Issue 5: Flux

faith in literature and art

flux

/. fiction

funeral music from M. David Hornbuckle

/. essay

thumbtacks and grandmothers from Liz Laribee and Martha Krystaponis

/. poetry siblings and ancient prayers from Brian Lowry and Albert Haley /. art attempts to calculate the intangible from Holly Hudson

05 ISSUE

Fall

2 0 0 7

$8.00

why

ruminate ?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoirs and visual art that resonate with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke— longing for the significance they point us toward. Every RUMINATE issue has its own theme or focus with the hope of drawing rich connections between art, life, and faith. Please join us.

On the cover: Holly Hudson. Hazel Motes. Drawing and woodcut. 14 x 17 inches.

On the inside cover: Holly Hudson. Attempt to Calculate the Intangible. Serigraph. 11 x 9 inches.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 05

Fall 2007

RUMINATE (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by RUMINATE MAGAZINE, INC., 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

WHERE TO WRITE Send all subscription orders, queries and changes of address to RUMINATE, 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521 or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine. com. If you are moving and want to ensure uninterrupted service, please allow six weeks of notice. (The post office will not automatically forward magazines.) For information on back issues, advertising rates, RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.com. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art—you may submit online at our website.

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POSTMASTER Send address changes to: RUMINATE MAGAZINE, 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521.

Copyright

2007 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.

Much thanks to darwill press in Chicago, Il, for taking on the task of printing RUMINATE—without Darwill there would be no RUMINATE.

RUMINATE is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Whitney Hale, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price , Jonathan Van Dyke Allison Korrey Alexa Behmer, Shannon Smiley Anne Pageau

editor-in-chief senior editor associate editors intern readers design

contents

Notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Last

4 5 6 56

Fiction R. Dean Johnson 27 Catching Atoms

M. David Hornbuckle

Poetry

40 Funeral Music

Ashleigh Hill

Essay

Leaving Pennsylvania 8

Albert Haley What Binds the World 9 In Saint Peter’s Square 9

Stephanie Gehring Here I Am 18 Pinned 18 A Place to Start 19

Liz Laribee 10 Seven Things I Used to Think About

Martha Krystaponis 36 Tracing a Root to Lithuania

Arthur Saltzman 46 Planks in Reason

PJ Bentley

Visual Art

Out of the Mouth a Sword 20 Revelation 25

Jenn Koiter Spitting: A Parable 33

Brian Lowry For My Brother 34 Seed Dispersal 35

Holly Hudson cover inside cover

21 22 23 24 56

Scott Coverdale Precursor to Love 38 Recognition 39

Julie L. Moore Long After the Divorce 45 Planting a Tree 45

Ellen Dietz Tucker Advance Directives 50

Sylvia M. DeSantis spiderwebs 51

Hazel Motes Attempt to Calculate the Intangible Out of the Mouth a Sword Self-Portrait with Affliction The Bleeding Heart Pigeon Revelation Ruminate

Josh Schicker 15 16 17

Italy 5 Israel 1 India 3

Jessica Anderson inside back cover back cover

Treeline East Field

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

Maybe you read flux aloud,

like it is a word to be spoken and heard, like because of the exotic x it is four letters of poetry. And I wonder if your mouth pauses over the little word, the same way our hearts quicken at thoughts of a new baby or a lost father, of change, instability and fluctuation. For flux is unresting. But it is also lively. And on some occasions, this combination generates great things.

I think the contributors in this issue have captured this generative nature of flux; they have found more exotic x’s, as in Stephanie Gehring’s lines: that in spite of myself I look up, reaching, wrap my fingertips into the rock, send my toes searching for a crack, an edge, a place to start.

And some contributors have recovered old constants. Like how, for all the change in this world (or perhaps because), some things still need to be said over and over, because we never truly get past the playground or the parables or our grandmother’s ancestry.

And while this issue is concerned with change, it also investigates permanence. As Liz Laribee suggests in her essay “Seven Things I Used to Think About,” the existence of flux is part of why we buy thumbtacks and hang Post-its, attempting to nail some things down.

Because, as so many of our contributors point out, we want a place to start, a square of words to hold on to, a God that doesn’t alter, and an eternity that doesn’t end. So it seems that, ultimately, this issue is made up of letters and lines and squares of paper that invite us to revel in the flux, perhaps precisely because of the fixedness He offers.

Blessings,

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NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

I got the last issue of RUMINATE and loved it. I’ve read through it a few times already and even got my husband to read one of the poems, “Frankenblessed,” out loud to me. Also, I gave the subscription card to my mother-in-law because she was really excited about the magazine after seeing it on our coffee table.

I’m so glad to see that RUMINATE is blessing the world with its gifts!

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.com

Your magazine has brought me peace of mind on many a restless night. I calm myself down by sifting through the poetry and then nestle into one of its beautiful short stories. Before I know it, I am content again and can freely bring closure to the day.

Thanks RUMINATE! Jessica Gonzales Portland, OR

Carly Ritorto Santa Barbara, CA

I have RUMINATE 04. I must write you or I’ll blow up. This is the most beautiful magazine I have ever seen in my life—inside and out. I didn’t really know what to expect because googling something isn’t the same as holding a copy in one’s hands. I just read the editor’s note and Josh Kalscheur’s poetry, and I am floating in the air.

I appreciate that RUMINATE provides a place for the beauty of the Christian faith and the beauty of good-quality writing to intertwine as they should. All too frequently, Christian writing is considered good by Christians solely because of its religious symbolism or tone. Thank you for your commitment to literary excellence.

Lawrence Door Alachua, FL

Addie Leak Jackson, MS

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ruminations

ARTIST’S NOTE holly hudson was born in Nampa, Idaho, in 1975 (a very good

year). Her studies of art and art making began at Boise State University in Idaho—first with sculpture and then in a zestful pursuit of printmaking. After a few years, Holly transferred to The Art Institute of Chicago.

There she emphasized in relief printmaking and began to draw and paint.

Holly intends to continue her studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, this autumn. Currently she resides in Portland with her fabulous husband Elton Kelly.

narrative: a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.

My fixation with creating art seems to stem from a fascination with illustrating experiences and stories I find to be true. When people ask me why I make art, I often hear myself say: “I just want to tell the truth.” My renderings are certainly fallible as they come from my own subjective standpoint, but never the less, they are earnest attempts. So it is that the characters within my art often find truths that seemingly conflict—their stories articulate a great sorrow that somehow simultaneously hold beauty, redemption and possibly even joy.

The image entitled Hazel Motes (cover) symbolizes the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s first novel Wiseblood. I envision him as a pigeon: both pedestrian and full of beauty and singularity (like humans).

Within the context of Hazel’s story, he spends his life running away from his purpose, and thus experiences great misery. In despair he even blinds himself. Though his eyes no longer see, his calling is ever before him. And in spite of his choices, a persistent grace that he is unaware of surrounds him.

Attempt to Calculate the Intangible (inside cover) addresses the frustration of trying to understand the human heart and mind with our own finite comprehension. Humans are far too complex to be rendered down in charts and graphs, but this awareness doesn’t seem to hamper our continued efforts. Self Portrait with Affliction (p. 22) is an effort to see redemption in the chronic pain and illness I experience. There must be transcendence somewhere in this? Still looking.

The Bleeding Heart Pigeon (p. 23) tells of a man (personified by the Bleeding Heart pigeon of the Philippines—and yes, this bird does exist) whose young wife dies suddenly and without warning. He is surrounded by the facets and dimensions of a grief he could never have anticipated. And though it seems impossible, he experiences moments of beauty within his ostensibly abject sorrow. He is surrounded but not overcome. It also references Martin Schongauer’s engraving The Torment of Saint Anthony.

Ruminate (p. 56) expresses a process of cogitation. I think there can be great fertility in meditation because, certainly, what we contemplate determines the form(s) of cogitation. Out of the Mouth a Sword and The Revelation (p. 21, 24) are illustrations for the poetry of writer PJ Bentley.

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RU M I NAT E ’s

First Annual POETRY AWARD

Judged by Gregory Wolfe, editor of IMAGE. Sponsored by the generous Janet Brown McCabe Memorial Fund.

1ST PLACE

Brian Lowry for “For My Brother”

lowry’s poem and bio are on page 34.

2ND PLACE

Albert Haley for “What Binds the World” haleys’s poem and bio are on page 9.

RU M I NAT E ’s

First Annual FICTION AWARD

Judged by Stephanie G’Schwind, editor of Colorado Review.

Sponsored by Ralph and Lisa Wegner, loving supporters of RUMINATE. 1ST PLACE

M. David Hornbuckle for “Funeral Music” hornbuckle’s story and bio are on page 42.

2ND PLACE

Judith Sara Gelt for “Killing Birds and Other Living Things” “This time I don’t have to compromise, on anything. My nonegotiations townhome: the pleasures of being in my early fifties with no roommate, no live-in boyfriend, no husband. I paint the kitchen Havana Yellow, dining room Dreamy Amethyst, living room Green Mountain Haze, master bath Purple Mauve.”

Judith Sara Gelt retired last year after thirty delightful years of teaching 8th graders in order to pursue her dream of writing full time. She was recently awarded honorable mention by New Millennium Writings for her creative nonfiction.

Thank you to all of our entrants for sending in your work!

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Ashleigh Hill

Leaving Pennsylvania The man in the next car Is mutely tapping his short fingers To our soft classical music And your hands Are taking their time.

We sit heavily, Sticking to the tan leather seats, Watching out our respective windows As the trees pass by Like a hundred green lollipops.

The gentle and empty greeting Of road and tires Holds us like tired puppets, Stringed still, Waiting to be lifted Into meaningful motion.

In my journal I will write, “He is thin, but tries hard.�

And then I will be the same, Only quieter.

Your black car drives away, Bearing us Like tightly wrapped presents, And the roads rise and fall, Always finding new reasons to go on.

The bleak sky has always stretched out Much further than we could see, Blurry and calm, Humid and bottomless, So now we follow it.

