noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer whom they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, poet David Wanczyk is highlighted.
In David Wanczyk’s luminous and inventive poems, we are keenly reminded of our own foibles, and how “all that / puts us back together, holds us / in suspension.” Twisted turns wistful as we visit a hurricane-pounded Gulf Coast and observe “How pretty the roller skating girl at the Sonic / must have been four months ago, compared to now.” Wanczyk’s poetry beckons and baits us into joining him on an unforgettable road trip traveling “the interstate of the brain” where we get pelted by patter that erodes the line between smile and smirk, “imagining irate giraffes…”
Giving Chase
Imagining Irate Giraffes
In One of My Heavens
Company
It
Mercy-Flurry
Sweet Girl
The Hoop
Confessions at a Catholic College
Contrast Lies. Waveland, Mississippi, 2005
Imogen on Oxygen
Riding the Train Balloons
Blue-Colored Doubt
Before the real doing can commence, so much
to do, the ever-preparing. First,
to clear the interstate of the brain
of all emergency vehicles, downed power lines,
burned-out Hyundais and the myths those Hyundais haul.
Myths like the one about the two men in the Hyundai
waylaid by a flat or, better yet, an approaching cruiser,
its lights plitter-plattering in their Hyundaish rearview,
their bent-by-a-telephone-pole Hyundaish rearview.
And there they go a-scampering into the federal scrubland
growing unmown on the side of the neural interstate,
and there I go pursuing, with a trooper named Dan,
and always with that one persistent worry:
that my Achilles will gun-shot pop and curl up my calf
like a Christmas-ribbon snaked by scissors,
that I'll get lost out there with the world's worst sharpness.
And then there'd be me just crumpled over with Achilles pain,
halfway between the steady push of the I-55 (of the mind)
and those two Hyundai criminals escaping their Elantra
into the federal scrub, with their abrasions and their glove
compartment treasures, The Real Score.
So much to do before The Real Score. And these guys
to catch before the doing-scoring,
and they're sprinting breathless in and out of flashlight,
far from the Turnpike of serious contemplation,
away from Trooper Dan, and up a federal scrubhill
I can't hardly manage. But here's
Dan's husky snorting behind me, and here's
Dan with his “Lost 'em” while I check my semi-resilient heel.
We tell ourselves we're on the track of The Real Score
in the very same chilly, heel-threatened moment
we're running away from it, out of shape, and so
without saying as much, Dan and I laugh a little
and wonder if we should have let this one go.
I may never move again, and I should have stayed
on the never-more-than-gently-curving Freeway
of brain-churn. “Lost 'em where?” I demand.
He shakes his head and we climb back over the guardrail,
which is busted and misting. The night's been rain and painful,
up to my hip. “They could have gone anywhere,” he says.
“We should have followed them.”
“How?” And that's the last thing he'll say about it
besides some more snorting.
I'm back in the cruiser (so much to do) and now
we're driving straight again, thinking one thing,
if that's even possible. There's a little writhing,
some Achilles pain, both unavoidable. So much to do
to put an end to all this pursuing. So many
power lines to clear before the doing. And all these
vain patrols.
Imagining irate giraffes, I imagine
your aggravation
at the way my head
lopes away with me.
I babbled my confusion, yours
stayed unsaid.
Some think giraffes are mute,
but they chirp at twenty a minute or so.
You smiled, I smirked.
The thing we had in common
was me. You liked to dance
when I stood cross-legged
and watching too severely,
my big ears reddening.
Giraffes have an intensely
perilous sex life, though it’s a slow
intensity, several hours before the show.
But know that all I wanted
was to be untwisted and re-wired
with your derangement,
such as it was.
That's all. Wrapped around your neck,
crimped.
Giraffes were called cameleopards in Britain,
did you know that? In the 1820s,
and groups of them are known as a ‘tower.’
But you wouldn’t show me your madness—
perched in the clouds
that odd shaped brain—
even though I wanted then
to look like you
in the next generation,
oddly tall boy
who could understand,
though we couldn’t,
why we ever wandered together.
When you came and when you left
I was a newborn calf,
all knees and stagger.
My best guess is: you were long,
and I couldn’t get enough of your longness.
The pressure a giraffe’s body
puts on the heart, that’s what.
