Buster, or the Unclaimed Urn

This is a posthumous collaboration with Barbara A. Holland. It is included in the new Poet's Press book, The Secret Agent.

BUSTER,
or The Unclaimed Urn

An Un-illustrated Book
by
ABADON BARR-HALL

1.

A well-pleased gray cat gave birth

to a litter of fourteen little kittens

whose eyes were as yet unopened,

and who spent most of their days

crawling all over one another

while batting those who climbed over them

with their tiny paws, and sucking

the fresh milk form their mother’s side.

One was a very special cat, not like

a cat that anyone had seen before.

Which one of the fourteen was he? We’ll see!

2.

Then one day the lady who owned

their mother decided she only wanted three,

and would give six away to people

who would love them. And she would drown

the other five, for who would be

expected to take home so many kittens!

Too many, no matter how pretty

they all might be! Was he to be one

of the Chosen, or the Drowned?

3.

So the lady chose which kittens

she wanted. Most you could not tell

what gender they were as yet. Two were girls,

for sure, and one was a boy, and he was a noble

little thing. As pretty as anything could be.

Wasn’t he the lucky one?

The doorbell rang. The visitors came.

They picked and chose and argued.

Even his mother was taken away.

The rest were scooped up. The toilet flushed.

Now he was the only one left! Just one!

4.

A voice in a tall shadow named him “Buster.”

Buster was gray, silvery-gray

on the legs and back, gray on the back

of his head and his ears, but his face

was white, and he was white beneath

the chin and his chest and stomach,

and he wore white socks. What kind

of cat was Buster anyway, all this-and-that?

5.

Buster paid court to the woman,

big hands and shadow, loud voice and all.

He was hungry a lot.

Buster would wake the lady up

in the morning by licking her face

with his tongue. He patted her cheek

just ever so gentle with his paws.

Buster had to pretend to like her,

or he would never get fed.

6.

Then came the day when the lady noticed

that he was fat for a kitten. Some sort of lump

stuck out at each side of his head,

and his forelegs met at two bent shoulders.

“That’s not what a cat

is supposed to look like!” she muttered.

Whatever could be wrong with Buster?

7.

So then one day, when she was playing with him,

her fingers slipped along his sides

and she discovered that he had WINGS,

two little furry wings which fit him perfectly.

They were gray on the backs

and as he flapped them open,

they showed clean white beneath them.

Whoever heard of a cat with WINGS?

8.

Buster’s head drooped on his chest.

She had discovered his secret.

Now she would drown him too,

for she hated everything that was not nice,

anything irregular or lumpy or out-of-shape.

He knew from what she said that he —

he was the only one of his brothers

and sisters and kittens of uncertain

gender, the only one for sure with WINGS!

He had another secret, too. He had WINGS,

and he knew how to use them!

9.

Would she hate him now? Would be be drowned?

The lady seemed delighted. She crowed.

He lifted his head and looked straight at her.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Show me.”

Flapping his wings slowly, he showed her,

how up and out they opened, and flapped.

WINGS were to show you are happy.

10.

Each morning, he would get up,

stand on two legs as tall as he could,

and stretch his wings out, out and up.

He would set them shaking.

“Go ahead!” she encouraged him.

She laughed and he walked and fluttered.

Then down he went, like a common house-cat,

and all he could do was utter a faint meow.

The reward was a pat on his neck

and a trip to the bowl in the kitchen.

“My little eagle!” she crooned. “My little eagle.”

11.

One day the windows were all-the-way open.

He walked to the far wall, then turned

and raced toward them and spread his wings

and FLAP, FLAP, FLAPPED

and he found himself flying out the window

just like the birds who fell by accident

and always seemed to come back up.

Now he knew their secret, too: up and out,

then down and up again! Imagine,

a cat with wings. No one was ever

going to drown him! And he had a world to see,

and his whiskers thrilled and trembled.

12.

Cats are no more curious

than any other animal,

          but a cat’s WHISKERS

are like a personal radar.

Buster’s seemed to feel about in the air.

They looked eager to understand.

Buster let the soft plume

of his tail stand straight up tall.

Now he could fly straight. This little thing

would make a difference.

Wings out, tail up, here comes BUSTER!

13.

He came and went from the house

without the lady knowing it —

she liked the window open,

and so did he. Back in the house

he was hearth-kitten, ears up and ready

for the sound of cat-food, for whatever sounds

were there to be heard, nose twitching for

fresh smells of clean litter and Lysol.

He did his duty when the lady entered.

“How is Buster? How is the little eagle.”

Flap-flap-flutter-meow, he would answer.

