Yahara Journal 2002

Yahara Journal

F I N E

A R T S

J O U R N A L

2002

Yahara Journal F I N E

A R T S

J O U R N A L

2002

Yahara Journal Staff Senior Editor

Genia M. Daniels

Editorial Team

F.J. Bergmann Richard Commander Brandy Copeland Tim Mantz Lesley Wolf

Production Team Tim Mantz Kari Steinhilber Mel Wartenberg

Promotions Team Alex Andre Dawn Lambert Corey Leisher Dustin Pageloff Tiffany Pope Kathy Smith Joe Vickers Michelle Weidner

Web Design

F.J. Bergmann

Journal Design

Genia M. Daniels

Advisors

Sonja Hansard-Weiner Doug Kirchberg

On the Cover Front Cover Illustration Through the Street R. Logu

Back Cover Illustration Laundry Line Christine Knorr

Contents You Bring Out the Housewife in Me Our Lady of the Broke Spine Alpheus in the Harbor Dissolution Becoming Imperceptible Changes Masala Terracotta Prayer Horse Mama Home Off Air El Paraiso Drag Tough-Dog Leather Bottom of the Glass Waking Wonder Sleepwalking Barbie’s Regurgitation of Pink Blocked Untitled Photograph Ogre at His House Back Home Thin Hot Hour Pearl’s Mistake Annis 825 Roosevelt St. The Parlor When I was 20 Fixing A Hole In The Wall Willing Exile, May 25th Actaeon The Survivor Untitled Photograph Sticks & Stones The Darkest Hour Block Out the Sun Going Home

Amanda Leck Heather Lins Michelle Weidner F.J. Bergmann F.J. Bergmann F.J. Bergmann Stephen Crymes Christine Knorr E.Victoria Wilson Cynthia Adams Hector Valdivia Jr. Lesley Wolf Michelle Weidner Jennifer Paige Jennifer Paige Jennifer Paige Lesley Wolf Ben Van Iten Pat Kranz Jason Ungart E. Victoria Wilson Jared Kubokawa Mary Bielefeldt Nelle Burke Amanda Leck Amanda Leck Sharon Vanorny Adam D. Seeger Christopher Johnson Christopher Johnson Jessica Doermann Pat Kranz Genia M. Daniels Genia M. Daniels Rachel Hudson Takeylar Benton

1 3 8 9 10 11 12 17 18 19 20 21 25 26 27 28 30 32 38 39 41 42 43 49 50 51 52 53 55 56 57 61 62 63 65 72

Amanda Leck

You Bring Out The Housewife In Me Homage to Sandra Cisneros

You bring out the housewife in me.

The treeless suburbia Two-car garage Nine-to-Five romance in me You are the one I’d let call me honey Or Sugar Pumpkin Muffin Maybe. Maybe.

You bring out the tasty chef in me.

The “dinner’s ready” in me.

The packed lunches in me.

No more sushi or chai tea.

You bring out the baked chicken in me.

No more ‘86 Saab or fully loaded BMW You bring out the minivan in me.

The soccer mom in me.

The shoes left at the front door in me.

The carpet scrubber in me.

No more Aphrodite or Athena You bring out the Hestia in me.

The fear of being alone in me.

Yes, you do.

Forget Puccini and Bjork You bring out the Yanni in me.

The Magic 98 love songs in me.

The Danielle Steele novel in me.

The Fabio look-alike fantasy in me.

Forget about fairies and Bacchus Day You bring out the college football fan in me.

The high school sports booster president in me.

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Amanda Leck I am faithful. I am Days of Our Lives.

I am subdued.

I am control-top panties.

Target. Woodmans. Wal-Mart. Pick-N-Save.

East Towne. West Towne. Pier One. Three times a week.

Baby-talk. Jogging pants. Pooper Scoopers.

Only yours. Only you.

Love the way a housewife loves. Let me show you.

Love the only way I now know how.

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Heather Lins

Our Lady of the Broken Spine “But that’s not really seeing it,” he had said.

I can see plenty from here, Anne thought as she filled the book truck. Solzhenitsyn in a Siberian work camp, Jacques Cousteau tooling about the globe. I can see. It’s all right here.

She looked around the library circulation desk. The thick carpet seemed shabby today, and the wall in front of the desk needed painting. Must apply to the board for renovations, she thought.

Anne righted Where Angels Fear to Tread from its supine position — pages splayed open, spine cracking — and tucked it in the cubby where she kept her recreational reading. Forster would have to wait until another day.

She pushed the book cart past the Children’s Reading Room and smiled thinking of old friends. The thick carpet made moving the cart difficult but she was careful not to topple the precariously stacked books. One of these days I’m going to get stuck. She had to throw all her weight behind the cart to make the turn into the Adult Reading Room.

She put away the embroidery pattern guides and craft books and stopped in front of the art section. She had encouraged the board to buy some of these books when she first started working at the library six years ago. She pulled down a handsome volume about Dutch still-life artists filled with beautiful plates. As the pages fluttered by her fingers, she caught a glimpse of the checkout card.

“Anne Barnes 213 E. Chestnut, Decorah, IA.” The rest of the card was blank. Anne was accustomed to seeing her name alone on checkout cards but it still made her pause. Occasionally, she was accompanied by a precocious high schooler or a college student on break but most often her name was alone.

She had told herself she’d stopped making new book suggestions to the board because she didn’t want to waste money on books no one read. In reality, she felt sorry for the books. The board retraced their footsteps to consumer reports and bestsellers and Anne was left to tend a lonely hearts’ club of books.

She closed the art book with an efficient clap and put it in its place. Besides, looking at checkout cards is like looking inside medicine cabinets. They’re private. Her friend, Sharon, thought she was crazy when

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Heather Lins Anne told her this once.

“It’s not like you’re checking out literature of a pornographic nature,” Sharon had said jutting out her bottom lip. “To know anything really juicy, you need to work at the video store.”

Anne had said private not juicy but she let it go. You can only understand if you see it. Sharon hadn’t checked out Life After Divorce to Gladys Rademaker weeks before Gladys had filed the papers.

Sharon hadn’t seen J. Blass’s name and address fill both sides of the checkout card of Cracking the GRE and wondered what score he had gotten.

Anne was the witness. She saw things. She didn’t need a degree in library science to know that a library record crossed with articles from the local paper could expose a person in a small town. It could leave them naked. So as items crossed the circulation desk, she did her best to appear unseeing and she held the secrets close.

She checked out Denise Austin’s Fat Burning Blast videotape to the wheezing, fat man. She checked out My Life as an Astronaut to a boy who would never pass math. She checked out The Rainbow to a co-ed who blushed. She checked out The Sugar-Free Cookbook to a wife whose husband was diagnosed with diabetes. She checked out a dogeared issue of National Geographic (September ‘86) to the boy who wanted to see aboriginal Amazon breasts. She checked out The Battle of the Bulge: A History and Dissection to the old man with rheumy eyes again and again.

You see all sorts of things here. She doesn’t know.

She had just started to push the book cart when she saw Michelangelo: His Life and Work. It had been her favorite once, though she hadn’t looked at it in years. Her fingers touched the embossed letters on the spine. As she took it from the shelf, a musty smell escaped. The book fell open to a plate of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It had been her favorite work.

She turned a few pages to find The Last Judgment, the fresco on the Sistine Chapel’s altar wall. It was darker than the ceiling fresco and more morbid. Jesus was in the center and around him was a constellation of figures — some waiting to get into heaven, some entreating Jesus to reconsider sending them to hell.

Anne noticed a saint holding a human skin — his own.

Renaissance artists often painted saints in their act of martyrdom.

Another martyr held the rack on which he had been burned alive. To be welcomed into God’s beatitude only to relive your demise for eter-

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Our Lady of the Broken Spine nity, seemed less than heavenly to Anne. She skimmed over the rest of the figures but she couldn’t find her favorite: Saint Lucy, Patron Saint of Blindness and Eye Problems.

Lucy was martyred in the 4th century by Diocletian.

Government henchmen gouged out her eyes for practicing the Christian faith. Anne didn’t really like Lucy for her background but for how she was portrayed in paintings — as a young, healthy, sighted woman carrying two eyeballs on a tray.

In her readings about Renaissance art, Anne had met a lot of patron saints but hadn’t found any who watched over libraries. She mused at the possibilities as she returned the book to its place: Patroness of Tomes and Poor Bindery; Our Lady of the Broken Spine; Keeper of the Blessed Catalogue.

Anne returned to the mechanics of reshelving and, as usual, her mind drifted: TV programs, characters in books, patrons, old conversations and grudges. She usually kept a tight rein on her thoughts or she’d find her lips moving in response to an imagined question or her emotions bubbling up and out of control at a rude remark. The comments of strangers tugged at her as se let herself rmember them.

“There’s no place like Tuscany,” he had said.

Anne jumped. She had been so engrossed in her book she hadn’t heard the man walk up to the circulation desk. He nodded toward her book. She looked down at her hands as if she had forgotten what she was reading.

“Oh yes,” she said looking at the cover of Where Angels Fear to Tread. “Have you been there?”

“Yeah, I backpacked around Italy during a summer break in college. Best three months of my life.” She had never seen him before today. He was probably from the college. They were the only men in town who wore sport coats. She could smell coffee on his breath.

“Oh really. Where did you go?”

“All over. All the way down to Sicily and as far north as Turin,” he said distractedly as he rummaged in his pockets.

“Did you see the Sistine Chapel ceiling? I can’t wait to see it restored.”

“Yes, I saw it — but only the dirty version. When did you go?”

“Oh, I haven’t but I know that National Geographic is planning a feature on it when the restoration is finished.” She looked down and straightened date due cards.

“You have to see it for yourself,” he said lightly.

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Heather Lins “Oh, I will. When the issue is published.”

“But that’s not really seeing it,” he said. He looked at her directly and she could feel her face get warm.

“A book can’t do it justice,” he continued. “The figures are huge.

They’re as big as this room. And the perspective is so good, you think that they are going to reach down from the ceiling and grab you.”

“I’m sure they are very impressive,” she said unintentionally cutting him off.

“And the shading —” “Yes, the chiaroscuro technique.”

“— it makes every muscle bulge. And there’s this other fresco on the altar wall underneath it that Michelangelo did later. I can’t remember the name of...”

“The Last Judgment,” she said softly.

“That’s it. One side of it is Christ raising all these saints to heaven and on the other side, he’s condemning sinners to hell.” The man looked off into the middle distance. Anne almost turned to see if his recollection had conjured up The Last Judgment on the wall of the library.

“It’s this really intense blue,” he said quietly. “And the figures are standing on clouds and they seem to float right off the wall.”

“As part of The Last Judgment commission, Michelangelo’s patron bought the paint. Since he wasn’t paying for it, Michelangelo used a lot of the most expensive color — blue.” Anne said trying not to look too pleased with herself.

“I hadn’t heard that.” He smiled at her. “I suppose I’d better pay for these photocopies,” he said and handed her his papers and a dollar bill. Anne opened the cash box and made change.

“So do you study a lot of Renaissance Art?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, a bit self-consciously. “I was on an Italian kick for awhile and read quite a bit about it.”

“Well, when you finally make it to Italy, don’t be as dopey as the people in that book.”

Anne looked down at the Forster book and assured him she wouldn’t. The door closed and Anne tried to return to Forster’s Italy.

She speculated why angels feared to tread there, but put the book away before she came to an answer.

The sound of the heavy front door opening finally jolted her to the present. She shook the stranger’s comments from her head and smoothed her blouse. She made her way to the circulation desk with

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Our Lady of the Broken Spine the empty book cart.

