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Salt Hill is published by a group of writers affiliated with the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. Salt Hill is funded in part by the College of Arts & Sciences and the Graduate Student Organization of Syracuse University. Special thanks to the following individuals for their generous support of the journal: Terri A.G. Zollo, Sandy Parzych, Daphne Stowe, Sarah Harwell, Erin Skye Mackie, George Langford, Gerry Greenberg, and Christopher Kennedy at the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program.
SUBMISSIONS: The editors welcome submissions of poetry, prose, translations, essays, interviews, and
artwork from August 1 through April 1. For submission information, please visit our website at www. salthilljournal.com or email: salthilljournal@gmail.com. / SUBSCRIPTIONS: Individuals: $15 one year, $28 two years, $42 three years. Institutions: $20 one year, $38 two years, $54 three years. Canadian and Foreign—use rate for institutions. Sample packs: $16. Visit www.salthilljournal.com / ADVERTISEMENT RATES: Full page (6x 7.5") for $125; half-page (6x 3.75") for $75. Please make checks payable to Salt Hill. Distributed in the US and Canada by Ingram Periodicals Inc. ,1240 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086. (800-627-6247) AND Ubiquity Disributors, Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217 (718-875-5491). Design and typesetting by NIETOpress (www.nietopress.com). Salt Hill is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography. Copyright 2010 UPC 7447092503 Cover Illustration: Mostly Boys and Dogs, Lydia Conklin. Previous page: Live a Little (detail), Rachel Mack. This page: Another Angel as Revealed to John and Dmitry (detail), Dmitry Borshch.
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Carroll Beauvais Alice Holbrook FICTION EDITOR Chris Brunt POETRY EDITORS Gina Gail Keicher Jasmine Santana NONFICTION EDITORS Mikael Awake Chanelle Benz ART EDITORS Rachel Abelson Rebecca Fishow ONLINE EDITOR Helina Kebede DISTRIBUTION David Wojciechowski FOUNDING EDITOR Michael Paul Thomas ADVISORY EDITOR Michael Burkard READERS Mildred Barya, Oscar Cuevas, Mi Ditmar, Kit Frick, Caitlin Hayes, Annie Liontas, Danny Magariel, Cate McLaughlin, Devon Moore, David Nutt, Andrew Purcell, Nina Puro, Jessie Roy, Ed Tato, David Wojciechowski
Physicality versus spirituality. Belonging and rejection. Intimacy or isolation. These are among the tensions and moods populating our 26th issue, which teems with voices on the verge of revelation, devastation, and redemption—voices which rejoice in the full breadth of what it means to be human, have an origin, a body, and to live. We see in these pieces a gradual, imperfect movement from solitude to explosive, sometimes even disastrous, contact. Amy Marcott’s portrait of self-imposed exile in “On the Menu at Marco’s” speaks to Courtney Queeney’s haunting “Tick” and “Restless Leg Syndrome,” in which the speakers find themselves strangers in their own bodies and homes. These feelings make sense, given Gary Lutz’s meditations on the unknowable nature of other people in his veracious and witty interview with Anthony Antoniadis. But states of alienation are impermanent, untenable, as we see in the excerpt from Paul Cody’s recovery memoir, A Place of Not Dying, and Nathan Hogan’s heartbreaking “A Sure Bet”: our need for closeness enables, indeed compels, us to do the most difficult things, from breaking addiction to forgiving the unforgivable. Of course, we wouldn’t be human without moments of levity. Matthew Lippman and the late Tim Dlugos show us that even in the face of these most intractable of problems, the human spirit finds light and humor. It is our hope that as we fully enter winter, you will find among these pages writing that reveals new truths and companionship to your own experience. That curled up during a winter storm, you might reach for this 26th issue and feel a little less alone, slightly warmer. Because what gives more comfort in the dim moments of existence than the reminder of recursion, than the embrace of the full spectrum of emotions our lives have to offer us? With warmth,
