Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
My Father’s Christmas Cards, poems by Carolyne Wright.
My Father’s Christmas Cards
My father had a battered Hasselblad 4×4 camera
with a viewfinder hood that he peered into from above
and a bellows-like casing for the big retractable lens.
The camera lived on a shelf in the hallway closet
in its scuffed, fitted hard-leather case with rusted metal buckles.
He got it, he said, from a German soldier at the end
of The War. My father never said how, and I
was too much a child to ask.
Every holiday season of my childhood, my father took
black-and-white Christmas photos, developed them
in a darkroom he set up in the basement bathroom,
and had them printed onto glossy card stock
to mail to friends, family, and his colleagues at The Bank.
The first image I remember: myself a chubby toddler
plumped down under the living-room Christmas tree,
turning some tinselly ornament in my hands
in the hot glare of my father’s photo-studio lights.
I’m alone in this photo—my brother still swelling
in my tiny mother’s belly.
Another year: both of us
under the tree’s bulb-laden limbs, little-girl me
grinning toward the camera and gripping my toddler
brother’s shoulders as if to turn his face toward
the lens—his anxious smile still tentative, the flower
of his worry not yet fully blossomed.
The winter I was four, my father posed us
on my red tricycle (soon to be my brother’s)
against a photographer ‘s white cloth drop—
both of us in fuzzy footy pajamas with Santa-pattern
mufflers at our necks. The trike in profile,
I sat astride—hands firm on the handles, fuzzy feet
planted on the pedals, torso and head turned
toward the lens, curly hair cascading
to my shoulders, my smile electric, outsize.
My little brother stood scowling behind me
on the runner between the trike’s back wheels,
as tall on foot as I was on the seat. His hands
on my shoulders as if his palms burned, his mouth
a thin straight line, face grimacing into the lens,
forehead crumpled under his straight blond bangs
as if in the studio’s glare he already glimpsed
the decades of resentment ahead of him.
My father had given up asking my brother to smile.
The drill sergeant just beneath the surface in him
barked, “Stop squirming! Stand up straight!
Look at the birdie when I tell you!” Off-camera,
my mother cajoled and pleaded with them both
until my father told her to keep out of it, and for a moment
my brother broke his frown and smirked.
Smile holding steady on my sweat-dewed face,
I didn’t know how to make them happy.
As if for all of us, my expression surged forward
toward my father’s “Smile now! That’s it!
That’s my girl!”
Was this the first time
I played to the camera—my smile gathering
force, the post-War spoils of my trying to cheer them
as the shutter finally delivered the season’s greeting?
Powdered Room
The afternoon I powdered my Grandma’s room
I wasn’t trying to be mean. That flask of bath talcum
was probably meant for my or my little brother’s bottom
when we were small and whimpering with diaper rash.
But I was a big girl now, I had just turned five,
not this many anymore—too many fingers
to hold up to the grownups. I had to show them
my whole hand, which fit so smoothly around that flask
of Johnson & Johnson on Grandma’s dressing table
when I tiptoed through her bedroom’s open door.
I’d watched her softly powder her doughy arms,
pat talcum onto her pillowy bosom as it descended
into cleavage of her flowered rayon old-lady
dresses from the War. Blonde sunlight streamed
through my Grandma’s bedroom windows, glowing
across the chenille bedspread, the glass-topped
vanity table and chest of drawers, the nightstand
and steamer trunk from her own parents’
voyage in steerage from the Old Country.
I let myself go cheerfully creative for an hour,
humming some kiddy ditty from a cartoon show
and shaking talcum snow over the hand-stitched
pillowcases, the bureau tops, the big easy chair
(a cast-off of my Dad’s) with its crocheted
afghan throw—even the shepherd and shepherdess
figurines with their separate family group
of ceramic sheep, and the Swiss music box,
its vellum top painted with a boy in lederhosen
blowing on a child-sized alpenhorn
in the shadow of the Eiger.
How better
to celebrate the colors and shapes and textures
of my Grandma’s room, the snowy angels of art
descended into my big girl’s shaking hand?
Dinner time and I skipped upstairs to the kitchen,
so richly satisfied that I can’t recall what
happened next—did I announce my handiwork
before astonished grownups at the table?
Or did Grandma’s cry of consternation—Gott
im Himmel!—rise from the basement through the aroma
of my Mother’s after-dinner coffee?
Did my Daddy paddle my bottom with his hand
or wallop me with the belt he always threatened
before my parents sent me back to Grandma’s room
to clean up everything?
I doubt
I cleaned up everything. Even with artful angels
in her big girl’s hands, how could that five-
year old have pulled a queen-sized bedspread
off Grandma’s high antique bed, shaken it out
in the yard, hauled it to the laundry area
in the far corner of the cellar, bundled it
into the top-loading washer, set the stiff controls,
slammed the washer door, then dragged the clean
wet bedcover to the laundry line outside
to hang with Grandma’s wooden clothespins?
