Doctor KEN HOGARTY, who lives in SF’s East Bay with his wife Sally, retired after a 46-year career as a high school teacher/principal. He also taught collegiate grad classes. Since, he has had many stories, essays, short plays, memoirs, and comedy pieces published in Underwood, Sport Literate, Sequoia Speaks, LYRA, Cobalt, Woman’s Way, Purpled Nails, the S.F. Chronicle, MacQueen’s, In Parentheses, Doubleback Review, Bridge Eight, the Under Review, Barzakh Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Mini Plays Review, Word’s Faire, NUNUM. Route 7, Wingless Dreamer, TwoTwoOne, The Kelp Review, Good Old Days, Robot Butt, the Satirist, and Points in Case, among other publications. You can find a preview and critique of his novel as well as viewing other published works, at https://kenhogarty.net/

Pseudonym

By Ken Hogarty

            “There’s a poem inside everybody,” Velma Richmond Smith’s mother told her adult daughter just before breast cancer took her, “just waiting to be unlocked.” At the time, Velma imagined the poem of the mentally retarded child, the old-fashioned nun in her habit, the prostitute Velma saw strolling the Brazilian seaport on one of her few travel escapes, or even the characters in introspective stories whose stasis intrigued her. Their poems seemingly remained locked, veiled from the world like the real personalities of the 19th century female novelists, beloved by Velma, whose work appeared in print topped by a male pseudonym.

            Velma had unlocked her poem. She had put words to paper before, forming many keys many times. But she still needed to find the right key and file it to perfection to get it just so to turn the tumblers. This one fit. The key had turned deep into her soul. She had known it would fit as she worked on it to the last syllable. She had mailed it off as she had many of the others. The others she had quickly forgotten until they typically came back with polite rejections; this one she hadn’t, and it didn’t.

            The New Yorker would print it. Velma had had poems, verses really, published in obscure poetry journals, but this was a prestigious magazine that some in her circle would have died to see highlight their name, if only as the winner of the weekly cartoon caption contest.

            The key fit, but the reality that the magazine would hit the newsstands in a day or two tempered Velma’s joy. The turning of that key grinded Velma’s insides. Velma dropped the letter of acceptance she had pulled back out to reexamine with her poem, maybe for the hundredth time, to the kitchen table. Though alone, she sighed audibly as if for the benefit of another. She picked the letter up to read again, this time thinking solely of the magazine’s circulation, the readership who would know something of her, of her life, of a reality beneath her veil and into her locked heart.

            And, of course, she thought of Joe. Almost consciously pulling her make-believe veil back on, Velma jumped to her feet and crossed to the sink. Mechanically, she prepared the sink to wash the dishes strewn about on the counter. Before, she had stared at egg-stained plates imagining them to be private Rorschach tests, but now she only thought of them as plates to be rubbed clean. Plates, silverware, and pans were simply plates, silverware and pans.

            The last dish placed in its place in the cupboard above, Velma reached for a broom. She swept the floor compulsively, thinking about Langston Hughes’ poem about sweeping the world clean with a mop of blood. Her tied bundles of straw searched crevices and corners for hidden wisps of dirt. Always there were thoughts of Joe and his reaction to her poem.

            Velma loved Joe, though recognizing him as almost a flat character. He drank beer, watched sports on television, worked hard, and barely suffered change. Joe Smith: Ring it out loud, clear, and uncomplicated. Joe Smith: Right up front; right there. Joe Smith: Like his father and his father before him — no secrets. His reactions were as predictable as a light bulb. Still, Velma loved Joe.

The poem, she was sure, would shatter him.

Velma turned the house upside down and then upside right for two hours, but she only thought of Joe who would be home a little after five. Velma flirted with the idea of avoiding the confrontation but choked that idea at its inception. He would read the poem eventually. Somebody would talk about it. She and Joe were too close to expect otherwise. He was certain to find out. She would need to force the moment to its crisis.

            Velma reread her poem three times during the afternoon. It was part of her, but she needed the words in front of her just the way Joe needed the announcer to tell him what was happening during a football game. Thoughts and images returned to life, made even more beautiful in their yielding to a poetic format.  The poem mystically resurrected and recaptured the moment and even the flesh. Love. Physical love. Passionate love. Love on a vacation. Love with a stranger. Sweating, needing love with no promise of commitment. Hidden love.

            Velma blushed and threw down the dregs of a cup of lukewarm coffee. Her skin tingled, and little beads of perspiration trickled down her face and even into the valley of the nape of her neck. Her mother had joked once that women didn’t sweat but only glowed. Clearly, a joke.

            Perfunctorily, Velma finished her self-imposed list of chores. Four o’clock. Joe’s imagined monosyllabic responses began to intrude: “Lust; Wrong; Sin; Hurt!” The explicit, naked, personal lines in the poem would not leave much room for doubt. Joe would look at her in an entirely different light. Their relationship might be shattered, but Velma knew she had to let Joe read the poem. She owed him the chance to read it before somebody else they knew told or teased him about it. But, how to bring it up?

            Upstairs, Velma drew a bath. The warm water tickled her body as she immersed herself in its comforting bubbled warmth. Joe’s first pronouncements when he had found out about Velma’s desire to take creative writing classes at the state college extension center fifteen miles away seemed to echo from the crackle of the bubbles: “For what reason?” “Don’t you have enough to do?” “Foolishness! A waste of time! What will you write about?”

