"Cliffed"

By Meredith LaFrance

The waves beat against the base of the cliff. The spray licked her tear-stained face and settled onto her matted hair. Her frock, once sky-blue with white ruffles down the front and a hem of white lace, was now torn and soiled. She sat with her knees tucked underneath the soggy wrinkled mess, shivering with each icy gust of wind.

He hadn't even left her a note. The house was as empty as her heart. At first she had thought his sudden absence might be some sort of a joke, but the neatly made bed, the bare closet and a couple of five-pound notes on the oak table, were telltale signs that he was gone for good.

The cliff seemed to welcome her with open arms. She longed to extract all the memories of Ari from her muddled mind and cast them into the swirling depths of the hungry sea, but they were to remain with her forever.

She slowly drew herself to her feet and stretched her arms up as high as they would reach. She couldn't believe Ari had been at her side only a night before, caressing her hand and running his fingers ever so gently through her auburn hair. She had stared into his deep blue eyes for what had seemed like hours.

"Amanda," he had whispered. "I never want you to leave me." His words had made her heart slap inside her chest. She nearly melted in his hands that night.

She strolled back to the cottage, drawing her tattered shawl about her shaking shoulders. She didn't even try to avoid the murky puddles and her feet felt the cold result of it. Misery enveloped her like a damp rag and made her queasy. All she wanted was a hot bath and a warm bed, but she knew that she would wake up the next morning with the same aching feeling in her chest. She decided to rise to the occasion and take the carriage into town. She needed to see what this was all about.

She alerted the stable boy and then quickly changed into a more presentable dress. She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. Ari's sudden disappearance certainly had not been a last-minute decision. And she wasn't going to let him walk away without locking eyes with him one more time.

Writer Meredith LaFrance is a senior at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She will be a freshman at the University of Oregon at Eugene next fall.

"The Brown Madonna and Child"

By Camincha

Nina started. She tore up the gold metallic paper for the background and glued it so the jagged edges overlapped. Then she cut the child's and madonna's faces and hands out of a Safeway shopping bag. The dark brown paper she had chosen was the exact tone she wanted, the tone of her own skin, her mother's.

For the Madonna's robe and child's wrappings, Nina had bought bright color tissue paper magenta, mint green, azure, mango.

Next, worked on the Madonna's face, then the robe. Not easy, it took hours. Hours that spread over several weeks as she could only work on it evenings after a day at the office. And only if she wasn't too tired. And only if she got home early enough. Not always possible because of errands, her art class. And because she had Larry and wanted to spend time with him. And because even when he wasn't there, HE WAS, Yes. He was always on her mind. More since the engineering firm he worked for was transferring him out of San Francisco to Seattle.

Finally the Madonna emerged. Beautiful. She couldn't wait. She ran to the local art shop to have it framed. She told the store clerk: This Is a Madonna and Child.

href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRSagYjgeueeEsVRSddZbFIOlmVUO2lHeKutBE886loLj_jhzWe3kUFOvVzcldQXrqWQI_5UrXHYEwwFaa2Da8xRiPxxjlnmtm7J3Weft3DXe3g1d9buoYIMTW05ZRWl9mRt2IfA/s1600-h/camincha+bag.jpg">The clerk looked at the collage, then said, And child?

Nina explained, It's not finished.

The clerk was amused. People usually wait till the work is finished, she smiled.

A week later Nina picked it up. The gold-specked wooden frame she had chosen really brought the Madonna's figure to the forefront. Made it three dimensional. Regal in its simplicity. It emanated compassion, tenderness. Nina delighted took it home to finish her composition.

Larry phoned, I started to pack. You sure you won't relocate with me?

Nina was sure. As much as it hurt she had to face facts: They weren't getting along. He loved her, but resented her foreignness, her Peruvian friends, her Peruvian music, her Peruvian food. To go away with him would end in disaster.

SHE HANGED UP the collage and admired it for a few days before she found time to get back to it. Then lovingly designed, shaped and glued the figure of the child in its colorful wrappings. Next, went to work on the Madonna's hand holding the child. She worked diligently, one finger at a time. Just the way she had planned it. Nina drew long, graceful fingers on the brown paper.

She cut. Glued the hand in place and 1eft it to set overnight. Next day ran to admire it. Six graceful fingers stared at her ?*!*?*!

