U.M.Ph.! Prose #8 november 2011
an eclectic journal of gritty city narratives
Already fat on Halloween candy, city dwellers prepare to be feasted upon by premature-decorating department stores with electronic Santas ho, ho, ho-ing away more energy than anyone should be able to afford in this still bleak economy. They can almost feel the grit of urban life between their teeth as the early winter splashes frigid air--off the Harbor and River, over the trees struck dumb by lightning in October--full into their exhausted faces. Yep, life’s a bitch these days, no gettin’ around it. But the peculiar thing is people having more time to talk to neighbors, hang in with friends cuz it’s too expensive to go partying, commiserate over the common human condition in the cafeteria if they’re lucky enough to have a job. Face it, pure joy and prosperity foster competition and a who cares? ‘tude. Eat, drink, bitch, moan, and be merry this holiday season. Misery loves company, especially if you bring a pie.
The Umphatic Editor
Beantown, Mass
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
A PANHANDLER’S TALE
You can’t do it on private property, he says.
The cops will give you a ticket for seventy-five dollars;
then when they catch you again they send you to jail
because, after all, you didn’t pay the first ticket.
They let me sit in the cells for a couple of days,
clean well-fed guys don’t look quite as desperate,
give me the medication to keep me alive,
and give me another line on my rap sheet.
It’s a crime to be a failure now,
if you do it out in public.
It’s okay to fail at work if you have a home.
It’s okay to fail at home if you have a job.
There are some mornings I think I could hate you,
dropping your spare coins like manna into my hat.
WASHED UP ON THE BANK STEPS
Bank closed four years ago in this neighborhood,
but everything else was closing down.
Boarded up windows every second store
and what’s open now is the under a dollar value types.
Six old drunks loll on the steps, broken beer bottles
lined up in front of them like bowling pins;
forty year olds looking sixty, dirt in the wrinkles,
yell insults and curses at passersby.
Time and beer catch up with one of them.
He staggers off, knocking down the bottles
that shatter like Sunday morning church bells,
goes into the phone booth, darkens the August dust.
No sirens, the cop car creeps up like a second mortgage holder;
two burly cops attempt to negotiate a payment of respect,
foreclose on the pisser’s freedom, haul him off
into a debtor’s prison of old sins remembered.
Drunk native woman passes by and their lips can’t whistle,
too dry in the now starting early evening.
The nameless drunks move stony-faced into the night;
the bank’s carved name remains in stone.
--Lucille Barker
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
#16 – Urban Education
The rotary, hospital, park, zoo, municipal
golf course, wan sun casting the shadows of bare trees
on snow banks that dot the landscape like pimples:
the route my father took to a besieged
school, a redlined neighborhood. Out grimy plastic
windows you can still see, behind the blue-spired
church and the new library they tacked on, the brick
edifice. After wrestling a student for his gun, my father retired.
When young, I’d tag along on the last day
of school. Mr. Malloy, who fell, hit his head, and passed
this past fall, was the computer teacher. He let me play
Oregon Trail on a desktop in his class.
Little Day the kids called me. In my parents’ basement
there’s a drawer full of photos, articles and objects
documenting the more than 30 years my father spent
teaching and coaching. Reflected
in the creased images is my close-cropped,
gray-spattered hair, though I suspect in my vanity
I’ve done more to hide the color than he ever did; chopped
it off at one point. I never thought of him as young or me
as old, but I’m the age now he is unmistakably
etched in my memory, the age at which I fear,
when I mull the unforeseen, he will live eternally,
though my grandmother – prim, fussy, dead twenty years –
might choose to remember him as, say, her bright,
young seminarian, might choose, too, to be recalled
other than as I do: frail, teetering on high
heels. Ultimately, my father's wasn’t a higher calling.
He left the seminary, graduated from BC,
started teaching, met my mother, married,
had a son, a second son, had me,
watched his father die, mother die, carried
to the grave by cancer and age. My wife
and I live today on the same route my father took≒≒
to the school and students to whom he devoted his life.
