Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY
________________________

Anita B. Rice
Wood Bloxom
Louis Jaquith
Marion Howard
Loretta Langley
Orville Parker
Ed Price
Albert Higgins
George “Pop” Lodel
Richard Doxtator
__________________

ANITA B. RICE

My life’s blossom might have bloomed like a rose—
But Emporia’s bitter wind stunted my petals
I ended up as an old maid school teacher
From my grave I lift my voice of protest:
“I’m simply appalled by small town stupidity.
Sons and daughters of the Kansas bourgeoisie.
Insipid spawn of vulgar Emporia fools I teach
This ignorant progeny of foolish Breeders who
Get more & more stupid with each generation
These atrocious little pricks and kunts who do
Nothing but pick their noses and act stupid
These crummy little Slackers of the Prairie who
Know nothing of American History like I do
Why was I cursed to endure this sad existence
My womanhood ending up just an old Witch!!!"
_____________________

WOOD BLOXOM

If a man could bite the cruel hand—
That dealt the cards that destroyed him
As I was doomed by each new generation
Of Emporia’s slacker genealogy entrapping
Me each year here in my tacky third floor
Geometry class stuck in this Black Hole of
The fucking Universe where no light shines
No not here in Emporia, not a glimmer of
Intelligence or any kind of decent IQ…
The retards worse with each new generation
Testing my soul to deal with human stupidity
And the rapidly decaying gene pool of Kansas
Here I am stuck in a job I’ve always hated
With my cabinet of Euclid’s paradoxes and
A blackboard full of plane geometry shit and
Me taking naps in these cheesy classes full
Of stupid rats gnawing at the door to get out
Of this crummy high school on Sixth Avenue
Making me rant and rave for hours insanely
About the hopelessness of being a Mexican or
How shameful uppity women are getting like
Connie Leonhart who dared get a lucrative
Merit scholarship to Stanford leaving me here
Back in dingy Emporia with my paltry wages
How dare the youth of this hick town show 
Even a glimmer of intelligence while I scowl
Down at them like a cheap Chartres gargoyle
From the heights of my bitter disillusionment
Stuck here in this shitty little high school.
____________________

LOIS JAQUITH

I could’ve been as great as Virginia Woolf—
But for an unexpected turn of fate that
Stuck me in this quaint little Midwestern town
All because of an abusive alcoholic husband
With deep-set eyes who tried to kill me by
Strangling my chaste delicate chicken neck
With his big bad homicidal hands of death
Leaving me with the horrible black and blue
Bruises that turned into horrible awful scars
So that I had to wear these soft ever so nice
And delicate lavender and chartreuse scarves
To cover-up the shame of my sad marriage
And divorce, ending up your typical quietly
Modest English teacher who once was going
To write the Great American Novel, only to
Find out that it was all a Tragic Nightmare
From which I was trying to wake up from
Covering my scrawny scarred delicate neck
With endless mauve and pink silk scarves
Trying to forget the drunkard maniac killer
Who couldn’t stand my literary ways
________________________

MARION HOWARD

To all my young Mexican students from down
There south of the Santa Fe tracks who took
Spanish thinking that it was an easy “A” with
No homework or reading assignments because
They already spoke fluent Spanish Oley!!! But
Little did they know that I got my Masters from
Columbia in New York City and I made sure there 
was more to studying Spanish than just simply 
speaking it like their elders down in “Little Mexico”
In the shacks of La Colonia where Las Casitas Park
Is now, down where the Santa Fe railroad hired 
Mexicans to work the rails and shops while living in
Little brick houses with outdoor toilets, since then
Expanding, growing and blossoming into a strong
Thriving Hispanic community that it is today, but
There is more to Hispanic culture that though, and
That’s what we studied in my classes, the rich 
Spanish literature and culture that was their El 
Grande History, although unfortunately for me my 
love affair with a handsome Cuban businessman 
from Havana which I gave my heat and soul to ended 
in tragedy for me when he refused to leave his wife, 
so that later on after getting my Masters, shamed 
and embittered by romance, I fled to an obscure little 
town in the far-off wilds of Kansas where nobody could 
know the guilt and hurt of my failed romance back in 
the Big Easy, seeking obscurity and anonymity in a 
small town Called Emporia as a meek, modest Spanish 
teacher Who lived in a small rented room in the grandiose
Colonel Hood Mansion, ensconced there on stately 
State Street up a block from the local Blue-Barnett 
Funeral Home…

