mister street

mister Street
wants all the meat he can rip off
the bones of the world

walks tall past it all
strong as a Wall
built according to plan

mister Street
will throw you a treat
and take what he knows is his,
just knows it is,
according to plan

--  
(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 1985
written about a lover but today I'm thinkin' Wall Street,
therefore capitalization added

Classroom

a box, a
yellow box
with motionless
           figures
   sitting, stranded,
         each wrapped
up in
       his own
   thoughts, worries,
                  feelings,
and bits of trivia
                 flying,
trying
           to find a
       poor, unsuspecting
head to enter
         and
     fill the spaces
       from which the
          dreams evaporated.


(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 1972, age 15
written while desperately bored in Spanish class
with lasting gratitude to my English teacher Alex McKay
who submitted the poem to Typog (where it was published)
even though the picture the poem draws of school made him sad.

9-11 x10

What I did today. Governors Island was almost empty, as was all of the southern tip of Manhattan, which was sad to see on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. (I guess the "credible but unspecific and unconfirmed threat" scared people off?)

Sad, yes, but I needed the space. It was amazing to be on Governors Island with stretches of lawn and the beautiful historic buildings and the salt of New York Harbor, with the breeze and the birds and my memories.

I had brought materials so that visitors could paint on the pennants, or write on a ribbon and tie it on. But there were no visitors. I think maybe The Twin Flowers were complete without the collaborators, we'll see what happens as they stand there for the final two weekends of Microtopia.

Only a few days before 9/11 my mother had an exploratory and was told "inoperable." She was still in the hospital here in NYC on 9/11 and for weeks afterward. Her cancer was what the world was about inside her hospital room (and at first I had to walk more than 3 miles there and 3 miles back because the buses were not running), and then, exiting the hospital and seeing all the flyers of missing loved ones ... and coming back downtown to breathe the smoke of burnt plastic and death ... there was such a disconnect and so much overlap all at once.

In the wake of 9/11 it was all about being strong for my girls. Except for the first minute of seeing both of those towers burning with my own eyes, while standing and sobbing alongside a group of bizarrely silent, zombie-like, random people who had gathered on the corner ... I never cried again. I made sure to use my reassuring voice. My Mom Will Keep You Safe voice.

I never did feel angry. I felt unable to process how human beings could act with such unfathomable hatred. I never lost my belief in people, but I could not put the pieces together, and to this day there is this gigantic double hole in the sky and I cannot find the pieces to complete the puzzle of my personal world.

This morning I opened my sewing machine, which had been my mother's sewing machine, to stitch a sleeve in each of the 16 pennants for The Twin Flowers. I could remember sitting at the same machine, my mother teaching me what her mother taught her, and her mother, backwards in time. I honor the mothers who did their best to keep each crop of children safe. I honor the lost souls. I honor the dead and those whose loved ones were ripped away from them so horribly.

The day that I can honor the souls of the haters, I will feel much better. For now they still don't fit.

The God of No Explanation

My mom used to say she believed in God because of the miracle of how the seasons dependably follow each other, the tides come in and out ... in other words, the natural order. One time I finally replied to her that if I were to believe in God it would be because there is no explanation for the mutations that caused evolution ... nor for an incredibly dense basketball containing all the matter in the universe -- the strength of the gravity pulling all that matter towards the core simply beyond imagination -- to have suddenly exploded in a cosmic orgasm. No explanation for the accidents, the monkey wrenches from outer space, the heartbreaks and the moments of utter joy. If there is a God, I told her, it would be the God of unpredictability and creative chaos, a God of the things for which we have no explanation, not a God of the things we have measured and weighed and documented.

Usually when she and I debated she would eventually throw up her hands and say "You should be a lawyer!" This time she said, "You should be a rabbi!" LOL. Love ya mom, hope you're enjoying the trip out there.

The Witch's House

[This is a story I will rework one day. As it stands now it was written to satisfy the guidelines of a short story contest. the opening sentence and closing sentence were given as part of the contest rules, as well as the length.]

Some people swore that the house was haunted. Almost all the kids in the dodge-ball circle agreed. "They say a witch lived there," whispered Darla's big sister. "My friend saw a ghost inside." Maybe her sister was just teasing, or making it up.

Darla walked across the street and climbed onto the old bike her father had bought for her, its fragile "German racer" frame as spindly as her own little limbs. She pedaled down the street past the homes and obedient shrubbery of the suburban development. The houses were reassuringly uniform, placed at even intervals along the green stretch of front lawns. At the corner the street post marked the intersection of Trafalgar and Cypress Drives. Familiar names. She had been turning left here on her way to school every day for the past three years.

But today Darla turned right, and then a few blocks later turned left, leaving behind the young housing development built on a former potato field. She coasted down Pine Avenue towards the witch's house. Here the houses were older, each one different under a tangled canopy of unmanicured woods. The street was pitted. Gravel and dirt blurred the line between roadway and yards. An old boat dropped peeling paint on an unkempt lawn. Scraggly grass, neglected under the trees, did its best to survive.

There it was. That had to be the witch's house. The air was suddenly cooler. Darla got off her bike and buttoned up her cardigan.

The cracked stucco cottage barely held up its sagging roof. Vines pushed their way off the crowded lattice and spilled across the walls. Even the "Condemned" sign was in tatters on the torn screen door above the rotted stoop. But the late-summer flowers bloomed and thrived among the weeds in what used to be the garden.

Darla did not have the nerve to walk up close and look in the dirty old windows. She stood still for a long while and watched the honey bees at work in the liberated yard. And then she began to see. She began to see the image of an old lady -- watering her garden, making tea on the stove, talking to her cats and her flowers, clocking the changing seasons. She saw a lonely old woman. No. Not lonely. Alone. A woman who nobody understood. Who had no one to tell the things she saw and the things she knew.

The sun was getting low in the sky. Darla was pretty sure the streetlights would be on back in her neighborhood, and the rule was: Come home when the streelights go on. She mounted her bike and rode back.

Ciprion Court? That was a strange street name. Was she going in the wrong direction? The next street post said Lloyd Lane. What? Was everything replaced while she was on Pine Avenue? Was this actually a dream? The ground tilted. The green lawns might open up and swallow her.

Ahh. OK. Trafalgar Drive. She turned into her street and then into the driveway. She was home. But now the houses looked dangerous. The obedient shrubs did not understand her. She felt out of place, and the uniform homes laughed their ridicule from behind neat curtains.

She could not tell anyone the things she saw and the things she knew. Nothing was ever the same again after that.

(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 2011

the musician

(after i drew this someone pointed out that this musician has no ears,
but he is an ear)