NTENTS
ART SHORT STORIES POEMS
ELEMENTS OF LARGER OBJECT
6
An Accounting
8
Shed
9
Sunrise Charlotte, NC
10
Julie Wittes Schlack
Elizabeth Compton
Joseph Pepe
Are Idle Hands The Devil’s Workshop? Susannah W. Simpson
11
Black Macadam Over White Asphalt
12
August-ish
13
Balanced Offering
14
Wake
Susan Thomas
Sarah H. Boatwright
Kyla Hall
Matthew Walsh
Tropical Jive 15 That Mark Gordon 4 5 66 69 70 71 Dedication Editor’s Note Contributor Bios Juror Bios/Special Thanks Staff Bios Colophon
16
Two Figures Dancing (Hot Pink)
18
Sides of the Story: A Triptych
21 22
Amber Watts
Kate Fetherston
Summer of ‘07 Karen Pierce
Hanging Around Serge Neri
CONTEN ART SHORT STORIES 23
The Bath
45
24
A Final Slow-down
Tracks Charlotte, NC 46 Train Joseph Pepe
25
Amputation
47 Diversity Eric Alan Wattinne
26
Bronz
Body Has a Memory 48 TheRaphael Badagliacca
27
Junkyard Charlotte, NC
49
28
On the Way to Nashville
Desperately 50 Love, Chuck Taylor
33
White House and Tree Charlotte, NC
(the kind your mother used to make) 53 Lunch Austin Ballard
34
Doll Giving Boy Key
Child 54 TheEli Inner Langner
35
In Motion
55 Nowhere Louis Daniel Brodsky
Max Snavlin
Gerald Zipper
Helen Wickes
David Banemanivong
Joseph Pepe
S.D. Lavender
Joseph Pepe
Amber Watts
Carrie Sigmon
House Signs
Richard Lighthouse
Insomnia
John Field
36 Gigabytes Toni L. Wilkes
56
37
Dream
A Lovesong 57 Collision: Elizabeth Burk
38
Going to Jukebox Heaven
Tuesday Supper 58 A Matthew Perron
Jessica Harman
Tom McFadden
Undesirable
Elizabeth Szewczyk
Station Charlotte, NC 39 Train Joseph Pepe
61
Lily
Lieu of Flowers 40 InJanet Flora
62
Balance Offering I
43
Burning Down Memories
64
Lost Girl
44
Sonogram
65
Premature Prosperity 2
Ashley Owens
Gannon Daniels
Amelia Fletcher
Kyla Hall
Elizabeth Compton
Austin Ballard
EMS
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a former employee at SMP and a friend to many
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This year’s magazine is dedicated to the memory of
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GO OUT AND DO SOMETHING THAT INTIMIDATES YOU! Why? Because I said so? No. Do it for that sense of accomplishment that one rarely experiences in life that can be achieved through doing something that you never believed you could do. For example: As an artist, I have recently found myself drawn to the joys of experimenting with new and unknown processes. Mostly because of influences. More than likely, I’ll see something like a crazy, awesome texture in a painting and I’m like “Woah! Alright. Somebody tell me how to do that.” But, leaving the original process a curiosity is more than intriguing to me. As I push myself to haphazardly recreate the inspiration, I find that new and innovative images are produced. These new discoveries are completely different from any original intentions I held for the piece due to my lack of knowledge of the actual porcess. In essence, I invent my own way of doing something organic and from…well, the soul. For an even better example: David Carson. A typographer. I stumbled upon his work one day and was very interested in his use of text. He may be pretty “over analyzed” in the graphic design world, just as Van Gogh is in the painting world, but, nonetheless, I find his work to be very innovative. I am not a graphic designer and was very intimidated by the thought of fonts. I knew nothing about them. As I pushed myself to experiment, I began to realize that text can be molded into forms and can break up negative spaces on a page quite nicely. A fairly new subject for my staff and I, typography was the jumpstart to the design of this magazine — and from there, the creative juices began to flow.
We hope you enjoy!
{5EDITOR’s NOTE}
Julie Wittes Schlack Walking home from work today, I passed a homeless guy, a street person, giving a zealous performance. He clutched a drinking straw in his hand like a crooner’s microphone and loudly sang an unrecognizable tune, accompanied by music that only he could hear. Maybe the juice box peeking out of his pocket was a disguised Walkman, orchestra to the crumpled and filthy straw. He reminded me of you sitting in the backseat on a long drive home, not more than four years old, listening to your Walkman, to Bert and Ernie and Pete Seeger. With a child’s incredible tolerance for repetition, you listened to this tape over and over again, and every minute or so, as the chorus came around, like some happy lunatic you roared, “Don’t you ever forget the words of Martha Luthah King!” You sang, as you did most things then, with gusto. Do you recall that trip, those minutes and hours of atonal, uninhibited joy? I ask because clearly we have very different views of our history, apart and together. I will not try to
...clearly we have very different views of our history, apart and together. {6LIT}
persuade you that yours is wrong. I will only share what I do and don’t remember. During your midnight to 3 a.m. crying periods in the first weeks of life, your tearless wails would rack your tiny body, your face would turn beet red and hot to the touch, and you would cry and scream, inconsolable. “Poor little baby,” I’d whisper. “You don’t know what’s happening to you.” I’d hold you, rock you, feed you, sing to you, pace with you, spend those deep night hours scared and sad that I couldn’t seem to help you, wishing that your father were home instead of at work, wishing that you would sleep so I could sleep, feeling so helpless at first, then so resigned in time as I grew to predict it, to weather it. I taught myself to take your apparent pain in stride, to see it as a normal phenomenon of growth and life in general. And by the time you were seven or eight and I saw that you experienced minor slights as major rebuffs, little aches and bumps as enormous physical insults, I must have started to set the bar higher, to implicitly demand more proof that something was really wrong. And so I guess I trained you to deliver. I remember watching you and your friend sitting on the roof of the miniature log house in the playground at the corner. It was recess; the playground was bubbling with flushed and dashing children, racing each other with sneakered feet and high-pitched voices. The two of you sat above it all, glum and apparently silent. Arms crossed,
But I know i
AN adored
AN ACCOUTINGAN FELT TO BEG ANREMEMBERAN ACCOUTING
I don’t remember how it felt to be adored by you, but I know I was.
knees to chest, you stared down at the darting, yelling kids, exuding an almost palpable sense of needing to be anywhere but here. You did not look happy, not even engaged. You looked morose, distant even from the friend sitting next to you, perched precariously on the peak of a playhouse roof. Soon came the poems and drawings, vivid with darkness, strewn around your floor with the dirty laundry, the chewing gum wrappers, the children’s lunch boxes, animal stamps, Dylan lyrics, postcards, photos of your sister, wads of tear-drenched toilet paper—debris and physical carnage that seemed to mirror your soul. I don’t remember the catalysts or the context. But I do remember the defiance I felt in those years, the love and pride surging through me at those glorious moments when you’d grin or show a flash of insight or make a joke or offhandedly say something breathtakingly smart, reflecting that abstract, mathematical, powerful, and irrepressible mind of yours. She thinks too much, she feels too much, but isn’t the world better for having people like her in it? I’d think, challenging some invisible army of judges. Last night I dreamt I was in Japan. I was silent, living in a silent coastal village on which a tsunami was bearing down. In the dream I knew that if I swam out to greet it, if I swam in it, I could delay the catastrophe. I stretched out in the water, feeling like a bobbing seal, and the water, the single enormous wave, was black and soft as a seal’s snout,
black and smooth as granite. The wave pulled me in and steadily up to its crest, and I rose and rose, defying gravity, jettisoned into wakefulness before the wave ever broke. Awake, I realized that the catastrophe has already happened. Some inner earthquake has made you rise and cast me off in your thundering rush to a distant shore. And me, I’ve washed up on a wrecked beach, gasping for breath. I don’t remember how it felt to be adored by you, but I know I was. Sometimes I imagine that the phone will ring and it will be your husband calling. He’ll tell me that you’ve been in an accident, that you’re in a coma, that we should come. And then in my fantasy, I’m sitting by your bed, holding your hand, stroking your forehead, calm now that I can see you. You open your eyes, blink a few times. I can see consciousness coalesce behind your eyes, and I hold my breath. Then you smile your glorious smile, and it’s clear that you’re all back, that you’re going to be fine, that you recognize who I am. I don’t remember when I last saw you — that is, not the time of year. Just the luscious green of the rain-bathed trees and the desolation of having to leave you.
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llll
ELIZABETH COMPTON
Silver Gelatin Print 13 x 14
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JOSEPH PEPE
Photography 8x8
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Are Idle Hands The Devil’s Workshop? Susannah W. Simpson
I am ready to lay down bitter root and brittle laugh, ready to find the moment between moments, that catches my breath. I am ready to ramble through an orchard full of fruit and rather than kick aside or give notice to the rotting beneath, to find instead, a foothold in the breach of a friendly tree, climb up and eat the ripened. I want to stare out into the blue, blue of June, and rest my back against the warm wood. I am ready to ride my bicycle without helmet or spandex, and to stop, to put whatever catches my eye, into my wire basket.
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Black Macadam Over White Asphalt Susan Thomas
After—and apologies to — Vallejo
Maybe I’ll die in New Jersey near the Hackensack River, clutching a Jersey tomato or a Bischoff’s ice-cream cone like the ones I couldn’t eat in my youth fearing midriff bulge and popular mean girls who sat at the counter. The sky was always gray then, or maybe it was pollution. I’ll probably die in New Jersey, bored, waiting for the No. 70 bus to pick me up on Rte. 4, and it will most likely be Tuesday, the most boring day of the week, even worse than Monday because you expect the worst from Monday but it doesn’t get any better and by Wednesday you’ve gotten used to the awfulness of New Jersey. Yeah, maybe I’ll die in New Jersey, the Bergen Evening Record lying unread on my doorstep, pissed on by my neighbor’s cat, wishing I was someplace else.