Irma Bloom was waiting for her.

“Back for more I see,” Anne said.

“Yep. Gotta get my weekly dose of adventure.”

“Guess so.”

Irma used to return her romance novels to the circulation desk face down. Eventually, she started to place them face-up and to confide in Anne. Irma talked about her boss at the grocery store, how she should go back to the community college, about how her husband bore no resemblance to the high school sweetheart she married eight years ago.

“They do all the things I don’t in these books, if you know what I mean,” Irma said her eyes bright with meaning. She leaned on the counter contentedly. Her lipstick was slightly smeared.

Anne shook her head and smiled. Then, without thinking, she said, “Have you ever wanted to go to Italy, Irma?”

“Me? No way. They’ll run you over as soon as look at you. I saw it in Roman Holiday. No sir, I’ll eat my spaghetti right here, thank you.”

Anne looked down and began processing Irma’s returns.

“Why? Are you planning a trip?” Irma asked.

“No,” Anne replied. She placed Irma’s returns on the empty book cart and sighed.

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Michelle Weidner

Alpheus in the Harbor

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F.J. Bergmann

Dissolution When I lost my soul, I was doing what comes naturally, rolling it between my finger and thumb, watching its fine threads sparkle in my palm, returning feathers of sunlight from its cloudy prison, hefting its glinting mass gently from hand to hand, when a wind took it into the cool bright sky.

I chased it for what seemed like miles as it swooped down the sidewalk, hovered momentarily above the forsythias, shrank to a pinhead glittering amid the swarm of angels invisible against the blue.

It finally caught in the twigs of a tree too tall to climb, with branches years out of reach.

It faded and unraveled into the weather.

By summer, its last filaments were an absence.

Sometimes I see a shimmer in the weave of a nest that will not fall, an iridescence on the wings of a bird that remembers my name.

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F.J. Bergmann

Becoming When the snake tried to follow us east from Eden, we pelted it with apple cores and drove it back, ignoring the longing in its eyes, and watched it burn. Our honeymoon.

Now we know what it is to be human, burdened with nomenclature and the memories of imaginary ancestors, happy, peacful animals whose skins and innocent expressions we wear.

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F.J. Bergmann

Imperceptible Changes I was reading The Doors of Perception for the nine-and-a-halfth time (the halfth time, not to be confused with half time or part-time, was the time I left it on a New Jersey bus, halfway through) when I should have been studying physics; laws of dim light, fading color, occlusion, illusion and all the other phenomena lurking at the Threshold of Perception, but it was nicer just to sprawl over the sun-bleached cushions and describe an ever-decaying arc through the summer daze in the swing on the Porch of Perception with a glass of lemonade, supersaturated with sucrose in solution, imperceptibly accumulating condensation out of the felted air that wept down its slippery vertigo, and I perceived that, out in the Dooryard of Perception, the foliage of the wilting lilac shrubbery was looking more smokable by the minute in the hazy afternoon and beyond the peeling whitewash of the Gate of Perception, which dangled from one distorted Hinge of Perception, in the Roadway of Perception there seemed to be a procession of immanent, tesselated beings who whirled past in sintered, frangible radiance with a band of glass harmonicas, trailing opalescent taffeta and a fragrance of tuberoses.

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Stephen Crymes

Masala It’s Saturday night, 11:00, the time when all the hip extroverts in the city like to hit the bars; right when shit is about to get crazy. I hit Masala downtown – and regularly – because in a town with a couple hot spots, it’s the hottest. True to the pattern, the line is already long and full of those beautiful people that make you re-think your fashion decisions. The windows are steamy from heavy breathing and sweating, but I can easily make out the large commotion of uninhibited young people. Some of the rich, beautiful people spot the arrival of my motley crew of hip-hop enthusiasts and probably think we are trying to be fashionably late, and then have the nerve to not be fashionable. In truth, we just get caught up at the crib, smoking pot and drinking, laughing and playing our music loud. We have to make Masala’s though, and soon we’re skipping all the well-dressed partygoers, and going right to the front of the line. Our friend DJ Oliver is the star of the evening, spinning the most exciting blend of hip-hop and soul music in the city, and, also, putting our names on the guest list.

“Hezekiah Jones, Sartouk Moussavi, Justin Evans, Severo Benavides.” I list our names off for the square working the door.

This cat has a skeptical look on his face. I’m looking at him, thinking, “Yeah, we’re on there fucker.” I ain’t got room in my head to feel bad about his dismissal of me or my friends. My mind is already on the party scene, like it always is. It’s too fun and fast-paced; too much to miss. I’m there in the middle of it, and I feel like I’m the only one who sees everything that is happening in its entirety. To me, everything is beauty. I feel despair because everyone else treats it like it’s just a party, some small bar with too many people in it, on some small mid-western college campus. Only I seem to see it, but then I have always appreciated the details, the subtle things that communicate so much. Only I see the culture clash as the artsy hipsters make room for grimy rap fans. Only I seem to notice that this is one of the few bars with anything other than purely white kids in it. Only I envision a revolution unfolding before my eyes on a Saturday night in a cramped campus bar called Masala.

It doesn’t start out that way. Saturday nights build up intensity, until they are stars ready to burn bright and hot, exploding. Perhaps the build-up for this night began at around 10:00 p.m. Right about

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Masala then, Masala’s more traditional crowd arrives. For lack of a more accurate or appropriate ways to identify them, they’re white, almost exclusively. They’re not your average white, more like upper-crust, knew-they-were-going-to-a-college-by-age-2, big word-using white people. Not to prejudge, but I think you know the type. Their scene is mood lighting and mellow atmosphere, perfect for fancy martinis and meaningful conversation that borrows heavily from famous dead white male thinkers. This is yet another secret spot for rich kids and hipsters who drape themselves in expensive, trendy fashions, rarely straying from colors that reside somewhere on the scale between black and white. They sit still, hardly aware of the option of dancing to the mid-tempo soul music Olivier spins. They want to engage you with their wit, and ask if you’re up on the latest offering from some obscure artist that only they are cool enough to have heard.

Olivier fucked all that up pretty thoroughly. Olivier is simply the best hip-hop DJ in the city, not that it’s hard to do in most cities.

He loves the music, which is a requirement for a DJ to truly have a chance. He’s one of the few people I see who loves the hip-hop culture as much as I do. We loved it before it became the thing of the moment to dig. He’s French, but he’s actually from Canada if memory serves. A white boy. He’s hip, not in the artsy, intellectual pretentious tradition, but in the wordly, understanding way. We’re very similar. I’m from a predominantly white suburb, where I was part of two black families in the neighborhood. My only brown friend before high school was Severo Benavides, a Mexican kid I’d known since grade school. People like Olivier and I live in several really different worlds. I never felt comfortable in my worlds, neither the white one nor the black one. An outsider at all times, it was probably what led me to just play the observer, learning the customs and norms in whatever environment I was in at the moment. The result of my dual consciousness was that it made me open-minded and aware of people. The result of Olivier’s worldliness was that he knew how to bring a lot of different types of people together, and make them all lose their minds in dance.

I discovered hip-hop’s cool, underground material, the more socially aware and substantial music, and found it was special and had inherent depth. It was raw, without pretense. Some of it was even political, without even trying to be.

It was poetry,

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Stephen Crymes Shakespearean even, though this was surely blasphemous to say.

Some of the rhyme schemes were very elaborate and thought-provoking, some of the imagery dramatic enough to move me to tears. I fell in love with hip-hop at a very precise moment, and knew that it was for life as soon as that moment hit me. Hip-hop became immediately capable, in my mind, of bringing the agenda of the downtrodden to the world’s attention. If it could only resist the temptation to pander to an audience craving negativity, violence, and moneyworship. This would be its struggle, to bring awareness to the world and unite people through music. Hip-hop was relentless in its yearslong battle to gain acceptance and credibility. It never stopped fighting, clawing its way past doubt, gaining momentum on its way to do what everyone said it could not do. Our world was one where children of all colors, backgrounds, and styles grew to understand and love each other, even celebrating our differences. We had come to learn from each other, work and play with each other, and we had come to throw off burdens of yesterday that separated us.

Diversity is not in the classroom, it is at your nearest hip-hop event. Diversity does not like to arrive at parties on time, it comes fashionably late, somewhere around 11:00. It is without pretense or care for rules of decorum. It is loud and laughs hard, and it dresses and acts how the fuck it wants. It is here to respond to the call of the music, and it will deal with the local elitists and hipsters in short order. It demands party music, and it knows just what to do when it hears it. Diversity tonight is African-Americans, Africans, Latinos, Pakistanis, Cambodians, Jews, and various types of whites. It is the thick-rimmed intellectual glasses of the white hipsters, the wave caps of the black males under a fitted baseball cap, and it is the exposed belly button of a captivating butter pecan woman.

“Tu eres una empresa,” I whisper to the inspiration for my lyric as she stops to hug me and kisses me on my cheek. Her name is Edivel, but I have always called her Mi Amor. Sartouk laughs at my nervous face during this welcome distraction. He never blushes when I would because chicks love him. He’s Iranian, and since nobody knows what that is, he can pretend to be whatever he wants.

He doesn’t comment, but instead heads to a table with Severo. Later, they’ll break out that weed-filled cigarillo and puff a little.

I’m already high as shit, right where I wanna be, so I scan the room for poetry, searching for someone else who is making revolution happen. I find Justin dancing his ass off with this cat Arash.

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Masala Justin is this young black kid from Milwaukee and he was born to dance. Hip-hop has the most amazingly creative and visually splendid dances. I make Justin and Arash pivotal characters in my tale of revolution, scribbled on my notebook. In a room with conservative, shy people, the descendants of people who stood stiff for Little Richard performances and worshipped a Charlie Parker who would’ve just as soon spat on them as played for them, Justin and Arash instruct through dance. This is how you’re supposed to react to this, they seem to say, as their bodies sway and convulse in time with the bass line, the drums, and the emphasis of the rhyming vocals.

“Hey, how you doing tonight, Kiah?”

“Yo, I’m over her tripping, man, don’t pay me no mind. I’m just high.”

I’m exchanging pleasantries with this cat whose name I can’t even recall. I love all the multihued friends I have and the beautiful women of all nationalities at Masala’s, but tonight is not about getting laid or saying some generic-ass bullshit to some cat I hardly know. Tonight is about leaning on the wall and appreciating the important things taking place in my world. It’s beautiful, or as hiphoppers might say, it’s off the chain. I must look pretty odd to others, like a kid with an identity crisis. I speak in different dialects to each person that gives me a sturdy handshake. “I’m having a wonderful time,” to the kid who works at Jazzman becomes, “I’m feeling it tonight,” to my nigga Justin when I catch up with him on the dance floor. He’s deep in the middle of the Harlem Shimmy, and the room becomes his when he does that shit. I let loose with a nice round of shit-talking, rap freestyle verse off the top of my head, just to grab a little shine for myself, then it’s back to the wall.

It is twelve in the morning, and the tension is tangible. Dancers are bumping into one another. Too many people in the bar, or maybe just too many are drunk and on the dance floor. Tables and conversations have had to relocate because as the night progresses, dancing became the top priority. The mood is different. The atmosphere is not at all laid-back. Now it is Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z on that “Million and One” beat that the pop crowd doesn’t recognize, but the real hiphop fans catch immediately. They throw their mouths wide open to exclaim their surprise at hearing it. The bar is hot, and only getting hotter. Sweat forms on foreheads, and under armpits. Don’t just sit

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Stephen Crymes there, stand there, stiff as a board, the dancers seem to be saying to the hipsters, you’re supposed to move! Lose your inhibitions, let yourself go, this is hip-hop! Alcohol enables more to join the party.

