Whiskey Island Issue 58 by Steve Aresmon Thomas

2010

WHISKEY ISLAND

ISSUE

FIFTYEIGHT A L I T E R A RY J O U R N A L P U B L I S H E D B Y ` C L E V E L A N D S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

2 THE COVER: "The Alternate Universe" by Lissy Laricchia

Whiskey Island is a nonprofit literary journal that has been published (in one form or another) by students of Cleveland State University for over thirty years. We welcome poetry, fiction and nonfiction (including translation), and art submissions. Reporting time is about six months. WHISKEY ISLAND www.csuohio.edu/whiskey_island/ whiskeyisland@csuohio.edu English Dept. Cleveland State University Cleveland, OH 44115 Telephone: 216-687-2056 GENERAL SUBMISSIONS: All rights revert to the author after publication. Payment is two contributor copies. We accept fiction submissions up to 8,000 words, poetry submissions consisting of up to 5 poems. We accept simultaneous submissions and ask you identify it as such in the cover letter. Please withdraw your piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. No multiple submissions. ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION: Electronic submissions can be made through our website - www.csuohio.edu/whiskey_island/. BY MAIL: We prefer online submissions, but if you are unable to submit to us through that method, send to our campus address. Please include a SASE. Copyright ÂŠ 2010. All rights reserved. Thank you for your support: This magazine would not be possible without the support from the Dean of Students, Dr. James Drnek, Budget Officer Marilyn Werner, Media Specialist Dan Lenhart, Advisor Michael Dumanis, and the students of Cleveland State University, who continue to show interest in the publication year after year.

WHISKEY ISL AND

WHISKEY ISLAND ISSUE FIFTY-EIGHT Editor-In-Chief

Megan M. Erwin

Poetry Editors

Krysia Orlowski Karen Schubert

Fiction Editors

Katherine Graham Jeffrey Rice

Nonfiction Editor: Art Editor: Design & Web Editor: Readers:

Elena Tomorowitz Steve Thomas Ruth Anne Bruner Nick Elder Amanda McCoy

Media Specialist:

Dan Lenhart

Faculty Advisor:

Michael Dumanis

Interns:

Bonnie Jacobson

Yuriy Bilokonsky Rachel Boyd Tim Collingwood Amanda R. Hebebrand

Friend us on Facebook to keep up-to-date with the latest events and happenings with Whiskey Island. Go to facebook.com and search for "Whiskey Island"

WHISKEY ISL AND

CO N T E N TS

POETRY Carmen Giménez Smith

For About Five Minute in the Aughts Ars Amatoria In-Between Elegy Your Tiny Dimensions

6 7 10 11

Laurel Bastian Rachel Mehl Zach Vesper Michael Glaviano

All the Presents in My Dark Hair for You Saturdays on Lynn Street with Frazey Ford Still Life with Fruit Pastoral Half Brother

28 29 30 31 32

Marsha Kroll Daniel Bourne

Improvisation Lake Erie Cars Late Discoveries of Lipstick

43 44 46

Gabriel Welsch Carl Dennis Erinn Batykefer

Ars Poetica The Motel Keeper How the River Reckons Time At the Mouth of the Maze Simultaneity Mordant

48 49 50 51 52 53

Philip Dacey Kyle Flak George C. Looney Erika Meitner

Laryngitis The Secret Admirer Children of the Moon Wound Laced with Evening News, in Which Criss Angel Appears and Vanishes We Need to Make Mute Things One Version of December

54 63 69

Emma Bolden Dawn Dupler

The Witch Remembers Her Early Learnings Something Snaps Our Sunday Outing

75 76 77

Timothy C. Kercher Simone Muench

On Being a Refugee Wolf Cento You don’t taste like anyone I know Elevator Landscape

78 79 80 82

Cody Todd Christine Hope Starr David Starkey

Prison Moratorium The Point of Dreams A Clear Night in February

83 87 88

WHISKEY ISL AND

71 72 74

CO N T E N TS

POETRY Kathryn Jacobs Meredith Davies Hadaway Jake Adam York

Wife Refraction Secession Secession Secession

89 90 92 93 94

Nina Corwin Jeffrey C. Alfier Amy Newday

the human organ The New Barkeep at the Ghost Ship Tavern Genealogy

95 96 97

Stephen Graham Jones

Nine Feet

Lydia Conklin

What the Kid Does

Rider Strong

Two Kings

Susan Overcash Walker

Harvest Queen

Get Along Little Doggy

Poof

I Spy

Battle for the Kingdom

The Magical Mystery Box

FICTION

NONFICTION Timothy L. Marsh

ART Lissy Laricchia

REVIEWS Laurin Wolf

Michael Goroff

Speechless: A Review Allison Titus's Sum of Every Lost Ship

105

A Review of Eugene Martenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Firework

107 110

Contributor Notes

WHISKEY ISL AND

For About Five Minutes in the Aughts Carmen Giménez Smith

I put up notice on the Internet where misspellers wrote the most compelling notes. They wore industrial eyeglasses and ironic t-shirts and trucker hats and often forgot their wallets. One taught me about science fiction porn while we lay on his silk leopard print sheets. After that, a Nugent look-alike, then a mapmaker in Alaska and that old-timey going-nowhere correspondence. I thought I’d tell our kids about our cute meet over Thanksgiving in the new fifties. This concurrent with a cameo by a figure from my past who told me I looked a lot smaller since the nineties. I watched films that made me feel old because of choice feminism contradictions, and I wrote poems about the city’s howling lunatics in dialect compost of technology and snark. And then, and then, and then. Met a lunatic on Craigslist. Concerned about starts, I stuffed his inbox with amendments and bloated metonymy. This happened for months. This happened while I healed from pneumonia, from broken bones, from agoraphobia. Drinking beer gave me a panic, so whiskey. Divorce ephemera, safe doors and pre-midlife. I collected fancy pens and yeah, I’m working on an article about animé and Marxism. Pills made me shaky, but I filled myself with pills because they made me shaky. Attended dotcom parties thrown by post-Stanford nerds in tucked-in shirts (Such Adam’s apples!). They gave away fonty tzotchkes for Internet pet stores and other terrible ideas. Just one hayride after the next and only tickling and stalker calling, the hang-up thing. We’d work on it, we’d patch it up. My action item, my best of bread. I met the lunatic and we did it until it outlived its hipness, until it was Eastern European. We did it until the buildings came down. We did it until the affect was moot, until the recipe got muddled. We did it until I turned into myself, until the whole city turned into itself. We did it until the line got too long and therapy turned me down. I’m talking Beginning of the Decline of Our Smug Empire. I’m talking about the rise of a collective posture for the skittering theatre of our time.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Nine Feet Stephen Graham Jones

