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Interface Issue 05
inter\face 5
summer 1993
contributors:
(in random order)
Susan Bertot
Emily R. Novack
John Malboeuf
Ron MacLean
David Connolley
Nancy Dunlop
Michael Rae
Katie Yates
Benjamin H. Henry
inter\face is.
===========================================================================
inter\face 5 is published at the University of Albany, State University of
New York, down in the basement of the Humanities building. If you would
like any information, to contribute, or have any comments, e-mail to
bh4781@rachel.albany.edu.
===========================================================================
Benjamin H. Henry
Aram Aram
Aram Aram big-u-ity
wise -o- wizened
ample morph, sit you on
meta morph - for
silly frightened : tetra town
building blocks
a no mo in men si ty
am probable
invincible
about a ble
in tense
too.
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Spring '93 Collage
1. An invisible man peers in,
offers his hand to shake, throttle, or excelerate to paced speeds,
raceway along city streets with postcard visions,
a woman with long hair smiling.
2. My motor failed exhaustive tests,
emissions blurted out; the priest says,
holding a subscription,
at the stairs of the empire state building,
clutching a plastic model,
an exact duplicate in structure
or taking elevators, their sliding doors
shutting, but the soft bumper and the button,
being pushed from some distant point...
3. I immediately failed to notice that
screeching sound, a horrible sensation,
a plenty of thirst, succumbing, ending.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 18, 1993
And, today, if you must know,
I am tread:
Tracks behind wheels,
behind a cylinder rolling down
an inclined plane --
I am a simple geometric figure,
drawn to perceive three dimensions
on flat paper --
I am fixed in movement and time.
==========================================================================
Susan Bertot
The Eucharist
I.
I am saved!
I am God
We are one
the blood I have drank
the wine flows within my veins
Drowning me in a sea of fumes
II.
Cannibalism's holy
Flesh tastes like bread
Toast would be nice
Red Blood toast
Where's the butter?
I want my country's cock
Blood is thick
I'd really like a cherry
coke
Get me one human
God gets hungry too.
===========================================================================
Emily R. Novack
Reena
now through recurrence
now through the long thin
hands
i
within
seizures
one woman I knew
raped, found behind
a store unconscious,
the water from the rafter dripping
long lines into
her face
twenty three years old
coat covering up where
the skin shows
said she saw
the running water
the
swallowing whole
the
swallowing
of her image
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Towards
you tell me
for years
I've longed for mountains
for the feeling
of rising
the flat land
agitated
by
wild
occurrence
and the smell
of dried flowers
your pale hands
reach for copper
crosses
loose on blankets
we've circled
these years-
a drawing open
of living things
and wounds
the smoke was clawing
from air
into air
and breaking
and
i said I've
lived like this
for so long now
the injury accumulating
a long
throat
of beads
shaking,
hands in snow.
===========================================================================
Nancy Dunlop
from: From the Window
"The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead." (Heidegger)
hers on small head bobbing
under big goddess-sky-dome
she is sapling: a happy
blockhead shaking her baby leaves
warmth of spring and new starts
ow! so much it hurts
how can the pavement hold such radiance?
has heaven become so encrusted with jewels
that they are dropping
at her feet?
each step a little giggle.
"Earth is the serving bearer." (Heidegger)
and arches up her feet
the grasses its tentacles
its roots the cords to her belly
the tree of her uprooted
shaking its remnants of dirt
the tree of her striding
down this bright sidewalk
she's already shed her fruit
it straggles behind her on the pavement
a trail of seeds and cast-off reasons
limbs straining from force of new buds
she is so new her bark still gives to pressure
"Now woman is neither closed nor open . . . form is never complete in her."
(Irigaray)
and she is running through the forest she has chosen as her situation.
swathed in pre-raphelite fullness. hugged within her husk, within her moist
shell. and she is falling but the ground left her. she is rolling down moss
and spores. pulled toward this forest floor and veining as these leaves
around her. she is photosynthesis and arches toward the light. the tops of
the white pines. cathedral light in fractured colors. she is prismatic.
unfolds origami-like. like the finest tissue. she is her own envelope.
fool-hardy bride-of-air. bird fare. she could rise up. burst through upper
branches. thrust herself into being. or loll in wet leaves. little lute.
upon which strums celestial.
