Sanskrit 2008 by Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine

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VOLUME 39 | UNC CHARLOTTE

FROM THE EDITOR When I was little, I was given a microscope kit from my parents. In this kit was a sample of an onion peel. When I looked at it under the microscope, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand what it was, but I knew that there was something ordered, important and amazing about it. Later I learned that all the cells in an onion peel contain the DNA of the entire organism, each in various states of replication. Each tiny cell of the plant contains the information to make up the whole onion. Art and literature can elicit such moments of discovery. The physical world doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be so far disconnected with the world of creativity. In fact, the two can be interchangeable. All the shapes, colors and words in art are as ordered and important as the onion. Life is the part and the whole. You have discovered this magazine composed of paper, ink and wire. On behalf of the Sanskrit staff, I hope that you will find something beautiful and wonder-filled.

Debbie Archer Editor in Chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS The Corset judie rae_____________________________________________________________ poem____________________________ 4 I’m Not Really a Waitress anni macht gibson___________________________ poem____________________________ 5 Petrified mary carol moran_____________________________________________________ poem____________________________ 6 The End-All Diet susanna rich________________________________________________ poem____________________________ 7 Season marvin adelson___________________________________________________________ poem____________________________ 8 Untitled nathan tucker___________________________________________________________ art_ ____________________________ 9 We’re Not So Different, You And lee waller__________________________ art_ __________________________ 10 Untitled bridget blackwelder____________________________________________________ art_ ____________________________11 Embrace austin ballard___________________________________________________________ art_ ___________________________ 12 Call Me Jack patricia mastricolo_______________________________________________ poem___________________________ 13 Bright Holders of Plenty ellen case___________________________________ short story_____________________ 14 This Is Not Justice, This Is Truth sara colee_________________________ art_ ___________________________ 16 Different Point of View lydia ko_________________________________________ art_ ___________________________ 17 Dreambox 3 austin ballard______________________________________________________ art_ ___________________________ 18 Poet Show michael riser_________________________________________________________ poem___________________________ 19 Put This on Your Coffee Table julie neid_____________________________ poem__________________________ 20 Habeas Corpus l carol lappin_ _______________________________________________ poem___________________________ 21 Aunt Clara’s Keys karen batchelor_ ________________________________________ short story____________________ 22 Untitled nathan tucker___________________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 26 Lust austin ballard__________________________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 27 You Wear It Well torukpa agbegha___________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 28 Thinking In Circles fredrick zydek_________________________________________ poem__________________________ 29 Epitaph james navé________________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 30 Roots jocelyn paige kelly__________________________________________________________ poem___________________________ 31 Husbands miranda coffey_______________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 32 Real Historical Dolls kathryn higgins___________________________________ short story____________________ 33 Theatre Section Study chris campbell___________________________________ art_ __________________________ 36 Theatre Plan Study chris campbell_ _______________________________________ art_ __________________________ 37 A Biased Perspective: As You Perceive Them, Not As They Really Are leeann hargett_________________________________ art_ __________________________ 38 Fire ann robinson_ __________________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 39 Talking To You deborah brown_______________________________________________ poem__________________________ 40 Regret elizabeth berkenbile_______________________________________________________ poem___________________________ 41 Solstice shae davidson___________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 42 Rubber kirsten ferreri_____________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 43 First Kiss rebecca foust__________________________________________________________ short story____________________ 44 Nest bridget blackwelder_ __________________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 47 Sibling Love melissa root_______________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 48 ID: Burt’s Bees dylan willis_ ___________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 49 Rain nathan tucker_ ________________________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 50 57 pete hurdle_________________________________________________________________________ art_ ___________________________ 51 No Privacy johnny robinson____________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 52 Gone to Roady’s rachel de baere_____________________________________________ poem__________________________ 53 The Miracle of Gravity cathy arden_ ____________________________________ poem__________________________ 54 Ménage À Trois rachel terner vogel___________________________________________ poem__________________________ 55 Archie & Edith joan call_ ______________________________________________________ short story____________________ 56 Say Cheese leeann hargett_______________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 57 Electric! alexander o’neill_ _____________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 58 Pink Orange No. 1 jennifer liu________________________________________________ art_ __________________________ 59 Gaia dylan willis_ ___________________________________________________________________ art_ __________________________60 Instructions For My Burial miranda coffey_ ________________________ poem___________________________ 61 Faux Pas, First Day Teaching In A California High School perie longo_____________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 62 Eulogy thomas a kimmel_ ________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 63 Dangerous Behavior barbara d pieroni__________________________________ poem__________________________ 64 A Simple Proposal james adams baker_____________________________________ poem__________________________ 65 Rhombus steve demoss___________________________________________________________ poem__________________________ 66

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my grandmother wore could stand upright unassisted, the stays so rigid I could feel them through the housedresses she favored. I’d touch not flesh but substance as unswerving as she. Every morning was the same— Even during the heat of Canadian summers she’d rise, fasten with rheumatic fingers the endless hooks. I’d watch, a bean-pole child, as she strapped her ample body into the straitlaced straitjacket, leaning over to arrange her large breasts so they conformed to the outline of her confinement. Next, she’d attach stockings to the garters that hung like sleeping insects around the base of her girdle.

In a shallow bowl on her dresser lay extra stays, bone people I played with, marching their sturdy bodies across the silken cover of my grandmother’s bed, the quilt stained with brown shoe polish I, as a toddler, found and spilled on the downy quilt. My immaculate grandmother kept it, she said, because when I wasn’t there the comforter reminded her of me. It’s such a small stain, eh? I can feel yet the severe girth of her body entrapped in a bundle of bone, though love spilled out, see her as she gardened so outfitted, burrs catching on her dark hose and on the laces of her no-nonsense shoes. She needed no corset to keep her upright. My grandmother was as unyielding as the undergarment she wore, holding firm in her God, her family and flowers, her commitment to enfold her grandchild against her upright bosom. Though the stays poked tender skin, I said nothing, glad to be held by this woman who corseted me, whose wide arms ceded just enough to accommodate one small form.

I’M NOT REALLY A WAITRESS 7

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Hands down my favorite nail color, “I’m Not Really a Waitress” is come-on crimson, imparting cachet, shedding caution with each precise brush stroke. But if “I’m not really a waitress,” who the hell am I? A glamorous diva singing Puccini, my audience waiting for the fat lady to sing? The woman who waves the flag at road construction sites, jackhammer staccatos punching my time clock? Maybe a saucy CEO— flush with bucks for a weekly manicure, throw in a massage for good measure. No, “I’m Not Really a Waitress,” shouts I’m a classy broad. with well-turned ankles, confidence and conviction. I’m not really a waitress, but I can act like one if you want me to, honey.

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A thin wedge of stone weighs my pocket, an anchor, rough comfort to a nervous thumb. My geologist daughter says you can’t test whether a rock is petrified wood, or just a rock. No science can verify, only the human eye, speculating. If it looks like a sliver of wood, maybe it once was. If we were born of clay, and return to dust, how like we are to stone. In moments of despair, needing to act, I hold tight and remember, in fifty years I will be dead. My words will vanish, photographs fade, but my dust will linger, might cling to a puppy’s paw, be swept from home plate, or dance in a window, motes, to some child’s delight. Standing beneath the heavy branches of a water oak in my front yard, I dig in my pocket for car keys. My thumb brushes a rough surface. I pull the rock from my pocket, and sure enough, it looks like wood to me. The fine knife edge of life weighs gray in my hand.

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Banish Your Belly, Butt, and Thighs Forever

—Rodale Title

On its own, your belly will assume that six-pack look—sucked in, skin sculpting ribs. Sit-ups will be strictly forbidden. The cellulite will unpucker and dissolve. It will not be hard, this diet— no DVDs, no Web sites, no two-for-ones at Jenny Dregs, no Oldestra or Aspertime. There will be no shame— no temptation to binge and hurl, no eight glasses of water. And starve —no more to starve. It will be fast— your thighs will never again strain the zipper of your jeans. Everyone will be waiting to be as thin, at last, as you in your suit — size zero.

SEASON 18

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Loving isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just the flash and flurry Of lightning stroke and thunderclap, But rain That beats in all its soft insistence Through coat and skin and flesh to very bone. It is that deeply certain knowing That root in darkness has Of leaf in rain and sunlight, Whose every change is felt deep down. As we, they have their ways of sharing All spring and summer long Although they may not meet Until the fall.

UNTITLED 11

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WE’RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I L

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CALL ME JACK 91

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I have a plan an idea “Here’s the thing…” and everyone knows that with a good playlist and enough gas we could see the world we could follow through and leave before the price of beans is high enough to sell our souls for a handful and I’ve got jack who says it’s about how many pages you can rip from the calendar not the pinpricks in a map I can feel the general unconscious slip a little shudder on the edge of its sleep days from rearview mirror goodbyes weeks from the familiar sight of failure and I’ve got jack who says it’s about the words that flow between the night and street not the miles between the two it crawls up in my gut, the simple clench of disgust and tired faces repeating till we don’t know the date (July 4th, you think that would stick in pale and worn thin minds) we hear our names in song lyrics we see ourselves in dark sunglasses silhouetted shop windows in unknown towns we need to be the Vikings of America we need to be Columbus in an all night truck stop I throw jack into the back-seat he says it’s about the you you always needed not the one they always saw

e s a C en b y El l

I always imagined that my collection of Fiestaware bowls would be broken once I had kids. I looked forward to it. I could hear the sound of one era closing and another opening, as pottery fractured against a countertop, and cake batter flowed onto the floor.

But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not what happened.

started collecting Fiestaware and other dishware from the 1940’s when I was 20 and establishing a kitchen of my own. I bought the first two bowls at an elderly neighbor’s yard sale. The marigold yellow four-quart and the raspberry two-quart, both sported the trademark Fiesta ridges on the outside of the bowls, meant to make them easier to hold when whipping a meringue. I fell in love with the curves of the bowls, the way they combined beauty and utility and their bold blue, pink and yellow glazes. Over the years, I foraged through garage sales and thrift shops for the odd saucer or cup. Later, as the value of the old china grew, I searched antique shops. I found pitchers, saucers, a gravy boat and when I was lucky, one of the big stately mixing bowls. Friends gave me matching salt and pepper shakers, cream pitchers, and sugar bowls of another time. A time when women did not question whether or not they’d have children. When I lived in a communal house, I forbade my roommates to use the bowls. My best friend Margaret was the exception. Together we stirred up the corn fritters of her childhood and the apple brown betty of mine, following recipes handwritten by our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers on yellowed index cards. Margaret and I hoped to live our lives in the same town. She wanted children, and I looked forward to helping her raise them. But she was accepted to medical school in Atlanta, married a man with a Southern drawl, and when she got pregnant, we were three time zones apart. She sent me a photo of herself at eight months along. We called it the Demi Moore shot because she had posed in profile, naked, in the bathroom, one arm draped across her breasts, the other forming a fig leaf beneath her protruding belly. I flew out after the birth, stayed a week making soups and stews to pack their freezer, assembled a stroller, folded diapers and rubbed Margaret’s shoulders until she slept, little Florence tucked in the wing of her arm.

