The Morning After a Perfect Storm: Narrative Poem by Kathleen S. Burgess

Image of a perfect storm approaching the state of Ohio

After a Great Wind

In the too-early darkness, candlelight flickered
our shadows up the stairs. Beneath open windows
we lay bare, sweating between sheets and dreams.

Transformers exploded in fireballs. The storm
peeled roofs like lids of tinned sardines. We lost
homes beneath old oaks and shallow maples.

We wake to a wounded city. Empty refrigerators.
Eat raw. Board up what we must. Make our way
through a jungle-green maze of limb and canopy.

Together we heave lighter branches to the curbs,
toss in twigs. Tree trunks that crushed our cars
we leave for huge machines to grind the wood,

spit sawdust. Cautiously we move, and watch
for the power lines’ fanged bite. After sundown
we lie uneasy, to sleep, day animals in the night.

From Atlanta, Georgia to a Deadbeat Dad’s Ambiguous End: Narrative Poem by Kathleen S. Burgess

Image of deadbeat dad in narrative poem

Dead Man’s Petition

With a last what-the-hell round, a chaser
of self-pity, he drove to Atlanta, Marathon,

parts south. His ex-wife didn’t see him go.
He’d been lost since the factory closed.

And he owed a year’s back child support.
From Ohio, his decades as deadbeat dad

were untraceable under an alias, living
underground in a work-for-cash economy.

Twenty-odd years later, and beseeching
the same county judge who’d declared him

deceased, he remembers those days past.
His ex doesn’t want him alive—can’t afford

to refund the Social Security spent long ago
for their children. Life got away from him,

he says. But he doesn’t account for much.
Doesn’t visit. Defeat transfixes him again.

Then the gavel pounds. The man stands down.
No one buys back time. A heart in purgatory,

he wanders away. The children are grown.
His ex is getting along. She says he’s better

left a citizen of the Republic of the Undead.

Open Season on the American Experience: Poem By Kathleen S. Burgess

Image of hunter during open season, an American experience

Mark

Silhouetted by a sun about to fail,
this man takes aim. On the other side
his face must gleam, as a cartridge
case, ejected, tumbles wingless.

Skyward. Into clouds. Gray eyes
focus from the shade of a wide brim.
Sweat-curled hair spills from the hat
back, down his neck and collar.

The rifle butt narrows to its dark
barrel as a fist to an eager finger.
Clouds explode. Birds scatter.
His target convulses. Spins away.

In his holster a pistol sits snug,
walnut grip and trigger ready
for the short shot. To make sure,
he’ll cock again. Fire. And again.

At first, only the moon’s flushed
face begins to fade. An eye
rising into less light. Then
the red mist sudden, and fine.

 

Catching Up with Steinbeck In My Time Machine: Franklin Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, And Germany’s Third Reich

Page 1 image of the telegram sent by writers Including John Steinbeck to Franklin RooseveltPage 1Page 2 image of the telegram sent by writers Including John Steinbeck to Franklin RooseveltPage 3 image of the telegram sent by writers Including John Steinbeck to Franklin Roosevelt

On November 16, 1938—three years before America formally entered the war against Germany—John Steinbeck joined 35 writers in urging Franklin Roosevelt to confront the Third Reich. Responding to the outrage known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, their telegram (shown here) recommended severing economic ties with Hitler’s regime, the equivalent of today’s sanctions against Iran. Signed by Steinbeck, George S. Kaufman, Pare Lorentz, Robinson Jeffers, and other writers known by Steinbeck, the message was one of many received by Franklin Roosevelt urging action against the Nazi regime. But this one meant more than most. The signers were all working artists at the whim of a domestic audience that, as today, was deeply divided, and powerful voices—including Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, and the right-wing radio priest Charles Coughlin—opposed U.S. intervention on behalf of European Jews for economic, political, and racist reasons. As John Bell Smithback notes in his time-machine fantasy about the rise of the Third Reich and the telegram sent to Franklin Roosevelt, John Steinbeck and other progressives were correct in their assessment: Kristallnach was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. When he signed his name, Steinbeck had yet to meet Franklin Roosevelt, but his work was already controversial, so his action took courage. John Bell Smithback’s imaginative account of the Kristallnach atrocity and Steinbeck’s public response is a timely reminder that Steinbeck’s instinctive sympathy for victims was profound and prophetic—and that 1938 was like 2015 in deeply disturbing ways. The Third Reich was new, The Grapes of Wrath was in manuscript, and John Steinbeck was in his thirties when the terrifying events of 1933 and 1938 transpired.—Ed.

Catching Up with Steinbeck in My Time Machine

The UPS deliver man has just dropped off one of those spiffy new portable time machines that everyone is talking about. I’ve nearly finished setting it up, but I’m not going to use it to take a trip into the future. Everyone seems to be doing that, but observing what a stinking mess the world’s in I’m going to have a look into the past to see if there are any comparisons to be made. Accordingly, I’ve set the dial for the year 1933, and lo . . . here I am in Berlin! The Reichstag building has gone up in flames and the Nazis are claiming it’s the work of foreign terrorists. Consequently, they’ve issued a Decree for the Protection of People and State that gives them sweeping new powers to deal with a so-called emergency. Déjà vu: didn’t we go through this kind of thing when a few men burned down our Twin Towers?

Déjà vu: didn’t we go through this kind of thing when a few men burned down our Twin Towers?

