wiea_reduced

WHISKEY ISLAND โ ข ISSUE FIFTY-SEVEN

Maureen Alsop Amanda Burnham Lee Chilcote Kyle Churney Darren Demaree James Doyle Mike Foldes Molly Gaudry Marie Gauthier Justine Tal Goldberg David Gracie Michele N. Harmeling Fiona Hopper Robert A. Kaiser Elizabeth Kay

David Kirby Susan Levine Amelia Martens Donelle McGee Mary Miller Dan Moreau Andrew Plattner James Reed Erika L. Sรกnchez Steven D. Schroeder Britton Shurley Sarah Sloat Simon A. Smith J. Michael Wahlgren Molly Lynn Watt

WHISKEY ISLAND ISSUE FIFTYSEVEN

A Literary Journal Published By Cleveland State University

FALL 2009

WHISKEY ISLAND

Issue

fiftyseven Fall 2009

© 2009

Cover: "Willy's Parkway" by Amanda Burnham, watercolor and ink on board 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 and the students of Cleveland State University, who continue to show interest in the publication year after year.

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 non-fiction (including translation), and art submissions year round. Reporting time is about six months. Include an SASE for reply.

General Submissions: We read submissions year round. Unpublished work only, please. We ask for first English-language print serial rights, with an option to showcase your piece on our website. All rights revert to the author after publication. Payment is two contributor copies and a one-year subscription.

We accept simultaneous submissions; if your piece is accepted elsewhere, let us know. Multiple submissions: you may submit in more than one genre, but please send each submission separately. After hearing from us, please wait at least a year before submitting again. Take note that our editorial staff, and therefore preferences, changes yearly. Try us again!

To Submit by Email: Place cover letter and contact information in the body of your email.

Put "Poetry Submission," "Fiction Submission" or "Nonfiction Submission" in the subject line, and attach the poetry or prose as a Word, Word compatible, or PDF document. Send to whiskeyisland@csuohio.edu.

To Submit by Postal Mail: Include a cover letter, SASE, and writer's name, address, phone and email on each piece. If we accept your piece, we will ask for an electronic version.

Mail general submissions to: Whiskey Island Magazine English Dept.

Cleveland State University Cleveland, OH 44115 www.csuohio.edu/whiskey_island/

2

Whiskey Island Issue fifty-seven • Fall 2009 • Established 1977

Editor-In-Chief: Megan M. Erwin Poetry Editors: Michelle Skupski Bissell Karen Schubert Laurin Wolf Fiction Editors: Baixi-Su Alexander Lori Compton Virginia Konchan Jeffrey Rice Nonfiction Editor: Bonnie Jacobson Art Editor: Leanne Hafer-Dippong Design and Layout Editor: Steve Thomas Web Editor: Steve Thomas

Media Specialist: Dan Lenhart Faculty Advisor: Michael Dumanis Readers: Krysia Orlowski Jeffrey Rice Interns: Brit Charek Nicole Fragapane Josh Kleinberg Liz Newman Diana Mruk Adam Torres Contest Judges: Michael Dumanis Imad Rahman

Contact Information: Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 216-687-2056 whiskeyisland@csuohio.edu.

3

Contents: Issue Fifty-Seven From the Editor………………………………………………………………

From the Editor

6

Poetry David Kirby

What Are You Going to Do?…………………… 7 The Kind of Person Who Comments on YouTube………………………………… 10 Holy Grail ……………………………………… 13 To My Enemies ………………………………… 17

Darren C. Demaree

OHIO #50 …………………………………… 27

Erika L. Sánchez

Earthquake ………………………………………32

James Doyle

The Tax Collector Laments His Bunion………… 34

Donelle C. McGee

Threesome……………………………………… 35

Molly Gaudry

Parts …………………………………………… 38

J. Michael Wahlgren

Stilt …………………………………………… 47

Steven D. Schroeder

Their Sons Grow Suicidally …………………… 48

Kyle Churney

Jawbreaker Triptych …………………………… 49

Molly Lynn Watt

The Vertigo is Back ………………………………53

Britton Shurley

Eleven steps to Becoming a Poet of the T’Ang Dynasty ………………………… 64

Suzanne M. Levine

Diptych ………………………………………… 65

Marie Gauthier

Rerouting the superhighway …………………… 67

Sarah Sloat

To Long Division ……………………………… 68 Riding Backwards on the Train ………………… 69

Elizabeth Kay

The good mother ……………………………… 70

Maureen Alsop

Winter Archive in the Double Mirror ………… 74

Amelia Martins

The Doppelgangers’ Daughter gets her First EKG……………………………… 75

Mike Foldes

4

letter to joe……………………………………… 76

Fall 2009 Fiction Andrew Plattner

28 Decade…………………………………………

James Reed

Viewing……………………………………… 33

Justine Tal Goldberg

43 The Pill…………………………………………

Mary Miller

Painted-Up Girls………………………………58

Dan Moreau

Challenger…………………………………… 66

Robert A. Kaiser

An Arm and A Leg……………………………71

Simon A. Smith

Have You No Eyes………………………………

77

Art David Gracie

Light …………………………………………54 Boombox …………………………………… 55 Branding Iron #3 …………………………… 56 Right of Return ………………………………57

Amanda Burnham

Willy's Parkway………………………… Cover

Contest Winners Michele N. Harmeling Poetry Fiona Hopper Fiction

On Learning to Fend for Ourselves ………… 88 Selected by Michael Dumanis Anodyne ………………………………………89 Selected by Imad Rahman

Book Review Lee Chilcote

Lies Will Take You Somewhere Sheila Schwartz (Etruscan Press,2009)……… 96

Contributors…………………………………………………………… 98

5

From The Editor

Dear Reader, I am so proud and so happy that this issue, #57, is now a tangible, beautiful thing.

The stories and poems that the editorial staff chose delighted and surprised me, and I have a feeling you’ll appreciate them too. David Kirby will make you laugh. James Reed will make you cry. Robert A.Kaiser and James Doyle wrote some characters you’ll want to avoid and I want Simon Smith’s Joshy to be my new best friend. The artwork by Amanda Burnham and David Gracie is wonderful. Thank you to all the contributors. When I first read these poems and stories, I was thrilled such wonderful work was sent to us.

Thanks to Steve Thomas for the design and layout of this gorgeous book, and for always answering computer questions. Thanks to faculty advisor Michael Dumanis, media specialist Dan Lenhart, and those that stepped in to help read when the slush pile was too high. Finally, many thanks to former editor Karen Schubert for her guidance, support, and vision. Without the work she did on the infrastructure, this journal wouldn’t be here.

Enjoy,

Megan M. Erwin Editor-In-Chief

6

What Are You Going to Do? David Kirby

Guy and his wife come barreling into the last two seats of the first row of the Roundabout Theatre just before the curtain

rises on O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, and the wife says, “These are our seats? These are our seats?!?” and the guy

says, “What are you going to do?,” and Barbara and I,

who are sitting in the two seats next to theirs, don’t understand the problem, seeing as how we country mice

are as happy as we can be just to walk through the big city and take taxis and eat something besides ribs

and fried oysters (not that there’s anything wrong

with ribs and fried oysters) and gawk at the tall buildings and not get our faces smashed by

the big-city thugs you always hear about when you live in the country but that we never see

when we’re actually in the city ourselves, though the wife

takes the guy’s question personally rather than in the rhetorical sense in which it was surely intended

and says, “What am I going to do? I’ll show you what I’m going to do!” and whips out her Platinum American Express card and thrusts it toward his face the way

you’d thrust a crucifix in the face of a vampire and then marches off and comes back a couple of minutes later

and thrusts two new tickets in the guy’s face the way she thrusted the AmEx card just a few minutes before

and grabs him by the arm and yanks him up and hustles 7

David Kirby

him off to seats that may or may not be better, though we’ll never know because we never see them again.

What are you going to do? The doctor performs a biopsy and when the report comes back, you notice your letter

carrier holding the envelope up to the sun so he can read

what’s inside, and when he hands it to you, his eyes are wet.

What are you going to do? Or you come home early,

and you hear the sounds of Ravel’s Bolero coming from your bedroom, and you say to yourself,

“I didn’t know she liked Ravel,”and you open the door,

and there’s your darling, the one who promised to forsake all others, and she’s in the bed—your bed—

with somebody else, and you realize you’ve never been exactly sure what the dictionary definition of the word

“forsake” is, but whatever it means, she’s not doing it.

What are you going to do now? What are you going to do when the good stuff happens, when you catch

a break, do good, do well, make people happy?

What are you going to do at the end of the day, when

you’re the last one in the restaurant, and a guy you haven’t

seen before is hovering by the door, and you’re not sure who he is, whether he’s the owner or just the manager,

but you can tell he wants you to go, that your time’s up.

There’s a cab outside; the guy says it’s your cab,

but you don’t get in. What are you going to do?

8

David Kirby

You get in anyway, and the cabbie looks in the mirror, and it’s the same guy, and he looks at you

like, “Where to, bub?” What are you going to say? Then you realize you don’t have to do or say anything,

anything at all. And the guy starts driving.

9

The Kind of Person Who Posts Comments on YouTube David Kirby

As someone who has always been worried that other people

would try to push him out of the windows of tall buildings, I have to say that a really good quality for a hotel maid

would be to stand near a window and adjust the shade,

say, or polish the glass and not be afraid that one of the other maids would rush across the room

and push you out so you’d land on top of a station wagon

with a dad and a mom and a bunch of kids in it

and leak your brains all over the windshield while the mom screamed and the dad wondered what to do

and the kids saw your underwear. Of course,

you’d have to be up five or six stories for that to happen, whereas if you were on the ground floor, you’d just

brush yourself off and go back and whale the tar

out of the other maid. But if you were up, like

twenty-five or thirty stories, and there was an IHOP or a Denny’s attached to the hotel and it didn’t

have a good roof on it, you might fall through it

and break to pieces and squirt your blood and liver and stuff all over everybody’s Grand Slam breakfasts: two eggs, two sausages, two slices

of bacon, two pancakes, hash browns or grits, and you

in your maid uniform, all fucked up and horrible.

No reason to fear death, although, as Woody Allen

says, you might not want to be there when it happens.

Last night I dreamed I was at the house of my friend 10

David Kirby Maxine, where there had always been a mannequin

that looks just like my friend Lenore with

her brown curls up and wearing a black Edwardian

dress, only the real Lenore was visiting Maxine at the time and took the mannequin’s place so that she could stand

motionless as I looked at her and then, as I turned

to go, not jump or shout “Boo!”but just follow me with her eyes, which she did, and I’m sure that if,

at that moment, either in the dream or in the bedroom

where I was having the dream, someone who’d had

their hand in a bag of ice had stuck their finger up my ass, I’d have died, just as I’m sure that if that person or someone

else had filmed my death with their cell phone

and put it onYouTube, then the kind of person who posts comments on YouTube would have said that I looked stupid

as I died or died the wrong way or did something while dying

that they, the YouTube perv, wouldn’t have done had

if they died on YouTube, which they won’t, that is, not die on YouTube, but simply not die. Ever. Or they’d say

OMG the dying guy is so fat IMHO LOL,

or they, the perv, had sex the night before with a guy who they thought was Colin Farrell but, like, but so

wasn’t ahahahaha! Poe must have liked the name Lenore,

since he gave it to the main character of three of

his poems, “Al Aaraaf,” “The Raven,” and “Lenore,” 11

David Kirby which name originally comes from Eleanor, as in Eleanor

of Aquitaine, who was named Aenor after her mother

but was called by the Provençal phrase alia Aenor or “the other Aenor” in order to distinguish her

from her mother—alia as in “alien,” get it?

12

Holy Grail David Kirby

I am playing with my little red notebook and, as Barbara

is in Zaragoza, with the little brocaded mirror she left behind, and now I am pretending that this virile red notebook

of mine is seeking the beautiful mirror’s hand in marriage, so I start marching the two items toward each other across the top of my writing desk and make the notebook

say to the mirror, “Hola, guapita, I think you are very beautiful today, how about a little kiss,” and have the very modest mirror

reply to the cheeky notebook, “Oh, you can’t talk to me that way, for my father, who is a hall mirror, will give you some very angry looks,” and about the time I get tired

of this, I remember standing atop the Miguelete Tower in Valencia the month before and watching as, two hundred

feet below me, Barbara emerges from the pastelería and enters the Plaza de la Reina and walks with a determined stride toward the Cathedral of Santa Catalina,

where the Holy Grail is, a wooden cup suitable for a carpenter and his working-class buddies,

even if it has been lacquered and buffed and mounted in a setting of gold and precious jewels, as befits so venerable an object, and I’m thinking, O Jesus,

how I love this woman, and then she makes a sharp turn toward the ceramics shop, and I think, O God, no,

not the ceramics shop, because experience tells me that the great cause of marital discord is not religion or money 13

David Kirby or the kids but ceramics—not the buying but the packing

and shipping thereof, the search for bubble wrap (what dictionary contains “bubble wrap” in English, much less Spanish?), the trek to the post office and the inevitable rebuff because the package is too big, is wrapped wrong, will for some reason not make it past the Customs agents

whom the postal clerks seem to dread as one might fear unseen deities, but she always says “It’s just a tray”

or “It’s only a plate” or “It’s a cup, for chrissake,” and I say “Yeah, but we’ve got twenty of the son of a bitches already,” and I can feel my teeth pulverizing like crumbling

Gothic masonry as I think, Can’t she feel the love streaming down on her like hot Spanish sunshine, not divine love

but mine, my Dave love, the love of Mr. Passion, Mr. Romance, Mr. Drinks Champagne Though He Doesn’t Like It, Mr. Make This Whole Trip Possible In the First Place,

Mr. Everything Except Ceramics? It’s not as though she doesn’t also buy purses, shoes, belts, hats, jackets, coats. . . .

I mean, what’s next, a ceramic dress? This morning I was watching her put her clothes on, and she was wearing pedal pushers and sling-back sandals as she looked for a bra

and top, and since she had just stepped from the shower, she was so pink then and yummy, and so we head downtown

to the Cathedral of Santa Catalina to see the Holy Grail and to climb the Miguelete Tower, though when it comes time 14

David Kirby to climb the Miguelete Tower, she points to her sling-backs

and says, “Look, I’m not climbing some stupid tower,” and when I insist, she says, “Look, I’ve gotta go to

the bathroom,” and I indicate the church and all its trappings with a sweep of my hand and say, “The bathroom?

What do you think this is, McDonald’s?” and she says, “Look,

I’m going to that little pastelería on the Plaza de la Reina,” the very pastelería I’ve seen her emerge from just before

I hurry down the tower steps to wring her neck, past the bells whose birthdates and weights are listed on the back of my ticket, past big María, born in 1544

and weighing in at nearly 8,000 pounds, past Narciso and Violante and their fourteen brothers and sisters,

all the way down to baby Eloy, just a few months shy of his one hundred and eighty-fifth birthday and, at a mere 260 kilos, still a growing boy, through the vestibule, past the card shop

whence the sweet-faced nun smiles at me as I scuttle by, past the chapel where the Grail sits in a niche above

the same two or three or four worshippers who always seem to be kneeling in perpetual adoration. The Holy Grail: now there’s a cup a man wouldn’t mind having on his table.

Poor Jesus only used it once, though, and that in the company of the man who would betray him. Given time,

he would have married: bachelor Jesus had a steady income and a good future. A great future, posthumously speaking.

