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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE front cover

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fall 2002 volume 14 number 2 Table of Contents

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BRYONY ROBERTS

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LISA GROSS

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33

DEPARTURE

2

SHARI GOLDMAN-GOTTLIEB

suddenly there were glasses in my hands and bottles to be put back into a wooden cabinet and thought caught within them,fully formed and soon out of reach.

Departure

beyond the window the air was moist, sighed and let its water fall, in the kitchen the three of us began to eat the day's last meal: wine, bread, and the round peas. breath moved through and exited from the toes. someone said: to breathe is to be hit hard and soundly,to walk through the air is to be set upon by thousands of armed sylphs. someone else said: there are more important things at hand. my husband fed the cattle. japheth peered through the window at the trees squirming in the ground and sighed: shem and ham would be welcome tonight. they came in late, the water up to their thighs. the sudden rocking that followed slid every glass and bottle to the edge ofthe cabinet, and when I opened the door in the morning, everything shattered through my hands.

THE TENTH PLAGUE

Blood begins to appear on anyone's doorposts, and on their white Suburbans, and on the walls DAVID GORIN

oftheir schools. Congressmen leap out oftheir cars and scuttle home,children prick their ears in the field, dogs learn to walk themselves through autumn afternoon's denuded streets and sometimes return to other peoples' houses, scratching and whimpering at the wrong white gates.

Something has burned away the sheath ofthe world, drawn out its narrow silver blade perhaps for good now, underneath nothing anymore—in every bush, its luster evident, as though the leaves themselves were knives, reflecting the flash ofeyes.

When did the world become so small?

The beltway tightens around us,the strip mall long since encircled by the slithering grip ofsmallness. We peer through the shutters: the trees can't breathe. They turn a last red face to the angel who picks off their dead.

The Tenth Plague

3

DECEMBER, 1998

4

NICOLE DIXON

December, 1998

That was the winter your body grew a new geometry— the surfacing rays ofcollarbone, angles ofrib, elbow, shoulders more acute.

Everything became a plane.

Or it was like standing by the ocean, watching the tide of your flesh pull out. In the ebb, your cheeks made hollow grottoes.

You had tidepools filled with starfish, urchins, crabs: everything visible was skeleton.

One morning I caught you there on the tiles bent double and gagging,face flushed with serious calm.

Your eyes looked like praying; regular but more full.

You looked up, panicking, coughed, your spine jumping up and down, your vertebrae little dorsal traitors.

Your body was a shrine to waste: Bitter dough risen, unbaked and falling, lost bread that sank heavy in my guts.

What could I say when I had begun to spend nights kneeling over still water, finger sliming in my own depths before jerking back, unable.

That was the winter I dreamed ofempty churches, ablaze with light, their steeples shot up in whiteness through the freezing dusk, their windows and doors thrown open to give, streaming their heat to the night.

THINK OF ADULTS, GROWN-UPS, RUNNING ON THE PLAYGROUND. WHAT WOULD THAT BE LIKE?

6

HELEN RUBINSTEIN

Think of Adults

Mornings, Brian once enjoyed watching his wife dress for work. She always believed him asleep, and so she stood naked before the mirror for many minutes,seeing the moonlike reflection of her skin. He imagined their dialogue, the words of nude and mirror, like moon and night: 'Mirror;she would say, Night—'turning to the side,'am I a joke?'

And the mirror would answer, like a knife, 'Are you laughing?'

She would laugh, then, and raise her hands to her breasts, which were a joke, ornaments lollying over her composure.

But the mirror never laughed back. The mirror reflected her laughter, and held her flesh.

Dirty under the rosebush now, her skeleton scares away some ofthe children. They cry, holding their noses and running from the soggy smell, then enjoying the nasal sound as they tell their parents,'Bones! Bones!' But other children like her bones. These children are pirates or murderers; in the sandbox they build ships from her arm-bones and add sailors with her fingers.

At midnight, most ofthe adults still come to the playground, naked. Just like before, they enjoy the swings and the slide. But in the sandbox they knock down ships and sailors, and they return the bones to their pattern under the rosebush, replace arms and fingers, try to keep this woman's skeleton whole.

The skeleton is missing an index finger.

Bobby Rafford took it home with all of its joints. When he is supposed to be doing homework, he sticks the bones together with dried Elmer's like cartilage, and then he takes them apart and builds upside-down fingers,

4

inside-out fingers,fingers that circle back to their bases and never end.

Bobby's mother thinks they are chicken bones from the dinner table.'He's got an imagination;she says, and worries, in bed at midnight. She says he is'young'for a fifteenyear-old. She tells Bobby if he does not do his homework she will take away his bone-toys.

He hides them in his pencil bag, and they begin to smell like pencil shavings.

Brian no longer goes to the playground at midnight; the ritual is superficial, wrung dry.

The night she died was almost normal. They were all tired from work,from children,from daylight, headlights, fluorescent lights. They had been couples, married people, and sexy people, and they left being behind. Naked, stretch-marked, varicose-veined, they ran slow and klutzy to the park, thanking the darkness.

They did not stop moving but slid, climbed, swang until their buttocks were pink-striped and sweaty; their bodies buzzing on the metal, the rubber,the plastic; breathing the sweatykid, grassy-night smell. They did not speak but laughed often, hearing the squeaks of their butts on the slide and their weight on the swings sing to the night.

Seasons change despite midnight's constant return: it was December,the night hung gently ominous, and oftime the adults felt: This is a chore.

Many things were,so the adults only sighed.

And Brian's wife saw her nudity then not as an affirmation, no dance of honesty or purplespidered pleasure; no, her nudity was its own clothed affront and she shouted out loud: 'I wish to wear not even skin!'

Her own words killed her. From the swing, from her skin,she slid under the rosebush and rotted. Husband Brian said,'That was silly?

