HELEN DEGEN COHEN -- HALINA DEGENFISZ -- Poetry and Fiction

Work on line and elsewhere:

Paper publications include: The Partisan Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Minnesota Review,Spoon River Quarterly,Natural Bridge, Rhino. ABROAD: Akcent (Poland), Stand Magazine (England), Versal (Amsterdam), The Antigonish Review (Canada). ANTHOLOGIES: Concert at Chopin's House and The House on Via Gombito (New Rivers Press); Something of Her Own To Say (Columbia University Press); The Sarievo Anghology; Blood to Remember, American Writers on the Holocaust.
ON LINE PUBLICATIONS include: ChicagoPoetry.com, Octavo, The Poetry Porch.com, TheScreamOnline.com, KingLog.com, etc. PLEASE LOOK IN ARCHIVES, OR UNDER Helen Degen Cohen.

Please check out Rhino Magazine as well, at RhinoPoetry.org. And its adjunct, The Poetry Forum, a drop-in workshop in Evanston, IL.

****************************************************************************************************

*SEE DIRECT LINKS TO WORK AT BOTTOM OF PAGE,TO:

--"RETURN TO WARSAW", A MEMOIR,
--an interview in SPOON RIVER QUARTERLY,
--and poems in CHICAGOPOETRY.COM

****************************************************************************************************

SAMPLES OF WORK (changed periodically):

-------------

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT "HABRY" OR "THE END OF SNOW":
From After Hours:

The End of Snow
after reading Anna Swir
1.

1939 and my mother
is not the town beauty
my mother is an orange flower the wind
can move only so much.
Iron in hand
she curls
the butcher's wife's hair.

Powerful gypsies come in and out
whispering secrets their eyes like bats
their skirts sweeping the floor of the beauty shop
My mother the flower says nothing but
dropping her orange hair, smiles.
Oh. Does she know I'm already inside her?

*

My father the Hun stands on a chair
sword in hand, over his customer – Hah!
waving his razor in the air
like an orchestra conductor, whop! whop!—
killing them with stories.

The customer laughs, You tickle me, Joe.
My father takes off the white sheet
from around the man's neck and – whips it into the air, snap!
laughing back, What do you think!
everybody knows me here already!

*

Mama, please don't steal the lilacs.
We are only strangers on the sidewalk, Mama.
When I am a woman, with a house and a fence,
Will you steal lilacs from me too?
Mama, please, don't pick their lilies,
In our house they will turn old,
In our house they will overpower us.

2.

1968 and he curses people who spit in the streets
curses those who will not arrest them
curses the missing signs on the grass
that in Europe told him to KEEP OFF!

You know?--Once I saw Hitler in a parade!
Standing on top of my friend's shoulders!
I saw him! Hah!.... It was really something!

Listen, God had fun making the world!
He is probably still laughing at the joke!
I have to make his acquaintance some time!
Shake his hand! Maybe give him a haircut!
I would be the best barber in heaven!

He is still laughing.
I am still smiling, growing younger by the minute--
I am seven, six--
He lifts me onto his shoulders
quiet under the trees
the fields flapping under white clouds.
Even if he tore the horizon apart
with his screaming, he could still reach God.
I am bringing my father
back to paradise.

*

She ruined her hands with chemical solutions
humming as she curled their perfect little oceanwaves
painting on their long fragrant fingernails
smiling up at their tunics and bows
her hands aswim in the poisonous lacquered waves.

3.

Famous Resistance. Can it be
that in a thicket in the Underground, in 1943

she played a wicked game of chess
with a former Union leader no less
both in shirts of
green parachute?

That out of a tree-stump he had carved a chessboard
in the moonlight, just for her
while, somewhere in the trees, a mandolin played?

That, although she blushed at the way he looked at her
she won
calculating every one of her moves—
and my father

came bounding out of the trees
dragged her back to the fire
and made her dance with him!

Which embarrassed her for all the rest of her life
and the war be damned?
Like owls, we were
lucky to be living in the dark.

My father rose up as if into a dream
when the plane came in the middle of the night.