At market’s peak, the neighborhood looked
like it would tip, but the storefronts are vacant,
the Vaudeville theater the city risked
millions on restoring remains dormant
and the code on floppy disks
I inserted into bulky desktops at years’
end, stalking digitized elk in the red-brick
school, feet swinging from hard-backed chairs,
might as well be written now in hieroglyphics.
--Liam Day
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
JOB ‘07‘Til
Inspired by JOB 5:7
"Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."
I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist lately.
She says I’m crazy for being crazy.
I must figure out why God forsakes me,
why He breaks me. “Can you get life straight, please?”
That would be great
but she can’t relate.
Hopeless. Jobless. Helpless. Faithless.
Where are my options to create
in a depressive state.
Dreams never take shape
building upon planes that constantly break.
--Jamaal Eversley
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Shooting Them Out
By Timothy Gager
I wait in an outside room with the other addicts, soon to be ushered into a larger room for our weekly session. Last week our trainer, Barry, said that in order to deal with our unhealthy addictions, we must have an action plan. A guy in a suit stands up, whispers something to Barry and they let him out. We all heard him; he misunderstood, thought this was the meeting for sex addicts rather than an addiction to the women in their lives.
I know these men by their faces, but I don’t know their real names. We go by Mr. P, Mr. A and Mr. W. My name is Mr. H. but my real last name begins with a “G”. Her last name begins with “H”. It’s devious on my part and the program would frown on it but it makes me inappropriately laugh if I think about it during meeting time.
Mr. P announces he sat outside his woman’s house the other night because she wouldn’t answer the phone. Mr. A started crying because the daily e-mail for her, he was so used to, had a two day rest. Mr. W and his girlfriend were guilty of texting over 5,000 times this weekend.
“Mr. H?” Barry asks and pulls on the cuff of his flannel shirt. “Time’s almost up and we haven’t heard from you. We encourage everyone to speak at least once every week.”
“I feel I have a healthy love infatuation,” I start.
“Denial,” some of the misters say.
The trainer shakes his head and the bell rings. He pulls a spoon out of his sweat pants, mixes up what looks like to be Tang in little cups and offers the first one to Mr. P. We wait in line and drink them down like a good little parade of wooden soldiers, shooting them down, one at a time.
Back in Boston
It’s been raining every day:
smacks down onto sidewalks,
roads that seem more curved
than before, falling loud
the run off has been brutal,
you’ve soaked me once more.
I hear bits of conversation
from the homeless
huddled in doorways
one turns to another,
“A standing poodle is a substantial dog.”
and the force of this storm
hits a woman’s plastic bag,
which covers a wedding dress,
like a snare drum,
and a man turns to his wife,
says, “I hope it stops soon,”
but she can’t hear him
say, I need you
in my life, I love you.
as a door is held open
for her,
and it falls even harder, for me,
the world washes away,
the weather, fine
over where you are--
the sun brightly shines.
Her car is officially dead
What kind of flowers for the wake?
I was thinking something like Tiger Lilies
but let's face it she’s is a bit tigery.
so let's go with that. Amen.
What did the autopsy say?
Engine damage that can't be repaired.
And she’s not replacing the engine:
since she hates car problems.
A massage will help you,
at least for the moment
you shudder and shake.
--Timothy Gager
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Shoot first
By Gill Hoffs
So I shot him. Right in the bollocks, though I doubt he felt it. I'm always open to being wrong, though.
“Argh, shit! What the fuck?!” he screamed, blood pissing on the seat.
And how do I answer that?
a) You deserved it.
b) I felt like it.
c) Somebody had to, or
d) All of the above.
Yeah, d), that about covers it.
Now what will he do? Press creeping hands to the deep red gore or circle silver-trimmed wheels? Stem the flow or propel his wheelchair for help?
