FALL 2013 // ISSUE 1
Nine Mile is an online magazine of literature and art. Our mission is to publish the best writing and artwork from across the country, with a special focus on Central New York. The magazine will be digitally published twice a year in the Spring and Fall. We take the name of the magazine from a local waterway, Nine Mile Creek, formed by glaciers about 14,000 years ago. The creek runs 25 miles from Otisco Lake, in the town of Marcellus, through Camillus and into Onondaga Lake in the Town of Geddes. Its watershed covers 10 towns in Onondaga County and two in Cortland County. The creek has different elevations, different turns, different speeds. It has had a long and varied history. The magazine is also varied, with different writings and arts coming together to form a cohesive whole. Our views are broad and we’re excited to be able to provide publication and appreciation to our fellow creative types. Nine Mile is a labor of love. We are currently not supported by outside financial sources. At this time we are not able to offer compensation to published submissions other than the ability to ‘get your name out there.’
EDITOR: ART EDITOR:
Bob Herz Whitney Daniels
DESIGN:
WRKDesigns, wrkdesigns.com
COVER ART:
Jamie Ashlaw, “Super Service”
Copyright © 2013 by Nine Mile Magazine. Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner. Send submission inquires to: info@ninemile.org ninemile.org
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Pamela Stewart When Elbow Patches The Shallows The Donkey It’s Men
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Michael Burkard Gaslight exchange
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Howard Bragman Repercussions Day Camp Iroquois
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Frank Cetera In A Grey Dearth
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Walt Shepperd I Dreamt I Took a Two Week Vacation in an Audrey Hepburn Movie A Rainy Day is Like Looking for Work
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Cindy Day Sunny Was Here
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Elinor Cramer Lee Goes to Work Spooky at My Doorstep
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CONTENTS
POETRY
Gail Peck Birthplace They Past Tense Writing My Mother’s Obit Offering
FEATURES 4 56
The Premier of nine mile One From Then: James Tate
ART 9
Jamie Ashlaw Painting / Mixed Media
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Rebecca Knoll Painting / Mixed Media
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Kari O’Mara Photography
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Stephen Kuusisto In the Cards
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Laurel Butkins Photography
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Ian Randall Wilson Bitter Carrots Losing Friends The Rules of Accurate Choice and Prudent Restraint The Physics of Stuff Iron Mike in Three
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C J Hodge Painting / Mixed Media
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Maureen Foster Painting / Mixed Media
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THE PREMIER OF NINE MILE Welcome to the premier issue of Nine Mile Magazine. As editors we intend to publish the best of those things that we like, without necessarily adhering to any particular ideology of writing, composing, or creating. The magazine will be open to all, but will have a special focus on Central New York, where we live, and where Nine Mile Creek has its home. The creek is long and winding, sampling, if you will, many different earths and locations. We intend for the magazine to be like that also. We hope you enjoy this issue. We have worked hard on it, and on our online presence, and will soon have a reading featuring many of the poets in this issue.
– Bob Herz, Editor – Whitney Daniels, Art Editor
ninemile.org
@9MileMag
facebook.com/NineMileMagazine 4
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By way of background, we both have had some history in editing and publishing various types of publications. Here’s a bit more about us:
ABOUT Bob Herz Bob Herz was editor of Seneca Review as well as the Hobart & William Smith book series, which published essays by Donald Hall, reprinted Robert Bly’s The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, and Different Fleshes by Albert Goldbarth. Mr. Herz also ran his own small press, W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons, which published such poets as David St. John, Jim Cervantes, Michael Burkard, and others. The Hoffstadt press has just been revived, with the publication of Poems for Lorca by Walt Shepperd (first run sold out), and will shortly issue Some Time in the Winter, by Michael Burkard.
ABOUT Whitney Daniels Whitney Daniels is the owner of a graphic design studio, WRKDesigns and has designed such publications as Poems for Lorca by Walt Shepperd and Welding and Gases Today quarterly trade magazine. She fills a variety of different roles by being a graphic designer, surface pattern designer, crafter, and all around creative chick. As the current NOTES Editor and member of the Junior League of Syracuse, she designs and publishes the monthly newsletter in both print and online formats. She is also a member of the Near Westside Initiative Business Association, Syracuse First, Phi Sigma Sigma and is working on becoming certified as a “Women’s Business Enterprise.”
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Pamela Stewart
When Elbow Patches She often thought if she ran into him she’d pretend not to be her. This morning when she shook the carton of orange juice before pouring it out, she could feel her belly shake too – left to right. His emails are curmudgeonly. Once he had captivated her – fair-haired, brown-eyed boy in his green corduroy jacket back when elbow patches were dashing. His energy had been all nerves. She adored him. They shared almost nothing -- a couple of dates in the City during school breaks and one evening in bed hushed in the apartment where, in the next room, his famous father snored. Her husband snores. In the mirror her face is thick, splotched. She still has a nice grin. She knows he’s bald now. He was always designed to be bald, that slight grouchiness and shoulder stoop. She’s certain he’s invested well. How he spends his time doesn’t much interest her. Once he complained about some too-smart Asian boy beating him at chess. When she sees his name in the inbox, it’s a though someone’s handing her a cookie, or a ripe scented pear. She never wants to see him. She never wants him to set eyes on her again.