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August-ish
Sarah H. Boatwright
It’s mainly because of this picture of my Sister, sitting at the piano wearing an Army helmet with happy birthday On it and maybe even a hot pink Peace sign against the dirge of green In a picture and maybe it’s a Polaroid With a white boarder defining The minute of capture, perhaps my father Turning a number in the mid thirties, I may have been a twinkle in his eye When the photo was snapped With the sound of so many tendons breaking In the air of a dream, the brown leather on the Top of the piano stool it was probably fake But there were real books inside with Real songs, one my sister played Much later when I was a twinkle in my Own fleshy skin and she played Imagine by John Lennon and not Some obtuse construction by a German man harsh in a painting because He lived before the time of Photography.
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KYLA HALL
Stoneware 12 x 12 x 31
{13ART}
ake wake ke
Wake
Matthew Walsh
In the vantage, of the final day of summer, you waited while a vibration of voices continued in the rooms below you, all morning, until even the coffee’s aroma no longer lingered, you laid in bed, watching. While wind divided curtains, making a sky into river, and clouds, floating its surface, became remnants of summer, moving downstream Each inchoate shape, freed from our collective interpretations, leaving what veil had draped the mundane to shimmer in new definition It lifted, like the lake’s mist, when it was sensed that our time for that place was waning all that morning, You laid in bed, gazing upwards, through the window, A wounded fish, below the current that had wound its way to the valley. Surface.
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tah lacipor evi That Tropical Jive
Mark Gordon
I once danced at the Top Of The Town when my father was still alive. He looked at me and my mother as we did that tropical jive, his body as stiff as a rifle barrel, a wink caught in his eye. On top of Miami once again this time in a hospital bed, his balls ballooned to oversize, his bladder was half dead. He looked at me like a rifle sight, a moth caught in his eye. One night in Miami we played cards. my wife shuffling overlong, my father said, “Girl, take care, the Jack is getting a hard on.� He coughed as harsh as a rifle shot, a laugh caught in his eye. Ashamed of dying he closed the door, hacked for hours in the dark. No one got in, not even his wife, no one got out but his corpse. Like a proud rifle they laid him out, not a thing in his eye anymore. I heard the angels singing tonight calling me to remorse. They hovered over Miami bay, they sang until they were hoarse. He never did own a rifle and his eyes returned to their source.
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{16ART}
(HOT PINK)
AMBER WATTS
Silk Screen, Acrylic, Graphite 20 x 30
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MY SIDE:
Sides of The Story: A Triptych
Kate Fetherston
My side: Did I break Suzanne’s nose on purpose? Sure, in sixth grade, Rodney Littleton mooned after her like a sick calf, and that by itself could’ve been enough. But also, that time she asked me to spend the night at her house, before dinner, Suzanne and her parents put on nice clothes, and we had to sit on fancy living room chairs with our legs together like ladies while her father made drinks: a martini with three olives for her mother and Shirley Temples for us. “I like to wait on my girls,” he said, winking at me. Even though my own father hadn’t yet devolved from tragically remote into scary, when Suzanne’s father, in his navy suit and tie, bent smiling to offer me an extra cherry, I couldn’t stop wiggling in my hand-me-down cord skirt. After dinner Suzanne and her mother chatted on her white eyelet bedspread for two hours, putting Suzanne ‘s luxurious hair into pink rollers while I watched, embarrassed by the toothy zigzags my mother cut into my hair with pinking shears. They got into matching satin-quilted robes before bed, and Suzanne wore a real bra under her lacy nightie. I put on my little girl Mary Poppins flannel pajamas in the bathroom and got between the sheets quick, so they wouldn’t see. Later, Suzanne’s father came in to say goodnight, stooping to kiss her lumpy, pink head like she was his perfect doll. In the morning Suzanne’s mother made pancakes while “Good Morning, Starshine” played on the radio. Her father even thanked her mother for breakfast with a peck on the cheek before going out to cut the grass. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran all the way home, where, as I walked in, my dad muttered “Balls” and disappeared into the garage to drink and fume, while mom banged something on the washing machine that was broken again and was in pieces all over the kitchen floor. Next day, on the playground, there was my elbow — the tetherball swung high — there was Suzanne’s nose, and I never got invited to her house again.
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SUSANNE:
Suzanne: It’s weird that Katie remembers it all wrong. I liked her, even though she was an odd girl. It wasn’t so much her red glasses as that she was always in love with some buck-toothed dishrag of a boy like that Rodney, and she wore her heart on her sleeve for the whole school to see. That Rodney liked me was an embarrassment I ignored. But when I invited her to spend the night at my house, something about the way she watched my mother roll my hair got under my skin. Didn’t her mother do her hair? And where was her robe? She wouldn’t shut up after we were supposed to be asleep either, wanting to know what I wanted when we grew up. How could I say all I wanted was to get away from my parents hovering over me like I’m going to break, like they’re going to break? How I couldn’t breathe with their fussing, their plans for me. How could she understand? Even though we were the same age, she was still a little girl in her baby pajamas, and I already had breasts to safeguard. That morning I’d looked over at Katie sleeping, just a little lump in the next bed, but she had nothing to lose, whereas I had everything: a perfectly nice life and doting parents, and I couldn’t stand it. Also, she lied about the song on the radio at breakfast, which was “Raindrops Keep Falling,” my favorite song, so I remember. I’d whisper the lyrics to myself when no one could hear: “I never worry that the rain keeps on falling / because I’m free.” She could’ve helped me, could’ve shown me how, but then again, she was just a kid. And another thing, she didn’t break my nose. I broke hers, and I’d do it again.
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S
SU ANNE’S MOTHER:
Suzanne’s mother: I’m losing my daughter, and she’s only in the sixth grade. I hate her perfect skin, the velvety peach of her ears. I hate her soft curls, the ones I put into rollers every night. I watch my husband withdrawing into polite solicitude. Making a show of frosting my martini glasses, pouring out my drink as though I was the Queen of Sheba. As though I was a stranger. He’s begun dressing for dinner as though we were both his dates. I warned Suzanne to wear her new bra under her nightie because you can’t be too careful of men’s urges, and also, you have to keep up what appearances you can. Who knows when your looks will start to go, breasts sag, your face turns blowsy and your breath vile. I bought us matching satin robes, the quilt dotted with pink roses like the corsage I wore to my high school prom, but inside I seethe. Late that night, after too many double martinis, I sat in the dark, imagined placing a pillow over Suzanne’s head, how I’d lean on my husband’s embrace as I arrange just-budding pink and white roses on her casket. Horrified, I wake her, hug her too tight, then crawl into my cold bed and cry myself to sleep. My husband is having an affair. He can’t stand the confusion in our house, everything changing, our daughter’s star rising, our own stars guttering into oblivion. Suzanne’s a woman already, and I’m tumbling down the stairs, nothing but a middle-aged drunk. My husband’s leaving us, and I’m leaving myself. Who will love our beautiful daughter? I don’t even remember her inviting that girl Katie overnight, but for breakfast, I’ll make pancakes from scratch with sliced strawberries. I hate my life.
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KAREN PIERCE
Silver Gelatin Print 11 x 14
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SERGE NERI
Digital Photography 11 x 14
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The Bath
Max Snavlin
TH
When out, my hand on her hip, perched gently but firmly aware. I could throw her with my hired hand into a perfect spiral. Being a man is not hard. Wake up, shave, groom, cut, trim. It makes for good politics, poetry, stories. My hand perched right at the hip, knee, ankle, neck. A story firmly takes shape, like blown glass, imperfect, essence petrified. A cigar in the bath on a hot day in a small apartment on the nth story in the city. The formal errors of our age become acceptable. The dominant hand is a brush covering and the non-dominant hand uncovering the much sought-after niches of occasion, soap, shampoo, lotion, steam. I put your legs around me and reach and hold you behind your ribs with enough lift for you to forget, allow my hands around your hips with my thumbs at the base of your iliac crest pointed and rooting, pressing diminutively, a pitcher of cool water.
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A Final Slow-down
Gerald Zipper
Bug-bellied busses inching down Broadway engines coughing emphysemic debris mothers rolling carriages in distraction stepping blindly into weightless air no one knew the earth’s spin was braking I knew everything rolling to a halt machines wheezing their final throes creatures staring in sightless misapprehension the moment was here I could now rest riveters laid down their guns dredgers pulled into shore waiters ceased wild dashes into kitchen bedlam cabs stopped lurching to curbs elevators slid to a shuddering halt the world becalmed in dreamy suspension I knew it was true it was my dream my ending.
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Amputation
Helen Wickes
A man down the hall yells all night, the sounds bursting through the eighth floor, east wing’s chill sterility. Everyone here’s had a place cut into, cut off, cut out. Cut right above his knee, says the nurse, sawing the air with her hand in the awkward way you’d hack at frozen butter, and because she chooses to save the rest of us — we, with our monstrous hunger to know — she won’t tell us why or how or his name. Hunched over walkers we separately trail our racks of bags with fluids running in, fluids out, and aim for his door. He’s bathed in yellow light, his back turned; his thin arm dangles. I didn’t know he’d be this young. When he aches in the empty place, late at night, he shouts, calling out for the lost loved thing. He shouts and nothing seems to comfort. You’re a passel of vultures, hisses the night nurse, catching another of us on crutches, cruising by his open door to catch a glimpse. How much can be taken from the body and a person still want to be held, still told that the day is fine? The blue blanket, which drapes his hip, drops off at a steep angle. Sometimes he dreams about the gone leg casually slung over another’s leg, as they fall together into sleep.
