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Contents
Rushton Emery Loring
An Autumn Well...........................................................................8
Kate Putnam
The Cartographer, 1.....................................................................10
The Cartographer, 2.....................................................................12
Christopher Robin’s Theory of What the World is Like..............................14
Elizabeth Qualls
Ruin.......................................................................................16
Alexandra Katsos
There is No Wha in Who................................................................17
Amber Midgett
Broken Ballad............................................................................19
Cala Estes
Life Unto the Dawn.....................................................................20
David Wall
Same Difference.........................................................................22
The Hospital Rhythm....................................................................23
Empty Field...............................................................................25
Candace Owens
A Polaroid from July, 2007...........................................................27
Temporary Solutions to Permanent Problems.........................................28
The Build-Up, Unveiling, and Review of Human Artwork.........................29
Happy Hunting Ground.................................................................31
Maurice Moore
Heavy Cross..............................................................................32
Caroline Hughes
Temple Wires.............................................................................34
Morganne Radziewicz
I Was a Lover............................................................................36
C O R A D D I
4 5
Holly Mason
Communion..............................................................................74
Goose Creek..............................................................................75
The Scent Remains.......................................................................76
Ashley Wiggins
Ode to Joe................................................................................78
Jamison B. Hackelman
Medlan Yearning.........................................................................80
Kenneth Bennett
Untitled..................................................................................92
Steisha Pintado
Self Portrait (Energize).................................................................94
Isabelle Abbot
Climax, NC..............................................................................96
Hagan Stone.............................................................................97
David Nolker
Blind......................................................................................98
Jayce Christian Russell
Those Who Would Remain............................................................104
Death of Venus.........................................................................106
Jessica Vantrease
Chalk Castles, Asphalt Sky...........................................................108
Emily Dickinson Was Human.........................................................109
Escapement.............................................................................110
The Campaign...........................................................................111
Sophie Rynas
One Day I’ll Be Safe in the Arms of Parentheses....................................112
Alex Craig
Insects...................................................................................114
Julie Sullivan
Everyone is a Villain....................................................................115
Ben Huber
The Day I Decided to Ditch College and Go to Pastry School Instead............117
Bradley Scott Biggerstaff
Imagine Delirium.......................................................................118
Cassandra Poulos
Marion’s Acid Trip......................................................................119
Tommy Malekoff
Untitled (Creation of Adam).........................................................122
Jolie Day
Sausages..................................................................................38
Morgan Joyce
Duchamp Shuffle........................................................................39
Samuel Dalzell
Endurance.................................................................................40
Jessica Beebe
The First Year............................................................................41
John Friedrich
Untitled 45...............................................................................42
Untitled 47...............................................................................43
Afterlife..................................................................................44
Indelible..................................................................................45
Charlotte Kathryn Smith
Speculations on the Private Life of a Cashier at The Dollar General.............46
Yadkin Valley Dying Song..............................................................48
Katie Fennell
Between Two Hills: Three Vignettes...................................................50
Caitlin Watkins
Getting to Bermuda......................................................................52
Clink......................................................................................54
Malbert Smith
Iya.........................................................................................55
Laath Martin
Matronly Lesson..........................................................................58
Eyes, The First............................................................................60
Ghanian Play.............................................................................62
Drema Wilson
Cityscape.................................................................................64
Dance.....................................................................................66
Autumn Rayn Brehon
Escapism..................................................................................68
Jessica Fritz
The Whitest Day I Can Remember.....................................................69
Corey Cantaluppi
That Room................................................................................71
David Englebretson
Simple Degree of Truth..................................................................72
Peel - A New Way to Look at Student Poverty........................................73
6 7
Travis Hauer
Cheeseburgers..........................................................................151
The Dancer..............................................................................152
Caitlin Meredith
Pasiphae and the Bull.................................................................154
Penelope.................................................................................155
Persephone Speaks to Demeter........................................................156
Hannah Danger
Person Watching.........................................................................157
Garrett Taddeucci
Sleeping, Sweating, the Sounds, and the Silence...................................158
New Year’s Meditation.................................................................159
Jesse Morales
Night Lights.............................................................................160
Les Demoiselles Opaques..............................................................162
Clefts....................................................................................163
Spirit and Flesh.........................................................................164
To the Working Class God I Have Lost..............................................165
Christopher Stella
God, Strung Out.......................................................................167
Tate and Rankin........................................................................168
Caitie Bailey
Bird is Word, Scale is Frail..............................................................172
Yourself..................................................................................173
Jillian Wood Anderson
Untitled.................................................................................174
Lunar Cnidaria.........................................................................176
Above All Else, Be Armed.............................................................177
Samuel Gregor Dalzell
Untitled.................................................................................178
Gaze.....................................................................................180
William Leatherwood
Daniel Doon............................................................................182
Matt Northrup
Young Thought..........................................................................184
Alexa Feldman
2012 (We’re Fucked)..................................................................185
Contributors’ Notes...........................................................................186
Kimberly Nguyen
Forever..................................................................................124
Janie Ledford
Danger...................................................................................125
Untitled (T. Lee)......................................................................126
Blaine Wyatt Carteaux
Untitled (Leigh)........................................................................127
Taking Trips with Dad.................................................................128
Labyrinth...............................................................................129
Jolie Day
Tiger Fish Doesn’t Care About You Other Sea Critters............................130
Rebecca Bennett
School...................................................................................131
Samantha McPeters
Vacuum................................................................................132
Lauren Ling
All Brilliant.............................................................................133
Samuel Gregor Dalzell
Marksman..............................................................................134
Technophile............................................................................135
Sam Otterbourg
Renaissance.............................................................................136
Colton Weaver
Bury Me in Paris........................................................................138
Title This, Millenials...................................................................139
Alexandra Ledford
Elegy....................................................................................142
The Burdens Undertaken by Important People of Polite Society..................144
McAlister Greiner
Remembrance...........................................................................145
Ashley Fare
Warming................................................................................146
Kendra Hammond
Wander..................................................................................147
Michele Trumble
Exhale...................................................................................148
Robert Watkins
Excursion...............................................................................149
8 9
But, unavoidably,
Winter stuffs Autumn away,
With a winded push.
Nevertheless,
Autumn remains
In a closet where
I throw my bucket.
An Autumn Well
by Rushton Emery Loring
Autumn is kept in the closet
So she can’t breathe out
Tangerines and bark.
So she can’t hang like a portrait
Or stand like a friend.
But when I need to
Hide in finished leaves or
Breathe and simply breathe,
I stand at the season’s edge -
A closet brimming with Autumn,
And I drink in warmth
From a strum
Negotiating mountains.
Listen.
Vibrations don’t dry up.
Not when a neck fits in a palm
Or when bodies are
Born again into one.
Melodies aren’t like wallets
And skin and creeks and spit.
But rather -
Sound becomes street lamps,
Magnolia leaves, and a watery
Wood grain - a well with a thousand
Blue daisies. A perfect fix to a silent
Desk.
10 11
we jump from skiff to skiff in the canals of this death-crazed, screaming
country
and only take what catches our eyes, makes our chests expand outwards and
our fists come to rest on our hips, swashbucklers who wave swords and shake
in our fists the fingerbones of our enemies, though we have only molded
them
out of clay and our eyes are whole under the velvet patches, and we wonder
how much of the world around us can shine gold before we die.
The Cartographer, 1
by Kate Putnam
My friends and I have eyes as big as universes,
like the giant squid that fill the empty spaces of ancient maps,
dilated wide to gobble up the light of the flames of
the burning city around us as we shriek our discordant joy –
Oh, the plunder gleaned from the ruinous wake of lives lived!
Just keep swimming, one of them yells to me
as we’re tossed overboard amid a sea of thrashing wet strangers,
and I do, shoulders surging forward with a heartbeat like
we are in a hurricane ocean fight for survival, and I can barely lift
my head over the waves to gasp in enough air to go forward,
gasp in a throat-full of smoke - not mine - and listen to the scuffing
of tired boots on concrete underneath the forced laughter of
four hours until sunrise and if we can push past this one moment
of lull, we’ll be awake to see it, and then we’ll have another reason
to dance. There are so many.
We are young enough to go to work in the morning and I
am young enough to keep laughing even though some part of
me is worrying about the silence of our wake and the laughter
I am using is torn from the body of some landlubber.
We are strong enough that our presence is enough to fill sails and I
am strong enough to push the water down my throat and through
my gills as though I am turning mermish and will live forever in coral beds.
Still, eye-lit candles and saline water as the grains of our
minds percolate a weak tea of unrealized potential, our hands
gesturing in grand ceremony at this latest port. I once expressed a
desire to be geisha and no one agreed but everyone wished for kimonos.
We will wear the robes but we will not espouse the stiff obi-restraint of ideas,
not yet, we are too young and too mind-wide for that. Right now
12 13
I could not breach any border, and so
while those areas of my maps are detailed
and easily transversed again – the natives
will remember my face and rush to greet me
as one of them –
I will not return to those borderlands.
I leave them for the tourists, to be scavenged for souvenirs.
In you I am become Columbus.
I lay my hands to this map
and declare it my own.
With my hands I will ink the lines of your landscape
and note those landmarks which were before
only vague legends and innuendo.
I have looked across these borders and known you existed
where others wrote you off as monsters and folkloric fancy.
I know you, though I have never seen you until today,
and I will learn you
your histories, your flora, your local customs,
your gods, your songs, your tempers and temperatures.
I will record all of these things and
my countrymen will say to me
‘How brave you were, to dive into the unknown,
the inky black darkness where, they say,
dangers surely lie.’
And I will shake my head, and point
to my maps and reply, ‘No.
You see?
This place of you was always there.
I knew before I ever saw your face.”
The Cartographer, 2
by Kate Putnam
When I say I know you
I’m not talking about your face.
I’m not talking about the way your skin
wraps over your muscles and dips smoothly
over the rolling landscape of your body.
These things are uncharted territory to my eyes,
places on my maps that are blank, their edges
bordered with half-satirical hearts
and vague notions of who you might be.
Ancient mariners would have plastered bold words
over these uncertainties: Here there be monsters.
But I am the hardly intrepid observer of today;
my pen scratches hesitantly across the known void.
I want... it begins, and then the ink trails away
disappears into the wrinkles and folds of the paper
as though I must keep unfolding to find
the end of the sentence.
I have explored all the borders surrounding this unknown.
I have wiped my tears in the warmth of the lowlands and
swallowed them up against the harsher climes,
bowed my back and shouldered burdens for those I thought could guide me in,
begged artifacts from those who would swear to have returned.
There is evidence of my forays, left perhaps
for other explorers to discover in other expeditions,
and use to form their own incorrect theories:
books of insecurely vague poetry and photographs stolen
from yearbooks and broken handcuffs and bits of
bravado I have ripped
from my own skin.
14 15
(because even his bear knew
there was no honey without bees).
But the bees did not really sting Winnie the Pooh,
only buzzed. A bear of very little brain
is too much fluff to feel the pain.
A bee can sting, or a bear can fall
into a thistle bush, and, well, that’s a bother, but
then there was Eeyore, who was apt to thank
the bear for finding his dinner.
In the Hundred Acre Wood, everybody
was always benefiting somebody.
It was only a matter of time.
Winnie the Pooh ate the Eeyore’s birthday honey
(because he was a bear and that’s what bears do)
and Piglet popped his birthday balloon
(because he was a pig and that’s what pigs… oh, bother)
and Eeyore – who was what Christopher Robin tried to be
when Christopher Robin was blue – didn’t like balloons
or honey, very much (because he was blue and not one person
wants to look at a balloon, which is happy, when
they’re sad, which is what you are when you’re blue)
anyways. Bears and pigs shouldn’t pick out birthday presents
because apparently they are bad at it.
And we’ll wonder about why Eeyore had a birthday some other day.
Like when we wonder where in the Wood Piglet got a balloon.
Christopher Robin’s Theory of
What the World is like
by Kate Putnam
Winnie the Pooh was a bear of very little brains
(because he was full of fluff so
there was not much room left for brains).
Owl was wiser but only as wise as Christopher Robin,
because Christopher Robin made him wise.
Christopher Robin made Winnie the Pooh stupid, too,
but only insofar as Christopher Robin
was stupid.
When Winnie the Pooh tried to understand the world
it was only Christopher Robin trying to explain the world,
and since the bear was the boy, or the boy was the bear,
neither understood from beginning to end.
It was okay for Christopher Robin to lie to his bear
because we all have to lie to ourselves
sometimes.
We all think we’re smarter
(and taller)
than we really are.
Christopher Robin put his brains in an owl,
and his honey in a bear,
and his rabbit grew its own carrots
(which is a sensible thing for a rabbit to do)
but the carrots were only Christopher Robin, too.
Honey was what Christopher Robin wanted
so honey was what his bear tried to get.
And of course there were bees
16 17
THERE IS NO WHA IN WHO
by Alexandra Katsos
I was never inherently selfish.
I was concrete, saw the bigger picture.
We were only bodies we wished were others.
Only faces worn with missing eyes.
In the dead of the night …
we kept the television on to lessen the sound,
the gasping moan, four times over.
The way you’d succumb.
Me as I was, on top.
Left bruises under my bones
the other lovers laughed to marvel at.
Did they pay the attention you wanted?
With your constant begging
always covered in hair like dental floss.
Well I tossed that salad, I fought it off.
The bigger picture meant self-preservation;
it meant hailing the mustard cab 387.
One meal a day to afford your dive;
its pricy subjection
pushing forward stained and empty glasses,
pulling down lowered shirts,
my heart finally fully saturated.
I requested anything, except the blues.
Burnt all those pricks with their pieces in a circle.
I never invited you.
And with a status change we both stopped coming.
You told me inside you were just a child.
Suckling on each teat
with your expected achievement,
a well that eventually ran dry,
Ruin
by Elizabeth Qualls
Small cool stone
bright candied red
speckled along the curve
pooling underneath.
Snap of the slingshot
whistle of a missile
slicing through benign air
A dizzy tumble
careening lower
soft feathers rustle
wings caress grass.
I am seven
standing on that sidewalk,
this is my first taste.
18 19
Broken Ballad
by Amber Midgett
All my poetry was stolen by a girl in a Detroit Lions jersey.
She wanted to run away to some obscure European country,
like Montenegro or Malta, where one couldn’t guess offhand
what language they’ll be speaking.
She left without me when I realized that the rest of the world
fighting against two was more than I could manage. She took
my words with her.
Who knows what they’re saying now.
an inner thigh that didn’t.
Filthy dirty rascal, you must’ve milked it right.
I told you I never wanted my own child;
so someone should tip the sitter
sitting on your face.
We don’t have time for it.
Our needs were as discussed.
It was never you
who looked around but never up.
You’ll pity a fool
and never let on that you actually gave a fuck.
20 21
and all the land was still.
Said the prince to the quiet Moon,
“I think thou art too early.”
Said the lady to the fiery Sun,
“And I think thou art too late.”
So for an age their gazes held
locked in a loop of silence.
Until at last, as one they spoke
and reached out with both hands.
Said the Moon in modest manner,
“Light must always lead the way.”
And said the Sun in gentle whispers,
“Night is comfort to the day.”
And so they joined in hands and hearts,
the Lady and the Prince of Stars.
The silver and the gold together
bring life unto the dawn.
Life Unto the Dawn
by Cala Estes
A hundred stars drawn on the walls,
a dozen comets behind the curtains,
a thousand stories as yet untold,
and just one night to read them.
Close your eyes, my tired lover,
and I’ll sit by your side.
Beneath the covers lies a world of mist
where sea foam caps the sky.
There was a man of princely state
who traveled o’er the land.
And for his blade, he caught the Sun
and threw it from his hand.
There was a lady of humble means
whose craft was moonlight art.
She wove the words that whispers spoke
then tied them to the wind.
And on the eve of equal time,
before the first leaves fell,
at twilight’s rain the Moon and Sun
clashed amid the heavens.
The golden prince
and the silver lady
stood either side of dusk.
No whispers came,
no battles raged,
22 23
The Hospital Rhythm
by David Wall
I remember the metronome beat of the machine
Leashed to her chest and wrist, unrelenting.
No one could erase the steady rhythm —
Each beat, same tone, forward, then back.
We waited, halfway expecting to hear a break,
A syncopation, a jazzy skip to bend the chime
Over again, on itself, rounding the quick declines.
We did not cut straws to decide our shifts,
But we all took our turns in stale seats
Then stumbled into corner shadows.
Filling my mother’s room, no —her Extended
Care room, with dense recycled air, calm tension
Expected in infirmaries: papered walls,
Four-wheeled bed-frame, a small television set —
Having already, time and again, seen faces like ours.
We prayed, each day with amen and amens
Following in unison the effortless beeping.
Patience, family visits, a preacher sat
Along with us, and we tapped our feet together.
Growing dependent on the digital repeat, we
Lost ourselves when it fell into a ceaseless scream —
A turntable needle pierced our eardrums,
Tracing an unending channel, colliding
Into the ticking clock on the wall. Sharp
Unbroken static fell over us, like waves
From the walls of the Red Sea, after the prophet
Let his hands fall to his side, his people safe.
Same Difference
by David Wall
I want to get home tonight
Wrench off my shoes and socks
Run through my front yard
Cutting across browned grass
Barking at the stars, daring them
To fall down and spit on
My hands to prove they are
Serious about this shining.
24 25
Empty Field
by David Wall
When you called to ask me if I wanted—
Let’s pause for a moment. I feel
As though the word “want,”
Used to ask me if I would
Be at your wedding day act
Is like using the world “love”
To describe what you have now.
Four letters combined in this way,
They are not efficient, cardboard around
Door frames to keep out the cold, apologies
After betrayal, forks for eating ice cream—
On the other side of a bookended
Silence, when you decided to phone me,
My chest seized. Unlike when you
Decided it was best not to grab coffee,
Or set up scenes in sandwich shops;
I was surprised. Books on a shelf
Are used to not being able to stretch,
And I knew it would be a long time
Before you picked me up again.
You gave me choices.
Did I “want” to come or did I not
“Want” to be there for you the day
You turned me from friend to old
Friend, from chance to decided
Upon, future to past. Would I
Come to see you given away
By the father who never lifted
His hand when I drove by?
How long did my father listen? The preacher
Found him, with arms crossed and head down,
As if drowning, unable to float. We were covered
In loss denser than salt water, with no chance to gasp.
My lungs refuse to expand. No more dry breath.
This heart, searches for rhythm again, a steady
Beat to mimic, rattles against my ribs. A nurse blackened
The bedside monitors and left us to new silence.
Weeks before she checked into Baptist Women’s Memorial,
After waking up from a nap on her couch, the one resting
In front of the bay window, my mother remarked:
Sleeping is a whole lot like practice.
26 27
A Polaroid from July, 2007
by Candace Owens
I like you best
in the drivers seat
with your wayfarers on
and my legs on your dashboard
with nothing to fight except
the passage of time
Would I find my seat
In the field where
A man I had never met
Would shove me from the shelf
To replace me with an emptied
Picture frame of some young girl
Dressed in off-white, close
Against the same man?
No, I didn’t want to make it
And months later, when you tripped
On your pallid gown and fell
To the flowered floor, I’m sure
You thought how lucky
Only friends saw you fall.
28 29
The Build-Up, Unveiling,
and Review of Human Artwork
by Candace Owens
He holds me and my colors bleed,
A living, breathing coated candy in the palm of his hand.
Ashamed, I wonder can he see my dull and rotten insides?
Skin painted watercolors on the sheets, his olive, mine peach.
But where I was hoping for pastels, I see a muddy mural,
Set against a backdrop of superficial bullshit-
A visual composition of the months of smiles,
Witty comebacks,
Calculated movements
It took us to get here.
Now his once-dirty laundry is hanging on the line,
Shedding every last hint of me-
Another attempted masterpiece forgotten,
Thrown in the washing machine.
Two hours later and I’m driving away,
Seatbelt unbuckled intentionally.
Cross my legs, light a cigarette.
Ding-ding-dings of the seatbelt off sign serve me auditory pleasure,
As reckless driving habits are my only revolt against a life that seems
Scripted for us to act out,
Filled with implicit rules and expectations.
go to class.
get a job.
join a club.
date nice boys.
eyes on the road.
hands on the wheel. (no)
fasten your seatbelt. (ding-ding-ding, NO)
Temporary Solutions to
Permanent Problems
by Candace owens
Your lips on mine in the back of a late-night movie,
Retreat to your car’s backseat once credits are rolling-
Well, I hate to say it, but it’s really too damn cliche.
Cause all bullshit aside, I bet you’re a really nice kid,
But you and I, we both know what this is.
And sure, you made me shudder in steady rhythms like
The revving engine of your car, but that’s not really love, now is it?
Instant gratification may slake our hunger,
But I’m hollow in ways that your hands can’t fill.
You are the clothes strewn on the floor.
You are the jokes you tell for comic relief.
You are the eight-hour quick fix pill.
30 31
Happy Hunting Ground
by Candace Owens
I remember when
I let my roots grow out long and
you said it made me look wild,
like a member of an island nation
we wrote the laws of the land
a mix of your rules and
my revelations, a king
and queen with no subjects
you taught me to hunt
and tear through the grizzle with my teeth
of the very same animals we’d tricked
into being our friends
I drew faces in the sand when
we ate on the beach and
we pretended like we were hosting a royal feast
instead of scavenging scraps like wolves
and at night we’d make love
and I’d howl and I’d cry
because no one could hear us
or tell me to quiet
it started with a shipwreck
and ended with love
we built our own kingdom
an wild Eden of our own
Handed a rhythm to maintain like monkeys with brass cymbals,
No room for new patterns, only the same continuum of
perform, impress, amuse.
During these drives alone, I can feel my fair complexion graying
Like the dusty pages of an old newspaper,
Seeking refuge from such perfunctory percussion
Before my hue has been permanently desaturated.
Left piece-by-piece as ghostly shades on boys’ bed-sheets,
Friends’ couches,
Schoolroom desks,
Coffee-shop mugs,
Impersonal letters of “recognition for academic excellence”...
No longer able to sustain the societal beat imposed upon me,
I’m drained of both my color and my battery
32 33
Heavy Cross
Maurice Moore
Next:
Temple Wires
Caroline Hughes
34 35
36 37
I Was a Lover
Morganne Radziewicz
38 39
Previous:
Sausages
jolie Day
Duchamp Shuffle
Morgan Joyce
40 41
The First Year
by Jessica Beebe
I’ll be married by winter,
with every i dotted,
the underside of my arms exposed.
The dress will unravel by morning
but I’ve made certain we are ready,
they don’t prepare you for things like this.
I’ll build my house around autumn
and plan birthdays in advance,
I prefer a driveway lined with oak trees.
I’ve decided to burn toast in the evening
and peel oranges at midnight,
of course, I’ll invent stories for the lapse
in the day.
I’ll write less poetry and more conversation,
pay attention when he talks in his sleep,
and these lists will hold us as we wait for the first fall
of snow.
Endurance
by Samuel Dalzell
For how much longer must we endure the tired tyranny of public hypocrites?
hyperconsumption
hyperstimulation
and:
Greed, Ignorance, Bigotry, Misinformation, War,
Religious Fervor, False Hope, Corporate Hegemony,
Ecological Meltdown, Overpopulation, Poverty,
Institutionalized Dehumanization?
(no matter:
for we shall continue to
breathlessly shout paeans of
adoration to glossy demigods
who’ve done right in our eyes)
alas,
now we have been made
w h o l e
?
42 43
Untitled 45
by John Friedrich
blind alleys feel their way
as rats and fools
stumble lives against the bricks
and the stoplight changes
to tell the empty road
it has every right to leave
Untitled 47
by John Friedrich
Splitting hairs
one by one
and still the truth
grows no more bald
Pour then another cup
of my wine
— if any man can own
what sun and grape lacking witness
create —
and bring the dead philosopher
forth from your lips
parted also by cigarette
and words broken only
by the whippoorwill
who tasted neither
wisdom nor wine
and yet whose voice
is more easily recalled
44 45
Indelible
by John Friedrich
Cover every inch of skin
in tattoos
— you pick the color —
and still you can bore me
Rebels indifferent to cause
and responsive to effect
only when loud or close
to bright
but not too close
and risk seeing the first smear
of this artistically blemished flesh
and the blush
of the little girl
still in there
Afterlife
by John Friedrich
Come, ghost
sit in my chair
otherwise empty
no hairs
stand on my neck
for your company
the graveless ask little
save to be heard
while those who haunt
do so without shame
or lack of blood
as her fingers lace with his
woven into funeral shroud
for the unburied
Come, ghost
does the moon set
so soon?
the fact of your death
I do not begrudge
and will pour my best wine
into a saucer
above your drying shell
if you only summon the substance
to shade my eyes
from her lips
46 47
neighborhood women, all flower-potting, bra-strapping, toddler-toting and
diet-pill popping. He isn’t missing much. The registertape sings in perfect
time but the mop gets harder to manage over the linoleum streaked in debris
caught in kidspit.
I continued home with my plastic bags of plastic bags, and all the way I won-dered
if he was lonely and if she was real and how I half-way like everything I
should like all the way, and be glad about it all,
How I still have time to fall in love and collect whatever I want in the guest
room,
If I could have loved him when he was young and even brilliant, before his
spectacles became bifocals—
Before I was younger than he,
When I was someone to whom he would say “Have a nice day!” In hopes I’d
return.
He was only working his way through college, after all.
Speculations on the Private Life of a
Cashier at The Dollar General
by Charlotte Kathryn Smith
Maybe his wife tells him so when he comes home, quieter, grayer and smell-ing
of mop-water.
She is boiling potatoes to mash and watching Jeopardy! On their tiny kitch-en-
counter TV set, still rabbiteared, and tweaked with tinfoil.
She has an eye for beauty, and a fascination with the uncommon.
She keeps special-edition Barbie-dolls in mint-condition packaging in the
guest room, and collects tabloid photos,
Three-legged acrobats and bat-babies born to congress ladies.
But he has no wedding-band, I notice.
He leaves it at home because his fingers swell in the mornings, or it gets in
the way when he box-cuts shipment in the stock-room. He lost it in a poker
game when he was less balding and more rambling. He pawned it to pay last
month’s light bill.
