Issue 9: Communion by Ruminate Magazine

faith in literature and art

COMMUNION /. fiction

Thievesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Weather, 1996 from Leif Nikunen

/. poetry

Confession, American Sweetgum, and Rehearsals from Julie L. Moore, Sally Rosen Kindred, and Mary Van Denend Scott-Coe

/. art

essay

Creation Series from Evan Mann

Calling from Jo

09 ISSUE

Fall 2 0 0 8

$8.00

why

ruminate ?

ruâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates 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 brushstrokeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;longing for the significance they point us toward. Please join us.

On the cover: Evan Mann. Donkey #3. Silkscreen and mixed media. 10 x 14 inches. 2007. On the inside cover: Evan Mann. Donkey #1. Silkscreen and mixed media. 10 x 14 inches. 2007.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 09

Fall 2008

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. SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website. For information on RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminate-online.org. SUBSCRIPTION RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this operation and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to RUMINATE and supporting the quality work produced. One year, $28. Two Years, $52. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at editor@ruminatemagazine.com. 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. Subscription services are available through EBSCO. DISTRIBUTION RUMINATE MAGAZINE is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company, 1402 Avenue B, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 and through direct distribution. Copyright © 2008 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 Stefani Rossi, Stephanie Walker Megan Barnes, Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, and Jonathan Van Dyke Edie Adams, April Berry, Kristin George Anne Pageau

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

contents

Notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Last

William R. Stoddart

43 River Cabin

4 5 8

Richard Sederstrom

52 The Circus Beautiful

inside back cover

Shanna Powlus Wheeler

53 The Widow’s Lament in Autumn

Poetry

Mary Van Denend

Mary E. O’Dell

Walking this labyrinth Safekeeping

10 11

David Harrity

Ellen Birkett Morris

Down by the River

Brian White

Out of the Eater

56 Heth 57 Kaph 57 Semekh

Jennifer Stewart

58 Postcard, Yellowstone

Julie L. Moore

Confession The first time I saw A shooting star

54 Rehearsals 55 Waterhouse

14 15

Fiction

David Feela

Digging a grave No Moon

16 17

Leif Nikunen

20 Thieves’ Weather, 1996

Misty Anne Winzenried Jonah’s Revelation

Jo Scott-Coe

Ellaraine Lockie Rebirth

Nonfiction

44 Calling

David Wright Return

Art

Evan Mann

Lauren Dobay

The Birds Are Falling Privacy

36 37

Leland James

Mist

Sally Rosen Kindred American Sweetgum Apple Night Pilgrimage

40 41 42

cover inside front cover

8 9 19 33 39 50 51 Back Cover

Donkey #3 Donkey #1 Creation #0 Creation #1 Creation #2 Creation #4 Creation #5 Creation #6 Creation #7 Donkey #2

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

I am proud

to share this issue with you all. Flipping through the proof pages, it seems like such an abundant communion of artists—of artists coming together, collecting, and sharing their gifts. And now because of your participation as reader, this communing and community is even more complete and the exchange is even greater. Thank you for joining us. We are also proud to share the winning poems from our 2008 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. The timing seems entirely fitting for this communion issue as the prize is a great example of the breadth of talent in today’s poets who are engaging faith in their craft. In fact, the entries were so impressive that our friend Luci Shaw—poet and judge of this prize—selected three winning poems instead of the anticipated two. Ms. Shaw wrote: I have truly enjoyed reading through the poems you sent in for the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize—what a cornucopia of riches. It was hard to make a final choice, but three poems kept coming to the top: “Confession,” “Rehearsals,” and “American Sweetgum.” Here’s what I’d like to do, with your permission. I’ll forgo the honorarium you were going to give me and add it to the purse for the prize-winners. If that plan fits your contest, I’d suggest “Confession” as first prize and “Rehearsals” and “American Sweetgum” as runners-up, since I can’t decide between those two! In the cause of poetry, Luci I loved receiving this letter because it affirms what we at RUMINATE believe—that the arts, and indeed, the very act of creation (as our featured artist Evan Mann reminds us), are a cause worthy of our generosity, admiration, and contemplation. Thank you Luci, all of our contributors, and our readers for supporting this cause alongside us. It is this communion of believers, writers, artists, and thinkers that moves us all forward.

Warmly, Brianna Van Dyke

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ruminato

NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.com

I would love to subscribe to RUMINATE! I have read a few issues at my daughter’s house because she is a subscriber, and have been touched by the honesty of the entries—that is always what I respond to, people who are realistic about the human condition and yet still hopeful towards God. Keep up the terrific quality of the magazine, and thanks for signing me on. Susan Trollinger Boulder, Colorado

I received my first two issues of RUMINATE last week and have already devoured them. But I promise to, yes, ruminate on them some more. Good stuff. Becky Haigler Shreveport, Louisiana

I couldn’t be more pleased or more grateful that my poem will appear in this issue of RUMINATE. After reading issue 08 I told my wife, “I subscribe to a number of these literary magazines and I’m almost always disappointed with their content or their quality. But this one is different—definitely my favorite so far. Someday, I’d really like to be published in RUMINATE.” I just had no idea it would happen so quickly. Many thanks to the editorial staff, not just for choosing my poem, but also for creating such a beautifully thoughtful journal. Brian White Allendale, Michigan *Brian wrote us this kind note after finding out that we had accepted his poem “Out of the Eater” (p. 10).

I subscribe to your magazine and have been impressed by the quality of the work you publish. I am also touched by the respect you and your staff extend to writers. That is a rarity, indeed, in the publishing world. Godspeed in all your endeavors! Calder Lowe Columbia, CA

Friends of

RUMINATE

We would like to thank our 2008 friends, whose generous financial donations have helped establish RUMINATE at the intersection of faith, literature, and art.

Benefactors Steve and Kim Franchini Kelly and Sara McCabe Darwill Press Jesse and Carly Ritorto Ralph and Lisa Wegner Scott Ackerman

Patrons

John Zeilstra

Sponsors

Josh and Nicole Roloff Everyday Joeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Coffee House Darla Korrey If you are interested in becoming a Friend, mail RUMINATE MAGAZINE 140 N. Roosevelt Ave Fort Collins, CO 80521 editor@ruminatemagazine.com

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The 2008 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize Judged by award-winning poet Luci Shaw. Sponsored by Steve and Kim Franchini, in loving memory of Janet McCabe.

Winner of the Janet B. McCabe Prize

“Confession” by Julie L. Moore PAGE 14

Runner-Up Prizes

“American Sweetgum” by Sally Rosen Kindred

PAGE 40

“Rehearsals” by Mary Van Denend PAGE 54

Thank you to all of our entrants for sending in your work! Janet B. McCabe, 1951.

ruminations

ARTIST’S NOTE

Evan Mann currently lives in Fort Collins and works as an artist serving the front range of Colorado. After finishing his BFA in printmaking at Colorado State University, he hopes to attend graduate school in New York City. He exhibited in the 2008 Art and Science Exhibition at CSU with an honorable mention and has exhibited several times in the Mini Gallery, including a solo exhibit during the fall of 2007 and a group show in the Senior Printmaking exhibition and at the Gallery Underground in Fort Collns. Evan also has commissioned work in numerous private collections throughout Colorado. To see more from Evan visit www. evanmann.com.

Evan Mann: One-ness Composed of Many-ness For me, art is creation returning to its Creator. Believing that we are created in God’s image and

therefore have an innate desire to create, this series is an exploration of our desire to create something new, something never realized. To make something non-referenced; something with neither external, nor internal influences; something not of this world, something of nothingness. I know this is not completely possible—we are extensions of our environment and are influenced by a lifetime’s accumulation of ideas and experiences—and yet, these are my attempts. It is also my hope that my work engages God’s design for a unified body. For just as these pieces are composed of many parts with different functions, they come together and work as one. The creations are one-ness composed of many-ness; these bodies are a unified diversity. Sections are extending, reaching out and working together, but for the better of the whole, for the good of the composition. I am moved by this idea of a unified diversity— the kind explained in chapter twelve of Romans—that we all have been blessed with different gifts and passions and are called to serve one another through our abilities. We belong to one another; we are not our own, we have been bought with a price, and I believe that a Christ-like humility is the means in which we can find this unity, a humility that is far more powerful than cultural boundaries and misunderstandings. So, let us celebrate diversity and the beauty it brings.

