Braids & Sequins: A Brief History (Marie Alexander Poetry Series, 25) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Alexander (1949 - 2023) received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and worked for many years as a freelance editor. From 1993 to 2001, he was a contributing editor at New Rivers Press, serving for the final two years as New Rivers' creative director. Alexander is the founding editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press. He authored several collections of prose poetry and two historical books.

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T.  S. Eliot (1888–1965) 

The Engine

I 

The engine hammered and hummed. Flat faces of American businessmen lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine. The machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog it pursued its course; the life of the deck stirred and was silent like a restless scale on the smooth surface. The machine was certain and sufficient as a rose bush, indifferently justifying the aimless parasite. 

II 

After the engine stopped, I lay in bed listening while the wash subsided and the scuffle of feet died out. The music ceased, but a mouth organ from the steerage picked up the tune. I switched on the light, only to see on the wall a spider taut as a drumhead, the life of endless geological periods concentrated into a small spot of intense apathy at my feet. “And if the ship goes down” I thought drowsily “he is prepared and will somehow persist, for he is very old. But the flat faces. . . .” I tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern. Failing, I roused myself to hear the machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet upon the deck. 

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

In Our Time

Chapter 1

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

Chapter 2

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and

the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.

N. Scott Momaday (1934–     )

The Colors of Night

1. White 

An old man's son was killed far away in the Staked Plains. When the old man heard of it he went there and gathered up the bones. Thereafter, wherever the old man ventured, he led a dark hunting horse which bore the bones of his son on its back. And the old man said to whomever he saw: 

“You see how it is that now my son consists in his bones, that his bones are polished and so gleam like glass in the light of the sun and moon, that he is very beautiful.” 

2. Yellow 

There was a boy who drowned in the river, near the grove of thirty-two bois d’arc trees. The light of the moon lay like a path on the water, and a glitter of low brilliance shone in it. The boy looked at it and was enchanted. He began to sing a song that he had never heard before; only then, once, did he hear it in his heart, and it was borne like a cloud of down upon his voice. His voice entered into the bright track of the moon, and he followed after it. For a time he made his way along the path of the moon, singing. He paddled with his arms and legs and felt his body rocking down into the swirling water. His vision ran along the path of light and reached across the wide night and took hold of the moon. And across the river, where the path led into the shadows of the bank, a black dog emerged from the river, shivering and shaking the water from its hair. All night it stood in the waves of grass and howled the full moon down.

Nin Andrews (1958–     )

Snow Magic

The Year Prayer Wasn’t Enough

 Gil 

Whatever you want, you just pray for it, my nanny, Lila May, used to say. But by the year I turned eleven, I knew. Prayer wasn’t enough. That year everyone in my school turned mean, and my mama developed a conscience, as she put it, which meant she was always out. If she wasn’t at a meeting for the citizens of Gordon County, or delivering cans of Dinty Moore Stew to the local soup kitchen, or going horseback riding with her Hunt Club friends, she was checking on old Mrs. Mellinger, our widow-neighbor who had a habit of get- ting lost in her own home. Your mother, my daddy said, as he poured himself another whiskey, is always trying to save lost souls. 

Does she ever save them? I asked. 

He didn’t answer me. He just rattled the ice in his cocktail glass. I could tell by his sad eyes that he missed her as much as I did. My mama and daddy had stopped talking to each other that year, so even when she was home, our house went so quiet it felt like the inside of a funeral parlor before the mourners arrive. On the nights when we sat down to the sup- per table together, I felt a hush in the air and a chill. As if snow were falling inside each one of us, and no one would make it stop. 

Sarah 

Confederate Gil 

In the town where I grew up, folks were still fighting the Civil War. They blamed the North for all their problems, including taxes, old age, the economy, the rising murder rate, even the tomato wilt and the raspberry blight. My friend, Gil Simmons, bragged that his great-grandpa was wounded in the Battle of Cedar Run. The Simmons lived on the outskirts of town in one of those old plantation homes with white pillars and lace curtains on the windows and acres and acres of green fields with thoroughbreds grazing in them. Gil was an only child, and whenever I visited, he gave me a tour of the bathrooms. All nine of them, not counting the servants’ bathrooms. Rumor had it that Mrs. Simmons, or Violet, as my father called her, planned to have an ample family, but Gil was the only child she carried to term. Gil, my daddy said, never looked fully here. He was so pale and thin, he was almost see-through. The town doctor, Dr. Repolt, said Gil was bitten by a spider when he was a bitty thing, and he barely survived. My daddy said Gil looked like he’d been dipped in Clorox. Rumor had it Mr. Simmons wasn’t even his daddy. People joked that he was the son of a Confederate soldier, so he was part-ghost. On Halloween Gil’s mama dressed him like a ghost in a gray suit with a Confederate flag in one hand, a...