Bellerive, Issue 12: Synethsia

Bellerive 2011

Issue 12

Cover Art:: Nude

Christopher Lahr

Pierre Laclede Honors College

University of Missouri - St. Louis

No Smoking

Poiesis

Your Mouth Is a Vent

Chalk Lines vs. Color Lines

Apprehension In the Car

Four Is a Crowd

Young Love

Kundalini

twitch

Solitary Confinement A Good Way to Live Autumn

Hysteria Cajel*

Flower Boom Boom Boom Boom!! (I Want You

Ghostwood

Walking

Glass

Walls Without Pictures

Eros Asshole

Handle Bars

Song in the Dark

Moonlit Tree

Union

Across East Monroe Street

Witchcraft Left Behind

Under the Collars of Our Shirts

“. . . And into my eyes your glory pour.”

Robert Bliss

Dannie Boyd

Ellen Huppert

Sam J. Imperiale

Joe

Somewhere under the Rainbow Frankenstein’s Creature Meets

Alexander Pope: Critical Analysis and Letters

Parked

Feminism’s Blind Spot: Black Women and Intersectional Identity

Featured Cover Art: Nude

Biographies

Staff Notes

Staff Photo

Essay Contest Winners

Editing Committee

Joe Harrington, chair

Mary Grace Buckley

Emily Cronin

Joyce Gates

Brandy Grossich

Thomas Manion

Art Committee

Layout Committee

Public Relations Committee

Grace Stone, chair

Dannie Boyd

Lauren M. Ewart

Faculty Advisor

Kelly Rohlf, chair

Brian Farrar

Amber Jeffery

Matt Plodzien, chair

Alex Hale

Laura Kessler

Abbie Kipp

Sharon L. Pruitt

Gerianne Friedline

All members of the staff participated in the selection process.

No Smoking

From Deboliver bridge above Platform One seven smokers peer down the tracks.

Behind a grille, their faces shadowed like prisoners, they await their train.

Blue-red like my veins, Bleeding iron and hot knives.

My fingers twitch at The glossy wood grain And the grey lead dust Across the page.

Dead men have written before The words I’m writing now. This is an expression. This is

The heartbeats of a thousand bristling blackbirds.

My whetted tongue rolls ’round my mouth, Tasting words like “death” and “tumbleweed” As if they were sweet candies.

This is black water—tar burning my blood, Pressing out against the skin that holds Me in.

Your Mouth Is a Vent

Cup that harmonica like you would cup a soul your mouth is a vent. blow.

your bold breath and my strums will leave tracks in the snow with bare feet we free verse ’til our lungs run on low we emit we emit we emit so cup that harmonica like you would cup a soul your mouth is a vent. blow.

Chalk Lines vs. Color Lines

Apprehension

Stenciled into the bumpy enamel, as though the figures themselves represented an existence marked by triumph in the face of implausibility, was a single word. Higgins. Swept aside like a curtain, the door would reveal, squat and square, a windowless office, lit by an elaborate faux crystal lamp set upon a wide oak desk. A cheap leather armchair sat facing the desk, occupied by an elongated man with an elongated, anxious face. His posture was remarkably poor, which worked out well as the chair itself would have proved rather unfitting for the upright of the world. The man leaned forward as he spoke, brow furrowing in time with jaw, eyes cast abstractedly downward. He suppressed his natural inclination to fidget by busying his hands with his derby. He turned the hat over in his hands, compressed it between his fingers, scrunched it for all it was worth. But not maliciously so. Seated behind the desk in a matching armchair, facing the man and endowed with an air of one listening intently, was Higgins. He was a broad, sloping-shouldered man with thinning brown-blond hair and a heavy, yet shrewd, mustachioed face. He might have even emanated an impression of subtle intelligence had the light in the room been dimmer than it already was. He swiveled in his seat and leaned back, revealing his chair to be identical to the other man’s only superficially, and pressed the tips of his fingers together. Lifting his eyes to the ceiling, he frowned at a splotch of a murky and brown something located there. He nodded slowly, apparently deep in thought. The thin man had finished his monologue.

Higgins resumed an erect position and swiveled back to the other man, whose sights remained downcast. He opened a drawer in his desk and produced a bottle of rye whiskey and a pair of cocktail glasses. “Drink?”

Shaken from reverie, the thin man looked up at Higgins. “Oh no,” he said, his voice croaking as though strained from overuse. “It’s a little early for me.”

Higgins had not waited for the man’s reply before starting to pour out the whiskey. In fact, he did not stop pouring until the glass was full to the brim. He exhaled heavily and made a mental note to buy bigger glasses.

“So can you, um, can you help me?”

“Hm, what’s that?” Higgins looked up from the whiskey. The thin man’s eyes were two wavering full moons, as reflected upon the surface of a troubled lake. “Ah, ahem. Erm, yes.” Higgins cleared his throat with a cough. “I think we can handle such a trifle.”

In a particularly fiery squeeze, the thin man’s hat popped out of his grasp and rolled across the floor. He paid it no heed. His face contorted into a mask of gruesome delight, and he leaned forward even more, his chin practically suspended over Higgins’s desk. “You can?! That’s great! That’s fantastic!”

Higgins was busy replenishing his now empty glass. “Quite so, quite so…Yes, I believe it won’t be difficult, judging from what you’ve been telling me.” He paused to lock eyes with the man. “You have told me nothing but the facts, I trust?”

“Of course! By thunder this is swell news! Thank you, by God! I felt at the end of my rope. I just didn’t know what to do about her anymore, and I couldn’t just come out and ask her! Think of what would happen if I were wrong! Think of what kind of position that would put a man like me in! My God, I felt at the end of my rope!”

He continued in this vein for some time. Higgins looked on half-lidded. He had become accustomed over the years to the initial effusion of desperate men afforded a glimmer of hope, and the nature of his business necessitated that such were his clientele. But even he could stand only so much. “Yes, yes, that’s grand.”

Grinning, the thin man sat slightly back with his twitching hands splayed out atop his knees. “Secrecy, secrecy is the chief thing! She must never know!”

“Oh, I can assure you, it will be like I am not even there.” Higgins paused, his glass frozen midway in its ascent to his lips. “Now. Your wife. How long have you suspected this has been going on?”

“Oh dear. It’s come to me by degrees.” Higgins experienced a brief and absurd notion that this man was capable of only delight and melancholy. The spirited animation present a moment before gave way to a dejected recounting: “At first, all was easily explained away. The book club meeting had run late. Hailing a cab in the rain had been a dreadful affair. That sort of thing, you know.” He paused, and Higgins felt a pang of fear that the man would actually take him up on his offer of whiskey. But the thin man soldiered on, eyes to the floor. “I think as I continued to believe her, she became bolder. Her excuses took on a note of flippancy, her stories a wilder shape. Would you believe,” the

thin man’s voice adopted an icy tone as he shifted his moonlike gaze to Higgins, “would you believe that just this past week she claimed that the buses hadn’t made any of their scheduled stops all night? All night! In this city! She even went so far as to tell me she slept on a bench at the terminal! Trying to garner my sympathy into the order! Can you even imagine what it took for me to not—” The man’s features reverted at once to a shroud of worry, and he dropped his gaze. “I just…I just have to know for sure. Please…if I can just know…if the worst is…to find some measure of closure in this…”

Several seconds passed, and when no further speech appeared forthcoming, Higgins rose to his feet. “Not to worry, sir. I’ve not botched a job yet, and I don’t plan to start now. If your wife has been…I assure you I will get to the bottom of this matter.” He set his gaze squarely on the lamp. “The mark of apprehension is one that distinctly haunts the human psyche. It is an anguish that I have made it my business to extinguish.”

Shakily, the thin man stood up, a faraway look on his face. Higgins recognized in that bleary expression the hallmarks of client preoccupation. He felt that little of what he had just said had been relayed successfully, but he was surprised when the man spoke. “You came highly recommended.”

“…Not to worry, sir.”

Higgins stepped around his desk and led the thin man to the door, scooping up the derby as he passed. “My secretary will show you out,” he said, handing the hat to his client. The two of them stood for a moment in silence, their fingers wrapped around opposite ends of the derby.

After the thin man had left, Higgins returned to his desk. He sat still for several minutes, an inscrutable expression on his face. A shadow crossed his eyes in the dim light, and he removed from his jacket a polished wooden pipe and a plastic, powder blue bottle. With the bit of the pipe perched between his lips, he unscrewed the cap of the bottle and poured out a small quantity of clear liquid into the bowl.

The Personville Racetrack housed a shady element. Higgins sat at a small circular table in an open-air bistro just off the grandstand. A pile of ticket stubs had been slowly accumulating on his table as the day progressed, as had an assembly of empty bottles and shot glasses.

Sunlight was tipping below the horizon, leaving a gash of purpling sky in its wake. The races were ending for the day.

From across the bistro swayed a figure packed tightly into a checkered apron. She advanced with her hands on her hips, her eyes set, humorlessly, on Higgins. He did not look up even when she stood directly before his table. Rooted in tableau, she looking down at him and he looking down at the table with a bottle clasped in one hand, there arose between them the kind of implicit understanding that renders words of greeting obsolete. She pulled out the chair opposite him and slumped down with less grace than her comeliness would suggest.

As he sat motionless, she lit a cigarette and took several drags, glancing around at the empty restaurant. Her frame seemed to sink into repose and the corners of her mouth twitched into a slight smile. She leaned back and held the cigarette aloft between two fingers, supporting her elbow with one hand. Revolving back to Higgins, her smile vanished and her eyes narrowed at the pipe he now had between his lips. “Higgins, in the name of all that is holy—”

“Do you want something, Marie?”

Instead of answering, she continued to stare at his pipe. “… You been paid yet?”

Higgins gave a languid wave of his hand over the ticket stubs and alcohol.

“…Makes no nevermind to me, you know. You always pay your tab here, and I value you too much to start prying into your affairs now.” With a sudden motion, she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and willed him, fruitlessly, to return her gaze. “But from where I sit, the price of your services seems steep. On both ends. Higgins.”

A sudden chill wind blossomed, sending a shudder through them both. Higgins knocked back what little liquor was left in the bottle and looked up at her. The slight smile sprang back onto her lips, and he looked away. Sighing, she rested her chin on the heel of her hand and penetrated him with a slow, impassive gaze. “You’ll be here in the morning?”

He turned in wrath. “What do you think?!”

“Thank you! Thank you, by God!” Higgins smiled benignly and the thin man leaned forward rubbing his hands together. “You’re sure? I

mean, you’re sure? There’s no cause for—”

“A week and a half’s worth of work is nothing to sneeze at,” said Higgins, but not reproachfully.

“This is great! This is fantastic! Thank you so much, by God! What a load off my mind. And I mean it now! I was just about at the end of my rope!”

“It’s what I do, sir.” Higgins folded his hands on his desk and stared at the only object at his workstation, the lamp, as the thin man continued to gush his gratitude. He allowed the man to wind down before speaking again. “And…as per our agreement…”

“Ah. Ah, yes. Of course! Thank you, Higgins.” The thin man placed on the desk a blank envelope, closed but unsealed, thickened slightly. “You came highly recommended.” A moment passed, and Higgins’s smile undertook in its passage an oddly fixed quality. The lamp held his eyes. “You…you may count it if you wish.”

Higgins did not avert his gaze from the lamp. “…I trust you.”

“How I could have ever doubted my Elizabeth…I must make it up to her.” The thin man stood up, still beaming. “You have restored harmony to my marriage. I thank you once again, Higgins.”

