Phoenix - Fall 1986 by UT Media Center

PHOENIX LITERI\RY ART MACAZINE

Pat Allen Editor

Bobby Reed Managing Editor

Elizabeth Helvey Designer

S. Denise Ellis Design Assistant

Greg Spinner Poetry Editor

Forrest Craig Fiction Editor

Amy Fletcher Non-fiction Editor

Heather Joyner Art Editor

AI.cia Long Copy Editor

Supporting Staff Linda Parsons Burgraff Jessica Burstein Peter Harris Peggy Hambright

UBRARY

:rRE UNIVERSITY OF TENNE,Sa KNOXVILLE

three times each year. Works of art, ROn-fiction, fiction, and poetry are accepted

throughpout the academic year. Send submissions to PHOENIX, Room Five, Communications Building, 1345 Circle Park Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996-0314.

Contents

Features DEC 041986. UNIV. OF TENN.

KNOXVILLE Art 4

Untitled by Beth De Vaney

Untitled by Lee Ann Renfro

Untitled by Ginger Dogruel

6 7 8

Panama City Triathlon by Eric Hogue Arm's Length by John Campbell Ancestral Presence by David Harvey

Untitled by Sterling Worrell

Nathan by Carol Tullock

Shadowland by David Harvey

Frustration by Judy Condon

Untitled by Allison Moore

Jerry by Rea Mingeva

The Carousel by Rea Mingeva

2 Vantage Points

Humor 24

Folk Songs for a New Generation by Jeff Heiskell

Poetry 8 8

What the Rock Said by Jon Parker

Imagination and Fancy by Robby Griffith

Untitled by Quinn Windham

12 Origami

by Dan Frye

The Gardener by Maria Jones

Kyra's Twenty-seventh by Sammy Parker

Keeping Balance by Maria Jones

P.D.A. by Ron Wheeler

Stubborn by Linda Parsons Burggraf

Still as the Stone Lion by Bernie Leggett

Evening Flight by Gina Pope

Barbershop by Chip Delffs

18 The Language of Inequality by Richard Penner -

Cover: Untitled ceramic by Judy Condon.

Untitled /

Beth De Vaney

Untitled /

Lee Ann Renfro

Untitled /

Ginger Dogruel / mixed-media on canvas

What the Rock Said

The Gardener

Looking off the roof I see a couple walking. He shoots up Diane says and looking back as if he heard us he stumbles kicking a rock that goes tic tic tac across the sidewalk and

All night I have pruned this tree, and I can see no end to it. My legs have grown as tall as the highest branch, and I sway heavily through my work. Beneath

ting

me growing crowds buzz with suggestions and directions. I am the gardener, only I can trim these stems,

cut the end of each nubby stump and squeeze

through the brown tree-flesh with scissors so small they fit on my fingers like rings. When the blades click together the branch blossoms, bountiful with pink

meets a lampost.

and white petals that die and fall away as I lurch and sway, reaching for the next branch. 路

Jonathan Parker

Maria Jones

Imagination and Fancy

Untitled

She tried to tell him how Romantic it would be to go down fighting for the freedom of the Greeks like Byron, to drown in the fury of a Mediterranean squall, like Shelley, or at least to die young, like Keats,

Without words, Her coy grin flickers A madness boundless. There, Toying a married Spaniard, (Latino, she says) Brushing her virginal hips Past Victorian Romances, Exciting the dust into clouds From their stagnant layers, Briefly sweeping his thigh, Burning his face with giggles Reverberating off the spines Of tightly packed volumes, She pulls back Flushing Latino up. .

But he told her that Byron died quite under protest, leeched to death by his imbecile doctors, that for weeks Keats coughed up putrid brown blood, begging his friends for an opiate, and he asked her if she had ever seen a corpse that had been soused for two months in the sea.

Robby Griffith

Quinn Windham

Ancestral Presence /

David J:Iarvey / dirt, photocopy, and oil on canvas, 3' x 6'

Kyra's Twenty-seventh

Keeping Balance

Kyra plays odd Irish rock, her stereo the booming background for her unselfconcious movements. She sways, and her lips form lyrics. For moments at a time, she heeds no one else, as if the music and the words and her sincere mimicry are the only reality. We others sip cold, crisp gin and smile at the translucent beauty of our Kyra.

We took turns the four of us immediate family listening to the beeps, and carving notches for them in our own hearts, and watching the green lines leap high and then crumple down again and again; we sat balanced carefully on the edge of a chair in a corner our legs strung tight like bows crossed ankles holding us back from flinging ourselves at white walls and monitors and wires and tubes that kept you balanced so carefully the way you taught me years ago when you sat on the back of my bike, pushing with your feethow like your father-love, right behind me so that it wouldn't show too muchand I pedaled furiously thinking that this business was much easier than I expectedbut then you never really understand balance until you lose it and then slowly carefully tenderly feel it returning to you.

