Kafka in Pennsylvania

PASSERS-BY

by Franz Kafka
translated into the patois of middle-Pennsylvania by Hans Upph-Ovryerhed

LIKE IF YOU'RE SHLEPPING your ass up a hill at night and see some dude a ways off because there's a full moon, and this here dude is running at you full-bore, well, you don't tackle the fucker even if he is some whipped out little piece of shit, if you know what I mean, and even if there is some other fucker panting after him. You play it smart and let the bastard blow by you.

Because it's night, even though there is a full moon. And like what the fuck do you know, maybe these assholes are just having a game of tag or something. Or maybe the two are chasing some other motherfucker. Or maybe the second guy has a grudge against the first dude, maybe for something he didn't even pull. And maybe he's going to snuff the fucker. You might even get sent up as an accessory. If you know what I mean. Or maybe they don't even know each other at all and are merely running home separately to get laid. Or like maybe they just always like to go jogging at night.

Anyway, like you're too tired to grab anyone, even if you had the balls to. And haven't you had a few too many beers, and are a bit shit-faced. You watch the two men disappear into the darkness, thankful that you didn't stick you're nose in it. If you know what I mean.

translation copyright 2007 OnagerEditions

***
Hans Upph-Ovryerhed was born in East Germany. Accused of being a snitch for the STASI, he fled his homeland and moved to Trout Run in central, Pennsylvania, where he still lives. He has had many jobs, and currently works as a grocery-bagger in a supermarket. On Sundays he is an usher in a Slovak Catholic church. Han's goal is to translate all of Kafka's work into the middle-Pennsylvania dialect. This is his first published translation.

***

Remembering Richard Rutkowski

Four Poems by One Man

AT TWELVE
Jan Wroclaw

She bends her head
over her tablet, drawing
splendid maidens and silky
steeds that surely fly.

Outside the room wars
rise and fall again.


THE VERY LAST LILAC
Jan Wroclaw

There are all these gods,
these voices that went dead,
all these reasons why
we forget

some sons will rape
and some will kill,
and sons will weep
for what happens to the seed.

BARTONSVILLE IDYLL
Kenneth Oldmixon

Fire Is.
It fills the road with sun
striking cries of children, forging
fields to copper sung
with a clang of children.

Come brazen as the grain
banging your thighs and ring
your hair,
make me the liturgy of seed.

KETURAH CANDY (1858-1869)
Kenneth Oldmixon

Hello lover! How does it go
down there? All stone and leather?
Or settled to the mulch of our
best years. Do shards of lace
tease the tunnels of your bones?
I need to touch and thrill a rise
of skull to know if laughter
leaves a scar or tears erode
some way out, to trace
my maze of now become, a face,
although it hardly matters.

*   *   *

These poems are from a portfolio printed in 1989 at AXIAL PRESS in Hublersburg, Pennsylvania, by Richard Rutkowski. Twenty-four sets were made. The portfolio was hand printed by Rutkowski using the silk-screen process. There were also four illustrations by E. M. Hollis. The poems and illustrations were all created by Rutkowski himself, and attribituted to the various imaginary authors. Richard Rutkowski died several years ago, and AXIAL PRESS is no longer in operation.

*   *   *

Lock Him In, Lock Him Out? Hmm. . . .

A Poem by Sasha Thurmond

Broken pipe beneath my house

Plumbers come to fix the spout

Snake they find behind the pipe

Four to six feet I'm a fright

Call to boss with their report

Quit the job till snake aborts

Pest Control he comes on out

Under house he scoots about

Says the snake had gone outside

Never see him till I die

Sprinkles dust around my house

Says all snakes will now stay out

What a very happy day

Lock him in, lock him out ? Hmm...

Plumbers come to try again

See the snake, they can not win

Take a break til pest man comes

Now the three compare and hum

Plumbers say that they'll be brave

Get the pipe fixed that same day

Now I wonder what to do

Snake is in, snake is out ? Hmm...

Pest man said to cut my grass

Spot a snake and kick his ass

Then I wonder long and hard

Snake in grass rang very far

The orange man could go ajar

Lock him in, lock him out ?  Hmm...

*   *   *

Sasha Thurmond  is an artist and writer who lives on a farm in South Carolina with her horse and other animals and who also finds time to write, paint, and take photographs. She is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at Cornell University, where she studied with Steve Poleskie. 

