Fall 2020 | Volume 19, Issue 1
The Oklahoma Review
Cameron University
The Oklahoma Review Volume 19: Issue 1, Fall 2020
Published by: Cameron University Department of Communication, English and Foreign Languages
Managing Editor GARY REDDIN
Faculty Editors
WILLIAM CARNEY & LEAH CHAFFINS
Layout and Design GARY REDDIN
Cover Art
GARY REDDIN
Mission Statement
The Oklahoma Review is an electronic literary magazine published through the Department of English at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. The goal of our publication is to provide a forum for exceptional fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in a dynamic, appealing, and accessible environment. The magazine’s only agenda is to promote the pleasures and edification derived from high-quality literature.
The Staff
The views expressed in The Oklahoma Review do not necessarily correspond to those of Cameron University, and the university’s support of this magazine should not be seen as any endorsement of any philosophy other than faith in – and support of – free expression. The content of this publication may not be reproduced without the written consent of The Oklahoma Review or the authors.
Call for Submissions
The Oklahoma Review is a continuous, online publication. We publish two issues each year: Spring and Fall. The Oklahoma Review only accepts manuscripts during two open reading periods. 4
•Reading dates for the Fall issue will now be from August 1 to October 15 •Reading dates for the Spring issue will be January 1 to March 15. Work sent outside of these two periods will be returned unread.
Guidelines:
Submissions are welcome from any serious writer working in English. Email your submissions to okreview@cameron.edu. Writers may submit the following: •Prose fiction pieces of 30 pages or less. •As many as five (5) poems of any length. •Nonfiction prose pieces of 30 pages or less. •As many as five (5) pieces of visual art— photography, paintings, prints, etc. •All files should be sent as e-mail attachments in either .doc or .rtf format for text, and .jpeg for art submissions. We will neither consider nor return submissions sent in hard copy, even if return postage is included. •When sending multiple submissions (e.g. five poems), please include all the work in a single file rather than five separate files. •Authors should also provide a cover paragraph with a short biography in the body of their e-mail. •Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please indicate in your cover letter if your work is under consideration elsewhere. •Please direct all submissions and inquiries to oklareview@gmail.com
Table of Contents Poetry
Names of Birds | 7 The Black Dog | 8 “Those are just words, man” | 9 Upon Learning of a Friend’s Imminent Death | 10 [musical] | 11 [Bbbrt] | 12 [even the ant] | 13 The cold coat | 14 Neighbors | 15 Counting pies before their baked | 16 Day goes home | 17 Best mistake | 18 On the run | 19 Crossing the Valley | 20 Late-Night, 395 South | 21
Fiction
The Evening News | 23
Nonfiction
Luminous | 29 Why Were They Laughing? | 35
Art
“Oklahoma Morning” | 39 “I’ve seen this one before” | 40 “Patron Saint” | 41
Contributors
5
Poetry
6
Names of Birds I do not know the names of birds as I should, as my ancestors no doubt did trudging under them as they trekked Carolina to Tennessee on to Arkansas, shadows of wings flitting over their heads. Oh, I know the garish he-cardinal, the bully bluebird, robin with spring’s worm bright in its beak, quarrelsome grackles and starlings hording in fragile branches of sycamores. But these five flyers bouncing from powerline to fence to still-leafless maple— fighting or flirting, I can’t say— their sudden dance on a sunny, dismal day seems otherworldly, spirits from some old story told around a campfire circled by humble wagons of my ancestors, who knew the names of birds.
- Don Stinson
7
The Black Dog Sometimes it comes in the door like a feather on the shoulder of a shadow. Other times you turn and there it stands, or lies, or rolls over and plays you know what. Sometimes it’s a chihuahua, ridiculous, too stupid even for self-loathing. Other time’s it’s a Dane so great Hamlet pales, and if you try to walk it you end up dragged through the dirt, a bone ready for burial. Most of the time it’s a Bassett Hound, jowls and ears dragging the ground, and it casts no shadow, for your shadow covers it completely, until only its eyes remain, locking on yours until the dog enters you like dark steam, and you feel nothing, nothing at all.
- Don Stinson
8
“Those are Just Words, Man” Grout is one of those words, isn’t it? Like kumquat or laissez faire, one that rolls not only off your tongue but out of your mind, where you’re on a surfboard inspired by Bob Marley in an ocean full of motion with not a shark in sight and Mother Mary’s been praying for you since the day you were born. Go ride that wave, the one swelling and rising like the inflections of certain syllables, like always, like simile, like a child’s smile, like You really mean it this time, don’t you, and Lover, oh Lover, so do I.