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The Shallows dog eared dusty door window curve Mouse in the skirting board cold trees coffee mug those hours to find your face skitter & pause Marilyn, don’t send your bare skin into that noisy room so crazy & soft let the Mouse sit alone with the mouse cha cha into the corner people are talking loud people are talking seriously right here but across the hall a cough and some laughter cha cha away, Sweetheart, because the bossy tune & beat are taking over and slashing the room to ribbons of cash Mouse, sleep while you can -love stays silky dreaming
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The Donkey doesn’t know sand from gold. If rough sand or golden dust fills up his ears he’ll twist his neck, shake his head. A donkey’s ears are long and deep. They catch the footfall of that beast beyond the hill. No handsome donkey’s ears decide if the sound of friend, or breath of foe, is sand or gold. It’s a long time tossing of the head before the donkey isn’t deaf and his ears lift free. But when he brays he cannot lie: from ear to tail he knows how nothing living thrives on sand or gold.
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It’s Men who speak of summer dresses: a lacy strap. crinkle, slink, & drape. The skirt which wraps against smooth legs in wind, the dip of skin, shine on the burnished shoulder. It’s men who grow the roses, stripes or dotted-Swiss to a population of memories bleeding into bar talk, lyric and dream. She’ll never know that what crumpled to the floor one humid night, her brush smoothing long hair and those white sandals kicked off so carelessly would be the thought retrieved while sitting on summer’s evening porch.
ABOUT Pamela Stewart Pamela Stewart (Jody) lives on a farm in western Massachusetts with 7 dogs and some others. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost Farm, Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010. Once she tidies up, she expects to arrange a small and delightful gathering of letters between the late poet Lee McCarthy and Guy Davenport. 8
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Jamie ashlaw
Wines and Liquors Acrylic and oil on panel 48” x 12” Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Palace Theater III Acrylic and oil on panel 11.5” x 11.5”
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Fanelli Cafe Acrylic and oil on panel 22” x 44” Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Royal Motel Acrylic and oil on panel 26” x 45”
ABOUT Jamie Ashlaw Jamie Ashlaw was born in Carthage, a small town in upstate New York. Born of Lebanese heritage, Jamie began making art at an early age, winning his first contest in 4th grade. His first visit to a museum happened at the age of 16. While living in Bogota, Colombia for the summer, Jamie was brought to the Fernando Botero Museum. After that summer, he would never see the world the same way again. After high school, he majored in painting and drawing at the University of Oswego before moving to New York City. Shifting between art and theater, Jamie began working as a gallery assistant at the CFM Gallery where he learned a thing or two about the NYC art scene. Soon came another move, this time to Chicago in order to study illustration at the Columbia College of the Fine Arts. During this time, 12
Jamie worked as a custom sign maker, an experience that would greatly influence his current series. After his return to upstate New York for graduate work, Jamie spent a semester in New Zealand teaching and traveling, forever changed by the landscape and the Maori culture. Jamie presently lives in Syracuse, NY, where he makes and teaches art. Presently, his work can be seen at the Delavan Art Gallery. Jamie Ashlaw explores the design of classic American signage. His images are inspired by neon tubes, bright colors and quirky shapes. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
Super Service Acrylic and oil on panel 36” x 24”
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Michael Burkard
Gaslight
– for Isaac Babel
I had to do all that because she always felt cold, because my books were extinguished by a flood of milk. I endured the loud whip and told the mortar, go in peace. Everyone wants a feeding; —imagine, an axe proposes to the window, the vowels of the moon in this same place! September, 1920: “the fog bled. The barn temporarily drooped.” Our attendants: a fat professor who refuses to remove his coat, a girl student making drawings of the stomach. Marius, water blackens the metaphor. You would better confuse the heart with blood. Such passages are rare . . . the blood large, decent; flowing behind the window. The occasion for this is your first pair of glasses.
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exchange how many times had he hunted for the right singer of “Careless Love” - there were over two hundred and some versions of the song all of course by different singers - he thought of sending the tape he had of the version he had to a very famous writer or at least one who was doing very well and getting relatively more famous as each passing month went by - the two of them used to exchange tapes once in a great while or was it that he had simply made tapes of different blues and sent them to the famous writer - no telling now whom he could send what to - snow is falling again out of season and there really are thieves who can keep you up all night like a willingness to give up or just start singing yourself
ABOUT Michael Burkard Michael Burkard teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Syracuse University and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has received prizes from The American Poetry Review and the Pushcart Press. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His books of poems include The Fires They Kept (Metro Book Co., 1986), My Secret Boat (WW. Norton, 1990), and Entire Dilemma (Sarabande, 1998). He lives in Syracuse, New York. The poem “Gaslight” is from the book Some Time in the Winter, which will be published by W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons Press in January.