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A Letter from Richard Russo

The Writing Life: Still Ours to Defend Back in 2013, I wrote an open letter to my fellow authors urging them to join the Authors Guild, especially those who, like me, have enjoyed the best the writing life has to offer. The AG’s core mission has been to protect authorship by defending copyright, but also, more recently, to help emerging authors prosper in a publishing ecosystem that is endangered (and here I have the rare pleasure of quoting myself) “by downward pressure of e-book pricing, by the relentless, ongoing erosion of copyright protection, by the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, by spineless publishers who won’t stand up to them, by the ‘information wants to be free’ crowd who believe that art should be cheap or free and treated as a commodity, by internet search engines who are all too happy to direct people to online sites that sell pirated (read ‘stolen’) books.” Those of us who made our names before the digital revolution, I argued, had it easy. Advances were larger. There were more publishers to buy our books, more newspapers with pages devoted to reviewing and advertising them. Publishers, less driven by numbers, played a longer game, waiting patiently for talented young authors to break out. Debut authors were sent on costly book tours to meet the independent booksellers who would ultimately make their reputations. Those of us who benefitted from these advantages, I maintained, owed a debt not only to subsequent generations of writers who are emerging into a diminished publishing landscape, but also to readers impoverished as a result of not knowing (how could they?) just how much breathtaking new talent was in the pipeline. So, what’s changed in the last five years? Answer: quite a lot, and not nearly enough. Author incomes, here in the U.S., but also in Canada and much of Europe, continue to decline; many of us live at or below the poverty line. A tiny percentage can make a living through writing alone; the rest have to supplement their income by teaching or taking on other work or marrying people with more lucrative careers, strategies that have been known to lead in the end to exhaustion, writing less, and self-loathing (which many of us suffer from already). Traditional publishing continues to consolidate and contract, and many of the largest houses are part of conglomerates that demand books yield the same profit margins as flat-screen TVs, in effect squeezing out important midlist books that were never designed to be bestsellers. Writers are often told that the success of their published books depends on their ability to promote themselves on social media. Additionally, many of the trends that alarmed us in 2013 continue unabated. Those of us who make things—books, songs, films—continue to lose market share to those who distribute what we make. Government continues to side with Big Tech by viewing anti-trust issues solely in terms of low prices for consumers. Many digital magazines not only expect us to work for free but to thank them for the opportunity to “get our names out there.” Despite Guild efforts to spotlight the problem, some publishers continue to offer writers unfair contracts. And every year, it seems, the National Endowments for the Art and Humanities have to defend themselves against slashed budgets. If all this weren’t bad enough, the internet continues to ambush potential readers with click-bait mini-narratives (“You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!”) and social media ensures that we’re sufficiently outraged every moment of our waking lives such that we’re unlikely to sit down with an actual book. In other words, like our friends in the newspaper and music businesses, we’re still getting our asses kicked. And yet, the news is not all bad. The price of e-books has stabilized and many readers seem to have remembered the pleasures of the printed page, even as self-publishing and new digital platforms offer opportunities for writers that didn’t exist in 2013. Independent bookstores, written off for dead five years ago, are staging a comeback. The Eye of Sauron (Amazon) seems to have been distracted away from us (furry-footed Frodo and Samwise) by the events on other, larger battlefields (the rest of Retail). And there are other reasons to be cautiously (okay, very cautiously) optimistic. Big Tech, it seems, suddenly has a lot to answer for, thanks in part to the EU, but also to Guild authors like Franklin Foer and Jonathan Taplin, who have sounded the necessary and long-overdue alarm. Moreover, there’s the distinct possibility that other winds that have been blowing in the faces of creators may in the not-too-distant future be at our backs. Tech Giants like Google and Facebook and Apple are all moving into the content business, which means (and what a bitter pill this must be for them to swallow!) they need us “content providers.” That means more book options and, for those of us who want to make the pivot into TV and film–writing, more opportunities there. So, we’re basically good, yeah? Well, no. That term “content provider” should give us pause. We can all hear the sneer, right? Traditional publishers may have underpaid us, but at least to them we were poets and painters and songwriters, terms that implied both respect and ownership of what we made, at least until we’ve sold it to them. The tech ethos is different. To them, we’re often seen as mere hirelings. And since those who hire us are in the business of business, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to pay us as little as they can get away with and to make certain we understand that we’re mere workers, not partners in the enterprise. The conflict, of course, is as old as art and commerce, but today it’s playing out algorithmically and those algorithms have not been designed for our benefit. If we creators don’t fight, the massive transfer of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector that we’ve been witnessing since 2013 will most certainly continue. Which means, my friends, that I must end this appeal as I ended the last one, by reminding you that the writing life, even as it changes before our eyes, is still ours to defend, and that we’re stronger together. If you’re not a member of the AG, please join, and if you are one, please forward this to your writer friends and invite them. We’ll be working for all authors in any case. But as I said back in 2013, there’s such a thing as being too late. -Richard Russo August 2018

My Grandfather's Ferarri

Stephen Poleskie

My maternal grandfather came to America from Poland

At a time when there was no Poland.

