CAROUSEL new & selected poetry & fiction
Judith R. Robinson
CAROUSEL new and selected poetry and fiction
by Judith R. Robinson
Š2017 Judith R. Robinson Cover art by Judith R. Robinson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of written reviews. ISBN: 978-1-929878-55-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963553 First edition
PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733 www.lummoxpress.com Printed in the United States of America
for my son Sanford N. Robinson, Jr. you are always with me
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Carousel I who want speed tumble & crash struggle to right myself ponies bow down ivory teeth bared nostrils spread wide I roll to my left creep to my knees
ponies rear back painted hoofs rise blank eyes stare
ponies spin on edges blend & blur angels & cherubs watch
full circle mechanics fuel whistles & horns plexiglas hearts
my body go down again & again
wounds will heal swellings recede scars will be pink but not pretty unlikely roses roses as bruises on limbs & on lips & ponies spin on
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This Summer Moment for Donald Featherstone Saint James Street At mid-afternoon. The sound of traffic. Wheeling, humming. A window box Of orange roses Outer petals gone pale In full sunlight. Down on Fifth Dangerous numbers Staggering toe to toe Bumper to bumper Along the broken street.
They must work To collect the fat To stake the flag Up the golden pole. To drag every living thing From the swift gray river. The Chinese doctor Who never speaks Pulls into the spotty shade Of his driveway. CNN reports the father Of the pink flamingo Has died. No more white ice cream Trucks, very few honey bees. No more starlit hay rides Or other glowing events.
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If this was a movie I would drift back onto a slope in Pittsburgh when my ballerina days were still a dream and the kids on the block found what to do that had nothing to do with parents. Only the bike named Betsy negotiated for me, helping me always win down the hill, the street hill not the cemetery hill. All before I cared about any other wanting. No big questions. We may as well have been tomatoes or anything else alive that grows regardless, like tomatoes. What mattered was the bike --racing--more than jacks more than tar-baby stop much more than Monopoly.
If there was thought it was not deep or has been forgotten, slipped back, flickering, a blurry frame silver-gray as were those skies if this was a movie.
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Enchantment Listen: When it rains it rains all over the world! a child’s cherished idea: perfect to engage another battle with the cretins smirking on the corner. And: We are human beings, all of us! My mother said so! Beans! Beans! Beans! Snickers to screams to hysteria... She gulps down trouble; Swallows each laugh, feels a bloodscar settle underneath her smooth bronze surface, her magic exterior: the umber that masks foolishness, secrets and shame, damage that has no cure. Yet so madly in love with sweeping pronouncements so besotted with ideas that might turn tides she will never stop the chorus, the forays, the enchantment.
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gloss and chaos the fire drills the glue the iron gray stairwells the mimeographs of poems smeared blue with tears you and i hiding in the back of class aware of what terror could occur right there with a pointer or downtown with the pumped-up weekend marchers the rag-tag adults we wanted so to be but came to see as ruthless in their grasp hobbled by the hammers of their conceit now alive in a season of full captivity thursdays noted for fat newspapers fatter with extra sections that will never address the iceblock cold nerves stretched tight as wire so much effort to hold bitterness at bay in the silence that crushes any thought that a song we loved might still somehow matter
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Now the sadness of searching for one lost and not found in memory but for a static camera image: the same twist of body dodging the swells a smile at fourteen reflecting bright sunlight a striped bathing suit the bluegreen Atlantic; what perverse circuitry of suffering brain fastens on this utter stillness, this image caught forever in an unmoveable moment sans touch, sans smell, sans taste; why only the eye, the eye as lordly registrar of what was, why the partnership with torment that hoards a berry scent, a young baritone, a mother’s kiss on tender skin... why this outrage, this thievery ?
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Collateral Circulation When both its inbound and outbound ways are injured the heart is still served. Tunnels that route blood expand into brand new byways circumvent old grief-laden scar tissue; they are smaller, they pinch their way around all the fat and flaw, serve to keep the animal running. Can a badly-worn oak receive a graft of fresh branch that actually works well? Well. So much for metaphor. Please understand that the heart does not quite break. Neither is it ever quite repaired. It shrinks to semblance.