I have never seen my belly swell like Margaret’s. Never felt the tumbling inside of another being growing and dependent on me. I had pictured it, a life with one man and two brown-haired kids. But I had not questioned, in my youth, if I truly wanted children and why or why not. I suspect many women assume as I did that they will be mothers because we were raised to think it’s what we do, that a life without children will mean something went wrong. It didn’t. I don’t mourn the lost chances as some of my friends without children do. What saddens me is that, despite our involvement in our communities, our support of schools, the roles we play as teachers, aunts and babysitters; not having children can still leave us excluded from the mainstream. I’m at the age — my forties — where women often befriend each other by striking up conversations at the gym or in the checkout line. Assuming the commonality of motherhood, they ask me, “Do you have kids?” Sometimes the question is “How old are your kids?” or “What school do your kids go to?” They ask in the friendliest of manners, with the expectation in their voices that we’ll soon be envel-

oped in that dialect of parents, comparing first-graders or how much our teens eat. But I derail this pleasantly anticipated interchange when I answer — with a smile— that no, actually, I’m not a mother. For a moment, the smiling woman initiating the conversation is at a loss, so while she switches gears, I ease the transition by offering that I’m an enthusiastic aunt, my nieces seven and 14, piano and volleyball geniuses. I’ve saved the conversation from that awkward plummet it could have made. If the conversation goes well, we find many areas of common ground—including and beyond a love of children—upon which to nourish the start of a friendship.

But I still cringe inside when the question arrives and wish I could just tell the larger truth. “No, I decided not to have children. And it makes me feel like an outsider at times, as if I don’t belong. Yet I do, because I look after and enjoy the children of my friends, family and even strangers, which is as it should be in this tribe called humanity. No, I don’t wish I had kids, just that I could be inside the loop of community whose bonds seem to require having had children.” My Fiestaware bowls are still intact, hardly a chip marring their brilliant Art Deco curves. They’ve survived half a dozen moves, countless batches of corn muffins, banana bread and potato salad. Bright holders of plenty, they glow against the yellow cabinets. They are worth something now because a craze for old dishware swept the nation some years back, followed by a wave of revived Fiesta designs. Manufacturers introduced new lines and colors with which today’s brides can outfit their kitchens. The bowls I own have seen 50 or 60 years of biscuit dough and cake mix, and when I take one down from the cupboard, I wonder what bride of the 1940’s first owned them. Did she have children? If we had met, is that the first question we’d have asked each other? When my sister’s girls came to visit, we choose a bowl and sift flour and sugar, crack eggs and pour vanilla. Today we are making waffles for their parents, still asleep in the guest room. Amy and Molly have chosen the marigold bowl because they want to make a really big batch. Under Amy’s inspired and vigorous stirring, the bowl slips over the lip of the counter. I hold my breath and watch it fall. The moment has come, and I wait to hear the crash. But Molly, the volleyball player, dives under the falling bowl. Both hands extended, she grabs it, getting a face full of batter for her heroism. Waffle batter slops onto the linoleum too, but the bowl never makes contact with the floor. “Good save!” Amy shouts. We mop up the floor and Molly’s face, add more flour, and start again. After breakfast, I wash the bowl and leave it upside down to dry, its yellow belly rising from my dish drainer. Tomorrow I’ll use it to make mango biscotti, which I’ll FedEx to Margaret’s family in Georgia. Before I seal the box, I’ll write the ingredients and instructions on an index card and tuck it beneath the wax paper. Perhaps, one day, in their 21st century kitchens, in bowls I can only imagine, her daughters will follow that recipe.

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pop corn and soda pop flow, currents of sticky solace running past red carpets and countertops, past once molten faces of coming attractions, dingy flicks shown in an underground theater built for one. hot bulbs cough dust, focusing yellow diligence from their positions over aisles. children wander streets outside and peek through low sidewalk windows to get a glimpse, dreaming of Coke and soft butter kernels. a puppet flops down behind the curtain, a diminished man marionette strung up to make hand movements, scar gestures like obscenities carved on park trees, those stories of grim adolescence told to awestruck throngs of small Saturday children. the kids stick fast â&#x20AC;&#x201C; grimy magnets on window glass, restless as though in hope of skin, of some private, restricted mix of lusty functions where boy beds brunette above the hazy stage and demands the damselâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s love between reckless fits. the curtain rises, bright applause absent as all the quiet children sit, bound by ink light while the puppet carves common life in paper, words made mystical by presentation and the choice to hide in a stuffy underground theater built for one.

PUT THIS ON YOUR COFFEE TABLE J U Li E 3

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As I walked on waves and felt my body trembling, I stepped inside of a gray monster. The roaring of the engine crept under my skin and pounded its strength into my brain. I looked behind to watch the tires spin a fresh path of blackness. My head hit the window numerous times from those corners speeding by, and my body was tossed from side to side as though it was weightless. Your foot, still on the gas, wouldn’t let up despite my screaming anguish. You stopped only to rub your luck out, as though my pain wasn’t worth the amount of a two-dollar winner. Maybe if my hand wasn’t holding my head, I could have hit you with both. But it was too much for you to feel my weakened punches, so I was thrown to the ground. You could never comprehend what was going through my lumpy head. When my hands held yours I always tried to stop the spinning path of blackness I never created for you to see.

And to this day, no one has ever comprehended that I knew how thin those walls were. I know they heard as I tried to hush the returns against my back. My mind interchanged from dim to black, so dark, but they could still see your drunken arms come up again, the way my world was tiptoeing around your moods. So put this on your coffee table and let them read, let them all read how Silence must fear my face staring hateful among them. With what words on these pages will finally break him?

So when you went in for the kill, I will never forget your mouth fall to the floor, as if your jaw was broken. All the tiny punches ever thrown before finally found the strength to knock out my delusion of love. My purple speckled bruises had connected their dots to form a smiling face because I was keeping something from you. A secret solace nobody knew I had. I was always one step ahead on the stairs you tried throwing me down.

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What was her crime in this life, that she relives every angry word, a missed embrace, but forgets years of musky passion and the morning sun slicing through fog? She wanted more than motherhood, laundry, and this big house offered: only cool autumn sunshine, only love letters on blue paper, only love. She cannot begin anew. Her hands, bent and stiff, cannot hold sable to the canvas—cadmium, cerulean, sage—all drying in a shoe box. Her body, rigid as the dried stem of a rose, cannot lean into any new love. Her hair is winter white, her eyes milky pearls. She turns up the volume on Vivaldi until the speakers buzz. Her fingers pull across the pages of poetry she once loved. Faces around her contorted, enunciating, shouting even the things they would rather whisper. She will retreat further and further from them and into herself until one day— she won’t hear, or smell, the fire.

Aunt

Claraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Keys Karen Batchelor

hivering on the front steps in the light rain, I pleading that I drive to Hermiston, he said, “She calls all the men hesitate before pressing the buzzer. I suck in a deep Bill—friends, family, guys she doesn’t even know!” breath and roll my shoulders to loosen them. I am Except for her long-dead first husband, there are no Williams in on a mission. the Walker clan. The electricity from the little button tickles “Bill?” I ask her. the tip of my finger, and bugle notes ring out to greet me.The door “The gardener.” bursts open, and there stands my Aunt Clara, just under five feet in “Which Bill do you mean? I know a lot of Bills.” height, flaming-red hair wrapped in a purple scarf. She is wearing “Well, you don’t know this one. He’s the gardener,” she states a caftan of the same purple fabric, a garment intended to be freewith imperious logic. flowing but cinched around her plump middle with a red, silky sash. The skirt drapes over her ample hips and hangs to the floor. I look down to see slippers with pink feathers peeking out beneath the hem. unt Clara was married four times, although She waves one hand at me.The other hand clutches a cordless she kept the names of only two of her former telephone to her ear. husbands. She ran off early with Bill Addison, “I’ve got to hang up now, honey. Got some company,” she says who may have been the love of her life, but they into the receiver as she motions me inside her spacious 1940’s-era were together only about three years. During house. Prohibition, Bill was a bootlegger. He inadvertently left her a small “Aunt Clara! You look great!” I give her a hug. fortune when he was shot and killed while making a delivery to the Her eyes are clear behind her glasses, and her skin is smooth, wrong address. undoubtedly a result of remarkably good genes, and her lifelong Her next three marriages didn’t have quite the drama, but there beauty regimen. was usually a tidy financial settlement at the end. Marriage number “Damn right I do! For a woman who’s eighty years old.Well, two ended in divorce. “He was a lazy, no-account, son-of-a-skunk,” in honey, I’m so glad to see you! Don’t get many visitors these days.” Clara’s words. Husband number three, Bradley Wolf, passed away from Is she a little shorter than the last time I saw her? a heart attack on their honeymoon, so she felt obliged to keep his She never calls me Christine name, and the hundreds of shares of anymore, and I’m afraid she doesn’t blue chip stock he had left her. remember who I am, so I don’t Her fourth husband ran off bother to remind her. On some level, with a little old neighbor lady who she recognizes me, I am sure.Today I had inherited an oil well somewhere have to get on her good side. Actually, in Oklahoma. I don’t know how she did it, but Aunt Clara cleaned out you never want to be on Aunt Clara’s name sometime in her teens, she changed her his bank account before she filed bad side. Once she got so mad at my of from mathilde to clara, in honor for divorce.We never mention him mother—for accusations that she had of eart clara bow, the “it girl” and sweeth when Clara’s around. lied about her age—that she refused know, i the silent screen. the family, as far as “What brings you out in this to attend the annual family reunion. has called her clara ever since. rain? We don’t get much rain here Among the Walker clan, absence from in the desert, you know.” Clara says this event is considered high treason. from her perch on the sofa. She reaches up, pats my cheek “I just wanted to see how my and plants a wet, resounding kiss on my favorite aunt is doing.You say you don’t get many visitors?” forehead. She ignores my question. “How about some tea?” She knows I’m family. “Sure. Let me help you.” I stand and follow her to the kitchen, I follow her into the living room on paths of plastic laid out still decorated in 1960’s style—avocado stove and refrigerator, to protect her new green carpets. She motions to a dark green stainless steel double sinks. I start opening cupboard doors looking overstuffed chair, its arms and headrest also covered with thick for tea bags while she fills a red kettle with tap water and puts it on plastic.When I sit, the plastic squeaks. She sits on a new sofa, also her electric stove top. green, also wrapped in plastic. I quietly lift the lid of the cookie jar and peek inside. No keys. “New furniture.When did you get it?” “Who’s been to see you lately?” I ask. “Let’s see. Not long ago.You know, honey, I just decided to treat “Bill was here a few weeks ago.” myself. After all, I’m 83 years old, and I’m not going to live forever. I wrinkle my brow. Bill. A neighbor? A friend? The gardener? There’s no use having money if you can’t spend it.” When my cousin George telephoned me in Portland, he said, “I agree. Be good to yourself.” I smile at her. My mother was “The old gal is losing her marbles. Christine, confiscate those damn right. Clara has lied about her age so long she can’t remember how car keys.” Confiscate is a cop word. George uses a lot of cop words old she actually is. because George is a cop. Mathilde Louise Walker Addison Wolf is my father’s older “Hell, I’ve tried. So have all the others.We’ve been over there sister—older by about 20 years, as far as we can figure. She was the looking. But we don’t know where she hides them.The old girl’s first of nine siblings, many of whom have already passed on. She is gonna have an accident driving around in that tank. She sits on a also a family legend. Sometime in her teens, she changed her name phone book and a pillow, but she still can’t see over the steering from Mathilde to Clara, in honor of Clara Bow, the “It Girl” and wheel. Folks in town have made complaints – not to her, of course, sweetheart of the silent screen.The family, as far as I know, has called her Clara ever since. In fact, I wasn’t aware of her name change until to me! As if I can control her!” That’s when he told me about the Bill Syndrome. Again I I graduated from college. I look out the window into the backyard. “Your roses are lovely. wonder why. Bill Addison has been dead for 70 years. “When was Bill here?” I ask, taking a seat at the FormicaWho does your gardening?” topped table. I catch a glimpse of a romance novel in the corner at “Bill.” My ears perk up.When my cousin, George, called last weekend, my elbow. A ten-dollar bill marks her place. Lydia Takes a Lover.The