He left, and Higgins sat quietly for a full five minutes, smiling peculiarly at the envelope. His hands remained clasped together atop his desk. Leaving the envelope untouched, he pulled open a drawer and lifted out a bottle of rye whiskey. He stared at the envelope.

Rather than open the liquor, he took out his wooden pipe and the powder blue bottle of plastic. His hand steady, but not effortlessly so, he opened the bottle and poured out a dash of the clear liquid into the pipe’s bowl. He set the powder blue bottle beside the whiskey and leaned back, cradling the underside of the pipe with the palm of his hand. With his other hand he turned a tiny, almost imperceptible crank on the side of the stem, raising to a vertical from within the bowl a minuscule rod, on the end of which was a small hoop. Taking a breath, he blew into the mouthpiece.

A steady current of soap bubbles issued forth from the hoop. Removing the pipe from between his lips, he sat and watched the bubbles tumbling upward, ever and away from the lamplight.

In the Car

There’s a four-lane highway through cornfields where you can see semi-trucks and birds of prey compete for what’s left on the road. Dirt cows fill up the air.

I’m writing this from an exit ramp, too many cars knocking each other to pieces. There are bits of wood floating in the Mississippi. I feel like I’m part of the land cut: discolored concrete and duck feathers from bombs going off. It wasn’t my thing, and I’ve got to get out.

The speckled fields repeat themselves gold for miles and miles under clouds that came out of a whipped cream tube quietly this morning. You were still asleep. I had coffee fresh from the microwave waiting when you woke up. It wasn’t that far from the land cut I’ve become, but I was waiting for you, too.

Four Is a Crowd

Young Love

Limbs enveloped in limbs enveloped in blankets. We’d rather fuse and sweat out the night’s humidity than pull down the covers or get up to turn on the fan.

Kundalini

I stack holy books on your terrarium, I seal the lid with locks but you escape, And a snake is suddenly in my home, my life, my bed; A silken black forked tongue on my skin, A warning hiss at my ankles.

My home becomes a testament to the tempted Eve And a mausoleum to the assassinated Cleopatra. Your scales steal the heat from my fingers. You slide from my grasp only to appear again at night, Dormant beside me as I sleep.

Someday I will catch you, serpent, And as you struggle in my hands, I’ll break your fangs from your sweetly lying mouth.

open: look into something for the elderly patron check out 3 books to a busy mom smiling at her spittle-covered-smashed-in-squishy-faced-baby answer phone call after phone call

“goodafternoonMachacekthisisEllenspeakinghowmayIhelpyou?”

find a slice of cheese [swiss]: a bookmark you’ve never seen before, this one beats toilet paper . . .

sit down, breathe rise and color with 5 6½-year-olds

“I AM NOT A BABY” pick up 7,452 crayons and find 4 cheerios stuck to your blouse, by your cleavage . . . your very non-professional slit

break up a fight mediate a heated book discussion of the newest “Highlander: Cheap-&-Sexy-Porno-For-Old-Broads-Secretly-Called-Romance” novel with 13 older ladies go home. stop. breathe.

throw the new García Márquez on the supposed coffee table, whispering, “fuck it all . . . I hate books”

Solitary Confinement

A Good Way to Live

On the morning of his wife’s funeral, William found himself scratching at the mole. He drooped at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him, watching a rabbit nibble at the lettuce in his garden. Outside the kitchen window, the sun was shining brightly, and the trees were blossoming.

William had had the mole on the back of his shoulder for as long as he could remember. Whenever he was nervous or stressed, William would unconsciously pick at it. While William’s picking always began at the subconscious level, he would soon start to notice what he was doing. Although his wife Diana had often caught him and told him to stop, William had an obsession with picking at his mole. William fantasized about ripping the mole off. Sometimes he would even pick at it enough to make it bleed, and although the mole proved itself time and again a permanent part of William, every time he picked at it seemed like a new battle. To William, the outcome was never certain, and he genuinely, though not naively, believed there was a legitimate chance of separating the mole from the rest of his body.

And so for the mole, Diana’s funeral was a day like any other. Diana’s death had not been unexpected. She had fought breast cancer—on and off again—for the last twelve years, and in many ways her loved ones were content knowing that she would not have to suffer any longer. She died with William, her two sisters, and her close friends by her side. She confessed her sins to a priest hours before her death, and she died believing there was a better place waiting for her. Everyone said if there was a good way to die, which of course there was not, but if there was a good way to die, this was it.

As William watched the rabbit and picked at his mole, he listened to his sister’s boisterous entrance at the front gate. He waited for her to thump to the door and raise him from his daydreams.

“Knock-knock,” she said as she let herself in the front door.

“It’s open,” he called, too late.

“You’re not even ready,” she said. “I took care of everything for you. I talked to the papers; I talked to the church; I arranged for flowers; I even asked Uncle David to pick up mother, and you can’t even get yourself showered, and shaved, and dressed.”

“I did shower.”

She rolled her eyes. “I couldn’t tell. Go fix yourself up. Your nose hairs are sticking out.”

“I just don’t see the point in all this. Diana never cared about superficial things. Diana wouldn’t have said anything about my nose hairs or anything. She would have just helped me pick out something to wear and that’d be that.”

“It’s proper, William. You need to look nice for your wife’s funeral. People will notice these things. If you show up with your nose hairs hanging out people will think you’re too grieved to take care of yourself, and then they will think you are selfish. They will think that you care more about your own loss than about Diana being in a better place.”

“It’s still hard, Elizabeth,” he said.

“I know. I’m just telling you what they will think. What they will think, and what they will talk to each other about. People notice these things.”

“Okay, Elizabeth. I’ll go spruce up. I’ll be ready in a bit.”

“Do you know what you’re going to wear?” she asked. “I’ll pick out clothes for you.”

“I’m a grown man.”

“Yes,” she said. They both knew she’d pick out clothes for him anyway.

William looked back out the kitchen window; the rabbit was gone.

In the bathroom, William checked himself in the mirror. There were a couple nose hairs sticking out. I guess I did let hygiene go a little the past week or two. But I had more important things to worry about. Are people really as shallow as Elizabeth sees them? I could never read people like Elizabeth can. William had entered the bathroom with the intent of merely satiating Elizabeth; however, the longer he thought about what she said the more he wondered if there was truth in Elizabeth’s concerns.

“I’ve got clothes laid out on your bed for you,” Elizabeth called through the door.

“Thanks.”

“I couldn’t decide between two ties, so they’re both out.”

“Okay, thanks.”

His clothes were laid out in the order he would put them on— pants, shirt, socks, shoes, two ties, and a jacket. William felt sorry for Matthew, Elizabeth’s husband. But I guess a man gets used to his wife, William thought.

The pants were looser than William remembered. His shirt had a faint cigarette smell that William was pretty confident only he could smell. Elizabeth had picked out black dress socks, but William, who thought “dress” was synonymous with “uncomfortable,” quietly switched them out for a much comfier pair of plain white ones. No one even sees the socks, William thought. He was surprised by Elizabeth’s selection of ties. They were both black and white, but they were quite different from each other. The first was striped black and white diagonally all the way down, whereas the second was all black with small white polka dots.

“You sure you don’t have a preference on the ties?” William called to Elizabeth. “I don’t want to put on the wrong one,” he added under his breath.

“Oh, good. I was just going to talk to you about the ties,” she said, entering the room. “Goodness. You have blood on the back of your shirt.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” she said, pointing to the area of his mole.

“Oh. I must have scratched my mole.”

“You should just get that thing removed. They can do those things super quick nowadays. Just make a doctor’s appointment.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Change your shirt; then I need to talk to you about those ties.”

“What’s wrong with the ties?”

“Nothing. Just go change your shirt.”

After putting on a clean white shirt, William wished Elizabeth would just pick one of the ties and be done with the whole matter.

“What do you got to say about the ties?”

“Well, I think they give off different vibes, and I want you to know what you’ll be saying by which tie you choose.”

“Elizabeth, they’re just ties. You wear them when you get dressed up. That’s it. They’re just ties.”

“Maybe to you, but everyone else will be looking at what you’re wearing as a sign of how you’re dealing with everything.”

William believed Elizabeth to be a well-intentioned fool. He thought that what she was saying was a bunch of shit, yet some primordial self within him was haunted by the idea of it being the truth. He mentally compared the feeling to that of the feeling one feels after leaving a psychic. Everything the psychic has said is certainly bullshit, but what if, by some frightening twist of fate, one of her dire predictions unfolds?

William shuddered and listened. “The black tie with the stripes says that you were really attached to Diana,” she said.

“Which I was.”

“Of course, but it says it in an overbearing manner, like perhaps you’re being selfish about her death,” she said. “And the polka dot one says that you have accepted Diana’s death and you recognize that she is better off now than she was on Earth.”

“So one says I’m a control freak and self-absorbed husband while the other says I’m an insensitive jerk who’s ready to move on. Why can’t I just wear a meaningless tie?”

“No, no, no. It’s much more subtle than that. No one would ever even gossip things like that. And there is no such thing as a meaningless tie. Everything you present in public states something about you.”

“Which one do you like better?” he asked.

“I can’t decide for you how you are feeling on the inside. You must determine that and choose accordingly,” she said.

“Okay. Well, I’m not going to pick one now. This sounds like a bigger decision than I’m ready to make right now. I’ll choose in the car.”

“Fine. Finish getting ready, and we can go.”

William threw out the remains of the morning coffee and checked the backyard through the kitchen window. He thought he saw two rabbits nibbling at the lettuce. He smiled. “I’m ready to go,” he said.

Elizabeth drove to the funeral, and William watched the day go by through the car window. He looked at both ties, trying to decide, and unconsciously began to pick at his mole.

“You’ll make it bleed again,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah. Sometimes it bleeds,” William said.

“You should really get that removed.”

“Why? There’d still be a scar.”

“They can fix them up so there is no scar.”

“Maybe, but everyone who knew me would still know that it had been there,” he said. “I can’t just remove something that has been part of me for most of my life and expect me and everyone else not to remember. I will still remember.”

Elizabeth was silent. After a while, William chose a tie. He wrapped it around his neck and knotted it methodically. “That looks nice,” Elizabeth said after he had finished. William looked out the car window. The sun was very bright, but he couldn’t tell if it was one of those days that just appeared warm outside because of the sunshine, or if it really was a warm spring day.

Hysteria

I place flowers on the desk

White and yellow against green

Everything is fine in a colloquial sense

There are no storms beyond my window

No stacks of unfinished work in my inbox

There is only silence.

I imagine the twenty-first century

As it should have been imagined

A broad gesture of ambiguity

An uncertain sense, not unlike sight

Faith and fear have been generated

Like footholds at the edge of the Tower of Babel.

Climb, child, climb. And in climbing discover

The twenty-first century is only so much hysteria

A woman’s mouth cast agape

In black and white

Documented succinctly on Wikipedia

Informing us the condition no longer exists

It is, rather, hypochondria.

I feel better knowing I have only imagined The tragedies of this century

White wall waves of water over Japan

The threat of nuclear explosions

Because nuclear plants exist

It is quiet in my suburban neighborhood

I sip wine and am lulled Back to my senses.

As dad and uncle toast to times past I mouth full with the aftertaste of burning rubber am busy measuring a gap not years or even decades but generations oceans continents wide

*Cashew liquor indigenous to the region of Goa, India

Boom Boom Boom Boom!!

(I Want You in My Room)

This evening

At the station of 8th and Pine, With a wall of cold marble Pressed against my cheek, I find myself vomiting Into a plastic bag To the beat of the Vengaboys.

