RED 
CEDAR 
REVIEW

4


Dedicated to the memory of

John Clark

and

Arnold Isenberg

who gave,

beyond the measure 
of their own times.


Figure without caption.
Melvyn S. Bucholtz Pen & Ink


RCR-4

A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS

PUBLISHED BY THE STUDENTS OF

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Volume Four: Number One

Spring 1966

CONTENTS

FICTION

5 Eddy Freeman / Nicholas H. Bradley

15 Selection from a Novel in Progress / Will Alberts

35 Paris, London, Berlin / Ricka Leonhardt Dinges

47 No Fit Place for a Child to Play / Marilyn Pettit

58 The Stargazers / R. Thomas Sheardy

POETRY

10 Three Poems / George Arrick

(Untitled)

Elegy on the Death of Don Perlimplin

(Untitled)

30 Three Poems / Melvyn S. Bucholtz

(Untitled)

Lime Grapefruit

Giver

33 Ladies of the Camellias / Kenneth Regenbaum

44 Poem / Martha Aldenbrand


45 Three Haiku / Steven Randall




54 Two Poems / Romanus Egudu 
Through the Eye of Night 
A Curs’d Blessing

56 Blighted Autumn / Jennifer Lee


Figure without caption.

Erin McKinney “Dancer” Liquitex

EDDY FREEMAN 
by Nicholas H. Bradley

We were all proud of Eddy. His name was really Edward Freeman, but all 
of us, even the masters, called him Eddy or Eddy-boy. Eddy was the fourth 
Negro ever to attend Byington, and everybody’s friend. He was never hazed by 
the seniors like the rest of us, and when one of us would make a crack, like 
he looked like a shadow in the shower-room, all the rest of us scowled, but 
couldn’t help laughing. Eddy played football and basketball even in our 
freshman year, though freshmen weren’t supposed to play varsity sports, and 
I guess that’s why we were all proud of him. He wasn’t too tall, but he was 
wiry and strong and very fast. He was handsome, too, very dark. One time he 
told us that he didn’t care that much for sports, but we knew he was just being 
modest. He was a great guy.

It was the Saturday night of the big end-of-winter dance that all of this 
happened. We only had three dances a year, so this was a big deal. I went to 
one of these dances once with a blind date, and I tried to think it was a big 
deal, with the headmaster and his wife taking a turn around the floor, and then 
some of the younger masters and their wives doing the same, everyone smiling 
and saying how lovely it was, and then all of us out there fox-trotting around, 
but I began to laugh after a while, and when I called up my blind date to 
apologize the next weekend, she wouldn’t even come to the phone. It was like 
a part of me cut loose from the rest of me and roosted above us all and looked 
down; and it saw us all wheeling around to the band of tired old men, the girls 
wearing strapless evening gowns stuffed with padding to hold them up, and the 
boys wearing over-sized tuxedoes with pant’s cuffs dragging on the floor, and 
all of us pale and damp and all of us thinking how grand it all was. I had to 
laugh, but it depressed me, too, so I never went again. I went to the movie 
instead which was shown every Saturday night in the auditorium.

It had been snowing all day a heavy wet snow and most of the dates hadn’t

5


arrived. Nor had the movie. The place was packed with people. Guys in tuxedoes 
sat in the back of the room and kept looking at their watches and then at the 
doors anxiously. There were a few dates already at the school who came to 
watch part of the movie before the dance began, and they caused a stir coming 
in. A couple of guys hooted and whistled.

After a while, it seemed as though we had been waiting hours for the movie 
to begin. It was stifling hot in the auditorium and the air stank of wet wool 
and galoshes. There were no windows open. The faded purple curtains hung 
absolutely still. Everyone was getting fidgety. Occasionally, someone would 
turn around and yell angrily up to the projection booth. One or two stamped 
their feet on the wooden floor. Ripples of clapping began and then died out. 
There were shrill whistles. Someone would crack a joke and the little group 
around him would burst into laughter, and all the rest of us would look.

No one claimed to know how it had started. I never knew. I always thought 
it came from the front of the room back, like a wave rolling onto the shore. 
Suddenly I was aware of a chant they were yelling over and over, stamping their 
feet to and clapping their hands. I turned to Jack Malony who was with me 
and asked him with my eyes what was going on, but by then I knew what they 
were yelling, and I felt nervous and ashamed at the same time. We should have 
left then, but we didn’t. I guess we were curious. “We want Eddy. We want 
Eddy. We want Eddy,” over and over they chanted, louder and faster as more 
and more people joined in. The whole room thundered with the noise, and the 
floor shook with the stamping feet. I had to lock my mouth shut and so did 
Jack. We sat on the edges of our seats, waiting for a master to stand up 
and quiet everyone. No master stood up, and I never knew if there was one in 
the room. Anyway, we stayed, I don’t know why. Everyone was laughing and 
yelling and stamping their feet and looking around for Eddy, who finally stood 
up with his hands raised a little. His eyes darted all around the. room. When 
they saw him, everybody yelled and stamped and clapped even louder.

“We want Eddy, we want Eddy, we want Eddy!”

He walked toward the stage slowly, as though something was pushing him 
that way, looking around him all the time, smiling with only part of his mouth. 
When he got up on the stage, there was a sudden hush. He stood there not 
really smiling, now knowing what to do with his arms that dangled and jerked 
nervously at his sides. He laughed uneasily and everyone else laughed uneasily, 
even me. He began to say something, but no one could hear, even though it 
was dead silent. Maybe he never said it at all because his voice was caught 
in his throat, or maybe he knew they didn’t want to hear him talk. He threw 
up his hands and looked around him up there, most of the time at the steps that 
led back down to the audience. Then something caught his eye off-stage. He 
disappeared for a minute and someone began to boo, but Eddy came back with 
an old cardboard box and a broken hockey stick. He grinned a jagged grin. I 

6


guess I saw it in a movie or read it in a book, but that grin made me think of 
people about to die; that’s the kind of grin they would give. My stomach tightened 
up and I wanted to yell something, but I didn’t know what to yell, and even 
before I could have, Bam, he hit the bottom of the box with the stick. Bam! 
Bam! he hit it again. "Come on,” he yelled, and he looked angry even though 
he was smiling. Everyone laughed uneasily again, and Jack and I didn’t know 
what to do. He began to hit that box in a steady beat now, crossing the stage 
as he did, half-dancing, half-pacing. The beat was slow at first — a bam, a 
pause, then two bams right together. He held the box way out in front of him 
when he hit it, his eyes not seeing anything, then pulling it back into him 
and doubling over it between bams. It looked like he was saying something 
to himself over and over as he moved around.

They had begun to clap now and stamp their feet again. I don’t know why, 
but I did too, and so did Jack. Just seeing him up there holding that box and 
stick and slamming them together until the bottom of the box was almost in 
shreds, made something push inside of you, like you’d been holding your breath 
too long and had to let go before you burst. You couldn’t just sit there. Eddy 
began to yell now, not saying anything, just yelling a kind of tuneless song, 
and everybody was yelling with him. A few people stood up and clapped their 
hands and stamped their feet, looking like they wanted to break every bone 
in their bodies or the floor beneath them, and that part of me cut loose 
from the rest of me again and watched them and me, and that’s when Jack and I 
stopped. Their faces were all twisted and red, and their eyes were looking 
toward Eddy, but they weren’t seeing him. They saw something else, I don’t 
know what, but I thought they were going to run up onto the stage and do something 
horrible. Eddy didn’t see them. He was beating that box faster and faster 
and yelling at the top of his lungs, with his eyes so tight now that he looked 
like he was in pain. I don’t know what made me think of it, but I almost laughed 
out loud when I did, but I didn’t laugh because I knew that I wouldn’t be 
laughing just at my thought or anything, really, except that I wanted to laugh — 
Eddy looked like a lion-tamer with a stick and box instead of a chair and a whip. 
He looked like the lion, too, pacing and dancing the way he was. I wanted to 
laugh at this and tell Jack, but I didn’t do either. And then the next minute, 
because it smelt so terrible in there, wet wool and bitter sweat and breathing 
and something else, too, like the smell when people are scared, but more than 
that, I thought I was going to throw up or run out of there.

And then the lights went out and the cartoon came on. Everyone was startled 
into silence, and then they began to applaud, whistle and shout, but it was 
different now. They clapped long and loud, but I knew they weren’t clapping 
either for Eddy or the cartoon. The picture on the screen and the sudden 
darkness caught Eddy, and he stood stock still for a moment in front of that 
huge screen with all those stupid cartoon colors playing across his front, and 

7


then he threw that box and stick away from him and walked off the stage and up 
the aisle and out, like football players do after they’ve lost a game. I don’t 
think too many saw him go. It was dark and they were busy telling each other 
how great it had been and trying hard to concentrate on the cartoon. I elbowed 
Jack in the ribs.

"Do you have the weeds?” I whispered. He nodded and we left and went 
out onto the golf course where we did all our smoking and drinking, and smoked 
up what was left of the pack. We talked the whole time about Eddy, and what 
a great guy he’d been and what slobs they were, but it didn’t do us any good, 
and I guess Jack knew it too.

8

Pat Hull Photograph


Three Poems / gEorge arrick

As I pass

my shadow floats 
along the fish net 
hung along the wall.

The net no longer catches: 
it enobles a narrow room 
dulled with dark people.

And I prefer to think

the net deigns not to catch, 
which once brought life 
to one

from where no eyes look.

The barmaid’s talk of Pirandello, 
with naked and absurd men

who sit on stools and watch their glasses melt, 
slips through the holes in the net, 
slides to the floor, 
and runs back to the bar 
to make a new glass;

the soft trio’s protean sounds

evade the net,

and the waves and waves of the magic horn 
blow through the eyes of the net;

and those who gaze into the net 
for dreams of Portugal 
perhaps

and travel posters 
and would be caught 
are not.

The net doesn’t look with eyes 
which see where no eyes look.

But it’s poised in folds 
along the wall 
as if to fling, 
and I am sorry 
I’m a shadow when I pass.

10


ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF DON PERLIMPLIN

In his corner of months 
the young boy rising 
in the old man’s breast 
flowers the wind to greening: 
its blue-veined breath unbuttoning, 
unfolding the close-moist sighs.

I would touch you, say mandrake fingers, 
and bring you to my mouth.

And the spreading wind laughs

at the red-clad hunter, 
the villainous hope 
and silver knife.

In his corner of months 
the young boy frantic 
in the old man’s bones 
seeds the wind with his marrow blood: 
the clots spring up with drum and fife 
and wind away down the dragon-wind’s fire.

I would breathe you, say wrinkling lips, 
and break your fire on my mouth.

The armored wind mounts

a scything cry;

in his breast of pain 
darkness shatters.

In his corner of months 
the green wind passes 
through the young lad’s death 
and the old man’s skull: 
spring shreds down the fleshless eyes 
for the green singing birds in the dead man’s sigh. 
You lie on our altar, say swinging trees;

your lover kneels to touch your flesh.