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DAVID BANEMANIVONG
Illustrator 34 x 48
{26ART}
JOSEPH PEPE
Photography 8x8
{27ART}
S.D. Lavender
A
few days after Christmas,
Tom Smoot, wearing only shorts and sandals, and his wife Ginny, who had on a faded pink bathrobe, sat by the pool of their motel on the gulf coast of Florida. They were both middle-aged, but she looked older than him because her curly red hair had gone mostly gray. Tom was trying to take a nap, but with the gulls crying out like lost children as they flew back and forth from the river to the parking lot, and Ginny rustling the pages of the Orlando Sentinel, it was proving difficult. He was about to say something to her, when she suddenly let out a yelp and nearly fell out of her wheelchair. “Look at this! That preacher we saw on T.V. is going to be up in Nashville!” She had made Tom come in and watch a chubby boy in an ice cream suit shout and slap people on the forehead and make them faint and then come to—miraculously cured. “That’s all fake,” Tom had said. “Nashville’s only a two-hour flight,” said Ginny, “and we haven’t been anywhere in a long time.” Her chin began to quiver. Tom hated it when her chin quivered.” You know you hate flying,” said Tom. He lit a cigarette and looked around. There wasn’t a guest in sight, which he considered a good thing since the pool needed cleaning. Ten years managing the place and it was turning out to be the slowest winter ever. “I don’t ask for much,” said Ginny. He knew it was no use reminding her what the doctors all said—that after being thrown from the car that way she was lucky to be alive. Tom groaned and ran his fingers through what was left of his hair. The next morning, after Krispy Kremes and coffee, Tom bathed his wife then dressed her in a white summer dress and slippers. After rolling her out to his black ’98 Buick Regal, he picked her up and set her in the passenger seat, then collapsed the wheelchair and stuffed it in the trunk. Tom gave some last minute instructions to Rosa, the head maid who would run the place while they were gone, then sang out, “We’re off to see the Wizard,” as they drove away. “What a glorious day,” sighed Ginny. They sky was turquoise and cloudless and the lawns glistened with dew. A light breeze rustled the leaves of the palms along the road. “Let’s have some music.” She turned on the radio and a guy sang through his nose about lost love. “I wouldn’t like that even if it was good,” said Tom, and they both laughed. He watched her fiddling with the dial and thought about how much had changed since the night she came bopping into that roadhouse on open mike night with a couple of
{29LIT}
her sorority sisters, saw him singing and playing guitar and decided he was the one and she was going to spend all her time and money making him the next Bruce Springsteen. It turned out her love had been both blind and deaf. There was a stack of supermarket tabloids at Ginny’s feet, and she soon had one in hand, flipping through it. “They got a diet in here says if you eat a grapefruit with every meal, you’ll lose five pounds a week.” “You don’t need to lose any weight,” said Tom, remembering how she used to look in a bathing suit. “Aww, don’t give me that,” said Ginny. “I’ve got at least twenty pounds to lose before I get out on the dance floor. What are you looking so surprised for? If I’m gonna be a-walking, I’m certainly gonna be a-dancing. What’s the matter? Afraid you won’t remember how?” “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too high.” “Don’t you worry,” she said. “There’s no way on earth I could tolerate that much grapefruit.” “I mean about this trip.” “Well,” said Ginny, then she started singing an old Doris Day song. “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.” She stopped singing and Tom figured it was because she couldn’t remember anything but the chorus, but then she sighed and said, “If I was to die right this minute, I’d die happy.” Tom looked at her, knowing what she meant. On the other side of Valdosta, after they had stopped for gas, they passed a girl standing on the curb with her thumb out. She had on a gray jacket that was too big for her and white pants with black stripes. She carried a beat-up green overnight case. Ginny’s head swiveled to keep her in sight. “Oh, Tom,” she said, clucking her tongue. “We have to go back and get her.”
“Not on your life. She could be insane for all you know.” “She’s just a girl. What could she do to us?” Tom shook his head. “Absolutely not.” Ginny reached over and touched his arm. “It’s not safe nowadays for a young girl like that to be hitchhiking.” “That’s her people’s business, not ours.” “It’s everybody’s business,” said Ginny, watching the girl get smaller. “We all got to watch out for each other. What if she gets taken off like that girl last year, with her mother on the news crying and begging for whoever had her to let her go, and all the time she was laying dead in the woods? How would you feel then? What if she was our daughter?” “Well, she’s not.” Tom dug frantically in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, found one and stuck it in his mouth. But
before he could light it, Ginny snatched it and threw it in the back seat. “That won’t fill your God-hole, Tom.” “What did you just say?” “You heard me. Nicotine and alcohol and—and—dirty movies. Don’t give me that look. I’m ashamed for you. You’ve got to find good ways to fill your God-hole, and one way is by helping those in need.” Tom struggled to hide his mortification as he wondered how in the world Ginny could have found his porno stash, and which tape she had watched. “Where’d you read that crap?” “Never mind where I read it. It’s true. How can we expect the Lord to help us if we won’t help others?” “We can help others when we get home,” said Tom. He kept his eyes on the road, not wanting to see the expression he knew so well—the judgmentally arched eyebrows, the sanctimoniously pursed lips. “It’s the Christian thing to do, Tom. Are you a Christian?” Tom snorted. “No, I’m a Hairy Krishna. What do you think?” “I don’t know. You could be anything. You either believe in Jesus Christ or you don’t.” The truth was, Tom didn’t know if he could call himself a Christian or not. Of course, Christmas was his favorite holiday; no other holiday even came close. But he hated hypocrisy, and in his opinion, Christianity was full of it, from the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials all the way down to the weeping Jimmys—Swaggert and Baker. “Yes. I believe there was a Jesus,” he said. “As a matter of fact, there was a show on just the other night about how they found actual evidence of him when they were digging up some ancient Roman—stuff.” Ginny shook her head, her eyelids fluttering. “That’s not being a real Christian. I don’t know about you, but I’d sure feel better standing before that healer if I’ve done something to deserve being healed.” “And what about you?” said Tom. “You haven’t been to church in years.” Ginny nodded sadly. “It’s true. I’m ashamed to say I lost my faith for a while. That’s why we need to go back and get that girl. Start doing things for others instead of always thinking only of ourselves.” “All right,” said Tom between his teeth, pulling off the road and one-handing the steering wheel, the sound of gravel crunching under the tires as he turned the Buick around. “But if I’m not mistaken, hitch-hiking is illegal.
{30LIT}
We’re not doing her any favors by indulging her.” As he rolled up to the girl, she shaded her eyes and approached the passenger side, leaning over to talk with Ginny, who had rolled down her window. Long stringy hair the color of molasses obscured much of the girl’s face until she brushed it away and Tom saw that she was pretty, but dissipated, like the girls in his dirty movies. Ginny told the girl they were headed to Nashville and the girl said, “That sounds good to me.” The girl stood there, studying the two of them as if trying to make up her mind, until Tom got annoyed and said, “Are you getting in or what?” Ginny gave him a dirty look, but the girl let out a nervous laugh and said, “Thanks y’all.” She barely got in the back door before Tom took off. He watched in the rearview mirror as she put the green overnight case on the seat beside her, opened it, retrieved a brush and flipped her hair over in front of her face and began brushing it down like it was an animal. He tried to guess her age. Figured she was definitely young enough to be his daughter. Ginny introduced herself, then Tom. The girl said her name was Brenda. “Hitchhiking is so dangerous,” said Ginny. “I hope you haven’t been doing it too long.” “No ma’am. Not too long,” said Brenda. When Ginny told her they were headed up to see the famous faith healer, Brenda asked, “What are you suffering from?” directing the question to the back of Tom’s head. “Not him,” said Ginny. “It’s me. I’m a paraplegic. You see, my husband and I were in a horrible car wreck. My husband was driving and these wild boys just came out of nowhere and ran right into us. It wasn’t my husband’s fault. Not really. We had been out to dinner and—“ “All right,” said Tom. “She doesn’t want to hear about it.” “And alcohol,” Ginny continued, “even a little bit, dulls the senses and slows the reflexes. But you’re right, Tom. That’s all in the past and the past is a cancelled check. What matters now is getting to Nashville and getting healed.” “Well, good luck to you ma’am. I sure wished I believed in miracles.” “Why, honey,” said Ginny, “your very existence is a miracle—the miracle of birth!” “I was a caesarean,” said Brenda. She bent over and came up with a cigarette. “I found this back here on the floor. Is it all right if I smoke it?” “I suppose so,” said Ginny. “But those things are so bad for you.” “Yes ma’am. I know.” Brenda lit the cigarette the rolled down her window. “I stayed at the Opryland Hotel one time. It was like being lost in the jungle.” Tom wanted both of them to shut up. He could feel the girl’s eyes on him and looked at her in the mirror. She was smiling like she knew a secret. “Slow down,” Ginny hissed.
Tom looked at the speedometer. He was doing eighty-five. He let off the gas and tapped on the brake. “How many wrecks you plan to have in this life?” asked Ginny, her face as hard as a cemetery statue, and when Tom didn’t answer, she added, “You were going way over the speed limit.” “All right. Drop it.” “Don’t clench your jaws like that. You know what your dentist said.” After a while, a billboard advertising a truck stop appeared on the horizon. Ginny turned to Brenda. “Honey, when was the last time you had something to eat?” Brenda shrugged. “I had half a sandwich for breakfast.” “Tom,” said Ginny, “get off at the next exit and let’s feed this child.” As they left the highway and caught sight of the dingy white building, the gas pumps and the eighteen-wheelers, Brenda muttered, as if in a trance, “Relax—Refresh—Re-fuel.” Tom and Ginny both turned and looked at her. “That’s what the signs used to say,” she explained. “And that’s just what we’re going to do,” said Ginny. Inside, Ginny and Tom sat at a table drinking cokes and sharing an order of chili cheese fries while Brenda, waiting for her cheeseburger to fry, explored the gift shop. Tom watched her pick up and examine a rubber snake and then a little pair of praying hands you were supposed to stick on your dashboard. “So much for my diet,” said Ginny, wiping her mouth. Then she looked at the girl and sighed, “I wish we would’ve had a child. I know I would have been a good mother. Why didn’t we have one, Tom?” Tom shrugged. “It just wasn’t meant to be.” “Maybe we should have tried harder. It’s funny. That’s what I was thinking that night when I was lying in the
to the table, Brenda had her cheeseburger and was sitting across from Ginny. “Well, we thought you might have fallen in,” said Ginny. “Now it’s my turn.” “You need any help, ma’am?” asked Brenda. “No, thank you, dear. I can manage by myself. You know, it’s getting so late. We should stop and get us a couple of rooms. How would you like that, honey? Have a nice hot bath and a nice big bed and watch come cable TV? “Oh, I can’t let you do that,” said the girl. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Ginny, putting her hand over Brenda’s and looking her in the eye, “Just do for others. That’s the only thing that really matters in this world.” Brenda shook her head as if unable to believe the existence of such generosity, and watching as Ginny maneuvered around the corner, said, “She sure is a nice lady,” and bit into the burger, the juice dripping down her chin onto her hands. Tom thought about pulling a napkin out of the dispenser and handing it to her, but didn’t. He ate the last of the fries and drank the last of his Coke. Then he started chomping on the ice. After a while it got to be too cold on his teeth so he stopped. He looked at his watch. Brenda was staring at him, grinning at him, and to show her he couldn’t care less, he let their eyes meet for a second or two. The fading sunlight slanting in gave her face a kind of glow. Tom wondered what her story was, but he didn’t want to talk to her, so he put his elbows on the table and hid his mouth behind his folded hands. Then he looked over at a pimply-faced boy and a short, chubby girl cutting up at the magazine rack. They had their arms linked around each other’s waist. Stupid kids, thought Tom, they’ll feel different when they get the bill. A moth bumped over and over again against the plate glass window. When Brenda finally finished eating, she said, “Lordy, that sure hit the spot. Say Tom, you think I could get a
ditch, watching all the headlights go by, wondering if anybody was ever going to stop and help us. I was thinking we should have tried harder because now it’s too late. I called out for you.” “I didn’t hear you,” said Tom, for what he figured must be the five thousandth time. “I was knocked out. If I would have heard you, I would’ve come.” Ginny patted his hand. “I know you would have.” Tom got up and headed for the men’s room. While he washed his hands he read the labels on the condom machine. Increase her pleasure, one said. When he returned
cigarette off you?” Tom gave her one, and as he lit it for her, she softly steadied his hand. “You don’t talk much do you?” she said. “Or maybe you just don’t like me. I’ll bet you didn’t even want to stop for me, did you?” When he didn’t answer she blew a few smoke rings at him. “I guess you don’t agree with what your wife said—about helping people. Well , I think she’s right.” “That’s nice.” Tom started to get up, but Brenda grabbed his shirtsleeve. “Fifty bucks,” she said. “What?”
