Cellar Door Spring 2009

CELLAR

DOOR the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Prizes judged by MARK STRAND, DAVID PAYNE and JEFF GOLL plus an interview with MARK STRAND

spring2009 vol xxxv number ii

POETRY Baker Daugherty Fisher Gudas Hicks Oberembt Pratt McDonald FICTION Conover Devlin Driver Nolan O'Neill ART Benning Coley Di Filippo Feng Lineberger Loeven Michelson Mundie Saunders

CELLAR

DOOR

the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Š Cellor Door 2009 All rights 'e'e'ved

(ll;/

Cella, Daa', the unde,gcodu"e Hterary magazine of the Umve,,,,y of No rrh Carolina duar at!Iud"" '.

Hili, I, pubH,hed twice annually and welcome, ,ubml"lom fco~ .11 unde~/'"uden'OIl"" currently enrolled. GUidelines for submission can be found orurne at http. st edulthedoo, ..

PUbflc"lon of thl' I"ue of Cello, Daa' was m.de pO"lble In par-r with. generc /I Door'" usgrantfrom C'e"'veW'ltlng" Blanche B"ttA'mf)eld Fund tor Poetcy" UNC Chapel HlIl.e, ormen''; gratefully acknowledges the generous the Department of EnglishGift Fund. financial sUPPOrt of the UNC Student Govern

CELLAR DOOR VOLUME

XXXV

ISSUE

II

Editor-in-Chiej Art Editor

Travis Smith Sally Symons

Jill Dwiggins

Fiction Editor

Laura

Poetry Editor

H.L. Spelman

Treasurer Art St'!/!

Sarah Smith Sarah Smith Jessica Kiernan

Fiction St'!/!

Poetry St'!/!

John McElwee Liz Turgeon Elizabeth Wallcer Sarah Archer Hannah Bonner Matthew Poindexter

Noah Brisbin Faculty Advisor

Marianne Gingher

CONTENTS ART Mary

Catherine

Penn

Maria Reclaims the Dress 1 36

Cary 1 37 John Benning Devin Coley Angela Di Filippo Liz Mundle Kristen Lineberger

Amanda Michelson Gwendolyn

Saunders

Mindy Feng

Kathleen Loeven

Pleonexia 138 Breaking Free 139 Precious / 40 Untitled 1 41 Run Faster 1 42 The Underside 143 Contradict Me 1 44 Lights 1 1 45

Untitled 1 Cover

FICTION Delaney Nolan Delaney Nolan Maria Devlin

Mitchell Conover Jon O'Neill and Ellis Driver

Supernova / 8 Salt 116 4 Final Letter (Written from an Airport) I ~ A Short Story for the Last Man Who Like Whistling Dixie 1 46 Larry 1 60

POETRY MeredithBrooke Baker Guion Pratt

Skylar Gudas Michelle Hicks JulianaDaugherty Caroline Fisher Jon McDonald Katherine Oberembt

How to Garden in the Family Graveyard in Zehulon, North Carolina / 10 Locust Bolero / 11 Bell Tower Slow Aire / 12 Bat Psalm / 14 The Summer We Turned Twelve / 15 What We Leave / 22 The Starlings / 30 New House / 31 Leeches / 32 Winter Flora / 54 Encounter on Interstate 40 / 56

The First Time I 58

INTERVIEW Travis Smith

An Interview with Mark Strand I 24

JUDGES

Mark Strand is the 2009 Morgan Writer-in-ResidenceatUNC.Hereeenoim.

M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1962 and is the author of numerous collecCWll prose, translation, and poetry, including most recently New Selected Poems (21107) aorl Man and Camel (2006). His honors include a Pulitzer Prize for his collectionBlI'l.wJ of One (1998), a Bollingen Prize (1993), and a MacArthur Fellowship (198n.H, served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1990-91. He currently res,desUl New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

• David Payne is graduated

the author of five novels. A native of Henderson, NC, p~n: from UNC in 1977 in English with highest honors in creative wnongjan

now lives in Hillsborough

d~ with " his family. Of Payne's most recent novel, Backt' Hion;

Parro, Pat Conroy writes: "Back to Wando Passo quivers with authentic life andissob.ol in concept and audacious in scope that it seems like the summing up andexcl:unaoo~ point of a great writer's career. The novel contains everything." His website JS WW\I, davidpaynebooks.com

• Jeff GoII is a painter, sculptor, and photographer living in Durham, NC. He has shown widely across the U.S. including the North Carolina Museum ofArt III Raleigh, Nexus Center for the Arts in Atlanta, Ann Nathan

Gallery in Chicago,Hoen

HaIWood Gallery in Miami and New York, Spirit Square in Charlotte, PiccoloSpolero in Charleston, SC, and Somerhill Gallery in Chapel Hill. He has been awarded theNC State Arts Fellowship as well as the NC sponsored Arts Residency at the Headlands in Marin Co., California. His work was included in a USIA Arts Americashowthat toured Mrica in 1999. You can view his work at http://gollart.blogspot.com!

•

PRIZES ART First

Mary

Catherine Penn

Maria Reclaims the Dress / 36 Second

Kathleen Loeven

Third

Untitled I Cover Mindy Feng Lights 1 145

FICTION FIrst Second Third

Delaney Nolan Salt I 16 Delaney Nolan Supernova I 8 Jon O'Neill and Ellis Driver Larry I 60

POETRY FIrst Second Third

Juliana Daugherty 7he Starlings I 30 Guion Pratt Bat Psalm I 14 Michelle Hicks What Uk Leave I 22

CELLAR

DOOR

Delaney Nolan

SUPERNOVA Or, I feel the choice you made in being killed at the Brighton stop was very irresponsible and short-sighted but that IS my personal opinion and it's a free country, I guess,

But oh, god. when the train struck your body the way you new JJ all ap.art! How it came lurching like a drunk from the cramped tunne I5 to c h arge towar d 5 you and the ,val. r

you two coupled in one great hallelujah! I wasn't there but I won't forget.

Eyewitness accounts claim it was a splat, like dropping more like-light, and heat, and a star being formed.

. it a bag of mille J Imagine

You fell over and disappeared.

I won't stand for this.

I have been thinking on it a while now. There are alternatives if you would just ed choose to drop your cover and step out from the mantle of "death. " I have arrang three options,listed below: Please review them carefully. l.

With a whoosh the train shoots past as you step back suddenly. The train slows,. stops, and you cheerfully elbow your friend Martin and board it. You ride the traJ~ to the city.'Ihere.you work with dedication. You type while Sipping coffee from a white mug. You are productive. You make friends. You bring them over for dinner and I meet them. They are lovely. I serve spaghetti. You get promoted. You propose on a sunny Tuesday. We kiss. Cue confetti. We move into a nice house. We get a dog. We get a child. We love him very very much. You get promoted again. We buy more. We talk less. You grow bored. You have a tryst with a waitress in a hote1]acuzzi. I throw the vacuum through a wall. I forgive you. We fix the wall. We kiss again. We grow old. We get liverspots. We die. We are buried.

8

XXXV. II

spring 2009

2.

Witha whoosh the train shoots past and you stumble, circle your arms to balance, but it clipsyour shoulder even as it slows. You fall. You hit your head. Your brain swellsup like a moonbounce. You are taken away in an ambulance.

You are in a coma.

I visit you daily.I kiss you on the nose. You stay in bed. Your coworkers send daisies.

I put them in water. You are unimpressed. I get a job, and there, I meetJeffery.]effery islovely.Youstayin the coma. You are stubborn. Jeffery proposes to me on a hot Sundayafternoon. I accept. We kiss. We move to Arizona. Cue desert ambience.

Backin your hospital there is a nurse who pinches you on a regular basis to see if you arefaking.You are not. You stay in the coma. I visit you sometimes. You are still not impressed.We all grow old. We all die. We are buried. Jeffery is cremated, according to hiswishes,and sits in an urn.

3.

With a whoosh and an explosion and a flash of light and noise that rips a hole in the universethe train strikes you, killing you instantly. You are there and then you are not.Marty and I and many others attend your funeral. We grieve. I give a touching eulogy.Many cry. You are buried on a warm Thursday. The grass grows above you.

YOurlittle wooden house rots around you. Your skeleton shows. You turn crumbly.

Youturn into dirt.The earth rotates on its axis in a counter-clockwise direction.

Rootscreep through your space. You let them. Trees grow up. Photosynthesis takes place.Greenery trembles and shrugs towards the sun. Underneath, little fat worms eatyou.Youmove.You become carbon. You become a zucchini plant. You become theeyelashof a kangaroo. You become the lips of two young people. They kiss. Cue music.And you become sand, and you line and soften all the beaches all over the worldwhich stretch on and narrow into lines forever into the distance, and perspective gathersthem all up like the strings of glad balloons and brings them into a single farff' -0 POIntthat we cannot see, as hard as we try. And sornew h ere you are rna dee i Into a sandcastle.So the water moves over you, and around you, and through you.

I wishyou all the luck in the world while making this selection, dear.

Let me know when you've decided.

CELLAR

DOOR

Meredith Brooke Baker

HOW TO GARDEN IN THE FAMILY GRAVEYARD IN ZEBULON, NORTH CAROLINA Sink your hand into the sandy loam slowly. Allow the rasp and scrape of buried pebbles, bits of brick, old mortar, snail shells, oxidized nails from a lost house of a lost century to slide by your hand. Allow the slugs and earthworms.

Allow the dirt.

Sink deeper.

Sink to your wrist.

The earth will grant you this, it is heavy with last night's rain. the earth is wet and waiting. and you are not an interloper, you are standing on the bones of your grandparents.

Close your eyes.

Your eyes are in your fingers, in the dark sandy tunnels your fingers have made, flushed and throbbing with the red ligh t of blood as you slide by bits of other times and grasp for the buried remnant that you need, the hard cold thing in the sandy ground that COversyour family's dead, the dark hard thing that's waiting to be found: the last bulb of the purple crocuses that you'll replant next fall in cooler earth.