Evan Mann. Creation #0. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

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Evan Mann. Creation #1. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

Mary E. O’Dell

WALKING THIS LABYRINTH In this holy place I’ll leave the pain of my abandonings, my fingers’ memory of a Mozart prelude the feel of Scottish yarn on smooth British needles. I’ll leave the remembered scent of yeast the serious heft of stone-ground flour and the swell of dough all of these having become too difficult to carry. And as I reach this inner ring I feel the trickling away of years and capabilities turn gently to sweet sadness. And where do they go, these loves— to sleep? to God or to the universe? Perhaps they take to the air as red-tailed hawks kites strung by boys in China or maybe they fade into some eternal light, where they began. I would like to think these homely skills of mine will go to ground in some safe place and wait like Easter eggs to be discovered by another unassuming child.

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Mary E. O’Dell

SAFEKEEPING To enter the unexpressed is to find the cracked blue bowl someone left in the garden at light’s last flicker and place within it your pearl. The bowl knows nothing of pearls, knows only how to be broken, how to be mute. How to fill itself with darkness, to wait.

Mary E. O’Dell serves as president of Green River Writers, Inc.

She’s been writing poetry for thirty years and has two full-length poetry collections, Poems for the Man Who Weighs Light and Living in the Body (Edwin Mellen Poetry Press) and a chapbook, The Dangerous Man (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ellen Birkett Morris

Down by the River White robed like summer swans, They gather at the water’s edge. Cradled, they lean back Stare into the face of God. Bird song, Blinding sun, Cool water, Muffled cries of the crowd. Dripping, they are set on their feet. Clamber up the bank Welcomed by a flock of hands Grasping for traces of the spirit Already taken flight.

Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer and poet based in Louisville, Kentucky.

Her poetry has appeared in many journals including The Binnacle, The Pedestal Magazine, and is forthcoming in Alimentum. Her poem “Origins” was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. Ellen is fascinated by the role of ritual in religion and is an informal student in Buddhism. She enjoys every moment with her husband, a statistician and banjo aficionado, and their terrier mix.

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Brian White

Out of the Eater In the belly of the mastodon dug intact from receding permafrost they found seed preserved, undigested, the creatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last meal. Planted again, this time in more congenial, modern earth, the kernels of antiquity broke open, germinated miraculously seminal after millennia. Life springs from the ancient seeds I take in daily, too, sometimes thirty, sometimes a hundredfold. When I die, no doubt some will remain, even after I have lain long winters, undisturbed. And in some far off spring I hope someone will dig me out, open me, discover what I have ingested, conserved, and sow timeless seed in new earth.

Brian White is a professor of English at Grand Valley

State University in Allendale, Michigan. Although he has written poetry for many years, he has only recently begun submitting poems for publication. Some of his more prosaic work has been (or is about to be) published in such journals as Research in the Teaching of English, Christianity and Literature, English Journal, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, and Teachers College Record (online).

Julie L. Moore

Confession Mark 5:24-34

And in the twelfth year, there was still Blood. And so many difficult degrees Of separation. Everything, at this point, Burned. The once-soft skin of her labia. The pathetic pulp of her womb. And the mass of hard questions. Pressing on her like the crowds Bearing down on him. She knew the rules: Keep your hands To yourself. Whatever you touch you foul. But she reached for him anyway. Fastened her unClean fingers, tipped With outrageous nerve, Onto the lip of his cloak. While he sensed the tug Of the siphon, the precious liquid of his power Tapped, she felt her river of red Drain, the fierce spear of her pain Withdraw. He wanted to know who grasped Such scandalous and particular Faith. Never again would she soil A place where she lay. So she fell At his feet. Confessed.

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Julie L. Moore

The first time I saw a shooting star, I was 42, and the world was busy casting Its orange shadow onto the surface of the moon. The red eye of a plane was blinking As it slipped beneath Orion’s belt, The rumble of the engine too far away to hear. Icicles, invisible in the dark, Crackled in the near-zero air, Splitting their grips, Tinkling like glass as tips reached The sleet-topped snow below. The wind was still, asleep in its cloudless bed. The wafer of wonder, crisp on my tongue. My prayer, simple, Spoken aloud like the soft call of an owl: O God, maker of heaven and earth, heal my husband. Then the flame, light years old, Streamed through the sky. And I was as skeptical as you are now, My faith in any true goodness Eclipsed by the pain in my life. But I tell you, it happened like this, Visible as the disappearing moon, The light, long-awaited, arrived.

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping

Out of Bloom, forthcoming from WordTech Editions, and the chapbook Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Cimarron Review, Flint Hills Review, Free Lunch, The MacGuffin, Sou’Wester, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others. She is also a previous contributor to RUMINATE. Moore lives in Ohio where she is the writing center director at Cedarville University.

David Feela

Digging a grave My foot presses the shovel’s blade into the dirt—steel returning to the earth. The morning is cool so the digging warms me like the sun drawing me into its pleasure, but this is work. A grave shakes enthusiasm and lays it flat. Stones have to be pried loose, tossed onto a pile that grinds like a mouth full of teeth. The deeper I go, the softer the soil as if life’s argument against death had exhausted its resistance. I cut the edges straight, scoop out of the bottom what falls then strike again with the pickaxe, a little more, and more again, the spade returning to shape this emptiness. Hours pass and I’m sweating, leaning against my shovel, measuring in my head how much I have left to go.

David Feela is a poet, freelance writer, writing instructor, book collec-

tor, and thrift store pirate. His work has appeared in regional and national publications including High Country News’ “Writers’s on the Range,” Mountain Gazette, and as a “Colorado Voice” for The Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for the Four Corners Free Press. His poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series and a new book of poems, The Home Atlas, will be released early 2009 from WordTech in Ohio. 16

David Feela

No Moon Stars break through, fracturing the blackness so that I’m reminded of a colander I once pressed to my face while staring at the ceiling light. I could have been two – maybe younger – playing on the kitchen floor unloading my mother’s cupboards into the exploding universe of my mouth. She watched me from her place by the stove, smiled like any mother who finds it in herself to bring forth another, until somewhere in the wall a fuse reached its limit and suddenly the house went dark. I must have cried, probably screamed out of pure ignorant terror. Everything I knew had been taken away in that moment and except for the hands reaching out of the void to lift me from the floor I’d have believed in nothing. Now, with a cold half century between us, I am never alone, and it’s still impossible to count all the stars. 17

Misty Anne Winzenried

Jonahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Revelation Crunching through the sand between families on towels, I pause to watch sailboats, those triangular vessels, being coaxed by invisible strings through the salty water, almost leaving ripples. I imagine being swallowed by the ocean: waves open up and I disappear, engulfed by sorrow in big gulps, thick quilts, or a big fat fish. * Jonah fell asleep, and for three days he dreamed of his daughter at the wading pool. He watched as she announced her determination to sit in the water, dress and all. Her green jumper bled darker at the hem as she bent her knees a little lower, then a little more. She shrieked with delight. * As I walked home from the beach, the tips of my hair still dripping, I realized that I suddenly remembered which way was Tarshish, and which Nineveh.

Issue 09 // FALL 2008

Misty Anne Winzenried holds

her MA in counseling and teaches writing at Seattle Pacific University and Mars Hill Graduate School. She loves living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, where they adventure together on the Puget Sound, on the Olympic Peninsula, or in the Cascades. Misty Anne is interested in exploring how the writing process allows writers to participate in the redemption of their stories.

