Salt Hill Issue 29

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SALT H I L L

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EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Rachel Abelson Gina Keicher FICTION EDITORS Annie Liontas David Nutt POETRY EDITORS Kit Frick David Wojciechowski NONFICTION EDITORS Chanelle Benz Danny Magariel ART EDITOR Rachel Abelson 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

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

Copyright 2011 UPC 7447092503

INTERN: Brittany Leitner READERS: Molly Anders, Taylor Collier, Robert Evory, Rebecca Fishow, Brittany Leitner, Ashley McConnell, Devon Moore, Erin Mullikin, Nina Puro, Stephen Reilly, Jessica Scicchitano Cover art: Aaron $hunga, Xenocave, ink on paper / Interior cover art: Faye Moorhouse, Cat Lady Five and Cat Lady Six, ink on paper, from The Cat Ladies of Czechoslovakia / End sheets: Brian Cypher, Division Arrays 5 and Division Arrays 4, monotype prints

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Here in Syracuse, the winter of the Mayan apocalypse has been mild to an eerie degree. The bathrobe moods to which we’ve grown accustomed didn’t snowball this time around. Often instead we see the sun. The streets are salted enough to walk. It all feels so alien, this fine-weathered parallel realm, this unseasonably utopic Syracuse. Just swap out the color of sky, and you’re in a wormhole to someplace else. “To know the difference between Natural Philosophy and Natural History,” writes Gale Marie Thompson, whose Observatories opens our current issue. “To know the unfurling universe.” The twenty-ninth issue of Salt Hill is evidence of how capricious and flimsy our perceived world is, how gray and clouded the separation between phenomenological reality and the science fictions looming behind it. Or in front of it. The fantasies stuck between its dark matter.

Either which way, the work in this issue pursues the out-there dimensions. Rivka Galchen speculates about 2001: A Space Odyssey and her theory of scientifisie. Faye Moorhouse documents UFOs and human-feline gestation while Emily Pettit builds horses and houses to talk into space. Joshua Young addresses survivors in the bruised light of an apocalyptic dawn as Simone Muench and Katie Jean Shinkle watch the horizons blaze and smoke. Amy Gerstler’s thoughts are lava-encrusted. Jacob White’s hole spouts gasoline, but from Helen Rubinstein’s mother grows a cabbage. Faces for her are at once faceless and kaleidoscopic, while Karyna McGlynn’s “Russel Says Everybody is Aubrey” portrays a character convinced we are all the same, old specimen. “Is the curvature of the earth bored with us?” wonders G.C. Waldrep as Carlos Franz journeys through a fetish for shapely flesh and Ulrich Haarbürste has perversions for Roy Orbison bound up in Saran wrap. Rudy Rucker’s hot dog stand of the future is in 2D, but life for Paul Slocum is just a 3D game. All this equipment, however, is faulty when it comes to Ben Marcus; he likes his science doomed, his language toxic, and his PowerPoints analyzed for him by his wife.

Ours is a city where we frequently address the weather: the wind’s shape-shifting abilities, the sun’s tendency to an invisibleness that leaves denizens wondering if that solar star ever existed to begin with.

We know the climate here is strange; we just aren’t always so sure how or where it will take us. “Are you plural / are you embarking,” asks Gale Marie Thompson at the close of Observatories. The prospect of forward momentum—boarding a craft to transport the self—is certain, yet the destination, the means of travel, and our reasons for the journey may be question marks which loom as large as celestial bodies. We hope you embrace the journey in these pages, the appeals of other worlds and the peculiarities of the places we inhabit and people we know, the language we use to humanize and alienate. Or as artist Aaron $hunga implores us onward into the unknown, “Enter Xenocave.”

Gale Marie Thompson from Observatories

7

Turn Here

Oxen on the Last Day

Ron Moss the Mountain Goat Old Room, New Room

XV. Dear Mr. Big Thinker: XVI. Mr. N:

Interviewed by Rachel Abelson

Works on Paper

New home

Penance

38 Amy Gerstler

37 Dolly Lemke

31 Brian Cypher

18 Ben Marcus

15 Patrick Lawler

13 Chiara Barzini

11 Patrick Haas

10 Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Untitled (Two Shapes, Twelve Times and Their Echoed Presence)

Brian Cypher

>

from This is the Way to Rule

from The Show Must Go On

The Beach

Italian Hours and Other Reviews from The Secret Correspondence: A Novel of Novels Russel Says Everybody is Aubrey