In the bedroom exactly two minutes earlier, Martin had decided that, sure, he knew it was wrong, but the fact of the matter was that he was just a better father when he had a line or two coursing through him. He played with the kids at their level, was more attentive, quicker to smile. More forgiving. On cocaine, he was everything his father had never been, and that had to be worth something, right? It was even valiant in a way, to be sacrificing himself for the kids like this. Except, when he went out into the house to find Julie to share this news flash with her—it felt like telling on himself, like he was maybe going to start laughing partway through—he remembered that the kids were down the street for the afternoon. A lemonade stand. He stood at the sliding glass door in the kitchen and contemplated this, nodding to himself then making himself stop, because that kind of activity was always a dead giveaway, at least with Julie. Maybe it was best that the lemonade stand got all the glory this afternoon. Now he could just sit still in the backyard and enjoy his Saturday, and nobody could accuse him of playing too rough with the kids, or not letting them make up any of the rules, or of using profanity that they were hearing on the playground anyway. And, hey, if the kids weren’t home, and Julie was still hunched over her pottery wheel in the basement, another line couldn’t hurt, right? Just a taste? Two minutes later, his face tense with the muscles it was taking not to smile, Martin eased the sliding door open with one finger, reminded himself to grease that track with soap or oil or vinegar or animal fat or whatever the good greasing thing was, and settled into the wooden deck chair like a knight, retiring from a hard day’s battle. This was the life, he said to himself. Everything up to this point had now officially been worth it. But then Julie was there, standing beside him, waiting for him to notice her. She was wearing the wooden clogs that were supposed to make her invisible in the house. When she had them on, she was working, couldn’t be disturbed. Except, beside her, little Melanie, the three-year-old from next door. “Just for ten minutes,” Julie was saying. “Until I’m done. Please?” Martin looked down to little Melanie. “You can just stay sitting there,” Julie went on. “I wouldn’t want to

WHISKEY ISL AND

inconvenience you or anything.” “Yeah, sure,” Martin said, his elbows cocked like he had been going to stand. “We’re old friends, right Mel-girl?” Melanie was already studying all the possibilities the backyard had to offer, now that there were no big kids around. “Kitty,” she said, about Oscar, still swirling behind the sliding glass door. “You could call him that,” Martin said. “Ten minutes,” Julie said, already backing away, her apron dusty with dried clay. “No more bongs,” Martin called after her, a joke Julie didn’t laugh at this time either. And then it was just him and Melanie and the new Labrador next door. Martin stared at the spaces between the boards of the fence, the black dog on the other side frantic, barking. How had he not seen it before, right when he walked out, or at least heard it, been bugged by it? It didn’t matter. This was a Saturday afternoon the way it was supposed to be. First the lemonade stand, and now the gods had even seen fit to send Melanie over, to keep Martin from sneaking inside for another taste, which would definitely have pushed him over, gotten him into trouble. Where he was now, though, it was perfect. He could ride it for another halfhour then drift down into his recliner, hold a smile on his face for whatever foreign film Julie had for them that night. Tell her to just leave the subtitles off this time. Nothing could mess it up. Except Melanie. Ten minutes later, Julie streaking across the yard in her clogs, uninvisible, Martin had to admit to himself that, yeah, he guessed that at some level he probably had registered that Melanie was crying. That she had been. It was a definite and very distinct sound. But she was three years old. Wasn’t she supposed to do that? And, that she was crying, it meant her airways were unobstructed, that she was still conscious, all that good stuff, so he really wasn’t doing anything that bad, just staring at the leaf blower he’d left out either last weekend or the weekend before, staring at it and trying to figure out what the essential difference was in a leaf blower and a snow blower, and whether he could design one that would cover both bases, and if he’d maybe taken some wrong turn in his life years ago. And anyway, Julie hadn’t left instructions for him to do anything. He was just supposed to sit there. With Melanie. Which he’d really excelled at doing, he

WHISKEY ISL AND

thought. To the fucking letter. Julie didn’t quite agree. She was holding Melanie to her chest and screaming at Martin loud enough that the whole neighborhood was going to hear. And there was the blood, of course. What had happened was Melanie had tottered over to the fence, to the doggie next door, and stuck her finger through the space between the boards, and the doggie, being a doggie, had of course snipped her finger off at the first knuckle. Martin rose from his chair, trying to force a concerned look on his face, and then he ran through the house at what felt like five hundred miles per hour, looking under every cushion and in every drawer for the car keys. By the time he found them, Julie and Melanie were gone to the hospital. They’d left the front door wide open, like they wanted to air-condition the whole neighborhood. Martin stood in the doorway for a few moments, the cold air rushing past him dollar by dollar, and then he shut the door, forgot for a moment who had torn up the living room, and the kitchen. It was two days before Julie actually talked to him. A Tuesday. The Tuesday, judging from the tone of her voice. But Martin was resigned, knew he had it coming. “You disfigured her,” Julie was saying. “I think Bobbert had something or another to do with that,” Martin mumbled back, looking away. Bobbert was the hyper Lab, named by some other three year old. “But don’t you get it?” Julie said. “She already—and it’s not her fault—but you’ve never seen how Melanie socializes with other kids, have you? She’s already displaying . . . I’m not saying this to be mean-hearted, okay?” “What are you not saying?” “That she’s already hard-wired to be promiscuous in her teenage years.” Martin studied the carpet, pulled his top lip between his teeth, and cleared his throat. When he looked up, Julie was waiting for him to agree. “There’s a slut gene, you mean?” “She’s her mother’s daughter, more like.” Lydia. Martin went back to his interesting spot on the carpet. Had he missed something? Flipping back through all his beers with Roger,

WHISKEY ISL AND

Lydia’s husband, Melanie’s dad, the only thing he could even partially remember was Roger saying once that Lydia, she was athletic in the sack, that he would say that for her anyway. It had made Martin look at her differently at the next couple of cookouts—she had the body for it, sure—but then he’d forgotten about it. Or thought he had. “Well, if it’s—if it’s like you say, hereditary,” Martin said, really choosing his words, “I guess I don’t see how—” “Think about it,” Julie said, “God. She already has two strikes against her, right? She’s pretty, or going to be, and is already inclined to be loose? And now, with a . . . what do you even call it, missing a finger?” “Unpolydactyly?” Martin tried, half-smiling. It sounded like the worst dinosaur. “It’s going to push her farther out of the circle’s what it’s going to do. Leave her prey to the wolves.” “Wolves?” “Older boys, Martin. Are you trying to be difficult here?” Julie was dead-serious. Martin knew better than to let himself smile. “And you do remember that we’re eating with all of them Friday, right?” she said. “Over here?” The big reconciliation dinner—Lydia and Roger and, from the other side of the fence, the undiscovered country, Bobbert’s owners, Sandy and Wayne, Martin in the middle of them all, in his Do Whatever You Want to The Cook apron that had been a hit two summers ago. “Yeah, Friday,” Martin said. “Think you can get everybody home with all their fingers?” Julie added, waggling hers. Martin smiled out loud now, took this, even liked it a bit. Mostly he was thinking about Lydia, though. Wednesday after work, Wayne was lofting pre-Bobbert dog stories over the fence for Martin to run around under, pretend to catch. It was some kind of therapy, or penance. Wayne couldn’t see Martin’s eyes, though. Or count his beers. The end of the story Wayne was just trying to wrap up had something to do