Not even enough sense To remove my goddamned earbuds As the peppering Of full-bodied fists Laughed into my face.

One of these days I won’t just fall. One of these days I’ll paint the grout With blood and teeth.

I’ll spit rusty nail slurs Like they do.

But for now I wipe my mouth.

The electric hum Of sterile lights And the dank cement Console me, Embrace me With absolution. And for the first time In a long time I feel relief.

The Mimosa Tree

I did not plant the tree that vexes you

Because mimosas weep on pristine grass. It was here before me before you, too. This archetype of what is past.

Mimosas fly away but words remain.

Was it worth bringing up transient blooms

That are present today then melt with rain?

Blooms never stay, words always do.

Flowering the Rosy Pavement

There’s a sun beyond my door

Spitting shadows across the floor

Clutching my gaze with thoughts of hope And filling my path with wires and rope

There’s a sea below the cliff

Heaving waves against my skiff Enfolding nights with glorious swells And pressing dreams beneath the fells

There’s a girl before my sight Flooding my mind with lovely light Shaping with warmth adoring speech And promising joy outside of reach

There’s a life beside my years

Cleaving chains from ’round my fears Restraining frailties not to express And careening tides of loneliness

There’s a stone between my words Stumbling my meaning into thirds Chipping from me my cherished light And the girl before my sight

Every fall, and in spring too, the sun sits just so in the sky to make for me a Huxley hologram outside, against the building’s ell.

It’s only an angle of reflection but his likeness appears to float in space, becomes dimensional, smiles in the sun’s light, readies to speak of things he knows.

Meanwhile his real image hangs on the back of my bookcase, a poster whose flat quote does not say that Aldous taught Orwell at Eton, or dug ditches alongside Lord Russell at Garsington, or loved Anita Loos in Los Angeles.

In minutes the sun moves on, leaving me without his world that had such people in it.

My Bones

My bones are limits They slim with the disorder of forgotten breakfasts

Goodbye to the Nordiques

The first thing Edward saw when he flicked on the lights wasn’t one of the big things—the air hockey table, the old toy chest, or even the collection of bicycles—but rather the orange glow of a stray Matchbox car.

He knelt cautiously on the concrete basement floor of his parents’ old house. The Matchbox car—a 1970s Charger—belonged to a large collection in a nearby box. Edward opened the box and immediately started playing with the cars as if resuming a game after the shortest of breaks.

Edward had already worked his way through half a box before his younger brother Christopher arrived.

“Hey, you down there?” Christopher called.

“Nope. It’s a robber. I’ve come to steal your childhood,” Edward replied.

“I don’t need your sarcasm today.”

“Bad drive?”

“Got a ticket,” Christopher said, flopping down the stairs in his sandals.

“Speeding?”

“Yeah. I just get bored being alone in the car for three hours.” Christopher approached Edward, but Edward remained kneeling in front of the Matchbox car collection, fingering the delicate design of a 1960s Mercedes. Christopher loomed over Edward. Despite not having seen each other for over a year, they were comfortably silent. “How about you? How was your drive?” Christopher asked after a while.

“Flat, but not as long.”

“Guess who I saw peeking through his window when I arrived?”

“The Michael Jackson neighbor?”

“Yeah. He is probably going nuts that we’re back.”

“He’ll probably soon be knocking on the door wanting to have a Nerf gun fight or something.”

Christopher laughed. “I sort of feel bad for him though. He’s like a ten-year-old stuck in the body of a fifty-year-old.”

“Thus, Michael Jackson freak.”

Christopher wandered along the cold cement walls, not really

looking for or at anything. Every so often he’d pick something off a shelf, turn it over in his hands, and replace it.

“Wow. The air hockey table,” Christopher said. “You think it still works?”

“I don’t know. Turn it on.”

Christopher clicked its switch, and it activated as smooth as a new car. “Sweet. Play with me,” he said.

“I’m busy,” Edward replied.

“What are you doing?”

Edward didn’t reply. He continued to line up the cars, as if preparing for a valuable car show.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff?” Christopher asked.

“Keep it. You?”

“I don’t know. Keep it. Sell it. Give it away.” Christopher watched Edward’s hands move with precision and care. His hands were delicate yet powerful like a physician’s.

Christopher grabbed a disc from its slot and slid it across the table.

“I remember how pissed off you used to get when I’d beat you all the time,” Edward said.

“Yeah, because you used to just hold the mallet right in front of the center of your goal so it was impossible for me to score,”

Christopher said. “You were a cheating bastard.”

“Bullshit. You were just a sore loser.”

“Your memory is way off.”

“All right. Let’s do it. Let’s play for keeps.”

“What, whoever wins gets to keep the air hockey table?”

“That’s what playing for keeps means.”

The brothers took turns smashing the disc across the table. One of the four 100-watt basement light bulbs hung directly above the table. Edward played a tight defense, keeping the mallet centered low and only taking shots when they were nearly sure things. Christopher thrashed wildly at the disc, pounding it across the table time and again in a carefree attempt to wear down Edward’s defense. The game heightened old instincts.

Edward’s tight defense backfired. The few times he left the goal to shoot, Christopher responded with a wild lunge too quickly for Edward to retighten his defenses. The more Christopher scored, the

tighter Edward’s defenses became, but the tighter his defenses became, the more Edward was unable to leave his goal. Soon Edward found himself stuck, trapped in his self-created prison, and Christopher continued firing and firing again until, at last, Edward yelled, “All right. Enough. I need to be free. You win.”

“Yes,” said Christopher. They put down their mallets, and Christopher reached under the table to turn it off, noticing the team stickers for the first time. “Look at these.”

“Oh yeah,” Edward laughed, taking in the stickers of the professional teams of their childhood. “The Nordiques. I don’t even think that’s a team anymore, is it?”

“Nope. They moved to Colorado and became the Avalanche.”

“That’s right.”

“Here’s the Jets, and the Whalers, and the North Stars. A bunch of these teams aren’t teams anymore,” Christopher said, pointing to more stickers.

“They move a lot. Move to a different city, change the name, and the logo, and presto—you have a completely different team even though the people are all still the same.”

They were both quiet while they thought about how they would probably never play air hockey together again. It seemed like a reality that neither of them had guessed would be so harsh. “So, what’d Dad say when you talked to him?” Edward asked after a minute.

“Nothing really. He just told me to come grab anything I want because the bank’s going to take possession on Friday.”

The brothers looked around the basement, taking a mental inventory. It was too much to take back home. They would have to be selective about which parts of their childhood they kept. They each had small places already crowded with everyday things.

“Are those Tonka trucks?” Christopher asked, making his way across the basement. “Remember when I was like three, and you put me in the bed of that dump truck, and Mom stopped you just before you were going to push it down the stairs?”

“Mom hid them from us after that.”

“But later we found them down here. We waited until she was gardening or something and snuck them back upstairs to try again.”

“But you chickened out that time.”

“I could’ve got hurt,” Christopher laughed.

Edward smiled at that. He shifted through more decaying

boxes. In a large white one he found plastic olive army men. He pulled them out fistfuls at a time. One by one, he lined them up, and Christopher watched, amused.

“You know they still make those, right?” Christopher asked.

“You can buy them at any toy store.”

“It’s not the same,” Edward said.

“So what happens to the things we don’t take with us?”

Christopher asked, easing out of a potentially hostile conversation.

“I guess the bank gets them.”

“And then what? An estate sale or something?”

“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe the bank will just be lazy and sell the house with everything in it.”

The brothers continued to sort through boxes of children’s toys. Sports equipment, baseball cards, tattered books, board games, and miscellaneous collections of plastic toys lined the basement walls.

Christopher paused on a box of Lincoln Logs. “We can’t keep everything,” he said.

“It’s going to be hard deciding what to keep.”

Christopher breathed heavily. “I’m burning mine,” he decided.

Edward laughed like a man who laughs at a funeral because he does not know how to express the proper emotions. “What?”

“Everything that you’re not taking, I’m burning.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to. But I’m burning them just the same,” Christopher said. “I won the air hockey table. Will you help me bring it outside?”

“No, please. I’ll buy it off you.”

“Help me bring it outside.” Edward knew that persisting would not help.

Without realizing that he was doing it, Edward grabbed the other end of the table and began to follow Christopher up the stairs.

As they placed the air hockey table at the end of the driveway, the neighbor made his way to them.

“Are you giving this away?” asked the neighbor.

“No,” Christopher said.

“Are you selling it?”

“No,” Christopher said.

“I could use an air hockey table. Does it work?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. The brothers went back inside.

“Will you help me with those bicycles?” Christopher asked.

“I guess,” said Edward.

Outside the neighbor was inspecting the air hockey table. “This is a nice table,” he said. “If you’re not giving it away, and you’re not selling it, what are you doing with it?”

“We are burning it,” Christopher replied.

“Burning it,” said the neighbor. “No, no, no, no. You can’t burn this. This is a vintage machine. I’ll give you $50 for this air hockey table.”

“No,” Christopher said.

“$100.”

“No.”

“Are you crazy?” said the neighbor. “$100, cash, right now.”

The brothers went back inside, leaving the neighbor with the toys, scheming.

Christopher grabbed the Tonka trucks and walked upstairs, alone. When he came back, Edward had gathered the Matchbox cars into their box, and he began his journey outside.

They took turns carrying boxes in silence. With each box, the neighbor became more and more frantic. He yelled things like “You don’t know what you’re doing,” “This is dangerous,” and “You’re crazy” at the brothers each time they added another box to the pile. Soon they had an enormous stack of boxes at the end of the driveway. When the brothers came out with the last of their childhood toys, the man was still there, going through the boxes. “I’ll give you $1000 for everything here. Just don’t burn it.”

The brothers ignored him. Christopher went to the garage for gasoline.

“Please,” said the neighbor. Having returned, Christopher began soaking everything in gasoline, starting with the boxes, moving to the bikes, and finishing with a large puddle on the air hockey table.

“Goodbye to the Nordiques,” Edward laughed.

“Are you insane?” asked the neighbor.

“Stand back,” he said, throwing the match onto the pile.

All three men were silent. The gasoline lit up in a whoosh. The heat felt comforting on the chilly March night.

The brothers looked across the fire at the man. They both noticed the orange glow of the fire reflected in his glasses, and they

smiled at him pleasantly.

After some time, Christopher and the man backed off a little bit, but Edward took a step closer, standing so close that he could feel the heat drying out his skin. He’d have to get lotion on the way home. There were still some cold nights to come.

Starflyer

you told me once, long ago in an enchanted land that your father, your one-armed patriarch, worked in a chocolate factory over lunches, trips, days spent on your double bed with the odd crease in the middle from pushing 2 together to make 1, your story slowly edged into the open

like a naked child caught singing in the bath, you shyly revealed: your brother’s death (how you still counted him because even though he once was didn’t mean it severed ties forever) watching you cry, feeling lonely ’cause you missed your car or going to shops, made me love you more

I know you are drinking tea with the reina now, baffling her with your tales of hot Mexican nights alight with foreign heat.

Dazzle her with it all show her, feed her the tales of a daughter, born of factory workers, who lived in an eden and drank Cokes with a mouthy American who always wished well to dear old Betty

Sky coated brittle gray, I watch it crack.

Feel its worth upon my cheeks, The scraping of feet on concrete, The simmering of the cold upon the heat.

Pounding liquids on solids

Stick in my ears

Like gum on the sole of my shoe. Making me wobble walk

As I hear the water talk

Enveloping me

In echoes and reverse drum beats Of rippling puddles, Of murmuring leaves, In the sobbing skyline and the sopping streets.

