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Whiskey Island Magazine Issue #54/55

A literary magazine published by Cleveland State University Est. 1977

ISSN 1089-1277 © 2008 Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 www.csuohio.edu/class/english/whiskeyisland/ Cover: “Ionized Star Trees” by Judith Brandon, 2006, ink, charcoal, colored pencil on paper Cover Design: Steve Thomas

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From the Editor Issue #54 Joel Allegretti H.L. Hix B.J. Best Louis E. Bourgeois Sarah J. Sloat

Deborah Poe Simmons B. Buntin Christopher Barnes Richard Bailey Nancy Burke Nick Carbó Amy Casey

Karen Vaughn Ava C. Cipri Carl Peterson Allan Douglass Coleman Sean Thomas Dougherty Jesse Dunlap Denise Duhamel

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Da Vinci’s Joseph Cornell Box Shawabty Box of Ditamenpaankh Feathered Panel Bird Dissection: Blue Jay The Mansion Curtains Ingrid Wears Bangs God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline Barium (Ba) Flare Mothballed The Man I Shot is Dead Seasons Mal de la Tete Aubade for a Married Woman Baiser Moi Blogrubble New 2 Electricalize New 1 Edible Prayers “There is no blue without yellow, and without orange” How it will be built up.

Core Sample Maybe It Was How She Smelled of Laundry Jolie This is the Way That We Belong The Last Hurrah I Keep Going Around in Circles About Lowbat, 2006

9 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 43 45 47 48 51 54 57

Kyle Flak Amanda Gignac Rachel Contrini Flynn Jay Hopler Nigel Jenkins Christian Anton Gerard Michael Salinger Thomas Dukes Reviews Virginia Konchan Jay Robinson Pamela R. Anderson

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

From a Boy, To His Father Phone Lines Indelible The Range of Birds Semicolon Hyphen Inverted Comma Amarillo, For a Change Peggy Wants a Picket Fence my wife’s laugh Try Me Coyote Walk Up Oakdale Street on Christmas Eve

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“Modern Life” by Mattea Harvey: Inextricably F*#&ed – and Lovin’ It Varied Tones: David Lawrence’s Lane Changes Review: An Almost Pure Empty Walking

by Tryfon Tolides

73 77 79 83

Issue #55 Poetry Contest Winner Mindi Kirchner Fiction Contest Winner Lisa J. Sharon Jeffrey Skinner Matthew S. Colglazier

James Henschen Eric Anderson Benjamin S. Grossberg Jonathan Wells Judith Brandon Akiko Koga

In Medias Res

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The Stag You Need a Subject for the Sun To Rise Portrait of a Marriage Nighthawks Syrup My First Funeral The Space Traveler and Earth His Next Child Water Table Barber

86 90 91 93 96 105 106 107 108 109 3

Heather Charley Jim Fuess Sara Dailey Carolyn Furnish Jessica Jewell Blas Falconer Shannon Robinson Jason Bredle Karen Hildebrand Deborah Baker Josiah Bancroft Wayne Miller Kathy Davis C. Prudence Arceneaux Thomas Brian Osatchoff Elton Glaser Stephen Lloyd Webber Christian Anton Gerard Phyllis Carol Agins Megan Bohigian Harry Bauld James Allen Hall Joshua Marie Wilkinson Dan Murphy Laura Hogan Becky Kennedy Jericho Brown John Panza Bio Notes

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A meeting place for our shared but fractured memory Blue and Purple Cannibals Usually Dine Alone The Meat Place A Bear for the Day of the Dead The Grass Widow What Any of it Meant Secondhand Body Mass Apology Softball Game at the Church Picnic Caput Medusae Shaking Bill by the Neck Dismantling the Scarecrow Weeding Discover Woyend Thanksgiving Plus One Gondola Synecdoche Technicolor Sweeping: el lógico de la escoba, à los desaparecidos de Guatemala Sunday Morning Magic My Father Dreams I Am the Bringer of Death A Brief History of the Trapdoor gelatin print (lost, rewritten) A Human Sign The Breadbox Autobiography Don’t Get Any Stupid Ideas

110 111 112 113 117 119 120 121 123 125 126 131 132 134 136 137 148 149 151 152 153 155 156 157 158 159 162 163 164 165

This is my second time moving to Cleveland. The first time I was two (we left three years later). In the photographs my hair is long until the gum-andscissors episode. I recently found my childhood home from the four-way stop before our block, that almost-home moment. I remember riding my tricycle around the block, and about half way thinking I would never make it back.

My elderly neighbor grew tomatoes. He told me about the sheep that came at night to nibble off his hair. Once, I fell to the bottom of a friend’s pool and sat there looking at everything shimmer shimmer, until a teenage girl, all bubbles and motion, came down to get me. I wonder why I didn’t swim.

Every day the Whiskey Island mailbox fills with wonderings, wanderings. It is my pleasure to bring you this double issue, all feathers, boxes, bones. One theme in this issue is time. Jesse Dunlap’s story moves backwards through a night. Poetry contest winner Mindi Kirchner writes about time: in choosing the poem, judge Denise Duhamel says, “'In Medias Res’” is a philosophical ars poetica, a contemplation on ‘middles,’ a view of a life through flashback and flashforward. This poem leaps from singsong to ‘ex-everything,’ with stunning and exact imagery, such as ‘a hole in my mouth/where words should be.’ I trust this poet to take me on the journey.”

In choosing Lisa Sharon’s short story, fiction judge Karen Joy Fowler says, “The finalists here represented a wide variety of techniques and voices, from spare and poetic to profuse and digressive, from sad to comic, from sincere to ironic. There were things that impressed me in each of these pieces and things I enjoyed in each of these approaches. But I chose ‘The Stag’ for its delicate imagery, the naturalness of its structure, and the wonderful sympathy the writer showed for the characters.”

This issue is also about flesh: Carolyn Furnish’s “The Meat Place,” Sara Dailey’s cannibals, Jessica Jewell’s bear on a spit, Christian Gerard’s character imagining legs wrapped around him like a tortilla. It is about “Shaking Bill by the Neck,” and “Don’t Get Any Stupid Ideas.”

Thank you to our submitters, to judges Denise Duhamel and Karen Joy Fowler, to editors Amy Bracken Sparks and Travis Hessman, to Dan Lenhart, Rita Grabowski, Michael Dumanis, Michael Broida, Steve Thomas, interns and readers for keeping things humming, and to CSU for funding and support.

This was so much fun, we’re going to do it again next year. We’ll be back on schedule with two single issues, and I hope you will subscribe. Writers and readers – they just go together.

—Karen 5

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Whiskey Island Magazine Issue #54

Editor: Karen Schubert Poetry Editor: Amy Bracken Sparks Prose Editor: Travis Hessman Art Editor: Amy Bracken Sparks Design Editor: Steve Thomas Media Specialist: Dan Lenhart Faculty Advisor: Rita Grabowski Readers: Lori Compton, Gale Flament, Mike Flament, Virginia Konchan, Devon Zeigler Office Assistant: Miranda Miller

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Joel Allegretti DA VINCI’S JOSEPH CORNELL BOX Many flowers drawn from nature A head, full face, with curly hair Certain figures of St. Jerome Measurements of a figure Drawings of furnaces A head of the Duke Many designs for knots 4 studies for the panel of St. Angelo A small composition of Girolamo de Figline A head of Christ made with the pen 8 St. Sebastians Several compositions of angels A chalcedony A head in profile with fine hair Some bodies seen in perspective Some machines for ships Some machines for waterworks A portrait head of Attalante raising his face The head of Jeronimo da Feglino The head of Gian Francesco Boso Many throats of old women Several heads of old men Several nude figures, complete Several arms, legs, feet, and postures A Madonna, finished Another almost finished, in profile A head of Our Lady ascending into heaven A head of an old man with a very long neck

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Joel Allegretti

A head of a gypsy A head with a hat on A representation of the Passion, made in relief A head of a girl with knotted braids A head with a coiffure.

This found poem is a list of various studies and objects that Leonardo da Vinci took with him when he left Florence for Milan in 1482. The inventory was published in Leonardo da Vinci, Reynal & Company, New York, 1956.

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H.L. Hix Shawabty Box of Ditamenpaankh

(Cleveland Museum of Art 1914.718) Whether to plow the fields or fill the channels with water or carry sand from East to West, so charge I these shawabtys on our behalf, for you who have made pilgrimage already to Abydos, and for me, who’ll follow soon.

Give over labor; these spirits precede me.

Though they merely mimic with blue the faience who could afford, they bring tools, and know their charge.

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H.L. Hix Feathered Panel

(Cleveland Museum of Art 2002.93) Feathers from Peru’s Papagayo macaw, viewed from close enough and in good light, look green.

The blue feathers look green, so do the yellow.

As it was on that bird-riddled desert coast a dozen centuries ago, so is it here and now. We weave what we weave, blue feathers, as offerings of what colors we can catch to what colors — though we name them — we cannot.

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B.J. Best Bird Dissection: Blue Jay

Blue jays have it pretty good, jabbering away as they do, all sunlit and primary-colored—this is what scientists thought. They had cracked open a dead bluebird and inside found a set of seven neatly stacked skies, each with its own few cumulus clouds and a bluebird perched in every one. Scientists conjectured it was much the same with the jays, either skies with small jays or perhaps instead a deep, calm lake.

So. In the spirit of knowledge and progress, etc., they made it official, and the dissecting scientist gurgled like a guillotined chicken. Inside, he had found: a cage of termites, several spent and rusting shotgun shells, a photograph in black and white of seven frying eggs. Later analysis proved that the edged glowing bones were reject cigarettes and each blood cell was a muddied infidelity. Its beak was deliberate and hard as a speleothem; its tongue lanced him like a gypsum needle.

In seven days he was tried and convicted by a jury of bluebirds. He was hanged from a cloud with a noose made of feathers.

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Louis Bourgeois THE MANSION

They began to mutilate one another; sister became armless, mother faceless, father voiceless, brother and son went blind—servant became master, master piled up loaves of shit in the outhouse. The dogs took over the table and the caged birds settled down into bed with a good book.

The home owners knew there was no way of stopping this; outside always gets in no matter how hard you try.

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Sarah J. Sloat CURTAINS

For weeks I have been waking up in the living room curtains, their shrug and frump, and there I have not met a single person.

In the folds where I am rolled, some mornings I have seen the Andes, strands of wax, and in the stitches once I made out a line of ants carrying their minute burdens.

Everything that appears possible can be turned into something impossible.

If a face appears, if I recognize a posture, I raise a hand to flatten it.

A tassel bunches the damask like the tie of a robe, but when it’s loosened no legs fall out, no eye, no heart drops from its monstrous socket.

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Sarah J. Sloat INGRID WEARS BANGS

This drop is a leaden venture a tanker anchored between two oceans hugging the sullen isthmus a sponge that sopped up glue and got stuck plugged in a tunnel in an umlaut in a rut here lies the shape you’ve seen in dreams the bar of soap, the pueblo reachable by shuttlebus here lopes a bovine, pendulous, grazing the brow here descends a seizure that smells of hay a torpor, deathly close to closing the eyes this is the loaf of toast sliced thick a set phrase, such as as if I care or best left alone falling finally into context 16

Sarah J. Sloat GOD HAVE PITY ON THE SMELL OF GASOLINE

God have pity on the smell of gasoline which finds its way like an arm through a car window, more human than kerosene, more unctuous, more manly.

Have pity on the tincture it rubs into the coils of fingerprints, the crests left under nails, the surfeit it insinuates, brawn that comes on suave.

God pity the vapors lifting through the pores of the soil, loitering near the pumps, soot that films hair and coats, that beds in collars, dark groom of velocity.

Pity the swoon towards motion, the yen for speed.

Pity the billow and sinew of fumes, muscle that makes the crash spectacular.

God have pity on the whole machine gas has to carry, lead, flesh and metals that do not travel light.

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Deborah Poe Barium (Ba) 56 Tell us what you see on wall woven shadow.

An arm, a torso, a dream. It’s an old story. It takes the force of an arm to break an arm. A fire to really make us burn. Arms to rescue us.

To hold us. To cheer for us. He made the adjectives, but who made the nouns. There is lettuce everywhere. Dust. Arms carry heads through the swinging back door—their shift an hour earlier ending, their witnessing closer.

Lettuce in the arms. Not one of them in the first building had a single cell phone to afford the opportunity to say goodbye, good morning.

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Simmons B. Buntin FLARE

South of Arizona 86, we slow at a sudden field of gold-poppies and dappled bladderpod.

Already their heads are closing—already the dark cape of desert sky calls them home.

How like that roadside gouache we are, I say: born of the mad summer storms, rain-soaked and rooted like ravens on the scarp’s red slope.

And like the single white lily drinking the last brushstroke of sunlight, you say, flaring now to rise again next spring.

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Christopher Barnes MOTHBALLED

(after Ezra Pound’s The Garden)

Hollyhocks on her orlon midi blouse gum up infectious railings.

A sundial fields this exquisite birdcage.

Blue-mould sky is analgesic applying pressure on plumago, kingcup, buddleia.

Explosions have arisen, fixed: coming out hop, a love-lyric from Mosley, a hundredweight of turning traitors, vehement months.

At 80 her keepsakes are cliff-edged.

Beige-cheeked sprogs blah-blah through the side-path to Comprehensive doors.

Swankpots, stiff-necked, flagrantly dressed and feisty, starkly alive.

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Richard Bailey THE MAN I SHOT IS DEAD

The man I shot is dead, remains dead.

He lacked the spirit in his work to come back alive.

I do my part for the great temple wall, give all to it, with strength sufficient for four weighty stones at a time.

No man can say I don’t do my part or take life when I have to.

I am part of the correct temple at the correct time in history.

If you have a god, the temple God is mother and father to it.

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Nancy Burke SEASONS

What else is there to talk about Besides the seasons and how we Hate them, the promises and losses, the Dried fruit and the drip drop of the Melting sky? Complex, intrusive Redolences curl from the Folds of your jacket and Skin, the stale dislocations of Hunger and hope, the borders between Things in time. We drink to empty Glasses, to the fullness of your ale-colored Eyes, and to the checkpoints, the Doorways between summer and Spring, so many and narrow they Admit us only singly, stripped of All but our cravings For beginning and end, World without us.

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Nick Carbó MAL DE LA TETE

My headache is this big and France is as big as my leg in April all Spring.

That’s Avril in the Charcutterie down the road. Pass on the poisson if you please, because I just have to taste the canard in its natural habitat. N’ est pas.

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Nick Carb贸 Aubade for a Married Woman

Is solitude the blank page awaiting you in the middle of the week?

Take this red poppy, slide the scent of far away slowly on your nape. an Italian word comes to mind, fascino.

You are fascinated as white words fly away from your window.

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Nick Carbó Baiser Moi

Let’s take these Gallo-Roman fricatives and rub them on our feldspar faces, first, with a homunculus slur. then lavishly with cantaloupes on our lips.

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Blogrubble Acrylic on Paper Amy Casey

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new 2 Acrylic on Paper Amy Casey

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electricalize Acrylic on Paper Amy Casey

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new 1 Acrylic on Paper Amy Casey

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Karen Vaughn Edible Prayers

Downtown, there is a harried woman with a flamboyant red mane and a fur coat. I watch her as she ushers a trio of stoic little boys over to the curb in front of Samuelson’s Jewelry. The boys, who are dressed in strange, tightfitting suits, walk as if they have no joints. None of them are smiling; they’re waiting for something.

I hear the grating of wheels against the sidewalk. A woman with a weathered face, deformed lips, and a tattered military jacket lumbers along with a small hot dog cart she’s converted into a movable shrine to Eastern religion. A hand-lettered sign reading “Karma Kart” is taped to the frayed canvas on top. Cones of incense, some of them emitting plumes of colored smoke, are set out side by side on a round ceramic tray.

The woman holds out a plate to me with palsied hands. Piled on the plate are little breaded rolls with something like jelly spilling out of the sides.

“What are they?” I ask.

“Edible prayers,” she says, smiling with the half of her face that she can smile with.

All at once, a skinny black girl rushes by, exploding past the boys and into the street. She wears pieces of the sun studded in her round ears. Her fluid limbs are blurry with movement, like hummingbird wings that trail glitter in the air. Her heartbeat is too fast for bullets, too fast for fear.

The lesson is a simple one, I suppose. If you have joints, use them.

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Ava C. Cipri “There is no blue without yellow, and without orange” —Vincent Van Gogh thought I didn’t need you could do without your nauseous shades everything Florida again walking barefoot among snakes & dog shit in the groves all I ever wanted was my blue back (sky river night) interior of mind a corner I can’t recognize my hands my name so when you call & say it was the painting that didn’t sell your copy of Haystacks in Provence . . . that all the recent work went I’m relieved you say to me that my brother said the same & I know it because he was there: tombstone sketch for the shot dog strawberry soda can full of ants limbo & the Camaro with teeth that ate up the road

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Carl Peterson HOW IT WILL BE BUILT UP.

The oldest memory he has is motion.

The first memory I have is my body.

Different same this, the coursing through, the head rolling, the far behind the eyes rush.

It is the swing. Mom behind, pushing. Grip chain fingers pinch flesh goes wind dry. Pinch again. Wind dry. Wind cracked. Tug up stomach clench. Her hands on my back. Realizes he can escape her with the pull up up then down, leg swoop. Pinch. I fell backwards. He jumped from the swing and didn’t land.

And in the piano room, living room, music making his mother on piano bench with pupil after pupil in the afternoons, trying to teach him, too, after the other kids left. She gave us lessons, me and Ryan. Fighting her long years, trying to get out of practicing, but always curious to listen from the doorway to the hall down past the bathroom to the kitchen, clunky melody from small fingers followed by patient reinstruction and further attempts, memorizing, practicing. Recitals on winter nights with students in stuffy clothes and their parents arranged in a crescent of chairs. Him again listening, the notes resounding through the walls and open air.

Alaska. House. Spring thaw. House. The hill soft young Elizabeth body.

In him on me touch taut. House. Swiss village in summer sends him to Paris, on to London. The entrance to a strip club off Leicester Square, behind the mobbing theater lights, the milling international crowd, ice cream moustache and walking weary feet. The words, red rounded mouths. Back to Bern and up into the hills. Elevation sickness that first week, weary head and stomach and sudden fear he’d be sent home. Anchorage big brood, hunt and fish the bluegrass nights out in the spruce woods. Steel strings souring. Six man house.

Holcombe in summer except when on to Europe. Sled dogs unleashed run up.

Skiing. House. Ice bridge. House. Father in basement. House. Father in den with pencils.

To his friends, What does your dad do? My dad makes machines. My dad writes books. My dad builds people houses. I have always been in Holcombe.

He paddled to Big Island. He left home when he was ten and went out onto the 32

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lake. He had a tree fort and he kicked soccer goals when he was eleven twelve thirteen. I ran down the field and picked up Timmy. Timtim timiditimmy.

I high fived Jon. They sucked quartered oranges like mouthguards, guzzled juiceboxes, leg muscles watery and tired sweet. Long gash on his knee. Soccer cleat cut in, big kid with green jersey stepped on his leg, he didn’t squeal once.

Back at the house mom taped it up and he was off to the woods with Tim and Jon. Dad hammering in the basement. Dad with powersaw. Dad with lathe, with turpentine. The room in the basement then his room. Fifteen he climbed into bed bare, ran hands along his legs. Dark, cold at first under the covers, but I warmed it up fast. Tired from skiing. Ligaments between legs, under, smooth down on chest. Back of neck bumps. Elbow skin stretched, pimple pebbled.

Behind the knees tightwedded to muscle. Cotton twists. Dark hands peach fuzz alone hard alone. This is the first memory. The body.

My dad worked a lot. His father brewed one subdivision after another.

Had plans in the den for ten years, drawn more and more slowly, refined, pencils sharpened, more and more paper, scrapped, drawn again. After soccer on Saturdays sometimes we’d go to the houses he was working on. Up the plywood ramp into the guts, jumping through walls, nails pointed everywhere.

Jon always went to see the upstairs. Timothy looking into the hole where the basement steps would go. He ran back onto the dirt outside and shouted to both of them through the open frame, I see you. To his dad. I see you.

Bear meat in Anchorage. Kitchen cooking with sweat with cotton shirts with jeans and matted hair with socks inside out in corners. College dropouts.

Windgear scattered around. Long underwear that came in a can. Swollen knuckles beltloop hooked and bare feet beer stuck to linoleum. Stuffy air rushes out when back door opens. Warm crevices, the creases of the body as the fabric wicks away moisture, the dry salt lingering on the skin. Tiny bedrooms with palettes or mattresses on the floor. Booze brought out by girls when they came, other townies, he told Jess to bring the Gibson. He hunted drank banjoed sleptgripped unceasingly for three years. And skied. Through the woods night and day, to town and back, beyond into the dark hills and old tundra, the spirit sky landmass. No classes. No Beth. Brad Doog Phelps Jerry 33

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Paul Scott house. Women when they could coax them along. Summers back to Holcombe, working for dad. Odd jobs back in Anchorage from month to month, when drinking and hunting allowed, the snow coming up and then skiing to get everywhere, rifle strapped behind. House bright at the end of the trail. Bear meat for dinner and roasted potatoes. There’s a nutty flavor to it that I like. Somewhere between beef and coffee when it gets up in your nose, when you grill it peppered.

Elizabeth long gone, lit out after we broke up. He flunked three classes that semester and knew he was done with school. But Alaska had promise. The long dark a cloak to bundle himself under many months around. Nighttime booze and music. Nobody wanting. I didn’t give a shit. It was easy, lots of people in town, lots of girls who wanted to check the place out. The house became some kind of legend. Fucking yetis living off bear and deer meat in the woods all winter, that’s what they thought of us. Came into town for liquor and seasoning. Potatoes and toilet paper and boxes of ammunition. They slid out of the woods at the trailhead behind campus, clapped their skis against one another and stood them up along the side of Food Lot, stomped out of their boots, and in stockings gathered groceries. Girls following them back on snowmobiles or in jeeps if the snow was well panked. Simple. We lived like fucking kings.