And the paraffin moon 
breaks light of its mooring 
to move away 
the foam-black earth.

11


This was the town

of infants of day-old diapers

and dirty legs,

of little bigger kids

of the yellow hair and blue eyes 
like discarded soap wrappers 
on a shower room floor,

where you and I ran to the setting sun.

This was the town

of the dead white faces, 
where the young men 
carved their girls’ names 
on the toilet cave walls 
and scratched appropriate hymns 
to the valley of the ram 
and the girls didn’t care, 
and you and I hid behind the setting sun.

This was the town

of voices not beautiful from song

and old hands not beautiful

from work,

of old ladies’ pension dresses

and old men’s pants 
swinging loose at crotch, 
where we stuck our hands into the setting sun.

This was the town

of the fertile bodies,

of the upstream swimmer

with an enzyme in his head

that could split the veil

and create a pig-iron belly,

and the mystery of life and death

was in those bodies,

and you and I put out the setting sun.

12


And you and I 
leaning against the dead sun 
remember that the sawn-off man 
with thigh-level eyes 
which used to leer at the ladies’ legs 
doesn’t even have one chartreuse pencil left 
in this town 
for me, 
let alone you.

13


Phyllis Luginbill Lithograph

SELECTION FROM A NOVEL IN PROGRESS 
by Will Alberts

1

I live on the poem not on the punctuation.

I don’t know how I got there and I guess it doesn’t really matter as I really 
don’t suppose I give a damn except I was there and that was all. I was there 
and he was there and she too also you were there, and that was all, the matter 
of fact being you gave me my first bath, and he mixed me my first drink and 
she went to bed with me first for what it was all worth while everything is 
in the gutter only some of us stoop looking at the stars.

The poet manque is Eliot Harrah. It would be hard to make clear just 
how life appeals to me, but I’ve pretty much concluded it does only so far 
as I can talk to you about it: there concluded and there after I suppose to 
relieve the boredom and sense of having already arrived and labored at it 
and been hopeful at it so long as it lasted, need be it will have to be done 
something about.

You’d think with all this breathing here we’d be bored stiff with it, but 
who ever knows we’re doing it it becomes second nature like Wordsworth says:

And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part,

As if his whole vocation 
Were endless imitation.

And therein also lies the biggest frustration of my life: Am I a little actor 
conning a big part, or a big actor conned with a little part?

Today a poem hungrier, than night for color, than love for more, than life 
for live I must.

15


2

I keep thinking it’s Thursday. It must be something fine once happened 
on Thursday. I keep thinking it’s and know I know what I’m thinking of must be 
done on a Thursday. Today is Wednesday though I know I just heard it somewhere, 
someone yelling Wednesday Wednesday Wednesday in New York girls 
in their summer dresses and some broads too. I was downtown and when I 
heard it was for sure I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket — chalk I steal 
from school piece by piece as my final collegiate protest — and slipped behind a 
service alley off the Metropolitan Opera House and painted Wednesday Wednesday 
Wednesday in New York on my canvas of bricks between the canyons.

And it’s a cathartic. Cathartic. Since I’m hungry since Tuesday when I 
grubbed a meal off my old buddy only grubbing straight cigarettes off 7th 
Avenue all day. It’s a relief and a placebo, like a good piss after good tap beer 
out of frosted mugs, to go on the wall with my chalk and leave my feeling my 
strongest feeling it’s Wednesday, the one before Thursday, on a wall of the 
tortured town.

I know how you see me, unshaven so my face pure and beautiful underneath 
shows only up like the mask of a raccoon. And my sweatshirt, my beautiful collegial 
sweatshirt that I hope to be an alumnus of someday if I could only make it 
through these summers, looking less like a sweatshirt than a shroud like a shroud 
after the wormes have timed and time has wormed. Colorless, my pants were 
once dungaree blue but what matter dung cotton-dacron colored colorless by continuous 
washings and contaminations the subways and streets bring to pants they 
see too much of. My nails and fingers bitten and burnt but we’ll skip that for 
my eyes sharper and more beautiful in their sharpness than ever by contrast to 
what else you see me and in me and of me my eyes sing me still.

But it doesn’t matter how the hell you see me will you stand me a cigarette? 
sorry I don’t smoke. Then why in hell’s your right forefinger so yellow and 
burnt? Get screwed. What’s wrong with the world? Try to bang one out of a shit 
heap.

3

Sol’s throwing a party tonight at Sol’s. Guess I’ll go — just to bring some 
order into life. Not that it’s completely devoid of order, tomorrow’s Thursday 
and I’m thinking about it. It’s desolator than you think you know. Little children 
contemplating suicide continually after being embarrassed or condemned, to 
show the old lady life will not live without them: you’ll be sorry! Older little 
children 1—19—consider suicide for order’s sake: if all else fails, beat it . . . 
But the point is the party and order of sorts and people of sorts, and if around 
people I can still think about killing my grandmother — I a poet of sorts.

16


My grandmother a woman of sorts — as the subway sings my thoughts 
lessly and me toward the Bronx — she is uglification the ugliest person I have 
ever seen. Lives by herself, and me when things get desolator than I can not 
bear seeing her in the face and in the body but must sort of look at her sometimes 
and kiss even at the coming and at the going less painfully through her hand five- 
spotting my hand and running down the flights the full belly feeling good to 
my nausea of her face and her body its blood my blood though in me running 
backwards, running. GodBlessingme all the way in my journies from her apartment 
her voice echoing me more than I can stand, off the tripe rock of brickan- 
concrete chasingly me until unable to bear it alive — that face and that voiceless 
voice and feet-eyes hypocriting me with godblessinglymes a big man I-hope-to- 
see-you someday now though lookinglymost at me knowingly — I wish it dead.

All doubts all certainties a villian I must be come what maybe as a result 
of me my self blessed only by me on a full stomach stomaching not the comic 
of blood. An old woman causes pain fully knowing with pleasure. Pain.

4

What can a man do? When he has reduced everything to poetry and found 
he has been himself poetry reduced. Hungry for another person to reach out 
and off me off my poem to the punctuation, on to where others live lovingly 
living lives with tiny hearts and massive stupidities.

But this is incorrigible — it’s all a matter of concentration, self-discipling. 
The only truth is in violent things, the subway bickering down the track the 
third rail my thoughts electrically; the man fly-casting himself from a plane: 
the simple truth of that moment with his parachute packer, and himself.

There’s no truth in boredom. Everything means too much to me to mean 
anything to me. I don’t like people. They mean too much to me.

They bore me unless I can taste them into my mouth and get their personalities 
stuck tight and meaty between my teeth, their goodnesses and badnesses 
and mediocrities choosing places on my tongue that will transmit their flavor to 
my brain and maybe slide down my tongue and down and later or sooner 
become a part of the part of my brain they have flavored. But most of the time 
now, Mr. Wordsworth, I am convinced I am the big actor conned with the little 
part, and so I rationalize the only trueness my breathing and my tasting know and 
that is the lie to me and I will lie to you for therein only can be found relief to 
breathing’s boredom for such a big actor as I poem.

The train grumbles stoppingly and with the silence of non-metalic feet 
heeling their passengers across a waxless concrete floor toward the concrete of 
their existence, the basement of their being, I feel in my stomach the pathetic 
prattle my mind has been making for you to the scatter of the subway, and makes 
me feel like a child in loneliness calling out to the smell of hot buttered popcorn 

17


roasted in cashews candied in cotton caramel. Is it time? Can I be contemplating 
killing, my mind so little and rushing forth all the time through you toward the 
ice cream vendor who is melting down and up ten cent streets in his ice cream 
war that is so really and so mine in all his meltingest of day darkness dreams?

5

I try to give you an emotion and not tell you too terribly much, — my dream 
and my war being so far less than my poem that the more you try the less I 
lie, my lie my raison d’être.

A male animal was bom says the certificate, on August 6, 1945. I say the 
day freedom lit the first atomic furnace with Hiroshima, I was born of it — 
though half a world away — and as such spontaneity of dynamicmadness in me 
is justified. What can a man do when he was born to yearly out and in celebrate 
himself a symphony pathétique? I am not making an excuse for some fool setting 
off a bomb in a baby carriage, but rather for myself setting off in a baby carriage 
with the bomb: therefore I a fool of sorts.

It will suffice to say I hope that of my childhood — which may be extended 
to yesterday, or to one moment ago, or to one minute from now two minutes 
from now — I remember nada de particular or next to it, so eventfullessly 
did my life me along up until now and perhaps including, that everything seemed 
droll, pathetically amusing, not worth remembering onward from when it happened. 
What can a man do when from boyhood, indeed infancy, he has been in 
his second childhood? A man can always cease. Or be a poet of sorts, or contemplate 
the killing of the killing of his grandmother.

The party of course — and the train I have missed my stop, but what matter 
I like to walk, it helps me think, and so I have been walking and am almost home. 
Home is where one room is for the sleeping the living and a half a room for the 
kitchen that is supposed to be more efficient, but I never use it anyway so 
wouldn’t know. And a bathroom I wouldn’t have spit twice for when I lived 
with my folks when I had folks. But now it’s so messy with unwashed clothes 
and empty depositless coke bottles and things, it’s sheer nausea to be there 
and tell myself, well it’s home of sorts. I don’t go there much. When I have to 
bathe I sponge in the men’s room of the N.Y. Public Library. It’s quite a 
trek down to 5th and 42nd just to take a bath, but something about the marble 
there gets me. Something so permanent and unalone like it’s a natural thing for 
marble to have surrendered itself to be steps for my sneakered soles and floors 
and walls.

I look at my apartment. I am confused because it is really not me, my nature. 
Yet anyone who has ever liked me, loved me enough, gotten to know me enough 
to wonder not just how about me, but sometimes why, has become disillusioned, 
disappointed with me. Yet perhaps they have not tried enough. I look at the

18

Mary Harrold “The Hat” Pen & Ink


J. A. Taran "Sporadic Encounter” Lithograph

apartment which is a fine broken egg shell scrambling in its own ugly yoke, 
and wonder perhaps, and regret perhaps. It is them. But the thing perhaps is 
to search out dandylions to wine and not to be afraid.

6

Not to be afraid. Isn’t that a farce? Sol’s party at Sol’s. That’s security. 
It’s not terribly much better than my rooms, but Sol’s has class — his has people 
in his. And people improve the looks of everything everywhere they are. There 
are nearly fifty people here crowded. That’s not a lot in the general scheme of 
things; when Sol used to provide the booze of his parties his door used sometimes 
to go down to the Concourse and often didn’t find itself back up for hours 
of waiting on line — even though it was cheap stuff and watered down no end. 
Now it’s bring your own and so you don’t see much to speak of though from 
piss poor college kids, as all the left over coin goes for books and pot. Potpourri. 
The poor man’s wealth, the slobs suavity. I a poor slob.