Heavy heavens above us, Muddled words between us, Shifting states below us.

Ashleigh Hill, recent recipient of the International Lucidity Poetry Award, lives and writes in Arlington, Virginia. She enjoys live music so much that she writes concert reviews for NBC4.com and enjoys coffee so much that she spends a lot of time finding new and improved places to do so.

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Albert Haley

What Binds the World Just a nighttime fever, treatable with aspirin and drinks from the water cup and still he’s keeping us awake, tossing in the middle of our bed, at age two so small yet so vital that the adult-sized mattress becomes a desert stretching beyond the window pane.

Sometime deep into the night, sleep grudgingly blankets us and we sag together, a family of kinked hair, sour sweat, and wrinkled pj’s until I am caught by morning’s finger of light hooking me forward— to study our little boy and listen to his breathing in a vault the robbers fled mid-caper without taking a thing. Left behind are the puffed cheeks, the pink skin, the rise and fall of the chest, and my unreasonable expectations that once again are reality.

That is when I feel it, know it in my bones.

Somewhere some man, some woman, with soup bowl scraped clean, is lying back on a cot beside hard walls and spider webs in overnight bloom, gripping beads as lips frame unspoken, centered thoughts and willed cohesion for a world falling apart.

Albert Haley

IN SAINT PETER’S SQUARE He lies in state with the pointed red shoes on his feet.

The unkind think it is Oz come to Rome.

Not these people who look tragic as they cross themselves. He was so old and made older by disease and even now they recollect his stuttering walk or the vague trembling hand raised behind the grilled window.

All those times in the final years that his features crumpled like paper as he tried to concentrate and read lines of text.

The way they brought the soil of new lands to his face, like bread, because he was too weak to kneel.

Now he becomes composed in the midst of thousands. Beneath jeweled vestments and miter cap and with a shepherd’s staff in hands, he looks like a wax man for the ages,

It’s a simple request really, that all souls be spared for exactly one more day as we squirm sleepily and invite the air in, let it out, and pass from tainted night into a new dawn.

an adornment on a white confection, but there is more here that finds these eyes

May there be thousands more like this, mouthing the ancient prayers, binding us together in our disease.

the needle of his history.

as they wind their way slowly past, slipping through, evenly, raggedly,

Albert Haley is writer-in-residence and associate professor of English at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Windhover, The Cresset, Christianity and Literature and The Texas Observer. His nonfiction piece, “Jesus Took the Bus to Chicago: Goin’ Down the Road with the Blues,” was published in RUMINATE’s Issue 01.

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Liz Laribee

Seven Things I Used to Think About

(a week of remembering what it was like to think about anything at all)

DAY 1

Sisters

10

I find my sisters comforting in the way that burnt chicken reassures me of no salmonella. Days and days stacked between us, and when we share the bed over holidays in mom’s guest room, they’ll still dig their cold toes into my side.

Our parents moved us around the whole country. We were like army brats, except we didn’t get the benefit of having been born in Germany, and we were generally the least disciplined children ever. I always imagine army brats pushing themselves out of bed and into their pleated khakis at six o’clock every morning to begin work on their college finances before a grueling day of middle school. In contrast, I had to be driven to school most days after missing the bus. And, I’ll be finished paying loans for college when my children marry rich and send a check in after I’ve died.

It was silently accepted by us that we had no choice in how our lives were playing out. We choked down the chicken, we vacuumed the master bedroom, we moved all over the continental United States. Our rebellion was adorable at worst. What we lacked in malice we more than made up for in charm, a fair trade in the world of vendetta. The target was the recipe for Chicken With Curried Dates, treasured by only two living people: Martha Stewart and our mother. The Chicken was the sort of meal that stuck in your back molars for days, a memento from white American women dabbling in cuisine from, I’m convinced, imaginary Middle Eastern countries. It sat heavy and stewing like uranium on a plate, the Dates like canker sores.

We were always assigned to pack the books, sweltering in the living room under the pretense of help from a box fan in the window. Upon discovery of the cook books, production ceased as we scoured them for evidence of Curry.

We then took the recipes, stacked them neatly, and taped them to the underbelly of the bottom shelf in the linen closet to be left forever.

I always told myself that I’d bring my sisters back to each house we’d scarred with recipes as a reminder, in our later years, of survival.

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DAY 2

Men

Nick Perfect had this scar tracing his chin like Indiana Jones. I used to pretend that he’d gotten it (knife fight, alley) protecting the honor of a kitten or something.

He played guitar in a worship music band that played at my church sometimes. I worshipped feverishly. There were a few things keeping us apart. He was a senior in college, I was a freshman in high school. He had a girlfriend. He moved to Russia. You know. Some things.

Tall Aran was the biggest heartthrob of South River High School Theater Company. I realize that the qualifier doesn’t do much in his favor, but it was a really good high school. I remember one month when he grew muttonchops.

He’d swagger into the auditorium, cheeks a-fuzz, and the sophomores would swoon over their props. I knew it wouldn’t work when he started dating a girl who smoked a lot of pot and wore fishnet stockings every day.

Joe the Cook agreed to be my prom date. We had spent a year and a half working up to that moment. Flirtation was manifested in flung food through the kitchen of Friendly’s while he let tickets build up on the line and I forgot to chop lemons for my ice teas. The connection was solidified over a hose skirmish in the walk-in fridge. Later, after prom, we were standing stranded on the side of a country road beside an immobile car when the Local Riffraff drove past and egged us. It was a great metaphor for how the entire evening had gone, and I was reminded of karma and the time Joe and I had snuck out the back of Friendly’s to hurl eggs at the bank across the parking lot. He wiped my eggy left shoulder with a Kleenex, and I knew we were toast.

DAY 3

Self-Help

I am trying to be better.

I am trying to curse less and floss more and run in the afternoons and not sleep through class either in my bed or in my chair and paint more frequently and join a farmer co-op and buy organic and read my Bible ever and memorize a verse or two and think before I speak and sing the harmony line and read all of the directions before operating power tools or heavy machinery or the GREs and think better of humanity and smile at strangers and be good to my friends and carry mace in the dangerous bits of town and be time efficient and be courteous and dance in the street when cars aren’t coming and look both ways when they are and be terrific and life-of-the-party-y and clean the mug when I’ve finished my tea and clean the mugs I find left on the coffee table and go to bed on time and stay up late and have a mind like a diamond and share my secrets and gossip less and send real-live letters and listen patiently to my roommates as they spill boring problems over me and spill my boring problems over my roommates and clip my toenails and avoid identity theft and graduate college on time and hug thirteen people a day for mental health and worry less about going crazy and be an organ donor and use the hippest font and sound my barbarian yawp on the rooftops and give all the extra away and finish my homework on time and believe in God as much as I did earlier this week and wear clean socks only and smile and breathe and be Liz and hope for improvement.

Results are pending on how well I’m doing.

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DAY 4 Do you know how it is when you’re shopping in the grocery store and you hum along to the song that’s playing somewhere overhead (you say that because you have never really learned the name of that thing) and as you hum along, the song is cut off by Margie who needs Assistance With A Clean Up In The Olive Aisle (but the song is still in your head) and when the song resumes (because Margie no longer needs help) you are on the same word in your head as on the radio?

I know how that is.

Life is far enough along at this point for me to know that it’s not kidding. It seems pretty set in continuing on with or without my breath caught up. My dad says things like, “People don’t change after college. They’ve become who they’ll be.” I take a lot of comfort in that, thinking of beautiful people that have moved me, even though I think he was complaining about the fact that his college roommate still owed him money. I’m having a hard time believing life can be any sweeter than you’ve made it already. I’m hoping this is like an interruption as we clean up things in different aisles, but always with the song stuck in our ears. I worry that you’ll think anything less than that I’m a different person because of who you are.

I heard mom on the phone saying, “Yeah. You’ll all be dissipating. It’s kind of sad actually.” Mom has a way of making the end of the world seem like a zit.

I talk a lot. Everywhere I go, people tell me, “Geez, you sure talk a lot.” And it’s true. You know that moment in the movie theater when the lights go down and the din evaporates all in an instant except for that poor unfortunate soul who is One Millionth Of A Second Late and who happens to be knee-deep into telling a story about sperm banks? I’m that soul. There’s something panicked within me, jolting to get out, and as any accommodating person must, I let it. I’ve cultivated a rich history of clumsy, loud moments.

Till middle school though, I kept my cards close and wore ambivalence like a warm blanket. Once when playing a board game with my family (called “Therapy”, which should have told us how poor a choice it was for us to have made for a Friday night), my father was made to point out the player he knew the least about. He pointed, and I wept. And now, in my post-mousy years, people think that that part of me is one more punch line. I’m glad I’m not like I’m not. I haven’t always been that way, but when I was what I wasn’t, it was a real drag. But sometimes I feel like a character with too many lines to say, too many scenes to act, and sometimes I wish I were watching Little House on the Prairie with a mug of vodka.

I don’t expect to have gotten to the end of my list of things to say when I keel over in the Olive Aisle at the grocery store. And that’s okay. I say boring things.

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Leaving

DAY 5

Myself

DAY 6 Eileen Laribee’s face folds in on itself beneath the nose. She keeps the line of her mouth long and bent; both ends worming over a paper cheek. It’s a beak that scowls and scolds. She’s been in central New York too long, and her vowels and hopes have flattened thin like pancakes. Most people in Camden, New York, know the name Laribee. It fades and yellows on the side of semitrucks snaking over Route 1 bringing wire and electricians to brown businesses in snowy towns. The niche she has carved in the snow has nothing at all to do with anything more than the fact that she has always been there. Central New York has always been a reminder to me that I am part of a small group of people that have escaped.

My father is the only of his family to shoulder a canvas bag into a dorm room and to later scrape nickels together to buy books. He then went on to more dorm rooms and more books, keeping all of them stacked on cinder blocks until he finally stopped toting them back and forth from Camden to Ossining. Ossining won him at last, and he bought his first pair of bookshelves.