I have to concentrate. Stop thinking of Larry, she screamed. It took her two more tries before a five finger hand was finished And many, many more tries to get the child's face not to look like Humpty Dumpty's. In desperation, about to give up, decided to try just one more time. It worked.

Larry called, I've started taking down pictures.

She held his photo: That juicy, full lipped, heart-shaped mouth, his one outstanding feature. She decided the child's mouth would be perfectly heart-shaped with full lips. It worked.

NINA AND LARRY, a few days later, stood admiring the finished collage. Nina pointed out how she had immortalized him. Larry chuckled, flattered, amused.

Their parting kiss was sweet.

Camincha is the pen name for a writer in California. She is a frequent contributor to MyStoryLives.

"Socks"

By Claudia Ricci

Ma is shouting at me but I’ve got the white running socks tied around my ears.

“You cannot go, do you hear me? Do you hear me? You’re crazy to go, there is so much flooding out there, there’s flooding everywhere, right down the street, one bridge is out. Do you hear me, Gina?”

I do, of course I hear her, I’d have to be deaf not to, but of course I don’t let her know that, I just stand there, sweaty and stinky and just staring her down, motioning to the wet socks, one tied over each ear.

Running socks I’ve just taken off. Wet socks. Wet shoes too. I think it’s funny. Wet shoes. Wet socks. Tied on my ears.

I have to laugh, so I do, but my humor is lost on her.

“Stop with the laughing. And take those stupid socks off your ears already. Take them damn socks off your ears and listen to me.”

I pull them off. “What?”

“Please don’t go, Gina. I don’t want you to, it’s not safe driving.

“Well, so I’ll take the train then.”

“NO!” Her finger comes up to my nose. “That's worse. It is supposed to rain some more today. What if the tracks are flooded? I want you to stay home.”

“No Ma, I’m not staying home. I was outside jogging and the rain has tapered off. Yeah there are puddles and the river is high but I’m driving away from the river. The hurricane is over.”

I shrug, as if to say, that is the end of that story.

But of course it isn’t. I am turning toward the steps, I have one bare foot on the first step up when she grabs my shoulder. Yanks my pony tail.

“Hey, stop that,” I yell, wrenching my hair out of her grip. But she’s got me back on her level now. That bony finger of hers is practically resting against my nose. I can smell the garlic she’s been chopping. And something else. Chlorox, maybe? The washing machine is chugging away down in the cellar.

“So you just think you can just ignore me, just walk away, just like that?” Her voice stands in some kind of desert. The sands are piling up.

I raise my voice over the hot dry wind. “Yeah, Ma, I can. Because I gotta get ready. If I’m gonna meet Jackson at noon, I gotta go and get ready. He’s only got six hours, I told you that.”

Her eyes flare. “So you stand there and tell me you can do whatever the hell you want to when you want to, no matter what? Even when they are saying tornados? Huh? Tornados, Gina. What about that? Huh? You wanna end up dead in a tornado?”

I close my eyes. “Ma, go look at the weather channel. The tornado warning is posted for the south. I’m going north. North, Ma. Fort Drum. It’s away from the tornadoes.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like it. I don’t like you going up there anyway. Nobody should be driving up there today.”

“I told you he’s got only this afternoon. And then he ships off for…”

“I would just a soon he ships off for good and that you never see him again.”

I stare at her. I sew my bottom teeth into my top lip and I count to seven. And then, ten. I turn and start up the stairs again.

“You made a mistake, Gina,” she calls after me, “but now that’s over you don’t have to make another one.”

I bite into my lip so hard I taste blood. I have the wet socks in my hands and I started to wring them around my right fist. I feel my belly clench. The muscles know. They still remember the pains. The feelings are almost a year old, but I remember so well. I told Lauretta, my sister, that I felt like there were steel cables pulling across my abdomen. And then, in the end, just before the end, there was that flood of pain, like a freight train, barreling through me. Ripping apart my belly. And all that warm blood bathing the space between my legs.

All of that comes roaring out of my memory now. I wait a moment so I can collect myself. Then I turn to face her. I whisper. But lying below the whisper is a razor blade.

“Don’t you dare go down that road, Ma.” The tears are like hot wet beads crystalizing around my eyes. A couple drip over the soft ledges that are my cheeks. “You should know better. I deserve better.”