15

David Kirby Mary Magdalene wasn’t the only one; any woman would have

been proud to be his widow. “What an enormous emptiness there is around the frantic little fire of creation!”

wrote Raymond Chandler in 1952, and, of all people, he should know: his professional life already in decline, his wife Cissie just two years from death, alcohol

his only medicine against loneliness yet one that, in the end, took more than it gave. I know how he felt: no wife,

no poems. Here in the church, though, I can’t find her, and then I see a pair of sling-backs under the curtain of a confessional and am bending down for a closer look

when I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Where’d you go?” I ask, and she says, “I told you, to the pastelería. Ready for lunch?”

The restaurant we choose—she chooses—is La Ríua, famed for its paella valenciana rich with saffron, chicken, rabbit.

“Just the pastelería?” I ask. “And the ceramics store,”

she says, “but everything there was ugly.” The waiter looms above us like a priest giving communion, points

to my empty goblet, taps its rim with a nail.

“Something to drink?” he says. “Something? Sí? Yes?”

16

To My Enemies David Kirby

“You’re crazy!” she shouts, and for a minute, I think

she’s going to slug me, even though the party’s on

my deck and it’s my liquor that is fueling her rage, yet all I’ve said is that we wouldn’t have any art at all in

this country if it weren’t for Republicans, for rich

plutocrats whose wives are crazy about Shakespeare and Mozart—oh, sure, your lefty will vote for

the school-lunch program, but it’s not as though

Marx and Lenin and company were huge fans of painting, say, unless it was the Socialist Realist kind which showed

big-muscled Svetlanas driving tractors and tossing

sacks of grain over their shoulders as though they were ladies’ handbags, but when I say it takes a lot of money

to stage operas, much less build the theaters you’re

staging them in, she shouts, “We can do it ourselves!” and goes in search of another drink as I think to myself, who is

this “we”? Does she mean the colleague who glowers

at me from my doorway and who proposed in a meeting of our departmental evaluation committee that a co-worker who

had poor teaching evaluations and had not published

a thing that year be given a merit raise because he had

17

David Kirby served as faculty advisor to the Students Against Children

Working in Sweatshops Because Surely They’d Be

Better Off If They Lost Their Jobs and Became Prostitutes,

As Nicholas Kristof Has Warned Repeatedly in the New

York Times, and I said I thought it was a bad idea to reward

faculty for political activity because, in a department that

has largely given up the teaching of literature to devote

itself to a kind of sociology not even taught any more

by the Sociology Department and in which every form of cultural activity is seen as a construction that has

no basis in “truth,” as if there ever were such a thing,

and even if there were once, it certainly doesn’t exist in these enlightened times, for if we were, as

a department, to endorse a lefty cause, then what

would we do should one of us seek a merit raise on the basis that he or she now serves as faculty advisor to the student chapter

of the Ku Klux Klan? And does this collective

“we” who is so much more politically astute than the knuckle-dragging host who nonetheless manages

to stand up straight long enough to pour more drinks

and continually refresh the supply of snacks onto which 18

David Kirby his guests are falling like locusts in an Old Testament plague include

the new grad student who is talking to

Barbara and who has a degree from a pricey college where you don’t have to go to class so much as roam the world doing internships

with sheep farmers in Australia or ceramicists

in Italy and then writing about them—the internships, that is, not the farmers or the ceramicists—in unpunctuated sentences that

some on-campus mentor or monitor or proctor reads,

i.e., not, and Barbara is saying something about the horrors of clitoredectomy as widely practiced in sub-Saharan Africa,

and the young woman is saying Yes, but it’s part

of their culture, and outsiders from the West can’t just step in and criticize others’ culture, and Barbara is saying, Well,

in general, yeah, but not when it comes to slicing off

your unanesthesized clitoris with an unsterilized knife and sewing the labia together, and the young woman, who

will never suffer anything more painful than having

her credit card turned down at Bendel’s, is getting madder

and madder and can do little except keep saying Yeah, but

it’s their culture, and finally she says, Well, I can’t

talk any more, I’m too mad, and Barbara says That’s all right,

19

David Kirby don’t worry, you’ve just never had anyone disagree

with you before, and it’s true, because on the campus

of the kind of college the young woman attended, everybody agrees that white people are bad, that it’s not our fault

if parents sell their children as sex slaves, that it’s better

to go without live music if only rich people can afford to build concert halls, please have another drink.

And it’s just when you think the whole university

has become a sort of Festum Asinorum or “Feast of Asses” of the kind conducted in French cathedrals during the Middle Ages

and during which the people sang “Up! Sir Ass,

and sing. / Open your pretty mouth. / Hay will be yours in plenty, / and oats in abundance!” and at the end

of which the priest, instead of saying “Ite, Missa est”

or “Go, the mass is ended” would bray thrice, and the people, instead of replying “Deo Gratias” or

“Thank God!” would say “Hinham, hinham”—

in other words, just when you want to pull out your own unsterilized knife and chase these idiots off your deck or at

least say “Okay, lick my nuts, buddy! Or, as they say

in France, Honoré de Balzac!” you think no, wait, stop,

20

David Kirby hold it—and what follows here, reader, is quite a list, so if you

want to jump in the shower before your date arrives

or get your dry cleaning while they’re still open or start dinner or watch the last quarter of the game live rather than wait

for the re-play and risk somebody saying “Fuckin’

ref had hadda another fuckin’ eye, he’d a been a fuckin’ cyclops,” go ahead—for as we judge, first, our enemies, calling someone we

despise an “absurd, blasphemous, cowardly, devilish,

empirical, fanatical, ghoulish, horrible, ignorant, jacobinical,

knavish, lily-livered, maudlin, nondescript, odious, poisonous,

querulous, rascally, sycophantic, traitorous,unrighteous,

venal, witless, extravagant, yankeeish zero,” as a Petersburg, Virginia newspaper said in 1866 of a judge who allowed black

men to be jurors, so we may end by judging, second,

our dear ones, since, as the Duc de la Rochefoucauld said, “In the adversity of our best friends, we always find something

that does not displease us,” just as we may

also judge, third, those with whom we wish to become dear, as in the case of the woman whose personal ad in the London

Review of Books stated she was looking for a man

“who doesn’t name his genitals after German chancellors,”

21

David Kirby not even “Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, however

admirable the independence he gave to his secretaries

of state may have been,” and we may, worst of all, in the end come to judge, fourth, ourselves, as the Italian soccer fan

did when he watched Roberto Baggio’s penalty kick

go wide in 1994, giving the World Cup victory to Brazil, and said “It was like you wanted to kill yourself ”—not that

he killed himself, you understand, or even wanted to,

though his statement as it stands is surely the first step on the path to self-destruction—or we may say simply, as Martin Landau

did in the 1994 Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, in which

he portrays the distinguished Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi, who became a drug-addicted pauper in Hollywood thanks to

the typecasting that followed his portrayal of Count

Dracula, surely the screen’s greatest personification of pure evil,

which career triumph-stroke-misstep led him to parody himself

in one pathetic poverty-row shocker after another,

the last of which were helmed by the legendary Worst Director of All Time for whom the Burton movie is named,

“Nobody gives two fucks for Bela.” When Othello

kills himself, he uses sleight of hand to distract Lodovico,

22

David Kirby

Montano, Cassio, and Gratiano as he readies the sword with

which he will stab himself to death and tells the story

of an epic battle with a “malignant and turban’d Turk,” ending the military recap and his own life at the same moment

when he says, “I took by th' throat the circumcised

dog, / And smote him—thus.” To dead Desdemona he says with his last breath, “I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee:

no way but this; / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss,”

for so mixed are love and hate that if we are not heedful, if we are not cautious and sober stewards of our emotions, then

we will find ourselves no better off than the young

nobleman named simply Julian who, returning from the hunt one day and thinking himself to have surprised his wife in bed with her

lover, drew his sword and slew the covered

figures, only to learn that, in his absence, his parents had come to visit, and, respectful daughter-in-law that she was,

his missus had offered the best bed in the house

to the mother and father of the now-orphaned noble who renounced all his worldly goods, withdrew to a river

bank, and, as St. Julian the Poor (though not yet),

devoted the rest of his life to ferrying strangers

23

David Kirby to the other side. One dark and stormy night, a leprous

pilgrim appeared and demanded to be carried

over despite the evident dangers, and, after several hesitations, the saint-to-be invited the stranger into

his bark, whereupon, in the middle of the river,

the leper’s head became surrounded by a luminous nimbus, and it was—guess who, reader! That’s right! Jesus Christ,

come to take away the suns of the unhappy parricide!

And you thought you had problems! Boy, I’d feel awful if I’d done what Julian did, wouldn’t you? Future sainthood

notwithstanding. When I recount some mistake or other

I’ve made to Barbara and say, “At least I never killed

my mom and dad,” she says, “Well, you’re okay there, Dave.”

Can we not all be as philosophical? Can we not say,

as Janis Joplin does midway through the live version of "Ball & Chain" on the Greatest Hits album, which

she performs with the Full Tilt Boogie Band and not

the better known but less accomplished Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Tomorrow never happens, man," and then,

just before a bone-chilling, straight-from-the-grave

laugh, "it's all the same fucking day, man!” Can we not talk

24

David Kirby to ourselves as Friar Lawrence does to pouty-pants Romeo—and, yes,

reader, I do realize this is the second Shakespeare

play alluded to in the present poem, but have you ever asked yourself why there are thirty-two regional Shakespeare festivals

in the U.S. alone and not a single John Marston

Jamboree or George Chapman Literary Funfair?— saying, “Thy Juliet is alive” and “There art thou happy: Tybalt

would kill thee, / But thou slew'st Tybalt; there art thou

happy too: / The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend And turns it to exile; there art thou happy: / A pack of blessings lights up

upon thy back,” says Friar Lawrence, and so are

you, too, my enemies, a pack of blessings on my back.

As the medieval French said during the Festum Asinorum, you

have beautiful asses—I mean, you are beautiful asses.

You light my way through my gloom, my self-pity, my certainty that every man’s hand is against me, that my own hand, too,

is poised over my head, ready to bring down a sword

or at least a coconut cream pie. Now you again, reader: are you not convinced that the news agent who put

your change on a stack of Newsdays rather than in

your hand or the baker who gave you your raisin-nut loaf

25

David Kirby without thanking you or the policeman who shot you

an irritated look as he waved you through traffic is even

now talking about you to his colleagues, saying how fat

you looked, how stupid, how old? This is when your inner

Friar Lawrence must step forth and pull back his cowl

and place a kindly hand on thy jerkin or waistcoat or doublet or camisole or gabardine or farthingale or whatever the hell

it is you’re wearing and remind you that Juliet’s alive,

you’re alive, you’re free! And you got to slay Tybalt.

26

Ohio #50 Darren C. Demaree Why do we, after all, in our plain flesh & measured fists even reach our arms towards such violent perfection?

Now, now too, pushing against the road, no guts, no wind, until the end spells you out, let the blood, unbound & full of storm, flow in spite of the burnings.

27

Decade Andrew Plattner After the man and his wife opened the wedding invitation with the San Jose postmark, they looked it over and agreed that they ought to go, even though they were not close to the soon-to-be-bride at all. They had not seen her for more than a decade, when she and her family had flown across country to attend the wedding of the husband and wife. The husband and his wife loved one another. Nothing there had changed. The invitation stated that the wedding was to be held at a chapel in Belle Pointe, California, and the reception would follow at the local Elks Lodge. The husband imagined walls lined with deer heads and bear heads and when he said this to his wife, she grinned and said she had pictured the very same things. Plus, a moose.

The man and his wife packed the map that had arrived with the invitation and they flew out from Cincinnati, Ohio, on a Friday afternoon and spent the night before the wedding at a hotel near the San Jose airport. In the morning, they awakened in a quiet mood and prepared for the drive out to the countryside to find the wedding chapel. Before they checked out of their hotel, the man put on his two piece suit and necktie. His wife applied her cosmetics.

She was going to wear a deep blue linen dress, which she worried would wrinkle on the drive. When they headed south in their rental car, his wife was in jeans and a t-shirt, and the husband’s mood diminished just a bit. They stopped at a coffee house after driving for half an hour. The husband and wife sat across from one another at a table by a front window. She had on make-up and had done her hair and overall he supposed she looked somewhat strange.

How close are we? she said.

The map says we are very close, he said.

He felt like saying more, but resisted. He supposed the way they were dressed now might be an illustration of their marriage overall. He regarded it as a top flight matter. She had been prepared, but just partially. The man started to feel morose. Outside, the morning sun covered the sleepy valley in a wash of blue-yellow light. There were rolling fields beyond the other side of the highway and the husband abruptly decided a place like this would be an appropriate one to scatter his ashes. He did despise unnecessary noises.

Then, four women, two on motorcycles, and two riding in a pickup truck with no muffler arrived in the parking lot. The motorcycle women pulled off their helmets and gloves and waited for the pick-up women to exit the truck. They all entered the coffee house together and took a table at the center of the room. One of them was older, but otherwise they all looked the same.

28

Andrew Plattner They were outdoors women with thick, long, brown-black hair, salmon cheeks, tanned arms, chapped hands. Two of the younger women walked to the counter and did the ordering and when they returned to the table, they each held two cups of coffee. The chatter began. They seemed to be relaxed and happy on this break from their men’s-work jobs. Suddenly, the woman the husband supposed was the mother of the others began to laugh uncontrollably.

When she could get the words out, she said, I thought Michael Jackson was singing, There’s a fire in your ass, so beat, just beat it. Her daughters laughed and apparently the sight of this made the mother laugh even harder. She leaned forward and her body shook, like someone hit with heartbreak news. When she was able to sit back and wipe her eyes, she said, In that Rolling Stones song, I thought the guy was singing, I’ll never be your big suburban. She squeezed her eyes shut, covered her face and began to shake again.

The husband and the wife were laughing along with them. The wife began to laugh and she laughed so hard she had to bring her hands up to her face. She leaned forward at one point. The husband continued laughing as well. One of the motorcycle daughters finally grinned at the kids working behind the counter.

Every thing's funny today, she said.

The kids at the counter were young, younger than the mother’s youngest daughter. Someone at the counter nodded uncertainly. When the laughter at the table faded, the women there were still smiling at each another. We ought to get back, one of them said. She then looked over to the table where the husband and wife were sitting. The wife wiped at the corners of her eyes. The daughter leaned towards a sister and said, What’s she laughing about? The daughter’s voice was loud enough to be heard; in fact, she wanted to be heard.

The husband’s wife paused, she held her smile, but there was an effort to do so.

The one daughter looked their way again, and her expression seemed superior, as if she had somehow made her point.

The four women were all on their feet and in the next moment they had slipped away again on their motorcycles and in the pick-up. Back, the man supposed, to their grapes and their horses. The man tried to feel hopeful. He did not look in his wife’s direction for a minute because he knew she had been caught off-guard.

When she spoke, his wife said in a quiet way, I think I’ll get dressed now. She stood, walked out to the car, then carried her dress over one arm, 29

Andrew Plattner re-entered the coffee shop and strode past where he sat, for the ladies’ room.

He thought she had her scarves, too, all three of them. Back home, she had modeled each one with her dress. She then decided to bring all three because she thought things might look differently in California. On the morning of the wedding, she might feel differently, too. The husband supposed he understood everything. The women at the center table did hard work. The way the mother had been laughing simply meant that she had not been laughing enough of late.

That’s what it usually meant. Should he have said something to the daughter, though? For heaven’s sake, she was a just young girl. Probably just protective of her mother in some way.

