10th Anniversary Issue Fall 2007

Selections: The First Ten Years

Touchstones Volume 11, Number 1 Fall 2007 Selections: The First Ten Years Faculty advisor Stephen D. Gibson Editors Cassie Eddington, Eric Lyman, Amber Watson Consulting editor Aaron Guile Copyeditors and proofreaders Margaret Donaldson, Deb Thornton and her editing class Design, layout, covers Eric Lyman Selection committee Jeff Bond, Loran Cook, Cassie Eddington, Stephen D. Gibson, Aaron Guile, Chad Lee, Eric Lyman, Dominique Replogle, Rebecca Valero, Amber Watson Touchstones Department of English/Literature #153 Utah Valley State College 800 West University Parkway Orem, UT 84058

Touchstones

Selections: The First Ten Years Laura Hamblin Foreword 6 Editor’s Note 8 Joe Alisa Vignettes 9 (Fall 2006) Xochitl Michaela Anson At Home and in Graveyards 14 (Fall 1997) Samuel Banford On Frida 16 (Spring 2004) Jeff Bond Belladonna Form 18 (Spring 2006) Heather Brady Flirtations 19 (Spring 2005) Annik Maryse Budge Otoño/Autumn 24 (Fall 2006) Jessie Bushman Avoiding the Awkward Goodbye 25 (Spring 2004) Michelle Davidson Upon Marrying a Dreamer 26 (Spring 2002) Amanda Duke The Owl Told Me So 27 (Fall 2000) Cassie Eddington If Mirrors Could Hold Us Together 31 (Fall 2006) Joe England Hombre 32 (Fall 2005) Kamri Evans I Wore the World 35 (Fall 2003) Nate Gambill Ex-Con 36 (Fall 2006) Daniel Green Fight Night 37 (Spring 2006) Aaron Guile The Busdriver Shouts Happy New Year 51 (Spring 2006)

Michael Hansen What We Burned 55 (Spring 2001) Tami Hansen Pallbearer of One 65 (Spring 2005) Havilah Howard Wicks 66 (Fall 2005) Nanette Kasallis My Best Friend’s Name Is Not Claude 67 (Fall 2003) Eliot Keey cycle 68 (Spring 2006) Brian Kenison The Blue Bullet 69 (Spring 2000) Charlie King Pussy King of the Pirates 74 (Spring 2003) Jessica Lepinski Magpies Singing like Preachers in a Prairie Storm 85 (Spring 2007) Eric Paul Lyman Lament 86 (Spring 2007) Jason Macomber Untitled 87 (Spring 2002) M. Jared Malan Light for the Weekend 89 (Fall 2006) Henry Miles Becky, Not God 91 (Spring 2005) Whitney Mower To Be Gauguin 94 (Fall 2005) Phineas Nau across 96 (Spring 2007) David Self Newlin Litany for Cain and El Paso 97 (Spring 2007) Autumn Nielson Our Pyro Psychology 98 (Spring 2006) Susan Nielson Heaven and Snow 99 (Spring 2006) Michael Palmer Seven Moments of Red 100 (Fall 2005) Darren Reid Thomas Aquinas Trapped in the 21st Century 104 (Fall 2002)

Renato Rodriguez Corozones Como Pistolas 105 (Spring 2006) Kai Samuelsen Cacophony 109 (Spring 2006) Megan Scott Anacortes Art Festival, 2002 111 (Spring 2003) Christine Spencer I Dreamt I Had a Pen 113 (Fall 2002) Sophie Standish Leaving a Snowgirl to Sulk 115 (Spring 2004) Laura Stott Cat’s Eye 116 (Fall 1998) Karen Strang It’s a Girl Thing 117 (Fall 2004) Michael Erin Strong Golden Drapes 126 (Spring 2007) Natanya Ann Sturgill Gapp’s Basement: The Lone Wolf 130 (Fall 1997) Swen Swenson A Yugoslavian Love Poem 131 (Fall 2002) Tanya Terry Firstborn Part I 132 (Spring 1999) Josie Thompson Tom Tibbits 133 (Fall 2002) Rebecca Valero Gypsy Freedom 135 (Fall 2006) Matthew Warnick Uncertainty 136 (Fall 2002) Amber Watson Mantis, Praying 137 (Spring 2007) Thomas Wetzel Candor 138 (Spring 2005) Everett Williams A Proposal 139 (Spring 2007) David Cole Woolley Panic of a Corpse 140 (Fall 2006)

Foreword Ten years ago, as a new faculty member at Utah Valley Community College, I approached Dr. Charles Vogel (then English chair) and J.D. Davidson (then dean of HASS), asking for permission to compile a student literary magazine. The lack of such a magazine seemed to be a noticeable and unnecessary void. I was granted $60.00 with which to produce the magazine. I then solicited pieces from my one class of creative writing students (we offered only one 2000 level creative writing class and had no creative writing emphasis) and literally cut (with scissors) and pasted (with masking tape) the first issue of Touchstones. . . . How much has changed in ten years—UCCU became UVSC and this summer will become UVU; every year we have published two issues of Touchstones; and now we receive close to 400 submissions a semester. Our little magazine has grown into a respected journal (having one’s writing published is a prestigious accomplishment), and our writers have gone on to publish in regional and national journals, to study in Masters, Ph.D. and J.D. programs, and/or to work in publishing, teaching, law, computer science, advertising, business, graphic arts, etc.

The world too has changed—in ways most of us, ten years ago, could not have imagined—the Internet, iPhones, September 11 and its horrible aftermath. . . .

I write this introduction from the city of Amman, where I am on sabbatical leave, gathering oral histories of Iraqi women refugees. The stories I encounter are disturbing, devastating, and heroic. And the human loss, of course, it is endless. But here I am, attempting to do as Rainer Maria Rilke admonishes Orpheus in sonnet II, 13, of The Sonnets to Orpheus : To all that I used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully and yourself, and cancel the count. (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

The myth of Orpheus speaks to me now in ways it has never before—the poem is an attempt to voice the unsayable. And knowing full well that language is insufficient, we still attempt to speak—we sit at our computers, we scribble in our pads, we read the literature that feeds and nourishes our souls, and, ultimately, we must cancel the count, give ourselves over to the act of writing and not to the product of writing.

September is the Holy Month of Ramadan for those of the Muslim faith. In an attempt to focus on the spiritual aspects of life, the pious will fast from sunup to sundown for thirty days in a row. . . . All of minarets in Amman call the faithful to prayer five times a day, and this month, one additional time, at each sunset, to declare that iftar (literally “the break of the fast”) can begin. Even as I write, the cry to pray is vibrating through the city. Each time the call is sung from the tops of the minarets, I find myself pausing to ask, “What prayer is in my heart now—in this broken and ordinary heart?”

The net cannot hold water.

The screen window cannot hold air.

The heaven cannot hold all of the prayers rising like stars in the night.

May we continue to attempt to voice our insufficient song, may Touchstones continue to gather those songs, and may we someday become wise and brave enough to cancel the count.

—Laura Hamblin Amman, Jordan September 22, 2007

Editor’s Note We began the selection process for this anniversary issue during the summer with copies and copies of every Touchstones journal of the past.

Aaron Guile started it, and we are very grateful for his organized efforts. Throughout the summer there were several reading nights where we came together to read past Touchstones and participate in selecting pieces. We read nearly three thousand pages, as Steve mentions, of poetry and prose, and I don’t think any of us regret having spent our summer this way.

It should be noted that not all of the pieces included were award winners in their original publications, and not all of the pieces that were award winners in their original publication are included. This fact should do nothing more than remind all of us of the subjective nature of judging. Because the selection process for each issue of Touchstones is subjective, and the judging process for each issue is subjective, our compilation of an anniversary issue is, well, subjective. We cannot deny that when we are reading, seated next to us, to the side of us, behind us are each of our very specific backgrounds, reading right along with us.

We only hope that we had a large and varied enough group of readers, that we have produced a diverse and interesting compilation.

Hopefully we’ve compiled something good, something you enjoy reading. And we hope that this collection kindles interest in the past and future issues of Touchstones.

—Cassie Eddington

Joe Alisa

Vignettes Chickens (moa) “Damn Chickens!” It’s about four o’clock in the morning and my dream about Big Macs and fries being fed to me by buxom women is cut short by some insensitive hen trying to get comfortable in the pulu tree next to my hut. My host, Tuiala, is snoring, softly for a change, on the floor, a few feet away from me. The fala mats we sleep on are cool and a little sticky from earlier when it was still warm and we perspired. I think the flies in Samoa work in shifts. I wish I had a mosquito net instead of having to use my lava lava, which is a little confining pressed up against my face. I must be the only one in the whole village who can’t sleep. I amuse myself by looking out into the malae and imagining the village kids playing a rugby game. Minutes seem like hours. And then, when I begin to doze off, the roosting hen wakes me with her chatter.

The open walls of the hut afford a panoramic view of the sleeping village, and I take it all in. Then I see the old matai walking across the road toward our hut. In the early morning light I can barely make out his large shuffling shape, but I know it’s him because no one else in the village walks like that. He is carrying what looks like a walking stick. I’m about to wake Tuiala when I see that the old man has stopped a few feet away from the pulu tree. He looks up, searchingly. He lifts the walking stick to his shoulder, takes aim, and fires. In the dark quiet of the village, the muzzle flash and following report are augmented. The matai turns and fades back into the dark.

Large shade tree, like a banyan Woven mat Cloth wraparound worn by Samoans Open space in the village Chief

(Fall 2006)

Customs (FA’A SAMOA) The plantation is hot today. It rained all day yesterday and all through the night. We get to the plantation early, but later the blazing sun and the saturated earth combine for an almost overwhelming sauna-like heat. Finally, we finish the wall and begin the long walk down the mountain. My neck aches from the weight of the yoked baskets I’m carrying: green bananas for the saka and coconuts for the pe’e pe’e sauce. Both Ioane and Sosaea have baskets the same size as mine, but they do not seem to feel their weight as they hurry downhill. I am glad when we reach the village because I do not think I could have gone any farther. I drop my load next to the umu kuka.

Ioane tells me that Tuiala is in the house meeting with a high chief and that we may not enter. Ioane says they are discussing marriages.

In Samoa, arranged marriages are customary. We lie down outside in the soft, white sand. Because it is in the shade, it is cool to the touch, and I am thankful. I close my eyes and listen. Deep male voices, floating on the cool breeze, reach me from the nearby hut. I listen to the words and strain to understand them. Then I recognize the voices. It is Palepoi, the high chief from the neighboring village, and he is here discussing the marriage of his daughter to me. My eyes fly open.

Fish (I’A) I do not know what the silver, black-tipped fish is called, but I know it is edible (Sina cooked some last night for dinner). This one is currently grazing on some algae growing amongst a patch of pink brain coral.

It is sixteen inches long and five inches high—a good target. Slowly I increase the tension of the tubing on my spear and wait for the fish to turn itself broadside. Nature gave this fish the gift of virtual invisibility.

It is a silvery hue, which begins almost platinum at its belly and darkens just along its dorsal ridge. To a hungry eva eva flying above, the dark dorsal ridge blends in with the dark, multicolored ocean floor.

Food prepared by boiling White sauce made from coconut milk, served on saka Cook house Large white bird

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Alisa: Vignettes

To a lurking tu’una,10 hiding on the ocean floor looking up, the hoary underbelly of the fish is lost in the sunlight streaming down from above. Even at a side view, the fish appears ethereal at best. Its shimmering skin mimics the light patterns as they bounce off the waves and through the water. But now this creature’s camouflage has become its death sentence. Against the brilliant colored corals, it stands out pale white, a perfect target. Slowly, as it is caressed by the current, the fish revolves until it presents its profile to me. I gently release my grip on the shaft. The tubing contracts and the spear leaps at the fish, striking it, penetrating, and driving through. Quickly I stand, grasp the spear, and secure the fish. I remove my goggles and smile. I wade ashore to find some wood and make a fire.

Pig (PUA’A) I’m sitting in the faleoloa,11 cleaning the single-shot bolt action .22 rifle. Whoever borrowed it brought it back this morning. This is probably the gun the old man used to shoot that chicken the other morning. There aren’t many guns on the island. I am almost done when Pala comes and asks me to come with her to a neighbor’s house. I lay the gun on a stack of mats and follow her to Lopeki’s garden where there is a huge sow. Pala tells me that Palepoi is coming today to visit with Tuiala, and I realize that means we will kill this pig. There is an old saying that pigs are not happy when the chief visits. I wonder if this pig knows what will happen.

Pala has a length of cord. She makes a noose and tosses it on the ground next to the pig, who roots around in the dirt instead of running away. When the pig steps in the noose, Pala pulls on her end of the cord and the noose tightens, catching the pig. The pig starts to struggle, but with its foot anchored by the cord, it cannot escape. I wrestle the sow onto her back and with the cord, tie her legs together.

Pala brings a log and we lay it across the pig’s neck. Pala sits on one end of the log and I on the other. It is a gruesome see­saw. The pig struggles a little at first, but her efforts are in vain and eventually stop.

We sit and talk for another fifteen minutes before we stand up.

10 Eel 11 Store or shop

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Credit (AIKALAFU) I’m sitting on a bucket filling bags with a pound of flour each. I have only been here for a few weeks and am still learning to speak the language, but today Tuiala has left me in his little store and asked me to tend it. He has told me not to sell anything to anybody on credit, no exceptions!

Pala comes in and walks up to the counter. “Mai le pusa susu fa’amolemole,” she says. She wants some of the boxed milk for her baby, but I know that she often does not have any money.

“Fea lou kupe?” I ask. I want to see the money first.

She doesn’t have any. “Le se kupe, fai aikalafu fa’amolemole.” She wants me to give it to her on credit.

“Leai . . . No!” She goes away crying. I feel like shit.

The Boat (O LE VA’A) I ran in a race once. It was fourth grade and my school sponsored a Run for Your Life marathon. I remember just before the race, standing in the middle of a herd of kids, standing like cattle, waiting for the starting signal. I think a lot of kids got trampled. Our school had to change the way they ran Run for Your Life the next year.

Now I am in the middle of another crowd, about to run another race. This time, though, I am not surrounded by a hundred fourth graders. I am in a pack of about a hundred Samoans. We are outside a chain link gate at Salelologa harbor, waiting to be let on the boat.

Old ladies with flocks of kids, young men with bunches of bananas, an old chief with a teenage boy carrying his bag. There is a couple from Sweden on vacation.

Everyone is carrying something: kava root, tobacco braids, pigs, fala mats, correspondence. The guard, dressed in blue, stands at the gate, checking his watch. He checks it again and then walks to the gate. The crowd presses forward, pauses as the gate is unlocked, then surges. I am in front of the human wave as we charge and storm the boat. I find a spot under some stairs to stash my package of pisupo,12 and then I go up on top. People find places to leave their baggage 12 Corned beef

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Alisa: Vignettes

and find their way to the deck. The Swedish couple keeps their bags with them; they look around, bewildered. Some of the young men find space on the floor and go to sleep. It is a two-hour voyage. I lean against a crate and fall asleep.

13

Xochitl Michaela Anson

At Home and in Graveyards I stood there for a while and watched them from the outside. The California December wind crept into the sleeves and neck of my undershirt. It rushed through my body and up into my nose and into my eyes, droughting my senses and playing me like a flute. The rawness of the evening emptied from every pore, and as I stood, content or cold to the discriminating wind, I was an instrument, and had anyone been listening, they may have heard the soft melody of my arrival.

The porch yellowed from the glow of the dull light, which seemed as if it would snap at any moment into darkness, but to my memory, it had always been this way. The porch built by my grandfather hugged the front of the house, while stretching beams of peeling paint, exposing their underwood, were numbed by the small sun-like bulb screwed into the socket of the house’s imaginary celestial sphere.

At that moment, I knew what was behind the façade of tranquility. I knew what the back yard looked like with its wild grasses and rusted swing set; the long-running lines for laundry that I used to hate so much; the cracked sidewalk that surrounds the mausoleum of childhood pets that we knew would never outlive us. I knew what happened there when spring came like winter and the rains flooded the floors, making mud of the whole foundation. I knew where Mom slept, and Dad, and how my brother had the smallest room of the house, which used to be my uncle’s and my mother’s, now mine.

I used to break boxes and find the jaundiced photographs of my mother in her room, preparing for marriage with a nervous glint against the brown of her skin. She was almost foreign with her long hair of Stygian hue, her alabaster eyes of ornamental onyx, and the lips that knew only my father’s. I remember him too, in photographs, but one in particular that I saw once and never again. As I peered into the black and white, I wept when I realized that my father was not the same man he was in the picture, and as guilt flowed from my eyes, I understood that his life was different without us, though we were still there.

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(Fall 1997)

Anson: At Home and in Graveyards

The window encased them all into the warmth of the house. My grandmother’s small and tender touch was in the kitchen, her anxious beating over the heart of the house, sinewing the walls of the rooms enclosed. I knew how she would look upon me with her seraphic visage, and I knew the smell of her make-up and her perfume and her mother’s antiquarian scarf with which she used to pull back the slight grey from her face when making tamales. How she loved my grandfather, the rigidness of him, his stern looks and comfortable silences. His strenuous brow and black-stained hands reminded me of a time much harder than mine, when eating was more important than sleeping. Behind his serious mustache and tenebrous perception, I knew, was a venerable and altruistic soul which I had met on several occasions and with whom I wished to seek refuge.

I stood there, still, and begged not to enter, but refused to leave.

It was all decidedly familiar to me, though everything was incongruous. We almost all slept differently, now. My brother no longer had a room there, though detergent-scented linens expected him should he come home. I remembered the day he left. We all stood at the edge of the driveway as did the Spaniards at the docks when Columbus sailed to the new world. He found his the same, but did not claim it for the queen. In the tempest, I know he remembers our time here and there, but I wonder if he ever broke into the same boxes I did. I often think that if he did, he would come back more often and share the witchery of it all.

The wind grew harsh and paralyzing, and my eyes began to tear and moisten my cheeks. I had not expected the night to be as frigid and my nervous shiver shook off little chill. In the ripe of the evening, among the weakening apricot trees and the weed-sprouting concrete beneath my feet, the house looked to me like a lantern in a graveyard.

The glow of the porch, like a flame in the blackness, lured me closer, exhuming the buried inside of me, and I sighed. I knew that there was an inside to the house I had lived in, but I had never found it.

I wanted to come home that night like a newborn baby—pure and adored. I wanted to forgive and I wanted to be forgiven all the things I wasn’t supposed to have remembered as a child. I was drawn back like so many times before. I was home.

15

Samuel Banford

On Frida at night when all is quiet, our embrace lasts long like my red tehuana dress. it’s at night that i want to suckle milk from your breast, like water to the roots of the agave. our cactus filled planet is only food for the fields of vacas living across the border. my baqa is knowing that holding you is like embracing a fire that can consume me, your planet, at any time. it is only here on my red dress that covers our mexico like the roots of the bougainvillaea drinking heavy the milk of our love—that i feel safe, safe like milk. (warm) that very same milk that vacas drink when they are young. we are rooted here between night and day, embracing dark/light, like the accordion folds of my dress where i can love you. my terracotta planet revolves around us, watching us like the plants that fill our home. break the stem and milk flows. today there is no time to dress you. i can only hold you, touch your cow stomach, and hope that this embrace can last the day. our hungry roots go back to when there was no word for raiz when our small succulent filled planet spanned the sky and when an embrace was second nature, like drinking milk

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(Spring 2004)

Banford: On Frida

from mother’s breast, drinking in memoria like a word which can be dressed in any language where “dress” can be any word with roots like vowels. like leather from a cow i too am strong enough to weather your planet’s storms raining large white drops of milk that cover the universe holding mexico embracing me touching your cow skin. i want this dress to be larger than that embrace. help me to lay down roots enough to fill this planet. let me drink of your milk.

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Jeff Bond

Belladonna Form Chant the spell of youth returning, harrow heart in beauty burning. Wrap the waist in mummy leather, brush the eye with raven feather, pierce the ears with lover’s arrow, brew with monkshood serpent’s marrow, wallow in this scalding potion, writhe with maudlin planets’ motion. Bind to word of barren tarot, bury soul in rib-caged barrow.

My body now an hourglass in red, my skin of woven silk, my flesh of warm ambrosial nectar, I await a chance encounter lying on a lonely bed, and in my softest belladonna form seduce the strong, the wise, and fools entrance.

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(Spring 2006)

Heather Brady

Flirtations There is no point in repressing this.

Just let them lay side by side.

I learned to flirt when I was twenty years old. My teenage years were a series of awkward dates combined with sexual naivety. Perhaps as a teenager, I was too embarrassed to acknowledge the power of my skin, my breasts, or my hair. I had never batted my eyes, worn a short skirt, or even touched a boy’s knee. Upon escaping teenage innocence, I met a boy named Miles who showed me how to flirt. He didn’t teach me; he was my guinea pig (I would present stimuli, he would respond—very informative). Flirting is dangerous. Sex is dangerous. Breasts, nipples, lips, tongues, all of these things are dangerous. Sharks are dangerous. Great white sharks are very dangerous.

I went out with Miles as a favor. He wasn’t my type (assuming that I knew what my type was). Miles was tall and heavy. He had facial hair, which would have been cool, except that it was poorly maintained and made him look like a barnyard animal. Also Renae/mother didn’t really approve (of the facial hair). He didn’t have any solid plans for our date; this was a surprise to me as I thought boys were well organized and decisive. We went to his brother’s house, where he played the blues on the piano for about an hour. “I can play anything,” Miles bragged.

“What do you want to hear?” I was impressed and started to pay less attention to the facial hair.

Miles decided he was thirsty, ravenously so. We hopped into his ’87 Subaru and drove to a coffee shop near campus—very cool. We drove in silence; Miles was as uninterested in me as I was in him.

He asked me if I liked jazz. Of course, who doesn’t? “I love Ella Fitzgerald, and recently I can’t seem to get enough Billie Holiday.

Also Frank is good.” I was spouting off; he was impressed. “Do you like Nina Simone?” he asked.

