Analogies
Elli Hazit
You study scientific decay
Regeneration,
compounded and recited
As if the memory
will increase the knowledge,
move history forward,
achieve something as yet unattained
When aren’t we just
plugging holes,
whispering reassurances,
stopping crimes before they occur?
Really, to lay a foundation
takes poetry, perseverance,
Capital,
stakes in a beatific future
of solutions
Don’t shake her
her brain will never be the same
Give something gentle back
At least there’s that
My memory fails me
That’s something like the heartache
every life contains
The receptacle is noisy, unpredictable,
misbehaving, and contagious
Blends appetite with waste
until the herd moves forward
into a state of grand preoccupation
Water, necessity
No brand,
braided uncertainties,
callous lovers
Only these little hopes
of improvement
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
For the Parade
Elli Hazit
Contented?
Building,
The endless construction
manifests in
something temporary
For want of the durable, the unchanging
Tagged walls skim past
Messaging of letters, words, fragments
Seams drawn, delineated
Her carriage straight and intentional
A stride that leaves no doubt
of faith or confidence
In public, for the viewing
the critique
By herself—that’s another story
The letters shriek
Words form, descend
And this emotion snarls into life
Turning,
escapes from view
Proceeds, tosses candy, scrambles, rests
The sacred repetition suggests
No redo
Just a renaming
A day’s celebration
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Winter 2011
Elli Hazit
The ravens
scatter in the snow
fly back up to the bare branches overhead
Black on white
against an overcast sky
Winter sprawled out over the vast fields
Green gone
Light scarce
Warmth withheld
A shelter
A gathering place
for considered reflection
is sought out
The phrases are concentrated
like parcels
Carried to become less specific
Richer for the telling
Or forgotten, like a verse
The tune unwinds
Wind swirls sparkles of ice
into my eyes
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Education
Elli Hazit
Your answers bewilder me
I’ve forgotten the method
and I am far too old for relearning
these equations, properties
Rules to live by
Advice cascades over the modern day
There’s a way to be better at everything
Better at living
Better at dying
Forgetting the role of chance and
leaving days unnamed,
unburdened by definition
In the throes of real pain
the moment renders itself, by itself
An existence
that will flame out
Comfort exacts desire, leisure,
the luxury of the first world
Every corner holds secrets
that are irrelevant
Or hard fought knowledge
gathered in quiet desk days
Half-remembered facts, connections,
imagined situations
History repeats itself, it’s said
Man-made, why not?
Can this be a soul
that crawled out?
Warmed, lighted, fed, and launched
into the fray, the forest, the field
Distinct from the meal
first served, then made
No rewinding, only memory
complicated, cheap memory
to bolster the feel of experience
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
The Haves
Elli Hazit
They teach from an abundance of books
They have analyzed the warp and the weave
of how best to convey—Words
We’ve dissected, again,
the best method
for reinvention
No one will articulate the obvious:
The random gifts,
the essential inequalities
that life doles out
Maestros and laggards,
Chanteuses,
Those who pick up
and those who concentrate on
the specifics
How it might rain
Injustice will prevail
as time wears down
the most energetic
The differences seem as marked
as ever, but distance makes
a buffer from the tears
Heartbreaks are of another sort here
where water flows freely
we see images, read and bemoan
sporadically
their extreme need,
our extreme luxury
Muster sympathy
Jump into the pool
to cool off
Fly, fly anywhere, but somewhere nice—
Some place full of exotic plants,
and beaches
to rest from our heavy labors
while night falls on an exposed plain
of hunger—there
Back in the stacks
the millions of books
beg to be read,
are preserved, cherished, catalogued
The course of human history
that begat this.
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Snow Melt
Elli Hazit
This was my story
I didn’t mean for it
to get away from me
To get out of hand
I watched alone
as the snow melted
to become pitiful heaps of dirty ice
Retreating before the sun
As we turned back closer to its heat
I told myself to hold on
until Spring and then, when it finally arrived,
I couldn’t believe my eyes
One Sunday in March
I stayed in my room all day
waiting for the last piles of snow to vanish
Peeking from behind the blinds
from time to time to check
as they shriveled to nothing
Superstitious
When they vanished I’d be able
to move
to move on
They’ll be no more pieces to pick up
or push from the path
After carrying its weight all this long winter
I will be able to feel the thaw
Inside me, inside the ground
I’ve become
sick and tired of leafless trees
straw colored grass
Though I will contrive
this final symbol from the snow
Remnants that I notice
Whatever the pain is like
the pain we say we quick forget
What the pale pink faded scar cannot recount
is remembered
making faith less hardy
stirring, still, an uneasy bile
These new leaves are suspect, too
I can’t trust them to endure
Their frothy blinding green and lush demeanor
might not last
Might not survive
the winter
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Eleven Poems: An Audio Chapbook
Elli Hazit
I. Battle
II. Winter 2011
III. Snow Melt
IV. Ruby’s World
V. A.M.
VI. Education
VII. The Haves
VIII. Mall Rats and Their Grandmothers
IX. Analogies
X. Like A Name
XI. For the Parade
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Lord of Misrule
By Jaimy Gordon
Vintage 2011 (McPherson & Company 2010)
Reviewed by Bob Wake
The West Virginia racetrack hangers-on that populate Jaimy Gordon’s 2010 National Book Award-winning Lord of Misrule have rich inner lives that sweep them up in ecstasies of insight or irrationality; guided by seer-like divinations; glutted and spellbound by sensuality; pulled apart by rage and self-destructive impulses. The story, set in 1970, is mythic yet rudely earthbound, refusing at every turn to romanticize the meanness of lives circumscribed by the hardest of luck.
