"834675f7-768f-4ba6-838f-15c650cfad52"@en . "CONTENTdm"@en . "Prism international 29:2 / Winter 1991"@en . "http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=1215619"@en . "Prism international"@en . "Prism international"@en . "2015-08-10"@en . "1991-01"@en . "https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/prism/items/1.0135246/source.json"@en . "85 Pages"@en . "application/pdf"@en . " JUL\ninternational\nContemporary writing from Canada and around the world\nJANUARY 1991\n$3.50\nSpecial Issue on Sexuality One year $12\nTwo years $20\nNAME\nSTREET\nCITY\nNAME\nSTREET\nCITY\nPROVINCE\nPROVINCE CODE\nInstitutional rates slightly higher. Please enclose payment with order.\nCODE\nPlease renew/extend my subscription: Please give a gift to:\n One year $12\n Two years $20\nNAME\nNAME\nSTREET\nSTREET\nCITY\nCITY\nPROVINCE\nCODE\nPROVINCE\nCODE\nInstitutional rates slightly higher. Please enclose payment with order.\nOld address:\nMOVING?\nNew address as of:\nNAME\nSTREET\nCITY\nNAME\nSTREET\nCITY\nPROVINCE CODE\nPlease stamp and mail.\nPROVINCE\nCODE Please place in envelope\nand mail to:\nPRISM international\nDept. of Creative Writing\nUniversity of British Columbia\nBuch. E462- 1866 Main Mall\nVancouver, B.C.\nV6T 1W5\nPlease place in envelope\nand mail to:\nPRISM international\nDept. of Creative Writing\nUniversity of British Columbia\nBuch. E462 - 1866 Main Mall\nVancouver, B.C.\nV6T 1W5\nPRISM international\nDept. of Creative Writing\nUniversity of British Columbia\nBuch. E462- 1866 Main Mall\nVancouver, B.C.\nV6T 1W5 \"VI\n_MJ international LrVL\ninternational\nEditor\nBlair Rosser\nExecutive Editor\nHeidi Neufeld Raine\nFiction Editor\nJim King\nPoetry Editor\nMartha Hillhouse\nAdvisory Editor\nKeith Maillard\nEditorial Board\nRodger Cove\nPatricia Gabin\nFrancie Greenslade\nJaan Kolk\nShelley Macdonald\nVivian Marple\nJane Scott PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times per year\nat the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver,\nB.C. V6T 1W5. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms, Ann\nArbor, Michigan, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, N.Y.\nContents Copyright \u00C2\u00A9 1990 PRISM international for the authors.\nCover and artwork by E. Grimm-Vance\nOne-year individual subscriptions $12.00, two-year subscriptions $20.00, library and institution subscriptions $18.00, two-year subscriptions $24.00, sample copy $4.00.\nAll manuscripts should be sent to the Editors at the above address. Manuscripts must be\naccompanied by a self-addressed envelope with Canadian stamps or International Reply\nCoupons. Manuscripts with insufficient postage will be held for six months and then discarded. The Advisory Editor is not responsible for the content of this magazine.\nPayment to contributors is temporarily $20.00 per page plus a one-year subscription.\nPRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights only.\nOur gratitude to the Canada Council, the Dean of Arts' Office and the University of British\nColumbia.\nWe gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of British Columbia,\nthrough the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Recreation and Culture.\nSecond Class Mail Registration No. 5496. January 1991 Contents\nVol. 29, No. 2 Winter, 1990\nFiction\nElizabeth Graver\nGreg Hollingshead\nEric Horsting\nPeter McGehee\nNawal El Saadawi\nTranslated by Peter Whelan\nJames Morrison\nThe Blue Hour 63\nWhen She Was Gone 38\nVacation 20\nI Am Stealing Your Life 53\nLies 28\nSea Monkeys 47\nPoetry\nDavid Axelrod\nRoo Borson\nGeorge Bowering\nSu Croll\nDee Evetts\nCarolyn Gammon\nDiana Hartog\nScott Minar\nKim Morrissey\nRoxanne Power Hamilton\nStratis Paschalis\nTranslated by Yannis Goumas\nAl Purdy\nDavid Reiter\nJay Ruzesky\nMark Sanders\nConnie Vivrett\nBoy Scouting Rounds a Guy Out 37\nThe Wind and The Rain 17\nBed 18\nSmaro Kamboureli in the Foothills 32\nthe day after goat gloves 25\nKatherine Wheel 27\nSix Weeks 74\nAt The Female Ejaculation Workshop 33\nMen 15\nWomen 16\nSaussure's Rain 75\nexcerpts from Poems for Men\nWho Dream ofLolita 56\nPark Slope With A Mind To Walk 54\nBlack Shadow 77\nThe Lovers 60\nEnergetic Ezra Falls on Hard Times 36\nEdict #2: Sheep 76\nSometime in November\nMaybe, Midnight 19\nAnna Cernik's Diary: Of Daughters\nand Sons 14\nSomething That Feels Like Waiting 81 Non-Fiction\nAnita Roberts Stockholm, 1989: The Sauna 78\nArtwork\nE. Grimm-Vance Small Torso\nContributors 83 Sea-Monkeys\nJames Morrison\nThe children want sea-monkeys. There are two of them and only\none of me. My son has me in a head-lock. He's eleven, husky, and\ngoing through a wrestling phase. Give up? he asks me, his voice\nheavy and breathless, and when I say yes right away, he says it's too late\nand tightens his grip. My daughter holds a comic book and rattles the\nglossy back page in my entrapped, reddening face. Look, Daddy, she\nsays. Look how cute they are. Ralphie, let him go, you butt.\nThe cavorting sea-monkeys take up the entire back page of the comic\nbook in fanciful line drawings. They're waving their arms, frolicking in the\ndelicate, ink-crested waves of the imaginary water they inhabit, sporting\ndeep sea goggles and professor's caps and other mock-human accessories. Send money, is the upshot of this ad, and we'll let you in on the hidden mysteries of life itself to which otherwise only we have access: that's\nthe message, and the sea-monkeys\u00E2\u0080\u0094irrepressible, guileless\u00E2\u0080\u0094are its inadvertent agent, and there's no way to tell my children that it's shameless, that you go in hopeful and open faced, believing everything they tell\nyou, and you come out knowing the score, wised up, seeing finally that\nbelief and hope are just two more shells in the game.\nYou're the butt, says Ralph. And you stink too, just like a big ugly butt.\nNo, I don't. You're the one who stinks. You stink more than I do.\nLetty's voice is sing-song matter-of-fact, almost scholarly in its pure conviction that who stinks more than whom is a real question, something that\ncan be proven in a world where things generally make sense. She offers\nher evidence: Just go ahead and smell yourself if you can stand it.\nPromptly she loses interest in this sideline debate and turns her attention\nback to what really matters. Please can we get them, Daddy? She holds\nup the comic book.\nSay Uncle, says my son.\nUncle. (I owe him this much at least.)\nNow say Bula Bula Bula.\nRalphie, says Lettie. Quit it. Come on, Daddy, please? Can we?\nOkay, okay, okay\u00E2\u0080\u0094I can barely get the words out\u00E2\u0080\u0094but brace yourself\nbecause it's going to break your heart. After the children have safely gone, whisked away in their mother's\ncar, Matthew appears. There's no suggestion that he's been waiting for\nthem to leave, but I know he has. He knows what time they go home and\nhe times the drive up from the city to where I live in the suburbs so that\nhe arrives a few minutes after they've gone. If he mis-times it and gets\nhere too soon, he browses the used-book stores in my neighborhood,\nchoosing with grim appreciation from the collection of paperback self-help\nbooks of the mid-seventies, his favorite genre of disposable book. This is\nwhat's happened today, for he arrives with two new books he wants to\nshow me. I figure it's just as well because the children's presence embarrasses him. He talks to them the way a moderator on public radio solicits\nopinions from groups of experts: stiff and doggedly formal and remote.\nWhen Matthew lets himself in with the key I've given him, I'm cooking\ndinner, and he kisses me and takes a seat in the kitchen, opening a can of\nbeer. I won't give him a hard time for now, I decide, but I will soon, by\nsome means I haven't yet come up with, if Matthew sticks around long\nenough (a doubtful proposition, really), bring together these halves of my\nlife, Matthew and my children, pleasure and pain and pleasure, and the\ntwo halves will merge, and then my life will be seamless again, whole.\nDuring dinner, Matthew fills me in on the latest books. The first has to\ndo with methods of control, the second with a technique of meditation,\ncentering. He rants on about them with his usual intense, gonzo irony,\nhalf taking it seriously. When he gets like this, I tune his voice out and\nmentally pour myself into him across the space of the room, latching onto\none of his features\u00E2\u0080\u0094the small freckle under his left eye, the ridged skin of\nhis forehead\u00E2\u0080\u0094and trying to get to the bottom of it. This is what I do, and\nhe knows about this habit and says it's indicative of what he calls my abstraction. At the end of the meal, he holds a hand up in the air and snaps\nhis fingers twice. \"Hey,\" he says. \"Earth to Jonathan. Have you been listening to what I've been saying?\nNo, I say. I've been looking at your teeth. They look the way teeth\nmust have looked before there were dentists. You're gorgeously\nsnaggle-toothed. You have medieval teeth.\nJust for that, he says, I'm not spending the night.\nI slip onto his lap as he folds his hands, and I manage to clamp his hands\nbetween my thighs. I like them, I say. I bet I can get my tongue between\neach of them. Like dental floss.\nYuck, says Matthew.\nAnd you didn't intend to stay anyway, I tell him.\nWhere would you put yourself? What category? He frees his hands and\npicks up from the table in front of him the book he's been describing to\nme, Control Demonology. The front cover has been eaten into by two fuzzy white interlocking rings, dazzling shadows of a past owner's coffee\ncup. The book's co-authors, a husband-and-wife team, gaze out from the\ncover with the crimped, steady smiles of self-conscious charlatans. What\ndo you think? he asks. Are you aura-generative or hyper-gravitational?\nOr what?\nI'm not theoretical, I say. And I reject the categories.\nMagically, the dinner dishes vanish and we're in bed, the pillows and\nbedclothes heaped beside us on the floor, leaving us, only us in the center\nof the broad sheet with twinned limbs, clenching arms and legs. My head\nis pressed against the mattress, my face against his neck where, opening\nmy eyes, I see a slightly raised mole I never noticed before, extruding a\nsingle hair in the shape of a question mark. Every time we do this, I tell\nhim, I find something new. It's really amazing. Can you move a little?\nThis is uncomfortable.\nYou can't, says Matthew, rolling over. You can't reject the categories.\nIt's not allowed. You have to choose. It's important.\nOkay. I'm on top of him; he's on top of me; we're on top of us. I'll do\nthis, I say. I'll do this if I have to but then we're going to talk about something real. I mean it. Now what were the choices?\nNo chance, man. If you didn't listen before\u00E2\u0080\u0094before, when I was telling\nyou\u00E2\u0080\u0094then you're shit out of luck. You'll just have to choose blind and take\nthe consequences. He reaches over the side of the bed toward the television. He gropes in the patch of darkness next to the silent, glowing\nscreen and changes the channel from a game show to a tabloid news\nshow, the only choices at this time of the evening. Why don't you turn\nthat off? I ask him. Because, he says, I can't concentrate on only one\nthing at a time. He slumps forward, his chin and spread arms hanging\nover the side of the mattress. Nothing in the world, he mumbles, is any\nmore real than anything else.\nI'm licking his back, and I reach forward, above my head, to take hold\nof one of his arms. I pull it back, readjust it, draping it over my own back,\nwhere it remains, heavy and flaccid. Let's talk about our lives before we\nmet each other, I suggest. Tell me about the great love of your life. If you\ngot really drunk, so drunk you didn't give a fuck what you said any more\nand you could tell someone for the first time you loved them, who would\nyou call on the telephone. You don't have to give me a name right away.\nGive me an area code and let me guess. Make it interesting. His arm\ncomes to life, scratches my back perfunctorily. I lift my face from his spit-\nwet back and look up at the back of his head. Matthew, I say. I want us to\ndo something together. You and my children and me. Go to the zoo or\nsomething.\nMatthew rises on all fours. He rears back, assuming a lotus position with my head wedged between his legs. Now I'm going to center, he\nsays. Watch me. You might learn something. It really gives you a sense\nof your place in the world, centering\u00E2\u0080\u0094gets rid of pride and vanity and\nanxiety.\nThe seven deadly sins, I say.\nHe looks at me severely, lifting himself from my head and repositioning\nhimself on my chest. Don't mock, he says. A deadly sin is a deadly sin, no\nmatter what the karma. He closes his eyes. So here's the scam. You position yourself, get it? You think about where you are. Like I am here, on\nthis bed, in this room, in this house in this city in this world. And you\nthink about what's in the world, and you think about what's around you\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nyou're under me, and there's the TV and there's a wall and there's a wall\nand there's a wall and there's a ceiling\u00E2\u0080\u0094and then in your mind you make\nthe two things, what's in the world and what's around you, into the same\nthing. Then you're ready. You look inside and find the center. And the\ncenter can be anything. It can be God, or the Self, or the fucking TV, or\nanything, but it has to be inside. And if it's outside you have to put it inside. And then you hover over it, over this center. Your whole self.\nI can never tell if your jokes are bitter or just a sign of bad breeding, I\ntell him. It's a problem.\nHe opens his eyes. They reflect the image of the television screen.\nEverybody has to think of a way to live his own life, he says. A devotee\nhas nothing to fear from the uninitiated. He lies back so that I can no longer see him, can only feel the blunt pressure of his legs against my legs.\nAs I stare at the ceiling, I hear him whisper. The zoo, he says. The fucking zoo.\nSo we go to the zoo. It's Saturday, cold and drizzling, but the zoo's still\ncrowded with divorced parents dutifully exercising their visiting rights.\nWe wait in line an hour to see the koala. Matthew, however, refuses to\nwait with us, claiming he's not built that way, and he stations himself on a\ndistant bench, refusing even to smile when our eyes decisively meet, his\nhair slick, diamond-dusted with beads of rain. We have one umbrella\namong the four of us. All day Matthew insists that he's the outsider, he's\nthe one who should be left out in the cold, so there we are\u00E2\u0080\u0094the three of\nus, Ralph in his safety-patrol poncho and Letty in her too-heavy blue\ncoat, pinned mittens suspended from the sleeves, the three of us huddled\nunder the bright umbrella with Matthew bringing up the rear, grave, silent, a lonely watcher. Whenever Matthew is out of earshot, the children\nask whose brother he is: if they're supposed to call him uncle he must be\nsomeone's brother, and finally he overhears them and says he's nobody's\n10 brother and they don't have to call him uncle if they don't want to. The\nkoala's not worth the wait. It sleeps sixteen hours a day, a sign tells us\nwhen we get close enough to read the sign. The koala is a quivering ball\nof hair pressed against the bars of its own cage. Letty says it's dumb and\nshe's had it and she can't stand zoos anyway, all you do is watch a bunch\nof animals poop. She says it's all Ralph's fault, too, for making us stand in\nline to see the koala. Ralph tells her to stuff it; she looks like a freak in\nthat big coat. She tells him his breath smells like pee. I ask them please\nnot to call each other names, to remember that Matthew is with us\u00E2\u0080\u0094\neven though he's not with us at the moment and he hasn't really seemed\nto be with us much at all the whole day. Ralph objects he didn't call her a\nname. I tell him to be still. He says great, he doesn't call anyone names\nand he gets yelled at; he might as well call people names if he's going to\nget yelled at anyway.\nExiting the koala hutch, we're reunited with Matthew. How was it? he\nasks. Should I be sorry I didn't come?\nIf some of us have to stand in line, Letty says under her breath, I think\nall of us should have to stand in line.\nLet's go see the birds, I suggest. They have a big cage full of birds\nfrom everywhere, birds you've never even heard of before.\nDo they have bathrooms by there? asks Ralph.\nAs it turns out, they do. Ralph and Letty disappear into separate bathrooms, expressing uncomplicated happiness, knowing what to expect for\nthe first time that day. Once they're gone Matthew brushes his palm\nagainst the back of my neck. Free, he whispers, for a minute.\nI stiffen. I didn't know my children were such big trouble.\nYou know what I mean. You know how this feels. You've been here as\nlong as I have. His hand leaves my neck, which goes on tingling, idiot\nnerve endings answering churlish synapses, confused by the dialectic of\ntouching and not touching.\nYou're not helping much. You're not helping at all. You're acting like a\nbitter old man. They're afraid of you. I've been staring at the ground, but\nnow I turn toward him, full into his face. He's flushed, opening and closing\nhis mouth. And, I say, why shouldn't they be afraid of you?\nHe grabs my elbow, and as I feel his fingers digging into my arm, I see\nmy son emerge from the bathroom, freeze in the doorway watching the\ntwo of us locked in this subtle intensity, another man gripping his father's\narm in mute anger. Stop it, I whisper, he's back. Then: Hey Ralphie,\nover here, as if I don't know that he's seen us, as if everything can still be\nmade harmless. There's a second in which I don't know if Matthew will\nlet go of me, but as Ralph approaches he does let go, and as I shout to\n11 Ralph something cheerful about all those birds we're about to see, I hear\nalready above my own voice the future voices of friends, people I haven't\neven met yet, telling me how much better off I am without him.