No he didn’t—he loves her too much.
Maybe he has no wife at all.
She left him for blowing money on booze, or working late hous and missing
every baseball game and ballet recital. She left him for his brother, the hand-some
insurance salesman.
Maybe she died. He couldn’t bear to wear it anymore. The questions are
cumbersome.
Perhaps he never married; took care of his crippled mother until she died in
’93. She was so alone when his father went away.
Now he scans the lightbulbs and bathmats, tunafish and babydolls for the
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Yadkin Valley Dying Song
(A Pantoum)
by Charlotte Kathryn Smith
I am a haunted man
Never loved my woman right
She’s been gone for 23 years
And I may die tonight.
I never loved my woman right,
Met her on army leave.
And I may die tonight,
If she will let me be.
Met her on army leave,
She was my bunk-mate Tommy’s girl
If she will let me, be, I said,
I’ll be her husband first.
She was my bunk-mate Tommy’s girl
Til he took me home one spring
I said I’ll be her husband first
But I never bought a ring.
Til he took me home one spring,
I was a gamblin’ man.
But I never bought a ring,
I just stole her hand.
I was a gamblin’ man,
even after we was wed.
I just stole her hand,
put dreams in her pretty head.
Even after we was wed,
With 6 boys in the yard,
Put dreams in her pretty head,
Put achin’ in her heart.
With 6 boys in the yard,
her mind began to fail.
Put achin’ in her heart,
made her body sick and frail.
Her mind began to fail.
She’s been gone for 23 years.
And for what I did to Baby,
I am a haunted man.
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Between Two Hills: Three Vignettes
by Katie Fennell
I.
I wanted the side of the bedroom that had the best view of the outside. It
was the window on the right, the one that looked out on the oak sapling, the
one whose upward view wasn’t obstructed by the tree line. It was through this
window that I thought I could see the stars at night from my bed, a view into
a lighter darkness high above the pitch-black forest. It was quiet at night; the
summer heat became softened with mid night dew, and sun-drenched trees,
plants, and hills were illuminated by the light cast by June and July full moons.
This made my view eerie, and suddenly the brightness of the star-riddled sky
became the blackness in a land of illumination and quiet haze.
II.
The winter wind rushes past us, moving the leaves around our feet and mak-ing
the barren trees moan a painful melody. Our breath creates a haze in the
crisp, clear air. We ring the black bell on top of the hill where we were going
to build our house, moving its rusted iron body with a stick. The old logging
road winds down into a wooded valley and disappears, along with the echoes of
our whoops and halloos. We climb over moss covered rocks and fallen trees,
under aged barbed wire fences that show that deer have also done this. Our
clothes stick to briars, and seeds bury themselves in our sweaters. We follow
a deserted logging road, passing groves of rhododendrons and fallen fences.
Holding on to sturdy tree limbs, we warn each other not to grab onto the trees
with the long thorns, and not to step too quickly on the pine needles. We slide
and fall, but keep going. We rest where the tops of the trees open to reveal
mountains. We look for snow on their peaks and compare their size to that
of our own. We follow the deer paths, narrow and winding, up to the ridge,
saying how hard it was to get that far, but how it will be harder still to go back
down.
III.
I told him to wake me up early to go motifing. I wanted to walk into the sun-awakened
pasture-hills, to stand among the tall grasses, my clothes becoming
wet with their dew, and to sit and see and create. I wanted the chalk from the
pastels on my fingers, the feel of the rough paper on my hands, and for the
sounds of the morning to be filled with a natural awakening, the scribble of
pastel on paper, and a loud silence between father and daughter. I filled my
cup to the brim and took it with me among the hills, its contents spilling as
we walked along the uneven road, and my hands becoming the guides for the
sloshing coffee, sticky rivers of glistening tan running along my hands and
forearms.
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Getting to Bermuda
by Caitlin Watkins
The man and the woman were arguing
in the living room; they were trying to pass the time.
I was, at first, off-put by the expensive love-seat,
as it caused me to sit upright-ostentatious, but
it offered me an arm to cling to
as I began my well practiced methods
in the art of disappearing.
Here’s my trick:
focus on something you can understand,
an ornament, a bookend, the candles never lit
on the mantle piece. Worry
for them. It will seem
less suspicious, and for you,
it will be a much easier sorrow to bare
and to forget.
For instance:
I first searched for the places
which the woman had neglected to dust.
These were few, and decidedly, much more valuable.
Upon finding a spot, I would spend time noticing it, and
in my mind, praise its uniqueness.
Then,
something glimmered
as it caught the light
from the backyard window.
Between them and I, sat a glass dome
paperweight which held down
nothing in particular next to
a stack of Southern Living.
A kind of novelty used
to take up space on coffee tables,
commemorating some trip they once took.
Offering a mantra:
content,
content, content.
I could not stop
starring, as if
a whole world of
calm existed inside. I was
transported, I felt that line
of infinity, the sinking
of my boots, the salt sting
on my lips and a
gust lifting my real
hands full of
some sorted
shells that were
now just empty
houses.
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CLINK
by Caitlin Watkins
The prison they are building
downtown next to the courthouse
does not yet have walls
instead there are concrete boxes
stacked high and uniform
with lonely ghost plastic sheets that hang
and the fluorescent buzz of workers lamps
that never turn off lingering
in the heart of a building
you hoped never to see the inside of.
While headed home from the downtown bars
of dimly lit pickup lines and eyes
that shift downward thinking of crimes
they never had the passion to commit
you wonder about the man whose job it is
to lay the final perimeter of cement blocks
and if he is thinking how to build the walls
so no man can ever get out.
Iya
by Malbert Smith
I have just taken a bath.
My clothes stick to me. Awkwardly.
Iya comes in to tell me to brush my teeth.
I, reluctantly, say ok. My small self still sour
towards basic hygiene.
I brush my teeth.
The mirror, my clothes, my body,
nothing was spared from the toothpaste explosion.
Iya leans down to wipe my face.
She is tall. She is commanding. She’s a presence.
She wipes my face clean. She cleans the explosion.
Her hands cupped she fills them with water.
Her hands are rough.
But there is elegance in their roughness
and roughness in the elegance.
West Virginia and North Carolina mountains,
and African jungles,
have left their imprint.
I then sip the water from her hands.
I rinse my mouth. I spit in the sink.
Iya tells me to go to sleep.
Before I go I ask a question.
How did you hold the water in your hands?
I have asked before. She has shown me before.
She cups my hands for me like she did the other times.
The water builds in my palms. It builds to its highest point.
56
Look you did it she says.
I did it, but still think it’s her magic that’s responsible.
Something about those hands,
digging in jungles,
moving rocks on mountains,
clasped constant in prayer,
are powerful.
A power as a kid I did not understand.
As an adult I envy it.
At her age I hope to say I lived up to it.
Next Three Spreads:
Matronly Lesson
Eyes, The First
Ghanian Play
Laath MartiN
“Over a period of time, the Interior Architecture department at
UNCG has designed a school to be built in the small village of
Kyekyewere, outside Kumasi, Ghana. They have also raised quite
a bit of money to make it to Ghana to start the building process
over there. They asked a select few students to accompany them
and photograph the process, as well as help build. This is where
my work comes in, as well as the work of five other lovely pho-tographers.
The process was exhilarating and eye opening, to say
the least. The project is at a stand still currently due to fund-ing,
and we could use your help tremendously to get this thing
rolling again. Visit the Rescue Aid Facebook page to learn more
about how you can help, or e-mail Hannah Rose Mendoza at
hrmendoz@uncg.edu for ways your donations can reach
Rescue Aid.”
Laath Martin
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Cityscape
Drema Wilson
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Dance
Drema Wilson
68 69
Escapism
by Autumn Rayn Brehon
Affections turn their way around corners-approaching
the edge of fantasy; reverie is closer.
Dulling the sharp tines of reality’s harshness-that
make life’s Bougainvillea’s so thorned.
The author caught fire, from the expulsion of the dalliance.
Fervor burned the point of the pen, leaving the paper scorned-
Causing the hands to scorch-from
the pure conviction of the words.
The Whitest Day I Can Remember
by Jessica Fritz
“Open your eyes, Marion.
You have such beautiful eyes.”
His back curled over like a
Shrimp in the sun, he was
Pleading or singing, I don’t know, I was
Too teary-eyed dumbstruck like us all.
He kissed her cold, hard lips, and
I’ve touched one before so I know how they felt:
The way steel stings in December,
And he walked around the rest of the afternoon
With a stain of cheap pink on his mouth.
And it was all you could look at as he said,
“What will I do now?” over and over again.
I hid myself in the car,
staring out at the tombstones, because
it’s strange to cry
in front of strangers, and to cry for someone
you only knew liked gardening, and
collecting the figurines that came in tea boxes,
who occasionally wore wigs. Stranger still
watching dumbly as your father cries,
swaying and singing to hymns, as if
knocked back to boyhood Sunday school,
Norristown choir in full fruition.
I fumbled for the words and tune,
but all I could think is, “Has he always had God?”
Outside the sun is a blaring
White wave, casting off the frozen grounds.
This wind pulls old snow
Off the pine trees, and it moves
Around us in new shades like
70 71
the tiniest pieces of glass, slicing our coats
And sifting through our hairs.
I want to say that I closed my eyes
And breathed it in deep,
All that milky, pearly, earth and
That it’s how I knew there were more than just
Holes in the ground.
But I could only stare forward, squinting at the back
of my father’s head, all peppered and grey like
parking lot pigeons or
the asphalt beneath them.
That Room
by Corey Cantaluppi
A bathroom wall exposes you
more than the mirror
A forty-dollar brown jacket, now just a tissue
and outside they all just look like faces
They speak but instead of words, just a dull ring
like a television set on VIDEO1
And each opening door is a heart palpitation
because eventually a man in scrubs will come to tell you
You aren’t strong enough
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Simple Degree of Truth
by David Englebretson
Surefire hate bled with the willow
Said to the wind
A friend lost to the dirt
Hurt says nothing of the pain
Make me smile. Make me sure.
Dawn spreads her honey light on the wafers of my thoughts
Lost growing with each new ray
Pray on the yeast
Renewed with the rolls
Make me laugh. Make me sure.
Smell is one word for it
Fit neatly with the rising dough of truth
Youth could be to blame
Shame no one told him
To sink his teeth in and never never
Give in
Peel - A New Way to Look at
Student Poverty
by David Englebretson
Bid you placed in the palm of the institution’s hand.
I carefully push my thumb into the center of your navel.
With the pressure you begin to split.
At first it’s a small tear.
Then I run my thumb slowly up your spine, until I reach your mind.
You come undone.
Your rind unfolds to reveal a cradle of sweet, white-threaded, flesh.
Accompanied by an aroma of zest.
Each perfect piece primed for the taking.
I suckle and slurp until you are consumed.
Your vitamins are left to the acid in my stomach.
I discard your peel.
To burn orange in the sun.
To garnish the mire.
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Communion
by Holly Mason
sitting in the kitchen before church
we would go back and forth
saying “fork”
until it no longer had any use
humming glory glory hallelujah
while cracking an entire carton of eggs
dad told you to set the table for breakfast
but your kick to my shin
told me I should do it instead
I like ‘em runny
no I hate runny eggs
yeah ooey gooey dad
kill ‘em dad, cook ‘em till they’re dead
and later in the creaking pews
when our disobedient eyes met during prayer
you slowly leaned forward
to see around mom and dad’s bowed heads
and smiling lightly you raised your hand
as if to say
hello sister we are holy in this place
then your wrist rotated
and four fingers fell into your palm
leaving your middle finger alone
pointing straight up to heaven
and Pastor said
Amen
Goose Creek
by Holly Mason
They played slaps,
red-handed brothers
sitting Indian-style
facing each other
on the creek’s thirsty mouth,
baked bean can brimming
with bait, resting
cap gun within reach,
the smaller one
facing the sun
squinting, open mouth
playing silent shout
no,
a sneeze
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The Scent Remains
by Holly Mason
When we’d kiss
there was the taste of that fruit,
always.
But first— there was
stripping the orange.
revealing her soft white skin,
then peeling that thin layer off
to expose the pulp,
if there are seeds inside
the belly,
we rid her of those.
Our fingers, wet and sticky,
curving, working to dig them out
— those bastards.
I didn’t want to get rid of them,
Maybe, I wanted to keep them,
plant them
nourish them
grow trees.
Maybe then,
we’d still be eating oranges together,
laughing at the specks on our chins,
smiling at each other—
as the sweet tartness bursts
against our teeth and tongues
and slides down our expecting throats.
Maybe then,
We wouldn’t need to wash our hands
of the citrus scent that stains
the curves of our nails.
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Ode to Joe
by Ashley Wiggins
Caffeine possesses a beauty so rare,
Its powers are endless it seems -
In coffee and lattes it answers my prayers
For a rush laced with sugar and cream.
As I walk through the door, the glorious scent
Of the coffee shop’s featured aroma
Travels from nostrils to brain then to soul,
Hence causing a coffee coma.
Reality knocks as I am faced with a choice,
I cannot decide on this joe.
So my regular, “A hazelnut latte, please,
With two extra shots of espresso.”
Appliances roar, anticipation is strong
As machines mold my treasured treat.
My eyes start to twitch, my palms perspire
And my body yearns to be complete.
Small talk is made as my drink is received.
“Whipped cream?” “Oh, no thanks,” “Here you are!”
The heat from the cup and the scent tease and taunt
As I hurriedly sit at the bar.
I finally take on the very first sip,
The steam from it fogging my glasses.
The bitter perfection and warmth of this drink
Is a pleasure that nothing surpasses.
Just five minutes after, I savor the sensation -
Caffeine, like blood, circulates my veins,
My fingers start tapping and eyes open wide
As thoughts quickly pass through my brain.
An array of behaviors blend well with caffeine,
I’m high-strung, invincible, mostly giddy,
I could sky-dive, run circles, drive 90 mph,
Try dancing and do a little diddy.
Energy flows until nothing remains,
Affectionately known as the “crash.”
Consume the last drop, now it’s empty with grief
As I gently place the cup in the trash.
The journey has ended, so I bid a farewell
To the something that never has failed me.
So now I await the next time I am able
To partake of my true love, my coffee.
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Medlan Yearning
by Jamison B. Hackelman
It was an old 1987 Saab he drove into town that day, tattered uphol-stery,
flecks of paint chipped away over time and misfortune, bumping along,
making a fuss, hissing up a storm and puffing a fine cloud of smoke behind
him as he took the final turn into the parking lot of the pediatrician’s office.
The car was left to him, an inadvertent inheritance from his father Frank who
had left in the haze of a sultry southern summer in his Chevrolet, leaving
behind a family of two and poor credit and unpaid bills and memories long
forgotten in the rattling of bottles on the floor.
When his mother’s father died Frank was not given word and was not
among the many suits and ties crowded around the grave, mumbling final
words I’m so sorry for your loss he’s in a better place now it will get better in time life is messy how
could you ignore diabetes.
“It’s going to die on you,” his father had said once or twice or many
times at home, the counters messy, dishes a formidable pile in the sink, a small
puddle of water creeping out from beneath the washer, Johnny Cash playing
on an old vinyl in the corner of the dining room on top of a small table their
mom had made. “And anyways, it’s a piece of shit. I don’t know why you want
to drive it.”
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” Mark said through an awkwardly
cut haircut and jeans tightening around his thighs and waist.
“How about you get a new car?”
“Frank, come on,” mom said. He shot sideways glances to mom and
the room was quiet.
“Yeah, well who can afford it?” he asked.
“Get a new job,” dad said.
“Why don’t you get a new job?”
“Why? So you can eat more? Jackass.”
“Anyways, when the Saab does die I’ll be okay with it,” Mark said.
“Yeah right. It smells like shit too.”
“Frank! Could you please watch your language?” mom asked.
“Uh, Leslie, how about you back off and mind your own business?”
Mom got quiet. Mark got angry.
“Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’
Rock of ages, rock of ages cleft for me”
Things had gone on like that for years and people had noticed the
fracture and the break, the splintering and the tears, but shook their heads and
hung them low, walked about the town of Medlan whispering small concerns
and forgetting the name of the Harmon family altogether when Frank Harmon
pulled out of the driveway and left town.
Medlan was a small town, small enough to be forgotten by those who’d
left it years before, big enough to still linger faintly haunting in the deepest
corners of their minds, waiting to be reawakened either by a slight trembling
of horror or the faintest tingle of nostalgia, calling them back if only to see
what it had become in their time away. The town could not call itself home to
success, only to the promise of such and the eventual short coming pervading
in the downtrodden and disheveled homes of the dust and grime. Medlan, as
the Harmon’s had known it for the last few years, boasted little more than its
gentrified main street home to almost every fast food restaurant you find in
the south, the big box stores and coffee shops, gas stations and doctor’s offices,
pushing its own old time inhabitants; its own pedigree of home grown and
dirt fed to the outskirts in what was known as downtown comprised of a music
store, a small park on the periphery, a dance studio for young girls, and a tro-phy
shop providing awards and medals and placards to the local sports teams
of the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club and the Rotary Club.
Then there were the bowling alleys where those either fighting to hold
down jobs or those who had already lost them spent off time or unemploy-ment
in the dark corners of the lanes, nursing bottle necks, stumbling through
greatest hits of the 80’s on cheap karaoke systems in dirt stained denim and
acid washed jeans. There was the dollar cinema, seats squeaking from overuse
and sparse care, cushions tattered and shirking their form to simple blocks
of foam squeezing their way out of busted seams, the bottoms covered in a
colorful array of hardened gum and candy, the floors covered in a glaze of
old soda and popcorn. Weekends played home to hot and heavy petting in the
corners of the back rows to thirteen year-old boys and girls, some precariously
straddling the seats of their boys, some curled up in their laps, clutching the
collars of their Old Navy Polos, Gap, Abercrombie, brands and names forged
deeply into their hearts. The roller rink where families who skate together stay
together, where youths crawled into dark spaces and similarly groped about in
less than mentionable ways.
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Then there were the churches. The Methodists and the Moravians
sharing a small block outside of the downtown, the Episcopals escaping to the
outskirts of town, the Catholics lingering in dark hovels of cathedrals distant
and away from them all. The Baptists though, had all but gone out, congrega-tions
dying off with a quieted bitterness not yet resolved or even affirmed in
most parts, their old time religion picked up and brushed off by those without
and seeking such as the non-denominational, exchanging hymnals for tabbed
guitar parts; contemporary spins on timeless melodies, pipe organs abiding
but obliging to the dissonant chords of the rock and the roll God is my Rock, the
tomb of Christ has rolled the rock of ages, rock of ages. Years went by and the south-ern
Baptists had shifted and shrugged and writhed and left forever and ever,
Amen.
And then they came after everything. They took down the trees and
the family owned shops. Rapacious and fierce, they uprooted the town from its
very core and it became a stagnant child, stillborn and festering and spoiling.
They repaved the cracked roads and the gravel lots. Farmland worked over for
seasons on end, turned over for the plants and the factories, a hushed guf-faw
of noxious fumes and computer parts. There was the library, taken down
brick by brick and reassembled in a place not so downtrodden, not so depress-ingly
antique. The abandoned seafood restaurant changed hands and names so
many times no one quite remembered what it once had been or if it had been
important to begin with. All that stood now from what once was Medlan was
the Hadley House, the last standing social structure the old families like the
Swishers and the Griggs’ and the Cranfills could play host to parties and din-ners
and dances and everything that comes with being one of the old families
of Medlan, a town built on propriety and namesakes and soil.
It had been some time since he’d enjoyed those old moments, the
sights and smells of the town, the quiet desperation of getting out and finding
a soft promise of a bettered tomorrow driven by the axe and the crane, cement
and tobacco, returning home in the spring only to find the same bunches of
people scuffling hurriedly through the streets in preparation of the coming
Spring Folly, looking for God, finding him lost in the woodwork cleared for
more houses, more people, better times ahead. The town was in full swing of
things, setting up booths and kiosks and tables, unloading trucks and cars of
knick- knacks and drinks. There were bright red coolers set out under fold out
tables, stages erected in opposite corners of the downtown area, festivities to
be found for a few miles around.
He got out of the Saab and walked to the glass double doors of the
pediatrician’s office. It was odd for him, doing this. He was twenty-two and
was still seeing a child’s doctor. It was routine, though, routine enough. He sat
in the waiting room tracing out the different flight patterns of the airplanes,
dirigibles, and helicopters painted in bright colors on the walls. Remember the
time you had that terrible ear ache? Oh, lord, you cried for hours and hours because it hurt so bad.
Your dad was quiet though. Didn’t lose his temper. Didn’t scowl or nothing. Just held you crying about
in his arms.
“Mr. Harmon?” Dr. Hatling called. Mark waved his hand to him and
followed him from the waiting room to the examination room.
“My name is Mark Harmon,” he began days later, standing in the mid-dle
of a crowded circle of chairs, a group of strangers in the hot gymnasium of
the Medlan Elementary School, “and I’m an eating addict. I can’t say when it
began, for sure, and I know that’s probably part of the problem…” his words
trailed off for a moment, dangling in the air, waiting to be snatched away and
brought back down to the circle of folding chairs.
“Why do you think you eat, Mark?” the counselor asked. David Swish-er,
fattened, balding, though his clothes had begun to loosen from his portly
frame, sat hunched over, his posture never quite commanding or even slightly
appropriate.
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. He stood before them, shoulders in a
still motion of half shrug and attention. He did not look up at the face of men
and women, some strange, some familiar or at least presenting the odd pos-sibility
that he should recall them.
“Now, Mark-”
“I’d really prefer Mr. Harmon, if you don’t mind,” he said. Swisher
sat for a moment in silence, leaning forward on what Mark thought to be a
cane but what was actually an old, rusted golf putter, and then laughed not
quite to himself, but rather more out loud than Mark Harmon would have
expected or preferred.
“I’m sorry Mark- excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Harmon but
there are no strangers to addiction. We’re all familiar and familial to the pains
it takes to scorn what we’d most prefer, things in life we feel we most deserve.
No matter what, the bottom line, the reason why we are all here is to let go…”
he paused for a moment, looked to the floor, stared off for a moment, gradu-ally
laughed himself back into the conversation. “We all have the same pain,
Mark. It’s okay to have this pain and it’s okay to share it with us. Most of us have
been here for some time and we know what…Mark, the worst thing you could
do is hold it with you and keep living your life with it. Ask any of them.” At
this he made a circular motion of the room outstretching his arms and closing
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them back towards him embracing them in his large, loose skinned arms. Many
of the group nodded, some teared up, some wiped tears that had already fallen.
“Now, Mark, if we’re going to get down to the bottom of this whole
mess I think it’s a bit more than necessary tha’ you help us in determining
whatever it is you think is wrong with you.” I’m fat, getting fatter. He saw he was not
alone, looking at the people about him. Round. Rotund. Wide. Box frame cuts
with a large bowl in the center. Thighs thick and filling out more than enough
space in tightening jeans. The pairs of sweatpants, baggy pants and hooded
sweatshirts, hiding what needs not be seen by the passersby on morning jogs,
brisk evening walks leaving them aching and breathless when they return home
hearing faint whispers or snickering as they go move out the way wide load 2x4 trailer
man those legs got four wheel drive look at them calf muscles slinkin down to their toes. Nights
filled with stress dreams and small bouts of gorging at darkened kitchen tables.
Tall glasses of milk and a few slices of grapefruit. Then a piece of toast. Then
add peanut butter and jelly. Pop a few grapes in the mouth down the hatch in the
buzzing light of an open refrigerator door.
“I’d really like help Mr. Swisher-”
“It’s David,”
“Sorry-”
“Mark, there are no apologies here. We have nothing to be sorry for.
We have done nothing wrong. Life is messy, but we do our best to carry on.
Isn’t that right, gang?” There was mild applause, there were a few scattered
Amen’s offered around the circle, mostly just the silent acknowledgement that
indeed life was messy, life was falling apart at the seams like so many unravel-ing
sweaters and shirts and scarves and flags.
“Mark, if it’s help you want, you need to be a straight shooter with us.
The most important thing now is to be honest with us.”
“It rained all the way to Cincinnati
With our mattress on top of the car
Us kids were eatin’ crackers and baloney
And papa kept on driving never stopped once at a bar”
He’s driving her home from work. Dad needed the car. They putter
along noisily in the old Saab.
“Your father’s going to be so proud!” she says.
“Don’t know why he would,” he says. She shirks the doubt and contin-ues
on, smiling, singing along to the Johnny Cash on the tape deck.
“Oh, you know he loves you,” she says.
“Yeah, when it’s convenient for him.” She laughs.
“Oh, come on Mark. He’s struggling too, you know.”
“I mean, when does it end though? When does the struggle end and
the love return?”
“I know,” she says. “I know. At least you got the job, though.”
They pull into the driveway and he is shutting the trunk of his Chevy.
A couple of suitcases. A box of books. Mom jumps out of the car before the
engine is off. Mark stays behind and hears the protests and the questions the
where are you going and why now, why now, what the hell do you think you’re doing.
He sits there in the car, his parents now in the house, watching the
outspread arms drooping down into defeated motions of shaking, slight con-vulsion,
and tremors of his mother as she tries to reason with him. He’s not
sure if she’s trying to reason. Maybe she saw this coming. Maybe she had known
it was coming but didn’t know how to say what needed to be said and left it all
unspoken.
“She said your papa is a good man and don’t you kids forget it
The whiskey’s tryin’ to ruin him but I know the Lord won’t let it”
“I’m heading back,” Mark says as he opens the door. He pulls back a
little, wanting to close it as quickly as he had opened it.
“Wait, hon,” mom says through trembling, choked back tears. “Say
goodbye to your father.”
I don’t speak to ghosts.
There is no time but the time to go and he shuts the door without say-ing
a word and gets into the Saab and onto the freeway and then to the apart-ment
complex and the sign that says You are now leaving Medlan! Please come back! and
never to see him and always to let him away to Ann Arbor.
“Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing In The Sheaves’
Rock of ages rock of ages cleft for me”
“I can’t,” Mark started, voice shaking, legs trembling and bouncing
and tapping, “I can’t remember why I started eating. I don’t know if it was
guilt. I don’t know, I can’t explain it away, but I was hungry.”
“Guilt?” Swisher asked. Mark had almost forgotten there were oth-ers
in the room, in the crowded mess of chairs and the oscillating fan in the
corner.
“Yeah, guilt.”
“For what?”
“For letting it happen.”
86 87
“And what did you let happen?”
Saw the warnings maybe. Saw the drink, the mid-sips, slight gulps,
the rough hugs and pats on the back, how you doing, son? Good grades? No, well, no
shame in being in the middle, look at me.
“Mark, you make it seem like you’ve let some terrible thing happen as
if you had the notion to stop it before it could.”
Saw the furrowed brow, the rolled eyes, the downcast looks in family
portraits, small smiles, slight and almost empty. Saw the receipts of flowers
paid and sent to women in Michigan. Tragedy is a train done pulled out, Mr.
Harmon. Guilt is thinking you had a hand in shoveling the coal but your hands
look mighty white to me, boy.”
Saw all of this and let it go unquestioned, if not unnoticed.
“How’s your mother, Mark?” Swisher asked. “That is, if you don’t
mind my asking.”
“No, no, of course not,” he said.
He sits at the island in the kitchen teetering forward on a bar stool
peeling furiously at an orange and Johnny Cash still plays on an old vinyl in
the corner on top of the table mom built.
“I can’t say how good it is to have my boy back in the house,” mom
says, wiping sweat from her forehead over the hot skillet at the stove, the smell
of chicken and smoke filling the space between words. “I’ve missed it so much,
but somehow I always knew I’d never be completely alone. Even…even after
granddad died, I knew I was never going to be completely alone. Boy I sure
miss him.” She looks over and smiles. Her cheeks glisten in the faint glow of a
dying ceiling fixture bulb, eyes swelling and tearing, could be the onions she’s
chopped for the quesadillas. Could be that he’s home.
“And your father leaving, well, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Twenty-seven
years and then to just leave in the middle of the day. I mean, school had
just started. Do you remember that? Moving to the new house without him,
just throwing out all the stuff he left behind?” Of course Mark remembered
the pain of moving and shoving it all into boxes and bags. Boxes in the yard,
clothes, shoes, belts, socks, none that matched with one another. Piles of as-sorted
old books he hadn’t packed in the Chevy. Books on sales. Books on
faith. Books on tape. Books upon books upon boxes of books. Thomas Fried-man.
Thomas Merton. Tony Robbins. Be a better you. Sell the sale. Out sell
the seller. Sell it all. Let nothing stand. And the passersby of Medlan knew
as well as they did that this was the break of a line in loyal and honest men. “I
mean, who thought…who could have seen that coming?”
“No one saw that coming at all, mom. He’s just an idiot.” Receipts re-covered
online from flowers sent to women he’d been acquainted with in Ann
Arbor. His desk was broken down into its pieces, still chill from the cold tomb
of his office.
“You know, it’s just so easy for you to hate him.”
“Come on, mom. He makes it easy.”
“Your father was a good man. You knew him to keep his word to you
kids. He didn’t give you a ring, didn’t tell you time and again that it would be
okay, that he was an honest man, that things were going to start looking out
that, ‘yes, dear, of course I’ll pay the bills’ or even months after he left when
it turned into ‘yes, dear, I paid that all on time’ or ‘yes, dear, I’ll send money,
right away, coming at you’. He didn’t leave you,” she says.
“Then mama started talking about Jesus
And how our lives could be from now on”
“Yes he did. He left all of us. He lied to all of us.”
“He was a sick man-”
“No. Granddad was sick. Frank is not sick. Frank is just nothing.
There is no excuse for him.” She turns off the stove and slides the steaming
chicken onto crisp tortillas with tomatoes and sour cream and onions.
“You can still have him though. When you’re ready to forgive him
he’ll still be your father.” And then there’s guacamole and a bean dip she’s
prepared and a bowl of chips for them to share and there is beer in the fridge
and a near empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the freezer dad left behind.
“Yeah, when it’s convenient for him.”
“Enough. I’m tired of this endless attack on your father-”
“No. He’s not dad. When he walked out he took his name and his title
and his bullshit with him. We don’t pick up after anyone, mom. ‘Harmons
don’t fold on shit hands they’ve been given’ like you’ve always said, right? We
don’t let up on when we’ve been let down. We pick ourselves up and hope the
next man’s got the same sense to do himself too. We don’t pick up after him.
We don’t justify and forgive because we think oh, well he might be sick in the head. No.
I don’t know who that man is, and I have no plans on figuring him out.”
House: The place you live.
Home: Everything else before it’s gutted.
The table is set on the island. Mom cries and hugs him tightly to her
chest.
“While papa bought a used tire in Columbus
Mama rocked the baby till all her tears were gone”
88 89
The room was silent for a moment, save for Swisher’s creaking in the
metal folding chair and the scattered snifflings of sympathy and condolence,
feigning understanding and having none.
“I think she’ll be okay. She’s lonely. I don’t get out here as much as I
ought to or would like to, but I think she’ll be okay.”
Granddad, oh I wish you could have seen him. You didn’t call him enough- oh, I wish you
could have seen him. I mean, hon, I’m glad you didn’t, it was awful, but to be there- I know you had
work, I know, it’s okay, don’t get upset. You didn’t miss much, couldn’t remember anyone’s name in
the room, but oh, I wish you could have seen him.
“Let’s thank Mark for sharing all of this with us,” Swisher began.
“You’ve taken a big step today, Mr. Harmon. I want you to know how proud of
you I am, and I think I speak for everyone in saying that. I know this coming
from what you’d like to consider a stranger can’t seem to amount to much at
all, but all the same, I want you to know that you’ve done a pretty brave thing
here. Vulnerability is not cowardice or weakness, Mark. There is no weakness
in needing someone. We know. We’ve all been through the pain of losing what
you love.” Many nodded their heads in silent approval, scattered mumblings
of Amen to this and Amen to that filling the small spaces between the crowded
chairs.
“Now, it’s difficult to find a good Baptist hymnal anywhere nowa-days…”
Swisher said and the circle of chairs and addicts chuckled, “but I think
this Methodist one does quite a number for us today, so if you wanna pick it
up and follow along, I’d be obliged. But if you’d rather not sing and if instead
you just want to sit there in silence and prayer or reflection, God don’t play
favorites…and he just figures you can’t carry a tune.”
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure…”
He sits in his apartment watching the television. His apartment is
messy crowded with dirty plates and papers and clothes and fallen or discarded
objects. He eats alone tearing pieces of chicken off the bone, scooping large
spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and sweaty collards, and flaky crumbs of biscuit
adorn his shirt that tightens in the arms when he reaches across his body to
change the channel or turn the volume up.
“Mr. Harmon, your blood pressure is 140/90.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Could mean, one of two things. One possibility, kidney disease, but the blood work we
did came back negative for that, leaving the other possibility, and with your family history, it makes
sense.”
“Diabetes.”
“Precisely. It’s imperative you make some lifestyle changes. Crucial ones. Type 2 diabetes
is no joke, I’m afraid. You need to exercise more, eat less, pay attention to your blood sugar all the
time.”
He sits and his chest is hurting and his stomach is full, but he can-not
stop himself from eating. His jeans are tight. His stomach is tight to his
shirt and his granddad sits next to him eating as well. Should have been there to see
him. Oh, but in his condition, who could bear it? His granddad sinks into the cushions
of the couch and disappears without a word, a faint ghost not asking anything
of anyone. Not wanting last words. Not wanting help. Just disappearing as a
whisper does in a crowded room and Mark does not feel guilt or self-pity. He
does not feel the rough pats on the back, the gruff laughter of a man lost in
drink. He does not ask why me why me God and he does not break down and
cry anymore as he had for the weeks before and he is no longer hungry. He is
no longer hungry. His plate is full and he is no longer hungry.
“While I draw this fleeting breath,
when mine eyes shall close in death,
when I soar to worlds unknown,
see thee on thy judgment throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee.”
The singing stopped. Mark blinked around the room and found
smiles and stares and mild laughter.
“I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep,” he said.
“And are you sure that God doesn’t like us more when we’re asleep?”
Swisher asked. “Listen, and I mean everybody listen before we all head off
and fight our way through this muck and grime business we call life: Life, as it
would be, is messy. It’s a big time mess that takes big time fixin’ up. We’ve got
to hold on though and keep our hearts in it. Addiction is familiar and familial
and none of us, even if we don’t got anyone to call our family, not a single soli-tary
soul in this room right now is leaving here alone. Think with your heart
and your head…then get a third opinion from your stomach. God bless you.”
90 91
The week came and went, and Mark had stayed with his mom. The
Folly had been modestly crowded with the sticky hands of small children
clutching tightly to wands of Cotton Candy, faces painted and stained with
dirt and chocolate, fathers dragging their sons along, spitting images of blue
collars, brandishing large drumsticks of Turkey legs in their fists, fighting
their ways through the stifling heat of a southern May. And at night the Ferris
Wheel had buzzed to life, the lights illuminating the shocked pale silhouettes
of small arms enfolding small bodies of youth between trees and under veran-das.
Street vendors came from all corners pushing their handcrafted jewelry,
hand stitched clothes, fabric samples, small mobiles and toys, baked goods
for good causes, balloon art, coffee mugs with pithy sayings or commemorat-ing
town lore, branding it across the surface of small porcelain molds.
And on the last night Mark and his mother walked through the streets
of Medlan in the final dying sounds of the annual firework show, lights ex-ploding
across a small, dark sky, clouds all but vanishing in the dusk of May.
She grabbed for his wrist as they shuffled along the uneven pavement of the
sidewalk, cobbled and fractured stones forming the path all the way through
downtown. He said nothing, only listened again as he had many times before
this, knowing that this was pain, familiar and strange, fleeting and permanent,
obstinate and meandering.
“I’ll be fine, okay” she said. “I’m not damaged beyond repair, right?
This is normal. We got a raw deal out of this, hon, but this isn’t the worst.
We’re no worse off than anyone else. Nobody’s terminally ill or broken to a
million pieces or suicidal- you’re not suicidal at all, are you?” He shook his
head and she began to tear up. “Because I have a pretty taut line here. There’s
not a whole lot more that I can handle here.” She squeezed his hand, and he
put his arm around her shoulder. Everything will be alright. It will all be okay.
Turkey legs cotton candy pretzels funnel cake hot dogs corn dogs muffins cupcakes snow cones your
blood pressure is 140/90 change your habits everything will be alright everything will
be okay. She squeezed his hand tighter.
“I need to know that you’ll be okay, Mark,” she said.
“I’ll be okay, mom.” Chicken on the bone, plates of collard greens and mashed
potatoes, flakes of biscuit.
“Oh lord, we’re a mess aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are a big mess.”
They walked on towards the car and Mark watched as David Swisher
scuffled along with the golf putter as his cane, stopping in the windows of
downtown, took his hat off, and held his head low and kept walking onward,
shaking his head. And after the lights had gone out across the sky, people be-gan
packing away things in coolers and boxes, in the beds of trucks and the
backseats of minivans, hustling and bustling about. Leftover food was handed
out freely with smiles and cheers, but Mark was not hungry. Praise was given
to those who had pulled it out and made the money worth the sweat and the
loudness of the affair. The Methodists stood on corners handing out small
print versions of the New Testament bound with a soft green vinyl, stepping
in the way of people in as friendly and Christian as they could be spreading
the good word of the lord in a town lost in his presence, but not far from it.
They moved on in their caravans of thrift and squalor back to land that was no
longer there in houses people no longer had built for themselves on roads and
highways paved and repaved over, the dust still not quite settling at the heels of
their sneakers and heels and flats and boots.
“And through it all mama’s faith was the one thing
That was strong enough to finally do the some good”
Mom began to sing as they approached the old Saab. “You know, that
car’s going to die on you. It’s going to fail and you’ll be stuck in the middle of
nowhere without a car and without anyone to help you.”
“And when it does, I’ll be okay with it.” She hugged him once more
as he opened the heavy door of the car. He turned the key in the ignition but
the engine would not turn over. Once for luck. Twice for good measure. Three
times for something better to come of a messy life of hunger and wanting and
locked doors and folly and old vinyl’s playing in the corner of an old messy
kitchen. The engine turned over finally and he drove off in a fine cloud of
smoke and hunger and God watching his mother in the mirror as she walked
off singing.
“She said your papa is a good man and don’t you kids forget it
The whiskey’s tryin’ to ruin him but I know the Lord won’t let it
Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’
Rock of ages, rock of ages left for me.”
Self Portrait (Energize)
Steisha Pintado
96 97
Climax, NC
Isabelle Abbot
Hagan Stone
Isabelle Abbot
98 99
Blind
by David Nolker
James stared at the blank, grey ceiling. The artificial breeze from a
ceiling fan brushed his face. Morning light shone through the curtains in the
window and streaked across the wall. Hearing the rhythmic pounding of foot-steps
marching down the hall, he closed his eyes and remained motionless. As
the door opened, James rolled onto his side, facing the wall.
“You still in bed?” Meredith asked.
“I’m getting up,” he said.
“Hope so. I’ve been up for three hours. I thought you said you were
going to get up early and work this morning. You haven’t written a word in two
weeks.”
“I know. I’m getting up.”
“It’s not like I’m pressuring you, but Dave has called several times this
week and he wants to know how the new story is going. You really need to get a
move on.”
“I know.”
“Well, it’s nearly ten and I’ve got to be going. I thought we’d get a
chance to talk this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be late tonight. I have to meet with one of the new curators.”
Meredith said.
“I bet you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Never mind.”
“No really. You’re insinuating something and I want to know what it
is.”
“I wasn’t insinuating anything. Sorry it sounded like I did.”
“Whatever. You need to get out of bed.”
“Ok.”
“James, please get up. It’s not good for you to lie around. You used to
be so active. Go for a walk. Do something outside. Some exercise will make you
feel better.”
“Alright.”
“I have to go. I’ll call you later.”
James stared at the wall. He remembered how the paper had looked
when he picked it out at the store. The paper once had a clean white back-ground
that made the blue flowers seem to jump off the walls. Meredith and
he had worked hard to renovate the house. They patched the walls, replaced
the floors, doors, and countertops. It had been difficult, but they enjoyed the
work together. The final touch had been the wallpaper. It felt whole when he
held Meredith in his weary arms and saw how the paper made the house his,
theirs.
Now the small blue flowers looked like tiny faces. Contorted and
staring. Blue scowling grimaces. Over time, the paper had grown yellow and
stained from years of dust and cigarette smoke. The flowers wilted into the
dingy background.
He forced himself out of bed and lumbered down the hall. The desk
where he worked was in a corner of an expansive room that was the main living
area for Meredith and him. It was situated between the kitchen at one end of
the house, and the bathroom and bedroom at the other. The books and papers
on the desk were arranged neatly.
“How am I supposed to find anything when she keeps moving every-thing
around?” The papers rustled as he spread them over the chipped, brown
desktop.
The phone rang but James did not move to answer it.
“Jim, I know you’re there. It’s Dave. Answer the phone. We need to
talk.”
James picked up the receiver but he did not say anything. He just
breathed.
“We need to meet asap. The editors are crawling all over me. If you
don’t feed ‘em something soon they’ll bite my ass off,” said Dave.
“Come by the house tomorrow.”
“You need to get outta that house. Meet me in the park tomorrow.
Your career is on the line. I’m not just your agent. I’m your friend ya know. I
don’t want to see you fall apart.”
“OK.”
“Damn right OK. You need to take me seriously. Bye Jim.”
“Bye.”
The phone buzzed loudly against his ear for a few minutes. Through
the window beside his desk, he could see the autumn leaves twisting in the
breeze. The afternoon sun refracted through a glass of water on a side table
100 101
and projected a small square rainbow onto the far wall. His neighbor across
the street was mowing his stubby brown grass.
Then she walked by. She walked in steady measured paces, her long
brown hair dancing in wisps across her face. A long white cane with red tip was
clasped in her delicate hand. She moved deliberately, yet with a grace he had
never seen before. Behind her dark glasses, her face was flushed and she bit
her bottom lip in determined concentration.
After the girl passed out of sight, James closed the curtains; blocking
out the light. He sat in front of his computer, staring into the blackness of
the screen before he finally switched it on. He felt a new excitement pushing
its way through his mind. He plunked at his keyboard for hours and did not
notice when Meredith returned home. As usual, she was not quiet in her en-trance,
but when she saw her husband laboring at his computer, she tiptoed
down the hall, trying not to disturb him.
James stopped typing late in the evening and when he looked up from
his work, he felt like he was in an in an unknown place. He saw Meredith sit-ting
on the couch reading a magazine.
“How long have you been home?”
“Not sure. A long time.”
“How was your day?”
“Fine.”
“That’s good.”
“How was yours? Looks like you’re going again. Is that your new sto-ry?”
“Yes”
“Can I read it?” She closed the magazine and laid it in her lap.
He twitched slightly. “No.”
“Oh.” She picked the magazine up again and flipped through it. “Why
not?”
“It’s not finished yet.”
Meredith studied her magazine intently. James could see that she was
upset, so he turned back to the screen.
“You know, you used to let me read your stories even before they were
finished.”
“I know, but this one’s different.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it just is.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
James forgot what he was doing in the kitchen and sat on the other end
of the couch from her. “I’ll let you read it when I’m finished.”
“Fine.” Meredith she snapped her magazine shut and tossed it on the
table. She sat with her arms folded across her chest.
The dwindling twilight drained the color from the room. The first
shadows of night began to gather in the corners. There was nothing on televi-sion
to distract him from the blank stare on her face. He glanced at her every
few minutes, but she continued to stare at the floor. Deep inside himself he
wanted her to cry, so he could see that he had hurt her. He hoped that he hurt
her, because then he would know that she still cared.
They still slept beside each other, but they never touched, not any-more.
They clung to themselves, tired and alone.
Darkness still filled the room when Meredith left for work. He waited
for her to close the front door rushed to his computer. The screen filled with
his thoughts about the girl. If only he could catch hold of her. Take hold of
her arm and guide her on her walk. She could lean against him. He would
hold her up and be her strength. She would need him. Time passed without
his knowledge until the clamor of the telephone shattered his fantasy. When
he answered it, there was nothing but the tired groaning of the dial tone. Sud-denly
he remembered Dave.
James dressed hurriedly and headed out. He walked quickly. Beads
of sweat gathered on his forehead. He hurried toward Dave. Would he even
be there? If only he could talk to him about his problem. Dave would under-stand.
He always understood. James’ head felt light. He kept his face toward
the road ahead. The pavement seemed to swirl around him. He walked faster.
He looked up to find his bearings and saw the edge of the park only a few steps
away.
He raced for the old bench under the oak tree. He sat down eagerly.
Dave was nowhere in sight. There were many people, and he did not recognize
any of them. Couples walked arm in arm around the park. Then he saw her.
The girl’s measured steps brought her to his bench. She stood before
him, just like he had dreamed. The bright day seemed to illuminate her as she
faced him and smiled broadly. His fell to his sides. His dream was standing
right before him.
“Excuse me. May I join you on this bench?” she asked.
“If, you like.”
She slowly lowered herself beside him and folded her cane into its
three pieces. Her delicate hands held it in her lap. He looked at her, and
noticed that she was even more beautiful in person. She turned to him and
smiled.
102 103
“I appreciate you letting me sit here. This is my favorite spot in the
park,” she said.
“It’s no problem. I was expecting a friend but he is always late. I enjoy
the company.”
“Thank you, I won’t stay long. I just like to come here in the after-noons
and enjoy the autumn air. It makes me feel so good.”
“Kind of clean.”
“Yeah, exactly. I never thought of it that way. She smiled at him.
“Have we met before? It just seems like I know you from somewhere.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“We haven’t ever talked? Your voice sounds familiar,” she said.
“Well, we’re neighbors. Maybe you heard me when you walked by
sometime. “
“Oh, I didn’t know we were neighbors. What a coincidence that we
would both be sitting here together,”
“It’s not that strange. This is the closest bench to get to. We both like
the park and the fall air. Maybe all that we have in common has brought us
together.”
She laughed absently. “Two souls brought together on a park bench.
Sounds like a story.”
“It is a story.”
“I really feel like I have met you before. We haven’t met?”
“I know this sounds strange, but I’ve seen you walk here. I watch you
outside my window.”
“That does sound strange. In fact, that sounds down right creepy.”
James’ heart fell. The wooden slats of the bench suddenly felt uncom-fortable.
“I mean, it’s not like I watch you all the time.” His story had deviated
from the plot he had created. “I’ve just seen you walk by my house. I think it’s
admirable that you can walk here by yourself.”
“Admirable? Why couldn’t I walk here by myself?”
“I don’t know, because you are…”
“Blind?” she interrupted. “You know, that really irritates me. Why do
people act like I can’t do things myself? I don’t need to rely on someone else all
the time.”
“I’m sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean to say that you couldn’t do
things yourself. It just seemed to me that it would be a challenge for someone
who couldn’t see to walk to a park.”
“Well, it isn’t. I do it all the time. I don’t need anyone to help me. I’m
fine getting here by myself.”
“What about when you get lost? How do you find your way?”
“I call Charles.” She raised left hand for James to see.
“I see. I never thought that you were married.”
“Well, I am. We look out for each other. I look out for him just as
much as he looks out for me.”
“That’s a very nice sentiment,” James said.
“Are you married?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about.” The girl got up from the
bench, unfolded her cane and turned back the way she came. She stopped after
a few steps and turned to face James.
“Good luck getting back home,” she said.
“Thanks.”
She tapped her deliberate pace down the walkway and out of sight.
James watched her go. He could hardly take in all that had happened. When
had he lost sight of Meredith? He was only roused from his stupor when Dave
nudged him in the ribs.
“Hey, man, you alright?” Dave rested his hand on James’ shoulder.
“I’ve been worried about you.
“I’ll be alright.”
“You sure?”
“Actually yes, I am sure.” A smile crept across James’ face until he was
beaming.
Dave sat back and held his hands together in his lap. “Good to know.
Are you working on anything?”
“I have a new story, but it’s at home,” James said.
“Is it good?”
“It’s the best.”
Dave laughed. “The best? Amazing. You went from having nothing,
to the best. And you didn’t even bring it? What’s it about?”
“You’ll see after it is finished.”
“Come on. How does it start? How does it end? Give me something.”
“It ends like it begins,” said James.
“Great Confucius. And how is that?”
“With two people finding their way home.”
104 105
Those Who Would Remain
by jayce Christian Russell
I
The neighbors have been drinking and
again are shouting. Gibberish
at this distance, in this heat—
the cicadas sing that it is the allembracing hellbound hot.
Window framed, another couple sprawl across the kitchen table
texts and three ringed binders.
The voyeureds’ a/c rattles
awake and I think, briefly, it is
the sound of rain.
Or wind against leaves.
II
They debate on understanding and its other
around the corner; the man does not, has not, will not
care for how drunk she was. Her response slurs this blurred
night—she doesn’t remember. Raccoons claw to the
sawsheared lower branches of a tree at the first dry crack
of approach.
III
The cicada serenade has bred itself out,
elected those who would remain from those
whose was to perish. Their numbers,
dwindled carapace by carapace, leave only
a tenor, a bass to sing the nights along.
How they hiss the death of heat.
IV
Her last boyfriend was abusive, she tells him.
It will rain soon, within days, and he has his arm
around her waist. She recounts the arc of bottles.
He cinches his grip and they disappear up sidewalk,
beyond the elms, beyond the dogwoods, the sycamores,
the willows.
V
I am tucked into my jacket, crouched beneath her
umbrella between low hanging limbs. Passing Jeeps
leave in their wake a breeze. It does not hang at all.
106 107
Death of Venus
by Jayce Christian Russell
That unitchable scratch wore her raw
so she jumped, broke like waves on the rocks below,
bounced once, and rolled a Hokusai tide to the whole.
Her pockets empty, she carried nothing
to her common grave, bore no tokens of kindness
to the sailor sacrifices, made no alms to the wretched
who gnarled below. Marble eyes watched
her fall, from faces worn smooth by the lap and
the lilt of All-River’s End. Hers was the red and black
scream that echoed the world;
hers was the coral crown and she, she was to be ruler
anointed of this new dominion, Death or Sea, or
both as meshed lovers, entwined
serpents, the tangled ball of rat king gnashing garbaged
sewers. She came to rest in the wreckage of canoes,
knarrs, junks long since lost
exploring, triremes blown adrift by the errant whims of
a god with more than the two names; she called the collision
her throne and surveyed from
its cracked arms her expansive kingdom. All cultures
drown the same, are nipped away by schools of dumb
fish born hungry. She had
tithed not and was appointed to no lower a seat than
godhead of all her tendrilous fingers could snatch.
The bridgebound crowd
watched from their rafter seats, found the course where
they would later dream her song; some dreamed that
she sang to them, but her lungs
were scraps floating papyrus thin from the delicate
ivory work of her ribcage, and she would not sing to
them from this decay.
Some sang for her, but know this: their eyes did not
find that spiral where all becomes one, that vortex
which centers the hole
in things, as hers had gleamed it. They had not crashed
that final crash, had not bobbed buoy as their tendons
gave way, as their minds
wandered the blue still encased in a skull that wore yet
some semblance of their face—save the eyes, the nose,
the lips, the cheeks picked
clean by the mercurial operation of scavengers.
They raised her a god in their way—rivers and bridges were named.
Her admirers mused her eyes from
the constellations reflected on the surface of her lover
destroyer on still nights but it was only ever dead light,
returning.
108 109
Chalk Castles, Asphalt Sky
by Jessica Vantrease
My six-year-old self warms her translucent pink skin
in the white-hot reflected sun from her father’s pickup truck.
She’s too small to know about the stratosphere and political maps,
city councils and unemployment, black holes and fallout. The world becomes
amorphous and neonatal around her, as much what if
as the chalk dust and neon pigment beneath her tiny nails; as much maybe
as the damp waxy-soft inner stalks she finds while ripping apart
blades of grass in the green island that the driveway circles.
