the poisoner’s wife
in the cool like lemonade
of a hot summer’s day he went
as though it were unto a pool
the sodium he administered
made us a great salt cellar
with appurtenances of a modern-day Cellini
the furnishings and fixtures round the pool
the ask it man
in his pastel dragon shirt
slack pantaloons
steely hair and frames
he gives the world of information
the virtual sign of no more hope
beyond a certain point
and thence no whence
A few days after I moved to Atlanta, about twenty years ago, I came home from my new teaching job at Georgia State to find my grass mowed and a lanky white man in his sixties wearing overalls and a straw hat, trimming my hedges.
“What are you doing?” I asked, jumping out of my car almost before I turned it off. My Chicago cynicism was showing. Why would a white man be mowing the lawn of a single black woman?
He took off his hat, displaying the remnants of white hair combed straight across his pink scalp and offered a theatrical bow from the waist. Holding his hat to his chest while smiling a big, yellow-toothed grin, he said, in an accent as thick as the Atlanta humidity, “Ah’m Mr. Beasley, your neigh-bah.” He pointed to the neat little brick cottage next-door with a beautiful bed of red and yellow roses still in bloom, although it was early September. “I hope you don’t mind me fixing up your place a bit. Just my way of welcoming you to the neighborhood.”
I wasn’t sure how to react. Was this a subtle Southern way of telling me I need to get my black behind in gear if I was going to live next to white people? I decided to keep my thoughts in check and held out my hand. “I’m Valerie Harris. I was planning on getting to the yard this weekend.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mz. Harris.” He showed me his hands were dirty and didn’t shake mine.
I told him if he gave me a few minutes to change my clothes I’d help with the hedges, but he said he was about finished. Then he added, “I’d certainly be appreciative of some iced tea, if it’s not too much of a bother.”
“Of course,” I said, not sure what to expect next.
I set up a pitcher of tea and cookies on my front porch and noticed that he washed his hands at the outside spigot. When I suggested he come inside and use my bathroom, he declined. “This’ll do right fine, Mz. Harris.”
I told him to call me Valerie. He made no mention of his first name.
We sat on the porch for about half an hour, and he talked non-stop, like a man unaccustomed to conversation. He told me he was a bachelor and that he bought his house in 1956 when he was working at the Ford plant in nearby Hapeville. He had retired a few years back. Soon I had a history of the neighborhood, including how “the colored folk” had started moving in, but he didn’t mind as long as they were neighborly. I smiled to keep from saying something I might regret.
He was a good neighbor and, in time, he became a friend. Routinely, we’d talk on my front porch over a pitcher of tea. He’d tell fascinating stories of Atlanta in the old days and I’d talk about my own past. In an unguarded moment, I told him about the man I was engaged to in Chicago and how I had found out through friends that he once had a live-in relationship with a man. I had never thought of myself as homophobic, but I couldn’t get over the thought of him with a man. Mr. Beasley seemed shocked, and I could see he was uncomfortable, but he offered no judgment.
Not that Mr. Beasley was a man to hold back his opinions. One sunny Sunday, a group of black teenagers walked past our houses playing their music loud and cursing even louder. Mr. Beasley was in his rose garden while I read the newspaper on my front porch. He approached them, swinging his shovel, and shouting, “Git away from my property, you niggers!” The young men stopped dead in their tracks and I ran out between them, telling Mr. Beasley to put down his shovel and saying to the teenagers, “You need to walk away now. Please.”
They did so, much to my relief, but Mr. Beasley, instead of thanking me, kept using the “n” word. “This was a good neighborhood before those niggers moved in with their music and their cussing.”
I could see the teenagers stop once again. Their curses were now directed at Mr. Beasley. I knew I would have to talk with them about how I, too, found their language offensive, but for now I had to confront my neighbor.
“I’m offended by that word, Mr. Beasley, even more than by their cursing. Please don’t use it in my presence.”
He looked at me like I was a simple-minded child. “But you’re not a nigger, Mz. Valerie.” I just stared at him, shaking my head.
I lived in the neighborhood for a long while before I heard anyone call him anything other than Mr. Beasley. I knew his name because I received his mail by mistake one day and saw it was addressed to Woodrow Carson Beasley. But I was shocked when I heard a man his age, who lived down the street, call him Carson.
Although the man visited Mr. Beasley regularly, he had never offered me more than a friendly wave. In an attempt to be neighborly, I brought them iced tea one hot, sticky August afternoon.