He rolled on the floor, this way, that way,

wings tucked neatly under, resting up.

14.

Daytimes, when the lady went to work,

he had all the outdoors to investigate.

One night, on the window-sill, he heard

things he had never heard before,

a far-away fluttering, calling, the night,

the opal eye of the big moon,

so he slipped out the window

         and flew away.

She watched him do it. She ran to stop him.

She cried hopelessly,

for she thought he was gone for good.

No one was safe at night in the city!

Would Buster come back? Would you?

15.

But he was only just down in the garden,

three floors below where the ground-floor tenant

had roses (ouch!) to land on, soft ferns

and a catnip patch much visited by felines

of every conceivable shape and color.

There, he learned new ways to catch food.

16.

There were big ailanthus trees

all around the garden. They smelled terrible,

but up in their spiky leaves a person who flew

could get lost, or stay hidden

where no one would ever find them.

Among the flickering leaves at night,

only the eyes of the ones up there were visible.

Can you see BUSTER in the high trees?

17.

And there, one night, on a high branch,

he met a new friend, The Owl

(What owl? Who? Don’t ask an owl his name

because he’ll never tell you. Who will suffice.)

He doesn’t talk much, anyway,

looks wiser and smarter than he actually is.

Turning his eyes this way, that way,

all he is thinking about is, probably: mice.

And that was just fine with Buster.

Buster loved mice.

18.

Buster knew one way only

to catch a mouse: a slow process

with no promise of getting anything,

just crouching in front of a hole

in the lady’s baseboard, and waiting.

It had been hardly worth the trouble.

Out here, the mice were everywhere.

They ran about like crazy people

looking for their own food. Careless,

they never saw Buster crouching

and certainly never saw The Owl

as he swooped down on them.

19.

Buster and the Owl, the Meow and the Who,

came up with a method to hunt together.

They’d hide among the leaves,

     The Owl, watching

     Buster, with his big ears and radar whiskers,

          listening. They made

a game of it, to see who could slide out

of the twig-end of the low branch first

and land on the back of the prey.

One mouse for you, Mr. Owl. One vole for you,
     Mr. Cat! The chipmunk is on to us.

A rat? A rat we can divide between us!

20.

Exploring the neighborhood by daytime

Buster would see bats like empty bags hanging

from the doors of old garages.

There goes one he frightened with his paw-prod:

no bigger than a mouse

but with a wingspread many times wider

than its little body.

Ah, Buster, marveled. If a cat can fly,

why not a mouse, a flying mouse.

These Buster would not eat:

          he respected them.

21.

Birds! Oh to catch a bird!

Birds, after all, despite their prettiness,

devoured one another. One giant hawk

swooped down and made off with anything

its talons could carry: rabbits and birds,

chipmunks, and even a toy poodle

(to that, Buster said Good riddance!).

Buster wasn’t good at catching birds.

He had been brought up for stalking.

22.

On a long flight

that nearly exhausted him

he came to a pond, and to a bird,

a lordly bird on stilts. The Heron

nodded a little and then resumed

his absolute stillness.

Buster saw fish, red, gold and brown

move aimlessly around the heron’s legs.

How do you catch fish?

     he asked the Heron.

Hours and hours he stood and waited,

     the Heron explained

until the fish ignored him.

Then he’d jab down with his long beak

and come up with a neatly-skewered fish.

Buster did not have a beak,

and the water, which he tried,

was cold and chilling. Pads of his paws

could tread on water, he could dart

and flutter and try to catch fish,

but no, Buster was not getting wet,

the way the lady sometimes had tried

to make him cleaner and fluffier.

No way, Baby, no way

is any self-respecting cat

going to lurk in the water

on four short legs!

23.

He spent the summer

in the trees with all the varied birds

(they finally came to be unafraid

once he announced he couldn’t catch them

and didn’t like the taste of feathers, anyway.

Well-fed on mice, he was growing.

He started to feel that time was passing.

He was bigger, stronger, longer-legged

and sleek, but something was wrong:

Buster’s wings did not grow with him.

They were just the same size

as when he first kitten-flew

and made his great escape.

If this kept up, he would not lift himself

to the treetops anymore.

24.

On one final flight to see how far, how high,

how much of the city he could explore,

Buster flapped up to where a high wind

grabbed him and took him up high

     the dizzy-up where the hawks went.

His mouth wide, his whiskers extended,

tail up to guide him, he soared the skyline.

Towers he saw from above, rooftops and ladders,

windows and fire escapes, twisted iron ropes

of river-spanning bridges. Sharp edges, high

spires jabbed at him. If he fell here,

the city below would skin him alive.

25.

