UFM
issue32 / 1
CO NT EN T S COVER
Poetry
AnTHONY ILACQUA “SUGAR BEET FACTORY”......Cover image
DR. JUANITA KIRTON
Prose VICTORIA ANDERSON “Book Tour”...........................................................9
MIcHAEL COHEN
“LUNCH IN THE COURTYARD”........14
“Naughty Boy” “Small Glimpses” “Two Smaragdine”
Dan PinKERTON
“MEDITATION ON LIGHT” “LUNCH AT HARRODS” “HIDDEN VOICES”
Editor’s Note About Us Submission Guidlines Bios and Credits
issue32 UFM
22 23 24
5 4 6 25
UFM JUNE 2018, Issue 32
2/
19 20 21
UMBRELLA FACTORY WORKERS Editor-In-Chief
Anthony ILacqua Copy Editor
Janice Ilacqua Art Director
Jana BrAMWELL
UFM
issue32 / 3
Umbrella Factory isn’t just a magazine, it’s a community project that includes writers, readers, poets, essayists, filmmakers and anyone doing something especially cool. The scope is rather large but rather simple. We want to establish a community--virtual and actual--where great readers and writers and artists can come together and do their thing, whatever that thing may be. Maybe our Mission Statement says it best: We are a small press determined to connect well-developed readers to intelligent writers and poets through virtual means, printed journals, and books. We believe in making an honest living providing the best writers and poets a forum for their work. We love what we have here and we want you to love it equally as much. That’s why we need your writing, your participation, your involvement and your enthusiasm. We need your voice. Tell everyone you know. Tell everyone who’s interested, everyone who’s not interested, tell your parents and your kids, your students and your teachers. Tell them the Umbrella Factory is open for business. Subscribe. Comment. Submit. Tell everyone you know. Stay dry
4/
issue32 UFM
hello there UFM editor’s letter - December 2017 Welcome to Issue 32 of Umbrella Factory Magazine. Thanks for your interest in Umbrella Factory Magazine. As always, it is our sincere desire to assemble the best writing available and humbly submit it for your consideration. This issue we have new prose from Victoria Anderson, Michael Cohen and John Danahy. When putting together an issue it’s more than just choosing a group of individual stories, it’s curating a group of them to work as a whole. These are the sorts of stories we might hear around a campfire, or some sort of intimate setting on a sultry summer night. We gratefully present these stories here. Our poets this issue, Dr. Juanita Kirton and Dan Pinkerton round out our issue. I’m exceptionally fond of Dan Pinkerton’s “Corporate Banjo” and Dr. Juanita Kirton’s “The Air Smelled of Shadows.” Thank you to all the readers and the writers who support our magazine. Read. Submit. Tell everyone you know. Stay Dry.
UFM
issue32 / 5
submissions
Submission Guidelines:
Yes, we respond to all submissions. The turn-around takes about three to six weeks. Be patient. We are hardworking people who will get back to you. On the first page please include: your name, address, phone number and email. Your work has to be previously unpublished. We encourage you to submit your piece everywhere, but please notify Umbrella Factory if your piece gets published elsewhere. We accept submissions online at www.umbrellafactorymagazine.com
ART / PHOTOGRAPHY
POETRY
Accepting submissions for the next cover of Umbrella Factory Magazine. We would like to incorporate images with the theme of umbrellas, factories and/or workers. Feel free to use one or all of these concepts. Image size should be 980x700 pixels, .jpeg or .gif file format. Provide a place for the magazine title at the top and article links.
We accept submissions of three (no more and no less) poems. Please submit only previously unpublished work.
We also accept small portfolios of photography and digitally rendered artwork. We accept six pieces (no more and no less)
We do not accept multiple submissions; please wait to hear back from us regarding your initial submission before sending another. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. All poetry submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes a two to four sentence bio in the third person. This bio will be used if we accept your work for publication.
SUBMIT YOUR WORK ONLINE AT WWW.UMBRELLAFACTORYMAGAZINE.COM 6/
issue32 UFM
NONFICTION Let’s just say nonfiction is a piece of expository writing based in fact. Further definitions are as follows: piece-a work with a beginning, a middle and an end. Expository writing-writing with a purpose such as, but not limited to, explanation, definition, information, description of a subject to the extent that a reader will understand and feel something. Think about the cave paintings of 30,000 years ago, they tell a story. And for the modern man, a good film documentary conveys its purpose. A film about Andy Warhol and his friends who liked to drink and smoke and screw is interesting. A film about how I felt at age ten and watching the adults in my life drink and smoke and screw is not a good idea.
FICTION Sized between 1,000 and 5,000 words. Any writer wishing to submit fiction in an excess of 5,000 words, please query first. Please double space. We do not accept multiple submissions, please wait for a reply before submitting your next piece. In the body of your email please include: a short bio—who you are, what you do, hope to be. Include any great life revelations, education and your favorite novel. Your work has to be previously unpublished. We encourage you to submit your piece everywhere, but please withdraw your piece if gets published elsewhere.