Mr. Beasley made a simple introduction. “Mz. Valerie, this is Mr. Waverly.” We engaged in small talk, but when I asked Mr. Waverly how long he and Mr. Beasley had been neighbors, conversation ended abruptly. We finished our tea in awkward silence.
Years passed as naturally as the seasons. Mr. Beasley became my confidant through another bad relationship and cared for my house when I took a leave of absence for a semester to attend to my mother in Chicago. When she passed and I moved back, he and Mr. Waverly met me on my front porch with a coconut custard pie. I told them how I had tried to get my mother to move in with me before she took ill, but she had refused.
“You did everything you could, Mz. Valerie,” Mr. Waverly said. It may have been the first time I ever heard him utter a full sentence. Your mama knows you love her.”
I found the way he spoke of her in the present tense reassuring.
Winters turned to spring and the little crepe myrtle I had planted in front of my house now stood near twenty feet tall with lavender blooms that lasted most of the summer. Mr. Beasley was stooped over now from osteoporosis, but he still cared for his roses and added a beautiful autumn flowerbed of orange and yellow chrysanthemums running along the path to his house. Mr. Waverley used to help him; the two old men would be out there most days raking and weeding in the kind of rhythm that can only come from years of friendship. But the last time I saw Mr. Waverly he looked weak and had lost a good deal of weight.
Yesterday, Mr. Beasley rang my doorbell and asked if he could talk with me. It was a chilly November morning, so I asked him in. He had never been inside my house, and now he stood at the door, his hat in his hands.
“I’m moving,” he said, before I could coax him inside or offer him a drink. “Mr. Waverley’s health isn’t good, and we’re moving to a nursing home.” Then he looked at me, his eyes red and puffy. “We’ve been together for near fifty years, although we could never live in the same house because of the talk. I want to be with him at the end.”
My face registered shock. I wanted to ask if I understood him correctly. My conflicted feelings about homosexuality returned, and I wasn’t sure what to say.
He looked away momentarily, but then turned back and spoke almost in a whisper. “I hope you don’t think ill of me.”
“Oh no, of course not. It’s just that…” I stuttered like a fool, realizing how much I cared for this man. I saw his eyes glisten and I thanked him for trusting me with his secret. “You and Mr. Waverly found love. I’m happy for you.”
He nodded and tried to speak. We had many conversations about my own failed attempts at love. “Please take care of yourself,” I finally said. “And Mr. Waverly.”
He thanked me for being his neighbor and his friend. And for the first time since we met, shook my hand.
I felt tears roll down my cheeks, and I reached out to hug him. He felt so frail, I was afraid he’d break in two. His body shook. I knew he was crying.
But he pulled away quickly. Standing as straight as his twisted back would allow, he said, “Thank you for your kindness, Mz. Valerie.”
He turned and walked slowly back to his house.
Let me do this, now:
I’ll drag you down there,
down, down, where you will
feel lonelier than I,
and less delicate, less alive, somehow,
jealous of my moving body,
in the lights, itself a shifting light.
See, love, this is what you missed. What you
will miss, are missing out on -
it’s passing, passing
the way I would hold on to you,
touch your shoulder lightly,
if you’d let me -
I’d be wild and innocent,
if you’d let me, love -
but ah, you know yourself well,
and the same power that burned me alive
is but an annoyance,
a mild unpleasantness
that you dissolve immediately
through careful analysis and a stream of descriptive words.
awake
The furnace-black odor of cigarettes
made acid shadows where you slept —
it took me days to smell the cotton clean.
It’s a scarred pleasure of mercy
to stop feeling you
near me, finally.
I may have spit the waxwork gristle of collapsed probability,
but tinfoil dreams still wire through
my unteachable
delta rhythm
sleep.
Exiles
I watch you at Nell’s wake;
You cover your mouth
as if your heart were some restless bird
that might fly wild from it.
There is a tremor in me, then;
it points to some dark epicenter,
slurred with depth and gravity.
It’s the antithesis of flight, but no less evasive.
And then there’s Nell.
I’m on the couch, you’re near the buffet when
an understanding passes through us;
I can tell you’re remembering, too, how surgeons
muddled through her excess of tissue;
worked the too-quick math of her remaining time;
named the bloody bits and unwanted pieces of her
with grim precision; and
understood things for us
because we could not.