CONTENTS LYDIA CONKLIN
MATTHEW LIPPMAN*
RACHEL MACK
CHRISTINE SCHUTT
COURTNEY QUEENEY
FRITZ WARD
RACHEL MACK
BRIDGET TALONE AMY MARCOTT*
Mostly Boys and Dogs (detail)
Mostly Girls and Horses (detail) The Intimacy Issue Comedy Central
throughout throughout 009 011
People to Avoid If At All Possible,
Live a Little, Look At All the Fun You Could Be Having
015
COMMONPLACE
016
Tick
018
Restless Leg Syndrome
021
Excerpts from Prosperous Friends
Office Logic
Dear Cannibal Quivering With Lipstick and Moonlight
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,
019
022
These Days Are Stupid and Long
023
Overture to a Legend
024
On the Menu at Marco’s
027
Sirenomelia
025
WESTON CUTTER
Knocking Before Entering vs. the Unknown
031
44 Standish Avenue
035
13 Pleasant Street
038
Behind is a Relative Term
DAVID RODERICK*
ERIC SHAW
TIM DLUGOS
179 Florida Avenue
041
I really like your poems
051
Death Series
053
Two Things a Star Wouldn’t Do
Breathing in Connecticut
GARY LUTZ
037
Drawings
Under the Sky
RACHEL MACK
032
Pinocchio’s Final Days,
052 055 056
Small Victory
058
Interviewed by Anthony Antoniadis
059
I Don’t Mind the Mess that Comes
MATT MAUCH
RICK HILLES
from Pressing Hard, from Scribbling
Over Scribbling to Cross Things Out (But I Hate Erasable Ink)
077
Svendborg Sound
079
ABBEY E. MURRAY
The Empty Glass
081
ANNA JOURNEY
And Behold the Locks of the
Three Dimensions Are Sprung
082
LUCIA PERILLO*
To Carlos Castaneda
085
A Sure Bet
089
The Other Night
106
After the Tornado of ’61, Indianola, Iowa
109
The People We Used to Be
110
NATHAN HOGAN* AARON FAGAN GARY DOP KYLE MELLEN
Another Treatise on Beauty
Yard Bird
October
087
107
113
A Mining Archer, Unchained from Lust,
DMITRY BORSHCH
Another Angel as Revealed to John and
Dmitry, Betrothal of the Virgins, Daughters of the Dust, The Budding Patriarch,
PAUL CODY* GAIL SEGAL
Preparatory Drawing for Blue Architects
116
Excerpt from A Place of Not Dying
123
Gift River
137
Storm Center
138
JENNIFER CHANG JEFF FRIEDMAN
RACHEL MACK
MARY CAPONEGRO
EDUARDO C. CORRAL TASHA COTTER JULIA STORY
EVA HOOKER
Lovely Weather Elegy
139
Wine
141
Future Snow
140
Quit While You’re Ahead, Nature
vs. Man, Quit While You’re Ahead, This Song is About You
142
Stairway to Heaven
143
Excerpt from Chinese Chocolate My Hands Are My Heart: Two-Part
Cibachrome Print: Gabriel Orozco: 1991
151
Sunset in the Land of Mangled Lovers
153
Red Town #1
155
Red Town #2 We Learn to Sing What
156
the Blood Thinks
157
Contributors’ Notes
161
* Mini-Interviews by Annie Liontas and Caitlin Hayes
Mostly Boys and Dogs (detail), Lydia Conklin.
MATTHEW LIPPMAN
The Intimacy Issue I want to be a fag in Provincetown so I can walk the beach. I want to be so gay all my gayness makes me straight. I want to wear pink shirts and tight shorts, own three poodles with white wings and have a beau named Chuck. Maybe another named Earl. Some of my friends will dress in drag. Some of them will eat pork. I want to be taller and skinnier and have a stomach that is pimped hard receding west. If I were a gay man named Frank I’d have a tattoo of Marilyn on my ass, a bottle of whiskey under the bed. If I were a straight man named Herb I’d slip my tongue inside her ass and pretend it was a him. I want to be a gay man with many children and a straight man all alone. I have never wanted to be sex change material. Nothing against sex change material but I believe this, for me, alone: God gave me what God gave me.
LIPPMAN
9
I pleasure myself with chiffon and gin, construction hats and cheese. My gay friend Paul has a wall of porn. Men on men on beaches in pools. That’s not my thing. My thing is silence. I want to be a queen on Commercial and listen to the surf. If I can’t be that, I want to be an astronaut in space floating upside down. No matter who you sleep with, sleeping with them is being an astronaut in space floating upside down. The best part is when the helmet comes off. If you open your mouth, you die. If you don’t open your mouth, you die. But you are not dead. You are happy in bed wrapped in the soft, white sheets that feel like Egypt.
