December 31st, 2008
Bruce Cohen
THE JERRY LEWIS TELETHON
In those existential black & white days
It was indulgent luxury when television
Succumbed to its own insomnia.
My family adopted the Labor Day Telethon,
The day off, children with no bed times
Huddled around the talking box till 3 a.m.
Surrounded by our personal repartee
Of salty snacks. Members of the rat pack
Would radiate on stage, comedians who’d end
Their shtick with a somber note on the kids,
& a few tame rock n’ roll bands.
I must confess we never pledged a red cent
& when solicited my father said he gave
At work. I must confess when the crippled
Kids (it was okay to say that then) paraded
Across stage I made a fat, slow sandwich in
The kitchen so I’d be spared the drooling,
Slurred incoherent speech, their contorted
Bodies supported by utterly exhausted parents,
Their crutches & wheelchairs just out of reach.
Look at us we’re walking. Look at us
We’re talking. We who’ve never walked
Or talked before. I was curious about one
Thing: Jerry never revealed his personal conviction:
Why he volunteered his heart year after year.
People asked him always & he was stoically
Evasive. It was the scoop. It sucked you in.
I loved the 24-hour evolution of his tuxedo.
When the telethon was new & hopeful,
It was neatly pressed, shiny crow-black,
His bow-tie so perfect it must have been tied
By someone else. By the next bleary morning,
His face unshaved, bags swelled under his eyes,
The tie undone of course, you could smell
His stale Marlborough breath through the TV.
But Jerry could do anything. Just his face
Made us laugh. Astaire-like dancer, uncanny mimic,
A singer, according to my father, better than Frank
or Dean, he’d duet with whoever graced
His couch. Jerry was especially moved by
Unexpected stars & hugged & kissed even men.
I wanted to be Jerry. The wacky voices, the fake
Buck teeth. Unabashed generosity. I must confess
I got chills during the drum roll before the new
Total was announced. I even prayed a little
For the cure though I suspected none of the kids
Were Jewish so I worried my God might
Not be watching the show. But Jerry was
Jewish. So was Sammy Davis. I loved how
We adopted him too, glass eye & all, the way he
Threw in a Yiddish phrase when he spoke
& we all smiled his same crooked smile.
After three hours of sleep I would stumble
Downstairs & flip on the show. None of the big
Names were there at 5 a.m. Only Jerry. Only
Some pudgy Vinnie from Local 526 who pledged
744 bucks that he personally collected from
Customers on his bread route, only a scout master
From troop 13 whose boys collected 121 dollars
From returning Coke bottles at two cents a pop.
The early morning acts were crummy. Jerry needed
Filler. A girl, who would be described in those
Days as negro, was twirling a baton while doing
Cartwheels. Jerry was twirling a baton as well.
He could do anything. During her penultimate
Cartwheel the girl’s top slid down.
She quickly pulled it back up but I saw her breast.
It was brief I admit but I saw it on TV.
I had never seen a breast outside of my family
Before & she ran off the stage in quick humiliation
But Jerry, the gentleman that he was, ignored the indignity,
Applauded & asked for the new total. All my life
I wanted to ask contemporaries if they happened
To be awake at that precise moment, if they had
Seen what I’d seen, if it really happened.
You know the business about the tree falling
& if it makes a sound if no one is around?
Don’t we need a witness to validate our lives?
Each of us is so expert at deceiving ourselves.
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
December 30th, 2008
Review by Michelle McEwen
SWEETWATER, SALTWATER
by Rosie King
Hummingbird Press
2299 Mattison Lane
Santa Cruz, CA
95062-1821
ISBN: 978-0-9792567-0-7
94 pp., $12.00
www.skyhighway.com
Sweetwater, Saltwater, Rosie King’s first book of poems, is not only a baptizing of fine-crafted poetry, it is a baptizing of nature and exploration; it’s a nod, too, to the times when teachers were superstars and when one could play outside until dark—coming home worn-out and drenched in outside smell. From the beginning (the book’s cover is an image of a girl and the author playing in water), we are emerged immediately—even before opening the book—into the poet’s sweetwater, saltwater world.
In “Midsummer Homecoming,” the first poem, that word “homecoming” tugs at you, warning you that you’ve been missing something. Aptly placed in the book, this poem hints that this is not just a book of poems, it is a homecoming back to nature and exploration—back to the root of life. “It was the summer of the landing on the moon,” begins the poem. What better way than this to say, let the exploring begin.
December 29th, 2008
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Tanya Chernov
SOMEONE ELSE’S WET STYROFOAM
I practiced flirting on an Italian train
leaving Switzerland, with a European boy
camped out across from me.