10

XXXV.II

spring 2009

Guion Pratt

LOCUST BOLERO

For Terrence Malick, director, "Days

of Heaven"

Before we could tell they had come from somewhere, they were everywhere. Level on the wheat, pushing it through their mouths to their throats, as if their stomachs were bottomless. Smoke them out. Find a dead patch, or cut a circle in the center of the harvest, and build a fire there.

The farmer is in the field with a broken lantern,

thisfield we understand to be the complete universe becausewe have only ever been here. The house burns, and the field, and the locusts cating the field, and the chickens, asleep until they smell through night masks of wingspan too late the singeing of their wings.

As

for us, OUf nightmares

have colored outside the Lines

and found us awake, doomed us unsuspectingly in a quarantine of oxygen and heat inside a house that only has a driveway when an airplane needs to land on it, wondering

what song

God likes to hear his player piano playing.

We have seen

the gate. We cannot find it now to escape through because we are in the house

and we have never seen the gate and the house at the same time.

There is no driveway because we have no airplane.

There are no locusts because there is no field.

______________________

~11

CELLAR DOOR

GuÂŁonPratt

BELL TOWER

SLOW AIRE

For tbe ringers in SkÂŁbbereen On the other side of a small dark hole, suspended on a pulley out of sight, bronze tongue, split lip, skirt-up to the heavens,

mouths held open to the sky until we arrive, the three-weave

of rope,

the sally of velvet by both hands brought to the chest and released-the

pendulum

of the clapper spun around, kissing

the tuned lip and the tuned lip telling the whole town, the whole town listening for its chorus of confessions.

Sand (which you say we are) pulling sand

(which this rope is also) ringing sand at the other endwe stand under it, calling tbree fillO'W one, one ftllow twoand for all this we have Come to hear youwe Want to hear you almost

12

XXXV.II

spring 2009

as much as we fear you

falling,all treble and tremble and calling through eacb of the tiny holes, one mediator between

man

and his music, or what we assume to be conduits

of our summoning, portals from this belfry into one space or the next.

13

CELLAR

DOOR

GuÂŁonPratt

BAT PSALM

For Howard and MÂŁke Pratt

Sight was a punctual cylinder that night, and rhythm a steady mistress of the blind nocturnals conferring above us, inverted in a circle, hanging from a street light as if we below were the shadows they were casting.

We offered them our hats, one at a time, thrown vertical inside the beam, then watched as they took wing, dove in response, struck them and returned to wait on the next, pitched from Our assuming world of weight like a dark flare in a desert of light, summoning the darkest of that desert. Bull bat, bull bat, Come and get your wool batl Good kings, you have heard your shadows, though you cannot see them. No king can sec, but the good ones listen.

XXXV.II

spring 2009

Sky/aT Gulas

THE SUMMER WE TURNED TWELVE

Dark freight trains on their way from Florida shook your black and white tiled kitchen floors and spilled your mother's cabernet on my white dress.

"Thisdamn wine" - swallowed up in babbling crowd and trumpet song, the party feast of din and her apology. I glowed. "It's fine."

Cold water bled the stain til it was pink.

The dripping faucet kept time with the bass.

And I was drunklost in your mother's laugh, the turquoise house she kept, dyed silk and jazz, her red dial phones, the bathtub feet like clawsthe way here even apples tasted wild.

I tanntella-ed to the stove and stoppedtwo bodies fever hot danced there to songs

I couldn'thear, their breath and thighs were fighting, red lipsand hips colliding. Coldest heat I knew, your dad asleep upstairs, and down, yourmother's hands without a glass for once.

Inside I scrubbed my half clean dress, outside darktrains hummed by, cars crammed with ripening fruit.

15

CELLAR

DOOR

Delaney Nolan

SALT

w7:n "

When I left she was shuffling across the room, all slumped and round in the face and shoulders. Scraps of bright foreign fabricwere scanere h . dead feathers and she was looking . ~~~ t e floor .like out th.d e Will ow,wid

CIl

Texas sun slung low, shadowing the Mesas. I shut the d oor be hi nd m e with a ou ndUi. firm snap, and was glad to be ill the white halls of the station: clean, modem:~ tered.There was a satisfaction in pulling on my slick leather driving glov," \W tla Smart little tug. And there was reassurance in the line my fee' followedaero;. e in parking lot to my rented Chevy. By now I'd gotten used to the "RESERVE SIgn my space, it was no longer embarrassing. I no longer felt like a glorified maJ~'b.

At first, though, when]effery, the once-T.A., had calledba au r rhejo It had sounded too ideal, and I wondered why he would ever choose me: an ave"!'IIÂŤ

Milwa~;s

DC-Berkeley graduate, still unemployed, on the verge of building a I tower in her unheated apartment with no examples of leadership to speak 0 ' u,' '" ' . my me. 'trestsay botl... suspect Jeffery had always had a crush on me, and I never told him the curvier sex, so Igot lucky. The job was impossibly rare, somehow combUlUlg, , ten'1eIV. my Anthropology and Nursing majors, and I was ready for the telephone ill in September: yes I am willing to relocate, yes I have experience in home,,: ~:: concentratmg On ancrenr Mexico, am culturaiiy sensitive, I can start fIght a ), you, you too, t ak e care. And within a week I was in the central terrnm. aI 0fHollsron Allport, an awkward tourist just 100 miles from home. .

Another week after that, when I had settled into provided housing (a on)' apartment with buzzing lightbulbs and skittering things in the walls), I met the Indian woman. Over the phone Jeffery had told me I'd be helping her cook and deaD and taking care of her, yes, but I had not been told that didn't speak English. Our firsr meeting went like this: :HelJo, Ms. Atzopl. My name is Georgia.

thll o

16

t

n

of

EztJ.1 culxtli mecau. Nahuatl tenoch tototl Sod sod sod. n And she rum '" e ra bespectacled man beside her and rugged on his sleeve until he Jedher

---------------~

XXXV.II

spring 2009

a",y,apologizingwith a little smile.

Now,the first days of November, I don't even try to speak to her anymore.

I come in, I vacuum, I replace the towels, I replace the sheets, I dust, I leave to make herfoodin the kitchen. And the whole time she watches me suspiciously with those

eyes sunkin the soft folded up face, like wet seeds in wet clay.

At home I eat frozen dinners and watch movies from the 19505. 'There is aHollywoodVideo a 25 minute drive from my place but I would rather go through theleftovervideo collection of my apartment's former tenant. I put on an old blackand-whiteand Hipthrough National Geographic. The first night it was Casablanca, becauseIhad to, because it is the most classic. TOnight it is 'Ibe Fly. I fall asleephalfway through and wake just in time to see Vincent Price's horrifiedfaceas he sees the tiny head of his brother get munched by a giant spider.

I slumpback down and try to develop a system for eating popcorn without using myhands.National Geographic is open to an article about the endangered Mexican MoleLizard.Irefreshed on Mexican culture before I came down, and I know about theirfleshycrown-like gills, and that they were called axolotls and connected to the god of death and lightning. We had one in Honors Biology and its translucent flesh gavemethe creeps.

D

Somehow,it is lonelier here, even though I didn't go out when I was in enver,eventhough here Ileave my room everyday. I can feel country songs coming true,[ feellike a chubby little cliche.

Tomorrow,I think, I will call somebody. I will caII that girl I met just before I leftColorado,the one from the bar the one who was all fizzy and golden. But I d~n'thaveher number.Tomorrow I will send an e-mail, okay, I swear. I fall asleep to YmcentPrice'spoor brother getting crushed by a rock.

The next day when Igo in, the Indian woman is watching

television. She

looks sad.

She alwayslooks sad. It's exhausting, .

For the first few weeks I'd tried to cheer her up, but she only talked over me m a dialectIdidn't understand, and the more we interrupted eachother in languages thatdid'tn even besi . , egin to Intersect, the more agItated she seerne d, fl'applOg aroun d usel~sly,~ntil Igaveup and stood in the shower pretending to scrub the tile. It ""ntuntil' Just a t:lew days ago that I found out why I dido , t recogruze ' any 0f' It, all those x'sand d's, squat and bloated words like toads run over on the highway.

I I was in the kitchen cooking her lunch. It's my favorite part of the day. My s eevesWererolled up and I was sashaying around the island, surrounded by deep rich smells路 chili .' . . es and cumin and coriander the hot violent SpIces of old MexICO, steam mm fa ' Y ce.and a burning on my tongue. Crisp maguey leaves rolled on the counter, avocadosnpened in my hand. In the kitchen I was powerful and ancient.

17

CELLAR

DOOR

I was singing when the tall man with the glasses stepped intothebotlt 1was startled and dropped the fruit. He apologizedat thesame". "'.101 "I shouldn't have snuck up like that. 1 guess I'm not usedtoall rIUs...... ness." He hesitated but he was smiling. His name was Arthur and he hatedthe. mer heat and that was all 1knew about him. reho!

"No, that's all right, it's all right." 1 grinned, shrugged, wiped myfo.W with my sleeve. "Is the project coming along? The research? Am I~owedlO "No He nodded and rearranged little dicing knives on the cuttIng berd' , secrets here, Georgia, it's not that kind of project. Boring, linguisticsortsofthiIt He straightened up suddenly. !o "I shouldn't say that. What we're learning is very important.Very ... O~. still old." ....

1nodded solemnly and met his eyes in a way 1hoped lookedlikeI. stood. "Yeah." k

"D o you know w h at we'd . re omg, exactly.'''H e set down thedicerwhoo , realized I didn't. "Oh, Georgia. The woman you're cooking for right now-sheSl" of the oldest living members of the Metszu tribe of Southwestern Mexico. AI/I/. descendents. Their language is very complex, unique. In another twentyyears~r will speak it anymore, at all. That means it'll be lost to us, to everyone,forever. .L His words sunk in gradually.l added a little salt to the waterb0iling"~ stove.