picture on the cover shows the hero burly and bare-chested. Lydia is blonde, buxom, and barely covered. I lift the book discreetly. No keys. “When was Bill here?” I repeat my question. She ignores me again as she opens a cupboard, pulls out a bottle of Bacardi rum, and sets it on the table. I point to the bottle and ask, “For your tea?” “Hell, yes. Been drinking it that way for years, honey.Tea by itself is just so bland.” I try it. Not bad.Who would have thought there would be so much indulgence here in little old Hermiston? My family has lived in this desert town in eastern Oregon for several generations.The current population of 15,000 is three times larger than when I was growing up here.When I fled to Portland, the ink was still drying on my high school diploma. Last night, as I was driving the two hundred miles back to my hometown, I used the time to work out a ploy for getting those keys. It’s time to get started. “Aunt Clara, are you doing much driving these days?” I step stealthily into the ring. She looks at me sideways through mascara-thick lashes. “You aren’t trying to get my car keys, are you? Bill tried that last week.” “George,” I say automatically. She ignores my correction. So much for stealth. I back up. “No, no. I was just wondering how safe your car is. How long has it been since you checked the brakes or had a tune-up? That’s an old car. Anything could go wrong.” I’m raising my voice, and I check myself. “Come on out to the garage and have a look for yourself. She’s in great condition.” She rises, and I follow suit.We leave our tea on the table for a little stroll down old auto lane. As she opens the door to the garage, I catch the familiar sight of her car, lovingly referred to as Bertha. Manufactured sometime in the late 1950’s, Bertha is indeed a tank. It’s a two-tone Plymouth— white on top and tomato soup red on the bottom—with enormous shark fins behind. “Sure is a beauty,” I lie. “But how does she run?” She chooses not to hear me. “You know, honey, someday this car is going to belong to you. I put it in my will. It’s an antique, you know.” She beams at me. I rethink Bertha’s inherent beauty. “How old are the brakes?” I take another swing at the issue. “Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to teach your grandfather to drive?” I have heard the story many times, but in most versions, it is my father, Ralph, who was doing the teaching. I just smile encouragement. “Well, Dad had never driven a car. He always had a team of horses and a wagon.We—all of us kids,” she makes a circular motion with her hands to indicate a group, “thought it was about time he learned to drive. So I took him out in my brother’s car.” I think this part is true.That Model A Ford belonged to my father. “Dad was probably 55, maybe 60, at that time.Well, we drove around the block, and he was a nervous wreck.When we got back to the house, he pulled up on the steering wheel and yelled ‘Whoa! Whoa!’The car didn’t stop.The steering wheel came off in his hands. I shouted at him, ‘The brake, Dad.The brake!’ I tried to reach the brake with my foot, but I couldn’t.The car kept going right through the wall of the garage and out the other side. He never tried to drive again.”

She laughs. I laugh too. I always do. “You know, honey, that’s the funniest thing I ever saw in my whole life, and I’m 87 years old!” I place a hand on her shoulder and look her straight in the eye. “Aunt Clara, what about the brakes? When was the last time you had this car in the garage for service, a checkup?” She chooses to answer this time. “I just had new brakes put on about two weeks ago.” “Who did it?” I press my advantage. “Some guy down at the garage. I think his name is Bill.” I feel my shoulders slump and give up for the time being, realizing I will have to try another course of action. I take her arm gently and lead her back into the kitchen.We need another cup of tea. I try again. “If that car is going to be mine, I think I should try it out. Can I drive it for a while, just to get used to it and see how it runs?” “Not yet.” She looks at me, and I can tell she’s on to my game. I take another tack. “How about later I drive the two of us to the Dairy Queen. I assume you still like soft vanilla cones?” Her eyes brighten, and she touches my hand. “Of course! Is a bear Catholic if he does it in the Vatican?” I chuckle. I can remember when she started using this modified and slightly sanitized expression. My mother had scolded her about being a bad influence on the children, so she amended the sayings to her own personalized version. Aunt Clara’s language could never be considered refined. I flash on an image of her dressed in the flapper garb of the 1920’s.That photo always amuses me. This thought reminds me of her collection of family albums. I look through them every time I’m here. I leave the table and pat Clara’s arm to indicate that I’ll be right back. In the living room, I lift the lid of the ceramic candy dish and look inside. No keys. From the tall bookshelf in the corner, I select two of the albums and carry them back to the kitchen. I set them down, open the first one and take a new approach with my aunt. I point to a family photo taken many years before. “I love this picture.This was at one of those great Walker family reunions, wasn’t it? Do you remember when?” She squints at the picture. “I must have been between husbands. I don’t see any of them here.” She is probably right. She often nails down past events by remembering who her husband was at the time. “I was with Fred then.” Or Charles or Bradley or Bill. Aunt Clara shakes her head slowly and rolls her eyes. “Look at all those kids! I said to my mother one time, ‘Haven’t you figured out what causes that yet?’Was she ever mad at me!” I’ve never heard this before. “Did you really say that to your mother?” I ask, putting a shocked expression on my face. “Damn right I did!” She grins. I raise my eyebrows but return to the album. She has arranged the photos in some random, haphazard order that only she can understand. In the next picture, the six sisters are standing together by age, with Clara on the left, followed by Myrtle May, Mabel Ann, Maude Evelyn, Mildred Fay, and the baby of the family, Margaret Joy. Seeing the evidence lined up like this, I understand clearly how this woman might want to transform from Mathilde to Clara. On the next page is a picture of my father, Ralph, and his twin

brothers, all of them handsome and dressed in baggy suits and large hats— the finery of their day. I turn the page and find the faded black-and-white picture of Aunt Clara dressed in a sleeveless sheath, fringe around the hem, nylon stockings rolled to just below her knees. Her hair is bobbed, and there is a band across her forehead. A tall feather sticks straight up from one side of the headband, and a string of pearls reaches almost to her knees. She is waving her arms, and her feet are flying. “Is that the Charleston you were dancing there?” I ask. She takes a closer look. “God, that was fun. And I was pretty good at it too.” “I imagine you were.” “The neighbor boy and me won the dance contest every Saturday night. I think I still have one of those trophies in my closet somewhere. I’ll be right back.” I watch her leave. She moves more slowly than I remember. I scan the kitchen, trying to think where she could have hidden her car keys. When she returns, she is carrying a tarnished silver cup engraved with the words “First Prize.” I haven’t seen this before. I admire it, wishing I could have known her when she looked like Clara Bow, when she danced the Charleston, when she was young. I push the silver cup aside, and we continue through the album, stopping at a picture of Clara beside her brand-new Plymouth, now out in the garage. I am suddenly surprised to be reminded of how much this woman and I resemble each other. We have the same large eyes, full lips, oval face and dark hair with a widow’s peak at the hairline. I trace my finger over the widow’s peak in the photo. We continue turning pages in the photo album until my stomach starts to growl, and I suggest a ride to the local Denny’s for supper. My treat. “Hey, Aunt Clara, I’d like to drive your car. I promise I’ll be very careful.” She eyes me suspiciously, then opens the freezer compartment, reaches in and pulls out a little plastic bag. Inside, I see, are the keys to the Plymouth. I groan silently. It’s just five blocks to the restaurant, so I’m not able to give it a thorough test drive “on the open road,” but the brakes work just fine. Clara winks at our waiter, who looks young enough to be my grandson, and greets him. “Hi, Bill.” He must be acquainted with my aunt because his face lights up in greeting, and he helps her off with the mink jacket she insists on wearing everywhere.We order burgers, fries, and soft vanilla ice cream, deciding that a trip to the Dairy Queen is unnecessary. As I am paying the $25 check, she slips the waiter a $20 tip. He too seems to know that it pays to be on Clara’s good side. I drive us safely home again, and once I have parked the car in the garage, I slip the keys into my coat pocket, quickly and casually. I think I will also casually forget them. I wonder if this will work. I don’t look at Clara. Once inside the house, I hang my coat in the closet, keys still in the pocket, and relax as best I can on a plastic covered chair. We watch the early evening news on her brand-new flatscreen television set, and I listen to her complain about the local, state, and federal governments. “That mayor would sell his grandmother on the street if he thought it would get him reelected. Cheat! Liar! Scoundrel!” She shakes her finger at his TV image. At seven o’clock, I tell her that I must be leaving. It’s a long drive back home, and I have to work tomorrow. “Are you sure you won’t spend the night? You know I have that spare room. It’s yours.” “I really have to go, but I’ll be back soon. I promise.” “I hate to see you leave,” she says, looking quite sad.

I gather up my purse and struggle into my coat. On the porch again, I lean down to hug my aunt. She kisses me and pinches my cheeks, as she has always done ever since I can remember.Then without warning, she reaches into my coat pocket and pulls out her car keys. For a minute, I don’t know what to say. She dangles the keys in front of my face and smiles. Before I can think of a joke, an excuse or an explanation, she takes my hand and holds it, palm up and open. She drops the keys into my hand and closes my fingers around them. She looks me square in the eye. “I’m going to be 94 in June, and I’m not nearly as crazy as you all think I am.” She smiles before adding, “Christine.” I feel my jaw drop. I stare. She steps back inside the house and pulls the door partway. I see her fiery hair wrapped in that purple scarf poking through the open space. Before I can open my mouth to ask why, or how, she winks and says, “I get a lot more visitors these days. And I like it.” With a wicked grin, she shuts the door.

UNTITLED 11

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Drinking wine at midnight helps, especially if you can reach the point where there is a slowness to speech whether spoken in praise or anger. In such a state, life becomes easy but finding a parking place big enough for your car impossible. Sometimes one reaches a point where the universe has no edges and no center. In such a state, one might question the marital status of rocks and trees, admit there are times when church boards can’t pass gas (let alone financial decisions), and that no matter how often we slur our words, we never admit that we’re running on empty. The secret to being a good drunk is to keep to yourself and avoiding topics like religion or politics unless you want to get into fisticuffs with some idiot who wouldn’t know a Merlot from a Chardonnay or an import from something born in a California cellar. Better to drink at home among your own who are well prepared to note how wondrous and strange you become after your third glass when you start thinking in slowly moving circles.

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When I am dead scatter my ashes along the edge of the cornfield where burial grounds ooze arrowheads after rain. If you must shed tears, give them to the wild pigs that run along the river. If you must grieve, do it in the morning after you have dreamed of walking across Spain. When I am dead tell everyone I ate buffalo, slept naked in the winter, praised the Lord for lost wages, fell in love a hundred times, and sang with the lungs of an elephant.