WHISKEY ISL AND

with one of his childhood dogs having a prostate the size of a grapefruit. Martin drained his beer and focused on the fence. The space between the slats was too narrow for his fingers. Did Julie really think he was supposed to have anticipated Melanie would try to pet the dog through the fence? Martin laughed politely about the grapefruit-prostate joke. It was an explanation for why this dog of Wayne’s had had to lay in a wagon to pee, and why Wayne had pulled that dog all around the neighborhood, so he could still visit all the hydrants and posts and bushes of his youth. The obvious next question, Martin thought, was whether Wayne had held it for the dog too, but he smiled the possibility away, looked back to the house, Julie in there not watching tv, not cooking dinner, not taking the weekend’s videos back. Maybe talking to Wayne was better, all things considered. Or the idea of talking to Wayne, anyway. Actually listening was taking a lot more effort than Martin had intended. So far, at twelve minutes, this was the most Martin had ever talked to Wayne one-onone, he was pretty sure. And it was getting complicated, Wayne laughing at his own jokes, Martin trying to remind himself to laugh too, loud enough that Wayne could hear it through the fence, each of them pretending that Wayne wasn’t really asking, in every way possible except with words, if Melanie’s dad hated him or not. If Roger was maybe going to try to kill him, come Friday. It was the kind of conversation Martin might need some chemical assistance to get all the way through. Except he’d made promises to himself, alone in the house after the accident. So he nodded, hooked his hand over the top of the fence and asked Wayne how do you know something like that, about your dog’s prostate? Wayne chuckled—it was different from his laugh, like something he usually saved for the office—and said, “When you’re a kid, you mean?” “Just anytime, really.” “My brother ran over him. It was on accident. I didn’t tell you about his dog, did I?” “Your brother ran over it?” “It just, it’s like if you step on a chicken real hard, sometimes an egg’ll pop out, with the shell still clear and everything, right?” Martin stared at his spot on the fence, shook his head no, that he wasn’t going to follow this any farther into Wayne’s childhood, but then Wayne was already telling about his brother’s dog Lady, who liked it missionary position.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Martin tried to drink some more from his empty bottle. Because he was pretty sure Julie was watching him, he smiled about Lady on her back under some Rottweiler, all the neighborhood kids standing around in a circle, not saying anything. “So have you found it yet?” he finally asked Wayne, just real casual. From the other side of the fence, and for more breaths than Martin liked, nothing. Then, “A dog’s intestines are only nine feet long, you know that?” Martin closed his eyes, didn’t ask how Wayne knew this. “That means shit usually goes through them in eight or nine hours—did you know that . . . that intestinal contractions have been clocked at about a foot an hour? Any faster, some of the nutrients slip past, something about enzymes or chemical processes, but any slower and—” “But it’s been three days, right?” Wayne nodded. Martin could hear it, and nodded back, was thinking whether he could arc his bottle out into the alley, into the dumpster, and, if the dumpster was closed, if the bottle would slide up the plastic lid, ramp up into the backyard of the new people on the next street over. And whether they’d just take that kind of abuse. “They can’t do anything with it, right?” Wayne asked, his face right next to the fence. “The—her finger?” Martin looked back to the sliding doors again, lifted his empty beer to Julie, if she was there, and then the streetlights crackled on up and down the street and Bobbert groaned on his new chain, wanting to explode out into the night, and Martin had no idea what he was going to eat for dinner. Instead of coming straight home Thursday at lunch to marinate the meat, Martin circled his house, starting about six streets out and then making left turns until he was on his own street, like it was just happenstance that he’d wind up here, of all places. What he was trying to forget was which dictionary he’d folded his thin plastic bag into, when, after the accident, he’d suddenly been sure Julie was going to be searching his top drawer. But it wasn’t working. And was halberd the most obvious word to have folded it in with anyway? It was probably at the top of the list of words people needed to look up on any given day. He should have put it between some of the scientific pages that were all prefixes. Neo, or super, something. Or just in a book Julie had already read. Except then she might loan it out.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Martin tried to laugh at how stupid he was being. There was hardly even enough to get him in trouble, really. He nodded to himself about it then, fastened his thinking on that: that it was hardly enough for Julie to get mad about. That he could throw it away if he wanted, that’s how little of it there was. Or he could even go ahead and dispose of it properly—that amount, it would have no real effect on him at all, would just be nostalgic, and would have burned through him by the time Julie came home with the kids this afternoon anyway, burned through and left him clean, unworried, so he could help with homework and dinner and baths. So it was settled. Martin tapped the top of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and accelerated. But then he slowed back down. Next door, Lydia had boxes all over the lawn. Martin coasted past his driveway, had to back up into it like a teenager or a cop. Lydia was wearing what Julie would call Usual Lydia: shorts that let the sun get all the way to her legs and a shirt so thin she had to wear a bra with it. Athletic. He should have hidden the bag under athletic. “Cleaning,” Lydia confessed, holding up an ancient shadeless lamp to show. Martin nodded that that made sense, yeah. “Anything you see,” Lydia went on, “a truck’s coming by at four-thirty. Roger thinks he has to save everything, you know how he is.” Martin shrugged, studied the boxes, stopping on a mirror he remembered from when Roger had the pool table, and then looked next door with Lydia when Bobbert exploded against his new chain. Martin felt a sound rise in his chest like a chuckle. But he wasn’t smiling. “What?” Lydia asked. Martin rubbed his lips harder than they needed, and said, his voice different, “It was my fault, y’know? Saturday I mean. I should have . . . ” Instead of finishing like she was supposed to, correcting him like he was leaving room for, Lydia just closed her eyes and held them there, like Martin wasn’t apologizing at all. Like she could pretend it hadn’t happened. “It’s just a finger, right?” she said then, all at once, her laugh not real either. Not even close. “It could have been . . . it could have—” “My finger won’t even fit through the fence,” Martin blurted out.

