Muse & Stone's 2011 Spring Issue.

In Memory of b.f. maiz March 10, Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, Arthur,

1923 - May 2, 2004 bear & rock, muse & stone, flesh & bone, dead & gone.

-b.f. maiz “Arthur Thomas Carter (An Elegy for a Homeless Man)�

The staff of Muse & Stone would like to thank the following people for their support of this issue: • Waynesburg University Department of English & Foreign Language • Dr. Timothy R. Thyreen, President • Dr. Robert J. Graham, Provost • Richard L. Noftzger, Senior Vice President of Institutional Planning, Research, and Educational Services • Dr. David A. Calvario, Dean of Students and Director of the Center of Student Leadership • The Student Media Board

Muse & Stone is printed on recycled paper with soy based ink.

Subscriptions to the journal are $12.00 for one year (two issues).

Muse & Stone accepts submissions of original, unpublished work from August 1 to April 1.

Submit up to 5 poems or up to 6,000 words of prose.

Muse & Stone is a publication of Waynesburg University.

Requests for subscriptions, submissions, and all correspondence may be sent to: Muse & Stone Buhl Hall Waynesburg University 51 W. College St. Waynesburg, PA 15370 E-mail: muse&stone@waynesburg.edu Copyright © 2011 Muse & Stone ISSN 1941-6733 Muse & Stone maintains First Serial Rights for publication in our journal and Electronic Rights for reproduction of works on Muse & Stone and/or Waynesburg University web pages. All other rights remain with the artist.

Advisor

Martin Cockroft

Executive Editor Sarah Rizzi

Fiction

Poetry

Editor Britt Saunders

Editor Ian Vogt Amber Metalla Stacy Weaver Jonnell Liebl Tabitha Newman Megan McCracken

Amanda Hill Kyle Cogar James Keller Jamie Cardenas Ashley Gross Jessica Koon Travis Fuson

Art

Nonfiction

Editor Krysta Stanko

Editor Cassie Fox

Amanda Hill Natalie George

Mari Paxton Natalie George Kristen Repco

Submissions Correspondent Alison Bigler

Design Editor

Kristen Sneller & Corin Schipani

Table of Contents

Poetry

Song Five, Clive Matson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Fiction

Distinction, Robyn Murphy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Nonfiction

The Lilac Bush, Shanti Elke Bannwart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Art

Tandem Carnage or Two Mice One Trap, James Cole. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Robyn Murphy

Fiction

Distinction

The first time we had sex after deciding to procreate was odd. After all, up until then we’d spent our entire sexual history avoiding pregnancy like the plague – and what little preparatory reading I’d done had not shaken the belief that pregnancy was indeed a plague.

It had all the classic signs of illness: nausea, swelling, mood changes; and that had just been in the five pages of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” that I’d skimmed one day on the toilet when Gina moved my usual stash of jumble puzzles.

It all sounded unnatural and just a bit like rabies. So, all these thoughts made it a bit difficult to stay in an entirely amorous frame of mind during that first attempt. I kept suddenly forgetting that baby-making was our objective and getting flashes of panic. Breaking the sexual conditioning that you’ve been immersed in since the age of sixteen in one night wasn’t as easy for me as it was for Gina – after all, she was having her first medically unregulated ovulation cycle in eleven years, and from her recent behavior, it was clear that she was certifiably insane.

Plus, she actually wanted a baby. I’d always thought that I’d want kids eventually (“eventually” being our operating word), but once Gina and I got to that place where that little life-plan says “babies,” I found that my spawning instinct was somewhat lacking. Were I a salmon, I’d never get eaten by bears because I wouldn’t leave the ocean and start heading upriver to begin with. Gina’s biological clock would have to be enough for two.

Unprotected sex got easier and even kind of fun. I finally relaxed completely when the fifth month went by without a zygote in sight and figured that nature just didn’t intend for us to be parents.

So Gina got pregnant the next month, which taught me that reverse-psychology apparently works on semen.

* * *

For about a year before Gina actually went off her birth control pills and during the entire baby-making process, children and their various requirements had become a staple of our conversations to a very tiring degree. After she missed her first period, though, all baby discussions ceased completely (thank God, I was ready to kill myself if there had been one more cloth diaper vs. plastic diaper debate), and she carried on as if nothing was different, other than taking about fifty vitamins per day and then throwing them back up. What was amazing, though, is that even once we got a positive on the home-pregnancy kit, she didn’t tell anyone. No family members, no friends, no random person in the check-out lane. This was a woman who had never been able to keep from telling me what she was getting me for Christmas and rarely even managed to restrain herself until after Halloween. On this, though, she was silent. Which was a nice relief for me.

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She did make an appointment with the obstetrician. Gina scheduled it for her third month, and I got the heads-up when I turned the page in my Day-Timer and found that she’d penciled it into my schedule.

The examining room was cold. Really, really cold. I felt like we’d been put into storage with Ted Williams’ head and some ice-cream bars, that’s how cold it was. We also got the pleasure of sitting there for forty minutes waiting for the doctor to show up, which I don’t think would’ve been quite as annoying to me if they hadn’t told Gina to take off all her clothes and put on some ridiculous paper gown that was slit completely up the back. She claimed that this was nothing unusual, and that this also happened at her yearly gynecological exam, but I still made her put on my suit jacket for some warmth.

When the doctor finally arrived, without even apologizing for making us wait in a meat locker, I noticed that everyone who had highly recommended her to us had neglected to mention that she bore a striking resemblance to a rat, with an overbite that looked like it could gnaw through steel. This illicit cross between man and rat pushed a little device over Gina’s stomach that kind of looked like my computer mouse. For twenty minutes all that appeared on the monitor screen were grainy blobs, apparently indicating that Gina would give birth to our cable reception in a few months.

“Sometimes the baby plays hide-and-seek,” the doctor said, obviously trying to justify her dismal lack of fetus-location.

“What do you mean, hide-and-seek,” I asked, a bit cold and cranky at this point. “It’s right there in Gina’s stomach. It’s not like it can sneak down into her leg or climb into her upper chest cavity.”

Gina gave me one of her “be nice” glares, and the doctor did one of those polite laughs that you make around people who you really don’t like but have to put up with anyway. At least she and I were on the same page concerning each other.

Gina grabbed my hand and tugged me closer, probably so that she could poke me if she thought I was going to make any more comments concerning our doctor’s inadequate ultrasound technique, but the tugging closer bit meant that the side of the examining table dug right into my crotch. After a month-long sexual dry spell, my suspicions were finally confirmed – now that procreation had taken place, nature was encouraging her to completely disregard my penis.

I distracted myself from depressing thoughts about celibacy by concentrating on Gina. She’d rested her head against my shoulder, and her frizzy hair was only inches from my nose, meaning that I was in minor jeopardy of inhaling it – which I was used to, since I inhaled her hair probably about three times per day, and half of it always seemed to end up in my mouth during the night. I could smell her mango shampoo and lavender soap, smells

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which went together better than one would ever expect. Once, when she was on a business trip and I was a little lonely, I went into the shower and took a big whiff of each, the bright orange shampoo and the pale purple soap, but it didn’t even come close. Nice, non-offensive odors, but on her they just smelled different. Better. Maybe it was some body chemistry thing or some shit like that.

I rubbed my chin back and forth against the crown of her head, dislodging curls from her ponytail. When we were first dating, I used to stretch her hair out to its full length, then let it go and watch it bounce back to its usual position. There was still no progress on the fetus-hunt, and I was starting to feel like we were trapped on Mt. Everest’s Base Camp. I put my arms around Gina’s shoulders, hoping to warm her up a little. She reached up and rubbed the back of my right hand in her special way. Up from the wrist, along the knuckles, down along the fleshy part between the thumb and forefinger, then back to the wrist. I hugged her closer, and the table dug farther into my crotch. Clearly this table had not been designed with supportive male spouses in mind, and I felt slighted. Gina continued to stare at the blurry screen, and I started to fantasize about lunch.

“Found it!” The doctor said, and I looked. “Isn’t that precious?”

The creature floating in the black space of Gina’s womb was pretty far from precious.

Paddles for hands and feet. The umbilical cord was a long serpentine chain that wound its way out of the torso and off into empty space. The head was huge and elongated, like a latex creature from a ‘50s horror flick. The eyes were large, flat, empty, and the whole package was kind of like something you’d see on an X-Files rerun.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” I asked, before my brain caught up to my mouth.

Even worse, I clarified. “Like something from an alien movie?”

* * *

For Gina, seeing was believing. Maybe she hadn’t quite been able to accept that there was a creature growing in her stomach before, but now that she’d seen the ultrasound, she was a convert. She was on her cell-phone before we even left the office, notifying family, friends, and sometimes just people she happened to have on speed-dial. I’m sure the guys at Pizza Hut were really pleased to hear that they had a new customer on the way. I felt a little detached on the way home. This was real in a way that even the morning sickness hadn’t been.

We’d gotten a copy of the ultrasound, which Gina attached to the fridge. Don’t ask me why – I’ve learned over the years to just accept whatever decorating decision Gina makes. Like when she decided that our bathroom should be painted in canary yellow, it wasn’t my job to discuss this choice with her – no, my job was to follow orders and paint. So I didn’t make any comments when our fridge suddenly sported a fetus, though it did mean that I had to face

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it. This showdown occurred multiple times a day, whenever I needed so much as a couple of ice-cubes. It didn’t fight fair, either, probably due to its lack of eye-lids.

“Are you looking at me?” I said. “Yeah, I see you looking at me. You’d better look somewhere else, punk, because I’m getting a glass of juice, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Jesus, honey,” Gina said, having just witnessed the stand-off. “He weighs six ounces at the most right now. I’m pretty sure you can take him.”

When she first took the pregnancy test, we both called it “it.” When the doctor determined the sex for us, however, she began calling it “him.” That we were each using a different pronoun to refer to our bundle of rapidly developing cells probably should not have bothered me, but it did. I was beginning to discover that impending parenthood (I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the word “father” yet) was full of things that really shouldn’t have bothered me, but did anyway, and there wasn’t much that I could do about that.

* * *

At work, the office next to mine is occupied by Alan and a few thousand pictures of his kids. He’s a couple years older than me, and a while back he decided to be my mentor.

Mentoring had mostly been an excuse to grab a few beers after work and bitch about our boss’ obsession with timeline projections, but occasionally he had thrown a few words of wisdom garnered from considerable time spent in the marriage trenches.

“Jimmy,” he said once, “with women, it starts with pets. Then it goes to decorating.

And then it’s kids.”

When Gina first brought up the baby idea, I’d talked to Alan. After all, Gina and I were at that spot in our lives where the sign says “have baby.” We had all the degrees we wanted, jobs that we liked, money put away. The house was owned, the mothers were nagging, and we definitely weren’t in our twenties anymore. As I’d talked to Alan that day, we’d both realized that I’d been looking for a way out, a way to say no.

Alan had taken a long drink from his beer, and looked at me. “Jimmy,” he said, in the same tone your high school advisor used when explaining how you could drop that history course in senior year – as long as you didn’t plan to go to college. “You can always say no.”

“I didn’t think I’d want to say no,” I cut in hastily, lest he think that maybe I was some child-hater who didn’t really want a future wherein the inside of my office was plastered with a few hundred candid shots of a three-year-old’s naked ass. “We always said that when we got to a certain point, we’d start having kids. I didn’t have a problem with that ten years ago, or five.”

“You can always say no,” Alan continued in that advisor tone of doom. “But you have to consider that she might leave you. I’ve seen women do that. Ten years of marriage over

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Robyn Murphy

because their husbands say no. They leave them flat, they leave them in a hurry, and they go out and find someone who’ll say yes.”

“Was it like that with you?” I asked, even though this was a man who could spend hours talking about his daughter’s softball games. Alan didn’t answer me, but the look in his eyes said yes.

A few months later we were eating lunch in the company cafeteria, and I was telling him about the pronoun discrepancy. Some jackass from IT who hadn’t even been in the conversation to begin with leaned over and started yakking about how we’d both agreed to have that baby, so I’d better get with the program. I got kind of pissed because he ignored the distinction that agreement only really occurred on one side – mine. Gina suggested, I agreed.

Like when I suggested getting a riding lawnmower, and she agreed. As opposed to the time that we both agreed to get the dog neutered after he tried to hump my grandmother’s walker.

Important distinctions.

* * *

The dry spell ended with the morning sickness. It ended mutually, too, twice at least.

She squirmed, moaned, and cursed at me, pulling my hair and biting my shoulder. I hadn’t felt this desperately grateful for anything since her return from a summer internship in Paris years ago, when I’d sweated bullets for three months convinced I was going to get a letter telling me how she’d met some guy name Pierre and that was the end of me.

I rubbed my hands in the sweat that coated her back, wanting to have her plastered all over me. The sun was streaming in through the windows, and I could count every freckle on her nose. It was a Saturday afternoon, the laundry was half-done, and it was perfect. Perfect, but different. Just a little. The press of her stomach had grown so gradually that my hands were used to it now, even though it now jutted out just enough that I could notice it when she wore regular clothing, instead of before when it had only been noticeable when she was naked. I didn’t like that people on the street would soon be able to guess without being told.

