OxMag May 2014
KEEPING THINGS SHELTERED by DUSTIN JUNKERT It is all the attention that causes me harm. The things I love are fidgety. Chinaware, dining room pieces, box sets. Having clams delivered daily to our door has I think eased a lot of the tension typical to evening-time. Guilty as charged. I get deep into things, and my capacity for hearing goes up. A shovel is slicing at the ground. One sound is either the ocean crashing over a mile away, or it is the heater by the window exhaling constantly and quietly. The kind of person we are looking for will not match any description. Or, there is a quality which can only be felt and we will know when we are feeling it and who is putting it out. And what is he doing now? Fidgeting? No one is on trial here. You feel this way and then you always regret it, repent it and go on about how you shouldn’t be allowed to trust yourself anymore because some people are not to be trusted. I can be, you will see if you decide to trust me at a moment when you are trusting yourself.
CENICERO by HOLLY HENDIN The walls are full of sand Rough with found words Gouging spaces in between. Quiet canvas pierced with poetry Like a hook, a nail These white sheets This cane, this table upended This telegraph Awash in red, strings break Blue ocean unreachable under foot He is above me and below Black paint, crossed The mathematics of heaven and earth All this in the cup of my hand Paper, unraveling in the Water plain with children Like a birthday And at the last moment A reprieve. House with wire hair And quiet eyes We knelt in tandem at your altar, reverent, Collected our belongings And never looked back.
LIFE IS THE SEVENTH WAVE by TOMMY BUTLER I start high school. My parents tell me to focus on my studies, and I get an A on my first History test. They beam. I go to my bedroom, turn up the music and play air guitar on my tennis racquet. A month later I get a C+ on my Chemistry exam. My mother frowns and my father glares. My vision starts to blur when I try to read my textbooks. My father tells me to focus on sports. I focus on sports. I make the tennis team: Singles, Number 2. I win my first match, my second, my third. My coach tells my teammates to study my technique at the net. Fame is a buoy. My limbs are light and the game is easy. Yet I start to lose: my fourth match, my fifth, my sixth. I start breathing heavy after long points. My coach tells me to sit down. I stop practicing. My parents call me moody. My friends tell me I need a girlfriend. I get a girlfriend. I pass her notes that begin, “Dearest Jenny.” My knees bounce whenever she passes one back. She tells me she loves me and I can’t eat for a week. She tells me it’s over and I can’t eat for a week. My parents worry. They stop calling me moody. They want me to start taking medication. I start taking medication. Jenny ignores me at Greg’s party. I don’t care much. Two weeks later she smiles at me, asks me for my hat, sets it carefully on her head like a crown. I don’t care much. I eat prunes and drink apple cider vinegar from the bottle. I can’t feel my lips. I can’t feel my dick. I can’t feel much of anything. My therapist tells me I need to give to others, that I need to stop thinking about myself. I stop the medication. I start volunteering at the Salvation Army on Thursdays. I help my sister with her homework. After dinner, I let her control the remote. I like seeing her smile. I leave encouraging notes in open lockers. I never leave one for myself. No one else does either. I start to sleep too much, then too little. I drive by B&G’s on High Ridge Road, the one with the hunting rifles on display in the window. I slow down. My heart tells me this will always be a struggle. I struggle. I continue to win and lose, pass and fail, hurt and get hurt. The emotions rise and fall like a wave. I step back from it, watch it. I see beauty in the gather of the swell, in the height of the crest, in the crash and tumble of the whitewash. I try to let it flow.
THE ONLY MAN IN IOWA WITH FIVE CANNONS by GARY DOP I dream of my father in an open green field surrounded by his five cannons, four facing the four winds and one facing him, his hand clenching each lanyard. His eye twitches, scans the horizon for enemy. My father, the retired soldier, collects wars: Cannons, Bombs, Bullets he never fired in battle. Maybe my father’s the only Marine who wanted Vietnam but got stuck stateside training grunts, guarding guns, testing his aim on nothing smarter than a deer, nothing that knows death as more than a scent, nothing that shoots back, nothing to test the worth of a soldier who will learn to collect canons in Iowa and wonder if he would’ve run, if he would’ve killed, if he would’ve been given a warrior’s name. His brothers envy his innocence, which fires its own burning shells. I dream of cannons melting into the dew and him walking free in the field of open dreams. I dream my father pulls four worn cords, and we wake to our world without want of cannons.
DAWN by JAMES GRINWIS A baby mud eel. Look, he is fizzing like a cracked soda. The sky is very bleak and the universe still except for this baby mud eel. The trees surrounding the basin are like moldy Slim Jims. Things around here are permanently burned out, husks, even the flies. Look, he is squishing himself deeper into the hot mud, like a box-juice crushed in the fist of a toddler who jumps up and down until his head falls off and floats upward as if filled with helium. It is the moon, and the shapely woman over there with the spear, she is ripe and shiny. She has come to me, she drops down on her hands, wiggling. When I run over like a hard clump of oily grapes, she buries her spear in my heart and I pop like a small, exploding kernel.
CONTRIBUTORS TOMMY BUTLER received his BA from Dartmouth College and his JD from Harvard Law School. His fiction has won the Short Fiction Award at Reflections Literary Journal, and his screenwriting has won Showtime’s Screenplay Competition at the Nantucket Film Festival. He has been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship at The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and has been a Writer-in-Residence at The Screenwriters Colony. His feature screenplay, Half Life, is in development with Wishbone Films and Tracey Becker (Finding Neverland, Hysteria).Tommy recently completed his second novel, a literary urban fantasy exploring the conflict between order and chaos. GARY DOP grew up throughout Germany and the United States, and he now lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where he is an English Professor at Randolph College. Dop was awarded the 2013 Great Plains Emerging Writer Prize, his essays have aired on All Things Considered, and his poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, Agni, Rattle and New Letters, among others. His first collection of poems, Father, Child, Water, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. JAMES GRINWIS is the co-founder of Bateau Press and lives in Northampton, MA. He is the author of two books of poetry and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals. He received his MFA from UMass-Amherst in 2000. HOLLY HENDIN is a psychiatrist working in Phoenix. In her poetry she tries to catch and elaborate on those moments that otherwise would slip by quietly, expanding upon the spaces between the stitches. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Front Range Review, Summerset Review, The George Washington Review, ginosko, Crack the Spine, Crack the Spine Summer 2013 Anthology, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Write Room, Wild Violet, Red Ochre LiT, Midway, The Tower, Fourteen Hills, and Alembic. DUSTIN JUNKERT started writing in order to impress girls. Most girls aren’t all that impressed by writing, he has found. But here’s hoping. Dustin is working on an MFA at Georgia College. He recently won an essay contest in the New York Times and has received poetry prizes at Caesura and Willow Review, and otherwise has published in The Journal, South Carolina Review, the minnesota review, Georgetown Review, Natural Bridge, Chattahoochee Review, and Euphony.
Editor-in-Chief Magdalena Waz Fiction/Nonfiction Editor Elizabeth Jenike Poetry Editor Brenna York Web Editor Amy Toland Staff Readers Joe Franklin Nathan Schaad Laura Tabor Kelly Thomas Joe Thornton Matt Young Interns Shannon Glancey Katie Oldaker