Fine-tuning my time machine, I see thousands of people being arrested and sent to a camp where guards are being taught terror tactics to dehumanize prisoners. I thought it might be Abu Ghraib or maybe Guantanamo, but no, this place is called Dachau. Back in Berlin, though the democratically elected president of the country is a man named Paul von Hindenburg, the Nazis have gone around him to pass the Enabling Act allowing Hitler to issue laws without the Reichstag’s approval. Déjà vu again as I’m reminded of the House and Senate going around our president to manipulate U.S. foreign policy by inviting foreign politicians to speak in Washington and by addressing threatening, perhaps treasonous letters to foreign governments warning them not to declare peace.

Déjà vu again as I’m reminded of the House and Senate going around our president to manipulate U.S. foreign policy by inviting foreign politicians to speak in Washington and by addressing threatening, perhaps treasonous letters to foreign governments warning them not to declare peace.

I take a moment to catch my breath, and as I inhale I detect the scent of burning books and see 40,000 people in the square at the State Opera to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of . . . .” Hitler’s Karl Rove stands on a platform gripping a microphone, his voice rising ever higher as he screams the names of writers banned by the Third Reich: “Heinrich Mann, Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, Max Brod, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque . . . .”

Hitler’s Karl Rove stands on a platform gripping a microphone, his voice rising ever higher as he screams the names of writers banned by the Third Reich.

Sigmund Freud is on the list; so are Gorki, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Andre Gidé, Karl Marx, Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust—”Und auch die amerikanische Schriftstellern, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck . . . .” A pillar of smoke rises over the square and sparks from books by hundreds of internationally acclaimed authors and poets, philosophers and rationalists, drift skyward. Ashes falling on my shoulders to remind me of Senator Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and of the American Library Association asserting that each year it receives hundreds of challenges to remove dangerous works from the shelves of American libraries. At the top of the current list are books about the imaginary childhood of a British boy named Harry Potter.

Sigmund Freud is on the list; so are Gorki, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Andre Gidé, Karl Marx, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck.

It is late, but the crowd seems reluctant to disperse. PR people put away their motion picture cameras and groups of tough-looking men and boys in brown-shirted uniforms slink off to beer cellars. Newsmen rush to their offices, and then there is a hush. I press a button and inch my time machine forward, eager to see how the events of the evening are received overseas. Thinking that a pyre this big would sound warning bells around the world, I anticipate outrage. But what is this? Except for the living writers who learned that their books had just gone up in smoke, there are few outside Germany expressing concern about what’s happened. Within Germany, it seems to be a case of “Who needs books when we have Joseph Goebbels?” I pause to ponder this failure of reason. Is it really so different today? “Who needs factual information when we have Roger Ailes?”

Except for the living writers who learned that their books had just gone up in smoke, there are few outside Germany expressing concern about what’s happened.

At this point everything becomes a blur of red, white and black, of symbols and banners and uniforms and parades. Martial music blasts from lampposts, and at dawn I stop at a boulevard café to have a look at the newspapers. The only one at hand is Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s paper. He owns the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, much, I suppose, as Rupert Murdoch owns and controls media throughout the English-speaking world today. There are fear stories on every page, and if it’s not one crazy group accused of threatening the nation it’s another; raving anarchists, murderous communists, and stealthy homosexuals are around every corner. Judging from what I read, there are unseen forces everywhere conspiring to rip out the German soul. That’s the reason given for the new Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich. In an instant, German Jews are stripped of their civil rights, and I note that the man behind the decree, the one who will provide the balm, is none other than the Leader himself.

In an instant, German Jews are stripped of their civil rights, and I note that the man behind the decree, the one who will provide the balm, is none other than the Leader himself.

A group of youths march by the café in wrinkled uniforms. I turn to the editorial page and am astonished. Beneath the screaming headline—“We Need A Fascist Government In This Country”—I read this: “We need a fascist government in this country to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

Smedley Butler? What in the hell is this? He’s not even German: he’s an American general in command of an army of 500,000 war veterans back in the United States.

The Nazi editorial explains the American connection: “We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that President Franklin Roosevelt’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second . . . .” So says Gerald MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman and one of the financiers of a group known as the American Liberty League, a corporate cabal that includes the heads of General Electric, Goodyear Tire, Bethlehem Steel, DuPont, J.P. Morgan, and Ford. Praising the prescience of these America First! patriots, the Völkischer Beobachter refers with approval to the racist ravings of Father Coughlin, the popular radio commentator from Henry Ford’s hometown. It seems Germany had highly placed friends in the United States. Why am I so shocked, I ask, as I think of today’s EIB Network and Fox News, of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lars Larson, Bill O’Reilly, and the America First! Tea Party?

It seems Germany had highly placed friends in the United States. Why am I so shocked, I ask, as I think of today’s EIB Network and Fox News, of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lars Larson, Bill O’Reilly, and the America First! Tea Party?

On the streets of Berlin people have lifted their arms in the Sieg heil salute, and I hear voices, thousands upon thousands, singing: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!“ I watch transfixed as German troops march into Vienna, and I hear the world’s silence. Three months later I see Nazi soldiers marching into Prague . . . and hear the world’s silence. Then, on the night of November 10, this message is posted from SS-Grupenführer Reihnard Heydrich to all German State Police Main Offices and Field Offices:

DATE: 10 November 1938

RE: Measures Against Jews Tonight

(a) Only such measures may be taken which do not jeopardize German life or property (for instance, burning of synagogues only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhoods).