{31LIT}
“I said fifty bucks.” “What about it?” “You know what about it.” He started to speak, but nothing came out. He wanted to get away from her, but he also wanted to hear what she was going to say next. “I saw how you were looking at me.” “Look, little girl,” said Tom, forcing a chuckle, and shaking his head, “I don’t know what ever gave you the idea that I would be interested in the sort of thing, or that you would even be worth fifty dollars but—“ “All right—forty five. Take it or leave it.” Before Tom could think of something else to say, he heard Ginny’s wheelchair banging against a door. “Oops. Here comes the wifey express,” said Brenda. Ginny appeared, slightly out of breath, and rolled over to them. She took a drink and looked at Tom, “What’s your face so red for?” When Tom didn’t answer, she turned to Brenda. “Was your cheeseburger good, honey?” “Yes, ma’am. I sure was hungry.”
“Would you like some dessert?” “Let’s get back on the road,” said Tom. Ginny said to Brenda, “When you get married, honey, make sure your husband is a real Christian.” The pimply faced boy and his girl walked by, the boy’s hand on the small of her back. “I might have something sweet later on,” said Brenda. Ginny stretched her arms and yawned, “Oh Lordy, I’m all done in.” On their way out to the car they passed a pickup truck where the pimply-faced boy and his girlfriend, in silhouette, appeared to be eating each other’s faces. At the Fairfield Inn, Brenda in one room, the Smoots in another a few doors down, Tom helped his wife into bed then sat at the little table reading the paper. “Don’t forget to check on Brenda,” Ginny said, fluffing her pillow. “Yeah, all right.” “No matter what happens tomorrow, honey,” said Ginny. “I really appreciate you bringing me.” They said goodnight and before long Tom heard his wife’s gentle snoring. After a while Tom walked down to Brenda’s room and when he knocked on the door, the light from the peephole went black and then white again, and he heard the chain unlatch. Brenda opened the door and smiled. She was wrapped in a towel, her hair wet and clinging to her shoulders. Tom smelled marijuana. “Everything all right?” he asked. “Yeah, great. Is she asleep? Tom nodded. “Well, then, come on in.” Tom didn’t move. Brenda glanced over her
{32LIT}
shoulder at the clock radio on the nightstand. “It’s only nine thirty. You got something better to do?” Before Tom could answer, the towel fell away. His eyes darted from part to part, then widened with wonder when filled with the whole, unaccustomed to beholding such beauty in three dimensions. Suddenly realizing that the door was open, he rushed in and shut it behind him. So close they were almost touching, Tom thought she smelled like a field of flowers after a rain. “I know it’s none of my business,” said Brenda, “but can you two do it?” He wanted to tell her, if only because he’d never told anyone before, that Ginny couldn’t feel much down there. Just a tingle if he kept at it long enough. He acted like he didn’t mind, but he did. Sometimes she used her hands on him, but never her mouth. But the girl was right. It was none of her business. He backed up, then turned and went out the door. Lingering outside, going over in his mind what had just happened, Tom heard voices from the parking lot below. A family had arrived in an SUV, the father carrying on child in his arms, the mother holding the hand of another. Back in his own room he fumbled in the darkness for the remote, found it, then turned on the TV for illumination, pressed the mute button, cutting off the romantic repartee of two long-dead movie stars and found Ginny still asleep. He sat in a chair, watching the blanket rise and fall below the graying halo. He thought about how that night would soon be gone forever and then it would be morning and they would go to Nashville and see the man who would turn out to be a fake and Ginny would be disappointed once again. The long-dead movie stars embraced and The End, in big white letters, covered them. Tom moved to the bed, kissed his wife gently on the forehead, then placed a pillow over her face and pressed down hard, held it there as she struggled. He saw himself going back to Brenda’s room, her taking hold of him and guiding him home, wrapping her legs around him, pulling him deeper, digging her heels into his backside, kicking at him, arms around his neck, crushing her mouth against his until he tasted the salt of his blood. But after all was still, Tom turned off the TV, undressed, and slipped under the covers on the other side of the bed. He settled back and laced his fingers behind his head and stared into the darkness and tried to see into the future, but all he saw was the usual flash of headlights followed by the screech of tires and the crunch of the metal and glass and then a voice calling his name from the wrong side of the grave. But his time he felt at peace, for he knew that the next day would be different from all the other days of his life.
AND CHARLOTTE, NC
JOSEPH PEPE
Photography 8x8
{33ART}
AMBER WATTS
Lithograph 15 x 19
{34ART}
CARRIE SIGMON
Black and White Photography 11 x 14
{35ART}
Gigabytes
Toni L. Wilkes
Someone said that every time we pull out a memory, we alter and redesign it. Something new gets created in its remaking. People probably fold their memories like jpeg digital images, opening and closing the pictures, enhancing and distorting them. You and I must have folded our memories differently. You altered our scuffles, the way you cheated at Canasta, Dad saying, “If he can’t beat you at the table, he’ll beat you with a pencil.” Just as you totally reformatted the recollection of me breaking into that box you designed in woodshop, when I unscrewed the brass hinges and lifted out chocolates. And you must have stored deeply into your hard drive the day you burnt the wooden toilet seat by dropping burning paper into the toilet. You tried to mend it using model airplane paints, totally forgetting that Dad would need to sit long before the seat could dry. How he howled when he left rump flesh stuck to it and ran after you throwing his slippers, Mom screaming his name. You must have compressed those memories. To this day, you insist that we were raised in different households.
{36LIT}
d r
ea
Dream
Jessica Harman
I am the tiredness of butterflies, going south, going further into the dream. The dream is the poem, and vice versa. World in which my heart is an empty attic full of amber light, bright as Sunday.
Fright, storm clouds, excuses, choices, closed eyes to the sound of your scratchy voice, like the stubble on your chin. Your mind, your mirror, your praying, your music. I sleep in the apse of your dreams, wandering through woods that smell of chestnuts in autumn —
{37LIT}
Going to Jukebox Heaven
Tom McFadden
Dreams lived inside, waiting to be chosen, while Cokes were sipped with long, it-could-come-true sounds and ketchup flowed like red magma, still hot, across a french-fries volcano, newly ascended on the checkered tablecloth plateau. If just the right number and letter were pressed, perhaps a pretty face might come to join the sound of the sky there. Perhaps that sky would form by pressing for At the Hop… or, maybe for Diana… or, perhaps it should be Little Star. Somehow, with some wondrous combination of number and letter, magic might enter one’s life! A world never reachable might be attained, if only the right dream-sky were pushed into formation. Maybe the magical buttons were those for Little Darlin’… or, maybe those for Rock ‘n Roll Is Here to Stay! Yes, as the red magma flowed and the fried aroma ascended on the outside, dreams waited on the inside… waiting in there… waiting to have the right buttons pushed… waiting to come out… waiting to come true.
