There is no silence. In: footsteps, breath, stir of stream, dry breeze dry.

There is sky, blue corn blue. “The sun has been good to us,” the Navajo woman speaks

softly arched over a host of turquoise turtles & arrowheads & bears & juniper seed beads.

There are birds. Up high, an inky raven spellbinds: soars with shadow cast on sandstone,

teases red tail hawk into a scream. Pictographs of scorpion & four directions on rock face.

There is place. “Over there, crumbling, used to be four stories high, Anasazi.”

White House Ruins. Tan horse tethered to barbwire fence; a blow of raw manure flows.

There are people. Artisan shines silver & stone, Diné jewelry. “I remember you,”

recalls the man; his face melds into red stone of cliff walls.

There is history. Black & white photograph. “That’s my family here,

shot by Ansel Adams in the 1940’s,” says the Navajo man at canyon’s depth.

There is art. “I use acrylic paint. It dries fast,” says the painter; his hand sweeps

Kokopelli on chosen sandstone slabs beneath sprawl of cottonwood nude. “Lasts forever.”

There are storytellers. “Pick up the art. Feel how light the rock.” Raise to winter

sun & it sparkles like the water we crossed to land in this place.

Played the flute down to keep the people happy.

The journey in, the journey out.

Lightning.

Healing hand of Medicine Man.

Journey of Life.

Sun & rain.

The four seasons.

There are visitors. Did we miss it? He nods, “Aoo`.”

There is moment. Hoof prints stamped into cool sand. Echoes: lost in wonder, earth & sky.

Canyon de Chelly Echoes is a post from: Pif Magazine

I’m a good daughter. I take her to lunch every Wednesday. I sign her out of The Home. I hate watching her try to eat. I’m sick of her not speaking.

I text Dexter: u don’t luv me

LOL, he texts back.

Dexter is a demon. He called me an over-accessorized hot spot yesterday evening and FYI: he didn’t even kiss me. I slammed the door and left my own apartment. I slept in my car. I wanted him to know how much I suffer for him.

U r all whim was his text.

Stiff back from not sleeping, hacking cough from too much grass, I pick up Dementia on schedule, regardless of circumstance.

Dementia, I say to my mother, Dexter just texted me. I think he’s gonna split.

Dementia answered, 86, 86, 86.

Isn’t 86 what you say when somethin’s gone? I pulled the waiter’s arm and whispered in his ear. What the fuck, he said, under his breath, looking like a little kid. I pulled him harder and screamed inhis ear. Yes, he finally said, pulling away like every creep guy I ever met.

I ordered me and Dementia vanilla milkshakes and a plate of French fries. The kid jotted it all down in his memory bank and fled. He plopped down the mess, without a word, five minutes later.

Dementia was putting fries in her milkshake, licking her fingers, dropping the milkshake-stained fries all over the place, including her face, dress, lap. She needed a bib. I was sick to my stomach, watching my once-beautiful mother.

Mommy…the word came out begging.

86, 86 86, she kept repeating, licking her fingers, scratching her ass.

86, I texted Dexter.

The phone beeped back: LOL

FYI, I texted back, F U.

Some chick cleared the mess. The kid stayed out of sight. Dementia got up and started wandering, tasting food from the plates of strangers.

I took Dementia back to The Home, hugging her, without a hug in return, just like real life. She didn’t even turn around when the orderlies buzzed her in.

You’re all I have, Mommy, I said to myself. Then I went back to texting Dext.

Milkshake And Fries is a post from: Pif Magazine

I was nine-years-old and my team was the Indians, our uniforms white with red trim, and we were sponsored by a local real estate company.  Our team was good, or at least I thought it was better than our win and loss record turned out to be. I enjoyed our twice weekly practices on the field at the nearby elementary school almost more than the actual games.  I also liked that our team was managed by Joey Coletti’s older brother, John, and we were the only team not managed by someone’s father.  John was someone we looked up to without ever feeling intimidated.  He encouraged us to do our best, offered tips where appropriate, and then it was “On with the game.”

Little League was divided into the minor league and the major league, and the Indians were in the minor league since it was almost unheard of for someone to make a major league team before the age of eleven.  I’m still not sure why we were forced to try our for Little League.  I can’t think of one kid who never made it on a team, but who knows? There were six teams in the Little League minors, and only twelve spots per team, so there were probably a few too many.

A Saturday morning in February all new potential Little League players had to show up with a parent and guardian at a school gymnasium.  We were then forced to field grounders and given a chance to take our best shot at three pitches.  I don’t think I slept much the night before, so nervous was I that I might fail, terrified that my dream of playing would be thwarted before it even began.

My father took me to the tryouts, trying to reassure me and calm me down, even though he had absolutely no interest in baseball.  My mother was the avid baseball fan, starting with her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers when my parents first moved to Manhattan from Toronto.  Still, my father dutifully, and frequently, played catch with me, starting when I was about five, and I believe the first baseball mitt he ever owned was bought at the time he took me to the Englewood Sports Center to buy my first glove, one with Luis Aparicio’s signature scrawled across it.  Along with Willie Mays, a true home run hitter, which I knew I’d never be, Luis Aparicio, the great fielding shortstop for the White Sox, and then the championship Orioles, was my hero.

I never thought of my farther as being physically handicapped, but he was, born with spina bifada, with one foot about a size and half larger than the other, so when he walked, he tended to lean forward to make his limp less noticeable.  His childhood was marked by numerous operations on his back and legs, and a great deal of time wearing leg braces and using crutches.  Naturally, he never played sports as a kid, and though he may have regretted this a bit in the beginning, he dedicated his time and interest to science and studying, as well as becoming a pretty accomplished magician, one who mastered a variety of tricks, from those where he was flawless at shuffling cards and guessing which one you picked, to multiplying little red balls, one after another appearing from the first one, and also replicating the same type of trick with handkerchiefs, and finally demonstrating a brilliants sleight of hand by pulling a bright penny out of a child’s unsuspecting ear.

I’m not sure whether my father took it upon himself to devote so much time playing catch with me, or perhaps my mother encouraged him after it was obvious I didn’t share my father’s love of model trains, or more likely, it was a combination.  Regardless, those catches in the backyard or on the lawn just before the beach at the lake at the summer cottage in Ontario were probably the best shared moments of my life with my father.

I remember one particularly haunting story he told me as he sat on the side of my bed when I was maybe four, long before wanting to play baseball was close to becoming something I wanted to do.  Unintended consequences, I was able to see that later on.  The theme of loneliness and rejection ran through my father’s childhood, and in relating such horrible experiences to me, he sought to reassure me that nothing like that would ever happen to me.  Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.  If my father, whom I looked up to as someone who was there to care for and protect me — in short, was the equivalent of my own childhood deity — could suffer so much during his childhood, what chance did I have?

Anyway, the haunting story had to do with baseball,  I guess my father was eight or nine, and obviously couldn’t participate in any capacity, so he was standing around watching his friends playing a game of baseball in a local park.  I don’t know how my father came up with this idea, but he decided it would be funny, a great joke, if he grabbed the bat of the player who was up before he could swing at the oncoming pitch.  In my father’s head, the player would be prevented from swinging and everyone would have a great laugh.  In reality, the hitter snapped his wrists back before following through and smacking the pitch, with the result that he smashed my father in the face, breaking his nose, and sending my father sprawling on to his back, unable to walk, with blood gushing everywhere.