Beneath a wide-eyed childish wonder, she shows us old snapshots, the past transfixed in her delicate hands. Each one shows the sweet, 35-mm lover, the always penultimate Kyra: her slender hips in short, tight skirt of leopard skin; she, younger, lying on some museum's cool marble floor, the light-pink cigarette unlit and dangling from her blood red lips, her eyelids dark, dark green, half closed yet still electric bright. Her friends knew rock stars; they went backstage. In Kodak's still suspension they pout like cocaine-queen Cleopatras, all lusty, vigorous, and chic, young vamps who could've passed in earlier times for the fleeting gut loves of Kerouac and Cassady. She sits and charms, surrounded now by new icons: slim volumes of Russian poetry; photos of obscure, dead poets, all more appealing for surrendering mortality; tracts on the IRA; one stark black-and-white of Bobby Sands, who died of self-imposed starvation, an achievment of beauty and strength to Kyra, who could surely embrace the cold clarity of emulation. She is so tender and endearing and once went nine days without food. Now, anemic and pale, she gently reigns. She tells how Christmas will find her mother's Scottish sweater and her father's eelskin wallet wrapped beside the orange, art-deco sunglasses and magenta skirt for her younger sister, who has said she simply must see, as Kyra did, Stonehenge when snow fills the angry British skies. Kyra smiles and says she'll help pay her way because she knows herself how very, very far it is from Omaha to London and then back through her desperate, dreamy Belfast. And home to Omaha.

Sammy Parker

Maria Jones

P.D.A.

Stubborn

Along the conference table sage heads Nod in restless agreement we will adopt a new specialty study; the tone of the Christmas program will be serious; here is the final exam schedule. Then, public dislay of affection is raised. (How mighty is the protective passive, stonger that a shield of faith.) "What about couples sittin' all over each other in the student center? Am I the only one sayin' anything to 'em?" "I know I've had to speak to them at night in the upstairs halls. At night it's really bad." "There's a difference between a friendly hug and what my father - excuse my saying so - what he called lollygagging." No one is offended. I bite my lip. There will not be time to discuss it.

You're taking this far too personally, he said, folding himself stiffly onto the oasis of the green quilt. She tumbled his words to the music of her guitar, vibration of steel against leaf and sky.

Mom says you lose something in marriage if you don't sleep together. Her parents bedded through the Depression and eleven kids, fed on Kentucky dirt. Fifty-eight years they slept together. Dad's folks quit the same bed after seven boys. Perhaps it's different with boys. I was five the last time I kissed my dad A "coast-card" brat saying good-bye to the ship's corpsman who prescribed this advice: "Boys don't kiss boys on the lips." After that I don't even remember kissing him on the cheek. Now he lies, day after day, an object of nurse's care, Fed by a tube through the nose. When the nurse shakes him enough He opens one vacant eye.

Too personally, her mind hummed, to personally. Okay, I'm sorry, he said, an attempt at the old magic the softening of the voice the intensity of the blue eyes a mirage in the slow sand of his face. She stood then with the calm statement of movement. You haven't seen the last of me, he called after her. No, she thought, just the back, humming as she went, shaking the evening off the shabby quilt.

Linda Parsons Burggraf

No matter how bad things were between them, Mom and Dad slept together. They even kissed in broad daylight through the car window When she dropped him off for work. She gently kisses his arm at each visit, now. I wish he were awake so I could kiss him too, full mouthed, For the whole world to condemn.

Ron Wheeler

Untitled /

Sterling Worrell / photograph

Untitled /

Nathan /

Sterling Worrell / photograph

Carol Tullock / photograph

Still as the Stone Lion Still as the stone lion on his stone, Buttressed, clever, having posed all day, So quiet I hear my swerved neck groan, I seek some lucid lesson of my own, Watching undergraduates at bay. Here, as my whiskers grow, displacing air, Rococo coeds go cascading by, Some winsome, some curvilinear, Some, but far too few, are passing fair, And one has beauty to abut the eye. A mindly beauty, portioned for display, Eyes covered by a tinted lens, Thighs captured by a cloth in sway, Sighs inauspicious, sanctioned by delay, And all the paraphernalia for sin. I wonder what she supply learned today. We wonder what one ever learns in school. We doubt the dean is ancient, walking wise; We doubt the scholar in his vestibule, The Gallic in the carrel with his rule, The student with his eyes italiciz~d; We doubt the wisdom of the skeptical. Three bicyclers bicycle by. We could find fault with every uttered word And fault the image from the painter's eye And fault the melodies that rise and die, And doubting, age would circle us like birds. Just now a Jesus freak comes slouching by.

