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

Wearing Pink in Glen Ridge, New Jersey–My Hometown

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

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Nothing important happened in my hometown.
Well, nothing ever happened that anyone was willing to talk
about to Catholics, newcomers or children. Nor did I gather
useful information eaves dropping
at my parents’ parties from the top of the stairs
on Saturday nights when I was just a child.
Have you heard the one about two poops in a baby buggy?
The Dow looks a bit shaky, time to put. (Or was it call?)
The suit collection at Best & Company is very classic this fall.
Martini straight up or on the rocks?
The Colored are getting closer.
It nothing you could put in your pipe and smoke—
Two hearts, three clubs, I pass.

As I got older, Italians moved in.
On our annual tour to see our neighbors’ Christmas lights,
we came upon one yard with masses
of multicolored bulbs strung out
across the roof like guy wires from a circus tent.
Blinking, twinkling lights ran from the eaves in all directions
with red-nosed reindeer everywhere. A giant, lit-up
Santa sat smack in the middle of the yard.
Will you look at that! Mother exclaimed.
So garish! Must be Italians. I countered,
Well, you can’t be sure just because of what’s on their lawn.
She had the perfect reply. Oh no? Well, look over there,
isn’t that the Virgin Mary?
As Congregationalists or Episcopalians, we took it
as our religious obligation to be rational in my home town.
Who then would spend money to buy a Cadillac
when Lincolns were so much more tasteful?
In mys enior year my boyfriend Jack Cuozzo (be careful,
they are so hot-blooded) created the most lasting incident
when his taste was called into question.
Jack came to school wearing a pink, buttoned-down shirt.
Mr. Black, the principal sent him home and posted signs
on the trophy cases on every floor which read:
Male students are expected to dress appropriately.
No pink is permitted!
The next day almost to a person, our class showed up
wearing something pink and Dr. Cuozzo called
the principal and brought in his attorney,
so Jack was back. Mr. Black watched helplessly
at graduation as we walked in, the class of 1955,
flourishing a banner fashioned in pink and black.
Some years later we heard he called us
the worst class to graduate from Glen Ridge High School.
By now I think they’ve altered that opinion
since my hometown has become famous for the high school jocks
who raped the neighborhood retarded girl
with a broom handle and most of the town thought,
or so I’ve heard, it was a scandal and a shame those boys
had to do some time in prison when the parents were willing
to pay the girl’s doctor bills. Wasn’t it best just not to talk about it?
My God, these boys were college bound!

Not many residents were very interested in giving information
to reporters or willing to search out a wider point of view.
I wonder what my parents would have thought
about this incident, but they are both dead,
and I never said anything to them, anyhow,
before they died, about what I learned sitting
at the top of the stairs on Saturday nights
when I was just a child.

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

Memories from Age 13 of Saturday Mornings at Hussman’s in Great Falls Learning How to Lose Money and Shoot Pool, Hoping I’d Still Have Enough for a Hot Ham Sandwich.

14 Monday Nov 2011

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Fred Holmquist’s title

That was quite the morning for me, too,
when over the stubbled hill of a Saturday,
the cops nabbed me out of the blue,
took hold of my collar, turned me around
to see what my parents might do.

Those cops wanted to intimidate
a girl like me. I listened quietly
as they gave a long explanation of my fate—
the whys and wherefores of not throwing rocks
though someone else’s window plate.

I had to apologize, couldn’t clown around.
I wasn’t sure why these developers or other Joes
were never bawled out for knocking down
our tree forts, birch-protected paths,
building ticky-tacky houses
with just two bedrooms, one bath.

But those cops seemed satisfied
that I was scared enough not to hurl
rocks again (they believed my lie)
and being just a girl, still criminal,
they let me go.

 

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

On Finding an Old Picture of My Mother, My Sister and Me Standing Half-Submerged in Lake Willoughby, Vermont

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Childhood, Seasons, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

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In this picture, holding my sister and me by the hand,
my mother stands the most exposed—
the water to her knees, my sister’s thighs. I’m waist deep
in the cool water. My mother and sister are wearing matching
homemade green and white striped bathing suits.
I’m wearing a wool one, a bit too prickly; furthermore,
my bathing cap’s askew as if I were putting in a hurried,
somewhat reluctant appearance. As usual, my older sister,
Shirley, looks much more composed.

This evening we will go to town to see a girl’s entertainment show
at “Camp Win-a-Toboggan” (I stand corrected later
for my mispronunciation.) We all like best Professor Spittoni
who could spit in spirals, both in and out the window.

My father will never forget this line. Like a fish
suddenly breaking the surface of a lake, it pops up
often in unexpected places.