{38LIT}
TRAIN STATION
JOSEPH PEPE
Photography 8x8
{39ART}
In Lieu of Flowers
Janet Flora
{40LIT}
“...the unit I knew as my parents, was gone forever.” have never been to the cemetery to visit my parents’ grave, even though Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where I was raised, is just a short distance from my apartment in downtown Manhattan. All four of my grandparents are buried there too. My parents died four years apart in the mid-’90s; my grandparents passed away one by one a decade before them. By the time my parents were buried there, the zigzag roads of Greenwood Cemetery and the smooth lake near my maternal grandmother and grandfather’s graves seemed like familiar terrain. The actual burial service of each of my parents and grandparents is stacked in my memory—a bit like their caskets are stacked in the ground—one on top of the other. There are moments that stand apart, like seeing my father cry for the first time at his mother’s graveside, with my mother and his brother on each side of him. And then when he stood at my mother’s opened grave without his wife or his brother, but instead between my sister and me. Then there are moments that blur together: family and friends dressed mostly in black, flowers that were transported from the funeral home in their own car to be left at the grave site to die soon too, the final prayers, ashes to ashes, the slight lowering of the casket into the ground, and then a toss of freshly turned soil. My mother passed away before my father; she was the only one of my parents or grandparents to be cremated. This was her wish. She also wished her ashes to be scattered in the Atlantic Ocean on a particular piece of beach in Fort Lauderdale, where she lived for the final twenty years of her life. I, too, would have preferred that and to have kept some of her ashes at home with me. That would have been an ongoing visit; or whenever I was at the ocean that, too, would be like a visit that would feel much more like time with her than any visit to a cemetery. But the Catholic Church only condones the burying of ashes. Before she died, my mother agreed to the burial to honor the wishes of my father, a devoted Catholic. After the burial of her remains, I began to sort through her possessions, looking for something tangible that I could keep at home: photos, a vase that had been given to her by my grandmother, items of jewelry. Two pink-gold wedding ring guards, thin like pieces of wire from 49 years of wear, were obvious treasures. But what I treasured more
was a hairbrush and curler that still held strands of hair, a bra that smelled of her personal scent mixed with the White Shoulders fragrance she always wore. I put those items in a Ziploc Freezer Bag, hoping to preserve what was real and perhaps something else more ethereal. A month after she died, I began framing some of my favorite photos. There was the one of Mom, when she was five years old, in a summer pinafore standing at the entrance of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. And another of her sitting in our little, inflatable pool in between my sister, at six years old, and me, at two; the three of us smiling for the camera held by my dad. But when deciding where to place these newly framed pictures on my desk, which was already crowded with snapshots of my parents together — like their wedding photo and the group shot of the four of us on vacation in the Catskills and the one taken at their 45th wedding anniversary — I felt another bolt of angst sneak up like something suddenly startling me from behind. My father was still alive, but the couple, the unit I knew as my parents, was gone forever.
2 My father would live another four years without my mother. He spent the last month of his life in a hospital room in Fort Lauderdale. I spent the last week of that month with him. Each day, walking down the hospital hall, the medicinal odor that was a combination of disinfectant and illness would stab at my nostrils. As I got closer to his room and heard the sound of his wheezing cough, I felt both tormented and relieved, not sure what I feared most — his dying or living. On the last morning of his life, he asked me to read him a prayer on page 7 from the book he kept on his night table. On the faded cover was a picture of the Virgin Mary, barefooted, standing on a cloud, eyes cast to heaven, hands clasped in prayer. As I read, he made the sign of the cross with a trembling hand made more cumbersome by a clothespinlike device attached to his finger that monitored his oxygen. After I finished reading, his lips were still moving silently in prayer, his eyes closed. I stayed with him until the morphine made him comfortable, and then I left to shower and change. When I returned two hours later, I noticed the odor in
{41LIT}
the hall now seemed familiar and soothing, his coughing had stopped, and the door to his hospital room was closed. Opening it, I found a young nurse at the foot of his bed. She told me he had passed away ten minutes before. She told me he looked peaceful and smiled at her before he took his final breath. At first, I thought she was wrong, he hadn’t died yet; after all, he was still lying there. But then I realized something had changed. He wasn’t struggling to breathe, his body no longer served as a port for tubes, and the beeping of the monitors had been silenced. Seeing him but not being seen made me wonder which one of us still existed. The nurse left me alone with my father. I sat on his bed, rocking his still body in my arms, repeating over and over, “Daddy, I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” I released his body and smoothed the few hairs on his head. His skin was growing cold. I ran my hands down his arms, stopping to examine each bruise and sore caused by the countless injections he received throughout the month. I held his hand, closed my eyes, and waited, not sure what I was waiting for. Eventually I began taking off his jewelry. I put his miraculous medal around my neck and his watch on my wrist. The stainless steel band slipped down below my knuckles. Taking his hearing aid out of his ear, I kept turning it over in my hand, wondering if this would serve as a future memento. A security guard knocked on the door and brought me his wallet with a separate sheet listing its contents. I took out his driver’s license and stared at the picture of my smiling dad. There was 20-dollar bill and two singles and several photographs: one of my parents together, taken just before my mom passed away, and a black-and-white snapshot of my sister and me dressed alike when we were toddlers. Afraid to disturb the order, I put the wallet in my purse. Finally, I stuffed everything he owned in the room in a bag the hospital supplied, marked “Personal Belongings.” I left it in his apartment and returned to New York. Back at Greenwood Cemetery for my dad’s burial, now it was just my sister and I standing shoulder to shoulder, looking down at his casket that would soon be lowered in the ground. My sister’s two children, our significant others, and friends stood just behind us. As we exited the cemetery, I saw a couple arriving with flowers in a vase to sit in front of a tombstone; I saw a woman in her forties with a broom, sweeping leaves away from another tombstone. After the funeral in New York, I returned to my father’s
{42LIT}
“Seeing him but not being seen made me wonder which oneof us still existed.” apartment in Fort Lauderale. From the hospital bag, I took out the shirt he had last worn. Holding it up to my face, I breathed in deeply. It still smelled like him. Quickly, I ran for a Ziploc. Folding the shirt, I noticed a small pin on the breast pocket. It was a tiny, gold figure of Christ carrying a cross. He wore this pin on every shirt for as long as I could remember. I removed the pin and put it in a small, velvetlined box that once held a ring he bought for my mother. Sitting on the floor in the living room examining documents, I discovered an envelope. Across the outside, in my mother’s handwriting, it read, “Just for Inspiration.” I found newspaper and magazine clippings, yellowed and creased with age. A small clipping began to tear as I unfolded it. Inside was a short poem, (author unknown) titled, “The Value Of A Smile,” which opened with these lines: “It costs nothing, but creates much.” There was a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and Mother’s Day cards from my sister and me. I sat there reading and rereading with a roll of tape, mending the tears. I wandered back into the bedroom. On my father’s bedside I found his rosary beads, the same black, pearly ones I used to try and wear as a necklace when I was little. When I returned home to my apartment, I put his rosary beads in the same box with the pin of Christ carrying a cross and put the box in my nightstand drawer. A few days later I brought the prayer on page 7 and “The Value Of A Smile” to a professional framer. They now sit on my desk next to their photographs. I think sometimes of the couple I saw at Greenwood Cemetery bringing a vase of flowers to the grave site and of the woman sweeping leaves away from the tombstone near my parents’ graves. I wonder if my parents’ names on their tombstones are visible or it they have been covered with leaves and debris. But on those days, rather than making a visit to the cemetery, bringing flowers, I wear my father’s miraculous medal on my neck and my mother’s pink-gold rings. And on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, sometimes I open the Ziploc bags with his shirt and her bra and breathe in deeply.
2
ASHLEY OWENS
{43ART}
Digital Media (photo manipulation) 16 x 9
Sonogram
Gannon Daniels
His hand is in my stomach and my hand is holding up my shirt There’s a spine and eye sockets with imagined blue imagined views before he arrives I see his sex and his profiled nose dainty passage waiting to breathe Our hearts beat faster while I listen to his I ran into my neighbor last night I hadn’t seen her since she hadn’t been pregnant Now she has a four-month-old daughter I cried, she said for the first two months after giving birth I cried Mine is four months incubating my anticipation holds no perfection there is no fear yet I leave with a black-and-white of my miniature boy incredible reality this him inside me I sit in the waiting room with proof of a form — a growing life detected by symptoms and a wave of sound cravings, nausea, swaddling dreams the lullaby I practice and the image in my hand
{44LIT}
house signs
Richard Lighthouse
houses sing to you while driving past. buy me. rent me. i’m yours. these are homes un wanted. places not owning anyone. rampant. in begging, please. now. cash in that long promise. ink your desire in scribbled name. your need can live in this yard. i will call you home from work each evening. bring me your body’s weight. lay under my shingles of love. even the rain won’t find you here.
{45LIT}
TRAIN TRACKS CHARLOTTE, NC
JOSEPH PEPE
Photography 8x8
{46ART}
ERIC ALAN WATTINNE
Watercolor, Pen & Ink 10 x 4
{47ART}
The Body Has A Memory
Raphael Badagliacca
The body has a memory older than words carving its space in the unrelenting air. These practiced steps take you to the place where the moment awaits. This way of standing foreshadows understanding the way the spokes know the wheel the way the stream traces the mountainside the way tears shape the face. before the cry the mouth opens. In every pause there is longing. In the aftermath only these gestures count. At the point of climax when words fail you lift me.
{48LIT}
Insomnia
John Field
While you sleep Insomnia dehydrates Each sip of your breath My parched ears drink. At midnight a bus snores up the street, Ploughing its headlights Through our curtain. “False dawn,” the streetlights crow. Why did you say no? At one-thirty the tapping begins, Softly at first, fleeting pains In my belly and chest, Fear of death. At two The tapping grows louder, My heart thumping Like a rat on speed Banging a tiny tin drum. If I had a knife I’d cut off its paws. Three-thirty Stretches and yawns, Then veers away from earth And disappears Somewhere in outer space Like a time capsule Heading towards the stars. At four I get up And stand in front of the window Staring at the moon, A silver sleeping pill Bathing the garden In a soft decaffeinated glow. Exhausted, I crawl back in bed And feel your fingertips Touch my arm Seconds before I fall asleep.
{49LIT}
I
t iSn’t eaSy being a balloon clown,
rather embarrassing, in fact, if you’ve got a PhD in European history but haven’t been able to find a teaching job. There’s always a tension. For example, say it’s almost closing time—a few minutes shy of five. The phone rings and this woman is calling from work in Houston. She desperately needs a bouquet of birthday balloons delivered to her boyfriend’s Rail Yard Apartments in downtown Austin by 6:00 PM. You were sure you were done for the day, but your boss says no, go put the whiteface back on and I’ll blow up the balloons and tie them off. Luckily you’ll be going south while most rush hour traffic on Lamar will be heading north. You get inside the clown suit and zip it up. You smear on the oily whiteface and put on the orange curly haired nylon wig. You load the slivery red helium balloons into the back of the van, where they crowd to the top, and then you start driving south. It’s 5:20, but you’re not too worried because you don’t need to consult a map. You know exactly where the complex is located, even if you may have trouble finding the exact apartment. The place looms huge and narrow along the train tracks, built back in the 1980’s when the goal was to get people living again in downtown Austin.
