from Startles

Startles

The photo is pornography’s abstraction, black square with a little girl’s tutu peeking out. Stuffed animal held by a woman’s hand beside her. Another photo can’t be seen, but the files contain its thick description. Words, sentences, images as we know them in poetry, a document as we locate it in the archives. Why redact photos, but not the words?

Look, don’t look, witness and/or be traumatized. Testimonies on social media, first person behind a handle. If you click on the gray lines, words exfoliate. “That’s not the word I would have chosen,” my daughter says. They blossom, horribly.

Like a mouth full of blood, every orifice a wound. Hide pain behind black squares. When words emerge like translucent dots on a camera lens, they correspond with you, your wish to void yourself of poisons. Our old cat coughs up fur in small puddles you hope not to step in before the lights come on. The prophecies are coming true, a man in scrubs says.

Down to the detail, he adds, meaning that “peace and security” in various contexts makes a prophecy, or is it a conspiracy, true. Once you turn the conspiracy theory upside down, and shake it out a bit, it makes more sense. The monk tells us to wash our mirrors after we brush our teeth. Odd in a philosophy that downplays identity, but we can at least see our form, if not the smudge of soapy stars. The monk wept at his teacher’s feet, his face vividly damp when he stood.

Wisdom is internal, but only if you fail to react to what wants to enter, lie down on your couch, watch your television, plaster you with obscene videos. To redact is not to take away, but to cover over. To unredact reduces us to our basest impulses in the sentence-mirror. Typos are rife. They pulled teeth, so the children couldn’t bite.

I don’t see images in my mind, even the worst of them. But words hang in my mind’s cave, sharp, savage, promising the onset of migraine. I cannot push words away, as I sometimes do the images they describe. The cave fills first with music (drop after drop) and then the redacted sound of forced silences. Your phone is your lover, the monk says, turn away.

 

"All the way down to the details"

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Lilith was interested in the mortician's blue scrubs (even though they'd just been washed, he said), and in his off-white athletic slippers, the heavy socks that slipped into them. The mortician asked how I am; we haven't talked in a long time, except sometimes through the window of his red Mercedes. OK, I say, so long as I don't turn on the news. "Oh, the news is good!" he says, his voice brighter than usual. "The prophecies are coming true.They say that when people start talking about 'peace and security,' things are falling apart. And that's exactly what they're saying, in just those words, peace and security. The United Nations is saying they want peace and security." I suggest that whatever the Trump administration says, the opposite is true. "Oh no, it's not Trump, even though he thinks he's the only one. It's the entire world." Beside us, The Detailer, as the mortician says he's called, was washing a white van until it shown, revelatory, in the morning sun.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

He loved the large and colorful moth, before he knew he had to drown it. Moths would destroy his palm trees. Pigs destroy lawns as persons bulldoze the rain forest to make them. So persons kill pigs. “I enjoyed the torture video,” Epstein writes to the Sultan.

Files are made from dead trees and tortured girls. Girls in basement stalls—today we’re pointed to a five year old—girls in massage rooms, girls on beaches, girls in airplanes. “Where are we going?” one asks. The mic-ed up tree might ask the same question, where someone left a chainsaw on the sidewalk unattended.

Moth and pig are “invasives.” ICE is leaving Minnesota to go wherever they’ll go, the governor says, his arm flailing outward. The governor does not look well. Photograph of a woman in a bathrobe on a cold city street, her phone up to record ICE. She lives in St. Paul, in the photograph, in our minds. The monks walked through DC barefoot, bearing flowers.

Being put in a stall makes the child a beast. Bestiality among billionaires comes to seem normal, or at least expected. Epstein marked girls as “virgins.” Was he moth or man, hunting his prey? A southern sheriff leans over, his hands in prayer, as the monks approach.

Bull Connor was a beast. They are hosing down protesters in Argentina today. Photograph out of the context of meaning is surreal history, cruelty’s lineage. Is that nature or nurture? Or lack thereof?

You have offered us their suffering, even ramped it up by doxxing them. You take back the men’s names, for they are victims. Bad Bunny’s grasses came out as themselves on social media, with their numbers attached. Joyful concentration of souls. Benito behind a bulletproof football, clutched to his chest. 

“No one is illegal on stolen ground.” What approximates ground is Vegas, pretending. After mass murder proved their point, the gamblers went back. Chance pilgrims, hoping for heaven from the slots. My daughter’s teammate’s grandmother played the penny slots for hours, in rapt concentration.

So many posts begin: “do not look,” but they lead to small rooms with black squares in them. I am not I but the black square that covers me. Blanket over my pain, this double excision of self. The shame lies with the man beside the square, the man who lies. You are now behind the square, in this perverse community of protected blanks.

