The Piecework Of Being A First-Generation American Jew


“My Dear Cucie Olga,” my father, Martin Weiss pencils in a four-page letter dated August 8, 1939 when my mother is vacationing in Mountaindale , New York with her mother and my oldest sister, Elaine, who is eight months old. A quick check on the Internet tells me that Mountaindale was a vacation hamlet in the lower Catskill Mountains, which offered boating and other amenities to working class families who were seeking a respite from the intense heat of New York City ’s summers. My father writes to my mother of more incoming business at his arch supports store in the Bronx , and a sore shoulder which is keeping him from playing soccer. In another letter exactly one week later, written this time with a fountain pen in graceful broad sweeps that I recognize in my own handwriting, he gives her another business accounting and soothes my mother about a family matter involving my Aunt Clara, her sister, and Uncle Jack.

My father talks about playing billiards in my mother’s absence, soccer training at Starlight Park and a new bridge table. He reassures her that he is not losing big money at cards, something that Clara and Jack seem to have insinuated. He writes, “I wish peoples would mind their own darn business and not make the other feel miserable just so that they can hear themselves talk.” He ends by teasing, “You got some nerve not to write me anything about the baby, wait I’ll fix you for that.”

The letters, contained in a plastic bag in a green box at the bottom of my closet and my fading memories are what I have salvaged of my parents. They died within 15 months of each other when I was in my early twenties, more than 30 years ago, too young for me to have known them as an adult, and at a time in my life when I was necessarily distancing myself from them as to make my own way in the world, much as my daughter is doing now. I am the same age as my mother when she died.

Over the years I have pieced together my knowledge of my parents through random family stories although not much is available there either. The one remaining family member of both my mother and father’s generation, is my Aunt Elsie, my father’s sister who soon will be 97, and has not chosen to share much about the family history save references to her “poor mother” who kept the family together, four brothers, and herself, a girl who learned the hard lessons of survival well enough through the family’s immigration from Hungary in between World Wars to make security and accumulation of money the top priority in her life. As a result, she like her mother, Bertha, often rescued her brothers and their families financially, and wasn’t shy about reminding them of her generosity. Graciousness has never been one of her strong traits.

But this is not about Elsie or my parents or my Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack, for that matter. It’s more about my own sense of being Jewish, what I learned in my home, and how I have carried that into my own life. It’s about the piecework of being a first-generation American Jew, how I construct my identity as a 21st century American Jew living in the United States . There isn’t much available documented history at my fingertips. By the time I was born, both sets of grandparents had died. But I preserve the scraps of what has been left to me.

My father arrived in this country when he was 11 from Hungary and my sister Elaine tells me he had his bar mitzvah here. I have a copy of his steerage papers from Ellis Island . My mother’s family was from Budapest, but as the youngest, she was born in New York City. She graduated from New Utrecht High School. My father had been accepted to Stuyvesant High School, but had to leave in the second half of his senior year to help the family as his father had just died and only his older brother, Sol, was available to help support the family. At one point before my mother met my father, she worked as a milliner, affixing fruit to the brim of hats. In preparing to become his town’s next Rabbi, my father had studied midrash (interpretation of Jewish Biblical text) at an early age in Hungary, but later rejected the observant Jewish life and became active with the Hungarian-American social clubs, at that time hotbeds of radicalism. It was sometime during the Depression that he became involved with the Communist Party helping to organize the Painter’s Union. At one point he chose to leave and travel the rails, spending time in Cleveland because of a confrontation at a New York City demonstration where a police officer possibly was killed by a falling brick.

I do not speak the language of my parents’ origin. My parents discouraged our learning Hungarian, since it was their private adult language that they used to shield us from their conversations. My father knew Yiddish but spoke it infrequently with his mother when she was alive. I can recall my mother saying how Yiddish was “too Jewish,” dismissing this with a downward sweep of her hand. Likewise, we didn’t eat herring or lox at home, foods associated with Ashkenazi Jews, but they put their store on Hungarian stuffed cabbage and Chicken Paprikas, two dishes including my mother’s wonderful yeast cakes, which always gilded our kitchen table together with a pot of Maxwell’s House coffee. On the other hand, my two older sisters and I, Elaine and Nancy, were always aware of being Jewish, something that was associated with holiday celebrations and family gatherings. We were secular Jews.
There is much I don’t know and so much I’ve had to intimate.

I don’t recall my parents discussing the Holocaust except to allude to the fact that my Great Aunt Jeanette and her husband, Harry who ran a shoe store in Brooklyn, had helped some surviving relatives move to Israel and to New York City. Today I have no idea who these relatives are although Elaine, who is 10 years older than I, visited these Israeli cousins in 1963, but since then, we have mostly lost contact. Something was so terribly cut off for us. A generation died and a canyon of silence replaced their deaths. My parents didn’t want to talk about their experience. Instead, they were about the business of making a new life, burying old pains, and assimilating into a new culture.

My father’s father worked in the United States as a waiter, and it is rumored that he ran liquor during prohibition. For years, my father worked six days a week. My mother joined him at the shop after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and then lived for five more years. It took all their strength to make a new life in this country. On his deathbed my father said, “I raised three girls and sent them all to college.” I believe he felt this was his greatest achievement. I think my mother who died a year after him, also of cancer, would’ve concurred.

The legacy that my sisters and I received from them was a strong sense about celebrating life. Whenever I hear L’chaim (to life) I associate this Jewish toast with my parents. I believe they chose life so that they and we could live and thrive. My parents expressed this in their love. They cared deeply for each other, always hugging and teasing. My father’s pet name for my mother was, “Toots,” and my mother simply called my father “Marty,” with a certain demur blush. My father thought my mother was beautiful and told her so frequently.

He gave my sisters and I a healthy sense of our bodies, an athlete who as a young man won the “all American Hungarian Goalie” prize, also an amateur gymnast and acrobat, who taught us to do shoulder stands or caught us in the air from the time we could walk. “Stand up tall,” he’d admonish me as I’d approach him to do a “birdie” where he’d catch me at my hips and swing me over his head so I could see the beach umbrellas and the ocean washing up on the shore. He’d coach me, “Here’s the rhythm. One-Two-Three-Jump!”

As a kid I didn’t think there was anything unique about acrobatics, but was aware that we always drew a crowd around our beach blanket. I assumed that this is what we did together. Occasionally, even my mother would get up from her beach chair; dust off sand from her legs, and do a shoulder stand on my father’s knees to prove that she could still point her toes better than any one in the family. “Watch!” she’d announce. Not only could she do shoulder stands, but my mother enjoyed reading poetry. Every poem that she’d memorized from her youth regardless of who had written it was by “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

My friends joined us on the beach and also watched as we paraded through our repertoire of “tricks,” being encouraged by my father to join us. It was only as an adult did I appreciate the gift he’d given us: to take joy in our bodies and to be comfortable with physicality, which I believe was unique in his generation. My parents were progressive in ways I didn’t totally understand. I knew something of my father’s radical background, but by the time I was an adolescent, year round he worked hard in his shop and then went to the beach on the weekends. As I became more politically involved during the sixties, he occasionally took the subway with me to Union Square for Labor Day rallies, waving to a few older men in the crowd whom he recognized from the old days.

While my mother strictly kept her eye on us, she also encouraged her daughters to get an education and lead independent lives, but was more conflicted when I didn’t wish to follow her own projection of what my life should become--a teacher so I could enjoy my “summers off with your children and a husband.” As an adult, I now understand that this probably was as far as she was able to see. As a child, I craved for her to have more vision.

Most of all what I appreciate is that my parents didn’t stand in the way of my developing an important friendship from the time I was in second grade throughout middle school with my friend Norma who lived several blocks away. Norma and I grew up in each other’s households. Every morning for years, I knocked on her door so we could walk to school together. We visited all the New York City museums, and once on my birthday, head down to Times Square before the area had become sanitized and saw “Midnight Cowboy” not understanding the odd squirming in the seats around us. Norma is Black and I am white and the fact that my and her parents did not stand in the way of our growing up together during a time when interracial friendships were not the norm and still are not -- was another gift which Norma and I to this day celebrate.

We attended New York City public schools and each one of our teachers was Jewish. The schools shut down during Jewish High Holydays. Albert Shanker reigned as the president of the teachers union. Through my political activity and books, I learned about a radical Jewish history of organizers in the garment industry, about the women in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the formation of the AFL-CIO, the Wobblies, the Haymarket Square Riots, the Spanish Civil War, and somewhere I heard about the Freiheit, the radical Yiddish newspaper of the left. Curse words were never used at home, at least not in English. We went to hear the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. I heard about Jewish comics like Mort Sahl and Groucho Marx who we watched on television. My parents admired Albert Einstein; Karl Marx was not mentioned in the same breath. I think my mother had become disillusioned with politics because she felt it caused dissension. Maybe she remembered when my father had to go “underground” during their early years together. Maybe the McCarthy period had put fear into their hearts as they watched “blacklisted” men unable to provide for their families. I know that somewhere there was a line for them between whatever progressive ideas they harbored and the ability to take care of their immediate family, and when one began to impinge on the other, it was time to redress priorities. Part of this may have been my mother’s overriding influence, and my father always a dutiful husband, bowed to her wishes. Always choose life. As a result, I think of them more as being conservative than radical. I don’t envision that if given a choice, either of them would’ve died for principle. I think they believed in the strength of compromise.