{50LIT}
The rents are high and there’s all the noise coming from the partygoers dancing to loud music in the clubs of Sixth Street, and then there’s the trains clanging through in the middle of the night. No way in the world you’d live in the Rail Yards, though you do live downtown, in the basement of a used bookstore you operate with two other guys in a kind of co-operative that so far barely pays the building rent. You take Lamar south until you reach Ninth, and then you cut through a green and leafy neighborhood full of rich lawyers’ offices in big antique homes past the lovely old Austin Library building to San Jacinto, where you hang right and head south again to the apartments. The drive has been slow because of the traffic, even with your shortcuts. It’s 5:50. You’ve got to find a place to park, hopefully near the apartment you’re seeking. Wouldn’t you know? You get lucky and find a spot at a meter that requires no change after five. The downtown workers have cleared out; the partiers on 6th have yet to arrive. Is this a singing balloon bouquet? You check the work order on the seat next to you. You have a lousy voice and hate singing. You look into the rearview mirror and try to drain some tension from the body, to turn clown jolly. You stick on your
red rubber nose and check your whiteface to see if your sweat has made the clown face run in any places. Luckily it’s a fairly cool evening in June. The work order says the balloons are from “Jacqueline,” and that they are for “Jay.” The accompanying message reads, “Five years, babe, and still desperately in love.” Not such a bad cliché. You open the back of the white van, grab the balloon ties close to the top where the various lines are knotted together, and start across the street. You keep the balloons down and close to your body because in June, breezes will pick up speed tunneling down between downtown buildings. 5:57 PM. Luckily the numbers on the side of the buildings are big and easy to read, and at 6:02 PM you are standing in front of apartment 347 on the second floor. You could pull out the tuning harmonica in the clown costume right pocket, but you don’t know what singing in tune means. You think happy thoughts like a method actor. You picture your very first kiss with Rosy in the sixth grade under an umbrella in the rain on the sidewalk leading up to her front door. Ah Rosy. She married the basketball player, the center, whose dad had the big insurance agency. You remember your first kiss with your ex-wife Katherine, back in high school during summer vacation, on her front porch, she and you sitting on a big wooden swing, like in a Victorian courtship. You ring the doorbell, plaster a wide smile on your face, and wait. “Yeah, who is it? Just a moment,” a voice says from behind the door. You’re now thinking how this part-time, extra job pays lousy, but does have compensating moments. You are none other than the happy messenger of love. You are a modern day Cupid. There’s a kind of happy irony here, for your specialty in history was the European Romantic movement. The door opens and a young man in underpants with disheveled blonde hair stands before you. You can see around him and you notice that the floor of his efficiency is littered with clothes and empty beer cans. You did not know that the Rail Yards had such small units. You are about to burst into the happy birthday song. Few know that the tune is still under copyright with royalty payments due for every performance, but you’ve never heard of any balloon clown being busted. After singing you will hand the blonde man the helium bouquet of red and silver balloons and read with both humor
and feeling Jacqueline’s words, “Five years, babe, and still in love desperately.” But then your eye catches sight of a woman in the man’s bed, a woman who is probably naked, given the way she has the sheet pulled up to her chin. She has a slightly irritated but quizzical look on her face. You do a fast mental compute and decide the woman in bed cannot be Jacqueline. There’s no possible way to make the drive from Houston to Austin in one hour. You decide not to sing the birthday tune. You thrust the balloons at Jake and mumble in a low whisper, “These, for you.” Then you turn on your heels and fast track it out and down the stairs, across the street, and back to your van. In about a minute you’re pulling away from the curb, long before Jake can slip on his jeans and rush to follow you out shouting, “Hey wait, dude! These can’t be mine! You’ve made a mistake!” No tip on this run, damn it! Ah, but another grand little tale of love gone wrong to share with your two partners in crime without regular jobs trying to make it at the used bookstore business. Katherine, lovely Katherine, was helping you through school, working as an optician’s assistant, when you slipped up and slipped into the back bedroom at a party and had sex with a fellow plastered graduate student. It happened only once, and Katherine wasn’t with you at the party. She had to work till nine that night, yet somehow the next morning she knew. You loved Katherine but you despised that one trait of hers, that she was so superbly intuitive. As you drive back to the balloon clown office, you’re shaking your head and laughing out loud, but when you stop at a red light and check the rear view mirror, you notice, from the blurred whiteface around your eyes, that you are also crying.
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AUSTIN BALLARD
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Oil on Canvas 52 x 52
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The Inner Child
Eli Langner
torso unzips the adult costume furling to the ground in waves of melted taffy revealing the inner child radiant and dark adventurous and shy murderous and kind Jekyll and Hyde in a fetal blossom wants to destroy and rebuild the world signing the new creation by handprint of leftover peanut butter and jelly
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Nowhere
Louis Daniel Brodsky
Where you were Immediately prior to where you are Is an implacable cognitive ambiguity, Not to mention a temporal and spatial conundrum, A metaphysical enigma, Since you seem to be occupying two places simultaneously. The problem, challenge, is to distinguish present from past, Now from then, is from was, So as to achieve some contrast, By which to judge the distance in between, Better ascertain the here from the there. But for now, death is nowhere everywhere.
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Undesirable
Elizabeth Szewczyk
(In the news, a fourteen year old boy kills his gay classmate) The way desire took him, from his lips through his man-breasts, to his heart, electricity bursting from his sex, urged him to reveal the secret he had stored inside himself since he was a little boy. His anguish around lockers, showers, track teams, drum corps was almost palpable, the heat rising in his brow and chest, steaming through his ears as if he were feverish. Finally, after the basketball game, the admission. Fourteen and gay, so sure of it he knew since he was five, couldn’t stand to hide it anymore, needed to bare his secret hoping everyone would understand, accept who he was. One couldn’t. Also fourteen, he claimed he hated “fags”, couldn’t get past his need to silence one forever, shot two bullets in the young boy’s back, making sure he’d never know the touch of his sex with another man. Two bullets. One for the loud-mouthed boy, one for his own secret shame. In the courtroom, the young murderer screamed, Mama, Mama, reverted to her little child, the one who loved her, loved his sister, loved grandma, who would never do this, take another life, he was such a good boy.
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Elizabeth Burk
You’re a wild ride, never tongue-tied outsourced Louisiana Jones landslide a camera slinging, ring bearing upside down, run aground, try again kind of guy I was stuck on a treadmill, stranded midstride, absorbing the babble of Westchester wives, a misfit marooned with Starbucks brides sipping their snowdrop Eskimo chais You roared into my life like a runaway truck careening through suburban streets, and I hopped in without a thought flinging the map into the backseat I fell in love with your hands like gnarled trees your triple E feet your rollerblade knees your twisted rope shins your duck gumbo soup your heart like a scoop of banana cream pie Now I bring to you my crooked toes my spidery fingers penning poems and prose my arms like feathers my thighs like warm toast my thoughts like buckshot spraying words to the air: how did we get so close, how did we dare?
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collision:
Collision: A Lovesong
Dad was an hour late. I pulled open the beige cupboard. The same boring color coated the walls of every room in the entire building — elevators, stairwells, kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Mom tried to hide it by hanging framed photos — our family picnicking on Candado Beach, my parents newly arrived in America, smiling on the Brooklyn Promenade. It didn’t matter; everything was still beige. I reminded myself we wouldn’t be here forever. Dad worked late so we’d be able to move out soon. I got the glasses, plates, and forks and set four places at the table. “Should I pour the milk?” Mom, standing before a crackling pan of chicken, nodded. The heavy plastic jug shook my wrist as I filled Melissa’s glass. Something exploded outside. I felt the boom as much as heard it and jumped away from the echoing sound. Mom turned off the burners. “Under there now!” she said.
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I IMAGINED QUITtING SCHOOL TO WORK AT The laundromat, Rising in the dark to get breakfast ready, spending wesnesday nights rubbing gel into Melissa's hair. I grabbed Melissa’s wrist and we ducked under the hanging cloth. “What was that?” she asked, rubbing her ears. “Think it was a gun.” Her jaw dropped. We watched through the dripping milk as Mom’s legs carefully moved toward the window and stopped to the left of the sill. I crawled out over the worn linoleum and Melissa followed. Mom was peeking around the edge of the blinds and didn’t notice us. I stood behind her, hooked my fingers into the back pockets of her bleach-spotted jeans, and pressed my cheek against her back, trying no to worry about Dad. Melissa sat on my foot and wrapped herself around Mom’s leg. A door slammed. Footsteps pounded down the stairs. Someone screamed for an ambulance. “My God,” Mom said and let the blinds fall back to the wall. She stood almost still for a moment, harsh breaths raising and dropping her chest. “Was it Dad?” I blurted. The question broke her trance. “Of course not.” She shook loose of us and ran to the phone. Melissa groaned and pressed her forehead against the floor. Mom punched three numbers. “A man’s been shot,” she said. “Gowanus Projects in the courtyard off Hoyt, across from Butler. Can you repeat the address?” She listened. “That’s it,” she said and slammed the phone into the cradle. She knelt before us and held our hands. “Stay in the apartment. Do not go near the window, and, no matter what anyone says, don’t open the door until I get back. Understand?” “Get back?” Melissa asked. “Where you going?” Mom opened the hallway closet and pulled some towels from a shelf. “Ambulance might be too late.” She bent and kissed both of our foreheads. “Stay in the apartment. Lucy, you’re in charge.” The beige door slammed closed. For a moment we both stood stunned. Melissa started wailing. “Shhh,” I turned the bolt. “Want the gunman to hear you?” She bit her lip and a rope of snot burst from her nose. “What is she gets hurt?” she whispered.