Later he saw her there, bones and a pair of breasts, bloody but intact, and he carried her breasts to the car. In the morning they went in his briefcase, bouncing irreverently.

The other adults, as normal,showered as if they'd just had a night ofgreat sex, and like maracas shook on stockings and boxers. They never know each other during the day.

HELEN RUBINSTEIN

Brian's high-school English class makes him a sympathy card. Bobby Rafford signs his name illegibly and writes,'Sorry your wife's dead?

So honest Brian could laugh,so genuine so wonderful. Bobby is a terrible student, has bad handwriting, draws monsters,folds paper airplanes in class, and for these things Brian loves him.

Brian carries two briefcases to school, now, and he has given his students a new assignment: Read The Scarlet Letter.

Answer thefiVlowing questions: 1. Did you enjoy The Scarlet Letter? Why or why not?

2. What would your scarlet letter standfir?

Some of Brian's students are children, but most are entering adulthood,their foreheads wrinlded. Their worries—grades, college, careers—frustrate Brian even more now,now that he no longer uses the playground,so some nights he writes long tirades, cursing at the students'impatience, wringing the shallow ambition from their necks. He locks these words in his medicine cabinet. His wife, flesh guarded by the night,shivers in ecstatic accord.

Think of Adults

7

8

HELEN RUBINSTEIN

Think of Adults

She is on an airplane, Brian's wife. Flying away from the playground with other angels who don't need nudity to know that kids are kids and kids have kids and you're still a kid and isn't it great to be a kid. They are vibrant souls with videocameras and community colleges and green workout pants and a tan. They guess her organs without intruding and help her blow away the blood.

That is the sad part, the blood-bye that comes without skin, the death poking inevitable. Amid the blueblood of her skinlessness, she remembers Brian's squishy butt, his jazz, his organic breakfasts, the first time they heard the call to the playground come through an NPR recording played backwards.

And he thinks of her, too, midnights, not on the playground. Sometimes he goes camping and uses her breasts as a pillow. Other times he rides a motorcycle and wears her breasts as a helmet. Once in a while he walks around town naked, holding one breast in each hand. No one recognizes him.

If your brain were a stomach, his wife used to tell him,it would be better than a six-pack, and it would eat a lot. They would laugh, but it wasn't very funny. He was a teacher, a brain-trainer, and even at midnight on the playground.he used to compose essays in his head, riddled with guilt—so inappropriate: Bobby Rafford would never think of writing on a playground. Or need to think at all.

In the woods or on the street, these nights, still struggling to live unadulterated as Bobby, Brian understands his wife, and he respects her sacrifice.

That midnight Brian holds his wife's breasts as he swims through a salty lake. He hopes they'll work as flippers, but they don't help his speed. They play so ferociously with the water that his swimming becomes precarious, his breaths gasps. He must drop the breasts, and he watches them sink slowly like parachutes, wobbling like an unsteady joke, peacefully silent. He imagines hearing the squeaks ofadult ass on the playground. The night, the moon, the stars glint.

0-

Rereading Bobby's paper over breakfast, Brian weeps for such brilliance. By mistake he puts the paper in the bloody breast briefcase, now empty, and his wife feels a twinkling hope where her breasts used to be.

Next day Brian returns Bobby's page, bloody and rank with dried-blood smell.'Cool!'

Bobby says, and smiles secretly at the darkened scarlet. At home, midnight, he attaches his gory answer to the woman's finger-bones. Her bones are a small spine, and the bloody Adult' is a pair of wings. Bobby glues the pieces together and puts the creature in his pocket.

4

Bobby turns in his Scarlet Letter assignment, and writes that his scarlet letter would stand for Adult.'

FOR EMILY

for Dr. Emily Ann Gargiulo (d. 2001) and Margo Emily Schneier(b. 1988)

Your name is on my tongue.

The presence of you in this house—cloying,sweet, a heavy fragrance—is foreign and welcome, almost known and never discovered. You've settled in between the bricks, the closet doors, you sit in chairs we've yet to occupy, books we haven't read. When my mother wed,she wore you like a veil, my father, kissing her,swept you out ofher eyes.

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MATTHEW SCHNEIER

For Emily

Dear ghost, words are not enough.

My sister, a half-thing, wears you about her midsection— under her first and above her last names, there you are near the belly-button, hanging under the breasts we've watched begin to perk, the ever-spreading hips. She will not say it. Her tongue is thick and can't pronounce the sounds. You are the ornament and the anchor.

And there are arms around my shoulders when there are no arms in sight. My breathing vanishes after making itself known to the air. There are things to be said, lost words and first meetings, but, gone, you remain,suspended like drops ofsilver. It's enough.

Dear ghost,finger-pricked, you're spreading over the night like fog.

WHEN THE ELK PUT THE QUESTION TO THE GIRL ON THE PORCH

BY GAZING AT HER WITH HIS NARROW FACE AND TENSING THE VELVET MUSCLE OF HIS RIGHT HAUNCH

and when the elk looked straight at her she knew she'd go, without a question

HELEN PHILIPS

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When the Elk...

A

THE PIGEONHOLE

To the individualist, a category is an ugly place — a slide-tray in a natural history museum bunching the etymologically similar in a communalgrave.

The name on the labelgivespeople who would pointsomething to point at, and those within the box a rallying cry. And yet, categories seem to be indispensable to anyone—taxonomists, anthropologists, comparative literature majors—wishing toget an encompassinggrip on agood handful ofthe things that constitute our world. Now that certainforms and ideologies are coming increasingly to dominate theglobe, smaller categories can be a comfort to those whofear globalist hegemony, rather than a contributor to it.