UFM
issue32 / 7
PROSE
8/
issue32 UFM
BOOK TOUR Victoria Anderson
UFM
issue32 / 9
prose The 50th Birthday Party I never intended to join a book group. I was perfectly happy reading my self-selected narratives alone. I loved the guilty pleasure of reading in my cracked leather chair with its arms leaking stuffing. Every year as the weather cooled, I expected the tiny mice who lived on the spilled birdseed in our garden to move indoors and into the reading chair through one of its many points of entry. My garden and the house that accompanied it were in a township that refused to call itself a suburb. We had a family across the alley who had a daughter approximately the same age as our son. They played together occasionally, most often “kitchen magic,” a faux cooking game that meant using a huge mixing bowl to mix dry pantry staples with something like ketchup or honey. The alley father hated the mess. Somehow we got ourselves invited to the alley neighbors’ boat party, celebrating some sort of occasion that was mathematically complicated. It was a fiftieth party for his thirty-fifth birthday. Although I could never recreate it, it had something to do with his thirty-five years plus the ten years they had been married and a whole bunch of other things that added up to fifty. Maybe the five-year-old dog’s age multiplied by their oldest son’s age. Who knows? The party was to take place on a rented boat that would tour around Lake Michigan, providing a view of Chicago’s skyline. We were invited along with several neighbors and their children. I would have preferred an adult party because this smacked of the dreaded block party, which we left town to avoid when we were able and turned all the lights out and watched television in a back room when we were not. But we went to the fiftieth party. There was an electrical storm that night so the boat stayed docked. The alley friends were very thrifty. Relatives in another state owned a factory that manufactured polyester sweat clothing in primary colors. For years they got a free box in late September, and both their children wore the sweatsuits until summer, when the pants became cutoffs and the sweatshirts had their sleeves cut off. Once the new shipment came, the cycle began again. Occasionally an odd sweatsuit would ar-
10 /
issue32 UFM
rive in the wrong size, and it would be offered to our son. Invariably he loved them. He had a red pair that he insisted on wearing without underwear and with the cowboy boots we had bought him on a trip to the Southwest. Not surprisingly the alley friends cut some corners on the party. To save money they severely under-ordered food. Once we had all arrived, mostly dripping wet, the children attacked the buffet table. By the time the adults approached, the only things remaining were the vegetables from the crudité tray and the garnishes deemed inedible by the kids. The only beverage available for adults was champagne; the juice boxes relegated to the children had disappeared within the first twenty minutes. No water anywhere except the stuff rocking the boat and falling from the sky. The champagne was not good but we swilled it. The boat rocked, the champagne (which, ironically, didn’t run out) was poured and repoured, and we were drunk. When the storm died down and we were able to leave the dock and venture out into the lake, we felt that we were being held prisoner. I struck up a conversation with a neighbor with whom I had made eye contact a couple of times. Laurie was an eye-roller so I figured she was a good conversational bet. At some point she said, “Hey, you’ve got to join our book group,” and I said sure. I didn’t see her for a week, but when we bumped into each other in the alley putting empty wine bottles in our blue recycling bins, I asked when we were meeting. She seemed nonplussed. Later it would occur to me that she had forgotten she’d invited me. If I’d stayed silent, I could have avoided the whole thing. But I went to my first meeting. Independent People The group was comprised of a knitting psychologist and three mid-level corporate women who belonged to the same professional organizations. Two were married and one was a non-practicing lesbian (her term for her partnerless state). Later a chronically tardy psychiatrist would join the group. There were problems from the beginning. I was brought in by a member without consulta-
tion with the rest of the group. I was oblivious to this rule infraction, so I didn’t notice tension until the second meeting. Meeting two was a discussion of Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, a book I would surely never have read without a book group. What I remember now is the relentless rain on the turf roof of the croft under which Bjartor of Summerhouses lived variously with one of two wives while sheep, a horse, a cow, and a dog inhabited the main floor below. I loved best the two- or three-sentence description of rain—all two hundred fifty words of it, ending with: “And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.” I wanted to talk about that line, but the discussion quickly moved to other matters at hand. It was 1994 and Winter Olympics time. Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding were skating rivals. Our hostess dismissed Tonya Harding as trailer trash—I can’t say the phrase was or wasn’t used, but the suggestion was strongly there. As it turns out, someone who went to the defense of Tonya Harding didn’t have a great deal to work with because this was around the time her boyfriend tried to break one of Nancy’s kneecaps. But I launched into an exhaustive defense of the underdog because she was the underdog. Eyes rolled except the psychologist’s, which never looked up from her knitting project. I ended my prolonged but nonsubstantive defense with a shrug and the admission that “I always liked the bad girls,” and when no one responded, a further admission, “I always was one.” This was more an aspiration than a truth. The Things They Carried …and sometimes I can see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story. Those are the lines I wanted to talk about at our third meeting—the author/the character (interchangeable) speaking about the redemptive power of narrative. But instead we went to