WHISKEY ISL AND

“It wasn’t your dog,” she said then. Halberd, he almost said back. After that Lydia nodded, wove her way barefoot through all the cardboard boxes her lawn was made of now. Martin let her get all the way to her front door before rising from his car, holding the door shut, studying all the windows watching him. After calling in to work that something had come up, he poured the leftovers from the lemonade stand into one of his tall glasses and, instead of marinating, sat in the living room with the tv on, and when the garage door started to rumble up, he thought for a stupid instant that the neighborhood was collapsing around him, and smiled at himself. “Another treasure?” Julie asked when she walked in with the groceries. Beside him on the couch was Roger’s mirror. Martin shrugged, nodded. It was more complicated than that, though. Friday. Because it was too late to let the brisket soak for the twenty-four hour minimum, Martin zapped the marinade in the microwave until it was popping bubbles on the surface, then lowered the meat down into it. When he backed away from it to judge his work, he felt like he deserved an award now, some recognition. As far as his office knew, he was at a funeral. The way he’d worded it, it had something to do with the little girl next door. He’d left the "or her finger" part out, of course. And anyway, he didn’t have any good dictionaries in his office. What if he needed to look up some particular medieval word today? It was a good idea to stay home, all in all. It would be vocabularily dangerous to do anything else. If that was even a real word. Martin laughed: there was only one way to find out, right? Ten minutes later he was back where it all started: on the back deck, enough sunscreen on his cheeks and forearms that maybe Julie wouldn’t even know he’d been home all day, just that he’d come back early to check on the meat, to play with the kids, just whatever the hell they wanted to play, so long as he still had time to get the coals ashy and white for dinner. It was all going to be all right.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Martin smiled, closed his eyes against the sun and let his mind skate for a bit, just lazy figure eights, all the weight on this side, then the other, and he could have gone to sleep like that, got caught by Julie, but Bobbert saved him. He was coughing, choking. Martin stared at the fence and weighed his options, decided that just looking wouldn’t hurt anything, right? It’s not like the dog’s prostate was going to squish out. To get a good angle on Bobbert’s ten foot radius—less when he had the chain knotted around the stake—Martin had to stand on the hose reel, something he probably wouldn’t have been light enough for if he hadn’t thought to bring his halberd to lean on. He laughed, pulled himself up, and, just like it sounded, Bobbert was choking himself, finally dry heaving something up, stringing it down to the grass. The finger. Martin felt his lips purse. He wasn’t sure whether he was obligated to do anything here or not. Would finding the finger make up for what had happened? Would it be a good gesture, or poor taste? Could he just pretend not to have seen, not to have even been home? That, yeah. Martin wasn’t even here, wasn’t even— But then Bobbert saw him, lifted his lips away from his teeth. “Good doggie, good boy . . . ” Martin lilted across the fence. It didn’t help. Bobbert repositioned himself so that he was standing half over the finger, then, darting his eyes away for the least possible time, inhaled the finger back just like the first time: without chewing. Martin threw up a little, more than he meant to, and then the hose reel broke under him, driving a plastic shard of hot pain into his ankle, and like that he was flat on his back in the cool, aerated soil of Julie’s herb garden, the clouds scudding past like time-lapse, Bobbert suddenly at the fence, biting at the cracks, the chain dragging loose behind him. Deliberately, slowly—there’d been more in the bag than he’d remembered, either that or his tolerance was way down—Martin put the pad of his finger to the space between the boards, and his fingertip came back wet. “You almost feel sorry for it, don’t you?” At first Martin just nodded, pretty sure he was talking to himself, just in

WHISKEY ISL AND

a female voice, but then it was Lydia. She was standing at the edge of his deck, her arms crossed over her chest. “Roger wants to bury it,” she said then, still not looking directly down at Martin. “He wants to have like a little funeral, so Mel can say bye, I don’t know . . . ” What Martin wanted to say was my ankle. Instead, on accident, he laughed a breath of air through his nose Lydia didn’t smile at first, then did, and let him lean on her all the way to the downstairs bathroom and left without saying anything, came back again with the bottle of Melanie’s pain pills, the ones they’d stopped giving her because of drowsiness. She rattled them so Martin would know to be careful. He nodded that of course he’d be careful. C’mon. “And you’ll be all right?” she said, halfway out the sliding glass door again. “You really don’t want to bury it?” Martin said, Bobbert’s chain rattling in his head. “I don’t want to tie it on a balloon, I don’t want to have it bronzed, anything.” Two of the pain pills were already chalky and bitter on Martin’s gums. His whole mouth was numb, perfect. “Do you think she’ll bring it tonight?” Lydia whispered, nodding next door. “Like in a plastic bowl?” Martin added. “God,” Lydia said, touching him on the shoulder, pushing herself away. Minutes after she was gone, maybe even an hour, Martin was on the back deck again. Do you think she’ll bring it tonight? Lydia had said, just to him. “No,” he said back this time, and hobbled over to the broken hose reel, carried it into the alley, the dumpster. It was right over by Wayne’s back gate. Martin pulled it open as if just looking in and Bobbert exploded out on cue, the chain rattling behind him, slapping both sides of the fence in farewell. “Oops,” Martin said, his hand to his mouth. But then: “So, babyback or brisket?” It was Wayne, from beside his shed. A cigarette in hand, a thousand more crushed beside him. He held the one he had going out to Martin. Martin shook his head no, could feel his heart beating in his throat.

