Is This Blog Too Much of A Mishmash?

I’ve been thinking about this blog–well, I always think about it, but this is a specific question. I’ve been given some standard common sense advice to limit the focus. But I find I don’t really want to. That is, this isn’t just a poetry blog, it isn’t just a personal diary type blog, and despite its many valued contributors, not a magazine.
I can’t help but have goals, though. I want more traffic, more contributors…and by mid-autumn I hope to have a somewhat better look with a way to post each contributor’s byline simply.
But I like my mishmash. Every day I say–whatever happens today is the blog. It might be a poem sent from thousands of miles away. Or sneakers thrown over a telephone wire here on Santa Fe’s westside.
One suggestion is to create more than one blog. I keep hearing how the web is niched. Any opinions? I’d love to know what you think as readers, writers, and fellow bloggers. Tell me!

How Is Star Midden Faring?

In April, Leah Stravinsky installed Star Midden on The Land/An Art Site. She visited in July, and reports that the bowls (which in part represent the Pleiades fallen to earth) look good, are changing color due to sunlight exposure, and slowly filling with earth.

Creative Writing at Santa Fe Community College Fall 2011

There are still spaces in Julia Deisler‘s Poetry Class (Monday 5:30-8 pm) and in Terry Wilson’s Exploring Creative Writing.(Wed 6-8:45 pm) And possibly 1-2 spots left in Miriam Sagan’s Memoir Class, Tues/Thursday 1-2:15 pm.
SFCC offers both a certificate and an AA in creative writing, which transfers directly to IAIA and easily to UNM. Campus has a student run magazine, “The Santa Fe Literary Review” which you can follow on Facebook.The 2011 issue should be out very soon! We also have ten “Poetry Posts” which are a permanent installation to showcase student work.
Always happy to answer your questions.
***
P.S.FREE CREATIVE WRITING CLASS at downtown library Wed. Aug. 10 from 5:45-7:45 pm. Break your writing blocks and tell your stories! Contact Terry at tmwilson222@aol.com or 505-603-1218. Beginners welcome! (Ongoing class at SFCC, “Exploring Creative Writing” begins Aug. 24.)

Spirited Sisters: My Self with Gray Hair by Miriam Sagan

When I look in the mirror I see myself…but with gray hair. I see my grandmother who was a worn invalid by mid-life and my mother, who is 84 and teaching high school.
My main feeling about aging is a poignant one–so much time has past, so many things have happened, so many people come and gone. I feel the past with its tidal wave weight of water behind me.
My view is obviously formed by the fact that I haven’t had a healthy body since I was 21. At that time, I had what now, at long remove, appears to have been swine flu. Doctors told my parents I would die. My lungs failed, and I was in the ICU for many weeks (on an oxygen mask before respirators) and for many more in the hospital. I emerged from the Beth Israel Hospital a different person–and one cut over 25% of her torso.
The result was chronic pain, some trouble breathing, and eventually soft tissue trauma and a difficulty walking. The true result, though, was being blasted from one life into another. I became less conventional, I moved to San Francisco, I listened to my own drummer–simply because at 21 I knew, really knew, that I was going to die.
But I can’t remember an intact body. I think aging may be less traumatic for me in that I have truly come to live with limits–vanity doesn’t forbid a cane at 56 that I bought when I was 40. What is more traumatic though is that I’ve got some post stress–including a fear of doctors and a tendency towards self-pity! (what! Another symptom!).
So here I am, looking at 60. Happy to be alive, happy not to have died that ignorant hopeful girl I was. Amazed that I’m already twenty years older than my first husband Robert was when he died. Pleased I can still think of myself as cute as I catch a passing glance.
Teaching is the main thing that keeps me from feeling I’ll get rigid with age. I love the young–their tattoos, pierced noses, purple hair, generational kindness, and yes, hope, in the wake of the world they inherit. I read what they suggest, watch their favorite shows, listen to their music, ask for the techie expertise, and accept their advice.
The best advice I got recently from a 19 year old–”you should just do what you really want to.”

