Lives

Lives

       by "Dip-em-in" Doug

when the fever strikes you that you must do something fast or lose it all and more

remember jesus on the cross who died for all of us and gave his blood for us who are not good

recall how churches told the world that all the poor and meek were just the ones who needed most

and so the whole conglomeration of the ones who had till then done nothing but for gain

found love and finding love they gave to all the chance to have a life except the ones who had till then had lives

The good thing about homemade jam is the way you dip your buns with it into tea and eat them soaking. The bad thing about homemade jam is making it. Making it is all right if you do not do it to excess. But those of us who are closet jam makers know this fact, that when the berries hang on the vines or boughs in great abundance and you begin to pick you pick too much of it and the jam making then never stops until it is all made and jarred and put away. Jam making is not like anything else in the world. It reminds me of nothing else. It is unique. No allusions clarify the act. No metaphors to hand enrich the understanding of it. A simile only reduces the suggestiveness of the process of picking, packing, transporting, stemming, washing, rewashing, measuring, buying, straining, bagging, jarring, storing, eating, presenting, and throwing away. Jam making is a story that begins in early morning joy and ends in evening weariness. I once made eighteen gallons of wild plum jam. My family ate it for six years until we threw the rest away. At the beginning we ate it along with other jams such as apricot, marmalade, raspberry and blueberry bought in tins from Overweighty. By the second year we ate half and half. Then we realized that we would waste fourteen gallons of plum jam at this rate and so began to eat it more often. By the third and fourth years we got to eating it exclusively. After six years, and with the crystals along the top warning us, we threw out seven gallons. I teach. I am a teacher. I give advice and know-how to students. My job is to take incoming information, synthesize it, prepare it, discard much of it, and pass it on to younger ones who themselves one day, some of them, will be in the profession of dispensing knowledge or wisdom. There are places on the prairie near Winkler where the wild plums grow and can be harvested if they can be found. How do you find wild plums? You go in May when the blossoms are coming out and make a map exactly where you see this tree and that tree. I had about two hundred trees mapped out for myself and guarded the information with solemn selfishness. How did I know which were plum trees? Could there not have been chokecherry and crab apple trees among the blossomers? No. There could not have been. Plums bloom first in spring, I found out. There were two sites that provided much fruit. One was along the Burwalde River a mile west of town and two miles north. A band of wild plums bordered a dike and a farmer's woodlot. These plums were mainly of the very small variety, about the size or a dime. I would shake the trees and crawl along and pick them up off the ground. Another place was west of Morden Lake up in the escarpment along a farmer's field. Forty or fifty trees lined a rutted access road and these were of a bigger variety. I picked them that year when they were so abundant into plastic grocery bags and when they were so full I was afraid the fruit would bruise I took them into the car. I came home with two dozen bags filled to the brim. I spent two weeks jamming. Now I do not jam anymore. Let the factories do it who know how to sell it. I thought then, stop making jam and devote yourself to love making. Less jam making, more love making. But that is not an inspiration any more. Well, less jam making, more guitar playing, more singing. That is, I must tell you, still a viability. So, when all is said and done, Freud was wrong in his estimation that it is sex that permanently drives our desires forward in an effective way. Sex malingers, music calls. Music never flirts with one. It always puts out. It gives one as much as one puts into it. If it wasn't for music, life would have been a mistake. That is what I have learned from jamming. Sex calls and disappoints. Music calls and satisfies. One can get better at music. One can only get worse at sex. When you, you old ones out there, get into your seventies and flaccid or wabbly, go out and spend some of your savings on a good instrument, preferably hand made (there are many good instrument builders in Manitoba) and buy a self-teaching tape and book from Long and McQuade and learn to play. After a while, when you are eighty-five, you will make fine music. You would have died at eighty if you had not done this. So, at ninety when you are playing at a dance and thinking about jamming and the sex the young ones will be partaking of outside among the cars and in the gorse, you can say to yourself, "Yes, I once thought sex was a permanence, but it is music rather. I am a musician. Yes, I play this guitar that I have owned for twenty-five years and learned to finger." Call my friend the musician. His number is (204) 772-0140. H will build you a wonderful instrument for twenty-five hundred. You will be playing at gigs around town at ninety-six or seven. At a hundred, people won't be able to stop you, you will be randy with the urge to get out of an evening and pick and finger. 

Little Lovers

Little Lovers

       by Douglas Bucklejohn

                        "Whisper to me sweetly," said the gopher to the mole.

                        "Give me all your money," shyly spoke the mousy foal.

                        "Only if you marry me," the furry rodent cried.

                        "Then off with you, you little turd," the paramour replied.

