Almost a Hipster
The brick buildings on Battery Street
are covered with climbing vines,
and movies beam from the window of a corner bar,
then flicker outside on an external wall.
The images are monochrome,
somber foreign films with no volume,
just outlines that I can barely see.
I like to guess what the mouths are saying
as I wander through Belltown
in my plain black Chinese shoes and Dobbs hat,
carrying a six-pack of imported beer
and a new Tom Waits cassette.
I climb the fire escape to my apartment
because I owe rent money,
and I don’t want the manager to see me.
He waits for me in his office
like a sinister gargoyle.
No man ever worked so hard
for three hundred dollars, plus late fees.
A neighbor gave me her ancient hi-fi
and it still plays records, but I
have to shake it occasionally,
and I like to fall asleep
with the hi-fi playing softly
after shutting down the Two Bells Tavern
and wandering unsteadily home
to my apartment beside the Monorail tracks.
I work as a nanny
for a kosher Jewish family in Ravenna
and the pay is terrible,
so I decide to moonlight as a dancer
at Sugar’s, an establishment devoted
to men’s pleasure, located at the bottom
of Aurora Avenue, the colon of the city.
It is better than the Lusty Lady
where the women dance behind
one-way, bulletproof glass,
as if they were on television.
The other dancers say that I am too fat
and appear nervous, and that men
don’t like fat, nervous women.
They’re probably right,
and I quit four days later.
The men at the Two Bells are less concerned
about extra pounds and social dysfunction,
and this is fine with me, but the rent is due.
Meanwhile, the Frontier Room offers
its dusty pint glasses in the afternoons,
followed by healthier fare at the Free Mars Cafe
with its array of bones and hubcaps
nailed haphazardly to the fence outside.
There is a lurking certainty everywhere that
Something Big Will Soon Happen in Seattle,
but I fall so far behind on the rent
that I am forced to give up my apartment
and move to an abandoned school bus.
Eventually the developers rush into Belltown
and everything closes-the Dog House bar
with its Dick Dickerson organ singalongs,
a favorite of elderly men and women
who croon along to Andy Bennett tunes,
and Byblos restaurant, where the comical owner
rages like a thunderstorm
and then, just as abruptly, grows placid.
He smiles sweetly as he places the meal
of hummus and stuffed grape leaves
upon my table, then returns
to the back room and starts screaming again.
This is not my city any more.
Only the Two Bells remains, and it is full
of computer professionals who wear khakis
and boat shoes, and brag about stock portfolios
while they sample the soup of the day.
The pay phone on the nearby corner
where I once groped the young writer
from the defunct alternative paper
is long gone, and the intersection looks bare
even though cars are everywhere,
all of the drivers in search of their spoils
as they race in circles around each other
and grab for nuggets in the new Seattle gold rush.
No Sense in Waiting
The rain was falling like artillery
on a chilly March evening
while the four of us huddled
around a tiny wood stove
in a damp farmhouse in the forest.
We rubbed our hands together
in front of the fire,
and the flames sparked abruptly,
making popcorn sounds
as the wet wood ignited.
It was one of those nights
when no one had much to say-
words fell to the floor
like sacks of laundry
and remained there, unattended
until the entire room was filled
with the stench of dullness.
My visiting boyfriend was an attorney
who had followed me from Chicago
to a tiny island in Puget Sound
where I lived with Chris and Debbie,
two women I'd met on the highway
only a month beforehand.
Debbie owned a dog
who'd roamed the same highway
while in heat,
searching for a willing partner
to alleviate her strange discomfort.
Eventually she coupled with a canine
who had bad genes,
and then gave birth to a batch
of deformed puppies, who lay now
in a jumbled pile in the nearby barn,
attended by their anxious mother,
waiting for their fate to be decided.
We humans had known their fate for a while,
but never discussed it openly.
Debbie was a single mother
who had migrated to the Northwest
from a southerly direction,
her sullen toddler son and the dog
tossed into the back of her car
with their few possessions,
stopping only to purchase soda,
disposable diapers and cigarettes.
Now she had a squirming mess
of defective puppies
but no money for a vet bill
for their humane extermination.
