Sanskrit 2007

7

Piercing

8 9 12 21 24 25 27 28

Crystal S. Thomas

Where Souls Live Jean Wiggins

Poems

The Young Who Are Ready To Die Susan Benjamin

Onan

Russell Rowland

To my enemy Ervisa Martino

Single

Cherish Wilson

My Life Dies. Now I am Alone Jennie Ray

I’m Tune

John Marvin

29 38 40 43 46 47 50 58

Dyin’ Blues

Tom Lombardo

More Of Us At Eleven John Grey

Inside The Canopy John Gosslee

Radios and 10¢ Movies Carol Hamilton

Tuesday Night Jazz Barbara D. Pieroni

Even This Door Must Open Fred Ferraris

At 40—17

Susan Benjamin

The New New World Barbara Tramonte

A Coat Of Paint Ann Levison

5 61 63 64

Editor’s Note Contributor & Juror Bios Special Thanks & Colophon Staff Bios

14 32 52

The Jam Maker

Stories

Hannah Selinger

Jonny

M. Bela Sas

Seeds Of A Marriage Nathan Thoma

6 10 11 13 19 20

Untitled

Lee Waller

Burlap

Paola Mateos

Nude Figure Daniel Skalak

Looted

Mina Nelson

Anti-French Alex O’Neill

Pursuit

Daniel Skalak

22 23 26 30 31 39 41

Deborah’s Pick Me Up Leeann Hargett

Namaste I

Heather Opal Kimsey

Freedom

Jesse Eric Schmidt

Road Kill [a,b,c] Debbie Archer

Corkscrew

Josh Branson

Raleigh Stripes Alex O’Neill

Image of the City Lee Waller

42 44 45 48 49 51 59

Art

Dermis

Shelley Lineberger

For The Popular Mind Set Leeann Hargett

Slug

Daniel Skalak

Madness

Shelley Lineberger

Lost In Its Translation Leeann Hargett

Untitled

Janelle Geaber

Soup

Alex O’ Neill

Imagine a life completely void of self-expression.

Could we survive an existence so bleak and meaningless? A world lacking music, art, cinema, fiction, fashion‌thankfully, this scenario is nothing but just that, a scenario.

Sanskrit strives every year to create an outlet for self-expression, not just for the staff that work so diligently producing it, but for the thousands of contributors willing to allow us into their private worlds.

This year we are pulling out our blank canvas to share. While certain pages are reserved for our expression, we handed the ink, paint, pens, and brushes over to the contributors to fill the rest of the canvas. We hope that by opting to keep this edition of the magazine simple that the focus will be placed in the correct direction. This is not about winning you over with impressive design, this is about presenting you with the contributor’s self-expression.

In an effort to stear clear of any labels for this theme, we choose to share with you the influences behind our creative decisions. We have incorporated illustrative styles that we tend to use, hand-crafted elements, and simple doodles that you would surely find if ever flipping back through an old school notebook. We want you to be able to relate to what we produce for you, as we came to relate to what was sent to us by contributors. We want this to be a full experience.

In closing, we would like to tip our hats to you. To all of you. We encourage you to embrace your self and let the world in to experience your very own form of self-expression. Write a poem, sing a song, paint a picture, just make sure that your heart is in it, that it comes from you.

Untitled • Lee Waller

22" x 30" • Ink, Charcoal, White Charcoal, Acr ylic , Graphite

Piercing

Crystal S. Thomas

all that’s left now is a scar two nubs of tissue dark parted like a curtain a tiny stamp where a steel ring was, the memory of risk. we were twenty-five too old they say for such adolescent folly carb-thickened, sweaty from tennis cosmopolitan in our high heels and jean shorts, having finally learned to put on our eyeliner smoothly. the hearse outside was both gothic and garish, a giddy scene to complement a dare the silver lines of chrome crossing its black body like the braces we once wore. o Jillian, how I miss those days of your singing: “good morning, good morning, good morning, it’s time to rise and shine;” and that other song our mothers would discourage. you sang to me that evening grinning cheerily ignoring the waggling eyeball in the corner. i miss us then and before then — o the cusp of twenty — unfettered dancing, unconscious dieting, snorts with no reins such freedom has slipped away from me more stealthily than my naval piercing both true confection, victims of too much fingering.

I’m pissed I lost that ring.

It was to have been small talk for reunions like the day we met, the first time you got underneath my skin

Where Souls Live

Jean Wiggins

The brown-shingled house of my grandparents, the grease on my father’s clothes from the cars he coaxed back to life or pronounced dead on the spot, blue hyacinth, cinnamon rolls baking in a cast-iron stove, dried tomato sauce spattered on the walls of the kitchen, a lone fly buzzing over the canning jars, my mother standing at the screened door fanning herself with a tomato-stained apron, in the sun drawn in through yellow curtains our cat, napping, unambitious as Columbus wasn’t, licks its fur with its pink tongue, pauses, the newness of the moment paraphrasing solitude shifting him into trance, his eyes universes of clear ice.

All of us are gathered in the old house, our souls living in individual apartments rented out for life.

The Young Who Are Ready To Die

Susan Benjamin

The young who are ready to die have eyes like pressed glass, their limbs hang loosely, they tell wry jokes.

The have walked miles and miles and miles along hospital corridors, know the tiled patterns, the antiseptic smells, by heart.

Have seen their image splashed in the dead -pan eyes of their doctors, have read their hospital charts.

Still, they become cheerleaders, go on dates, graduate high school, and speak of careers, collect memories like baseball cards and flip them idly like bets with the healthy, with the ones who have elastic pink lungs, cruising blood, pump-pump-pumping hearts; flip them idly like actors flipping the page when they know, too well, too well, the part.

Burlap • Pa o l a M a t e o s 10" x 8" • Silver Gelatin Print

10

Nude Figure • D a n i e l R . S k a l a k 10" x 8" • Graphite

11

Onan

Russell Rowland

Father’s fox-brush beard wagged with his argument.

Tamar watched, said nothing.

Those onyx eyes again.

My dead brother’s phantom swirled about us like a breeze.

It was awkward, in the bushes.

Her shawl caught, sheep blundered near; father’s voice everywhere, yelling too loudly at the servants.

I thought of a child who would look like me, but not be mine — and did what my name became.

Thus the Lord taunted, bless His holiness: the angel he sent had Tamar’s eyes. She will have to wait for our kid brother now.

I rest in Sheol, remembering how I rocked in the cradle of those hips.

Where I spilled it on the ground, there is a marsh today, and it is spring. every frog ever created gargles there, out-gargling his neighbor, all for a mate.

There’s never enough love to go around.

12

Looted • M i n a N e l s o n 8.25" x 8.25" • Mixed Media

13

Hannah Selinger

“Driving through Palm Springs is like driving through another planet,” David says. He is at the wheel, Maya in shotgun, the road before them dry and dusty like in the country’s interior. California is a vast and strange state, Maya thinks, always full of surprises.

David taps a finger at the glass of the driver’s side window, motioning toward the windmills that cover the hills in waves of white. They spin at random, some remaining patient while the others generate energy. There is an uninterrupted sea of them, flanking the landscape from Chico south, all the way, Maya guesses, to the Mexican border.

“How does it work?” she asks. “How do they capture the energy in the first place?” She fiddles with a mason jar, full of homemade jam. She has brought four different varieties, glass jam jars filled with raspberry, orange marmalade with the rinds still intact, blueberry, bing cherry. At home, she has filled the storage shed with salted preserved lemons, too, with green apple jelly and spiced mulberries from her parents’ house back East. The shed, which housed tools and lawnmowers in another life, has staved off old age with the newborn mason jars, clear and radiant and shiny next to the musty, rotting wood.

“Something about spinning the mechanics inside,” David says, grinning. Maya can tell that he has no idea what he’s talking about, but he’s not putting on a show today. He has been complacent since the trip began, patient in the car, not checking the gas mileage too often, not bothering her to stop at In N Out for burgers every 100 miles. He has been content to eat her jam with whole-wheat crackers, to stare at the scenery, the undulating yellow of it all, to watch as the slide show clips by, panel by panel of desert life. Palm trees tipping to the sides, white windmills, heat radiating from the tar in waves that Maya associates with charcoal grills.

“Jam?” Maya asks. She has opened the raspberry, dipped a spoon in, tested the waters herself. There is no foolproof method, she has learned, no promise of a tasty jam. Her jams differ in quality depending on the fruit. Early raspberries are tart, firm, require less pectin, more sugar. They leave the sharp aftertaste of leaves behind.

The mid-summer berries are sweet and soft and often go gooey, changing the jam altogether. This raspberry batch is an early one, which Maya prefers. Northern California has the perfect raspberries for the jam, while Seattle boasts the West Coast’s best blackberries. She looks at David. He is all angles now, his profile tight and shaded by the early afternoon sun.

“Please,” he says. He turns, and his face becomes soft again, pliant. Maya thinks for a minute of leaning in to kiss him, but she dips her spoon instead, brings it to his lips in a not entirely asexual way.

He closes his eyes for a split second. Maya watches the sensations register: sweet and then tart. She can see he is pleased. “One of your best,” he says, and Maya nods as the dry land unravels around them.

Where they are going, Indio, is a part-time town, a place devoted to golfers and retirees, to gamblers and northern Californians looking for a warmer climate. There isn’t much to say about the town itself, which boasts a few strip malls, an In N Out, a Ralph’s, several gas stations, one small casino, and condo complexes that all remind Maya of a trip she took to Phoenix when she was eight. The colors of the buildings are the colors of the desert: burnt sienna, beige, goldenrod. There is stucco and adobe everywhere, low terra cotta-shingled roofs straight out to the horizon. Maya has directions written on a scrap of notebook paper, frayed at the edges from where a metal spine used to connect. “Turn on Jefferson,” she tells David, once they’ve gotten off the 10 and followed Indio Boulevard into the heart of the desert. “We’re looking for a development called PGA.”

Maya thinks for a minute of leaning in to kiss him, but she dips her spoon instead, brings it to his lips in a not entirely asexual way.

“Like the golf tour?” David asks. “This is the twilight zone.”

“It’s impossible to understand, places like this. How do people deal with the heat? There’s no ocean, just pools of still water.”