“Yeah, she’s cool,” I lied, staring out the window (I had only heard of her name). He turned on the cassette player. The only tape he had in the car was a Nina Simone tape that he had probably played

(Spring 2005)

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on loop about 87 hundred times. “She sounds like a man,” I blurted out. And my cover was blown; he stared at my fully exposed dorsal fin, probably thinking, I know exactly the type of creature you are. He turned up the music. In loud, annoyed tones, he explained the different types of pianos and organs that Nina used, which made her so unique. I, however, was not unique, just an ignorant naïve girl, hardly interesting enough to conquer. And yet there was something dangerous in my intentional deception. I wanted to impress him; maybe he started to wonder why.

[Some scientists are marine biologists. Some marine biologists specialize in sharks. And some shark specialists are on the constant quest of witnessing the infamous breaching—leaping clear of the water—of a great white shark. These obsessive scientists lure their specimen with buckets of blood and innards (chum), sheep carcasses, cardboard seal decoys, and shiny cameras. The shark nerds slosh chum out the back of boats for seventeen hours straight, waiting, watching, hoping for a glimpse. A great white shark, whose scientific name is Carcharodon carcharias, is the only shark that can hold its head up out of the water.

The luring is mutual. The dorsal fin strikes a nerve of horror and attraction simultaneously. The desire to escape and be consumed exists in the same heartbeat.]

As the night progressed, I listened to Nina’s deep, sexy, sticky, scorching, muggy voice. She no longer sounded like a man but more like a voice that I had never heard before—a voice of depth, of experience, of beautiful, trembling pain. I imagined her sitting at her piano—a dangerous woman with skin so deep and dark, owning an impenetrable opaqueness.

She had just made love to her piano, and now she was gently caressing, stroking her lover. Fingering the keys, causing the flats to melt and the sharps to smoke, working them into a fiery friction, teasing them into one more frenzied fuck. Her voice wailed, releasing oppressed cries of passion and rage. I was starting to like Nina Simone and starting to like Miles for liking Nina.

At the coffee shop, I ordered a hot chocolate, while Miles scoffingly consumed a highly caffeinated beverage. He thought it was cute and weird that I wanted hot chocolate. He talked about himself, a lot.

The walls were yellow, the floors were wood. We left the coffee shop to go on a drive up in the canyon. “Oh, I love the canyon, it is so pretty

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Brady: Flirtations

this time of year” (I made lame small talk). It was ten o’clock; there was no moon. At this point Miles knew what he wanted. I had no idea.

After seventeen minutes of being stuck in the car with me and my small bladder, he decided to give up and start back down the canyon.

I was sweating bullets I had to pee so bad. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but rivers, streams, and porcelain. Miles was a practical man and suggested several times that we pull over in order to alleviate the bladder and compressed organs. I finally gave in.

As it turned out, he had to pee, too. We hiked up the side of the mountain; he hiked higher to give me privacy. I dropped my pants and peed between two small aspens. I reflected, during the long steady stream, on the breeze brushing over my soft white skin. I hoped no one could see me, and as I pulled up my trousers, I realized that Miles was probably only six feet away from me, enjoying a perfect view. This thought made me a little mad, but mostly I was amused and confused.

Why would anyone want to look at my very white ass? It struck me, as we picked our way back to the car; Miles wanted to look at my ass, quite a bit actually. Everything changed.

[Upon close examination of photos of great white sharks, one begins to notice certain details. The shark is paradoxically named “white” although its top half is black, while its underbelly is white (“great” remains apt). This white from black is distinctly separated.

Along this line of separation lie several white gashes and scars penetrating their way into the dark portions. The scars are mostly from thrashing victims (seals, sea lions, humans) making desperate attempts at escape from the four-ton, nineteen-foot, apex predators.

Resistance becomes insanity (much madness . . . ). Also, after hours of obsessive staring, one begins to distinguish the pinkish-red rimming the jaws and mouth of the shark. This lipstick stain seems permanent; it is sloppily applied and smudged on the shark’s nose and the tips of the pectoral fins, indicating rolling and contorting during eating frenzies. I have never seen a picture of a shark sans scars and lipstick; it’s as if they devour for a living. Evolution engineered eating machines, flirting, luring, seducing, devastating.]

Back in the car, Miles seemed to be in a cheerful mood. He chatted away about how he worked at Kinko’s but put in part time hours in a biology lab. He said he felt cool wearing a white coat and mixing chemicals. I began to flirt, mentioning that if I worked at the lab, I

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would wear the white lab coat and nothing else; oh, and it had to be extra short in length. His eyes bulged, and his hair stood up straight.

“Are you serious?” He grinned. “Yeah, and it would be low cut and tight around my breasts, so that everyone could see my lovely cleavage.” The words were actually gushing out of my mouth. [Sharks’ organs are loosely attached; when a shark is captured for examination, scientists take special care not to let the organs fall out of the shark’s mouth.] He got serious in a very comical way. “I can get a small coat, even if I have to steal it.” He looked at me anxiously, expectantly.

I almost laughed out loud, considering the possibilities. I had every intention of talking and no intention of doing. I would bite him and then leave him to bleed.

[Great white sharks attack from beneath. They surprise their prey, biting them, their jaws rimmed with pink subterfuge. The initial bite is meant to devastate, removing enormous chunks of flesh, then the shark leaves its victim to bleed to death. And, if it tasted good, they come back later to finish the job, consuming completely. People say all sorts of horrible things about sharks, that they are teases and dangerous, unstoppable killers. But the fact is people are enthralled, fascinated by the creature’s infallibility. Every aspect of this fish is designed to devour. The only intrauterine cannibal, the great white starts at a young age. It can detect blood and urine miles away. Frantic thrashing attracts and entices the animal. It swims at speeds of forty-three miles an hour, cruising the sea in search of victims. We love it, we embrace it, we can’t escape it.]

Post-Miles, I honed my flirting skills and utilized my evolved femininity. A cute boy is at a party, all I have to do is talk about soft lips and even softer breasts. I only need to caress the skin on his arm instead of patting him on the back. Stare at him, smile, pretend he is incredibly intelligent. It’s easy; it’s fun. I can watch the blood rush to his face, feel his body become tense, and then leave.

I can admit that I am addicted to flirting now. I can also admit that I have selachophobia (fear of sharks). I am afraid of the ocean, the swimming pool, and even the pools of my own nightmarish sweat.

I always wake up as the shark bites down. If my dreams had conclusions, I would see the shark’s eyes roll back into its head; its pleasure would be evident in a jagged toothy grin. I am probably smiling too.

My exsanguine body washed ashore, devastated. Pale. Pink. Wet.

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Brady: Flirtations

Leaking from engorged and torn cavities. Nina Simone sings somewhere, “Beyond the Sea” or “Mack the Knife.”

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Annik Maryse Budge

Oto帽o

Autumn

Hablo en el idioma de galletas de arr贸z. Ellos cayen sin calor铆as.

I speak in the language of rice cakes. They fall without calories.

Me dejaste con un est贸mago, vacio.

You left me with a stomach, empty.

Me tengo que ir; dentro de la bombacha mente de mi madre: donde me puedo encontrar.

I have to go; inside the uterus mind of my mother: where I can find myself.

24

(Fall 2006)

Jessie Bushman

Avoiding the Awkward Goodbye If I tie my Cinderella sheets around your bedpost and throw myself like a rock out the window, do you think I will splash like a stormspark in a ruined sky?

Will a burst of warmth whisper across your face?

Will you wait to taste my echo, or bury me before I land?

(Spring 2004)

25

Michelle Davidson

Upon Marrying a Dreamer Late November, after storms sweep sidewalks clean of leaves you count the shingles blown off our roof, resting in soft piles of slush we called snow only a week before. “Fifty-two,” you declare, and collect them like tinder, count them over and over, stack them into poles so tall they lean to the right, place them in boxes and carry them outside to count them again.

Your cache of 1965 pennies sits in a clear beer-gut jar on my dresser, collected copper that glows in morning sun, grows charcoal in evening’s moon, a chronometer of light.

Some mornings, I wake to find you beneath the oak, one arm stretched to the sky to count geese flying.

If their wings brushed your cheek instead of clouds, you would gather them in an embrace: a collection of feathers pushing south.

Outside, you count pumpkins so orange they are planets in a brown, drying sky.

When we carve them, you attempt to count the seeds by lining them in garden-straight rows; I believe you want them to sprout in the spring (inside this kitchen), their roots cracking marble like petrified soil, almost as strange as your methods, but producing a wonder only two dreamers could understand.

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(Spring 2002)

Amanda Duke

The Owl Told Me So 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Once there was this girl.

Okay, so it was me.

So, once there was me.

I had a fondness for the dark.

Some people said I was dark. But you can’t judge a book by its cover, whatever that means.

6. So sometimes I would prowl around in the dark. Some people do that.

7. It’s not like I was doing things I shouldn’t.

8. I just had a fondness for the dark.

9. It was so, well, so dark.

10. I also loved cemeteries, tunnels, caves.

11. I don’t know why.

12. Maybe because I loved the dark, I also loved animals associated with the dark.

13. Bats, owls, coyotes, foxes, wolves . . .

14. The Egyptians believed that a person had five souls: a physical, a double, a shadow, a magical body, and a spiritual body.

15. I always knew that one of mine had to be an owl.

16. I had dreams of becoming an owl.

17. They felt real.

18. Susan Griffin says the body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

19. I remember who I am supposed to be.

20. But can’t remember how to get there.

21. I woke up feeling that I was flying.

22. But I was in bed 23. Underneath a quilt 24. In my house.

25. I thought if I just wanted it enough, I could become an owl.

26. So I wished.

(Fall 2000)

27

27. I opened my eyes.

28. I was still human.

29. I thought maybe I should watch owls 30. And that would teach me how to become one.

31. Owls are soft, plumaged, nocturnal birds of prey. Owls have large eyes, directed forward, and all have pronounced facial disks. Most have extremely sensitive hearing. The eyes are also extremely powerful: some thirty-five to one hundred times more sensitive than our own. Their flight is completely silent. (Desk Reference Encyclopedia) 32. So I took up owl watching.

33. I stalked the owl untiringly.

34. Until I tired.

35. And sat. Hoping an owl would come to me.

36. Not one did.

37. I got dreadfully tired, so 38. I closed my eyes.

39. And felt a wing brush my cheek.

40. I held my breath.

41. The aim of all human existence is the return to the source. We are here, to work to regain that higher state of consciousness that is our birthright. ( John Anthony West) 42. Had I reached that state?

43. I slowly opened my eyes.

44. Nothing was there.

45. I’ve never felt such disappointment and heaviness.

46. I rubbed my eyes tiredly. But I didn’t rub them with a hand!

47. Surprised, I looked down. Upon a feathered body, clawed feet.

48. I can’t even think anymore. Is this some dream again?

49. But it feels so real.

50. All this wondering makes me hungry 51. For random scraps of butt, hip and tongue, thrown in with ankle, cheek and lung. (Gina Doxey) 52. I fly away from my nest.

53. I know how to fly.

54. I wander through the night, feeling as though I’ve finally discovered my true nature.

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Duke: The Owl Told Me So

55. As I fly, I spot a friend of mine. One who never believed in my search for my inner owl.

56. I swoop down to show him what’s happened and make him a believer.

57. He just says hi and asks how I’ve been doing.

58. “Don’t you notice anything different about me?”

59. “No, just that you’re as weird as usual.”

60. I begin to laugh; only it comes out as kind of an owlish hoot.

61. He looks at me weirdly and steps back a little.

62. “Don’t you see that I’m an owl?”

63. “Nope, can’t say that I do. But you have fun with your owl self.

I really have something I should be doing, far away from here.”

64. He scampers off.

65. How can he be so blind, I wonder. It isn’t as though you can mistake my owl form for my old human one.

66. I meet more people that I know. With all the same results.

They all think that I’m insane, but I AM AN OWL. 67. After dawn, I head back for my nest, only to find some strange people waiting there 68. Wearing fake, concerned coats, and lab expressions.

69. I try to fly away, but they grab me before I get very far.

70. It is not right to hold by force a man who is anxious to escape from a burning house. (Buddha) 71. They put me in a rubber room. And ask me all sorts of dumb questions 72. Like, “How was your home life?” and “Can you draw me a picture of how you feel?”

73. I tell them that it would be hard to draw with a wing, so I decline.

74. They just look at each other. And shake their heads.

75. What can you do with doctors?

76. They ask me for explanations.

77. On the day I was born, God was sick, gravely. (Cesar Vallejo) 78. They didn’t believe anything I told them.

79. They didn’t believe their own eyes.

80. Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.

(Lily Tomlin)

29

81. They couldn’t believe that someone could change their physical soul just by wanting it bad enough.

82. But I found my shadow body.

83. Didn’t I?

30

Cassie Eddington

If Mirrors Could Hold Us Together I was the naked one.

Pink tile.

White sheets.

She hid in camisoles, put proper caps on her breasts, like nuns.

Undressing in the shower, Missing show and tell.

Oh, cold as a rod, naked as a bear, Sister, After years of bunk beds, Why can’t we Let some things swing, Glory in our only sameness.

(Fall 2006)

31

Joe England

Hombre My mother’s Bible is ten pounds of paper, leather, and gold paint.

Years ago when she would beat me, I would stare at its shiny spine and curse Sundays under my breath.

Appearances occupied my mother’s mind more than most. She would teach me this with her dry hands when I would cough in public or stare at the passing senoritas in their red dresses, glowing skin, and satin hair. My mother never seemed to appre­ciate them like I did.

She would tell me they were dirty prostitu­tes and if I looked at them long enough I would go to hell. After a few months of hearing this, I stared at one of them once when my mom wasn’t looking just to see where hell was. I felt rebel­lious and different for a moment, but then nothing changed, so I thought maybe I was already there.

On my thirteenth birthday my tio Josy took me out to become a man and meet the golden women in their red dresses. We start­ed the evening in the cantina where he fed me one tequila shot to his three.

At twelve and my four, Tio took me out back to the senoritas.

The yellow and white cantina light reflected off their red dresses and bronze skin, making them seem more like prizes than people.

Cigarette clouds, tequila breath, earth, and the smell of brick sur­ rounded us as my tio spoke to one of them, using many words that were foreign to me but familiar to her, I assumed, based on powdered facial expressions. After a few more strange words had been properly placed and an amount fixed, my uncle put his sweaty arm around my shoulders and shoved me into the woman’s red dress and shiny legs. She smelled like vanilla and dust mixed with something I couldn’t quite place.

The woman grabbed me. Was I now going to hell, finally, after all this time?

This thought suddenly made me nervous and I couldn’t look her in the eyes. She told me that it was okay to look and that I was going to be a man. I didn’t know what it meant to be a man. I should have asked my uncle before I agreed to go out with him. Maybe it was

32

(Fall 2005)

England: Hombre

going to hell or touching women in dark places until they made funny noises because not seconds after she said it, she grabbed my hand, held it to her left breast and let out a breathy sigh. Was I a man now?

Had I passed the test? Was I going to hell now?

As I was caught up in this thought, my uncle came barging around the corner and, upon seeing us, started laughing in a voice I’d never heard before. I felt uncomfortable and just froze. He reached out and grabbed her right breast and twisted it. Apparently all the vowel placements my tio had previously made were no longer working because she swatted both our hands down and backed away, calling us colorful, peppered words I had only heard the night my father walked out.

My uncle was still laughing when she turned the corner, a red blur fading in and out of hell. Was I a man now? Or did I need to twist the breast like my uncle had? I suddenly felt cheated and confused. If only I had twisted instead of just freezing there like a scared rabbit, I would now be a man. I hated myself and my uncle for not telling me about the twisting.

Tio didn’t see my anger and just said that I would have to become a man another night. That comment and the four tequi­la worms doing the salsa in my stomach made me suddenly feel sick.

The drive home only worsened my condition. I held my face out the window, hoping the wind would make my features older and I would be able to hold my liquor like my uncle. It didn't work; I painted the side of his old brown trucka habanera pepper yellow with tequila worms and orange juice. In response to my modern art, he dusted the air with a vast array of words reserved for prostitutas, leaving husbands, but after a minute had passed he seemed to find it funny, which just confused me.

My mother was waiting up for me on the porch when we pulled up to the curb. Her voice began to echo and pound in the space where my brain should be. She told me to go inside and wait by the Bible. As I slowly made the holy death march, I could hear her scold my uncle for letting this happen. He laughed and told her to take it easy on me because it was mostly his fault; I was glad he said that. A few more seconds passed; the car door shut and his trucka pulled away.

After what seemed like the length of a mass service, she pulled the door loudly behind her and slid her back against its metal to the

33

floor. Then she began to cry. For some reason I wanted to comfort her despite her punishing me, but previous experience had taught me that leaving the Bible area could get me into more trouble. So, torn between orders and feelings, I just sat and listened to my mother fumble her tears to the saints and curse my father’s blood to hell. And so it was there, caught between my mother’s Bible and pain, when I held my head up straight, stared at that shiny black and gold spine, and vowed never to become a man.

34

Kamri Evans

I Wore the World on my right foot today.

It flailed from its adhesive ends, color-filled with green, blue, clear.

There were pirates on their crossbonedcannon armored ships vibrating my toes with their warfare.

They fought for bananalove and free water.

In cities, people hurried on verdant streets to do exactly what they did yesterday.

The thick mountains sang, soothing the war, hurried sneakers and water.

Those who would, listened.

(Fall 2003)

35

Nate Gambill

Ex-Con He walks now, if he needs to get anywhere.

His shoes are worn and brown with miles, And he doesn’t change his clothes as often as before.

When the sun is out, he doesn’t mind the walk.

People speak to him as they would To the very young, or the very old.

They’re always so willing to help.

But when he leaves, They whisper.

He has learned to hear the whispers over the years.

Before, he tried to run from his past, But now he just walks.

36

(Fall 2006)

Daniel Green

Fight Night Monday Night It’s Monday night. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel of my Toyota as I roll down 8th North in Orem. There are two bags in my trunk. My singles ward 1 is meeting at the Institute 2 for a musical program performed by the Institute choir. The radio is playing “Blue Monday,” remade by Orgy, and I’m thinking about Robert Frost. 3 The first bag contains my scriptures 4 (all four books), a notepad, some pens, and a package of gum 5—all things essential for a successful FHE, 6 but I keep looking at the northbound on-ramp and thumping the steering wheel harder with the palm of my hand.

It’s the second bag that keeps my hand in rhythm. I should probably head south to the Institute, I keep telling myself, waiting for the green light—but do I have everything for the northbound trip: cup, shorts, mouthpiece, tape, Vaseline, jump rope, white towel to mop up blood and sweat?—all things essential for a successful night at The Monday Night Fights 7 in Salt Lake City.

The light turns green. It’s decision time: north or south? I’m thinking that I should go to Institute. I imagine an evening of Christmas carols that I should enjoy. The truth is, with few excep­tions, I have never liked choral music. It’s all just so boring, so bread and water. Christmas music is worse. How many times can a sane person hear “Jingle Bells” and not go on a shooting spree? But I should go to FHE—like a good LDS young adult. Isn’t that the “road less traveled”? I think. Or is it?

I’m drumming with both hands now and bobbing my head. “How does it feel? How should I feel?” sings Jay Gordon. My crappy speakers make him sound even more mechanical. The cars behind me crowd forward. “Long I stood” is not an option. I think about the paths, and bread and water. I can still go south, I think. I can still go to FHE. But on some level, I have already made my decision. And when you’re ninety and in a diaper? I think, turning right onto the northbound on-ramp.

(Spring 2006)

37

Which will you value more when you’re ninety and in a diaper? 8 I merge into anonymous headlights and tail lights, knowing that none of them are going where I am going. None of them will taste flesh and blood tonight.

Sunday I’m sitting in Fast and Testimony Meeting. 9 The bread and water have been passed, and I’m so hungry I want seconds. I watch the usual people stand, say their usual piece, and return to their usual place within the congregation. I wonder if this is the place for revelation. I look at the clock again. I’m time traveling. I could swear the small hand is slowly spinning backward. But this particular time machine isn’t going any place interesting—not ancient Rome, not ancient Egypt, not even last night. We are rending the sequined fabric of time and space to visit last month’s Fast and Testimony Meeting—just like we did the month before.

Say amen, I think. Just get it over with and say amen.

I zone in, then I zone out. I look at the clock again and then back at the speaker, who quotes Elder Packer 10—something about “We must step out of the light and into the darkness, and we will find that our path is lit a few steps ahead.” I zone out, studying the pattern in the carpet, creating pictures that were never there.

Fight #19 The overhead floodlights are like one of Spielberg’s UFOs—hovering, waiting, humming.

As I step over the second rope, under the first, 11 I realize that this is not a likely place for revelation, but possibly abduction, dissection, even destruction. The ring is a circle of burning light—an altar. The crowd is a dark mass, a congregation of specters obscured by smoke and colored by their silence or roar—they are thunder as I raise my fist to their smoky silhouettes on the ground floor and in the balcony. 12 They are here for blood and flesh. I am one who will deliver the other. I am a Pentecostal preacher with a snake raised in each fist, in the neon belly of an Appalachian tent revival—salvation, brothers and sisters, salvation. Let us wrestle the devil together.

38

Green: Fight Night

Monday Night Dani, a girl from my ward, stops by my house to use the Internet.

My roommates are gone. I get her some brownies and a drink then go back to my own studies. After a while, she comes into the kitchen and sits down to chat.

“So what’s up with your roommate?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” She asks the question, but her body language tells me that she knows exactly what I mean.

“Well, she hasn’t answered my phone calls. Is she seeing someone else, or something?”

“No, no one in particular.”

“So what’s the deal?” I ask, closing my Algebra for Complete Retards book.

She studies the chipped, false-wood tabletop intently and then says, “Listen, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but, um, Maggie just doesn’t think you’re right for her.”

“Really? Why’s that?” I am genuinely confused. She’s been sending all the right signals: smiling with her eyes when she sees me, playing with her hair, laughing at my mediocre jokes, and seeming to have fun when we hang out. She even pretended to like my pot roast. 13 “Like I said, don’t take this the wrong way, but she feels like you’re just on a different spiritual level than her.” She puckers her lips as though she’s explaining something obvious to a toddler—if you run too fast, you’ll fall down and get hurt.

