Volume 1, Issue #2 (December 1995)
Edited by Matthew and Amelia Franz
Unless otherwise stated, authors retain copyrights over all work appearing in this publication. Individual articles, poems, and stories may be duplicated in accordance with the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law. Entire issues of Gruene Street may be electronically distributed in their original form for non-commercial use only.
MARK PIERCE has published non-fiction articles in a variety of medical journals, including Medical Imaging , San Antonio Medical Gazette , and Nurseweek . His poetry has also appeared in Electronic Revenge .
ROBERT SWARD is the author of twelve books, including Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) and A Much-Married Man (Ekstasis Editions, Canada).
MITCH PARRY lives in Montreal, Canada, and has published poetry and fiction in Grain, sub-TERRAIN, and Geist. His first novel, Vacant Rooms, was published last year.
GENE DOTY has taught English at the University of Missouri-Rolla for nearly thirty years. Under the name Eugene Warren he published several books of poetry in the seventies and eighties, including Fishing at Easter (BkMk Press).
RICHARD FEIN lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Oregon East, and other small journals.
WILLIAM LANTRY is Professor of English at Slippery Rock University. A former recipient of the Paris/Atlantic Young Writer's Award, he has read internationally and published in The Tennessee Quarterly and Charlotte Poetry Review.
KENNETH ALEWINE lives in Galveston, Texas, where he is currently at work on an aesthetics of his poems, oil paintings, and electronic music. The first chapter of a memoir collection, "Letters from the Asylum," is forthcoming in Blue Penny Quarterly.
H. PALMER HALL's most recent book, From the Periphery, was published by Chili Verde Press. He teaches writing and directs the library at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. He is also co-editor for Pecan Grove Press.
KEVIN BUSHELL recently received his M.A. in English from Concordia University in Canada, and now teaches at College de Rosemont in Montreal. He has published poetry in Tabula Rasa, Public Works, and The Fiddlehead, and has critical work forthcoming in Studies in Canadian Literature.
DOUGLAS LAWSON edits The Blue Penny Quarterly and Virginia Online. His fiction has appeared in The Willow Review, The Alabama Fiction Review, and other print journals.
AMELIA F. FRANZ also lives and teaches high school in San Antonio. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared or will appear in The Texas Review, Oyster Boy Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, English in Texas, Radical Teacher, and NCTE Assembly on Computers in English Newsletter. She also writes regular reviews for two small journals.
E. RUSSELL SMITH
The Mongoose Letters (Selected)
It is improbable that all the letters of Leonard Woolf will ever be
collected. My own research has been into those which were never written,
an endeavour admittedly liable to errors. The texts are rigorously
inferred from the abundance of other epistolary and biographical sources
of the period.
All these years we have hardly been apart, and I want him every moment of the day. But we still have each other -- Nessa and Thoby and Adrian and I.
My dear Goth, Only yesterday I learned your father died -- how should one respond? Are you wise to tramp alone the Welsh sea cliffs, chasing choughs and ravens, fugitive wraiths of unbecoming guilts, hunting foxes on foot to even the odds of vulpine memory? Last year you asked us to visit him -- he said he could have liked a deanery! He seemed at last to doubt his calling. You must not suffer for his proud sorrow. The noble vintage of his years was drained, and you his children mulled the galling heel-tap. And I -- Should I ignore the augury that shines behind your lovely sister's eyes? Should I remain to read your father's wisdom graven in her virgin marble?... (I see her on the Backs, in white, with wide hat and summer parasol.) No, I will take myself away, till she is mistress of her own discretion, and both of you have found a bright room of your own.
We had Lytton last night: you will be glad to hear that I am not in love with him.
You're sorry she accepted you? What if she had kissed you? Could she have given you the little peace you crave to ravel out your complications? an escape from the cloying affections of the old belles of Belsize Park? relief from the grief left by faithless boys? Surely as you made your way, sniffling and sneezing from Hampstead to Bloomsbury, you had time to reconsider. And why had you first suggested that I should marry her? For a moment she contemplated your disembodied brain -- sex, learned from a half-brother, was repugnant, and there you posed no threat -- but you and she shared the same cruelty, you and she were two left gloves.
I am going to marry Leonard Woolf -- he is a penniless Jew.
The shabby shopkeeper in me envied you, urbane in frock-coat and insolence, prosperous among gravestones. Omens thundered... After a moment of being alone in an empty universe we found you in our bed, between us. Did you presume to tell me what she's like? She sickened of all fleshly appetite, and now I must force her for my own relief! Get you behind us! I must attend upon her father's daughter (she has acquired his avidity for adoration) and though my sun won't melt her Olympian snow, beneath her fear a lively spirit sings that earth and people matter. This drives her mad -- and me to love her!
I must say the first day has been completely ruined by parting with you. Vita is very kind and sympathetic...
