows
that mask the dead, a while. No burials till the hard ground thaws.
She lugs rubble from wrecked buildings to raise new barracks.

Nights, she mans an anti-aircraft gun. One wretched crust a day.
Bombs hit her flat, in Pushkin's former stables, but a captain rescues her,
says, "Come, teach English to our officers: someday they'll need it."

At headquarters she gets a cup of soup with bread, a place to sleep,
safer if not warm but no one is. Medals afterwards. She survives
the war, more blizzards, tribulations from the KGB.

They allow her to teach English, French, and keep her piano.
She moves into three barrack rooms in a village north of Leningrad.
She dares not write, but sends me picture books.

2.
A luminous June, 1986. At last we meet. Eighty-one, half-blind,
she serves me tea and tells of childhood skating on the Neva,
troika rides across St. Petersburg, walks with Akhmatova and Blok,

those nine-hundred nights the Germans ringed the wounded town.
Her champion Airedale disappeared for someone's cooking pot.
Now a small white mutt and large gray cat sleep on her feet:

Trust creatures more than certain humans…
But Ludmilla, her neighbor, is faithful, discreet.
December 1991. Ludmilla writes:

Maria's gone to hospital. Midnights she wakes
the ward with lectures on Pushkin, Bach,
Dickens, English grammar, and Voltaire.

3.
My plane from Washington lands a day too late.
By three metros and a bus Ludmilla takes me miles
across the city heaped with dirty snow. Not neighborhoods

for foreigners. We skirt the hospital on snowy paths
that lead us to the morgue. A white-smocked worker chases out
a dappled cat who slips back in, resumes his watch beside the slab

where my chilled aunt lies in state. She wears her blue professor dress,
beret she swore she would wear to the grave...Through falling snow
we escort her to the marble crematorium. Friends flock.

Something like a service. Then the fire-the Church forbids it but
she'd seen too many dead awaiting spring. Attendants, thrifty, saved
the clothes. The coffin slides through low brass doors.

We troop to her old flat, repaired, and toast her soul's
lone journey through the snowy skies. The rest will go
beneath a churchyard stone.

4.
Washington, 2002. In this wind swirling white
I seek her still, and still the night is blind. My attempts to fix
her life in words freeze, then melt with flakes of snow.

Yet, as if these were the drifts that cloak
the stone above her distant sack of ash,
I keep on shoveling.

--------

AFTER THE MOTORCYCLE CRASH
                    for Alexander
1.
Your caved-in skull
was a jigsaw puzzle
reassembled just in time.

Yet pain clings,
transforms, deforms,
enshrouds cells scrambled,

nerve ends snarled
to the least fingertip.
I tried to absorb

your torment, to shield
the glare of lamps,
the sun no longer kind,

to mute a violin
two floors down,
soften jolts of the road.

As when you were small
I fed you, but could sing
no more lullabies.

Your body repairs
like an old battlefield
where now potatoes grow

or kids play ball
ignorant of history.
Bewildered still

how and why that
instant of transformation,
you jumpstart your life.

2.
Four years pass. Suddenly revved-up
your brain roars off along new roads,
shoots you toward the stars--

then dumps you
down an abyss
again and again.

Such wild parabolas
tangle into puzzles
far harder to assemble.

I knew only how to soar…
Then, fractured in a crash
merely metaphoric, I

am dropped in my own
chasm and, like you, learn
the meaning of sinkhole.

Time heals me,
pills -- you. Perhaps
we'll both pull through.

--------

READING THE RUSSIANS
  Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Blok, etc.

Russians can write
of sorrows and souls
with authority. They know.

Transparent as vodka, souls
drift through blizzards, gulags,
luminous summer nights.

The sun may melt snow,
dankness continues to seep
sorrow into the heart.

Battlefields of bones
topped with manure
grow potatoes and wheat,

or, paved over, create
playgrounds for orphans.
Every home holds a ghost.

Rivers enfold the dead,
those fallen, those thrown.
The lost lure the living.

Still, New Year's Eve,
smash your glass,
sing like a full battalion --

as if this could waft
your plaints to God,
lift sorrow from soul.

--------

CONTROL ISSUES

I'd prefer to run everyone's lives.
That way, they would come out right.
No ragged edges, unraveled seams
or unexplained stains.

A few well-chosen words
would keep X out of jail,
Y from an inexplicable baby,
Z from writing a terrible play.

A, B, and C would already be
settled into acceptable roles:
middle age, bootlegging or banking.
Alphabets of harmonious souls.

Lord knows that, like Him, I try.
But not everybody cooperates
including this body, its offspring or
the rest of the unwieldy world.

At least I can make my own
fictional characters fall into line.
If they don't, if they wander off
in 63 unplanned directions -

one swoop of the pen,
one click on DELETE,
obliterate the whole
unwieldy mob.

Perched on His buoyant clouds
far above my leaking roof
He lets us erase each other, one
by one or en masse and for real.

In my dilapidated control room
a thunderstorm's breaking panes,
rain soaks the paper, dilutes the ink,
and the power's about to fail.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: DAVID BRISTOL

David Bristol was born in 1948, grew up in Verona, New Jersey, and lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia. He graduated from New York University and obtained his law degree from George Washington University. Mr. Bristol has published three collections of poetry, The Monk Who Made His Momma Happy ( Bunny and the Crocodile Press, 1977), Paradise & Cash (Washington, D.C.: Washington Writers Publishing House, 1980), and Toad and Other Poems (Bunny and the Crocodile Press, 2002). David Bristol is a senior attorney with the Office of Thrift Supervision.

--------

A BETTER SPORT

Wanting a germ or an egg.
Wanting a great deal.
Wanting zilch.
Wanting & wanting
the beginning of something to give me a start??
to be led to the door
out of the tired night.
I know that my feet
will take me.
Have no pity, celebrate!
This never ends??
the exercise of the soul pulling on its shorts.

--------

END RUN

Missed? Avoiding this paper
the last hour giving the hand over
to duct tape repairs to a storm door,
sorting bills,
indulging burdens that never pass.

Missed? Minutes given over
to a mind taxed with a self
questing and afraid
seeking the comfort of immersion in chore.

Beckoned by the dead bulb in the hall
walked in the dark as weeks pass
finally to address this now in a moment
drawn to moment.

Here is the life and the record
in the quiet house.

--------

WHITE SHIRT

Blue, pink, ecru,
stripes narrow and bold, red and green,
now waking, wanting a white shirt.
Quiet and simple,
shunned for lack of style, color.

The simple is sought,
sparse and absolute to wear for the day.
Clean, white, lightly starched
and unremarkable,
to button up is to button up,
a modest gesture of presentment.

Step plainly, showing a humble color,
out of the house
washed.

--------

HAIR IN THE COMPUTER

And man needs cat.
Needs much,
garbage bags, toothpaste,
wishes and feathers.
From need and more,
he went to the animal
in hope of fur and stunts,
of something warm sleeping at the bed's foot.

The cat slept among his books
and put longing into his heart.
A good animal,
instructive in play and fear.
Grown man dwelling on a little beast.
Obsessive, the time out of the day,
it is more than cute.
Man alone wants his teddy bear,
even shitting in a box.