Crack the Spine
Literary magazine
Issue 118
Issue 118 July 2, 2014 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2014 by Crack the Spine
CONTENTS
Roger Soffer Anthem
Alexander Cendrowski Depression in the Sand
Jocelyn Mosman D
Laura Kopchick Dear __________
Barry Yeoman We Were Born
Shaun Turner How I Learned to Fish
Roger Soffer Anthem
Hear this anthem, which begins, as the habitual audience settles, with my inability to conjure the mud-people and their broken-mirror words, with my reluctance to draw succor from that yesterday smallness, especially when, with one softening breath, my eyes are nearly liberated from once-thick flesh, and my palms push into the rushing water of our kitchen sink, and my ears lift with the passing bus: You have cracked me like a coconut, and the milk runneth over, and yes, I know, that’s a little grand for a guy scrubbing cheddar out of a cast iron pot, but what can I do? I am twice my size, even with one knee on the ground.
And now that I’ve stopped moving, how can I tell what will come before me, and to what end? Like that moment we couldn’t stop laughing when the truck pulled in front of us and we almost died. Death wasn’t funny, but who I’d always thought would die sure was. And you were laughing, too, to watch me spill, all that milk and grace, and my flag, effortlessly, in the wind.
Alexander Cendrowski Depression in the Sand
It was hot. Not like a left me cooked.
brutal snap. I hesitated Still, I dug. My father too long in the face of my morning cappuccino, burning your tongue and had dug, his father had only friend’s sudden forcing you to lap up ice dug, and damn it if divorce, allowing the water like some everyone else didn’t heat to turn the metal me. This adorably deranged seem to be digging, against puppy when you were though I couldn’t see indecency prevented me just trying to escape the anyone for miles around. from using it as a trowel, I attempted freeze of a January cold My only companion was though front. Nor like a day at my shovel, the plain, several times. From then the beach, painting your cracked wood and rusted on I worked with my back a lobster red, a metal that I relied on to hands, because, although burn that was sure to pierce the wretched sand they blistered when develop into an early-set and fling it onto the pile. picking through bits of and early-caught form of That was the theory, at stone and glowed a skin cancer just like your least. In practice, I warm red and eventually eighth grade science snagged my shovel on a a leathery brown after hours of teacher said it would. No, boulder and, attempting several it was a desert heat: a to use it as a lever on attacking the baked scalding, unforgiving, which to enact a lesson sand, at least they were in physics, managed to my hands, and I could mouth-drying-son-of-abitch heat. A heat that separate the metal from rely on them to be as its wooden mate with a perfectly miserable as I
was. The shovel, I determined, had not been a very good companion at all, constantly wearing its curved smile to show how happy it was in spite of my exhaustion. I buried the two by kicking a wall, which covered them successfully, though with the unintended effect of refilling a third of the pit. All relationships end in poor work ethics. It began to dawn on me then that sand was a very poor medium through which to dig. The more I removed, the more the walls caved in, and it became a constant struggle to maintain depth and width rather
than to actually strive towards any sort of progress. I cupped gritty waterfalls in my hands and shoved them upward, hoping to cut off their flow, but merely enabling the stream of sand from the opposite side. I became the Titanic, sinking in the covering sands, my hull filling, and my arms flailing wildly in an attempt to bail. I could hear the shovel rolling over in its grave, laughing at my Sisyphean struggle. But I didn’t have time to get bothered by harassment from a goddamn shovel, especially not one that was so obviously unstable. The sand was
more pressing. It pressed and it pressed and I worried it might blow my house in except I had no house anymore and this wasn’t a nursery rhyme so there wasn’t too much merit in that. After hours of struggling against the sand’s will, my strength took a lunch break, throwing me face down into the pit and giving me a front row seat to its steady filling. The sand surged across my back and down the waistband of my briefs, violating me with the same heat that had hardened and fractured my hands. I did not cry out, though it probably would have been appropriate, and
instead chose to lay there and survey the sand close up. It’s sometimes hard to think of sand as anything but liquid, because it flows so beautifully even when it’s so extremely temperate, but no, it’s a bunch of solids, and in my position I could see the individual grains rolling around and separating, only to fall back into the sea of their brethren and become indistinguishable again. After assuring myself that it was, indeed, sand and not some new yellow lava, I stood up and brushed myself off. The space between my nails and fingers was caked with a fusion of