Funny, he'd no qualms about touching the bleeding groins of others.
I was enjoying this.
But now: a choice.
One bullet left. Two heads to blow. Better to end it for him, or for me? I'm an atheist — let there be no doubts here, the end is The End. I can let him live, twitch a finger at my temple once the police arrive and my tale is told. Perhaps a marksman will take care of it for me, I dunno. Or I can make him die. Quick. Clean. Painless.
Undeserved.
I'd let him bleed out, watch him grow damp and clammy, twitch and fumble, grey and grow still. But the gun's exhaled explosion, well, even in this area it'll merit a call. And the bastard isn't even feeling this. That's what a broken back can do for you. In the kitchen, cooking at the stove, he'd lay towels on his bony lap, soaking spatters in soft cotton cloth, protecting himself from burns. I'd tried, then, putting shit in his tea, but he was wary from the spit, bubbles warning him weeks ago never to trust my mug.
So I waited, time telescoping, dragging its heels in the grey mud of my misery. Till now, and a bouncer's loaned .32. I'd had to show him my tits but that was nothing. For a blowjob he'd have done it all, but where's the fun in that?
Doing doughnuts now, trying to move and live at the same time. I moved when he kicked us out. Only likes the younger ones, only tolerates their mums so he can get in close, handle their laundry, take them out in the car, babysit…. But I don't live, I exist. I cut, I fuck, I swear, I get fat, I get thin, and through it all, the current through the wreck of me, runs rage.
Do I stay or do I go? Sirens are close, I can hear them through his whining and the squeak of tyres twisting on the floor. Those crepey pink lids are growing fat and heavy over winter-water eyes. He's just about gone anyway, knuckles catching knobbles in the wheel. Shadows pass the window: I have no time.
“Bit-“ a whisper blown away by a bullet.
He spent time in Germany as a boy. Whether ‘please' or ‘bitch' my finger chose for me.
Now a bang, a shout, a roar.
So they shot me.
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Dancing Around the Mugumo Tree
By Nyambura Kiarie
Hooting cars in the snarl of traffic,
Draped in a mist of carbon mono-oxide fog,
Melting in the heat from a multitude of engines;
Bodies breathing shallowly in the fog,
In the midst there she sits,
Gazing with unseeing eyes at the concrete hills and mountains,
Child of the mountains transported and then transplanted into this hard jungle.
A woman evolving from soft living places,
Deeply green,
Breathing out life,
Her thoughts fragrant with dreams of dancing beneath a Mugumo tree.
A sharp blast from a road raged driver,
A long overdue cue for an urban symphony of rage,
Every driver responds at once and hands press down on horns,
Epithets spew forth smoothly, not missing a beat;
Only the dreaming fades away, slowly strangled by sounds of rage.
Woman,
Wearing only the forgotten fragrance of dancing beneath the Mugumo tree.
The fragrance of dreaming in the sacred grove, where once Love, long ago conceived a people.
Here she is,
Dreaming dreams, though never seeing the living mountain turning to stone.
She says, “I am here,
Without the Mugumo tree, in the sacred grove,
Having nightmares in the place of dreams.”
In broad daylight,
Violent dreams of longings untold,
Matching perfectly the mood of motion trapped.
Raging at the snarl up,
Bodies trapped together,
Breathing discordantly in a broken rhythm,
All the pregnant fumes of the polluted fog,
Swirling thickly in air compressed.
Her world so far from where she began.
People so close and yet so far,
So much heat yet so little warmth,
She is here,
Swathed in fog, gazing upon sculpted stone hills and mountains, with doors and windows,
Dreaming again of dancing beneath the Mugumo tree,
In the sacred grove where the world began.
*Note: The Mugumo tree (Fig tree) is sacred to the Gikuyu people, used for the ritual prayer for rain and other intercessions. It was also in a grove of fig trees that, according to their mythology, Gikuyu found Mumbi, his woman and conceived a nation.
