WORDWRIGHTS #5 Winter 1996 Edition $3.95 US $4.95 Canada
POETRY by R.D. Baker Joanna Biggar Denise DeVries David Franks Sunil Freeman Elizabeth Hazen S.L. Hester Susan Holliday Dan Johnson Zoe Konovalov Lisa Kosow Miles David Moore Sharon Negri Michael Reinke Patrick Smith Paul Weinman
PROSE by R.D. Baker Michael Charm Kevin Eliot Charles Dean Layman
EDITOR: R.D. Baker
FRONT COVER: Zoe Konovalov
HOME
A poem by David Franks
Alice Gaines Played the Harp
In kindergarten Alice Gaines
Played the harp at nap time
& for an hour at noon each day
It was as if Angels sang away
The cares of children sweetly sleeping
After graham crackers & milk even
When the air raids sirens shrill alarms
Shattered dreams
Alice Gaines played the harp even
We the youngest children knew the drill
To close the windows against flying glass
To move under our desks & clasp
Our hands to the back of our bowed necks & pray
That the bomb was not really on its way
This time that the Russians werent coming
This time to sift through our charred remains
Alice Gaines played the harp as
From beneath my desk I prayed:
Dear God this is David
In Washington, D C remind
The Russians my Father
Papa & Bubbie are Russians too
Dear God this is David
I am in
The first reading group
Under my desk
Waiting
For the end
Of the world
A poem by Elizabeth Hazen
Matters of Science
I have not yet told you all I had planned:
geometry in the curve of your face,
the strength of the body in which you stand.
The atoms swarm to form your exact brand.
I analyze the eccentricities of your race,
but still, I have not told you all I had planned.
The matter of your paper heart, torn by my hand,
the pattern of its beating too soft for me to trace.
The strength of the body in which you stand.
Your words to me are strained: hard grains of sand
that slip through my fingers. I have lost my place
for I can not tell you all I had planned.
A complication in my DNA strand
may help explicate my lack of grace.
I desire the strength with which you stand.
I want your cells to bond to mine in bands
of heat, but my warmth hides in locked places.
I will try to tell you all I had planned:
Your strength exceeds the body in which you stand.
A poem by Michael Reinke
Where
At the dining room table, forever
insisting his children to see again
where hed spread from the crystal shaker
the black pepper thick as seed
on the white cloth, and then
with a single hand snapped the draped
coverlet taut, at once the stain
lifted, resettled, asking
time and time; what is this
what is this; and the constant
whispered answer come back, shadow
of a hundred starling
changing direction
on the snow. Or bound into
the twist crown
of his cufflinks, the worn white gold
torn huge through the sleeves
intractable, fearsome knots
the braid of a newborns head.
Under the thinning, antique
Byzantine carpet, the rose papered
living room walls the pale of a flesh
the hair branch hed cut the length of the man. Willow
stripped to
bone with an upholstery knife
whip green and bitter
and thatched as a squall
to my back, my thighs
the raised hands, the neck, the chest
of my sister, where both
our eyes traced a nest
of scald. Or sweet
and hidden, the hard candy
he kept for us, clear,
wrapped, stone sharp
in the cuff of his pant.