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Howard Bragman
Repercussions At Nottingham High School My history teach, Frances Durkin Sent me down to Joseph Dixon, vice principal, with a note saying: Howard is Jack the Ripper in Disguise I stopped off at the a-v room For the rest of the period Giving the note to Steve Muller The next day Dixon came up Behind me And perpetrated a judo chop on the Back of my neck The next day Durkin brought her henchman to class saying: “You better watch yourself He’s my bodyguard” The next day Davis gave me a ride Turning to Judy Sachs saying: “You better watch out for Howard He’s liable to drill you full of holes” Miss McBurnie used to give me dirty looks Miss Gates downgraded me twenty points saying “Your other grades weren’t that high
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Day Camp Iroquois When I was a little shaver Simon Samuel sent me to DCI Larry Share was a switchhitter So I thought I would give it a hand Our counselor yelled and screamed at me Until wracked in tears I batted right handed I had loaned my McGregor glove To Emanuel Johnson You probably know where this is going I wacked the ball right to him Abuse continues at an early age
ABOUT Howard Bragman I am a 70 year old male who has spent most of my life in ‘Cuse. I went through the upper east side school system including Charles Andrews Elementary, T. Aaron Levy Jr. High, and William Nottingham High Schools. I was Bar Mitzvahed and Confirmed at Temple Society of Concord. Although I only have a year of college credits at SU, UC I think I would have done better if teachers had taught me how to study each course. I also have an Exec Sec degree from CCBI business school although my shorthand was sparse. I was also in the military although I am not really a spit polish kind of guy. To relive my life I believe I would have focused on Team USA The Olympics, performance arts, and veterinary medicine. My poems reflect a more realistic look Nine Mile • Fall 2013
back at my life, i.e. how I wish I had looked at many events that have affected me personally. Although I have been accused of stringing words together by Pat and Mike at Happy Endings Cake and Coffee House, I prefer to think I string poetically. Although I sometimes try to make my audiences giggle, according to Georgia I always want to make them think. Sometimes, I even write innocuously but that merely reflects my mood at the time. Although I am a pretty good speller and even made it through the first round of the local tryouts for the national spelling bee, I missed ‘inaugurate’ by inserting two n’s. It’s interesting how something like that stays with me. I could swear that I read two n’s in a comic book. There was a psych at SU who taught with comic books, but I digress (heh). That always makes Georgia giggle. 17
Rebecca Knoll
A Garland for Girls Watercolor and pencil on book page
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He Artfully Led The Conversation Watercolor and pencil on book page Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Secrets Watercolor and pencil on book page
ABOUT Rebecca Knoll Rebecca Knoll received her Associate of Science Degree in Civil Engineering Technology with Architectural Specialization from Alfred State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Interior Architecture from the University of Houston. She has been a practicing Interior Architect since 1980 in Houston, TX and Bal20
timore, MD. Earlier works translate craft, historically associated with the “feminine arts” — weaving, quilting, sewing — into multi-media pieces mostly of recycled paper, fiber, metal and found objects. Her current work is a watercolor exploration of jewels and verbiage utilizing recycled book pages. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
Money Cannot Buy Refinement of Nature Watercolor and pencil on book page Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Frank Cetera
In A Grey Dearth Famished I have been roaming; among this desert of grey dearth. The objects rising before me hold no sufficiency without being propped up by the labor of millions, and give so little in return. My brother called today, he needs surgery again for his chronic condition, but there is no insurance; and there was no wisdom. And thus we are here. I always hoped that we would each learn from our mothers, each of us on this planet; but our mothers’ milk has been poisoned and dried up by the econocrats. Sand not under foot, yet barren; mother gathering for her child finds naught but plastic wraps and soft drink caps. The groundcover not of sweet herbs but of asphalt dark and sour (yet a sweet smell that harkens to childhood when it pours steaming hot from its beast of burden). Heat waves rising in this desert, from the heated blackness; mother searches for berries but finds naught but waves of nauseous rot and human lack of thought. The understory not of pregnant bushes of juice but of poles of metal and barriers of concrete and signs for sale. Yet I see in a distance, family, they are working the field, they are working the lot, they are surrounded by looks of disdain, and sneers of pain. How dare they; who do they; never will they overcome our lords of pleasure for lords of simple life. Mother clambers upon a bench and reaches for a fruit; yet the elm is in death woes and produces nothing to eat. The awnings and the telephone wires, provide our shade and our sweet
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onslaught of entertainment; as we blind ourselves to our true human needs. A canopy which mother strains her neck towards; longing for the sunlight to nourish her crops; for clean water to fall on her dwelling and slack the thirst of her children; for the simple aspects of life to show themselves through her; not the steel and glass of man-made gods to look down upon us all, oh almighty! You can always look down upon us, we will always be here; working for our release and our sufficiency and when you are locked in your boxes and the energy, only, of our sister sun warms down over us all; we will welcome the overlords to join in with us and forgive thee for they ransacking of our wisdom; which you will learn can never be taken from our thousands of years of being on this Earth. And as the ground is released from its overlords of weight and pressure, new life can begin; as we reach into our/ancestor’s bag of tricks; as we must rely on some begrudged use of our masters’ tools to overcome our masters’ rules. Family is harvesting peas and carrots from this opening in the canopy. Singing can be heard in the distance and in the eves. Sister is healthy from sweat and vegetables; the surgeons (as the soldiers) now turn to the plows.