a big box bookstore to hear Tim O’Brien read his own words. Laurie leaned over during the requisite post-reading Q&A and whispered, “I wish I was going on the rest of the book tour with him.” Then I remembered why I liked her in the first place. The next day I went through my postcard collection and wrote the first of the five I would send her. “Tim and I are exhausted but the hotel is lovely. An effort to get out of bed and make ourselves presentable for cocktail hour and the evening reading. Love from Seattle.” “San Francisco is all the lovelier with Tim. Walked the bridge holding hands. LA tomorrow.” And so on. The English Patient By meeting four, The English Patient, we weren’t talking much about the novel at all. It was ambiguous, and ambiguity was not embraced by most members of the group, particularly by the three corporate women who were Nancy Kerrigan boosters. Now I had one person who liked me, three who didn’t, and a knitting psychologist who appeared to be withholding judgement. Under these terms I was in the group but already wanted out. This was the last meeting before the psychiatrist joined the group. By the time she joined us, a proper vetting had taken place. Maybe they wanted to demonstrate what should happen before an invitation to join was issued. A proper vetting was a means by which to avoid someone who was a Tonya Harding promoter. Although the psychiatrist survived the scrutiny of the group (or the seasoned members of the group—I wasn’t included because of my probationary status), she felt she needed to know us more intimately before she attended her first meeting. She arranged a meeting at her house for that purpose. The Session When I arrived at the psychiatrist’s split level, the others were sitting in what you might call an early seventies conversation pit. Although the seating arrangement was designed to suggest a power equity, the psychiatrist was clearly in charge. “Many of us don’t know each well,” she began. “I think it might be productive to go
around the room and have each of us reveal something intimate about herself.” Then she poured us each a huge slug of wine. “I will start since the idea was mine,” she offered. Her brief revelation set the tone—the hallmark of embarrassingly intimate (and unwelcomed) information. She explained that she and her husband of many years had separated on a trial basis in the past year but had come back together several months ago. We had seen the husband leave the house moments earlier. There was little to distinguish him. A modest beer belly, a balding pate, and shoes that looked like my father’s Hush Puppies. Anyway, his first night back, after a celebratory dinner, the psychiatrist and her recently estranged husband headed to the bedroom. I’m trying to make it more romantic, but in her telling the whole evening sounded very lockstep. So when they began to make love (my word—she said “have intercourse”), she got a searing pain in her vagina. The pain was so great that they could not “complete the act.” When Laurie and I made eye contact, her pupils looked like they had been replaced by exclamation points. Where could this go next, or might we have to remain in her vagina? And there we remained. It turned out that the vaginal pain was not, as she had thought, her body telling her that she didn’t really want to get back with her husband but was the effect of early onset menopause and the subsequent thinning of the vaginal tissue. My sister’s best friend is British and uses a word I’d always wanted to find a use for. I had found it. I was gob-smacked. We continued around the room with smaller, safer confessions. A bikini shoplifted when a mother wouldn’t pay for anything but a one-piece, an infidelity with a best friend’s fiancé, a child’s misbehaving dog taken to the pound and the child told that it retired to a farm where it would have a blissful life chasing rabbits. Mine was a behavioral mistake. When my older son was in high school, his girlfriend came over to show both of us her strapless junior prom dress. When she changed back into her jeans, I asked her if I could try it on. I did and modeled it for both of them. I figured that the psychiatrist, if she was rating the stories,
would like mine best. It would give her plenty to chew on. The Alienist Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be. Meeting five and I was not in a church. If I was in a church, I was in the last pew waiting for the perfect moment to sneak out. If I was in a church, I would say to the stranger sitting next to me, “This choir is tuneless.” The Alienist discussion was held up by the late arrival of the psychiatrist. The arrival was dramatically late, an hour to be exact. She arrived with the meal she had picked up at the train station and ate it noisily while we watched. Even the knitter looked up. The psychiatrist, it turns out, was testy. She didn’t like the book much because, as she termed it, “it borders on genre.” The knitter was bothered not by the murder mystery at the book’s center but rather at the early appearance of Teddy Roosevelt at the novel’s beginning. “What are we to do with that?” she wondered as she clicked away. I was interested in the term “alienist,” which was applied to psychiatry when the field was young. What was its source? The psychiatrist was busy chewing and couldn’t be bothered to answer. By the meeting’s end I was planning my exit. The Robber Bride I didn’t show up for meeting six, thereby committing the cardinal book group sin—a noshow for the discussion of a book you’ve chosen. When I chose Atwood’s novel, it seemed kind of appropriate for this group as it centers on a small clique of women who struggle with malevolence and betrayal. Not a fair summary of the book and the Grimm fairy tale on which it is loosely based, but those were my thoughts before reading it. The night before group I called Laurie to tell her I will
UFM
issue32 / 11
prose be leaving. She was on her way out too. The psychiatrist sealed it for her. Then we talked about the book. Not Atwood at her best, we concurred, but an interesting look at friendships and toxicity, although we agreed, with some irritation, that the things that go wrong in the women’s lives (the things attributed to the malevolent Z.) seem to have to do with losing men. Not one of the feminist Atwood’s best books.
The e-mail was signed by every member, names listed alphabetically so as to avoid the impression of a ringleader.