"If I could have anything I wanted," the jailbird pondered, I would have . . ." and here he thought for a minute. Nothing came to him. (You might think, gentle reader, that someone languishing in prison would be able to imagine a need, unless he was an imbecile, and had his head knocked against things stone with too great regularity.) He considered the question at length and then decided.

       "I would have a little lover," he determined within himself, for none there should hear. Prisoners regard loving, and speaking openly about loving something diminuitive, criminal. A man, for instance, who has been convicted in the courts of performing intercourse with a fourteen year old or younger, with or without her consent, with or without protection, and incarcerated, stands a grave likelihood of coming there to harm. Neither should he love at lower rate, you might add, having read this unwanted meditation. Big John knew his consumers. They had, before him and God, killed Henry Hubbard the child molester, by first mutilating his you-know-whats, then slicing open his thingamajig, next perforating his anus with sharp objects to hand, and finally performing certain ritual cleansing acts known only to inmates (a trade secret, one with which you do not wish, gentle reader, to acquaint yourselves, in any case).

       By "little lover" Big John meant a petite woman, not a child. He wished for someone to replace his daughter in his arms. He longed for that feeling of smallness and timidity and newness that a little person causes in the affections of the oversized. He would have been content with Liza Manelli (a now old woman, small for her age, fragile in appearance, and quaintly delicate in her motions) had she approached and said, "The Lord sent me to fulfill your wish for a little lover." Someone such as Ally McBeal would have certainly contented him, with her slightness of form and her luminescent skin and protuberances. Neither would he have balked at a little boy-like man in his arms. He did not really care what gender since his need really arose from, though he understood this not and need not understand it, a desire not for carnalis satium but one of sexualitu's kin and partners, human touch of a gentle sort.

       An angel heard Big John's cry and sent him what he wished for. Nightly, in his dreams at first, and then in his waking night-hours, a slim form crept up to the bars of his window (he had earned a window apartment on the outside prison wall since he showed no signs of wishing to escape, ever) and clicked her rings against the steel. For many a fortnight Big John thought he dreamt. Then waking finally to his fear and his aching arms, a state brought on by the scent of perfume and some other smellable presence, he finally climbed up on his bunk and looked out. There stood as beautiful a form as he had ever hoped to see near him again. She looked at him, smiled, and put her hand to her breast to indicate that she was shy and wished to be let in.

       "Who are you?" Big John said, quite loudly considering the wakefulness of the guards. They seemed not to notice anything since they kept walking around on the parapet without glancing his way. The fascinating woman said not a word but once again held her hand towards him as if to say, "Please, let me in."

       "Are you cold?" Big John asked and then when she shook her head he thought he'd been foolish. He grasped the metal bars and shook his head at her.

       "I don't think these will move," he said. "I have tried before to bend them but they are sturdy and well-set in stone. The figure smiled at him as if she enjoyed simply hearing him speak. Big John knew the implication, the love in her smile, and blushed. He felt such odd self-consciousness that he turned away for a moment, but then quickly looked back, fearing that she might be gone.

       "I will try," he said. "For you I will try again." He applied himself to the bars and they, oh wonders, began to bend. She nodded and smiled and mouthed to him to keep at it. If his love were great they would yield. He strained and rent apart until the muscles along his arm rampangled in great welts and salt ran in watery streams from his forehead. They bent, they bent! "They bend," she whispered, exultantly.

       Then she stood inside, and soon enough in his arms. "Oh, little one," was all Big John could manage at first. "Oh, my little sweet one," he said again and again, as he rocked her with great care in his great arms. She sat on his lap and laid her long tresses against his chest with such simple giving that Big John began to cry. He did not cry long, though, since he felt it a shame to let tears fall when the desire of his heart sat in his embrace. John traced the lines of her tender cheeks with a great, heavy finger, fearful of hurting her, worried about disturbing her. She seemed a little frightened at his size, at his hands' huge proportions, but something in her eyes, too, told of pleasure. She so small, he so large, they sat there many hours while he touched whatever of herself she gave up to him to touch. They spoke hardly a word but learned to understand each other well indeed.

       When day broke, Big John said with sudden worry, "You had better go home, my little lover. The light from yonder window breaks. Your parents will wonder where you are!" She smiled and looked on him with pity.