I ask the kid what she thinks about the conflict
between nature and artifice, art and life, and she shrugs:
“I like art. I made a clay man at school, but he broke in the oven.”
Wobbles to the porch on fawn-spindly legs, fearing nothing
except bee stings. Envy chews ulcers into my gut as we settle on the swing.
I kill chiggers and massage caffeine withdrawal from my aching temples,
pouting over my lack of a love life and impending term papers.
She kicks her glittery jelly-shoes, rocks us in the swing like the
babies we are, while sucking on a Capri Sun. As we sway, summer
air drowses through our bodies, a lullaby: Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone?
I am almost asleep when she vacuums the juice pouch dry, slurping startlingly
along with August’s cicadas, not noticing or caring that she is poor.
Emily Dickinson Was Human
by Jessica Vantrease
and not the sum of her words
not made of smooth white-on-black but dirt
sweating and breathing like you are now
somewhere behind the slant rhymes of three sixty
i hear her crying and peek past the rounded
corners of the letters
her flesh-and-blood shoulders
quake as she firmly shuts
her lost friend’s book
dabs at her eyes with sleeves
darker than the white of lore
she could never forgive herself
if this graphite memorial
dissolved in the salt of her grief
so she pours and seals the tears in airtight verse
she watches the universe forget
110 111
Escapement
by Jessica Vantrease
golden dots, l.e.d.
scroll above the frizzled heads
of drowsy riders. date and time
glow within the driver’s slow yawns
your sotto voce jokes
the sign itself is time
or maybe
made of time
even this bus is made of time
seats and bars and bolts of time
so are the riders. so is the driver
fibers and vapors and cells of time
and so are you
drumming fingers and ironic grin
and so am i
awkward curves and asthma cough
we’re milliseconds, you and i
gritty fleshy milliseconds
minutes huddled close for warmth
while the golden clock
keeps merciless time
chilling us to our historical bones
hold my hand, dear, tight as you can
lock fingers with mine, the teeth of a gear
i have to feel the seconds tick,
pulse out of you, our clockwork singing
before we’re gone
before we reach
the stop.
The Campaign
by Jessica Vantrease
Next door, the cold war erupts into a blitz. Ballerina phone-sobs
“Mama-I-want-him-out-of-my-life,” like a planted claymore,
her giant of a man sulking silently in the kill zone. We wait in our
apartment, tense, because we all know that in war, even the
neutral parties suffer. The AC thunks to life, drowning out
the whines and accusations of the wounded. The mines
never explode, and the siege finally migrates from the front walk
indoors, and ends in silence as I strain floury water from dinner’s boiled
noodles.
At four AM, a vacuum cleaner’s drone wakes me up.
Ballerina is drafting an armistice in the carpet-dust upstairs.
112 113
One Day I’ll Be Safe in the
Arms of Parentheses
by Sophie Rynas
We are not who we need now
I admit this gladly.
You’re confusing, thoughtless
And you exhaust me.
I’m done with this run on sentence.
I’m putting in a period,
and moving on to the next paragraph.
Despite awkward words
Despite sentence fragments
I don’t wish to erase what’s written
A dangling modifier or two remain
And I can’t complain
Because this stumble will fade
We were never meant to be
You’re a singular subject,
I’m a verb for plurals.
I was too busy telling myself lies to notice
Subject-verb agreement proved us to be fools
You’re a gerund.
You only look like a verb.
Underneath it all, you’re a noun.
And I’ve come to find, I need actions and reactions
I need a verb
I’m done with subjects and objects
You complained I was an independent clause
And always wished to stand on my own
But, when the semicolon was removed,
We forgot our connection
And realized we were strangers
Wearing a semicolon like a mask.
It became too much to face
The exclamation point sliced us in two
Like a metaphorical sword
I became lost after your appositive
A period fell between us,
Blocking our remaining connection
But it’s all okay because now I’m hanging
from the hook of a question mark
{And question marks always were my favorite}
And I know, one day I’ll be safe in the arms of parentheses
114 115
INSECTS
by Alex Craig
She was hiding in the trunk of a big maple
Watching the insects work.
The morning dew plopped onto her outstretched hands
from the wrinkles of an old leaf.
A terrific set of clouds worked to undermine the beaming sun.
Her mother was calling to her for dinner, to wash up.
To fall into routine, just like her sisters, and her mother before them.
To act like a lady at dinner, at school, at church. She would lose track
of when she was acting and when she wasn’t
Aware that her feet were calling to her (run!), but she didn’t know where to go.
She never wanted to wash up or bake or clean.
She didn’t care to close her legs, she didn’t wear skirts, and if she did,
She did whatever she wanted to with everything they covered.
She sat sprawled in the trunk, dirty,
with both her legs and her smile spread wide.
She knew that her mother would call and call, but mother would never come
out into the woods to search. She would be standing into the doorway, livid,
rumpled apron fabric dripping from the spaces between her fingers,
where the fist she was making couldn’t contain all the frills and lace,
but it did a good job trying.
In the trunk, she giggled.
Her mother never left the house,
And her father never left the office,
And the insects never left the tree.
Everyone is a Villain
by Julie Sullivan
Dear Diary
Today I let my mask slip,
and someone saw my eyes.
They say those are the windows
to the soul, you know.
While I don’t expect you,
a blank book my mother gave me,
to understand my fear,
just know that all is lost.
Everything I’ve ever feared has come true –
My identity has been compromised.
They know everything:
My strengths,
my weaknesses,
my hatred for imperfections,
why I don’t trust anyone with XY chromosomes…
I am vulnerable, diary.
I could be destroyed
at a moment’s notice.
I may not come home tonight.
Why aren’t you panicking like I am?
Why aren’t you sweating at the very thought?
This is a fiasco,
a debacle,
a disaster,
of the very worst kind.
116 117
No one can know the real me.
I must flee the country.
This is why I always travel light,
ready to run at any moment.
It’s the life of a hero, and
Everyone is a villain.
I can hear your imaginary voice in my head now,
telling me that I’m overreacting,
that people do this, reveal themselves,
every day.
But I am not everyone, and
I can’t do it.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, Diary,
But the mask
must stay on.
The Day I Decided to Ditch
College and go to Pastry
School Instead
by Ben Huber
Maybe I just want to decorate cakes for the rest of my life.
Or make desserts; éclairs, or all manner of
Chocolate gluttony. Maybe some nice crêpes suzette
Every now and then. It doesn’t have to be
Cake, specifically.
118 119
Imagine Delirium
by Bradley Scott Biggerstaff
These mud towers frighten ruffle chip children who bounce
through bus park hallways and rampant teachers’ hives.
Got to get the words outta that drum a beat dissonance
that’s ganging up on Walt’s imagination.
Mickey Whitman, you cherry green bastard, who’d ya call
about those oil stains stained on black on technicolored
black oil and coughed up dreams?
Color flavored scents function on boat rides’ pinstripes
stretching in and in the candy that rises to the top.
Just please forget that old Doctor cartoon, the one on a
cactus the name escapes and grass eats leaves cause
only the sun grabs ankles down here.
Marion’s Acid Trip
by Cassandra Poulos
she is static and
window glass women reach to her
crying baby wrapped warm in frost-bitten sheep skin
grabs orange infant hands
press
lifeline to lifeline
above the catacomb womb. The ghost
meets the hallucination
carrying the expired child’s thumb
around her neck
cordially tethered, noosed between breasts
pointing down
pointing away, phantom hitchhiker
pleads to be released from
Marion’s blistered, barren garden
where unforgiving baby’s breath
tangles around
moonlit sunrises, anxious moments where
the heavens are illuminated
the star meets the dawn
the dawn meets the morning
the morning meets the
paper thin world. A two-dimensional place where
the miscarried child
will write to anguished irony
To be aborted by the God who was once a lost child
To be aborted by the God who once lost a child
“Am I you, am I part of you?”
infant hands creating cognizant lines,
120
hardly self-sufficient lies.
the answer was five clutched fingers,
around his mounted thumb
a mother will forever carry the belly,
the village once pillaged
the room once euthanized
the tomb of tattooed skin
with her delusional arms
but the child is not Christ
and the mother is no virgin, the father is not god
The ghost is not holy,
only an impermeable cloud
of nature’s tyranny
that begs to be released from the acidic clutches
of the lady named Marion.
Forsaken by his mother,
his mother forsaken by God
knows what - The birds,
the sky,
Satan? She blamed them all.
The eclectic homeless humming,
dreadful choirs, the collapse of the blind beggar’s epitaph.
on the hot hot concrete,
she kneels to her cold cold knees
the stained light refracts her detached reflection,
only now an imitation of the lost glow of morning
sickness, now she has
eleven fingers to count the days
until she joins her son, until she too is only
a lonesome finger
to be suckled by the mouth of-next
Spread:
Untitled (Creation of Adam)
Tommy Malekoff
124 125
Forever
Kimberly Nguyen
Danger
Janie Ledford
126 127
Untitled (T. Lee)
Janie Ledford
Untitled (Leigh T.)
Blaine Wyatt Carteaux
Next:
Taking Trips with Dad & Labyrinth
Blaine Wyatt Carteaux
Tiger Fish Doesn’t Care About You Other Sea Critters
Jolie Day
Previous:
School
Rebecca Bennett
Vacuum
Samantha McPeters
All Brilliant
Lauren Ling
Marksman
Samuel Dalzell
Technophile
Samuel Dalzell
136 137
Renaissance
by Sam Otterbourg
Things change.
Cell phones ring in the Sistine Chapel
Pristine silence broken by blaring tones
Echoing off works of art
That was what people wanted in their churches
Now they want Xboxes and plush seating
So they can be entertained and comfortable for their salvation
In the room, ladies come and go, talking of Michelangelo
But Michelangelo
He’s a ninja turtle now and he
Like the other great masters
Fights crime for pizza
He’s not even the cool one
Leonardo is the leader
And has the cool swords
So it goes, the greatest painters of the Italian Rennaisance
Better known as mutant reptiles
How will they remember me? I wonder
Will I be re-animated, centuries after my death?
It would be nice to have such a tribute.
It is tribute, though heavily merchandised
And critically panned
They could have named them after any other quartet
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
George, Paul, Ringo, and John
But they chose the masters
Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo
Their masterpieces sit in Rome and Paris
While they live in a sewer and in the toy chests of children
Whose parents have disposable income
And so things have changed
A half-hour commercial made into video games
And poorly received films
Is a memorial to the artists who defined culture
Cell phones ring in the Sistine Chapel
Kids wear TMNT shirts in the Louvre
And plead to go back to the hotel
So they can watch cartoons.
138 139
Bury Me in Paris
by Colton Weaver
Bury me in Paris, when my heart stops and my eyes open wide,
next to Beckett or Sarte & de Beauvoir, ménage à trois.
Bury me in Paris, where the tourists go,
on the Champs-Élysées, or near the home of Picasso.
Bury me in Paris where the Seraphs scoff and roll their brown eyes
and the saints sell paints on the edge of the Seine’s grime.
Bury me in Paris between the pavement and le Métro,
take my body to whatever stop, just go.
Bury me in Paris on a winter’s night,
beneath the Louvre pyramid light.
Bury me in Paris with Lady Liberty in tow,
make my bed next to de Balzac, next to Marceau.
Bury me in Paris at the foot of l’Obélisque
accompanied by pharaohs, exhumed.
Bury me in Paris, leave me there, I guess,
in the hotel room overlooking the Arc. I, fully dressed.
Bury me in Paris while listening to Robespierre’s final scream,
the silence drowned out only by the guillotine.
Bury me in Paris, Montrouge, your angel calls to me,
that one who serves macarons at the head of the Tuileries.
Bury me in Paris, with the Angel, unimpressed,
next to her, I, in eternal rest.
Bury me in Paris, toss me off Bir-Hakiem, splashing,
or under tour Eiffel in the springtime night, waking.
Bury me in Paris, my body yearns to be free and true,
but if I am to die in New Orleans, bon Ange de Montrouge,
Bury me there with the jazz worms, singing:
“Angel, come to me, come to me, Angel, come.”
Title This, Millenials.
(for Those Who Eat Ramen by Choice, or Not.)
by Colton Weaver
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by disillusionment,
lacking egotistical sold, dragging themselves through the hip streets at dawn
looking for a socially self-aggrandizing fix.
Poets, as they sit in desks and discuss discourse
about discourse about discourse about discourse,
who fear that thinking itself was buried with Vonnegut,
who are lost in forests of brick walls,
inviting, because they block the wind of dying fall,
who swim in cesspools filled with academic sewage, yearning for freedom,
for truth, as they always have,
mining their minds for images, and searching for words to describe
-a reality which is virtual at its core and each act, another chore./
-a scene of life which reflects all that is poignant and sacred.
Poets seek musicians while musicians seek poets.
and the dog chases its tail, endlessly
and the dog chases its tail, endlessly
and the dog chases its tail, endlessly
These poets who search aimlessly for the feeling of feeling,
who are overwhelmed with meaning to the point where meaning
has no meaning in itself.
Who claim this poem as their own and continuously write themselves into it.
It is those who suffer in truth that live the poetic.
Those who sit in front of space heaters eating peanut butter sandwiches in
winter,
who sweat unknowingly in summer, comforted in each’s odor.
Those who open Macbooks while squatting in empty flats.
Signing up, logging in and zoning out, forever disengaged.
Those who type prophecy on keypads and let keyboards gather dust-stratification,
signs of long nights spent in century-old homes still not reno-
140 141
vated,
ceilings sinking at the sides while those above pogo to punk rock long dead,
or grind genitals to old soul, simulating all that is sensual.
Those who play archaeologist to their own layers of makeup, grimed on the
sink.
Those who share their food with the roaches and the mooches who all have
keys,
who use the books as shelves to hold ceramic mugs, stained with a single
drip-drop,
who, with arms crossed, watch bands in basements play noise.
Those who replaced their nu-metal records with folk but kept the unkempt
beards.
Those who drink stale beer on stranger’s rooftops.
Those who live with bags under eyes, themselves asleep, lacking a body,
sleeping naked together to stay warm,
sleeping naked together to stay sane,
sleeping naked together to stay touched.
Those who leave coffee in unplugged automatic pots, decaying rapidly.
Those who eat pizza for breakfast, cold or microwaved, as an act of ultimate
indulgence.
Those who prance about in un-matching socks
from hardwood floors to vinyl floors to tile floors, all under the same pop-corn
ceiling,
dancing to the sound of rhythmic silence.
Those who fight with lovers about acts, but never once mention the act of
love itself.
Those who don flannel plaid in springtime color, constructing Williamsburg,
who consider gentrification a new form of landed gentry,
who live in poverty as if it were a novelty,
capitalist martyrs sacrificing employment to hide being non-hirable,
who shop in online surplus department stores for unique vintage.
Those who, who, who hoot like the owls framed on their walls, eyes wide but
beaks small.
Those who are oppressed by nonexistent kings ruling in imaginary suits.
Those who crave something new, not tired-as the form of this very poem-something
which is not-yet auto-tuned.
Those who, faux-hawked and shredded, rock and bop to Bowie doing Lou
on Sunday Morning from Station to Station shooting Heroin,
who walk swiftly with denim skin on their legs and refuse socks.
Those who, in their rightest mind, are the wrongest-minded.
Those who can reject privilege only because they are privileged,
who, in their uniform whiteness, denounce racism,
who, in their uniform straightness, claim immune to homophobia
who, with their cocks erect in a row, claim to be feminists.
And those who search for revolution in a time when rebellion is conformity.
Listening to the pounding sound of blog-protesters typing n o w.
who, in claiming to accept, don’t accept the unaccepting,
who got veggies tattooed on their sides while snapping bacon in their teeth,
who ironically infiltrated asylums and performed madness until the shocks
came
and they were maddened, for good, eaten alive by volts resounding
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
Who sleep naked together to be together but end up being alone,
exchanges from lips that move in pretentious drone,
and the dog chases its tail, endlessly.
When the abnormal is normal and the whole structure is inverted and
heaven is here and flames under the soil are no longer hell burning for soles
of the
Converse, Adidas, and Nike sneakers on the bicycle pedals of poets who ride
at night,
listening to the sound of owls that question:
who?
whoo?
whooo?
142 143
ELEGY
by Alexandra Ledford
Andy Warhol, you bastard,
you have shown us what a mockery it is
to create. Fifteen
minutes my ass, you had yours for a good hour
with your cheap photographic stills
of Marilyn Monroe and ketchup bottles, juxtaposed not grouped
into glistering cloying chuck
or the copies of “Howl” ensconced
among your shelves, never read or perused, just
kept around: “Allen is famous.”
So vain, so glorious,
drag coquettes named Candy to this day
await at your altar,
young artists with their paint boxes,
gobs of ink and occasional semen
perceive the patented plush
sealed ironic bulk
against which no ManWoman can rebel
though maybe a Reaganomic
consumer’s palette is the most valid
snatch at tangibility
and God it’s been
24 years and we navigate
back to the impermanence of it, while my dollar’s
being burnt.
A little everyone clings
to the sensual fantasy of celebrity culture
visual and stupefying
like a nucleus of garnets
swiveling out of chaos.
Cementing my fear of your prosthetic legacy,
Andy (may I
call you Andy? Your hand
feels limp in my pumping vise) is:
what of course you wrought
solidified even
is an ominous foggy knowledge
that one has and rejoices
(skeins whirl and one cuts oneself
on Malaysian machines):
we will die.
144 145
The Burdens Undertaken by
Important People of
Polite Society
by Alexandra Ledford
I cannot stand
in Trafalgar Square and look up
without squinting
at royals behind curtains
fussing about The Papers and Security,
busying themselves
rattling jewelry
getting nowhere because they were born there.
Yes I hate them,
these Valium-saturated
damaged mothers who sip Earl Grey
leaving dregs and feces for the Proles.
The Rolls Royce got paintballed last month
—it was in all the papers—
angry pedestrians speaking of
the widening between
havenots and havemores
yet we still buy the glossy rags
to feed their polo horses.
Meanwhile on Long Island somewhere
Noveau-Tom and Noveau-Daisy and the Noveau-Buchanans
beat the Brits at their own game
(better, stronger, faster)
but still worry
about the stench from the cities.
Remembrance
by McAlister Greiner
I grasp these leaves
as many would cling to memories,
knowing they are a part of me,
a part of my survival.
This past spring, a child climbed
to my highest branch,
grazing her precious hand against my top leaf;
I was left with the innocence of her touch.
When I felt my strongest,
a summer storm tore many from my branches.
Though the coolness of the rain was refreshing,
the rage of the wind left me nearly bare.
As autumn approaches,
I slowly begin to lose them.
I mourn their fall.
Later, when winter arrives,
they shall all be lost,
crunching unheard
under the crunch of snow.
With each year,
new leaves come, old leaves fade,
but I grow from the nourishment they give to my soil.
I thrive in remembrance of them.
146 147
Warming
by Ashley Fare
We swung back the canopy on ancient hinges,
And swept up the floor we’d riddled with singes:
Recolored it again with mechanical haste,
By left palms itching to break age at the base.
No form was as powerful
To cease what was dawning.
The horizon at our backs,
We thought less about warming.
With purpose:
So did I,
Without regret,
I followed suit,
Kicking paths between the leaves,
Ignoring the green-flagged truce.
Wander
by Kendra Hammond
Through one central station, out of the city, into the next,
and we’re back at a station again. They all look the same. But
feel your shoes click on the brick beneath your toes and lift,
set down, click, lift, skip, and onto the next city. Again.
148 149
Exhale
by Michele Trumble
We carved our initials
into the lungs of the earth,
asking mother to bleed
for our permanence.
I turned to the East
to the horizon
where she slid into my life.
I asked her how she knew,
how I would know.
“Because it felt like home” she said,
rising on her heels to get a little bit closer
But even I could see
her footprints were deep,
yet questioned.
She turned to the West
to the horizon
saying that is where I could find her.
My eyes traced her receding outline
wanting desperately to trickle down her spine
to see what it felt like
to have one.
We carved what we thought
our souls would look like
into the lungs of the earth,
hoping with each exhalation
we would find just a little more peace.
Excursion
by Robert Watkins
Today,
my phone went off more
than usual,
but it was never
who I wanted it to be.
Rather than wait ,
I went to the bookstore.
Liquidation, all items
MUST
go, the empty shelves and
colorful caps-lock signs were enough
to disenchant every reader in town.
Through deserted streams of text
bound in sale stickers
the ghost-skinned redhead
made her rounds
and drew me in with
her casual curiosity.
To speak to a stranger
goes down like slurry,
the music of conversation is
stimulating enough.
Each encounter, a new mission.
the idea of success is enough to ensnare
any man.
I approached her as though
I worked there,
“What are you looking for?”
Taken aback,
one word answers spilled from her
clumsy mouth like drunk missiles.
150 151
It was all very forced and
hurried,
her discomfort exercised the charm
from my body
I lied about plays and books, got her to smile
just enough
so that I didn’t feel like a failure,
and sauntered my burning ears to the car with my friend.
I asked my friend if he had seen
the cute redhead carrying a copy of Peter Pan.
As usual, he scoffed,
an unamused sibling, an impatient
father,
because it’s the same exhausting story
every time we go out
so we talked about something else.
When I got home,
I set my bag down and put my
new book on the shelf,
lay on my bed and
saw that my phone had still disappointed me,
but the empty house was enough.
It felt good to be alone.
Cheeseburgers
by Travis Hauer
Red flesh sizzling
on the flat top stove.
Stained linen aprons
and sweat-soaked clothes.
A hot summer Sunday,
a diner off Tate.
Still unnoticed
forced to wait for a cook
with a hazardous belly
and crippling cologne.
Behind a boy with an application
And a suit he’s outgrown.
Listening to the girl in the corner
tearing nails with her teeth.
The man sweeping a shattered plate
dropping fries into grease.
My thoughts wander into a field
of grass beneath my feet.
Like a thief I steal away
worries of cheeseburgers
in the heat.
152 153
The Dancer
by Travis Hauer
Theater lights are swallowed
by darkness as I find my seat.
All around are the sounds of
chit-chat dying, a woman next to me shivering,
whispering to her husband, it’s so cold.
The stagnant air feels thin, almost
stretched among the mouths
rhythmically breathing in sync. I can hear them.
It’s quite comforting. We are waiting
and breathing so very slowly.
My eyes fall onto a girl who dances
from the black beyond the stage.
Her feet sweep endlessly, leaving streaks
like white paint across a black canvas.
Slow, methodical piano keys drown the sound
the bodies create as they rise and fall with air.
She is so pale, so thin and dizzy.
My fingers squeeze and clinch, she isn’t dancing
she is sick. So thin, she isn’t breathing.
Her arms hung like a puppet, she is falling,
sweat covered feet smacking awkwardly about.
Knees crack as she crashes to the ground,
fumbling at her throat, crawling,
reaching, trying to shout.
So still, they sit motionless and stare.
The woman next to me doesn’t shiver;
she doesn’t blink.
Cold lines of sweat stream down my sides,
they don’t notice that I’m standing.
Tip-toeing between shoes, fingers drifting
along the backs of the seats. I am coming.
In the heat of the light, I crawl to find her
in a pile of dress and sweat, still and quiet.
Sweeping her up I shout, SHE IS SICK! PLEASE HELP!
The bodies stare quietly back, lidless eyes
biting on every inch of my skin. There is no more
piano, the air grows still. I can hear them again.
Rising and falling. Breathing and waiting,
gently sliding her out of my hands.
The only sounds to be heard
are the soft breaths and my feet
sweeping endlessly across the floor.
154 155
Pasiphae and the Bull
by Caitlin Meredith
Many nights after the consummation,
she wakes from a black sleep,
slips her fingers into the throbbing wetness,
and remembers the rough thrusts of the bull—
the way his horn skimmed her back,
how she bit her lip and slurped the blood, how
his musky scent mingled with the forsythia.
Moonbeams sparkle on her heaving chest
as her hands replace his hardness. She knows
this lust will never end. Her stomach is taut
and swells by the day. After the last moan leaves
her mouth, she lies in the milky afterglow
of memory and climax, at once human
and animal. It’s then that she thinks she
hears the bull groaning in the garden.
Out of bed she staggers, finding the cowskin
Daedalus crafted. Beneath the hide she
shields herself once more; the bull’s warm odor is
still there and his wetness and her own and
a surge of grief pins her in place when she
discovers the vacant garden. Her toes
curl around the dewy grasses as she takes
her position by the flowering forsythia.
Awash in moonlight and longing, her dance
begins: thrust after thrust after thrust; she
imagines he is there underneath her—massive,
marble-white gift—as the soft, quiet orgasms
blossom inside her. Then she feels the water
trickling down her leg, but knows she cannot stop.
Penelope
by Caitlin Meredith
I think of you most when I’m in pain—
a toothache that makes my jaw throb,
the rawness of my hands after hours
at the loom; the stiffness in my back
from hunching like an old woman.
Pain reminds me of the
only touch that can soothe.
Do you remember the day we
ran in the orchard? I tripped over
twigs and tumbled to the earth,
humiliated and ashamed. Swathes
of skin started to purple; to my side you
came, fell on your knees and
touched the wounds with rough
lips and fingers. The first surge of
lust lurched in me, an awakening that
cancelled the pain. I lifted my skirts
past the dirty, blood-caked knees
and staked my heels in the ground,
open to you at last. I never knew
what passion was until pleasure and
pain melted as one inside of me.
Nights I have wandered, in my mind,
from our cold bed to that warm spot
of earth in the distance where you
first broke me open. And yet I
wait. My ache for you, like the
ache in every part of my body,
affirms that I am still alive.
156 157
Persephone Speaks
to Demeter
by Caitlin Meredith
If I had known how
the narcissus would
give way, mother I
would have stayed
closer to you but the
fields were swollen
with flowers, the wind
was crisp, the air fragrant
What were my last words
to you before he claimed me?
Mother I love you.
Mother the day is fine.
Mother I will return
I won’t be gone long.
I am here now in this spring.
We are together again but
not as close as before.
The girl you knew is no more.
Mother, she is no more.
