Issue #1, Summer 2007 --

Issue #1 of Metta F features texts and images by Ben Stoltzfus, Judith Palmer, L.A. Heberlein, Alice Rahaeuser, Lillian Behrendt, and Anthony Cristofani.

3 boys, 3 girls; 3 mad masters of the surreal/metafictional, 3 daring apprentices and links to the music of the Myonics and the Sacred Dice.

Enjoy --
The Metta F combine

Romoland #1, Fugue 7 -- text by Ben Stoltzfus, image by Judith Palmer

Black and white. Straight lines, curved ones, and squiggles. Geometry.
His world and hers. The container and the contained. One within the other.
Form, matter, texture. Contrast and opposition. The language of
contradiction. Solidity and motion. Movement away from and toward
abstraction. Meaning.
He says meaning is everything and meaning has the law on its side. It's
useless, he says, to pretend otherwise. He sees and hears only meaning. He
says her art has none because language should be invisible. He doesn't under
stand her art because all he sees is words. He thinks that language and
meaning are two different things. Separate. Like the spirit and the flesh,
the body and the soul, form and content. He cannot grasp the idea that flesh
can be spirit, that the body can be soul, that form is content. He thnks
that meaning hides language and that meaning is self-evident. Meaning, he
says, is not visible because it is outside of language. It's eternal, like
the soul, and it floats around disembodied, waiting for someone to apprehend
it, lie the shadows and essences on the wall of Plato's cave.
(copyright 2007, Ben Stoltzfus and Judith Palmer)

Ma Kitty -- L.A. Heberlein

1. Memory
Grandma had a gray cat named Ma Kitty.

2. Probing for more
I think Ma Kitty lived in the shed out by the chicken house, where grain was stored. I remember her as large. I don't think she was friendly, she wouldn't let us get close.

3. Canonical family story
"Your grandpa was the worst at sexing kittens of any man who ever lived. This Ma Kitty is about the seventh Ma Kitty. Whenever Ma Kitty has a litter, Grandpa saves out one male. Then don't you know, pretty soon that male is dragging her belly and we have a new Ma Kitty."

4. "Saves out"
The others kittens, it being understood, going in a gunnysack thrown in a lake.

5. Geographical puzzlement
What lake? Surely not Brennan's stock pond. But where else was there within a reasonable distance?

6. How it must have felt
Confusion, mewling, pushing away from one another. The stones enough to crush one as the sack swung. The dark with the water pouring in.

7. Save for possible use
Like trying to sex a kitten. The stone in a sack of kittens.

8. More memories
I met her at a church camp. Her name was Nanci Bond. She was from down in Southern Colorado. Dad a big rancher. Short blond hair. I shot roll after roll of her, black and white I'd loaded off the big bulk roll into cartridges myself. Developed myself, and printed. I had those negatives in my closet for years, would wonder where they are today, possibly in some manila envelope in a storage shed at my sister's in Longmont, only I could just about promise you they weren't properly fixed and if they do still exist are only a slimy gray pulp.

9. And now
Is there a pond somewhere on whose bottom, the gunnysacks quickly decomposed and stones sunk into the mud, the piles of tiny skeletons rest?
(Copyright 2007, L.A. Heberlein)

Romoland #2, Assemblages 1 -- Ben Stolzfus and Judith Palmer

She writes the body and its inscription performs magically on a yellow
field of dizzy traces. Her writing evolves with few distinguishing contours
and the shapes swell strangely within their improvised borders. Each chiasma
foretells another loss while forms of exuberance ooze indiscriminately. One
subverted angle of his square world is a copula full of promise. She dares
the fleeting swellings (within the hims and hers that she inhabits) long
enough to hatch them as they emerge from the unconscious of her worldwide
desire. Libidinal marks surface momentarily then fade into the pages of
time. She, the one excluded, listens to the multiplying forms filled with
brief identifying sounds. She hears the resonating script of language. She
seizes the ephemeral, she enables it, she holds back nothing. Her flesh
mingles indiscriminately with the utterance and onto its porous surface are
grafted many Is--the masculine and the feminine--more or less human because
they evolve relentlessly--their primal shapes flowing freely through and
across his emblematic square.
She surprises herself and others with these metamorphoses, with these
living reverberations that have escaped from some primal shore. Jaws and
beaks disturb the symmetry of the social contract. Their cries are no longer
passive but active, strident. Their bodies leap and sometimes fold over upon
themselves. They inhabit permeable, self-contained spaces of yes, where they
give everything, renounce all security, and spend with no return. All this
activity is spacious and the new reality emerges graphically. It comes from
that other country without boundaries where the repressed survive.
(copyright 2007. Ben Stoltzfus and Judith Palmer)

A.M. -- Alice Rahaeuser

We didn’t do anything wrong. We were just being normal kids.

It was a normal Monday. Like normal, we were all sitting in homeroom. Some people were talking about the football game last Friday. Others were still talking about the dance that happened two weeks ago. At 8:00, we were all talking and waiting around for the principal, Mr. Cassell’s voice to come over the P.A. so we could get on with the rest of the week.

At 8:17, we noticed that Mr. Cassell still hadn’t come on with his usually corny “And a good Monday morning to everyone.” Nobody really cared though. Nobody cared if Mr. Cassell got to say his usual routine of current events coupled with old jokes followed by his “and everyone have a fantastic day.” None of us really listened to the morning announcement. But by 8:24, when we noticed that Mrs. Sampson, our homeroom teacher, wasn’t in the room yet when she was usually prompt and expected us all to be the same, some of us started to wonder what was going on.