The first memory. Hands across knee bumps, down shins, thumbs cutting calves. His hair, behind ears, fingers laced across the top of his head. A strange thing, the sudden urge to be sure of every part of his body. In bed in old house under parents in Holcombe. Hands to hip flexors like ski stretch but on his back, fingertips on legtops almost to hair, ligaments beneath thumbs.

Then to stomach then up. This is not with Beth. Beth does not come to the house until next year. When she did she was not the first. Sure, I’ve kissed girls before. I had Sissy Dubrove in this very bed in seventh grade. It was her idea.

Didn’t touch him like this but neither did Beth, not right away. Sissy sucked his tongue. Felt like a fish in his mouth that wriggle thing. She bit it. She liked to sit on my stomach and pin my arms and I would say, Let me go Sissy, let me up now, and laugh. Elizabeth never liked Sissy. Both a year older than him.

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Carl Peterson

Sissy cheerleading. Elizabeth in the hills running faster than the ski team boys, through the reeds down to the creek, down to the lake, past houses then up out of dales. Kicking up legs in windpants. Ski poles flailing behind her on the dirt hill, hunched rehearsals of technique, sore back muscles. Tiny arms all wrist strength tight shoulders and legs tensed, Beth chasing down through unwarming days as the light drops off earlier and earlier. Idling in school parking lot with the smell of exhaust drifting up off ice patched pavement, kicking a soccer ball on the snow field. Waiting for the accumulation. The waxing shed. Pullups. Wrestling mats for leg lifts, whitewashed cinder blocks for wall sits. The citrus tang of wax remover. Pink and aquamarine bricks of wax and irons cooling and drying sweat.

Beth climbed on his stomach, too, same bed three winters later, sophomore year for him. That first time she could pin me, not like Sissy. Beth flunked history. They had a class together and she came over to study, year older girl with brunette ponytail and ski team lips chapped. She pinned him on the bed.

He pretending not to try, going limp, she holding him and saying, Get up now if you can. Months of this until he was strong enough, history lessons learned, strong enough to unwrench her from his frame, then kept on. Sweating against each other, the first time mouths met. He’d do pushups. Her on his back. She demanding the same.

I’ll crush you No you won’t I won’t do it Get up Get up now if you can Go on get up This wasn’t hands across every bend. That was fifteen, the first memory.

This was new. In Holcombe home. This was wet touch no chap kiss, cheeks cold kiss, red pinned down under parents but not. Sweater sleeves inside out on dirty workout clothes next to the bed, hers on his, plum dyed wool while she in small brassiere kissed him no fish in mouth. Remember the first memory and want her to touch the same. Two years winters and more, history and soccer and skiing, then gone the Beth body to college in Duluth. Northing town heavy under harbor mist. Make out in freshman dorm room on weekend visit.

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Wasn’t the same. He wanted her in his room, in the same bed. Thanksgiving, that came again. Then gone, and him the body sweat no shower after skiing, pasta dinner then to sleep in long underwear. Static on arm hair. No motion.

State championship third place, ski scholarship to Anchorage. She transfers from Duluth the next year. First floor apartment without patio, windows half buried under snow, all their stuff together for once and the bed. I brought the bed from Holcombe.

Plum sweater is gone that first night in high school, rightside outed and driven away to some other node in town, her parents’ house probably. Ryan and I were watching tv. Dad came out of the den and pulled me aside, nodding toward the back porch, and I followed him. Father and son talk about the Beth body.

First off, don’t think your mother and I don’t know what you’re doing.

It wasn’t a big deal.

If you’re gonna have girls down there I want you to be careful.

They’ve been down there before.

We know. It’s your room. We respect that. Our house. Your room. Just be careful. Don’t let things go too far too fast.

I like her a lot.

I see that. Remember. All you’ve got is your body.

Mom song echoing through the wood box of the piano, the wood box of the house, out to him on the patio, playing her own choices once students left, him listening again, that night, and after the swing, the daylong sun warm parkplaying with her pushing, at night, listening from the stairs, arms dangling through the banister and then up to his old room, Ryan shared room, before the basement was done, mom enjoying her own music until she came up to put him and his toddler brother to bed.

The last time at the Lutheran church was the funeral. So no, he would not like to go back for a visit this Sunday morning mr. harry frisk, old man thick chested on his front step in early morning tree light. Pews were sharp under sore legs after an hour of sitting. Hated the sitting, the stillness. I looked up at the ceiling, the long tall beams that arched overhead, the temple where they 36

Carl Peterson

joined. Wood plank set into wood into wood into cement. Plaster groined at obtuse angles, smoothed bumps and dents. His fingernails dug into his palms as he mapped the Lutheran hall. Father mother ice bodies absent until spring, no caskets up front by the minister. Wood house, new house, empty. Yes, dad had made good on a decade of drawing. Dream house built. I came back from Europe and they were about to move in, mom and dad. He traces the inside of the house, shoulders slumping in shirt and tie after the service, marking and melding fixtures until the house runs together. Beams meet near stairwells, join together in doorframes and meet in mom and dad room. I didn’t want to go in there at first. Then others started moving in. He invited them, brother Ryan, friend Tim and then Jon, too, after his divorce. Doog would stay, Doog who followed from Alaska. All the rooms full, so he took that one, at the end of the long hallway upstairs. Their bedroom, slept in only three months. He took up the reins. Father’s company, his. Building people houses, his. Their house, his.

Could not go unlived in. The house was only his.

First time was different than the first memory. Started with her sweater off, winter custom now, his ski warmup unzipped, blue with furry collar and Holcombe Nordic on the back, white tanktop underneath. Tug tussle wrestle, fast and provoking. Ponytail down. I was sure it would happen that time. Long mouths and for a moment he recalls Sissy’s tongue suck, but then Beth bears down, legs clenching rib cage. Everything undone and Elizabeth murmurs the soft phrase with pointed middle. Will you fuck me now. He laughs at the half question, the dare. Sheepish look away and grinning stupid queasy, wondering why she said it like that. I want to do it. I want to too. It wasn’t slow. At fifteen he ran hands down downed legs, doubled over, still looking. This was not that.

Pushed grip flexed up like arms grabbing fierce bones. All hair pressed back and knees up cotton feet. Flipped down ass aired and that was her brown hair fanned out on the pillow, while his hat head clumped on his scalp. In the old hilled Holcombe home. It was not slow, but it didn’t end. Air rush in drafty winter basement on all sides. They kept fast, but it didn’t end, and they were still, and they waited, then rebegan. The draft hit us again, and I heard Ryan on the stairs. He leapt up to shut the bedroom door. She was on her side facing 37

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away, and he locked his legs around her when he returned. Moment of stillness then they moved again.

She left Anchorage when he drank himself out of his ski scholarship. The team cut him and he called his dad.

What are you going to do?

I’m failing my classes.

Scott.

I’m just not up for it anymore.

What are you going to do?

There’s a place in town trains dogs for sled races. I know the guy who runs it.

Scott.

The team doesn’t matter. I’ve only been skiing to stay in shape.

You drinking much?

Not much.

You’ve got to take care of yourself.

Snow trail. Built. Pushups. Built. House with them all in the spruce woods. House away from campus, move away. Cut loose from Anchorage and find hunting trails. Ski the dim gray daylight. I wanted things to be as simple as possible. Long weeks away from town, as long as he could stand it, unelizabethed then. Liquor and banjo practice. Built. Shed for carpentry and ski waxing. Built. Bluegrass riffs. Built. Long lung stillness in eighteen hour dark. Twenty one hour dark. Dark dark. Built built keep building built.

Lake Reed frozen thick. Window down, solid snot in nose, matted winter hair under hat as always, he drives through Holcombe and up around the lake, through Salt Rock, through Hockakaduta, ski gloves on the wheel, to the Yardling Bridge at Grouper’s Bay. Perfect for diving during summer. I could see it was a sloped curve leading down to the bridge that did it. They must’ve hit a patch of ice and slid off, down the hill and through the wooden split rail blocking the drop off into the channel. Ice wasn’t thick enough yet to hold the car. Summon the image. They plunging through, hard water rush, a mother loosed gasp. Keep it there. Bubbling surface for a moment where the thin ice 38

Carl Peterson

is broken. Overnight the temperature drops and seals them in until spring.

The channel deep for boat traffic, deep enough to swallow them no problem even along the cement abutment. Policeman told a reporter from the local paper that he could see the car through the ice the next day. No way to get to it safely. Stay with the image. Back seat. Dry palms facing down. Cold gush over legs arms chest head. Push shoulders into jammed doors. Final breath against soaked ceiling fabric. So silent. So few feet to the surface. Then the water solid, nothing in or out until March. A week after it happened, fishing houses and heavy trucks dotted the ice plane, snowmobiles dodging here and there, everyone eager to trust the lake.

Golf courses turned to ski trails. Gripped cotton in hot pits and shushing wind past pants. Push, strong lean, plant and follow through, pole release.

Snap back. Lunge down. Snap. Balls of feet. High school pastime, body built with Tim and others out in the woods on the settled snow of gentle slopes.

Glove flick sends iced snot away from face as he hurtles down among barren maples and cold cattail marshes. Still air.

Stiller. No nothing empty, empty like a ghosting, empty like the rush rushing outward into a void. Skis slip frozen toes farther and farther from the clubhouse where hot cocoa and granola bars wait. I never felt more at peace than in those Holcombe woods.

Winter afternoons as the sun starts to set. He courses through. Deep exhale stomach clench, jaw tightening grunt bend. Double poling around buried ponds. Lunge down. Snap up. Lunge down. Snap. The simplest motion carries him forward. Stomach pull. Finger pinch. Chains on the swing jerk as he drops his head back to see pebbled playground beneath him, legs higher into the air and higher and then almost all the way around, toes rigid and pointed as the chains shoot taut. Feels the bounce. Mom behind him shouting his name and then his father’s. Lunge again. Snap.

Phone dropped carefully in its cradle in the sled dog office, watching old Olympic ski races while his boss jots notes behind the counter.

Who was that?

Niederlander.

What’d the old woman want?

39

Carl Peterson

She’s taking her team out.

Dogs yip in kenneled background. Boss Steve drums fingers on the countertop. I’d been working there on and off more than two years. He slept sometimes at the training center, but still made it out for bluegrass and bear meat most days. The legend had only grown around Anchorage. A party any time they wanted. But he’d found new trails that braided with the skiing paths, dogsled trails.

Taking the team out? The fuck for?

She says she’s investing in a tourist trap in Switzerland. Get this. She wants us to go.

Go? Move there. Run things for her. I can take two people.

When?

Next month.

Fuck.

Yeah.

You doing it?

Yeah. Why not? Let’s do it.

Airplane to Bern, pushing him back in his seat like the swing hold, like the finger pinch lips dried. Motion oh so familiar. Sing song head swim back and forth back and forth. Parents yes. Elizabeth no. Dogsled yes. Holcombe no. Days in the mountain resort, old woman telling him he’s not enough of a people person to run the tours, so he trains the dogs, making muscles as he goes. Always home tired like the ski season, hair matted good, aching legs waiting for a hot bath, feet and finger bones chilled. Two running dog winters, summers free and paid for. He drank Europe. Could’ve gone on for years with boss Steve and old Niederlander woman. Then dad called. The plans were done, the house half built. He wanted me to come home and work for him. Said I could take over the company some day. Seven months until the ice gave.

Yes, the swing. Yes, soccer. Yes, snow forts and hill sledding and back back before, dad hands with tools and mom fingers mezzopiano. But this is the first 40

Carl Peterson

memory, the body fifteen. In bed in old Holcombe basement, hands on the map. Drawings in the den. Dad upstairs and mom at a recital, he only needing to occupy his room, no more. Ligaments, joints, knobs. All you’ve got is the body. Right on the tops of his legs, the strongest tendons, the fast knitted mass. Had seen his father come in from the snow an hour before, ice crusted to the arm shoveling shirt. Pulled it off over his head in the entryway from the garage, slapping out the snow. Back to Scott, who sat in the kitchen, broad built builder’s arms bare in the halllight. He laughed.

Sure is a mess out there.

I wondered when that would happen. The shoulder flourish had come, but his arms remained spindly. He watched his father as he slung the icy fabric into the drier then trudged upstairs to get a new one. His father’s body. His father’s house. The well crafted frame. Dad headed up to their room and later he went down to his and that was the first memory, the new mapping. But now he’d been left the entire house, wood woven by his dad for them, for the family, for good. By soccer coach and soccer mom. They had done this, this here. Then gone around the bend. Ski trail push past ponds and out onto the open lake, hip sliding sway, back in knots and toes a rigid balance. Night skiing on the lake. Dogsled trails in two hemispheres. And the not soft Elizabeth moving away from him in Anchorage like the push pull arm flex, yanking him upward like the swing, the long inescapable pendulum.

Where will you go?

Home.

Home. And what’ll you do at home?

Get a job. Get life started.

Move back in with your parents?

I don’t know, Scott. Anything but watching another night of drinking and bad guitar so I can drag you to bed and have you throw up as you try to climb on top of me.

Go on then.

Why don’t you do something with yourself ?

Go on.

41

Carl Peterson

Really, do something. Anything.

All I’ve got is This rings in his ears when she leaves Anchorage. I tried not to think about it. Elizabeth. The landscape of her. I just wanted to keep in motion. The first memory I have is my body. In the bed. All toward the house and then away, swinging in the park across the street from the old Holcombe home on the hill.

Into the house and out, in and out. Up stairs out back down steps in hand past touch unclenched leg lift. Mom pushing from behind at the small of his back.

I wanted to jump. I looked backward along the arc and saw her upside down. I saw the house. Dad coming out. Father’s body emerging onto the front steps.

Pullup drained arms straining hard. Harder. Pump. He came out of the swing.

Up and up. Down, the full air pulling him toward pebbles. The oldest memory he has is motion. Body with all he’s got. Fingers pinch the yes house up stairs all his. Keep in motion.

42

Allan Douglass Coleman Core Sample So if

as seems

likely & suspected

it proves

rotten:

then

what exactly?

What is to be

done

wont really cut it

at this

point of

no

return with all the pointed

fingers warding

nothing

no

blame

shortage &

it

wasnt

Not something

to look forward

off

who

will buy

me

to 43

Allan Douglass Coleman

regardless of:

I

told you so / the whole

lot crammed

into one

sinking

boat

&

going

down together no last

wishes granted

at best

every Jeremiah

vindicated

i

44

& the end:

Sean Thomas Dougherty MAYBE IT WAS HOW SHE SMELLED OF LAUNDRY

Floating through the back yard carrying a basket pulled from the line, and how she bent down to put it on the grass, and how when she looked up I smelled lilacs.

Or maybe it was her mouth of honey and myrrh.

When she opened her legs, and I sucked the shucked oyster of her sex.

Or maybe it was her contented purr, when she was alone, and I was not there, how I knew the night was enough: her hands knitting a sweater for her mother, the cows still looing in the distance that grew between us.

Or maybe it was her hands, and what she didn’t say, how everywhere around her I saw a shawl of light that wove around me candy wrappers, whistling.

Or maybe it was because I heard a music in the mornings, and the small dance that she did through the kitchen, like laundry swaying slowly on the line— 45

Sean Thomas Dougherty

~ Or was she the roof of the house, the way the storm raged across the hills downing power lines and she pulled me into her into the AM. Or was she that wind, that insomniac wind pushing over trees, combines, harvesters, the way I felt my skin lift off when she was on top and I was inside her, and all was storm, and rain and wet. She was plain and beautiful as a bowing field of wheat. She was bright with lipstick. She was honey and apricot jam when she opened her thighs. When she moved she was the beat of jackhammers against the hulls of ships. She was carts of anthracite hauled out of the mountains just south of us, where the night is dead steel mills and children high on meth hang from the highest rung in the barn. She was a farmhouse lit only by candles, and an aria by Puccini echoing lowly through the halls, as she walked in nothing but my white shirt, as if she walked on the light that leads to the other world, the one we will all enter, as if when I entered her I began the journey there, to the place without angels, only the river the color of smoke, and the waves above dark as memory that I dove through, erasing the scent of anyone I’d ever touched before her.

46

Sean Thomas Dougherty JOLIE

Dusk drifts like a terrible scream. My friend Jolie is now a skull, or is she ashes?

I can’t recall. Only her freckled Lithuanian face alive, her mouth floating past Danny’s pizza shop window on Seventh Ave. Her ghost has risen, whistling I used to visit all the come what may places: Lush Life, Billy Strayhorn’s dark blue failure fingered, like a bullet struck into a bar stool. But that’s not how she died, that’s the bullet hole I found in Scotty’s corner bar where the boy was shot in the chest. The one I never knew. This is where she finds me, alone and wasted on too many Vodka martinis. J died of cancer. A rare form. At thirty-three.

You need to be direct sometimes. Pull out your tooth and count your griefs. Or do we call them losses? There is no translation for the bees, only the blossoms.

The cherry blossoms pirouetting in the wind down the Eastern Parkway, where Jolie and Bill and I would walk, passed Hasidic families, the children’s crazy Mazurka across the colored-chalked sidewalk, their tassels trailing. In the neardark of my stool I close my eyes. Jolie was nearly blind. When she met you, she would say, without irony You look good. She felt us as a place in the air. The transitory obligattos of Being. The unfolding act of never being afraid. The way she reached for the chords on her guitar, their ecstatic Braille, the way her music made us raise our fists. When she said the word revolution it wasn’t a theory: the way the yellow finches are singing the delicate light of her hair.

47

Jesse Dunlap This is the Way That We Belong

I want to wake up before falling asleep and step into the lonely shower. The setting sun rises, reflecting off water swirling up from the drain. My careful hands wipe soap from my body and rub it onto the bar. I massage my hair, and water runs into the spout at the top of the tiles. Drops climb my legs as the drain quits spurting. I reach down to spin the faucet, and I am dirty once more.

Old clothes jump as I fling out my hand. I am on the phone speaking nonsense to my mother. Droplets condense on my shirt and rise into my eyes.

I dial the numbers before I hang up.

Downstairs, I sit next to my husband. Now calm again, we stare at the carpet. Then we cry backwards, and we both sob and cling. We stand an hour earlier and walk to our car, locking unlocking the door behind us. We drive in reverse without looking backwards.

We stand in a room with cruddy white couches, clutching each other after hearing bad news. Ronnie’s mother sags near a wall with a fist on her forehead.

Our shirts dry out as we cry more and more. A doctor speaks to us, and we pace the room waiting for him to come. We spit coffee into cups which I place in a machine. Arms locked together, we travel to the desk. The receptionist phones the doctor, and we exit enter the building.

We are hopeful now as we tread to our car. Looking back on this, we will feel so relieved. My clothes repel dust, and I pray.

A nurse wheels you into the operating room. A white sheet is peeled back, and the scene picks up speed. Gloved fingers press your neck, and your heart starts squeezing. Calm nurses become frantic as the electric line jumps. Doctors untie arteries that suck up your blood. Needles pull stitches from your head, neck and arm. Cuts open up to collect what came out. Nurses crumple your scalp, making it dirty by wiping it clean. People flash through the room and steal equipment from your body to jam onto shelves. Two men wheel in a bloody stretcher and place you on top. The ambulance alarms through the night.

The moon gazes down at backtracking goblins. I take candy from kids before shutting the door. They ring the bell and walk down the driveway. A 48

Jesse Dunlap

princess screams, and your dad darts behind a cardboard grave. Ghostly clouds slip over trees.

You are lifted from the ambulance, and the cart is now clean. Under flashing lights, men place you at a tree. Ronnie is now in a crinkled red car, and Sandra rests with her face in the road. The men check your pulses before backing away.

You lie there and stare at the slick, oily mud. Teasing ants creep from roots to your neck. A deer pads nearby, and you wish it could care. Mist cools your skin and you close your eyes shut.

Suddenly, the tree shakes hard. Leaves spring from your body and flutter up the branches. Sharp bark slides from your sealing skull. Broken roots release your neck, and you retreat through the air. The steering wheel withdraws from Ronnie’s chest. He is pushed into place. Sandra flies through the air in a torrent of glass. Her neck whips into the headrest as the car jolts backward and races down the road.

Ronnie accelerates. You stick your head out of the window and brace to spin the curves. Sandra turns the music down. Wheels breeze past a bottle that flips into her hand. She regurgitates into it and pops the lid on. Without any lights, you back into a cemetery. You think about putting on your seatbelt, but no one else has.

The moon is a sponge soaking up light. You open the gate to erase scuffs in the dirt. Your shoes uncrack leaves, and Sandra’s bangs blow into place.

Tombstones lean in the shifting sand. Ronnie sits down near a crumbly grave, and crickets hop towards his jeans. Ashes form cigarettes that Sandra picks up.

They smolder near her lips. You lie on your back and look at the sky. A gray bird sings near a squirrel placing acorns onto branches. The cemetery house illuminates sheets like phantoms ruffling on a line.

It is lighter as you begin to drive home, the sun going down coming up. I stand on the porch with an empty bag and a bowl. Ronnie drops you off, and Sandra greets you goodbye. You place a fist of candy into the bucket, before the pile jumps into the bag. I seal it with my scissors. Dad takes a hanged man down from the roof. I smile as you back through the front door.

49

Jesse Dunlap

Our day returns, and we eat and we talk. I work on a dinner, and you chat online. You take cobwebs from the doorframe to help decorate. We collect plastic spiders that are taped to the porch. You go to school and come home in the morning. We take showers and brush our teeth for our breath to stink.