The party is sort of. If elaboration is quite necessary, you have not been — 
too many people slouching out in in — pay a buck get your smoke. Corners 
most of the room with girls in their summer levis long straight hairiedly spellbinding 
outofit boys. Boys scored out of it or on the way if they’ve the price 
or a friend or a slave; wholesaling the President with some pre-law guy, in one 
puff summing up the whole world situation and what’s so wrong with it, and 
what’s with it. An in-one-puff Lippmann. Then the same guys despairing over 
the weather situation overlooking some Conrad sea on the tear blue stainless 
steel sofa by the window. And then the host nowhere to be found on the floor 
leaning against an infection green hassock and some lavender girl the color of 
whom it’s hard to tell such is the fire under her nose.

Now you see me, and two fellows about as light as fireflies wend an argument 
in my direction in pity of my standing not in a corner.

— Americans take better care of their cars than they do of their own bodies, 
philodendronized one of them. Don’t you agree? His right forefinger was 
overgrown with goldenrod colored bathtub ring.


— Actually, I answered quite seriously deliberating and looking quite deeply 
into his eyes where I could see his left lip quite seriously attempting control 
of his twitching pickled tongue, I keep thinking it’s Thursday. He looked at 
me quite sorried at having had raised such a subject at such a time.


— You’re a quite right guy, he said, absolutely right.




He sort of was drawn into the overhead light in one movement of the lower 
eye lash which left no room for speculation as to what he ever really looked 
like except for his big lips which sort of melted into his face like hot butter 
as he moved the smoke-stained words from his mouth. In his place she was.

Man, alone and enraged, I was, there standing, warming myself by burning

21


god there under my nose and beating my mother by the overhead light overhead. 
An adventure, she stood there, committed as the last breath, two breaths 
ago, and deep almost as life. Her eyes fled me and into me as though knowing 
the wart of me was not me though its roots bit deep and scabbed themselves 
so as to flavor me, and yet her eyes knew my flavor, the true one, burned yet 
still beautifully under the wart. Her eyes sung me; and almost had color to 
them and a ring of song and singing of their own to contend with, but they were 
desperate and alone there under that draughty bare bulb, — desperate to reach 
out to another person. And be reached out for.

— You’ve a nice pair of eyes, I said. And felt compunction for the first 
time for not having shaved. Long pause.


— You’ve a beautiful body. More pause. But don’t get all self-conscious. 
I sculpt things. So I’m supposed to notice. I mostly do bodies — without the 
heads — because faces are generally so ugly, so worthless to immortalize.


— But me you want to hue into marble for ever and ever?


— Clay. I’m but crazy for you body — the head I couldn’t care less what 
you did with it.




She wasn’t a garden of beauty herself — except for the eyes, yet as bodies 
go, hers was more beautiful than at least half the people I’ve ever met. But 
seriously, she just kept looking at me, and it was an inconspicuous enough act 
seeing as where we were, so I didn’t mind but contrari-wise relished it as I 
could practically literally feel the massage her terrific eyes were handling me. 
She sat on the floor and I sat on the floor. And that was all, she and I on the 
floor in the room under the bulb.

It made me think of my grandmother, though — and there I was with people 
and with one person very much with, and able to think about her. An old 
woman’s face, too old to be spontaneous anymore. Older than that, and uglier. 
There were mosquitoes in her eyes, white bellies out, flapping around in there, 
unable to focus on anything, at you when she looked at you — but really towards 
you or through you but not into you. She aimed her head casually like you would 
a shot gun at you, not really directing it or caring to have it directed like you’d 
want it to be so maybe you could tell a little better what her cockamania words 
and sentences were supposed to prove if not mean by the look somewhat in the 
eyes. But there were only mosquitoes. And mosquitoes all around the face, 
under the skin in there flapping around and dancing and maybe singing there 
under her corn cob skin all around the face where you could see it doing a two- 
step up near the surface in narrow little twitches, and where you could look 
away and still not be rid of it knowing it’s there where your eyes were and will 
be there when your eyes go back to the face and the violin-sounding eyes.

But what can you do when this is your grandmother and you know it too 
so have to do some walking through the door even though it’s the hairiest thing 
in your life, but for some reason have to; and she knows it too during the coming 

22


through the door and from ten-fifteen feet back she lifts her hands and twitches 
them the few feet toward your shoulders and neck in agony for her muscles and 
your stomach, all for that wet kiss on the cheek or the top of the head if you’re 
lucky enough to falter a quick cough or sneeze bringing all the hair of your head 
instead of the cheek of your face into her face. And since you’ve known her she’s 
been watered down kisses and shaky hands, yet it gets no easier to accept just 
because you get older and she only worseness.

There were times when she used to make wine in the bathtub by the stepping 
on of grapes so they’d not only get under the feet but between the toes especially 
the big ones, so you could bring the toes together with the next smaller fingers 
and feel grapes suffocating sometimes with a little pop and always that 
oozing which was good and was miles below your nose yet could be smelled 
way up and more each time you brought a single grape closer to being a wine. But 
now she didn’t make wine or even drink it bought. But now she couldn’t even 
look at her feet much less do the crushing of grapes with them, as all the looking 
and all the looking she did all day from the windows all day didn’t let her look 
at her feet all night because of the ugliness swollen on them. This was the 
ugliest thing in her life. Except for the rest of her body this was the only ugly 
thing in her life as everything should only have luck and health and happiness 
and gowithforandtogodnessest’sblessingnesses, except for her life itself which was 
almost as ugly and sometimes uglier than her feet for her.

So what can a man do, the son of a son of a mother, when he can’t remember 
five minutes into his childhood five minutes ago? And it hurts the not remembering, 
and the trying so hard — for a clue, and the failing, feeling you 
might have been or as well have been bom this five minutes ago for what the 
remembering’s worth, except that you’ve a beard on three days old and can 
remember the growing of it all through those days because you grew it alone. 
A man always grows his beard alone, and feels it through the days, and shaves it 
off — the coming and the going of it alone. Maybe I’d grow a full beard. 
Grow it nights with a girl beside me. But it wouldn’t belong to me, not even 
if I trimmed it every day, not even the trimmings. Only the growing of it.

How could I promise anything to age, not even knowing how many cigarettes 
between third finger and thumb I’ve flicked out and against them against the 
wall or pavement firefully and absent mindedly? Who I went to bed with last 
week and if and when and why most of all and even where because there are 
places and there are places and what’s so good to have remembered that, counting 
my life out in unsheeted mattresses and streets I’ve upped and downed, when 
time in its petty pace from day to day creeps and means nothing only the less 
than which than is age, — and an old woman’s face, too misshapen to be spontaneous 
anymore. Too misshapen to say: My, grandma, how I look like you, the 
son of a son of a mother. Because if my face looked like that I’d be thinking of 
killing myself instead. Or growing a beard from my eyelashes down to my chin 

23


and further to cover it up, all of it, and not shave certainly, and not eat except 
timidly in the dark or a deep corner where it didn’t matter for me to lift my 
beard that came from my eyelashes and down, because no one would be able 
to see me in my face such would be my discretion, if I didn’t have the balls to 
commit suicide, or didn’t have someone to kill me for it and put an end to the 
face and my hating of it.

Then there’s the personality, the little etchings we make of our emotions 
and hidden things day out and in. I wonder if my body were her body but 
in me, if I in my agony of self pitying — But what matter. What does anything 
matter save when we were glad and young that we cannot remember now. 
The best days of our years and they’re beyond recall. Why don’t we, in what 
upstairs of us controls these things, want to remember when we were glad and 
young?

This party I’ll remember, why, what of it is it, this linoleum torn and 
bare and missing and walked and talked away colorless and designless and 
importantless as the windowframes spitting paint on the viewless parade of life 
beneath betwixt between below pane and eye and pain. Don’t pain on my 
parade, nor rain sanelessnesses brainlessnessestmost night and bright and seeing 
and being and thought things I have nothing to say to that will not be a mere 
rain in a rain which will never be missed.

This bare bulb shedding light on bright dimnesses that could as well be 
my grandmother as that guy in the corner passed out by his own importance 
his speaking to him so much, but really a merely a so muchness in a so manyness 
world. He guffaws and the light blinks him so he thinks he’s inspired and 
carries on with more words deeper and deeper into himself in would-be illuminations, 
the light-blinking enthused by his mawkish sentimentality. But little 
does he know it blinks him and not with him. And her it could be blinking too, 
but in me. She is everywhere blinking herself at me through things like the 
sun whimpering into blinkingnesses by clouds, or girl’s legs hanging on to 
summer dresses, or the likeness to a chair I’m used to seeing her in, blinking me 
into nauseum by the likeness to her in me, yet just a chair in a room. The likeness 
to her in me. That’s what I’m killing, I know. Her body so misfortuned by 
age, — in me though running backwards.

Yes, yes, my body beautiful. Little girl of tight pants. My sweet lady of the 
pacific with the Chinese eyes on. My little one under the bare bulb, smile and I 
will give you an apple. Brim from ear to ear without moving your lips, and I 
shall pose for you naked forever, so you can make me forever. My body will 
sing me always through your hands. Your fingers in me and on me mold me 
Oedipus before the fall, create me Job before he met God in the tunnel of 
love, sing into my body the fullness of Shakespeare putting his pencil down after 
killing Hamlet. My lovliness, stuff me and pluck me and bake me a feast always 
for the lust of the eyes of those hungering for my beauty, in me forever by the 

24


rays of the suns of your fingers. And your mold will achieve for me what the 
ugliness of her face in my blood projecting itself never could. Oh uglification, yes, 
unzipper me from the basement of my being.

Nude, nude, nude ... I cried. And carve me up into immortality! And 
faces turned, and lights blink, and blinking bare bulb lights overhead bulbishly 
blinking blinkness bulbinesses. And I take a last long drag of the joint someone 
had scored me several minutes before back a couple of minutes minutely but 
deeply drawing sucking squenching down into my lungs; raised my arms so 
light absolute potent flightable, squashing the glowing firefully red ash under 
big left toe lightly firmly like a grape in a bathtub burgandying the porcelain 
nudely. Nudely. And the walls haven’t changed color, but I can feel the colors 
of it; and the bare bulb blinks on but is blinking out heat I can feel; and only I 
have changed in the room — big, bigger, but have though not changed in size 
but can feel my fingers thinking for me, thinking me; a little hair below my left 
knee trying to become ingrown; growing eyes of that girl feeding her love by 
teaspoonfulls from her eyes into my eyes, spoon-fed I, into me her love sings 
me my body of me through her nudely immortalizing its, its — vaccinating away 
ugliness of blood.

Growing growing growing, and I’m outgrowing my body. — Nude. Sculpt 
me forever I cry. And peel off my body outgrown, in growing me so much I 
must be rid of the wart, the hypocrisy. — The summer’s flower is to the summer 
sweet, but to itself it only live to die. Shakespeare of course. The Great Nude. 
And I cry it. But the room still isn’t changing, only pulsating to the possessive 
pronouns of my body. I’m sitting, but of course the pants come off more easily 
with the sitting. All the other faces are sitting too, sitting on my body with 
their eyes. And the one face, the face of eyes, my Michelangelo, is traumatic.