\nThe sea-monkeys have arrived, packaged in a small prefabricated plastic aquarium, but the children are more interested in the housekey that\nhas been abandoned on the table. Did you know that man from work,\nDaddy? Was he somebody you work with? Letty turns upward at me her\ntiny, polished face, pinched with the astute energies of question-asking.\nI'm overwhelmed by generalities\u00E2\u0080\u0094the endurance of children, how the\nthings one loses give advice to the things one keeps, what it's like to\nknow more about the world than the small, earnest people whose lives\nyou're responsible for\u00E2\u0080\u0094so I can't answer. Why did you give that man\nyour key? And if you gave him your key why did he give it back?\nThe instructions for the sea-monkeys are painstaking, and we follow\nthem painstakingly. What's supposed to happen is this: you're supposed\nto fill up the little aquarium with pure water, room-temperature, and then\nopen the packet of freeze-dried sea-monkeys and pour them in. The little\nbeads will come to life in the waster, burst forth, unfold into living,\nbreathing miracles. Isn't it, the instruction booklet asks ardently, the most\nwonderful thing you have ever seen in all of your life? Ralph wants to be the\none to drop in the contents of the packet and for once Letty doesn't argue. Instead, she sits with her arms folded, leaning forward avidly. I see\nher face through the aquarium, magnified and disproportionate. As Ralph\nreaches for the packet and I notice again the piercing otherness of scale\nof his hand and his not-quite-human wrist, I know this is my last chance to\ndisillusion them the right way instead of the wrong way.\nWith a flourish Ralph overturns the packet. Its contents, like thick\ngrains of pepper, fall through the air and hit the water, where some just\nfloat languorously on top but a few penetrate the surface, falling in slo-mo\nspirals to the bottom. Each grain remains stubbornly, fully itself, without\nmuch potential to become anything else, immutable. It becomes clear\npretty fast that nothing much is going to happen here. The children exchange looks. Letty says, What a gyp, and then, unexpectedly, she\nlaughs. Ralph leans back in his chair, laughing too, and slapping his knees\nhe says it's a real knee-slapper. Both of them are doubled up; neither can\nstop laughing. I watch them for a minute. Slipping the key from the table\ninto my pocket, I head out into the front yard, where it's dusk. The key\nfeels first cool and tiny against my thigh, then, as it warms, as if it is just\nanother part of what I'm wearing. I sit down in the middle of the lawn, listening to the laughter of the children from the kitchen. Then, as I stretch\n12 out on my stomach, they're on the porch\u00E2\u0080\u0094laughing, laughing\u00E2\u0080\u0094and they\nask me what I'm doing.\nI'm centering, I tell them.\nThey stop laughing for a second, then start up again, not having heard\nwhat I said, playing with the word they didn't hear\u00E2\u0080\u0094celery, semolina,\nsemi-colon\u00E2\u0080\u0094and doing a Chip-and-Dale act\u00E2\u0080\u0094After you my dear chap, no\nno I must insist, you first\u00E2\u0080\u0094as they go back through the door into the\nhouse.\nI, meanwhile, am left here in the world. The world consists of figure\nand ground. I am the figure, lone and inert. The ground is part earth, part\nsky. Before me is the close earth with its cool layer of grass. At my back\nis the thickly-vested sky, which tries without success to conceal a bright\nmoon in one of its threadbare pockets.\n13 Mark Sanders\nAnna Cernik's Diary: of\nDaughters and Sons\nPapa came in this morning\nangry at the winter.\nHe had been with one of his calving cows\nmost the night,\nhad to drive her to the barn through snow to his knees,\nand the calf's hind legs coming first,\nthe wet of birth freezing.\nMama in the barn held the lantern for Papa\nas he worked.\nI held the cow's head to calm and steady her.\nBut Papa could not pull the calf himself,\nit was lodged so.\nThen the cow fell to her knees,\nrolled over to her side,\nher great belly heaving and heavy with her death.\nMama, feeding little Tina who slept through it,\nsaid Papa would not drink his coffee,\neat his breakfast,\nbut went out early to chore.\nThen he came back in, angry at the winter.\nSaid over and over he wished he'd had a son\nto help him pull,\nneeded more muscle to do what last night\nhad to be done.\nOver and over said he was angry at the winter.\n14 Diana Hartog\nMen\nThe variety in which the flesh clings to the stone\nwas never my mother's favorite\nnor is it mine: less sweet, less shaggy with juice\n(they require a knife), than if you wait\ntill later in the season, for the other kind to ripen\nand fall into your lap,\nfall open between your thumbs\nand run down your chin and between your breasts.\nThese also dry best.\n15 Women\nHigh-strung, they're always transporting\nthis & that: the thorax of a compatriot\nor some useful snip of leaf, or their Fate\nin a grain of cooked rice.\nAnd lighter stuff, a man, if it so amuses. A motif\nof black, narrow-waisted notes might pulse through the\nmind of a genius like Bach as a cantata\nand then refuse, veer off the page to\nvagaries\u00E2\u0080\u0094forgetting things\nand doubling back, for instance, though never\nthe instinct to seize a man's tiniest fault\nand hold it aloft between pincers.\n16 Roo Borson\nThe Wind and the Rain\nThe room is a musty Long Island room we arrived in only yesterday,\nhaving crept through the eye of the needle which is the Lincoln Tunnel to\nwhat we imagine must be the city of self-loathing though it goes also by\nother names. Scrap of paper improvising a slow poised ballet at the base\nof a sign saying The Taxpayers Pay For Littering, the The crossed out and\nreplaced by Us, which nobody reads. My father won't be coming back\nagain, nobody does, eventually his atoms will suffuse the universe, on\ncamelback, police car, fern, travelling to all the places he only read\nabout\u00E2\u0080\u0094while my aunt, frightening herself again, makes a joke of her age,\nsaying nowadays she hardly even dares buy unripe bananas. Somewhere\nin the middle of any argument the engine breaks down. No point\ncontinuing. The wind and the rain. I sleep beside a fellow for whom sleep\nand snoring are one, he growls gently like a hunting cat but wakes\nwithout remembrance. Nothing to report beyond the rare condition of\ntogetherness, this side-by-sideness, part figment, part fruition. The list\nof complaints changes on the other side of the fence, but it's the same\nfence. A room in Long Island, the wind and the rain, America, where\neveryone's on a first-name basis, my father won't be coming back again.\n17 Bed\nThere are whole days I would rather not leave you.\nAt coffee break and at\nlunch break and in between,\nin the split-seconds between adding up figures\nfor a moment I peel away the covers\nand sit up, again,\nto the inextinguishable day,\nand your expanse gazes\nup at me sadly\nand the long limbs of the blankets' dishevelment\nseduce me back.\nThere are days I would rather not leave you,\nthat intimate-\nnothing to be said,\nand no misunderstanding. Remember\nthe afternoon I first brought you here: the cat\njumped down in a huff\nand sauntered off, showing us\nhis vertical tail, but you\ngrew wider,\nand curious,\nand very quiet.\nThere are whole days I would rather\nnot breathe, but you compose my dreams\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nand when they turn,\nwhen I'm at the edge of what I can bear, I\nwake suddenly, held up by you.\nWhy do you taunt me so?\nWhat does it matter what a human can\nbear or not bear,\nwhat is this\nwish for measurement?\nWarm sand you are,\nand effortless\nwanderings of ocean music,\na sea wall\nwhere hurled bottles have smashed\nat night. You are the night.\n18 Jay Ruzesky\nSome Time in November\nMaybe, Midnight\nGlowing from the cold bulb\nnaked as a cantelope. Untouchable.\nWhy you\nalways left to purge\nthe sour milk, moulded rasberries?\nI'm thinking of those people\nin California in the 70s with\nterminal problems.\nWho paid to be\nquick frozen in liquid nitrogen\nbefore they died\nkept in a vat for a cure.\nI was going to mention pickles here\nbut I won't.\nI'll talk about the cars\npneumatically assembled,\nthe buzzing line in Windsor\nGust a year ago I saw them,\nthe workers were ants at a picnic of\nmetal hulls)\nand the heap of dead cars\ndown the block and across\nthe Gorge at West Coast Auto Wreckers.\nThe quick way some things\ncome to an end and\nothers never do.\n19 Those people floating, waiting\nas though all the problems\nwould be solved,\nas though anything could be\nthat simple.\nWhy I lie here in the dark hoping everything\nwill be fine in the morning.\nListening to the sound of you\ntossing gone bagels into the compost.\n20 Vacation\nEric Horsting\nThe sun beat down on the island like flame.\nThe evening had been as cool as the blueberries we'd picked the\nday before; it had been a night of wandering with my friend, who'd\npulled me along in the little red wagon we used to pick up groceries (the\nlaws of the island forbade automobiles). My friend was blonde, straight-\nhaired, and slender. I was small enough to sit with my knees up in the\nwagon, and she was old enough to want to pull me along.\nOnce, we stopped along the road in the coming dusk to watch a long\nblack snake cross the road, and she offered me a cigarette. She'd stolen a\npack of Luckies from her parents; it was then that I knew I was in love.\nThe party that night happened in a sandy plot among the dunes half\nway between the ocean and the bay. The stars were all over the sky and I\nsaw one fall when my friend shouted at me to look up. Many people sat in\nthe sand, listening as Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse played guitars and\nsang. My parents, meanwhile, waited back at the cottage, gently but with\nforce squeezing three quarts of blueberries through linen handkerchiefs.\nThey hoped to be making jelly from the juice.\nWe had made the crossing a week before, my parents and I, storing\nthe old black Chevie with its Venetian blind at the rear window in a rundown garage on the mainland. We had a choice between the Artemis and\nthe Oceola, one a sharp-prowed excursion vessel and the other a\nbathtub-hulled boat that looked like a few waves would topple it. My\nbrother wasn't yet born, so four of us, my parents and my sister and I,\nsettled on the foredeck for the trip over on the Artemis. My mother gave\nme a chocolate bar, and I wandered about the decks, a stranger visiting\nthe ship's crew.\nWhen we arrived, my friend was waiting for me at the slip. As she saw\nme, she waved, and, when we landed, she ran up to me and embraced\nme, one arm about me, her hand holding on to the wagon's tongue. My\nparents looked off into the sun and commented on the beautiful weather\nto the Stillwells, who were renting the cottage to us. So, off we went, my\nfriend and I, my fair skin taking on a slow burn that in a week turned to a\ntan like hers. Strolling along through the sandy walks with the grains grit-\n21 ting along the hard rubber wheels, I searched her eyes and knew at last\nthat we would be beautiful, that the party, when it happened as we both\nknew it would, would be the time for everyone to be dazzles by us, to\nlove us for how we looked to them, to make them more strange to ourselves than we could possibly have imagined.\nSo we sang along with Cyd and Tony, and all the women and the men\nsang too and drank beer from silver kegs. One by one they would drift\nover to us where we sat cross-legged in the sand. All of us were barely\nclothed, wearing swimming suits for the most part. The men were large\nand muscled, hairy and strong, and put their arms around the women,\nand when they drifted over like brown ghosts shaking the dune grass, my\nfriend would motion me to stand, as we both then did, and my friend\nwould spread her arms out wide, and one by one the men would embrace\nher and she would hold them tight and smooth as she kissed their nipples.\nSooner or later, they would drift over to me and I would once again feel\nlike a stranger, because my friend seemed to know what must be done,\nwhile I seemed lost, but fascinated, overwhelmed by the delicious odors\nof hair and sweat and perfume. The women would come to us too. They\nwere more talkative than the men, and said we were Apollonian, and\nmade us stand close to each other, so that they could caress our blonde\nhair, put their glistening arms about us and hold us tightly to their bodies\nstill warm from the day's sun.\nOne woman in particular wore the slightest of clothes, what has come\nto be called a \"bikini.\" Late in the evening, she approached us and took us\nby the hands off into the dune grasses, away from the others. We tagged\nalong in what seemed an obedient way and she lay down on the sand and\nremoved her clothes. My friend gasped and took my arm, pulling me\ndown to the sand. For the rest of the evening, until we walked off into the\ndarkness pulling the red wagon behind us, we lay there, one of us on each\nside of the woman's body, cradled in her arms.\nIt had taken a week for that night to come, and this day my friend and I\nfelt new, and realized that it was time for us to head for the ocean beach,\nto set out in the sun's flames at a time we would agree upon, to change\nour previous habit of chance meetings and careless wandering.\nFor centuries the ocean had been eating away at the beach, carrying\nthe sand away and sludging it down island in its strong currents where it\npiled up along the lee shore. Often the waves were enormous, six and\neight feet high as they broke, and the noise they made was fearsome.\nThe local residents had spent hours and money planting hard grass on the\ndunes to save their houses.\nBut today there was a marvelous silence, It was so great that, as we\napproached the beach, we wondered if the ocean would be there. It was,\n22 but in a way we never could have imagined. Instead of its usual gray, the\nocean gave us a pastoral green that was painful to look at, and the water's\nsurface shimmered quietly, lapping softly at the shore, acting like a lake.\nFor miles it stretched out, silent and lovely. Far off, we saw a trawler\nthat seemed not to move.\nThe hours passed as we lay next to each other on the sand, and soon\nthrough the glare I saw a canoe working its way up the shoreline, gliding\ncarefully and mysteriously red upon the green. The boat seemed headed\nour way, but it would, I thought, take days for it to reach us. But there\nwas no doubt, even as we heard voices in the distance behind us, that the\ncanoe would eventually arrive. So my patience was endless even as we\nawaited the visitors who were now upon us.\nIt wasn't Tony and Cyd, as we had at first suspected, but the woman\nwe had lain with the night before; with her was her husband Sam, who\nwanted us to call him \"Uncle.\" As they came near, we could see that the\nwoman walked with her left arm around Sam's back, circling his waist,\nand her hand was deep inside the front of Sam's trunks. Sam was carrying\na kite shaped like an eagle. When they reached us, they sat down and removed their clothes and rubbed each other and then us with oil.\nAfter a while, Sam stood up and suggested he and I try to fly the kite.\nThere was so little wind it seemed impossible we would do it, but Sam insisted, so off we ran, heading down the beach trailing the kite behind us\non its string, running hard, playing it out. Somewhere a soft breeze must\nhave arisen, so that slowly and gracefully the kite began to ascend. About\na mile down the beach we stopped; the kite was drifting upward, becoming a spot in the sun. Sam gave me a piece of wood wrapped with the remaining string. The connection seemed vague to me. I couldn't see the\nstring.\nSoon we lay upon the sand, and I dozed, lightly holding the piece of\nwood. Hours later I felt a tug on the string and sprang up. Nothing had\nchanged. The ocean still was green and smooth. The canoe was coming\nnearer, and off in the distance, I saw my friend and Sam's wife moving\nabout, seeming close to each other. Somewhere far off the kite floated\nand began to pull me along. Soon I could not control it. The pull became\nso strong I knew I would have to let go. Sam still slept and I didn't want to\nwake him; I didn't want to free the kite either, so I held on more tightly.\nGradually, the pull began to lift me off the ground and I started to sail up\nthe beach, my body tense with fear and joy. As I floated along, the\nstrangeness I'd felt all week began to disappear and soon I reached a\nheight that made Sam a shadow on the beach. Eventually I reached my\nfriend and woman, and I let go, settling slowly down upon the sand next\nto them.\n23 That day seemed to go on forever, and when the canoe arrived with\nthe man in it paddling steadily toward the shore, no one was surprised\nwhen I waded out to him and stepped into the craft, taking a paddle in my\nhands. I understood that we knew each other well and felt no shock as I\nleft my friend upon the shore and headed out to the open sea.\n24 Su Croll\nthe day after goat gloves\nI'm not much on the receiving line\ntight end of that\nI mean tight ended\nanyway I'm not the scraped now\nI'm not but by god\nsome of the goat rubbed off\nhas been rubbing\noff fine and mighty all over me\nyou know rubbed in good\nw/a dye that won't wash\nand those damn fine goat gloves\nfeel good and so what\nif I'm goated I'm goated\ngood and goated\nso what if everyone's goated\nor monkeyed a little\nwhen noone's looking I'm good\nand goated now\nand good god sometimes I think about somebody\nrubbing me hard all over\nwith these good fine goats\nand those good\ngoat gloves\nsometimes I think and I can't stop thinking\nI can't stop thinking about\nthose three billy goats gruff\nall sneaking up the fire escape\nand staying in my room with me\nmy two little men have found\na third for me\nthey're already setting up the ring\nthe girl is walking through with the round number\nI don't care the room's not\n25 paid for and I don't give a shit\nwe're pushing the little beds together\nthe way we always do\na whole family of men\nready to monkey with me getting me\nready to monkey\nI'm waiting to get good and monkeyed\nmarch twenty-first and he's got the best\ndamned goat gloves I've seen in many a year\nthey're setting up the tent and the goats are outside barking kate's in on\nthe roulette wheel and you know what that means she's on the wheel and\nher hair's standing straight up end to end and her eyes are like red coals\nand she's been good and goated and she's been up the ferris wheel w/st.