I also have to believe that growing up in Hungary, my father who had helped to protect the younger Jewish boys from getting beat up by the Gentiles and was known as one of the Mordecai or wolf brothers, had been shaped liked many youth of his generation by the Jewish Labor Bund founded in 1897 and which had atheistic, anti-Zionist and socialist trends. He was a forward thinking man whose radicalism became tempered by his adult experience, but I believe that he never stopped dreaming of a world where each person’s potential could be realized. I can remember as a young girl asking him if he believed in God. He seemed shocked that I would ask him such a question, swallowed hard, and said “No.” But when he was dying, he admonished us to “never forget you are Jewish.” Until the very end, he and my mother continued to help people who were low on cash, food or clothes, especially where he worked in Manhattan . Once as a little girl, I remember walking in the Bowery in New York ’s Lower East Side and my father stopping to give money to a man who’d approached him on the street.

“Why do you bother, Marty?” asked my mother when we got out of range. “He’s only going to use it for drink.”

My father shrugged. “I know,” he said. “But he’s been forced to ask.”

During the sixties, I had conversations with him about politics. “According to Marx’s class analysis you’re not a worker,” I announced.

“I’m not?”

“No,” I patiently explained. “You’re a member of the petit bourgeoisie.”

“That’s not true.” I could tell that I’d upset him. “I go to work every day.”

But I wasn’t attending a Marxist study group in Manhattan twice a week for nothing. “That’s not possible. You possess your own means of production.”

“What kind of crap are you talking?”

That was the only time I can remember him getting upset with me, except when I announced that I wasn’t going to finish college, and instead become a full-time political activist.

“Over my dead body.” We never discussed the subject again. Both he and my mother highly valued education and wanted to be sure that I got one.

So who were my parents? At this point they are mist, gone for so long and never present as I’ve walked through my own life cycles; they didn’t have the opportunity of knowing their grandchildren, never saw me age and become more tempered in my own beliefs, and I will face my own old age not having the experience of walking that path first with them. But what they did give me feels at its core essentially Jewish: a reliance on family and love to create stability in this flawed world and by choosing life to also choose to make this flawed place better because for them and for me there is no other choice.

Music Box Ballerina on Low Battery

Go for jugular meaning, I said, using open source
to cut and paste myself into your picture,
but you didn't want to hold hands in Gaza.
I pointed my toe like a digital Rockette
when I heard a voice page someone
for a defibrillator.

My partner in circles, I can tell you what the media won’t say:
An army of poor schnooks casts a giant shadow in sage paint.
Brother, lest you believe in stones don’t throw them at me.
This I keep pirouetting around and around finding no room
for partial measures, interim agreements,
or road maps leading no where.

For Irena Klepfisz

I plotzd on the couch with you,
the first poet I'd read with new glasses,
me, the same age as my mother
when she'd died on the plane.
At that exact moment.
I heard her apron strings snap.

Before that even happened, ancestors
had whispered about other shadows,
things a child shouldn't hear
preparing me in a way my parents
couldn't since they'd been too struck dumb
by two World Wars.

In third grade we brought shoeboxes for a project.
No one knew about my inside diorama,
arms melting near chintz-curtained windows,
wind blowing softly through the fire escape.
I never saw how closely my face resembled loss
until I felt how you'd wrestled with its dead weight.


Poet Irena Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 and spent the first few years of her life there until her father smuggled she and her mother to the Aryan side in 1943. Her mother had Aryan papers and worked as a maid for a Polish family while Klepfisz was placed in a Catholic orphanage. After her father died what many would term a "heroic death" on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April 20, 1943, Klepfisz's mother took her out of the orphanage and they survived the duration of the war in hiding in the Polish countryside.

Four Mood Swings

1.

It's just like me to plant bulbs
at the bottom of the condo's steps
in sandy soil where workmen
have been digging
for these last six months

how can we live without flowers
we need flowers not just boxy shrubs
I see stalks
rise up from between
clumps of ivy don't
remember if I planted daffodils
or hyacinth think I should
be able to tell the difference.

Each morning at the bottom
of the stairs I worship them.

2.

I've got a job
after the first few
hours at the office
post appointments in Outlook
everyone knows I'm busy

park my car in the Chicago Title Mortgage lot
get the picture?
don't pay for parking most of the time

sometimes there's a good lecture
at UC Berkeley even though
I have to pay for parking there.

3.

The speaker was from Jerusalem
a professor talking about religion
and politics
how Palestinians and Israelis
after too much of a good thing
history hate each other.

When the speaker finished,
a thin man who'd been dehydrated
to gesture,

I asked if
women in both societies
have been involved in talks
he nodded
explained
to each other, yes, they've talked
but so many Arab men are
ultra-conservative Israeli men
security-crazed
and women
across the border
protectors of life
who can, he nodded, he said,
may be the only ones
to allow that concession.

4.

No matter how good
my weekend I wonder
when it's going to include
love a memorial for Tillie Olsen
a performance at The Beat Museum
with naked pictures of Allen Ginsberg
and Gregory Corso strewn
across the walls.

Then there's Monday.

I hear more people in the United States
are addicted to Valium than to any other drug.

For Yair Dalal

Driving to Monterey
where fog caresses telephone poles,
and cypress trees bend to the waves,
where Pampas grass etches
an arc above a pod of surfers,
all their wet suits glistening black,

as your music slices a hole
through the roof of my car
without acetylene torch,
a dance of sandstorms fills my head
and runs out my ears.

Sitting aloft the camel of your oud
there's a country vast before me,
unlike the U.S.
where my parents emigrated
as yours did from Iraq to Israel.
My soul drinks deep from desert wells

as light parses sky
into successive openings,
just watch as layers fall apart,
a veil shakes loose from the Shekinah
who appears like a Bedouin on the horizon,
luminous in her presence.

I want to believe there can be peace.
I want to believe that a face viewed
through the cross hairs
of a weapon
is another human being
with eyes,
nose,
tongue,
mouth,
and two ears
that listen.

Hands

There are hands around me.
They keep watch and wave when there is danger.

They gesture with broken metal wristbands
and ringed fingers,

hands whose fingernails are edged
with night and creased with years,

who have shaped dreams
when dreams had ruptured wings.

These are hands who have been teachers.
So when I speak, when I ask

why G-d has sent the Jews to wander
once again in the desert,

as bombs blow up restaurants in Tel Aviv
as bombs destroy mosques on the West Bank

without a bird to nest
in the cracks of the Wailing Wall,

a pale beak tangled in barbed wire
still estranged from its own song,

as I stretch out my hand to an invisible hand
and squeeze hard.

Hands Around the Lake

Today we held hands
around Lake Merritt
actually
it was more like hands around
the sound truck
while seagulls and pigeons
flapped a 500-wing salute
and no one saw the geese turd
in the grass it was that special
with Congressman now he's our Mayor
Dellums sure looks like Frederick Douglass
and Congresswoman Barbara Lee,
the only one
who had courage
to stand up in those days
when it was seating room only
for Republicans in the House.

There were striped-glove hands,
and leather-covered hands, and bare hands.

There were raising in the air
"Stop the Violence hands."

There were big hands.
There were little hands.

There was a mike in somebody's hand.
They were our hands.

Did people hear the drums around Lake Merritt
all the way back to Washington D?

I hope so.
Because we have a dream

it hasn't been asleep
it was drugged by power.

It's been in the courts
but not in the newspapers for years.

No one knew peace and justice
had camped out beneath the freeway
waiting for change.

We got up early today.
We got up early to join hands.

object, event and action

With a strap of his back pack,
a man sitting on BART flagellates his arm
until it dissolves into square pixels
large enough to be his father

How I Came to Write "The CellPhone Poems"-- Particularly for KPFA Listeners

You can order your CD of “The CellPhone Poems” by sending $10.00 to Lenore Weiss / 645F Canyon Oaks Drive / Oakland, CA. 94605. She will be sure to respond.

My CD of the CellPhone Poems grew from a spec of annoyance within my consciousness, which started anywhere from five to 10 years ago. This was the time that cellphones were making a transition from the occasional specialty item carried by the dot.com rich to the ubiquitous item it has become today, a rite of passage into adulthood for the young. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Picture me commuting back home to Oakland from my job located in one of the Embarcadero Office buildings. As a young mother, I bounced between BART and AC Transit buses trying to cut the commute time down to a bare minimum. You know the drill: it’s 5 o’clock, you’ve worked all day, you’re tired, and you have to pick up the kids from childcare and go home and cook dinner-- as if public transportation weren’t enough of a challenge with its ongoing delays, crowds, purchase of tickets, and the occasional fight breaking out in an adjoining seat. Cellphones began to add yet another level of stress. Who the bling bling needed them?

Well, it seemed like a lot of people did. Everywhere I went, people had them. It was bad enough that my own day had been stressful, but suddenly I had to listen to someone else’s problems. Then there were calls to a girlfriend, or to the ticket agent for an upcoming concert, restaurant reservations, and all the business that decent people, I thought, should keep to themselves. Suddenly, the whole world was spilling out in places that had been normally reserved for relative quiet, reading a newspaper or a library book during commute time. It got worse. There were updates about a cancer diagnosis, a mental breakdown, and lovers splitting up with each other in real time while one of them waited in line at the bank.