Nancy Grace is on every channel
and I've eternally lost the remote,
but the TV's off.
My son has been recently kidnapped
and newly-returned, sporting
a healthy tan and constructive amnesia.
There is no baseball;
but there's about to be, and the glee of that
discovery will cool my chest,
the fear-fun of relief
pristine as a stolen base.
You can call me Silly Stanley Sisyphus.
Got the rock up the hill and slanty-signed it
with a pen I'd thought was out of ink.
But it wasn't!
And now I'm leaning soft against
the green pregnancy of a morning sky,
Alleviation personified,
perched on a lawn chair (just repaired)
sipping the juice of strawberries
to which I've heretofore been allergic.
On the mountain top,
near-constant acid reflux
has just ceased, as has war,
bee-sting pain, and hip-hop
in which words rhyme with themselves.
I'll hear from renowned liars
that Australia has been destroyed
while watching my childhood dog
elude barely the scum-blooded knife teeth
of a wild boar who is then eaten
by hungry children, no longer terminal.
And I get to tell them they're well!
Though my red-headed rival Ralph
almost got the credit.
Who am I kidding?
Ralphie boy and I have just reconciled
over not-quite poisonous
boar-stuffed mushrooms,
the fungus of our friendship
benign and oh so fine.
And you who speechless turned
and last week left, sick
of the rock grime under my nails,
will tell me in verse
that you never stopped
loving me, that you've flipped
with a sharp quarter
and, unhurt, declared
that there is a God,
that God almost burned himself
on that iron I left out,
but didn't, and championed instead
my endearing absentmindedness,
a quality for which He has sympathy.
That you think we could
give it another shot, by God,
end up together after all. As if,
Silly, anything ever ends.
You can put it on briefly
like a coat at a party on a bed.
And I can have yours tentatively,
an old memory. Since we let this occur.
Since we beg. Reaching out, both,
it would seem. Invited, by all means.
Something of us forming in the middle of us.
Our collective cards shuffled and re-dealt.
I think it can be, this inextricability.
So I've got on my midnight face,
the one that tells you it's seen a soul tarred
and feathered, seen one float,
the floating
snatched down: free, then bonded.
That I can piecemeal wear your life: you play
guitar, so this I want. You play my joy
unclotting. But I feel what you can and I
can't be. Your chords, individual, settling
together. I tour your halfs and quarters.
You know what I mean! We're slightly one
and only. The whole thing. So sing
your fleeting song and I'll tap my hand
on this here leg, thanking you; thank you
for stopping up your self with me—
the modulation—
our common offer
a narcotic hospitality.
It if it is it is
of no familiar face
place
It if it is it is
above and around
the sorts of it
I've known
and I can only think
it if it is it is
hardly akin to roses
posies
or anything
swelling
or a choir
fire
More like a pilot light it
in Wyoming wind
if it is it
a three-year old softly croaking
Tomorrow
Tomorrow
if it is it
a pose
a ruse
an itch it
if it is it
a bite
but it is it
if it infects inflects
ignites
And is it
if it is it
alright?
“Where no wood is, there the fire goes out: so where there is no talebearer, the strife ceases.”
– Proverbs 26:20
I was willing
to stand her once,
twice to stand
around a plywood fire
together in
threadwearing February.
Hard-going,
the easy-going
pose, and the snow
lit on the flaring,
dampening
the high heat.
We drank thin cocoa
and burned surprise parts
of our mouths.
Forgiveness comes
once and then
and again, but stop
its soft falling
for a frozen second,
stop its exacting
mercy-flurry,
and even
an elderly ember
will burn off
your damn
eyebrows.
The effort is why—
and you are, too—
why I (still
can’t not) hate her.
Back here, about to go on, it's impossible to believe
it's been fifty years since “Sweet Girl,” and tonight
I'll have the graying crowd swaying because they want
memories, that's all they want. They'll hear
what they remember hearing, and so I'm strong
to them, strong and straining for sweet girl, sixteen.
They'll stand and replace their jackets careful
on their chairs. They'll clap when I'm backed-up
and when I hit my old tenor's high note with a little help.
The sweetest girl I ever knew has left and gone away.