Buster was dizzy. He had gone too high.

No one should see their high places upside-down.

His wings were tired. He dropped

onto a window-ledge some thirty floors

above the street. He looked below

and almost belched a fur-ball. He looked

to both sides: nothing, just other windows

and no way to get to them.

What would become of Buster, thirty floors up?

26.

This was no place for a cat at all.

Changing with three feet like any other cat,

he tapped with one forepaw

     against the window pane.

Buster was frightened now.

He remembered how The Owl had warned him:

Fur is no replacement for feathers.

He had lost his nerve for leaping.

Too high, too far,

        to the unforgiving pavement.

And no time to wonder if The Owl was wrong.

27.

Not every wind is friendly. New ones swirled

around the building, and lashed him.

The pigeons he shared the ledge with

kept nudging him, afraid

he would bother their little nestlings.

Move over, they said, or fly back

     to where you came from.

So Buster’s ledge-hold became

a paw-and-claw tango.

If Buster fell off, could he fly up again?

28.

Inside the window a woman typed,

click-clickedly-clack, all the while Buster

was going tap-tappedy-tap at the window-pane.

He tried his loudest meow. The woman

looked up. She stared at Buster

in wide-eyed astonishment.

He kept one paw up

against the glass, as if to wave.

She didn’t seem to see his wings

outstretched in desperation.

Instinct took over. She raised the window.

Into her two arms he leaped.

“Oh kitty!” she murmured.

“How did you get here, thirty floors up?”

Buster gave her his most

    consoling and grateful purr.

Soon the woman and her boyfriend

went off to the elevator (a car that went up
and down without a step or wing-beat!),

Buster held tight in their hands.

The door opened and closed.
Another man got on.

Cat-whiskers knew they were descending.

What would Buster’s new friends do with him?

29.

Buster shook out his wings, just in case.

The stranger’s voice bellowed, “What’s that?

What are you doing with that huge bird

on this elevator?” “It’s a CAT,” the secretary

told the loud man, lifting up Buster

to the man’s steel-gray eyes and moustache.

“He landed in fright on the window ledge.

We’re bringing him down the street,” explained

the young man. And Buster purred.

30.

Man, woman and cat emerged

into a noonday crowd below.

She petted Buster. The man’s hands

began to tighten around Buster’s

middle. His wings felt squashed.

“We’re going to make a fortune on him,”

the man said. “We need a big cage.

I have a friend at the zoo. We’ll be famous!”

And then in a burst of light and wind

they were outdoors. Buster went limp.

The woman yelled “Taxi! Taxi!”

With teeth and claws and wing-beat

Buster attacked the man and broke free.

He heard them screaming far below.

He was going home. He was fed up with flying.

People were no good, but at least

he had a place to be a hearth-cat.

His little wings had served him well enough.

31.

The lady’s window was open.

When she saw Buster, she was so glad

she even sang a song. Never had he seen

so much milk, so big a bowl of food

(no mice, but what could one expect?).

She held him and held him,

and then she noticed. “Your wings!

They seem to be growing shorter

as your body grows bigger and bigger.

I wonder what a vet would say?”

32.

To say he did not like the “cat carrier”

was putting it mildly. And what did Buster

know about this creature called “The Vet”?

“These are vestigial wings,” the Vet explained

as his gloved hand held Buster expertly.

“This is a full-grown cat you have here,

fully matured. He’s a full-fledged tomcat now.”

The woman paused to take that in.

She wrinkled her nose.

“How can I deal with that?”

“We can remove the vestigial wings,

so he’s less likely to run into danger.
God only knows what he did while he was out there.”

“Remove them? You mean a surgery?”

“Yes. Since he means so much to you.”

“Of course,” she gulped. Numbers they talked,

and then they went aside and whispered.

All Buster heard was, “The other thing

we can take care of while he’s out.”

33.

Babyhood, childhood, adolescence, all

were now in Buster’s past. He was a new thing,

something they called a tom-cat. Did this mean

no more hunting for mice and voles and rats?

no more night-watch in tree-top with Mr. Owl?

Buster waited in a small cage.

Another cat, an orange tabby, howled

and meowed in the next cage.

They talked. The orange fellow — Max

was what his owner called him —

was here for an operation, too.

“Just you wait,” Max said ominously.

I know what they do here. It’s my turn now.

They’re going to cut me down below.

I will no more go out a-prowling. No lady

cats in my future. And I will grow

immensely fat, and be pampered.”

34.

“I’m here for something else,” said Buster.

He flapped his wings to show what he meant.

“Harrumph!” said Max. “That’s fine enough

to have a bird-part removed. Who needs it?