“Well, yeah, I deserve better too. I deserve you getting married. I deserve you going with somebody who can...”

"Who can what Ma?"

She stops. Maybe because I am sitting on the stairs now, a fist full of socks stuffed into my mouth. And I am starting to bawl, the sound muffled by the socks.

“Oh stop your crying. All I was saying was you are too good for him.”

I bolt to a standing position.

“Oh no, Ma. That’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying that he is too dark for you.”

“I am not saying that.”

“Yeah, but you’re thinking it. Say it, just say it why don't you? You want me to go with somebody who can do what? Huh? Give you a white grandson?”

“I don’t want to go into it. All I know is that you just assume you can do whatever the hell you want to do when you want to, go anyplace you want to, meet anybody you want to, no matter if there is a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake. You are crazy. You are.”

“No, Ma, you are crazy. Because there has never been an earthquake here, ever. And there never will be. But if I have anything to say about it, there will be a black man in this family, whether you like it or not.”

I stand up and my heart pumps triple time, my bloody lip trembles, and I race the rest of the way up the stairs.

Writer Claudia Ricci teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY. She lives in Spencertown, New York.

Pain Cuts

By Lindsay Kirsch

The movies have it right. These things don’t happen on sunny days. The birds aren’t chirping and the leaves of the trees aren’t shimmering in the sun. These things don’t happen on days when the world is beautiful. The world is ugly, and so are the words. The tears streaming down the faces of the wounded victims, the innocent victims, match the cold rain falling from the clouds. The world is steely gray, and so are the words. The insides are gray, wet, and bloody.

The pain is monotonous. It has become so accustomed to its spot inside the insides that one has to stop to make sure it is still there, to make sure that it hasn’t fled during the night. But when one looks outside and sees the rain, and hears the words, one knows that the pain is still there. It will always be there.

Everyone is in their positions. The four innocent victims sit in their places. The youngest male is on his bike, ready to pedal anywhere that he can go to get away from the gray, harping pain. Regardless of how hard he pedals, though, he doesn’t go anywhere. He’s yet to learn that the pain doesn’t leave. Even if he finds his way out, the knot will be there when the wheels stop turning. The middle one holds the most deeply wounded, stroking her, hoping that her touch will ease the pain. She’s yet to learn that there is nothing that takes away from the throbbing of the heart, begging for something to put it back in place, unsure why it was rocked like this in the first place. The oldest holds the voice of reason, saying the words that no one else can mutter.

And the last one finds some words, just as gray, and shaky: “I just want this to be over.” It is over. We have heard the thunder coming from the mouths of the mourning, and we have seen the lightning strike from the eyes of the wounded. It is over.

And it is over on a rainy day. It wouldn’t have ended if the sun had come out. When the sun is out, the world can’t end. The lives of those pedaling, stroking, reasoning and shaking will not end on a sunny day. Just leave it to Mother Nature to set the right backdrop. The actors are dropped into their positions and they hear “ACTION!” and they accommodate the audience. They will play to the rain, they play out the pain because they know that they will never hear “CUT!”

They will be told they can stop but in reality they will always feel cut. The pain cuts, the words cut, the gray cuts, the rain cuts, the emotions are cut. Cut and dry. Life will go on but the pain won’t leave, or at least, it will never be forgotten. And they are only learning now that the rain is the backdrop, always, to the most painful movies of their lives.

Writer Lindsay Kirsch is a junior at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her major is Latin and Caribbean Studies, and she has a double minor, in Spanish and English.

MARTI ZUCKROWV "Dance on Paper"

"Just Because"

I had the great fortune of taking dance lessons at an
early age. It feels like I was born with a passion to
move. I wished I could fly and secretly made bargains
with a God I was told did not exist. (This from my
father.) The dance classes watered the kinesthetic
seeds already stirring in my young body; I was
encouraged to discover new movements, to stretch the
limits of what my body could do. Dance was my magic,
my power to transcend.

Our family was poor and had a hard times making ends
meet. Money for dance classes was not an option.
To help pay the rent, my parents took in borders.
Serendipity or just plain luck, they rented out two
back rooms to a young, newly married couple, Ellie, a
ballet dancer, and Eddie, a composer. It was Ellie,
who recognized the fire in me and convinced my mother
to enroll me in her movement classes, fees waived,
JUST BECAUSE.

