"Paulette Roeske is the author of four collections of poetry, including Anvil, Clock & Last, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2001. Divine Attention (LSU, 1995) won the Carl Sandburg Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for both the Society of Midland Authors' Poetry Book Award and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress. Her other titles are The Body Can Ascend No Higher, winner of the 1992 Illinois Writers, Inc. chapbook competition, selected by Maura Stanton; and Breathing Under Water (Stormline Press, 1988). Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, The Chariton Review, and The Georgia Review, among many other journals, and are frequently anthologized. Also a fiction writer, her collection, Bridge of Sighs: A Novella and Stories, won the Three Oaks Prize in Fiction and will be published by Story Line Press in the fall of 2002. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Other Voices, The Great Ideas Today, which is an annual published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, and elsewhere. Recognized by fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Japan Foundation, Roeske currently teaches at the University of Southern Indiana. For many years she served on the board of The Poetry Center of Chicago at the School of the Art Institute. "

American Gothic  Poetry

by Paulette Roeske


The tiny back bedroom of our small house should have tipped
like Dorothy's Kansas under the weight of the used Gulbranson upright,
its sharp verticals looming over me like penance,
its dark finish crazed like the choir's splendid stalls at tragic Canterbury.
On the lid a goldfish circled, halo for my stubborn head,
or hung above the miniature diver screwed into his helmet,
sans air hose, sans life line, sans boat.
Sentenced to the bedroom each day before supper,
I listened to my mother in the kitchen twist the timer,
turning back time for an instant before the thirty minutes began ticking down
toward the ping! that would set me free. My stubby fingers
on the summer keys massacred Long, Long Ago, fingers
dumb as dogs fighting the neat parallels of bass and treble clefs,
straining virtuositys short leash. When I whined, How long,
how looong?, she would not answer but launched her biscuits
on a sea of white gravy, where they lorded over flotillas of peas
and the flotsam of hacked chicken martyred under her knife.
She slammed the oven door. 30 minutes, her answer to everything timeable.
Revving up her Mixmaster, she whipped the egg whites into meringue's
Baroque topography while the vanilla cream burbled its hurly-burly
in the double boiler. How fragrant the kitchen air that wafted from our immaculate
white house to hobnob with the sweet perfume of lilacs, honeysuckle,
a mélange I spiced with the rampaging arpeggios of the ten little Indians
charging down the keyboard hell-bent for the prairies of America,
the landlocked Midwest.
Surely I must have named the fish, the only pet I was allowed,
since to it I confessed the torments of my eight-year-old heart,
muttering a litany of hate for each key of the eighty-eight,
each string, hammer, pedal, and pin, each vibration,
not to mention my mother, keeper of the keys to balmy summer
washed with the happy cries of children, girls clamoring
after their fathers to punch an ice pick through the lid of a Mason jar
already fitted with its nest of grass, home for lightning bugs
they would place beside their beds while they drifted to sleep
under the timed and silent blink . . . blink . . . blink,
little lanterns lighting the dreamscape
hate even for the biscuits browning on their thick sea,
oh bitter, bitter heart.
Looking for absolution, my eyes roamed upward
where the vibrations of discord shuddered the thin lace of the fins I stroked
in a daily wrist-deep ritual, catching up my fish like Fay Wray
in the monster fist of King Kong. Zipped into its tight orange coat,
cantankerous as a tongue, it fought me to the end.
If I pitched a penny through the window yawning beside me
where I sat chained by time's interlocking ticks, it would have scritched
our neighbor's screen. Their white clapboard house, identical to ours,
housed the only television on the block. Yoo-hoo, it's me, called Pinkie Lee,
my personal saint, but I was lashed to the bench, back straight as a mast.
How I longed for him, jaunty in his bowler hat and checked suit,
high-water pants inching up his calves as he flung himself down in a flurry of limbs
before catapulting into the air and landing on his feet.
My heart's one desire for which I fervently prayed to the fish killing time
above my head was for the joy that would anoint me
as I sat ecstatic inches from the flickering black and white screen,
this after doing time on the neighbor's porch, cough-cough- whistle-cough,
finagling an invitation. Patience, my father had taught me, is a virtue of kings.
But what did I care for virtue in a world where even the fish
would one day hurl itself down, a suicide on Middle C, tail draped over B-flat.
Most days I could hardly hear Pinkie sing above the racket
as I punched the keys and kicked the backboard as if possessed
Long (Bam!) long (Bam!) a-go (Bam!) long (Bam!) a-(Bam!) go (Bam! Bam!)—
each kick a testament to the industry that would later fuel my ardor
for the Russian composers when without warning the timer pinged!,
the biscuits browned, the fish leapt, Pinkie signed off, and I rose from the bench
with Rachmaninoff's heady chords already clenched in my warring fists.


Reprinted from The Threepenny Review, Fall, 2003.