In the blurredgeography ofa Barnes &Noble and Starbuck's America, the South still seems to be a place differentiated against thegeneral homogeny, at least in the 'American'imagination. The Southern writer, in particular,seems to have sole claim over a regional adjective and a right to such things as anthologies ofSouthern poetry.

I wrote to the editor ofThe Southern Quarterly and several writers whojust happen to live in the South, and asked them how theyfeel about their position in the category that comes along with their habitat.

Do you consider yourselfa Southern poet? Or is this odious pigeonholing?

Pc: I dislike these pigeonholing questions, but I do consider myselfto be a poet according to that label since I live in [New Orleans].

Place is important. If we don't have one, we'll make one up out ofthe locale given to us. my first book,Resurrection, I felt much more linked to the geography of Louisiana and New Orleans—many ofthe poems reflected that, some about train rides through the South and the levee by my house.

My second book of poetry, however, The Afflicted Girls(forthcoming), is about the Salem witch trials of1692, a world very far from the landscape of New Orleans.

NC: With

Dm: Yes. No. MORGAN BABST

a writer, editor and filmmaker who is from New Orleans. My work defines me much more than does my geography and the cultural assumptions and associations that go with a'Southern heritage'(howsoever one might define that). My work is rooted in a different current. I consider myselfan integral part ofthe African diaspora.

KYS: I am

/4c: I do consider myself a Southern writer, because I was born in North Carolina and now live in New Orleans, although I think having been born and raised in North Carolina in a small town qualifies me more to be a Southern writer than living in New Orleans in the present (in middle age) does.

Does the idea ofhaving a coherentgeographically bounded literary tradition inform your work, or does your work attempt to comment upon that tradition or breakfrom it? Alternately, would you

The Pigeonhole

13

say thatyou create your own lineage ofcongenial precursorsfrom whom it's comfortable to descend?

PC: I would say I create

my own lineage etc. etc. Why? I didn't come from the South or from a literary family. I have little choice except to make up a tradition and lineage. It is composed of all those 'ancestors'from whom I can draw. Dickinson is foremost. Just to think ofher makes me happy...

NC: I have to say I don't feel an allegiance, per se, to Southern poets.(I guess I think ofthe New Critics, the Fugitive Poets, the Agragrians etc.) Southern fiction is much more ofan influence—O'Connor, Welty.

DM: Southern consciously and

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MORGAN BABST

deliberately, but from Joyce, Conrad, and other British and European writers perhaps even more. Much of my fiction is innovative.

The Pigeonhole KYS: My three initial and

major influences as a writer are Langston Hughes,James Baldwin and Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. On the other hand my major non-literary influence was the civil rights/black liberation struggle.

C: There is a line in one of my stories, 'Dream State; in which an actress says,'Can't we drive a stake through Faulkner's heart?'

She's talking-about how bored she is with her new historian husband, a publicity hound 'mind ofthe South type.' A Southern man who is always looking for the'end and the woods? Well, there is plenty of 'the end and the woods'in Faulkner, and rebellion against it doesn't seem like a bad idea. I suppose that I attempt to break from this tradition... But if you rebel against something, then certainly that defines you as much as towing the line. So I don't go at it straight, but slant.

How much is such a tradition shaped by the actual writers and writings within it and how much is it inscribed externally, by the rest ofthe country's persistent discourse on us?

PC: I guess I think of my poetry as inscribing a

universe in the face ofthe country's 'persistent discourse? That p. d. would be TV, especially CNN ...but also current music and the ridiculously hurried pace ofcontemporary culture.

NC:It seems like South-bashing is still an

acceptable kind of prejudice, especially in the Northeast where I have lived for the past six years, and especially in NYC where I live and work.There is no limit to the people who imitate Southern accents to mimic'stupidity?

But in terms ofa literary tradition, I wonder how it is constructed now that the South is changing, has changed...

DM: Southern

writers are the cause, taken up by the academic and review writers, with conferences devoted to the subject (Society for the Study of Southern Literature, etc.). There's no such thing as a Northern writer, not even a New England writer anymore. Western, yes.

California, probably. But Southern definitely, absolutely, and maybe not forever.

When it comes to literature, what is usually termed 'Southern'literature is generally speaking a segregated literature and is defined de facto as either whiteness or inter-relating with whiteness.

KYS:

Mc: I was just at the Eudora Welty Conference in Mississippi, where most of the presenters were women Southern writers who might have some claim to Welty's legacy, be her descendants. So these writers are consciously... aware, it would seem,that they

are in a tradition and that they recognize the limitations ofthis tradition, its boundaries...

They also chafe at the'reviewers' who say that'Southern' novels shouldn't take place in bland sub-divisons, but instead in quaint old towns,for example, or in some other way hold up their work to the old standards...

These writers want to widen the field but claim the legacy. Other writers, such as Richard Ford, who is also a Southerner and native of Mississippi, and who also spent a lot oftime in the last few years with Ms. Welty, before her death, writes books set in Montana, New Jersey, etc. Given how much his work owes to Southern Writers like Walker Percy, it would seem that he may have made a decision not to be associated with a tradition he could claim every right to... Avoiding being a Southern writer has probably made him a more American' writer, in some sense, seen as universal. I think that, in a more obvious way perhaps than fiction, you can see how the 'discourse' defines `southemness.' Consider the subject matter of women's emotional lives.

Just about every American movie I have ever seen that touched in some way on sisters' strong and difficult bonds and deep female friendship (from Green Tomatoes to The YaYa Sisterhood to Street Car Named Desire) has been set in the deep South. There must be a predisposition on the part ofthe rest ofthe country or Hollywood to expect that if women have affection or weirdly close relationships then they must be in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Alabama. So here the 'discourse' defines what a Southern Movie can be about, or perhaps, it defines that a women's film with some negative emotions or intense feelings in it has to be set in the deep South, as if that were

the only place in America where such feelings exist.