Evan Mann. Creation #2. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

Leif Nikunen

Thieves’ Weather, 1996 Clifton Clark on his way home from the OK Liquor Corral with two new bottles of brandy took the pasture road instead of going round by the blacktop. A bright night in new November and he drove south into a cloud encamped in the big open country, as though God had pitched a tent to be his neighbor for the night. The first snow melted on the windshield and the hood of the pickup and the hides of the Hereford cattle around him, but more snow came and it didn’t all melt. It sifted down and covered the country and all the country lay cuddled under snow and wet weather. Thieves’ weather. Taking a turn out of his regular path, Clifton Clark jockeyed his pickup truck over soft slopes and winter grass and stopped on a boulder-crusted nob. He shut off the headlights and cut the engine. The changed terrain of the season made everything unfamiliar so that he had to wait for the moon to break cover like a startled hare flitting between clouds to see where he was. The snow gathered on the windshield and the wiper blades. He got out and walked forward to the lichen-covered rocks jutting out of the hillside. He listened. He stood on the tracks of jackrabbits and looked down on a creek feeding south toward the south fork of the Grand River, but there was nothing to see. There was nothing to hear but the wet sag of snow descending. But he knew. He had a feeling. He drove east and then south into the coulee, looking for the Texas crossing he knew was there. He crossed the creek with its frozen shine of meltwater from that week’s warmth. A half-mile south he stopped again and shut off the engine and rolled down his window to listen. He got out to listen more closely. He heard unmistakably the sound of a four-wheeler. He got in the pickup and drove back the way he’d come across the coulee and up the other side and east two miles on the pasture road to come to the Karlson ranch. Horseman Karlson came out and Clifton said, “I hope you got your long johns on. It’s a long ride to the south corral.” “I got business at the south corral?” “Somebody does. Been moving your cattle that direction. I been watching for it like you asked me to.” “That would be Tasker, I guess.”

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“Your dad did always notice that he was fond of working this kind of weather,” Clifton said. “Bright moon, but the snow coming thick and fast. Kind of weather rustlers pray for.” “You saw him moving cattle?” “Heard him. A four-wheeler going and stock cows a-bellering. Can’t say I saw him. But you will if you ride over south and west of Pryor’s Coulee. Keep an eye peeled after you cross No-Name-for-It Creek and top the bluffs.” “And him keeping an eye out for me, too, most like.” “He won’t look for you to come out of the pasture. He’ll be watching the road.” “You’re pretty sure he ain’t dangerous?” “Pretty sure. Not a hundred percent. I’d still take along a rifle if I was you.” “You fixing to ride along?” “How bout I take my pickup up along that west fenceline and sit there and watch. Show my headlights a little if I have to.” “How bout you just ride along. I’d like that better.” Clifton shrugged, noncommittal. Horseman went inside and came out wearing a sheepskin coat. He went to the barn and returned leading two horses, saddled, a big gray gelding and a big bay mare. Stepping into the saddle of the mare, he tugged the gelding over alongside the open window of the pickup where Clifton Clark sat listening to radio station KFLN out of Baker, Montana. Clifton had a brown paper bag beside him and there was the smell of something fruity in the air. “Well,” Horseman said. “You up to it?” “I’ve been lifting up my courage. What do you got for a gun?” Clifton said. “Dad’s old Mauser. The 8-millimeter.”

“Huh. Big slow bullet like that, the man could probably see it coming and outrun it on that little machine of his.” “I’d just as soon talk to him as shoot him anyway.” Clifton shut off the radio and got out, nobbing his sheepskin coat closed. He mounted the gelding and they rode. “Your dad didn’t want to shoot him, either,” Clifton said. “He didn’t bear him no malice. I’d say he found a good deal of entertainment value in those goings-on. Sitting up there on Pryor Hill with the field glasses if there was any light to see by. He says to me one time, ‘Take a look, Clifton, there’s a man that works hard to get ahead. Tramping around the middle of the night in the snow and he’s got to be east of the Missouri River and outside the brand inspection area by sunrise. An absolute textbook capitalist if it wasn’t for his hazy conception of private property.’ Like he plumb admired him. That was about the time Tasker’s wife took sick the first time.” “What was it you said killed her? Cancer?” “I believe so. Something in the female line. Your dad took to hazing a few head down south so Tasker would nab them. Tricky kind of charity work, because that’s when your brother was in high school and he and his buddies were running off with stock, too. They were loading them out of the west and south corrals, Tasker was stealing them out of the south. Sometimes we almost ran into scheduling problems.” “Dad knew all about that, did he?” “He knew. Sigurd said he figured he’d just about have to hire Tasker as foreman just to stop his own son from stealing him blind, only he thought Tasker wouldn’t do it. Too humiliating to work for the man you’d been robbing.” The cold had a smell, it made a sound. The snowflakes drifted down the size of quarters and filled the air and made a soft rustle of moving in the winter grass like a hen settling onto her nest. Winter returning like a native to nest and breed its brood of young weather to affright the country. “I don’t know why my dad should want to look out for Tasker,” Horseman said. “They were roommates once. That might have had something to do with it.” “Roommates? I never heard that.” “It wasn’t for very long. Your Grandpa Magnus kicked Sigurd off the place once,

Issue 09 // FALL 2008

did you know about that? Right after the war. He was plenty mad about something. Sigurd needed a place to stay till it blew over.” “Mad about what?” “Don’t know. They were hollering at each other in Norwegian. Even your grandma couldn’t make it out, she never learned Norwegian worth a dime. They patched it up afterward.” Horseman swept the hat off his head and licked a snowflake off the brim. Tilting his face to the sky he let the flakes fall down on him trying to catch them on his tongue. “My dad used to say they tasted like cotton candy,” he said, replacing his hat. “Do they?” “Not no more. But I believe they did when I was a little boy and he first told it to me.” They crossed the No-Name, stepping out of the saddle to lead the horses across the ice that creaked underfoot. They moved up the other bank and rode across the floodplain

The snowflakes drifted down the size of quarters and filled the air and made a soft rustle of moving in the winter grass like a hen settling into her nest. and up into the bluffs. There was more light now. The moon played hide-and-seek with clouds the shape of haystacks and big bales of wool. They stayed off the ridges. They heard him before they saw him. The four-wheeler made a thrumming. They heard cattle moving along a fenceline. Then they saw their shapes, the red backs of cattle and the white faces, through the sift and waft of snow. “Might as well pitch in and help,” Horseman said.

“Looks to me like he don’t need help. The man’s had practice,” Clifton Clark said. “They’re not in the corral yet. I believe I’d like somebody to pitch in and lend a hand if I was all alone working my cattle.” “They are your cattle,” Clifton said. “Which is why he’s got so good at working alone and why I don’t believe he wants the help.” But Horseman rode down whistling and yipping and brought up one flank where the four-wheeler had been doubling back to keep the gaggle of cattle moving. Clifton Clark sat watching and saw the four-wheeler stop and the rider turn his head, craning to watch too. The thrum of that engine sounded at first like contemplated flight, and then like resignation. Clifton fell in beside Horseman to bring up the rear, pushing the cattle south along the fence and leaving the four-wheeler to keep them from darting west into the open country. In the corner where the southbound fence bumped another headed west, they came upon the green steel corral. They bunched them in and Horseman got down to swing shut the gate. Tasker, sitting on the four-wheeler beside them, killed the engine and took out a pack of Winstons. He lit one and dropped the match in the snow. He watched Horseman looping the chain round the gate and gatepost of the corral and making it fast. “There’s some good stuff ready to sell, all right,” Horseman said. “Dad always said you had a good eye for livestock.” “I’ve had my eye on these ones a good while,” Tasker said dryly, looking at his cigarette. “Going to Sioux Falls with this bunch?” He shrugged. “Somewheres back there. Maybe Aberdeen. I always figure I get a little better price east of the river.” “And not have to pay that 60 cents a head brand inspection fee,” Clifton said. “A damned nuisance for an honest man.” “I did never like that thing,” Tasker said. And looked at Horseman and said, “You figure I should do something else with this lot?” “No, Sioux Falls is fine. They got a sale on Wednesday. That’s tomorrow. Shoot, that’s today. You’ll have to drive fast to get there. Got any animals of your own you want to take along?” “You know I just haven’t been selling a lot of my own.”