ABOUT Frank Cetera Ecosocialist, Permaculture Activist, Practice Artist, and Green Party Organizer Frank Raymond Cetera conjures up prefigurative visions of a possible regenerative future that may result if the destruction from unfettered Capitalism continues on its way. There is no blatant utopia in this current society or waiting for us in tomorrow’s, there is only the future we make, by organizing, educating, and restructuring, before it’s too late. We don’t have to wait for a barren planet to recognize our limitations, our potentialities, and our connections to each other and the natural world, we only have to have the courage to look at and into ourselves, and change today. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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WALT SHEPPERD
I Dreamt I Took a Two Week Vacation in an Audrey Hepburn Movie I never wanted birthdays and Christmas and mother’s day to be what now it seems they must become, excuses for remembering that time is now a luxury. We build new worlds and gather things that patch the strands that chafe our shells that brace our memories into barricades that must stand by themselves, for time is now a luxury. The things we gather gather dust the barricades won’t stand a charge the boxes burn the seeds grow mold the papers crumble in the light, and love becomes the luxury.
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A Rainy Day is Like Looking for Work A rainy day is like looking for work passing grey merged faces like waste passed unconsciously concentrating on the captions in PEOPLE Magazine faces passing grey promising uncertain futures telling people I can get my own coffee do my own typing answer my own phone to whatever harassment and I’m sorry this shreds your job description but here’s a chance to be creative what was it you wanted to do with your life reflected in a resume read by some remarking it looks like you have a hard time holding a fob. Yesterday the sun remembered the birds sang early the dark came late for one psychic moment a universe in cosmic balance and me looking for work.
ABOUT Walt Shepperd Walt Shepperd has read poetry at colleges and cultural centers throughout Central New York and in New York City. With Stewart Brisby, on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he edited and published Born into a Felony, the first national anthology of contemporary American prison writing. Mr Shepperd is Executive Producer for the Media Unit and Senior Editor at UrbanCNY. He is a threetime winner of the New York Press Association Writer of the Year Award and a recipient of the Syracuse Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award. His most recent publication is Poems for Lorca, from the W.D. Hoffstad & Sons Press. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Kari O’Mara
Congeal Silver Gelatin Print
Scabbing Silver Gelatin Print Moist Silver Gelatin Print 26
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Embryonic Silver Gelatin Print
ABOUT Kari O’Mara Kari O’Mara is Central New York-base fine art photographer who focuses on large scale high-contrast prints. O’Mara graduated from Cazenovia College in 2010 with a BFA in Studio Arts with a concentration in Photography. In 2011, she earned her MA in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. O’Mara became the youngest artist to show her work at the Earlville Opera House in 2012 with her series “Repulsing Attraction.” Her work was recently shown in Syracuse’s 40 Below Public Task Force’s “Snow Show.” Repulsing Attraction: We often go through life only viewing objects and people on the bare surface, but when we begin to look closer, the surface starts to crack, gape, and crust over. From the time I was little, I have seen common place items in a more eerie and detailed 28
way than most others. Focusing on every line, shadow, and dot. Using the body as my canvas, I add texture to the bodyscapes to push the audience out of their normal view point and into my hypersensitive world. Instead of focusing on the figure in its entirety, I allow a visual journey to be taken; new details and information will come to attention. The goal is to stop simply seeing the world as a whole and start truly examining our surrounding in fragmented detail. When we are awaken to the physical truths of the world and other aspects of life, whether for good or bad, we begin to creep towards enlightenment. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
Splitting Silver Gelatin Print
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Cindy Day
Sunny Was Here Sunny, thanks for the necklace. I called your name out loud last night and again this morning because a film I saw about the West reminded me of your suffering. It was my prayer, your name, if you heard me. The narrator of the film was saying we can’t imagine the life of the Sioux before the Whites, that much freedom is beyond our language. It seems insulting to even mention this. Yet you and I found ourselves in the same car. I made you laugh because you looked at the sky and asked if rain was coming. I said no and it rained. You were enlightened. You were past insulting. And I said to myself and to you, “Sunny, meeting you is an experience.” And further along in the car you spoke about the end of the trees without emotion— or if I heard any sadness in your voice or bitterness, it was ancient, felt so many times that it had settled down finally like a rock into a state of being. You had long ago accepted it, perhaps you had even died.