"Only a dozen other people, maybe, speak Metszu, and only sheagreed; come with us." He Went on about the Indian and linguistics, then stoppedabl1lP , If "You probably don't want to hear all this. Th:re are hundreds of unknown I~ corners of the globe that are going extinct, so trying to preservethis one15 mort . W.e don 't know much about the history of her tribe. Or whatwedo"""'" ?ractlce.

JUStthat it was, and soon, it won't be."

This is what I'm thinking about when I sit next to her takingherb1~ pressure, which I do once a week, to make sure her new surroundingsaren'tburtill!i her health. It is only after that conversation that I understand why I'm doing idlt fugDefutl· . . ,a e Imported tree that might choke on our complicated AmencaD '!SIS kept, solitary and protected, in the middle of the flat dry table of Texas. SheP' hand while 1 take her reading, like I'm the patient. Her skin is dry and rhin as COfII husks.! remember th 1· . tltinkin " e .mgwst,. .g, soon, you won't be."

*

When 1 come home that night, 1 don't feel like watching anotherold(I1!dh Instead, I lay Bat on my Stomach on the Boor with a pen and paperIsu* rom r e research ce 1 . .,t: to in •a scrt nter; wrrte a letter to my mother. 'Jand in it explainmywe Jf erres 0 r confessjons: f

18

XXXV.II

spring 2009

1. I havenot actually gone to a single job interview in the :full year since I gnduated.

2. I broke up with Brandon, the financial advisor.

3.1 think 1 might be gay.

Iwalk the blocks outside my complex for twenty minutes before forcing my handtodrop the envelope into the mouth of one of the big blue mail deposits. I give myself a week before Ishould expect a reply.

Countingthis as my social activity for the day, I go to bed early.

A weeklater I bring the woman her dinner on a tray. The food is still "earningand popping. I've begun fixing little side dishes for myself instead of eating LeanPockets.1hemeals are all custom, fitting the requirements Arthur the linguist handedme my first day: Plenty of maize, beans, squash, chilies, tomatoes, cocoa.

SometimesI find strange meats stocked neatly in the huge gleaming refrigerator: rabbi~deer,once dog, which I threw away instead of cooking. And all of it spicy.

WhenIpush open the door with my hip she is sitting on the edge of the bed like usual,staring out the window and turning the remote over and over in her hands, eventhoughthe television is off. She looks to me like a prisoner, though Iknow she ~e ofher own free will. She doesn't say anything when I come in, just looks at me With thosewet sorrowfuleyes and rises to cross to the kitchen table. I set down the tray andsmile at her.

"Bon appetit."

"Quet'l1tern malorl. Qpetzl, quetzl."

Shegesturesat the chair opposite her. I know she wants me to sit with herandeat,but her desperation and shaky hands are too much for me and I am overcome with embarrassment and pity. I hate her for her lonesomeness. I shake my headlike I don't understand and leave quickly. I stand in the doorway before 1 shut it closed behindme,and look once more at the room with its quilted bed, the red walls, tb~Out-of~place television.Iwonder why it is even there, when it doesn't mean a thing to her.Then 1 snap the door shut and hurry through the bright halls to the exit, my heelsclick-clicking on the tiles.

A letter comes from my mother the next afternoon. I don't get it until I COmehome from the station.

'DearestGeorgi~ . . IWasa bit confused by your last letter. I appreciate that this is a confusing :;;e In YOurlife-as it was for me!-and I hope when you are finished in Texas you )'lJtl.~:'hon:e and We can talk about you, your life choices, and what's troubling t Watt to see you, sweetie.

CELLAR

DOOR

XO,Mom." 1 put the letter in a drawer and don't write back.

s

The next time the Indian woman motions for me to eat with heI;I feel uncomfDrtable and terrified for as long as it takes to SCODP thesteamin onto our plates, and then

1

remember

that she expects nothing from

roe,andl

sit silently, and eat the tamale she pushes towards me, and even put myfee:t~

let my shoulders untense. All there is is chewing, and hot tomato juiceIUIlll my chin. While 1am licking crumbs off my fingers, she says somethingroar: language. The words she says are not particularly striking, or beautiful.They ~ to me like all foreign languages: not as halting and squat as Chinese,norrolliq marine like Italian, bur blocky and tangled. She points to herself and says,

"Itchtaca. " She jabs herself in her chest with her finger again and,! saying, l'Itchtaca, Itchraca." .

1 understand, it's the name game. 1 point to myself. "Georgia.Georf She smiles, nods, says "Jolja."

Ultchtaca."

Neither of us is pronouncing it right, but we are both smiling~dnq Our plates and outside the dark sky is riddled with suns and planets, the disrana history and the size of pins.

In my apartment, I have run out of old movies. 1re-watch Cosoblal/(l. still sends Isla off with Laszlo. I don't cry this time. I have perfected the artofil less popcorn eating.

I don't eat frozen surprised

dinners anymore. I eat corn and rice and guaeamol to not be sick of it. I have a little belly fonning but 1don't care.

That night I go out to the balcony and sit, which I have never don~iJ: The moon is OUt and it is colder than I realized Texas got. 1 wrapped myself1011 blanket off the couch and look out across the landscape, cast blne and remo~Jil: S~.rfa_ce.of the moon. and I think about how many square miles I am raking

U1_

dlSr:ussmg at once with my greedy little eyes. I think of where Irchraca is from,l:c do~ r know if I should picture choked steamy jungle orsmooth black-sand bc2dx I will probably never knOw. I call my brother on the telephone. We talk,boUl,," mother, and politics. and his fiancee. I tell him I can't remember the last rimef ~ make up an excuse to hang up first. I can hear him smile and around rnidnighl'll COUnt I, 2, 3, and hang up at the Same time.

treat to m~\th:;, last week I am working at the station, and I try to think of a"'" crushed J jJj C tl1 rnra everyday. The first day it is hot COcoa with cinnamon and c 1 es. ie second day it is SWeet blue corn dumplings. 1 don't know if silt

XXXV.II

"

spring 2009

b,,, I like to think she looks more at my eyes and less at the floor. I eat runner Ilcr "''Y night now.

On the secondto last day the linguist greets me when I come in, a dusty ,hit pushingme into the white hallway.

'Only two days left. Sad to be leaving us?"

'Y..,'[ reply,and surprised myself. Before he can say anything I rush, "I've 1lClIIing to ask you-I know you are trylng to study her language, but what dw mean? I mean,what do you do? I mean, what does she do?"

The linguisttakes off his glasses and rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. "Oh, kt'l 1Ct. I shew her pictures of things, and have her say the name and write it rlshe can. Sometimes the words are the same as ones in another dialect, but oIttn than no, they aren't. I was trying to teach her English at first, but it is ttD pickup at 67. So, mostly I have herspeak into a tape recorder. At this Ib's what I haveher doing for three, four hours out of the day, just speak into I!lI<RItI>fd<~"yingwhatever she wants."

And that is what I am thinking about at runner with her, eating a kind of Utw,b.u mostlywatching her. When she eats, her hands shake so most of ' I

dribb", out of the spoon or down her chin, and I am sorry for making it. I ~ ar and think about her talking into the tape recorder for three, four hours â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ diy, the onlyone listening, while she tells old stories wrong, and then re- becauseshe forgot, and probably calls it "dear" and tells it of her sadness. 'dliak.bo,,, how she probably is telling stories about her grandchildren, and I probablytold a stol}' about how when she was very young in a hidden illo.t Auec bonesher father brought her to a river and took both her hands .... tnd hejeri<edthem forward when she wasn't expecting it but when he tDher faee again there was wriggUng between tbem a slick crowned lIIlySCj1Urming feet and frantic rolling eyes. And she probably told the tape "flttIed and dropped it back into the river and then was sorry and cried but ~ her itlYa.lokay, okay, and blessed her in a language that dried up and .... 'ueddllll.

"""be

-up

Ilhink thou, all the half-dead lost languages in all the plains and deserts all lI!lrId,tnd of the lonely axolotl, and I am glad now that she cannot un"" when I sty that even as I learn to talk again, everything, even the little &"dof detth itself; is sUpping away, into the river and out to sea.

CELLAR

DOOR

Michelle Hicks

WHATWE

LEAVE

In Saint Francis's first church, simplicity was next to godliness, until the marked gild of F'rrenze slipped in by way of pretty

women that stand guard Over the tombs. Distilled from antiquity, divine beauty enslaved . in

marble

haunts the vestibules'roughened

build,

the simple woodworking, the high-vaulted nave, The church's father, dove-gentle in his death, stigmatized, does not even turn in his grave, Light larks on the seeming-soft marble, the breath from those lips is almost tangible: standard in hand, toga slipped Jow; one rogue lays a wreath on MaChiavelli's grave. Her sister, hard face tearless, seems to languish, spilling her hair On

the book that rests above Dante's

time-marred,

bas-relief face. 'Their very presence declares: e 7bes men 'Wtll be missed by beautflUl women.

Before Francis's COWl, the faithful kneel in prayer.

A i1

.

un E!r . of happenstance, I go again, Y arn, rught masking the gold of Tuscany.

I see Italy's blooming City as the den

b ~

c

Of}tll by street lights ' honeyco oreddark a e- -is brOken h In . too small "baInSt t e stone. Like vermin packed tight a space, apartments all runny

xxxv. II spring 2009

filth and rain greet my travel-weary sight.

On the high balconies, pitted with decay, are the things that people abandoned, a blight

with

of shelves,bicycles; we won't speakfor you, they say, OUf ladiesof the tomb, relics of saints unnamed, in caseI journeyed there to atone, to pray_

CELLAR DOOR

The day before I conducted this interview, Mark Strand and I agreedto meet at 10:30 in the lobby of the Carolina Inn. I arrived on time. At 10:35,thoug~ after realizing

that there are several lobby-like places in the Inn, I was stillwanderin

the haIls looking for him. Walking from one empty lobby to the next, I felt briefly like one of the drifting speakers of Strand's poems.