Therapy Laurie went to the therapy session. I did not. Nor did I offer an excuse. Over coffee the morning after, she broke it down for me. The reputable therapist mentioned in the summons we received was no other than the Hush-Puppied, balding husband of the psychiatrist. After welcoming Quitting the group and introducing the value of group ther Laurie and I wrote separate e-mails to the apy, particularly for our group’s communication group. I didn’t read hers but mine went something difficulties, he promised a “healing journey” relike this: sulting in improved communication, insight, and trust. He then asked the psychologist to put away Dear Book Group members, her knitting. While I have enjoyed my time with When all were seated in the familiar conyou and have enjoyed being introduced to versation pit, he handed out brown paper lunch the books we have read together, I find that bags and Post-it Note-sized pieces of scrap paper. other obligations pull me away from this My friend feared a session in mask-making but no commitment. Thank you all for including me glue appeared, so she stayed in her seat. for the last several months. I wish you many “These, in case you are wondering, are years of happy reading. inside-outside bags.” My friend was imagining a sort of group All the best, hyperventilation that would require all to breathe into their bags in order to balance the carbon-di K. oxide-to-oxygen ratio, but soon markers and fur What I thought was a gentle bow-out cre- ther instructions were circulated. ated outrage. I assumed the silence for the first “On the outside of your bag,” Hush Puppy two days after sending the e-mail would be fol- continued, “you will record, in images or words, lowed by brief, individual notes offering less- the qualities you show to the world. On the pieces than-sincere niceties. The delay was followed in- of paper you place inside the bag, you will record stead by a group summons, not only to me but my your inner, hidden qualities.” quitter friend. “Oh no,” is all I could manage. “Outside of my bag I am fierce, well-read, Dear K. and L., and competent,” Laurie reported. “And I’m deep We write to express our dismay at both ly suspicious of knitters.” the act of quitting and the means by which you We are laughing at the funny/not funny have quit. In our opinions, both actions express nature of the activity. great cowardice on your parts. Because we are “Inside the bag I am intolerant, generous confused and troubled by your motivations and until I am no longer generous, and not good at bebecause we require closure, we have scheduled ing part of a community. Our friend the psychiaa group session with a respected therapist to trist is empathic. By her own declaration it is her explore the issues that are troubling the club. We primary quality. Hush Puppy’s head nodded when have scheduled the session for next Tuesday (our she held up her bag. Evidently he agrees. Oh, and regular meeting date) at 7 p.m. (our usual meetshe also has a great sense of humor. Largely uning time). S. has generously offered her house exercised, I suspect.” for the session. We look forward to seeing you Laurie said a graceful good bye at the end there.
12 /
issue32 UFM
of the therapy session. The knitter rolled her eyes and picked up her needles and resumed her work. After One year later, at the gym, I am at my locker trying to wrestle out of a particularly sweaty workout bra when I spot the psychiatrist. She is walking toward me and she is naked. She is strangely pink from head to toe, either from the exertion or her recent hot shower. She walks toward me with a sense of purpose that frightens me. I cross my arms in front of my chest defensively, but she closes in to offer me a big hug. “Great to see you,” she chirps, “it’s been too long.” I suppose I responded in kind. I can’t remember. She threw me completely off my guard. And then she walked away to another bay of lockers, even the backs of her knees blushing with exertion. Closure I am back in my leather reading chair, writing postcards. I’ve collected various sorts for years—some of them of old Route 66 hotels, many of them from museums, and some from state fairs around the country. Five of my favorites are from a railroad hotel in Winslow, Arizona. I stayed there once when applying for a prison job that I did not get. It was an odd and menacing trip. The hotel had been recently taken over by a young couple, and because only half the rooms had been renovated, it was close to empty. The gardeners were overly friendly. Menacingly so. I didn’t sleep during the couple of nights I was there, so I often wandered the hallways. The owner’s wife was a visual artist who painted portraits of the Presidents’ wives in something other than an official mode. In Jackie’s portrait she is holding the king of hearts. The king’s face has been replaced by JFK’s. She is wearing her pink assassination suit. A bullet has shot the card in half. She looks surprised. Jan Pierce, Franklin’s wife, has no playing card but is wandering the second floor of the White House, where she remained for two years after her second child’s death. She is carrying a box filled with blond locks from a child’s curly
head of hair. Mary Todd Lincoln is painted holding a séance in the Oval Office. Louisa Adams is playing the harp, and at her feet is a box of the silkworms she so enjoyed raising. Helen Taft is driving a car and smoking. I’ve never known quite what to make of the paintings and loved them more for that. I’m not sure why I am willing to let go of the First Ladies or why I am sending them to the women of the book group, but that is what I am doing. On each card I have written the same message: “These women. What are we to make of them?” Then “Happy Reading.” I am not signing the cards nor am I offering a return address, which might signal the desire for a response. I am simply stamping and sending. Then I am picking up an unread novel, turning its crisp pages, and finally resuming my work.