“A ‘different spiritual level’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well,” she continues with that same condescending pucker, “You just don’t seem to have the same priorities as she does.”

“Really? Explain.”

“Like in church, you never seem to pay attention, and you’re always watching the clock or making jokes. You’re not very reverent.”

Suddenly I feel like I really am five years old. “I get bored. I can’t help it . . . ” I say.

She doesn’t seem to hear and continues listing my spiritual shortcomings. “In Fast and Testimony Meeting, she says that you’re always encouraging whoever is talking to ‘hurry up and say amen.’ ” I giggle, ’cause it’s true, and get a scathing look for it. “Come on,” I say. “It’s the same people every month, getting up and saying the

39

same thing. I could give their testimonies for them. Hell, I could do it right now.”

“See, that’s what she means. You just aren’t on the same spiritual plane as she is.” She stands up and gives me an apologetic look— like she’s truly sorry that she’s had to be the one to inform me that I’ve got terminal testicular cancer.

“Wow,” I say. “This has been a real eye-opener.” It’s hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. She shrugs magnanimously and leaves through the back door. It has been an eye-opener. Not in the way she hopes though. Sitting there at our yard-sale kitchen table, I imagine what life with Maggie might be like: a life of being how I’m supposed to be, looking how I’m supposed to look, and laughing when I’m supposed to laugh. An entire lifetime of bread and water, bread and water, bread and water.

“Wow,” I say again to Dani’s empty chair and delete Maggie’s number from my cell phone. 14 Three months later, Maggie marries a guy who looks exactly like he’s supposed to.

Fight #20 Saturday night. I’m resting my elbows on the railing of the upper floor balcony at Club X-scape, chatting with a stripper-turned-ringgirl, and watching the spectators swarm through the double doors.

Her name’s Becky and she’s a stylist by day; by night she’s a Lil’ Devil’s girl. 15 Someday she wants to open her own salon in California or Las Vegas. I ask her where she’s from and she says, “West Jordan.”

“Why Vegas? Why California?” I ask.

Her green eyes flash into mine and she playfully flips her hair behind her ear. “They’re just more fun.”

I smile again and agree. We flirt on until that uncomfortable moment when I should ask for her phone number and promise to call.

Instead, I say, “Wow, it’s almost time. I’d better get back and start warming up. See you in the ring.” I see uncertainty and a little hurt loosen her lips and eyelids, and I feel like an asshole, but there are certain things that make a girl undatable—or so I’ve been told. On my way to the dressing room, I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as true redemption.

40

Green: Fight Night

Sunday The organ is moaning out the first few notes to “Nearer My God to Thee.” I try to limp a little faster—but not show I’m limping.

Slipping through the rear chapel door, I sit down on the back row next to an elder who’s wearing a white shirt and dark tie—“Is this seat taken?” It’s a singles ward attended mostly by BYU 16 students.

We meet in a converted conference room on the second floor of the Wilkinson Center on campus. The room has a hardwood floor and pastel, gray dividers for walls. The mobile podium stands out a rich brown. The dark suits and pastel dresses seem to match the room, like the people are part of the decor.

The elder leans toward me and asks: “What happened to you?”

“I, uh, fell down the stairs,” I say, trying to be funny.

“Oh, that’s terrible. Did you have to go to the hospital?”

“No, no. I’m kidding. I was in a full-contact kickboxing match last night.” The truth is, I fought the North American Heavyweight Muay Thai Champion on a two-days’ notice. He had the advantage in height, weight, training time, and experience. It was the most brutal and satisfying match of my career. The fight was stopped five seconds before the end of the fifth and final round because I got cut on my left eyelid from an illegal head-butt in the clench. There was an artery’s worth of blood. My contact lens flowed out like a basket on the Nile. “Your eye is cut. Your eye is cut,” the medic said, standing in the neutral corner, latex fingertips tilting my face to the blaze of the UFO lights. All I could see out of my left eye was a raw, red blur, like an empty socket. I thought he was talking about my eyeball and thought of glass replacements and pirate patches and that, yes, it was worth it. The ref somehow missed the foul, but later, when I review the tape, I see it clearly. By the judges’ cards, I won. Because of politics, 17 the match went to my opponent.

“No, what really happened?” he says.

“That’s the truth. I’m a fighter.”

“Oh . . . Oh!” His eyes widen a little and his whole body swivels back toward the podium. He actually scoots a half-cheek away from me like he’s afraid he’s going to catch whatever I’ve got. His hymnal is rapidly hoisted, and he sings like his soul depends on it.

41

I may as well have told him that I got the black eyes from a flailing crutch while raping the handicapped.

Normally I don’t tell church people about my hobby, but sometimes it’s painted all over my face. Nevertheless, his reaction takes me by surprise. Suddenly, I feel conspicuous—marked. I can’t think of any commandment that I’ve broken, but maybe I’ve transgressed some unspoken law. Maybe I’ve trespassed some cultural boundary that every true member of the collective knows is out of bounds.

Maybe I am trespassing. The guy never speaks to me again. I feel a strange mix of pity and anger. Screw him anyway, I think. He can blend with the furniture. His attention is fixed on his hymnal. He’s singing fervently with the congregation. I look down at the green hymnal between my feet but don’t make a move to join in.

When the sacrament finally makes it to the back row, I can’t help but notice how much the bread and water tastes like bread and water, bread and water, bread and water.

Cornering for Jess The cigarette smoke is already a choking fog. Clubs in other states aren’t like this. It seems like Utah smokers try to make up for all the non-smoking Mormons. I walk past the ring, shouldering through spectators. My brother is fighting tonight, so there’s nothing for me to do until it’s close to his match. I wave to a few fighters I know and almost collide with Alex—an NHB 18 fighter I sometimes train with. He’s got a pitcher of beer in each hand and is heading for his ringside table. “Dan!” he shouts over the music. “Come have a beer.”

Before I can answer, Mickey, another friend from the fight world, loudly explains that I don’t drink. Alex shakes his head and says, “Fuckin’ bullshit.” He gives me a look I’m familiar with: the oh-you’re-one-ofthem look. Those are the last words Alex ever speaks to me without my instigating the conversation. When he does talk to me, he’s short and guarded, like a soldier passing messages to an enemy prisoner through a hole in a wall mortared by assumptions. This is a guy I’ve sparred with, sweated with, cheered for, and been cheered by. “Fuckin’ bullshit” is right, Alex.

Mickey and I are still good friends. His molars are rotting out from binge drinking, but I’ve never said anything. I don’t drink ’cause

42

Green: Fight Night

I’m a Mormon and ’cause alcohol was a factor in my favorite uncle’s death. He cured his alcoholism with a .45 caliber bullet in the basement of his rented house. His brother found his corpse three days later. I can only imagine the tragedy plastered all over the wall and probably squirming—it had been three days. After the funeral, my surviving uncle swore he would never drink again—promised he was having his last beer.

Maybe he forgot.

I haven’t. But how do you explain that? Would it be revelation?

Would I be “casting my pearls before swine,” as the Bible says? I pat Mickey on the shoulder as he angles toward the bar, fading into neon smoke—pink and blue like silence, yellow and black like a bruise.

Sunday The bread and water have been passed. Behind the rolling podium, an elder looms like a mortician—tall and pale, black and white.

He’s so tall he’s got to lean over to speak into the microphone, like he’s lecturing a sticky-fingered child. I zone out. After a few minutes of carpet-Rorschach, 19 something the mortician says catches my attention.

“Some of the members 20 in Brunswick would spend their evenings hanging out in bars,” he says. “I don’t think they were drinking, but that just doesn’t seem like the environment a Latter-day Saint should be in.” Involuntarily, my eyebrow peaks. He pauses for effect.

I find his silence more insightful. Aren’t we supposed to be “in the world, but not of the world”?

He continues: “Spencer W. Kimball said, ‘Stand ye in holy places.’ ” 21 And where are those “holy places”? I wonder.

“And where can we find those holy places?” the mortician asks.

Excellent question, I think. You get a gold star!

“Temples, churches, even our homes should be holy,” he answers.

Wow, I think, we’re all supposed to be super-pious, agoraphobic shutins. You just lost your gold star, I think. How are we supposed to learn anything if we’re never tested? I look around at the monochromatic mass, taste white-bread metaphor on my back molars, and wonder: Is this a holy place?

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Fight #21 He’s a big guy—forty pounds heavier, two inches taller—not fat. It’s after the fighters’ and corner-men’s meeting, but I don’t think either of us has heard a syllable of the official’s instructions. We’ve been eyeballing each other—“sizing each other up,” as they say—and we both know he’s got the advantage. The rough circle of fighters, trainers, corner men, and officials breaks up—red corner entering the adjacent room, blue corner staying put until their time. I meet him at the door, him and his trainer, and immediately forget his name.

“First fight?” I ask, looking at his trainer. There’s something familiar about this guy, but I can’t think what.

“Well, in the ring,” my opponent says, giving me a meaningful smirk. “But I’ve been training hard for like five years. I’m ready.”

“Really?” I say, not liking the way he’s looking down at me with his chin raised. “What style?”

“Kung-fu,” 22 he says. “I’ve been training hard for four or five years.”

Like most big guys, he’s got all the false confidence in the world. He’s also got faith—big, dumb faith. You can see it in his chest-out posture and hear it in his overconfident voice—it’s the voice of a fanatic, the voice of a suicide-bomber that’s certain of his seventy-two virgins.

“Kung-fu, huh?” I say. You’re a dead man, I think. I may as well be fighting a toddler.

“He’s been training really hard,” his trainer throws in. “He’s definitely ready.” And I finally realize where I know this guy from. He’s the adult version of every little kid that subscribed to Black Belt Magazine, or owned a set of Ninja pajamas, complete with little tabby boots. He’s the guy who’s never been in a fight—or at least not since his big sister beat him up for playing with her dolls—has never won a fight, but claims that he has, and with conviction—enough conviction that he’s convinced himself.

“Well, go easy on me out there,” I say, but what I’m thinking is, You poor, deluded bastard. Like a vision, I see our fight. I see him leave his head open, because that’s what Kung-fu teaches. I see his kicks—slow and telegraphed because he’s never tried to kick another living, moving human being. I sidestep, attacking from multiple angles, landing punch after punch to his unprotected face. Mickey, who’s reffing tonight, squeezes between us, ordering me to a neutral corner. I see Mr.

44

Green: Fight Night

Kung-fu slick, red, dazed, wadded up like a fetus against the ropes.

The whites of his eyes reflect the blaze of the dissection lights as he watches Mickey’s fingers pop-up—three, four, five. . . .”

But he doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to get up—this is the second time he’s gone down in less than a minute in the first round. Something has gone wrong, not just with the fight but with his entire belief system. Something has gone cataclysmically wrong, and he’s wondering how he can be deadly to brick and wood and yet crumble against flesh and blood.

The announcer calls me “The Destroyer” for the first time, announcing my victory at one minute, twelve seconds.

I see it all like a vision as I return to my trainer in the blue-corner room. I see it and feel pity for all those naked, untested souls—all those virgins who are experts at screwing. He will receive revelation tonight. This isn’t his first fight; it’s his last.

Fight #22 It’s almost fight time. I’m kneeling in piss in the upstairs men’s room in a tobacco-choked Salt Lake City dance club. Some guy is pounding on the door and my roommate has wedged his foot against its bottom and is telling him to go away. My brother has his hands on the crown of my head and commands my body—in the name of Jesus Christ and by the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood 23—to be purged of the flu so I can fight. This is not a “holy place,” I think.

This is not a “holy place.” What am I doing here?

“Amen,” I repeat as my brother removes his hands. My scalp feels hot and tingly. My stomach still feels like a writhing basket of venomous snakes; my head still feels packed with sand. Both of them are watching me with hope in their eyes. It’s like they’re waiting for me to levitate.

I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to tell them the blessing didn’t work. I straighten my back and say, “Thanks. Let’s go to work.”

Back in the dressing room, I walk past Jason, my trainer, and murmur, “Keep the bucket handy.” He nods and I hope he’s got a towel ready for when it gets bad. I start warming up. I try not to think about my stomach and focus on not smashing the bare bulbs, strung

45

low overhead, with my spinning jump rope. The walls are black, and the unstocked bar along the side of the narrow room declares it was never intended to be used for warm-ups. I drop the rope and start shadowboxing in front of a mirror. I can’t be sure if it’s the scuzzy lighting, but I notice how pale and greenish my reflection is. I turn away and keep punching, light and fast at a bare, black wall.

“Green. Gutierrez,” a pierced, spiky-haired, clipboard-carrying bouncer calls. “You’re up.” Gutierrez and his corner men take the narrow stairs in the back of the red-corner room. He’s a big guy, my height, but twenty pounds heavier: an accomplished boxer. I know the kind of damage he can deliver, but I know it’s not about him anymore. He’s no longer my opponent. He is the chipped-stone knife in Abraham’s fist.

Having been designated blue corner, I go down past the main entrance and back up through the crowd. The last fight hasn’t cleared out yet, so I drop to one knee, hoping to give my bubbling guts a little rest. I feel Jason’s hand pat my head, and I wonder if he hasn’t been spending too much time with his dogs.

The floor is sticky. My feet are bare, and I hope that there are no bits of broken glass to go with the spill. Feeling disgusted with myself, I offer up one last prayer, hoping that the creator of the universe is a kickboxing fan. It’s not so much a prayer of words, but a mash of thoughts and emotions glued together with hope, and timidly offered like a first grader’s Father’s Day gift.

On one knee, I wait. I wait for some answer, some sign, some loosening of the knot in my stomach. Nothing. No peace. No revelation.

Not even a high-school-seminary, too-sugary-to-be-real warm-fuzzy; just the pulse of the PA, the cackle of the crowd, and the static in my skull. This is it, I think. This is where I end. This is not the place for revelation. This is not a holy place.

“In the blue corner,” the announcer blares, “fighting out of Provo, Utah: Dan ‘The Destroyer’ Green!” I force myself erect and think of something else I heard in church, some Sunday . . . something Elder Packer said about stepping from the light into the dark. I also wonder where they came up with that stupid name—“The Destroyer.”

Who am I? Conan?

The corrugated steps bite into the balls of my feet as I ascend from the shadows into the lights brooding over the blood-speckled ring. I

46

Green: Fight Night

slide through the top and middle rope, knowing that my bludgeoning will be recorded from multiple angles and replayed in slow motion for all the folks watching at home. If I’m killed here—and that could happen 24—it will be Christmastime for the promoter. Blood and death are the kinds of reality that draw spectators—the kind of advertising you can’t buy. This is not a holy place, I think.

I step onto the blood-smeared canvas, ducking through the ropes, and something happens. It happens in the span of an exhaled breath.

The writhing cramp in my stomach diffuses into a golden light that flows outward to my knees and wrists. I look around, amazed, feeling light, and fast, and somehow detached. Detached from the crowd, the ring, the lights, even time. I step out onto the spotted, blue canvas, look back at Jason, and grin. It’s a strange thing to see later, watching the tape—so strange in the smallness of the gesture. I raise my fist and feel as though I’m levitating a few inches above the canvas, pushed a few moments ahead in time.

I return to my corner. “How do you feel?” Jason asks, pinching my mouthpiece a few inches from my lips.

“Good,” I say. “Really, really good?” It comes out sounding like a question. And it is. I don’t know how to explain it. Jason gives me a strange look, and I have to stop myself from laughing out loud. 25 Sunday Like last month, and the month before, and the month before that, I am time traveling in Fast and Testimony Meeting. According to the unbreakable order laid out in heaven, one-by-one, the usual people arise, approach the podium, say their usual piece, and then return to their usual seat. I want to leave—all this time travel is a waste of time. But I can’t. I’m thinking about Frost and how I don’t believe him. I just can’t buy his dichotomy. It’s kicking through the wilderness, between the roads, that has made all the difference for me, and at the places where the roads have crossed that I have contended with revelation.

I want to stand. I want to stand and break the order. I want to break the order, raise my fist, and tell these people about revelation; tell them how a stripper named Becky tested my soul with her wounded, green eyes and found it anemic; about a miracle that

47

blossomed gold in unholy soil; that bread and water can never replace flesh and blood.

I want to tell them. I want to stand and tell them. But how do I explain it without simplifying it? And would it be a revelation?

Would I be casting my pearls before swine? Or would I simply be “The Destroyer”?

Notes 1 A ward is a congregation of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). A singles ward is composed of—you guessed it—single Mormons (ages 18­–30), not as great a place to pick up chicks as you might think.

2 The LDS Institute of Religion attached to the UVSC Campus. It’s supposed to work as an antidote for our secular education.

3 “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could . . .” —Robert Frost (“The Road Not Taken”) 4 The standard LDS canon includes: The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price—a surprisingly heavy load from a super-egotistical perspective.

5 Green Extra—the best, hands down.

6 Family Home Evening (FHE) is an LDS program designed to improve family ties by setting aside Monday nights as a family night. In a singles ward this means another opportunity to meet and associate with other LDS singles, then get married after a month or two, and make lots of Mormon babies—I am convinced the church owns stock in Huggies.

7 Usually held at the Sandy Station but sometimes at Club Axis or Club 90, depending on the promoter.

8 Chances are, I won’t remember a damn thing.

9 The first Sunday of every month, for members of the LDS faith, is a day of fasting. During the Sunday service, there are no prepared sermons or “talks.” The members of the congregation, if moved upon by the spirit (but usually not), approach the pulpit to share their “testimony” with the rest of the congregation. A testimony is supposed to be a declaration of faith and knowledge about principles of the gospel, as taught to the testifier by the spirit. In a singles ward, it’s usually an

48

Green: Fight Night

opportunity for the pretentious to advertise their quality as a potential mate—not much revelation.

10 The upper tier of the LDS clergy is composed of apostles, who also bear the title “Elder,” as do all of the men who hold the higher priesthood.

11 In traditional Muay Thai, the fighter enters and leaves the ring over the top rope—unless he’s been knocked unconscious (and is still unconscious) or killed. I always enter through the ropes. I don’t know why. I’ve only seen one other traditionally trained fighter leave the ring through the ropes. It was in Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium; he was on a wooden stretcher.

12 The balcony is separate from the rest of the club and reserved for those who have not yet reached the legal drinking age but are willing to pay fifteen bucks to watch the fights.

13 Actually, my pot roast is pretty freakin’ amazing.

14 Yeah, that’ll make me feel better.

15 A stripper.

16 Brigham Young University, named after the second prophet of the LDS Church. The ignorant call it the “Lord’s University.” I’ve always felt like it’s a giant ant farm.

17 John Castle had traveled all the way from Indiana to teach a seminar that would culminate in his victory in the night’s matches. His opponent backed out at the last minute, and I got the call the day before the match. It’s not like they could have let me win after all the hype.

By the cards, I won the match, having knocked him down twice. But because of the injury, they gave it to Castle—which is also illegal considering the injury was inflicted by an illegal blow. But it’s okay. I’m past all that (dirty, punk bastards).

18 No Holds Barred. It is a combination of boxing, kickboxing, and ground fighting. It usually involves a lot of rolling around on the ground with other sweaty men—I’m not really into that.

19 You know, the guy who invented the inkblot test—what does it mean when all I see are breasts?

20 There are really only two kinds of people in the world: “members” of the LDS Church, and “nonmembers”—bet you didn’t know that. I love a bad simplification!

21 It was actually Joseph Smith from The Doctrine and Covenants 87:8, which is a variation of a scripture from the book of Matthew in the

49

New Testament, but what the hell do I know?

22 Kung-fu is one of those theoretical fighting styles that looks impressive and powerful against a bag or rubber dummy but has no practical application. I sometimes think that styles like Kung-fu and Karate are a part of an Asian conspiracy to teach Americans how to fight wrong in preparation for the invasion. I sometimes think Karate is revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

23 There are two branches of “priesthood” in the LDS faith: the Aaronic (the lower order) and the Melchizedek (the higher order).

24 I have a cousin who was killed in a boxing match. My dad always brings him up before my fights—it’s a real confidence booster.

25 It’s a three-round match. For the first two rounds, he doesn’t land a clean blow. I land almost every one of my kicks to his stomach and left thigh. When he does land a couple of punches in the third round, his stomach and leg are so battered that they have no power. After defeating him, I tell my brother that I feel like I could go ten more rounds, and I mean it. I had been nasty sick all day.

50

Aaron Guile

The Busdriver Shouts Happy New Year Rain yields to sleet then to snow, does not stick to the grass, busstopbench, me but runs down my back soaking through my coat as I wait to go home.

In Wal-Mart’s warmdry coffeesmelling barefluorescent breakroom, the overnight crew midnight babyshowers a Christmasless, abandoned coworker.

As my watchhands

(Spring 2006)

51

point to twelve, I sing Robert Burns’ anthem to the dark, to the snow, to the passing cars, to the three years of sleeping alone.

Two breakroom gossips, not sharing the babyshower refreshments— cake, salad, sloppyjoes— indict another (whose man beats her, shares manyother’s beds, comes home to make babies— shackle her with obligations, hungry mouths), the one giving the patchwork quilt and pink pajamas.

My feet tell tales to each other,

52

Guile: The Busdriver Shouts Happy New Year

two vets sharing the trenches, the abuse, the lingering smell of life, the joy that they are a pair, remaining feet shivering, stomping in the cold, wishing their boots did not leak letting in busstop puddles.

Medicineball-belly woman sits center in this mystic cabal showered with gifts and cries.

Uteralquakes shake the baby within with tears, but warm the pulleddown, tearwrinkled,

53

scarred smiles of women who share loneliness, know the fear of having no one to hold the camera when baby first steps.

Fireworks explode overhead through the sky’s frigid tears sticking to shoulders, shopping bags, the attendant yellow free newspaper stand, as headlight angels answer prayers— the red and blue UTA coach pulls up carrying me away to chili, chips, homemade salsa, children, and apple cider sparkling.

54

Michael Hansen

What We Burned Everything is dying. This is why Christian has started bringing in the flowers from the yard, from the neighbor’s yard. Our small house is filled with them, wilting more slowly now under his careful watch.

