Fall, 1998



Editorial policy:
I have to like it a lot. --Luke Breit


Copyright Policies

All materials published by In Sublette's Barn are the property of their creators and fully protected by U.S. Copyright laws. Copyright protects original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible form of expression and is automatically in effect the moment an original work is put on paper. By proceeding forward you are acknowledging an understanding that all materials herein are the sole property of their authors.

Table of Contents
for the Fall, 1998 Issue

Four Poems by Kim Addonizio

Seven Poems by Susan Kelly-DeWitt

A Poem by Layne Russell

A Poem by Christian Kiefer

A Poem by John McGinley

Two Poems by James Lee Jobe

Four Poems by Kerry Campbell





Four Poems by Kim Addonizio

Photos by Robert Specter


THE CALL



A man opens a magazine,
women with no clothes,
their eyes blacked out.
He dials a number,
hums a commercial
under his breath. A voice
tells him he can do
anything he wants to her.
He imagines standing her
against a wall, her saying
Oh baby you feel so good.
It's late. The woman
on the phone yawns,
trails the cord to the hall
to look in on her daughter.
She's curled with one
leg off the couch.
The woman shoulders the receiver,
tucks a sheet and whispers
Yes. Do it. Yes.
She goes to the kitchen,
opens another Diet Pepsi, wonders
how long it will take him and where
she can find a cheap winter coat.
Remembering the bills
she flips off the light.
He's still saying Soon,
turning his wheelchair right,
left, right. A tube runs down
his pants leg. Sometimes
he thinks he feels something,
stops talking to concentrate
on movement down there.
Hello, the woman says.
You still on?
She rubs a hand over her eyes.
Blue shadow comes off on her fingers.
Over the faint high hiss
of the open line
she hears the wheels knock
from table to wall.
What's that, she says.
Nothing, he tells her,
and they both
listen to it.

________________________________________

SANTUARIO AT CHIMAYO


It's so quiet among the carved saints,
the votives giving out, one by one, the old
Indian woman scraping wax and spent wicks.

Grief lights them again. Photographs
of the dead are tucked into the corners
of framed Christs, dogtags slung

from a punched-tin cross--Jaime Escalero,
his number and blood type.
And Catholic. Even the tourists are hushed

by so much evidence of faith.
In the room behind the altar
a small hole holds the dirt

said to heal. The blind
come here, and the broken-hearted.
They squat down

to take the earth
in their hands and let it run through.
Every afternoon

the old woman slips new candles
into their sheaths
and the random light from cameras

is like souls entering
or abandoning the world,
each with that same brightness.

________________________________________

WHAT THE DEAD FEAR


On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh snow,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,
or watch the patterns on the TV.
It's all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they'll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they'll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning, and when the cut
flowers are laid befor their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn't have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.

________________________________________

PHANTOM ANNIVERSARY


Imagine the marriage lasting,
the lilies blooming in the black vase
for years, the water still fresh.
The man and woman are looking at each other
as they fuck, blooming and looking,
and the angels are looking, too,
opening their beautiful abstract mouths
as though they are about to say something
neither difficult nor true.
The man and woman are oblivious.
They grow fainter and fainter without caring.
And the angels fold their wings flat
and plummet toward them like stones.

Return to the table of contents





Seven Poems by Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Salt


People still die for it.
Gandhi marched to the sea
for it. The heart spasms

without it, the muscles cramp.
Last night I sobbed crazily
and the salt appeared on cue

residue of fifty years.
The body floats in it.
The oceans are drenched in it.

These are all well
known facts, so
the soul must feel

at home in it
among measuring
spoons and shakers,

in the bitter shining
sprinkles of salt (even the Great Salt
Desert.) Boil

any pot of water
and all your plans will vanish
except for the salt.

________________________________________

Mosquito


I look up through these shallows
as through layers of glassine.
Drifts of leaves float

over me like pharaoh's boats.
Who knows what propels us
what keeps us here alive.

I breed with the rest. I squirm
to life and call the day's work
good. When I drop my beaded raft

of eggs onto the water's
skin, it seems
beautiful to me.

