flashglass 2017 by Glassworks Magazine

glassworks

a publication of Rowan Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Master of Arts in Writing

flashglass2017

flashglass Volume III 2017

MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING GRADUATE PROGRAM ROWAN UNIVERSITY

All work in flashglass originally appeared as digital content at RowanGlassworks.org The staff of Glassworks Magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program, and Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department, and The Glassworks Advisory Board: Ron Block, Lisa Jahn-Clough, Andrew Kopp, Jeffrey Maxson

EDITOR IN CHIEF Katie Budris MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Davison COVER ART “Yellow Red Wine Glasses, Paris” by Roger Camp Glassworks Issue 7 COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT Katie Budris

flashglass, a subset of Glassworks, accepts flash fiction, prose poems, & micro essays See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org

Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program

Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials. All other rights remain with the artist.

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Noiseless, Patient Erinn Batykefer

I tried to kill her once. My sister. My spider. More than once, actually. I tried smothering her, starving her out, slipping an x-acto knife between her abdomen and mine. Jamming a fork into her eyes. Nothing worked. Once or twice, she sunk her fangs into me when I tried, but the venom that made everyone else crawl and weep at my feet had no effect on me, just sizzled against my skin. Every time I tried to kill her, I imagined she’d drop off of me like the withered black stump of umbilical cord my mother pasted into my baby journal alongside pictures from the day I was born: me, tiny and pink and wailing; my spider, her soft exoskeleton already hardening, all eight legs waving over my chest; and my parents grinning at the camera, exhausted and giddy and terrified of what came next, when they’d have to leave the hospital and take me home. They weren’t scared of my spider for whatever reason, but plenty of people were, and my granddad insisted we should have been drowned at birth. I couldn’t help but see his point—I mean, I looked normal. But then my shirt would ride up or someone would hug me, and the day would end in screams and a visit to the emergency room. My spider bit besties and boyfriends and lab partners. We ran out of mice once, and she bit my cat. I woke to bloody sheets and a cat-shaped burrito of silk laying next to me, and my spider, looking well-fed and clicking happily I suppose she was terrifying, but the thing I couldn’t stand was how everyone blamed me. Why couldn’t I control her? Or at least keep her to myself ? My life would be great, I thought, without her hanging around on dates. I could cancel the pet store’s standing order for white mice. I could shower at the gym! Maybe one day I could have sex with someone—anyone—without having to explain that it could kill them. After years of grad school and shit jobs and ACE bandages tight as a tourniquet to smash my spider down under my dress, I bought a big black can of arachnid Raid and sprayed it in her face. I watched her legs seize and flail until a terrible burning sensation flooded my limbs. I hoped it was the feeling of her dying. It was not. I ended up in a slick pastel terror of a psych ward and endured weeks of tests and meds and group therapy till the doctor said I was stable and unlikely to take my life— that’s how she put it: your life. Just the one. She put up a scan from some fancy new imaging machine she’d developed after the dead started waking up. The image was like a cloudy x-ray, a blue blur of breastbone and ribcage, carapace and thorax, and— “Your soul made manifest,” the doctor whispered. My spider wasn’t just attached to me, she was me—my inside out.

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It took me a long time to get my strength back after that, a long time to get used to the fact that there was no undoing us. And then we hunted, and it erased every wasted night spent crying into deep glasses of wine, all those fumbling moments in the back seats of cars with boys I hoped would make it out alive. All of that shrank to nothing compared to the feeling of choking the life out of one of them, the satisfying shudder and shake of his limbs as my spider’s poison loped through his veins. Weren’t we lucky? Hardly anyone knows what they’re made of. Hardly anyone knows what they’re for, but I licked bloody tears from his face and knew I would never have to be as bored or alone as I would have been with him. Never again.