- Don Stinson
9
Upon Learning of a Friend’s Imminent Death The heart clutches at the words “lemon-sized tumor,” a tight fist of thick sorrow. When I saw you last summer, with your wig and prosthetic breast, you still wore that Adair County smile and that wonderful laugh as you said you sought a man looking for a bald woman with one boob. I remember your country mother cooking squirrel dumplings on a cast iron stove, and how you loved teaching—no, not teaching, but your students. Nila, may your journey be easy, light as ripples on the Illinois River on a September morning after autumn’s first so-long-awaited rain.
- Don Stinson
10
[musical] Gray day, after the long rain, everything green, and inside, dry, he sings the first few words of “Love a Rainy Night,” by Eddie Rabbitt, and she says, “Enough. It’s not raining. And it’s not night.”
- Kevin Rabas
11
[Bbbrt] Gorillas fart a lot, no one seems to talk about that much. Maybe we’re all meant to fart, and should not always cover it, feel unclean, unseemly, and so full, so full of shit.
- Kevin Rabas
12
[even the ant] Even the ant casts a shadow in the August sun.
- Kevin Rabas
13
The cold coat The cold coat has been laid down Blanketing every dark thing Hiding houses Behind deep drooping branches I scoop up the chilly fluff That bends and cracks tree limbs Crashing down And blow it away easily It appears deceptively light Deceptively cozy I dig a hole The grass is still green below I wander sinking in the cold coat Until my feet becoming soggy And numb to pain Time to retreat from this illusion
- Kathleen N. Listman
14
Neighbors Having lived in the city for so long Where privacy exists only inside The concrete for my backyard The sidewalk for my front yard I hear neighbors to the top I hear neighbors on both sides And the traffic never stops Moving to the country days ago Where distance seems too far Wild ravine for a backyard Field of weeds for a front yard Neighbors houses are but dots Down the narrow winding road Where traffic rarely goes Discovering a garden long forgotten In between the weeds tomatoes hide Bringing order of the city To the chaos of the country Whacking with the iron hoe Cleaning out the clogged rows So I can walk satisfied Staring out the window into dusk The reddening tomatoes my pride After weeks of careful pruning Green fruits are now turning But new neighbors have seen He sneaks from the ravine And the fox steals his feast
- Kathleen N. Listman
15
Counting pies before their baked Ripped from Spring’s soprano throat hot and cold slams and dances roof rolls back in one step pirouettes in next county. Planks surgically divide trees ruining expected crop’s crisp promise of dripping fruit and hot pies.
- Michelle Hartman
16
after Laurie Kolp
Day goes home shoulders slightly hunched lunch bucket occasionally bangs knee more lethargy than weight ponders how to face another shift as so many entities commit suicide in Rube Goldberg political farce taking the lonely planet with them Night for all the difference might as well take over
- Michelle Hartman
17
Best mistake Pulling each memory through experiences needle eye I conjure gossamer shrouds pulled closer & closer around my shoulders all that warms me now
- Michelle Hartman
18
On the Run Folks said they were crazy Completely irate Took ‘em to a place called Woodlawn Estates. The girl in her cell ate cigarette butts And the man in his Bombed little grass huts. With friends on the outside And the sanity left inside They made their escape. They joined up with a caravan Travelin’ cross the land Sleepin’ in the desert sand And dodgin’ the man. Made a gas stop and some old man Called up the cops. Man spied by a friend On the run again. On the run from the sanity Man calls humanity. Never did trust ol’ Jess, But they lost him in a fuss ‘Bout a girl in a bar Near Omaha. On the run from the sanity Man calls humanity. Papa was a cryin’ Mama was a dyin’ Couldn’t find their pups And then they woke up.
- Sheila Robinson
19
Crossing the Valley Past the deputy sheriff in his sand-colored truck, through the curve of starlings, the farmhouses, fields, hawks. Nosing with the horses or cattle, a tired pronghorn, a lame deer, even a half-blind coyote seeks to stagger in the livestock’s sleep-worn steps, dozing in safety’s constant daylight. But the fences and warm stables starve us with order. Captivity holds our nightfall back. Like the dawn our hearts are broken.
- Ryan Scariano
20
Late-Night, 395 South Like never before and never again Muse Road snuck up out of the fog and kissed me.
