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Judy Meiksin, a Pittsburgh poet and playwright, has published in various journals, including 5 AM, Oakland Review, Poetry Motel, and slipstream. Her plays have been produced by Queer Theatre and Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company. |
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Published Spring 2006
 
Releasing Herself
I have been to Europe and I don't
even recall that stain in the road
that you refer to as Ely, Nevada
- Lynn Emanuel
Dillonvale, Ohio, where doctors hired by
the mines never recognize blacklung,
only emphysema from chain-smoking in the bars
after each shift ends; a town as exciting as a thumbprint
and just as small; contaminated well-water;
and a small girl in the corner
of the livingroom on Christmas morning with her
battered babydoll, her brother at the tree,
unwrapping a brand new hunting rifle.
She escapes
for a job as a chef, a brick house,
city water. She becomes a magnifying glass
to her brother's ineptness: he who receives
$20 for gasoline for visiting their father in the hospital
loads up their father's truck with items
"he won't know he's missing," good-bye son,
I worry about you driving so far, while she
prepares meals for a week for their mother,
consults medical texts on emphysema, searches closed mines,
the expert database of Dillonvale's version
of Dr. Spock, she is a stain on the white of their eye.
Sleeping in a hospital, breathing, a chore made easier
by a daughter who props his pillows & turns up the fan,
who rubs his sore legs with bag-balm, he says
Why don't you fix your ugly hair?
At home, she dreams about filterless cigarettes, Noah's flood,
a goat with its chin on her lap.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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