rising off the confined cattle.
It rises from her memory now and permeates
the room.
A needle pierces her breast,
her gown slips off,
the cows bellow and her sweaty fingers
grip the table.
On the drive home,
the hills embroidered gold
with mown and baled hay
prick her eyes.
She hears the calves—
they are bawling now.
You Call Me to Jump
You call me to jump into a pool.
The water is dark. It looks deep.
I do not recognize the place.
Kids swim and flail,
ducklings without instinct,
some drop below the surface.
My day grows short. I hear your voice
and I hear a six-year-old yelling at me—
Auntie, help, I need help.
I push the kindergartener
up the hill on his bike
and listen to his non-stop shouts—
Look, I can ride a bike.
Can I push up my sleeves,
lift my skirt
and jump in?
Here I am,
hitting the cold surface.
Keep calling.
I need to hear your voice.
Barry W. North
The Molotov Cocktail
of the Deep South
I swore I would never
lie down with one of your kind,
and it was not even within
flying distance of possible
that I would ever let one of you
relive the slave days at my expense
by taking me from the rear,
although I must admit I had, on occasion,
used my vision of such a coupling
to amuse myself and others
with the image of a
modern-day wannabe aristocrat,
the color and texture of vanilla ice cream,
gone completely soft,
like so many of your tribe
have a tendency to do,
getting his rocks off
by mounting me from the posterior position,
in honor of his long departed heroes.
I pictured him
as a ludicrous caricature of his ancestors,
clad only in rolls of milky flab,
riding me, like one of his prized fillies,
while lashing my rump
with a tiny whip,
to match his annoying little node,
all the way to the finish line,
at which point,
wild-eyed and exuberant,
he raised his hand in victory,
as the Caucasian crowd,
overcome with generational nostalgia,
cheered for the triumphant return of privilege
as it was in the glorious slave and plantation days.
I must confess to you that
my unbridled enjoyment
in depicting of your people’s
moral corruption and physical debauchery
showed me how satiric ridicule of my own folk
might seem like great entertainment to certain
twisted members of your bloodline.
Then you,
white as a damn Ku Klux Klan robe,
came along, and
to hear my girlfriends tell it,
ruined everything.
Like a medicine man with a magic elixir,
they say you somehow managed to scramble
my little black circuit board.
They claim I am no longer myself
and with that I cannot argue.
I am so out of whack, at this point,
the only thing I know
is when I look at your face
I am struck colorblind
and at that mysterious
juncture inside my brain,
where animal meets human,
there is a fire raging,
sparking off boiling daydreams
of the two of us making what is still
the Molotov cocktail, here, in the deep South,
with me screaming,
like the fool I so clearly am,
as we burn old Dixie down.
The First Day
Today is the first day of the rest of your life. . .
—Charles Dederich, a reformed alcoholic and founder of Synanon.
The day after her
only daughter’s suicide,
she came out
of the upstairs bedroom,
dressed in white,
like a virgin bride instead
of a grieving mother
and now childless divorcee.
She hesitated at the top of the stairs,
and then slowly descended,
as though going once again
to unite with her man
and begin their life anew.
In an unexpected vision, she saw
the faces of her deceased parents
floating beneath her, their sparkling eyes
full of hope and love just as
they had been on her wedding day.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs,
stripped off all of her garments,
and trudged forward to the reality
waiting for her in the kitchen.
Inside the doorway, she paused
to take a few deep breaths,
and then started the ordeal.
With sponges, bleach, bucket, and mop
she cleaned the room for hours,
from ceiling to floor,
until, by mid-afternoon, the task was complete.
With her hands raw and bleeding,
she stood on the gleaming ceramic tile,
covered with her teenager’s insides,
her skin glistening
like the scales of a fish.
She left the kitchen,
went through the downstairs bedroom,
where her only child had been conceived,
entered the bathroom
and stepped into the shower.
She let the water flow over her
and watched what remained
of her fifteen-year-old daughter
swirl around and get
sucked down the bathtub drain,
at which she continued to stare until
she was looking at her three-year-old,
full of life,
waiting for her bathwater to disappear,
at which point, just like she always used to do,
she suddenly tossed her hip to the side,
flipped her hands out at shoulder height,
glanced up, and said:
“Look, mom, it’s all gone.”