Still, Debbie was nothing
if not intrepid-
she suddenly rose to her feet,
strode purposefully across the room,
and heaved herself over to the corner
where her shotgun lay.
She lifted the barrel to her shoulder
and, while everyone stared at her
with stupefied amazement,
she casually stated, “Well,
might as well do it now.
There ain't no sense in waiting”
and stormed outside into the rain.
A minute later,
the gun fired six times
and then everything was quiet-
at least until Debbie came back inside
sat down beside the wood stove,
snapped the door open,
and threw a new log on the fire.
BB King, Vic Theater, 1987
when you first fall in love
she's willing to do anything
to make sure you're happy
he explained from the stage
as he strummed his guitar
ever so gently
with the fingers and thumb
of one of his enormous hands.
the minute you open your eyes
in the morning, she is standing
beside the bed
with an overflowing tray of food
and you ask her
my, what's that?
and she replies sweetly
that she made you breakfast.
on the edge of the tray is
a steaming porcelain cup
filled with coffee,
and she offers
the entire package to you
without another word,
then lies down beside you
under the covers.
she touches your chest
with fingers warm
from holding the cup,
curls her body around yours,
and dozes lightly while you eat.
many months pass, and
one solemn morning
lying quietly beside her
you realize she hasn't
even made coffee
for a long time,
and you ask her quizzically,
why don't you cook me
one of those pancake breakfasts,
like you did
when we first met?
but instead of rising,
she rolls over quickly
looks you straight
in the eye, and snarls,
fix it yourself!
and that's how you know
the thrill is gone.
Illegitimate
I don't blame you
I blame your mother
and the three months you
spent in limbo, as if
you were still in the womb
draining the embryonic fluid
while fretting, knowing
a change would come,
and it most assuredly
would not be good.
You live in that space
between arms,
those appendages
that refuse to embrace you,
and are rendered helpless
by your constant need
for touch, no matter
who offers it.
I have the larger hands,
but they are too small to cover
the gulf that separates you
from the very thing you
desire the most.
Those first three months
of your life,
in the Catholic orphanage,
watching the nurses pass
your crib, as you cried,
you learned that it was
best to say nothing
and to refuse security-
but five decades later,
you still stretch your arms
and beg for entry
into any room
that has a spare bed.
Lactose Intolerant
I liked my name just fine
until the day in fourth grade
when I discovered
that it meant “wild cow”
in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
The book was a thick tome
with golden-edged pages
that was stuffed
with an unimaginable
quantity of words,
and it sat on a wooden podium
in the back of the classroom
with its covers
spread open invitingly.
This new edition
contained every word
in the English language,
including proper nouns,
names and their origins.
“Leah” was at the
upper-right-hand corner
of the 682nd page,
so its presence
was impossible to miss.
One of my sharp-eyed classmates
spotted it one day,
during an odious class assignment
which involved
looking up obscure words
while thumbing through
the dictionary's heavy pages,
and then painstakingly
copying definitions onto pieces
of lined notebook paper.
Discovering that my name
had a bovine connotation
was considerably more interesting
than homework,
and this fascination
blossomed into a terrible flower,
until my arrivals at school
in the mornings
were always welcomed
by ritual choruses of mooing
that only ceased
when the teachers yelled
for silence.
My classmates asked what flavor
of milk I was giving,
and sometimes I played along,
said plain or chocolate,
or no, I wasn't giving milk
because I wasn't actually a cow.
Finally, I transferred
to another school
where they didn't
use Webster's dictionary
and the mooing ceased-
but it was years
before I learned to like cows,
or could even
hear the word “cow”
without thinking of my name.
Prozac
PROZAC
The fear
of dropping
whatever it is
that we’ve been working on
to face the radiating terror
that illuminates our bones
is what drives our existence
into a frenzy of avoidance
with a whole industry of tools
designed to help us elude it.
It’s a wonder any of us
even get close,
because each attempt
also pushes us further away,
we hop on the coals
until the heat forces us
to leave,
when perhaps the heat
has the answer.
Who knows?
We’d rather be spectators,
watch someone else do it,
retire to some place
that is pleasant and warm,
perhaps with a view
of the water.
I’m no different,
and I look through catalogs
stapled together
by other people
as I sit on my couch
and dream
of a life devoid
of introspection.