- Ryan Scariano
21
Fiction
22
The Evening News By Patience Williams
Silver stars twinkled in the black sky. No clouds blocked the view, and no streetlights hazed it over be-
cause the power just went out. The small girl with purple glasses was sequestered in her dark room, and wished for a shooting star to fly across the twinkling sky. Something happened today that invaded her somehow, but she couldn’t pinpoint why she felt that it made her sad and guilty. She heard her sister banging around in the kitchen right as the loud, Latino music that had been pouring in from the loft above theirs suddenly stopped playing. A siren sped past and the doorknob to her room jiggled a little, and then the door flew open. Her older sister Samantha stood there holding a mug steaming at the top, her legs lengthening out of little shorts and her stomach exposed from a tight tank top. There was no air conditioning.
“Are you okay?” Samantha asked.
Someone laughed obnoxiously loud near the window. Gloria sighed, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered.
“Okay. Do you want some tea?”
“Yeah.”
Her older sister sighed a little but, seeing that her younger sister was still watching her, smiled and
walked over. “Be careful, it’s hot.” She placed the mug down on her desk.
Samantha left and closed the door behind her. The power cut back on and the living room light illumi-
nated a dim yellow in the hallway. She turned into the kitchen and refilled the electric kettle and then went into her room. He was sitting upright in bed, leaning against the wooden bedframe with the remote in his lap. Since she arrived empty-handed, he made a small face but didn’t say anything because she saw his reaction. “I’m making more,” she said. He leaned over to kiss her and hug her thigh.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her.
“No, are you?”
“No.” Pause. 23
“Yes you are.”
He laughed. “No, I’m not! And what are we doing, huh? Are we watching tv? Talking?”
The kettle went off.
“I’ll be back,” she said. She poured two medium-sized mugs and dropped an earl grey tea bag into each.
In her bedroom, the small girl sipped her tea and contemplated the previous happenings of the day. She
was in class with her other classmates when she saw it—her teacher looked at her differently, and spoke to her differently. She didn’t understand why and she was sure that she wasn’t supposed to notice this, and no one else noticed it either. The thing that bothered her most was that this behavior wasn’t acknowledged, nor corrected— the moment passed as though it never happened. And then she had smiled at something her teacher had said and then her teacher said something to make her laugh and told the other kids how smart she was. The discomfort lingered, and here she was, contemplating what it meant and why she couldn’t define this feeling that invaded her, and that she couldn’t remove (it was sharp) nor forget about.
Gloria moved to the kitchen with her book because the kitchen light finally came on, and she didn’t want
to be alone much longer. Her sister came out and poured another steaming cup of tea.
“Can I pour milk into mine?” Gloria asked.
Samantha smiled. “Of course you can. You know that you can have as much milk as you want—you just
can’t have soda more than once a day.”
“I know. I just wanted to make sure I actually knew that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired but I’m too young to be.” As she exhaled, her sister’s boyfriend came into the
kitchen and drank from the tea Samantha just poured.
Gloria spoke again, with her eyes casted down and her glasses slipping slightly lower. “I don’t live in the
same world that they have us read about, or study, or dream for. I can feel the way they look at me—” “Who?”
“Them. You know them—everyone who isn’t them is conscious of exactly them, of what they do. Sa-
mantha, I know you love me and you tell me if I keep studying and reading the books I like then I can get into a 24
really good college—”
“Yes!”
“But I don’t like how they look at me!” Gloria’s voice cracked some and her sister’s heart broke. “They
know so little of what they do and they have so many excuses for the things they don’t even know!”
Samantha and her boyfriend looked shyly at each other. Gloria was the smartest child they knew—even
smarter than most adults—and could not imagine how the inadequacy of everyone else might make her feel inferior. He wrapped his arm around his girlfriend’s waist and rested his head on her shoulder, looking receptively at the little girl.
“Keep talking, baby,” he said.
“Okay. It goes like this—
I have less than a split second to prove to someone that I’m not who they think I am or what they expect
me to be. And I can already tell by the moment they look at me that they have an expectation; I can read their openness, but they can’t read mine. I take their judgments and assumptions of me they don’t realize they have— or honestly don’t believe exists within them—and I talk to them about things that make them smile, that impress them, that flatter them—and then, we leave each other and they feel good. This is because I’ve manipulated their thoughts of me against themselves and I won the battle with their own perception.
“But why am I only 8 years old and could tell that my teacher sees me differently and that the world
wants me to prove my own humanity?”
Samantha was crying now, but she didn’t interject. Her boyfriend kissed her forehead and then gazed at
the little girl with moistened, light brown eyes. “God damn,” he whispered.