All That Glitters
The trees at the edge of town
seek in vain to be heard
with every passing wind.
The crescent moon
and stunning array of stars
have not a single disciple
on the empty street,
but inside the pulsating nightclub,
women, wearing neon skirts
and perfume which smells like money,
sit cross-legged on high-backed stools,
sipping cocktails
not worthy of the name,
surrounded by men
whose clothes jingle
like pocket change when they move,
and whose eyes, when reflected
in the dazzling mirror behind the bar,
seem, at times, to flash
inside their heads like some sort of
genetic, next-generation bling
making its ghoulish debut
in the midst of a receptive crowd.
Thanks
Mom,
for the gift of life
because it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize Winner
to figure out
that without it I would have been,
from the beginning of time
part of the black pall of absolute nothingness,
which, for some strange reason,
has just made Archibald MacLeish’s
stunning little work of art
The End of the World pop into my mind,
a gem, it occurs to me, I would never have had
the joy of reading for the first time,
or the pleasure of re-reading over the years
to remind myself that life is a circus
there is no way out of,
even if you try to play it safe
by being only a spectator.
And thanks, Dad,
for the unconditional love,
which I have carried with me
every single day of my seventy years,
like that little pocket knife
you always kept in your trousers
that seemed to be able to do more work
and get you out of more jams
than a truckload of specialty tools.
And thanks, God,
for letting us all die,
often in bizarre, unexpected, and brutal ways,
because without death,
life would just not seem so precious to us.
Funny how that works,
but I guess you would have to have your perspective
to fully appreciate the humor in it.
You Are Also What You Don’t Do
When my country went to war based on a lie,
I saw the face of my dear dead father
as he instructed me to always tell the truth.
When my country engaged in torture,
I thought about the astonishing irony
of every talk show host
and every concerned parent in America
condemning, with high moral indignation,
the act of bullying.
When my country said that the euphemism
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
had produced valuable results,
I wondered how it would be to
live in a world in which everyone believed
the end always justifies the means.
In spite of all that,
when my country violated its principles,
I did not take to the streets to protest.
Instead, I stayed in my comfortable
three bedroom house pretending
it was not being done in my name;
sat at my spacious dining room table,
enjoying the fruits of the land,
as though not a single thing had changed,
as though what was being
done on my property, somehow,
had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
Charles C. Childers
Camouflage
Under the shade of a barren
apple orchard, little children play
at poverty.
With no shoes, they smear dirt
on their noses and clothes.
All innocence in hillbilly blackface.
They make mock depression dolls
with their lunch left-overs, chuck rocks
at beehives, pummel a copperhead corpse
with fiberglass fence-posts and fish for leaves
in mud puddles with bits of string.
They were sensible enough
to bring these things
from the air-conditioned city.
By the time they return
to the farmhouse, they’re covered
in burs, like coonhound curs,
new clothes all tattered and torn.
Their aged grandma catches them,
and tans their backs with a switch.
The children, tear-choked,
scream incoherently
at the injustice of it all.
Privilege
It was a generation that crept
along on knee-pads.
These, the picayune people,
preyed upon
the Almighty Dollar,
panhandling in cashmere suits
and charmeuse silk dresses.
Recessive
My mother’s in the living room,
staining the walls, spraying
them with the sickly sweet yellow
smell of cigarillo smoke,
using calloused hands as an ashtray,
and my father’s out of work.
I can hear him in the bedroom
suppressing sobs,
like smothering puppies,
into a bed-wallowed pillow.
They barely speak between
their gasping, both fighting for air
in their claustrophobic closeness.
Underseam
Between the incessant barking of the mixed-
pomeranian pup and the cutting clink
of knives on plates, nothing was audible—
a silence intolerable.
Of course, not racist, they kept their traps
shut. But still, she was a stain on the white tablecloth,
which one hides on the underside
or else attacks vigorously with bleach.
