WT Chronicles

wt #15 - Family

issue #15 cover

contents:

Dear WTaholics,

So much has happened and so much has changed… It’s been a long time since the last WT Chronicles has been put out, and almost two years since we’ve been around. (keep your eyes open for a killer white trash birthday party near you!) We apologize for the lapse in publication. One of the most thrilling new things this time is our content—all of the work in this issue is original work, by nine of the most fabulous working class writers we know! This is amazing to me…two years ago we were only two writers and frequently (and probably illegally) republishing poems and essays by working class authors we loved, both because we felt they were important to read, and because we needed to fill space in what was then a bimonthly publication. This time around, I couldn’t fit all of the submissions in! Thanks so much to the writers who shared their work with us! The WT Chronicles has always been meant to be a forum for working class writers and for others who want to share their thoughts about class through writing and art.

We loosely center the publication around topics; this issue’s theme is about family… it seems we never run out of things on that subject to talk about. We are always seeking submissions, and looking for venues in which to do spoken word performances—many of us are spoken word artists, always eager for an audience to bear witness to our class rage! (but don’t let that scare you) We also have back issues available for anyone who wants them—the WT Chronicles is always free, and available online at wtchronicles.org, but donations are always appreciated. Your ideas and thoughts on class are welcome and much needed!

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Better Than Tony

Bruja Bones

Tony Giovani lived in the trailer next to the interstate overpass. We had to go by there on the bus on the way to school. I’d see Tony, his shoulders hunched over, in the mornings making his way across the weedy field between the highway and the school. In the rain, his greasy hair would be plastered to his head. His Jimmy's Auto Parts windbreaker wasn't waterproof and his wrists stuck four inches out the sleeves anyway. His knees poked out of his jeans into the rain. My ankles stuck out of my too-short pants, but Mom would die before sending me to school in holey jeans. Besides, I had new slip-on shoes from KMart and I stepped off the bus dry. When we sat down at our desks, Tony dripped and made little puddles on the floor around his chair. That's what made me better than Tony.

I lived across town in a house with a rusty swing set out back and a cracked slab of pavement for a driveway. We always had two cars. Weekends would find dad sticking out from under one or the other. Whichever had the worst leak at the time would get parked in the grass to slow down the growth of the dark spot on the driveway. But we also had little flower gardens—an especially nice one down at the mailbox so all the neighbors would see. And all around was woods. That was the best part—woods where I was free to wander and play. All Tony had out back was the interstate and the power lines. And there were always way more than two cars at Tony’s—6,7,8,9—rusted out and not going anywhere any time soon. Dad said, “That place is a dump.” That’s what made me better than Tony.

Tony’s dad was the game warden. Tony made the mistake of bragging to kids about getting to eat road kill for dinner. Big mistake. My dad sat behind a desk all day. He’d be gone from before I woke up in the morning until after dark—always later than he said. Dinner would be cold and Mom stood in the kitchen with the dish towel over one shoulder wringing her hands and cursing him under her breath. Finally we’d hear him coming down the road. The dogs always heard first and jumped up, tails wagging. No one else’s car sounded like that coming down Maple Street. Pork and beans in the crock pot, mac ‘n’ cheese with hot dogs, tuna casserole. All our meat came in clean packages from the store. That’s what made me better than Tony.

I have a lot of memories of Mom back then and in so many of them she’s standing at the sink, doin’ dishes. It seemed like she was always doing the dishes. In the daylight, she ran a daycare out of our house so she’d stand at the sink with babies tugging on her pants legs. She’d have to stop to hoist one up onto her hip. In the evening, the spot at the sink was alternately a battle ground and a safe haven. Doin’ dishes while yelling into the phone at a bill collector. Doin’ dishes while staring out the window into space softly humming to herself. Doin’ dishes while spitting out angry words at Dad. Doin’ dishes while avoiding one of his explosions for five more minutes. I have so many memories of Mom but it’s hard to remember her ever really happy. All I can remember about Tony’s mom is the rumor that she had been in jail once. Jail! That’s what made me better than Tony.