Person Watching
by Hannah Danger
saw the gait
which like your soul is
ardently alive within its
field,
like earth swivels
on its axis,
and like my thoughts
tending towards only
one direction.
158 159
Sleeping, Sweating,
the Sounds, and the Silence
by Garrett Taddeucci
Tangled and damp, we, the vines
and the leaves of this forest,
canopied by sheets, rooted into the mattress,
twist in our sleep, and our eyes
shift and they flicker to the whine
swelling from the woods, thick with cicadas
whirring through the night for what fate handed to us,
or what the gods allowed us, or what we took for ourselves.
We pull the blades from our hearts and our backs.
We kiss the wounds we’ve left in each other,
and we stay here like ghosts
left with time and each other,
and we pass, like vapor,
in and out of sleep and each other.
New Year’s Meditation
by Garrett Taddeucci
Crystalline mist
floats around me
like a swarm of tiny, icy, insects.
Stoned, I’m lost
in their kaleidoscopic dance
among the bittersweet, tangerine rays
of the dying sun.
I sink further into the trees
until I’m deep enough
to join their gray, silent legion.
Eyes closed,
fingers dug into the soil,
I pray for them to bless me
with their wisdom, benevolence,
and stillness.
I too, have shed my vibrant foliage.
I too, have spent these winter months
gnarled and dormant.
But I too am eager
to let my dead parts rot beneath me
as I reach up,
green and reborn,
to the newly risen sun.
160 161
Night Lights
by Jesse Morales
One summer during a lightning storm
you told me stories of absence,
how the sirens did not sound
at the waterfront
when you lit firecrackers there,
how your absolute fear
is not that you cannot feel shock,
but that you do.
Your voice then was voltaic
as the white veins
that open thunderclouds,
and its sound washed me
with memories of other nights,
how the dusk’s curtain
would drape itself over the lake
as the stars rode soft currents
like tea candles in paper boats,
how we would paint the lakeshore
with our forlornness
until we lay spent in the grass
like the husks of stars
cooling against vast space.
Once we drank the moon
from our bottle of red wine
while you gestured at the Pleiades,
wondering how shared heat
melts off into nothing,
how the novas of love
make dust from solid figures
glowing in darkness.
It was those seven ripe lights
that revealed to me
why the tenor strains of your speech
set firestorms in the heavens;
this was because you were brother
to night lights,
everlasting suicides that burned
vacancy into your soul
whenever evening came.
162 163
Les Demoiselles Opaques
by Jesse morales
Three women sit for snapshots
on a stone fence.
Feet limp like damp lea
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| Title | Coraddi [Spring 2011] |
| Date | 2011 |
| Editor/creator | Shipley, Maxwell D. |
| Subject headings | Arts--North Carolina--Greensboro--Periodicals;Creative writing (Higher education)--North Carolina--Greensboro--Periodicals;College student newspapers and periodicals--North Carolina--Greensboro;Student publications--North Carolina--Greensboro;Student activities--North Carolina--History; University of North Carolina at Greensboro--Periodicals;College students' writings, American--North Carolina--Greensboro |
| Place | Greensboro (N.C.) |
| Description | Starting in 1897, State Normal Magazine contained news about the State Normal and Industrial College (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro). Renamed Coraddi in 1919, the magazine became primarily a literary and fine arts publication and remains so to the present day. |
| Type | Text |
| Original format | Periodicals |
| Original publisher | Greensboro, N.C. : The University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
| Language | eng |
| Contributing institution | Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries |
| Publication | State Normal Magazine / Coraddi |
| Rights statement | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/ |
| Additional rights information | NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES. This item has been determined to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The user is responsible for determining actual copyright status for any reuse of the material. |
| Object ID | Coraddi2011Spring |
| Date digitized | 2015 |
| Digital master format | Application/pdf |
| Digital publisher | The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304 |
| Digitized by | UNCG DP |
| Full text | 3 Contents Rushton Emery Loring An Autumn Well...........................................................................8 Kate Putnam The Cartographer, 1.....................................................................10 The Cartographer, 2.....................................................................12 Christopher Robin’s Theory of What the World is Like..............................14 Elizabeth Qualls Ruin.......................................................................................16 Alexandra Katsos There is No Wha in Who................................................................17 Amber Midgett Broken Ballad............................................................................19 Cala Estes Life Unto the Dawn.....................................................................20 David Wall Same Difference.........................................................................22 The Hospital Rhythm....................................................................23 Empty Field...............................................................................25 Candace Owens A Polaroid from July, 2007...........................................................27 Temporary Solutions to Permanent Problems.........................................28 The Build-Up, Unveiling, and Review of Human Artwork.........................29 Happy Hunting Ground.................................................................31 Maurice Moore Heavy Cross..............................................................................32 Caroline Hughes Temple Wires.............................................................................34 Morganne Radziewicz I Was a Lover............................................................................36 C O R A D D I 4 5 Holly Mason Communion..............................................................................74 Goose Creek..............................................................................75 The Scent Remains.......................................................................76 Ashley Wiggins Ode to Joe................................................................................78 Jamison B. Hackelman Medlan Yearning.........................................................................80 Kenneth Bennett Untitled..................................................................................92 Steisha Pintado Self Portrait (Energize).................................................................94 Isabelle Abbot Climax, NC..............................................................................96 Hagan Stone.............................................................................97 David Nolker Blind......................................................................................98 Jayce Christian Russell Those Who Would Remain............................................................104 Death of Venus.........................................................................106 Jessica Vantrease Chalk Castles, Asphalt Sky...........................................................108 Emily Dickinson Was Human.........................................................109 Escapement.............................................................................110 The Campaign...........................................................................111 Sophie Rynas One Day I’ll Be Safe in the Arms of Parentheses....................................112 Alex Craig Insects...................................................................................114 Julie Sullivan Everyone is a Villain....................................................................115 Ben Huber The Day I Decided to Ditch College and Go to Pastry School Instead............117 Bradley Scott Biggerstaff Imagine Delirium.......................................................................118 Cassandra Poulos Marion’s Acid Trip......................................................................119 Tommy Malekoff Untitled (Creation of Adam).........................................................122 Jolie Day Sausages..................................................................................38 Morgan Joyce Duchamp Shuffle........................................................................39 Samuel Dalzell Endurance.................................................................................40 Jessica Beebe The First Year............................................................................41 John Friedrich Untitled 45...............................................................................42 Untitled 47...............................................................................43 Afterlife..................................................................................44 Indelible..................................................................................45 Charlotte Kathryn Smith Speculations on the Private Life of a Cashier at The Dollar General.............46 Yadkin Valley Dying Song..............................................................48 Katie Fennell Between Two Hills: Three Vignettes...................................................50 Caitlin Watkins Getting to Bermuda......................................................................52 Clink......................................................................................54 Malbert Smith Iya.........................................................................................55 Laath Martin Matronly Lesson..........................................................................58 Eyes, The First............................................................................60 Ghanian Play.............................................................................62 Drema Wilson Cityscape.................................................................................64 Dance.....................................................................................66 Autumn Rayn Brehon Escapism..................................................................................68 Jessica Fritz The Whitest Day I Can Remember.....................................................69 Corey Cantaluppi That Room................................................................................71 David Englebretson Simple Degree of Truth..................................................................72 Peel - A New Way to Look at Student Poverty........................................73 6 7 Travis Hauer Cheeseburgers..........................................................................151 The Dancer..............................................................................152 Caitlin Meredith Pasiphae and the Bull.................................................................154 Penelope.................................................................................155 Persephone Speaks to Demeter........................................................156 Hannah Danger Person Watching.........................................................................157 Garrett Taddeucci Sleeping, Sweating, the Sounds, and the Silence...................................158 New Year’s Meditation.................................................................159 Jesse Morales Night Lights.............................................................................160 Les Demoiselles Opaques..............................................................162 Clefts....................................................................................163 Spirit and Flesh.........................................................................164 To the Working Class God I Have Lost..............................................165 Christopher Stella God, Strung Out.......................................................................167 Tate and Rankin........................................................................168 Caitie Bailey Bird is Word, Scale is Frail..............................................................172 Yourself..................................................................................173 Jillian Wood Anderson Untitled.................................................................................174 Lunar Cnidaria.........................................................................176 Above All Else, Be Armed.............................................................177 Samuel Gregor Dalzell Untitled.................................................................................178 Gaze.....................................................................................180 William Leatherwood Daniel Doon............................................................................182 Matt Northrup Young Thought..........................................................................184 Alexa Feldman 2012 (We’re Fucked)..................................................................185 Contributors’ Notes...........................................................................186 Kimberly Nguyen Forever..................................................................................124 Janie Ledford Danger...................................................................................125 Untitled (T. Lee)......................................................................126 Blaine Wyatt Carteaux Untitled (Leigh)........................................................................127 Taking Trips with Dad.................................................................128 Labyrinth...............................................................................129 Jolie Day Tiger Fish Doesn’t Care About You Other Sea Critters............................130 Rebecca Bennett School...................................................................................131 Samantha McPeters Vacuum................................................................................132 Lauren Ling All Brilliant.............................................................................133 Samuel Gregor Dalzell Marksman..............................................................................134 Technophile............................................................................135 Sam Otterbourg Renaissance.............................................................................136 Colton Weaver Bury Me in Paris........................................................................138 Title This, Millenials...................................................................139 Alexandra Ledford Elegy....................................................................................142 The Burdens Undertaken by Important People of Polite Society..................144 McAlister Greiner Remembrance...........................................................................145 Ashley Fare Warming................................................................................146 Kendra Hammond Wander..................................................................................147 Michele Trumble Exhale...................................................................................148 Robert Watkins Excursion...............................................................................149 8 9 But, unavoidably, Winter stuffs Autumn away, With a winded push. Nevertheless, Autumn remains In a closet where I throw my bucket. An Autumn Well by Rushton Emery Loring Autumn is kept in the closet So she can’t breathe out Tangerines and bark. So she can’t hang like a portrait Or stand like a friend. But when I need to Hide in finished leaves or Breathe and simply breathe, I stand at the season’s edge - A closet brimming with Autumn, And I drink in warmth From a strum Negotiating mountains. Listen. Vibrations don’t dry up. Not when a neck fits in a palm Or when bodies are Born again into one. Melodies aren’t like wallets And skin and creeks and spit. But rather - Sound becomes street lamps, Magnolia leaves, and a watery Wood grain - a well with a thousand Blue daisies. A perfect fix to a silent Desk. 10 11 we jump from skiff to skiff in the canals of this death-crazed, screaming country and only take what catches our eyes, makes our chests expand outwards and our fists come to rest on our hips, swashbucklers who wave swords and shake in our fists the fingerbones of our enemies, though we have only molded them out of clay and our eyes are whole under the velvet patches, and we wonder how much of the world around us can shine gold before we die. The Cartographer, 1 by Kate Putnam My friends and I have eyes as big as universes, like the giant squid that fill the empty spaces of ancient maps, dilated wide to gobble up the light of the flames of the burning city around us as we shriek our discordant joy – Oh, the plunder gleaned from the ruinous wake of lives lived! Just keep swimming, one of them yells to me as we’re tossed overboard amid a sea of thrashing wet strangers, and I do, shoulders surging forward with a heartbeat like we are in a hurricane ocean fight for survival, and I can barely lift my head over the waves to gasp in enough air to go forward, gasp in a throat-full of smoke - not mine - and listen to the scuffing of tired boots on concrete underneath the forced laughter of four hours until sunrise and if we can push past this one moment of lull, we’ll be awake to see it, and then we’ll have another reason to dance. There are so many. We are young enough to go to work in the morning and I am young enough to keep laughing even though some part of me is worrying about the silence of our wake and the laughter I am using is torn from the body of some landlubber. We are strong enough that our presence is enough to fill sails and I am strong enough to push the water down my throat and through my gills as though I am turning mermish and will live forever in coral beds. Still, eye-lit candles and saline water as the grains of our minds percolate a weak tea of unrealized potential, our hands gesturing in grand ceremony at this latest port. I once expressed a desire to be geisha and no one agreed but everyone wished for kimonos. We will wear the robes but we will not espouse the stiff obi-restraint of ideas, not yet, we are too young and too mind-wide for that. Right now 12 13 I could not breach any border, and so while those areas of my maps are detailed and easily transversed again – the natives will remember my face and rush to greet me as one of them – I will not return to those borderlands. I leave them for the tourists, to be scavenged for souvenirs. In you I am become Columbus. I lay my hands to this map and declare it my own. With my hands I will ink the lines of your landscape and note those landmarks which were before only vague legends and innuendo. I have looked across these borders and known you existed where others wrote you off as monsters and folkloric fancy. I know you, though I have never seen you until today, and I will learn you your histories, your flora, your local customs, your gods, your songs, your tempers and temperatures. I will record all of these things and my countrymen will say to me ‘How brave you were, to dive into the unknown, the inky black darkness where, they say, dangers surely lie.’ And I will shake my head, and point to my maps and reply, ‘No. You see? This place of you was always there. I knew before I ever saw your face.” The Cartographer, 2 by Kate Putnam When I say I know you I’m not talking about your face. I’m not talking about the way your skin wraps over your muscles and dips smoothly over the rolling landscape of your body. These things are uncharted territory to my eyes, places on my maps that are blank, their edges bordered with half-satirical hearts and vague notions of who you might be. Ancient mariners would have plastered bold words over these uncertainties: Here there be monsters. But I am the hardly intrepid observer of today; my pen scratches hesitantly across the known void. I want... it begins, and then the ink trails away disappears into the wrinkles and folds of the paper as though I must keep unfolding to find the end of the sentence. I have explored all the borders surrounding this unknown. I have wiped my tears in the warmth of the lowlands and swallowed them up against the harsher climes, bowed my back and shouldered burdens for those I thought could guide me in, begged artifacts from those who would swear to have returned. There is evidence of my forays, left perhaps for other explorers to discover in other expeditions, and use to form their own incorrect theories: books of insecurely vague poetry and photographs stolen from yearbooks and broken handcuffs and bits of bravado I have ripped from my own skin. 14 15 (because even his bear knew there was no honey without bees). But the bees did not really sting Winnie the Pooh, only buzzed. A bear of very little brain is too much fluff to feel the pain. A bee can sting, or a bear can fall into a thistle bush, and, well, that’s a bother, but then there was Eeyore, who was apt to thank the bear for finding his dinner. In the Hundred Acre Wood, everybody was always benefiting somebody. It was only a matter of time. Winnie the Pooh ate the Eeyore’s birthday honey (because he was a bear and that’s what bears do) and Piglet popped his birthday balloon (because he was a pig and that’s what pigs… oh, bother) and Eeyore – who was what Christopher Robin tried to be when Christopher Robin was blue – didn’t like balloons or honey, very much (because he was blue and not one person wants to look at a balloon, which is happy, when they’re sad, which is what you are when you’re blue) anyways. Bears and pigs shouldn’t pick out birthday presents because apparently they are bad at it. And we’ll wonder about why Eeyore had a birthday some other day. Like when we wonder where in the Wood Piglet got a balloon. Christopher Robin’s Theory of What the World is like by Kate Putnam Winnie the Pooh was a bear of very little brains (because he was full of fluff so there was not much room left for brains). Owl was wiser but only as wise as Christopher Robin, because Christopher Robin made him wise. Christopher Robin made Winnie the Pooh stupid, too, but only insofar as Christopher Robin was stupid. When Winnie the Pooh tried to understand the world it was only Christopher Robin trying to explain the world, and since the bear was the boy, or the boy was the bear, neither understood from beginning to end. It was okay for Christopher Robin to lie to his bear because we all have to lie to ourselves sometimes. We all think we’re smarter (and taller) than we really are. Christopher Robin put his brains in an owl, and his honey in a bear, and his rabbit grew its own carrots (which is a sensible thing for a rabbit to do) but the carrots were only Christopher Robin, too. Honey was what Christopher Robin wanted so honey was what his bear tried to get. And of course there were bees 16 17 THERE IS NO WHA IN WHO by Alexandra Katsos I was never inherently selfish. I was concrete, saw the bigger picture. We were only bodies we wished were others. Only faces worn with missing eyes. In the dead of the night … we kept the television on to lessen the sound, the gasping moan, four times over. The way you’d succumb. Me as I was, on top. Left bruises under my bones the other lovers laughed to marvel at. Did they pay the attention you wanted? With your constant begging always covered in hair like dental floss. Well I tossed that salad, I fought it off. The bigger picture meant self-preservation; it meant hailing the mustard cab 387. One meal a day to afford your dive; its pricy subjection pushing forward stained and empty glasses, pulling down lowered shirts, my heart finally fully saturated. I requested anything, except the blues. Burnt all those pricks with their pieces in a circle. I never invited you. And with a status change we both stopped coming. You told me inside you were just a child. Suckling on each teat with your expected achievement, a well that eventually ran dry, Ruin by Elizabeth Qualls Small cool stone bright candied red speckled along the curve pooling underneath. Snap of the slingshot whistle of a missile slicing through benign air A dizzy tumble careening lower soft feathers rustle wings caress grass. I am seven standing on that sidewalk, this is my first taste. 18 19 Broken Ballad by Amber Midgett All my poetry was stolen by a girl in a Detroit Lions jersey. She wanted to run away to some obscure European country, like Montenegro or Malta, where one couldn’t guess offhand what language they’ll be speaking. She left without me when I realized that the rest of the world fighting against two was more than I could manage. She took my words with her. Who knows what they’re saying now. an inner thigh that didn’t. Filthy dirty rascal, you must’ve milked it right. I told you I never wanted my own child; so someone should tip the sitter sitting on your face. We don’t have time for it. Our needs were as discussed. It was never you who looked around but never up. You’ll pity a fool and never let on that you actually gave a fuck. 20 21 and all the land was still. Said the prince to the quiet Moon, “I think thou art too early.” Said the lady to the fiery Sun, “And I think thou art too late.” So for an age their gazes held locked in a loop of silence. Until at last, as one they spoke and reached out with both hands. Said the Moon in modest manner, “Light must always lead the way.” And said the Sun in gentle whispers, “Night is comfort to the day.” And so they joined in hands and hearts, the Lady and the Prince of Stars. The silver and the gold together bring life unto the dawn. Life Unto the Dawn by Cala Estes A hundred stars drawn on the walls, a dozen comets behind the curtains, a thousand stories as yet untold, and just one night to read them. Close your eyes, my tired lover, and I’ll sit by your side. Beneath the covers lies a world of mist where sea foam caps the sky. There was a man of princely state who traveled o’er the land. And for his blade, he caught the Sun and threw it from his hand. There was a lady of humble means whose craft was moonlight art. She wove the words that whispers spoke then tied them to the wind. And on the eve of equal time, before the first leaves fell, at twilight’s rain the Moon and Sun clashed amid the heavens. The golden prince and the silver lady stood either side of dusk. No whispers came, no battles raged, 22 23 The Hospital Rhythm by David Wall I remember the metronome beat of the machine Leashed to her chest and wrist, unrelenting. No one could erase the steady rhythm — Each beat, same tone, forward, then back. We waited, halfway expecting to hear a break, A syncopation, a jazzy skip to bend the chime Over again, on itself, rounding the quick declines. We did not cut straws to decide our shifts, But we all took our turns in stale seats Then stumbled into corner shadows. Filling my mother’s room, no —her Extended Care room, with dense recycled air, calm tension Expected in infirmaries: papered walls, Four-wheeled bed-frame, a small television set — Having already, time and again, seen faces like ours. We prayed, each day with amen and amens Following in unison the effortless beeping. Patience, family visits, a preacher sat Along with us, and we tapped our feet together. Growing dependent on the digital repeat, we Lost ourselves when it fell into a ceaseless scream — A turntable needle pierced our eardrums, Tracing an unending channel, colliding Into the ticking clock on the wall. Sharp Unbroken static fell over us, like waves From the walls of the Red Sea, after the prophet Let his hands fall to his side, his people safe. Same Difference by David Wall I want to get home tonight Wrench off my shoes and socks Run through my front yard Cutting across browned grass Barking at the stars, daring them To fall down and spit on My hands to prove they are Serious about this shining. 24 25 Empty Field by David Wall When you called to ask me if I wanted— Let’s pause for a moment. I feel As though the word “want,” Used to ask me if I would Be at your wedding day act Is like using the world “love” To describe what you have now. Four letters combined in this way, They are not efficient, cardboard around Door frames to keep out the cold, apologies After betrayal, forks for eating ice cream— On the other side of a bookended Silence, when you decided to phone me, My chest seized. Unlike when you Decided it was best not to grab coffee, Or set up scenes in sandwich shops; I was surprised. Books on a shelf Are used to not being able to stretch, And I knew it would be a long time Before you picked me up again. You gave me choices. Did I “want” to come or did I not “Want” to be there for you the day You turned me from friend to old Friend, from chance to decided Upon, future to past. Would I Come to see you given away By the father who never lifted His hand when I drove by? How long did my father listen? The preacher Found him, with arms crossed and head down, As if drowning, unable to float. We were covered In loss denser than salt water, with no chance to gasp. My lungs refuse to expand. No more dry breath. This heart, searches for rhythm again, a steady Beat to mimic, rattles against my ribs. A nurse blackened The bedside monitors and left us to new silence. Weeks before she checked into Baptist Women’s Memorial, After waking up from a nap on her couch, the one resting In front of the bay window, my mother remarked: Sleeping is a whole lot like practice. 