{59LIT}
It could happen; once an eighth-grade girl eating fries on the corner, just a year older than I, caught a bullet in the throat. I imagined quitting school to work at the Laundromat, rising in the dark to get breakfast ready, spending Wednesday nights rubbing gel into Melissa’s hair. I could almost feel her fragile head in my hands. “Don’t be silly, “ I said and got a napkin to wipe her face. “Let’s see if she’s outside.” “But she said to stay out of the window.” I crawled to the sill, slipped my head under the blinds, and looked between the safety bars to the ground three floors below. A man lay sprawled beneath a streetlamp in a growing puddle of black blood. Two men stood over him. One knelt on the grass and held the hurt man’s hand. I’d seen him pulling his cigarettes off the deli counter before, just a neighbor. I pressed my nose against the safety bar and looked closer at the shot guy — red cap, Army jacket, and work boots. The same clothes Ramirez had been wearing this morning when he had coffee with Dad before work. I remembered his rings clacking against the mug. My eyes adjusted and I saw the moustache, the big nose; it was Ramirez. A door opened and Mom appeared with more neighbors carrying blankets and towels. She knelt and spread the linen across his chest, then doubled the blanket and pressed with her palms. The kneeling man patted her back. Mom’s compassion for Ramirez made me proud of her because she hated him, said he was a bad influence. Why couldn’t Dad be home right now? I ducked out of the window. Melissa was sucking her thumb and rubbing the top of one foot with the bottom of the other. “Mom’s okay,” I said. “She’s down there with some neighbors trying to help.” Footsteps pounded up the stairs outside the apartment and stopped. “Who’s that?” She dug her fingers into my arm. I imagined bullets pinging through the room, a redrimmed hole in the center of her forehead. “Let’s go.” I pulled her by the hand to the hallway closet, pushed aside a sooty flannel jacket, and closed the door behind us. Brick dust made my nose itch, and I bit my lip to keep from sneezing. A crack of light showed the tips of our sneakers. Melissa pulled on my sleeve. I bent and felt her moist whisper against my ear. “How come she left us?” “Looked like one of them teenagers Mom and Dad are always warning us about is hurt,” I said. “She wanted to help.”
er o f h e r f o {60LIT}
nt
“Where’s Daddy?” I thought of the times he held my hand with his scratchy palm and the stories he told about the big house with a green lawn we’d have someday. “Of course he’s okay,” I said. “Probably putting away his tools and getting ready to come home right now.” I forced myself to take breaths and think pleasant thoughts, the bright-colored houses of San Juan, the windows of curbside restaurants fogged by vats of yellow rice, the fresh smell of the flower garden behind Grandpa’s place as I hosed the beach from my feet. “Remember Grandpa’s delivery truck?” I asked when I’d calmed enough to keep fear from my voice. “It was dark like this in the back of there too.” She sniffled and I felt her rub her wrist against her nose. “Bread smelled good,” she said. “That rooster crowed and you got scared because you didn’t know what it was.” “That was pretty dumb.” For a time neither of us said anything. I started feeling scared again. Melissa’s breaths got faster and I knew she was too. “Cock-a-doodle-do,” I said. She giggled and her breathing slowed a little. We heard a distant siren get louder and louder until it clicked off outside. The front bolt clicked. The knob jingled. “Can’t be her already,” I stiffened, imagining the dull black of the barrel just like the one we found wrapped in oilcloth under a bush, poking into the kitchen. Melissa squealed and hangers clawed against the back wall. Sitting in the dark, not knowing who or what was outside scared me more than risking a peek. I held my breath, grabbed the knob, slowly twisted, and then, ever so gently, eased it forward a sliver. Mom entered slowly, hanging her head as though half asleep. Suddenly, she snapped alert. “Lucy, Melissa?” she said, her voice rising as she searched the kitchen. We burst from the closet. Melissa pounded past me and leapt into her arms. I spoke before she could ask any questions. “I told her it was one of the boys you tell us to stay away from.” She raised her eyebrows. “And how did you know that?” she asked. I didn’t answer. Suddenly, I had to blink my eyes to keep from crying.
ce
r eh
I im ag rough the roo in h t g ed m, bullets pingin a red-rimmed hole in t he e a d.
“Where’s Daddy?” Melissa asked. “Coming home late,” Mom said. She cleared her throat. “He called and said you girls should eat and go straight to bed.” Melissa sat at the table. I wiped the milk puddle with my hair hanging in front my face. Mom knelt beside me with a paper towel to help. “Is Ramirez okay?” I whispered. She shook her head. “Did Dad really call?” She bit down on her lower lip before she spoke, so I knew she was going to lie. “Of course,” she said. I grabbed the milk bottle and started pouring. It didn’t feel as heavy, but my hand still shook. Outside the ambulance engine roared and the siren blared; the noise grew softer and softer until it was gone. We ate a quiet dinner and prepared for bed. The excitement must have exhausted Melissa because she fell right asleep. I listened to the television show Mom was pretending to watch until the door opened and I heard his footsteps in the hallway. Mom didn’t run to him. He reached the living room. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said. My mother didn’t reply. “It looks like he’ll pull through okay.” “I’m not sure how to feel about that,” Mom said. “That’s a fucking awful thing to say.” “What if that was you? This little extra money is costing a lot more than it’s worth.” “Little ears could be hearing,” he said. The television got louder and, although I could still hear the anger in their voices, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. But I didn’t need to. From now on I’d have to worry every time I heard a siren, and there wasn’t going to be any big house with a green lawn. Somehow Melissa still slept curled into a ball, with her thumb in her mouth. I rose to turn on the fan facing the wall at the foot of her bed so she wouldn’t awaken. Wind bounced from the beige blocks and swirled around my bare legs as I turned the knob to the loudest, strongest level. Carefully I slid under the sheets next to her, lay on my side, and stared into the dark with an arm draped across her shoulder.
AMELIA FLETCHER
Black and White Photography 11 x 14
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KYLA HALL
(Detail) Stoneware 8 x 8 x 37
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ELIZABETH COMPTON Digital Print 8 x 12
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AUSTIN BALLARD Installation (found objects)
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LIT:
Raphael Badagliacca is the author of Father’s Day: Encounters with Everyday Life. He began his career at Columbia University, graduating Magna Cum Laude-Phi Beta Kappa, during which he worked full time in the newsroom of The New York Times, later becoming one of the youngest editors in the paper’s history. Rapheal is currently the President and CEO of SpaceMaster Inc., a software company with products used by magazines and newspapers. When asked what one thing she would take on a trip back in time, Sarah H. Boatwright responds with a confident, “Vacuum Cleaner”. It seems odd that her poems would not accompany her but when asked why she responds, “I’d take something capable of exciting the strongest response from people”. It seems she has been doing just that with her poems since she started writing poetry in the ninth grade. Louis Daniel Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941. After earning a B.A. Magna Cum Laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received a M.A. in English at Washington University in 1967 and a M.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1968. Louis is the author of fifty-eight volumes of poetry, twenty-three volumes of prose, and seven books of short fictions. In 2004, Brodsky won the award for best book of poety, You Can’t Go Back Exactly, presented by the Center for Great Lakes Culture, at Michigan State University. A native New Yorker, Elizabeth Burk is married to a Cajun man from a small town in southwest Louisiana. Her relationship with her husband and his home state has inspired much of her writing. She is now a psychologist/ psychoanalyst in with a private practice in Westchester County. She has taken several writing workshops most notably with Suzanne Cleary, Rebecca McLanahan, and Patricia Smith. Elizabeth’s work has appeared in The Louisiana Review and Wisconsin Review. Gannon Daniels has earned a Masters Degree from USC and received honorable mention from the Rainer Maria Rilke International Poetry Competition and the Ann Stanford Prize in poetry. Gannon’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Cape Rock, Cimarron Review, CQ, Poem, RATTLE, Sierra Nevada College Review and the Southern
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California Anthology. First book of poetry, The Occupying of Water, was published in 2001. Also, two of Gannon’s plays have toured the Los Angeles Unified School District, commissioned by the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts. Residing in Montpelier, Vermont, Kate Fetherston is a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the recipient of the 2004 Vermont Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grant in Poetry. She has a MFA for the Vermont College of the Union Institute and University. Kate is a classically trained singer (coloratura). Although legally blind, Kate’s wide interest in artistic media influences her commitment as a psychotherapist to help others access their creativity and passion for life. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, has been nominated 5 times for a Pushcart Prize, and is a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. Janet Flora is currently teaching nonfiction for Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. She is a graduate from the MFA writing program at The New School. She is the former nonfiction editor of Lit, The New School’s literary magazine. She has been a reagular contributor to Health Magazine, Makeup Artist Magazine, Salon News, The Southampton Press, Vox, Dramatics, and other weekly and monthly publications. Her essay, “The Goodbye Ceremony,” won best prose for 2004 in the Willow Review and her short story, “It’s Not What You Think,” was solicited by the Hawai’i Pacific Review. Mark Gordon has published two novels through Groundhog Press, The Kanner Aliyah (1979) and Head Of The Harbour (1983). His poetry has also appeared in numerous publications, including Phantasmagoria and Illuminations, among others. Jessica Harman was born in Montreal, Canada, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University. She moved to Boston in 2000, earning her Masters in Health Communication from Emerson College in 2003. She has been a contributing editor of Matrix magazine, as well as a researcher at Harvard Medical School. Currently she is an artist and freelance writer. Her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming from Eden Waters Press.
Eli Langner has been a featured speaker of the Performance Poets Association, and his work has been read on radio stations KXCI (Arizona) and WRHU (New York). His work has been published by numerous literary reviews. S.D. Lavender graduated from Georgia College and State University with a MFA in Creative Writing and is currently teaching English in North Georgia. Richard Lighthouse is a contemporary writer and poet. He holds a MS from Stanford University. His work has been published in The Penwood Review, West Hills Review, Mudfish, and many others worldwide. Tom McFadden’s writing has appeared in ten countries in such publications as Journal of the American Medial Association, Poetry Ireland Review (Dublin), Voices of Israel, Poetry Canada, Storie (Rome, Italy), The Plaza (Tokyo), The Poet’s Voice (Austria), etc. He has published one poetry book entitled Twilight of Dreams (Plain View Press).
Elizabeth Szewczyk is currently a part-time instructor of English at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut. She began teaching at the college after her son was diagnosed with cancer, which prevented her from continuing a full time position in the elementary schools in Enfield. She also suffers from bipolar disorder, which is often the subject of her poems. Chuck Taylor’s new book of poems from Pecan Grove Press, Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon, is now out and available on the web, as is his 2006 book from Panther Creek Press, Heterosexual: A Love Story. Taylor has published two novels, Drifter’s Story and Fogg in High School, and three collections of short stories, Lights of the City, Somebody to Love, and All Things Flow Away. In the 1980’s he taught at the University of Texas and helped operate a bookstore in downtown Austin that was a major Texas literary center. In 1990, when rent and traffic became overwhelming, Taylor reluctantly left Austin for the more rural College Station. He now teaches creative writing, American nature writing, and the Beat Movement in American Literature at Texas A&M.
