32 1 First Edit Notes From Emily

THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW
PUBLISHED AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
EDITOR: Brandi Lee George ASSISTANT EDITOR: Erin Hoover POETRY EDITOR: Jen Schomburg Kanke ASSISTANT POETRY EDITOR: Keith Kopka FICTION EDITOR: Emily Alford ASSISTANT FICTION EDITOR: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR: Jacob Newberry ASSISTANT CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR: Laura Smith
THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

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BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Nick Sturm ART EDITOR: Jessica Reidy PRODUCTION EDITOR: David Antonio Moody ONLINE EDITOR: Kate Kimball ASSISTANT ONLINE EDITORS: Sakinah Hofler CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Katie Cortese CONSULTING EDITORS: Mark Winegardner INTERNS: Angelina Colao, Devon Grahl, Patrick ONeill, Tazara Weilhammer, Rashanda Williams POETRY, FICTION, AND CREATIVE NONFICTION ASSOCIATES: Janelle Jennings Alexander, Kilby Allen, Michael Barach, Josh Burnett, Leah Cassorla, Leslie Chan, Christian Dickinson, Jaclyn Dwyer, Kimi Figueroa, Jenni Garber, Bethany Goch, Paul Haney, Marie Hause, Micah Dean Hicks, Hannah Jones, Steve Lapinsky, Jie Liu, April Manteris, Stephen McElroy, Sara Leslie Miller, Chris Mink, Claire Nelson, Michele Nereim, Amber Pearson, Natalie Perfetti, Liz Polcha, Justin Reed, Laura Smith
Email: southeastreview@gmail.com Internet: www.southeastreview.org Cover art courtesy of Aini Tolonen
Copyright 2014 The Southeast Review, Inc. All rights revert to author upon publication.
CONTENTS
POETRY
Jaswinder Bolina Second Variation on a Theme by Csar Vallejo XX Christine Butterworth-McDermott You Didn't Show XX Stephen Danos Prospective Client XX John Deming Knowing What to Do XX Matthew Fee Last Time You Threw a Chair at Me XX John Hoppenthaler Sleeping in Elizabeth Bishop's Bedroom XX Gianmarc Manzione Randall Jarrell XX John A. Nieves Salvager's Shanty XX Kathryn Neurnberger Bat Boy Washed Up on Shore XX Wonder and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed (1791) as What I Want Is XX Steve Light Scene from the Time of the Decemberists XX Glenn Shaheen Pearl XX WINNER Kat Gonso A Pinch of Salt XX
ART
Leslie Oldaker XX Nance Van Winckel XX
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Nora Kipnis Survival XX Jennifer de Leon Lucky Woman XX Sarah Fawn Montgomery Syndicated Silence XX
THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW NARRATIVE NONFICTION CONTEST 2013, JUDGED BY DIANE ROBERTS
FINALISTS Elizabeth McConaghy Sam Shaber WINNER Pamela Balluck Little Gods XX I am 40 XX Parts of a Chair XX
THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW POETRY CONTEST 2013, JUDGED BY ERIN BELIEU

FINALISTS (split into those chosen by Erin and editors) Rachel Contreni Flynn Gratitudes: Detasseling XX Collete Gill Thoughts in a Russian Museum XX Jonathan Greenhouse All is Noise & Music XX Elizabyth Hiscox Cellular Physic XX Or What You Will XX Allan Peterson Lasting XX Christine Salvatore Betrayal XX Vivian Shipley No Gold Lam for Me XX Kathryn Weld Seed Bed XX WINNER Elizabyth Hiscox Night Being the Consort of Chaos in Milton XX
INTERVIEW
Ron Salutsky A Dirty Dozen with Don: Interviewing Don Bogen XX
BOOK REVIEWS
Okla Elliott Lisa McMurtray Nate Pritts Misha Rai The Complete Poems of James Dickey, James Dicky You Are Not Dead, Wendy Xu Managing Difficulty - Lorig, Finn, Reines Whistling Past the Graveyard, Susan Crandall XX XX XX XX
FICTION
Allison Wyss Only Real Art Lasts Forever XX
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
WORLDS BEST SHORT-SHORT STORY CONTEST 2013, JUDGED BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
FINALISTS Shannon Beamon The Skeletons That make Your Closet XX Kelsie Hahn What My Daughter Is Holding XX Alisha Karabinus Begin Again with Heat XX Julia LoFaso The Envoy XX Heather Michaels These External Manners of Lamont XX Eliot Wilson Costco XX The Homeowners Association XX Match.com: A Lovesong in Two Voices XX Uncle Frank Meets Charlton Heston XX
Jaswinder Bolina SECOND VARIATION ON A THEME BY CSAR VALLEJO
Ill die in Chicago on a Tuesday midsentence on a muggy evening my entreaties unfinished Ill die demented and murmuring asleep in my bed Ill wither in a ward in Chicago Ill die of woe as if an infantry in 1914 or like a codger of pestilence in the 14th century Ill die irradiated and eradicated in Coral Gables in 2176 Ill die everywhere and for all time like a loosed balloon or blunt as a beer bottle dropped from a fire escape Ill die in Chicago on a Tuesday on a muggy evening lousy with estate planners and anesthetists in a week perforated by serial blips of a renal pump Ill die quiet in Chicago what a drag it will be how feckless and feeble it will be to die on a Tuesday amid the zoom zoom of weed whackers the unending industry of the trash collectors buzz in the fuse boxes not furious like a Hoover in a stairwell or regal like a bugle on a 747 but meek as the reggae whine bleeding from earbuds plugged into the head next to mine on the 22 bus what a humdrum thing it will be on a Tuesday in Chicago in which I lope into the long spike of death and become simple as the bodies this morning in Homs and in Hamah in Damascus and Deraa Ill die on a Tuesday like today is a Tuesday and Ill be dead in Chicago in 1978 and dead in Paris in 1938 and dead in Aleppo in 2013 Ill be dead everywhere and for all time as when a body is lashed and is shelled as when a body is punctured this morning in Idlib in Baba Amr its torn animal interior its machines un-machining it dies in Chicago too no soul prattles eternal protein mishmash and cortical noise the soul shudders on dirt among despots a rifle butt can end it but today the bones of my arms are fixed in their good sockets the soul is wired by dendrites into its power supply all my exiles and all the roads are ahead of me and I rouse myself in the democratic vista to launder the sheets and hit up the Kroger for yogurt and bread I empty the dustbins and Tuesdays forget all my trash at the curb I sit at the plasma hearth of the television set like an ancient at the tribal fire of his brute regime and Ill die this way too
Christine Butterworth-McDermott in the confederacy of the Tuesdays and Thursdays the sweeps weeks and no-term annual contracts unlimited nights and weekends in the mundane practice of life dull rot of the flesh on a Tuesday so like a Tuesday in which Jaswinder Bolina is dead as the dead in Deraa their lipids combusting too on Dearborn Avenue their dendrites disconnected slick tesserae on the faades of Chicago their ulnas on 95th Street humeri dead wet and steaming on 117th on a Tuesday so like a Tuesday in which Jaswinder Bolina is dead Molotov his palace fell every monument and rechristen the roads on a Tuesday in which Jaswinder Bolina is dead and Bashar al-Assad is dead and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is dead Shimon Peres is dead Vladimir Putin is dead and the eye sockets of every dead executive are lidded with half dollars Xi Jinping is dead Ban Ki-moon is dead Barack Obama is dead as Jaswinder Bolina is dead as every dead idol every prophet Ibrahim and Isa dead Muhammed dead the dead bells stilled in their steeples the dead minarets emptied of dead muezzins now sing, all you daughters of Deraa, if it please you to sing. YOU DIDN'T SHOW
After your birthday party, I gather the ballons and slice their necks, let my own air back into the room. All these molecules circulate again and again like the rings of Saturn in those old cartoons we watched in grade school, the lights low. I still remember that cinematic outline of a man drawing diagrams on chalkboardshis squares and triangles animating to form some dusty galaxy. Do you every think of him when you choose to duck into the doorway of the next bar to stare into the pooled whiskey in a shot glass? Do you ever think of the infinite nature of space, its black holes and nebulas, how they whirl or do you just think of milk swirling in coffee-flavored liqueur? What do you think of when you stay on the evening train, miss your stop, leave me to maneuver around the guests to look at the clock until they apologize, pity-eyed, and shuffle out like mourners for someone dead. In bars, you're still alive, your mouth wide with pouring words, your eyes twinkling like blue ice. I am zombied in an empty, decorated, house with a frosted sheet cake. Streaming news does not report these kinds of accidents. You are somewhere, tossing back another and another and another and another, and I am here trying to catch my breath as it is released from its nylon casing.
Stephen Danos PROSPECTIVE CLIENT
John Deming KNOWING WHAT TO DO
When I am the doily of skin beneath your fingernail, or admiring the skeletal black bear paws grasping the braided ribbons of the first recorded sound. We are not so indifferent, strained through similar colanders. When I write a haiku in urine on an unsuspecting snow bank, Im trying to impress you. You have levitated with others. Psst is the only word without vowels accepted by the Oxford Dictionary. Psst is a Boston terrier of the high-stepping variety. Re: the voice smarmily hollering re: the innate, revolting spirit of society. I will send you the instructional video I found online for mending the torn wing of a live butterfly.
Not knowing what else to do, last week, shirtless, I wore a steel blazer, coral pants, black beads to a party. It was a success. Except the whole time I fought the sense I ought to be wearing sunglasses. I know thats false in one way why would you keep wearing them inside and all that, like on the subway when everyone watchesoh, they case and thinks I have a hangover, and why else would I look like this but the crucial thing always is completing the look. You put things in their places, thats what matters most. Or else were making it all up.
Matthew Fee LAST TIME YOU THREW A CHAIR AT ME
John Hoppenthaler SLEEPING IN ELIZABETH BISHOP'S BEDROOM Great Village, Nova Scotia In the room that used to be hers, next to the room of her mothers scream, Im staring at the ceiling. My dream had begun on a wing of moonlight, shadows in the room. Across the road a car door slams. All I hear from my wife and son asleep next door is the box fan whirring softly as a whisper. But Id heard the church bell clanging, and I had awakened to fire. Id heard someones urgent hushing from the kitchen below. Mother I could see in white flames. Other than that, nothing is the matter.
I sat and looked at the four-inch dent in the lawn, the skid marks on the driveway, the golf club hanging from the telephone pole I think I'm just exultant twelve years since you molded me into the nothing that is love and feels like more You don't do your hair like you used to your hands are smaller. I think it's enough just to hear your voice instead of mine Let's get out of this place, you tell me, fuck Prozac, fuck the government, let's move to Turkmenistan and never wear silence again. We are on the porch. Your hair falls around your shoulders like laundry.
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Gianmarc Manzione RANDALL JARRELL Headlights show me where the world will make my name its dream, the way the night assigns these ball-breaking stars to their stations. Elm trees slouch deep enough in the dark to know me in the Nashville night, where Im a boy captured by the something in me I never could nameKirilov on a skyscraper. Here in the Chapel Hill dusk I am nothing, a flower folded in a book the admired one left behind, the man who walks the length of his life in an hour. To plunge this deep in a prayer and not know it, to never consider that Mary might be made to miss me, are the troubles of those free to choose among the attitudes the nameless days enable. Even the comical traffic Im stepping into knows the road to my lifes low chore. An automobiles headlights boil in the trees
John A. Nieves SALVAGER'S SHANTY We sing: Wishes work better underwater and kisses leave their own shiny brine. Some eyes lock red below the sunrise and each wave cascades across a blush. So hope circles in the tide pools, but never finds its way out to sea where ranges higher than the Rockies sleep black below a crushing dawn with those who gave up any dream of seasons, wind-born whispers or sentiments in snow. Every river, every stream bleeds into that darkness, into the reticulated wrack that screens each ray aimed trench deep. In all the icy pitch and undertow rot remnants of where someone longed to beboards that set out in the starshine, compass pointing anywhere but here, before each last prayer went unanswered and down was the only route to take, and salt and barnacles erased the manifests, taught the passengers, the captains and the crews that night is a luxury born of daylight. Dreams are heartless mutineers. They stay marooned on some far shoreline high above the swirling widows sleep, forgotten and forgetting charts and charters, myths, anniversaries, beliefs, holding out for the hand a diver downto misread, to translate, to recede.
Kathryn Nuernberger BAT BOY WASHED UP ON SHORE I have grieved Bat Boy. When I was a sophomore with a joint and a bad boyfriend, he was an urchin with spray paint and an underpass that felt like home. When my trip turned oh-shit-I-can-only-see-in-blackand-white, Bat Boy took me to the gas station to walk the neon pharmacy of the candy aisle. Anyone would have cried to stare at the newsprint of his face, but he was the leather-winged angel of that place, showing me how every microscopic quadrant of my tongue was a different piece of molten fructose architecture. People who are depressed cant see colors as brightly. The blur of his fang-teeth was probably hepatitis yellow if I could have seen him clearly, but after that I got clean because it seems you never get to go back to the first glittering rainbowed miracle of a gas station and wishing for it newsprints your face and your insides. Bat Boy was gone a long time, undercover for the CIA in the mountains of Tora Bora, an American hero in the headlines, even if you couldnt see through the gray of his redwhite-and-blue bandana. I was busy organizing protests with a lot of colorful posters and tie-dye. Hes not the only person I dont know at all anymore. When the paper went bankrupt everyone became very frank about how it was all made up. There wasnt even a kook in an attic reporters went out to interview. Just cynics with word processors. I thought I remembered one day buying a pack of Tic Tacs, white and plain in their plastic box, when I saw the cover where he washed up dead on the beach and it was like when Shelley was found on the shore and how they said his heart just wouldnt burn, waterlogged and smoking on the pyre, beating some untranslated poem. But actually thats not true, so I looked it up again, and it was the merman I was thinking of. Bat Boy is without end. Hes looking up at the incoming drone, hes under the overpass flashing his teeth, hes hissing in the static behind the news that a certain number of people are dead and a certain number are wounded and I wonder what we might say, where we ever to pass each other at the periphery of someone elses war or natural disaster, how we would talk if one of us were really there.
WONDERS AND MYSTERIES OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM DISPLAYED (1791) AS WHAT I WANT IS In a stall where you count the patterns you can make of linoleum squares which are also triangles and diamonds, having contractions you think are not, because six weeks ago you were pregnant and five weeks ago you were not, and what you didnt learn in health class is everything you would ever want to know like how big a placenta is and how veined and how purple and how when you birth it in a bathroom outside the classroom where you were trying to explain the difference between logos and pathos, you might first think a kidney or your spleen fell out, because it seems now anything at all could happen, you turn it over with a pencil, careful not to break the jelly of it, but what part was the baby part? Remembering makes my chest hurt with flapping and repeating geometry. Pathos is the patient Dr. Mesmer annotated, noting her propensity for falling into waking sleep fits, crying My brain is too big for my head! and I beg of you, cut it off! Logos is how he drew a diagram to explain what was wrong with her. See how the polar moon over her right eye is bigger than the opposite moon over her left? Is how his colleagues stroke their beards about why she wont consent to the procedure. Everyone else does. Everyone else wants to get it over with. Everyone else wants it cleaned out. Everyone else does not think being yourself a coffin is the only last act to do for a child you couldnt. Did you know a hunk of amber is a magnet for feathers and lint and paper bits? Did you know they stick to it like a miracle? What I want is the weight of a loadstone to affix itself on the airy aether of my womb and have it be as if my head were sap-sealed to my rest of it and there be no floating off and there be no sinking under and the birds are all sleeping in a nest of stones I buried over a blue-and-white china bowl with milkmaids and a maypole because it was the prettiest I had, how they never stop dancing around the center of it.
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Jean-Baptiste Para SCENE DU TEMPS DES DECEMBRISTES
Jean-Baptiste Para SCENE FROM THE TIME OF THE DECEMBRISTS
translated by Steve Light
Plus rien ne ressemble a sa promesse. Bien au-dela du Borysthene, bien au-dela de trois fois neuf pays, en mars ou brunit la neige, trois chevaux allaient de front, le limonier au milieu. "Le courage n'est pas seulement une vertu, a dit le premier--c'est aussi un bonheur." "Derriere le verrous de nos geoles nous rions du tsar en secret" a dit l'autre. Et pendant une longue minute le trosieme se tient dans leur fierte. Ce qu'on aime plus que soi-meme, cela seul est la neige qui ne fond jamais.
No longer does anything resemble its promise. Well beyond Boristan, well beyond three times nine countries, in March where the snow is turning brown, three horses stride forward, a silt-toned one in the middle. Courage is not only a virtue says the firstit is also happiness. Behind the bolts of our stables we laugh at the tsar in secret says the second. And for a minute which lasts a very long time the bearing of the third exhibits their pride. What one alone loves more than oneself is the snow that never melts.
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Glenn Shaheen PEARL of Houston back onto itself stores libraries dance parties various forms of obsolescence this radio station too and it never even signs off uranium in the groundwater discs and tape an artists mannequin feel for me or take some of this away from me I heard youre sick a friend said youre sick he said broken treasures medical tattoos up your legs our heat in the heat splitting our bodies our cells what were we locked to is curious is not to speak to balance an egg on a small spoon uranium in the ground water little symbols of intricacy and color displayed on the wall for our own amusement and pleasure
Youre sick I heard youre sick a friend said it he said broken treasures medical tattoos up your legs the expos showed too much radiation in Houston water but I dont feel funny let me finish Ill please you we were on a bench once the Alabama Ice House mist spraying from fans to simulate a beach atmosphere two stars the lights obscuring the rest Im tired of living in this permanently illuminated landscape shadows erased by lights aggressive and humming unmatched tones one star north one star south in a house there are countless broken trinkets each with little chips that may or may not be noticeable replicas of ships weapons and animals gifts or bits of personal accrual not useless or useful in particular another time we were drunk before nine a photo sliding out from between two pages unexpected we were placing a friends items in boxes creating loci of safety we were left alone and drunk and what a sudden crack in memory teeth of the lock clacking we were two devices of heat in the heat of Houston the nonfunctional air conditioner we were full of Pearl young in our way it is not two tall systems trapped in bitter weave we were an accrual of glances brushes the lighted sky not dawn as it appears but the reflection
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THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW POETRY CONTEST FINALISTS AND WINNER

Rachel Contreni Flynn finalist GRATITUDES: DETASSELING
chokecherry, singing finches. Nice enough, but once we finished 50 acres and found in the ditch a dozen pigs piled up dead to burn. Thank you for a place to put my body thats not near those pigs, not slumped on a rusted bus for home where I was grateful just to eat and sleepdirt-streaked and dreaming of sun and green and something else.
The years go by in single file But none has merited my fear And none has quite escaped my smile. Elinor Wylie Let No Charitable Hope Thank you for a place to put my body thats not a wet field in Indiana wearing a black trash bag at 5 a.m. Thank you for something else to do with my hands than yank tassels from corn all July a job thats made no other work a burden, made me grateful for ease, for gourmet coffee rather than water from a slimy spigot, even for fake sugar to drop in, so much better than iodine tablets. Thank you for sending me to Phoenix and Cleveland, and though Im nervous on the dais to speak about rights of privacy, it sure beats sneaking off to the weeds to pee on my shoes. Thank you for my pretty shoes, the sturdy house, new toys for the kids. In the fields, we threw clumps of dirt for fun until my cousin got knocked unconscious. Aware at 13 of what hard can be, I thank you, corporate office, for the years of regulated air and ergonomic chairs, for the Blackberry. The edges of the fields were always rimmed in thistle,
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Colette Gill honorable mention THOUGHTS IN A RUSSIAN MUSEUM
Jonathan Greenhause finalist ALL IS NOISE & MUSIC
to Osip (Joseph) Mandelstam This Faberg egg: soldered gold encased its blue and sage in cells and Josephs Old Testament coat enclosed its hues in lavish strips. (You Josephs discovered brothers purple the throat before the pit.) It was you, shadowed poet, who murmured, Names serve as omens; but fear didnt rend your readings. Trains plowed you to Vladivostok in a frayed coat, to gulag camps jeweler Stalins ice and skeleton cloisonn. No flight or passage. But a word is rock, never cloth, so you returnas if from Egypt in lines like tones on alexandrite.
All is noise & music, a throwing up of hands & hollering & howling at a moon covered with craters named after the dead & dying, & all is joy & wonderment & benediction, all a slow race to old age along roads paved with our footfalls. All our words are breaths taking form in reinvented space, & all we have are the selves wed like to be, forever in conflict with the selves we cant relinquish. All our hearts are as fragile as newborns, as vulnerable as a ship in the Doldrums, & all is commotion & movement & discord, all our symphonies broadcast simultaneously, all our notes spiraling around us like applause washing over our ears in sound-waves. When the music stops, theres no silence: Only waiting. Silence carries its own notes, its own measures, with thoughts as loud as thunder & as persistent as echoes. What we dont say is internally repeated, reformulated until our lips are rent apart by its urgency. Our heads fill up with expectancy, our pregnancy of ideas expanding. Were our own supernovas, stars in their death throes expelling brilliant gasps upon the universe. All is noise & music, each pause full of chords incomplete symphonies. All is what we make of the moments between first & last, the things were afraid to grasp, & the things we master.
