California State University (CSU): Open Journal Systems

Ong, J-son

f·sonOng 
ChingMing 
On April fifth, 
showers sprinkle the whole day 
on the living and the dead. 
All dressed in white 
like apparitions, relatives 
stroll toward Kong Meng San Crematorium. 
Pink umbrellas and black wet shoes 
line the walls outside the temple doors. 
Four dishes of half cooked food are offered 
before grey walls, ashes and bones, 
rows and rows of small urns, 
inscribed with the names of the deceased. 
A monk in golden robes walks between devotees, 
sprinkling chrysanthemums, murmuring blessings. 
When the evening ends, a monk digs 
a hundred blows to the temple's gong. 
At the front door, a haloed street lamp 
shines on silver drops of rain 
spearing into darkness, 
pattering a wet courtyard. 


English

Ching Ming

Owen, Kevin

Three Poems: "Aubade" "Sweeping" and "Manuel as Symbol"

Scheibel, Patti

Patti Scheibel 
Home 
Outside on the porch Chris sits on the steps and smokes a 
cigarette. She traces something with her while tennis shoe in U1e 
diltwhere the grass won't grow. I stand in the doorway behind the 
screen breathing in her smoke and the charred smell of barbecuing 
somewhere near on this warm summer night. All up and down the 
stTeet crickets chirp and the lushness of people's gardens lingers in 
the air. 
By the set of her spine, I can see she is thinking. I would go out 
and sit with her on the steps, but she seems restless and my presence 
would only be an intrusion. Still, I like to watch the way she holds 
the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, and the way the 
glowing orange tip flits through the darkness like a firefly. 
So often I wonder if she ever thinks about me or if she's 
threading together all her memories and abstractions like beads on 
a suing. I think about her a lot and how I love tllis house with a porch 
to sit on and talk or laugh. Chris manages to weave in passersby, 
eitherto talkaboutortocall up to sit with us. I neverinvited anyone; 
I'm awkward with strangers. 
Even the fi rst Saturday after we moved in, she invited the 
mailman to sit with us and have a beer. He came stumping up our 
wallc way gleaming with sweat, his blue unifonn sticking to his 
stocky frame. Chtis said, ''Take a break for God's sake! You look 
like you need a beer. Why don't you sit with us and catch your 
breath?" 
HOME 55 
l resented her invitation because he looked to me like a pain; 
like the kind of cocky guys who ask me in deparonent stores where 
the automotive section is. They always act offended when I explain 
I don't work here and I don't know. I swear I must look like a typical 
saleswoman, although I can't imagine what a typical saleswoman 
looks like. Chris laughs about how often it happens and tells me it • s 
because r go around with the same slightly dazed expression that 
she sees in salespeople's eyes during half price days. That's the 
kind of person she is though, the lcind that stares into salespeople • s 
eyes and remembers them. 
Anyway, the mailman dumped his letter sack on our steps and 
personally handed our mail to Chris with a big grin. Then he thrust 
out his big hand at me to shake. It was hot and sweaty and r made 
a point of wiping my hand off on my jeans. "I'm George," he told 
me happily. "Glad to meet you." 
I said, 'TmNina,"butldidn'tsay I was happytomeeth.im. He 
flopped down into out· new white wicker lawn chair. I thought his 
weight would break the delicate weave, but it didn't. Chris 
introduced herself and askedJU.m what it was like being a mailman, 
as if it were some rare and highly sought after career. 
He mlled the open can of beer between his hands for a moment. 
He said, "Well, I don't really consider myself a mailman. I mean 
I know I am, but it's not what I really want to be.'' He was aching 
to tell someone whatever it was that he wanted to be, but Chris 
didn't ask and I couldn't. 
She said, "If it weren't for ferocious dogs and lugging all that 
mail around, I'd like to beamailman,ormailwoman, or do you say 
mailperson?" He shrugged helplessly. "Well whatever. You get 
to be outdoors and see where people live and what their names are. 
You could even read all the magazines you wanted to without 
having to buy them." Chlis always could sidetrack a conversation. 
Not that she meant to ignore George, although he did look like he 
was about to burst a blood vessel all over the fresh green paint on 
our porch, she just gets caught up in an idea and can't control 
herself. 
In a rare fit of mercy, I asked good old George what it was he 
wanted to be doing. His round face seemed ridiculously angelic 
56 NORTHRIDGE REVIEW 
when he said, "I want to play the cello." 
Chris smiled and asked, "You mean you want to learn how? Or 
do you already know how?" 
"I know how to play already," he impatiently explained. "l 
want to make a living at it though.'' 
Soon they were knee deep in arpeggios and intermezzos so I 
qui tlistening because I didn't understand. I watched their faces and 
listened to the humming of their voices. George's face grew soft 
and his voice dropped to almost a purr. Chris's face had that aura 
of distant interest she gets when she talks about something she 
knows but shehasn'ttouchedorseen yet. She's beautiful, or maybe 
not beautiful in the sense most people would think, but beautiful in 
the way ideas make her face move and her hands wave as if she 
could touch and make personal the things I don't understand. 
Things I can't understand that leave me watching lips move. 
After that George sat with us every Saturday and had a beer. I 
didn't mind him taking up so much space anymore because he 
loved the cello. Once he even brought it over one evening and 
played for us. He looked like a different person without his 
uniform, almost a stranger. The music was dark and bitter but 
lovely, and it made me glad that it was summer outside, not winter. 
Chris stared at him so hard through the half light of an early dusk 
that the black pin points in the center of her eyes grew and 