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I fell not far from the tree, an angered apple, a bruised pear. I bruise easy, but I mend just fine. I go on like daffodils and sway in the breeze. It takes more than a gentle wind to blow me away. I lie there on the ground barely above the roots, and I can feel them underneath me like lumps of an old mattress. I lie there and look at the stars, disturbed by how easily Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m comforted from the roots beneath me. I listen to the branches above as they sway, and I am warmed by scattered sunlight. It trembles before me, telling me how easy it feels to be something other than rooted, and I just barely feel envy. The roots are inside me now. and I...I become the treeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; dispersing seeds that become other trees, and I forget how paralyzing it feels to be still, admiring how easily the breeze bends within me.

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Number one his blarney tongue his cock that wagged as much neither one connected to his head or heart Number two his mother didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t suit him he found another when he was thirty-five and I was thirty-nine

Welcome to the Historical Girl Doll Company, Inc. Catalog! Unlike other toy companies, we do not sugar-coat the facts by pretending that life has been nothing but charm and heroism. Our educational dolls show how people actually lived throughout history. We guarantee that your child will find this much more interesting! And don’t miss our Today’s Real Life family of dolls—full of realistic modern characters that put other well-known dolls to shame. Whether you’re just starting your collection, or you’re well on your way, we’re sure you’ll enjoy perusing our latest selection of dolls, all made of the finest materials by indentured laborers in China.

from our

Historical Family

Dolls:

Neanderthal Nancy: With her sloping forehead and hairy body, Nancy is a real blast from the past. Hunting and gathering, she’s fighting for survival. But, oops, her species is doomed to extinction, when the competing Homo sapiens kill them all off. Accessories: spear, club. Early Christian Kristie: Earnest and ranting, Kristie

London Blitz Betty: When Nazi bomber planes fly overhead, her house bursts into a million pieces. No family members to accessorize with, but you can get a toy orphanage house. Planes sold separately. Mary Queen of Scots: From the Queens line of dolls, Mary comes complete with a wig and a detachable head. You

can have Elizabeth I (sold separately) order her execution. When she’s decapitated, hold her head up by the wig, and watch it bounce down the aisle, just like it did in real life! Accessories: masked executioner with axe, small dog that lives in her skirts. With a different dress and wig, your child can pretend this doll is Marie Antoinette. Accessories for Marie: cake, guillotine, extra blood.

has a message to impart, even if it means being stoned or crucified by a mob. Detachable fingers, which can be saved as relics to be visited by devout Christians when Kristie is sainted by the Catholic Church. Mob, stones, and cross sold separately.

Medieval Molly: With her tubercular cough and realistic patina of grime, Molly doesn’t even know jeweled dresses exist. Push the button on her belly to give her the Plague, which, after all, killed nearly two-thirds of her friends. Look out for the pus! Companion pieces are two knights errant with detachable limbs and blood, horses, rat, wheelbarrow, and death-masked town corpse collector action figure.

Betsy Ross: From our American Revolution series, Betsy sits and sews a flag while the menfolk write a declaration, a constitution, inspirational pamphlets and books like Common Sense, and fight a war to win independence. Keep sewing Betsy!

Inquisitive Ignacio: From

from our

the Spanish Inquisition era, Ignacio’s costume is richly embroidered with crosses. Make sure you’re a good Christian! Ignacio’s torture chamber comes complete with a strappado, a rack, thumbscrews, a whip, and a Spanish Chair.

Pioneer Polly: When Tomahawk Sue (sold separately) hits her with her tomahawk, Polly’s scalp comes right off. It’s painted red underneath. Look, here’s a hook on Sue’s belt to hold the scalp. Accessories sold separately: horse with saddle, additional scalps.

Wild West Wynona: Her husband and family were all killed by Indians, so Wynona lives in a whorehouse. Your child will love her black & red western-style dress, which comes with snaps for easy removal. Saloon and hotel room with stained mattress sold separately.

Today’s Real Life Family

Dolls:

Emily Anybody: A doll to represent the melting pot of today’s global economy, Emily’s features are a conflation of many diverse ethnic groups. We’re sure your child will find something recognizable to love about her! Emily works as a secretary for a large corporation where she sits in a grey cubicle (included with purchase), answers the phone and tries to laugh at the boring jokes of her accounting department superiors. She goes home at night to update her myspace. com site and otherwise communicate via internet in her sparsely furnished apartment with no view. She exercises, but it doesn’t compensate for all the television and M&M’s — her favorite things. It’s Real Life! Accessories: Xanax prescription.

Wal-Mart Wanda: With her two-inch fingernails that

Parish Priest Paul: In rich

barely allow her to work the cash register (included with purchase), Wanda is pissed off that you came to her line. Don’t give her additional change after she’s rung you up — the doll will malfunction and possibly explode. Accessories: scholarship to Yale.

vestments with a golden crucifix, Paul is ready to hear your confession and perform absolution. He comes complete with two young altar boys and a Mercedes convertible.

Trailer Trash Trish: Trish comes with a trailer, a TV, a tattoo, a pack of cigarettes, a six-pack of beer and a monthly disability paycheck. Bob, her brother/ husband, is sold separately.

Global Warming Gayle: Gayle’s big black SUV comes complete with a loud horn and a yellow “Bring Our Boys Back from Iraq” ribbon on the back. She’s got a Bluetooth wireless cell phone embedded in her head which she uses to talk to her decorator about getting larger appliances. She comes with three kids; additional kids sold separately.

Bulimic Bridget: Wearing a crop top and low-cut jeans that show off her slim torso, you can feed Bridget ice cream and then watch her vomit when you press her stomach. Comes complete with subscriptions to Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazines.

Gorgeous Georgiana: One of our most popular Today’s Real Life dolls, Georgiana’s gorgeous, but she’s dumb! Nevertheless, she gets any job she wants. Right now she writes a blog for a swanky ad agency. Everything she writes has an exclamation mark! after it, and on behalf of the prestigious agency she sends out all of her most inane thoughts for the whole internet world to see. Nobody cares that her work sucks, because she’s gorgeous! Latter-Day Lucy: From Utah, modern-day Lucy comes with a Bible, a husband and three “friends” that her husband also happens to be married to. Muslim Mariah: Modestly dressed in a traditional burka, Mariah brings her prayer mat with her. But, whoops! There’s a surprise underneath: she’s wired with explosives and she’s on her way to the mall! Additional accessories: exploding bus, exploding shoes.

Displaced Diana: Originally from New Orleans, Diana has lived in places ranging from the Louisiana Superdome to a muddy FEMA trailer park. Luckily she’s a good swimmer and good at waiting in line! Accessories: life jacket, water bottle.

Baby Boomer Belinda: Modern medical advancements have extended her life, but not her bladder control. Aging Boomer Belinda comes with two outfits: sneakers & jeans and casual cruisewear. With a decent stock portfolio and a good supply of Depends undergarments, Belinda should be around for a while! Head Scheduler Haley: PTO President, Sunday school teacher, room mother, head school fundraiser and car pool organizer all rolled into one, no job is too time consuming or troublesome for Haley. She comes with her own cell phone and email address, because she’ll want to confirm that appointment at least three times!

Commuter Carl: After commuting home on the train, where he drinks gin martinis and plays cards with his pals, Carl is cranky if dinner isn’t on the table and the kids aren’t ready for bed. He spends his days in the city having expenseaccount lunches and exchanging sleazy double-entendres with his colleague, separately).

Gorgeous Georgiana (sold

Out-of-Work Annie and her companion doll, Child Laborer Chin-Wau: An excellent lesson in global economics for any child. Annie comes with a TV and wears a patriotic red, white and blue T-shirt emblazoned with antiimmigration slogans. Chin-Wau wears a plain sack-dress but comes with our coolest accessory: a working sewing machine!

Euphemistic Eunice: Eunice began her career as a “Sanitation Engineer” picking up garbage. There was nowhere to go but up! After her job as “Concessionaire,” making coffee and cleaning up the bathroom, she graduated to “Barista.” Then she became a “Cast Member” taking fast food orders at a theme park. Moving on to office work, she hopes to soon celebrate “Administrative Assistant Day” along with her highly qualified co-workers. It’s up to you to decide what she’ll do next! Accessories: Advanced College Degree.

THEATRE SECTION STUDY

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THEATRE PLAN STUDY

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A BIASED PERSPECTIVE: AS YOU PERCEIVE THEM, NOT AS THEY REALLY ARE L

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I didn’t want to go home because I knew that you would be there. The broken tree in the front yard, the windowpane without light, even horses with their brave syntax, the wild running reminds me of your rant. You’re here again, sitting in the floral chair. Upstaged, bald, the old runner, track star with no knowledge of the past. You walked three miles from the grave to tell me that the past is whiskey and blood. Stars spilling out of the sky. Teeth on ice. It was midnight in Texas. You were at the wheel. I was seven, hit on the back of my head because you didn’t like my questions. The dashboard was icicles. The floor broke open, there was no underneath because the beginning was starting again, the engine running against the heart, you drunk on tequila, no floor, I tell you, four visits to your grave last week and still the car won’t stop.

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Not to my father, mother, God, or my dead sister. Each of them had a long turn with me. Not about the sunset, the mountain range, the shack with painted cows where high school dropouts sell ice cream in this Vermont town. Not the poem by Emily Dickinson I once read to a class saying even if she didn’t believe, she could argue with faith and with her family who lived in faith. Not yellow lights daggering my eyes through slits of blinds, not even when I tramp through mud to the IGA where a toothless woman in a quilted jacket wanders — I’ve seen that woman before, or a woman like her. There’s one of me in every town, too, a woman who crosses a stone bridge on the way home, telling a man or woman fragments about her life, knows she’ll hear answering words that work on her — like the novel Kafka dreamed of, or wanted to burn. for George

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I didn’t tumble out of bed this morning bent on destruction. The truth is it happened inadvertently, almost instinctively, while writing a poem that a small, wriggling something crawled up into my pant leg, tickling and squirming— undoubtedly arachnid. My strike was preemptive, automatic: thumb and forefinger dropping to the target administering a brisk, explosive squeeze producing the soft, resounding shock of “pop” and “squish,” confirmation, termination of something small and lethal— probably arachnid. I hobble to the laundry room pinching the blue flannel shroud of my enemy, trying not to imagine what I will soon force myself to look at, to prove that I am justified, that I am not a random act of violence. Carefully, I unfold the matted cloth to reveal shiny, black-spotted, crushed red wings shattered beyond repair, even as she desperately tries to lift herself back onto the page of life. I’m sorry, oh, so very sorry, ladybug.

