Thursday, November 30, 2006

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)--Emily Thomas

My shopping basket is too heavy to hold onto so I put it down by my feet. Through the big glass window, I watch a couple fight and make up. The girl wears a long black coat. The boy wears faded tan Wallabees and a tie. The boy gives the girl a long kiss on the mouth, steps off the curb, and looks both ways. Someone pokes me in the back. The line has moved. I push my basket forward with my foot. I don’t want gum. I don’t want to read the tabloids. The woman in front of me pays with food stamps.

I make it home and my pregnant mother digs into the shopping bag and grabs the carrots and the mustard. She eats this every day and in a month my sister is born. Her hair grows in curly and blonde. After her first haircut the curls go away. She tries swimming and hates it. She tries ballet. Still no curls. I drive her to second grade and we talk about our dad’s new puppy whose name is Bernie. She gets her first pair of pointe shoes and I teach her how to sew on the ribbons. She dances in the Nutcracker. When she puts up her hair, a couple of curls fall out on the sides. I drive her to sixth grade and we talk about our dad’s new apartment in a different state. We like it. It’s bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

For a few months all I wanted to listen to while my mother and I drove in the car was country music. If a song I didn’t like was on Continuous Country, my mother would sigh with relief, but I would switch over to The Nashville Way All Night and Day.

“Why?” my mother would ask. “Please, why?” And I would say, “Because it makes me feel good.”

On the first of February, we drove to her favorite restaurant. There had just been a blizzard, and the wind sent tree branches pirouetting into the road. Since it was her birthday, I let my mother pick the music. The station she picked was playing the song “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” by Bruce Springsteen. “What is this, mom?” I said. “Ugh.”
My mother cracked the window and threw out a piece of gum she had wrapped up earlier in a napkin.

“I wish I was listening to Tim McGraw,” I said.

“Let me tell you a story about this song,” my mother said. She brought a hand to her hair and poufed it into shape. The whole coif shifted to the side when she touched it.
“When I was a teenager, I would listen to the radio through my pillow when I was supposed to be asleep. And once I heard this song, and—“ she put her chin on the steering wheel. The car was filling with cold air.

“And what?”

“I just thought it was the best song I had ever heard.”

“Can you close the window?” I said. “That’s not even a story.”


emilymica@gmail.com

Thetis--Aldrin Valdez

for Mai Maguire

I met you in a city by the sea,
just yesterday
it seems. Your prettiness was harsh
at first, unusual
because most girls then
were blonde and stout--
you were lithe and ocean-eyed,
not in color but in gaze.

I heard you sing once, too,
in a bus to the mountains.
It was winter and your nautical tune
warmed the ride through valley frosts.

And then you became a friend
years later, in the flotsam-jetsam of hurricane times.
I ended up beside you in class sifting too slowly
through millennia of art, pausing to consider
a then-faint metaphor
in the Cycladic shores of Grecian yore.

Since then, you've become too quick.
You move too fast and too much,
I can barely keep a memory still;
it ripples with a mere touch
and then I remember I cannot breathe water.

I would like one day
to grasp you completely, secure you
in the tangle of my arms,
finally tangible and exhausted of all forms
except one:

My friend
my sister.

Aldrin Valdez is a Sophomore Painting Major.
avaldez@pratt.edu

Monday, November 06, 2006

Serial Poems -- Erin Heath

Dearest Mousetrap Inventor,

their coats are still white, buried beneath theories

Look; produce; compare among the scientists
before oceans before bones,
it turned out a glitch produced a gene
for reasons, not mutation.
An experiment, a mixture of circumstance builds
a complex mousetrap.
Such a system falls with evolution’s
modern jawless equivalents
of incremental changes: 9.82 meters per second per second







The tracks of scientists scratch the kin

of a bitten skeleton. The teeth remain closed,
half-blown, scattered glass on glass table.
A direct afarensis stature, the frame sized unlike

a modern two scientists, unclear, a key of
a key of evidence happened before.
uncover
the States’
wobbly foundation







Dear Fahrenheit,

The object, unnamed trumps its discovery, tagged with
only 1.5 pixels. The telescope measures the ground.
Observations of a moon circling, enabling the release

Science operates a new report, shuffling thin white rectangles.
They spin out until they look like stars whose light takes years.
A percent of light, analysis, percent of
planetary shock—

Shooting geysers transform to ice crystals, a sheen
of freshly fallen snow. Nine billion miles
liquid water

shooting geysers minus 400 degrees

an eccentric atmosphere sweating organisms:
astronomer should be regarded as
two distant objects







Outer

Crashing crafts, help scientists.
Water might lurk deep in dark craters. Help future human
early lunar hydrogen
bound for the south pole,
identified identified identified
help astronauts off-land, the first to strike.
A craft will fly, launch Earth before slamming






Dear Mathematics,

Dr.,
the date
ancient keys and locks
Dr.
find any piece
an elegant,
of course
formulate
Dr.
be considerate,
three pieces
what, Dr.?
even if this calculates
it doesn’t show much






Dear Scientist,

A plume of debris rising 30 miles before
hitting the moon. Looking 90 degrees against the darkness,
high high increase of the orbit,
aim the telescope, smash into distant bodies,
A heavy copper comet ejected from a stone






Dear Force,

Earth’s magnetic storms send large flares.
Their intricacies introduce a phenomenon called
atoms,
stripped of ultraviolet force,
these temperatures are high enough to
x-ray the loops
beyond a fuzzy dawn.
The first sign the first high x-ray
the loop the pointed the rounded
then a wave






Crossing

A pocket would be expected to glow
at high velocities, causing ions
to suddenly bash near the
edge of the loop.
The lack of such electric lines
lines
relatively converge.
The strong halt
against a mattress, a motion charged,
a big trap






Burn

In a field, a lightbulb dissipating
over the years, a flux,
such fields, parallel to the sun,
a flat sheet
working over time as a result of
the current giving rise,
the weak x-rays
a series, a sequence,
the mysterious source reaching its peak
within two minutes—such fields




Erin Heath is a Junior writing major
cityscorp@hotmail.com

REWIND -- Katie Cheek

I threw up. I ate three slices of pizza. The pizza arrived and I was starving. In the car, I begged my mother to order Pizza Hut. When I was putting on my pants and shoes, my mom asked me what I was hungry for. The nurse gave me graham crackers and diet coke. My vision was blurry. I couldn't open my eyes but I could hear a little boy screaming. The nurses were gossiping. 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, I'm not going to fall asleep 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, I'm going to college in Brooklyn next year, 96, 97, 98, 99, I can move my left arm if need be, 100. The metal table was freezing. She gave me a heated blanket. I almost tripped on my IV cord. The nurse had to hang the IV bag from the bathroom door so I could use the bathroom. It was weird trying to walk attached to a pole. When I stood up, I immediately grabbed the back of my gown so as not to moon the hospital staff. My Dad came back. My mom touched my hand. My hand hurt. The nurse tried three times to put in my IV before she was successful. Laura came in and read me a book. They gave me a heated blanket. My Mom came in. The nurse sat me next to an old woman who complained very loudly. I shuffled through the hallway in my surgical socks. I locked my purse in a locker and wore the key around my left wrist. Cheek, Katie you can come back now. I watched the news on channel 13 because that's what was on. I sat in the corner of the waiting room. Dad dropped us off at the door. I sat in the back seat. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning. I didn't sleep much that night.


Katie Cheek is a Junior writing major
katiecheek@hotmail.com