His thinking was interrupted by distant sounds of chapel bells. The sound was gorgeous in the empty valley and he tried not to panic. He felt a touch of relief when the bells finally stopped. He wondered about the brightness in the ladies’ bathroom, if his wife was seeing herself in a unique way. She had been laughing before, some of her mascara had run. The husband’s wife was strong, she only took the small defeats hard. He thought of his wife bringing her face close to the mirror and looking into her own eyes. You are my wife, he thought. I am your husband. He pinched at his chin with his thumb and index finger. The husband stood and walked for the little hallway. He waited in front of the door to the ladies, room and then he knocked. He waited again, then said his wife’s name.

I heard them, her voice said, from behind the door.

The husband walked out to their table, sat down again. He understood that time was passing, that his wife had been in the bathroom for fifteen minutes or more. She did not like what she was seeing in the mirror. The husband felt like shrugging at this. He thought, The same thing happens to me, every single day of my life. I stare and stare. We rarely have sex. I do not ask for understanding. He thought ahead about what to say to the family if he and his wife just wound up heading straight for the Elks Lodge. Well, we did miss the ceremony, yes. We had to come a long way. We simply did not know how far. He was so ready to offer this explanation, he almost said it aloud. He moved his hand in front of him as he thought of the words. He thought of the way he was dressed, like a politician.

Then, a moment later, he felt relief. He was imagining, even hoping, that his wife, when she stepped out of the bathroom, would still be in her jeans and t-shirt. She’d walk over, sit down at the table and say to him, Screw this.

30

Andrew Plattner Let’s do something else. Let’s do anything we want. Let’s don’t look back. Let’s get in the car and drive and wind up in a place where we can just watch the Pacific Ocean.

His wife was finally walking in his direction. He detected her in the corner of his eye and when she sat down again, at first he did not look her way.

He sat in his place and he realized that not only did he want to see her in jeans and a t-shirt, he wanted to see her like she was before they were married. It was not as if he did not like the way she looked now. This was now, nothing could change that. Everything just seemed to be about the wedding. He had done nothing to upset her. Anyone who looked at a mirror long enough was bound to be unhappy. When he did glance over to his wife, he saw that she was in her linen dress, had chosen the sky blue scarf. Her cosmetics had been neatened.

He nodded to her in a knowing way. Then, neither of them made a move, they simply stayed put.

He tried to think of something else to tell the bride’s family. He could say, Sure we were there, we were just sitting in the back. The ceremony was lovely. I wished it would have gone on a while longer. The husband settled on this. Presently, he tried to enjoy the quiet. At last, the chapel bells began to ring again in the distance. It was a haunting sound that filled the valley.

When it stopped, the husband kept his gaze on the fields across the road. In an even way, his wife’s voice said, How do I look? His eyes went in that direction. She was standing. She was profile to him and she stood up straight.

I want us to drive out to see the Pacific Ocean, he said. Her head turned and then he decided to look out to the window. I want to sit on the edge of a cliff and watch the horizon change colors. His voice was quiet. That’s how you look to me. Do you understand? He turned when she did not answer.

Can we just do that? he said. He turned his right palm upward.

I think that I have been thinking something like that, too, she said. I’m ready, she said.

After a moment, he nodded. In another moment, the husband was on his feet. His hitched at his trousers and his eyes went to the window one more time. They’ll never know we were here, he thought. The idea pleased him. He felt wonder.

31

Earthquake Erika L. Sãnchez

Nicaragua, 1972

Let the salt burn in the corners of your lips, the tiny hooks open in the bread you have swallowed.

Let hunger nest so deeply in your stomach it begins to eat itself. The air is thick with grease, with the smell of frying meat, but you can’t eat it; you can’t eat air. Shine shoes barefoot, sniff glue, drink chicha until you stop growing. Let your hair fall in wild tangles full of creatures.

The ground will open, swallow your huts, your rabid dogs. This is god wiping us clean of you— your bodies, your brief little bodies.

32

Viewing James Reed

Doyle got a haircut the day before his surgery. He wanted to look good in case he died on the table.

He didn’t say so. He swaggered instead and said at the door, “I’ll be back in two weeks. Try to hold the place together.” Then he trudged to his car and smoked a slow cigarette, leaning on the fender, before turning the key.

The jacket was handsome, the shirt and tie beautiful. His glasses alone were unnatural. They lifted so high we saw dents left like bruises, like thumbprints pressed in fresh earth.

33

The Tax Collector Laments His Bunion James Doyle

I want to be Revenue’s new hot tamale of the month I want strings of deadbeats to whittle in my fingers like a cat’s cradle. I want Form 1040 to slide out of its negligee and leave safe sex on the floor.

Here I am with my trusty cleaver. Bend over and I’ll lop those unnecessary deductions into the giblet pit.

See that cloud sailing a hundred miles across the sun? Nothing at all to the shroud I’ll knit your explanations.

I’m feeling a mite tetchy today.

Bring on the rattiest cases, those twirling their moustaches and singing lullabies to Swiss accounts. I’m horny for the swollen numbers in the locker.

Swish your skirts and yodel Clementine Pile-driver of a day. Bunion baked to crust with burnt-out returns. No matter how fast I drain the pus, tomorrow swells with another tide of cheaters. These feet were made for kicking in shelters. Grin again and I’ll debit the rest of your life.

34

Threesome Donnelle C. McGee she like you

feels the layers of his loneliness

she like you peels it away sits in it if need be

he needs you both

she knows his kind adulterated rifts

on squeaking mattresses

you know his kind too drunken mornings

forgotten drive home

so it is no surprise when you meet him each time he winces

she dies

each time you pour tea each sip from your cup loneliness is like this by lips bodies jerking and going

surrounded by talking

loneliness is like this drunk to babble alone

drinking a heineken

loneliness is like this two indian women licking

peering at youtube

35

Donelle C. McGee

each other’s underarms this is how loneliness tastes do you see him now? loneliness is like this white walls bare he is only missing loneliness is like you

asleep at 4 a.m. in a hot room

and like her

the girl across the way

loneliness is like this of tapatĂ­o

a white refrigerator with only a bottle

eating out calms inside kills

for him

the straightjacket far away

sleeping in the white room is enough

but look in more

like you

this man we all know smiling for you

you are with him

in this room

like her

not by choice yet do you feel him calling?

assigned in his head

you don’t answer you remain here

no response needed

36

Donelle C. McGee

loneliness is like this he will eat a misguided bullet

man waiting for nothing

listen

she is here like you

with him

in flames

if need be

37

Parts Molly Gaudry one of my many employers liked to give me her old clothes and one such item i have had since is a soft brown cloak that was at the time several sizes too large but fits me now and so i wear it and people here call me the woman in the blue coat whose greatest virtue is that she is patient the coat has that quality but it is not a coat and it is not blue it is a cloak and it is brown so I do not understand but what matters is this when i wear it i feel wealthy because the employer was a wealthy woman and hired me and many others as seamstresses to build her an armory of dresses that could be worn until she wore them out and sure she wore us out in the process those many years but if she had not done so then another of the seamstresses who was one of my favorites for she was quite kind would never have quit with the intention of starting her own business but she did and on the sly I sent her an occasional dress of sewn flower parts made during the stitching hours which were generally around midnight after our employer’s dresses were done and it was these dresses in particular from the stitching hours that i came to be famous for during what later came to be known as the stitching years for i produced those dresses made from flower parts with impressive speed and anyway the wealthy woman did not like to wear a dress made from flower parts said 38

Molly Gaudry

flowers are too fine to be worn and die besides and i like to wear a thing that lasts longer than a moment and has a permanance but really it had more to do with what she considered wasted time and our time was her time which was rather valuable in her opinion so she did not like for it to be wasted on dresses that could only be worn once oh it was a fine excuse to be able to make those dresses for the other woman who believed in the impermanence of objects the lasting unlastingness of things meant to be appreciated in a moment their moment but what is a moment a fragment maybe of an experience and experience a fragment of understanding and understanding recognition and recognition the thing by which we can know and be known and I was so known for my dresses made from flower parts that eventually i had to quit my employer and join with the other 39

Molly Gaudry woman and when i did my employer gave me her brown cloak which I had made several years before but as she did not want any reminder of me around she quite generously gave it to me and I have had it ever since I began to produce several dresses a week and in the making of them not a single flower part was left out because every part has a function and I believed then in the function of things and how things could work and become the becoming of another or at the very least a whole thing that was more than just their parts for we are more than our parts we are all of us more than our parts we are all of us more than our parts and the women who wore my dresses knew this or I liked to think they knew this as as the parts of their dresses were petals that attract and can be scented I liked to think these women wore their dresses in order to attract

I

I liked to think of these women strutting city streets and herds of children following f stigmas covered in sticky so pollen adheres I liked to think of these women strolling through fields of

40

Molly Gaudry wildflowers and all the wildflowers’ pollen lifting into the air and attaching like metal shavings to a magnet styles raise stigmas from ovaries in order to decrease pollen contamination I liked to think of these women sitting crossed-ankled on park benches thinking of their ovaries I liked to think of these women thinking of how to decrease the contamination of their ovaries I liked to think these women thought they were on the cusp of style ovaries protect ovules and become fruit upon fertilization I liked to think of these women growing larger with the growths of grapes and cherries and apples inside them anything but citruses of course for Ihad given up citruses which was new to me then and because it was new to me it was strange strange now to think of how i hated citruses so passionately for Ido not hate them so much now ovules that upon fertilization become seeds like sequins I sewed those ovules to the hems of those women’s dresses and I liked to think of them shining and glittering as they undressed before the watching eyes of lovers receptacles 41

Molly Gaudry join flowers to stalks and sometimes become part of the fruit after fertilization

with the receptacles i sewed buttons so that those dresses would not come undone and leave those women bare without their wanting to be stalks support flowers and with them I made seams and stays nectaries are where nectar is held and with them i made hidden pockets because every woman should have a place to hide her personals sepals protect flowers while the flowers develop from buds I liked to think of these women protected by their dresses as they felt themselves developing into finer better women filaments are the stalks of anthers and anthers contain pollen sacs I like to think now of these women in the moments of their undressing fragmentary ripe for fertilization

42

The Pill Justine Tal Goldberg When Jonathan picked at the pill pack on Monday, the thing bent but did not break. He tried pushing the capsule through its foil backing. He worked to puncture the plastic covering. He scraped at the corners, but all he got was a bloody fingernail. He bit, chewed, tore, poked, prodded, pined, pushed, pulled, spat, and swore. Jonathan laid the medicine, still safe in its wrapping, on the kitchen counter, shook his head as he often did and went to work.

“I have a headache,” he told Wendy, his supervisor, when she asked him why he looked so blue. Wendy advised Jonathan to take an aspirin and he left the break room in a huff.

The packet was not on the counter when he got home from work. In fact, it was not in the kitchen at all. Louise Bunk was singing in the next room.

Jonathan knew what had happened. He kicked himself for not knowing sooner.

“You moved my medicine, Mrs. Bunk,” Jonathan said. Louise puffed her cheeks and held them there, marble-eyed like a chipmunk.

“Mom to you,” she said. “For crying out loud.”

“The pill,” Jonathan said. “The pre-packaged pill. Where is it?” His voice sounded something like a squeal.

“It’s on your nightstand, Jonny. In your room.” She breathed and watched him go. Her heart ached like a mother’s heart does when she wants more for her boy.

From his bedroom, Jonathan could hear Louise singing. He twisted the tiny package between three fingers and plugged his ear with another.

Tuesday was very much like Monday. Wednesday, Thursday too.

Jonathan had taken a scissor to the casing, but the center would not tear. The thin rip in the foil offered hope, but made the job dangerous. Trying to bite, he had already cut his lip an inch across.

On Friday, Ted, his cubicle neighbor to the right, leaned in and startled him.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, buddy.” Jonathan made no move. He pretended not to hear. “Pssst.” Jonathan motioned to his headset. Ted straightened up, gave in for the moment.

“Yes, sir. I’m still here, sir,” Jonathan said into the mouthpiece. “I’m 43

Justine Tal Goldberg canceling your subscription retroactively from the month of May.” He clicked a button on his keypad. “Updating, now.”

Ted tried again. “Jonny,” he said conspiratorially. “You wanna get out of this shithole? It’s Friday. I’m dying over here.” Ted glanced at something over his shoulder.

“I have a headache, Ted,” Jonathan said, but Ted hadn’t stopped talking.

“—skip out early. Hell of a titty show. This place downtown, the girls wrap it in plastic, saran wrap or some shit like that. They let you eat stuff off ‘em.” He made a wet sound with his tongue.

Ted’s words came to him from far away. Jonathan pictured himself naked and warm, his body pressed against a giant conch seashell, trying to make sense of the nothing-at-all sounds that pretended to be the ocean. And then he was screaming from the inside of a phone booth, banging and beating his fists against the plexiglass casing.

“Suit yourself,” Ted said. He squinted his eyes and scrunched his face when he thought Jonathan wasn’t looking.

Ted’s neighbor to the right held his palm open under the table. Ted slapped a twenty into it, hard for effect.

“Guy had a tear in his eye,” Ted protested. “I’m telling you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” his neighbor said and they shared a chuckle.

Jonathan waited for five o’clock, powered down, and left.

He had lost sleep. He had black-and-blues around both eyes, one from exhaustion, the other from an accidental punch in the face when he had pulled at the pill pack so hard his fist released backwards with a pow.

On Saturday, Louise told him he looked tired and on Sunday, tireder.

“Tireder isn’t a word, Mrs. Bunk,” Jonathan said.

“Even so, you look it,” she said.

He checked for the hundredth time the label instructions on the back of the package square, now barely intact. Separate foil at the place marked, “Peel Here.” Remove aspirin from packing. A simple task, to be sure, but for Jonathan, no. For Jonathan, always no. When Jonathan asked, the world answered: No. He fretted and wondered how his label instructions would 44

Justine Tal Goldberg read. Fragile. Handle with care. Discard in the event of damage.

The mangled package lived beside him until, late Sunday night or early Monday morning, he moved it into the kitchen. After that, he rested much better.

Monday, Jonathan brought the thing to work. He skipped his coffee break to fuss with it under the table. He kept his headset on.

“What’s with you, boy? You stoned? You slow?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir. I’ve got it,” Jonathan said, but he hadn’t. Both thumbs pushing down hard, the pill refused to pop. He was red in the face.

His fingers were nearly numb. Jonathan trembled, then shook, then rocked, first with strain and then with frustration. Head tilted back, mouth hanging open, wide wide and wider, he whined with his entire body. The sound was heartbreaking, like the backlash of a swinging gate or the final undoing of a rusty hinge.

Someone whispered to Wendy in a far corner. She buzzed on the intercom. Co-workers huddled together in small, chattering groups. Jonathan needed to concentrate. No time for Ted, no time for customers, no time for Wendy who now stood beside his station, mouthing his name. His earpiece had slid down around his neck. He was crying.

“Jonathan. Go home,” Wendy said and there was a hint of something gentle in her voice. “Jonathan.”

Jonathan turned towards his name now. He looked up at Wendy.

When he tried to speak, his lip split along the already formed incision, cracked slowly along the perforated edge. The string of blood dripped and dropped, got lost in the red wet of the tiny cuts that formed the new geography of his hands. He said nothing and did not know what it was he had been about to say.

Wendy told everyone to get back to work—“Get back to work, all of you,” she said—but she did not move until Jonathan did; barely walking, mostly dragging, tucked under Security’s arm.

