*Featured Poet December 2003*

Poetry

Amsterdam Dolores Hernandez, age 14 map-game Red Coat

Reflections

Jesse Rice of Rice's Fruit Farm

Your silly girl was tipsy?
you were three sheets baby
When we played the map-game.
 
The World
            (Tacked above your pillow like a crucifix)
was easy and sweet-
a blue dish of penny candy.
 
You crowned me with your camo-cap
and bid me
to bounce barefoot on the mattress
and blind, with a finger
find a place
that melted on my tongue.
 
With a sweep of your glass
you declared it yours.
 
On the news
that I set low
The World
is a crocodile straining to crack
the flimsy plank
They've placed in its jaw.
 
Your sleeping breath is infant ragged.

Amsterdam
				
Neon and noon-time clash for dominion
over the dirty scene.

Men with wallets leaning, practicing boredom
in oily puddles.

By the slick back of the brown canal
men with money clips pour through the streets
drip into gutters where
the sun flashes a greasy sheen and
discarded leaflets are left fluttering.

Neon and noon-time,
round the clock red light but
No stopping.

No merciful shadow to hide what we are—
        Oh, we Are foreign
but we are not strangers, as 
there are no shadows to make us mysteries.

(a shade snaps above, on level with a streetlamp.  
slender, pale hand, long fingers, bit-down nails.)

Neon,
The girls in glass 
    windows,
bare in metal chairs, no light tricks to robe
the deepening streams at their lips.

Sharp, 
The white teeth of daylight,
The starving faces.

Red Coat

Of all the fall 
deaths,
the burning bush screams the loudest
protesting this grayness—the changing air

My mother is crisp too, she says she’d go crazy
thinking the way I do—

“and don’t forget you’d better get that new coat before first frost”

See,
I have a grey I could wear
as I wander
as I bump into girls in stairwells
and hide my face

But in a red coat 
I could 
At least
be blazing

as I fall away, 
leaf by leaf.

Dolores Hernandez, age 14

Green Eyes 
steals Doritos 
for breakfast, 
punched out a girl 
for what she said. 
“I seen a kid get shot,” 
but startled by a siren 
her shoulders won’t settle 

gold hoops swinging 
picking jagged nail edges. 
 

Green Eyes 
wears girl sizes 
stuffs her mother’s bras 
and paints her face 
like an island bird. 
Surveying the streets 
from her windowsill, 
she’s humming to the radio 
or singing songs her mama sang, 
before she left. 
“Un dia, mi nina, 

Dios me salva.” 
 

Green Eyes 
leaning into the rain, 
her hair a black curtain. 

She won’t tell a thing. 
 


Green Eyes 
Won’t tell nobody where her mama’s at. 
Slicks Maybelline over 
her baby cheeks, 
Lines her eyes black, 
and waits to be saved, 
making angry faces 

in the streaked mirror.
 

Out the window 
girls are drawing foursquares. 

After much pleading, Mr. Rice finally allowed us to throw him a small party in the apple storeroom in honor of his eightieth birthday. Most of the workers from the apple orchard came down at noon, and the three old storeroom hens, Olga, Annette and Bonnie, put aside their incessant bickering to serve up thick pieces of chocolate cake on paper plates. Throughout the day, town notables stopped in to shake his hand, wish him a happy birthday and ask when the Macs would be coming in. Middle-aged women stopped by with cookies and cards labeled “for the birthday boy.” For all his work and the respect he had gained, he had still managed to earn the title of “cute old man,” a role that he accepted in the same grudging way he bore the report of an incoming hail storm. He drew the line, however, when Olga tried to put one of those cone shaped party hats on his head and secure the elastic under his chin. His puritanical spirit, like his work ethic, ran deep through his veins.

Mr. Rice was the healthiest octogenarian I had ever seen, with wide eyes and permanently flushed cheeks. Though his shoulders were stooped slightly and his thinning arms seemed to dangle in the sleeves of his red plaid work shirt, there was a vitality in his movements and a firmness in his step that men forty years his junior had already lost. He was stubborn down to the ends of his wispy hair, which poked out from beneath his flat brimmed baseball cap. Each day in creased leather boots and suspenders, he boarded the bed of a pickup with his crew to work the land of his family orchard.

The old iron tools that first broke ground at the orchard were hanging on the walls of the storeroom where I was employed the summer of my junior year in high school. Along the back wall, blown up black and white photographs showed the first orchard workers loading apples onto carts with the first Jesse Rice, in his overalls, looking on. A later picture showed young women in the barn, grading apples for the sweet, crisp cider that had won the second Jesse Rice numerous blue ribbons and praise. A few of the ribbons, worn with dust and time, hung over the refrigerated case where bottles of cider, pressed each fall in the good old way, are still sold. The cider is as much a tradition in the town as the annual peach parade.