enveloped the brown. I couldn't watch George playing. It seemed 
too personal, worse than watching someone make love. 
We have a new mailman now, an old frail looking guy that isn't 
very sociable. He won't even stop for a beer. We lost contact with 
George. One Saturday he simply didn't come, and this new guy 
showed up. I wasn't very sociable either. I asked if George was 
sick, and he shrugged and dmpped our mail into our letter box 
instead of handing it to me, even though I was standing right there. 
"What happened to George? Where is he?" I yelled to make sure 
he heard me. He shrugged his spindly old shoulders and scurried 
away from me. He didn't say hello or goodbye m· anything at all. 
I admit I c1ied. Actually I cry quietly at least once a week, and 
usually I'm not even sad when I cry. Sometimes just reading the 
newspaper makes me cry. I used to think I was crazy, but Chris told 
HOME S7 
me sometimes a person's body takes over and skips over emotion 
to get rid of built up toxins. Probably my body needs an outlet for 
the dust that blows in my eyes from the patch of dirt where nothing 
will grow in our front yard. But that time I cried up a storm in the 
bathroom with the door locked so Chris wouldn't see. The deep 
purple she had painted the walls made it the perfect place to cry in. 
I never told her how horrible it looks though. 
She must have unlocked the door from the outside because she 
was just suddenly there, asking me, "What's the matter?" When I 
told her I missed George she laughed and held my hand. She said, 
"What does it matter? I'm here." 
"But he didn't say goodbye." 
"Maybe he didn't have time. He probably got accepted into a 
symphony orchestra and had to leave right away. Can't you just 
picture him in a tuxedo? It's where he belongs. Here, blow your 
nose." She held out a single square of toilet paper. I felt a little silly 
clutching her hand and blowing my nose, but then she smiled at me; 
and I realized how easy it is to get lost anywhere at all if you don't 
have a map. 
I suppose I've always been greedy. 1 remember how I'd spent 
weeks steaming the labels off of cans to paste up on the dull white 
kitchen walls: Hunt's tomatoes and Birdseye beans along with the 
rarer peaches and beets -- things I didn't really like that I bought 
strictly for the labels. Chris would have nothing to do with it at first 
because, as she told me, ''There's such a thing as good taste.'' Later 
though she'd bring home an occasional can of lima beans m· 
something she hated, explaining to me that she'd never given them 
a "proper chance." She pretended not to notice the new labels I 
pasted up whenever I got around to it. But one night I found her in 
the kitchen squinting up her eyes at the half finished wall and 
muttering, "Green Giant com here or maybe some pretty yams .... " 
After I'd covered up every bit of white wall, it looked so cheerful 
l swelled up like a turkey with pride. 
But Ch1is wouldn't admit it looked good, not even when I said 
point blank, "We sure did a good job, huh?" 
She said, "It's a kitchen. There's notmuchtosay," as if a single 
good word would magically transform her into one of those strange 
58 NORTHRIDGE REVIEW 
women on television who bliss out over waxed floors. 
Watching her there smoking, r know instinctively she isn' t 
thinking about houses or anything in them. I put my hand on the 
door frame just to reassure myself it's solid and real. I know she's 
smarter than me. The last big think I had was back in school, right 
before I dropped out, when I concluded that someone should have 
given Kafka a kitten or a puppy. It's penicillin for syphilis and 
puppies or kittens for existential depression. Dr. Peterson told me 
not to be so fucking cutesy. I never heard a professor say fuck 
before. I only meant that watching a puppy yap at a sprinkler or a 
kitten hunting a stink bug might have been better for him than 
locking himself up in a room. There's a joy anyone can see if they 
look, but I wasn't sure anyone there wanted to look. Dr. Peterson 
also told me only an intelligent person should tackle Kafka. When 
I told Chris about it, she couldn't stop laughing. She told me I 
should have known scholarship is like a football game of the mind. 
She even got me laughing when she said, "Did you dig him up and 
bring him into class before you tackled him?" 
We both work at the same factory stuffing cotton balls into the 
tops of aspirin bottles. We wear surgical gowns and surgical caps 
and even rubber gloves, which is a little inane; because people are 
always rubbing their eyes or picking the sleep out or wiping their 
noses. Instead of using unclean hands they use germ free gloves 
though. Chris tells me she enjoys the job because it gives her time 
to think. Me, I don't think as the aspirin bottles pass me by on the 
conveyer belt. Sometimes someone says something and it stattles 
me, because I realize I'm standing there doing nothing, and the 
elastic gathers in the surgical cap are digging into my forehead, and 
I don't even know how long I've been there. Chris always tells me 
no one can stop thinking for even a moment, but I can never 
remember what I've been thinking about. It's like waking up 
without remembe1ing any dreams. 
Chris remembers all her Lhoughts and sometimes she tells them 
to me; like the way Buddhist monks shave their heads and wear 
orange robes the color of poppies instead of dull black or bmwn like 
monks. She thought it would look like Halloween if all 
the monks could be gatheted together. She to I d me Buddhist monks 
HOME 59 
used to set themselves on fire during the Vietnam war in protest. 
We were digging holes in our garden to plant bulbs. She stopped 
digging and told me this thing very carefully, and I knew I was 
supposed to remember it. Why, I don't know. What does it mean 
to her? Certainly it was a tragedy: people killing themselves for 
peace. Maybe she meant they weren't killing other people for 
peace, but killing one's self doesn't very effective either. I 