Outside, an owl releases a mouse from its beak. Our jack-o-lanterns grin at leaves on the grass. Paper ghosts you made years ago dance from a tree outside my window. And the rising sun sets and the setting sun rises, and I come into your room and I kiss you goodnight.

50

Denise Duhamel THE LAST HURRAH

This is probably the last car we’ll buy…

—my mom the last batch of return address labels the lost bird feeder the last bag of seeds the listless raincoat the last pair of jeans the lost three-pack of white underpants the last movie ticket the lost television the last carton of 2 % milk the lost bottle of nail polish the last order of Chinese takeout the lost box of trash bags the last pair of prescription glasses the lost bottle of Prell the listless computer the last six pack the lost shower cap the last shoelaces the lost stick of butter the last set of dishes the lost pot the last pan the lost spatula the last box of microwavable popcorn the lost rake the last lawn mower the lost heating pad the last set of coat hangers the lost wool scarf the last stove the lost tank of gas the last airline ticket the lost set of luggage the last box of cough drops the lost pair of tube socks the list of gifts the lost roll of wrapping paper the lustrous silver bow the last package of scotch tape the lost cell phone the last cell phone plan the listless air conditioner the lost backpack the last roll of quarters the lost bottle of Tide the last box of Bounce the lost straw bag the last tomato plant the lost toaster the last set of placemats the listless box of plastic spoons and forks the lost pillow the last set of sheets the lost newspaper the last magazine the lost bag of rubber bands the lusty tube of Revlon’s Long Lash mascara the last washing machine the lost drier the last bathrobe the lost bra the last pair of sneakers the lost hotel reservation the last spa massage the lost greeting card the last book of stamps 51

Denise Duhamel

the lost mystery the last deck of cards the lost roll of film the last camera the lost camcorder the last disposable razor the lost bar of soap the last roll of toilet paper the lost box of envelopes the last stack of napkins the lost welcome mat the last hairbrush the lost sachet the last pack of light bulbs the lost fuse the last box of Ziplock bags the lost book of matches the last scented candle the lost pair of earrings the last pair of tweezers the lost stick of deodorant the last bottle of Oil of Olay the lost gallon of cider the last tulip bulb the lost throw rug the last bottle of eye drops the lost tee shirt the last box of Ritz the lost hankie the last ace bandage the lost antacid the last ice cube tray the lost can of bug spray the last pencil sharpener the lost lawn chair the last bottle of wine the lost can of tuna lest we forget the last bouquet the lost pack of gum the last bottle of water the lost leather jacket the last coffee table the lost bag of coffee the last coffee pot the lost box of sugar the last box of filters the lost box of Splenda the last bobby pins the lost costume ring the last generic prescription the lost over-the-counter box of cold medicine the last bottle of vitamins the lost protein bar the last flashlight the lost toothbrush the last oven mitt the lost CD of easy listening the last radio the lost wallet the last tin of shoe polish the lost umbrella the last pair of gloves the lost backscratcher the last key ring the lost bumper sticker the last box of cookies the listless frozen dinner the lost extension cord the last paint brush the lost roller the last can of paint the lost drop cloth the last bag of charcoal briquettes the lost can of lighter fluid the last couple of steaks the lost package of hotdogs the last package of buns the lost hammer the last drill the lost step ladder the last beach towel the lost bathing suit the last tube of sunscreen the lost sweatshirt the last skirt the lost fancy blouse the last roll of aluminum foil the lost bakery cake the last recliner the lost pie the last set of curtains the lost orange the last spool of thread 52

Denise Duhamel

the lost apple the last package of laxatives the lost bunch of bananas the last bag of kitty litter the lost kitty the last head of lettuce the lost 1000-piece puzzle of the Last Supper the last picture frame the lost floor lamp the last napkin holder the lost jar of peanut butter the last loaf of bread the lost shawl the last board game the lost set of dice the last AAA batteries the lost watch the last calendar the lost mirror the last box of Quaker Oats with the picture of the Quaker holding a box

of Quaker Oats with his picture on it‌

53

Denise Duhamel I KEEP GOING AROUND IN CIRCLES ABOUT

taking an alias my wisdom teeth your generation the role I play stagy scenarios bumper stickers soggy nostalgia my surveillance your blind spot the angel I saw revolutionaries gossip I spread my super heroes what they meant matrix concepts my contribution the life I left giving up on it not being there my bad decision a letter I sent why he bothered beginning again brazen ambition keeping secrets the tip we left that flirtation six resentments blue hula-hoops spending it all her convictions a dream’s worth 54

Denise Duhamel

stealing a kiss the lies I told my final choice corn on the cob the Middle East the proper gift my lack of grit cashing in soon bringing Merlot destiny or luck lipstick or not serving chicken guilty pleasure Cosco jukeboxes red Tarot decks freeing spiders relying on love who was wronged not speaking up buying that car my weak apology your hissy fits Larry King Live when to confess my part in this the green shoes our commitments your friendship tinted contacts The Virgin Mary things you said small betrayals 55

Denise Duhamel

letting them go shaving my legs shouting at you how to deal now the big changes religion’s role true absolution genuine closure who you believe

56

Denise Duhamel LOWBAT, 2006 Nick tells me that the Filipino word of the year is “lowbat,” a description of a cell phone running out of juice, and I say, “You’ve got to write a poem about that!”

But Nick says I can have it—he is lowbat lately himself.

I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s out of bed, watching Sky TV in our rental on the Spanish coast.

His favorite program is a travel show about renting Spanish apartments—completely meta. I suggest that he write a TV pilot about a guy on vacation watching the vacation channel.

The demographic: guys on vacation wanting to watch other guys on vacation looking at Sky TV in the middle of the night, looking for vacations they could have taken instead. Better yet, a TV pilot about a guy writing a TV pilot about a guy on vacation…

When we find cookies in the supermercardo called Filipinos— 50% Chocolate, 50% Galleta, 100% Filipino!— I think, This is it! “I feel a poem coming on,” I say, meaning for Nick. “Nah,” he says, putting the cookies in our cart.

“Visit www.filipino.com and join the community” boasts the box—the community, we guess, is not a community of Filipinos, but rather a community of people who eat Filipino cookies.

Hip cartoon teens, with silhouettes reminiscent of the i-pod campaign, hand feed each other. “Imagine if the Filipino word of the year next year is Filipino, as in the cookie?” he says.

If there were a cookie called Caucasian, what would its slogan be?

50% White Flour, 50% Processed Sugar, 100% Caucasian?

Would the cookie be a bland shortbread with a bitter center? Or a vapid meringue with nougat bullets in the middle? What about a pasty pastry filled with artificial cream? I could ponder these questions all day—I am hardly ever lowbat.

57

Denise Duhamel

Maybe I’m the one who should write a TV pilot about a woman who wakes up in the middle of the night to find her husband out of bed, watching Sky TV in their rental on the Spanish coast. The husband escapes into the TV where he is renting a different apartment, a quiet one without all her questions and poem ideas. She watches him on the screen, grilling him through the TV—why is he there and not with her? “Why don’t you write about this very moment,” she hollers, “about your alternate television holiday?” He can’t hear her, even when she follows him through the tubes and wires and sits on the TV-couch with him.

The demographic: women on vacation wanting to watch other women on vacation dealing with their husbands who watch Sky TV in the middle of the night, looking for vacations they could have taken instead. Better yet, a TV pilot about a woman writing a TV pilot about a woman on vacation…

Soon our trip will become the stuff of nostalgia, like the 1964 calendar we found at PAWS, the Spanish thrift store with proceeds benefiting abandoned animals. Like the manual typewriter with the upside down question mark and both an “n” and an “ñ.” Even though we have no idea how we’ll get it home, we just couldn’t resist.

But now, for better or worse, we are in the politics of this moment. Nick took paint to the calendar—1964 is the year he was born—and used it to make a visual poem.

He clicked away on the typewriter, writing about none of this.

John Ashbery said in an interview Americans need all the escapism they can get. For better or worse, Nick is an American now, a hyphenated one with a social security number and a green card.

I show Nick my new poems and ask, “Have I revealed too much?”

He runs his hand along my back, feeling for a button to lower the volume.

58

Kyle Flak FROM A BOY TO HIS FATHER

Perhaps you’d be more interesting in a mezzanine, approaching a kiosk, saying, “Am I in Añatuya or Djado? Do I need some lemon-grass rice pilaf or a pound of barley muffins?” But instead you go like this: on a salty davenport, thumbing through the J.C. Penny lingerie ads, waiting for an expired bus pass to appear from the grim reaper, while mother spends her days weeping at a faraway chapel. Well, at least you raked the lawn a couple of time in the autumnal dusk of 1958. I was there, popping the heads off a few crispy dandelions, wearing a plaid schoolgirl jumper.

59

Amanda Gignac PHONE LINES

In the evening dusk we sat working, me with my papers, her with her needle and thread. The phone rang and she answered.

“Hello?”

A gasp, a widening of eyes, and she slammed the receiver back down.

My voice was deeper than usual when I spoke. “It is my duty to protect you, Mother.” I waited, hands in my lap, fingers copying the progress of her resumed stitching.

When the phone rang again a minute later, I lifted it to my ear. I thrust the word through the line – Hello! – before the enemy could speak.

From the other end of the connection came, not a response, but a scream, a long, drawn-out scream echoing as if from far away. She screamed only once, an even, enduring cry, a cry like wind that still lingered after the line went dead. My heart quickened; I had killed her.

A flutter of panic, a contraction of breath, and I replaced the phone on the cradle with inappropriate calmness.

“There’s no one on the line, Mother,” I said. She nodded as the needle plunged back into the cloth.

60

Rachel Contrini Flynn INDELIBLE

The pen, uncapped, leaves a rough-edged patch of wet red on our fancy sheets.

One of us says Beach rose.

The other, Exit wound.

61

Jay Hopler THE RANGES OF BIRDS

A simple spiritless per-wee or chu-wee.

A staccato tuk-a-tuk or kut-a-kut; also a single kewk.

A piercing wheep! or kleep!; a loud pic, pic, pic.

A low nasal wurk; also check, check, check.

A hoarse kar-wit, kar-wit. When flushed, a cackle.

A cackling kor-ee-ee-a, kor-ee-ee-a.

An emphatic sneezy bark, kee-yow!, wow!, or waow!

An asthmatic squeal, keeer-r-r (slurring downward).

A slightly phoebelike p-p-pit-zee or pit-a-zee.

A croaking cr-r-ruck or prruk; a metallic tok.

A harsh tseeeer; a whistled whooee.

A musical teew; also a rattle and a whistle, ticky-tick-tew.

A throaty, rasping za-za-za; also kay-weck, kay-weck.

A nasal wide-a-wake or wacky-wack.

A loud whistled wheeep! Also a rolling prrrrrreet!

(found poem assembled from the descriptions of bird voices in A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies, by Roger Tory Peterson, 1980)

62

Nigel Jenkins SEMICOLON

; Cwtsh up, o dread-struck, to the jinxed, the best avoided, the point that panics; I will not, if you come to know me, dement or destroy you.

I am the point of balance, a glass of iced water at the half-way hotel.

It could all end here, yes – but it doesn’t; there’s more and maybe better to come.

63

Nigel Jenkins HYPHEN

Let’s be friends, if not lovers.

If wars have blundered across my bridgework, so too, in time, have the treaties had to teeter.

Let the swaggering dash go loudly about his disruptive game.

I, at half the size, am the line that combines – though not for me, fear not, the private ownership of individuals.

I comprehend the atom’s binding repulsions, the together that remains a free-breathing twain.

64

Nigel Jenkins INVERTED COMMAS

‘ ’

A twosome, always, untouching yet inseparable, like a marriage gone to speechless seed.

We raise curtains, sound fanfares, and seal, when all’s said, the silences.

We have, ourselves, nothing to say, one loneliness turned in upon the other, and mocked by soixante-neuf ’s mirage.

65

Christian Anton Gerard AMARILLO, FOR A CHANGE

Jackson, seated in a Texas truck-stop, finds a quick fascination with a pair of tan legs, crossed, the left foot bouncing above the floor. A secret enterprise, a grapefruit’s aroma in sauvignon blanc, draws his mind to seeing those legs wrapped like a tortilla around his body. There is guilt for such musings. The price, like too much donut for the coffee.

The sweetness, he’s sure, would wash away.

Years with Peggy would crumble— cake sitting too long on the counter. The stale flavor of single life lingers like Jack Daniels in the throat.

Looking up, the legs are gone and rubbing his eyes brings the trickle of Peggy’s perfume still lying in the sweatshirt sleeve from the hug before leaving. The citrus sweet that wakes Jackson, keeps him clean, makes the quick sip of wine a nightmare; a tequila sunrise he’d rather not see.

Mr. Bellhorn, your car’s all ready to go.

That’ll be fifteen bucks—oil and filter.

66

Christian Anton Gerard PEGGY WANTS A PICKET FENCE

Dusk is singing the twilight song.

Like a baker, Jackson Bellhorn’s spent the day fitting his handmade picket-molds over slim cedar planks. Tracing lines, jig-sawing Peggy’s wish into life, into pieces of a dream. White won’t do for the sensuous wood. There’ll be no paint, only water-seal and sweat will cover Peggy’s picket fence.

With the last picket in place, three nail heads file Bellhorn’s front teeth, and the fourth shimmies between a splinter-filled left thumb and pointerfinger. These last nails are love and all the rain clouds love’s been made under. These last four hammerpounds will crack like a man ragged with passion for happy, for handmade happy, for jig-sawed days traced with fingertips fit together with the sweat and low moans of an animal content.

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Michael Salinger MY WIFE’S LAUGH

I told him that her laugh reminded me of paint long chipped from cracked glass window frame in a classroom outside of shanghai where quasi-legal migrant construction worker’s black eyed children sit bundled red cheeked runny nosed shouting poetry at the top of their lungs like birds begging in a nest I know exactly what you mean he replied

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Thomas Dukes TRY ME

James Brown called Aunt Ruby every bad womanword he knew the smelly morning she processed his courthouse intake: he’d crossed mean and drunk over the Georgia-Carolina line of our Baptist peaches, sweet lynchings of prosperity.

Later, one night.

Aunt Ruby and I drove by the juke joint she operated with sorry-assed I. P. Poole— Lord, how she cussed James Brown’s soul when the radio sang Try Me, but we rolled the windows honeysuckle down to fall in love, again, with longing and loneliness so bad that we split a Diet Rite to the tune of stories about her rotten men and mine all the way to Heaven’s Here Barbeque in Columbia, where we ate so much funky pork we almost turned common before promising each other not to get the heartbreak again, much less anything down there, no matter what bad news we kissed on Saturday nights 69

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when James Brown brings home the forever God Almighty pine-tree blues.

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Thomas Dukes coyote walk up oakdale street on christmas eve I’m a naked fifty, doing time and housework to the beat of Jingle Bell Rock when I hear neighbor Sam scream Keep your pets inside!

There’s a wildness in Ohio.

I look out my cross-boned window to see three coyote strolling through our seductive lights, ready to eat what Santa brings.

Maybe they’d want to gnaw my belly down from a barrel to a six-pack, or feast on my poodle, Madam Princess, who barks insanely from her plush sofa-throne.

I can’t help but like their loping, the natural rhythm of free beasts.

I got close, once, in north Texas, and saw their eyes deep and wide as my grandmother’s when she said I left home to save my mind.

That may be the story of these coyote, too.

We’re all trying to save something in Ohio, from the cold and politics.

The coyote turn the corner now, and my prayers wish them luck.

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I go back to the dust rags and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.

The phone rings with someone’s panic,

but I keep cleaning up the past.

This afternoon, behind my mop, I’ll walk with three coyote to some wild stable where we’ll bring what gifts we have.

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Virginia Konchan “Modern Life”: Inextricably F*#&ed—and Lovin’ It Matthea Harvey MODERN LIFE Greywolf Press, 2007 A careful reading of the poems in Modern Life, the third collection of poetry from Matthea Harvey, shows that not only is Harvey engaged with the intersection between the personal and political, she has taken it upon herself to define that place. Announcing her—and our—arrival with a lusty “Geronimo!”—Harvey proceeds to map the modern landscape, distinguishing herself immediately from many of her peers in the publishing world by tone: readers inured to doomsday prophecy in contemporary poetics will be delighted to know Kantian idealism (albeit tempered) is still alive and well in 2008—in Brookyn, New York, nonetheless, where Harvey lives and teaches.

Mapping the convergence of the personal and political is a significant poetic project, akin to high-wire acrobatics, but Harvey has proven to be a poet capable of discovering, if not answers, then working “hypotheses” to overarching metaphysical concerns. The long lost lovechild of Woody Allen and Dorothy Parker, Harvey marries an absurdist’s sense of play with a deadpan sense of humor, creating sophisticated symbologies, both lexical and graphic, to document the complexities of the 21st-century’s phantom domain(s). The cartographic eye that pervades Modern Life was present in her previous collections, Sad Little Breathing Machine (Greywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000), as well, and her cleverness and exaggerated sense of whimsy temper the pretension that might arise in a book that promises, with its hyper-generalist title, to define or at least do justice to the species of modern living. Humor and the occasional dirty-mouthed Harveyism further her approachability: “Here was my hypothesis,” she declares dryly in the last poem of the book’s first series, “The Future of Terror/ 11.” “We were inextricably/ f*#&ed.”

Structurally, “Modern Life” employs a chicken-and-egg rhetorical device to explore the nuances (possibly nonexistent) between the future 73

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of terror, and the terror of the future. After a short prelude of five prose poems—the first of which, “Implications for Modern Life” barely evades the responsibility of being the collection’s title poem—“The Future of Terror” appears in all its post-apocalyptic glory, bringing glad tidings of “iodinedribbling wounds” and enough Napoleons for everyone (the edible kind, though Harvey is not above mixed metaphors).

Harvey has been publishing in America’s edgiest literary journals for the past ten years, and has described the formal concerns of Modern Life to be that of “halving” and “cojoining.” The poems in this collection enact those ideas literally and non-, through hybridized characters/figures and truncated stanzas and punctuation. The prose poem takes over Harvey’s previous reliance on unrhymed couplets, and the specificity with which she articulates her central postmodernist complaint (“We’d killed all the inventors and all/ the jesters just when we most needed humor/ and invention”), ailment (“I had a head cold which made it hard/ for me to hear the bullets coming—”), and overarching fear (“With the right pomade you can smooth over/ anything”) rescues the collection from the abyss of non-referentiality too often found among the language poets. The reader leaves Harvey with a sense of clarity only to be found through I-statements, ample reality checks, sufficient knowledge of the other’s subjectivity, and details that are concrete enough to orient oneself in time and space: for $14.00, choice books of modern poetry such as this might just be the best psychotherapy around.

Readers will soon find, after perusing not-quite-uplifting poems such as “Once Around the Park with Omniscience” or “Inside the Good Idea” that Harvey is a genius at working in tight rhetorical spaces without compromising depth. “Idea” in particular is a gold brick-bar of a poem that invokes Stevens, as do many other poems in Modern Life (her “wooden horse” having become his “glass jar,” only Harvey’s horse is a site of habitation, rather than a purely reflective surface). Echoes of allegorist James Tate also surface throughout Modern Life, as well as the ghost of Dadaist Stephen Mallarmé, whose use of homophony resulted in dense lineated poems that tread, like Harvey’s, the fine line between poem and prose, form 74

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and formlessness. Modern Life, however, actively resists comparison with any Dead or Living White Guy, however esteemed, and shares an obvious frustration with traditional strictures of form that Paris-based ex-beat Alice Notley grapples with so insistently in collections such as Disobedience and The Descent of Alette.

Have you ever used a teleprompter, spent time at a Listening Post or Isolation Booth, or used Ghost Morse Code? No? Well, how about relationships—might protocreature “RoboBoy” be a more fitting pet name for your Starbucks-programmed spouse or lover? RoboBoy appears throughout Modern Life as a meta-author of her book, co-terminus with Harvey except for the fact that he was issued not by the “parentheses of spruce trees” but by a manufacturer, in a box.

Like a slightly deranged tour guide with carefully combed blue hair, Harvey shows herself in Life to be not only willing but masterfully capable of naming not only where we are in space—planet earth “before the equator was invented,” but how we got here—helicopter—and lastly, why it is that we all haven’t killed ourselves in a post-9/11 spiritual wasteland. From Harvey’s perspective—which she doesn’t force you to share—it’s for a chance to hear the words “I love you too,” issued from someone’s mouth—possibly even our own. After completing Modern Life I had the distinct sense that it would be a very good thing to trust in Matthea Harvey’s poetics, and yet tie my camel to a tree. In a period of time when both the author and poet have been declared either dead or wholly untrustworthy of imparting truth-statements, this is high praise. In short: the goggles are on, the furniture has been kidproofed, and Harvey—insert sigh of relief—has agreed to take over as commander, of her ship at least.

Additional good news abounds in Modern Life: we are just in time for “The Festival of the Children,” as promised in the “Terror of the Future / 3,” which somewhat mitigates the bad news: the stakes have never been higher (hence the high-wire feel of the entire collection and the realization that, at least for Harvey, “It’s not a matter of life and death, it’s life or death” (“Terror of the Future / 10”). This information is given to us from a poet, 75

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however, for whom the tragicomic perspective seems optional, like an ugly reversible vest, and in nearly every poem in this collection, Harvey names— with large doses of irony—the detritus that surrounds, and yet doesn’t coming close to defining, modern life as we know it.

The collection isn’t perfect: there are moments in certain poems, such as “The Future of Terror / 3,” where the speaker seems almost incapable of slipping out of her acerbic, Walter Kronkite-esque tone: “We were a sad jumble of journeymen and here’s/ the kicker: a few of us had never been in love.” Interestingly, however, this flip line is trailed by the collection’s only reference to an immediate family member: “When I looked/ at the nametape inside my uniform, I missed/ my mother.”