\ntheresa burning up that heavenly flame of love he sends down once in a\nwhile he sends a good shock through our systems good god he's got a\ngood pair\nand george Washington ferris is the man\nw/katherine wheels in his head\nall the goats line up good and ready\nfor our monkey helmets and we're waiting\nand watching for the animal liberators\nespecially the young men in their salvation\narmy suits all pressed\nand rolled out good and fine\nthey come carrying our tickets\nand plenty of free feed\nand all the go-back-to-where-you-came-in's\nand the carnivalling is all around\nand I let them bring me off\nmy horse and let them lead me\nright to the limits of the grounds\nbut I end up back at the room anyway w/the tar baby fast and hard riding\nfast and hard fast and hard on my tail that never stopping\n26 Katherine Wheel\nONE YEAR I WORKED THE MIDWAY in the bingo tent I used to get a\nride in with my friend kate we knew this guy who ran the bullet you know\none of those rides where they strap you in so you can't move and they\nsend you up higher and higher into these tight little circles higher and\nhigher like a ferris wheel but faster and you can't turn your head and they\nhang you upside down you always lose all your change and your purse\nhanging from a bootstrap your hair standing on end because you're hanging upside down over the cattle castle or some greasy little fish and chip\nplace and you can't breathe you can't breathe\nONE TIME THIS GUY OFFERED US A FREE RIDE we knew this guy\nwho ran the bullet the midway wasn't even open yet he offered to let us\nride for free it wasn't time for our shift so we said why not well this guy\nkept us going for forty five minutes we were up there screaming and begging him to stop all that time he had us going in these really fast spins and\nin tight little upside down circles and he kept us hanging our hair brushing\nthe ground for a second before he flung us up into the sky again in that big\nblack bullet of a machine he hung us and he spun us and I lost my wallet\nwe ended up being late for work and getting into a lot of shit last time I\never take a free ride from anybody\n27 Lies\nNawal El Saadawi\nTranslated from the Arabic by Peter Whelan\ns,\nuddenly, he became completely naked.\nHe didn't know how he had removed his clothes. But he wanted to\npresent her with a fait accompli. With a naked man. Nakedness in itself\nwould be guaranteed to further the relationship between him and her. His\npatience had run out. The present was risky; there was no insurance for\nthe future. He had no time to lose, for youth had fled away and middle age\nwas approaching as he left forty behind him. His fund of vigour had begun\nto dwindle, too, and often his body had failed him in moments when the\nheart had caught fire.\nHe was talking about something or other. Some dry subject. Science\nperhaps, or politics, or philosophy. And there was she, sitting opposite\nhim wearing a fashionable dress. She wasn't gazing at him seductively or\nlustfully or with any of the lecherous enticements more properly clad\nwomen have perfected. On the contrary, her gaze repelled a man rather\nthan invited him, repelled him, in fact, with a violence that left no room to\nconsider advancing\u00E2\u0080\u0094just as we repell disease or death or anything whose\nattack, we feel, would be bound to devastate us.\n\"We are driven onward to death, willy nilly.\" He said this to himself\nwhen he caught sight of himself in the mirror, naked. Twenty years he\nhad lived with the mother of his five children\u00E2\u0080\u0094his lawful wedded wife, a\nbashful virgin and passionately devoted to procreation without the body's\never being exposed.\nHe averted his face from the mirror, for his eyes had fallen on a chest\nas hairy as that of an ape, and a belly as prominent as a pregnant\nwoman's. He hadn't thought his belly had swollen to that extent. Every\nday it swelled just a little, imperceptibly, and his trousers were just a bit\ntighter\u00E2\u0080\u0094not more than a millimeter, or half a millimeter. But it was cumulative. The accumulation of days, hundreds of days, thousands of days\nand of millimeters, little by little, bit by bit. Twenty years.\nAnd she\u00E2\u0080\u0094she was sitting with a book in her hand. She knew he was\nsitting in his chair, utterly dignified, talking, the words emerging steadily\nfrom his mouth, one after the other, with no intermissions or silences, as\n28 though he were masticating his own saliva and secreting it as a stream of\nletters stretched out like a viscous fluid or a thread dangling from his\nmouth, long and silky, endless and unbroken\u00E2\u0080\u0094perhaps wound and\nmeshed upon itself like the cocoon of a silkworm. Perhaps a word could\nspontaneously detach itself and fly about in the air like a water droplet or\na bubble that soon lands on some solid object.\nShe was paying attention to him; he was no ordinary guest. He had\nbeen a friend of her husband's for many more years than she had known\nher husband\u00E2\u0080\u0094more years than her husband had known anyone. He was a\npolite man. You could tell by the tension in the muscles of his face and\nneck, and the way the tie bound round his throat was tightly knotted. As\nthough it never came untied, or never could come untied. As though he\nslept in it. Or rather, as though he had been born with it. And the blazer\nwith two rows of buttons and the trousers, tight and buttoned precisely,\nand his thighs pressed together and his knees clenched. He sat like a\nbashful woman or a virgin girl. He really did have the virgin air of a man\nwho looks as though he never takes his clothes off, or couldn't take his\nclothes off if he wanted to.\nHis presence in the house did not bother her in the least, even if her\nhusband were out. She would leave him talking away in his chair and get\non with whatever she wanted to do. She might write or she might read,\nand if her pen fell and rolled under the coffee table she would bend over\nand pick it up uninhibitedly. If her short, tight skirt suddenly rode up so\nthat she was completely exposed from behind she didn't care. He couldn't\npossibly look at her. And if he did it would be a refined, cultured look, settling on her body innocuously, without ardor, just like the air. Even his incessant talking didn't bother her at all; perhaps it helped her pass the\ntime, in fact, for whenever she was without it she switched on the radio.\nHe turned his back on the mirror and remained standing. She was sitting in front of him on a low chair, her thighs half naked and slightly\nparted. The natural position adopted by the thighs of a modern woman\nwhen she was seated. His eyes could easily penetrate between them,\nright to the top, with no difficulty at all. He had changed his topic from\nworld politics to the origin of being to fatalism in religions. But the muscles of his neck\u00E2\u0080\u0094while he talked\u00E2\u0080\u0094tensed up, making an odd squeaking\nsound which he feared might be audible. As a result he was now talking\nlouder than fashionable decorum prescribed. He felt slightly embarrassed, but his voice resonated in the room with its ultra-modern furniture and made the translucent curtains over the windows vibrate delicately and finely, tickling his ears. He was now so in love with the sound\nof his own voice that the mere articulation of words had him sensually enraptured.\n29 The book was still in her hand, her eyes on a line of print on one of the\npages. She was not moving her eyes from word to word. She loved books\nwith a passion, but her hatred of reading was more passionate still. So\nnow her eyes were dragging, despite herself, from the line of print to her\nlong, silvery nails, sharp as a bird's beak. The fine smoothness of the superb paper passed into the fine smoothness of her fingertips, and she felt\na sensuous bond between herself and culture.\nHe remained standing, his back to the mirror. She still hadn't raised\nher head from her book. All that happened when his voice suddenly broke\noff was that she reached out unconsciously to turn on the radio and the\nroom was filled with a calm voice reciting the Koran. Probably, if it had\nbeen some other program, something less proper\u00E2\u0080\u0094an opera, for example, or a piece of music\u00E2\u0080\u0094probably, he would have moved from his\nplace. But a recitation of the Koran in that dignified voice\u00E2\u0080\u0094it gave him no\noption but to remain standing where he was, motionless. It was winter\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nthe last day of January, to be precise\u00E2\u0080\u0094and despite the solid, tightly fitting\nwindows there was a cold draught blowing right on his spine. He thought\nabout reaching down to pick up some of the discarded clothes at his feet,\nbut he was afraid that if he moved he might attract her attention before\nthe recitation was over. He could regard with some little distress his pullover with its expensive English wool spreading warmth over the tiled\nfloor, and there beside it was his tie from Liberty's with its precise, impeccable knot and its long, slim, shining tail. And beside that\u00E2\u0080\u0094almost\ntouching it\u00E2\u0080\u0094were the enormous underpants of coarse cotton, which\nbetrayed the humiliating size of his stomach and the creases in his thighs,\nbetrayed them mercilessly, shamelessly, regardless of decorum.\nThe recitation came to an end. He began thinking about the first movement he might make. It occurred to him that an arm movement might be\nmore appropriate than another. Yes, perhaps he did move his arm, because the thick hair under his armpit became plainly visible. She, however, did not move a muscle. She was sitting reading her book, her thighs\nhalf naked and slightly parted, the normal position adopted by the thighs\nof a modern woman who is absorbed in a book\u00E2\u0080\u0094when she is in the state\nof absorption natural to any person of culture. But he had not thought\u00E2\u0080\u0094it\nhad never occurred to him\u00E2\u0080\u0094that such absorption, however profound or\ncultured, could come between a woman and a naked man.\nHer ears had picked up the voice reading the Koran, and she reached\nout unconsciously and turned the knob with a slight feeling of awe. Instead of recitation came the bellow of a newscaster. If she had been alone\nshe would probably have reached out again to turn the knob, but she\nknew that he was sitting there in his chair, his neck tense and bound with\nhis tie. His top half a box precisely fastened with two rows of buttons, his\n30 thighs pressed tightly together for the sake of propriety. The natural position that the thighs of a modern man adopt when he is listening to the\nnews. Her eyes had stolen furtively away from the line of print to her\nsoft, smooth arm, but they soon lit upon a few coarse projecting hairs,\nand she remembered it was time she shaved.\nHe was beginning to feel perplexed. What could he do to get her out of\nher state of absorption? He put his fingers in his mouth to whistle, as he\nused to as a child playing in the alley barefoot and with naked rump. Perhaps he did actually put his fingers in his mouth, but he did not whistle.\nThe muscles of his mouth were no longer capable of making those sounds\nso incompatible with good taste. He remained standing, frozen and naked\nas a statue. Silence fell suddenly on the room. It was probably a power\ncut. She raised her head from her book to find the room plunged into\ndarkness. She would have collided with him on her way to the study if he\nhad not taken a step back. By the time she returned with another book\nthe power had come back on and he had sat down in his usual chair, fully\nclothed, and utterly dignified.\n31 George Bowering\nSmaro Kamboureli in the\nFoothills\nThe bus to the barbecue ranch was held up\nby a passel of cowboys with kerchiefs up\nto their eyes.\nMost of them sat their hosses while one of\nthem entered the bus, his hogleg drawn, &\nmoseyed down the aisle, hot basalt in his\neyes.\nSmaro leaned forward against her spaghetti\nstraps: \"I'll do anything you want,\" she declared.\n& the desperado's eyes turned into panicked\nfrogs.\nHe retreated, his mask fallen around his neck\nnow, & he turned before he went down the\nsteps, a three-tooth gap in his lonely bunkhouse grin.\n32 Carolyn Gammon\nAt the Female Ejaculation\nWorkshop\nWell-WHY THE HELL NOT?!\nOf course we can ejaculate\nor fountain, or gush, or hit-the-wall\nor emit spontaneous urethral eruptions\nwhatever you want to call it\nof course we can\nJust because it's been hushed up for years\ncenturies, make that millenia\njust because Hirschfeld and the boys ignored it\nKinsey denied it and Masters says it ain't so\ndoesn't mean we don't\nSo we're sitting around a tree at Michigan\nabout fifty dykes\nand the workshop leader asks\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nHow many of you ejaculate?\nUp go the hands\nover half\nHow does it taste, smell, look, FEEL?\nand how much and how often\nand how?\nMore hands shot up\n\"First it was with my husband\nI was ashamed to wet the bed\nand he didn't like it\nso for twenty years I held it back\nI didn't come for twenty years...\nNow I have a woman lover\u00E2\u0080\u0094she loves it\n33 and I come every time\nwet the bed every time\"\n\"I'll tell you\"\nsays another\n\"I thought I'd been around the block\nI thought I was really good\nbut when this lover spurts all over me\nI'm saying to myself:\nDo I ignore it? play polite?\nDo I drink it?\nLike what do I do???\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094My lover taught me\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094I discovered it masturbating\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094I need fingers on my G-spot, you know, reach in and up\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It takes a lot of pressure\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It takes a little\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094Once I fountained with just nipple stimulation\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094You've got to bear down\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094I recommend Sears rubber sheets with flannel covers\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It's clear\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It doesn't taste\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It changes taste during the month\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094It's not urine\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094So what if it is?\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094Once, it shot across the bed\u00E2\u0080\u0094and I mean lengthwise\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094I love it running down my arm, I get soooo turned on\nI'm sitting there\nme, dyke-born, 1959\nFredericton, New Brunswick, Canada\nlistening to maybe ten thousand years\nof hidden lesbian herstory\nasking myself WHY, WHY, WHY\nwas it so vital to hide?\n34 Then a voice from the back\n\"I was thinking\nmaybe it's a vestige\nof women being able to reproduce\namong themselves\nMaybe if we worked on it... \"\nSilence fell under the tree at Michigan\nand I went home\nto work on it\n35 David P. Reiter\nEnergetic Ezra Falls on\nHard Times\nJERUSALEM: An Israeli bachelor\nhas been jailed for thirty days\nbecause of his permanent erection.\nA court in Tel Aviv ruled that Ezra Ezra\nfrom Kiron in central Israel was a public\ndanger and must spend time behind bars.\nHe was a regular at Tel Barukh beach\na known haunt for Tel Aviv prostitutes\nand went there up to six nights a week.\nAfter doctors failed to cure his erection\nhis family sought help from a psychologist\nand social worker, both women\u00E2\u0080\u0094but they\ntoo fell victim to his amorous advances.\n36 David Axelrod\nBoy Scouting Rounds a\nGuy Out\nEros heard the prayer and figured that\nlove after all was love\nOne night before I knew to suspect anything,\nI woke and looked out from my tent\nat an old man and boy\nhurrying across the grassy field at midnight.\nIn two years, the boy enlisted for the war\nand that timid old man was found out-\ntrashed and shunned.\nDrifting up from the coal marshes,\nground fog glowed green with foxfire,\nand the Milky Way, glistering brightly\nas a slug trail on wet bark,\ncast blue light over the naked bodies of those two\nnow long dead, who were so near to me\nI might have cried out their names.\n37 When She Was Gone\nGreg Hollingshead\nThe nurse in charge of Snider's wing is not the one you spoke to on\nthe phone last night. She knows him though, everybody knows\nhim. He's in the common room, sitting at an arborite table talking\nto a boy six or seven. According to his file, Snider has just turned\nseventy-four, but he looks more like sixty. His white hair is cropped, and\nhe wears glasses now, to correct that squint. He is cleanshaven and\npinker, fuller in the face.\n\"Oh look,\" the nurse whispers. \"He's with the Gein boy. They're great\npals,\" and in her nurse's singsong she calls, \"Mr. Snider! You got a visitor!\"\nSnider takes one sharp look at you and says, \"Eddie, go find your\nmama.\"\n\"Hello, Gordon,\" you say, and as you pull up a chair you remember the\nmoment from twenty-five years ago, Snider across the table, the weight\nof the handcuffs in your palm.