Books were the evidence of his betrayal. They meant that he was unwilling to stick it out in the factory back home. Green shag carpet was not enough for him, nor the crumbled fried onions on green beans. Instead, he chose the box of a U-Haul to truck himself away from Central New York toward the spine of a book and later, a wife.

The U-Haul has remained a theme in his life, and later as his children, we learned to pack his books into a conveyor line of brown boxes.

Books

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DAY 7

Bits of Paper

My house burned down the year I entered fourth grade and fell in love with Paul Balzano and began to realize that my sister Rachel was prettier than the rest of us. At this point in my life I’m over all of those things, but the house-burning is still a probable threat. I have nearly laminated my room with tiny, unimportant, flammable squares of paper. They hang off walls and cling to sides of dressers, stick to my roommate’s forehead, etc. Above my desk a ticket stub for the American Museum of Natural History slices a postcard of Lillian Hellman’s gin-and-tonic-ed face in half, right through her forehead. Behind that spills out a card reading, “every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers ‘grow, grow.’” The whole thing together looks like I was undecided on whether to decorate classily or kitschily and so did both (a black and white photo taped to the rim of my computer is right above a Banana Walnut sticker).

I love these. I reckon I collect to remember that anything at all can continue to be important, that a square of words can help me remember who I am or was or want to be. A snapshot of my final moments would likely display me trapped and choking inside a house spilling over a library of paper, my fingertips disappearing beneath stacks of Post-its with song lyrics scribbled in the corners.

A picture of my sisters and me as children (wearing polka-dotted swimmies and squinting into the sun) together with a tea bag wrapper and a note from Mandy Hoffman is skewered through a bulletin board. Beside that kebab, John Lennon stretches his arms like sonorous eels over a sound system, his mop-headed son looking on with a thumbtack grazing his left nostril. If these weren’t displayed like Ziggurats, I’d forget them. And that’s reason enough to buy thumbtacks.

Liz Laribee is a recent graduate of Messiah College with a BA in English and an emphasis on creative writing. She has published pieces in several journals including Georgetown Review, The Cedarville Review, and Minnemingo Review. Liz is a member of the Sycamore House, an intentional community in Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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Josh Schicker. Italy 5.

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Josh Schicker. Israel 1.

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Josh Schicker. India 3.

For the past ten years, singer-songwriter Josh Schicker has spent a good deal of time traveling the globe with a guitar in one hand and a camera in the other. Whereas Schicker’s music seeks to describe in words and melody the journey of the heart and mind, his photography seeks to capture visually what words cannot convey. Schicker and his wife are currently traveling around the country in their VW Golf.

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Stephanie Gehring

Stephanie Gehring

Here I Am

Pinned

I stand with the burning coal inside me—all it was supposed to do was touch my lips, but I misunderstood and swallowed it. All my

Maybe I am just not built to kneel— it is an awkward thing for me from the beginning. If I go half down, stay standing on my knees, I stick up

throat is branded, tender, my insides silvery-thin with unformed blisters from the path of the heat to my stomach. I cannot eat, for fear of bread smoke wafting out my nostrils: then they would know; this way, locking screams away deep, I contain my secret. Instead of moving down the way of digestion, the center of the flames goes up, lungs fill with smoke, heart pumps lava. A witch burns to death inside me, justly accused—rising from the ashes on bright wings.

The center has not moved, the searing has spread slowly; I raise my hand and my fingertips glow.

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like a stump cut off too high. But if I sink completely, sitting on my feet, it is not long before they seem to swell and then to fade, floating thick beneath me.

So when the time comes where I get up off the floor, I don’t. Or if I do, I hobble down the aisle, ankles giving, fingers stretched out for support. Usually, though, I stay in the back, my legs half bent in front of me, upper body rocking as the ants march slowly with their many needles, start in the centers of my foot-bones, writhe their way through my calves.

You are relentless because numb and dead are so close; finish what you came for, go ahead—stab bright, stop at nothing, bring life back.

Stephanie Gehring

A Place to Start I will try to say this simply: I love you. But what I mean is that I do not see you, that in my blindness you have known me, that there are walls to climb and no ropes, that in spite of myself I look up, reaching, wrap my fingertips into the rock, send my toes searching for a crack, an edge, a place to start.

Stephanie Gehring is earning an MFA in poetry at Cornell. Her poetry has been published in Poems and Plays and Folio. She graduated from St. Olaf College in Minnesota with a double major in studio art and English and spends her time walking all over Ithaca, grading student essays on mystery stories, and forgetting to check her email.

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PJ Bentley

OUT OF THE MOUTH A SWORD

Last night everybody stayed inside and sat down for a long bite to eat. The stereos and TVs were turned up so that indoors we mimed how the day went. We screamed for the salt. We cupped our hands to our ears. We turned red explaining our side of the story. We stormed out in frustration, slammed doors, and no one noticed until minutes later.

The seventeen-year cicadas had sprouted, numbers like never before, an armageddon from the ground, and they sang, sawed, and prophesied, vibrated with love.

This morning we emerge, our eyes dark, a hot pulse in our ears. The radio hisses the news of cicadas in a language now purged from us. We are amazed to hear our feet move through the grass as we retrieve the paper. We gaze out into the quiet trees. We sit in awkward silence at the breakfast table, some eyes redder than others, some voices gone.

PJ Bentley lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon, where he writes in his spare time and

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reads manuscripts for Tin House Magazine.

Holly Hudson. Out of the Mouth a Sword. Linoleum cut. 12 x 12 inches.

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Holly Hudson. Self Portrait with Affliction. Woodcut. 14 x 17 inches.

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Holly Hudson. The Bleeding Heart Pigeon. Drawing. 17 x 14 inches.

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Holly Hudson. Revelation. Linoleum cut. 12 x 12 inches.

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PJ Bentley

REVELATION I remember a first day of spring from years ago that we spent playing mini-golf at Circus Putt-Putt. Each hole was a piece of a circus—an animal, a clown, a man on a motorcycle, etc.

Daniel and Annie were little monsters then, and Donald, the avid weekend golfer, mopped the astroturf with us, his own wife and children.

Every hole, he’d lightly tap his blue ball once— up a precarious see-saw, or into a python’s eye, or into a lion’s mouth and out its heel, etc.—and sink it on the second shot.

Daniel and Annie did not seem to care, more concerned with stealing each other’s ball mid-roll or posing with the moving statues— Daniel on the back of a fist-pounding gorilla, shouting “Look at me!” Annie holding a pidgeon-footed clown’s hand and saying “Look! It’s my new boyfriend! We’re getting married!”

Daniel saying, “Yeah, because you’re pregnant!”

Annie whacking the clown in the crotch with her putter, giggling over her embarrassment “He doesn’t have a thing!” as my ball rolls between his legs, Daniel running up to dance around Annie and the clown, squealing “Clown babies! Clown babies!”— and, shushing and pulling them off the poor statues, I couldn’t sink a single shot. All the mechanical eyes ticked back and forth, limbs pounded and scissored, wheels spun, jaws chomped open and closed, and as we proceeded to play Donald disappeared. He was still there but was lost in his putt, had pulled himself into a trance, imagining, I imagine, he was putting in deep, still outer space,

25

his blue ball a star pulled into a black hole. He drifted away from me and the kids, wordlessly, holes ahead.

And as I progressed with the kids, I sensed growing apprehension from each successive statue, almost a muscular tension as their limbs began to hesitate, their eyes narrowed and saddened, as some mouths hung open; but the kids, oblivious, shook hands, smacked behinds, rubbed bellies, clubbed faces.

I could not stop the devils. My children, like biblical storm systems moved forward, drifted away, too, leaving me alone. I played through, wiping scuff marks off the fiberglass bodies, trying to tuck splinters back in, but unable to amend the hostility now pulsing from the animatronics. At hole 11, I leaned in to clean the snout of a tutued bear and felt a puff of hot breath on my face.

At hole 14, a lion tamer, his arm swinging a chair back and forth looked at me like an old woman in a store: Would you please do something with your children? I met my family at hole 18, where they stood before an elephant, its trunk laid out toward the tee, waiting for the next shot.

There was no hole at the end.

“Where’d the ball go to?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Donald said, looking as if he had just woken up.

“My ball never came out.”

“I’ll find it,” Daniel said, then shimmied up the face of the elephant.

For the first time in our lives, we were brought to our knees to see our world sliced open when this happened: The elephant shook its massive head, threw Daniel to the ground, reared back on its hind legs, kicking, and unfurled its trunk to trumpet something so loud our vision blurred. We could barely see it as it turned slowly and marched away, crushing the tiny, wooden ramps and hills, smashing through the fence and into the streets, trumpeting and trumpeting and trumpeting.

*PJ’s bio is on page 22 26

O

R. Dean Johnson

CATCHING ATOMS

The first day of school and it’s one of those cold ones where the sky looks like it came right out of a black and white movie. We’re still unpacking, and the box with all my jackets is who knows where. So it’s either my winter coat, which even I know would look ridiculous in California, or my dad’s old work jacket—a navy blue, sharp-collared, cut-tight-at-the-bottom-so-it-doesn’t-get-sucked-into-machinery, machinist’s jacket. I go with the work jacket even though it fits all saggy in the shoulders and so long in the sleeves I have to cuff them just so my hands can make it out far enough to carry my backpack. And on top of all that, there’s a patch over the heart with my dad’s nickname on it, “Packy.”

My mom says it will be okay, that making new friends will be tough for my little brother and sister too. But Brendan and Colleen are still in grade school, and little kids don’t care what you’re wearing or how you do your hair. Not like junior high, where everybody notices everything. Especially when you’re new. That’s why it would be a lot easier if I had my Paterson All-Star jacket, because then the guys would all see I can play ball, and they’d probably like me right away.

When I get to school, I don’t stuff the jacket in my locker like I would have back home. In Southern California, everything is outside. Instead of hallways, there’s breezeways, which is a nice way of saying tunnel. And you might not think it can get all that cold in California, but on a cloudy day you can keep ice cream from melting in one of those breezeways.