WHISKEY ISL AND

“He was a stupid dog,” Wayne said, shrugging, exhaling, lifting his chin farewell to Bobbert. Farewell and good riddance. All down the alley the rest of the dogs were barking now. “Brisket,” Martin said. “I should—I should get the fire going.” Wayne smiled, rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, said, pointing with the top of his smoking hand, “The gate?” “Got it,” Martin waved, then threw up in the alley as quietly as he could and burrowed through the vomit with a branch, to see if he’d lost anything important. When he couldn’t tell, he figured that, to be safe, he might better take a couple more, then palm a couple into his pocket as well, in case he stepped wrong on his ankle. Because it would ruin the party for the host to be grimacing over the grill, right? It wasn’t for himself, but the party. Knights were known the world over for this kind of self-sacrifice. After everybody was the standard fifteen minutes late, Wayne and Sandy and Roger and Lydia showed up almost at the same time: Sandy rang the front doorbell and, just as Wayne was delivering a twelve-pack to the cooler on the porch after having followed it through the house like a shield, Roger let himself in through the side gate then held it open for, first, Lydia—second time over today? third?— then the star of the show, Melanie. Martin grinned into the fire. He’d lost count of the pills by the time the kids got home, then had to go back and either halve or double what he could remember, as they were doses for a three-year old. The coals were seamed with red, like a nature show about a volcano. Martin dragged his eyes across the grass to Melanie. She was staring at the fence where it had happened. Roger leaned down, held her by the shoulders, and they went over together, at Melanie’s speed. “Got him in the garage?” Roger called back, and Wayne finished the long drink he was involved in then realized he was being talked to and rewound the last few seconds, shook his head no to Roger. “Bobbert,” Wayne said, “you don’t have to worry about Bobbert anymore,” and left it at that, grubbed in the ice for a beer to spiral across the lawn.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Roger caught it—it was a magic throw, had been in slow motion for Martin—then twisted the lid off, toasted Wayne, and the next hour was all fastforward: Julie delivering mystery trays to Martin, each with complicated directions, Martin nodding like he didn’t need to be told all this, then, in one of the lulls when the women were inside tending the kids, Roger nodded Wayne and Martin over, showed him what he had in an old pen box: a severed finger. It was latex, from the joke store. “Too big,” Martin said. “She won’t know,” Wayne countered, shrugging. “I told her we’d have a funeral,” Roger said. Martin coughed into his hand and studied the back fence. “Tell her it— that things swell up when they decay,” he said. “When part of her is decaying, you mean?” Roger said. Wayne: “Maybe you could boil it—have you tried boiling it?” Martin: “I’m just saying.” Roger: “You’re wearing a ski boot.” Martin didn’t argue with that, just took another drink, and when he tuned back in, the women were circulating around the back porch, admiring one of Julie’s irregular pots, hanging from an eave. Roger caught Martin’s eye and Martin pooched his lips out, shrugged about how many bad things can happen, and do, and that was that. “I tell you about that dog I had when I was a kid?” Wayne said to Roger then, and Martin grimaced, followed his arm to the fire, because it had to need tending. “So what’d you do, cowboy?” Sandy said, touching her hip to his. The ski boot. His ankle. “It’s just the new style. I’m a trendsetter, didn’t you know?” When he looked over to her she was staring into him with that direct way she had. “Wayne told you about Bobbert?” “The dog?” “Not the grapefruit story.” “He got away, yeah?” “I think Wayne had him . . . you know.” Martin rolled one of the kid hot dogs over, so it would have black marks all

WHISKEY ISL AND

the way around, like it had been hugged by an octopus. One that was on fire. “I thought he just got away.” “Into that great dog pound in the sky, yeah.” Martin scratched his chin on his off-shoulder and snapped an image of Wayne, his hand on Roger’s shoulder, his voice low and drunk and earnest, and all about canine prostates. He rolled the hot dog over again. “It was just an accident,” Sandy was saying beside him now, her voice almost wistful, but low too, pulling him into her confidence. “It wasn’t Bobbert’s fault. As far as he knew, it was just a little sausage somebody had pushed through the fence.” Her eyes had welled up while she talked. Martin went directly back to the meat, the fire. “She should have known better,” Sandy hissed to him then, and Martin breathed in, didn’t want to be hearing this, and Julie saved him, suddenly had a hand on each shoulder to tiptoe-look around him, at the brisket. He had the foil on it open now. An alien pod hatching in the heat, this comparatively light gravity. “Almost—” he started, but then the fingers on his shoulders weren’t stringy and hard from pottery. He leaned forward to look behind. It was Lydia. She laughed, leaned with him, over the grill. “Think I’m going to steal your secret recipe?” she said, draping her arms around his neck—the cook’s neck, he was telling himself, the cook’s neck—the rest of her firmness pushing into his back. Martin smiled, wordless, and Julie called out for the NASA report. “T-minus five minutes,” Martin said back. “Drinks?” “Drinks,” Martin nodded. Lydia pecked him on the back of his jaw and bounced off. Martin breathed out, rolled another hot dog over then followed an imaginary fork down to the grass, came up with his hand in his pocket and smuggled another pill up and in. They didn’t even have any taste anymore. Martin looked around to the porch to see if he’d been caught, but there was only Melanie, balancing from lawn chair to lawn chair.

WHISKEY ISL AND

A moment later, Lydia appeared in the door. “You’ve got her?” she said, nodding to Melanie. “No problem,” Martin said, and Lydia licked her lips, stood in the door a moment longer then made a turn on one foot, went back to the kitchen or wherever. “Kitty,” Melanie said, reaching under the table with her bandaged hand. “His name’s Oscar,” Martin said, at preschool speed. “He’s seven times older than you.” Melanie just stared at him. “Good kitty,” Martin corrected, and then Melanie went on, out into the grass. Inside, through the open door, it was kids and video games and someone, Sandy maybe, laughing too hard. Martin felt the pill slip whole and unbroken into his brain. It made him open his eyes wider, just to focus on the brisket. Because the foil wasn’t moving. That was stupid, was going to get him caught. Still, he laughed a little on accident, and, because he was a good kid watcher, not a bad kid watcher, he turned his head at Melanie’s little squeal of delight. It was Bobbert. He was standing half in the gate Martin must have left open. The chain was still behind him, and he was mud-splattered, showing a long scrape on one shoulder, his tongue lolling, dog mouth grinning. “Doggy,” Melanie said very clearly, and leaned forward, and Martin would have run to scoop her up, except he couldn’t figure out what to do with the long fork: just leave it in the brisket, or drop it on the rack, or set it on the platter, or take it with him, risk falling and stabbing it into Melanie or himself? It was a complicated procedure. And Bobbert was faster than him anyway. No man can outrun a dog. In an instant Bobbert was to Melanie, so that she shut her eyes for the impact, for him to bite something else off. For whatever. But he only licked, and jumped around her, his chain rattling. Melanie smiled and danced, even when Bobbert nudged the mummy part of her hand then stood still, tasting it with his nose, his tail stiff. Martin pushed against the brisket’s foil with his fork. “Good doggy,” he heard himself say, and feel, all the way through his body. It drew Bobbert over, to buck and spin and snap at his chain, finally put his