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Elizabeth A. Hiscox honorable mention CELLAR PHYSIC
OR WHAT YOU WILL Can we just acknowledge for a second that most of us do wear jeans? Wear them often? They are like a middle working class top hat future generations jaws will drop and theyll say they all had them? Those crazy black stovepipes. I thought it was just a thing, but what a wonder and the feathers on the womens! No wonder the birds went dead foreverwent extinct, away. Went is enough really but we want to twin words off. It is funny not to have a twin. It is funny not to have the same last name. How do the Violas and Sebastians of this world do it, though? Those political Clintons? How dont I? My sister had the same name as me, but no more. I dont say mine that way so there was never my mom, who was also never like her mom because she changed her name. Which she? Exactly. To have sisters and mothers and brothers is not the same thing. To syntactically equate an animal and humans is a misstep. All zeugma and no respect. And it is also true because bears dont carry the thorn of a last name in their left paw. Theres more reasons than that, but thats exactly when my own resilient dark enters and the existentialists dont seem as off as usual. Dont hit me like Vespers at dawn. In the novel I reread at these times someone is at the opera and says you have to choose. There at Tristan and Isolde where everyone is choosing wrong onstage and the narrator believes you have to choose. Not how to die or what forof love even, I guess, if you wantbut what to look at. Who to watch who is watching who is choosing wrong. The and . . . and . . . And some have opera glasses: twinned lenses and polished brother, no, mother of pearl. And by funny I mean look at everyone wearing jeans and dont look away or youll laugh thinking how easy it is to be in the world.
I. Bull in a china shop: collecting the sound of Ming, tumbling through Yuong and Song. Timpani noise: sweet kettle thrum. Skin. The finality of the first twitch. Dynastic shards crippling the polished floor with clatter. An animal rotating in heavy light, closed quarters, a cadence of hooves keeping time with widening eyes, nostrils, rotations of neck, gyres, motion made bright in its inevitable ephemeral. II. Pristine variation on the theme of sugar beet. Liquid crystal endowed with cheek-flush, with undoing. Vodka tune played out in orderly rows of breakable engagements. Wild nights shed called them. III. Anyone watching this woman alone in the rows her touching of the gilded lips, enameled feet sees her want to unleash her spine, that flesh-hoop to the drumhead of her outer, despite the causality of aisle. Like a lover, like one loved bodily with overlay, intricacy of line, to be both horn and hoof, and glaze. All pottery was wet once. Held, but also thrown. What generosity the bull brings.
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And someone who may be my twin will swallow another sip of madeira and order a pair of corduroys from Amazon and not think about the river once because neither would I. Would you. Wouldnt think of water at all. Of Noah. Countless fish and eels and dolphins who dont come into it.
Allan Peterson finalist LASTING
The story of pure speed has no hand brakes no bikini women perched on a lacquered hood polished to a spotless hand rubbed finish but like space probes loose in such vastness that seem motionless to any observer we are left with the visual paradox of wheels turning backwards pages bent back to save a place orgasms delayed a little by pinching But some things cannot be put off snowmelt synthesis ardor the incessant pestering of things At one end of sleep is the dream flower At one end of thinking the poem like a rose so much so we even say brain stem Anything is possible but denying the body or we would not be having this discussion Inquiry would be like a view of Albuquerque colorful balloons set aloft from their tethers inheritance with no spotted beans to explain it Those so afraid of dreaming they will not sleep wind up in the state hospital where the dream is everyday life and they can finally lie down Some choose to be suspended in photography to last longer than memory like the stones behind them sinking below marigolds But we have planted the dead for centuries nothing revealing has occurred and the moon is still a cold empty room but with footprints
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Christine Salvatore finalist BETRAYAL
Vivian Shipley finalist
NO GOLD LAM FOR ME

1. The Poet Thinks about Christo, about Thirdness Just about every day, I think about thirdness: Christo draping Berlins Reichstag in a million square feet of aluminum fabric, swathing Paris Pont Neuf in 454,178 square feet of champagne polyimide that shimmered like silk. I think about veils: Christo in a park in Basel, Switzerland, bagging 161 trees in black and white polyester mesh. When the sun was behind the trees, every branch, every leaf was visible, but shielded from light, corrosion, fading and leaching. My father was no artist, didnt know that primer shields canvas from paint which eats and rots it over time, but curing country ham in our Kentucky farm smoke house, he taught me meat rubbed in salt, laced with pepper, shrouded in muslin didnt spoil in air. However, I am not about to be Julia Child, wrapping Caribbean fish in banana leaves to protect it from tongued flames. I do debate whether to veil poetry with a metaphor, or lift black mesh from a widows face, white netting before a brides first kiss. I balked at wrapping gold lam around my head to scarf a scar half-mooning my scalp after a brain tumor was removed. I have wondered when the Bronx Zoo guard turned his head, if I should shatter glass over the Burmese python balled over the walkway in a hollow log? Rubbing brown, then yellow, I could break the sheen of what lies beneath Salomes seventh veil, of what cant be contained. 2. The Poet Thinks about Boxes I make time to think a lot about boxes: sizes, shapes, materials, stackability, cost. I think
The dogwood startles me this morning as I mistake its flower laden branches for snow. Disoriented again. I need flame in order to rise. I strike a match for every misunderstood thing in the forest, join forces with twigs and leaves and deer. Dont tell me not to cry, dont tell me the wind isnt my father. I am all Ive ever made myself to be, down on my knees now, elbow deep in ash and soil, where robins ignore my persistent gardening and wait for rain. I cannot mimic their faith. I am mistaking apples for oranges. Theres no telling what I am capable of now.
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about waxed, unwaxed, corrugated cardboard, shippers, wired wooden sides, those with pressboard ends, paper-covered slats, the depth, width and solidness of the bottom. I even have a moral order of boxes: perfect boxes, good boxes, bad boxes and totally useless boxes. There are active boxes, inhaling and exhaling like tidal pools at Morgan Point. Inactive boxes cornered in the shed let me finger rough surfaces of my past, my grandmothers purgatory: Limoges, Staffordshire, Dresden too chipped to display, too good to trash. The walls of a box can shelter, but also disturb equilibrium of, say, apples. Crated, Macintosh, Macouns, dont spill to rot, to blossom, to pollinate. I cant hold a box up to light to make the interior visible and the perfect box says, Trespass. Why is it I oscillate between statement and suggestion? Like boxes, poems make me question whether to uncrate anxiety over my glaucoma, or erect a screen of ambiguity about a poets loss of vision. 3. The Poet Thinks about Birthdays I suppose I should be against ideas that come in packages but I think all of the time about robin egg blue boxes topped with white satin. Who among us isnt a fool for a surprise when packages are nicely wrapped and tied? Rodin first sculpted Balzac naked, but I suppose, like a lover, he became jealous. Taking a cape, Rodin soaked it in wet plaster and draped Balzacs figure the body was after all only a crate for the magic, for Le Pre Goriot. Six years old, it was not the thought but the gift that counted for me. I didnt want barriers, pauses, paper to rip, just pile upon pile of presents circling me, end to end, covered wagons pulled around the campfire. At sixty-nine, I still dont have the time to read cards, wait for the song, poke ribbons in paper plates, a birthday bouquet. Yes, I know Aristotle said in Rhetoric that metaphor is the token of genius. I dont have an eye for resemblances, dont want metaphor
as tissue, or a lid to lift. Anticipation, hope lead me to disappointment. So, I keep tugging until the inside is revealed. No predictability in life, I dont cast about for drama, have no need to be provoked by a box circled with gold foil ribbon Martha Stewart has scissored to curls. 4. The Poet Thinks about Sonnets I think, although less often, about sonnets: Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean. I debate: quatrain/couplet or octave/sestet, leap of logic or steady steps to epiphany? I have no moral order for poems. Villanelles are road maps I hope lead me somewhere. A sestinas six six-line stanzas march to the final envoy that I always do first. Like an AAA destination, it maps my trip. I can goad nouns, verbs, adjective and adverbs into equality but cannot decide which ones should be kept trousered or buttoned. Never into nuance, silence, subtlety, or mustering the inexplicable, I did seek rough edges, nubby, wooly, deckled rims. Isaac Newton reincarnated, with no stanza pattern as velvet cushion, I liked line breaks that pushed words off balance into white space, a force like universal gravity. Reassured as I now am by a beginning, middle and end, pattern helps me but does not break up binary thinking. No more banisters as parallel bars to swing down three steps at a time, Way too old to trot down Emily Dickinsons stairway of surprise, I depend on rails and rhyme, count steps like syllablessafe with iambic pentameter.
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Kathyrn Weld finalist SEEDBED I. Slippage
Elizabeth A. Hiscox Contest Winner NIGHT BEING THE CONSORT OF CHAOS IN MILTON
It begins with dodder. The golden thread of parasitic stem twines into an orange hairnet: pull-down, bindweed, devils guts, hell vine. I cannot find you. The diagnosis (suffixed percreta) is black: haustoria root in the cold frame of your mind. One by one, the fuck-buttons are being disconnected, I think, Making room for what? Your hands upon my arm are pillowy and doeskin soft as we shuffle across the grassy patio. Where? I ask. You point, ...forsythia... I prefer to think it ends with forsythia, the cheery, alien harbinger of spring: on that good early day bloom and dead leaves.
How clich and wonderful soap bubbles in moonlight in slight wind in descent and alternating ascent with meteoric qualities that outstrip ephemera. Bel cantos to any any. The word diadem an ornament to tongue if not to crown. The crown: a chakra all up and out (but of in) and rainbow rise. Breath fills the bubblesthe breath the air has been becomes becoming. The profane and sacred are both Molotov cocktails, arent they, waiting to be lit by the opposing side and lobbed back at us? At least thats what the canopy thought and the canap too. One covered needlessly in chives and sour cream, the otherquite needfully. II. Gentleness And I can bon vivant as well as the next. Roundabout the night with tight attenuations, articulations of splendor manifested in angular libations that lead onward into the spilt-light estate of crowd. However, you, my dear, are of salmon cooked long until it is falling flesh and salt and plain black pepper and humble mayonnaise that mimics that slow fat of the fish that allows the grill to make of this day a scent and ruddy pink wonder and leaves to memory alone the desire for spicy stacked tapas that hint night & vexing intrusive escalation. These hours, now, consist of lament at star thistles encroachmentspeaking of land and its tethers at the Deltas penchant for sandbars this season, at the gravity of saying anything at ten a.m.
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III. felix culpa Through the palpable obscure, Muse, urge onward Kick the luminary lunch bags to flame on holidays, and drop avocados into the channels of Mars. Fell the shrines each diner makes of the condiments. O melting arctic and savage modus operandi! Salt them with sweat from a dance with a name, those pistachios I eat at roasted dusk. Copulate near a bicycle and throw oblivious peaches at catfish who swim near enough. Sun-down is a thing both locked and and, Muse, dont you know it. Fall already, beautiful.
{WAITING FOR TITLE}

THE ARTIST WRITES
Leslie Oldaker I am a UK born visual artist who is currently living in Zurich, Switzerland. I have exhibited in the UK, USA and Switzerland and have work in private collections in the UK and USA. My work observes and explores through painting, the transient nature, purpose and interconnecting relationships of random moving figurative groups and their interactions within the groups and the space around them. My own personal response from cooccupying the space explores the sense of displacement and questions our belonging and relevance among random groups of people and the spaces we inhabit. The work originates from drawing and photographic and printing studies of large public spaces where there is a continual sense of movement of form within the structures. These studies enable me to abstract the essence of form, space, and color for the paintings. Initial washes of inks and acrylics create the sense of structure, negative space, and perspective. Oil paint, the main medium, I feel communicates more desirably the sense of continual movement and fluidity of the form within the work. Painterly mark making and a limited color pallet further enhances the suggestion of mood and place, creating a more engaging visual experience and encourages the viewer to explore further, the form and space of the painting.
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Allison Wyss ONLY REAL ART LASTS FOREVER I didnt go with Jenny because: Love is not eternal. I walked in and it was just body parts, full female ones, disassembled by lines drawn, pictures swirling, sliding, shimmering across white skin. A flickering snake, with blue and teal scales, slithered up from an ankle, coiled between loose legs, dropped itself into a pile at one breast. Then it stretched, yellow eyes gleamed and a cranberry tongue licked up her neck to tickle her ear. Live fingers twisted and rubbed thighs covered in sunset. Those fingers were sprinkled with inky flowers, and vines climbed around delicate arms. A bright nipple popped. Faeries danced around it. Then I found a face in the patterns and saw it was Dolores, our old friend, eyes closed and barely breathingI held my breath to hear her hot, quiet onesbut she was smiling softly, calm under Ponchos humming needle. Oh shit, sorry. I put my hand over my eyes, but I had already stood there too long, chin and arms dangling, for anyone to forgive me, if they even noticed. I hadnt expected her to be naked. I pulled my hands together, peeled a bright petal of polish off one fingernail, and watched it waft to the floor. I was just looking for. Shit. Im sorry. I backed out of the door. Out of Ponchos studio and back to the main room of our tattoo shop. Im in the pool now, flinging myself through the water. Dolores popped her head into the tattoo shop todaythats why Im thinking of her. I was inking a heart around a surgical scar for a middle aged woman, knotting the curves over skin twistsbeautiful and grotesque. Really, it turned out wellwhen Dolores swung the top part of her body through the front entrance, her fingers hooked on the door frame. Poncho was out and so Dolores disappeared before I could put down my tattoo machine. Count the arms spent between breaths. 1-2-3-4-5. Its five years since Jenny left, since I stayed here, with Poncho, to open the tattoo shop. The thoughts that float over the numbers, behind the waterline, arent like other thoughts. Usually its Jenny that floats in front of me when I swim. I see her hair like a river, rippling in a smooth ponytail down her back. Or I think about a design that Im working on. Words and pictures, right at the waterline. I think of Ponchos paintings, too. Real art, lasting and forever. Poncho is my business partner, and hes the real thing, an artist. He closes his eyes when people talk to him, then, when they finish, he gets out his sketchbook and shows them what it is they want. He punches it forever on their arms and legs and torsos. Mostly I have clients flip through the book, and those are the clients that go to me, the kind who come in on a whim and want to flip through the book. Poncho does the people who are looking for real art, like Dolores, who comes to the tattoo parlor once every couple months. She and Poncho lock themselves in his tattoo room for days. Then she emerges, more glorious than the last time. And Poncho is spent, relieved, talkative and happy. She lets him do whatever he wants with her. He just goes freestyle and she never regrets letting him do it, I dont think. I havent dated since Jenny left. Now, drilling tattoos on strangers is the closest that I let myself get. Poncho writes notes on the wall, between the polaroids of his best work, with a permanent marker. Five years ago, he wrote our schedule there, so now we still havent changed it, because the days and times wont wash off. I only ever did one tattoo on Jenny, my own initials, small but solid. She was sprinkled with freckles that I needled between. Jenny couldnt sit still for more than those tiny initials, tense muscles, always fidgety. Her fingers wandered over the bench, over my neck and arms as I worked. She didnt need much decoration, anyway. Poncho isnt just my business partner. We grew up together. I remember when Poncho was just Nick, before we all started calling him Poncho. My real name is Sara, but people mostly call me Dubby. It was my brothers nickname in high school, but then it got stuck to me, and I cant seem to shake it. After we got Poncho tattoo certified, and set up our shop, he wanted me to take a drawing class, so I did, with the last remnant of my California money. I was blown away by all that Id never even thought ofabout perspective, and the way people are proportioned, and lots of other stuff. But a lot of it Id already figured out on my own, too. The nuances of skin workdrawing over creases, veins, bones, wrinklesthe instructor
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didnt cover at all. She didnt know anything about tattoos. Said I lacked confidence, said I used the eraser too much. So I erased my whole sketch book, line by line, rubbed holes in the paper, and started over. Back then, I still thought I could be an artist. Not just a sidekick. Not just the one who cleans the equipment, who drills Ponchos designs, right out of the book. So even when Im done, its not my work, everlasting on cold skin. Its still Ponchos. But its the closest I can get. I swim every day at the Y, except if Ive got fresh punchings, and even then, I only wait a day or two. The water is constant and its the best I ever feel. The ache in my arms and the tightness in my lungs. No thinking, really, just counting strokes. I dont even count laps anymore. I just swim until Im too tired to go further. And in my mind, as I swim, I hold one of Ponchos paintings, or else one of his tattoos. I didnt go with Jenny because: Only real things last forever. Its March and Im in the tattoo parlor on a slow Tuesday afternoon. Im sorting through our design books, pulling out pages that are ragged, so I can redraw the pictures on fresh paper. The drawings are arranged by category except for a few of mine that Poncho seems to have moved to the back. I can take a hint. I rip these out and dont redraw them. With my tattoos, Im good at predicting weight gain and loss and aging. All tattoos are affected by these thingsyou cant help thatbut you can design your drawings so they grow with their canvas. So they dont necessarily look the same ten years later, or twenty, but they still make sense. Poncho doesnt see it that way. He makes something lasting every time. Before last week, when she stuck her head briefly into my studio, I hadnt seen Dolores in at least six months. But here she is again, walking in the front door. Poncho isnt in right now, I tell her. Cant she read the wall? He doesnt come in until three on Tuesdays. I know. Same as always. I came to talk to you. I fucked up and I need your help, Dubby. Its chilly outside and Dolores looks unusually modest in long sleeves after she wriggles out of her coat. Um. Dont tell Poncho, okay? I havent been around lately because Ive been seeing someone else. But now Im sorry and I want to come back
to Poncho and I think hell take me back, only I just cant let him see the work I had done by this other guy. This all comes out in a rush before I have time to make any excuses or stop from hearing it. Im good at keeping secrets, but sometimes just knowing them is hard. Oh no. Its all I can think to say. I cant think how to make my face look or how I could possibly help Dolores with all this. I wait for her to go on. Its just small, see? Dolores lifts her shirt to her chin and puts her finger to a small bird on her chest. Its only an inch long, but its obviously not Ponchos work. Oh. I say. Do you think you could cover it? Huh? Make it look like Ponchos? Uh. Of course I can imitate Ponchos work. Its what I do every day, draw his designs on fresh skin. I fool most people, but I couldnt get anything past Poncho, I dont think. Uh, I say again. Dubby, you have to. Dolores pushes her mouth into a pout that surprises me. Is she flirting? Since I dont date anymore, its hard to tell. I know you can do it. Even if I could Hed remember, Im sure. Hes gonna know he never drew anything there. I stretch my finger toward the bird and then jump back when I feel hot skin. I didnt mean to touch her. Dolores doesnt flinch. Please, is all she says. So she takes off her shirt and I do a tracing of the birdcarefully professionally. Its a red finch, quiet, pretty, nestled between two trolls, right below her clavicle. Dolores is pretty and shes nice to methats why I agree. Theres no chance of this working, no chance of fooling Poncho. You cant make real art and then forget it. Afterwards, I catch a glimpse of Dolores back, briefly, as she dresses. FOREVER. Five-inch black gothic, with green ocean waves swirling in front, obscuring, eroding the bottom from the F, the V, curling into both Rs. Its beautiful. Then it vanishes completely as she pulls the shirt over her shoulders, tugs it down past her waist. Only that snakes tongue and a spray of violets peep over her collar. So Ill come back next Tuesday? Okay. We arrange for her to come in early next Tuesday to go over designs.
