ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FOUR POEMS
by Joelle Hann

A Diary and Two Letters

Dear Diary,
--fascinating how I try to keep a record of things as though I can
keep myself from disappearing and even then
the night that comes on little dancers' hooves, trips through the house,
doesn't see me.
"I made hot chocolate, watched the late news, put the cat out."
No one gets up, everyone is too afraid. The tripping
sounds like shotguns going off below them.

Dear Diary,
--the horror of trying to get my whole life into each day!

Dear Diary,
--when day broke I felt the streaming slip-slip of my mind as it
slip-slipped into high nothingness.
I walked away from it, walked around the house,
the effort of thought requires too much from summer!
I sit around all morning making notes until I start weeping and the noise
of that wakes everyone up.

Dear Diary,
--I studied the sexual manuals because I'm so easily confused.
But right now there's no time to practice.
I just eat scallops, receive bills and
suffer the air conditioners which sound
like a hundred planes taking off together--

Dear Diary,
--cut my hair so I could see the trees and they looked good
but then I wanted my hair back
so a minister raised his hands and everyone knelt to pray
"let us stop ourselves before it's too late!"
I tell myself,
I can't be too busy-- what's going on --eat something better than that--

Dear Mike,
There's this place you might not know called
Omigo by the Lake and the stars
shine and the moon shines and the ground shines
with light you'd like it even in the darkness.

Dear Mike,
Just let's you and me walk there and sit and throw stones.
You'll like it there
even in the darkness.




tapestry of isolation

those weren't excuses
I really was marking papers and waitressing and
pulling the dishwashing actions of a life into center,
the dirty bits of things
swept into my palm.

I'd love to get together
but I have a job. And then I plunged my hands back
into the murky water, cat-food hardened
on the dishes, crustaceans of yesterday
catching up with me too fast,

no, there is no time,
clean up, step up,
go to bed and begin again--
washing undiminished. Up, down

and across I rushed --even then
the curtains were falling down
(if I'd had curtains)
and the cats needed attention
(if they hadn't been sleeping).

--in the background there's the father unadorned,
the boyfriend turning in circles like a pigeon--
--the friend with eyes like buffed chestnuts
the mother's hands limp with soaked shirts--

Below, and above, a cloud with a distinct smell
idles strangely--

ii) tapestry of isolation

after a while you wonder
what busy means anyway:
time for only
one arm around you?

poverty: when there's never enough for you.
consciousness: at last you see
everyone's tied to the tracks.

but still you have to tie yourself to something solid
and so the busy brick appears
and you hang on--

iii) tapestry of isolation

and when you've accumulated a lot of it?
It crumbles into pocket-lint
and single silver dog hairs and crumbs
from morning after morning.
I bet that's what it does.

And the crumbling happens at the beginning,
or does it take years?

Years.

iv) tapestry of isolation

In the beginning you walk with plates balanced on your head
up the Avenue of the Americas.
Pedestrians rush like stock-hawkers, manic shoppers
against the future.
You do it to prove you can.

But I bet that was always happening,
even before you started the balance. The rushing
and the which-a-way walking. And like the others
you were so afraid your body would leave you.

v) tapestry of isolation

for the first time since the house burned down
I am living with rugs.

How much they hold. Each strand so loyal
it stands firmly in its pattern of printed roses;
roses holding
a footprint, crumbs, or feathers, things
from all over, including the direction the vacuum passed in.
(you can vacuum but
things stay unclean)

Rug, so internal, so at home, so domestic!
Womanly it spreads across the floor,
doing exactly as I ask,
holding like a breath its wearing.
And what's unwanted inside its weave, it holds in.

The Volcano

Down at the end of Grand Street
under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway
which has been quiet for American Thanksgiving
the top blows on a local volcano
and everyone down our street
sticks their heads out the windows--

why hadn't we seen it before?
did we think it was someone's pet
brought back from vacation in South America?
or a piece of scenery from a movie set
fallen off a truck racing on the elevated highway?
a bit of cloud moving low in from the East River?

upstairs a black woman on t.v. laughs and laughs

the lava pours towards us
I see my reflection, a grave image
of someone looking

everyone stays inside
everyone looks for something

and like the lovers
dying entwined in the lava flow
we wish to die, to step out and be completed
through death and catastrophe
through the bizarre and unexpected
through private audience with Shiva
memorized by fire
complete like the ash in the clouds
particulated, undistinguished, at home,
nothing left to break down-

I want to be on the front lines---
I get ready to go outside---

---if I really put my shoes and coat on,
if I really walk down to the BQE
if I can't get close because of the heat
if I stop because a sea of red
molten lava oozes my way
if jump into the molten lava and am turned into glass
if as glass I take my true form

will I be memorialized
shown on t.v.
documented, reported, make
front page news?

will my friends eulogize me
will I then 'make it'
be 'completed'
have a 'hero's death'
show 'historical aberrance'?

Glassy bodies all over the neighborhood
twinkle like Christmas lights.
Firemen glide by in heat-resistant boots,
picking up the transformed:
the hipsters, the Hispanic,
the Polish, the dog-walkers, the fallen babies
plucking them out of the hardening rock
setting us on the sidewalks,
cooling us with hoses,
while we view the molten river
that has changed us-

a neighborhood of glass replicas
true products of volcanic spectacles-like pumice

All this might have happened.
And upstairs on t.v. a black woman laughs and laughs.



Baby Dolls'

The busboy placed his mouth on mine like a resuscitator-
telling me in French he needed
sexual practice-pretending it's for my own good
next moment he'd jab me with the lower spoon
like I am pudding in a straightjacket,
his teeth hanging there
so filled with lust

no? then to Baby Dolls to see the strippers
as he leaned down in his thoughts, I heard

Why don't you try it? Why don't you?
we pushed through the crowd
the long painted fingernails
dragging over the g-string's cleft
the dark brown legs lifting
to swivel
no, no it's all a mess
it can't have me
no sir, it can't have me

but this time I

not prudish, no, not unliberated
fumed to feel my clothes come off
snagged in mass fantasy,
my feet step up, took
my long-reserved place among those girls

on the cluttered stage
among the swinging and shaking
of hips and ass
lifting my pudding white legs in a giant "V"
flicking my tongue
towards my shoes easy

so very easy and all
the glittering and cracked-up and work-glazed

eyes out there faded
into one soundless chanting breath-
leaving me insulated in a vacuum
gyrating into a mirror
and a sound nearby, my own breathing
like another woman's in a stethoscope,
a ghost of myself,
the tortured good girl
told me I'd found the root of all discomforts
the way they'd all wished me, Mum, Dad, the schools,
employers, lovers and strangers
since ever I could or could not remember--

I disappeared around the stripping pole then
under the flashing twirl of a disco-ball
and swiveling spotlights,
outside of the cheers and the dollar-bills
the fingers pushing and the hollers

and felt something relieved fall down nearby
as though shot in the head
and watched it lay entranced and loving
though bloody in its own death.