With that in the past, and Little League in my future, I do remember my father taking me to my first professional baseball game at Yankee Stadium shortly after I had an epiphany and apparently turned to my mother and said in awe, “You mean Mickey Mantle’s real?”   And he was real all right, starting in center field the day my father took me to see the Yankees play the Kansas City Athletics.  We were joined in our outing by the man who lived across the street from us in Flushing, Queens, and his son, who was about my age.  Hot dogs and soda and peanuts, and spending the afternoon watching the heroics on the field of the larger than life, at least for me, players on the New York Yankees, whose numbers on the scoreboard listing the lineup were consistent and readily known to me throughout my grade school years.

Like my first Little League game, I don’t remember all that much about the first Yankees game I attended, except I know we won our game at Garrity Field and the Yankees beat the Athletics, though I have no idea of what the score was of either game.  I do know at the end of the Yankees game that day, a memory that was triggered by Billy Crystal in a baseball documentary, my father and I walked hand in hand out on to the field and out across from the infield toward center field where much of the crowd was leaving the stadium, and we were, as well.

Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee “Scooter” and great shortstop before my time, and before he became heralded for his familiar, excited cry of “Holy Cow!” as an announcer for Yankees games of WPIX Channel 11, was the master of ceremony on opening day at Garrity Field for my first Little League game.  Members on both teams lined up in front of their respective dugouts as some guy in the announcers’ booth played a horrible, warped record with a song about “Little Leaguers being eager beavers,” and fortunately, those are the only words I remember.  And then the umpire yelled, “Play ball!” and the other team took the field.

I started in left field that day and batted clean up. I don;t know why but almost without exception the son of every team’s manager played second base.  And that’s where Joey Coletti started, even though his brother was our manager.  I do know that Joey Coletti and I both scored during that first inning at bat and we were never behind in the game.  I also know that my father wasn’t there to see it.  In fact, my father never saw me play Little League that year, or the next, or ever, and I’ll always wonder if he knew how much he helped me by playing catch for countless hours with me, limping with an awkward limp, as he stretched his undersized glove out to greet the ball that was thrown by me.

More than just playing catch is a post from: Pif Magazine

It was raining outside. The old man was sat in the corner of the coffee shop staring into his mocha latte, the vapors warming his face. He was yet to take a slurp. He’d unpacked his tattered old radio from his satchel and placed it in front of him on the table. It had seen a lot, the radio. The steel of the aerial was bent and stuck in place with a binding of masking tape and glue. The volume knob was gone, lost to a long ago; and one of the speakers hung loose from its socket causing it to distort. He looked briefly at the waitress, her hair and curves, and the nodding heads sat opposed at the myriad tables. Rings of worlds still whole. Like the radio, the old man’s mind was distorted in the atmosphere. Phantoms he’d never known to exist had risen from the mists of his mind but an hour ago and were dancing enjoined with glee in a macabre ballet. They had smeared grins and their bodies were wisps of black streaking along his frontal lobe with ineffable grace, circling wisp to wisp in mantric song.

He knew of names for these ghouls: philosophy, religion, spirituality, conscience. People had created so many of them over the millennia, but now he knew they were all one of the same thing. Poor Kurtz knew it at the last, no one was immune. Incredibly, plenty of people dance with them early in their lives before they really need to. Embracing them with a somewhat Faustian uneasiness. Poets and writers for instance, those of the church too, make a decent living from immortalizing their activity – materializing their presence. But if anyone on the face of the planet could have avoided them, it was the old man sat at the coffee table that evening. Born to die

The waitress wandered over. She was all ivory and gold and spoke in an accent. Probably from Ukraine, he thought. Lots of them were in the city, their names scribbled beyond the dotted line. Would you want coffee? More, more? she asked, brandishing the pot like a weapon. He analyzed her gaze: it was glacial, unblinking, and in the manner that only those children of the eastern bloc can know, those who can make a stone bleed and dance. Even for a choice as banal as this her stare had been groomed for generations never to falter. But he saw something. He caught from the wall a twitch of her small mouth as if to underline the gravity of what she was asking. If only she asked something different with the same pitiless intent. This can’t hide your loneliness my ice queen. What goes on in that little foreign head of yours – I should be foreign – amongst this rabble whose nuance you’ll never understand and certainly never love. Why are you here? Will you love me?

He looked back longingly into her wide blue eyes, not able even at the very end to converse, to woo, to blackmail, to ravish – to prop and people his fantasy and take her into the back kitchen and sink within the enigma of her slender waist.

He turned cravenly back to his coffee without answering. He felt her presence and the cascade of that stare a few moments longer before she gave a low uuummph and tottered off in between the tables, drawling her alien tongue under her breath.

You could suppose that the old man had led a divisive life, if only recently. It was one that fundamentally fractured only an hour ago in the consultancy ward of a hospital, and subsequently, in the creamed swirl of a mocha latte. Before that life was one of routine, a retired plumber: he got up, made a brew, ambled to the bookies, lost on the dogs and the horses, roamed to the tavern, spirited himself away to fumes and the paralysis of empty nostalgia. Then he staggered home – home was a two-room flat in a council tower overlooking the unspectacular – ate a microwave meal, watched telly, unwound to porn, then limped to his bed. He was one who existed on the earth, gazing at the world indifferently with eyes on stalks. A crustacean scuttling from the shadows of rock to rock not sad or lonely or confident or mysterious, just alive.

He took one of his hands from the cranium of the coffee mug and fingered the old radio into life. A shrill voice streamed from it amidst a constant crackle and buzz. Talking heads from the other tables glanced over with steel in their eyes and frowned before falling back into their worlds.

. . And already they near the completion of the first half of this grand circuit and the leading pack have formed a strong lead and trailing them still is Old Avenger at the back of the field as expected. His rider onboard is whipping frenzily, trying to get his horse into gear, get it moving. I’m sure the board will be taking a retrospective look at this after the race, but he’s got to do something to inject some life into it . .

The illness had been consuming him for two years now but for only one hour was he aware of its presence, the thing buried deep in his loins. He had come to the coffee shop straight from the hospital. It was newly built, a super-hospital the local press so indelicately called it upon its unveiling: large and domed. It replaced the old royal one close to town and the old man had to get two buses to make the journey. He’d sensed by the phone call they were not going to merely advise more vitamins.

A Dr Tambling broke the news, a square faced man of mid-thirty or so who seemed garishly joyous with the world he worked in. He smiled a Hollywood smile and was flanked by two pretty but reticent underlings. His hair was expensively cut, his back straight, shoulders square, and he held a penetrative but casual gaze that looked through you to titles and awards and leggy dolls looking for ‘Doctors’. The old man disliked him. He opened his arms and invited him into the consultancy room. Would you desire a tea or coffee? he asked. Desire. No he wouldn’t, so he began. Okay Mr Davison, I’m afraid we have your test results back..