— You wanted me nude, I cry. You’re not putting me on, are you? 
Sculpt me . . .

Then things slowed down. And we looked at each other with them slowed 
down and getting slower the more we looked. But her looking at my eyes 
seemed forever, yet was only an eighth of a second. She couldn’t look into my 
eyes is what she told me with her eyes in the second that was forever. She 
said, she hollered at me through those big dog jollo eyes in that less than a 
moment that she could never be able to look into anyone’s eyes again. Nevermore.


The light was cold on my bare bulb lit body. And the eyes were warm 
though. All the eyes and all the eyes. I stretched my arms and found they were 
still light and airy and carried with them eyes, and eyes. I breathed in through 
my nose and could feel the people in there, drawn in by the breathing, and the 
smell reminded me of school and the crowded bus. The smell of little children 
and some older, the school bus smell not even like the classroom of more kids, 

25


but better. You could smell the noise and laughter and chewing gum and baseball 
gloves and smiles smelling like bitter lemon when kids beat on each other 
and the bus driver grinds the gears. And the feel of the vinyl seats broken in 
the back bleeding cotton can be smelled. Then the sun blinking us all back 
through smudged windows, and blinking the little shmucks in bows and baseball 
caps, smelling more like winter every day.

I keep thinking it’s Thursday. An arm slips around my bare shoulder and 
I can feel the after shave lotion of it, cool and compassioned. A chill runs down 
me and I could grab the hand and press it into my fingers for the smell of it, 
the smell of a person of beauty. However it goes away too fast and the trench 
coat takes its place. My nakedness gone. Someone buttons me in the front, 
still sitting. I stand. The smell is a little thicker up here. I want to lick my 
lips, to wet them a bit, but mostly for the taste you get off them from not 
licking them in a long while — yet we must maintain some semblance of 
propriety. Standing over her, her head bowed, I could still feel the outstretch 
her eyes are making to grasp at something — where is it now, the glory and the 
dream? Where have all the flowers gone? Her head is down. Is it true I can 
really smell the muscles in her throat contracting to keep her head down? I 
want to say a man is always prey to his truths . . .

— Don’t ever put water in the wine, I say though. She is not looking up. 
So what, — Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Ibid. I turn. I go. 
I go to seek some great perhaps.

7

The dank hall that smells from all the darkness that’s passed through. 
All the darkness, and all the darkness. It’s the awkward darkness of a warm 
night, and I can feel all the darkness sitting there above my nose on both 
sides and a little back and a little in, all the darkness and it sits there inside 
sort of slouched with its bare feet stretched out and on the hassock it thinks 
my mind, and just sitting there big toe tickling the inside of me. But there’s 
light, too. Every once in a while little spots and spurts of it bouncing forth 
and then back over the dark. Beware the light, my son, the claws that scratch, 
the jaws that bite. The light that was my eyes.

My eyes, through me running backwards — back, back backupwards into 
the light that’s still me, in me a remembrance of things, but mostly her eyes in 
me and I must admit through me; but for me? In me her eyes, but running 
backwards. Backwards to the moment her eyes changed colors. The color was 
the room, no the world, and all in it. In that moment it changed and was not 
the world but me, the color of me in her eyes. Me and my nakedness before her. 
As she desired it, yes; as she wanted it, I guess not. And my nakedness shall 
cleanse the world.

26


And I can feel me under the trench coat. Naked? Yes, it’s true, not a dream 
of sorts; I can feel it. I have cleansed her by it too, truly. I have cleansed her 
like taking my pitchfork into her windpipe to search out her heart. How 
tenderly I descend with my fork. How meticulous I am about the walls about 
me, not to scratch or puncture or destroy the mucous membrane in any way. 
She feels me down there with all my delicate care which is almost a loving. And 
she trusts me for she is singing gently soft things about me. She is singing me 
for the air rushing around me down there in her pipes is her song only lower 
than can be used for words beneath the cords that make her tuneful beauty.

There I am with my pitchfork down there, and her singing. The singing 
is too beautiful for words and I am so touched, deeply touched — she sings 
me, that with tenderloving care I plunge my fork deeply, almost blindly deeply 
into her singing, and pull it up, to the beat of her heart on the end of my fork. 
To the beat of her heart I’ve stopped the singing of me. It was a fine heart, 
and a fine singing.

The streets somehow are darker to me than I remember them. I have upped 
and downed them walking until I don’t know where I am, and will not look 
at a sign through the darkness, for the darkness is me through me and it hurts 
and I like the hurting such as it is, without the knowing of where I am, for the 
knowing of where you are sometimes hurts worse. And all the knowing and all 
the knowing could not hurt worse. — the worst is not, so long as we can 
say, 'this is the worst’. Lear.

The darkness is somehow darker to me, but has all the color of total darkness, 
or total knowing. I see the darkness through a tear darkly, and this is the 
color, and this is why darkness. One tear after another, bad after bad. Tears 
that are my heart. Do I cry her or me? But perhaps it’s the losing of her I 
tear, or the losing of the losing of her — which is in the libido: the hunger 
of the hunger which is so much more satisfying than a seven course dinner. She 
is lost and I have lost her. And the rest of her days shall be bound in the 
shallows and in miseries. And the rest of my days shall be bound in the nakedness 
of her mind through me. I have achieved something through her. Everythings 
got a moral, if you could only find it.

The sidewalk is rough beneath me, and the grass finds its way up through 
the cracks to my heels and soles. Even in the dark I can feel it. Why polish 
your shoes, they spend most of their life in the gutter. Why contemplate the 
killing of the killing of your grandmother, who is a delicate vegetable — yclept 
rhubarb? — existing feverishly in a sewer: guttersnipe. A vegetable of sorts, 
she plays at the game of life. But she is existing by a fine string, a delicate 
(determined) thread that is my gut, that is a dairy fork in my scrotum, turning, 
twisting turning twisting turnings, with each breath. Why? She cries it not I 
— or at least louder — cries why do I live, why am I tortured, why why why ad 

27


infinitum. The crying is not mine, it is the fork in me gouging by another’s 
terror. — the terror! the terror! the terror! She scream me and in me for an 
answer, but I can only give solutions. Do I delude you with grandeur, — the 
knife, the pills, the staircase . . . It’s so easy. The world is so full of solutions. 
Only the answers come hard and drag at your guts before they honor you with 
an appearance; and then you only see your guts on a stick, and the stick is the 
answer, but it’s covered with your guts.

Little girl, mon petite, smile and I will give you an apple, and if you will 
be happy I will be glad to hold you close to my heart forever and do you no 
harm. Little tuft of cotton in my navel, bellybutton of navel-orange, I am a 
cronic bastard, but sincere and significant.

28

Erin McKinney “Unposed Model” Liquitex


Three Poems / melvyn s. bucholtz

Dappling against glass skin

They line

streaking to

Beads in their last traces

Through which the soft

Appling haze of autumn cold

Is seen

peeling

Beneath edges of leaves.

In the milkweed green of morning 
The muted whistle-chatter from

Bearers of frosted berries

bound

By the serene clasp of chill

That rising in the first light, 
reveals them,

They move

jaggedly

Across the wide,

thick blades

Of the field,

folded

By the blurring streamers on

The window

Into the bobbing wings of

The speckled plum skins of 
Bashful trees.

30


LIME GRAPEFRUIT

They pull

Through the menagerie of bright blue air 
Streamers of willows straining

The wind with direction

She feels the tart sweet green

Of fem comb wells of

Hunting eyes as fingers of

Whistling earth along cold grass

Relieved of night by

Wet morning sun

Blades stick against the feet 
Tattooing memory on her 
Longer than the Herons pale 
Flight leaves a dark outline of his 
Motion

And the arrogant waving of pink 
Daisys up milk-green stems

Confusing the sky with their lime fragrance 
In the centering eye

where she

Riding the blue column of air 
directionless

Hunts the whistle’s echo

Into the stomachs of trees, down hillocks 
Of frosted grass, clearing the sky 
With green crystals warmth 
in the sharp

Distant buzzing of the cicada

Edges unseal

The anxious lips of the walnut flower

Of youth and

Dripping of the velvet

Centering eye

She mystifies reality in the blossoming din 
Of her nervous, silent

Mumbling.

31


GIVER

Breathing in the warm

Clean skin of early afternoon

You doze

Bland as silk stockings folded as

Brown shadows

reaching through

The tiger lace of sun currents,

Breathing clean into the room

The pockets of my bowl shaped hands 
Stabbing over its own shoulder 
Through the mirror

the chord grabbed, 
Opening sky into the sand fog of sleep 
You whine clear

As a drop of perspiration thins its bubble 
Down your brown chest lost

In the staring breast

Forming a slight wave

into the patterned

Air you breathe spirils of wood

Like smoke

Asking me awake,

we ask

Without moving

The tiger head of sun or re

Moving the smoke between us if 
That part we had was ours, and held 
as intimately as flowers given without 
Provocation or stiff

demand.

32


Ladies of the Camellias 
by Kenneth Regenbaum

1

In the fragrance of an instant

We grew of each other,

Fashioned denizens of whispers, 
Bathing ourselves in warm soapy water 
—And coming away smelling nice.

Shortly we ate of the same breath:

Lost wondering in spades of summered color, 
Fished dreamily by inner springs

Where washed our toes- quite twenty- 
in a whirly pastels and crayoning.

We, gentle notice of measuring fancies 
Knew our tides in opening motions, 
Flaking starry cushions of each other 
— To loose a solitude in beauty.

2

Although holding so tightly

Where our arms in bloody conclusion, 
Squeezing lengths to stay together, 
Lounging strength in seconds tasting 
Quite a wisp of blood and lashes.

Friends of neither, worlds of posiers 
Nails of chalky chipped and broken,

Lonely pennies rusting over,

Every kindness hurting gently 
Glistening with the fall of fingers 
Sliding grayly in the dark.

33


Figure without caption.

Gilmer Peterson Lithograph

PARIS, LONDON, BERLIN 
by Ricka Leonhardt Dinges

The time was 1938, and so it might have been one hundred years ago — 
those pale, remote figures under the blackened trees. Cold winds stirred across 
the birch tops and down the meadows of the old, purple earth of Poland; and 
the last leaves dropped. It was in the aging Baltic country just before the War, 
at the north join of the German and the Pole on the historic black waters — 
in Danzig, a winter land of sticks and hunger, spiked with feudal lords whose 
hearts were overlaid with the thin elegances of Paris, London, and Berlin, but 
which still ached with the antique hates and griefs of the cold countries, in 
literature always called "Mother . . . .”