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“Might as well load up these, then. How many you got room for?” “There’s half a dozen will fit in there easy enough, skinny as these ones are. You ought to be feeding already if you’re going to try to raise heifers on range. Your family always waits too long to put heifers on feed. Damn foolish. It’ll cost you in your calf crop. Just look at the ribs. You ain’t got a clue about body condition scores. I’ll tell you what, there’s times I felt bad taking them cause folks had to think they were mine.” “Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I’m thinking of making some changes around the place. Little by little. If I can find a man with know-how about cows, I mean. Come see me after you get back from the Sioux Falls Stockyards.” Gid Tasker nodded. He turned on the lights of his four-wheeler so that the headlamps shone through the green steel bars on the drizzle-faced Herefords. He bared his forearm and reached his watch forward into the headlight to read the time. “Coming up on half-past midnight. Best get at it,” he said. They went inside the corral, Gid Tasker with a short whip in his hand, Horseman with his coiled rope. They left Clifton Clark to tend the gate, swung a quarter open to let out the ones they didn’t want to sell. In the end they kept five head and ran them into the trailer and shut the gate and bolted it. Horseman and Gideon Tasker lifted the four-wheeler in the back of Tasker’s pickup, in front of the gooseneck trailer hitch. Then Tasker said, “If it’s a job you got for me, I don’t want it.” He was slashing the snow with the whip. “What’s that?” “I got second thoughts. About what you said you wanted to talk to me about. If you’re fixing to offer me a job I ain’t interested, I ain’t looking for one. I got plenty of stuff to keep me busy.” “Shame to have to work nights, though,” Clifton said. “Just run me in if you want, I’ll plead to it. I got nothing against you. Fox and goose and hound dog, that’s just how things are. You just go see the Harding County state’s attorney and get your papers filed. I’ll plead to it.” He went and got in the cab of the pickup and slammed the door and sat there inside. Horseman went round and opened the passenger side door and looked in on him. He said, “I wasn’t planning to go to law about it.” “You do what you want. Go if you want, don’t if you don’t want. But don’t blame me if you’re still missing cattle. And don’t think you’re going to get me to work for you.”

Horseman got in and let the door fall shut. Neither one said anything. The cattle rocked the trailer behind them when they shifted and one’s hoof kicked the metal side and made it ring like an empty oil drum. The snowflakes fell on the windshield, no longer the size of quarters, the size of dimes now. “Cooling down,” Tasker said. “I was afraid it might.” “Hope it don’t blow,” Horseman said. Tasker reached down at Horseman’s foot and brought up a coffee thermos. He screwed the cup off the end and poured it full and started to sip. Steam rolled off the cup and carried the smell of coffee. “There’s another cup in the glovebox if you want some. I like a cup when I drive nights. Safety first, that’s my motto.” Horseman ferreted inside the glove compartment for a dirty plastic Cenex cup. He blew in it to get the dust out and rubbed it with a corner of his coat sleeve and held it out for Tasker to fill it. “I never been took to law before,” Tasker said. Horseman looked at him and watched the white flakes of snow melt into his gray hair. “You know why? It’s cause I never took nobody else’s cattle, no matter what people say. Oh, I know what they say. I hear it in the cafe or the filling station,

Conscience to a sinner

is what a glass jaw

is to a fighter. clear over to Baker, down to Belle. ‘Missing a Black Angus steer. Too big for a coyote to handle, must a been that goddamn Tasker.’ That’s convenient, makes a guy feel good to have a coyote or a Tasker to lay it on. But nobody ever caught me at it cause I never did take none of theirs. Just his. Sigurd’s.”

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“Can’t be because he did so well with them. Skinny like these are.” “No sir. It’s cause he deserved it. Just doing back to him what he done to me. Taking something of his for a change.” “What did he take from you?” Clifton gave a short laugh but there was no humor in it. “Your mama and your dad didn’t either one ever tell you?” “Tell what?” “About her and me. Your ma and me.” “No. I just heard something about you and my daddy used to be close. Roommates and all.” “Not for very long. Not very close, neither. What it amounted to, he needed a place to sleep for a few weeks while he sorted it out with his old man. What was that, 1948 or something. Him just back from the war.” “I thought the war was over way before that.” “Well, he must a had some loose ends to take care of, then, because he didn’t come back right away. Not till ’48. I don’t know what he was up to. Liberating the young girls of their virginity, I shouldn’t wonder. That’s what he was up to here, and had the makings of being pretty good at it but for his conscience. Conscience to a sinner is what a glass jaw is to a fighter. I’d a never took him in if I knew what I was in for. Christ, if there’s anything more pitiful than a sinful, believing Irishman I don’t know what it is.” “He took after old Magnus. The Norwegian side.” “Maybe looks and height. He was all Irish on the inside. I never seen a man so worked up about sin. Grieving over a dead horse and a live girl and a packet of letters from some woman he’d left in Italy. Well, I could have got a packet of foreign letters and World War II medals, too, if they’d let me go, but they didn’t. Army wouldn’t take you if you were flat-footed and pigeon-toed, which I was. “I’d come home nights and find him laying on the rug, drunk and buck naked, sometimes alone and sometimes not. He’d sing ‘Be Thou My Vision’ with his voice all full of tears. Then if it was coming a Sunday he’d get up early and drive all over West River going to Mass, one church after another. He knew three, four parishes where the services were staggered so he could get to the next one if he drove fast, and him taking communion at each one like a drunk begging drinks.

I hear he got himself made a Catholic over there in Italy. Must a been true, those priests seemed to know him. I believe there was one Lutheran church in the country he’d stop at, too, but they never let him have any wine. He wanted to take me along sometimes. One time was enough. Going on and on about the horse and the girl and the U.S. Fifth Army. Jesus.” “Those letters, were they mailed to him there when he was in the service?” “Maybe. Maybe some mailed to him here afterward. I don’t know that.” “Did he say much about the girl?” “Only that she was a looker. Like my Milly, he said. Clean and sober he’d say that was all he needed, a good woman to settle him down and make him forget. Said that’s what his dad, old Magnus, wanted, too, that’s why the old guy was mad at him. Well, I never did buy that, why should Magnus kick him off the farm just cause he wasn’t ready to settle down? I figure it’s something worse. I figure—this is just my idea, now—I figure it’s a case where the soldier boy’s come home from the war all broken inside, something’s not right, he knows way too much about sin and he don’t even believe in God anymore. Sigurd didn’t anyway when I knew him. And that scared him. I could see that the way he’d run from town to town on a Sunday morning, like he thought he must have missed God in Prairie City but meant to catch up to Him in Dupree or Eagle Butte. And him looking worrieder and worrieder because he’s already figured out God ain’t waiting for him in Eagle Butte or Dupree and he’s scared to tell it to himself and he’s wondering what he’s going to do if God ain’t waiting for him in Bison either. But I could a told him what he was going to do.” “What’s that?” “Same thing he’d been doing with any young thing he could get into his bed. Only maybe something new he hadn’t never tried before, like two at a time. Because if there ain’t a God, if there ain’t a heaven, what’s the best you got to hope for but a really interesting life in bed? That’s the story of him and my Milly, too. Why he took her away from me and why he didn’t stick with her. One look of her in that black sweater she wore and he decides he’s got to have her, too, like she’s a new brand of coffee or vintage wine. Only he makes her believe it’s something more, like she’s the key to his happiness. Well, I thought she was to mine, too. Before Sigurd came along.” “You two engaged?” “I thought we were. Thought we had an understanding. Misunderstanding, I guess it was. He pretty much walked away with her. Big tall fellow like that,

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blond, hawk-looking, he whistled and she was gone. There he was, six-two and muscles, and there’s me, five-seven and skinny. Not much of a contest. I don’t believe she even saw me after that. Never looked back.” “That’s all it was? Looks?” “I thought about that. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t love, whatever it was. Looks and a bunch of little things, I figure. Like him special-ordering a certain kind of olives from Italy, a certain kind of coffee, a special coffee pot. Putting on airs like that. There was a store in Rapid City where he could get all that stuff. And then she wanted to go places and be seen and he was going away to Chicago to school. So they married. Too bad for her and him, too. I don’t wish you no ill luck, Horseman, cause I did always like to see you ride rodeo, but I do think it’s kind of funny you’re here at all. You and your brother and sister. There wasn’t a lot of love in that marriage.” “No.” “But I would have loved her. I took her to shows when we were courting and he never did that, it wasn’t in his line. I used to look around sometimes afterward when I had Delores, God rest her, to see a show in Belle or Bowman, but she was never there. I don’t believe he ever knew how much she liked movies. But I did. I always thought we had that in common and I could have special-ordered the olives, too, if that was all there was to it. But she probably thought she was moving up in the world, choosing him over me.” Outside the snow had begun to thicken. The moon hid behind clouds the shape of woodpiles. Gid Tasker sipped his coffee and said, “Ask anybody, they’ll tell you I treated my Delores right. I never made her feel second-choice. I cried when I lost her. No meanness to you or your old man, Horseman, but he wasn’t half the husband nor half the dad I was, neither. Running all over hell and carrying on like he did because he wasn’t satisfied with your ma anymore.” “Carrying on how?” Gid Tasker looked out the window. Snow was falling on the winter grass. “Well, that is the question. Maybe carrying on ain’t the right word.” “Why don’t you tell me so we can see if it is. Because nobody wants to tell me anything and I’d just like to know what else he did besides cards, I’m curious about his bedroom habits same as anybody else. What was it, a dead woman, a live boy, what?”