For a long time, I attempted to turn a deaf ear. Of course, it was hopeless. Part of this had to do with my coming to terms with my new role. Now I was invited to serve as a witness to people’s lives, to take sides with feuding lovers, or to approve about food choices made in the supermarket aisle.

Somewhere in the quiet of my own home, I had an ah-ha (!) moment. I realized that I was living in a new age whereby the definitions between public and private space had dramatically shifted, and the previous boundaries regarding what was allowed in those spaces, no longer held sway. Thus, was born the CellPhone Poems. I approached a composer friend of mine, Paul Kirk, to work with me on the project.

After completing that work, I now realize that the world has been thrust into our laps in a way that it never was before. I feel that we have a decision to make regarding how we handle that responsibility. Do we resist listening, or do we choose to participate?

Currently, I have been invited by Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, a school that teaches young people hip-hop dancing, martial arts, and leadership skills, to work with a group of young people to develop their own cellphone poems. And so it continues…

You can order your CD of “The CellPhone Poems” by sending $10.00 to Lenore Weiss / 645F Canyon Oaks Drive / Oakland, CA. 94605. She will be sure to respond.

Poem at Half-Time

Near the trailer park and graveyard markers
blaring above each alabaster stone
across the street from Albertson's
with cars carrying the day's appointment of diapers,

milk, and nonfilter cigarettes,
I'd said my good-byes, stopped at a red light
before getting on Hwy. 101 to Oakland,
and there they were

people in black robes, hands
with square fingernails edged in night
and for two straight seconds I didn't understand
how they'd escaped

into my living daylight
dancing around the parking lot,
nodding as though they were bobble heads
who'd grabbed the word Yes by the throat.

1. A Poem in Two Mood Swings
   
   1.
   
   I am the daughter who came after
   those who went to heaven
   through the opening of a chimney at Auschwitz
   or the lucky ones who sailed through a harbor
   waving the torch of their hearts
   at a statue
   never mentioning
   the two grandparents who remained
   
   as life skipped a generation
   and gravel filled my mouth
   with uncomfortable silence.
   
   I pick out stones now
   and place them on graves
   no, throw them at the pits of Hell.
   Here's one, two, three, four...
   
   a volley of stones
   transporting me back
   to when I ran
   in fields
   with my cousin, my sister, my uncle
   looking for any hole
   where we could bury ourselves
   and never come out
   
   
   2.
   
   My parents spoke Hungarian,
   not Yiddish.
   
   They ate stuffed cabbage,
   not lox and bagels.
   
   On Yom Kippur
   my sister's friends
   came over the house
   to stuff themselves.
   
   We were a refuge
   from being Jewish.
   
   All my teachers
   in the New York City school system
   were Jewish.
   
   When my father was growing up in Hungary
   he use to protect the smaller boys
   from getting beat up.
   
   My father was a Communist
   who sent my older sister out
   to buy the Daily World.
   
   Politics made people argue
   or disappear underground.
   Everything was hidden.
   
   When my father was dying from cancer
   my mother didn't want him to know what was wrong
   because she was afraid he wouldn't fight it.
   
   On his deathbed
   he told us to never forget we were Jewish.

When Bush Came to Shove
I was listening
to election results
on the couch
the cat's tail is tick-tocking
against the backdrop of my hair
a day after we'd turned tables
sent the bluecoats
back to the White House,
two days since I'd come down with a cold
stretched out beneath a fleece throw

smell car exhaust fumes drivers
tuned to their own 6 o'clock evening news
the kettle's on the stove
other life forms
wait 200 billion years
to get the picture.
I'm in the kitchen.
Tsk. Tsk. The past is not over yet.

Introduction
I stand before you,
a woman with my roots exposed
to their silver baseline.

Anselm Kiefer

show at MOMA SF

"All stories of heaven begin on earth"

"Each of these buildings has a history created by its own fiction...That fiction is part of the debris of human history."

"Our stories always begin in the forest."

Robert Fludd
wheat paste
gelatin print
Ha-Ha Club
Subduction zone
I stand here with my roots exposed before you

Mayor-Elect Ron Dellums speaking at Oakland Task Rorce Meeting October 25

"In order to achieve consensus, there has to be a dialogue."

"I have an unwavering belief in the principle of democracy."

"This is not about Ron Dellums, but it's about this community coming together."

Reincarnated Lenny Bruce Speaks of The Jewish Problem

“… Israel calls in public speeches and schoolbooks the Arab citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the enemy from within. As for the Palestinian refugees living under occupation, they are defined in Israeli History schoolbooks as a 'problem to be solved’. Not long ago the Jews were a problem to be solved.”

--Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem anda member of Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace.


Before there was a Jewish Problem
there was a Jewish Question.
Maybe they were the same thing.

No one wanted the Jews to live in their country.
People hated them.
Why? Because they were different.

They wore yarmulkes,
striped shawls, and smelled of fish.
Fishy! Yech!

They spoke a different language,
and lived in filthy ghettos.

After years of being squashed
until their blood coated stones
along every road leading somewhere,

but not to the pub except
for the occasional schnopps on Shabbos,
no, they didn't traipse to the beer garden

where the National Socialists,
or Nazis as they later came to be called,
decided to solve the problem.

The Jewish Problem, was not as so many had said,
religious. It was racial, which gave the Nazis
a legal basis for everything. This was so brilliant.

Jews were now excluded from six branches of industry.
Properties were de-Jewdified.

Jews were prohibited from attending concerts, films, and theaters.
Jews were prohibited from attending German schools.
Jews were prohibited from bearing firearms.

You know what’s next.
We’ve all heard about the six million
who died in the ovens, and how the world

didn't want to know about anything
until it was too late, which is about when
the Jewish Question became the Jewish Problem.

Where do you stick the Jews
who survived the Holocaust?
You out there in the audience.
Where the fuck d'you put them?

There was a search party.
Everyone looked around.
Uganda was too far from where the Jews wanted to be.

The Jews became a People for a Land
for a Land without a People.
But that was a slogan, not the reality,

because it seems
there were many people
who lived in Palestine, the Palestinians,

primitive people, said the army men,
wild beasts with schmutzy teeth.

Fast forward to today when Israelis have a problem
with people who retain keys to houses
that are now occupied by families who light candles
and invite the Shekinah of peace into their homes on Shabbos,

while during the week Israeli soldiers order Palestinian women to strip in front
of their children for security reasons, and as jailers, torture and lock up young men without decent food or clean mattresses who run checkpoints that force old men to wait in line for hours without water.

Jewish life is filled with irony,
which some of you out there call a Jewish sense of humor,
but this is not funny.

And how can I, Lenny Bruce, who in my day
talked a lot of unfunny stuff,
not cry out as a Jew,
how can I not say that justice and mercy belong to us all?

Sh’mah Yisra’el

Hear O Israel,
from a daughter
who can only read the alliterative text of Hebrew
with glasses that need a new prescription
and a mouth that gets filled with saliva
from a tongue that knows not how to deliver
two-dotted vowels—

Here O Israel
from your daughter
who was born in the same year
you were created,
after World War II had folded
its charred arms around
the only hope that was left—
Israel, the land of milk and honey—

You were the voice of my parent’s generation
who planted trees along new boulevards
and carried ashes sewed
inside the hem of their clothing
to cry along the wadis of your limestone beds,
hugging Exodus by Leon Uris.

You gave them a bright torch
to carry every high holyday
for all their days
raising money and donating shoes—

a reason to drink tea
in a glass mug with a lump of sugar
coating their tongues with sweetness
as they stamped letters,
made phone calls,
argued with each other in the accent
of wherever they’d come from.

Israel, my heart is heavy
with the dreams of my parents,
this second generation daughter
who wanted a lasting peace
to fill the crevices
of your Wailing Wall
with a light of its own creation.

Instead, only war and massacre,
dairy farms and steel plants
laid to rubble.
Twisted iron stabbing the earth.
And the sighs of the six million
each time another official
invokes their name.

For Destiny Arts
There weren’t always cell phones.
People went home to make a call
or stopped in a telephone booth
to put in the right change.

People called long distance
or person-to-person
asked to reverse the charges
or to make a collect call

which meant whoever picked up the phone
had to foot the bill.
There weren’t always cell phones.
There were longer silences.

People rolled down car windows
and waited until they got
behind closed doors, which is not to say
those were the good old days.

They were just different,
with longer pauses.
Now we keep talking,
text messaging, I aMMing each other

we can hear each other think
we can hear each other think

Exercises:

Think of all the places you use your cellphone. Where are you?

I'm talking on my cellphone in the bus
I'm talking on my cellphone at the mall
I'm talking on my cellphone in the bathroom
I'm talking on my cellphone in the hospital

Think of all the places you hear other people talk on their cellphones. Where are they? Where are you?

I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm at school
I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm in the supermarket
I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm waiting on line to buy lunch

Group work:
Team up. Pick one of the above scenarios and develop a conversation.

Individual work:
1. 9/11. You're in the Towers. You're calling who? What do you say?

2. You're on the street. There's an accident. Who do you call? What do you say?

3. You're an astronaut. There's another life form outside the spaceship. It's telepathic. You don't need a cellphone. What do you say?