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Obviously we dont put her down in the appointment book. By now its quarter to 3 and Dolores is moving way too slowly. Um. Poncho I look at the door. Oh, better go! Dolores scoops up her coat and scoots out the front door. Bye, Dubby! Thank you! This is going to be hard. Growing up, everybody wanted to be Ponchos friend, but I was the one who lived on his block and got to walk to school with him. Later, in high school, when a dozen girls lined up to drive Poncho home everyday, hed still ride with me, in my hundred dollar Honda. He had a knack for tying the door closed with the seatbelt and guiding the windows up and down with both hands. He liked to talk to me about painting and girls and getting out of this place, making some real mark on the world. I never said much, but always wanted the same things, something bigger than here, that would last. After Poncho went away to art school in Chicago, and then to pretty much starve on his own for a year in New York, I was working in a comic book store mostly, drawing a lot and also getting heavy into tattoos. I got licensed, got pretty good at the tattoos, actually. I was dreaming with Jenny then, wrapped in her hair, tying her to me. Love felt bigger than art then, like it could outlive us both. We were saving for California. Then Poncho came home, looking beat-up and skinny. He and I opened Body of Art, and Jenny went to California without me. Dolores tattoo. Ponchos going to know right away. If I could somehow manage to cover this bird for Dolores, what would it mean about Poncho? What would it mean about his art? I leave the shop early today, waiting just long enough for Ponchos glasses to unfog after he sweeps himself in the front door. Then I tell him Im tired with just squinty eyes and a pat on his shoulder. I drive straight to the Y. Its better in the pool. My armstrokes. Ponchos brushstrokes. 1-23-4-5. Except, today, instead of Jenny, instead of Ponchos paintings, its that piece of Dolores, from years ago, that snake tongue uncoiling. It skims the water line in front of my fingers, twists half above and half below. Its etched in my mind, so perfect and permanent. My face is burning with the memory, and I try to shake it from my head on each breath. It was years ago and neither Poncho or Dolores remember me walking in on them, Im sure. I didnt go with Jenny because:
Ponchos art is big and real. When Tuesday comes around, I dont have a sketch for Dolores. Im having second thoughts about the tattoo, wondering if I can do it, what it means if I can. Im kind of hoping she wont show up, but she does. So I hope she wont bring up the bird. But she does. Shes standing in front of me, all dressed, but Im imagining that snake, Ponchos work, through her clothes. Hows my design coming, Dubby? Im real excited to see it. I cant copy Poncho. Im not good enough. Dubby, I know you can do it. I shake my head. Wont you at least try? I shake my head again, but my shoulders are slipping. Dolores puts her hand on one of them and squeezes. Come on, Dubby. You have to do this for me. I shrug, but not hard enough to knock her hand off. I nod. Dubby, I knew I could count on you. Do you need to trace again? I dont, but she already has her shirt unbuttoned, so I go ahead and make another tracing. I dont need to be as careful with this one, so I can take a better look at the whirlpool of peonies dripping towards her navel, petals overlapping into feathers into scales. Theres very little blank skin lefteven the snake I remember is hard to find now, eclipsed by later art. Anyway, I ought to know the truth. Later, at the pool, I draw a straight line in the water, drilling with one hand, then the other. Breathe every three. Punch. Punchhnhh. Punch. Punch. Punchhnhh. Punch. Punch. The laps are like a mobius strip, when I flip at one end, then the other. The water is always the same. Its not just pictures with tattoos, but words, too. A quote, a name, a single, meaningful word. Poncho has me do the words mostly, except on Dolores, because its beneath him, but I like the small bit of craft in them, the way I make the letters bend and sway. The way their meaning shifts with the angle of their lines, the curves surging through them. I didnt go with Jenny because: Sex isnt eternal either. Its Wednesday and since I dont have any appointments until later and Poncho should be busy in his studio for a while, I sit down with
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Dolores bird. Its not a bad tattoo. The lines are clean, the shading is subtle. In fact, I feel bad covering it up. But it would never pass for Poncho. Dolores is right about that. And I dont know how to get out of this project. I can tell a few things about the artist from the work. Right-handed, thats easy. And a lot older, I think, than Dolores or Poncho or me. An artist puts so much of himself into a tattoo. Jennys hair was the lightest blond imaginable. It flowed away from her face in long straight lines, arrows down her back. Some nights, shed let me make rivers of blue and green and purple with washable magic markers. Then, my hands tangled in that hair, looping the strands into intricate designs, the colors rubbing off on my fingers. Id take pictures sometimes, but always shed wash the color out in the morning. And Id take her blotched pillowcase to the laundromat, disappointed to pull it from the dryer fresh and white again. Jenny and I picked California because it was exotic and wed have only each other. We could swim in the ocean and have summer all the time. Of course we were young then, and so romantic. Back then, I thought we could last. Making this bird Ponchos its all in the lines. The colors and the lines. Poncho would thread Green 854 behind this line, but not that one. Poncho would balance the bird on Dolores chest with a fish on her toe. Not every client would let him do itfew, in factbut I know Poncho would try, would ask, plead, beg, give discounts. This is where I cant copy Poncho. I dont have the nerve to ask Dolores for another piece of her skin. So the project is hopeless. Hell know right away. I focus again on the drawing. The birds face is so important. The eyes need irony, but the beak cant smirk, not even a little bit. I want to shade Blue 57, but Poncho wouldnt. Poncho would feather in Purple 628 or maybe 624. Poncho still sells his paintings sometimes or at least he tries. But mostly he stores them in his grandmas basement or in a shed at my parents house that they never use. Except for some that he gives away, just to random people who admire them. Hes never given any to me, because Ive never tried to tell him how much I like them. I couldnt tell you what his paintings are of, just that I like looking at them. The colors take me somewhere else, pull me into them, like Im swimming in the shapes, holding my breath from feeling to feeling. Sometimes I seem to find people or places I know inside them, but Im
never sure its them, and of course I dont ask. I always wanted to be an artist, but Im not. Just a tradesman. Or maybe a craftsman, but thats only on a really good day. Its good that I get to work with Poncho, my best friend and business partner, because hes the real thing, and I want to be close to that. His art will last. I draw the fish anyway. The first lines come quickly, and are perfect, but then my hands move more and more slowly. This one is important and I have to really think about it. This fish. I guess Im just drawing it for fun. I do have fun with it. It starts out Ponchos but then it turns into mine, you know? Its starts out as a favor to Dolores and a way to learn the truth, but now I cant let my fish down. My charming little fish. When I swim and I have a design half-donesometimes it will finish in my mind. Ill see it behind the numbers 1-2-3-4-5, rippling on the bottom of the pool, flipping with my feet, splashing out of the water on the turn, just in front of my fingers on each pull. It will come together slowly, shimmering, and then itll goddamn solidify, like magic. When its clear in my mind, steady like a snapshot, I hold it there for another hundred or so, let it set. Then I can climb out of the pool, shake the picture from my head and not even think about it as I take my shower. When I get to the shop next, next get out my sketchbook, its already in my fingers. I just tap my pencil, and it pours onto the page. If not the art, floating behind my splashes, its Jenny. I didnt go with Jenny because: I still have Poncho. Its Tuesday afternoon again and Dolores is sprawled out on the workspace, her breasts bubbling out to either side of a bra thats not quite working. Shes so relaxed about it all, talking as I drill tiny hole after tiny hole. This guy, hes just my friend. I tell you I dont know what I was thinking, letting him work on me. I just got carried away. And then I was still mad at Poncho over that thing last fall, you know, the girl and the red turtle? So I just did it. And then, you know, as soon as it was done before the blood driedI was sorry. Her blood, its thin like air, rubs right back into her skin in places. Its not like water at all. I blot it away as I work. It blurs the lines or darkens them, depending. I live in Cleveland, you know? Well, sort of outside. Ive been there
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since high school. Can you believe that? But I come home all the time. You know thatIm always in here, right? Its like a 4-hour drive. My sister and niece live here. Sometimes my niece comes to stay with me, too. Sherry drives her out when things get too crazy here. Whenever Dolores pauses, I nod. If she ends on a question, I grunt. Well, Sherry, my sister? Do you know her? She went to Calvin High School, too. Shes having trouble with Hadyn now. Shes fifteen and fucking feisty. And Im laid off. No prospects for at least a month and probably longer. So I just drove out. I might even look for work around here. Hospitals everywhere, right? I do medical coding, have I told you that? Mm. Yeah, its this tattoo guy in Cleveland, outside of Cleveland, did this, I dont know what I was thinking. I nod, but I also glance up long enough to see that whatever it was, shes thinking it again. The feathers are turning out nicely. They look soft, yet alert. Its all in the angles. Anyway, Im home for a stretch now and Im just terrified of running into Poncho before we get this damn bird fixed and healed. Ill be helping Sherry talk some sense into my niece, I hope. Not that anybody can do that. Shes fifteen, you know? Dolores smiles then, thinking about fifteen, then frowns like shes remembered something bad. My niece just doesnt realize. This shit will last her the rest of her life. She gets all fucked up on some guy or some drug or some crime. Shit. Shes just a kid and so stupid. I can totally see her in some fucking knife fight or something, all cut up with scars, or arrested. Im afraid to even talk to her. I mean you can recover from that stuff, but not completely, you never completely get away from it. I nod and when she doesnt go on, I grunt. Shes still silent, so I have to speak. Permanent record, right? Yeah, look at my sister. I love her but shes a mess. And thats coming from me, right? She twists her arm back and forth, letting the vines, the frogs, and the starry night sparkle. The freak show? Ponchos sleeves are surprising on him, too. They are blindingly bright and look different from every angle. I did the work, but under his instruction. Poncho! Theres a bang at the front window and I stand up straight and gasp when I hear it. Dolores flinches, then sits up and grabs for her
shirt. Blood spins like a thread from the bird to her waist as she hops off the table to the floor. Its not Poncho, thank god, but its certainly time for Dolores to go. She blots at her skin and then gives up and puts her shirt on, holding it away from the front of her so it wont stick. Ill see you next week? Or maybe Ill call you! she says, and runs out the door. What Poncho has with Dolores, I dont understand it, but its lasted long enough that I know it means something to them both. So part of me, at least, hopes this will work. Im not always sure I did the right thing, setting Poncho up here, getting him to tattoo. I mean, hes so good. He ought to spend all his time painting pictures, making art thatll last. These tattoo masterpieces of histheyre all doomed. They live only as long as the carrierand sometimes not that long. You can protect paintings from knives and fires and acid. But people dont protect their own skin. At least weve got a sort of wall of fame here, with Polaroids of our best work. Clients have to consent, of course. And then we initial the Polaroid. So its like that part of the work is permanent. The signed part. It wont sag or swell or wrinkle. After work, Im at the pool again. I flip water in a long, perpetual circle. It splashes up and under and marks me in the pool. Sometimes words float behind my eyes, too, like the pictures. Whole sentences hover at the waterline, but I dont believe them. I didnt go with Jenny because: I wanted to draw. Im staying late at the tattoo shop tonight and its a bit eerie all alone. The metal equipment gleams, reflects in the windows, flashes the streetlights back out. I told Poncho, before he left, that I had to sort through some accounting stuff, but really Dolores is coming by and Im going to color in the bird. Dolores taps at the door and I let her in. She smells like tequila and is in a quiet mood. She lies down on the table and I start working right away. The bird is still, just as motionless as Dolores underneath my hands. How does she make it so even her heart doesnt beat? This space on her skin is like flat paper, no perceptible rise and fall. The bird is tense, gearing up for flight, but not taking off, not yet. I color carefully, glad shes
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not talking so I can concentrate. Eventually, I prick the last dot of orange 326, a drop bubbles back. I blot it away and straighten. Finished. She takes a deep breath that sends each feather into its own, individual quiver. Then she rises up, slowly and smoothly. I hand her the mirror and she studies the bird, her lips twisting up at the corners. She hops off the table. Yes. I love it. Its just like Poncho. Dolores is right. Its just like Poncho. Will he know? She walks towards the big mirror on the wall, looks for a moment, then turns suddenly and comes back toward me. Theres another thing, Dubby. Dolores is biting her lip in this way to suggest hesitance, but I think its just for show. Poncho never does just one place at a time. Something about balance. Will he notice an odd number? Or should we do another? Dolores is smarter than I thought. I pull the fish from my folder. Its kind of like a koi, but different, evolved, and moving so fast in its stillness. Its whiskers are antennae and tentacles at the same timeand still whiskers. It ought to go on your toe. Do you have a good toe spot? Dolores drops a shoe and then peels off a sock. Perfect. Her foot is small and white, with only a few coils of ink that wrap underneath the arch. Were both high on the tattoos and want to keep going. Dolores is mostly quiet when I draw the fish on her toe. She can see the lines go down and so is entranced, it seems, watching the needle. Shes not the kind of person to be really comfortable with silence, however. And shes sobering up. So theres the occasional small talk. The occasional personal question. Hey, Dubby. Dolores keeps her eyes on the slowly emerging fish. Its growing over the muscle, will shift as she walks, roll with each step. So whatever happened to that friend of yours? From way back. Jenny was it? Um. I focus on the tattoo machine, which suddenly feels nothing like a pencil. Is she still around? She moved away. Needle in. Needle out. So fast, but so careful. I think. I keep my attention on the lines, the zig and the zag of tiny scales. She was nice. Uh huh. The ghost fish, the clean outline, is looking pretty good, but theres still a ways to go. Blood lines weave in and out, swirl to her heel, and hang right at the edge of it. My eyes are a little bit blurred, and
I have to step back for a minute. I blot the blood and the extra ink, then Im back in with the gun. I used to stare at Jennys freckles until my eyes lost focus and the tiny dots formed floating castles with turrets and dolphins leaping over waves. Its like swimming now, with Dolores art, my graceful little fish, wavering through the water in my eyes. I keep tattooing, but I think about the rhythms in the pool, arms reaching, splashing, breathing every five. Dolores sits up on the tattoo table now. Its finished. My still-wet fish streams through quiet, inky waves and Dolores is glowing. Im glad the fish is the one I get to look at all day. She curls her toe, then stretches it out, then points it ballerina style. Its really nice, Dubby. I dont take my eyes off my fish, fluttering-quivering-swelling, until she puts her hand over my shoulder. Shes smiling. Thanks Dubby. I cant believe how good this looks. I nod. Youre welcome. Come here. Dolores pulls at my shoulder. I stand firm, but she curls herself toward me, almost falling off the table. She grabs hold of my arm as she hops to her feet. Youre a sweetheart, Dubby. Rain is just starting, in fat drops, when Dolores leaves. I try to think if theres an umbrella around here anywhere, but shes already out the door, sprinting across the street to her car. She holds her purse over her head as she dodges traffic. I take every tattoo seriously. I dont care if its a butterfly straight out of the book or some made-up Chinese character on a frat boy who doesnt even ask what it means. Because the frat boy might grow out of being a dumb asshole, but he wont grow out of my tattoo. It will stretch with his belly, flap over his belt, fade in the sunbut it will still be his tattoo. I clean up the table, disinfect the equipment, and drop the cash in the safe. By the time Im done, the rain comes down heavy like tiny needles. I dont have a raincoat and the drops prick at my neck when I walk the two blocks to my car. Im drenched by the time I get there and dripping as I drive to the pool. Its late so Im speeding. Desperate to get a few laps in before the Y closes. When I swim, I hold my favorite images in the front part of my head. Beautiful Jenny, sunrise hair in my fingers. Silly Jenny, stomping around in my rain boots. Sweet Jenny, leaning into me. Holding my breath from color to color, from shape to shape, from feeling to feeling. I didnt go with Jenny because:
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I made a mistake. Dolores disappears for a few months, to heal, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Jenny. The day before she left, Jenny came to the tattoo shop. I was scrubbing the floor on my knees. I stood and let the water drip from my rubber gloves when she walked in the front door. I showed her around, my very own studio, the closed door to Ponchos room, where he was setting up, the used couch, the brand new tattoo machine. Youre sure about this, Jenny said. Her freckles shimmered, moved towards me, but I managed not to touch them. I breathed in deeply then counted to five as I let it out. The moneys spent. Our money. My half. I dont even care. This was the first her voice sounded desperate. You could still come with me. Jenny. Wed been through this. I just dont think socould you promise me? Maybe. The end of her ponytail twitched. I need to know it will last. Like Ponchos stupid art. Jenny said this loudly, then looked over her shoulder at Ponchos door. I breathed in deeply again and held it. I floated through air and water. Yeah. Like art, like Ponchos art. Jennys eyes were red. Her hands were clenched fists and her hair gave off continuous, tiny vibrations. Fuck, Dubby. Five years. Five years weve been planning this. Im sorry. Poncho burst from his studio then. His breath came evenly, but in puffs and the corners of his mouth were springy. His arms hung, muscled, but quietly still at his sides. It was clear hed been painting. Lets do a mural out here, too. I turned to consider the wide white wall, and Jenny slipped behind me out the door. Its summer when I finally see Dolores again. Im in the shop, doing inventory of the ink colors, when there she is, falling out of a skimpy sundress and hugging me all at once.
She steps back and smiles harder. On Dolores thigh, theres a dwarf with an axe, raised up, poised to take a chunk out of something. She says, I saw Poncho last night. I ran into him at Curlys and everything is fine. The axe swings down. Oh. Its like I missed my last breath before the turn and now Im going hard into the wall, screaming for air. Yeah, he saw everything, didnt even notice the bird. We did it! Dolores gives a little hop. The bird on her chest twitters. Oh. I swallow air. Good. And the fish, Dubby. Guess what he said about the fish! I sit down at my desk. The vines on her arms are swelling and falling like ocean waves. I need to look away. What? He said, Who did that pretty little fish? He noticed it was new and didnt even care. He traced it with his thumb. I didnt tell him it was you, because, wellShould I tell him it was you? I dont care. Then Ill tell him. Were going to do the rest of my leg tonight. Dolores rubs a spot behind her knee, where its still white. Between a black web and a faded spider. Theres water in my eyes again, so I find the fish, that fish, my fish, gearing to leap over the strap of her sandal. Can you wait for him? I stand up sharply, sling my bag over my shoulder. I have to go. Could you watch the place? Sure. Shes sitting on the desk now, her butt tearing a page from the open appointment book, legs swinging. No appointments? None. I have to get to the pool. I have to pour myself into the water. I cant swim in Ponchos paintings anymore. When I swim, I will hold my favorite images in the front part of my head. Beautiful Jenny, sunrise hair in my fingers. Silly Jenny, stomping around in my rain boots. Sweet Jenny, leaning into me. Those memories dont changejust their meaning. And then theres that tiny fish, ever-streaming-ever-rippling, close as I can get to real. Maybe I can think of that fish, perfect, on Dolores tiny toe.
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WORLDS BEST SHORT-SHORT STORY CONTEST FINALISTS AND WINNER

Shannon Beamon finalist THE SKELETONS THAT MAKE YOUR CLOSET
A man drowned in the bay behind my house this summer. They found his boat drifting up the Northwest River, and his dog paddling in the marshes. But they never found him. I went swimming while they were searching for the body. I paddled my kayak out into the middle of the bay, dropped anchor (two bricks tied to a rope), dangled my feet over the edge, and tried not to think about clammy fingers and pale wrinkled feet and cold dead lips hanging open somewhere down there. And then I jumped in. I even knew the guy. Of course everyone knows everyone in Currituck County, but this guy used to live across the street from me. My mom told me I wore his daughters hand-me-down clothes when I was little. But how do I put this? I have lived in that house on the bay since I was born. I learned how to swim in those waters, how to sail. How to water ski and drive a boat. How to make a crab let go of your finger once hes latched on. Hard-earned lesson too. Back home, one dead body isnt enough to keep anyone from the water. We go sailing in hurricanes. This boy sits across from me in my art class and he asks me, Where are you from? And I tell him, Currituck County, down near the beach. Just off of Tulls Bay. His eyes gleam at the answer. He smirks. He says knowingly, No way! I was just there this summer. I went parasailing over the bay. You ever been parasailing? No, I say. Well, Im telling you, you have not seen the bay until youve gone parasailing.
And Im sure I havent. I mean, Ive only seen it in the foggy morning, Ive only seen it in the setting sun. Ive only seen it white-capped and frothing and Ive only watched it ripple at my touch. But perhaps he has a point, because its true, Im not there anymore. Im in school now. And I cannot see any of it. Ive got an internship starting next summer, and with any luck a job the next. Here in the middle, with no water anywhere, Im not sure if Ill ever really be back. Its a nice little place, he continues. I found the perfect little swimming spot that no one knows about. I spent hours just floating there. And I find myself wondering what he would do if I told him about the body of my neighbor still floating out there in the water. Rotted by now. Gnawed down to the bones by crabs. I wonder how quickly he would jump out of the water at that. I grin at the thought. The boy smiles stupidly back. But I dont say a word.