(b) Business establishments and homes of Jews may be destroyed but not looted. The police have been instructed to supervise the execution of these directives and to arrest looters.

(c) In business streets special care is to be taken that non-Jewish establishments will be safeguarded at all cost against damage.

As soon as the events of this night permit the use of the designated officers, as many Jews (particularly wealthy ones) as the local jails will hold are to be arrested in all districts—initially only healthy male Jews, not too old. After the arrests have been carried out the appropriate concentration camp is to be contacted immediately with a view to a quick transfer of the Jews to the camps.

What follows is a night of absolute destruction, later labeled Kristallnacht, the Night of Smashed Glass. Hitler Youth and the brown-shirted S.A. have destroyed 167 synagogues and shattered the windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned shops and businesses. Throughout all of Germany, Austria, and Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, mobs are roaming the streets attacking Jewish residents in their homes. Although murder did not figure in the official directive, Kristallnacht will claim the lives of at least 91 Jews. Police records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence: a fine of one billion marks is to be levied, not upon the criminals, but upon the victims.

Although murder did not figure in the official directive, Kristallnacht will claim the lives of at least 91 Jews. Police records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence: a fine of one billion marks is to be levied, not upon the criminals, but upon the victims.

Outraged, a group of writers in the United States, John Steinbeck among them, sends a telegram to President Franklin Roosevelt asking him to sever economic ties with Nazi Germany. Unfortunately for history, no action will be taken by the administration in time to help the Jews. But I don’t need a time machine to tell me that.

National Anthem? “What the Lead Guitars in Hotel California Say and Do Not Say”: Poem by Roy Bentley

Image of Hotel California remagined

Who would believe ultra-rich Hollywood
would slander itself? This dilapidated hotel
has mirrors on the ceilings, pink champagne
effervescing 24/7 in lighted fountains—
all right, it’s California and, by extension,
the republic of sunlight and worn-out souls.
If you listen, what you hear is the vox populi
of Failure. Hear it? You could do worse

than remember the message of some music
is the truth because what it says, in any case,
is We Have Blown It. Which is accurate and
true. And so after “you can check out anytime
you like but you can never leave” breaks off,
that other national anthem, beautiful light,
plays and the wrecked world assumes
an ordinary but recognizable shape.

A Winter’s Tale: Lyric Poem By Roy Bentley

Image of a harsh winter's tale moment in Eastern Kentucky

A Woman Hanging Out Her Family’s Washing
During the Harsh Winter in Eastern Kentucky

Like my grandmother, the dress doesn’t fit her.
And it’s thick sweaters instead of an overcoat.

Like my dead mother, she has wild black hair
and props up a clothesline with a yew branch.

A dark moves by the creek. A snake perhaps.
Ice stalactites from the eaves of a row house

testify to what’s necessary to survive here:
to let pain melt then forget to summon it

even once as the sound of a slow freight.
When she was a fleur-de-lis too beautiful

for the snapshot moment, she showed up
the sun and moon. Now, she is filigreed

with tattooing and scarring and starlight
in laceless, newspaper-filled work shoes.

Soon, she’ll glimpse herself in a mirror:
a ghost straight out of Dorothea Lange.

The place is a heaven of snakes, though
seeing one in winter is always a bad sign.

Short Story by Roy Bentley: “How Sweet to Have a Home in Heaven”

Image of New Orleans red-light district historic marker

John Steinbeck’s love affair with New Orleans was brief. Guests and couple got drunk when he married his second wife in the city they call the Big Easy. The marriage wasn’t easy and didn’t last. East of Eden reflects the bitterness that did. Violent white response to civil rights for blacks when New Orleans schools finally integrated infuriated him. He wrote about that in Travels with Charley. But if he ever visited the brothels of the Big Easy and heard jazz piano in the parlor played the way he liked it, he probably felt right at home. Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday are the evidence. In this short story set in the red-light district for which New Orleans was once famous, Roy Bentley steps back into John Steinbeck’s era, a period when political correctness meant passing your poli-sci exam and the n-word was considered acceptable speech. Bentley’s language may be tough, but his short story’s center is sweet—much like John Steinbeck’s fiction, where whores with hearts of gold work and sometimes die in towns, such as Salinas and New Orleans, without pity. Civil rights inch along in America, but Hurricane Katrina showed the world that blacks were still considered second-class citizens in New Orleans, 50 years after Travels with Charley was written. Big Easy indeed. John Steinbeck would be appalled.—Ed.  

Cherry Vanover was staring out the room’s one long Victorian window, naked except for a pair of red-and-white striped six-dollar-a-pair stockings, and seated in a ladder back chair beside the high four-poster bed. Whatever it was she saw, I thought it likely had nothing to do with what she’d been doing with a sport I’d passed in the hall. Cherry’s red hair had come undone and hung down her back. A moon-coming-through-clouds shown in the window, the glass of its top half, though the room was lit by the orange flame of a pair of gas lamps on the opposite wall. That light held her like a knife, just so.

She hadn’t turned when I opened her door.

“Miss Cherry.”

“Yes?” she asked without looking in my direction.

“Countess said to get you when you were through with your last boarder,” I said, moving to where she could see me.