It was snowing
the softest quietest snow
One by one they came out of their holes
into the whitest midnight on earth
snow falling around them like a myth.

As if what they wished for had a new name.

And so came to (she reminds him)
where the parachute landed
in a tree
dropping tinned meat, cigarettes... and news.

Beside the small fire can it be?
which to God must have appeared like a flower of light
in the damp forests of the earth
below

a Partisan woman leaned back to sing
a war ballad and they sang along.

Perhaps it can, in 1989.

But my father remembers only
the snow
that fell so quietly
into his dream.

-----------------------------

from TheScreamOnLine.com:

The Odor of Memory
(a poem in 4 sections)

A boy, recalling:

We got there in a
state of awe
It was like having traveled
all those years
without knowing it
to arrive in this shaky wagon
full of straw—
the world smelled powerfully
good and there were girls
of every kind but all
the same, with skin.
And breath
they breathed like a disease
almost, some sort of
heavenly, holy disease. We grew red.
That rickety wagon.
How could you learn anything?
Yet everyone thought
we could learn.
The trees
dropped their faces over us. They were
girls.
Wheels, machinery, rolled over us,
motorcycles airplanes—wheels
we had to control, get on top of—ride.

A girl, recalling:

We got there in a state
of awe
without knowing it, without
having traveled. We were
trees that had never budded before,
our leaves greening, shedding, falling
like paper
you could draw on, like cloth
you could sew into anything,
we were
utilitarian
so pure were we, in and out of the
hopscotch squares
our hair a river of silver fish.
We floated
without moving, we arrived
in the rickety wagon and the world
smelled masculine—
we were tickled even by the word,
we were moist, we were
open words, we were m’s the s’s could
crawl into, we ached,
we were trees finally budding.

A boy, recalling:

They stood opposite
in the roomful of straw,
grounded like open flowers,
iris, camellias, wavering,
we thought they were only girls, across
the wagonload of straw, they sat
always opposite, across, as if
already filled up with country liquor, we
didn’t know it was sugar-water.
Still, we moved, we were used to
moving, never knowing
limbs, groins, what to do—in olden days
boys wrote poetry
something in us really wanted to write poetry
something we didn’t know
so we moved,
we coiled like rattlers in the straw
and they stood opposite, like calves, then cows.
They were the world. No longer trees.

A girl, recalling:

We came second. So it seemed. Their
moving, their motion, coming first,
because we stood so still, because
we sat still as the close-up
odor of grass,
of straw you could die in, widening
in slow motion, in iris and camellian
ways (so bad) because
we could barely hold our breath
for the budding, while they
across the roomful of straw
moved, snaked, and we, waiting,
like flesh-eating plants,
opened, no, like open water
in our silver cups, opened and closed and
A stable thing is afraid of motion.
We were trunks moving, whirling, turning from
paper to leaves, to grass, to too many things solid
as silver cows,
we were no longer trees.

© 2002 Helen Degen Cohen

Helen Degen Cohen (Halina Degenfisz) is a widely-published poet and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She won First Prize in Stand magazine's worldwide fiction competition for an excerpt from her autobiographical novel, The Edge of the Field. Other honors include two Illinois Arts Council Awards, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, an Indiana Writers Conference award in Poetry, and fellowships to the four major art colonies in the United States.

Ms. Cohen is a graduate of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and, after years traveling to schools throughout the state as part of the Artist in Education program, she returned to teaching (at Roosevelt University) and then to co-editing Rhino magazine. Helen originally co-founded the magazine as well as its adjunct, the Poetry Forum, a monthly drop-in workshop. She can be reached at: Halinka1[AT]aol.com (replace [AT] with @).

For more of her work in TheScreamOnline, visit the Talent Index.

HELEN DEGEN COHEN -- HALINA DEGENFISZ -- Poetry and Fiction

Two bodies of work -- 1) the war and Europe, and 2) everything else.

Work in Poetry, Fiction, Non-fiction, and Theater

Work on line and elsewhere:

DIRECT LINKS TO WORK:

My Favorite Products