_____________________

LORETTO LANGLEY

I taught typing and secretarial conduct to many generations of future secretaries and business women who went on to successful careers there in Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City, although toward the end I got crabby and bitchy like they all do, like Anita B. Rice did, but she was nice compared to me. I wrapped Theresa B’s knuckles most severely when I caught her eyes wandering from the assigned exercise I had the class dutifully slaving away at. I wasn’t like Roy Stanton, the other typing teacher, who was much too kind and gentle with his classes, even going all the way to suggesting they’d warm up their little fingers in the morning before getting busy with the typing task. I wasn’t easy like Stanton, I patrolled the aisles like a prison matron making sure that there was complete and utter obedience to the daily drudge assignment to be dutifully typed without any tiny bit of adolescent slack behavior or slovenly laziness. So when I caught Theresa B. shirking her secretarial responsibilities letting her gaze wander thru the windows to the outside lovely world—I smacked her knuckles really hard and she screamed in pain. She ran off to the Principal’s office to scream in pain and cause trouble by telling lies about me—it’s lucky it wasn’t today’s educational milieu because I’d have been fired for child abuse and all sorts of other modern legal challenges to the sanctimony of my kunt dictatorship. They covered it all up and they let me go on to my modest retirement, guilting me simply just awful with their tacky bourgeois morality. I got even on my deathbed though—when I willed all my estate and savings horded over the years to none other than an abused women scholarship fund for future KSTC female teachers. Take that I said to all my critics—$1,000,000 to break the glass ceiling that they kept me under for years and years!!!
____________________

ORVILLE PARKER

One of the more charming things about one’s mother if she marries young and still in high school—that twenty years later I came around and was simply blessed, my dears, with many of the same teachers at EHS that she had. One of the more charming men that she was fond of was a gentleman by the name of Orville Parker—a very handsome young man in my mother’s ‘40s yearbooks who was the high school bandleader. He looked so smart and debonair—dressed up in his snazzy high school band uniform. My mother was in love with him—she played the flute for three years in his Emporia High School Band. All the photos and memorabilia in her Spartan yearbooks—looked so film noir black & white with the Second World War going on. So many lovely scribbled notes by her many boyfriends—lauding her red-headed stunning beauty and simply dying to get into her panties. Which was what her parents were worried about—knowing that sooner or later she’d be pregnant just like that and there’d be a need for shotgun marriage. But Jenny Larkin was too esteemed for that—after all she was a G.A.R. Grande Dame with a reputation to protect. Her father having been a Civil War Union Colonel who fought the pro-slavery Missouri ruffians right across the border. She was the kind that planned ahead—knowing that sex was inevitable with a cute redhead like my mother. There were other concerns as well—since mother had been adopted from the Willows Home for Unwed Mothers in Kansas City. Surely it was Bad Seed that made a mother give up a child for Adoption—it was a time back then when such things were in the closet even just as bad as homosexuality was for a long time even up until and including now with me. Who knows who was her mother and who was her father—these were terrible guilt complexes that my mother had to live under. Her files were sealed in the courts—and they disappeared when they tore down the old Willows Home mansion. I had to grease the usual palms—to unseal the court records and finally find out who I was. But that’s another story—I’ll get into that later. So that growing up with Mother was like living in a House of Shame and Secrets—to which I added my own little queer spin, my dears. Her loving lacksadaisical father, Walter Larkin, was a Lyon County Commissioner—who worked in the old classic Courthouse built solid as the Rock of Gibraltar with limestone blocks from the Strong City quarry in Chase County. The foundations and bridges, even the sidewalks—sized and sawn by the stonemasons who built most of Emporia way back then. Monuments like Plumb Hall and the Plumb Mansion—and most of the commercial buildings up and down Commercial Street from Soden’s Grove to KSTC. But I meander, my dears, what was I talking about. Oh yes, Mother playing the flute in Orville Parker’s Band. And the Band Played On back then—just as it did with my generation. A look of dread and death on all the young male Yearbook faces—just as bad as the Obit pages of the Bay Area Reporter back then in the Nineties. Walter and Jennie wanted to marry off Amy Jane as soon as possible—before she’d become inevitably pregnant that’s for sure. So when she fell for a handsome kid in a local KSTC band—who played the bass during a dance with his band one Saturday night in the Emporia Civic Auditorium. Well, it was like a row of dominos—all planned out and helped along by my future grandparents. They left town to visit relatives in Kansas City—while I ended up getting rather rudely conceived in my mother’s womb out there on Old Highway 50 in her parent’s country home. Just up from the Santa Fe tracks— with the lonely wail of the Doodlebug droning away. As Marion and Amy Jane fucked me all night long— into my latest rather interesting reincarnated newborn Kansas existence. 
_________________