UFM
issue32 / 13
LUNCH IN THE COURTYARD Michael Cohen
14 /
issue32 UFM
prose Bogged down in a swale of strange and arcane legal words during the law-school day, I suffer the same dream over and over at night. I am sitting at a long, planked table in one of Georgetown Law’s dim nineteenth-century lecture halls, surrounded by a mass of suits, sport jackets, and ties. The bald head of Finckel, the torts professor, orders me to my feet to brief a case. “Mr. Oberman,” he says, “give me Baker v. US Can Company.” The room is quiet and anxious. My chair creaks as I rise and attempt to open my mouth, but I am unable to speak. My lips are stuck together. I try to pry them apart with my fingers and by blowing air out, but my upper lip breaks off in my hand like a chip of pottery. Noises like a bleating sheep come out of me in wet bubbles. With no upper lip, I have no consonants. There is laughter from the mass of students as blood spews from my gashed mouth onto my notes and my Black’s Law Dictionary. I awake and feel my face with damp hands. All the pieces have miraculously reassembled. And there’s no blood. My smokes sit on top of my Black’s Law Dictionary on the floor next to my bed. I light a cigarette and sit back against my pillow. I hear the first of the morning’s jet airplanes bolt out of National Airport, heading out of the District of Columbia, the dwindling yowl of their engines leaving me behind. I would rather book a ticket out. I would rather rocket out on any of those jets tearing out to anywhere, but I have no idea where I would go. *** I grew up working in my father’s drycleaning plant and studying the customers’ fine clothes: suits, coats, and slacks of lustered wool and cashmere; tawny plaids; thickened flannel and twill; sharply creased tweeds and worsteds; shirts cut from pure white and regal blue pinpoint oxford cloth; ties of creamy silk in designs of swirling paisleys, patterned foulards, and regimental stripes. The shop had a poster: “Clothes Make the Man.” I believe this to be true. Clothes show a person’s walk in life, forecast character. No one particular garment carries the whole message. It is the ensemble that warms me or warns me. I don’t wait and watch for behavior.
I decided years ago that I had a choice; I could clean the clothes, or I could wear the clothes. It was an easy choice. Now I’m at Georgetown Law. *** It is springtime in the District of Columbia. Finals are coming, and the new body counts from Vietnam are reported in the Washington Post. We, the Americans, are winning the bodycount war, and my draft board has requested my grades from school. If I fail finals, I will be wearing an olive-green uniform in Southeast Asia. It is much safer at Georgetown Law. Suits, sport jackets, and ties are safer than jungle khaki. At noon after contracts class, I weave my way through the mobbed law-building hallway, past the six-foot-high painting of Thomas More in the foyer near the door. I can feel Thomas More’s painted eyes follow me out of the granite and terra-cotta entrance as if he disapproves of my departure from class and study. But I want a smoke and some lunch before the afternoon’s class on criminal law. I walk around the derelicts sleeping on a hot-air grate in the sidewalk by the school’s front door. The exhaust from the law building is discharged there and heats the bodies stretched over the metal bars. The sleepers give off the aroma of dirt and offal blended with urine, the stench of foreign gutters. Everybody calls the hot-air grate “The Georgetown Hilton.” Bodies lie across it all day and all night. I carry my Black’s Law Dictionary next to my briefcase as I walk around the grate and the bodies. Black’s is too bulky to fit inside the briefcase, but someone might steal it if I leave it in the law building. Black’s Law Dictionary is dense and stout and smells like authority. The inside page claims that Black’s contains one hundred thousand words and phrases, accompanied by common-law interpretations as well as Latin roots and Anglo-Saxon pronunciations. The pages are thin as phyllo dough; they stick together, making it hard to read. “Oberman, you can’t go wrong,” Sam Lerner, the bookstore owner, had said. “The law is words. And they’re all in there, all of them.” I don’t know the law, and I don’t know the words. So I bought the Black’s Dictionary from
Sam. It is concrete heavy, the Black’s; I carried the book out of Lerner’s in both arms. I bring it to class every day, where it sits on the wooden, planked lecture-hall tables. I confess; I never open it. *** I eat lunch with two of my torts classmates, John and Larry, a couple of Ivy League grads. We sit on the grass lawn of the Court of Military Appeals across the street from the law building. The lawn is separated from E Street by a thick boxwood hedge and a row of cherry trees. The scent of cherry-tree blossoms seems to cover up the reek of car exhaust from E Street traffic. I see two marines in dress blues posted at the doors of the courthouse. Guarding the courthouse is better duty than Vietnam. Larry and I carry sack lunches. John purchased a chicken-salad sandwich from the lunchroom automat. I use my Black’s Dictionary as a place mat. Larry has an open New York Times in front of his face. “General Westmoreland announced that the Viet Cong body count of the past week exceeds the number for the previous month,” Larry reads. “Hooray for us. Where did I put my Pepsi?” Larry wants to be an actor, but he needs to stay in law school to avoid the draft. Sometimes in the afternoon, Larry reads the Times’ antiwar editorials and the military obituaries with a loud New York honk in the anteroom of the library. Larry graduated from Dartmouth. He is in blue today: blue shirt, a blue blazer—threadbare on the arms—and a striped tie, which is soiled at the knot from too much handling. “As long as we’re out of ’Nam in two years,” John says, “odds are my board won’t take me.” John’s clothes are leftovers from his undergraduate eating club days: the button-down shirt with his initials on the cuff is frayed at the neck. He sits on his sports coat; his club tie has brown gravy spilled on it. John went to Brown; he wears the blotched tie with pride. Larry and John wear worn-out Bass Weejuns but no socks. My socks are black ones, nylon and cotton blend. I graduated from Colorado State University.