Lest readers of Modern Life begin to feel overwhelmed by either the scope of Harvey’s project—a recapitulation of the failures and “glass-faced glor[ies]” of the 20th and 21st centuries—or its sheer expulsion of new vocabulary to handle the ghastly visage of history, Harvey reminds us that the task before us is simple: discover a.) what to look at; and b.) how.

In (re)defining the modernist project, Modern Life recalls the anguished question of centrifugal modernist himself, Wallace Stevens, in his poem “The American Sublime.” Stevens’ first order of business, after all, like Harvey’s, was not so much one of orientation as it was of form: “How does one stand to behold/ the Sublime?” (italics added). As for Stevens’ second question, written in the long shadow cast by the Church—“What wine does one drink?

What bread does one eat?”—he might find his answer in Modern Life, a nondidactic conglomeration of an instruction manual and epistle to the last vestiges of 20th-century thought. Life is a thoroughly satisfying third book from a racy raconteur-poet riding the wave of contemporary literature’s bleak yet tentatively verdant landscape with style, a necessary irreverence (the name of her not-yet-born firstborn: “Influenza”) and—alluding to a curative state involving “milk of magnesia” for all our modern ills—grace.

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Jay Robinson VARIED TONES David Lawrence Lane Changes Four Way Books, 2007 In terms of subplot, it’s hard to top Lane Changes: former Wall Street CEO and prizefighter turned prison inmate writes a book of poems. Then he gets it published. And that’s not the whole story, but you get the point.

Not coincidentally, the voice of David Lawrence’s book is one of varied tones and brutal honesty, a speaker who’s willing to say anything at anytime, occasionally to a fault, without much concern for whatever his words reveal.

Shifts in subject and mood, as the book’s title suggests, aren’t hard to find.

“Unlimited Detention,” one of Lane Changes handful of prose poems, showcases Lawrence’s gift for the wry, comic metaphor: Rejection is a broken erector set. You can’t build on the sadness of toys. You didn’t want to see my bloated face, musing from the beer can.

In school they used to put me in detention because the teachers liked to keep me around.

There’s more than just self-deprecating humor in this book, however. In many of the poems, what results is a kind of franticness. Often, it seems as though the speaker hovers over the landing pad of meaning, rendering again and again images and metaphors in hopes of finally landing, only to steer away. “Steve K,” one of the book’s best poems, revisits a friendship that has ended in betrayal after the subject of the poem has helped authorities put the speaker behind bars, presumably to spare his own freedom: You were wired that night at the Japanese Restaurant.

You looked like tuna wrapped in seaweed.

Your hands were at your sides Like you were pickpocketing yourself.

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understand betrayal, the speaker unravels a string of similes. Yet each of the similes, while it succeeds independently, fails to connect with the others.

Thus, the poem emphasizes the uncertainty we’re left with so often in the wake of some of the most important moments in our lives. Questions, not answers, we understand, is what we’ll have to live with going forward. Poems like “Steve K,” when the subtext of the narrative and lines on the page fuse thematically, highlight this volume.

But the highlights don’t happen at every turn of the page. In fact, they don’t happen often enough. In these places, what results is a desperate rambling nobody in particular would care to listen to, unless you’re paying them by the hour, and maybe not even then. Consider the opening lines of “The Business of Dying”: When I close a deal I am king.

When I lose an account I am loss.

This life is about loss And the lessons I learn from being broke Prepare me For death.

The writing here, especially in terms of line break and metaphor, is sloppy, predictable, more like the lyrics to a pop song than poetry. It’s hardly fresh. As if somebody left that hunk of tuna from “Steve K” wrapped in seaweed too long. Poems like this, which occur all too often in this book, illustrate why Lane Changes seems an odd choice for a full-length collection.

Outside of a few poems, not to mention all the pomp and circumstance of Lawrence’s brow-raising bio, it’s hard to see what justifies an entire volume and not a chapbook instead.

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Pamela R. Anderson Review: An Almost Pure Empty Walking

Tryfon Tolides An Almost Pure Empty Walking Penguin Books, 2006 In An Almost Pure Empty Walking, poet Tryfon Tolides paints an interesting picture of America from the eyes of an immigrant and his family.

He bounces back and forth between the village where he grew up and his new home in America, the result being a compelling look at both worlds through his piercing and not altogether dispassionate gaze. Most successful are those poems that describe simple scenes; less successful are the poems written about poems, which become a too-self-conscious way of viewing the topics he has tackled.

Tolides has a knack for using his poetry to capture beautiful moments in life. “By the Pier” is one such poem, in which the writer initially seems to do no more than create a detailed drawing that engages the senses of sight, sound and smell: Vistas of people walking by the pier tonight, and seagulls dipping at the smooth sheet, and harbor lights casting fire glows on the water. The sound of bicycle bells as they pass, and the smell of corn roasting on top of charcoal, and the swinging legs of children, perfectly illogical pendulums, back and forth over the ocean.

This lovely image is one in which Tolides could be straddling both his adopted home in American and his birth home in Greece. It is not set in a specific era; rather, it could be describing a wide expanse of years. After all, impatient children have sat, swinging their legs to and fro, for centuries…and 79

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the ocean has been repeating that motion for time out of mind. It is the act of carrying on—of mindless repetition—that is so perfectly captured and described in the poem.

This carrying on is one that Tolides repeats again and again, with great success: “There is a window in Maine,/open, in the dark/of June, to a field, a marsh/with peepers, one or two/tree silhouettes, stars” (“There is a window in Maine”) or “I go to a spring in my village,/carrying two white plastic jugs/along the steep path/to the base of the mountain,/by the sparrowed wild fruit tree” (“All Summer”). How beautifully he describes the most basic images!

Interspersed throughout the book and with equal success are dramatic personal moments, such as with the first poem in the book. In “Immigrant,” he shows the difficulties faced by older immigrants: “My mother called this morning, kept trailing away,/or off, with complaints about her failure/to make it, alone in the house…blaming, in part, America….” In the midst of her complaints about America, she still perseveres with daily concerns: “Her whole message, a cry, though still she asked/what I would eat for lunch.”

The reader quickly understands the near-impossibility of uprooting and transplanting a person who will and, indeed, must continue to mourn for what has been lost. It is poignant and painful, but Tolides manages to build empathy without edging into sentimental pity.

Less successful in his book are those poems written about poems. “I wish I could make a list of things which persist” is one such example. From the opening lines—“Just now I am thinking of an unfinished poem I wrote/ years ago, about calling to a woman after/she decided to walk away.”—the reader resists being drawn into the scene. If there had been only one such poem, it could be forgiven; however, Tolides returns to this method several times throughout the book, always with only moderate success. He could eliminate these poems, which would make the overall effort much more crisp and tight.

Unrelated to content but still distracting to the reader are Tolides’s excessive use of quotation marks and commas. Simply italicizing 80

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conversations within poems would create a better effect, and the use of spacing in the body of the poem would be a tidy way to create the pauses that he wants within the poems. However, these are small issues that do not take away from the mood and beauty of An Almost Pure Empty Walking.

Overall, this is a book of poems that is well worth the time devoted to reading it.

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Whiskey Island Magazine Issue #55

Editor: Karen Schubert Poetry Editor: Amy Bracken Sparks Prose Editor: Travis Hessman Art Editor: Amy Bracken Sparks Design Editor: Steve Thomas Media Specialist: Dan Lenhart Faculty Advisor: Rita Grabowski Readers: Michael Broida, Patti Dzadony, Paul Martin-Patterson, Carmen Richards Office Assistants: Michael Broida, Patti Dzadony, Paul MartinPatterson, Delia Springstubb

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Mindi Kirchner IN MEDIAS RES Because beginnings promise to be intolerable— think phonic tics, a hole in my mouth where words should be, or the flooded blood and bone-twist of a difficult birth— I’m dragging the middle toward you.

Doctor, chirps just-fertilized egg, I’m finished starting— toss me into this world mid-life and sullen sign me up for an unpaid mortgage, and an ex-everything because I want anonymous, continuously— none of this but I’d really like to know you better banality because I want the way your eye blinks in pentameter, I want sing-song and chant: I love coffee, I love tea, I love the boys and they love me.

In all heart-sputter and sweat in here, honey, because I want history stripped naked, pages torn until all that’s left is now.

Because I want living and living and living, all the while, without ever having to be born.

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Lisa J. Sharon THE STAG

“Just get out of my room!” Her son Charlie’s voice burst out of his bedroom overhead and filled all the space in the house.

She sighed and looked up from the sink where the dinner dishes soaked in soapy water. Looking beyond her own reflection in the window and out into the yard, she saw it. Behind the gray pole barn on the other side of the small pond, standing by the sweet gum tree where Alan had just cleared out the tall grass and brush the day before. It was stark white against the deep scarlet of the burning bushes that rose up under the glowering sky along the western boundary of their property. An albino deer. Alan had never seen it and she could tell by the way he said, “I’ll have to watch for it,” that he doubted that she had either.

The stag stood unmoving as if it were painted on the red background, its whole body visible and its head turned toward her. She stood just as still, her rubber-gloved hands hovering above the hot water. She could only just see its full brown rack where it rose above the burning bushes and melted into the browns and oranges of the trees that filled the back seven acres of their property. She could hardly believe that a neck could be strong enough to hold it up.

“Not until you answer my question!” Alan’s tone was sharp with the effort to maintain control.

“I was with Mike! Okay?”

She pulled off the rubber gloves one finger at a time and laid them over the edge of the sink. A loud stomp from above made the light that hung over the kitchen table swing slightly. She opened the back door and stepped out onto the porch. She hoped the deer would still be there when she walked around the corner of the house, but it was gone. She thought she saw a flash of white disappear into the trees.

It was not yet sunset but the sky was grey with the remains of the storm that had strewn leaves and small branches across the lawn near the house.

The air was unsettled and occasional gusts of wind, redolent with rain and decaying leaves, blew her hair across her face as she headed toward the pond.

The wooden fence that they had built when Charlie was a child sagged and 86

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the gate was never closed anymore. The pond was a black reflection of the sky. She heard the uncoil and splash of frogs as they anticipated her course along the pond’s reedy edge.

The path through the woods was overgrown, hardly used at all anymore.

Thick vines hung down from the branches overhead and she found herself veering off and having to backtrack and reorient. She remembered walking the path in the days that Alan maintained it. She had carried Charlie snuggled in the pack that hung down over her chest and stomach. He would sleep with his head at an impossible angle while she tramped along watching for the Indian pipes and false Solomon’s seal that grew along path. She had bought an all-terrain stroller when Charlie got too heavy to carry. But it wasn’t long before he wouldn’t stay in it anymore. He would run ahead to find a stick so he could battle the ogres that lived among the trees. Their walks were halting, full of spaces when she would stand waiting and watching Charlie, the smell of earth, moss and water, enveloping her.

She didn’t see the deer until Charlie was ten or eleven and would no longer walk on the path with her. She didn’t see the deer until after the path had become obscure and shadowed by years of unchecked growth. But when she first saw it, it was like a vision from the stories of knights and magical beasts that she and Charlie used to read together. She had caught her breath then held it, not sure if the sight had wafted in on the air she breathed and would disappear as soon as she exhaled. But it stayed. For five minutes she had watched it until it suddenly turned and leapt through the bushes and disappeared behind a curtain of trees.

She crunched through the twigs and fall leaves that littered what was once the path, ducking under low-hanging branches, wet with recent rain, and avoiding the roots that hid underfoot. Now and then she stopped and surveyed the entire area, searching for that flash, listening for that sound that would tell her that she was on the right track. She had never seen the stag when she looked for it. She knew that deer were silent even in the densest forests. Even a white deer could disappear behind the branches and leaves 87

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that wove a labyrinth through the woods.

She swept aside some hanging vines and stepped off the path and down the short decline that led to the stream. The rocks that she and Charlie used to use to cross the shallow rivulet were washed over with the runoff from the day’s rain. She stood, her shoes sunk an inch in mud, and gazed across the stream at what had once been a small clearing. She looked for the deer near the child’s wooden picnic table that stood decaying amid the new growth of vines and bushes that threatened to engulf it. Her eyes lingered on the table, barely visible in the dying light, and she thought of Charlie when he was first learning to walk. On sunny days, she and Alan would bring him to the clearing for picnics. She could still see him sitting on top of the picnic table, his short legs splayed, watching for the appearance of the puppet Alan held behind his back. When the puppet suddenly materialized, Charlie would gasp and laughter spill out of him until he toppled over and she would have to catch him.

Now, she didn’t think the sun could penetrate the growth that had crept into the clearing and swallowed those childhood picnics. The deer was not there.

She could remember each time she had seen it, the images frozen in her mind like snapshots. While packing the car to drive Charlie to four-week overnight camp when he was thirteen, she had said “Look!” and pointed toward the pond, but Alan looked up from the trunk of the car a moment after the deer had disappeared through the row of arbor vitae and into the thicket of red maples and low pines. “Next time,” Alan had said.

But the next time was in the winter and she was alone. She had just pulled her car into the driveway after picking Charlie up from ninth grade band practice—after she had seen him kiss Susan Adler’s daughter in the instrument room—and there it was, behind the fence by the pond. Charlie had disappeared into the house before she could point it out to him.

The rack looked like the bare branches of a sapling growing out of the newly fallen snow, and as soon as she noticed it, the deer melted into the 88

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background and vanished among the trees.

She saw it the day the crystal vase that she and Alan had gotten as a wedding present, broke. It toppled off the cabinet when Charlie stormed past. She heard the crash of glass and then saw the deer. A white flash through the hedge that separated the pole barn from the neighbor’s corn field. Her mind followed the deer while she and Charlie swept up the broken glass.

The sky had grown darker and the woods dissolved into shadow. Even the wind seemed to have settled for the night. She was afraid that if she walked any further she would be lost in the gloom. She turned around. Cool evening air coaxed her onward to where the path opened up and gave way to grass around the pond. She could see a small yellow light hovering between the branches of the trees. The light in Charlie’s bedroom. She followed it, settling the gate crookedly against the post that used to hold it closed, and avoiding the muddy dip in the lawn, no longer watching for the deer. She took off her shoes, setting them on the porch by the back door, and went into the kitchen where her yellow gloves hung over the counter by the sink.

All was quiet.

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Jeffrey Skinner YOU NEED A SUBJECT FOR THE SUN TO RISE You need a subject for the sun to rise You need a horse to make a shadow You need bullets, money You need an ocean to bride the wound You need the god that needs you You need black jam for heaven You need a fist from the embalmer You need red jam for earth You need a new planet You need thumbs to dredge the lake You need monkey, happy evil, bone breaker You need another few centuries You need a hole punched in your need You need discipline You need shavings from the moon You need a subject for the sun to rise

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Matthew S. Colglazier PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

The real lights dim, the hallway lights come on.

The husband rocks on the banister whispering to the cats heading down at three for pills, half-blind.

The wife then murmurs something to his absence in the dark words like laundry dropped down metal chutes.

She stares at the crack of light beneath the door, a trail on which the children’s sleep awaits.

She thinks of the door’s paint, the cracks on its hinges like thumb bones, her touch, weathered to a thinning shine.

Her husband works the aspirins down like fists.

He breaths. The cats paw at his robe’s wrinkled belt, 91

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as they climb, his hem like the drape of a wave or that absence his wife flattens with her hand.

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Matthew S. Colglazier NIGHTHAWKS

Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play. —W.H. Auden I. Was it a party they came from?

A woman in the corner was crying.

The couch by the door was cold, the parlor stuffed with birds.

No one talked about the war because it was evening. Women hourly filled the halls as we drank very late, cold drinks made with bitters.

It snowed that night, very light, flakes falling through sidewalk grates landing on dull metal, their fortunes, water as men walked away in their coats and women formed a line like Eurydice, down to hell.

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II. I am the man behind the bar, milky cap and shirt, half-Irish still I think my mother was, or else, I would tell you.

I went hunting last year and shot a buck and dragged him back home where suddenly I’d forgotten what to do.

So I called my wife, but she had gone.

And my son, looking down from the window began to cry, fearful of the blood steaming through a punctured lung.

III. Where does the street move on to?

To the street behind the glass? The seats round and warm like air? The news soon stirring from their trucks at dawn?

What about the till in the window?

What shape assumes of thinking of its meaning?

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The bar is dark. The shop light bent now, like a memory.

I have my own questions. But now I must face things as they are—colors and shape the world itself a kind of stare. Because the woman has raised her hand and the man has shrugged her off, and the stranger turned his head away from us— as we are gone, and yet that light, so smooth, stays on.

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James Henschen SYRUP

How about a drug story?

Don’t roll your eyes, not yet. This isn’t one of those stories. I’m not a recovering junkie. I didn’t go to rehab. Don’t worry; you aren’t required to applaud me for pretending to turn my life around. I didn’t steal or kill or degrade myself for money. I don’t need anyone’s forgiveness. I’m not begging for cash with some gloriously sad story to pay off an enormous drug fueled debt. I’m not on step six. And I definitely have not surrendered myself to a higher power. This is a drug story about a drug problem. But it’s not my drug problem. It’s someone else’s.

So let’s start at the end. Let’s start right now, because right now is the end. No, not that kind of end, there are no pistols or pills or razor blades anywhere near me. Quit over-exaggerating. Things are never that black and white. If you believe they are, then you may be in need of pistols, pills and razor blades. Good luck with that.

But the end for me is the end of my marriage, the end of my mediocre job as a chemist, the end of my fading bank account, and the end of my steadily increasing collection of glassware, couches, dish soap and paper cuts.

It is absolute zero.

But more importantly, it’s the end of the story and I’m sitting here on the shiny wood floor of a postage stamp-sized apartment scrawling these words, the ones you are reading at this very moment, in an obnoxiously bright yellow spiral-bound notebook with an equally obnoxious red pen. I’m sitting on the floor because I have no furniture. I’m writing in a notebook because I have no computer. I’m using a red pen because I have no pen, at least not one of my own. This one I stole from the receptionist desk at my lawyer’s office. And I hired a lawyer because I don’t want to lose all of my money.

Too late for that, but I’ve got a pen, although red wouldn’t have been my first choice.

The notebook is a bright nauseating yellow because I have terribly bad luck and it’s the only one I could salvage from the three cardboard boxes labeled “Syrup” filled with my few remaining personal items. Oh, and the notebook is wide-ruled, you know the ones that have space enough for 96

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gargantuan letters between the lines, the ones made for people that don’t realize they are blind or have giant elephantiasis hands. Just to clarify, I am not a giant elephantiasis man. I am normal size; hence the need for normal sized lines in normal sized notebooks. This is how it ends for me. This is how it ends for all of us, no surprises here.

In front of me, dangerously close to three flammable cardboard boxes, mostly filled with dry old books, I placed an enormously over-sized ashtray.

The ashtray is oversized because currently, I don’t have a trashcan. Since there is nothing to do other than fill my aching lungs with black smoke, there will be a lot of residual ashes and no place to dispose of them.

My only other possession is a mattress. But it’s not a real mattress. What it really is, is an over sized floatation device that has a slow, silent, sneaky leak that requires re-inflation of the big blue sleeping apparatus every two to four hours. They call it an ‘air mattress.’ At this point, I can only afford ‘air’ inside of my bed. Absolute zero.

You are probably thinking this is just a catalogue of the items I own. It’s not. You should be wondering how I got here. It isn’t what you think. Let’s work backwards from here. Try to keep up.

A few days ago, I stuffed what was left of my personal belongings into those three cardboard boxes labeled “Syrup”. The day before that, I quit my stable job as a stable chemist and signed my divorce papers ending my unstable marriage as an unstable husband. Then I acquired this atrocious red pen that is allowing you to learn the details of my life.

The day I signed the papers was the last time I slept on the hardwood floor of what used to be my large 3-bedroom house. I slept on the floor because the couch was gone, and the bed had been missing for quite some time. I wadded up a gray wool sweatshirt for a pillow. And for a blanket, an oversized beach towel with the words “Got Crabs!” printed under a faded orange smiling insect-like crab wearing an oversized sombrero. A large hole gaped ominously where the crab’s eye should be. It kept me incredibly warm, despite its visual handicaps. Oh, and I don’t “Got Crabs!” and don’t plan on ever getting them, with or without sombreros, so there was no irony there.

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I hadn’t showered in days. The shower curtain was gone, but that’s not the reason I didn’t shower. I didn’t shower because the showerhead was missing.

She took everything with her, my ex-wife. So I slept on the hardwood floor smelling bad and feeling nauseous, because the only true way to fall asleep on interlocked wooden planks is to drink vodka, six to eight ounces in quick succession.

I know what you are thinking. But I warned you that you didn’t have it figured out. So don’t shake your head or click your tongue, because you are wrong. None of that stuff was used for drug money. It wasn’t sold or traded or bartered for an 8-ball of coke or a fist full of xanie-bars. Like I said before, this isn’t one of those stories. Pay attention. Besides, there was enough money available for a coffee table full of cocaine and an entire prescription pad of pills, if I so desired. There ‘was’ enough money, was, but not today and maybe never again.

So let’s keep moving backwards, because before the days of missing shower heads and nights of crab blankets, there was one special moment where I perched on a rock near a tiny crystal clear waterfall trying to get cell phone reception on a small mountain trail about one hour north of Portland, Oregon, approximately 2500 miles from home. I could have sworn that before a barrage of phone-signal-distorted screaming and swearing and name-calling, I heard my wife say something about, “I miss you. I want to work things out.” There was screaming and yelling because I spoke the words, “I’m sleeping with someone else.” I wasn’t. But this magical phrase can cure all of your problems, or cause them, depending on how you prefer to look at it. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, but I wished otherwise.