26 27 A Polaroid from July, 2007 by Candace Owens I like you best in the drivers seat with your wayfarers on and my legs on your dashboard with nothing to fight except the passage of time Would I find my seat In the field where A man I had never met Would shove me from the shelf To replace me with an emptied Picture frame of some young girl Dressed in off-white, close Against the same man? No, I didn’t want to make it And months later, when you tripped On your pallid gown and fell To the flowered floor, I’m sure You thought how lucky Only friends saw you fall. 28 29 The Build-Up, Unveiling, and Review of Human Artwork by Candace Owens He holds me and my colors bleed, A living, breathing coated candy in the palm of his hand. Ashamed, I wonder can he see my dull and rotten insides? Skin painted watercolors on the sheets, his olive, mine peach. But where I was hoping for pastels, I see a muddy mural, Set against a backdrop of superficial bullshit- A visual composition of the months of smiles, Witty comebacks, Calculated movements It took us to get here. Now his once-dirty laundry is hanging on the line, Shedding every last hint of me- Another attempted masterpiece forgotten, Thrown in the washing machine. Two hours later and I’m driving away, Seatbelt unbuckled intentionally. Cross my legs, light a cigarette. Ding-ding-dings of the seatbelt off sign serve me auditory pleasure, As reckless driving habits are my only revolt against a life that seems Scripted for us to act out, Filled with implicit rules and expectations. go to class. get a job. join a club. date nice boys. eyes on the road. hands on the wheel. (no) fasten your seatbelt. (ding-ding-ding, NO) Temporary Solutions to Permanent Problems by Candace owens Your lips on mine in the back of a late-night movie, Retreat to your car’s backseat once credits are rolling- Well, I hate to say it, but it’s really too damn cliche. Cause all bullshit aside, I bet you’re a really nice kid, But you and I, we both know what this is. And sure, you made me shudder in steady rhythms like The revving engine of your car, but that’s not really love, now is it? Instant gratification may slake our hunger, But I’m hollow in ways that your hands can’t fill. You are the clothes strewn on the floor. You are the jokes you tell for comic relief. You are the eight-hour quick fix pill. 30 31 Happy Hunting Ground by Candace Owens I remember when I let my roots grow out long and you said it made me look wild, like a member of an island nation we wrote the laws of the land a mix of your rules and my revelations, a king and queen with no subjects you taught me to hunt and tear through the grizzle with my teeth of the very same animals we’d tricked into being our friends I drew faces in the sand when we ate on the beach and we pretended like we were hosting a royal feast instead of scavenging scraps like wolves and at night we’d make love and I’d howl and I’d cry because no one could hear us or tell me to quiet it started with a shipwreck and ended with love we built our own kingdom an wild Eden of our own Handed a rhythm to maintain like monkeys with brass cymbals, No room for new patterns, only the same continuum of perform, impress, amuse. During these drives alone, I can feel my fair complexion graying Like the dusty pages of an old newspaper, Seeking refuge from such perfunctory percussion Before my hue has been permanently desaturated. Left piece-by-piece as ghostly shades on boys’ bed-sheets, Friends’ couches, Schoolroom desks, Coffee-shop mugs, Impersonal letters of “recognition for academic excellence”... No longer able to sustain the societal beat imposed upon me, I’m drained of both my color and my battery 32 33 Heavy Cross Maurice Moore Next: Temple Wires Caroline Hughes 34 35 36 37 I Was a Lover Morganne Radziewicz 38 39 Previous: Sausages jolie Day Duchamp Shuffle Morgan Joyce 40 41 The First Year by Jessica Beebe I’ll be married by winter, with every i dotted, the underside of my arms exposed. The dress will unravel by morning but I’ve made certain we are ready, they don’t prepare you for things like this. I’ll build my house around autumn and plan birthdays in advance, I prefer a driveway lined with oak trees. I’ve decided to burn toast in the evening and peel oranges at midnight, of course, I’ll invent stories for the lapse in the day. I’ll write less poetry and more conversation, pay attention when he talks in his sleep, and these lists will hold us as we wait for the first fall of snow. Endurance by Samuel Dalzell For how much longer must we endure the tired tyranny of public hypocrites? hyperconsumption hyperstimulation and: Greed, Ignorance, Bigotry, Misinformation, War, Religious Fervor, False Hope, Corporate Hegemony, Ecological Meltdown, Overpopulation, Poverty, Institutionalized Dehumanization? (no matter: for we shall continue to breathlessly shout paeans of adoration to glossy demigods who’ve done right in our eyes) alas, now we have been made w h o l e ? 42 43 Untitled 45 by John Friedrich blind alleys feel their way as rats and fools stumble lives against the bricks and the stoplight changes to tell the empty road it has every right to leave Untitled 47 by John Friedrich Splitting hairs one by one and still the truth grows no more bald Pour then another cup of my wine — if any man can own what sun and grape lacking witness create — and bring the dead philosopher forth from your lips parted also by cigarette and words broken only by the whippoorwill who tasted neither wisdom nor wine and yet whose voice is more easily recalled 44 45 Indelible by John Friedrich Cover every inch of skin in tattoos — you pick the color — and still you can bore me Rebels indifferent to cause and responsive to effect only when loud or close to bright but not too close and risk seeing the first smear of this artistically blemished flesh and the blush of the little girl still in there Afterlife by John Friedrich Come, ghost sit in my chair otherwise empty no hairs stand on my neck for your company the graveless ask little save to be heard while those who haunt do so without shame or lack of blood as her fingers lace with his woven into funeral shroud for the unburied Come, ghost does the moon set so soon? the fact of your death I do not begrudge and will pour my best wine into a saucer above your drying shell if you only summon the substance to shade my eyes from her lips 46 47 neighborhood women, all flower-potting, bra-strapping, toddler-toting and diet-pill popping. He isn’t missing much. The registertape sings in perfect time but the mop gets harder to manage over the linoleum streaked in debris caught in kidspit. I continued home with my plastic bags of plastic bags, and all the way I won-dered if he was lonely and if she was real and how I half-way like everything I should like all the way, and be glad about it all, How I still have time to fall in love and collect whatever I want in the guest room, If I could have loved him when he was young and even brilliant, before his spectacles became bifocals— Before I was younger than he, When I was someone to whom he would say “Have a nice day!” In hopes I’d return. He was only working his way through college, after all. Speculations on the Private Life of a Cashier at The Dollar General by Charlotte Kathryn Smith Maybe his wife tells him so when he comes home, quieter, grayer and smell-ing of mop-water. She is boiling potatoes to mash and watching Jeopardy! On their tiny kitch-en- counter TV set, still rabbiteared, and tweaked with tinfoil. She has an eye for beauty, and a fascination with the uncommon. She keeps special-edition Barbie-dolls in mint-condition packaging in the guest room, and collects tabloid photos, Three-legged acrobats and bat-babies born to congress ladies. But he has no wedding-band, I notice. He leaves it at home because his fingers swell in the mornings, or it gets in the way when he box-cuts shipment in the stock-room. He lost it in a poker game when he was less balding and more rambling. He pawned it to pay last month’s light bill. No he didn’t—he loves her too much. Maybe he has no wife at all. She left him for blowing money on booze, or working late hous and missing every baseball game and ballet recital. She left him for his brother, the hand-some insurance salesman. Maybe she died. He couldn’t bear to wear it anymore. The questions are cumbersome. Perhaps he never married; took care of his crippled mother until she died in ’93. She was so alone when his father went away. Now he scans the lightbulbs and bathmats, tunafish and babydolls for the 48 49 Yadkin Valley Dying Song (A Pantoum) by Charlotte Kathryn Smith I am a haunted man Never loved my woman right She’s been gone for 23 years And I may die tonight. I never loved my woman right, Met her on army leave. And I may die tonight, If she will let me be. Met her on army leave, She was my bunk-mate Tommy’s girl If she will let me, be, I said, I’ll be her husband first. She was my bunk-mate Tommy’s girl Til he took me home one spring I said I’ll be her husband first But I never bought a ring. Til he took me home one spring, I was a gamblin’ man. But I never bought a ring, I just stole her hand. I was a gamblin’ man, even after we was wed. I just stole her hand, put dreams in her pretty head. Even after we was wed, With 6 boys in the yard, Put dreams in her pretty head, Put achin’ in her heart. With 6 boys in the yard, her mind began to fail. Put achin’ in her heart, made her body sick and frail. Her mind began to fail. She’s been gone for 23 years. And for what I did to Baby, I am a haunted man. 50 51 Between Two Hills: Three Vignettes by Katie Fennell I. I wanted the side of the bedroom that had the best view of the outside. It was the window on the right, the one that looked out on the oak sapling, the one whose upward view wasn’t obstructed by the tree line. It was through this window that I thought I could see the stars at night from my bed, a view into a lighter darkness high above the pitch-black forest. It was quiet at night; the summer heat became softened with mid night dew, and sun-drenched trees, plants, and hills were illuminated by the light cast by June and July full moons. This made my view eerie, and suddenly the brightness of the star-riddled sky became the blackness in a land of illumination and quiet haze. II. The winter wind rushes past us, moving the leaves around our feet and mak-ing the barren trees moan a painful melody. Our breath creates a haze in the crisp, clear air. We ring the black bell on top of the hill where we were going to build our house, moving its rusted iron body with a stick. The old logging road winds down into a wooded valley and disappears, along with the echoes of our whoops and halloos. We climb over moss covered rocks and fallen trees, under aged barbed wire fences that show that deer have also done this. Our clothes stick to briars, and seeds bury themselves in our sweaters. We follow a deserted logging road, passing groves of rhododendrons and fallen fences. Holding on to sturdy tree limbs, we warn each other not to grab onto the trees with the long thorns, and not to step too quickly on the pine needles. We slide and fall, but keep going. We rest where the tops of the trees open to reveal mountains. We look for snow on their peaks and compare their size to that of our own. We follow the deer paths, narrow and winding, up to the ridge, saying how hard it was to get that far, but how it will be harder still to go back down. III. I told him to wake me up early to go motifing. I wanted to walk into the sun-awakened pasture-hills, to stand among the tall grasses, my clothes becoming wet with their dew, and to sit and see and create. I wanted the chalk from the pastels on my fingers, the feel of the rough paper on my hands, and for the sounds of the morning to be filled with a natural awakening, the scribble of pastel on paper, and a loud silence between father and daughter. I filled my cup to the brim and took it with me among the hills, its contents spilling as we walked along the uneven road, and my hands becoming the guides for the sloshing coffee, sticky rivers of glistening tan running along my hands and forearms. 52 53 Getting to Bermuda by Caitlin Watkins The man and the woman were arguing in the living room; they were trying to pass the time. I was, at first, off-put by the expensive love-seat, as it caused me to sit upright-ostentatious, but it offered me an arm to cling to as I began my well practiced methods in the art of disappearing. Here’s my trick: focus on something you can understand, an ornament, a bookend, the candles never lit on the mantle piece. Worry for them. It will seem less suspicious, and for you, it will be a much easier sorrow to bare and to forget. For instance: I first searched for the places which the woman had neglected to dust. These were few, and decidedly, much more valuable. Upon finding a spot, I would spend time noticing it, and in my mind, praise its uniqueness. Then, something glimmered as it caught the light from the backyard window. Between them and I, sat a glass dome paperweight which held down nothing in particular next to a stack of Southern Living. A kind of novelty used to take up space on coffee tables, commemorating some trip they once took. Offering a mantra: content, content, content. I could not stop starring, as if a whole world of calm existed inside. I was transported, I felt that line of infinity, the sinking of my boots, the salt sting on my lips and a gust lifting my real hands full of some sorted shells that were now just empty houses. 54 55 CLINK by Caitlin Watkins The prison they are building downtown next to the courthouse does not yet have walls instead there are concrete boxes stacked high and uniform with lonely ghost plastic sheets that hang and the fluorescent buzz of workers lamps that never turn off lingering in the heart of a building you hoped never to see the inside of. While headed home from the downtown bars of dimly lit pickup lines and eyes that shift downward thinking of crimes they never had the passion to commit you wonder about the man whose job it is to lay the final perimeter of cement blocks and if he is thinking how to build the walls so no man can ever get out. Iya by Malbert Smith I have just taken a bath. My clothes stick to me. Awkwardly. Iya comes in to tell me to brush my teeth. I, reluctantly, say ok. My small self still sour towards basic hygiene. I brush my teeth. The mirror, my clothes, my body, nothing was spared from the toothpaste explosion. Iya leans down to wipe my face. She is tall. She is commanding. She’s a presence. She wipes my face clean. She cleans the explosion. Her hands cupped she fills them with water. Her hands are rough. But there is elegance in their roughness and roughness in the elegance. West Virginia and North Carolina mountains, and African jungles, have left their imprint. I then sip the water from her hands. I rinse my mouth. I spit in the sink. Iya tells me to go to sleep. Before I go I ask a question. How did you hold the water in your hands? I have asked before. She has shown me before. She cups my hands for me like she did the other times. The water builds in my palms. It builds to its highest point. 56 Look you did it she says. I did it, but still think it’s her magic that’s responsible. Something about those hands, digging in jungles, moving rocks on mountains, clasped constant in prayer, are powerful. A power as a kid I did not understand. As an adult I envy it. At her age I hope to say I lived up to it. Next Three Spreads: Matronly Lesson Eyes, The First Ghanian Play Laath MartiN “Over a period of time, the Interior Architecture department at UNCG has designed a school to be built in the small village of Kyekyewere, outside Kumasi, Ghana. They have also raised quite a bit of money to make it to Ghana to start the building process over there. They asked a select few students to accompany them and photograph the process, as well as help build. This is where my work comes in, as well as the work of five other lovely pho-tographers. The process was exhilarating and eye opening, to say the least. The project is at a stand still currently due to fund-ing, and we could use your help tremendously to get this thing rolling again. Visit the Rescue Aid Facebook page to learn more about how you can help, or e-mail Hannah Rose Mendoza at hrmendoz@uncg.edu for ways your donations can reach Rescue Aid.” Laath Martin 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Cityscape Drema Wilson 66 67 Dance Drema Wilson 68 69 Escapism by Autumn Rayn Brehon Affections turn their way around corners-approaching the edge of fantasy; reverie is closer. Dulling the sharp tines of reality’s harshness-that make life’s Bougainvillea’s so thorned. The author caught fire, from the expulsion of the dalliance. Fervor burned the point of the pen, leaving the paper scorned- Causing the hands to scorch-from the pure conviction of the words. The Whitest Day I Can Remember by Jessica Fritz “Open your eyes, Marion. You have such beautiful eyes.” His back curled over like a Shrimp in the sun, he was Pleading or singing, I don’t know, I was Too teary-eyed dumbstruck like us all. He kissed her cold, hard lips, and I’ve touched one before so I know how they felt: The way steel stings in December, And he walked around the rest of the afternoon With a stain of cheap pink on his mouth. And it was all you could look at as he said, “What will I do now?” over and over again. I hid myself in the car, staring out at the tombstones, because it’s strange to cry in front of strangers, and to cry for someone you only knew liked gardening, and collecting the figurines that came in tea boxes, who occasionally wore wigs. Stranger still watching dumbly as your father cries, swaying and singing to hymns, as if knocked back to boyhood Sunday school, Norristown choir in full fruition. I fumbled for the words and tune, but all I could think is, “Has he always had God?” Outside the sun is a blaring White wave, casting off the frozen grounds. This wind pulls old snow Off the pine trees, and it moves Around us in new shades like 70 71 the tiniest pieces of glass, slicing our coats And sifting through our hairs. I want to say that I closed my eyes And breathed it in deep, All that milky, pearly, earth and That it’s how I knew there were more than just Holes in the ground. But I could only stare forward, squinting at the back of my father’s head, all peppered and grey like parking lot pigeons or the asphalt beneath them. That Room by Corey Cantaluppi A bathroom wall exposes you more than the mirror A forty-dollar brown jacket, now just a tissue and outside they all just look like faces They speak but instead of words, just a dull ring like a television set on VIDEO1 And each opening door is a heart palpitation because eventually a man in scrubs will come to tell you You aren’t strong enough 72 73 Simple Degree of Truth by David Englebretson Surefire hate bled with the willow Said to the wind A friend lost to the dirt Hurt says nothing of the pain Make me smile. Make me sure. Dawn spreads her honey light on the wafers of my thoughts Lost growing with each new ray Pray on the yeast Renewed with the rolls Make me laugh. Make me sure. Smell is one word for it Fit neatly with the rising dough of truth Youth could be to blame Shame no one told him To sink his teeth in and never never Give in Peel - A New Way to Look at Student Poverty by David Englebretson Bid you placed in the palm of the institution’s hand. I carefully push my thumb into the center of your navel. With the pressure you begin to split. At first it’s a small tear. Then I run my thumb slowly up your spine, until I reach your mind. You come undone. Your rind unfolds to reveal a cradle of sweet, white-threaded, flesh. Accompanied by an aroma of zest. Each perfect piece primed for the taking. I suckle and slurp until you are consumed. Your vitamins are left to the acid in my stomach. I discard your peel. To burn orange in the sun. To garnish the mire. 74 75 Communion by Holly Mason sitting in the kitchen before church we would go back and forth saying “fork” until it no longer had any use humming glory glory hallelujah while cracking an entire carton of eggs dad told you to set the table for breakfast but your kick to my shin told me I should do it instead I like ‘em runny no I hate runny eggs yeah ooey gooey dad kill ‘em dad, cook ‘em till they’re dead and later in the creaking pews when our disobedient eyes met during prayer you slowly leaned forward to see around mom and dad’s bowed heads and smiling lightly you raised your hand as if to say hello sister we are holy in this place then your wrist rotated and four fingers fell into your palm leaving your middle finger alone pointing straight up to heaven and Pastor said Amen Goose Creek by Holly Mason They played slaps, red-handed brothers sitting Indian-style facing each other on the creek’s thirsty mouth, baked bean can brimming with bait, resting cap gun within reach, the smaller one facing the sun squinting, open mouth playing silent shout no, a sneeze 76 77 The Scent Remains by Holly Mason When we’d kiss there was the taste of that fruit, always. But first— there was stripping the orange. revealing her soft white skin, then peeling that thin layer off to expose the pulp, if there are seeds inside the belly, we rid her of those. Our fingers, wet and sticky, curving, working to dig them out — those bastards. I didn’t want to get rid of them, Maybe, I wanted to keep them, plant them nourish them grow trees. Maybe then, we’d still be eating oranges together, laughing at the specks on our chins, smiling at each other— as the sweet tartness bursts against our teeth and tongues and slides down our expecting throats. Maybe then, We wouldn’t need to wash our hands of the citrus scent that stains the curves of our nails. 78 79 Ode to Joe by Ashley Wiggins Caffeine possesses a beauty so rare, Its powers are endless it seems - In coffee and lattes it answers my prayers For a rush laced with sugar and cream. As I walk through the door, the glorious scent Of the coffee shop’s featured aroma Travels from nostrils to brain then to soul, Hence causing a coffee coma. Reality knocks as I am faced with a choice, I cannot decide on this joe. So my regular, “A hazelnut latte, please, With two extra shots of espresso.” Appliances roar, anticipation is strong As machines mold my treasured treat. My eyes start to twitch, my palms perspire And my body yearns to be complete. Small talk is made as my drink is received. “Whipped cream?” “Oh, no thanks,” “Here you are!” The heat from the cup and the scent tease and taunt As I hurriedly sit at the bar. I finally take on the very first sip, The steam from it fogging my glasses. The bitter perfection and warmth of this drink Is a pleasure that nothing surpasses. Just five minutes after, I savor the sensation - Caffeine, like blood, circulates my veins, My fingers start tapping and eyes open wide As thoughts quickly pass through my brain. An array of behaviors blend well with caffeine, I’m high-strung, invincible, mostly giddy, I could sky-dive, run circles, drive 90 mph, Try dancing and do a little diddy. Energy flows until nothing remains, Affectionately known as the “crash.” Consume the last drop, now it’s empty with grief As I gently place the cup in the trash. The journey has ended, so I bid a farewell To the something that never has failed me. So now I await the next time I am able To partake of my true love, my coffee. 80 81 Medlan Yearning by Jamison B. Hackelman It was an old 1987 Saab he drove into town that day, tattered uphol-stery, flecks of paint chipped away over time and misfortune, bumping along, making a fuss, hissing up a storm and puffing a fine cloud of smoke behind him as he took the final turn into the parking lot of the pediatrician’s office. The car was left to him, an inadvertent inheritance from his father Frank who had left in the haze of a sultry southern summer in his Chevrolet, leaving behind a family of two and poor credit and unpaid bills and memories long forgotten in the rattling of bottles on the floor. When his mother’s father died Frank was not given word and was not among the many suits and ties crowded around the grave, mumbling final words I’m so sorry for your loss he’s in a better place now it will get better in time life is messy how could you ignore diabetes. “It’s going to die on you,” his father had said once or twice or many times at home, the counters messy, dishes a formidable pile in the sink, a small puddle of water creeping out from beneath the washer, Johnny Cash playing on an old vinyl in the corner of the dining room on top of a small table their mom had made. “And anyways, it’s a piece of shit. I don’t know why you want to drive it.” “I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” Mark said through an awkwardly cut haircut and jeans tightening around his thighs and waist. “How about you get a new car?” “Frank, come on,” mom said. He shot sideways glances to mom and the room was quiet. “Yeah, well who can afford it?” he asked. “Get a new job,” dad said. “Why don’t you get a new job?” “Why? So you can eat more? Jackass.” “Anyways, when the Saab does die I’ll be okay with it,” Mark said. “Yeah right. It smells like shit too.” “Frank! Could you please watch your language?” mom asked. “Uh, Leslie, how about you back off and mind your own business?” Mom got quiet. Mark got angry. “Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ Rock of ages, rock of ages cleft for me” Things had gone on like that for years and people had noticed the fracture and the break, the splintering and the tears, but shook their heads and hung them low, walked about the town of Medlan whispering small concerns and forgetting the name of the Harmon family altogether when Frank Harmon pulled out of the driveway and left town. Medlan was a small town, small enough to be forgotten by those who’d left it years before, big enough to still linger faintly haunting in the deepest corners of their minds, waiting to be reawakened either by a slight trembling of horror or the faintest tingle of nostalgia, calling them back if only to see what it had become in their time away. The town could not call itself home to success, only to the promise of such and the eventual short coming pervading in the downtrodden and disheveled homes of the dust and grime. Medlan, as the Harmon’s had known it for the last few years, boasted little more than its gentrified main street home to almost every fast food restaurant you find in the south, the big box stores and coffee shops, gas stations and doctor’s offices, pushing its own old time inhabitants; its own pedigree of home grown and dirt fed to the outskirts in what was known as downtown comprised of a music store, a small park on the periphery, a dance studio for young girls, and a tro-phy shop providing awards and medals and placards to the local sports teams of the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club and the Rotary Club. Then there were the bowling alleys where those either fighting to hold down jobs or those who had already lost them spent off time or unemploy-ment in the dark corners of the lanes, nursing bottle necks, stumbling through greatest hits of the 80’s on cheap karaoke systems in dirt stained denim and acid washed jeans. There was the dollar cinema, seats squeaking from overuse and sparse care, cushions tattered and shirking their form to simple blocks of foam squeezing their way out of busted seams, the bottoms covered in a colorful array of hardened gum and candy, the floors covered in a glaze of old soda and popcorn. Weekends played home to hot and heavy petting in the corners of the back rows to thirteen year-old boys and girls, some precariously straddling the seats of their boys, some curled up in their laps, clutching the collars of their Old Navy Polos, Gap, Abercrombie, brands and names forged deeply into their hearts. The roller rink where families who skate together stay together, where youths crawled into dark spaces and similarly groped about in less than mentionable ways. 82 83 Then there were the churches. The Methodists and the Moravians sharing a small block outside of the downtown, the Episcopals escaping to the outskirts of town, the Catholics lingering in dark hovels of cathedrals distant and away from them all. The Baptists though, had all but gone out, congrega-tions dying off with a quieted bitterness not yet resolved or even affirmed in most parts, their old time religion picked up and brushed off by those without and seeking such as the non-denominational, exchanging hymnals for tabbed guitar parts; contemporary spins on timeless melodies, pipe organs abiding but obliging to the dissonant chords of the rock and the roll God is my Rock, the tomb of Christ has rolled the rock of ages, rock of ages. Years went by and the south-ern Baptists had shifted and shrugged and writhed and left forever and ever, Amen. And then they came after everything. They took down the trees and the family owned shops. Rapacious and fierce, they uprooted the town from its very core and it became a stagnant child, stillborn and festering and spoiling. They repaved the cracked roads and the gravel lots. Farmland worked over for seasons on end, turned over for the plants and the factories, a hushed guf-faw of noxious fumes and computer parts. There was the library, taken down brick by brick and reassembled in a place not so downtrodden, not so depress-ingly antique. The abandoned seafood restaurant changed hands and names so many times no one quite remembered what it once had been or if it had been important to begin with. All that stood now from what once was Medlan was the Hadley House, the last standing social structure the old families like the Swishers and the Griggs’ and the Cranfills could play host to parties and din-ners and dances and everything that comes with being one of the old families of Medlan, a town built on propriety and namesakes and soil. It had been some time since he’d enjoyed those old moments, the sights and smells of the town, the quiet desperation of getting out and finding a soft promise of a bettered tomorrow driven by the axe and the crane, cement and tobacco, returning home in the spring only to find the same bunches of people scuffling hurriedly through the streets in preparation of the coming Spring Folly, looking for God, finding him lost in the woodwork cleared for more houses, more people, better times ahead. The town was in full swing of things, setting up booths and kiosks and tables, unloading trucks and cars of knick- knacks and drinks. There were bright red coolers set out under fold out tables, stages erected in opposite corners of the downtown area, festivities to be found for a few miles around. He got out of the Saab and walked to the glass double doors of the pediatrician’s office. It was odd for him, doing this. He was twenty-two and was still seeing a child’s doctor. It was routine, though, routine enough. He sat in the waiting room tracing out the different flight patterns of the airplanes, dirigibles, and helicopters painted in bright colors on the walls. Remember the time you had that terrible ear ache? Oh, lord, you cried for hours and hours because it hurt so bad. Your dad was quiet though. Didn’t lose his temper. Didn’t scowl or nothing. Just held you crying about in his arms. “Mr. Harmon?” Dr. Hatling called. Mark waved his hand to him and followed him from the waiting room to the examination room. “My name is Mark Harmon,” he began days later, standing in the mid-dle of a crowded circle of chairs, a group of strangers in the hot gymnasium of the Medlan Elementary School, “and I’m an eating addict. I can’t say when it began, for sure, and I know that’s probably part of the problem…” his words trailed off for a moment, dangling in the air, waiting to be snatched away and brought back down to the circle of folding chairs. “Why do you think you eat, Mark?” the counselor asked. David Swish-er, fattened, balding, though his clothes had begun to loosen from his portly frame, sat hunched over, his posture never quite commanding or even slightly appropriate. “I’m not exactly sure,” he said. He stood before them, shoulders in a still motion of half shrug and attention. He did not look up at the face of men and women, some strange, some familiar or at least presenting the odd pos-sibility that he should recall them. “Now, Mark-” “I’d really prefer Mr. Harmon, if you don’t mind,” he said. Swisher sat for a moment in silence, leaning forward on what Mark thought to be a cane but what was actually an old, rusted golf putter, and then laughed not quite to himself, but rather more out loud than Mark Harmon would have expected or preferred. “I’m sorry Mark- excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Harmon but there are no strangers to addiction. We’re all familiar and familial to the pains it takes to scorn what we’d most prefer, things in life we feel we most deserve. No matter what, the bottom line, the reason why we are all here is to let go…” he paused for a moment, looked to the floor, stared off for a moment, gradu-ally laughed himself back into the conversation. “We all have the same pain, Mark. It’s okay to have this pain and it’s okay to share it with us. Most of us have been here for some time and we know what…Mark, the worst thing you could do is hold it with you and keep living your life with it. Ask any of them.” At this he made a circular motion of the room outstretching his arms and closing 84 85 them back towards him embracing them in his large, loose skinned arms. Many of the group nodded, some teared up, some wiped tears that had already fallen. “Now, Mark, if we’re going to get down to the bottom of this whole mess I think it’s a bit more than necessary tha’ you help us in determining whatever it is you think is wrong with you.” I’m fat, getting fatter. He saw he was not alone, looking at the people about him. Round. Rotund. Wide. Box frame cuts with a large bowl in the center. Thighs thick and filling out more than enough space in tightening jeans. The pairs of sweatpants, baggy pants and hooded sweatshirts, hiding what needs not be seen by the passersby on morning jogs, brisk evening walks leaving them aching and breathless when they return home hearing faint whispers or snickering as they go move out the way wide load 2x4 trailer man those legs got four wheel drive look at them calf muscles slinkin down to their toes. Nights filled with stress dreams and small bouts of gorging at darkened kitchen tables. Tall glasses of milk and a few slices of grapefruit. Then a piece of toast. Then add peanut butter and jelly. Pop a few grapes in the mouth down the hatch in the buzzing light of an open refrigerator door. “I’d really like help Mr. Swisher-” “It’s David,” “Sorry-” “Mark, there are no apologies here. We have nothing to be sorry for. We have done nothing wrong. Life is messy, but we do our best to carry on. Isn’t that right, gang?” There was mild applause, there were a few scattered Amen’s offered around the circle, mostly just the silent acknowledgement that indeed life was messy, life was falling apart at the seams like so many unravel-ing sweaters and shirts and scarves and flags. “Mark, if it’s help you want, you need to be a straight shooter with us. The most important thing now is to be honest with us.” “It rained all the way to Cincinnati With our mattress on top of the car Us kids were eatin’ crackers and baloney And papa kept on driving never stopped once at a bar” He’s driving her home from work. Dad needed the car. They putter along noisily in the old Saab. “Your father’s going to be so proud!” she says. “Don’t know why he would,” he says. She shirks the doubt and contin-ues on, smiling, singing along to the Johnny Cash on the tape deck. “Oh, you know he loves you,” she says. “Yeah, when it’s convenient for him.” She laughs. “Oh, come on Mark. He’s struggling too, you know.” “I mean, when does it end though? When does the struggle end and the love return?” “I know,” she says. “I know. At least you got the job, though.” They pull into the driveway and he is shutting the trunk of his Chevy. A couple of suitcases. A box of books. Mom jumps out of the car before the engine is off. Mark stays behind and hears the protests and the questions the where are you going and why now, why now, what the hell do you think you’re doing. He sits there in the car, his parents now in the house, watching the outspread arms drooping down into defeated motions of shaking, slight con-vulsion, and tremors of his mother as she tries to reason with him. He’s not sure if she’s trying to reason. Maybe she saw this coming. Maybe she had known it was coming but didn’t know how to say what needed to be said and left it all unspoken. “She said your papa is a good man and don’t you kids forget it The whiskey’s tryin’ to ruin him but I know the Lord won’t let it” “I’m heading back,” Mark says as he opens the door. He pulls back a little, wanting to close it as quickly as he had opened it. “Wait, hon,” mom says through trembling, choked back tears. “Say goodbye to your father.” I don’t speak to ghosts. There is no time but the time to go and he shuts the door without say-ing a word and gets into the Saab and onto the freeway and then to the apart-ment complex and the sign that says You are now leaving Medlan! Please come back! and never to see him and always to let him away to Ann Arbor. “Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing In The Sheaves’ Rock of ages rock of ages cleft for me” “I can’t,” Mark started, voice shaking, legs trembling and bouncing and tapping, “I can’t remember why I started eating. I don’t know if it was guilt. I don’t know, I can’t explain it away, but I was hungry.” “Guilt?” Swisher asked. Mark had almost forgotten there were oth-ers in the room, in the crowded mess of chairs and the oscillating fan in the corner. “Yeah, guilt.” “For what?” “For letting it happen.” 