ED PRICE

He’d survey the latest crop of Kansas nincompoops—looking up at his captive audience. There we were slouched lazily and nonchalantly—in the only classroom at Emporia High School that had a really old-fashioned almost Med School tiered classroom structure. Giving him the aura of an esteemed Surgeon or Medical Genius—taking the time to stoop and utter a word or two for the lowly RFD farmboys and hardly any girls who dared enter the macho inner sanctum of Physics and Chemistry. He’d lean back against the big Mad Scientist counter—in front of his stately blackboard. He preferred lecturing—and pontificating like Wood Bloxom down the hall. It was in the early Sixties—Sputnik and the Race to the Moon was Kennedy’s gambit to circumvent maybe increase the pace of the new hi-tech Cold War. (I was the literary type though—I preferred Science Fiction to Fact and was dizzily lost in SF pulp fiction novels like Heinlein’s “Time for the Stars”—a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein published by Scribner's in 1956 as one of the Heinlein juveniles. The basic plot line is derived from a 1911 thought experiment in special relativity, commonly called the twin paradox, proposed by French physicist Paul Langevin. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

Time for the Stars

“I want to get this straight
because there has been a
lot of nonsense about twins.
He’s the right-handed one—
I’m the left-handed one. And 
he’s the one with the big 
big piece of cake.” 
—Robert Heinlein,
“Time for the Stars”

When did it happen—
When did the scifaiku muse
Get a hold of me?

It was way back when—
During my Adolescence
That age of wonder

So many young men—
Go thru juvie-sci-fi love
When they’re teenagers

It’s the golden age—
Amazing Sci-Fi Stories
Paperback novels

It’s the time when—
My boyish bildungsroman
Was like a movie

Back when radio—
Could turn Captain video
Into the real thing

When the spoken word—
Could conjure up film noir
Adolescent Imagination

Before TV sets—
Destroyed the young eidetic
Imagination

The Storyteller—
Still Beowulfian magician
Anglo-sax wordhoard

The ability—
Of the third eye to focus
On the inward plot

The Null-a story—
The Heinlein narrative line
Dreaming it forward…

Like Charles Beaumont—
The Twilight Zone script writer
Said about Viewing

Television is—
The lazy man’s Seeing Game
Passive Image atrophy 

It takes storytelling—
Outta vivid dreaming time
To get the movie going

And nothing’s really—
As important as image is
For scifaiku lit

Tight concise snapshots—
Seventeen syllables long
It’s just that simple

Robert Heinlein’s book—
Time for the Stars the first time
I Really noticed it

Telepathic brothers—
The speed of light paradox
Torchships to the stars

Communicating—
Thru twin telepathic bros
Time shift for star travel

I knew it was true—
I could feel it that time
The clairvoyant murals

Down in the Lowther—
Cafeteria basement
When I had the Flash

Damon-Pythius—
Long Range Foundation journey
Thinking of Heinlein

He could read my mind—
And I could read his mind too
On the same wavelength

Telepathy helped—
To span light-years of distance
Between him and me

Vandals of the void—
They wanted his big Secret
Saturn’s Rings began ringing

Scifaiku writer—
My Space Trooper kid brother
We talked outta time

Getting into sci-fi—
Back then in Junior High
Telepathy collapsed Time

Before joining the—
Long Range Foundation 
They tested us both

They wanted brothers—
Telepathically inclined 
To make the star jump

Mind-melding with it—
Getting beyond the Paradox
The speed of light Problemo

Just like every day—
Can be scifaiku you know
If you just let it flow

Earthy Spaceship Earth—
Interplanetary telepathy
Distance communication

Seventh grade Lowther—
Literary flashback changing
My so-called life
_____________________