===========================================================================
John Malboeuf
Seen Your Dad on the Corner
The broken man was wearing new blue/purple jeans and a white T-shirt
which had "i am in hell and i can live with it" written on the back in
green magic marker. He made his living selling toothpicks which he carved
as he walked through the streets during the day. When I first saw him this
morning, he had part of a tree branch under his arm and he was whittling at
it, leaving a trail of shavings behind on the sidewalk. Now, he was holding
a coffee can, which I guess was full of toothpicks, and he was stopped at
the corner and was looking at people walking by.
I started playing some rhythm, hoping people would give me enough
change to buy a bus ticket. I had made one buck fifty-two and had four
strings left on my guitar.
The broken man walked towards me slowly, nervous and listening to the
music. His face was smeared. He was angry. He took the change out of my
hat, replaced it with four thin six inch toothpicks. "I've seen sky," he
said to me.
"Then dance," I replied. "I would."
The broken man scowled. "I've seen sky," he said again, touched my
shoulder, paused to let me look into his smeared eyes, walked away. I was
hoping he would get hit by a car.
it was about time I got a move on, so I smashed what was left of my
guitar on the front stoop. Stones go through me. Catch, cut,, a tear. Right
down the middle. Why do you expect so much from me? Stones and candy carry
a punch.
Standing, you said you'd visit. Causing a stir, it was just me. I
noticed the blink of your eye, your sudden hesitation, your cut short stop
breath before you returned my look. We don't need to do this, we could
forget it or the reverse. Sunday, over at the stones, I met you on the
corner. The pavement was all that I could, see it.
So wait. Stones cut, through me, I let them. I can't stop them, it
isn't human. A sudden stop, change of key. A zone.
I tossed the toothpicks out into the street. It had rained the night
before, so they floated in a puddle.
===========================================================================
Ron MacLean
How to be Happy
This year, she's decided to be happy.
She may not know what she wants, or how to get there, but she's
determined to accept the uncertainty that for years has depressed her.
Besides, she knows what she does not want. She's certain of that. She does
not want Ray.
Here are some of the things she does when she decides to be happy.
1. Walk by the river. Afternoons, after work, for at least an hour,
she walks on a footpath that runs alongside the Charles River. She's lived
her life near water, and cultivates this connection now that she's decided
to be happy. Since water makes her happy, she walks by it, right next to
it, every day. What does not make her happy is the pollution, but the city
of Boston claims the river is being cleaned up, that the Charles Watershed
Authority is having an impact. Liz maintains hope by taking a water sample,
once a week, in a glass, and leaving it on a shelf in her kitchen, watching
to see what will settle to the bottom of the glass, how it will compare to
the previous week's sediment. The shelf is above the antique stove that
Ray, her former lover, had bought for her, the stove that she is always
threatening to get rid of. Because it reminds her of him. Because it leaks
gas sometimes. But it's such a beautiful stove. Irreplaceable.
2. Read tabloids. Weekly World News is her favorite. Best covers, she
says. The photos are sometimes breathtaking, she says. A couple weeks ago
she showed one to her daughter Katie, about a bat child found in a cave in
South Dakota. A kid with fangs and pointy ears. She was right. The photo
was amazing. Airbrushed into a soft focus, the eerie child's open mouth and
sharp fangs dominating the page, eyes popped open. No hair anywhere on his
head. He demanded your attention. These tabloids are placed on the floor of
her second story bedroom, in a neat stack by the radiator, in the house
that she shares, most of the time, with Katie. It's okay to leave the
papers next to the radiator for now, because it's summer. The tabloids lay
under an article that Liz had clipped from The Boston Globe two weeks
before, headlined "4th slaying of lesbian reported in area," which
describes a stabbing in the Back bay, and which quotes a Boston detective
as saying that it's the fourth such murder in the past few months. There
are enough similarities in method that they are beginning to investigate
the possibility of a single killer, of a pattern. Liz has been unable to
dispose of the article. Each time she buys a tabloid, she lifts the article
off of the pile next to the radiator, places the new issue on top of the
old issue and then the article on top of the pile.
