Feb. '98
IiAB^PA Poetry Contes Winners Page 7
iFirst Place!
Second Place!
Plantings
by Kevin King
♦
/
The Chair
by Eliza Kendrick
In a courtly gesture the
[Office of the Dean of Students,
Japanese maple
bows its crooked trunks, as
Salem Female Academy]
we walk with shivering steps
How many times she called me to that chair...
past its palmate leaves.
My body gave the impression of sitting there.
Waving in the wind
as hard as that wood was, and worn threadbare
it spreads its leaves, long and lithe,
five greened fingertips.
as wood can be, as we all heard we were.
It was the chair s slick seat, its crescent back
The leaves have yet to turn here
that held my true attention while I eyed
but at the elbows of the branches
the length of a sick green carpet, piles of junk.
pairs of growing seeds
form firey reddened couplets
a buried couch, a cluttered desk, work laid aside.
forming to fall alongside
Within this proud, imposing mess she’d be—
autumn foliage.
so pale and scant, but full of heavy truths
and her obligation to unleash them on me.
She laughs at me, how I love
a little maple tree.
The chair saved me from shame as best it could.
talking endlessly about it.
I think how many must have sat there before,
If she only knew
and yet they left none of their heat behind?
what potential I see in
But wood remembers shapes, adopts their forms
its little seeds.
And Ifelt poised to fall in
as they burn into it. And so with mine.
reddened pairs of we s.
#
HIV continued
more excruciating ways to die. Any
'vay you look at it, psychological
therapy is always a better option.
Fortunately, this is only the
case of an individual. My own belief
IS that the vast majority of gay men
and people with AIDS are not as self-
centered as Tony Valenzuela. One
only has to look on the same page to
find Jose Orta, who is also HIV-posi
tive, | except he has had only one
sexual partner in the past year and
questions the wisdom of people who
are, “...more casual about having un
safe sex” (p.51). Still, the whole situ
ation reminds me of a line from the
Morrissey song “Such a little thing
makes such a big difference.” It goes,
“Most people keep their brains be
tween their legs.” I’d like to be a little
more optimistic, though, and say that
some people keep their brains be
tween their legs. Let’s do all we can
to be weary of those people.
On a sidenote, I strongly rec
ommend viewing Savage Nights^ an
excellent French film that can be
found on reserve at UNO’s Under
graduate library. This film deals with
many of the same issues discussed in
this article in dealing with a bisexual,
HrV-positive man, his girlfriend, and
his boyfriend. It is a little graphic, so
don’t say I didn’t warn you. X