4. Make up your own.

5. You're sending a text message to your boy/girl friend who just found out that a best friend was killed. What do you say?

Oakland is a Holy City
At the orientation this evening, the first of several for 40 transition task forces with a total of approximately 800 members, who are meeting over the course of the next six weeks to give Mayor-elect Ron Dellums five recommendations. A process "to bring the brilliance of the people of Oakland together," according to Kitty Epstein, a representative from Dellums' staff. She said this is "historic and unprecendented" in the way this is happening. I'm on the task force for Transparency and Ethics in Government.

First Online Date, Background Check

So by no agenda do you mean you don’t care any number of California figs whether a said page turner wears poppy or propane blue nailpolish or doesn’t have hands altogether, but manages to turn turn turn through a suction device strapped to the top of his or her forehead, which leads to another question, do you have an agenda regarding the gender of the person who might join you for a latte on some semi-lit afternoon when the light filters in slanted Greek pillars across the city? Just wondering.

Or by no agenda do you imply that somebody somewhere did have an agenda and wrapped you hard around his or her bullet points until you started to bleed so badly you needed to tie a tourniquet along any number of pressure points to staunch what was rising up inside you like a revulsion washing away what some people might describe as a tender feeling? Just curious.

Or by no agenda do you mean you are open to the moment, to fill a container of whatever two people can become together and not have any preconceived notions regarding whether a container should come from Neiman Marcus, or Ross, or fed by streaming video? Because I think everyone has some kind of agenda even if it's a non-agenda except of course for moments when we're inside our own puzzle. A background is the hardest part.

Like times when I didn't know what or how to say something without an agenda, found hidden ones tucked inside other pant cuffs, pockets, velcro fasteners or zippers that were missing teeth and plain broken. Now my agenda has turned into a to-do list. I do, I do, said the Cowardly Lion. Keep going. Take a bus to North Beach. Walk home without an umbrella. Drive five hours to Disneyland just to give Mickey Mouse a hand.

In the Shadow of the Middle East
A Spare the Air Day
when public transit
offered free rides
on the house
the ferry fuller
than it’d ever been
caps turned backward
orange hair braids
digital cameras snapping
waves mixed with exhaust
on the hottest day of the year
so packed to the gills
we tipped backward and water-skied,
but once we passed
beneath the shadow of the bridge,
there we were
on the other side
of something we didn't know yet.

Release Party
You'd already left for Spanish immersion class,
I had my own baptism to take care of,
so I showered, but wanted

to lie on a bed of frozen raspberries,
each a clit pressed against my back.
Let's say I was motivated.

I walked outside the condo
with a bucket to go picking
when I heard the new neighbor say,

"You've got alot of duende
being out at night,"
and it wasn't even night,

tech vendors were on the march,
schools were wide open
everyone was driving carefully,

but from a car radio came a remix
of the Kurds and Rockefellers
pounding harder at every corner,

when a voice announced,
"Get the defibrillator." And I did.
And it was a good thing, too,

it brought me back
to my galvinized bucket,
filled with longing.

Movie Review of X-Men: The Last Stand
A friend and I had tired of viewing Netflix DVDs on our 13-inch monitors and thought that over the Memorial Day Weekend, we'd treat ourselves to a visit to the big screen. The next question was what to see on the big screen. Oddly, it turned out that we were individuals who shunned fads. Both of us had neglected to read the Da Vinci Code and I myself had to admit to only knowing what "Sex in the City" was all about until several years after its debut on HBO when I was able to rent all the DVDs from Netflix and watch the smashing conclusion with Mikhail Baryshnikov, which is to say that we didn't want to see the Da Vinci Code.

I, instead, suggested that we see the third X-Men movie, having read positive reviews with intimations of a drug that had been found to cure the mutants of their weirdness. It offered the possibility of an intelligent movie that was fun at the same time: moral choices with character development and lots of computer animation.

I was game and so was my buddy. So despite the fact that I had confused the movie times with another theater, we found ourselves in front of the big screen, having missed all but one of the noisy trailers and quickly sitting down for a recap of the last two X-Men movies as Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) recruit young mutants from the sofa of their parents' living rooms. (This might be, I thought, a science fiction version of Harry Potter.)

Quick Disclosure: I am unfamiliar with the two other X-Men movies preceding this one, and score low on series trivia tests.

The movie was overall entertaining. Storm (Halle Berry) knows how to roll her eyes into her head until the pupils disappear better than anyone I know, if you go in for that sort of thing. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is hunky enough, but didn't have the real pathos of Lon Chaney's Wolf Man. (Is it wrong to ask for depth?) Mostly, as the movie ensued, I bemoaned all the lost opportunities to grapple with some tantilizing issues. For instance:

Why does Magneto flash his concentration camp tattooed numbers on his arm when some young mutant upstart insists on seeing his mark? (Forgive me if this is explained in previous episodes.) What I really want to know is how his experience has turned him into a sort of warped genius, in some ways not unlike parents who survived the Holocaust not ever discussing the pain of that experience with their offspring, but succeed in fucking them up nevertheless.

Why is the choice to take the drug and lose mutant individuality not a bigger moral question?

Only Rogue (Anna Paquin) grapples with the issue, if only for a few moments of screen time. Her special powers don't allow for physical contact with other human beings and she wants to get close, really close to the Iceman (Shawn Ashmore). But what about other more philosophical issues that could've been explored? Sure, a few of the characters proclaim, "There's nothing wrong with us," and in the end, regular hum-drum humanity gets to co-exist with the mutant population who now have a representative in the White House in the character of Hank "Beast" McCoy.

But what about examining parallels with the thousands of people in the United States who rely on mood-enhancing drugs to control their neurosis, which is not a judgment call, only a question. At what point does the quality of our lives become so terrible that we surrender ourselves to the cure or to the pill, or to an operation? The choice for HIV and AIDS patients is surely about life or death. But what about cases that are more subtle? What if someone doesn't want to be chosen by their special gift and grows tired of its demands?

Then I was confused by the internal "them" and "us" scenario -- the older more schooled X-Men who've benefitted by Professor Xavier's tutoring on how to use their gifts (don't let the power control you, something many of us learn in driving school), versus the younger tattooed and pierced hordes who team up with Magneto to kidnap and kill a bald boy who's hidden in a drug company's corporate headquarters on Alcatraz Island. His DNA is the source of this miracle drug.

As a group, Magneto's crew are a lot less sophisticated then Xavier's, who've had the benefits of a sort of ivy league education in the mansion. So what kind of comment is this upon public education as school becomes increasingly focused on passing tests and less upon critical thinking? Is our educational system producing unruly children who consider violence a viable solution?

A few other questions: Does it really take blowing up and moving the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz to accomodate one of the punky mutants, the Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), who's never learned how to swim? You'd think that an intelligent older guy like Magneto could come up with a more energy-saving solution.

Then what about the human population at large? How do they feel about the mutants merging back undetected into their ranks? Neighborhood populations always seem to be uneasy when child predators are paroled back into their communities.

And what about the nature of life once a grand mutant like Magneto, now stung with the drug's needle, is condemned to sit at a park bench, trying to stir the pieces of a chess board with his outstretched finger? How does it feel to be ordinary and to sit around remembering your old glory days?

I applauded for a moment where there's a scene with Patrick Stewart on the mansion's lawn, discussing the nature of violence. But it comes and goes too quickly.

I know. I'm too serious, and the film is based on a comic book. However, why not think graphic novel? I bemoan lost opportunities to explore provocative questions that the script raises. I refuse the notion that a sci-fi thriller can't do that. (What about 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick?)

Maybe I'm one of those mutants who expects more.

Houdini's Cousin in the Storage Unit
She was moving from a 10 by 15 into a 5 by 9, downsizing whatever she'd packed into plastic boxes with seals that popped when I lifted them like they were filled with effervescent secrets, household remains, until she'd decided to make the pile smaller so she gave stuff away -- not the piano, it was her husband's, he played -- to people who kept driving up in cars until the pile was small enough to move to the second floor where we stacked her stuff, me and PeeWee who had a stroke six months before and Freddy who bought PeeWee $15.00 worth of gas that morning so he could get there. She said how I was a magician for getting her shit into one space, and I said that's why alot of people called me Houdini and I wondered how he did those tricks, and she said she knew. Really, I said. Really, she said, because she was Houdini's cousin her father use to tell her it was all muscle control, he'd expand his chest when they chained him up, and after they dropped him into the river, he'd let out his breath and escape from the slack.

String Theory
A woman walks down a path in early spring,
a firetrail that runs along a creek,
bloated with the excess of winter.

But today golden poppies are arched to the sun,
as the woman spots a brown snake, new in length,
stretched across the road, its tongue

begging for hand-outs from every rustle.
She bends down to see the solicitor.
But seeing happens so quickly,

even if with her own two eyes,
as dragonflies piggyback around her,
she touches the string of snake with an outstretched finger.

Her act is an instinctual thing,
while observing is an acquired art.
Never mind. She's in the thick of it now,

follows the snake through water, to the other side
of the water's bank, until she turns into snake,
and twining around him, even his cold blood feels warm.

Un Dia Sin Imigrantes
It happened in Spanish.
My father stood behind a kid wearing a T-shirt
printed with "Hecho in Mexico," and waved to me
from across the street pointing to a digital
camera like he knew how to use one.