dug into the soil concentrating on monks in orange, burning. I 
planted the hyacinth bulbs so close together they never bloomed. 
But sometimes, like now when she sits with her back towards 
me, I know she won't tell me what she's thinking ev.en if I ask. 
Probably she's thinking about wide open spaces, fields or deserts 
where the sky stretches out so far there's no way to avoid it unless 
one looks straight down. 
She's been so many places I've never seen: Pakistan, Japan, 
even New York City, which she says counts as a foreign country. 
She told me the people in New York city are like chickens in factory 
fanns where they have to cut their beaks off because the chickens 
are so crowded they go crazy and peck each other to death. She said 
that's why New York has gun laws; but they need ice pick laws, and 
tire iron laws, and so many laws, soon people would be living in 
empty buildings. She told me about a temple sand garden in Japan. 
Sometimes a tourist would leave foot prints, but the next morning 
the sand would be as smooth as glass again. She told me how she 
saw a young monk whistle, and birds flew down from nowhere and 
lit on his skinny outstretched arms. She told me about the beggars 
in Pakistan who would follow her around and show her their 
children with missing limbs or distended bellies. She lived cheaply 
in a hotel that used to be a palace. She broke her arm there, when 
she fell out of the four foot high bed on to the marble floor. So many 
nights I've curled up on the lawn chair and traveled inside her voice. 
She never said anything about it to me, but I heard her one time 
out on the porch say to Mrs. Zilas. ourneighbor, "I feel old and done 
in." I was making iced tea, and I heard it through the window 
screen. For a second the beautiful walls of our kitchen seemed 
hideous and gawky. It made me want to make some fun for her, 
loud roaring fun like people in Times Square on New Year's Eve. 
60 NORTHRIDGE REVIEW 
Chris is only twenty-seven and Mrs. Zilas must be at least seventy; 
but Mrs. Zilas would never say a tbing like that. Underneath her 
orthopedic shoes and frowsy moth eaten sweaters beats the heart of 
a mad woman who'll never give upi who'd never admit to it even 
if she felt "old and done in." 
When r came out to give Mrs. Zilas her iced tea, she calmly 
informed me that she stretches her social securjty check by eating 
sparrows and robins. "I spread crumbs out on my ledge and kill 
them while they eat." She seemed rather smug about it. Chris 
nodded in understanding and asked Mrs. Zilas how she killed them. 
She replied, "With a bow and arrow.'' I saw how shaky her frail 
hands were when she lifted the full glass to her lips to take a tiny 
lady-like sip. Chris was very amused. She egged Mrs. Zilas on by 
asking which bird tasted better and what was the best recipe to use. 
I like Mrs. Zilas because I could really imagine her with a bow 
and arrow if her hands were steadier. Tasked, "Wouldn't it make 
more sense to shoot whoever is in charge of sending such paltry 
social security checks?" 
She looked lost for a moment, but then sbe said, "I wouldn't be 
blabbing about it if I had, now would I, Missy? Besides, you shoot 
one bureaucrat and another pops up right away, just like toadstools. 
Believe me, I know." She gave me a very dangerous look. I liked 
her even better. 
Sometimes though, like that time she was talking to George 
about music, Chris sounds like she drank down an entire dictionary 
like buttermilk. Then conversation turns to static inside my ears, as 
if I were caught between two radio stations. Words crackle. If I 
listen closely enough, I can faintly hear a ghost of meaning, but it 
fades so fast. 
Then there are times when I'm alone with Chris when I have 
something important to say to her to bridge the gap between my 
ignorance and her, something to wash it away. It flashes through 
my mind like sunlight bouncin,g off a mirror; but words aren't fast 
enough and then it's gone as ifitwerenevereven there, leaving me 
propped up like a rag doll against these walls. It's almost as though 
I'm a foreigner with no native language; no way to tell her. 
I breathe in Chris's smoke. Maybe Chris writes what she's 
HOME 6l 
thinking about in the dust with her tennis shoe. Maybe when the sun 
comes up I could se.e her thoughts spread out like a diagram in the 
dirt. Maybe my mind or this house is too confining for her, who has 
been so many places, and I'm too stupid to know it. 
Cats somewhere unseen yowl into the night, probably copulat-
ing .. I choke back a giggle: and Chris turns and looks at me through 
the mesh of the screen door. Always, I make sounds when I most 
desire to be quiet. A tiny stream of smoke flows from the comer of 
her mouth and drifts up into her short curly hair. She says, "Come 
out or go away, but don't just stand there. You make me nervous." 
I go out and sit besides her on the porch, ignoring the wicker 
furniture. 1 hold my words in. Chris grinds out ber cigarette into 
the dirt under her shoe, obliterating whatever she traced. We sit in 
the dark heat filled with the chirping of crickets. Chris brushes a 
gnat away from her face and says, "Do you ever get lonely?" 
I want to say, why should I when you're here, but something in 
the set of her square jaw stops me. Instead I say, "Maybe we should 
get you a dog." 
She looks at me from the corner of her eye and laughs. "N ah, 
with Mrs. Zilas two doors down having a pet might not be a good 
idea." I'm not so dumb as she thinks, perhaps. A dog lives a long 
titne; years and years in which it's blindly and faithfully loyal. 
People shouldn't leave them behind when they move, but they do 
anyhow. Then the dogs go wild; snarling and snapping at strangers, 
knocking over trash cans for scraps. Maybe they even have vague 
doggy dreams about the doorno longer opening when they bark and 
bark until they're hoarse. Chris lights another cigarette, and I watch 
the orange glow as she draws on it. Ribbons of smoke curl around 
it, and I breathe it all in. 