sand and sweat, a mixture that waxed them together like claws and made my scooping uniform. Eventually, my excavation attracted the attention of some great flying beast. I imagined a dragon come to lift me away from my dig forever and perhaps breathe fire just to show that desert heat who was boss anyway, and then maybe we could vacation together in Alaska and exchange old ghost stories and muse about the way things used to be before we were forced to grow up and get real jobs. Instead, and to my immense disappointment, it descended and revealed
its bald-headed ugly vulture self, though I must admit to some fondness for its voluptuous white scarf. It tilted its head as if to ask if I might just go ahead and drop dead, because he really had to get home before it got too late and his woman yelled at him again; he really was just trying to be a good man-of-thenest and put some decent food on the table for once, not that horribly passé lizard shit, but she didn’t appreciate him and, if he must be blunt, was withholding sex for no other reason than to spite him. Despite his perfectly reasonable
intentions, I regretfully declined the bird’s request and began my dig anew, striking at the sand and tossing it over my shoulder. He resumed his circuit. To prove myself to him, I promised myself I would work harder. In defiance of my renewed vigor, a desert storm snapped into life around my excavation. Sand buffeted my face, gritting into my teeth and gathering in the pockets of my eyes. I adopted the role of actor escaping paparazzi, arm covering face, until the storm subsided. It left me with a final present: the remains of my dig, a mere pocket in the sand,
myself its epicenter. I stared at the result of my work, my callused, fractured hands, and sat down in my shallow grave, happy.
Jocelyn Mosman D The dark alleyways of “D” led us down This tricky path between good and evil (But I don’t think it could be that simple). It was you and me, since the eighth grade, And together we made a mess of middle school, Leaving a trail behind us... We wrote “D” over and over until it sounded More truthful than “H.” “Happiness” felt like a curse word in my crooked mouth, And you only knew frowns (no smiles for us). We traveled like whores, selling Ourselves short of self-restraint, and I knew even then that you were my (Cursed, hated, rotten) Metallic Monster. I carried you with me to create designs Of “D” on white canvas, Transforming the white into red, red paint. You got me through the hard days, (And just like bad sex) you were a reminder Of my failure and “D.”
I met an Angel freshman year, (You called her a Devil) and She cut the strings attaching You to my existence. I knew with her on my side, I could be free, But parasites like you don’t give up easily, Not without a fight (to the death). I tried breaking you, But you broke my will. I tried throwing you away, But gravity pulled us back together. I’ve seen what an addiction can do: It’s written on my body (like pieces of art). Our creations are the evidence of The dark alleyways we traveled So long ago, digging our way down To the dark pit (of self-pity). I couldn’t cover you up, My makeup was too yellow, And you made me feel like a freak, (Long sleeves, dark circles, red lipstick).
They called “D” a plea for attention; I called you “Box Cutter” But I was cutting outside the box. Couldn’t they see, (Why couldn’t they see?) I was falling apart, creating a Blood bath in dark alleyways, Just you and me, me and you… Depression creating my monsters, Digging deep down (in my darkest holes), And spilling out around my rough edges Like red war paint.
Laura Kopchick Dear __________ Dear _____________, That story you sent about the owls fucking made me realize we should have had more of a moment at that duck pond. All that cement and trash floating around? Those sick looking birds? It might have been perfect. Or maybe the moment should have happened two days later, in that sad little cafe near campus on the final morning before I took you to the airport to catch your flight back to Pittsburgh. The place with the peach detox tea, where "Hello Dolly!" played on repeat until you got up and disengaged the replay button and the old ladies from the Chamber of Commerce met in the back room and talked about an upcoming library book sale at Civic Center Park. Or maybe in the back garden at Sanford House, because think about that lovely red carpeting on the circular staircase up to the second floor and the orange blossoms in the white ceramic vases on the tabletops in the bar. After you went up to your room, I wandered out to the back patio and waited while two women (mid-thirties? a bit younger than me) debated the merit of gauze draperies for the veranda versus lace or tulle for the wedding that night and twenty minutes later, after you finally came down from your room, when you asked me about my wedding—whether I’d worn an elaborate white dress with intricate pearl beading, had an expensive reception with crab bisque and such—I’d told you the honest truth but suspected your lie when you