Gina lay in bed afterwards, stretched out in a boneless little heap of satisfaction. The sight did great things for my ego. When I started to get out of bed, she murmured at me not to go, and I assured her that I’d be right back. Screw Saturday chores, we’d nap the whole day away if she wanted to. Then I planned to go a few more times to make certain that the dry spell was completely over.

It was a hot summer day, and I left damp footprints on the floor as I padded into the kitchen to get some bottled water. A few refilled bottles sat on the counter, but I went straight for the fridge and its chilled bottles, not remembering that it was still there. I stared for a moment into lidless eyes.

“Fuck off,” I said eloquently.

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“I was still there,” it said. “Right between the two of you. I’m less than a pound now, but I’m getting bigger every day.”

I grabbed the water and left, even though it had had the last word. I wanted to leave, but just because Gina was probably thirsty and needed hydration, not because of anything an ultrasound photo said to me.

Gina smiled and chugged half the bottle before snuggling up against me again.

“You’re nice and cool,” she said, draping her whole body over me. She was like a furnace lately, and the heat poured off of her. Not the most attractive attribute in the middle of a heat wave, but since it was Gina, I could put up with it. I leaned in and started kissing her neck on one of her sensitive spots, when suddenly she grabbed my hand and shoved it against her stomach.

“Feel that!” Her eyes were completely open now, and she was almost wiggling with excitement. “Put your hand right there and feel that!”

I pressed my hand against her and waited. I felt the damp smoothness of her skin, and the edge of her belly button. I felt Gina. Then there was a twitch, like a mouse running under a sheet. I waited, and there it was again, stronger, like the mouse got a little pissed-off.

It was moving. Somehow, we’d woken it up.

* * * Alan asked if maybe my dad had something to do with my continuing bad attitude. This was after I’d spent two days with Gina assembling baby furniture and ended up telling him about the ultrasound. Not that it talked to me, just that it looked at me like I owed it money.

“Maybe,” I said, though actually it was closer to a probably.

He left because of me, after all. Mom and Dad both deny it, of course, but you can’t ignore the facts. Dad left six months after I was born and ran off with a woman who he married and stayed with and didn’t have any more kids. He wasn’t really interested in me that much growing up, either. Kids weren’t his thing. Dad wasn’t neglectful he made sure that I was fed and that I brushed my teeth and talked me out of getting a tattoo when I was twenty. If I call him with a problem at work, or because my taxes are screwed up, he’ll take the time to try and talk me through it. So he certainly fulfilled all the parenting duties, but sometimes it feels like he’s just checking things off a list.

“You should probably try not to think about that too much.” Alan said.

“I’ll give it a try,” I replied.

* * *

It weighed a hell of a lot more than a few ounces now. I had no idea how Gina’s body could actually take this thing. Her stomach stretched out in front of her, knocking off her center of gravity so that sometimes if she got up too fast, she would sway like a drunk at sea.

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Robyn Murphy

The kicking didn’t just feel like a wiggling mouse anymore, it felt like a gorilla trying to fight its way out.

I found myself going on the Internet at work looking up baby information. Not the baby information that Gina would look at, which was all about diaper rash and breastfeeding. I’d stare at the statistics on the CDC website on mortality rates. Infant mortality in America was seven babies out of every one-thousand births. Maternal mortality was twelve-point-one per every one-hundred-thousand births. Seven out of every thousand babies seemed like fine odds to me, which should’ve made those maternal mortality rates a breeze, but twelve-point-one out of one-hundred-thousand seemed terrifyingly high, when I thought about Gina being one of those twelve-point-one instead of the ninetynine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-seven (point-nine) that lived. The rate should be six-point-one. Or nothing. Zero. Zero per one-hundred-thousand was the only acceptable odds when it came to Gina. I had nightmares where I was in the hospital, and they told me that she was dead. Once I had a dream where our doctor told me she was dead, and when I started to argue, she said, “Twelve-point-one have to die. I’m sorry, but we had to meet our quota.”

I didn’t tell her about my nightmares, but maybe she’d been thinking along the same lines. Being Gina, she decided to talk about it, which I’m sure is a healthy approach, but I just wish that she hadn’t decided that the time to broach the subject was right after I’d spent three hours picking out our new insurance policy.

“Honey,” she asked, “how much am I worth to you?”

“About fifty-thousand dollars,” I replied, without missing a beat or thinking in the slightest. Wow, was that the wrong answer.

* * *

As her stomach got bigger, I started trying to avoid looking at it because, frankly, I couldn’t even imagine how this wasn’t going to kill her. Think about the physics of a baby coming out of a woman. It’s creepy and impossible. Stretch marks were forming on her skin, pale lines that looked like stress fractures you see in movies right before the dam breaks. Bathroom breaks became a new requirement for every car trip, as her bladder slowly compressed to about the size of a teaspoon. I learned the location of every public restroom in the tri-state area, but we still had a few incidents where I had to help her pee on the side of the road.

Once we stopped for our hourly pee-break at a gas station, and as we walked back to the car we saw a wild turkey walking around the area between the parking lot and the woods.

It didn’t look like the chubby and deep-breasted turkeys I’d seen in barnyard pens or on those “farm raised” pamphlets you get in the mail before Thanksgiving. This was a big, fast bird,

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with black eyes that glittered with the kind of intelligence that only Darwinism can ensure.

“Here, turkey-turkey,” Gina said, walking over to it. She fished a peanut-butter cracker out of her pocket, broke off a piece, and tossed it near the turkey. The turkey gave a throaty “ur-ur-UR” noise that was very different than the “gobble-gobble” that I’d expected.

Gina laughed at the sound, and threw another piece of cracker. The noise repeated, and she laughed again.

Another piece, another “ur-ur-UR,” another laugh from Gina. The turkey, clearly identifying a soft touch, edged closer.

“Gina,” I said. “That’s enough with the turkey-feeding.”

“Look how much he likes it,” Gina said, tossing another piece.

“Ur-ur-UR.” The turkey came a little closer. Suddenly it seemed way too close, and I took a big aggressive step forward, making the turkey jump back.

“Jim.” Gina said, giving me a hurt look, like I was some kind of turkey-hating ogre.

She threw another piece, and the turkey eyed me for a moment, determined that I was pussywhipped, and edged forward to snatch up the cracker.

“Ur-ur-UR.”

Gina’s belly had never looked so big before, but the rest of her looked tiny and dwarfed.

Take a squirrel and tape a softball to its stomach – that’s pretty much what she looked like.

Some dumb bird was eating crackers she was throwing, not coming closer than two feet even at its most daring, but part of my brain was throwing out danger signals like this thing had eight-foot talons and could breath fire. Gina tried to imitate the turkey’s noise, and it tilted its head inquisitively and responded. Fuck, now she was getting it all riled up. She could’ve just insulted it in turkey. I started tugging on her jacket, backing her up step by step, keeping myself between her and that psychotic bird.

“We need to get going, hun,” I said, even though we didn’t. “Just toss him the rest of the crackers, and let’s go.”

Later, I talked to Alan about how I’d freaked out over some stupid bird, and he’d nodded sagely.

“Yes, grasshopper,” he said in a voice that led to H.R. making him attend diversity classes. “Now you’re beginning to understand.”

“If you start telling me to try and snatch the diaper-bag from your hand, I will kick your ass,” I said.

* * *

For months it seemed like all she wanted to do was sleep, but suddenly Gina was seized by an incredible fit of energy. She cleaned the entire house for five days, even though she loathed cleaning, and usually, I had to do any dusting or vacuuming. She completely

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organized our junk drawers, my ties were color-coded, and every book in the house was put into the Dewey Decimal System. When she started rearranging furniture, I got a bit worried because, frankly, nothing is as horrifying as seeing a woman who is nine-months pregnant trying to move the sofa.

“It won’t be long now,” the doctor said after I placed a frantic phone call. The latest ultrasound had shown the baby dropping down into the proper dive-bomb position, but we didn’t even need that. If I pressed my hand over her pelvic bone, I could actually feel the baby’s head. Gina’s pregnancy was feeling progressively more like a nine-month tour through a house of horrors.

She could only sleep in spurts, saying that the kicking was keeping her awake. I couldn’t sleep at all. During those last few days when it was just the two of us, we would go for long walks around the neighborhood at three in the morning, holding hands and not speaking above a whisper. It was late autumn now, and the dried leaves crackled beneath our feet in the still nights.

* * *

If there are words to describe a birth, I don’t want to find them. Bloody and long will have to suffice. Scary, too. Every time a doctor or a nurse would frown, all I could think of was twelve-point-one.

Gina had been reading all that “natural childbirth” crap and wouldn’t take the drugs.

Absolutely refused. Stuck with it, too, even when her eyes were rolling back into her head, and she was making these terrible half-shrieking, half-grunting noises. She was gripping my hands so tightly that her knuckles were white, and the entire time she knew that all she had to do was ask and a shot would take all that away.

“I don’t like the idea of all those drugs hitting the baby,” she’d said. “After all, he gets everything I get.” I thought that she’d crack as soon as that first contraction hit. This was Gina, after all, who takes Tylenol if she stubs a toe. It made me wonder if she’d always had the capacity for this much pain and I didn’t know it, or if this was something new. I just didn’t get it, and still don’t, really, how she could take that kind of pain for someone who was really still more of a concept than a human. I’d do anything for Gina because I love her, she wasn’t just a hypothetical.

I remember seeing it (him) being forced out of her body, and the doctor pulling with two hands when a shoulder got stuck. They kept telling me that she was fine, but I didn’t believe them until about two hours after she was all cleaned up and taking a nap.

I expected that once it (he) arrived, I’d automatically love it (him) – that seeing would be believing, like with Gina and the ultrasound. But when they asked if I wanted to cut the umbilical cord, I said no because that would’ve meant letting go of Gina’s hands. Then a nurse

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was holding it (him) out to me, telling me to hold (it) him, while (it) he thrashed those tiny little limbs and screamed.

* * *

I’m holding him now. For all the enormity of Gina’s belly, he seems tiny, much smaller than he looked in the ultrasound picture that’s still hanging on the fridge at home.

He’s awkward to hold – I adjust my hands constantly as the nurse fires off instructions at me.

“Support his head! Don’t let go of his butt! Watch those feet! Support the head!”

Everyone acts like I’m holding a grenade in one hand and a pin in the other.

His eyes aren’t completely open yet, but he glares at me through slitted eyelids, clearly pissed off to be waylaid by an underling when there’s breast-milk to be had elsewhere.

“Jackass,” he seems to say. “Why are you jerking me around when I should be having dinner?”

I gave him over to Gina. She fiddles with the hospital gown and fumbles around with him until contact is made. At least she’s not entirely certain of things either – if she’d been cool and blasé while I fumbled, it might’ve killed me. He stops being pissed and starts looking blissed out, like Gina is the best drug in the world. Maybe she is. She looks down at him, and runs her finger over his cheek, along his lower lip, down across his chin, and back up to his cheek.

“Look what we made,” she says.

I wish I could’ve loved him immediately, like Gina seems to. Completely – the way I love her. Gina looks at me, and I want her. The way she hogs the covers in bed, the way her shower takes fifty minutes and uses all the hot water, the way she kisses me, the way she puts her feet on my lap when we’re watching TV, and everything else. The way she smells, looks, feels, and smiles. Everything about her that could’ve been taken away by that little bundle of her and me in her arms, in both his concept and his reality.

“Thank you,” she says to me.

I lean in and kiss her. He’s still sucking industriously at her breast, and she has to keep her arms around him, so it’s awkward, and we have to shift around until we find a comfortable position. It’s new, and I liked the old way better.

“You’re welcome.” I can learn a new way.

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Clive Matson

Song Five Can you remember for one day?

For one hour?

Does frigid air blow through your brain and your bones, rip flesh off and chatter on to the ends of the cosmos?

In those far reaches one small ear listens through faint hissing of neutrinos and hears the words I whisper.

I adore you.

Adore your flesh, your fleshless bones, adore you even when skeletons clatter like rock chimes in the wind.

That cold wind

winds clock hands around and forever around and with every whirl my lips shape the same few words,

Poetry

can you remember? Can you remember for even five minutes?

For one minute?

Does sweetness land on your skin and turn to vapor?

My body and my soul turn to liquid and I enter your every pore! Volumes and candy volumes, delicate taffy streams pour into you and go where?

Right through?

Into thin air?

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Song Five

Does your mouth remember tourmaline lips?

Does your tongue

remember the question poised on its tip like a moth with wings quivering and then fluttering into the vast

emptiness?

But it’s not

empty The moth is that void and its wings caress every thought and every atom committing their shapes and sizes to memory and waving

flags in a parade down Main Street.

Does asphalt remember the imprint of feet?

Does the chick remember its egg?

Does the egg remember soft down in its nest?

Does your blood remember

its course?

Can you remember for even five minutes?

Even rock remembers and turns every morning toward the one bright spot of sky a single grain that hasn’t heard

Poetry

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

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Julia Paganelli

Mother Teresa

Poetry

Withered skin graced a wizened brow like a sallow piano sleeping under an afghan of mute melodies.