Soon tensions give way to love. Everybody loves everyone else, and for the rest of the night, they are not colors or on sides, they are the best of friends.

What the fuck is going on? I ask myself. Rock and roll revolution is happening right before my eyes. All over the earth, children of all creeds live out the dreams of Martin Luther King in classrooms and neighborhoods, as well as on dance floors across America. The day I waited forever for is here. My hope, long trampled upon by negativity, tradition, racism, classism, and narrow minds, is now blossoming. My hope is expanding now, out of control, running off the page, becoming an indecipherable prayer of tomorrow. Hip-hop is here, motherfucker, and it ain’t going anywhere. Teenage white boys flex their angst muscles while damn near breaking their neck to the new Ludacris song. Artsy intellectual kids do drugs in their apartments and trip off the cerebral lyricism of Talib Kweli, and the lush orchestrations of D’Angelo. Young Latino kids continue to break-dance, and somewhere some little kid in some sports apparel, maybe a doo-rag tied around his head, plays with a blonde-haired boy who worships Eminem. All over America, house parties become a little more exciting to the tunes of rap music. Hip-hop is fulfilling its promise, bringing together young America. To me, it is a revolution. I trip off my victory, in the midst of party beats and lewd, rhythmic poetry. Hip-hop has caught the attention of America, and that means I have caught the attention of America. I scribble this thought in my notebook, then grab a drink. It is time to join the revolution before my eyes.

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Christine Knorr

Terracotta Prayer Horse

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E. Victoria Wilson

Mama Home This city is a woman aging with hysterectomy dry pimples high blood pressure downtown cafeterias left to rot like corns on curling toes.

She suffers from saddle sores hot flashes stretch marks diarrhea.

This city is a woman hooked on nicotine caffeine barley hops and malt.

She tucks railroad horns and factory farts into pretty, fenced-up girdles as she laughs, wetting herself and crying for more.

The lovely woman of the hour, both mother and midwife, sings from under her bosom the taunts and ridiculous catcalls that bring her children crawling back to her womb.

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Cynthia Adams

Off Air Music rises up from my belly Like a florescent orange bobber That refuses to stay beneath the surface Of the vast blue water And I find myself in a place Where I am strangely invisible All that can be seen of me Is what I do not know Or what I cannot do And I am forced to be who I don’t want to be At times, I want to offer up a melody To release this breath I’ve been holding For so long That my face has turned Red, purple, blue and finally Gray I can’t sing here

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Hector Valdivia Jr.

`

El Paraiso `

Paradise exists at the end of a block in my father’s hometown, Loreto, silver mine capital of Zacatecas, Mexico, a secret held only, it seems, by the old men.

The entrance, small, hidden between a chicken place and another store, Reads “Paradise,” in simple, block letters above small swinging doors of pearl and gold.

Hot and musty, rust and spirits overpower my nostrils, given respite only by the sweetsour smell the men wear on faded clothing.

A figure entrenched like a statue at the end of a booth again asks for his last one. My great-uncle Monchis listens to the men, the only one who listens to anything they say. Each one contemplates his own disfigured reflection at the bottom of his drained pint, and I look at the little boy mimicking me in the mirror behind the bar.

Here, last call is never given. The men usher themselves out into the cold night, back to a reality eager to swallow them–it is their fate.

I stay behind with Monchis, help mop the spilled beer and tears the men daily leave behind.

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Lesley Wolf

Drag You think you know who you are. From birth you mold into this being, look in the mirror and say “that’s me.” Then you change your clothes, your hair, to look more and more like some one else – like you wish you were. You go to school or church and sit with your peers. Each one wearing his own clothes, doing his own hair, only to let others know that is who he wants to be. You show up not knowing who you want to be, or rather who you’re too embarrassed to be.

It’s a sin, this person you want to be. You’re a man, not especially attractive, you’re plain, shy, and have trouble fitting in. Yet you try so hard to be a nobody rather than a sinful somebody. You’re boring, utterly and completely boring. You blend and bend to others, you’re a wallflower and not even a unique one: a daisy among all the other daisies when you really want to be a poppy or a lotus. The truth, you’re a piece of shit dressed in a suit and tie. You live a life full of lies and regrets. You’re not a bad person, are you? No, of course not, God loves you. But God doesn’t know you, not the real you and if he did he wouldn’t love you. You’d end up in hell with the other sinners wishing you’d wanted to be someone else.

You go out one evening for an anniversary party, celebrating ten years of marriage to a woman who doesn’t love you, though you wish she did. She loves what you and she represent – stability, good Christian people, Baptist people who take part in the church and live simple lives. At this party, thrown by your wife’s crazy sister, you witness the beauty of what it means to be. A man dressed in woman’s clothing delivers your anniversary cake singing and dancing in high-heeled stiletto shoes. You salivate at the idea of being this free.

For the next two weeks you’re consumed with envy. These men are lotuses among all the daisies. You picture yourself on the stage in glamorous dresses and eccentric hairdos. The audience applauds you and throws ten-dollar bills for an encore. You show up to teach your students history and geography and imagine that they are your audience oohing and aahing at your magnificent performance. You imagine how envious they must be at your freedom. You’re not a man. You’re not a woman. You’re beyond all the laws of gender.

You’re suddenly a god.

You run out to the club and begin training with a queen named

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Lesley Wolf Marmalade and become a lotus yourself. Marmalade’s a large black man with fiery orange hair and he’s truly magnificent. His grandeur is breathtaking to watch as he takes the stage. He understands you and yet you fear becoming him.

Still you learn how to walk with confidence and take pride in your beauty; you’re defying everything you’ve ever been taught. You slip on a long black wig and satin elbow-length gloves. They’re your favorite part of the act because as you lip-synch the words to Abba tunes your body follows, arms swaying, and the gloves glisten under the spotlight reminding you that on Friday and Saturday nights you’re a star.

You stop going to church on Sunday because you were up until two a.m. on Saturday night posed as Marilynn Monroe or Bette Midler. You start to sing in the shower and tweeze your uni-brow.

You’re forced to hide your confidence from those around you or else people would say, “what’s up with Joe? Has he gone mad?” and you’d have to say, “I am a free spirit, a bird, a dove.” So you start to practice your routine in the basement pretending that you’re fixing a leaky pipe or a hole in the insulation. You come out dry as the desert, but completely out of breath. Your wife looks at you puzzled, but doesn’t care enough to wonder too long. You skip away because for the first time, you don’t care. She says something like, “Joseph, will you change the oil in the Minivan,” and it suddenly occurs to you that you own one of those things. You vaguely remember how proud you were when you finally saved up the money to buy it, and now you don’t care. You realize that having it has very little effect on your stability or happiness.

You and your wife Kathy met when you were twenty. She was amazing: short and meek with wide innocent green eyes. She was singing in the choir and you couldn’t take your eyes off her. Every Sunday you’d sit in the first row to watch her sing for God’s ears and for yours to cherish. You and Kathy married and moved to a suburb of Cincinnati where you teach at one of the public middle schools.

You and your wife see less and less of each other now. She puts all her time into the church and you put all of your energy into your job and maintaining that image of the middle-class, white-bread, Christian, suburban family.

Your wife is now pregnant and that beautiful slender shape is filling out to that of a woman and you can’t keep your hands off her rounded hips. She pushes you in disgust. She’s tired and feels heavy,

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Drag unappreciated, ugly, and lonely. You turn away not knowing what to say except, “If you could only see what I see. Kathy, you’re amazing!

I love it that your belly protrudes with that little guy in there kicking and he just can’t wait to get out, and get a look at his beautiful moth….” She turns to look at you as if to say “whatever, Joseph” and you feel defeated. “Goodnight, Kathy.” No response. You turn off the light and hang your leg off the side of the bed, a large sigh, and you drift into the warmth of your dreams.

You start spending all your time with Marmalade and his sister Janet. You lie to your wife, telling her you took on a night security job at the library. You go home, think impure thoughts about another woman, think of your wife and cry like a baby. You are a good man who believes in the sanctity of marriage.

You have been hiding your identity as Fiona, a drag queen from your wife, your family and friends. Your wife is convinced that you’re having an affair, and in a way you are. People have affairs for the excitement, for something new, something to look forward to.

The thing that makes you wake up in the morning and get through the monotonous routine of Monday through Friday. You are having an affair with yourself, where you and Fiona run off to a distant time, a distant place.

You talk with Marmalade about your marriage and your faith.

You tell him that you fear that God has stopped loving you and you’re embarrassed about your other life. Marmalade explains that his ex-wife and family disowned him and the church banished him.

You explain that when you were younger your parents took you to see a ballet and you fell in love with the lead dancer. You were enticed by her beauty and grace. You told the minister at the church that you wanted to be a ballet dancer, and the minister said that it would turn you into a fag. You couldn’t believe that God designed something so beautiful for women only. Marmalade puts his arm around you and asks if you’re happy. You’re silent, but finally say, no, no, you’re not happy as Joseph unless you can keep Fiona in your life.

You, Marmalade, and Janet go out for a drink and you can’t stop looking at her. She smiles and you dance with her performing “Stop in the Name of Love” and she laughs with the greatest laughter you’ve ever heard. She takes your hand and says, “Fiona, you’re more fun than I ever imagined!” You check your wrist for the time

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Lesley Wolf and realize you’re not wearing a watch, you haven’t worn one for months.

Kathy and you lose the baby and she becomes more religious.

She’s convinced that God is punishing her. You start to wonder if God is punishing you for Fiona. You don’t want Kathy to be harmed by your actions, yet you can’t give it up. It would be like giving up oxygen or water. Fiona has become an essential part of your life. You have to do something.

You walk into the living room, sit down next to Kathy on the couch where she is reading. You’re shaking; you suddenly feel wilted and cold again. She looks up at you and looks back down at her book. “Uh, Kathy,” you breathe deeply, ‘I have to tell you what…,” She looks up at you again and pinches her mouth to a smirk. She shrugs her shoulders and crosses her legs. You uncross your arms, “I don’t work at the library…I, uh, I.” “Oh, fuck you, Joseph, you coward, you bastard, you …”

You get up and back away as she hurls her book at you. It hits your shin and you lean down to pick it up: The Holy Bible. You set it on the coffee table and pronounce that you are Fiona and that you are a drag queen.

Kathy smirks more, presses her hair down flat, and says, “I know who you are. It’s like I’m living with the devil himself.” She closes her eyes and opens them wider. I want you to leave this house and take all of your sin with it! I lost my baby because of you, you sinful piece of shit! People like you should be burned at the stake, but you’ll get yours in hell with all the other fags and queers!”

“Kathy, you say quietly, I do, uh, did love you, but I can’t be Joseph Peters any longer.”

“Get out!” she screams.

You scramble your things together and find yourself at Marmalade’s doorstep. Janet answers the door. She’s in a blue nightgown and gray slippers. You stutter that you weren’t expecting to find her there, you were looking for Marmalade, as she shyly opens the door.