The next moments remain a blur, rather like a scene from a drama sitcom or the movies where they point the camera at the Doctor staring straight back from the perspective of the poor soul he’s condemning.

Then it unfolds like this: the scene is fast-forwarded so the Doctor convulses with alien speed, he is stood still but his arms jut and bend spontaneously like a beetle rolling dung, his eyes gaped wide, white and shatteringly still – as still as the drones either side of him paining their wooden features, straining to look sympathetic – and his lips puck and quiver like some animal furrowing in the dirt to a high-pitched rabble and all you, the patient, can hear is your own narrating consciousness commenting on the very scene patiently and catching from the miasma the ostensibly grand but dreadful sounding nouns of medic-speak. This was how it went for the old man. The moment introspection dawns on even the most idle.

The Doctor stood firm with his invincible ease and entered into the crescendo, his hands now knotted together in front of him, crafting the stark of the truth with pearls he threw into the air called “prostate glands,” “radiation,” “hormonal treatment” and the odd piece of coal like “infertility,” – not that he cared about that. And then grabbing more pearls called “battle” and “desire” and “prolong” and juggling the clichés in with the medical jargon, arcing the deathly mist thickening the room, a drawn grin on his otherwise contemptible face as he performed his tired act of rallying the patient in the same suave and declarative manner that he’ll, only hours later, pronounce a death to desperate colleagues over a corpsed bed in ICU; praising their effort and “all they could” but whistling the tune of mortality and how it is that some things are dictated and unfortunately “that’s life” before going home to sip a glass of red and screw a beauty over his four-poster. His act was as flawless as ever as he looked at just another coffin-dodger dead in the eye and composed his sonnet on existence before bringing it to its grand and exhilarating climax: Terminal, he said.

The old man was sat down holding a betting slip in both hands and he felt only the cold of the chair through his chinos. The talking head drifted somewhere after that, leaving Davison alone with the density of life. The room was quiet but he could see through the double-glazed glass the ward outside in its daily tumult, the doctors, nurses, interns all leaned over countless horizontals, examining their plight. Pipes and instruments protruded from different coloured flesh, searching for souls. The immutable buzz of energy light bulbs, the panorama of endless, blinding white, and high ceilings, impersonal and alien but animate. The whole place looked seemingly alive as if the architecture of it was itself some great, fatted beast breathing in death as people rushed around in white coats baying to its gluttonous command. Agents and workers to the harvest.

The inks of the betting slip rubbed blue onto the old man’s thumb and forefinger as he absorbed the news. He’d put the bet down on the way to the hospital, a horse called Old Avenger. His usual stake of five quid. He broke the silence with a trembling croak.

Fifteen to one, he said. Three miles, two furlongs, good to soft. And he had an operation a week ago too, trainer said he wasn’t breathing well in his last race. Good earner if it comes through.

He sat nodding. The Doctors looked sheepishly at one another before the old man stood up. He crossed to the window and stood gazing out. A row of elms were swinging in the wind and the sky behind them was softly streaked in a burning crimson over the roofs of the city. It was so peaceful and distant from the glass on the other side of the room and he felt something rise. A single, crystal tear presumed extinct – melted from the dewed orb of the old man’s left eye and clung to a withered lash, hanging a moment before it plunged down onto the tweed of his cardigan. Erm, Mr St Clair? the Doctor asked quizzically. He turned from the window and placed his tartaned flat cap over his head, shaping and cocking it before walking toward the main lobby and the exit, drowned in his world entire. Where are you going? they said. The Doctors watched him leave.

He slept briefly on the bus back into town. The image he’d created of his cancer raged in the dream: he was drowning in the black of the Atlantic during a great storm, foam was crashing over his head and he battled against the ocean’s beat bobbing between the depths and the surface. He was watching a cruise liner only a few miles distant shaking violently within the swell as screams funneled from its portholes. The screams mingled with the horn and the groans of the dying boat and the crash of snapped metal reverberated from under the sea. They grew louder. He’d just resurfaced from another wave, gasping, his lungs and eyes flooded with salt, when he saw them towering high through the murk. Two great tentacles battening the air. Spawned in the deep colds and now rising from the sea to languidly wrap them around the girth of the vessel. The giant squid was at least thirty times larger than those measured by man and was slowly disemboweling the boat from underneath: its serrated cups sucking air tight against the polished steel of the hull, mated against it. The vessel rocked and swung and glinted under starlight until it swung no more and the squid performed the death roll, its great mass appearing for only a few seconds jellied and greyed by the murk. It spun exposed to the moon and the old man could see the two glassed eyes of the beast mute and godless. He saw it clearly; saw its gills contracting with air. Saw its anus inked and black. And he saw its beak, a relic of myth, hungrily shredding the metal which twisted from its mouth, winnowing the bits of viscera it didn’t want and which were carried away with the tide to become rafts for the stranded wailing on top of them. The scene submerged beneath the surface to silence and oblivion.

This was where the dream ended, where he woke up against the cold glass of the bus window. But he didn’t need to know the next episode for it was clear in his mind what the squid was to consume after the ocean liner, it lay between his legs.

. . and now as they come galloping into the home straight we have five riders separated by less than a length. This could be one of the great finishes, one of the great races. All but one jostling for glory with only one fence left and here they all are the fearsome quintet. They all make it safely over the fence and on they go, triumph in sight. And.. oh a faller! We have a faller! So we’ve lost one, Old Avenger in a desperate blunder has gone at the final fence and is stricken on the floor. The jockey is down too, neither of them moving. Old Avenger, having never threatened at all in this race has gone down at the last. He is out! He is out! HE IS OUT!

Hours then passed in the coffee shop and day sank into night. The betting slip lay limp on the table and the old man looked around at the emptiness and the cluster of waitresses grouped at the counter, leaning with unease as they eyeballed the stranger. He stood from the table with his hat in his hand, and walked quietly over to the exit leaving the untouched latte to congeal and the radio to crackle into eternity.

Once outside he lit a fag and looked out from the pavement, a swinging anvil with medieval lettering proclaiming the coffee shop creaked to and fro overhead. The night was alarming and he looked up with sad eyes and leveled the cigarette at the brightest star to the north. He pointed it upwards in his eye line so the end of it burnt in a quadrant of space next to the star. Considering, musing: noting its nooks and crannies with a summarizing eye. It was winter. It was black. It was endless. The stars seemed brighter than they had before, at least to him. And the outer reaches of his cone of vision, that haze that can so bewitch a man with ghosts of nature and memory, conjured silver lines of half-ling comets soaring to other destinies he didn’t know were true or not. It was as if the sky was traced with spider silk and the spider was hiding clamped to the dark side of the moon, as stealthy as his cancer.

He shivered from the chill. The wind was bitter and invisible and it clawed at his face, whistling along the deltas of his wrinkles. He saw it propel congregations of exploded clouds that were pale and blue and clung together in disparate anatomies and speeding westwards in a faint whoosh. They knew something.