86 87 “And what did you let happen?” Saw the warnings maybe. Saw the drink, the mid-sips, slight gulps, the rough hugs and pats on the back, how you doing, son? Good grades? No, well, no shame in being in the middle, look at me. “Mark, you make it seem like you’ve let some terrible thing happen as if you had the notion to stop it before it could.” Saw the furrowed brow, the rolled eyes, the downcast looks in family portraits, small smiles, slight and almost empty. Saw the receipts of flowers paid and sent to women in Michigan. Tragedy is a train done pulled out, Mr. Harmon. Guilt is thinking you had a hand in shoveling the coal but your hands look mighty white to me, boy.” Saw all of this and let it go unquestioned, if not unnoticed. “How’s your mother, Mark?” Swisher asked. “That is, if you don’t mind my asking.” “No, no, of course not,” he said. He sits at the island in the kitchen teetering forward on a bar stool peeling furiously at an orange and Johnny Cash still plays on an old vinyl in the corner on top of the table mom built. “I can’t say how good it is to have my boy back in the house,” mom says, wiping sweat from her forehead over the hot skillet at the stove, the smell of chicken and smoke filling the space between words. “I’ve missed it so much, but somehow I always knew I’d never be completely alone. Even…even after granddad died, I knew I was never going to be completely alone. Boy I sure miss him.” She looks over and smiles. Her cheeks glisten in the faint glow of a dying ceiling fixture bulb, eyes swelling and tearing, could be the onions she’s chopped for the quesadillas. Could be that he’s home. “And your father leaving, well, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Twenty-seven years and then to just leave in the middle of the day. I mean, school had just started. Do you remember that? Moving to the new house without him, just throwing out all the stuff he left behind?” Of course Mark remembered the pain of moving and shoving it all into boxes and bags. Boxes in the yard, clothes, shoes, belts, socks, none that matched with one another. Piles of as-sorted old books he hadn’t packed in the Chevy. Books on sales. Books on faith. Books on tape. Books upon books upon boxes of books. Thomas Fried-man. Thomas Merton. Tony Robbins. Be a better you. Sell the sale. Out sell the seller. Sell it all. Let nothing stand. And the passersby of Medlan knew as well as they did that this was the break of a line in loyal and honest men. “I mean, who thought…who could have seen that coming?” “No one saw that coming at all, mom. He’s just an idiot.” Receipts re-covered online from flowers sent to women he’d been acquainted with in Ann Arbor. His desk was broken down into its pieces, still chill from the cold tomb of his office. “You know, it’s just so easy for you to hate him.” “Come on, mom. He makes it easy.” “Your father was a good man. You knew him to keep his word to you kids. He didn’t give you a ring, didn’t tell you time and again that it would be okay, that he was an honest man, that things were going to start looking out that, ‘yes, dear, of course I’ll pay the bills’ or even months after he left when it turned into ‘yes, dear, I paid that all on time’ or ‘yes, dear, I’ll send money, right away, coming at you’. He didn’t leave you,” she says. “Then mama started talking about Jesus And how our lives could be from now on” “Yes he did. He left all of us. He lied to all of us.” “He was a sick man-” “No. Granddad was sick. Frank is not sick. Frank is just nothing. There is no excuse for him.” She turns off the stove and slides the steaming chicken onto crisp tortillas with tomatoes and sour cream and onions. “You can still have him though. When you’re ready to forgive him he’ll still be your father.” And then there’s guacamole and a bean dip she’s prepared and a bowl of chips for them to share and there is beer in the fridge and a near empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the freezer dad left behind. “Yeah, when it’s convenient for him.” “Enough. I’m tired of this endless attack on your father-” “No. He’s not dad. When he walked out he took his name and his title and his bullshit with him. We don’t pick up after anyone, mom. ‘Harmons don’t fold on shit hands they’ve been given’ like you’ve always said, right? We don’t let up on when we’ve been let down. We pick ourselves up and hope the next man’s got the same sense to do himself too. We don’t pick up after him. We don’t justify and forgive because we think oh, well he might be sick in the head. No. I don’t know who that man is, and I have no plans on figuring him out.” House: The place you live. Home: Everything else before it’s gutted. The table is set on the island. Mom cries and hugs him tightly to her chest. “While papa bought a used tire in Columbus Mama rocked the baby till all her tears were gone” 88 89 The room was silent for a moment, save for Swisher’s creaking in the metal folding chair and the scattered snifflings of sympathy and condolence, feigning understanding and having none. “I think she’ll be okay. She’s lonely. I don’t get out here as much as I ought to or would like to, but I think she’ll be okay.” Granddad, oh I wish you could have seen him. You didn’t call him enough- oh, I wish you could have seen him. I mean, hon, I’m glad you didn’t, it was awful, but to be there- I know you had work, I know, it’s okay, don’t get upset. You didn’t miss much, couldn’t remember anyone’s name in the room, but oh, I wish you could have seen him. “Let’s thank Mark for sharing all of this with us,” Swisher began. “You’ve taken a big step today, Mr. Harmon. I want you to know how proud of you I am, and I think I speak for everyone in saying that. I know this coming from what you’d like to consider a stranger can’t seem to amount to much at all, but all the same, I want you to know that you’ve done a pretty brave thing here. Vulnerability is not cowardice or weakness, Mark. There is no weakness in needing someone. We know. We’ve all been through the pain of losing what you love.” Many nodded their heads in silent approval, scattered mumblings of Amen to this and Amen to that filling the small spaces between the crowded chairs. “Now, it’s difficult to find a good Baptist hymnal anywhere nowa-days…” Swisher said and the circle of chairs and addicts chuckled, “but I think this Methodist one does quite a number for us today, so if you wanna pick it up and follow along, I’d be obliged. But if you’d rather not sing and if instead you just want to sit there in silence and prayer or reflection, God don’t play favorites…and he just figures you can’t carry a tune.” “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee; let the water and the blood, from thy wounded side which flowed, be of sin the double cure; save from wrath and make me pure…” He sits in his apartment watching the television. His apartment is messy crowded with dirty plates and papers and clothes and fallen or discarded objects. He eats alone tearing pieces of chicken off the bone, scooping large spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and sweaty collards, and flaky crumbs of biscuit adorn his shirt that tightens in the arms when he reaches across his body to change the channel or turn the volume up. “Mr. Harmon, your blood pressure is 140/90.” “And what does that mean?” “Could mean, one of two things. One possibility, kidney disease, but the blood work we did came back negative for that, leaving the other possibility, and with your family history, it makes sense.” “Diabetes.” “Precisely. It’s imperative you make some lifestyle changes. Crucial ones. Type 2 diabetes is no joke, I’m afraid. You need to exercise more, eat less, pay attention to your blood sugar all the time.” He sits and his chest is hurting and his stomach is full, but he can-not stop himself from eating. His jeans are tight. His stomach is tight to his shirt and his granddad sits next to him eating as well. Should have been there to see him. Oh, but in his condition, who could bear it? His granddad sinks into the cushions of the couch and disappears without a word, a faint ghost not asking anything of anyone. Not wanting last words. Not wanting help. Just disappearing as a whisper does in a crowded room and Mark does not feel guilt or self-pity. He does not feel the rough pats on the back, the gruff laughter of a man lost in drink. He does not ask why me why me God and he does not break down and cry anymore as he had for the weeks before and he is no longer hungry. He is no longer hungry. His plate is full and he is no longer hungry. “While I draw this fleeting breath, when mine eyes shall close in death, when I soar to worlds unknown, see thee on thy judgment throne, Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.” The singing stopped. Mark blinked around the room and found smiles and stares and mild laughter. “I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep,” he said. “And are you sure that God doesn’t like us more when we’re asleep?” Swisher asked. “Listen, and I mean everybody listen before we all head off and fight our way through this muck and grime business we call life: Life, as it would be, is messy. It’s a big time mess that takes big time fixin’ up. We’ve got to hold on though and keep our hearts in it. Addiction is familiar and familial and none of us, even if we don’t got anyone to call our family, not a single soli-tary soul in this room right now is leaving here alone. Think with your heart and your head…then get a third opinion from your stomach. God bless you.” 90 91 The week came and went, and Mark had stayed with his mom. The Folly had been modestly crowded with the sticky hands of small children clutching tightly to wands of Cotton Candy, faces painted and stained with dirt and chocolate, fathers dragging their sons along, spitting images of blue collars, brandishing large drumsticks of Turkey legs in their fists, fighting their ways through the stifling heat of a southern May. And at night the Ferris Wheel had buzzed to life, the lights illuminating the shocked pale silhouettes of small arms enfolding small bodies of youth between trees and under veran-das. Street vendors came from all corners pushing their handcrafted jewelry, hand stitched clothes, fabric samples, small mobiles and toys, baked goods for good causes, balloon art, coffee mugs with pithy sayings or commemorat-ing town lore, branding it across the surface of small porcelain molds. And on the last night Mark and his mother walked through the streets of Medlan in the final dying sounds of the annual firework show, lights ex-ploding across a small, dark sky, clouds all but vanishing in the dusk of May. She grabbed for his wrist as they shuffled along the uneven pavement of the sidewalk, cobbled and fractured stones forming the path all the way through downtown. He said nothing, only listened again as he had many times before this, knowing that this was pain, familiar and strange, fleeting and permanent, obstinate and meandering. “I’ll be fine, okay” she said. “I’m not damaged beyond repair, right? This is normal. We got a raw deal out of this, hon, but this isn’t the worst. We’re no worse off than anyone else. Nobody’s terminally ill or broken to a million pieces or suicidal- you’re not suicidal at all, are you?” He shook his head and she began to tear up. “Because I have a pretty taut line here. There’s not a whole lot more that I can handle here.” She squeezed his hand, and he put his arm around her shoulder. Everything will be alright. It will all be okay. Turkey legs cotton candy pretzels funnel cake hot dogs corn dogs muffins cupcakes snow cones your blood pressure is 140/90 change your habits everything will be alright everything will be okay. She squeezed his hand tighter. “I need to know that you’ll be okay, Mark,” she said. “I’ll be okay, mom.” Chicken on the bone, plates of collard greens and mashed potatoes, flakes of biscuit. “Oh lord, we’re a mess aren’t we?” “Yes, we are a big mess.” They walked on towards the car and Mark watched as David Swisher scuffled along with the golf putter as his cane, stopping in the windows of downtown, took his hat off, and held his head low and kept walking onward, shaking his head. And after the lights had gone out across the sky, people be-gan packing away things in coolers and boxes, in the beds of trucks and the backseats of minivans, hustling and bustling about. Leftover food was handed out freely with smiles and cheers, but Mark was not hungry. Praise was given to those who had pulled it out and made the money worth the sweat and the loudness of the affair. The Methodists stood on corners handing out small print versions of the New Testament bound with a soft green vinyl, stepping in the way of people in as friendly and Christian as they could be spreading the good word of the lord in a town lost in his presence, but not far from it. They moved on in their caravans of thrift and squalor back to land that was no longer there in houses people no longer had built for themselves on roads and highways paved and repaved over, the dust still not quite settling at the heels of their sneakers and heels and flats and boots. “And through it all mama’s faith was the one thing That was strong enough to finally do the some good” Mom began to sing as they approached the old Saab. “You know, that car’s going to die on you. It’s going to fail and you’ll be stuck in the middle of nowhere without a car and without anyone to help you.” “And when it does, I’ll be okay with it.” She hugged him once more as he opened the heavy door of the car. He turned the key in the ignition but the engine would not turn over. Once for luck. Twice for good measure. Three times for something better to come of a messy life of hunger and wanting and locked doors and folly and old vinyl’s playing in the corner of an old messy kitchen. The engine turned over finally and he drove off in a fine cloud of smoke and hunger and God watching his mother in the mirror as she walked off singing. “She said your papa is a good man and don’t you kids forget it The whiskey’s tryin’ to ruin him but I know the Lord won’t let it Then we sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ Rock of ages, rock of ages left for me.” Self Portrait (Energize) Steisha Pintado 96 97 Climax, NC Isabelle Abbot Hagan Stone Isabelle Abbot 98 99 Blind by David Nolker James stared at the blank, grey ceiling. The artificial breeze from a ceiling fan brushed his face. Morning light shone through the curtains in the window and streaked across the wall. Hearing the rhythmic pounding of foot-steps marching down the hall, he closed his eyes and remained motionless. As the door opened, James rolled onto his side, facing the wall. “You still in bed?” Meredith asked. “I’m getting up,” he said. “Hope so. I’ve been up for three hours. I thought you said you were going to get up early and work this morning. You haven’t written a word in two weeks.” “I know. I’m getting up.” “It’s not like I’m pressuring you, but Dave has called several times this week and he wants to know how the new story is going. You really need to get a move on.” “I know.” “Well, it’s nearly ten and I’ve got to be going. I thought we’d get a chance to talk this morning.” “Yeah.” “I’ll be late tonight. I have to meet with one of the new curators.” Meredith said. “I bet you do.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Never mind.” “No really. You’re insinuating something and I want to know what it is.” “I wasn’t insinuating anything. Sorry it sounded like I did.” “Whatever. You need to get out of bed.” “Ok.” “James, please get up. It’s not good for you to lie around. You used to be so active. Go for a walk. Do something outside. Some exercise will make you feel better.” “Alright.” “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” James stared at the wall. He remembered how the paper had looked when he picked it out at the store. The paper once had a clean white back-ground that made the blue flowers seem to jump off the walls. Meredith and he had worked hard to renovate the house. They patched the walls, replaced the floors, doors, and countertops. It had been difficult, but they enjoyed the work together. The final touch had been the wallpaper. It felt whole when he held Meredith in his weary arms and saw how the paper made the house his, theirs. Now the small blue flowers looked like tiny faces. Contorted and staring. Blue scowling grimaces. Over time, the paper had grown yellow and stained from years of dust and cigarette smoke. The flowers wilted into the dingy background. He forced himself out of bed and lumbered down the hall. The desk where he worked was in a corner of an expansive room that was the main living area for Meredith and him. It was situated between the kitchen at one end of the house, and the bathroom and bedroom at the other. The books and papers on the desk were arranged neatly. “How am I supposed to find anything when she keeps moving every-thing around?” The papers rustled as he spread them over the chipped, brown desktop. The phone rang but James did not move to answer it. “Jim, I know you’re there. It’s Dave. Answer the phone. We need to talk.” James picked up the receiver but he did not say anything. He just breathed. “We need to meet asap. The editors are crawling all over me. If you don’t feed ‘em something soon they’ll bite my ass off,” said Dave. “Come by the house tomorrow.” “You need to get outta that house. Meet me in the park tomorrow. Your career is on the line. I’m not just your agent. I’m your friend ya know. I don’t want to see you fall apart.” “OK.” “Damn right OK. You need to take me seriously. Bye Jim.” “Bye.” The phone buzzed loudly against his ear for a few minutes. Through the window beside his desk, he could see the autumn leaves twisting in the breeze. The afternoon sun refracted through a glass of water on a side table 100 101 and projected a small square rainbow onto the far wall. His neighbor across the street was mowing his stubby brown grass. Then she walked by. She walked in steady measured paces, her long brown hair dancing in wisps across her face. A long white cane with red tip was clasped in her delicate hand. She moved deliberately, yet with a grace he had never seen before. Behind her dark glasses, her face was flushed and she bit her bottom lip in determined concentration. After the girl passed out of sight, James closed the curtains; blocking out the light. He sat in front of his computer, staring into the blackness of the screen before he finally switched it on. He felt a new excitement pushing its way through his mind. He plunked at his keyboard for hours and did not notice when Meredith returned home. As usual, she was not quiet in her en-trance, but when she saw her husband laboring at his computer, she tiptoed down the hall, trying not to disturb him. James stopped typing late in the evening and when he looked up from his work, he felt like he was in an in an unknown place. He saw Meredith sit-ting on the couch reading a magazine. “How long have you been home?” “Not sure. A long time.” “How was your day?” “Fine.” “That’s good.” “How was yours? Looks like you’re going again. Is that your new sto-ry?” “Yes” “Can I read it?” She closed the magazine and laid it in her lap. He twitched slightly. “No.” “Oh.” She picked the magazine up again and flipped through it. “Why not?” “It’s not finished yet.” Meredith studied her magazine intently. James could see that she was upset, so he turned back to the screen. “You know, you used to let me read your stories even before they were finished.” “I know, but this one’s different.” “Why?” “I don’t know, it just is.” “That doesn’t make sense.” James forgot what he was doing in the kitchen and sat on the other end of the couch from her. “I’ll let you read it when I’m finished.” “Fine.” Meredith she snapped her magazine shut and tossed it on the table. She sat with her arms folded across her chest. The dwindling twilight drained the color from the room. The first shadows of night began to gather in the corners. There was nothing on televi-sion to distract him from the blank stare on her face. He glanced at her every few minutes, but she continued to stare at the floor. Deep inside himself he wanted her to cry, so he could see that he had hurt her. He hoped that he hurt her, because then he would know that she still cared. They still slept beside each other, but they never touched, not any-more. They clung to themselves, tired and alone. Darkness still filled the room when Meredith left for work. He waited for her to close the front door rushed to his computer. The screen filled with his thoughts about the girl. If only he could catch hold of her. Take hold of her arm and guide her on her walk. She could lean against him. He would hold her up and be her strength. She would need him. Time passed without his knowledge until the clamor of the telephone shattered his fantasy. When he answered it, there was nothing but the tired groaning of the dial tone. Sud-denly he remembered Dave. James dressed hurriedly and headed out. He walked quickly. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. He hurried toward Dave. Would he even be there? If only he could talk to him about his problem. Dave would under-stand. He always understood. James’ head felt light. He kept his face toward the road ahead. The pavement seemed to swirl around him. He walked faster. He looked up to find his bearings and saw the edge of the park only a few steps away. He raced for the old bench under the oak tree. He sat down eagerly. Dave was nowhere in sight. There were many people, and he did not recognize any of them. Couples walked arm in arm around the park. Then he saw her. The girl’s measured steps brought her to his bench. She stood before him, just like he had dreamed. The bright day seemed to illuminate her as she faced him and smiled broadly. His fell to his sides. His dream was standing right before him. “Excuse me. May I join you on this bench?” she asked. “If, you like.” She slowly lowered herself beside him and folded her cane into its three pieces. Her delicate hands held it in her lap. He looked at her, and noticed that she was even more beautiful in person. She turned to him and smiled. 102 103 “I appreciate you letting me sit here. This is my favorite spot in the park,” she said. “It’s no problem. I was expecting a friend but he is always late. I enjoy the company.” “Thank you, I won’t stay long. I just like to come here in the after-noons and enjoy the autumn air. It makes me feel so good.” “Kind of clean.” “Yeah, exactly. I never thought of it that way. She smiled at him. “Have we met before? It just seems like I know you from somewhere.” “No, I don’t think so.” “We haven’t ever talked? Your voice sounds familiar,” she said. “Well, we’re neighbors. Maybe you heard me when you walked by sometime. “ “Oh, I didn’t know we were neighbors. What a coincidence that we would both be sitting here together,” “It’s not that strange. This is the closest bench to get to. We both like the park and the fall air. Maybe all that we have in common has brought us together.” She laughed absently. “Two souls brought together on a park bench. Sounds like a story.” “It is a story.” “I really feel like I have met you before. We haven’t met?” “I know this sounds strange, but I’ve seen you walk here. I watch you outside my window.” “That does sound strange. In fact, that sounds down right creepy.” James’ heart fell. The wooden slats of the bench suddenly felt uncom-fortable. “I mean, it’s not like I watch you all the time.” His story had deviated from the plot he had created. “I’ve just seen you walk by my house. I think it’s admirable that you can walk here by yourself.” “Admirable? Why couldn’t I walk here by myself?” “I don’t know, because you are…” “Blind?” she interrupted. “You know, that really irritates me. Why do people act like I can’t do things myself? I don’t need to rely on someone else all the time.” “I’m sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean to say that you couldn’t do things yourself. It just seemed to me that it would be a challenge for someone who couldn’t see to walk to a park.” “Well, it isn’t. I do it all the time. I don’t need anyone to help me. I’m fine getting here by myself.” “What about when you get lost? How do you find your way?” “I call Charles.” She raised left hand for James to see. “I see. I never thought that you were married.” “Well, I am. We look out for each other. I look out for him just as much as he looks out for me.” “That’s a very nice sentiment,” James said. “Are you married?” “Yes. I am.” “Then you know what I’m talking about.” The girl got up from the bench, unfolded her cane and turned back the way she came. She stopped after a few steps and turned to face James. “Good luck getting back home,” she said. “Thanks.” She tapped her deliberate pace down the walkway and out of sight. James watched her go. He could hardly take in all that had happened. When had he lost sight of Meredith? He was only roused from his stupor when Dave nudged him in the ribs. “Hey, man, you alright?” Dave rested his hand on James’ shoulder. “I’ve been worried about you. “I’ll be alright.” “You sure?” “Actually yes, I am sure.” A smile crept across James’ face until he was beaming. Dave sat back and held his hands together in his lap. “Good to know. Are you working on anything?” “I have a new story, but it’s at home,” James said. “Is it good?” “It’s the best.” Dave laughed. “The best? Amazing. You went from having nothing, to the best. And you didn’t even bring it? What’s it about?” “You’ll see after it is finished.” “Come on. How does it start? How does it end? Give me something.” “It ends like it begins,” said James. “Great Confucius. And how is that?” “With two people finding their way home.” 104 105 Those Who Would Remain by jayce Christian Russell I The neighbors have been drinking and again are shouting. Gibberish at this distance, in this heat— the cicadas sing that it is the allembracing hellbound hot. Window framed, another couple sprawl across the kitchen table texts and three ringed binders. The voyeureds’ a/c rattles awake and I think, briefly, it is the sound of rain. Or wind against leaves. II They debate on understanding and its other around the corner; the man does not, has not, will not care for how drunk she was. Her response slurs this blurred night—she doesn’t remember. Raccoons claw to the sawsheared lower branches of a tree at the first dry crack of approach. III The cicada serenade has bred itself out, elected those who would remain from those whose was to perish. Their numbers, dwindled carapace by carapace, leave only a tenor, a bass to sing the nights along. How they hiss the death of heat. IV Her last boyfriend was abusive, she tells him. It will rain soon, within days, and he has his arm around her waist. She recounts the arc of bottles. He cinches his grip and they disappear up sidewalk, beyond the elms, beyond the dogwoods, the sycamores, the willows. V I am tucked into my jacket, crouched beneath her umbrella between low hanging limbs. Passing Jeeps leave in their wake a breeze. It does not hang at all. 106 107 Death of Venus by Jayce Christian Russell That unitchable scratch wore her raw so she jumped, broke like waves on the rocks below, bounced once, and rolled a Hokusai tide to the whole. Her pockets empty, she carried nothing to her common grave, bore no tokens of kindness to the sailor sacrifices, made no alms to the wretched who gnarled below. Marble eyes watched her fall, from faces worn smooth by the lap and the lilt of All-River’s End. Hers was the red and black scream that echoed the world; hers was the coral crown and she, she was to be ruler anointed of this new dominion, Death or Sea, or both as meshed lovers, entwined serpents, the tangled ball of rat king gnashing garbaged sewers. She came to rest in the wreckage of canoes, knarrs, junks long since lost exploring, triremes blown adrift by the errant whims of a god with more than the two names; she called the collision her throne and surveyed from its cracked arms her expansive kingdom. All cultures drown the same, are nipped away by schools of dumb fish born hungry. She had tithed not and was appointed to no lower a seat than godhead of all her tendrilous fingers could snatch. The bridgebound crowd watched from their rafter seats, found the course where they would later dream her song; some dreamed that she sang to them, but her lungs were scraps floating papyrus thin from the delicate ivory work of her ribcage, and she would not sing to them from this decay. Some sang for her, but know this: their eyes did not find that spiral where all becomes one, that vortex which centers the hole in things, as hers had gleamed it. They had not crashed that final crash, had not bobbed buoy as their tendons gave way, as their minds wandered the blue still encased in a skull that wore yet some semblance of their face—save the eyes, the nose, the lips, the cheeks picked clean by the mercurial operation of scavengers. They raised her a god in their way—rivers and bridges were named. Her admirers mused her eyes from the constellations reflected on the surface of her lover destroyer on still nights but it was only ever dead light, returning. 