wunderkammer

Poem in Comments

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Image: foundphotoslj via Flickr

Writers as Kids: To Wrestle

by Paula Gilovich

Pictured: Jamie Gaughran-Perez

Enter 27 high school wrestlers.
They will stand against a flattened bleacher. It will be
the beginning of the year, and time to take a picture.
And they will photograph the beginning of year as if
it is the end of year. Coaches will remain
on the side in regular outfits. Their faces
will appear as if they have snuck into the scene.
The boys will be tight or loose in their jumpers, depending
on their luck. They will line up, kneel, make masculine their
faces, their weak shoulders, their hands on knees.
They will invariably have problems.
Things like desperate thoughts against becoming men.
Things like feelings people have told them they feel and they do not.
Things like all their wants that they will not.
Things like all that wrestling teaches them to love that they cannot.

Even when your body lives what you want it to, make sure to keep it far from mind.
Swing into sanctity. Fall into sanctity. Hold someone you don’t know from behind
in competition.

They will falter, make feminine moves, and they will scold themselves
until they drink until they puke on Friday night.

Whatever you can’t remember must be good.

Spotlight on the boy down left. He will be the example.
The truest form, the nearly Adam, the country and
the quest for something god in man.
The boy will stare into the camera light
as if it is the sun and promise to become president.
In a dirty state of mind he will promise to be cleaner,
better. The devil will get pinned; he cannot win.
The boy is a very good wrestler.

All the boys exit, except this one.
This is where our greatest tasks are at hand.
With no one to wrestle.

Writers as Kids: The Edge of Something

by Melissa Walker

Pictured: Paula Gilovich

At the place where muck grows on the edge of the lake, the bullfrogs used to croak long low planks of sounds, where now a tadpole may swim by, fat body trailing legs like weak twigs in the water, at the edge of the algae smell is a memory you can never quite get to. A thousand million stars above you, the bikes you never brought, your mom’s best friend’s boyfriend in his trucker’s hat. A roadie, you heard. Your dad who knows where. Just the kids and the moms and the boyfriend. No dogs, no cats no dads. The three girls two boys, and only one pair of each really had anything to say to each other. The others nothing except to say, ketchup please. Or just a strong swift smack on the back of his head, the stun, the silence inside and the look on his face when he turned around. Saving it up, he was saving it up to spend some day in another store where it wouldn’t cost him so much. You caught ten thousand million tadpoles that year. Became brave enough to just catch them with your hands in the water, you reached for their soft slimy skin. It was hard to believe they wouldn’t last and someday they wouldn’t live at all. So you caught them but then there was nothing to do with them, just hold them in a jar, till you hear your mom or the best friend yelling each kid’s name in a list. Hot dogs for dinner. Then may as well let the tadpoles go. Nothing to do with them anyway.

Writers as Kids: [Whiskey and old]

Writing by Catherine Maskill

Pictured: Martin Wall

Whiskey and old 

tobacco meet lavender 

perfume and the stench 

of the disinfectant bowl.

Heavy sea green, pea green 

curtains ('the owl and the pussycat 

went to sea') thick with dust, 

invisible but for beams of sunlight, 

which illuminate the mass of debris 

floating in the room. 

 

He tells you, 

"it's all dead skin". 

You don't believe him. 

"All dust is dead skin", he says. 

You slam your hands 

over your mouth. 

He laughs so hard 

that he needs the oxygen. 

 

Afterwards, you wonder if 

he is choking 

on all the dead skin. 

He assures you he isn't.

You breathe it in, moving 

your mouth like a fish. 

You feel heavier with every breath.

 

'They' take an x-ray of his tired, full lungs 

whilst early morning 

condensation snakes a path 

down the grimy glass. 

In some places, the stained lace 

curtain clings to the window. 

