California State University (CSU): Open Journal Systems

Pearson, Marlene

marlene pearson 
The Preacher Meant What He Said/ 
I Saw The Spit Fly Out His Mouth 
1. 
The year I got saved 
I was in the 3rd grade 
we lived in LA 
a small house with ice plant 
dripping over the fence 
on saturday my mother with shears 
trimmed the juicy plant 
my father watching the lizard scamper out 
stabbed it with a shovel/its head and front legs 
ran away from its body 
I asked why/he said they're no good 
they don't belong here 
at night mother listened 
I said my prayer: "now I lay me down to sleep" 
mother added 
lines and I said them: 'God bless mommy and daddy 
and make Marlene a good girl' 
on sunday at Bethel Temple 
I saw spit fly out the preacher's mouth 
his waving hands/red eyes 
he explained how Jesus died for me 
he told how many nails they used 
how long/how wide/how blunt 
how Jesus longed to cry 
but he was dying for me 
because of my sins 
what did I do wrong? 
35 
Northridge Review 
someone stabbed his belly with a 6 inch spear 
Jesus nearly bit off his tongue 
from the pain 
his father made him do it 
and he wanted to 
so I wouldn't have to die 
when the preacher called come down/confess 
accept salvation/ I ran to the altar 
a fat woman followed/she smelled 
of deodorant and gardenia/she wrapped 
her arm around me/waved another in the air 
and halleluiahed for 1 5  minutes/! couldn't 
stop crying all the way home in the car until 
mother tucked me in bed and kissed 
me good night/when I closed my eyes 
to sleep I knew I was good enough. 
36 


English

The Preacher Meant What He Said/I Saw The Spit Fly Out His Mouth

Ritchie, Margaret

Margaret Ritchie 
At the Nursery 
at the rhododendrons, their clay 
pots swollen, ripe soil wet and pungent you 
put me in charge of the seeds, letting me go 
where the small packets l ine up like a colorful 
band of plump cellophaned players: tomatoes 
carrots sumer squash sealed loosely 
in slick packages rattle 
l ike a golden gourd. 
I am starting my own garden 
to feed the hole in my head I believe 
is the only opening to my toes. 
It started with the avocado 
seed on my windowsill 
and comes to this, my love 
is caught in a plastic 
glass, transparent, suspended 
by wooden toothpicks, driven 
past the skin to the meat, the sweet 
beginnings of roots dangling 
in rotten water. 
I can see you at the ferns 
marvel l ing at their bright perfection 
you sift between them l ike an ant finally 
crawling toward me at the potted pines; 
like small men their arms yellow 
and stiff, I think, LA smog does something 
to the trees, I think 
if we meet 
it will be at the planted flowers: 
so strong a perfume that 
that section makes the eyes water. 
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Northridge Review 
While I touch animated pictures 
of squash and carrots you 
will motion for me, enveloped 
between iris and bird of paradise 
as if to say " in  LA we have enough to eat. Let's 
care for flowers despite the air." 
But you are planted somewhere 
between the ferns and me 
carefully planning my garden I am 
I am dreaming of fruit. 
Margaret Ritchie's ''at the nursery" received an 
honorable mention for the 1 987 Academy of 
American Poets contest 
60 


At the Nursery

Hirsch, Adria

Adria Hirsch 
Technicolor 
She said 
I don't like poetry 
Let's turn on the TV 
instead 
I said 
I want to peel you 
from that droning box 
like sil ly putty 
from the comics 
I said it silently 
75 


Technicolor

Swansen, L.

Shorty\u27s Song

Wolfe, Jennifer

Three Poems: "I Call My Mother Every Day" "Underneath the Wrapping" and "For Erich Fromm"

Shimazaki, Lois

Two Poems: "Cancer" "The Move"