Matthew Perron attended Northeastern University in Boston. Upon graduation, he worked at an orphange for traumatized children and then for computer company, testing boxed protocol analyzers. He recently graduated from the Arizona Writer’s Workshop. He now resides in Brooklyn, where he teaches in a middle school.
Matthew Walsh was born in 1976 in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He has been published in numerous poetry journals—most recently in Diner and The South Boston Literary Gazette. In 2007, he was the Stolpman Vineyard Haiku Label winner.
Julie Wittes Schlack, a mother of two, is currently writing monthly book reviews for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Louisville Review, Ellipsis, The Ledge, Ninth Letter, Dos Passos Review, and Schuykill Valley Journal of the Arts. She has also won a Hopward Award for her fiction.
Helen Wickes received her MFA from Bennington College in 2002 and was the recipient of the Jane Kenyon Scholarship. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. For many years she worked in the Bay area as a psychotherapist in private practice.
Susannah W. Simpson is a founding member of the New Mexico Poetry Alliance and Poets For Peace, Long Island Chapter. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications. Max Snavlin is pursuing two Masters in Writing, Nonfiction and Poetry, at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a rehabilitater and remodeler of houses in and around Baltimore.
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Also: John Field Toni L. Wilkes Gerald Zipper
ART: Austin Ballard is currently completing his BFA in Sculpture and Fibers. His works reflect ideas and thoughts about the human body through a variety of manifestations. David Banemanivong is a senior at UNC Charlotte pursuing the BFA degree in Graphic Design. David is influenced by music and graffiti art and hopes to one day have a graphic design studio of his own based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Elizabeth Compton is currently in her senior year, graduating in Spring 2009 with a BFA concentration in Photography. Her recent work has been concerning the creation of a narrative, often addressing social issues and constructs. She hopes to pursue work in the documentary field while traveling as much as possible after graduation. Whatever the future may bring, she continues to find inspiration in family, friends, and life’s little jests. Amelia Fletcher is currently enrolled as a sophomore at UNC Charlotte and plans on graduating with a BFA concentration in Photography. She also enjoys drawing and illustration. Kyla Hall is striving to mature as a Christian and an artist as she finishes her BFA in Ceramics at UNC Charlotte. She is currently experimenting with mixed media and saggar firing. Recurring themes in her artwork are mood disorders, faith, and balance. Kyla’s husband, Daryl, is her biggest fan and supporter. She would not be here without Daryl, God’s love, and her family. Serge Neri was born in Mexico City, Mexico and moved to Charlotte when he was eight. He picked up a camera three years ago and has loved it since. He started at UNC Charlotte in 2005 and hopes to graduate in 2010. Ashley Owens is currently studying Spanish translation and Art at UNC Charlotte, but dreams of making animations of her own one day. Her artwork focuses on issues including murder and suicide, but she also takes a lighter look at life with storybook illustrations.
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Joseph Pepe is a Charlotte based street photographer whose main goal is to represent city and rural landscapes honestly and nostalgically, along with the people and objects that live within them. He wants the viewer to take in the smallest and largest details of his simple, yet beautiful photographs to create a story and a scene in their head that is special to them. Currently a senior at UNC Charlotte, Carrie Sigmon is a studio art major in the BFA program. Although her concentration is Illustration, she does not like to limit herself with a single label. Instead she enjoys art from many different areas and makes every effort to combine those areas and media when possible. Art has always been a part of life and always will be. If he has ever felt like creating something, he has never backed away from the situation at hand. Overall, Eric Alan Wattinne has had a long, and so far fulfilling life as a mixed media artist. For Mr. Wattinne, art has always been, and always will be. Amber Watts was born in North Carolina in 1985 to Ron and Terry Watts. She is the oldest of three sisters and has one son. Amber received her AFA from Caldwell Community College and is currently attending UNC Charlotte to obtain her BFA degree. In the future, she plans to get a MFA and go on to teach studio art classes at the university level. Also: Karen Pierce (bio on staff page)
JURY: LITERATURE
Christopher Davis is Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Charlotte. His most recent book of poetry is A History of the Only War. Julie E. Townsend is a published short story writer as well as in other genres. She has publications in The Distillery, The MacGuffin, Main Street Rag, and No Hiding Place: The Legacy of Charlotte Area Writers. She won Creative Loafing’s Fiction Award in 1999; First Place in North Carolina’s Working Press Award for an expose on a cult-like church in 2001; and Third Place in Creative Loafing’s non-fiction category, 2002. Seafood Jesus, her first novel is due for release in May, 2009. She teaches at UNC Charlotte as a full-time Lecturer. Aimee Parkison teaches creative writing at UNCC, and has a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University. She has received numerous national awards for her writing. Her book Woman with Dark Horses won the 2003 Starcheone Fiction Prize and was published in 2004.
ART
Malena Bergmann makes 2D, 3D and 4D work, most recently in collaboration with earth worms and spiders, as well as human. She has been teaching visual art in the southern US for some years. Dr. James F. D. Frakes teaches the art history of the ancient Mediterranean at UNC Charlotte, and specializes in the art and architecture of the Roman Empire. Deborah Wall is the coordinator of Art Education for The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Prior to serving UNC Charlotte for the past four years as a lecturer of art education and drawing instructor she taught art for twelve years in the Charlotte Mecklenburg School System. Her artistic work depicts figurative relationships with personal cultural scenarios and combines photography and painting.
THANK YOUS: Wayne Maikranz: Thank you so much for your advice and input. Even though we didn’t get to see much of that face, we know it’s smiling out there somewhere. For us. And for cake. Mark Haire: You stop it. Stop it with the tricks...eh, it’s no use. You know just how to keep us awake during the busy times. And we are grateful. Thanks! Mike Teague: Without your help, we would have no magazine! Thanks for keeping the computers in working condition! Kelly Lusco: Take care of those babies now. And make sure to bring them by for a visit! Thanks for your support! LouAnn Lamb: You’re not even working for SMP anymore, and yet you are still a huge part of the Sanskrit family. Thank you for all of your help. We miss you so much!
Pete Hurdle: Never ever forget toodle day. And thank you for taking the time to teach us a-lotta bit of this and a-lotta bit of that!
Jurors: We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedules to help with the making of the magazine. It is always an honor.
Brittaney Forte: What can we say B40. You’re basically one of us. We should have pushed for a paycheck, no? Thank you for keeping us company! And for bringing us all of the chocolate goodies...
Contributors: You make this magazine what it is. Congratulations to each and every one of you.
Vanna Kealy: We’re pretty sure you volunteered to work with us JUST to get away from Mark and his tricks. Kidding! Thanks for your help and for organizing our paper work! Michael Kerr: Mista Mac Kerr...You are a supporter through and through. Don’t forget that David Carson loves you no matter what. Thanks for putting in your two cents! SMP Departments: Thanks for putting up with our loudness. And for letting us use your offices during desprate times.
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Friends: To everyone. Thank you for everything. We cannot say it enough. The Cone janitorial staff. We are a mess and we know it. Sarah Jane Wheeler! Come back next year if you can! And Brandon Hicks. You’re always welcome in our office! Brandon Mead Jackson, you may be overseas, but we enjoyed your late night phone calls. Tell the troops we’re thinking about them! Hope Matiwe, you can have a Twizzler whenever you’d like. Steph Jansen, thanks for keeping Mel sane. And to Mary Lord, Hugo, Brandon Grubbs, and Burim – thanks for stopping by to keep us company! Debbie Archer?
STAFF BIOS Editor-in-Chief cannot believe that this is her last and final year at Sanskrit. She’d like to say farewell and good luck to the new generation of Sanskrittles: KP, Latte, and Lauren PLEASE! May the amazingness of the new office guide you. Now, the time has come for Melanie to leave UNC Charlotte with her BFA to pursue a career in Illustration. Her fingers are crossed! Ohmahgawd!
Karen Rose Pierce, Associate Editor, surrounds and fully involves herself with all that she enjoys and loves. The camera is her most prized possession and she can be lost in her own world in the darkroom. Usually found stressed out and tired as she tries to do everything, she still plans to stay in school as long as possible. Lead Designer sa ma nt ha we b st er is breaking up with Sanskrit. It’s a sorrowful time, but that’s not to say that there are any hard feelings. They will always share fond, beautiful, and sometimes heart-wrenching memories. Sanskrit will be an inspiration for her novels and fuel her booming career, but no matter how famous she becomes, her love and care will always be just within a text message’s reach. Don’t cry Sanskrit; you’ll always be good friends. At least she didn’t break up with you on a Post-It. Once upon a time, little loved to dream, dance, read, write and hang around with good friends. Years went by and Ervisa grew into an "interesting" person. She changed as nature requires but some things remain the same. Today, she still dreams, dances, reads, writes and has coffee with friends. Oh, and she’s a finance major, with minors in Religious Studies, Philosophy and “bullshits.” The lone male on the Sanskrit team, Paul Lascara, is a senior majoring in English and minoring in film studies. He does his own fiction writing, and hopes one day to even make money that way. Real original Paul. A self-complimenting announcement of your plans for the future, in a self-deprecating tone. Classic. Time to graduate and get some new material.
Lauren Nicole Plesz is a new addition to Sanskrit. She graduated from culinary school, but for some reason stopped by the office and started doing stuff, so it seemed only fair that she be paid for it. She’s an art major now, or something like that, minoring in indecision. She is a ravenous reader, and enjoys cooking, running, and playing the devil’s advocate. Oh, and recycling. So, her name is Atehbang Ndingwan. Ateh for short. Pronounced “Ah-Tay” or “Latté” without the “L.” Although, sometimes the "L" is necessary. Her parents are originally from a West African country called Cameroon. They moved to Greensboro a year before she was born. Ateh transferred here last semester from UNC Greensboro in hopes of getting accepted into the Graphic Design program here at UNC Charlotte. She enjoys working at Sanskrit and LOVES all the new people she’s met through the magazine and Student Media.
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