NP: Conformity... exists less and less among

the top echelon of Southern writers. On the one hand, Richard Ford holds that there's so much good Southern writing because 'southerners have a lot ofexplaining to do.'

Part ofthat tradition gets shaped by readers and critics who sense similarities among writers from a particular region, then define those similarities, over many books and articles, as a tradition. All'tradition' is a recognition ofsimilarities and continuities over a period oftime, and there is no doubt that what I have called the'Southern literary industry,' which operates in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue as well as in universities, is a major contributor to the tradition... If you live in Mississippi and know there is a market for a certain kind offiction that can claim to be'Southern,' you might very well write directly into the tradition. By the same token, that'tradition' has operated to train critics and readers to look for certain things from Southern writers that they don't look for in writers from any other region. Critics don't even blink when Hemingway,Fitzgerald, and Henry James set novels in London, Rome,Paris, Pamplona, and Michigan; but they go absolutely cross-eyed when Faulkner and Welty set stories and novels outside Mississippi. It is as if Faulkner and Welty must actually write with their bare feet in contact with the Mississippi mud,as if their genius has nothing to do with their intellect and all to do with their geography. That's the ridiculous part ofthe 'tradition': the part that insists readers see what they expect to see and not what's manifestly there.

MORGAN BASSI

The Pigeonhole

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Is itpossible to identiO a tradition in the present?

PC: It is possible to

perform such an identification, but why would one want to do so for one's own work? To feel more secure?

The writer is not meant to feel secure.

DM:Yes, name

brand Southern writing—that is, bizarre details (Padgett Powell,for instance, more blandly, Anne Tyler).

KYS: History is

made every day. Everything we do contributes to history. The question is, who is the historian and what is the accepted interpretation of history?

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MORGAN BABST

The Pigeonhole

Mc: Yes. There are many readers, many, who want to read fiction about family and women in families, and various gothic subjects (ofthe Flannery O'Connor stripe. . .), and intensely emotional, personal, psychological struggles, especially concerning abuse and the overcoming ofabuse, and race relations and their ramifications and progress, and history, especially ofCivil War times and so forth; and most ofthese readers will pick up a Southern novel ofsome description first, ifthat is what they want to read about. They don't read a Western. They don't pick up a family saga with roots in the Old World, or novels about immigrant communities, or ethnic differences and assimilation, or'making it; in the mercantile world, or rootlessness and its consequences,or the financial world, or the novel of manners, or novels set in New York or Chicago or LA if these are the issues that interest them. There are other kinds ofAmerican novels, which are perfectly wonderful, but in the area ofdeep emotional struggles, women's lives, issues ofintimate violence, and the complexities of race relations, Southern novels are the place people go.

And the existence ofan audience ensures the perpetuation ofa tradition.

NP: ...Probably not. The most we can

recognize are tendencies.

Why is it that the South has retained at least the semblance ofan identity separatefrom that ofthe rest ofthe country?

Pc: The answer to this question is obvious.

I get sick of hearing about'the South'down here, but the homogeneity ofthe rest ofthe us makes the South interesting. People are very bored out there.'The South'gives them something to think about.

NC: Well,sometimes it feels like so

much of the country is all the same (I know this is a horrible generalization) and yet the South has a regionalism and a flavor that seems preserved from another time — albeit a bad time in American history — and so seems more unique.

DM: The Civil War. Defeat. Lost cause.

Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement.

more separate than the west coast or the New England states. But all regional identities are gradually being worn down by the forces ofglobal capitalism.

KYS: No

Mc: Because the South was built on the backward-looking concept—that a preindustrial, feudal world could be recreated in this place, in America. And that there would be an aristocracy, and rigid social roles and a completely stratified social order, with actual slaves at the base ofit, supposedly parallel to the peasants ofother societies (in the pastoral version ofthis concept). And this concept, this entire idea, was completely at odds with the general idea that America was founded on—that people are created equal. All the way into the last century, the thirties and forties,

people in the South who were intellectuals were still promoting some positive spin on this very antique and ultimately evil idea. That somehow this was the 'natural order.'It took Faulkner and civil rights to finally blow this up, but the pieces haven't stopped falling out ofthe sky yet.

South was opposed to slavery, because the majority ofthe South was enslaved. So then, Southerness does not get defined by the status ofthe majority, but rather by the views ofthe empowered. When it comes to the'South'as a literary or cultural definition,frankly, I don't give a damn.

NP Well, again to be cynical, at least partly because a Southern identity is marketable. We get grits-ed to death in the media every time a southerner gets elected president or becomes a movie star. That's much better, to be sure, than to have our miserable racial past brought up over and over. Charm is better than racism, for sure.

Mc: For the market, probably for the readers, some value. The dangers are that some 'Southern' writers are going to feel hemmed in by the expectations ofthe readers and the 'tradition'they believe in. And be silenced because they have things to say that aren't correctly'Southern: But as we go along, I would say that the Southern tradition has been adding elements, not subtracting them. The widespread nature ofthe audience looking for fiction that has'Southern elements; has in some way dumbed-down the content. There has been some deterioration.

Do you believe such a categorization has value?

For whom? What are its dangers?

Pc: All categorization appears dangerous to me, not that I'm not tempted by it myself!

NC: I do think there is value in it, as American literature' is made up ofso many literatures, and this is a vital, crucial part of that tradition.

DM: Yes. For readers and writers and other citizens, because Southern difference helps to define overall national identity. Its dangers are few, except for enabling neo-Confederates to find a reason for living.