When she turned her face I caught sight of a look unlike the mask of tiredness most of the women in our house wore at the end of a night’s business.

“Hello, Professor.”

I was used to the name they used for all the piano player-greeters in the District, though it wasn’t my name. I’d been called Professor for sometime. The name I was given on Amelia Street, where I was born, was Antonio Jackson, Jr.

“I passed Mr. John Douglas in the hall. He seemed pleased ‘bout something.”

She nodded and crossed her breasts with her arms, rubbing the opposite shoulder with the fingers of each of her hands. Long, thin fingers. Like a piano player’s, I thought.

“What does she want with me?” Cherry asked.

“Can I sit down?”

“Something wrong?”

I sat at the foot of the bed’s white-sheeted mattress.

“Did you know the Countess had another go-round with Max James?”

I regret not having the ability to make small talk. It causes me to get to the point too quickly. In a house of pleasure you’d think getting to the point would be the stock and trade of customer and lady alike. But making it seem like what you’re about to do is an experience as rare as a voodoo charm is a skill, too. The best sporting women have it. This was one of those times when it would have been nice to have some of that talent at delaying to offer up.

“I left him in the parlor,” she said. “Along with that sailor.”

“He claims you gave him a hard time instead of what he paid his two dollars for.”

The woman in the chair by the window with the moon in it glanced at me.  She must have seen I wasn’t her problem, or that I wasn’t the source of her problem, only the bearer of bad news. Of the madams in Storyville—some of the boarders and sailors called the District that—Countess Piazza was one of the fairest, but she could flash mad. Warning came, when it came, if it did, with her fingering the diamond choker around her slim neck.

“You can figure she’ll slap you a time or two. She might kiss you, but I wouldn’t count on it.” I stopped talking and a horse whinnied up the street by Gipsy Shafer’s.

It wasn’t I didn’t like Cherry Vanover or was unconcerned about what might happen. It was just I couldn’t have much sympathy for any woman in Cherry’s situation cheating a man. She was a whore, a live one. And I figured she might want to stay that a while.

“Are you thinking it may be worse, Professor? Because if she’s got it in her head to make an example out of me again—”

Cherry dropped her arms and leaned forward in the chair. Her breasts hung in the shadow her head and neck made in the gaslight but with still a glow to the skin. She was the sort of woman Countess Willie V. Piazza preferred for her house at 317 North Basin Street: an octoroon. Like the Countess herself. Dark but not too dark. With hair that could be made to graze a white man’s skin—any man’s, for that matter—and make a believer of him.

Her hands were in her hair, combing. She moved to rest them at her sides, finally gripping the wood seat her naked skin was pedestaled on.

“She didn’t lay into you that bad,” I said.

“I guess I been beat worse.”

“What was it you called Mr. James?” I asked.

“A bastard,” Cherry said. “Because’a his hatin’ niggers, seeing us as cursed and little better than animals. How was I to know he didn’t know who his father was?”

I nodded and smiled. I reached over to place my hand on hers but she pulled away.

“You better get down there. And put something on.”

“Of course I’ll put something on. But she better not beat me over this. I’ll scratch out Max James’ eyes if she does. It ain’t nothing to call a man what he is, is it?”

“No, but sass and talk like that will get you sent back to the dollar cribs,” I said.

The dollar cribs—Bienville Street’s five blocks—were the lower regions of Hell.

I raised up on the bed and Cherry stood up. I could see the tangle of hair above her “womanhood”—as the books I learned to read called it, books nice people would have no part of being seen buying but read. Books they would send a house servant to buy for them.

Cherry stepped to a three-drawer bureau, reached in and took out a white drape she threw over her shoulder and cinched in the back. Her womanhood was left exposed.

She moved to the door and turned a crystal knob.

I got up to follow her from the room. I’d done my job.

It was Cherry’s room, her place of business, the place she’d slept since she’d come to Basin Street the year before, but I was the one to close the door. In the hall a line of lamps the color of grapefruit pulp guttered as she walked to face the Countess, who Jelly Roll Morton said was the only madam in the District with sense enough to keep a piano tuned.

. . . . .

Jelly Roll had a nickname by the time we met. Winding Boy—“winding” like you wind a watch, I thought. He explained it was because of the walk he sort of put on, a hip swivel for the ladies. He was a dresser, had a diamond in a front tooth, but it was his piano playing he was known for. I had my own style, but I liked it considerable whenever I heard his. Which wasn’t all that often since he mostly played Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall by that time. Lulu wasn’t likely to let no nigger hang out with the swells. Why, a dark-skinned black man in a shiny suit in New Orleans—the Port of Missing Men—or anywhere in the South, took his life in his hands just to walk down the streets. Let alone to be putting on airs by expecting to be allowed in a tenderloin parlor with white folks.  The times I caught Jelly’s act he was playing for the Countess.

First time I saw him play Jelly asked me what the word “jazz” meant. He said some magazine he picked up in the train station depot had used the word. I told him I’d never heard it. I said the word out loud. Jelly said a magazine writer had given “jazz” as a Negro word meaning “particularly good sex.” He flashed a satin smile and we both laughed.

“Just like a white man to cheat us out’a namin’ our own music,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s a good word. A good name for the music.”

“A white name for a thing black as you and me.”

It became our joke, mine and Jelly’s. Part of a shorthand sort of talk we used till we found a piano and could communicate with one another on a whole other level.