I don’t think Mom would remember Tony. I don’t think I ever mentioned him to her back then. If I had ever told her about Tony she would have said, “Well don’t you hang around that Tony Giovani. Those are the kind of kids that’ll get you a bad reputation if you’re seen with them.” Mom and Dad were both proud and they worked their asses off to create the image of our family. You found something of use down at the road that the neighbors were throwing out: God don’t let anyone see you take it. They’ll think we’re poor people. We don’t wear stains and holes—that’s for poor people. Dad got a friend to tow off the cars

when they died so they didn’t sit around—that’s for poor people. We had flowers and enough space between our house and the next so that at night when the windows glowed it looked cozy and no one knew that the glow was Dad’s fury and Mom’s sadness. Poor people scream and fight and we were NOT poor and that’s what made me better than Tony.

Warm weather meant ticks. Ticks in my socks. Ticks in my hair. Ticks flushed down the toilet. Ticks sucking the dogs’ blood until they dropped off, silver grapes on the rug. One day at school I was day dreaming as usual, staring ahead at Tony’s back when I spotted a tick crawling up his t-shirt. “Hey Tony, there’s a tick on you.” And then for dramatic effect, “EEEW! There’s a TICK crawling on Tony Giovani,” loud enough for the whole room to hear. I was delighted but later a little sick with the effect this had, the squealing of the barbie doll girls, the shuffle as some kids came over to get a closer look, the teacher trying to regain control and calling the nurse to come and pluck the tick off Tony’s shirt. I felt utter relief that it was Tony with the tick and not me. But I’ll never forget Tony’s eyes when he turned around to look

at me, pleading eyes that flashed to embarrassment and then to rage. I had ticks on me almost every day of every summer but Tony Giovani had one on him in the middle of school and I spotted it and that’s what made me better than Tony.

A few years later I was big enough to do the dishes—to stand there in that spot at the sink and feel little slivers of what it was like to be living inside Mom’s own jail. I stopped complaining about the fatty bits of pork in the beans and about not being able to get new clothes from the mall. I too learned to steer clear of Dad, who eventually left and moved into the basement of the building next to Tony—under the power lines, next to the highway. I still had never spoken to Tony, except for the tick, even though we’d both started smoking and wore the same black leather jackets. I grew a bitter hatred for the kids in Gap sweaters with shiny new cars in two-car garages and fancy ski trip vacations. I dumped my friends who never had jobs and didn’t do drugs. I couldn’t stand the look on their faces when they talked about eating out at restaurants with their families or spending so much time on their English papers. I never understood their looking forward to prom and to college. And I didn’t think much anymore about being better than Tony.

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No Class

NO CLASS is a group of Maine people who began getting together in 2003 to educate ourselves and each other on issues of class and classism. The group is at least 3/4 people of working lowered class background.

NO CLASS works for justice and the redistribution of power by working in our communities to increase understanding, change attitudes, take action and overcome class inequity.

Our goals include:

Here are some projects we’re working on:

interested? contact us:

NO CLASS
(207) 338-0406 or 474-0950
noclass@megalink.net

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Motors Dying in Quiet

Starr

Kisses
entering in,
lips wide open;

Every cigarette
goes straight to my head—

We’re motors
dying in quiet,

I'm the turbine
in your bed.

kisses
coming in soft, mouths shut tight—

Engines purring
into night.

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Petey

Jen Hodsdon

Petey stretches up to the drawer that holds his underwear. His hand barely reaches it, and he can’t see inside, but he feels around until his hands close around the small piece of fabric. The Spiderman ones, he sees, as he pulls them out. He slips his thin legs into the briefs and pulls them up, followed by a pair of jeans still stiff from the clothesline. He hates when his Nana hangs the clothes out on the line, they’re all crunchy when he puts them on.

He executes a series of enthusiastic karate chops to soften the jeans, kicking and slashing at the air with his bare feet and hands. Petey imagines a Bad Guy in front of him. This one is a tall bald man with a thick black mustache that curves around his mouth like a frown. Petey kicks at the Bad Guy’s stomach, shouting “Hyuh!” like his sensei told him, and the Bad Guy bends over, groaning, giving Petey the opportunity to kick his head. The Bad Guy falls over and disappears, and the jeans are not scratching the backs of his knees any more.

Petey reaches into the drawer again, fumbles out a pair of socks, and sits on the floor to pull them on. His feet are cold. His feet are always cold here, not like at Nana’s house where he can watch cartoons in his briefs and a t-shirt before Nana wakes up. His dad says Nana’s house is too hot, but Petey likes it just fine.