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40 Abandoned Cats So few ways to pull across the broken surround. An overcast afternoon Pittsburgh sprung green again stretching sadness into a poem. Yes, the cats, the cats. But on the trails the loss of trillium has allowed slugs and other invasives to take hold. And what of the aging beauty surveying the landscape of her face, flexing her limbs, stretching her spine? Remember her to Saks Fifth Avenue which could always restoreth her soul. They closed down & left town.
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Art Deco The hotel is vast and pink squatting on a southern shore grand old palm trees turquoise water shimmering waves of white heat. I am running the burnished halls that reek money I am not naked exactly but searching for my nightie. Butlers in tuxedos are on the lookout. I can’t get the elevator to come for me can’t remember which room I had; utterly lost and out of ideas. But I don’t cry, don’t give up, just keep dashing around in full frenzy, the angry butlers closing in on me. They don’t get me. I wake up. Just in time to tell the whole wretched tale to Y. She listens, nods in her wise way then goes to the kitchen to make coffee. The paper says rain she says and you’re not too old to dream.
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another thing opening a new white page the machine says CREATE & something in a back corner of the brain shlepps its weary self up and announces: this feels a little like buying a lottery ticket! yes for a few moments there is this bright-faced thing that giggles & jiggles but then of course it winks & settles back under the old couch with the stained upholstery which is where it often goes to sleep. (~.~)
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Desperados 1. At first, when a lack of rain came upon us we paid scant attention. We had just met Tom and fair Ann. We meant to water the garden more often; mentioned it, twice, on the Fourth of July. 2. Summer wore on. For want of water the wrens flew away. You decided to go to the Cape, a shipwright’s job might be available. The garden had drifted dry as ash, the vines withered to brown. We had let it all go. 3. I wore a party dress, lavender and gold, when we met, accidentally, next year in September. You reminded me of Barney Moll, the copyist of Renoir who rendered dresses like mine in bold blots of color. 4. Our lovemaking that afternoon happened with purpose, with weight; we held on as true as we could, as if there were still chances: one more grand summer storm, green lightening, a murderous downpour of rain.
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everyone I tell everyone to try to take note of things that are improvements like soft foaming soap in a bottle vastly sturdier tires air in the shrunken city-so much cleaner that men don’t wash cars on Saturdays anymore; everyone is wearing black and talking on small personal phones many are fat and no one smokes but everyone knows the way to stay alive is movement dance spin run yoga make room for those bikes but watch out-everyone runs the red lights.
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staying home from junior high move your lips but never sing do not throw others off key stand still and hold the flag try not to look pathetic try hard not to hear them giggle just plan tomorrow to rub your head again on the radiator fake sickness trick mummy stay home watch a thousand hours of television or a thousand hours of wetness out the window storm sends ripples across the puddles rock-a-byes the baby boy & girl worms mrs whitman runs down the street of blowing leaves she looks exactly like faye emerson that bright blonde chignon her topper coat flying like a tail wind got under it streaking through the rain in high heels to the big dark silhouette in a fedora hat waiting on the corner of dallas ave in a silver-finned cadillac every thursday mummy nods & nods ok that’s enough get yourself in bed
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Keeping pink sugar pliable newborn perfect pump eager to be primed steady now cells blush scarlet separate & synchronize so grandly
expanding into elation joy-rides just beginning
tempo builds accecelerates time & tides gather & turn surge on without notice or pity slowly but certainly spaces start shrinking until uncertain walls begin bit by bit to harden & brittleness becomes breakage challenge: continuation courage to keep despite disillusion, to dare address another dawnlit window, the dark nightload of dreams.
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To The Yellow Umbrella she lumbers retreat the summer heat summer’s numb scorch glider swing on the porch-that rusting slider suggests the days number, makes her wonder: who stole the snow was there not just a glory show of snow? the gorgeous summer another deceiver outright liar loosens such beauty lavender, peaches & roses the sparkle on water warmth that cools fleeces of lambs & clouds this is joy who can laugh to see it flee who cares who loves so much & still gets fooled each season into belief and prayer that intensify as the days pile on a voracious snake called time crawls in & in turns gold to ash burrows in dirt in cold grit the snow the freeze that comes & comes grind in grind on push back though she may no concern is ever returned think deaf think still think hollow.