He’s bought all of these botany books and things, plant food and all that. It’s funny. Everything for Christian has become this strange sort of improvisation. Take the flowers, for instance. The way he lined them all in buckets and Coke bottles along each window because the vases were used up almost immediately. Every room with any sunlight has become a bright sort of mess. Or take the way he’s started dressing, in that same robe everyday, a blue hat placed awkwardly on his head; my mother knit it for him when he started losing hair.

I love Christian, but he’s no longer the man I married. He showers before and after every meal. He talks to me in spurts. Sometimes not for days. It gets weirder than that, though. This week, despite the lectures I’ve been hearing for years, he’s started smoking cigars.

“Because it’s ironic,” he tells me. “You live like a beauty queen for thirty-six years and one day, bam: cancer.”

Makes sense when you think about it. He doesn’t go jogging anymore, either, has stopped with the grain-ridden diet and the protein shakes. In a weird way, though, it’s like he’s started enjoying himself.

He’s stopped working, stopped driving and, like I said, he’s stopped wearing clothes. When I ask him to take out the trash or turn down the T.V., he says, “I can’t. I have cancer.”

It’s funny, I’ll admit. But you can see it in his face, too, everything sinking back behind the wash of his eyes. And his skin, awake with spilt white. Porcelain almost.

I suppose things just come differently than you imagine them.

Like when my father died—I heard while I was away at college—I didn’t even cry. I mean, my father died. I got up the next day. I got on an airplane, went to a funeral and all, thanked everybody. He really would want you here. It means a lot, thanks. That sort of thing.

I wore a skirt. I went back to my part time job and strange evenings at

(Spring 2001)

55

frat houses. What I mean is my life kept moving while my father was slipping from his own stupid bones somewhere beneath the blackness of the earth.

Even now, though, with Christian, things seem so normal now and then. There are times that we make love. There are times that we sit up all night on the patio, drinking beers in the cooling air till the stars make me dizzy and I get sloppy sad. When he talks then, it’s like he doesn’t know I’m listening. Soft, like he’s reminding himself of something, making notes of the coal dark around. I hang on the words. They’re what I have left. I find myself wanting to say things, but instead, I peel labels from the empty bottles. Instead, I pull the loose fray from my jeans or I start us on something we can sing together, drunk and pathetic like we’ve always been. Jesus. I want to tell him he’s looking better, or that I love him. I don’t know if I should do that anymore.

But, like I said, there’s suddenly this weird sort of improvisation about him. Like a week ago, I came home and found him sitting in the driveway with our television, a can of lighter fluid and one of those long barbecue lighters laid out in front of him. When I pulled up, he told me, grinning, that he’d waited for me. So casual.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “We’re gonna burn the goddamned thing together.”

I stood there, arms full of groceries, sort of nodding at him and shifting my feet. Before he lit it up, he pissed on it too, singing something Billy Joel—I can’t remember what exactly—and chuckling despite the broad daylight, the neighbors gath­ering in their front doors and at their windows. No one, of course, said anything. Even I was pretty calm. I’ve gotten that way. I smiled back at him, at them, pulled over a lawn chair and peeled us both an orange. Looking back now, I wish I would’ve filmed this first fire like I’ve filmed the others that have followed. I can’t remember seeing him so alive.

When it was done, Christian seemed to feel better. He waved at what’s-her-name across the road and sat down next to me to eat his orange. I waved too. She grabbed her very inter­ested five-yearold by the hand and shut the door. We’ve left it just the way it was there in the driveway, an unidentifiable slab of plastic, glass glinting in a strange halo around.

56

Hansen: What We Burned

Later that night, he came into the bedroom with a cigar in his mouth to wake me.

“The radio’s next,” he said.

I nodded. He smiled at me, then out the window, like a child pulling something off. That’s another thing: he keeps reminding me of a little boy. So weird. Anyway, so he wanted to keep burning things, and I just sort of smiled back the way I’ve started to. Apparently, we’d made an agreement.

And as it turned out, he wasn’t lying. The next day we bought more lighter fluid and burned the radio. We didn’t stop there, though. We burned an old clock and a pair of singing Santa Claus figurines. I actually enjoyed myself, cheering him on from my lawn chair with a six pack by my side. He found other things to douse and blaze too, like strange small rituals, parading from the house with them in his arms.

The microwave. His Johnny Cash collection. The Dust-Buster.

I’ve caught them all on tape with our camcorder. It’ll be strange, I guess, to watch these tapes ten years down the road. His last Christmas, birthday; you know, the stages of decay. Then, suddenly: our possessions on fire in the driveway. I can’t tell him to stop. He’s dying and I love him. If he wants to, he can burn the fucking house down.

Always, the flowers die. And, always, he hangs them up. They’re dying in our windowsills and dead on the walls of every room. I’ve been trying to tell him.

I try, “Chris, this can’t go on forever. Where are we going to keep putting them?”

Never works.

I try, “Things die. Water and sunlight aren’t enough. Things just die.”

Sometimes, he’ll look at me for a second like I’ve struck this chord with him or something, then he goes on doing whatever he was doing. After this sort of thing, he won’t talk to me for hours, sometimes days. It’s pretty hard.

This morning is no different than any other. He’s moved outside—a ritual—and found replacements for the dead flowers he’ll hang up to dry. It’s a bad cycle. Soon, we both know, the cold will take them all.

57

I’m getting used to it, though, standing at the kitchen win­dow every morning now, keeping quiet while he moves up and down our street with a stolen grocery cart, picking the flowers that look most like they need his help. Even the neighbors have kept quiet, have kept to themselves. We haven’t had to say anything; instead of pushing them under, they’ve left the flowers this year, I suppose, for Christian. Everything’s differ­ent this year.

When Christian sees me he waves and lights up a cigar, the flaps of his robe swinging open and closed at each movement. I remember when we were first married in a way I can’t remem­ber the years that followed. We spent all our extra money on pot and just stayed home watching movies all the time. God. We were very young, very unaware.

He passes through the kitchen with several loads of flowers without saying a word. I’m sitting at the table with the paper, drinking coffee while he puts them in their places, humming something I can’t make out. After a while, everything gets quiet. I find him asleep in the living room and put out the cigar he’s left smoldering on the coffee table. Twelve years.

In the kitchen I pour myself another cup of coffee and an hour later, when he wakes, I’m waiting. He comes in with his robe open across his pale body.

“We need more bottles.”

I want him to look at me. I want him to look up at me. “Are you sure there’s room?”

“I just need more bottles for the window. And get string. They’re dying.”

He looks like he’s already dead. I pour him some coffee and hand him a plate of toast. He wants to put the flowers in water. He wants to hang them up. When he sits, I touch his shoulder and he jumps like he’s forgotten I’m here. He looks like a dead little boy.

I’ve noticed this year that the sun moves farther toward the back yard every day, against the cold coming toward us. The shadows, too, keep changing every room in the house. I don’t know that I’ve noticed before how this happens. This morn­ing, the table is in shadow while we eat breakfast, the stove lit with the window’s boxed light. The sink filled with dishes is a web of gray. It’s how I’ve started marking movement: shadow, window, light. It’s not easy to say out loud, that I can

58

Hansen: What We Burned

hardly tell the difference between us, that I feel less alive too.

Christian asks for his pills and I cross the room to get them. Six times a day. Six times a day. He’s started to cry. He never used to do that. I turn on the water until I can’t hear anything, let it run and stand by the window looking out. It’s funny how quiet everything gets at this time of year. Over the sound of the tap I forget he’s in the room with me. A bird moves up from the lawn with a worm in its beak. Everything is so still. I let the water run. I should have had a daughter. When the cold comes, it covers the sound and smell of everything.

This afternoon, like yesterday, like the day before, we string the oldest flowers together. They look like dead birds in my hands, their small legs bound by the thin white string. We’re quiet. Across the yard, three children are chasing each other with long sticks in the sad light. They’re climbing the tree we planted the year we moved in.

The morning it came, already half grown, with bulging roots, he told me to remember the way it looked that size. It’s gotten bigger. Every year since, on Christmas Eve, we’ve walked out, drunk on eggnog, to count the rings. Christian plugs the base and pulls out a line of wood as long as my arm. Every year. I can’t remember how old it is.

I’ve forgotten that already. I’m sure that he remembers. When there are five or six flowers, he holds them upside down, and I tie them: start with a knot, cut the loose string. I want to say twenty, but that’s not right.

Five years ago, I threw one of his shoes in the tree during an argument. It got stuck there, laces wrapped around one of the high branches. He didn’t talk to me for a week solid. It’s still there because I get a kick out of it and he’s afraid of heights.

Wrap the two feet of string tightly. Leave enough to hang them up.

I’m sure he remembers. He called the rings something pre­dictable, a clock to measure a year by.

Pick up the petals that have fallen on the floor. Put them in Christian’s jar beside the cold pipes under the sink. When it’s full, he’ll burn them.

At night, I wake and touch dark beside me, knowing he’s gone. The strange white spirit of this house. I think I hear his cells humming,

59

eating at each other in rhythms where he is. I dream they are insects orbiting our home, that Christian is saving them too, filled with the violet rush of his breath as it leaves him each moment. These nights, when I wake, I find him in the kitchen eating macaroni, a botany book spread out on the table. I find him in the living room, completely naked, staring at a chessboard or watching PBS. I find him praying—something he hasn’t done since before we were married, and it makes me sick with grief. Something about whatever he can’t say to me spilled out instead on his face. That’s what does it.

“Who’s listening to you, Christian?” I ask him always, and go back to bed. I’ve seen this before when people are dying: they want God. Funny thing is, when I was younger, when I believed in God, I don’t remember thinking about death at all. I only remember things changing: holidays, seasons, all that, whatever was once exciting there, dulled and unrecognizable. I remember sweaty crowds of people on Sundays, my father’s voice enough off pitch that I could separate him from the oth­ers singing hymns. My father touching me. I remember braid­ing my mother’s hair before it turned, being alone at night in the field behind our home.

Two days before he died, my father wrote me a letter like he did to just about everyone else. He kept saying in the letter, over and over, that he was sorry for everything. I think by that he meant to tell me in the only way he could, from behind a typed page, that he could feel the waste under his skin and that, suddenly dying, he regretted it all. That was how he said it: sorry for everything. I guess I can understand. Looking back now, there are so few bright spots, sparse and quiet. Everyone wants to put their grief in a sentence they can stare at.

I realized later that what he was saying had to do with more than just me, that it was a kind of confession, an apology for letting go. Maybe my father had wanted a cat. Or, for one thing, maybe he had wanted to travel some. I know he had. Or to love us differently. There’s always something to regret, I guess, holes to fill. It’s a goddamned joke.

And I guess when it comes down to it, Christian’s just like anybody else. Now that he’s dying, he wants something larger to be watching it happen, God or someone, stroking his god­damned head while the flames go up. But there aren’t even flames. People keep

60

Hansen: What We Burned

going on, despite your last momentary breathing, stare, the oldest kind of desperation.

It’s getting colder. Today, Christian and I spent three hours in the yard burning our things. We burned our wedding clothes (his idea) and a frozen Tupperware case filled with pieces of our wedding cake I’d forgotten were at the bottom of our freezer.

Twelve years. We burned a blanket that my mother made when we told her we’d decided to try for a baby. It was beau­tiful, white.

It still looked new.

We burned paintings I’d done in college, the trusty waffle iron, nine T-shirts we used to wear after work and on Sundays. We burned five pairs of shoes and a wooden deer that’s been in the garden since we bought the house. I’d always hated the thing anyhow.

Sometimes, lately, I film him doing other things too: eating, sleeping, feeding the cat. It’s amazing how beautiful he can be. When he wakes up, he forgets where he’s fallen asleep. Maybe it’s at the table.

Maybe it’s in the hall, in the shower, on the lawn. It’s beautiful—he wakes and looks around so breathless for a moment that his eyes go wild and he grips at his head. It’s like he’s afraid of everything. It’s true, this is not the man I married, but he needs me even more than that man. You can see it in the stare.

So, after we burned what was still left from the wedding day along with that stupid deer, we came in and fell asleep togeth­er—something I’ll bet we haven’t done during the day for about five years. And this afternoon, while we’re tying the flowers that have died, I feel his hands move across my back. Against the skin. I feel his hands move to my shoulders, my hair, and I can smell him behind me. I want to cry when he touches me. His lips on my neck.

Have you ever felt somehow placed above your body, sort of watching everything happen outside? It’s like that when we move toward the bedroom, a kind of mirror folding inside the familiar movements.

I feel him, alive inside me, and I think of a child growing there. I see flowers spread out like sparks inside.

When we’re finished, the house is dark.

“Am I dead?”

I close my legs away from him, imagine clawing through the brick of our home. I bite his shoulder in the dark, hard, but he doesn’t move.

61

When he starts coughing, the blood starts too, up with sprays of black.

I touch it, plum dark against the white sheet, the smell of opened skin, my father touching me. When I turn from him I know that I’m alone.

I want to wake without memory in a place I don’t know.

This is how I find him: wearing only his blue cap, shivering in the empty bathtub.

It’s morning. I’ve crawled from bed and put one of his shirts on. A few minutes ago, he was outside. I filmed him through our window, crouched above an anthill. Little boy. He put his whole hand on top of it, started beating the ground until they were everywhere, biting him. I didn’t say a word, just kept the camera on him. I didn’t call out when he took off his robe, when he lay down above the ants, his eyes blank and quiet.

There are, I imagine, certain things you must see pretty clearly later.

I know I won’t forget the butterflies moving up around his body, spinning color in the gray air.

He doesn’t look at me when I come in the bathroom. I turn the sink on and press the cold against my face again and again. I can’t help it. He’s still, even when I start the water slowly over his feet, his chest. I’ve never washed a child’s body, and I wonder if it feels like washing a man who’s dying.

There was this time when we were first married that we left to go for a drive on a Sunday and ended up in Mexico. That week, we drank warm beers by the dozen right there on the highway. We got caught having sex in three different rest stop parking lots, ate nothing but gas station hot dogs and didn’t change our clothes once. When we got back, on Friday, there were something like fifteen messages on our machine telling me I was in trouble, more trouble, and eventually, fired. I remem­ber we thought that was pretty funny, got drunk as hell again, and made it right there on the goddamned living room couch. Jesus.

Even with the water on, Christian falls asleep. I keep wash­ing him. I can’t help it. This is when it starts to snow. I go to the window and open it so the wind hits. When I look out I see butterflies moving up around the cold, falling to staggered color on the white.

I open every window in the house until the wind moves in small

62

Hansen: What We Burned

waves over my skin, the flowers. I remem­ber nothing this beautiful. For a minute, I want to start shak­ing Christian, to wake him up and make him watch what’s happening. But I don’t. I sit down again by the tub with every­thing hushed, the cold coming above me, my voice the dull bell of a mouth opening.

And I wash his body the way that I would wash a son.

You might have guessed by now what happens next. I don’t know when it came to me. When I was asleep, maybe. It hap­pens sometimes. Everything just gets clear.

Christian and I, bundled up to the goddamned throats, dragged the lawn chairs back out onto the lawn. It’s cold as hell. After I left him, asleep in the tub, I spent the entire day clean­ing. I don’t mean that I tidied things up, I mean I cleaned. I start­ed in the kitchen, in the fridge. I did the dishes. When I was done there, it was the bathrooms and the bedroom, the living room, every single closet. I even cleaned out Christian’s maga­zine drawer. All this while he wandered in and out, looking bewildered, took a few naps and made me peanut butter sand­wiches every couple hours or so.

When that was done, I went to the grocery store and bought a whole hell of a lot of beer. I bought six bags of potato chips and some powdered doughnuts, even a cheese ball to go along with the twenty-one bottles of lighter fluid I’d already placed in the cart.

When I got home, Christian was sitting on the floor in the kitchen, still sufficiently confused, between dozens of bags full of garbage and old mail. It didn’t take him long, though, after I started spreading the fluid over everything, to figure it out.

By then, it was really dark out and I imagine it would have looked pretty funny if you were standing out on the lawn or something, lights on in every room in the house and us run­ning like little kids through them with bottles of lighter fluid in both hands. All that furniture, my favorite rug, all covered in the stuff. It was great.

When we’re sitting comfortably, I open us both our fifth or sixth bottle and hand him the matches. He mumbles some joke under his breath about insurance policies and starts laughing so hard I don’t even hear the end of it. When he turns back to me I smile. He takes out the first match, lights another cigar with it, belches, and promptly starts toward the house.

63

I remember my father in a single image: his body a bright glow swimming toward me, age five, beside a lake. I remember waking in a forest with Christian, the way his hands look and how he smells when he gets cold. It’s funny, I’ve thought of leaving him so many times. I’ve never told him that. Something about him standing there by the house, though, just makes me want to laugh. It could be the stupid hat. Or the way he’s stumbling around in the new snow like a hurt animal or something. I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.

The rest? I’m sure, by now, you must already know: the fire will be beautiful.

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Tami Hansen

Pallbearer of One I wish I could say all there is to say about you. Your perfect profile, patterns of infinite freckles, small solar maps.

How you are vexed by a darkened bedroom.

How Mother has you high, drugged on Zoloft, for reasons out of her maternal realm.

Who knew the bogeyman was flesh and blood?

He jumped on you, filling the closets in your mind with monsters drugs can’t erase.

Can you spell murder at such a young age?

You want to see how I form the letters?

Three o’clock a.m., hour of the dead.

Your prayers leaking into my alarm clock, waking me to see your vile predator.

Mom cried in Japanese, a language she does not know. Her wailing running amuck, a samurai in the valves of her heart.

And, your eyes search me with the dark question, like brown, bitter cocoa you have consumed.

It bleeds moonless black from corners of your frown. Making me know if I have the chance, I will kill for you, my little brother.

(Spring 2005)

65

Havilah Howard

Wicks I told you she was a witch and it would come to no good forgive me, I was wrong for on the coldest day of winter the bonfire heated the apple tree and it bloomed.

66

(Fall 2005)

Nanette Kasallis

My Best Friend’s Name Is Not Claude monet gave me coloring tips, so i took them and spread them on my front lawn. mom told me if i cleaned them up before dinner, monet could sit in the special seat. but monet said the special seat was cheap and overrated. monet said he’d rather ride a tram all over town and get off at every stop. mom never let me get off at every stop. i yelled at monet and said he was a dumbass. he yelled back and said i was too garrulous and trite. i didn’t know what that meant, but figured it couldn’t be good because monet packed his bags, stole my special seat, and slapped my mom on the ass before he skipped off down the driveway, only to throw me a piece of pink chalk, say salut, and light a cuban cigar.

(Fall 2003)

67

Eliot Keey

cycle i bled my love upon him— which he wiped off—curtly leaving me alone— hoping next time i wouldn’t

68

(Spring 2006)

Brian Kenison

The Blue Bullet In high school, I drove a five-door, blue ’76 Ford station wagon. My father bought it for two hundred dollars from another farmer and gave it to me so I wouldn’t roll his truck or dent Mom’s car. He had bought cars for more, but I don’t think he ever made a better deal.

The body was covered with rust spots, and there was a large dent in the front passenger’s door, so you couldn’t open it from the outside.

It was a large car, though, with three bench seats, two facing forward and the other backward. There was plenty of room for all of us.

We took it to my dad’s shop, and Chuck said the color was ugly, boring, and downright degrading. He said he would spruce it up.

I went into the house to get a coat hanger, and when I came back, Chuck had painted two stripes in racer’s red on the hood. He began painting stripes down the sides but ran out halfway down the right side, so I told him to finish it with a can of John Deere green we found in the shop. “Better,” he said after he had finished.

Don pushed up the hood and pulled off the air filter so he could get to the carburetor. He said the engine needed a lot of work, and we would need to change all the engine fluids.

Danny said the car looked a lot better with the stripes, but there was still something wrong. He scrounged around on the paint shelf for a few moments and returned with a tin of black paint and a brush.

While he painted across the back door, I fastened the coat hanger to the end to the antenna so the reception would be clearer.

“We’ll pick up the L.A. stations if you put on another hanger,” Mike said sarcastically. I told him to shut up or he couldn’t ride in the car or listen to the radio. He didn’t say anything else and finished fixing the taillights.

I stepped back from the car and saw what Danny had painted.

Across the back door, just above the bumper and above the front wheel wells, he had written the words “The Blue Bullet,” almost as if it were the name of a ship. He had paint on his face, and he was looking at the car and grinning.

(Spring 2000)

69

“Looks better, huh,” he said and nodded toward the car.

“Should run better, too,” Don said as he slammed down the hood.

He was covered to his elbows in engine grime.

We walked around the car slowly, in awe. Chuck grunted and said we should probably paint half the left stripe green too, but I told him it looked fine.

“One more thing,” Don said. He pulled a dream catcher and two eagle feathers from his bag and hung them in the rearview mirror.

He helped his father make the dream catchers and sold them at rest stops. “There.”

Don hated visiting his father on the Navajo reservation. It was somewhere in Northern Arizona, and he said the nights were as hot as hell at noon. From what he said, I guessed it ranked somewhere just below Levan and barely above oblivion.

His stepdad taught us to stalk nightly through the woods, and we practiced each weekend. Don said his dad never taught him to do anything except lie and drink. His dad was a full-blooded Navajo who drank too much and claimed to be Geronimo’s direct descendant. Geronimo was Apache.

Sometimes he and I would stay up by the campfire before we started talking. He told me once that he wanted to get out of Levan. He could feel it gnawing at his neck, and if he got far enough away, his dad wouldn’t be able to send for him each summer. We said we would go to New York and write a book together. It would be greater than even Tolkien’s.

The next day we threw our packs in the back seat of The Blue Bullet and drove out of the canyon. He was silent. He pulled his copy of The Hobbit out of the glove compartment, but he didn’t read it. The book lay open in his lap, and he stared out the window at the trees. I listened to the dream catcher beat staccato against the windshield.

Danny used to practice his guitar in the very back seat of The Blue Bullet. When he did, we would turn off the radio so we could hear him play.

He told us one day he was going to start a band. He said he and I could do the vocals, Chuck and Mike could do the percussion, and Don could play the keyboard. Chuck said he didn’t mind percussion,

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Kenison: The Blue Bullet

but he really wanted to sing too. Don said he would rather play the bass guitar, and we could computer generate the keyboard, or Danny could prerecord it. Mike didn’t say anything.

