ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
•••••••••••••••••••••••• This Paper Cinema anthology, featuring work by WCC students, faculty, staff, and alumni, is a production of the WCC Poetry Club, at Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, MI. Book design by Tom Zimmerman. Copyright © 2019 the individual authors and artists. The works herein have been chosen for their literary and artistic merit and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Washtenaw Community College, its Board of Trustees, its administration, or its faculty, staff, or students. wccpoetryclub.wordpress.com
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Paper Cinema •••••••••••••••••••••••• A WCC Poetry Club Anthology Edited by Tom Zimmerman
Contents—Words Zach Baker KD Williams Diane M. Laboda William Bullard Natalie Rinehardt Emy Deshotel Tom Zimmerman
Movies, Memories, Moving On Left at the Lakehouse The Old Hag Underneath the Bed From the Basement, a Tornado Story What I Like—Fragmentum Michigan Theater Jane Eyre (1983) Screen Time The Movie Screen
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Contents—Images Zach Baker Tom Zimmerman
Front cover, inside front cover, 5, 11, 13, 15, 18, inside back cover 7, 14, 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, back cover
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Zach Baker
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Movies, Memories, Moving On In the movies, there used to be people that asked who wants to go to the movies? The kids would scream, the dad would smile at the mom, and all would pile into an American sedan. But I don’t want to go to the movies anymore. At 40, I have seen Terminator 2 10,000 times. Reliving how at 12 we snuck in and Kyle didn’t kiss me. Surprise. I couldn’t have imagined anything more romantic. Instead, now I like to sit in my car in the parking lot of a big box store watch the projection out the windshield of people moving like clouds, forming shapes, making patterns—lives—I guess. What did they get? What did they forget? What kind of life are they living? As the screen goes dark, I return to a room I’m living in. I throw away my concession items: a blue ribbon, karate black belt,
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ticket stub, college degrees, family photos, stupid clothes, years of tax returns, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Ginsberg’s Howl, a condom wrapper. Each item I throw away I find pleasure in counting. More pleasure than the end of a movie, but . . . . When you throw away meditation beads, does that count as one thing or everything?
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KD Williams
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Left at the Lakehouse All I want to do is watch movies from my childhood while lying in front of the ac unit my grandma bought the year I was born. I’m healing, cooling, naked in the late July heat. And to think just a month ago, I was wearing my denim jacket when my friends lifted me from the ground. Boss down! Someone shouted, and I remembered there was a time when I used to be in charge of the arms carrying me to a kitchen, the fingers delicately applying ointment and gauze. Funny, I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful, but I never actually collapsed until the longest day of the year ended and the whole world was going to bed. The movie playing in my head was so bad it was good— the tape worn thin and familiar. I wanted to go with my shoes off. I started my car, but something called me back to the bed where I bled, restless, in a dark room of breaths. I departed at dawn. It might be true— I left my denim jacket and my dignity 6
at the lakehouse, but I did not leave, blurry in the rearview, an image rippled in smoke and water. When I meet my friends again, for a double feature in the basement, they hold cold beers and I say no. They put my jacket on me like a ceremony and then we disappear together into the screen, emerging only to laugh and catch another’s eye.