KYS: Certainly there is some value in

identifying (and identifying with) regional characteristics. But for some of us those regional characteristics are limits rather than defining markers ofidentity. At last year's Tennessee Williams literary conference,I asked for a definition ofSouthern literature. I was catching the distinct aroma ofthe Confederacy as a salient characteristic ofSouthemess, even though numerically, the majority ofthe

NP: I would say categories have meaning insofar as they are inevitable. People need to have some ideologies to cohere around; it's tribal: we have to believe that our group is superior and that our own traditions and beliefs connect us to some supra-spirit or intelligence in the universe who validates what we believe and how we live. Its dangers are obvious: such categories isolate those who are true believers, they deny multiplicity and complexity in favor ofthe simplicity of mantras. Politically speaking, this kind of belief makes people easy prey to those who use our words to make us believe they are speaking our language, who can then manipulate us to do their will. The recent Republican takeover suggests that conservatism is no longer a peculiar quality ofthe South. Alas.

MORGAN BABST

The Pigeonhole

17

Peter Cooley: Since 1975, Mn Cooley has taught creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans and is afrequent workshopguest at the *Creative Arts. He is the New Orleans Center. author ofsix collections ofpoetry, among them Sacred Conversations (1998) and The Room Where Summer Ends (r999). He does afabulous imitation ofMark Strand.

Nicole Cooley: A native ofNew Orleans,Ms. Cooley teaches creative writing atQueens CollegeCUNT She won the Walt Whitman Award in 1995for Resurrection, herfirst book ofpoetry. She published herfirst novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love in 1998 and is currently working on a book of poetry about the Salem witch trials, entitled The Afflicted Girls.

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MORGAN BABST

The Pigeonhole

David Madden:Mn Madden was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and went onfrom the University ofTennessee to attend the Yale Drama School, where he published one ofhisfirst stories in the Yale Lit. He is currently the Donald and Velvia Crumbky Professor ofCreative Writing at LSLI. He haspublished several novels, including The Suicide's Wife and Sharpshooter: A Novel ofthe Civil War which was nominatedfor the Pulitzer Prize. He had this to say, in conclusion: 'Charles Wright isfrom my hometown, Knoxville, Tennessee (East Tennessee was both Rebel and Yankee).I was in Venice writing Bijou, a novel set in Knoxville, and had a map ofit on the wall.

A knock on the door, and there stood Charles Wright andJames Tate, dripping Venice rain, and Charles walked immediately to the map and pointed with exhilaration at the street where he was raised. How's thatfor Southern?'

Kalamu ya Salaam: Kalamu ya Salaamfounded the Noivim0 Literary Society, a creative writing workshop in New Orleans. He is also one ofthe founders ofRunagate Multimedia, agroup that deals with New Orleans and African-heritage

cultures. He leads a poetry performance ensemble that melds poetry, blues, andjazz. His latest book is entitled What is Life?.

Moira Crone:A native ofNorth Carolina,Ms. Crone is a professor ofcreative writing at Lsu. * She is thefounder ofthe International Society. the Study ofthe Short Story. She is the author of many collections ofshortfiction, including The Winnebago Mysteries and Dream State. She was awarded the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society *Short Fiction in 1993.

Award.

Noel Polk: Mr.Polkgrew up in Picayune, Mississippi, `a placegeographically Southern, but hardly Southern in any other way.'He is the current editor-in-chiefofThe Southern Quarterly, ajournal out ofthe University of Southern Mississippi. His book Outside the Southern Myth waspublished by UP Mississippi in 1997.

ELIZABETH ELSTON

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/ 7 / 1

SESTINA

I'm six, and a bird mistakes our window for a tree: a light Sound ofan in-breath marks the collision Ofglass, and the image of branches, and a body, Which we bury. We used a green feather, I remember, To mark the grave and said words to mean Nothing more serious had been broken.

My sense ofcontinuity is broken.

I flew out ofthe grave scene and alit In an adult body,in a doorway with you, a meanLooking boy: this time-collision Knocked the wind from me.I remember Thinking you had an impact on my body.

I

You could have been anybody: I was that ready to have my heart broken.

More confusion over what I imagine or remember— We took a walk through Vermeer light.

You took my hand to steer me away from collision With the dead pigeon at my feet—I fear what this means.

Before I left home, my uncle, who knows what dreams mean, Foretold my future: You will meetsomebody Who will lead you to a sacred place, a collision ZOE KAZAN Ofpast and present. What did Isee there? A broken Sestina Bird's breast. I could be mistaken, but in that light, You were the stranger to take me there. Remember You said you would make me remember What two bodies, touching, on a bed, mean?

You weren't wrong. My skin recalls it: your light Touch made a captured bird of my body, My legs trembling like wings. But the feeling is broken By a dream: as a child, I pictured love as a collision Of bodies on a bed, but only a silent collision Where two people became one whole. I saw as ifI remembered: The man and I faced each other. He slept, but our clasp was unbroken And our shape,from above, was a ring. This is what I mean When I say you can't be with me—your body Doesn't make me see mine in a clearer light.

The light here falls through branches, scattered by this collision.

Nobody leads me from this sacred place to the world I remember.

My broken wings keep coming up against what these visions mean.

21

STILL HOLDING TO THEORIES OF MAN

In this whole world,there is not one body That knows another, and not one hat That hasn't hung on some other hook.

But what's the point ofcalling them crazy?

They are children of normal parents.

They still have homes. While we were Chomping on apples, they were eating Their soup: mangoes, grapes, and lentils In the broth. They Were testing for possible Humanness in their bones. Haven't found any Yet, but still looking, inspecting the canisters For oil. If you look hard, there must be Someone who's looking for you, the theory goes.

Just signaling. This day is round. The passion OfGod must be earth-shaped, curved Like a moon under fire.