Mark Strand is one of the most prominent poets of his generation. Since his first book was published in 1964, his disquieting, darkly humorous poemshae . received almost evcI)' honor a poet can get. As the Morgan Writer-in-Residence this March, Strand gave a public reading and visited creative writing classes,answering students' questions and discussing his work. Some of my questions reference things I had heard him say earlier in the week- I hope that I have provided necessary context in these places.

Thankfully, it didn't take me too much longer to locate Strand. It turnsout that he had been looking for me since 10:30 as well, just as lost in the halls ofthe Carolina Inn as I was.

Travis Smith

AN INTERVIEWWITH

MARK STRAND

7he last time I went to seeyou read, at Duie, thefellow introducing you describedyour d£ction as "'s£mplistic.'"I -unnced, because there's a b£g difference between "'simplistic» all~ ". '''h t e word people typ£cally use to describeyour style. In your poems, seemtngrysl ./.,. t SImple, statements somehow become mysterious, Do youftel that there's a danger, though,tbatt!JoJ who attempt that s£mple style can tuind up sounding simplistic?

Yes. I think I once had many more imitators than I have now. There was a periodin the seventies when I was imitated, and yeah, the imitations seemed to me reductive.

S·lmp Iisti soc. B ut th at ' s about all I have to say-I can ,.t remember any parnc uIar pcei-lit was sort of pleasant

to know that I was being imitated

but on the other hand,youdo

~nce a little. But now that I'm not imitated, I don't have to worry about that sortof thing.

Do you find that, in the process one element that elevates £t?

of wr£ting, apoem will sound simplistic until youfind that

That's what writing is. It's adding one thing that changes the color, the direction of the sentence, or even the sense, the tone of the sentence. Yes. One is always looking for a key to enliven the line, the sentence, and finally the poem.

24

xxxv. II spring 2009

Wby is it that onepoe/will succeed writing in a certain style, while another won't? Is your style inherentlysuited toyour sensibility?

My stylehasdevelopedover time and certainly was determined by who I am, but peoplewhoimitatewant to sound like the person they're imitating, and so they share something of the sensibility of the one they're imitating. Or they want to appear to havethatsensibility,and so they imitate. When I was a young poet, I imitated others because Iwantedmypoems to be thought of in the same breath, but of course, a lesserbreath.I'm not sure that anybody, when they imitate another, wants to be the other,becausethere's a difference between sounding like the other and actually being theother.One wouldlike to sound better than he or she is, but no one would want [0 change places.

Isit neussarythat apoet imitate others in the process oj learning their craft?

No.I mean,everybodyhas a different way of going about maturing. What worked foro~ewon't necessarilywork for another. But a lot of poets have imitated others, cO,nsClously doneso,in an effort to elevate their style, or to sound better than they ~ht ifleft on their own. There are many ways of undergoing an apprenticeship. I think writingproseis good for poets. I think translating is good for poets, young poetsespecially, I think a lot of poets don't know how to write prose, and it's a shame.

Theyd ont'kn owhow to develop an argument.

Do YIJU think thatpoetsshould write criticism?

Ithink . .. th ,thatif they want to write poems then they should wrrte poems, but I think bo. tnJ.ghtwant to write essays now and again,just to clarify their position, or think a tltwheretheyare in American poetry or where American poetry is. You know, wthe havea culturethat is alive and growing and is in need of periodic definition. And at defini ng processhappens best in a thoughtful essay. '::;:tve weretalkingearlier about your essay "Notes on the Craft of Poetry"; you were . gme to takesrnneofthe things you said in that with a grain ofsa!t. How have your tIltws chaner. d . tl Since you wrote that essay? ~~ I'm not as....well, how do I say this' Iguess that I don't believe in do's and thi ,q~te as muchas lance did. I don't believe in laying down the law, that some~glIS IpSOfactonecessarily bad or wrong. I'm much less certain about many things used to be.

2S

CELLAR

DOOR

So, wbat's a "don'I" that you don 'I believe in any more?

Well, I used to believe in strict merrics. And I don't anymore. I used to beliee

paraphrasable argument. I think that some poems are very beautiful and SUCCes! that also resist paraphrase. And I'm not Sure that the way to understand poems paraphrasing them.

Unfortunately, this is how poetry is taught. There's a difference betweenunder ing a poem and experiencing a poem. One can experience a poem endnor uedn stand it. One can fall in love with a woman and not know why. Same with a poe It just seemed beautiful, and seems to say something except that it moves you.

that you're not quitesure0

Do you tbink that memorizing poetry helpspeople experience it morefully? I dont tbj people memorize poems in school as much as they used to.

Yeah, I think poetry is not taught well in primary and secondary schools.Maybe under the Obama administration, brighter young people will go out and teach.

He's a very good writer.

I think memorizing poems is important. I don't have a very good memory,so I'm one to exemplifY that. 1 mean, I did memorize some speeches from Shakespeare~ few poems, but really I never bothered. See, I went to fourteen different schcos,s had a very partial education. Bits and pieces just cobbled together. My family mOV a lot.

I wanted to ask a question about rhyme/ike the pantoum in Man and Camel.

it Seems like you favor forms that dont rhyme,

I sometimes rhyme, but I'm not really good at it. I'm better than a lot of peaple,bu I'm not really good at it. If rhyming seems to come naturally to a situation in a pot t~en I'll rhyme. Sometimes kind of concluding gesture.

a poem won't be in rhyme, but I'll rhyme at the end,a

Talking e more abollt crt!ft, I recently read an essay by Heaney about WordsworthandYaI whe: he said that Wordsworth would tend to submit to the rhythm thepoems sugges/td to hIm, whereas Yeats had a tendency to try to master them. It seems likeyoufall intatM Wordsworth camp, but I'm wondering if yOll ever.find yourself in a Yeatsianframe of min

26

XXXV. II

.nl iiJI is~

mJ路

spring 2009

No. Actually, betweenthe two I was much more influenced by Wordsworth. I ""'II have, poemcalled"The Untelling" which was my attempt at writing' IIIxdsworthian blankverse.I found Wordswotth very seductive. I think the Prelude I. ofthefouror fivegreatest poems, certainly the first truly modern poem.

IUz!O be takenoverby cadence. There usually is a cadence roughly blank. verse, a hHtressline,which I sometimes make six, sometimes shorter. I like the ease of a biglint.Ils mucheasierto establish a cadence with a longer line. With a short line, JiWan have a short stacatto beat.

r-

[ll

y~triftr 10 linger.

WdI,I didn'tat the beginning. But as I get older, Ilike more space . .fta!ingufWordsworth,I was reading through Dark Harbor, and there's a section where of the fairest and most IQrtftingqualitiesofnature. "Yougo on to say that 71's a pity Nature no longer means "'C!!>JdI.' You'regoingwith Wordsworth asfar as the Preface, but it seems like you have ". 'tstrvatians.

"fU4Jttht Preface, whenbe says that the mind is "tbe mirror

""

I

,I

ed

m,

~dca"l'tmember whatI said, but nature is no longer ... we find it in protected areas.

11IO~ng'"h,wildplace chat it was. taJilid thatnow it "includesOblivion. " ~I did11'dbetterre-read my poem. I might learn something. I haven't re-read poem In, longtime.M'ybe I'll read some of it tonight.

k thaI

"m sr...路 ",,"a requestfor the reading.

~.ru

ty Could you talk about your brand of surrealkJmerme elselikeJames Tate, who was also influenced by European surrealism?

.,:::t T.. ' _.

lnny

.Funnier than Iam. He's a terrific poet. I don't think of myself

st. I think of myself as a fantasist. Surrealism was a social and political

~'''taswell h Itrlosidtr as a terary movement. We use the word "surreal" rather loosely. lC<iaI ~elf ,f,nbSist because I'm not really part of a program. There's no ~cal1 b~hl~d my aesthetic. My strangeness, if you want to call it strange, is ~SOt y obvat,d. What is strange seems perfectly natural. What I'm able to I'dkdfromInsV'ry much a part of me. It doesn't seem foreign. I think what is im\'iJ"t"" Within,that follows a psychological imperative, is fantasy, or the fantastic a SOCial base is surreal. .

CELLAR DOOR

In one interview I read with you, you talked about poems as occudngintbtOo se!! and the world

Yes- that thin membrane where the self ends and the worldbegins.A po ther completely objective or subjective, but has elements of both. I chink rl true. Now there are the "eco-poets'whe want to supress the self,and creat which is really about the world around us, without imposing our own sene it.

Seems like a difficult project.

Yeah, I don't think it's possible. And if it were, it would be boring.I don'tk much about it. I heard a very nice guy,Forrest Gander, give a lectureonit,3 gathered made it seem rather unappealing.

Orpheus is afigure that appears frequently in your poems. Why is hesuchanatt" figure to you?

It's the central myth of poetry. He was a powerful poet. He couldchangeth( He couldn't save the world, but he could change it. He could makeyoubell things were different than they are, at least while they sang.And in essencet what a poem does, it makes you believe,for the time you Irereading thepoen things are as they are in the poem. Although it's not a poem, a good examp be Kafka's Metamorphosis. We have to believe in order to read the storythat( becomes a giant insect. If we don't accept the premise there is no story,but K makes us believe. We accept it. There are a lot of things that we acceptin apo the duration of our reading, that we might not accept ordinarily.

D~ you think that thats as much as we can ask ofpoems, that they male tisbelit:fx thmgftr a short duration?

Yes;Poems. aren't religion. Poems are modest. Poems say, "Believe me foras10 yo~ re reading me, then you Ire free to do what you like." Religion says,"rouge believe me or you Ire damned forever."

1his seems like some'h" J I "h } . . . b ,. ," ~, mg you aea -usu: a tot m your poems- thts desireto ettt'lJt" myth of thepoweiful poet and tben the Auden-like voice in the other ear,saying,-/1 makes nothing happen.."

J

28

ďż˝~-----------Ispring 2009 XXXV. II

nothing happen in a political way, but it makes things happen internallIlIktpcopl' feel.lt can calm people. It can excite people. It makes things 1Min. modestway.It's not going to change the state of the economy. That

ItllJowd 10 expectthat of a poem, or poetry. 'fd"klliJ go b'el 10 th, days of hawking broadsides on the street.