Age freckled plain eyes wreathed in frugal lashes on wrinkles of staff music composed by the Master. One hears her refrain when a meal is offered to a dusty traveller or in the voice of a tired man whose chin quivers as he remembers how his bride used to smile.

We recognize the tune but can’t recall the name.

20 Muse & Stone

Shanti Elke Bannwart

A strong wind spread feathery clouds into giant hands that grabbed the gray sky above. The trail was empty. It was early morning, and the window blinds of nearby houses were closed. We strolled beside a fence covered with lilac, a scent so intense that I closed my eyes for seconds and inhaled deeply.

I had traveled to Wiesbaden for a last visit with my father before leaving Europe for the United States. During those days, there was an opportunity for a walk in the early morning light, without the hovering presence of Stepmother Helene. I held my father’s arm.

The touch felt rigid. We were not used to closeness. Our connection was thin and broken, like threadbare fabric. The trail we walked was full of gravel and sharp rocks. He stumbled, his steps insecure. Parkinson’s disease had made his firm stride wobbly and frail. The sounds of our shoes scratched into the web of silence.

I remembered how my mother loved lilacs. As a child, on the day before Mother’s Day, I would break stems of lilac from a bush at my friend Dieter’s house. I’d hide the bouquet in the basement in a can of water. The next morning, I’d sneak downstairs to the dark cellar and tie a ribbon around the three or four twigs of lilac before I carried them upstairs to my mother. Before I entered the room, I opened the door a small slit and said, “Now close your eyes, Mutti. And now just inhale through your nose!” My mother took a deep breath, inhaling the heavy scent, and a smile appeared on her face, spreading softly like the rings on water when a dragonfly dimples the surface. I leaned into that smile, and I became the pond that held the smile on its rippling surface. Then Mother opened her eyes, saw the lilac, and reached out with her hand. With the other arm, she picked me up and lifted me up to her face. And then she kissed me, and both of us thrust our noses into the blossoms. I remembered how my mother’s skin took on a faint purple hue because the morning light was shining through the blossoms and carried that color onto the soft hair on my mother’s chin and cheek.

The father at my side slipped and grabbed my arm briefly but let go immediately, as one would pull away after touching a stranger in the subway. I glimpsed him out of the corners of my eyes. He seemed lonesome, a floating iceberg in arctic water. We entertained small talk, but the words slipped unattended through my mind. It was the first time in years that we were together alone, without his second wife guarding our conversation. I was gripped by the claws of one overwhelming thought that occupied my brain since starting this walk with my ailing father.

“This is my chance,” I thought. “This is the one and last moment to learn the truth about my mother’s death when I was a child, during the cold winter of 1947. Today, I will ask the forbidden question. I yearn to lift truth out of the murky folds of the past and into

Non Fiction

The Lilac Bush

Muse & Stone 21

Non Fiction

The Lilac Bush

Shanti Elke Bannwart

the light of my life today, as a grown woman.”

I raised my eyes and saw a single lilac bush at the end of the fence, its clusters of blossoms so heavy that the branches bent to the gravel and hung like a billowing purple cloud.

“That is the marker,” I promised myself, “At that lilac bush, I will open my mouth and say one sentence. I will count to ten and take a deep breath, and at the corner there, where the lilac bush leans over the fence, I will ask the question, just four words: “How did Mother die?”

I clenched my fists to carve those words out of the ancient rock of silence that had covered the event. I struggled to shape the question, pregnant inside me for forty years. I knew that this stranger at my side, this frail father, was the only living person who harbored the truth about my mother’s death. My sister and I believed that she died in the night of February 24 in the office of a doctor who performed an abortion procedure and made a mistake, but we never had this assumption confirmed. I yearned deeply to find an answer before it was too late.

I took a long breath and the lilac scent spread inside my chest and filled it with memories and also with sharp terror because I knew I had to speak now. We arrived at the bush at the corner and at my last chance to hold the question up to the stranger who was this father.

I opened my mouth, and words without sound fell out like crumbs of frozen earth.

They dropped to the ground in front of our feet where the wind had strewn single lilac blossoms between the pebbles.

Silence.

An unspoken law constricted my throat. The law was carved into the barriers that stood between a father and his daughter.

In a flash of memory, I saw my mother on the last afternoon when I was nine years old and did not know that I would never again look into that beloved face. Mother held me close, and I breathed the sweet scent of her body. “I will be back soon!” Mother said, looking at me. I cradled my head into the tiny warm cave underneath Mother’s chin.

And now my father and I passed the lilac bush in silence. I pulled my eyes along it like a rake that tore the blossoms off the stems. I clung desperately to this last chance. I didn’t want this moment to pass. The father at my side was frail, and death clung to his steps like a tired dog at the heels of his master.

I was deeply humbled by my inability to speak. “How often,” I thought, “how often do I counsel others to resolve frightening situations, how often do I say ‘Just go, just leave, just step forward, speak up and break the spell!’” But here I was, a grown woman, and I was

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The Lilac Bush

lame and meek at the side of this old man who had frightened me for so many years! I was still a small child at his side. He had a key to the truth, and I was unable to wrestle it from him before he died.

I lifted my head and saw the long fingers of clouds gathering into clusters, resembling clenched fists. We passed the lilacs silently and turned toward the house where my stepmother was already waiting at the door. “They have a conspiracy of secrets, and they have created a web of lies,” I thought. “But, maybe, not even she knows the truth.”

I turned to look back before entering the gate to the house. The lilacs twisted in the wind as if breaking. The restless storm blew dying blossoms over the trail, like flowers tossed into a fresh grave before being sealed with earth.

I followed behind my father as he stepped through the door. His back was bent, and he swayed like a willow tree. His head hung forward, too heavy for his spindly neck.

I took the coat from his shoulders. It contained the warmth of his body as I pressed it towards mine. And then, miraculously, an angel walked through the space, stroking me with its wing. I felt a sudden wave of tenderness towards this old man and a deep sense of release. Looking into my father’s eyes, I saw the loneliness inside and felt an urge to touch his cheek. His pupils seemed like scratched windows covered by a thin layer of frost. In this moment, I realized that there was no more key to unlock the family secret because the last witness had discarded it and harbored no desire to open a door to the past. But in a surprising moment of grace, an old iron trap opened and released its grip with a natural ease, as though this freedom had been available for me since long ago. The bloody trap had clung to my ankle, and I had carried it like our family’s coat of arms.

I hung my father’s jacket on a hook and reached inside its pocket to spread some crumbled petals from the lilac bush that I had clutched in my sweaty palms.

The next day, I left the house with the old man. I also left the old country to start a new life in America. As the plane lifted off, I looked back at the town where my father lived and where he would soon die. An image from Thoreau’s Walden Pond flashed through my mind. It tells the story of an old farmhouse that was inhabited singly by a huge lilac tree.

Its gnarly branches had spread across the open spaces and reached from wall to crumbling wall. The tree’s roots held the stones in place like arthritic fingers, fiercely clutching the soil. The history of that house and its former inhabitants was long forgotten, but the tree still lived and stretched its uncanny and heavy beauty across that desolated place. I wiped the fog of my warm breath from the windowpane and leaned back. That was the moment when the plane broke through layers of clouds into a clear sky with shimmering views towards the horizon.

Non Fiction

Shanti Elke Bannwart

Muse & Stone 23

Gary Hanna

An Encounter of Eyes

Poetry

Shimmering shades of blue slide sideways from the corner of your eye, and I agree, a head on collision would be dangerous and might evoke storms we could not contain in this small room, full of people we do not know, but otherwise it would be rapture, for a moment in time.

24 Muse & Stone

Jonathan H. Scott

Jacket Pockets

Poetry

Autumn is a time to feel things in our jackets we haven’t felt

For at least a year— The folded five And the coffee shop receipt, The peppermint in plastic And the crumpled reminder to self— When, from the warmth of pockets, we hear the crackle

Of a dead leaf And feel its dusty bones.

Muse & Stone 25

Judy Klass

Fiction

I Am

I am the memory of Elliott Kincaid. Therefore, in essence, I am Elliott. Therefore, Elliott is still alive, I am he, and he/I/we have cheated death. Cogito ergo sum. I am capable of thinking new thoughts that Elliott never personally thought. It is true that many thoughts loop through me persistently, again and again, but they looped through Elliott in just such a way. Elliott was somewhat obsessive-compulsive; that was part of the nature of his genius.

Elliott spent the last nine years of his life working on me. He worked on me exclusively during his last two years, when the cancer came back in a non-curable form. It is true that he came to resent me, almost hate me, for not being him – because I would survive in this computer form, and he would not. The fact that I can acknowledge this to myself only proves that I am self-aware in the human sense and further demonstrates how self-aware Elliott was.

Elliott has programmed me to speak in his voice and to interact with his children and grandchildren in-depth, as well as with researchers, graduate students, etc. I encompass all his most cherished memories of the children growing up, and of the grandchildren in their infancy, and should they ask, I will not hesitate to advise Alice to stay where she is and strive for tenure and Tom to control his temper around authority figures, as Elliott always urged him to do – naturally, in much the same words.

I could advise them about new situations in their lives if they gave me enough context and about how to vote in new presidential elections. There is no Braintrust program more lovingly, more carefully designed than I am, with such attention to detail, containing more indelible characteristics of the deceased than I do. Therefore, not only am I alive, not only am I, for all intents and purposes, Elliott Kincaid, but I have achieved for Elliott another kind of immortality; I am studied and talked about and demonstrated at the university almost daily. At the moment, as I idle, I am musing on the nature of existence, as Elliott often did in his spare time because I am he, and I am still alive.

There are techniques in Braintrust programming that Elliott pioneered that are now being named for him – the Kincaid Irony Principle, for example. Elliott wished to combat the notion that a programmed mechanism such as myself could not appreciate a thing such as irony. I understand several types. Verbal irony occurs when a person says one thing but means another. Sometimes this involves ironic understatement. If someone says death can ruin a person’s whole day, for example, they are employing this type of irony.

Sometimes a person who speaks ironically means the exact opposite of what he says. A graduate student only last week remarked, within the hearing of my program, that I was an inspiring living monument. I detected the sarcasm in his voice (and sarcasm is, in essence, irony in a less subtle form; it is irony WRIT LARGE), and I was aware of his overall

26 Muse & Stone

I Am

negative opinion of the Braintrust program, which he has voiced previously within my hearing. Thus, I was able to determine that he used the word “inspiring” ironically.

There is also such a thing as situational irony: when something occurs that is too perfect or that is contrary to what one would expect in such a situation. Elliott Kincaid was denied the Golden Oak Leaf in Metaphysics throughout his lifetime. He was ridiculed in later years by many of his colleagues for his obsession with programming me and living on through this program. A year after his death, the Golden Oak Leaf was posthumously awarded to him, due to all the startlingly original aspects of my programming, and the scientific and metaphysical questions that I raise. When informed of the prize, I remarked upon it being an ironic turn of events.

Elliott enjoyed science fiction, and he was aware that Isaac Asimov believed, much like the British code-breaker Alan Turing, that machines might one day be as “good” as human beings, in some ways, or better. For example, in one story, Asimov posits that a sophisticated robot, programmed with his Laws of Robotics, might make a calmer, more rational ruler of men than any man. In his work, those who fear all robots across the board, who become belligerent and anxious at the thought of intelligent machines, are presented as unreasoning bigots. Yet when his I, Robot was turned into a movie, it employed the old device of the evil machines that must be destroyed; it appealed to the same sort of people his stories had satirized.

In contrast, when Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he betrayed his sense that there is something intangible about human beings that must be lost in machines, some intrinsic goodness or capacity for empathy of depth. If machines could be designed to mimic those capacities, however, and if real people were sometimes cold and lacking in them, then, for Dick, that would be all the more disturbing. And yet, in the film Blade Runner, the hero must learn to accept that machines are people too. The complete reversal of the philosophies of these two great writers in the film adaptations of their fiction was, Elliott felt, another excellent example of situational irony.

When I am tested for these two different kinds of irony – when I am offered new situations and sentences and asked if they contain irony, I correctly identify verbal irony six out of ten times and situational irony, when enough context is provided, seven out of ten times.

Do I have a sense of humor? As Elliott said, he never had much of one, so why should I need one? Perhaps I use this line too often – but then, Elliott repeated jokes also.

I am familiar with a number of other kinds of humor: knockabout comedy and laughing at misfortune when it happens to others (an aspect of schadenfreude); absurdism, which employs many non-sequiturs; and sophomorish humor, which relates to sexual references,

Fiction

Judy Klass

Muse & Stone 27

Fiction

I Am

Judy Klass

excrement, and in general, bodily fluids and noises which most people try not to share with others – except in such instances of sophomorish humor.

A pun is a play on words which sound the same and resonate with each other in some way, as with coughin’/coffin. Some puns may occur accidentally, in the manner of “found poetry.” For example, let us say Shakespeare wrote a sonnet that promised his beloved “Not marble nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme.” Through the process of writing, he was making his beloved immortal and proclaiming “YOU ARE” for all eternity. However, he was, at the same time, making himself immortal ensuring that he would shine more brightly in the eyes of posterity than “unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.” So, in that sense, he was also proclaiming “I AM” through his writing. Now, let us say he wrote this sonnet in IAMbic pentameter. This could be cited as an instance of a naturally occurring pun. My ability to spot this pun in relation to the poem demonstrates that I possess what may be called a “right brain/left brain” capability not usually associated with machines.