UFM
issue32 / 15
prose A jet airplane rips through the sunny sky. It is a 727 banking and rolling over the Potomac River away from National Airport. I could be out of here on one of those jets, out of DC, away from torts, Finckel, and finals. But I don’t know what I would tell my draft board. John takes my sack lunch, peers into the bag, and wrinkles his nose. “Another stale-fish special from Oberman.” I pull the bag back. “Hands off, John. None for you.” John unwraps his flattened sandwich, removes the gum from his mouth, and bites off a wad of chicken salad and bread. He talks with his mouth full. “I wouldn’t touch your crap, Oberman,” John says. “Tuna makes me upchuck.” Larry looks at John. “No napkins?” he says. “Talking while eating? I think we’ve given up on manners.” “Shove it up your ass, Larry.” John’s words pass through a spray of chicken salad. Bantering with Larry and John—these two carelessly elegant, sockless ruffians with their frayed cuffs embroidered with initials, silk ties with food stains, and weary, worn-down, wine-colored loafers—makes my muscles unbind, makes my breathing slow down. Now I can take a bite of my sandwich. *** A sleeper lies nearby on his side, his back to us underneath the courtyard’s boxwood hedge. He is also sockless, and his cotton pants have a mahogany stain spreading across the seat like a Rorschach test. I can hear his snoring as we eat. Larry waves his sandwich at the sleeper and says, “Another guy who couldn’t stay awake in torts.” “Doesn’t need to be awake,” John says, talking and eating at the same time. “He’s got last year’s finals.” We laugh. Rumor has it that someone garnered copies of the exams from last spring and is hawking them to the highest bidder. John takes out a Marlboro and holds it between his teeth as he lights up. He lays his silver Brown lighter on my Black’s Dictionary. The lighter is engraved with crossed swords on a
16 /
issue32 UFM
shield of polished metal. The sleeper wakes up, maybe from our laughing or from the smell of tobacco. I watch him hoist himself to his feet and shuffle toward us. “Hey, what about a smoke?” he says. “Get lost, creep,” John says. “Not so fast, John,” Larry says. His eyes gleam with opportunity. “This could be interesting.” Sitting cross-legged on the grass, Larry waves at the sleeper. “You. Come here.” The sleeper is slow to hear that the voice addressing him has changed from John to Larry. He walks around to Larry and stands over him. “What’s up?” he asks. “I’ll make you a deal, friend,” Larry says. “I’ll give you a smoke if you’ll tell me a little about yourself.” “Whaddya mean?” “You know—where you’re from, what you’re doing here. Nothing terribly personal.” The man has skin like a brown grocery bag, and his teeth are yellow. He smells like a foreign gutter, like the Georgetown Hilton. “Like, what’s your name?” Larry smiles now, sticking out his hand. “My name’s Larry.” The man looks long at Larry and then takes his hand, slowly and deliberately. “The name’s Elbow,” he says. “Elbow? Elbow?” Larry asks. “What kind of a name is Elbow? I mean, how do you spell it?” John starts to laugh. I have stopped eating; the smell of foreign gutters is too strong. “You spell it just the way it sounds.” Elbow’s words crackle as if he were chewing Rice Krispies and talking at the same time. “So,” Larry says, “are you from around here?” The man shakes his head slowly, as if he has pain when he moves. “Nope, and it doesn’t sound like you’re from around here, either!” he says, jabbing a bony index finger at Larry. “Ah,” says Larry, falling backward as if struck by a spear, “my ‘cultcha’ has given me away.” Larry is on a roll. I light a cigarette with John’s lighter and hope that the smoke will cover up the foreign gut-
ters. I move Black’s Dictionary out from under my lunch bag. “Mr. Elbow,” Larry says, “if I may call you that, do you have a family?” “I do,” Elbow says, his hair sticking up on one side as if there is a cyclone blowing in the courtyard. “Where are they?” “Down in m’ home.” “Where’s that?” “In Ashford. Ashford, North Carolina.” Elbow points the wrong way; he points north, toward Maryland. “Have kids?” “Yup.” He grins. “Three of them: two girls and a boy. Now what about that cigarette?” “Yes, what about the cigarette, John?” Larry is being the ring impresario. John tosses over the Marlboro pack. Larry takes one out and extends it to Elbow. “How about a couple for my buddies?” Elbow says. Larry feigns surprise and disappointment. “Mr. Elbow, we—you and I—had no arrangement for additional smokes. You’re renegotiating our deal. What do we do about this? What about a tuna-fish sandwich?” I snatch my sack away from Larry’s hands. “No way,” Elbow says. “Not good for ya.” He puts the Marlboro in his mouth. “Somebody gotta light?” “Here.” Larry throws over John’s silver lighter. “Gimme that back, asshole,” John says to Larry. “Too late, my boy,” Larry says. “Need help in the operation, Elbow?” Elbow pops open the lid, and the lighter ignites like a blowtorch. “This is something,” Elbow says, squinting through the smoke as the sun reflects off the silver lighter. The blend of Elbow’s breath and smoke swirls around me like a dust devil on a newly plowed field. “Okay. Now let’s have the lighter back, buddy,” says John. Elbow hands it over. “Thanks.” “Thanks for nothing,” John says as he