David shrugs. He has never cared much about the ocean, hailing from Colorado, where there isn’t one. “You learn to love it, I guess,” he says.

Maya shakes her head. No, she thinks. It’s too dry. The absence of life. But aloud she only directs the motion of the car, calling out street names until they find themselves in a complex named for golf, with street names named for golfers. They pull into Jack Nicklaus and there is the house with a car they recognize out front. David honks his horn in his typical showman’s way, attracting attention from inside. A shadow changes and someone approaches; Maya squints in the sunlight. There is a bounding, a leaping step to the figure, who wears long shorts, wraparound

15

sunglasses, flip-flops, and no shirt. He runs to the car, where David has started to step out. The shadow man is Peter Grees, an old friend from college whom David and Maya have not seen in years. David steps out and the men embrace and Maya stays in her own shadow, glasses down, mason jar still in hand. She looks forward at the hot pavement, at the haze rising in the distance before the mountains. She looks at the desert flowers, surprisingly vibrant despite the heat, purple-blossomed trees, pink flowers that are as bright and wide as Hawaiian hibiscus.

She has lost herself, and now hears the tapping on the glass. Peter Grees is standing at her window, smiling. He winds his hand in a circle and mouths, “Roll down and say hello,” and so she smiles back. She brushes her black hair from her face and pushes the eye-distracting bangs to the side and reaches for the door handle.

“Hey there,” Peter says loudly. He has shaved his head and his scalp has begun to turn pink from the desert sun. He picks Maya up and does one turn, letting her legs fly out behind her. “Long time no see. Did you bring my favorite?”

David heads to the trunk. The Jeep opens and spills its contents with little fanfare. “Four different kinds, but we opened one on the way down,” he says.

“But,” Peter counters, “did you bring my favorite?”

Maya smiles. Orange marmalade. She had not forgotten. “Of course,” she says. “The jars are in back.” The men saddle up, carrying sleeping bags and pillows, duffels, jars of jam, vittles for the weekend, beer. David leads, though he doesn’t know the way. He has his glasses on his head, and from the back Maya notices that he looks especially tall and strong, his black tee shirt betraying just the tiniest stream of sweat down the middle of his back. Behind him is Peter, shirtless Peter with his military march. The path is littered with the purple blossoms of an unidentified tree and the grass is dewy from the intermittent work of the sprinkler and Maya thinks, just for a second, that maybe the desert isn’t so bad.

The house is more than they had expected.

How Peter came across the weekend retreat is anyone’s guess, but Maya assumes he’s got connections from something illegal and doesn’t press the issue. There are two bedrooms with king-sized beds, open bathrooms, a sub-zero stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and a pool that juts into the golf course in a way that doesn’t seem real. There is a hot tub, too, with a waterfall that trips over the slate edge, and a gas grill built into the stucco side of the patio. In the pool, a bikinied girl floats on a raft that pushes half her torso underwater, thought she doesn’t seem to mind. Peter leads David and Maya to the pool’s edge and shouts to the girl. “Kelly, say ‘hi’ to your guests.”

16

Kelly offers a flaccid, backwards wave. Her glasses, large, round, and clearly Prada, lie on a nest of slick brown hair that Maya can tell is well cared for. Kelly’s stomach is slick, too, but with oil rather than water, and her arms have already turned a light chestnut from the sun. “Make yourself at home,” she says without turning her head, and Peter shrugs as if to say, “It’s her house; she’ll do what she wants.” And it is her house, Maya later learns, an inheritance from dead parents.

The girl will live as she pleases.

Maya assumes he’s got connections from something illegal and doesn’t press the issue.

To the side of the pool there are other guests, empty cans of beer, a half-carved watermelon, and a glass bong. The guests vary in height, gender, and skin color. Peter herds David and Maya to the table, making hasty introductions: the lanky redhead Justine with shimmery eye makeup and a white bandeau; Derek with a shaggy, bleach-blond surfer cut, a six pack, and board shorts; Elena with hair as black as Maya’s but without the curves; short, squat Jon, an ordinary brunette with a crew cut. Maya and David smile, then retreat to the bathroom to change. When they come back, donning suits, Peter has parked himself at the table and is taking bong hits. “Want some?” he asks, and Maya shakes her head no, though David looks unsure. “We’ll hit the concert late afternoon,” Peter continues. “Too hot this time of day.”

And it is hot, approaching 100, but not humid like the northeast.

Maya thinks about the concert, named Coachella for the valley, for the Indians who lived there first. It is a two-day festival of arts and music, of indie bands from the 1990’s that have faded into obscurity and of ones that have made it big. They have driven from temperate San Fransico for the bands, which go hand in hand with the pot, the mixed company, the mysterious golf-course decadence.

Maya sweeps her hair from the back of her neck and tucks it into a stray rubber band she has laced around her wrist. Her wrists are always marked with the impressions left from such rubber bands, indentations that dig deep into the skin, so much so that David has asked if she was born that way. Her skin is light now, wan from too much San Franciscan fog, but will darken quickly, she knows. She walks to the slate near the pool and sits, and the hot rock threatens to burn through her bathing suit.

David has moved to the table and is taking a bong hit. He looks in her direction first, silently asking permission. She nods; it isn’t her business, anyway. He has immersed himself in the murmur of people, as always, leaving her to the quiet. The house they rent is like this, too, him with his noise and toys, the click of magnets on the refrigerator,

the hum of the humidifier on rare dry days, the television, stereo, phone, all prone to noisemaking. She alone enjoys the solitude of quiet, the nothingness of mason jars and jam. She alone understands that it is not an impugnment of him to feel this way, that she would love him no more if he, too, were quiet. Five years together, and he is yet to understand that what she doesn’t share with him she shares with no one, and that she prefers it this way. He has reached the deepest point, looked as far into her soul as she will allow, and when he wants more — begs for it, even — she allows him no entrance. The mason jars are hers, the shed her haven, the glittery glass in the midday California sun no one’s business but her own.

Once the sun is low in the sky, they pile into two cars and head out. Peter, Kelly, and the short boy named Jon join Maya and David in the Jeep; the others take a Lexus SUV in a stunning shade of charcoal.

David is chatty now from too much pot. “Who’s the first band everyone wants to see?” he asks.

“Wilco,” Peter says. “Definitely Wilco.”

“I want to go less mainstream,” David says. “I want to check out some of the really hot sleeper bands.”

“Yawn. Those bands always turn out to be so ordinary,” Kelly says. She has changed from her bikini into a minuscule denim skirt with frayed edges. Her white tank top allows a more than healthy glimpse of cleavage.

“That isn’t true,” Jon counters. “Last year, I saw this band—” “It is true,” Kelly says. “Don’t contradict. It’s impolite.” She smiles.

“I do want to see Weezer, though,” David says, perhaps to be conciliatory. He has told Maya this, too, that Weezer is the band he’s most excited to see play. Their pocket-protector anti-cool is what attracts him — the fact that they make no bones about being losers, and that such honesty has only bolstered their appeal.

“What about you, May?” Peter asks. He sits behind her, strokes the back of her head with his hand in a way that confuses Maya.

Maybe it is meant to be affectionate, but she can’t deny that there’s a charge there, too, an electricity to his interaction with her. “Favorite pick? Or did you just drive down here for the sunshine?”

“I’m easily amused,” Maya says, which isn’t true. She turns to look at Peter, who winks in response. David looks only at the road before him.

“That right?” Peter says. “Easily amused? Never would have guessed that about you.”

“Don’t take her at her word,” David says. “Maya’s amused by very little.”

“Maybe she just isn’t amused by you,” Peter says, and laughs.

“Brutal,” Kelly says, chewing on a nail. “Peter, who knew you could throw such barbs?”

“How do you all know each other, anyway?” stout Jon asks.

“College?”

“We were the Three Musketeers our junior year,” David says.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Only four years, Dave. It’s all relative,” Peter says. “It was your typical Eastern university experience. Too cold to do anything but sit around, hang, smoke some pot, listen to tunes, bemoan the state of humanity.”

“Typical Eastern bullshit,” Kelly says. “At Irvine, we spent a lot of time outside. Laguna, Huntington, and Newport were our libraries.”

Lucky you, Maya thinks, but says nothing. She had loved the closeness of Eastern universities, the comfort of dark libraries, the dingy familiarity of the dorm rooms, the stodginess hanging in the air like fog. In fact, it is those feelings, the feelings she associates with old buildings, that Maya misses most. Peter had moved West after college, just like she and David, and had started bartending, much like David had once money got tight. Maya herself had moved West to become a potter, thinking that she would have more space for her wheel, her kiln, her buckets of silt. Instead, she had abandoned the idea when her adopted city’s moistness changed the consistency of her clay. The pots wouldn’t dry before the first bisque fire; the glazes wouldn’t stick. She began to make jams.

She had made them all her life, starting with the mulberries in her parents’ Connecticut backyard. In college, she had turned to store-bought fruits, had used the dorm’s common kitchen for stewing oranges, lemons, apples, cranberries, figs. Peter had loved the marmalade, David the seasonal cranberry preserve. Other friends had favorites, too, which she still occasionally mailed out for a birthday or wedding. Once the potting had failed, Maya had spent an afternoon clearing and cleaning the tool shed near the garden; the hoes and spades were still in a wicker basket beneath the mason jars, but the rest of the junk had been sold in a yard sale. She made labels, signs,

17

business cards, and people from the area bought her jam and loved it, and suddenly it was a business.

“See why I couldn’t date her?” he whispers, and Maya says nothing.

She had become somewhat successful overnight, owing mostly to her own patience and willingness to work through dawn. David struggles at the bar, enjoys cocktails with friends, and comes home drunker than she suspects he means to be. He sleeps on the couch when he can’t make it to the bedroom and snores loudly enough so that she can hear it from upstairs. She looks at him on nights like these and wonders about their transformation, from young couple to something else. His eyes refuse to shut completely when he drinks, and it looks like he’s watching her sometimes, wondering the same things.

Wondering if they are ill-matched, or if the jam has gotten into the crevices of their relationship, making the gears stick.

“How do you know each other?” Maya asks Kelly and Peter.

“I’m a bar flirt.” Kelly is unapologetic. “He brought me home.

The friendship, amazingly, lasted.”