Gloria continued but she didn’t look at them. She entered her Dream State—funneling into a world in-
side of her that she could not explain—only loathe and remain quiet as it made her experience tiredness, heaviness, and attention to everything around her that made her feel self-conscious and hollowly existent. “I feel like I know something I’m not supposed to know,” she said in a low, crystallized tone. “Like it doesn’t actually exist. I don’t know that it exists, but I feel it. They don’t look at me the same and from the moment they look at me I have to prove that I’m human.”
Samantha went over to her younger sister and hugged her as fiercely as she could in effort to make up
25
for the words she did not have and the explanation she could not give and the protection she could not provide. “It’s starting to rain,” her boyfriend said quietly, disappearing from the kitchen and going back to the bedroom. A window closed.
“I’m going to close the window in your bedroom,” Samantha said. Gloria nodded, but she could tell that
her older sister had gone someplace that she herself knew already. Samantha’s own Dream State had grown to be a place of terror and solace, as well as a resting stop for pain. This is where the emotions lay before she committed her unruliest actions or opened her mouth to say horrid things against the people her sister was talking about. However, she was proud of how she carried the weight and how it defined her. It gave her grace, a sense that she knew about different frequencies that other people did not know existed. She also learned to combat her sadness with her culture, with the way she was taught how to better herself and make herself happy. It was an amusement park of melancholy—she could choose which ride would make her feel woozy with disgust or exhaustion, stare at the bright, hypnotic lights of her thoughts as they channeled something new to her or something weary and dazed. A light shower released within her as she went to close her sister’s window, muffling the thick sound of the silver rain falling heavy.
When she turned around, Gloria was standing in the doorway with her glasses crooked on her face as she
rubbed one of her eyes with the back of her hand. She knew from the way she stood that she had been crying. “I know it hurts but you are going to learn about yourself and the ways of the world from how you feel,” her older sister said. “There are many corrupt and hurtful things about this earth and the people on it, but as there are many resources to harm ourselves, there are just as many to heal us.
“Use everything in your heart to guide you, to serve the goodness you wish came unconditionally and
without effort. You have to keep liking who you are because people are going to sense that. They already do, and many are going to change how they act around you as you get older.”
The volume on the living room television increased enough for them to hear of a shooting from that
night, less than an hour ago. Her younger sister assumed that’s where the sirens were headed. The expression on her face changed from upset to angry. “Okay, I’ll go to sleep now,” Gloria said abruptly. Her older sister nodded and left the room, eager to crawl into her boyfriend’s arms and fall asleep. Her sadness had released her for the night, and the small pouring that had lessened to a sparkling within her had yet to subside. The crystalized sadness was evaporating into a subtler, lighter version of her Dream State: the one of loosely grounded and un26
restricted dream. She wanted to talk quietly but intensely about things that were special to her—but she couldn’t do it with her sister, not while she was entering a deeper dimension of her State. She left the room and closed the door behind her.
The little girl watched the rain pour on the outside of her windowpane and bleed down the front. She
could still see the moon, but it was blurry now. “Dear God,” she whispered in prayer, “Please pray for all the black bodies that will flood tonight.”
27
Nonfiction
28
Luminous By Kylee George
The first house we lived in was a small one story outfit with space in both the front and back to play. The
backyard was spotted with patches of red dirt between the blades of bermuda grass and outlined by a chain link fence that was taller than me, though not by much. In the front, there were two rows of southern wax myrtle, trimmed into a rectangular prismatic shape that lined the sidewalk to the front door and our driveway. One of these hedges bore hard and round berries that once, at the age of five, left to my own devices while my mother cleaned the garage, I decided to collect and swallow. A call to poison control was eventually made and I spent the rest of the day lying on the couch, sorry for my attempt at foraging.
As a young and adventurous child, much of my world was made up of the front and back yards of this
house. This was the place I learned to climb trees especially fast without my shoes on, where I practiced dribbling soccer balls up and down the street (also often barefoot, much to the chagrin of my mother), and where I had many unfortunate experiments with gravity–from falling out of trees to tipping over on a ladder and even once pulling the entire shelving system in the garage down on myself. It was also the place where I first encountered the lightning bug.
Lightning bugs, as my family calls them, are known officially as Lampyridae and are a type of soft-bodied
beetles. There are many different species of Lampyridae that vary in shape and size, sleeping and mating patterns, and location. Not all Lampyridae light up.
