Read an Excerpt

SHE GOES LIKE


It’s character assassination time
next to Captain Video, at Mr. Game’s
arcade. Cool neon surf breaks over them,

green and purple rippling the metal O’s
on lip or lobe. They breathe out a clear gas
of words to warm themselves. Ashley’s exposed

navel shivers when they start in on Mr.
Spinelli’s homeroom and his history classes.
Her mind fast-forwards You should’ve seen the bastard

this morning, stops, rewinds her eyes catching
his in World Civ sliding down her cleavage.
No, too gross: eject. Instead: “His clothes,

they’re like so Yesterday.” Safe choice, that place
half underground, walls papered with dead names,
the living room of all the guys’ parents.

There, Ashley wears the name Anton and Eva
fit her into when she was only a dream
in the Budapest whose air their dreams still breathe.

“Elektra.” Imagine. Years of getting called
“Lightbulb” or “Hydro” in elementary school
sent her off to Central Tech as Ashley.

She broke it to them slowly. They have a thing
about new things – whatever some Hungarian
fossil ­didn’t invent or eat. Anton’s

instrument hatelist targets electric shavers,
digital watches, Japanese violins.
“And Eva goes like Peanuts butter isn’t

a launch. Cheese isn’t cheese unless it reeks.
Forget about sushi.” She cringes when they talk,
their tongues caught up on consonants sticky

with foreign memories. Yet tonight, past one,
Ashley won’t fall asleep till they come home
(the tables stacked, the door sign switched to closed)

and whisper the old world into her ear,
their breath threading with hers in endearments
like nothing spoken by her yesterday.




A Word about “She Goes Like” by John Reibetanz
Most teenagers think their parents are dinosaurs. It’s a healthy attitude that contributes to the teenagers’ ability to live independently and in turn become dinosaurs to their own children. This generational division is especially acute in immigrant families, where the children pick up habits and values that are a foreign language to their parents. “She Goes Like” focuses on one such teenager, whose parents also turn up in several of the other poem-stories of  Near Relations. The book traces the efforts of parents and children, wives and husbands, to find a common language in, and for, their love. In this case, the moves on both sides are painful, funny, and successful.

How the Poem Works by Stan Dragland

“She Goes Like” is about the difficulty of parent-child communication, yes, but there is also the minefield of high school, with a goatish teacher and peers exacting conformity in speech and dress. Ashley’s world has its emotional hazards and the new name she adopts is the most obvious sign of how she copes with all that, creating a more conventional identity that allows her to fit in. The poet understands the pressures she faces. In fact, the speaker of his poem knows the complexity of her situation better than she does. In the third person, at a certain distance from her, he layers the conflicting New- and Old-World aspects of her life her slang, for instance, and her parents’ European speech with the tension between what she can safely say (and to whom) and her private thoughts. It’s remarkable how much of Ashley and her milieu is packed into twelve three-line stanzas. The poem moves along quietly and deliberately in these stately tercets. Their (Old-World?) formality, like John Reibetanz’s sophisticated use of metaphor, contrasts with Ashley’s deliberate air-head colloquialisms. Until the word “yet,” in the second-last stanza, the poem seems to judge Ashley in the same way she judges her parents.

Now Ashley’s fully reciprocated love for her parents, despite their old world ways, snaps into focus. Now the poem comes home to the heart, home to the haven that Ashley’s parents have made for her. Surely a girl so loved, in an atmosphere of such bedrock security surely she will eventually come to be an unconflicted woman, both at home and away.

Reading the poem again, it’s easy to see that “Ashley” is camouflage. Unlike “Elektra,” it won’t inspire those alienating jokes, but it does reflect an independent spirit, one who is no mere slave to conformity. The original Elektra is a strong and loyal woman in an old-world play by Sophocles. In the moment caught by the poem, it’s probably not the right name for a beleaguered girl. Ah, but she’s canny too, and she may well grow into her baptismal name. Should she re-adopt Elektra, the hopes her parents invested in the name will have been realized.

Stan Dragland’s latest book is Stormy Weather: Foursomes, poetry, from Pedlar Press.