So here we are;
By grace of wing and grit and memory
we lean into the thermals of our sorrow,
pressing toward some relief,
exiles in the high and low places
where Nell is not.
are gunfire in a
schoolyard at
three pm
her words are
like snorting the
ashes of what was
once new york city
after a nuclear
holocaust
no bullshit
her words are
strange sexy
lethal and
beautiful—
She was a woman who had contempt for women and was easily frustrated by her body—cramps, its tendency to fat, its sensitivity to cold. She came like a man: quickly, usually before him. She spoke plainly when she wanted time to herself, and was good at sending him away, not just when she was angry, but when she was tired, or stressed.
She quit her teaching job in the same way: bluntly, almost accusing. Lesson-planning and calling parents cut into her evenings and weekends; she had no time to “write.” She thought it would be easy to find a desk job, not entry-level and not management. He admired her decision, her ability to leave her career behind. Her writing, so rare and ornamental when she’d had a regular paycheck, after weeks of temping and false leads, seemed like a petty thing to tinker at.
He tried to make plans for the few nights she was free, but she would come home, wash her face, and crawl into bed, hair sticking to her wet forehead. He couldn’t even get her out on Halloween. He understood, he told her; she hadn’t had a night off in weeks. Privately, though, he felt she could have rallied for their holiday. Last year, still new to each other, they had stood and watched the parade, making out through most of it. He had worn goggles and a cape and too-small footed pajamas that swelled in front as he pressed against her.
They argued; about the clutter she left strewn around, the cooking she never reciprocated, the sex they never had. He summoned memories of old girlfriends for relief: the girl he’d hooked up with while he backpacked through Slovenia, girls he’d brought home from parties in college. Tank-topped and smiling, they never gained weight, never cluttered his space with socks or unopened mail. They just accepted the frothy plastic cups he brought them and folded pliantly under him, disappearing in the morning, grateful and ungrudging.
Out of loyalty, he tried to use them only as supplements: her face and old self with the other’s legs, in place of the less-solid ones she folded under her as she scarfed a late dinner. His heart still lifted when she came home, hoping she’d have some good news that day.
But her face was always crumpled by the packed trains or some slight at work. He wasn’t always sorry when she went to bed, leaving him to his movies or whatever work he’d dragged home. As she receded from him, the girls in his memory became more and more lifelike. He made a game of recalling details about them: their favorite foods and books, their sisters’ names, the particular clench of each as he slid inside them. He began to feel like a collector, mulling over the impossible loops of his ex’s Celtic tattoo or the smell of that raver girl’s neck inside its neon orbit. They weren’t her at her best—not by a long shot—but she was almost unrecognizable now, her prettiness cloaked by exhaustion and bad food, her sense of humor choked.
He looked over at her, barely visible under the bedspread. At least she was safe and warm for another night. He would wait out her infirmity, sustained by the lean, lively golems who smiled on him, eerie and pleasing, like a candle out the mouth of a carved pumpkin.
Open Mic
Intrigued by the film noir flyer
sealed into the corner streetlamp.
Seduced by the scent
of sublime stogies
and murmuring macchiato.
The grizzly, lazy-eyed
sidewalk strummer
fingering linear chords
like a lost virtuoso
looked up to greet me,
as I eased inside past
the local university boys
(sporting the same haircut
displaying different shades of plaid)
to a worn, orange, recliner.
Narrow girls
with lifeless hair
crossed tapered denim legs
on wicker chairs
waiting for boyfriends
to belt out blasé songs
from their indie bands
with commercial names.
I sat, glad snapping is passé.
Sentiments stemming from my
Latino lineage—
Dad’s machismo explained:
his calloused thumbs,
my propensity for double entendres,
and Mom’s friend who visited
late-night while he was away.
Though I’m a jr.,
I didn’t inherit his ways.
I just wanted to sign the sheet.
Read my meager poems,
hoping one of the narrow girls
would notice and say,
“Damn. That was good…”
© 2010 Daniel Romo
*an earlier version appears in Verdad Magazine.
Containment
She says the sky is on fire. The blue actually cool hue of the
quintessential flame, and clouds: spectators to record the
calamity. There are no such things as planes. They are products
of chemtrails—governmental spaying and neutering. Airports:
kennels/accomplices. She says birds are a dying breed of
matchsticks, striking the fuse with the tips of their beaks.
Runaway balloons are the severed grasping hands of children,
inflated aspirations set ablaze ‘round campfire songs gone awry.
Kites, are kites. Mostly pointless. Reigned in when fear outweighs
risk. But fireflies are real. Embers of tossed cigarettes thrown
over cold shoulders. She says either way, we’ll all burn in hell.
© 2010 Daniel Romo
*an earlier version appears at Ditch Poetry.