He threw the fag to the fate of the world and wandered in the direction of nowhere in particular. The street lonely and his to rule. He cried as he walked, reckoning aspects of life and nature, not just himself and the sudden startling awareness of time – the great deadline; but passions of people, his enjoyments: sports, a treacle pudding, birdsong, the daughter he abandoned. Each, however casually enjoyed by the subconscious over the endless and immortal years now raged as beacons more blinding than the dots above and with an orderly line marshaled and formed strictly behind them. Time so nearly up. This was why he looked up at the night sky, not to whine and ball over the beauty of it but staring at it, into it, stripped bare of all its tags of mystery and cliché and the fraud of romanticism. He saw everything plainly for the first time at the very end: the unconditional breath of the cosmos, the nightingale singing from a veined leaf, a rugger ball cutting the air. The round faces gobbling up sugary treacle and his nameless child bouncing through a field to play, the petals of daffodils holding her knees. He walked down the lonely pavement and into the blackness until his existence was visible no longer. Consumed in annihilation. Everything would stumble on without him.

Old Avenger is a post from: Pif Magazine

named for a fallen soldier.

I tasted tomatoes and cucumbers

with vinegar for the first time.

Boys tried to press closer.

Eden already tainted, already bloody.

Tractors pulling carts of oranges,

crunching, breaking sticky carob pods.

Plates of hard-boiled eggs –

not religious practice, but still

part of the national myth.

God gave me this bounty.

I have no Hebrew name.

The tang of fresh yogurt

a whole different spiritual summons.

Sure, smug as insecure teens,

we all wore peace signs.

My body became occupied territory.

But the condom broke and

I took the risk anyway.

Summer of 1970, Five Word Lines is a post from: Pif Magazine

beside a campfire I can’t quite get to flame.

I know it’s not a liquid, she says.

Is it a gas? Is it a solid?

Simple. Straightforward. Something

I should know, I’m sure.

I start to say it’s what’s left

when the wood gives up the ghost,

but then I think of ash—

I always think of ash,

how it’s something but nothing,

what’s left when something’s gone.

There was a woman, then there was ash

her husband and the men she loved

scattered on the beach. The wind

wouldn’t let her stay there where she wanted.

My mother, seeding cancer, more ash

than paper dangling from her Lucky Strike.

What is it? my daughter says.

Nothing, I respond.

No, she says, what is smoke? I say

It’s what I make instead of fire.

Smoke is a post from: Pif Magazine

Wisniewski’s fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Southern Review, Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Gettysburg Review, to name a few.  His narrative poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry International, New York Quarterly, and Poetry.

Mark Wisniewski

Wisniewski has been awarded two Regents’ Fellowships in Fiction, an Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction, and first place in competitions for the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, the Gival Press Story Award, and the Tobias Wolff Award.

DA:  Congratulations, your recent novel, Show Up, Look Good, has received high praise for being an intelligent book written with a “riotously original voice.” Are you really, as one blurb suggested, part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, and part Elmore Leonard?

MW: This business of likening me to other authors has been going on since the ‘80’s. First they said I was like Hemingway and Bukowski, those comparisons often made to disparage me as a womanizing drunk. Then it was McInerney and Salinger, with the resultant accusations that I was a snob. I’m glad McCullers and Capote have been tossed in—kind of rounds out my personality, don’t you think?

DA: How long did it take to write Show Up?

MW: Writing and revision took about three years. Publication took seven.

DA:  You’re originally from Milwaukee.

MW: Yes. A good Polish boy. Actually a good Polish boy who, if born to be a writer, didn’t suspect it until he was older. And didn’t declare himself a writer until he was older still.

DA: Why was that?

MW: My upbringing was blue-collar, an aftermath of all four grandparents having immigrated from Poland. Life back then for us was about securing work and meals and having a roof over your head. The roof over the head was huge. The father worked and put the roof over the kid’s head, so if the father wanted the kid to go out and work raking leaves or changing oil in cars or picking up garbage or hunting for night crawlers to sell to neighborhood fishermen, that’s what the kid did. Nobody’s dad said, “Stay under the roof and write and revise and send manuscripts to editors who tend to think Polish people aren’t smart”—if anyone’s dad had said that, he would’ve been called nuts by everyone down at Woidka’s On Tap.

DA: Your older brother went to medical school, and you felt pressure to become a lawyer–that seemed to be your father’s plan for you.

MW: My father’s and my mother’s. Maybe more so my mother’s. See, you were supposed to keep cash coming in to pay for the roof yet also go to school and ace tests so you could go to more school so you could someday make “big money.” So, yes, there was some parental talk about me becoming an attorney, and the fact that my older brother skated though prep school and undergrad and med school suggested I could likewise breeze toward lawyerhood. My older brother passed away somewhat tragically in his thirties—sometimes I wonder what he’d say about all of this now.

DA:  What were your thoughts when it came to college?

MW: I was the wisecracker in college. Everything in college was stupid. You know: hand me a beer at a party and stand near the stereo with me and the pot-smokers and we’d play Clapton and the Stones and criticize most everyone in the room, who were of course criticizing us. I was anti-Nixon, anti-disco, anti-suburbia, anti-materialism, anti-authority, and probably more than anything anti-myself, but here I was, spending most of my time and money to be part of an institution that, push come to shove, endorsed many of these things.

DA: No clue you were going to become a writer then.

MW: No. Just a lot of I don’t want to be here.

DA: Did you take any writing courses?

MW: If there were creative writing courses back then (and, remember, this was back in the mid-seventies, before most people had even heard of an MFA), I was unaware of them. I did take a course in the journalism department taught by a woman named Heather something. She was this good-looking, tough, no-bull teacher, a kind of Mary Tyler-Moore-wannabe slave-driver who required a lot of writing and, if I recall correctly, wore leather boots and lots of mascara and insisted her male students behave ultra-professionally. She stressed the five W’s and forced us to look for story. I suppose you could say she started me down a path.

DA:  During the summers you gained invaluable experience.

MW: Yes. Blue collar jobs in factories. Punching the time-clock. The kinds of jobs where you were required to wear protective eye gear.

DA:  And then you went to law school.

MW: Didn’t want to go, but I was accepted at Georgetown, which everyone around me said was too good an opportunity to ignore. So I went—that is, after convincing Georgetown to defer my acceptance for a year so I could write a novel, which I now knew I wanted to do. It was as if the threat of lawyerdom forced my inner spirit to play its hand career-wise. But the novel I wrote during that year of deferral was rejected by an agent, so off I went, to DC.

DA: What was the title of that first novel?

MW: Never Enough Ketchup.

DA: Does it still exist?

MW: By 1985 there was only one copy left, and during a stint of drunken frustration, on a very windy night, as I left a party where people were doing coke, I flung the manuscript as far as I could over my head. This was at like four in the morning, and the woman I was dating, who I now realize was probably more into drugs than I realized at the time, ran off in her mini-skirt chasing pages of whiteout-dabbed onionskin into these dark suburban yards while I stood on asphalt screaming something presumably profound.

DA: What did you scream?

MW: I have no idea.

DA:  You found a home for a while in San Antonio.