I haven't seen him in years.
He didn't drive either, said he didn't have time
to learn, worked six days a week supporting three girls.
My mother was the one who drove.

She was there also, her arm chain-linked through his
like in the olden days when they were still alive,
watching from the stand as everyone marched up 14th Avenue--
grandparents, uncles, Moms, Dads,
kids stuffed inside strollers and backpacks.

They waved harder now,
began to chant "Si Se Puede" in a broken language,
and the sound of their letters
stamped through the air.

Lost and Found Department
It's like I mean
I just didn't know

You know everyone tells you
you don't know
you don't know
you don't know
And the thing is you don't know
so you don't even know that you don't know
you know what I mean?

It's like-

I don't know.

University Art Museum Berkeley
I enter the bathroom stall
of the museum

leave the door open
paint a Jackson Pollack

drip color everywhere
a work of art

in white porcelain
until gold flecks splinter sky

the energy of one man
bursting into dendrites

no one sees me pee
and I am a forest

Dressed as a Wedding Guest
Riding on a bus, dressed in a black suit
with the dust of his travels
making a path across his buttoned jacket,
hair neatly trimmed into a gable
that points to a nose
that speaks nothing to his mouth,
but then,
a nose is for smelling danger.

The wedding guest feels
for a loose cord braided
beneath his jacket,
a loose cord that leads back
to where he came from,
a loose cord that is simple,
unlike his life that has no words,
so he waits

to deliver his gift
to the assembled party
riding with him on the bus,
heads pressed to glass,
when the man who is dressed
as a wedding guest,
pulls the cord,
and marries them all to the same thing.

The Collapse
so buried inside sadness
dig to remove rubble
see who walks out

daffodils say
hide in the pampas grass
with the sparrows.

Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island
Man, woman, and infant sit on a cliff with their backs
to stone statues. They pray for good luck
to enter through the wind, to hear

a yes spoken beneath the toromiro tree,
the last one standing since the giant palm
was tricked into falling all over itself.

He tells a story of how birds drop seeds,
and trees push back. The man begins to work.
She fastens the infant to her breast.

Frigates and storm petrels
serve melting sun to melting water.

The infant sucks.
The birds fly away.
Nothing enters through the wind.
The stone statues turn into more than stone.

Horatio at Graveside
It falls to me, the last request of Hamlet,
Not so much lord as friend of my heart
Who was able to plot the way my eye followed a sparrow

Landing upon a tree for a moment’s respite,
While I saw how the wave in him crested
Into the sun’s shimmer on water,

Our minds were of such close hemispheres,
We could spot each other inside the juggle
of life’s changing fortune—

And so he asked me to serve as witness,
To speak of events even as my own bower
Of grief threatened to hurl me beyond hearing,

Knowing there was no way Hamlet could live,
Even as I throw rocks upon his grave,
A bedcover to warm his body,

Which is why I came from such a long way off,
Because I loved him more than any other man
Who stood on this earth and looked at the sun.

I Have My Green Card Now
don't tell me how a people string together thoughts on a beach of content keeps washing up shells and seaweed and dead things they stay for easy pickings in sentence structures the caw caw caw of slang banging into rocks

when I lived in Hungarian my mother tongue more of a step-mother who was married to someone I never knew there were hundreds of words for horses their smell, color, earth at a certain time of day or after a rain I knew where my tongue wrapped around shaped language with loam and light but now I've hit everything the ground running with English how many times in one year malls coupons ATM's express accounts can one person open because I've loaned my soul to the devil and I'm getting no interest

CellPhone Poem 17: Extra Minutes
Business centers confront
each continental shelf,
each wave of water
from my cubicle
to your global positioning device,
a world drawing in upon itself
tighter under pressure
as we turn
into carbon diamonds carbon
diamonds wearing headphones
speaking with instant translators
embedded on the edge of a bluetooth
look Mom no cavities
no more countries
everything a borderland
beneath the freeway
bordering on something else
on something else on something else
where time is a rerun
in a new slot game
and we apple and orange
through the bling bling of it all.

Cannibal Memories
Where will I go to talk to you now that the house has closed and I no longer have the keys or can use the excuse of checking the mail to see if the honeysuckle has started to bloom or if daises are starting to grow after everything front and back yard was leveled?

Where will I go to speak your name now that there’s no place after you died in the front room of the house with glasses of soda, tissues, and a standing orchestra of pill bottles that did not cheer those itinerant trips between your room and the bathroom, your room and the kitchen?

How can I locate you in my cannibal memories and in the things I’ve carried to my next landing: candles, bells, necklaces, a file cabinet, me?

TV Flash Fiction
The size of a 27" television set,
her life was compact, she heard voices

movie stars and their consorts
who stopped for a quick show of teeth

and laughter before taking their places
in the first row of the Grand Ballroom,

where she went remote,
reached for a cigarette, a glass of swollen ice.

Contrary to Common Belief
Good guys don't always wear white
sometimes they shine leopard green
orange red even yellow

if you want to know a man
watch the way sinewy night
curves next to his sorry spine

why a man fights to wear black
along a taut stretch of hide
how he enters your brown eyes.

CellPhone Poem 16: More Breaking Up
burned sage smudge sticks in the house
drank vodka & pomegranate juice
spliced my heart saw it beating
there was no getting past you
this number will always have static

CellPhone Poem 15: Waiting for the Call
I'm waiting to get the call in the fumes of the Caldicott Tunnel
or along the MacArthur Maze where I'm queued up to pay the bridge toll,
in traffic listening to the radio CD player boom box in the car next to me,
cellphone ringing waiting for speakers to announce the doctor's diagnosis
if I need surgery got the job when I'll be moving need to pick her up
and what the hell I'm supposed to do now I have nothing
to remind me should've saved your messages
water under the bridge going over in a bucket
everything freezes until coffee spills. My head is hot.

Today I'm sitting in the back of the 72R bus
with a woman talking to her mother,
I know because she keeps saying, "Mom, I love you, Mom.
You have to believe in God and ask for help."
The good daughter of San Pablo with blonde highlights
gets off where I do, but jumps on another bus
spreading her message. The cellphone in my purse is ringing.
My mother died years ago.

The News
it always takes longer than I want for anything to happen in direct proportion to the depth of my longing, which is not to suggest that if I stop insisting the world cough up what it owes me right now, it will happen; au contraire, the forces of watchfulness will be on to my game and make me wait, teach the lesson of submission to the one thing I care about, and just when I think I’ve finally got whatever it is I’ve been looking for, it turns into a squall of hummingbirds, disappears down the red throat of morning.

Braking News
while big cranes slip beneath the Bay Bridge, we two play hooky, out-of-practice after I don’t know how long of hurling Homeric epithets at each other, my green-eyed Econoline van, wearing sweats and peeling down quickly to basic moves that holler back to an earlier time when you weren’t taking pills to keep your heart going, and when I had a full set of lungs; I pedal with my tongue, you inside my mouth; we speed down the hill, brake for hesitation, come crashing into each other. On one side of the bed as you stretch out, I think you must be a cold black star, collapse, and leave me alone.

Bad News
and for years, I sat around believing you’d take action, that everything was going to change, but the exercise machine remained a clothes hanger, the goggles never made it to the pool, and I never made it to your bed, only the breathing machine that slept with you regulating each sigh while you waited for the father you never knew to come home.

Good News
there are always drugs: Lanoxin, Lasix, Carvedilol, Tolinase; your every day over-the-counter Tylenol Extra-Strength, Tylenol Migraine, Tylenol for Right Brain, Aspirin to take every day for the rest of your life, codeine, morphine if you're on a medical plan or have a good dentist, in-your-eye designer shots of Botox, pain-killers, depressants, uppers, downers, antihistamines, glazed maple donuts at two in the morning.

News Update
finished swearing up and down a Targét parking lot, phoned my friends and authored messages to an old e-mail list announcing how I’d decided to give up the whole damn thing forever, forget about whatever “it” happened to be at that particular moment, except whatever “it” was, bugged me to the height of my crotch; so I take a ride to the Wine Country. Stay in Calistoga where I soak in a heated pool, listen to frogs all night practice their croaking, and I realize they’re speaking my language (!) and I get everything they say, like love me, love me.

Parking Karma
There's a single woman who reaches into her pocket to retrieve car keys, her head lifted slightly, the angle of her chin indicates how far down the street her car is parked. Sometimes I target a car on this side of the fire hydrant near the lamppost; sometimes in front of the bakery. Today the car is outside the pizza store. I see it.

Before she slides into the front seat, she checks the meter, just to know how closely she missed getting a ticket. The thrill. She presses the car remote and pops open the trunk, places two shopping bags next to each other. Straightens a box of tools in the back.

All this time, my right directional signal flashes red stakes out the spot, warning off all challengers who idle by and drive off. It must be my RayBans. I focus again on the owner who turns the key in her ignition and buckles her seat belt. The car hasn't been washed in weeks. A gray streak cascades down the trunk. By now, she knows I'm waiting as she continues her ritual, turns on the radio and adjusts the rear-view directional mirror.

Finally, there's nothing left to do and she pulls away. Now's my chance. I pull in. I'm parked outside the pizza store. A boy standing in the doorway drips a string of cheese from his slice. I think about getting a slice, too. I look at the clock. I need to get to my group.I've been a member for one month. We meet every weekend.