Back then, at the age of 6 and 7, I was
happy being me and happy with the girl body I
inhabited. I was at peace with myself.
Photos of me at 9 and 10 show a chubby girl, with
buckteeth and a buster brown haircut. By then, Ellie
and Eddie had moved out. Ellie kept in contact with
our family but gave up her dance classes in lieu of a
full time job. My lessons continued with another
teacher, Edith Segal, (again at no cost to my parents)
a legend in the Jewish Left Cultural world.

There I learned narrative dance, protesting war and racism and
Mc Carthy-bashing with dramatic movements rather then
words. When I danced, the freedom of my movements gave
me limitless joy. At other times though, self-
consciousness was rearing its ugly head. Discomfort
trailed me like a shadow. I learned to hold my
breath and try to make myself smaller, to take up
less space (the exact opposite of what nourished my
soul.) I don't know what triggered this destructive
behavior.

Was it my girl body with the "down there"
that I'd discovered gave me pleasure, or the shame I
felt when kids at school blasted the "pinko's" who were
trying to save the Rosenberg's and I didn't speak up
and protect my parents. Somehow the two got mixed up.
My first clear memory of hating my body is from when
I was in the sixth grade. I sat next to Frankie
Acquinita, the cutest boy in the class, the wildest
boy in the group of nogoodnicks (my mother's term) he
hung around with, and the boy I wanted to go steady
with. His interest in me was straightforward: I could
provide him with enough correct answers to a test so
that he could get a passing grade, and for that and
that reason only, he was nice to me. Of course, the
minimal attention he showed me left me with goose
bumps and fantasies of showing up to the 8th-grade
prom with him as my date.

I had all ready begun stuffing my bra with those furry
pom pom like things the girls used to wear around
their necks in the 1950's, an accessory to the pink
angora sweater sets and the gray pleated skirts so
popular in my school, but I hadn't run into
unadulterated self-hatred of my female body. I
accepted my lackluster breasts, because I knew this
was only a temporary deformity. I was fated to grow
knockers (another inherited term) like my mother and
her two sisters had.

They all cursed their huge breasts, bemoaning the fact
that finding a comfortable brassiere was impossible,
not to mention the expense.

All of a sudden, when I hit 6th grade and got assigned
the seat next to Frankie; my stomach became my enemy.
It stuck out. And my chin. It wasn't strong and
angular the way the all American blond girls in
Seventeen magazines looked as they posed in happy
groups of two and three. I had a receding chin.
Frankie's view of me in the small wooden desk on my
left was my profile. There was no way I could hide my
hideousness from him. I remember squirming in my seat
until I was reprimanded by our teacher, a short
muscular man who hated his job and let the class know
he'd rather be anywhere else.

The best solution I came up with was to place a textbook
on my belly and hold it there to hide the bulge I imagined as huge as a
whale. I placed my other hand on my puny chin and
angled my head to the right while sticking out my fake
breasts in Frankie's direction. Needless to say, this
took much concentration and refinement. Oblivious of
my intentions, Frankie's eyes landed on my test
answers, or on the paper airplanes he made and sailed
through the room whenever the opportunity arose.
Anatomically speaking, my girlfriends and I spanned
the spectrum of overdeveloped wannabe almost teenager
to scrawny flat chested tomboy. I was somewhere in the
middle: I was great at punch ball, able to outrun
many of the boys in our class, and aspired to be as
sexy as Marilyn Monroe.

Seated opposite Frankie Acquinta, self destruction
set in. I experienced a debilitating split; my mind
shouting at my body," you are disgusting." I couldn't
remember the "me" from before those words. I no
longer fit in my skin. My ugliness was oozing out all
around me and there was no where to run.
I have spent most of my 63 years battling "fat
thoughts." In many ways, dance has helped me. I
found a way to rise above my badgering mind and live
in my body. It's time for me to live in my body and
love it, JUST BECAUSE.) I hope to get there before
my time runs out.

WRITER MARTY ZUCKROWVIA IS A MONTHLY COLUMNIST FOR MYSTORYLIVES. A LIFELONG DANCER AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, SHE NOW TEACHES MOVEMENT CLASSES TO PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES. SHE LIVES IN CALIFORNIA.