116 Karyna McGlynn

from The Wolf Centos

105 Tom Whalen

Translations by Ana Pepelnik and Matthew Rohrer Pot (A Way) Kupi mehko majico (Buy a Soft Shirt)

102 Simone Muench

98 Tone Škrjanec

97 Matthew Rohrer

77 Katie Jean Shinkle

74 Joshua Young

Game of Life Extrusions

205 Contributors

Xenocave

Agoraphobia National Park

191 Aaron $hunga

189 G. C. Waldrep

Poem with Limbs My Anne Carson

A Voluptuous Cat Beside a Queen: On Translating “Alejandra the Great”

187 Jeff Alessandrelli

182 Jonathan Blitzer

translated by Jonathan Blitzer Alejandra the Great

God Brings Before Us a Series of Delectable Cakes

168 Carlos Franz

Parking Lot Poem

167 Kyle McCord

Untitled, At Osler’s

165 Christy Crutchfield

69 Paul Slocum

Five of Spade

159 Renee Gladman

68 Caroline Cabrera

Roy in Clingfilm Conspiracy

Albert Goldman is Dead, Alas

The Round Barn

the knot you worry is your skull shaped into a square and populated with minutes

San Sebastian

the animals have lived here longer

Manhattan in the Rain

Cabbage Mother

147 Faye Moorhouse

63 Helen Rubinstein

Winkfield

Someone Else’s Horses

Interviewed by Danny Magariel

146 Emily Pettit

138 Rivka Galchen

136 Pablo Medina

135 Caroline Crew

126 Jacob White

Selections from Spaceland, Saucer Wisdom, and Mind Tools

122 Rudy Rucker

Fast Forward

121 Travis Brown

118 Tony Mancus

Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl

A Tall Man Destined to Come to

a Mysterious End

61 John Pursley III and Sarah Blackman

Strawberries

56 J. Robert Lennon

55 Jennifer Chapis

53 Michael Kelly

48 Ulrich Haarbürste

from Small Fails Epilogue

44 Abraham Smith

Alvis

41 Michael Bible

Earthbound

40 Matthew Hotham

Brian Cypher, Untitled (Two Shapes,  Twelve Times and Their Echoed Presence), graphite and colored pencil on paper

::

To know the difference between Natural Philosophy and Natural History To know the unfurling universe, spiral nebulae How to navigate How to extract Waiting for your body by the stove I look for your trademarks: the graying robin in the driveway moths that will not leave the kitchen generations and all Are you cardinal are you quince tree

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Are you plural are you embarking

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:: So much like the season I muster you as from a book, its physics brightened You unbraid and unbraid

We are two heads in the firmament of the many spots in the sky What tiny spaces in which to long for the other

THOMPSON

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She stood before the blender. She was blending. Inside the glass container pink liquid swirled; her right hand lay on top, holding the lid on.

The blender made a loud noise, a grinding, and the air smelled like burning oil. She didn’t know what the liquid was, in the blender. She tried to remember what she’d put in there but couldn't—there was only her right hand holding the lid on the blender and her left hand on the pulse button. She lifted her finger.

The blending stopped. The noise of the blending stopped. She could hear herself breathing. She opened the container and put her finger inside, then she put the finger in her mouth. Bananas. Strawberries.

She looked down at the counter. There were the leafy tops of strawberries, on a wooden cutting board. A banana peel; a container of yogurt, half empty. She had made a blended fruit drink. She could not remember deciding to make such a thing; she could not remember ever making one before. Beside the blender were two glasses.

“What are you doing?”

She turned, started: there was a man, sitting in front of a magazine at the kitchen table. Her husband. For a moment she hadn't recognized him: he had shaved his beard.

She said, “Your beard.”

“You made your point,” her husband said. “I’m growing it back, already. I can’t grow it any faster.” Angrily he thrust out his chin, grunting.

He turned back to his magazine.

She knew it was afternoon, somehow she knew that, though she couldn’t remember the morning. What was he doing home? It must be Saturday. She looked up at the clock and the clock wasn’t there. Just a blank white space, accentuating the dirtiness of the wall. A nail stuck out from the space. “Where’s the clock?” she said.

“Broken? Hello?” He did not look up from his magazine.

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She poured the fruit drink into the two glasses. She stood at the counter, her hands around the glasses, thinking. Where had she gotten the idea to make this? Had it been his idea? Why wasn’t he making it?

She was eager to drink it, that was certain, but why? Did she like it? Was it something she liked?

“I feel funny,” she said. She turned to her husband.