Those were my childhood days, and the Countess — the Countess— had 
always been a figure in them, unseen but looming, like a witch. Her family was 
very old, very rich. She was said to be a complete aristocrat in the time when 
such expressions were still used; her very name was important, connecting us 
directly with the kings and bishops of our common history, begun in 1300. 
There was never a time when I first heard of her. She had reigned, possibly, 
since the time of the Hansa, when the trees were young, and the port open 
all year ‘round, the Countess Andora von Etten and Spezca.

The weaving legends of the northern countries brewed about in the downstairs 
kitchens, and in the backs of churches, and possibly this is one of them. 
But it seems to me, now, later, that I really saw it all, then, when I was tiny, 
in that frozen world of ghosts and ginger cake. They are all dead now, the 
serving girls, even my parents, who might remember. But such stories are still 
told there, and this is what I recall . . .

I was a polite, well-trained child, preeningly typical of the upper classes, 
given to little speeches in foreign languages and curtsies dropped to the floor. 
My mother and father, the geehrte Herr Doktor und Frau Doktor, trotted me

35


around like a poodle and I leered at tall ladies for marrons. The world seemed 
very calm then, coherent, and genteel. My days were spent with the grownups, 
passing cakes and being polite, and in being taken for walks by a panorama of 
servant girls, seemingly all named “Maria”.

We lived in a fairy tale, at the edge of a great forest, in a villa built in 
the French manner. It was timbered and stuccoed and draped by willows, I 
recall, with a ladies drawing room of pale, thin, blue, and a smoking room for 
the gentlemen in hot velvets and wood and enamel. There was a grand piano, 
and a great deal of fillet-tirée work. The grounds, very flat, had a tennis 
court, and gardens, and a sunny dancing pavillion. I remember it with spring 
weeds, dandelions and daises. But at the edge of the gardens stood the woods — 
more than a mile of close black tangle, extending to the Polish border. At the 
far side of that forest, so far away that none of us had ever gone there, stood 
the winter palace of the Spezcas.

The servant girls in the kitchen, which was built beneath the house, and 
had a warmth to it, would tell me, over glasses of blistering tea, that naughty 
girls were eaten by Spezcas. How they must look, those Spezcas . . . like the 
witch in Hansel und Gretel? A woods, and naughtily children, and then a tall 
woman with a long black skirt!

And the girl would stir her glass and whisper, “Eat you!”, and whistle the 
words out through curved yellow teeth into the sinking afternoon air. And I 
would cry, like my Mother, in English, the special language of counterfeit 
horror, “Oh, no!” And she would sing, “Eat you. Eat you all up, still alive!”

But then, upstairs, I would be allowed to sit with the ladies again, and sew, 
and hear about parties. But late, outside, as the clouds closed over the far, 
white sun, and the shadows ran ahead of my bicycle, I would keep my eyes away 
from the forest — and run in when the first lights went on.

There were many visits in those days. There was little else for ladies of a 
certain rank to do in Danzig. The gentlemen were in town until late, and 
there were servants for all the necessary work. Mother was the only one of 
her circle who had had a child, this being attributed to the fact of her being 
English. And so we visited and received, in the long afternoons between one 
and eight, and I heard stories from Paris and Vienna and Carlsbad. I was 
even in Carlsbad myself at one time, for three months, while my mother took 
the waters; and learned to receive alone, later usually to become the guest 
of a very old lady or gentleman at tea in the Grand Salon.

The Danziger ladies were amused, it seems, to hear a five-year-old passing 
opinions on Carlsbad, and the performance was often requested. Through this 
story I was to become an invited guest of the Spezcas.

I remember the day vividly because I expected so much to be frightened, 

36


and wasn’t. For though she was very tall, and blazing with the horrible fire of 
dirty diamonds and Parisian silk, she stooped immediately to my level in the 
foyer, and gently took my hand.

“Child . . .”

She had a beautiful voice, like a queen or a fairy, and a special white skin 
without mark.

“Child,” she said again as if she didn’t quite believe the word, and I, pulling 
my fringe, whispered to assure her:

“But I’m here!”

It was a moment away from time. In our low world, near the marble tiles, 
I realized no one had ever been just my size before, and very much liked her 
for it. But what she might be thinking I did not know, for she looked quite 
unhappy even though she smiled.

Yet a third time she murmured, “Child . . .”

And then the moment passed — my mother came in, greeting her.

“My Dear Countess . . .”

And bore her physically away.

I watched the party from the hallway, once again small amongst immensities, 
and had to be bribed to the fire with cakes. I watched her across what seemed 
a huge distance, sitting quite straight in a high gilt chair, holding a fine cup 
motionless in her long hands. Around her, the flamboyant circle of our robust 
ladies, formerly so satisfactory, looked gross and apoplectic. They fell over 
each other while yet sitting quite still. She was lofty, I could see, speaking 
rarely and yet always being spoken to.

And I could see, in my peace, the precision of her person, her innate chill 
and grace, and the care with which she had been made.

Time is always long for a child. I almost slept in my wonder and comfort, 
and it was through a trance that I saw her rise and come away. The farewell, 
the stately dance, the weaving hats and crossing hands, the “We musts . . .” and 
the “Of course . . .” and then the final smile for my mother, who was carefully 
seeing her out. But then through my vapors I could hear her distinctly again. 
Her words flowed softly and increasingly until they hammered at me like shouts.

“. . . the child in my motor car. Do you think the child would enjoy my 
motor car?”

I ran to her knees afraid to speak in my hope. My mother, with an arm to 
me, asked, “would you like to, Suzanna? Would you like to go in the motor car 
with Countess Spezca?”

I shrieked with pleasure and began promptly to cry. It was decided another 
day would be better, in view of my “tiredness,” and I was carried from the hall 
by the maid, too torn by sobs even to shriek a goodbye to my friend.

Late that night, the wind woke me, and I knew, with the child’s sure 
knowledge of promises, that she would never come back again.

37


Yet the following Friday afternoon, as the early dark swept up the grass, 
and the leaves began whistling around the sides of the house, I was picked out 
of the garden, given a bath, and festooned in a new green serge frock. It was 
the new party dress, I could see, from the handsmocked yoke and the rows of 
small buttons at each cuff. There was talcum, and hairbrushing, and a set-to 
with my hands. Cold, stiff party shoes were lifted from their tissue. And I 
was given orders not to touch anything, but to sit on the bed until called for.

Is all of childhood spent waiting? I sat on the bed watching the grey gloom 
spread, afraid to turn on a light. But then the door flew open again, and 
my mother came in, laughing.

"Such a lucky girl. Such a lucky little girl! Ride in a motor car, without 
even Mamma or Daddy. Look who’s here!”

On the doorsill a stranger stood, a fat old man in a uniform, holding a 
folded car rug. My mother never explained that this was the Countess’ chauffeur, 
being herself stiff with excitement at this triumph. I was led away all unsuspecting, 
laden with jackets and coats, a bonnet and gloves, scarf and a 
handkerchief; and carried, wrapped in the rug, from the rarely-used carriage 
entrance of the house, to an immense white touring Delahaye.

It was of course, the Countess, sitting inside, in the familiar clothes she had 
worn before, and smiling, very pleased with herself. Beside her sat her lord, 
a silent, white man who looked at me once, and then resumed his thoughts.

But she, she was wonderful. She undid all my wraps, asked me where we 
should drive, and let me give the order into the speaking tube.

We drove very slowly down the allees, and turned eventually into town. It 
appeared we were chauffeuring the Count to a dinner, but that after that we 
could motor wherever we pleased. I gave pleasure by suggesting we see the 
Marienkirsche, our cathedral dating from the Middle Ages, where a multitude 
still worshipped daily before a fine Memling altarpiece. The Cathedral is 
fantastical to a child — larger even than life, incredibly high, spun and whipped 
in a perfection of gothic tracery into the very clouds. Along its sides, the 
abandoned crutches of the believing ill and the minute cakestands of the 
believing well. Set in the heart of the valley of the Vistula, the Marienkirsche 
soared past the highest points to be seen. The far mountains dwindled by 
comparison. Such is the power of faith. Outside the great doors, magicians and 
spiritualists performed impossibilities, one old man causing an entire horse and 
buggy to disappear into the sky.

We spoke a great deal, the Countess and I, about the nature of our mutual 
religion, she nodding, always, an "Ah, yes!” and I spewing my catechism 
verbatim. And then she suggested we also view Cafe Blum, and even stop 
there to eat.

The Cafe Blum, situated since the time of the Stuarts on the windfree side 
of the Hundegasse, was a shop devoted entirely to Viennese coffee and pastries, 

38


which had found great favor with the ladies of my mother's circle. I had been 
there many times, permitted to choose by own cake if sufficiently quiet, and to 
sit at a table by myself, where I doused myself liberally from the silver bowls 
of whipped cream left standing. And so now I came into Cafe Blum in my glory, 
a debutante, a lady friend of the Countess herself, not only to choose cakes, 
but to order some chocolates too, in the Viennese style, and to talk politely 
about the events of the day.

Which were minimal. But she — she had spoken just that day to Paris — to 
her twenty-one year old niece of whom she was very fond, having no children of 
her own. I asked her several times about Paris, but she used it as a device to 
start me on Carlsbad again, and, half out of vanity and half out of politeness, I 
told her again my memories of the haut monde — gin, silk, and old ladies. 
The piece had grown quite long with frequent telling, and I was still only half 
through when the Countess noted the time with a murmur and sent the waiter 
to summon her car.

We drove home very quickly. I was tired and seemed to have lost my ability 
to make her speak. She grew more and more silent as we raced down Oliva 
towards the country, and sank back into the blue shadows of the car, hard even 
to see. I fell silent, too, not wishing to offend. But as we drove up the gravel 
to my family’s house, she roused herself with a pretty shrug and smilingly took 
my hand.

“You are a good little girl, my Suzanna.”

“Thank you, Madame,” I nodded, counterfeiting as best I could a sitting 
curtsy.

“Very dear, pretty child. You do me much good — you are still fresh.”

“Thank you so much, Madame Spezca.”

She gave me a kiss as I stepped out, and promised to come soon again.

Inside, up the steps, in the stifling air of the dining room, where my mother 
stood waiting as my father dressed for his dinner, I could not make the connection 
between two worlds — the one so vital and vivid, the other so remote and 
yet telling. My mother, in her pearls and her red crepe-de-chine, asked the 
servant to leave me for a moment, and asked me what the Countess had said.

I replied that I had had a lovely time, and that the Countess had said 
I was “fresh.”

“But darling, you weren’t, were you really?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“But you’re so perfect, you always behave.” She smiled at me bravely, and 
with winks.

“Oh yes, I behaved,” I replied. And to my father, as he entered, I made 
a low curtsy.

“The child’s back from the Spezcas?”’ he asked.

39


“Mmmm,” Mother nodded, “and the Countess thought she was fresh.”

I realized just as she said it, that another construction could be put on 
that word, and was hastening with a statement of general and categorical innocence 
when my father, a customarily dour and even angry man, coughed with 
immense, rocking laughter and leaned, in his abstraction, against the wall.