Words, Words, Words

Slutty knives that penetrate random lives in alleys bars offices blinking and bleeding with just enough strength to survive.

I bid my cousin farewell after a visit and head again in the direction of Grandma’s apartment. As I round the corner and pass the shrubbery marking the shortcut through a predominately Serbian neighborhood, my legs slow. An old man lies facedown on the bare asphalt ahead. Even the navy woolen suit—a surprise unto itself in the summer heat—fails to conceal his frailty; it appears just as worn. A small group of kids, each about ten years old, encircles him loosely. Farther from the scene but with a clear view, an adult and two kids play on the faded basketball court. The row of apartment buildings to the left appears vacant, but the flowers on the balconies are in bloom. A tenant drives his automobile into the garage, exits, and, without looking over to the kids and me, now standing together near the old man, disappears into the nearest building. The few others strolling by glance at the old man just long enough to report with convincing sincerity over coffee the following morning the details of the scenario—for they quickly diagnose him: “He’s probably just drunk.”

Grandma had opened the door to the three of us: my brother Adnan, Mama, and me. It was nearly midnight. After a day’s flight, we had arrived in Zagreb—its bullet-ridden, dirty airport, the surrounding area marked by gaunt faces—and had taken a taxi to the Bosnian border, where my aunt Faketa and her friend-with-a-car awaited to drive us the rest of the way to Brčko, to the apartment where we assumed Grandma and Grandpa had been waiting eagerly.

“Where is Dad?” Mama asked Grandma, as we placed the luggage in the foyer.

“Oh, he’s sleeping. I didn’t want to wake him. Come, come. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

It had been ten long years since we saw each other; she wouldn’t wake him.

The old man lies in a Serbian part of Brčko, but I no longer have Grandma’s apartment in mind. Alone, speaking with a slightly off-Bosnian accent, wearing Nikes that reveal a foreign passport, and stubbornly without fear of what may happen—my only thought is that this is 2008 and the war ended a decade ago.

He must have fallen, stumbled forward. There are a few small droplets of blood on the asphalt near his wrinkled, gray face. He mumbles quietly, attempts to raise his head, begins to look over to the kids and me, and lays it down again, closing his eyes. I’m afraid to help him up, of how fragile he is.

I had woken to Mama’s hollowed expression. Everything about her seemed as gaunt as those first faces spotted near the airport and made me revisit the initial tears of shock. “They didn’t tell me,” she said. “He has dementia. They thought it would be best not to tell me until we were here together, in person.”

I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly I wanted only to go back home to America. I regretted having ever been in favor of coming. I thought I wanted to visit what used to be home, what we left because of the war, what we had spiraled away from for twelve years—but this wasn’t what I imagined that would be.

He didn’t know who Mama was; he didn’t know who I was, or Adnan, or even Faketa, who had lived with Grandma and Grandpa since the war ended. She was the youngest of Mama’s sisters. The middle one lived with an abusive Bosnian husband in a village an hour away. She dropped out of medical school with a perfect academic record because Grandma wouldn’t let her marry the Serbian she was in love with thirty years before war would highlight ethnic divisions. Meanwhile, Grandpa paced from the balcony to the kitchen, the foyer, then back again, in silence, a straight face, fingers touching the table in the kitchen then the dresser in the foyer each time he turned to continue pacing.

“Grandpa,” I sang, smiling at him, eyebrows raised in hopes of a meaningful response, momentarily interrupting the perpetual silence he was in.

He looked up, curved his lips and flashed his eyes into a smile, then continued pacing.

“What happened?” I beg the kids.

One of the boys, who continues bouncing his basketball not two feet away from the old man’s head, speaks with a sudden pride: “He just suddenly fell. He was walking from the park, when he, just, fell forward.”

The others laugh at being reminded. I swallow, growing

nervous. I ask the boy if he would stop bouncing the ball. He looks down at the man and again at me and apologizes. I ask if anyone has a phone. I want to call the paramedics. Nobody in Bosnia is without a cell phone—but I can’t care less that they can now confirm my visitor status.

All but the youngest has a phone, and all but one make excuses as to why theirs can’t be borrowed—insufficient funds on their prepaid cards, fear of the police station or hospital saving the number, or ethnic divisions we didn’t choose to believe.

I call the paramedics, and they say they will see to it. I wait twenty minutes, apologetically ask again for the phone, and try the police; “We will see to it” echoes. When another twenty minutes pass, I phone the paramedics again: with laughter in the background and, I imagine, feet up on a table, a man answers. “Someone’s on their way now.”

Despite that I now spend only my summers in Bosnia and live far away in the presumed comforts of America, the war remains a force in my body as natural as hunger and fatigue. I understand it almost as much as I feel it—and I know the voices in charge who care only enough to lounge secured their job by turning in a résumé filled with dead bodies that were yet to be excavated in one of the countless mass burials trying to remind the world of the genocide committed on this now-partitioned soil. But I don’t even have a cell phone—who am I to speak on their behalf?

I swallow, and feel little besides anxiety.

Two weeks before Mama, Adnan, and I left, the family decided to place Grandpa into a care center at the local hospital. He had lost control of his bladder, he had become increasingly violent, hitting Mama one morning as she tried to change his clothes after he had wet himself. We kept telling ourselves he had no way of knowing, that he had never meant it to mean what it usually means to hit someone. But I struggled: I hated who he had become. I hated Bosnia and blamed it for changing him, blamed the war for removing us and enabling the thought that we may have been able to prevent this, somehow, just by being here, together, before it got out of hand. I wanted only to seclude myself further on the side of the world I had known for the past twelve years, far from Bosnia, from everything associated with what was unraveling before me without my control or permission.

The hospital complained: he needed more individual attention than the attendants could provide, especially since the seven o’clock evening soap opera was not to be missed and one doctor was responsible for the entire floor of patients like Grandpa—patients who had dementia or mental instabilities from war experience and were unable to care for themselves.

Before they moved him to a specialized center two hours from Brčko, I visited him.

“Grandpa,” I sang. His eyes shined as he sat at the edge of his stained mattress on a metal spring bed; he had wet himself that morning. He wore orange- and white-striped pajamas. The gray floor was dirty and cracked, the white walls turned beige, one large window opened to metal bars, high ceilings leading to one hanging light bulb.

I tried to leave him behind as I descended the stairs and walked into the street.

An hour passes. I sit with my elbows on my knees and my head resting on my knuckles, the kids playing hand games, the old man dozing a few meters away.

Light rain has been falling long enough that an outline has formed around the old man’s body, which keeps the gray asphalt beneath him dry.

I’m nervous—and frustrated. I’m disappointed for being disappointed, for expecting humanity. The kids start to scatter. I stand, look at the old man. A small population of 90,000 residents in this town, plenty of ambulances donated by Japan after the war, yet most of the kids and I still stand here, still wait, alone. Then the ambulance appears at the end of the street. A younger man in a red, one-piece outfit strolls toward us. He is too slow—or I am too eager—so I also walk toward him and then walk back to the old man with him, failing to tell him more about what happened, stuttering over my excitement, relieved with surprise. He kneels by the old man and, after a few brief examinations—the minutes seeming longer than the hours we waited— asks him if he could latch onto his wrist to stand. And he asks him, sounding impatient, reproachful, “Where do you live? You need to go home.”

I swallow, thinking he should take the man to the hospital. “He’s just drunk.” The paramedic shrugs, before turning to

walk back to the ambulance sitting idle. The old man staggers in the direction of the town center. I don’t know what to do.

I stand back, dumbfounded as before, with the kids, who now debate which one of them knew of his intoxication in the first place. An emptiness fills the street; the rain continues to fall, slowly washing away the outline of the old man’s body.

Things I lost on my roadtrip across the country, summer 2008

A brown pair of sunglasses, tortoiseshell, the first casualty. They used to belong to my mother during her wayward days in the seventies. I always swore I’d never be like her.

A red sandal that flip-flopped off my foot and fell behind me at a gas station in Topeka. An overall-clad man strode over it in mud-dung-caked boots like it was the easiest thing in the world. I left without looking back.

Twenty dollars to a guy named Spike with a scraggly beard and vacant stare for a bag of weed that wasn’t even worth ten. Then twenty more to Spike’s friend Rodney who must have weasled it out of my pocket as the Ziploc bag slid in.

My innocence to a sandy-haired boy whose eyes I imagined a deepest blue and who never once met my gaze.

My dignity at a bar outside Albuquerque as I choked back tequila and tears for a place where I couldn’t return.

My mind on a roadside in the Mojave, thumb to the sky, to the blinding sun.

last time

I saw your face, I remember clearly . . . you were wearing your orange sweater, a fall sweater you called it once. You walked quickly, quietly even and I lost sight of you the crowd swirled around you like a wave in Veracruz you became sea foam and ebbed out of my life do you wear your orange sweater, your fall sweater, and think of me ever? Do I ever cross past your vision, gliding like a Veracruz wave?

I remember you wearing your orange sweater, your fall sweater, crying in México City crying not in pain or from joy but because you could once more blend in with the crowd you accepted the wave you rushed out to meet it in happiness you cried, again accepting your old role of complacency it was December fall had passed

Ghostwood

Before sunrise, moonlight streams like spilt milk across the forest floor.

Walking

Closely we walk

With transparency of eyes

To visualize the scenery

On the greenery of grass

Her body is succulent glass tinted in grape

Guitar-shaped she is strumming my tone with her walk

As a Victoria’s Secret pendulum

To my acoustic curriculum of love

Her lips are cherry-flavored doves

Replicating sexual identity of the sky

The sidewalk articulates the twitching of her thighs

Under the covering of jeans and I am her denim fiend

But today she wears lace hip fitting

So I am a mouth of dreams spitting

The ground I’m hitting to be stepped on Because her feet . . . my mind . . . are on Like two roses attached to my optical thorn

The poetry of social science

She is socially stimulating my science in coordination with her biology

Physically . . . she is the engineering of my wants

Psychologically . . . the training center for my poetic flaunts

Of admitting her to my nurturing sensation of amniotic relations

Through menstruation pleasure in intoxicating sensations

As she nears my location under the aquatics of grey clouds

My sensual value is loud through lenses

Reading the insides of my frames investigating my first of five senses

She is the butterfly outside the windows to my soul

Walking

Glass

Walls Without Pictures

I dreamed the pictures disappeared That had adorned our home Fearful—I saw the walls bare As though the record of our lives Was no more—

Were they swept away by time, Or had—I—caused them to fall?

I pause and look at them now Wondering what I might do— To keep them there.

Eros Asshole

His maraschino cherry kisses do something funny to me: A tingling in my feet, A tickling on my knees, My neck sweats, my eyes twitch, On the backs of my elbows there’s a stinging like bees.

I’m pretty sure Cupid’s using fire ants these days, And when we kiss They eat my toes. Not quite as romantic as the old bow and arrow But it gets the job done, I suppose.

We part lips and I taste red hots and sherbet. To be sure, It’s a taste to savor.

I find myself asking, is my man made of candy? How else could he ooze such unusual flavor?

But that sadistic amorino is a son-of-a-bitch. Sticking rattlesnake tails In the back of my head, Teeth clanging, jaws humming. Should hugging and kissing always fill me with dread?

Handle Bars

Song in the Dark

The flesh sings. A flash of steel and the juice begins to flow, the beautiful red juice. No one, Jonathan, no one ever liked you here. But I am here with you now. I will help you make the beautiful red juice flow and cause the wonderful flesh to sing. The song is lovely, Jonathan. It is lovely because you have made it sing. They never liked you here. They never wanted you. No one ever wanted you, Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan, let’s go. Let’s go to free the juice. Let’s go to make the flesh sing. II.