But no one leaves here without being snipped.

It’s a conspiracy, and the Vet is a monster.”

Buster had always wondered

what the she-cats and he-cats did in the alley

that made so much noise. His life as a cat

was about to be terminated.

All the lady wanted was the idea of a cat.

Buster decided he would rather be dead.

35.

Buster was pierced with a needle, and then another.

His vision spiraled down to darkness.

His wings were carved off, the stitches applied.

“While he’s asleep, let’s do the neutering,” a voice said.

He heard it even though he was numb. His legs

no longer answered his call, and his whiskers

told him nothing, either. He even heard them breathe

when they hovered over him.

Buster meowed once, and took a death.

Twice and thrice, he meowed again —

           he had the knack of this dying thing.

Still his heart beat. He twitched and meowed

           life four, life five, life six

               there they go

          (are you sure you want to go through with this,

               Buster, no more mice ever?)

          life seven, life eight,

               meow your lungs out to give up the ninth.

“We lost him, Doctor!” the assistant reported.

“He went into seizures and we lost him.”

36.

The lady was furious

when they told her Buster was dead.

“I’m not paying for that operation,”

she shrieked, “since all you did

was kill my poor kitten.”

“You can come get the body,” they told her.

“What would I do with it?”

“We can cremate Buster. You can have a nice little urn.

There’s a pet cemetery in Queens.”

“That sounds … suitable,” the lady told them.

37.

Buster’s remains went into a furnace.

Black smoke went up, a pile of ash

sank to the bottom,

all that remained of the noble cat.

A small bronze urn, engraved

with BUSTER and the single year

of his birth and departing,

was filled with the ashes.

No one ever came to claim it.

38.

The lady cried a great deal,

but then the winter came,

and she was busy at the office,

and there were the holidays,

and then a trip away,

and come spring

the only thing that bothered her

was that an owl kept coming

to her closed window, tap-

tapping on the glass and looking

at her. She had a dread

of owls and didn’t know why

it kept tapping and peering,

tapping and peering.

After a while.

the owl stopped coming.

Introduction to Barbara Holland's Medusa

Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line. 
After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet's notebooks and papers have been transferred to The Poet’s Press. The objective is to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the first product of this project, as we have begun to catalog and scan the papers. 
Approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s have been scanned.  Some of these may be added to the Collected Poems edition published in 1980; others will form a separate, large Collected Poems, Volume 2.
Astonishingly, the trove of typed manuscripts contains five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” are largely made up of poems no one has seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. An enormous folder of “Old Poems” spans from the late 1960s  up to as late as 1987.  If possible, I intend to see each of these manuscripts into a print and/or digital edition before the papers are archived. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets.

Medusa and Other Poems
The present book exists, so far as I know, in only the single copy found in the Holland papers. It is self-published, undated,  and bears the address of 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. By my guess and from internal evidence, the chapbook was printed sometime between 1958 and 1961. The copy at hand is personally inscribed by Holland to Leonie Adams, a famed poet who was her aunt, and whose help and encouragement she solicited. This copy has penciled markings not in Holland’s hand, and some typographic corrections by the poet. 
Barbara told me sometime in the mid-1970s that Leonie Adams had refused to help her in her poetry career, and it is no small wonder considering how shocking the content was, especially from a woman poet at the cusp of the 1960s, a daughter of two accomplished Philadelphia academics. Medusa has to be the most shocking first book of poems by any American female poet, erotic, Satanic, raw in Chthonic myth, and assured in its bardic manner.
There is some indication that Holland was persuaded to withdraw the chapbook. She never listed it in her publication credits and never offered any of the other poems for inclusion in my anthology, May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry in 1975, nor at any time after. Her notebooks offer evidence that she strove to write in other veins, but the supernatural affinity roared back by the early 1970s with Holland’s two most famous live-performance pieces, “Black Sabbat” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 
Medusa includes 13 poems in its table of contents. Two more poems were added, apparently to fill out two blank pages at the end of the book, so the poems “Undermined” and “Fire Tumor” should be considered as outside the conceived cycle of poems centered around the title-poem.
Although this book might seem to belong to the horror genre, this was a minor niche in 1961 and rather limited to fiction (Barbara knew the work of writers such as Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft quite well). Along with Holland, Shirley Powell, Claudia Dobkins, and, later, Jack Veasey, we formed the Gothic avant garde in Greenwich Village, cemented with the publication of May Eve in 1975. It is safe to say that we were regarded as lunatics. But at no time did we consider ourselves part of a sub-genre: we were fellow poets in the New York poetry scene of the time, contending against all the other styles and manners of the era. And it is important to note that none of us wrote rhymed verse.  The poems we wrote were intended for performance, and we read them all over the Northeast. Barbara was our exemplar, and her readings from memory were riveting. Those who only heard her in her last few years, after illness had affected her eyesight and memory, have no idea how powerful and incantory her performances were. She was called, rightfully, the Sybil of Greenwich Village.