MW: I lived in a house there with my younger brother and a generous friend of his named Scotty. Rent was low and food was cheap, and days were warm, and back then eighty degrees in February didn’t mean global warming—it meant vacation.

DA: You became a substitute teacher there.

MW: Yeah. The phone would ring at six or seven or eight in the morning and I’d throw on Salvation Army khakis, walk the half dozen blocks to this high school (couldn’t afford a car), glance at the sick teacher’s lesson plan, then stand in front of the chalkboard and teach Fitzgerald, Rita Dove, or whomever. And if I didn’t know what the students were supposed to have learned, I’d sit on the teacher’s desk and ad lib stories about my Polish relatives, stories these students, being non-Poles raised in Texas, got a kick out of. I think they thought I was a freak. I remember all of us laughing a lot. I was writing and sending out stories then and always getting rejected, and this one kid walks up while I’m on cafeteria duty one day and says, “Mr. W, you should just write one of those stories you tell us in class and try to get that published.” This ended up being the best writing advice anyone ever gave me because it led me to write Confessions of a Polish Used Salesman.

DA:  Then you took another major step.

MW: Yes. Applied to the respected MFA programs, turned down my first choice, Columbia, because they didn’t offer enough money, went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst because they waived tuition and offered a stipend if I’d teach. I was finishing Confessions, and the novelist Jay Neugeboren loved it and helped me get an agent for it. I was still living in a tiny room and eating a microwaved baked potato with tuna and every night to save money, but things were looking up.

DA:  You were fortunate to study at U-Mass with John Edgar Wideman. .

MW: He encouraged me to find a narrative voice that wasn’t me and let it say whatever it wanted, the edgier the better. If it weren’t for John Edgar Wideman I never would have drafted Show Up, Look Good. In many, many ways, I owe that guy a ton.

DA:  And then it was time to go west.

MW: The UC-Davis creative writing program got wind of the fact that Confessions had an agent, so they offered me two years of waived tuition and fees and sweet brand new housing and a lot of fellowship spending cash on top of money to teach—and free health insurance—as long as I’d transfer to their program. I hadn’t had a physical for years, so I went.

DA:  Commenting on your story collection, All Weekend Long with the Lights On, Clarence Major, who taught then at UC-Davis, said you “capture with precision the speech patterns of working-class Americans.” Did you study under him?

MW: Yes. And I loved him and still do. He’s a helluva painter by the way, in addition to being the accomplished poet and fiction writer he’s known as. Talent-city, that guy, but what I admired most about him was his level-headedness and inner goodness. By this time I was pretty much despised and badmouthed by most any grad student I’d meet (if you want people to hate you, just show up in an MFA program with fellowships and an agented novel), and the supposed friends I’d made at U-Mass now considered me a traitor of sorts, so sitting in Clarence’s office was bliss. He was just so together. I wish more people were like him.

Show Up, Look Good

MW: The adjunct mill wherever they would have me. You know: one-year contracts, no health insurance, you leave one town and drive your crappy car halfway across the country and rent another tiny apartment and, without a single promise about your future, get assigned six classes, most beyond capacity. At this one university—and I kid you not—I was scheduled to teach a section of comp that, according to the attendance sheet I received just days before the first day of a semester, would meet in two different rooms at the same time. A total of something like sixty-four students were enrolled. For a comp class. When I went to the registrar’s office and said, “I think we have a clerical error here,” they looked at me as if I were asking to be fired. I asked them how, physically speaking, I could possibly be in two rooms at the same time, and they suggested I get students in one room to begin a writing exercise, then walk down the hall to the other room to get those students doing the same exercise, and so on. Of course none of us brought up the fact that, for this one class, I’d be grading 64 five-page papers every two weeks—in addition to the papers I’d need to grade for the other five classes I was scheduled to teach that semester for a measly $18K a year. Nor did the administration and I bring up the fact that now that I hadn’t just jumped through this ridiculous hoop of theirs with my mouth shut (and without caring about their students’ educations), there was no way they’d give me another one-year contract after that academic year was over.

DA: You ended up in Scranton, PA.

MW: For the 93-94 academic year, which was also the coldest year on record in Scranton history. That’s cold. And that was the year my brother died. And I think Bukowski died that year, too. By April or so of ‘94 I was so depressed I’d drive for miles to get away from things, sometimes winding up in Manhattan. I was on my second agent then, this one a woman supposedly more of a big-shot than the first, but she couldn’t sell Confessions either, though she did get me an inch away from being a joke-writer for David Letterman. There was a month or so then when I’d buy the Times every morning (yes, they had it in Scranton) and write jokes for Dave and fax them over to his offices, then stay up and watch to see if he’d used any, as well as wait all day for the phone to ring to see if he’d hire me full-time, which of course would be my ticket to leave PA. And the phone did ring, and I did talk at some length with a well-known producer whose upshot was that they were interested but I needed to wait longer and keep up the good work. But the phone never rang again. Or if it did, I’d already broken up with my girlfriend then (mutual depression, by the way, not a very good recipe for any relationship) and left Scranton for Manhattan, where I supported myself for a while by scalping tickets to the Letterman show itself.

DA: Any specific plans for the future, or are you just going day to day and writing?

MW: Tomorrow I travel to NYC to watch horses run at Aqueduct with another under published, underemployed, award-winning fiction writer. Alcohol will be involved, and of course there’ll be gambling, and with any luck there’ll be plenty of laughter. What happens after that depends on how much I win or lose.

Mark Wisniewski is a post from: Pif Magazine

I move closer to Pordova and hold her hand.

“Not now. Not here,” she says. Her hand tremors and I lose my grip. All I’ve ever wanted was companionship and this was the closest that I have come. It only makes sense that it is not achievable. It’s never the right moment. Years ago I would have begged and pleaded and asked why, but now I just shrug my shoulders and accept it.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“Me too.”

I was lying. I could go an endless amount of miles on this heartbeat and dedication. As long as she’s with me there’s an urgency to reach Santorel and rest before we wake. I tire her.

Pordova’s knees hit the sand, spilling her water bottle, her eyes turning towards mine. I grab her right arm at two places: hand and elbow. She thanks me instead of pulling away this time. Her kneecaps carry sand stuck to her sweaty legs and I help her brush it off. I knock the sand from my palms and onto my pants as we continue to walk to a tree that fans out like a bonsai. Pordova and I sit against it.

“Where did you say you wake up to, Zemi?”

“Home. Good ol’ New York City.”

It takes a certain amount of courage to break through the dry rheum mucus that tears away from itself. Our eyelids make-out each night and I’d like to think that every blink I give is a soft and delicate kiss against Pordova’s lips; a millisecond glimpse back into the dream world that we share. I bat my eyes incessantly with the hopes that I’ll turn into some creature, maybe Nosferatu. The coffin that I rise out of sends me to my death. Every time I feel the pillow fold around my face, where my cheeks contort just enough to make these smile lines seem permanent, I hope that I don’t wake up with an endless longing.

I picture my comforter shoved deep inside the duvet, and my girlfriend, Patrice, running the shower, brushing her teeth, and attempting to speak to me while my oscillating fan breathes air back into my lungs. And I lay there, with my brown hair on ends, jerking out of my slumber, spooked by an unknown source. I can’t crack the code. I check the time with one bloodshot eye and know that it’s the weekend. Those days never pass by without a distinct earthly underpinning.