Photo by Hope Atterbury

Fleeing The Nazis At The Riverdale Ice Skating Rink

I’ve been thinking about fear–the different kinds that have been part of my life. I spent my childhood being terrified of Nazis. Oh, I was afraid of the Cossacks my grandparents ran from, and from the Russians who had missiles aimed right at my elementary school desk, but really it was my parents’ terror that haunted me the most. So, Nazis.
Being a practical child, I did fantasize solutions. Where would I hide? How would I run? Every Sunday morning, in winter, for many years, my father took us to the ice skating rink in Riverdale. I loved it there–the ice, the music, the hot chocolate, the bells and pom poms on my toes. Thanks to a weekly lesson with a guy named Vinnie, I was a pretty good ice skater.
So what did I think about as I skated round and round? Not a figure skating competition with me in an outfit. Not Holland where I’d glide with Hans Brinker and his silver skates. No, Nazis. I’d skate to the music, all the while fleeing from storm troopers. Of course on an ice skating rink you can’t really escape. So, mind following feet, I was trapped in a loop.
Once, coming back from the rink when I was nine, we heard the report–Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. There was an ad on the radio–”Who was the first to conquer space? Castro convertible!” Only years later did I realize the joke. We lived in a prim world where beds were beds and couches did not open. But Castro I knew, on an island that had missiles pointing at it or from it…It didn’t surprise me that he was now in the furniture business.

City of pickpockets and the dead

City of pickpockets
And the dead…

The Hondoran cabdriver
Points to the full moon
(solstice, eclipse)
Says: it is my favorite
How do you say it
In English?
My favorite…astro…

A sign in the bar:
WE CAN’T SURVIVE
WITHOUT LEVEE 5
And at the voodoo shop
HELP WANTED
(feathered boas, pole dancers, palm readers)

And for some unknown reason
Every other block
A reflexology parlor
(Chinese? Vietnamese?)
As if the foot
Were a map
Of the city
And the city
A map
Of the world.

City of pickpockets
And the dead…

No oysters in the little hotel
With its fountain
Of boys riding dolphins.
Necropolis of vaults
Ominous oven-shaped graves
Above ground so the dead don’T float
In a city where the living
Floated–a dog, a child, an old woman
In a wheelchair,
Where X, the universal sign for rescue
Is X’d on the voodoo graves
In groups of three
And I, who am accustomed
To light candles
Won’t leave a copper penny here.

Across the destroyed ward
It is Al Baba still
Where the robber king
Marks the door
Of his intended victims
With a chalk X;
Next morning every door
Is marked.

The silver mime
Turns on the corner
Yells at a tourist
Who fails to tip
“How’m I gonna buy
Dog food…”
A girl belts out
“There’s gonna be a heartbreak tonight”
Which for years I thought
Were lyrics saying
“There’s gonna be a party…”

And the beautiful ass
Of the stripper
Simmers in an argentine G-string
Girdled like hoochie-coochie
Aphrodite
Who rises
From this
Muddy water.