________________________________________

March Blossoms


I stroke the radiant
petals under my thumb
the grassy

Chinese tea smells.
How they'd love
to stay

open
and vulnerable
like that!

Some of them
look like suicides
necks snapped, petals

shocked back
dangling from a frayed
green stem.

Fragility
is the word we have
in common today

a single syllable
like frost
can kill.

________________________________________

The House Finch


as if the sun had risen
through his breast slats
and kept on rising--

like the dream of poetry
which refuses to stop
burning, its torch

flaming in your chest, blazing
brightly all day every
day and night--lighting

up his songster's
shrewd head,
(half beak)

which swivels now
like a pomegranate
blossom, turning

right and left, right
and left--little
watcher!

________________________________________

How Strange


With war in the air
again, with haywire flocks
of chemicals gathering

and the memory
(still fresh)
of what hot metal
does to flesh

we walk
along the river this foggy
morning, breathing in, trying to
identify, name, the wet
fur smell of the dusky
sedges

and the bird with the collar
of blood whose call
through the low-lying
mist sounds like a telephone
ringing.

How strange
that what summons us
ineffably toward joy disappears
into us, and finds a home.

________________________________________

Maybe I Have No Ideas


Eating a turkey sub from the school cafeteria
I suddenly think of the blonde woman
whose marriage is falling apart and the dark
circles under her eyes, as if two moons
had lost their light there; I think of how
she so unevenly layered the pickles and tomato
with the pink turkey flesh and the odd way
she has of wearing what she calls a "wife-beater"
T-shirt, even in winter. Her fingers have left
their slender depression in the bun so in
this tangential way we touch. And then
it strikes me that maybe I have no ideas at all
of my own, only other people's lives where
they've left their imprint on my husk.

________________________________________

Bible Story


That night we heard a dream of thunder
through the thin sheetrock of apartment
walls that was no dream but some poor
married woman's nightmare of her skull
and shoulders being battered, crushed.
We dialed 911 and the police arrived
with sirens and billy clubs but not before
we listened, alert as two deer in the forest:
there was muffled cursing, the sound of flesh
slapping flesh (like a stubborn and destructive
wave slapping the dock) and then the woman
begging, sobbing. The next morning
you left as usual for work, a roving job
through the meathouses of the world,
and when you were gone ten minutes--
a knock on our door. Our neighbor,
thick necked, with the face of a cruel
Christ, asked if I did it. Was I the person
who phoned the cops? I tried hard
to look startled enough to make him feel
guilty for even suggesting it. Here is where
I shrank down and crept into the tiny
squeezed blue vessel of a Judas heart.
I hid there for a long time. A pigeon
cooed three times from the balcony
like Peter's cock. "I'll find who did.
She had it coming to her" he said.


Return to the table of contents



A Poem by Layne Russell

Sierra haiku


boulders and stones
white rapids tumble through green --
at my feet tiny trout


Return to the table of contents



A Poem by Christian Kiefer

A Prayer


In this world there will be blood, and all kinds of creatures will be born with blood--deer--all kinds of birds_all kinds of creatures--all of them, without fail--every kind will be born with blood in this world. In various places, rocks, being red, will stay that way. It will be, in this world, as if all is mingled with blood. Then the world will be beautiful to look at. Ay! What do you think of that?
Coyote
Maidu Creation Myth


1

Many things have died here
--it is true.
Under the needles
the bones have already returned:
the sacrum of the crow,
jaw of coyote,
skull and thumb of man.

I don't remember how it was.
Or how it must have been.
Such things are like
the afterimage of the sun
on the retinae
or the memory of thirst.
Or the darkness under stones.
Those things have lifted
into what world beyond?

Now the dirt.
Digging up the place
where they wintered
(where they must have wintered)
before descending
into the land of the bear.
Their stick homes would crumble:
straw thatching into fire,
acorns riddled,
chest bared to some older sun,
some older fire,
some older bones.

So it is written.
But it is not the past
that binds us.
It might walk among us sometimes,
like some living thing.
The trail like a long
swath of warm blood
through wet snow.
You might find a few
spare scraps there:
left like offerings to some older way.
But these are only
the shadow of the ceremony
and not the thing itself.
And even this is only
if the stalking and pouncing
are successful.