Mann, Mark

Mark Mann 
An Enormous Purse 
A thin rain began soon after the El left Howard Street, slanting 
from the east and spattering the window where they sat. With the 
aisle clotted with bodies, they were lucky to get a seat. Out along 
the ridge of old buildings someone three floors up on a back porch 
took linen from a clothe line strung between post . The boy 
watched as the train carried him away. and by the time it began to 
rattle around the cunre the figure had shrunk to a prinprick on the 
window whitening under his breath. When he turned to ask his 
father how far they had to go, a woman, eating a tomato like an 
apple, sat there instead, smiling, between bites, a smile of wide 
yellow teeth burnt with decay like the pages of an ancient book, 
clutcrung to her breast an enormous pur e. 
Hi father stood uneasily in the aisle slightly behind him, 
balancing himself between seats. The woman caught a tomato eed 
lipping down her chin in a line of red dribble and wiped it up into 
her mouth. After she had devoured the tomato, she reached in her 
purse and brought out a paperweight in which were embedded two 
tiny polar bears prowling the tundra. She shook it like a can of pop 
and held it up for the boy to ee. Snowflakes swirled and glittered 
around the bears. He reached for the object, but she pulled it away. 
"Don't do that," his father said. 
"What?" the boy said. 
"With your tongue like that." 
His father bent forward to elaborate. 
60 NORTHRIDGE REVIEW 
"You want me to pull it out? Just keep it up and I'll pull it right 
out. Then you won't be able to talk for the rest of your life." 
The boy paid attention. His mouth lapsed into a small defen­
sive hole. 
Satisfied, his father stood back. 
The woman had waited for them to finish, and now she made 
the paperweight snow again. The boy reached for it, and again she 
pulled it away. But then she let him have it, warmly, and he shook 
it for himself. He understood. It was a game. 
While he studied the bears and how the snow fell, the woman 
stripped an artichoke of its petals, dropping them around her feet, 
counting down to the heart. Then came a cluster of grapes smudged 
with frost. She snapped off a branch and gave it to the boy, but his 
father nervously intervened, explaining that they would soon be 
having lunch and he didn't want his son's appetite spoiled. The 
woman shrugged and did nothing, so his father forced him to return 
the fruit. It occurred to the boy that the woman might be deaf. In 
any case, she opened her purse and exchanged the grapes for a 
floppy bouquet of wisteria bundled at the stems which she propped 
up between them on the seat. Then out came a weighty hardbound 
dictionary with a raggedy black jacket, a half-dozen red melons big 
as softballs, and a doctor's stethoscope which she helped him to 
plug into his ears. The woman opened the dictionary to a middle 
page, making a table for the melons, while he listened to the pulse 
drumming in his chest and wrist and all the arteries he could find. 
In a little while the boy realized they were descending. The 
train eased itself lower and lower beneath the city like a gigantic 
mechanical worm. He was delighted to be going down because it 
gave him the same exotic, faintly taboo sensation as when he hid in 
the crawlspace or stayed out after dark. Everything--the drab 
yellow lights flickering above him, the cool air filling his head with 
the fresh smell of soot and cinder and rotten wood, the relentless 
howling noise so loud he couldn't hear himself say "Jungleman 
Jerry went to town," the woman with the enormous purse--all of it, 
all the accidents of the ride so far added up to a conspiracy of chance 
in which he somehow, miraculously, had a part. 
The woman produced a long flashlight, the kind policemen use, 
AN ENORMOUS PURSE 61 
and allowed him to point it out the window in order to see the wall 
of the tunnel race by. Then she lifted out of her purse a huge 
jasmine-scented candle as thick as a maple sapling and lit the wick 
with a match she struck on a button. His father, however, immedi­
ately blew the candle out and demanded that she give up the seat. 
But she didn't seem to understand, and after a minute or so of 
argument that the boy couldn't hear over the noise of the train, his 
father relented and because it was the last straw, kept a close eye on 
the woman the rest of the way. 
After the incident of the candle came many things: felt hats of 
various personalities, a lavender princess telephone, an immense 
plastic model of a pinto stallion, a purse, of all things, of black suede 
with a brass buckle and packed with a thousand marbles. She was 
still showing him the treasure when the staticky voice of the train 
called out their stop. And when they got off the woman got off too. 
They rode the escalator, but she passed them on the stairs, 
frequently bounding two at a time. The purse dwarfed her, but she 
bore it lightly. It seemed even larger than it had on the train, perhaps 
because she wasn't too tall. The strap cut across her body, right 