What Is Left Behind

What Is Left Behind

crossing the salt flats
dying of thirst

discard, first the button
then the dress

wooden yoke
then the oxen

the weight of the past
is too much

I’ll toss the silver samovar
the prayer shawl stripped in blue

self’s carapace
the souvenir

of experience
called mother tongue

maternal mitochondria
the DNA of air

War

War
                  Fiction by Miriam Sagan

          Gloria had been retired for over thirty years—if you consider running a motel in the desert retired.  But like all gypsies, she is never really retired—and so when Mel calls and says he has a part for her as an extra, right in her neck of the woods, she can’t help but say yes.  It means business, too; he’ll put up the tech crew at the motel where they’ll enjoy the hot spring in the center courtyard, the little cabins shaded by tamarisks.
          She and Mel go way back—fifty years—to the Arts Student League and Brooklyn and then Hollywood.  They’ve been friends, and lovers, and were even married at one point—but that is a long story.  Gloria’s pretty petite looks have been ravaged by sun tanning before sunscreen, age, a mediocre face lift, cigarettes, and at times a bad attitude.  But the motel has been a lifesaver.  She bought it when the only clients were old folks with arthritis.  But then came the
New Age—and she added massage and salt scrubs and reflexology to the menu, and crystals and books on healing at the front desk, while Native American flute music plays.
          It’s a weird gig.  Mel has tried to explain—it’s for the army, but not the army exactly—it’s done through a subcontract.  It’s for training.  They set up a typical desert village and there are actors who have parts—innocent civilian, terrorist with bomb, lady with baby, etc.  Then the soldiers in training come into the village and sort of practice . . . and here Mel gets a little vague.  “Destroying the village in order to save it?” Gloria asks helpfully.  Mel’s laugh gets cut off—reception can be weak out in the Mohave.
          Of course it is winter, or nobody would be practicing anything but dying of heat prostration.  Gloria shuts up for the summer, and goes to the Catskills. But it’s a mild December day, the morning sky a pale blue that will brighten to turquoise by noon.  So she packs up and drives a short distance to the site, taking her bottled water, sun visor, paperback, a deck of cards.  A lot of life is just waiting around—the theater, war, aging, running a motel, even baseball—and it is good to be prepared.
          At first look, the set is like any other.  It’s just a ramshackle arrangement of buildings—the kind that get burned down or blown up.  There are trailers and camera men and, Gloria is pleased to note, a catering van offering coffee and Danish at this hour, with the promise of lunch.  The whole thing feels cut-rate though, flimsy, and when she looks for Mel she is told he isn’t coming in until the second day, which is also the last day—tomorrow.  She finds the others—actors? extras? civilians?—sacked out in the shade of a big Joshua tree gossiping, napping, reading, and playing a deceptively casual hand of poker.  
There are about a dozen of them, an odd-looking crew, foreign somehow, not really Asian, not really Middle Eastern, but mostly dark.  She feels as if she has stumbled into some kind of odd restaurant, the kind L.A. strip malls are full of, and despite herself is about to eat something Mongolian or Bosnian or with a lot of couscous.  But a young man offers her a beach chair propped firmly in the
shade, people say hello, someone passes a bottled iced tea, and everyone is speaking a perfect uninflected English, the English of southern California.
          “Look, here comes the army.”  Someone points.  And two camouflaged trucks roll in with a cloud of dust and discharge another dozen or so young soldiers who also look cut-rate and flimsy—like bad actors playing soldiers.  The two groups barely glance at each other, even if they are opposing teams.  Gloria notes that while the actors can relax, the soldiers have to pretend to look alert. She has always hated that kind of job and lasted only two days once, years and years ago, at Macy’s.
          Then the sub-director—unshaven and with an air of pretension that seems absurdly optimistic in this setting—comes over and starts assigning parts. The buildings are labeled A, B, C, etc.  The parts seem equally generic.  Gloria is “woman.”  At least she has been spared “old.”  One of the young women in the group is “girl.”  They are in building F, a barracks-type structure that makes an L-shape with another.  Their activity is “cooking.”  Their designation, “harmless
civilians.”
          Now there is more waiting around.  They are in a low shady room that appears to have been built of adobe bricks.  In terms of “cooking,” there is indeed a kind of hearth and a large frying pan, but obviously no wood or fire or anything real.  Gloria and the girl—who despite her exotic dark looks is named Amanda—get to chatting.  Amanda, Gloria is relieved to hear, isn’t really an
actress.  She did this on a lark with a friend—they sometimes work as extras. Amanda is actually a sensible person who works in small business development and is engaged to be engaged to an appropriate-sounding boyfriend.
          But what if it were real?  What if Gloria were the aging mother, looking at the bare hearth, worried and frantic?  What if soldiers roamed the alleys outside, ready to hurt or kill?  What if insurgents were hidden out in back?  She is worried more for Amanda than for herself.  What if Amanda gets attacked and then no one will marry her?  Do they have men, husbands, or are they a widowed mother and her daughter?  Or two widows, and Amanda pregnant with Gloria’s dead son’s only child.  And soldiers. . . .
          Amanda has fallen quiet.  There is a noise outside.  The women look at each other nervously.  Amanda seems to shrink back into the shadows.  Gloria picks up the frying pan, an iron skillet really, heavy in her hands.
          Through the door bursts a soldier, immense, blocking out the light.  He seems to have a gun in his hand, pointing it wildly.  Gloria takes the iron pan and swings it with full force across his face, breaking his nose in two places.  The private recoils, blood gushing, trying not to scream.  He moans.  He’s just a kid out of Cleveland, a good track runner but not quite good enough for one of the big scholarships.  So he joined the Reserves, glad to serve, like his dad and uncles.  There is blood everywhere.  Amanda is shrieking and Gloria seems to be yelling as well, but not from fear—a high-pitched banshee war cry.
          Later, she’ll feel terrible.  She’ll want to send the private flowers and call his mother to apologize, but no one will let her.  Mel’s lawyer will work it out for her and nothing will happen, although she and Mel will fall out for a while.
          “What the hell were you doing, excuse me for asking, what in the name of hell was an old lady like you doing smashing someone across the face with a frying pan?” Mel asks.
          And all she can say is: “I thought it was war.”