Then repeated the process with afghans, pillowcases
and throw rugs? Or wiped and polished the antique
sheep without their slipping from my fingers
to shatter on the concrete floor?
I don’t recall,
and only one image remains: my chubby hand
pushing a damp rag vaguely across the glass top
of Grandma’s vanity, smearing a moist swathe
through the gray-white snow-dust of Johnson’s.
My bottom stung, I sniffled and whimpered as I wiped,
but a secret grin was gleaming through my tears.
(for my grandmother, Mary Klenk Lee)
Saturday Night Dinners
with Perry Mason
Always the roast from the oven roto-grille
on its pewter platter in the middle of the table
—my mother’s dining-room set from before the War.
The roast beef’s au-jus pure, no thickeners or roux,
cooling in a gravy boat and waiting to be drizzled
over the unbuttered mashed potatoes.
The quick-frozen peas, steamed brilliant green
(never canned), next to the other two
food groups.
My father at the table’s head
with a glass of something (beer? wine?),
my brother and I with milk or juice, my mother
with black coffee and a cigarette burning in the ashtray
by her plate. Even in baggy house robe
and metal curlers she hung on to her career
girl’s figure and blonde highlights from
those Midtown offices in the middle of the War
where she out-typed and out-filed everyone.
The TV in its faux-mahogany console
faced the table, turned to Perry Mason
so we didn’t have to talk. My father’s glass
emptied and filled, my mother picked at her tiny
piece of beef, sipped coffee, dragged
on her cigarette. My brother muttered at her
under his breath: This meat’s too pink inside,
and Why are the potatoes cold?
My mother’s face twisted as his sotto
voce rose, she kept silent as he went after her
like a D.A. badgering a witness, and my father
finally spoke: Leave your mother alone!
You’re lucky to have food, and someone
to cook it for you!
Stop scolding him,
my mother barked at my father, and my brother
smirked, beaming in triumph with my mother
glowering between them. My brother went on
murmuring taunts at my mother until she finally
cried out: Leave me alone! For God’s sake, I can’t
take it anymore! My father scowled and raised
his hand as if to strike my brother, glanced at my mother
and gave up, took another gulp from his glass
and pushed himself up from the table.
I tried to focus on Perry Mason with its safe,
formulaic plots and post-War characters—
the willowy blonde with her beehive bouffant
or pageboy flip, down on her luck but always
stylish, speeding a late-model convertible
around hairpin turns in the Hollywood Hills,
out of cash and second chances, soon to be murdered,
her snub-nosed revolver at the ready.
The good guy in pressed trousers and polo shirt,
his distinguished jaw with its five-o-clock
shadow; the bad guy overweight in rumpled,
plaid suit, jowls quivering in a perpetual snarl.
Every actor with a California accent, every actor
white. Except sometimes a Chinese gardener
or colored maid, the token walk-ons.
Perry Mason stolid and deliberate in his dark suit,
glancing at some brief the judge handed him
and looking past the camera with a cryptic,
knowing smile. Was there any message
for me in these episodes?
By this point, my brother
had stalked down the hall to his room
and locked his door, my father had stumbled
downstairs to whiskey at his basement workbench,
my mother had pushed aside her plate, her tiny
slice of beef half-eaten. Meanwhile, Mason asked
all the right questions, sent his detective on leads
for just the right pieces of evidence.
Every episode ended in the courtroom,
Mason’s client innocent—sympathetic
and perplexed—the courtroom audience
on the edges of their seats as Mason
kept questioning, catching witness after witness
in compromising lies, each one the likely killer
as the hearing reached an impasse and in the hush
the real guilty one rose slowly from audience
or witness box and blurted out, “I can’t
stand it anymore—I’m the one, I did it.”
Who in my family, would have stood up
and admitted, I did it ? Silently,
like cleaners clearing away a crime scene,
my mother and I stacked the dirty dishes,
wiped off the placemats and tablecloth
and put away cold roast and mashed potatoes,
and then I fled to my room. “I always believe
my clients,” Perry Mason said. In my family,
there was no Perry Mason to believe us.
My Worst Job
Had to be in that grubby phone-sales room downtown,
the one I could get to on the #7 View Ridge bus: not
one of those clean suburban call centers in windowless
pre-fab warehouse sheds in the office parks of Redmond,
Renton, or Enumclaw—the indigenous Lushootseed name
that one non-Native person told me once meant something like
Unholy Place of Death. This room was in a crumbling,
1880s-style brick office block on notorious First Avenue
—where my parents warned me never to walk alone—
between a pawn shop and a payday loan, where I had
to walk alone: from the bus stop down a gauntlet
of burly, hooting men in coveralls and hard hats
lounging against construction scaffolding, and drunks
muffled in ragged parkas in midsummer, extending
their dirt-creased palms for a handout.