He was staring at her, as if he had just realized something.

“You’re not changing your mind, are you?” he said. His voice was fearful.

She turned. “About what?”

“About everything.” He stroked his face. “I wish to God I could grow this back faster.”

It wasn't clear what he meant by this. She sat down at the table and gave him his drink. Then she sat across from him. She took a sip from her glass. It was exactly as she expected, though she hadn’t been expecting it. Strawberries and bananas. The liquid in the glass was pink and she wondered what it might be. She put her finger in and then licked it. She looked up at her husband.

“Your beard!” she said. “You shaved!”

He didn’t say anything at all. Behind him there was a blank space on the wall in the shape of their clock, with a nail sticking out from it. She realized how dirty the wall was. She said, “Where’s the clock?”

He looked up at her. He leaned closer. His bare face: she hadn’t seen it in years. Though she didn't remember those years, she only had the feeling that it had been years, that years ago she had seen him like this.

She said, “What are you doing home?”

After a moment he said, “Are you all right?”

She studied his face. Something unfamiliar was in it. Without his beard all his expressions were magnified, she couldn’t tell what they meant anymore. Carefully she said, “I feel funny.”

• She let him lead her to the car: he guided her by the hand and elbow, as if she were pregnant. But instead of getting in behind the wheel, he

LENNON

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went back into the house. Why was he doing that? Wait: she had been pregnant, hadn’t she? What had happened with that? She looked down at her belly, ran her hand over it. It was flabby, a little bit, but she didn't think she was pregnant. She looked out the windshield, at two boys playing in the street. She thought, What am I doing in the car? In a moment her husband approached, holding a baby wrapped in blankets. She thought, He looks good holding that baby, like a real father. We should have one. We should have a baby. She watched him open the rear door and latch the baby into a rear-facing child seat. Something was different about her husband. He shut the rear door and slid into the driver’s seat.

“What happened to your beard?” she said.

He looked at her, blinking.

“Where are we going?” she said.

He started the car and pulled away from the curb. Two boys who had been playing in the street moved aside to let them pass. She said, “Who's your friend?” and made herself laugh. It came out wrong.

“What?”

“I mean...there's a baby back there,” she said, more quietly now.

“Uh huh,” he said.

She glanced into the back and could see the top of the baby’s head.

It was a small baby, a new one. She didn’t know its name but seemed to know that it was a girl. She turned back to her husband and studied his face. Something in his manner, something in the set of his shoulders and jaw, filled her with sadness, and she wanted to touch him. She reached out and touched him, she stroked his face, and she realized she hadn't touched him this way in a long time. “Oh!” she said. “Your face!”

He half-turned to her with an expression of worry and fear.

“Did you used to have a beard?”

“Yes.” “How do I know...” she said, but she lost her train of thought. Now she looked out the window. They were on the county highway, headed out of town. She looked back at the driver's seat, and there was a man sitting there, a clean-shaven man, who was supposed to have a beard. But how did she know that? The man was good-looking, but his expression was hard. Still, she felt she ought to be comforted by the sight of him.

She said, “Hi.” 58

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“Hi,” the man said, his jaw tight. He didn't look at her.

“Where are we going?” she asked him.

From the back of the car came a cry, and she screamed.

• A doctor looked into her eyes and felt her hands and forehead. A nurse drew blood. “Anne,” the doctor said, “how do you feel?”

Well. Her body felt fine. She was a little tired, maybe. And she could taste strawberries, though she didn't remember eating any. Was that why she was here? Something to do with the phantom strawberries? Maybe she was having a hallucination, a taste hallucination. Now she heard the sound of a baby crying somewhere nearby. It distracted her. She felt as if she were supposed to answer a question, but she didn't know what it was.

She turned and saw a man with a baby in his arms. The sight startled her.

“What is it?” the doctor said.

“Him!” But as she said it she realized, without knowing why, that it was a foolish thing to say.

“I shaved,” said the man.

“Oh,” she said, and she didn't understand why he was telling her this, she didn't understand why these people were here, or why she was here, or where here was.

“Anne?” said the doctor. “Maybe you should feed the baby. She wants to eat.”

The man brought her the baby. As it approached, she grew frightened, but when it landed in her arms she deftly unbuttoned her blouse and took out her breast. The nipple was small and hard, and she was reminded of a nail sticking out of a dirty wall. The baby took the nipple into its mouth, as if the two of them had done this a thousand times before. The baby sucked. Amazing! Her mouth tasted like strawberries, and when she looked up, two men were staring at her, their faces expectant.

