Category Archives: Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

My first chapbook published by Pudding House Press in 2003, poetry with an edge of calamity to it

The New World

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Childhood, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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Dark burnished bronze skin
covered his whole lean body.
That was all he was wearing, standing
on the front lawn of the Montclair Art Museum.
He was a young boy, probably about my age
when the sculptor had fashioned him.

I stood there staring between his legs.
A small limp stick resting on a sack of marbles
where a slit was supposed to be.
All the leaves in the large maples rustled
like a grandmother coming upstairs.

He seemed comfortable wearing only himself,
oblivious to my gaze. I suddenly saw
words pass by in my head: My father is like that,
all the boys in my school are like that,
all the boys in my class standing right here!
How do they stand it?
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Lowe,
hurried us on. “Let’s go inside, children,
so many wonderful pictures to see.”

I dutifully stopped in front of all the paintings
and felt their colors wash over me, but what
I was really thinking about was outside:
how, just now, I had divided in two.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003

Stirrings

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Love and Lust, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.

Takahashi, “Wind Among the Pines”

Canberra, Australia

Outside my hotel window here
in Canberra, so far from home,
wind moaning through the pines,
orgiastic memories
haunt me
like an amputee
trapped in the attic
of her body,
who dreams of walking
on her own two legs.

I have my ear
pressed to the wall
listening for cries of passion
from a bed next door
the soft padding of feet
across the floor.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, 2003, Pudding House Press chapbook series

What I found when I opened my locker 3-26-30 after a long absense.

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Life Reflections, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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I am surprised by finding:

John Berryman under a rotting bathing cap,
one tan sock, a gray towel,
six shades of lipstick (amber, dusky pink,
wildfire, etc.), tights that are surely now
too tight, two outdated T-shirts—
one with the phrase: 1986,The Year
of the Executive Director
and the other one, green and gray—
our class colors—from our last reunion
when we marched over the hill
trying to believe it—
Fine Wine, 59—and
even my old running shoes
which took me around the lakes
by upside down trees
and through half marathons.
Ah, and here, finally,
my good intentions—
to keep moving.

Whistling Girls and Cackling Hen, 2003, Pudding House Press Chapbook Series

From my Window I Watch a Carpenter Building the Condo Next Door

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Love and Lust, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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That skywalker in the orange hardhat
has blond hair. It’s lying
damp on the nape of his neck.
His ebony back glints in the sun.
Runnels of sweat run down his sides.
Only his armpits hint of a lighter shade
of skin. He is a hula dancer
with a skirt of hammers, tapes
and other tools of his trade.
His thighs crowd against his cut off
jeans as he nonchalantly turns
his back on the height of
his predicament and mine,
but I’m not done with
this carpenter yet or
this precipice.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, 2003 Pudding House Press chapbook series

I Finally Fired Him

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Love and Lust, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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I am ink-deep in my bookkeeper, he
stands at my office door, accounts in hand
but the numbers will never compute
nor revenue cover the expense
of coveting his innocent blue eyes.

The spread of my imagination
undresses him here on the desk, a bed
of indecipherable desire to let go,
buttocks on wood. What would happen next?

My staff in outer rooms rifling through papers
would be less surprised to see a whale walk
in, his scissor teeth chewing through
all of our transparencies and behind him
a Souza of secretaries waving their dictations
of oughts, musts and shoulds.

As for me, D-based, I say, spread the sheets,
turn the tables, rebel, excel, paradox.
I won’t get caught while the janitor mows
the short hairs on the lawn, he will not see
me covered with this extravagant lust

for a bookkeeper whose lack
of experience will cause us all certain
trouble. But I am set to ring like
an old cash register. What does it matter
that it doesn’t tally? In this hour
of fire, I will hold on to the edge
of the desk, waiting for a knock at the door,
the firm grasp of my auditor.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, 2003 Pudding House Press chapbook series

Season Of Memories

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Life Reflections, Politics, Seasons, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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Mother, all you remember is how you feel
you don’t remember anything.