She was a street corner harmony, that song, got her
from The Harptones, The Moonglows, The Lingoes,
the rest of 'em. We would sing her everywhere we were,
“Sweet Girl.” On a train to Brooklyn for a pat on the back.
We had a colored guy then, a black, I mean, and
he could do some things with that voice, let me tell you.
Let me tell you what. We had fun, and the parties
with the girls who were sweet and not sweet at all either.
I'd been going with Anna Lisa, to tell you the truth,
and I'd tell her she was Sweet Girl, but I hadn't met anyone
like the song we sang, innocent and still vavoom and out-to-here,
with a face that wouldn't promise you tomorrow or ask.
When she kissed me late that night, I thought she'd always stay.
No one like that, maybe ever, now that I think of it.
About to do this again, what's it been, a thousand times,
a million, for a million people, and it's impossible to believe
it's been a year and change, last May, since Margaret,
who was all of twenty-seven before she was seventy-four.
I remember I met her exactly two years after “Sweet Girl”
went gold, and it was still getting play, and she'd tease me.
“Am I your Sweet Girl, fancy boy? Am I gonna leave you?
Do I give you the best hugs and kisses? You better watch out
for Johnny. He's outta sight.” She wasn't blond, but she was right
for me then, more up-to-here than out-to-here, but I didn't care,
and now it sounds strange to say it all like that. Feels strange
but it's the only thing to do to think of Margaret young.
I'll tell you, you never don't want to be in love
with a young girl, never don't want to be as young
as she was then, whoever she was, and able and willing,
like they say, to bring her up the way you want so she's still
that young because you never noticed her getting old
and she's not sixteen anymore in a little bob and sweater,
or twenty-seven, but that doesn't matter because you've been
with her the whole time and she hasn't seemed to grow up
even though she's got a jumpsuit and one of those poof-perms,
but when she's gone she sure ain't sixteen, I tell you what.
I tell you what. I never met a girl like “Sweet Girl,” never.
I gotta go on soon. I gotta go out there and sing hard as I can
for this made-up thing I started in ‘62, this thing
that was about to lose all it meant to me, this kind of song,
this kind of girl who was half-grown-up. Is anyone
half-grown-up anymore, or are all the kids fully done?
And all the Margarets are still really kids at twenty-seven.
I'll have to pick someone to sing to tonight, though, some poof-perm.
But you never don't want to sing to the ripe ones, because
you never remember when the drums go that you're anywhere
other than twenty-four with Margaret in the Buick or
Anna Lisa on the Sunday stoop calling her sweet girl and feeling
that it wasn't true but it was true enough and that there was so much
time left to get things wrong and right, the nice line, a harmony.
They want memories. That's all they want. I didn't want to go
back to doing the old songs. I didn't want to go back.
But that's what they need, they tell me. “It Might Be Love,”
which I'd forgotten, to tell you the truth. And I'm just about ready,
and maybe, for the sake of it, I'll sing to a granddaughter out there,
which could get some noise, or a new mom with eye-liner everywhere:
Just out of Iowa on a bus to Santa Monica, My Sweeeet Girl.
And maybe then we'll all feel the stirring, something sterling,
the thing I made up before I knew anything else and the thing
you never want to lose no matter if you have the whole world,
no matter if you've gotten thick and happy in some tomorrow.
No matter if you've never met a girl who went away until now.
What's crossed quickly in front—what was
it?—I couldn't, couldn't avoid.
Steady whine of memory forming and smell
of gauze, the cold charged with siren.
My daughter out of the van now sits
on the highway scrub re-tying her shoes again.
Again, I am the little girl I was
that Thanksgiving Day playing “Fortune Tellers”
under the netless basketball hoop.
My mother was secretly dead in the whispers
of Great Aunt Moira. I flashed my hands to find
how many children I’d have, who I’d marry.
The paper’s gaping mouth stayed silently blank
about you, what's crossed, and the images idling now:
my daughter of curls, the hoop, a medic’s chapped lip,
a fist reaching out weakly
from under my broken-down caravan. More cars
whispering by and your little girl jumps rope
in her driveway, hearing them.
Confessions at a Catholic College
A friend told me he was gay
and I told him he wasn’t, but
I’m not sure why. I like to tell myself
that I thought he was joking
and shouldn’t be.
Joking, that is.