Tasker set his coffee cup on the dash of the pickup so that the steam came up and fogged the glass. He said, “You know what, Horseman? I go up to the Baptist Church in Baker some Sundays. Not every Sunday, but now and then. They’re not sure they want me. I see them studying me: There’s that goddamn cattle thief. But you know I always find a little comfort thinking back, Whatever you think you know about me ain’t all: I’ve done worse. You can think that about your dad, Horseman: Whatever’s the worst you could find out about him, you can bet he’s done darker things. I think that’s why he was racing to all those churches all over West River—trying to catch up to God so he could explain or something. Like maybe he thought he’d thought up a few new sins that God hadn’t heard about before and maybe Jesus would have to take him aside and say, Hmm, let’s see if my broken body and shed blood do avail for that peculiar kind of wickedness you have been rolling yourself around in. “I remember watching him and thinking, Ain’t this a hell of a note? He’s going to get her. My fiancé is going to run off with this clown because he’s tall and drives a nice truck

hmm, let’s see if my broken body

and shed blood do avail for that peculiar kind of wickedness you have been rolling

yourself around in. and looks so fine when he ain’t stinking drunk and afraid of himself. And there’s not a thing I can do to keep her safe. “I just thought it, you know. But it was almost like I said it out loud because next thing I know I hear this voice saying, ‘I have hell’s own time dealing with my bride, too.’ “And I look around to see who said it and first thing I see is Jesus, on one of those

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Stations of the Cross. Looking square at me. And He says, ‘My blood pays for all of that, and all of them. It’s strong medicine. Just believe it.’ “And I did, and I do, ever since.” “Had you been drinking some when Jesus talked to you that way?” “I was riding around in a truck all weekend with your old man, Horseman. I’ll leave you to cipher on that one for yourself. It ain’t like God couldn’t talk to a drunk man, if I was. Some folks listen better then.” Horseman sat quietly. “You know what your daddy liked to drink then? Red wine. Isn’t that something? He learned that in Italy. ‘Red like the blood of Christ,’ he used to say. Which was a thing he seemed to set store by when he was drunk. Sober it didn’t seem to matter, he didn’t believe in it unless he was drunk. But I did. I have come to value it highly, that day to this.” “Just not enough to make you quit stealing cows.” “I’ll put it to you this way, Horseman: I was just an instrument in the Lord’s hands. I was always going to quit someday. As soon as Sigurd caught me, I was fixing to. So the Lord could teach him something. So I could say to him, ‘So what? I took some young cows worth so-and-so much a pound. You took something better. Now treat her right.’ The hell of it is, he never even knew the value of what he stole. She was never a person to him, just another thing he wanted to have, like a coffee pot or a bottle of wine. “I made it as easy as I could for him. I even took up smoking so I could leave my Winstons laying all over the ground, but could he take a hint? Then he died. And hadn’t a clue I was robbing him blind, the poor dumb bastard, any old time I felt like it. And him with the high-powered degree in economics from the University of Chicago that got him that job for the Homestake. Hadn’t a clue.” Horseman said, “I believe you can stop stealing cows now that you got it said.” “Tonight was just for old times’ sake, anyway. Force of habit.” He sat there and sipped his coffee and watched snow on the windshield. “Come see me about that job,” Horseman said. “I already spoke all my piece about that. I don’t want it.” “You could even take Ma out to a show or two. You know she still reads the movie reviews in the Rapid City Journal even if she don’t ever go.” “Don’t want to do that, neither. Like sipping on someone else’s leftover soft drink when the fizz is all gone. And you’d be real happy for me, I bet.”

“Truth is, I haven’t thought a lot about you. I don’t care a hill of beans about you. But I’d say it might be good for her.” Gid Tasker was quiet. “Well. I’ll think on that.” Outside in the snow Clifton Clark had been sitting in the saddle and now he came alongside the pickup and rapped with his knuckles at the passenger side window. “I believe we better ride, Horseman. This snow’s fixing to come down on us.” Horseman Karlson got out of the pickup and stood a moment in the open door and studied the sky and said to Gid Tasker, “It does look like it might pile up. You drive safe.” “I always do.”

Leif Nikunen writes about the prairie from his home in

South Dakota. Some of his favorite writers include Gyula Krudy, Cormac McCarthy, Olafur Johann Sigurdsson, and Martin A. Hansen. His fiction was most recently published in The King’s English and Dark Sky Magazine.

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Evan Mann. Creation #4. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

Ellaraine Lockie

Rebirth The cat who came from nowhere disappeared behind the organ at Christ Lutheran The organist’s head bobbed up and down like a jack-in-a-box gone demonic foot pedaling a dissonant hymn from hell As though she had finally flipped out from under the weight of a family of eight and her flock of side jobs I saw her, my best friend’s mother pull the feline Satan out Cradle him down the aisle to the double doors like she was delivering him to Noah’s Ark She floated through the same celestial cloud that surrounded her at home Steam spitting from the mangle as she pressed other people’s sheets and pillow cases Pressed their problem kids to her breast A halo of heat hung over the deep-fat fryer when she made doughnuts for Smith’s grocery store And for under-mothered strays like me who loitered just to share the air she breathed To take it home and hope she would spread like sunshine I heard the women in our breakfast nook clucking over coffee say she was a wild thing once The preacher’s daughter out to prove God loves a sinner I felt that feral when I slept over When after family prayers she’d fling herself on the clunkiest piano in Chouteau County And pound Jesus into the night with white-hot keys like Liberace in Las Vegas I would have climbed onto her lap Into her womb and out again But my body was nailed to the bed frame by the Fourth Commandment Rebirth incomprehensible for a girl too damaged to claim her own disorderly cat

Ellaraine Lockie is a poet, nonfiction

author, essayist, and professional papermaker. In the last year she has received a poetry residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, her eleventh Pushcart Prize nomination, the 2008 Writecorner Press Poetry Prize, the 2008 Skysaje Poetry Prize, and the 2007 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize. Recently released publications are Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, a poetry/art broadside from BrickBat Revue, and her fifth chapbook, Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, a collection of first-place contest winning poems from PWJ Publishing. Her nonfiction books are All Because of a Button: Folklore, Fact and Fiction (St. Johann Press) and The Gourmet Paper Maker (Creative Publications, U. S., and Collins and Brown, U.K.).

David Wright

Return Coming

home from an Andalusian village of goats, of pig cheek, of blood pudding, of meat so fresh you remember its voice,

In the air above the Midwest, you hear the fish monger—pesce—and recall the tomato purée & peppers—you tell me, pure stranger, of the herd of goats obscuring the road as you drove home. On your passport are stamps—exotic remnant— of the way you arrived, how you left, And your hands have also been made exotic, callused from tearing down, and building a pueblo, a property, as if you could add anything to España, its collection of dialects. Now, of course, these are your hands, which you will have in Texas and may endeavor to fill with new loves—even when The sound of a car horn, a few phrases en Español fill your mouth with a longing for tendered and fire-roasted lamb.

David Wright’s poems have appeared in Image, Artful Dodge,

Poetry East, and the anthology A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (Iowa, 2003), among many others. A past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship for poetry, David’s most recent poetry collection is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003). In addition to teaching writing and literature at Wheaton College (IL), David is an active church musician, having recently published the hymn collection A Field of Voices (Table Round, 2007) with composer James E. Clemens. He and his family live in Central Illinois.

Lauren Dobay

The Birds Are Falling We secretly hope that birds will never learn of God. Then we should have to carry an umbrella always. Pull it out, say to each other, “the birds are trying to commune again, See, they’re falling.” Vertigo strikes their delicate wings, oxygen flees their lungs and they plummet. We’ll shake our umbrellas, let them hit the ground step around them and decide what we’re doing for lunch. I secretly hope that birds will never learn of God; They’re already much closer than I.

