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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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