“Ted, take care of this mess,” Wendy said and she meant the pool of blood that was drying beneath Jonathan’s chair.

45

Justine Tal Goldberg kitchen. Louise hummed a tune while she cleaned.

“Oh, Jonny,” she had said after him.

He had slumped through the kitchen with a “Not now, Mrs. Bunk.”

She busied herself with swiping the counter top. In a pathetic heap of crumbs, dust, and near-too-tiny-to-see gnats, the unopened packet rested in Louise’s upturned palm. One gnat, not quite dead, flipped from back to belly and back again. She sighed. She brushed both hands into the trash. She puffed her cheeks like a chipmunk.

“Such a waste of a beautiful little life,” she said, thinking of the gnat.

The neighbors could hear Louise singing a ditty as she went about her business.

Jonathan, pressed up against his bedroom door, heard the nothing-atall. He had only his drumbeat; the one in his head, pounding out every step of every day that came before, N-O-N-O-N, and every trip of every fall that was sure to come after. Jonathan thought of his conch seashell. He sucked in his gut, squeezed through the crevice-moon opening and climbed inside.

Jonathan squished his eyes tight, grateful, and willed that they would stay that way.

46

Stilt J. Michael Wahlgren No cello. I string you To me from haven.

No sting. Some Untouched tassel. Unlucky As starling, it took days To prepare for arrival, Left. A march passes, Lights. I find That when the stars, devour a white To white, the contrast Of nothingness becomes The easiest thing. I make Myself marvelous. That delight Is at night in her armor. Too soon My love escapades, Leaving me on a stilt, just One stilt, trying To keep notes Balanced.

47

Their Sons Grow Suicidally Steven D. Schroeder

Beautiful isn’t spoken aloud.

This Paxil lacks the overdose of those backseat lovers cold and cloud, this nude bed’s not yet said screw yourself up to stick the point of the pen in psychiatry’s eye, this dad adopts friend nicknames that amputate the end, this laboratory test job offers options of food or shock from the buzzer button.

Eat that and shit and laminate paper tattooed with blueprints and batter your limbic system with bottles and sleep interrupted. They call it getting better.

48

Jawbreaker Triptych Kyle Churney for Erika

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

-Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

I. Why I Listened No, no: It wasn’t for Adam Phaler’s snare thwack thwack or Bauermeister’s bass, buoying or ominous as clouds. It was singer Blake Schwarzenbach, brooding on the microphone like his German surname, black brook.

Blake, the Pabst Kerouac who courted hearts of maladjusted boy-men with his weathered Les Paul….

“Sea Foam Green,” palm slapping 4/4 time with rust scabs flaking from my truck door: Follow me to the end of the dare…

Or work-week ennui, swatting sweat bees in wheat fields, bogus pining for my first ex girlfriend Belly Ring, eighty miles & trust funds north in her mother’s cul-de-sac dwelling. Ah, the faux pain I wore like an ascot. If only I’d spewed my righteous sullenness with Friday’s half-case, beer-stains cancering the June bluegrass.

49

Kyle Churney II. On Hipness & Gentrification In the photo on the back of the album Bivouac, Blake grasps a shell of Napa cabernet rooftop a Mission District tenement, while crackheads huddle in the foyer: Since when has poor had middle-class cachet?

Take my hip pal Cath who pays cake for her spacious floor over Restaurante Borinquen. The old Caribbean lessees? Veni, vedi, vici.

(O infuriated you, who would have skipped your slum-run Cicero at a quick drop of your teenage beret.)

Make sure the deck furniture’s padlocked. Make sure the two-by-four’s blocking the door.

During drive-bys, duck to the parquet floor.

50

Kyle Churney III. Paper-cuts & Gunshots Only if pain could mean a man mimicking British inflection, smoked-out voice gravel under truck tires. The homey whine of cicadas in late August, saying Illinois, saying Nowhere.

Eighty miles-an-hour wind in your hair.

Then you’ll understand me, this flawed product of middle America.

There was a time when three guitar chords & a lovelorn man’s cathartic screams seemed to crack open the thick crust of life—beauty glowing like a ghost within. I wish I were lying.

The only pain I know the middle-class absence of everything.

You know how this story goes.

I want you to see what paper-cuts and gunshots have in common. So many things we won’t understand. So call it whiney, whiteboy music: It is. Yet don’t blame the music, as you wouldn’t blame lilacs for sneezes. Sit in this ditch of crabgrass & foxtails lining the road, waiting for my old truck to groan by, the former me slouched

51

Kyle Churney in the driver’s seat, bequeathing a trail of dust— and us, blind from the dust, only the beats of our hearts in our ears.

52

THE VERTIGO IS BACK Molly Lynn Watt

in a sea of pillows I hear the dog bark at a truck rumbling by sense ghost father in pajama tops on bloated feet shuffling across my bedroom I am afraid of dark of being airborne I flee hair streaming nightgown flying through starless black burdock elderberry nettle toward the sweet-sour bales of hay stowed in the barn where once a hired man raised a shovel and bludgeoned the top-hat lover of his wife the Rhode Island Red squawks a warning to her brood the rabbits start a rumpus in the cage I shut my eyes listen field mice gnaw at feed corn bats swoop up mosquitoes someone gives a bitter cough I grab the sisal rope suspended from the ridge pole mount bare foot on the double knot become a pendulum creaking back and forth above the pitchfork hacksaw scythe strewn across the hand-hewn floor spin the rope corkscrewing it coiling until taut it pauses reverses with a whiplash snap catapults me off the barn still spinning

53

LIGHT by David Gracie Dimensions: 22''x 26''

54

Attributes: Oil on board

BOOMBOX by David Gracie Dimensions: 19''x 23''

Attributes: Oil on board

55

BRANDING IRON #3 by David Gracie Dimensions: 8''x 10"

56

Attributes: Oil on board

RIGHT OF RETURN by David Gracie Dimensions: 27''x 32 1/2"

Attributes: Oil on board

57

Painted-Up Girls Mary Miller

Elizabeth was looking in the attic for something she had forgotten.

She found a trunk. She knew what it was but she went and asked her mother anyway. Her mother said it was Michael’s trunk. Michael was her father’s brother. He was killed in Vietnam. Elizabeth liked the idea of this. She had never known anyone to die who wasn’t old.

“Can I look in it?” she asked her mother. Her mother did not tell her to ask her father. Her father would have said no. Her mother said 'okay but don’t tell your father.' She went back upstairs and opened the trunk, which was a lot like the trunk she used to take to camp, but she didn’t go to camp anymore. She had only gone because her friend had gone and her friend had only gone because she had gone. It took them three years to figure this out.

She found a photo album. It said ‘photo album’ on the front. It was black and squishy.

Her uncle looked like her brother. He had the same round face and sideburns. He had the same eyes. She looked into his eyes. They were not the eyes of a monster. He was smiling and drinking beer with his buddies. They were in a bar. There were painted-up girls in the background, half-bent while taking orders. In other pictures there were dead Vietnamese lined up in a row.

The pictures did not look real, like how sometimes the moon did not look real and even if you painted it exactly how it was it would still look fake. She studied the death certificate, turned it over and smelled it. She said the name of the place he was killed. It was a far-away place. It was not real, either. Her uncle was not dead, or he had never lived, she told herself.

Elizabeth dragged the trunk to her room and put it in her closet. She had a big closet and no one ever went in there. She was good. She kept things neat and did well in school. Her brother did not do well in school. He caused trouble. Some days she would find him sequestered in the tiny room next to the office because they had stopped sending him home because that was what he wanted. She would look at him through the window and mouth nonsense words and her friends would laugh.

Elizabeth was in love with her brother. His name was Dan. He had asthma. She did not know if it was normal for a girl to be in love with her brother. She only had one. There was nobody she could ask. Of course she knew it wasn’t normal so she avoided him. It made her mother sad. Her mother said, ‘your brother loves you.’ Her mother said, ‘one day your father and I will die and he’ll be all you have left.’

She sat in her closet and flicked a Zippo. There were three of them and 58

Mary Miller they were all out of lighter fluid. She would have to get some. This seemed like an enormous task. She could ask her boyfriend, who was in tenth grade and too old for her according to her father, to get her some but she was going to break up with him soon. She had already written the note. It said, ‘I like you a lot but I’m not ready for this.’ Every time they went out it was the same thing. They would go out to dinner and then he would park somewhere and try to get up her skirt. She would fend him off. He would get angry and drive too fast. Her stomach would start to hurt and she would have to ask him to pull over at a gas station so she could use the bathroom. She loved him a little then, when she walked out and found him still there.

She looked at the Purple Heart. It was nothing. It was a Mardi Gras trinket.

She found a pile of letters from a woman named Linda. She took them out of their envelopes and sorted them by date. In paragraph one of the first letter, Linda’s dog got run over and her mother wanted her to move home because she was afraid she was going to kill herself. “Jesus,” Elizabeth said. She had started saying, ‘Jesus’ a lot. It was not the same as taking the Lord’s name in vain, she told her mother. It was talking to Jesus like he was your friend, like, hey Jesus, can you believe this?

Dan had a friend over. She could hear them in the next room. She could smell the pot. Her brother was nice to her. Whenever he went out with his friends, he would invite her to come along. This was not normal, according to her friends. According to them, it was the brother’s job to discourage all interaction between the sister and the friends. Maybe she wasn’t pretty enough to discourage interaction. She never wore lip gloss, though she was allowed.

She never even painted her nails. One time she went and sat in the backseat of John Robert’s car, sandwiched between Dan and another boy who were armed with high-powered water guns filled with pee and vinegar. John Robert drove through McDonald’s and ordered a small fry—it was always a small fry, they told her, that was the code—and when he pulled around, Dan let loose on the woman at the window. The woman screamed and covered her face but she didn’t move from the window and then John Robert peeled out and they all laughed and she laughed, too, but she did not go with them again. She listened to see who it was. It was not John Robert. It was not Tom. It was Zach. He lived in the neighborhood. His father had a second family so he was gone a lot, and he and his mother sat around their living room smoking cigarettes. This was what she had heard.

59

Mary Miller Elizabeth went back to the letters. There was a whole stack.

In some of them Linda was depressed and in others she was so depressed she attempted to sound upbeat. Those were worse. The one she was reading now was on blue stationary, it was three pages long and Linda was just depressed. ‘I’ve put on weight,’ she wrote. ‘I’m saving up my money to move back to North Carolina. It’s too flat here. I miss swimming at the lake. I miss running naked in the moonlight.’ Elizabeth looked at the wall. She could see Linda’s thighs quake as she ran. She could see the big fake moon lying too low, the clouds snaking across it like branches.

Elizabeth heard two pairs of footsteps clobber down the stairs. Then she heard one set lumber up. It was her father. She knew each of their footsteps.

She knew when it was safe to move around the house.

Her father knocked and opened the door as she was saying come in.

“Dinner’s ready,” he said.

“I’ll be right down,” she said, standing there. He didn’t move. She thought this must be what war was like: you waited for someone to gather the courage to shoot.

Her mother and brother were already at the table.

Report cards were in. Dan made a C, three Ds, and an F, and her father, as usual, was going to send him to military school. Elizabeth did not understand why her brother did not understand how much easier it would be if he just did what he was supposed to do. Any idiot could understand it. Why did they have to be subjected to this over and over again? She did not know.

She was not going to ask her brother. She was going to ignore her brother, like she always did, and her father would go back to forgetting until next time.

Elizabeth concentrated on her salad. She liked salad a lot, especially when it had mushrooms and carrots and tomatoes, like this salad did, especially when her mother put it in its own separate bowl, like she had tonight.

“Just fail out,” her father said. “Just go ahead and flunk.” He shoved the table as he stood up and the bowls and silverware shifted. Then he stomped back to his room with the food still on his plate. This was new. Elizabeth and her mother looked at each other.

“He doesn’t really mean it,” her mother said.

“I don’t care if he does,” she said.

“I can’t find my inhaler,” Dan said. Elizabeth hoped he died. If he died then she wouldn’t have to love him anymore. It was like that boy who let 60

Mary Miller his dog lick his penis. It was against nature. She made herself sick. She could stab herself in the eye with the butter knife. Dan said, “Fuck it,” and left but he couldn’t go far without his inhaler. He would walk over to Zach’s house and smoke cigarettes and Zach’s mother would put a pizza in the oven and the oven would be so dirty that the smoke alarm would keep going off. Elizabeth had never been to Zach’s house but she had seen his mother—her messy boy haircut and thin shoulders—and she had seen the inside of his car.

Elizabeth helped with the dishes. Then she went back up to her room and closed herself in her closet. She picked up with the letters where she left off. ‘I’m seeing someone,’ Linda wrote. ‘I don’t love him but he thinks I’m the most beautiful thing he ever saw and I’m tired of being alone. I am so bone-tired of it.’ Elizabeth tried to imagine how bone-tired felt. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to be the most beautiful thing someone ever saw. Then she got up and went into her brother’s room. She picked up his black Led Zeppelin t-shirt and pressed it to her face. She sat on the edge of his bed and touched herself over her panties but it did not excite her like she had imagined it would excite her. It only caused the hole inside her to well up. She took her hand away and the hole shrank back down to a manageable size, the size she had become so accustomed to that she had stopped recognizing it as a hole. She put her hand back and the hole grew again. It was enormous. She had no idea how she could contain such emptiness. door.

Her brother knocked. He waited until she said ‘come in’ to open the

“Is my inhaler in here?” he asked.

“Why would your inhaler be in here?”

“Because I’ve looked everywhere else.”

“No,” she said.

“Will you help me find it?”

“I’m busy.” He stood there a minute before closing the door. She felt bad. She should help him. But he was always losing things and it bothered her. She had never lost anything. It was to the point where she almost wanted to lose something. Her best friend, Katie, who was in seventh grade because she’d been held back, was like her brother. She lost things all the time. But she was rich. If she lost something, it would get replaced, whereas if Elizabeth lost something it would be one less thing she had.

“Dan?” she said. He was still standing there. He opened the door.

61

Mary Miller “You should stop doing drugs.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“I know what you do. People tell me.”

“People lie.”

“You probably smoke crack,” she said. “You’ll probably kill yourself.”

“I’m not going to kill myself.”

“I heard what you did in Florida. You went crazy and threw all the furniture off the balcony.”

“It was just a chair,” he said. “If I don’t find my inhaler soon I’m going to have to go to the hospital.”

He took the upstairs and she took the downstairs.

She found it in the junk drawer in the kitchen. Important things ended up there, among the broken crayons and marbles, the freebie lipsticks and spools of thread. Her brother took a few hits, thanked her, and went out the back door. She fixed herself a bowl of ice cream and ate it while listening to her parents fight. They hardly ever fought. She was not afraid they were going to get a divorce. She turned on the television. There was a sex scene on HBO. She pressed mute and sat on the floor, watching the man pump away in slow motion. She watched the woman’s boobs wave. They were small, the nipples scrunched up.

Her parents’ door opened. She changed the channel and pressed mute again and the sound came on too loud, something she would never watch.

Her father was in his robe. “You’re wearing a new one,” she said. “It looks good.” He thanked her because she had picked it out. Every year she got him one and now he was running several years behind. She didn’t know what else to get him. Her brother got him fishing rods and hunting boots, things he could get excited about. ‘Aw, man,’ he’d say, ‘aw, man,’ and then she would give him another robe that looked almost exactly like the last one because she could not picture him wearing anything she hadn’t already seen him in.