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Michelle Weidner

Tough-Dog Leather

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Jennifer Paige

Bottom of the Glass to cold gold

alchemy turned ice cubes

you are drunk and hilarious hiding under the kitchen table lazily carving air with a butter knife crawling like a baby cackling like a devil grinning up at me with alligator teeth you squeeze my knee like a ripe mango drag me with you covering me with hot buttered kisses i melt down

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Jennifer Paige

Waking Wonder sleeping in a gigantic nest sandwiched between boy and birds sun shining through the cracks dirt caked between my toes smoke in my cheeks fire in my belly feathers under my chin you, all i want for pillow we, wild as blueberries in sleep formed a chain (morning has broken us) last night flames licked the stars we tasted each other inside your sour mouth

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Jennifer Paige

Sleepwalking I dreamt that Peg and I were walking through city streets, arms stretched out sideways, one foot in front of the other, slowly, like angry zombies or Egyptians.

Peg used to dream of witches with snarled teeth and fingers, that come, at midnight, to grab at uncovered toes and spill poison into unsuspecting ears.

For three nights in a row Peg and I refused to sleep, and instead we rolled down the hill carpeted with dandelion’s skeletons.

Sending wishes sailing through air, to mingle with stars waiting at the bottom, along with twin concussions.

The doctor came with questions: Why don’t you two sleep? (he didn’t understand the value of night) Why don’t you stop laughing? (he refused to celebrate lunacy, he refused to join the game) He wanted to cut us down like trees, somehow make us useful.

He could not hear the beautiful rhythms bouncing in our brains, daring us, making our eyes and tongues roll,

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Sleepwalking making sleep impossible.

He gave us pills to make us sleep, and we dreamt of talking skeletons, squawking birds and supernovas.

We were sisters in love with time and the millions of stars that haunted us even in sleeping.

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Lesley Wolf

Barbie’s Regurgitation of Pink Dear Barbie, When I was five When I was six I so wanted Malibu Barbie Pink bikini Blue flowers Plastic pink brush By seven my sister’s Work and Play Barbie Tall Long blonde hair Large blue eyes Dashing pink smile with pearly white teeth Large breasts Tiny waist, slender arms and legs Pink mini skirt reversed into pink frills Pink stiletto pumps Everything I dreamed of When I was eight Playing dress-up in mom’s closet Her high-heeled shoes Stuffing her bra with socks When I was nine Begging mom to bleach my hair When I was ten When I was eleven Getting Teen magazine Blonde haired, tall, slender model on the cover Stretched out on the beach Pink bikini Blue flowers Pink smile with large pearly white teeth When I was twelve Reading “How to lose weight in two weeks” “How to get Buns of Steel” “How to increase your chest size”

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Barbie’s Regurgitation of Pink When I was thirteen Measuring tape to the waist Feet flat on the scale Ipecac in the cabinet When I was fourteen 24-inch waist 89 pounds Rotted yellow teeth Bad breathe When I was fifteen In the hospital, four weeks White gown Pink flowers Blue flowers on the nightstand In the bed next to me A child Playing with Splash and Swim Barbie Now Pop Rock Barbie’s turned Brittany Spears Feeding Ken’s ego with a strip tease on live TV I’m twenty-eight Trying to find a job Natural black hair Short Pale lips Black slacks and blazer to match Room filled with mini skirts and blondes Still cursed by those arched feet Permanently molded into stiletto heels So even if they tried they could never run too far from the truth An interviewer enters Looks us over Motioning for an attractive blonde Winks at the bit of her breast peeking out from her blazer Follows her hips into his office I’m twenty-eight Black hair Pale lips Don’t need this job

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Ben Van Iten

Blocked I’m not asking you to understand, or even like me.

Goodness no.

There are caricatures of us everywhere: the elitist writer who stands behind a podium and talks about this craft in terms of vast oceans and other assorted metaphorical waste. There is some truth to what people like us say. We aren’t just trying to make you feel stupid, I promise. This is a delicate process, and inspiration really can be like a kind god. Before you start a story it really can feel like you’re standing on a pier, looking into Lake Michigan. But, just the same, who talks like that? Goddamn egotistical shitheads, I know, I know. This is why I stopped standing behind podiums: the way they looked at me. *** People don’t get famous writing short stories anymore, but I did. This was a long time ago. A long time ago my hair wasn’t thinning and gray. My friends tell me that this is a very hard thing to believe. There was a literary journal, which I will not name, that published my work simply because I knew one of the editors. One of the stories was about a boy who believed that rocks grew from watering them like a plant because his father told him so. I tell people that the story is really more complicated than it sounds, but sometimes I just don’t know about that. They tell me it was pretty good.

So good, in fact, that it was put in anthologies and I have an award somewhere in my basement. College professors put this story in their syllabus and that’s just great.

So now this same editor, whose hair is also thinning and gray, says to me, “I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

I tell him, “I don’t believe in not believing in things.”

And he laughs. *** It’s a pretty depressing thing, I’ve been told, the reason why I’m in town to begin with. My mother passed away and she was a pillar of this community, this community that I grew up in. She was a large

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Blocked woman who worked at a bank. I don’t remember my mother very well, but of the things I do remember, this is what really sticks out: About the 20th of December every year, when I was still a small boy, she’d bake cookies. They were little cookies in the shape of Christmas trees with red and green sprinkles on top. The next morning she’d put them on a sparkling silver plate, put clear plastic wrap over the top of it and take the glorious things into the bank. There, people would eat my mother’s cookies and compliment her. The deformed cookies were left at home for us, and that’s sort of how everything always went.

My father wanted to divorce her for a good portion of his natural life, but he never did. He never ran away and just look at him now: dead. Everyone loved her but the two of us. It sounds like such a horrible thing to say, but keep in mind that I’m withholding most of the back-story. I could make you dislike her too if I was so inclined.

I went to high school with this girl and we had dated for quite a while, but it was during this time, when we were on the road and supposedly free, that I wrote the short story that made me famous years later. The girl and I would write at the same time, sitting back to back, and people have told me that it must have been such a nice little photo-op. This was my idealistic stage: the stage in every writer’s life where they pump out the best and worst material that will ever run around in their brains. One day the girl grew tired of me, or I grew tired of her, I forgot how that worked exactly.

The funeral is tomorrow and I’ve already told them that I’m not giving a eulogy.

That is the worst podium ever. *** “Do you promise?” the editor asks in his disturbingly familiar voice.

“Yeah, I’ve already got a few more stories written. I don’t know if they are really publishing sort, but that’s your decision,” I lied aloud. I hadn’t written in years, but I was always telling people that I was. Always working. Always working on something. Maybe a novel?

“Well, you know where to reach me. I know a few of your fans that would appreciate this. Hell, the journal would too. Might sell

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Ben Van Iten me a few copies. No one reads short fiction anymore, you know.”

“I had writer’s block for so long.”

“You told me that the last time we talked.”

The bartender fills up my friend’s glass in a reckless sort of way.

He doesn’t tend to the minor spill of beer on the table, and my face tenses in a most ugly way at this. What in the hell happened to me anyway?

“I’ll tell you one thing,” the editor says between sips with a face full of melancholy, “your mother was a fine woman.” *** Everyone has a story.

This is what my Creative Writing instructor told our class, years and years ago. The students would laugh at him when he wasn’t around, and say things like “horseshit.” It was just the sort of cliché that even I disregarded and here it is, staring me in the face. I’m hoping my Creative Writing instructor was right. The fact of the matter is I’m going to have to finally write something. If not for me, for the editor who thinks I have a story that can just be dropped off on his front step whenever I get around to it. It’s time to make myself something to believe in again, right? Right?

So I sit in a café on the morning of my mother’s funeral, and I say to the waitress, “Life. Thumbs up or thumbs down?” And I hope. I hope something comes of this.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She smiles like I’m some kind of crazy person. She might have tripped the crazy person silent alarm. There might be armed guards coming.

“I’m not some weirdo. I’d just like to know, how is your life?”

I wanted to assure her that it was okay because I’m a writer, but somehow I doubt that would have helped the situation. Besides, am I a writer? She scoffs, and for the record, her tag tells me that her name is Jeanne. With one impatient movement she puts her order sheet in the front pocket of her apron and crosses her arms at the chest.

“My daughter ran away from the group home she was assigned to. She has been missing for a total of four months now. Thumbs

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Blocked down,” she says, and promptly walks away. I wanted to ask her why, because that is what I was trained to do. To always wonder why. So now I’m left with a plate of half-finished runny eggs and bacon that is too crispy for my taste. There is a check on the table too.

The thought of a story like her daughter’s being untold used to suffocate me. It’s starting to suffocate me again, and I wonder if this is a good sign. Nonetheless, I’m going to be late for a funeral if I don’t violate traffic laws of every kind. *** “I’m sorry,” they say, and shake my hand. There is a time and a place to ask why and this didn’t seem to be it at all.

Some of them hug me, some of them don’t, and some of them just look at me from across the room. What are they waiting for?

“You’re holding up so well,” a woman my mom probably used to play cards with says to me, and I’m thinking, well, yeah. This is a large Catholic church. I vaguely remember playing games of tag in this place when service was over, while we were waiting for our mothers to get done socializing. We’d dart in and out of pews, usually until someone got hurt. The drive home would be spent catching my breath.

Jesus Christ is being crucified on the stained glass window over there. My mother died of natural causes and she’s in the casket up front. The service is starting in about twenty minutes, and everyone is waiting for me to cry, I just know it. There is nowhere for me to go.

I take my seat a few rows from the front, and a hand pats me on my back. I do not turn around. Maybe I should write about this? The hands on my back? Part of being a writer is taking small unimportant things, and making them important. Making them large. This is a big secret in the writing community, so pretty please don’t tell anyone.

The editor, he’s here too, and he smiles faintly at me. He waves.

But why am I here? *** A eulogy, as I figure it, is sort of like mad-libs.

(Name) was a great person. There was this one time where (personal anecdote, ending in heartfelt moment) and I’ll remember it for-

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Ben Van Iten ever. I will miss (him, her), etc. I have nothing against the brave souls that go up there. I envy them, but let’s be honest for a second here. As it turns out, the last speaker is up there right now. He was my mom’s supervisor at the bank for a million years, or what have you. He is a short and stocky man. His legs do not function properly, so he has a cane. He is older than me by at least thirty years.

Supposedly, he knew my mom better than any other living soul. His eulogy is just like the other ones, only a little harder to understand.

I’m getting the gist though. He thought my mom was just swell.

And without warning, it happens. I pretend to cry.

Hands touch the back of my shoulder in sympathy.

And I know, this is awful, I know. I don’t expect you to understand, or even like me. Or did I already say that? As I sit here, pretending to cry like a baby, something I’m better at than you’d think, there are questions I ask myself. This is my idealistic phase part two, and this is not good material.

What would happen if no one cried at this funeral? Or the television studio shows we all intertwine ourselves with, what would happen if the people didn’t clap when the applause sign instructed them to? Is this as fragile as I think it is? I’m not talking about starting some kind of revolution. No. I’m talking about something else.

A feeling I’ve had for some time now that I’ll never be able to explain.

I can see the editor looking at me again. He’s watching me out of the corner of his eye, and I’m watching him out of the corner of mine. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll find something to write about. What you’re reading right now doesn’t count. I mean, where’s the plot? *** Everyone has a story.

This is what my Creative Writing instructor told our class. What he didn’t tell us is that some writers have just one story, and they just keep telling it over and over again. They just disguise it, so no one calls them on plagiarizing themselves. Some of these writers are very successful. I could name names, but that would just be tacky, wouldn’t it? I can name one name: Merton Grinde. That’s me, and for the record, in the grand scheme of things, I’m not very successful. My life is a pool of secondhand everything. Here is my one true story.

Here is what I’ll keep repackaging.

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Blocked In seventh grade I had an earth science class.

