Salt Hill 28 Preview

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Rachel Abelson Gina Keicher FICTION EDITORS Caitlin Hayes Annie Liontas David Nutt POETRY EDITORS Kit Frick David Wojciechowski NONFICTION EDITORS Chanelle Benz Danny Magariel ART EDITOR Oscar Cuevas ONLINE EDITOR Helina Kebede DISTRIBUTION Robert Evory FOUNDING EDITOR Michael Paul Thomas ADVISORY EDITOR Michael Burkard

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, Carroll Beauvais, Erin Skye Mackie, George Langford, Gerry Greenberg, and Christopher Kennedy at the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program.

SUBMISSIONS: The editors welcome online sub-

missions 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.

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 (6 x 7.5") for $125; half-page (6 x 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 (800-6276247) AND Ubiquity Distributors, Inc., 607 Degraw St., Brooklyn, NY 11217 (718-875-5491).

Designer: Nadxieli Nieto Hall (www.nietobooks.com) Salt Hill is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Copyright 2011 UPC 7447092503

READERS: Molly Anders, Taylor Collier, Chris Dollard, Robert Evory, Brittany Leitner, Ashley McConnell, Devon Moore, Erin Mullikin, Nina Puro, Stephen Reilly, Yanira Rodriguez, Jessica Scicchitano INTERN: Brittany Leitner Cover art: Frederik Heyman, Untitled, Mixed media: pencil, watercolor, acrylic, marker, and oil on paper.

First page: Andrew Jilka, Rites of Passage, Colored pencil on paper

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

“We’re going through alone, or asking for help, and how we can get there as us or as ghosts, with this tin cup. This ocean.” John Gallaher gets it right in his poem “Because Thought Isn’t Prayer”: each of us is contained by and immersed in personal experience, our brackish travels of the past and their briny apparitions in the present. We bring these journeys to the page to create and confront life, to embody the paradox of being conscious: partaking in an existence that is as dimensional as it is confined to a tiny tin cup. Yes, this life may constrict but in its vessel, seas are held, ones upon which we both float and drown.

The stories, poems, interviews, and art in our 28th issue are reminders of the inspiration that comes with encapsulation; if we are living in a body, we are writing. From how we persist together to how we perish. The anti-toned tenderness in Laura Eve Engel’s “For You Out of Soft Materials.” The nostalgic for those who’ve gone in John Skoyles’ “Friday Night with My Dead Friends.” And the space of Gallaher’s oceanic cup isn’t the only one our bodies encounter in this issue. We go to places we have never been before, such as the expressionistic, facial topographies of Anders Oinonen’s oil paintings, or the structural menageries of Jason Schwartz’s fiction. Lands we have once seen but wish not to revisit, like the vertiginous and mythological warren of adolescence in Oliver de la Paz’s “Labyrinth” poems. We climb into the oversized bird’s nest of a bamboo exhibition in Amy Benson’s “Outlaws and Citizens,” and are immersed in the folkloric Eutropia of Ben Mirov’s “Destruction Manual.” Meteorology embraces the surreal and sexual in Sarah Rose Etter’s “Gown Rain,” while the double-edge of ecstasy is cut into the faces of Andrew Jilka’s drawings. Elsewhere, voices as multifarious as Jilka’s tongue-in-cheek singers abound.

Sound and style assume new shapes as John Madera sits down with Mary Caponegro to discuss digression, philosophy, and syntax’s music-making capacities.

The sardonically heartbreaking tone in H. L. Hix’s “Counterexamples” complements the narrator’s nostalgia in Casey Wiley’s “Sgt. Slaughter.”

And the angular dialogue of the characters in James Robison’s “Zurich” collides with the assured and soothing vocal tides in excerpts from Jennifer Denrow’s Each Thing That’s Left to produce a pleasingly discordant harmony.

When the weather hits its bitter notes and everything around us here in Syracuse swells to a freeze, there is comfort in staying inside.

However, we hope that in these pages you’ll find new meanings to the body’s hibernations. For although we are cabin-feverish souls—trapped by the flesh and its forecasts—our indoors can bear an ocean, one just waiting for the barometer to rise and the seas within to melt.