shoulder to opposite hip, and the hull of the purse bottomed below 
her left knee, spreading out from the line of her leg in the elegant 
shape of a clipper ship. 
"Where do you think she comes from?" the boy asked, but 
before his father could answer that he had no idea or that she came 
from Morton Grove or Mercury, the escalator had deposited them 
at the top and on into the first-floor splendor of Marshall Field's, 
and she was there, waiting, holding up a chrome-framed print of 
Napoleon. 
His father walked him past her, even though he wanted to stay, 
past the array of fur and silk and dangling jewels, to the revolving 
door which turned them out to Washington Street. The woman 
followed close behind. 
"Look," his father said, "you're going to have to leave us 
alone." 
The rain had softened to a mist, and she nodded and nodded, 
bouncing the wet twine of her hair, but really didn't seem to 
understand a word. Her eyes ticked back and forth. He could tell 
62 NORTHRIDGE REVIEW 
that his father, every now and then a tolerant man, was losing his 
patience; something in the familiar diligent face began to crush it 
like an oily white nut. The woman searched her purse, shuffling its 
contents wildly till she found what she was looking for, the candle, 
which she urged on the boy. His father kept her away with the back 
of his hand. 
"We don't want your candle," he said. "We don't want any of 
your crazy things. You don't have anything in your purse we could 
possibly want" 
Then, after a moment of face-to-face silence, she broke forth in 
strange new words, words of quickfire in the ears of the boy. 
His father nudged him to go. 
"Come on, we're late." 
The woman, maybe a little discouraged but having had her say, 
backed off and finally headed down the street on her own. 
"I want to see what else she has in her purse," the boy begged. 
"And she wants me to see it." 
"All kinds," his father muttered, but the boy heard. 
"Kinds of what?" 
"Nuts in this city." 
It was a mean thing for his father to say. 
"You didn't have to make her feel bad." 
"I didn't make her feel bad. I wouldn't do a thing like that. 
People like that one need help." 
"Help?" 
His father took him by the hand and led him to the comer. 
"Not the kind you're probably thinking of." 
"Then what kind?" 
"Forget it." 
"What kind?" 
"I'll explain it when you're older." 
The boy looked behind him for the woman. 
"She's getting something out of her purse," he said, and tried 
to jerk himself free from his father's grip. 
"Stop it." 
"I want to see it." 
"If you don't stop it right now I'll give you something to see that 
AN ENORMOUS PURSE 63 
you 'll never forget." 
So they waited for the light to change. The boy suffered a little 
from the damp-dog smell of his father's sleeve. He saw the woman 
kneeling on the sidewalk over the enormous purse with her arms 
inside it up to her shQulders, but people kept passing in front of her 
and he couldn't make out all she was doing. 
Then the light changed. 
As they crossed the street his line of sight improved, and then 
he saw her. She was holding something aloft, something large and 
blue, offering it left and right to any and all as she waded against the 
human current, most of whom--out of some stubborn reflex or an 
impenetrable sense of their own sovereignty--did their best to 
ignore her. Fifty pigeons whirled madly above the amazing blue 
thing that sat on the pedestal she'd made of her hands. And then, 
as his father yanked him farther and farther and farther away, he 
finally saw what it was, and luc ky for him that he did because after 
he had grown into a man himself he came to believe that it had 
changed his life in unaccountable ways and even had given him 
something hopeful to say to his father many years later when the old 
man lay stinking and hurt in the bed of his death. "It was a great 
bird," he would begin, "that she kept in her purse, a great big lovely 
long-necked bird with feathers out to here." 


An Enormous Purse

Cogswell, Grant

This paper aims to summarize the multiple narratives on the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973 between the American Indian Movement and the United States government, centering the paper on the relationship between American-Indian activists and Non-American-Indian activists. Trying to synthesize the narratives from Black, White, Latino(a), American Indian, and Asian activist sources and FBI documents to see how widespread and effective this popular front was at Wounded Knee. This was placed in the context of a wider debate over the role and importance of Non-American-Indian activists and whether they were trying to co-opt and whitewash the Wounded Knee standoff. What we see by comparing the sources is a grassroots movement of solidarity that was in collaboration with AIM’s leadership and goals

Mansur Abdullah

Wounded Knee: A Moment of Cross-Racial Intersectionality or Cross-Racial Co-option?

Le, Kianna

Perez, Denice

Smith, Jaylen

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