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KD Williams
•••••••••••••••••••••••• The Old Hag * I dreamed I lived in a hotel of horrors. A sinister man with perpetually rolling eyes killed off my family and friends one by one and stalked me, bloodied, appearing in the corner of mirrors and in darkened corridors. Strange rules applied in this dream—as in any dream. I could not tell anyone about this sinister man. I could not move or call out for help when he was near. At times it seemed he was pushing himself into my chest to impress his evil in my lungs and steal my voice away. I spent long stretches of the dream trying to maintain appearances. He stalked me to a movie theatre and his shadow floated across the screen, growing larger and larger the closer he came to the projector’s light, the closer he got to me. When the light cut off and all was darkness, I screamed and broke the spell. I awoke on my couch. It was 4:54 PM, nearly dark, and the house was quiet. I took a drive to get a coffee, to shake off the sinister man I felt tailing my every move still. Rounding a dark corner, I came upon a baseball diamond I’d never noticed before. The parking lot was full and cars spilled onto the surrounding grass. I slowed, drawn to the bright lights of the game and a concession stand boasting hot cocoa. There was one spot left on the grass, the perfect size for my car, and it wasn’t until I cut the engine and my radio clicked off that I noticed the silence. As I approached the diamond, not even my feet made a sound on the fallen leaves. The packed stands held open mouths and clapping hands, but no sounds reached my ears. I shook my head. I pressed my palms against my ears. I shouted. Nothing. Bats made contact with balls, but there was no crack or thunk. Boys slid into bases, but the gravel did not grumble beneath their feet. I walked straight to the pitcher’s mound and no one seemed to mind my intrusion. In fact, 8
the pitcher ceded his throne and returned to the dugout with the other silent boys; the crowd closed their mouths and folded their hands in their laps. I looked down at my own hands to find a baseball and a glove. I turned the ball in my hand and found it was not a ball at all — it was too white, too smooth, slimy almost, without stitching. It was an enormous eye. The eye rolled itself over and over in my gloved hand, the gaping pupil always just beyond my sight. I heard someone approaching the batter’s box. I didn’t have to look up to know it was the sinister man, his labored breath escaping every person in the baseball diamond. I awoke on my bed, out of breath, more tired than when I went to sleep. The red glow of the clock said it was 5:07 PM, but otherwise the room was completely dark. I caught my breath and made to move, but I was stuck. I was moored in the darkness, paralyzed, losing my breath again, panicking. Though I could not see, I could smell him approaching. Mud. He smelled of mud. I felt his footsteps, heavy on my bed, and then the crushing weight of his evil on my chest, mud in my nose and throat and eyes and ears until I was buried beneath the sheets the floor the basement the ground the center of the earth and hell. I was gone.
*Old Hag Syndrome is a colloquial name for Sleep Paralysis, a disorder wherein the affected person awakens from a nightmare unable to move and often experiences difficulty breathing and visual, auditory, or olfactory hallucinations. 9
Diane M. Laboda
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Underneath the Bed The demons, monsters, Bogeymen, and all things that go bump in the night live in the dark places under my bed. They convene as soon as my head hits the pillow. They begin to rumble and rant in short bursts at first. Then they shake the bedposts in earnest, advertising their charms, soliciting their next tender victim. Once I know they’re there I cannot sleep, but keep my eyes closed in case they peek out, look for a chance to spirit me away. They’ve grabbed my feet before, when I lingered too long on the edge of the bed reading. Now I wrap up tight in the covers. I’ve also seen them skitter across the floor, pull clothes down out of the closet, swing the door back and forth, and cackle. Mom and dad say they aren’t real, even though Monsters, Inc. shows exactly how they’re trained, but mom always leaves a light on next to my bed.
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Now why would they do that if it weren’t to keep some demons they know in the shadows under my bed?
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Diane M. Laboda
•••••••••••••••••••••••• From the Basement, a Tornado Story In another life I must have been a storm chaser, obsessed with gathering thunderstorms, never in the basement, but hanging out the window with my camera ready for the next great shot. The Weather Channel satisfies my curiosity, my observer’s voyeuristic need to see out the windshield of a truck as trees and houses and livestock are hurled through the air toward me. I can feel myself in the movie, Twister, tied to the well pump with a leather belt, being lifted straight up into the eye of the beast. My heartrate soars, I’m all eyes and ears. I don’t know where my fear goes. Perhaps it’s the fantasy me, the one in that other life that peeks out with its childlike wonder and sees the awesome power, the strange beauty. At my age and in this life I’m satisfied to sit among friends in the basement of this old house on Platt Road and write about my strange fantasy in not so twisted words, 12
no racing heart, no wide eyes. Just the impatience of a 70+ year-old to get back to a softer chair and write about calmer days in dreams only a child could conjure.