Their lights, of course, are what make lightning bugs or fireflies, whatever you like to call them, so recog-
nizable. This is due to a process called bioluminescence–where chemicals in specialized cells in the insect’s abdomen combine with oxygen to create a new, inactive molecule called oxyluciferin. The reaction, caused by an enzyme called luciferase, does two things: first, it combines with a phosphate to form a new compound on the surface of the enzyme. Then, that compound combines with oxygen to form the oxyluciferin and yet another phosphate compound. This is the winning combination–the chemical compound that gives off light in varying shades of white, green, yellow, and even hints of red on occasion.
I don’t remember the first time I saw these little creatures, cousins of the hard-shelled black beetles that I
often found rooting around in the dirt beneath our shrubs, flitting about in our front yard. I do, however, remember lying in the grass there and watching them shine above me, their lights flickering on and off as they worked to 29
attract a mate or a meal–long before I learned that those options could be one and the same. At the age of three or four it didn’t yet occur to me to give chase and attempt to capture one between my grass-stained palms.
As I grew older, the lightning bugs became a sign of the oncoming summer; when they appeared, I knew
that school was soon to end and the air was ready heat up. The summers where I lived in Central Oklahoma went through climactic phases, culminating through July and August in a dense paste of heat that was inescapable. The lightning bugs, however, came before that–in late April and early May, when the winter chill was giving way to the oncoming warmth, the thickening of the air that smelled of honeysuckle and rain. They were always a welcome part of the symphony of spring. ***
We moved to a new house when I was seven or eight, one with more room inside and a cast of neighbors
with whom I would play for the remaining years of my childhood. The backyard was dense with trees, many of which were dead due and would be removed in our first year there, the ground covered only by red dirt that turned to thick mud any time it rained. The front yard was covered by a dense fescue and sloped steeply down to the street. This is where I spent most of my time playing–where I learned to skateboard and where I played ill-advised games of tackle-football with the other neighborhood kids, most of whom were boys who had no qualms taking me down at full force.
This is also the patch of grass where I learned that sometimes, it is dangerous to be luminescent.
As I mentioned before, I never had the urge to chase and capture those little glowing beetles–at least, I
didn’t until I saw my next door neighbor Brandon doing just that. He told me, with that wild kind of excitement that accompanies childhood discoveries, how beautiful they were if you put two or three or four of them in a jar, how they would bounce around inside the glass, flickering like a magic lantern. I watched as he bounced around the yard, barefoot, knobby white knees stained green and brown from diving in the grass. After what felt like an hour, he let out a glee-filled scream and held his arms out towards me, hands cupped in the fading light. I looked at him, puzzled–how did he know he got it? And then I saw it. Peeking out from the spaces between his middle and ring finger was a soft yellow light.
I rushed to grab the empty jam jar he had brought outside and he carefully deposited the lightning bug into
it. I kept my hand over the top to keep our new charge in while he ran to get plastic wrap to cover the top. As I waited, I lifted the jar to my eyes and peered inside to get a better look at the subject of all this excitement. 30
The lightning bug had settled on one wall of the jar, opposite the sticky residue of a Smuckers label that
had been hastily torn off. Every so often, its abdomen crescendoed to radiate a clean yellow glow, and then it would fade. I studied its soft brown shell, the yellow-striped elytra which protected its wings, and the white plates of its head. It flitted to the adjacent wall of the jar and settled again; I wondered what it thought of me.
Soon, Brandon returned and we fitted the plastic wrap over the top and held it up–our lightning bug. Our
lantern.
At first, the lightning bug resisted, flying up at the plastic wrap to make an escape. But it realized soon that
there would be no escape, and instead took to flitting about the jar, flashing the yellow glow of its abdomen–just like Brandon had promised. We looked at it with glee.
After some time, the light emanating from the insect’s abdomen began to grow dimmer, its movements
more lethargic as it crawled along the walls to the base of the glass.
“Air holes!” Brandon exclaimed suddenly. “We didn’t give it air holes!” He ran around the yard, search-
ing feverishly for a stick small enough to punch holes in the top that would let in oxygen without letting out our charge. He found one and ran back, but it was too late. The bug was dead, its light faded for the last time.
I was called inside soon after, and with little time to reflect on the events of that evening, went to sleep
thinking about the importance of air holes.
We resumed our hunt the next evening, this time prepping the plastic wrap with air hole before we began.
Brandon caught the first one, and I the second and third, then he trapped the fourth–barely avoiding crushing its soft body between his fingers. With the four of them in the jar, we watched in wonder. Over time, it seemed that their lights synced up with one another, pulsating from darkness to a radiant yellow glow together in the dark of the night. He had been right; they were positively beautiful.