Danny said we would have a killer band. After we got some recognition and a recording contract, we would have it made. Then we would only have to worry about what we would eat and which beautiful woman would give us a full-body massage that night.

We all thought it was a good idea, and I looked up through the feathers of the dream catcher so I could see Danny in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes on Wednesday nights, I let Chuck drive The Blue Bullet so he could practice. When he became a NASCAR driver, he said he was going to use his full name: Paul M. Charles. He said it sounded more sophisticated.

Thursday was garbage collection day in Levan. By five o’clock on Wednesday night, full garbage cans lined both sides of the streets.

We practiced collisions for two months before the county assigned two sheriff ’s deputies to patrol the streets on Wednesday nights. It seems they had received calls about broken and dented dumpsters.

After that, we didn’t practice our collisions any more, and we waved at the deputies when we passed them in the streets. Chuck wanted to hit a garbage can in front of them, but I wouldn’t let him because I was afraid they would impound The Blue Bullet. He pointed at one of the garbage cans, flicked the dream catcher, and laughed. The deputy scowled at us, and we sped away.

Mike loved the farm like a sailor loves the sea. They say that seawater courses through the sailor’s veins and that’s what makes him return time after time to the sea. It’s the same with the farmer; something is born in him that roots him to a plot of ground and he can’t leave it. One time when we were driving home from school, he told me he didn’t think he could leave the farm or Dad. He said he probably wouldn’t be in our band.

I told him I thought I understood, but he could visit me in New York any time he wanted. We would go pick up girls and party because I would have a BMW by then.

He and I had to sneak The Blue Bullet into the school shop once to weld the bumper back on. When he was finished, he said it would

71

be cool if The Bullet were a convertible. We could cut off the top and weld it back on in October before it got too cold.

I chalked a line around the top, and Mike set up a torch. The instructor walked in just as Mike was beginning to cut and told us to get the car out of there. He swore and told us we were fools to light a torch or weld anywhere near a full gas tank. We didn’t cut the top off that year.

Mike is two years younger than I am, but sometimes I got the feeling he was the older brother. One night I saw him sitting on the hood of The Blue Bullet. In his extended right arm, he held the dream catcher, and he was gazing through its weaves at the fields under the moonlight.

I bought a new car when I went away to college. It was a Dodge Aries that got a lot better gas mileage but seated a lot fewer people than The Blue Bullet did. I worked two jobs while going to college and sang “New York, New York” in my sleep. Now I drive a fourdoor Ford pickup with “Plens’ Construction. Building the world around you” painted on the doors. It’s cherry red.

Mike is still on the farm. He sweats with his sons in the summer, like he and I did with Dad, and freezes with the cattle in the winter. He can still smile and look you in the eye. When he shakes your hand, it’s like he’s snapping a bullwhip.

Danny joined the Marines right after school. He said it was only until he earned enough money to start he band. He flew fighters over Bosnia and Serbia. When he sends Christmas cards, he signs his name and writes “Semper Fi” beneath it.

Chuck worked for a year in the gas station before joining the Police Academy. He pulled me over last year and showed me his badge: Captain Paul M. Charles. We talked for a while, and he let me play with the siren on his patrol car. He hadn’t heard, so I told him about Don. Don went back to the reservation the summer after graduation, and I never saw him again. Two years ago, I received a letter that had been forwarded to my apartment from my parents’ home. There was no return address, but the envelope was postmarked in the Navajo

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Kenison: The Blue Bullet

Nation. There was only one line scrawled on the notepaper:

Today is June 28. It’s a good day to die.

Don It was the tenth of July when the letter was delivered, and he had already been buried for over a week. His sister told me he had cut his wrists and gone to sleep in the bathtub. They found enough crack in his blood that it probably would have killed him if he hadn’t cut his wrists.

Last time I went back to the farm, I walked out to where Dad parked The Blue Bullet after we all left. No one had driven it in over ten years.

I just wanted to see if it still looked the same.

The paint looked washed out after so many years in the sun, and there were more rust holes than I remembered. All four tires were cracked, and none of them would hold air, but the spare was still good.

The keys were still in the ignition, but the engine wouldn’t turn over when I tried, and I remembered how long it had been. The battery must have been dead because I knew the engine was still good.

The car smelled of mouse droppings and urine, and the seat had begun to rot away; there was a hole in the roof where we hadn’t welded it on quite tight enough, and the rain had seeped through on the upholstery.

I opened the ashtray and found a cracked guitar pick and a pocketknife that wouldn’t open anymore. In the glove compartment, I discovered a copy of The Hobbit, a racing magazine, three welding rods with the flux broken off, and a picture of us standing in front of The Blue Bullet the day we painted it. I don’t remember anyone taking a picture that day.

The dream catcher still hung from the rearview mirror. Most of the fuzz had fallen off the feathers, and they looked like fish spines hanging there. There were a few gaps in the weaves where some of the strings had broken, but the frame was still there, and I could still see the general pattern.

73

Charlie King

Pussy King of the Pirates James was a stockbroker. He didn’t like it. He wanted to be a pirate.

James didn’t like going to work or paying bills or any of the rest of it. He had to get up at six o’clock in the morning. He had to commute to work. He had to work five days a week. His boss was an asshole. James got up from his desk. He began to walk out of the office. His boss said, “Where are you going?”

“To be a pirate,” said James.

His boss said, “You will never be a pirate.”

“Arrgghh,” said James.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” said his boss.

Outside of the office James thought it was nice. He thought it was better than being inside the office. He felt that it was good to be a pirate. He got into his car. He drove home. His wife was there.

“What are you doing home?” she said.

“I’m a pirate,” said James.

“You are not a pirate,” his wife said.

James said, “Yes, I am a pirate.”

His wife said, “No, you are most definitely not a pirate.”

“Fix my lunch,” said James.

“What?” his wife said.

James said, “Fix my lunch and leave the skin on the chicken and make me a cheesecake.”

James’s wife said, “I will not leave the skin on the chicken. I will not make you a cheesecake.”

“Do it now, wench,” said James.

“I am not a wench,” said James’s wife.

James said, “You are a wench.”

His wife said, “I do not think that I am a wench.”

James said, “Well, you are a wench.”

His wife, none too sure of herself, said, “I do not want to be a wench.”

James pounded his fist on the table and he said, “Wench, you

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(Spring 2003)

King: Pussy King of the Pirates

had better start frying that chicken. You had better start making my cheesecake.”

James went into his study and he looked at the map on the wall.

He liked the look of Algeria. He thought Portugal looked nice. He looked to Greece. He looked to Libya. James looked at the map and he said to himself that he was going to the Mediterranean Sea. He sat down in his leather chair and he began to make a list. He could hear the chicken frying. When he was done with the list he made copies.

He went into the utility room. He got a hammer and nails. He began to hang the list around the house. His wife could hear him. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I am hanging up this list,” he said.

“You are using a hammer and nails,” she said.

“Read this list,” said James.

James’s wife read the list. The title of the list was Things for the rest of you to do while I am in the Mediterranean. It was a numbered list.

1. Get off your asses.

2. Clean up this place.

3. Answer the damn phone.

4. If I get back and this yard’s not mowed, I will kill everyone starting with you Jason because that’s your job anyway.

5. Stop asking for money all of the time. But I won’t be here, I guess.

6. Marjorie, if you start sleeping around or anything, I will kill you.

7. Katie, if that damn bike is in the yard when I get back, I will pop the tires or something. I will definitely rip out all of the streamers. I may rip them out even if you do move the bike because they look stupid.

8. Jason, a word to the wise concerning my Camaro while I am away—Do Not Drive It. 9. I am a pirate now.

10. If work calls or anything, tell them I will deal with them when I get back.

James’s wife did not like the list. “I am not too sure about this list,” she said. James said it sounded to him like a personal problem.

75

James went to the beach. On the way he ran over his neighbors.

They were Tom and Diane. Tom was an attorney and Diane was an Osteopath. They were parasites so James killed them. He felt pretty good about it too. It was all part of being a pirate.

At the beach James looked for a ship. He saw lots of ships. They were owned by yuppies like him before he became a pirate. James did not want a yuppie pirate ship. He did not want a Cape Dory or a Vancouver or a Sirocco. He wanted a frigate.

James saw an old man at the end of a dock. The old man had a wooden leg. James walked up to the man. The man turned around.

“Are you a pirate?” James asked.

“No,” the man said.

“I am a pirate,” said James.

“I am thinking about becoming a pirate,” the old man said.

“It is a good life,” said James.

“I have heard that it is a good life,” said the old man.

James said, “I used to be a stockbroker.”

“I see,” the old man said.

James said, “I need a pirate ship.”

The old man said, “I have a ship.”

“That is good,” said James. James said, “Is your ship a pirate ship?”

“It is a pretty good ship,” the man said. The old man pointed to the ship. It was a big wooden ship with a white sail.

“I don’t see any cannons,” said James, “Yes, that is the problem,” said the old man. “That is why I cannot decide about becoming a pirate.”

“Yes, you need cannons to be a pirate,” said James.

“You need cannons to be a good pirate,” the old man said.

James looked at the ship again. He thought it was a pretty nice ship. He wished it had cannons. The old man also looked at the ship. He wished for can­nons. They both wished for cannons, and they both came up with an idea.

“We don’t have any cannons,” said James.

“No,” said the old man, “The cannons are missing.”

“But what about this,” said James, “What about a nice pirate flag?

What about a nice skull and crossbones?”

“You have to have that anyway,” the old man said.

“You are right,” said James. “Of course, you are right. You have

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King: Pussy King of the Pirates

to have a pirate flag anyway.”

“Having a pirate flag doesn’t make up for a lack of cannons,” the old man said. “You can’t raise the skull and crossbones and expect people to believe that you are a pirate if you don’t have any cannons.”

“I know, I know,” said James. “I cannot believe that I even suggested it.”

The old man’s idea was to go and buy some cannons. He told James about it. “You are a stockbroker,” the old man said.

“No, I am a pirate,” said James.

“You are not a pirate without cannons,” said the old man.

“I am a stockbroker,” said James.

“Let’s use some of your money to go and buy cannons,” the old man said.

“Why don’t we use your money?” asked James.

“Because it is my ship,” the old man said.

“That is only fair,” said James.

“Pirates are never fair,” the old man said.

“Just this once,” said James.

James and the old man bought some cannons. James had his wife make a pirate flag. They searched for Traci Lords. They found her and she agreed to be the naked lady on the front of the ship. “I have always wanted to be that naked lady,” she said.

“What a break,” said James.

They went to the ship. They installed the cannons. They raised the flag and Traci tied herself to the front of the ship. Some people approached the ship. “Ahoy, there,” the people said.

“State your business,” said James.

“Are you pirates?” the people asked.

“We are pirates,” the old man said.

“We want to be pirates,” the people said.

James and the old man discussed it. They discussed it and it was agreed that pirating was difficult without a crew. “All aboard,” said James.

Everyone came aboard. They were impressed with the ship and its accou­trements. They were glad to be pirates. James, the old man, the crew, and the naked Traci Lords put out to sea and made course for the Mediterranean. James had convinced the old man their fortunes lay in the Mediterranean. It was a sunny day and everyone

77

was feeling good and here is a list and a description of the crew: Harold—Recently divorced. His wife said he was “an asshole.”

Edward—Thirty-three years old and living at home. Time to be a pirate.

Ted—Former fat-ass and brilliant biographer of the definitive abstractionist Anthony Caro.

Henry—When Henry learned of his lupus he figured all bets were off.

Stanley—His kid wanted a car. His wife wanted one too.

Patrick—Ugly and a Mormon. When the chips are down . . .

Ned—Ned was working fulltime. You can only take so much of that shit.

Colby—Colby went too far, and so his friends decided to hang him.

Darby—Darby had a Trans Am but somebody stole it.

Ray—Ray happened to be walking by. He saw the flag and figured it was time to head out.

Donald—Donald also happened to be walking by. He saw Traci Lords.

It was a pretty good crew. James was feeling good about it. So was the old man. The water was nice, and the sailing was smooth.

They had a nice wind. Everyone said the flag looked nice and that it was waving pretty good. They all agreed that Traci was a nice touch.

Ned asked if he and the crew could fire the cannons and James gave him the go-ahead. It was quite a show and they managed to sink a few little Hallberg-Rassys. The people on the Hallberg-Rassys cried out for help, but nobody in the crew or James or the old man offered to help or any­thing. Everyone said it was a good sign, sinking some ships on their first try. Traci was glad too because the cannon blasts drew a lot of attention and she was feeling pretty sexy.

Soon the beach and all land was lost from sight and the men settled comfort­ably into the pirate life. They drank. They slept. They played cards and fished. They traded stories about the opposite sex.

Traci didn’t mind. Some of the men told jokes. James and the old man argued about the spelling of doubloons. Darby caught an octopus, but he let it go and everyone was glad. Ray and Donald prac­ticed sword fighting. Some of the men were worried about sea monsters.

After a few days at sea the men asked what the plan was. What were they going to do in the Mediterranean? James and the old man

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King: Pussy King of the Pirates

said they could do whatever they wanted. The crew agreed and Colby then suggested they name the ship. The naming of the ship had been on the minds of more than one of the pirates. They felt it was an important issue.

“We are open to suggestions,” James said.

“What about The Black Death,” said Stanley.

“That is a stupid name,” said James.

“This isn’t even a black ship,” said the old man.

“None of us are black,” said Ned. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” said James.

“The f1ag is black,” said Stanley.

“So are the cannons,” said Harold.

“I do not care,” said James. “We are not calling our pirate ship The Black Death.”

“It is a stupid name any way you cut it,” the old man said.

“I hate that name,” said Henry.

“If you ask me, The Black Death is a very stupid name,” said Colby.

“What about Ship of Skulls?” said Edward.

“What about it?” said James.

Patrick said, “I think The Golden Galleon is a good name.”

“Everyone names their ship The Golden Galleon,” said Edward.

Henry felt We Kill Everyone was a good name. “We are not naming our ship We Kill Everyone,” said James.

“I have the perfect name,” the old man said.

“What is it?” said James.

“The Rise of Capitalism,” said the old man.

“It is a good name,” said James.

“We are all capitalists,” Donald said.

“All men shall fear her,” said Ray. “All hail The Rise of Capitalism!” said James.

“All hail The Rise of Capitalism!” said the crew.

Having named the ship, the men set about the important tasks of swabbing the deck, building a plank, and fashioning the lookout tower. Ted was designated chief cook with Patrick and Colby as assistants. James was declared captain. He chose the old man as first mate. Everyone felt good about everything, but Traci said she was cold so the men gave her a swig of ale.

When they reached the Mediterranean, James declared the first

79

order of busi­ness was to decide what was to be done.

“You’re the captain,” said Stanley.

“I know that I am the captain,” said James.

“Well, then tell us what is to be done,” said Stanley.

“Be quiet,” said the old man.

Captain James and the old man questioned the men. They asked them their reasons for becoming pirates. They asked them why they had fallen in with the pirate life. Some of the crew said they wanted gold. Some said they wanted ale. Many a pirate said he wanted the women.

“Good reasons, good reasons all,” said the captain and the first mate. “But are there any other?”

The sun was high. There were white clouds in the air. The wind moved the ship along steadily, and no one spoke. The crew could see other vessels. They saw the shores of lands they had never seen.

They could see bright fish moving beneath the water.

Edward spoke and said he had always wanted to get out of town.

He expressed distaste for the city life. It was time for the open sea, he said. Patrick said he had nothing much to live for. He said he had never had a woman. Colby exclaimed that certain people were after him.

“Aye. Aye,” said the captain. “I am with ye, lads.”

Darby cleared his throat. He began to speak. He said he maybe had a little speech to make. He said he thought he maybe had a little something to say. Darby then stated that he had always felt somewhere inside—somewhere deep in the back of his mind or his heart or down in the depths of his soul where the world could not quench or devour or dissipate that he had always wanted to be a pirate and set sail on the high seas and have adventure and whatever else it was that he wanted which was everything which was wine and ale and rum and women and gold and mates and good times, high times on a pirate ship with the wind at his back for once in his life and the sun on his face and the whole wide world sitting there waiting for him to approach in his magnificent pirate ship and take what he wanted or blow it all away and if he went down with ship so be it he had lived for a minute and by hell let’s go up along the coast of the Mediterranean and have it all and when we’re done we’ll sleep for four and half days and there’s nothing any­one can do about it and if they can, keep it a

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King: Pussy King of the Pirates

secret because I don’t want to know.

Well, Darby was made ship poet and several of the men said, “Arrggghh!” as loud as they could, and cap’n James and first mate Old Stump personally raised the Skull and Crossbones and said by hell they were going to sack and loot the entire Mediterranean.

Event I—Sinking the Small Frigate: Colby spotted a small frigate off the starboard bow. He told the Captain. They sunk the ship. “Why did we sink her?” Stanley asked. “Practice,” said the first mate. “And frigates should always be large,” said James.

Event 2—Women for Everyone: The pirates dropped anchor off the coast of Alicante. They took small boats to shore. There were women on the beach. Donald agreed to do the approach. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said the women. “We’re pirates,” said Donald. “We saw the ship,” the women said. “Well?” said Donald. “We’re coming,” said the women. Once the women were aboard The Rise of Capitalism the pairing off began. It was agreed that Donald, having done the approach, should have first pick after the captain and first mate. He chose quite a number. Ted and Edward did well in obtaining a couple of tremendously well­-endowed women. Ned and Henry acquired some of the bigger-hipped women, while Darby and Colby paired off with some of the prettier girls as they were somewhat more interested in face than form. Despite his being a Mormon and his homely appearance Patrick managed a somewhat attractive girl. Harold was left with a fat girl. Harold said he didn’t like fat girls, and that “by the sea” he wasn’t going to stand for it. Edward asked what “by the sea” meant.

Harold got mad and said it meant he was a pirate and he wasn’t going to settle for any fat girl. But he did because there weren’t any other girls left.

Event 3—Stanley and Ray: Stanley and Ray were playing a game of checkers. Ray liked to keep all of his kings on the back row. Stanley said it wasn’t fair. Ray didn’t understand. “It’s not fair,” said Stanley.

“Why not?” asked Ray. “It just isn’t,” said Stanley. “By hell,” said Ray. When Ray said “by hell” Stanley stuck him in the ribs and the rest of the crew and especially Ray decided it was high time Stanley walked the plank. With the captain’s approval they marched him up to the

81

plank and asked if he had any last requests. Stanley said that he did.

Ray told him that was too bad because pirates didn’t give last requests. Stanley walked the plank. There was a shark in the water. “A shark! A shark!” he screamed. But then he passed out. The shark ate Stanley. But he didn’t feel anything because he was passed out. The crew was sort of put out. Especially Ray. Event 4—Looting the Cruise Ship: Henry was in the lookout tower.

He saw a cruise ship. The pirates sailed up along side her. Ray and Donald struck up a con­versation with some of the ladies. It was a diversion because Harold and Ted were throwing grappling hooks.

Edward and Ned were lowering planks. The pirates boarded the ship.

There was a skirmish. Shots were fired. Captain James got into a fight with a member of the band. The man hit the captain with his trumpet. Captain James promptly kicked the man’s head in. The first mate got lots of jewels off the necks and chests of the ladies. Colby was stealing earrings. Cruise security fired on Edward and Ned as they attempted to blindside the ship’s first mate. Ned was wounded, but Edward turned and dispatched both men. Ray and Donald threw the ugly women overboard. Harold took the rest onto The Rise of Capitalism. The pirates captured the first mate and the captain of the ship. “Where’s the gold?” Old Stump asked.

“We haven’t any gold,” answered the captain of the cruise ship.

“Make ’em walk the plank,” said Ned. “To the plank with them,” answered Captain James. Ray asked if they had any requests and all the pirates laughed.

Event 5—Sacking Melba: The pirates decided to sack and loot Melba.

It went really well because what they did was burn everything down and steal all the gold.

Event 6—Back on the Ship: The men had women and wine and gold.

They had sunk ships. They had robbed and sacked and looted. They built a fire. It was warm and everyone gathered round. The Captain said he wanted to hear a story. The crew said they wanted a story. “Let’s hear from Darby!” they cried. “Darby the poet!” they cried.

“Tell us a tale,” said the captain.

“Aye, tell us a tale,” said the pirates.

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King: Pussy King of the Pirates

“I will tell a tale,” said Darby.

Everyone took a draught of ale and settled down for a story. The men put their arms more tightly around the women. Traci untied herself and came out on deck. Colby put a jacket around her. Darby cleared his throat. He moved close to the fire. He started the tale.

“There was a girl who wanted everything there ever was in the world.

She wanted a father and a mother and a sister and a brother and a dog and a cat and a boy who loved her and a house with a big yard and a garden­. She wanted clouds and rainbows and trees and flowers and mountains and valleys and poems and stories while she lived and she worked and she lived out her dreams. She crawled out of her dark dirty hole, and she saw her father and her mother a very long way away. She walked for four days without drinking or eating and when she got there, there was just an old pile of dirty old bones lying there in dirt. She looked all around, and she thought she saw her sister and her brother far away down in a valley. She walked down to the valley, but it wasn’t her sister and brother, it was just two stupid rocks with moss on them. The girl almost cried, but she saw her boy on a boat in a lake and she swam out to him. She climbed into the boat, but it wasn’t even a boy, it was a talking mannequin and it told her how ugly she was and it pushed her out of the boat. The girl swam to shore, and she sat down on a rock and she didn’t want a dog or a cat or a house with a big yard and a garden anymore. She looked up to the sky to see the clouds, but they all blew away and the rainbows disappeared and the mountains fell down and the valleys moved up and there were no more stories or poems and the girl crawled back down into her hole, and she stayed there for a long time and she is still there, crying.”

When Darby finished his story everyone was asleep except the Captain. Darby went to sleep. Only the Captain was awake. He steered the ship for home. He looked at all the stars. He tried to count them. He sort of gave up though.

After many days the captain landed the ship safely home. He had told the first mate and crew they were sailing for Barbados. He made sure to arrive in the dark of night. The pirates were asleep. He took one of the small boats ashore. He went home.