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Vocabulary Lesson Samuel J. Fox

Petrichor: as in the smell of the earth after it rains. As in nitrogen filtered through the ground. As in the scent I remember on the night that I met her. The night was alive with wetness, a happy wetness, a boisterous but distant challenge from thunder. How soft and smooth the air felt once the clouds stopped shedding. The frogs were cloaked in darkness as they voiced their mating calls, the moon just beginning to pierce the overcast curtains the sky had drawn. And the smell! It was like the dark musk of the earth. Assemblage: as in a small gathering. As in two is a pair, three is a crowd, but five makes a party. I was invited into the dorm by a new and lovely friend. Her face held an assemblage of freckles, her eyes framed by large-lensed glasses. She took my hand, which surprised me. She led me to her room where three of her friends were already drunk. She was a microcosm of atoms, assembled into a woman. The light was low, the window open to the weather, rain still dripping from the wooden pane. Lissome: as in slender or graceful. Though her name, Katie, was sharp, two staccato syllables connected by a broken hinge, it was as if her body was dancing even when she was standing still. I watched her silhouette in the dark as we listened to hip-hop, as she settled into my lap. The circle of tipsy college students was pulsing, hearts in synch, dreams aligned. As she sat, her arm around my neck, her face close to my cheek, I could smell the perfume she wore. She smiled then, and I was lost. Scintilla: as in small thing or small spark. A quark at first, growing hotter as my desire grew. She threw back her head and laughed. Some scintilla, some flare, finally burst, illuminating the moment. I could not stop looking at her as she stood, her hips swaying to the music. When she sipped her glass of wine and looked at me, her eyes glowed, much like mine must have been, and there came a scintilla of recognition. Dalliance: as in a short love affair. We spent all of our time learning about each other. We learned to speak softly, honestly, together. Some nights were spent doing nothing, lying in her bed as the moonlight stretched across our bodies. We talked of the past, and of the present. We talked of the future, how uncertain it was. We wrote silly love letters, poems blistering with amity and candlelight.

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Imbroglio: as in a complicated situation. Angry words, bitter tears, and the fear that loneliness brings. Months after the breakup, I found myself clearing space for her in my life, clearing space for more stories. If we decided to reunite I might treat her better. I could not seem to let go. Eventually I realized that dwelling on something that might never happen was leeching away my life. Still, I held on to her words as I began to move on: things work out because they have no choice, she had said, even if theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not how we expect them to. Ephemeral: as in fleeting, temporary, impermanent. The smell of the earth after it rains, or a small gathering in a college dorm room. Youth and beauty. A spark after a flame has been doused. Short love affairs built on sand, each grain sparkling with vanity. Ephemeral as the complexities of a failed relationship, a bitter stain washed away only with time. Time too is ephemeral, each second fleeing into the unknown. Listen: take what you think you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bear to lose, and cherish it. Then give it to the night.

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Woman Who Flies an Aeroplane Ann Howells

What do you call her, this woman who flies an aeroplane? Who knows a magneto from a windsock? Whose favorite childhood poem began, How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue ... At six a swing, at twelve a rollercoaster—Ferris wheel too bland—at eighteen she’s airborne. Wings any skylark would die for. When Amelia flew through that window in time, she unlocked doors. Hand firmly on the stick, she pulls back, laughing up the sleeve of a cyclone, millions of neurons sparking in sequence, every ganglion aquiver, frisson cracking her spine clear to the tailbone. A persistent wind is inconsequential as the annoying telemarketer who uses her first name repeatedly because that’s what he was taught in annoying telemarketer school. She gazes into wide blue wonder, sky its immense self this morning, few blood-colored clouds. The boundary between here and there becomes elusive, impossible to pin down. Mystifying. Viscerally satisfying. So, what do you call her, this woman who flies an aeroplane? You call her a pilot.