We were called inside again, and Brandon let me keep the jar with our four lightning bugs–our bug lantern,
as he called it. I took it to my room and set it on my bedside table and watched as they glowed in the dark room until I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, all four of them were dead and I was distraught. I didn’t understand–we
had poked holes in the plastic and even put some dirt and grass in the jar to make it feel more like home. Why had they died? 31
My mother found me embroiled in distress and had pity on me. She took the jar to the backyard where, I
imagine, she took off the plastic wrap, turned it over, and shook out the grass, the dirt, and the tiny Coleopteric carcasses that had collected at the bottom. As I got ready for swim practiced, I wondered if it had hurt when they’d died–if they had tried to escape or comforted each other in their final moments.
At that age, I didn’t understand what I know now: that poking holes and putting a handful of grass in the
jar is not enough to replicate their environment. Lightning bugs, like all creatures, have a complex set of needs that must be met for them to survive in an environment. ***
According to the organization Firefly Conservation and Research, lightning bugs need moisture in their
environments to survive. In order to promote a positive habitat for these little flickering beetles, it’s best to have some kind of water available in your yard, whether that is a pond or a fountain or a natural stream. Fireflies survive best in moist climates, places with high humidity and lakes and rivers. They also appreciate organic debris like logs and fallen leaves that rot and give larvae a safe place to grow. Like many other insect species, lightning bugs are endangered by modern environmental practices like pesticide usage, chemical fertilizers, and over-mowing of lawns.
This organization also provides directives on how to best care for captured lightning bugs, which includes
placing clumps of grass and apple slices into the jar and leaving the lid without holes, in order to preserve the moisture of the air that lightning bugs so desperately crave. According to their research, fireflies should only be kept in captivity for a day or two; they have relatively short lifespans with which to flit about and illuminate the night sky. Also, the jar might run out of oxygen and they will die.
I don’t know why Brandon and my lightning bugs died so quickly. I have to assume it was because we put
them in a tiny jar and poked holes in the plastic wrap, thereby drying out the air. That doesn’t explain the first one, though. Rather, I tend to attribute a more existential cause to their death; we catch fireflies and put them in jars because they are luminous. But no one truly thrives in captivity–eventually, that light will go out. ***
At the end of my first year in New Mexico, a group of colleagues-turned-friends and I drove three hours
from Gallup to Kayenta, Arizona to help another friend do some renovations on her mother’s home. The house had been damaged in a fire almost a year before and our task was to help tear out damaged drywall and insulation 32
so that they could come in and make the necessary repairs. I discovered throughout the course of this day that I may have missed my calling in home renovation, as there are few things quite as satisfying as ripping through plaster with a sledgehammer.
At the end of the day, when the job was done and we were sweaty and coated with dust and insulation, we
got back in our cars and drove another twenty minutes or so towards Monument Valley Tribal Park. Before we had reached the park, we took a turn onto a dirt road which wound us between a few scattered houses, over a creek, and eventually into the heart of an idyllic canyon. Though we had all been happy to help our friend, the canyon had been advertised as the real draw of our day of service–a secluded canyon away from the tourist traps of this part of the reservation where we could camp, hike, and relax after a hard day’s work.
There were three layers of canyon that rose vertically from where we stopped, two of which were acces-
sible with a bit of free-climbing and boulder hopping. The third layer would have required ropes to scale. To the south, up a short incline, was a leveled field planted with rows of squash and melons and corn. On the other side of that field was a traditional Diné sweat lodge, dug deep into the ground and protected from the elements by debarked branches engineered into a perfect cone shape.
And then there was our campsite, an expansive grove along a stream, covered in soft grass that was so
uncharacteristic of the desert southwest that I almost didn’t believe it. There were great oak trees that stretched into the sky and shaded the ground and smaller trees dotted with little green balls, apricots in the early stages of life, still safe from being plucked. And then there was the stream–rushing from the falls that spilled over a canyon wall maybe a quarter mile to the south and east, it filled the air with a cool dampness that reminded me of spring mornings back home.
We pitched our tents and started a fire before the sun dipped below the canyon walls that surrounded us,
changing into shorts and t-shirts and stretching out in the cool grass. There was no phone service to speak of in the canyon, and so no distractions from our surroundings, and for that I was grateful. We cooked over the fire and passed around a case of beer to share–technically an illegal activity on the reservation but we felt very far from anyones rules. And then the sun went down, and the canyon lit up.