I'm working to extend my parking karma range from two blocks to three.There's someone in my group who's been coming to meetings for a whole year. He can do it from six blocks off.

CellPhone Poem 14: Breaking Up Where XBox Marks the Spot
The day after Thanksgiving
I'll walk across the Great Mall,

and use a credit card with a revolving account
that turns pennies into gold and gold into health plans,

taller than I ever thought possible, slinky
with thighs like Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat,

living at the edge of a culvert
where security systems cook dinner for the homeless,

a member of my own Special Forces unit,
carrying a knapsack of turkey bones

wrapped in tinfoil, the power
to grow apartments from pizza crusts,

feeding a voice inside my computer
so I sound like Stephen Hawking on a good day

standing at midnight in the Garden of Eden
wondering what God was doing before he broke out the world.

Cellphone Poem 13: Cancel Service
I robbed banks for two years straight
they never caught me except on camera.

I dressed up whenever I did a job,
the kids were in San Francisco with their grandmother.

Once they started school I'd hoped there'd be more time
for me to pull off the Big One,

wearing heels, a sheath, maybe a skirt.
I was working in the public sector so I had to dress the part,

because my kids needed things and I needed them,
so there you have it. Sure, I have skills.

I could've checked off a bunch of boxes,
but that'd be like sticking a pin up my pinata

on mornings when I walked to the window,
I was the leading lady instead of him giving me orders,

my husband with no hands in his heart,
a man who never got me except between a rock,

and a bed. After I went solo,
he starts calling on the cellphone

saying how much he loves me.
I didn't need to hear that. I was Number One,

but his calls turned me into the CellPhone Bandit,
and then all the law wanted a piece.

I'd become too good at my own game,
robbed more banks than I even had birthdays.

Listening to a Funeral Oration for Rosa Parks
at the Gas Pump
And late enough for me to pull into the station
without queueing up, ignition off, radio on.
I was a pearl onion caught between the big toes of a gas pump,

my week'd been crazy with nothing going on,
a daughter who'd just passed her driving test,
now she's got a California license,

and I'm coming back from the DMV, running again,
slide my ATM card through the slot,
hear the Michigan Governor eulogize Citizen Rosa,

who sat down so that we could stand up,
when it seemed everyone got out of their cars,
filling up on all those free words.

Seinfeld: The Broken Glass Episode
My elbow did it:
pushed a glass over the edge to the kitchen floor.
Suddenly,

the glass had become two-dimensional and garbage,
while I had become a person with one less glass,
but that's what happens when an elbow

starts making its own pointed remarks
(elbows are you listening?).
It was an asymmetry of the universe,

I was one glass down,
and something had to give.
I started sweeping.

I kept sweeping,
started to dream about pulling glass
from the bottom of my feet, saw blood streaming

chandeliers on the ground
crystals to light my way,
which is how I learned to walk on broken glass.

Cingular Wireless: Raise Your Bar From the Basement
Doesn’t getting a promised rebate also constitute being able to use the rebate? I always thought so, but it seems that telephone companies, CingularWireless in particular, has found additional ways to squeeze more money from the consumers' pocket.

Here’s my story. I renewed my cellphone contract, formerly held with AT&T, which was recently bought out by Cingular. This simple act of renewal was its own nightmare, since for some legal or other convoluted reason, even though Cingular bought out AT&T, their data records and customer base aren’t a shared entity. But I digress.

After weeks of phone calling and speaking to innumerable cheery young customer service representatives reading from various scripts, I finally was able to order my phone, which came with a promised $50.00 rebate. However, when the phone itself arrived, it contained no rebate coupon so I needed to spend additional time on the phone. It turned out that this was a Cingular phone, but it had become tainted by my previous association with AT&T, so the coupon had to be ordered through a different path.

Cingular received my rebate request on 8/15/2005, processed the request on 9/07/2005 and I received the card in early November. I know because I kept the paperwork. It took about three months to get the rebate, but as a trained consumer, I was glad when it came. However, this was not a check, but a card, similar to a credit card. I used it to pay for a meal. But it was later rejected at most other places like supermarkets.

I got on the phone again. Through Cingular’s labyrinthine customer service center, I was able to find out that the balance on my card was $15.76. A cheery customer service representative advised me that I could use the remainder of the balance by “splitting the difference” with another card.

Really, should we have to go through all this trouble to use a promised rebate? I think not. Instead, I feel that this is simply a clever way for Cingular to collect some of that $50.00 multiplied by a lot of other frustrated consumers like myself, wearing down our resistance to corporate greed by making everything difficult.

I protest!

No. 23
Mike dropped off a hundred t-shirts for me to sell in the lobby of the theater. I saw Lulu skulking around outside with her camera in one hand, and her bounty of t-shirts in the other. Don't ask me where Clyde was. Working some job, I guess.

So I had to decide how to balance my newspaper sales of "Homeless Security" with my new inventory item. Thank goodness the theater owner was some kind of weak-kneed liberal who didn't mind me setting up shop to the left of his ticket window. So many of these owners freak whenever they see a homeless person because they think it's going to drive away customers. As long as I keep myself relatively clean, I never find that I'm a scab on the general premises. Why on the contrary. I think I add an interesting mix to the general boring fare that passes by without so much as a look. In fact, that's what I like about selling newspapers.I play a game with myself about who's actually going to see me without storming by like I'm a piece of warmed over shit. Usually, I'm right. Every 20th person or so I can spot some one in the crowd. What do they have in common? Hard to say. I think it's a zig-zagging aura they've got coming off of their fontenelle's where their life spirit sits. Clyde told me that. But never mind. Time for me to get to work.

"Want a paper? He was relatively tall with cute dreads dangling around his face like a shower curtain.

"I bought one from you yesterday."

"What about a t-shirt?"

"I've got a million t-shirts at home."

"I bet you do. But not one like this." I held up Osama's name on the front.

"Is this for real?"

"Sure. This is a grassroots thing."

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I don't know."

"What if I throw in something you've never seen before?"

"How much did you say it was?"

I knew I had him. I tied my tongue into a knot and his jaw dropped. "That'll be 10 dollars," I said.

Rondeau for the Lost Lenore
Help me to look, for I lost her there
deep in a field, or on a burnt pier,
stuck between two rotten planks of wood,
not making noise, even if she could,
kicking around a shuttle of years.

Long ago I remember she stood
on a fire trail, wearing a fleece hood
loosely, without covering her hair.
Help me to look.

She's gone so long without eating food,
take-out on-the-run that tastes no good.
I'm not sure if I know how to clear
her heart's basement, look in the mirror
when she sang to the singing blood.
Help me to look, for I lost her there.

Yizkor (Memorial) Service
Yom Kippur 2005

I'm watching darkness
embrace a glittering thumbnail
someone had trimmed and left years ago
for the cleaning lady as it rolled across the floor
into breadcrumbs, cat hair, a tissue blown by the opening door
into a tent of good-bye kisses, yet the nail,
painted glow-in-the-dark still blazing pink,
catches the light and is swept from the room
on a braided tassel,

as I follow the meditation,
but keep wandering to thoughts of my new vibrator,
a molded purple plastic water-proof super glide,
waiting for me at home tucked between my socks and panties,
which I bought the weekend before, while doing food shopping
and going for a walk with my friend and her dog,
the solemnity of making our days count,
well, I want to feel good and I need batteries.
That's how I entered the High Holydays. In a blaze.

No.22
We decided to use our existing marketing channels. Granny had the movie theater crowd sewed up, Clyde was going to work the wash-and-dry crowd at the laundromat, and Lulu would concentrate on school cafeterias. But we weren't going to stop there. I was elected responsible for getting the model t-shirt produced, and for designing a Web site to help sell the shirts, and for the ultimate broadcast.

"If we get thousands of people coming out to hear Osama streaming over the web, how's he not going to show up?" I reasoned. Plus, he wouldn't necessarily have to divulge his location, which was key to the success of my plan. I gambled that the opportunity for Osama to speak to a ready-made audience of thousands would be as irresistible as a free-interest loan from the World Bank.

I got busy. I put down my water-bottle next to the computer. First I designed the t-shirt over the Internet, dragging and dropping text and pictures on a handy blank canvas of a white t-shirt. I choose colors, named my date, checking to make sure I wasn't setting a time during Ramadan, and gave the domain name of the site I was building to find more information. Since the domain hadn't been registered yet, I grabbed it: www.osamaspeaks.com. "Hear Osama on www.osamaspeaks.com, May 20, 2006."

Done. I had a highly satisfied sensation that was similar to winning a superbowl pool. I made a mental note to be sure to provide an audio file so whatever came together could be downloaded. Exhilerated, I took another swig of water. But suddenly, the light from my basement window shimmered before me in the shape of Lulu. Time slowed down. She touched my cheek with her hand. I can't remember anything else, except she set up my networks and made them run. Thank God I'm a geek.

Notebook from the Year One
It's a small room I live in,
but the rent's okay,
a bedroom with two windows,
utilities paid.

I sleep on a couch,
I eat on a door,
when company comes,
they sit on the floor.