22

REBECCA GIVENS

Still Holding to Theories of Man

t

23

BRYONY ROBERTS

POORNIMA A FULL MOON NIGHT

24

SABRINA SADICIUE

Poornima

Shondeep,January 2003 Rumor has it that Meghna jumped in the well because her lover refused to marry her. Some say that four years earlier when she left the kidney-shaped village on the island ofShondeep to seek her fortune in Dhaka City, she was hired as a maid in Finance Minister Ishtiaque Rahman's house. Some say Meghna was carrying his child. Many are, however, content with the explanation that a restless spirit possessed her to her ruin. They say it was adolescent madness— a fever that ripe city girls who cross the age ofsixteen succumb to when their parents fail to find a fitting groom. Yet most enjoy the speculation that the seventeen-year-old girl had become a worker in the red light streets of Old Dhaka City. A village, conceived in the malignant womb ofrumored sorcery, entertains only the worst possibility.

The weaver's wife starts chanting her prayers backwards a quarter of a mile from the well.

The sugar-candy seller still refuses to tell his war stories if wide-eyed children ask about the well. And the children, ofcourse, take a different route to school but keep looking back at the trail to the well as they balance their books on their heads. Motiur, the stationmaster whose shack is on the trail, cannot sleep.

Moti;a weeping girl calls every night,'I am stuck in the well and the lid is closed...'

Moti closes his eyes and recites verses of the Qur'an till the muezzin's call for morning prayers floats from the minaret.

But then,there is one rumor that still makes this dot of a village on the island ofShondeep shudder. It is a story that only grannies tell little boys as they tuck them in hand-woven quilts, their white rosaries dangling from their necks and rocking in the frozen, sandy wind

from the bay. This is a story for moonless nights when lightning burns trees and thunder splits the earth wide open.

The hand was one-fifth the size of a thumb. The feet were found ripped at the toes.

The miniscule body parts seemed crushed by a sledgehammer. It was a grown baby, they said, with jet-black curly hair strands soaked in blood. One can only guess if Meghna killed her daughter or ifsomeone else did it for her, ifshe was the one to throw the remnants into the well before jumping in. People wonder.

People talk. And they talk some more. And now,after a year, what bothers the villagers more is that they have not been able to use the well since.

Dhaka City,January 2003 Ishaan stares at the once-red (now black) crescent blood-clot on her toenail. Its subtle ascension gives her a sense oftime. Its movement by three millimeters tells her that two weeks have passed since she last noticed it.

It has been two months since Ishaan discovered her pregnancy in the horizontal red line ofa cheap pregnancy strip. She felt wrinkled from the inside. As though a few balls ofcells had been pulling her skin, releasing it, and pulling again, in simple harmonic motion.

Any sharp object proposed tempting possibilities. The blue kitchen scissors with which her maid, Meghna,separated the bones offish before marinating it, the gleaming silver Swiss knife on her father's desk in the study, and the Nawab's swords, an heirloom, crossing each other in an'X'on the wall, beckoned her.

The doctor, a robot with a French-cut beard and blank, pitiless eyes, had probed further and further. It didn't hurt. It only felt raw. As

raw as the bloody slices of meat that butchers cut during animated dialogues with customers. There was something deceptive about the evacuation. As though not enough were being scraped out. Ishaan felt cheated out of something big in something small. She asked the butcher to bring her the plucked bundle ofcells. He looked at the mousy nurse with a little hump on her back. She reminded Ishaan ofa female rodent version ofIan McKellen in Richard III. Richard III brought her to the recovery room and handed her two sanitary pads saying that spotting was expected and standard.

However,excessive bleeding warranted a trip to the emergency room. Ishaan's eyes were locked on a girl in the bed across from hers who kept wiping her tears on the sleeve of her pale green hospital gown. She must have been no more than fifteen. Even fifteen seemed too old and skeptical an age for the child with sunken stomach, protruding collarbones, and large, sleepy, red-veined eyes. Ishaan is bad when it comes to remembering faces, but that one face keeps coming up. When she stops at traffic lights, when she is buttering her bread, or when her mind is a black clear slate, without memory, without thoughts. Like right now, on a quaint and pitifully slow rickshaw headed for the crowded,sweaty footpath stalls of Nil Khet where she plans to buy her physiology textbooks.

Red bangles, studded with diamond-shaped mirrors on a peddler's two-wheel-cart remind her of Meghna. No one knows where Meghna is anymore. All the telegrams that Ishaan sent her had been promptly returned, unopened.

Meghna loved Tibet Snow—a cheap face cream, red ribbons, and red printed cotton saris. Ishaan did Meghna's make-up before all

SABRINA SADIQUE

Poornima

25

the servants went to the photo studio, packed tight in their master's car like olive pickles in a musty jar cooked by the summer heat. The chauffer sped through the narrow lanes of Baridhara (lest the master come home early from the office) and almost ran over a coconut seller running home, his lime green coconuts about to drop out ofthe mouth ofa blue plastic bag on his back.

He was Goheen: nineteen year-old Ishaan's thirty-two year-old ex-lover. In Bengali, Goheen means deep. And he seemed that way—like a deep, black well when she saw him for the first time, trying to remove the molten summer pitch stuck to the back of his sandals while sipping cinnamon tea at Masood's Tea Stall. Perhaps it was the raging tide of passion that knocks the senses out of an eighteen yearold that made Ishaan feel the way she did a year ago,standing behind Goheen, waiting for her turn to buy a cheap Nabisco Biscuit. Or perhaps, there was an astrologic alignment of planets that made her feel dizzy with a peculiar desire that August day. Bad things happen in

26

SABRINA SADIQUE

Poomima

August.

Goheen dropped his cup on Ishaan's right foot; it broke on her toenail and a single globule of blood instantly clotted.

He was married,she found out four months later. His daughter, a girl whose name Ishaan now can't remember, giggled hysterically when she crammed strawberry Jell-0 into his mouth. That's all Goheen ever said about her except that she slept between him and his wife, Mira—a fact that made Ishaan smile during her Physics quarter-exam on Geometric Optics and which contradicted Mira's second pregnancy after Ishaan had slept with him.