I was a bad audience.
There, where poster-children
emerged in pamphlets,
and “Hate Crime Happened Here” headlines
covered the slab walls of the all-male
dorm halls
that smelled just a little too much
like Sunday School.
“Gay and Republican,” he admitted later.
I insisted he was kidding, and I switched
from trust to doubt like a little kid
measuring the unlikely
cancellation of recess on April 1st.
“No.
You’re not. You’re full of it.”
I wasn’t upset, just felt
tricked. He had been lying
the entire conversation. I knew it.
I wouldn’t have been upset if he hadn’t been.
Lying, that is.
I remember needing a second
opinion. “Of course he is,” it said.
“Were you living in a cave?”
I surveyed his dorm-room walls
decorated with man-muscle. Abercrombie
bombshells suggestive
of the bomb he'd dropped. They stared
at me with pouty eyes and rowdy lips.
Later that year, Nate's mom died and I denied that
for a few seconds too.
I wondered if she knew about him
and how she’d taken it. Hopefully
not like I had.
And I hope he did tell her,
even if she tried to ignore
the joke, the punchline
she might not have been ready for.
I think he needed her to hear
while shaking her head and smiling.
An audience member aghast
at how much she loves
the blue stuff.
Contrast Lies. Waveland, Mississippi, 2005
We tromp doubtfully where
we shouldn’t be, amidst
what seem to be photos, taking photos.
Split beams and orange seascape,
mud-wet Virgin Mary.
On the ocean side of the tracks, the well-off
took a hard hit, felled Magnolias boring
through their Tudor-styles. Wood mixed, mahogany pulping,
Trivial Pursuits askew. Is there some other beautiful
thing broken?
I piss. “You just pissed in a backyard.”
I just pissed in a brilliant oilslick puddle behind a tire
as a Vietnamese shrimper approached in a newly-washed Chevy
and gave us directions to a Pleasant Street
no longer marked with a sign.
Maybe there’s something in that detail.
How pretty the roller skating girl at the Sonic
must have been four months ago, compared to now. Sharp features,
sharply lit. We tip her five dollars and enjoy our Biscuits.
“IC” is missing from the logo,
leaving just the “SON”,
as all the Ws are missing from all the Waffle Houses,
and all the letters of her life that made the thing a neon verb
have gotten tossed back into the scrabble bag.
She’s still nearly gorgeous;
and there’s the ruined sign behind her!
I slide past these damages, wonder if I don’t quite
feel anymore without the framing, the dramatic contrast. But there can’t be
in this piece of human interest a pure smile
or undiluted despair, those
dishonest definite things.
There is nothing in that, we think.
I remember a photo of a humvee carrying diapers.
That’s what I’m here to get: Disaster diptych:
joy smooshed up with the blackness that turns joy
almost true, because that’s always meaningful
for some reason.
So on a certain lot, twice condemned,
I inspect the rubble for its secret. Where’s the relic that open-armed embraces
suffering and indomitability? The image that won’t fib.
Bloat and blight, duct tape, a doll
and The Game of Life.
Sharply lit, sharp contrast. I hope
my friend will snap a picture because it’s somehow fitting, right?
“You’d be surprised how ineffective ironic trash pictures are.”
He likes a stuffed, purple smiley face toy
belching its stuffing,
which I find kind of dull, though poignant, I suppose. Something.
In the way it says two things, ultimately, and ultimately
nothing beyond what art had been convincing us all along—
from odi et amo, to Auden’s Icarus plunging
beautifully into the bayou
while the fieldman trudged on,
to Anthony Corleone’s baptism as gunshots
played their Passacaglia in minor. The essential falsehood:
that opposing tones occupy each minute, filling them evenly
to bursting. That innocence gets
oddly-punctured,
and that we can know this in our notebook:
Everyone else but us breaks
cleanly into very bright colors.
Even in this thin johnny, Imogen on oxygen’s a ten:
her slipped-shoulder-strap smile, flash,
that old oops and titter, still, like Betty Boop,
and I’m here to get her for Erotica, the yesteryear issue,
so we paint on the familiar red dot of a mouth, flash,
curl back her hair and mute a damn fluorescent
with an unlaundered bed sheet from the corner of her room.
The nurse isn’t asking questions, not really.