Writers as Kids: Invisible You

Writing by J. A. Tyler

Pictured: John Heckman Wright

Visible me, tap tap dancing, a smile on my face face. Glasses on my face face. Dark glasses making of the world a balled shadow, a fist. Us going away, the drop. You. Because there is a leg gone missing and no one laughs. Where is the thing that we had, your face erased by my face, your head consumed by my thinking. My feet tap tap dancing. My angel smile. My choking up face with kid cheeks and the hair bowl-cut and my hands magic filled. Us and our two kinds of red, and I have already taken your limbs. No one laughing when you try to ask when do we start recording and your face is half gone and it is a picture and not a camcorder. There is no recording. Jump they say jump up and dance and I do, my feet tap tap dancing on this rug that is a mute, my neck a swan, your body disintegrating. Because you stood behind all the things I was thinking and now you are only a portion of jaw. You will be the one losing your face. And I will be tap tap tap-dancing like gravestone beautiful tones, the tangle of people disappearing, the playful bodies that overtake you, the disappearing act. Our invisible, only one leg left to tap tap dance on the bones of them who still exist. Hallelujah. They clever joke and split your clenched face. Hallelujah. No one is laughing. Put the table cloth over your face and sleep. Sleep. We will hear voices and they will be asking us questions. I have the answers. You can sleep. Sleep. Me tap tap dancing. My face face face. Your face gone. My feet feet tap tap dancing. The jump as they say jump, because I will be the one who flies away, I will be the one they say visible to, I am the one they are asking questions of. Dark dark and these glasses. My face face. Feet tap tap tap. They are not laughing, Hallelujah. They get it. Letting go of these invisible hands, so hard. This visible me.

Writers as Kids: [I'm still lost in the dream last night]

Writing by Justin Rands

Pictured: J. A. Tyler (the one crying on the right)

I’m still lost in the dream last night.

I can’t feel my face.

Something’s changed in me.

I was stuck on the boat with my father and sharks were everywhere.

My father stared off into space and steered and didn’t pay attention to them, or me.

He was lost, and we were lost at sea, with nothing in sight but the water and our death. But he wasn’t moving.

He stood there, one hand steering, the other hanging limply at his side.

His light khakis stretched out with his foot up on the side of the metal pole lining the boat.

Thick beard, scraggly, not trimmed.

Intimidating.

No lifejacket.

I wondered who he was.

 

 

My yellow lifejacket was a bit too big for me and I kept pulling it down around my head and shoulders to keep it in place.

I held onto it for dear life.

I could see the sharks.

They were everywhere.

Leaping out of the water sometimes, their gigantic bodies flailing in the sky.

I could hear them whispering.

I cannot speak.

Only think.

I can feel the clouds pressing against my face.

I know I am too small to do anything for myself yet.

I am curious how much longer this can go on.

How we can survive.

I finally started to feel fear.

I finally started to feel weak.

I wonder if this feeling ends, or how I can control it.

 

 

My name, what is my name.

It is loud.

Yelling.

I am back here, in this place.

This place is so strange.

Everything is so strange.

I can still hear the whispers.

Why do I have this hat on?

Where am I?

Oh God….

Writers as Kids: [Over here son]

Writing by John Heckman Wright

Pictured: Justin Rands

Over here son.  Now smile.  But you never do.  Just that smirk that seems wiser than you are.  How much can you know already?

 

Someday you will wear a shirt like mine every day, then it won't be special like it is today.  Someday when your arms are long and your chest broad, you may not even fit in a shirt like this.  You have your mother's features, not mine. 

 

You want to wear the shirt now, you say "Dad can I put it on again?"  in your socked feet outside the bathroom in the morning.  So I let you put it on.  You wear it all day until your mother makes you come inside and put something else on.  She's worried that you'll stain all of my shirts.  I don't care. 

 

The shirts are not to be celebrated--they're uniforms we grown men wear as we drive to our jobs in the city and back to our homes in the suburbs.  We're all playing make believe, son.

 

My father fought in the War to End All Wars.  He killed eight men in the South Pacific.  He said "It isn't hard to kill somebody.  You just pull a trigger.  The hard thing is to live with it."  He never talked about the war more than that.  You never met him but he was a good man.  He didn't talk much, so I don't know all of his stories.  When I'm gone, will my ghost remember all the stories I should have told you?  Will there be anything in my life worth telling?