\nIt would not be true to say I am not bothered by the things that were done.\nI have thought about them a good deal, not worried so much as tried to understand. I would say that blowing through the world is a wind of destruction. People huddle and say, You can know this, you can't know that. Others see the thing for what it is: a simple matter of salvage.\nA mile south of the Third Line, where the dump road cut off through\ndiseased maples to loop at the edge of a trench bottomed with garbage\nunder raw plywood signs in black aerosol that said Dump Hear, Brush\nOnly, and Mettal and HouseHold, Cheryl Deinert swung the pickup into a\nlane that wound another mile through rock and low bush. If she kept going, the lane would cross a hydro cut line where defoliants had turned\ngreen balsams to burnt sienna, but she said,\n\"We'll leave the truck before the cut and circle the dump on foot. The\n38 Snider place is half a mile past it down the Third.\"\nThere was no reply. This had been discussed. Like guerrillas they had\nstudied a map.\n\"Hey,\" said Vicky Armitage from under the dash. \"Can I come out\nyet?\"\n\"Come out, come out,\" Cheryl said.\nWhen they were planning this, Vicky had argued it would be crazy to\nwalk a mile through this bush carrying two-and-a-half gallon tanks, but really they had no choice. Too much dump traffic past the Snider place.\nThe trek turned out to be only tiring. It was too late in the year for\nbugs, the ground was rock, and once they were past the ravens, the\nstink, and the invisible bears of the dump, they cut back close to the concession road and so did not, as Vicky had predicted they would, miss\ntheir target and wander off into seven thousand acres of crown bush.\nIt was Lynn who first glimpsed the tin roof through a screen of spruce.\nFrom there they could see the weedless, perfect circle of a pond so blue\nit should have had snow-white geese swimming in it; a cedar-railed compound containing a somehow orderly arrangement of damaged car and\ntruck bodies; segregated engine parts; neat stacks of tires; rows of\ndoors, bumpers, fenders; behind the house a freshly-painted outhouse;\nand the house itself: two storeys of faded Insulbrick with narrow windows.\nAttached to the back of the house was a new addition, painted red.\n\"Neat as a pin,\" Vicky said.\n\"No flies on Gordon Snider.\" Cheryl indicated the outhouse. \"Funny\nno plumbing.\"\n\"Maybe he didn't shit much.\"\n\"Grass needs cutting,\" Lynn noticed. \"Where's the animals?\"\n\"Impounded. He won't be coming back.\"\n\"You hope.\"\nThey stared at the silent property.\n\"Hey,\" Vicky said. \"Maybe this is going too far.\"\nImmediately Cheryl pushed a set of keys into Vicky's hand. \"Vick.\nDon't worry. Go back to the truck. You already did more than enough.\nSee you in one hour at the most. You too, Lynn.\"\n\"Which window,\" Lynn said.\nCheryl turned back to the house. \"The one on the left\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\n\"I'll pass it in to you,\" Lynn said.\nVicky returned the keys. \"I'm the one gets lost at the A & P, remember?\"\n\"You wouldn't find that truck any better with me along,\" Lynn said\nkindly.\nTaking care to keep the house between themselves and the road, they\n39 carried the tanks to the back window. Tied to the knob of the addition\ndoor was a red police tag that said, \"Break Enter & Theft of a dwelling\ncould result in life imprisonment.\"\n\"Christ. That's worse than Snider got.\"\n\"Know what?\" Cheryl said. \"This addition's got no windows.\"\n\"What if there's an alarm?\" Vicky asked.\n\"Why should there be an alarm?\" Cheryl unfolded a Swiss army knife\nand slit the window screen. She pounded one side of the frame with a\nrock until the thing splintered and fell in. Lynn and Vicky made a stirrup\nby locking fingers, and Cheryl climbed inside.\n\"More guts than I'll ever have,\" Vicky said. She was showing Lynn her\nhands, which were shaking.\nCheryl stuck her head out the window. Briefly she examined a bit of\nsun-stained curtain before she looked at them again. \"Won't be long,\" she\nsaid and was gone.\nShe was a good woman, one of the best. She was good in every way. A\nlittle stern maybe. I hated the way she suffered at the end there. The strokes\nand that. A man could turn away from God. Still, He knows best. Sometimes in certain sleep zones I would hear her voice. Once I had a dream\nabout a forest that had the tops of all the trees sheared and vultures watching down from the branches that were left. It was hard to live in that house.\nI had plenty of spells of the blues.\nCheryl stepped aside from the window to let more light in and wait for\nher eyes to adjust to the darkness. Through the wall to the left she could\nhear rats scrabbling. She was in, as deep as the house and as still and\nabandoned as the yard outside. The air seemed fifty years old. Faded\nwallpaper, linoleum, hooked rugs. A stuffed chair and a sofa, soft with\ndust. In flight along the right-hand wall were five silver geese, jig-sawed\nfrom plywood. Otherwise the walls held faded prints in pasteboard\nframes: Northern Lake Sunset, Storm at Sea, Parliament Buildings Ottawa. Cheryl tried a lamp and a wall switch: nothing. She crossed to the\none door, took a breath, and opened it\u00E2\u0080\u0094on a wall of plywood. Police, she\nthought at first, but the plywood was not new and dust lay in the corners\nof the space between it and the door. Must have been up before the police came through; they had put it back.\nShe returned to the window to tell Lynn and Vicky what to expect,\nwent back and kicked at the plywood with the heel of her boot. Nailed\n40 tight. She hit it with her shoulder, and again, harder. The nails shrieked\nfree, and the panel fell against the opposite wall of a narrow hallway. To\nthe right was the front door, to the left the second floor stairs. They too\nhad been sealed, once. This time the police had pried off the plywood\nsheet and left it leaning against the wall. The floor had been carefully\nswept.\nCheryl climbed the stairs. Along the front of the house was a\nbedroom\u00E2\u0080\u0094his mother's. The bible by the bed, the hairbrush on the dresser, were half buried in dust. Except for the police again\u00E2\u0080\u0094scuffs in the\ndust, a drawer standing open\u00E2\u0080\u0094this room, like the living room, must not\nhave been touched since the woman's death. Same with the bathroom.\nSo he did have plumbing, had boarded it off too. The third and last upstairs room was abandoned, with hangers and dustballs scattered across\nthe floor and a door standing open on an empty closet.\nDownstairs, on the other side of the front hallway from the long parlour, was a cramped room contained a La-Z-Boy, a bed, a bureau, a wardrobe. The bureau was empty. In the wardrobe were wire hangers, on the\nwalls pictures of movie stars, publicity stills, the kind that come in Wool-\nworth frames: Ginger Rogers, Mitzi Gaynor, Judy Garland. In this room\nthe floor was patterned with dust in a way that said things had been\nmoved out. A lot of things. Police again.\nThe kitchen was a darkness into which light came only from a small\nwindow over the sink; a bigger window had been closed off by the new\naddition. The kitchen was where the rats had been busy: cupboard and\npantry contents strewn across the floor.\nThe back door opened into the deeper darkness of the addition. Cheryl\nfelt her way to the door next to where Lynn and Vicky waited, called to\nthem, and unlocked it.\n\"Don't scare us like that,\" Vicky said as they crowded in with the light.\nWhen Cheryl turned she saw a room painted red, a Milky Way of gold\nfoil stars across the ceiling. She saw an iron clothesrack without hangers,\na full-length mirror unsilvered along the edges, a wood cookstove, dark\nstains on the floor.\n\"Hey, come on guys,\" she said. \"Let's just do it,\" and moved to push\nLynn and Vicky back outside.\nBut Vicky had crouched to raise a floorboard.\n\"What's this?\" she said, reaching to lift something into the light. It flew\nfrom her fingers, and she was screaming.\n\"Right,\" Cheryl said, shoving her. \"Everybody out. Just get me the\ngasoline.\"\n41 Once I did consider getting married. But I couldn't think how to start\nthings rolling. We skated on the river in those days. \"Hey, let's go skate,\nMary\" (or Beth, or whatever) stayed stuck on my tongue all one winter\nthere. I never ice-skated in my life. Still haven't. One time my mother said\nto me, \"If a woman is good enough for intercourse, she is good enough for\nmarriage.\" That's pretty true I guess. Doris Cooney? She was nice all right,\neven if she did have that tongue. Some people used to take her for the resemblance of my mother. Her height and everything was different, though maybe\nshe had resemblance in the cheekbones. But my mother sure never talked\nlike that one.\nOn a cool April night, seventeen months before the Snider house\nburned, a Ford pickup splashed across a bare-earth parking lot to nose\nagainst a low windowless building alongside a Dodge sedan with its headlights burning amber. In neon lasso by the door of the building was the\nname Countryman Restaurant and Lounge. The sky was black with moving cloud, but down below the night was as dank and still as a basement.\nEverywhere except near the highway, where the diesel vapours drifted\nand eddied, and by the ventilation fan at the back of the building where\ntwo ten-year-old girls had dropped their bicycles and pressed their\nmouths against the mesh to get drunk on the fumes, the air had the perfume on it of wet balsam.\nInside the lounge an obese man named Orest Thorns presided over the\none occupied table. He sat tipped complacently toward a smaller, crew-\ncut version of himself. This was his nephew Sy. Sy was hunched on the\nedge of his chair with his hands on his knees and with his elbows pivoted\nforward in a way suggesting that at any moment he would jump up and\nrush out. The third man, Albert Fennick, was gaunt and hollow-eyed. At\nthose junctures Albert might be felt called upon to speak or laugh; he\nwould cough instead down into his windbreaker.\nThe door opened, and the owner of the Ford pickup entered. Gordon\nSnider was a fox-faced man with a cast to his right eye that gave him an\nappearance of oblique private scrutiny. He was wearing a John Deere\ncap, a yellow plaid shirt buttoned to the neck, high-cut olive-green work-\npants, and running shoes. He nodded to the waitress who stood by the\ncash.\n\"Hey Snider,\" Thorns called. \"Are you going to be sociable and hear\nsome intelligent comment on what's been going on around here lately or\nsit by yourself and learn nothing?\"\n\"The only thing I'll learn from you, Thorns,\" said Gordon Snider as he\nwalked past Thorns' table, \"is how to be a fool.\"\n42 Thorns made I-told-you-so eyes for the others. \"Just being friendly,\nGordon.\"\nSnider did not reply. He sat down at a table by himself, his back to the\nothers. When the waitress came over he said,\n\"Little bit on the damp side.\"\n\"Almost prefer more snow than this piss,\" she replied.\n\"I'll have the hot turkey on white, mashed potatoes with a large Coke.\nNo ice in the Coke.\"\nThere is a common streak to most women that my mother did not approve. I do not mind it so much myself, except that I wonder if their own\nthinking is there, or are they just trying to be like the rest. My standards got\nset too high maybe. It was a curse and an honour to know her. My mother\nwas so intelligent you could never exactly tell what she meant. I know I got\nmy brains from always trying to figure that one out.\nThe same morning a check-out girl found Snider's friend Little Jimmy\nstuffed in the shopping cart in the A & P lot, Doris Cooney went missing\nwithout a trace except some blood on the floors and walls. That night the\nChief still wasn't back from holiday, so you drove out to Snider's place on\nyour own. It was one of those black Spring nights. He wasn't there and\nyou didn't go in, but coming back into town you spotted his pickup outside\nthe Countryman.\nSnider's neighbour he had the feud going with, Orest Thorns, was\nthere with his nephew Sy and Sick Albert Fennick. Snider's latest grievance against Thorns was that Thorns was paying somebody that Snider\nalso had a grievance against to take his hay off. Snider was sitting with his\nback to Orest's table as if Orest did not exist, arranging golf tees in one of\nthose little wooden triangles while he ate.\nYou sat down across from Snider and said, \"Gordon, I have to take a\ndrive over to your place.\"\n\"Have to, eh Mclntyre? Then I guess you better go ahead. But you\nwon't find what you're looking for.\"\n\"I'd like you to come with me.\"\n\"You can see I'm eating. You go along. I'll wait right here.\"\n\"Give me your keys. Truck keys too.\"\nHe placed them on the table, watching you.\n\"You're just a dumb lunk, Mclntyre,\" he said as you stood up. \"You\ndon't know what you're in for.\"\n43 \"Don't threaten me, Snider.\"\nIt wasn't a threat.\n/ always was one to know. Now you see it now you don't. If a person can't\nunderstand how a thing works how can he know what it is? Life isn't pictures on a wall however sometimes it might seem. A person has to walk in\nand wade around. Get their hands dirty if that is what it takes. Otherwise\nthey might as well be asleep like everybody else. One day some people look\naround, say Pinch Me, and want to know.\nWhen you got back to the lounge you were still shaking. In the parking\nlot you threw up again, to the amazement of a couple of girls standing\nwith their bicycles.\nSnider was inside, as promised, drinking coffee, playing the golf tee\ngame. Orest, Sy, and Sick Albert were also still there, waiting to see\nwhat was going on.\nYou sat down across from Snider, as before.\nHe watched you, amused by your condition.\n\"Put your hands on the table,\" you said.\nHe placed both fists flat on the table, wrists together. Small hands. He\nsmiled. \"Pretty bad, was it?\"\nYou could hardly get the handcuffs on him for shaking. The others\nwere watching closely.\nSuddenly Snider shouted, \"Thorns!\"\nYou jumped, everybody jumped.\n\"You talking to me, Gordon?\" Orest said.\n\"You didn't leave your lights on, did you, Thorns?\"\n\"Shut up, Snider!\" you said.\n\"Don't think so, Gordon,\" Thorns said. \"Did I?\"\n\"Maybe you did.\"\n\"If so, thanks a lot for telling me right away.\"\nThomas was feeling for his keys.\n\"Let's go,\" you said.\n\"Maybe you should turn them off,\" Snider told Thorns as he stood up.\n\"If you can find your keys, that is.\"\n\"Awful thoughtful of you, Gordon\u00E2\u0080\u0094\" Thorns stopped patting his pockets. \"Hey Gordon. What's those pretty bracelets Doug's put on you\nthere?\"\n\"Maybe you locked them inside the car.\"\n44 Thorns was back checking his jacket pockets while watching the handcuffs as you walked Snider towards the door. You were almost abreast of\nThorns when Snider's fists flicked up and something slapped hard into\nThorns' chest and dropped to the floor. A set of car keys.\nWhen Orest stooped for them, Snider made a kick at his face. You\ngrabbed a handful of shirt and carried him straight out to the cruiser and\nthrew him into the back. He was light as a cat.\nOutside, on the edge of the parking lot, when they saw who it was, the\ntwo young girls laid down their bikes and stood with their arms around\neach other's necks. In the rearview Gordon Snider twisted in his seat to\ngive those girls a fierce, happy smile. It was still fading when he turned\nback around, the radiance of his pleasure.\nAs I told them over and over, my girls all come from elsewheres. The\nCooney woman was pure accident, a stroke of bad fortune. Something ordained to happen. The time comes it comes. There was no intention. It puzzles me. Even now it seems like a dream, impossible. No, anybody did it,\nthat was somebody else. I definitely didn't, that I know of. Drifters would be\nmy guess.\nThe night before Doug Mclntyre arrested Gordon Snider, Gordon and\nhis friend Little Jimmy were out in Snider's Ford pickup driving west out\nof town. This was the first time since October Snider had fetched Jimmy\nfrom Mrs. Afelski's and taken him home for a meal. But tonight Jimmy\nhad not been himself. Instead of eating his stew he laid his arms on the\ntable and rested his head now on one elbow and now on the other, sighing\nand yawning. When Snider, who as usual had promised Mrs. Afelski to\nhave Jimmy back by eleven and was conscious of the work that lay before\nthem, asked what the matter was, Jimmy would only say that he was not\nhungry. In three years Jimmy had never not been hungry for one of Gordon Snider's meals. Finished his own, chewing gum, Snider sat tipped\nback in his chair watching Jimmy poke at his food.\nLater, out in the truck, Jimmy whispered. '\"S too cold, Gordon.\"\n\"No bugs yet,\" Snider replied. \"Ground's fresh-broke as well.\"\nOn arrival Jimmy refused to get out of the truck. Snider had to haul him\nout and press his fingers around the shovel.\n\"They get whole carloads of snivellers in here, Jimmy,\" he told him.\n\"Make a difference.\"\nAt the site Jimmy stood and gazed at the gravestone. \"What's her\n45 name?\" he asked finally, wiping his eyes.\n\"Fobbs.\"\nThere was a pause.\n\"Mary-Ellen!\" Jimmy cried, in a kind of anguish. \"Mary-Ellen Fobbs!\nShe worked at the Roxy!\"\n\"That was another one. This one here was a whore out at the Fifth\nWheel. Cancer victim.\"\nJimmy kept shaking his head.\n\"Jimmy, do you realize how many she-Fobbses they have in this township?\"\n\"Gordon, it's her!\"\nSnider repositioned his cap on his head. \"Jimmy, am I your best friend\nor what?\"\nJimmy was sobbing. \"You can't if you're not Jesus Christ Our Lord and\nSaviour in Heaven!\"\n\"Can't what?\"\nJimmy did not reply.\nSnider put an arm around his shoulder. He whispered in his ear. \"You\nbeen talking to that new minister, Jimmy?\"\nThe shovel fell from Jimmy's hand.\n\"Pick it up.\"\n\"Don't have to, Gordon. You're my best friend on the face of the earth,\nbut Jesus is my Lord and Saviour in Heaven!