“Classy, Kel,” Peter says. “Do you think we could invent another story?”

“Why? I’m not ashamed.”

Peter leans forward and Maya can feel his hot breath on her neck.

He leans toward her ear, hand on her shoulder, just barely touching the clavicle. “See why I couldn’t date her?” he whispers, and Maya says nothing.

They slip through turnstiles, enter fields littered with empty water bottles, apple cores, beer cups. Concert detritus spreads out before them, an indication of the day’s heat and of the numbers in attendance. There are art exhibits everywhere: a giant baby made from papier-mâché, plastic garbage cans painted with tempera, a Calderlike, free-standing metal mobile. Music comes from all directions, electronic trance and alternative and what almost sounds like metal.

The bands scheduled run the gamut from famous to unknown, from mild-mannered to gothic. Maya looks toward the main stage, where blue mountains rise in the background and colored spotlights turn the palm trees unnatural hues. The scenery is romantic, placid, and in some ways utterly unreal. David reaches for his wallet.

“Beer?” he asks. Kelly nods. So does Jon. “Maya?” David asks.

“Anything for you?”

“Too hot for beer,” she says. She knows he has anticipated this response.

18

“The line’s pretty bad,” Peter says. He points to the first line, an ID line, and the second line, where the beer is actually purchased.

Both lines weave for a good distance.

“So the three of us will go,” David says. “You and Maya find a good place to stand. By the main stage.”

Maya watches Kelly sidle up to David. She is, again, unapologetic as she knocks his hip with her own. She seems to believe that her beauty, which is undeniable if not a little ordinary, can conquer anything.

“Okay?” David asks, attempting to balm the wound created by the pretty girl at his hip. Maya doesn’t really care. Girls like Kelly are a dime a dozen, she knows, though the obviousness of intent is a little frustrating.

“Have fun.” Maya says. She almost means it. Kelly smiles dramatically. Jon gives an awkward salute. David walks away, turning only once as he leaves to look at Maya, his seriousness unexpected.

He pauses as if he has thought better of the beer, thought better of leaving his girlfriend in the California dust. But then he thinks better again, turns, and walks on. Maya wonders what has happened, what they have just chosen, knowing that they have agreed on something, but not knowing what. She thinks of how thin jam is at first, before the pectin has set, how the clear liquid can fit through a sieve. She thinks of time and of the cooling process, of the gelatin setting, of the consistency changing, of the thick product that she scrapes with rubber spatulas into mason jars. And then Peter has his hand at her back, trailing down lower where it shouldn’t be, as if to say the stickiness is all that’s left behind.

Anti-French • A l ex O ’ N e i l l 10" x 10" • Digital Photography

19

Pursuit • Daniel R. Skalak

18" x 24" • Graphite on Illustration board

20

To my enemy In the memory of Kostandina

Ervisa Martino

For three years now I was waiting for you every day In the same place Waiting for you, my enemy For three years now We were fighting over The same love For three years now You hated me I hated you For three years now I wanted to see you dead Yes dead, my enemy For three years now I did not have anyone Except you, my enemy And now They tell me that You are dead Shame on you!

With whom will I fight Whom will I hate Whom will I wait How did you dare to die before me So, unfair You coward Fight, I said So, unfair There your victory Beaten by my only enemy With love of human being

21

Deborah’s Pick Me Up • L e e a n n H a r ge t t 9" x 7" x 3" • Mixed Media

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Namaste I • He a t h e r O p a l K i m s ey 72" x 60" • Gesso, Acr ylic , and Oil on Canvas

23

Single

Cherish Wilson

A Single Woman’s Musings on Pee Sticks, PhDs, and Push-up Bras

Yes, recently married friend, I am still single And, Mrs. Hyphenated-names, you used to be, too Do you recall the wrenching panic of a false-positive On that little pee stick, the middle of senior year?

Now you pay thousands to be drugged into fertility So you can have six translucent, half-pound babies Yes, I’m happily single So, please, I’d rather not play dress-up and meet Dan’s best friend’s half-brother, new-in-town.

Unless you can assure me of his financial holdings His sexual orientation, his SAT scores, his PhD and Alma mater — there is no need to fix me up.

Yes, at my age I’m single And if this were 1875, I would be worried.

And if this were 1975, I would be high But this is an age of empowered women With push-up bras more advanced Than the computers aboard Apollo 11

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My Life Dies. Now I am Alone

Jennie Ray

I have never spoken to this man with my voice.

I have never commented on his work or any work which fascinates him.

I have often given him dirty looks or ignored him.

But

I could watch a film of one gesture he has made repeated for the rest of my life— Perhaps the way he leans back and puts his hands on his hips, or holds his arm so tightly to his body when he bites his nails, (as if those nails are all that he can eat) as if his arm would fly away if he did not cling to it, or the way he paces like a lunatic, looking behind garbage bins and around corners, when he smokes a cigarette.

The

of test

love

is with fascination gestures.

I have always known that.

25

Freedom • Jes s e E r i c S c h m i d t 36" x 24" x 5" • Mixed Media

26

I’m Tune

Über Wahrheit und Lüge John Marvin

introit spaces in haven

finale minuet in c

minute distinctions color special dimensions perhaps a shade of say your father complaining

musical selections from the menu du jour an elegant couple dances slow etiquette

well then what was his complaint in reality except a discontinuity emerging

dancers acknowledge the music with bows in style and graceful curtsies to partners and spectators

as intra-cosmic hyperactive disorder as though the universe never heard entropy

soft steps in rhythm one two three one two three tracing figure eights later latter letter Z

grand pausing the orchestra for a quarter beat not to über-anthropomorphize everything

rotating counterclockwise to an N in time in Don Giovanni there is a minuet

but how then could the post bang sound waves have been heard when no one could possibly have been where was I

perhaps it is wise to peek at modernity from the romantic sublime from time to time

transit moments in ¾ time

singing in the key of temporal dimensions while Venus crosses the solar blaze your last gaze between the red nodes swinging like a pendulum to the last particle of knowing reluctance I can’t wait longer than it takes to cross the space from womb to tomb to tell all the tales that flesh out the encumbrance of the dismal fate of ending must it be beating like a little distant drum so much for striving up to the minute minute when dusk dust is suspended and the sky is red

27

A Coat Of Paint

Ann Levison

Brushes dripping color cranberry mocha wheatstraw gold spread warmth over the walls covering your logical white comforting the old house from the inside out as if it were drinking tomato soup or hot cocoa while outside white still covers the sleeping fields stencils the branches blankets the place where you lie under pines.

Before long April too will pick up her brush spread a wet wash of color over pale sky red-budding maples newborn grass hiding for a time winter’s chilling white.

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Dyin’ Blues

Tom Lombardo

Delta Blues Dying, reports The New York Times.

Only four men, older than Satan, still play: one in a wheelchair uses a butter knife to bend notes on his hollow body Epiphone.

His piece of the Delta heard about That Salk Man too late, and nowadays he plays for busloads who email his blues far from the Mississippi’s summercracked silt. In Tokyo, when they hear it, they know. It’s something that bends them blue with a low, sucked-in wah-oooo . . .

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Road Kill [a,b,c] • Debbie Archer 4.5" x 3" • Black & White Photography

30

Corkscrew • Josh Branso n 33" x 44" x 7" • Wood and Metal

31

M. Bela Sas

had already passed two Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 80 but still could not find the turn that would take me to Jonny’s group home. The brown dash of my rented Camry showed 50 as I rushed through yellows to try to be a little more on time. Even for the important things in life, somehow I am late.

At last, I turned onto the unlabeled street. The car seemed to take up too much space in the middle of the road, which had no line to separate the coming and the going. Number 15 was the last house. I parked a little far from the curb and patted my nose with powder, then walked up the wheelchair ramp.

My hand gripped the brown paper bag with its elaborately wrapped present inside. The ribbons spilled over the top of the bag and brushed against my wrist. Almost 30 years had passed since the last time I saw my brother Jonny, who has Down’s Syndrome. He never came home from the hospital when he was born, and we visited him only once at his foster home when I was seven.

A big woman opened the door before I could ring.

“You must be Jonny’s sister. I’m Rochelle.” Her hand was a little clammy in mine. “Hey, everybody! Jonny, come out and meet your sister.” Rochelle wore an open windbreaker hanging out over her wide pants, and her blond hair was curly like a home permanent.

In the living room, the sounds of Star Wars emanated from the TV. A boy — a small man — in baggy blue jeans, about four feet tall, rocked back and forth from one untied Nike sneaker to the other. His hair stood straight up from his head.

“Rrrrrr,” he said. His lower lip protruded below his upper lip as he rumbled. He had the light hair of my mother when she was younger and her blue eyes.

“Yes, Jonny, this is your sister. Come over here and say hello.”

Two other ladies stood back and watched him. Rochelle introduced them as staff at the group home, Marisa and Diane. Diane, the manager, had a big wad of keys hanging from her jeans belt along with a cell phone. Marisa, young and thin, wore an open-midriff top.

“Rrrrrr,” said Jonny.

“Everybody loves Jonny,” said Rochelle to me.

“Oh, yes.” Diane’s keys trembled as she walked over to Jonny.

“He’s real smart. He’s mischievious.” She gave the word an extra i.

A plastic cup with ice and a straw in it sat on top of a strange brown podium. Jonny picked it up.

“That’s not for you,” said Rochelle. “Jonny loves Coolattas. Here — Diane, you’d better put that somewhere else.” Diane brought the

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cup into the office. Rochelle ushered me into the living room where Jonny circled.

“He’s wild for Coke too. The staff has to watch where we leave things,” said Diane. Coolattas, it turns out, are iced frappes from Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Rrrrrr,” said Jonny. With his back to me, he was flicking a black canvas strip, like the handle of a book bag cut to ten inches. He held it between thumb and middle finger and used his index finger to flip it up and down, up and down. The rhythm of his flicking doubled the rhythm of his rocking back and forth, and under it all ran the low rumble in his throat.

“Jonny, look! I brought something for you.” I held out the present.

He walked away from me toward a girl slouched in a wheelchair facing the TV. “You want to go play with Rhonda? Rhonda’s your buddy,” said Rochelle.