No. 21
"It's the theory of market share pressure leading to groundswell," I explained. "We print up thousands of t-shirts announcing a meeting with Osama bin Laden at a certain time and place, say runs of 1,000 at a time and we finance more runs with the sales of previous t-shirts; sell 'em wherever we can, whenever we can, all we do for the next six months or so is sell t-shirts ; I'll build a web site to help us sell the t-shirts. As members of the t-shirt collective, all of you can pocket a certain percentage of the sales; say two percent."

"Five," said Clyde.

"Five," I said. "Then we take things from there. With millions of people publicizing the event and waiting to hear the biggest terrorist of all time speak to them over a public broadcasting system, how can we fail?"

"We need music," said Lulu.

"And to sell food," said Granny.

Then went out for another cup of coffee to discuss the details.

Content Management System

And while I'm waiting for you in the car like an otter
floating beneath a hood of water watching the sky
pull itself into threads of orange taffy, I swam away
to Chicago and the punch press factory near O'Hare Airport,
where I met Johnnie with mahogany skin and red straightened hair
and Eola from New Orleans who said:
"Life's like powder on a powder puff, just ready to blow off;"
and a woman from Argentina who thought I was pretending
not to be Spanish so I wouldn't get deported,
a time in my life just before three-alarm fires

started to go off and I had to skate down the freeway,

when we ate three-course meals in 20 minutes
and heated food in a microwave that smelled like a roach coach.
I remember when the lugging machine punched a hole through my finger
and the foreman drove me to the hospital in his car where I spent the evening
filling out worker's compensation forms, and worked the next day
anyway and didn't make my quota; something about the thinness of the sky,
the way the airplane balances on a diagonal wire
the way Chow Yun Fat did in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
walking on tree tops,
which is a good trick if you know how to do it.

No. 20
Clyde, Granny, and I walked the half mile from my apartment to the theater. People were queued up at the bank window. The street was filled with people sipping coffees, and I saw a hold-out with a cigarette who was blowing smoke. Clyde and Granny had fallen a few steps behind. I began looking around the corner for Lulu.

"She'll be there," said Granny.

"There's another one?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this one has a camera."

"Whoa, baby. We're making the papers."

"Only the ones you're smoking."

"I'm sorry, Miss. You can't take pictures without a permit," said an officer to Lulu who was standing in the middle of the street. "You'll have to move." Lulu kept her eyes buried in her frame. The youngish officer, who judging by the peach fuzz on his chin, might've been a rookie assigned to the school crossing on any another day, stepped closer to her side. "I'm sorry, Miss, you're not allowed to stop the traffic. Cars were queued up behind her, and they were honking their horns.

"Lulu, c'mon," I said, stepping into the street.

"D'you know this woman?" the officer asked. He looked a lot taller once I was standing next to him.

"Yes," I said, taking her arm. "Lulu, what are you doing?"

"Well, mostly waiting for you," she said picking her head up. "But I thought I'd get some footage of how we're supporting the oil companies by driving around at different times of the day, in different light. Great diminishing angles from the corner."

"Thanks, Miss," said the officer. "You can't stand here."

"Geez," she said. "You don't have to go ballistic."

"Thanks, Miss," he repeated, "I'm just doing my job." He stepped aside and started to wave traffic on.

"First you get a college education, then you can't get a decent job, and then they want to arrest you. I think the country is going down the tubes."

"Amen, to that said Granny," who'd finally caught up to us.

"Amen to that again," said Clyde.

Lulu put her camera back into her satchel. I introduced Lulu to Clyde. "Granny knows him. He wants to work with us."

"So, Thinktank," he said to me, rolling back on his heels and winking at Granny. "What's next?"

“T-shirts," I said. "We're going into merchandising."

No. 19
[digression] Clyde wanted to join the party, so we head in the direction of the nearest live wire, which to my mind, was Lulu who had struck a chord within my shredded heart. I was hoping that she still planned to meet us in the lobby of the movie theater, whereupon I had a plan to start moving in the direction of Osama bin Laden. As crazy as it seemed, I think I'd fallen upon a foolproof idea. Because if you look at the history of programming languages, they don't last forever, since technology changes, programming styles change, and good languages last only 15 or 20 years; a man like Osama fell into the same category. Let's say he had shelf life, which was only a few years left until he became ho-hum on the international market.

Likewise, I reasoned, but actually, I lost my bookmark of reasoning. I was aware of being able to concentrate more and more less. Prowlie's glass and light was beginning to emerge again in my consciousness and I didn't know what that meant except I had to follow it to its ultimate logical conclusion.

"Paranoid schizophrenic," I'd heard someone once say of me.
[ / digression]

Back to the party.

No. 18
For breakfast I rustled up two cups of coffee, brewed over a spoonful of instant, and two bowls of assorted dry cereal, poured out from the bottom of a bunch of almost empty cartons. Okay. The cereal was a little stale, but who cares if you've got milk. Right? Sometimes I can sound like a fucking commercial. So Granny stuffed her sleeping bag back into some expandable netting and then spent the rest of the morning in my bathroom cleaning herself up while I danced around waiting to take a piss.

"Come on in," she said. "I don't care."

"Don't look."

"Are you out of your mind? I'm behind a shower curtain."

I pissed, brushed my teeth, and washed up. By the time I got dressed, the water had stopped running, but she was still futzing around in the bathroom.

I decided to sit down at the computer balanced on a snack table outside the kitchen.

"You ready?" she asked after I had almost finished checking my email.

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. Cleaning up had done things for Granny that I couldn't have imagined. While before she had been some indiscriminate age, a raunchy gnarly thing curled in upon itself, now she appeared radiant, a woman in her late thirties, and her light brown hair; well, it almost had sheen. I was glad to see she was no longer wearing several layers of multi-colored shorts, now dressed in a black shirt with a stained red top, clearly rescued from some Goodwill sale pile.

"Stop looking at me," she said, throwing her bag over her shoulder. "Let's get going. I'm not use to being in one place."

So we walked up the side of the house, past the recyling bins. I saw a man going through my bottles. He looked familiar. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere?" I asked. He was this black guy. All I knew was that he was built like a line-backer.

"I've never seen you before in my life," he said, holding up an aluminum orange soda can.

"Yes, now I know where I saw you. You were the ticket taker at the movies up the street the other night."

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Nothing much. I remember you bumped in to me."

"Hi, Clyde."

"Hi Granny."

"You two know each other?"

Granny nodded. "I know a lot of people."

"So you got yourself a place to stay last night," winked Clyde.

"You can think whatever you want to think."

"Say, you look good cleaned up," he laughed.

"Clyde and I have done street time together," she explained to me. "But right now he's holding down more jobs than you can count on two fingers."

"Three right now," he said. "Going through the recyling bins is a sideline. I work at the theater in the evening, the laundromat across the street in the afternoon, then I haul off the glass whenever I can, and get five cents a bottle."

"I'll probably see you in the theater lobby real soon," she said. "selling newspapers. But in the meantime, I'm going with a couple of these bums to build a mass movement."

"Anything I can make money at?" he asked. " I need time off from one of my jobs."

No. 17
"I use to be pretty," said Granny, "not that you'd ever believe it," and she held up her hand in my face when I tried to protest. "You don't have to say anything. And my hair! I bet you wouldn't believe that I almost was hired for a shampoo commercial. The people said they'd never seen anyone with the kind of sheen I had in my hair, especially for someone with light brown hair. Light brown hair usually doesn't do much of anything. But I was eating back then. I think it was the nuts. They say peanut oil has a lot of vitamin E."

Was that so, I thought. My hair was starting to thin on top and I wasn't ready to reach for the Rogaine. Maybe I should eat more nuts. "So what happened?"

"I can't wash it, brush it, so I just keep it braided down my back. But it's so dirty, it weighs two tons. I can hardly hold my head up."

"No, I mean about the commercial. For shampoo."

"Oh, that," she laughed. "They hired someone else. And you know what? She scrunched up her face. "That girl hardly had any sheen. She and the photographer were sleeping together."

"Sometimes that happens," I began, wanting to say something to Granny about bum breaks. I kept feeling I had to be nice to her to help make up for society's injustices.

"But that's the way my luck has been. Never knew my father. My mother went crazy by the time I was ten. Not that I really could tell the difference. It was all crazy. I thought that was the way everything was. You could say that these past two years on the streets have been my most sane."

I could tell this was going to be an all-nighter. "What do you mean?"

"You're not interested."

"Why do you say that?"

"You're just being nice. I'm not going to sleep with you. Now don't think just because you're listening to me..."

"I'm not the least bit interested in sleeping with you. First of all, I've got at least four hours of work I still have to do. And second of all, we're on a project together, which means we can't sleep together."

"Why?"

I stumbled for an answer. "Because it's unethical."

"Oh," she said, folding her hands into a neat pile on her lap and looking more relaxed. "So what do you do?

"I'm a programmer," I said.

"TV? Radio?"

"No, I program languages. Like XML."

"What about XXL?"

"Do you program also?"

"That's my t-shirt size." Oh, by the way," she said, "I lied to you before. It wasn't peanuts that gave my hair that sheen. It was rosemary oil."

Rosemary oil. I made a note to ask her tomorrow where I could buy the stuff. If my hair had more sheen, it might help to make up for everything else it was missing. "Good night," I said.

"Good night," she chirped back, and shook out a sleeping bag from somewhere inside her shopping bag upon my old couch.