Right before lunch, this guy comes up to my locker and says, “Hey Packy, where you from?”

He isn’t real big, but he’s bigger than me, so I try to be cool about it. “Jersey.”

“Jersey?” he says. “Isn’t New Jersey where all the fags hang out?”

“You’d know,” I say.

It’s barely out of my mouth before he’s got me by the collar of my jacket. “I know only a faggot would wear a jacket like this.”

People around the lockers stop what they’re doing and look at me like maybe I’m supposed to have some big reaction. Then someone behind me says in a real casual voice, “Knock it off, Jaime.”

As this Jaime guy lets my collar go and steps back, some big guy with his hair perfectly combed so it looks kind of messed up steps around me. His shirt is this nerdy, checkered button-up that’s hanging out everywhere except by the back pocket where his yellow, Velcro wallet is sticking out. You can tell it’s that way on purpose, like a gun holster, like he could whip out his money real fast in case of an emergency.

He looks around at everybody, then says, “How you doing? I’m Garrett.” He reaches out and flicks the patch on my jacket. “Is your name really Packy?”

“Nah. It’s Reece.”

“Reece?” he says. “What kind of name is that?”

Everybody laughs and I’m thinking maybe he’s setting me up. “The kind my dad would give me, I guess.”

OOOO OOOOOO OOOO O O O O O OOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO O O O O O OOOOOOOO 27 OOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO O O O O O OOO OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO

Garrett gets this smirk and looks me over. “Cool jacket, man.”

“You busting my chops?”

“Busting your chops?” He glances around like maybe Jaime or somebody can explain what that means, only nobody says anything. “You mean razzin’ you?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“No, man. It’s Fonzie cool.”

“Yeah?” I say, looking around to see who’s grinning and about to laugh at me. “I think it’s about that old, too.”

“Maybe,” he says and laughs, and when Garrett laughs, everybody else starts laughing. “You’re quick,” he says. “You should hang with us.”

“Totally,” Jaime says and slaps my shoulder the way your buddies do when you make a great catch. “Sit at our table for lunch, Reece.”

That’s all it takes and I’m one of the guys. But just to be safe, I wear my dad’s jacket to school every day.

Looking at Clifford Matlin, you’d think he could be one of the guys too. He’s as big as Garrett, but he doesn’t know how to use it for sports or anything. All it does is make him easier to spot in a crowd and see how weird he is. You see his head over everyone else’s at assemblies, his hair hanging down in his eyes and every two seconds him pushing it over the rim of his glasses or tucking it behind his ears. Sometimes, he shows up to school wearing jeans that are too long and cuffed like it’s the fifties.

Other times, he wears this big, fluffy, turtleneck sweater with a patch that says, 1980 Olympic Winter Games, Lake Placid. The patch is cool, you know, kind of sporty, but everyone makes fun of the sweater because who wears turtlenecks in Southern California? And no matter how hot it is, he’s always got this red windbreaker with him, sometimes on, sometimes tied around his waist or stuffed in his backpack, but always there, like his mom won’t let him out of the house without it.

One day, Clifford brings this glass jar to Pre-Algebra and hunches over it the whole time with both hands on the lid. Every couple of minutes he reaches a hand out into the air and pinches his fingers together like he’s caught something. Then he unscrews the lid of the jar, flicks whatever it is inside, and screws the lid back on.

When I ask him what he’s doing he whispers, “Catching atoms for an experiment.”

Then he grins like it’s some funny joke.

I don’t razz Clifford or anything when he tells me. Who is it going to hurt if he catches a few atoms? That doesn’t stop other people though. The girl in front of me starts telling everyone around us and in five minutes you can see people on the other side of the room whispering and then looking over at Clifford and giggling. By the time the bell rings, he looks kind of mad and mumbles something about Albert Einstein’s teachers not understanding his genius. “Maybe his accent was too thick,” somebody says, and a bunch of people laugh. Then they tell the people who haven’t heard, and before you know it everyone is laughing their way out the door and not listening to a thing Clifford says.

At lunch, Jaime can’t stop looking around for Clifford, wanting to see if he still

OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO 28 OOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOO

has the jar. I try to act like that’s stupid and we should play basketball or something like we always do, but when the guys spot Clifford sitting over by the tennis courts with the jar right next to him in the grass, they take off to mess with him. And it’s not like I join in or anything. I just hang back and watch him take it until Garrett says to back off because it’s too easy, and what’s the point of that?

When baseball season starts, I get drafted on to Garrett’s team—the best team in the league. Our coach tells us second place is just a coward’s way to say you lost, and he swears he’ll bench anyone, even Garrett, if you miss practice for anything besides dying. But that’s okay, because we can’t get enough baseball. Every day at lunch Garrett gets some guys together to play pickle, and since I’m on his team, I’m always one of the guys.

About a week before summer vacation, we’re playing pickle and Jaime launches the ball past me like a missile. It skips across the grass all the way over to the fence by the tennis courts. I run after it, and as I get closer I see the ball has wiped out Clifford’s apple juice. He’s got the ball in his hand, staring at it like it’s a meteorite or something. Then he looks at me through his hair, his eyes squinty because of the sun. “I think you owe me an apple juice.”

I say, “Sorry, it was an accident.”

He shakes his head no and grips the ball with both hands. Everyone is waiting, so I tell him, “It’s not even my ball, Cliff. It’s Jaime’s. If you don’t give it back, he’s going to get pretty mad.”

Clifford ignores me and stuffs the ball in his backpack, his windbreaker all around it like a nest. He zips everything up, and just like that all the guys come over.

Jaime gets in Clifford’s face, and just as he’s about to rip the backpack away, Garrett stops him. Garrett doesn’t stick his hand out or anything; he just says, “Come on, Clifford, lunch is almost over. Give us the ball.”

Clifford stares at the grass, shakes his head and mumbles, “N-no.”

People who weren’t even playing start coming over then, everyone making this half circle behind Garrett. Garrett asks Clifford for the ball again and gets another no, and you might think he’s expecting that the way he lets his head drop slow and relaxed, bobbing a little on the way down, almost like he’s nodding. He stares at the spot in the grass Clifford’s staring at, then raises his head back up. “You’re gonna need to give that back, Cliff. Unless you’re feeling lucky.” Garrett crosses his arms,

es a

he reach s e t u n i m of ers Every couplhee air and pinches his fingin g. t t someth h hand into g u a c ’s e like h together

OOOO OOOOOO OOOO O O O O O OOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO O O O O O 29 OOOO OOOOOO O OOOOOOOOOO O OO O OO O OO OO O OOO OOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO O OOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO and they look kind of big all coiled together. “You feeling lucky, Cliff ?”

We all laugh and Garrett could let it die right there, but he has the crowd. “If you can’t see a ball rolling toward you, those glasses aren’t doing you much good. Maybe you need a haircut. Or a guide dog.”

Everybody busts up at that, even me, but it doesn’t matter. Clifford still has the ball in his backpack and both hands wrapped around one of the straps. And without looking at anyone except Garrett, he says as clear as anything, “At least I don’t use a pound of grease to keep my hair out of my eyes.”

It’s not exactly the best comeback ever, but Garrett looks pretty shocked anything came out of Clifford’s mouth. “Give me the ball, Clifford. Give me the ball right now, man, say you’re sorry for that little comment, and you’ll get to keep existing.”

Clifford shakes his head and pulls tighter on the straps of his backpack.

“Poor guy’s having a meltdown,” Garrett says, except nobody’s laughing anymore.

So with his finger an inch from Clifford’s nose, Garrett says, “If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life dead, you’ll give me that ball right now.”

“No.” “I don’t want to have to fight you over this, man.”

Clifford looks around at everybody and says, “Why? Are you scared of me?”

Garrett isn’t scared. He can’t be. But it seems like forever before he finally throws up his hands and says, “Fine, today after school. Behind the bleachers.” His face is glowing, and he looks Clifford over one more time. “You better be ready,” he says, then walks away.

Everyone runs out to the far edge of the football field as soon as school lets out. I’m one of the first people around the backside of the bleachers, and Clifford is there just like he said he’d be. In about a minute, a circle two or three people deep forms around him and a bunch of other people climb to the top of the bleachers to look over the back.

When Garrett finally slips through the crowd, he slaps my shoulder and says, “This will probably only take a second.” He looks at me real confident, then tosses his backpack to Jaime and steps inside the circle.

Garrett lets it quiet down, looking around and taking in all the faces before stopping at Clifford’s. “This is your last chance, man. Just give me the ball, say you’re sorry, and we’ll be cool. You won’t get hurt.”

Clifford stands there, his face totally blank and his hands hanging by his sides, all bunched up into fists. He stares straight ahead into nothing, and you can’t tell if he’s even listening.

“Well,” Garrett shakes his head, “at least take off your glasses.”

Clifford snatches his glasses with one hand and tosses them backwards without looking. It’s amazing because the glasses don’t crash down in the grass like you’d expect; they land on top of his backpack all gentle—as if he planned it that way. The one thing Clifford ever got right, and he doesn’t even notice. He walks to the middle of the circle, stops, tucks some hair behind his ears, bends his knees, and brings his

30

OOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fists up near his eyes the way guys on TV do. It looks ridiculous because you know the only way a guy’s going to win a fight with a stance like that is if he’s the star of the show.

Garrett shuffles forward, steady, and puts his fists out in front of his chest.

I’ve never seen him fight, but he sure looks like he knows what he’s doing.

Everyone starts cheering, calling out Garrett’s name and rooting him on. But me, I don’t make a sound; I just push forward a little and get on my tiptoes to see everything.

They start circling each other, waiting to see who’s going to throw the first punch. Garrett looks sharp, but Clifford doesn’t look scared like you’d

t Right, AND HE Go er Ev d or iff Cl g in th e on e Th

DOESN’T EVEN NOTICE. expect, just focused. Then Garrett swings low, splitting Clifford’s arms and catching him square in the stomach. Clifford’s eyes open real wide, like he’s surprised, and his hands drop. He winds up to counter-punch, but Garrett connects solid on his cheek, and he falls.