Soldiers had come to the family’s farm to take away their horses.

When his father protested an officer replied; “We will be back for your boy.”

So he put his son on a boat and sent him off to America.

There he worked in a coal mine, married and begot three daughters.

When his lungs filled up with black dust and he couldn’t work anymore

His eldest daughter, my mother, dropped out of school to support the family.

Many years later I visited my relations on their farm in Poland.

They talked excitedly about my grandfather and the letters he had sent them.

He was a banker and had three daughters, who had all gone to college.

And have you ridden in your grandfather’s Ferrari? someone asked me.

And how could I tell them that my grandfather only drove an old Ford?

And that those letters he wrote had been just his American Dreaming 

*  *  *


Stephen Poleskie’s writing has appeared in numerous journals in the USA and in Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines, and the UK; as well as in five anthologies, and been three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published five novels and two books of short fiction. Poleskie lives in Ithaca, NY. with his wife the novelist, Jeanne Mackin.   website: www.StephenPoleskie.com

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Silhouette

Sasha Thurmond

Silhouette...where are you? Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Damn that druggie former friend and his dealing girlfriend. She let Silhouette outside. I was just there for one night before I'd catch a flight back home to the east coast where I was born.

The condo complex was ticky-tacky endlessly all the same and the repetition and the people staring at me as I drove around and around with my passenger door wide open hoping Silhouette would hear me and leap in the car, making me joyful and myself again. Not a car he'd recognize since it wasn't mine. I just borrowed it...declared I was taking it to find my cat and my ex-friend had no say in the matter at all. Ricky Ticky Tavi, like a mongoose I was gonna find him if it was the last thing I ever did in my spiraling life, I swore to God.

Damn...I got a D.U.I. in that dinky little Mormon town in Idaho where I went to ski for a winter; like what a great idea while my boyfriend was in jail so at least I could lay low and traverse the law and chaos I tried to escape since my life was gone like Silhouette was.

Wow....what a stupid idea, like most of mine were on the merry go round I was living. I took a geographic , for fun or something...returning to the saner parts of my childhood excluding all the drama and combustible parents and dysfunction. Now I was not only estranged from my boyfriend...I lost my key to responsibility and love and care who had always been my touchstone. "Silhouette...where are you? Here kitty, kitty, kitty." Everyone thought I was nuts and out of control and an accident waiting to happen. Waiting to happen? It already had happened time and time and time again. Maybe I should believe it and turn it around myself. Right...not so easy a thing to do, I secretly had discovered but swiftly dismissed as an aberration of my mind.

Holy smokes...the state troopers found me hanging over the Snake River in my car but they saved me! That damn blizzard disoriented me on my way home from the cowboy saloon where my car wouldn't start when the bar was closing. I was a cocktail waitress...my job to earn money and ski the incredible, awe inspiring mountains. What a blast I was going to have. I was an avid skier who learned as a young child when the roses were red and smelled like an overpowering perfume confection.

However, like Thomas Wolfe said in 'You can't go home again. " I have to see a thousand times before I see it Once." Now...I said the state troopers saved me. Then why did they take me to the county jail instead of taking me home? I was being victimized, treated unfairly, what a joke they convoluted my untenable situation.

"Silhouette ! Where are you? "Now people were waking up in the ticky-tacky rows and they are curious who the woman was wending her way with her car door open and screaming something incoherent. My mind was screeching, my heart was pounding I couldn't go home again without him.

Those Mormon neighbors of mine banged on my door every Sunday morning inviting me to walk with them on the Mormon Path and learn what they knew about life and salvation. It was sort of sweet but me, spend seven hours every Sunday doing whatever they did all day long was definitely not for me. I was always nursing a hangover and needed to recoup by sleeping like Goliath. They even gave me a Mormon Bible the entire fifteen person family had signed. Do you think I should have read it? Or the Bible? Or the Koran? Or Anything about a Higher Power ? I sometimes thought I wasn't worth saving...fleetingly before I reminded myself how fun and unfettered my exciting life was. "Don't tie me down." Yeah.

"Silhouette...." My voice was getting hoarser, the hours were passing like a tortoise and the damn car was running out of gas. A gray apparition whizzed by me mentally and clunked down flat on my lap! Holy smokes...it was Silhouette climbing up my chest !! "Silhouette...you're with me again...I won't ever let you get lost again. It wasn't your fault...maybe mine for hanging around with sketchy people. But never again Silhouette. We're going home again." I hoped that Thomas Wolfe could enlighten me.

*   *   *

Story and illustration by Sasha Thurmond who is an artist and writer living on a farm in South Carolina with her horse and other animals and who also finds time to write, paint, and take photographs. She is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at Cornell University, where she studied with Steve Poleskie. 