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Andrew Jilka

35 Casey Wiley

The 21st Century Ecstasy of St. Teresa

09 John Gallaher

Because Thought Isn’t Prayer Anecdote of the Pony

Sgt. Slaughter

37 Zachary Schomburg

The Wild Meaninglessness Falling in Love with the Death Thought

13 Laura Eve Engel

39 John Skoyles

For You Out of Soft Materials

Friday Night with My Dead Friends

14 Frederik Heyman

40 Frederik Heyman

Untitled

Untitled

15 Bruce Bond

41 James Robison

Zurich

The Fire Eater

17 Mark Baumer

46 Ciaran Berry

if you do not have a face because your face is a television then your father is probably mowing a piece of the suburbs

23 Nate Pritts

Abstract Lessons

24 H. L. Hix

Stealing Einstein's Brain Outside Riverdale Manor

50 Frederik Heyman Untitled

51 Maile Chapman

Counterexamples Evasions

28 Andrew Jilka

69 Andrew Jilka

Of Pomp and Circumstance

Foreign Wedding Interviewed by Chanelle Benz and Natalie Rogers

21st Century Ecstasy: Male Gaze

30 Oliver de la Paz

70 Brett DeFries

Labyrinth 18 Labyrinth 19 Labyrinth 20 Labyrinth 21 Labyrinth 22

from Ezekiel

72 Wang Ping

Winter Garden

73 Frederik Heyman

118 Jennifer Denrow

Portfolio

79 Anders Oinonen

122 Frederik Heyman

Portfolio

Untitled

89 Wang Ping

123 Mary Caponegro

Morning Lessons

from Each Thing That's Left

Interviewed by John Madera

91 Sarah Rose Etter

132 Andrew Jilka

Gown Rain

Ecstasy 2

95 Andrew Jilka

137 Jason Schwartz

Ecstasy in Black and White

Housepost, Male Figure

96 Tony Trigilio

142 Ben Mirov

#-8.3 from the Analects of Confusion Ducking

Destruction Manual

My soul sometimes floats out of my body. I don’t listen to the radio while driving.

98 Bridget Lowe

148 Andrew Jilka

The Gods Rush In Like Police The Nihilist Takes a Bow

100 Dara Wier

The Satellites Are Okay Pink Grasses

103 Frederik Heyman Untitled

104 Dana Spiotta

Interviewed by Rachel Abelson

113 Amy Benson

Outlaws and Citizens Gone

The Cleansing

149 Contributors

Andrew Jilka, The 21st Century Ecstasy of St. Teresa, Colored pencil on paper

JOHN GALLAHER

Because Thought Isn’t Prayer This is kind of a danceable tune. To turn ourselves around and then think about it this other way. “I’m unsure about it,” we can say, and kiss someone new or kiss no one at all. Think about every dog you’ve ever had, or every cat you’ve ever had, or every time you’ve ever played put-put golf. Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t played put-put golf ? you can ask yourself. Are there no more reasons to be thankful? you can say. First lover, last lover. Stubborn memory. There are always many other things I wish I were doing. How anything can feel like praying if you want it to. Signing your name at the grocery store. Amen. Both of your hands on the cash machine. Amen. If you know why you’re praying. If you don’t know why you’re praying. But you pray anyway. The poinsettia. The resurrection fern. The car starts. The children return. Let’s document the performance. The dogwood blooms. X number of people will be dead in the next Y minutes and stay dead. Go home again, why not. Feel all aphasic about it, because aphasia feels like prayer. Feel all Radio City Music Hall about it, because Radio City Music Hall feels like a shrine. How shrines feel like they can pray for you, so that being there makes you the letter in the envelope. It’s raining in Portland, on The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother. The ablution and inundation.

GALLAHER

9

It’s summer in Texas. Hot. They can barely move. They crawl, oblations to the car. We drink water, which feels good. We’re hydrated. We’re children, and I’ve this new BB gun. And everything speeds up as time equals distance over velocity. Start counting, because counting is prayer. Say this prayer six times, followed by “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry that velocity is equal to displacement over time. I’m sorry for the lovers whose names I can no longer recall. That I don’t think about. Start with one and then move to the Midwest. I’m sorry that it all seems like cold breakfast, later, and you’re just looking through the window at a diorama a sixth-grader made for a sociology project. Even with that, there are things around the corner of the room that they might or might not have painted in, knowing no one will be able to see them anyway. There are these two groups. The ones that stop where they imagine no one will see past, and those who can’t leave it there, who must go a bit further, which feels like prayer if you want it to. Compulsion, if you don’t. That moment where I had to glue the walls up, knowing I was covering up that little design I made in the wallpaper. The person I placed at the table. I loved the things of this world a moment, the way they reflected every futile book of new inventions. Because they’re not futile. And because I thought none of it. I want to be of use, the way we all do. The marimba, perhaps, or the chorus, because it’s hard not to think it all accrues, that we’re watching, through a fence, a place where it’s going to work better. We’re going through alone, or asking for help, and how we can get there as us or as ghosts, with this tin cup. This ocean.

