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.