Petey thinks it’s funny how him and his dad got the same name but they like things so different, like Nana’s hot house, and what kind of pizza they like. Petey’s dad likes pepperoni on his pizza but it burns Petey’s mouth whenever he eats it. Nana always lets him pick the kind of pizza that they get. Hamburger is Petey’s most favorite kind, but sometimes he likes to get bacon instead. He hates onions and green peppers and pepperoni. The mornings at Nana’s are Petey’s favorite, sitting in front of the TV in the dark room, eating cold pizza, little slivers of light around the heavy curtains Nana closes every night before she goes to bed.

When his socks are on, Petey rummages in another drawer for a t-shirt. He finds his Harley-Davidson shirt that his dad got him in Laconia this summer and puts it on, but he is still cold, so he goes back for a sweatshirt. Petey can hear the water running in the little bathroom across the hall from his room, and knows his dad must be still in the shower. His dad takes a shower every single day. Petey’s glad he doesn’t have to. He hates taking a shower; he gets too cold,

even though his dad always says, “just get under the water, you’ll warm up.” But the water sprays in his face and he has to shut his eyes, and he definitely doesn’t like standing there in the spraying water with his eyes closed. He took a shower two nights ago, so he doesn’t have to worry about it again until next Sunday. Their last apartment had a bathtub, Petey liked that better. The water in the bathroom turns off, and Petey’s dad calls from the bathroom.

“Are you gettin dressed?”

“Yup.” Petey yells back. He pulls the sweatshirt over his head and feels warmer.

“Put on your sneakers, then. I’m almost ready.” Petey almost forgot that today is Wednesday and that means gym day at school. Gym day is a good one because Petey can run fast; he runs with his elbows bent, his fingers stiff out, and his thumbs folded to his palms because it’s his secret way to run extra fast. Nobody else knows that’s why he can do it. His dad calls it robot arms.

Petey lies down on the floor and pulls the sneakers out from under the bed. He doesn’t leave his hand under there too long because it makes him scared, but he gets the sneakers and puts them on, pulling the velcro tight, tighter, so he can’t feel the sneakers move around on his feet. He hates when he can feel them move. When the sneakers are on, Petey jumps up and down so he can see if they wiggle. They seem OK. He jumps a few more times because the sneakers make his feet feel bouncy, even though he knows his dad is going to yell. He’s right.

“Petey! Cut it out! It’s too frigging early.” Petey knows that the landlord lives right under them, and Petey has to be careful not to make so much noise, especially in the morning. The landlord is a fat man with thick glasses and big brown teeth, and he always says that Petey makes too much noise. That’s why he can’t ride his Big Wheel inside any more. He doesn’t really ride it at all because the porch is too small and he can’t go down to the yard by himself, and his dad never wants to go watch him. But it did make a wicked noise on the floor when Petey rode it up and down the hall, and Petey could pretend to be a Harley Davidson guy with a big Hog. He wishes the landlord lived someplace else.

Trying not to bounce too much in his springy sneakers, Petey heads for the kitchen, thinking about the Lucky Charms cereal his dad had probably put in a bowl for him on the counter.

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Economic/Civil Rights Efforts Are In the Wind

Jan Lightfoot

Many people do not see the signs of a second Economic/Civil Rights Movement on the wind. But with some states passing laws against feeding the homeless, another movement, like the 1960’s civil right cause, will be born.

Hospitality House Inc. of Maine is presenting logic to other groups throughout the USA. This small non-profit is doing powerful work. It not only provides statewide information on preventing homelessness. It is fighting the number one cause of homelessness—poverty.

It is workers being paid less than the cost to live a modest decent life. The government’s own figures say 65% of all of the poor are the working poor. They are not lazy—just underpaid.

Plato and others of his time spoke against the violence of poverty. And not much has changed in over 2,000 years. It is not until us—advocates and contributors—help those who know poverty first-hand to speak out. That is when poverty can become a nightmare of the past.

The richest country in the world should not have 40 million people counted as surviving under the poverty level. Even one million living under the poverty level, out of our 300 million US residents, is too much. Nearly 1/6 of all Americans live in poverty.

Hospitality House Inc, needs your help to take action. We want to be part of the improvement riding on the wind. We need free places to advertise, donations and places to speak out. Write to:

Hospitality House Inc
PO Box 62
Hinckley, ME 04944
(207) 453-2353
Jan Lightfoot.