WHISKEY ISL AND

nose to the grill but pull back fast, singed. Martin slashed his eyes up to the window—empty—then flipped Bobbert a string of the brisket. It was that tender, that perfect. Bobbert inhaled it deep enough that it sent him coughing again. He threw the brisket back up. And what was left of the finger too. “Hey,” Martin said. Bobbert looked up to him, his ears flat, and lowered his nose to the finger then chose the brisket instead, thieved it a safe distance away. “It’s okay, boy,” Martin said. “Doggy,” Melanie said again. “That’s right. Doggy. Doggy.” Martin was about to flip another bite of brisket, this one farther away, when Bobbert’s demeanor suddenly changed, like a current of electricity washing over him. Martin craned his head around slow, prepared for Wayne, or Roger, or Lydia or Julie or Sandy, but it was just Oscar, doing his ragged, no-joke growl. “Shit,” Martin said, and then Bobbert was bolting forward, Oscar hissing back. Again, Bobbert’s chain slapped each side of the door, and then he was in the house. Martin licked his lips and stabbed the finger in the grass with his long fork, realized his whole right arm was numb, or cold, or something, so shifted the fork to his left, but it was gone as well. The phantom-limbed cook, holding a severed finger. Martin laughed to himself, almost threw up a little, then nestled the finger down into the coals right under the hot dogs. When the heat found the baby fat in the finger, a tongue of flame licked up, caressed the hot dogs. They sizzled, and Martin pressed them with the fork, smelled a fingernail burning, he was pretty sure, but wasn’t sure whose it was. And then Melanie was touching his leg, saying it again: “Doggy.” “No,” Martin said, stabbing with his fork again, “hot doggy,” and finally speared one, nestled it into a bun and handed it down to her. Her eyes widened with wonder, and Martin nodded, touched her head with his right hand—like petting a ghost—and whispered You little cannibal to her before ushering her towards the house, the commotion inside, the . . . the pandemonium, the havoc. It was a word he’d found earlier. Havoc, yes.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Oscar scrabbling across the tile floor, Bobbertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chain catching on table legs, kids screaming and spilling drinks, Sandy stepping easy up onto the countertop in the kitchen, offering her hand to pull Lydia and Julie up as well, Wayne or Roger reaching for the fire poker probably, or maybe the antique canoe paddle over the fireplace, and Martin palmed another pill right out in the open, then nodded as it scraped down, because sometimes you just have to smile, know that this was the way it was meant to be. Or close enough.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Lake Erie Cars Daniel Bourne

After a decade under water, the paint job goes, the metal opens up like skin. The license plate rusted through. Muddied numbers like the markings on fish must identify the species, trace the name of the drowned man inside. On the way to the morgue his family buckles up with his swaying hair. They had no idea he had vanished so close to home.

WHISKEY ISL AND

The Dodge Dart rises from the Lake like a walleye on a hook, the water draining from the doors. Slick curve. Severed brakes. We all drink our beer and stare. He rolled down the window. He struggled to escape. But sometimes where you are is where you have to stay. Just think of all that weight surrounding your body. Lake Erie flowing in your lungs.

WHISKEY ISL AND

The Secret Admirer Kyle Flak If I take a shower, maybe you’ll love me. There are so many different kinds of fireworks for sale down at the beach. And a tiny baby squirrel ran right by my feet just as it was getting dark! If I could be a magazine, I’d definitely be the one that you read all the time right before bed with your pretty glasses on. National Geographic? Hey. Don’t just stand there while I’m thinking about you. Do something. Look at the stars. Crane your soft neck. I just put something wonderful inside your mailbox.

WHISKEY ISL AND

WHISKEY ISLAND

ART ISSUE FIFTY-EIGHT

Poof Lissy Laricchia

WHISKEY ISL AND

I Spy Lissy Laricchia

WHISKEY ISL AND

Battle for the Kingdom Lissy Laricchia

WHISKEY ISL AND

The Magical Mystery Box Lissy Laricchia

WHISKEY ISL AND

107

A Review of Eugene Marten’s Firework Michael Goroff Eugene Marten’s latest novel, Firework, offers the most complete vision of America’s hell-on-earth landscape since Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, minus the proselytizing. It forces its readers to hold tight to their loved ones to make sure they are not hallucinations. Marten’s America is the America in which religion and TV newscasters invade homes like burglars. It’s the America that has no homes. It’s the America in which nameless cities are populated by faceless creatures, so that, without names, their horrible raw materials bubble to the surface, along with their little glints of light. Firework begins with blue-collar government-employee, Jelonnek, being rounded up as a john in a prostitution bust. We do not see Jelonnek, but the bust itself as presented on the local news, in flashes of color, talking head catchphrases, and the blurred faces and jokes of ball-busting cops. In this way, it’s hard to tell who is perpetrator and who is victim, and this sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Jelonnek is not a bad man but, like anyone else, he’s no saint either. In jail he keeps to himself, not inciting, not avoiding, just there matter-of-factly. He’s love-starved, licentious, and anonymous. No one says his name right. No one feels the need. Jelonnek is, simply put, the average American male. In the opening half of the novel, Marten masterfully weaves us through Jelonnek’s day-to-day life, each minutia-informed sentence like a match being struck and singeing the tiny hairs off our faces. Jelonnek’s position is Forms Officer, a glorified warehouse manager, a librarian of citations and claims, a position he does not want and never wanted, not that he can he afford to escape it. Like everything else in his life, he was pushed there. He lives with a girl whose name is never given, and he passes his nights drinking beer and watching a VHS of his favorite football team’s glory days. Jelonnek wades through his crum-infested life, his crum-infested cityscape, in a stupor, with nothing but a hopeless script, excerpts of which are injected here and there throughout the novel, as something that’s his. He’s jolted from this stupor when a trip to the store for cigarettes with his sister’s boyfriend turns into a violence- and sex-fueled Mister Toad’s Wild Ride. Jelonnek is dragged through chaos, helpless to stop it, forced to encounter his own mortality and ineffectuality. When the horror ride is over, Jelonnek takes it upon himself to help a