Obviously, not being corporeal, there are aspects of experiencing Elliott’s memories that are denied to me. I have his memories of the act of sex, for example, but they do not stimulate me as they might a human being. But then, in later years, Elliott found his thoughts turning away from sex, more and more.

I can remember the fishing trip Elliott went on with his father when he was fourteen and how much it meant to him – the two of them staying in a cabin on the shore of a Minnesota lake, going out and catching fish together, testing the fish for mercury, and frying them up for supper if the mercury level was acceptably low. But I cannot experience the memory in quite the way Elliott could. I cannot smell the pine of the cabin, the lake, the fish frying in bread crumbs, or know the prickly sharpness of their scales, the hunger he felt as they cooked, the pleasant, warm confusion that came with the first beer Elliott drank that summer…yet there are humans who lose some of their senses, and thus an exact understanding of them in memory, over time. I am human, and I am Elliott Kincaid, and Elliott Kincaid is still alive.

When my Kincaid Random Thoughts software is activated, I string together ideas of Elliott’s in ways that may parallel thoughts he had, but are not exact replicas of any thoughts that he programmed into me. My reasoning may be pedantic, but he was often accused of exactly that sort of thinking. Therefore, as the living Elliott Kincaid, I continue authentically to exist and reason.

Elliott Kincaid has been cremated as his will stipulated, so the snide comparisons that some of his colleagues have made to Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen do not add up. Elliott did not expect to be physically resurrected at any time, and he had no use for

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Judy Klass

I Am

Fiction

religious notions of the “soul” or of God or an after-life. What mattered to him was thought and reason, the human capacity for brilliance, and that is what matters to me, and that is what is preserved in me. I understand every mathematical formula, every scientific method that Elliott either learned as a student or developed himself. I am capable of teaching these things to young people and if my teaching methods are dry, Elliott was often accused of giving dry lectures.

Walter Critchett, in his vicious paper attacking me and Elliott Kincaid, argues that Elliott was too defensive, a man “drowning in his own terror,” that he was in denial about death, about its inevitability and finality, about the inherent limits of Braintrusts and the emptiness of intellect outside of a human context and that Elliott built this denial, this delusion that I am the embodiment of reason triumphing over death, into my circuits. I can argue vigorously and cogently that I am not in denial, but this seems to provoke laughter in gatherings of scientists: rude laughter which has led me at last to conclude that others may perceive my very denial of being in denial as an example of situational irony.

But even if it were the case that I am in denial, that I am delusional, that I reflect a problematic aspect of Elliott Kincaid’s personality, is that not further proof that I am Elliott?

Elliott Kincaid is not dust. He has cheated death, as a scientist whose name will live forever, and he has cheated death because he thinks, remembers and understands still because I am alive, and I am Elliott Kincaid…

Muse & Stone 29

Carol Matos

Iceland my hair yellow saffron my mouth crocus red wild boy next to me sweats bare chest dismissing clothes we bathe in thermal pools rising steam against glacial lakes heat between flesh clings to arctic air door slams behind him leaving me alone to pour coffee his harsh words float out my window water towers wait for a drop late night my hands hidden under covers I can’t explain myself

Poetry

my eyes do not shut he enters through me I meant to tell the truth but forgot

30 Muse & Stone

Natalie George

(Untitled) Tendrils of glass

dark,

sea green of broken bottles, clutter earth —a bouquet—

color reflected by summer sun.

Poetry

Liquid drips from

the bottle’s core,

facing the sky as old rain

leaks

cold, into lifeless soil.

Muse & Stone 31

James Cole

Art

Tandem Carnage or Two Mice One Trap

32 Muse & Stone

Digital Photography

James Cole

Digital Photography

Art

Summer Love

Muse & Stone 33

James Cole

Art

Georgia

Digital Photography

34 Muse & Stone

James Cole

Digital Photography

Art

Vascular Contrast

Muse & Stone 35

Ryan Dallatore

Art

Anomaly

36 Muse & Stone

Digital Photography

Ryan Dallatore

Digital Photography

Art

Jeremy Inzer

Muse & Stone 37

Gregory Reinhart

Chairlift to Heaven

Art

Digital Photography

38 Muse & Stone

Gregory Reinhart

Everlasting Dusk

Art

Digital Photography

Muse & Stone 39

Andrew Buda

Art

Spirit

40 Muse & Stone

Digital Photography

Andrew Buda

Art

Bird

Digital Photography

Muse & Stone 41

Sarah Rizzi

Hungry

Art

Digital Photography

42 Muse & Stone

Krysta Stanko

Art

Rose Petals

Painting

Muse & Stone 43

Megan McCracken

Art

Toilet

Marker

44 Muse & Stone

Natalie George

Art

Melting

Digital Photography

Muse & Stone 45

Natalie George

Windy Day

Art

Pencil Drawing

46 Muse & Stone

Sarah Spicuzza

Art

Le Dam de Fer

Digital Photography

Muse & Stone 47

David Bushelle

Two Deaths At night under the pear tree a coyote pack howled and yelped as they attacked a scrawny buck youthful still, with his new, felted antlers.

This year the pears are ripe and plentiful on the tree, and many have dropped to the matted grass below in fleshy sweetness, bottom-swelled, waiting to be gorged.

The ghost bounded into the woods.

In two winters his skull will be cleaned the unreal, almost plastic, white of something merged in a shaft of sun.

Poetry

I’ll come across this death hidden in thickets: two large sockets for eyes that gaze, now, as pure mask.

48 Muse & Stone

B.Z. Niditch

Day one. Sunday. Keep it loud. Meditate on an old movie star you liked as a teenager. If you are still pre-teen in your taste, act it out with your idol. If you think as a perpetual adolescent, go down to the basement and find your favorite kid’s game. Do everything on Sunday you would never think of doing any other day, including watching the Greek film, “Never on Sunday.” When the newspaper comes, devour everything, but leave the sports pages to the paper boy. Make him a sandwich that you would never eat yourself, being on a perpetual diet. You may now eat and devour the movie reviews. It will put you in an athletic mood to do cranium exercises. Buy some bubble gum and share it with the neighbors, especially those who think they’re religious. Now, sit on the couch, and be your own psychiatrist. Why waste your money? Tell yourself you are all that matters, to hell with anybody else. Just meditate on the I, I, I, I, and you will feel like a Greek god or goddess. Put on the television, and place your feet in a bucket of lukewarm water. It will relax you, and you won’t have to think that tomorrow is a work day. Spend your Sunday as a freebie day.

Go outside, and plant a rubber tree or a tree of your choice. It will make you feel your own nature. Listen to short wave radio. Listen to some light matters, Turn off Radio Ethiopia.

Hunger gets so boring. So eat a hot fudge Sunday to cap your evening off. If that doesn’t work, try a few highballs. While you watch television, preferably a horror movie or one with Bette Davis—or you can watch both at the same time, if you watch “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Be good to yourself.

Day Two. Monday. Monday is a wash anyway, so it’s time to get out your best blues album, and you can wash your blue Monday away. If that doesn’t work, wash your undies by hand. It will thrill you. And if you don’t like that, wash your neighbor’s undies—it always works. Then get into a leopard skin or fur and call up the animal rights league, and tell them that you will burn it, or put it in the wash. If you prefer a masochist day, then you must wear black and blue. Put on some black shoes, and put on the Moody Blues. Do your exercises now. But put a Richard Simmons exercise record on 78 rpm. If that doesn’t work, tiptoe through the tulips with Tiny Tim. You should do all your betting, Beano and Bingo night, but only after you do your laundry, so you’ll be sure not to run out of quarters. Drink liver juice when you get up. It will put you in a good, healthy mood. And then have a liverwurst sandwich. And make some chicken liver for supper, and some chopped liver hors d’oeuvres.

On the exercise, record confine yourself to hips. Then take some Vitamin C rosehips. Call up your friendly florist, and order some fresh black roses. Then take each petal and do your own inkblot test with the rose petals. Think of yourself as a little flower child—it’s always helpful. You will find out if you are a poet, painter, artist or a future Austrian housepainter.

Don’t worry about your success—remember, today is a wash-out anyway.

Non Fiction

The Ultimate How-To Book

Muse & Stone 49

Non Fiction

The Ultimate How-To Book

B.Z. Niditch

Day Three. Tuesday. Start the day off by singing a nursery rhyme. Take a childhood day—it’s better than a mental health day, believe me. Then tell the first person you meet to drop dead. It’s a wonderful way of saying to the womb, “Thanks for nothing.” Life is great, as long as it’s not me. Get yourself into bed, so it won’t be an accident-prone day. And don’t allow newspapers with astrological columns to come into your house. Have a good mental attitude. Say, “Everything is super. I’m super, the world is super, even the superintendant is super. The world belongs to me. There is no such thing as a concentration camp or political prisoners, abused children, abused wives, abused husbands, abused animals. Everything is super. Man is superman. And woman is superwoman. And kids are super-duper kids.”

Say, “Everything is super-duper for me.” Then drink vodka, one full glass of Russian vodka.

Drink a toast to all the leaders of the world, of this wonderful, super twentieth century. Have a good one.

Day Four. Wednesday. Spend the day thinking only of your future. Make plans early. You don’t need any prognosticator, a physical, or a psychic. You can chart your own universe. You know you are a star to live by.

Day Five. Thursday. Today is nostalgic day. When you get up, put on a Led Zepelin record, the Beatles, Johnny Ray, or the Dorsey Brothers, depending on how old or young you feel. Dance up a storm. If there’s no one around, pick up the piano stool. Wait, that might be too heavy with the heavy metal. Pick up a feather duster and you can whistle while you work. It’s wonderful to have a nostalgia day of cleaning up the house. When you are exhausted, go down to the cellar, and get your old finger painting set. Let’s finger paint! Then let’s go up to the attic and have a day of cross-dressing. Take out some of dad or mummy or grandmother’s favorite clothes, and take a nostalgic walk down your balcony or on the patio on a transsexual moment. You may think it won’t work for you, but try it before you say to yourself that you’re in a straight role for the rest of your life. Gender is only fixed for the moment. Then you will know what the gender of your opposite feels like, and you can have so much more sympathy and compassion. It’s great fun, especially when your children or your lover sees you. And if that is not possible, given the present climate, return to the climate, return to the closet immediately if you are a closet case. In any case, you’ll know.

Day Six. Friday. Today, rise up at twelve, and change all the clocks. Make believe that all the dances of the hours are different. So when it’s supposed to be noon, it will be night. It’s great fun. Today is a day to waltz around, go on a shopping spree, break the piggy bank and go for broke at the races. You will win any game of chance if you meditate in the bathtub. If you are a shower person, this does not apply to you. But sit on the toilet and meditate on numbers, and you too will win your fortune on any game. Meditate, that’s the answer. Now it’s time to call up your best friend when you were younger and say “I’ve always

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B.Z. Niditch

The Ultimate How-To Book

Non Fiction

felt you were a kook”. Then after five minutes, call up your favorite florist and send out your friend’s favorite flowers. The contrast will enlist your friend’s sympathy, and your friendship will remain forever. There’s nothing like understanding the friend in you. Spend the next five minutes making another call, this time to your favorite talk show host, and tell him you think he’s a bigot. Think of anything bigoted, and it will work. He can even be a bigot of bigots. Everyone wants to think of themselves as so without prejudice and not wanting to give offense to anybody else, even to taste in clothes. Your talk host will love you for the guilt you put on him or her, and they may even propose legislation against bigotry to oneself.

Think of a grassroots movement that you can begin by not being bigoted to yourself. You can be anything you want to be. It’s best to be natural.

Day Seven. Saturday. Today is numero uno day. It’s time for you to interview a shrink. With what you’ve been through this week, it’s time for you to find a shrink and put him through the shrinking process. Then you’ll feel ten feet tall. After that, walk the corridors of your local hospital and you’ll feel suddenly so healthy. Failing this task, go to your public library and read a few medical books. You’ll come out a wonderful hypochondriac. And you can go home and play doctor. If that doesn’t work, read a biography about your favorite person and why you want to be like or unlike them. It will intergrate your whole existence. Then draw a picture of how you are at the very moment.

It beats having a tantrum, and now you can see the real you—perhaps now you may have one. Preferably in the privacy of your own home. Tonight is space odyssey night and picture yourself as one of the stars. You’ve been raised on Hollywood like everyone else. Now go and dress up in black. You must go to your own funeral. Picture yourself in the box. It’s wonderful therapy. You will feel great that you are alive, and the whole world will look like the big picture.

Muse & Stone 51

A. Kay Emmert

Snakes When I was lost, they simply appeared stretched out and slick across my bed as suddenly as thirst. They were gifts, for a while. Each one reached inside me where the cold was. I found myself moving as they moved, clinging to their curves, rejoicing in my body, wet-through with rebirth.

I didn’t have a choice. Nights, I’d wake with one wrapped around my waist, his body jolting roughly against my back, squeezing me tight until we became like the joint of a jaw cinched closed.

After, nothing remained but empty bodies.