You are wondering why I lied. There is a reason, so calm down, I am getting to it.

It’s hard to enjoy the free mountain air and crisp sunshine when your cell phone rings every three to five minutes. The cold floating mist washing over your face from the dissolved droplets of water falling from some undeterminable height aren’t quite as soothing when you know there is a truck 2500 miles away being filled with your couch and your showerhead, 98

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never to be seen again. I asked a fellow tourist to take a picture of me smiling near the miniature rainbow formed by the eternal waterfall. That special moment is forever frozen in time.

A few days prior, 36,500 feet in the air, being re-routed to CVG from MCO on the way to PDX, legs folded into a faded blue or gray cloth airplane seat, my stomach started to ache. My gut filled with sharp pains, as if I ingested bits of broken pottery or shattered marbles or a bag of sewing needles. Fairly certain that I hadn’t eaten any glass or rocks or needles, at least not lately, I decided to walk around the plane for a while to get the blood flowing. This was when I noticed it. Squeezed into what passes as a bathroom in an airplane, I gazed into the mirror. Looking through the streaks and stains I never want to think about, I noticed that my hair was turning gray, and I now had permanent lines arcing out from my eyes. The skin under my eyes was a weird purplish hue. It puffed out like little bags of soft garbage. Tiny red lines scattered all over the whiteness of my eyes. My stomach hurt, my eyes burned, and for a moment, I couldn’t quite remember where I was headed. This is when I knew it. It was all ending. Maybe it was cancer or heart disease or cholera. It was the first time I noticed it, 36,500 feet in the air over Chattanooga, Tennessee. The end was coming and I could not stop it.

If you are beginning to think this is going nowhere, then leave. But this is where things begin, right before the end.

So I was 36,500 feet in the air because a few days before that I sat in a worn out office chair in front of a long dark shiny conference table. This was some sort of meeting about some sort of ‘thing.’ This ‘thing’ would eventually send me rocketing into the clouds at 600 mph toward the rain and suicide capitol of the world. For some reason, instead of paying attention to the omni-important ‘thing ,’ I was busy squinting hard, trying to catch a glimpse of my own reflection in the glassy conference table.

The wood shined magically. For a moment I imagined a handful of laborers in dark blue jeans with oversized belt buckles crowded around the table, bold cowboy hats tilted downward, gently buffing the table with enormous poofy natural sponges. Sweating and grinning wildly, they beamed 99

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with pride over their painstaking work; polishing the table into a mirror.

Then I noticed a streak of what could be coffee or blood or semen. The laborers vanished and the room was filled with serious discussion of the ‘thing.’

I really didn’t care about the ‘thing ,’ but it happened anyway. Staring at the mystery streak reflecting upon itself in the glass and half listening to the details of the ‘thing ,’ a little tiny nook opened up inside my brain. A little cluster of cells that waits for their moment of glory, their moment to fire off an epiphany, shot a sudden wave of brilliance throughout my body. I knew how to fix the ‘thing.’ And fixing the ‘thing’ was my job.

I knew how to solve the drug problem.

Did I lose you? If so, you aren’t paying attention. I will not recap. Please, try to keep up.

About an hour before the serious discussion around the shiny table, I was notified in an urgent memo about a ‘thing ,’ and this ‘thing’ turned out to be a drug problem. That’s why there was a meeting, to discuss the ‘thing.’ This ‘thing’ was in Portland. So I’d be packing my bags.

You see the ‘thing ,’ the drug problem, was having what my industry calls an ‘adverse side effect.’ This adverse side effect was adversely affecting some people in Portland. You see, there are waitresses, construction workers, and strippers in Portland who suffer from an inconvenient affliction we will call Illness X. When these people can’t afford to go to regular doctors, to discuss the embarrassment of Illness X, they sign up for those studies announced on radios and TV’s because they want to erase Illness X and hide it from the world, despite the unclearly warned about ‘adverse effects.’

So these construction workers and waitresses and prostitutes and single mothers with no insurance took this drug we will call Substance A. And Substance A, when combined with everyday ordinary things like cold medicine and birth control and heroin, create what we will call Substance B. The problem with Substance B is that it is a yellowish-brown syrupy solid that sticks in the kidneys like that congealed black sludge clogging the drain of your shower. The problem with kidneys of blue-collar workers being filled with yellow-brown syrup is that it eventually ruptures the wall of the kidney.

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The drug problem was that the people who signed all the waivers, the ones who were just happy to receive medical attention, died. This is what they call an ‘adverse side effect.’

But I had a solution now, a solution because of daydreams about big belt buckled laborers and semen or blood or coffee stains on conference tables. I had solved the drug problem. But I won’t bore you with the voodoo chemistry involved because I doubt you are capable of understanding it anyway. Just know that it would be gone like the blood or coffee or gray matter stuck to the conference table after the men with the big poofy sponges gleefully do their job.

I solved the drug problem. But you thought it was something else. Oh, don’t worry, you were right this time.

Two weeks before my moment of clarity in the sky, I sat in my big blue American car listening to Jim Morrison scream about dead rats and dead cats while I continuously smoked menthol cigarettes, lighting each one from the smoldering end of last. The smell in the car was making me feel old and wrinkly as I began to sober up in the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes erected dangerously close to the interstate. I was sobering up because it was almost 6:15 in the morning and just out of reach of the parking lot, right behind the oily dumpsters, was a tall fence, beautifully spun with razor wire. The sun rose and sparkled off the lightning sharp barbs and tips of razor that gently wrapped around acres of incarcerated ladies and gentlemen. It was almost peaceful, like staring at twinkling Christmas lights lining a snow-covered bush. If that snow covered bush surrounded a prison.

So this is what you were waiting for, the beginning of the end.

About seven hours prior, my wife was handcuffed and pushed into the back of a police car, under arrest for possession of cocaine. A few minutes before that, the first cancerous cell clicked on in my body, born from its 30 year incubation as I watched a stone-faced marine-looking police officer dump the contents of my wife’s pink sequined purse onto the cracked sidewalk. One of the sequins shook free and skidded several feet from ground zero, sitting lonely in the grass. A small green chewing gum box 101

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fell out, slightly open. There was no green chewing gum inside, only white powder. Oddly, before my bowels started twisting and expanding, before my stomach began to rebel against its own lining, I actually wondered where all the gum was, but only for a lightning brief moment. My first real thought though, when I watched the man with the cinderblock haircut pull into the distance with the ghost of my wife staring out the back window, thick black streaks running down from her eyes to the corners of her mouth, making her look like a clown, was, there might be a drug problem.

And there was a drug problem, because 2500 miles away working-class kidneys were bursting and on the other side of the Christmas razor wire, next to the house of pancakes, my wife was in jail.

Don’t look shocked. I wasn’t. It was only a matter of time.

At that moment, I had a choice. Two paths. Neither path led to victory.

There was no winning here. I already told you which path I chose.

How about a rehab story?

How about I hold my wife’s hand while a euphemistically titled brainwashing program convinces us that she has an incurable uncontrollable disease. How about I forgive and forget and applaud her for memorizing a series of vague ambiguous ‘steps.’

Is that what you would like to hear? Because that is the right thing to do?

I could pretend. I could pretend that the rehab is working. Instead of spending my nights wrapped in blankets with crabs on them, instead of walking away from the chemistry that has haunted me endlessly, how about I continue to spend most of my nights wrapped in chemical equations ignoring the ghost? Instead of drinking vodka and sleeping on a blue inflatable raft, I will continue to figure out how to prolong life. I will continue to try to stop those little bugs and cells and cancers that eventually slow your heart and lower your core body temperature until your brain can’t tell your lungs to breath anymore. I will pretend that we don’t all know how this ends; pretend there are lots of surprises and twists and turns.

I will pretend everything is okay. I will pretend relapses are part of the process. At night, I will use earplugs to concentrate on the math in front 102

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of me. I will use earplugs because if I don’t, the loud snoring of my wife will break my concentration and I could write a 2 instead of 0.2 and then somewhere some middle-aged man waxing his sensibly sporty burgundy car will fall down with his heart torn open filling every open internal body cavity with thick, coarse blood, choking him to death quickly.

I will smile mindlessly while the loud snoring persists through the little allergy pills she pops like tiny candy hearts with dreamy phrases written on them to mask the real problem. An air filter in the corner will whir uselessly. It won’t help because her nasal passages won’t be swelled due to the interaction of pollen or dander or mold particles. Her nasal passages will be inflamed and irritated because of the inhalation of C17H21NO4.

But that’s okay. I will hold her hand and smile and accept it. The constant nose blowing will be an indicator of over production mucus to flush out the foreign body. I’ll pretend not to know this. I will stop myself from searching the correct drawer to find a crystalline white powder. It will always be in the top drawer, back corner, in a candy box, or an old jewelry box. It’s all part of the program; relapses are normal. Forgive and forget.

How about step one would be to surrender yourself to a higher power?

No. It doesn’t work that way.

I don’t care about rehab, I don’t offer sympathy and I don’t forgive.

So when the sun began to burn my eyes through the razor wire, and my lungs ached for clean air like they were being squeezed in a dirty charred vice, the decision was made. I got out of my big blue American car. Putting out my menthol cigarette, I approached the oily dumpster that served as the only barrier between pancakes and prisoners. I dug out three cardboard boxes labeled ‘syrup ,’ turned off my cell-phone and drove off into the sunrise.

Dead rats, dead cats at full volume, the twinkling of Christmas razor wire fading in the rear view mirror.

You get one phone call when you are in jail. My phone didn’t ring that morning.

So at the beginning of it all, or wherever we are now, all I ever did was try to stop the end from occurring. What I wanted to do was end the end.

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There was a drug problem. That problem was one cancerous cell engulfing everything I had, starting with my time, then my sleep, then my showerhead, then my couch, then my pillows, then my blanket.

At the end, all any of us will ever have is a red pen, a yellow notebook for elephantiasis people, a leaky mattress filled with air, endless piles of alcohol and cigarettes on every corner and cancer slowly forming somewhere inside of us. The final page is the same for everyone; there is no twist, no surprise.

We all know how it ends. There is nothing after the last page, except maybe another page-one buried somewhere in the bottom of an oily cardboard box labeled ‘syrup.’

104

Eric Anderson My first funeral

I was the one they made climb in the casket. I was just a boy, and I thought the sleek corners looked like a sports car, tight through the turns, tires squealing.

Everyone was dead except for me and the morticians, who were all dressed like chauffeurs. One of them reached towards me, his gloved hand trembling.

When he closed the lid, the inside of the coffin was like driving a country road at night with no headlights. I pretended to have my hands on the wheel and that I knew where I was going. My knuckles brushed the satin lining.

I kept saying Vroom. Vroom. It sounded funny in there, almost an echo, or maybe the opposite of an echo, and I was so sure I could feel the whole world in there with me, I let go of the wheel and fell endlessly into the dark.

105

Benjamin S. Grossberg THE SPACE TRAVELER AND EARTH

There are thirteen thousand manufactured objects—two inches or greater—in orbit around your planet right now. When my ship pulls up, there are thirteen thousand and one.

I enjoy being among so much of your junk; it gets me closer to the ethos of your planet— ever expanding circles of junk. At first I thought it was disdain, but now I see it’s a way you have of expressing ownership.

Circling, I scoff at TV and what passes for “prepared food.”

On my planet, no one uses microwaves, and we all decided the radio went far enough in terms of in-home electronic entertainment.

The space around us has absolutely no orbiting junk, only a few weather satellites and a refueling station with a small shop and liquid hydrogen in three grades. Even its bathroom floors are clean.

106

Jonathan Wells HIS NEXT CHILD

In the forest I walk first so I can play the native’s part the singing behind me, like songs from a farewell.

I walk toward the scented leaf air like mead sapling bark as sweet as a newborn scalp.

Each step is a garment I shed as if I had wandered off a pilgrim ship and lost my self stitch by stitch in the maiden hills where I am changed by a tender god into his next child.

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WATER TABLE Ink, Dye, Charcoal and Pastel on Paper Judith Brandon

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Barber Black & White Photograph Akiko Koga

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A meeting place for our shared but fractured memory Pen and Ink Heather Charley

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BLUE and purple Acrylic on Canvas Jim Fuess

111

Sara Dailey CANNIBALS USUALLY DINE ALONE

By now the answer to each question is always survival.

I’m all teeth and nails, the plumes of my hair like smoke, soft ribbons streaming upward from flames as if from flames. Defiance is a smear of ash on my cheek, tears calcifying in their sockets, the hint of a hard skeleton beneath all this soft flesh.

This dance, our slow firelight ritual, has always been a spiral outwards, an unraveling thread, spider web split by careless thumb. You were a bleak ledge climbed to without pitons, blue and angular, an ice cliff waiting for avalanche, your hands never anchor enough to hold me.

Now, as the ellipse of my arms opens, my elbow has become a hinge on which the world hangs, my heart a jungle whose snakes can be found dangling from tree limbs like question marks, my spine a fierce arrow, swift arc of fire, to keep propelling me upward, ever out of your reach.

112

Carolyn Furnish THE MEAT PLACE

I moved to Ohio from the Panhandle of Texas about seven months ago.

Deer hunting, cattle roping, and horse riding, components of the knee jerk idea of Texas, were never part of my tame, suburban life in Amarillo. In Ohio, we decided to buy a place on six acres so that I could raise chickens and a goat or donkey or two. We have good neighbors who help us split firewood and give us tips on country living. One suggestion was that we could split a cow between us, buying it from Rick, a guy they’ve been buying from for decades. In late February, it was time to pick up our meat. I drove out to Rick’s place outside of Ellsworth Township on a Sunday morning.

I pass by the house on the first try, turn around and find Rick’s address hand painted only on the north side of the mailbox. In the crook of a small circular drive sits a long, narrow wood frame house, probably built in the early 1970s. It has black shutters that are colonial in suggestion. The twocar garage door is open and five vehicles are lined up outside of it, most of them pickups. No one is around, although I am expected. The walkway to the front door is blocked with snow, so I climb some steps inside the garage leading to a door that leads inside the house. I knock. While I wait for someone to answer, I focus on specific items in a waist-deep jumble that fills the garage floor: a cracked outboard motor cover, five or six rectangular animal traps, on the new side, a tired cardboard box marked “Wreath,” a lone, black industrial-strength rubber glove, one of those mini-trampolines, lots of clothes.

No answer comes. I look behind me into the front yard, really a dab of grass at the core of the circular drive. A plywood jigsawed donkey, missing a leg and needing some paint, a flag pole with OSU and USA flags, and a yellow fifty-five gallon drum fill up the space. Nearer the house sits a small aluminum frame greenhouse. Inside its mineral-deposit windows are wall-towall, floor-to-ceiling stacks of plastic nursery flats. Next to the greenhouse, an assortment of enclosed trailers that haven’t moved in awhile flank a metal warehouse, the kind that are advertised to go up in a weekend.

I hear voices coming from a warehouse door behind one of the trailers and walk toward it. On the way to the door, I pass the greenhouse and see 113

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a table piled with coyotes. I look again – coyotes. I look into one of the coyote’s faces, frozen in a snarl; lips pulled back, teeth ready. I think, “victim of bad taxidermy, left out to weather.” It lies on its side, all four legs straight out, stiff. Under this coyote is another coyote, and another, about five, stiff from rigor mortis, not taxidermy. I breathe in to test the air, to see how long they’ve been there; I can’t stop myself. The air is fresh; the cold has preserved them. Still heading toward the door, I pass by another yellow fiftyfive gallon drum. It’s filled close to the top with purple/tan viscera.

I open the door. Inside a scrawny, red-haired kid, fourteen, tops, is… I’m suddenly more interested in what he’s doing and to what. The tail helps me figure it out; there were more of those stacked beside the coyotes – beaver tails. The boy wears a John Deere-green rubber apron and is carefully navigating a dead beaver’s nether regions with a bowie knife. A pair of stout black rubber gloves covers the kid’s hands and forearms. I stare at what looks like the beaver’s scrotum, laid bare of its sacque, the skinned balls are puce-colored, wet. The beaver is lying on its back, its head tilted up, an incision runs from its chin to the base of its tail. It’s alarmingly large, the same size as a good-sized three year old child. The paws, front and back, have been nipped off; red ankle bones protrude from fat legs. The thick odor of warm blood closes in around me.

The kid looks dully at me; I look dully back, and say, “I’ve come for the meat.”

The kid reluctantly lifts his head and hollers, “Grandpa! Some lady’s here for meat.”

The kid keeps working, sliding the knife blade in between the skin and the meat, methodically loosening the blue membrane that holds the hide to the body. I stare at the beaver’s insides: muscle, tendons, intestine winding in and out, yellow fat deposits. To the left of the boy, out of a darker ante room, a remarkably tall, perhaps 6’5”, greyed man walks in, also in a rubber apron.

He looks angry.

I repeat the purpose of my errand; he looks puzzled.

I try to clarify, “Are you Rick?” He doesn’t answer.

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Another man, shorter, but large enough to have man breasts nudging their way out of his rubber apron, comes out from the same direction as Grandpa, and taking his time, says, “I’m Rick.”

After Rick clears up who I am and has a convoluted discussion with Grandpa over whether my meat order is ready or not, Grandpa disappears into another room and comes out with brown grocery sack. Still surly, he asks me to pull my car closer to the door. By the time I do that, no one is around again. I go back to the beaver room, and the kid points his knife blade in the direction that I should go. I pass by army surplus shelving that holds freshly stripped, bluish pink skulls -- beavers? sheep? calves? Inside this room is a wood work table, about nine by six, stacked with neatly folded – raccoons? – most likely, judging from the limp tails, black and white striped.

Without this clue, the bodies are difficult to identify: skinned, scraped, and folded in such a way that the inner skin, dried rawhide by now, is on the outside and the fur is tucked inside. Each animal forms a narrow plank: sixteen inches long, not counting the tail, five inches wide, only about one inch thick, the color of maple furniture, and shaped very much like a cricket paddle. The table is covered with these packages, stacked six or so high, hundreds of dried raccoons.

Along one wall of this room are towers of beaver skins. The stacks reach almost to the top of an eight foot ceiling. At one point, Rick stretches on tip toe to reach a skin on the top and pulls it down for me, a rigid disc, and two feet in diameter.

“This one’s New York beaver,” he says.

Instinctively, I “pet” it. It feels coarse, many processes away from consumer fur. Its eye holes are shriveled into the shape of commas.

The two men are busy loading grocery sacks of meat into my hatchback.

I look around for a place to write a check. There’s a circa 1940s wooden desk to one side, but the writing surface is covered by yellow and pink receipts and invoices, a jumble of small cardboard parts boxes, catalogs. I turn back to the work table, but writing a check beside folded raccoons seems disrespectful …, or something. Rick finishes loading my meat and 115

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directs me to a room lined with five or six refrigerators and the about same number of chest freezers. I write the check on top of a freezer.

On the way home, the phrase “blood pudding” keeps coming to mind, a certain kind of sausage. The phrase makes more sense now; it turns out that the smell of warm blood and organs is compelling, inviting, like custard pie baking in the oven. Nevertheless, I don’t know if I’ll be eating much of Rick’s meat in the coming months, even if the neatly folded, white paper packages in the brown paper sacks turn out to be beef.

116

Jessica Jewell A BEAR FOR THE DAY OF THE DEAD

His belly hangs over the pit like an twice-pulled bow, turn— to the spine side, vertebrae roasting like garlic bulbs, the blistered button ears gravity sags toward embers.

His neck will give soon.

And his head will burn.

The Baxter Boys from Yuma thought to spit him like a sow, turn—the belly side again, his last meal searing, the crackle of fat and tissue, undigested dewberries, cheekbones of last night’s cutthroat trout.

The Apache have looked away.

They cannot stand to witness this, will take no part in the offense.

Darkness comes as a starless dome.

The moon— eyed gods are turning their heads.

The sound of the spit-gears aches all the way to the Dragoon Mountains, awakens the howls

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of the coyotes, and beyond them, pine country and the canyons he was brought in from.

No one窶馬o one says it: But without his cinnamon brown fur, this naked sacrifice suckling on death looks just like a man.

118

Jessica Jewell THE GRASS WIDOW

If you haven’t heard of the grass widow, hang around. She’s fond of fires, is half seas over for flumes. Doesn’t draw the blinds at night— prefers the moon and her convolutions.

They say she stitched closed the beak of a meadowlark.

Sing-songed, the grassland ocean in her throat.

Full as a tick and twitching.

119

Blas Falconer WHAT ANY OF IT MEANT

That year I walked no matter how far.

At the market, the little labels, peppers strung above the door, a pinch of paprika on every table.

I lived alone—five walls in each room, pots of water on the radiator, the ducks long gone.

For months, snow buried us all, I practiced speaking to the mirror.

When tiles fell from the shower stall, I thought, Dinner plates—the way they sounded, crashing to the floor.

One night, girls stood below the balcony, singing up, their faces like saucers, round and white.

I didn’t understand— again. All the black dresses. I would have been content to listen to the wind.

A webbed foot in a bowl of soup became a sign of luck.

What could I say while others sighed with envy, the small bones breaking in my mouth.

120

Shannon Robinson SECONDHAND BODY

I haven’t always had this body – that is, this one, the one I’m living in right now. And yet I can’t clearly remember having any other. The current one is second-hand. That much I know. What became of the other one, I can’t recall.

That body is lost, I think, along with almost every memory of who I was.

Because this body hasn’t always been mine, it’s filled with surprises. Despite its feeling of familiarity and its perfectly natural fit, there are discoveries that I make about its topographies. For example, the other day my husband asked me about a fish tattoo he’d seen on my thigh. As I lay on the bed, I twisted my spine and turned my leg over. I had expected a small goldfish; instead I found an elaborately inked design covering the entire back of my haunch. Stylized swirls of blue water framed a grimacing mer-creature, fierce like a Chinese dragon. The picture was not my doing, but I accept its presence. At least I didn’t have to suffer the pain of its installation.