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The Visit

mamaspitfire

You run to greet me from under the tired porch. I am amazed at the lines in your face, your skin, cracked like old leather. The sun has not been kind to you. Under the folds of skin on your neck, the deep tan pales to white in the clefts between deep wrinkles that form a collar around your thin neck. You're still smoking. The smell reminds me of childhood, hiding under the table silent as you chatted with Judy, or Tia Milagro, the click of coffee cups, ringed with maroon lipstick stains, dark smudges on the end of your menthol cigarette butts. You smell like cheap spray on imitation perfume and desert dust and smoke. I barrel into your arms and let you mark my tear-smudged cheeks with smudged kisses the color of burgundy wine. I have missed you.

We spend days over the Formica kitchen table, the very same one I used to hide under, the one from the first house on Grand Boulevard. I am the big girl now. I'm the special grown up visitor in the honorary chair in the kitchen. I help make the coffee and match my mom cigarette after cigarette, grey smoke drifting upwards on clouds of gossip and memory. You tell me Tio Larry just found out his wife was cheating on him. I answer that I never liked that bitch anyway. You talk about MeMe's emphysema, and your new job taking care of the old and dying for seven dollars an hour. You crack up over the fact that you take cigarette breaks outside of the cancer treatment facility you bring your client to. I laugh to. I have to.

When I climb into your rusty van, I am swept away back to an embarrassed adolescence when you used to pull up in front of my high school to drop me off. Ma, the other kids will see. I hated her van, the peach rotting square body patched together by brown smears of primer. Now it makes me smile, and the torn interior of the van that smells like tree shaped air freshener and coffee makes me ache with sweet grief. She turns the radio station to the salsa music that I used to despise, and now rest as comfortable as a hammock under palm trees. I feel at home.

When our visit ends it seems as if a whole week disappeared when our backs were turned, and the talk at the kitchen table has faded to good bye. You wait with me for the bus, and curse out the hotel manager who won't let me in to use the bathroom. We huddle over a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee in the pre morning darkness. The sky is deep indigo straining into turquoise at the edges, waiting for the sun to make up its mind to rise and shine. The desert air is cool, crisp, with just a hint of the heat to come. When the bus pulls up I am taken by surprise at how hard I clutch onto her as we say goodbye. We are weeping into each other as the bus driver impatiently waits for us to finish up. We stub out our cigarette butts and part. As the driver shuts the door, my mom pushes past him to slip a sweaty crumpled ten-dollar bill into my hand. For snacks, she says. I try not to lose it as I watch you grow smaller and smaller as the bus pulls away. I want my mother I think. I sniff my cigarette pack for comfort all the way back to the airport.

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Systemic Homicide

by Dugan

The death certificate lists hypertension and aortic rupture – nonsense to a sixteen year-old boy sitting, hands in his pockets, staring at the floor of a small, flowery waiting room in Maine Medical Center. “This is where they put people when someone they know has died,” I thought. It seemed obvious to me: the cushioned, soft-colored furniture, the intended notion of coziness.

Returning home, I collapsed on the carpet of our living room. I sat sprawled on the floor, the occasional tear escaping as I stared into the carpet's synthetic fibers. Darkened by dog hair and last winter's grit, the shade was a far cry from the rose pink it was when my family installed it ten years before. The bright, fresh feeling of that house had too soiled in that time. I pondered what would happen to the house, myself, my brother, our dog and cat.

Pulling me from my swirling thoughts was a phone call from the photo plant at which my mother worked. My mother's boss was calling to let her know she was late again. “She's deceased,” I told him, my face wet with tears.

“Just tell her to come in as soon as possible.”


I didn't realize she was an alcoholic until a couple years before. She stood before me in the elevator clad in non-matching sweatshirt and sweatpants, her hair straight, yet unkempt. I thought at the time that it was for this reason she looked disturbingly different to me. The look on her face when she turned to face me hinted of suppressed shame, confounding me further. I still didn't understand why she had been sent away days before. My older brother told me that alcoholics drink so regularly that they are somewhat intoxicated all the time, thus it takes days just to clear the bloodstream of the substance.

She liked whales, old cars, diners, vampires, pigs, pink flamingos, and pink in general. She was a big fan of Phantom of the Opera and used to collect its memorabilia. She divorced my father when I was seven, marking the point at which she could no longer afford to travel regularly, crippling to a woman whose passion is to explore. Watching silent 8mm films of her and my father's adventures in the seventies, I see an energetic, excited youth – a markedly different image than what I remember from my boyhood.