\"\nJimmy turned and started back to the truck.\nSnider used the shovel he held in his own hands to hit Jimmy across the\nback of the head. He knelt at Jimmy's ear.\n\"And here I bought you new runners.\"\nJimmy moaned.\nSnider dragged Jimmy to the truck and propped him in the passenger's\nseat. The shovels he had to go back for.\nThe thing about salvage\u00E2\u0080\u0094its time is after. Real life happens right now or\nit doesn't happen. In real life there is a person behind those eyes a man had\nbetter face with all the brains he's got because if he fails to, you better be\ncareful. Hurricanes and ruby shoes is one thing. Taking them live is another.\nLittle Jimmy stirred when Snider pulled up in front of Cooney's General\nStore.\n46 \"Wha\u00E2\u0080\u0094?\" Jimmy said as Snider got his rifle from the rack behind the\nseat.\n\"Almost there. Wait in the truck.\"\nDoris Cooney came through a curtained doorway behind a long counter\nthat ran the length of her store. She was a tall woman with painful hips\nthat caused her to walk with a rolling, nautical motion. When she saw\nSnider she stopped to consider him the way she might have considered a\ndrunk.\nSnider nodded affably and wandered down a far aisle studying buns and\nsugar loaves. When he reached the end he looked up and saw her watching him in a convex mirror. He must have known that she could see the\nrifle, which he held in close to the right side of his body, because he came\naround the display rack with the barrel in his fist and leaned the weapon\nagainst the counter in front of her saying,\n\"Don't need this to shop, I guess.\"\n\"Early for bear,\" Mrs. Cooney said.\n\"Is that right.\"\nMrs. Cooney did not reply.\n\"Little bit on the cool side though,\" Snider said.\n\"What are you doing in here?\"\n\"Any bandages?\"\nSnider touched his palms lightly against the edge of the counter.\nMrs. Cooney shook her head.\n\"Bandaids?\"\n\"No.\"\nSnider ran his fingers along the edge of the cash register, admiring the\nold machine.\n\"Sure like to get my hands on one of these beauties some day. How's\nabout eye-oh-dine?\"\n\"Go to the drugstore.\"\n\"Peroxide?\"\n\"You got exactly ten minutes.\"\n\"For what.\"\nSnider's eyes indicated the cash register.\n\"How does this work. Pretty complicated, I guess.\"\n\"Drugstore closes in ten minutes, as you well know.\"\nSnider nodded. His eyes went to the curtains she had come through.\n\"The thing is, Doris, this is a first aid emergency\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\n\"Why?\" Mrs. Cooney was interested. \"What's happened?\"\n\"My pet bear just got hit by a lad with a shovel.\"\n\"Bear?\"\n\"Kind of shaggy? Walks on all fours?\"\nMrs. Cooney's eyes were grey and cold.\n47 Snider had been scratching at the back of his head, pushing his cap forward until the peak was all the way over his eyes. Now he pushed it high\non his head and said, \"Come on, Doris. Let's have a look.\"\n\"I don't keep bandages.\"\n\"You should.\"\nSnider gripped the edge of the counter tightly, let go.\n\"You know,\" he said and grew thoughtful. \"I go into a store and a\nwoman comes out from someplace\u00E2\u0080\u0094I don't know what it is\u00E2\u0080\u0094I just have\nto find out how she's got it all arranged back in there. Little Barry the\nBear can bleed to death all over my truck for what you or me care, Doris.\nI just want to crawl into your medicine chest and take a poke around.\"\n\"Get out of my store.\"\nSnider seemed to consider this. Then he said, \"I am driving along with\nBarry. He's my bear. Blood everywhere. Damn kids and their shovels.\nWe see this here big brick house. Store. Whatever it is. I see it. Too\nmuch of the plasma ratazzma in Barry's eyes to see a damn thing. And\nthis house here has this store sort of on the front but also sort of on the\ninside. And out of deeper inside this store comes a woman. Name? Doris\nCooney. I know that, I knew it all my life, but who exactly is Doris\nCooney?\"\n\"Stop this right now. If your\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\n\"Mother, Doris? Are you going to start to talk about my mother? Go\nahead. She talked enough about you. In fact she told me just about everything, and it was a very complicated story, Doris, you've had such a complicated life, but she didn't tell me the answer to one question:\" \u00E2\u0080\u0094here\nSnider reached out as if to finger the material of Mrs. Cooney's sleeve\u00E2\u0080\u0094\n\"What exactly is it like inside this here sensible old nylon dress?\"\n\"Get your hands off me?\"\nSnider nodded sleepily.\n\"How does it go together, all this here skin and bone.\"\nHe reached to touch her flesh, but Mrs. Cooney was out of range,\nbacked to the wall.\nSnider picked up the rifle by holding the tip of the barrel between the\nthumb and forefinger of his left hand. He continued to talk.\n\"What's it like. That's what I want to know.\"\nSnider held the rifle high. He let it drop and caught it in his right hand.\nAt the trial Snider insisted he was only fooling, it was an accident.\nWhatever it was, Snider, \"in a kind of a dream,\" was immediately over\nthe counter to drag the body outside and roll it into the box of the pickup.\nNext he was back for the cash register, which he empties before he carried it too out to the truck.\nAs Snider knelt on the seat of the cab to fasten the rifle in its rack, he\n48 said, \"Now Jimmy, see what you got me up to with your Jesus Lord and\nSaviour in Heaven?\"\nBut Jimmy who had a cracked skull and a brain slowly filling up with\nblood, was slumped against the dash and did not hear.\nEverybody has a place for salvage, whatever they might say or act like,\nand they watch over this place from day to day, protect it at any cost maybe.\nDifferent salvage might come and go, but it's always the same. A picture in\na book or a magazine, a memory with a shine on it, or an actual souvenir of\na person, it's a changing dream, that's all. Everywhere you look these days\nsalvage is on display. It's like hair in a locket. Everybody knows this, everybody does it.\nJimmy's reluctance to help Gordon Snider had its origin the previous\ntime he had been invited to dinner, four months earlier. On that evening a\nmassive surprise snowstorm not only prevented them from going out but\nprevented Snider from delivering Jimmy back to Mrs. Afelski's that same\nnight. And so after Snider had given Jimmy his meal and beaten him at\ncheckers, he put him to bed, in a fold-up cot in Snider's own room. When\nJimmy complained that he could not sleep without a light, Snider assured\nhim there would be plenty from the snow. But there was no light from the\nsnow, so Jimmy tiptoed to the door and opened it, to see Snider clearing\nthe table from dinner and filling the sink to do the dishes. Jimmy left the\ndoor ajar for the light from the kitchen and fell asleep. Sometime later he\nwoke up in darkness afraid. For a long while he listened but heard nothing. He crept to Snider's bed; it was still made. The door to the kitchen\nhad been closed. Cautiously he opened it. The kitchen was dark, but light\ncame from around the edges of the door to the new addition, where\nJimmy had never been allowed. He crept across the kitchen to the addition door and looked in.\nWhat Jimmy saw was Gordon Snider sitting naked in a chair, his back\nturned, leaning over to wrap his legs. As Jimmy watched, Snider went on\nto wrap his arms. The material was tawny and soft like oiled leather; he\nwas using his teeth to fasten it with string. On the table beside Snider\nmore of the tan stuff was laid out, in the shape of a girdle. When Snider\nstood to reach for something, half-turning, Jimmy ducked out of sight and\nhurried back to his cot, where he lay thinking about what he had just\nseen: Gordon Snider's eyes outlined in black, his lips in red.\n49 After awhile Jimmy was no longer so sure that he had not been dreaming when he saw Gordon Snider looking so much like the devil. Again he\nlistened for the sound of Snider's breathing and heard nothing. Again he\ncrept out of the room and across the kitchen to the addition. This time\nwhat he saw was a creature in a black dress and bare feet, with bracelets\nthat jangled. It had smooth tan skin and it prowled stiffly, like an animal\nawkward in a cage, tossing its shining hair. Sometimes it stopped to peer\naround into a long mirror at the hem of the dress, and the dress swirled\nand lifted as it turned.\nBack in his bed Jimmy did not know what he had seen, but he knew\nsomething that it didn't know: It was not a woman. And when he knew\nthat he understood. Gordon Snider was not Jesus. If Jesus had brought it\nback it would know what it was.\nSometimes a person might even think this whole world's a house of cards\nof pure salvage. And then there's TV and that's all it is, from start to finish.\nAnd everybody knows and nobody talks about it. As if the truth will bring\ntoo much down. It's like somebody speaks out about life and people say,\nWhat's your beef? As if this was treason. Get on side, mister. Think the\ngood things. But what if some people's salvage has more of the stink of truth\nto it? What if some people's has been required from Day One to do more\nduty? What if some people are not satisfied with the usual apportion of\nknowledge?\nThe front door wasn't locked. You switched on the light, a forty-watt\nbulb on a wire. The front hall was filled with junk, in boxes and barrels.\nThere were piles of clothes, papers, magazines, books. You could hardly\nsqueeze in. You stumbled through the junk towards a door off the hall to\nthe right. The one across from it had a sheet of greasy plywood nailed\nover it. What the hell? And so did the door straight ahead, probably to upstairs. The open door on the right led into Snider's own room, maybe\neight by ten. There wasn't much light. Your eyes took some time to adjust. Aside from a foot-wide passageway from the bed to the kitchen, it\nwas the same in there. Papers, books, rags, boxes. Junk to the ceiling,\nalmost. A lot of it was old clothes. There was a stack of worn-out overalls\nfour feet high. On the floor by the side of the bed was a pound coffee can\nfilled to the brim with wads of gum. It was like the lair of an animal. A\nfunny smell.\n50 As soon as you saw the first one you saw them everywhere: bones, big\nraw bones with strips of withered fat and muscle still attached. There\nwas a chair in the corner, made out of bones.\nYou made your way to the kitchen. It was the same in there.\nSomething\u00E2\u0080\u0094probably seeing such a thing amongst all that junk\u00E2\u0080\u0094made\nyou open a hatbox. Inside was a woman's head. After that it was all\nwomen. There was a bag made out of a pair of nylon underpants with half\na dozen vulvas in it, one of them painted gold, a red ribbon tied to it, two\nturning green. Another head in a burlap sack in a cupboard. An apron with\nnipples stitched in a zero. On the wall, masks made from women's\nskinned faces, stretched on big crochet hoops. A heart in a saucepan on\nthe stove. An ear ashtray, a cigarette stubbed in it.\nIn the back room you found the remains of Doris Cooney. He'd slipped\na four-inch diameter wooden rod through the tendons at the back of her\nankles and hung her upside down, headless, slit open, dressed out like a\ndeer. The head you found in a bag under a mattress. You knew where to\nlook because the back room was unheated, the mattress was steaming.\nThere was an iron clothesrack. On the hangers, slips and dresses and the\nskins of women's torsos, tanned and oiled, slit down the front, with holes\nwhere the arms used to be. String for lacing up.\nAll in all I'm happy enough how things turned out. This place suits me\nfine. An institution's just a bunch of people doing their job along with the\ngrain and against the odds. Some of these nurses just do what they're told,\nbut some of them are pretty complicated. It's a full-time occupation to understand what is going on inside their heads, and the turnover's good. You get\none figured, soon enough there's a new one to start on. It's a good life.\nOne day you call over to the hospital, and the nurse says,\n\"Gordon Snider? He's right here.\"\nAs if he's been waiting by the phone for twenty-five years.\n\"Would you like to speak to him?\"\n\"No, no. I'll just show up. What's your visiting hours?\"\nSo you show up and you talk to Snider and after that you go and see the\nhead of the place, a guy with the most creased face you ever saw, sloppy\ngrey hair, skin that clay pallor of two packs a day. As he's ushering you\nout of his office he takes you aside.\n\"What I'm saying, Mr. Mclntyre, it's not that there aren't reasons for\n51 the way he turned out, a logic, his mother, and so forth. I'm not denying\nit's an interesting case. But I'd want to question very closely indeed anybody who'd try to generalize from it. This is a very disturbed individual,\nand that's the bottom line. We've got plenty of his type in here, I'm unhappy to say, of both sexes. You understand what I'm getting at? You\ntake my advice, you'll go home and put this whole thing out of your\nmind.\"\n\"I thought I did. It came back.\"\n\"People retire, and the past will do that. Especially after an active life\nlike your own. The point is, a man like Snider, you'd be better off rummaging through garbage cans, you know what I'm saying?\"\nHe starts you walking again.\n\"You play golf, Mr. Mclntyre?\"\n\"Not really. I never had the time.\"\n\"You have to make time. I play every day I can.\"\nHe stops again, and this time there's a hand on your shoulder.\n\"It's a fine game, Mclntyre, a man's game. Precision. Patience. I recommend it.\"\nYou're standing at the front doors, and he's sighting through the glass\ndown the softest, greenest, most dew-shining fairway there ever was on\nthis earth. It's the end of the interview. Your hand's been shaken, and\nyou're alone on the steps, and if he's watching you from the other side of\nthe glass you can't see him, but you doubt it. You don't look back again\nuntil you reach your car. Then you take one last look up at the building,\nand you know that Gordon Snider is watching from one of those five hundred windows, but you can't see him either. You can't see anybody.\n52 I Am Stealing Your\nLife\nPeter McGehee\nThere is a man I watch from my apartment window. He lives on the same\nfloor as I do, opposite building over. He is a skinny man who eats TV dinners, and late at night turns into Mr. Leather. I watch him pose in front of\nhis mirror adjusting his chaps and dog collar necklace. He cruises the alley between our two buildings, then returns with a trick. Sometimes I\nknow the men he catches. Sometimes I've seen them in the Superfresh.\nAt the magazine rack. Thumbing through the latest copy of Inches.\nI watch the dance of their instant courtship: a couple of hard-ons, a\nblow job, hand cuffs, maybe a well-condomed fuck. But tonight won't be\njust any night. And as soon as my neighbor kisses the man, the man grabs\nmy neighbor's throat.\nThey fight, Struggle. Topple over furniture. Kick. Punch. Slap. My\nneighbor finally gets away from the man long enough to grab the closest\nthing he can, a lamp, and whacks him over the head, whacks him hard.\nThe man crumples to the floor. I keep watching. The man doesn't move.\nMy neighbor paces, panicking. Finally, he picks up the phone, has a short\nconversation, then goes into the bedroom to change into regular clothes.\nSix police show up. They take pictures of the body; they take my\nneighbor's statement. Later, I see the story on the news. I follow it for\nweeks, in fact, right through my neighbor's acquittal.\nHis apartment is dark for the longest time. I figure he's gone away. I\ndo not see him again until summer. Then there he is. In the courtyard.\nSunbathing in an old pair of gym shorts. A cocker spaniel by his side. A\nWalkman on his head. And he is reading. He is reading my book.\n53 Roxanne Power Hamilton\nPark Slope With a Mind to\nWalk\nYour red sweater sliding off your shoulder, you\nspin these dark rap secular seductions.\nThis is as much an escape, no? As the bottles\nthat await you down the street. When trouble hits.\nTrouble, simple. Like not knowing why\nsuddenly on the roof you stare over Brooklyn,\neyes hungry with ribfuls of questions.\nTrouble. Simple. Feet on the stairwell. Knocks\non the floor. Steps of an unknown somebody wanting\nsomething. Maybe, like you, to know why\ndown the stairs, down the street, in the bar,\nthere are men waiting to dance you into corners,\nwhisper what they would do, lift you blind\ninto the drumbeat. Til one finds you\nfleetfooted inside the joint. Your unwritten desires.\nYes, these: could you but write them down,\nto her, the woman at the table hiding sorrow\nwith her promises of wide-lipped cognac\n(which you accept as a matter of course),\nunknowing how she will invite him,\nman in the corner with the loaded dream,\nup to the apartment.\nWound tight as belts around the sun,\ntonight she will not see the Northern Lights.\nShe will not undress you but wonder\nin passing before she falls how she\nwill escape this. Visible barter.\nHis coat flung, an empty tent, on the floor.\nDeflated off untouched shoulders\nin its green pool. This could never be\nan equal exchange. Just displacement. For her hands\nrocking on your shoulders is what you've wanted\n54 all along. Her lightning tongue, flickers, stars\nfalling into rivers underground\nbearing fruit among the hard\nplain roots of winter.