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Summer’s End
The suburb belles
kinderly flirt
untested street smarts
on Boston ratwalks.
Subway fans flutter
see through flimsies,
corsets that barely corsage.
A nervous hiding
of breasts in plain sight
paired pointedly
with avoiding eyes.
Storm clouds shadow
grilled tans, end
season of glitter.
Golddug legs spread
on subway home,
eagle eyeing T square
for last minute game of no.
––Chad Parenteau
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
A Bad Moment in the Crush
Trapped in the heat of world growth
I am blocked from happiness, don't see hope.
I am stupid. I don't get the smiling faces.
This man-that man wants what I wish for.
A never-ending succession marches eyeing
all worth that is left and shakily held.
I'm not so privileged, not connected and set,
not given the best and expected to succeed.
I'm lucky, but in my mind and body mostly,
not naive enough to think it easy to "get over"
as they say on streets of drug borne dreams.
I have enough advantage for some sober dreams.
But for what do I fight? Why do I suffer?
With what army do I carve a piece of land
that I can protect completely from man's needs?
Unstopped he breeds thinking not of limits
but of riches. He dreams of parapets and flesh.
and comfort swims in his images of success.
We cannot see this finite little planet.
Even with photographs from the moon we crush.
When I repress the hopelessness of fighting,
I bury fear, but it leaks out like water
finds its way sneaking through the concrete
believed so strongly to hold the biggest dams.
A nervous tick like a water squirt from rock
forces its way out of my eye past my rub.
My impatience makes my loved ones uneasy.
The children I love so much bother me
with their wondering that never ceases
when they get another glimse of the fight ahead.
When I don't know, what do I tell them?
The earth burns. I run from flames,
Grab buckets full of water and pass them.
I don't think I have solved the problem.
I cannot pass important knowledge on.
The helpless feelings augment the sadness.
I sit before the T.V. with a glass of wine
and watch all the loveless overdosing.
I am amazed I can still stop at two,
but for how long? The blue flashing lights
go by again. Maybe another soldier fell
having given up and taken an awful shortcut.
--Frederick Solari
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Redline
1
leaving
drips of spilled milk on the table
grains of muesli on the floor
half a cup of coffee in the mug
obituaries on the chair
2
hurry hurry hurry down 3 flights of stairs
along the street
two stories down the escalator
to wait wait wait
the old man calls
Spare Change, get your Spare Change
3
the outbound is running 1-2-3 in a row
I check my watch, I'm inbound
at least I mean to be
4
the banjo lets fly a Celtic jig
I throw a quarter in the case
stare down the track
check my watch
and wait
5
eeeeeerrrrrrrrkkkkkk crick
the doors spring back
one seat
I press past others to snag it
stopping at a pool of yellow
6
I stand
7
a woman holds an apple core
a man replacing double-A batteries
drops one, says oh shit and leaves
a pregnant woman carries
a baby in a snuggly-bag
no one rises to offer her a seat
8
everyone has somewhere to go
everyone has something to do
the T emerges from underground
but no one looks to see
a rainbow arching over
rowers on the Charles
or the community sailing fleet
9
I could get my G.E.D.
have a three-week vacation in a hospital
earn a fifteen hundred dollar stipend
be counseled about my unwanted pregnancy
join Hope Fellowship in worship
be surprised by Michelob light
get tested for HIV
so many ways to mend my life
10
everyone is studying feet
or listening to an ipod
or diddling with a cell phone
or reading
heels click across the floor
a man taps his walking stick
against people's toes
people press each other
against the Do Not Lean on This Door sign
ding ding ding
grrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrr
11
seven cups of Dunkin' Donuts
nine cups of Starbucks
eight Evian water bottles
evryone's hydrating
no one's relating
12
Porter
Harvard
Central
Kendall
Charles/MGH
Park
Downtown Crossing
South Station
Broadway
Andrew
JFK/UMASS
my half-hour mantra
to the rhythms of the T
takes me from home
to where I need to be
--Molly Lynn Watt
[Republished with the author's permission from Shadow People, Ibbetson Street Press, 2007.]