ALBERT HIGGINS

“Writing is dialog
with another person”
—Manuel Puig

Albert Higgins the talented Grande Dame—
The Drama & Debate Team Coach who taught
Me how to be ad lib and extemporaneous 
When it came to thinking and writing and 
Speaking on my two feet before an audience
Carrying over to my writing style today even
When there’s no conversation goin on inside
My head, my dear, just body language doing
Its foreplay routine leading up to the Text
Especially if I’m talking with the Other, Hyde
To Jekyll, Dorian Gray to the Portrait in the
Attic, dreamlike and surrealistic like Buñuel 
And Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou” grabbing the
Parisian decadent audience with a simple
Horrible slice of the Eyeball, a dead donkey
On top of a piano, a lover’s mouth covered
Up with a patch of obscene pubic hair, some
Praying priests dragged along the floor as
The discontinuous dream imagery disrupts
And transgresses and queers the Narrative
That we’re all bored with but from which 
There’s No Escape from New York, with or 
Without an Exterminating Angel, entrapped
By the Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie,
All of us just “Los Olvidados” pimps, whores,
Hustlers caught up in this New Third World?
________________

“POP” LODEL

I was once a football coach for a few years—
After they built the new Neo-Classical EHS
Now to be renamed Breckinridge Hotel for
The new Convention Center push for Emporia.
Named for Buchanan’s Confederate Vice-Prez
Who became a General in Davis’ Dixie Dream
Whose disgrace brought about the changing
Of Lyon County’s name to what it is now but
That’s okay with me I’m not a history buff,
Just a Mechanical Drawing teacher here in 
The basement by the parking lot where I once
Tutored mostly young men in the intricacies 
Of blueprints and engineering design except
For Roberta Eckdall the daughter of Dr. Eckdall
And Mrs. Funston Eckdall on the esteemed
Board of Education who was told by her father
To study Physics, Chemistry and Mechanical
Drawing rather than being just another quaint
Housewife in the Grand American Dream back 
When hardly any girls dared to break the glass
Ceiling and for heaven’s sake think like a man.
Funny though how I ended up with my bulbous
Alcoholic nose and sheepish grin driving my old
Pickup truck around this building that had so
Gently become my whole life and existence, 
as Well as my son’s livelihood who later became 
the Principal for a year. Funny how an old man 
like me—Hanging around this little small town 
Temple so Serenely poised on Sixth Avenue and 
Constitution Street can become the focus of one’s 
life as the long cicada evenings of Emporia 
slowly drone away…
__________________________

RICHARD DOXTATOR

I’d tell the young Emporia dummies—
Cheer up, we’re all dying, just at different rates that’s all, isn’t that how it works after all these years but then what do I know, I was just a young upstart English teacher with a mob of stupid little robots sitting there in class, that’s why one day I got up and walked up and down the stupid rows of their nailed-down old worn-out old-fashioned desks that had been riveted to the floor for how many fucking centuries? Did it wake them up? They were used to just reading books all the way from Walnut or wherever—doing Cliff Notes in their sleeping brains. That was the dead language way—I tried to get them to Write instead of Read. To get to know the English language as something to communicate with the Other—the Creature from the Black Lagoon lurking down there in their stultified Kansas imaginations. A few broke free and got into Writing—Larry Ballard and Tom Jaggard. Thinking satirically like Orwell’s “1984”—trying The New Yorker and then getting into Nabokov and “Lolita.” One problematic rather queer little faggot named Denise—even made it to the West Coast and the SF Gay Renaissance. Got to know Winston Leyland of Gay Sunshine Press—and published a couple of scandalous books. “Chicken” (1979) and “Size Queen”(1981)—after coming out of the Athens of the Midwest coterie of flaming gay poets!!!