My son Andrew’s complaint at age 16

I’ve read recently that medical researchers are working feverishly
on pills to improve the memory. Would we really want to dwell
on the past, the painful — the loss of our missing limbs,
our old enemies, waiting rooms, burnt skin?

How would we appreciate the moment —a spring day
of cherry blossoms — if we were forced to live
in such a tenement of overcrowded memories?
My son Andrew was only five in 1968

when we visited the orthopedic clinic at Walter Reed
Army Hospital. We sat in the waiting room with stacks
of books to read, waiting for ghost pictures
of his femur and predictions about whether breaking it again
would spur growth in his one short leg.

All the other patients were in blue and white seersucker robes
and army-issued slippers. I didn’t ask him what he thought of them—
those without their limbs, parts of their skulls blown in.
On our way home, we drove around the tidal basin,
huge marble buildings with the triumphal feel of Rome.
Cherry blossoms from Japan fringing everything.

I barely remember my mother’s cousin who survived
the Battan Death March and a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Everyone is moving toward death, but marching there
was a different story, or so they said. He never spoke of it —
hundreds and hundreds of men dropping silently in spring.
Like a frail cherry blossom, once home, he didn’t last.

The only bone I’d broken was my arm in a field at Camp Nyoda.
Dearie, this is going to hurt. One hand on my shoulder
and the other holding my wrist,
the doctor took the arm and yanked it
in that one perfect motion of realignment.
That little girl, Phan Tri Kim, running down the road

trailing her burning skin, I read not long ago that she is in Paris
and the green beauty of Vietnam is bringing the tourists back again.
This year, I’ve heard the cherry blossoms are already blooming in Washington—
not the tear gas, police in plastic helmets with mouth guards, running
right toward us, batons raised, the thousands of protesters
on the mall. Now there is just the shiny wall.

After the organizing, after the protests, I was home, as I recall,
each afternoon when the boys returned from school
but I have forgotten what the argument was about
when Andrew first brought me flowers in spring.
Comfort is a complicated forgetting and remembering.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens 2003, Pudding House Press chapbook series

The Unstoppable Sixties

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Grief, Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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Jackie steps out of Air
Force One into dazzling
Dallas sun. Her handsome
Jack behind her. She’s wears
a shocking pink Chanel
and matching pill-box hat.

The Texas governor presents to her
a dozen violent roses.
She holds them in
her white-gloved hands
in case the roses run.

Now riding in the open car
in her lap she holds
her husband’s head,
feels his weight pressed on her,
the brambles of the roses.
Her suit is stained with red
as red as if the roses ran.

Aloft again,
headed back to Washington,
still in her pink Chanel,
she takes the bread, the wine
as red as if the roses ran.

A killer kills the killer
and he had a name of red—
The story doesn’t end.
On a balcony,
in a hotel lobby,
they bring down Martin, Bobby,
both lying there
in beds of blood
as red as if the roses ran
as red as if the roses ran.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, 2003, Pudding House Press chapbook series

A Real Red Scare

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Coming of Age, Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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During my junior year in high school my friends hung around
after school, went to Bonds for a malt, to the gym
for basketball practice, or to the movies while I went home
to watch TV, more specifically the Army-McCarthy hearings.

I thought it so outrageous for Senator Joseph McCarthy
to call all liberals and union workers—even worse—innocent,
apolitical people—Communists—not just Communists,
but Soviet agents or blame them as the guys who lost China
to Mao and his red guards. Were you or did you ever know one?

It was obsessive and I knew it (36 days, 32 witnesses,
71 half-day sessions, 187 hours of TV air time, two million
words of testimony). My friends were incredulous. I guess, not like me,
they’d never been to Salem, Mass. or studied the details

of American history—or maybe they believed these folks were witches,
so why should they worry? And who cares
about the First Amendment anyway? Let them stew
in the Fifth. But I thought it outrageous

for I regarded Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the Army,
as a prophet even before he uttered that final, cutting rebuke
to the senator: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you no sense of decency? His words, I believed,

paraphrased Jehovah’s own, while McCarthy, with his faithful aide
Roy Cohn and their red-hunting plan, were from Satan’s ring—the truly crimson
crowd. I have in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who appear
to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist party.
(81 were supposedly from the State Department.)

