Aug '02 [Home] 12 Washergirl Stephanie Dickinson The Sideshow Geeks Eats a Minuteman 3 East London, 1888 Suzanne Burns Shore Blackbird Michael FitzGerald Sam You Heara Me Callin Andrew Glaze Design Scott Simpson Contributor Notes ~ . ~ Washergirl Stephanie Dickinson After Ché Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, was executed in the jungles of Bolivia, a local girl was paid to wash the body in a laundry shack. The sheets turn away as I caress Ché. On my wash table where fat blue flies light I unsnap his pants like any girl for pay. I smell on his hands (his thumbs they will take) What he has touched. Guns, sweet plums, mice. Turn away, sheets, as I caress Ché. When I peel off his muddied shirt I gaze His nipples white as rice cooked on fire. I unsnap his pants like any girl for pay. His hair lies between my scissor blades. I cut too much. They say he is Christ. The sheets look away as I caress Ché. My finger like a hummingbird's tongue tastes His calf and thigh angry with spider bites. I unsnap his pants like any girl for pay. The moon goes black calling ants to bathe Inside his eye where my small shadow glides. The sheets look away as I caress Ché. I unsnap his pants like any girl for pay. ~ . ~ The Sideshow Geek Eats a Minuteman 3 Suzanne Burns Harder sideshow fights are spent Defeating the sinew of chicken necks, Digesting the dormant charge of electric Stars barren in cold bulbs, but this battle Pinpointing my lips, intersecting the neon Of my heart, declares victory in the ascension Of my intestines sparring arsenals. This is my quest to exist, a silver-lined Orifice, plutonium center sparking Metallic incense, smooth steel shanks Ignited with internal combusting, Gristle of warhead bits marking my gut Like lovers' quarrels, or fingerprints. But no remnant of life can be read in these Nuclear dustings. No mote shed from the arm Of its creator. Not one solitary hair embossed Like a foreign letter on the missile's flank, Nor coded signal deciphered from distant shores. Even when I taste the radiant core, mouth dripping, Nothing satiates in that atomic taste. Radioactive, engineered, man-made— But never human. (Sideshow geeks traditionally devour inedible objects(whole chickens, nails, light bulbs). A Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile is 60 feet tall, weighs 200 tons, and is built to carry three thermonuclear warheads that could destroy three large cities in one half hour.) ~ . East London, 1888 Suzanne Burns For Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, Mary Jane, and the other unnamed victims of "Jack the Ripper" Uplifted, our skirts arced like wings Though you clipped the take-off Of moist flights and refused to hum The bridge of hymns sung with carnal tongues. You strangled halos on our necks, draped Your girls in the red pearls of fallen angels. A ceremony clicked in photographer's angles, Past the ash flash, dark powder translating The obtuse dynamo of our flesh procession, Our oracles of bone, our entrails The color of rare orchids or crown jewels Tethered us to the bloody London streets, The fetid alleyways where that autumn Five chambers of skin, rented To killers and gentlemen For coal and bits of bread, toppled On the cobbles and sank like tombs. Though our petticoats stank With the stains of grinding you chose Not to undress us 'til the end, Corralling the easy gait of your pleasure While the half-bred bulls of Britain Snuffed at our thighs and pawed at our middles. And they never knew your proper name To carve on marble pedestals and shatter Like the pillars of an ancient place. When you interred us, all of Whitechapel, With only the fuel of your internal cutting, Ripped, and unraveled at the seams, For one-hundred years our grainy pictures Blown-up and analyzed, how you laid Us gently on the ground, sliced Silent smiles across our mouths, Arranged our viscera like sweets lifted From the sticky velvet beneath our ribs, The valentines of our hearts carrying The secret of your initials to our graves. (From Freaks and Fairytales a manuscript-in-progress. Prior publ. or forthcoming in Carriage House Review) ~ . ~ Shore Michael FitzGerald Level down to the wet flats And feel the edge of an island sink Where soft skin breaks Away from the hard town People like little pegs in the sand Wakes caressed and erased Just a glimmer of the vast A breath of curve and haze Come dawdle with man With his slapping and tears And his flapping kagool His precious few years ~ . Blackbird Michael FitzGerald How sharp your beak tongue cuts And your bamboo arms work and work Hurling handfuls of rocksalt hard at me It is over, if you needed a sign Look at my straining leash Look at the carpet worn with the pacing Look at your pumping veins bubbling with heat Look at your poor clawed hands Look at the shot of us kissing and laughing Like only those in love can do See how old that makes you feel Look at our walls Bowed in pity ~ . ~ Sam You Heara Me Callin? Andrew Glaze It's only another old man dying alone, playing with dregs among the mustache locks, trapped in the bed wrinkles. But in some way, Sam's not here, he's cast off in the raft, is rapiding off down river by burning wreckage booming with ecstasy through the chutes. Gone with Huck, Jim, bilgewater and the dolphin, floating, pulling up out of lightning on castaway islands, beset with rattlers, he's lost in the burnt ends of steamboat nights— disappeared in the search which never finds itself. He's learnt to love that creature, wild, lover of blood, not quite bright as a stump—which is us. But don't dast stop laughing, else it'll turn out rage. He's gone down that unconsidering river , seeking perfidy's bandito strand, spinning it into yarn. And this morning , he's tossed one end of the line in the water, waits with amusement for what will take the lure and make a run with the hook of today. ~ . ~ Design Scott Simpson 1 We have a secret place my daughters and I where an old creek has run empty The sky above that hill pushes fast past the swaying tips of pines but the birch, oak and ironwoods have not yet leaves enough to dance No dry winter no drought emptied our creek the water turned aside some years ago for other work and my oldest stares at the smooth stones sunk into soil When will the water come back? My youngest has hands delicate as birch twigs and burrows pebbles from the bank like a busy mole carries one at a time to the mound of larger rock we are shaping into a ring for our campfire She chooses a spot for each and believing in some master design believing I would know it asks, Should I put it here? Or here? There, that looks good right there. But that's really the question, isn't it? And I think of the water's working years and centuries into polished stones forever setting and re-setting each here in our creek bed to be abandoned 2 I cannot tell how my knees bend how my fingers inside these leather gloves swing on their hinges I know only the digging and the occasional sun on my neck I cannot read the seasons burned into the grain of this handle or tell what secrets if any the hills keep but here, another shovelful for a moment visible mixing with air thrown toward the sun 3 The deep soil reclaims each stone we leave unturned, swallowing her wayward children around us, the trees are smoldering with an inner fire relaxing into the dirt that grew them flaking open with each rain skeletons all of ribs marking the ground with bright stripes of greener grass The air darkens as rain enters the ravine like a lost fawn: one step there, here hesitant behind us other side of the tree, there again, over the rise and suddenly certain almost purposeful all around us the leafy floor comes alive with movement We flee our unfinished altar rain drenching stones, wood, dirt rivulets refilling the creek bed and back in the car we decide, tomorrow to build a bridge Contributor Notes