Lauren Dobay

Privacy The only tree left standing in the forest blinked, once or twice. Thought he saw a willow reach up her gossamer bow to him and smile but he was just waiting, alone in the woods. Somewhere below him, a blond haired boy with matches. Lauren Dobay writes: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Poetry has been my passion since I was six years old,

and I am delighted to say that this is my first publication. I work as a registered nurse in the field of child and adolescent mental health and graduated from Gettysburg College with a degree in anthropology and sociology and also from Penn State University with a degree in nursing. I write nearly every day, and find it to be the time I am most at peace.â&#x20AC;?

Leland James

MIST I like the fog, the mist, “Cat feet,” and all that. But that’s not the real Thing, what I mean: I like the obscurity Of it all, the hidden But not quite, the ... Promise of revealing. Not Avalon, or anything So grand, regular stuff: A swale along the road, A ditch, earth movers Emerging like dinosaurs. The rolling nothingness Beneath a bridge. Silvered water. Overhanging boughs, Ghostlike fingers interlaced. A curtain parting. A Promise . . . Not of anything Really, but another day. Little mysteries Everywhere, Scaled not so much To saints and laureates But to truck drivers, Bird hunters, Kids on their way to school. A first curtain, the fog, The mist, clearing. The sideways curtain Pulling away, announcing The second curtain, The main one that rolls up On the story, the dance. The sometime, someday. A Promise in the fog, the mist. Mornings and midnights On regular days, nothing days. The brush of a leaf, A tickling, an itch To look within, beyond, inside, Not just around, and to expect Something as if every day is The birthday of the world.

Leland James is the pen name of Leland

James Whipple. He is the author of five books, two college texts, two novels, and a book of essays. His novel Whole Again has been translated into several foreign languages. Leland has also been published in a variety of both academic and popular periodicals, ranging from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Twilight Zone to the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine and Disabled USA. Recently, Leland has begun focusing on poetry and short fiction. This effort has resulted in being awarded runner-up for the 2008 Fish International Poetry Prize and a finalist in a New Millennium Writings poetry contest, as well as recent publications in Harûah, Breath of Heaven, and Inspirit, among others.

Evan Mann. Creation #5. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

Sally Rosen Kindred

American Sweetgum Here it stands, finally, in the chapter marked Flowering Trees, and I’m afraid to read the words as if their spiny tongues could curl to touch heartwood, that underbark where the sap no longer goes. As if from this static strip of print my mother could rise gripping the yard’s black bench and throw her cigarette into the grass and twist her foot over it like a Spanish dancer, and I’d be left sitting under the American Sweetgum, my knees pricked by its fruits, bitter spheres, wired as they are with the sweetgums of my children’s children, except that I will bear no children, I will lift my small empty body from this place like those seeds borne in dried globes and on flowers nobody remembers anyway. The parched print says nothing of September that year she left beer for wine, nothing of the safety of my own fingered reds, fissured wood, crunch of fruit—we called them gumballs—the skate key swinging cold on my neck in the cracked grass, white Nova pulling up, brother swinging eyes-down out its grimy door, father stalking just behind, the racket of birds in the drive wheeling in dust. After all that dense passing: the hose’s stilled twist in dirt, wronged sounds from inside, ants retreating to hills by the asphalt’s edge. I killed one there with a flat basketball, looking up then but not seeing the hair-tender undersides of the lobed leaves, not knowing the bark is stripped, boiled and pressed to yield a resinous oil.1 God might or might not be there, in the tree’s firm grasp through the cloven air, the whisk of leaves annointed from their start beneath the tree’s skin. I didn’t ask the trunk and narrow crown how I could pay for what I’d done, and the sweetgum stood, thirsty skin leaning for wind, stood there not saying my name, not even turning its starry hands. 1

Italicized passage appears in Simon and Schuster’s Field Guide to Trees, 1977.

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Sally Rosen Kindred

Apple Night Green Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Goldrush, Bentley’s Sweet—I don’t know what I’ve come for over the wall of black barbed wire between my yard and the Rumseys’. It’s September, I’ve been at the swing until I forgot my mother and father heading down the drive to walk and only her blue body coming back. I forgot everything but the setting green: my best moss beneath the sweetgum, the ragged bright braids flung out like honey and the smoother faces twilight folds sea-gray. Now I am standing in Dusty’s father’s orchard lifting the bottom hems of my shirt to cradle four tart moons, their skin divided from mine by cotton the color of night. My feet bristle into grass, scratched bells. I covet this dusk. I’m not hungry for apples. My legs steam where their skin lifts in hooks and stars from the fence’s blood promise. I don’t think about getting home. I am going to be here until my body turns the silver-wet of the orchard’s breath, until my bones are flares of ginger gold.

Sally Rosen Kindred

Pilgrimage I entered the cathedral of the blackbird’s wing my seventh year. I’d found her hunched like a storm on the birch. Why wasn’t my mother in there? Why wasn’t her body whole in walls of blue bone rising through ladders of smoked light? I looked. I looked for what I’d lost. The ink air climbed and swung. I touched the brittle altars. Holy fear: my mother must be made from this glass stained like old, dry stars. I knelt and felt burnt threads tunneling in new chambers of my skin. The yard outside whined a web of thin songs I was only sorry for. And then, the keening, a hymn of rain filling my bones like bells tipped up, all gone bird-cold. No mother but I’d found her sleep: great throbbing, night-feathered nest of mercy and devastation. And I lay down. I lay down.

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Sally Rosen Kindred is author of

Garnet Lanterns, winner of the 2005 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest. She received a 2007 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Relief, Passages North, and other journals. She lives, reads, and walks a lot in the woods in Columbia, Maryland, with her husband and two sons.

William R. Stoddart

River Cabin We see her from the river, full face in the last sun of October. She stares back, too old to remember us, defiant as if we came, hearts in hand, to use her as we did in our youth: sweeping out neglect, airing the damp, kerosene smell, fishing from the boulder that ramped into the dark current, playing brittle records on the Victrola phonograph. When we rest the oars on the gunwales, we hear her whispering some old lyric about singing the Swanee River, or in the morning, in the evening. There is no sadness to her, only the stoic gravity of a weather-beaten antique. She watches the timeline of the river passing by, and milestones splash before her mirrored eyes as we pull through sodden leaves. There is no shame in leaving, turning about and starting back, like repentance after examining the dark current of conscience, we make promises not to return, promises we shall never keep.

William R. Stoddart lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Ja. He has fiction published recently in River Walk Journal, The Pittsburgh Quarterly online, and more work in Insolent Rudder. His poetry has appeared in The Adirondack Review and The Pedestal Magazine.

Calling

Jo Scott-Coe

It begins with impressions from books, church, music lessons—together, a kind of seamless caul that holds and draws you towards adulthood. A desire gestates here, this place that feels practical, connected to the dailiness of May I? Can I? and Every Good Boy Does Fine. (Does he really? You never stop wondering.) Teaching becomes merely one container inside another container made of writing and reading, melodies and dissonance, pictures of saints and imaginary friends. The containers fit so close together you can barely tell which is inside and which is outside, they feel inseparable, inextricable, except for stupid moments of technicality when a voice intrudes: “Why not pick one (teaching) or the other (writing)?” Words and notes as landscape seem natural, if not always comfortable, a place to inhabit–the way another landscape of numbers, photographs, proofs or experiments seems natural to friends who choose surgery, the courtroom, interior design, plumbing, or selling cars. A few first moments: Your parents give you a book with blank pages, bound as if it were already published. “A Nothing Book,” your father says. The smooth sheets have no lines, and so you begin to imagine a long story recalling other stories that have provided consolation. The martyr who laughed when men dragged her body across hot coals. The nun whose cheeks glistened as she wept and prayed. You are too young to know how white and lonely you are, or what this would mean if you could talk about it. You do recall, though, breaking into tears after swimming lessons, remembering tufts of brown hair which appeared in a girl’s armpit as she reached out one lithe, pale limb to draw a classmate from the blue water. It was rescue practice in case a person was drowning, sinking. Somehow it hurt that the girl didn’t worry what others might see, that she had not been embarrassed by herself. You still envy her, wondering where that quality comes from. So on the blank book, using a salmon-colored crayon, you scrawl a title on the cover, something like “The Poor Family.” Underneath, you draw what resembles a covered wagon and then cringe at how broken it looks, especially around the rickety wheels. You start writing then what you think you are allowed,