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ABOUT Cindy Day Cindy Day has published in the Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and the Southern Poetry Review, among other magazines. Four of her poems appear in Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction and Deliverance, edited by Sarah Gorham & Jeffrey Skinner, Sarabande Books, 1997. Her first novel, Last House, was serialized online in 2005 where it won an award, and she is working on a second, The Janeville Murders. She won the 2008 Emerging Poet Award from Stone Canoe Magazine at Syracuse University. Currently she is participating in the Downtown Writer’s Center PRO program in Syracuse, NY. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, she has lived and worked in Central New York for 30 years. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Laurel Butkins
The View Giclee
Snow Geese Giclee The Porch Giclee 32
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Blooming Pink Dahlia Giclee
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Blooming Pink Daisy Giclee
ABOUT Laurel Butkins I’ve been told before that I can find beauty in absolutely anything and I completely agree with that… From the intricate detail of a snowflake or the delicateness of a flower about to bloom, to the intensity of a skyscraper or the power of a battleship, there truly is beauty in everything, everywhere, all around us… And I try to capture that in each of my photographs… I am inspired by nature and intrigued by technology and with my camera I try to find the perfect balance of both… A large majority of my artwork is associated with nature inspired images such as flowers, birds, landscapes, sunsets and Nine Mile • Fall 2013
moons, though I also do event and portrait work not only of people, but also of pets, classic cars, motorcycles and boats… I also provide services for other Artists in photographing their artwork for hi-resolution images. I am very fortunate to travel to Alaska and work with Ice Alaska in creating artwork, dvds and photobooks of the bp World Ice Art Championships located in Fairbanks Alaska and featuring Ice Sculptors from all over the world. Any day I have my camera in my hand is always a good day! 35
Elinor Cramer Lee Goes to Work Because it’s Sunday, I wake slowly, after Lee’s door slams across the hall. Then I open the shades and watch him cross to the convenience mart. Pitched forward, he seems to catch himself with each step, his boots unlaced and blue coat flapping. He does the daily things more or less at the same time. It’s one-thing-then-the-next time, eat and sweep, sweep and eat— what he learned at the State School. And in between, the waiting. Not one for routine, myself, I see its goodness in him. He pulls a piece of cardboard for a dustpan, and a sparse broom from behind the icemaker—$2/ bag. Lee plants his feet wide, and bends to pick up a plastic lid, but falls to one knee. It’s hard to watch as he rights himself with his hands, but he goes on— so I do too. I start my chores brewing coffee, and when I return, there’s a customer outside the locked store hollering at him. His dismissive gesture seems to say, the owners will come when they come. It irks me how little they care for his time. Lee sits on a bucket waiting for the next thing to happen. His wispy hair blowing, he never wears gloves or a cap.
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Spooky at My Doorstep My neighbor’s old cat crouches on my porch. When my car pulls into the drive, she stretches the crooks from her legs. She cries Waa, like a baby cries, ow like ouch. Waa-ow... from her tail like a pump’s handle, out her sharp pink mouth. I touch her rough fur— mostly for me, I think. And she quiets. All night it rains, and she prowls on her stiff hips—Waa-ow...Waa-ow...Waa-ow... her yowls filling my heart as a bucket. It’s been weeks since you’ve phoned or come around. The wailing keeps on till I can’t stand it. I run barefoot from the house in the dark, and rock her, letting her claw and muddy my gown.
ABOUT Elinor Cramer Elinor Cramer’s first poetry collection, “She Is a Pupa, Soft and White” was published in December 2011 by Word Press. She is the author of a chapbook, “Canal Walls Engineered So Carefully They Still Hold Water,” for which she received a Heritage Grant from New York State. Her poems have appeared in “Stone Canoe,” “The Comstock Review,” “The Healing Muse,” and other journals. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson Nine Mile • Fall 2013
College, and holds a Master’s degree in Psychology from Roosevelt University in Chicago. She lives in Syracuse where she practices psychotherapy. Most often I’m aware of an emotional thread as I write. I let the thread stitch together the things that come into my awareness. I’m happiest with a poem when it seems to speak through the sounds and words I call my voice. 37
C J Hodge
Bones and Gears Acrylic and mixed media on paper 20” x 30”
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Bones and Gears 2 Acrylic and mixed media on paper 20” x 30” Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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After The Party Acrylic and mixed media on paper 47” x 67”
ABOUT C J Hodge I think I was brought up as an artist, my mother is a working artist and my father is a medical doctor but I don’t remember anyone suggesting to me that I could be a doctor. I loved to paint and draw and my parents had these great, interesting friends who were artists. I had a fantastic group of high school teachers who nurtured my talent and inspired me to push my art. College was a fantastic experience, my professors were a huge influence on me even though I was not a “model student” M. Sickler, G. Trento, J. Witkin and others were a huge part of my growth as an artist. Currently I have been developing a new style that I call Expressionist Pop though my work evolves and changes monthly so 40
I can’t really be pigeonholed into any particular style. Subject Matter: C. J. loves to paint people but is not concerned if the people are recognizable when the painting is complete, the paintings are changed and the people are made into shapes and forms. The original person is lost in color and form and usually not recognizable. The paintings are not meant to be portraits. C. J. Hodge III currently lives in Jamesville, NY with his wife and son. He is an Art Teacher at Cortland Junior Senior High School. His artworks are mixed media pieces using mediums such as acrylic, watercolor, and tempera. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
Sinclair Ethyl Acrylic and mixed media on paper 47” x 67”
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Gail Peck
Birthplace after a first line in a poem by Czeslaw Milosz You were my beginning and again I am with you, mother, in the song of the bird perched in the dogwood of Virginia where both of us were born. We’d walk down the hillside to town, a few dollars in your pocket for lipstick, a coloring book for me, a large box of crayons with a name on each. Then up the hill again to sit in the swing. I’d pick dandelions you’d place in a glass on the windowsill. I did not conceive of them as weeds. Later, the pungency of roses, lilacs. We didn’t buy flowers at the store, counting on the wild iris to continue blooming by the fence we dreamed never to leave, yet did. Now dandelions are taking their place on your grave where rain falls on the etched stones someone mows around. Listen, you’d say. A mockingbird I couldn’t always see in the distance. You’d repeat the sounds so that I hear them in this silence.