Poems from Notebooks and Manuscripts
For the remainder of this book, I have turned to Holland’s hand-written notebooks, and to the large “Old Poems” typescript folder. Holland’s hand-written notes are mostly preliminary sketches for poems, often a dense block of lines, not yet broken up in any kind of meter or breath-phrasing. The same lines might appear on several successive pages, re-ordered but still with little hint of what might become a typed poem for submission to a magazine. A number of these were coherent and polished enough that I felt them worthy, especially as they demonstrate Holland’s attempt to take everyday journal ideas and make them into poems.
Thus, from these notebook sketches, I have “constructed” poems. Some needed only lineation and punctuation, and since I often worked with Barbara on the final appearance of her poems in print, I did what I always did. I know her style and her voice. I passed by sketches that seemed unyielding, and prepared others that seemed almost ready to be poems.  I have invented titles, and I have made small groupings of short lyric pieces that were found on adjacent sheets and which seem to go together.
I found a clump of poems written during off-season visits to Coney Island, so I put some of these into a group titled “Coney Island Suite.”
I have also done what any book editor would do, which is silently to correct spellings, to replace words where another word was clearly intended, and in a couple of places, indicated with square brackets, to insert a word that I would have persuaded Barbara to add.  I have added a few footnotes to help the general reader.
Holland was famed for a kind of trance-like, floating “run on sentence” manner in her readings, and I have judiciously added semicolons and other punctuations that serve to make her syntax clear. In “Medusa,” which I heard Holland recite from memory hundreds of times, there was always a syntactical knot in the middle which I have finally addressed.
From the typed manuscripts I have selected a range of poems that include the everyday, as well as re-appearances of the raw desires of the Medusa poems. Those who knew Holland as an eccentric but staid “spinster poet” may be startled at her emotional confessions. But what may come back to haunt the reader is that Holland is always one brave outsider, contending with solitude, desire, scorn, and genteel poverty, the soul of a Homeric poet in the guise of a shopping bag lady. And we may see also from these poems that “Medusa” is about becoming the dreaded monster no one may regard, simply by becoming old. Holland told an interviewer, “I am my own prison.”

The Inhuman Wave

by Brett Rutherford

Those not Frenchmen, who found themselves
in Paris during the Terror, or the Commune’s tumult,
have told of them, the unnumbered multitude,
for every jeune fille a femme terrible,
how they welled out of the slums and docksides
ten thousand strong with knives and hooks,
marched all the way to Versailles to rip
and shred the silk bedding of Marie Antoinette;
how with scarcely-human, distorted visages
they howled with joy as nuns and priests
were dragged to the chugging Guillotine;
how they bore the piked heads of nobles
from square to square while shriek-singing
enfants de la Patrie (enfants indeed
as the starving fishwives and worn-out
ladies of the after-hours avenged their rapes,
revenged miscarriages and hunger’s stillbirths,
shook fists in the names of starved-to-death
children, of menfolk vanished to dungeons).

Those horrified witnesses to ’93,
or to the doomed Commune of commons’ rage,
said they had never seen such creatures,
contorted rag-faces that scarce were seen
in daylight, demons even from Goya’s fever,
Maenads in ’71 who hurled incendiary bombs,
Medusas of the Communards reducing the Tuileries
to an ash-ground of burnt and crumbled ruins
(damn their palaces! to the flames, their documents!) —
and how in each time of revolt, indeed,
illiterate and with no scrap of paper on them,
many a hag could issue detailed death-lists
of accumulated resentment, this way, milord,
to the alley where you will be torn to bits.
Women whose work it was to skin and scale
the Seine boats’ harvest, who throttled hens,
gutted the hares and trimmed the venison —
how easily they came to blood and rending!

“Where did they all come from? One never saw
such faces! A physiognomy of anger, creatures
so hideous and filthy one could not think
they dwelt with fathers, lovers and children;
rather, they were demons of political rage,
as though every wronged, dead harridan
rose from her Black Death catacomb undead.”
Mères-grand, Citoyennes, Dames de la Mort!
Beware, kings and tyrants, the women of Paris!