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Goshen

by Kevin Swanwick

                                                                I

Seated between two hills

   north & south

sleeping at appropriate times –

   mostly free 

   from its wetland past –

capturing dew points along 

North Church Street

   on stubborn crabgrass

urgently marking the jagged joining

of ancient slate slabs

all strangely formed

   in strakes

processing to welcome travelers at 

   its ambiguous center.

We moved with attentiveness

across those wedged stones,

shifting over epochs

   crooked & precarious, 

markers for the habitual

stroller & child handlebar-gripper

whose body memory could marshal 

   phantom steps & pulsed clenches

striding or riding safely to church, 

the meat market or toy store.

But visitors beware.

Peopled early by workmen

cleaning catch basins before newly

car-driving villagers crisscrossed the

madly formed square;

   converging streets

   wrapping buildings closely

across from the sunken park of green

that softens the stark facade of steepled

   limestone history.

Harriman Square,

   a magical singularity

bereft of organizing traffic lights

& marked by its solid white bullseye;

   an unreachable point but

forming the statuary base for our

beloved sentry Chief Walker, 

   erect, white-gloved & spit-shined

   half-smiling, arms & hands

slicing the air

   with mechanical precision

bright eyed; his peppered police whistle

   bringing pitched order to chaos

while his august form draws

   every housewife's gaze.

                                                                   II

Outsized & punching upward,

holding a county seat, posing questions

about appearances & the oddness of

Rio Grande creek channeled & directed

out of sight in subterranean solitude 

   a sluice

quietly moving under our feet 

but peek-a-booing at grade

   near the end of Canal Street

where young boys who made plans 

to build a light raft & pilot through 

   its dark tunnel

were at last repelled by the stench of sewage

from the leaky history of busy pipes; 

hidden, rusting capillaries

   offering quiet witness

to organic hushed humanness

elderly & unattended, discharging slop

while above ground tattooed

   seasonal horsemen chattered 

   on the corner of Main

   & monied gents passed by,

   acting as if no one were there.

Courtesy ruled the dissimilar habitués

flinging curiosity aside with directed attention –

   horse grooms at their bars, 

dairy farmers at the hardware store –

   no time to stop & eat,

lawyers & bankers at Howell’s Luncheonette,

policemen strolling past the Occidental Hotel 

silently keeping order while scheduled train stops

announced themselves & cars halted

for the arm-folding railroad signal;

an opportunity for happenstance & short

   conversation.

The indifferent tracks formed rhythm & geometry

   & stretching along Green Street,

   home to black villagers,

connected two sides of town 

hosting both border & exchange 

   for melanin mixing

   or tentative greetings;

a coupling geography offering 

glimpses forward & from its

   proud purlieu

the mirth of gentleman John Bruen, 

black & brilliant, The Ole Hasher

who knew those tracks –

   man of prose & wisdom, 

dapper, handsome, pen in pocket 

offering chat as he gathered thoughts

   for the next newspaper scribbles,

local & universal, our brass tacks 

   village sage.

                   III

Revenants loiter

at this lowland crossroad 

   pressing immortality

where the French Canadian horse groom

smiled at the gum-snapping waitress

& others, stomach-ulcered & drunken,

stumbled across Greenwich Avenue

   to flophouse quarters,

fugacious & filled with wraiths from

   knife-fight pasts,

   murmuring unknown entreaties.

Through history-filled senses

listeners might hear,

between the metered jolts of 

   that oversized diaphone

   fire horn, 

youngsters arguing about trotters & pacers

and who is held champ – 

knee-raising Greyhound or 

well-hobbled Dan Patch, imagining 

   a showdown of equine gods.

“What if Stanley Dancer

could have driven old Greyhound too?”

Dispassionate doppelgängers at work,

evenly matched & giving open track 

to trotting & pacing kings,

letting the aged, pounded clay decide.

And across town a knowing horseman’s ear

   could discern

the dissonant rhythms of 

left-side hoofs to right-side hoofs

changing forward position & pelting the track

against the syncopated & symmetrical

alternations of an old grey stud.

What if & what about;

so full of remnant recesses

in its ghostly décor, is Goshen. 

                                                              

*   *   *

Kevin Swanwick  works in the software technology industry and resides in the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife Kathy, two daughters and their dog Dante. Kevin has returned to poetry after a long separation. His published short fiction and essays can be found at The Strange Recital podcast and Elephant Journal. 

The poem Goshen arises from the firsthand experience of a 12-year old horse groom’s assistant at the Historic Track of harness racing in Goshen, NY and the interpretive memory of a middle-aged man. Their reunions occur in poetry.

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