ISSUES | spring 1990

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

As it was her turn to direct, Nelly Farrower had the choice of plays and chose Streetcar. There followed the usual bitching about how everybody’d seen it and why not something experimental for a change, of which Nelly disdained to hear a word while she budgeted, cleared the schedule with the house committee, ordered the script. She was on the verge of making the cast call when she had a stunning idea.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

Sometimes he comes up behind me at the stove and lifts my skirts and we do it right here in the kitchen like a couple of kids. Quite a change from Noah who could only stay hard by imagining me being sawn in half. Robbie is the tallest, nicest man I’ve ever gone out with. His back and shoulders are broad and strong and make me think of the word wingspan. When we go to sleep he folds me in his arms as gently as if I were an origami bird. But nothing is perfect. He is dead broke. And worse.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

Wally’s was the corner room; two rooms, in fact, counting the small bedroom, with a porch large enough for the two rocking chairs and a view of the old watch factory. He’d lived there twelve years, through two owners. With Joseph, the new landlord, he’d grown to a position of responsibility: in exchange for ten dollars weekly off the rent, he swept the halls and kept a set of keys in case any of the tenants lost theirs and needed to be let into their rooms. Joseph lived across town, and didn’t like to be called over for every little nuisance.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

A Confederate Officer, himself as raggedy as a scarecrow, together with a few of his men, and most of them shoeless and all of them is tattered and torn and patched pieces of uniform, is on his hands and knees crawling down the long straight row of a cornfield. They all go very slowly, carefully, as quiet as they can. Above all they do not want the famer in the log cabin, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, to find them here. For what they intend to do, the farmer could have them hanged.

Diaries kept by women taking part in the pioneer westward movement of 1840-1870 were often sent back east to be used as guides by family members intending to make the same journey. Surviving until the late twentieth century, they became guides by which we can understand in sometimes poignant, sometimes monotonous detail, the lives of families caught up in a momentous period of American history.

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For most American women, the question of where to have their first child is easily answered. Either they would never dream of having it in a hospital or they would never dream of not. For these women, there is no decision to make, no research, no late-night reversals. Intuitively they have determined the relationship between birth and technology. Most accept pregnancy as a medical “event,” belonging to the realm of doctors, pharmacology, and electronic equipment. A few reject that model as undesirable and unsafe. Right or wrong, pro-homebirth or pro-hospital, these women feel secure. They have made their judgment.

This poem is not currently available online.

On July 19, 1989, Nicaragua observed the tenth anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. As most anyone who pays attention to the news headlines might surmise, the recent record of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations endowed the occasion with particular significance. The Sandinistas have no been popular in Washington. Were their country situated in some half-forgotten corner of the globe, all things being equal, Yankee opinion might not count for much. But since Nicaragua occupies real estate regarded by the United States as part of its “backyard,” Uncle Sam’s displeasure has translated into eight years of devastating trade embargo and even more devastating sponsorship of the Contra rebels.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

Before they let her have her clothes back so she could go, they reminded her once again — in the gentlest, kindest, most compassionate voices — that she could not see him again. Not in the way she claimed she had. “Oh, in the next life, surely, if you’re of that persuasion,” one of the doctors supposed, “but not in this world. What you see is what you want to see, a mental projection. This happens sometimes to those in certain circumstances.” What she saw was her true heart’s desire, and she understood this. Doctors are very scientific in their explanation. The dead stay dead. Buried is buried.

This poem is not currently available online.

I have no hatred in me. I’m almost certain of that. I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn’t matter. In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this, and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I’ve been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

“I couldn’t get used to the idea that mere will would not produce a creative work.”