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permitted, a story someone else has already written—Little House on the Prairie? A Christmas Carol? Nancy Drew’s Mystery on Lilac Lane? Already, this inner wrestling feels urgent. As becomes habit, you drag fingertips across bookspines filling grey shelves along one living room wall, touch and wonder where these texts come from, how they are written and manufactured and make it to the grainy shelves. How other they feel, how alien you are, touching their seams. A soft sense of doom and resignation descends, as if you realize those books might suddenly plummet down, bury and smother you. As if there is conversation among these shelves you may not enter, you cannot enter. You overhear adults talking politics in a nearby room, voices loud and laughing, assured of their places, not worried about you under the avalanche of books, not worried about being swallowed up themselves. (You realize years later how this was a child’s perception, how their worries, while different in details, were much about smothering and being smothered). You reach a small hand for the dictionary, look up a new word that has come to concern you—masturbation. Too young for euphemism, too young not to fixate, you stare down at the spelling, at the definition, wonder whether it helps to see the syllable and accent marks there, like science without sin, the surprising “U” in the middle instead of an “E.” Your mother and father are among voices now clamoring new phrases that become intriguing: curriculum, back to basics, the dangers of secular humanism. You hear someone—your mother?— run water over glasses in the kitchen sink, perhaps the adults are moving into the living room now. You close the dictionary, slip it back into place, make yourself seem to disappear. Nervousness underlies this need for meaning and sorting terms, sorting feelings, but there are comforts. At the small church school, you take part in a spelling bee in the church basement which smells of old marble, beeswax, cooking grease and incense. The same basement where your parents fry doughnuts with other parents during fund drives in winter, where the Knights of Columbus serve pancakes and sausages twice a year,

where families gather with their kids to play small time bingo or walk the cake walk. In that spelling bee, in your plaid uniform, you advance to the local finals and don’t win, but there is a teacher who encourages you. She seems nearly sixty years old, a German Lutheran who folds hands across her waist and closes her eyes, moves her mouth to the words when the class prays together. She doesn’t make the sign of the cross, but she prays the Hail Mary like it’s her own prayer. Nuns visit the classroom from out-of-town (passing through from Boston? New York City?), strong but not strident in long habits swishing black against wood rosary beads. They smile, talk with you, open their briefcases and take out books they have published—on theology, the saints, prayer, the sacraments. You are not the only child who is impressed. The boys aren’t so interested, but you hear other girls saying, “I could do that.” Your father has even said something like, “You could do that.” (He probably doesn’t know about the masturbation.) You wonder: where is the medium, where is the variation on a theme that fits my life? You can’t forget the Lutheran teacher, who sits at the end of the fifth grade pew each weekday before mass, an hour before school, waiting for students who straggle in. She kneels

There’s something inside you

that’s always kneeling

down, ashamed, even when you do things well.

Issue 09 // FALL 2008

with everyone else when the priest raises the bread and wine. It seems that, to her, prayer is prayer. A word is a word is. Perhaps denominations are temporary, a mere abeyance. You think of the teacher those Sundays your father yanks you, yanks your sister and mother to the front pew, where he refuses to kneel at the moments everyone else is kneeling. He seems to be performing his act of not kneeling for everyone behind him. You’re not sure if, like your mother, he even wants to be Catholic. In a weird way, you believe if he could just kneel you’d relax, you’d be able to speak better—and not just you, but your mother, your sister. Books might make sense instead of seeming like an avalanche, a tidal wave ready to drown you. There’s something inside you that’s always kneeling down, ashamed, even when you do things well. But as friends learn piano on standups that fit in corners of kitchens and living rooms, you begin on the oboe, a Bundy made of plastic. Parents pay for summer music lessons at a public school where you learn scales and old standards. (This is, really, a certain gift from your father. He has played trombone, piano, organ. He has introduced you to records: Dave Brubeck, Handel, Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band.) Something in these lessons clicks you away from anxieties, away from the tidal wave. You’ve found a thread or electric wire, perhaps a vein. Perhaps your parents see some change in your face. No matter what concepts they imagine you may reject from them later—back to basics, the fear of secular humanism—they do feed this thing that lets you fly wherever. They sign the blue checks from the bank. A note is a word is. The conductor of the city symphony takes on individual students. He’s an oboist, but years-fluent in every instrument. Week by week, you follow the downslope of the auditorium carpet, quiet as church, to the side stairway that leads up past practice rooms and to his office, a kind of turret. His windows angle open to the trees and the evening, his desk scattered with sheet music, symphony scores and open books. You are a minor part at the end of his day, you are not afraid of him, you have, in some small way, chosen each other. You never feel unsafe in this room, alone with this man. Every wall is filled with shelves, which are teeming with record sleeves, cassette and 8-track tapes, books and concert programs. He begins with real music—a sonata by Telemann, a concerto by Bach. He traces a white finger under notes on the page. “Just listen right here,” he says. He

lifts a flute from where it lies across papers on his desk, eases it under his lips and dips his head into the breath he pushes through. “Do you hear how the notes go?” he asks. How unworried he is that you possibly might be intimidated, that your small fingers certainly will flub and fail. His lack of worry makes it possible for you really to hear. To read. He gives you a recording to take home, a real musician performing, and he tells you to practice by ear. It doesn’t matter that your instrument is made of plastic, that Telemann and Bach are so absurdly far beyond the reach of your current preparation. The notes are letters, a language carrying you beyond what you will be expected to say. Teaching and expression crash together here, in this place you’ve felt distinctions erode. You intuit, and then you think, There must be others who want this. There’s no warning—not from mother or father, not the dictionary or German Lutheran teacher, not the nuns who visit or the conductor with his flute. You don’t wonder for a second how to name this awareness, whether it will be useful or become outdated, or how it will translate. This is you and way beyond you. The gift won’t simply become the classroom or the grades you record in a tidy line across graph paper. It’s not about old books toppling from shelves, or Formica desks, or announcements across the public address system or memos from the principal. It doesn’t matter how as a grown-up you will simplify this vocation at times—talk about getting paid too little or too much—and it doesn’t matter that politicians will pat you on the head (metaphorically, of course) in that coded way that warns, “Just relax, you hear me?” Yours is no fall-back plan, no second-hand profession. It’s a kind of pregnancy you learn to carry, increments of nine months at a time coming to term—or not—in beats and measures, pages and paragraphs, from fall through spring. Words and flesh brush against, then become music to each other. Picture that girl’s slender arm again, the “V” of hair opening as she offers herself perpetually to someone else across blue water. The person she reaches to either reaches back or doesn’t. You can’t always know. Remembering now: it was partly the offering which made you cry, the cheerful lack of agony inside her openness. Catching a hand, a breath, and what if slipping from the edge or watching a head go under, a drowning. It happens over and over, always the others: leaving, staying. They choose. You choose. The classroom door closes. You carry their names long after they forget how, once, you might have existed.

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Pushcart-nominated essayist Jo Scott-Coe is a new assistant professor of English at Riverside Community College in Southern California. Her writings on education, gender, and violence appear in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Swink Online, Babel Fruit, Ninth Letter, and the anthology (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press). When looking for spiritual and literary encouragement, she turns to Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Margaret Atwood, Richard Rodriguez, Cornel West, and the Berrigan Brothers.

Evan Mann. Creation #6. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

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Evan Mann. Creation #7. Intaglio etching on zinc. 2008.

Richard Sederstrom

The Circus Beautiful Smell of moldy canvas. Canvas and smell stretched over the pained wooden beams of the world. Ragged teeth of the peaks of this cosmos, rotten too from ages of survival, and the two women, few teeth and nothing vertical, no gap symmetrical with any other gap, more real than the clowns over there pretending to be roustabouts, hammering Cosmos to Earth, bellowing their profane paean to no Creation worthy of song. So few teeth, a brown worn tangle that the women would have to share to eat, chew turn and turn about. But their question was beautiful! the double smile perfect, eager, noble. “Are you in charge here?” I said “No” to the truth, yes to the smile, the beauty that asked me to take charge of the beauty, the glide and tumble, the soaring of star-glittered acrobats, caress of cats, terrible truths of clowns, and the tent: shouting, whanging of mallets beating stakes to root the Earth, the rise of our cosmos of canvas, mold smell now of living, and I in charge, momentary ringmaster of the dire, perilous, tumbling beauty, the rotting wonder of the old circus, Earth.