At 8:32, a voice came through the speaker, but it wasn’t the voice we were all used to hearing. It was still Mr. Cassell, but he sounded sick.

“Good morning everyone,” he said, then stopped. We could all hear him breathing heavily into the mic.

“I regret to inform you,” he continued in his sick-sounding voice, “that one of our students, Helen Dowd, passed away this weekend. Please join me in a moment of silence for Helen.”

Everything was silent except for Mr. Cassell’s heavy breathing that we all still heard even though it was supposed to be a moment of silence. The whole time, we were all thinking “Who was Helen Dowd?” and “Was she really a student here?” Someone nudged someone else and someone else and we all looked at an empty chair that sat in the back corner of the room. Someone whispered something to someone else and someone else and by the time Mr. Cassell ended the moment of silence, we were all whispering.

“I know this must be a shock to everyone. If anyone feels the need to speak to someone about this, we do have counselors standing by in the cafeteria.” The connection cut off abruptly, but hardly any of us even noticed.

“Who was she again?” someone asked, looking at the empty seat.

Someone else answered, pointing, “She sat over there.”

“The short fat girl?” Another person asked.

“Yeah,” said some other person, “with the messy hair.”

“She was always by herself,” someone else put in.

Everyone was quiet again, but we were all wondering the same thing.

“It couldn’t have been murder,” someone said suddenly, “it would’ve been on the news or something.”

“Maybe she killed herself.”

“Yeah, probably did. Blew her brains out or something.”

“Yeah.”

The rest of the day and the week, we tried to find out what really happened to Helen Dowd. We figured out her class schedule and where she had sat in each class; we figured out that she had always sat in a corner and that her locker was one of the best lockers in the world because it was right in the middle of the hallway in front of the cafeteria. We figured out that no one was really her friend. We figured out that Helen wasn’t involved in anything, but here and there, some people remembered her trying out for cheerleading, volleyball, soccer, softball and basketball, though she didn’t make any of them. Someone said they saw someone push her here, that someone else had dumped their lunch on her head once, but none of us knew her.

She did commit suicide, though. Swallowing a whole bottle of sleeping pills the Saturday before. Eventually we remembered her. But we never figured out why she had killed herself.

Mold Duet -- by Lillian Behrendt

Twenty-five year old man eating a grapefruit -- Anthony Cristofani

A twenty-five year old man stands
in a dark kitchen shivering, eating
a half of grapefruit.
He is eating quickly, common sense like cataracts
on the eyes stuck on the hands
of the glowing clock
that already point past
the general safety zone he regards
as ‘Early’
and sick men should Go
To Bed Early.

But halfway through
the half
he understands the grapefruit
is good, in many ways.
So first he lets the juice
lounge on his tongue within his mouth
and then he moves his tongue and lops
through the word
‘grapefruit.’

But these overtures are not enough
to redeem the profanity
of his first half
of grapefruit half
in the last quarter
of the tenth hour
of the thirtieth day
of the sixteenth month
of his incarceration.

So he makes a poem.
But first he’ll wash
his hands as pens
in prison are hard
to come by.

and he does not want to leave his
greasy with grapefruit
juice.


COMMENTARY ON TWENTY FIVE YEAR OLD MAN EATING A GRAPEFRUIT

Does the poet really believe he can fashion a Moment out of any profane circumstance by virtue of a mere poem? A poem is not a palliative for Catholic guilt. Neither should it be a substitute for the tongue and eyes and hands and nose. In any case, if he keeps this habit up, he’s going to grow addicted to mezzo-moments and the poems they bring about. I prescribe for him a week of tropical fruit and penless hands, assuming the poet is not literally incarcerated.
I would have opted for a poem about identity, in this case:

In case anyone asks who I am--

I am a twenty-five year old man standing
in a dark kitchen eating a grapefruit
half.
(copyright 2007, Anthony Cristofani)

Romoland #3, The Body of the Text 2 -- Ben Stoltzfus and Judith Palmer

The birds of her dreams flutter around her. She stands poised, strong,
self contained. She feels upright, integrated, whole. She regulates the
circuits. His rules no longer pull her in opposite directions. She has, in
fact, discarded the arrows of his arrogance. She is the night goddess of
daylight, a magnetic field, the communicating vessel. She is ibis, condor,
giant bat and she soars on the diurnal winds. She patterns herself on the
earth: its curvature is her nightgown, the leaves are her blouse, grasses
are her pinafore, and the sky is a cap of prussian blue. She wers an arband
of 53 Black-Eyed Susans. She is air, land, water, and fire. She sees through
the night and she hears the creaking of the galaxies. The solar wind
caresses her skin and she bends the light of the moon to her designs.
She is fish and fowl, the center-piece of knowledge and foresight. She
is the mistress of the planet. Her energy short-circuits right and wrong. It
overrides good and evil, fat and thin, rich and poor, big and little, happy
and sad, birth and death. She is eternal. She gives new meaning to hope and
despair. Suddenly, young and old are complementary, while pleasure and pain,
like soluble fish, dissolve in an ocean of satisfaction, a oneness that
becomes all things. She is the end and the beginning, the rose of space, the
essence that encompasses. She is everywhere and everything: the madonna, her
child, the diety. She is the triadic spirit, the dark sun, the nighttime
that illuminates. She is a woman in man's clothing and she rules herself,
confident, supreme, and loving. She exists, she is herself, she lives.
(copyright 2007, Ben Stoltzfus and Judith Palmer)