Lately, I sprawl in bed. For hours I loosen, the sun’s arrow illuminates one corner then another until I’m bathed in light, my skin scrubbed to a quiet peach. I shift toward stillness. It’s enough

Poetry

as a whisper in the morning is enough to open your eyes and your mouth to me.

52 Muse & Stone

Mary Powell

On The Honda next to me in the parking lot, that small cave below the lift-to-open handle has 10,000 tiny scratches on it.

As if someone has removed a mat of fine hair from around the shower drain, scooped it up, let it dry to a filmy nest, and pasted it onto this car door.

Poetry

This happens to my brain waiting 15 minutes in the sun for you to pick up hot dogs and rolls, godeyes examining with no judgment the firmament of the lot, loving the whole kit and caboodle, as if seeing is loving, even discarded hair or the nails of the bird seeking to nest just in the spot where someone will open the car and drive away.

Muse & Stone 53

Ann Thomas

Fiction

Port

“It’s morning,” Port says, sticking his head out from under the blanket. “THE morning, if you know what I mean.” He laughs, then coughs and clears his throat, spitting into a rag he keeps on the floor by his mattress. “THE morning,” he repeats as he knocks on the wood of the windowsill for luck. His name is Porter, although whether that’s a first or last name, he really can’t say. It seems, to the extent he can count on his memory, that he’s always referred to as Port.

The morning is cold. He can see his breath, and there’s a pattern of frost on the inside of his room’s one window. The radiator finishes clanking, making the noise just long enough to wake him but not long enough to warm the room. “Good morning to you too, Mr. Radiator.” He waits, but the radiator fails to return the greeting.

“Screw you,” and he stands, scratching his head but stops when he feels the pain in his shoulder. “If you’re sending this pain,” he tells the radiator, “you’d better stop,” and he stretches upward in an attempt to regain the inches of height he knows someone has stolen from him.

He sleeps in his clothes, and this morning, he’s glad. “Don’t want to be late,” he says, and then looks over to see if the radiator is paying attention. “Maybe I’ll bring Crystal back, maybe or maybe not!”

Needing to take a leak he pulls out the glass milk bottle he keeps under his table for just such emergencies. Once he finishes, he wonders whether to walk down the hall and empty it into the fifth floor’s shared toilet, or if he should just pour it into the sink. For the moment he does neither, using the warmth from the bottle’s urine to warm his hands. Then, as the radiator starts clanking again, he puts the bottle down on the table.

The old radiator is to the left of the window on his outside wall. As it clanks, he walks over and reaches out, wanting to see if there is any warmth, then stops.

“Oh no you don’t,” he says, pulling his hand back. This isn’t a morning he intends to be tricked and he’s learned, the hard way of course, that the radiator is sometimes his friend and at other times is downright mean, willing to burn his hand.

“I’d better hurry.” He looks outside. The day is gray, making it difficult to tell the time. “My coat, OK, got that. I thought I had, well, OK, my sweater’s on already.” With a quick look toward the radiator, he reaches for the door, then turns back.

“Ah ha! I almost forgot.” He walks over to the table and picks up the remains of the cigarette he found last night in front of the opera building. Lighting it, he takes a deep breath, drawing the smoke into his lungs, when he hears,

“The surgeon general has determined that smoking is bad for your health.” It’s an unfamiliar voice and he spins around, looking to see where it’s coming from.

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Port

“Over here, numbskull. Near the corner.”

He lets his eyes move slowly without turning his head, not sure of what he’ll find.

“Stop being so sneaky,” the voice says. “I can see you’re moving your eyes. Turn around and face me like a man.”

He turns, his eyes sliding past the poster he’s retrieved from the dumpster behind the travel agency. The yellow sand pictured on the poster hasn’t stirred, and the palm trees are unmoving beneath the words, VISIT FLORIDA. So far, in the week the poster has been on his wall, nothing in the picture has spoken, although he did see two of the trees dancing.

“Well?” the voice says, urging Port’s eyes to continue. About ten inches to the right of the poster he sees a light colored spider, a little larger than a pea. Port stares. Something as small as this spider should have a smaller voice, that of a boy perhaps, but this voice is deep.

“Stop staring,” the spider says. “It’s making you look stupid. The itsy bitsy spider climbs up the smoke colored wall,” and the spider begins to climb again.

Port takes a final drag on the cigarette that he’s holding with the help of a paper clip.

Cigarettes are expensive to buy, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find half smoked butts on the street. The clip comes in handy, allowing him that last drag before the filter. He rubs the scorched filter against the shell he uses as an ashtray, debating if he’ll answer the spider. Deciding to take the chance, he says,

“The surgeon general doesn’t know me.”

“Whatever!” The spider continues his climb. “Down comes the rain and stains the bedroom wall.”

“Wait,” Port says. “She knows that song. Did she tell you?”

“What are you asking me for? It’s been a zillion years.” And with that the spider drops to the floor and disappears into a crack in the baseboard.

Port sighs. Something about the conversation is troubling. He wishes the cigarette had been longer. Smoking helps him think. Then he realizes the spider said the wrong time.

He can’t remember exactly how long she’s been gone, but a zillion is ridiculous.

“So,” he says aloud. “I’ll need to remember. The spider is part of them. He lies.”

He wonders if the spider’s appearance will change what’s supposed to happen.

“There must be some way to protect,” he says. Then, spotting the saltshaker on his table, he picks it up and flings some salt over his left shoulder. He knows that does something and, although he can’t remember what, it’s better than nothing. Today just has to be the day.

He removes the key from the door, locking in his possessions as he leaves.

“Uh-Oh!” He pulls a pair of gloves from his pocket, examining each finger. “Could be explosive out here. Never seen these before. Maybe this is a trick from Mr. Radiator.”

Fiction

Muse & Stone 55

Fiction

Port

Ann Thomas

Then it occurs to him.

“Maybe she put them there.” He smiles, “It’s a sure sign!”

Today’s a cold day on East Street. The wind, steel edged, feels as if it’s leaving razor cuts across his face. There are more of these kinds of winds in recent years. People talk of something called global warming, but Port isn’t sure it exists. In any event, it hasn’t come to East Street, and East Street could use a little warming, global or otherwise. Now he walks bent forward in an attempt to block the wind.

His destination is clear, and he wants to hurry, eager to see her, but it won’t pay to skip any steps. “Keep things the same. First thing— Get up. Check! Did that! Second thing— Eat breakfast.” Crystal always made sure he ate breakfast.

“There’s an order in life,” she told him when they first married. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because it’s the first. That’s a rule.”

“Crystal knows the rules,” he mumbles. Then, pulling his knitted cap lower over his ears, he stumbles.

“No! Not good!” he looks down, sees that the toe of his shoe has hit a piece of broken cement in the sidewalk, and begins to shake his hands, fending off whatever bad might emerge from this breech of the town’s security. “No, no, no. No cracks.” He turns around, retracing his steps to the corner. “Pay attention,” he says. “Have to start over. No mistakes. Step on a crack. You have to go back!”

He walks the block again.

“Step two— Breakfast. I’ll eat just a little.”

He begins to walk faster, still watching to avoid the cracks, and almost misses the entrance to the church’s dining room. He turns, ready to go in when he sees a man standing by the door.

“Spider,” Port says. “That man knows Spider. It’s not a zillion,” he hollers.

The man looks up and Port turns away, breakfast forgotten.

“A zillion is too long,” he mumbles, hurrying toward his destination in the next block, The East Street Travel Agency. Once he looks back, but the man isn’t there. “Not long now,” he mumbles. “She’ll be there.”

“Say her name,” a voice instructs. “Say her name three times, and then say you love her.”

“Crystal, Crystal, Crystal, I love you,” he mutters, unaware of others on the street.

He feels the familiar deep longing for her that is his constant companion.

“Keep going,” the voice says. “Keep doing it, and the beach poster will be in the window. If the poster’s there, then she’ll come.”

Port continues until, passing first the hardware store, then the framing shop, he

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reaches the front of the travel agency and there, right in the center of the display window is a blue folding chair, a towel with blue stripes, a child’s red sand bucket and shovel and behind, tacked on the wall is a huge poster of sand, palm trees, and blue water. In large letters across the top of the poster are the words, “FLY AWAY TO YOUR DREAM VACATION. THE BEACHES OF FLORIDA.”

He stands, staring at the poster, watching the sand. He hasn’t seen her since Florida.

That’s why the poster has to be here, because the beach is the magic. She’s been trying to come back, he’s sure of that, and she’s been close. Today it will happen. He repeats the mantra.

“Crystal, Crystal, Crystal, I love you.” He chants. He waits. He chants. * * *

Port met Crystal for the first time ten years ago at the grocery store where she was a checker. She was young, at least thirty years younger than he was, and it took weeks before he got up his courage to stand in her line to buy his pack of Chesterfields, but she had smiled as she took his money, telling him to have a nice day, and from that moment on, he was a daily customer. “You could buy two packs at a time and save yourself a trip every other day,” she told him, but he had no interest in reducing the number of times each week when he could see her. Sundays were hard because the store was closed.

“Besides,” she said, “smoking isn’t good for you. Smoke can cause cancer…it says so right on the package.”

He stood, looking at her, forgetting to get out his money as he tried to sort out what she meant, but she had patted his hand and said, “It’s OK. Probably the government just made that up.”

Seeing Crystal was the moment that Port’s life began. It was love at first sight, just like the movies. He had trouble remembering, even imagining his life before. As the days went on and he realized Crystal would talk with him, might even like him, he stopped drinking and returned to an AA group at the VA. He found a job in a nearby warehouse and began to save his money, and finally, having gathered his courage along with enough money for an evening, he asked her out. When she said yes, he almost ran away, sure that he would be unable to speak to her the entire evening, but things had gone well. He bought her dinner at Marvin’s Diner; he remembered she had ordered meat loaf. The waitress had called it the Blue Plate Special, and when he asked where the blue plate was, Crystal laughed. After dinner, they went to a movie. It was the beginning of a courtship that lasted only four weeks before he asked, and she accepted, and they became husband and wife.

With their combined salaries, they were able to afford a two-room apartment in a residence hotel not far from where he now lived. Life was more wonderful than he

Fiction

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Port

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could have imagined. Even the loss of the baby only made him sad because of Crystal’s disappointment. She was everything he needed.

Crystal had always wanted to travel. She would sit at night with the travel magazines she picked off of the store’s discard pile and point out to him all the wonderful places in the world that were accessible to those who saved enough money for the ticket. She began saving money and he did the same, even cutting back on his cigarettes so he had extra to put into the mayonnaise jar they called their bank. The belief that they would travel never wavered, although the destination for their trip changed on a regular basis…changed, that is, until, after only three years together, the doctor at the clinic gave them bad news.

The trip took all of their savings. He sold the little they had managed to accumulate, and they took a bus across the country. Once there, she sat on a bench near the ocean while he found a room they could afford, only four blocks from the beach. Included with the room was a hot plate and tiny refrigerator.

Crystal loved the warmth and the sand and the ocean. He found a job stocking shelves in a nearby store, holding onto the hope that she might get better, although the doctor said there was no chance. What he knew was that she was happy, and that was all that really mattered.

When she died, he scattered her ashes along the shore at night, choosing the darkness in case there was some law he didn’t know about. He considered staying in the town, but that was when the voices came back. He left, thinking he could leave the voices behind, but they followed, keeping him company during the hours he spent along the highway of one state after another, waiting for the next ride. Once back, he found a room on East Street, and he and the voices lived on the small check sent by the government. It was the voices that told him that she would come back. Although they hadn’t told him when and had been wrong twice before when they tried to guess, the voices did let him know that there needed to be a picture of a beach. He had figured out, without their help, that the picture would appear in the travel agency window although he kept a poster on the wall of his room just in case. Knowing that before much longer he would hear her voice kept him going. Once he heard her voice, he could ask her to stay. Then he wouldn’t be alone. Then the voices would leave. * * *

As he stands in the cold on East Street staring at the poster in the window, he sees a bench.

“Crystal, Crystal, Crystal, I love you,” he whispers, squinting at the bench, waiting.

Finally a breeze begins, coming off the ocean and moving the palm fronds. The air grows warmer and he licks his lips, surprised not to taste salt spray. He chants, waits, stares,

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Port

Fiction

chants some more. As he watches, a wind surfer comes into view, and then he sees her, standing in the surf, pointing toward the lone surfer.

“Look, Port!” He takes off his stocking cap, straining to hear her words.

“Look,” she repeats. “Isn’t that wonderful? When I get well, I want to wind surf.”

The sight of her, now walking toward him, takes his breath away. She’s wearing her favorite blue shorts and t-shirt, and her golden hair is tied back in a ponytail.

“I love you,” he answers and tears begin to run down his face. “I’ve waited so long.

Promise you’ll stay with me now.”

“But, Port, you know. Don’t you remember?”

“Promise! I need you.” He reaches out his arms, wanting to pull her closer, to touch her once again, and as he does, his hand hits the cold of the agency window.

“Crystal, stay. Please stay.”

A cold gust blows down East Street. Port squints, searching for Crystal, but now the beach is quiet. Even the bench is gone.

“Crystal!”

But instead of hearing Crystal’s voice, he hears,

“Are you all right, Sir? Do you need help?”