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Sisters

Ann Howells Comingled blood, dark as windfall cherries, spattered lichen-streaked stones: grandfather (dead of foolishness), still-born Baby Anne—your family plot. And you might have sprung, angle and bone, from that corner yew, dark, with dark lank hair while I was mere summer folk, city girl—pudgy, pale, whiskey-colored ringlets. But on that garland branch, we pricked thumbs, became sisters. Envy grew green as island pines. Your narrow saltbox: high-ceilinged rooms, chamber pots beneath iron beds, stone-floor kitchen with hand pump and black, wood-burning stove—matriarchal dragon dominating the room, captured me. Your grandmother, brown and bony as yourself, knew things. I trotted behind as she gentled Sunday’s chicken. Ax arced, shell-carved eye stilled while deranged feathers convulsed in mad, mute tarantella. I was baptized in blood. You hungered only for trolley rides, glass revolving-doors, luncheons on the mezzanine, until you turned fifteen—one umbrella step ahead as always—left for New Orleans, a married woman. Island wives lashed tongues, raised long, red welts on your memory: Got herself in trouble. Uh-huh. I alone knew it wasn’t love or even lust that lured you; it was city lights. Had I been offered spells and incantations, I’d have gone too.

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History

Victoria Dym She was infamous for having whiskey in her coffee cup while teaching. Mother would most days either fall asleep on the couch after her final two cherry Manhattans of the day, which I had learned how to make for her. Or she would beat me, with a hair brush, her stiletto heel, bookend, her fist, my belt—anything that was within reach when her violent nerve was triggered. I was often blamed, for answering the telephone (usually creditors), for talking back (children should be seen and not heard), for having chicken pox, for not cleaning the floor correctly, for anything and nothing at all. ~ The worst punishments were being thrown down the basement stairs (I thought I was going to die before landing hard on the cement floor), being thrown through a wall (there was a hole where I had been catapulted—a negative plaster ass cast, which never was repaired), and the day I had to place my hand intentionally in the car jam while Mother intentionally closed the car door (I lost my middle fingernail; it took 9 months to grow back, still is crooked to this day). When I was 13, she asked if I wanted to know the reason that I was born. She took me into her bedroom, squeaked open the nightstand drawer, and removed an old square cardboard box, with a cracked domed object inside. She explained that there was a hole in the diaphragm. I was a mistake. 2 years later, with a safety pin through the chest of my parakeet, Phoebe, I was warned, in Mother’s handwriting: Shape Up. ~ My father died when I was 19; he was 45. My mother threw herself on top of his body and blamed herself for the cancerous end. Her drinking worsened. After college, I moved to New York. When I called her on a payphone to tell her that I was pursuing acting, she called me a slut and hung up. She threatened suicide 3 years later and I moved back to Pittsburgh. There were 10 years where I did not speak to her. The family home, she allowed to go to Sheriff ’s sale, after abandoning it, not paying back taxes. The day after the birth of my daughter, 28 hours in labor, my Mother came to the hospital drunk. She told me that I had betrayed her. Four years later, I watched her have a heart attack in the E.R.. A tumor had dislocated her shoulder. She was put on morphine. She asked me if she was going to die. I said, yes.

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Persistence Mark Trechock

The crumbling steps now lead to no oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s front door, just a miniature precipice, a leap into the slumping depression left behind when everyone had had enough of whatever it was that ground them down. Resting in the soil: shattered glass; a bent fork; the scattered shards of a dinner plate; a metal box of rain-soaked recipes. Above, the planted trees huddle, swaying like a family around a hospital bed, waiting for the doctorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bad news, already starting to mourn, thinking of who might take the piano and whether the cousin who drinks might want to be the last occupant, or could it be rented out to a hired hand, or could the siding be salvaged for a nephewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s barn, or whether to let nature take its course. Still, along the unworked dirt, near what might have been the view from the kitchen window, whose maroon awning someone might still remember, the rhubarb arteries stretch out straight and grasping for space, red as the face of an uninvited guest, and carry to the extremities of life the promise of one last dessert.