Peeling the Onion (Poem Version)

The story in this poem was placed in my collection, An Expectation of Presences, as a short story. It was put there, in effect, to "mark the place" where a narrative poem would be. It has taken years to put all the pieces together, and to be able to present my grandmother's "confession."

i

Summer of my fifteenth year, grandmother
spoke of the grown-up things, her secrets.
A little I knew from her mother, half-deaf
Cristina Butler, coal-stove memories
of Alsatian parents fleeing Prussians,
a grandfather who had served Napoleon
as waterboy in one of his campaigns.
The Emperor loved his men of Alsace
those who “spoke German but sabred in French.”
Things hidden in cubbyholes came down, things
my grandparents would inherit and carry on:
something in tarnished silver whose purpose
we never understood, a never-read Bible
from the Philadelphia Lutherans, and wine,
Passover wine long turned to vinegar.
There once had been a barn, long since burned down,
and you could see how far the garden had gone
when there were still men to do the tending.

But these were passed-on secrets, dimly-known.
Today grandmother Florence told me of Butler,
her father Albert, who robbed the town bank,
got thirty dollars for his trouble, caught
within hours. She showed me his photograph,
a stout man in coat and tie, Masonic pin
proudly displayed.”Dear Florence,” the obverse
said in pencil script, “the photos we took
together did not come out. Good-bye from your Pa.”
“And I never saw him again,” she said.
“He went to jail. No one know where he went
when he got out. Too shamed to be seen here.
I was left alone with my mother Cristina.”

But what about Homer, then?” I asked. She frowned.
Homer, the old man who had lived with Cristina
up to his death when I was eleven.
Cigar-smoking recluse called “boarder” sometimes,
others said they were “secretly married.”
We were told to include “Grandma Butler
and Homer” right after Grandma and Pap-Pap
in “Now I lay me down to sleep,” that nightmare
prayer that threatened death by suffocation.

“Homer came later,” grandmother told me.
“Nobody liked him, but he kept things safe.
We had bad years, what with the war, and then
the worst of the Depression. Nobody
had to eat except what you grew yourself.”
She wiped her eyes; she was peeling onions.
Her wide peasant face, pock-marked and plain,
the face of every German village,
bent downward over her task, the skins and roots
of onions falling into the bucket
where all the waste and slops accumulate.

She held one up, pointed her knife at it.
“The truth is like this here onion.” she said.
I jumped to hear her use a simile.
I leaned forward. “What do you mean, grandma?”

“See here. I peeled it So here’s the white part.”
She cut some more. “Now look. There’s dirt again
and another layer of peel inside.
Then the rest is all white. That’s just the way
some people talk to you. A lie outside,
and then a little truth, and then more lies,
until you get to the white truth inside.
I guess you’ve seen enough — how people are?”

Like my stepfather, I thought. My mother, too.
The double scandal of small-town affairs.
My mother, my father’s sister’s husband,
together now in a new town, “in sin”
as everyone called in. I lived with her
and the man I once knew as “Uncle Joe.”
My father fled town when they spread the lie
that he had incest with his own sister,
gaslighting near-incest with false outrage:
they did it first, so it’s all right for us.

Grandmother’s house was just three miles from town.
That summer I tried to call my school-mates.
Their mothers answered the phone; each told me
their sons and daughters were just too busy,
and I shouldn’t bother to call them again.
The steeple-filled streets frowned on my walking.
The place that held my ancestral tombs shunned me.

In the new town, the hated town, I said
“My parents are separated.” I called
the humping couple Gertrude and Claudius.
Stepfather hated me, as I soon grew
to understand I was despised for what
I was and did, a sensitive book-worm,
hated the more for whom I resembled.
(During the courtship, if a slow dive bar
seduction can be called that, he told her
her son was a genius and ought to have
a trust fund to make sure he made his way
to some good college. A trust fund, by god!)

The false white peeled away, indeed, one day
when Uncle Joe, whiskey-drunk, said to me:
“Just so you know” — he never pronounced my name,
“You are not welcome here. Your father pays
child support. A bed, food on the table,
that’s what you get. But when you graduate
I want you out of here. Don’t ever expect
anything from us.” I later learned how
he had dumped his children from Marriage One
into an orphanage. He meant what he said.

“Grandma, I know about lies, and liars.”
(I had already told her everything).
“I’m here right now to get away from them.”

“Out home — this is where you can always go.”
She wiped the onion tears, the anger tears.
The peels slid into the ever-swelling bucket.

ii

The house had been great-grandmother Butler’s,
a four-room never-quite-finished structure,
a living-room door that never opened
since the back porch there had never been built.
It hung in air above root-cellar door.
The roof and the four walls were nothing more
than tar-paper nailed over two-by-fours.
From the road, “a shack.” For Grandma, growing
from childhood to marriage, it was “Out Home.”
Power it had, but no running water.
Bucket by bucket, it came from the spring,
or fell from the stormy sky into tubs,
rainfall for washing, bathing, and cooking.