Issue 09 // FALL 2008

Richard Sederstrom lives in the

Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico and the north woods of Minnesota. He has published poems regularly in Big Muddy, The Talking Stick, Red Owl, and Saint Anthony Messenger. He has also been published in Mother Earth Journal, Plainsongs, and English Journal.

Shanna Powlus Wheeler

The Widow’s Lament in Autumn After William Carlos Williams

The box elder bug creeps from my yard toward this house, pushes in like sorrow through cracks in doors and windows, comes to winter in as the year’s light and warmth run out. I watch the black bug red-flame like a maple leaf with each clumsy flight from sill to ceiling. I can only crush so many, one body swathed in each of a dozen tissues piled in the waste basket. How fickle they are; once inside they cling to the sunny window, looking out with an insect longing. Oh first frost, come soon, for though I once loved how the box elder carries its black-red wings like a tribal mask up a window’s trim, I cannot live with it now. I have worn enough black; I can no longer brightly paint my un-kissed lips. It’s enough to winter in with my own cold, colorless body.

Native to central Pennsylvania, Shanna Powlus Wheeler can’t seem to escape the Susquehanna River. She studied poetry at Susquehanna University (near the main branch), and then at Penn State while living in Lock Haven (near the west branch). She now teaches writing at Lycoming College in Williamsport (west branch, again), where she lives with her husband Drew. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, The Evansville Review, Mezzo Cammin, Relief, The Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, and other magazines. She’s preparing her first collection for publication.

Mary Van Denend

Rehearsals Samira remembers carefully watching her mother’s hips turn and dip across the stage where she danced like a veiled bird long into the evening. Her mother’s arms glittered in hoops, her huge almond eyes ringed with kohl. Samira fancied herself on cool marble floors with restless daughters of Baghdad, twirling and spinning, brief shooting stars shining their lights for a welcome world. But a new Ayatollah pronounced the folk dancing haram—always for women. No one comes to watch the dancers performing now. The National Theatre sits empty as a dry pool in the desert, where once it was filled with flocks who came to wade and drink deeply. Samira remembers when her mother danced in Paris and Cairo and Rome. Once she even danced for the United Nations—but no one is united anymore. Now the mosques share mortar rounds and palace walls reek of dried blood. Yesterday she received in the morning a letter, but not a real letter with news of a friend’s wedding or the birth of a cousin’s first child—it was instead a warning, a bullet wrapped in soiled cloth. Samira rehearses four hours each day; pretending errands at market, she slips from her house wearing a veil and all black to hide her dancing from fond neighbors, who know nothing of her destination. She slides into the dimmed theatre where empty seats stare like tombstones, where faces of companions wait like masks. Soon the choked and barren streets shrivel and disappear, now her velvet hair tumbles over a sequined dress and her mother’s far-off voice begins to sing.

Issue 09 // FALL 2008

Mary Van Denend

Waterhouse Things are floating by detached from their place of origin, and the morning tide carries with it a stormy night’s debris. I’ve not been here in weeks and all around the dwelling lie mossy logs, bits and pieces of decking slick and sodden, wrapped like mummies in eelgrass, gliding westward toward the sea. Ancient Egypt sent its pharaohs and commoners alike on a final journey equipped for eternity’s mysteries with whatever tokens the body might require on its passage to immortality—but here, in a cottage on a salt marsh on a river at the edge of a watery vastness still waiting exploration, we might just settle for a roof

Mary Van Denend lives and writes in western

Oregon, though her childhood was spent in many places. Poetry of place speaks deeply to her. Her poems have appeared in regional journals such as The Asheville Review, Eloquent Umbrella, RUMINATE, Wellspring, and others. She is a graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in creative writing, and the mother of four grown children.

that doesn’t leak, a turtle shell against the elements in this amphibious borderland between already but not yet, where a misty light from the east crosses over the ridge.

David Harrity

Heth

Spring came for two weeks

open to stifle my belief. I was a child

then left us surrounded

and could dream of your unseen

by snow over stone, all so cold

bones and skin, the hands you

it’s killed every bloom—

had—the layers that have since

is it your way to remind us

disappeared and returned,

that death is just another word

but I have never touched. I don’t

for patience and patience

want you to be like the cold, ebbing

is a new direction to creating life?

and flowing with its own

I don’t remember what it feels like

restless reasons. I want to know

to be with you. And you work

that your body died to live

so slowly that I can never see

and you are still there waiting

what you do without impatience

to warm us all. Let me know

taking root deep and growing

every root— the art of

into a hedge of anger that bursts

dying and rising again.

David Harrity’s poems have

appeared in or are forthcoming from Limestone, Kudzu, The Minnetonka Review, The Xavier Review, New Southerner, and other magazines. His chapbook, Morning and What Has Come Since, is available from Finishing Line Press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Kentucky Literary Award. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, daughter, and their two dogs while working as a high school teacher at Lexington Catholic High School.

David Harrity

Kaph

What do I know about offering? I have nothing to give you but these weary words, the deep hollow of my hands, my palms’ empty faces. I believe. I believe in what it means to be apart— I believe in the weight of my own weaknesses. I want you to know that I will learn how to find you, that I am learning how to gather your symbols together, all the pieces of you that have been scattered. My palms wait to be filled of you,

David Harrity

to pull you from earth’s black soil. You are every word I want to know.

Ask me to offer my palms pressed together as a gift so that I might move into you. My hands will open like wings beginning to pump: again and again I believe.

Samekh

Every time I draw this character I know that you’re turning my eyes to look toward you, toward the sky where three blackbirds are spiraling into the searing eye of the sun, their wings soaking with light until they are gone. I am left trying to remember the shapes and motions, their weightless bodies and wings being swallowed into a flash so alive with light that I must turn my eyes quick to the ground. I’ve found you in the flight. I am hiding it all away to remember: your love so bright and permanent it will burn me into looking away. 57

Jennifer Stewart

Postcard, Yellowstone Corner of eye catches the plume of smoke, the pillar of steam etched against Wyoming, orange scratches down the painted sky. I think about how this rhythmical release was caught by family photos: my aunt in her patent leather shoes, tilting head out over mud pots boiling with sulfur. Grandpaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thin, one-pocket shirts tucked into khakis, arm cranking the camera wheel; images flickering now in our collective memories that we are people who go out to witness who hold our breath and poise ready to capture that instant Old Faithful blossoms from the ground where the pillar of steam and fire paint the sky again.

Jennifer Stewart recently returned to Colorado after three years of teaching

writing and literature at LCC International University in the port town of Klaipeda, Lithuania. Before moving to Klaipeda, she earned degrees in rhetoric, composition, and literature from Colorado State University and Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has published in The Priscilla Papers and has poems forthcoming in Relief. She loves words in all their forms, the Rocky Mountains, and Lithuanian saltibarscai (cold beet soup). 58

Challenging the Mind, Nourishing the Soul

Find the Divine in the Daily Heartbreaking, sardonic, whimsical, elegiac, crazy-funny: this is a book to be sipped like a rare wine, the last bottle of a fabled vintage, brought up from the cellar for our delectation. —John Wilson, Editor, Books & Culture In these original essays, short stories, and poems, Buechner reflects on the moments of transcendence in the midst of daily existence. In a myriad of commonplace activities, he finds the presence of the divine and elegantly describes these situations. In The Yellow Leaves Buechner edifies, inspires, and offers a timeless model for approaching human experience. Frederick Buechner has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and is an ordained Presbyterian minister.

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LAST NOTE

EXPERIENCE

A COMMUNION

OF ARTISTS Visit our new website for the editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blog on all things art, literature, and faith, read notes from you, and discover fellow artist, writers, and ruminators.

Evan Mann. Donkey #2. Silkscreen and mixed media. 14 x 18 inches. 2007.

Issue 9: Communion

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