She still calls him and hangs up. Mira always answers the phone and asks politely,'Could you please speak up? I can't hear you. Hello!'

Sometimes Ishaan is tempted to tell Mira that her husband is not the best oflovers. That he was awkward and demanded too much and returned too little. That he had the audacity to say that Ishaan's performance in bed was a 9.25 on a scale of to while his wife barely made it to 6.75 on a good day. That she was three-fourths away from a perfect to only because she needed practice. And that often he called her Mira while making love to her and apologized.

The rickshaw screeches into a ditch. She gets down to bargain with the rickshaw puller, her faded denim drenched in ditch water full of canine urine and spit.

Dhaka City, November,2001 Ishaan's father, Ishtiaque Rahman, waters his marigolds every day. On Tuesdays, he cooks what he calls a special meal—shorshay eelish (spicy hilsha fish cooked in mustard sauce) with rice.

For those who ask, he has been stuck at forty-eight for a while now. His green veins protruding on loose,jaundice-yellow skin remind Ishaan ofthe map ofthe tributaries of Bureeganga River that she had to memorize as part ofeighth grade Bangladeshi geography.

Gnarled. Twisted. Polluted with a sheath of fungus. Despite his impeccable sense offashion, perfectly manicured nails, and seven-figure bank balance in Switzerland, he belches in public and eats with his mouth open. Ishtiaque Rahman belongs to that species of politicians who seem to talk with a mouth full ofspit. His diction is as synthetic as the cellophane bags he

manufactures, distributes, and exports as a side business.

Ishaan hates dinner with her father.

Punctuated by formalities, the exchange proceeds from anticipated remarks about the consistency, spiciness, and salt concentration ofthe curry to feigned queries about her dwindling health.

'You look tired... Are you sleeping well?' he asks, as he dexterously separates hilsha bones with his silver fork.

'I am?

'Are you... pass me the daal please... are you feeling alright?'

'Yes? Ishaan leans over for another spoon of Hilsha curry to spread on her Basmati rice.

'You said you needed money for something.

How much do you need?'

'Three thousand?

'Remind me to write you a check tomorrow?

Mr. Rahman doesn't believe in the MasterCard commercial. Nothing is priceless. On his way back from the bank, he rolls his tinted windows up and smells the fresh bundled notes tied by a thread in the middle.'Everything is a transaction, Indira, a barter ofthe body, the flesh, the mind between bills oftaka; the world is a fish market and I like being the customer; he once said to his wife over a heated conversation on prostitution twelve years ago.

But when it comes to Ishaan's needing money, he never asks why.

An hour and a quarter after the servants in the house take Ishaan's leftovers to the sink and turn offthe lights in the west wing, Mr. Rahman walks out of his master bedroom toward the servant-quarters as he does every night. He softly unlocks Meghna's door with a duplicate key. The room has a single bed, a 40-watt Philips bulb hanging from the ceiling,

the cracked pentagon of a once-rectangular mirror, and a 1996 calendar,frayed along the edges with a picture ofthe mosque in Baytul Muqarram.

Meghna, about to prostrate herselfon the prayer mat, sits still, her back toward her master.

In her room down the hall, Ishaan drowns Meghna's muffled,sporadic screams in R.E.M;s Everybody Hurts.

She presses the rewind button on her Discman and rolls the tuner to maximum volume.

Goheen's teacup broke on her right foot and blood clotted. It has been a beautiful day full ofsurprises and expectations.

I am Ishaan's mother. I live in the east wing.

In fact the whole ofthe east wing is mine.

There are four square rooms with Thai aluminum windows in this side ofthe house. My bed is made of Burmese teak. The calendar says December 2001. I am always a month ahead.

I have been writing in my head all day and it is starting to hurt me. My sentences come in fits and bursts and jam my nerves. I spend hours disentangling and aligning them. As soon as I place them in chronological packets, they dislocate themselves from the time axis and disperse in my blood stream. Thoughts thump in my pulse; never linear, they clog some arteries and unclog others. Their entropy breaks my brittle bones till I think that I am losing my mind.

I was a high school math teacher in a private school for twenty-five years. In fact, the day I got my job was the day I first talked to Ishtiaque. The sun penetrated the fat banyan trees lining the street by the school and liquefied everything that it could. My yellow

SABRINA SADIQUE

Poornima

27

28

SABRINA SADIQUE

Poornima

ice-lolly, salty with sweat, trickled down my fingers and made a green blotch on my blue chiffon sari. Ishtiaque, driving by, offered me a lift. Two weeks later, I convinced myself that this was the man of my life and married him. Perhaps it was the gruff, drunk sound of his voice that recited verses from Tagore's Gitanjali as he traced my collarbones with his lips that stormy afternoon in the backseat of the white Volkswagen. I was sucked into the foreignness that he smelled of, that twisted and ripped the predictability of my small, unenchanted world. He was the dark, enigmatic stranger who read Tagore but called me Michelle as he sped through the twisted alleys smelling of burnt kebab. The Beatles watched us from the rearview mirror when we made love. I didn't know who he made love to that stormy afternoon—was it McCartney's Michelle or was it Indira? It is too far away now to analyze and too long ago to matter.

Ishaan came to my room a little after three last night and massaged my feet till they were wet. I saw the tears drop on my toes. I saw the same fingers that I had marveled at eighteen years ago slip through mine. They are longer now, more defined, less pudgy,less pink. I could tell you about their texture or how their touch has changed over the years.

But I cannot.

I have been paralyzed from the neck down since the year she turned eight. And my jaws are stiff too. Stiff and motionless like the dead crow that got itself wrapped in electric cables, twitched for thirty seconds, and fell on the windshield ofthe white Volkswagen on a rainy afternoon.