The lawn hadn’t been mowed. Katie’s bike was in the front yard.

The grass was dead all around it. He went inside. The house was a

83

wreck. There was grape ­juice on the carpet. It could have been wine.

His lists had been torn down. The nails were still in the walls. He went upstairs. His children were in their beds. His wife was in her proper place. James got into bed and went to sleep.

The pirates awoke the next day. They felt betrayed. They made Old Stump captain. They sailed for Venice and lived like kings for the rest of their days.

James’s wife left him and married his boss. Jason burned the lawn and the house and everything else and Katie joined a biker gang.

James moved into an apartment. He had a dream. He dreamed he was an animal. He was sleek and taut and very amorous. He had a lady friend. She was soft, soft . . . furry and silky. He dreamed they would love together . . . and fly away . . . forever.

He woke up. It was late in the day. His eyes hurt. So did his head.

He looked around the apartment. It was dark. He could not see very well. He could see a lit­tle. He could see light filtering through the tightly drawn blinds. It reminded him of something. It reminded him of Melba in the twilight. He saw the faces of pirates as they put torches to the city. He could see Darby’s face, and he was smil­ing and coughing and crying and laughing, and so was he, and so were the rest of the pirates but nobody else was. James got out of bed. He took a little breath. He moved his feet. He began to walk toward his refrigerator, but he tripped over the phone cord, and on the way to the floor he cursed himself for not getting Traci’s phone number or something.

84

Jessica Lepinski

Magpies Singing like Preachers in a Prairie Storm Return again to ruin’s barn.

With beak against rock, we’ll spark the burn, circle the blaze and cry for a thousand birds.

Plucking black feathers, we bury in snow.

There are no crows.

There are no doves.

We blur our eyes and even magpies turn grey.

Better to fall with the snow than drown in it.

Better to melt well in smoke before we know the ground.

(Spring 2007)

85

Eric Paul Lyman

Lament

Lorem ipsum

malediction dolor Micah Nahum

Maria Miriam Ivan

scrap names, top left drawer

sit amet, consectetur

Solomon has lost his mind.

And he saw mene mene tekel upharsin

riding a

pale wall.

adipisicing elit

She’s a memory borne,

an emery board on his Cadillac floor.

86

(Spring 2007)

Jason Macomber

Untitled all matadors all bullfights all angels begin with a drained bull the art of the bullfight is before is in bleeding the bull too much spain’s tongue will click cold not enough and americans will be on their feet ugly scaffolds of hot ocean and she sings when I was holy bleeding the bull bleeding in black and white and grey fire her buttermilk breasts of mead and ghost trace cough and know the arcing muscle of glass peeling away at the base of the horn how does this belong to us this stutter these small torn mouths in its back and shanks laughing then cauterized she studies how it flies from its wires wet silked

(Spring 2002)

87

onto young skin inhaled locused seeing pocked the angle by which it touches her by what it has reached for how it has formed itself open and dead amoeba god horse she is text prophesy of hammering soft hands against pretty shields the thirsty ponies of her belly will not gestate for her will chime no faith the curve of her breast tattooed with burning birds ringing red will quench like mouth river a god of salt the apparatus in revolution now in numb fingers where birthed now felled where droughting now a legless czar in air and she too much like the pony to measure

88

M. Jared Malan

Light for the Weekend He fell in love on Friday.

Because the sun was shining, the rose color glowed, and she walked by at just the right time, at the high note of a melody. She didn’t jump or spring, rather, she floated by with a smug smile that undoubtedly referenced the night before on the shoulder of another. He never saw that. He saw gleam and legs and shiny. It was this gloss that alluded virtue and that happy, which satisfied him, because on this shiny day.

Obviously, the push did not lead to asking; it led to passivity.

He turned and followed. If the joke of yesterday, they would laugh now. Him and her walking down the sunbeam, laughing. It definitely implied cheer—because the consequence of this is perpetual.

(Can you believe that?) That is what was swirling in his mind as he touched hands. Smiling, just him. Smiling. (Can you believe that?)

They kept walking and that was before a word was passed. So he spoke lyrical. And she dazzled. He loved how she dazzled—look at that smile. Only him and her, smiling.

Only if that joke of yesterday. They dated. He took her, beaming, in his flashy car on a date, a date with a kiss at the end. The kiss after the hug and after all that fun. The flattened images up on the silver screen, which allow both him and her to indirectly connect. The surrogate feelings are the same, and they are both much happier when they leave. That is when it gets interesting, because they are left to their very own devices. But he is damn charming. He tells her stories, mostly about him, and dragons.

But it is broken, that sunbeam fizzled. At that moment she spoke to Another. The Other was striking and curt and the two were in a star burst. Her smile was subdued, but her gaze long, inviting. All the energy there was pulsating.

He was a little cold.

But then there was electricity walking the other way. Her gleam was a dark glow and not a smile, just all smarts. Bright intelligence kept him close and she walked with sense. Knowledge lightning bolt

(Fall 2006)

89

out of her sweet face. Those eyes imploring. Her hair was even smart.

So he followed and only if he had remembered that idea, then they could think. Him and her reasoning, light bulbs flashing and bursting because they are so shrewd, like fox.

Only if he had remembered that idea. They conversed. He told her the object of Rilke, the terror of Poe, the character of Salinger, and that was only the literature. She liked praxis, not communism, and the intelligence of a picture with its deep reds and noble greens.

And he was just as quick with academic pop culture and the names of the presidents. Lincoln, he liked best. This was all over tea, mind you. With pictures on the wall, over their shoulders, it smelled of intelligence. And he spoke every clever word.

But then lighting bolts disappeared into a classroom, and he didn’t want to go. A demanding teacher he saw greet the girl, and Another—he was all smarts. She sat down with confidence, ready to answer a quiz, all stormy within that classroom.

He was a little dense.

Maybe it is just right as he continued down the hall.

90

Henry Miles

Becky, Not God set the time for their reunion.

She’s over there under the green canopy in the closed casket. She is 29 and I wish I’d met her.

Mindful of her neighbors, she had signed away her body, except for her skin so her hip bones might be fashioned into screws to repair broken ankles or into wedges to fuse spines or to let others bend on Becky’s knees.

Are those people Navajos?

One is wearing a jacket with “Navajo Nation Fair” inscribed on the back.

I look over the mourners gathering hoping the prayer I’m pondering will be apt.

What did Becky believe?

What do her relatives and friends believe?

This service is for them.

Bishop Tillack begins the service.

He has not met Becky but he is caring, choking up, as he talks of the death of a woman he does not know.

Her aunt Nancy tells us as a teen, Becky became rapt with Native Americans collected their artifacts and handiwork

(Spring 2005)

91

became acquainted with their burial ceremony asked it for her own.

The bishop introduces the Navajos says they will guide Becky’s spirit on its journey home.

The man in the jacket stands at the casket speaks a language I do not understand places beads on the coffin and backs away.

The man picks up a yard-long eagle’s wing brushes the coffin, the nearby grass the first two rows of chairs, and Grandma Laura.

The man lights the smudge releasing aroma of sage, sweet grass, and tobacco.

Then he eagle wings the cleansing smoke over the sacred space.

The man in the jacket and the other four men sit around a rawhide drum.

The men lay the sticks on the drum and chant long aa, aa, aas and oo, oo, oos.

The five men grasp the sticks thump out an unrelenting beat and beat and chant evoke a path of music up the pines.

Behind the men, an elegant Navajo woman looks on.

One man chants solo, and four respond.

A diesel train draws near and steel wheels on steel rails and air whistles erase chant and beat for half a minute just like a diesel paused the sermon of the bishop half an hour ago.

As steel turns to irony I ponder the casket in which lies

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Miles: Becky, Not God

and yet lies not, the remains of

Becky MacDonald.

93

Whitney Mower

To Be Gauguin He painted in Tahiti for a month.

We wrote, I dyed my hair then dyed it back the day he called and said he was to fly a plane and marry me—I dyed it back.

The plane was late, I had a drink and watched a girl with yellow shoes. She touched her hair and licked her lips and waited for her man.

The bar was cold, he let his leg touch mine.

He said I was a perfect girl except, I want to be Gauguin, he said and tucked a flower from the vase behind my ear.

Red eyes, a microphone, the waitress waved.

She sang a song, her face was tan and hot.

The beach is lonely, gray, so marry me.

The plane was late, a perfect girl except a flower from the vase except behind.

He let his leg touch lips with yellow shoes.

He called and said he was to fly, red eyes.

The bar was touch, Tahiti licked her lips.

I wasn’t happy, flowers, microphone, Gauguin, the shore, I dyed a month alone.

He sang the plane, we wrote my hair, his face.

The waitress got ideas, cold and fly, he touched her tan and flowered, lipless hip.

I sang a song, the vase, my glassy room.

Gauguin was cold and yellow, smile and watch.

I fell (the bar was cold) against the floor and saw her apron brush his arm she licked.

Except a man who says he wants to fly

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(Fall 2005)

Mower: To Be Gauguin

but won’t, a microphone, the beach, a grave.

He laid the flowers down against my ear, my head, a grave for flowers, lips to gray, his hand, Tahitian soil, a lonely isle.

95

Phineas Nau

across clouds gather to watch the moonless white river crack its mouth open devouring the deceived who dare disturb its slumber

96

(Spring 2007)

David Self Newlin

Litany for Cain and El Paso god, let it be raining. please, when i step outside let a lungful of weighty water-air drown me.

the dirt, oh god, the smell of the dirt.

please, whatever you ask binds me now; i just don’t want to see the sun anymore. she sets my eyes on fire, she dries me up, screaming light at the top of her lungs. father, give some shade to shut her up, some rain to put me out.

oh god, the dirt. the smell of the dirt.

i’m so sorry. father, bury me in mud.

(Spring 2007)

97

Autumn Nielson

Our Pyro Psychology We drive to Yuba Beach at one a.m. to worship fire, desire, and waste our worries on the water.

The sounds of mating owls surround us, cradled by a stormy wind that buries our paper whispers in the sand.

We light single sheets of want ads and burn them like witches against the black of lake.

Flinging the papers at the sky, burning birds of flight, we watch the wind tear them to echoes and stardots.

Then they fall as ashy rubble

to the rocky ruin

of the beach.

98

(Spring 2006)

Susan Nielson

Heaven and Snow lovely nothing, arranged inside a crystal riddle of ordained ice. miniscule perfection, shaped by shifting wind, like unformed thoughts that know a poem. lovely nothing, offering an emptiness, a chrysalis redeemed, a pristine hope of flight. lovely nothing. hidden, hollow, empty of hurt. defining heaven and snow with holes.

(Spring 2006)

99

Michael Palmer

Seven Moments of Red 1. First or seventeenth thing Sunday morning, I do not want to stand up in the cold bright room. Under newly laundered sheets, I am already tired from dreaming too intensely, and I pre­fer drowning my routine with imagination to the feel of the frigid floor below. The morning seems quiet except for my heart echo­ing synchronically with the water dripping from the bathroom faucet.

Eventually I will stand up—the trick which evades me each subsequent day—make coffee, and draw the blinds; it is noon, and the neglected sunlight shines in redly like anger.

First cup of coffee on Sunday morning seems like a pleasant, quiet time to sit and write. Sometimes over said cup I will pick up a pen, open a notebook like a vein, and try.

After bitter time and sun, though, this desire dissolves into dismay. The remnants of my initial writing ambition are spilled sloppily in my notebook: a coffee stain, a few lines of anything, and a note to self, suggesting I stop waking up so late on week­ends.

Sometimes I hear typing from the adjacent room—my more ambitious neighbor running away on his or her clamorous type­writer again. I initially despise and envy this person’s daily ambition (why am I not as diligent?), sometimes also blaming social circumstances of work, wealth, and fatigue. Then I begin to tell myself that tomorrow, with less on my mind, I will write more; next Sunday I will be free to write all day.

But there is no tomorrow; if I do not write now, when? Ultimately, therefore, I stop; I sew up my notebook and embrace my worthlessness like lost family.

2. Sometimes for inspiration and/or escape I will trek, note­book in hand, to the harsh hills in southern Utah. In late sum­mer, these antiquated geological scars look as though they were made only moments ago, with gallons and gallons of still drying paint—dark, wet, and bright red on top. Upon closer examina­tion they are dry, of course;

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(Fall 2005)

Palmer: Seven Moments of Red

finger painting efforts are futile; and aside from a far-reaching view, the climb seems for nothing. The hills do not seem to care.

This natural indifference is more apparent to me in the desert than other landscapes; cacti, for instance, are disturbingly self-sufficient and therefore unwelcoming. The desert does not seem cruel, only unnoticing, not even bothering to point out the irrelevance of one’s existence.

Is it because of this that I love it so?

But wading through the desert scars, trying to write their mystery and beauty usually leaves my notebook blank—not a single word is ever written and kept spontaneously.

3. Sleeping next to mysterious Utah Lake for the first time somewhere in the previous century, I asked myself what it must have been like when the lake hosted boat dances and so on, before the people were afraid the lake would make them sick.

It was midnight, and aside from the occasional watery dis­ruption from jumping carp, the lake seemed dead—this, our dance-free condition. Still, with the moon, the webs of stars, and the water—each quiet moment I considered potential poetry.

Looking back now over the several years of my frivolous life, I remember times like this, secretly coveting revelation; some­times even feeling despair when none came.

The more I live the more I realize I am unfit to write.

4. I would undergo, feel a tinge of this realization several years after Utah Lake, in a maroon hotel room overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

It was well past midnight this time, but I was again awake—in the moment where it doesn’t feel like nighttime anymore, instead like Dawn and Dusk at war.

Below, in addition to the laughing teenagers and hand-in-­hand couples, a twelvish-year-old boy in a red sweatshirt was spelling words with a stick in the sand for his parents—the words I could not read. This far after midnight, and still families on the loose.

Maybe it was early for them.

I thought about sleeping. Was it worth being tired all day just to watch this boy compose late-night sand poetry and smile?

I thought, maybe yes, maybe no.

Watching these people I knew I would never meet, with the arti-

101

ficial lights of the hotel hitting the ocean so coldly, I think I missed Utah. I imagined the desert moon, searching for me like a mother back home; never mind whether that moon was the same as the one glimmering pointlessly on the Pacific below.

I have never felt life to be so desperate, so slow, as in that maroon hotel room, watching the infinite waves twist and bend like glass, the moonlit ocean extending for miles and miles and miles.

Declaring the vastness of the ocean is a painstakingly unorig­inal observation, but there is something about the desire to touch it, to be just one minuscule part of its immensity, however fleet­ing, that reminds me very much of writing.

5. Between oceans and deserts and much greyer texts, I don’t know how I feel I have the right to write. What can I say? I know or don’t know what life is because I live it, and that’s all.

Still, I continue. Things go along thus—morning routines and the occasional escape to southern Utah—until one disrup­tion, until one day when someone over the phone tells me that another is gone, and my eyes burst like a flame.

Henceforth I will write and write and write for nights that which is of no use to anyone.

6. I have no realization to impart. I haven’t realized any­thing new; not today, not years ago on the ocean, nor the disrup­tive day on the phone. I read on the bus, I sleep in a warm bed. I drink coffee in the morning and write in my notebook when I am lost.

I do not know the exact language for outlasting those more worthy to live nor the precise syntax to accurately portray red southern Utah. I don’t know if language can depict anything absolutely.

But what it can do is a lot. “I miss you” is not everything, but it is something to me. So I try, embracing all futility, because my heart is a red, cold, open grave.

7. Presently, I do not visit the ocean, nor do I generally answer the telephone; but I still make the trip to the desert. I like to go at noon, when an overwhelming blue is coalescing overhead—the blue color of desert heat sticking onto the blue sky like a contact lens—this is the most calm I have experienced. Lying on a red rock then, the inconveniences of sweat and bothersome sand on my skin are diminished by the warm recognition of insignificance. Sometimes a lizard will protrude from under­neath a nearby rock abruptly, but mostly it

102

Palmer: Seven Moments of Red

is just colors blended together, silent and bright. This understanding of insignificance allows me to feel as though I am oscillating between existence one moment, nonexistence the next.

The desert at noon feels very alone. This aloneness is not loneliness as is, say, two people before bed, not sure how they became entangled with one another and desperately motioning in their last fatigue before sleep, eventually ceasing speech alto­gether and merely tapping the wooden bed frame in frustrated anxiety. Being alone in the desert is simply being alone in the desert.

Sometimes in the desert calm, I will tell myself that I ought to write the feeling, but instead just let it be. Later, I will curse myself for not being able to conjure that moment exactly as it felt, out there in the heat; then, I will simply hope that there is a glow­ing flame of the moment somewhere within.

I am still not sure why, even after leaving the desert, I feel the need to write and explore the mystery; nor do I know why I feel like becoming involved in the disgusting phenomenon of self-preservation.

It is just that there remains fire in my hair, on my skin—clearly something residual.

103

Darren Reid

Thomas Aquinas Trapped in the 21st Century His head cocks to the side.

It cocks again.

Turning and looking at the people, they don’t seem to mind.

He continues to rub the fine pages, his thumb caressing the paper woman in naked abundance. (is it flesh? is this a city?

And the paper . . . is this flesh?)

He studies the positions, the scenes and equipment, the explanations and expressions, the techniques and satisfied faces.

He cocks his head, and puts the magazine down.

The smell of apples hits his nose.

He cocks his head and stares at the skyline. (the gates of hell have never been so subtle, or at least so close to the marketplace) He tugs at his scarf— his fingers feel heavy.

104

(Fall 2002)

Renato Rodriguez

Corazones Como Pistolas Off the northwestern edge of Interstate 73, the venous Ophir Range fanned out wide open, spread its leftover sediment onto shallower ground, and threw its dust over the long row of short stables, where Joe swallowed the bodily smell of closely sheared sheep. Joe stepped tall into the early-day air and pulled the bandana off the lower half of his tan, pockmarked face. Limbs loosely hung, Joe turned and set his eyes on the help as they gathered the naked ewes with sticks, pressing them into a narrow, porous trailer. Wool lay bunched up in a couple of the shanties, and as the wind began to run cross-course over the earth, small bundles of dirt-lined, white boluses broke off the raw, thick mass and drifted.

The Chicanos downed their beers in Spanish and pitched the bottles through holes in the walls. Joe walked back toward them, pulling a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He caught and understood only fragments of the worn-out Spanish col­loquialisms. He rolled back his sleeves and joined the others as they started pairing up.

“Conrad,” said Joe, as he approached the shorter, older man in patched-up, gray clothing; Joe took the lit cigarette out of his mouth and handed it to Conrad, oral end first.

Conrad grabbed Joe’s arm, inspected it closely, and ritualistically brought the burning end of the cigarette to bear on the boxy hinds of the redbugs that burrowed comfortably into Joe’s arms.

“Little shits,” said Conrad. “Hold still, mijo.”

The focused heat felt cool, like cold metal pressed against sweatslicked skin. Joe relaxed a bit as Conrad turned his arms over. “I have some extra herramientas if you want,” Joe said into Conrad’s white hair.

“If you’re still working on that car, you might want to take a look at what I got.”

“Tengo so many. They’re all just scattered all over the place,” answered Conrad. “Okay, mijo, you’re all done.”

(Spring 2006)

105

The pairs of men exchanged roles. They unconsciously supported the arms of the others with their cracked hands and methodically wiped the skin clear of chiggers. Aided by the alcohol, rough fidelity surged through each of them; their words danced and were followed by successions of loud laughter, a license earned by the day’s work and reinforced with descriptions and songs—“THAT’S A GOOD SONG, MAN”—of fifteen-year-old girls. Geared up to spend their money, they swung into their faded trucks and shot out east, toward the city.

Joe waited ’til the caravan hooked round and passed the southern point of the mountain. He watched the mid-sun pushing its gold color into the cornered greens of the sprouting grasses, into the remote shades of coal-washed rocks, outing the tracks of rust on a straight, cut-off portion of exhaust pipe that rested in the back of his pickup.

Joe drove in the same direction as the others. In fourth gear, the separate pieces, the separate components that made up the truck, pinged where they joined together. Even the clutter on the floor rattled: the empty paper cups, the gas receipts, stray bolts, cassettes, the warped pages of porn magazines, the long barreled revolver that Ulla had bought him as a reconciliation gift and as a means to fidelity. These things forbade distraction and projected on to Joe a thin course of relational introspection.

Joe’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. Joe easily formed an image of Ulla’s face—triangular in shape, brown eyes framed by her filledout cheeks, her wrap-around lips, and black hair that resisted chemical stiffeners—but, in Joe’s imagination, Ulla’s body was always hidden by her white nurse’s uniform, an unequivocal symbol, Joe thought, of her inestimability. Not a mystery; rather, it resembled resistance.

Ulla wore the white shoes, the white stockings, and the double-breasted uniform dress that many other nurses discarded for the regular two-piece scrubs. The cleanness was something Ulla dis­played with an upright saunter. For amid the vomit sloshing in pink basins, sheets saturated with loose stool and brown urine, patients surrounded by wet tissues that hid lung mucus in their centers, the general nursing staff contributed to the fact that Ulla’s uniforms never became stained with the aforementioned; a miracle, proof, said the hospital chaplain,

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Rodriguez: Corazones Como Pistolas

that La Virgin de Guadalupe privileged St. Mary’s Memorial Hospital above all other hospitals in the city.

Ulla placed her right hand on feverish foreheads as if, by doing so, she could take into herself the patients’ pain. The old men, re­coiling into senility, reached for her breasts with their shaking hands as Ulla bent over them to listen to their relapsing hearts; she batted away their weak fingers and scolded them with motherly disappoint­ment.

During Ulla’s shift, the older women patients, their desire to thrive doused by their demanding families, called out the names of their lost sisters. Carol Ann, shriveled and shrunken by cancer, told Ulla of the dark lining that can form around one’s soul when the body begins to eat itself.

“My mother died of cancer, you know,” Carol Ann said. “I was thirteen when she was diagnosed. My aunt moved in with us. It was just me and my older brother at the time. My father had to travel often. He was in the Merchant Marines. He tried when he was home, you know, but it just made my mother angry, the way he tried to comfort her, like he was pretending. We kept her in the house. The doctor told us that it would have been no use taking her to a hospital when she got real sick.