One day, a few moments after I had raised my hand and shared with the class, everyone became very silent and looked at me curiously for a moment. The teacher, even more so than the others, looked at me curiously. He said, “So who told you that rocks will grow if you water them?” Everyone laughed, of course. What my father would do is have me water a small rock in the backyard, and days later he’d make a switch. Perhaps this is how he escaped his reality. I don’t think he ever counted on me believing him.

I believed him.

“My father,” I said and shrunk, “my father told me so.”

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Pat Kranz

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Jason Ungart

Ogre at His House In the night, my father stomps down the stairs, An ogre leaving his mountain den.

The earth trembles with every step of his feet, massive blocks of pig iron, trampling carpet beneath like stone.

In the night, my father stomps down the stairs, His hoary ears have heard the sound of boys laughing at his table.

He has caught their scent in his bulbous, warty nose.

In the night, my father stomps down the stairs, Mangled limbs dragging across blasted rock, scrub brush and sand.

He catches three boys that play beneath his home.

In the night, my father waddles into the kitchen, His eyes squinting shut against the brightness of the lamps, Brow furrowed in discountenance.

His jaw juts out in sleepy snarl, Yellow teeth, polluted breath.

In the night, my father stands before the table, On spindly, bowed legs, ropey from carrying his weight, wearing only threadbare rags.

His genitals and rotund belly shake when he lifts and points a crooked finger.

In the night, my father heaves in breath.

He barks to the boys held with fear, “Get outta my house!� My father cries, Jaundiced voice of vinegar and outrage, Thrashing the boys, driving them from his home.

In the night, my father storms from room to room,

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Jason Ungart Looking for signs of the three boys’ trespass, Finding his lair undisturbed, Returns his eyes to me “What are you still doing here?”

In the night, my father pushes me up the stairs, Still bellowing, throws me into my room, Grunts, closes the door.

He curses from his bedchamber, Then mumbles himself to sleep.

In the night, my father snores loudly, Grunts, groans, and coughs and snores again.

In the night, my father dreams of bread baked from children’s bones.

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E. Victoria Wilson

Back Home Home – like the last day I was in the red house with the white trim.

That big, old willow out back still my favorite, even if has been cut down.

Being seven and grinning over cut lawns, Dad, the old push mower, blue hanky in his back pocket – I sat out on the painted concrete stoop with my dolls, blades of grass shocked my feet each time he passed.

Back then, Dad stood up high on my list of good men and stayed close enough long enough for memories to sneak in – like eating frozen spinach on his lunch break.

Mom did the unfreezing, dropped the green spongy mess in a copper bottom pan with a thud.

Maybe if we would have listened closer we would have heard her heart breaking – Instead, we listened to old country and silverware clattering against porcelain.

Dishwasher grumbling just like Dad when Mom made it do anything.

That smell stays with me like the taste of frozen spinach when I pass an open window just past dinnertime.

And when I hear the clanking of dishes or water in someone else’s sink, I think my way back home.

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Jared Kubokawa

Thin Hot Hour I remember that thin hot hour of my fever mother crying a chair swallowing a snake ballooned spotted goldfish hovering singing Henry the Eighth I Am I watch the red ball drop from the hand of my nonexistent twin picking up jacks gasping I see another child mocking me in the corner she has one eye in her hand winking she laughs and bites it with her teeth the ceiling is alive and I am screaming all of my bed sheets soaked spiderman pajamas plastered to my back I cannot breathe nor taste nor smell only my hearing that immense roar in nothing like the hum of submersion for a moment I see a dark shadow near my bedside retreating beneath damp pillows I emerge and he is gone then there is a darkness only the vast darkness you feel being eight years old living in the cold room of your mother’s desire

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Mary Bielefeldt

Pearl’s Mistake Pearl stopped dead in her tracks, and glared at her older sister.

Betty pushed her glasses up on her hawk-like nose and glared right back.

“I don’t believe this!” Pearl cried, her hands place on her rounded hips. “You forgot again?”

In response her sister’s lips tightened into a thin line. She pulled her shoulders back and straightened her spine. There was nothing to say.

“Betty, we can’t keep going through this!” Pearl wailed, her voice rising higher.

A faint blush crept over Betty’s high cheekbones, visible through the layer of soft powder that covered her raddled skin. She refused to meet her sister’s eyes.

“My favorite chair,” Pearl moaned softly. “Why did you have to pick that one?”

Betty looked up at that, and shot her younger sister a fierce look.

Pearl sucked in her lower lip and breathed heavily through her nose.

She closed her eyes for a long time and stood quietly, breathing in and out. Then her shoulders hunched as if in pain. Pearl turned and without a word walked down the hallway towards the kitchen.

Betty watched her go.

Moments later, she could hear Pearl’s voice from the kitchen, raised in the sharp, staccato way it always got when she was upset.

Pearl was on the phone, talking to someone. Talking about her.

Betty shifted slightly in the chair, feeling damp fabric against her thighs. The smell of sour urine floated up to her nose. She was sitting in her own piss. She turned her head sharply away and pulled her worn cotton cardigan closer to her throat with a liver-spotted hand.

The dog lay in the doorway and gazed at her with mournful eyes, but came no closer.

When Pearl hung up the phone she came back into the room.

Taking Betty gently by the arm, she helped her to her walker.

Without a word she took her into the bathroom, shucked her out of her clothes and into the shower. She was there with a warm, soft bathrobe when Betty came out, dripping and subdued. They hardly said two words to each other the rest of the day, but when Pearl

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Mary Bielefeldt helped her sister into bed that night she said softly, but very clearly, “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

Betty tossed and turned in her narrow little bed.

Pearl slept in late the next morning, stumbling into the kitchen well after 8:00am. Betty was already at the kitchen table, hiding behind the daily newspaper. Pearl poured herself a large cup of black coffee and sat down opposite her sister.

“I talked to Violet last night, Betty, and the girls are all agreed,” began Pearl.

The paper rattled lightly. “About what?”

“It’s time, Betty. Probably past time, and I think you know it.”

Betty licked her thumb and turned the next page.

“We’ve both been trying to ignore the plain facts, but that just isn’t going to work anymore. Have you forgotten the time you fell on the ice and I had to get the neighbor to come and help you up because I couldn’t do it myself?”

“Humph,” snorted Betty.

“Or the time you almost set the house on fire when you fell asleep smoking that cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke anymore,” lied Betty, who had a pack of Newports in the pocket of the sweater she was wearing.

“Then there was the day when you got your medications mixed up with mine, and we had to call the ambulance because of your heart pains? I thought you were going to die. The doctor said you could have,” Pearl added, taking a long drink from her coffee mug.

“I’m 76 years old, Betty,” she continued quietly. “I’ve had a stroke myself. I just can’t take care of you anymore. I can’t keep you safe. The girls say it’s time for the nursing home.”

Betty carefully folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. “I won’t go. You can’t make me go.”

“Oh, Betty,” Pearl sighed. “They’re coming early next week.

Ruth and Beverly will pick you up and take you to the airport and Violet will pick you up in Minneapolis and take you back to Wisconsin.”

Betty stared at her sister for a long time. Her hands shook as she raised them to her wrinkled cheeks. “No. Don’t send me away.

Pearl, don’t let them take me to a nursing home. You know what happens in those places. I’ll die there. They’ll kill me.”

Pearl sat back against the chair. She took another long sip of coffee.

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Pearl’s Mistake “Betty, that’s just not true, and you know it. It won’t be as bad as you think.”

They did not speak to one another again.

It was Pearl who packed Betty’s meager belongings into boxes, Pearl who folded all her clothes carefully in the suitcases. When she could not force Betty to go to the bank and the law office, the banker and the lawyer came to the house with all the appropriate paperwork. Betty signed the paperwork in silence.

On Monday, her daughters arrived with a wheelchair in the trunk to make it easier for her to get through the airport. Gordon, Ruth’s husband, was also with them. He gave Betty a careless grin and started slinging her belongings into the back of the vehicle.

Betty sat on the couch with her purse in her lap. It was a very large black purse, imitation patent leather with a goldtone clasp.

Betty fiddled with the clasp, deep in thought, as her daughters and son-in-law moved her luggage from the house into the car.

“I’ll ship the rest of this by UPS,” she heard Pearl tell them.

“There’s no need to put it all on the plane.”

“Send it on to Violet,” Ruth advised. She added to Pearl in a low voice, “I was afraid she’d refuse to go. I don’t know what we would have done if she just refused.”

Pearl’s eyes filled with tears. She blew her nose fiercely. Ruth patted her on the back.

“Mom, it’s time to go,” said Bev softly, maneuvering the walker in front of her mother.

Betty sighed deeply and set her purse down by the side of the couch. She reached out for the handles of the walker and heaved herself up. Once she was steadied, she moved slowly and carefully out the door and down the steps. The daughters and Pearl trailed after her. Gordon hopped into the driver’s seat. They helped her into the back seat of the car. Ruth took the walker and stowed it in the trunk.

Betty looked up into her sister’s face. She reached out a blue veined hand and patted Pearl’s cheek. “See you later, sweetie,” she said. Pearl looked puzzled, but squeezed her sister’s hand.

“Goodbye, Betty. I’ll call you. I’ll write. Everything will be okay.”

She stood on the porch to wave them off. As the big car pulled away from the house, Betty looked straight ahead, but a small smile played across her weathered face.

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Mary Bielefeldt Gordon got them to the airport in record time. He hailed a skycap who helped him unload the luggage from the trunk of the car.

The girls helped their mother out of the car and into the wheelchair, pushing her up the concrete ramp and into the noisy interior of the airport.

People were streaming everywhere, heading purposefully toward the airline counters. Ruth and Bev pushed her wheelchair towards the Northwest counter, leaving Gordon to deal with the luggage.

“Do you have her ticket?” Ruth asked Beverly.

“I thought you had it,” said Bev, rummaging through her bag.

“I think it’s in her purse,” said Ruth, glancing down at her mother. She stopped pushing the wheelchair.

The daughters stared down at their mother who looked innocently back.

“Mom, where is your purse?”

Betty looked at her empty hands. “Oh my,” she said softly.

Ruth and Bev looked up at each other. “Do you know what’s in that purse?” asked Ruth, her voice starting to rise. “Her airline ticket, her checkbook, her savings account, her CDs, her social security card…”

“Mom, did you have it in the car?” asked Bev. “Huh,” said Betty.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” moaned Ruth. Gordon came up behind them.

“What’s the hold up?”

“We can’t find Mom’s purse,” said Beverly.

Gordon frowned deeply. Betty frowned back.

Gordon’s cell phone began to ring. He pressed a button and put it to his ear. “Yeah?”

His mouth curved up in the beginnings of a smile. “Where are you? In the car? Okay. We’ve got some time yet. But hurry.”

The daughters looked at him. Gordon caught Betty’s eye. He gave her another cheeky grin. “Pearl found it after we left. It was sitting by the couch. She’s bringing it. Should be here in about half an hour.” He put a hand to Betty’s shoulder. “You’ll still be able to make your flight, Betty.”

He steered them all over to the airport lounge and went in search of a cup of coffee.

Ruth left her things in Beverly’s possession and went to the

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Pearl’s Mistake main entrance of the airport, so Pearl wouldn’t have to come hunting for them.

Betty was sitting in the wheelchair, looking at her hands. They trembled slightly. One thin tear trickled out of her damp eyes. Bev reached over and took her mother’s hand in hers.

When Pearl arrived with the black purse tucked under her arm, Ruth and Bev went to find Gordon. Pearl sat down in a chair opposite her sister. Betty’s long fingers were clenched in her lap.

“I need to tell you something,” said Pearl when she had caught her breath.