grabs the lighter from Elbow. “Mr. Elbow,” Larry says, “I have a new proposition for your consideration, and possibly I can offer some further benefits.” “Money,” Elbow says. “You got some change for me?” “I was thinking about the full pack of cigarettes, Mr. Elbow. No money.” Elbow now is hunkered down; the rubber is returning to his skin, and his balance is improving. He seems to enjoy the banter too. “What for?” he says. “Elbow,” Larry says—dropping the “mister”— “Elbow, I don’t understand. You have a wife, a family, children of your seed, a wonderful place you can call home. Why are you here in the District of Columbia, sleeping in the grass and dew of the justice system, somewhat unclean and uncomfortable?” Elbow rises halfway up. He stares at Larry’s smile, as if he senses the possibility of a blow from his interrogator. “Because,” Elbow says with emphasis. He says it again. “Because.” “Because, why?” Larry asks. “Because,” Elbow repeats loudly and slowly, incredulous at the question and the accumulated impertinence of the questioner. Then he straightens up and speaks over the noise of cars going by on E Street. “Because I’m a drunk,” he says and stands there. Larry and John are silent. I find myself unable to answer Larry’s question, which is now saturating the air around me: Why am I here? Larry breaks the silence.
“I’m done with this.” He rises without acknowledging Elbow, who stands next to him. “Larry, you’ve left your lunch crap,” I say. “You clean it up, Oberman,” Larry says over his shoulder as he walks out of the courtyard. Elbow says, “What about my smokes?” There are grass patches on my pants from sitting on the lawn. Soiled, I think. Maybe stained forever. I pick up Black’s Dictionary. “Here, take this,” I say, handing Elbow the Black’s. “You can sell it to the bookstore owner over on the corner.” I point to Sam Lerner’s bookstore across from the law school. “Come on, Oberman,” John says. “Don’t kid the guy around.” “I’m not,” I say. “This book is a waste, dead weight. I’m just lightening up.” “That book’s a ticket to jail,” Elbow says. “I walk in the store with that, and the book guy, he calls the cops.” “See, Oberman,” says John, “this guy is better equipped to make it around here than you are.” He is right. Elbow knows that anyone with Black’s in their hands looks like a phony. I would get off so easily by giving Black’s to Elbow, but he is way too smart to take it. Maybe tossing the Black’s in the rubbish bin by the courtyard gate would be a start. And buying a plane ticket out of here. Then the draft board. One step at a time. hears her rummaging. “The comfort kit’s out on the floor for some reason, and I cannot find the bottle. I don’t understand—”
UFM
issue32 / 17
POETRY
18 /
issue32 UFM
Dr.Juanita Kirton
BLUE MOTORCYCLE On the winds of expectation twist the wrist bottomless bass awaken Canadian geese calling the chorus complete Leaping on black asphalt through tented autumn canopies seated behind my bug shield grasp the bars Blue obeys and nudges forward grips the curves squeezes against the ridge switchbacks float by Securely she takes the unknown path slow motion is not her devotion we have a need for speed
At the bend of the wind vulnerable against nature I reach in, to see out my wings exposed to the all Some say follow, stay safe but my calling sits in the surprise the unexpected journey bracing my wings to fly Without fear riding past possibilities scenes etched on optic nerve words to outlast these bones Promise to memorize unbridle force agitating under my butt slaps of wind against my cheeks
UFM
issue32 / 19
Dr.Juanita Kirton
SMALL GLIMPSES
Mother gripped the old black cast iron handle with ease she spoons the batter hitting the oil the entrance of flour is announced Bakes for snack, puffy and hot savory with sugar and spice mommy fries them nice Kitchen aromas crowded three corners one reeks of shadows nobody sees, no one hears concealed, worn under the family mask upside down, painted clown Bakes keep coming, feeding and nurturing the mother continues her ritual blinded by fear what is buried under the pan? four mouths to sustain her hunger left behind Her back carries the load family secrets in her womb slow death from neglect and guilt dragged down by racism and bigotry complicated by dreams unfulfilled Mother washes the clothes but the stain persist reminder of What the
Why left unspoken
she died, not knowing
20 /
issue32 UFM
TABLE Delivery came on the only table
The table gutted, stained with family
serrated splinters etched into mommas fleshly thighs
solid from base to top
blood poured in front and rear
structured from oak and pine
dragging her insides out
branch legs 6 inches thick
feet first
focal point, grounded in mud
BORN Sunday’s an altar, get saved, pray and eat My head is small, my limbs are long
mother chops, bakes and washes
we lay together tethered in the umbilical cord
a birthing table, hospital and deathbed
leaking afterbirth
hammered and battered, spit and fucked on
separated with his butchering knife
sacred possession, ownership
FREE Liberation blew in one December Left breast is mine
dug up from the dirt floor
close to her heart
upside down, each held a leg
she empties the right
we carry all
in master’s boy
one blanket, 2-pots, a shirt, a skirt
my belly left half empty BONDAGE