The Suzanne Murphy I remember is perfume and hairspray in the bathroom, a skinny figure before the mirror applying makeup, brushing hair at 9:00 PM. Waking me in the morning with pancakes and

Shop N Save syrup, it is difficult for me to understand that she had been awake the whole night while I was asleep. Even harder to understand is the heavy whir of machinery; the white, windowless chambers, uniformly lit with economic florescent light; or the repetitive motions of cutting photo after photo out of never ending rolls of developed film. In later years, her schedule at the plant had her home and in bed before I'd get up in the morning to find a home-cooked breakfast waiting for me on the stove: cold poached eggs and pan-fried sausage lodged in solidified grease. The kitchen bar and stools at which I ate were pieced together from refuse salvaged through yard sales and bulky trash week scavenging trips. I'd add my plate to the pile surrounding the sink, turn out the lights, and run out the door to catch the bus to school.

Under-appreciation met shame as I dumped out bottles of cheap vodka I removed from her bedside or during her occasional welfare tirades. My twelve-year-old self and school mate are in the backseat and while pulling out of the driveway my mother screams, “Maybe we should just go on welfare, huh?! Make things a little easier? I have friends at work who do it!” To probing mothers of friends, I play down incidents, make excuses.

“No, we're doing okay. She's just been a little stressed out lately.”

One evening the faint smell of smoke brought me out of my bedroom to find a skillet full of black char flaming on the stove. I pulled it off the stove and brought it out to the garage where I set it on the concrete floor to cool off. I found my mother in the living room, asleep on the floor in front of the television, belly-up and knees bent like she had been doing sit-ups. Once her daze had lifted, she began apologizing – she had been working overtime the past few weeks. I pointed to the garage and returned to my room, blasting mid-nineties alternative rock.

And she was ashamed too. So many times she lamented to me about how she ought to be like my friends' moms: younger, more active in her sons' lives, staying home while a husband worked for the family. Her and my father had it planned out in the beginning. They pooled their resources to get him through the state college and waited over ten years before they decided that they could finally afford to have children. After the divorce and an endless sequence of used cars, bills, impending home repairs, and nighttime hours spent at Konica Photo, my mother was drained and dried up – her hands stiff with arthritis and legs bruised without impact. I failed to take her seriously, even after she taped up a medical poster at the foot of the stairs with diagrams on hypertension and related heart diseases.

July 16, 1999 started normally enough. I said good night to her

that morning - funny, I never knew whether to say good night or good morning – and my brother and I went out for the day. When we returned in the afternoon, the house was silent save for the shrill buzz of an alarm clock emanating from my mother's room – one of those cheap white plastic analog alarm clocks they don't sell anymore. The kind with the little red hand that points to the moment where sleep ends and preparation for work begins. She had slept past the alarm many times before, so I went in to wake her. Her flesh felt cold and thick as I gently patted her cheek. The look on her face appeared startled, mouth agape and eyes just barely open. Her posture also resembled that of someone frightened. Frozen.

My mother was an eccentric one. Many times she had detailed to my brother or me about the grandiose ways in which she wished to be memorialized when she died someday. On one occasion, she told me she wanted to have her ashes sprinkled about in an old 1960 Rambler she used to own and have the whole thing buried as a tomb. On another, she expressed wishes to have her ashes sprinkled over Delicate Arch from an airplane. Smiling, we laughed together about the absurdity of such demands. At that age, I could not reckon the notion of death directly affecting my life.

Delicate Arch is one of the natural wonders of the world located in Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Drawn to it, my mother traveled to the arch at growingly sparse intervals in her life, almost like a pilgrimage. Three years after her death, my brother and I journeyed out there ourselves, taking our mother's ashes through the post-9/11 security check at Portland Jetport. To assure peace from photographing tourists, we snuck up the long trail at nightfall, arriving at the massive stone arch in moonlight. I recalled two previous ventures with my mother to this very spot, once when I was four and again at twelve. At nineteen, it would be our last. Standing back in the imposing presence of the arch, now dusted with the remains of the one who gave me life, I imagined her finally at peace, free from burden. In retrospect I am able to appreciate her and give thanks to the woman who gave her life so that I may live.