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MATTHEW LIPPMAN
Comedy Central If I was funny on Tuesday you shoulda seen me on Friday. There I was, with the penguins, falling off the banks of The Charles River like falling off the ice flow into the Antarctica. They tell me the Antarctica will never be the same as it was when I was twelve. That’s hysterical. When I was twelve there was a black kid up the street who wanted to kiss me on the mouth. Broke me up. When he did, the right knuckle of his middle finger crushed my nose. What was so funny was the blood splatter on the gym floor looked like Donald Duck making love to Jimmy Connors. We all sat around and had a cackle. It wasn’t because he was black or that I was Jew but it takes a long time to love a kid who busts you up no matter what color his face. Still, it was the blood that brought us together and the funny part is every time I look in the mirror I see my nose and miss him, Keith, because that’s all that he ever was after he kissed me in the shine. And on Tuesday I was funny because no one got hurt. And on Friday I was hysterical
LIPPMAN
11
because the world did not go to war even though my wife and I pulled out the tanks. She called me frog-head; I called her fungo. It went on like this for hours, in front of the children, in front of the t.v. We were all in stitches. I missed Keith and I missed the polar ice caps in full ice. I tried to tell some jokes to the kid next door but he was asleep when I crept into his room. So, I went outside and pulled four hundred leaves from the trees. I sat in the middle of the street and tried to thatch a roof over my head the way Indians did before the cavalry to protect themselves from those uproarious bullets that fell from the sky and would not shut up.
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MINI INTERVIEW WITH
MATTHEW LIPPMAN Salt Hill: How does intuition play a role in your process? In revision, how obligated are you to preserving the original impulse? Matthew Lippman: I am all about the feel and pulse of a poetic moment. That means that if I get a line going in my head which I find interesting and musical, I go from there, burn my little language engine until the fire goes out. That usually takes fifteen minutes. I’m all feel, touch, gut. I get what I get and that’s it. Later, I’ll go back to the piece and tinker and tweak. I have found that if I do too much, the original impulse fades and the poem gets stale, disintegrates into a mass of nonsense. I have been very connected to the act of writing, of how it feels to make a poem, and I find that moment to be sacred and totally fun. The two are, for me, profoundly connected. So, I don’t revise that much. I just go and write another poem. SH: How do you know that you’ve discovered the inevitable word or image? I’m thinking specifically of the stomach “pimped hard/receding west” in “The Intimacy Issue”
and of the “frog-head/fungo” juxtaposition in “Comedy Central.” ML: I don’t know how I discover anything in my poems. The language just comes. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t want to. If I did, I think I’d have to stop writing poems. So, “pimped hard/receding west,” I don’t know. I see the image in my head, hear the music, and it pops out. I did work a little with the “frog-head/ fungo” moment. I did not want to write something banal or expected. Usually people call each other the same kinds of things over and over, so I wanted to be different. This was a conscious decision. What was not conscious, or thought out, was the “f ” sounds. That just came.
LIPPMAN
13
I love the word “fungo,” always have. So, I was working on two levels in this moment—wanting to come up with some whacky gibes, and then the sonic “thing.” SH: Are there certain subjects, ideas, or entities that you return to? Is this a conscious decision or something driven by the work itself ? ML: I got all this stuff happening in my head that I think about all the time. It changes, of course, with what makes up my life. For three, four, five years I was writing about being a new parent, my kids, the earth, food, sports, etc. I probably will be writing about these things for a long time, but I am not a new father anymore, still a father, but with two kids who are constantly changing. What I have noticed recently is that with the release of my second collection of poems, Monkey Bars, my voice has shifted a tiny, tiny bit. The subjects are the same, but there is a little more tenderness, a little less narrative. The content is similar, but I’m a little quieter. This is a new thing for me. Quiet. It just started happening. It’s a little poetry miracle for me and freaks me out. But, I love it. 14
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That is to say, it is not a conscious thing at all. It’s just God. You know, like that, like how God is.
CHRISTINE SCHUTT
COMMONPLACE {1} “Right on time,” a beige woman said, and “I’m glad because it turns out I don’t have a lot of time.” “Neither do I,” Ned said, which wasn’t true, the rest of his day, his week—his life!—was a blank, so he bucked up to make the most of it now with Carol, the woman in beige, who already knew the menu, though he asked for chili and a salad instead. “Big mistake,” she said. “Call the waiter back.” “Too late—I’ll live.” The commonplace salad came in the middle of an anecdote about antidepressants—“Had she lived,” Ned was saying, “I don’t know what my mother would have done with her time. I emptied the house when she died. I remember finding tooth whitener in her medicine cabinet; it was packaged like narcotics. The vials didn’t have an expiration date. They were poisonous, I’m sure.” The woman in beige slapped away his hand. “Do you want some of my frites?” she asked. “I do want some of your freet,” Ned said, and she swept some onto his plate, saying, “All you have to do is ask.” “That’s enough,” he said. Carol got down to business then, talking and eating at the same time while he, uninterested in his insipid salad, ate her salty fries and watched the bracelet she wore slip up and down her arm as she cut into her skinny steak.