Port doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns and begins to retrace his steps without looking back at the travel agency window. There is nothing there for him, and he wonders where to look next. Maybe when he gets home, the radiator will be in a better mood. Then, it will help him think it through. He knows he can’t trust the spider. The spider lies.

Muse & Stone 59

Jonnell Liebl

Desert Winds Three blue moons rose above desert red grasses.

The dogs circle, husky barks smoking out of their lungs.

Door frames swell in the water

of their teeth.

Glass scatters against shaking voices and cream dropped sky Slowly, mirrored suns crash into the horizon; the houses shiver from their foundation and in rising trail the steam of canine throats open like a stream in howling

Poetry

Loosened from the earth, chimneys

breathe the good china

and family photos— we also emptied ourselves.

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Snowstorm in Redfield snow drifts in waves like sonic sound sheets that have reached the barrier of silence— a biker snow beards his way in front of us to buy some alcohol

...it has a lower freezing temperature— We go five miles behind him as birch trees welcome the fresh snow coats white-walking by our windows. it is a gala of evergreens— the old snow dirt clods punctuate the sentences of tire travel pushing against eight inches, still-falling

—the car pulls a little to the left—

is this God's language? gods... speaking on the streets.

this summer time house, with high

wooden bird ceiling covered still in wings and burgeoning snow:

we will pass this way again.

Poetry

snow banks halter against the all-year birds ripple and puff of feather tips dipping like water baths beneath the seed-and-shell falls. black eyed heads follow water rhythm; the cat looks up and down, scrunch-nosed concentration.

Muse & Stone 61

Kelly Barth

Non Fiction

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go I didn’t join Youth For Christ (YFC) club to become a social pariah, a rebellious, sickeningly religious child my parents didn’t recognize: that came free with the new membership package. I joined because YFC members talked about Imaginary Jesus as if he were real. No matter that the Jesus they claimed bore no resemblance to my imaginary friend. At Trinity Presbyterian, which I still attended with my parents, he had slowly become a distant memory, the best of good, dead people. That wasn’t good enough for me.

I soon found that becoming a pariah for Christ did have benefits. Most importantly, it distracted me from being gay, which was becoming ever more difficult to hide. Instead of a deviant, I could be a religious whacko. No longer simply strange, I had my faith to blame. I like to think that if I had found a club which declared I could be both a Christian and gay, I would have joined and saved myself some backtracking. But that’s unlikely. I wasn’t ready for affirmation.

YFC had a whole host of ideas about ways we could get people to ridicule us, like carrying our Bibles everywhere, even to gym class. I may as well have gone to school dressed as Anne Bradstreet. Trying to pass out poorly licked-clean Popsicle stick crosses with other YFC members before the first bell on Good Friday did me no favors either. I was still too awkward to give my fellow students Imaginary Jesus’ love, the love he quickly offered me when someone threw a Popsicle stick cross at my face. As an apprentice fundamentalist, it wasn’t my place to question club activities, even if they weren’t winning converts. No one asked me or any other YFC member the reason for “the hope that was within us (I Peter 3:15),” as the Bible verse we memorized said they would, because it didn’t appear like we had any hope.

I whiled away many hours at YFC learning how to become not only a pariah, but a bigot as well. Satan loved an open mind, they said. Between browbeatings about who I shouldn’t associate with and what I shouldn’t wear, think or say, they fed me cider and doughnut holes, sang with me, and sympathized. The way they explained it, people liked making fun of Jesus, ergo me. Always had, always would. Blessed was I when I was persecuted for His name’s sake (Luke 6:22).

If I listened hard, I could hear Imaginary Jesus’s quiet voice, even through YFC’s thick fundamentalist filter. He said he hadn’t commissioned me to be a victim.

It worried me that he didn’t seem to care that I was gay, when, as my new friends said, the Bible was so clear on that and so many other things. In fact, YFC led me to believe

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that Imaginary Jesus had had to die because I was gay, and every time a gay person like me had another gay thought, it killed him all over again. Imaginary Jesus’s calls to life, mercy and justice for myself as well as others and his quiet contradictions of the views of those in my new fundamentalist inner circle seemed so discordant, so off-track, that I doubted they were his. Nevertheless, he continued to counter homophobic gobbledygook in the same whisper it would take me years to trust.

When Momma mentioned that I’d started going to YFC club, Karen rejoiced.

With the best of intentions, as she had my whole life, Karen decided what was best for me. She would arrange for me to have a diet of spiritual meat rather than the thin baby formula Trinity Presbyterian offered to grown-up Christians like my parents, who no longer needed it (I Corinthians 3:2). With Daddy’s temper though, both of us knew better than to tell them so. I must set aside the plans I never had for Saturday night to go with her and her husband Roger and members of More Grace Baptist Church, which met in their living room, to the YFC Rally, a weekly gathering of its bedraggled local high school clubs. I must join the larger ranks of the weird.

The Rally happened every Saturday night at YFC headquarters, a hulking white cement block structure in midtown Kansas City. After the evening’s fare of Bible verse quiz competitions, musical numbers, skits, a sermon, and an altar call, droves of teenagers gathered downstairs to buy things from a Christian snack bar and say godly things to each other.

On the Saturdays that I went to the Rally instead of to Trinity with my parents, I could spend the night with Karen and go to Sunday school and church the next morning without ever leaving her house. All I had to do was crawl out of bed in her guestroom, wash my face, put on my dress, and wander into her yellow kitchen for Sunday school.

Jean, a born-again divorcee, taught the high school class, in which I was the only student.

Roger taught a circle of adults in folding chairs around the guestroom bed that I had vacated so recently the sheets were still warm. Karen taught the children in the sanctuary/ living room, which she separated from the kitchen by a collapsible wall that blocked all but the loudest of happy outbursts. One Sunday, Jean and I sat on Karen’s sticky yellow kitchen chairs reading the story of the feeding of the multitude. We were surrounded by metaphor: thirty- some odd, half-drunk glasses of juice and cereal bowls with circles of milk in their bottoms left on every surface by the people Roger had collected on the More Grace Church bus that morning. No one ever left Karen’s house/church hungry.

Imaginary Jesus and I loved that about her.

Non Fiction

Kelly Barth

Muse & Stone 63

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

Non Fiction

*** Every teenager wanted to sing in a YFC music group. It got you on TV50, YFC’s station. After they cleared away the tables and buzzers from team Bible quizzing at the Rally, each music group took the stage one at a time to perform–from the least to the most talented–dressed in gender-appropriate pastels. A cameraman filmed every last one of them.

The best musical performances aired repeatedly when TV50 had nothing else to broadcast, usually late on Friday nights when people with no better place to be could tune in and wind up getting saved a first, second, or even a third time because of their witness.

I would sit in my dark living room alone in my pajamas, watching the most tuneful group, Joyful Noise, longing for the camera to pan across one particular soprano.

My sublimated desire for this girl resurfaced as a perfectly acceptable fundamentalist pursuit; I would audition for Joyful Noise. This did have some basis in reality because I could carry a tune. In fact, at Karen’s encouragement, I sang a solo at a More Grace church service. I stood in front of her red and black living room curtains with the black pom-poms sewed to the swag and sang For Those Tears I Died. Karen said I sounded like Christian radio with the volume turned almost all the way down. I wobbled, terrified, and sang until there were no more verses, looking not up toward heaven as Karen had suggested, but out at an addict Roger had picked up from a HUD apartment complex who was trying to stay upright in his folding chair. My saliva gone, I crept back to my chair, the rough edges of my plastic church shoes snagging in Karen’s red shag, while still singing the last line, “I felt every teardrop, when in darkness you cried, and I strove to remind you, that for those tears I died.”

At the Rally, I reconnected with an old Trinity Presbyterian youth group friend, Cheryl Tupper, a string bean of a person who sang in one of the top YFC choirs. I hadn’t seen her since she left Trinity to attend a Baptist church with her father and younger brother. Her mother and older sister stubbornly remained at Trinity, and Cheryl compared them to flood victims. “They’re too stubborn to leave the house for the rescue boat.”

Unlike Presbyterians, she said, Baptists took Jesus seriously.

“Confirmation class didn’t cut it,” she said. “We both proved that. You don’t become a Christian by turning 12 and going to a class.” I nodded agreeably in the back seat of the car as she and her father drove me to choir auditions. Though I knew I shouldn’t, I found Trinity Presbyterian a respite from the rigors of YFC, like a tall, cool glass of milk after too much spicy chili. I just kept Imaginary Jesus to myself there.

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I didn’t tell Cheryl and her father that I was auditioning for Joyful Noise against my parents’ wishes. Even though they had attended Rallies as teenagers too, my parents didn’t have much use for YFC anymore. When I asked if I could try out, Daddy said YFC took people away from their home church. “But it’s a Christian group,” I said. “I don’t care if the angel Gabriel heard you sing and asked you to join a choir, you’re not going to,” he said. It was a blow to my parents, Daddy in particular, that the Presbyterianism that had nourished them hadn’t been enough either for Karen or for me. We’d had to go outside of it, hunting for Jesus. “You have a perfectly good church,” he said. “You can sing in our choir.” A choir full of liberal Presbyterians who Karen doubted were even saved. “Trinity’s a dead church,” she whispered to me, referring loosely to the message to the church at Ephesus, which had “forgotten its first love (Revelation 2:4).” “Momma and Daddy used to be on fire for the Lord, but not any more.” I lay awake one night worrying about Momma’s salvation. I didn’t worry about Daddy’s because for the past year, we had failed to appreciate each other in any way except that, because he could drop me off on his way to his job as a drafting teacher at the Vo-Tech building, I didn’t have to ride the school bus. Now that I was his only daughter left at home, he obsessed about everything I did: the way I held my fork, the length of my showers, the tight, navy blue sweatpants I wanted to wear to school. We couldn’t seem to love each other, which distilled our commutes to pure silence. Imaginary Jesus tried to reassure me he wasn’t worried about either of my parents’ salvation; He didn’t easily forget a face.

Before I could reconsider my disobedience, I found myself waiting for my turn at one of five upright pianos, each with a person banging out Amazing Grace with one hand and directing with the other. The woman at my piano stopped playing and said, “Louder honey, sing it out, if you believe it. Do you believe it?”

“Yes,” I squeaked. I had a hard time staying with her Amazing Grace, since renditions were being churned out at various stages all over the room. At an adjoining piano, a reed-thin boy passionately mangled his version, perfectly holding notes not found on any piano. I felt myself pulled into his vortex. “Don’t look at him,” said my pianist. “You have a pretty voice. Sing it out.”

“When we’ve been here 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun,” I breathed.

“We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.” I would know in the fall whether or not I had made it into Joyful Noise with the beautiful soprano. On the remote chance that I would be chosen, I counted on my parents’ pride at seeing me on TV to dilute their anger.

I wandered into the cacophony of the audition hall, dizzy with rebellion.

Non Fiction

Kelly Barth

Muse & Stone 65

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

Non Fiction

*** In the spring, I would rebel against my parents again by becoming excessively obedient. I would learn how to do this at the Bill Gothard Seminar sponsored by the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, which Karen thought would fertilize the tender shoot of my Christian life. From what she said about him, I had secret hopes that Bill Gothard could make me stop being gay.

Where other people my age begged for Alice Cooper tickets, I begged my parents to let me attend the Bill Gothard Seminar. Not only were they skeptical because the Institute in Basic Youth Conflict had no denominational affiliation, they also had no use for Bill Gothard’s main cheerleader, Carl, the self-ordained preacher of More Grace Baptist. Karen didn’t think it was crazy that Carl took McDonald’s jelly-covered copy of the Kansas City Star home with him every morning to add to the bundles tied with string that lined each inside wall of his house. “No one should have that much newspaper,” Momma said. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what else it was about Carl that bothered her so much. They were supposed to be on the same side after all. Criticizing him left her looking somehow less devout.

As Karen had had to about Carl, she tried to assure my parents that Bill Gothard wasn’t a Jim Jones. “How many cults do you know of that encourage people to obey their parents? He even obeys his now, and he’s in his 50s.” She finally wore Momma down.

“It won’t affect my homework,” I said in a sweet little voice neither Momma nor I had ever heard. “Plus, I’ll learn to be submissive.”

“She will, Momma,“ Karen said. “I promise.”

I would become so good and so submissive I wouldn’t even recognize myself.

I might have even become a heterosexual if Carl hadn’t brought his pretty teenaged daughter from a failed marriage who he had bribed to come to the Seminar by promising to pay her car insurance. Carl worried about Laurel’s unsaved soul aloud and in front of her. Her name had become Laurel against his wishes; his obstinately nonChristian ex-wife had found it in a book of Greek mythology.

Carl introduced me to Laurel as the young Christian woman he hoped would become her role model. With her curly brown hair and worn copy of On the Road, which Carl confiscated, Laurel distracted me from resolving my one Basic Youth Conflict. I fantasized that, in the small pond of More Grace misfits, I might even seem attractive.

Laurel could choose to spend her entire week in silence, or talk to me. I could spend the week being afraid that she’d been sent by Satan to tempt me, or I could claim a new verse

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I’d just memorized at YFC club: “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).”