“Fresh with the Spezca, your daughter! Well, good for her. What a change!” 
He laughed for an unreasonable time.

But my friend never came again. Not that I had really expected her, or even 
thought about it often; but when I did, I was sorry, and began to confuse in my 
memory the events of that afternoon until I wondered if I really had been rude 
and could possibly have made her cross. It did not really seem to me that I had, 
but on the few occasions I took these thoughts out and inspected them, I felt I had 
missed a thread, or forgotten something important.

But it was a busy time. I was starting school, where the nuns tried to cure 
me of my “Polish superstitions” with what my father told me were superstitions 
of their own. The Nazis marched with increasing frequency; a radio, a miracle, 
came into the house and was an accepted reality within three days, blaring 
flatly confused events in London and Berlin, Munich and Rome. The world 
opened up for me. I began to realize the rhythm of the world — that the strawberries 
came every year, and were not a unique, biblical happening; that the 
snow is made merely of very cold, very cold water; and that change is more 
likely than any lack of it.

By the following spring we were packing — Mother said, to take a holiday 
in France, but, in actuality, to emigrate to The Bastion of Freedom, America. 
Our favorite cups, pictures, napkin rings disappeared. I never thought of the 
Spezcas any more, there being so much talk about who was leaving. It seemed 
for a time that everyone was leaving — Van der Reis, Gutknecht, Donnermeister, 
freuhoff; and then, that everyone was staying, that nobody could “get out.” 
But at any rate it appeared that we could. Mother told me, in fact, that my 
father had already left, and was waiting for us in Holland. Why Father was 
awaiting us in Holland when our holiday was to be spent in the south of France 
I never asked. It was a great secret that we were ourselves to leave in two days. 
From the moment she told me, I was not to leave her sight.

We became now like madly matched sisters, she crawling about in the 
nursery cupboards with me, looking for the lost wig of a favorite doll, Armandina; 
and I trotting to a late evening dinner with her.

It was much different from the parties of the year before. Frau Tulle, it 
seemed to me, had become both much kinder and much older. She kissed us 
both now, and cried a lot, while my mother, once so gay, answered just with 
motions of her slender fingers. There were ten of us there, ranged around an 
opulently set table, but all dressed for the day, and picking at what we had come 

40


to know as National Socialist Abundance. I sighed heavily for the Cafe Blum, 
realizing as I did so that we had not gone there for some time.

During a pause in the conversation I asked my mother about it.

"Cafe Blum?” She went pale, smiled vaguely at me, and turned back to the 
table with a tired gesture. "You see? What can one tell a child?”

"I would tell the truth, Dolly liebchen, so that they learn from this experience.”

"But oh,” breathed my mother, "Blum was . . .” She waved a hand, shaking 
herself.

"He was — Danzig, Madame,” Lukas answered, looking at me. "Danzig, 
Madame, as we shall remember her.”

The grownups were much stirred by this and there was the shuffling that 
always precedes toasts. I was let down from my chair and excused to go play 
if I liked with a favorite old toy left in the living room for me. I left the room 
and fetched my doll, who had an English coin hidden in her silk handbag, and 
told her for a while about choosing cakes at the Cafe, which she would be 
allowed to do if she ever learned to behave; but I felt alone and missed my 
mother, so went creeping back into the hall adjoining the dining room, still called 
in those last few days, la salle d mangee.

From between the imperfectly closed doors a hushed, musical voice was 
reciting — Frau Tulle. She spoke as did my teachers when it came time for a 
story during our days. I propped myself on the door jamb and listened. Before 
long realized that the story was about that long-ago princess, the Countess 
Andorra Spezca.

Frau Tulle was saying: "... I remember. Then she went again last year, 
for the tenth time, and by now they must have discovered something, or possibly 
it was just Peasant’s Luck” (here everyone laughed) "but by October our Dora 
was pregnant. Yes! Absolutely! Our Maria has relatives working there! And I 
saw her myself then, at the dentist’s office — now we all know she has flawless 
teeth, whatever was she doing there? — And I commented to Hermann who will 
recall” (Hermann must have nodded) "that she was plump, for once, and looking 
radiantly well, especially for someone who had just had a tooth drawn. Well! A 
tooth for every child, you know it as well as I do. So! At any rate. She was 
pregnant, really pregnant, took to her bed immediately, even had the blinds 
drawn, saw no one, did nothing, lest she jar the baby somehow or some such 
thing. You know, some women . . . but then, again. The pregnancy ran along — 
well into the tenth month, even the eleventh. You know what a sign of luck they 
think that is, those insane Poles. But all right, luck, if you want to call it that. 
So that when the baby finally, at length, made its appearance, it was more than 
perfectly formed, fat, and very strong, with long black hair — so long they had 
to tie it back with a ribbon — and with nails that curved over the ends of the 
fingers, which had to be clipped, for he was already finding his mouth with 

41


his thumb, and so cutting himself. And then — then they saw that he had been 
bom with a perfect set of teeth. Perfect! All of them!”

“Really?” a voice asked, amused.

“Really! And they say she was terrified, and flew into the most collossal 
rages, and swore . .

“Countess Spezca?”

“Hell yes, Countess Spezca, whom do you think I’m speaking of, some ignorant 
peasant girl? And she raged and swore and she pulled at her hair, my dear, 
great handfuls, and cried terribly. And lay on the floor, and hit at herself and 
at the others. And then — then — oh, my dear, it’s impossible to believe . . .”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Then she strangled it.”

“Tulle! You lie!” Hermann Tulle knocked back his chair as he stood. “Events 
excite you, Tulle! Remember yourself.”

“I do remember myself, Hermann. You asked me yourself why on earth the 
Nazis had her in custody and were handling her like an animal, not that they 
don’t handle everybody that way. I myself . . .”

“But Tulle,” I could hear mother asking, “how do you know?”

“My own girl went with them to bury it. With the servants. The family 
would not do it. They say already that there was no baby, oh, it’s too dreadful.”

“But why would she do such a superstitious, medieval thing?” Mother was 
asking. “She was the most civilized — the most civilized. And always so wanted 
a child. She used to borrow my daughter . . .”

“Possibly,” one of the voices added, “possibly we change only on the outside 
as we grow up and are educated by the world? Possibly underneath we are only 
what we heard in early childhood? What stories we all believe in — Jesus, 
Hitler, Father Christmas.”

“But to kill one’s own child, Herr Blumenthal?”

“To kill all of Man, my dear lady.”

We left, we came to America. Of the Spezcas, little was heard. He escaped 
and went to somewhere in South America, where he married, and had several 
sons; she, it was said, had committed suicide.

42

J. A. Taran “To Dance Alone” Lithograph


by Martha Aldenbrand

This is a crazy game of tenderness, 
talk softly, rock back and forth, 
laugh long and quietly, say

I am schizophrenic but 
you can come in, let’s play 
this quiet game, pretend 
we’re squeezing grapes with our tongues 
and tasting the juices dripping down. 
We’re in a yellow attic,

I will show you the clothes 
of the period, I have a muff.

Do you love me for that, 
for showing you something 
that is only us? Baby, 
slip on this shaggy coat 
and we’ll walk out through the rafters.

44


Three Haiku / steven randall

The moon, the blossoms, 
a painting on the still lake. 
Shattered, a small fish?

One sparrow and I 
fleeing the summer thunder. 
Are we the same size?

The fish, the sparrow, 
in deep cerulean blue, 
fly before my feet.

45


NO FIT PLACE FOR A CHILD TO PLAY

by Marilyn Pettit

There were four of them together, two dapples and two blacks. She knew 
it though she couldn’t see them yet — four appearing black then white then 
black again on the night wind that carried the stench of their naked sweat, 
and the plunging of their heedless hoofs made the long black wind rattle and 
coil around the curtains, hissing, drawing them back and there was nothing 
to stop them, not the screen that sieved the wind nor the magic in the moon 
patch and surely not the quilt, surely not Nana’s quilt for all the God in bows 
that tortured fingers tied. Her screams were hollow in the fleeing wind as 
the horses plunged closer and closer. Their necks were arched, their heads 
were down and pushing and their manes blowing forward over their wild 
crazy eyes. They came, blind and running and bearing the night. Blind running 
hoofs, pounding, manes scattering, quick, hard, pounding fast, sending the wind 
shattering through the screen. Coming to a sudden stop, the wind dying, 
uncoiling from the curtains and falling unto the floor, the horses manes falling, 
revealing gentle eyes. They came softly around her whinnying and nuzzling 
with their moist velvet noses. She snuggled against them in turn; the matched 
dapples, the watch-eyed black, the heavy loined leader. Their nuzzling became 
jostling and she pushed them back with a laugh. Their jostling became shoving 
and the gentleness went from their eyes. Closing in around her and shoving 
each horse became two and she couldn’t breathe for the hot stench of naked 
flesh. She was being shoved from one to another, from muzzle to muzzle, 
shoulder to shoulder, and then among their knees as the horses grew bigger 
and their eyes went wild again. They began to run around her sweating, 
snorting, and stomping their feet. She was so small in the circle of big crazy 
horses. They circled in unmatched pairs, popping up and down with the 
uncertain rhythm of a carnival ride gone out of control, panicking and popping 
up and down, throwing their heads back and whinnying wildly, trying to escape 

Mary Harrold “Albert Street” Woodcut

47


their own panic but stiffening into wooden figures, their sweat become enamel 
hard. They were circling faster and faster and she thought she would be sick 
as they circled about her. She was on the stiff back of the biggest black going 
faster and faster, wild and out of control — up, up, down up down, higher faster 
and still higher, up, up and she was off and falling. She reached for the mane 
to pull herself back on but they were thundering away, their hoofs pounding 
the ground, their manes scattering in the wind. She couldn’t catch them. 
They had fled from the yellow glare of her dream leaving her behind and she 
was too close not to hear.

Her father’s feet would hit the floor heavily and the chair slide a little 
under her mother’s impact. The rest of her gave in and sat up to listen too 
and there was the giant’s mouth screaming into her room. She sat against the 
head board and pulled the covers up to her chin and waited for the sound 
to lick its tongue into the corners of the room, sampling of the dust and cracking 
plaster, seeking her out, threatening to swallow her whole, spreading flat 
against the floor, curling up into the corner and illuminating the cold linoleum 
with its black warm peeled spots and the table beside her bed which held a 
small wooden box. She looked at the box now and snatched it to her, opening 
it and taking them out one by one, tiny carved, brightly painted, gray brown, 
sorrel, dappled — all the pretty little horses. She hummed the song softly 
to herself as she rolled them over and over in her fingers. But she could still 
hear their raucous voices and the giant ate its way into the room.

“No, Dear, of course not, now why don’t you go to bed?”

“No, Dear, of course not,” he mocked. “Why don’t you say it? I’m not 
worth a damn.”

“Please, you’ll wake up Karen.”