Synchronized
It’s dusk, and fireflies dot
the horizon in every direction,
communicating with their own kind
of Morse code. Brief dashes and dots
lighting up the trees, signals intermingling
with the indecipherable effects
of this midsummer evening.
As I fiddle with my notebook, trying
to capture the intricacies
of their language, I realize
its a frequency which has been denied me,
the antenna of my linguistic ear
broken to the complex cries
of their community.
One of theirs lands on my hand
in an act of sheer defiance,
as if to further my frustration
flaunt its semantic prowess,
and began to brandish
a rather aureate display
in order to irritate me.
. . . - - - . . .
I smashed it and felt satisfied,
demonstrating my own form
of intellectual supremacy.
Ricky Ray
Listening
A man, tired after a day’s long journey, comes to a cabin in the woods and opens the door. The hinges squeak and the sound of wings shuffles overhead. He walks in, waits for his eyes to grow into the darkness, to make out its forms.
He finds a stool by a table and sits to rest, not wanting to try his back on the floor. He has no sleeping bag and does not feel like piling leaves. He puts his head to the table and listens.
It speaks through his skin, his mind, tells him all he can remember of tables, of wood, trees, seeds and growth, of splinters, termites, rotting and soil.
Eventually his mind takes him to the edge of the field where he grows quiet and humble, where his inner voice no longer speaks for the table, and feeling takes over.
He sits there a long time, until his forehead begins to hurt. Then he lifts his arm and runs his hand along the edge of the table, slowing to finger its nicks, its rough spots, stopping at the rounded corner.
There, in the oily smoothness that might be the inner elbow of someone he once caressed in the night, he grasps the part of the table, the part of the tree, the part of himself that, then as now, he does not and cannot know.
In that shadow of time, in the descending darkness he belongs to the cabin and falls asleep, waking when his neck grows hot under the morning sun. If he dreamt, he doesn’t remember.
He listens, not to the table this time, but to the living day—the things he can hear, and the things he can’t. The hinges squeak. His stomach grumbles. A box of crackers, quiet as a skeleton, stales in a hidden alcove behind the cupboard. A small-breasted birdsong slips under the door.
/>
The Crossroads a Pound of Flesh Is
Sun and water become seed and soil
become timothy and clover
sharp and soft in the evening,
lips wet, fuzzy with milk, manure in the barn,
calves the color of gloves and coal
grazing in the rain.
Add years and slaughter:
a block of meat bought from a beef farmer,
blue-green plaid kilt,
splashes of red in his beard, slight New England
twang, an upturn at the corner of his mouth,
neither smile nor smirk, etched, when
he needs to put it on.
Add minutes and sweat:
this block, ten dollars, marbled with fat,
frozen pound in plastic pressed between palms,
freezes the hands I wrap around my dog’s Irish ears
as we sit on the bench, inching back from the sun,
gently rocking in the rise and fall of her breath
as she raises her nose to study
a scent I cannot detect,
folds upper lip under lower canine,
pensive about its statement.
Add seconds and sense:
come to some conclusion, she crosses one paw
over the other, tufts of cinnamon pluming
between toes, drops her jaw, unrolls
her tongue, lets drip one bead
of saliva and pants the heat away.
Quiet, Grit, Glory
Sometimes I go silent, not intending to,
just following an inclination to be quiet,
and then some shadow will pass
and I’ll think to respond, engage again,
throw voice and opinion,
take the counterpunches they ignite,
but before I do I turn my head aside
and hear the woods calling,
and the pull of that call tugs deeper,
so I go into the woods,
and when I come out to some
road or town or intent to be social,
I feel obliged to live up to the weight
the silence has spread over us,
and I can’t, the word weighs too much,
puts a whole world of gravity in the tongue,
so I stay silent—I sit with it until it breaks.
And sometimes that breaking is heavy,
the shattering of metal, lead, hammers,
brick you have to chew until
the teeth work it down to grit,
then the tongue resumes its fighting shape of yore
and lashes like I’ve always been in the ring,
even when I left all buildings
and said nothing but what was said
by the ring of the horizon.