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Extinct Carnivores William Doreski

The diner cringes in snowfall. Parked pickups sneer as I slog to the door and peer in. The men at the counter hulk like Easter Island’s giant heads. They don’t bother to turn to watch me dripping in the doorway. Despite their hairy exteriors and filthy mouths, these men are devout churchgoers, whose Sundays yawp with hymns shaped like dirigibles and just as lofty. I want to explain to them that I once believed in both physical labor and spiritual bliss, but something underground derailed, and the blue sparks of dragging steel illuminated places I hadn’t imagined. Now I want to delve into distances brisker than the wind on the river, want to track through matter tougher and more permanent than snow. They’d laugh, of course, and look at me with dutiful Christian pity. Poor old coot, they’d mutter. Too much education for his own good. Too much mind to lose. Too many horizons bleak above his carcass as he naps. They’re right, of course, their faces brimming with health and ignorance. Better not to know how deeply the starlight despises us every night, how indifferent the winter daylight blue. And now, enveloped in snowfall, this diner sweats and smelts and crushes us all together in a scent of flesh so powerful even extinct carnivores threaten, their saber teeth glinting in the stainless landscape outside.

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Girl in Finger Web Aimee Parkison

I was in a web of fingers obscuring the warehouse where girls were kept in boxes like the one I escaped. Sister lullaby singing swallowed this closeness, so male, the other body, the boy’s hand sliding across her belly, the beauty of him, not the beauty of women and girls at the abandoned warehouse where we sat with the body I thought was like the statue of David. But I kept remembering skin scratched with splinters and mites. I dug and pried. Broke my nails, fingers torn to shreds. When a board finally gave, I pulled, busted a hole, a hollow for me to wriggle, breasts and back scraping wet concrete. It took a while before I could see again. Narrow crumbling concrete halls, blood on walls, I stumble. Her hands cover my eyes. Hers with others. Soon, I’m in a web of fingers obscuring, rough with dried blood—light from dusty barred windows, crates stacked on crates. Outside, sunlight, blinding white, erases the trees as birds sing to the river of the warehouse, where girls are kept in boxes like the one I escaped, sister lullaby singing.

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American IngĂ&#x2030;nue in Russia Julie Gard

Come prepared to convert the locals with your duffel bag of lipstick, ramen, t-shirts and the Good News in translation. Laugh at each challenging cross-cultural situation and tell everyone how much you love kasha. Say God loves you to the babushka who scolds you for sitting on cement, then cry as she helps you out of an open sewer grate. Embrace the homeless children who call you mildly obscene vegetable names while you feed them soup. After the near break-in, start sleeping with a bat beneath your bed. Stop sleeping. Keep your coat on at all times. Let no one in your room while you reread the book of Job. Struggle with your lust for an aging ex-con you meet at the mini-bus stop. Fall in love so hard you fall off the daybed, so drunk that soon the bedroom stops turning back into the living room. Drink Baltika No. 9 for breakfast with the shades down. Treat your sinus infection with fate. In the outdoor market, procure a wandering eye and a missing finger, a scar of unknown origin, and a knuckle prison tattoo. Eat nothing but cooked macaroni until your skin turns translucent. Teeter on spiked heels; fend off pickpockets with witchcraft. Step over the bodies by the tracks. Get on any train you want without a ticket.

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The Girl in the Feather Skirt Sends a Postcard Kathleen McGookey

To Whom It May Concern: Today I plunged into the living room and the lovely bubbles of my breath rose through the crystal ropes of the chandelier. Sunlight on water makes waves like fish scales, iridescent even from underneath. The pale overstuffed couch swayed. Blurry shadows soared above the surface, calling each other with reedy, twostep notes. The windows are open but the water will not leave the house. That’s one hidden rule. Here’s another: inside my sleep I am never lonely. I’ve set out white teacups on the windowsill for us, a little trail of bones.

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She Steers Toward the Horizon Kathleen McGookey

The girl in the feather skirt opens door number two. Behind door number one are rain and hail, tornadoes, a roiling mess. Door number three conceals a hearse. She doesn’t mind silence, so she drives around her island. She just got her learner’s permit. It’s slow going, but she likes the wind on her skin, how the hearse gleams like polished leather, even the steep hills with no barriers between herself and the sea. Alone on the road, the girl tightens her seatbelt as kitchen windows blink past: a woman peels carrots: a man sharpens knives. A dog howls behind a picket fence. The girl in the feather skirt never thinks about the other doors. She hums. A door is not the story of a bright blue sky. She memorizes fractions and their decimal equivalents. She pets her skirt which she wears like an invisible shield. Like an opal, its color changes by increments, depending on the light.