Firing squads shoot mostly blanks so that none will know who killed. A redacted conscience, there but not there, bruised and yet not bruised. Are we the shooters or the fired upon? Clear the mirror after you brush your teeth, the monk tells us. Then you can see yourself.

We see us both. That is our own particular torture, this knowing what we cannot see, or seeing it, unable to take it in. Mirrors take in nothing. Sponges are full, the ground is flooded, a washer floats down the street like a rubber ducky. Aloka the peace dog plays.

Review of Io ed Eucalipto (Italian for I and Eucalyptus)

 https://www.vocidallisola.it/2025/06/20/io-e-eucalipto-di-susan-m-schultz/

by Daniela Maurizi

 In English, including "the bitch, Lilith"!

https://www.vocidallisola.it/2025/06/20/io-e-eucalipto-di-susan-m-schultz/ 

 

Grazie to the translators and to the reviewer here! 

 

My week in China . . .

was over-full with amazing museums, meals (including one that sent me to the ER with my peanut allergy), temples, Buddhas, faces, voices, monumental buildings . . . I was there for two reasons.

1) The Abstract Only show that had been at the Wailoa Center in Hilo, which featured artists from Hawai`i and Shanghai included one of my photographs. Several of us went to Shanghai for the opening there. It was overwhelming!

https://www.wailoacenter.com/abstract-exchange 

 

 

2) I did a poetry reading in a Filipino nightclub with several other English language poets.

 

 

 

 

from Startles

Startles

Kona storm: clouds scurry from the Koolau toward the ocean to the east; trees pronounce the wind before it arrives. I pronounce you and you pronounce me. The diary of a young girl appears in code, though “Jeffrey Epstein” looks clear enough, as if clarity had anything to do with it. She was made pregnant, the birth monitored by a woman dressed in blood; the baby was taken away. “From then on, her tone shifts permanently.”

From then on, she writes as if to gather artificial flower petals that fall on a cemetery road. If you can’t put the actual flower back together, then try the fake one. There’s less wilting, more willingness to be glued in place. We won’t ask the meaning of place, as flowers are less that than portions of one. I must remember to save my document, I tell the wind.

The horror is in their use of ordinary things: masks, pizza, ice cream, a pacifier. None of these are what they mean. Metaphor takes us to the hell of cackling rich men. You can find two bodies on the New Mexico ranch, one email says, its writer saving that information against legal cases. We don’t report crimes, we pass them on for bitcoin.

She went in a lamb and came out a lion, she wrote. Was her name redacted for safety, or pulled across the internet sky like an ad? “She’s available,” the future president was told. She was told what to eat, what to wear, how her teeth should look. The chair for dental work doubled as something we have no word for.

Or none that we shall say. “Did you get the torture video and did you like it?" The photographs I can’t forget are the still ones. Girls in white blouses and black skirts, dressed as if for Catholic school; from a stool, one reaches to take something from a cupboard. Her panties fall around her ankles, her face is black square.

A woman in a red dress screams about the smell of human flesh, after it was cooked and eaten. She disappeared. Girls’ frail voices ask where they’re being taken: Epstein and Pinker stare back at them. Girls play the part of the camera, taking it all in, never emerging from its chrysalis/lens. If you want to witness, click yes to “are you over 18?” on the government website.

I love Reznikoff, his testimonies, the gaps he left for us to fill. The gaps offered an ethics, the answer to why a Black man had been killed in a barn in the south. The gap is where we fell, and out of which we came clutching our bills of rights. Holocaust I couldn’t read past babies thrown in the air for target practice. No pacifiers there.

Now, as then, gaps can only tear fabric; no spools of thread can be had, only blindfolds. To have one’s eyes covered takes away our power to witness. I might see bodies fall from the sky if they’d not been redacted, twice hidden in limitless streams of words and photos. Documents without end, amen. Completion would be a form of justice.

 

I bought beer and meat, oranges and apples

"Are you homeless?" she yelled at me. "You're MAD." I'd approached her--seated outside Times Supermarket on a blanket with an umbrella and few other possessions--to offer her two green bars. "I don't want nuts!," she yelled, and I thought she meant nuts in the bars I was holding, but she meant crazies. "Why are you talking to me?" she demanded. "I'm not homeless, I'm from Kahuku." She held up a blurry newspaper article that had been covered in plastic a long time ago. I saw nothing except an unreadable black and white photograph. "You want my fucking real estate?!!" I noticed her eyes, I heard her voice, I saw that her hair was held back with a cheap golden headband, that her teeth were yellow, but the details don't add up to image. The fragments are land and theft, madness and home, and those are as real as her illness.

"AOC. What's that?"