Ishaan told me that Meghna is pregnant with my husband's child. That Meghna threw up on the floor in Ishaan's bedroom and has

been crying since, covering her face with the red border of her sari.

At 3:42 a.m., the call ofthe muezzin for the Fajr prayers floated into the room from the mosque behind the park.

My daughter walked to the door,turned around, and said,'Why are you so dead?'

The door clicked shut behind her. I wish I could have asked her to bring me some water.

Chilled water with crushed ice from the fridge.

Every day, at the early hours ofdawn,an overwhelming thirst rises up my throat and settles on my tongue like a hot rug sun-dried and stuck on molten pitch in the summer-black streets of Dhaka.

Dead is the word. Like a slap. Like an electric pulse that shocks the body to ash or to stone. I am stone. I am locked in my numbness. Like my muscles that fail to twitch.

Blank and pitiless like the black crow on my windshield—its eyes wide open—shocked at the hardening of its own wings suddenly flapped shut.

Similes are wonderful. They keep me awake.

r-

I

29

LISA GROSS

March 5, 2002

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CARLA PINTO

30

AND THE FIGHTS

Once after our lovemaking she taught me how to caramelize onions byfrying them in their own juices.

As they started to burn, I reached into the pan,fingers frying to produce the perfect Vidalia— when she stopped me,turned offthe stove.

She saved the onions with a tablespoon of vinegar, Once you burn away the acid it tastes sweet 2

On top ofthe greens, dump the onions; let the pan cool, run it under cold water.

One day we'll be saved.

Come. Sit down at the table here.

Bite the salt off my lips. Touch my tongue.

ESTHER PHILLIPS

And the Fights

31

,,,,..........

LONG-DISTANCE RENDEZVOUS (VIA METRO-NORTH)

after Derek Mahon

The world speeds by in metered fragments, all the previews of possible lives distilled on billboards. Next to early signs offall, one reads,'I'm hot for you. Love, Florida; a joke that one could warm to—in the end, too corny for the rain that has begun its graded shading into night.'Florida, we might be anywhere but are in one place only,'I might say, knowing, as he who said this first must know,that, one: we are en route (to other cities, death), and two: that we inhabit elsewhere more than any other place.

However temporary,I love best all versions ofarriving at your gate, since, for the weary ever-traveler, rest might still be measured in returns, and towards this rest the loving phoenix burns.

32

OANA MARIAN

Long-Distance Rendezvous (via MetroNorth)

I

41.1111mm

YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF THE SPECTRUM: INDIGO, ULTRAVIOLET, X-RAY

The waves have shrunk too small for eyes,light has slipped into invisibility, and you have reached the end ofthe spectrum. No red,surface capillaries bursting with embarrassment.

No green, new blooms ofinexperience. No moaning blue. Just these: the light ofthe already-known that colors the present; (By which each note recalls each note before in this Mood Indigo solo.

By which the boy in the backyard angels, aware: I roll in cold snow.

By which you ask: Her breath on your neck? and the brain replies deep,low: No.) and the light that unsheathes the hidden sword; (By which honey bees are honing in on petals' veins lit ultraviolet.

By which the pi単ata falls, and, mask off, he beats it still, bent hyperviolent.

By which the ex-lover calls. Forget please what she did. Shut tight your eyelids.) and the light thatstrikes, but does not reflect.

(By which the stretching universe pushes outward its dark x-rays.

By which we answer What sees boys' hearts? with Superman's stark, flexed gaze.

By which you tuck yourselfin, her curse winks, and you're marked. Hex stays.)

ADAM FARBIARZ

You have reached the end of the spectrum: indigo, ultraviolet, x-ray

33

Editor in Chef C. Morgan Babst Des(finer Timothy Gambell Publisher David Gorin Managing Editor Helen Phillips Online Editor Allie Stielau Events Coordinators Meredith Kaffel Nicole Dixon Emily Anthes Circulation Managers Katherine Poltorak Steven Nam Meral Agish Art Editor Andrea Hill Selection Committee Jennifer Barnes Thomas Cannell John McEachin Joshua Frydman Vardit Haimi-Cohen Sonja Ostrow Matthew Schneier Gabe Smedresman Julia Wallace

The editor of The Yale Literary Magazine would like to thank J.D. McClatchy at The Yale Review for his infinite support, Philip Greene, Francis Bergen, Audrey Healey, Robert Stone, Susan Bianconi, the Davenport College Sudler Fund,the Trumbull College Sudler Fund,the Branford College Sudler Fund, Joe Maynard at RIS,Peter Cooley, Nicole Cooley, David Madden, Kalamu ya Salaam, Moira Crone, Noel Polk, Margaux Wexberg, Koffee Too?, Atticus, the fellows at the Pierson Printing Press, and Ruth Lilly.

The designer would like to thank Joe Maynard, George Guman,John Robinson, and GIST. The contents of The Yale Literary Magazine are Š 2002. No portion ofthe contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights reserved.

The Yale Literary Magazine is a non-profit, registered undergraduate organization at Yale University. The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those ofthe editors or staff members. Yale University is not responsible for the contents ofthe magazine.

The winner ofthe Francis Bergen memorial prize for Poetry is `Long-Distance Rendezvous (via Metro North)' by Oana Marian.

The winner ofthe Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Fiction is'Think of Adults' by Helen Rubinstein. J.D. Mc Clatchy was the judge for poetry. Robert Stone was the judge for fiction.

Subscriptions to The Yale Literary Magazine are available for $15 (individuals) and $35 (institutions). Contributions to the Lit are welcome. Make checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund and mail to: The Yale Literary Magazine PO BOX 209087 New Haven, CT 06520 Library of Congress catalog number 7-19863-4. www.yale.edu/ylit/

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