"A Windbreaker Life"

By Joe Markman

I was high but there was little to be done about it. No choice really. She came prepared and I wasn’t going to let the intoxication of my chocolate-haired friend escape my grasp. When she dropped the cold curtain between us and warmed to me, I accepted her offer of fine powder and potent sex.

She had been pacing the bedroom, taking care not to look at me. A breeze sneaking through a fracture in the room’s only window hardened her nipples. I could see them through the thin fabric of her shirt. She was pondering my statement.

“I want you.”

“You want a nimble fairy with cellophane wings.”

She didn’t say anything for a while after that. She only paced, from wall to wall, taking in my slouched existence. When she finally moved within my reach there was no smile on her face, only a line of uncertain flesh. I grabbed her hips and kissed her smooth navel. But first the drug. A second thought passed through my mind, but not a third. We rocketed into the ozone and she jumped on me, a frenzy of long brown hair, tickling fingers, and moist excess.

Days later we grew tired of sex. As for the drug, the possibilities were endless.

“Where am I?”

“You’re on a grapefruit river drinking crimson souls.”

Maybe I was. All I could see were wisps of clouds, floating along and bunching together under the tender sun. I felt her nails on my bare forearm, scratching leisurely up and down. There was only the sky, her long nails, and an infinite orgasm soothing the wrinkles of my essence.

Then I died.

“Am I dead?”

“You’re on a slug-powered roller coaster gliding over bamboo rails.”

Everything had gone dark. I saw nothing, felt nothing except for my own body. I curled into a ball in the steel-trap expanse of my mind. Time dragged and I listened for clues to my encapsulation. I heard creaking wood and liquid splashes, soft wind and the ting of metal against glass. Then a white hot light scorched my eyes.

After a moment I noticed that I could see. For the first time I saw that we were on a train. The sort of train a child might ride at the amusement part, but much bigger, with room in our open-roofed car for two strangers. The strangers faded into the background when I saw myself. I was slumped on a wooden bench, my eyes half-closed. I looked down and saw a razor blade in one porcelain hand and a mirror in the other. I was cutting a pile of white powder into two lines.

“Am I you?”

“You lead a windbreaker life, confusing all you see.”

I looked at my own face, my nose wider than I remembered, my pores deeper, my lines older, my chin lower, my eyes full of strawberry worry. Light red lines crisscrossed the white globes resting beneath my eyelids. I was ugly and obscene. I chopped at the drug and blew a line. I collapsed and immediately found myself rousing from a twisted stupor.

Her breasts were pressed against the bottom of the car. They had slipped from her tangerine wrap when she fell. I noticed the strangers again. One was staring at her breasts like a lion at a gazelle. The other, his back straight, was making a visible effort not to look. I waded through the air toward her. Beef stew with no broth. I moved my slapping clown’s feet, my pillowcase juggernaut arms, to sit beside her. She awoke and we whispered nothings, ignoring the strangers.

“I love you.”

“You love the forest sky and my darkening heart.”

There was a raging fire inside her brain. In our youth she smiled at me, her doll’s eyes and coy lips burning my loins. We used to put together puzzles on the floor of my mother’s living room.

When we were twelve she looked into my eyes across a puzzle and traced her finger along my jaw, smiling as my face grew red. Now the smile was gone. Now she was frantic, grabbing me at odd moments and gazing into deep pools of invisible passion water.

It was lovely to sit next to her, away from everything, with two strangers and a plastic bag full of the only thing that mattered anymore. Then I took a line for myself and looked in the mirror.

My nose suited my face. I saw each unclogged pore, shallow laughter lines, a strong chin, and eyes that looked straight through it all. We whispered about the strangers and I held her shaking arms. From time to time she would pull away and then hold me twice as tight. It went like that for a while, both of us ignoring the warping sky, deciding on the strangers, deciding on ourselves.

She touched her face and shrieked. When she pulled the bag open I shook my head.

“You don’t need it.”

“You can see my crackling skin, my wicked eyes.”

I shook my head again.

“You are beautiful.”

“You can’t see my candy cane need and my rose petal trails.”

I shrugged and we went higher.

Waves of thick motion tracked her fingers as they brushed against my face. I saw her wicked eyes, her hesitant feelings, and threw myself at her orchid lips. The stiff stranger grunted and I felt the other move closer to us. We broke our embrace and looked at them with glee. I offered them the drug and they said nothing. Like it didn’t even exist.