“Do you want the puncher?” she asked. “Nothing’s on.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

She took him the remote and then sat on the couch and watched him flip channels for a minute so it wouldn’t look like he’d run her off.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight,” he said.

She went upstairs and sat in her closet and read the last of the letters.

62

Mary Miller Linda was pregnant, and she had gotten married by the Justice of the Peace.

She’d done it backwards but now that it was done it didn’t matter how it had happened, she said. And what could people say except to imply that he wouldn’t have married her otherwise? She didn’t want the baby, but everyone thought she should want it so she didn’t know if she really didn’t want it or if she didn’t want it because she didn’t want to want what everyone thought she should want. The whole letter was like that, the cursive loops eating up the paper.

Elizabeth put on her pajamas and got in bed, though it was too early to get in bed. It wasn’t even nine o’clock. She could stay up as late as she wanted on Friday night. Usually her brother spent the night out, but sometimes he had friends over and her parents would stay in their room while they drank up all the vodka and refilled the bottles with water, sucked on cans of pressurized whipped cream. Elizabeth did not like spending the night out because she did not like other people’s parents. She did not like feeling like she had to make them like her.

She read until she fell asleep and when she woke up Dan was sitting on her bed. She moved an arm so he’d know she was awake and he turned his dark face to her and said, “I’m sorry.” She didn’t ask what he was sorry for. She was tight under the covers and there was no sign of the sun. If it was morning, she would tell him to get out, but it was not morning, and her brother smelled like whiskey and hot dogs.

He nudged her with his elbow and she scooted over but he didn’t lay down.

“I’ve got the spins,” he said.

“Don’t throw up.”

“I’m not going to throw up.”

Did you lock the door?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. She would have to go downstairs and check. She wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep until she had checked. “Sometimes I smell your dirty underwear,” he said, and she knew that she would never let him touch her. She would keep her dirty laundry in her room from now on where he couldn’t get to it. She would hide herself from him so completely that he would never again be able to recognize her love and love her back.

63

Eleven Steps to Becoming a Poet of the T’Ang Dynasty Britton Shurley

Scrawl your frail, black bones of poems on the backs of junk mail envelopes.

Use only pens you have stolen from banks. Let the lines of old poets hum like late-night traffic through your head.

Write letters to your long dead friends, & dream of bright, pink azaleas.

Walk for miles with gravel in your shoes.

Every year, dig a hole in the yard then bury some small thing you love.

At least once, you must fall to the ground in a rainstorm after midnight; you must crawl toward a puddle’s white surface; you must drink the moonlight down.

64

Diptych

Suzanne M. Levine Shoe Dreams

The January Oranges

Sometimes I recognize the arch When I cut the last orange into sections, they teetered of a foot when shadows take shape. Once Dad’s wing tip swung on the small blue plate like dinghies tied at the pier. A chapter, out of the dark into light and back again

as they say, has ended with a phone as though keeping tempo call, something I think over with a tune only

while sucking the life he could hear. Mother’s out of the feather weight triple-A crocodile pump has a habit of showing up when pulp, tear-shaped and sheer I’m wrapped in as silk, and I know now the soft knot of her orange cardigan.

there is nothing ordinary in this world.

65

Challenger Dan Moreau

We sat in the library, necks craned up at the television. The teachers’ voices were high and excited. “Isn’t it terrible?” “She was so young.” “The whole thing was a bad idea.” “I’m so glad I wasn’t selected.” “I didn’t even apply.” “I heard it was the fuel tank that caused it.”

At the start of first grade Mrs. Ladinski had us write letters saying why she would make a great astronaut. I silently rooted for her. I knew astronauts had to train for months and live away at space camp.

The week after the disaster our class wrote letters of condolences to the family of Christa McAuliffe who would’ve been the first teacher in space.

I didn’t know what to say. All I could think about was how lucky her students were.

66

Rerouting The Superhighway Marie Gauthier

He’s pruning the maple, his handsaw eating the hardwood until the severed limbs fall.

Our boy watches from the window, smiling like one promised a chocolate heart—he knows why the tree must bear its loss: squirrels, scores of squirrels, travel its branches into our ceilings.

Sometimes one, perhaps the original squirrel, pioneer of our troubles, perches for minutes at a time, right by that window.

Tail twitching, it stares, all cheek and chitter, then launches itself up, over, and in.

The interminable skittering overhead, the periodic ruts and animal moans—the boy wakes crying, carries a stick to rout them out.

At the trunk, our neighbor gripes about lost shade, lost privacy, but we couldn’t care less: Our rooms brim with sunshine— golden-warm silence—it drips like syrup from the eaves.

67

To Long Division Sarah Sloat

I always knew you’d come back, you brute, with your fat dividends and digital blinking.

Push my face to the ground with your gogo boot and I’ll execute, dangle the remainder down in a noose. There are 58 thousand 17s in 1 million, ten roads to ruin, and two bullets spinning in the pistol’s chamber. Sixteen folds twice into 41, not thrice so by my reckoning the first hen on the roof must be neutered.

In Ohio, once, I knew a man who kept 11 wives spread evenly over 66 acres. Fathering 51 children meant dilution, a swift destitution, meant there’d be little left to inherit. Exacting bureaucrat, it’s even worse after taxes.

How long I’ve hated having to enter your hat trick of a house, wanted to jump from the upmost story into genial ignorance.

To divide is demise; to divide is divine when finally it’s time to zero in on that last subtraction.

68

Riding Backwards on the Train Sarah Sloat

It’s not unpleasant: perpetual surprise.

But instead of feeling I’ll arrive, the world appears to pour towards whatever I’m getting away from. Cows and foliage blur by and I try to imagine easing into couch cushions, or the plunge back onto the bed, quilt whooshing up from behind. Still, I can’t shake the faint dyslexia reverse riding brings, the suspicion I’m rushing assbackwards into the future, kick-me sign tacked to my spine, a breech birth with no eye for what’s ahead until it crashes into the past, the inkling I’m a fool doing the backstroke smack up against the wall of the pool.

69

The Good Mother Elizabeth Kay

I make sure to tell the boy how little I love him, how the weight of him is an unbearable drag, and I am sinking in the mud of a lake bottom, while he clings to my back.

I walk further, losing my heels to the mire, and the water creeps higher, driving the boy up.

He straddles my shoulders, crosses his ankles around my neck and demands a story.

But the water is over my head now, lapping his chin.

Fish dart in and out of my mouth each time I open it to speak.

The boy claps his fat hands and calls for more fish.

He winds his fingers through my hair, now thick and slippery as kelp.

He climbs up, plants himself, sitting, on my head.

His feet bruise my face as he kicks them absentmindedly.

The water gurgles in my lungs and above me, I hear the boy— singing.

70

An Arm and a Leg Robert A. Kaiser

The arm and the leg were in an old metal container, the size of a large camping cooler, under a table in the corner of the basement, in the dark, away from the single bright overhead light. It wasn’t a particularly heavy box, maybe 40 pounds, but it was clumsy, even with handles at both ends. It was a twoman job.

“Take the other end,” the kid said. The older man nodded, put on his gloves and grabbed a handle. The kid was white and thin. It was his basement.

The man was black, in his late forties, with heavily muscled shoulders visible underneath his thin T-shirt.

“This way,” the kid said, bending slightly into the weight, taking baby steps.

“What’s in it?” the man said.

The kid ignored him and started up the steep stairs. He hoisted his end to clear the steps. That put the weight on the man who put his free hand under the box to balance the load. They took the steps slowly, one at a time.

“Where we going with this?” the man said.

“Out back.”

The stairs led to a landing and the back door and then down a short flight of stairs to the driveway. At the bottom, they put the container down and flexed their hands.

“This last job for today?” the man said.

The boy nodded and pointed to the container. They lifted it again and followed the driveway down past the garage to a flagstone path where their shoes brushed through the tufts of uncut grass to a spot under a half-dead apple tree. The tree was the last survivor of an orchard that had been there long before the house was built. It had gone wild years ago, its branches entangled with suckers, its fruit good only for birds and worms.

“Right here,” the kid said.

The man took a rag from his overall pocket and wiped some dampness from his forehead. The kid rolled his shoulders.

The man pointed to the container. “What’s in it?”

“Old stuff.”

“What we doing with it?”

71

Robert A. Kaiser “Burying it.”

“Why?” The kid didn’t answer. “Get the pick and the shovel,” he said.

The man didn’t like it when the boy ordered him around. But he needed the work, the Saturday handyman’s job. The money was good, and he had a wife and two sons, the oldest this one’s age.

He found the pick and a shovel in a tangle of rusted garden tools in the shed next to the garage. When he got back to the tree, the kid was smoking a cigarette.

“Your mother know you smoke?”

“Yeah.”

The boy took the pick and with the spike end scribed a rectangle in the hard soil. Then he drove the blade end deep and pulled up a fist-sized lump of dirt. It was early spring, but it was hot. The two worked together and after fifteen minutes of shoveling and breaking through tree roots, the hole was nearly done.

The boy lit another cigarette and hunkered on his lean haunches. The man squatted down too and stared at the box. “I know this is something your mamma wants,” he said. “She asks for some crazy stuff and all, but that’s OK, considering. But tell me, why we burying this?”

The kid took a drag on his cigarette, reached over to the container, undid the hasp and flipped the lid open.

The man leaned over and looked inside.

“Jesus,” he said and fell back on his rump.

There was no smell. The dissected arm and a leg were flexed, cold, gray, bloodless. Muscles, tendons and bone were exposed.

“Jesus,” the man said and looked in again. “Who’s that?” he said.

“Who knows? He brought them home for experiments.”

The kid closed the lid and snapped the latch.

The man stood and spit and pulled at his gloves.

“Well you wanted to know,” the boy said.

“It ain’t that. I’ve seen parts before. In the Pacific, during the war. They 72

Robert A. Kaiser had us wade out in the bay and pick up the bodies, the arms and legs and heads and middle parts and all like that and bring them in. White people, like these here. It was nigger work.”

The sun was higher. Their partially dug hole was out of the shadows.

The kid shrugged, “Well, let’s get it done,” he said. He stood and took another whack at the last knot of roots with the pick.

The man didn’t say anything. He stood and stared at the ground.

“Nigger work,” he said.

“Come on,” the kid said. “Dig out that end and we’re done.”

The man took off his gloves. “No,” he said. “I’m going home.”

The kid drove the pick into the ground and turned to face his helper.

“What?” the kid said.

“I’m going home.”

“You go home, she won’t pay you.”

“I know.”

“You coming back next week?”

“Don’t know.”

“She’s counting on you, you know. I’ll be gone.”

“I know,” the man said and turned and walked up past the garage and down the driveway to the tree-lined street and in a minute the kid heard the old car start up.

He lit another cigarette and finished the hole. The kid shoveled the edges neat and clean like a grave and pushed the container in. Then he covered it over with soil, patted in down with the back side of the shovel and walked over it a few times.

When he was done, he looked up at the bright sky and tried to think of a prayer. None came to mind.

73

Winter Archive in the Double Mirror Maureen Alsop

When I rotate my hand in the double mirror the back of my palm blushes under a revisionist’s kiss: my lips, the thresh of wings, the incantation of fire. After we make love I know I am not rational. Birds dart in the glass trees. Pinstripes up your body’s plane draw you into a flicker. I study us in the mirror, as once, at sea-level, I studied the wind map, the repeatable stretch of red glyphs were the waves of a grackles flight smeared into dusk. The faint silvering of my hair, no less the snow, as a white blossom, a stone shore, or a drift of starlight. Press your ear against mine. The shade brightness of birdsong moves through us, limitless. We breathe into the black foil. As beyond us, music washes the grass. A sway of hills reflect the smallness of our image.

74

The Doppelgangers’ Daughter Gets Her First EKG Amelia Martins

and she doesn’t know what this means either; these mountains outlined on pink graph paper.

She lies there, eyes poking holes in the ceiling, her gown on, open to the front, and the machine beeping: how

would you

know

if you

were

dying

The nurse says: lay perfectly still, shallow breaths are fine; don’t worry you won’t feel a thing.

This is how she will know when she is dying: her body will start to feel less and less and less, she will be absorbed by the pulse of the universe.

75

letter to joe Mike Foldes

one foot in hell, here, as if jammed into a galvanized five-gallon pail, black canvas high-top bent like cupid’s bow without room to spring back. there they go again, clomping on sterile terrazzo while the brains of the operation are shot like puffed rice from cereal box finger-ring spring guns. time to flex the muscles required to recombine the DNA and get on with today’s first and last orders of business on the helical path to absolution. what’s new with you?

76

Have You No Eyes?

Simon A. Smith

My nephew had been talking like an exhausted housewife all weekend.

At the barbecue he walked right up to me while I was eating my chicken leg, put his hand to his forehead, turned his back to me and let himself fall across my lap like someone who’d fainted or been shot. Then he dipped his head back, drew his fingers down my cheek and looked up at me the way Ava Gardner used to look at Robert Mitchum in the movies. He said, “You’re a little baby with a precious, precious beard.”

I scanned the picnic table to see if anyone had heard but everyone else was busy listening to my mom tell her story about the huge sale she’d stumbled upon at Macy’s last month.

“Joshy,” I said, “where did you hear that?” Joshua had turned eight a few weeks before but still preferred Joshy and got pretty upset if you didn’t say it just right.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He stopped giving me the bedroom eyes and sat up.

“Who taught you to say that?” I said.

“Nobody,” he said, straight-faced and surprised, “I made it up.” And then he hopped down and went racing toward the swimming pool. He ran four or five laps around it, picking up speed and pumping his fists. Joshy is tall and lithe with arms skinny as cooked noodles and long blond hair like a girl’s.

He didn’t seem to care that nobody was watching.

It was Labor Day weekend, and in our family that meant it was time for the annual barbeque extravaganza again. My mom likes to get the whole neighborhood involved. Not that she’s a big partier, because she’s not, but she loves to entertain. After church and all church related things, entertainment is her number one priority.

Earlier in the day, Joshy kept running up to all the women and either slapping their butts or squeezing their breasts. It was unbelievable how understanding everyone was. There were more giggles than screams. However, one incident involving one neighbor, April, didn’t go over too well. While April was bending over to pick up her wine, Joshy decided to give her a sharp pinch on the rump and she spilled an entire glass of merlot down her blouse.

She let out a yelp, but Joshy was already gone before she could turn around and do anything about it. She kept standing there, steaming, scanning the yard to see who might come to her rescue. She took a few clipped steps toward the fleeing Joshy and released a couple angry huffs of breath but nothing came of it. I guess I could have done something, but I was tired of always being the 77

Simon A. Smith one who had to deal with everything. I stayed hidden behind the dessert table instead.

I know Dad saw the April incident, but he wasn’t going to do anything.

Dad was busy trying to hide the fact that he was getting drunk on Maker’s Mark to respond. I knew it was Maker’s Mark because it was always Maker’s Mark. Growing up I’d seen the bottle with the oozing red paint many times.

He kept it pushed back behind some old oil jugs and watering cans beneath his workbench in the garage. I’d watched that bottle play a secret role in our family my whole life. Dad had been in and out of the garage all night. Right after April squealed I caught him darting back inside. When he came out again he had a little rust colored stain on his breast pocket and he was walking on a wild slant, caroming into trees as he lumbered back to his table.

My mom was at the point in her Macy’s story where she talks about how despite her best efforts, she couldn’t help finding the gay sales manager to be a true delight. Not even the “pastor’s wife” in her could hold her back.