\n55 Kim Morrissey\nfrom Poems For Men Who\nDream of Lolita\nfor you there is only\nthe pushing down of a head\nor a hand on your cock\nthe caress as you pull the hair back\nfrom a face for the view\nyou make love without speaking\nhold my hands from your lips\nturn your shoulder away\nwhen you turn from one girl to the next\nyou have no time for words\nno memory of change\n56 and yes, I agree\nthis is not seductive\nthis stripping naked\nunder the fleshy eyes of a man\nwho sees two arms two legs\ntwo eyelids pressed down\ntwo elbows bent over breasts\npale skin green in the light\nthis is not erotic\nand you are obscene\nas you sit, fully clothed\nsaying no\n57 today you will tell me again\nhow ugly I am, your eyes\nskimming over my breasts\nto the bedclothes beyond\nyour flesh slapping hard\nas you press my knees wide\ntoday you will turn\nback to back\nreaching down from the bed\nsearching for the cigarette\nwe both know isn't there\nyou will leave without speaking\nand then stand at the door\nlighting your smoke with one motion\ncaressing the air\n58 your words click over my body\nquick as a cock's ruby beak\nsearching for scraps:\na finger, a toe-nail, an eye\nit is best not to move\nyou strip skin with each line\nand peck deeper, your smile\ntilted and cocked, watching\nmy blood form on paper\ndrawing words from the bone\n59 Al Purdy\nLovers\nAll those others\nPyramus and Thisbe cooing and billing\nand I've forgotten the date when\ntheir dust was somewhat more lively\nof course Paris and Helen\nbut I'll get to them later\nHero and Leander\u00E2\u0080\u0094the latter\nswimming a considerable body of water\nto ease the itch\nall men and women seem to have\nor most do\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094then we come to a sportive pair\nwhose names I can't remember\nsome time in the Middle Ages\nshe married but\nin love with another guy\n(maybe in Beowulf?)\nanyway they slept in beds\non opposite sides of the room\nflour sifted on the floor between\nto keep track of boy and girl\nshenanigans if any\nbut the athletic lover somehow\nleaped across the telltale flour\n(tough too\u00E2\u0080\u0094with all the armor\nthose guys wore\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094maybe even in bed?)\nParis and Helen now:\nsee them on the antique Attic shore\nbefore it got that way\nand he to she and he to she:\n\"will you won't you will you won't you\"\net cetera\n(and just what the hell do you\nthink they were talking about?)\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094and say at this point in time\n60 they can't help us none\nthey're all dead\nClass Dismissed\nReach down your hand\nto guide me home\nlift up your eyes\nthat we may voyage on together\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094as time plays its little tricks\nsomersaults\nleapfrogs\nand we return to the antique shore\nof all those others\nbridged for god's sake\nby the ritual exchange\nof a few drops of fluid between us\na matter of pipes and opening valves\nwith exaggerated importance\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094and a prolonged shudder\nin which the hard core\nof ourselves melts\nthere is a great silence\nand such tenderness\nMy dear my dear\ndepend on this\nfor there is nothing else\nthe world remains outside\na clock ticks somewhere\nquite irrelevantly\nand we lie making maps\ntracing the route\nof where we have been\nand making plans\nto return there soon\nyour hand in my hand\nyour head upon my shoulder\nwe lie in this rumpled earth-place\nlost in each other\ntransfixed and flummoxed and soon to die\n61 teach me\nwhat one can never learn alone\nthe dance of life\nteach me\nmy love\nteach me to be human\n62 The Blue Hour\nElizabeth Graver\nThe pretty little night nurse Juanita takes all the get well cards,\npunches holes in them and strings them on a ribbon around the\nroom. They flap whenever somebody comes in. The day nurse\nhas no time for anything, all business and scrubbed, efficient hands. Juanita has a baby, six months old, and she shows me his picture shyly, cups\nit in the palm of her hand where I cannot see it, then slowly, ceremoniously turns her wrist. There: her son, framed by her fingers, fat and\nbrown in his starched and ironed clothes. At night, though it is against\nregulations, she opens my window halfway to let in air. Then the cards\ntouch covers in the breeze like a row of lightly clapping hands. People I\nhardly remember are sending me those cards: Best Wishes, Heard You\nWere Under the Weather, May You Be Up and Around.\n\"You have many friends, no?\" Juanita says.\n\"I guess so,\" I say, though I am not sure at this point, for I have hardly\nany visitors, just this growing strip of cards.\nOnce in a story I heard somewhere, an old woman took some of her\nhusband's ashes and put them in an egg timer, saying that he might as\nwell do some work now that he was dead, having been a lazy oaf his\nwhole life. I tell Juanita while she sponges me, and she says not to talk of\nsuch things, to be cheerful.\n\"I am cheerful,\" I say. \"It's a funny story.\"\n\"One, two, three turn,\" says Juanita, and she flips me over as easily as\nif I were a baby and begins to clean my back.\nI am not dying. This is what they tell me: \"You're a strong and resilient\nlady, Mrs. Haven, and with a little rest you'll be out of here in no time.\"\nThey are making two mistakes\u00E2\u0080\u0094first, I am no longer a Mrs., and second,\nI am nearing my seventy-seventh birthday and though it is true I do not\nfeel as if I am dying, I cannot quite imagine what other event might be\ntaking place. My symptoms, I am almost embarrassed to admit, are\nnearly pleasurable; I feel small, continual palpitations in my chest, legs\nand arms, as if a crew of gentle carpenters were tapping with rubber\nhammers on my bones. Also, I cannot get up. My legs buckle under me\nand the world spins black and gold before my eyes, but it is a giddy spin-\n63 ning and I quite enjoy it, so that sometimes I raise myself up halfway just\nto get the beginning of the spin. The doctors say it is circulatory and\nheart trouble coupled with depression and exhaustion. They ask me if I\nlive alone. I do not mind the hospital, not at night when Juanita is there.\nDuring the day I mind it terribly, and become, for the profit of the day\nnurse, a wretched, crotchety old hag.\nHere is Juanita when she comes to work: a small girl, twenty-five last\nJune, and she wears a coat passed down from her sister, black with a red\ncollar and a Christmas brooch on the lapel. She always stops in my room\nfirst before she passes on to the nurses' station to leave her coat and\npurse. She would like to wear red fingernail polish, but the nurses are\ntold not to be showy, so Juanita sneaks by with a pale coral. Her mother,\nshe tells me when I ask, is Puerto Rican; her father is from New York.\nShe has a tiny accent which gives curves to her words, but she has\nnamed her baby Robert James and has no interest in cultivating ethnicity.\nHer husband works as a postman, not an easy job, she tells me\u00E2\u0080\u0094such\npressure to move fast, and he has scars on his hands and legs from attacks by neighborhood dogs. Around her neck she wears a small gold crucifix and a green jade heart.\n\"I have another story for you,\" I tell her, and she wags her finger and\nsays, \"Tell me happy, only happy stories, or you'll make me cry.\"\nSo I tell her about the time, as a young woman ushering at the theater,\nI found a pearl and gold bracelet wedged in the crack of a velvet seat. I\nturned the bracelet in at the box office and in three months nobody had\nclaimed it, so I took it home.\n\"Yes?\" she says, her hands busy dropping pills into paper cups.\n\"I wore it,\" I tell her, \"for three years. It was a beautiful\u00E2\u0080\u0094it is a beautiful bracelet. But every time I wore it I expected someone to come running up to me and tell me it was theirs. I was nervous all the time, pulling\ndown my cuff. You can't imagine.\"\n\"You could have left it home,\" she says sanely. She places the paper\ncups on a tray before me, and I begin to swallow between sentences, the\nblue and amber pills vanishing one by one.\n\"Anyway, one day it really happened. I was walking up an aisle in the\nmarket, buying vegetables, and a young woman ran up, grabbed my wrist\nand said, 'Excuse me, but I think that's my bracelet you're wearing.'\"\n\"It was hers!\" says Juanita\n\"She said it was hers, and I believed her\u00E2\u0080\u0094why wouldn't I believe her?\nOnly you know what?\"\nShe shakes her head almost imperceptibly, and when I wait for more of\na reaction, shakes it harder until the red hoops in her ears begin to sway.\n\"It wasn't hers and never had been. She was trying to pick me up.\"\n64 \"My God,\" says Juanita, her hand flying to her mouth to suppress a\ngiggle.\n\"But I didn't know, and so you know what I did\u00E2\u0080\u0094I gave her the bracelet, and then, as a reward for my finding it, she took me out to dinner.\"\nJuanita is perched on my bed, leaning toward me. Her eyes dart to her\nwatch, and she draws in her breath and straightens up.\n\"I have to go to 109, to Mr. Feldman,\" she says. \"Tell me quick. How\ndid the lady know it was lost? She must\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\n\"Wait\u00E2\u0080\u0094I'm getting there. So she took me to a very fancy French restaurant, and halfway through dinner she told me it wasn't her bracelet.\"\n\"Then you could keep it.\"\n\"No, I gave it to her.\"\nShe makes a tsk sound. \"Oh, I would like to see it.\"\n\"You would, would you?\" I say. I have been storing this up all week.\n\"Charlotte died last year, and left the bracelet to me. I want to give it to\nyou for being so kind to me in my last days. Charlotte would approve.\"\nJuanita takes hold of my pale, blue-roped hands, presses them between her smaller brown ones.\n\"I\u00E2\u0080\u0094I mean, thank you but\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\nI squeeze her hand. \"It's what I want.\"\nShe strokes my hair, starts to say that I'm getting so much stronger\nand shouldn't talk that way, but I interrupt, unable to stand the thought of\nher fingers encountering my greasy hair.\n\"Don't, dear, it's not clean. They haven't let me have a shampoo in\nthree days. Chills, they say. Really they don't want to waste the shampoo.\"\nSometimes I grow so tired of apologizing for the body. I am no longer a\npretty woman. Once\u00E2\u0080\u0094if she could have seen me then\u00E2\u0080\u0094I was something\nto look at, almost six feet tall with a straight back, long fingers and thick,\nchestnut hair which curled up around my face in the heat. Some schoolteachers have to struggle to gain authority in the classroom, but my pupils seemed to have no concept of mischief, or perhaps I frightened them,\nthough I never once raised my voice. At school, teaching French, I wore\nmy hair pinned up behind me, but at night when I ushered at the theater\nor played tennis in the park, I let it down. For sixty years I washed my\nhair every day with a mild camomile rinse. Juanita's hair has a blue sheen\nlike a blackbird's wing, each strand as thick and strong as upholstery\nthread. By looking at a person's hair and fingernails, you can tell the quality of their bones. I tell her I think of her as a daughter, which is true\nsome days, and she tilts her head and gives me a funny look.\nJuanita does not know that I am leaving her not just the bracelet, but\nmy entire fortune, which, though not enormous, is surely larger than\n65 anything she has ever known. There is the inheritance from my grandfather, my savings from over the years, and the money which will come\nwhen my apartment and possessions are sold off. Left to the night nurse.\nIt would infuriate my mother, who believed in keeping things in the family, but there is no one I can think of as more appropriate, Charlotte gone\nnow, and the faces of all the people I have known over the years dissolved into one amorphous face\u00E2\u0080\u0094male or female, young or old, I cannot\ntell. Perhaps this is what I am losing, for they do say that at my age you\nare supposed to lose something\u00E2\u0080\u0094your teeth, your bladder control, your\nmind. I have not lost any of these things, but still somehow I seem to be\nlosing track of the people I have known. Often during the day I feel more\nlike an animal than a person, almost entirely self-possessed. I know I\nmust remember to call a lawyer, change my will, but each day everything\nrecedes except the drummings of my body, the bulky shapes of the\nroom, my voice registering its automatic complaints to the stout day\nnurse.\nAnd then at eleven each evening, Juanita, and I watch the black hands\nof my watch tense up as they near the symmetrical 11, and I cock my ear\nand learn to separate her footsteps from the other noises in the hall. As if\nI were eighteen, not over seventy. As if the world had shrunk to the size\nof a room and all human presence become contained in the clever body of\nthis girl. At my age, falling in love seems out of the question, but I exhibit\nall the silly symptoms, down to the palpitations of the heart. Or perhaps\none can convince oneself of anything, given the need. Getting better\nfrightens me, for I am not sure what I would use to plump out my hours,\nback home surrounded by my stacks of books and extensive collection of\nherbal teas. I manufacture complaints, a few each day. \"I'm dying,\" I tell\nthe day nurse and doctors, and because I have plenty of money and really\ncannot get up, they have little choice but to contradict me firmly and let\nme stay.\nAnother night Juanita asks if I was ever married. I tell her yes, that it\nwas nothing, and she wrinkles her nose.\n\"Nothing,\" she says, \"how nothing?\"\n\"He was a big newspaper reporter. He travelled a lot. We got divorced. \"\n\"You couldn't go with him travelling?\"\nI shake my head.\n\"Because of the children.\" She states it, leaves no room for argument.\n\"No children. We didn't get along. I had my job in the city.\"\n\"Why, then, did you marry him?\" I am afraid she considers me wise\nand is looking to me for answers. Sometimes when she thinks I am sleeping, she lets down her guard and sits staring off into space or clrumming\nher hands aggressively on her white-stockinged knees. Then I doubt her\n66 happiness, with Robert James, with her husband the postman. She toys\nwith the crucifix around her neck or stands in front of the mirror and\nsneers at herself. She looks years younger, then, a petulant child. Often\nshe scrapes off her fingernail polish with her teeth and reapplies it with a\nsmall soft brush, spreading out her fingers and blowing hard until the polish dries.\n\"A mistake,\" I say, and Juanita runs her hand on the edge of the dresser, checking for dust. She turns away from me to look out the window.\n\"And no children,\" she repeats.\n\"What, does that seem a tragedy to you? It's no tragedy. I wouldn't\nhave wanted to bring a child into that marriage.\"\nShe shrugs, gazing at something outside, and I almost tell her how, in\nthe smallest, most buried way, in a way I had almost forgotten, she is\nright\u00E2\u0080\u0094I would have been a fine mother, I have a way with children. They\nlike me because I don't talk to them as if they were furry and stuffed. She\nmight have come to visit me in the hospital, my daughter, grown now, tall\nand level-headed, brown-haired. She might have brought me books.\nFrom the beginning, I would have taught her to read good literature, not\njunk like the pink and gold romances Juanita reads. You need to start\nearly with an education, in the home. Juanita is not stupid, but she is\nhappy reading trash, doesn't know the difference. It's not her fault, not\nher mother's fault, but my daughter would have been different.\nDown beneath the sheets, somewhere in my womb, I feel a pain now\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nor hardly a pain, but a brief, forgotten cramping like that of my ancient periods, a fist expanding, a fist contracting.\n\"Aie,\" I say, but when Juanita turns, I tell her it is nothing, I am fine. I\nhave learned that the individual parts of my body hurt most when I concentrate on them. As my thoughts leave my womb and travel up to my\nhands, my fingernails tingle and ache. As my thoughts leave my hands\nand climb to the roots of my hair, I feel each hair clinging to my dry skull\nlike a determined weed. I tug, just a bit, and my hair comes away like\ngentle cobwebs in my hand.\nI ask to see Juanita's wrist, to check it for size, and she perches next to\nme and places her arm on the covers like a gift. The bracelet will swim on\nher small brown wrist; we will have to get it altered. When I tell her so,\nshe becomes gruff and hurried and says she is not accepting any bracelet.\nRight now, she says, she is going next door; I should get some sleep.\n\"Yes,\" I agree, but I close my fingers around her wrist, and for a long\nmoment we sit there in silence, she and I, her quick pulse beating against\nmy thumb.\n\"When do you have your nights off this week?\" I ask her, then, and release her wrist.\n\"Tomorrow and Sunday,\" she says. I grab hold of her again.\n67 \"Tomorrow? Why didn't you tell me? Would you drop in and say hello\nto me? You know how much I miss you.\"\nOne day a few weeks ago, she left her purse in her locker, came in on\nher night off to pick it up. Now I pray for her forgetfulness. Leave your\numbrella, I think. Leave your knitting, your muffler, your housekeys. It\nis not easy to think of things important enough to make her come back.\n\"We're going to my mother's,\" she says. \"We take the train. It's not a\nshort ride.\"\n\"You could stop on the way. I'll give you money for a cab. It must be\nimpossible on that crowded train with a little baby.\"\n\"I'll be back on Thursday,\" she says.\n\"Thursday night, almost Friday.\"\n\"Yes, but still Thursday.\"\n\"You don't know how the other nurse turns me\u00E2\u0080\u0094like I was a log. If you\ncould stop by on Wedne\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"\n\"But I'll be with my mother.\"\n\"No, but on the-\"\nShe cuts me off, makes her voice artificially bright, the tone she must\nhave learned in nursing school.\n\"So on Thursday night, I'll see you again. I'll miss you, too. You tell the\ndoctor if the nurse turns you hard, okay? They have girls who are better\nthan me at that. I'm not so good.\"\n\"I'll wait up for you,\" I tell her. \"I won't be sleeping when you get\nhere.\"\nShe laughs. \"You, sleeping? I'll never see it. You are a night owl.\"\nShe kisses my forehead and leaves.