Two guys, one covered in tatts, talked loudly next to the tourist vans they drive, while their tourists were at the temple. Something about taxes, then "no one looks out for the workers; it's the employers who take everything!" 

 

"You should support AOC next time," I said. "What's that, AOC?" the one guy asked, baffled. I said her full name. "Mayor of something?" "No, a congresswoman who supports workers." 

 

"I just live under a rock," the more heavily tatted one said. The other guy asked if my camera is digital. Yeah, but it looks retro, I said. "Poor person's Leica." He said he was a photographer. I asked if I could take his picture, and he asked what for, so I showed him some of my instagram feed, mostly abstracts, which popped up first. He liked the rusted metal photos. But he preferred taking the pictures to being in them. I asked the other guy if I could take a photo of his tatts. Nah, he said. "I see I struck out!" I said, as Lilith and I climbed the hill.

 

Ed Foster, a personal obit

I met Ed Foster at the first of the Russian/American conferences in Hoboken in the 1990s. The conference was amazing, though the scheduling was not. There were two breakfasts in a row, as I recall, and then no time between panels/events. The "lounge" exploded with smoke from the Russians talking to the Americans in no particular language. At one point, Russians and Americans bonded over hearing the sound of gunfire at night in St. Petersburg and Detroit (say). One Russian poet tried to walk out of his own reading, but was heckled back on stage by Andrew Dragomoshenko. (Lyn Hejinian told me what they were arguing about, and I forgot.) I later saw him wrapped around a staircase railing. I believe he died by suicide some years later. Ed was quiet and kind throughout; there was no grand master of ceremonies shtick from him. 

 

At the last Maine conference, he spoke up from the back of a room to say that becoming an editor was "a disaster." "No one thinks of you as a poet ever again," he said, I attended one of his conferences in Amherst in 2019 (was it?), a lovely gathering of souls who read to each other (no one else seemed to come!) and ate Chinese food together. Ed's introductions to the readers, including me, were kind, thoughtful, incisive. It was a blessing to be so introduced.

 

Ed published two of my books and would have done a third if illness hadn't taken him away from us years ago. He sent me his last book of poems, which was stark. His childhood had been more than difficult and, combined with the New Englandly stoicism, made for a stern brew. 

 

In recent years, the conversations between some of us have centered around the question "how's Ed?" I corresponded occasionally with his friend of the many names, now deceased (like my memory), about his failing attempts to keep Talisman on track. Now I find the Talisman House website littered with hacked intrusions, and feel sadness. (Google his books and you find them--and a slew of books on being Wiccan.) And I feel awe at what Ed accomplished over his many years of service to our craft, his close care to others' work, his quiet kindness.

 

Sweetie's new digs

"Are you the person who took Sweetie?" I asked the woman who answered the doorbell. "I wanted to thank you." She was, and I did. We adjourned to one of the rooms in her house; the TV was playing Nemo over a comfy dog bed. And there she was! I'd been afraid that Sweetie might be completely unsocialized after her years alone on the fenced lanai. But she came over to say hello, and has clearly bonded with her new person. Mary is retired military; she did logistics for the army groups that traveled to excavate the graves of dead Americans in SE Asia. While in Vietnam, she had visited the Hanoi Hilton; she's also following the Theravadan monks on their walk across the south, and I told her about the weeping man who told the head monk that his father had been a POW there. She flinched at the memory of her visit. 

 

Shortly after my confrontation with the previous "owner," and before the Humane Society came by, the owner had told Mary that she could have the dog. "Take her," he'd said. She'd asked for Sweetie a year ago, but he didn't want to give her away then. All she could do was to give Sweetie a platform that got her off the cement. Mary decided to think it over, but that next night was cold and wet, so she took Sweetie into her home already populated with a rescue dog and several foster cats. The vet had said they'd check her heart first; if there was something wrong, it's wouldn't be worth going further. Her heart was strong! She was 25 pounds underweight was all. All.

 

Sweetie couldn't walk when Mary got her a few days ago. She's now walking, indoors and out. "Has a bit of a swagger when I take her on short walks," Mary reported. Sweetie's a lovely soul, and she sure smells better than she used to. "For however long she has left," Mary told me, "Sweetie will have a good life."

My heart, cracked hard by the events of this past week, year, decade, opened wide. Next time, I'll take Lilith with me.

Death on the street

I try to stay off my phone during Lilith walks but today we had a long light at Kahekili on the way home, so I turned it on to Threads. First item: "He called her a bitch after he killed her," read the caption to the agent's own video of Good's death. He had started on her side of the car; she smiled at him and said she wasn't angry. He walked behind the car, where Good's wife told him that they didn't change their license plates every day. She heckled him a bit. She had her phone up. Her last words to him before he came all the way around the car were, "go get your lunch, big boy." He came around the front of the car, its wheels turning away from him, and he shot. Digital noise. Video over. 