. . . . .

Countess Piazza had a mute white cockatoo she kept in a rosewood cage. The bird hadn’t always been mute. Its first month in the house it had talked up a storm, spouting obscenities and the nicknames of sports the girls talked about in their off hours. One afternoon the bird called out Madame Beelzebub! and the Countess took a shoe to it. The bird, named Mr. Roosevelt after Teddy Roosevelt, ceased speaking from that moment on.

I knocked on the rosewood door. Then I knocked again. The Countess didn’t often answer on the first or second knock and I could hear a raised voice the other side.

The door came open. A tall woman in a low-cut black dress was standing there before me, the diamond choker at her throat. Dressed like a suffragette-starlet, the Countess reminded me of Olga Nethersole, a Broadway vamp who scandalized the New York theatre in Sappho. The Countess was, however, her own one-woman production of Sappho.

Mr. Roosevelt preened himself in his cage to one side of the gaming wheel on the wall. The gaming wheel was a walnut wood circle with black numbers on alternating red, white and blue backgrounds. The wheel rested on the number nine, as it had from the day the Countess and I had hung it.

“What?” she asked.

Cherry was standing by a fireplace with black andirons. The room was perfumed by the fire behind the andirons. Cherry’s head was turned to the wall and a pair of rosewood-handled Colt revolvers in a display box of wood and glass. A gift from Wyatt Earp. The smaller woman slouched as if she might be trying to crawl inside herself and disappear.

I said, “I thought I might have a word with you.”

“Come in. I’m almost finished with Miss Tease the Renowned Cleric’s Nephew.”

I stepped into the large room. It was almost half of the whole second floor of the three-story house. The oak floor glowed darkly from the light of gas lamps. The room’s furnishings reflected my employer’s affection for rosewood. I walked over to an armchair of laminated and carved rosewood. The chair, done in a pattern the Countess had once said was commonly referred to as “cornucopia,” was rumored to have been stolen from the offices of Alderman Sidney Story who authored the Story ordinance creating the District. A second chair sat near a rosewood music cabinet I knew contained an Edison phonograph.

The Countess carried herself with authority which made you quickly decide to treat her with the respect she demanded. Mr. Roosevelt fluttered his white wings as the tall figure shadowed past his cage. The Countess’s hand searched for the choker as she walked.

Cherry turned toward the Countess as she approached her.

The Countess stopped a few feet from the whore and struck her.

“Do you understand me?” she said. The madam’s light-skinned face flushed.

Cherry didn’t cry but was smart enough to keep her gaze on the floor. Her cheek had reddened. It looked like flesh under a freshly broken blister.

“Now git.

I watched the bird’s tufted head follow Cherry as she walked from the room. With Cherry gone, the door closed, the Countess stepped to the mate of the chair I was sitting in.

She seated herself. Breathed. And breathed again. Then she smiled.

“Always the deliverer, Antonio. I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

I said, “No, I didn’t s’pose you would,” and waited for her to speak again. If I had trouble with small talk with most folks I found it almost impossible with the Countess. In the firelight her seen-everything-twice eyes were their own fire. Her bun of pinned-up blue-black hair looked lacquered. She reached in the bosom of the low-cut dress and pulled out a cigar. She chewed the end and spat a piece of tobacco. She reached over to one of a pair of ebony cherry pedestals for a match, which she took from a running gold tiger. She struck the match on the tiger’s backside and brought the flame to the end of the cigar. The lit end glowed and she waved the match-flame to a line of smoke.

When she exhaled, cigar smoke rose toward the tinned ceiling of the room.

“You wanted something else?” she said. She puffed the cigar as she spoke.

I told her I’d written a new piece of piano music, a song. I said it was bawdy. I made up a story about hearing a “wild earnestness” in the rhythms of horses hooves and carriage wheels on Basin Street. It was, I guess, a good story because she seemed to like it.

In those days, women were to be enjoyed; ladies were to be married. If I’d been pressed I’d have marked the Countess a bit of both. But whatever she was, she was royalty in a kingdom that counted among its subjects two thousand harlots in a sixteen-square-block area.

She said, “You’re welcome to try it on the sports when you feel the time’s right.”

“I want you to hear it before you make up your mind, Countess,” I said. “I honestly hope you won’t take offense because’a the title— I calls it ‘Rosewood Rag.’”

The Countess coughed smoke. Then she laughed. “I’m sure I’ll love it,” she said.

I had a tune, a new one, in ragtime tempo, I thought I might could snap up some.

I lied, “It’s lively. Full of what goes on in this house, ma’am—”

“The livelier the better.”

. . . . .

Most days, whores in the District slept till late in the afternoon. New Orleans was a loud town with calliope music and steamboat sounds and the constant racket of horse-and-carriage traffic raining down ‘round the clock. But there was an hour or two of let up in the heat of the day when only the cries of deliverymen like Meatball Charley would split the air with I gots sweet potatoes! I gots onions! Sporting women need their sleep. It wasn’t unusual to see one shake her titties at Charley from an open window and hear her shout down her own strings of I-gots: I gots your squirrel nuts in my hand and I’s ‘bout to squish ‘em! Which might be followed by a basinful of dirty water hurled, from on high, at the offending vendor.