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SALT HILL JOURNAL

JOHN GALLAHER

Anecdote of the Pony The field is large and there never is a pony.

You wait all spring.

You consult the heavens.

Which story is this one? The bowl upends from the table. The chairs fly backward.

The table upends.

You know when you have these dreams when you are little anyone can be an acrobat. Anyone can jump from a tree to the roof.

You can leap from one horse and land on another horse.

In between you’re weightless.

You wait all summer.

You practice falling from tables, then counters, then the roof, and then the trees.

Each time it’s a yard full of ponies for the time it takes to fall.

GALLAHER

11

Each time you climb the tree there’s someone approaching with an axe.

Each time there’s a taller tree you can see in the distance where someone is climbing as someone else approaches with an axe surrounded by the ponies you believe in.

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SALT HILL JOURNAL

LAURA EVE ENGEL

For You Out of Soft Materials It’s summer and the bodies fling sweat at each other.

The park is jammed with people at work blocking the sun. A boy throws a ball in a way that’s American.

Once in a park you cupped my cheek and said, now don’t think I’m cupping your cheek.

Time goes like all those people and then all these people.

Someone calls a dog a cupcake and someone calls back, you’re being absurd.

Once I admitted I made my face for you out of soft materials, so you’d have a place to put all your fingers.

Probably it was wrong of me.

It’s a good day for a joke. Tell me the one whose punch line is platypus, then I’ll say platypus is a joke whose punch line is platypus.

Look, the little lusts diffuse in a gust like a thing we could wish on.

There are all these ways we can decide not to be very tender.

ENGEL

13

Frederik Heyman, Untitled, Mixed media: pencil, watercolor, acrylic, marker, and oil on paper.

ANDERS OINONEN

Anders Oinonen, The Mope, Oil on canvas

Anders Oinonen, State of Zero, Oil on canvas

Anders Oinonen, Seldom Seen, Oil on canvas

JASON SCHWARTZ

Housepost, Male Figure [FENCE] On the north side: the fence was six feet high, board on board, posts four on center. The pickets were in the Gothic style. On the south side: the fence was four feet high, open-picket with four-inch spacing, posts eight on center, rails at the top and at the bottom.

You would be forgiven, however, for mistaking a certain post—on at least one occasion, in the rain—for the form of a woman. While the broken rail—hanging at a curious angle—would sometimes put me in mind of a skeleton on a wall.

The gatepost, in our case, rotted first.

A gate, absent a lock, may be understood as—in legal parlance—a place of danger. The creaking of metal gates—this, I like to think, was the great eighteenth-century sound. Just as the great nineteenth-century sound was the burning house.

She would kneel here with the shears.

On the west side: the hedgerow was six feet high, perhaps seven.

The wasps kept mostly to the rockery—beyond the flowerbed, the creeping jenny, the cat’s ear, and the child’s things. Burdock—also known as cuckold’s dock, as it happens—grew more beautifully, it is safe to assume, outside other houses.

I cannot abide a column overgrown with vines.

SCHWARTZ

137

On the east side: the garden wall was five feet high, brick in a standard configuration, flush cut. The child found mice there from time to time. The rats preferred the balcony, the latticework, the gutters. Birds would drown in the flowerpots.

She was disappointed by the pine trees, I believe, or by their location or arrangement, and by the manner of the shadows thrown across the lawn. A portion of the walk was hidden behind the firewood. The stakes were placed three feet apart, running from the gatepost to the cellar doors.

[DOOR] The deadbolt was poor. It failed, shall we say, one February afternoon. The door was removed the following spring, incidentally—beetles of some species having taken to the frame.