@@@@@@@@
The Umphatic Editor
Beantown, Mass
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
A PANHANDLER’S TALE
You can’t do it on private property, he says.
The cops will give you a ticket for seventy-five dollars;
then when they catch you again they send you to jail
because, after all, you didn’t pay the first ticket.
They let me sit in the cells for a couple of days,
clean well-fed guys don’t look quite as desperate,
give me the medication to keep me alive,
and give me another line on my rap sheet.
It’s a crime to be a failure now,
if you do it out in public.
It’s okay to fail at work if you have a home.
It’s okay to fail at home if you have a job.
There are some mornings I think I could hate you,
dropping your spare coins like manna into my hat.
WASHED UP ON THE BANK STEPS
Bank closed four years ago in this neighborhood,
but everything else was closing down.
Boarded up windows every second store
and what’s open now is the under a dollar value types.
Six old drunks loll on the steps, broken beer bottles
lined up in front of them like bowling pins;
forty year olds looking sixty, dirt in the wrinkles,
yell insults and curses at passersby.
Time and beer catch up with one of them.
He staggers off, knocking down the bottles
that shatter like Sunday morning church bells,
goes into the phone booth, darkens the August dust.
No sirens, the cop car creeps up like a second mortgage holder;
two burly cops attempt to negotiate a payment of respect,
foreclose on the pisser’s freedom, haul him off
into a debtor’s prison of old sins remembered.
Drunk native woman passes by and their lips can’t whistle,
too dry in the now starting early evening.
The nameless drunks move stony-faced into the night;
the bank’s carved name remains in stone.
--Lucille Barker
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
#16 – Urban Education
The rotary, hospital, park, zoo, municipal
golf course, wan sun casting the shadows of bare trees
on snow banks that dot the landscape like pimples:
the route my father took to a besieged
school, a redlined neighborhood. Out grimy plastic
windows you can still see, behind the blue-spired
church and the new library they tacked on, the brick
edifice. After wrestling a student for his gun, my father retired.
When young, I’d tag along on the last day
of school. Mr. Malloy, who fell, hit his head, and passed
this past fall, was the computer teacher. He let me play
Oregon Trail on a desktop in his class.
Little Day the kids called me. In my parents’ basement
there’s a drawer full of photos, articles and objects
documenting the more than 30 years my father spent
teaching and coaching. Reflected
in the creased images is my close-cropped,
gray-spattered hair, though I suspect in my vanity
I’ve done more to hide the color than he ever did; chopped
it off at one point. I never thought of him as young or me
as old, but I’m the age now he is unmistakably
etched in my memory, the age at which I fear,
when I mull the unforeseen, he will live eternally,
though my grandmother – prim, fussy, dead twenty years –
might choose to remember him as, say, her bright,
young seminarian, might choose, too, to be recalled
other than as I do: frail, teetering on high
heels. Ultimately, my father's wasn’t a higher calling.
He left the seminary, graduated from BC,
started teaching, met my mother, married,
had a son, a second son, had me,
watched his father die, mother die, carried
to the grave by cancer and age. My wife
and I live today on the same route my father took≒≒
to the school and students to whom he devoted his life.
At market’s peak, the neighborhood looked
like it would tip, but the storefronts are vacant,
the Vaudeville theater the city risked
millions on restoring remains dormant
and the code on floppy disks
I inserted into bulky desktops at years’
end, stalking digitized elk in the red-brick
school, feet swinging from hard-backed chairs,
might as well be written now in hieroglyphics.
--Liam Day
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
JOB ‘07‘Til
Inspired by JOB 5:7
"Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."
I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist lately.
She says I’m crazy for being crazy.
I must figure out why God forsakes me,
why He breaks me. “Can you get life straight, please?”
That would be great
but she can’t relate.