My wife is in France in the care of Orlando, for a week of Sapphic odium. On Tuesday I dine with your spouse and her lover -- Do you have any messages to send? We have parallel perplexities, you and I -- Mine rests in the full bosom of a disreputable gypsy given to transvestite frolics, but yours is more conventional. Would you trade places with me? She will write me every day, needing comfort for her gritty conscience, I suppose, demanding that I answer her -- Such a bore! I will not. After sixteen years perhaps she warrants a holiday away with someone else, but she will not subdue the cupid stomach of that animal. That full-blooming flower must be rummaged by a better bee. I shall greet your wife, her lover and their child, and learn from you to let a love find otherwhere those crumbs beyond my competence.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Dearest... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you... I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.
I thought she wasn't ready, as the bombs were falling, not ready to ask what comes after the light is out, after the drum... (dot dot dot) But Virginia has vanished! Gone, successful on the second try, with colours flying, defeated, like the tidal river where I found her stick, defeated by the boredom of the wilderness and the horror of the death of art, terrified by passive acquiescence to daily tedium without an echo in the wasted air. I sparked her fantasy, I raised her fear with a warning word, a hint of pressure. Cold fingers sorted her old sorrows; an unsafe intimation of the awful truth settled like a moth on the mountain-side, and Death was whistling in the churchyard. Your love might have stopped her -- mine could not... as the bombs were falling. Excuse me, but I will not come to tea.Previously published in EVENT 20:2 (New Westminter BC Canada, Summer 1991)
There is a spackled boardwalk here in this hallway of sighs Bordered by perennials, planted in careless disarray but which are now miraculously immaculate. The beaten planks lead to coastline which I do not recognize but which I know somehow is Texas. There are no ships, but I know there are ships beyond the ragged black line where sky comes down to water and lightning bestows its fragrant blessing upon lamprey eels and a host of bottom dwellers who make their own brightness in the absence of sunshine. And I think This is what I'm doing here. Borrowing light.
The station's signing off Just time
for the news & national forecasts
Up the band Ginsberg chants long lines about failure
All day the sky was stretched
high & thin, blue on
blue on blue further than blue
could reach Night is startled & dry, air
wrung numb after thick wet weeks
This summer
what I learned was the love of bones Shin-bones,
cheek-bones, collar-bones oh, shoulder-
blades, femora sterna (heart's
flimsy breast plate), knuckles, knees
Not scars or bruises but
memories nonetheless: brittle & persistent,
smoothed & grooved by tendon, by muscle
Personal histories in pouches of flesh
shaping how we are around what we've been through
Tomorrow will toss you far west, over mountains
abrupt and perfect as a spine
What we must never forget are bones long
as evening shadows
thin stalks wading in shallows:
desire.
There is no sleep, this night
in me, in the livingroom
where I write my sleep.
I open the window, and unhook
the screen; the bushes, metal lawn chairs
streetlamps
the moon, like pieces of a livingroom.
The stilts, rotted long wooden beams,
stand just beneath the bookcase,
TV,
the bedroom and kitchen,
the four corners of the house.
The sky,
dark, a starry imitation ceiling-
our family, house on stilts people,
goiter, bulgy-eyed mother,
weekend father
half in one state, half in
another
dots and dashes on the map,
Cross Lake with a line
running through it.
* * *
The highway alive, aloud
a blatant strip of rug.
And people,
in their houses,
the back doors opening, slamming.
Every hour
someone screams quietly for a while.
And babies, in little closed windows.
The TV, a bluish, fluorescent hearth.
-Tilting, facing
in, out, itself
its double, the house on stilts.
A house in the shape, a dream
in the shape, of itself
of its house, of its dream.
A sleep
the impossibility of sleep,
the vision, the life that it requires.
Her eyes opening, singing,
my mother, former Miss Chicago,
on a springboard.
A sleep, a sleep without a subject.
-- for G.
I was standing on my head and feeling it start to rain and the first drop landed on the sole of my right foot. And, next, I remember distinctly it begin raining upwards. Eileen, for her part, camera in hand, clicked away, making sure the light was right, and the shutter speed too, singing, adding and subtracting from a bouquet of flowers. And, truth be told, in those days I used to stand headside down, morning, noon and night, ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and that was the position of choice when -- How much love and warmth and goofiness there is between people anyway! I remember nodding as best I could standing on my head.
Night birds mock the bell's sound flown just ago from the belfry of a country church. In the wash of dim lights its whited wood frame goes pale in the morning dark, the way a schoolmarm's face seems drained of its rouge, when the chalk dust gets in her hair, as if to add years there. Her curls were once tighter, tendrils perfect zero's until stretched into sixes and nines. Now her morning hair drops to the basin in the shapes of bass clefs, to mark the dropping voices of her students, boys and girls her own age if not for the treble still left in their spoken lessons, songs of the nightingales, on long walks, birds she wears on her gowns the wind gives flight to, or simply birds carrying her dress away in gusts for warmer nests. The morning comes on Monday for the mad, where outside her closed window - frosty and cold - the fog acts as opaque nurse's hose round the trees. Fog-hose, strung out over the buildings and hedgerows, festoons of toilet paper in some crazed raid last night by a wending medical fraternity she saw as custodians, in their flattest white overalls, painting the trees, as if to reverse the process of cutting them down for housing. The day seems backward through her rounded sun shades, two black discs above her nose, manholes cartoon characters get lost in, why her chattering makes most sense to visiting children preferring her visions to the t.v.'s, Tweety Bird and Donald Duck with an aptitude for Music and Mathematics. The white coats stop on rounds, to test her elbows, a look in the eyes, then become children to blow from her hair the chalk dust, fatal snowfall down her shoulders. Her face, creamy as her half-empty milk glass, ice cubes a scattered staircase there to the rim, like steps that lead to a gutted lot, khaki ruins that leave off where once there was somewhere to go.