admitted a small wedding, only a few family members no longer in touch with you because of your lost religion and the stories in your second book taken from those family members, ones they claimed you’d gotten all wrong (about suicides and drug use and grown men in love with teenage girls). I doubt much about your life is small, or non-elaborate. I imagine the calisthenics of your mornings play out brilliantly against a dull grey sky in Pennsylvania, sifting snow falling beyond a dirtied glass pane, and a counting of small, colorful capsules next to a cobbled together PC on a makeshift desk you thrifted last year from the Salvation Army in Iowa City. But did I think about that then, in that moment outside as we sat in the damp garden chairs and watched the clouds drift overhead? When you admitted you would have been flattered if I had, indeed, come on to you at the conference in Seattle? No, that would come later, the next afternoon, before the party with all of the writing students. When we were still alone and took your brightly-colored pills and walked along the Trinity where I told you about the sewage and the watching-a-movie-while-floating-in-the-polluted-river story and I pointed out the abandoned band shell where they projected those movies, the cement façade that emerged from the barren landscape like a giant solitary thumb nail from the weeded ground. Except right then it all looked beautiful in the grey afternoon light and you pointed to the newly built bridge, its supporting wires splayed like fingers against the darkening sky, and you joked that we should just fuck that party, right? And instead get in my car and drive straight up I-35, right through Oklahoma, Kansas, maybe not stopping until the pills stopped working their magic, a good eleven hours away. But back to the Sanford House, out in the back garden with the wedding planners. That might have been a perfect moment. We could have just
slipped up the back staircase. Next to the faulty ice maker that seemed to be slowly on its way to dying, with that low whine it made as we passed, right after I asked if your room had one of the balconies and I pointed, hopeful, to one of the rooms above us with the french doors and filmy white curtains. We maybe should have taken one of those moments. But what I know for absolute certain is the one moment in our three day visit where we should not have had a moment: on Thursday, just three hours in, when I told the story about my infant daughter and her open heart surgery, and the way my husband’s face looked when he finally let himself cry. And I told you about how I had made a deal—with whatever entity a person makes these sorts of deals with—as the surgeon described the way they would crack open her chest. I could sacrifice my six month old daughter and live through her death if I had to, if that’s what it took to save my other, an older son, and how I had only told one other person that story—another writer—someone more famous than you, someone you were jealous of—and how the moment right after that you came out with your own story about a wife, a premature birth, a lot of blood and a stay in a hospital. A story I doubted, actually, as quick as it came after mine. That was not the place for our moment. But, looking back, maybe it was. I don’t know if you realized, but above us, right over our heads, on one of the tree branches that hung over the sidewalk, one of those awful black birds that had hovered above us the whole time you were here—maybe one in the flock that had followed us, actually, from the campus parking lot to the beige brick building where my writing students waited—was plucking the brains from the split head of a dead
squirrel. And when you talked about the blood from your wife, your infant son, that is what I focused on—the way that bird was being savaged.
Barry Yeoman We Were Born and our creations loomed larger than ants moving whole mounds of sleep swarmed over hands as if atoms actually existed in touch and when pressed ever so lightly against closed eyes the thumb and forefinger became larger than any one sky or lidded oceans ago the canyon-socketed night thought of itself as master pieced photograph and in that self-manicured space called mind
our quirky inner-voice sang seriously to and commented till therapeutic laughter overcame the grave circumstance offered and those never created
Shaun Turner How I Learned to Fish
That guy in bed is curled coke into his gumline. in his sleep, like a shrimp. He hugs a pillow like it is my body, and I can see the crack of his ass carved into a flimsy sheet. I think that from the backside, he looks like a good guy. Too much attitude, a little pompous. In east Texas, you take what you can get. I drove to his suburban apartment at 2 AM, and made the awkward small-talk. I nodded when he spoke to affect a certain knowing. And before he pulled me in for that first bitter kiss, he rubbed
fishermen said, just When I lived off the tasted like that. Galveston coastline with I look at the guy in my father, the two of us bed—a boy, really. I went shrimping one think, I should leave morning with our before he wakes up, fisherman neighbor and before he gets some kind his son. The sky was of idea. I pull gym shorts overcast, and I sat on top over my waist and feel of an ice chest as the the keys jangle in one three men dragged their pocket. Briefly, I nets into the sea. After consider waking him they pulled the mesh with a kiss. He will kiss heaping with brown me back. He will smile shrimps onto the boat, and wipe the back of his the fisherman's son hand across his face. peeled one fresh. He took In bed last night, his a pocket knife, and eased hands pawed at my back, the bloodline out of the scratching in neat circles. shrimp's back. He said Boy, he said, give me taste it, and my first raw some of that. And I didn't bite was bitter iodine. know if it was the Brown ones, the alcohol talking, or the