The best thing was to keep her comfortable. So we did, or we tried to at least. I can remember, though, one day she asked me to read her a story. I was so happy to do this for her that I grabbed the first book I saw. You know what it was?”

“No, hon,” Ulla replied. “What was it?”

“The Velveteen Rabbit,” Carol Ann answered, with a whispered chuckle. She licked the sores on her lips with her dry tongue. “I began to read it. I changed my voice, even, to match the characters, but the more I read, the more she seemed to hate me. . . . She turned her head toward the window and covered her eyes with her arm. Her legs moved back and forth underneath the sheets, and I watched them, wondering if she was in pain. I wanted to go get my aunt so that she could give her something, but I kept on reading till my words just trailed off. And then I just sat there watching her, like she was some new kind of animal.”

Carol Ann smiled weakly and turned off the lights above her head; she brought down her cap past her eyes. Ulla stood and replaced empty I.V. bags with full ones. Ulla stepped out of the room, past the

107

general staff, down to the end of the hall, into the stairwell, found her car, and drove home with the visor against the side window, an ineffectual pall and remedy for the shift that she did not finish.

Joe and Ulla met up at Montgomery Hoist’s: Indoor Shooting and Archery. Ulla leaned, aimed, and in a furious string of bullets, emptied the cylinder of her five-inch, large-frame revolver. Her hands and arms deadened by the striking sting of the kickback, the burnt gunpowder itching the insides of her nostrils. Joe raised his gun from his side, brought the sight to an abstract apex in space where Joe felt the target to be, and returned the gun to his side to begin the cycle again.

For Ulla, the act of shooting was enough. The forces of action, reaction, were stripped down to their gravest essentials, pull and push.

She glanced at Joe often enough. She weighed his physical attributes against an imaginary image of him as a woman; his legs and thighs retained their muscularity; his pelvis, slightly broader; same stomach and back, compact shoulders, the chicken pox scars remained, and Ulla insisted on keeping his penis.

They went to Ulla’s apartment, bowed and energized. On the couch, Joe took off Ulla’s boots and massaged the balls of her feet.

Ulla rested her head back, stared at the ceiling, and summoned the trenchant urge from the deepest, fixed need of her sex, for her sex.

They made love. Joe made the mistake of saying, “I love you,” sweating, with her legs over his shoulders. But Ulla reached behind and pulled him farther in. She cried. She shook. She was resurrected in the pushing, in the synthesis. She wept.

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Kai Samuelsen

Cacophony “It was a Tuesday, I remember. I was about halfway between the subway station and my bus stop . . .”

“It was one of those amazing days you get in early October—sky completely overcast, but not wet; one of those days the pavement seems to bleed into the sky . . .” “. . . there were a couple of Hispanic kids down the street, playing something bass-heavy in a boombox . . .”

“There was a traffic jam—the whole street about two blocks in any given direction. Cars were honking, naturally—a couple at each other, one or two at a homeless guy with a dirty rag and entrepreneurial sprit.” “. . . not even real music, just a continual thump thump thump to dance to . . .” “. . . cold, but not like freezing, or really uncomfortably cold. Like in soap commercials when they show like a waterfall, or when the waves hit a rocky coast and it sprays up—bracing, I guess . . . ” “It didn’t seem intentional. I was on the subway once, when a couple of college guys staged a happening, and this wasn’t like that.

It just felt genuine—sincere, you know? Like Oprah.” “. . . I thought Hispanics were supposed to be good dancers, but these kids couldn’t even seem to find the beat. It shouldn’t have been that hard, just that thump thump thump . . .”

“There were a couple of street musicians—I admit that much.

But I don’t see how they could have orchestrated it; in fact, one of them had just broken a string, and the other one was tuning at the time. I definitely didn’t hear a guitar. That I know.”

“The Johnsons’ dog downstairs was barking again. I could hear people through my open window: singing in the shower, yelling from balconies, Springer on loud in someone’s apartment. Not like so you could understand what they were saying or anything—just noise, coming in through the window I opened to enjoy this bracing breeze.”

(Spring 2006)

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“These guys had all gathered on the train that night—planned it ahead of time, getting on at different stops, some sitting near one end, some near me—and all dressed like gang members. I guess like I’d expect gang members to dress—it’s not like I go to their fashion shows. I guess a bunch of people could have done it that way, met on that block at that time—but it would take so many people, and for who? Me?” “I guess in a way, I was contributing—whistling something. I think it was that Radiohead song. ‘Don’t leave me high,’ that part. So it had to be spontaneous, you see.”

“There was this warning, or something. Like when you go to a concert or symphony and everyone finishes tuning up and suddenly there’s this hole left in the air. All the cars honked at once, and then there was this moment of quiet. I was just like, standing there, reflecting on that eye of the hurricane kind of urban moment.”

“These guys all of a sudden yell at each other from across the train, and it wakes me up—I’d been just kind of staring out the window— and all of a sudden I’m paying attention to this, what I immediately sized up to be an exceedingly, like, volatile situation. They hold for a second, just one second—this really tense silence. And these guys start walking toward each other, tough at first, but all of a sudden the two guys in the lead bend over slightly, and start snapping their fingers, and all of a sudden everyone on the train is treated to a song and dance moment from West Side Story. Everyone in the train laughs, and we tip the guys—they pass around a hat. I tossed a ten in; probably bought beers that night.”

“Suddenly, all the noise, everything, becomes momentarily more than the sum of its parts, and the horns and dogs and everything are all in the same rhythm. It sounds like music. I hear like a horn, and then a note in the hip-hop song, and then a bell, and the notes string together like a necklace, and there’s this melody. Beethoven, The Ninth, like two full bars. And then everything goes silent again, and I look down the block, and everyone is looking at each other, like wondering who masterminded it. And we all look at each other and start laughing, every one of us, for a whole square block.”

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Megan Scott

Anacortes Art Festival, 2002 Look at these stained and shaking hands. When did these become my hands? Standing here in this strange place looking for strangers, my fingers once again feeling my back pocket and the wallet that holds everything I am: cash, checks, the number of my sponsor, and a faded photograph of a dark daughter and a blond boy whose faces have cohabited my conscience nearly two decades. How did seventeen years slip through my fingers like so much spare change?

All I want is for a grand, giggling girl to come and kiss these fingertips, and a small, steadfast son to slip his hand in mine.

But I am afraid she will be somber, he will be a man, and I will be fumbling.

Actually all I want is a Guinness, but a man can’t flee forever and at fifty-four, what used to fly like freedom begins to fall like fear.

So I will stand right here, hiding hands in hip pockets, and search for tiptilted

(Spring 2003)

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eyes and uncertain strides­—and maybe, if I buy them ice cream and listen to their lives, they will find a little room there for me.

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Christine Spencer

I Dreamt I Had a Pen This is for mixing sugar with strawberries in my Grandmother’s stiff, white kitchen, for her raisin-asparagus meals and five gold forks for dinner, and for listening to Grandpa, talking in circles in the living room on a pink sofa, telling the same story about playing the trumpet in a parade and meeting his first wife and playing the trumpet in a parade.

This is for my tomboy haircut in second grade, for the blue Vans I stole with my best friend when her mom wasn’t looking, for doing the moonwalk in the Primary talent show with the boy who kissed me behind a garbage can at Albertson’s, for fourteen years later, when I wanted to kiss a German stranger in the Rudolf-Diener Strasse right in the middle of a conversation about Plato’s shadows and why the man can’t forgive his father.

This is for last month, when it was snowing inside the building on an empty afternoon full of dead trees and new carpet; when the fluorescent pink fliers, curling up from the tack strip in the fourth hour of a storm, pulled the diagonal flowing of January down the hallway sideways.

This is my chance to say, I want raindrops falling in a picture. I want a window to clear out my mind. I want energy and a manicure and a steak and to write a poem about a tuba.

I want to do art, and my hands are cold, and I have given nothing in the last seven months. My doubts have long since been resolved, but my friends keep staring at me like I stopped thinking hours ago, when really my head is blurring from the language that surrounds us or maybe from not knowing words.

I haven’t slipped or broken anything all week, but I feel like I’m continually getting up from a bicycle wreck, from too much rain in my shoes, from melting out of the back row and into my little brother’s winter wedding plans, my uncle’s crooked house in hurricane-prone New Orleans, my attic prayers in search of a way to understand my attic prayers.

(Fall 2002)

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I move toward the place where fog eclipses mountain. Behind a pair of purple sunglasses, I still look the same. The earth is wet. The clouds around my contentment are condensing. My soil is thick, heaven’s water warm.

This is what this is for. This is what this is for.

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Sophie Standish

Leaving a Snowgirl to Sulk His hair burst into flame, illuminating the dark forest, full of whispering spiders, slithering leaves, and a smooth, silken silence.

I am blue all over with icicle arms drawn to his crackling crown.

Because the sky was falling we felt taller and taller.

Maybe we weren’t taller but our lives were lengthening.

The wind recited a pied piper poem, and his sparks and cinders became stars.

(Spring 2004)

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Laura Stott

Cat’s Eye Have you ever taken a handful of marbles, spilled them into March, and let them crack as they hit the surface?

Sky blue, never discontinuation blue.

Not orange sounds on the ears of thunder who holds out his hands to the crow.

The voice of the wing cuts through his ears, and we run into the blue sky raining.

I could hold it in my hands—yellow ochre hue.

It sounds like two saying, two said, Not exactly.

I look at the sky, wanting I could shatter its wigwam and play marbles in its attic.

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(Fall 1998)

Karen Strang

It’s a Girl Thing When I was a little girl, my Aunt Olive sat me down after we had finished watching Cinderella and told me Prince Charming didn’t exist and all men were bastards. I called her a pooh-pooh head, which I still say is the worst insult one can receive, and ran crying to my mother. I asked her if it was true. Were all men bastards?

“Absolutely not,” she replied. “Maybe seventy-five or eighty-five percent, but not all of them.”

And so being raised by my mother and my five aunts, this was to be my comfort and my reality. Yes, somewhere out there were fifteen to twenty-five guys out of a hundred who weren’t bastards. I suppose this worked for me. I don’t have any high school heartbreak stories the way that most girls do because I was never let down. You can’t be let down when you have such low expectations. I guess it worked. But growing up in a household of strong women who spoke openly of sex, organized protests against bras and Barbies, and practiced daily rituals of meditation to help them purge any anger about the way society viewed them, you’d think I’d have turned out differently. You’d think I’d be more aware of, well, everything.

But as it turns out, I’m not very bright. I have little to no common sense, and I feel clueless most of the time. I suppose I came to this conclusion when that play got popular. You know, the one about the talking vaginas? Of course the play was given to me several times by every woman in my family.

“Can you blame me for hating them?” This was often the topic of conversation at my therapy sessions. “Do you know what it’s like to be sitting around a table with your mother, your aunts and their friends after they’ve just given you a copy of The Vagina Monologues for a birthday present? ‘Oh, she’s growing up so fast. Has she experienced intercourse yet?’ Or how about at the grocery store when you’re getting ready to check out and you notice that the check stand boy is the cute one from your English class? You smile and all seems to be going well until you hear your Aunt Gertrude shouting, ‘Hey,

(Fall 2004)

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grab me a copy of that magazine on your left. There’s a great article in there on female masturbation.’ Do you know how many times prayers of, ‘Please let me die. Please let me die right now,’ have gone through my head?” Being a strict Catholic, my therapist had a hard time relating.

But the fact remains, when that play came out my mother and my aunts considered it their personal calling to help liberate the word vagina. Yes, they helped set it free. Set it free, they would say. You know, like if it came back to them it was theirs but if not, it was never really theirs to begin with. Either way, I was suffering because of it.

I was exhausted after the countless times I had heard them saying it and talking about it as if before this nobody knew vaginas existed.

Calling it “that area” was a sin at my house and they would discuss it at coffeehouses, bars, and book clubs. And the questions they asked.

What would it say? What would it wear? How does it feel? Is your vagina depressed? It was humiliating, but it didn’t stop there. Oh no. As if I weren’t a big enough freak already, they decided to offer classes. That’s right. Classes, lectures, and workshops to help women everywhere understand how to use them and discover them the way a scientist discovers a cure for some disease. Women from all over town were crowding into their classrooms for the opportunity to straddle a mirror and have a look. Flyers hung from every telephone pole screaming, “Come and explore what makes you a woman” or “Join us for an evening of self discovery” and “Get to know your vagina.” I didn’t ignore them because I couldn’t, but believe me I tried.

Maybe it was because I was going through a stage and I needed to rebel against all authority figures. That was my Aunt Charlotte’s explanation. But I think it was because I didn’t really want to know my vagina. I didn’t know what it would wear or how it felt and if it could have talked, it probably would have said quit asking me so many damn questions. But more than anything, I think it was because I was tired of being known as the girl who lived with her mother and her five Aunt Vaginas.

That’s why that night was so important to me. I wanted it to go well. My stomach felt sour from nerves. His name was Eric, and he was unlike anyone I had ever met because I had never heard him use the word vagina. He was intelligent, witty and beautiful. I wanted to bite his neck from the moment I first smelled him. I know that

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sounds strange, but his scent was intoxicating. Whenever he spoke, everything around me felt like it was moving in slow motion. He had asked me out before, but I always told him I was busy. I didn’t want him to meet my mother or my aunts. I could just see my mother giving him a basket of condoms and my Aunt Virginia, passing out advice on pleasuring a woman. They had all left for the weekend to attend a sexual energy conference. I knew this was the only chance I’d have to pretend I didn’t come from a strange family of female vagina activists. Eric and I worked together with Elly and Charles. I had known Charles for years. When I told Charles about Eric and me going out, he insisted he and Elly come along.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and tried to apply some lipstick.

But I felt like a little girl playing dress up, so I took some tissue, wiped it off, and decided to forget the lipstick.

When I walked out of the bathroom, Elly and Charles were waiting for me. “You should put some lipstick on,” Charles said. “You look ill.” Charles was from Boston, and sometimes I wanted to smack him.

He was always so arrogant. He was also thin, pale, and he had no upper lip whatsoever. But the worst part was, he liked my mother and my aunts. He thought they were great. I always called him Chuck, which he hated, and accused him of being secretly gay. I told him there was no shame in admitting it and that most girls would actually be quite relieved to hear it.

Truthfully, I knew he wasn’t gay. He was in love with Elly, even though he would never admit it. But Elly wouldn’t date anyone she worked with and she always made this very clear. Not after James, she’d say. And she’d say it in this dramatic, sophisticated, Greta Garbo kind of way and then she’d change the subject. It gave me goosebumps.

When the doorbell rang at six o’clock, my stomach jumped. In my thin high-heels, I ran to the door just as Charles was about to answer it and pushed him out of the way onto the floor. I opened it and there was Eric. My thighs went numb and I hoped Charles was still close by in case I couldn’t keep my balance. “Hi. Come in,” I said. As he walked by me, I inhaled deeply. His scent made me even weaker. We all sat down, each holding a drink, and began making small talk. Eric was so different from the people I had always known. When he talked he would use big words. He used them incorrectly, but it didn’t bother

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me because I loved the way they sounded when he said them. I tried to focus and not appear too anxious, but I began ringing my fingers.

Maybe he would never have to meet my mother or my aunts. I could hear their voices in my head.

“Even if you don’t know what your vagina would say, I’ll bet she’s offering a reward to anyone who can find her g-spot.” I could hear them laughing. “And, Sweety, trust me. That boy has no training in g-spot hunting.” I tried to ignore their voices.

After a few drinks, we headed for the restaurant. When we got there, Eric opened my door and offered his hand to me. My mother would be so pissed right now, I thought to myself. But I liked the way it felt to have him help me out of the car. Any help felt good to me. Inside, we were quickly seated.

Eric smelled good. He must wear cologne, I thought. If men only knew what the right cologne did to women, they would never go anywhere without it. Eric ordered for me and then began telling a story about an article he had written for the paper earlier that month. I knew he was talking, but it was everything I could do to pay attention to what he was saying instead of climbing onto his lap and unbuttoning my dress. He talked a lot that evening, but I didn’t mind. I was used to being quiet. I actually preferred it.

I had refused to go to the conference with my mother and my aunts that weekend. When I told them no, it caused an argu­ment.

But I wasn’t like them. “Why do you think every woman needs to have these stupid learning experiences with their vagi­na? It’s ridiculous. Men don’t have them. You never see a flyer that says, ‘Come join us for an evening of beer, football, and the opportunity to get to know your penis.’ They don’t care, so why the hell should I?” Yes, this is what I said to them. My mother, my Aunt Olive, my Aunt Gertrude, my Aunt Charlotte, my Aunt Virginia, and my Aunt Harriet. But I didn’t stop there. “And why is it that you only ever invite women to these conferences? Why not men? Why don’t you ever offer to teach them all this crap you claim to know so much about. Aren’t they the ones who real­ly need it, you stupid old-maid hypocrites?” A deathly sort of silence fell over the vagina clan as my mother gasped and dropped the dish in her hand. Don’t panic, I thought to myself. Don’t cave. But I knew what I had done in their eyes. In that moment, I had flipped off Aphra Behn and Dorothy Parker. I had told Gloria

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Steinam to go to hell and they were sure that Susan B. Anthony was clawing through her coffin just so she could come and kick my ass.

But I wasn’t giving in. I was an adult and I was sure of this as I ran to my bedroom screaming, “I hate you all. I wish I was never born.”

I slammed the door and fell on my bed, face-planting my pillow. My cheeks were hot, but I refused to cry.

It was difficult to swallow my food at dinner that evening. This was mostly because I didn’t like chicken, which Eric had ordered for me. My stomach was turning all night. Every time Eric moved, his leg brushed up against mine. I sat there watch­ing his lips and trying very hard to keep myself from leaning over and licking them.

“So, when does Eric get to meet the family,” Charles asked when Eric had stepped over to another table to say hello to an old friend.

“He doesn’t,” I said.

“Well, I have a feeling the aunts are going to have some­thing to say about that.”

“Leave her alone,” Elly said. “Let her enjoy it while she can.”

Elly understood, I thought to myself. “Listen, when we’re about to leave, will you make up some excuse why the two of you can’t come over to my place?”

“Sure,” Elly said. By now she was drunk and would have agreed to almost anything.

“Wait a minute,” Charles said. “You hardly know this guy.”

“I know him well enough.”

“No you don’t,” Charles said. “For all you know he could be a serial killer.”

“Well, I realize he pales in comparison to the classy hookers you usually date, but we can’t all be as refined as you. So butt out, Chuck.

I like him.”

“I know you think you do, but you don’t. The only thing you like about him is that he doesn’t know anything about you.”

“Hey, Gidget,” Elly said referring to Charles. “I told you. Leave her alone and stop acting like some damn jealous boyfriend. “ I started to laugh. I thought it was funny until I realized that Charles wasn’t laughing. Instead, he was sitting there with an almost hurt look on his face. It was the look of a jealous boyfriend. Slowly things became a little clearer to me, and my small laugh quickly turned into an awkward gasp for air. I told you I’m not very bright.

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“You,” but I didn’t know what else to say. “You pooh-pooh head.” I stood up and walked away. I didn’t really understand why I was so angry, but I had the urge to flee the scene. I met Eric halfway across the restaurant. I took him by the hand and whispered in his ear. “Will you please take me home?” His eyes opened wide, he kissed my cheek and led me to the car. On the way out I glanced at Charles. He was still sitting at the table looking at me. His eyes were sharp and filled with disappointment. Disappointment in me. He shook his head, closed his eyes and turned away. I got into Eric’s car and we left.

But Eric didn’t take me home. Instead, he drove to a near­by park and suggested we take a walk. It was next to the ceme­tery where my grandmother was buried, but I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t feel like talking. But then, I never felt like talking. Eric held my hand and talked about himself as we walked towards the cemetery.

When I was little, my mother use to teach art classes at the college.

One night she brought home a drawing that one of her students had given her. It was an abstract drawing of the female anatomy. I used to lie on my stomach and stare at it for hours until one day I took a pair of scissors and cut it up into tiny pieces. When my mother saw what I had done, she didn’t get angry with me. Instead, she took all the pieces I had cut up and glued them together on a large canvas.

She told me it was still art, just reinvented art. She hung it up on the wall and called it Creation Ruined.

“Why did we leave the restaurant?” I had become so caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t realize Eric was asking me a question.

“What?” I asked him.

“Why did you want to leave the restaurant so quickly?”

“Probably because I’m a woman and it’s in our nature to be emotional and cause scenes.” Eric laughed. But truthfully, this stereotype is one of the things I hate most about being a girl. It isn’t that I’m ashamed of what makes me a woman, it’s just that sometimes I’m so jealous of men. They seem so free and able to move about.

I haven’t met one yet who carries pepper spray on his key chain or one who’s scared to walk to his car alone late at night. They sleep wherever, whenever. But not women. Like dogs we are chained to the feminine hygiene isle at the grocery store, forced to always carry cotton tubes, antibiotics, and special creams with us. Our wilderness still contains an out­house and a kitchen. And our bedrooms will

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always display a picture book story of Cinderella with no red stain on the back of her dress.

I looked around and realized that Eric and I had walked to the middle of the cemetery. No one else was around. Well, no one with a heartbeat. It sounds strange, but I always liked the cemetery. It always made me feel calm. It was dark outside, but I felt warm. I didn’t know if it was because of how angry I had been or if it was just Eric. He was still holding my hand when he stopped walking. “What is it,” I asked. But he didn’t say any­thing. He just looked at me and smiled as he leaned in and kissed me. I loved the way he tasted and the way he felt, but I was confused. Suddenly there was a sharp stabbing pain in the back of my head and it was pounding. I felt dizzy and when I looked up, everything was spinning. It took me a moment to catch my breath, which had been knocked out of me, but I couldn’t understand what from. I realized then that I was on the ground and I didn’t know why. I hadn’t fainted, but my dress was covered in mud.