Hopeless. Jobless. Helpless. Faithless.
Where are my options to create
in a depressive state.
Dreams never take shape
building upon planes that constantly break.
--Jamaal Eversley
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Shooting Them Out
By Timothy Gager
I wait in an outside room with the other addicts, soon to be ushered into a larger room for our weekly session. Last week our trainer, Barry, said that in order to deal with our unhealthy addictions, we must have an action plan. A guy in a suit stands up, whispers something to Barry and they let him out. We all heard him; he misunderstood, thought this was the meeting for sex addicts rather than an addiction to the women in their lives.
I know these men by their faces, but I don’t know their real names. We go by Mr. P, Mr. A and Mr. W. My name is Mr. H. but my real last name begins with a “G”. Her last name begins with “H”. It’s devious on my part and the program would frown on it but it makes me inappropriately laugh if I think about it during meeting time.
Mr. P announces he sat outside his woman’s house the other night because she wouldn’t answer the phone. Mr. A started crying because the daily e-mail for her, he was so used to, had a two day rest. Mr. W and his girlfriend were guilty of texting over 5,000 times this weekend.
“Mr. H?” Barry asks and pulls on the cuff of his flannel shirt. “Time’s almost up and we haven’t heard from you. We encourage everyone to speak at least once every week.”
“I feel I have a healthy love infatuation,” I start.
“Denial,” some of the misters say.
The trainer shakes his head and the bell rings. He pulls a spoon out of his sweat pants, mixes up what looks like to be Tang in little cups and offers the first one to Mr. P. We wait in line and drink them down like a good little parade of wooden soldiers, shooting them down, one at a time.
Back in Boston
It’s been raining every day:
smacks down onto sidewalks,
roads that seem more curved
than before, falling loud
the run off has been brutal,
you’ve soaked me once more.
I hear bits of conversation
from the homeless
huddled in doorways
one turns to another,
“A standing poodle is a substantial dog.”
and the force of this storm
hits a woman’s plastic bag,
which covers a wedding dress,
like a snare drum,
and a man turns to his wife,
says, “I hope it stops soon,”
but she can’t hear him
say, I need you
in my life, I love you.
as a door is held open
for her,
and it falls even harder, for me,
the world washes away,
the weather, fine
over where you are--
the sun brightly shines.
Her car is officially dead
What kind of flowers for the wake?
I was thinking something like Tiger Lilies
but let's face it she’s is a bit tigery.
so let's go with that. Amen.
What did the autopsy say?
Engine damage that can't be repaired.
And she’s not replacing the engine:
since she hates car problems.
A massage will help you,
at least for the moment
you shudder and shake.
--Timothy Gager
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Shoot first
By Gill Hoffs
So I shot him. Right in the bollocks, though I doubt he felt it. I'm always open to being wrong, though.
“Argh, shit! What the fuck?!” he screamed, blood pissing on the seat.
And how do I answer that?
a) You deserved it.
b) I felt like it.
c) Somebody had to, or
d) All of the above.
Yeah, d), that about covers it.
Now what will he do? Press creeping hands to the deep red gore or circle silver-trimmed wheels? Stem the flow or propel his wheelchair for help?
Funny, he'd no qualms about touching the bleeding groins of others.
I was enjoying this.
But now: a choice.
One bullet left. Two heads to blow. Better to end it for him, or for me? I'm an atheist — let there be no doubts here, the end is The End. I can let him live, twitch a finger at my temple once the police arrive and my tale is told. Perhaps a marksman will take care of it for me, I dunno. Or I can make him die. Quick. Clean. Painless.
Undeserved.
I'd let him bleed out, watch him grow damp and clammy, twitch and fumble, grey and grow still. But the gun's exhaled explosion, well, even in this area it'll merit a call. And the bastard isn't even feeling this. That's what a broken back can do for you. In the kitchen, cooking at the stove, he'd lay towels on his bony lap, soaking spatters in soft cotton cloth, protecting himself from burns. I'd tried, then, putting shit in his tea, but he was wary from the spit, bubbles warning him weeks ago never to trust my mug.