“200 films,” Imogen wheezes, not many by today’s standard.
Most of the girls do thousands now,
but she sure was prolific in black, white, imagined
scarlet, all that shadow and flash.
In the office Imogen is nothing, “The one
who’s been put out to pasture,” emphasis on “put out,” har har.
But I remember her opening my eyes wider than, well, wide,
Little Miss Imogen, on oxygen now, in a thin johnny smiling.
“I was respected,” she coughs, and I lay my hand on the bed
beside hers, fiddle with the backlighting, do whatever I can
to keep this going as Imogen readies for her closeup.
And I’m the weekday afternoon De Mille of some
weekday afternoon money shot, trading on the appeal
of a faraway century and trying to snag an image of a last
sincere wink, Imogen, with thin lashes—thin lips Imogen,
red as Technicolor satin, Imogen on Top Imogen, on oxygen.
I push back her bangs: she puckers for the lens.
“Thank you, dear,” she whispers. “Thank you.”
Not a smoky “dear” like darlin’ or honey or sailor or pizza guy,
God forbid, but a dear like love, like she might have remembered
playing doctor with me as a kid in Brooklyn.
“Can you recall
your favorite costars?” I ask her while the camera anticipates
a flash, flashes. “I don’t kiss and tell,” she says, and it’s a line
she gives all the guys, whoever’s left. She laughs
like a not–quite-grand-dame, like Bacall
might have laughed if she’d never made it past chorus girl.
And Imogen on Oxygen launches into her catalogue of ships,
the girls she knew who’d gone mainstream. “June,
who stole Marty Johnson from me in ‘Bottoms Down’,
which never could’ve happened off camera, mind you. She was in
On the Town or Off the Record or one of those On-Offs.”
And Carolyn married a stock studio player,
the one who always played the mean neighbor. She divorced him
and married a grip. Divorced him and I don’t know what came of ’er,
but if you ask me, she never got over that kiss
I gave ‘er in ‘His Next Miss.’” Our Sprites come in styrofoam cups, I gulp
too much, watch the nurse as she slowly walks out of the room.
I always watch, and watch, and can’t help watching, and turn steel
from watching. Even though I’ve seen it all and every which way.
fluffed and tickled, even understudied once. But something
flutters when Ima remembers the kodacrhome hanky-pank.
“Before my time,” I say and glance away toward the window, the floor.
Orange curtains, thick-whaled. Green jell-O on the paisley carpet.
I chew my chewy ice.
She thinks I’m shy, a little embarrassed on account of her
being so old and still cracking dirty, but
it’s the fact that she beats in my throat that does it.
The nurse comes back with a cup of meds, scolds us
for taking out the tube, and leaves again. I watch.
“You know, we called those candy-stripper films.” I spit a little Sprite.
She has more charm in the little finger she’s wrapped me around
than all the rest of them have in their whole spread-eagled deal,
the 29-year olds whose “cumbacks” will sell the mag.
Imogen’ll be buried, somewhere after “Lechy Letters”
and before the lube ads, but even though
she’ll only have an inch or two, I want to get her
to tell me more of what it used to be.
Because I had stopped drooling
over real women by the time I was sixteen, and if she wasn’t
folded down the middle of a page
and then unfurled, I cheated on her
with someone who was, glossy, pretendable. I’d cut short dates
to go home and dream up a Jayne right off the page. We’d talk. I’d want
to make her a banana split, oh really, give her a robe, slip it off,
put it back on again. Sex like a ten-cent novel. Lose interest
real quick when you figure out the twist. But now I’m asking Imogen:
“So, you ever get stirred up anymore?”
“Inquiring old ladies who read the articles
in smutty magazines want to know, do they dear?”
I respond, “I want to know.” I’ve learned to flirt
for a good quote, but it rings false. I don’t talk to women much.
“I bet you know all about women, Henry,” she tells me.
I have images in a lineup, all the kinds mismatched:
a over-tan body flash, a housecoat, a habit and a halter; this nurse,
the back seat leather of a Buick, an expectant face, most of it fake,
ultra-fake joy and love and all the rest of it you’re supposed to have by now.
Imogen was nothing like that. All suggestion then, and happy even,
the lady-like kiss in ’53 with Carolyn (it was before my time, but I’ve seen it).