The circle explodes in cheers and guys like Jaime Muzi pump their fist the way you do when a guy hits a home run. We all know it’s over because Clifford doesn’t try to get up. He just lays there, doubled-over on the ground.

Garrett waits a few seconds, to make sure, then he goes over to Clifford’s backpack and pulls the ball out. Half of Clifford’s jacket comes out too, like it doesn’t want to let go, and his glasses fall to the side. You might think Garret would hold the ball up all victorious, but he just sets Clifford’s glasses back on top of the backpack, then walks to the edge of the circle real fast, tosses the ball to Jaime, and keeps going right through the crowd. Everyone goes after him and slaps him on the back and congratulates him like he’s some kind of hero.

I wait to see if Clifford will get up, and after the last few people clear out, he does. He’s holding his stomach as he walks over to gather up his stuff, and when he kneels down I see the tears streaming from his eyes. But he isn’t crying. He just pulls his jacket all the way out and wipes his face with the soft, cotton part in the lining. And though you can already see the red mark where Garrett connected, Clifford doesn’t make a sound. It takes him both hands to fit his glasses over his ears and then he looks up at me through that stupid hair. I want to say something, to tell him it was a good try or a lucky punch, but all I do is stare at him a few seconds until I hear someone calling my name.

Garrett’s halfway across the field now, stopped and looking back at me.

We’re teammates, so I guess he’s wondering why I’m not there congratulat-

31

ing him like everyone else. He calls my name again and it sounds like a question, “Reece?” All the other people shut up then and stare. I look back at Clifford who’s standing now, a few feet away. I really want to say something, but I know I have the crowd, so I reach my hand out a little ways, pinch my fingers together like I’ve caught an atom, and put it in my pocket. From so far away, I figure no one else can see that, but as I take off to catch up to Garrett, a few people cheer like it’s the best joke ever.

Like I’ve razzed Clifford. I don’t know if Clifford understands that I don’t mean it like that; I just know I’ve got to leave him standing there all alone.

When I get home, I go straight upstairs to my room. My chest feels tight and full and I sit down heavy on my bed. Laying back only makes it worse, like everything is overflowing into my head. So I sit up, and a little at a time I let my face go, my mouth stretching into a frown, then relaxing, then doing it again. It keeps going like this, quicker and quicker, until my eyes go squinty and the tears leak out, fast down my face and hot. It’s so stupid because I’m a teenager now and I should be through with things like crying. But I can’t stop. My chest pushes the tears out in heaves and with each one I make this hiss, like a tea kettle right before it starts whistling. And though I hardly make a sound, I’m bawling like a baby.

By the time my mom comes into the room to find out why I haven’t gone to baseball practice, my chest is empty and sore, and I’ve stopped crying. Still, she can tell, and she keeps at me, wanting to know what happened. It takes me half the night to convince both my parents that it wasn’t me who’d gotten beat up. And even though they finally say okay, I don’t think they believe me.

R. Dean Johnson lives in Oklahoma with his wife, the

32

writer Julie Hensley, and their newborn son. He teaches at Cameron University and online for Gotham Writers’ Workshop. His essays and stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Ascent, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Santa Clara Review, and The Southern Review. His novel manuscript, Californium, is based on the characters he discovered while writing “Catching Atoms.”

Jenn Koiter

Spitting: A Parable

(ending with two questions from Seamus Heaney) How tired they are, the words

for what we cannot know. Then God spits in our eyes,

and we, insulted, turn to visible things

and see them new.

So much sense to be made

with our new senses!

It takes years. And then,

Excuse me? we ask, a little timid, trying to remember

who spat at whom, Please? some words

seem to be missing; – might we say Mystery, again?

might we say Spirit?

Jenn Koiter lives in Wyoming, where she recently leapt out of the frying pan of academia and into the fire of nonprofit work. Her poetry has appeared in Relief, Fickle Muses, and The Eleventh Muse, and she is a winner of the 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.

33

Brian Lowry

For My Brother His days stand before him, unclouded by questions of time.

Their limits, though centripetal, do not constrict. He does not kick against bone. His skin, dust blown by malignant winds, never escapes sight of its captain.

His darkening frees him, for within its circle, old margins are dispersed.

Fears fade into a boundless music of the spheres, his orbed tears blotted by grace. He becomes light, as in a dance, stepping in the perfect rhythm he once labored helplessly to find.

All his stirrings settle into earth.

He comes down to that place which does not recognize divisions, awaiting the quickening turn.

34

issue 05 //

FALL 2007

Brian Lowry

Seed Dispersal What an unmerited pleasure to watch my little girl run toward the setting sun, through the golden broomsedge, and see the bright backlit downy tufts of seeds loosened and borne on the breeze by her happy passing there.

Brian Lowry writes from the Southern Indiana farm he shares with his wife and young daughter. His creative work has appeared in Farming Magazine: People, Land, and Community; New Southerner; The Quill; in HGTV’s book, Flower Gardening; on WFPL radio’s HomeGrown; and in several newspapers. He serves as a middle school counselor and English teacher.

35

T racing a R oot to L ithuania MARTHA KRYSTAPONIS

My grandpop, Tony Krystaponis, always tells me that if I just covered my head with a babushka, I would look like Catherine Krystaponis, his grandmother and my great-greatgrandmother. She was a short woman, rather chubby with rosy cheeks and a smile that dominated her face whenever she let it out. I never met her.

“Look at you, doll!” Grandpop would say, grabbing me in a tight bear hug within his over six-foot frame. “You even act like her rather than a whole ‘nother person!”

Tony doesn’t care that his cap is gone, and my babushka now covers the hungry orphan miles behind.

Grandpop is Lithuanian. His grandparents, Ludwig and Catherine Krystaponis, emigrated in the early 1900s. Under the oppressive control of the Russian government, Catherine and Ludwig were unable to practice their Catholic religion. They were just poor farmers, and every day was a struggle to survive off the land and evade persecution.

My eyes sting. Sweat trails

down my forehead, through creases—

paths of past worry.

Ludwig traveled alone via steerage to New Jersey to start a new life for his family. He worked in sweatshops for two years, waiting for them to join him.

Catherine’s emigration was much more treacherous. At about twenty-two years old, she walked from Kaunas, Lithuania, to Brennen, Germany, with their sons: Joe, age six, Tony, age four, and Eddie, age two. I start to whine after walking for a few hours in the Southern spring heat and humidity. What must it have been like to experience such fear, exhaustion, uncertainty, and weakness as she did?

My feet hurt. The rough path from Kaunas to the German ocean causes a blister to build on my heel, encased in brown box shoes.

I clutch my son’s sweaty hand as his legs try to keep up with mine.

What must his feet feel?

We rest near Castle Trakai.

His eyes close, while mine cannot.

Once they reached Germany, both Catherine and her sons stowed away on a ship for the entire trip to Ellis Island, having to hide throughout the tedious boat journey. When Catherine and the boys finally reached New Jersey, Ludwig had to claim them at Ellis Island lest they be denied entry into America.

36

issue 05 //

FALL 2007

I dread the stench of human waste lying in that far-off ship’s hold, playing hide and seek behind families consumed with disease to escape the ship’s men.

Their immigration records were burned in a fire, so the Krystaponis family became unknowns in their new home. Catherine and Ludwig never became citizens, but all of their children did.

They bought a small farm in New Jersey right before the Depression and left the sweatshops of the city behind to return to their farming roots.

Once I smelled like lemon soap, and the Lithuanian mountains welcomed me as a flower on their slopes.

But only a stench rises from me now to my son’s nose.

In 1944, Catherine died from cancer in the abdomen. From what Grandpop can remember, he said that her stomach would inflate and then blow up several times, and they had to drain it, until one time when it was too late to save her life.

My stomach wrenches, seeing

a shack and a field

where three people dig

for potatoes. Food can be gold.

I help the family dig to fill

Tony’s mouth, but not his stomach.

My nostrils flare with desire

as I watch him eat without washing

the food or his hands.

I can smell it, filling me

yet leaving me emptier.

My grandpop learned how to cook from her. Whenever I see him standing over a frying pan filled with pasty pierogies and the fragrance of onions and bacon, I think of the woman I never met. I fried onion and cheddar pierogies over Easter weekend, and I covered my stomach with a plain blue apron to try to imagine how she once felt. I want to put a real babushka on my head someday and blend in with the crowds of people in a Lithuanian market, buying potatoes and seeing pieces of Catherine around and in me.

Martha Krystaponis is a junior BFA student of creative writing at Belhaven College in Jackson, MS. Her ten-poem manuscript won fifth place in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies competition in spring 2007. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and loves to claim her more northern roots in New Jersey.

Martha especially enjoys delving into her ancestry, recording the stories of her grandparents, parents, and others, and imagining more than she is told.

37

Scott Coverdale

Precursor to Love

Is there such a thing as divine chagrin?

Sometimes I wonder if he’s kicking himself

for taking on such a debilitating handicap

as invisibility and silence

and regretting that he hobbled himself or

under-designed his principals—

eyes and ears with sound and sight receptors too narrow for most of the sound and light But how would I know?

I am one of the under-designed principals

trying to make out the substance by the shadow

the ventriloquist behind the myriad sounds of

one cacophonic world

by the sound of seabirds, jets

the cry of a newborn man and the contents of the one small heart that I have reasonable access to But what chance do I have?

My memory reverberates with drumming in the African moonlight

the thunder of glacial waterfalls

the impact of artillery shells on the next hill

intermingling, random, chaotic, with the sermons of Jesus

the petroglyphs of the Anasazi

the fossils of Cro Magnon the howl of the human condition

Scott Coverdale dwells in the Sonoran desert, City of Tucson, Arizona. There he tries to keep up with his two boys, loves his wife, and directs a nonprofit agency that fixes old houses for people who can ill afford to fix their own. He has written poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction for years and years, and is a regular contributor to Spirit and Life, a bimonthly Benedictine magazine.