I think )llU'~ going to get many buyers. How much can you get from a .\1jODIttr1 Ldssay you print out a hundred poems, and you stand outside ,",,,,,..n a poemat a quarter a piece. That's 25 dollars. Poetry is not a OCCUpation.

,..n! "thll

h,,',

,thll

..-I!

;.p a&l

.....

'II-

'"

\

CELLAR

DOOR

Juliana Daugherty

THE STARLINGS

I don't remember why you had come home, or for how long. Only that it was early evening when I called)1lU to the kitchen window, to look out over the neighboisyard where the starlings traced the currents of their Bight, the incomprehensible mass of them swelling as one and then dissolving, the excruciating

unisons.1h.is was years ago. Little by little I had watchedyou hand your whole self over to order, combing your hair d one hundred strokes each morning, not once eatingtoo muchat Then it was dark, and the window's small light rushed out foolishly into the long tunnel of evening. Are you beginning to understand? Nothing can remain untouched. Like that night, invisible thousands still hurtling through darkness, palpable, unsettling what had been.

o

iJÂťS

XXXV.lI

]uliaml Daugherty

NEWHOUSE

The sunroom darkened andcold since afternoon, the backyardcedars stilled in their casings of ice.

The neighbors shout all day: his lover is youngerand more beautiful

and after he leaves, his wife keeps pacing the icy driveway for hours, notcrying. Youth goes, beauty goes, even the old house went up in flames before you, and now it seems the whole world's glittering to prove its newness,

and the television murmurs all night through brief dreams, and someone's dog barks twice, to be let out orin,and the neighbor's wife goes back inside, finally, and lOOsensher long hair for bed, or leaves it up. It doesn't matter.

spring 2009

CELLAR DOOR

Caroline Fisher

LEECHES

I stood ankle-deep in mud From rain that washed everything

Spotless but the ground.

All around, the many Incarnations of leeches, Variations on a theme.

Sometimes

round and gorged,

They dotted the ground, shiny Truffles filled with blood.

Some stretched into thin Brown fingers, upright, beckoning blood seen t

The source of

To come hither-a hopeless Gesture. Our hairless skins Made for easier pickings

Than the yelping gibbons flexing The branches overhead.

They were everyv.rhere_ On furred leaves, stalks Of prehistoric growth, River rocks. The draWStringed Canvas bags protecting

My feet

did nothing

to ease

The tingling diSCOmfort

-

2

XXXV. II

or my nervous blood.

And I could think of nothing But my mother-her generosity; Her flesh forgiving, vulnerable.

spring 2009

CELLAR

DOOR

Mario Devlin

FINAL lETTER FROM AN AIRPORT)

(WRITTEN

. you have to understand IS, . 1 have th e mas t terrible fa50 The clung with airports. It's so easy to be dramatic in them. Just to bringaperson~ into an airport is like winning some small victory-s-a little pieceofspe CI outpost, territory gained in that vast tundra of sameness where youwalk~ , and find yourself in the same place you were twenty feet back and ivil1 bein feet again.

I romanticize like crazy in airports. I imagine I've come fromsam sad place and am going to another terribly sad place b ut not gillite sa sad .as and 1 adopt a brave look of hope and having suffered as J check the mOJll[OI I Wrote down the gate number wrong, again.

. .

The trouble is, very few people match me in this craze',People 1I1 ~ become as familiar as the Starbucks coffee-cups they carry-busJflessme~, girls, a lot of college sweatshirts. That day, looking around gate C-something h dr r. a un ed strangers, and the only person 'I hadn ,t seen before was yo U . You. . . legged, doing something so specific that I wanted to be you, to alsobe Sl~ airport, to be sketching in a notebook with an orange-leather cover.

LUckily, I had my notebook too, my own little anchorof seIfh~u such scribbles as, "Story: boy looks into goldfish bowl, seeshis ownref!eco:o wanted to be drawing, couldn't think what to draw, so I drew you,looking P so often that you noticed, and started looking back at me. . d I> ' When you finally approached, you had a low, reassuringVQJce an Ivealwa I d "n_, . d allth"" ys ove t<U.KUlg to strangers. You low-reassuring-voice me New York whe fi all ge-leather b k reb we nka Y parted, my address written in your..oran oO.Imut' s ve Cen 0 y, at the time with the idea of you USIngit.

You write Iovelj- letters. You ~ea1ly do but as I was readingthemO\tl" now I h ad th' ali ' her'" â&#x20AC;˘ IS re zation that made my mouth fall open-I can'tremern . you look Ilke Y< alk . .bly" ÂŁ0 rever: burIc'. OU t allm these letters as though we're great friends,passl d"" an tree your face. Not even myoId drawing helps.I passe I

XXXV.Jl

.....

spring 2009

p<opkin thelast half-hour; I remember none of them, and you could've

"vqof diem.The thing you have to understand is, it was very romantic, meeting .Iftistic Marine:in an airport (you! a Marine!) and it's still very romantic,

sitting in of ..... ClIlnpltte with drawin!l', that arrived on the same day, due to some hold-up in 6t0l'tJJeal mail.It takesa lot to romanticize a personal pizza- except, that's not ..... hanllyanything.In an airport, any little bit of specificity will do. wtu! I'm trying to say is, you tell me you're coming back. soon, and this ndItion comeswith a request, and I just can't promise what you're asking. I suspect ... on the same page.

.arpon, C<l.ting a personal pizza and reading artistic letters from a marine-two

Youmust haverealized this by now-I've

never written such poetic,

""'dutyn in)1lU. But Ijust couldn't trust myself if I came to meet you on your an airport, to

....

(l1lCII

"""'"

So I'msony,but <heanswer is no. And I'm sorry, really I am, but I think I'd ""ad)1lu mypicture, either. It's probably best if I start to fade out.

~,.

,"'!"-

I""'"

, 1.I.AA 0

A

XXXV.II

spring 2009

Mary Catherine Penn CAR.Y

37

CELLAR DOOR

70

XXXV.II

spring 2009

Devin Coley BREAKING FREE

CELLAR DOOR

40

xxxv.

II spring

2009

Liz Mundie UNTITLED

41

CELLAR

42

DOOR

XXXV.II

spring 2009

43

CELLAR DOOR

Gwendolyn

44

Saunders CONTRADICT H

XXXV. II

spnng

Mindy Feng LIGHTS'

45

CELLAR DOOR

Mitchell Conover

A SHORT STORY FOR THE LAST MAN WHO LIKED WHISTLING DIXIE

or THE SUSPENDERSOF JEWTOWN

or CANCER THE MAN A Short Story for the Last Man Who Still Liked Whistling Dixie "To operate car, overthrow the government."

The words were sloppy, but simple. It was clear what they meant.~~ afraid of elevator cars with two doors on them. I was nervous whileI stoodln e middle of the car. Not in a weird way,or a way that would makeyou look.atme or something. Just slumped. I looked around the elevator with apprehensIvee}~ trying to decide whether to stand closer to the door that opened or the dooron e other side that stayed shut. I swayed like a tower. Towards the one thatstaysshut On the one hand there's the likelihood that the one that stays shut will stayshut.

Unless it doesn't. I bent back towards the door that opens. At least I lrnewwhat to expect. 1 know that door will open. Bouncing back and forth betweenthes~ver I doors, I began to read the emergency instructions. I am not afraid of emergenoes am afraid of doors.

- J. a operate car, overthrow the governmen t." Someone had wntte . n~ ditional instruCtions for me. If I did get stuck, and the doors opened, thenwhar?

How would I overthrow the government from an elevator car? This is notastory. about people that overthrow their governments or governments that overthrowÂŁhell' people. This is a story about Jewtown and all the suspenders.

Id on'kn h all 0f the dust came from. In the spnng .. It ge~sodus~ t ow were I can't breathe sometime because I can see the pollen in the air and Iknow there Ill' are tIny little pollens on the tiny little pollens that I am breathing in and It hurn } head to think too much about the difference between the tiny little pollensandthe tiUd ny r e oxygens. You see, when I think too much, which my mom and the d" QCtO

46

XXXV.II

spring 2009

IJI'mmy'prone"to doing, my heart starts beating really fast and I get the feeling i:elOlIl(()ne is following me and there is nervous gas rushing up from my stomach "nych~t.It feelslikesticking a paper clip into an outlet but without the pain.

Mrbrother told me that it is because I have a brain the size of a tangerine but when .~ methatI tellhim that is impossible and that I looked it up on the internet.

Yoo.probably wooderingwhy I didn't take the stairs. I have an answer for you OatIt2llgive withouttrying to think too hard so I will give it to you. More than ~afraid ofelevatorswith two doors on them,I am afraid of echoey stairwells. rmafraidofechoeystairwells because my older brother who does not get nervous (fOOts OOt havefearsof echoey stairwells or elevator cars with two doors on them ~ meOJ. moviewhere a man chased a man up an echoey stairwell and killed him Ood ngbtthereandthat is why I am afraid of eehoey stairwells.

11< Suspenders of]ewtown

I like to readbooks. Last year my mom told me to read a novel by Jacob of New York Iwidherthat How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of ~iS really How the Other Half Lnes: Studies Among the Tenements a/New York ~ nota novel,but is, in fact, an expose. My mom said I was being smart. I don't roId Iam smart,butwhen Iasked her whether or not she meant it in a bad way she methat shemeantit in a good way and then she smiled and kissed me. .

Soaren'tyou wondering if1 read the essay How the Other Half Lives: Stud~AJnQll~theTenementsof New York? I did. I read it all the way through, even the ::uctlon which my older brother told me you don't have to read because nobody s wroteit. bo.use JacobRlisis a Racist who doesn't like Chinese people. I don't like him heisa Racistand also because I looked him up on the internet and found ~[a1Iso", f' . all sorts a f .