 

My old man risked his life in the War to End All Wars.  I work in an office park.

 

This is the world my father left me.  What world am I leaving you, son.  What will you be when it's time to wear a white shirt, just like all the other drones, out into the world we call "real."  Is there a world for you beyond office parks and war?

Writers as Kids: Shucking

Writing by H. V. Cramond

Pictured: Susan Ortha's son

Bury your corn feral

so big hands can never invade,

 grabbing stripes and threatening kindergarten.

Cover with corpses of de-stuffed bears,

 cavities inverted, fluffing scraped away

floating on warmer breezes.

Add stolen Skipper heads

that refuse to rot

even when Fall comes.

In your third arm, a sword, stirring.

Visit on second Tuesdays, reverently,

dropping tears to knees, diving under

because even your furry, talking fellows

have left you for someone who can see better.

What grows after will be all yours.

Writers as Kids: On Any Given Day

Writing by Jamie Gaughran-Perez

Pictured: Melissa Walker

Weak chin, strong nose.

Strong chin, weak nose.

Strong chin, strong nose.

Belly before and after.

Lips before and after.

Breasts before and after.

 

We go to school, and the prom. We get taller and an apartment or busy or more. There is a lot of buying involved. There is a lot of eating. What would Calvin say?

 

She’s looking forward and casts a shadow and it is all flat.

 

There is fading, but further fading halted by contemporary translation. We will find something has been lost. We will keep translating. We will find something that defies gravity. It is beautiful and it is captured and it is also flat.

 

She’ll wrap the memory in caul fat and fry it.

 

xoxo

Writers as Kids: [West Tallahassee Community College]

Writing by Sean Lovelace

Pictured: Amanda Marbais

West Tallahassee Community College                                                                                                             page 3

 

Instructor Fleck, PhD.  

Art 108 Midterm Exam

 22.) Define the term juxtaposition:

You throe one thing than another you end up with a third lose thing that is different that the first two things once the right time passes. Like when I make beer at the house.

23.) Define the term perspective.                                                                  

I remember I guess I was 12 and my first remington and it said the little book their to clan the gun that the gun was packed in shipping grease and oil clean it good before you go hunting I took it to my grandpa and I say grandpa how do I do this I don’t know much I am 12 to and he put his cigar down and took my remington and walked outside and shot it right up in the air I mean both barells loud and he handed it back to me and said Boy, that’s how you clean a damn shotgun.

 ·         Using the theoretical concepts and vocabulary we have discussed to this point, briefly comment on the four images below. Please be sure to address perspective, iconography, and juxtaposition.

24.) “Sunday B Morning” by Andy Warhol

 That is a can of tomato soup. I told you everybody I know eats ketchup sandwiches has that can of soup in their pantree and you said that’s the point exactly that was my favrite class Ok.

 25.) “Hard Teachings” by Sven Pheers .

 That there a picture a Hummer truck with one of them Jesus fishes on the back. That’s a nice truck. Good winch to.

 26.) “Monogram” by Robert Rauschenberg.

 A tire stick on a goat. I have seen goats do worst things. We own goats so I can answer this one easy. A goat always wants to go up higher. Our goats always stand on cars and one time we found one on the roof. It clumb up the truck onto the cab then jump onto the roof I guess. We could not get him down so grandpa shot it with a rifle. We cooked it hole in the ground like the Mexicans. That was first time I seen my grandpa fall. He fell after he shot the goat. It scared me OK.

 27.) “Sunday Girl” by Robert S. Fleck.

You did this photo? That is cool I didn’t even know you were a big artest. That is Britney Barnes if you want to know her names. I seen her in those same boots. We were all over there fooling around with her mom and drinking beer and Britney spent the whole time out on the front porch. She always stays out there waiting. Then her mom had enough and walked out there in her underwear (she looks awesome in her bra and panties I don’t care she is 30) and she said Britney! Let me tell you something. Your dad was a sons a bitch and he ain’t never coming back! And those ain’t even his boots. Not even near so.

That’s all I know on that photo I mean my perspctive. I am done.