“If it weren’t Karen it would be the wash or a toothache or some other 
damn thing. I can’t lay my hands on you without . . .”

She listened with her whole body, straining forward to catch his words 
for they were a low and far away rumble. She held her breath the way she had 
when Mother had said that she might ride once on the train whose night shrieks 
filled the room in her behalf; the way she had when Nana had told her that 
Death was holding hands with her but that when he let go she would knit her 
a sunshiny orange and yellow afghan; the way she always did when the kitchen 
went quiet like this. She held her breath and shut her eyes tight and hoped. 
But the cold settled in Nan’s fingers and the train, once had, was dirty and 
reeked of five o’clock work shirts, lard on kinky hair and fat butts against the 
shabby upholstery and its shrieks became the tortured bellowings of a madman. 
And the kitchen wasn’t ready to be quiet yet. The giant was just clearing his 
throat for the shouting that would follow.

Their voices were too low for her to know what they were saying but she 
could feel it. Her stomach was tight with feeling it and she thought she might 

48


be sick. The rumble poured thick and heavy, filling the kitchen and seeping 
in around the door and she waited for it to burst.

"God damn it Helen!”

"Please. Please, please, please.”

"That’s it beg. Say yes my lord and master. Say wither thou goest I will go. 
I will follow thee from mansion to shithouse kissing the ass of a half-all dreamer 
who kisses the ass of a dream. Say it.”

"Go to bed.”

"Say it.”

"Say it!”

"Wither thou goest, I. Wither.” She was sobbing. "Will, please, go to bed. 
Oh, please go to bed.”

She dropped the horses into their box and thrust them into the slubbering 
glare to be devoured. Her throat ached and she swallowed again and again 
thinking — I will not have to cry this time. This time I will not cry. Then 
she heard the clap of flesh on flesh and her mother’s sudden whimper. Why 
did she have to whimper like that? Her head jolted against the pillow and her 
face was hot and wet in her fingers. Jesus meek and Jesus mild. Her stomach 
was drawing her body into a hard knot around it and it screamed to be free. 
She straightened up on the edge of the bed, and took big steps across the 
cold linoleum to avoid the giant’s tongue whose groans of pain would give her 
away. She put her hand slowly and firmly on the knob and, turning it steadily, 
opened the door just a crack, squinting against the painful light coming from a 
room that appeared to her not as the morning kitchen she had known for this 
year but like a heavy black-lined page in a coloring book that had been covered 
edge to edge with a bright yellow crayon, harsh, angular, super-real, screaming 
at its own defacement. The walls and cupboards were yearly erased and reintroduced 
somewhat the worst for the doing but the table and four chairs that Nana 
had given them and the stove that had been theirs longer, she knew, than she 
could remember, remained behind them, two figures who squirmed beneath 
the feet of the giant’s shadow.

"Why did you marry me anyway?”

"Willard, please, I’m very happy with you.”

"Oh, don’t give me that.”

"Willard, please.”

"Oh, hell, Willard please.”

"What can I say?”

He was quiet.

"Sit down, ok? And I’ll make you some coffee.”

"I don’t want any coffee.” He belched.

But he sat down. He rested his elbow on the table and leaned his head 
on his hand, letting it settle further and further down. She let her stomach 

49


go a little and it didn’t come up so she let it go a little more. She sat down, 
tucked her feet under her nightgown, wrapped her arms around her legs and 
hugged them close. She felt like she had left her mother’s body and come 
back into her own. Mother now stood next to the stove watching Father like 
a cornered animal waiting for a break and she sat in her own body feeling it 
going faster than it should, knowing that Mother would go to work and leave 
him like that to wake up later, sorry and find his way to bed. He was snoring 
now, resting his head on his hand. His head slipped off and he jerked it back 
up. “What do ya looken at, Woman?” he barked, but he didn’t wait for an 
answer.

And then the knowing came like Death on the shoulders of a gaunt and 
long-drawn-out disease, there from the beginning, before its acceptance, 
throughout its resistence, not only in the giving in, not only in the end when 
it becomes a passion. The knowing was always. She knew it had been with 
her in the big white house where she’d had the whole upstairs to herself and 
it had been so wonderfully cold that she’d slept under mounds of quilts and 
made shapes in the night with her breath. It had been with her when she first 
felt it in that spring when he stopped coming regularly to tuck her in and 
smelling when he did come like a stale and smoky room. And, as it was before 
her knowing, it was now, upon her and she could no longer ignore it. The 
knowing came suddenly into her. Her stomach was not ready for it, too late 
for her to hold it, it came, heaving dryly into her mouth. She was sick with 
wanting and with the knowing that nothing could just go away.

She tripped on her nightgown getting up and tried to brace herself against 
the door that opened further under her weight and sent her plunging headlong 
into the kitchen, landing elbow first, sliding across the slick linoleum and 
stopping short of the stove. She scrambled to her hands and knees, getting all 
tangled up in the nightgown again and once more sprawling gracelessly, like 
a limber-legged foal upon the floor, diving finally at her fathers feet and 
clutching them as though they were playing a game of freeze tag and this 
action alone would stop him. He pulled her to her feet and pushed her roughly 
aside, rushing once more at her mother. She ran between them and this time 
her mother gently pushed her aside. She was between them again being pushed 
and pulled, her mother gently pulling, and her father roughly pushing.

“Do you want some of the same?”

She was between them resisting his pushing and her pulling and then her 
mother broke away leaving her beyond resisting, beyond the dark of her bedroom, 
suffused, saturated with, devoured by the yellow glare. His hands were 
on her shoulders and he smelled like a stale and smoky room again. His hands 
were big and wet through her blouse and he clutched her shoulders so hard that 
it hurt. He began to shake her and she struggled to be free. Looking up at 
the black stubble under his chin she felt her stomach screaming with wanting to 

50


come up but its screams got all tangled up in the fury of the room, screaming 
high-pitched, unbalanced.

"Willard leave her alone.”

—tossing her about, setting the objects of the room in irregular motion, 
scattering the door, the stove, the sink which flew past her one after another 
and then clamored all at once— rushing at her, coming faster and faster until 
they were all a blur, hot, liquid, reeking, and there was nothing but the blur 
as the giant’s stomach reeled in sick and uncertain digestion. The back of 
his hand broke out of the blur and caught her behind the jaw. Lord have mercy, 
Christ have mercy. The whole room shifted and the floor came up and hit her 
on the chest. It tilted under her and she skidded down it until the table 
leg cut into her shoulder. The block of wood that had been holding it fled 
' blindly into the wall and the table threw itself down on her.

The motion stopped all at once and everything ran, like kindergarten 
children when the teacher returns to the room, back to where it had been before 
the motion began. She was safe in the gentle inner sides of his arms. She 
tucked her head beneath his chin and he rubbed her shoulder. She looked for 
her mother and found her packing her lunch.

"I didn’t mean it. I just couldn’t help it. I won’t get started next time. 
If I don’t get started I’m all right. I’m all right then. Helen?”

"That’s right Will. That’s the way. We’re with you, Will,” she answered.

She began to push him away but Mother shook her head. "I’m going now.

Help your Daddy to bed.” And then, softly, “Tomorrow it won’t matter so much.”

She looked around the room trying to hold the hate as long as she could, 
avoiding his eyes but coming upon them at last and they were wide with caring. 
"Come on, Pops.”

She helped him heavily up the stairs and into the bedroom, took off his 
shoes and, drawing the covers up, she put her cheek first to one of his, "with 
a love,” and then the other, "and a love.” His eyes were gentle now. "And a 
kiss,” she said.

He put his hand on the back of her head and brought it softly down on his 
chest. She pressed hard against him but it didn’t stop the shaking. She felt 
his shoulder give way under her as he held her, half-singing, half-whispering, 
half-believing it just as she did.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry 
Go to sleep my little baby. 
When you wake, you shall have 
All the pretty little horses.

He lifted her hair back over her shoulders and caught it behind her ears.

She raised up to look at him. "Do you want me to sleep with you? We can 
snuggle close and I’ll keep you warm.”

51


His brow furrowed and his mouth disappeared into a thin line. He lifted 
her to her feet saying, “To bed. Now.”

She left, closing the door carefully behind her and crossed through the 
kitchen to her room. She tumbled into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin 
and waited for sleep to take her.

52

Sally Anne Kovach “Non-Objective #2” Lithograph


Two Poems / romanus egudu

THROUGH THE EYE OF NIGHT

I looked through 
the eye of night 
into the deep below 
littered by the shed 
leaves of light of day 
that formed a net 
of shadows above.

Under this shelter 
propped on pin- 
pillars sending metal 
roots thru the rock-skin, 
ran a dry stream 
fed from the bleeding 
pores of dying rocks.

A thirsty bird drank 
of the water and grew 
drier-throated, 
the monocled night 
donated drops of tears 
and went blind: 
the bare-branched day 
led the night away.

54


A CURS’D BLESSING

Her lily-white bag spotless 
for purity, with jealous care 
beyond the reach of youthful use 
she hung on the sacred tree 
by her house;

no gift inside it expected, 
save from Lucinda in due season, 
the season of consecrated harvest.

But it came, and came too soon, 
in sowing, not in reaping time, 
the bag looking blown with content 
good but not needed, an admonition 
to its owner and it;

and neighbors saw and passed by in silence, 
while she sat looking and weeping: 
a goat has bitten leaves off her head!

55


BLIGHTED AUTUMN

by Jennifer Lee

Mushroom lilies bloom unfolding earthward petals 
blistered in the dying rage of summer;

Sumac flowers bleed seeping through thinning birches 
blackened by the smoke of sunsets;

Evening raindrops sizzle hissing in the fiery arms

of maples on the hill;

Birds have fled to cooler climates.

Milkweed constellations burst showering sparks 
to smoulder delicately in faded field grass;

Quixotic cornstalk men unhorsed dessicate

in ragged rows the dusty earth;

Naked elms shrilly etch the hill

with outflung nails —

Dead rats infesting the gutters of the land

Dry swept by skirts of passing Plague.

Louise Keary “St. Margaret Feeding

The Wolves” Woodcut

56


Figure without caption.

THE STARGAZERS

by R. Thomas Sheardy

Seven people stood on a hill watching a comet dart to its death in the sea. 
Green and long, like a smear of chalk on a blackboard sky, it moved quickly but 
seemed not to move at all. It hung suspended in the bouyant air and its brilliance 
obscured all the other starry flecks. It cast strange luminous shadows on the 
seven people and their faces glowed and shimmered like ghosts. They watched 
it fly away until it hissed in the water.

Then they put their clothes back on and left.

But they wandered away in pairs and one of them was left over, a girl 
huddling near the ground. She was left alone on top of the hill in the dark after 
the brightness died in the sea. The others went away and left her alone, but 
she wasn’t afraid. She spread her body over the grass and felt the cold prick 
of each dewey blade; the bathing leaves seemed to squirm and writhe under the 
sprawling whiteness of her thighs. The ground trembled as if with footsteps.