108 109 Chalk Castles, Asphalt Sky by Jessica Vantrease My six-year-old self warms her translucent pink skin in the white-hot reflected sun from her father’s pickup truck. She’s too small to know about the stratosphere and political maps, city councils and unemployment, black holes and fallout. The world becomes amorphous and neonatal around her, as much what if as the chalk dust and neon pigment beneath her tiny nails; as much maybe as the damp waxy-soft inner stalks she finds while ripping apart blades of grass in the green island that the driveway circles. I ask the kid what she thinks about the conflict between nature and artifice, art and life, and she shrugs: “I like art. I made a clay man at school, but he broke in the oven.” Wobbles to the porch on fawn-spindly legs, fearing nothing except bee stings. Envy chews ulcers into my gut as we settle on the swing. I kill chiggers and massage caffeine withdrawal from my aching temples, pouting over my lack of a love life and impending term papers. She kicks her glittery jelly-shoes, rocks us in the swing like the babies we are, while sucking on a Capri Sun. As we sway, summer air drowses through our bodies, a lullaby: Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone? I am almost asleep when she vacuums the juice pouch dry, slurping startlingly along with August’s cicadas, not noticing or caring that she is poor. Emily Dickinson Was Human by Jessica Vantrease and not the sum of her words not made of smooth white-on-black but dirt sweating and breathing like you are now somewhere behind the slant rhymes of three sixty i hear her crying and peek past the rounded corners of the letters her flesh-and-blood shoulders quake as she firmly shuts her lost friend’s book dabs at her eyes with sleeves darker than the white of lore she could never forgive herself if this graphite memorial dissolved in the salt of her grief so she pours and seals the tears in airtight verse she watches the universe forget 110 111 Escapement by Jessica Vantrease golden dots, l.e.d. scroll above the frizzled heads of drowsy riders. date and time glow within the driver’s slow yawns your sotto voce jokes the sign itself is time or maybe made of time even this bus is made of time seats and bars and bolts of time so are the riders. so is the driver fibers and vapors and cells of time and so are you drumming fingers and ironic grin and so am i awkward curves and asthma cough we’re milliseconds, you and i gritty fleshy milliseconds minutes huddled close for warmth while the golden clock keeps merciless time chilling us to our historical bones hold my hand, dear, tight as you can lock fingers with mine, the teeth of a gear i have to feel the seconds tick, pulse out of you, our clockwork singing before we’re gone before we reach the stop. The Campaign by Jessica Vantrease Next door, the cold war erupts into a blitz. Ballerina phone-sobs “Mama-I-want-him-out-of-my-life,” like a planted claymore, her giant of a man sulking silently in the kill zone. We wait in our apartment, tense, because we all know that in war, even the neutral parties suffer. The AC thunks to life, drowning out the whines and accusations of the wounded. The mines never explode, and the siege finally migrates from the front walk indoors, and ends in silence as I strain floury water from dinner’s boiled noodles. At four AM, a vacuum cleaner’s drone wakes me up. Ballerina is drafting an armistice in the carpet-dust upstairs. 112 113 One Day I’ll Be Safe in the Arms of Parentheses by Sophie Rynas We are not who we need now I admit this gladly. You’re confusing, thoughtless And you exhaust me. I’m done with this run on sentence. I’m putting in a period, and moving on to the next paragraph. Despite awkward words Despite sentence fragments I don’t wish to erase what’s written A dangling modifier or two remain And I can’t complain Because this stumble will fade We were never meant to be You’re a singular subject, I’m a verb for plurals. I was too busy telling myself lies to notice Subject-verb agreement proved us to be fools You’re a gerund. You only look like a verb. Underneath it all, you’re a noun. And I’ve come to find, I need actions and reactions I need a verb I’m done with subjects and objects You complained I was an independent clause And always wished to stand on my own But, when the semicolon was removed, We forgot our connection And realized we were strangers Wearing a semicolon like a mask. It became too much to face The exclamation point sliced us in two Like a metaphorical sword I became lost after your appositive A period fell between us, Blocking our remaining connection But it’s all okay because now I’m hanging from the hook of a question mark {And question marks always were my favorite} And I know, one day I’ll be safe in the arms of parentheses 114 115 INSECTS by Alex Craig She was hiding in the trunk of a big maple Watching the insects work. The morning dew plopped onto her outstretched hands from the wrinkles of an old leaf. A terrific set of clouds worked to undermine the beaming sun. Her mother was calling to her for dinner, to wash up. To fall into routine, just like her sisters, and her mother before them. To act like a lady at dinner, at school, at church. She would lose track of when she was acting and when she wasn’t Aware that her feet were calling to her (run!), but she didn’t know where to go. She never wanted to wash up or bake or clean. She didn’t care to close her legs, she didn’t wear skirts, and if she did, She did whatever she wanted to with everything they covered. She sat sprawled in the trunk, dirty, with both her legs and her smile spread wide. She knew that her mother would call and call, but mother would never come out into the woods to search. She would be standing into the doorway, livid, rumpled apron fabric dripping from the spaces between her fingers, where the fist she was making couldn’t contain all the frills and lace, but it did a good job trying. In the trunk, she giggled. Her mother never left the house, And her father never left the office, And the insects never left the tree. Everyone is a Villain by Julie Sullivan Dear Diary Today I let my mask slip, and someone saw my eyes. They say those are the windows to the soul, you know. While I don’t expect you, a blank book my mother gave me, to understand my fear, just know that all is lost. Everything I’ve ever feared has come true – My identity has been compromised. They know everything: My strengths, my weaknesses, my hatred for imperfections, why I don’t trust anyone with XY chromosomes… I am vulnerable, diary. I could be destroyed at a moment’s notice. I may not come home tonight. Why aren’t you panicking like I am? Why aren’t you sweating at the very thought? This is a fiasco, a debacle, a disaster, of the very worst kind. 116 117 No one can know the real me. I must flee the country. This is why I always travel light, ready to run at any moment. It’s the life of a hero, and Everyone is a villain. I can hear your imaginary voice in my head now, telling me that I’m overreacting, that people do this, reveal themselves, every day. But I am not everyone, and I can’t do it. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Diary, But the mask must stay on. The Day I Decided to Ditch College and go to Pastry School Instead by Ben Huber Maybe I just want to decorate cakes for the rest of my life. Or make desserts; éclairs, or all manner of Chocolate gluttony. Maybe some nice crêpes suzette Every now and then. It doesn’t have to be Cake, specifically. 118 119 Imagine Delirium by Bradley Scott Biggerstaff These mud towers frighten ruffle chip children who bounce through bus park hallways and rampant teachers’ hives. Got to get the words outta that drum a beat dissonance that’s ganging up on Walt’s imagination. Mickey Whitman, you cherry green bastard, who’d ya call about those oil stains stained on black on technicolored black oil and coughed up dreams? Color flavored scents function on boat rides’ pinstripes stretching in and in the candy that rises to the top. Just please forget that old Doctor cartoon, the one on a cactus the name escapes and grass eats leaves cause only the sun grabs ankles down here. Marion’s Acid Trip by Cassandra Poulos she is static and window glass women reach to her crying baby wrapped warm in frost-bitten sheep skin grabs orange infant hands press lifeline to lifeline above the catacomb womb. The ghost meets the hallucination carrying the expired child’s thumb around her neck cordially tethered, noosed between breasts pointing down pointing away, phantom hitchhiker pleads to be released from Marion’s blistered, barren garden where unforgiving baby’s breath tangles around moonlit sunrises, anxious moments where the heavens are illuminated the star meets the dawn the dawn meets the morning the morning meets the paper thin world. A two-dimensional place where the miscarried child will write to anguished irony To be aborted by the God who was once a lost child To be aborted by the God who once lost a child “Am I you, am I part of you?” infant hands creating cognizant lines, 120 hardly self-sufficient lies. the answer was five clutched fingers, around his mounted thumb a mother will forever carry the belly, the village once pillaged the room once euthanized the tomb of tattooed skin with her delusional arms but the child is not Christ and the mother is no virgin, the father is not god The ghost is not holy, only an impermeable cloud of nature’s tyranny that begs to be released from the acidic clutches of the lady named Marion. Forsaken by his mother, his mother forsaken by God knows what - The birds, the sky, Satan? She blamed them all. The eclectic homeless humming, dreadful choirs, the collapse of the blind beggar’s epitaph. on the hot hot concrete, she kneels to her cold cold knees the stained light refracts her detached reflection, only now an imitation of the lost glow of morning sickness, now she has eleven fingers to count the days until she joins her son, until she too is only a lonesome finger to be suckled by the mouth of-next Spread: Untitled (Creation of Adam) Tommy Malekoff 124 125 Forever Kimberly Nguyen Danger Janie Ledford 126 127 Untitled (T. Lee) Janie Ledford Untitled (Leigh T.) Blaine Wyatt Carteaux Next: Taking Trips with Dad & Labyrinth Blaine Wyatt Carteaux Tiger Fish Doesn’t Care About You Other Sea Critters Jolie Day Previous: School Rebecca Bennett Vacuum Samantha McPeters All Brilliant Lauren Ling Marksman Samuel Dalzell Technophile Samuel Dalzell 136 137 Renaissance by Sam Otterbourg Things change. Cell phones ring in the Sistine Chapel Pristine silence broken by blaring tones Echoing off works of art That was what people wanted in their churches Now they want Xboxes and plush seating So they can be entertained and comfortable for their salvation In the room, ladies come and go, talking of Michelangelo But Michelangelo He’s a ninja turtle now and he Like the other great masters Fights crime for pizza He’s not even the cool one Leonardo is the leader And has the cool swords So it goes, the greatest painters of the Italian Rennaisance Better known as mutant reptiles How will they remember me? I wonder Will I be re-animated, centuries after my death? It would be nice to have such a tribute. It is tribute, though heavily merchandised And critically panned They could have named them after any other quartet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John George, Paul, Ringo, and John But they chose the masters Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo Their masterpieces sit in Rome and Paris While they live in a sewer and in the toy chests of children Whose parents have disposable income And so things have changed A half-hour commercial made into video games And poorly received films Is a memorial to the artists who defined culture Cell phones ring in the Sistine Chapel Kids wear TMNT shirts in the Louvre And plead to go back to the hotel So they can watch cartoons. 138 139 Bury Me in Paris by Colton Weaver Bury me in Paris, when my heart stops and my eyes open wide, next to Beckett or Sarte & de Beauvoir, ménage à trois. Bury me in Paris, where the tourists go, on the Champs-Élysées, or near the home of Picasso. Bury me in Paris where the Seraphs scoff and roll their brown eyes and the saints sell paints on the edge of the Seine’s grime. Bury me in Paris between the pavement and le Métro, take my body to whatever stop, just go. Bury me in Paris on a winter’s night, beneath the Louvre pyramid light. Bury me in Paris with Lady Liberty in tow, make my bed next to de Balzac, next to Marceau. Bury me in Paris at the foot of l’Obélisque accompanied by pharaohs, exhumed. Bury me in Paris, leave me there, I guess, in the hotel room overlooking the Arc. I, fully dressed. Bury me in Paris while listening to Robespierre’s final scream, the silence drowned out only by the guillotine. Bury me in Paris, Montrouge, your angel calls to me, that one who serves macarons at the head of the Tuileries. Bury me in Paris, with the Angel, unimpressed, next to her, I, in eternal rest. Bury me in Paris, toss me off Bir-Hakiem, splashing, or under tour Eiffel in the springtime night, waking. Bury me in Paris, my body yearns to be free and true, but if I am to die in New Orleans, bon Ange de Montrouge, Bury me there with the jazz worms, singing: “Angel, come to me, come to me, Angel, come.” Title This, Millenials. (for Those Who Eat Ramen by Choice, or Not.) by Colton Weaver I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by disillusionment, lacking egotistical sold, dragging themselves through the hip streets at dawn looking for a socially self-aggrandizing fix. Poets, as they sit in desks and discuss discourse about discourse about discourse about discourse, who fear that thinking itself was buried with Vonnegut, who are lost in forests of brick walls, inviting, because they block the wind of dying fall, who swim in cesspools filled with academic sewage, yearning for freedom, for truth, as they always have, mining their minds for images, and searching for words to describe -a reality which is virtual at its core and each act, another chore./ -a scene of life which reflects all that is poignant and sacred. Poets seek musicians while musicians seek poets. and the dog chases its tail, endlessly and the dog chases its tail, endlessly and the dog chases its tail, endlessly These poets who search aimlessly for the feeling of feeling, who are overwhelmed with meaning to the point where meaning has no meaning in itself. Who claim this poem as their own and continuously write themselves into it. It is those who suffer in truth that live the poetic. Those who sit in front of space heaters eating peanut butter sandwiches in winter, who sweat unknowingly in summer, comforted in each’s odor. Those who open Macbooks while squatting in empty flats. Signing up, logging in and zoning out, forever disengaged. Those who type prophecy on keypads and let keyboards gather dust-stratification, signs of long nights spent in century-old homes still not reno- 140 141 vated, ceilings sinking at the sides while those above pogo to punk rock long dead, or grind genitals to old soul, simulating all that is sensual. Those who play archaeologist to their own layers of makeup, grimed on the sink. Those who share their food with the roaches and the mooches who all have keys, who use the books as shelves to hold ceramic mugs, stained with a single drip-drop, who, with arms crossed, watch bands in basements play noise. Those who replaced their nu-metal records with folk but kept the unkempt beards. Those who drink stale beer on stranger’s rooftops. Those who live with bags under eyes, themselves asleep, lacking a body, sleeping naked together to stay warm, sleeping naked together to stay sane, sleeping naked together to stay touched. Those who leave coffee in unplugged automatic pots, decaying rapidly. Those who eat pizza for breakfast, cold or microwaved, as an act of ultimate indulgence. Those who prance about in un-matching socks from hardwood floors to vinyl floors to tile floors, all under the same pop-corn ceiling, dancing to the sound of rhythmic silence. Those who fight with lovers about acts, but never once mention the act of love itself. Those who don flannel plaid in springtime color, constructing Williamsburg, who consider gentrification a new form of landed gentry, who live in poverty as if it were a novelty, capitalist martyrs sacrificing employment to hide being non-hirable, who shop in online surplus department stores for unique vintage. Those who, who, who hoot like the owls framed on their walls, eyes wide but beaks small. Those who are oppressed by nonexistent kings ruling in imaginary suits. Those who crave something new, not tired-as the form of this very poem-something which is not-yet auto-tuned. Those who, faux-hawked and shredded, rock and bop to Bowie doing Lou on Sunday Morning from Station to Station shooting Heroin, who walk swiftly with denim skin on their legs and refuse socks. Those who, in their rightest mind, are the wrongest-minded. Those who can reject privilege only because they are privileged, who, in their uniform whiteness, denounce racism, who, in their uniform straightness, claim immune to homophobia who, with their cocks erect in a row, claim to be feminists. And those who search for revolution in a time when rebellion is conformity. Listening to the pounding sound of blog-protesters typing n o w. who, in claiming to accept, don’t accept the unaccepting, who got veggies tattooed on their sides while snapping bacon in their teeth, who ironically infiltrated asylums and performed madness until the shocks came and they were maddened, for good, eaten alive by volts resounding ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Who sleep naked together to be together but end up being alone, exchanges from lips that move in pretentious drone, and the dog chases its tail, endlessly. When the abnormal is normal and the whole structure is inverted and heaven is here and flames under the soil are no longer hell burning for soles of the Converse, Adidas, and Nike sneakers on the bicycle pedals of poets who ride at night, listening to the sound of owls that question: who? whoo? whooo? 142 143 ELEGY by Alexandra Ledford Andy Warhol, you bastard, you have shown us what a mockery it is to create. Fifteen minutes my ass, you had yours for a good hour with your cheap photographic stills of Marilyn Monroe and ketchup bottles, juxtaposed not grouped into glistering cloying chuck or the copies of “Howl” ensconced among your shelves, never read or perused, just kept around: “Allen is famous.” So vain, so glorious, drag coquettes named Candy to this day await at your altar, young artists with their paint boxes, gobs of ink and occasional semen perceive the patented plush sealed ironic bulk against which no ManWoman can rebel though maybe a Reaganomic consumer’s palette is the most valid snatch at tangibility and God it’s been 24 years and we navigate back to the impermanence of it, while my dollar’s being burnt. A little everyone clings to the sensual fantasy of celebrity culture visual and stupefying like a nucleus of garnets swiveling out of chaos. Cementing my fear of your prosthetic legacy, Andy (may I call you Andy? Your hand feels limp in my pumping vise) is: what of course you wrought solidified even is an ominous foggy knowledge that one has and rejoices (skeins whirl and one cuts oneself on Malaysian machines): we will die. 144 145 The Burdens Undertaken by Important People of Polite Society by Alexandra Ledford I cannot stand in Trafalgar Square and look up without squinting at royals behind curtains fussing about The Papers and Security, busying themselves rattling jewelry getting nowhere because they were born there. Yes I hate them, these Valium-saturated damaged mothers who sip Earl Grey leaving dregs and feces for the Proles. The Rolls Royce got paintballed last month —it was in all the papers— angry pedestrians speaking of the widening between havenots and havemores yet we still buy the glossy rags to feed their polo horses. Meanwhile on Long Island somewhere Noveau-Tom and Noveau-Daisy and the Noveau-Buchanans beat the Brits at their own game (better, stronger, faster) but still worry about the stench from the cities. Remembrance by McAlister Greiner I grasp these leaves as many would cling to memories, knowing they are a part of me, a part of my survival. This past spring, a child climbed to my highest branch, grazing her precious hand against my top leaf; I was left with the innocence of her touch. When I felt my strongest, a summer storm tore many from my branches. Though the coolness of the rain was refreshing, the rage of the wind left me nearly bare. As autumn approaches, I slowly begin to lose them. I mourn their fall. Later, when winter arrives, they shall all be lost, crunching unheard under the crunch of snow. With each year, new leaves come, old leaves fade, but I grow from the nourishment they give to my soil. I thrive in remembrance of them. 146 147 Warming by Ashley Fare We swung back the canopy on ancient hinges, And swept up the floor we’d riddled with singes: Recolored it again with mechanical haste, By left palms itching to break age at the base. No form was as powerful To cease what was dawning. The horizon at our backs, We thought less about warming. With purpose: So did I, Without regret, I followed suit, Kicking paths between the leaves, Ignoring the green-flagged truce. Wander by Kendra Hammond Through one central station, out of the city, into the next, and we’re back at a station again. They all look the same. But feel your shoes click on the brick beneath your toes and lift, set down, click, lift, skip, and onto the next city. Again. 148 149 Exhale by Michele Trumble We carved our initials into the lungs of the earth, asking mother to bleed for our permanence. I turned to the East to the horizon where she slid into my life. I asked her how she knew, how I would know. “Because it felt like home” she said, rising on her heels to get a little bit closer But even I could see her footprints were deep, yet questioned. She turned to the West to the horizon saying that is where I could find her. My eyes traced her receding outline wanting desperately to trickle down her spine to see what it felt like to have one. We carved what we thought our souls would look like into the lungs of the earth, hoping with each exhalation we would find just a little more peace. Excursion by Robert Watkins Today, my phone went off more than usual, but it was never who I wanted it to be. Rather than wait , I went to the bookstore. Liquidation, all items MUST go, the empty shelves and colorful caps-lock signs were enough to disenchant every reader in town. Through deserted streams of text bound in sale stickers the ghost-skinned redhead made her rounds and drew me in with her casual curiosity. To speak to a stranger goes down like slurry, the music of conversation is stimulating enough. Each encounter, a new mission. the idea of success is enough to ensnare any man. I approached her as though I worked there, “What are you looking for?” Taken aback, one word answers spilled from her clumsy mouth like drunk missiles. 150 151 It was all very forced and hurried, her discomfort exercised the charm from my body I lied about plays and books, got her to smile just enough so that I didn’t feel like a failure, and sauntered my burning ears to the car with my friend. I asked my friend if he had seen the cute redhead carrying a copy of Peter Pan. As usual, he scoffed, an unamused sibling, an impatient father, because it’s the same exhausting story every time we go out so we talked about something else. When I got home, I set my bag down and put my new book on the shelf, lay on my bed and saw that my phone had still disappointed me, but the empty house was enough. It felt good to be alone. Cheeseburgers by Travis Hauer Red flesh sizzling on the flat top stove. Stained linen aprons and sweat-soaked clothes. A hot summer Sunday, a diner off Tate. Still unnoticed forced to wait for a cook with a hazardous belly and crippling cologne. Behind a boy with an application And a suit he’s outgrown. Listening to the girl in the corner tearing nails with her teeth. The man sweeping a shattered plate dropping fries into grease. My thoughts wander into a field of grass beneath my feet. Like a thief I steal away worries of cheeseburgers in the heat. 152 153 The Dancer by Travis Hauer Theater lights are swallowed by darkness as I find my seat. All around are the sounds of chit-chat dying, a woman next to me shivering, whispering to her husband, it’s so cold. The stagnant air feels thin, almost stretched among the mouths rhythmically breathing in sync. I can hear them. It’s quite comforting. We are waiting and breathing so very slowly. My eyes fall onto a girl who dances from the black beyond the stage. Her feet sweep endlessly, leaving streaks like white paint across a black canvas. Slow, methodical piano keys drown the sound the bodies create as they rise and fall with air. She is so pale, so thin and dizzy. My fingers squeeze and clinch, she isn’t dancing she is sick. So thin, she isn’t breathing. Her arms hung like a puppet, she is falling, sweat covered feet smacking awkwardly about. Knees crack as she crashes to the ground, fumbling at her throat, crawling, reaching, trying to shout. So still, they sit motionless and stare. The woman next to me doesn’t shiver; she doesn’t blink. Cold lines of sweat stream down my sides, they don’t notice that I’m standing. Tip-toeing between shoes, fingers drifting along the backs of the seats. I am coming. In the heat of the light, I crawl to find her in a pile of dress and sweat, still and quiet. Sweeping her up I shout, SHE IS SICK! PLEASE HELP! The bodies stare quietly back, lidless eyes biting on every inch of my skin. There is no more piano, the air grows still. I can hear them again. Rising and falling. Breathing and waiting, gently sliding her out of my hands. The only sounds to be heard are the soft breaths and my feet sweeping endlessly across the floor. 154 155 Pasiphae and the Bull by Caitlin Meredith Many nights after the consummation, she wakes from a black sleep, slips her fingers into the throbbing wetness, and remembers the rough thrusts of the bull— the way his horn skimmed her back, how she bit her lip and slurped the blood, how his musky scent mingled with the forsythia. Moonbeams sparkle on her heaving chest as her hands replace his hardness. She knows this lust will never end. Her stomach is taut and swells by the day. After the last moan leaves her mouth, she lies in the milky afterglow of memory and climax, at once human and animal. It’s then that she thinks she hears the bull groaning in the garden. Out of bed she staggers, finding the cowskin Daedalus crafted. Beneath the hide she shields herself once more; the bull’s warm odor is still there and his wetness and her own and a surge of grief pins her in place when she discovers the vacant garden. Her toes curl around the dewy grasses as she takes her position by the flowering forsythia. Awash in moonlight and longing, her dance begins: thrust after thrust after thrust; she imagines he is there underneath her—massive, marble-white gift—as the soft, quiet orgasms blossom inside her. Then she feels the water trickling down her leg, but knows she cannot stop. Penelope by Caitlin Meredith I think of you most when I’m in pain— a toothache that makes my jaw throb, the rawness of my hands after hours at the loom; the stiffness in my back from hunching like an old woman. Pain reminds me of the only touch that can soothe. Do you remember the day we ran in the orchard? I tripped over twigs and tumbled to the earth, humiliated and ashamed. Swathes of skin started to purple; to my side you came, fell on your knees and touched the wounds with rough lips and fingers. The first surge of lust lurched in me, an awakening that cancelled the pain. I lifted my skirts past the dirty, blood-caked knees and staked my heels in the ground, open to you at last. I never knew what passion was until pleasure and pain melted as one inside of me. Nights I have wandered, in my mind, from our cold bed to that warm spot of earth in the distance where you first broke me open. And yet I wait. My ache for you, like the ache in every part of my body, affirms that I am still alive. 156 157 Persephone Speaks to Demeter by Caitlin Meredith If I had known how the narcissus would give way, mother I would have stayed closer to you but the fields were swollen with flowers, the wind was crisp, the air fragrant What were my last words to you before he claimed me? Mother I love you. Mother the day is fine. Mother I will return I won’t be gone long. I am here now in this spring. We are together again but not as close as before. The girl you knew is no more. Mother, she is no more. Person Watching by Hannah Danger saw the gait which like your soul is ardently alive within its field, like earth swivels on its axis, and like my thoughts tending towards only one direction. 158 159 Sleeping, Sweating, the Sounds, and the Silence by Garrett Taddeucci Tangled and damp, we, the vines and the leaves of this forest, canopied by sheets, rooted into the mattress, twist in our sleep, and our eyes shift and they flicker to the whine swelling from the woods, thick with cicadas whirring through the night for what fate handed to us, or what the gods allowed us, or what we took for ourselves. We pull the blades from our hearts and our backs. We kiss the wounds we’ve left in each other, and we stay here like ghosts left with time and each other, and we pass, like vapor, in and out of sleep and each other. New Year’s Meditation by Garrett Taddeucci Crystalline mist floats around me like a swarm of tiny, icy, insects. Stoned, I’m lost in their kaleidoscopic dance among the bittersweet, tangerine rays of the dying sun. I sink further into the trees until I’m deep enough to join their gray, silent legion. Eyes closed, fingers dug into the soil, I pray for them to bless me with their wisdom, benevolence, and stillness. I too, have shed my vibrant foliage. I too, have spent these winter months gnarled and dormant. But I too am eager to let my dead parts rot beneath me as I reach up, green and reborn, to the newly risen sun. 160 161 Night Lights by Jesse Morales One summer during a lightning storm you told me stories of absence, how the sirens did not sound at the waterfront when you lit firecrackers there, how your absolute fear is not that you cannot feel shock, but that you do. Your voice then was voltaic as the white veins that open thunderclouds, and its sound washed me with memories of other nights, how the dusk’s curtain would drape itself over the lake as the stars rode soft currents like tea candles in paper boats, how we would paint the lakeshore with our forlornness until we lay spent in the grass like the husks of stars cooling against vast space. Once we drank the moon from our bottle of red wine while you gestured at the Pleiades, wondering how shared heat melts off into nothing, how the novas of love make dust from solid figures glowing in darkness. It was those seven ripe lights that revealed to me why the tenor strains of your speech set firestorms in the heavens; this was because you were brother to night lights, everlasting suicides that burned vacancy into your soul whenever evening came. 162 163 Les Demoiselles Opaques by Jesse morales Three women sit for snapshots on a stone fence. Feet limp like damp lea |
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