So many times I have felt my own
watching from secret places.
I have heard it
sharpening those bones.
Even now, with you so close,
the distant rumble of huge things
pass through the oldest
places of my heart.

2

Now you see
how history bites
the hand that feeds it.
And it has been
this way since the beginning.

By the time the first
horse appeared,
we had already learned
of endings
We had already lay down
in the dirt
had clutched our
last breaths to fever
had fallen there
beneath that cold sun.
And so it was that the
baskets blackened,
grew into a hundred spiders
that swarmed over us
and would not stop.

After that it must have seemed as if
all the world had been caught
in the wild desire to build a rag town
from this unnamed hill--
through the wrinkles
of ridges and fields,
all the way to the river
of the bear.

3

So it was
that we came to this place.
You and I.
And became haunted
by everything to come before.
And what else is there?
With ignorance mattering so little
or not at all.
And even if you manage
to hold your heart past the earth,
still your blood
will flow into it.
So it is now
when their voices call to us
from the dirt,
crying out the last
riving of soul from body,
casting off all the years
of sweat and love and longing
--the final fire
of their lives on earth.

Then all the world becomes
the memory of the dead.

4

This is how it learned
to sit in silence,
unmoving for so long.
How it learned to thicken
in the mud,
mix with the powder
of old bones
until once again it could collect
the desire to rise
into the air of living.

Now it is part of our blood
the way breathing is:
the tiny skulls of birds
break their whitened beaks
against the soil,
and the curved teeth
of the big cats gnaw
the stones.

5

This is the place
we have come to:
a place supported by all
our histories.
In the dark, hardened parts
of our living it shines.
The body continues
to perform its vitality,
and this oldest of ancient beasts
pauses a long, wet moment
without breath,
its body limp and blue and useless.
Then, all the air of the world
is sucked in for the first
of many screams.

It is a moment of reckoning.
For all these long days
of spring and summer
I watched you lean against
the weight of your body
and learned how things
suffer to cleave our hearts.
The acorn is removed from the cap
the same way the ancient people must have,
and the meat crushed and soaked
in the river for seventeen days
until its acid has been lost.
Only those who escape
with bitterness intact
become alive.
Only those who grow up
become born.

6

It is in these moments
that I remember
that the acorn brings forth
the curling leaves of the seedling
and the heartwood of the oak.
Even in this season
it drops its potency
to the deck like rain.
This is the drumming
that parcels out our passions
of love and dreaming,
the rhythm of the falling
away of the heart,
and the dry, final wheeze
of the dry, final moment
of our lives on earth.
It is the same sound
that punched out its staccato
rhythm on the hunter's earth,
the bone people's grinding stones,
the tents of railroad workers
and the chatter of the rail itself.
And for those who fix
their bitter taproot
into the water under bedrock--
no amount of fire will still them.
Let them be burned many times
and still they will lift again,
each year,
into the light.
Let them weave through
the eye sockets
and pelvic bones of our history.
Let them enter the tiny
nerve places where the impetus
of motion burned,
and let it be so living.

Eaters of berries and acorns,
weavers, love makers,
game players, child raisers,
gold hunters, track layers,
keepers of old songs,
and old joys--
know that we too
have come to this place
with our handful
of tiny seeds.

In the west,
over the canyon
of the river of the bear,
the sky is reddening again.
The night will be filled
with the hiss of opossum
and the howl of dogs,
and in the morning
our shadows will once again
cast out toward the river
and coyote will fire them again
with blood.

Here, to this little house
in the trees,
we have brought our own
impression of joy
--for it is true
that winter again breaks
into spring
and the scorched earth
again brings forth
the red curls of the oak
--for it is true
that this night of dreams opens
into the history of daylight
--for it is true
that many things have lived here.

Return to table of contents


A Poem by John McGinley

All the working night
poems plowed through my mind
flew in my face, eager to birth.
No way to pen them as my swollen hands
slopped caustic powders, soaps and bleaches
over nicotine-yellowed walls.
My good writing arm swung
the leaden mop over an even grayer floor
until my elbows locked up stiff and fiery
until my shoulders hunched down in pain.