As time passed and the orchard grew and became more widely known, it was necessary for the third Jesse Rice to hire extra help to manage his store, and the three batty old ladies are still there after thirty years. He hired Annette to grade fruit, Bonnie to bake pies, muffins, scones and cakes, and Olga to manage the workers, take orders and oversee most of the other business that went on in the store. And then there was me. I was originally hired to work the cash register, but Mr. Rice gave me the additional responsibility of helping these old ladies when they needed it.

I could never tell whether the three of them detested or loved each other. They spent each day bickering back and forth and ordering me to do the most vile work, like taking out the trash, mopping the floor, doing the dishes and stocking drinks in the tomb-like freezer. After awhile, I grew suspicious that each was giving me any work she could find to deprive the others of my services. Because of their little competition I was kept very busy, a bit like Cinderella. Of course, if I ever failed at a task I was given, all three of them descended on me, squawking like vultures.

One evening after I was berated for accidentally burning some maple cookies, I had retreated to scrub muffin tins in the deep aluminum sinks next to the freezers in the back of the storeroom. Mr. Rice walked in from the storage room in the back and gave an amused chuckle.

“What are those ol’ cats fussing about now?” he asked. “Nothing, really. It’s okay.” I sighed and wiped my hands on my stained apron.

He cocked his head at me and smiled, then disappeared back into storage again. I smiled to myself.

He was wearing navy suspenders with little apple shaped buttons sewn on. I guessed that they were the handiwork of his wife, Winnie. The elfish old woman rarely came down to the storeroom from the old white house next door where they lived. The joints in her wrists and ankles were swollen with arthritis and she could rarely get down the stairs. One day I came to work with a terrible sore throat and cough. I had called Olga on the phone to ask if I could take the day off, but she refused. When Winnie came down that evening to check on the store, she heard my cough, which she deemed “quite a bark,” and asked me why I was there at all. She rubbed her gnarled hand on my back and sent me home with a handful of swirly red and white peppermints from the penny candy baskets. When she could get down those creaky wood stairs, she would unwrap one of Bonnie’s fresh blueberry muffins to share with me while the three of us closed the store. They would wander around inspecting the counters and muttering observations to each other without expecting a reply, the way old couples do. At seven, when everything was cleaned and put away, they would thank me with tired but genuine smiles as I left. On those nights as I went out to my car, I watched the third Jesse Rice flick off the last storeroom light and lead his wife out the front door, his hand supporting her thin arm. Mr. Rice emerged from the storage room on a night like this, with an odd metal pail strapped to his chest. “I bet you’ve never seen one of these,” he said, grinning. He unfastened the worn leather buckles that held a lid in place.

“What is it?” I asked, drying my hands and peering into it. “This,” he said proudly, “is what we used to pick apples into when I was a boy.”

The pail was about as thick around as the old man himself, and extended down to the tops of his rickety knees. It made a hollow clanging sound when he moved. I wondered how the weight wasn’t causing him to pitch forward.

“We’d climb up the ladders with one of these strapped on and drop the apples in. It’s hefty to carry around, but its much heavier after you’ve filled it with a half bushel,” he rasped. I watched his hands as he latched the lid again. His fingers were rough and callused, his nails were yellow, cracked and split at the tips after almost a century of working with the earth.

When he left again, I scrubbed the tins a little harder. My hands were as smooth as peach skin. I had no relationship with the land I lived on, not like he did. Jesse had grown up right along with the trees in the orchard, intertwined with them like the freak apples that he always brought back—the ones that had formed so closely on the branch that they shared a skin.

About a week after we celebrated Mr. Rice’s eightieth, I came to work to find him waiting for me, a roll of little red labels in hand.

“I have a job for you,” he said grimly. “The state has made it a law that we can’t sell our cider without these damn stickers on the bottle.”

He handed me the roll. I read the label. Warning: this apple cider has not been pasteurized and may contain some bacteria that are harmful to small children.

“Been drinking the damn stuff all my life.” He sat down on the steps up to his office and removed his worn hat, wiping his brow with a sleeve. “Pasturizer would cost too damn much. New bottles are under the counter.”

I took the bottles out of the cardboard box and lined them up on the counter top: the gallons, the half gallons, and the little individual sized pints that my mom always put in my lunchbox when I was in elementary. Outside the opened front door, and across the road, the sun was setting over the orchard, drenching the gray, leafless trees with coral colored light. His eyes drifted from the bottles to me, and then to the labels in his hand. He held them out at arms length. I took them. I began placing a label on each empty bottle, on the back, at the very bottom, neat and square. It did not make them any less offensive. I, a timid sixteen-year-old girl, was doing the first task that Jesse Rice could not do himself; it was the first in his whole adult life. It was not his old age, but his pride that prevented him. With each label, I felt as if I was poisoning one by one those solemn rows of apple trees up in the orchard, each planted with such care, years and years before I was born.

That night as I drove away, I watched him shut off the last storeroom light, lock the door and climb up the splintered porch stairs to his house, alone. His shoulders were stooped, his white head bowed in submission to the gusty October wind.