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Query Poem timing is not everything nothing is everything-in the eye of a housefly are four thousand glittering little eyes; infinite networks of thread connect the silk of gutted worms; query: will something always birth the brilliance that turns a mud ditch to crystal, re-assembles blueness, the vast blinding palette of blue....?
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Ah, Faith! Orphee’s agony coincides in mystery in irony in truth with the Satmar and Lubovitch-breathless Jews in black frock coats twisting through the hot-baked streets of Crown Heights, their wives running behind dripping sweat under fashion wigs— pulling gaggles of kinder past the Kundalini Yogis of Soho whose gleaming eyes flicker whose breath comes in deep gasps of ecstasy rocking chanting davening swaying all of them rooted to the earth like ancient conifers certain as rain in spring that every human hair is counted every snowflake a blessed original as the glorious universe spins on palpably innocent athrob unfolding exactly as it is meant to.
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His Love
lost beyond dead
skies
a heaven mute
past human silence
past ordinary cruelty;
so inconsolable Orpheus slips into the only other eternity imaginable:
the viscous liquid one
within the nether mirror—
to dwell in shattered crystal
likeness of himself--
shadow poet
in parallel blue blazes
robbed of mystery
robbed of possibility
having traded away his soul’s lyre, the trenchant wind, the antelope, the bear, his own hypnotic song.
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Rage in remembrance of the Sharpeville Massacre It disturbs, this slanting light yellow & rapturous and once a part of promise. Mocking now, and strange these sighing palms that stirred with expectation. How like betrayal the stillness of summer flowers quiet, beautiful, unfaded. I was not an alien here. I was as one with the light the palms, the lilies. Why did the earth I loved not cry out for me as my life’s blood was sought and taken?
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urbanity how to tolerate crowds of human strangers all those bodies that sweat and push and displace space and air and seats on buses or clog the roadways I don’t mean robbers rapists or molesters or anything like that I mean the strangers who load up on wine in restaurants and scream their shrill heads off when you are trying to eat the ones who smell lousy that you have to wait behind in long lines at the store the ones who run red lights and cut you off in traffic and what about all the pretending that goes on? One honest curmudgeon said hell is other people but few will admit that is the truth nor will most admit a reasonable preference for dogs.
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Them Someday Things I can still hear the radio playing in our kitchen on summer afternoons: low, melancholy organ sounds that promised a glimpse into the thrilling, unknown world of adults. The kind of music that to this day reminds me of mystery and secrets. Outside our kitchen screen door was shimmering heat and stillness, and days that seemed to last so long. School was out, and sometimes there was nothing much to do but hang around Bee, our maid, while she ironed clothes or baked pies. She listened to “Old Ma Perkins, brought to you by Oxydol,” every day. Bee was fat and black and weary-faced. She had rheumatism, which she called the misery. Because of the misery, sometimes in her back, sometimes in her knees, she sat down while she ironed. She sat, ironed, talked to me, and listened to Old Ma Perkins all at the same time. My baby sister Katie was almost still a baby then. She thought every colored person was a “bee” because of our maid Bee. It was one of her first words, and one of the first cute things she did. When we went for a ride in the car Katie would point her little finger out the window and say “bus” when she saw one, or “sky” when she looked up, or “bee” when a colored person went by. This happened only when we drove up to the Hill District; otherwise, we rarely saw colored people, except for Bee, or a neighbor’s maid. The first time we went up to the Hill it felt like we had stepped into a page of a story book, or a place in a dream. Everyone was doing something familiar–selling newspapers, climbing off streetcars, coming out of stores–just like anywhere else, but they all seemed to be pretending. They didn’t seem real in the way white people in our own neighborhood did. They were all colored, every single person, the shoppers, the newsboys, the children, everyone. Bee owned a roominghouse on the Hill. She took in boarders, usually men, who paid for their rooms by turning over their social
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security checks to her. In exchange for their checks they got clean rooms, two meals, and laundry done on Saturdays. Somehow Bee arranged things so that when they died she also collected any insurance money they had coming. There were always three or four of these ‘mens’ in the roominghouse at any given time. They were either retired from the railroad or the steel mills. Sometimes one of the mens wanted to marry Bee, but she was never interested. She was full of mistrust when it came to the mens. She was ‘old as this old Hill’ she explained, and knew all about ‘they’s foolin’ and ‘they’s games’. The only sweet lover man Bee ever had was Weeyums, and he was long, long gone. Most times, when I coaxed her to tell me about him she refused, or told me just a little bit. I knew it was a sad story and I never exactly understood then why I wanted to hear it so much, but I did. “Always pesterin,” Bee would sigh, shaking her head, referring to me and my efforts. Yet on one of these warm and boring afternoons, by begging in my most lonesome voice, I finally got her to tell me. Recalling it now, Bee’s soft drawling voice sounded lonesome, too. Lonesome, and fascinating . . . “Well, he was one sweet little lover man,” she began, “and I was just a little gal up from the country, myself. Course I didn’t know nothing of mens ways too much then. I was just past a child myself.” She paused and added slowly, remembering, “I was working out, just like I do’s now, but just starting then.” “How old were you, Bee?” I can hear myself asking. “I was just fourteen.” “Just two years older than me?” “That’s right. Why you always ask that same thing?” “I just want to know. I want to picture you. What did you look like then, when you were fourteen?” “I looked all growed and nice then. Not fat and old as I is now.” “You’re not so old, Bee. You look nice now, too.”