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Kelsie Hahn finalist WHAT MY DAUGHTER IS HOLDING
Alisha Karabinus finalist BEGIN AGAIN WITH HEAT
My daughter intercepts me at the back door and offers up the patchwork body of her recently dead rabbit. He was out in the hutch on the back side of the house all night during a surprise cold snap and now he is stiff. His blunt eyes are wet where the frost in his fur melted and ran. She lifts him up to me, and I murmur meaninglessly. This seems more like my wifes department, but she is not here to assist. My daughter is strangely undisturbed by the corpse in her arms. Cant we just put him in the oven and warm him back up? she asks. The idea is sound. We can simply reverse the process that killed him, and he will come back to life. In this way, I could back a car over my own childhood dog, Rusty. I could stitch up the wrist of that girl down our street who suicided last summer, who I had to delicately explain to my daughter because we couldnt hide the police tape or mute the newscaster fast enough. I could dissolve the tumor in my fathers stomach and he would meet my wife, my son, my daughter here, even the rabbit. The ones who are gone would rise up new again, eating and breathing and perspiring in this morning that has grown cruelly, ironically, warm in the West Texas sun beating down on the side of my house and the roof of the little hutch. My daughter cuddles the body firmly to her chest. Any moment, she will tilt down her expectant face to rub it in the rabbits fur, giggling when it tickles her nose, cherishing as she always does that moment before the rabbit squirms out of her grasp, not realizing yet that this time he wont. Yes, I say. Lets warm him back up. We cover one of my wifes cookie pans in foil and lay the rabbit on it. I lift my daughter to turn the dial, 350 degrees, why not?, and we slide the tray inside. My daughter drags two small chairs from her tea set over to the oven, and I turn on the little light so we can see in. The rabbit lies still. My daughter clasps her hands over her knees and leans farther and farther forward. The tiny chair hurts my tail bone. But we both wait, her watching the rabbit, me watching her, for as long as we can.
Dont just assume the plates are microwave safe because they were stamped by some kid in a sweatshopafter years of washing and drying, swelling and shrinking, apply heat and they snap clean, two slick halves the right glue could surely fix. But then glue would be lurking every time you served up chicken breast or cubed summer melon; you wouldnt eat, couldnt; you would think of horse hooves, chemicals leaching into the pores of pink flesh, but fuck it, the plates are ceramica fancy word for dirtand not worth fixing, so cook bacon in the microwave anyway, skip the skillet, shun the oven, pile pig strips on soil and wait for the hollow thud of finality. You wont glue anything; you will throw the platehalves into the garbage, dirt in plastic, plastic in plastic at the curb, and start again, new dirt, new meat, new heat.
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Julia LoFaso finalist THE ENVOY
thing that woman says.) Its all Ive really thought about these past few weeks on set, and its taken me this long (I mean the weeks and the entire contents of this letter) to tell you how terrible I feel about it. You are my buzzing sun, my disquiet. Im not just talking about now, but ever since we were kids. I only want to imagine you shrieking through the sprinkler on your uncles lawn, beating me and Clayton to the tree at the far end of the yard. We were always too prissy to even try. Skinny boys hanging back, sauntering through the downpour. I want to imagine its still exactly the same: the three of us under a magnifying glass, a force field between our patch of grass and the rest of Haskell, Texas. Anna, if theres any justice in this world, it will rain down like frogs on that motherfucking town. I miss you and I love you, and Ill think of you and Clayton tonight as I lie awake listening to the cars and the waves. Yours sincerely,
Dear Anna, Back. Finally. Why is it so hard for them all to imagine that I might want to sleep every once in a while? Maybe even six hours straight, Buddha forbid the thought. I remember when there were stipulations, fail-safes. I remember when a bartender cared enough to know it was a lemon twist, not a wedge. But this girl still had that freshly-washed look, a teetering fawn in her mothers shoes, chrome shaker throwing off her balance. I could really make all sorts of metaphors about this. Think in terms of a night out. Wig, heels, the works. A man walks in. Pinstripe suit. Its hard to tell whether hes deadly serious or just devastatingly handsome. Would you rather he offer a plot twist or a wedge in your plans? Or imagine this: you are floating in an inner tube in a beautiful outdoor pool. The kind that doesnt smell like chlorine, but like the tangle of bougainvillea bushes surrounding it. Late September, Indian summer. You open your drowsy eyes behind dark glasses and a single leaf floats gently to the surface of the water. Or, alternate option, so popular among young bartenders these days: you crash into a buoy, red-striped like an alarm bell, and from then on the pool is not as blue. It is not as calm and pleasant. There is a buzz behind the hazy sun, a disquiet. So Im drunk. So what. What doesnt change, what only heightens, is how sorry I was to hear about your brother. (My mother told me. I call her. Dont believe every-
Teadora (FKA Teddy)
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Heather Michaels finalist THESE EXTERNAL MANNERS OF LAMENT
Its just a gust of wind through trees, but I swear I hear him breathing, Alyosha the cat no one came back for. Kneeling in the dirt, I hold my breath and remove the lid of his cardboard coffin. The weight of his body slumps to the side. I stay a long time, thinking of calling Marilyn, who might recite my grief lies all within and bring over photographs of Aloysha sprawled on our laps. Its been a year since she loaded her boxes into a taxi headed for Greenwich Village. In truth, Id rather see the old woman from 5C who gave me Alyosha. This man downstairs moves and leaves little kka all alone, she said, nudging the orange cat into my arms. You watch him now? He come back maybe get him? She brought other gifts too: decades-old Yale sweaters, a vintage edition of Monopoly, a Russian ruple, a photograph of a fur-capped girl and a board house. I wonder if in her old age she thought me her son or an old lover, someone who deserved tokens of her longevity. I kept them in the closet should anyone come looking for them. But its been years since she passed and no one has. During the years I knew her I made guesses at what she would bring next: a suitcase full of jewels? a love letter folded and unfolded so much it left the creases frayed? Mornings over coffee, I invented her life story as a countess whose family escaped the Soviets, leaving fortune for a cheap New York apartment. These stories routinely ended in her husband running off with a gypsy, her supporting herself in an unforgiving city. Somehow the thought that she probably just outlived her family and friends seemed too austere. I last saw Miss Havisham, as I started to call her, a few years ago. She stood in my doorway, holding up a bag of homemade rolls so carefully prepared I could smell her fingerprints on them. For you and the wife. For five months I had been dating Marilyn, Broadway actress from Queens whose nose constantly type-casted her as a witch or a Jew, but she hadnt yet brought over clothes or shampoos, hadnt yet picked out my favorite leather couch or celebrated my small promotion at the library by
reciting Shakespeare in the nude, hadnt yet left me for a playwright in a tweed jacket. Oh, shes not I answered and took the bread from her. Thanks. I started to close the door and she opened her mouth as if to say something else. I paused. And between Miss Havisham and I, this silence stretched out, grew shadows. I noticed for the first time the quiet look in her eyes I couldnt place; grief, it seems to me now, as I smear dirt over the cardboard coffin of a cat that wasnt even mine, for someone, a friend, a lover perhaps, who left too soon, taking nothing, but taking everything.
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Eliot Khalil Wilson finalist COSTCO
Eliot Khalil Wilson finalist THE HOME OWNERS ASSOCIATION
. . . and Id like to add that I will show up everyday at dawn like the sun. I will tumble out of my Yukon and up to the door like Mannix. I will be first in line or kill somebody. I will make it my Jerusalem, my Wailing Wall and Promised Land. I will never fail to be hopelessly flattered by my membership card which confers exclusive gold star, VIP membership like grace and makes the deluded losers at Sams Club look like the hell-bound bitches they are. I will flash my card like a homicide detective. I will lash nine carts together, three abreast, to make a rolling wholesale barge. I will steer with a plank of frozen salmon. I will join the brethren of blockish white people with polygamist sect jumpers and hair dos. Ill bring all fourteen of my children. I will take them there and just cutem loose to buzz the store like electrons. Ill call the store a jungle gym. There will be wholesale fun, wholesale chaos, wholesale despair, wholesale disgust and rage. I will not pay full price. I will gorge like a Viking on free samples. I will find the table thats dealing cheese and stay there forever like a gambling addict. I will discover my children driving mowers through bags of spinach and broccoli, whipping each other with pork loins, passed out naked on a gay beach of spilled jelly bellies, comatose in a puddle of urine on a memory foam mattress, high in the rafters among the sparrows bombing shoppers with giant tubs of mustard. I will save mountains of money on essentials: a popcorn trolley, enough limestone blocks of feta cheese for a pyramid, a can of live tuna, a fifty gallon drum of non-dairy creamer, a musical casket, a billboard plasma flatscreen, a duck blind and fourteen crossbows, a cascading chocolate fountain just like the Trevi in Rome. I will then make room for impulse buys: six eggs, a half gallon of skim milk, a dvd of Mama Mia. All of it into my barge. I will wait in the three mile check out line. I will not use my crossbow on the man in front of me who, like some Amish caveman, seems to have never encountered the monetary exchange system before. I will hit the concessions for the mortarish low-fat yogurt and discounted wieners. I will descend upon the Hebrew Nationals like Yassar Arafat on a hashish bender. I will submit to being scanned and patted down. I will almost confess to the Cuisinart mixer up my ass. I will pick up my kids in the morning.
and Id like to add that I will be a model neighbor. I live in a model home. I will obey and abide. I will keep the HOA Sabbath, bylaws and covenants. I will chisel them into stone tablets, carry them about, proclaiming, in my bathrobe and beard. I will host every meeting for every committee, I will be earnest, put away the maps of Axis Europe, stow the Nazi armbands. No more torch-lit basement rooms or fervent Teutonic outbursts. I will represent and defend the sanctioned color palette. The house, garage and tree fort, the car, the cat, the clothes, the visible tattoos-- all whole wheat brown, crushed stone gray, and bungalow taupe. My dwelling will be a whole wheat brown, crushed stone grey and bungalow taupe mirror of your home. I will force all color defiant neighbors to wear a bungalow taupe triangle patch. I will confiscate all wind-chimes, all clotheslines, all folksy lawn statuary, all poorly carved lopsided non-standard pumpkins. I will collect all delinquent fees provided that you dont ask how and, yes, your little boy Ethan does happen to be in my garbage which doubles as a medieval dentistry museum. He is trying to grab the phone. He is gurgling something about some fee? I will be eerily pleasant despite being the absolute epicenter of all communal hatred and resentment. I will power trip, not just a power tourist. I will move to Power and remain there like a taupe leech .I will never question why our community, Olde Sheperdston Brook Hills, has neither shepherds nor brooks nor hills and is younger than my shoes. I will have the model yard. I will mulch and aerate. Hire the Knights of Columbus to river dance the front yard in aeration shoes. I will force them into bungalow taupe. I will prune and tweezer. The grass will be emerald green upon green upon green. There will be no question of greenness. Green as can be. I will pluck dead leaves from the trees, prevent the snow from falling in my yard by sheer force of will. I napalm my neighbors lawns to stop cross contamination, spatchcock your incontinent spaniel if he even looks at my grass. I will have a sapphire pond with prehistoric koi, a cascading bridal veil waterfall and a live Swedish mermaid. No more lolling obscenely in a partially inflated Walmart pool spouting lines from Whitman. I will hire a crew of Japanese gardeners, have a bonsai forest twenty-feet tall. The folks at Augusta National Golf Club with weep and quit, go back to Georgia and put down surface parking. No more giant wind-activated pornographic boxwood topiary. I will sell all the furnishings to pay for the yard, do my actual living in a motel by the interstate.
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Eliot Khalil Wilson finalist MATCH.COM : A LOVE SONG IN TWO VOICES
Eliot Khalil Wilson finalist UNCLE FRANK MEETS CHARLTON HESTON
. . . and Id like to add that I am six feet tall and make six figures no matter what. I am always a good-looking successful fun intelligent man with goodlooking fun intelligent friends. Im a man seeking emotional connections, spiritual bonds, failing that, just boobs. I will compliment your appearance; stare fixedly at your breasts as if they were trying to impart a barely discernible message. I will strive to notice that you have a face. I will not visually part you out like a butcher. I will not treat you like a collect call girl. I am a dreamer and a hopelessly romantic woman which is why Ive paid to access this computer generated database of paired sentiments and random characteristics. I will ignore the fact that my search netted 623 ineffably perfect soulmates within a sixty mile radius. I will also ignore the fact that a very similar interface found me a registered stud for my shih tzu. I will have cleavage than Bryce Canyon. I am incapable of lying, like Jesus or Abraham Lincoln on sodium pentothal. I do not have a date right after this. I will be a bon vivant. I will ooze class. I will not make subtle but distinct humping motions. I will wear my baseball cap backwards then off to the side because that never stops being cool. We shall dine at Applebys or Olive Garden. I will snap my fingers to summon the waiter like Im the maharajah; look stunned when he flips me the bird. My hands will be in my lap. I will not try to use my cell phone to photograph your underwear and post it on my blog. No winking. I will not seductively try to feed you my breadstick. I will be all about trust. I will trust that your real name is PBRbullrider69. I am not a big talker. I will be mostly mute and act drunker and dumber than I actually am. I will not prattle incessantly, mostly about my ex-boyfriend, the Navy Seal. He was just so loving and caring and generous you have no idea. I will not show you his picture then characterize our previous sex life as sublimely supernatural. I will not weep like a fountain when the breadsticks arrive. I will be a knight in shining armor in a rented bright red Plymouth Neon. I will wear enough cologne to offend a gay Arab. I will not say I am searching for a deep committed long-term one night stand. I will not notice your self-described curviness nor that you did not stipulate the type of curve. I will explain by athletic build I meant bowling and ice fishing. I will be what I can buy you. I will pretend I have read your entire profile. I will agree that we have chemistry when what we really have is physical science and business law.
He was taller that your tallest tall friendthats what Uncle Frank would always say. Frank worked as the janitor at the Student Center at the University of Alabama and Charlton Heston was there to drum up support for the NRA and the Republican Party which is like going to Florida and campaigning for oranges. Frank said there were barrels of peoplemost of them in camo and Mossy Oak clothes. Frank said Heston looked like a model in the Sunday ads. Slick as a whistle with a thunderbolt smile. When I imagine the scene I think of the distances between the two menCharlton Heston there in a Brooks Brothers suit and a Borelli shirt, and Uncle Frank just barely taller than his trash can chariot in his blue service jumpsuit and cardboard insoles. A man who stole cleaning supplies and forgotten textbooks to keep the lights on at the tar-paper shamble he called a house. Like a different species, I thought, but Uncle Frank would never give in to that kind of thinking. Uncle Frank waited for his chance, for the sea of people and reporters to part and present a clear path to the only celebrity he ever gave a damn about. Not what you would call a moviegoer, Frank had nevertheless seen all his movies, and even named his runt beagle Moses in Hestons honor. The cleaning cart bought Frank some space. Then it happened. Heston looked Uncle Frank right in the eye. It was like shaking hands with a bald eagle, Uncle Frank is fond of saying. Neither man said a word. Thats just how solemn the whole thing was. I said you should have refused to shake his hand and said, Take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape. Uncle Frank said thats what a boy would say and that I should grow up or shut up, and that Christmas and every Christmas after that, Frank always bought me some kind of a weapon.
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Kat Gonso Contest Winner A PINCH OF SALT
{NEED TITLE!}
THE ARTIST WRITES Nance Van Winckel In these text-based digital collage pieces, I am having a dialogue with an encyclopedia (circa 1947). Im also attempting to entwine a bit of poetry withand through the Know-It-All Simplifier-of-the-Universe voice. Besides altering the text, I often add other graphic bits and refine to my own purposes all that had been in the vast before. Im working my way through twelve volumes, realizing this may be a life-long (lifesustaining?) enterprise.
A week after my fourteenth birthday, my mother left us for an Amish farmer, Jedidiah Luke. I was a boy barreling through puberty, not paying attention to anything or anyone other than myself. I hadnt noticed her change, the pale lip gloss and extended absences, my fathers quick temper. We never talked about it. My father and I. He didnt understand how to fold dress shirts right, the way she had. Once, he threw the hamper at the wall. My mother and I had cooked together. Each Thursday, she fetched her olive green box of recipe cards from its resting spot above the fridge, the one that had once belonged to her mother and her mothers mother and that, one day, would be mine. Our dishes were classically Cleveland (macaroni salad, pierogis); but, sometimes we looked beyond the home: rice noodles, couscous with figs, flan. I never told anyone how much I loved cooking, not even my best friend Max. Once, he called me a fag. And I was. But I didnt know it yet, though I think my mother did.
Andrea Lewis LUCKY WOMAN
I have heard the story many times. How, three decades after deserting my grandmother and their eight children in Guatemala, my grandfather asked for her forgiveness. I imagine her, Luisa, standing in my parents kitchen in Massachusetts, using the side of her wrinkled hand to wipe crumbs from the counter. She tosses them into the sink, a metal box where she can make hot water run, miraculously, by turning the left handle to the right. No need for a horseback ride to the river. No need even for a horse. Here, there are cars. Here, there are wide, paved roads. Of all the girls in the villages that dotted the southern coast of Guatemala, Luisa was the one my grandfather chose. They married in the town of Tiquisate where they signed a document in the presence of an alcalde, the mayor. They lived on a farm, in a simple house that sat beside a long row of lime trees in one direction and on the other, a dusty dirt path that led to the rest of the world. Their days: milking cows, fishing, hanging cured meat from the ceiling, making love in the country darkness. They had six boys. My father was number three. Women called Luisa lucky. Her husband was handsome, smart. When he didnt come home for days, she figured he was just smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with Communists. When she learned hed been with another woman, she forgave him. He was the only man she ever loved. They had a seventh baby, a girl. They had no money. They traded limes for avocadoes, sugar, and shoelaces. My grandfather found work at the United Fruit Company. At the end of each day he brought home bunches of bananas and powdered milk in cans whose labels were written in English. Before long, he left again. She forgave him again. They had their eighth child, another girl. Then he stepped on that dusty road for the last time. After thirty rainy seasons of not sending so much as a single letter he sits on a sand-colored recliner with his hands folded on his lap. Luisa stands in the doorway. Shed heard he was coming. Shed also heard his second wife left him. He clears his throat. Take me back, he says. She squints at him for several seconds. He is the only man she ever
loved. Yet she remembers how, when one of their sons went missing and she searched for him alone under the moonlight, she whispered her husbands name across the fields too. But he never answered. Luisa? he whispers now. Her mouth is one straight line. She stares at his ironed shirt and wirerimmed glasses. He looks old, she thinks. Finally she tells him, What you want is a nurse, not a wife. At that he lowers his bald head. Later, she would hear that he married a third time and that they had one girl, deaf at birth. Even now, long after her death, when it is impossible for her to answer my questions, the story brings me closer to her. She was called many thingsweak, strong, luckybut to me, she is simply a woman I want to know.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery SYNDICATED SILENCE waving an agitated bee away with an unconcerned hand. Soon were talking about travel, inspired by my grandmothers cue, the warm weather, and the flights of insects. The conversation fluctuates between my grandmother, my mother, and I. My younger sister stays quiet. She is shy and though we coax her to join in, she prefers to listen. She hasnt earned her spot among these women yet. My grandmother describes a trip to Mexico she took with my uncle years ago, where she stayed in a motel in Mexico City and a sad violinist came to her table while she ate fresh fish and my uncle told her about Madame Butterfly. The hotel bathroom was a gorgeous jade green, with beautiful tile, she reminisces as my sister flings an ice cube at me to signal she knows whats next. But there was no coffee pot, my grandmother adds reluctantly, flicking a bit of ash to show her disapproval. My sister smiles softly. Next, my mother describes a trip to Scotland. The bed and breakfasts were quaint, she begins before telling us about old cemeteries on shaggy hills. My grandmother nods in time to my mothers story, and my sister giggles preemptively at my mothers jokes. I listen until its my turn. Id love to go to Greece, I add, as I always do, thinking of pristine white buildings accented in blue, of eating sticky baklava. The scene and our conversations are the same each time, whether the background noise is a slow rush of waves or a flutter of spring insects. We know what to expect, and we can and do tell each others stories with increasing clarity, making meaning for each other and ourselves. The conversations are in syndicationcycles of conversations weve had over and again. They are, like my grandmothers television shows, safe and certain. But syndication breeds static. Another season and scene: In summer the heat swelters and shirts cling to clammy skin. The shades are drawn in the house, which is dark and cool, the sound of running fans a relentless whir. My mother and grandmother have retreated from the front porch to the dark, and my sister and I leave the heat outside to join them in the living room. When we enter, quietly, we know we are not meant to be there. My sister recognizes this and goes to her room. But I remain, just out of sight, watching as the women sit tensely, their voices barely audible over the rush
I was watching tv, my grandmother begins, the wind rushing at her back through the short perm circling her head. Gulls fly through thick fog as, with frozen fingers, we carry picnic baskets to a low bench by the beach. My mother and I smile as my younger sister taps me knowingly on the arm. Shes heard this before. We all have. My grandmother loves television, syndicated sitcoms in particular. She likes repeats because she knows what to expect and can be ready for it. Repetition helps her avoid change and uncertainty. Repetition promotes control. On the same day in early January each year, my mother and grandmother take my sister and me to the coast for a picnic. The day holds no significance, but its the same each year and each year we stop at the same bit of California coast, the same bench sinking slowly into the sand, complain of the same whipping wind and the way our noses redden and run in the weather. A gull with a broken leg begs this part of beach, parading his pain for sympathy and a bit of bread. He too remains the same year to yearhopping and hoping, flying away fantastically when his show is successful. I was watching tv, my grandmother repeats to make sure were listening, as she tells us about an episode of Mamas Family, one of her favorite comedies, a show where Vicki Lawrence plays an elderly widow, fearless and outspoken, whose grown children return to her for advice and help. My grandmother lights a cigarette, spiraling smoke barely discernable from the fog as we lean in to listen in the cold, though as with most of my grandmothers tales, we know the lines by heart, hearing them every year as we crouch together for warmth under a grey, miserable sky. I was watching tv last night, my grandmother repeats again a few months after our yearly picnic. It is spring now and the lilacs in my mothers backyard are flamboyant with their scent and bees crowd for a chance at the blossoms. My grandmother, too, craves something sweet as she sits on the patio, cigarette in hand, asking my mother for a treat, though shes diabetic. My grandmother raises her coffee cup to her lips as my mother drinks a Diet Coke and my sister and I sip at our tea. I was watching tv and Regis gave away a trip to Hawaii, she says,
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of blades. My grandmothers hands waver, something I rarely see, even when we take her to hospitals and nurses push long needles through her papery skin. My mother pets the family dog, worrying over her fur and caressing her like she would a child. Over the hum of the fan, I catch a few words: Alcohol. Bruise. Memory. Fear. They are airing stories Im not to hear. This happens rarely, my grandmother slipping into sentimentality and whispering things that haunt her before she straightens and smiles and lights another smoke, my mother vulnerable for a moment, her secrets slipping out before she stops them with silence. We each know what silence tries to shield. We know there are stories, awful stories we havent spoken, much less committed to memorybut we only want good stories, safe stories, part of the routine. When the women realize I am standing close, that I can nearly hear, they stop short. Feigning smiles, they invite me to sit, my grandmother beckoning me by brushing the couch cushion next to her, then brushing away a tear. My mother busies herself with crocheting, pushing the dog from her lap. We sit awkwardly for a few moments, my grandmother turning on the television and flipping channels to find something safe to watch, my mothers hands tangled in yarn, looping and knotting the mass into a pleasant shape. My eyes cross paths with my mothers; my grandmother exchanges a knowing glance with my mother. Suddenly, my grandmother zaps the television off, and we three rise almost simultaneously to go to the backyard, where the heat hits us strong in the face as we step outside. The sunshine is blinding. It is strange we can be as close as we are with such a boundary of the unspoken separating us. Its as though weve reached a philosophical understanding about struggle and pain, and that understanding is this: sympathy and strength come from what people choose not to say despite the knowing. We reject each others stories because we cant avoid them, because they are our own. Despite the silence, Ive pieced secrets together, guessed and supposed from what Ive heard in darkened living rooms over the rush of fan blades. Despite the silence, the story is in syndication, has spanned the generations. My grandmother. My mother. And now me.