0 mterestmgthings about him. When I say I "found out "tttesti hin d ". . n~~ gs abouthim," I mean it like the way a taX collector says the war LI1 ""-ing, like theyare already suspecting that you are up to no good. .' ~ Someofthe interesting things that I found about Mr. Riis (this is in 1taliCS Riis

lot talledHowthe Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements

1) useofthet~~eI am using when I say it when I write it) are: ~ In additlonto being a Racist he is also a Sexist l) He doesnor like Chinese people because he thinks they have eyes like cats IAiso He startedfires with his flash photography in poor people's houses (A.KA.

~) Known As) tenements) He onlylikes Protestants . ''''' list could . all I c d out about him goon forever but it won't because that 1S roun " . beeaus s: f "fi of speech meanlOg e goon forever"has become somewhat 0 a gure '

'Ii'. ....J "'IU

I(

47

CELLAR DOOR

that things that really may not go on forever because it is all someone couldfindOIl the internet can be said to go on forever. Even if they don't. "Figure of speech"i seems to be a "figure of speech. n This could go on forever (and that is not afigure

speech).

There was one part of the essay that I found particularly interesting(wh this time I mean in the tone of a teacher who is pointing out something importtDt to his or her students).

In the chapter called jewtown, Riis writes about his day.in Jewish market. He mentions a man who makes suspenders and walks aroundwiu "millions" of suspenders around his neck I put "millions" in quotes becauseRiissay "millions" in the book and when you take words out of a book you haveto putthen:. in quotations.

I also put "millions" in quotes because I am trying to subtly pokefun

at Riis by implying that it would be very difficult for a man to hold "thousands'o around his neck., let alone "millions. n But we will "let RUsgo"onthatOIl because 1) the expose has already been published, and 2) Riis is dead,andeveryO suspenders

gives you a break when you are dead.

Riis is perplexed by the man with the "millions" of suspenders around~ neck because he is a Jew and in J ewtown, only Jews are shoppers. The reasonchis does not make sense is that Jews could not afford them, nor could Riis, looked very slovenly indeed, the support of suspenders, or any

did not wear suspenders back then becausethey they afford overalls. The Jews, according to Mr. and wore loose pants around their waists)without kind of suspension for that matter. My mom told

me that I am a Jew and Riis may have been right because I do not wear suspende either! I do not wear loose or baggy pants - because I have a Batman belt bucklt.t

that my father gave me last year for my 13th birthday before he went to theh"",..

- hut I must admit, I do not wear suspenders. It is about now (then) that I am smtO (started) to admit that Mr. Riis (in italics this time because I am trying to ametdt that I may have been wrong have been right!

before about using italic tones with his name earlier)lttot

Rus, still very perplexed by the situation of the suspenders, wonderswhat they may be, and how an old man can live off the wages of unsold suspenders.Al-

though I am pery>lexed by many things and made nervous by many things, I am"'iii perplexed

by this because if an old man can hold "millions" of suspenders around

neck I do not doubt his abilities to live without wages because he is clearlyabnHere, I am poking fun at Riis (not people that are abnormal). ..

. . 1am not going to waste your time (and mine) by extensively hypothesiIi how it is that an old man can live without wages because Riis tried to do that and I

no lange Ilk hl r

ggI dl

e rm as my 7th grade history teacher Mrs. Wilson with sna

ecce

~ysI should. If! tried to write a book like Riis I would take out a few things. 1h<

sa-

. a~sm and the Sexism. But the problem with taking out the Racism and the ism 15 that I might be R '. . all ... e a acrst and a Sexist and not even know it. It IS veryr-

48

(

I

XXXV.II

spring 2009

, l~mom said I am not a Racist or a Sexist but I bet that is what Jacob Riis's dd Ilim too,becausemoms love their children and nobody wants someone ,~to be a Racistor a Sexist. No, I don't think I will write an expose because 1 ainid(notasin scaredof, but as in "sorry to admit") I am a Sexist Racist.

Idon'tknowiflmade a town called Jewtown if any Jews would move to it. ill.... itIls meJewisnt a bad word but I'm afraid (this time as in "I think") it is IllO" boy twogradesup at school called a girl three grades up a Jew and had to ' .. ihe&"Jdancecounselorand her dolphin hand puppets that are inappropriate oilIufura weekandhalf during lunch hour. I told thelastsentence to my morn d:an\haveto be in quotes because I said it and ifl said it I can give permission ~"bmmyquotesbe put in quotes and Igave that permission to myself) and she oIdw &OOd words canbe said in bad ways and when I asked if bad words can be .... &OOd IY:lys shesaidthat If1Want to Know the Truth They Sometimes Can "'llking " · p «miSSionnot to put her quotes in quotes she told me to write her "'" ~ltIikethis).

-. SoI am ajew and that is not a bad thing. When I asked my older brother ,. ~I ~t: toldmeto'please go away" (this is in quotes because when I asked him ramisslonto not put his quote in quotes he told me "please go away"). .... Twodayslater at school when I confronted the girl and told her that my -laid] tid • ew .IS nota badword' and that I myself am a Jew, the girl three grades fWd IT\( b~owi~outofyour ass." Still remembering that bad wor~s ~~nbe said. " IIlf ~ decidedto askher, would you live in jewtown? She said choke on it '0 smoke' ., her fnend that wears a tot 0 f eye makeup-L_ a cigarettewith

""a

~ '!her_n thatl could probably not make a town called Jewtown is ~ Iam almormal and cannot do a lot of things. I don't have a lot of friends la.st~in thecafeteriaI got nervous from thinking about my Styrofoam tny which will neverbreak down in a million years and can only be used ef'Idle robe: recycledinto a giant indestructible wall to keep the pandas in the cages "" 7.00. I got SO ·workedup "which as I have stated earlier I am very "'prone"to • lhatI took myshirr off and curled up under the foldable lunch table that 1 sit . abnormality. . Ih ad to mee r wi th the m,idance ~,·1IlyIe~beea use0f my tangenne WI 0wllhthedolphin hand puppets that are inappropriate

for adults for an

"l~th. She told me when I started to get nervous that 1 should start hreath-d and countingto ten and when I asked her if she thought 1 was some .kin

Id d h' f words IS not methat wasn't a good choice of words (goo c: - oice 0 thout quotes .' _. utQusc when I asked her if I can put her quote 10 my story W1 laid that was "a-okay" which I assumed meant it was permissible). h Ih ' I ) because vi en )L aventtakenoff my shirt in while {in an abnorma way d y ~ 1new th d th 1 discovers on m · methodof not getting nervous. The me 0 -at . . f wallle e • that I thomkof images that calm me down. Me' Y laVon te Lffiag .. 0 ttanlsht

.....

L__

to

49

CELLAR DOOR

cones before they are made into cones and they are just circles of waffle-paper.I like waffle-paper because it reminds me of the time that me and my dad went to theice cream parlor before school once and he told me "not to tell mom" (this is in quotes because I cannot ask my father if I can put his quotes in without quotes becausebe went to the hospital). When you go to the ice cream parlor before school,theyare just making all of the waffle-paper.

They stacked all of the waffle-paper circlesupon the counter and started, one by one, pulling them off of each other. 'Thewaffle-papers circles peeled off and were still hot and bendy when they started to peel, I like to think of my father's hands peeling the waffle-paper circles back one by onelike a deck of cards without numbers or drawings of Siamese twin-kings and twin-queens.

I like to think of the image as just his hands because everybody has the samehands and I can't remember his other characteristics because I do not remember whathe looks like.

Another image I like to think about is from an Olive Garden commercial that I saw once when my mom and me were watching a movie on the OxygenNelwork which I think is just for women but I like to watch anyways because my mom likes to watch it. In the commercial there is a kitchen with wooden countersandlot of ivy on the walls with open windows and very little pollen in the air. In theimagt I think about when I am getting nervous, there are six women all in long Amishdresses (the Amish are an Anabaptist Christian Denomination found primarily in the United States and Ontario, Canada that I looked up on the internet) that are each folding their own darkly-colored bath-robe on when they are done folding them they flap them out refold them. The Amish-dress wearing women fold I am no longer nervous and the gas goes down from

a section of the counterand in the sunny kitchen and!hen. and unfold their bathrobesuntil my chest back into my stomac

When they fold there are never wrinkles or creases like when my mom foldsmy laundry. I always refold it when she puts it away in my drawers.

Cancer the Man

Last week in school we had an assembly and an orator who was alsoa doctor talked to the entire school about "cancer the killer. '" When I got homefrolll school that day I did a1k c el stupid not t to my mom because she had made me re because until the assembly I had been under the impression that Cancer wasthenznc of the man who t k d d . etuaI1y' .

00 my a to the hospital but now know that Cancer u a deadly disease which took my dad to the hospital. I migbt be stupid but it doesno' ~a:e me so nervous to know that my dad was probably m ract, probably dead of cancer.

not at the hospital hut~

her i When my mom asked me What Is Wrong Honey I responded by telling d er in a very rational manner that she had made me feel stupid because I hadtofin

so

XXXV.1l

spring 2009

IIfromme orator/doctorthat Cancer, the man who took my dad to the hospital, .. infuetCancer, thediseasewhich took my dad to the hospital. I told her that her lrb3dmade mefeel like my brain was the size of a tangerine and when she asked .wlyWouId I Think My Brain Is the Size of a Tangerine I responded by telling kf!hatin",c.s becauseshe lied to me about the man who took dad to the hospital.

Although I hadtold her what was "on my mind," I have guilty feelings _I think it madeher feel sad that she thought she made me feel like I have a taiotht sizeof a tangerine. I don't think she lied to me. It was what my guidance ~rwith thedolphinhand puppets that are inappropriate for adults called a lie which, apparently,is not as bad as a whole-lie, but is more like a half-lie.