It is dark here, Jonathan. It is dark enough here. The glowing has stopped. Here is the place where the juice will flow. Singing in the dark, no one will know. No one can hear us in the dark, Jonathan.

The door is different here. The door is glass. Lift the door, Jonathan. Slide it up. Quietly. In the dark no one will know. Step inside, Jonathan. Did we bring the steel? Good. Good, Jonathan. Quietly now. We must be extra quiet in here. In the dark no one can know. The flesh will sing in the dark.

A little one. A little one with eyes closed. A little one with wonderful flesh. Have you ever noticed it, Jonathan? With the eyes closed and the limbs still, have you noticed? Is it not familiar to you? A little one before the flesh sings is much the same as a little one after the flesh sings. No one will know. The beautiful red juice will feed the steel, and no one will know. In the dark the juice will flow.

He is strong. He is strong like Father. Jonathan! Quiet! Jonathan, quiet. Quiet your limbs. Quiet your limbs, Jonathan. Quiet your eyes. Do not let him know. Do not let him know why we have come here. Quiet. Show him, Jonathan. Show him that we’re here to, yes, to stop the red juice from flowing out! Yes, to stop it from flowing. Tell him the steel is to stop the juice from flowing out of the little one!

So that no one, Jonathan, no one can come to make the flesh sing. We’re here to stop them. Anyone who dares try. We will stop them with the steel! We will make their flesh sing.

He is strong. He is hurting us, Jonathan. He hurts like Father. He hurts and the other one is gone. She is gone with the little one. She has taken the little one with the wonderful flesh and she will tell the others. The others will come, Jonathan. They will come, Jonathan, and they will find us. They will find us in the dark and they will know. They will see the steel we have brought and they will know. Quiet now, Jonathan. Do not let them know. Quiet. Quiet your eyes. Quiet your limbs. Do not let them know.

III.

The lady is lovely. Isn’t she, Jonathan? All in white, the lovely lady. She is like a song in the dark. In white, lovely. The white is lovelier even than the red. You and I, Jonathan. We will stop anyone who dares try. We will stop anyone who dares stain with red the lovely lady in white.

She is not like the others here. She is gentle. She talks to us. She lays a hand on us and talks. She talks to us, the lady in white. Asks us how we are today. Lovely lady. The others in white, they do not treat us this way. They do not deserve the white! Tonight we will show them, Jonathan. We will show them they are not fit to wear the white. We will stain with red the others in white. In the dark, the white will be red and then only she will be lovely, only she will walk through the song in white.

But no. No, Jonathan! We mustn’t! No matter how much we want to, we mustn’t. The lovely lady in white would not want us to. She would cry. We mustn’t. We mustn’t ever make the lovely lady cry. She smiles at us. We mustn’t make her cry. She smiles at us when no one else will. Lovely lady in white.

She asks us questions. She asks us about Father. She asks us about red and steel and flesh and singing. She asks us with a hand laid

on our cheek. A hand warm with song. She says to us that everyone has a right to live.

The lovely lady with the eyes to make us sing. Everyone has a right to live, the lovely lady says.

She likes us, Jonathan. The others in white do not like us, but she does. The others in white, they touch us, but not on the flesh. They touch us to make us do things. To make us go with them. They make us go with them and sit in tunnels and stare at lights and swallow blue juice. We will do the things they make us, Jonathan. We will do the things for the lovely lady in white. Not for them! Never for them. IV.

The lights and juice and tunnels. Jonathan, the tunnel lights and the blue juice. I do not feel well, Jonathan. Not at all well. You have been talking to the lady again, haven’t you, Jonathan? You have been talking to her while I have been in the tunnel lights. While I have been gone, you have been drinking the blue juice and talking to the lady in white.

In the dark you lie quiet. I tell you to make the flesh sing in the dark and you do not listen to me. You used to listen to me, Jonathan. With Father you would listen to me. His flesh sang in the dark and the red juice flowed. When you listened to me. But now you only listen to the lady.

Jonathan, why have you stopped listening to me? Why this lady in white? Where was she when Father would hurt us? I was there, Jonathan. I was with you! With Father! It was me! When no one liked you I was there! The lady was not there.

How often, Jonathan? How often do you talk to the lady when I am not here? When I do not feel at all well, how often? We were to make the wonderful flesh sing! Instead you do what they say. You swallow the juice they give you and you put me into the tunnels with the lights.

Jonathan, have I not been here with you? When no one liked you, was I not here? When you hurt, I brought you steel to use in the dark. Didn’t I, Jonathan? Yet now, you talk to the lady in white. Now you talk to the lady in white more than you talk to me. You listen to her more than you listen to me!

The juice you swallow hurts. It makes me feel not at all well. Jonathan, the juice hurts. It hurts like Father. The juice hurts me, Jonathan. It puts me in tunnels with light, where there is never singing. It hurts me like Father hurt you.

Why? Why, Jonathan? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me? I was the one, Jonathan. I was with you. When no one was there, I was with you. Why are you doing this to me? I helped to make the flesh sing for you, Jonathan! I helped to make the red juice flow. Why are you doing this to me?

Everyone has a right to live. Jonathan, everyone has a right to live! Your precious lady in white, she said so herself. Have I? Jonathan, have I? Have I not also the right? Jonathan. Jonathan, answer. Jonathan, answer! Answer me, Jonathan. Answer. Jonathan?

Please. Please, Jonathan please! Have I not also the right to live? Have I not also the right? Jonathan? Jonathan!

Moonlit Tree

Soft and young, damp, flushed, two cherry blossoms in spring unfold overnight.

The “For Sale” sign read Perfect for a growing family, and it was no lie. The rooms were numerous and versatile: one could be a guest bedroom, then an office, then a nursery soon after, with little renovation. The backyard was small but densely shaded with mature trees, so that at noon anyone could walk to either neighbor without crossing through sunlight. It was a senescent home, on a friendly street, in a well-respected neighborhood. The house drew Scott in like a pair of open arms. It was the fastest sale the bank had made in years.

But there was another force that pulled on him and his wife, and perhaps it appealed to their soon-to-be-born infant too. Scott couldn’t describe the attraction as anything other than witchcraft—but it was child’s witchcraft, conjured in imaginative play with bugs trapped in airtight jars, drywall cracks stuffed with pilfered rose petals, broken toys stashed in crannies under the white heather bush. All obvious traces of young residents had been wiped away during the foreclosure, but the sanitized home still held snipped locks of hair under its loose carpet corners. Twice while repairing the aging Douglas-fir deck, Scott uncovered troves of tiny dolls with dented limbs and mildewed faces. Each discovery had the air of the home’s final secret, until a new nest of hidden artifacts would be unearthed.

Most curious, to Scott, was the constant erosion in the backyard, which revealed large oval stones just underneath the scraggly pale grass. The first few rocks came free with a kick, and when he picked them up he could feel their eggshell-smoothness, cold from the damp earth. With each pass of the lawn mower, he looked down to see in its swath the tops of more oblong tablets, some as large as cooking pots. His wife suggested they were from past landscaping that had gradually been swallowed by nearby willow trees’ roots. Whenever he found a new stone emerging, Scott would dig it out so the grass could take root. He piled them at the side of the house, next to the brick chimney. As months passed, the ground continued to yield its rocky cysts. The cairn beside the house grew. It was as if some primordial force at the earth’s core were slowly pressing the stones to the surface.

At last, the frequency of rocks borne to the air slowed. While his wife nursed their baby in the den, Scott grabbed his shovel and took it to the yard to unearth the only protruding lump he had seen in several weeks. This one was greyish and spherical, only barely peeking out of the dirt. Scott dutifully thrust the shovel into the ground beside it and levered it up, chunks of grass still clutching its curvature. He lifted the ashen orb with his free hand and stood upright, shaking the clinging mud back into the resulting divot. With the dirt crumbling, he heard and felt something come loose from his hand and thunk to the ground. When Scott looked down, he saw on the pile an arch of the same material as the orb, rocking back and forth. It stopped, a ridge of yellowed bumps barely visible at its edge.

Scott froze under a developing figment that he prayed was too far-fetched to be real. His eyes darted anxiously to his hand and the orb. There, the yellow ridge, the sockets, the curves. The shovel escaped his hand and clattered to the dirt, but the other hand held its possession like a vice. A small pair of dirt-filled eyes stared at Scott, half of a juvenile grin beaming, a gaping jagged hole in its temple collecting the meager sunlight like a kaleidoscope.

Left Behind

kissed your forehead left didn’t look back saw your kin unknown they stared they knew

idiots around us smiled couldn’t feel it

imbeciles didn’t know their exam room your deathbed girl keeps smiling words broken someday her turn

Under the Collars of Our Shirts

Dew rested heavy on whimpering blades their tops bent like heads hunched in prayer sweat dangling from their cheekbones ready to pounce.

Our breath blooms of condensation as she waited drumming fingers on the hood of my car hips swaying slightly with a patient grace.

My hand lifted hesitant to brush her cheek dexterity abandoned me in the cold left my palms damp with a heated anxiety I did not trust them to expel the warmth of my heart in motions she would comprehend.

So I kissed her instead. Against the car she said things with her tongue until our bodies radiated and rain fell from the sky just to roll under the collars of our shirts.

The stormy sea of passion in me is still water. Sincere love kindles no artfulness, for all art’s artifice with shrouding sentiments to stamp down, inspirationless. But even as my thoughts swim to other subjects, like some lovely sunrising haze settling over the sea she comes to engulf my visions.

“. . . And into my eyes your glory pour.”

Equipped for Orchards

Entrance

This is the long road northeast to harvest. Open me there, at my right branch; load your pickup with willing ladders, long-reaching pickers, forged steel border forks.

The blocks are well kempt. So it seems there are plenty of laborers this season, but they have been dismissed. They leave only their chemicals and dirty bandanas. They have taken their shears and rakes and moved on.

No one is here now. No one but you.

Instruction

Pass the first row, leave the truck.

See how the sun filters down in blinking eyes, the sun settles in, under everything: bleeding the soil, illuminating the bare earth, the footpaths.

The sun gets in no matter how thick the blossoms, no matter how poor the hands, however ill-equipped.

Harvest

Deeper in, you will be easeless, where the preplanting rye still grows, where, we both know, I should have better managed.

Resist marking the trees, dead or dying, in your book.

Put away your razing tools and touch me with your hands, the base of me, one trunk.

Take one apple at a time, unhinging them into your garnering bag.

Undress me slowly. Oh, one who is equipped for orchards, the only gardener left to sow.

Frankenstein’s Creature Meets Alexander Pope: Critical Analysis and Letters

Through a series of letters, Frankenstein’s creature and Alexander Pope will discuss and argue the contrasting views on the power of God and divine plan. The creature who sees himself as a unique, abandoned being who is not like any other man, is a creation of man, not God. In addition to that, he is shunned by his creator and, as a result, sees himself more as the fallen angel like Satan rather than the beloved creation like Adam. On the other side of things is Pope, who believes that God is the absolute power in the world and that one can find solace in the realization that all of God’s creatures are part of his divine plan. The contrast between Pope’s beliefs and the creature’s knowledge and experiences creates an interesting scenario in which the creature’s existence can be examined further.