I liked him when he sat down,
liked his messy hair, his loose sweater
his weathered pants that hung on him
the way pants ought to hang on a boy.I pretended not to notice him,
tried to look my prettiest staring out the window.
He tried, too, not to give himself away,
but we each caught the other staring more than once.
Little smile, wet my lips.
I watched like a child while he rolled cigarettes,
smoked them between sips of coffee, and glanced
out the window, then back to me.
I wanted him to speak English.
I wanted him to ask my name.When he fell asleep against his backpack
I imagined myself moving
like a thief across the tops of the seats,
to kiss his eyelids without a word of hello.But it wasn’t for me to wake him up
and the men who did were far less sweet
than I fantasized I would be.
Nine sweating Italian police hurried toward us,
looking more like commandos covered in green,
with weapons too large for such a confining space.
Swinging their rifles round to their backs
they flipped through my passport, and they examined
my body. The dogs watching me at their kneeswere not the dogs I knew from home.
Turning to my boy still sleeping
they slapped his forehead, and unpacked all his things.
His embarrassment was racking for us both.
The Polizia Ferroviaria, yelling and laughing
and slapping my boy on the head,
didn’t mind my watching. I knew they were talking about it.When they pulled him out of his seat
and threw his things on the floor he looked at me again
and asked for a cigarette. I knew enough Italian
to understand sigaretta, but couldn’t lift my arm to give him one.
I watched, behind the window, as he was taken away.
When he was gone I took a sip from his cold cup of coffee,
and smoked that cigarette myself.
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
December 28th, 2008
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Maria Mazziotti Gillan
SHAME IS THE DRESS I WEAR
On the first day of school, my mother slips a dark blue
dress over my head, ties the starched sash. Zia Louisa and
Zio Guillermo have come down the back steps to our
apartment to see me setting off. They don’t have childrenof their own and Zio Guillermo is my godfather, so they are
a big part of our lives. My mother has starched this cotton
dress handed down from Zia Christiana’s late in life
daughter, Zia Christiana who has enough money to buylots of pretty dresses for her red-headed daughter and also
throw chickens into the garbage that year when my father
was sick and couldn’t work so we lived on farina and
spaghetti. When my mother was dying, she talked aboutseeing those discarded chickens and about being too
ashamed to ask for them. Anyway, I’m standing on that
wooden kitchen chair, my mother tugging at the dress,
my hair formed into sausage curls that my mother curledby wrapping my thick dark hair in white rags, my eyes
enormous in my long, thin face. Zia Louisa stands back,
shakes her head and says, Why didn’t you get her a better
color? This dress that both my mother and I were proud ofuntil my aunt’s comment pointed out what should have
been obvious, that this dark blue color, perfect for a redhead
made my olive skin look jaundiced. I could almost
feel the starched skirt deflate. Sometimes I think that littlegirl in her navy dress has followed me my whole life
through. There she is when I am at a party and I find a
chair to sit in and never move or when I am afraid to look
in a mirror to see what the years have done to me or whenI go to an Ivy League college to read and I meet the President
and his wife, so slim and Episcopalian, so upper class,
the whole place is jammed with faculty dressed in tweed
skirts and broadcloth white shirts and leather pumpsand shame is the dress I wear that day, shame and that little
girl, that shadow, is there her head hanging down as it did
then, her hands shaking.
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
December 27th, 2008
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DAVID HAGE and DAN WABER: “When David and I met, he was a visual artist with a desire to incorporate more text into his work and I was a poet and visual poet with a desire to explore further into the visual arts. Collaboration seemed a natural next step. David and I started sharing existing work with each other and discovered that we were both wildly prolific in our output and that we were both idea factories. Right away we started brainstorming on large projects, but figured it would be wise to do a few smaller collaborations first, to be sure our working temperaments didn’t clash. I had a stack of about a dozen blank books that I’d been given as gifts over the years, and that I knew I was never going to use for anything. They were lovely productions, and it seemed a waste to not put them to some use. One of David’s favorite working techniques is to incorporate found, recycled, abandoned, and discarded materials, so this seemed like a good fit for us both. We got together and each picked one from the stack of blank books. The idea was that David would put art on every page of his book, and I would put words on every page of my book, and then we’d get together and exchange books. Then, David would make art in response to my words, and I’d make words in response to his art, and we’d end up with two finished books. Less than a month later we had over 600 collaborative pieces as a result, and we’d strayed as far from our original notion of David-does-visuals and Dan-does-text as we could go. Our methods included typewriter, pencil, letraset, markers, ink-jet printing, pen and ink, oil pastels, lumber crayon rubbings, and, of course, our mutual favorite ‘and more.’”
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--from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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