Home

Kunstmann, Karin

Photo Sequence 
Karin Kunstmann 

z 
H 
35 

z 
H 
37 

z 
H 
39 

41 



Photo Sequence

Wolfe, Jennifer

Jennifer Wolfe 
Letter 
By the time you get this 
I will be in some channing room 
halfway across the country 
humming my good-mornings 
to the fishbowl, the sunlight 
slanting in just so, moving 
over the postcard 
of the Japanese Tea Gardens, 
redundant with cherry blossoms 
in its silver frame, 
and onto one sleeve 
of my bathrobe blooming roses 
-Can you see it? 
I hope that the girl 
mooning over her steamer trunk 
and handkerchiefs 
is thinking of someone else 
because that room is still 
months off and I must confess 
that tonight I am thinking of you 
all too often 
so that the pain of it 
keeps me sleepless, 
writing a letter in the only 
language I know, sending it 
to the only place 
I'm sure you'll ever get it. 
You're unsuspecting 
standing in the hallway 
as a familiar face 
works its way through the crowd 
to give you this special delivery. 
You crouch down along the wall, 
running your index fmger 
over the first page 
and then you see this, 
start reading, 
and if your world is swirling in, 
if your heart pounds as you read this, 
drowning out the voices, the crowd, 
that slightly puzzled face 
standing before you, 
if these words pound into your skull 
with the dull grace of a jackhammer 
then know, know that somewhere 
I too am swirling and know 
that this letter is for you. 
91 