My cat, Milo, scrapes his body against the doorway and begs for me to wake up and attend to his continental breakfast of canned goods. Our overgrown tree in the front yard runs its nails up and down our glass window. The pollen crosses in and out of the sun rays, hoping for a higher ground that will save it from extinction. Every piece of pollen rises like a balloon that’s just waiting to pop. I can’t even begin to rise. I’m tired.

I’m fine to share Patrice and Milo’s company, although I miss what Pordova and I have. But what Pordova and I have takes time. It can’t be finished in a night’s sleep. I regress back into Pordova’s conversation about where I live.

“Some crappy apartment,” I say, while tucking my right leg under my left. Pordova lets the water bottle drown her hair before it forms a single stream under her chin that waterfalls onto her lap. I watch these three steps forward and don’t take any back.

Pordova enjoys reading books in her bed with her hair curling and bending along the jaw lines that frame her face. Her boyfriend enjoys the sounds of television frequencies to send him into his nightly coma. But Pordova and I don’t sleep. We move.

“What’s the weather like there now?”

“Cold.”

Summer is sweat and fall is sweatshirts. Winter is overcoats and spring is overcast. I used to imagine the seasons as dripping memories that siphoned into the next month. But now it’s changed. I’ve moved from temperament to temperature. I’m falling out of repetition and I can’t seem to get it back. I want to belong instead of be longing for something else. I’d like to spring into summer with sexually-charged relationships that fall victim to the winter blues, whites, and red dye dresses. Patrice likes to have her dresses bleed around the holidays. Pordova cradles the holidays with a childish delicacy, enjoying every rock of coal in her Christmas stocking. I’m preying for seasonal salvation.

I wither every object in my presence. I can’t keep anything pristine or unbent. My shirts fade and wear at the collars as if moths fed on them during my hibernation. My dinner plates chip and spider after I delicately place them back into our cabinets. My girlfriend’s elastic skin bristles into crow’s feet and every conversation that I indulge her in shows signs of aging. All of this effort that I put forth in keeping things perfect has only returned damaged goods and voided purchases. I always get a warranty.

“Weather’s the same in Oregon,” she says.

Pordova lives outside of Portland in a house with a wall that should have been a deck; long floorboards run its length and break, intersect, and align. Although she tells me that it looks great inside, I wonder if she finds it more fitting in its natural habitat where it withstands those rainy Oregon days and ages well instead of being cooped up in a place that doesn’t challenge its durability. I regress back into Pordova’s conversation.

“We need to talk.”

“We need to go,” I say.

I’m moving towards Santorel. I should have let Pordova know this so she wasn’t raising her voice behind me and falling behind. I reach my arm back as if to help her. I’d shine my armor every night for her.

“Time is of the essence, my lady.”

“I’m not your lady. I’m your friend.”

I cringe, but I don’t let this slow me down. I said it hoping that it would pass over her like a word mumbled under my breath until we arrived at Santorel together. And maybe next time, like the brush of those pebbles on her knees, it will be accepted and thanked, instead of swept under the rug with such concise rejection. How about a thank you next time?

I’m charging forward to reach Santorel, thinking that every new step that I take will bring us closer. I just don’t know who “us” is. Are we merely broken hourglasses out here, or are we piling grains that accumulate space, time, and a hope to be flipped and start anew?

“I want to arrive with you,” I say.

“Well, won’t we be?”

“Sure.”

I want to show up at Santorel and have the town correctly assume my intentions. I need it to be true. I don’t want them to question the gap between our bodies, or our footsteps not being in synch. There must be no gap, but there’s time. I digress back into Patrice.

These days pass by and I scoot closer to the corner of our queen-sized bed. At least Milo enjoys the extra space. I used to cradle Patrice and let her body warm mine. Now I’m cool under these covers and I never break a sweat. What would she say if I whispered that I knocked sand from Pordova’s knees? How would Patrice respond to those thoughts that flooded my head and clogged my pours when I watched the water weave its way through Pordova’s hair? I need to divide and conquer these ruins.

There are things that I can’t tell Patrice. It’s these things that only Pordova understands. Maybe that’s what makes things so difficult for me to separate. Patrice’s eyes would crumble if I tell her everything, but there is this distance; a distance that I can’t build a bridge to drive over. It is a bridge that topples at the earthly shakes that tremble in my dreams.

Santorel is on the horizon, deep olive greens and flower smells; houses with decks in their rightful places and roofs with drains that leak down into the soil. These people share a comfort in the smaller things in life. They enjoy pumping the well for water. They turn and walk that water back into their homes to drink it, bathe in it, and reflect. I envision falling into the well like a boy who missed the bucket and lost his footing. I careen into a bottomless darkness, injured, and lay there, staring up at the circular spot of light, hoping to be rescued. Patrice knows that I’m clumsy. I wish Pordova did too.

“If you had one wish, what would it be?” I said to Pordova.

“To be back home.”

Home is a state of mind, or so I’ve been told. It’s made up of many things: We make friends. We make moves. We make progress. We make plans. We make-out. We make mistakes. We make distance. We make do. We make changes. We make love. We make babies. We make it cry. We make it stand. We make it drive. We make it work. We make it count. We make it up. We make pretend.

We arrive at the opening gates of Santorel and are met with smiles. I inch closer to Pordova, brushing my skin against hers. These barriers that I was so eager to cross don’t seem so familiar. The questions that I wanted to resolve have dissolved into trickling confusion. These are the breaks. I break stride with Pordova as I introduce myself to a woman, who bends at the knees to pick up a bucket.

“Who’s ya lady?” the woman says to me. I would have answered the same, but Pordova speaks up.

“I’m not his lady.” Pordova jostles. I knew it all along.

I retract within the words that flatten my own existence and scatter the hopes that I once had for my future. I ramble into oblique sentence structures with verbal soliloquies, sonnets and arias that can’t hold a tune. I fear my last days out in this empty repetitious stranglehold. Or is it a stronghold? I care for nothing that I have built, yet I want to stack those Lego bricks into a formation that resembles a home.

I am home-bound; restrained. I cut corners and ties that I swore to wear to church on Sunday for Patrice. The tie goes to the runner and I’m running as if my deity is Hermes, the Greek god of athletics. I digress.

“Honey, church.”

I burrow low, stretching my arms under the covers, feeling spots where grains of sand once hit my skin, as my heartbeat slows down. It is this good fortune of missing that balances any misfortunes that might preclude.

Maybe we’re all just waiting for our dreams to run their course before we’re fine.

I Digress Back into Pordova is a post from: Pif Magazine

“Christ, you can be hateful when you want to be. This isn’t your business. You don’t have to tell me this.”