I noticed the warping sky had finished its task when my head melted back onto the edge of our car. Black circles, edged with orange flames, appeared all across the sky. I stared in amazement and my lover stroked my arm. Wild ecstasy. The two strangers sat looking up, their mouths open wide, mumbling and glancing accusingly at us.

There was little to be done about it. So we enjoyed ourselves for a while, and just when it outgrew its novelty, the dragons came. I think there were aliens riding the dragons. But they could have been people, just like you and me, riding on fuzzy dreams. The dragons were strange, covered in a patchwork of lollipop hairs. As they dove toward the earth no fire shot from their mouths, but they swooped down right on top of us and pulled up at the last second.

The stiff stranger held his arms above his head when the dragons came, but straightened his jacket when they flew away. The other stranger howled in fear. He cursed the planet for its carnivore punishment and when I asked him what was the matter he jumped out of the car. It was quite the show. Exciting and tranquil and a thrashing for the nerves, but we held tight, admiring their wonderful coats and taking some of the drug when they’d gone. I asked the stiff stranger what he thought. He told me that it was a figment of his imagination, some crazy coincidence of imagery. Had they spiked his air?

We laughed and told him no. It was not for strangers. But I liked the dragons and I didn’t like his answer, so I asked my Chhaya what she thought.

“What was that?”

“Nothing is real.”

Joe Markman is a journalism student at the University of Rhode Island, where he has also found time to write fiction and poetry. "A Windbreaker Life" originated as a dream. Says Markman, "Strange stuff. I took the disjointed images and turned them into a sort of skewed 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' narrative."

"Razbliuto Redux"

By Ellen Zunon

Google “razbliuto,” and you will find 1,130 references to it on the Internet. Pretty good for a word that doesn’t exist, don’t you think? In fact, a few years ago there was a real buzz on the Internet about the “word” razbliuto. Some held that it was a perfectly good word, borrowed from Russian, meaning loosely “the feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.”

Others maintained adamantly that there was no such word, in either English or Russian; that it was a myth; that it should be expurgated from the writings of any decent and self-respecting wordsmith.

Columnist and lexicographer William Safire, who had cited the word in a published essay, even recanted and corrected himself in a later column, after having received a stack of letters from readers who insisted that the word simply did not exist.

Why such bilious spleen about a mere lexeme, or phantom lexeme, as one might call it? Here in the United States, we have no equivalent for the Académie Française, that group of 40 Immortals, whose charge it is to keep the French language pure by serving as linguistic gatekeepers, nixing such Americanisms as “le cash flow” or “le fast food”; one might as well try holding back the tide with a fishing net. Linguistic borrowing is here to stay. Didn’t the French give us rôti de boeuf in the Middle Ages, only to have us Anglophones hand it back to them as roast beef, which they promptly transformed into rosbif?

Didn’t we Americans borrow a multitude of words from the multicultural mix of immigrants who came here, as well as from the various Native American groups that the newcomers displaced? Mark Twain, that quintessential American writer once wrote of our homegrown variety of English, “There is no such thing as ‘the Queen’s English.’ The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!” Doesn’t that give us the right to borrow new words where we will?

If razbliuto is not a borrowing, it must be a coinage. In that case, is it thus any less of a word than “jabberwocky,” coined by Lewis Carroll, or than IM, as in “I’ll IM you,” coined by some unknown instant message user? Our language is all the richer for these borrowings and coinages. So why not “razbliuto”? It’s certainly a useful word, if you look at all the relationship problems that abound in modern society. In fact, razbliuto is a large part of what keeps advice columnists in business.

It’s a useful concept for poets and writers, too. Take Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” for example. Neruda could use a bit more razbliuto when he says, “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.”

“Maybe I still love her” is no way to get over an unrequited yearning.

But the all-time World Champion of razbliuto is Marcel Proust, who wrote seven volumes as a memento of the love he had once felt for the faithless Albertine.

As for myself, about that darkly handsome Frenchman who threw me over for a girl named Angelika so many years ago, and for whom I pined for months before finally leaving France with a broken heart, I am absolutely and forevermore razbliuto. I once loved him, but I no longer feel the same way. I’ll say it three times, just to magnify its incantatory power. Razbliuto. Razbliuto. Razbliuto.

