This page last updated: July 28th, 2003 |
Ginny MacKenzie received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her poems have won numerous literary prizes and have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the Agni Review, the Threepenny Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pequod, Shenandoah, the Mississippi Review, Boulevard, the North Dakota Quarterly, Mudfish, the Seneca Review, and the Crab Orchard Review. Her short stories have appeared in New Letters, the Wisconsin Review, Korone, Caesura, and the American Literary Review. In addition, she is the translator and editor of two contemporary Chinese poetry anthologies, which are part of New York/Beijing, a cultural exchange of poets and painters. Recently, her work won the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Award from Southern Illinois University. She teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at BMCC/CUNY. Two Poems from Ginny MacKenzie's 2002 Backwaters Prize winning collection Skipstone Cover design and photo © by John Berthot Price $16, 79 pages, Perfect bound CLEARFIELD COUNTY FAIR My mother told me never mind the morphodite-- "And stay away form those babies, in those bottles," she called out the screendoor. Their abortive faces bulged their jars: some lacked noses, or ears; others had double sets of genitalslabeled For Educational Purposes Only, they were lined up like targets. I stepped back, took imaginary aim. Just this morning I had scattered starlings from our garden with my BB gun. Shooting galleries, kewpie prizes, Haunted HouseI passed them all. Lit by a red spotlight: Mondu the Hermaphrodite loomed, glowering at us as if we were to blame for the half-rouged, half-bearded cheeks, for all this. I closed my eyes, thought of that other display, what they'd've been like grown up. Then suddenly it was over, or nearly: "Ladies," the barker hissed, "I must ask you to leave. Gentlemen, for another 50 cents, 2 quarters, 5 thin dimes, Mondu will remove this loincloth and reveal to you..." Back outside, it was chilly, the fairgrounds covered with trash. I headed up the midway toward home, my new Babydoll high-heels sticking in gum, taffy, Crackerjacks. AUNT LENA COMMITTED TO BELLEFONTE STATE HOSPITAL Because he'd heard menopause was hard he forgave her the unmade beds, the cold meals-- what he couldn't accept was the way she looked: the slip all yanked down below her dress, the hair pasted with grease and sweat to her neck like wet crepepaper. The hospital would have to come and take her. In those days, in those small-towns, what else could you do with a wife like thisa good wife and mother falling into the things around her. No matter what, it does matter what people say and their breath filled with accusations... That was all thirty years ago now. I don't know any more of the story, they're all dead or gone away, or why it matters to me, why I lie awake nights sometimes thinking about it, imagining Lena still alive somehow, though delirious, senile by now. I see her there. I visit her there: I sit across from her and watch her scrawling a crayon over some scratch paper, which she asks me to slip out the window as if there were someone down there, waiting for a message. Sometimes I try to read them. Here and there I make out what seem to be words: blouse or searchlight... Sometimes in the morning I wake up from a dream of her and start to worry the things in my house are like hers were back then, when her bad time came--a sinkful of dishes, the laundry-hamper spilled down the stairs Or I'll hear someone at the door: only the deliveryboy probably, wanting his money, saving up to go to college. There's just no future, he says, in these small-towns. There's a place for everything but you can't find it in its place. He's out the door before I can say yes, yes, I agree. |