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“I’s plenty old. You wants to hear about me and Weeyums or not?” “Oh, I do!” I said, pulling my chair closer to the ironing board. “I want to. What did Weeyums look like?” “All right then. But, see, the thing about Weeyums was not just how he looked, it was how he was to me.” “You mean what he was like. His personality.” “I means what he did. He would come by where I was every day just to talk and ask me how I be doing and how I be getting along. I just arrived up here, like I told you. I was staying with my Daddy’s sister and her family here in Pittsburgh. I didn’t know nobody else at first.” “And how old was Weeyums?” “He was some older than me. About eighteen then.” “But he was handsome?” “Yes. Wouldn’t have to been, good as he was. But, Lord, he had big black eyes and the whitest teeth I ever did see, and he just shined. He was the color of a shiny penny. He was! Just like a new mint penny.” “Did you fall in love with him as soon as you saw him?” “No, it wasn’t like that. We was friends first before we was ever sweethearts.” Friends, like me and Danny Stewart, I thought. Except I was sure that Danny Stewart was the real life, honest to goodness version of every fairy tale prince I’d ever read about, but it was abundantly clear that Danny Stewart never thought about me at all. “Did you go out on dates, like to the movies, Bee?” “Well, we mostly kept company together. Like I said, I was brand new here in this city. Weeyums would come by of an evening and we would walk down into town mostly and see all the sights. “He showed me everything. He knowed where everything was at, all the bright lights. Course we didn’t have no money to speak of. And it was so hot then! Best place to be, he knowed, was down to the river. We did that all the time that summer. Ate us some ice cream, too.”
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“But didn’t you want to get dressed up, or go to dances and stuff like that?” I asked, pirouetting a little around the kitchen curtains. “Oh, child, the things you don’t understand. Them things wasn’t in my head, like they is in yours. I told you I was just up from Alabama then. Wasn’t in my mind to be going to dancing clubs and such.” I sat back down, considering this. “Did you know when it happened, when you fell in love?” “I suppose I did. I knowed when he come by a good feeling, like a little flutter, started inside when I seen him. But that started after he been by quite a bit. After I got to know him that summer.” “So you went for walks and had ice cream together?” “That’s right. We did. We kept company, Weeyums and me. We knowed each other, that was the thing. I told him things in my mind I never told nobody before and he did the same. Turned out some of them things was the same.” “Like what?” “I means that both of us found out we wanted to go to New York and make us some money and live real good someday. Yes, we had a mind to do that someday. There was that part to it, too,” she sighed, “all them someday things.” “Did you kiss a lot, will you tell me about that part?” “No I will not. Cept to say he was sweet like sugar to me and that’s all. Some things you just too much a child to know.” “I’m not a child as much as you think. I know things. I know about getting my period, Sheila Pearson already has hers and I will soon, too.” “Well, then you just go ask her what you wants so bad to know. Or ask your Mamma, don’t ask me.” “Okay, but please tell me the rest about you and Weeyums.” “There wasn’t so much else to it, past that summer. Just how sweet he was, that’s what I remembers most.” “Can I hear about when he left?” “Allright, then. I’ll tell you, and you go on outside and leave me be, hear?”