I was always up before the whores. Part of my job as a greeter was to deal with deliveries—laundresses, apothecaries, coal men—and to see to payoffs, which I handled in daylight by answering the summoning of bagmen who collected on schedules as regular as clockwork. On any given day I would referee a squabble the madam didn’t need to be no part of and make sure the Trick Babies were cared for. Trick Babies are the result of Nature playing a surprise on a sporting woman and her getting pregnant. There were half a dozen of various ages living at the Countess’s around that time, all feisty little packages.

I might get in four hours of sleep and a couple of hours to practice my playing, but whatever I was doing at the moment was subject to constant interruption. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the knock at the door preceded the Renowned Cleric’s Nephew, Max James, blowing in the Basin Street front door like a hurricane. He was loud as the French Quarter at Mardi Gras and pushing his way past me. I slipped a cane from a rack by the parlor door.

Max James was very thin. So much so that his eyes looked sunken into a core-skull rather than a face. His clothes had the look of having been slept in. After taking in his appearance I thought the man had likely not been to bed from the night before. Drunk or ablaze with anger, as Mr. James clearly was, even an afterthought of a man can be a handful.

And I’d have hit him, a white man, was about to, but the Countess came swooping down from nowhere and took to slapping his chalky face. A couple whacks and it was clear, even at four in the afternoon, he was doped to the gills. I slipped her the horse head cane.

The Countess put his lights out with the ferocity of a plantation foreman.

I dragged him to the parlor and laid him out.  Then I sent someone for a cop.

The District was carnivorous and the One Who Fills the Room with the Promise of Sex was its steak. The Countess was, by that time, over forty.  But she still had looks could siphon the world away. Men stammered in her presence night in and night out. The policeman who came to collect Max James was by no means immune to the patchouli-wake followed her or the stirring red dress she filled out or the way the gaslights caught in the diamonds of her choker. He walked, dazed and compliant, behind her as if he too had been struck. He was her conquest by virtue of the fact their eyes had met. I was her statue, ready to croak out the whole story of how she had felled a man, a white man, with the down stroke of a cane. I trailed her and the policeman into the parlor.

Max James was attempting to sit up on a striped silk sofa.

“This is Mr. James,” she said as if he had become a curiosity and little more.

The policeman looked from her to Max James and back again. “On your feet, you.”

It was that simple: One minute Max James was a threat to the peace of 317 North Basin Street and the next he was being shown the front door. I know because I was the doorman slipped the constable a One Visit Free lilac-scented card he accepted and glanced at (and pocketed) without changing the rough, theatrical pace of his handling of Mr. James.

. . . . .

It was around four in the morning and I was at the piano picking out blues and ragtime tunes. Cherry came into the room. She was a whore for reasons known only to her and I was a piano player in a whorehouse because I had, at thirteen, fashioned a crude sort of harpsichord on which I played a hymn that a neighbor on Amelia Street, a saloon keeper, heard and liked enough to let me wash dishes for the privilege of practicing on a real piano, mornings before the saloon opened for business. I had banged out the notes of “How Sweet to Have a Home in Heaven” as if visits to and from Paradise were a daily occurrence on Amelia Street. Cherry smiled and said good night to a boarder with a black hat in his hand. She then walked over to the piano and stood, naked as the day she was born, beside the piano stool. Before I finished playing she leaned over my shoulder and whispered my name—Tony—and “I’d like it if you came up to my room.” I nodded like she had asked me for a match to light a cigarette. I knew not to follow her. Not in front of a handful of drunk white gents would take offense at the idea of a nigger getting him some under the same roof they got them some. I started in playing a song while she left the room, making out like Cherry had requested it. My hands weren’t tired and I spanked out a lively cadenced “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It,” snapping it up, though it was late and the few left in the room wouldn’t have known the difference if I’d played it as a dirge.

After the song, I picked up my pearl gray derby and excused myself.

I got to the door to Cherry’s room and tapped on the wood. She answered and held the door open for me. I stepped inside. Her room smelled of cigars and sweat and other things you come to expect in a whorehouse. All the lilac water and jasmine incense in the world can’t cover up the stink of men. The Countess once called it the smell of money.

Cherry closed the door and asked me if I wanted a drink of whiskey. I said “Sure,” and she went to a bureau and opened it and took out glasses and a bottle. She was still mostly naked but she had a sheer black drape over her shoulders. Cherry didn’t have a beautiful face. It would have been plain except for a glow she had when she turned it on you. It was a great asset for a whore. I knew the Countess was pleased with the sort of earner Cherry was. As it was she probably had her pick of the sports down in the parlor waiting. I tried not to think about Cherry’s power over men. It wasn’t like the control the Countess had, where she could handle a man like a horse, beat him whip-blind before he knew what hit him. Cherry’s power was a younger, softer version of the sheer force of personhood the Countess had. It occurred to me humiliation, the threat of it, had to fit in somewhere. Along with chasing the Almighty Dollar like a rag in a windstorm.

Cherry poured a drink. Another. Then she stoppered the bottle and picked up both glasses. She stepped toward me, giving me a face I hadn’t seen before.

“I wanted to thank you for what you did for me. With the Countess.”

I took the drink and watched her step to the bed and sit. She patted the sheet beside her, motioning for me to sit. I took a drink of whiskey then hung my hat on the bed and sat.

She took a swallow from her glass.

“And for what you did with Max James—handing her the cane. One of the others said she saw you.”

“What else was I going to do?” I took a drink, letting the whiskey do its work.