Up three flights of unlighted stairs, the elevator
next to the stairwell busted—yellow crime-scene
tape and an Out-of-Order sign fastened across the half-
open door to the airshaft; and into the seedy phone room
with fly-specked fluorescent tube lights casting a jaundiced
glare over the long tables pasteboard-partitioned
into cubicles, each with a greasy rotary-dial Ma Bell
desk phone: solid, old-style phones so heavy
that one of them could break your foot if it fell just right.
Each cubicle with a stack of stained and dog-eared
phone books, with overflowing ashtrays
and brown burn scars on the tables’ edges
where forgotten cigarettes had balanced
while smoldering down to their ends.
My cubicle was in the corner farthest from the smokers.
It had no ashtrays—I’d offered them on my first day
to grateful co-workers who carried them off and right away
began filling them. I wiped the dust from my cubicle’s
surface every morning so I could almost endure
hunching there all day, dialing for consumer dollars
and the stingy commission I was supposed to get
if clients signed up for whatever dodgy product
we were selling that week: lava lamps? toaster ovens
that cleaned themselves? vacation-condo time-shares
in Taos with sweeping ocean views? Were there suckers
gullible enough to fall for those?
How could I know?
I’d just graduated from Roosevelt High, not yet eighteen,
clueless of career choice and empty as yet of love’s
devastating resonance. My attention was overwhelmed
by the mumbling, mouth-breathing presence of our boss,
Cliven, who hovered over the younger women
at their stations, or prowled the narrow aisles
between cubicles, barking at everyone to snap to it
whenever the phone voices fell silent in the sweaty
summer lulls, the First Avenue traffic through the open
windows a constant blare and rumble. I was a distracted
dialer, all right, when Cliven pressed his half-unbuttoned
belly against my chair back, leering over my shoulder
and rubbing his stubbly chin between thumb and stubby
forefingers as he tried to squint at my call notes.
In one move I hoped was cat-like, I leaned forward
and away from his advancing gut, but I caught
the reek of his underarms from the sweat stains
ringing the armpits of his Hawaiian shirt.
“You need to rewrite those call reports,”
he mumbled. “Too many words.”
Too many words,
indeed, when forty-something Cliven and his girlfriend,
barely my age, took to making out on a pair of welded-
together folding chairs in the center of the room.
She sprawled across Cliven’s spraddled thighs,
and they kissed and groped on that clap-trap love seat
most of one afternoon, while we dialers averted our eyes
and pitched our pitching voices into the phone receivers’
black holes—squeals above the kissers’ smack and slobber
and the screech of traffic below us.
Next morning we labored up the wretched steps
to our workspace as furtively as we’d tiptoed out
on the lovers before they could achieve complete
undress. We stood before the door to the phone room—
it was bolted shut, a City Ordinance – Eviction Notice
plastered across it. We milled like pigs
in the wrong chute, asking each other
whom to ask, noticing for the first time
there were no other offices
left in business in that building.
Eventually we slunk away, dispersed—dialers
deprived of connections, decades before cell phones
could promise all the answers. Back home,
my worried mother hovering in the background,
I kept dialing: the company’s main office
with its hours of on-hold Musak, weary receptionists’
exaggerated sighs and promises to leave a message
for management. Home early from The Bank, my father
took the phone and took charge, shouting into the receiver
about lawsuits and small claims court as my mother
hustled me down the hall out of earshot: Let him
handle it, those assholes won’t be able to brush him off.
I’d never heard my mother use such language!
Next week the final paycheck came in the mail.
Deposited, it bounced—stamped Returned No Funds—
the bounce fee the bank charged my account
only a little less than the chintzy pittance of the check.
Live and learn, Kiddo, my father shrugged and walked away
after I showed him. The world is full of cheats
and horse’s asses, you’re lucky to be learning this
early. I thought of creepy Cliven and his nearly naked
lady spilling out of their chairs and roiling the heart
of our tedium—what did they know on that last day?
What did I know then of attempted connections?
It would be years before I fell in love with anyone.
(with thanks to Jeffrey Harrison)
*The name Enumclaw is derived from a Coastal Salish Native American term that translates as “place of evil spirits” . . . The City of Enumclaw says the name means “thundering noise.” –Wikipedia
© Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021), and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Bengali and Spanish—including Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017) by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist, 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation). A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant; on her return, she studied with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington. Carolyne returned to Brazil in 2018 for an Instituto Sacatar artist’s residency in Bahia. A Seattle native who teaches for Richard Hugo House, she has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and the Radcliffe Institute, among others. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil took her back to Salvador, Bahia, in mid-2022; she spent from June-August 2024 on the second segment of this grant.