I couldn’t believe the folks they’d done in (about 10,000,
the best estimate of who lost their jobs) including, I later found out,
when my sister married him, my brother-in-law, a conservative
Republican who was learning how to speak Russian, hoping
for a career in the foreign service.

By attending the trials via TV, it was, at least, one way to rehearse
all my denials regarding whatever I was guilty of,
even though, like my brother-in-law on the other end
of the political spectrum, I wasn’t un-American.
I was happy, though to see McCarthy finally go up in smoke;
condemned 67-22 on December 2, 1954 for
conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions.

In the Sixties I felt some comfort with the flare-up
of liberalism, but then, given our need to prevent the domino effect
in Vietnam (that red scare again) it began to fade until, with the rise
of Ronald Reagan, liberalism was back to being heretical

again. But now the twist was different, one must be a fervent supporter
of the totally unrestrained market economy. Such fanaticism
did in my political aspirations and my brother-in-law never could join
the Foreign Service. So I suppose there were rings of fire
for everyone, whatever your political persuasion.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens
2003, Pudding House Press chapbook series

The Wrong Address

22 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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Cuidad de Juarez, Mexico

i
A new mother wrapped in a worried face
and hospital gown stands thickly
in the hallway talking to the volunteer doctor.
Aa a small band of newborn philanthropists,
we troop by her, grouped behind our guide,
the priest and clinic administrator. And we follow
him over well-scrubbed, but cracked
linoleum floors, and walk by a few beds
covered in frayed chenille spreads
and enter the small nursery where tiny, purple-tinted
twins lie in two old fashion oxygen tents,
with miniature prongs stuck into their noses
which are tethered to bottles that bubble.

Como estan? We ask.
Muy malo, the nurse replies.

Another volunteer on the phone tries to find
a city hospital that will take in this pair
born with little weight and no pesos.
The mother had summoned the priest’s
wheezing ambulance after she delivered one baby
to her sofa. Father Baca could help, she hoped,
if she came to this meager clinic at the base
of her barrio, a hillside covered with tarred
cardboard shacks that clung tentatively
to the hill, where dead dogs lay in the middle
of littered streets and all people withered
in one way or another.

ii
Now we encounter other dogs
tethered to DEA agents who stalk
along the long lines of cars filled
with passengers, who like us, hope
to convince these officials in uniforms
to let them cross the border. The khaki
faces look us over, for a moment,
then waved us on as if
we weren’t the ones in question.

The Facts of Life at Camp Nyoda

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in Childhood, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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Pat, one of my cabin mates, thought she was a horse.
Every morning she got, whinnying and galloped out
onto the hillside. Through the screen door, I studied her
eating oats. Jane slept in the bunk next to mine,
her sour breath drifted over me. Crying softly
in the dark, she whispered, headaches hurt.

On Sunday evening we gathered around the campfire
with our camp director, “Cha-woo”, who,
dressed in emblem-decorated deerskin, lit
three candles for work, health and love as we sang,
We come, we come to our council fire with measured tread
and slow to light the fire of our desire, to light the fire
of wo-he-lo, wo-he-lo, wo-he-lo.

The following night in bungalow number eight,
Susan began to read aloud about a very young, Latin American girl,
the youngest girl ever to give birth, or so Time Magazine said.
I was even more surprised by this than the reporter.
How can she have a baby when she isn’t even married?
I asked. Laughter. A messenger of God disguised
as Susan’s cabin mate spoke. Silly, don’t you know
the facts of life? She outlined them. It was evening.

My face was as hot as last night’s campfire,
my heart galloping like Pat’s legs in the morning, my breathing,
as labored as Jane’s with her migraines. I walked out into the field alone, toward the lake. The setting sun was like a sheepherder collecting colors off
all the trees, the rocks, the grass, the barn walls
until I too was as black as sheep, huddled against
the oncoming avalanche of a rushing moon.

Published, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003