I didn’t mind summering there, so long
as the cache of books to read held out, so
long as there were woods to run to and from,
and the fierce night sky’s Milky Way undimmed.

This morning, in the kitchen, something new:
an alarming object I had not seen
in the house or the shed or the cellar:
a shotgun (loaded?) next to the front door.

Almost on toe-tip I stood, alarmed. “What
is that?” — I pointed — “And why is it here?”

“It might for your Uncle Joe,” she answered.

I smiled at the thought. It must have belonged
to my now-dead grandfather. She saved it,
perhaps when all his things were sorted out,
the coal-miners’ gear and carpenter tools
no one knew what to do with. Did she know
how to use it? What was it really for?

She said no more, but the gun stayed. Not once
was I tempted to touch or inspect it.
Its aim was at the ceiling, yes, but what
if it toppled over and shot us both?
Each night I was aware of the dark steel,
the double-barrel, the trigger so tensed
that a sleepwalker might load and fire it.

One afternoon, late, we heard someone’s car
come up the long driveway, hump over the wood-
plank bridge, crack-hiss on the close-up gravel.
“Quick! Turn off the lights!” my grandma ordered.
“The TV, the radio, everything!”
She locked the door. We crouched on the carpet
beside the bed great-grandma had died in.
The shotgun lay on the quilted bedspread.
I smelled black powder and spied the brass edge
of the shotgun shells. The gun was loaded.

In the yard, I heard the chickens scatter.
A single set of heavy feet, up steps
and onto the porch. Two knocks at the door,
and then two raps on one kitchen window.

We waited. Grandma was shaking, from fear
or anger I could not be sure. She reached,
and when her hands found the shotgun she calmed.
She crouched. She was ready to aim and shoot.

At the kitchen door, an angry pounding.
“God damn it, Florence, I know you’re in there!”
a bass voice shouted. “I just want to talk!”

The voice … was the voice of my stepfather.

He pounded again, cursed. Glass did not break,
door frame did not abandon it hinges.
The steps receded. A neighbor’s dog barked.
Again the chickens scattered. Another
round of curses as the rooster attacked
and chased him back to his automobile.
The engine started clumsily, gears ground
as he made the turnaround and went back
to the blacktop slope of Ore Mine Hill Road.
We waited for the normal outside sounds
to come back again. Hens, robins, wind sighs
from the high pines that grazed the bedroom wall.

“What did he want?” I finally asked her. —
“He comes out here, days he’s supposed to work.
He’ll take me to the courthouse, he tells me.
He wants me to sign the property away
to him and your mother. He wants this house.
This is my home, your home, your mother’s home,
and home to my sons when they come visit.
When Joe comes in the daytime like this, drunk
or sober, he’s a bad man either way —
I just turn out the lights and I hide here.

“Drunk or insane?” I said to her. “He knows,
or ought to know, I’m here for the summer.
I guess there is no bottom to evil or stupid.”

From this point on, grandma and I became
a secret alliance. Amid the slither of serpents,
she was my only friend.

iii

This time she was peeling potatoes. Peels,
eyes, and dark spots fell into the bucket.
I no longer feared the shotgun. It stood
in its place next to the kitchen door.
She looked at me, at the gun, at the knife
as it deftly pared and sliced our dinner.
“Another story I’ll tell you. You’re old
enough to understand it now, or you will
when the time comes to sort all the stories out.

“I was just ten when my father went to prison.
My half-sister and I were mostly off to school.
Ma was alone all day, worked herself raw to cook
and garden. She learned to can. The winter was bad.
You had to get coal for the stove, no matter what.”
She pointed to the ancient coal stove, flues and pipes
set up to heat the place as well as cook and bake.

She hesitated then, and then it seemed she spoke
beyond me to someone, or in her mother’s voice:
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman here
in the country, alone in the woods. Husband gone
off somewhere, or maybe dead. So a bunch of men
are sitting around in a road-house, drinking beer.
They read the paper and they see a woman’s name
in the tiny print of an obituary,
or read out the address of a man sent to jail.
And, oh, they remember you. Men you hadn’t seen
since you were a little girl in school. It’s like they had
a list that they added to and subtracted from..

“One day a car comes down the drive. Two or three men
get out. And they take their hats off respectfully.
They have washed their hands and faces. You wouldn’t think
they had jobs they should be at, and on a weekday.
They bring you a big sack of groceries. They worked hard
to think of what you might be needing, salt to flour
to cans of soup to a jar of German pickles.
They come in and sit down. They have some of your bread,
crust like none they have ever known, so they tell you.