“Almost anything,” she said. “Nothing.”

I hadn’t had a woman in sometime and it was clear if I thought too hard about what was happening then it might not happen. I took another drink.

Cherry drained her glass then kissed me. I had watched this whore work a room of high rollers. I’d seen her with other men but suddenly I was in her company. I’d been invited in and offered a drink and gifted with a look said she was mine if I wanted her.

After she broke off the kiss I said, “You don’t have to thank me like this, you know. I get paid to watch out for you.”

“You get paid to play piano. Everything else is a kindness, or didn’t you know that? The others know it. The Countess knows it.”

“If you think that, maybe then that’s what it is,” I said.

I downed the last of the whiskey Cherry had poured for me.

Then I bent down and sat the empty glass on the floor. When I raised up, I kissed her. The kiss was hard, lacking in the small talk of most kisses I’d observed, and with it I had begun to deliver myself to that other falling down set in motion by a gesture of gratitude.

. . . . .

The next afternoon I was at the piano, mapping out a rhythm without a song to go with it. I wasn’t alone. One of the younger of the Trick Babies was clapping his hands. He was probably three. Cherry was watching him, though she wasn’t his mother. They sat side by side on the sofa where we had deposited the unconscious Max James the previous day. The child had on a smock-type garment appeared to have been a feed sack laundered until a portion of the roughness of the cloth had been taken out. His curly black hair was cut in bangs, stringing an archway around a face filling out its own dimensions with an out pour of smile. The Countess called him Randy, referring to his deceased mother’s excessive appetite for sex. I played one-handed, gliding the fingering, a thing I was known for, which made Randy clap his hands as soon as I was finished. He squealed, Do again, do again, Tony!

It being late autumn, the air as comfortable as it gets in the Delta, windows were open in the parlor.  Sweet jasmine and open sewers scented the breeze. I was starting in on another song, had played the first notes, when I heard a loud sound so close at hand that I couldn’t place at first. It might have been a whore, pissed off about something, in the entrance to the parlor slamming one of two heavy walnut doors. But it wasn’t that.  No one was near the doors. Then there were two more sounds—crack! crack!—and Cherry stood up on nearly steady feet and turned her back on me as if to attend to the child who sat, still, on the sofa. Before I could get to her Cherry fell in a heap at the feet of the boy. When I took hold of her and turned her over her eyes were open and big and looking at whatever she saw before the light went out of them for good.

The Countess found me, the chocolate skin of my hands covered in blood. She had hold of me, was lifting. I knew her other strengths but I remember thinking, She’s not strong enough to lift a grown man. Then I started to cry. I could feel I’d been expecting something.

. . . . .

I couldn’t bring myself to play at the funeral. Jelly Roll Morton, my friend, stood in for me. Everyone in the District had heard. They showed up to pay respects to one of their own and to a body in a smaller casket whose only offense was being born in a whorehouse.

The Countess had services in the parlor. A maid had scrubbed at the bloodstains and gotten up what she could. Whores from the dollar cribs on the lake side of Marais, between Conti and St. Louis streets, filed in. Lulu White was there. I don’t recall a lot about the day. The Countess served booze and I hit the bottle. Numb was what I was shooting for and it was what I got. But I broke down if someone so much as touched my shoulder.

Music had been my shield from monotony and loneliness but it couldn’t shield me from the ache. I knew Randy was in a better place. His life would have been hell: son of a whore and just enough dark blood to make him one of us forever.  But Cherry I saw as someone robbed. She likely wouldn’t have been lucky enough to wind up as well situated as the Countess or Lulu White but that was her dream. She had confessed as much the night before. And I knew she was saved from the slow death at least half the whores in the District knew they would someday see from disease, one of the costs of doing business.

After a time we loaded the bodies into the hearse for the short ride to St. Louis Cemetery No 1. I rode beside the Creole driver, a courtesy for a Negro man in those days. The Countess had made the arrangements and walked, with the others, beside the horses.

Balconies along Basin and Conti streets were packed with the women of the District. Some had their titties out. A few were naked and waved scarlet handkerchiefs.

. . . . .

The Countess called me in to see her a few days after Cherry and Randy were in the ground. She was smoking a cigar and offered me a drink. I told her I thought I’d pass on the drink. She then offered me a cigar, which was unusual for her. Mr. Roosevelt was showing off in his cage like he was glad to see me but I was feeling about the same hollow feeling I knew I’d have for a while, maybe a long while. I stood by the fireplace where I remembered Cherry had stood. A pitiful fire in the hearth had nearly burned itself out.

The Countess said she knew who had done the killings. She said it like she had discovered the secrets of powered flight or Edison’s phonograph.

“I was thinking I might have Max James killed,” she said.

“What for?” I said and looked down.

I kept looking down.

“Isn’t that what you want?  It’s what I want.  Someone should shoot the bastard.”

Then, plain as day, I thought I heard: Do again, Tony!

The voice had a low quality like the notes of a trumpet played with a mute cup.

I’m sure I expected to hear it again, but the room was quiet.

I looked in the direction of the Countess. Her face was a map I couldn’t read.

She said, “Jelly Roll would look you dead straight in the eye like that.”