*** I imagine. Coming home from work, tired from her day as a seamstress, my grandmother always worried my grandfather would have alcohol in his veins, if words and fists would pound into ears or backs, tables or walls. My grandmother never knew whether the dinner she prepared would feed the family or wash down the sink because it wasnt right. She never knew whether to be relieved and happy or terribly afraid. She never knew what to expect, but she often expected the worst. Coming home from school, shuffling her feet and cradling stickeremblazoned notebooks, my mother always feared alcohol would be flowing, my grandfather sipping whiskey on the porch for several hours, an afternoon and early evening. She never knew what to expect from her father, whether to crouch in her room and listen to records, Elton John or Queen, whether to find a place to hide after school to eat fries and wait for the sobering. She never knew what to expect, but she often expected the worst. Coming home from school in my last year of undergraduate work, I knew what to expect. Id open the door to my sunny apartment with hardly any furniture. Id put the kettle on to make raspberry tea for my roommate, and wed eat the buttermilk and ginger biscuits shed made earlier in the afternoon. Wed sip tea and butter biscuits and talk about how badly we needed a coffee table and how we should invest in a large pitcher to make sun tea. Shed ask if I wanted to go dancing like we did most Thursdays, and Id say yes. I always expected this routine. When my grandmother came home one evening to find my grandfather drunk in his recliner, the Dodgers on television, a glass of whiskey in his hand, she went to her room and changed out of her hose and pencil skirt, her blouse with the tie at the neck. Perhaps she put on crisp slacks and a soft blouse with a faint pattern of daisies. I imagine she sat at the edge of the bed, looking out the window to her garden of hollyhocks and flirty snapdragons and decided to go out with her husband like hed asked. Out to a bar with some friends, out for an evening of dancing to jazz and gin and tonics amongst couples. When my mother came home one afternoon to find my grandfather drunk in the driveway, changing the oil of the family car, leaning heavily against its side before he slid to the ground and under the cars dusty front, she went to her room. Maybe she changed from the denim jumper
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and red blouse with Peter Pan collar she had worn to school, and pulled her hair out of her eyes. I can picture her wrinkling her brow and fighting back the stinging sensation she always got in her nose when her drunk Daddy asked her to help him with things she didnt know how to do, she decided to go out with her Daddy like hed asked. When my roommate asked if Id go out with her dancing one evening, I changed from the clothes Id worn to school into something prettier, warmer perhaps. As I changed, I heard my roommates voice from the other room, arguing over the phone with her boyfriend about the evening. Moments later she came in my room to say her boyfriend had broken up with her, but was still going to come dancing with the two of us. I thought this might make for an uncomfortable evening, but stayed silent. My grandmother went out with my grandfather that night, and upon entering the bar and dancehall, she regretted it, for though the band was loud and the olives bitter, so too was my grandfather and it embarrassed her. Sitting at the table with her sister and brother-in-law and another couple, my grandmother tried to ignore her husbands slurred words and crude jokes. She tried to resist going to the dance floor where she would have to hold him upright as he threatened to stumble. As they drank and danced, she became more apprehensive, he more aggressive. My mother went out with my grandfather that afternoon and stood in the driveway while he cursed at the car and the hoses and valves she did not understand. Handing him tools or running to the house to fetch me a beer, sweetie, my mother ignored his halting speech, his numbed hands unable to grasp tools precisely, the dull eyes that always made her sad. I went out with my roommate and her ex-boyfriend, the windows down as we drove to our favorite bar. I talked to my roommate, but didnt say much of anything to him, because Id only met him a few times, and they kept fighting in front of me, and I was certain he was trying to grab me when she wasnt looking. I could feel my roommates hot breath when she shouted that she had to go the bathroom, and after she left, his sour breath making me shivery and clammy as he whispered into the side of my neck. Uncomfortable, I sipped my vodka tonic and sucked at the sour of my lemon wedge, waiting to leave. When my grandmother and my grandfather finally left the bar and piled into a cab, she probably hoped everything would be fine when they
arrived home. Perhaps she thought she could take a hot bath, soothe her tense muscles, while he waited in bed. That she would fall asleep safe, glad he hadnt tried to drive. My mother hoped her father wouldnt drive once the car was fixed. Maybe she hoped hed change the oil and then they could get popsicles out of the icebox and eat them together, ignoring drips that rushed down the sticks and onto his thick, dirty fingers and her slender, clean ones. But he drove anyways. Through the streets of Reseda where they lived, past hotdog stands and cabinet stores, my mother biting her bottom lip, holding her hot hands together and leaning her head against the window wishing for a popsicle. I held my roommates hot fingers in my own in the car. I worried when he tried to drive, sharp turns pushing me up against the sides of the car, my roommates calm voice asking him to please slow down. It was dark and the trees softened the corners and made me less afraid because if wed crashed, wed soar into the trees velvet leaves. When we got back to our apartment, my roommate was tired and sad, and I lifted off her sequined shirt, its sparkle dejected. She held my shoulders as I helped her out of her skirt, found soft flannel, tucked her in and said goodnight. My grandmother said goodnight when she walked in the house that night, for the cab ride hadnt been pleasant, but rather embarrassing as my grandfather insulted the driver, called him less of a man for some reason or another, and insisted on getting out of the cab a few blocks before the house, he and my grandmother making the rest of the trip home in silence on foot. She said goodnight and tried to lock herself in the bathroom and draw a hot bath as he stepped in front of her with deadened eyes. My mother watched her fathers eyes out of the corner of her own as they took turn after turn harder and harder, faster and sharper. As he drove, she watched his face for a sign of fear or determination, but it was blank and the emptiness scared her. She did what she always did when her father drove drunkshe locked the doors and prayed. I didnt do what I always didI didnt lock my door. When my roommate and I moved in together, she laughed because I locked my bedroom door whether I was home or not. Id done this since moving to college, never trusting anyone the way I trusted family. After I tucked my roommate in, she asked him to come in her room, and I went to bed and didnt lock the door like I always had, like my mother does, like my
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grandmother does. When my door opened slowly and he came in, his eyes were bright as he sat on the edge of my bed, said he was worried about my roommate, thought that hed hurt her and made her sad. I was yawning and murmuring, Yes, I think you did and maybe you shouldnt hang around here anymore, sleepy from the drinks and the late hour. When he leaned over, I felt his weight on me, a weight heavier than the quilt I was sleeping under or the drinks on my brain. My grandmother felt his weight when my grandfather pushed her back from the bathroom door, blocked her entrance, shouted she wasnt going to go run and hide like you always do goddammit. She felt the weight in her brain and her eyes from the alcohol and from what she recognized was about to come. And my mother felt the weight of the turns and the speed and the pressure pushing down on the car. She wasnt old enough, big enough, loud enough to ask him, scream at him, plead with him to stop as his confused determination for speed and control drove them fast and hungry toward the inevitable crash. He went fast and hungry, though I tried to talk him out of it, tried to push him off, tried to escape as he pulled the quilt off the bed, slid his hands and then his body over mine. My grandmother cried as my grandfather told her she was lazy, useless, no fucking fun. As he hit the wall, pounding a hole where the picture of her parents once hung. My mother cried as the car screeched around a final turn, as the car resisted its pull towards a light pole, when the car slammed into it anyway. As her father punched the wheel, pounded the dash while they sat there, smoke rising. I cried when he wouldnt listen, when my bottoms were off and he was on me. As he placed his cool hand over my wet mouth. For just a moment, I managed to push him off. In the moment that I untangled myself from the bed sheets and his limbs and crawled to the end of the bed, I noticed, embarrassed, one of my socks had come off. Perhaps my grandmother remembers my grandfather pausing in the midst of yelling and backing her into a wall pausing to light a cigarette, to blow smoke up and outwards, its thick smell curling around her face and seeping into her eyes. Maybe my mother remembers how my grandfather whistled through the smoke of the wreck. I remember my missing
sock. My grandmother backed up against a wall, watched as my grandfather cleared a bedside table, lamp and ashtray hitting the floor, shattering. Stood against the wall as he came close and withdrew again and again. My mother sat on the curb, watched as he struggled to lift the hood, cursed the dent, the pole, the road, but never himself. Sat on the curb as he pounded the hood over and over. I was yanked back by the hair and pulled by the neck. Lay there as he put hands across my eyes, fingers in my mouth, lifted my legs like a puppeteer, told me how to turn, what to say. His hands on my neck eventually choked me and my memory stops short. These stories happened onceone evening after work, one day after school, one Thursday after tea and biscuits. These stories happened over and overa marriage over fifty years; a father for a lifetime; nearly six months. These stories happen stillsilence does not mean we forget.
What does syndicated silence look like? Husband? Father? Attacker? What do we find when we try and create meaning out of stories we dont want to tell? When we try and answer the questions we have? The answers are the most important part, my sister says, a spread of pages before her, a pen in her hand as she wrinkles her brow. Ive left something out. The story isnt right. When I tell stories or decide to write them down, my younger sister listens and reads them and sometimes she laughs or is sad and sometimes she tells me where to put a comma. Mostly she asks questions, gets me to fill in gaps to make the meaning. We are endlessly similar, endlessly like my mother and grandmother. Seven years younger than me, I am surprised at how many of our stories she knows already. Our stories, my stories, have become and will become hers one day, just as stories always do and always have done. I dont want her to know this story, though, to hear me tell it or to read it once Ive tried to write it. I dont think silence can protect, but I dont know if telling will save. If she knew the story, would she remember the scene? I skipped class, drove home unexpected from college early on a Friday morning, sat quiet though the afternoon, drove back again late that night. My sister, worried I might be sick, spent the afternoon
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reading at the foot of my bed while I slept in cool sheets, sweat in a longsleeved turtleneck, my bruised neck and arms hidden, my body aching. Would she want to know the scene when he came back? He knocked on the door days later and, afraid he might tell my roommate, my friends, anyone, I let him in. Or the scene days after I told him to leave me alone, when I found him waiting in my bathroom, the window open, the ripped screen blowing in the wind? Would she want the metaphors? His hands around my throat an embrace, the marks on my palms after he pushed me against a stucco wall a map. The sensory details? His sweat tasted like moss, he smelled of ocean caves. Would she want the setting? He used to follow me as I walked home after school, commanded I get in his car, drove us out past the city limits his hand on my knee, the coast following us as city lights faded. The climax? He used to tap on my window in the middle of the night, whisper threats that hed punch through the glass. He kidnapped me one night in the parking lot, refused to take me home. And what would my sister say if I told her how my roommate never knew? Years later my old roommate and I remain close friends. I blamed the screen on rowdy neighbors, my long absences on library studying, the knocking on the window late at night to friends. Would she find my silence weak, a betrayal, if she knew? My sister already knows his characterstand-in lover. Pretend romance. She remembers the way I talked about him, as though it were natural, normal. She already knows the timeline. Six months. How can I rationalize that with story? Like the women I love, I prefer silence. Except I cant keep it in. Months after it finally stops, after I graduate and move away and he doesnt know where I am, I tell my mother. It is fall and my mother is visiting me in my new apartment in my new city where I try and forget about him as leaves drift from the trees, leaving branches barren and sharp. My grandmother is too tired and weak to make the journey; my sister is taking care of her. Im sitting on the kitchen counter, my mother on the couch in the living room, a distance between us so wide we have to raise our voices to speak to one another. I dont remember what we were talking about, but suddenly the story bursts out. I spit it out like salt and
lead, like an apology or an accusation. My mother rises from the couch, rushes over and cries out, nearly shouts, Sweetie, why didnt you tell me? Why didnt you tell me? Im your mom. I stop, humiliated, stomach sick. I look down at my feet swinging frantic over the counter, my hands clutching at the counters edge. I balance my feet on the trashcan, watch it wobble under the pressure. Later we go to dinner, where we slip into safe routinewe talk about my grandmothers health, and travel, and at one point even how to get spots out of the carpet. The conversations are safe, easy to enact as I pick at my potato and my mother slumps and stares at her rare, bloody steak. My mother and I talk on the phone every day, sometimes several times a day, but weve never spoken of my outburst in the years that have passed since I spoke, breaking our contract. She doesnt know what to say, doesnt want to know the story because she couldnt protect me from it. My story is like the secret stories Ive heard parts of, once, maybe twice. I am left to piece the parts together. I wonder if my mother does the same. These women give me strength with their stories, sorrow with their silence. Storytelling is how we know each other, yet we do not tell what may be the most important stories of all. My grandmother is getting older and spending more time in and out of hospitals. My mother and I go with her to doctors, watching as they poke and prod, tell her shes got to quit smoking, test to see how strong she is, how much her weakening body and heart can withstand. My heart can take just about anything, my grandmother argues with physicians. Its true, my mother adds at my grandmothers stubbornness. Yes, I agree quickly, thinking of secrets. We slip into silence. The three of us are quite a group. My mother and I crowd around my grandmothers hospital bed, intimate as we adjust her hospital gown over her bare shoulders, hold cups of water to her mouth like a kiss, watch nurses adjust the catheter, all while the room smells sterile and machines beep like a timer, We must look foolish, aching for one another in our self-imposed isolation. I wonder what my sister might think if she were brave enough to join us. My sister fears the bodys weaknesses and decay, hospitals and
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Nora Kipnis strangers, so she waits in the car alone or sits in the waiting room, curled up in a chair, wide-eyed and clasping her hands together as if for warmth. My grandmothers ill health reminds us all that one day she will be gone, reminds my sister that soon there will be an empty spot for her to fill. Soon she will have to join us. While she waits, my sister reads. She asks me for stories. She writes in the margins, always questions. If syndicated silence breeds this violent pattern, then perhaps a story might save it. If my grandmother could, if my mother would, speak. If I were not so ashamed. My sister knows there is a story I wont let her read, one my mother doesnt want to read either. Ive told her the story is about something bad. She doesnt want to read it right now. Maybe someday, she says with a shudder, settling down in a cold plastic chair in the waiting room before my mother and I go in to sit beside my grandmothers hospital bed, our routine as of late. SURVIVAL IN THE PREPARATORY ENVIRONMENT: A FIELD GUIDE
Preparing for Preparation: Literature, Gumption, and Lies You are shy but want something more adventurous than the life you live, stirred by an early and rapid reading of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. You have divorced parents, or unhappy parents, or wealthy parents, or parents who are good people but arent good parents, or all of the above. When you are eleven and visit your exiled sister at her castle of a therapeutic boarding school, you will invariably want to go there. She will tell you this place isnt right for you, and youll know when you are older. She will say the same thing about the bottles of gin you found in her closet. Read Prep. Read The Catcher In The Rye. Watch Dead Poet Society. Wish you grew up in New York City, but really you live in the suburbs. Wear Abercrombie in middle school because everybody else does, but know polo shirts dont look good with your frizzy hair. Stuff your bra, but only once. Feel out of place because you have never been kissed and are friends with the theater kids. Be smart, but not the smartest the smartest kids are all boys. Apply to prep school in eighth grade, and for the first time face rejection. Try again. Accepting that you are an outsider Show up to prep school at fourteen after a weeklong adventure to Burning Man with your uncle, a philosophy professor, during which you tried mushrooms and received a pair of orange Thai fisherman pants from a man named Akshay. Your trip was life changing, and this place is a factory of boys who wear pastel shorts and carry lacrosse sticks. It reminds you a little too much of home. Your roommate will be a blonde from Potomac whose grandfather started a popular and expensive clothing brand. Dont worry if you forget this fact; she will be sure to remind you. You will be in physics class together and you wont be friends, but she will ask you for help with her homework and peek over your shoulder during quizzes. On the first day, her parents will see your unfolded fisherman pants before they see you and
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nervously wonder if her roommate will be fat. You are not fat, but you will gain some weight that first year. Laugh silently when your roommate tapes 36 photographs to the wall in a perfect grid, using a level. Play The Strokes from your room after your parents leave and you are bored, hoping someone cool will hear. Why that was a good idea Go to a poster sale in the student activities center with the first girl who knocked on your door and buy a print of an absinthe poster in the Art Nouveau style. A girl named Zinnia will see your poster and tell you a story of how she had too much absinthe at a wedding and then fellated a half-man, half-sex god named Vishnu. She will also tell you that she was on acid at her interview. Over time, learn to believe little of what she says, because boarding school is full of lies that are impossible to disprove. You will make your third friend in the bathroom, a small half Jewish, half Asian girl named Rebecca who is best friends with Zinnia. She will be running her chubby little fingers through her long black hair in front of the mirror when she says, I wish I brought a hair brush. Offer her yours, and she will laugh and feel embarrassed and tell you that she didnt mean to be hinting like that. Think that maybe she did mean to, but dont mind because you notice her dimples and you are already half in love. Zinnia and Rebecca have an obsession for each other that you will never understand. When you see the scars on Rebeccas legs and wrists, pinstripes from razorblades and sewing needles that run up and down her soft olive skin, and stare too long, Zinnia will narrow her eyes at you and ask, What the fuck are you looking at? and then you will quickly avert your eyes, realizing you were making them both uncomfortable. Try not to make anyone uncomfortable. This is essential for survival. Survival and Your Future Your English teacher tells you to caress the details, a quote by Nabokov, the author of Rebeccas favorite novel. Make a mental note to read Nabokov, but dont do it until you graduate. Instead, in your free time that first year read Bukowski and e.e. cummings and Hemingway and Vonnegut and Palahniuk, authors Rebecca also loves. There is a funny redheaded boy in your class. Become infatuated with him.