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Good Morning

Tom Fallon, Rumford, ME

A sharp noise - a voice - a child's voice - two kids -
Dammit - turning over in bed - sunlight leaking in the window -
Pillow over head - kids' voices through the pillow -
Godammit! - out of bed - opening the door -
You kids keep quiet shouted -
Back into bed - pillow over head - sunlight leaking in the window -
Quiet -
Sharp noises - kids' voices - kids running -
Out of bed - opening the door -
Godammit, you kids keep quiet, didn't you hear me -
Jackie - keep those damn kids quiet - I'm sleeping, remember -
Silence -
Did you hear me, Jackie - keep those kids quiet from now on -
We hayed all night on the paper machine last night -
I need to sleep - You know I'm workin' again tonight -
Silence -
Did you hear me - Jackie -
Mom's not here -

What -
Mom's not here -
Coming down the stairs -
Where is she -
Hangin' clothes -
Godammit - what the hell's the matter with her -
Three kids scatter -
Walking down the hall to the kitchen -
Opening the back door -
Jackie - get in here - keep these damn kids quiet -
You know I'm workin the graveyard shift in that godammed mill -
Okay - turning from the clothesline - I'll be right in -
Get in here now, dammit -
Okay, okay - I'm coming Bob -
Turning out of the kitchen, down the hall, up the stairs -
Godammit - she knows I need sleep this shift - what the hell's the matter with her -
Closing the door - sunlight leaking through the window -
In to bed - pillow over head -
What the hell's the matter with her - Godammit - I need sleep -
She wants the money - what's the matter with her -

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Green Mountain Idyll

Hayden Carruth

Honey    I'd split your kindling

    clean & bright

& fine

    if you was mine

baby baby

    I'd taken to you like my silky hen

my bluetick bitch my sooey sow

    my chipmunk    my finchbird

& my woodmouse

    if you was living at my house

I'd mulch your strawberries & cultivate

    your potato patch

all summer long

    & then in winter

come thirty below and the steel-busting weather

    I'd tune your distributor & adjust

your carburetor

    if me & you was together

be it sunshine be it gloom

    summer or the mean mud season

honey I'd kiss you

    every morningtime

& evenings I'd hurry

    to get shut of the barn chores early

& then in the dark of the night

    I'd stand at the top of the stairs & hold the light

for you for you

    if you'd sleep in my room

& when old crazy come down the mountain after you

    with his big white pecker in his hand

you would only holler

    & from the sugar house

the mow    the stable

    or wherever I'm at

I'd come    god I'd come running to you

    like a turpentined cat

only in our bed

    honey

no hurting

    but like as if it was

git- music

    or new-baked bread

I'd fuck so easy

    sweet-talking & full of love

if you was just my daisy

    & my dove
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Excerpt from Tornado Country

Bob Bergeron

“Wyatt?” Wally called when he got to the door. “Hello! Is there anybody home?” No answer. He peered through the screen, his heart skipping a beat. Nothing appeared out of place in the kitchen. Everything in the spot it had occupied since before he was born. No bodies laying unnaturally on the floor, no blood on the walls. Wally assumed that his brother was practicing (“Practicing for what?” he always asked his mother when she referred to his brother’s habit of holing up for days in his room with his drums and his secret thoughts.) but he didn’t hear the familiar macine gun tap tap tap of Wyatt’s sticks on the rubber pads he used to muffle his drumheads.

Wally walked through the house to the back door, not realizing that he was holding his breath - the way he always did until he found Wyatt and realized that everything was alright.

As alright as it got, anyways. He found his brother on the back porch, crouched over by the edge, hunkered down with his chin on his knees, his arms around his shins. He looked like a carefully perched ball, or a sitting hen. He was rocking back and forth slightly. A goose walked over Wally’s grave. For just that one moment everything was silent and Wally was taken back to a day from their childhood. They were little boys stuck inside on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and Wyatt had sat in his bed, holding himself like he was doing now, rocking back and forth while he chanted softly to himself, “It’s gonna be a bad out.” Over and over he had chanted this in a sing-song little voice. He’d done this until finally he’d stopped and broke out into tears.

It had been as if he’d had a vision of apocalyptic magnitude. Wyatt’s eyes had expressed a fear so primal when he finally tried to explain to young Wally what had come over him that for the first time in his life Wally got the sense that we can never truly know another person.

It had scared the shit out of him.