            At first, Velma remembered, Joe had been right. She had nothing to write about, nothing real she dared write about. Writing those poems was all about other people’s feelings and experiences, imagined or pasted together from literature. Her scribblings amounted to generalities, platitudes, axioms, morals festooned to emulate poems. Finally, she had let herself go. Write about what you know, what you do, who you really are her teachers prodded. Velma abruptly brushed aside some bubbles. What I know; what I do; who I really am. It was all in the poem.

            Velma awkwardly sidled out of the tub. The cold-fanned air rushed to meet her warmed body before she quickly snuggled into her Egyptian cotton towel. She leisurely patted herself dry, thinking of her poem that turned on the contrast between a mundane day in the house and the one day with the exhilarating stranger. Though far from cold, Velma shivered as the intense feeling of that imagery suffused her. The poem and that day were real. She couldn’t conceive of pretending they weren’t. The details, the place, the time were all unmistakably clear, unmistakably real. As real as the description and detail of this place, Velma thought, this place and everything about it that locked her in. As real as Joe who counted on her.

*          *          *          *

            The front door downstairs opens and closes. Joe’s home. Velma knows what he’s doing without being downstairs, his every move on his entrance etched in her consciousness. He plops his coat onto a chair in the hallway. He sits his lunch pail on the kitchen counter. He pops open a Smithwick’s. He positions his body almost supine in the brown leather chair in front of the flickering-to-life television.

            Velma, a novice actress groping hesitantly over uncomfortable lines, nervously practices her opening as she throws on her underwear, dowdy black pants and plain sweatshirt.

            Self-consciously descending the stairs to live a real-life experience. To refigure who she really is. Slowly, deliberately – no sound – and then a desperate rush. Joe’s in the kitchen where Velma had left the copy of the poem and acceptance letter on the table near where Joe always looks for his mail.

            “Joe, my poem.”

            A penetrating look. “You wrote this, Velma?” He waves it in the air as if it’s an eviction notice.

            “Yes, it’s mine. It’s going to be published.” Velma hesitates in mid-stride toward Joe. Joe looks child-like, his huge worker hands toying with the delicate onion-skinned manuscript that’s her original. But then he places it gingerly, almost reverently, back down on the table.”

            “My God, Velma. Published?”

            “In a national magazine,” Velma’s pride creeps into her retort.

            “Your name?”

            “I used Velma Richmond, the same I used on those other poems published in small journals. Like a pen name. Me and not me.”

            “Velma, it’s . . . it’s so . . . real. Even our real place.” Of all things, Velma notices that Joe hasn’t even opened his beer. She crosses closer to him.

            Velma surprises herself feeling as calm as she does. “It is real, Joe. All of it.”

Joe encircles Velma’s wrist, tenderly as if she were a baby. “Velma,” Joe’s voice trembles, “what is poetry? What did those professors teach you? Do you have to . . . to do something like this?” Joe’s not angry, Velma senses. He’s scared.

            “Yes, Joe, I had to. Anything else would have been a sham. I . . . I feel Joe. I’m a woman. A real live flesh and blood woman.” Velma measures her words carefully as she shifts gears: “Poetry has to be an intensely honest expression of feeling.”

            Joe Smith loosens his grip on Velma’s wrist. Furtively, his eyes dart to the poem as if to see if it’s still there. Joe bites his lip before raising his head and staring straight into Velma’s eyes. She thinks of it as seeing some new circuit pumping current to his soul. “I’ll be damned. My little sister. A poet. And I didn’t know it. I’ll be damned!” He bangs his fist on the table emphatically but not violently. “Published. My little sister who helped raise me and always took care of dad to the end. A life of her own. Damn! Let’s celebrate.” He shoots past her crossing to the refrigerator. He pulls out another beer and opens both, foam spraying on the counter like spent fireworks falling to earth on Independence Day.

            Velma shivers. Had he understood what the poem said? Depicted? “Joe?”

            “A published poet,” he repeats. Velma has never seen him this way. He extends one of the beers to Velma. “Here, take it,” he booms. “Take it, please.” He raises his can in toast. “To my sister. My sister I hardly knew. Dammit, father would have loved to have known you were human and not just a fleshless creature like our . . . .” Joe stops, catching himself. He’s not comfortable unlocking any part of his own soul. Speechless herself, Velma joins her brother quietly, pensively drinking their beers.

Joe says no more, instead picking up the poem and acceptance letter again to peruse both as if seeing them anew.     

*          *          *          *

Velma slurps down the rest of her beer, glad to be done. She picks up the poem as Joe awkwardly reaches out to give her a peck on the cheek. She gathers the poem and carries it upstairs to her bedroom, her mother’s room toward the end so that her father could sleep undisturbed.

She opens the jewelry box that plays the “Viennese Waltz” whenever she uses the key from the chain around her neck to open her mother’s prized possession. The melody, as it always does, moves her. Cocooned in a silence that like fiction is at the heart of the real world of experience, Velma, tears now streaming down her face, places the poem on top of her mother’s diary that germinated it. She reaches for the key but then, smiling, chooses to leave the box unlocked. It will now play for whomever chooses to open it.

  • Reprint — originally published in Sequoia Speaks (Winter 2022, print-only journal, now defunct). This version has been lightly revised for this submission.