Previous page: People to Avoid if At All Possible, Live a Little, Look At All the Fun You Could Be Having, Rachel Mack.
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“Is that made out of coconut?” Ned pointed to the bracelet. “Elk horn, thank you. Look—”she halted, ascertained. “Do you want to feel?” she asked as she slid the bracelet off her wrist. He rubbed it with his thumb. “Neat.” “Look,” she began again, “as I said, I can’t sell this and I don’t know small presses. Write something else.” The beige woman used her knife efficiently. “Everyone has at least one novel in a drawer. Memoir,” she said. “Write a memoir.” “What the hell,” he said. The bangle didn’t fit, and he gave it back to her, to Carol Bane, agent to nobody in particular, and should he be surprised? Enthusiasm! Emerson had shouted. Nothing great can be accomplished without it. Carol Bane had been described by more than one person he knew as deeply uninterested in books, and this was true; she was a book-hating, hateful... “Hey!” she slapped his hand again. “The least you can do is share your fries,” he said. {2} “I was early,” Ned said, considering her, Carol Bane, his agent, forever in beige. But what color was best for beige? Not hers. A bloodless, bleached woman whose body had surely never known a vivid day—a goblet grace maybe, once, for her wedding—today she wore sand-colored clothes as shapeless as dunes and large bangles; the impression she made was disingenuously uncertain. The waiter had told them the specials, then left them with menus. She pushed his manuscript in its sleeve across the table. “Once again,” Carol Bane said. “Memoir.” They looked at their menus, shut their menus. “Do you know what you want?” Ned asked her. The waiter recited the day’s specials a second time, to which Carol Bane responded, “Nothing much to shout about is there?”
SCHUTT
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COURTNEY QUEENEY
Tick First there was the crabbed thing, small as a freckle, that I peeled from my hip, slick-fingered in the shower, and stared at: the small scab body, the thin legs giving it away as alive. It hadn’t dug itself far enough in to stick, but I worried there might be more— and then I welted red, a corrugated bull’s eye pinned to my hip. I couldn’t scrub the feeling of feet crawling over my scalp or down my legs away. I washed myself on the hour, but still felt lived-in, fed-upon, blood-sucked. When the man came home I wanted no other hands on me. All night I scratched to get at the thing I thought lived under my skin while his body hushed and pumped its healthy blood, but by dawn I still did not know who she was.
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COURTNEY QUEENEY
Office Logic In the morning she doesn’t dwell on the other swelled faces of the semi-awake, and if coffee burns her tongue her taste buds are distractions, anyway— there’s no space for appetite under an office’s anesthetic green light that gutters but never cuts out and therefore, in office logic, won’t be fixed. She stamps each small job done and places it in the box marked Out. She memos, takes minutes, mass mails. If there’s a product she’s pushing, it’s Her as Worker. Her Yes is toothless, tongue and hiss; she’s fake. When she exits she vacates her face to shut out the strangers crammed into her mass transit. After hours with only the stapler and paper clips to model commitment,
QUEENEY
19
she sinks to a coma in the living room washed in weak-ankled light and fills her mouth in front of a screen and sets her alarm in the dark.
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COURTNEY QUEENEY
Restless Leg Syndrome You twitch awake and electric. Don’t pause to squint in the dumb, backwards, blind eye of your neighbors’ peephole. There’s no one there for you; there’s no one waiting, awake. When you peer out to the purple sky your street just dead-ends into another dumb block of buildings. There is nowhere for you to go. You are home.
QUEENEY
21
FRITZ WARD
Dear Cannibal Quivering With Lipstick and Moonlight I was nominally yours. You were abnormally mine. We loved with our fangs out, our truths in. I licked fifty-six square inches of your lavendered skin. I begged for the first two psalms and received your twenty-four hour flood. You hand-washed six figs, fed me one per night. I listened for your three deepest breaths, but your mouth was a drain painted Harlot. Spring delivered the first four steps of happiness and I tangoed in the mineshafts of your moonlight, unsutured. Summer sent us your slow-clotting cuts, your sugar ants, your human dark with honey. It was all a little too sweet to believe in. The truth is just another way of saying I always hoped you’d stop loving me the next day. And that you never would. And each of those meals in between, I longed for your ingredients: your sweet cream and your curry and your over-ripe bed. I stayed. Not for the cancer or for your skin beneath me, but to watch your soft hands flutter and flay the green skin of the mango, its glistening flesh exposed, alone on the white cutting board.
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This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and These Days Are Stupid and Long, Rachel Mack.