Jonny rocked from one foot to the other toward Rhonda. She also had that strong underbite, and her dark hair was pulled back from her face. She held her head low and to the side so her Jonny could not talk neck was almost but he could listen. horizontal, but she tilted her chin up toward him and he leaned over. There was about a foot of space between their faces.

“Here comes Eddie,” said Diane. Marisa, the delicate one, stood behind his wheelchair, but Eddie, lanky and balding, was wheeling himself. When he made it halfway into the room, Marisa flipped the brake so he would stop at a polite distance.

“Rhonda is Eddie’s girlfriend,” said Rochelle. “They’ve been together seventeen years.”

Eddie was not looking at Rhonda but rather at the brown paper bag I had brought with the blue and red and yellow gift-wrap ribbons flowing out over the top. He tried to turn his wheelchair and make it go forward toward the gift bag, but he was stuck because of the brake.

Jonny circled without looking at it.

“He’s shy,” explained Rochelle.

“Rrrrrr.”

“Oh Oh!” said Rhonda to Jonny, lifting her lips as if to be kissed.

She put one painted fingernail in her mouth.

“Look, Jonny, this is for you. This is for you,” I said. I smiled at Rochelle because Jonny wasn’t listening and this was our big first day, the grand reunion after almost 30 years, after I had searched for him on the Internet and in the Department of Mental Retardation records,

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spoken to case managers on the phone, made this appointment and flown all the way across the country, and had been late, which nobody mentioned. Because time here, I could see immediately, was another matter. It did not run at 50 miles an hour like on the Camry speedometer or at any real speed. Rather, Star Wars played in the background marking the hours of the rest of the world, the coming and going, days and nights, like a yellow line down the middle of the road that just wasn’t needed here. Here, time grew like Rhonda’s pained red nails, chipped and faded, and had to be painted back on.

Just now, Rhonda was looking at those fingers very closely, just a few inches from her eyes, and she was puckering her lips toward her own pretty hands: “Oh! Oh!”

Just then, as if to please me, Jonny turned to the brown bag with all those streaming ribbons the shop lady had curled for me with her big scissors in the back of the boutique. I had thought hard about what to get him, and in the end I had chosen a child’s harmonica, a long plastic rain stick with colored plastic balls that tippled and tapped from one segment of the stick to the next with a crescendo and a gentle running off, a long rainbow streamer for kitties, and phosphorescent stars and comets for the ceiling of his room. Jonny turned away again distracted by Diane who brought her Coolatta back into the living room. Obi-Wan-Kenobi moved his lips mutely on the TV screen. I sat next to Rhonda, who took a break from the contemplation of her nails to look at me and move her forehead toward my face.

“Jonny, come back, look what your sister got for you,” said Rochelle. It seemed a long time that we sat on the couch, eyes half-on and half-off the TV, waiting for Jonny to come back. Eddie strained one or two more times with his wheelchair toward the bag.

I settled into the vinyl of the couch in a slightly more relaxed pose than I really felt. After all, here I was, and I imagined that Rhonda did this every day, with Eddie and the others, watching but mostly not watching the Hollywood movie that was entertaining the staff. It was a Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day, and I could see the few leaves on the trees in the front yard shimmering.

“Here, Jonny, look!” I took the big box with all the presents out of the bag and brought it over to where Jonny now stood at the entrance to the office. He looked away from me, but I could feel a radiant awareness coming from the side of his temple that was tilted in my direction. He was waiting. I shook the box so that everything in it rattled. I put it in his small hands. Jonny’s fingers reached toward the ribbon, and I realized he would not be able to get the wrapping off by

himself. I took the present back, although at first his fingers wouldn’t let go. I slipped the ribbon in one direction over the corner of the box and, scissorless, started working it off in a perpendicular direction. It wouldn’t come off at first, so I had to wiggle at it and really work.

“Ta da!” I said, handing him the box covered in brown newsprint paper. He did not look again at the box or listen to the sound of his jiggling presents. Instead, he reached out to take the tangle of red and blue and yellow ribbons with its large loop handle, and he took the largest loop in his hand and held it up high above his head, his mouth agape. “Rrrrrr,” he said, dropping his back flicker strap. “Rrrrrr.”

Then Jonny began a waltz around the room, a lilting step with his right and then syncopated left-right, as if he had found the most beautiful Shirley Temple dancing partner with curls of tangled red, blue, and yellow hair. And he was taking her left, guiding and flipping and turning her right, to the suspenseful background hum of the muted TV set, and he held her high above him, worshipping her golden and blue curls. If you listened carefully, her ribbony tresses made an ever so slight whooshing sound as he circled the room.

Indeed, he was no longer looking at the ribbons but just listening to them, giving them a dip down and a pull up so they stretched long and bounced, and he tilted his temple toward the sound of their bounce, all awareness and readiness. From one foot to the other he rocked, and I sat low on the couch and followed the flight of these ribbons around the room, these ribbons that had cost me nothing while the expensive presents sat unopened on the hardwood floor. Meanwhile, Rhonda and Eddie and Diane watched Jonny’s circle, his minuet for two, the first dance of introduction and love at first sight with accidental wrapping from a fancy boutique. When he stopped for a moment, there was a smile on his face, a “mischievious” smile, and he met his ribbons faceon, as if it were not his own left arm that held them aloft. He rubbed his slightly wet, jutting chin into their curls.

I watched and felt the little ribbon curls wind around the spirals of Jonny’s swaying, like the spirals inside his mind that I could not see or hear. I felt as if I were very far away from this place, peering in through a peephole in time and space, noticing the curl of events that had made the connection between here and there, between me and this extended sphere of my life.

Sitting in a pool of tears, reaching out for colors. Takes one of the colors in his hand. It waves around in ripples. He holds it high; it flicks. Sadness flows down the ripply end of the ribbon, down the watery wave, up his arm to his heart. Then it ripples out again, so all there is left is the entry of colors in his eyes — red, blue, yellow without names — flowing into and out of one another in afternoon light.

Less words. Just sounds and feelings, the edges of a self.

Chik-chik-chik —sound of a bell on the end of a ribbon in a hand. Hand shaking. Hippley-bibbly-rzzzzhhh. Feeling in the hand, movement of arm beyond him toward him. Hmmm.

Still too many words. Peering in my peephole — outside in, and inside out: The ribbon — soft hush of sound a ribbon makes, after he takes it off a box, holding it by its big loops, crunching down its curls and corkscrews. Corkscrews like a little girl’s hair. Like a little girl he remembers. Shhh-shhh. Sound of colorful ribbons bouncing when you bounce them. Sound of sweet colors hissing, swishing in

Jonny could not talk, but he could listen. He could understand what people said. Only once had I read in a curriculum report of his having said anything; he said one word, “baby.”

Imagining inside his thinking, imagining my way in:

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air. Swish to her. Swish to the couch, sit, biting the ribbon. Taste the colors, taste the swishing. Corkscrew colors in his mouth. Takes in: mine. All for me.

“Don’t bite.” — Rochelle. “Don’t bite.” Bite more. Whole curls, missing curls from one time. Someone’s curls.

This part, the memories, I am imagining: Puts them in his mouth. Never saw him or visited him, except that once. Curls like her curls. Ribbon against his cheek. Tastes bad. Full of spit. Pulls it out.

Wicked laugh. Naughty. The naughty one. Cross legs. Double cross. Cross again.

Extra crossover, no one can cross as good as he crosses, open legs, hips loose and happy. Pulls knees to chest.

Jonny had brought the bundle of ribbons over to where Rhonda was staring at her fingernails from up very close. He kept the ribbons wrapped under one arm, and he picked up his black canvas flicker — why have one when you can have two? He steadily flicked up and flicked down: adventure and safety, strangers and family, colors and the gentle return to the piece of strap he always kept with him, because although it might not be beautiful it was his, only his, and it was just right. I thought for a moment and wondered if I would ever get to see his reaction to the other presents inside the box, if there was one. I could see Rochelle still looking at them on the floor. I thought she was probably checking to see if I minded or to see if she should get him to open it. But I was watching Jonny’s legs as he cradled the two sets of toys, the ribbons and the black strap, and now he was coming over again to sit in the middle of the couch where I sat, between me and the house manager, Diane.

Jonny leaned into the big ring of keys hanging from Diane’s pocket and put his head on her arm.

“Oh, Jonny,” she said, and she started rubbing against the fluffy top of Jonny’s crew cut with her hand. Jonny leaned into her hand and

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let her rub. He leaned his whole upper body into hers, like a child or a kitten, let himself be scratched and preened. She let her hand run over his face, over his chin where it jutted, and over his ears until he closed his eyes.

Head. Head.

“Oh, Jonny—” she said again, and he raised his Nike sneakers up in the air, and they wavered there, uncertain where to go, until they came to rest across my lap, his blue jeans crossing over my black jeans.

Rochelle immediately asked, “Are you OK?” from where she stood in the corner, and I nodded yes. Jonny crossed one leg over the other and opened the knee out away from me in half-lotus, so the sneaker was near my face. I had to take his legs and pick them up and move them over a bit, which meant I was touching him, ...whispering loudly, lifting his sneakers, just once: and shifting the angle “BABY!” of the cross of his legs. Now they were resting directly across mine, and he was stretched across the couch, feet on me, bottom on the cushion, head on Diane, and he looked happy.

There are moments like this when you know just what to do. A part of me was still caught up in watching Jonny, the Jonny who clung to the ribbons I’d brought, proof that I was not just watching from a distance but had added myself to this scene. Another part wondered what Rochelle was thinking; I could see her watching me and I was watching her watching, now sitting under Jonny’s legs. She must have been thinking that it was nice, a relief even, to know Jonny had a sister, but she might also have been wondering where I had been all these years.