Betty looked up cautiously.

“When I found your purse at home, I checked through it to make sure you had everything in it that was supposed to be there,” Pearl said, opening the clasp. She rummaged inside the purse and pulled out a prescription bottle. “I found this.” She handed it to Betty.

Betty looked at the label, then up at Pearl. “These are yours.”

“I know,” said Pearl. “See the big pink sticker? Remember how we put that sticker on my medication so we wouldn’t get ours mixed up? The last time the medications got switched you got so sick. The doctor said you could have died.”

Betty frowned down at her hands. “I don’t remember putting these in here,” she said finally. She looked up at her sister and saw two tears tracing down the side of Pearl’s nose.

“That’s just it Betty,” said Pearl, her voice choking up. “You didn’t do it. I did. I’m the one who forgot this time. I made this mistake, not you. I put that bottle in your purse and I didn’t even see that sticker. If you had taken those pills, it could have killed you.”

She sighed shakily, took the pills out of her sister’s hand and slipped them into her coat pocket.

“Do you see? Do you see now why you have to go?” Pearl reached for her sister’s long-fingered hand and stroked the soft, wrinkled skin. “I can’t take care of you, Betty. I just can’t.”

The two sisters sat in silence for a long time, their fingers intertwined. Finally Betty sighed deeply and said, “We are just too damned old.” Pearl snorted with amusement and wiped her eyes.

Betty patted her knee.

“Oh, cheer up,” Betty said. “Maybe the plane will crash.” Her wheezy laughter brought an answering grin to Pearl’s lined face.

Pearl set the purse in her sister’s lap. “Here,” she said. “Try not

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Mary Bielefeldt to lose it this time.”

When Betty’s flight was called, the attendant took brisk possession of the old lady in the wheelchair. The girls called out farewells as Betty was wheeled away. The big black purse was clasped firmly against her chest. The flight attendant had been instructed to stow it personally in the overhead compartment and to see it safely transferred to the possession of their sister Violet upon arrival in Wisconsin. Betty went without a word, and did not even look back as she vanished down the entryway to the airplane.

Ruth and Bev stood by the windows overlooking the tarmac until the big plane pulled away and began taxiing down the runway.

It gathered speed and then lifted lightly off the runway into the bright, blue cloudless sky.

Gordon bounced on his toes. “That’s that,” he said to the daughters, who watched the big jet grow smaller and smaller in the sky. “How ‘bout some dinner?”

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Nelle Burke

Annis I find her essence in the memory of orange flowers, vivid against her pale peach skin or the rich cream hat on which they were lovingly placed.

There, quiet joy spreads across her face, with a contented curl in her slight, flushed lips.

She looks to me with the light stare that stretches from her eyes.

My love looks a picture of subtlety, with calm in her freckled hands, a hush in the wispy strands of her hair, a gentler shade of the blossoms she holds so fondly.

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Amanda Leck

825 Roosevelt St. I never really understood the audience of the phloxes or that fortress of raspberries waging religious war against mosquitoes or the crabapples blossoms studying their graceful falling art during winter performing it during spring or those massive pines ruling over them all it was a kingdom my backyard of nobility and justice of grace and power and I never understood until the sandbox filled with weeds and the truck filled with couches pulled away

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Amanda Leck

The Parlor The old man wearing deer piss the financial advisor the racist school teacher a small autistic child his nervous mother the musician working behind the counter the poet who does not appreciate words a boy with needs and I all in line for ice cream

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Sharon Vanorny

When I was 20

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Adam D. Seeger

Fixing A Hole In The Wall “I hate you!” punctuated by the slamming of the front door. He went over to the big window, but stayed off to one side and peeked out through the blinds. He had to watch her go, had to see this was not a lie of the mind.

From the moment she picked up the clock from the bookshelf, he had seen everything unfold in dream-time. It was all very fluid and deliberate. Surprise, as her delicate hand effortlessly hoisted the heavy clock, cocked back her slender arm, and hurled it across the room. Amusement, at the sight of the fully-rigged pirate-ship-shaped body of the clock sailing through the air. Amazement, as the creamcolored wall met the brown ceramic clock , and they both broke apart in slow motion splits and cracks like lightning striking against a stormy sky. He would later recall that the tiniest tips of the cracks in the plaster wall were still spreading when he heard her scream, and the slamming of the front door. But as he watched her turn from the big window, all clarity faded, and he felt the blood in his body fall into his feet. He didn’t even register her driving away, just the sudden emptiness of the space where her car had been parked.

He went through the rest of the day like an automaton. He picked up the broken pieces of the clock from the floor and placed them in a box. From under the kitchen sink, out of the hall closet, and from the garage he collected cardboard, a rubber-band, glue, a plastic putty blade, a small tub of spackle, a sheet of sand paper, and a can of beer from the fridge. He tore the cardboard and poked two small holes into the center, through which he fed the rubber band. He ringed the cardboard with glue and wedged it into the hole in the wall, quickly drank the beer and then put the empty can into the dangling loops of rubber band. The beer can was a little bigger than the hole, so it held the cardboard in place inside the wall as the glue dried. He sat admiring the strange piece of art on the wall. How many times had he promised her that he wouldn’t drink any more?

After the glue was dry, he spread spackle into the newly backed hole with the plastic putty blade. Once that had dried, he repeated the process, making sure the hole was completely filled. When the second application was dry, he gently sanded the new area of the wall smooth.

She returned, just after midnight, to a dark house. She didn’t call

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Adam D. Seeger out, just walked from room to room switching on lights. In the bedroom, she found his underwear and sock drawer empty, and some of his clothes from the closet were gone too. In the living room she saw the clean white patch on the wall, and the box filled with pieces from the broken clock, along with a note.

I fixed the hole in the wall. I could not fix the clock because I didn’t have all the pieces. I’m sorry.

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Christoher Johnson

Willing Exile, May 25th Somewhere jazz piano was playing over a car radio.

But in my car the only thing playing was shadows from my rosary across your holy flesh.

A thousand pale black crosses projecting up your legs, out of Eden through you.

And I was thinking of ways to sow the stars into your name.

Those dim satellites through the fog of well-loved windows, two ballroom chandeliers in your eyes.

Everything was in shades of black, perfect skin, soft, ashen, that left a glow of soot on my hands and washed out my face like war paint.

You were my garden, my fruit, and my faith.

This apple’s victim still had Eden with Eve, black dress, black hair, black slip.

In the car you ran kisses up my neck and like the prick of a snake’s tongue they added color to your eyes that shimmered apple red and took me off with the distant music of jazz piano playing in Eden.

And I just took your hand and became Adam because an eternity of apples and snakes couldn’t exile me from you, halo-headed and smiling between every pulse of my breath.

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Christopher Johnson

Actaeon The doorframe fell around you in bathing, the red light on your skin like an exit sign that, naked, i might escape into the wild with horns.

A small incision, the scar of living that excites me just right of the spine and up towards a shoulder that stands bold like Olympus is something that transforms me from the hunter to hunted – i am running wild like the pictures – you painted me with lips that fell in the rain and covered my footsteps, dissolving into the mud where hounds will never devour me without your permission.

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Jessica Doermann

The Survivor It’s odd, the sort of comfort one gets from routines. These days I feel as if I’m trapped in a middle-aged daydream, surrounded by forest on one side and the cold gray of industry on the other. In the dark, though, with Auron’s breathing in one ear and Ella’s face nuzzled into my stomach things seem uncannily natural. It’s as if I took a foray into the future and am watching myself.

During the day … during the day it’s a crazy house of mirrors.

Hallways lead to wings I know I shouldn’t be allowed in, walls covered with mad art, huge spaces I fill with music and spin around in, jungle filled nooks I curl up fetal-like inside and read the day away.

It’s one huge liquor cabinet and we’ve taken to guzzling gin and tonics. They seem to match the weather and the choppy way these days flow by.

There is plenty of time to think about things.

Sometimes I wander in the yard; foreign trees are friendly and, God, it’s so green. Not green like the Midwest; watered down with golds and yellows, but a deep impenetrable green. A green that whispers of hidden things, of betrayals. A green that feigns purity but holds secrets (sometimes deer in the morning drinking mist kisses from the lawn) and I’ve yet to discover all of the perfect places to sit and blow smoke or hum a few lines and try to feel content.

Ella sits here with me as I write this; such a stately creature, all fur and chocolate. She really fits her name, Lady Ella. She even walks like a woman, moving more gracefully on four legs than I, who only have two. She’s fine company which is why Auron bought her for me. Said he had to have someone around to watch over me while he’s away. She does so in her slightly bored way, her eyes always looking just past me into the shadows. On the lazy days he is away working at the marina, Ella and I duck in and out of doorways like two pixies, opposites, smooth darkness and a fading kind of light. She’s a wonderful companion. Very well mannered. Never interrupts. I tell her things I would never dream of telling someone with opposable thumbs, things about Auron, things about you. We squander whole days discovering spots of sun to sit in.

Yes, you would be proud of the household Ella and I keep, wandering around half-dressed, doing dishes with a drink in hand, yelling poetry out loud just to fill up some of the space (there’s so

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Jessica Doermann much space) … waiting for our man to come home.

And when he does it’s such a fucking picture of domesticity. He returns all craggy and weather-beaten, smelling the way men do when they’ve been using their hands, slumps through the door and cracks open a Coors, settles into his chair still grimy and sea-soaked.

“Hello, ladies. What shall we do for supper?”

Then it’s jazz and cigarettes, playful chatter, dinner, dishes, and then … then the crew arrives, an eclectic group of boys with accents, all guzzling liquor and rough tumbling on the floor, spilling over china statues and pewter candlesticks. The girls are raunchy floozies with sharp noses and absolutely no conversational worth, but they’re daughters of his family friends so they’re tolerated.

Auron is kind enough, despite his friends. Though we don’t see each other much. He’s rich, like the stereotype, but he works hard.

Yesterday, though, Auron didn’t work. He took me to the city.

It’s beautiful. Cobblestones one minute, dirty warehouses turned into punk coffeehouse hangouts the next. Old haunted bars with names like “Silver’s Shanty” and the smell of salt, fish and decay. Yuppie flats next to bondage shops and a run-down vintage store on every block. I skipped and twirled and fell in love. It’s such a dingy dark city, seems as though everyone’s crazy – mumbling and yelling and pulling pant legs for quarters. Authentic.

I met Tanta Dayla, his ninety-eight year-old great-aunt who still lives on her own. She’s a German sweetheart who can’t hear, so Auron yells, yells, yells, “HELLO TANTA DAYLA, THIS IS MY FRIEND SOPHIA.” He didn’t mention that I’m not Jewish or that when the blood didn’t come he blamed me or that my mother gave me no choice and I had to come to Maryland and live a harlots life hidden among trees. He didn’t tell her how he used those beautiful hands one night to make me sorry or how after that the blood came in waves and I was sick he said that was fine with him as long as “it” was taken care of. He didn’t tell her any of it. I guess Tantas don’t understand that sort of thing.

But she speaks stories in a lovely thick way: “You see So-phi-iah, I ham ninety-height yeers alt hand I geet veery lonely. Hare you tall, no? I have trouble seeing.”

Her eyes have given up so she sits outside and observes the world as a blur. Like a Monet in real time.

During the holocaust, she prayed to God every night to send her

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The Survivor an opportunity to make a difference. One night the Gestapo took her cousin while he was walking home from the factory where he worked. They took him to Auschwitz.

So, get this, thinking this was her sign from God, she marched to the gates and offered her life in return for his.