weed, but I roll off him onto my back and said, Get it for yourself. His mouth wasn't anything to write home about, but the little bedroom, the mattress on his floor had absorbed my will, and I yawned again, hoping it sounded something like pleasure. Last night he said things like I can't believe you're single, and You don't know what you do to me. These drunk emptinesses unnerve so I let him press his face into my shoulder. Felt that one final shuddering. But he stirs in bed, and I imagine kissing him good morning. Making
nice and eating a breakfast he will cook in his kitchen—one nicer than mine. Staying until he is in the shower when maybe I 'll look in his wallet, at the pictures and the discount cards. In the living room and stick my cell phone into my pants pocket. I think back to the bedroom, and the baggies scattered on his nightstand. Sunlight slats across the bed. I could kiss him, and he could disrobe me. His mouth would part—would taste like bitter numbing— and he would straddle me with his knees, somewhere between an embrace and a clutch. I would study the lines of
his jaw, the corner of his ceiling where a cobweb clusters. I would wonder if he ever swept it. Something about the long, open shallows has always enticed me. In East Texas, the hills buffer the pinewood forests and thick bayous against the ocean and the prairie. On my drive home, the ridges deepen. The woods grow thick. I imagine him waking to my absence: He goes into the kitchen and makes coffee. He looks for me—maybe peeing in the bathroom, or smoking on the patio. I see him touching his phone. Last night, the boy hugged me after I met him, and he kissed
the smooth skin of my temple, rubbed my shoulder in tight circles. The boy said, Sexy, which I'm not. Said my name, which I didn’t remember telling him. Now that he is gone, I can think about breakfast, about avoiding his text messages. On the drive back home, an hour east on I-10, I think about the open silence of the Texas coast, how I sat on the ice chest as waves rocked the fishing boat into the Gulf. The taste of brown shrimp coated the back of my throat and the salt spray hit my face in a way that felt like homecoming.
Contributors Alexander Cendrowski Alexander Cendrowski is currently an undergraduate student in the University of North Florida, and besides writing is kept busy working at his part time job in order to pay for this schooling. Crack the Spine will be his first publication. Laura Kopchick Laura Kopchick is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Michigan, where she was a Colby Fellow and where she also received a Roy W. Cowden Award in short fiction and a Hopwood Award in short fiction. In 1998 she received the First Place National Award (with a $10,000 prize) in short Fiction from the National Society of Arts and Letters. Her stories have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Ascent, Pleiades, and others. She currently teaches creative writing at The University of Texas at Arlington and also serves as the Series Editor of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction from the University of North Texas Press. Jocelyn Mosman Jocelyn Mosman is a student at Mount Holyoke College, majoring in English and Politics. She is an active member of the Northampton Poetry group, the Poetry Society of Texas, and the founder of the West Texas Poets. She has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Drunk
Monkeys, Rogue Particles Magazine, and Cum Laude Weekly. She has also published her own poetry book, "Soul Music," and is expecting her second book to be out this summer, "Soul Painting." Roger Soffer Roger Soffer is a working screenwriter on miniseries and feature films for Disney/ABC, Warner Brothers, Fox, and Paramount, with credits including Merlin’s Apprentice, Star Trek: DS9, Kazaam, and Category 7. As fun as that can be, poetry has been (and is!) his antidote. His poem “Rivers” had been nominated for a Pushcart, and he has had poetry published in a variety of journals, including Paintbrush, Southern Poetry Review, Briar Cliff Review, Mangrove, New Laurel Review, and Yellow Silk. New poems are forthcoming in Forge, Stickman Review, and Pennsylvania English. Shaun Turner Shaun Turner writes in West Virginia, where he is fiction editor for Cheat River Review. His work can be found in Cleaver Magazine, Potluck Mag, Bartleby Snopes, and Word Riot, among others. Barry Yeoman Barry Yeoman was educated at Bowling Green State Univ., The Univ. of Cincinnati, and The McGregor School of Antioch Univ., in creative writing, world classics, and the humanities. He is originally from Springfield, Ohio and lives currently in London, Ohio. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Red Booth Review, Futures Trading, Danse Macabre, Harbinger Asylum, Red Fez, Vine Leaves and other print and online journals.
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