In Jonny’s curriculum report, which Diane had sent me, it said that Jonny had spoken his one word to a speech therapist, who had

been testing his abilities and trying to devise a communications board for him with symbols for hungry, thirsty, tired, bathroom, electric hairbrush, and other necessities. He had said nothing to her at all until finally they entered a room with a real crib in it. At the bottom of the crib, he had seen a tiny baby doll. Jonny had looked over the edge, lifted the doll in his hands and threw it down hard on the floor, whispering loudly, just once: “BABY!” I pictured that moment now as I sat on the vinyl couch under his legs and his Nike sneakers — pictured him throwing down the plastic doll with all his might. Was it rage that had pushed up inside him at that moment — at the home, and mother and siblings he had lost without knowing them, or at the next foster family he had lost at twelve because he had not been toilet trained fast enough, or at the ugly institution where he had banged his head against the wall every night until he had to be restrained? Here on my knees was the baby my grandmother had carried on her narrow lap from Alaska where he was born to New York in an airplane, and in New York had dropped him at an orphanage. Was it a great rage that unlocked his tongue that one and only time in front of the stranger who had provoked him with her arsenal of verbal tests and tricks? And then: why wouldn’t you be silent? Why wouldn’t you forget, almost completely, how to speak, except once only according to the existing

records, and who knows how many other times alone in the dark, with the one word, the one word that said so much, yet communicated perhaps nothing he could now use?

“Oh, Jonny,” I said, like Diane, in her words, and looked at him, so tentative and grown up, relaxed on our laps, and I reached out to touch the top of his fluffy hair where it stood straight up as he lay on her shoulder. It was a long reach, but I could reach him, and he shifted over so I would have a better angle to get the sides and the top. Very gently I let my hand run over the tips of that hair that was straighter than mine and thicker. For a moment, I even forgot about Rochelle watching me as Eddie sat facing the TV set and Diane spoke softly to Rhonda, and I let my hand run up and over and down and back, not quite touching the scalp but just the hair tips. I put my other hand on his knee where the yellow part of the ribbons tangled through the black strap, both forgotten. I let my pinky finger curl around the yellow spiral, and I did not speak.

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More Of Us At Eleven

John Grey

There’s a murder on t.v.

Shot down in cold blood and the cameras were there to catch it, these modern technological wonders that never filmed a crocus, never say “gold finches at the feeder, more at eleven.”

Better some movie star mating in a car than a whole forest full of chattering hormones, of April fecundity.

Rather some manic disease with close-ups of insidious symptoms than the long, slow scourge and heal of seasons.

The camera’s range is narrow as a pistol’s, zooms in on targets only.

The weather is only worthy of a headline if it slaughters.

If it rains, it rains on blacktop.

In drought, a pan across a sad deserted lawn.

Fire may smoke from mountain-top for an instant but lenses can’t get to the faces of marooned householders quick enough.

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Nature is only nature if it affects us, if it costs.

Five years ago, a pileated woodpecker attacked transmission poles, shorted the power, blanked the news it might have briefly made.

Raleigh Stripes • Alex O’Neill 11" x 14" • Digital Photography

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Inside The Canopy

John Gosslee

After learning how to hold my breath for days

I walk into the ocean,

As the waves grow higher, I am pulled in,

Fathoms down stingrays accompany me.

A dolphin flanks my left, a shark guards my right,

An octopus behind me,

And a thousand sea horses in front:

As one we course through volcanic vents — Where tube worms massage and a school of glow fish

Magnified by clear minnows

Remind us to continue; quickening

Songs from mammoth whales, Knots away, below boat sails and oil ship spills,

Broadside submarines and coral,

Awakening serpents of the sea

That want to hold us in their bellies.

By morning light in shallow water, the whales —

Are in sacrificial protest

For one simple quiet day on earth, Mentality united, we try to coax them

Back into the glistening tide,

They will not retreat from their choices, Like the mounted swordfish on the wall

That allowed itself to be hooked,

As the meandering fish and banded lobsters, Bucket crabs and butterfly shrimp —

Alive to be consumed,

On the journey to one silent day.

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Image of the City • L e e Wa l l e r

30" x 22" • Watercolor, Acr ylic , Charcoal, Ink, Carbon

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Dermis • Sh e l l ey L i n e b e r ge r 39" x 30" • Oil and Latex on Canvas

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Radios and 10¢ Movies

Carol Hamilton

With one ear pressed against the silken nubs of the cloth stretched over a speaker and two eyes taking in again and again the flickery truths of Hollywood, I dodged the sound effect man’s cascade of stuff from an overfull closet and his bullets, too, died a thousand heroic deaths and kissed hundreds of handsome men and still had to dry the dishes.

But I shone on my surroundings with borrowed glitter and glamour and broke a thousand hearts without even trying.

The world was never simple, even then.

Big, hairy jungle tarantulas crept up my prairie-dried sheets at night, SS men kicked in the front door, and I pulled my baby brother’s crib close as protection from the evil-breathed darkness of the closet. Imagination is a costly gift, one paid for on the installment plan, and once in awhile, a huge, past due notice comes to shake off the subtle balancing between worlds one learns with practice.

Yet those borrowed costumes were as form-fitting as the home-sewn dresses my mother made, and sometimes, I still come out all high kick and swagger.

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For The Popular Mind Set • L e e a n n H a r ge t t 51" x 18" x 12" • Fibers, Mixed Media

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Slug • Daniel R. Ska l a k 8.5" x 11" • Digital/Graphite

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Tuesday Night Jazz

Barbara D. Pieroni

Three nameless men with sweet hands engaging smiles — one drums skin, two slide their fingers into slow-rising simmering tenor notes, strum unrelenting riffs, pluck deep-throated bass, all three side-slip me at once, and long after they’ve left me exhausted, satisfied, puddled on the floor, their sultry jazz plays on — still making love to me.

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Even This Door Must Open

Fred Ferraris

Remind me, my friend. Do you still dream of being the Pacific bunking into Tokyo Bay? Of reassembling the temporary language you spoke as a child, the one which contained a poem begging for a shovel to dig it out of the muck?

The weather is clearing. Another refugee died today while trying to collect his food. He walked into a fusillade of large two-handed swords. Never experienced an apple tree, let alone a barren hill. The soldiers who opened fire were firing blind. There are many who laugh at coy expressions such as amiable evil. I’ll send this one to your family in Afghanistan.

Am I crazy or has everything happened already? The blind cabinetmaker completed his latest project today. He doesn’t see the errors he’s made.

Eggs roll off his table top, his cabinet doors don’t swing. I attempted to blow breath back into his lungs. He tasted only blood and foam.

His brother the one-eyed architect will not be coming back. He is afraid I will crush and flatten his brother. He’s a lonely old man with a black patch on his one good eye. His fears are not my concern.

Yesterday, while you were at your desk in the city, a tour bus full of dead people stopped outside your house. The dead had lost their luggage in a fire at the tarred beach by the lake. I told them they could use the cabinetmaker’s tools to build new clothing. We found the cabinetmaker in his shop, blubbering about the amnesty he claims you promised. As he spoke he was slathering his naked body with human shit.

I wonder sometimes, how well do you really know him?

Colors, no matter what your science teacher told you, are nothing but filaments in empty space. Not the gaily painted pot of meat you lived in when your brother was a young architect. Sixty years of barbed wire, field tents, and unadulterated small-print — what kind of postmodern epic is that?

My friend, we must prepare for the present. It is due to arrive any second.

You want the rage pulled out from between your eyes? Underneath his coat of shit the blind cabinetmaker’s body is covered head to toe with abrasions and lacerations.

He claims I did this to him, but I swear I only dealt him a few small cuts and bruises.

The blind cabinetmaker’s wife has never married. She has given birth to another orphan.

Whatever the cabinetmaker says about her, I disagree. I cannot define the limits. I have no blacks or whites. That war is over. Now begins the rehabilitation. Even I will surrender. Even you who are notoriously expendable. Even you who are seduced by curtained dreams, you who stand and falter, wavering in the doorway.

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Madness • Shelley Lineberger 30" x 40" • Acr ylic on Canvas

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Lost In Its Translation • L e e a n n H a r ge t t 5.5" x 7.5" x 0.5" • Mixed Media

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At 40 — 17

Susan Benjamin

At 40, with my purse stolen, my keys, credit cards, IDs gone, my whole life open like a wound to the dirty hands of a stranger, I recall how tough you were at 17, how long-haired, beautiful, and lean, recall how fiercely you lived, how you hated your mother, and recall the story buried by years you’ve never known… about the night you drove your mother’s car from Jana Ugone’s and got in an accident with a man you didn’t know and exchanged addresses as anyone would only he got to your house first pulled you from the car beat you dragged you off to an icy lake and raped you threw you naked in the snow and returned and murdered and raped and raped you and left you to the snow to winter to dogs… unimaginable…

At 40, with the distance of college and jobs and men and a baby and some stranger with my key ring and IDs, I wonder about your own mother, the one you hated, and think how all that would have changed, you would have loved her, would have come home for holidays, would have loved her, would have called to talk about the kids, would have loved her, and argued and loved her.

You, long hair waving like banners, at 17.

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Untitled • J a n e l l e G e a b e r 8" x 10" • Digital Collage

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Nathan Thoma

You could say that their marriage began when Roy said he couldn’t take off his jacket. He was stuck inside it, literally tied in by a web of strings. At that moment, the young man in the bright red blazer became for Alice a harmless child, and a feeling shifted inside of her. Like an ice cube melting, releasing the smallest flood of forgiving warmth.

Blind Date. Synonymous with the words Bad Idea. It was confirmed when he showed up in a jacket and tie. The jacket was solid primary red. Like a sandwich board painted with the words Don’t leave your house! Stay where you are!

Alice didn’t even want to be set up. She was still nursing wounds from her last boyfriend, a bad boy sculptor in tattered jeans and dark green tattoos, who would come and go at the most random hours of the night. For two years she’d put up with his erratic ways and sudden outbursts, until two weeks ago, when he suddenly told her, I’ve had enough of you, once and for all!

Alice’s roommate Mary insisted on setting up Alice with her boyfriend’s cousin, who had transferred to their college at the start of the semester. Mary told her it would help her get over “that shit Wexler.”

“He’s nice, from what Gary told me. And it’d be good for you, just to see someone new,” Mary said, as Alice buzzed in the man she was about to meet. Alice was leaning against the wall as she pressed the intercom button, showing Mary a look of pained obligation.

“I don’t want him to be good for me,” Alice told her. “And what’s his name again anyway?”

“Roy. Roy Jenkins. Practice it a couple of times before you open the door.”

Alice said the name aloud repeatedly, in differing intonations. She opened the door on the fourth chanting of “Roy,” to find Roy himself standing there, holding his hand up, poised to knock, wearing his special blazer.