The hint of something below the collar, below the hip, a slip
flouncing and exposed, the grace. Of a calf, a turned shoulder
with an eye-brow invitation.
See, I was the kid
in the projector booth trading bubble gum cards to the invalid night watchman
for his third-shift, Mickey Mouse for Fritz the Cat.
And for classic double-bills with Ima. “Switch the reel,”
they’d shout back at the booth with clipped voices,
straining for the last scene when everything
would finally be revealed.
The kid’d fumble with the reel,
eyes squinted against seeing too much.
The kid’d walk home kicking stones with a grin and start saving quarters
for a wedding ring. If that’s what it’s like, there’s no use waiting.
But even the ones with the feather fans who’d lay curved in “Downtown Lady,”
stomachs like pearl, arms like pearl, mouths a fancy provocation. . .
They showed too much eventually, took an early sixties roles without dialogue,
with everything else, gave in. But I found Imogen. Imogen lives
on the misplaced reel of a projector room in a burned-out theater,
sold for its sconces. And Imogen on oxygen stays un-run, lovely
with anticipation. I can take her out, out of here. And I will,
I think, but the nurse comes in urgently. I watch her. She replaces the tube,
suggests I go. And Imogen gives me a semi-sultry sigh goodbye. My dream
nodding off under hospital corners we’d just started to untuck.
Riding the Train with Balloons
“They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet”
– Philip Larkin “Whitsun Weddings”
Out-bound above-ground,
I'm holding
five white and pink
balloons, and peeking
between helium at the thin-waled
taut shirt
of a T-girl, her slimness
salty-seeming and red.
I've got the decorations for you,
you across the way.
But you’re blocked from me by the T-girl,
blocked by the son and father
talking like friends,
and the Red Sox fans loud as their shirts,
from Revere, New Hampshire,
Maine, and Japan.
It's been
your going-away
party and we're ginned. It's been
your night,
though you're hidden,
stunningly nothinged
by the in-between, these flummoxed
in flux, fourteen people
and this girl staring at the city
in herself,
herself in the train windows, stop
by bracing stop.
I'm flamboyant in pastels,
my latex disguise, loving you
badly though
showing it well.
Each train-surge
like new coins in a mechanical bed,
and T-girl's jolty half-laugh visible
between my balloons:
it’s sweet as a debut chanteuse.
(And an alternative future, paltry-sultry,
must be considered.)
She’s only something
since she’s not-you, her August-damp eyes
flat below flattened-flaxen.
Train-glut, hot, always.
There's an outage on the T, and a
cramped thrill
of the spin-the-bottle closet,
new addiction
in jaundicing half-light.
Then it’s bright again
with the train cleared (she’s gotten off at Beachmont).
It's you and me still,
these balloons,
on a slow and stopping curve
to Wonderland.
.
Sometimes I want
to let go, but I know I'd never stop
watching you drift.
after Gerard Manley Hopkins
No, I can’t, blue-colored compulsion, doubt,
give in to you,
neither question—fruitful the answer may be
—the fact of the love in me,
nor deny her coarse
hands, years later, on my shoulder,
as they path their old way:
the tingling muted, the magic, tricks
of the trade long since given away as in
a lovely assistant's
sensational book.
Reasonable, the blue-colored thing is,
nudging me toward pretty new illusions
whose paperback titles curve
in a loud hand, little winking tail of an ‘a’
cueing beauty,
short-haired cover model, short-chaptered text,
giving off that heart skip
revelation, which is green-hued.
Eight of spades slip up
in a lurid game of three-card-monty,
a quick, mistaken read:
Ten Cents Only! Secrets Uncovered!
Magic Exposed!
Thin volume of sleights, love, or this:
Cut-you-in-half-
mumbo-spectacular-realness, and all that
puts us back together, holds us
in suspension.
I’ll fall
for all of it, have to, spelling myself
out of the blue-colored something:
a damned fine mirror trick if that’s not trueness.
David Wanczyk lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter and teaches nonfiction at Ohio University. His work has been published in The Awl, The Classical, Mental Floss, Salon, Slate, Splitsider, and the online journals Brevity, JMWW, and Pank. He is thrilled to have his poems featured in UCity Review.