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William Bullard
•••••••••••••••••••••••• What I Like—Fragmentum I cannot tell you what kind of films I like. I can tell you what films I do like, but not what type of films I like. I have been serious about films since I was 20. One of my older brothers “turned me on” to the importance of films. (He was the one who turned me on to something else. That was in 1970. I saw the film Woodstock that day.) I could say I know what I like when I see it, but that is too superficial, even though it is true. I could say “I have eclectic tastes,” but that is also superficial—even though there is truth in it. I don’t necessarily like all genres. I can certainly tell you what films, as well as what directors I like, and why I like them. I can talk about my top five or top ten lists. There are, however, two film constituents that I can identify that I look for when I am watching films (or TV shows, for that matter). One constituent has to do with how a film subverts established societal elements; the other constituent relates to whether or not a film has an authentic inner psychology operating within it. I like, and am drawn to, films that subvert in a critical way established and conventional attitudes and beliefs about elements of society and human life and relationships, and I dislike films, for the most part that affirm those established and conventional attitudes and beliefs. These elements include romance and sex, parental and family relationships, relationship to society, among others. I want a film to go beyond spoofing and satire. Spoofing and satire sometimes makes fun of such elements in order to reaffirm them ultimately. I am looking for a film to at least challenge established and conventional attitudes and beliefs; but I want much more. For me, a film needs to undermine these attitudes and beliefs. I am interested in a film that endeavors to tamper with and weaken attitudes and beliefs that are inauthentic, 16
and perhaps, portray what is authentic. The second major constituent that I like in films is an inner psychological consistency. I want a film to have an inner psychology so that the plot proceeds and the characters act out of something other than because that is what is written in the script to satisfy a plot necessity. Along with this, I want significant characters to have an inner psychology out of which they act. For example, in the British murder mysteries that I like (these are TV series), I am bothered when, at the end of a story, the revealed murderer shows no previous indication that the character is capable of murder. I’ve seen episodes in which an older woman who throughout the story acts as a “lady-like” character turns out to have committed the crime. There is no explanation given for motivation except for the conflicts stated in the confession or the detective’s explanation.
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Natalie Rinehardt
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Michigan Theater I know from the gloss on the bannister, that the wood is smooth and cool to the touch. With blood red velvet spilling down the steps and a soft yellow chandelier that warms the lobby considerably, every part of this palace is unbeknownst to me. I feel like dirt, standing here in plain jeans and a hoodie. You would think being here would be no different than visiting a historic estate, comfortably imagining what life would have been like behind a framed curtain. But here, the history is still being written. With modern movie posters’ dragged up into the ancient frames, how cheap they seem there. Like all the rest of this society, because I fit in with the people here. Who are not lost in the grandeur of this place, or feel the smallest of their life. This is but another picture they plaster on their social media, with a hashtag of how quaint it is, while complaining that the seats are too small. I feel rage as the theater tries to apologize, longing for people not to leave. I think: Sorry they didn’t make xl size seating in the 19th century, America wasn’t fat then. I stare back up at the remarkable ceiling, the detail crowning and the wallpaper. Everything about this place was designed to make you feel like floating, from the cushy carpet to the vast red curtains that stretch like waterfalls. I feel the tightness in my chest as I accept that I am this theater’s cheap heroine. The movie is starting, and holding my tub of greasy popcorn between my legs, I ache for the feature to pull me away.
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Natalie Rinehardt
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Jane Eyre (1983) “But think of my life when you are gone! All Happiness will be torn away from me . . .” I rewind the scene again, not knowing at the time Why it affected me so greatly This is the fifth time I have rewound this scene Surely by now my family is fully annoyed with me But they don’t seem to notice, as if the greatest love fight Was an anecdoche to them It is the moment Timothy Dalton is about to lose All he loves and in a desperate attempt to be happy He all but throws himself at the feet of Jane Eyre Whose resolve is to leave him The acting is so poor, and the dim VHS picture Perfectly reflects the height of ’80s TV filming And yet the words connect, they are received, They wound, as if I were Mr. Rochester Rochester turns away from her and falls to pieces He clenches his fist as tears rain down The next words are forever carved on my heart “Your love would have been my best reward”
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Emy Deshotel
•••••••••••••••••••••••• Screen Time I think about love In that dramatic, Cinematic way My modern fantasies play out On my laptop screen As I lay in the dark Alone Mesmerized by the picture-perfect pixelation of romance My daydreams often take me to Bookstores and coffee shops Where I hope to meet someone Who loves words as much as I do Someone Who will give me a reason to tear my eyes From Jim and Pam Leslie and Ben Lorelai and Luke —But life is not lived through cliches So I stay home Alone Trying to push the flights of fancy from my mind.
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Tom Zimmerman
•••••••••••••••••••••••• The Movie Screen is mirror just as well as window: dreams scream cinema, our shadows on a wall, and so I speak the names. There’s Annie Hall, King Kong, and Dr. Strangelove. Lives, it seems, enhanced and captured in a frame. The Bride of Frankenstein, Pulp Fiction, Vertigo, A Streetcar Named Desire. We think we know there’s more outside the box, but can’t decide how wild we want our minds. Some Like It Hot, The Maltese Falcon, Throne of Blood, High Noon, The Silence of the Lambs. The types so soon imprinted on the psyche, deep as thought. The Searchers, Cabaret, The Seventh Seal. Shaped fantasies have made our lives more real.
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