I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. Something was holding me down. It was Eric. The force of his hands had pushed me to the ground and he was now on top of me. He began kissing me harder and crushing me under the weight of his body. He felt so heavy, I thought he would squish through me to the ground. The word stop came out of my mouth very softly. It was intended to be loud, but Eric slapped it quiet. As I strug­gled, I began to lose motivation. I fought to scream, but could­n’t. This is it, I thought to myself. It’s going to happen. I could stop struggling and it would happen. I could keep struggling and it would still happen. It didn’t matter either way. I didn’t matter.

My muffled noises and thrashing about were nothing more to him than a mild obstacle. He held my arms above my head with one hand and kept me quiet with his mouth. He told me to stop moving and it wouldn’t hurt so much. It was happening to me.

“Why do you hate the word vagina so much?” my mother had asked me.

“I don’t know. Maybe because it sounds like something from a textbook. Vaginas are kind of like wrestlers or mobsters. Each one should have a nickname like Betty the Bareback, Tina the Tongue, or Liver Lips Lucy. Honestly, Mom, do you think a guy would mess with a girl if she told him her vagina’s name was Liver Lips Lucy?”

My mother laughed when I said this and tucked my hair behind

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my left ear with her fingers the way she always did when she was proud of me. I loved being alone with her. When we were alone, she always made me feel like every­thing would be okay. She made me feel special. Special in a normal way. But with five aunts helping to raise me, we were never alone. Except me, I was always alone.

I don’t know where it came from, the courage. But I opened my mouth and let Eric’s lower lip slide in. I bit down as hard as I could.

“God damn it. You bitch.”

He sat up and grabbed his lip, which was covered in blood. He looked down at me and let the blood drizzle out of his mouth and onto my face. I tightened my knuckles and closed my eyes. With my right fist, I hit his nose as hard as I could. It was gush­ing with blood when he fell on the ground.

“You bitch. You’re all the same. Sluts and bitches.”

I stood up as quickly as I was able to. Eric’s face was buried in the mud and he was moaning. I took off my right shoe and walked over to him. He looked pathetic and for a moment, I felt sorry for him. But the feeling faded quickly and when he looked up at me, I smashed the side of his face with the sharp heel of my shoe. I took off my other shoe, grabbed my bag, and walked away, leaving Eric alone on the ground with half a face. I was unsure what to do and my head was pounding, so I walked to the nearest gas station and telephoned the only per­son I could think of to call. “Hello,” I heard Charles say on the other end of the phone. “Hello,” he said again. But I couldn’t speak. I just stood there without words until eventually he hung up the phone. My vagina had fallen silent, not ready to tell its story.

In the end we liberate the word, the experiences, the con­cepts, and possibly even the image, but not the acceptance. What has any of it really accomplished?

They don’t think I see, but behind each vagina, each move­ment, each tear, each bruise, behind the raped, the pregnant, the victims, the survivors, and the protesters, one of them is standing there rolling his eyes. This has broken me, and I’m nothing more than cut up pieces of disappointment.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often any words are said. I will always be looked at as psychotic when I’m angry, boring when I’m tired, naive when I read a romance novel, unintelli­gent when I watch TV, a prude when I say no to a one night stand, a slut when I say yes,

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pretentious when I go to the opera, unladylike when I swear, lazy when I sleep, pessimistic when I am realistic, a bitch for defending myself, cold when I am hon­est, and asking for it when I agree to a late night walk. Above all, anytime I show emotion or express a strong opinion and decide not to Mary Astell my way through life, they’ll diagnose me with the well-known medical condition, PMS. As a woman I know it’s my responsibility to help change things and make a difference for my sex, but everyday my head aches more than the day before. I’m becoming less of an obstacle.

So Ms. Ensler, please don’t ever stop the words. They have become amphetamines for this naive girl who will learn to speak. And though I still love and believe in men, I just found out that millions of Prince Charmings do exist. Unfortunately, some of them are kind of bastards.

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Michael Erin Strong

Golden Drapes From my bed, through my too-expensive drapes, it’s another day.

The threat of another day passed, in fact, twelve hours ago, and it’s officially the crack-of-noon. I wallow in the warmth of my body heat, held so tightly in flannel sheets beneath seven layers of fluffy snowmen blankets and a heavy ruby-colored silk bedspread from India. I hide my childish side on the inside, held to my body through snowmen and Winnie-the-Pooh underwear, and I hide myself on the inside of the womb-warm bed.

It’s time to peek, and I do reluctantly, through the golden drapes that compliment the rubies and emeralds of my room: outside it could seem bleak, all white, but to me it’s like Christmas in my seventh year. In my seventh year when I was home in the house where my parents were one body in my mind, and my brothers were one sibling, and I knew the Truth about Santa but still smiled at Christmas.

The thick mounds of whiteness layer everything from benches to roofs and trees, and even the one person crazy enough to be walking by. His hat is the bland blue of local BYU, and his walk is as stiff as that, too, but with all of his whiteness he seems a statue of God with chiseled cheek. It is all white.

The golden drapes slip through my weak, morning fingers with aches that remind me of how sweet it was in my seventh year to sleep this late—those sweet aches like kisses from lovers and friends, reminding one of the nuances that are truly blessings, like the heavy snow. Snow like blankets on my bed, layer by layer, washing the world white again. From my bed I feel as though I’m wrapped in warm winter snow, heavy and layered over my body, washing me white, tingeing my lips blue. Sweet sleep.

My Lasik-burnt eyes feel dry and I seek to escape the warmth of snow with cold eye drops. Then, kitten-pawing the curtain back, again I see. It’s all and white, all, that all is there, and all white, that all is hidden. Like an education, the snow layers what already is

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(Spring 2007)

Strong: Golden Drapes

firm and existent, fooling naïve eyes into believing that what’s hidden is lost or retrained. Yet, the foundation remains to create the beautiful blemishes in a perfectly whited world.

Last night I drove home at 4 a.m. on streets that were awash in a foot of snow, as heavy as death but as sweet and powdery as Victorian wigs and whigs and olden tyme joys like figs. The snow is a joy like a toy from Santa’s workshop: built by one for another, built to be durable and solid. It’s an olden tyme joy that makes me consider leaving my bedding in birth of a day.

I twirl the golden silk curtains in my blue-nailed hands, contemplating the crisp cold that had hidden between the glass and solid curtain. As my fingers tingle with cold and my nose begins to feel the pinking effects of this chill, I sigh a breath nearly visible.

Last night as I drove home, I wondered where the deer tracks would have been had we not become a manifestation of manifest destiny. Would there have been deer even there? I wondered as I drove round a round-about three times, creating the first three tracks. From the next room, I hear a faint laugh to a canned crack, “It’s colder than a polar bear’s fart in here”and now I know that they’re awake, too.

The drapes slip through my fingers, such pretty curtains against my pale hands makes me feel like a hemophiliac child of a Russian Czar. Would that I were so royal, though my house’s heating would be on, and my finished homework would be available. I laugh, and now they know, too, that I’m awake.

Outside I hear a truck skirting the subject of a whited world from our minds. It rumbles, creating holes in the ozone with its black fumes, creating holes in the layers of learned assimilation betwixt the trees, homes, and streets.

The sniffles I hear are my own, and I feel the wetness on my lashes like paper cuts. The cold is permeating my consciousness, and still there’s the threat of actually getting out of bed. The drapes radiate this threat. Their opulence, my resolve to afford such things in earnest, not just in credit, their existence my reminder that I too must be stood up and beholden.

And somehow I sit up and pull my snowangel PJ bottoms on two legs at one time, then walk out to the kitchen to wave my roommates away. Their cliché: that they’re actually going to

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grandmother’s house, through the white and icy snow. I wave as they drive away after scraping for five minutes at their windshield, speculating as to which Mormon male neighbor must have shoveled our walkways for us. I wave them away and return to my bed, now not as comfortable, not as warm nor the blankets as straight.

Although I try to return to my bed and reclaim that earnest whited feeling about the day and the snow, I feel anxious to be about, anxious about driving about in the snow, and now a little sad that I’m home alone in this unheated hellhole of mice, warped wooden frames that prevent doors from soundly closing, and sounds. The sounds that do usually leak through these warped cracks in doors and windows are the ones that at first irritated, then comforted me as a resident in this new place. It is nice to know when someone is laughing, and not know why, and it is lovely to sleep a deep slumber regardless of vacuums and laundry loads.

Now I look through the drapes like raising my eyelids, without effort, with the affectionate aches of morning resolved into eager energy, and the curtains don’t lightheartedly cleave to my hands, but my hands strangle them into a tight grasp. The snow is cold and the house is empty, and my bed no longer wants my warmth.

As I drove home last night with wonderment in my eyes like snowflakes tritely hanging on eyelashes, I felt a spirit of the land before our time. In the olden tymes, these snows owned the lands, and blanketed them at will until the mother of nature came and washed cold away with rays of new cycles. Cold begat warmth begat spring begat babies begat body-heat-hot summer begat over-ripened autumn begat deathly-cold winter begat older babies breaking the cycle with smog-ridden trucks on previously deertrodden roads. This line makes sense one hour into a day.

Now on my belly, Winnie-the-Pooh down, I bite my bottom lip and watch the neighborhood come awake in my consciousness because, as proven by the shoveled walkways and already dressedand-gone roommates, the world did not wait for me. The roads were now more than plowed but also driven, snow lifting mud, creating murky waves in whiteness.

There’s a half-eaten blueberry pancake cold on the kitchen counter, and even that is more interesting to my morning grumbles than this imperfect scene. I get it and chew slowly, wondering which

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Strong: Golden Drapes

roommate cooked and which complained lovingly. There’s a bird as lost as I am sitting on my shed, probably wondering why it’s been empty-nested, and where its family is gone. My family is gone.

Sniffles like ruptures of snow through a film, one moment Jean Harlow, the next snow; one moment black and white cinema, the next dappled with winter; sniffles to unexplain the scene, to withdraw my mind from higher thoughts than Kleenex. Poor Alouette, how would he wipe his nez?

I’m full-awake and aching not with morning, with action, and the snow outside begs to be distorted into my own view of it, into snow-KGB-men or snowballs for ensuing wars. I am awake and ready with artillery. I am awake and thinking of my Peace Corps appointment. And I shall miss the protection of the golden drapes when I live where they were produced, and I will fear not anymore the Truth in their production.

As I get out of bed for the last time in this morning, as I shower and dress without the guile of an innocent childhood, not in Winnie-the-Poohs but in black lace, as I prepare my mind to ready itself for unpredictable problems, all I really feel is the weight of the snow. The heavy layers of sameness. I feel my assimilation into the roads of this manifested destiny, and my soul is reluctant to leave for someone else’s land.

My artillery of snow is ready, though, and it’s time to be away to the Middle East on a peacekeeping mission. I’ll TEFL the locals and charm their children away from becoming radicals, or I’ll try.

My body’s cold and white-washed. My nails are full-blue with lips a similar shade. I’m shaking; not with cold. I’m packing with television snow before me, not knowing between the lapses what’s hidden in layers. Before I hide my black-laced self behind layers of protection, layers upon layers of black muslin in practice, before I lay aside my pink Gap mittens, I want to be blistered with the white. I want to be that whited. I shall shake with the cold realization that there isn’t enough snow to freeze one idea into place.

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Natanya Ann Sturgill

Gapp’s Basement: The Lone Wolf We lured her from the sidelines with bread sticks and chocolate, let go her mucused eye, scattered hair.

She ducked and backed with her head.

In fall, she lay down near the Trifle River, dropped her sagged nose, and smoothed a smile.

We clasped our hands like springs and held her paws when she pounced to the sky.

A crow, she blacks her natural wings.

I see the steam from her beak, she says: “Take steps back to see the full moon rise and then rise again.”

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(Fall 1997)

Swen Swenson

A Yugoslavian Love Poem It wasn’t the bullets, aimless,

swarms of locusts feeding on

friends.

It wasn’t family taken

in the night to find the disappearing

cause of nationalism.

It wasn’t the burnt house sunk into

the hillside under the weight

of generations.

But you, mirroring my broken

emotion, oblivious of the river saturated with

the bridge’s debris.

(Fall 2002)

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Tanya Terry

Firstborn Part I Seventeen years old. Desperation in quiet isolation. A lone labor.

With no deliverer. He is taken from her hands, out and away. Rosary beads placed on empty palms. Exhausted and torn. Her heart beats through thumbs that press and press and never produce sweet wine. Hard bead-drops of Holy Mother’s concrete prayers slide on waxed floors. “It’s better this way, dear,” the nurse instructs, while the smell of clean stinks up the room.

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(Spring 1999)

Josie Thompson

Tom Tibbits Like the time I threw up canned raspberries mixed with white powdered doughnuts on my red homemade corduroy pants and all over Tom Tibbits who was sitting in front of me on the yellow school bus with the brown seats and the overweight angry bus driver with short brown hair wearing blue polyester pants who yelled “cut the noise” every five minutes.

Tom Tibbits who was my older brother Kevin’s best friend who helped aim sprinklers at me in the summer in our front yard as I ran screaming in circles in my stretched out swimsuit and who let his grey dog with black spots called Rex bite my sister Heidi’s nose in our haystack while we were trying to feed the horses.

Tom Tibbits who I loved in first grade so I stayed inside at recess to finish coloring the giant red heart I had drawn on a lined piece of tablet paper with “I Love You” written at the bottom in black crayon so I could drop it in the brown front seat of the yellow bus the angry bus driver made him sit in because he would not “cut the noise.”

Tom Tibbits who never noticed me because I was the girl with ugly hair who never talked and wore pink cabbage patch glasses too small for my face with a crack through the middle of the right lens because I had fallen off my maroon spray-painted bike Dad bought from the DI for five dollars with flat tires that I never learned to ride.

Tom Tibbits who lived in a brown house next to a green house next to a red house which was my house and whose mother taught me the piano lessons I can no longer remember and whose older sister Larita babysat me once and helped me make a yellow cake with purple frosting before she stood on my front porch with a friend and told her to watch as I skipped to the pasture where her brother was standing to hand him another love letter as they laughed.

(Fall 2002)

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Tom Tibbits who climbed up the metal shed in our apple orchard then reached down so I could see the name Brooke Bazil in blue pen with a heart around it written on his hand and who in sixth grade liked my best friend Amanda Klinger who wore expensive brand name clothing and was always prettier than me.

Tom Tibbits who grew up tall and skinny like a tapeworm with freckles and thin mouse-colored hair who my mom’s dog Teddy violently barked at every time he came over who wore Wranglers and a silver belt buckle to Retrix and who sometimes asked me to dance.

Tom Tibbits who now that I no longer wear red homemade corduroy pants or stretched out swimsuits or stay in at recess to color red hearts or ride a yellow bus with brown seats and the angry bus driver who yells “cut the noise” or am called the girl with ugly hair that doesn’t talk with pink cabbage patch glasses too small for my face and the maroon spray-painted bike I can no longer remember why I liked him.

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Rebecca Valero

Gypsy Freedom I want to live unmasked under the sky, taste starlight with my eyes, catch baby frogs in tall grass, swing over lake mirrors, splash.

I’ll pass out permission slips to a wild life disguised as Tarot cards. Dance, spin inside candlelight until flames sear dizzy skin.

Walk palm-kissing. Iridescent mist skim bodies, liquefying sparks into moonlight dust. I’ll sing crickets to sleep by firelight, stream stones splash me to sleep after midnight.

(Fall 2006)

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Matthew Warnick

Uncertainty That once, when I hung over you like a petticoat the color of uncertainty but you smiled. Your mouth wasn’t smiling but your eyes were the distance of teeth.

And we were nervous together. You saw something that was not the moon, but it was the moon inside my small fingers, these little half-fists. These prisons bursting with eventuality. My curmudgeon hands, armies buckled in prayer. They praised the way your shoulders fit inside my shoulders when I held your left hand with my left hand and your right hand was on my right hand on your neck. Two faces into the wind and you into me like saline into the corners of our eyes, our tears whipped back like capes.

I stood over you standing over all the earth, which was shore, and almost didn’t kiss you like a person that’s not there but you know someone’s there. Like your cheek knew, then your mouth knew. My fingers fiddling for a ring.

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(Fall 2002)

Amber Watson

Mantis, Praying We had one on the porch. It was not the most beautiful, not green.

Ours was tan-brown and large with a triangular head and enormous eyes, inquisitively looking, reverently waiting. Maybe it’s a female, I said to Jeff. She was strong and wise, even holy.

That was this afternoon. Later in the evening, Jeff ’s family descended. Between all our guests, the doors were slammed and the steps were climbed a hundred times. So, it’s hard to say how or when it happened. Perhaps she was sitting there, trying to be invisible.

Perhaps a child saw her and became frightened. Or maybe (and I hate to think it) one of my nephews made sport of her noble and delicate body. Regardless, when I descended the steps to say goodbye, there her tan-brown body lay, still in the attitude of prayer, fused to the concrete.

“She could still be alive.”

“No,” Jeff confirmed. “It is dead.”

He brought out the broom. My breath caught in my throat as Jeff swept our slender pilgrim into the impatiens. I sat on the porch steps for a while, looking and looking into the shadows between flowers.

Eventually, a daddy long-legs came slinking, trailing his shadow an inch behind him.

(Spring 2007)

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Thomas Wetzel

Candor I know I shouldn’t have taken off my clothing but it was such a nice day, and my cubicle is so small.

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(Spring 2005)

Everett Williams

A Proposal When your snow melts, pick a late spring day, and wear your Levi’s.

I’ll find a pair of old boots, fit you in a worn saddle, and take you up my canyon.

Pass falls and creeks, crisp with the roar of winter’s flow, up through green aspens, stepping over roots and worry, spurring on through rocks and muscle, and the sweaty pull of something bigger than ourselves.

Then, surrendering, we’ll see a thousand wild mountain flowers, forcing trails to end.

(Spring 2007)

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David Cole Woolley

Panic of a Corpse My house had been full of my roommates’ girlfriends. Not exactly full, though it seemed that way. There were only two of them, but they had stayed when Nate and Zach left for Santa Cruz.

“Jack, can you take out the trash?”

“Will you pick up some toilet paper from the store?”

“You should clean this room, it stinks.”

I had gotten home and found one of my goldfish, a calico, jammed up against the filter. It had either been too focused sucking and spitting sand or preoccupied in some other way when the fiddler crab reached up and snipped a gash in its side. I wondered what had really killed it, was it the crab or the filter? Had it been alive when the filter pulled its corpse closer? Had it been aware when its eye was sucked out and cycled back into the tank as food for the others? Its body was stiff when I found it, water logged. All the blood either spilled or sucked from its body.

I scooped it out with my hand but didn’t flush it. I threw it onto the front lawn for the crazy-furred almost-black cat that Zach had tried to get high.

“Jack, can you come here?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t move. Sitting on the porch looking at the mountains. The moonlight said winter was coming sooner than it should; I was ready for the ten-minute car warm ups, the sparkling snowtranquil evenings, the quiet, the cold.

“Now!” Water was seeping out from the dishwasher, nasty water with bits of moldy beans and slimy pasta in it. Zach’s girlfriend, Amanda, was standing near the mucky-puddled edge, slowly inching back as the puddle grew. She looked at me as if it were my fault.

“Well, turn it off,” I said.

I spilled quite a bit of water draining the washer. I had assumed the clog was in the drain and not in the hose. It took more effort than I thought, but I broke the clog loose and got everything reattached.

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(Fall 2006)

Woolley: Panic of a Corpse

I’m not even sure how it happened, but I must have been touching a wire when I reached up and turned the washer back on.

I’d have rather been home, at my father’s house, playing midnight apple baseball with my brothers. The sticky air coating us, mixing with our sweat, a mist of apple juice like fog in the barn’s spotlight. I’d have rather been apologizing to Lucy, an arm full of stolen, penitent flowers. Blue eyes demanding forgiveness and whispers begging for it. I’d have rather been anywhere, anywhere but lying on the damp linoleum, fingernails smoldering, waiting for someone to find my corpse.

The pain was the worst in my teeth. I speculated in the cold why they had cracked, why they still hurt. I also wondered why God hadn’t sent an angel to come get my soul. More than anything I felt stupid.

I didn’t want to see my friends’ faces when they found me. I couldn’t see. But I smelled something terrible, but I denied it was me. I didn’t want to be found. I wanted to go to hell with the burning sinners; I wanted to become a ghost trapped outside of life. I wanted something else, excited for something new, like the first day at a new job, the first day at school, the first day in prison, and new rules, yet, an uncomfortable unfamiliarity that would take my mind off of everything that had happened before.

Despite my father’s protest I was glad they decided to cremate me.

I have to admit I was afraid. I was still feeling a great deal of pain.

They hadn’t been gentle when they removed the few organs I had. I felt every cut and heard them talk about how I’d died. How my eyes had melted. I smelled the sour decay of the doctor’s breath. I’m not sure whether he was a doctor or a technician. He seemed to know what he was doing, I guess.

Despite the thought of burning, I was tired of thinking and hearing and smelling. I was tired of people poking and exploring.

Danielle was the first to find me; she didn’t scream. She just started talking to me about how she’d gotten sick at work, but no one believed her. She said she overheard someone saying it was “just her period.”

“Jack, can I have some of this vodka or are you saving it for Lucy?”

Danielle dropped the bottle, but it didn’t break. I could smell the paint-thinner fumes and felt the wetness in my hair. Amanda’s voice was the next I heard, “I’m not cleaning that floor again, you can just

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clean up whatever you just spilled . . . ” I wanted to laugh when I heard her scream. I had pictured her face as she came into the kitchen and saw me wet and dead with vodka in my hair and Danielle sitting up against the fridge.

Eventually Danielle called Lucy from my phone. She didn’t answer. I had to listen as she left a message. I had to lie there waiting for someone to think to call an ambulance. I had to wait and listen.

Wait and listen. Wait and listen to the lies that were told about how I was in a better place, how I probably died quickly. “Just a few moments of pain,” they lied. Lucy showed up just as they were taking my body away. I’m not sure who had called my parents. I was not at all pleased to hear them. I felt like I had let them down. I know they were disappointed to see that I had failed again. All their hopes that I would grow up to be a saint, cooked by two-hundred-and-twenty volts. I was ready to be ash and smoke and nothing. I was ready to leave through the chimney. I was ready to become steam in the almost winter air.

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