I am an easterner. I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, raised in Plattsburgh, New York, and grew up in New Hampshire. At 30, I moved to Colorado to become the westerner I’ve always wanted to be. There is so much about my personality seems western: a need for independence, an affinity for rural living, and being surrounded by wilderness.
All 39 years of my life have been about movement, dislocation; change; I am the child of a military family. It only makes sense that I end up a westerner where literature and myth has created a western persona of someone who can’t stay still.
I live western for the first time in 2004 as I drive I-70 across the country; from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I feel safely ensconced in my blue Subaru as the Pennsylvania mountains blur by me and as I am in awe of the plains of Kansas. As I drive across the eastern plains of Colorado, I finally see the Rocky Mountains white peaks in the distance. I drive through Denver and start the ascent into the mountains. After three hours of tunnels and narrow canyons, I finally see the “Steamboat City Limits” sign and recognize the ski resort where I’ve skied several times. I look at the directions for Hilltop Parkway; my new roommate is expecting me. The next two days I’m lost. This is no longer vacation land; it is home.
Matt and Erin, who I know from Vermont, invite me to their home for dinner several times my first week. They don’t want me to be lonely because they know what it’s like to be in a new place where you don’t know anyone. They introduce me to their circle of friends. On day 14, I meet Laura. Laura is friendly and invites me to her house to watch a movie and I can bring Abbey. Abbey and Dugan, Laura’s dog, love each other and play during the entire movie. We go on a group hike the next day with three of her friends; they all have dogs, too. We go to the Mad Creek trail west of town and the dogs play in the creek as we all get to know each other. I now have five friends in Colorado.
Steamboat Springs, population 10,0000 is a western, cowboy town with horses in fields outside of town, rodeos, and winter carnivals with horses pulling children on skis through the downtown. Steamboat is famous for being “Ski Town, U.S.A.®” and for the number of Olympians who live there. I start running and biking, like everyone else here, and decide to train for a triathlon. It’s been a goal for many years and it is not difficult to become a triathlete here with an outdoor, hot spring-fed pool, a multitude of running trails, and safe, scenic roads for biking. I become a triathlete, I volunteer on the running series committee and the chamber marketing committee.
I try to set down roots in my first western town but I don’t like my job and my friends start coupling. I cannot afford a home here and decide to find a job somewhere else. I love living in Steamboat and the Yampa Valley with a world-class ski resort in my backyard, but it’s time to move on. I find a job in a Granby, Colorado: population 1,500. I buy a house. I find a different job. I join a writer’s group. I get a second dog. I’m setting down roots and making a home out west.
The one thing my new home doesn’t have: my books. One day I will have a library in my house and all my books that are in my mom’s basement and sister’s attic will be reunited. I do have the necessary ones, the ones that motivated me to come west: Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, The Stories That Shape Us, a collection of contemporary women writing about the west, and my favorite Woven on the Wind Women Write about Friendship in the Sagebrush West. These made the trip across country because they remind me of being in the east when I read them as preparation to come west.
For now, I’m simply in love with this place; I love this landscape and the people in it. For the first time I’m living in the present. When I see my dogs running free on a trail with yellow and purple wildflowers, and aspen leaves scattered on the ground, the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the distance – I feel connected.
There is a herd of mule deer that wander on the hills across the street from my house that will soon be a new development filled with houses and people. But for now, I walk my dogs on the vacant roads with mountains surrounding me. I hike around my neighborhood I remember the warnings about mountain lions and hope I never see one. This is another sign that I’m in the right place; more wildlife, less people.
It took me thirty seven years to finally find a place where I feel connected and grounded; no longer pursuing that “thing” out there in the future. I don’t know how long I will live here; I still don’t know if I can say in one place for the rest of my lifetime. But for now, Granby feels like the right place. And, as the sun sets behind the rolling sage-filled hills to the west, a fox runs across the field in front of my house. He’s heading back to his den in the culvert down the road. I can see a herd of mule deer grazing on the hills and the horizon become darker blue. A star-filled sky ends the day and as I watch this entire scene, I feel at lucky, safe, and finally, fulfilled.
You must be laughing when you read this If at all you read this when it is finally a dismal winter in Kolkata If at all I collect my ruins to call you And ask you to visit me To walk with me to the distant nowhere of my passions You must be laughing when I talk to you Or even hold your hands Or touch the tired sweat of our evening together across your moist lips You must be laughing when I kneel before you When I tear my heart out You must be laughing when I stir sugar in your coffee I add cream I lift your cup When I say I could never write without you