In the context of the letters, I tried to incorporate specific vocabulary I observed in the original works on which the letters are based. For example, in the passage of Frankenstein in which the creature tells his story, he describes himself as tormented, a wretch, and a couple times he refers to being overcome with particular emotions or sensations. The creature also asks himself a great many questions within the text; this, and the other examples of how the creature thinks and speaks, allowed me to write more easily and fluidly from the creature’s perspective. Another trait of the creature I wanted to pull into the letters was the fascination with Adam and Satan that he obtains from his readings of Paradise Lost. Within the original text, the creature refers to how he views himself in relation to these two characters on more than one occasion. I specifically wanted to pull in the ideas of two particular passages. One of these passages seems to truly capture the creature’s viewpoint in how he regards his own person:

Remember that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I am alone irrevocably excluded.

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

(Shelley 77)

To me this passage captures the essence of the creature’s speech and his state of mind. How the creature sees himself provides the basis for the letters and demonstrates how he would make for a good antithesis to the ideas Pope expresses in Essay on Man regarding the belief in God as the ultimate authority and the power of God’s divine plan. When writing from the perspective of Alexander Pope, I made sure to incorporate the optimistic assurance that Pope conveys in his essay. When speaking from Pope’s perspective, I, once again, examined Essay on Man to find words and thoughts that seemed unique to him. For example, I looked at the different ways in which Pope refers to God: “Directing Mind” (51), “He” (48), “Disposing Power” (51). I tried to work these different names into the letters in order to mimic Pope’s way of writing to some extent. In addition to the little things I did to capture Pope’s voice, I tried to work in particular ideas that he brings up in his essay. Some of these ideas include: “reason alone countervails all the other faculties” (45), “lives through all life, extends through all extent” (52), and “one truth is clear, whatever is, is right” (53). I tried to convey these ideas from Pope to Frankenstein’s creature through these letters. When choosing the setting and context of the correspondence between these two very different individuals, I needed to find a way to keep the context of my letters realistic for both parties. I chose to write letters because I felt that in no way would the creature seek out someone to speak with face to face, and so I felt that it would be easier if he remained an anonymous and faceless being to Pope. I set the date at 1740 because Frankenstein is set in the eighteenth century and Pope published Essay on Man in 1735, but he died in 1744; 1740 seemed a good in-between year that would fit easily into the context of all that needed to be discussed in the letters. Finally, to set up the following letters, the creature points out that he learned of Pope from listening to the De Lacey family. This way it can be inferred that he heard the family, perhaps reading Essay on Man aloud to their father, speaking of Pope and his beliefs. Perhaps the creature was even able to obtain a copy of the work. Either way, he was clearly exposed to the work of Alexander Pope through his observations of the De Lacey family.

Overall, I believe that the letters I composed will provide an interesting look at the existence of Frankenstein’s creature through his correspondence with Alexander Pope. The discussion that takes place between these two people creates a different impression of the creature while still remaining true to the character presented in Mary Shelley’s original novel.

Autumn 1740

Dear Mr. Pope, I was recently in the company of a family who was familiar with your writings, and upon mention of your name I felt a deep interest in contacting you. Not long ago I came into contact with your Essay on Man, and I have come to believe that you may be the only person who could help me understand my own existence. I believe that you have expressed this idea of a divine plan, and that ultimate authority lies in the hands of God. I wonder, how can one who does not appear to be part of God’s divine plan find happiness in everyday life?

Everywhere around me I see people who seek comfort in their daily lives through their interactions with friends and family, but the poor wretch that I am, I have no one . . . forever doomed to be alone. Even worse, I am tormented with a frightening visage . . . a being with so gruesome a figure that no man can look upon me. I seek refuge in the desolate landscapes of mountains and glaciers, where few men dare to venture. If God created man in his image, what am I? Throughout my travels I have never laid my eyes on another being like myself! I am a miserable thing, a fatherless, motherless wretch! But at present, I cannot relate to you the full extent of my state and how I came to be as such. At present I merely seek your knowledge and counsel.

I do not believe that I am a descendant of Adam. God did not create a being such as me. I am the result of a single man’s curiosity and his hatred. If God did not create me, how can I find solace in his plan?

How can I trust in his guidance when I am less than even the beast He has set upon the Earth? I am the thing that is separate and alone, moulded out of death, and I now find that the only escape from this current pain and misfortune is death itself. Please Sir, if there is any assurance you can provide for me I will be forever grateful.

Sincerely,

A fallen angel

October 5, 1740

My Dear Sir,

I am sure you are no fallen angel! The torment you feel is the result of humanity’s faults, not the absence of God. The greatest truth one must understand is that the present way of things, whatever they may be, must be right; for why would they be any other way under the great Directing Mind?

Do not cast yourself off into a desolate land, as a creature lower than all others! You seem to be a man of reason, and that alone places you above the beasts. All men are merely created in a way to suit their place in creation. Given that you were created with the faculties of reason and understanding, it is absurd that you should think yourself so low a being. Whatever it is that has befallen you, understand that all that is bestowed on you is done so by Heaven. Everything is part of God’s glorious plan, including you, dear Sir.

Good man you are indeed part of God’s divine plan; for He lives in all life and is an omnipresent force. Even you, who see yourself as a fallen angel, are not excluded from His power. I find it curious that you claim to be no son of Adam, for we are all sons of Adam. To claim otherwise is absurd. When you say that you are the result of man’s curiosity and hatred, to what are you referring? If you could find the courage to relate to me those details of your current state that you could not relate to me previously, perhaps I could provide some further aide, if I can better understand you as a man? Do not worry, dear sir, you are not alone. If I can provide any consolation for you I will do my best to do so.

Sincerely,

Alexander Pope

Dear Mr. Pope,

November 1740

I noticed in your last letter that it was October. It is strange but in my present situation I find I have very little ability to keep track of the time. I notice the cycles of the moon, but I have no true count of the days. By now I gather it is November since I have hesitated in replying to your very kind letter. Upon receiving your letter I began to question the idea that I am part of a divine plan. Why would God want me to be a part of His plan? God created Adam, who was alone as I am, but God created a mate for Adam. From them all man was created. I have no mate. Life does not spring forth from my body, only death.

I was a creation made out of the vices of man rather than the virtues of God’s Adam. To help you better understand my person, as you requested, I shall recount to you some of the details of my existence. My maker is not God, but a mortal, a man full of anger and hatred towards me. I shall not disclose his name to you, for fear of discrediting his person, and thus provoking more hatred towards me. But this mortal, this man who saw himself capable of creating life, formed me from the materials he possessed; and then he gave me life. That was the nature of my creation. My creator has driven me from all happiness, when I have done nothing to warrant such animosity. I have seen kindness and joy throughout all my travels, but this bliss never extends to me. I have become a being of ugliness because of my maker. Not only is my visage startling, but the architect of my creation has also forced me into a world of misery. If only he would accept me as his own, his Adam, then I could be good and worthy of life again. But I am allowed no such gift. My creator spurns even the thought of my being, and so does the rest of humanity. If more knew of my existence, more would hate me, and so I find myself in the seclusion of nature, where I alone ponder my creation and what I am.

If only I could find some way to achieve acceptance or even recognition from him. You, who are such a great thinker, believe that everything that happens is part of God’s plan. Why would God create a man who himself tries to create life? If God is all powerful, how can my creator form living beings as well? I do not understand how God would allow a man to create such a miserable creature, a creature who receives the love of no one. My existence seems meaningless. Why? Why am I cast off when others are embraced? Why must I be removed from all that is light in the world, left to move only in the protection of shadows?

Once again I thank you for your assistance in my endeavor to find meaning in my existence. You are the only person who I find can understand me and provide me with the advice that I so ardently desire.

Awaiting your words, The Fallen Angel

February 12, 1741

Dear Sir,

Forgive me for not responding to your letter promptly when it arrived. Apparently there was some confusion when the letter was en route and I did not receive the letter until after the New Year. Lately my

health has been in decline, but do not be worried, at this point I am used to it. But I do not fret over my own existence, for God would not have afflicted me thus, if it was not for a purpose: I find solace in this, as should you.

I was quite alarmed at the recount of your creation that you provided in your last letter. It must have been very difficult for you to relay the details of such a cruel disposition. But do not fret, your existence is not meaningless, as you have so expressed.

I believe that as a creation of a man, and a creature of reason, you are indeed a descendant of Adam, and thus the divine gift of life. Perhaps God allowed your maker to provide you with life so that this mortal would, himself, learn that God holds the ultimate power. This presumption would provide somewhat of an understanding of why your creator looks at you with disgust and hatred; to him you are perhaps a reminder of his own faults. If so, his anger is not directed at you out of hate, but out of fear; fear that he himself will be punished for trying to prove himself equal to God. Perhaps if I could communicate with him as well, I could help you in your endeavor of making this man understand.

I believe you to be a very intelligent man, who has traveled on a path unlike any other on the face of the Earth, but that is not something to abhor or hate about yourself. Do not focus on the misery of your existence; look at the magnificence of the world that you were destined to inhabit. If your existence was meaningless, whom would I have to counsel? If you did not exist, how would I have spent the time I now spend writing and reading these letters? See, if your existence is meaningless, then so is my time, and since time has meaning, so does your existence. God has a plan, and you are part of it. Every life you enter, whether it be mine or your creator’s, you impact that life, and as a result you become part of the ongoing chain of events in His divine plan. Find solace in this, and realize that even though we have never met, I can tell from your letters that you are an intelligent man. And even though you have suffered greatly, perhaps realizing that that is the way things are supposed to be will bring you comfort.

Do not let your thoughts of loneliness and misery weigh down on you. You are a man blessed with the gift of life; find joy in the knowledge that you are as important to God’s plan as any other person on the face of this earth.

Your Confidant, Alexander

Pope

Dear Mr. Pope,

As you can see I’ve lost track of even what month I find myself in. I have been traveling a great deal since obtaining your latest letter. I hope your health has improved since you wrote the letter; it would be a great loss if any great ailment befell you. After reading your letter I must thank you for your understanding. I understand your explanation of how I truly am a descendant of Adam, but I still do not understand how God would allow a creature as grotesque as me to inhabit this beautiful world. I appreciate your attempts to satisfy my desire to understand myself and the circumstances of my creation, but I feel that I can never truly find contentment with my person until I can be accepted by my creator. My maker is a great man, I have no doubt, but he is pitiless in his treatment towards me. If I could only make him see that I mean him no harm, and that all I want is to be seen as his child: a child that must be accepted and loved, not looked at with disdain. Once again I thank you for the time you have spent in correspondence with me. I would never have understood my singular importance in God’s plan had it not been for your kindness and compassion. But now I must travel on; I must once again find my maker and relay to him all that you have shared with me. I believe that only then can I come to terms with my own existence.

Sincerely,

A Son of Adam

Works Cited

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Man and Other Poems. New York: Dover, 1994. 45-53. Print.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or The ModernPrometheus. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.

Feminism’s Blind Spot: Black Women and Intersectional Identity

In 1952 Ralph Ellison published a book that would change society’s perception of the black experience in America. Invisible Man, though one of my favorite books, left me with a feeling that something was missing. As a black woman in America, I could relate to it–but only to a certain extent. Where is the invisible woman? I wondered. This feeling of relating-but-not-quite is something I would continue to experience in my education in both race relations in American society and feminist theory. There was no book about the black female experience to be easily found in either the African-American Studies section of the library or among the feminist tomes; in both sections black females remained a side note, with the various -isms of each field seeping into the dominant discourses (“There’s sexism in my race studies and racism in my gender studies!”). It occurred to me that black women live in the empty space that exists between gender oppression and racial discrimination, existing in a way that encompasses both forms of oppression yet somehow leaves them rendered invisible. The increasingly popular theory of intersectional identities is the only saving grace in a feminist world in which I find myself often feeling alienated.