Ellen Zunon is a writer in the Capital Region of New York State.

"Spring Shipwreck"

By Sharon Wideyew

O what do we do with
What will we do?
It is the evening of the last day.
A true friend and companion is now
standing at the cliff staring at me. With me.
When you have known someone this long, it’s hard to distinguish the
“one from the other”
condition.

I say, “Look out there, the ship is in a terribly narrow passage of dark rock and there looks to me
to be certain devastation ahead.”
And then I wipe my eyes and the dream ends, and I wake up beside my husband of 30 years
Mouth dry,
So gloomy I can barely open my eyes.
And yet I still see the cliff and the light on the ship in the distance,
Rocking between the rocks.
In my half-dream state, I whisper,
How could the ship not flounder on those rocks?
There was moonlight, yes, yes,
But there wasn’t enough of it to keep the boat afloat.

I sit up in bed.
He lies there asleep.
Outside the window, it is spring
but the winter has wandered back in
The ice clings to the heart and the hull and the sails.
A nor’easter is up and the boat is glazed, sheathed in ice now
completely socked in by the bad weather.

Ah the boat, our old old weathered ark,
It rocks in dark dark water.
And now, I get up out of bed,
And I tiptoe.
I go below, and lock myself in my cabin.
The worst thing: there is no fresh air to breathe.
There is no fresh air to cry with.
There is nothing but the rocking
And the certainty that the ship is going to crash.
And now, I come to this:
What happens happens happens.
It only matters what description we give to all of it.
We rise we fall we crash we sail.
We look for reasons.

Was that lightning that struck the ship?
Was that a fire on board that could have been extinguished?
Or was the fire extinguished so long ago we forgot where we put the matches?
Or maybe this: the captain broke the rules and brought another woman aboard.
And after a night of sex and pleasure, he lay there smoking a cigar until he felt himself sinking into
peaceful sleep.
Nothing could keep the boat safe.

Ah, but those are just the stories we might tell each other
my friend and me, standing at the cliff,
Staring out to sea.
If we cared enough to tell them.
This is our toil and our work: we keep inventing stories for why something
crashes and burns or sinks forever into the sea.
A better teaching might be this:
We might rather say the simple prayer, It is what it Is,
It is God’s will.
And please, forgive us this day, for what we need to do to keep our boats sailing.
Show us the real objective is to learn
to be content with our
Lots. As we course our way through the rough waters.

Sharon Wideyew is a penname for a writer in upstate New York.

"People Who Aren't Really There"

By Camincha

"In my life today," my 72-year old uncle announced not long ago, "I know I can count on the radio programs that come on throughout the day."

We were sitting at the kitchen table of his home in San Bruno that gave us a bit of ocean view, drinking a cup of coffee, allowing the last bright rays of sunshine to accompany us. I was listening.

"Let me tell you," he began, "I can turn on the radio at 8:30 in the morning while I am having my coffee and toast in the kitchen and I get KCBS' objective news."

"I prefer it," he said. "I like the way they report the news. But then at nine, I turn to KGO, I sit there and listen not because of the so called show-hosts who are biased and take to insulting the callers: You must be an idiot to disagree with me. Up yours moron. No, it's not the show's hosts I like. I listen because of the callers, who bring up valid points of view."

"Other times," he said, "I listen while I do the dishes. My Rosie did them, even when she was so sick towards the end. Remember?"

He stops. He clears his throat. He continues.

"When KGO is finished, I straighten up the house. At 9:30 a.m. I turn to KDJA. They give me my horoscope and their program is kind of a nice diversion. But it can be very serious too: Yes! You, the glitzy butterfly are going to alight long enough to start a permanent relationship. At 72? That is serious!" He laughed. "That little interlude in my morning routine is always fun."

Serious or not, he smiled impishly."Well, so those are some of the things I can count on now."

We sat and talked some more, about this and that. The sun rays had turned bright red, only a few golden strands remained. And then he turned back to the radio.

"It used to be very different," he said. "My routine was: up at six a.m. At 7:00, I kissed my Rosie good-bye and I'd be on my way to work. 7:30 I¹d take the Jitney to downtown San Francisco. 7:50 I'd be at my desk, coffee in hand, having stopped at the quaint TO GO window on Fremont St. I'd be pulling the toast out of my brown bag and enjoying a few minutes to myself before everyone else came in.