Bernie Leggett

Evening Flight At 35,000 feet, past the turbulence for now, I flip over to Paradise Lost, Book III and imagine Milton blind and writing" ... wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.1 So much the rather thou Celestial Light! Shine inward," My eyes wander off the page to the dark solid mass of muffled clouds that swallow the plane. The eyes peer into night. Yet a certain diffused light lingers on each minute droplet of moisture that whips across the cutting wings. Somewhere out there the moon glows wholly round, outside the realm of eyes limited by the small oblong borders of an airplane window, doubly insulated. The two straining pupils embrace this vision soundly, then return to the contrast of print on white pages which shrink them down into slits. The rub of jet engines inside my head, sandpaper - ultra-course and granular with a deep bass tone. If I sit here long enough they'll sand me down to a dull roar, God forbid. We are at the disposal of air and I'm not sure I like that. One good pocket and down we go, time without weight I cannot stand. A few restless currents disturb our smooth horizontal rush and test the limit of flexible metal wings. Someone pops on the cabin light. Now we are lit from within and I cannot see out without pressing my nose against the glass. Sitting back, my blurred self repeats in the window, a two dimensional replica. Still yet I notice something else from this new perspective. This recent addition of light allows the eyes to see themselves and somet,hing else at once when they focus on the window. They see the light at the tip of the wing. It is white and flashing against a backdrop

Barbershop of damp diffused darkness. The man next to me smells of whiskey. His mold-green eyes roll back and get bigger when he reveals to me that he hears light. This flight is bound for L.A. so I'm not shocked. He goes on. I order another drink in hopes of hearing some light myself. It sounds particularly solid, high pitched and without much of a melody, unless of course the lights flicker or dim. I notice in his big red ears the shape of a fetus and see waves of sound crashing in upon its beating heart, the core it funnels into. Except one thing doesn't fit. The lobes are thick and fatty and old. He notices me staring and asks with a flick of the overhead reading light what the hell I think I'm doing. The incongruity of your ears bothers me, I say, the second drink having made me honest. Luckily, he laughs, exhaling a gust of used air my way, and says, Well, that's life. And as I look at him in this different light I see wrinkles like the loose folds of a Chinese Shar-Pei that rolls around in enough skin for two dogs. This is because of his suit. It is linen and black and God only knows what has holed up in all those folds. The skin under his eyes lies like a bank of parched clay, rifts of emptiness running this way and that, and when he speaks it all comes alive. Light stretches across and sinks into the crevices as a voice, deep and serious, reaches my ears.

On a Saturday morning when the world was new and I was over aIled and seven, I rode in the cab of a red and whi~e pick-up truck with my father down the red-dusted parchment to the candy striped pole which signaled men with hair on their collar to redeem themselves. Inside it was cool and smelled of tonics and shave creams, stray hairs mating on the linoleum floor, old men waiting but not for haircuts, and Daddy bought a Coke and put peanuts in it for me while I waited. My turn, the scissored man with dark, vaseline-furrowed hair picked me up and covered me with seersucker cut like a circus tent. Fear fell to the floor with my brown locks, his hands cool, soft. I watched people pass by through the spider-web-cracked window, watched the striped pole turn, with the same intensity my father watched me.

Chip Delfts Gina Pope

Of the Land /

David Harvey / mixed-media on canvas, 3' x 5'

Jerry /

Rea Mingeva / oil pastel on paper, 22" x 30"

The

CarOUSel/Rea Mingeva / acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60"

Then " .'i>~lished Cotton' . .. ~

'" '/Sti~ wa~ we~ri~' '~ight~, Polly'Ester was a friend ' of, Poor Poll~ Ester,'- she '~~~.: Went out of .style witho~t ~......... f~td:':'. . ~lly Ester lost her lovin' s:liin~ '; :.':'i...:;.~ :'~~~~ ,,

.'. ~ ~e ch~Iiged her,~a~e to R~YO~ ~',\~:,'{~~.~}\: ':', \\ '

B~evei~OdYknew

She

,,:,'

:' .,,:';~:'.',

~s siip~i~' ,~~~ ~lidin: ~~,ay '

: ': : J' " '

Some ~l.!, thirlk, she''St~ysyn , ' " ' Out with ~r in ~e town ' ',' . '\ '" Wearin' leisu e suit \ '.til their ~yin'day '

,\,

\ ' ,

~ ',>:\,:":::",:,~.:::'~':"\'