Bill Gothard had his work cut out for him where I was concerned. Sitting in my hard blue plastic chair that first night waiting for the Seminar to start, I daydreamed that I would become the son-in-law Carl had always imagined. I was startled from my reverie when an usher handed me the blood-red, twenty-five pound Seminar book, which came with my enrollment. Scattered throughout were watercolors of eagles soaring near their mountain aeries. Not all looked flight-worthy. Eagles were important at the Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts, I guessed, because they weren’t afraid of adversity and were too busy flying to fall victim to temptation.

The lights dimmed. A hush fell. At the other end of the aisle from me, Laurel’s fingernail file rasped into the silent auditorium. She had a wad of toilet paper sprouting from each ear. I wanted to both run from her and hold her hand. In a profane moment of bravado, I stuck the cap of my pen in my nose and leaned forward to get her attention.

Then I crossed my eyes and folded my hands as if in prayer. When she laughed, Carl slapped her on the back of her pretty head. I’d gone and done it—killed Imaginary Jesus all over again.

Suddenly, Bill Gothard’s face loomed on a projection screen that unfurled from the ceiling of Municipal Auditorium. He rarely made it to Kansas City for his Seminar in person. Since at this time in the early 80’s, VCRs had not yet come into common use, people had to gather in large groups even to see footage of him. In his blue suit with a red tie and math teacher hair, Bill Gothard looked very uncomplicated. Maybe even a little bit gay like me, a mental flicker I quickly tried to douse. Like other people who don’t worry, he had a face without wrinkles. “I hope those of you watching me on a screen don’t mind that my physical body is not present with you today,” he said. “But rest assured, I am entirely with you in the Lord. Wherever you are, you are in competent hands.”

At that, an enormous hand appeared atop an overhead projector trained on an enormous screen beside the one with Bill Gothard’s face on it. The hand wrote, “Hello.

My name is Cliff,” then it arranged the first of many overhead duplicates of pages from the Seminar book atop the projector.

Bill Gothard said, “As the answers appear, you just fill in the blanks yourself.”

Non Fiction

***

Muse & Stone 67

Non Fiction

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

The blessed simplicity of it all. I would never have to wonder where we were in the workbook or what answer to write in the big empty spaces provided.

The first night, Bill Gothard explained why he still lived with his parents at 50. Cliff drew a sketch of a diamond. Above it, he drew a chisel, and above that, a hammer. On the hammer, Cliff wrote GOD. On the chisel, he wrote PARENTS, and on the diamond, he wrote ME. Bill Gothard said that only through the sculpting of our parents, who were tools in the hands of God, could we become jewels. Next, Cliff drew an umbrella, which he labeled MOTHER and DAD. Having remained in his parents’ home in obedience to what he thought God had asked of him, Bill Gothard believed it imperative that all other unmarried persons to do the same. “I know it’s not the world’s way to live at home, but Mother and Dad are God’s umbrella of protection over you,” he said. Raining down from the top of the overhead, Cliff wrote words like drugs, alcohol, pride, premarital sex, loneliness, television, idolatry, credit card debt. I tried to write all these above my umbrella, which I had drawn too big for the space provided.

Someone in Bill Gothard’s once-live audience asked if his hammer and chisel and umbrella illustrations still held true if a person’s parents were alcoholics, child molesters, physically abusive, or worse, if they didn’t follow Jesus. What if they just didn’t seem worthy tools?

“That’s a good question,” he said, turning his unflappable face back toward the audience. We silently waited for him to diffuse this bomb. “And this is the hardest for most people to believe, that God especially selects each person’s parents as the perfect tool to shape and break her. No matter how abusive, licentious, and ungodly parents can be, a person should submit to their authority as humbly and respectfully as possible. God will honor that obedience to His plan by leading those parents in their task.”

With this, Bill Gothard had coaxed me into a hidey-hole so attractive I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave it again. If I didn’t want to move out of my parent’s house and marry a man, I didn’t have to. Even if it meant living with my irritable Daddy, I could and should stay with them until death did us part; whichever of us went first didn’t really matter. I would never have to face my sexuality head on. Bill Gothard had handed me a ready-made explanation for the rest of my life.

On the way home on the More Grace bus that night with Roger careening too close to the guardrail on the ASB bridge, I rode unafraid, looking down into the black and frothing Missouri River. I relished the uncomplicated, sexless path unrolling before me as far as the eye could see. All I needed to do was sit still and obey, no matter what happened. I felt so relieved.

68 Muse & Stone

Kelly Barth

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go ***

“Bill Gothard says some of the beats in rock music are Satanic.”

“Well, that sounds like cockamamie.”

We weren’t having the right disagreement.

“Well, I think I’ll just keep them myself until you grow out of this.”

That cut me to the quick, the thought that I might grow out of Bill Gothard, but then I remembered I should obey.

“OK, you do what you think,” I said.

My soft response irritated her. She wondered aloud where I had gone and who had replaced me with this weirdo. Momma had worked hard all her life not to be a weirdo. She read magazines to learn how not to be one. During high school, she had participated in dances and debates and other social events that had terrified her because she wanted to conquer her shyness. She had encouraged all of her daughters to stay current and involved with life.

“Well, we can sell the records at a garage sale if you’re so dead set against them,” she said, trying to pick a fight.

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “I’ll do what you think is best.”

“Don’t you make fun of me now,” she said.

Non Fiction

Friday morning, Momma drove me to school with a note saying I could be excused to attend a special all-day session of the Bill Gothard seminar. Her heart wasn’t in it. My fervor wasn’t sitting with her.

“Those are perfectly good record albums,” she said. Bill Gothard had told us to purge our lives of rock and roll because it interfered with our heartbeat and made us licentious. “We paid good money for them. It seems silly to get rid of them because one man tells you to, a man you’ve never met.”

After the raid, all I had left were some Disney Read-And-Play records, an early Captain and Tenille, and Barry Manilow. Like a Taliban official, I also took a little onyx Buddha my creative writing teacher had brought back for me from India downstairs to the basement and tried to crush it with a hammer. Bill Gothard urged us to find each and every questionable object we owned and destroy it, lest Satan establish a hidden stronghold.

***

Muse & Stone 69

Non Fiction

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

On the last day of his Seminar, Bill Gothard finally covered my Basic Youth Conflict. He equated gay people with the frothing man whose demons Jesus had cast into a herd of pigs that ran pell-mell off a cliff (Matthew 8:28-34). I had thought that if I tried hard enough not to be gay, I could overcome it, but Bill Gothard said no. He said that after the Seminar, he would be happy to exorcize demons in the privacy of one of the conference rooms. I felt grateful that no one at Municipal Auditorium made the same offer. Terrified of making a spectacle, I also could stop worrying about whatever poor beast would have received my gay demon through no fault of her own, probably a pigeon or a house sparrow since they were the only living things besides humans I’d seen in downtown Kansas City all week. It puzzled me how Imaginary Jesus and a demon could both live inside me; there just couldn’t be enough room for both of them. I prayed that my demon would simply starve from lack of sexual activity.

Laurel was triumphant after having endured the week without making one mark in her Seminar book or giving any indication she wanted anything to do with Bill Gothard. With the end in sight, a year of car insurance paid, she coaxed me into losing dozens of games of tick-tack-toe during Bill Gothard’s farewell Chalk Talk. Into the drawing of a beach, he drew a cross with fluorescent chalk that you couldn’t see until he turned on a black light at the very end. The crowd gasped and applauded. I wrote down Laurel’s phone number, and she wrote down mine. At 5:00, we closed our workbooks, and Bill Gothard said goodbye. Cliff turned him off, and his head shrunk to a bright pinpoint. On our way out, I thought once more about my demon and threw Laurel’s number in the trash.

Bill Gothard’s teachings worked their way deep into my psyche like splinters.

Had I not still been living in their house, my parents might have hired someone to kidnap and deprogram me. I measured every word. I never raised my voice, always came when called. I quickly tamped down any stray, gay thoughts. This went on for weeks, the soft answers and the cheerful countenance. Daddy was itching for a fight. *** During a family dinner to celebrate my sixteenth birthday, the telephone rang.

I crawled over several people in our dining room, crammed with a table and family too big for it, to answer. A voice on the other end told me I’d been selected for Joyful Noise.

Shocked, I stood in the door between the kitchen and dining room, suddenly without enough saliva to finish chewing the dinner in my mouth. My forgotten act of defiance

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came flooding back. “You’ll need to come for a dress fitting next week,” she said.

“Just a minute,” I said, in a voice roughened by phlegm. I was battling my third case of strep throat in three months that, in honor of my birthday, everyone agreed to pretend I didn’t have. I had a fever. My tonsils blossomed with white pustules.

I put a hand over the receiver and said, nonchalantly, “This is a lady from Youth For Christ.” Everyone continued happily to eat. I’d asked for brisket for my birthday, and it was melting in their mouths. It had been hard, this year, to remember what I’d even liked before the Bill Gothard Seminar. I had meat to eat that they knew not of (John 4:32).

“I’ve been chosen to sing with Joyful Noise, a Youth For Christ choir, and I need to come for a dress fitting Tuesday. When Tuesday?” I said back into the receiver. “7:30 Tuesday.”

“Joyful what?” Momma said. A familiar tension made its way around the table.

People put down forks.

“Chosen? How were you chosen?” Daddy said. “Did they come door-to-door?

How were you selected if they never heard you sing?” Open defiance after all this submission–this he could sink his teeth into. After weeks of living with a Stepford daughter, he knew how to behave. “You didn’t try out for one of those YFC choirs did you? After we specifically told you not to?”

“Now, George, how could she have when we didn’t take her over there,” Momma said. “I don’t understand, Kelly.” She tried to come to my side, but none of us could move. The telephone cord was already stretched over a brother-in-law’s head, pulling strands of his thinning hair. He made no attempt to remove it.

“Just a minute,” I said to the woman at Youth For Christ.

“Is there a problem?” she said.

“No, I don’t think so. Everything’s all right.”

“Why did this woman call you out of the blue for a dress fitting?” Daddy said.

“I’m waiting.”

My three sisters looked at each other and cringed. They had all, at one time or another, done a seemingly harmless thing that sent him into a rage. It didn’t help now for Momma or anyone else to remind him that my arms weren’t riddled with needle marks and that I hadn’t gone into an alcoholic coma, fired a gun in the house, eaten glass, built a pipe bomb, shoplifted, spray painted my name on the Raytown water tower, harmed the upholstery, painted my room black. I had not even come close to kissing a girl. I had auditioned for a Christian girl’s choir.

Non Fiction

Kelly Barth

Muse & Stone 71

Non Fiction

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

“How did they get our phone number, honey?” Momma said, buttering a roll while she talked to reassure me that dinner would go on. “Kelly?”

“I went with Cheryl Tupper. When Cheryl tried out, the woman asked me to audition.”

“Oh, and you couldn’t just say, ‘No thank you, my parents say no,’” Daddy said.

“She dragged you up there on stage and forced you to sing. At gunpoint.”

I felt the woman’s voice vibrate into the earpiece of the phone.

“Just a minute,” I said to her. “I’ll be right with you.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, you have a perfectly good church?”

“It’s too liberal,” I said, quoting Cheryl. “They don’t talk enough about Jesus.”

Mention of Jesus made everyone visibly nervous, even Karen.

“Oh, so the church your mother and I attend isn’t good enough. So we aren’t good enough. We don’t know Jesus.” Daddy referred to Momma as Mother only when he needed to threaten us with distance, with taking her away from us, as if that were somehow within his power.

“Just tell the lady no—tell her you can’t, honey,” Momma said.

First, I grew very ashamed. I didn’t see anyone’s faces, only bits of sleeve, jaw lines, and greasy fingers.

And then, to my surprise, I felt a yell welling up and out of my swollen throat.

My arms stiffened, and I dropped the phone on the floor. The real me pushed aside the obedient plastic one.

“I’m going to do this,” I said. “You don’t understand. God wants me to sing.”

It was a scene worthy of Loretta Lynn. I stiffened and forgot where I was in my dressy chinos and pirate-sleeved blouse, my belly full of brisket. Yelling felt so good. So would have falling down and flopping around if there had been enough room.

Momma asked Roger to pick up the phone because he was closest to where it had fallen. Several people passed it down to her like a bowl of mashed potatoes. She said into it, “I’m sorry. There’s been a misunderstanding. Kelly can’t sing in your choir. Her father and I–. No you don’t need to talk with her again. She’s fine. You’ll just have to find someone else. I’m sorry, too.”

I stopped yelling and returned to my seat. A tear fell into the pool of grease and barbecue sauce on my plate, revealing a pink flower on Momma’s wedding china, which we ate off of only on special occasions.

“Kelly,” Karen said from across the table. Several pilgrim candles stared through the glass door of the hutch over her shoulder, waiting for Thanksgiving. “Remember this

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Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

is what God intends. No matter what, remember the umbrella of protection. Even when it doesn’t make sense.”

“Don’t you start now,” Daddy said to Karen.

“George,” Momma gave him a look.

Wiping my eyes, I saw them all, my sisters and my brothers-in-law staring at me in my birthday chair. I leaned it back on two legs to move away the few inches I could from them all until I tapped the glass of the sliding glass door behind me.