And it might, of course, come clear It could be that the spaces which lay between an evening seascape and

the smoking wreckage of a car bomb

the worst of human news and

the best of human dignity—

the spaces between the stars themselves might fill in with portraiture

or might themselves prove to be a revelation of sorts And you, clever God

must have seen it all along

must have seen me coming—

guessed that in your audio-visual finesse

you might gain my poor, wandering attention

and teach me, perchance a curious wonder which is

in my inexplicable experience the precursor

to love

Scott Coverdale

Recognition

I should be able to recognize you having spent all of that chubby cherub time on your cottonball clouds before my mortally

adventurous occurrence or at least being created in your,

scripturally speaking,

image or your,

metamysteriously speaking,

imagination When I look into what I call my self: I think I see your telltale marks— the capacity to aspire to love this furious offense at the human atrocity an inkling of beauty in natural kindness the forbidden knowledge of good and evil the thinking that I see

and the seeing But I must confess, as well:

perplexity Why sing in the tongue of angels to a world of nearly deaf humans?

Why metaphorical bread to a crowd of hungers?

Why make me to be appalled at outrageous suffering

then put me on a restive planet twitching with earthquakes and

random violence?

We mortals, mind you, have a hard time seeing past mortality When our children die, omniscient God in Heaven, When our children die, Holy, Good, Almighty God in Heaven, When our children die, Master of the Entire Fearsome Universe,

the only world that we know is left scorched and idiotic Sometimes we have to ask:

At what price, this education?

Could it not have been a gentler schooling?

Could not even I, a fool, have made a better world?

Sometimes we have to feel:

you have brought us to the island, then left us lonely on the shore

hearts beating to death beneath a dazzling, indifferent sky

as we love and hate the story written on the pages

of our branded flesh and souls And still:

and still:

and still: though we can barely stand, we stand

we watch the imprecise horizon

for what we hope to one day recognize

as your rising

or descending

sails

39

funeral

M. DAVID HORNBUCKLE

In the Pine Branch Cemetery out on County Road 14, the air tastes chalky with a hint of citrus, like children’s chewable vitamins. There’s a plant a little further down the road that manufactures them. Fifteen-year-old Daniel Birch plays “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on the accordion as they lower his musical mentor Charlie Woods into the hole.

Daniel is saddened by Charlie’s passing, but the death came as no surprise. Lung cancer.

As he squeezes out the hymn, he thinks of Charlie’s voice wheezing out harmonies when they sang old tunes together on Wednesday afternoons. He looks out at the sober mourners in their metal chairs and suddenly feels as still and flat as a photograph. After the service, Daniel shakes hands with a few people and then discreetly slips away, hops on his bicycle with the accordion strapped to his back, and heads home for supper.

As he bikes away, across the green, Daniel can make out the shape of the widow Ballard sitting adjacent to her husband’s monument, where she can be found most evenings (weather permitting), knitting and listening to a battery-powered radio tuned to a nostalgic station. A string of multi-colored Christmas lights, not plugged-in, wraps ivy-like around a stone statue of St. Vincent rising above Dr. Ballard’s headstone.

The Ballard funeral was Daniel’s first. Charlie was supposed to play it, but Charlie fell ill just before the ceremony, and so his most talented pupil was sent in his stead. Daniel played “Galway Bay” and “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” When the service was over, the widow Ballard shook young Daniel’s hand and told him everything had been perfect.

Ever since then, Daniel’s known throughout the town as the go-to guy for pretty much any type of funeral music. Always bespectacled, his long blond bangs combed back, and wearing on oversized gray suit handed down from his stepfather Dick, Daniel plays bugle at military funerals and organ at church funerals. All the funeral directors in town have his number and will call him. He plays “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on trombone, “Nearer My God to Thee” on the banjo, and “Amazing Grace” on the harmonica. He gets paid between fifty and a hundred dollars for these performances, and he frequently gets out of school for them.

On a humid Saturday afternoon, Daniel plays piano for the residents at the Village, where his mother works as the social coordinator. He’s starting to get used to the antiseptic smell of the old folks home, but he’s still struggling to remember all their names. He does enjoy the attention he gets. The old folks ask him questions about all of his instruments. He plays almost anything he can get his hands on, and he loves the same old-timey tunes that they

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do. When he plays, the old folks all sing along with him, and the more spry among them dance.

- Do you know that one, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

- Sure do.

He plays and sings, drawing out ‘fire’ as ‘fiyaah,’ which makes the old folks laugh.

- What’s that thing on your notebook there?

He keeps his sheet music in a folder on which there is a picture of Jar Jar Binks. He learns that most of the old folks have not seen a single one of the Star Wars movies, but he can discuss older movies with them, including Casablanca and His Girl Friday, which are two of his favorites.

When he leaves, as always, Jack Finley jokes darkly with him about where they might next meet.

- See you next week, if not here, at Pine Branch.

Daniel reads the paper over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, finds out who he might be playing for soon, a way of preparing for his gigs. On his way to the obits, in the regional news, a story catches his eye. In a nearby town, workers were clearing out some abandoned buildings. In one, they found a skull and hands in a refrigerator. In another, there was a corpse whose face had been chopped off with a hatchet. There is something remarkable about that description to Daniel. Perhaps the funeral business is changing him. He’s not even sure what it means to have had one’s face chopped off with a hatchet. He supposes they mean the skin on the front of the skull, which would include the nose, the lips, and the eyebrows. To have ears, but no lips. Why not take all of me, as the song goes.

Back to the obituaries, he is struck dumb by a picture of a young Italian immigrant named Josephine. She is only nineteen, dark, closely cropped hair. Most of her family is still overseas, but for some reason the funeral is to be here. And she is a beauty, a classic dark goddess with that cow-eyed sense of tragedy that befitted the queens of the silver screen. Instinctively he caresses her cheek through the newsprint murmuring to himself, ah, sweet mystery of life.

Clay Davis is directing. Clay is one of the younger funeral directors in town, in his twenties. He inherited the business from his family and started running it straight out of high school. Sometimes the two of them get high afterwards, and then Daniel helps him put the chairs away.

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Daniel tears the page out of the obits, folds it gently, and places it in his music folder. He walks to school, still thinking of the brooding pout of the Italian beauty, Josephine. He tries to sketch her face during homeroom, but he’s soon frustrated by his incompetence, crumples the paper and tosses it.

Josephine’s address, according to the obituary article, is in a quaint subdivision called the Duck Pond—by chance across the street and a couple of houses down from his Aunt Jessie’s place. He asks Jessie if she knows of Josephine, if she knows how she died.

- Nope. I never met the people who live in that house. I think they just moved in a few months ago. Military people I gathered.

It’s the night before the funeral. Daniel sits on Jessie’s front porch and watches Josephine’s house, waiting to see what friends and relatives may stop by. Maybe they know some of the same people. But no cars arrive, and around ten, he gets tired of waiting, says goodnight to Jessie and walks home.

He is to play an old hymn called “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There” and “I Will Always Love You” by Whitless Houston, or more correctly by Dolly Parton. Anyway, it’s all wrong. It can’t be what she would have wanted. The attendees also are wrong—beehived Baptist women with too much eye shadow and middle-aged men with crew cuts and tobacco-stained

You’re in quote unquote lust—with a

woman wHO IS NOT ONLY SPOKEN FOR, BUT DEAD. shirts. The obit spoke of a mother and two brothers in Italy, but he can’t identify anyone that makes sense in that role. Especially wrong is the one Daniel presumes to be her father or guardian—a wooden jarhead with squinted eyes. The jarhead sits in the front row, and the preacher keeps looking at him when he speaks about “the loss.”

Afterwards, Clay lights up a joint and passes it.

- That wasn’t the dad, dude. It was the widower.

- Aw, man. Don’t tell me that. He’s too old.

- If I’d known you were infatuated with her, I’d have let you see her get embalmed. You could have helped even.

- There’s this dream I keep having. I know it’s corny, but it’s just her face. I’m curled up next to her and I can’t see her body, only her face. She says things to me in Italian, and I understand

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because it’s close to Latin, and I took Latin, in the dream I mean, not in real life. They don’t have Latin at my school.

- Even your dreams are dorky. So what did she say?

- I don’t remember. We just talk, you know, about stuff, about whatever.

It’s been a couple of weeks, but he is still obsessed … no smitten … no obsessed is more like it.

To think of her name—Josephine—somehow begins to seem too crude. Now he calls her simply “The Face,” which is what they used to call Garbo. He and The Face communicate often through his accordion, his trombone, his banjo. Not the bugle. On the family’s upright piano, he sings “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” at the top of his lungs while gingerly working around the two busted, dissident, polyphonic keys—the A below middle C and the B-flat above.

The mother asks him not to hit the keys so hard. Something in the kitchen smells delicious, but he cannot imagine eating.

He feels the malady of love festering in his heart and stomach, and he is not at all stoic. After he tastes a tear on his lip during “Abide with Me” at the Glen Yarborough service (a drunk driver, no open coffin for this one), he confesses again to Clay.

- Dude, you’re not in quote unquote love. Let go of that. You’re in quote unquote lust—with a woman who is not only spoken for, but dead. And I suspect the colonel is a force to be reckoned with. She’s already buried, man.

- I have to find out her story. I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him I’m writing a paper for school. On cradle-robbers or something.

Weeks pass during which Daniel does little but study and rehearse, and nobody new dies. The now crumpled Face lives in a desk drawer, but within arm’s reach of the bed. An unfortunate incident with a bottle of grape soda nearly destroys it, so he makes a few backup copies from the microfiche at the library. In a temporary lapse of good judgment and taste, he wastes one of them, using it as receptacle and tissue. The others he safely tucks away in a manila folder.

Clay calls to request his services for the Finley funeral. Bone cancer. They’ve requested “We’ll Meet Again.” Vera Lynn. He already has the sheet music. No problem.