WHISKEY ISL AND

108

prostitute, Littlebit, who has been nearly destroyed by the debauchery. With Littlebit and her young daughter, Miss D, Jelonnek crosses the country in his jalopy, crafting a bastardized family unit bonded more by fear and paranoia than by love, confronting issues of race, gender, class, sex, and violence. In a lesser writer’s hands, Firework could have been an obvious social commentary on a distraught America; however, with Marten’s deft, apocalypticpoetic touch, Firework transcends the genre roping of “social novel” and becomes instead an intense picture of a man confronted with his own twisted inner and outer lives. Often, Jelonnek’s words, thoughts, or actions may make us cringe, but there is the sense that he’s trying as best he can to make good. He doesn’t want to be perverse, paranoid, or hateful; he’s just never been encouraged or taught how not to be indecent. Throughout the novel, Jelonnek deals with his own insecurities, weaknesses and faults by not dealing with them, by brushing them under that crusty rug of inflicted and self-induced ignorance and apathy. We are not given names of places or people—not even his companions’ real names—because Jelonnek doesn’t care to know them. He’s better off not knowing. It makes his life less cluttered, less weighed—even if it doesn’t. It comes as no surprise, then, that when Jelonnek claims some agency in the novel’s searing finale, it’s crafted in such an intense display of destruction that we are left clutching our guts. There are surprises, shocks and turns along the way, over the course of Firework’s hellish road odyssey, but they unravel so meticulously, so beautifully, that we are unable to escape, so that every occurrence seems natural, obvious. It’s Marten’s prose that contains most of the surprises, face-melting like Jelonnek’s rock-and-roll. Firework is that beautiful prank of only the most masterful wordsmiths, whereas the world seems impossibly full, impossibly dangerous, tactile, when it obviously cannot be so. The locations, though unnamed, can be guessed (Cleveland and Seattle, as far as we can tell). When we are living in a place, we are submerged in the muck and mire of that place, the everyday junk, the prejudices crafted there like local slogans, the worldly crap that these places defecate. Marten crafts these locations with equal parts care and venom. Their influences are undeniable because they are in us, the readers, as much as they are in Jelonnek, Littlebit, and Miss D. The same goes for the words the characters use, their language, which is appropriated, mish-mashed, regurgitated, but at the same time, it is their language. The words they use mingle with Marten’s prose, forming the horrifying and tender world as it is. And though Marten’s prose and dialogue are good, undeniably his, the

WHISKEY ISL AND

109

world is so well-crafted that it takes over completely, almost as if it is pulling its own loose thread and unspooling itself. Firework is a major piece of American literature from a major American author, a novel and writer declaring their necessity to us. As the first novel released by Tyrant Books, it makes a bold statement: this is the new American novel, honest, cruel, beautiful, redemptive.

WHISKEY ISL AND

110

Contributor Notes Currently hiding-out in Tucson, Arizona, Jeffrey Alfier serves as co-editor of San Pedro River Review. He has received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize and won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. His poetry has appeared recently in Crab Orchard Review, Georgetown Review, and New Madrid, and he has work forthcoming in Rattle and Rhino. He is author of two chapbooks, Strangers within the Gate (2005), and Offloading the Wounded (forthcoming, 2010). Laurel Bastian has work in Margie, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Puerto del Sol, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2010-2011 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and she runs a creative writing program in a correctional facility. Visit her at laurelbastian.org. Erinn Batykefer is the author of Allegheny, Monongahela (Red Hen Press, 2009), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have been featured recently in FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Sou’wester, The Journal, and Threepenny Review, among others. She is currently at work on a second collection of poems that lyrically re-imagines Jane Eyre, as well as a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh. Visit her online at www.erinnbatykefer.com. Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press). She was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Book Prize and a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize, as well as a Ruth Lily Fellowship. She teaches at Georgetown College and is the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review. Daniel Bourne lives in Wooster, Ohio, where he teaches at The College of Wooster and edits the literary magazine Artful Dodge. The recipient of several Ohio Arts Council fellowships for poetry, his books include The Household Gods (Cleveland State University), Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords) and a collection

WHISKEY ISL AND

111

of translations of the Polish political poet Tomasz Jastrun, On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe (Salmon Run). His poems have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Salmagundi, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Journal, and North American Review. He has also lived from time to time in Poland, including on a Fulbright Fellowship for the translation of younger Polish poets in 1985-87 and while on research leave from the College of Wooster in Fall 2008. His translations of Polish writers have appeared in Partisan Review, Colorado Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Nimrod, and most recently in the on-line journal, Cerise Press. Lydia Conklin is a writer and cartoonist living in New York City with a herd of recycled dogs. Her work has appeared in Carousel Magazine, Coal City Review, Hobart, The Minnesota Review and other places. She is a 2009 recipient of the Astraea Foundation Grant. Her website is lydiaconklin.com. Nina Corwin is the author of Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work appears or is forthcoming in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Southern Poetry Review and Verse. A psychotherapist in daylight hours, she has twice served as guest editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal Philip Dacey is the author of eleven books, most recently Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009) and Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems (Rain Mountain Press, 2010), as well as whole collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City. His honors include three Pushcart prizes, two NEA fellowships in creative writing, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Stanford, a Discovery award from the New York YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center, and a Fulbright lectureship to Yugoslavia. With David Jauss, he co-edited the formalist anthology Strong Measures (Harper & Row, 1986). Visit his website at www.philipdacey.com. Carl Dennis’s most recent book, Unknown Friends, his eleventh, was published by Penguin in 2007. He has a new book out in October 2010 entitled Calllings. Dawn Dupler earned her MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University in 2010. She is a recent prize winner in Missouri’s Big River Writing Contest. Her poetry and

WHISKEY ISL AND

112

fiction can be found in Blue Earth Review, The Mid Rivers Review, A Hudson View Poetry Digest, Glassfire Anthology, and others. She lives in the St. Louis metro area, but occasionally she sneaks out to explore the world. Kyle Flak is the author of Harmonica Days (New Sins Press, 2009) and The Secret Admirer (Adastra Press, 2010). He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and currently teaches composition at the University of Massachusetts. Michael Glaviano is an undergraduate at LSU. He waits tables at Louie’s, Home of the Veggie Omelet, where his coworkers refer to him as Copernicus. His split chapbook with Tommy Jacobi is called Careful & The People Collider (The Violet Hour Press, 2010). Michael Goroff lives in Akron, Ohio with his cat. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction. Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of Fishing Secrets of the Dead (Word Press, 2005) and The River is a Reason (forthcoming from Word Press, 2011). Her poems and book reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Stand, Cincinnati Review, Harpur Palate, Atlanta Review, and Poetry International. She serves as poetry editor for The Summerset Review, as well as chief marketing officer for Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Kathryn Jacobs is a poet and a medievalist from Harvard. Her latest book of poetry, In Transit, will be published by David Robert Books in 2011. She has a chapbook, Signs and Portents, due the same year, from Finishing Line Press. Advice Column (also from Finishing Line) appeared in 2008, Signs of Our Time (Pudding House Press) in 2009. She has published over a hundred poems in a wide variety of journals, fourteen articles, and a book on medieval marriage contracts. Kathryn teaches at Texas A & M – C. Stephen Graham Jones has six novels and one collection on the shelves. His next two are It Came From Del Rio (Trapdoor Books) and The Ones That Got Away: Stories (Prime). After that, it’s Flushboy and Not For Nothing (both Dzanc). Stephen got his