Later, at home,
between midnight and four I tossed
exhausted in bed, promising myself
promising that the words would be there
at dawn - at dawn all the brilliant
tropical bird/words seen so clearly
in the flourescent tube glow
in the empty corridors of the institution
would come to roost for my pen.

In bed still, the next morning,
rolling fog and growing sunlight
struggle for possession of the streets.
Morning intrusions fill my small room -
laundry soap smells in the sheets,
fresh wax on the floors,
traces of shampoo on the pillows,
empty writing pad on the table
some old, stray feathers near the open window.

Return to table of contents


Two Poems by James Lee Jobe

His Great Belief in Marination


My father stared at those pigs for a long time, his gaze
steady, like Odysseus at the helm. "What are you staring

at, Dad?" "Son, I'm trying to figure out a way to raise
a pig in barbeque sauce, it's whole live-long life."

It was summer, 1970. Vietnam raged. We fought a lot.
Hair length. About who my friends were, or weren't.

I was 14. he'd already taught me how to drink, bought
me women. He showed me how to break someone's

knee quickly, how to hide a gun, how to hide a bottle,
how to set an illegal trout line, and where to set it.

And he taught me how to marinate baby-back ribs,
"At least 24 hours, boy." The one lesson I could use.

It's more than a quarter-century gone by since that
summer, I've got a son who looks to me for lessons,

for the secrets I have to give him. And here I sit,
in a Sacramento R & B club called Warner's, talking

to a waitress about the ribs I'd barbequed a day before,
how I had carefully marinated them for a full 24 hours.

"What I'd really like," I tell her, "is to find some way
raise a pig in barbeque sauce, his whole live-long life."

________________________________________

That Which Is Missing


for Nena


She worried out loud at the bus station, telling herself, or perhaps no one, the story of what was, and what might be.He'd left her, two children, strange

city, no money; just walked away. She aked how to survive this, how to even live, protect her children. What might happen? She might survive only to bear

her wound, to remember that daythe way an amputee remembers a lost leg, or stares at where a hand used to be. Her children might live as amputees

also, and their children. And theirs. They are all humans, the man, the woman, the children. And that species passes on that which is missing.

Return to table of contents


Four Poems by Kerry Campbell

bithday


your 1st birthday:
I cried
the pain of it-
breaking
metal on metal
in my womb
your 2nd birthday:
I drank heavily
until-
your father
was
a
blind stupor
your 3rd birthday:
I celebrated
with family
solace
sneaking cigarettes
on the back porch
your 4th birthday:
I threw away the pack
and your father too

_________________________

Cornerstore

it is 10 pm
I sneak out of the house

to the corner store
cigarettes

left you sleeping on the verge
of your third birthday

fast, fast running
to the corner store

what if there is fire?
you fall out of bed into darkness

and no one is there?

fast, fast running
to the corner store

i slow, suck
the misty air into my lungs

drag the tethered rope
to the corner store

cigarette in hand
i slow, suck heavy smoke

close my eyes and see:
a night raven in a cage fit
for a day bird

__________________________

Suicide note

all the people in the world.
she said
and left off
30 aspirin
and
no more

__________________________

witch's coven at the lawyer's office

the sacrifice:
a blond two year old
she gutted her way out
my belly with an ax
left a scar 3 inches long
her daddy said:
I don't want you
then turned over like
rotten fruit
his underbelly was fur
festering burnt green
he bit down with ripe teeth
clamped her leg
and started to move
like a pitbull
inching toward the jugular
the lawyer said:
he won't get her
sitting in a circle
him
my mother
and me

Return to table of contents

ARCHIVES

In Sublette's Barn - Summer, 1997



In Sublette's Barn - Spring, 1997



Links from this page.....
Calendar of Literary and Poetry Events in the Sacramento region
Luke Breit's Home Page
Poetic Links
Poems by Luke Breit
Columns by Luke Breit
Quotes & Reviews
About the editor
Sacramento Arts' Funding Saved!

Submit poems here or email the editor