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Her dark eyes focused sharply on me. “Okay,” I whispered. “Okay,” she finally sighed. “Weeyums and me was very close to one another by then. We was together every evening. I knowed although we was very young, he was very serious in my heart and me in his. But there was a war starting up, and then he got the news he had to go.” She paused and stared down at the shirt she was ironing. I looked away, at the flies crawling on the window screen. “Yes, that was a sad day for us, when he got the news.” I nodded, waiting. “I come back from work that day, and I knowed something was wrong, cause he was already there, waiting on me, when he usually didn’t come by till evening. But there he was, four o’clock in the afternoon waiting on me. ‘What’s wrong,’ I say to him, ‘let’s go down to the river,’ he say to me. So we did . . . Lord, I still do see him standin there, shining so pretty in the sun that day, down by that river!” “What happened, Bee? What happened then?” “Well, course then he told me he was going, no choice about that, and it hit me very hard, that news. It like to broke my heart to hear it, that he was going.” “Oh, no! Oh, Bee, that must have been so bad!” “It was, it was. Bad as it could be. I was taking on pretty bad myself, crying from the news and the hurting in my poor heart, when he done the last sweet thing I ever did see him do. You wants me to tell you that, too?” “Oh, please, please! Yes, I do!” “Well, don’t you take on like that, or I won’t. Stop sniffin. Your Mamma don’t pay me to make you cry.” “I’m sorry. Oh! But it’s just such a beautiful, sad story.” “That’s true. It surely was that. You all right now?” she asked, waiting. “Well, is you?” “Sure, I’m fine,” I said, quickly as I could. “What was the last sweet thing he did?” “Well, it did stay with me, just like it was yesterday. He told me he had to go, then he leaned himself over and picked me one
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of the little purple flowers that grows down by the water. ‘This is a forget-me-not,’ he says, ‘so don’t ever forget me, Bee’ he says, ‘forget me not!’” “Oh, no! And you never saw him again!” “No, I never did.” “But what happened? What happened to him?” “Well, I never did know exactly for sure about that. Cept he never did come back, else he would’ve come back to me.” “Oh, Bee!” “Now, I told you, don’t you take on so, girl. Don’t! Now it’s just a sweet old memory to me, and that’s good! Listen here . . . I knowed enough of mens since then, and they wants and they wants, but I did just like he asked me, I never did forget him . . . Now you quit that and go on out. It’s time for me to hear my radio story.” I left her there in the kitchen, listening to the radio. Every old thing out in the back yard, the ginko trees, the grass, the garbage cans, stood motionless but seemed to sway in the dense heat. The air felt so close, so heavy with summertime. It must have been a day just like this when Weeyums said goodbye to Bee by the river ... But . . . near the water there would have been a breeze, a beautiful dappled sunlight on their faces, and the fragrance of the little purple flowers . . .! I lay down on the porch swing and rocked myself for a long while. And wondered, through my sweet sad tears, if Danny Stewart or anyone else would ever break my heart.
The LUMMOX Press was established in 1993 and has published the Little Red Book series, the Lummox Journal, and publishes chapbooks, a perfect bound book series (the Respect series), a Poetry Anthology & Poetry Contest (annually), and “e-copies” of all its books. The stated goal of the press and its publisher is to elevate the bar for poetry, whilst bringing the “word” to an international audience. We are proud to offer this book as part of that effort. For more information and to see our growing catalog of choices, please go to www.lummoxpress.com/lc
CAROUSEL new selected poetry fiction &
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Judith Robinson is a poet of image and motion. She composes poems like songs with clarity and vision, trimmed with memory. She’ll take you along on the road she’s traveling, and it’s the least dangerous place you’ll ever be—filled with flowers and colors—sometimes sadness—but even that will endear—as she holds her mirror up to the world. —Grace Cavalieri, “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” A beautiful collection! Judith is a masterful weaver of emotion and action. These stories about growing up and coming home teeter on the edge of heartbreak and destruction, taking the reader on gripping rides from mining towns of Appalachia to the glittering beaches of Miami to the cold and snowy north. Judith delicately paints her settings and diverse characters with the expertise of a lifelong writer and observer in this brilliant collection of tragic and triumphant short stories. —Mike Mavilia, Head Barista and Editor, The Fictional Café
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