       "Dear, big John," she said. "This is now my home. I'll not leave your side. I am yours forever." With that she clutched him and held him and they both knew that death would have to part them. No guard would be able to separate what God had brought together.     

hot today

hot today

       by jetstream george

if the wind is strong enough

for us to fly our kites

go ahead and do that now

and if such flying bites

a string is that which binds us to

the world up in the sky

a bog is where we put out feet

and draw them out again

when mother was a little girl

she tried to make her peace

but pastor larry thought it bad

and asked that she surcease

she did to please the hoary kind

but felt the sting of it

now when a man of high degree

gets her to do something she nees

but let me be as clear as clear

the sky is full of hate

and man and history both

getting a little late

they're getting a little late

the weather is what it will be

cold now and late for sun

and in the next two months you'll see

the sun get up and run

and if the sky is not too bright

and hearts are filled with woe

go buy a condominium

and to that dwelling go

go live in it and be of cheer

the days are numbered few

we all will meet again we say

in that bright world below

the world below is bright and warm

the one above is not

there cold and pain are much sent out

to all the ones who through the gate

but down below ah what a place

the flames give up much light

and even men of poor eyesight

can read and read and read

and when they've done with reading tomes

they to the grave may go

to see whose buried in the earth

and who is not there yet

this is a poem for meteors

and meteorologists

if any one of them should cross

my path i wish him bliss

and this i hope he have the fun to say

how hot it will most likely be today

Immediately After the Funeral (cont’d)

Immediately After the Funeral (cont’d)

       By Dugless (Butchy) Riskmore

Immediately after the funeral all the men and women and children who had come to see her one last time, even if in her coffin, filed out of the chapel and drove to Winkler, Boissevain, Three Hills, Wichita, Chapel Hill, Swift Current, Clydesdale, British Isles, Desmoisne, Idaho in Ohio, and Deluse. Each of them had, in some measure, reason to wish that her form still graced this world. Without her in it the possibilities of afterlife felt more necessary and those of this life less likely.

       She once took me with her when she went shopping for a bathing suit for the summer. I should mention that she was a single woman all her life. She dated men often but never married one of them. The female clothing section of this store, which sold both men’s and ladies lines, had a cool, greenish feel to it, with rows of clothing under hot pot lights quite near one’s head. One’s hair felt heated when one walked under one of these. I am a redhead with thinnish, orange-colored hair. I have a great many freckles, and in those days, being twelve, when I still did not mind the effects of the sun on my skin, I often had enflamed cheeks and nose with reddish, unhappy knuckles and white, blotchy feet in sandals. I was probably dressed in baggy, tan shorts with a Bluejays shirt. I remember this because I was able to hide my difficulties if I stayed sitting.

       Aunty picked up four suits and pointed to a chair facing the curtain behind which she would try these on. I knew what an ordeal I was in for, I thought, simply waiting here, knowing she stood there taking and putting things on and off. I did not know, though, the full extent of what I would endure. The curtain was fully closed at first, but shortly I noticed it bulging and moving as she came in contact with it. It opened about six inches and Aunty did not notice. I could see her plainly. A pot light shone down from above her and another one from in front of the cubicle. It was the last cubicle and I was the only one nearby and on one could walk past. I sat just a few feet from the curtain.

       I saw Aunty unbutton her sundress behind and pull it off at the shoulders. She hung it up and stood before the mirror in panties and brassiere. She was tall and also tanned. Her bum was round without the knobbly wedges that my mom had on hers when she was at the beach. Her arms were long and slim, and when she reached behind her to unclasp her bra they looked like the necks of swans looking to see what was behind them. She never glanced at the curtain and must not have thought to. I could watch with total intent and not be seen. Aunty removed her underwear and stood, the most beautiful, tall, shapely woman that, in all my manly years, I have endured the sight of. Her breasts were firm, her shoulders held back in pride, her arms long and silky, her hair black and cut short just below the chin, her ears delicate, her hair in the front black, too, and as shiny as that on her head, her stomach, buttoned, with a small curve to it that I can never in my art duplicate, her hips slender and round, her thighs damp, translucent (I saw because she spread them momentarily to see if the suit fit there nicely), her ankles not bulgy like Aunty Caroline’s, her feet pretty, ending in toes as uniform as one would be blessed to see once in one’s lifetime. She had a pertempestuous figure, gifted in its crying shames, limping along in Italian sandals with sand in them from the beach to the cottage, swollen still, a tasty bun of a body that I have thought about nightly for these ten or twelve years.

       Aunty came out of the cubicle after she had tried on all four suits. Each had come off fast and each next one come on slowly. When she had spent an hour there, and I was spent, too, she suddenly noticed the curtain opened and reached and closed it. I breathed, finally, and got up and right away sat down again. Aunty came out in a minute and wanted to go but I said that I was tired and could we just wait a few more minutes. She looked at a rack of dresses, held up one at a time to her bodice and asked if this or that one would look good on her. I nodded yes to them all.

       Aunty died suddenly. It was not an illness but some other event that claimed her. The men and women sat in many rows, quietly, saying little, even at the free mick when they had a chance to reminisce and tell what they remembered about her. I did not get up either so I was no better than the rest. Immediately after the funeral I got in my car and drove back to Stonewall where I have my studio.