And here was his brother again, thirty or so years later and Wally knew he was right. You never can know anybody else. You get little glimpses, from time to time, at the person behind all the well practiced social nuance, and that was it, regardless of whether or not the same blood flowed in your veins. It occurred to Wally then, as he stood watching

Wyatt, that Wyatt had also been different. Eccentric. Maybe this had all been going on longer for him than anybody knew.

The pain shot up behind his eyeballs again, like the sensation one gets when one is in an elevator that drops too quickly.

It was going to be bad day out.

“Wyatt?”
“Huh?” Wyatt turned and muttered, as if coming out of a trance.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m watching this bug here. I don’t think it’s really a bug?” He ended the sentence in a question. It was unnerving to Wally.
“What do you really think it is?” Wally asked. Wyatt looked over at Wally as if to ascertain whether or not Wally really wanted to know what he was thinking. A familiar, guarded façade washed over Wyatt’s face. He’d become more and more careful about discussing his theories.
“Why are you here?” he asked, instead. That same even toned voice he used when he was distancing himself. It was like talking to a vaguely polite and distracted robot. His eyes looked right through Wally, as if to say “I know you’re one of them, you son of a bitch. You can’t fool me.”
“Do you have something to do with this?” he asked, gesturing at the bug. Wally loved his brother, and he knew Wyatt was sick. On any given day he thought Wally was there to kill him. Wally tried to be patient but his ability to not personalize his brother’s illness had faded over the last few months, poisoned by frustration. Wally’s answer was sharper than he meant it to be.
“I’m here to do the fucking yard work for Ma, Wyatt. Are you going to be of some help today or should I just get started?”

Wyatt had always moved at the speed of his own internal clock, so much slower than his siblings. With his own purposes and schedules. One of his eccentricities. Wally had learned long ago not to wait for him.

Wyatt didn’t respond. He just glared at Wally and went back to his bug. Wally felt a sudden remorse hit him hard in the gut.

“Hey, the game’s on. Got a radio?” He asked, trying to sound pleasant.

Which of us is the crazy one? He thought. Wyatt went for the radio and Wally got the chainsaw and a file for the blade out of the dark, cool shed, throwing them in the rusty old wheelbarrow they’d had since their grandfather was a kid. Another relic from better, brighter days.

Wally grabbed the long handled ax as an afterthought, and was holding it along the length of his right thigh when he emerged from the cool of the shed and back into the sunlight. Wyatt was approaching, radio and extension cord in hand, about twenty yards away.

He froze, right there in the mud with the cord dangling like a limp tail, when he saw Wally with that ax, and his eyes filled with the same concern one would imagine seeing in the eyes of a rabbit that realized it was caught out in the open of a field after dark. He looked like a scared kid, and for the first time since Wyatt’s illness had started Wally realized understood the depth of the fear his brother lived with daily.

A mix of emotion hit Wally like a brick wall. It was all there and underlined in dark black. Sympathy and fear of his own quickly changed to anger. What the fuck is he looking at me like that for?” and then; Where is my brother? Where has he gone? What happened to the what we once shared? How could he think I would intentionally hurt him? Followed by shame. You were a violent, untrustworthy drunk not too long ago…why should he trust anything you say? Finally, there was the cold closing door of resignation. There’s nothing I can do to change any of it. Whatever power rules the universe holds my brother’s fate in It’s hands as surely as It holds my own.

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tuesday morning rural blues

mamaspitfire

the compost is like an overgrown child, smelly, forming things I’d never thought of

(you’re sleeping)

i drink old chai and dream of new city mornings

the girls are at the doctors in the loft, they try to fix what’s not broken in pink fuzzy pseudonymns

(you’re not too fat or too thin, the doctor says)

the shifting of sheets in this green filtered light at 8am smells like restless dreams.

    (I’m wide awake)

my mind scurries back and forth across the dizzying lists of obligation, the money the fuel to fulfill them, they rattle on the inside of the mind like a fanatical pinball game and i

    (don’t want to play)

i wish there were arms strong enough to squeeze out the blues, they’d trickle out the pores in my skin and wash away like old sweat

(but your arms, love, are wrapped around pillows and i sit nearby, quietly drowning)

the trees block out the sun like vampires unable to face the dawn, and beneath them, it is as quiet as stone

is there something more than dishwater and and unpaid bills and the smell of rust and wood, soft with molding

(answered by the insistent click of mice claws in leftovers and your slow stretch awake)

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things i do not want my mother to know

cyndi o’leary

I mean when I say I love you

I remember lying on the sofa in our apartment when I was 15, for 3 months straight. I said I wanted to die. you responded by saying I didn't. You always want to pretend it's alright everything is light and love... I dressed in black for a long time after that, you said it made me look thinner.