\nIt is true, most others sleep at night. It is why I have so much time\nwith her; up and down the halls the others sleep hitched to respirators, or\nwith a leg in traction, or breathing through one overworked lung. Juanita\ntends to these people, but it is a silent tending, and brief. They want\nnothing more, at night, than to be left alone. But I sleep during the day\nnurse's shift, or pretend to sleep, for I seem to need so little rest these\ndays, as if the carpenters inside me cannot find it in themselves to stop\ntapping at my bones. Juanita used to read her romance novels at the\nnurse's station, but now she stays in my room and knits pale blue articles\nof clothing for Robert James. Hers is not a hard job, as nurses' jobs go,\nthough the hours put a strain on her marriage; she has been working\nnights for the past few months and her husband is not pleased.\n\"Why don't you work days?\" I ask her Thursday night, and she says\nsomething about saving money on day-care, and how when they are\nhome for long periods together, they don't get along so well, the house\ntoo small. In her voice is something else, a tautness. Her fingers dart\namong the yarn, and she refuses to look up.\n68 My revelation is swift and simple: Juanita stays working nights because\nof me.\nSometimes these things happen. Usually the timing is off, by a generation, by two or three. Usually nobody understands that anything could\nhave been different. People get matched up with their next door neighbor, or their aunt's best friend's son, or the postman, and if they are not\nexactly overjoyed, they nonetheless have companionship and a body next\nto them at night. Most people assume, as they must, that this is enough,\nand treat their leftover yearnings\u00E2\u0080\u0094for the postman's sister, for the window cleaner, for a vague, luminous presence they have never seen but\nknow must exist\u00E2\u0080\u0094as a kind of recurrent itch which will sink back into the\nskin for a while if only they can keep from scratching it.\nBut sometimes, through a hitch in the mechanism, people stumble\nupon each other, though the circumstances do not match at all. It happened with Charlotte and one of the guest teachers at the dance school.\nThe Madame was old, gray and pitiful in her leotard, moving like a remnant of herself, but Charlotte came home that day with glazed eyes and\nbroke down crying at the dinner table, saying she thought she had to\nleave me. The Madame was married, ill, long past her prime. They had\ntalked about dance for hours; she had massaged Charlotte's temples with\nher knotty hands. Charlotte didn't leave me, couldn't abandon me for a\nshadow, though we both knew the two of us were operating over a gap\nthat would never fill itself in, despite all the years. She should have been\nmy sister, Charlotte. I loved her enormously from the minute she ran up\nto me in the grocery store, but she and the dance teacher were something else altogether. Or perhaps it is simply that we place our foolish\nhopes in the things we know we cannot have.\nJuanita brings me small gifts, mostly snapshots of her son and herself;\nshe has discovered the self-timer on her camera and taken roll upon roll\nof the two of them posed formally on the couch, staring the camera in the\neye. Robert James wears something different in each photo, small\nchanges\u00E2\u0080\u0094a baseball hat, blue booties, an embroidered bib. I can picture\nher dressing and undressing him like a doll. She does not bring me shots\nof her husband. We tack the photos to the bulletin board provided in every room, where most patients hang pictures of their families. The doctors don't give the board a second glance.\nI teach her things\u00E2\u0080\u0094bonsoir and a bientot, which she rolls into the Spanish when she repeats after me. I teach her about what the French call\nI'heure bleue, the blue hour, how it's not an hour but a second, really, a\nhinge\u00E2\u0080\u0094that slivered moment when night is over, but day not yet begun. I\nwant to show it to her out the window, point out the light so poorly described by the color blue, but the streetlamps in the parking lot stay on all\nnight, and the sky is impossible to read in such a glare.\n69 Perhaps she is planning something. I can almost read it into her smile,\nthe way she starts to grin when she sees me, then pulls the corners of\nher mouth down into something more restrained. She asks me questions\nabout my favorite foods and how my apartment is decorated. If only she\nwould take me home. There, she might put the baby on the bed with me\nand I might hold him, sing to him, change him from one elaborate outfit to\nthe next. She would not have to work if she would rather stay at home,\nfor money would not be a problem. I could read to her from books, expand her horizons, gossip with her about the neighbors she has already\ntold me so much about. She is having trouble with her house plants, and I\ncould show her how to clip them back and wipe the leaves down with a\nsponge. I would arbitrate disputes between Juanita and her husband, arrange time for them to spend together, time for me to spend with her\nalone, for each day she would shampoo my hair and give me a long, hot\nbath.\nIt is not what it sounds like\u00E2\u0080\u0094I am beyond all that, would expect it neither of Juanita nor myself. Not baths like I used to take with Charlotte,\nwhen she sponged my back and leaned over me nibbling my skin like a silent, friendly fish, our hands slick and smooth with soap. Juanita is a\nnurse, and I, an old sickly woman. She would bathe me with little more\nthan the dim recognition of missed opportunity\u00E2\u0080\u0094what we might have\nbeen in another place and time. That would be enough, her hands so capable and swift, and beads of water catching on her hair. In such a place,\nbathed by such hands, I would grow stronger every day, until she could\nleave the baby with me and go off shopping with her friends.\nI tell Juanita about the money I am leaving her. I cannot help it. She has\ncome in frantic with worry\u00E2\u0080\u0094her sister has begun to talk to her about pre-\nschools, how only the private ones are any good, how Robert James will\nnever go anywhere in life if he starts out wrong. Robert James, says Juanita, may have something wrong with him. He's too happy; he never\ncries, just sits and drools and stares. She thinks perhaps he has a learning\ndisability. He'll be crushed in the public schools.\n\"I'm going to take care of you,\" I tell her, and she nods dismissively\nand says her husband wants to have another baby, afraid Robert James\nwill grow up spoiled and lonely. He wants a sister for him, says Juanita, to\nteach him how to share.\n\"You won't need to worry about money,\" I tell her. \"Anyway, I could\nbabysit.\"\nNow she is growing impatient; her eyes dart to her watch. She will\nleave me any minute.\n\"Thank you, but I can't bring him to the hospital,\" she says.\n\"Juanita,\" I tell her, and something about my tone gets her to listen. \"I\nhave a good deal of money, and I don't need it. I'd like to help you out.\"\n70 She takes a deep breath. \"I can't do that.\"\n\"I want you to.\"\n\"Yes, but I can't.\"\n\"If you like,\" I say, trying to sound as if I just came up with the idea,\n\"maybe I could come to your apartment some mornings and watch him.\nI'm feeling so much better lately.\"\nShe shakes her head and starts to walk away.\n\"Come here,\" I say. \"Please.\" My head has begun spinning. I know\nthere must be a thousand ways to convince her, a thousand ways to get\nher to sit for a few minutes longer, to accept my help, but if I open my\nmouth I am sure to say something wrong, and then she will go away. I\ncannot be alone in the room, not at night after waiting all day. I must\nmake her see that or she will go stay with the others, who are sleeping\nand don't notice her sitting like an angel in the corner or bending over\ntheir charts. She turns around and stops several feet from my bed, her\nhands clasped behind her, her white shoes planted firmly on the ground. I\npat on the cover for her to sit, and she backs away a few steps.\n\"What?\" I say to her. \"Did I do something? What did I do? Sit and talk\nto me for a minute.\"\nShe bows her head wearily, then perches next to me, her shoulders\ntrembling, and begins to cry.\n\"Oh, little one,\" I say, but when I reach out, she slides away, inching\nfurther down the bed. \"Shush now,\" I tell her, dropping my hand to the\nmattress. Exhaustion covers me like an extra blanket. \"It'll be okay. He's\na smart boy. I can tell from the pictures. He'll be fine.\"\nShe wears powdered blush on her cheeks, the tears weaving trails\nthrough the pink. I need to tell her how much she means to me, how miraculous it is, at this late date, to have stumbled upon her working here.\n\"I\u00E2\u0080\u0094\" I begin, but she holds out her hand as if to wave my words away.\n\"Stop,\" she says, and there is such command in her voice that I obey.\nAnd Juanita sits there, her small face turned away from me, and tells\nme she's been switched to days, and not on this floor. That's the way it\nhappens, she says, sometimes they just switch you, and she needs\nEmergency Room experience anyway, which is what she'll get, and\nthey've offered for a small raise.\nDid They switch you, I want to ask, or did you ask to be switched? Instead I tell her I don't know how I'll manage without her.\nShe says she is sorry and hopes I will not leave her the bracelet or anything else, because she wouldn't know what to do.\nI tell her to please look at me when she talks, and she turns her face toward me, the lines set stubbornly, an unyielding face grown hard already\nin its shape. She swipes at her cheeks, smudging the blush and erasing\nthe lines of tears. Poor Juanita, already growing old. I look at the face\u00E2\u0080\u0094\n71 such a stranger, so different from the face still glowing in my mind\u00E2\u0080\u0094and\nfind that I, too, am crying. As the tears leave my eyes and begin to travel\ndown my cheeks, her face relaxes and grows young again, swimming in\nliquid. She stands up when she sees me crying, puts a hand to her mouth\nand whispers, \"Don't.\"\n\"I'm an old dying woman, and you have a need to be cruel to me,\" I\nhear myself say. It is the sort of self-pitying, overwrought statement I\nusually reserve for the day nurse, but I am clutching at straws, and what\nis more frightening is that suddenly it rings true: I am an old dying\nwoman; she has a need to be cruel to me. The hammering in my body\ngrows harder as if it has started sleeting inside my limbs, hailstones pelting the marrow of my bones.\nShe leans over me, whoever she is, this night nurse, this little Puerto\nRican girl with an overdressed baby and a postman husband, and whispers that she is sorry, she never meant to be cruel. She manoeuvers me\nto a sitting position and holds me there, her cheek pressed up against my\ncheek.\n\"Stay, then, would you please?\" I ask her, and she says no, she cannot\nstay, and lowers me down to the pillow. I try to sit, to say please again,\nbut my head lolls like an overblown flower on a flimsy stem.\nAnd then she is gone, and I am alone in the room with the string of\ncards clapping lightly in the breeze of her departure. For a moment I feel\nsomething smoldering in my bones like lit coals, a deep, indignant fury\nnot so much against her as against all of them\u00E2\u0080\u0094the ones I have never met\nor couldn't have, the ones who spurned me, or loved me too slightly, or\nturned away from me before the disapproving face of the world. Against\nmy sinking body, too, for its share in the abandonment, and my mind, for\nsomehow allowing a limp version of my old desire to live on. I lift my\nhead, stronger suddenly, and look across the room to the bulletin board,\nstill covered with pictures of Juanita and Robert James. Someone must\ntake them down.\nThen everything goes slack in my body, the hammering subsides, and I\nfeel an airy sense of relief that I no longer have anything to look forward\nto\u00E2\u0080\u0094nights now the same as days, my peevish complaints free to circulate\nat will, my body free to air its indignities and shed its skin. I think of Charlotte, for it is she, finally, who deserves my thoughts, and of the bracelet\nand money I will still leave to Juanita; she can use some help, and I can\ncome up with no one else. I think of the old woman watching her husband's ashes flow. Such a small thing he became after a whole life\u00E2\u0080\u0094she\ncould cup him in her palm.\nI must have rung, for a nurse appears at my side, not Juanita, not the\nday nurse, but another woman altogether, her face as bland as hospital\n72 food, her warm consoling voice asking, \"Mrs. Haven, what can I do for\nyou?\"\n\"The pictures, there,\" I whisper. \"Could you take them down?\" I cannot seem to lift my head to watch her, but I know when she is through because her mouth appears above me saying she has put them in a pile on\nthe nightstand. Someone will find them there and think, perhaps, that\nthey are pictures of my daughter and grandson, though there is no resemblance between us. The nurse must have glanced down and recognized the face, because now she asks if she should return the photos to\nJuanita. No, I think. No, let them stay with me. So simple, photographs,\nso cooperative and flat\u00E2\u0080\u0094the beaming little night nurse and her son.\nOut of the corner of my eye I see the hands of the new nurse tapping\nthe edges of the photos on the nightstand, aligning them into a neat pile.\nThen she is gone from the room, the pictures with her, and I realize that I\nmust have told her yes. In such ways we are stripped clean of everything\nwe own. Even my own voice contradicts me, or perhaps I didn't answer\nand she took the photos anyway, thinking me asleep or close enough.\n73 Dee Evetts\nSix Weeks, Two Voices\nStill not really knowing\nmuch about the man\nin your bed, maybe you decide\nthat this is not time\nfor keeping up appearances.\nForget limping quietly to and from\nthe wardrobe, cane in one hand,\nclothes for a weekend in the country\nin the other.\nWe shall find out soon enough.\nLobbed across the room: socks, swimsuit,\ntampons, that paperback of short stories.\nNo longer really sleeping\nbeneath the soft bombardment\nhe turns a smile towards the wall.\nPerhaps it has come to this:\nfinally, the possibility of knowing\na woman who reveals herself\nas anything but disabled.\n74 Scott Minar\nSausurre's Rain\nThe one cry language never had, a low hum\nthrough thick fingers holding a woman's breast, the quiet\nhiss of skin caroming off linen\nand wool. My one\nlove's wish is to hear these sounds\nand be free of meaning\nlike dogs wandering in circles after nothing\nto be recognized.\nI wish it too. And watch the rain\ntrip down a used world. What dotage this faith in words. I hide\nin this skin feeling blue and peaceful\nwhen there are storms\nto look for, winds rising up in anti-synthetic sequence,\neach act of love a cosmos of signs frangible\nas the Rosetta Stone.\n75 Jay Ruzesky\nEdict #2: Sheep\nfor Bonnie\nTho you may be weary, let your parents take you on an\nimpossibly straight drive across the prairie to a Ukrainian\nwedding. Kick your shoes off while the cruise control holds a\nsteady ninety-five and sense your toes floating swiftly twelve\ninches above asphalt. Know your father well and be prepared\nfor the next gas station because you won't be stopping long.\nIf in transit you see a travelling circus, adore not the\nelephants, but the petting-zoo sheep; sink your fingers deeply\ninto their wool. Then sleep if you can and dream, later smell\nlanolin on your fingers. Forget the sequined caps and tassels,\nthe dazzling harnesses\u00E2\u0080\u0094the circus is going the other\ndirection. Stay alert as you cross provincial boundaries and\nnotice how driving east is like plunging under a patch-work\nblanket. At the celebration stand alone without costume or\nyour own dance and consider where you came from. Do an awkward\nbox-step with your cousin the bride and kiss her cheek the next\nday before getting into the car. When some oily smell triggers\nyour memory years later, remember how comfortable the elephants\nseemed on the baked earth, how out of place the sheep, longing\nfor a green field but standing on the prairie half-awake.\n76 Stratis Paschdlis\nTranslated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas\nBlack Shadow\nA shadow, one evening,\nas the warm October breeze\nscattered cigarette ends and leaves,\nwent through the mart and purlieus\n\u00E2\u0080\u0094seedy places\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nand onto the seafront\nlined with houses and poplars.\nHere it walked for a long time over seaweed\nalong the roadside\nand when it reached the landscape's end\nthus black and undulating\nit stood and said:\n\"The sea is voices of the drowned.\nA woman who years ago left traces\nof her walk on a beach\nwoke up inside me and I feel\nthat I am meowing harshly in fetid darkness\nwith her own vocal chords\nlike a blinded animal troubling\nthe sleep of the dead who spent\na life of gloom inside their coffins,\nleaving each time the cry lingers\nan echo. Believing that I am her\nobserve now my body: breasts belly\nhole and womb. In a while the moon will rise\nfrom the depths of a bedroom, made up\nlike the face of an aged mistress\u00E2\u0080\u0094the dream of Hecate-\na spellbound sea will ripple\nwith a maiden's barren blood,\ncasting ashore a rotten reed\n(of its own grass or the bone of a dead woman').\nAnd I shall make out of sand a woman to love\nthe very flesh that offered without fear\n77 on a wretched bed to a cat-woman\nthe fruitless pleasure of a dog-lover.\"\nThus it spoke; and when the moon appeared in full\nand slowly climbed the sky\nthe shadow plunged into the waves.\nNext day they couldn't tell if the body they had dragged ashore\nbelonged to a man or a woman.