“Intersectionality” is a term coined in 1989 by legal scholar and critical theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. The theory suggests that systems of oppression can–and often do–occur simultaneously. Models of oppression do not act independent of one another but interrelate within the lives of the individuals they affect. In order to better understand this concept, examine the following:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination … But it is not always easy to reconstruct an

accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. (Crenshaw 149)

While studying discrimination in the workplace, Crenshaw discovered that discrimination against black women is virtually invisible in the eyes of the law due to the fact that it does not fit neatly into the category of racial or gender discrimination. As Crenshaw illustrates in the above example, in the lives of black women racial oppression and gender discrimination are inextricably linked. However, according to the law, the discrimination perpetuated against the black woman–and, by extension, the black woman herself–is virtually invisible. In an example often cited to illustrate this concept, a group of black women are the last to be hired (due to discrimination) and the first to be fired due to lack of seniority–which of course links back to the discriminatory hiring practices that first took place. In court, the black women have no basis for a case because they cannot claim either racial or gender discrimination because neither black men nor white women were fired along with them. This leaves the black women trapped within a cycle of discrimination and effectively falling into the cracks of the current legal system where they have no real protection. Though Crenshaw’s studies focus specifically on black women, the realities of discrimination due to intersectional identities apply to many people in some way or another, not just in regard to race but also sexual orientation, class level, and nationality. The theory of intersectionality takes into account all of the factors that form the structure of someone’s identity and any experiences they may have with oppression in a systematically sexist, racist, and heteronormative society.

Unfortunately, the invisibility caused by intersectional identities is often found in spaces that are lauded as “safe” and inclusive–such as the feminist movement. When people speak about feminism there is an implied whiteness that accompanies the word–the experiences and struggles that are discussed are those of middle class white women and the goals that are reached for apply to these same middle class white women. Any intersections with race, class, and sexuality (among others) are continuously overlooked in the larger dialogue on feminism. White feminists, speaking from a place of societal privilege, have in the past overgeneralized their own specific struggles and experiences as those of

the movement as a whole. Rather than being inclusive, this ignores and excludes the experiences of any woman who is not white and/or middle class. If a movement preaches inclusiveness but fails to acknowledge the experiences of its members who are considered to be on the fringe, it damages the integrity of the entire structure. Focusing on just one form of oppression without considering how it invariably interacts with other systematic forms of oppression is at best frustrating and at worst alienating and an exercise in erasure.

For the purposes of this essay, as Crenshaw did in her early studies, I too will focus specifically on the oppression of black females due to their intersectional identities and the resultant societal invisibility. This “blind spot” has led to many activist movements being just more places into which the black woman does not quite fit. When (perhaps unintentionally) racist discourse trickles into feminist spaces and sexist acts take place in black-positive movements, then what place does she have left? A black woman is not a woman before she is black, nor does her “blackness” come before her womanhood. Intersectional identities are not things that can be neatly taken apart, their components set out and numbered in order of importance.

This issue of displacement is also a problem in movements that claim to be “alternative” or “counter-culture.” Once again, there is an unspoken whiteness that lingers around the word–an alternative that is not too alternative. A prime example of this is the Riot Grrrl movement, which sought to create a place for women in the male-dominated world of punk rock. This was largely a place for white women, though, serving as an alternative to the white male that wasn’t too alternative. Many people of color and women have felt less than welcome in underground creative spaces–this goes double for women of color, who encompass not one, but two levels of unconceived “otherness.”

The value of having one’s voice heard is often invisible to many who don’t struggle with visibility within society. Many women of color have felt unwelcome in traditionally feminist spaces and as a result have created their own. One example is the community of women of color in the larger world of “zines.” Zines are independently run “publications” that are traded within a network of like-minded people. They have a DIY appeal, often photocopied and stapled and featuring hand-drawn artwork and personal narratives. Though zines were very popular within many subcultures (such as the aforementioned Riot Grrrl movement that relied heavily on zines to spread its ideas), they

became yet another area in which people of color were marginalized. However, a smaller community was formed within the larger zine community made up of people of color who were telling their stories–loudly. Zines provided a place for the voices of women that were otherwise not heard. These zines often focused on identities that go unacknowledged not only in pop culture and society but also in popular feminist discourse, and they served as examples of writings that deal with the realities of intersectional identities.

Evolution of a Race Riot, a zine first published in 1994, is a 94-page compilation zine made up of contributions by other “zinesters” of color. According to its editor Mimi Nguyen, Evolution was compiled and created in order to “subvert the dominant punk rock order, yes, whiteboy/girl hegemony” (qtd. in Piepmeier 131). The legendary zine contained radically subversive writings–many by women of color–discussing everything from “white girl feminism” to the deconstruction of the punk rock scene as one that embraces its privilege while ignoring the prevalence of racism within its own subculture. This unwillingness of many whites to examine supposedly “alternative” movements more closely was–and is–a constant source of frustration and alienation for many women of color. In an unnamed essay published in Evolution, Chandra Ray draws attention to feminism as “a sisterhood that flattens differences or, more insidiously, functions to mask racial hierarchies” (qtd. in Piepmeier 131). The prominence of the radical idea that feminism was perhaps not as inclusive as it claimed–that it did indeed have a blind spot–at once shook the core of the movement and proved the importance of women of color having a venue to share their thoughts.

In the wider world of publishing there are an increasing number of anthologies featuring writings by women of color that continue to publish in the spirit of zines. Perhaps the most well-known of these anthologies is the groundbreaking collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Women of Color, which is considered by many to be the spark that started the fire. The anthology was published by Third Women Press, itself a revolutionary feminist publishing company in that it was formed by working class women of color in order to publish authentic accounts of the lives of women like them. Other anthologies, such as Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, offer a modern view by featuring essays by a newer generation of feminists of color.

What these larger anthologies retain from the earlier zine movement is a certain candidness and refreshing authenticity. In her essay “Weaving an Identity Tapestry,” Sonja D. Curry-Johnson, an “educated, married, monogamous, feminist, Christian African-American mother,” expresses her need for a place where she can “bring [her] whole self to the table” (Curry-Johnson 223). Participation in other movements may require women of color to leave some parts of their identity at the door. Through writings like Curry-Johnson’s, a sense of community that provides a much-needed safe space in which women of color can operate is built. While some argue that this promotes divisiveness, the need for an inclusive space is very real and should be respected. Like Curry-Johnson so masterfully articulated, black women need a place where they can bring their whole selves to the table, as all women do. The problem lies in the delay in realizing that those spaces may not be the same for everyone. Intersectionality attempts to bring to the light all of the different factors structuring experiences of oppression that the feminist movement as a whole should fight against. Noted feminist Audre Lorde said it best:

I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides arerotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. (Lorde 133)

What Lorde is suggesting is the idea that within the feminist movement there needs to be a sense of unity that embraces diversity–only then can feminism be truly inclusive.

Works Cited

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”

University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. 139-67. Print.

Curry-Johnson, Sonja D. “Weaving an Identity Tapestry.” Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Ed. Barbara Findlen. Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2002. 221-230. Print.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press, 2007. Print.

Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.

Christopher Lahr

Biographies

Jennifer Adams is currently an undergraduate senior pursuing a B.A. in English. She has written for a number of publications, including Maize and Apt. She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, where she enjoyed teaching poetry to underserved youth as a volunteer for Girls, Inc. She also volunteered with the Writers Center of Indiana and assisted with teaching poetry to a high school group as a part of The Writer’s Way program. She has lived in St. Louis for two years and is in her second semester at UM-St. Louis. Upon graduation, Jennifer hopes to write and continue expanding her design company.

Robert Bliss is the Dean of the Honors College and an occasional contributor to Bellerive. Of the poems he submitted this year, “Aldous” is noteworthy because it was written so quickly when “spring sunlight and dirty windows conspired” to reflect a posted image of Aldous Huxley “in space,” outside his office and he “had to write about it.” True, he left out some stuff because he remembers that someone once wisely said you can’t get everything into a poem. “Ghostwood” is about a Missouri hardwood forest, at night, in midwinter. “No Smoking” is a poem about commuting and the “Deboliver” Metro station. Earlier versions of “Ghostwood” and “No Smoking,” were once far longer and full of the poet’s thoughts, but both are better now that they are older and speak for themselves.

Dannie Boyd is currently a senior majoring in Communication. He plans to work in the media industry as a creative director. His long-term goal is to become a multitalented freelance artist in the areas of writing, photography, and graphic design. As an artist, he dreams of having his work displayed across the city in the most public and highly visible locations in town. Poetry drives all of his work. Dannie believes that the world can be broken down into metaphors to describe every aspect of life. He loves bright, colorful, and vivid art that glows in florescent hues; this is reflected in his creations.

Mary Grace Buckley will graduate in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English as well as certificates in Writing, Honors, and Women’s & Gender Studies. She initially started writing because she wanted to be the next J. K. Rowling, but she sticks with writing because she truly loves it. In her five years at UM-St. Louis, her experiences at

the Pierre Laclede Honors College have been her favorites, hands down; it’s perhaps the only place that has truly understood her overactive imagination and knowledge-junkie ways. She is honored to have her poetry included in this anthology and hopes to continue publishing poetry and fiction after leaving UM-St. Louis. She also truly enjoyed working on the Bellerive Editing Committee this year and wishes that she had signed up for the class earlier because the other members were so much fun to work with.

Charlie Diehl received a B.A. in English in May of 2011 and is continuing on at UM-St. Louis to receive his M.A., but he would like to transfer to the M.F.A. program. In addition to writing, he enjoys reading, hiking, riding his bike, lying in a field, and “frolicking” anywhere. Charlie believes firmly that all life’s activities are improved with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20—best consumed by passing around a bottle (still in its paper bag) with a group of friends. His literary influences include Noam Chomsky, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Colson Whitehead.

Tina Fanetti is currently a graduate student writing her dissertation on the connection between video games and science reasoning. After completing her Ph.D., she hopes to work in informal science education (mainly physics) at a science center or museum. Tina has been seriously pursuing photography since January 2010. She enjoys photographing nature and brightly colored, sparkly objects—especially colored fountains. Tina gets her inspiration from her dog Jake and her photo-buddy Mark.

Cynthia Graham is a senior pursuing a B.A. in English and a Pierre Laclede Honors College Certificate. Through a semester of research and writing, she has “really come to respect both Mary Shelley and Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft,” and she plans to focus on the Romantic Period in graduate school. When it comes to writing, Cynthia’s favorite genre is historical fiction. She particularly enjoys genealogical research and finding stories that allow her to create voices for “people who have largely been forgotten.”

Joe Harrington is the type of person who says he’s going to do something, and then he does it. He’s also the type of person who says he’s going to do something, and then he doesn’t do it. Sometimes, he’ll say he’s not going to do something, but then he’ll do it later anyway, on the sly. He might threaten to do something, not do it at first, but do it later and then deny ever having done it when you press him. He knows the law. You can’t prove a thing.

Ellen Huppert is an undergraduate at UM-St. Louis seeking a B.A. in Anthropology. She plans to eventually receive her Ph.D. in Anthropology in order to work as a college professor. She finds inspiration for her writing and artwork from the everyday images and life around her, as well as from pure imagination. Ha Ha Tonka was created to remember the beautiful Ha Ha Tonka State Park’s ruins after visiting them with her family. She loves art and literature and enjoys listening to music, watching movies, and spending time with her best friends.