Realizing you are not as smart as you thought you were is a natural and essential element of preparatory school. Even though your grades are good, your comments in class lack depth. The comments sections of term reports are cruel. Excel in English, do just okay in everything else. You will feel out of sorts on Sundays when you are not doing work. This is part of the process of molding you into a leader of tomorrow. Dont sign up for many advanced classes because the kids that do scare you. Fall asleep daily in physics. When you buy a coffee machine on your first visit home, this habit will cease. Artful Acts of Rebellion Ask Rebecca if she wants to have a cigarette with you. Smoke lots of cigarettes, on walks in the woods and the back streets of town. Its not allowed and thats what you like about it. Make your code word for smoking cake, a way to say it in front of teachers and not have them know. Know that they probably know and that your code is silly, but keep these habits the code word and the smoking until you graduate, and maybe even after, as a little joke with your prep school friends. Tell Rebecca about your crush. She is friends with the redheaded boy, whose name is Brandon, and she introduces you. Soon after you meet he tells you about his new girlfriend, who he fucked the first time they met. It was at a party. Cry in your bed when you are finally alone. You will not be alone often. Eleven kids will get kicked out for smoking pot your first trimester. Freak out because you smoked a skinny joint once at a friends house, leaning out her window in the rain. Worried that they will drug test everyone, throw the following things into the science center pond: a cigarette holder you bought for seventeen dollars at a curiosity shop, a pack of Camels, and three lighters. Go on long rebellious walks in the woods with your friends and complain about the man. The Use of Art in the Preparatory Environment Take a drawing class, and spend the evenings of that first winter in the arts center, making a portfolio for your application for the Arts Concentration program. Decide not to apply at the last minute, even though your art teacher was encouraging, because you realize you will never be great. Give up on a lot of things because you will never be great: history, running, math.
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Hang out with Rebecca in the city over the summer after your sophomore year. Her abusive boyfriend will sometimes come along too. Go to free concerts in Williamsburg and smoke weed in the East Village and talk about books. Cry when you read one of her poems in the schools literary magazine, but dont tell her. Laugh when you are sitting on a stoop near Astor Place, smoking a bowl and looking at pigeons, and she says, Its three animals jumping collectively! Animal Collective! Its funny, the way she says it. Admire the contents of her backpack when she unloads it one day at the Williamsburg Waterfront: a worn paperback, a billfold, a Bic lighter and a Nikon camera. Escape Tactic #1: Pretending You Didnt Escape Come fall, claustrophobia will send you to Paris on the abroad program. Read Letranger in French and feel sophisticated, even though you dont understand it. Go on long walks in the rain and write poetry about the way the Eiffel Tower looks draped in fog in the morning, a view that impresses nobody but you and the army of khaki colored tourists on the 6 train. See a man with a deformed face on the metro perhaps he was shot and try to write a post-apocalyptic love story about him, but only get down a paragraph. Other Effective Escape Tactics Return from Paris with a short haircut and a severe smoking habit. Several weeks later, you will lie in bed thinking about the inevitability of death, and in the morning you will find out that Rebecca committed suicide. You will never know how or why. Dont cry about it for a week afterwards. Then cry all the time. Remember the time you swallowed a bottle of pills because you didnt like your life any more, and your mother came in and yelled at you and stuck her finger down your throat. Feel stupid and empty. Your friendship with Zinnia will eventually end because of Rebeccas death, but neither of you will admit that this is the reason. Accepting the necessity of escape The winter of your junior year will revolve around a deep depression that leaves you crying every time you step into the shower. You will take another drawing class, and your teacher will tell you to love the process instead of the end result during one of his long-winded, rambling speeches that you and your fellow students barely listen to. Do not forget this speech.
In the spring, make friends with a girl across the hall from Phoenix. She is white-teethed and beautiful, someone your stepmother would call a smoothie. Everything about her is, in fact, smooth her hair, her skin, her social skills. She has the uncanny ability to talk to anyone she wants to, and you adopt some of her bubbly ways. This is how you meet Sam, a senior. Where to go with a boy when your roommate is there: the radio broadcasting room, the chapel (enter through the side window), the locking closet in the library book stacks, the music practice rooms, gathering ticks in the meadows of the cross-country course, the forgotten decaying bathroom underneath the dining hall. Preparatory Boys Sam is very smart. In the student-written play you are both in, you are the star, an egg with a neurotic personality, and he plays a piece of moldy cheese with a hippie personality who helps you realize important truths about life. He is going to Yale next year. You will watch Rushmore together in your room and he will teach you how to waltz, and then you will lie in your bed together and when it is almost curfew you will kiss him very quickly on the lips, and he will smile. Then, soon after, Brandon will contact you. You will hang out on a night with a full moon on an abandoned couch in the woods, and he will read you a rap based on an Internet meme that he wrote while on drugs. Make sure that you do a good job of pretending to understand. Walk on the new Astroturf field they are building at your school, climb up on a tractor, and he will hold you in your suede coat you bought for $7 at Salvation Army, and kiss you very hard. You will tell Sam you want it to be non-exclusive. He will say Okay but he will treat you differently later in your room, throwing you around like a slut. That summer, go to your mothers house, and talk to Brandon every night on the phone for hours. He has just broken up with his girlfriend. Dont realize that you are just a rebound, and fall in love with him again. Then you come home and he will invite you to a party, and you get too high off his friends vaporizer and dont talk to each other. He will not contact you again after that. Think about the karmic implications of this situation, the way you treated Sam and the way Brandon is now treating you.
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After a long time, decide to stop feeling sad. Sometimes, read the little pamphlet they gave out at Rebeccas funeral, which has some poems she wrote and a poem by e.e. cummings. Sometimes, finger the photograph of her smiling in the too-green prep school grass that they put in the pamphlet. Remember her chubby fingers when you read, Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. Talk about her with those who knew her well, trying to decide how she died. Find out the things she never told you: the cocaine, the dead ex-boyfriend, the family issues she never discussed. Realize there is probably more, and that you probably werent as close with her as you thought. More Artful Acts of Rebellion Senior year, drink almost every weekend before the dances. Almost get caught a few times. Apply to colleges that are chill because you are sick of prep school. Leave the table at the dining hall when the discussion turns to college (as the year drags on, this will eventually happen multiple times at every meal, voices rising around the small oak tables over bowls of pasta). Take a creative writing workshop class, and love your teacher and the opportunity to practice writing, but hate the competitive students. There is a pecking order in class, and the day student who writes melancholic, obsessive love poems about a painfully shy rower she doesnt know is at the bottom. Write short stories and memoirs about your mothers town on the Panhandle. One of your classmates compares you to Hemingway and you adore him for this, even though you arent sure what he is talking about. On Houseguests Invite someone interesting from far away and always serve good coffee. Lea, a South African girl in your class who stayed for Thanksgiving, will months later write you letters from Pretoria about how she misses the coffee at your house. First Love and Fighting for Yourself: This is Going To Be important That fall, in the fading light of an October afternoon, you see Will. He plays guitar and his girlfriend sits behind you in chemistry class. He is two years younger but you dont care. Understand that he is Going To Be Important. Find reasons to go to his dorm; the first time, he ignores you
because he is an introvert (something you will later learn about him). Tell his prefect you like him, like in middle school, because this is how things go at prep school. The first time you hang out will be at Toms, the little diner next to the train station run by old Tom, where you can smoke cigarettes but only order greasy egg and cheese sandwiches on almostmolding rolls. After Toms, go on a walk in the icy sidewalk of town, smoke two cigarettes each, then play him Dj vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young on your record player. Get angry with him one day because he wont dump his girlfriend for you. Soon afterwards, he does. Lose your virginity to him on a late April afternoon, drunk, after everyone has left the dorms for long weekend. Miss two trains headed home and feel addicted to sex. For the first many times you make love, cry afterwards. He will not understand this practice but he will come to accept it, despite the uneasiness he feels. Rejection II: How to Move On Plan to take a year off before college, to go to Peru, a plan inspired by your freewheeling South African friend. Feel afraid and happy and unsure that it will even happen (it will). Cry when you get wait listed Wesleyan, but dont when you get your rejection letter from Brown. Visit colleges and decide on a small one in Ohio, and then take yourself off the Wesleyan wait list. After a life of waiting, await nothing. One of the last weekends of school, your friends all get together for beer and wine and marijuana on top of a mountain nearby. Invite Will. Spend almost the entire time huddled under your grandmothers blanket with him, and whisper that you love each other. Feel happy and sad at the same time. Step carefully off the escalator The last week will be a whirlwind. Spend most of your time lying in that impossibly green grass, swinging on tire swings, getting drunk on church roofs. Type up letters to the teachers you love, telling them that they changed your life. Accept your creative writing award and dont cry at graduation. Lea will come to your house after, and you will both go with your older brother to a very high cliff and jump into the lake below it because even though you are afraid to, you are more afraid of what will happen to you if you dont.
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A DIRTY DOZEN WITH DON

AN INTERVIEW WITH DON BOGEN Ron Salutsky
sequences described them as like mobiles, with ideas and references in the units bouncing off others in changing patterns, and that metaphor was also a help, not just inside the sequences but also among them. As for the mathematical title of the book, youre interviewing someone who didnt make it past Algebra II in high school, so theres no equation behind the book--though I did once visit a class where the students had discussed An Algebra an hour earlier and left an actual equation of it on the blackboard! In math, I imagine, perfect equivalence is possible, but life in time includes loss--and that particular equation is not about to be balanced by poetry. When I read from the book, I often refer to the etymology of the word algebra, which was what drew me from the start. The word comes from the Arabic al-jebr, the reuniting of broken parts. I suppose this is a lot of what I was doing as I wrote the book, and I hope the book itself does that as well. RS: What can we expect from your latest manuscript, Immediate Song? DB: This new book has a range of themes and approaches and includes poems of place and memory--it opens with a poem spoken by the house in Wisconsin where I grew up--others dealing with city life, others about historical subjects from the 2000-year-old earthworks here in southern Ohio to Charles Dickens, and fourteen short lyric poems interspersed throughout the collection. The last section of the book is a twelve-part meditation on hospitals that includes, among other things, an account of each of our childrens births, a joke, and a brief translation from Neruda. If An Algebra is my most intimate and stylistically unified book, Immediate Song may be my broadest and most varied. RS: Question 3 - Does poetry do anything? Should it? Question 5 How can you write poetry when people are being gunned down with automatic weapons? DB: Ill put this one and question 5 together. On question 3, Audens comments in the elegy for Yeats about poetry making nothing happen but surviving as a way of happening seem relevant, if a little fuzzy to me. Question 5 ups the ante by raising issues of the poets responsibility in a world of violence. It makes me think of Seamus Heaneys desire at the end of Oysters to escape from cozy nostalgia into a more politically
RON SALUTSKY: Youve defined algebra as the bringing together of broken parts, and your latest book, An Algebra, departs aesthetically from previous work. Did you see American poetry as broken parts, and how did An Algebra seek to bring things together? DON BOGEN: I have to say I wasnt particularly thinking about the state of American poetry when I was working on An Algebra. The great diversity of work out there, some of which its been a pleasure to accept for The Cincinnati Review, I find energizing. An Algebra began life--a long time ago now--as what I thought would be a long poem about change and loss. Early on, I hit on the idea of working in small units, each focused on a moment of change, but for quite a while I was committed to the idea that they could all be combined through juxtaposition into one single book-length poem. It was my wife Cathryn who first suggested that I could use these individual units to build smaller sequences based on shared topics--love, different kinds of art, parenthood, mortality--under the overall theme of change. Then the units began speaking to each other, and some of their closing lines seemed ripe for the generation of different kinds of short poems. As is often the case with my writing, I had many more completed pieces than I ended up using in the eight sequences of the book, and several sequences that didnt fit in somehow. The challenge of how to arrange things--the units within the sequences, the sequences themselves, the short poems generated from lines in the sequences, and the four poems that frame the two sections--engaged me for a long time, as did the possibility of repeating a handful of units: Which ones? Why these? Where? The algebraic concept of balancing both sides of an equation came fairly on and helped in this process, and one of my goals was to get the different parts of the book interacting with each other in various ways while the whole thing progressed linearly from the first page to the last. A friend who saw some early work on the
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engaged state of being verb, pure verb. Among many things I love in that poem is its awareness of the full context of eating oysters by the sea-not just the taste and smell, the sounds, the light, and the conversation, all of which Heaney conveys brilliantly--but also the history of oysters, where they come from, how theyre prepared and transported. In this way the poem includes a public and hence political element essentially interwoven with the personal scene. Oysters shows the poets need to engage the world--and Heaney is, of course, one of the greatest poets to deal with the problem of violence in our century--but the poem also has no illusions about the ability of poetry to change the world. I resist attempts to elevate the power of poetry to some kind of higher realm, either a quasi-mystic one, as in Rilke, or a vaguely political one, as in Shelley--do we really want to be legislators, let alone unacknowledged ones? Poetry seems to me an art like others, and it shares something of the strengths and flaws of all human activity. I take pleasure in thinking of it as a craft rather than some kind of special calling. But language is as well suited as any artistic medium to deal with violence and injustice, so one answer to question 5--at least for a poet--might be How can you not write poetry in these times? I love all kinds of poetry, but Im especially drawn toward work that engages experience in its fullest context, which includes public as well as personal concerns. RS: In what sense does poetics inform your poetry? DB: Im less interested in poetics as its commonly understood than in specific methods of composition poets have used. My dissertation and my book on Theodore Roethke are all about that, and I like to explore different approaches to the writing process with students in workshops. Im sure these explorations of writing methods have affected how I write and some of what I write, but I dont think poetics per se enters into it. For me poetics is more something I might discover in going through the body of a poets work as a reader than a starting point or core set of principles I deal with in writing my own poetry. RS: Describe the moment of poetry composition for you. DB: I wish it were a single moment. I tend to work on many things
simultaneously. If I have the beginnings of a poem--a line or two or a phrase (not necessarily the opening ones), Ill scribble them down on a sheet of paper, but its rare for me to get anything like a first draft in a single sitting. When I have some time to work, Ill often look through these sheets--I have a manila folder stuffed with them--trying to find places of entry to go further with one or two. The vast majority of these initial jottings are never developed, but if I am able to complete a draft at one of these later sessions, I print it out and start a separate manila folder for drafts and revisions, noting changes on the printed sheets, then entering them into the computer file and reprinting. Im fairly free and, I suppose, obsessive in revision, often making major changes, so these draft folders get pretty fat too. The advantage of this approach is that when I find time to write there is almost always something I can do on either the dozen or so poems Im actively revising or all those initial scribblings. The disadvantage, obviously, is that it takes me years to finish any single poem. But I tell myself that going back to drafts at different times improves them and that the long process involves my deepening understanding of the initial work and its possibilities. I should also mention that I speak lines and phrases aloud as I write and revise, often re-reading a draft from the beginning, so the process is generally quite oral and aural--even tactile, in a way. RS: How did you get started with translation, and are you doing any current work with translation? DB: Thanks to a scholarship, the strong dollar, and the great educationabroad program of the University of California, I spent my junior year of college in Germany. That year changed my life in all kinds of ways, and I made my first attempts at translating poetry when I came back. Over the years Ive published some versions of Brecht and Johannes Bobrowski. After a sabbatical at the Camargo Foundation in France and a Fulbright in Spain, I was able to translate from French and Spanish as well and did various small things: an opera libretto from the German, a few translations of Baudelaire for a music program. During my time in Spain ten years ago, I came across the work of Julio Martnez Mesanza in several anthologies of contemporary Spanish poetry and was really struck by it. We started corresponding, and I just finished translating his selected
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poems--theres an example below. My current translation project is considerably different: a group of songlike poems from various nineteenth and early-twentieth century poets working in Spanish, French, and German. Im just at the beginning stages but have done some versions of Heine, Verlaine, and Garca Lorca so far. RS: Care to share a translation and brief translators note? DB: Sure. Battery is a poem from Europa: Selected Poems of Julio Martnez Mesanza. It came out in Two Lines in 2011 and was featured on their website. Battery When everything around me is collapsing, I think about artillery and maps, about the perfect world of maps, and how reality transforms that perfect world. Someone picks a target, and someone looks for reference points in the landscape-the tower of a church, a mountain peak-to gauge the levels with exact precision before he lays out the trajectory. At tables, those who use the formulas to find the range, the proper charge and angle immerse themselves in calculations. The gunners start their work at the cannons in a feverish, mechanical routine, while the observers wait impatiently to see the cloud that shows the first impact. When the order to fire is finally given everything is excitement and turmoil; each man is responsible for his part and no one is responsible for the wreckage. Julio was born in 1955 and is one of the most prominent Spanish poets to come of age after the death of Franco. You can read a brief essay about him and his work at the Two Lines website.
RS: You helped establish the University of Cincinnatis PhD in creative writing. What good is that degree, and do you feel some ambivalence about selling the PhD, the MFA, or any creative writing degree? Why the increasing demand for such impractical degrees? DB: Actually our PhD with creative dissertation had been in place for a couple decades by the time I came here, but very few people took advantage of it. That started to change in the 1990s as people with MFAs, and sometimes first books, began to apply. I have a PhD myself from Berkeley--there wasnt a creative-dissertation option available, but I wrote about poets processes of composition under the direction of the poet Josephine Miles--so I cant be opposed to poets going for the doctorate. Our program here is small and selective: We have an MA but no MFA, and we take about a half dozen PhD students in fiction and poetry each year. Our job placement for PhD students with the creative dissertation is quite strong, I have to say, largely because a number of colleges are looking for new faculty who are qualified to teach both creative writing and literature. I imagine this holds true for the doctoral program at Florida State as well. That combination of literature and creative writing is actually what I teach here, and I think its a great one for a poet. Working with talented new poets in workshops and at the same time getting to teach everything from Cathy Park Hongs Engine Empire to Life Studies and Lyrical Ballads has been a delight over the years and, Im sure, has made me a better poet. I wouldnt want to have to choose one over the other. Where I feel some frustration is with the separation of creative writing from the study of literature. Doctoral programs like yours and ours are helping to bridge that gap and turning out stronger writers and teachers. RS: Are you a Cincinnati Reds fan? By the time this interview appears in print, the 2013 World Series will be overa prediction about how the Reds will have done? I write after the Reds lost the wild card slot to the Pirates and they in turn lost to the Cardinals--so no predictions at this point. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I was a fierce Milwaukee Braves fan until the age of twelve and then lost interest in baseball when we moved to Southern California and puberty struck. But I learned early on after we moved to Cincinnati that you have to know how to respond to the universal question How about them Reds? And you cant just say, How about em? So I try to keep up with where they stand.
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NARRATIVE NONFICTION CONTEST FINALISTS AND WINNER

Elizabeth McConaghy finalist LITTLE GODS
Adie Mae told Earl Pearly his whole life it was his broad shoulders passing from her body that made her weak. She whipped the kids so hard Earl Sr. said she didnt know when to quit, but Earl Pearly was a mamas boy. He said there was nothing in the world he and Adie Mae couldnt lick.
Remember, the biographers will say. Remember the southern context, the southern sun. Remember poverty, wrecked industries of wrecked conscience. Remember the south will rise again. Your memory is in that dusty dirt road, the red Georgia clay, in the sound of summer, cicadas funeral song. Earl Pearly Paulk, sixteen years old sitting in his daddys church listening to the old man preach, heard a voice from heaven telling him Earl Sr. would never preach again if junior didnt get his ass out of that pew and tell every God fearing man, woman and child in sweaty Baxley, Georgia that his life from that day belonged to kingdom work. Earl Pearly saw the old man clutch his hand, burning hot, lean hard against the pulpit, go silent, and he saw a circle of light bolt down the center aisle. Earl Jr. stood up out of his pew, turned to the hot faced, nodding, humming crowd and he said what he needed to say. Back when Earl Jr. was just the preachers kid who couldnt drink a Coca Cola without his daddy getting wind, a couple of boys tied him tight to a river birch tree for being a holy roller. Earl Pearly leaned back against the peeling paper bark, hated his holy roller haircut and his holy roller shoes and his holy roller daddy whod tell him getting tied to a tree wasnt the worst would happen. By the time his big sister Myrtle came by and untied him, Earl Jr. wouldnt say a word. Earl Sr. said his son couldnt play football even if he made the team every year. Earl Sr. said no kid of his had business calling that kind of attention. Earls mama Adie Mae said what about something that doesnt catch much attention, so Earl Pearly ran track and field. He ran until his body blurred and the crowd cheered loud enough for Earl Sr. to say the boy better quit. Earl Jr. said, Mama and I could whip the whole world if we wanted to, even Daddy, but it wasnt true. Nobody whipped Earl Sr.
At eight I sucked the thumb of one hand, worked my shirt tag with the other, rubbing between thumb and finger, frenetic, self-soothing. Twenty years too old, I bite my nails, twirl my hair into knots that have to be pulled or cut out. At the salon, a stylist lifts my wet hair, finds the shorter patch growing back. She frowns in the mirror. Burned it, I tell her, but she doesnt believe me. My dad baptized me at ten, one hand at my back, the other across my face, his voice made for that sanctuary echo. Elizabeth Cundiff Johnson, I baptize you in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit. I went under and resurfaced, born again, to applause. I disconnect, master my disguise, fake it until, some distant day, I make it. When I start to twirl my hair or bite my nails, my husband reaches for my hand. I could use a stress ball, I tell him, something sturdy.