\n78 Stockholm,\nSeptember 1989:\nThe Sauna\nAnita Roberts\nA dozen fourteen year old Swedish girls sit naked and splay-\nlegged around me on the warm wooden benches. I am surrounded by shrieks and giggles. Their breasts, with the palest of\nnipples, all have a swollen, pouty look. Their bodies seem as firm and\nrubbery as the dolls I used to get for Christmas and I imagine they would\nhave the same brand new smell. Unlike my dolls they have little down-\ncovered mounds between their legs. I can't look there. It would be a violation. They are so virginal. So powerful. Those pink little lips. Squeaky\nclean and hiding among the pale damp curls. They whisper precious secrets. They know things. If they were to speak aloud they would shout:\n\"How dare you!\"\nEnfolded in nubile sensuality, I grieve for the loss of my own young\nbody. Then a momentary panic and I think: \"I can't possibly go around\nwearing this!\" My naked body feels shabby and desperate like something\nfrom the Goodwill.\nAt once, as if on some secret cue, the bodies begin to tumble off the\nbenches and spill out the door. Their laughter and foreign words come\nout in bursts and harmonies. They are birds chattering and shrieking.\nTheir hands flap paraplegically, bent at the wrist in a universal adolescent\ngesture.\nOnly Freida remains. After a time she speaks to me in Swedish. I am\nshy\u00E2\u0080\u0094I only speak English. She brightens at this, seems curious. She begins to speak English to me in the most delicate accent, her lips forming\naround the words with exaggerated precision, as mine would do if I were\nto imitate a British princess\u00E2\u0080\u0094but each word held longer in the mouth and\ndrawn out enticingly before finally being released. I am enchanted.\nFreida is thirteen (twelve days ago). She wears her brand new breasts\nproudly. From time to time as we speak, she strokes the beads of sweat\n79 down her chest and abdomen in a gesture of such innocence and grace\nthat I am awed.\nShe announces that she will have five babies. Boys or girls, either\nwould be okay. She is not surprised that I have a twenty-one year old\nson, although I am only thirty-seven. She says her father was in an accident and must wear a neck brace \"perhaps for the rest of his life, but it is\nno so bad because he is old.\" How old? \"Oh, he is 30.\" Laughter threatens but my respect is stronger.\nIn the shower we talk and talk. I find out that, like me, she is terrified\nof sharks and we have a long talk about that. She was recently in the Canary Islands where she refused to go in past her knees. I completely understand.\nShe knows how to say \"I love you\" in English, Norwegian and German.\nI teach her \"Je t'aime\" and she is pleased.\nWe share my shampoo and conditioner because she finds them more\ninteresting than hers, but I don't offer to wash her hair. I know I must not\ntouch her, must not teach her that being touched by strangers is okay.\nHer vulnerability terrifies me.\nShe glances from time to time at my pubic hair. I can tell that she has\nnever seen any so black and I imagine it looks strange and exotic to her. I\ndon't know why but I feel pleased by this.\nShe says, as we are leaving the shower, that she must go soon. She\nsays it is not good to bicycle home in the dark because of the men who\nopen their coats. She says this knowingly but not without fear. Her vulnerability fills me with desperation and rage.\nAs we are dressing, Freida tells me that she has no friends, that the\nothers are mean to her. There is an uneven number on the swim team\nand it is always she who is without a partner. Her voice is thin with pain.\nHer mother, she says, insists that she must not care so much, must try\nharder. I have said the same helpless thing to my son but I know better\nnow. I say: \"It must be hard for you; it must hurt.\" Her tears brim.\n\"Yes,\" she says, and as a few tears spill over she smiles. We both smile.\nThree of her classmates come in then and look curiously at me. I am\nnew. I am 'English'. I am prestige and Freida is proud of me.\nBefore we leave I dig in my bag and produce a little salamander brooch\nwhich I pin onto Freida's jacket. She looks at it with delight and strokes\nit, eyes wide, disbelieving. \"It is for me? It is sooo lovely!\"\nI'm the one who received the gift. Freida; bright, open as a sky.\n80 Connie Vivrett\nSomething That Feels Like\nWaiting\nI have the patience of a snake\nswallowing an egg.\nI open myself wide\nto take what comes.\nIt usually makes me happy.\nMy husband says I am soft.\nThis body is a good place\nto grow a child\nso I wait.\nWomen understand the waiting\nwaiting to become beautiful\nwaiting for a phone call\nwaiting for the dust to resettle\nso we can wipe it away again.\nI understand\nthat the stir to passion\ntakes time sometimes\nand that the labor pains\nmust last no time at all\ncompared to the length of the life.\nMy patience becomes clear to me\nwhen I think back on the night\nmy husband noticed my open eyes,\nand he stopped his kisses\nto rest his head upon my chest.\nHe said my eyes were distant\nas if I were waiting\nfor a bus in the dark.\nI laughed and placed his mouth\nwhere it had been\u00E2\u0080\u0094\nI'd be too afraid\n81 to wait for a bus alone\nand at night.\nInstead, I was thinking of the snake,\nimagining how it must feel\nto have that swollen egg\nmoving so slowly through its body\nstretching the skin almost to breaking.\nI was thinking how good that must feel.\n82 Notes On Contributors\nDavid Axelrod lives in eastern Oregon near Hell's Canyon. His poems appear in Crab\nCreek Review, Calapooya, Kentucky Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and Poetry Northwest.\nRoo Borson's latest book is Intent, Or The Weight Of The World, published by McClelland\n& Stewart. She is currently living in Toronto, where she continues to write poems and\nessays.\nGeorge Bowering's most recent book is a novel, Harry's Fragment, from Coach House\nPress. He is one of the founding editors of Tish magazine, and has since published numerous books of fiction and poetry and criticism. He is perhaps best known for his long poems:\n'Kerrisdale Elegies' and 'Allophanes'. Currently, he lives in Vancouver, and teaches English\nat Simon Fraser University.\nSu Croll has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her most\nrecent work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Poetry Canada Review, and in The\nMoosehead Anthology. She is currently at work on a poetry manuscript about carnivals,\ntwins, dwarfs, goats, and the bearded lady, \"the day after goat gloves\" and \"Katherine\nWheel\" are from this work in progress.\nDee Evetts was born n England in 1943 and currently lives in New York city. A former\nteacher of Thai and English, he subsists as a freelance designer/carpenter. His poetry, written over the past 25 years, reflects an obsession as poet, teacher and critic with haiku and\nrelated forms.\nCarolyn Gammon, Mistress of Arts, Concordia University, has been working for four\nyears to see Lesbian Studies developed as an academic discipline. She would love to get\npaid for such work, but instead makes her living teaching lesbians and women how to pump\niron.\nElizabeth Graver's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, Southern Review,\nSeventeen, Southwest Review, Street Songs I: New Voices in Fiction, and Best Stories from\nNew Writers: 1991. She lives in Ithaca, New York.\nYannis Goumas is the author of six books of poetry, and has translated widely among contemporary and modern Greek writers. His original work and translations have appeared\nworld-wide, including the Malahat Review, London Magazine, Poetry Review, Shenandoah,\nChelsea, and Contemporary Literature in Translation. His poetry has been translated into\nfive languages including Greek, Italian and Serbo-Crotian. He currently lives in Piraeus,\nGreece.\nDiana Hartog lives in the Slocan Valley and is currently working on manuscripts of both\nfiction and poetry.\n83 Greg Hollingshead has published stories in many literary magazines and anthologies in\nCanada and the U.S. His first collection, Famous Players, was published by Coach House\nPress. His second, White Buick, is appearing from Oolichan Books in 1991. He has finished\na novel and is working on a third collection of stories. He teaches English literature and fiction writing at the University of Alberta. \"When She Was Gone\" is based on assorted published materials relating to Edward Gein, a Wisconsin Farmer.\nEric Horsting teaches at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was for several\nyears poetry editor of The Antioch Review. His work has appeared in numerous journals.\nPeter McGehee's latest book is a novel, Boys Like Us (St. Martin's and HarperCollins).\nHe is also the author of two story collections: Beyond Happiness and Thel.Q. Zoo. He lives\nin Toronto.\nScott Minar is the author of The Nexus of Rain (Ohio Review Books). He is the recipient\nof The Emerson Prize in Poetry from Ohio University, and is currently at work on a new\nbook of poems tentatively titled When There Are Storms. He is Assistant Professor of\nEnglish at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.\nJames Morrison teaches English and film studies at North Carolina State University. His\nwork has appeared in such journals as Centennial Review and New Orleans Review. He is\ncurrently completing a collection of short stories.\nKim Morrissey's first collection of poetry, Batoche, (Coteau Books, 1989) placed third in\nthe 1987 CBC Contest and won the SWG contest (judged by Gwendolyn MacEwen and\nD. G. Jones). The poems that appear here are from her second collection, Poems For Men\nWho Dream of Lolita, to be published this year by Coteau Books. She currently lives in\nToronto.\nStratis Paschalis was born in Athens in 1958, but grew up on the island of Lesbos where\nhis family hails from. He is the author of three volumes of verse: Anaktoria (1977), Excavations (1984) and Hermaphrodite's Night (1989). His first book of poems won the Maria Ralli\nPrize for a first published author. His poems, studies, reviews and translations appear regularly in Greek literary magazines.\nRoxanne Power Hamilton is a poet from Colorado currently teaching writing at Cornell\nUniversity, working with Epoch magazine and finishing her book, Cont (r) act. Most recent\nwork is in The Black Warrior Review, for which she won a 1990 AWP Intro Award. She is\nalso a performer of Feminist theatre and performance poetry.\nAl Purdy has arguably had more influence on Canadian Poetry than any other Canadian\nwriter. His book, Cariboo Horses (1965), is noted for ushering in the convention of the\n'prose lyric'. Recent collections include Bursting into Song (1982), The Stone Bird (1981),\nand Piling Blood (1984). He currently lives in Ameliasburgh, Ontario.\nAnita Roberts lives in Vancouver and teaches sexual assault prevention to high school\nstudents. She wrote \"The Sauna\" while teaching her program in Scandinavian schools in the\nfall of 1989 and is currently working on a novel about a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family.\n84 Jay Ruzesky's poetry has appeared most recently in Event, and is forthcoming in Saturday Night, BOGG, Queens Quarterly and Canadian Literature. He currently lives in Victoria and teaches at Malaspina College in Duncan, B.C. He is a member of the editorial\nboard of the Malahat Review.\nDavid Reiter won the 1989 Queensland Premier's Poetry Prize. A book of poems, The\nSnow in Us, was recently published by Five Islands Press. His most recent book, Voices\nfrom the Flood is now being considered by University of Queensland Press. He currently\nlives in Queensland, Australia.\nNawal El Saadawi is a well-known Egyptian feminist and novelist, who has been described as \"the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world.\" She was trained as a physician, and\nher first book, Woman and Sex (1971) cost her her job as director of education in Egypt's\nMinistry of Health. In 1981 she was briefly imprisoned for her outspokenness under the\nrule of Anwar Sadat. Her books have been banned from Egypt, though her work is freely\navailable in Jordan and some other Arab countries. Some of her work has already been\ntranslated into English, the best known being the non-fiction The Hidden Face of Eve (Zed\nBooks) and Two Women in One (Al Saqi Books) appeared in 1985.\nMark Sanders has published poems in the US, Canada, and Great Britain. His most recent\nchapbook is The Suicide (Cummington, 1988), and he is seeking a publisher for his first full-\nlength collection. He teaches composition, literature, creative writing and film at Southwestern Oklahoma University in Weatherford, Oklahoma.\nConnie Vivrett is a second year MFA student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.\nShe has received the Divine Fellowship in Poetry from this institution. This is the first time\nher work has appeared in PRISM.\nPeter Whelan is a British academic whose background includes a Ph. D in English Literature and a B.A. in Arabic. His book on D. H. Lawrence appeared in 1988. He has taught\nand published essays and reviews on literature, applied linguistics, and translation in the\nUSA, Britain, Spain, and Jordan. He currently teaches at the University of Miitah, Jordan.\n85 EPOC\ncontinues to publish\na wide range of the\nbest new poetry and\nfiction. Recent\ncontributors include:\nrick demar1n1s\nlee k. abrott\nharriet doerr\nstuart dybek\nj0hn l'heureux\nJoyce Carol Oates\na. r. ammons\nlorrie Moore\nnathaniel mackey\nFulton\nAS MOSS\nCharms Baxter\nPublished three\ntimes per year.\nSample copy\n$4.00\nOne year\nsubscription\n$11.00\nPainting (detail) by Richard Estell. Courtesy of Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York\nAvailable from 251 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 \u00C2\u00B03\nc\n2?\nb\n01\nT3\nC\nTO\nC\nO\ntt\no\nZ\nPoetry * Novel/Novella > Short Fiction, Stage Plays * Screen & TV\nCreative Writing B.F.A.\nThe University of British Columbia offers a\nBachelor of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.\nStudents choose ,. three genres to work in\nfrom a wide\ncourses, in-\netry, Novel/\nShort Fic-\nPlays, Screen\nRadio Plays,\nChildren, Non-\nTranslation. All\nrange of\neluding: Po-\nN ove 11a ,\ntion, Stage\n& TV Plays,\nWriting for\nFiction and\ninstruction is in small\nworkshop format or tutorial.\nFaculty: Sue Ann Alderson\nHart Hanson\nGeorge McWhirter\nKeith Maillard\nJerry Newman\nLinda Svendsen\nBryan Wade\nFor further information, please write to:\nDepartment of Creative Writing\nUniversity of British Columbia\nBuchanan E462 - 1866 Main Mall\nVancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5\nSihinaa \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 sAe|d oipey \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 sAe|d Al $ uaajDS \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 sAey aSeis 'uoiPj-j\n70\no'\n<\nn\n3\"\nO\n3\n0)\n3\nQ. Event's fourth $500\nCreative Non-Fiction Contest\nPrizes: Three winners will each receive $500, plus publication in Event 20/3.\nPreliminary judging by the editors of Event\nFinal Judge: Susan Crean\nSusan Crean has published Who's Afraid of Canadian Culture,\nNewsworthy\u00E2\u0080\u0094the Lives of Media Women and, most recently, In the\nName of the Fathers\u00E2\u0080\u0094the Story Behind Child Custody. She has been a\nmember of the editorial collective of This Magazine, and is a contributing\neditor of Canadian Art. In 1989 she was appointed the first Maclean-\nHunter chair in Creative Non-Fiction and Business Writing at the University\nof British Columbia, and in 1988 was an instructor in Creative Documentary\nat West Word IV.\nWriters are invited to submit manuscripts that explore the creative non-\nfiction form: narrative essays, personal essays, journals, memoirs, creative\ndocumentary. See Event 17/2,18/3 and 19/3 for previous winners, with\ncomments by judges Myrna Kostash, Howard White and Eleanor Wachtel.\nNote: Previously published material cannot be considered. Maximum length\nfor submission is 5000 words, typed, double-spaced. Please include a self-\naddressed stamped envelope and a telephone number. (Contributors outside\nCanada, please send International Reply Coupons).\nEntry Fee: Each submission must include a $12 entry fee. All entrants will\nreceive a one-year subscription (three issues) with each entry. Those already\nsubscribing will receive a one-year extension with each entry.\nDEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: postmarked no later than April 15, 1991.\ndouglos\ncollege\nAddress:\nCreative Non-Fiction Contest #4\nEvent, The Douglas College Review\nP.O. Box 2503, New Westminster, B.C.\nCanada V3L 5B2 r\nLITERARY COMPETITION I\nAccidents Will Happen:\nAnecdotes of the Unexpected\n1st prize $1000\n5 runner up prizes of $100 each\nSubmissions must be previously\nunpublished and should not\nexceed 400 words.\nSponsored by Canada India Village Aid\nAll proceeds to CIVAs health &\ndevelopment projects in rural India.\nIk*\nDeadline is April 1, 1991\nSubmissions & Information:\nCANADIAN ANECDOTE CONTEST\nCIVA\n6429 McCleery\nVancouver, B.C. V6NIG5\n5^1 Poetry\nDavid Axelrod\nRoo Borson\nGeorge Bowering\nSu Croll\nDee Evetts\nCarolyn Gammon\nDiana Hartog\nScott Minar\nKim Morrissey\nRoxanne Power Hamilton\nAl Purdy\nJay Ruzesky\nDavid Reiter\nMark Sanders\nConnie Vivrett\nFiction\nElizabeth Graver\nGreg Hollingshead\nEric Horsting\nPeter McGehee\nJames Morrison\nNon-Fiction\nAnita Roberts\nIn Translation\nStrati's Paschalis\nNawal El Saadawi\nISSN 0032.8790"@en . "Periodicals"@en . "PR8900.P7"@en . "PR8900_P7_029_002"@en . "10.14288/1.0135246"@en . "English"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "Vancouver : The Creative Writing Program of the University of British Columbia"@en . "Materials provided for research and reference use only. Permission to publish, copy, or otherwise use these images must be obtained from the Prism international: http://prismmagazine.ca"@en . "Creative writing Periodicals"@en . "Poetry--Periodicals"@en . "Canadian literature -- Periodicals"@en . "Prism international"@en . "Text"@en . ""@en .