Everyone at the picnic table was laughing. The Luke part is her favorite because it always gets a tentative and then propulsive rise out of her lady friends. Joshy was still circling the swimming pool but now his fist was pressed against his mouth and he was singing something into it.

Holly came up behind me and tapped my shoulder. When I turned around she put her hands up above her ears and shook them like she was playing two tambourines. It’s sign language for “party” and also the code we use when one of us is ready to get high. I got up and followed her through the house to the bathroom. She had already carved out four perfect lines of cocaine by the sink, each of them like skinny white caterpillars drowsing on the navy countertop. Holly is the only person I know who is crazier than I am, and that made it impossible for me not to fall in love with her. Before we could leave the bathroom Holly blocked the door with her foot. She folded her fingers in against her thumbs like two snakeheads and mashed both hands together in a twisting motion. She wanted me to kiss her extra hard.

I'd met Holly three months earlier at the Hazel Crest psychiatric hospital. She was in because she was only eighteen and she’d been living in motels with drug dealers for two years. I was there because my parents didn’t understand how a twenty-four year old man could be sad every day for two straight months. It’s impossible to explain to anyone, but especially my parents, that once you get to the point where you’re crying over a child’s faded sidewalk drawing, nothing seems too small to get worked up about. And then you realize that there are no small things. Everything is big in its own way, and 78

Simon A. Smith sad. If they really wanted to know why I was still living at home and acting like a baby, maybe they’d ask themselves why they used to take belts to my bare ass or why they jammed all those useless bars of bath soap in my unholy mouth. But I didn’t have it as bad as Holly. When Holly was seven her father tried blowing up their house with some kind of homemade dynamite. Her mother was cheating, and I guess this was his idea of revenge. He wanted her to know he was still there. As it turned out, it didn’t really work. Only a small strip on the back of the house was singed, but because the explosion had happened right below Holly’s bedroom window where she was sleeping and because the noise it made was above one hundred and fifty decibels, she lost her hearing forever. The odd thing is that when Holly told me about it I didn’t get that upset. I don’t know why. She was disturbed that this was something that didn’t bring tears. I couldn’t explain it. All I could tell her was that it felt too much like following orders. Maybe it was because what her dad was really trying to do was break one of the Ten Commandments and maybe by then I’d been desensitized to that sort of blatant behavior. In my house, nobody cared about anything unless the situation had something to do with the Ten Commandments.

When I first met Holly it was bliss. She understood me so well. For the first time in my life I was talking to a girl who didn’t glaze over or raise her eyebrows when I told her about my condition. When I told her that I broke down in the middle of Hobby Lobby, she got it. She understood when I told her that the place was so big and cold and luminous, and when I told her that it was almost completely empty except for a fat boy buying a model airplane kit on a Friday night, and that there was this one old man taking such great care to construct this nice wooden frame for a cheap poster in this little workshop in the back, and the boring music playing from the speakers was heartbreaking, and then to top it off, all of the lonely employees were so goddamn nice. I started welling up just talking about it and Holly cried too. She was a fantastic lip reader but telling stories to her took a lot of work. We had to get right up close to one another and concentrate with our whole bodies. Because she understood me so well, I wanted more than anything to understand her. She taught me a couple different signs every day. It didn’t take long before I realized it was just like learning any other language; you start being able to understand it before you can begin speaking it yourself.

When we got back from the bathroom my mom was wrapping up her Macy’s story. Joshy had worn himself out and was lying on his back next to the swimming pool, arms stretched out, chest heaving. I took a seat next 79

Simon A. Smith to my sister, Amber, at the end of the picnic table and Holly sat on my knee.

I wondered what my mom and Amber would do if they knew about the coke, but I knew they’d never find out. They’d never notice. A couple of our neighbors were seated around the table too, and I had no idea how observant they were, but I didn’t care. People tend to get caught up on the surface stuff only. Once they see a deaf girl sitting on a guy’s lap and they start chewing on that, everything else is lost on them. My knee was bouncing all over the place, Holly was jumping up and down and grinding her teeth. We were both sniffing and snorting like a couple police dogs and everyone was listening to my sister talk about Joshy.

“So,” Amber said, “not only does Joshy flip out and hit his little boy friends, like I was telling you before, but apparently he’s going after girls now, too.” A couple people gasped. “Yeah, he yanked a girl’s hair on Friday, right in the middle of the classroom, and then when Mrs. Delfino approached him, I guess he tried pushing her or something.”

“Do you take away his toys?” asked Sally, one of the ladies from the neighborhood.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” I interjected.

Everyone stopped and gave me their best how-dare-you looks.

“What do you mean?” Amber asked.

“Do you remember the seals?” I said.

“Oh, well…” my mother said. “That was different.”

“We don’t even know if that had anything to do with Joshy,” Amber said.

“I saw him do it,” I said. I spun Holly’s shoulders toward me and craned my head around so that I could include her in the conversation. When she faced me I started talking to her as slowly as possible. “Remember the seals?” I intoned. I had no idea how to make the sign for seal so I just started flapping my elbows like flippers and tilted my nose up a bit. “Joshy threw those pennies,” I continued, making the universal sign for “throwing” while still keeping up the seal impersonation. “Remember?” I said.

“Oh,” Holly said. “Yes.” Her voice sounded lispy and nasal like any other deaf person’s. She nodded her head.

The seal story was another one I had told Holly back at Hazel Crest.

Last summer while my whole family was at the zoo, Joshy threw a handful of pennies into one of the seal tanks. I grabbed him by the arm and shook him until he started bawling. Then my whole family came over and asked what the 80

Simon A. Smith hell was wrong with me. They hadn’t seen a thing. When I told them, they didn’t believe me. And even if he had done it, they all agreed, that was no reason to hurt a poor child. Well, a couple of months ago something showed up that I thought would convince them that I was justified in my actions.

We all went back to the same zoo and there, hanging outside the seal tank, was a memorial plaque in honor of Franklin the seal. What the plaque said, basically, was that Franklin had died from ingesting too many tiny objects that stupid people had hurled into his water. The message was that people should pay more attention to their kids, but I’m not convinced that would have been enough. Pointing out the plaque to the rest of my family didn’t turn out to be as satisfying as I thought it would. Plaque or no plaque, nobody wanted to hear anything about Joshy. I was ruining their good time. Why did I always have to do that, they wanted to know. I didn’t talk the rest of the day, and maybe I put my head down a lot and kept my hands in my pockets. I probably did. I felt that crushed feeling again and I couldn’t recover. It must have been the last straw for Dad because instead of driving me home when we left, he drove me to Hazel Crest.

Holly took her right index finger and thumb and rested them on her lips. She moved them back and forth like tweezers. “Bird chasers,” she said.

“That’s right!” I said. “You do remember.” I gave her a wet kiss on the cheek and she put her hand on my crotch.

“What’s a bird chaser?” Sally asked.

“It’s nothing,” my mother said.

“Bird chasers are just what they sound like. They’re the people at zoos who chase birds around like some kind of imbeciles,” I said. “They’re also the ones who pound on the glass lion cages, and then laugh their puny little heads off. Most of them are young kids, but I’ve seen grown men do it.” I made a point of looking over at Joshy by the swimming pool. “If you’re not careful he’ll be doing it forever. He’ll be sixty years old and still banging a stick against the elephant pen and making farting noises…”

“And you’ll still be right here living with your parents.” I hadn’t seen my father walk up. He came and plopped down right beside me on the picnic bench.

“Fuck off,” I said. I grabbed Holly and we went back into the bathroom to make out some more.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Joshy?” I asked my mom after everyone had gone home. I was in the kitchen helping her clean.

81

Simon A. Smith “What do you mean?” she asked. She was rinsing dishes and putting them in the washer.

“Like saying weird things,” I said.

“For instance?”

“For instance, he told me, ‘I’m not your partner, I’m your wife. You don’t actually love me,’” I said.

She thought that was one of the funniest things she had ever heard.

She laughed so hard she cried. “No,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes, “I have not heard him say that one.”

“He wasn’t laughing. He didn’t say it like a joke,” I said.

“Well, it sounds like one,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mom was quiet for a while. “He does seem to be a tad too into his guns and weapons and stuff,” she said.

This was how our conversations always went. I’d approach her with a certain idea or concern about something strange or somber I’d noticed, and she’d never admit to noticing the same thing. She’d pick out some other mundane or trivial thing she had witnessed and make me a counter offer. I don’t know if she just didn’t feel like talking about troublesome stuff, or if she lacked some basic capacity to absorb sad things altogether. For example, if we were both to look at a giant picture of a very old man struggling to put his shoes on, I have a feeling she’d want to talk about how vibrant the Holy Spirit was in the dear old fellow and leave it at that.

A few years ago Mom told me that she had been on Prozac for a while when I was like ten. She told me to make me feel better about my own depression, I guess. She told me that she was so glad I had never known how depressed she was. She was proud of herself for keeping her depression a secret from me and Amber. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I knew all about her depression. I knew it had something to do with Dad always working late at the church and never calling. I remembered her bedroom door being locked every night for weeks and I remembered listening at the door and hearing her endless sobbing and nose blowing. I remember all of it, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I don’t know where Amber was during all of it. Amber probably had no idea. Mom was probably right about keeping it hidden from her. Amber was so much better at doing and believing whatever she was told and leaving it alone. She expected the same from Joshy. Joshy’s dad hadn’t been around for years, so I didn’t know what that had done to him, but it seemed like no matter 82

Simon A. Smith who it was just then, Joshy couldn’t care less.

Holly and I took the “healing through art” class at Hazel Crest together.

We both loved to paint, but neither one of us was very good. It seemed like I was always the one with all the good ideas who never had the skills to make any of them come out right and Holly was the one with all the painting talent but nothing worth painting. We tried working as a team on one painting. I tried explaining my idea to Holly, but it was really hard. It wasn’t just because she was deaf. I wanted to paint something really abstract and fleeting. I told Holly about this moment I had observed once that I wanted to somehow capture.

What happened was that I saw these two small children, maybe five and seven, brother and sister, crossing the street at a busy intersection. They were trailing behind their mom, who was in the lead, and their grandma, who was only a few paces ahead. The grandma kept putting her hand out in back of her, like she was trying desperately to grab a hold of one or both of the kids’ hands.

She kept reaching and snapping at the air, searching for the kids’ hands to give them something safe to grab onto. She was begging for their acceptance and trust with each movement, snap snap, reach reach. The kids were looking at one another, back and forth, back and forth. They looked worried and annoyed. You take her hand they were saying with their wide eyes and shaking heads. No, you take her hand! I don’t want to!

The art teacher overheard me trying to tell Holly about all of this. The whole class must have heard me because with Holly being deaf and straining to follow my lips, I was really exaggerating the volume and pacing of every word.

“That sounds more like a poem,” the teacher told me.

“You can’t paint poems?” I asked.

“They’re two different art forms. You’re talking like a writer,” she said.

“I don’t know how to write,” I said.

“You sure talk a good game,” she said. And she gave me this huge smile and then walked away. I almost believed her.

Believe it or not, Holly is gorgeous. I have to say it like that because she’s deaf and a drug addict and everything and nobody would take me seriously, but she is. She’s got this beautiful chestnut skin and these bottomless brown eyes.

Her hair is long and straight and shiny and her nose is so precious it doesn’t even look real. She’s three-fourths Cherokee Indian and the rest Mexican. If she wasn’t deaf and a drug addict, she could have any man she wanted. She was my very first girlfriend and I worried a lot. Sometimes she’d go days without contacting me. The worst thoughts went through my head. It made me sick.

83

Simon A. Smith I hadn’t heard anything from Holly in almost a week. I was thinking about going over to Hazel Crest. When she runs out of money or she gets scared or something, she ends up back over there a lot.

I usually just walk over to Hazel Crest, but this time I borrowed my mom’s van and drove over there in the afternoon because afterward I had to pick up Joshy at school and then get a few things from the grocery store. The sun was bright and gushing through the windshield. I forgot my sunglasses and all the way there I was playing peek-a-boo with the damn sun visor.

Hazel Crest looks kind of like an old dormitory on a fledgling college campus. It’s a pretty crummy place. The high brick façade doubles as privacy walls for the patients inside. There’s also a big, solid black fence that runs around the entire perimeter so that no one can see the loony folks taking their exercise and whatnot in the yard behind it. There are lots of windows but most of them have white shades drawn across them. You wouldn’t know it unless you’d been in one of the bedrooms but most of the windows have huge metal cages on the inside so nobody jumps.

I knew where to go to catch a glimpse of the courtyard. Around back where all the dumpsters and private parking spaces are located, there’s a swinging gate in the fence that stays cracked most of the time. I parked back there and walked up to the gate. If you push against it just a little, a gap opens up, and I could see pretty much the whole yard. Right away I saw Holly. I couldn’t believe it. She was maybe thirty feet away. She was right there, sitting on a bench by the water fountain with James Stanzy. I knew James Stanzy. He lived right across the hall from me when I was staying there. He was a really dark and lonesome kid. Sometimes he didn’t get out of bed until like one in the afternoon and even then he just sulked around like a zombie with his hood up all the time.

James was facing Holly and Holly was facing me. Their faces were so close to one another that it looked like code for something bigger. Holly looked great. She was wearing one of my favorite big sweatshirts, the kind that made her look even tinier than she really was. I was thinking Holly was just being sweet to James like she was to everyone, until I saw her mash her fingertips together and then go in for a kiss. I let out a moan or something and James heard me. I staggered away from the gate, banging into the trashcans as I rushed for the van. Holly somehow noticed too, because I heard her mushy voice saying, “Thomas! Thomas!” She sounded like a drooling three year old.

My heart was thumping like nuts, like someone was being kicked to death 84

Simon A. Smith inside my chest. I got in the van and peeled out of there as fast as I could.

Pulling out onto the street I wasn't sure if I was going to puke or have a heart attack or black out, but instead I just kept gulping for air until my heart slowed down. I guess I kept driving because suddenly I was in front of Joshy’s school and the kids were running out the door and searching for their rides.

Joshy appeared through the crowd and came swooping toward the van. He threw open the door and before I even had a chance to think he said, “to the bat cave!” and I felt again like I could have a stroke. I could die right there in the van with Joshy.

Joshy buckled his seatbelt and somehow I put the van in drive and we pulled away from the curb. My stomach gurgled and my eyes watered and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that my face was red hot, and Joshy said, “Uncle Tom, are you a kid or an adult?”

“I’m your uncle,” I told him. I tried to smile but who knows what ended up happening.

“You’re an adult then,” he said.

“You know that,” I told him. “Don’t you remember? I have a beard.”

My “Oh right,” he said, “you’re a hairy husband.”

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?” Joshy had already moved on. He had his elbow out the window and he was letting the wind make choppy waves with his scooped hand. “What was it you said? What did you call me that time?” I asked him, “You said that I was… that I was a princess baby with a magical…”

“No,” Joshy said, “I said you were a little baby with a precious, precious beard.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly what you said.”

“Hey!” Joshy screamed and I slammed on the brakes so hard Joshy went drifting toward the dashboard. It’s a good thing he wore his belt. “Hey, don’t you have to go to the grocery store? You’re going the wrong way.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

Somehow we made it to the store. I felt like giving the list to Joshy and telling him I’d wait in the car because I didn’t think I could walk, but I managed to get up and go inside. I picked potato chips and spaghetti sauce from the racks as I walked down the aisles but I wasn't really present for any of it. I thought about how Holly had betrayed everything between us, and I thought about precious beards and hairy husbands, and what the hell does it 85

Simon A. Smith all mean? I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that I was talking out loud.