We return to the cabin late that night, no electricity.
Suddenly the dark becomes hysterical
in one spot, then another. It is a bat.
This is his cabin.

Like a cave man with a club, my father wielding
his tennis racket gets him out.
But standing in the lake that afternoon,
we didn’t know yet the bat was coming,
that Professor Spittoni would join our family,
or what the joke would be.

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

Upon Meeting My Russian Ballet Master Years Later

14 Monday Nov 2011

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Slippers squeak before the bar.
Twenty ballet shoes point
in one direction, one does not.
Snap goes Mr. Levenov’s baton.
I watch his ballet shoes moving
toward me down the bar. He ‘s looms
over me and growls,

Wrong foot—you’re off
on the wrong foot—don’t you know
your left foot from your right?

I’m off, always off, onthe wrong foot
which goes back to being knee high,
not used to the precise chords of pressure
created by a dance recital.

Fixed in my memory way too long
and way too tall, Mr. Levenov, now
I’m looking down on you! I want to leap
over you so I can hold my body
in my own hands, althoughit may be empty
of flying arabesques, thanks, in part,
to you, Mr. Levenov.

I know I could not master
all the steps to propel myself into the space
of ballerinas as blue and beautiful
as a Christmas tree lit on Christmas night,
so I have turned to the dance of words.
I have left your old world terrorism.
I can write you shorter, I can shout
you silent. Snap goes my baton,
Mr. Levenov, snap.

Published ReImagining, Minneapolis, MN, Spring,1998
Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003

Etiquette at Nana’s House

14 Monday Nov 2011

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for Blanche Rice

this is dedicated to all the Black women riding on buses
and subways back
and forth to the MainLine, Haddonfield, N.J., Cherry Hill…
This is for the Black Back-Ups…
This is for my mama and your mama…
And the colored girls say
Do dodo do do…
 Kate Ruskin, The Black-Backups

The bell gave a sharp buzz in the pantry when Nana pressed a button
under the dining room table. In response, Blanche would come out
of the kitchen. She entered the dining room, her lips pressed into a question
and returned to deliver entrees for answers. Surrounded by porcelain plates
and heavy silverware, she was always in her eyelet-trimmed apron and green
uniform which reminded me of spinach. Before dessert, I’d escape
the dining room, return to the kitchen to help her with the undressing of dinner.

Miz Sanny Jane (she always prefaced her remarks with a swipe at the wisps
of her black hair blanching at herorehead). Mercy, mercy she’d exclaim.
She could see me standing there, in a happy place, complaining. Miz Sanny Jane, ain’t you go no worries bigger than that to cry about, girl? I knew hers were long enough to reach the sky. I knew they couldn’t be put in my pocket.
At dinner I carried the silver pitcher into the dining room and tried
not to spill her out. When she went into the garden

to cut grandfather’s peonies, I’d run to take her hand, plead with her
to go down to the brook with me, but, Mercy, mercy, Child, ain’t got no time.
I wanted to know why we couldn’t invite her to our house for dinner.
So what’s wrong with Negroes? A pause, Blanche is not like the others,
she knows her place, Nana said.

On Sundays, with her dark hands floured to kneed the dough, she pressed down hard. She cracked the fine eggs just so and scrambled her obligations into small clumps. I took them for love. She was my sidewise grandmother. But where
does she go by bus? When does she go to church if she comes to us on Sundays? And who takes care of her children while she takes care of us?
Does she have a husband? And who tends her garden and scrubs her floor?

Nana never answered. These questions left without a sound, left with Blanche
on the bus.

Published in Over A Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

 

 

Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens Always Come to Some Bad End

13 Sunday Nov 2011

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– one of my mother’s frequent admonitions

If whistling girls might escape aprons
like my mother wore
and large breasts like Jane Russell’s,
I thought I might practice more.
And Eva Braun hadn’t whistled enough
was my sneaking suspicion, dying
in that bunker with the evil one.

When I whistled, I pursed my lips
and tried to blow
air out so hard
that they never looked as soft
as the overblown ones
of Rita Hayworth.

I whistled and whistled. Summers
I slipped into jeans,
went bare-chested,
rode horses on Uncle Hap’s farm
where the sweet smell of hay,
like the horses themselves,
rushed out when the latch was lifted
and the barn door swung wide.
I galloped into a blaze
of restless dandelions.

When I noticed swelling
behind my nipples,
I upped the volume of my whistling,
but Mother told me, finally,
I had to wear a shirt.
I still held out a stubborn hope
that when I grew up I’d be free
to ride the mountain trails
where water rushed and changed, but
like me, kept its own sounds,
its own shape.

Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, by Sandra Sidman Larson, Pudding House Publications, Columbus, Ohio, 2003