First he took her to a local pizza place. At least she was dressed for it. Jeans, a T-shirt, and bunned-up hair. Her fashion statement was Let’s get this over with and not make a bigger deal than necessary. What he was saying with his outfit she had no idea.

“Anchovies and pineapple?” he asked, popping his head up from the menu with an unrepressed smile. Roy had a largish head with ruddy, round cheeks, the kind of face that couldn’t help but shine with the ingenuousness of an eleven year old.

“Sure,” Alice said as flatly as possible.

While they waited for their food, he proceeded to ask her questions, politely, making small talk. She wished she had brought a tape recorder so that she could pop in a tape called First Date, hit play, and be done with it. She could leave it on the table while she got a smoke at the bar. Which is how she felt now, as though she were somewhere else, looking out at this strange man through a tube, ten feet back.

She scooted deeper into the booth, leaning her back onto the exposed brick, placing one foot up on the vinyl seat. Her replies to his friendly inquiries were lazy, trying to encourage him as little as possible, careful to tread just shy of the line of rudeness. Apparently oblivious to her bored reluctance, he listened intently, sitting with hands folded neatly on the table, his eyebrows bent with interest.

She thought that if she did not ask him any questions, somehow their date might take half as long. Or at least she would be spared the burden of learning who he was and how he thought of himself.

But he supplied her with such information anyway, eagerly adding it in as though surprised at how much they had in common. You’re a sophomore in studio art? I’m a Jr. in the engineering department.

You’re from Minneapolis? I’m from the outskirts of St. Louis. That’s why it probably seems like I talk a little funny. We say ‘Y’all’ and ‘Soda.’ I mean you folks up here sound a little funny to me too you know. It’s that Norwegian influence. Hot-dish, instead of casserole.

Rubber-binder, instead of rubber band.

“You seem a little distracted,” he said finally.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Perhaps a little magic would cheer you up.”

“What?”

“Would it surprise you if I told you I had eyes on the back of my head?”

“What are you talking about?”

He sat up straight and began to speak as though he were reading from cue cards.

“Some people are so good at noticing things that we say they have eyes on the back of their head. You might not believe this, but I’ve got eyes on the back of my head too. Magic eyes. Right about here.” He reached up and pointed to a spot just below the base of his skull.

She looked on in disbelief.

He asked her for a quarter, which she supplied. He held the quarter to the back of his head and recited its date. He gave it back

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for her to check. It was correct. She wasn’t sure which she found more annoying, the trick itself or the fact that she didn’t know how it worked. It was decided when he finished by adding, “With eyes in the back of my head, I don’t always know where I’m going, but I do know where I’ve been.”

It was almost too much.

He then got out a deck of cards and did a whole bit. Three Card Monte, Chase the Queen, Pimpernel Jacks. He announced the names as he did them, one after the other. Spreading the deck out in an arc, he made it flip back and forth in a wave while seeming to barely touch it. He let her shuffle. He let her examine the deck. He always found her card, sometimes in strange places. One time it was stuck on the window facing in toward them, on the outside of the glass. Her torpor wore off as she became determined to catch him fouling up.

He let her write her name on her card and put it in her purse.

It turned up two tricks later. He did some conjuring tricks. He made a matchbook move around on the back of his hand through goofy incantations. He used a handkerchief and colored tissues, which he pulled out of his jacket. He cut a string and made it whole again.

She was half-expecting to see a dove fly out of a glass of milk at any second. Holding to her frustration, she refused to give into even a grain of the child-like fascination that tempted her.

The waitress arrived with their pie.

“Ahh, the pizza!” he said. He served them each a slice.

Alice was practically angry by this point.

“What’s the matter? Is it the anchovies?”

“To be honest I find them disgusting.”

“Then I’ll make them disappear!”

He grabbed the anchovies off of her slice, and the half of the pizza nearest her, one at a time. With each, he crossed his hands elaborately, then turned them upward, to show that they were empty.

“You know, I’m actually just not too hungry. But thanks. For making them disappear.”

“Oh. OK.” He looked at her with a moment of concern, a face of half befuddlement, half resign. He turned to his pizza, which he ate in big bites, without looking up.

She wished she were hungry, if nothing else, to fill up what was at this point a pathetic lack of exchange between them. She could think of nothing she felt like saying, and he had fallen silent, involved in his shiny strings of cheese and slippery toppings. Alice decided to get drunk while Roy ate. She ordered a series of whisky sours, casually downing one after another.

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Alice noticed that there was a small, stage-like area across the room from them, against the one large wall. A performer began to set up as Alice drank, a promising distraction.

The singer was a young woman who sang sad folk songs.

She strummed her guitar and sang about lost loves, foundered

relationships, and the elusiveness of world peace. She was not very good. Alice and Roy both sat and watched her, even after Roy had finished eating, letting themselves sink into the awful soundtrack of their date.

They walked home in silence through the humid night air, taking the route that led along the pond near her building. It was only May, but sweltering already.

The hot, wet air sloshed together with Alice’s increasing drunkenness in a blurry mix. Roy was looking abject, shoulders slouched and hands pocketed. He must be roasting in that polyester jacket, she thought. She asked him why he didn’t take it off.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s connected to the inside of my shirt by several strings. And parts are sort of sewn together for holding things. Some of the tricks,” he said.

Curls of feeling unfurled in her, motherly fingers of pity and affection. She saw him practicing alone in the mirror, the hokey lines and showmanship. She saw him suiting up, carefully rigging himself into his magical red blazer. And she had been so awful to him, hardly giving him an inch of herself. She laughed in sympathy, she couldn’t help it. He looked down in embarrassment.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, and reached out for his arm.

She had the urge to kiss him on the cheek. He looked like a boy who was on the verge of outgrowing a bad outfit his mother had purchased for him the year before. A rather giant boy, at that.

Roy pulled back. “Wait,” he said. “I’ve still got those anchovies in my sleeve.”

He walked down to the lake and shook them out, snapping his forearm out repeatedly, like a fly fisherman.

As the strange man in the red jacket stood at the edge of the lake, flipping little fishes out into the water, she had an equally strange thought. What if he and I ended up married? What would it be like, he and I? They walked back to her building together, only a few blocks away.

Roy was quiet. A gravity appeared to be settling into him. His face was drawn and pale.

Alice’s mood continued to be buoyed from the sudden deluge of alcohol. Her feeling of drunkenness was still increasing, along with a rising tide of compassion and affiliation, inching her closer to him. She curled her arm around his, and smiled when he looked up at her in surprise. He smiled back, gently, with a look that communicated total understanding, allowing them to fully share each other’s worlds for the first time.

At her door she asked him if he still had that card with her name on it.

“Sure,” he said.

“Well aren’t you going to let me finish it? I didn’t get a chance to put my number on it.”

He took out the card and black marker without pretense. As she held the card against her doorframe and scrawled across it in big sloppy numbers, she realized that they both knew that he already had her number, but finished writing it for him anyway.

Handing the card back, she told him, “So now you can call me.

See?” “Thanks,” Roy said earnestly, as he took the card. “I will.”

Alice closed the door, and leaned back on it. As the sound of Roy’s footsteps faded into the hall, a sinking feeling inched through her body,

replacing the liquid optimism that had filled her. What was she doing?

What would it take to get even with Wex? Would falling for a pathetic and ingratiating science major do the trick? The pit in her stomach was telling her that she was going to try it either way. Wex, it rhymes with sex… Wexler had told her that, proudly, after their first time together.

What rhymes with Roy, she wondered. Poor little boy?

Alice could feel herself moving toward Roy already, into the pull of someone willing to show her attention. Someone who seemed the diametric opposite of Wexler, an antidote perhaps. Roy seemed like he would certainly take her. He would probably take anyone, really.

It didn’t seem like he would even know the difference, conveniently allowing Alice to continue with men who had no idea who she was.

Familiar territory. That was something, at least. Enough, as it happens, to stumble into something she’d never have the heart to get out of.

He was late again. This was the third time in a row Roy had been late to meet Alice. He’d have to find some compensation to present to her, a token of appeasement. Walking with quick, focused strides, he kept his eyes roving, looking out for something to give to her. Her annoyance was generally powerless in the face of such gestures.

Roy charged into the wreathy bushes that ringed a bronze statue near the center of campus. It was after eleven, and with no one around, he supposed he might find some suitable flowers in there.

Beholding the statue for a moment, Roy took in the power of its spectacle. The sculpture was of a military man, mounted on a large, muscular horse. The man peered out, surveying the quadrangle, emanating the sublime confidence of a conqueror.

Crouching next to the statue, with one hand on the horse’s hind quarter, Roy himself scanned the quad. He plunged down and hurriedly plucked a few pansies, daises, and a handful of violets, trying not to wreck them as he swiped at their stems violently.

An idea occurred to him as he hurried toward the art studios, where Alice was working. Stopping to lean against a brick building with a poorly lit façade, Roy unbuttoned his pants, and stuffed the flowers into his crotch. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he thought. Alice had more than once told him about her favorite part of the novel, in which Oliver had decorated Constance’s pubic hair with spring violets.

Roy tried to spruce his own flowers back up, after nearly ruining them, using his underwear to hold them in a rough arrangement, and closed them in with his fly. The prickly leaves and itchy stems bit into his more sensitive areas. He waddled out with a swift swagger toward the studio building.

Roy had no idea why Alice was willing to go out with him. He knew it couldn’t have been who he was at his core that she liked. Thus he judged it was best to keep her guessing. Surprises had worked well so far.

He correctly surmised that his card tricks and sleight of hand routine would wear thin quickly, so he planned other ways of being unpredictable. On their second date, he told her a dirty joke as they were about to say goodbye. It involved some nuns, a snake, and a birdbath. To his surprise, the gambit worked: she laughed, and then waited for him to kiss her. Twice he set up romantic dinners in improbable places, leading her to a card table decked out with candles,

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wine, and a three-course meal. The first dinner was on the rooftop of an abandoned warehouse, timed to coincide with the shifting colors of the evening sky. The next dinner was in the underground tunnel that linked the freshman dorms to the cafeteria, which was closed down for the summer. After finding a way to sneak in, Roy prepped the space by unscrewing all of the florescent bulbs, and lit the way with a path of votive candles. Alice called him an incurable romantic, and after a couple of bottles of wine, let him take her right there on the cold cement floor.