She flung her hand back and touched a warm brown tree — hairy and 
tight with kneeling muscles. The breathing cloud closed around her, clutching 
her swelling breasts, and rubbed its gritty body on hers. There was a tingling 
in her thighs and the cords of her back arched and ripped and seemed to pull 
her head back under her bending shoulders. Her neck twisted off and she 
scraped her face across the sweating mud. She felt him enter her and it hurt — a 
dull plunging pain that seemed to rise up into her throat. She squirmed, 
muscles tightened against muscles, her muscles against his, his sandy tongue 
feeling over her lips, his fingers clutching her shoulders like cold stoney claws.

Pain pounded through her trembling veins. She stretched her hands into 
the swirling cloud and fought the twitching tensions of her own body. Hurt! Hurt! 
The words closed round her like thorns and pounding bells, the deep breathing 
and the gasps came in an ordered rhythm of drum beats and droning chants. 
Stone arched above her and colored glass. It fell upon her and she flung herself 

58


away, her knees dug into the splintered wood. She pulled the string of shiny 
black beads through her wooden fingers. They rattled together in protest 
like bones.

She let them slide through her tightened fingers and pushed the heavy words 
out through her frozen lips, over and over again into the spongy brown ceiling 
until it closed round her, saturated with penance, and her eyes closed again.

Sister Theresa had to wake her up. She had overslept and missed breakfast. 
But that was all right, part of her penance. And she got a sliver in her foot off 
the floor. That was penance too. But should she tell them the dream? It would 
be penance to tell and penance to keep it inside. She decided to put it out of 
her mind until she could pray in the afternoon when her work was done.

She passed Mother Evangeline in the prayer garden. The elder woman 
nodded deeply, solemnly, but Mary Martha hid her face to smell the roses. 
The soil around the glossy leaves was rich and matted black. There was a hand 
print in it.

“The gardener,” she said aloud.

Then she walked again praying most noticeably. She heard someone call her 
name — the one she was bom with. Alice. Is that you? A sandy voice called 
out of the roses. In a start she turned to face him. Him? But there was no one. 
How could there be? Even if there had been, who would he be? Never in 
her whole life had she known a man well enough to call her Alice.

She had lived in a girl’s school until she was eighteen. Then the convent. 
And why should it hurt? She didn’t even know what happened between a 
man and a woman so why should it hurt? She could still feel the ache in her 
stomach.

She caught herself. She must put it out of her mind . . . until she had time 
to think about it.

She walked again past the sweet smelling roses. The grass was thick and 
green under her tight warm shoes. She killed it as she walked round and round. 
And that face, the haunting earthen face, brown and warm, strong moulded 
lips, the long eyes inlaid with cold blue stones. The long straight nose that still 
hurt against her cheek. But she musn’t think about that.

The chapel bell rang. Mother Evangeline sat quietly and watched her all 
during prayer. She must know about the dream.

“Aren’t you feeling well today, Mary Martha?”

The sun reflected harshly off the starched white band across her forehead. 
She shaded her eyes from the glare.

“I didn’t sleep well last night is all.”

“Insomnia, Sister?”

“No . . .” She moved to the side to see the woman’s eyes behind her reflecting 
glasses. “I — had a dream.”

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“A bad dream?” She spoke comfortingly, in half-belief. “Do you want to 
tell me about it?”

“No. It’s past now. I’ve forgotten all about it . . .”

The sandy brown image flashed across the reflecting glasses and Mary 
Martha turned quickly to see if he was behind her.

“Well, I hope you are feeling better in the afternoon. Father Gregory is 
coming up to visit the school. In the meantime, why don’t you take a rest? I’m 
sure Sister Theresa can take care of the children well enough without you.”

“Oh, no, Mother Evangeline. I feel fine and besides, today we’re teaching 
the children finger painting and I love to . . .”

The woman smiled and nodded deeply.

“Yes, yes. If you feel all right. The children do love you so anyway, it 
would be a shame to keep you from them.”

Mary Martha smiled. “Yes, I like to think of them as being my own . . .”

She stopped, gasping inwardly. She shouldn’t have said it that way. The 
elder lady smiled and Mary Martha shivered. She knows about the dream, 
she thought. She must or she wouldn’t have mentioned Father Gregory . . .

“Mother Evangeline—”

“Yes, my child?”

“Did you say Father Gregory was coming to visit?”

“Yes, today. You remember him don’t you?”

“Yes — I do.”

She could feel grains of sand in the corners of her mouth. But why should 
she dream about Father Gregory? She hadn’t seen him in years. Not since he 
was ordained. Everyone had said he was too handsome to be a priest. And 
who were the stargazers, that other six? Did it matter? Men? Ghosts? Did 
it matter?

She watched the dancing reflections, like strings of hollow flaming elephants, 
off the approaching shimmer of black polished steel. They spun around the 
spruces along the drive, then sped toward her and past her and around her 
and through her and she felt the sky close in around her like a deep breathing 
cloud. Then it picked itself up off the ground and fled way into the rose garden. 
It smeared across her face the red and yellow glimpse of a forgotten night.

A warm night, tucked back in the deepest grey depths of memory with fear 
and shame and boarded up with black and white linen. The memory sped 
away again and was lost.

There was a heavy heat in the afternoon, the brilliant yellow flashing off 
the limousine wrapped a stinging warmth around her face, and she could 
feel it collecting at the back of her neck, a stuffy, biting heat.

The car door swung open with a push of hot air and he stepped out tall and 
black against the reflections. The rising light seemed to burn a white hole in 
his head and she could see the trees behind him wilting under the stifling heat.

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Her head pounded. She saw the same face in the back of her mind as he 
turned toward her, and then he miraculously contracted into a distorted, twisted 
branch. It caught fire and burned in her flesh and the smoke smothered her like 
a choking pillow. She felt cold hands pull at her throat and she fell through the 
ground; It closed in around her like death.

A quick-scented breeze brushed past her and she could feel the blades of 
grass caressing her lips as she bit into the ground. Voices flooded around her 
then faded and it was cool and comfortable lying on the earth. A soft wind 
gently stroked her legs and felt up along her thighs and she smiled at its tenderness. 
She walked happily up the green hill. But they were waiting for her, 
the fear and shame.

“The stars haven’t come out yet,” one of them said.

“Yes, and I don’t care if they do,” she said.

“Oh, but that’s sacrilige,” they said loudly.

“Yes, and I don’t care if it is. How can I love them that have no care nor 
love for me?”

One of them with a red face came very close to her and said, “But they will 
punish you. They will rise out of the ground and devour you.”

She turned away from the smell of sex on his breath.

“You’re not even a man,” she said. “You’re an animal. How can you stand 
on this hill and pretend to be human?”

But then she turned around and knew that they were all men and she 
wasn’t. She bent her head in her hands and wept quietly. They spoke soothingly 
to her and caressed her but their voices were soft and far away; and far away 
on the horizon the day left and the stars rose out of the sea to cast darkness 
upon the earth.

They closed round her one by one, dropping upon her and filled her arching 
muscles with fire. Then they left singly and she lay atop the stinking hill smiling 
at the sky.

“Feeling better Mary Martha?”

A cold hand rubbed her forehead and Mother Evangeline bent down and 
smiled closely to her, so close, all she could see was teeth.

“Did — I faint?”

It was as if she hadn’t even said the words and tried to say them again but 
she forgot them. The room closed in around her then flung away again. The 
air whispered, “It was very warm in the sun, Sister, and you weren’t feeling 
very well. But you’ll be all right now.”

“I’m very sorry.”

She felt her feet rise up through the ceiling. She heard the chanting again 
and the vows and she fumbled for the comfort of the smooth round beads.

“I’m sure I’ll be better after I rest.”

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"Yes, you’ve been working much too hard and a rest would do you good — a 
long rest, a change of scenery.”

She didn’t want a rest. She didn’t want to go away. She tried to get up but 
the cold hands still held her waist.

"I don’t want to leave here,” she said blinking her eyes at the greyness. 
The room was still spinning, black and white, and Mother Evangeline was still 
smiling. She saw the brown faces of the children sliding and spinning behind 
the grinning teeth.

"But it would be good for you to get away. Some of the sisters are taking 
a sight-seeing trip to the ocean and I thought you might like to go along with 
them.”

"The Sea?”

"Yes, up around Atlantic City. It’s lovely there now, and cooler too. It 
would be a nice rest.”

"I don’t want a rest,” she said quickly, squeezing a tear from her left eye.

The elder lady smiled with a turn of sympathy in her lips.

"What’s wrong, my dear?”

Dear, dear, dear. The words fell through the spongy brown ceiling like dying 
sparrows. Maybe Mother Evangeline really understood. Maybe she should 
tell her now.

"You do understand, don’t you?” Mary Martha said. "The dreams weren’t 
my fault.”

"Dreams?”

"Yes. I dreamed such horrible things . . . But I don’t know what to do . . . 
What should I do?”

The tall black and white woman stood up, making her seem even taller.

"Pray, Sister,” she said softly. "Pray.”

And she left.

The girl pulled herself from the bed and dropped wearily to her knees. 
But even as she prayed, the stars and the red-faced men and that haunting 
earthen face fell into her world and joined her on the grass.

"Stargazers,” she said to them, "Why do you hold me captive on this 
sinfulhill?”

"Alice,” they said to her, "You hold yourself captive here. You climbed the 
hill alone, you know. You can leave it alone too — if you want.”

"So,” she said stamping the ground, "the decision is mine?”

"Yes,” they said taking off their clothes. "Will you worship the stars with us?”

"No,” she said, "that is sacrilege. Let me tell you about my God.” 
"What is his name?”

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“Gregory — I mean — Yes.”

They laughed. “And you?”

“I — worship him.”

They laughed and the stars clicked on.

She fell back on the floor and opened her eyes. The ceiling stopped spinning 
and she wept.

“Oh, why?” she called in a loud whisper. “Why do I dream so cruelly? 
How shall I live now?”

The Summer melted away into red Fall but the fear and shame remained. 
Mary Martha still worked, untiring and with great energy. She was happy 
when the leaves caught fire again and every day she looked forward to night. 
But now that the shame was there the dream was gone. Each morning she 
awoke to the chanting music and reached, fumbling for her string of beads. 
But then she’d drop them in her lap and forget them and smile dully at the 
distant memory of those brilliant stars and the cool, dewey grass on the hill.'

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EPILOGUE

by John P. Keary

All are means 
to the objective end

Of a subjective aesthetic.

You will produce 
perform at large

You must jump through 
the hoop.

But most important

you must never know

You drool at our request.

You must believe that 
you’re the one,

Free spirit of the age.

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RCR / STAFF

Editor / PEGGY CASE

Fiction / ETTA C. ABRAHAMS: Editor

MIKE STEELY

Poetry / JAMES D. LOCKWOOD

Art / SUE BOWERS

Advisor / VIRGIL SCOTT