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it snowed for the first time today white ash flakes that swirled in the air barely standing out against the weathered walls of the old well house dull against the lines of the grain I go back inside and see you at the window trying to find motes blowing in the cold sunlight

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It is forlorn on the top of my trash can lying as it does on a pile of my crumpled papers the aborted offspring of my brain dripping with the still-swimming offspring of you I will never be fertile now never swell with quickening Instead I will wait for three weeks to expel yet another of my limited chances parceled out at birth measured out monthly in half-cups of blood counting down daily to the very moment when I as a woman will have nothing left to leave the world It is typical of our modern way of loving even when I am most vulnerable still we are separated by a thin layer which catches and kills the symbol of love I am left in your arms absorbing nothing but my own flush of hormones Even your sweat is clean

— neither is worth two cents once it gets stale. In the case of popcorn, who wants to eat it any more than an hour after it’s popped? Kissing takes a bit longer to lose its savor, but once it’s gone it’s gone, and there’s no reviving it, at least not with the same man. But some kisses never have a chance to go stale, and as I get older, they well up in memory, golden and buttery rich, hot and salty as when I tasted them as many as 40 years ago.

ne that comes right to mind is my first kiss ever, the one I got the summer after I finished seventh grade. It was given to me by a farm boy I’d met on the bus to Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, on my way to a two-week-long summer camp for the Future Scientists of America. My junior high school served six rural townships in Western Pennsylvania and offered three curriculums: Ag, home ec, or academic. I didn’t see myself being a farmer or the wife of a farmer, and neither did my friends, so we opted for the academic curriculum and hoped for the scholarships that would take us as far as possible from the mountains, valleys, and farms of our childhood days. The February before, I had taken first place in the school science fair, winning in the process a scholarship to attend Carnegie Mellon’s two-week summer camp program for budding astronomers. That scholarship was a marvel. No one in my family had ever gone to college nor even heard of Carnegie Mellon, and Pittsburgh was the distant big city that the rich people went to for shopping and “culture,” both in short supply in our small town. Before that summer I had been to Pittsburgh just once before, to attend a home game of the Pirates the year my father turned 40. I loved science in those days the way other girls love dolls or kittens or—in a different economic sector—horses. I loved all science, and the best Christmas present I ever got was a microscope kit, complete with microscope, eyedroppers, tweezers and tiny bottles of solution for staining and fixing slides. But I was especially fascinated by astronomy. Our small town was surrounded by miles of fields giving way to mountains so heavily forested that they were a blue blur in the mornings and evenings. There was little pollution, and even a night drive to the grocery store was enough to make one gasp with the sight of the Milky Way, puddled up like clotted milk across the black sky. My first report on the solar system in the third grade had sent me reeling outside in the brittle, cold winter nights, drunk with the knowledge that each of the specks in that star-clabbered sky was a universe of solar systems of planets as dizzyingly complex as the one my feet felt less and less solidly planted upon. So, I was happy to make the two-hour bus trip twice a day for the two weeks that the planetarium program ran. The camp was part of a university program to scout and develop young science talent in rural high schools in the western Pennsylvania area, and the trip’s normal length—two hours—was lengthened by the extra hour it took to stop to pick up farm kids from all over the area.

he bus trip was beautiful, and not just because I was so excited by what it was taking me to. Miles and miles of plowed fields stretched out on either side, bordered in the distance by the heavily forested Allegheny Mountains. Even this early in the summer the crops were starting to come up, and with them the wildflowers between the rows: blue chicory, white Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, wild pink and white phlox. The bus left early, in the dark, and I loved to watch the sun come up, the sky changing from soft, misty gray to pale, clear blue. Steven Diehl was another kid on the bus, in seventh grade like me, but clearly older.There was no stigma to being held back in those days; it was not uncommon for farm boys to take longer to finish school because they were often pulled out to help with the spring plowing or fall harvest.

Steven was a farm boy through and through, wearing a checked cotton shirt tucked in stiff new denim jeans over heavy clodded work boots. He also wore a pair of cheap mirrored aviator sunglasses totally out of character with the rest of his appearance, but they did nothing to dispel the overall hayseed impression. The science program was clearly a lark for him, unprecedented time off from the heavy fieldwork he normally had to do in the summers. Maybe that accounted for the way he seemed always to be smiling at nothing in particular and everything in general. He waited by the crossroads that led three miles back through block-quilt patterned fields to his family’s farm, and when the bus pulled up, there he’d be, mirrored glasses winking back the morning sun and big, square white teeth showing in a huge smile. He’d smile and say hello as he got on the bus, and for the first few days he smiled the whole way to Pittsburgh, whether anyone sat or talked with him or not. He was a simpleton, I thought at first, although I knew that being on the bus meant that he had to be, by definition, the smartest kid from his school.

or some reason, Steve Diehl took to me right away. I had never had a boyfriend or even a crush on a boy before, and I did not know what to make of it. But there was something about the broadness of his chest, sunburned under the thin cotton plaid of the shirt he alternated every other day with the same shirt in a different plaid. My friends tittered and whispered and made me feel a fool, but by the third day I was sitting with Steven both ways on the bus between Pittsburgh and the crossroads leading to his family farm near Martinsburg.That was a lot of hours on the bus. Sometime near the end of the first week his fingers found mine. I could not believe how different his hands were from any other hands I had ever held. They were square and large and hard as horse hooves from his chores, but his nails were trimmed straight across and very, very clean. Soon enough we were holding hands openly on the bus every day. All the excitement of being the only one chosen in my school, of what we were learning at the planetarium, of the telescopes we were building from wrapping paper tubes, black paper, and a few cheap lenses, of seeing the heavens wheel about me in the planetarium just as they did in my wildest dreams—all this was like cardboard compared

to the juicy heirloom tomato feeling that blossomed in my chest every time I felt that boy’s fingers touch mine. My hands were feverish and damp in the hot, humid air of the bus, but Steven’s were cool and dry as my grandma’s springhouse. When I pressed my hands to my face after holding his, I found that I had taken on his smell, the scent of sweet, cured hay. The other girls on the bus continued to make fun of me for taking up with a hick, but I didn’t care. Even I, consummate nerd, could see that this guy was not cool, but it did not matter. I was undone by his sweetness and by the direct way that he let me know that he cared for me. I went home at night drunk with the pleasure of having my hand held for the full three-hour bus ride and went to bed dreaming of the next morning’s commute. Steven and I were the only romantic item on the bus that summer, and speculation about the next step— whether and when it would come—ran hot.

The last day of the planetarium program almost caught us unawares.We had no prospects and, therefore, no plans to see one another after it ended. On the way to Pittsburgh our last time together going west and away from the rising sun, I was filled with the white-hot pain that only the young in love for the first time feel when they are about to be separated. When I looked over at Steven, all I could see were his big, white teeth. “What on earth can you be grinning like that at?” I asked, and he took off the sunglasses and looked me square in the eye. “It’s your hair,” he said. “The way it’s just exactly the color of the silk on the sweet corn in July.”

n the trip home, Steven’s smile had slipped a little, and he held my fingers so tightly that our hands became clammy and uncomfortable. “Excuse me,” he said, taking out a blue bandanna handkerchief from his jeans pocket. He wiped my hand first, back and palm, then his own.When the bus rattled to a stop at the crossroads, everyone was watching us, holding their collective breath. We stood up, and Steven was smiling. The bus driver let me get off the bus to say good-bye, and when I looked back, every window had a face plastered on it, including the driver’s. Steven looked down at me and put his hands on either side of my face. Holding my face like that was how he kissed me, separating my lips just slightly with the warm tip of his tongue. It was the first time I had been kissed on the lips by a boy, and I could not believe how warm his mouth was, even standing there in the baking late-afternoon heat of a July day. He tasted sweet and salty at the same time, like fresh Silver Queen corn eaten hot on the cob. He was in no hurry either, and we held the kiss until the bus driver tooted his horn twice.

Steven fumbled a note into my hands, then put a hand under my chin and tilted my face so that he could whisper that he’d given me his address, and to please write. I got back on the bus, oblivious to the hoots, calls, and snickers of my more sophisticated girlfriends. I did write, the second I got home. Steven answered, and we kept up a correspondence all summer. Some letters were full of news. “Maggie calved twins today,” he’d say. “I got a job at Barroner’s farm, picking strawberries at eleven cents a quart,” I’d answer. Others were full of yearning, both of us wishing we were back on that bus to or from Pittsburgh. We began to talk about trying to see one another again. As I searched for the big double and triple berries nestled under the leaves and straw in beds stretched in endless rows right back into the fogbooted blue mountains, I dreamed about how long it would take to earn the bus fare to Steven’s family farm in Martinsburg. At some point he began ending his letters with the word “love” written above his name in his careful, round-lettered cursive. Nothing before or since has filled me with the same joy that I felt the first time I saw that word in one of Steven’s letters. It was like a kind of shocked recognition. “Yes,” I thought, “this is what it feels like.” No boy had used the word love with me before, and though many would in the years that followed, I don’t believe any meant it as purely and simply as that boy did in his letters.When I read the first one to my friends, they howled with laughter. “What a hick! Hey, Beck,” they’d say, winking, “farm boy is waiting for you to help him with the milking.” After that I kept the letters to myself, and they continued to arrive, every Wednesday and Saturday, all summer long. School commenced and suddenly, there were boys everywhere I had somehow never noticed before. And suddenly, they seemed to be noticing me too. At some point that fall, I stopped answering Steven’s letters. It took a while longer, but eventually I stopped going to bed at night aching for the feeling of those big, callused hands holding mine on the long, sweltering bus rides. At some point I forgot all about Steven Diehl and what is had meant to me to be chosen, to be desired and valued as a woman for the first time in my life. 46

Fall passed into winter, then spring. Busy with school, my new job as the busgirl in the local diner, and all the new attention I was getting from the boys, I did not enter the science fair that year. I still stayed with the academic curriculum, though; my sights were set on college, then law school. I aimed to be the first in my family to take any schooling beyond high school, and I knew that I would need a full scholarship to do it. One day, as I sat laboring over quadratic equations at the kitchen table, I heard a small cry from the living room, where Mom sat every afternoon to read the local paper, The Altoona Mirror. “Becky!” Mom called. “What was the name of that Martinsburg boy you liked so well on the bus to Pittsburgh? Was it Steven Diehl?” Something sounded funny in her voice, so I got up from my homework and went to where she sat in her big wingback chair in the living room. I told her that, yes it was, and why did she want to know? She handed me the middle section of the paper, the “Farm Report,” without a word. The headline was very small, covering an article only one paragraph long, with no picture. “Local Boy Killed by Corn,” it read. Steven had been standing under the silo chute when the trapdoor gave way.The weight of hundreds of tons of corn had come crashing down on him, crushing and suffocating him in its silky, golden kernels. Those Altoona Mirror writers never could resist alliteration in a headline, even if the effect was, as here, to make laughable something that was tragic to its core. Steven was the last boy left at home, and without him, his family would surely have to sell their farm. He was barely 15, and we had gotten the chance to kiss only one time. And I had never gotten the chance, as I had intended, to tell him what he meant to me or to sign one of my own letters to him with the word “love.” I did not show the newspaper to my friends, and somehow, the story never got out. Steven’s farm was two townships away, and news didn’t travel then the way it does now. I went on with my schoolwork and my job at the diner, which eventually led to a promotion to waitressing. In a few years time I did get the scholarship to a private women’s college in Massachusetts, which led in due course to the scholarship to Stanford Law School. I saved the article, along with Steven’s letters, for many years among the things I kept stored in my parents’ attic after I took off for the West Coast. Dad’s drinking and carousing went from worse to intolerable.The woman who served eggs at Joe’s Diner in the morning and took off her clothes at Josie’s Café at night was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Mom moved out. When my parents formally split up their 20-year marriage and broke up the house I’d grown up in, all my things were lost or thrown away.

hen I close my eyes, though, I can still see Steven’s thick scrawl across the blue-lined page of his last letter and the tiny, curling blond hairs on the back of the freckled hand that wrote them.“The sweet corn is growing,” he’d said,“and I love you so much.” Dad died of lung cancer 16 years ago, six months before my daughter was born, and mom died of the same sickness 10 years later. The trains are rusting on the tracks all around the town I grew up in, but the air and the dirt still carry the memories of the smoke that used to pour out of those engines. I don’t get back to Pennsylvania much anymore, and it’s been years since I’ve been made breathless by the sight of a glittering sky on the way to the grocery store to pick up milk for the next morning’s breakfast. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been so bad, being a farmer or a farmer’s wife. I wonder if the fields still sparkle with dew in mornings, like they used to then. I wonder what the second kiss would have been like, and the third. I sure wish I’d given that boy the chance to let me know.