Lightning bugs dotted the grove that we occupied, little burning lights floating every few feet. Along the
horizon, on the other side of the stream, their lights pulsed in tandem as the beetles flitted about, greeting one another, putting on a show for us. Unlike the lightning bugs I had grown accustomed to in my youth, these ones 33
represented a spectrum of colors–white, yellow, blue, greenish and red tinted. They were as unique as the desert oasis that they had made their home.
I was enthralled by this light show, but my companions were oblivious–they continued talking and laugh-
ing. Eventually I turned back to the conversation and laughed along with my friends, but I never quite forgot the luminescence of those little beetles.
34
Why Were They Laughing? By Kathleen N. Listman Humor was not my initial intention. Teaching the theory of concept attainment was. My classmates stared at me as I entered the room lugging a heavy wooden post with an ornate realtor’s sign dangling from it. I plopped into the nearest seat, still panting from exertion.
“Who wants to demonstrate their technique first?” The professor asked.
I raised my hand quickly. She often graded the first guinea pig to volunteer with a bit more kindness. Taking a deep breath, I drug my collection of paired objects in front of the ancient black board. “This one fits what I want,” I stated while flourishing a bright pink Nike with a bold silver swoosh. “And, this one doesn’t.” I lifted up a generic tennis shoe from Walmart. The sharper adults caught on the quickly, unlike the struggling high school students that I usually teach. After exhibiting a few more pairs I assumed my classmates, even the guy yawning in the back, understood the concept of status conferred by logos, so I started the test.
“Does this one fit?” I inquired holding a For Sale placard.
“What do you think about this one?” I hefted the high-class Ebby Halliday Realtor sign.
“It’s stolen.” The guy in the back murmured in a deep voice.
As snickers rolled through the class I imagined I stood in front of high school students again. I took another deep breath, paused, and then continued. A question arose in the back of my mind. Why exactly do we laugh? I am well aware that high school students laugh at anything. This serves a dual purpose of slowing down instruction and drawing attention to themselves at an age when the illusion exists that everyone notices them. However, this classroom contained adults, many exhausted after a full day of teaching. Thomas Hobbes described laughter as the response of one person trying to express superiority over another. For him humor was always at someone else’s expense—calling attention to other’s faults and foibles in a way that glorified oneself. In an ironic twist, Hobbes indicated that the people who laughed the most were the ones who felt the greatest sense of inferiority. He was not the first to express this superiority theory. Plato recorded a very similar explanation many centuries earlier. Two classic writers with the same idea—maybe the other teachers thought that laughing at me would make them look better. However, I wanted to believe better of them than that, so I searched for other ideas. In the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison and David Hartley recorded the theory that people responded to incongruities with laughter, such as the humor found in a pun. The gist of a pun is a word with two different meanings. One expressed a resemblance and the other an opposition, which creates a tension that results in the humor. Laughter signals the recognition of this unexpected reversal. Sigmund Freud had a different take. He focused on the repression of man’s sexual and aggressive drives required by civilized society. Laughter formed an acceptable and pleasurable release from energy bottled up by constant repression. For him, humor was a defense mechanism in which a person could express what they squelched inside in a tolerated manner. Freud’s explanation reminds me of the afternoon of my son’s field trip to the Science Museum. The vice 35
principal called me because of he didn’t appreciate my son’s treasured Boy Scout skill, the ability to tie secure knots. It had been a cooperative effort, as Jeff and his seat mate became annoyed by the student behind them who refused to stop kicking their seat. With stealth they knotted the student’s shoe laces together so tight they couldn’t be untied and had to be cut.
“Jeff must write a letter of apology.” The vice principal demanded.
“Can I talk with him, first?” I insisted.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I told Chad to stop kicking the seat, but he wouldn’t,” my son explained. In the background the vice principal hissed, “Don’t mention other student’s names!”
“How did you tie Chad’s laces together without him noticing?” I asked a bit perplexed.