Earl Jr. didnt run because he ran too fast. He didnt dance and he didnt smoke and he didnt sit summer nights in the backseat of the Paulks four-door with the windows down and a girl sweating next to him named Vivy Anne. Shed have had freckles on her shoulders and cherry Chapstick on her lips and when Jimmy Dorsey came on the radio singing Green Eyes shed have known every word, but Earl never knew her. When Earl Sr. took his son to camp meetings in the dirt-floored revival tents, once the ladies were screaming and the men sobbing and the children waking with wide eyes to the whole scene, all Earl Jr. could see were arms and legs and bodies falling shaking to the ground and he would be filled with a holy terror. Hed say, Dear Lord, I love you, and I want to follow you, but I just cant understand this. Later on, after hed married sweet Norma Davis and gotten the hell out of the Church of God, after he was Bishop Paulk, hed remember
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the Klansmens ghosts coming through the trees with their axes and their torches, and hed remember being tied to that river birch tree, the bark scratching his back and sun burning his ears, and hed think fuck it. The bishop Paulk integrated his church before 1957, saw straight through separate but equal and got onboard with interracial. He preached to blacks all through the hateful 60s and to gays through the scared straight 80s and when he felt the heat he took hard swigs of his Coca Cola and thought, fuck it all.
The day I got married my dad took me aside, said he was proud of me and started to cry. I let him hug me and slipped past him where he stood, preparing for his greatest performance. If I had been older, known better, I would have skipped the ceremony, given away by my father when I was never his to give. The next morning Kyle and I drove twelve hours south to the Gulf of Mexico, down the wide, tree-lined highways of Mississippi and Alabama. We were kids, my feet on the dashboard, legs brown in late spring, Kyle singing badly, music so loud I could barely hear him. We drove through spring into summer, got to the beach after sunset and laid on the balcony, listening to waves crash in the dark. The Bishop Earl Paulk, said, Just as dogs have puppies and cats have kittens, so God has little gods. Seed remains true to its nature, bearing its own kind. When God said, Let us make man in our image, He created us as little gods, but we have trouble comprehending this truth. Earl Pearly, Earl Jr. said, We see ourselves as little people with very little power and dominion. Until we comprehend that we are little gods and we begin to act like little gods, we cannot manifest the Kingdom of God. Earl Jr. believed in Kingdom Now, Plan B theology. When Plan A for Adam fell through God moved on to Plan B for body, Jesus Christ, first fruit of God incarnate, and after him Earl Jr. and all the faithful men like him, extensions of Christs body, carrying out the kingdom work on earth. Kingdom Now wasnt waiting on Jesus Christ to come back down and save anybody. Little gods didnt need saving. Little gods did the saving. For Kingdom Now, Bishop Earl was called a heretic but what he lost he got back in divinity. The Bishop Paulk took Mona Brewer into his office at the Cathedral
of the Holy Spirit in September 1989, shut the door behind her and said, Honey, youre gonna to have to take your clothes off now, because Im gonna to have to love you. Early Pearly had kingdom relations with Mona Brewer, soloists voice and a husband named Bobby at home. He had kingdom relations with Cindy Hall after he prayed for her, after he kissed her, and with Jessica Battle, 7 years old, shared the kingdom with her until she was eleven and then again when she turned sweet 17. He had kingdom relations in parking lots and church basements and in his office pressed up against the big walnut desk covered in Sundays sermon notes and in the backseat of his car and in the bedroom he shared with silent, steadfast Norma Davis, who made the bed up new every morning. He said kingdom rules were for little people, but for the holy few, kingdom relationships were ordained by God. Hed ask, Honey, you wanna get closer to God? and then hed show those holy ladies how. When Jessica Battle, all grown up, sued Bishop Paulk for telling her sex with him was the way, the truth and the life, the bishop went straight to Bobby Brewer and his good wife Mona and borrowed four-hundred thousand dollars to settle it with Jessica, that demonic agent, her grandma a pastor in his own church. Cindy Hall, already ten years into it with Earl when Jessica came forward, testified that the bishop would never be unfaithful. Bishop Paulk said to his congregation, to the seven thousand seats in his packed house of a church, he said, Honey, if you would do what Im telling you to do today and believe God is speaking in your life and you make a vow with God, you make a new covenant with God in your heart, and you can say in your heart I know that God will not fail his promise, if you do what youre supposed to do, you obligate God to fulfill a promise. I said you obligate God to fulfill a promise. Darling, Im living on that.
My grandpa could be a mean son of a bitch, but he kept boxes of Florida orange blossom honey in his trunk, left jars like calling cards wherever he went. At his funeral some rookie pastor with tinted glasses and a red, sweating face said, The thing about John is he never said a bad word about a single person. Not one single person. And I thought: democrats, politicians, minorities, waiters, cops. That preacher bullshitted straight through my grandpas elegy, then he said, Let us stand and
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sing Johns favorite hymn, Victory in Jesus, from your bulletins and I could hear my granddads sweet tenor, singing at the breakfast table on Sunday mornings in suspenders and his suit pants. When Grandpa started talking the difference between Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson my mom would say, Now, Daddy and hed mutter quietly into his collar. My dad didnt get muttering mad, he got charismatically mad, a big tent performer who could put on a Kentucky drawl as fast as he took it off. When my mom told me that cocktail waitress from the Way Out bar downtown was the first one, I thought, Oh Norma Davis, who do we think were kidding? My dads first sin was pride, and his second was making me fearful, but the sin I couldnt forgive was making my mother believe that cocktail waitress came onto him after all, and she was the first one, the last.
Earl Jr. told Mona Brewer, Honey, youre my resurrection, and the next Sunday he stood up in front of the congregation and said when a man is in despair, God will bring him a resurrection. And maybe he turned to Mona when he said it, smiled at her where she stood, waiting in the wings to sing some old hymn. When Bobby Brewer found out the bishop was promising his wife eternal salvation for screwing him and his brother Don, his nephews Alan and Duanne and any preacher coming through town hungry, Bobby punched Earl in the face and the bishop preached that Sunday with two black eyes. Don Paulk got it from a Sunday School teacher who turned him in for kingdom relations and when she did he said, I know now what it was like for Samson to place his head in the lap of Delilah. Dons son, Donnie Earl, found out his uncle Earl was really his daddy and he said, A saint is just a sinner who fell down and got back up again. Earl Paulk, womanizer, child molester, preacher, prophet, said, You know what the spirit of the Lord said to me? He said Im gonna let you get down to the rock bottom. I mean the rock bottom. All the excesses are going. All those who dont have the guts to hang in there when the spirit is there is going to be rock bottom. But he said when you get to rock bottom Im gonna build you a rock, Jesus Christ. Come on, get on your feet and praise God! The president, George Bush Sr., called Paulk one of a thousand points of light, brightening the dark end of the southern century. Every summer
on the fourth of July, Bishop Paulk put on a firework show for Atlanta and those points of red, blue and brilliant yellow lit up the black summer sky before disappearing into smoke invisible from the park benches and picnic blankets below. Dying from two kinds of cancer, the bishop sent word through his lawyer that his little granddaughter Penny Brooke was a liar, saying hed touched her, too. And when he did die the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit mourned him, they said These little things dont outshine the good this man has done. My dad taught me abstinence only, rocking back in his chair with a nervous giggle. Sex inside marriage, he said, can actually be quite fun. He taught me unease and I taught myself to keep still when I felt it. My dad, the psychiatrist, taught me not to cry. You are trying to manipulate me, hed say, with his clinical stare. Not a crier, I learned how to yell, and when he screamed at my mom, I screamed back. My dad taught me to love control with his lack, with his terrible, grasping apologies. He taught fear and I teach myself to hate it. I do my best.
I wonder how Mona and Cindy could have been struck so dumb, believing an hour in the backseat of Earl Jr.s car meant an eternity in heaven. I wonder if it was heartbreak that made them lie when Jessica Battles said what the bishop did. I think of my mother, hearts first love, choosing blindness. When Earl Pearly Paulk died, his coffin was pulled in a horse drawn carriage through the streets of Atlanta, congregation following on foot, fanning the sweat that ran down their necks with pictures of the bishops face. At Earls funeral, the preacher said, We did not, in case you didnt know, fall down out of heaven, and the crowd laughed and called amen. We were taken from among men so we could minister to men. We must remember what God remembers and forget what God forgets. If men are little gods, we must remember what Earl and Don, Donnie Earl, Duanne and Alan remember, forget all they forget. But I dont believe in little gods, in gods outshining little things. I dont believe in manifestations of the kingdom, divine incarnations, divine prophecy. I dont believe in those thousand points of light. There is only the suffocated breeze, summer darkness, Spanish moss on black branches and some old car radio hymn disappearing into the hot night, Georgia on the fourth of July.
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Sam Shaber finalist I AM 40 : CHAPTER 1
I am 40 years old. Im 40 and Im standing on stage at my high school, singing to a hundred people who have each paid $125 a ticket. Im halfway through the first chorus of my first song and the mic goes completely dead. This is not a dream. This is actually happening. As they figure out that the battery died and the MC runs to get me another microphone, I kill time. You know that dream you have, I say in the natural acoustics to this audience of former classmates, You know that dream you have-- The MC hands me a new mic, which I speak into now. --that dream you have where youre back in high school? The room erupts into laughter and applause, and I pick up the song right where I stopped. But when youre kind I rise And when you smile Im fine Im a hit tonight at The Dalton School. Of course all of my former classmates are 40 as well. From the popular kids to the gay fray, we all share some extra lines around our eyes, a lot of grey streaks, several divorces, weight gained and hair lost, and seemingly countless offspring. We also share wisdom, pain, good and bad luck, death, cynicism, debt, some real estate, and disease. We are in fact gathered to raise money and spirit for a classmate battling her second round of gnarly cancer. Five days after the birth of her second child, she was diagnosed with a relapse and sent into aggressive chemo treatments. Miraculously, she now sits, silk headscarf wrapping her bald head, beautiful and teary in the second row, at this grand display of warmth and generosity. Meanwhile up in Harlem, my friend Hallie, (not related to high school but closer to me currently), sits in her apartment after a double mastectomy, her mother Lynda nursing the rainbow-colored, fleshy hole in her back where they attempted to take skin for a graft on her chest. After opening the large wound, they realized she had lost too much weight already so they took skin from her thigh instead.
And meanwhile, up in Connecticut, is my father. Hes not sitting by the football game in the living room or stoking the little fireplace in his backyard pigbarn-cum-writing-studio. Hes not working on his next screenplay or doing the Times Sunday crossword. Hes not smoking quietly as he stares out the window down the hill, his wooden leg inside beige corduroys, propped up on the antique pine farmers table he uses as a desk. Hes not wearing one of his J Crew turtlenecks or Lands End cable knit sweaters. I am 40 and my father is dead. He is scattered along the dirt road at the top of the hill, where Roxbury meets Woodbury and antique planes take off from a cornfield. More of him is scattered across the flagstone at the door to his little red studio, and even more dusts sections of the upper field, the lower field and the front fence. I am 40 and Im married to a gorgeous, intense guy who looks like all my high school crushes rolled into one, with long hair to boot. George is so passionate about the world, he sometimes needs up to six Xanax a day to get through it all, and he makes me seem mellow by comparison, which is quite a feat. We have no children because we have each spent twenty years on our careers, ten of those together, instead of building a family. Now I set my phone alarm to take prenatal vitamins every evening at 7:15 and we visit a fertility clinic every few days to measure the diameter of my follicles so we can time our intercourse with the moment of ovulation. And even then, when the blood comes each month, I feel a mix of resentment, anger, impatience...and relief. I dont want to be 40. I dont want to have a dead father and Stage IV friends. I dont want to be standing in this auditorium, looking out into the sea of grown-ups and parents who are exactly my age. I dont want George to have periodontitis and me to have decaying eggs and a bone abnormality in my right knee, a dashboard injury caused by a car accident on tour fifteen years ago in which my best friend Maribel was killed. Growing up is losing little pieces Chipped away like fragile figurines Every song I write now is about death and aging, compared to the first song I ever wrote, about following your dreams. (Well the first first song I wrote was about Johnny Depp, but the next one was about following your dreams.) In college, I wrote about future plans and the affirmation that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. But now Im not so sure about that, as I stand singing under the ca-
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nary yellow proscenium of The Dalton School stage on East 89th Street. The same stage where I played Alice in You Cant Take it With You at age 14, Adelaide in Guys and Dolls when I was 15, and a drugged up, dying hooker in a Tennessee Williams one-act at 17. After setting my mind to rock stardom and putting it all in, I am 40 with a freelance day job, no kids and no Grammys. I do however have nine albums to my credit, three awards, many songs placed into TV shows and feature films, thousands of gigs and miles behind me, trunks full of road stories, and a comfort level on stage in front of an audience that allows me to break strings and encounter broken microphones without fear or panic, but with humor and a welcome chance to shake it up for everyone and enjoy the moment. I finish my first song, striking the last low D string and letting it ring. As it lingers, the rest of the band come out from the wings and head to their instruments. Gian the drummer adjusts his in-ears and Ben the bassist plugs in his Fender. George is playing lead guitar for me tonight, so he pulls on his new EVH, (he played in bands for years in school). I slowly stomp off each of the four active guitar pedals in turn: delay, flange, tremolo, chorus; peeling back the layers of effects until we hear just the single note, D, pure and unwavering. Tuning the headstock peg up as quickly and gracefully as possible, I bring the low D to an E, Gian counts me in, and we start the second tune. Check out my ride, my bumpers shine My every curvature is polished up so fine It isnt I, I crouch inside Keep all my valuables where they can safely hide Suddenly, in this new moment, Im not 40. Im not thinking about whether the follicle deep inside me is becoming an embryo. Im not thinking about death or disease or failure. Im not thinking about my freelance day job at SiriusXM Radio as a digital content manager. Im not thinking about how long Ive been doing this or all the record deals I havent gotten or the rapid decline of the entire music industry and the ever-increasing odds that anyone can make a decent living from it. Im not thinking about my 380-square foot, fifth floor walkup apartment on the Lower East Side that has recently contracted a roach problem. In this new moment, I am jumping up and down in my metallic silver Doc Martens, singing raucously into my new microphone, and pounding the strings of my gold top Les Paul. In this moment, I am doing just fine.
Pamela Balluck Contest Winner PARTS OF A CHAIR
Poet was A.B.D., all but dissertation, was leaving Salt Lake City, packing a U-Haul, returning to New York City to complete grad school at a distance, until he returned in a year to defend his dissertation, which would be published by then, his first book. He asked me, Do you want this chair? I had been looking for a second Heywood-Wakefield armless school chair to go on the other side of my little drop-leaf kitchen table from the chair I found at a vintage shop (also selling some pretty irresistible midcentury-mod cocktail paraphernalia) in Sugar House. I had been holding out for a match to the Heywood-Wakefield chairto no avail. My father made this chair, Poet told me about the armless ladderback. I could picture where the chair was created. Did Poet forget that Ive read his poems? I can immediately access a moving image, down the stairs into his childhood basement, where his own father bends him over the same work table that bore this chair, surrounded by vices and clamps and I see Poets sister stalled at the bottom of those stairs, wanting to save her little bro, her parents youngest, their only boy, but leaving Poet to the carpenter, in order to save herself. The boy with his pants down sees her. The man with his pants down does not. She realizes: if its Poet suffering this, its not, will not be, herthis timemaybe anymoreany moreit is maybe will behe. And, it was. Looking at the chair Poet was offering me, I saw that poem, that boy, that father. So why did I accept, besides Poets two velvety, wine-red, machinewashable throw pillows, the chair, which he would otherwise have given to Deseret Industries (the Mormon Salvation Army) or to one of his Mormon-boy friends? Each of his Mormon-boy friends uses multiple namesone set by which he leads his pre-fab Mormon life, others by which he seeks to build, or claim, his personal identity. The gym (there are many) acts as a thin veil, a conduit, a portal, between the two worlds: This is my buddy from the gym. These are my buddies from the gym. Does Poet have actual last names for any of them? And, whats it to me if the chair is lost to a Salt Lake gym buddy or
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to a D.I. stranger? Why not simply good-riddance
with me? I dont want Poet to want the chair. I dont want Poet to want me to have the chair (be the whatever he does with it). I dont want the chair. But I have it. Its mine. And Poets despicable father designed it, tooled its parts and fastened them together.
My sister and I are parentless, and we are grandparentless, orphans now, at ages our mother, who was thirty-eight when she died, never reached. Poet has called me a hoarder, because Im the keeper of so much of what my father and maternal grandfatherlast living parent and grandparent, who both died in the first decade of the twenty-first centuryleft behind: furniture, art, glassware, photographs, letters, stage- and screenplays, unfinished and as-yet undiscovered business. I dont hoard; I archive. Im clean and organized, just crowded, for now. I used white, lidded, file boxes from Staples as side tables, when I entertained during graduate school, where Poet and I metI, a former West Coast talent agent raised from thirteen by my single, TV-writer father; and Poet, a former East Coast social worker raised in a family whose father was not away on business enough. Inside my lidded file boxes: Dads stuff, which I got after he, a once-married-once-divorced bachelor, died at seventy in L.A. while I was in Salt Lake finishing my masters degree; and, later, during my doctoral work, my moms fathers stuff, which I got after Grampa died at ninety-five, leaving his third wifehe outlived the first twoa widow in L.A.. Getting Grampas stuff meant getting Grammas stuff and Mom-related stuff that wasnt left in the hands of Moms second husband, her widower, someone we didnt keep in touch with. Im the renter of a climate-controlled storage-unit. I have not yet learned how to purge. (In grad school, one of my creative-writing professors urged workshop participants to experience the exercise of writing a piece of fiction in longhand, or on a typewriter, and then burning it. I was horrified and said I would only after having made a copy to keep; writing-time and its products were too precious to burn for the sake of burning. My professor said I was missing the point. But, what was the point?) I could only imagine that Poet wanted me to have the chair his father had made because, when he changes his mind, it will be waiting for him, to do whatever withbecause I, with my one first and my one last name, am someone Poet will always know where to find. But what is wrong
I have not met Poets elderly parents outside the pages of Poets poems, but I have heard their ugly voices on Poets answering machine. When I took Poet home to his semi-attached cottage apartment after his hernia surgery, I heard their recorded voices, long swaths of grunting, guttural Italian, not the melodious Italian I hear Poet speak with his Italian-speaking poet friends at parties. How rude, I have said to Poet at the parties. And he says, We need practice. And: We dont use it, well lose it! Hell never lose it. Poet was born and began school in Italy. English is his second languageor third, after Spanish. Part of his poeting is putting words in translation next to each other and seeing what theyll do. He is granted grants to study Italian poets in Italy. His parents have been in New York close to four decades, and do they speak English? No. Even if he wanted to, he couldnt lose it. And over Poets phone, I could hear them. Poet, who was yelling at me, held his cordless out so I could hear that his parents, too, in their rough Italian were yelling at me, because I would not feed Poet the things relatives had sent him to eat in recovery that hes not suppose to have in combo with his medsdoctors and pharmacists orders. No bread. No pasta. No to a lot of things he had waiting in his kitchen. He was still doped on his last dose of morphine when he was released, and I was put in charge of filling and dispensing his scripts. He had certain pills to continue and pills he had yet to take. He was supposed to have been an out-patient. A poet friend dropped him off at the hospital in the morning and I was to pick him up in the early afternoon from short stay and settle him at home. Surgery went well and without complication, but Im not sure how much morphine Poet ended up getting, nor am I exactly clear on how many shifts of short-stay nurses rotated in and out around him. Nurses would get Poet out of bed, walk him to the john, see how he was doing on his feet. And Poet would double over, say he needed to lie down, in
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way too much pain to go home. Ive known him long enough to realize hes not strong about his healthpotential unhealth. He stands six-footplus, went to Amherst on a baseball scholarship, joined every game of whatever in grad school, is totally addicted to the gym (where he meets most of his non-academic friends), is completely handsome, confident in his art, his poetry; but something always seems to hurt. Injuries and maladies apparently healed or cured seem to linger and recur. He is vulnerable. He needs to feel safe. He needs to feel believed. Who can blame him? Back and forth I went, all day into nightin the midst of trying to finish reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for the Joyce seminar I was taking, plus completing and submitting applications for further grad-school fundingthinking this time Id finally be taking Poet home. But, behind his short-stay curtain, Poet would fall asleep mid-sentence, then wake up and say to me, waiting in the only short-stay visitors chair, PamEla! You look fabulous in red! Cant wait till youre famous! Then hed ask for more morphine, beg for it, demand it, and fade out again on me in my red turtleneck, Levis, and scuffed winter boots. In the middle of that January night, I finally got Poet home, twelve hours after expected. According to the doc and the pharmacist, if Poet ate the foods he and his parents were yelling at me to feed him, hed become constipatedput bluntly, after hernia surgery, Poet shouldnt be pushing! Did he want to, did they want him to, bust a gut? Fine! When the next shift of friend arrived (a Mormon-boy friend that I called by both of his first names, hyphenated in either order, because I could never remember which he was to usI was a terrible beard), I left him the written instructions Poet wanted in his delirium to ignore and I was out of there. But the guttural, grunting voices stayed in my head yelling I dont know what through the phone, and Poets outraged voice was still yelling at me: Mother says give me bread! Give me bread! Give me bread! I had stashed the bread in my purse before I pulled his door shut between us.