So I waited, time telescoping, dragging its heels in the grey mud of my misery. Till now, and a bouncer's loaned .32. I'd had to show him my tits but that was nothing. For a blowjob he'd have done it all, but where's the fun in that?
Doing doughnuts now, trying to move and live at the same time. I moved when he kicked us out. Only likes the younger ones, only tolerates their mums so he can get in close, handle their laundry, take them out in the car, babysit…. But I don't live, I exist. I cut, I fuck, I swear, I get fat, I get thin, and through it all, the current through the wreck of me, runs rage.
Do I stay or do I go? Sirens are close, I can hear them through his whining and the squeak of tyres twisting on the floor. Those crepey pink lids are growing fat and heavy over winter-water eyes. He's just about gone anyway, knuckles catching knobbles in the wheel. Shadows pass the window: I have no time.
“Bit-“ a whisper blown away by a bullet.
He spent time in Germany as a boy. Whether ‘please' or ‘bitch' my finger chose for me.
Now a bang, a shout, a roar.
So they shot me.
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Dancing Around the Mugumo Tree
By Nyambura Kiarie
Hooting cars in the snarl of traffic,
Draped in a mist of carbon mono-oxide fog,
Melting in the heat from a multitude of engines;
Bodies breathing shallowly in the fog,
In the midst there she sits,
Gazing with unseeing eyes at the concrete hills and mountains,
Child of the mountains transported and then transplanted into this hard jungle.
A woman evolving from soft living places,
Deeply green,
Breathing out life,
Her thoughts fragrant with dreams of dancing beneath a Mugumo tree.
A sharp blast from a road raged driver,
A long overdue cue for an urban symphony of rage,
Every driver responds at once and hands press down on horns,
Epithets spew forth smoothly, not missing a beat;
Only the dreaming fades away, slowly strangled by sounds of rage.
Woman,
Wearing only the forgotten fragrance of dancing beneath the Mugumo tree.
The fragrance of dreaming in the sacred grove, where once Love, long ago conceived a people.
Here she is,
Dreaming dreams, though never seeing the living mountain turning to stone.
She says, “I am here,
Without the Mugumo tree, in the sacred grove,
Having nightmares in the place of dreams.”
In broad daylight,
Violent dreams of longings untold,
Matching perfectly the mood of motion trapped.
Raging at the snarl up,
Bodies trapped together,
Breathing discordantly in a broken rhythm,
All the pregnant fumes of the polluted fog,
Swirling thickly in air compressed.
Her world so far from where she began.
People so close and yet so far,
So much heat yet so little warmth,
She is here,
Swathed in fog, gazing upon sculpted stone hills and mountains, with doors and windows,
Dreaming again of dancing beneath the Mugumo tree,
In the sacred grove where the world began.
*Note: The Mugumo tree (Fig tree) is sacred to the Gikuyu people, used for the ritual prayer for rain and other intercessions. It was also in a grove of fig trees that, according to their mythology, Gikuyu found Mumbi, his woman and conceived a nation.
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Summer’s End
The suburb belles
kinderly flirt
untested street smarts
on Boston ratwalks.
Subway fans flutter
see through flimsies,
corsets that barely corsage.
A nervous hiding
of breasts in plain sight
paired pointedly
with avoiding eyes.
Storm clouds shadow
grilled tans, end
season of glitter.
Golddug legs spread
on subway home,
eagle eyeing T square
for last minute game of no.
––Chad Parenteau
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
A Bad Moment in the Crush
Trapped in the heat of world growth
I am blocked from happiness, don't see hope.
I am stupid. I don't get the smiling faces.
This man-that man wants what I wish for.
A never-ending succession marches eyeing
all worth that is left and shakily held.