The seed planted thirty years ago uproots itself in an apartment empty of all but objects. Heavy earth parts before the river's wet insistent flow, clouds regather, lightning rattles below the stars. Midnight darkness opens for the telephone voice, through the ear's reluctant gate sorrow pours. The hole in the carpet where the body lay, the hole in the body where another person vanished. "God brought this flood," a woman says, "because he doesn't like riverboat gambling"-- as though the deer crushed in the torrent dealt the bright, condemning cards. What darkens will grow light again, what lightens will fade as ever to dark. The bereaved mother seeks clues in a son's possessions, aches to hear his voice from a friend's mouth. The laws of moving fluids guide many waters into the private spaces of all our lives. Chemistry, physics, mechanics conspire to drive a lead slug into our hearts. Each swift lightning bolt sounds a note for the song survivors sing in their pain-- "Split the wood and find me," the savior said. When your heart splits, whose face shines in the grain?Previously published in The Rolling Coulter and Rising Waters an anthology of prose and poetry on the flood.
Coyote is always out there, and coyote is always waiting...
It seems there are shapes of horses made of stones arranged ten thousand years ago in arroyo diablo, hidden by the thin sand of this almost deserted place. It seems a thin halo of moisture covers each rock, almost as protection against the Santa Anas, winds and generals coming from the east, to these low hills as I have come from the west. The salton sea has almost disappeared, and tire tracks are split by a mesquite now decades old. What would you do if one place on the plain is as good as another for sleeping while literal monsters turquoise and black carry their poisonous teeth silently, and scorpions curve their segmented tails around you in the dark? Would you not describe as these people did a small circle with your fist sized stone around you as your only protection against the known? But would you think ten thousand years later a man might find your sleeping circle here on the desert pavement and lie down on it for protection?
I wouldn't have done it. Like me he probably haunted those drifter, bus terminal hotels where: maniac drunks charge doors their hunched shoulders used as battering rams, or winos puke in the halls, or the trash steeped in the alleyways decides to burn. Then you really need the shoes on your feet, no time to fidget with the laces. Even if there isn't any crash, stench, or smoke, there are always the cockroaches nesting everywhere. But why he took them off in a barroom full of people I'll never know; I wouldn't have. Simply as everyone else did, I moved away. But not fat man. "Your feet stink, your feet stink." He didn't answer fat man. He didn't even raise his slumped head. The rest of us pretended to study the bottom of our beer mugs. "Your feet stink, your feet stink." He didn't answer fat man. A rouge of rage colored fat man's face. Fat man whipped out a gun, pointed it, still he didn't answer or even move except to run his finger around the rim of a whiskey glass. The gun cracked, the bullet whistled and his bloody head plopped on the counter. Fat man fled; we all exhaled, then quickly followed one another out the door, going our separate ways, not wanting to explain anything to the law. Alone, I picked my way through a carpet of sleeping drunks, walking, walking, walking, till I saw a park and collapsed under a palm tree. Nearby was a fancy L.A. hotel and in front a fountain lit by colored lights that made the gushing water seem so still as if it were a snapshot or a fluff of red cotton candy. I took off my shoes to cool my feet. "Christ, it was so lousy hot."
1. Spotlights shine out a hundred feet or more, show tufts of green where grass plowed under, struggles, shoots up. I whisper word to Claymores, 50 calibers M-60s, hold the dead weight of an M-79 listen to the sounds of water buffalo and of a distant firefight. In that dark men I have not really come to know wait quietly, barely breathe in fear that someone else will hear their breath, hunker down, eyes barely open, listen to their hearts beat, to night sounds grown suddenly quiet. The singsong cries of hootchmaids bring me back from a place I will never go and only, so far down inside, almost convince myself to regret never having been. 2. One morning in Dak To, I saw four men who had been five, LRRPs, kicking dirt into the sky, eyes focused straight ahead, silent, wrung dry in the hot sun. Sometimes commerce can not exist. Language can not always be enough, words can not translate what eyes have seen. Thoughts lie fallow, spears of grass that can not push up or out. This, then, is what war must be: a walk in the night, heart held in the hands of those who walk beside you, breath held in each other's mouths, smell shared in such a way that all scents are one, touch only a light pressure, hand on shoulder, eyes searching for movement in the dark.Previously published in From the Periphery: Poems and Essays (Chili Verde Press, 1995)