“Well, his shoe laces were untied, flopping around. The bus stopped for a while because of all the crowds near the museum. He stood up to look. So, we reached under the seat and tied them together. But we couldn’t see what we were doing, so we accidently tied them around the bar. When he tried to get out, he kept pulling really hard. We could have untied the knot it if he hadn’t done that.” Chortling, I advised my son to comply. “Just go ahead and write the apology, but don’t tell the vice-principal that I think it’s too funny.” In my mind I could see the annoying Chad, a regular hyperactive nuisance, who was so unaware didn’t notice the two boys leaning almost to the floor as they tied his laces together. I really did not care if the vice principal heard my laughter over the phone. Loud giggling is more acceptable than berating a vice principal for ignoring a student’s bad behavior. However, none of these theories really explained one memorable incident. I had joined parents perched on child-sized chairs at a kindergarten performance in a school cafeteria stage. The show was rehearsed, but not rehearsed enough. The teacher scampered out the door to locate missing students in the hall. Meanwhile the fiveyear-olds on stage wiggled impatiently, except for my daughter. She walked directly up to the microphone and giggled. A few people in the chairs laughed back, so she giggled a bit louder, and the crowd responded in kind. This back and forth crescendo of laughter between my child and amused parents continued for a full two minutes before the teacher rushed in to snatch away the microphone. Years later, still recalling that moment, my daughter informed me that she started laughing because she was nervous, not knowing what to do without the teacher. When the people laughed back, she thought they were pleased, so she kept up the dialog of giggles. “I thought they were laughing with me, not at me. I didn’t know the difference.” The difference is not clear cut. Although the parents may have laughed at my daughter, they chuckled in a kindly manner and not with the insecure self-promoting air that Hobbes described. Perhaps there was an incongruity, although I could not pinpoint it. Much of the laughter was generated by my daughter’s innocent belief that the crowd wanted to hear her giggle. That could hardly be considered a sociably acceptable way of expressing aggression. Why were they laughing? Maybe, for a few minutes they laughed simply because it felt good. 36
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Art
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“Oklahoma Morning” Shannon Truax
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“I’ve seen this one before” Gary Reddin
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“Patron Saint” Gary Reddin
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Contributors
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Shannon Truax resides in Oklahoma after spending her earlier years in Texas. After a number of years away, she’s recently reconnected with her passion for writing and art. Rooted in the southwest, she especially enjoys experimenting with all forms of media that reflect the scenes and colors of the region. Ryan Scariano is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Smithereens, published by Imperfect Press, and Not Your Happy Dance, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Some of his recent poetry has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Rock & Sling, Phantom Drift, basalt, and Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing. He works at Eastern Oregon University, where he coordinates the tutoring program and teaches First Year Experience courses for underprepared students. ryanscariano.com. Patience Williams graduated with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2020. She currently lives in the Midwest, the region where she is from, and enjoys practicing yoga and spending time with her mother. She is a Fulbright recipient to the Netherlands for 2020-2021 and is excited to represent her home there. Inspired equally by her upbringing on the vast plains of Oklahoma and time teaching at an innovative agricultural school in western New Mexico, Kylee George uses her experience as a lens, exploring in her speculative fiction and environmental essays the intersection between the land and those who inhabit it. She is currently pursuing an MFA in the Red Earth program at Oklahoma City University. Kathleen N. Listman, (M.Ed. University of Texas in Arlington) is an instructional designer, and currently serves as the V.P. of programming for Oklahoma City Writers, Inc. Her poetry has been featured in Speak Your Mind, the Anthology of Woody Guthrie Poets and in Riverbabble. Her poems have been acknowledged with an award in the 2020 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, and the Creme de la Creme award from Oklahoma City Writers, Inc. Her short drama has been featured in the Stillwater Short Play Festival. Michelle Hartman is the author of four poetry books, all available on Amazon & Barnes & Noble. Also, the author of 3 chapbooks, her work has been published in numerous journals as well as in various other countries. She is the former editor of Red River Review as well as the owner of, Hungry Buzzard Press. Hartman holds a BS in Political Science-Pre Law from Texas Wesleyan University, and a Cert. in Paralegal Studies from Tarrant County Community College; who recently named her a Distinguished Alumni. She won the 2019 Budd Powell Mahon Award. Don Stinson is the author of the poetry collections Flatline Horizon (Mongrel Empire Press, 2018) and Hunger (Turning Plow Press, 2020). A graduate of the Oklahoma State University Graduate Creative Writing Program, where he earned a Ph.D. in poetry writing and contemporary literature, he lives with his wife Pam in Tonkawa, where he teaches writing, literature, and speech classes at Northern Oklahoma College and cosponsors the annual Chikaskia Literary Festival. Sheila Robinson has received numerous awards for work during more than a decade in journalism – including commendations from two governors. Her writing has appeared in newspapers from Alaska to South America. Born in Oklahoma and raised in New Mexico, she’s lived from California to Florida and a handful of states in between. Sheila is retired, lives in a small town near Lawton and is currently working on two books. Past Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019) Kevin Rabas teaches at Emporia State University, where he leads the poetry and playwriting tracks. He has twelve books, including Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner.
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Cameron University 2020