The table, our suitcase, shelter from rain our first fire in FREEDOM
UFM
issue32 / 21
Dan Pinkerton
CORPORATE BANJO This year the company swarmed with bow ties and beards. Last year it was white bucks and skinny ties. We no longer resembled office employees but rather members of a bluegrass outfit. I was tasked with authoring reports, gussying up raw data with stylish neckwear and face-hair. I liked to pretend I was cooking a bisque and the main ingredient was nonsense. Make it pop, my boss insisted. I could still see the cat video open on his browser. The cats kept him in hysterics, he and his Mercedes convertible, his vanity plates. We liked to play at hostile takeovers. For us it was like a rumpus room game of D&D. Rumpus room M&E. My boss was the dungeon master for some rumpus room D&D, also S&M. Our competitors would’ve laughed tear-inducing belly-laughs, the kind that afterward cause loud sighs. The world needs more pie graphs, says the banjoist. Love-starved starlets in Hollywood bungalows need more nonsense, says Jim Morrison, the original Lizard King,
22 /
issue32 UFM
stroking his beard. I will leave a trail of data to mark my way out of the forest. Not many children’s stories end these days with cannibal witches being burnt alive. To our detriment, I say. A cat passes by with a lizard in its mouth. Better to be the Lizard King than the Sofa King, say I. Every day I open the door to my office and pretend I’ve arrived there by mistake while searching for the bathroom. Beards are filthier than toilet seats, they say. They’re opening another coffee shop on Figaro, by the way. I use my rewards card for the umpteenth time. Free dulcimer with every umpteenth coffee. Swallowed by my office like a half-caff venti, a witch-eating oven. Hard to pretend I’m a stranger when the guard greets me by name. He’s taken it to a whole new level: beard, bowtie, chambray shirt, like the host of a weekend show on public TV. Copper pipes, plaster and lathe. This one’s a real fixer-upper. I stoke the fire, don my dungeon master robes, put on some Soft Parade, straighten my bow tie, feed my boss to the cat.
THE COSTUME
As he reclined, the wind half-heartedly turned the pages of his book. The wind knew everything already. It indulged in this mimicry merely to recall the ancient grappling in mucilaginous caves. The wind required such reminders so it would not wash mankind from the face of the world like blood from a rock. The book lay in the grass, the man in his hammock. He battled sleep, sensing it ran counter to his interests, but it was as though the breeze had slipped a torpor over him without his noticing, a transparent apron and mask, as though in this costume he might rehearse for something else, a final recital. The screen door snapped to. Waking, he realized that nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake. Everything wore the costume and if you slipped off the apron, the naked bones gleamed underneath with such vibrancy you hastened to re-clothe what had been laid bare.
UFM
issue32 / 23
Dan Pinkerton
COUNTING CALORIES
Food couldn’t merely be eaten these days. It must first be catalogued, quantified, examined. The supermarket had become the new school, hunger the fashionable science. Butchers in blood-smeared smocks prepared to defend dissertations, which made for much distemper. There was some stern shushing of the babies who rode like spoiled princes on palanquins of baked goods, but their caterwauling was mouse-sized next to the racket made by the customer in the freezer aisle unhinged by competing brands of microwave snow peas. Lately it seemed there was one in every store, so inept a shopper, so basely and shamefully stymied he suffered the breakdown that led to a strict new diet of pills in paper cups.
24 /
issue32 UFM
bios
UFM
issue32 / 25
Victoria Anderson is a former writing program director at Loyola University Chicago, and received her doctorate in American Literature with a Creative Writing concentration from Binghamton University, New York. She has published three books of poetry: This Country or That (Mid-America Press), Vorticity (MAMMOTH Books), and The Hour Box (Kelsay Books). She’s a three-time
recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from Illinois Arts Council, and had residencies at Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Michael Cohen’s short fiction work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, American Writers Review, FRiGG,
Furious Gazelle, Penmen Review, Streetlight Magazine, and STORGY magazines. His short story “The Cantor’s Window,” was
acknowledged as a Shortlist Winner Nominee in Adelaide Literary Magazine’s 2018 “Voices Literary Award for Short Stories” and
was included in the 2018 Literary Voices Anthology published this February. In 2017 he published his first novel, Rivertown Heroes.
Dr. Juanita Kirton earned a MFA from Goddard College and is on the editorial staff at Clockhouse Literary Journal; published in several anthologies, Juanita works for Pennsylvania Dept. of Education and a US Army Veteran. She resides in with her spouse, PA. Besides writing, Juanita enjoys touring on her motorcycle.
Dan Pinkerton lives in Urbandale, Iowa. His work has appeared in Cutbank, Barrow Street, Subtropics, Boston Review, Indiana Review and Quarterly West.
26 /
issue32 UFM
STAY DRY. UFM
issue32 / 27