BlueIris
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
|
Mon Nov-30-09 10:29 AM
Original message |
The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 11/30/09 (warning: graphic subject) |
|
"That Winter"
In Chicago near the lake, on the North Shore, your shotgun apartment has a sun room where you indulge in a cheap chaise lounge-- and read Of Human Bondage-- There is a window in the living room proper cracked open so you Persian cat can go outside. You are on the first floor and upstairs a loud-mouthed southern woman whose husband is away all week on business trips has brought her maid up from Georgia to do the work and take care of the baby. "O lord," the southern woman says, "He wants it spotless on the weekend--" The maid, who has smooth brown skin, is not allowed to sit on the toilet but she feeds the kid and changes the dirty diapers. She washes the dishes, she cooks the southern meals, she irons the sheets for the mahogany bed. The southern woman shouts at her in a southern drawl, "Junie, don't sit on that chair you'll bust it." The southern woman is at loose ends for five days waiting for him to come in. "It's like a honeymoon, honey," she says-- "When he grabs me, whooee." She invites you up and makes sure you understand the fine points of being a white woman. "I can't let her live here--not in Chicago. I made her go out and get herself a room. She's seventeen. She bellered and blubbered. Now I don't know what she's trackin' in from men." It is winter. The ice stacks up around the retaining wall-- the lake slaps over the park benches, blocks of ice green with algae. You are getting your mail secretly at a postal box because your lover is in the Aleutians. It's during the war and your disgusting husband works at an oil refinery on the South Side. Up there in the Aleutians they are knocking the gold teeth out of the dead Japanese. One construction worker has a skin bag and fifty gold-filled teeth. He pours them out at night in his Quonset hut. He brags about bashing their faces in. One day you are fooling around in a downtown music store waiting for the war to end. You let a strange teenage boy talk you into going home with him. He lives alone in a basement behind a square of buildings. He shows you his knife collection and talks obsessively about Raskolnikov--suddenly your genes want to live and you pull away and get out of there. It is almost dusk. You run until you find the boulevard sluggish with the 1943 traffic. You know by now there isn't much to live for except to spite Hitler-- the war is so lurid that everything else is dull.
--Ruth Stone
|
Tuesday Afternoon
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
|
Mon Nov-30-09 10:56 AM
Response to Original message |
|
can not deal with graphic content right now. will read later. thanks for posting something.
|
BlueIris
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
|
Mon Nov-30-09 11:24 AM
Response to Reply #1 |
2. Okay. Well, that's what the warnings are for. nt |
CaliforniaPeggy
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
|
Mon Nov-30-09 12:24 PM
Response to Original message |
|
Yeah, it is graphic. And very good...
So much sadness and terror...
Plus things hidden.
Thank you.
|
Tuesday Afternoon
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
|
Mon Nov-30-09 11:44 PM
Response to Original message |
DU
AdBot (1000+ posts) |
Tue May 07th 2024, 04:50 AM
Response to Original message |