When I found out I was pregnant with my beautiful, difficult, hard to and much loved child,mom, you described the challenges of raising children in poverty, and told me if you had had the choice you would have chosen abortion. Standing there your first born, terrified and trapped, your words of comfort were to tell me that given a choice you would have let me die. Your honesty makes me ill. you are dark and cruel. Sometimes I feel that welling up in me too. I hate myself as much as I hated you at that moment. When I have a major life decision to make now that requires me to be particularly courageous I wonder what you would do and do the opposite.

I remember fearing that you were having a heart attack that summer before my life fell apart. I spent my birthday beside you in the heart ward, that seemed fitting to me, poetic. Fourth of July weekend, I celebrated our interdependence and my birth and prayed as always for you to live. You've been dying of a broken heart my whole life.

When I had the worst of my depressions, I felt so empty I was dead. I was dead feeling nothing at all. I felt what I imagine you feel often, nothing at all. Unable to do anything more than continue on and to figure out through bone numbing fatigue why. I stood at the place where I understand now you have been standing my whole life, your whole life... to live or to die, to give or to give up.

You are dying from the need for peace mom. You are dying from not living. You are dying from fear. When I go, I prefer to die at war with death. I tried mom I think to die because I wanted you to save me, I wanted you to want me I wanted for once in my life for you to choose me over all else. Every relationship I have had since then mom has been a re-creation of that... a demand to choose me to choose me to want me for me above all else, of a suffering for love because it isn't all light and love and some people are hard to love. That's a lot to ask of most people mom, but it is what it means to be a mother and your daughter.

You say my poetry depresses you and that is why i write it, because you think that I should regulate how i feel in order to make you comfortable. You jump from suffering to denial mom. I think I suffer just because I can sometimes because you won't. I suffer for both of us because some things should break your heart. I am fascinated by suffering, because I believe in the living mom and relief. I suffer because I have hope. I suffer because you have given up. You have to walk through fire not around it as if it isn't there.

Yes mom, if my friend jumped off a bridge, I without (much) doubt would jump too.

I would for love sacrifice myself to make the point, that yes, I would die for you...because I love you. I would begin by telling them to stay around when you are in pain. I will not leave you just because it is hard. I work to accept you as you are, even when you don't. I will stay when all others won't. I will push through my own discomfort to understand better yours. I wish you understood that about love, I wish you understood that about me, mom. I wish you understood me, knew me and loved me for that person. I wish I knew how to thank you for teaching me that. I wish it had been easier, to learn, but that is the point I think, if it had been easier, it wouldn't matter so much.

I paint because you won't anymore. I long for the gift of your graceful artwork. I eat too much ice cream and cake because you won't. I wish sometimes you would eat to the brink of oversatisfaction. I love my body and my spirit because you don't. I wish you would dance and sing and learn to let go andwell, laugh or swear. I wish you weren't so thin you seem to be disappearing in front of my eyes. I give my love freely, sacrifice my own needs for others, and get hurt for that a lot, because you won't. I go where you won't because you would be frightened or disapprove, even when I am frightened too…even when I know it is unwise. I am afraid to become you. I am always standing there on that proverbial bridge beside you and wondering which one of us is supposed to be saving the other. I amthe one who is always surviving anyway…the one who just keeps on insisting on life… because I am meant to be here mom We are supposed to be alive here. Still I am not leaving you there alone.

and so despite all that mom, I love you because you are difficult to love, in so many ways I have been you, and am living for you too. I love you even though you would have chosen to live without me, you have taught me how to be alive and to love through pain. I love deeper now because I have loved you. I know that love is hard work mom, that tolove what someone else finds unlovable, is the most incredible part of love.

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Burner

by Goatgirl

“I don’t think my mom wants us to hang out,”

my fingers warm

sweating bottle into sweating palm

my hand into the shimmer above

danger glowing like a stove coil

her boyfriend, a beer

“Why not,” he asks, dancing

bellyfirst, into the heat

unshaven and pouchy
around his eyes

“She thinks we might”

how close can I

“she’s afraid we will”

now can I

“you and me, we’ll”

is there time to

“like this?” and he is pushing
me into the door

blistering my hands and

oh mama, it burns

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