3. Make collages. Pictures cut from magazines, newspapers. Abstract
geometric shapes cut from construction paper. Objects she finds in her
travels, the refuse from the worlds around her. Ticket stubs. Gum wrappers.
Lately, it has taken a new twist. Words. Phrases clipped from publications
have started to appear, rubber cemented over images on the cardboard. These
have begun to capture her interest. Reminding her of a game she and her
brother, Otis, used to play as children, where they would chose a word and
recite it, chant it, invoke it, over and over until it lost meaning, and
then keep going. Later that day, whenever one of them would use the word,
the other would laugh, at the joke they shared, at the new meanings it
hinted at that no one else suspected. Now, visually, Liz does this with
words, placing them alongside other words in unexpected combinations,
pasting them on magazine photos, over cutout cardboard shapes. She has
started to send these to Otis. It is a way of keeping in touch.
4. Bake. She loves to make cookies, in her antique stove, but she
never eats them, so Katie ends up having to eat two dozen cookies, or
convince Liz to give some to friends. The numbers are escalating lately.
Even her friends are telling her they can't handle any more cookies.
They're starting to gain weight. Tell me about it, Katie says. Katie is
eleven, and mature for her age. The trouble is, Liz bakes really good
cookies. The successful recipes she keeps in a folder on the bookshelf.
There are many folders on the bookshelf. A folder of possible night courses
she might take, like the one in the Indian Cooking and Nutrition she just
signed up for. A folder of cover photos -- the really good ones -- from the
tabloids. A folder containing notes on her romantic relationships, and why
they ended. All part of an orderliness she's instituting into her life,
part of the same impulse that has led her to conclude, in the wake of Ray's
eviction, that what it really takes to be happy is to give up the
possibility of a relationship.
===========================================================================
David Connolley
Rampart reservoir pigs
play bluegrass
with dirty words
on a gray lake's
gravely shores.
It is hard,
this kind of life
water towers and skies,
the light of potatoes. Here we work.
We eat.
We starve.
===========================================================================
Michael Rae
band names
virtue and gender
naked melody
the 4th husband
JOLLY AS A PEA
with a wicked tongue
bullet the suicidal dog
palemento bug
at the master's gate
a urine sample
(stool).
===========================================================================
Katie Yates
Book Two had not the quality of beauty, was alone
life in fragile water mockingbird and clam kneedeep with tounge burning
nothing admitted change
tones of memory all at once held on to : couldn't touch
you were this source of amazement to me : beauty & anger propelling
terse transience explains the force of interruption
playbill volkswagon tentless numbness as free to carry us
penniless you wander to me finally at ease with method
we can't obtain assurance nor the insular logics of love -
?great morning. sky down to field. there is nothing between us
resolved as epithet
linger to wear longer
bright dales in lips
pocket-full-of-swim
Dive, she said & watch.
re(scind) ~ god-wanted you nearer than this tin midnight
hope ^ dire to be remembered pose at brisk lake - STOP
the sake of brittlest limnia scurvia metal wilder wilder
beast past coming
compelled by falling or awakening from a sleep more truthful than you are
separated into frames: tauto in - in toto - {{ vascular
limb in reflection - yours - take by Take - affirming
Covenant . envelope ^^ stasis . inside a mortal time
come to the defense
restricted by a memory
full-fold - quadrophenia
alert in most ways & dying
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book Four (3) wash is to wain
less
u
n
l
e
s
s
strictness
w i s h
f
i
n
i
s
h
able to touch lavender, could call out my name as loudly
in what we stole from you
in what we stole from the lovers
(scant blossoms with tremendous scent)
found equaled mingling
circuits, frets - finger locks in our heads
cling is to fervor
is to happen is too good
a choice
religio/region
cum
un
do circumstance
/
one
thunderous
secret
all secret matter came back for you
to
remember
em: me.
days before a Winter/close
friend of belittling syntax stung
a Most equall = squall
(elle)
halcayon the brightest