No, 16
Granny was now a person with food in her stomach, a situation which definitely agreed with her. We sat on the living room couch; her feet rested on an an unread pile of InfoWorld magazines stacked on my coffee table. Granny didn't talk much. We stayed up for several hours and sat in front of the TV, until I couldn't stall the inevitable. I had to start programming and finance my mass movement {all bathroom jokes aside}.

I knew she was the lady in the house, but beats the hell out of me if I was going to let greasy Granny spend the night sleeping under my blankets. I didn't care how dirty they were {my blankets}, which as far as I was concerned, was nothing compared to eau de Granny. I just thought Lulu had been pretty slick to dump everything into my hands and run off with her video recorder.

"Uhh, I'll make a bed up for you on the couch," I said.

"You're gonna let me sleep here?" she said, startling herself back into a sitting position. "On your couch?"

"Where else? There's only one bed in the apartment."

"You really don't have to do that," she said.

Yeah, and didn't I know it, which is when Granny decided to tell me her life's story.

No. 15 (continued from July)
We walked to my apartment that was a few blocks away. If this what it took make my life interesting once again, I thought, I was up for it. "So Granny," I asked. Do you like spaghetti?"

"Yes, indeedy, needy," she said. "I've got the sauce." She ransacked her black bag for a moment and pulled out a jar of Newman's Best. "I went shopping this morning," she said to me, and winked. "The trick is getting into the store."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you know diddley-squat? Granny's gonna teach you. In order to shop, you have to get in the store, and in order to get in the store, you have to get past security, and in order to get past security, it's important they don't know your face."

"So how'd you get past security?"

"A different guy was on duty this morning," she said. "I scored."

"Basil-garlic," I said. "My all-time favorite."

She smiled. "I figure you got a stove in your apartment."

"I even have a loaf of bread," I said and found the key. I jiggled the lock just the right way to open the door. Granny followed me to the refrigerator. "I forgot something." I said.

"Tell me."

I closed the refrigerator door and opened up a few cabinets, realizing that I didn't actually have spaghetti, just another jar of sauce.

Granny's face dropped, but then she recouped. "Heat them up," she said. "We'll have soup."

I did, and we had plenty of bread. But then there was all that Top-Ramen in the back of my closet, and who said you couldn't put sauce on a noodle that comes packaged as its own raft?

"Score," said Granny. "Totally score."

CellPhone Poem 12
Calling to find out if I can go
pearl-diving this evening
inside your mouth,

as I sit on a chair that dreams
of becoming a crocodile
climbing the hills

that turns into a bridge
connecting two short points
to a distance

as I wrap my legs
around whatever it is
we can become.

*
Me? Fine. I know.
You? Okay. Great.
Just for today?

So I'll come over
maybe in a few hours.
Around dinner.

We'll stuff plastic bags
with clothes for people
in New Orleans.

Take them to the Grand Lake Theater
any time from the morning commute hour
all through the night.

CellPhone Poem 11
It's me. All my important
numbers. Ring tones.
Daffy Duck & Pastures of Plenty.
Beseme Mucho & Beethoven.

All my significant others
gathered beneath one roof
a press away
distilling voices

into the daily grind
blinking when its cell
runneth over
with voice and text messages

video grabs
eyes closed shut
or an abandoned meth lab
there for all to see.

My whole life stripped down
to ankle bracelets
from single shining chip
to shining chip.

CellPhone Poem 10
So on the day of your eviction
three blue sentinels stood
at the edge of a parking strip,

almost a year
since your father had died
on a Sunday that stretched into police reports,

when sunflowers in the backyard
spit their black and white seeds
into my face.

You hugged me then
mostly because you didn't know what else to do,
before you crawled beneath the linoleum and sub-flooring

and buried yourself hissing my name.
Go away. You are a mother
of Shit Heads.

You said other things to me
I can't repeat
because I am a mother,

and because I'm trying to remember
how you're my son,
who taught me the miracle that life is.

I'm not sure when you started to hate
with the green stare of a cat's eye marble,
who'd already dismissed me from my post.

I don't know how a child can even do that,
you who discovered pill bugs beneath every rock
and tamed snails,

always searching for more
through mint and calendulas,
maybe learning from them

how to hide your terror.
Are you listening?
Can you hear me?

CellPhone Poem_WhatIs
A cellphone poem is music
how we sound

as we dial talk text message
and the breath between

the warm bath
of lymph nodes

that keeps lines open
in our groins back and forth

between listening
and expression

at right angles
broadcasting

I and Thou
me and you

perched on a molded cornice
where a voice speaks its essay:

Hold on, hold on
a soul shift does not occur

in the limelight,
it comes from shadow.

The planet will heat up,
species will die,

but when, and how many
and can we change?

CellPhone Poem 8
I'm here
walking down the supermarket aisle
where the strawberry yogurt
meets the fish counter.

Why d'you think containers of yogurt
are near the fish counter?
Those two things don't go together.
Yogurt sauce over salmon

is the closest I've ever come
in my whole life to anything like that,
but I don't think it was yogurt,
maybe cream cheese.

I'm here
sitting on the bus counting my change.
The Queen is eating bread and honey.
I said that to be funny.

I'm here speaking to you from the dental chair
in the few minutes I have left to me
before the dental assistant
sticks blue goop in my mouth.

I'm here,
but I'm almost ready to leave.
I've been here all day
standing in line.

What do you mean what tickets?
They're the ones for Andy's birthday
this weekend he was coming in from Fresno
and we were going to take him out.

Remember? I'm sitting in traffic.
Actually, I'm sitting in my car
listening to the radio,
and all I can see are brake lights.

It'll be hours
until I can return
to my reality show. I'm here,
but I want to be home.

CellPhone Poem 7
I'm repeating this again
because it needs to be repeated
like a bobble-head
that keeps waggling its eyes at me.

About time.
About him.
About me.
About place.

A woman warmed her nose
inside a tunnel of fingers. She saw:
eye-gougers, pliers for ripping ears,
a necklace of nails.

There was a small door
in a large wall
covering the spot
where something breathed.

On Hitler's birthday,
he'd served cup cakes
iced with red swastikas
to a guest with 1,000 eyes.

Now the interrogator gets close,
drenched in contempt.
The only thing protecting her
was his jet lag.

Later on, burning tires
floated down a river of oil.
Others sold images of the Virgin
on grilled cheese sandwiches.

About time.
About love.
About face.
About now.

It keeps coming up.
Memory extends my hair
to the next country.
Call me ASAP.

CellPhone Poem 6
I don't get it.
Why'd he say he'd get in touch
when he didn't?

When the next set starts,
he said he'd call.
That was three weeks ago.

Sitting. I'm almost there.
I'm looking out the window.
Take-out.

You told me
you didn't want to cook.
I don't want to either.

Pick me up. No, rice.
A few minutes.
Stop screaming. I got it.

CellPhone Poem 5
Waiters are bringing wine to the table
Chardonnay - the house
we have to leave in a half hour

here they come
did you talk to the realtor
about the surge protector?

I can see grass out the window
sprouting over my parent's graves
it's where last time they walked

my friend's test was positive
the cancer is malignant
she wants to lop them both off.

CellPhone Poem 4
Once I jmpd frm a cliff
I had time to fly.
I was a fly-grl.
U so l00kd dwn on me.

CellPhone Poem 3
I cn taste salt on yr shouldr
as u Ntered me lke you wre throwng
a duffel in2 the bck-seat of a car.
Neithr of us evr l00kd bck.

CellPhone Poem 2:
I called officials from Tokyo,
just like you advised,
gave an interview on prime time,

also an anchor in New York who wanted to know
what I'd eaten for breakfast,
as if viewers hadn't heard

enough about cereal bars
inside the shuttle.
We discussed the wing heat shield.

The anchor wanted to know how it's possible
to peel foam so thin it's like sand.
I told him carefully. We laughed.

But when I talked about earth from outer space
where air appears thinner than the pulsing white
of an eggshell, how the planet's scalp

is scarred with the stump of ridges,
the anchor talked to me during commercial break.
He said to can it.

You, who allowed me
to see creation, I am slow of speech,
and slow of tongue.

*

I am an old voice
that seeps through stone,
one stone at a time,

I am the so-called old man
that has heard way too much
speaking for myself.

Whenever I open my mouth,
it's Biblical.
Who knows what to say?

Do u think it's easy for me sounding
lke this all the time Now u've done it
R you satisfd U don't have to sound lke me

For God's sake u're an astronaut Moses tlked the sme shit
abt nt knwing wht 2 say Wht do u nd?
Sme kind of staff?

Keep rpeatng the sme thng u knw
people hear insde their own holding pattern becse
who wouldn't wnt 2 be held love catches throats

& strngs thm up
wth their own snd
rather than bng loved it's so mch easier.

Cell Phone Poem 1
I'm leaning against a parking meter
looking at a car that's not mine,

but it's a nice car, a two-seater,
taxi-cab yellow sports coupe

blinking aren't I hot from its tail-lights,
and if you follow the arc, spreading its wings,

two molded lines that meet on a hood,
which is to say it's lunch-time,

and I'm hungry for a sandwich with pickles
and stoneground mustard dripping from the side

of a sour dough roll that's been cut
into two halves folded over roast turkey,

but then I couldn't talk on the cellphone,
my ear pressed into the metal,

my ear picking up signals,
listening for a voice that's not there.