 

Lilith and I crossed the street.

 

Update on Sweetie, the neglected dog

"The woman with the big white dog took Sweetie," people told me. I couldn't place her, for no good reason imagining a fluffy dog. But, yes, it's the woman who rescued a white pit bull from He`eia; Lilith and I have to navigate around her and the dog, who pulls hard. She told me about her white dog once, her voice gentle. "She's a real animal lover," the property manager told me, "spends thousands of dollars on cats. She asked if she could take Sweetie over a year ago, but the guy said no."

 

Mary (for that might be her name) took Sweetie to the vet, the manager told me. She's healthy, except that she's supposed to weigh 60 pounds and she's down to 40. (She looked like a camp survivor when I last saw her, her haunches nearly fleshless, her ribs protruding.) The Humane Society talked to the man who'd neglected her for over an hour the other day. Perhaps there was a fine. Apparently, there's only one person who does this work on the whole island, the manager said.

 

On our way home, Lilith and I decided to find Sweetie's new person. We were walking beside the next parking lot up, when we saw Sweetie's old "owner." I'd spoken to him last week, telling him I was fond of his dog, was very worried about her. He'd spoken to me with a faint smile on his face. This morning, as he came toward us in his emergency lime green vest, wearing that faint smile, I said, "did Sweetie find a new home?"

 

Mr. Faint Smile walked by us, uttering not a word.

 

For Sweetie

I won't post my last photos of Sweetie; they were taken for the Humane Society. She lived in a fenced-off cement lanai about the size of the box I'm writing in now. This morning, when Lilith and I approached her enclosure, we saw an empty plastic igloo (her residence), a damp cushion half-way into her open door, the yellow plastic bone she never played with (why would she?), a smallish shit stain, no water or food dish, a hose. Her filthy, faded red collar sat on top of the small door on the way out. Sweetie was gone.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

Upside down tee shirts hang on the line under an overhang, dripping from the head space below. Half moon on white shirt or window whose translucence wrinkles. Clothes pins turn to the right; palm fronds hang down. Wallace Stevens is not my type, a poet announces on social media; and if he were? What would dangle down?

Farther trees lumber in moist wind under a clotted gray sky. My teacher corrected me to “skies,” but I see only one, smeared like chalk on cement. Small boy hands brightly colored drawing to monks; one receives it, hands held out, palms up. The new mayor prays with open palms, gloved ones. The palm outside drops dead fronds beside the laundry.

Era of objective falsehoods, like fictions about facts, or facts without invention’s anchor. To tell the truth is to look outside of us, as through a camera, not to dance inside among the crazy synapses. Under tyranny, we see, not think, at least not feelingly. Nothing’s traced inside the diagram of depth, where feeling used to lie like the monks’ dog. Only if introspection orbits over black lines can it operate at all.

Where’s the manual for this time? If space and time are invented by us, we’ve made two big problems! The spaces of time constrict, like blood vessels, while the time of our constructions dissolves like water on salt. That leaves us on a flat surface, flailing to launch. My dog killed a bird the other day; in the family story that followed, bird became two chicks, and death a couple of snacks.

The monk calls our phones our lovers. Hundreds pointed at him, who is coming to be loved through them, set on silent to honor pilgrimage. He urges us not to worry about the world, but to be present to ourselves. “Selves” is not the right word, but will take the place of emptiness for now. At the turn of the year we cling to the high rope with bare toes, bare life meeting the asphalt of a Georgia road, our blisters the size of saucers.

Not flying ones, but those that hit the hard ground. If I cannot find myself inside, I will look for “it” on the road, treasure each pothole as an internal incident. It or thou, no matter. The difference is in our being taker or receiver of the photograph. One monk runs ahead, holding out his phone to record the other monks walking. The phone contains a sacred space, but compresses it for social media.

“I’ve never before seen anyone act Christ-like,” a woman tells her phone. “You give me reason to stay alive,” another tells a monk. She and he are sitting on asphalt. Compassion is also hard. As is this present.

Published photos, now and then

 The expansive new issue of Laura Hinton's journal, Chant de la Sirene, is on-line now. My photographs and writing are among the features, along with Laura's kind, perceptive critique of my abstract photographs. See here: https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/issue-5-ontyranny-poetry-protest-art

 

Because I no longer keep my cv updated (it's also retired!), I'm going to post two other journal issues, these from 2023 and edited by Zhang Er, that include my photographs. Here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6DEEqCKEFw4umhBfSrE8ug

and here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/yQL9HiX4r4dJG0UfdJDIEA 

The poems in this journal are in Chinese, but there's a translation button, too.