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Whereas

Kathleen McGookey The girl in the feather skirt gets tired of waiting for her story to start. When would the mushroomy underside of the moon explode? Darling, she writes, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve sold your clothes. She loves the slash and glister of her pen. By the time you read this, my ship will be en route. Here on board, gold-tasseled tablecloths sway. Petal by petal, an inchworm crosses the centerpiece of lilies and phlox. The galley door swings, dishes clink, a kettle hisses. Sometimes she strokes the cricket in her pocket for luck. Here on board, staircases unfold into silken dark and tenderness begins at its regularly scheduled time, nothing like a coin purse snapped closed. Snowflakes fall like whispers and someone keeps shaking the globe.

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Contributors Erinn Batykefer earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Allegheny, Monongahela (Red Hen Press) and The Artist’s Library: A Field Guide (Coffee House Press). She is co-founder and editor of The Library as Incubator Project, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Roger Camp’s (cover art) photographs have been published in over 100 magazines including American Photo, The New England Review, and The New York Quaterly. He is the author of three books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002). He has taught photography at the Columbus College of Art & Design, University of Iowa and the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris. He is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NYC. Camp’s images are featured in Issue 7 of Glassworks. More of his work may be found at: rcampphoto.com William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in a small house in the woods. He taught at Keene State College for many years, but has now retired to feed the deer and wild turkeys. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals and several small-press books. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Last Concert (Salmon Press). Victoria Dym is a graduate of Ringling Brother’s Barnum and Bailey Clown College with a degree in Humility, a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing Poetry from Carlow University. Her chapbook, Class Clown, was chosen as one of ten finalists in the Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest, by Autumn Hill Press, and ultimately published by Finishing Line Press in 2015. A second chapbook is forthcoming in December 2017, When The Walls Cave In, also by Finishing Line Press. Victoria lives, writes, teaches, and laughs in Tampa, Florida with her cat Mook. Samuel J. Fox is a queer essayist and poet living in the Piedmont of North Carolina. He blurs his lines and fails to concede with social norms. He has been published most recently in Luna Luna Magazine and The Miscreant; he is forthcoming in Muse/A Journal, (b)OINK, and The Avenue. You can find him at his website: www.samueljfox.com Julie Gard’s prose poetry collection Home Studies (New Rivers Press) was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award, and her chapbooks include Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) and Russia in 17 Objects (Tiger’s Eye Press). Julie’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Gertrude, Fourth River, Clackamas Literary Review, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals and anthologies. A former Fulbright Graduate Fellow in Vladivostok, Russia, she lives in Duluth and is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Find more at www.juliegard.com

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Ann Howells’s poetry appears in Borderlands, Spillway, THEMA and in anthologies: Goodbye, Mexico and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas (Texas Review Press), Pushing the Envelope and Texas Weather Anthology (Lamar University Press) and elsewhere. She has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, recently going digital (www.IllyasHoney. com) and adding a co-editor. Publications include: Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag), Under a Lone Star (Village Books), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter), and Cattlemen & Cadillacs, as editor, (Dallas Poets Community). Ann served as President of Dallas Poets Community for four years and as Treasurer for many more. Kathleen McGookey has published three books of poems, most recently Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press). Her work has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman (FC2/University of Alabama Press 2017), winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, The Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc 2014), Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone 2004) and The Innocent Party (BOA Editions, Ltd., American Reader Series 2012). Parkison’s fiction has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. Parkison is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches fiction writing. More information about Aimee Parkison and her writing can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com Mark Trechock lives and writes in Dickinson, North Dakota surrounded by wheat and grass and quite a few abandoned farmsteads. His poems have recently been published in Passager, Triggerfish, High Desert Journal, Jonah Magazine, Kestrel and Red Wheelbarrow.

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