“Somewhere in that sack there is a whiskey bottle,
so someone says Let’s open it and have a drink!
And you want to be polite. You get the glasses.
They have a drink. You take a drink, though it’s a man’s
drink and you’re not accustomed to it. Then someone says
how lonely you must be without a man around.
And they laugh and make jokes until you blush.
And then they suggest something, and if you drank two
of those whiskeys and you got a little silly . . .”

She paused and looked at me. “...and you give in.” Nodding,
I waited for the rest. “And if you’re dumb enough
to do that, then there is no stopping it. They tell
their friends. They come by the carload to visit you.
That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun here.
Because of the things that can happen to women”.

iv

Grandma Florence has been dead for many years now.
Even the memory of great-grandmother Cristina grows faint.
Nothing remains of the house but its foundation.
Cousins passed by and took photographs.
They spoke to neighbors whose memories were long.
One knew all about the gang of three robbers,
how Albert Butler had gone away to prison.
They said Cristina Butler sold moonshine
right up to and past the end of Prohibition,
how cars came and went to the little “shack.”

“Yes, she sold her moonshine there,” the neighbor affirmed,
“but it wasn’t just moonshine she sold. She sold herself
and her little daughter Florence.”

The truth was in the onion, waiting.

Autumn Wizard, by Barbara A. Holland

AUTUMN WIZARD

by Barbara A. Holland

for Ray Bradbury 

When he fed your adolescence 
on the youth of his poems, 
do you remember 
his fireplace releasing 
his personal Octobers in sendings 
of unusual leaves: that they were crimson, 
indigo, coral and turquoise 
when they streamed 
out and once around him 
on their long glide to the ceiling? 

Do you remember that his house 
was a gaunt spinster with a rhomboid eye 
browed under angle of a gable; 
that the raw dawns of the crows 
had galled its clapboards? 

He was a poet then, 
as thin and angular as his house, 
and of a desperate season, 
when the sky screams and the clouds 
become impulsive. Not for all his summers 
has its bite diminished, even when the green-up 
hit him and his wallet swelled with May. 

He has been poet still. 
Despite the blockage of a moveable screen, 
the Autumn stuffs the yawning 
of the fireplace and the flue packs solid. 
The screen is a wall of gems, 
but even so, he sometimes 
removes it and the room is brawl 
of burst October when the crush 
crumbles and the whole belch of it charges 
the dining-room door. Then he burrows 
through the heap of his poems for air 
while his house leans on the wind.

This poem is featured in our new Poet's Press Ebook, Autumn Numbers.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER.

Talk at the Diner

by Brett Rutherford

Went to the City a few weeks ago —

all clean now since those homeless folks

took off and all found jobs somewhere.

Not a speck of garbage on the street.

The beggars were gone too. One drunk
I’d always see not far from the door

of some bar or liquor store, a nod and

a wink when he’d say, “Some money

for food, for Jesus’ sake.” You knew

just where your quarter wound up.

Well, he’s gone, and all the others,

the ones who pretended crazy or played

a scritch-scatchy violin for dollars.

Right here in town, by the tracks,

there used to be some Black folks,

but they up and moved last year.

Some factory must’ve given them jobs.

That Mrs. Hernandez who run the store,

the dirty one that no one would go in,

her place is all boarded up now.

They took her at night, seeing how

she had no right to be in America.

Remember those two men

who lived together, and how we’d talk,

tryin’ to guess what they did at night?

They up and moved; so did those gals

we thought were kind of funny

with their short hair and all those dogs.

Used to see that bus go back and forth

talking folks in wheelchairs out

and back from the shopping mall.

Since budget cuts it doesn’t run.

I wonder where those cripples went.

It takes all kinds, I say. We had ours:
that old man with the messed-up lawn

full of peace signs. That atheist poet
who’d cuss it out with the preacher

right here in the diner, and won to rights

more than half the time. Haven’t seen any

of those oddballs in the long while,

but the church is getting a new steeple.

Downtown was rough at night,

least in the old days, hell, just

last year it was still bad. Bikers came,

and bad women, and men you knew

from their complexion would slit

your throat in an alley if they could.

No one in the downtown taverns now

but farmers and red-cap hunters.

A woman can walk and not worry.

Sure I see lights, and hear sirens,

so late at night I don’t get up
to go out and see what it is.

They’re going to bulldoze a lot

of those yellow-taped houses.

Young people will move in, I’m sure.

Nice people.

Funny how all those other folks

keep moving away.

Not that I mind.