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Past Tense How quickly it passes from is to was
They My sister who gathered a drop of water in a straw and placed it in the corner of our mother’s mouth The sitter who rushed to the back room and stood with us waiting for silence The young Hospice nurse with the experience to pronounce someone dead lifting our mother’s arms for a bath Funeral director who tried and failed to get the stretcher out the back door My husband on his hands and knees attempting to unlock one of the front French doors leading to the hallway of the old apartment A last desperate prayer and the stretcher slides through Friend who bought dye matched to our mother’s snip of hair carrying it to the funeral home to make her beautiful one last time
from has to had— as quick as a bird flies from a windowsill— you hear its song but no longer see it. They’d slit her gown up the back to spread it across her. Small embroidered roses at the top with beads in each center. The eyes don’t totally close near the end and once the hands cooled we knew and I know almost no Bible verses but it came to me when they removed the body The peace of God which surpasses all understanding for she was a Godly woman, my mother. Dress her in pink with the white lace blouse for she loved white— white of the lily, white of the clouds.
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Writing My Mother’s Obit Although she wasn’t yet gone, I looked online to see how it was done, then wrote she’d been an army wife with tours in Japan and Germany, that she was loved by her church family. They did visit one-by-one, two-by-two, leaning over the railing of her bed to sing and pray. I was often in the next room lying down, staring at the wallpaper border that went around the ceiling, the cracked plaster barely concealed. Whatever I’d never asked would remain unasked, and could she hear what I said? The funereal director asked if I wanted my mother buried next to my stepfather. I said they didn’t get along in life, and there was no reason for them to be together in death. She hated Green Creek. An undertaker once wrote that the dead don’t care. A month before she died I’d stood by her bed, asking to be forgiven for any slight or shortcoming. Then I went to sleep, half-listening for her breathing, and would get up and lean over her the way she’d attended me as a child when she heard my cough or cries, knowing I was afraid to be alone.
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Offering First day at the beach, that old cliché of sun, neon, flashing its beauty over the ocean. Starfish are everywhere. A man walking by, seeing I was afraid to touch them, said they were dead. My general fear of the dark sea, waves having tumbled me and caught my breath. I walk up and down Inlet Point, holding starfish in my palm, thinking of my mother who may not live long, and then who will I call to hold my worries.
The egret is the most patient creature I know—white— my mother’s favorite color. When he lifts his wings, I see a sculpture of feathers, and the God my mother wants me to believe in—slow rise from the marsh. The starfish are drying in the sun, and may crumble I was told. Either way, I’m leaving them, small offering for all the years I waited, not knowing for what— this symmetry living in every ocean, star of the sea, that can regrow as many arms as needed.
ABOUT Gail Peck
Ms. Peck is the author of six books of poetry. Poems and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Connotation Press, Comstock, Stone Voices, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart, and one essay was selected as a “notable” for “Best American Essays, 2013.” Nine Mile • Fall 2013
“For over thirty-five years I’ve attempted to write poems that speak to the lives of others, to show we’re not alone in our hopes, grief and various losses. Whether I’m writing autobiography or not, my goal is to create from the fragments of thoughts and memories something that becomes whole, to be engaged in that process of discovery, for I truly believe what Robert Frost said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” 45
Maureen Foster
Cat & Mouse Ink on Muslin 46
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Parlor Tricks Ink on Dyed Muslin
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ABOUT Maureen Foster Maureen Foster is a young and emerging artist residing in Central New York. Her educational background is in the fine arts and she is deeply involved in the arts community throughout the New York State area. Photography by: Jake Beardsley Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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Stephen Kuusisto
In the Cards
– for Lars Gustafsson
Believing in luck I see luck everywhere For much of it is not human-Dogs know it Even swallows nesting High in the barn Feel the electrolysis of air. Don’t talk of Saint Paul Or the raft of destiny For though I’ll hear you I know luck has no figure for God. Early morning I walked in the field Where a bird cherry stood covered With blossoms and the alder Leaned in poor soil, Green catkins Lifting gently in wind.
ABOUT Stephen Kuusisto Stephen Kuusisto is the author of two collections of poems, “Only Bread, Only Light” and “Letters to Borges.” He teaches at Syracuse University. 50
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Ian Randall Wilson Bitter Carrots Out back they’re reporting a riot among the spirit guides. I have tried to convince everyone that a sponge understands excess. No luck. One man’s floor is another man’s yellow, anger is nudity, the wrestler behind the leaded glass door stops all of us from singing. Certainly the Chinese food was flawed but that’s not a reason for them to whip the flowers to death. All my problems can be traced to a defective muse. I purchase a cultural magnet hoping to father a discussion among black holes about the best way to raise beef. We disband when we discover we all have sons resembling the horns of a seer. You might call me a collector because I harvest the roads. In the last two years I have gathered two jars of careless expectation— the white kind. I look forward to winter and its ironically purified air. The trouble with things today is you try to be serious and end up in Cleveland. Let me return to the life of cows, cold water, the spaces they make in the world. I’m going to take the afternoon off from wrestling with the visible spectrum. I’ll be back later, or, if I believe them, in my next life.