He knew he was not a romantic, not someone who readily gave in to spontaneity or abandon. But he worked around this deficit with his careful and relentless forethought. Lately he had been running out of ideas. Things were getting baroque.

For her birthday at summer’s end, he had greeted her in his performance tuxedo, the one he still used to make a few extra bucks doing birthday shows and graduations, complete with his beaver-skin top hat. He blindfolded her, and gently removed her clothing, which she abetted with willing adjustments of her limbs. Naked, he led her to sit in a wooden chair in his small kitchen. He spiraled a chain of silk scarves around her so delicately that she squealed with shock when he tugged it tight and she found herself bound to the chair. He slowly tipped the chair back, all the way to the ground, and dripped cold milk on her patches of exposed skin.

“You bastard! What are you doing!” she cried, trying not to let her laughter through. He placed her birthday present on her stomach. The kitten purred as it licked at her belly button with its scratchy tongue.

Though there was no evidence to believe so, Roy usually assumed that Alice would cut him loose upon his next visit. As he strode down the hallway of the art studios, looking for her in each of the windowed doors as he went, he wondered how he might be greeted, if the specially packaged bouquet would be enough. The plant matter in his pants was irritating him to the point of pain. To make it worse, the stimulation had caused him an erection.

Each room provided a glimpse of what seemed various studentartist clichés. A wiry young man in paint-spattered T-shirt surveyed his half-finished canvas thoughtfully, while smoking an unfiltered cigarette.

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A red-headed girl in overalls held a pencil up at arm’s length, turning it at different angles, a transit for her still life of two sunflowers.

Somewhere around the fifth room, an older man was drawing the figure of a young, nude woman using charcoal. Roy could see the man’s sketch pad, but not the subject. He knew that a real, live naked woman must have existed right outside his field of view by the way the man kept looking up as he added detail to the drawing. Roy lingered there, held by the lure of the unseen woman, watching her curves take form as the man touched and smeared the graphite with his fingers, adding roundness to her body. Having been raised a strict Catholic, Roy was intensely ambivalent about his participation in this clearly perverted indulgence (a Peeping Tom, boner and all) but couldn’t quite pull himself away.

Unconsciously, Roy reached down and pressed hard on the top of his penis with the butt of his palm, trying to get rid of his erection by pushing it back down. He heard the click of footsteps approaching from around the corner.

He adjusted himself and carried on, walking with his hands in his pockets in an attempt to obscure the tenting of his pants.

Alice was hard at work in a studio halfway down the next corridor. Roy hesitated before going in, seeing that she was standing very still, and appeared to be concentrating intently. She stood in profile to the large canvas that she was working on, with both hands gathered just below her chin, and her head turned toward her work. The over-sized canvas was dominated by a rather messy stripe of red and purple in the center, which was lined on each side with blue. He wondered if it was supposed to be about her menstrual period. Being an engineering student, Roy didn’t claim to know much about art interpretation, but he did know that generally one began by looking for genitals.

She wound up like a hardball pitcher and flung a sponge sopping with paint toward the painting. A starry white splotch splashed into the middle of the red area. She flicked the loose paint off her gloved hands, and repeated this twice more. Music, which sounded distinctly like the National Anthem, emanated from within the room. Alice was wearing a baseball cap. He wondered what baseball had to do with her period. Opening the door quietly, Roy crept in.

Alice heard him and turned with a start.

“Oh, it’s you! You scared me.”

He stood with his back leaning against the door, hands behind his back. “I’m late.”

“I know you are. What do you think?” she asked, looking back at her work in progress.

He paused, looking it over, knowing she would give him more to go on. If he waited, she usually gave clues as to how she expected him to react.

“It’s called Star Mangled Banner.”

“I like the title.”

The portable phonograph in the corner reached the end of the 45, and, in repeat mode, started the anthem over again, as though on cue.

“It’s an inversion of a mainstream symbol normally used to prop up the manufactured thinking of oppression, now subverted through a mock act of patriotic ritual.”

“That’s great.”

“I’m going to light it on fire,” she said as she peeled off her blue rubber dish gloves and dropped them to the floor.

She approached him seductively.

Her body meeting his, she asked, “Well what do we have here?”

She rubbed his bulging pants like a pregnant belly.

“Oh just a little something I picked up along the way.”

“Did you now? Well let’s have a look.”

Looking him in the eye, she unzipped his pants. Delighted laughter peeled out of her when the bent up flowers poked out.

“You shouldn’t have,” she said in an affected voice.

He smiled. She pulled his underwear a little further down, and knelt down to spruce up the flowers, arranging them around his own straightened stem. After she had them organized to her satisfaction, she took him gently into her mouth. Roy reached behind and clicked the lock shut with his right hand.

On the nearby work table, amidst his jerky thrusts, Roy listened to the pompous marching music that streamed out of the record player, which repeated every two and a half minutes. The build-up of the previous half-hour had him worked into a desperate froth, and with each motion he tried to move further into her. He clung to her tightly, hearing the sighs of his own efforts as distinctly as hers. He wanted to climb up through himself and hide inside her, where she could not eject him, deep and away from his nervous wish to please her. He wanted to ball himself up within the warm encasement of her womb, where he would be protected from the painful split between who he was and what he needed, between himself and her. He wanted to live there, sleeping safely, where she’d be forced to feed him half of

everything she ever ate. They could grow old together that way, he knew it, if only he could find a way to dissolve inside her very veins, and become the nothing that he knew he really was.

Roy would spend the next couple of decades this way, chasing after her, trying to climb inside, to span a distance that would only grow greater, inches every year. Until one day, Alice would look at him from the other end of the couch, and ask him something rather ordinary, about an upcoming TV program, or tell him that they were out of lettuce. At that point, looking into her black and drawn face, he would see how alone she must have been all along. What a startling realization that was going to be.

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The New New World

Barbara Tramonte

John Steinbeck forgets the oddments of Cannery Row, the nipples on checkout change mats, and the big hearts that people once had.

He looks in bewilderment as 40-year-olds smoke like spies beside skyscrapers.

John Steinbeck wrestles with a url Charles Bukowski doesn’t eat low-carb foods mainly because his father beat him and strapped him to a toilet.

When he goes to bookstores he is surprised to see that bookstores look like supermarkets, divided into kosher and non-kosher neighborhoods where no skulking intellectuals slouch.

Charles Bukowski doesn’t want latté.

He wants coffee with grounds floating in it, American coffee, and girls who slide down fire poles and do the whole crew without whining.

He can’t smoke anywhere in New York City but Henry Chinowski hates that no sky city anyway.

Good news from the medical front: Hearts have grown small and healthy.

Planed eyes need no longer look in.

Men are more like women and women are more like men (They now share more diseases).

Communities are places that cohere through ad campaigns.

A friend in medical school reports, “Surgery is no longer bloody.”

Government works hard to sterilize war.

After that’s accomplished, it won’t be so painful to watch on demand.

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Soup • Alex O’Neill

11" x 14" • Digital Photography

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Literature: Susan Benjamin

Susan’s creative writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Mississippi Review and Oxford Magazine while her commentaries on writing and other matters are syndicated through Knight Ridder Tribune. Publications from The Wall Street Journal to The Chicago Tribune have featured her approach to writing. As a speaker, she has appeared on CNN and National Public Radio.

Fred Ferraris

Born in 1946, Fred was active in the poetry scenes in Northern California and New York in the 1970’s. Between 1977 and 1996 he dedicated himself to family life and dharma practice. He lives with his family in Lyons, Colorado.

John Gosslee

Born in Mississippi, John has lived in several states and abroad. He now resides in Italy, outside the city of Venice. Travel is a wonderful way to shape a well-rounded view of the world. He wants his poetry to speak to as many people in as many places as possible.

John Grey

John’s latest book is What Else Is There from Main Street Rag. He has been published recently in Pearl, Hubbub, Writer’s Bloc and The Journal Of The American Medical Association.

Carol Hamilton

Carol was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma 1995-97 and received the Oklahoma Book Award for her chapbook of poetry, Once The Dust.

She received a Southwest Book Award in 1988 for a children’s novel, The Dawn Seekers, and a new poetry chapbook, Vanishing Point, was recently published by Main Street Rag Press. She is a former public elementary school teacher in gifted education, taught at Rose State College and the University of Central Oklahoma. She is a storyteller, writer and translator at a clinic for women and children.

Ann Levison

Ann was the editor of the Harvard Post, an independent weekly, for 25 years, during which she wrote news articles, feature articles, humor columns, profiles, reviews, and opinions. It wasn’t until after she had retired that she undertook the craft of poetry — a change that has proved to be as gratifying as it was unexpected.

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Tom Lombardo

Tom received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of MD Writers, Inc., and he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of WebMD, the health and medical Web site. He has served as Executive Editor of Physician’s Weekly and Executive Producer of Medical News Network. His work experience also includes science writing. He holds a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering and Material Sciences from Carnegie-Mellon University and an M.S. in Journalism from Ohio University. He currently teaches courses in Creative Writing and in Art Theory at the Atlanta College of Art.

John Marvin

John is a retired social studies teacher and has recently earned a Ph.D. in English at the SUNY at Buffalo. He has four poetry books in manuscript and one on the drawing boards. His paper “Joyscience” is in a recent James Joyce Quarterly, and “Finnegans Wake III.3 and the Third Millennium: The Ghost of Modernisms Yet to Come,” is in Hypermedia Joyce Studies.

Barbara D. Pieroni

In Barbara’s lifetime, she has been a buyer for a major department store, store manager for two other major retailers, a customer service manager, and a paralegal. She now has turned her attention back to her one true passion: the crafting of words. She draws inspiration from her own experiences as well as from the world around her.

Jennie Ray

Jennie is from Greene, NY and recently graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton with a degree in creative writing as well as cinema. She has been previously published in The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Surrender to the Moon.

Russell Rowland

Russell is a Connecticut Yankee living in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. A lifelong poet, he has been submitting tenaciously for the last eleven years, with the success that often accompanies persistence. He hikes, drinks Moxie, despairs of the Red Sox.