One was dressed like a doctor. The other, a clean-shaven man, was scowling. His eyes were moist. He said, “I was right, wasn't I. You've changed your mind.”

LENNON

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She tried to smile. “I'm sorry?”

“About everything,” the man said. The other man, the one dressed like a doctor, turned to him in apparent confusion. “I knew you would,” the first man, the clean-shaven one, said. Though of course both men were clean-shaven, but this one was more clean-shaven, somehow.

What he said was true. She had changed her mind. But what had she changed her mind about? She felt her body begin to tremble, heard herself begin to say, “Oh my God,” as she noticed that there were two men in the room, and they were staring at her, and one of them was dressed like a doctor, and this one was lunging for her, because she was screaming now, and because she had felt a tug at her breast and looked down and seen that her blouse was open and her breasts were bare and there was a baby there, in her arms, somebody's baby with its mouth on her nipple, and she tasted strawberries, and she was leaping up in terror because she had changed her mind, and because there were two men in the room, and because there was a baby, rolling away from her bare breasts and tumbling to the floor.

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It’s hardly fair to bury a white man and a skunk side by side. He smiles and tips his hat, puts it all out on the table, though he knows her father’s dead.

You can’t scare us out of the county seat The mob knows one thing, the women another Meanwhile, Old Dad (much loved) is swelling in the sun.

Offer the horses. Turn your back.

It’s always daylight, even the dusty nights are withering.

(There’s a lot of riding around in this movie.)

You can’t make a clean get away of it, Molly; I only came to pay a social call The peerless faith of the serving woman only goes so far Against all these secret enemies. You can tell a lot by the built in bookshelves, the lamp lit, trimmed and burning.

For instance: this man isn’t who he claims to be.

Catch him or he’ll hang us all (cut to horses, hoof-hammers in triplets, quads) But are they running toward death or marriage? And who cares?

The steel rivets in the horse’s bridle announce the hero.

At the crossings a car crash, heading them off, a Wile E. Coyote cliff For the horses to leap in profile, stiff as carousal ponies.

Phone us up a posse, Tom, before they turn us over to the law Or, stay awhile—the furniture reduced to kindling . . . no consequence, but a lifetime in the kitchen. Kiss her now. Roll credits.

PURSLEY & BLACKMAN

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I will spread my limbs out like a five-point starfish to be more like you.

We all have our own ways of showing up, our methods for compassion.

In truth, I know I fall short.

In truth, I know you are five stingrays swimming around an obstacle in a necessary kind of formation.

I cannot be denser; I know that.

But sometimes it can feel like enough just to share a landscape.

I keep wishing you well, wishing you well.

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GAME OF LIFE EXTRUSIONS

are inspired by the British mathematician John Horton Conway’s cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life, which is a zero-player simulation game that artificially emulates the evolution of life. Each image in Game of Life Extrusions is a transformation of the evolutions Conway’s Game of Life can compute over time into a spatial visualization. These visualizations were made by taking each frame of a two-dimensional Game of Life sequence and stacking the frames from the animation into a large threedimensional object, where each pixel or "cell" in the original Game of Life sequence is now extruded into a cube in threedimensional space. The time axis of the two-dimensional animation becomes the physical z-axis of a static three-dimensional object. A custom script was used to convert the frames of a Game of Life sequence into a three-dimensional-model file format that could be opened with three-dimensional visualization software. Once imported into the software, the object was placed into a scene, lit, and then rendered into the final image using a ray-tracer to simulate the behavior of light within the scene.

Artist Name, Title of piece, Medium

dear survivors, in the bruised light of dawn, when birds begin those steady single notes, piano-like, we rise from the rubble. the city is all piles and spires of smoke, as though someone had plunged their hand into the center and yanked. we mourn alone and gather where highways used to merge.

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dear survivors, when the rain came, dragging black tendrils from the clouds, we climbed up to the caves above the city and watched. in the morning, fog came, covered the place where the city used to lay, covered the harbor over the next bluff, but now the fog has opened, first as a slit through the center, and there are ships in the harbor, tilted into the water or capsized or knocking against the shoreline. there are no sailors, just specks of white lapping with the waves. our voices echo off the cliffs’ walls, and below us in our city, there are soldiers, abandoned by the fogcover. they set what’s left of our avenues and homes on fire. they set fire and go, south. an hour later, the ships are burning, the harbor is burning. we retreat south, into the woods.

YOUNG

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