No, this body is like a rented apartment, and I’m philosophical about its eccentricities, its shortcomings. I am a little curious about my own lack of curiosity, but that in itself seems a feature of my new habitat.

As for the previous tenant, I’ve no idea what became of her. There are no signs of forceful ejection or hasty exodus. There are no slash marks, no holes.

There are some scars (I’ve looked for them because I’ve always liked scars) – some little marks here and there. A small white stripe over the knuckle, a puckered indentation on the outside of the right bicep (vaccination perhaps), a keloid over the big toe.

I’m left-handed now. This was a relief to discover, since I’d assumed I was clumsy, that my right hand was afflicted with numbness. The words had crawled so slowly and awkwardly from my pen. As an experiment, perhaps with a flicker of intuition, I switched hands, and the letters ceased to balk in their progress from mind to pen to page.

I haven’t looked in a mirror yet, but I don’t need to. I know what I will see.

I may not look the same, but I will seem the same. My eyes will seek to look behind me, but my head will block the way.

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into blackness, revealing nothing, suggesting everything. So I know those eyes will be there, without seeking a reflection in a polished surface.

Sometimes I pretend this new body is deaf. This isn’t polite, I know – but people insist on talking to me, asking me questions that I can’t answer. It’s important for things to be quiet; otherwise this gentle floating will end.

122

Jason Bredle MASS APOLOGY

The indie rock show killed, and afterwards somebody handed me a flyer for a Genitals show next Wednesday!

I might go.

The only thing is, it’s at The Woolly Mammoth, and while the idea of a huge, fake woolly mammoth in the middle of a venue appeals to me, it’s actually really obtrusive— the only way you can see the stage is if you arrive early enough to climb on top of the mammoth’s back and watch the show from there.

Otherwise, no matter where you are in the room, you can only see the bassist or the lead guitar’s left arm.

The thing about The Genitals that most people don’t know is that they didn’t name themselves The Genitals for any sense of irony.

It turns out the drummer was in medical school when the band formed and he decided to close his eyes, open his anatomy book, point, and whatever body part he pointed to first would be the band name.

Thus was born a band both darkly clinical and strangely hopeful, both purposefully functional and intensely sexual.

That is, the perfect band.

Not like The Fingernails at all.

Never intentionally catty.

Or The Toes or The Navals. Not gay.

Or The Intestines or The Armpits. Never amateur.

I have to admit, The Lungs and The Elbows are pretty good because of their sheer ferocity and crass, carnal energy, as are The Aortas and The Cerebral Cortexes. Art bands. Man, I’d be in a band called The Cerebral Cortexes 123

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in an aorta beat! Is that right?

I only made it through a semester of medical school. Essentially, I interacted with some people and then it was over.

Fine, maybe I was accused of breaking the Hippocratic Oath along with the drummer from The Genitals, but I’ve always contended that was bullshit.

I was young! Somebody handed me a plate with a spleen and I did a stupid thing, just as somebody handed the drummer from The Genitals a plate with a testicle and he did a stupid thing!

Really, I was so young.

When I think about those times now, it’s like thinking about a different life.

I was so far from home, so lonely, so distressed.

Yet at the same time, strangely hopeful and intensely sexual.

So it bothers me, at this moment, to have realized that while I may not climb to the roof of the medical school and fantasize about jumping anymore, I also no longer feel that strange hope or intense sexuality I once did.

And I don’t have anyone to ask why this is.

I should go to the show next Wednesday. It’d be good for me.

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Karen Hildebrand softball game at the church picnic

A speeding ball could ping apart this wishbone of rib a hit to your solar plexus you take it direct.

Deflated lungs like lilies doubled over waxy mouths gaspless count to 10.

The summer meadow goes fish-eyed you flail underwater useless mitt still on your hand.

The future will nail you just as sharp as this but you don’t know it yet as the moms on the sidelines, dads at the charcoal grill, the sorry guy at bat, all bend their shapes around the bubble of air raising its skinny arm.

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Deborah Baker CAPUT MEDUSAE

The head feels pretty stuck on the end of my arm, my fingers so tangled up in its limp snake hair that where it begins and I end I’m losing track of.

The weapon-head is now fixed to my hand. I look around, but there’s no one else around. The guy I was with, Jay or Pete or whatever name he gave me, he isn’t around, either. I just go home. No one calls me looking for it: the thing is mine now.

Over the rest of the weekend, it’s an inconvenience, but going back to work on Monday is a problem. It’s like, how much do I like this job? Not even a catcher’s mitt or bandages or a papier-mâché cast covers it. The thing is as big as my own head, and maybe a little bit bigger. It’s heavy.

So I get up early and get dressed: I have to cut down the armhole in a new sleeveless jersey to put it on. I look in the mirror, careful to face the thing away, because it can turn me to stone even by its reflection. I don’t know what kind of stone, but if it’s concrete, forget it. Concrete would be disgusting.

I’ve done my best, and in the mirror, in place of my left hand there is a woman’s head with snakes for hair, with a big floral pillow sham over it.

There’s no disguising it. A vest helps the armhole.

I get into the office really early, and practice leaving my hand down below the level of the desk. If I had a meeting today, there would be trouble, but so far as I know, I don’t.

The day doesn’t start well: my boss gets me going again. He always has, and I don’t think I have a thing for him, but he just startles me by being alive and walking around. It gets me nervous; at the same time he’s walking and talking in real time, we’ve got this other life together going on in my head, it’s all smoother, has music and close-ups, and is completely unreal. After a while, he goes away, and I finish what I’m thinking about, and it’s quiet. I kind of calm down, but my mind is still getting away from me.

Having this thing on my hand is not such a handicap for me as it might be for a woman with a significant other, or an S.O. plus dependents. Or a lot of work-friends. Fortunately, I’m spared that. The end of my arm starts to buzz, and I take the pillow sham off to let the thing get some air, and just let 126

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it go. No one’s around to see.

Then my boss comes back into my office, as I’m looking at something I shouldn’t be on the Net, instead of sitting there bugging myself about what to do and say when someone like him comes into my office, and so when he comes in, he got me so good I jumped up like I couldn’t help it. He sees the problem with my left hand, and stares at it like it’s another Monday-morning thing to piss him off, I’m sure. He starts asking questions, like, “Is that a head? Are those snakes?” I would have thought he’d be more subtle about it, he’s pretty subtle and bright in the alternate track I have him on in my ideas about him, but no, and before I can figure he’s going to do anything (I’m bad at guessing what any other person will do, I barely know what I will do myself sometimes until I do it), he comes halfway around the desk, and my hand twitches and before I know it, he’s on the floor, having what looks like a seizure. Incase you didn’t know: Involuntary motion in another person is very disturbing to look at. I call 911 with the good hand, and watch the poor guy, such a nice guy, getting more and more still. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the snakes sort of twitch a little, like they’ve acquired some life with the exercise of the power of the head. After a little bit of confusion with the receptionist, who wants to know who called 911 without informing her first, completely against the company’s emergency plan, the EMTs come into my office, work on him and strap him in, and take him away. After he leaves, inert and turning the color of concrete, I’m sure no one will be bothering with the status meeting today. After he’s gone I’m much more calm, and so everyone who comes into my office to ask what happened gets my story of his sudden seizure, and me wondering about how these things can happen.

Though everyone is called into a meeting later in the day to be told that my boss is dead, I stay in my office, guessing what this is about. My coworkers come to tell me the news, and I cry sitting at my desk, I am sorry, but I don’t cry hard enough so that they feel they have to come around and hug me or pat me on the shoulder or anything. I tell them I’m stunned. I stay at work until everyone is gone, and then I wrap the head back up again, 127

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and leave.

I can’t help but kind of scratch the thing’s scalp a little, like I’m petting a cat. And when I do that, a contented feeling comes up my arm. I get caught in traffic, of course, but when I get alongside someone I cut off a little ways back, they roll down their window and scream at me. There’s no excuse for what I did, not even road rage, but I shifted the sham off the head and held it up for them. At first they thought I was flipping them off, in the dark they couldn’t see the thing, but then I turn on the interior overhead light, and they stop in mid-shout and that car stops moving, and falls back behind me.

Aside from that, what kind of damage can I do with this? No husband, no children, no best friends. I sit home, and let the head face the TV. It does kind of move under my hand, and of course I’m not going to check to see if its eyes are open, or even if it likes this kind of passive experience. I’m thinking no. I don’t even have any pets, which is good.

As the infomercial drones on, I try to think entrepreneurially of my little gift. I could go into the lawn ornament business, and use real donkeys pulling carts, real flamingoes, real children with beards tied onto their chins.

While I’m thinking, a sound, a little mumble comes from the head. Of course, there’s no looking at it to read lips, it’s hard not being able to see my closest companion, and maybe it doesn’t even speak English. Maybe it’s Greek? And maybe it only speaks old Greek? If it did say anything, I wouldn’t be able to get a translation, probably. The thing mutters a little while, and then is quiet. Maybe it’s like a kid, like my niece, and only its mother can understand it?

It wakes me up in the middle of the night, talking to itself. I feel bad for it. Really. Poor thing to be stuck on me, with all my logistical problems. The snakes move and tickle my hand, gnaw a little on my wrist.

The next morning, I call in sick, and sit on the couch thinking I have no right to hold this thing back. It mutters and is just kind of limp there on my hand, and is obviously unhappy. I am stuck to it, and I wish I could do something for it. I should make myself do things I would not ordinarily to make it happy. Make some sacrifices to make it happy. It is a supranatural 128

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and unusual thing stuck on the end of my dull arm. I should try to think of what it might like.

The first night I take it out and try to get it to work in the park, there is some trouble until I can get under a streetlight. Then of course, everything works as it should. The next night I bring a flashlight, and it feels good to give the head what it wants. People I don’t know, dropping onto the sidewalk or into the dirt. A nice buzz comes up my arm. I think it’s happier like this.

I wish I had enemies, though. I make the decision: I phone in and quit my job, and we live on what I can take out of the pockets and wallets of the head’s victims.

But one night, I go too far and with the head out in front of me, I think everyone is susceptible, and then the police and the neighborhood watch start chasing me and the head up and down the broad city boulevards (“Put the head down,” they yell to me through a megaphone). I know how it’s going to end, so I turn the head on myself, at the last second, as they have me surrounded. But even staring right at it, I feel nothing. The woman’s face is not happy, and her skin is terrible. The snakes keep getting in her eyes.

The eyes seem pretty powerful, like they could read my mind. But what would be the use of that? I’m distracted trying to do this and the head just pops right off my hand and rolls under a car, out of sight.

So for years now, I can wonder why it didn’t work on me. I was first thinking, it’s a rule it has. Maybe it was grateful to me, I admit the possibility, but I think it was a rule. My therapist does a super-quiet, stealth freak every time I bring up my idea about a rule. He’s telling me, it was always me, my face that turned all those people to stone. I start talking about my immunity, and the rule, why can’t we talk about that, and he yanks me off the subject.

I am okay with his idea that this all happened because it was my head that needed the exercise of killing lots of people by turning them into concrete, and watching the convulsions and listening to them slowly smothering.

Because I’m in here, it’s more okay than it would be out there. And I keep at it, trying to figure out the selective effect. I have my theories written down, and they’re well thought out, and I don’t get them out for just anyone, 129

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because when I start to talk about it, people think it’s too simple, and they try to destroy my explanations by just putting them out of their minds. I can’t make them stick to anyone. And then I have to go back to work on the clues again, and it discourages me to plug away at it when I think of what the outcome will be.

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Josiah Bancroft SHAKING BILL BY THE NECK

You walk like a tree falling down, arms long as a hydrant uncapped by kids, with your ping-pong eyes and candy lips all wide as your liver. Not to say you’re living wrong. I’ve seen a house collapse under the stroke of a painter, and so know the wrecking ball comes sometimes on a length of horse hair.

But fun is no kind of vocation, and you’re no man on a ladder, hopping against the face of my house, a cripple two stories over the street. If anything, you’re living a dog’s life of running long and sleeping where you stop, saying nothing, and then only Holymoley, holy-moley, rubbing your head bald until, cracking with static, it sticks to my hands like an electric fence.

For godssakes, Bill, let go of me.

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Wayne Miller DISMANTLING THE SCARECROW

At first: the mouth still sewn, the voice inside with the straw the farmer pulls and scatters across the barn floor, the sackface a few weeks later burned in the bonfire, the shirt and jeans tossed into the workbench’s bottom drawer. Only the grayed hat continues to hold some trace of the snow that skimmed its brim, the pollen and light that dusted it. The hat left lying in a corner of the loft, behind the musty bales and a half-constructed engine.

When the next family moves in their youngest son will pick it up, lift it to his face as if its smell perhaps might yield some hint of history—.

What he uncovers there, inside that mute presence, will not be the past (he imagines the hat worn by a living man), but rather

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his own echo— like the light filling the windows of the house across the field.

133

Kathy Davis WEEDING In the back garden, habaneros broken shade over what’s forgotten from breakfast shells, grounds on the rot of old clippings volunteer corn holding an isolated thought

against the breeze Where is that child? I was trying to remember the French for strawberry the precise hour of blue on the china Absurd the haphazard filings a mind rifles the drunk selling nosegays

old directions to Orient Beach Wire grass, insidious spreads the bed evening primrose in the spirea He should have called by now pigweed sprouting here there a deep breath take it clover tiny shoots beneath the juniper The trick is painting my neighbor likes to explain

a brush application

herbicide

dribbles down the stalk to the root a brown country the stiff-handed dead weeds waving from her yard I shouldn’t have let him go parting narrow and arching blades of liriope I pluck an invasion of wild 134

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pungent and sweet

The word fraise drifts up My spade hacks a tangle of roots the nerve ends tremble tiny clods of dirt hanging on

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C. Prudence Arcenaux DISCOVER I have found that it never hurt to wander with my hands gripped tightly at the base of my skull explore the phrenology of the land under my toes I began this practice to stop myself from picking this scab you so artfully shaped hiding it beneath my stiff shoulder blade Filling the pages of my diary with the cubits I use to measure time I notice my referents were wrong and wonder if you know when god claps his hands in your eras it is the falling of trees in Brazil but phone connections were lost long before this was material I begin to imagine the faces of your children in that dark milk in the bottom of cocoa mugs and realize that digging in the dirt of garden variety couches for old pictures and names is easier than answering the phone on the fourth ring instead of the third Patiently I eat from tin foil forks and listen to my fillings tell me that ultimately it is simpler to gnaw on those forks than chew out the words necessary to find someone with the slim fingers of your left hand the dull cleverness of your teeth and still this common phaneromania keeps me looking because my imperfect angle allows a multitude of possibilities for stained shirts but no chance of healing 136

Thomas Brian Osatchoff Woyend A thick slice of Camembert, a glass of coke, a glass of milk, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice with a teaspoon of sugar, two Polish pickles, three fried eggs with no toast (the bread is moldy), and a kiwi for breakfast— and then the worst day of my life. Let me say this: a teaspoon of sugar in the orange juice doesn’t make the bad day go away. To start with I spill the coffee. I smile weakly at the dark aroma and wrinkle my nose at the not so viscous liquid about to leak to my toes, then grab several yellow dove-decaled napkins to sop it up a bit at the counter’s edge. It’s beautiful really, the way the coffee consistently and steadily seeps into each napkin, the dry chrome color meeting jet wet. But the napkins are limited so the flood continues, finding ignored corners and disintegrating little but the recycled paper napkins and my patience, futilely soddening what it can of the dry that is by far the quality winning this war of spilled coffee, mostly because only so much coffee can be contained in one of those smallish European coffee makers. Not bad, only one little drop on the mat below, and it’s already mottled brown, so all in all could have been worse. Another plus: the coffee is already cool. Not that it splashes me, but it could have, and it’s along these lines that everyone knows it’s always much worse to spill hot coffee than cold coffee, somewhat (but not entirely) like it’s much worse to cross the path of a black cat than a cream-colored cat. Or maybe it should be a superstition the entire world partakes, that to leave any coffee in the pot to cool is sure to bring disastrous effects to oneself, and to all one’s close relations: “One should always finish their coffee pot off.” Like the commercial says, “Good to the last drop.” Or perhaps a taboo against drinking black coffee would be appropriate in an ever-emerging world-culture obsessed with the whiteness of teeth. But belief in signs aside, what if an individual under the influence of stark sobriety were to fall asleep at the desk, or while driving for that matter? We must avoid all undue outlay, if not with coffee than with some other stimulant or other means. Assisted vigilance must persist against inefficiency and non-neon teeth, too; for if our bones can be white now and in death, despite being covered in blood and sinew or dirt and maggots, then why not our teeth white while we’re alive?

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At any rate, I clean up the mess, drink the rest of my orange juice (too sweet, can you believe it, too sweet), and wash the dishes. I suppose I should explain that the reason I knocked the coffee pot off the burner is because I twisted my ankle two nights ago, and have since been left generally awkward, and in particular, unusually feeble amongst the cabinets and kitchen contraptions. Decreased mobility aside, at least breakfast alone means I can eat all the strange combinations I want, and can look like a fool in peace. Relative peace, I should add, especially since I can’t be sure that my hobbling is the reason I knocked the pot over. But let’s not go down that street. Because I think—I can’t be sure because I was drunk at the time—but I think it was just that street on which I twisted my ankle. But I tell you, in my best Irish accent, streets are quite the same everywhere. No matter what side of the street the vehicles move along on and no matter the language of the signs, people from everywhere, I swear, although I admit I have not been everywhere, people from everywhere walk up and down streets. Even if they’re half-crazy like bohemian clowns dressed in pink, sticking out their tongues and holding umbrellas to keep away the rain from their faces (clown make-up streaks terribly). Even if the rain may not fall for another few weeks, or who knows how long because it sure isn’t falling now. Even in blue skies baby, even if they’re right wild like a flower child, or fully reasoned going about their every-day practical affairs as villagers in a village that has only one street going around and around like a Parisian roundabout, excluding the cobblestone and without the grave of some unknown soldier belted by a honking vortex speckled with debris of mostly compacts and bikes.

At the approximate center of this particular village of which the lone street goes round there is a shrine to “the one who watches us walk,” which can also be translated as, “street vendor who does not walk himself but watches us walk in the street.” I’m not particularly fond of translations; they inadvertently say so much more about the translator than the original author, especially since in this case village historians don’t actually know who is the originator of the shrine, or exactly who is “the one who watches us walk.”

Nevertheless, the villagers of this particular village are very wise indeed, and

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come across of sheer niceness in the way they carry themselves through the street: not too proud, not too humbly, just compos mentis given their circumstances, the way a community of people without eyes might walk, fully accustomed to a life of darkness. Of course, the manifestation of this scene is given shelter and sustained in virtue of every individual in the village being clinically blind. A deviant mutation gained footing eons ago on account of the village’s genotype pool being completely cut-off from other possible pools (as the village exists on the side of an isolated mountain engulfed by the expanse of a treacherous canyon, mostly unknown in the world and never conquered from without). I, like everyone as far as I can tell, have not been to this village, but have heard many stories, all which have leaked with no explanation as to how. (My best guess is that they 0 in the wind, or maybe via extraordinarily developed pigeons.) Although class divisions remain, from what I’ve heard, for the most part the swollenness of pride and the different shades of modesty right down to abject servitude don’t gain the illustrious position of being wholly evident in the perceptions of the villagers. Not to say they don’t have their problems. They too, cry over spilled coffee, and most are addicted to an indigenous derivation of cocaine. But they walk nice.

Not like the rest of the world, which it seems to me, without naming nations, either shuffles or waddles along. And I make these generalizations knowing full well that there are differences in how people walk, but that there’s one underlying similarity people share: they walk. No wonder every language has a word for walk. “Walk” is part of that not always so mythical “core universal vocabulary.” Even if they’re in a wheelchair they still walk, I mean, they get down that universal street called “Shared Assumptions.” Even invalids get down a street or two somehow, and if confined to a bed then they spontaneously piggy-back on someone else’s meanderings. So I tell you again, in my best Irish accent, streets are quite the same everywhere. And now that it seems we’re coming to the end of this street, maybe I can get on with it and tell about how today has been the worst day of my life, although much may not be gleaned in way of details, as the bald reality of it is that I probably won’t get off this street, and so it’s quite possible, dear reader, that neither

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will you. *** I know I said we’ve come to the end of this street, but streets like oceans don’t really end, they just run into more street that looks more or less streety, the way oceans look oceany, more or less, depending on how much it has rained lately, and whether or not the local public has been mixing water with their whiskey. And if the local public belongs to a Mediterranean climate, and it’s summer, then it most likely hasn’t rained (maybe a storm or two), and they’re most likely skimping on the water, whether it be whiskey they’re drinking or not. *** Words don’t make good boats. If I owned a boat I would name it “Woeyend” (The W is pronounced as V). In addition, words don’t make good ankle braces, and they don’t soothe the pain that comes with looking like a fool, of thinking yourself a fool. I have a penchant for tomfoolery, but to be foolish is about the worst. Not the worst pain, I should say, but still the worst.

And although boats may save one from an ankle injury, they’re only good in water, and not usually any help with making a worst day into a bad day better.

Unless it’s being used as a get-away boat to skip-out on work or for fishing, or both, in which case it must also be taken into account the fact that fish aren’t to be found just anywhere. I mean, a happy fish good for swimming and good for catching doesn’t wear anything but scales, and society has rules about clothing.