I 1besaId thatshedoes not think that it is more of a white-lie than a black-lie. As zm ~ youhavealreadyknown for some time, lying can be very complicated and

tmw~l

-estricky. /,

SoI thinkmymom told me a half-lie when she let me believe that Cancer hadtakenmyfather to the hospital. The guidance counselor with the ..pÂŁnband puppe~that are inappropriate for adults told me that maybe it made eelbett~rnottohave to tell me about it. Even though I think that the guidance ~lorW1ththedolphinhand puppets is a quack, I think she might have "had a fan IJl this particularcase. ~hi hWhenIgothome from my meeting with the guidance counselor with the ~ : ~n~ puppetsItold my mom that Ilove her and that no matter ho:w many ~ 't1j nussionshetold me, it was "a-okay" because I would never stop loving her. oI:~ktd~e if I ThoughtWe Were Going to Be OK Honey and I responded by -'t) hera-okay." bvtu ~e thingabout elevator cars nowadays is that they move awful fast, and Ittidcnttl h~e : forW~iting swears on the wall, or sexing up your fellow elevator Wh t,. hich arcthings people tend to believe are done on elevators (Mom says hoi tWlththeStateofThings Nowadays). But this elevator, much to my dismay ihatjl:ty ofswearson the wall and was moving extremely slowly (I can only say tl~ luckyI was in there alone). In the tens of tens of seconds that it was gomg *cth metoreachthe ground floor I began to sweat, realizing that I had forgotten L. er or notI wasgoing to the ground floor or to the ceiling floor. I was about to Io\QJtOUtin a "nervoussweat" when the elevator dinged. cId Mymomasked me if I would like to see a therapist. I responded that, no I ~ IIOtwant to visitwith a therapist because I don't like puppets and I woul~guess die therapistwould be much like the guidance counselor with the dolphin hand 1'1ppe~ that . then . areInappropriatefor adults. No, I do not think I wo uld like toa see. a '" PISt. Mymomtold me that She Was Not One to Push and that the poon '"" AIways 0 pen. Therapist or No Therapist I Nee d e dOd t I told herI am ~ an u e. till aplugandthat made her laugh a little, except when I asked her if she was 5 OJ] ':"

51

I L

IL-

CELLAR DOOR __

thinking of Dad she said tharshe was always thinking ofDad. Tomakehar.l better I told her thar I am never thinking of Dad and she smiledandkissedre l have guilty feelings thar she kissed me because Iwas tellingahe,andaotlrt.,;, which is not just a half-lie but a full he.

The ding that sounded tinny started to fade even in myeudrumsthll remember the ding and play it back to me quietly like when youclose)1lIlfq~' looking at a lamp too long and you can see a florescent green phanlOm-bm~ I. already feel that the door was not going to open because usuallyyoucan hearth ropes and machines moving and sweating just for you. Theelevator sat quietly&b was alive and it wanted me to open the door for it. The devatorwassoalivt(lll(t wouldn't open for me like usual.

I think my mom misses my dad because I know she criesatnigh!, soax times and that she is not crying because she is happy like the motherdoesm th< movie when her angry child tells her he loves her. My mom was cryingb<a;. was sad and my brother and Idid not make up thewholefamilytha15hen ' order to have eyes that didn't cry when they were alone. IdOn'ttltinkmymot brave enough because I don't cry and 1 miss my fathertoo. I wondcrifmy,dreams about his hands like Ido because she can't remember hisface.I~~ brother does not dream of my father's hands, although Idon't knowhe""e .101 him and he said "please leave me alone," and when I askedhim ~~ herespo~ by not responding which, in this case, is not a lie by omission, but IS slIDplY;fitl u sian. I love my mom but I am afraid and sorry to admit thatI amnoteno

like she is enough for me. . "'d",,; notJ1llSSv~ Mom, I am sorry that I am not enough for you. I may. . b>rkl'" miss you. I miss Dad because you died with him. Idon't thi~hnng1Dgdl"'J" dead mother is something you can look up on the internet. 1m I looked at the two elevator doors. I was locatedright~ thsli~ of them. The shiny doors were alive now like the elevator,two thin moU 'butuMl their lips because I had to choose one of them. Ipressed the "door:,?"J]lllt,1ol and both of the mouth-like doors opened. I knew that Ihad a chOIce W dbcit'" . th e easiest It was choice I had ever made because I had rnad e 1'tinmyh~ ~_ happened. I was prepared for exactly this moment in advance. Ma)>be:~ my dad and my brother and my guidance counselor, and my soon-to-~ .. /t and Jacob Ri.is who was just trying to change things and the waJlle-m ...... ~)'-~ Am'h lS women would have all gone through the door that nor ethingth""ultS In fact, I think they would have because in all of us there IS sorn .. be¢ _r'., . ' 'd thatlt15 us go arter what we haven t seen yet because we are hopmg IDSl e unJikta:! th b"'u~ an everything we have seen already, My decision was very easy donlt hurt~ mom and unlike my dad I think of things ahead of time so that they,."", ba dl'y when they happen. Because, in my fifteen years,the}'always, ~\"')' ""

~~;veenc

XXXV. II spring

2009

Through the seconddoor was something I wanted nothing to do with. I quickly .-illttd outof thedoorthat always opens. Out the door that leads to the ground. I ..

waIkOO outof the door and tightened

my backpack. straps, even

the

ones that went

""'" mybelly and chest like I was going on a hiking trip. 1 walked home to you IIthat youcouldfake sneeze twice and I could pretend that I didn't see your eyes r

WJltring.

011

â&#x20AC;˘

53

CELLAR DOOR

Jon McDonald

WINTER FLORA

Petunia, flower woman, lady of the street, tramp: Most townies called her Flora.

She set up shop on a park bench, collecting change from those who didn't know not to stop.

She kept separate spots for bills and pennies by way of an intricate system of paper cups scavenged from dumpsters of local bars.

Her flowers were always far too vibrant during the dead months of winter. Surrounded by a crown of golden yarrows, daisies, and an occasional lily leaning stubbornly against the still gray sky, she appeared at once regal and sad. But all told, at night, when she stretched out under the blinking traffic lights to rest her eyes, whether she watched young couples keeping pace with times and expectations; whether she dreamed of keeping books instead of cups, hiring interns and expanding storage, eventually acquiring the privilege of paying a home mortgage; Orwhether she yearned for love, looking

54

XXXV. II

spring 2009

aftersharp-dressedstrangers - there's no telling.

She'sgone now; a new development

just broke ground. What's left? The bench, some petals, a paper cup on the railing.

55

CELLAR DOOR

Katherine

Oberembt

ENCOUNTER

ON INTERSTATE 40

I met him on a cross-country

trip.

Our last hurrah, my friends called it.

Wilmington,

N.C. to L.A. I could drive for hours out of things to think.

without running

I met him at the Cadillac Ranch. The guidebook said, ten half-buried graffiti-covered Cadillacs, nose-down, facing west. I tried to think what to say like spines on the desert's back _

what bullshit. I didn't care about the golden age of the American automobile like he did, or the fact that the cars were facing in the same direction as Cheops' pyramid. He said, poor Cheeps, watching that great giant thing grow for sixty-five years, then getting buried in it all alone.

He spent his whole life getting ready to die.

I told him a story.

When I was eight, I said I don't care

that grandpas dying, I hardly know him.

The next day, a small muscle

above my lip began to twitch. Then, my temples started to throb; there was a soreness in my left shoulder, under my rib cage where my heart would be, and crampings

and pulsings all Over my body.

And I believed I was dying too,like grandpa.

I believed it as if I really was.

He asked if I still thought! was dying.

I shrugged. Not really. He said, I'dfeel like a sinner

56

if 1 didn't write

to you.

XXXV.II

spring 2009

I thoughtabout him at the Heritage Farm in Albuquerque, wheredressed-up ladies quilted like the olden days.

I thought about him at the Meteor Crater, at the Petrified Forest Natural Park.

I wantedto buy him a cheap shiny souvenir.

I'vethought about him when I felt hollow-boned and alone, whenI'mwith other people, when I lie awake andsufferimaginary symptoms.

I wantto keep the length of the highway between us for the rest of our lives.

I inventedhim out of the fire in his eyes ashewatched the Cadillacs leaning in the setting sun.

I haven'tforgotten that he never took off his sunglasses.

57

CELLAR DOOR

Katherine Oberembt

THE FIRSTTIME

He could hear her getting ready in the bathroom, Emptying the pouch, rinsing it out.

After the colectomy, she spent a month's paycheck at the specialty retailer she'd heard about from her "osromates."

The ostomy swimsuit, the pouch deodorant.

The opaque pouch, after she caught him staring at the little red cap poking out of her side.

The cummerbund, to hold it in place.

The ostomy lingerie.

While he waited , he remembered what his father told him.

You ought to tell her to work, he said.

If you don't let her work, she'll spend all day trying to be pretty and sexy and sweet for you.

Cooking the recipes she sees on Dinner at]ulia's.

New French recipe every night. It'll be swell for a while, and then you'll be bored to death.

Now, it all mixed together to him - her ailments.

The joint stiffness, the constant fatigue.

The piling on of weight. The frightening vagueness the doctor calls "cognitive dysfunction."

The heightened and painful response to gentle touch. Return to intimacy slowly, said her doctor. Start with kissing and touching. And make sure to let her know that you still find her attractive. This from the man who rerouted his wife's intestines.

She had washed the bag out three times hefore she came to bed. She stopped him twice to make Sure the cap was on tight.

It hurt on her back. It hurt on her stomach.

XXXV.II

spring 2009

It wasfinewhen she lay on her left side, but shecouldn't stop thinking she'dleftthe stove on. She stopped him andwent to check. As he heard her comingback up the stairs, sighing with the breathlessness that comes after crying, he turned off the light and pretended to sleep.

For her sake. For his.

59

CELLAR DOOR

Jon O'Neill and Ellis Driver

LARRY

June 16, Day 25, 8:57 a.m. 93 Degrees Fahrenheit; Muggy.

(A brutal midday in store).

Larry stirs. He pulls off that old rug sewn for a child with faxes and hens, nowd~, and piss-stained. He rubs his eyes, his beard, dressed in the clothes he wore yeste.~ and the day before and each day since Day 1. He is thirty-five feet below StateH~. way 21, where he sleeps safe from rain and teenagers. He stretches, one large~nd probing at the back of his dirt-tinged beard, the other at his chest feeling the nse we fall of his ribs, his heart beneath. Thun-thunk, thun-thunk.. The sun has peekedabovl: the radio-station. walk to work.