A few times I was jarred from my thoughts when Joshy bumped into someone in one of the aisles. In the cereal aisle he was walking backward and crashed into a man picking out oatmeal. Later he was twirling around by the hotdog cooler and whacked a poor elderly woman in the groin with his hand. I’d find my hands around his neck all of a sudden and then come to again.

As the cashier rang up our items I had a breakdown. I didn’t know if I could make it home. When we got back outside to the parking lot I started hyperventilating. I was breathing as if I’d just come up from being underwater for too long. The lot was crowded and Joshy was sprinting ahead, blindly dashing past parked cars and spinning through moving traffic.

“Joshy!” I said. “Stop it!” I ran for a short distance and caught up.

As I jogged up alongside him, a large black woman across the street caught my attention. I grabbed Joshy’s elbow and held him there. It was her outfit that made me take notice. She was wearing a long, flamingo-colored dress with candied green and blue swirls. The dress was blowzy and arched on her shoulders but tight and bursting around her broad stomach. As loud and colorful as the dress was in front, it was just as pale and shabby in the back.

There were small holes, like cigarette burns, along the hem in back and bleach spots below the waist. Her thick legs looked like lava spilling out of the bottom and she had what appeared to be bug bites or scabs ringing her ankles. She had just stepped outside the small, dingy wig shop on the corner and was admiring herself in the ashy store window with great adoration and approval. She might have been fifty or older– it’s always so hard to tell with black women– and her soft, blinking eyes were glowing with joy. Then came the hat. It was the hat that really got me. She must have bought the hat inside the wig store and she pulled it out of the bag and put it on her head. It was one of the most flamboyant, decadent hats I’d ever seen. It looked like some kind of bright fuchsia sombrero with a big black ribbon weaved around the middle and an octopus-shaped bow. She kept nudging it with her fingers, tapping it back and forth for the perfect angle. Her fingers were worn and blistered. Her neck was creased and drizzled with dirt. It was the juxtaposition of the gleaming new hat, the dress and the salt stained heels with torn buckles… It was her smile and her skin and her eyes and her earnest, whole-hearted enthusiasm…

“What is it?” Joshy asked.

“Look!” I said, guiding him with my eyes across the street.

“Where?” he said.

86

Simon A. Smith “There!” I said. I bent down and pointed. I use my fingertip to draw a line in the air around the lady’s stout body.

“Where?” he said.

“The lady.”

I was thinking about what it was that I was feeling. I was trying to think of words that might explain it and for the first time they were coming. I found words like mercy, valuable, wrenching, guts and pageantry, immutable, glory and unimaginable awe. There would be no painting this time. I wanted to get home fast.

“Who?” Joshy said.

“The lady. The hat.”

“Where? Who?” I squeezed his arm so hard I feel the bones shift. “I’m going to crush,” I whispered. I wasn't not sure where it came from.

“Huh? No!” Joshy whimpered. He frowned and ripped his arm away.

“Not you,” I said.

“Who?” he said.

“The people,” I said. “The lookers and the seers,” I said. “Maybe both.

People like me. I’ll make them crumble. They’re easy. Who else?”

“Who?” he said. “Where?”

“The President. The Queen of England. Ha! People like you, like the man you’ll become. Crushed. Your grandma and grandpa won’t care, but that’s… they’ll take care of themselves in time…”

“Whoosh!” Joshy yelled. He took off through the parking lot again.

“Let’s go!” I hollered after him. “Get the fuck back here! You blind fucking rat!” I wanted to catch him and shake him to death, but it wasn't his fault. He was the scapegoat.

I looked at the lady one last time. She was moving away from the wig shop, but she was walking backward so she could still see her reflection. She was talking and gesturing at herself in the window. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach and then it rose. I lurched forward and clutched my stomach so that even Holly would have known what was coming, and then I threw up.

“Crush,” I heard Joshy screaming in the distance, “crush, crush, crush!”

87

Contest Winner On Learning to Fend for Ourselves Michele N. Harmeling

What is the easiest way to dress a spruce hen? We already know, my brothers and I, the easiest way to kill one—with the old bolt-action twenty-two, or with a well-aimed rock. They aren’t smart birds, spruce hens, fat and heavy, swallowing gravel from the shoulders of the road, filling their crops with dirt and stones.

That noise they make: the tree-muffled thrum of wing against wind, the deep gung gung from the throat of the male.

We can’t imagine them dead, though we can imagine them eaten, nothing left but the tin foil we’ve cooked them in, a smear of mustard across a plate.

Gung gung from the old pipes, water running as we wash our hands.

Here is the tale our father tells us, about how to easily dress a spruce hen: you must carefully place your toe on its breast—don’t step down, or you’ll crush the ribcage, ruin the meat.

Take one wing-tip in each hand.

The eyes will not be closed as you perform the last step: pull up, sharply, as hard as you can, and everything will tear away with the wings—in your hands, dangling feathers and skin, the freed and bodiless mechanisms of flight.

88

Contest Winner ANODYNE Fiona Hopper

Anodyne yanked the map toward her with one hand, knocking an empty coffee cup and two full packs of cigarettes onto the floor. She glanced from the windshield to the snarl of roads. The dark gnawed at the ends of her headlights’ beams; she was sure their reach was shortening by the hour.

With her index finger pressed hard on the map, she swung the car around and headed back the way she had come. The unsettled dust made it even harder for her to see, but she spotted the campground sign she had missed on the way in. Its entrance was marked by a yellow box labeled “FEE.” She drove by.

Her headlights reflected off the pearly siding of an R.V. as she pulled into a spot across from it. After cutting her engine, the only noises were the rustle of her hand in the wrappers littering the passenger seat and her keys clattering until silenced by the pocket of her sweatshirt.

Before she turned on her flashlight, she looked at the sky. The last time she had seen that many stars, she thought, was on the lawn at her father’s house.

She remembered lying head-to-head with her sister watching more and more stars appear as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Here there was just quiet and dark. She unrolled her tent and began forcing its thin metal rods into their sleeves. It still smelled like Dean and made her feel like she was being followed.

Once her tent was up, she went back to the car and, holding the end of the flashlight in her mouth, pulled out a blanket and sleeping bag from the back seat and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. Then she draped herself over the hood of her car. The warmth of the engine worked its way into her back and seeped out through her stomach. Her forearm had numbed from too many hours of driving and she hoped the heat would restore some sensation to it.

As she warmed, she noticed a clicking sound, rhythmic and purposeful.

At first she thought it was an animal, but then it stopped and then started again faster. She closed her eyes and listened. It was the sides of the nearby camper rattling, she was sure.

When her cigarette had almost burned down to its pencil-yellow end, she pushed the cherry from the tight wrapper and let it fall to the ground and 89

Fiona Hopper put the butt in her pocket. The coffee cup she used as an ashtray was nearly full of them. She had heard that even if you put out the cherry, the butt could start a fire; she had never thrown one out again.

The noise stopped and Anodyne sat up and massaged her arm. As she scooted to the edge of the hood, her cigarette butt fell out of her pocket. She looked down just before her foot hit the ground and saw a snake half the length of her truck coiled beneath it. The noise had been its warning.

Her leg shot up from the ground so fast that she kneed herself in the lip. She shrunk against the windshield. Finally, she stood and tried to see where the snake was. She pressed her calves against the windshield and strained to see the ground as she leaned forward.

A screech owl shot out from a ponderosa and she heard the rattling noise again.

Any warmth she had absorbed left her. She clenched her arms to her chest and inched forward until she could see the ground. The snake was gone.

She risked a little more of her body and scanned the ground again. Nothing.

The owl must have scared it, she thought. She almost jumped down, but thought of the snake hiding underneath the car waiting to strike at her ankle.

She scaled the side of her truck and lowered herself in through the open window on the passenger side. From there, she shimmied through the window between the cab and the bed. She had only slept in the bed once--with Dean-and it had not been packed full then.

With her flashlight secured between her shoulder and her ear, she untied a garbage bag of clothes and layered the floor with its contents. She spread her extra blanket over the top. She thought of the snake, cozy in her sleeping bag outside, and made sure to check every corner of her makeshift bed and every article of clothing before lying down and pulling the blanket over her head.

Hours later, she woke up sweating furiously and sure the snake was wrapped around her. She unwound herself from her blanket, rearranged her mattress of clothes, and fell back to sleep. Early in the morning she bolted upright, the revving R.V. engine a giant rattler in her dreams.

A faint, blue light seemed to rise from the ground and into the back window of the cab. She pushed open the tailgate. The high desert air had become chilly in the night. It would only be hours now before she was getting 90

Fiona Hopper an uneven tan in the driver’s seat, she thought. She perched at the very edge of the tailgate, dangled and then dropped her flashlight. It landed quietly in the thick dust below.

When no snake issued from underneath the truck, Anodyne hopped down. Though she was sure—now that it was morning—that the snake had never been under her truck, she breathed deeply when her feet landed safely on the ground.

The campground had an outhouse and a pump but not a bathroom.

Using the pump made her feel like a working part of the landscape, a homesteader, or someone more useful, she thought, than a transient buying gas, turning it into smog, and leaving. She cupped her hands and washed her face.

Beams of light filed in through the trees, the dome of the sky began to blue. There were only two campers and one car in view. She turned her back to the campground and pulled off her shirt. The cold water covered her skin in goose bumps.

Anodyne tilted back to rinse her neck and untied her braided hair.

She gasped as the cold water streamed over her head. Once her hair was wet, she flipped it forward and watched as a rainstorm of droplets bead up on the parched dust below. She wrapped her hair in a small towel and put her T-shirt back on; it clung to her wet torso as she made her way back to her truck where she started making breakfast.

“Nice bath this morning?”

Anodyne looked up. A man, not much older than she, planted himself firmly in front of her.

“I didn’t think anyone was awake,” she said, wishing she had put on her sweatshirt.

“I’m not complaining. My wife told me she saw you, but I didn’t until you were walking back. Then I thought, damn, should’ve gotten up earlier.” He chuckled to himself.

Anodyne looked down and kept stirring her oatmeal; it was beginning to stick to the bottom of the pan.

“What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“I’m on my way to visit a friend,” she said looking up. He wasn’t 91

Fiona Hopper handsome, she thought, but looked like he could have lifted her truck above his head if he wanted to.

“What kind of a friend do you have out here?”

“He doesn’t live here,” she clarified. “He lives in California.”

“He? Lucky guy.”

“Adam!” a voice shouted from the R.V. in the distance.

“That’s the wife. She wanted me to offer you some coffee. And I’ll throw in breakfast because stirring isn’t going to save that oatmeal.”

Anodyne looked down. Her oatmeal had become a gelatinous clump.

“Thanks.”

He watched her as she turned off her small camping stove, blew out the flame, and laid it out to cool.

“Where are you from?” she asked as they walked toward his campsite.

“We’re from a town near Reno. We like to come down here once in awhile to get away from the city. Cheryl—my wife—her parents live near here.

They drive me crazy and I won’t stay with them. We camp out instead.”

“That seems like a good solution,” Anodyne replied, though she felt a little sorry that Cheryl had to camp in this desolation regularly.

He led her to the pearly white R.V. she had seen the night before. Its siding shone brilliantly in the full morning sun.

“Cheryl?” Adam asked as he disappeared inside.

Anodyne sat at the picnic table and watched millions of dust particles float through a patch of sunlight. The air was teeming with them. She could feel the dust settling inside her nose and started to cough.

He came out holding a note.

“This must’ve been what she was hollering about. She had to walk to the campground manager’s trailer because our generator kicked out. No wonder she sounded mad.”

Anodyne remembered that she hadn’t paid. She would have to leave before Cheryl returned with the manager if she wanted to stay for free.

“How long do you think she’ll be?” she asked, wondering if breakfast was such a good idea now.

92

Fiona Hopper “I don’t know, half an hour maybe. She’ll probably wake the poor guy up. One egg or two?”

“Um, one, thanks. Did you say you had coffee?” she watched as he poured her a cup. “Thanks.” She held the mug in both hands and looking down at the table trying to calculate the time difference in her head. It was mid-morning in the East; Dean must be at work already. “Do you mind if I look inside? I’ve never been in one of these before.”

“Sure. I have to warn you, though, it’s a mess. Cheryl isn’t such a good housekeeper,” he said with a look of embarrassment or resentment, Anodyne wasn’t sure which.

Standing at the front door, she felt like she was looking through the tiny window of a candy Easter egg. It was a miniature world. An entire house refigured, compressed, and then squashed into a tin rectangle on wheels.

The small sink was overwhelmed with dishes, and the table was layered with maps, paper plates, pamphlets, and nail polish bottles. Beyond the kitchen there was a low entrance to the back end of the camper. From what she could see, it looked to Anodyne like most of it was taken up by a full sized mattress piled high with clothes and magazines.

“What do you think?” Adam came up behind her.

She pressed herself against the doorframe. “I really like it. It makes you realize how much room is wasted in a full-sized house. In here you have everything you need in a fraction of the space and it’s mobile.”

“I like it too.”

When he moved next to her, he blocked the light from the open door.

He had to curve over to look at her.

“You’re a pretty girl,” he said as he moved his hand along her cheek.

“Thanks,” she said, reorienting her body toward the door.

“Not just yet.” His hand moved down to her waist. She drove her feet into the floor. He planted his sweaty mouth on hers and forced his tongue between her sealed lips.

Anodyne’s body stiffened while the rest of her felt as though it was emptying through her feet and onto the floor, or escaping from her head and clinging to the ceiling like a fly. His hand gripped the inside of her thigh. With every ounce of strength she could summon, she regained herself and pushed 93

Fiona Hopper him away.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She stepped back and was unbalanced for a moment from the force of her push.

Adam looked at her as though she had grown a third eye. “I just thought when you came in here and all…What was I supposed to think?” she could see his confusion turning to anger in his reddening face.

“You’re an asshole.” It wasn’t worth explaining further, she thought, and darted outside.

“Wait. What did I do? I’m sorry.” Adam followed her out, his erection an eyesore in the blazing sun. She walked deliberately back to her campsite, still clenching his coffee mug.

It was not until she had nestled into the pile of clothes in the truck bed again that she composed herself. The thought of paying a fee for a miserable night finally motivated her to get up. She dried her face with her t-shirt and put on a clean one. She drank the remaining coffee and swept the excess cigarette butts littering the car floor into a pile before scooping them up with her new mug.

There was still no sign of the campground manager. Anodyne opened up the cooler in the back of the truck. Its contents floated in five inches of water.

She made herself a peanut butter sandwich and squeezed the lid down tight.

She had no choice but to pass the R.V. on her way out. Adam was reclined with his feet on the bench of the picnic table smoking. He waved as she passed by. At the campground exit, she saw a small woman with tight skin and hair talking to a man who she assumed to be the campground manager.

Out of the trees and back on the main road, the sun seemed to sear the paint on the hood. She felt sorry for Cheryl, living in an R.V. with that man. The thought of it made her feel like she had an hour before. There had been many similar moments on the trip when the loneliness, anxiety, and even despair took hold of her. But with him it had been different, she thought.

There, she had become vacant, hollow, for a split second and that scared her even more.

Once on the paved road again, Anodyne began to tear off bites of her sandwich. It was warm from the sun on the passenger seat and peanut butter dripped slightly from one side. She pulled into the gas station outside of the 94

Fiona Hopper park hoping to buy ice, though there were only two free standing pumps.