I'm not so privileged, not connected and set,
not given the best and expected to succeed.
I'm lucky, but in my mind and body mostly,
not naive enough to think it easy to "get over"
as they say on streets of drug borne dreams.
I have enough advantage for some sober dreams.
But for what do I fight? Why do I suffer?
With what army do I carve a piece of land
that I can protect completely from man's needs?
Unstopped he breeds thinking not of limits
but of riches. He dreams of parapets and flesh.
and comfort swims in his images of success.
We cannot see this finite little planet.
Even with photographs from the moon we crush.
When I repress the hopelessness of fighting,
I bury fear, but it leaks out like water
finds its way sneaking through the concrete
believed so strongly to hold the biggest dams.
A nervous tick like a water squirt from rock
forces its way out of my eye past my rub.
My impatience makes my loved ones uneasy.
The children I love so much bother me
with their wondering that never ceases
when they get another glimse of the fight ahead.
When I don't know, what do I tell them?
The earth burns. I run from flames,
Grab buckets full of water and pass them.
I don't think I have solved the problem.
I cannot pass important knowledge on.
The helpless feelings augment the sadness.
I sit before the T.V. with a glass of wine
and watch all the loveless overdosing.
I am amazed I can still stop at two,
but for how long? The blue flashing lights
go by again. Maybe another soldier fell
having given up and taken an awful shortcut.
--Frederick Solari
≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒≒
Redline
1
leaving
drips of spilled milk on the table
grains of muesli on the floor
half a cup of coffee in the mug
obituaries on the chair
2
hurry hurry hurry down 3 flights of stairs
along the street
two stories down the escalator
to wait wait wait
the old man calls
Spare Change, get your Spare Change
3
the outbound is running 1-2-3 in a row
I check my watch, I'm inbound
at least I mean to be
4
the banjo lets fly a Celtic jig
I throw a quarter in the case
stare down the track
check my watch
and wait
5
eeeeeerrrrrrrrkkkkkk crick
the doors spring back
one seat
I press past others to snag it
stopping at a pool of yellow
6
I stand
7
a woman holds an apple core
a man replacing double-A batteries
drops one, says oh shit and leaves
a pregnant woman carries
a baby in a snuggly-bag
no one rises to offer her a seat
8
everyone has somewhere to go
everyone has something to do
the T emerges from underground
but no one looks to see
a rainbow arching over
rowers on the Charles
or the community sailing fleet
9
I could get my G.E.D.
have a three-week vacation in a hospital
earn a fifteen hundred dollar stipend
be counseled about my unwanted pregnancy
join Hope Fellowship in worship
be surprised by Michelob light
get tested for HIV
so many ways to mend my life
10
everyone is studying feet
or listening to an ipod
or diddling with a cell phone
or reading
heels click across the floor
a man taps his walking stick
against people's toes
people press each other
against the Do Not Lean on This Door sign
ding ding ding
grrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrr
11
seven cups of Dunkin' Donuts
nine cups of Starbucks
eight Evian water bottles
evryone's hydrating
no one's relating
12
Porter
Harvard
Central
Kendall
Charles/MGH
Park
Downtown Crossing
South Station
Broadway
Andrew
JFK/UMASS
my half-hour mantra
to the rhythms of the T
takes me from home
to where I need to be
--Molly Lynn Watt
[Republished with the author's permission from Shadow People, Ibbetson Street Press, 2007.]
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U.M.Ph.! Prose #8 Copyright 2011
is the temporary intellectual property of the editor, including typos, corrected typos, other edits of my own screw-ups, etc. Six months after the date of publication (aka November 2, 2011), sole rights revert back to the individual writers of each work of amazing language art herein. And Mark Hanser's pretty painting belongs to Mark, and any "Cheap Shots" photos belong to Mignon Ariel King, etc. If you steal people's work and pretend it is your own, you will be run over by notorious Boston drivers before burning in hell forevermore! Hey, don't say nobody warned you.