ISSUES | fall 1993

For all the effort he made to be calm and detached, to be amused at his own foolish tension, the unlikely prospect taht he would feel grief after all these years for a man he had never known, Sonny did not feel like himself at all when he climbed out of the rental car inf ront of the open gates of the cemetery.

“The house is crying,” I said to her as steam ran down the walls. The cooking stove heated the house. Windows were frozen over with white feathers and ferns. It was a long week of cooking, and there was no music.

“My Wife”
“Painting the Fence”
“Welcome”
“My Flame”
“Windows”
“The Radio”
“My Porch “

That evening we crawled under the fence and looked at the house where old man Fario had died. Wooden slats were nailed over the windows and the front door was padlocked. The grass was brown like the weeds along the road. Some of the branches were dead on the willow tree.

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I use the ultra fine needles, so thin I have to hold them to the light to see them. They dont’ draw blood and they don’t leave scars. My girls don’tw ant scars. Even if I have to zap the same hair five times, I still use the ultra fine needles.

The afternoon was appropriate for a clandestine mission, the sky obliterated by a vast grey cloud, farmyards empty, not an animal or a child at play to be seen. A bleak afternoon indeed when one failed to see even a nosey babushka on a stoop with a broom in hand pretending to sweep while gathering gossip for a meeting of crones at tomorrow morning’s church service, or with hands folded upon their chests.

George Appo was no ordinary criminal. Forgotten by the time of his death in 1930, Appo was a quintessential underworld celebrity in nineteenth-century New York City. He grew up in poverty, supported himself by picking pockets, became an opium addict, engaged in counterfeiting schemes, and was incarcerated for over a decade in five different prisons. In 1894, his tales of police corruption before an investigative committee generated not only front-page attention in the penny press, but earned him hatred int he underworld. Perhaps most extraordinary, George Appo wrote an autobiography.

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“El Cafe”
“Juan of the Angels”
“The Carver of Masks”
“Cuando Morimos”
“Three Views from the Latin American Summit”
“Lengthening Light”

If you think the streets are sordid and unsafe in 1993, read Timothy Gilfoyle’s recent book City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. It describes in stunning detail the sex-and crim-saturated streets of New York, particularly during the nineteenth centruy. In this issue, Professor Gilfoyle edits a memoir by George Appo, pickpocket, “green-good” con artist, and opium addict during one of the earliest American drug scenes.

This poem is not currently available online.

During my twelfth summer, each excursion I made into the world of adults was followed by an even deeper retreat into myself. Learning about sex was one of those excursions. It began following a Little League baseball game, during which my brother, Jamie, sat on the bench while I sat beneath a tree with my nose in a book–as it would be most of the summer. Joy Adamson’s Born Free and Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding interested me much more than baseball.