They were a tiny smudge of humanity against the broad, empty hills unrolling around them. A cardboard signed taped to one pump stated, “NO ICE�.

She moved the bandana tied over her hair down to her forehead to wipe up the sweat saturating her eyebrows then pushed it back up to her hairline.

She reached one arm behind her seat and felt around until she gripped a plastic gallon jug. She popped off the top. It was the temperature of bath water and tasted pungent.

The endless sun and dirt distorted the landscape. It made distances seem longer and then shorter than they were. She could see the highway she had left the night before, but could barely make out the road she was on as it disappeared in a blur of heat and pavement. Cattle crowded at the edges of dried up lakes marked only by thick rings of white salt. The cows licked the salt. Suicidal in this heat, she thought, though she couldn’t blame them for wanting to escape the desert around them.

95

Book Review

Lies Will Take You Somewhere Sheila Schwartz (Etruscan Press, 2009) Lee Chilcote

Sheila Schwartz’s debut novel, Lies Will Take You Somewhere, tells the story of a family divided by an act of betrayal. The title alludes to a Jewish proverb that reads, “Lies will take you somewhere, but never back.” In this dark, comic novel, a family learns to navigate a broken world, grappling with lies that keep them apart, searching for redemption in the rubble.

Saul and Jane Rosen live with three daughters in a suburb outside of Philadelphia. Saul is a rabbi at a local synagogue, and Jane is a homemaker.

When Jane’s mother dies, she travels to Florida to settle her estate, which she finds in complete disarray. While Jane is gone, one of Saul’s congregants, Martin, reveals on his deathbed that he and Jane had an affair. The admission threatens to tear the Rosen family apart. It also raises complex questions about our ability to truly know ourselves and others.

In Schwartz’s world, Florida as a stifling place, the American Dream gone awry, but with old people. In one scene early in the novel, Jane gets lost driving back to her mother’s house. It’s located in a cookie cutter subdivision in which the street names all sound alike. “Terrible things shouldn’t happen in a place where people pay good money to live in comfort,” she jokes. But they do – like the winding drives where Jane gets lost these comforts are shiny talismans that keep us from being real with one another.

Although Saul views himself as a shepherd to lost souls, as it turns out, he too is caught up in lies. After Jane leaves for Florida, Saul goes to the hospital to comfort Martin. He dreads it, admitting that such comfort requires “a degree of lying that he may not be capable of.” Martin is an alcoholic and a perpetual screw-up. He also wants to be buried with most of his material possessions. What can Saul possibly say to him?

Yet the tables quickly turn as Martin confesses his affair with Jane.

Saul’s life is upended by the transgression, and he metes out his own brand of Old Testament justice, cutting off all communication – and the credit cards.

Consumed with anger, Saul is unable to see his complicity in the fractured world that they live in. Ironically, his own self-assured faith – which, as it turns out, is rockier than he’ll admit – blocks his self-realization. Schwartz suggests that zealous belief, taken too far, is a kind of deception.

Jane is stranded in Florida, unable to reach Saul. She heads to a bar, where she salves her woes in whiskey and dances with a stranger. “She’s never 96

Book Review known who she truly is; she lets other people tell her, people like Saul,” Schwartz tells us. The free spirit that she abandoned after marrying Saul reemerges, yet quickly spins out of control. When she arrives back at her mom’s house, Jane runs into the gardener, and impulsively agrees to get in his truck. They set off on a nostalgic, pot-filled road trip to nowhere.

Like a good ghost story, Schwartz’s novel doesn’t let us rest. Jane and the gardener wind up in the Everglade swamps after driving into the night. Her drug-addled companion decides to go alligator hunting. When he finds one, he kills the creature bare-handed – “Pretty exciting, eh, babe? I did it just for you,” he tells her – and then drags Jane back to his shack in the swamp. We root for Jane’s escape in every heart-pounding scene, knowing that she is struggling to free herself from passivity, to face the truth about her own life. Schwartz does not let her off that easy.

Throughout the novel, Schwartz’s writing style weaves realist fiction with an absurdist style that draws from existentialist writers like Nathaniel West. She describes old people swimming at a Florida retirement community as “anxious sea anemones … [that] moonwalk in unison across the shallow end, chins raised with purpose.” As we plunge beneath the mirror-like surface of her writing, Schwartz reveals the muddy world beneath everyday life. This book is also quite funny. When Jane encounters a Florida neighbor who spontaneously announces “I’m a survivor” as she arrives at the door, Schwartz writes, “Jane isn’t even sure what kind of survivor the woman means. (Holocaust? Cancer?

A survivor of her long journey to open the door?)” Schwartz lines up every sacred cow, whether religion, death or the Holocaust, and pulls the trigger. It’s uncomfortable to laugh at such darkness, yet that’s precisely the point.

Sheila Schwartz was an award-winning writer who taught at Cleveland State University. Her previous book of short stories, Imagine a Great White Light, won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. She has also won an Atlantic Monthly First and an O’Henry Award. Schwartz lived in Cleveland Heights with her husband, novelist Dan Chaon, and their two sons, before she passed away in November 2008 following a battle with cancer. She found a publisher for her novel, but did not live to see it in print.

Ultimately, the power of Lies Will Take You Somewhere is in its message that human beings can survive heartache in a broken world, but only if we create honest relationships with one another, difficult though they may be. The Rosen family “cannot be put back together,” Jane says at the end – instead, they must turn and “navigate like a stormy sea, with determination” the future that lies ahead. Schwartz’s bracing tale urges us to seek out truth in our lives, no matter how painful or unwelcome.

97

Contributors Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of two full collections of poetry, Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag) and The Diction of Moths (Ghost Road Press, pending). She is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, pending), Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the dream you spoke (Spire Press) and Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line Press). She is the winner of Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award.

Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals including Blackbird, New Delta Review, Tampa Review, Typo, 42 Opus, Drunken Boat, Copper Nickel, and Front Porch Journal.

Amanda Burnham uses drawing and installation in her work to investigate and record evolving urban and suburban built landscapes. Her work has been exhibited extensively; she is currently represented by Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL). She is also very involved in collaborative work with writers; a book, Never Cry Woof, featuring her drawings alongside the work of poet Shafer Hall, was recently published by No Tell Books. Amanda holds BA and MFA degrees from Harvard and Yale, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Towson University. Despite having traversed the east coast for the better part of the last decade, she was born in Toledo, Ohio (1979) and traces her fascination with derelict warehouses, sign architecture, purposeless and repurposed spaces, and cars to that city’s rust belt landscape.

Lee Chilcote received his master’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University in 2002. While attending CSU, he studied with Sheila Schwartz. He is a poet and essayist whose previous work has been published in Muse, Cleveland Magazine, Out of Line, Northern Ohio Live, and other publications. He lives in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland with his wife, Katherine, and his daughter, Emily.

Kyle Churney received his MFA from the University of New Mexico, where he was Poetry Editor of Blue Mesa Review. His poems have also appeared or will appear in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Weber: The Contemporary West. This is his first publication in a journal without a colon in its title. He lives in Chicago. Note: the person for whom “Jawbreaker Triptych” is written is also published in this issue of W.I.

98

Contributors Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, OH with his wife Emily. Most recently his poems have appeared in the South Carolina Review, Meridian, Juked, Prick of the Spindle, and The Centrifugal Eye. Darren has most recently finished a collection of poems about sonograms entitled, Black & White Picture(s).

James Doyle’s latest book is Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes (Steel Toe Books, 2007). He has poems coming out in Poet Lore, Lake Effect, Margie, The Carolina Quarterly, Nimrod, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He and his wife, Sharon Doyle, live in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Mike Foldes edits and publishes the on-line magazine ragazine.cc, a collaboration of artists, writers, photographers, travelers and interested others. He has been a newspaper and magazine editor, reporter and columnist, advertising copy writer, bartender, Fuller Brush salesman and construction worker, among other things.

He is the founder and president of Michael Foldes, Inc., an electronics design and development sales organization, and was the first editor of the Power Sources Manufacturers Association Handbook of Standardized Terminology for the Power Sources Industry. His poems, essays, columns and stories have appeared in a number of English-language publications. He and his wife Margot have three grown children. They live in Endwell, N.Y. Molly Gaudry is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s M.A. Fiction program and was the 2008-2009 Visiting Writer in Residence at the School for Creative and Performing Arts. Currently living in Philadelphia, she edits Willows Wept Review, co-edits Twelve Stories, and is an assistant editor for Keyhole Magazine. Her first book, a novella in verse titled We Take Me Apart, will be published by Mud Luscious in December 2009. For more, please visit http://mollygaudry.blogspot. com.

Marie Gauthier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Cave Wall, The American Poetry Journal, Weave Magazine, and others. Her first chapbook, Hunger All Inside (Finishing Line Press), came out in September.

She lives with her husband and two young sons in Shelburne Falls, MA. Justine Tal Goldberg holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College.

Most recently, she was named Honorable Mention in The Writers’ Workshop of Asheville, NC’s Meet the Authors Contest for an excerpt from her novel-inprogress, Opening Umbrellas Indoors. “The Pill” was a finalist in Lumina’s 2007 99

Contributors Short Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Meeting House, Rambunctious Review, and The Weekly Dig, among others. She currently lives in Palm City, Florida where she runs WriteByNight creative writing workshop.

David Gracie received his MFA from Northwestern University in 2004. He has been included in group shows at the Bowery Gallery in New York City, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and in the exhibition Realist Tendencies on Paper at the Block Museum in Evanston Illinois. His work will be included in the upcoming National Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. David’s most recent solo show was with Aron Packer Gallery in Chicago. Currently David teaches painting and Drawing at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln Nebraska.

Michele Nisha Harmeling is a recent MFA graduate who studied poetry at Eastern Washington University. Her poems have previously been published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adirondack Review, Juked, and Reed Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2009 Joy Bale Boone poetry prize and is a former Writer-in-Residence, having taught creative writing to elementary school students as part of the Get Lit! Young Writers’ Program in Spokane, WA. She coaches at the Daniel Boxing School and currently resides in Anchorage, Alaska.

Fiona Hopper graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004 with a degree in literature and creative writing. “Anodyne” is her first published story. She currently lives and writes in Portland, Maine.

Robert A. “Mike” Kaiser is the former Assistant Managing Editor/News for The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post. He is a native of Buffalo, N.Y., and received his bachelor’s in history at Fordham University and his master’s in journalism at Penn State. A journalist for more than 30 years, he taught news and feature writing at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He retired from The Post when the newspaper closed in 2007 and has since concentrated on writing fiction and painting. He is married and the father of three daughters.

Elizabeth Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she received both an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, and the Wendy Fort Memorial Prize.

She was also a recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for 2008. Recent poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from: Red Wheelbarrow, The New York Quarterly, and The Sow’s Ear, among others.

100

Contributors Suzanne Levine’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Artemis, Bellingham Review, California Quarterly (CQ), Calliope, Helicon Nine, Interpoezia, New England Watershed Magazine, Passages North, Permafrost, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Tendril, and The Trinity Review, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist in the 2009 Midnight Sun Chapbook Competition and a contributor to Forty Fathers, The Search for Father in Oneself.

She recently completed Haberdasher’s Daughter, a collection of her work. Suzanne lives in Chester, Connecticut.

Amelia Martens was born nine minutes after her twin sister and nine days before Mt. St. Helens erupted. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and currently teaches writing at West Kentucky Community & Technical College in Paducah.

A co-founder of the Rivertown Reading Series, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Epicenter, Kudzu, pacificREVIEW, Slipstream, and The Madison Review. She is married to the poet Britton Shurley and also has a wonder puppy named Hoosier.

Mary Miller’s short story collection, Big World, was published in February, 2009

by Short Flight/Long Drive Books. Her stories can be found in and forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Black Clock, Mississippi Review, Versal, and New Stories from the South, 2008.

Dan Moreau is the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

His work appears in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, William and Mary Review, Red Cedar Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Words and Images, and Swink.

James Reed's stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Dogwood, and Quick Fiction as well as the anthology Tribute to Orpheus (Kearney Street Books 2007).

Among other awards, he holds a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Erika L. Sánchez has been published in Ghoti, Gumball Poetry and in two issues of Hanging Loose. Poems are forthcoming in Witness, Hayden’s Ferry and Crab Orchard Review. Her fiction has also been published in Other Voices. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and is currently an MFA student at The University of New Mexico.

101

Contributors Steven D. Schroeder’s first full-length book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared in 2009 from BlazeVOX. His poetry is available or forthcoming from New England Review, Verse, The Journal, The Laurel Review, and Verse Daily. He edits the online poetry journal Anti- and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.

Britton Shurley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University and is currently an Instructor of English at West Kentucky Community & Technical.

His chapbook, Johnny Depp Saved from Drowning, was published by Permafrost, and his poems have appeared in the journals Bateau, Epicenter, Passages North, and Salt Hill. He is married to the poet Amelia Martens and has a dog named Hoosier Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, and has lived in Germany for many years, where she works for a news agency. Sarah’s poems have appeared in Juked, RHINO, Bateau and Opium, among other publications. Her chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, was published in 2009 by Tilt Press.

Simon A. Smith lives in Chicago with his wife and a murderous orange tabby named Cheever. He is about one year away from receiving his MAT in Language Arts Education. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Quick Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Opium, PANK, Bound Off, Dogzplot and a few others. He likes it here.

J. Michael Wahlgren is author of Silent Actor (Bewrite, 2008) & three chapbooks, one forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. He lives in Boston where he co-edits Gold Wake Press. Recent poems can be found in Matter Journal & elimae & a forthcoming poem from Barn Owl Review.

Molly Lynn Watt, an educator and a poet, curates Fireside Monthly Reading Series, now in its 10th year, serves as poetry editor of HILR Review and Bagels with the Bards Anthologies 1, 2, 3 & 4. She and Daniel Lynn Watt created and perform George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, published on CD, with script to be published later this year by Cervena Barva Press. In 2007 Ibbetson Street Press published Shadow People. She is currently writing a series of poems set in the Civil Rights Movement, is published widely and reads at many venues.

102

iMAGinAtiOn

A Writing Workshop and Conference July 13- 17 2010

Workshop Faculty Fiction ZZ Packer Sam Lipsyte Jess Walter Salvatore Scibona

Poetry Olena Kalytiak Davis Sandra Beasley Writing for Stage & Screen Micky Birnbaum

Creative Non-Fiction Rebecca Skloot

Activities • Small workshops with 8 students or fewer • Readings by guest faculty • Craft talks • Receptions and social gatherings • “Business of Writing Saturday”

For More Information Email: imagination@csuohio.edu Phone: (216) 687-3990 Look for us on Facebook

Mail: Imagination Department of English College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Cleveland State University 2121 Euclid Avenue, RT 1832 Cleveland, OH 44115-2214

WHISKEY ISLAND โ ข ISSUE FIFTY-SEVEN

Maureen Alsop Amanda Burnham Lee Chilcote Kyle Churney Darren Demaree James Doyle Mike Foldes Molly Gaudry Marie Gauthier Justine Tal Goldberg David Gracie Michele N. Harmeling Fiona Hopper Robert A. Kaiser Elizabeth Kay

David Kirby Susan Levine Amelia Martens Donelle McGee Mary Miller Dan Moreau Andrew Plattner James Reed Erika L. Sรกnchez Steven D. Schroeder Britton Shurley Sarah Sloat Simon A. Smith J. Michael Wahlgren Molly Lynn Watt

WHISKEY ISLAND ISSUE FIFTYSEVEN

A Literary Journal Published By Cleveland State University

FALL 2009