Clara struggles to keep down a sneer, tightening her lips against her eyeteeth. “No, I have to say that the emperor wears no clothes. I have to say I see even if it doesn’t change anything. It matters and don’t act like it doesn’t. What doesn’t matter is your stupid skirt. The ugly red of it. It makes my eyes strain. I don’t know how, but it does. I guess it matches the bright colors of that childish shirt you have on. What? Is that supposed to be ironic or something? At least that sweater covers it up pretty well. Oh and nice job on that, too. Pitch black! Great for walking at night, ass. See? That doesn’t matter. It’s not my business.”

“Classy, you stupid bitch. And when did this other thing become your business? Huh!?”

“I guess it all started when we went to get beer together. He kept saying douchy shit and you kept just saying okayokay or fine like you just wanted to keep him from throwing a temper tantrum. You were those people. We were in a Marsh and you were those people. How trashy is that? And you enable him by doing that. He mouths off and you just say okay. Fuck you. And I was there and next to you and I was that friend who doesn’t say anything when they act like that in public and it made me that person. I like to think I control my image, but that fucktard and you had to be little childish cunts and ruin my night and the night of anyone else in that aisle. I asked Steve later and he said you guys do this all the time and that you get into stupid little fights over nothing and he ends up calling you a fat ass and you get all upset. Fuck you, again. Every time you go back to him after something like that you’re only saying that it was okay and that he can do it again. What the fuck is your problem? This is Tim and Carrie level shit and you noticed how shitty they were together and still you get caught up in the same thing. And it’s not like he’s great in any way. He has an okay at best profile, but from the front he just reminds me of a chipmunk. And he has those retarded earrings that every asshole who spouts urban slang like it’s going out of style wears. Very fitting as the slang he uses is a decade out of date at least. Mad and yo every two fucking seconds. I will say that his ability to turn those words into an endless string of inane questions and arbitrary statements was pretty fucking impressive though. And I know from what you told me that he has friends who go out with high schoolers and start parties where people huff. And he seems like he would totally have those friends. He is completely that guy. He probably does those things too. NO, LET ME FINISH. What I’m trying to say is that your boyfriend is a two bit loser who treats you like shit and you all but say thank you. That makes me think you’re daft or have no respect for yourself and either way I can’t respect you now. I liked knowing someone I thought was cool and eventually would call, wrong or no, my friend. But all of that’s gone in a single shitty weekend. I feel gyped. I guess that’s what I’m getting at. And if I seem cold it’s only because I think less of you.” Her friend makes a new attempt to speak, but this only seems to enrage Clara. “Why? Do you not think about your image? Do you fucking care what that looks like when you point to someone like that and say you want to be with him and have him represent what you believe to be your equal? How worthless and mediocre it makes you look. I don’t get it. Do you get off wallowing in shittiness? Do you? You must because otherwise you haven’t a thought in your fucking head. You dumb cunt. I have had more than enough of you. There is no us anymore. One of us cares about image and stupid, replaceable cunt isn’t the image I want.”

“Done? I’m trying not to cry. I’m tired, so tired. First, you spend most of the night talking shit about my friends, my friends that specifically invited you to their party despite your constant beratement. I’d tell them about it, but I think it’d break their hearts and I’m not mean enough to say everything I want. Secondly, you just made me feel like shit. I don’t care how negative you need to be or how you justify it, it isn’t right. You could say the same thing in a much nicer way, but I don’t think that’s what you want. You want to hurt me because you feel I hurt you. I get it, but I am not resigned to taking it. You are not going to this party with me. You were invited, but as my companion for the night. You have proven that you are not my companion, tonight or any other. You are not my friend. Don’t bother explaining yourself or calling me tomorrow. Goodbye.” Her heels dig in before twisting her around. She swings the door open as hard as she can. Clara follows.

Fog surrounds and, by sticking clammy to their skin, embarrasses them in a way that neither could explain if asked.

“Can I ask you a question? Just one. Just the one and that’ll be it. Come on.” Her friend tries to ignore her. “Yes? Is that silence consent? Okay, great! Well, did you meet him at a party or a rectal haberdasher? I always forget which.”

“Ew. Christ, what’s that?”

“Somewhere where one might procure an asshat.” The other girl had stopped briefly, but continues on with new resolve. Clara walks quickly after in the most disinterested way she can manage.

The girl comes to a bridge over the stream around the neighborhood of the party. Clara allows the bridge to be cobblestone for dramatic effect. The other stops in the middle and leans against the edge, peering into the brief remains of the day. Clara comes forward, amusing herself with the click of her heels on the stones beneath her.

“They’re Mormons. That isn’t a sin.”

“What a shitty choice of words.”

“They don’t deserve what you say about them. They’re too nice.”

“Sure, your friends are nice, but they’re fools. I hold people responsible for everything. I don’t bring it up if they don’t though. And who else throws parties where their isn’t drinking? I don’t drink, it’s nice. You do though. And I forgave you for it. Who’s to say I’m not capable of forgiving you for this?”

“You don’t forgive. You just forget so you can rediscover it and how sick and sad it makes you feel. And don’t talk about parties. You don’t drink, but even more you don’t party. You can’t let yourself. Remember that and don’t follow me. Neither of us will have a good night then. Though I think that may be just what you want.” Setting off once more.

“I’m going as I’m invited and it’s nice to show up to parties where you’re invited. I wouldn’t want to disappoint.”

What is it that changes in Clara’s vision, watching the girl walk away? The once ugly skirt changes with the light. It’s bright yet rich redness seems to bleed into the still, grey fog. Clara begins to think that it will be a shame to see its magic disappear when they leave the night for the interior of the party. She had never seen any color seem so saturated in real life.

Clara looks beyond the pastel colors of the homemade streamers and through the window. A trick of the dying light makes the whole world peach for a brief glimmering moment. Maybe it’s this, or maybe Clara is just feeling kind, but as she turns back around and sees her friend with closed eyes, peaceful in its concentration face and flowing black hair whipping wildly around as she dances, Clara forgives her. She forgets her hatred of dancing to see her friend lost to the music, her face not apologizing for its ugliness for once. She is herself and with friends.

Clara picks up a freshly made cookie from among the other homemade party foods and crepe paper decorations, and finds that she has never tasted anything so perfectly sweet. And as-UGH!-she spits out the saccharine brown mush into a neon napkin from the table. She rubs inside her mouth with her tongue in an attempt to wash away the sickening sweetness of it. Sweeping her tongue in the back of her gums she finds and spits out a crinkled and blackish brown bit of mush that must be a raisin, but she cannot convince herself that it is anything but an old larva filled beetle that had crawled into the cookie dough before being marinated and cooked in and with its young.

Clara Gives Leave Of Her Better Senses and Wastes Her Time Remembering is a post from: Pif Magazine

Bill Yarrow

Yarrow is currently a Professor of English, as well as iCampus Faculty Coordinator, at Joliet Junior College in Illinois, where he has taught since 1993, including courses in creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. He is also a poetry editor at THIS Literary Magazine.

Derek Alger:  Congratulations on the recent publication of your poetry collection, Pointed Sentences.

Bill Yarrow: Thanks, Derek. I’m very happy that Geoffrey Gatza and BlazeVOX published Pointed Sentences in January. It’s a handsome volume and is a representative collection of 114 of my poems written mostly over the last three years—a prolific period in writing and publishing for me.