The Nazis looked over her papers and gave her and her family (cousin included) twenty-four hours to flee Germany otherwise they would all go to Auschwitz.

“So dat is how my fahm-e-lee and I come to Ahmeer-I-kah.

Vonderful, no?”

That’s how it is here in Maryland. Everything is so deep and rich and thick. I feel see-through sometimes, as if there isn’t enough of something in my bones.

Even the leaves here are pristine and all accounted for, curves lazy like gorgeous women untouched by the conniving forces that so often turn things frayed or ragged .… It’s so green and gin and tonic fuzzy, in the dark Auron and I blow smoke at each other and I hide my arms.

We indulge in spectacular vices and they rain down with three petaled flowers and tiny orange leaves. We stand on edges and look out over grays and blues, hear the moans of the greedy. In the canopy we shrug off cloaks of canvas and watch, amused, as pixie girls in white frocks struggle to shape their lips into words, watch as they chip their teeth on crystal champagne flutes and multiple syllables.

In the mornings he kisses my face and runs off to work but I can never keep sleeping. It’s frightening to sleep in this place without the ha-ruff ha-ruff of his Marlboro sighs. Besides, mornings are delightful; everything is hidden behind a sweet tasting fog and I pretend I am a princess trapped in a castle.

You know, in a way that’s how I’ve always felt. In this moment, smothered in the scent of unknown petals, I am reminded of the bend in my mother’s neck as she curved over my frightened form (for I always feigned sleep from the day I learned to mimic the calm vulnerable sighs of slumber), and whispered dark smelling secrets, brushed away traces of innocence from my fluttering eye-lids, something short of panic filtering through her hoarse words. Words cracked and brittle from age, worn down by the teeth and tongues of her mother and the mother before her: “Child, do not shelter love. Know this little one, love is the one pain you will not survive.” Kisses followed, the reserved dry

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Jessica Doermann moments she only placed on foreheads and the tips of fingers, the true kisses being the spots from her tears that lingered on my cheeks and eyelids for days. The leftover burning on my face made peaceful dreams impossible.

Ah, it’s been so long it seems, since I’ve heard her hesitant steps beside my bed, yet in this peace I am reminded of how last night I smelled her perfume and felt her sorrow. As if she grieved for me as I grieve for you.

So I spend most of my time in the pool, floating on my back with my eyes closed, half asleep from drink and sunshine. I pretend I am swimming in dark liquid crystal. It’s warm against my skin and lips and Auron and Ella are there. You’re there too, wise and timeless, your eyes the same color as the water that surrounds us. I hold Auron’s hand underwater and ask if you are angry and for some reason, in the water, in the dark, I know you will tell the truth … because in the water, we are all flesh and fluid like unborn children, we are all equal.

You say, “I’m forever now. No time for anger.”

Oh, Auron tries. He has tar and paint hands you know, the kind that look best when they’re controlling something (steering wheels, doors, my back) and smell of salt and dog and Marlboro Lights.

Hands that taste like girl and spare change, wild hands that calm themselves to brush away tears … I’ll miss his hands. You would have had his hands.

Tanta Dayla will understand, and I find comfort in that. We are the same in a way, Orpheus without a soundtrack or symphony to call our own, just a prayer and a dream and a ticket to escape.

It’s time to let Ella out, take a swim and then perhaps a walk.

The road is a golden path this evening, cutting through mountains and cities and leading straight to you. Soon we’ll wander rosy cheeked beaches and feel the ocean’s licks under our toes. I know it darling. We’ll dive into layers of lace-like undergrowth and dance, paint murals of cactus and exotic red sand on the soft sides of fawns and woodland dwellers … and then return to this cobblestone paradise and Auron will ask where we’ve been when we return all wet and wispy, full of giggles like girls, travel-worn and weary.

We’ll be princesses in a castle surrounded by the kind of green that’s supposed to fill up the shadows and help you forget.

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Pat Kranz

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Genia M. Daniels

Sticks & Stones I learned to talk like an angel to keep my mouth shut and keep quiet as bones this is what I tell my therapist and she asks me to show her and for a moment I can smell the hot oil of machines August underneath the rain and worms and lying quiet in rows of corn and everything else that could make that day alive resting on my tongue and I speak knowing it is not that day at all only something I remember taking up space breathing in clouds and breaking like snow

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Genia M. Daniels

The Darkest Hour Even after all these years your nervous smile drifts past my window on quivering midnight shifts A memory caught you skip again through my sky-cluttered head – a game I play with myself You in a field of abandoned car parts stepping over tin cans and oil spills umbrella tucked under your arm You are everywhere sneaking over cracks in the sidewalk eyes squinting brown in the sun walking in the rain and mumbling maybe maybe You lurk in the earth blooming like a confused root wrapping the scent of wood and salt around the weight of night I close my eyes and push my hands deep in the earth reach and think of your shoulder – the scars the sharp bone of clavicle A piece of yellowed glass strikes my hand the bright edges howling in my ear This memory shakes like teeth clings like children

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Genia M. Daniels your voice creeping out reminds of the weight of bones I remember that bed like stone as old as grandmothers keeping us tight like coffins your bald foot cradled in mine My blood is simple red wet doing nothing to impress feeding the swell of worms leaking out chrysanthemum hope I see what your resurrection can do like a dangerous fruit or spider entering slowly – unnoticed at first then tearing with army of teeth Bruised memory sometimes you are simple like a wrist then the night comes marching with thistles and mouths and pillows of flesh

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Rachel Hudson

Block Out the Sun I’ve gotten as far as the parking lot today. I sit motionless in my green Honda, with nothing but the brutal mid-day sun burning around the gray interior and the more vocal shadows in my mind.

I open the door. I shut it again. I rest my hand on the door handle, relax the back of my skull against the headrest, and wait for divine intervention. I inhale deeply. Exhale. It has been several days since I last cried; the residual sob in my exhalation has gone. If I just open my soul, I will feel power come into me, and I will rise, resurrected, and walk through the sea of cars, through the ornate oak doors, and inside, just as rehearsed.

I stir to peer down at my ankle, where I feel an itch. A small run has begun to develop in my pantyhose, where I abruptly pulled the bunched left leg over my heel. My slip has twisted under my plain blue cotton dress; it digs slightly into the flesh of my hip. I turn the radio on. I turn the radio off. I look at my face in the rear view mirror, and blend my makeup into my neckline.

Already I’m 10 minutes late. The procession, with the ministers and acolytes, is finished. There will be no commingling with the robed professionals in the narthex at this point; the unknown yet name-tagged greeters will be settled in their chairs behind the very last pews, and there will be only the sneaking in to manage. A smiling usher positioned to handle latecomers will leap into my field of vision before I am allowed to amble in, hand me a bulletin, and guide me to a vacant seat, probably not in the back.

Deliberately, I close my eyes to block out the clock and the sun.

A certain scent filled the space, clean but distinct, so that if you closed your eyes, you would still know where you were. Dark, carved wood surrounded us, and through stained glass images of apostles doing good works, muted sunlight shone through onto our faces in all the colors of jellybeans.

I sang among familiar children’s faces and voices. We sang simple songs, horrifically off-key, about abstractions of love and faith, little understood but sung anyway by children with no concept of mortality or real fear. We were children, singing songs in a choir, and I wore a pink dress with a white polka-dotted collar that rustled when I moved, and lacy anklets.

After we sang, I sat with my family. Dad handed me a little pink dinner mint, a minuet of butter and sugar to dance upon my tongue, and looked

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Rachel Hudson down at me with a grin, as I twisted and squirmed with innocent impatience on the hard wood pew, thinking only about the pink and purple and green foil-covered chocolate bunny in my basket at home. Dad busied me with finding and marking the hymns with the red ribbon bookmarks in the hymnal.

Cheerful hymns bloomed defiantly in the graveyard of archaic, indecipherable liturgical chanting.

Hundreds of years ago, people spoke this way, Mom had explained when I questioned her, with thee and thou instead of you and your.

“Did Grandma and other Grandma say thee and thou when they were little?” I had heard many exotic stories of my grandmothers’ girlhood. They rode to school in sleighs with heated bricks on the floor to keep their toes from freezing off. They washed clothes with bar soap on a washboard. There were no radios and very few cars. I would not have been surprised at all to hear that they had said thee and thou.

Plop-thump. Plop-thump. My eyes dart open. A pigeon with a mangled claw has landed on the hood of my car and stumbles across.

He pauses to peer through the windshield glass at me. The pigeon and I are the only beings present in the parking lot now. The choir is singing, muffled but clear. I hear their voices joined as one, singing a harmonized Doxology just for me and Pigeon, drive-through congregation of two. The ushers must have propped open the doors for air. Comforted, I float slightly above my car seat as my eyes close again.

Dad sits on the edge of my bed to say a prayer with me. The aroma of grass clippings surrounds him, and his fingernails are green. First, did I brush my teeth? Yes. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. ... Good night, Dad. The Easter Bunny comes at night as we sleep. We never question or imagine too many specifics or inconsistencies regarding the Easter Bunny, how without opposable thumbs he could manage to manipulate eggs, and what a bunny might be doing with so many eggs anyway, and whether the night-prowling alley cats of the neighborhood might rip his throat out as he, weighed down with a basket of eggs, walking strangely and awkwardly upright on this one occasion, makes an easy mark just before the crisp dawn of an early April day.

We small children, cousins and neighbors dressed in brand new clothes, boys in little blue suits and girls in pastel, lacy dresses, would run

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Block Out the Sun out to hunt eggs, faces already stained with chocolate. What if we found the bunny carnage there among the crocuses behind the red brick retaining wall in the back yard, his sweet, unknowing, little eye still looking up at the sky, carcass ripped open and entrails scattered about, glistening in the sunlight?

A good-luck rabbit foot matted down with blood would wave at us from amid the spilled basket of pink and blue and purple and yellow and green eggs never hidden, never hunted. We’d pierce the peaceful holiday morning with desperate screams, run inside for our mother’s comfort, into the kitchen warm with coffee and cinnamon roll smells. One of the boys would stay behind and poke at the bunny head with a stick. We’d go to church just the same, our faces blotchy with red patches from crying. We’d sit in Sunday school and color pictures of Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb.

It never occurred to us children how grisly it was that Christ was nailed to a cross, nails driven through his hands and feet, a crown of thorns pressed into the flesh of his head, warm blood drizzling down over his eyes, as though blood had been poured over him. We never discussed how commonplace crucifixion was in that era, how such stunning cruelty permeated the lives of ordinary people, how anyone who ran afoul of Roman law might endure this form of capital punishment. Thieves crucified at either side of him moaned in a chorus of agony. Thirst pounded into him with every labored breath as his body collapsed under its own weight; his mother and dear friends stood below, helpless. There it was before us each Sunday; the Crucifix, Jesus suffering an excruciating physical end, his pain preserved for our constant reflection. Like any object regularly observed, it became ordinary. We barely noticed or even considered it.

Thump. A car door slams nearby. My eyes open, and three people are walking past, one row of cars away. They are 25 minutes late.

One of them is a very old woman, hunched over, arm entwined with that of a much taller middle-aged man who laughs with her quietly.

Behind them is a woman in a red linen blazer. They are laughing about a ham in the oven; if someone gets home before they do, there will be none left. They will be walking in just as the sermon begins, or maybe it’s over. When do they say the Lord’s Prayer?

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

I sink lower in my seat. The sun is so hideously bright. I open the glove compartment to search for my sunglasses. Nothing. I shut the glove compartment. I close my eyes again, a little dizzy.