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GONE TO ROADY’S Ra C He L 88

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Today, my car called me from the body shop. It wants to change its address, and live there permanently. But I need you, I said. It’s not my fault. You had to get fixed. I promise I’ll wipe the cran-raspberry juice puddle from your cup holder, the one that’s been there for months. I’ve been meaning to. And I’ll take the dog hair from your seats with that roller I bought at Wal-Mart. I’ll even replace that broken overhead bulb and remove the My Child Skateboards Better Than Your Honor Student bumper sticker. I do take education seriously, honest, I do. I can understand why you would want to stay there at Roady’s. The insurance adjuster must have given you lots of attention, and I know they’re finding just the right parts for you, And that Marilyn, who always answers the phone there, she’s so nice. Oh, please, say you want to come home. I miss you. The kids miss you. Hey, would you like a sign in the garage that says VIP Parking Only?

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The night is a circle like the wind anything we name will continue to fly away from us regardless bits of food on the earth we are scavengers we will eat the stars

Where is the body now since it is moving at the same speed as the comet that stays stationary in the sky as I stand in the driveway watching as it sits between two houses

we want everything to become us we assume we become anything we admire we are saved every moment without knowing

It is so easy to point out a comet to my daughter who is asleep in my arms I wake her and point up, “There it is!” it hasn’t been there for thousands of years and thousands of years from now you will no longer be asleep in my arms

Nothing is expected of us and yet we expect greatness being among the trees as we are and the miracle of gravity I was determined to be out this morning before anyone the crow jumped back surprised by my feet slapping the pavement and I almost forgot to look at the sun separating the clouds rising over the river

I want to tell her there is a reason why all her papers fell from her top shelf while she slept but the mystery is in what we do not name when we allow the universe to be autonomous we will rush toward nothing even as we go at great speed circling because we have to married to courage chasing the comet’s tail

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A fall tree half-bare and trembling I wait hoping it will settle like the weight of wood on water. You followed me snaking corners into the pastry shop on Amsterdam Avenue where I would go to write. The door jingled to a close against the leather whip of cold. You sat beside me collar straight prose muscular. I wanted what you had but not you. Not yet. I smelled you everywhere for years, down black-and-white tiled hallways stale with city piss, between damp sheets musky with the substitute scents of other men. I gave birth. I wrote a book. When I called at last a woman answered, her voice a sharp crush of autumn leaves beneath the sole of my boot.

archie &edith M

y husband and I were married on November 4, 1979, the same day that the hostages were taken in Iran. Whenever I mention this to other people, my husband likes to quip, “Yeah, but they got out.” Twenty-five years later, I have to assume he’s kidding. Further, with the national divorce rate approaching one in two, even he has to admit that we’re having a good run. A young friend recently asked us the secret to our success, and we clobbered him with clichés about things like respect and compassion, which are certainly important. But truth be told, if I had to credit our nuptial longevity to any one thing, I’d have to go with hand puppets. I had two of them on a bookshelf in the apartment where I lived when we started dating, male and female bunnies whom we named Archie and Edith, and it was during a serious argument between us that the puppets first got involved. Archie and Edith became us, only nicer. They were us lite. I can’t speak for my husband, but I found it a lot easier to forgive his puppet than him.

The four of us started getting together on a regular basis to sort of square off and clear the air. Early on in our marriage, I was always trying to get my husband to try to guess what he had done to upset me, feeling that if he didn’t even know what he had done wrong, well, there was just no point in going on. But magically, when the puppets got involved, it became possible for my bunny to say to his bunny, “You hurt my feelings when you did that.” And probably because Edith is a lot cuter than I am—and somewhat less strident in an argument—Archie found it easier to say to her, “I did not know that, and I promise to try not to do that again,” all the while stroking her cheek with his paw. After many years of practice, we are so firmly entrenched in the characters of Archie and Edith that we don’t even need the puppets anymore. Their souls are always with us, like the time I was very sick and frightened in the emergency room, undergoing a procedure where the doctor attached electrodes to various parts of my body and then steadily increased the voltage until I confessed to taking the Lindbergh baby.

Joan Call

Every time the doctor left the room, Archie popped up from under the gurney, talking trash about her in his squeaky little voice. We nicknamed her “Sparky,” and we dissed everything about that poor woman from her wardrobe to her anatomy. We so firmly believe in the effectiveness of our puppets that we gave my stepson and daughter-in-law male and female otter puppets as an engagement gift. They’ve been married for three years now, and they find our method effective, but they still need the puppets. Which is why I can’t understand what made my stepson, in a rash and impetuous moment, take his puppet to the office.

n a tragic turn of events, his otter has been taken hostage by a band of renegade employees, who sent him a Polaroid of the poor puppet, blindfolded and holding up a copy of the current newspaper. (I’m not making this up.) They are threatening to begin sending little puppet parts to him in the inter-office mail if their demands are not met. We are appealing to the kidnappers: “We beg of you, return the otter, unharmed, as quickly as possible.” My daughter-in-law is seven months pregnant. They need that puppet!

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Cradled in the cup of my hand, my left breast with its lumpy scarâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;my right breast, its small perfection spared by mammograms. Stay with me, you twoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;let no outlaw cells multiply, overwhelm your tender flesh, dense with midnight memories. Stay with me to the end. And may the child you nourished be there to fold my arms across my chest, so my fingers stiffen around you. Let her send us together into the fire, sprinkle us over the water.

FAUX PAS, FIRST DAY TEACHING IN A CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL P Er I E 15

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Sprung from 16 years of parochial education in Wisconsin to teach tenth-grade English is a dangerous thing, especially if you’re a virgin, it’s raining hard, and your bungalow is adjacent to the football field. The students drifted in without umbrellas, hair dripping like weeping willows, dragging pounds of mud on the bottoms of shoes. In Wisconsin you dressed for the weather, wore a slicker with a hood, put things on your feet to keep them clean. The students finally seated in the center of their personal lakes, I stared them down. Asked one question. “Doesn’t anyone wear rubbers around here?” After that, control was out of the question.

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I am not going to stand here in front of friends and family and say he was a good man; not when we all know our late friend was not particularly so. He had his good days, certainly, and his good qualities: the ability to catch fish when he should have been working comes to mind; the way he was able to keep his liquor hidden from his wife and appear sober at AA meetings; thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notable, definitely; his uncanny knack for winning money from his buddies, knowing they would bet their hearts on certain football teams, against their better judgments; plus we should not overlook his gift for exaggeration in successive tellings of tall tales and off-color anecdotes. But a good man? Is it not goodness enough that we loved him? That he was not an especially good man, and we loved him?

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Every morning you pray away the loneliness and it never leaves and you’re convinced God doesn’t answer your prayers anymore and you’re not sure he even listens so you drink glass after crystal glass of Dalwhinnie swirling around ice cubes until your eyes float in the tumbler and stare back at you, cheeks flushed, your body immobile for hours and you cruise the Internet for men who aren’t your match meet them in smoky bars and fancy restaurants talking about nothing, just waiting for the moment when their fingers accidentally brush your sleeve you convince yourself they like you when in your heart you know you’ll never see them again or even want to but you let one of them walk you to your car anyway when you know you’re headed for his backseat where he might love you like you hope you want and your hands unzip his jeans, your head bows down your hair falls in his lap the car rocks, the windows steam and when you walk back alone to your car, he’s already driving away you realize he never even asked for your phone number

so you light up that saved joint your last true love carefully rolled for you which you kept, because you could never roll them well and you thought he’d be back and he’s not ever so you just say fuck it and smoke the thing anyway all alone because now there’s no reason not to and you e-mail some guy living six states away because it’s safe and you know he’ll never be yours because his wife still wants him so you think you’d rather swallow the palmful of Seconal in your left hand but you can’t decide how much to swallow so you don’t swallow any because your kids would hate seeing you dead on the floor with your eyes wide open, staring into nowhere and your friends would think it’s such a shame why would she do such a thing because she has everything then they would realize that the highlighted hair hides a brokenhearted brain, the smiles are fake and if it could happen to you it could happen to them, too so you run from reality until you’re too exhausted you cry great gulping sobs sucking air collapse into restless sleep until the sunrise forces you upright and you paint that smile on your face, head out the door with Kahlua in your morning coffee pushing loneliness out of your way and avoiding your reflection in the hall mirror.

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The judge will say “You’re one blood.” We’ll hear “one flesh” from the pastor. I want nothing so gross — Just clothes hopelessly mixed in the drawers of our dresser.

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We usually meet in parallelograms Drink our circles And take notes within the textbooks of squares. Today is different though. I caught her under the magnolia tree Crying, small ovals running down her face. She told me she didn’t want to be a rhombus anymore. I asked her what is wrong with being a rhombus. She said nothing’s wrong with being a rhombus. With the sleeve of my sweater she wiped her eyes. She said it’s just that everyone is into trapezoids these days.

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES LITERATURE Marvin Adelson Marvin’s writing, spanning many years, has accelerated since his second marriage. He is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture at UCLA and his unconventional career stretches from engineering to psychology, the Army in World War II, public service, and an industrial research and development department where he oversaw development of a head-mounted display that prefigured virtual reality. He headed a team that sought to improve operations at the Air Force Command Post in the Pentagon, and helped design several military systems. He was also a cofounder of the Institute of the Future, executive director of a committee at the National Academy of the Sciences, and program manager for the Governor’s Commission on the L.A. Riots.

Miranda Coffey Since 2000, Miranda has been a member of Poets on Parnassus, a group that hosts a poetry workshop and public readings at the University of California at San Francisco. In 1998, she won second prize for poetry in a contest sponsored by the California Writers’ Club.

Cathy Arden Cathy is a native New Yorker, a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, an actor, the mother of two children, and a newly certified sailor. She was the recipient of a Ford Venture Grant and was a Writing Fellow at the Fiction International Writer’s Conference.

Steve DeMoss Steve is 19 years old and has been writing poetry for the past four years and has been publishing it for the last two. He works at a small local coffee shop and enjoys music, films, and writing.

James Adams Baker James received his bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Spanish Literature from the University of Buffalo. After attending law school, he began practicing law in Ithaca, New York, a profession that he continues to pursue. His writing explores the fundamental and universal themes of quotidian love, man’s relationship to the physical world and to his community, and man’s coming to terms with his morality. Karen Batchelor After she spent two years in the Peace Corps in South Korea, she returned to San Francisco State University and earned her MA in English with an emphasis in teaching English as a second language. She currently teaches English and ESL in the Bay Area, and also trains teachers both domestically and abroad. She has published poetry, professional articles, and coauthored eight textbooks. In March of 2006, her first novel, Murder At Ocean View College, was published by Houghton Mifflin, and she is now working on a sequel. Elizabeth Berkenbile Elizabeth’s background is diverse. She received a BA from the University of California in anthropology and music, with an emphasis in East Indian culture and music composition. She is a pianist and has been trained on a number of instruments, including violin, bassoon, and trumpet. She worked for eleven years as a teacher in New Mexico and most recently in Maine. Additionally, she has had training as a surgical technician and psychiatric technician. Currently her and her husband own and operate a home appliance business in Rockland, Maine. Deborah Brown Deborah is a coeditor of Lofty Dogmas: Poets On Poetics (University of Arkansas Press). She is currently in the process of completing a poetry manuscript, and was a cotranslator of a book of poems by Giovanni Pascoli. She is a professor of English and serves as Chair of the Humanities Division at the University of New HampshireManchester. Joan Call Joan is the former owner of The Little Harbor Bookstore in Cohasset, MA and was also the founding publisher/editor of The Independent Reader, a print and web publication about books. Currently, she works as a freelance writer and is the winner of the Cape Cod Women’s Organization In Her Own Words award in 2004 and 2005. Her website can be seen at www.joancall.com. Ellen Case Ellen holds an MFA from Mills College and an MA in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University, both in California.