Words may not make good boats, and in addition are not always such good companions on voyages, but they defer well, like people who frequently repeat, “I don’t know.” I learned early-on the pain of misunderstanding, and that the worst kind of pain is deflected or the kind you don’t feel: worse than the pain of absurdity or contradiction in terms, which may be closer to the worst kind of pain than I realize. I thought of a hundred things to tell my girlfriend while she was gone, and I’ve forgotten them all. I don’t know where they went, although I have a suspicion they’re in the same place the

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unfelt pain is in before and when it gets to me . . . . I like to read and I like to write, but most of all I like to write within the pages of books previously published. So I can later read between the lines. A German kid named Kristoph once told me that graffiti is an important social institution. I think he’s right, but I don’t like other people’s doodles on my house, nor any place I chance to dwell. Sometimes the places people dwell don’t have four walls. I can’t seem to help but dwell on the night I twisted my ankle. I lost my favorite shirt that night. It was blue like the sky isn’t in Poland during the winter holidays. It was wrapped inside a white plastic bag wrapped inside another white plastic bag and left behind. Someone that didn’t know probably threw it away. I don’t know. “Trash” is a term that covers a great deal of things. Perhaps everything, depending on who you’re talking to and when. Trash usually ends up in a hole, and then the hole piles up, and then there’s a mountain.

Pretty good that humans can make mountains. Quite godly, indeed. While I’m on the topic of holes . . . I suffer as badly as the bottom of a hole. And everyone should know that when holes get covered over there is no longer any hole, and more importantly, there is no longer any bottom of a hole.

So maybe I should correct myself: I suffer as badly as the bottom of a hole that no longer exists. I feel foolish, and if the phone rings I’m not afraid I’ll smash it.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here in desperation, trying to read something I erased that I had previously written between some lines in a book of poetry.

Should I have written it in pen? I don’t know. I prefer pencils over pens, although I once wrote something flattering about pens on a computer.

I typed it on this same keyboard that sticks, that is sticking right now, on a desk that has many things sticking to it. One of those things is an antique pen dated 1901. I’ve never used it, but I like it. In this case I probably prefer pens over pencils. Sometimes, like right now, I sit at my desk and stare at the window (not through it), or stare at my antique pen and think thoughts of thanks, like, “Thank God we live our lives in a soup of forgetfulness.”

According to legend, one particular soup of forgetfulness has its origins

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with some obscure Polish person, who invented it in a fit of boredom while staring at Dali’s The Persistence of Memory one drab December day. I’ve spoken with several people familiar with this legend, and have come to the conclusion that it must refer to an authentic soup of forgetfulness. Numerous old jars have been left behind, now empty of soup of course, with letters ED written across the tops or sides of each. As I’m told, the jars point to this conclusion in so far as ED most assuredly stands for “Egzystencja zupy z Dyni” (Existence of a Pumpkin Soup). Indeed, ED Soup seems an authentic soup of forgetfulness, because although those I’ve spoken with cannot remember its precise contents, they unanimously agree that it has the flavor of opium, and that despite the soup’s fundamental bitter taste and cadaverine-like foul fetor, they want to live no more days without it, and furthermore threaten to hole up in some cave on the outskirts of their town if something is not done soon to remedy the matter. I’m of the opinion they should just forget about it. However, I admire their adamance, and admit my fondness for caves, which like cages and cavities in general, go together well with single-mindedness. In addition to the plausible cadaverine and highly likely opium, vernacular records have also established that ammonia, succinic acid, pumpkin, and salt are most likely ingredients in ED Soup. Other ingredients hypothesized with a lesser degree of likelihood are watermelon and clementine, among others. For these ingredients and for the existence of ED Soup or any soup of forgetfulness (and fairy tales about young girls turning into pumpkins), I give many thanks to all the gods, however few or many there may be, because I’m sure everyone eats some version of forgetfulness soup quite regularly, and would tell about it if only they (we) wouldn’t keep forgetting. Ed could be a good name for a god, a good name to receive my appreciation for ED Soup. Or my thanks could get taken up as another ingredient in any forgetfulness soup; soups that must all be something like the swirling eye of Jupiter. Something we’ll never fully perceive because it’s a part of us.

Gratis. And sometimes I wonder why people say things like, “God grant us the strength . . .” Yes, grant us the strength to live now, so we may remember everything later.

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Sometimes I have strong feelings of hatred toward people. Loathing turns people into things, but I must say, although I’m mostly ignorant about how people are who they are, and I can’t seem to find the location of that which is immaterial in myself, I’m confident in asserting that people already are things before I come along, and I’m generally not a misanthrope. I grope along, and then every once in a while a poisonous moment bewitches me, despite being without venom by nature, at least of the snake’s kind. And although I sometimes play at being a vampire, my viciousness is exceedingly rare, and I’m sure my bite could never kill. I’m afraid of injections, anyway. Impulsively ingenuous by nature, I can’t help but point out that I can find no fault in determining my vile sentiments as utterly unjustified . . . and yet somehow filled with so much sense.

I only tolerate sentiment in writing taken up by art. Feeling filtered otherwise, by the norms of the day, or whatever blend of zeitgeists affecting appetites at any given time doesn’t interest me. Surely this story written three weeks before the year sets has its sentimental aspect, but I trust it’s not without beauty. Otherwise, I’ll soon banish myself to some corner, or join my friends in their cave to cry and sniffle in shared sorrow and joyous obstinance; where after some time—like at least one famous poet—we’ll put out images of beauty to tenantless space / casting against cave walls / those beautiful brims brinking directionless / coming close to skirting dark limits so bright / lightly sounding around smooth clay edges / and playing with certainties / those patterns unseen entertain in lengthening dreams. I like art like everyone values air, and relish it like only some people truly appreciate and give thanks to be alive, to be breathing. Beauty as our relation to things, to ourselves, tells me that the restraint required for life and for art is always within a field of greater or lesser perspective, comprising individuals composed of moving points, faineance and florid flashes: creation amongst vineyards of emotions previously unfiltered, now producing fruit. Art and beauty are just these foodstuffs indicating our limits, leaving behind a signatory trace already decaying as they (we) cycle through love and hate and nothing between.

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One famous French writer says that language thins out the sentiment like a mill, and without a doubt this short text filters, but I do not drink coffee while writing about truthy things like fairness for all, and what the heck is “freedom” anyway, besides being the most exasperating word these days. In this line, “justice” is one dangerous world, I mean, word. Like presidential hopefuls surging ahead in polls in virtue of a safe-and-secure system that somehow gets it that abortion must be utterly aborted no matter its term of development, no matter its role in the gestation of a more sophisticated, mature humankind. (I mean, “abortion” as theory.) And a hopeful somehow getting it in the same sentence that capital punishment, although difficult, serves an important social function. “It’s the hardest thing,” the hopeful says—for me or for him or for the prisoner awaiting execution, I’m not sure what he means—I don’t know. Actually, I’m pretty sure I know, but similar to my penchant for tomfoolery, I have an evident predilection for saying, “I don’t know.” As far as social policy and institutions go, it’s believed that they all strive in their design and implementation to preserve and promote justice for all. I understand aborting foetuses at any stage is the aborting of potential. They don’t even get a chance to live. Unlike those we condemn to death, they do nothing wrong (it’s not possible for them to do wrong). It’s really an epistemological thing, I guess, judgment is. We can only make them (judgments) based on knowledge, and when we make a mistake, you know, electrocute some innocent unprivileged or whoever, we repent, we ask for forgiveness and the strength to continue, to strive for justice so that one day all will be recalled.

I once had a surge of blood type ED (Extreme Dislike) for a young Polish photographer with a beard making him look old or wise or—I don’t know.

Right now I want his precious camera smashed to smithereens. Not sure if I would like to do it myself, or if I would prefer it to happen of its own accord or someone else’s. I don’t know. But I want the camera gone, so that maybe then I can forget a little more. And for him to sulk in the consolation of our Western heritage is quite alright with me. My girlfriend asks me, “Would you

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like salt on your fries?” “Eyes?” I ask. “Wounds?” I ask. I don’t know. I think of where I would sail to on Woyend . . . . I’m disappointed with the English language and its speakers for coming up with a word like “woe” to describe grievous distress. The sound of the W is not nearly harsh enough, cutting enough. “Woe” is the name of a smooth and sultry blues song written and performed by some blues artist “bemoaning the blues.” What such pleasure could ever come from anguish-?! And “lamentation,” “melancholy,” “heartbreak”: all poor words that miss the mark (they’re far too romantic) and do little to capture the significance of the sufferings of people without a home, of the uncanny sometimes seemingly mundane tension between life and death that everyone dredges themselves across more or less dreadfully, with more or less ebullience. But maybe the point is that such meanings cannot be fully captured. Perhaps “woe” isn’t such a bad word. It may not sound stridently, but it has a certain empty resonance more fitting for conceptual evasion. Perhaps this isn’t the worst day of my life, but only one of the bad days (one of the less good days?), an essential ingredient for anyone wishing to create a life worth living.

I look down at my fries and they look like petrified twigs. My girlfriend and I have a discussion about Twiggy. I call her the mother of EDs (Eating Disorders). I don’t know but the worst kind of pain is the kind you don’t feel. The burn of eonian glaciers. I’m convinced I had feeling at my conception. I realize I was without nervous system, but it’s the kind of suffering you don’t feel. Yes, pain unfelt, worse than gelid paradoxes, reminiscent of the throb of a woman once with child, without. The kind of pulsing gnaw that requires no individual. The anguish of the only sure thing I know: that whatever’s “in” the individual belonging to this world someday divides away.

The paroxysm of this event, which is already calling—too soon, for it’s always too soon, even when death is desired—is dividual and shared with the perpetual pangs of a universe always lost, without end and without memory, in common with what remains of us all. And for those individuals still adding together in the world, woe is ours remembering that someday we’ll no

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longer recall our individual pain, the pricks and cramps and the smoothness between. And it’s an ache to know and to be reminded of continually, that someday the pain will be gone, and that someday we’ll no longer move on through degrees of wet or dry streets, more or less the same. Streets are ordinary and so are buildings, partly because people don’t usually find themselves peering over the edge of dreadfully tall edifices, whether concrete or conceptual. I often think that those who look out for and from such precipices lose their conviction because they see only horror and not the hole that exists at the bottom of their plunge, as an end. Or maybe they don’t wonder in the face of possibility, but rather fear the end at the bottom, and lose conviction that way. But perhaps they do see the end, and they see a limit to their suffering; and then they experience a new pain, a pain of no pain, the intimating tingle of a pain unfelt that comes from the possibility of an individual no longer. Some may step off for this reason, but others back away. Many may never really get within range of the edge, despite its ubiquity, and others may play at it, dancing with a planck partner bleached white and unseen, stepping there, here and back, and back. At any rate, the end wins and the hole gets covered over no matter the decisions made along the way, probably not evenly but rather quickly, despite all attempts to extend things with commas or really long abstractions, written or flickering in the mind. The thing of it is that holes get covered over, and then they just don’t do a blasted thing after that, except serve the benefit of crazy people referring to things that don’t exist.

That’s how the narrator of this lengthening piece feels about a worst day becoming a bad day better. But this piece has an end. I have an end, too. But not now. In the meantime the story continues. Three weeks brings a new year and new Camembert (it takes three weeks to ripen). Granted, all new things that ripen can also over-ripen, and turn bitter if one drowns oneself in a soup of forgetfulness containing too much ammonia. Disturbing myself just now, I quickly look up ammonia online, and breathe easier seeing that it contributes significantly to the nutritional needs of the planet as a precursor to

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foodstuffs and fertilizers. I wilfully overlook the part that says ammonia is capable of burning, corroding, or destroying living tissue. My favorite kind of sarcasm is the kind that briskly wipes things out like I like to wipe clean my bathroom mirror with Windex and Kleenex, and so I somewhat caustically relate life and death, musing aloofly that everything has an end, just like this story. I have an end too? Put a period after me, and maybe I’ll exist forever within a dot, a dab of ink. But that’s that and this is this, and I’m pretty sure I have an end. But not now. I tell my girlfriend, “I don’t want to be alone.”

She says, “But you must be alone because I must go.” Poignant ending but I broaden, “What if I tell you I’m not going to let you leave?” “I would laugh,” she says, “and say I have to leave. “Ok,” I say, “let’s try it. I’m not going to let you leave.” Laughing, she leaves.

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Elton Glaser THANKSGIVING PLUS ONE Day after the wine and the wishbone: Neighborhood fogged in, An overflow from night. I can see nothing Beyond the nothing.

All the pilgrims heading home From their quick visits Must be stalled somewhere, on blind roads Or above the landing zones.

Smear of trees across the street.

Cars with their high beams Like strange fish at the bottom of the sea.

A world gone pale, gone under.

And there’s a mist inside, too, This page I write on, So white I could lose myself between The eye and the word.

Leftover weather, the day half dark, Half water. I give thanks For what’s still there, hidden on the other side Where the light won’t let go.

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Stephen Lloyd Webber GONDOLA Write for the Beloved. Write while skipping stones, construct a sestina where I play with the wet dog across the stream from us. A sestina in which I figure out what a sestina can do for our future.

“It’s nice,” the beloved says. She chews on her sunglasses, searching (honest to God) for a stone to throw at the dog. “But it has a weird brown face.”

I’m neck deep in my own idea. If this snowy mountain valley city filled to its peak-brims with water, I would enjoy swimming.

A child walks by. The mother tells her to “Start being positive today,” as if the girl had a thing to complain about. She’s five years old and owns toys.

I escape with the beloved in a gondola going up. She says we live in our own gondola. We sit where we have no reason being, get off on a peak we didn’t climb and scuttle back down.

The beloved speaks again, “If your name is so long you can summarize it, what do you have to be curious about with the world?”

Sitting on a lower hill we admire the roundness of landscape-sized shadows.

I scrawl the line “Worms live where anything brushes against” while she compares the way our minds work. She rescues me from going anywhere with that image.

I feel glad writing that line. I whistle.

And toss a dirty stick downhill and invent a notion. “It’s always because of dust that we see anything in the air,” I say. Dust equals sand 149

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equals glass, which blocks, reflects, and constructs air’s visibility.

A good idea since it’s beautiful even if it’s not true. An example of how partial I can be.

We must not be near any water anymore, because there is less white noise in the air.

Are less white noises.

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Christian Anton Gerard SYNECDOCHE Doesn’t it chap your ass to run

out late for work in the rain forgetting you own a waterproof coat

The store only takes cash You’ve got plastic You’re out of smokes and the bums smile

getting you back for the times you didn’t have change tinkling like bells

in that pocket You’ve got the deep anger involved in the meatloaf dream

you can’t wait to taste But lunch comes and you forgot to pack You scream

for dramatic effect but thick air cloaks your throat You cough like smoke

you wish you had If only you’d remembered the ATM

The bar that serves your favorite suddenly runs out The guy next to you

bitches about politics and God in a way better suited for Sunday The phone

rings from the hook like the fish that got away last Saturday

and all day long your bed calls your name listless and low

Like a sick cow you’re stuck in meetings tie cinched noose-like

You spend each breath introducing yourself as if

you remember who you are.

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Phyllis Carol Agins TECHNICOLOR Fifteen years of throwing clay and a collection of mythical dogs, medusae, bears in zoot suits salute him. All fired into permanent, gray solidity. Not a color in sight. Not a sliver of blue or a wisp of rose to match someone’s decor. Just fabulous whimsy caught in gray. The customers at the art shows nod politely and pass by. He believes he doesn’t care, vowing like a lover, to stay constant to his vision. He looks away when a woman holds a gray dragon and weeps.

Because he needs money, he takes a day job at a paint factory, naming the colors that march across strips of cardboard. He shrugs without hope when his boss makes suggestions.

“Just let go,” his boss encourages and proudly reveals colors called Embarrassed Pink, Electric Power Green, Outraged Orange.

But alliteration comes hard; images are worse. He tries the dictionary, a cold beer, a full day at the movies, even the Romantic poets. He needs to squelch his sepia dreams so he can absolutely see in color.

Finally, he gives up and bikes past the quarry on the edge of town. Jagged piles of granite and coal peak to cut the sky. All are the color of Earth, even like the clay before his imagination shapes it. His blood rises in surprise.

“Battleship Gray,” he breathes out his truth. “Pearl Reef Gray, El Greco Gray.”

And Silverback, he remembers the African apes. Pinstriped, for bankers on the commuter trains, and Upperclassman Gray, the thought of his school years. Seagull Gray, like the sun across bird feathers.

“Quaker Gray,” he calls out history.

But that night his clay figures rebel while he sleeps. Vibrant rose and plum, indigo and ochre, they dress to defy his careful laws of color control.

Then harlequined and glittering, a clown, who wears the artist’s face, pied-pipers into view. Passionately, the seducer dances with the other figures before they follow him into the colorful maze that opens in the middle of the dreamer’s mind.

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Megan Bohigian Sweeping: el lógico de la escoba, à los desaparecidos de Guatemala Escucheme. If you lay a broom across your threshold, witches can’t come in. I’ve seen the logic of the broom ignore the way dust spangles the air, then settles behind it. It does more than guard the house.

The broom gnashes its bristled teeth, slurs its words, exaggerates the wind it makes. It erases all the footprints with its whispers. Its only logic is movement.

In the industry of straw, motion is everything. Memories shake loose with a clang.

The broom hushes such noises.

Its only memento is the twisted gristle of spider webs.

Its sibilance swishes through closed doors.

It’s quick to let go.

The broom leaves collecting to the dust pan. It forgets Guatemala, where its straw was grown, what it swept away: how brown faces tumble and disappear with other sweepings.

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The logic of the broom comes down to this: two straws in a clenched fist, the broom’s hiss. Qué lástima— the short one always loses.

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Harry Bauld SUNDAY MORNING MAGIC Not even a real dog.

—Beckett A door slams in the apartment next door. At my feet my son, turning three, invokes the same muted spell over trains, a few words born in patter like slaves half-conjured out of marble, the prayer of play in the tongue of morning. That I should be his god is enough to condemn us all to misdirection, the empty shell, the moving hand, the plastic lemon we can’t see secreted under the silver cup where our money may reappear, too far away to touch. Why do we bother with love? When the bell rings the nap will end, we will wipe up after small stains, dress for the street, say goodbye at the iron door to the uniformed guard we have just met and push out under the scaffold erected against the falling stones of the facade into a day so blue and cold it doesn’t give a good goddamn if you vanish.

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James Allen Hall MY FATHER DREAMS I AM THE BRINGER OF DEATH In the dream, I lifted you from the car, let you down in the stoppered wheelchair. I gripped my hands on top of yours, on the wheels, tightening them so we could feel the rubber you can’t turn full circle. Not even here, where the mist rising off the mangroves isn’t real, where we walk barefoot into brackish water.

I took you out toward the signs saying no trespassing, endangered—you dream this story, but I’m ending it, propelling you into swamp, into the Everglades, a few miles from where we used to live, where you dreamed we were happy— following false north. And when it was time, I emptied the chair, one heave.

When your body disappeared beneath the surface, becoming a watersnake cured by its own poison, I wanted to wake you.

Instead, I let leaves scatter the disruption, I let mangrove moss the chair.

Let my body go slack as a mouth in prayer. Let fail.

Let killdeer and marsh wren chorus. Let my hands be tireless on the spokes, fatherless all through winter.

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Joshua Marie Wilkinson A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TRAPDOOR myths slacken & give out until we hammer a new trapdoor powder the cracks with quicklime bring in another seamstress to disappear against our wrongful noise into a city spooked with soft mortar collating us

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Dan Murphy GELATIN PRINT (LOST, REWRITTEN) a handclap of desert scatters its resilient seeds: transcontinental crucifixes, silver birds in black with high-wire strung above MOTEL LODGING, VACANCY, and half of a car under miscellaneous sky moving into darkness visible from the print-edge, stirring. and nothing steals everywhere.

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Laura Hogan A HUMAN SIGN —I’m a sign of things to come.

—That’s not a sign, it’s pure marketing.

—It’s kind of political.

—A sign has to have a message, information, direction. All that says is “50% off.”

—It’s performance art.

—It’s crap.

—It’s a poem. It was a rug sale. But it could have been anything. That’s the point.

—I think that’s enough cross talk for now.

—You don’t make the rules here, Justine.

—I don’t make the rules. I just make the brownies. I make the coffee. I set up the chairs.

—Here we go.

—Why is she even here?

—I’ve earned my chair.

—You don’t have a job.

—The only requirement for membership is a desire to be gainfully employed.

—Housewife isn’t a job.

—I work harder than you do.

—Everyone works harder than she does. She’s a post.

—I’m a human sign. I’m a sign of things to come.

—Do we have to listen to this?

—I’m the ultimate expression of capitalism. It’s the disease we all suffer from.

—Could we return to the format, please?

—My name is Justine, and I am an under-earner.

—Hi, Justine.

—I have identified myself as an under-earner. If you are in your first thirty days of gainful employment, please raise your hand.

—Well, that’s everyone.

—Pathetic.

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—You’re not a sign.

—John, please. Just ignore her.

—Sign making is a noble and ancient profession. It means something.

—Fifty percent off means something. It’s half, it’s division.

—Why doesn’t John go first tonight?

—My name is John. My father was a sign maker before me. And he made a good living.

—Excuse me, I’m from the meeting upstairs.

—NO SEX ADDICTS! —I was just wondering if I could borrow some coffee.

—This is a closed meeting.

—Are those brownies?

—We’re not going to fall for it. We’ve dealt with your kind before.

—Can’t we put up a sign to keep them from coming in here?

—The human post could stand outside the door.

—I’m a sign.

—Are you really? That’s so interesting. I thought you might be a sign.

—OUT, SEX ADDICT! —Fine. Screw you guys!

—John, why don’t you share with the group what makes you an underearner?

—You don’t run this meeting, Justine.

—It’s a fair question. He has to qualify.

—She doesn’t qualify. No meaning, no sign.

—It’s division.

—Would anyone else like to share?