M. Bela Sas

M. Bela Sas received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Japanese from Yale in 1995. She is an Associate Professor of comparative literature and film studies at UC Berkeley. Her book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, was released by Stanford University Press in 2001. She has studied fiction and memoir writing with Ellen Bass, Joan-Marie Wood, Ann Joslin Williams, and Maureen Howard. She has published numerous articles in English, French, and Japanese on Japanese modern literature, experimental theater, and dance.

Hannah Selinger

Hannah holds a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, as well as a M.F.A. from Emerson College in Creative Writing, where she was awarded the Presidential Merit Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Avant Garde, Bullfight, and Stork.

Nathan Thoma

Nathan is 34 years old. Originally from Minnesota, he currently lives in New York City, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Fordham University.

Crystal S. Thomas

Crystal is a graduate of the Indiana University M.F.A. program.

Currently, she is at work on a Ph.D. in postcolonial studies, but spends way too much time watching Project Runway reruns. Her fiction has been awarded honorable mention in the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Competition and a fellowship to the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony.

Barbara Tramonte

Art: Joshua Branson

Joshua is a Graphics major who is also interested in sculptural forms and materials. Corkscrew is one piece in a series of sculptures.

Janelle Geaber

Janelle is Rhode Island born, but came to North Carolina to attend UNC Charlotte. After graduation, she plans to move to New York City or Los Angeles. Photography has been her passion in life and she hopes to continue capturing this crazy, chaotic world one snapshot at a time.

Leeann Hargett

Leeann is currently a junior at UNC Charlotte pursuing a B.A., focusing on Ceramics, Fibers and Graphic Design. She is uncertain as to what direction her ambitions will lead her, but is confident that she will be able to succeed in future endeavors, regardless of their nature.

Barbara is currently an English language arts professor at Empire State College, where she teaches in the Master of Arts Teaching Program.

She also teaches in the Clemente Course in the Humanities, sponsored

by Bard College. She was a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for ten years and she has owned a children’s bookstore in Brooklyn Heights.

Heather Opal Kimsey

Jean Wiggins

Shelley Lineberger

Since 1984 Jean has been a member of The Academy of American Poets. In the spring of 1998 she gave a reading at University of North Alabama during their Writers’ Festival. In April 2002 she attended a literary festival on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In June 1998 and in June 2002 she attended the Indiana University Writers’ Conference and participated in the conferee readings. In November 2003, she attended the North Carolina Writers’ Network Workshops and Fall Conference in Wilmington, North Carolina. She attends readings by writers who come to Huntsville.

Also: Ervisa Martino (bio on staff page) Cherish Wilson

Heather was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on September 21, 1983. She began to study art in high school and furthered her studies at UNC Charlotte. She has earned a B.F.A. with a concentration in Painting and a minor in Art History.

Shelley is a non-traditional student who returned to UNC Charlotte to finish her degree. She always loved drawing and painting, however it was not until her return to school that she discovered her passion for ceramics. She is currently a senior completing a B.F.A. degree in painting and ceramics. She uses bold colors and expressive marks to express her inner self. Her pieces are moments of her life.

Paola Mateos

Paola is a fifth year senior currently pursuing a B.F.A. in both Graphic Design and Photography, as well as a minor in Art History.

She hopes to obtain a career in music marketing, as one of her passions lies in music. She will be graduating in May of 2008, and she is actively finding ways to fuse both her design and photography together.

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Mina Nelson

Mina is a recent graduate of UNC Charlotte, with a B.A. in Art, and is an international student from Bulgaria. She is planning on returning home by the end of the year to look for a job as a Graphic Designer/Illustrator.

Alex O’Neill

Alex is a sophomore Art major at UNC Charlotte, who spends what little free time he does have working as the Editor-in-Chief of The University Times, UNC Charlotte’s student newspaper. When he is not busy breaking news, he enjoys taking photos of anyone or thing that will allow him to, including himself.

Jesse Eric Schmidt

Jesse is an artist. His exploration of the characteristics of beauty is expressed through theories that question normality, motivation, and time. He is driven to continually expose himself to the artistic process of noticing, integrating, and outputting.

Daniel Skalak

Daniel is a B.F.A. Illustration student who grew up in Durham, NC and is moving on to study animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design in the spring.

Lee Waller

Lee is a third year architechture student. He enjoys a good band and is a relatively tall young man. He has become quite proficient in manuvering an EZ Go in his past year of working with the Circulation department of UNC Charlotte’s Student Media organization.

Also: Debbie Archer (bio on staff page)

Art Jury: Heather Freeman

Heather is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the UNC Charlotte in the Art Department. Her primary medias include video, animation and digital print, although her background is in drawing and installation. Her work is regularly exhibited nationally and has appeared in international exhibitions in Canada, Cuba, Germany, Hungary and Sweden. To view her work, please visit http://www.EpicAnt.com.

Also: Jim Frakes & Daniel Hudson

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Literature Jury: Mary Ellen Muesing

Mary Ellen has been teaching various levels and courses of English since 1988. She started teaching in the Chicago area and has taught at UNC Charlotte since 1999. Currently, she teachs freshman composition and technical communication. This will be her second year in organizing the annual Society of Technical Communication and UNC Charlotte’s student exhibit and competition of technical documents. She has edited work and published stories and articles in the Charlotte Observer, anthologies, neighborhood newsletters, and business publications. She has also produced technical documents for local businesses and edited and written reviews for textbooks. During her free time, she enjoys reading, painting, gardening, traveling, and sports. Some of her greatest achievements have been working with orphanages in Belarus and Russia and riding her bicycle 3,950 miles across the United States and through Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Aimee Parkison

Aimee is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UNC Charlotte, who has an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She has received grants from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the Puffin Foundation and has won a Writers at Work fellowship as well as the first annual Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review. Her story collection, Woman with Dark Horses, was published by Starcherone Press. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the following magazines: The Literary Review, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Santa Monica Review, Other Voices, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Fugue, Yalobusha Review, The Seattle Review, Texas Review, and Denver Quarterly.

Julie Townsend Julie has worked at UNC Charlotte since 1991. She is a published short story writer and is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Special Thanks Wayne Maikranz

LouAnn Lamb

Mark Haire

Michael Teague

Michael Kerr

Thank you for all you do and allowing us this opportunity to share our expressions and the beautiful work of others.

You’re never too busy to help us even though you really are. Thank you for your invaluble guidence and knowledge.

Even though you made our hearts stop more than once, you always helped us take care of business.

Broken printers and messed up computers — you always helped and kept us going. Thank you.

Thank you for your advice and sticking around when we needed you the most.

Alex O’Neill

Jurors

Contributors

Volunteers

UNCC Art and English Departments

Your spontaneous input and charm was a much needed comfort. You are welcome in our office anytime.

Thank you for all of your time and opinions. There would be an empty magazine if it had not been for all your work.

We would like to thank you for taking the risk to submit. You created the beautiful self-expression displayed in this edition.

Tiffany Yasup and Robin Selby, thank you. Without your help, this magazine would not be what it is today.

Thank you for all your support. We exist to serve the university and we appreciate all of your opinions.

Copyright © 2007 Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine and the Student Media Board of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Printing Wallace Printing, Newton, North Carolina. 3000 copies of Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine were printed on 100 lb. Utopia U2 Blue White Dull with a cover stock of 100 lb. Utopia U1 Blue White Matte. This magazine has 64 pages with a trim size of 9 by 9 inches.

Production Power Mac G4 running OS X version 10.3 using Epson Perfection 1200, 1240, and 3200 scanners, Adobe InDesign CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Illustrator CS2, and FreeHand MX. Type Body text is in 10 pt Baskerville and type for poems and art is 10 pt Gill Sans. Art titles in 12 pt Gill Sans Bold. Other fonts used are Baskerville Bold, Baskerville Italic, Baskerville Semibold, , Gill Sans Bold, Gill Sans Italic, Handwriting - Dakota Regular, Lionel Plain and Snyderspeed. courtesy of Emerald City Fontwerks by way of http://www.dafont.com.

Illustrations Jonny by Melanie Jansen; The Jam Maker by Pete Hurdle; Seeds of a Marriage by Samantha Webster; Colophon by Debbie Archer; Inside Cover by Melanie Jansen and Debbie Archer.

Title page designed by Pete Hurdle. Staff bio page by Debbie Archer and Denise Anetrella.

Cover and all other design by staff. http://www.sanskritlam.com

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Staff Bios Editor Samantha Webster hates writing about herself, unless all names have been changed and she can exaggerate a bit. That is probably why short fiction is such a blast to write. This is her third (of many undetermined) years at UNC Charlotte and she is attempting to obtain a BFA in Illustration as well as minors in English and Art History.

Associate Editor Debbie Archer is a Biology and Art major with an affinity for logical beauty.

When she’s not eating beans or listening to her precious album collection, she’s busy planning a new sculpture. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Lead Designer Pete Hurdle is a Charlotte native who has been involved with Sanskrit for some time but this is technically his first year working for the magazine. Set to graduate in December of 2007, he is glad to start seeing the light at the end of the academic tunnel.

Promotions Coordinator Melanie Jansen, a sophomore, is an Art major with a concentration in Illustration and is currently working towards a BFA. She enjoys life most when surrounded by family, friends, and nature. She admits that the best life lesson she ever learned was given to her by her parents: “Don’t fall and hit your head on a rock.”

Denise Anetrella is graduating in May with a BFA in Graphic Design and a minor in Art History. Over the course of the year she has learned that she is not the only designer that collects business cards for fun but she may be the only one graduating in four years.

Madison Hanakahi is attending UNC Charlotte as fresh meat. She prefers to learn everything the hard way. She’s already changed her major three times since this morning and will most likely change it three more times before she goes to sleep.

Aesthetics, music, and all things peculiar. Yep, that pretty much sums up April Meadows.

With aspirations of being a Broadway actress after pursuing her love of teaching, she has become a Theater Education major at UNC Charlotte. That’s April Meadows, coming to a theater near you.

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Ervisa Martino, a junior, is an Accounting major (which she hates). The most important things in her life are her parents. After giving up her childhood dream of being a maestro she started writing poetry and philosophizing life, dreaming that she will be an existentialist in the end. Her favorite quote is: “Everything that I know is that I don’t know anything.”