Shae Davidson Historian and poet Shae Davidson has worked as a museum director and educator, and currently serves as web curator for MIT Media Lab’s Creative Synthesis Collaborative. He is working on a set of essays exploring the relationship between identity, history, and perceptions of nature.

Rachel de Baere A native of the San Francisco Bay area, Rachel completed her undergraduate education at U.C. Berkeley. She received her MPA at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service and worked for over 15 years administering New York City programs serving crime victims and juvenile and adult offenders. Once again residing in California, she currently facilitates writing practice groups and teaches letter and literature courses. Kirsten Ferreri Kirsten is currently a student of Creative Writing at UCLA, and though she has not yet been published she has studied writing under Mario Padilla and Jim Krusoe. She also works part-time as a private writing instructor, working with children from kindergarten through high school, and recently took on a job as a proofreader for Reflections Publishing, a local small press. Rebecca Foust Born in Altoona, a gritty, depressed former railroading town in western Pennsylvania, Rebecca was the first person in her family to graduate college. She attended Smith and Dartmouth Colleges and Stanford University on full scholarships. She now lives in the California Bay Area with her husband and three teenaged kids. Until the birth of her third child, she practiced criminal defense law and has since volunteered full-time as an activist and grassroots political organizer for parents of public school students with Autism and other learning disorders. Anni Macht Gibson Anni is a teacher for the Women Writing for (a) Change School. She serves on the Board of the Woman Writing for (a) Change Foundation, as well as facilitats a writing circle at the Cincinnati YWCA Battered Women’s Shelter. She received her BA from Goucher College in 1974 and her Master’s of Education with a concentration in communications from Xavier University in 1977. Kathryn Higgins Kathryn is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s English Lit program (1984), and has been writing for newspapers for several years now. When she’s not chasing after her two kids (she’s a single mom) or proofreading coupons (horrendous day job), she reads her work at open mikes and poetry slams. She’s working on her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Jocelyn Paige Kelly Jocelyn works as a freelance business plan writer and copywriter. Her writing reflects the imagination, wryness, and dynamism of Las Vegas, the city of her upbringing. She is currently at work on a short story collection, Open 24 Hours, which deals with ordinary people living in an extraordinary setting.

Thomas A. Kimmel Tom was born in Memphis, grew up in Alabama, and now resides in Nashville with his wife and daughter. A successful Nashville songwriter, he is also a Southern humorist, a poet, a yogi, and a self-styled preacher. His songs have been featured in film, television, and on albums by dozens of artists including Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Randy Travis, and Linda Ronstadt, selling millions of copies around the world. A critically acclaimed recording and performing artist, he has released seven albums. L. Carol Lappin Currently, L. Carol Lappin is a creative writing instructor and a caretaker in San Jose (for a friend with dementia), but she spent almost 20 years as a technical writer in Silicon Valley while living outside Boulder Creek, California—off the grid amongst coyotes, raccoons, and crank labs. She has an MFA from San Jose State University. Perie Longo For 21 years Perie has led poetry workshops for the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference and the annual three day Santa Barbara Summer Poetry Workshop. She was recently featured on the Charles Osgood Radio Files speaking on the subject of poetry and its healing uses for psychotherapy. In 2005, she traveled to Kuwait and spoke at the University about poetry as a healing modality. Her poems were also translated into Arabic for a reading she gave at the Kuwaiti Writers Association. Patricia Mastricolo Patricia is a Philadelphia poet who has been modestly published in local literary magazines, and published once while homeless and unemployed in Prague. Mary Carol Moran Mary is a yoga instructor and a high school math teacher (soon to be retired). Clear Soul, her first book of poems, was published in 2001 by Court Street Press. The author of five novels, she was also the editor of unbuttoned and the anthology Ordinary And Sacred As Blood: Alabama Women Speak (River’s Edge Publishing Company, LLC, 1999). James Navé James is a poet, a performer, a writing teacher, and founder of The Writing Salon, based in Taos, New Mexico (www.thewritingsalon.net). He has been featured in Paul Devlin’s award-winning documentary Slam Nation, and is the slam master for the biannual Leaf Slam at the Lake Eden Arts Festival. He is also the author of an illustrated book of poems entitled The Road. Julie Neid Julie received her BA in English from the University of Michigan, and is currently working toward her MA in early childhood education. Working with young children was supposed to be the gap to fill until she was offered a fabulous job editing The New York Times, but things happen, and she found herself adoring the children that she worked with. In her poetry, she examines the many ranges of human emotion. Barbara D. Pieroni In her lifetime, Barbara has been a buyer for a major department store, a store manager for two other major retailers, a customer service manager, a paralegal and a proofreader. She now has turned her attention back to her one true passion: writing. She draws inspiration from her own experiences as well as from the world around her. Judie Rae Judie is currently working as a college English instructor, she has a Master’s of professional writing degree from USC. She has written four novels for young adults, including a Nancy Drew mystery, and has also authored a college thematic reader, Rites Of Passage, published by Heinle.

Susanna Rich Professor of English and Distinguished Teacher at Kean University in New Jersey, Susanna produces and hosts an online radio program, Poets on Air. The Fulbright Commission and Collegium Budapest awarded her their first joint Fellowships in Creative Writing so that she may complete “Still Hungary: A Memoir.” She is an associate editor at Future Cycle. Michael Riser Michael’s father instilled a love for poetry in him when he was very young, and he has been writing poetry now for about ten years. He pursues many art forms, but poetry is one that he loves dearly and still manages to find time for despite his schedule. He is 25 years old, living in El Cerrito, California with his wife of two years, holding a lamentable full-time position with the county of Alameda. Ann Robinson Ann received her BA from Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri, and studied in the MFA program in fiction and poetry at the University of Arkansas. She works in the Criminal and Traffic Department in Marin County, California. She also owns a farming operation in Arkansas, where she grows rice, cotton, soybeans, and corn. Rachel Terner Vogel Rachel attended Columbia College in New York City, where she studied with the late New York School poet Kenneth Koch. Upon graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a major in English Literature, she ventured into academia, receiving her MA in English Literature from Columbia University, before moving on to Harvard Law School. In her third year at Harvard, she was admitted into a poetry workshop with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. She graduated law school in 1991 and, after a clerkship with a federal judge, went on a brief career in litigation with a Los Angeles firm. A deep desire to write ultimately lured her away, though, and she is now pursuing that interest in earnest. She lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with her husband and three children. Fredrick Zydek Before retiring, Fredrick taught creative writing and theology for many years, first at UNO and later at the College of Saint Mary. It’s rather amazing how one wakes up one morning appreciating they would rather go fishing than teach one more class. He bought a small farm that has a creek running through it.These days he raises soybeans and corn and can fish any day of the week he wants—in season. He has more than 800 publishing credits which include personal essays, fiction, academic articles, plays, poems and an occasional review. He is either incredibly prolific or incredibly old.

ART Torukpa Agbegha Torukpa is attending UNC Charlotte as an art major with a concentration in fiber arts. As a first-generation American with Nigerian parents, her application of patterns, line qualities, and color suggest the blend of different cultures. She hopes to one day be successful in the design fields, particularly fashion design, illustration, and textiles. Austin Ballard As a growing artist, Austin is becoming more concerned with discovering a deeper sense of meaning and honesty out of everyday found objects. While he has always worked on a 2D format, he finds himself pursuing other avenues of art that are fundamentally three-dimensional. Bridget Blackwelder Bridget’s current work centers around two interdependent themes in her life: nature and experiences from living with cancer. She turns to nature because of its restorative powers. She borrows forms and patterns from nature, and adds some mystery or whimsy. Bridget’s primary focus is on sculpture, but she also enjoys mixed media, recycled materials, all kinds of metals, and the integration of fibers.

Chris Campbell Chris is an architecture student at UNC Charlotte that employs all forms of artistic mediums as a means for self-expression. His art is the result of a fusion between aspects of architecture and the fine arts. Sara Colee Sara is 26, a full time student with a full time job as Special Project Coordinator at Neurologist Pain Clinic here in Charlotte. Born in Dallas, she has lived in five cities in the past six years. She is concentrating in Illustration but is interested in interconnecting multiple disciplines including printmaking, photography, film, sculpture, and fabric… to name a few. She is drawn to art that addresses ideas of community, change (ex: evolution of imagery), and introspection/interpretation of self and others around us (empathy). Leeann Hargett Leeann is an art major who is completing her last year at UNC Charlotte. She utilizes research and development to ensure that her ideas are conceptually solid prior to construction. Her interest in sculpture, fibers and an assortment of mediums is growing and will increasingly begin to show throughout her work. With the attainment of knowledge that is unceasing, she will embrace the start of her professional endeavors open-mindedly and ready for anything. Pete Hurdle Pete is a recent UNC Charlotte graduate who is in the transition from student life to “the real world.” Pete is a graphic designer who enjoys all forms of pop culture and plays inline hockey in his spare time. Lydia Ko As an inventive artist, Lydia is currently a fifth year senior graduating in Spring 2008. At the moment, she is an art student obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts concentrating in graphic design and photography with a minor in art history. She does not know what the future holds for her, but she is ready to take it on in strides. Jennifer Liu Jennifer is a senior at UNC Charlotte pursuing a BA degree in art with a printmaking concentration and a double minor in psychology and art history. While her strong affinity for art emerged during her early childhood, she continues her quest for discovering the meaning of art and its vibrant impact on the lives of others. She hopes to envelope the viewer with her thoughtprovoking shapes and luring color schemes as they reflect her internal self. Art has been her life and it will graciously continue to set herself to music. Alexander O’Neill Alexander takes photos, it’s his life. Johnny Robinson As a graphic design student, Johnny’s work is usually ruled by line, form and color. His artistic work, however, is ruled by emotions and attitudes shaped by his life experiences. Whether the issues he addresses are things like suicide or gender roles, influencing the attitudes of the viewer with these types of issues tends to be his main goal no matter what the medium of choice happens to be. Melissa Root Melissa is graduating in December with a BFA degree in graphic design. She is not quite certain what is in store for her future, but she has big dreams. Melissa has had some pretty funny blond moments along with too many best days of her life. Nathan Tucker Nathan is an architecture and painting major at UNC Charlotte. He is originally from Hendersonville.

Dylan Willis Dylan has been creating unique artwork in the Charlotte, North Carolina area for over three years. Coming from a traditional southern family, the major influences on him are religiosity and socio-political mores. In the past year his digital photographic montages have discussed issues of materialism, as well as group and individual social identity. By juxtaposing those objects onto the subject, Dylan Willis questions the status quo and the sociological expectations of his peers. Lee Waller Lee is a four year architecture student who frequently Googles “What should I do with my life?”