Letter

Guthrie, Kim

Kim Guthrie 
Ca.240BC 
Ca. 240 BC 
Hot, dry, dusty, 
Somewhere near the juniper-
Though I've never been to New Mexico, 
I was there, 
This time in San Francisco. 
A basket in glass encasement 
Next to a printed page-
Ca. 240 BC, New Mexico. 
A woman had woven this, 
A woman I desperately wanted to see, 
There were no photographs. 
There is a picture I remember, 
Of my great great grandmother. 
But it was in black and white 
And the juniper was green 
And I was wearing white Nikes with a blue swoosh-
But I was there. 
There, seeing her hands fade in and out, 
Her face with only one expression 
Because of the photograph. 
Hands like mine, but darker, they were hers. 
Hers in the photograph 
Or hers in ca. 240 BC. 
Because of the photograph 
There was an image 
Of something disappeared 
Struggling to survive 
Anasazi 
Woman 
Because of the photograph 
And the basket 
Whose hands had woven 
Whose hands 
And the colors of black and white, green, blue 
Fading 
Mental fragmentation 
Those hands, 
Old, dry, weaving a basket 
Image-making power 
There was in San Francisco one day 
An Anasazi woman 
Because of the photograph. 
And the basket 
An artifact 
Art and fact 
Bound by the time on the page 
An Anasazi woman never knew 
Whose motionless lips could never respond 
To the meaning on the page 
And the basket under glass-
Material substance 
Woven by hands and documented in text-
Justification in language 
Without the sound 
Chafing 
Of dry grass and old hands 
And the wind 
Through the door leaving the museum 
And the basket. 
33 


Ca. 240 BC

Casey, Maria

Two Poems: "in like flynn" and "you"

Yoder, Mary

1. 
50 
Empty Space 
I'm back in the house that was my mother's 
looking for her 
behind mounds of excess tableware 
and rubber bands and 
styrofoam cups. 
Mary Yoder 
I'm not sure what she was barricading herself from. 
Perhaps she just forgot that she already had 78 cups 
somewhere. 
These are the layers of her mind 
preseiVed like an ancient civilization 
in the stacks of papers 
and the drawers and cupboards crammed with things. 
I let them breathe again. 
I unearth the 1960's silver plate dinnerware 
and set it out 
to remember better times. 
I wish for the impossible 
her return 
then I obsessively dig into another pile or drawer 
and lose myself in the spaces she filled so immeasurably. 


Empty Space

Muraoka, Nicole

Two Poems: "Ordering Words" and "Found Poem"

Sigman, Barbara

64 
Night 
I would like to know 
who sleeps in this city: little girls 
curled up on half a bed like shrimp 
on lettuce; grandpas snoring in white-
faded-to-gray v-neck undershirts 
and boxers worn thin as rose petals; 
cats on their backs stretched full-length 
like open accordions. Who else? 
The wind stirs chimes and rustles up 
odd clanging sounds, dinner bell, 
a toast, music-room triangle; 
Who hears? Doctors, janitors, 
slight teenage boys with scrawny 
legs and freckles, lipsticked women 
in lingerie .. .I picture 
the darkened houses around 
me, filled with people trying 
to sleep in the late night. 
I've studied, said my prayers, 
written pages of unedited thought 
but I'm not ready 
for this stack of cotton, 
rayon, and flannel that 
make up my bedclothes. 
I hunger for the wind-chiming 
night, its blackness a smooth 
petal against my cheek, 
immersed in its music, 
Barbara Sigman 
dwindling and growing like 
a chest rising and falling 
with air, reclined on a mattress. 
Closing my eyes, I'm there, 
riding the night gracefully, 
pressing its sides 
gently between my legs, 
holding my arms out languidly, for balance. 


Not a member yet