DA:  The poet Tony Barnstone describes you as “the Sun Tzu of verbal warfare” and “the Machiavelli of mental strategy” in referring to Pointed Sentences.

BY:  I appreciate it and think it was very generous of him.  I think he’s referring to the fact that my poems routinely pull the rug out from under the reader, move in unexpected directions, create a kind of reading and thinking whiplash. My poetic strategy seems to be that of the change-up, off-speed verbal pitches, an impetus to the unanticipated, continual (when I can manage it) surprise.

DA: You’ve published chapbook collections of poetry, but obviously with experience your poems are more accomplished now.

BY: There’s no direct relationship between experience and accomplishment. It would be great if there were a constantly upward curve in terms of a writer’s development, but it’s not straightforward progress. Novice poets can write brilliant as well as jejune poems; experienced poets are quite capable of writing crap even at the height of their ability, even as they produce works of genius. Wordsworth is the perfect example of the inconsistent great poet. But if you mean that as experience fades and ripens, poets are better able to process experience and shape it into a successful story or poem, then I agree with you. And so did Wordsworth: “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” I completely agree with him. It takes me a long time—in some cases, decades—to process certain experiences. Tranquility can take a lifetime. With certain experiences, it may never come.

DA:  As a kid, the word amusement had a different meaning for you than it had for many.

BY: Right! I grew up in an amusement arcade. My dad owned and ran a penny arcade on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland from 1947 to 1977. I spent every summer there, playing Skee-ball and pinball as a child, then working for my dad and running the business as I got older. A utopia that became a dystopia!

DA:  You grew up in Philadelphia.

BY:Yes, we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs and my dad was home with us for most of the year. He went down to Ocean City in late May and my mom brought me and my three sisters down after school let out in June. We stayed down there for the summers and closed up in early September to return to Philadelphia for the start of public school.

DA: What were summers like at the amusement arcade?

BY: I met all kinds of colorful people and had a lot of singular experiences, but I look back on my summers mostly with horror. Ocean City is a wonderful place with a large, beautiful, white beach and much to offer. People who go there to vacation have a wonderful time. But when I was there, I didn’t vacation; I worked—and not as a casual summer employee but as a permanent worker, the boss’ son—and that made all the difference. Summers were traumatic for me. Working from 8:00 AM to midnight or 1:00 AM seven days a week all summer was grueling. Dealing with the arcade employees and with the customers (in this case, the entertainment-starved clientele that frequented a beach resort like Ocean City) was a nightmare. At least it was for me. I was thankful when Ocean City ended—returning to high school and later college felt like an escape into paradise.  I’ve just started in the last few years (that’s over thirty years later!) to write about it. The handful of poems in Pointed Sentences that reference or directly confront Ocean City (“The Beaded Sheathe,” “After the Shark” “Salt Thought,” Great Moments in Blindness,” Mussel Memory,” “Ossian City,” “George.”) just begin to rattle the scab of the wound. I’m clearly not done with that subject in my poetry. In fact, I’m still processing a lot of those adolescent and post-adolescent experiences!

DA: I’m sure there are some good memories of Ocean City?

BY: MANY good memories. My best friend’s father ran the frozen custard stand. We’d have free frozen custard at his dad’s place and then go and play free pinball for hours and hours at my dad’s. What could be better? Then we grew up. No one gets to stay in Eden forever.

DA:  Fortunately, you were encouraged to read by your parents.

BY: Our house was filled with books. My dad was an amateur book collector, frequenting auction houses, buying up big lots of books of all kinds on all kinds of subjects. I read widely and ravenously.  Maniacally! Since my dad was home during the school year, he and my mom often went to plays. Playbills everywhere!

DA: You were a natural for college.

BY: Environmentally favored and genetically predisposed. I was a good student. I went to Swarthmore College where I took a lot of comparative literature classes, wrote poetry, won some prizes, got a degree in English Literature.

DA: Being a poet was not as easy as you thought.

BY: No, but early encouragement goes a long way. It fuels me even today. There was a long stretch of years though when no one was interested in my poetry. I kept writing anyway.

DA: You ended up stepping out into the wider world.

BY: Along with everyone else.

DA: After college, you went to Israel soon after the Yom Kippur War and ended up as a volunteer on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, and then traveled about Europe.

BY: So many people had similar if not identical experiences. I tried to write about this time in my life; I kept journals and filled notebooks, but I was unsuccessful. I didn’t understand how to make use of my experience. I squandered a great opportunity. The first of many squanderings. Shakespeare has Richard II say, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” I came home with a lot of stories but ultimately empty handed and empty. I slumped back to Ocean City.

DA: One major opportunity wasn’t squandered, you fell in love while corresponding with a woman you met on kibbutz.

BY: Yes, my love, my salvation! But then love is everyone’s salvation. Two writers fall in love through letters they write to each other. Imagine that! And then we got married a year and a half later over spring break in graduate school where she studied journalism and I got my MA in English literature, taking comprehensive exams in Renaissance and 18^thcentury literature.  Johnson and Boswell became late enthusiasms.

Pointed Sentences

DA: How did you develop an interest in film?

BY: I was completely turned on by seeing films by Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean-Luc Godard and others in T. Kaori Kitao’s film study class at Swarthmore in 1972. Completely eye-opening and mind-blowing! I later took Alfred Appel’s class in film noir at Northwestern. When I had the opportunity to teach film at Joliet Junior College, I grabbed it. I offer my film class each semester both in a face-to-face version and also online. I use a lot of public domain films (see The Internet Archive: www.archive.org ). I’m a fanatic for film noir, silent films, and lesser known/obscure films (see my film blogs: http://byarrow.blogspot.com/ and http://billyarrow.blogspot.com/ ). Some of my favorites: The Man Who Laughs (Leni), He Who GetsSlapped (Sjostrom), Cause for Alarm (Garnett), The Man Who Cheated Himself (Feist), Woman on the Run (Foster), Sudden Fear (Miller), The Blood of a Poet (Cocteau), La Chinoise (Godard), The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (Zeisler), Impact (Lubin), Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian), El Nazarin (Bunuel), Zoo in Budapest (Lee). I like so many! Hard to pick.

DA: You also teach Shakespeare.

BY: And creative writing. And contemporary literature. And world literature. And composition. And developmental writing. I’ve taught (but which teacher hasn’t?) many, many courses over the years.

DA:  What relationship do you find between teaching and writing?

BY: Teaching allows you to understand the difference between the bad and the poor, between the poor and the good, between the good and the great. It educates your palate. It develops your taste. It forces you to cross borders. It requires you to think things through. It is simultaneously a telescope and a microscope. What I know about writing, I know from teaching. I don’t believe in imitation but I do believe in models. I take ALL the great writing of the past as my model. I don’t discriminate. I read everything and everyone. Writing is knowing. But I don’t feel I really know anything until I’ve taught that thing. Teaching is humbling. It puts you face to face with greatness and dares you to back down. Writing is humbling too. It puts you face to face with what you know and dares you to walk away. I’ve tried not to walk away.

Bill Yarrow is a post from: Pif Magazine