His bloodshot

eyes squint closed and then open, and he beginsto

It's a short distance to the dumpster, which contains mostly paper, agains.tthe wall of the radio station. He walks in long strides, purposeful and tall. He is atthe d umpster III . 1ess than a minute today. (3 seconds faster than yester d ay,2 slower . than the day before.) He swings the metal bin, discarded I say aloud, to no one.)

the thick lid open and clambers with a hazy grace

Ulto

,

paper up to the middle of his thighs.("Nowfortheedi~

L arry ben d s and gathers a handful of paper in each hand, \vagglOg . his \crists gendyd. h h so t at e can see each page in each bundle. With a sudden fury he filn gs both han fall fuls of paper out of the dumpster and onto the grimy asphalt and watches thelD 1az ilyawn, d mas king potholes and a fast-food bag and a dead mouse. 0 nceallhU< . th tw o sheets have Come to rest he gathers more papers and hurls them as VI e1bolOesa\e ' alley by the studio. After

six and a half minutes

of this he begins to empty who!jjke

~e bin of memos and scripts and schedules, flinging tickertape.

paper to the ground beloW'

XXXV. II

spring 2009

Halfofan hour passes in this fashion, as it does every day, until he stands still and IlOOp<d withpaperto his ankles and his chin on his chest. He hoists himself out of theoflice,looking resolute as men tend to look on their way home from work. He gathersmostof the paper from the ground and slowly, methodically, returns it to the ~ metalbox. He reacheswith his crane-like fingers and slowly closes the heavy lid.

Hegathersthe paper left on the ground sheet by sheet, reading each one thoroughly ~then sortingit in his left hand until he holds about a ream of printer

paper. Sat-

isfierl,hewalks hackto his place underneath the overpass and sits Indian-style, with lhepaper in a stackto his left. His eyes close slowly as he sits. (Because I know what happens next,Iimagine that he is memorizing what he has read today, as though he :: preserving the words of holy texts.)

Aman rises beforedawn to a gentle buzz from a clock radio. His room is spartan, white-willed,His bed is narrow. He showers briefly; shaves. His name is Frank and bemakesthe bed. He dresses, puts on his watch, gathers the sorts of things one ga~ers beforeleavingthe house. His bag lunch, his bag dinner. Binoculars, a Pola[(lid camera,suntanlotion. A blue spiral notebook with a sea wolf--a high school l!lascot-onthe cover.He carries these to his car and puts his day's provisions in two stacks inthe spacethat passes for a back seat.

Hewalksbackto the low house-yard and shrubbery nearly tended-and locks his front . an d m ak es his donr.H e returns to the coupe, buckles his belt, turns over the engine way to the nearest onramp to 21.

-

Frank skI\JlQS ~ al ong the black-paved road at five over the limit. He keeps his . wm . d owa ~p,theradiooff,both hands on the wheel until he downshifts to fourth, third, pausUlg a~the triangularYIELD sign at the bottom of the off ramp and turning right, and nght againand into his parking place to the side ofWPSH, home of jeff and Dettilln The Morning. It is 7:15 a.m.

Heunloadshis supplies in the correct order. He opens the side door to the studio, chair and a,smallcollapsibletable from the trunk. of the car. Frank lugs his chair up the two llights,cigarettebutts in the corners and out the door onto the roof. He props it openwith the cinderblock he brought along on Day 1 and leaves against the wall. He Unfoldsthe chair and goes back for the table.

propped open by an accommodating custodian. He gets a folding beach

-

12:14 p.m. His day is still young, and meditation can only last so long befo~e the legs

beg movement.He rises and reaches for his stack of papers from the

mornmg-

61

CELLAR DOOR

He separates half of the stack of paper, as thick as a thumb or a generous sliceof bread. He holds it tenderly in both veined and sun-chapped hands, twisting thepile

of pages this way and that, appreciating its strengths and its weaknesses. He gendy tears the pages in his hand in a straight line, dividing them into two separatestacks He repeats this process just as carefully with the other half of his morning's haul and then gathers the four masses on top of one another (about four, four and a half inches high).

It is just barely afternoon now, and as he steps out from under the overpasshis shadow is just a small pitiful thing, riding the rain-dampened trash and soot to keep up with him. The rotting shoes walk a winding path. Larry slows as he passeshis dumpster, and he looks at it with familiarity without truly pausing-as one does when driving past school on a Saturday.

(I watch him shamelessly; sometimes I dream of his strides. His legs are thoseof insects; they are water, oceans, gears. They will spring and flow infinitely into the future and down the sidewalk. He is a clock, and God designs them to last.Always

If all could walk as he does, our knees would whirr with comprehension. But dream are dreams are dreams, and perhaps he pays for his grace with unmitigated loneliness).

Frank's been on foot since Larry quit his meditation some hours ago, scrawling . notes longhand in his spiral-ring. He keeps pace with Larry and doesn't bother~'I1 stealth-the deep focus of his subject is his deer blind. In his shirt pocket is a shyer or two of jerky from the bag lunch. He walks the sidewalk with the knowledge of nearly a month's re-treading) m~nts. and numbers

his eyes on Larry, his eyes on his pen. He writesin frag路

and a Sumerian

sort of scrawl) of jig and jag. He followsLany

~C1entifically and walks heel, toe, heel, toe. A bit of jerky between his thumb and index, he dines as he writes.

Larry walks east but his grey mainsail beard blows west. Every so often a fewfingeI of his right hand check that the papers are securely in his left. But after tWO~utes exactly he stops. The street CUrves up at the middle and he stands, thin, upon Its modest peak. The hems of his pants stain with rainwater. A foot twitches . . Hi~ head snaps down and to the left (at first I imagine he stares at a cat that shivers ~n his gaze). He glares down into the street drain, his true focus. He bends downto it lOVingly It see . face must travel down down his Shouldeo, . ms a th ousan d mi miles his chest down his to s d hi I ' , h ,outon . ' r 0, own s egs. He is losing altitude. His spine pus e his thin shirt curl b _,_ him look uncus a out the world outside. His spiny vertebrae maxe J

XXXV.I1

spring 2009

..n and weak.His face stops a foot =a

from the ground. He blindly but carefully sheetof paperand holds it over the grate. Then, with the most precision al-

btedtoourclumsy form, he sets it on the grate, centered

and perfect.

Helea~-es,a spidermissing half his appendages. Soon the paper on the drain is lBtbatis leftof him. Water funnels over it, sagging and discoloring it. It weakens ~tr:n themetalbars and breaks, a series of holes in a series of words . .~ thecity, a millionwords crawl through hundred sewer drains and sail with iIgIonous company to the sea. Larry, tired, walks toward the roar of Highway 21.

63

CELLAR DOOR

CONTRIBUTORS

Meredith Brooke Baker is a senior English major and creativewriting minorfrom Raleigh, North Carolina.

John Benning is a junior photojournalism major from Louisburg, North Carolina Devin Coley is a senior advertising major and business minor from EmeraldIsle, North Carolina.

Mitchell Conover is a junior economics and public health major from Mendham, New Jersey.

Juliana Daugherty is a senior geography major and creative writing minorfrom Saluda, North Carolina.

Maria Devlin is a sophomore English major and creative writing and math minor from Bronxville, New York.

Angela Di Filippo is a sophomore psychology and studio art major fromR~eigh, North Carolina.

Ellis Driver is a biology and art major from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Mindy Feng is a first year studio art and biomedical engineering majorfromXuz China.

Caroline Fisher is a junior English major and creative writing minor from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Skylar Gudas is a senior dramatic arts major and creative writing minorfromAsh, land, Virginia.

Michelle Hicks is a J' uni or E ng li sh major . f rom L afayette, L oursrana".

Kristen Lineberger is . dici . f rn Gasto~ . a senior gital media and photography major ro N orth Carolina.

XXXV.II

Kathleen Loevenis a junior studio art and anthropology

spring 2009

major from Clayton,

North

i:lrolina. )nMcDonaldis a senior English major and creative writing minor from Charlotte, Nonh Carolina. ~da Michelsonis a sophomore graphic design major and studio art minor from No. Bern,North Carolina.

Liz Mundleis a sophomore American

studies major and Hispanic

studies minor

fromDavidson, North Carolina.

Ddaney

Nolanisa junior communications

major and creative writing

forthescreenand stage minor from Winston-Salem,

and writing

North Carolina.

~therineOberembtis a senior history and English major and creative writing

mtnorfrom Galesburg, Illinois.

JonO'Neillisa first year comparative literature major and sexuality loreminorfrom Charlotte, North Carolina.

Mary

CatherinePenn is a junior photojournalism

studies and folk-

major and creative writing minor

fromWilmington, North Carolina.

Guion Pratt '\S a scni ...

L senior communications

. wrmng . . . r f r om major an d creative rruno

oJOUthem Pines, North Carolina.

;:dOlyn Saunders is a junior journalism and studio art major from Kill Devil , North Carnlina.

65

CELLAR

DOOR

BENEFACTORS The Blanche Armfield Fund in the Creative Writing

Program

The Department of English Gift Fund

Lc

XXXV.Il

spring 2009

SUPPORTING

CELLAR DOOR

Yourgift will contribute to publicity, production, and staff development costs not covered

by our regular funding. Contributors will receive copies of the magazine through the mail for at least one year.

Please make all checks payable to "Cellar Door" and be sure to include your preferred mailing address.

Cellar Door c/o Marianne Gingher, Faculty Advisor Department of English, UNC-CH Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

67

CELLAR

DOOR

~:----~

JOINING CELLAR DOOR

f\ll undergraduate ,,,,dents are welcDme to apply join the ,tRff of Cd/ar Door. Any Dpenings fDrpr on the poerry. F,eoon. and Art selectionstaffs"" sitc advertised on our "eb ,