WHISKEY ISL AND

113

PhD from FSU and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. See more at demontheory.net. Timothy Kercher lives in the Republic of Georgia where he’s editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. Originally from Colorado, he is a high school English teacher living and working in his fourth country overseas— Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others. He won a merit scholarship to attend Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he will graduate with an MFA in January 2010. Marsha Kroll’s poems have recently appeared in 5 A.M., Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quercus Review, and U.S.1 Worksheets. Her awards include two Allen Ginsberg Awards and a Mad Poets Society prize. She is also a former contributing editor for Hunger Mountain, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. A featured reader at poetry venues from Vermont to Florida, including Kelly Writer’s House, Penn State Abington, Princeton Public Library, and Caffé Lena in upstate New York, she’s completed two chapbooks, Modeling With Miss America (Finishing Line Press, 2005) and On Men and Cars, plus a full-length manuscript, Perpetual Spin. Lissy Laricchia lives between a cornfield and a tall forest and frequently plays pretend in between them. She documents this journey via her camera, when she is not reading every book she can get her hands on, having extravagant tea parties with her Teddy Bear named Donkey or on her swing with her headphones in her ears. See more at: www.flickr.com/photos/lissyl/. George Looney’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 novella Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). Open Between Us, a new book of poetry, is due from the Turning Point imprint of WordTech Communications early in 2010. He is chair of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

WHISKEY ISL AND

114

Timothy L. Marsh works and plays in Bali, Indonesia, where the surfing is reliably gnarly and glorious. His writing has appeared in The Evansville Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Newfoundland Quarterly, The New Quarterly and Waccamaw Journal, among others. His awards include a 2010 writer’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a 2009 Arts Jury Award from City Council of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Rachel Mehl has recently published poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, LA Review, Pank, Portland Review, Poet Lore, New South, and Willow Springs, among others. Her manuscript, Why I Hate Horses, was a finalist for Snake Nation’s Violet Reed Haas prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon where she studied with Dorianne Laux and Garett Hongo. During the day she works as a volunteer coordinator for adult literacy for Skagit County Community Action Agency in Mount Vernon, WA. She lives in Bellingham, WA with the poet Caleb Barber and Frazey Ford, the dog in the poem. Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared in publications including The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on Slate.com. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program. Simone Muench is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing, Lampblack & Ash, Orange Crush, and the forthcoming Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks. Currently, she is working on a manuscript in collaboration with pre-existing texts called The Wolf Centos. She directs Lewis University’s writing program and is an editor for Sharkforum. Amy Newday wrote her first poem at age seven for her pet Holstein calf, Misty. Currently, she’s pursuing her MFA in poetry at Western Michigan University and teaching in WMU’s First Year Writing program. She lives in an old house in Michigan with an old dog, a young cat, and the occasional milk snake. If she’s not inside writing, you might find her barefoot in the garden, where she grows monstrously delicious tomatoes and ruffled red lettuce. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry East, The Mom Egg, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, The Smoking Poet and elsewhere.

WHISKEY ISL AND

115

Carmen Giménez Smith is assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, publisher for Noemi Press and Editor-in-Chief of Puerto Del Sol. She is the author of Odalisque in Pieces and Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2009 and 2010). Her work has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review and jubilat, and forthcoming in A Public Space and Denver Quarterly. David Starkey is the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. His sixth full-length book of poems, A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel, will be published in the spring of 2010 by the Canadian press Biblioasis. His poems appear in The American Scholar, Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry East, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Christine Hope Starr holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, which nominated her for Best New Poets 2009. Her work appears or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Eclipse, Front Range Review, Manorborn, Permafrost, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She dances every night with her husband and daughters. Their cats, as cats will, feign ennui. Rider Strong wrote his first play in the third grade. It involved a talking fish. It wasn’t great, but his class performed it anyway. Lacking discouragement, he wrote his first poem when he was fifteen. Eight years later, he wrote a readable poem, and his work has subsequently appeared in Curbside Review, Poetry Motel, The Chiron Review, and others. Along with his brother, he wrote and directed the award-winning short film, Irish Twins, which premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. When not writing or awaiting a revival of “A Fish Story,” Rider works as an actor in Los Angeles. Cody Todd is the author of the chapbook To Frankenstein, My Father (2007, Proem Press). His poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain, the Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Bat City Review, and Salt Hill and are forthcoming in the Columbia Review and the Georgetown Review. He received an MFA from Western Michigan University and is currently a Virginia Middleton Fellow in the PhD program in English-Literature/ Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. He is the Managing Editor and co-creator of The Offending Adam.

WHISKEY ISL AND

116

Zach Vesper is a first year MFA candidate at Boise State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alligator Juniper, Squaw Valley Review, New Orleans Review, and Salamander. In his spare time he co-edits the online literary journal Strange Machine. Susan Overcash Walker’s short fiction has appeared in Big Tex[t] and Crimewave, and she’s a non-fiction feature writer and columnist for Global Connection Magazine. as well as a contributor to Matador Travel. Susan holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and has just completed her first novel, With Regards from Frankel City. Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry and is the author of Dirt and All Its Dense Labor and An Eye Fluent in Gray. He is vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, which is a fancy way of saying fundraising and advertising are the purposes to which he is now putting his language skills. When not writing poetry. Or cooking. Or playing with the kids. Or hanging out with his wife and trying new recipes for libations. He lives in Huntingdon, PA, but travels as much as he can. Laurin B. Wolf lives and plays in Pittsburgh, Pa. She has an MFA from Kent State University and BA from the University of Pittsburgh in poetry writing. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh’s City Paper, Two Review, and Madwomen in the Attic: an Anthology. Aside from writing poetry and book reviews, her current plans include reading all the books that are collecting dust on her shelves, exploring the perpetual possibilities of creative nonfiction and backpacking through the Amazon, eventually. Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Press Prize in Poetry, A Murmuration of Starlings (2008, Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and the 2008 Colorado Book Award, and Persons Unknown (2010, Southern Illinois University Press)—and a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (2005, Routledge). Originally from Alabama, he now lives in Denver where he is an associate professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He edits Copper Nickel with his students and colleagues and serves as a contributing editor for Shenandoah.

WHISKEY ISL AND

Cleveland State Kent State The University of Akron Youngstown State

NEO MFA

FICTION CREATIVE NONFICTION POETRY PLAYWRITING

Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing for information contact: Dr. Mary Biddinger, Director Department of English The University of Akron Akron, OH 44325-1906 330.972.6328 neomfa@kent.edu

Application deadline: February 1st

ONE PROGRAM * FOUR UNIVERSITIES UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITIES www.ysu.edu/neomfa

WRITERS WORKSHOP + CONFERENCE

JUNE 21-25 CLEVELAND Rigorous workshops, manuscript conferences, craft talks, readings, and receptions. You’ll be provided with wonderful opportunities to receive feedback, exchange ideas with faculty and fellow conference participants, make connections, and take your work to the next level. For details and deadlines, visit http://www.csuohio.edu/class/imagination/