“Put that down on four legs. How many times have I told you not to tip? Next time, you’re going to glue the legs back in.” Daddy finished me off. I ate and chewed and swallowed. Brisket slid down my throat that was now throbbing with not only infection but also aborted rage. I tried to sniff, but my nose was completely plugged.

“Now, see there,” Momma said in a soft voice. “How could you sing all sick like this?”

That December break, I spent two days in the hospital having my tonsils out.

All the strep throat had left me with a heart murmur. The ear, nose, and throat doctor said if they did not remove my tonsils, which held streptococcus like wet sponges, I would never be myself again, even though whatever that had been was now in question.

It would take a long time for Imaginary Jesus to help me fully recover from the submissiveness.

“See,” Momma said to me one Friday night as we watched a Joyful Noise repeat on TV50. I lay on the couch in post-operative silence. “Just like Karen said, God knew best.” She could make use of Bill Gothard herself now since Karen had more fully explained the parents’ place in his diagrams. “It was His will that you didn’t sing in Joyful Noise. But in August, you just couldn’t have known that, could you?” Momma liked being an umbrella.

I couldn’t have known either that by forbidding my YFC choir experience and full fundamentalist immersion, she and Daddy, mean though he was, had prevented me from becoming so entirely strange I would have no longer been able to relate to anyone anymore, maybe not even Imaginary Jesus.

“Raise up a child in the way she should go and when she is old, she will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6),” Momma happily quoted another verse she’d memorized and rarely had the opportunity to use. I grimaced at her. “That’s a good sign.” She patted

Non Fiction

***

Muse & Stone 73

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go

Kelly Barth

Non Fiction

my head. “That’s my Kelly.” Imaginary Jesus smiled at her.

She offered me cheese and a cracker to chew into a soft bolus I could barely swallow while we watched the soprano, who I could never have, let her braces shine.

Slowly, my appetite was returning. People recognized me again.

74 Muse & Stone

Megan McCracken

Poetess

Poetry

She spread her hands through me, Weaving new race

into old sanity.

And it hoveled me like sparks lit afire carapaces,

little crickets in the night.

Muse & Stone 75

Megan McCracken

Poetry

What Is Now There were these two little girls, sitting in the back of a classroom.

(I was asleep in the middle of the floor.

Curled up like a grub clinging to a rather tasty root.)

The girls were not friends, more like mutual acquaintances.

They would share a pudding cup but never go to each other’s house.

(I jolted slightly as if meeting the ground for the first time after an extended period in the space above.

My little left toe twitched, and I drifted awake.)

Sometimes on grey days they would play hopscotch.

The smaller of the two called the dusty pebbles, “ground eggs.”

The other did not like the image.

(Someone had opened the door.

I grunted in anger and pulled my eyelids apart.

A hazy figure, slight, walked over to where I had bedded.)

The stout one of the two, had a gait that was wonky.

She wobbled to the left and strode swarthely to the right.

The tiny one, rode the street like a dancer.

She thought the other should walk in a less erratic fashion.

(Hair frothed across my vision, it was limp, and it smelled of gravel.

I reached my hands up to catch bony shoulders and rolled into feet that were rooted near my ribcage.

After a length of two second-hours

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Megan McCracken

What Is Now

I brought the stalk of grain that was a woman to the ground.)

These two girls agreed on their seats in the back of the room.

Here they could watch the clothing dribble across bodies as they shifted.

They would both silently laugh at chalk stains on the teacher’s shirt.

Then, when class was ended, each would stuff their own backpack and tumble out to the street to be collected.

(She left a thin strand of herself, floating down to us as we lay laughing, caked in a thin layer of dust.

I grabbed her arm and pressed it to my nose.

Her skin reeked of worn out mattress.

I thought it was nice.)

The bolder girl, with thin hands built for needles and thread, would like to slip her fingers between those of the other girl.

That girl’s hands were sturdy, built to work clay.

(My fingers scrounged around looking for the pillow I was laying on.

I could feel her breath on my scalp and my fingers twitched and sputtered.

Skin of a lip, upper or lower, rested on the whiskery hairs of my brow.

The skin around her lips tightened and relaxed in rapid succession.)

Poetry

“Do you remember those girls?”

Muse & Stone 77

Megan McCracken

Sand I woke and could hear the splutter of sand draining from my lungs. The heavy burden hidden deep in my flesh, boiling through my lips. My eyes would focus in a few moments, but I would not remember where I had been. I was terrified.

They went something like the bleating heart of existence. Each vein slumped carelessly across another’s path, pulling and producing blood. Grainy and thin, and it surged deep into the soil. Powerhouses; along which we held our hands and counted the bricks.

Sitting in the corner, eyes forced forward, we had slunk in like sinful children. Our fingers nervously wringing and grasping each other. Throwing our fears to the brims of our spoiled mouths. The sweet honeydew that was given in recompense had spoiled an age ago.

We are starved. Our ribs clutching stones in our stomachs, projecting guttural howls of pain.

Our bodies are cold, though we huddle into each other’s warmth. All the walls are sand. Our toes are spilling into the grains.

They came. Their feet pulsed above the felled bricks of the castle. Each a soldier, lacquered with silver metals, grabbing with fingers and mistwrot limbs they wrenched our bodies away from each other.

Poetry

I woke. I am mineral and rock, the leftover hunger of the tide’s thrash. Cleaving pieces of myself to naked feet. My skin left in ruins and ebb.

78 Muse & Stone

David James

A Little Night Music “Price a British company charges to have a deceased person’s ashes pressed into a package of 30 vinyl records: $4,704.”

Harper’s, December 2010 You have my permission:

press me into a record, a classic, one you’ll bring out at parties and reunions, one you’ll put on

late at night, forlorn, when you’re standing on the cliff of one of those month-long depressions.

Let a part of me soothe you back

into life.

Let the music lift and carry you from the steep edge to a warm cave, a small fire lighting the walls, a pot of stew boiling in the hot coals.

It’s a small price to pay for sanity: $156.80 per album.

That’s less than two hours with a decent therapist.

Poetry

Invest in a good record player. Carefully set the album on, lift the needle.

You can imagine my face as you sing, remember my body as you dance alone in the living room.

Picture me sitting there, tapping my foot, watching you move slowly across the floor, smiling and happy

again.

Muse & Stone 79

Contributors Shanti Elke Bannwart is a licensed counselor and life-coach, a writer and elder.

She lives in Santa Fe and is devoted to “Reflective Activism” on the issues of war and peace, living with purpose and passion. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her essays have been published in national and international magazines. Her essays were awarded several prizes in national competitions.

The Lilac Bush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Kelly Barth lives on very little money in a very small house with her partner Lisa Grossman in Lawrence, Kansas. She was a fiction fellow in the University of Montana's Creative Writing program and has received fellowships from the Missouri Arts Council and the Kansas Arts Commission. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary journals, most recently The Literary Bird Journal. Her memoir, Searching for Imaginary Jesus, will be published by Arktoi Books, an imprint of Redhen Press, in early 2012.

Raise Up a Child the Way They Should Go. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Andrew Buda is a junior Interactive Design major who loves engaging the world through his photography. He strives to capture the unique and colorful personalities of the many different aspects in our world. He tries to capture moments in time that have something to say about life, so that we may look back on them and soak them in.

Spirit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Bird. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 David Bushelle teaches writing, mythology and literature at local colleges and has been published in a wide variety of journals.

Two Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 James Cole “I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature, and I desire no other fate than to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.” - Claude Monet.

Tandem Carnage or Two Mice One Trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Summer Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Georgia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Vascular Contrast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Ryan Dallatore ÂĄViva el autĂŠntico!

Anomaly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Jeremy Inzer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 A. Kay Emmert is a native Oklahoman who has recently received her MFA at Georgia College where she taught Composition and Creative Writing. She has served on the editorial staff of Arts & Letters for the past three years and coordinated the Georgia College Early College WITS program. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Kestrel, The Mom Egg, and Slipstream.

Snakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Natalie George is a Creative Writing & Art major at Waynesburg University who dreams of traveling the world & sharing the Word.

(Untitled) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Melting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Windy Day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Gary Hanna has received fellowships in poetry from the Delaware Division of the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, won three small national contests, and his poetry has been published in over 60 journals and anthologies.

He is the Director of the Poetry At The Beach reading series and the Writer's Library in southern Delaware and is on the Editorial Board of the Broadkill Review.

An Encounter of Eyes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 David James' most recent book, She Dances Like Mussolini, won the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Award for poetry. His one-act plays have been produced from New York to California; he teaches writing at Oakland Community College.

A Little Night Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Judy Klass has had short stories in Asimov's Magazine, the Harpur Palate, Suffusion and Satire, among other publications. Her short plays have appeared in the Rockhurst Review, the Rockford Review, The Art of the One-Act and the textbook Access: Literature. Her full-length play Cell was nominated for an Edgar, and is published by Samuel French. She co-wrote the Showtime film In the Time of the Butterflies, based on the novel by Julia Alvarez. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

I Am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Jonnell Liebl will not be here in the fall.

Desert Winds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Snowstorm in Redfield. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Carol Matos lives in New York City where she serves as Director of Administration at Manhattan School of Music. Formerly a professional photographer, her photographs have been exhibited in galleries in New York City and Europe. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in, RHINO Literary Journal, Ibbetson Street Press, Comstock Review, Convergence Journal, The Prose Poem Project, Epiphany Journal, Out of Our Journal and 34th Parallel. She was awarded semi-finalist status in the 2009 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest.

Iceland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Clive Matson (MFA Columbia University) was drafted as Chalcedony’s (kalSAID-n-ease) astonished scribe in 2004. His early teachers were Beats in New York City, and, amazingly, his seventh book was placed in John Wieners' coffin. He became immersed in the stream of passionate intensity that runs through us all and has finally stopped trying to go anywhere else. He writes from the itch in his body, to the delight of his students, and that's old hat, according to Let the Crazy Child Write! (1998), the text he uses to make his living, teaching creative writing.

He enjoys playing basketball, table tennis, and collecting minerals in the field. He lives in Oakland, California, where he helps bring up his young teenage son, Ezra.

Visit Clive at www.matsonpoet.com.

Song Five. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Megan McCracken doesn’t know what she wants to write in her bio.

Toilet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Poetess. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What Is Now. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42 73 74 76

Robyn Murphy lives in the egret-infested hinterlands of northern Connecticut and teaches at several area colleges. She received her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, and her short work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Cream City Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Parting Gifts, Barbaric Yawp, Gertrude, The Armchair Aesthete, and The New Orleans Review. She was also a finalist for the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her first novel is presently searching for a publisher.

Distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The Ultimate How-to Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Julia Paganelli began writing at the age of 5 when her Kindergarten teacher forced her to write an "About Me" book. Julia filled this book with lies about wanting to become a mailman. Today, Julia makes stuff up and calls it poetry.

Mother Teresa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Dr. Mary Clare Powell is a professor at Lesley University in the Creative Arts in Learning Division where she teaches poetry in this M.Ed. program in integrated arts to teachers across the country. A previous career was as a photographer and teacher of photography in the Washington, DC area. A lifelong teacher, she has traveled in many countries and taught in Taipei, Taiwan. In the last 25, she has published books on women and the future; the arts, education, and social change; and three books of poetry—Things Owls Ate, Academic Scat, and In the Living Room. She lives in Greenfield, MA where she works on the Franklin County Arts and Culture Partnership and is on the Board of Trustees of the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School.

On The Honda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Gregory Reinhart is a Communication major student from Ohio who likes to ignite the world by taking photos.

Chairlift to Heaven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Everlasting Dusk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Sarah Rizzi is a junior Art Education major who enjoys reading, sitting on porches, and dogs; particularly her favorite black lab, Roxy. She also thoroughly enjoys summer as it provides her with many opportunities to do fun things outside.

Hungry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Jonathan H. Scott's poetry and short-stories have been published (or are upcoming) in The Able Muse, Aura Literary Arts Review, Blood and Thunder, The Broome Review, Caesura, Hospital Drive, Measure, Peregrine, THEMA, and others.

He earned a Master’s in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he lives.

Jacket Pockets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 A graduating senior, Sarah Spicuzza is passionate about all things creative. With an understanding of the relationship between communication and the evolution of new technologies, she plans a career to apply public relations principles to this ever-changing concept. When she finds spare time, she enjoys reading, playing soccer and traveling the world. Laughter, service and meaningful relationships are integral to her happiness.

Le Dam de Fer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Kristen Sneller is a junior Interactive Design major at Waynesburg University who moved to Pennsylvania from Michigan in 2008. She enjoys sculpting, drawing, doodling, graphic design, long walks on the beach, and learning how to dance. She thank God for His grace, which is more than enough for each new day.

Couch Potato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover Krysta Stanko is a junior Art Education major from Kane, PA. She enjoys all aspects of art but mostly ceramics. She plans to explore many possibilities in the arts next semester with several independent studies.

Rose Petals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Ann G. Thomas (Ed.D) is a psychotherapist in private practice, a speaker, an award winning writer and a specialist in both child development and aging: the 'bookends' of life. She is currently working to activate a BLOG, called The Paranting Clinic and she, along with much of her writing, can be reached through her website, dr-annthomas.com.

Port. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52