***
This first appeared on-line in the Apple Valley Review, 2007. Copyright by Miriam Sagan

Love and Death

Last summer, Joan Logghe, Renee Gregorio, and I decided to bring out a joint “selected poetry” with Tres Chicas Press. We’re calling it “Love and Death: Greatest Hits.” Of course it is a fun project, but my process has been different than I’d expected. I imagined my earlier work would be full of love poems, and later books more about geology, archeology, history, art, etc. Turns out I was wrong–the percentage of love poems is constant. But what kind of love poems they are still might be a topic.
Here is the poem that is last in the sequence of “Art of Love.” it was published in the book by the same name by La Alameda Press almost twenty years ago–their first book of poetry, I believe.
***
The Sailor

Jason and the argonauts in full-blown color
Poised in snapshot
Lifting the golden fleece
Or leaning like low riders
On old Chevys, pink fuzzy dice
Over the dash. The utter stupidity
Of heroes-
Their boats with two Egyptian eyes
Painted on the prow
Have more sense than they do
To go with the wind.
Every man looks at his fate and starts running
Away from it, back into its arms
Jason loves Medea
The little hairs on his brawny arm
Don’t stand up in terror at her name
He isn’t halfway through
She’s just a girl
She likes him
She’ll do anything for love.

Once, long ago, there were two lovers
Also a golden fish and a Moslem moon
Magician in a trance
Can speak to the dead husband
Who has married again in the land of the dead
And is building a new house there.
Personally, I wish you liked me better
And didn’t care so much
About getting your own way.

The Russian poet in prison
Knows her husband will wait
Out her sentence alone in the apartment.
In solitary she reads her poem along the empty pipe
To common criminals, hookers and burglars
In their separate cells.
And the tap tap comes back with a question
“Who is this guy Ulysses?”
That is what I want to know myself
Which one of us is on an island
With Calypso, that low-tide lady
Which one of us keeps house
In the expensive palace eternally in need of repair.
Who sails from the past, blasted like an ancient column
Who waits, who waits
Who weaves the imperfect picture
Of a dissolving re-union.
***
And here is the gloss. The Russian poet is Irina Ratushinskaya, imprisoned in Siberia at the age of twenty-eight.(And after a stint as an academic in the U.S. now living with her family in Moscow.) But what I find disturbing at this remove is the riff about the dead husband. My first husband, Robert Winson, was alive and well when I wrote this poem. He died in 1995. I wouldn’t say the poem is a premonition, but it certainly gains in meaning.

Why The Sea Is Salt

Why the Sea is Salt

so you will float

because of the blood shed

by the Atlantis motel

because beneath the waves
a salt mill
grinds
and grinds

so you will lick your arm

because the fairy tale is Russian

in the dream
where I stand ankle deep talking to you
on a cell phone
and suddenly the sea rises
and my mouth
is full of oil

because I am talking trash

because you are dead and never had a cell phone

so single-celled organisms float phosphorescent

because of our cruelty

so you will wipe the crumbs off the table

and to be like our tears

This poem just appeared in “Poets for Living Waters” at http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/
Check it out for a lot of good work protesting the Gulf disaster.