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Losing Friends When I feel the urge to call you an idiot I’ll say, Shrimp Boat, instead. But in truth, Shrimp Boat, I wonder how you stay alive, your mind empty as a door. I did promise to keep my insults down to a light level only young cats can see because I think of you as another step in my program to free myself of weak verbs. I don’t care that you’re rich-what does money know?
The Physics Of Stuff In my parody of theory I construct a new civilization from this bucket of dirt and I have discovered light shining from a vapor, magnets in conversation. I call on all molecules to bend their arms in unison. More heat, more room. I won’t hide my fully extended theory. Write a speeding ticket if you want to. What is a poet? What is a man? What is an ellipsis? I’m the kind who gets stones talking. In Section 24 the candidate is asked to imagine a life with no bedroom slippers nor rocks. No longer can I obey the fluid laws. 52
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The Rules Of Accurate Choice And Prudent Restraint Wheels are growing on the jacaranda. Birds decline. Snails respond with personal greeting cards. Tonight I swing the fifth limb and the air cracks as if whipped. The house sings in a minor key. Good masonry helps. Once our bodies fit together like a mended door then the wall fell down bringing a grief that went running each morning around five a.m. with a pack of feelings on loan from themselves. Chen Zao says, What is a circle but a dream through history? I’ve decided to put the cat down, and throw out all my clothes. Say it was me that left her. About these scars on my throat and wrists-I’m holding all questions until the end.
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Iron Mike In Three After the Beloved leaves I move with the cut-man into the back bedroom and keep him very busy. I find myself sleeping with a heavy bag in case the urge for combinations strikes me in my sleep. This is not the time for ring metaphors about how no one wins moving backward, how a flurry near the bell may steal the end of every round. We all know the judges do their work in secret and often the results are a surprise.
I, personally, thought I was ahead only to discover I was losing on all the cards. But that’s another sport’s metaphor that it takes courage to climb under the ropes and standing on the canvas is sometimes a victory in itself. Tell that to the Beloved after she digs to the body and leaves without throwing in the towel or waiting for the referee to raise one or anybody’s hand.
ABOUT Ian Randall Wilson Ian Randall Wilson’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, The Gettysburg Revew and the North American Review. A chapbook, The Wilson Poems, was published by Hollyridge Press (www. hollyridgepress.com). He has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, and is on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension. He lives in Los Angeles where he works for Sony Pictures. At the time these poems were written, I thought I was a bricoleur. I thought I was taking little clippings from the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets 54
and the Dadaists and the Surrealists, tossing everything in the air in a grand show of color and light. I didn’t worry that much about sense-making. If I wanted sense, I would have been an estate planner. But then sometimes I think I got the word wrong and what I really meant was brick layer; that changes everything. These days, I’m happy to get off a good line. A single decent image. That would be enough. Nine Mile • Fall 2013
One From Then: James Tate I began writing a modern or modern-ish poetry in the late 60’s, while an undergraduate at Hobart & William Smith College. Several of us in those Woodstock / Altamont years of 1969 and 1970 discovered “new” poets, by which we meant poets new to us, who wrote in ways different from anything we’d seen before. We thought that we were on the verge of something, that the subjects and ideas we were working with were part of a broad project of changing society. We believed that this could happen by virtue of the way we lived and thought and wrote. The discovery of these new voices was important, because we needed signposts and helpers as we traversed this new territory. We were fortunate to have a very good and enthusiastic teacher named Jim Crenner, a poet himself who knew many of these younger poets, and an English Department whose members did not begrudge us turning from what they considered the real tradition—not just Victorians but also huge and by then grandfatherly presences like Eliot and early Lowell—to champion this new body of work. They sensed that something different was taking place in American poetry and were generous about letting us explore without interfering judgments. It was an exciting time to be writing. There were so many poets to discover, all of whom seemed to be doing something so different from what we had seen before, bringing new things to the art and to the conversation about poetry. It’s impossible, forty years on, to reread these poets with the same eyes I had then, to generate the same sense of fevered discovery, that sense that in our writing and the writing of these poets we were helping create the new world. Does that seem too much to say, too much burden to put on the discoveries of those years? It’s accurate: We were innocent, and caught up in the zeitgeist, the spirit of those times. Everything we looked at was potential, could be made new. I’d like to share some of the qualities of those poets who excited us then, and the discoveries we made in their poems. We read their work differently now, of course. Time does that. It gives us perspective, and we read back from work produced since. The trajectory and development of the lives and careers and work of those poets alters everything we thought we saw then, changes the potential into actuality or in some cases, into discards. Nothing can give the sense of the really new that we saw then. But all that said, I’d like to use the back pages of this journal to share some occasional thoughts about poets who upended our views of what we meant by poetry in those heady days, and to try to describe what was so exciting about them and the books that made their mark. One of those poets was James Tate. Three books, or parts of them, had a huge effect on what we meant by poetry and by a poem. They books were The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967), Row With Your Hair (kayak press, 1969), and The Oblivion Ha Ha (Little Brown & Co., 1970). Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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What was so great about Tate’s work? We—or maybe better said, I—had not known that you could split lines the way he did, or joke or surprise the way he did. The music of his lines was so different from anything before, sometimes raucous, sometimes subtle, but always somehow casual, more like someone talking than someone composing. Here from The Lost Pilot is a poem that moved me when I first read it, and whose music and surprise still haunts me this many years later: Why I Will Not Get Out Of Bed My muscles unravel like spools of ribbon: there is not a shadow of pain. I will pose like this for the rest of the afternoon, for the remainder of all noons. The rain is making a valley of my dim features. I am in Albania, I am on the Rhine. It is autumn, I smell the rain, I see children running through columbine. I am honey, I am several winds. My nerves dissolve, my limbs wither— I don’t love you. I don’t love you. I love almost everything about this poem, and I still remember my first reaction to it, the pleasure that came from the incredible music of those first 56
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two lines to the final surprise at the end, “I don’t love you.” Where did that come from? I was stupefied. It felt right, and yet, it surprised. And where did those children in the columbine come from, or that bilocation or travel to far-flung places on earth, Albania and the Rhine? I went back through the poem, noticing the rest of the music, the almost casual rhymes of Rhine and columbine, the slant-rhyme of wind, and the off-handedness of rain and Rhine and Albania—the internal sonorousness of the poem is intense and moves so quickly that you could almost brush past it in a first reading even as you are affected by it. The two-stress lines were new to me—everything we had read to that point was iambic pentameter. Who knew that you could write in lines so short and yet convey meaning and such music? And then, at the end of the poem, the way those last lines seem to shock, driving me back into the poem to see how it got there. It felt right, and yet strange. To summarize the movement and scenery of the poem: The poet is emotionally collapsing, muscles unraveling in an intense lethargy that comes without pain. It is afternoon, raining, and Autumn. In his mind he is or at least wants to be anywhere but here, and so grasps words that signify other places, but he does not envision or share with us actual locations. These are ciphers, incantatory words, not actual geography. He sees children in columbine, a vision which I take to be significant, for these are children of his fantasy, not actual children, and they are running somewhere, but probably not toward him, for they are no more real in this context than those cipher words Albania or Rhine. And although the poem is not explicit about this, it seems to me that they are children who will now never exist because, as we discover at the end of the poem, the poet does not love the woman, and is telling her so. They will not come together, they will not have a family, they will not have children, they will have no future together. There is, as he says, no pain or even a shadow of physical pain, but there is a painful struggle that produces this mental map of the world and of fantasy as he tries until the end to avoid what he has to say. What this poem showed to so many of us was music in short lines, in a structure unlike anything we had seen before that contained a wrenching meaning. That meaning did not come in the way of the older iambic poets – not in the heavy way of “Skunk Hour,” or the cynical way of “Portrait of a Lady.” It was something new. And there was something generous there that made us feel like we could be part of it. Maybe as important it seemed like these were lessons we could use in the development of our own poems. We could bond as writers with this poet, who had taught us something new. The Lost Pilot was an amazing book, and the Oblivion Ha Ha collected many of the poems that had been in chapbooks, including several from Row With Your Hair. Oblivion is a wonderful book. But to my taste, Row was the Nine Mile • Fall 2013
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best of the three. Produced by the iconoclast George Hitchcock the book was a work of brilliance from beginning to end, down to every detail, even to its designs and look and feel. Row continues and develops the breakthroughs from “Why I Will Not Get Out of Bed.” Magnificent pieces such as “When Kabir Died,” “Shadowboxing,” “The Wheelchair Butterfly,” “The Blue Booby,” and one I have not seen reprinted, “The Crushing Rose.” Wonderful! Why do I mention these particular poems? Read them and find out. If you can find the book they came from anywhere, look at it, hold it in your hands, and you will see what I mean. I have one cherished copy, and it is falling apart. Tate has never been so fresh. He was in effect making tracks on first snow. I want to write in future essays about others who influenced us in those early days: Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, and W.S. Merwin. I will post the essays as I finish them.
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– Bob Herz
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FALL 2013 // ISSUE 1
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Be a part of our next issue! Nine Mile is a new online magazine of literature and art. Our mission is to publish the best writing and artwork from across the country, with a special focus on Central New York. If you, or someone you know is a great writer or artist, we encourage you to submit your work. We are currently accepting submissions for: • Poetry: submit 4 - 6 poems in word, text, or pdf format. • Artwork: submit 3 - 5 small jpg files. Submission should be done via email to: info@ninemile.org Include your name and contact information along with a brief paragraph about yourself (background, education, achievements, aesthetic intent, etc) and a link to your website (if available), photo of yourself, and of course your poetry or artwork. We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. For now we do not accept essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A’s without invitation. But if submitted, we will keep your information on file for future reference.
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