- By the way… saw your girlfriend’s husband last night at Poplar Head. He’s got a new one already. This one’s Asian.

- Hmph.

He walks in the late afternoon by the duck pond in the eponymous neighborhood, and he sits emptying his thoughts into the water. Ducks become accustomed to him and consider him one

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of their own, duck-like. At times, one will stand next to him staring where he is staring, puzzling over what he puzzles over, but offering no answers.

On returning homeward, he passes her house, although to him it was never really her house. It’s just where some retired army colonel lives with his young Asian wife.

The Finley funeral is a morning service, so he misses his first three classes. However, he has to get back to school for a trig test in the afternoon, so Clay gives him a ride in the hearse.

- Dig this. They’re digging up your girlfriend. Someone suspects foul play. There might actually be some story to this story after all.

- Who told you that?

- Coroner.

He searches his vocabulary for a response. It’s so much easier knowing what to say when the song has already been written for you. Now he’s simply stunned, stung, stumped.

The workers dig in the night like robbers because he goes before school the next day to check, and the hole is unfilled. There is a ladder, and he climbs down, lies on his back, breathes. He can only smell dirt, but he imagines that there is some other essence there, a connection.

Above, the sun is not yet awake, and the sky is damp, red, swollen, inflamed. The moon is white, not at all like a big pizza pie, but more like the pus-filled head on a pimple or boil.

His lovesickness is coming to a head. He lies—horrified, fascinated, relieved—beneath the infected sky until he hears morning birds and then thunder. Fearing discovery more than the rain, he lets the mud, her mud, wash over him. The rain will soak his soiled clothes and cleanse him. He emerges from the grave, prepared to begin anew.

Across a thick fog, the widow Ballard softly warbles “Embraceable You” with an arm around Harry’s headstone. She’s probably been there all night.

M. David Hornbuckle is a writer and musician, originally from Birmingham, Alabama.

He currently lives in New York City and is the leader of the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra. His novella The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter is due to be released in October (Cantarabooks, 2007).

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Julie L. Moore

Julie L. Moore

Long after the divorce

Planting a Tree

she stops by, the aunt I once vowed to care for in her old age.

Years before, my Thanksgiving promise dangled from the edge of her fear.

Listening to our husbands’ senile, old-maid aunt saying over and over again,

I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t poop, while she forked stuffing and potatoes in my in-law’s kitchen, Deb turned to me, grasped her own childless arms, asked, Who will care for me when I can’t eat? My answer was risky, yes, but real. Then this day comes. She arrives, bearing gifts. Wrapped in green tissue, a china cup, then a plate from Slovakia, great grandma’s, passed down to her, the daughter-in-law. Giving it back

My husband planted a tree in the dog’s yard.

The poor sapling didn’t have a chance.

Held by its stake, it stood its ground through storms And wicked winds pushing through the plains.

But there was no hope. Our Lab couldn’t learn How to unravel her line when she’d wrap Around that lean tree. For she’s all exuberance At the sight of us. All charge and jump.

So the maple snapped, Leaving behind a stub like a corn stalk after the harvest.

John meant to pull it out, restore the soil.

But it stayed all winter.

Then May arrived in her sundress and heels, Blossoms in her hair.

And shoots burst through the stump like fireworks, Exploding with green.

to its rightful owner, she explains to my mother-in-law in the same kitchen.

And what could any of us say as mom held the blue dish like a moon up to the light? Keep it, dear aunt, I wanted to plead. So I can use it then

to feed you.

* for Deb

Julie L. Moore’s poetry chapbook, Election Day, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2006. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in many publications including Sou’Wester, The MacGuffin, River Oak Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Blueline, Flint Hills Review, The Fairfield Review, Mars Hill Review, Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, Radix, and The Christian Science Monitor. Moore lives in Cedarville, Ohio, and directs the Writing Center at Cedarville University.

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Arthur Saltzman

Planks in Reason I have no plans to run for office, an announcement I feel confident in saying that precisely no one will be surprised or disappointed to hear. Trying to be palatable to the majority would quickly overwhelm my limited supply of even-handedness and sociability, regardless of the size of the room whose majority I’d have to command. I am by nature too inconsistent for pronouncements, party affiliation notwithstanding, and not since I endured my bar mitzvah pictures have I managed to smile on cue amid unfamiliar company—and that was when people were sliding folded checks into my pockets. Diplomacy’s pesky amenities and delays—how to address the prime minister properly, where to seat the visiting sheik, which ambassador to bow to and which to embrace—will always be beyond me. In short, I may reasonably be accused of many things, but having designs on political power has never been one of them.

As I grow increasingly senior in my English Department, the prospect of my one day serving as chair has actually occurred to a couple of my newer colleagues, but never to those who’ve come to know me and my crackpot advocacies well; they wouldn’t trust me to administer a kids’ picnic, much less to govern adults. (And this is the verdict of my friends, remember, or should I say, my friends so far, since, were I to ascend to authority over them, my treatment of committee assignments and the like would jeopardize that standing.)

Admittedly, at my university, under the benevolent despotism of a president who is loath to delegate so much as a single decision, academic or otherwise, being department head would be comparable to sitting behind one of those plastic dashboards they mount before toddlers to keep them busy with the illusion of actually driving. Allowing someone with my ambivalence in almost all matters to steer would scatter traffic and send innocent bystanders diving for cover. (If elected I would not serve, but swerve.) But how much real damage I could do is beside the point. I haven’t the tact to handle the reins to everyone’s satisfaction or the temerity not to care who chafes. Therefore, any governmental ambition, whether confined to the curriculum, community-wide, or—perish the thought—even more expansive than that, must be scuttled in advance. So stop the petition, suspend the plebiscite, rescind my nomination, and save yourselves.

Still, that I’ll never wield significant power is a shame in some ways, really, because I do have a couple of pet notions that seem to me worth the travails of a campaign.

Most weekends, Sunday inserts in the local newspaper are about as welcome an addition to the central bulk of the newspaper as the sand and smell that insinuate into the folds of your clothing and the creases of your skin after a trip to the beach. Accordingly, before addressing its authentically significant sections, I debride the Globe of its supplements and circulars. I extract the advertisements for newly arisen taco stands and pluck out the notices for auctions on the sites of businesses gone under. I ignore the forty-eight-hour-only furniture sales, rifle past the pleas from used car dealers, discard the coupons for buckets of chicken and pizza bought in bulk, and junk the offers for personalized embossers, hand towels, and pillow cases. I shake the paper like a rug and sweep the fallout into a single recyclable pile. But I make an exception on that one Sunday when, tucked as always between the comics and the TV listings, Parade Magazine gives its annual inventory of “How Much

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People Make.” The cover always features a grid of postage stamp-sized photographs of American workers representing the widest conceivable array of salaries. I pore over the representative population with all of the voyeuristic attention of Jimmy Stewart scoping out his neighborhood with a telephoto lens in Rear Window.

Part of what makes this issue so seductive is the incongruity of seeing people who come from such disparate socioeconomic situations housed together, a condition usually resulting only from the occasional natural disaster, whereby the highborn and the homeless alike might be beached in the same high school gymnasium. It is as if their pictures in Parade, captioned by their names, occupations, and incomes, were windows in the most ecumenical tenement imaginable. Where else would you find Ted Stenson, a Carson City glazier who makes $17,000 a year, rubbing up against Roger Clemens, a professional baseball pitcher who makes $17 million? Jack Nicholson may have earned $20 million making movies last year while Jack Nesset, semi-retired, made $11,000 picking up trash at the Oriental Theatre after each showing of that actor’s latest hit, but here Nicholson’s west wall is Nesset’s east. Only in these pages would stevedore Ed Sellers and Senator Orrin Hatch inhabit the same premises. The stock boy with the hourly wage and the stock broker whose income is figured in shares of the company are situated only a single cubicle away from one another. No hospital is as undiscriminating, no bathroom so unrestricted or cemetery so inclusive, as this. The computer engineer and the stenographer, the army colonel and the systems analyst, the minister and the hotel doorman, the CEO and the custodian, the midwife and the warden, are all neatly imbricated together and, based on their unvarying visages, whatever the state of their respective savings, content. Though rank may divide us, rancor never does.

Once each year, Parade effectively demonstrates the viable democracy we were promised.

The second attraction of this magazine article is the divulgence itself. For some reason, while Americans may be more or less forthcoming about their drug use or sexual practices—afternoon talk shows command reliable audiences because of it—we are comparatively secretive about how

stock boy with the hourly wage and the stock broker whose income is figured in shares of the company The

are situated only a single cubicle away from one another. much money we make. We are apt to give our guests the run of the house, blithely leaving the medicine cabinet unlocked, the hook holding the car keys unguarded, and even the stained bed sheets open to their inspection. But let them hazard near the desktop where we’ve left the check register, let them stray near the table where the W-2 sits atop the bundle of tax forms, and we hurriedly shove the evidence into a drawer, take them by the shoulders, and lead them to a less revelatory room. Going by our behavior, we feel judged not by the content of our character, as Doctor King would have had it, but by the quality of our bank accounts; the financial advisor knows us better than the urologist, for it is to him, and not to the physician, that we expose our deepest and, potentially, our most compromising intimacies.

Apart from the question of just how legitimate it may be to define one’s worth or value primarily in fiscal terms, I am struck by oddness and inequity that Parade discovers in America’s wallets. I find it strange at least, criminal at worst, that a professional golfer out-earns a fry cook at Denny’s by a factor of one thousand when the fry cook would golf for nothing (if his work schedule and monthly bills allowed) whereas no appearance fee would be large enough to coax

47

Tiger Woods to step behind the counter and don an apron. Construction workers sacrifice their backs for a fraction of what their union bosses, uniformly kempt and unbent, make to collude and lobby on their behalf.

Compassion and common sense demand that something be done to level out the livings we make. Simply put, why not institute an inverse ratio between the intrinsic appeal of a job and the salary associated with it? For instance, careers that millions crave anyway—athlete, actor, music video producer—would not be fortified by excessive financial reward as well.