I stared at the floor the way a sporting woman does when she’s been slapped and knows there’s not a thing she can do about it. Another man would have said a bird had made him consider that we might be more than wayfaring strangers. Bags of sadness and plantation-white bones spawned by a big-enough God. I had chills running up my spine. I wasn’t crying but I was sure I would be any minute. I wanted to get back to being able to hold back such shows. I knew that to be a day some ways off. I had always taken a great pleasure in being a man who could control a few things—notes to a song, the traffic of swells in and out of a room, my reaction to being called boy or shine or worse. I needed that about the way a dope fiend needs fixed. Everyone is hoping to feel safe somewhere. And if you can’t feel safe in the world you move about in—say, the streets of a city in the South—then your world has to shrink a little. Maybe to the size of a house or a room in that house.

Cherry or no Cherry, this was the world I’d grown accustomed to, had lived in, and I knew I’d live in it a while longer. I looked up. I said, “Will that be all, ma’am?”

The Countess looked at Mr. Roosevelt then at me as cigar smoke rose toward the tinned ceiling in a cloud that winged upward until it might as well have been ceiling. She didn’t have anything else to say, not at that moment and neither did I. What else was there to say? I left her and went to the piano to pick out a few tunes before traffic started up again.

“How Sweet to Have a Home in Heaven” first appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. Used with permission of the author.

Poem: Great Britain’s Stonehenge—Sun-Worship Or End-of-World Prophecy?

Image of Stonehenge in Great Britain

Stonehenge

It’s all we have, he said, he said.
He said it’s all we have
Something,
anything, to leave behind:
a mark, a song, a word, a deed,
a stone overturned,
a monument.

But alas, he said, alas and alas,
that, too,
it shall not be.
Concentric forms upon a plain
or geometrical tombs at Giza,
all of it, he said, he said,
are nothing, are nothing to me.

Put there by
a man,
they will not last,
mankind
will see to that.

 

John Steinbeck, Charlie Hebdo, and the Prophet Muhammad in a Cab: Poem By Roy Bentley

Image of Brooklyn welcome sign traveling from New Jersey

Brooklyn Cab Ride

Did the Turk wearing Levis and a Knicks hoodie
think he needed to proclaim he was a secular Muslim
after the religiously motivated murders of the cartoonists
at Charlie Hebdo in Paris? Did he imagine his applause
for freedom of speech was anything but its own gratuity?
The driver could have been John Steinbeck’s doppelganger.
Hair and face and age were that close. John Steinbeck who
died in New York in ’68 with a fat FBI file for speaking out,
for believing that what we write and say matters. That day,
January in the streets like any lucky stiff from New Jersey,
the Turk in an NBA hoodie said the Prophet Muhammad
was a camel driver who married once when the world
has a polygamous heart. Was that blasphemy or was
the driver’s impertinence the sort of thing that a man
of a certain age will say to feel good about himself?
He wasn’t saying there isn’t a God. He was saying
that being alive and American isn’t easy. Idling
on Smith and Pacific, maybe The One God
was in the rippling reverberations before we
said what we said over the blare of car horns.

Three Lyric Poems by Jane Ann Devol Fuller

Image of three chickadees

Bird

One of them is dead beneath the window.
The others, blind to him, flit to seed,
their cumulative weight making the feeder swing
as the light shifts to contain it.

The bird has been there for days
as if paralyzed mid-state,
too cold for odor or parasites.

I think it’s a chickadee. That black mask muffled
by the other black mask. The eyes half-slits,
the head turned the other way.
We try to identify it from inside the house.

On its back, it’s body gray and downy,
the beak stays ajar like the blade of a scissor
I might take from my drawer. A smudge of red
makes us curious whether blood made it so, the dog
scratching to go out.

I will wait until she sleeps on the rug.
I will probably not look long
at the small body, beautiful still.

The tail-feathers will make an easy
handle for hitching into the woods.

At the Feeder, Early November

At first it seems a mostly social situation,
the nuthatch clowning around upside down
on the post, a tufted titmouse
pretending to be somebody else,
looking, through the glass, like a mute cardinal
in that gray get up.

Hulls they litter to the breeze interminably,
I sweep. So I feed them

bacon, raw, on a cracked “bird
of paradise” plate, its blue
positioned so the wings are circling
something else.
Breakfast after twelve. They are about as interested
as their painted mates and prove it
in perfect proportion to their plan:
if they feed us, we will come. We watch them as if
they were a religion we’ve invented.

Tomorrow’s another day:

nothing to wake to but morning’s dull-gray light;
hickories hold their own in thirty-mile-per-hour gusts.

The birds have disappeared.
For the hell of it I keep watch, remembering.
Some days we did not need to eat,
some days it was all we could do to be nowhere

among the soldiering trees.

How To Understand Desire for An Elsewhere

On the road between my house and yours
a woman walks her lot: children,
two on scooters, one on foot,
and their dog, a big male Airedale.

Who knows where her husband is, probably inside
watching other men beat around a ball,
driving one toward a hoop, or hitting one the size of a testicle
into a small, perfect hole.

I’m no better, watching from the window,
imagining you not watching anything,
nor walking, just floating around like an idea
of somewhere else.

I’m pretty certain elsewhere is measured by the sanity of men
we would not recognize,
alone in their madrigal summers.

Nightfall works this cobalt blue to a Parrish painting I inhabit
and I watch me watch myself cry.

And you, you might

in your willingness to surrender your life
appreciate me grieving now that I have listened.

Now that I know it’s not love you were after.
But order. Something manageable.
Something of another world.