"And there I would sit, working at my desk keeping an eye on my Rosie's photo smiling at me all day. A different kind of day," he chuckled.

"Today requires acceptance of the inevitable, of what has gone by, what has been. It takes imagination, some doing, to populate my hours with people who aren't really there," he said.

"But it's comforting, to hear those radio voices, even some perhaps from a world very different from mine. I hear some call from Miami where the weather is 95 degrees, to my 56 in San Francisco, or a call from Little Rock or New York or Alaska. However, all of them are people like me. They are all there, at the flip of my dial, keeping me company."



And then he slapped his thigh and laughed hard, celebrating himself.

"Yeah. Yeah they do keep me company, good company. They do," he said, chuckling.We turned just on time to see the golden disk disappear in the horizon.

Camincha is a pen name for a writer living in Pacifica, California.

"The Winter Fly"

By Ellen Zunon

I have a date with Jack Kerouac tonight. In my basement. He reads me his poetry from a 1959 recording, while Steve Allen plays a mean piano accompaniment, or Zoot Sims plays jazz sax.

While he reads, I walk. It’s still too cold to walk outside -- our upstate New York winters are lengthy and frigid -- so I walk miles and miles on my treadmill every winter. I’ve listened to other books on tape or CD while walking in the basement.

In "West With the Night," I traveled all across Africa with Beryl Markham and Baron Blixen. In "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys introduced me to the imagined early life of Bertha, the mad wife of Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre fame. And in "The Dharma Bums," by Kerouac, I climbed Desolation Peak in the Cascades with a fictionalized Gary Snyder and Jack.

But I like listening to poetry best of all, because it’s really written to be read out loud. And it’s even better with a musical accompaniment. Kerouac’s “Blues and Haikus” have an improvisational feel to them because that’s just what he was trying to do with his poetry: create a verbal equivalent to the spontaneous improvisations of jazz musicians.

Some of the haiku are darkly philosophical, some whimsical, but all are vivid virtual snapshots: Missing a kick at the icebox doorIt closed anyway. A dramatic saxophone phrase punctuates this haiku, and leads up to the next short poem.

Of course, Kerouac was better known for his prose, but he also wrote a lot of poetry. In fact, sometimes he combined the two genres, in a traditional Japanese format known as haibun. This consists of a passage of prose followed by a haiku that sets off the prose. Kerouac used this form in "Desolation Angels," where descriptions of his life as a fire tower guard in the high peaks of the Cascades are interspersed with haiku:

On Starvation Ridge
little sticks
Are trying to grow.

Jack studied the classic haiku of Basho, Issa and Buson before developing his own theory about what “Western Haiku” should consist of. He felt that western haiku need not conform to the traditional Japanese structure of seventeen syllables, since western languages do not have the same syllabic form as Japanese.

He proposed instead that western haiku “simply say a lot in three short lines in any western language.”Useless, useless, the heavy rainDriving into the sea. This little poem speaks volumes about despair, hope and mortality, if you know how to read between the lines. There are other things you should know about Jack Kerouac.

How he was present cheering on the crowd when Allen Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” in public for the first time, how he gave the Beats their name, and what it meant to him. How he spoke French before he knew any English, how he loved cats, how he was a genius before he killed himself with drink.

Those birds sitting
out there on the fence –
They’re all going to die.

These recordings were originally released on vinyl 78-rpm records in 1959 and 1960, and re-released on cassette tape in 1989. On the tape, Kerouac’s voice resonates in the listener’s ear as naturally as though at an intimate reading in your own living room. And it is indeed a natural spontaneous inflection, since there were no second or third takes in the recording studio.

Kerouac has no trace of a French accent, only a subtle dropping of the r at the end of certain words, as is typical of native New Englanders.

I’ve calculated that in an hour I can walk at most a mile and a half and burn 140 calories on my rickety old treadmill. A pound of fat equals 3500 calories, so I need to walk for 24 hours to burn off each of the five extra pounds of fat I’ve accumulated from eating too much comfort food over the long winter. That’s a lot of haiku. So I’m keeping my date with Kerouac tonight. When spring comes, I’ll have a date with the great outdoors.

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
has died of old age.

Writer Jack Kerouac would have turned 85 years old today, March 12, 2007. Ellen Zunon celebrates his birthday with this piece.