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Rachel Hudson Thump, thump, thump. Slowly, I identify this as the rhythm of my heart, pounding in my chest, in my neck, in my temple, like a paddle whacking a pillow near my ear. I lift my head from the floor, feel my cheek peel off the blue pile carpet, and wake reluctantly to glaring, vicious, mid-morning sun through a bare-naked, southern-exposed window. Empty brown bottles are scattered around, illuminated from within by sunlight. If anyone nearby had been conscious, I would ask if there was an axe planted in my forehead. Where am I? Oh, yes. Yikes.

Stiffly I stumble to the bathroom, accidentally kicking a fellow casualty sprawled in the hallway. I mumble a raspy but heartfelt apology in response to his groan. He rolls onto his back and snorts. In the mirror is the image of a darkened, squinting, pallid face with mascara smeared beneath eyes hollow with regret. Poor wretch. I’m an unfinished Picasso, one left hidden in an attic, for good reason. I make a cup of my hand and fill it with cool water from the faucet over and over, and drink to soothe my burning throat. I use a tissue and rub the scum off my teeth, splash more water on my face, and feel a disturbance where my stomach is trying to make sense of all this non-toxic liquid just introduced. My stomach rebels, harshly, and before I can kneel voluntarily I fall with the reeling and bump my forehead on the porcelain. Ouch. Even with the bump, it’s probably just as well to throw up now; it would be worse later and cold sober. I am alone, in spite of last night’s antics; no one is here to pull my hair back for me. Come to think of it, this is just as well, too, in so many ways.

The floor is vibrating gently with cartoon sound effects; somewhere in the house people are awake, and watching Road Runner and Coyote. A tenton anvil, a product of Acme Industries, precariously balanced on a precipice in the desert, teeters and falls, and through some chain of unlikely events, threatens to crush the predator, victim of his own nature. He has only a tiny umbrella to cower beneath.

Only now, sitting on the cold, tiled floor, waiting to for equilibrium to return, it occurs to me. Where are my jeans? I allow myself a small, depraved giggle, and then shudder involuntarily.

I had completely forgotten; I was supposed to go home this weekend to paint the garage with Dad. I never even called. My stomach turns again, this time when I think of my next call home, the terse replies and silences dripping with disappointment. In my mind, Dad’s right outside the bathroom door now, listening to me vomit, asking if I’m all right. No, Dad, I’m not.

“Hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail...”

We survivors pile out of the car and file into the truck stop for steak

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Block Out the Sun and eggs. I am hungry, but ambivalent about the smells of hearty food that greet us. The sunlight brutalizes every surface within; exposes every detail of the stained carpet and fake greenery, every blemish on every complexion.

Mercifully, some kindred spirit across the room twists the wand on the blinds and blocks the accursed fireball.

The one who sits next to me seems to have adopted me. I wonder absently, then, anxiously, from the conspiratorial way he engages my eye contact, if there is something I should remember about him from the party, some event, or perhaps, shared experience.

I make a mental note to ask Katy the next time we have a moment alone. She will relish telling the story in the women’s bathroom of this truck stop, as she yanks brown paper towels from the dispenser. “You don’t remember?” Then her body will convulse with laughter as she gleefully paints the picture of the encounter, or as much of it as she witnessed. Bits and pieces will come back to me, like b-b stings in sensitive flesh from an unseen sniper. I seem to recall something about tequila and belly button shots. I recoil; shoot me now. Maybe that wasn’t me. I think his name is Drake, or Drew, or Derek or something like that. Katy will know. He has wide gray eyes and smiles broadly at me. Could be much worse.

He’s nudging me, asking me what I want. “I’ll just have a Coke.” He orders for me. Someone calls him Derek. He squeezes my shoulders with one arm, the warm, strong arm of a man I have never met before, but know intimately. I am lucky this time, but luck has a way of running out.

Thump, thump, thump. Someone is listening to hip-hop, someone at red light nearby. Everything within a 500-foot radius rattles to the beat. I open my eyes. I’ve been sitting in this parking lot for 35 minutes. Inside, the ushers will be choreographing communion.

Row by row, the congregation will make their way up the aisle ... toward the altar ... toward the ...

We make our way slowly toward the coffin, Mom and I, holding hands, breathing deeply, bracing ourselves. Enclosed within, upper half exposed, is the lifeless, familiar shell of flesh. The lips will never again form a word or a smile, the eyes will never again open in recognition, the irrefutable truth of death is a presence, like another mourner standing between us. Only in sleep do I see him still; he talks to me about plain things, like planting gladiola bulbs, or a coupon for lasagna, or composting the grass clippings. He has an electric drill in his hand, about to start another project, only this proj-

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Rachel Hudson ect he will never finish, because now he is dead, which I only realize upon waking, with a short, sharp blow to the belly.

I am exhausted from carrying the weight of the last four days, the shock, the travel and preparations. There were the decisions, the planning, drinking a bit too much wine, which we all knew was a bad idea, but went ahead and did anyway. My knees feel like they will buckle not since I walked up this aisle wearing white satin have I felt so close to losing consciousness, have I felt so surreal, almost as though I am outside myself and looking on as an observer. I am wearing my favorite, my black silk suit; the lining is cool against my skin. Note to self – remind D. that if I croak sometime soon, don’t bury me in this suit, for God’s sake. Give it to Katy, even if she is too fat for it at the time, because she always gets thin again, and if not she can give it to Clara. The shoes have three-inch heels, and they pinch my toes, which I don’t need right now, on top of everything.

My eyes throb from sleep deprivation and crying. It turns out I am not made of stone, if I ever had myself convinced I was.

My brothers are among the pallbearers, and they nod grimly when I look in their direction. Behind them are my kids; I can’t see their faces.

Clearly I am avoiding looking down, but I am here at the coffin, and I will never have another opportunity, so I squeeze Mom’s hand, inhale deeply, and look into his face. I half expect his eyes to open, and find his mouth has been formed into a Mona Lisa kind of smile. My heart is beating hard inside me. I reach out tentatively and touch his hand. He is as cold as meat from the butcher. I turn away, letting go of Mom’s hand, and go to sit among my family. Mom follows.

There are prayers and eulogies and promises of eternal life, and I listen but can’t hear. Something breaks inside me, like an antique chair used as a stool by a child grown too large.

In a tidal wave of sobs, of conflict between faith and reason, between dark tunnels with warm welcoming lights at the end and ashes to ashes, something in me is shattered.

It’s over now. The minister has spoken the Benediction, and the impatient ones have darted out to get a head start out of the parking lot. They are all among the cars now. Still I have not moved. I put my arm up over my eyes to block out the punishing sun.

My mind is flooded with all of it, my heart threatens to burst with all of it; where I am coming from, where I am going, all these things that I have done, all these things I have left undone, here in the middle, and the growing snowball of consequences thereof.

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Block Out the Sun I cringe with the piercing pain inflicted on another, exquisite and constant, frozen in time, still as fresh today as the absolute lily shining fragrant from the altar. I remember long-forgotten debaucheries, worn as a deep line in my brow, appropriate punishment contained within each. I ache to cry out with love, love never adequately expressed to one now dead.

In the middle somewhere, I cling to the meaning of this act, of going through the motions of attending this one ritual, whatever the significance, historical, spiritual, or traditional, whether clearly defined or eternally ambiguous. I have to believe hope is a worthy thing to hold onto; to stay afloat is a worthy ambition – even if I stay right here in my green Honda.

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Takeylar Benton

Going Home Sunday morning at grandma's house Gospel music on every radio station Golden brown French toast sprinkled with cinnamon Sunshine-yellow still-steaming cheese eggs Mouth-watering crispy maple-cured bacon and Sausages, burned on the edges, just like I like 'em Homemade hash browns with tastebud-teasing onions Fresh buttery grits Buttery soft biscuits.

The instant I sit down My aunt stands in front of me with folded arms One hip at a 45 degree angle Fussing at me saying if I don't go change into something more ladylike I'll be meeting God personally today.

Stomping into the other room, Forced to wear a dress and tights, thinking to myself, I thought I was an adult – why she still gotta tell me what to wear?

In church Sister somebody or another always gets the Holy Ghost And then it spreads like wildfire and you wonder why it missed you.

The preacher is dancing and rhyming As the congregation nods and yells "Amen."

It's hot – stuffy – folks wearing too much perfume Big hats, tacky suits, prissy dresses Little girls scratching their legs from the torture of the wool tights.

Little boys tugging at their clip-on ties, peeling off their suit jackets.

Babies crying.

I fan myself with the daily program and yawn Then stare at the big wooden cross on the wall above the preacher Wondering why he's talking about me.

The soulful music and spine tingling voices of the choir rattle the stained glass windows.

I can't help but to get up and sing along But I can't get jiggy here – preacher's watching.

And he's not the only one – Did I mention the sexy ebony man sitting next to me

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Going Home Smelling like Michael Jordan cologne and a men's suit store Dressed in a cream and blue pinstriped suit blue shirt, cream and blue tie, dark blue suede hush puppies a bald fade, clean-cut goatee and small diamond studs in each ear.

Delicious Just looking at me out of the corner of his eyes trying to get my attention.

I lower my head for prayer Lord give me strength Waiting outside Rays of sunshine bounce off Flamboyant freshly washed cars Songs of R. Kelly blasting Kids chasing the ice cream truck waving dollar bills Black folks hugging and throwing their hands in the air Saying "honey chile" and "Lawd have mercy" Laughing and blessing everything and everyone.

My aunt showing me off Folks hugging me as if I actually remember them Saying how big I've gotten and how beautiful I am How they knew I'd make something of my life How proud my grandma would be of me if she were still here, Lord rest her soul, How much I've been blessed.

Out of the corner of my eyes I notice that sexy ebony man Navigating his way through the sea of laughing and hugging Baptists.

He graces the small of my back with his fingertips Squeezes past me Looking me up and down As the preacher walks over to give me a hug Welcomes me back And tells me I'll be in his prayers.

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About the Yahara Journal The Yahara Journal is a fine arts publication of Madison Area Technical College student work. It is in its ninth year of production.

The publication is funded by the Student Activities Board, which allocates money received from student activities fees. The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the MATC administration, faculty, staff or student body.

How to Submit Your Work All students of Madison Area Technical College are welcome to submit literary or visual artwork for consideration. A team of student editors will evaluate the work and decide which submissions will be published. Although the Yahara Journal is published in the spring, students are encouraged to submit work throughout the school year.

Work accepted includes short stories, poetry, essays, one-act dramas, photographs, paintings and other illustrations. Written items should not be more than 10 double-spaced typewritten pages. To sumbit: E-mail items to: studentlife@matcmadison.edu Drop off items at: the MATC Student Life Office, Truax Room 140, Downtown Room D237

How to Join the Staff The Yahara Journal has several student staff positions available.

Students are needed to help evalute and edit items, prepare items for publication, layout and design the publication, maintain the Yahara Journal Web site and assist with readings and other events. Staff applications are available at the MATC Student Life Office, Truax Room 140 and Downtown Room D237.

For more information, call (608) 246-6576, Truax, or (608) 259-2965, Downtown.

Yahara Journal contributors Cynthia Adams Takeylar Benton F.J. Bergmann Mary Bielefeldt Nelle Burke Stephen Crymes Genia M. Daniels Jessica Doermann Rachel Hudson Christopher Johnson Christine Knorr Pat Kranz Jared Kubokawa Amanda Leck Heather Lins R. Logu Jennifer Paige Adam D. Seeger Jason Ungart Hector Valdivia Jr. Sharon Vanorny Ben Van Iten E. Victoria Wilson Lesley Wolf Michelle Weidner