Luck, after all, can turn on a dime or the dusty final stretch of a horse race. And luck, like God, requires faith in its intervention and patience with its mysterious ways. Tommy Hansel, a college-educated wannabe stable-owner, surmises:
It came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luck was the world leaping into your arms across a deep ditch and long odds. It was love, which is never deserved; all the rest was drudgery.
To Medicine Ed, the racetrack’s aged and superstitious dispenser of both conjured and chemical performance enhancers, Tommy Hansel is “a young fool.”
The only horses you’ll find at the fictitious Indian Mound Downs are past their prime and damaged physically and spiritually. They run in what are called “claiming races,” meaning they’re for sale prior to post time. It’s supposed to keep things level and fair: only horses of similar value compete against one another. Should a claimed horse win the purse, i.e., “win going away,” the major share of the winnings are awarded to the previous rather than the new owner.
Individuals trying to game the system (or trying simply to intuit the combined aerodynamic alchemy of grooming, feed, exercise, phenylbutazone, and a hopefully not-too-psychotic jockey) comprise the good, the bad, and the ugly at Indian Mound Downs. The novel’s most memorable heavy is the “slug-lipped” Joe Dale Bigg, a bullying mob-connected owner whose base of operations is the front seat of his “midnight blue steel-top Cadillac.”
Our lifeline to normalcy and human kindness in Lord of Misrule arrives in the person of Maggie Koderer, gangster’s niece and failed culinary journalist. Her grooming instincts with horses are preternatural (“she tried to believe in the blind connectedness of her body, its unknown powers”), the animals trust her and are attracted to her, as we are, as readers. Maggie is more often than not guided by her better angels, unlike her lover, Tommy Hansel, who increasingly loses his way in the narrative, his sanity crumbling while Maggie’s strength grows. As we gallop toward the fourth and final section of this startlingly original novel, when the portentous titular horse Lord of Misrule is scheduled to race, we’re in a symbol-laden no-man’s-land that seemingly draws from the richest of literary traditions, from biblical apocalypse to Shakespearean madness-on-the-heath.
Written in a kind of roaming second- and third-person-intimate narration with alternating points of view, each chapter is a slipstream connecting fluidly to the next, momentum and memories building steadily, sometimes abstractly, sometimes inscrutably. Then, about midway through Lord of Misrule, without our at first realizing it, we discover ourselves fully immersed in a world and a cast of characters—human and equine—with whom we feel eerily connected on the deepest elemental level. By the time Maggie is lured into Joe Dale Bigg’s Cadillac our concern for her safety is such that we’re breathlessly clicking pages on our Kindles dreading the worst.
____________________
Bob Wake is editor of Cambridge Book Review.
Afterword
Norma Gay Prewett
This memoir is dedicated to not only Bonnie, my mother, but to many, mostly and always my sisters, in descending order, Pat, Jeanett, Sue, Donna, and Angie, and to our late brother Marx, the light of Mama’s days. And of course to Daddy, “Shorty” Prewett, without whom Mama would not have been my mom.
My mother wrote letters in pencil in an erratic scrawl on Big Chief tablets (I gave her stationary over the years, and she did me the favor of writing her poetry, late in her life, on these sheets). If Mama made a joke in her letters and thought us too dull to catch it, she drew in large letters the word HO, followed by three exclamation points and heavy black underlining. Today it might have been a smiley face or LOL, but her mark was HO! Today, my sisters and I, who also invented the phrase going all Bonnie on it to mean throwing oneself into Spring cleaning with a vengeance, crack each other up by signing off the same way. So, in remembrance of Ma, HO!!!
And thanks most of all for the gift of Bob Wake who called me up and nudged this work into being on a warm Spring day near April.
In love and laughter, Norma Gay.
____________________
Calling You Back
Norma Gay Prewett
for my son, Alex
You flop on the sled, luge-style
feet candy canes ahead, prone
as if you are home, lounging in your bed.
Instead of plummeting to a distant fate.
And I start to raise my hand,
to step into your path,
pull you up and call you to come back
as if you had slipped in the bath.
There’s already so much space between
five years old and six, such difference.
Your daddy shakes his head at me and gives
a bonus shove, to your delighted shout.
All I can see of you retreating
toward the sulfurous sunset
is your red left glove
and the Day-Glo pink of sled.
I knew you would be sliding from me soon
There were signs that the kernel, the meat
of you would crack that babyhood I loved
in a blizzard of sharp-boned shell.
Your shape is soon lost in the covey
of other people’s chicks scattered at the bottom
I hug myself and huddle with the other mothers
Each hoping, against reason, to call you back.
Later, as you crawl in with us, claiming illness,
I am shocked and comforted by
the still littleness of your body,
the lightness of your bones seem hollow
as those of birds.
The dark disguises and shrinks the boy
who seemed so solid on the sled.
I fall asleep breathing your essence
and blowing it back upon your purpling lids,
sealing our compact. I will let
you grow—if you will
always let me mother.
____________________
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