Conversely, dull, onerous, or exasperating careers—gravedigger, trash collector, junior high school teacher—would be paid sufficiently to make up for the stress, the strain, and the lack of intrinsic stimulation. In my utopian world of work, the vocationally challenged would not have to envy the auspiciously occupied twice, once for the friction-free nature of his daily grind and again for the swollen paycheck that awaits him. When it comes to compensation, I would see to it that a soldier’s pay would exceed that of the congressmen who sent the soldier off to fight in the first place. The boss might still bulk behind the bigger desk in the office with the better view, but his secretary would take heart, knowing that her annual income outstripped his. The adjunct relegated to teaching nothing but freshman composition classes would top the tenured faculty member who long ago abandoned freshmen and composition for the more inviting altitudes where literature grows thick; meanwhile, the star scholar, exempt from student intrusion altogether, would be pinching pennies despite his plusher digs and reputation in the discipline.

The slotting of jobs shouldn’t be a problem, but if any confusion were to arise as to specific dollar amounts, I’d gladly step in to clarify them. Coal miners would earn $200,000 a year. Tax accountants would earn $80,000. The centerfielder for the Yankees would get $16,500, firm, which could be adjusted upward in the event that he were traded to Cleve

We learn to love by incidentals because incidentals are all we ever get. land; the catcher would get a few thousand more; the designated hitter, a few thousand less.

Supreme Court justice? $22,975. Host of the Tonight Show? Add half a buck an hour to minimum wage, and send the lucky bastard out to do his monologue.

Next, I propose that all men, women, and children on the planet should be assigned the middle name “Bob,” with exemptions granted only to those whose parents had had the foresight to have named their children “Bob” prior to my executive order. Thus the larger percentage of people would become born-again Bobs of a sort, while the minority, the preexisting Bobs and erstwhile Roberts from whom Bobs can be readily broken off, would be grandfathered in. My rationale is that this immediate, unanimous name recognition would do more than any United Nations declaration, international exchange, or church mission ever could to create world peace. Imagine, for example, the approach of a hostile army. Spirits girded and guns trained, your battalion waits for them to come in range. But just before the command is given to open fire, one perceptive lieutenant peers into the mist, hesitates, then calls out, “Bob? Is that you?” A brief, tensed silence ensues. Then, a voice replies, “Yeah.

It’s Bob. Bob?” And steadily, inevitably, out of that antagonism that no political speech could staunch arises this mutual recognition, as first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of comrades bob up out of the battlefield. A gust of good will breaks the spell of enmity, and weaponry falls to the ground. For it is a truth universally acknowledged that you won’t shoot at troops that are universally acknowledged. You can convince yourself to kill whole populations when they’ve been abstracted into the Communist menace, sub-humans, or modern-day 48

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Huns, but how can you keep up aggression against folks whose names you know? (And there is no folksier name to know than “Bob,” as modest and chummy a little palindrome as anyone in any culture could wish.) And if our spiritual leaders are right in claiming that Bobs by any other name are really brothers beyond geographic boundaries and under the skin, Bobs by that name are all the more obviously so.

If this suggestion seems too meager and artificial to found affection upon, if the distance from Bob to brotherhood strikes you as too far to bridge, I would only add that love has always been at base an erratic, modular, and incremental matter anyway. By fits and starts we find one another. How many stories have you heard about ultimate beloveds first being glimpsed at a crowded party or a subway terminal? How many darlings-to-be had to resolve for one another out of a random background, their visages swarmed and voices obscured by projection and misgiving, their auras, which love’s intendeds see best, befogged? The conditions under which Pyramus and Thisbe had to interact may have been mythic, but they are representative nevertheless. He was always haunted by the thought of which facet or aperture, which feature or flank, would fleetingly present itself next. As he paced feverishly before the chink in the wall that stood between them, she saw his partitioned figure in flashes, whose unstrobed self she had to intuit the way that Muybridge parsed and pieced a steed back together by having it gallop past his shutters.

We learn to love by incidentals because incidentals are all we ever get.

So, too, does a deeper feeling have to realize past the fact that you threw out the leftover rice she meant to save, past your penchant to sharpen and misaim your epithets when your rage is on, past your tendency to lick your fingers and wipe your snout on your sleeve in public. Your partner is upset because the storm took out her rose bush or her boss looked at her sideways or she squashed a possum with the Mazda, and although you are as logical as an abacus or an assassin about it, she nevertheless manages to locate a deserving version of you before the evening’s over. She somehow finds the fraction that, had she been less vigilant, would have been lost through the crack in your commitment. She happens upon the intimation of someone she amazes you by still recognizing and, more amazing yet, still wants to.

For the sake of convenience, I say, let’s call that fortunate someone “Bob,” and while we’re at it, let’s give everyone the selfsame benefit of the selfsame doubt.

Now I’m the first to admit that the devil is in the details; experience shows that when the subject is affairs of state, his residence is all the more secure. Frankly, given the size of the compliance problems associated with my proposals, not even the presidency would afford me the authority and scope I’d require to enact them. Even if I were to countenance a cabinet’s advice, no amount of tinkering could hide the fact that the Presidential Seal would not be sufficient; I’d need nothing less than scepter and orb. Come to think of it, becoming dictator would cut down on both conflict and paper work. Not to worry: probability, personality, and circumstance have me safely riveted to a career in academe. There, as it happens, the dollars I’m given and the dollars I deserve are amounts close enough to keep me quiet, while Bobs born, bred, or still to be bidden can breathe easy: my plot to remove the least uniqueness they have will forever be beyond my Art.

Arthur Saltzman is a Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University and the author of ten books, including the essay collections Objects and Empathy (Mid-List Press), Nearer (Parlor Press), Solve for X (U. of South Carolina Press), and The Obligations of the Harp (Parlor Press). He gratefully acknowledges family and friends who give him love and give him leave, and who generously diagnose his scribbles and clicks, storms and sighs, as charming idiosyncrasies.

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Ellen Deitz Tucker

Advance Directive Dearest husband, This is not a suicide note, but recently I attended the funeral of a gracious, orderly woman, who left behind three children, grieving husband, and, I’d wager, a freezer full of pre-cooked meals. The memorial was perfect; she must have written out her wishes, made arrangements with the florists, set aside the compact disc that softly played while we all took our seats. So this has made me think. If I should suddenly die, I’ll leave behind a dresser covered with old credit card receipts, papers in unsteady piles, books enfolding ancient notes to show where I stopped reading, and, most likely, damage to the Subaru that, this time, the insurance won’t repair.

And also you and our two kids, shocked and probably exasperated, sorting through a hamper of our dirty clothes for funeral attire appropriately somber. So I’d like to help you in advance with some advice.

You’ll want a funeral; churches are the only ones prepared to act on these occasions, but don’t belabor the arrangements. I always liked unfinished pine, it smells of Christmas. The deacons will provide for the reception, and as for music, you don’t need an organist. Start with a recording—I’d prefer Andre Crouch on “soon and very soon we are going to see the King,” because, if any earthly thing is sure, it is the finitude of time. If there must be a sermon, let the associate pastor give it, he needs the practice, and when he’s stumped he can be brief. Ask someone else to sing how “I Been Changed,” because I’m counting on that final transformation. And don’t forget I loved you throughout every cranky day, adored the kids in their unfinished, gorgeous potential, and, oh, instead of bulletins inscribed with lofty aims of Brother Francis, you could just hand out copies of this poem, if it would give the gathered folk a laugh, although your sense of humor will be more exact than mine.

Your loving wife

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Between mothering duties, volunteer jobs, and multiple moves with her career-changing husband, Ellen Deitz Tucker has worked as an adjunct college English teacher, a standardized test designer, and a freelance editor. She began to discover her voice and themes for writing as she began to uncover her faith. Her poetry is stimulated by scripture study and memorable conversations. She thanks her friend Elaine for the conversation that led to this poem.

Sylvia M. DeSantis

spiderwebs

Sylvia M. DeSantis practices Reiki,

when we enter into a coupling with nothing but empathy and compassion, we get eaten up (alive) mouthful by heavenly mouthful.

Most of the issues from

performs rhythmic drumming, and writes for teens and young adults (and not-so-secretly fantasizes about doing all three on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic). Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in various publications including the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series and Summer Shorts, a book of short stories for children. She is currently completing her first middle grade novel, The Lost Hart of Cape May.

past ruminants

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Issue 01 Chewing on Life Issue 02 Humor’s Grace Issue 03 Reconstruction Issue 04 Benedictio 51

Announcing the 2008 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize You are invited to submit to the first annual Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. * $300 will be awarded for the best poem, which will be published in the Fall 2008 RUMINATE, and $150 will be awarded for the runnerup poem. * Fee is $15 per entry, payable to RUMINATE. Enter by mail or online. * You may submit three poems per entry. There is no limit on the number of entries. * Poems must be previously unpublished. * Deadline is the postmark of June 1st, 2008. * Please visit our website for further details. * Entries must be clearly addressed to:

contest@ruminatemagazine.com OR

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Attn: Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize 140 N. Roosevelt Ave Fort Collins, CO 80521

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issue 05 //

FALL 2007

ruminated

LAST NOTE

Holly Hudson. Ruminate. Woodcut. 17 x 14 inches.

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issue 05 //

FALL 2007

Jessica Anderson. Treeline. Acrylic on canvas. 18 x 36 inches.

Jessica Anderson is a Southern California artist who loves to explore and emphasize the vibrant world around her. Working mostly in acrylic, Jessica aims to capture those passing images often overlooked by the casual eye. Jessica and her husband live on twenty-two acres in rural San Diego where open fields and oak groves provide plenty of inspiration. Currently, Jessica teaches children’s art education programs and is involved in the local art community, showing her work at art fairs and in the Vista Art Gallery. Jessica has a BA in Spanish and a minor in studio art from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Jessica Anderson. East Field. Acrylic on canvas. 12 x 16 inches.