—My name is Phil, and I’m an under-earner. This is my first meeting. I’m a public school teacher. I teach the fourth grade.

—We can’t help you, Phil. We’ve dealt with your kind before. You have blazers with elbow patches, and you need a haircut. It’s depressing. You’ll just break our hearts.

—Let’s hear from the new girl.

—She doesn’t have to share if she doesn’t want to.

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—She has to qualify.

—Leave her alone.

—It’s alright, I’ll share. My name is Alison. My husband and I are in therapy together, and our marriage counselor diagnosed me as an under-earner.

I’m supposed to go to ninety UA meetings in ninety days.

—It’s Under-earners Unanimous. We’re not anonymous here.

—I thought this was confidential.

—There isn’t any point. You’re not fooling anyone.

—I’m really not sure about this.

—The husband and the therapist ganged up on you, didn’t they?

—Sort of.

—You should stand up to them.

—Like you do? John’s wife waits in the parking lot.

—Alison, tell the group what makes you an under-earner.

—I don’t like to work.

—TESTIFY! —It makes me feel like I’m dying.

—It isn’t work if it has meaning, information, direction. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain.

—Is John sharing again now? I thought it was Alison’s turn.

—I’ll share. My name is Justine, and I’m an under-earner.

—Didn’t she share already?

—Why is she here?

—It’s a self-diagnosis. I’ve earned my chair.

—Can someone check the format? I don’t think we’re sticking to the format.

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Becky Kennedy THE BREADBOX you said start anywhere it doesn’t matter just talk the moonlight had been crawling along the window is it bigger than a breadbox you asked it was a game you played with the children when they were children what’s a breadbox they asked is it bigger than a teapot smaller than a birdcage they were in the kitchen where the light hung like a moon on its chain I said it’s too big bottomless is it bigger than a birthday cake you said we were lying close hearing the gravel of a late car starting and brittle steps in the road

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Jericho Brown AUTOBIOGRAPHY Keep the line steady keep your back straight Keep coming Back for more keep fucking With me Cletus Keep putting your hands on me like that And you’ll always have a place to lay your head Keep my waistline down keep your figure up Keep your man happy keep a woman crazy Keep your daddy off your mama Or next time I’m calling the police Keep these nappy-headed children Off my green green grass Keep talking smart if you want to Keep looking at my man And I’ll cut you a new eyelid Keep looking me in my face When you tell your next lie Keep on walking I ain’t talking to you anymore Keep holding that last note keep singing while I get the splinter out Keep singing for Jesus baby and everything Will be alright keep me in your prayers Keep us in your thoughts keep your eyes on the black one He ain’t got no sense keep Your money in your pocket Nelson These ho’s Giving it away keep this one Occupied I’ll get his wallet Keep on living honey and you’ll Get old too

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John Panza don’t get any stupid ideas One Catholic, two atheists, and a half-Jew Are traveling to Indianapolis at 65 miles Per hour. They left Cleveland at 9:00am.

Never having been encouraged to do so By parents, siblings, friends, or Jesuits, They bristle at a tar black roadside sign With man-sized white sans serif letters: REPENT. Simple, direct, like a criminal Impaled on a pole along the toll road.

Just a mile into Indiana. This sign, planted Along as demoralized a span of asphalt As any in the Midwest. REPENT, they repeat.

Here? In this blue Alero? one asks. For what?

Do we REPENT here or later, when we’re Tucking ourselves into cramped hotel beds, A little drunk and a little lonely, our snores Sounding the works and days of the coming day.

Keep driving, one of them says. Seriously.

Don’t get any stupid ideas.

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bio notes Phyllis Carol Agins’ literary history includes two novels and a children’s book that remained in print for 16 years. In 1992, One God, Sixteen Houses, an architectural study was published. Recent fiction has appeared in Philly Fiction, Wild River Review, Lilith Magazine, Blink, Kalliope, Pearl, Mid-Atlantic Almanack, and Paragraph. Her travel essay, “Steps Into China’s Culture” was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Additionally, she taught writing at Penn State University / Abington Campus and served on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. She happily divides her time between Philadelphia and Nice, France.

Joel Allegretti is the author of The Plague Psalms and Father Silicon (both The Poet’s Press); the latter was selected by the Kansas City Star as one of the 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006. Allegretti’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Art/Life, Rattapallax, New York Quarterly, descant, The Laurel Review, Margie, Anglican Theological Review, BigCityLit, Wandering Hermit Review, Manhattan Literary Review, Porcupine, Knock, Confrontation, River Oak Review and others. His poem in the anthology Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions, 2005) received an Honorable Mention in the 2006 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press). Allegretti was a quarter-finalist in the 2002 Lyric Recovery Festival and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Eric Anderson often writes about himself in third person, and then places those writings into the contributor pages of magazines such as The Sun, Prairie Schooner, and the Youngstown State University Penguin Review.

Pamela R. (Pam) Anderson is the director of philanthropic giving at WKSUFM, Kent State University’s public radio station. She is a graduate of Hiram College and Kent State University and currently is a graduate student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, with a concentration in poetry. Her poetry and articles have appeared in a number of journals and magazines, including DiceyBrown.com, public radio’s DEI eReport, Epitome Magazine, Kent State Magazine, and others.

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. She earned a BA in English/ Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, but 165

even before finishing the degree realized “there’s no place like home.” Upon her return to Texas, she began work on an MFA in Creative Writing, which she received from the University-Formerly- Known as Southwest Texas State in 1998. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, Analecta, Inkwell, Hazmat Review and Clark Street Review.

Richard Bailey’s poems have appeared in several literary magazines. His two short films DIOGENES and TROPIC OF OZ were shown in festivals across the country. He is presently at work on a series of plays involving mysticism and crime.

Deborah Baker’s stories have appeared in Foliage, Pleiades, Columbia, and The William and Mary Review. She lives in Massachusetts, and is working on her first novel.

Josiah Bancroft’s work has appeared in New South, Passages North, The Roanoke Review, ReDivider and Salamander.

Christopher Barnes : In 1998 I won a Northern Arts writers award. In July 2000 I read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology Titles Are Bitches. Christmas 2001 I debuted at Newcastle’s famous Morden Tower doing a reading of my poems. Each year I read for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival, and 2005 saw the publication of my collection Lovebites published by Chanticleer Press, Edinburgh.

Harry Bauld was born in Medford, Massachusetts and was educated at Columbia University, where he was the All-Ivy shortstop two years running.

He has been the drinks columnist for Boston Magazine, a book reviewer for People, and is the author of On Writing the College Application Essay (HarperCollins). He was a finalist for the 2007 Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Deliberately Thirsty (Edinburgh), The Southeast Review, Elysian Fields, and The Litchfield Review, among others. He currently teaches at Horace Mann School in New York.

B.J. Best holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared recently in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Southeast Review. His chapbooks Mead Lake, This and Crap are available from Centennial Press.

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Megan Bohigian’s poems have been published in numerous journals, including The Comstock Review, Two Lines, In the Grove, and The San Joaquin Review, and several have been finalists for awards—The Ernesto Trejo Prize, The Joy Harjo Prize, and now the Whiskey Island Prize. She received her MFA degree in Creative Writing from California State University Fresno. She teaches English and journalism in Fresno, where she tends her garden with her husband Ron, and works for peace, the environment, and the cause of poetry whenever she can.

Louis E. Bourgeois lives and writes in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches writing and philosophy at the University of Mississippi. His most recent and forthcoming books include The Gar Diaries (Community Press), The Animal (BlazeVOX Books), The Created Body (Xenos Books), and Colleen (VOX PRESS). Bourgeois is also founder and editor of VOX PRESS. Judith Brandon: I grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where I followed the river through the parks and sometimes vacationed by the ocean. As an artist, the power of water inspires me and takes my paintings into unexpected directions. My work is exhibited across the country, but my hometown is Cleveland. Please visit my website, http://www.jmbrandon.com/.

Jason Bredle is the author of Standing in Line for the Beast, selected by Barbara Hamby as winner of the 2006 New Issues Poetry Prize, and A Twelve Step Guide, winner of the 2004 New Michigan Press chapbook contest. His most recent book, Pain Fantasy, was released by Red Morning Press in summer 2007. He lives in Chicago.

Jericho Brown worked as speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and several other journals and anthologies. The recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, two scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown serves as an Assistant Editor at Callaloo and teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. His first book, Please, will be published by New Issues in November of 2008.

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Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments and writes a bi-weekly column for Next American City magazine. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in May 2005 by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Weber Studies, Orion, South Dakota Review, and Mid-American Review. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Nancy Burke’s writing has appeared or will appear in such publications as Euphony, After Hours, American Poetry Journal, Permafrost, Confrontation, Rhino, The Seattle Review, and Green Mountains Review. It’s won various prizes, including a Gradiva award and two Illinois Arts Council awards. In addition, she has recently (provisionally) completed a novel, which is now in the process of being rejected, and has written and published extensively in her field in refereed academic journals such as Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychoanalytic Review and Gender and Psychoanalysis.

Nick Carbó is the author of three books of poetry, the latest one being Andalusian Dawn (2004). He has also published poems in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, North American Review, and Coconut.

Amy Casey lives in Ohio, in a blue house with a studio and a perfect cat, Wanda. She spends her days painting with tiny brushes, watching people’s stories out her window, and talking to Wanda. She received her BFA in painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Heather Charley received her MFA in two dimensional art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently resides in Columbus, OH, where she is a professional face painter at the zoo.

Ava C. Cipri lives in Pittsburgh’s East End; she currently teaches at Duquesne University and facilitates writing workshops at the Pennsylvania Organization for Women in Early Recovery (Power). Ava is armed with an MFA from Syracuse University, where she served on the staff of Salt Hill. Recent published and forthcoming work appears in WHR, 2River View, and New Zoo Poetry Review, among others.

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Allan Douglass Coleman writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, makes music, photographs, and produces various other forms of visual art.

His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Cape Rock, Creative Nonfiction, International Poetry Review, Lalitamba, Nimrod, The Pacific Review, Poetry Harbor, the e-zine Urban Desires, and elsewhere. Coleman’s second book of poetry, Like Father Like Son, was published in 2007. In 2008 he received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. Under the pen name A. D. Coleman, he publishes critical writings on photography, art, and mass media. His creative work can be found online at villaflorentine.us.

Matthew S. Colglazier lives on his family farm in Heltonville, Indiana. His work has appeared in Descant, Harpur Palate, and is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review. He works as an Academic Advisor at Indiana University.

Sara Dailey has a B.S. in creative writing from Mankato State University and an M.A. from the University of St. Thomas where she completed her thesis on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Her poems have recently appeared in Ascent, Bitter Oleander, Diner, Caveat Lector, and are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, California Quarterly, Barbaric Yawp, and The Red Wheelbarrow. Over the years she has worked as a bookstore supervisor, a publishing company intern, and a library staff member. She is currently working on her M.F.A. from Hamline University where she looks forward to teaching this fall.

Kathy Davis’ work has appeared in Blackbird, North American Review, The Louisville Review and numerous other journals. Finishing Line Press recently published her chapbook, Holding for the Farrier.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of eight books including the novella The Blue City (Marick Press, Wayne State, 2008) and the book of poems Broken Hallelujahs (BOA Editions, 2008). He is a 2008 Fulbright Lecturer in Poetry in the Republic of Macedonia.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) is winner of Binghamton University’s Milt Kessler Book Award.

Her other titles include Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). She teaches at Florida International University.

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Thomas Dukes is Professor of English at The University of Akron. His poetry collection Baptist Confidential appeared in 2007. His poems and other writings have appeared in New Orleans Review, RHINO, South Carolina Review, The Plain Dealer, MUSE, and other journals. He lives in northeastern Ohio with his partner; a poodle named Princess Diana; and six cats.

Jesse Dunlap is a 22-year-old artist who lives in Los Angeles. He makes a living by serving snacks on the film sets of commercials. He published his first story in Highlights Magazine while in third grade. He enjoys swimming and painting.

Blas Falconer is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University, where he serves as the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press. He is the author of a chapbook, The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press), and a book-length collection of poems, A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press). He lives in Nashville.

Kyle Flak is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has taught writing at Northern Michigan University and edited fiction at the Passages North literary magazine. He has also worked at a toothbrush factory, a vacuum cleaner warehouse, a turkey slaughterhouse, and a famous Utah national park. His poetry has appeared in the Glassfire Anthology, Wire Sandwich, Dicey Brown, Sirr, and many other magazines.

Rachel Contreni Flynn was awarded a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for 2007. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was published in 2005 by Tupelo Press after winning the Dorset Prize. Her second book, Full-Time Permanent, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Rachel is a corporate attorney and a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.

Jim Fuess has had hundreds of group shows and over forty-five solo shows over his thirty-five year artistic career. He is known for his vividly colored abstract paintings. He also has a series of black and white paintings, which are an exercise in going back to the basics of form and structure. They deal with the relationship of shapes and figures to each other and to negative space. He works with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. A lot of his work is anthropomorphic. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures 170

and movements recognizable. More of his work, both in color and black and white, may be seen at www.jimfuessart.com.

Carolyn Furnish was raised in Amarillo, Texas. She received a B.A. in art history at California State University at Sacramento and an M.A. in English at the University of Oregon with an emphasis in Shakespeare studies. She now lives with her husband in Canfield, Ohio, where she writes and tends to a menagerie of animals.

Christian Anton Gerard currently lives in Norfolk, VA, where he’s an M.F.A. student at Old Dominion University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Free Lunch, Triplopia, and Bloodlotus. This spring Christian was recognized as a semi-finalist for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award as well as a finalist in Whiskey Island’s 2008 Poetry Contest. When he’s not smithing words, Christian can be found over the grill of a local bar or fishing with his wife Lucy.

Amanda Gignac is a stay-at-home mom who lives in San Antonio with her husband and three sons. She has been previously published in Julien’s Journal and in a book of poetry entitled The Blend. In her spare time, Amanda runs a classic literature book club and enjoys reading, playing board games, and building gingerbread houses with her family.

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English. He has published six full-length collections of poems, most recently Pelican Tracks (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Here and Hereafter (University of Arkansas Press, 2005). With William Greenway, he coedited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002). Among his awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, six fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard Award. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is the author of one book, Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), and a chapbook, The Auctioneer Bangs His Gavel (Kent State 2006). He teaches creative writing and poetry at The University of Hartford and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for The Antioch Review.

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James Allen Hall’s first book of poems, Now You’re the Enemy, was published in the 2008 University of Arkansas Poetry Series. His poems and essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Boston Review, American Letters & Commentary, Bellingham Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at Bethany College in West Virginia.

James Henschen is the author of the award winning short film “Looking in the Fishbowl” as well as a film adaptation of the short story “The Monkey’s Paw” which screened in film festivals throughout the country. He has previously been published in Glassfire Magazine. James currently resides in Orlando, FL. A Colorado native, Karen Hildebrand now lives in NYC, where she blogs about the post-beat/new-millennium life of a poet in Greenwich Village (www.karenhildebrand.com). Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Fourteen Hills, Kitchen Sink, River Oak Review, Slipstream, and Center, as well as in One Foot Out the Door, a chapbook (Three Rooms Press).

She works as editorial director for a group of dance magazines.

H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His recent books include a collection of essays on poetry, As Easy As Lying, an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words, a poetry collection, Chromatic, that was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, and God Bless, a “political/poetic discourse” built around sonnets and sestinas and villanelles composed of quotations from George W. Bush. All are published by Etruscan Press: www.etruscanpress. org.

Laura Hogan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Awakenings Review, The Binnacle, The Bryant Literary Review, The Fourth River, The Hurricane Review, Karamu, Lullwater Review, Red Rock Review, RiversEdge, The South Carolina Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Taproot Literary Review, Willard & Maple, and Zone 3. She will be entering the University of California, Irvine MFA program in the fall.

Jay Hopler’s book of poems, Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006) was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Green Squall also received the Great Lakes Colleges Association 172

New Writers Award, a Florida Book Award [Silver Medal], a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award [Bronze Medal] and a National “Best Books� Award from USA Book News. His next book, The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, will be published by Yale University Press in 2009. He is Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing/Poetry) at the University of South Florida.

Nigel Jenkins was born on a farm in Gower and worked as a newspaper reporter in the English Midlands before returning home to work as a freelance writer and lecturer. His latest book of poems is O For a Gun (Planet Books, 2007); his book about Welsh missionaries in north-east India, Gwalia in Khasia (Gomer, 1995), won the Wales Book of the Year award in 1996.

His selected essays and articles, Footsore on the Frontier (Gomer Press), was published in 2001. Co-editor of The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (2008), he published in 2008 Real Swansea, a work of psychogeography about his home town. He teaches creative writing at Swansea University.

Jessica Jewell is a graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program where she was the Wick Poetry Center Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Harpur Palate, Rhino, Poetry Midwest, Wicked Alice, Barn Owl Review, among others. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and currently lives in Budapest, Hungary.

Becky Kennedy: I am a linguist and college professor from Boston, Massachusetts. I have published articles on topics in linguistics, and my poems have appeared in a number of journals and reviews.

Akiko Koga is a self-taught Japanese photographer living in Singapore. She loves to roam around making shots of whatever catches her eyes. She is into squirrels, Weezer, Yogi Bear, movies, baking and lots of other fun things. She lives with her dog Boo Boo who has really bad breath.

Working toward her completion of an MFA in fiction at Cleveland State, Virginia Konchan is a graduate assistant at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her poems, reviews and journalism have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Phoebe, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Miranda Magazine and The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

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Virginia spent the summer of 2008 in Prague on a John Woods scholarship for the Prague Summer Program hosted by Western Michigan University, and Paris, working on translations of lesser-known European poets as well as completing her hybrid fiction/illustration/poetry thesis, “Ludicrous Little Halo” (title excerpted from a poem of Mina Loy).

Wayne Miller is the author of The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), as well as translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and coeditor of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Dan Murphy has had three poems accepted for publication by Image Magazine. He was published in The New Zoo Poetry Review in the January/ February 2008 issue, and received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2006 for the poem, “Faithless II.” He has worked as a public schoolteacher in Los Angeles for twenty years. Mr. Murphy is married, has two daughters, a mortgage and a car. He has no piercings and maintains a manageable caffeine addiction.

Thomas Brian Osatchoff: Delivered into the prairies at the geographical center of Canada, I moved east to the country’s political center to study philosophy and linguistics. A summer working in California is complicit in my decision to start writing, and after a stint flying in helicopters in the Canadian Rockies, I left for the center of Europe. In Warsaw I began work on my first novel, short story, and poetry. I’m completing a Masters of Teaching program at Australia’s sunshine center on the Gold Coast. I will relocate to London and commence a teaching internship, gaining further experience from which to draw in my writing.

John Panza teaches poetry at Cuyahoga Community College’s Eastern Campus. He lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife, Jane, daughter, Eva, and cat, Bella.

Carl Peterson lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He recently completed his first novel and is currently working on a collection of essays.

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Deborah Poe is the author of Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008) and Elements as well as chapbooks from Furniture Press and Stockport Flats Press. Deborah’s writing has appeared recently in Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, FOURSQUARE Editions, and A Sing Economy. For more information, visit deborahpoe.com.

Jay Robinson’s poems have appeared in Anti, Mars Hill Review, Plainsongs, Softblow, and Tar River Poetry. Prose has appeared in AGNI online and Poetry.

He teaches at The University of Akron and is Co-Editor in Chief and Reviews Editor for Barn Owl Review.

Shannon Robinson’s work is also forthcoming in Sou’wester. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and a cat.

Michael Salinger is an author, performer and educator. He has been performing his poetry for over twenty years and teaching creative writing and performance for the past decade. He feels privileged to have worked with youth and young adults in such far-flung places as Fairport Harbor, Ohio and Shanghai, China. He believes strong communication skills are the result of writing and speaking with confidence. Michael is a frequent speaker in classrooms, conferences and professional development days nationally and abroad where he has presented workshops in writing and performing as well as keynote addresses.

Lisa J. Sharon: I live in Cleveland Heights with my husband and two teenage kids. I divide the bulk of my time between working toward my Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at CSU and chauffeuring my kids around to hockey, soccer, and baseball games. In my previous life I was a lawyer working first in criminal defense/civil rights, then in the federal court, and finally, in a start-up biotech company.

Some of Jeffrey Skinner’s recent poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Last year he received an NEA fellowship in poetry, one of his plays was produced in Philadelphia, both his daughters were married, and one of them gave birth to Luci, Skinner’s first granddaughter. He is currently training for a welterweight match in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, and after university lived in China, Kansas and Italy. For the last 16 years, she’s lived in Germany, where she’s an editor for a news agency. Sarah’s poetry has appeared in Third Coast, RHINO, Caffeine Destiny, Barn Owl, Bateau and Front Porch, among other publications.

Karen Vaughn is a freelance medical editor living in Lawrence, Ks. Her work has appeared in the journal Illya’s Honey and in REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters. She has also written several essays for Kansas Public Radio. Her patron saints are Gabriel García Márquez and Neko Case, and in their honor she recently completed a surreal novel about her home town. She lives with her husband Nick, who knits her sweaters whenever she’s cold.

Stephen Lloyd Webber lives with his wife, painter Jade Boswell, in Las Cruces, where he teaches at New Mexico State University and is an editor for Puerto del Sol. Jonathan Wells has had poems published in many reviews including Atlanta Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Nimrod, Poetry International, Poet Lore and The Evansville Review among others. In 2007 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and had a poem included in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthology titled Conversation Pieces, poems that talk to other poems. He edited an anthology of poems about rock and roll entitled Third Rail which was published by MTVBooks and Pocket Books in April 2007.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of three books, and a fourth, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth, is due out next year (Tupelo Press) along with an anthology of younger poets in conversation with their mentors (University of Iowa Press). He lives in Chicago and teaches at Loyola University.

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