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 the University of North Carolina at Charlotte since 1999. Currently, she teaches freshman composition and technical communication. For the past two years, she has organized 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. Julie Townsend Julie is a full-time Lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a published short story writer with stories in The MacGuffin, The Distillery, and No Hiding Place:The Legacy of Charlotte Area Writers. She won first place in Creative Loafing’s Best Short Story Contest in 1999 for her story, “Word Proxy,” and first place in the North Carolina Working Press, for her investigative article about a cult-like church. She has numerous other articles and non-fiction works in Creative Loafing and Main Street Rag. Currently, she has a novel under consideration with a press in Chicago. Hoppi Hurley Hoppi has written poetry, short stories and a novel (unpublished). She would like to express her joy and pride that she was allowed to help with the literary selections for this year’s Sanskrit. “Keep writing and reading, people. We need to reach out as often as possible. The world needs the stories of others to connect with each other.”

ART JURY Keith Bryant Keith joined the Art and Art History department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2000 where he teaches ceramics and three-dimensional design. With expertise in clay his sculpture has addressed ideas of loneliness, isolation, architecture and landscape. His work has been shown in Texas, Mississippi, New York, Michigan, Colorado, California, Tennessee, South Carolina and has work in collections in Colorado, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Jae Emerling Dr. Jae Emerling is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He specializes in modern/contemporary art. He is the author of Theory for Art History, a text examining the intersection between art history and critical theory.

Aspen Hochhalter In 2004, Aspen received her Masters of Fine Arts in Photo Based Media at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. From 2004-2007 she taught a wide range of art courses at East Carolina University and Chowan University in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Since August of this academic year, she has been teaching photography in the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her photographic work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States. Rachele Riley Rachele holds undergraduate degrees in art and design from New York University and the Burg Giebichenstein School of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. She earned her MFA in visual communication at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an artist and graphic designer who creates multi-media and print work, incorporating video, animation, drawing, collage, and Web-based imagery. Her recent work is a creative investigation into the visual representation of violence in our everyday existence. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally at venues such as The Backloft in Dublin, Ireland; The WPA/C Experimental Media Series in Washington, DC; the Marsh Art Gallery in Richmond,VA; Gallery 400 in Chicago, IL; and on Salto A1 television in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has worked as a graphic designer for the National Park Service, National Public Radio, the Smithsonian Institution, and VCU’s School of the Arts. Ms. Riley is currently Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Michael Simpson Prof. Michael Simpson, a graduate of Illinois State University, teaches fundamentals, life drawing and painting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He uses video and sequential still pictures of a small river in northwestern South Carolina as an inspiration to his paintings. His work examines the idea that you can never put your foot into the same place in a river twice; an idea first ventured by the Greek philosopher Heraclites. His paintings are installed in groups of five that explore about two seconds of the ever-changing turbulence of a specific site on the river. He calls these series “Moving in Place.” Typically, Simpson works to stay dry when exploring these river sites, but the students say he is “still all wet.”

COLOPHON Copyright © 2008 Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine and the Student Media Board of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Printed by Wallace Printing, Newton, North Carolina. 3000 copies of Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine were printed on 100 lb. Cougar Opaque/Smooth Finish with cover stock of 80 lb. Quest Tan Vellum with 72 pages and a trim size of 9 inches by 13 inches. Produced on iMac G5 running OS X version 10.4.11 using Epson Perfection 1240 and 3200 scanners, Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and Macromedia FreeHand MX.

Cover design and Table of Contents by Debbie Archer, LouAnn Lamb and Michael Allen Kerr. Title Page design by Debbie Archer and Michael Allen Kerr. Editor’s Note designed by Debbie Archer. All poetry and art content pages designed by Michael Allen Kerr. Bright Holders of Plenty designed by Debbie Archer, Louann Lamb, and Michael Allen Kerr with the assistance of Jennifer Nasipak. Aunt Clara’s Keys illustrations and design by Sam Webster with the assistance of Michael Allen Kerr and Mary Lord. Real Historical Dolls designed by Michael Allen Kerr, dolls made by Sam Webster. First Kiss designed and illustrated by Melanie Jansen and Karen Pierce with the assistance of LouAnn Lamb. Archie and Edith designed by Debbie Archer and LouAnn Lamb. Contributor’s and Jury Biography and Colophon pages designed by Melanie Jansen with the assistance of Debbie Archer. Special Thanks designed by Michael Allen Kerr with the assistance of Debbie Archer and Melanie Jansen. Staff Biography page illustration and design by Michael Allen Kerr. Fonts used were Arial Narrow Regular, Bembo Regular, Bembo Italic, Bembo Bold, ITC Bookman Light, ITC Bookman Light Italic, Cameo Appearance NF Regular, Eagle Light, Eagle Book, Eagle Bold, Eagle Black, Futura Extra Bold, Giddyup Std Regular, Goudy Old Style, Goudy Old Style Italic, Neutra Text Light, Neutra Text Book Alt, SignPainter HouseCasual, Stitch & Bitch, Swiss 721 BT Light, Swiss 721 BT Light Italic, Swiss 721 BT Meduim Italic and Swiss 911 BT Compressed.

THANK YOU Wayne Maikranz

Thank you for your baked goods and guidance. You encouraged us to no avail to behave like we weren’t six and helped us deal with the outside world. We’re really not kidding about taking the Student Media budget and giving it all to us.

Mark Haire

Alright, one thing we don’t appreciate is the hundreds of rubber bands aimed at our faces. Other than that, you saved our bacon. Without you we wouldn’t have rubber bands to shoot back, lousy paychecks, or a magazine. Thank you for keeping our business straight.

Michael Teague

Thank you for letting us play Halo and keeping our computers in working order. How you survived our shenanigans, no one will ever know. And we won’t tell anyone that you helped us steal the scanner from the University Times office.

Jennifer Conway

For the past two years, you have been gracious enough to take the time to come and share your wisdom with us. Thank you for the free advice from a seasoned and talented Sanskrit alumni.

Brittaney Forte

Britta-nanny, sometimes known as Brittaney Jackson, we know you’re always on a tight schedule, but thank you for keeping us in check at the Sanskrits. We love being your “girls” (especially Michael) and thank you so much for your encouragement and creativity. Girl, you got those design skills! Now what did you say?

Paul Lascara

We would like to thank you for your support and help, IRREGARDLESS of how pretentious you find the majority of us “art folk.” Your ceaseless bloviating will never be forgotten, and we love you, even if you have a touch of the ging. Don’t forget that Brittaney beat your Sanskrit Office Cart-Racing record.

The Staff of The University Times, NinerOnline.com and Media Marketing

Your encouraging words helped keep us jolly. Thank you for being our neighbors and cohorts this year. To Media Marketing, we would like to thank you especially for all that money you made only to be trown into “The Black Hole of Student Media.” We sincerely hope that this magazine is something all of Student Media will be proud of because we consider you all part of our family, in that Jerry Springer type of way.

Jurors

It is an honor to have worked with such a distinguished jury this year. You took time out of your professional careers to help us produce this magazine. Thank you for all decisions and suggestions.

Contributors

As always, there would be no publication without you. Any magazine is only as good as its content, and you have surely guaranteed us another stellar volume of work. Your dedication and unflinching desire to share your work with the world has made this magazine what it is. Thank you and congratulations again.

Volunteers

We cannot pay everyone, and it says something that you were willing to assist us for free. Thank you to our volunteers Sammantha Steiner, Christina Crisco, Brittaney Forte and Little Pauly Lascara.

Special Thanks

Kelly Mergeš, Daisy Concepcion, Joey Emanuel, Vanna Kealy, Alan Lamb, Ernest Goodridge and Will Robinson, Sudent Activity Fees Commission, UNCC Department of English, UNCC Department of Art & Art History, Scrabulous, the circle, Marion Cotesworth-Haye, St. Rita of Cascia, Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Mountain Dew, Philip Morris USA, Jimmy John’s, Toppers Pizza, iPod, BLAM!O and Rag Time Jim, Fräulein Sally Bowles, Thai House, Bob Ross, Post-its, CGRAAAW turkey, Ritazza, Dr. “Jimmy with a ‘J’,” Howard Beale, Marsh-mallows, Eleanor of Aquitaine, noise-canceling headphones, Wolf Camera 1710 and 1720, Neko Neko No, the couch, Lotrenex, Preacher Gary Eugene Birdsong, penicillin, MeatHammer, UNCC Biology Department, Baby Jane Hudson, Mudda-Wudda, mayonnaise, King Zog, Reese’s and eems, strawberry cake, iChat, Sacagawea, Bayer Aspirin, and Bluth Co.

LouAnn Lamb

You know…when we walk into that door to Student Media, we always peer with hope into that janitor’s closet that is your office, hoping our advisor and friend will be there with an open couch. We would like to offer you an extra special, irreverently large thank you on behalf of both ourselves and Sanskrit staffs past for your incomparable (albeit incomprehensible) support, guidance and love. Thank you for your years of offering advice on everything from typesetting to relationships and what olives really taste like. You have always wished the best for all your students and, likewise, we wish the best for you, wherever you may be. You truly are The Queen of…Everything.

THE STAFF Lead Designer Michael Allen Kerr is an impossible hodgepodge of an unapologetic fauxhemian rebel rebel hostile honky savoir-faire commie gringo neo-hippie andro-cracker dandy.

in ten Hopefully tent n years, Co ebster tor Sam W Coordina ) will be living in an bs (Sahm Web use, married to a d s an old farmho with tattoo g musician bearded ness for art, makin elry, a fond t silver jew magnificen d by stacks of surrounde d with her stories, fille notebooks d running around, with her ki g a guitar and strummin ey Jude.” singing “H

Designer Karen Rose Pierce has been engorged with art ever since she was a wee little rice ball. With that said, she is very fond of her Filipino heritage; although born and raised, here in Charlotte. This short gal is pursuing a degree in art with a concentration in graphic design and photography. And Mary Lord

Editor-in-Chief Debbie Archer has her moments, but she can . cackle with the best of them She is a senior in biology with a minor in sculpture and art history. While trying real hard to graduate, she fills her life with passions for Water Bears, Latin, and The Who.

Associate ne Editor Melanie An to ing Jansen has someth For ax. say: “Let’s all just rel major cereal.” She is an art in ion with a concentrat y illustration and is ver her close to finishing up third year at UNC Charlotte.

Cop Ervis y Editor Martin a “Mastercard and y o hails from A ” lbania, senio es, it is a co u r n a tr c hates). counting majoy. She is a She s r (which ti ll d re she exi am philoso stentialist like h s of being an pher er fa with an Sartre, and w vorite o ri passion ld typewriter. H ting poetry er new is ballro es p o e m c ia d a lly n She is a the Argentine cing, Tang lso a the 60’s lost soul from o. ; a fo dreame olish r.

Content Coordinator Mary Lord is a non-sophomoric sophomore at UNC Charlotte. Majoring in international business with a minor in Japanese, Mary hopes to expand her mind and lengthen her resumé by joining as many organizations on campus that will fit in her already titillating and rip-roaring schedule. She enjoys fine wine, Karen Pierce, and long walks on the beach—in that order.

Conten Coordinato t r Jennifer Na sip ak is a proudest coor Ginger of the dinating Ging clan. She er is Dave Gahan illusive, in love with and swears ev important by erything Bo of swears. Sh n Scott— the highest e and anything lives on words, art cla write for food ssic rock. She will and life an aspiring alt . She is also er healer. Let’s he native ar pins and poiso it for n.