Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
January
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . Always substance and increase, Always a knit of identity . . . always distinction . . . always a breed of life. Walt Whitman
c o n t e n t s
Cynthia dEste Geoff Stevens Phylllis C Braun Joanne Seltzer Bill Roberts 4-6 7 8 9 10 Robert Cooperman 11-3 Fredrick Zydek 14-5 Ida Fasel 16-9 David Lawrence 20-1 David Michael Nixon 22-3 Jeanne M. Whalen M. M. Nichols 24-6 27-8
Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions -- $33 for 11 issues. Sample issues $3.50 (includes postage). Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self addressed envelope. Waterways, 393 St. Pauls Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10304-2127 2004, Ten Penny Players Inc. *(This magazine is published 11/04) http://www.tenpennyplayers.org
All that was clear is now diffused. Dominions lost to a subtle world That follows no round. There is one moment in all time, come behold it. Crouch here in wild grasses under the hovering stars, see the falling meteors, the sudden arcs of fireflies.
Let the dim surround surrender you to the dark and empty silence. In his one moment a shining avatar may appear.
under brittle, bargain-table piles of leaves. Growth has never been a constant, nor has harvest. After fall, after life and light succumb, comes a refuge of artless dark where form is diffused with mystery and all things become again possible.
Geoff Stevens
Complete homogenization is the death of identity but emulsions break separate to constituents reveal their past their pedigrees
Darkness falls, lightning flickers, thunder like a great earth drum reverberating a thousand buffalo stampede, run. From this ancient tribal dream awaking to the chaos of the planet breaking.
dug for the biggest stone, didnt bother to remove the dirt or polish it, then gave it to her full-force by hand to her thick noggen as a token of his sincerity and proud ownership that has taken years, thousands of them, to diminish his harsh disputed dominance.
Robert Cooperman
Good riddance to the little heathen, his dirty fingers in my candy jars. My wife made excuses for him: "The poor tyke dont know better, raised up amongst savages." All them Injuns was thieving magpies; us patriots wiped out his band, shouldve done him like the rest, but when we saw he was white,
11
we rescued him; he kicked so hard, I trussed him to a saddle like a dead man. When Preacher and his Missus took one look at him, they sobbed like their long-lost son had returned, them never blessed with a child, and this one wasnt no blessing: demons jumping out of him like hed gripped a telegraph wire, the juice streaming to make him holler filthy words at me, like, "Greasy weasel, greedy weasel!" over and over.
12
Injuns call simpletons like him "Holy," more like imps that curdle milk and scare women into miscarrying. When Sheriff saw him waving a .45 that somehow witched into a Bible, Big Ed had to fire, for the sake of our women and children.
13
He became the keeper of the harvests and when the famine came, it brought those who tried to kill him, seeking mercy and the bounty of his barns. He gave them like the coat off his back.
15
The coats vests and caps thrown down The embrace of love and resistance The upperhold and underhold the hair Rumpled over the blinding the eyes.
I think of Jacob at Peniel, tenacious till the angel blessed him and left him lame but aloft. I think of myself, pulled from, pulled to. Your eyes are loopy with laughter. In love of the least love of all. Repugnant, irresistible you, embrace me. I stagnate in self-contradiction.
First published in Walt Whitman Review
17
and done those things we ought not to have done?"* Does he worry about his mental health, not as it should be? When I read psychologists who identify me As a little house of horrors For which they only have the key, Where years have drifted snow bank high, I find the key already in my purse And push open the door to rooms Pleased to welcome me so much improved.
I take a strong position next to the oasis. I am an atheist. How do I hate you if you dont exist? I swallow a canteen of sand. This oasis is just another mirage. The thing about the miracle Of absence is its palpable Dates.
21
I am alone and I am with you, you who have your own continuous story; I am victim and executioner, striving, when I can, to be neither; I am listener and reader as words pour over me; I am joy, ennui, depression, and a calm clarity; I am who I am and Here I am in person.
23
24
The night caved in around him, callously devoured the better half of his God-fearing bungalow, and he stood stunned until his brother called to him through the smoke and his hands startled, sweeping the artificial darkness for protection. He staggered into the raucous street with a jacket that wasn't his, pockets full of pictures, ducking the budding mobs of Hitler Youth, the glass shards mingling in the street, and the sputtering blaze haloing his home.
25
As night retreated, the last man standing wore haggard pride in his dead brother's suit jacket pocket-full, guilt-dusted, world-wise, shutting out more respect than cold, gutter pennies scraping the smile off his shutter-frozen souvenir of a daughter dearly departed clinging to her mother, once the ideal woman, bare feet cozy on kitchen tile while she took her turn carrying
26
the angel-baby now six pounds, eight ounces lighter and smiling a little less with each directionless step her devastated daddy took.
but hidden till they yank it out, divining where: a tooth deeper than turfs green, no place but earth. They keep tapping in, Badger the vast management of greenness. Flying is something else. They say Yes! and Yes! and startle up to sunshine. My dark glasses turn them garnet red those dusky hunters who wear a pitch-black glory in their crowns.
28