Sam J. Imperiale graduated from St. Charles Community College in May of 2011 with an Associate in Arts degree. He was recently accepted into the Pierre Laclede Honors College and is an undergraduate at UM- St. Louis. He is seeking a Bachelor’s degree in English, and plans to earn a Master’s degree as well. He looks forward to teaching at the college level someday. As a returning learner, the motivation for his writing comes from his life experiences. He has been a Marine, a carpenter, and, now, a college student. He writes best when provoked. Aggravation is his inspiration. He jokingly likes to think of himself as “a lovable curmudgeon” that is “still a nice guy.”

Brenna Kiser is a GraduateTeaching Assistant in the Department of English. Her goal is to continue teaching and writing after receiving her Master of Arts degree. She enjoys reading, music, and drawing.

Christopher Lahr is a student in the Art Education program with an emphasis in painting. He has completed a minor in Psychology and is now working on a minor in Art History. He believes that both minors will greatly reinforce his teaching abilities as well as enhance his own work. Paradigm is an attempt to create a self-portrait of sorts—in

relation to the subjects and issues that motivate his personal art work. Chimps was a quick study for figure drawing that Christopher enjoyed creating because it conveys a moment of peace for creatures that are constantly a public spectacle. Nude played a big part in what he considers a very successful figure drawing that conveys relaxation and contemplation.

Sarah Myers is an undergraduate student at Pierre Laclede Honors College hoping to obtain a Ph.D. in Psychology with a minor in writing. Photography is her hobby, and nature captures her eye. Friends call her “Mrs. Doolittle,” as animals seem to appear and pose in her presence. Or maybe she is always in the right place at the right time. Someday, she hopes to sell some of her photographs.

Ashley Nichole Nickell is an undergraduate student majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies, with minors in Studio Art and Biology. Her artwork is inspired by her fascination with realism and she enjoys portraying objects as they appear. She took up drawing in the fall of 2009. This is when she discovered her skill, which seems to be now progressing rather quickly. Her hobbies and interests include volleyball, pool and darts, Scrabble, and Alpha Xi Delta.

Ashley Pereira is a senior at UM-St. Louis pursuing a B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Certificate. Her plans for the future are still up in the air, but she hopes upon graduating to either enter into a M.F.A. program or become a trophy wife. Besides writing, Ashley enjoys reading, listening to music, cooking, shopping, interpretive dancing, watching films, taking photographs, and being snarky. She thanks those involved in this year’s publication of Bellerive for their hard work!

Sharon L. Pruitt is currently an undergraduate at UM-St. Louis. She plans to use her English degree to enter the world of journalism. She hopes to one day launch her own progressive women’s magazine that will contain more words than pictures. Her hobbies include writing, designing fictional spaceships, and knitting.

Erin Richey graduated from UM-St. Louis and the Pierre Laclede Honors College in the spring of 2011 and is currently attending the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

She participated in the Bellerive seminar that produced A Welcome Crisis in 2010. Her creative work North was heavily inspired by the fantastic black-and-white comic Sailor Twain by Mark Siegel and the underwater photography of Zena Holloway. After she “gets done making a fool out of herself in New York,” Erin plans to investigate wrongful convictions and continue to produce vague and questionable art works on the side.

Ellen Ryan Robinson is majoring in Spanish at UM-St. Louis. According to Ellen, Spanish majors don’t plan for the future, they just “speak Spanish, make fun of gringos who speak bad Spanish, and drink good cerveza.” Her work has been inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and she believes he should be a god; his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is that book you can read over and over again, and still fall in love with each time. In addition to Márquez, Ellen’s interests include Augusten Burroughs, Julia Álvarez, and listening to rancheras, cumbias, and Mexican música. Ellen’s poem “Yorkshire girl sipping Coke on a gloomy day” is para Yasmin.

Kelly Rohlf, a senior at UM-St. Louis, will be graduating in December with a B.A. in English. She aspires to become a published writer and a community theatre actress after graduation. To this day, she finds much joy in being outdoors soaking up nature. She loves her family and spending time on Intuition, the boat she and her husband plan to enjoy as a mutual distraction from the dreaded mid-life crisis. If she had it her way, they would sell everything and live on their boat in order to explore the waterways of North America.

Ena Selimovic is an English major in her senior year at UM-St. Louis. Besides literature, film, and photography, she loves running, discussing soccer, and pretending—in a sound-proof room—that she can rap to the beats of her accordion. On days when inevitable failure is more obvious, she dreams of expanding the number of hours in the day, becoming the captain of a ship, and writing and teaching literature for a living. She thanks her parents for being the source of her birth, and migration for being the source of her writing.

Grace Stone is an English undergraduate at UM-St. Louis. Poetry has been a big part of her life since eighth grade. She doesn’t like to talk about herself much.

Ben Watts was born and raised in Belleville, Illinois. He is a senior and a Pierre Laclede Honors College student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre and Dance. In his free time, Ben works as a professional actor in the St. Louis area, performing mostly stage work with small non-profit companies, such as Stray Dog Theatre and St. Louis Shakespeare. He’s also a frequent contributor to Brain Stew. Ben enjoys reruns of Murder, She Wrote, gin, and hiding the fact that his family is “bat-shit crazy behind a façade of quiet, privileged suburbia.”

Staff Notes

Each year, when I’m invited to reflect on a new issue, I realize how lucky I am to be part of Bellerive—from the first seminar meeting each fall to the day we celebrate the launch of the newest issue and begin looking ahead to next year’s issue.

You may or may not know the challenges of putting together a book like the one you now hold in your hands. You may or may not know the challenges of creating any of the amazing works that our talented poets, authors, photographers, and artists have so generously shared. But as you visit and revisit the pages in this book, you will certainly get to share in the familiar and not-so-familiar challenges of being human.

Synesthesia, like the previous eleven issues of Bellerive, assumed distinctive form and character through a blending of diverse talent and dedicated labor. This blending is particularly intriguing because the book evolves over several rounds of review, and the identity of submitters is not revealed until the selections process is complete and preparation of the manuscript begins. As Synesthesia evolved, the book became particularly humanlike. From cover to cover, this book offers glimpses of a fascinating and compelling mix of vulnerability and strength. I hope that you will enjoy Synesthesia as much as I know I will continue to enjoy the book.

Thank you to all who shared their creative talents with us, to seminar members who handled them with care, to those who have provided ongoing and unwavering support (especially Dean Robert Bliss and Associate Dean Nancy Gleason), and to you, who open and linger on the pages of this addition to the eclectic collection that we call Bellerive

Gerianne Friedline

Look. I acknowledge that the Staff Notes are what anyone picking up a copy of Bellerive wants to see first, but, I beseech you, please do peruse some of the other contents once you’ve finished reading this. There’s some good stuff, I promise. Granted, nothing that compares to the caliber of literature you’re reading right now, but the fact is we in the Editing Committee worked really hard to ensure there remained no grammatical or typographical errors in the book. I consider it a personal affront that you’re even still reading this. Haha, we’re having a lot of fun, but seriously, from all of us here on the Editing Committee, stop reading this. For real. You’re not “cool” or “hip” because you knew to go straight to the Staff Notes when you bought this book. Check out some of the poetry. Or the short stories.

This is my last year as a member of Bellerive. I can sincerely say that being a part of this publication is the most fun I’ve ever had in any academic endeavor. I’ve met a lot of cool people and made a couple of really amazing friends (hi, Grace!). Thank you, Geri, for helming this operation despite my weekly attempts to organize a mutiny against you. Thank you to the other members of the staff for making this a fun class to be a part of. And an extra special thanks to my fellow editors for all their hard work: Emily, Tom, Brandy, Joyce, and Mary Grace. Because of you guys, I really think there will be no typos in this year’s issue!

Jow Harrington

Visual art offers a set of expectations wholly distinct from that of the written word. In a publication encompassing both media, it is vital that there are individuals with the capacity to guide the assessment of ocular expression. Elements such as texture, hierarchy, contrast, and space must be taken into account. The members of this year’s Art Committee feel that they possess exceptional skill in relaying the constituent parts comprising the quintessence of illustrative creativity in a manner that is both accessible and graceful. 98

No one outside of the Art Committee corroborates this claim. In spite of this atrocious lack of respect and appreciation for our singular and surpassing ability, we would like to thank the other members of the Bellerive staff for all their hard work this year. In particular, we would like to extend our most sincere gratitude to Grace Stone, Lauren Ewart, and Dannie Boyd. In our opinion, these three are the most valuable members of the staff. And a big thanks to everyone who submitted artwork this year. Without you, we never could have exploited our prodigious talents.

Grace Stone

After three years of participating in the creative process of producing Bellerive, I have to say this year has been another satisfying experience of reviewing submissions, making hard choices, and, in the end, coming up with a wonderful collection of literature and art. This was my last run at seeing the book through to completion, and it has been well worth it.

I have greatly enjoyed working with Brian Farrar and Amber Jeffery. From the beginning they contributed fresh ideas and an eagerness to learn the process. They have experienced the idiosyncrasies of Quark and now are ready to carry on the great tradition of the Layout Committee work.

We would like to congratulate Geri Friedline and the staff of Bellerive for all the hard work and stupendous effort in putting together this edition. The collaborative process is always the best part of this experience. Thanks to everyone; we couldn’t have done it alone, nor would we have wanted to.

Kelly Rohlf

Our work started later in the semester than the other committees, but when it did, it started in earnest. Our semeseter was full to the brim with emails to and from submitters and potential guest speakers, as well as gathering biographies and formatting them to fit the bill. We’d like to thank Abbie Kipp for her wonderful work compiling and organizing the biographies while the rest of our committee undertook the mammoth task of writing the follow-up emails. We’d also like to thank our Faculty Advisor, Geri Friedline, for her tremendous support during our efforts in and out of class. We look forward to organizing the launch gala, as well as producing advertising for the book we worked so hard to create.

Matt Plodzien

Staff Photograph

Front Row (Seated L to R): Amber Jeffery, Mary Grace Buckley, Brandy

Grossich, Kelly Rohlf

Middle Row (Seated L to R): Joe Harrington, Grace Stone, Abbie Kipp, Lauren M. Ewart, Laura Kessler, Thomas Manion, Sharon L. Pruitt

Back Row (L to R): Emily Cronin, Gerianne Friedline, Brian Farrar, Alex Hale, Joyce Gates, Dannie Boyd, Matt Plodzien

Pierre Laclede Honors College EXCELLENCE

IN WRITING AWARDS

2010-2011

1000-Level

Ellen Huppert

“Frankenstein’s Creature Meets Alexander Pope: Critical Analysis and Letters”*

Honors 1200: Cultural Traditions I Instructor: Gerianne Friedline

1000-Level

Sharon L. Pruitt

“Feminism’s Blind Spot: Black Women and Intersectional Identity”*

Honors 1110: Men and Women in Popular Culture Instructor: Kathryn Weber

3000-Level

Sophia Halloran

“O Well, La Di Da, La Di Da, La La: Sexism in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall”

Honors 3010: Woody Allen and His Influences Instructor: Daniel Gerth

3000-Level

Darren Olsen

“George Whitefield’s Role in New England Revivalism”

Honors 3030: From Jamestown to Appomattox: American Religious Thought, 1607-1685

Instructor: Robert Bliss * This piece is featured earlier in this book.

Thank you for reading this year’s issue of

Interested in becoming part of Submit your work!

Submission boxes and forms are located in the Millenium Student Center, English Department Office, and just inside the door to the Provincial House on South Campus. Not on campus that often, or are the boxes out of your way? For additional information or to submit electronically:

bellerivesubmit@umsl.edu or

friedlineg@umsl.edu

G Ben Wt