A typical Colonial door has six panels, four rails, and two stiles.

Exterior: the letterbox, vertical or horizontal. The former appears in the hanging, or hinge, stile. The latter appears in the cross rail. Interior: the muntin, central and upper. This is for a name, in some cases. One abandons a nail there—or perhaps one’s daughter does.

The rattling of a door, at this hour, may recall a certain boyhood story.

The floor plan of the Jackson house on New Street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—built 1838; restored 1914; destroyed, by fire, 1949— indicates, among other things, a narrow staircase, a narrow hallway, and four bedrooms, one drawn without windows or a door.

Some Colonial doors have four panels, three rails, and a long gash in the shutting stile.

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SALT HILL JOURNAL

Interior: the doorknob, enamel or wood. The former is usually white.

The latter is this color or that. Blue, according to custom, on the occasion of a great disgrace. Exterior: thumb latch, pull, and plate. One expects a quite common style. Rust, in some cases, finds its way to the numbers, top rail.

The frame will warp by next fall.

The door was painted red one year, to match the back door, and brown another—some months after a storm. The hinges were nickel-plated, dull.

The brass doorstop was more unfortunate, finally, than the little silver hook.

[CURTAIN] In our bedroom: the curtains displayed faint stripes, and then a herringbone pattern, and later a formation of birds—doomed, by the look of them.

The stain at the hem was a rather unseemly red.

Is it true that the Rowan bride—in a stone house, one hundred years ago—named her rooms for former suitors?

The deacons—in Eaton and Marion, but sometimes in Harrow as well—would arrange the shades in various ways, indicating contagion, danger, alarm, and so on. Whereas the strangler would hide behind the curtains, or within them, before crossing to the bedroom door.

In the hallway: the blinds made frightening sounds at night. They were wooden—maple, let us say, or walnut. But dark brown is all I can recall.

The cord wound around a black cleat.

SCHWARTZ

139

The curtain and rod, the shade and ring—perhaps such figures were taken, in one tradition or another, as emblems of betrayal.

The wives—in Putnam and Whitebriar, and in Newbury and Bratton and Pike Fork—would open the drapes just so, and for only a moment, or two, or for an hour in the afternoon, and then close them, indicating a day of the week, a time of day, a location.

In the child’s room: one curtain split lengthwise, along a pleat or a crease. The other, I gather, caught in the window and tore.

They were replaced with shutters, painted white.

Iron screens, detailed with human forms, their faces turned away— these were placed in the window frames of convent sickrooms and hospital morgues.

The daughters—in Thornton, during the war—would tie the curtains back, disclosing a skull on the windowsill. The housemaids took the curtains down in due course, carried them to the bed, addressed them with shears and a brush, and then set them atop the daughters’ coffins.

[WALL] The wagon at the hanging: this is no longer on the wall. And now we have the rats and the ants and the way the door sticks, even in winter.

That makes up a day. But what about those nights when the shade is made to produce a sound like this one? All those lovely worries in the hallway, and the wire on the platter. As the hour passes. Or wears on, I should say, until the lights go out.

The colors may recall the walls of your childhood room.

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SALT HILL JOURNAL

Wall hornets, in cathedrals, would conceal murals and the like—and were, on occasion, mistaken for inscriptions. But elsewhere, in a brown house, years later, there were only rows of coats in an entrance hall.

I touch it four times, the line on the wall, and then five—just east of the hook and just west of the door. On the other side of which, yes, one’s wife stands in her nighttime attire.

In the photographs from that year: you can see the son in the window, but never the daughter.

I count again the number of nails, up and down. The banister flatters the paneling, I suppose, as the molding flatters the frame. The wallpaper has a dark gray border, within which the animals are hidden.

In castles, perhaps, bones were stacked to form walls—atop which you might find wooden crosses, painted red to resemble those figurines once arranged at table in place of departed fathers.

A sledgehammer and a crowbar will do quite nicely in removing the bedroom wall.

The clock atop the lowboy: this has a skeleton dial. The mirror cuts the broom in two. Do you imagine someone in the house? And now one anchor follows another, a small drawing in the far corner. Or a knife and a knife, and then a ruined hat. But this is foolish of me. I know that—I do. Take away the shade, after all, and we have eight panes, the socket, the channel, and the stop.

SCHWARTZ

141