When Poet first moved to Utah, I had been in Salt Lake City through two years of an M.F.A. program in fiction writing, plus the year my application had been rejected by the creative-writing Ph.D. program that
I spent teaching at the university as an adjunct and applying again. Poet and I started our doctoral programs together, and together we experienced the shock of 9/11 and trying to reach family in New York; the news of Poets friend, among those lost in the Towers; the good news from my cousin and his brother-in-law, who saw people saved. Im a few years older than Poet, and were among the oldest of our graduate-student colleagues. Once we figured out what was what between us, we didnt particularly act mature together. He was for me a much-needed dose of familiarity, East Coast-family-like. I was born in New York to a fallen-away Roman Catholic father and a secular Jewish mother, both struggling in the theatre world, who raised me in Los Angeles, where my dad began writing for 1960s television series like Dr. Kildare (starring Richard Chamberlain) and Peyton Place (starring Mia Farrow and Ryan ONeal). Poets Catholic family are, since he was singledigit young, New Yorkers. Poet and I , for years prior to graduate school in Utah, had been working in careers on separate coasts, in New York and in L.A.. Imother to no one and never been marriedhad, eight years before I met Poet, left L.A. for Montana (where Id lived as a kid with my mom until she died from breast cancer, married to the second husband, before I was then raised by Dad), and three years before I met Poet, I left Montana again, for Utah (with a B.A. finally under my belt, at the same age my mom was when she died). By the time Poet arrived from New York, I was starved for someone like him in my everyday world. And, together, we became like puppies, eager to nip and play, to bite; to test each other socially, culturally, intellectually, emotionally in this weird and gorgeous place called Utah. Very early in our first fall semester, before 9/11, after our dread theory-overview lecture, in which we felt entertained but clueless, some of us gathered in the English department to admit our mutual feelings of defeat and to discuss the possibility of forming a study group. Mike had been playing tennis and working out with Poet for weeks. I was still figuring Poet outjust the basicsfrom classes and colloquia and socializing. Anne knew him less than we did and asked him outrighton behalf of a friendif he had a girlfriend. No, Poet told her. But I do have a boyfriend named Art. Mike laughed. But, Poet was serious. Its not a cliche, not a metaphor. Poet is married to art, yes. But he also had a boyfriend named Art.
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*** At the hospital, I had to take Poets phone away from him and turn it off. On my own phone, my first cell (I was a rebellious holdout), I stood in what I hoped was a neutral zone (hospital signage: not helpful) on an internal bridge with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Salt Lake City, explaining to Artwho was freaking out from midtown Manhattan that cellular phones were potentially interfering with patient-monitoring equipment, and we have to shut cells down. This does not mean anythings wrong, I tell Art, who knows me in person a little by now. Hes been calling too much. Art, who himself told me that Poets a hypochondriac, nevertheless has allowed Poet to unnecessarily rattle him by acting the drama queen on morphine. Arts supposed to phone the shortstay nurses station only if necessary; instead, hes driving them batty, trying to deal on one side of the room with Poet, and with Art, frantic on the phone, at the other. Do not piss off these angels of mercy whove been humoring your big-baby boyfriend through multiple shifts. Ill call when anything new happens, I told Art. As soon as I can check Poet out, I told Art, well turn our cells on. Dont worry! I told Art. Poets loved!
er Poet was already on the phone with Art, probably due up soon anyway, to get ready for Wall Street, likely via the gym. And, as we wound down in elevation toward where Poet lived perched on a hillside below, he nearly shouted us off of North Campus Drive: Oh! The stars! The stars! The city lights!
Poet is not, has never been (that hes copped to), a recreational drug user, so the pain meds were his chance to legally imbibe. I give him that. I dont like the sneaky ambiguity of prescription anxiety or pain meds. Ive never been attracted to narcotics, except to go to sleep, and even then, except for surgery, I dont like the idea of being knocked out. I was a pot smoker, which Poet disapproved of. He didnt want to know about it. He was aghast when one night I went on a weed-buying detour with one of his Mormon-boy friends. Yet, Poet loves my period fiction about girls I used to be like, rolling all over late 70s into 80s into 90s L.A., Hollyweird, between work and parties and clubs and dysfunctional-family gatherings, amped and addled on pot, on coke, on booze, on Quaaludes, sometimes all together. (Scandalous.) In the middle of that night, on the drive home from the hospital, which is perched in the hills above the university, which itself is perched pretty high in some hillsbundled and padded and strapped into the front passenger seat of my twelve-year-old (bought new in L.A.) Troop-
Mother says give me bread! Give me bread! Poet had yelled at me until I shut myself out, on the other side of his front door, and it made me think, ironically, about the Eucharist, communion; and poems about Poet, after coming out as himself, being cut off by his parents from a Church in which too many Fathers do to boys what Poets father had done to him since childhood, so why would Poet want the Church? God doesnt live there. My parents are criminals was one of the first things Poet told me about them. I know this kind of talk. I and some of my friends have used this brand of language, about our own or each others parents. I was never sexually abused, one parent perpetrating it, the other joining him in denying it (Hereeat something). I came out of my childhood unscathed in comparison with Poet, who has nonetheless accomplished so much more than I. He is far more open to the world than I am. He works hard on the side of the underdog. He is a public speaker in the name of social causes. Yet his parents know relatively little of his published and public accomplishments as a poet, with a body of work built after all in part on tales and anecdotes about them, in English. They refuse with Poet to speak English. They refused to hear about, to accept the fact of ArtPoets life partner for what, eight years, a decade? In Italian, they tell Poet: We raised you normal.
During the two years of my first graduate program, one of my stories, about 1980s Hollywood as experienced by my generation, won the fiction prize in a Utah competition judged by an out-of-state author, and Imotherless before high school, raised by my self-made, intellectual, dramatic-television-writer father, who had never been to collegecelebrated my first publication, in the Western Humanities Review.
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Dad read my story and said, Dont get too academic. Less than a year after that publication, he was dead.
Me plus Poet plus grad school plus my being gifted a cocktail shaker and glasses equaled maybe those glasses should have been smaller. In Utah bars, cocktail glasses are minuscule, because hard booze is poured through meters measuring out, at the time of grad school, one ounce per drink (its now 1.5). Then, as now, one could legally up the alcohol content with a whole menu of drinks that use other boozes as flavoring. But, a simple martini, pretty close to the rim without olives? One had to wonder: What else is in this so-called martini, besides one ounce of vodka, a whisper of vermouth, and a dirty dash of olive juice? More often than not the Utah bar martini, small as the glass is, tasted topped off with shaker melt. Out, it was rare Id order a martini (on a grad students stipend). If a dirty martini, out, was honest, it would barely reach mid-glass without the olives. At my own place, we started with three-ounce martinis doubled in seven-ounce cocktail glasses (each of which years ago has been broken).
I thought of the chair as a placeholder. I told myself that when I find the second armless Heywood-Wakefield school chair, Ill ask Poet if he wants his armless, father-made chair back. But at some point, I find Ive stopped looking. And the Poets-father-made ladderback remains.
After I moved to Utah, I feared I was becoming an alcoholic, like my dad became. My tolerance seemed to have gone up. Or, was it down? I could finish a beer without getting buzzed, have another, still not be buzzed, have room for dinner, even another beer, and not feel too full or too drowsy. What had happened to me between Montana and Utah? At the time of my move, and throughout my M.F.A. program, my father was dying in L.A. of alcoholismlung and liver cancer from smoking and drinking.
I remember, the August night before the movers arrived, sitting on the floor of my Mary Tyler Moore Show-, tree-house-like apartment on my newly connected Salt Lake phone line, sobbing at reports from my sister and her husband in L.A. about how our father was losing it pretty much on every level. Thiskilling himself with drink and smokehad been building up for months, for years, for decades of course. At first, back in the 60s and the 70s, our dad was, or seemed, a sometimes glamourous- but sometimes character-drinker, sometimes like James Bond with a martini glass, sometimes like Dean Martin with a tumbler, not until the end like Foster Brooks, and always a lit cigarette between his fingers. By the early 90s, Dad had already suffered mouth cancer, the kind from drinking and smoking combined. I gave up tobacco a year or so after my adult move back to Montana in 93 (my motivation to quit was a guy there who didnt stick, but not smoking did). Dad resented that we no longer shared cigarette smoking in common. I had smoked for twenty-three years. I had started when I was twelve. After I reached a certain teen age, Dad started putting a carton in my December stocking. When Dad visited me in Montana where I ended up completing a bachelors degree twenty years after dropping out of L.A. Valley College to work in Hollyweird the reality of my non-smoking status made him miserable; terrible inconvenience; what a drag I was. I smoked pot when I could get it. I didnt trust new people quickly with my safety, with my privacy, my reputation as a responsible citizen so I mostly went without. I did whats legal: I drank, usually wine or beer, sometimes whiskey. But someone should have, when I crossed the border into Utah, slowed me down and passed a brochure through my window. My first 4th of July in Salt Lake City, I thought I must have blacked out a night and a day, into the next night, without any memory of having tied one on to begin with. Last I remembered, it was Saturday the 3rd, it was still daylight, and I had fallen into a nap. When I awoke, its dark, and not only were the skies crackling and sparkling with fireworks, but also from my street below. I went down to the hundred-year-old front porch of the former one-family home that houses five apartments on three levels, and I saw a next-door neighbor standing on his steps. I say, Dave, what day is it? He says, Saturday. I say, Thank-god. Ive only been asleep a couple hours. What had I hadwine? beer? I didnt think Id had enough to knock me out until the night of the 4th. Dave explained that
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because the 4th of July fell this year on the Lords day, the dominant culture had to pick Saturday or Monday and opted for Saturday. What astounds me about this is that the 4th of July is the 4th of July, not the 3rd or the 5th! The 4th of July is always on the 4th, no matter what. Jesus. Not long after this, someone clued me in on the fact that the beer Id been drinking from the supermarkets or 7-Elevens refrigerated sections is three two, meaning 3.2 percent (which, too, has risen since then; at least locally brewed and bottled, up to 4 percent). Real-strength beer is sold only at state liquor stores, which do not have refrigerated sections. God-forbid its cold enough to drink right away. No wonder my tolerance for beer seemed to have gone up; without knowing it, Id regressed from regular-strength brews in Montana to the equivalent of Bud Lights in strength; even bottled or canned by the same brewers Id had across the country. In Utah, domestic and imported brands supermarket-version cap and label schemes are slightly different than outside of Utah. How could I have gone almost a year without knowing this? By the time Poet arrived, I could clue him in on these and a few other pertinent oddities. For instance, according to the dominant culture, this Jewish girls a gentile.
I was gifted the fab cocktail paraphernalia possibly for my fortieth birthday, or maybe in celebration of my M.F.A. Either way, for a couple of years, the cocktail shaker remained in its gift box. I was afraid that once I played around with it (I already had a Mr. Boston Official Bartenders & Party Guide in my writers reference library), dot dot dot. Before long, I learned to make a killer martini. For awhile, I ordered bottled dirty (a.k.a. olive juice) from a novelty catalogue, since theres never enough dirty in a jar of martini olives; but, because of the glassbottled liquids weight, the shipping cost almost as much as the product, so I cut that out. (If I wanted to match my Heywood-Wakefield chair, I could find one online right now, but its heavy and, again, as with the olive brine, I dont want to pay the high shipping.) I cleaned, kept, and later re-used the nifty dirty-juice bottles in which to gift, Thanksgivings and winter holidays, home-made Ballucks Irish Creme. Its like Baileys a recipe handed down from someone in Montana who kept an actual Baileys bottle pristine and refilled with her home brew. Poet was my
biggest encourager in the Pam Makes the Best Booze department. I dont even want to talk about whether or not, between each others homes and parties, we may have driven drunk. I hang my head in abject shame. We were lucky. Those days and that kind of (not) thinking are over (again) (I hope). In New York, in L.A., in Atlanta, in Philadelphia, in Providence, in Denver, when Poetnow a tenured professor and I are on foot, downtown, he may, if hes buying, talk me into a fancy cocktail in a glass big enough to fit my face in. Otherwise, I mostly stick to beer, in and out of Utah. I no longer keep vodka at my place. For the occasional dirty-martini jones, sometimes Ill buy gin, because I hate gin, and its rare Ill finish even one cocktail made with it, wont even bite into the last marinated olive. If I drink wine, I drink white now, instead of refusing it because it gets me drunker than red; but red, Ive found, makes me (even after only one glass) feel sad in the morning. If theres champagne, Ill have that. But for the most part, my Pier 1 stackable wrought-iron wine racks collect dust or cradle hand weights. There have been times when I, cocktail-wise, felt close to following in my fathers footsteps. As you might imagine, those times are wakeup calls. Its disappointing how many wakeup calls it can take.
Maybe those days and that thinking are over, but Im still in the same apartmentyes, the grad-school apartmentbecause its affordable, as I continue to teach writing at the university, and occasionally at a nearby liberal arts collegeadjunctenough to stay afloat, hang onto health insurance, and have time to keep writing until Ive published that at least one book prevalent in teaching-creative-writing-job ads in higher education since the economy took a nose dive during Bush. Theres a tasty glut in the market that for now crowds me out. But, Ive gone from ashamed of still being here, in this same town, in this same apartment, before the economic meltdown, to feeling extremely lucky that Im not struggling to pay a mortgage and keep my home. From where I sit, renting looks like the best deal for a while to come, if not forever, for me. Yep, Im in the same apartment, but I now have a Ph.D.; and, most
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of the file boxes that used to hold the files pertaining to my parents and grandparents are collapsed, flattened, and waiting in climate-controlled storage for their next purpose. Some of the papers and photographs that were inside the boxes I have sent to family members that they would mean most to, or they have been incorporated intoto the left of my work table at hometwo tall, black, four-drawer file cabinets, bought new to accommodate my growing at-home storage needs. In them, my mothers family and my fathers family have their own drawers; and my parents have a drawer together, from engagement announcement to divorce files.
worlds of my stories? Yes.
Years ago, I began applying for awards to writers residencies and, as of this writing, have received one. A couple of summers ago, I packed up my six-year-old Xterra (bought new in Salt Lake with money left me by my father) with seven white, lidded file boxes, a dry-erase board, a few bulletin boards, and accompanying pens and pins and index cards, and drove from Utah east, to spend four weeks as a fiction fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, the historic site of a former woolen mill on the Gihon River. Im afraid I sound like an idiot when I try to explain succinctly what kind of an experience this was for me, almost (if not) spiritualthe concentrated continuity in studio (fellow residents chastised me when I called it my office), the camaraderie and unspoken understandings in an international village of artists, not having to worry for one moment whats for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, in a space where my job is to contemplate, to concentrate, and to write. I had, over time, acquired and learned to manage the contents of those lidded file boxes of stuff inherited after my fathers and then my grandfathers death, each time in them making it easier, generally, to find whats there the next time, before theyre re-sorted, re-lidded, and restacked. I had been working at sortingthrough my grief and both graduate programsfrom general to more specific, as I gradually became able to focus on more than just getting by. In Vermont, I needed to, among other and related projectslike story-boarding a multi-generational novel about a network of show-business familiesrealize finally (those tall, black file cabinets were waiting): What exactly was in those boxes? And, would their contents change my vision of my world and the
When I returned from V.S.C.I had a lot of time to think about this on my cross-country drive back to UtahI vowed to create an environment in which I can have, as much as possible in between teaching, that studio experience at home. It happened in stages. And, aside from the mental discipline it takes to make this switch, or rather, revision, I have finally turned my small, high-ceilinged, sun-blasted living room into my dedicated studio, my home office (havent had much use for a living room lately) and gave myself a dedicated bedroom in the process. I gave away my livingroom sofa-bed but retained a butterfly chair and a rocker, both from my mothers parents when I was still an L.A. teenager and they were still alive together and living in San Diego. I have been conducting a true romance with my Salt Lake storage unit, in a clean, (so far) safe building managed by folks so nice theyll give me a call if a payments gone awry, instead of contacting TVs Storage War Hunters to film breaking into it and auctioning off my dead moms dead folks mid-century-modern furniture and many of my dead dads television and film scripts to the highest bidder. My climate-controlled storage unit is full, since its been topped off with the narrow daybed I slept on for years in order to fit my workspace also into my one bedroom; plus the empty boxes of the new, full-size Sleep Number bed now in my for-the-first-time-dedicated-bedroom. Much of the upper space in my storage unit is taken by empty boxes of electronics and things I am currently using (for when I move themand I will). Ive stopped looking for a matching Heywood-Wakefield chair because I want to weed stuff down to what Id like to move to a new life, in a space with enough room to eliminate the need to rent a storage unit. For now, what I want is to make the Utah apartment most workable for me the writer while Im still in it. The Heywood-Wakefield only needs a match if its going to remain in its configuration at one side of my maternal grandparents drop-leaf kitchen table, sized for two. I wouldnt mind becoming detached from that table when I leave here. I inherited it decades ago, after Gramma
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died in San Diego and Grampa moved to his next wifes furnished L.A. home. For now, I want to undrop the leaf closest to my inadequate kitchen-counter, to create more workspace there. When was the last time two people sat at that table? I try to shut down my recall. (He was practically married. We were drinking morning coffee. We had slept together on the livingroom loveseat that unfolded into a double, the one I gave away to make room for my writing table, my studio.) In order to undropto liftthat one leaf of the kitchen table, one of the two chairs has to go. Guess which one?
But, what should I do with the displaced, Poets-father-made chair? Whatever I decide, Ive got to wash it, from feet to seat to ears, with Murphy Oil Soap. Why? Same reason I wash clothing before donating it to a thrift shop or delivering it to a consignment store. Whether or not I put the chair into storage for now and/or deliver it personally to Poet on this summers cross-country roadtrip (to a family reunion), whether I sell it, or give it away, I should clean it out of a sense of dignity. Its been a while since I washed it. The brown wood stain still bears some light spatters of bright white left over from last time I painted the kitchen. After I clean the chair, Ill Old English-oil it, as I would if I were keeping it as my own.
In Salt Lake, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Im engulfed by that Murphys smell, as I wash around and behind each piece of the chair crafted by Poets father. Front leg. Back leg. Spindle. Seat. Apron. Stile. Cross rail. Top rail. Ladderback. Ear. What am I doing with this chair? After its dry, I do the same with the oil. The smell of Old English transports me back further. I am up close and personal with this chair. I see how this chair was made. Poet writes of revisiting his fathers basement, of pissing in his fathers work boots and chipping tiny pieces off of furniture down there. I see the defects of this chair and wonder if, as a boy, Poet created them with his chisel.
What does Poet and his living fathers chair have to do with me and my deceased father and drinking? Im not sure. Something about choosing to hang on and then choosing to let go. It is possibly as simple as that.
The smell of Murphy Oil Soap transports me to North Hollywood, where I lived on a half-lot of my fathers property, in a funky, stucco, former orange-grove caretakers cottage, next door to Dads modest twobedroom with a pool embraced by little lawns and patios. When I pulled up the carpeting in that guest house, I discovered a wood-slat floor.
The Old English oil is still soaking in when I open an e-mail from Headlands Center for the Arts, near Sausalito, California, solicitingI kid you notdonations of dining chairs for their Mess Hall. Ive already planned to drive from Salt Lake City to Portland, Oregon, in a matter of weeks, and then down the coast to Mendocino, California, and then to San Francisco, to see cousins at each stop. Sausalito and the Marin Headlands are at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. What will I do with this chair? Tell me I dont have my answer, and youd be wrong. Ive continued to apply for writing residencies, aching to reassemble and pack up those boxes again, containing all the files associated with my current writing projects and to spread out somewhere beautiful like Headlands to work without conflict for a month or so. Last summer,
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I stopped there while driving through the Bay Area, to see for myself historic Fort Barry, a former military base. I walked the blustery beach at the end of Bunker Road. I visited San Francisco vistas from heights at the northwest end of the Golden Gate Bridge. You bet Im on Headlands mailing list. And, here is this e-mail from Headlands. And, here is this chair. I e-mail Poet. He finally ended it (amicably) with Art, and both have new loves already for years, in new cities. Art survived the Wall Street meltdown by leaving Wall Street. And Poet has taken advantage of opportunities the crisis ironically afforded him through the misfortune of others and is a home owner now. I ask Poet if hed like me to bring the chair to him on my summer roadtrip Back East, or whether I can go ahead and find a new home for it. Poet said, You can burn the fucking chair if you want. Made by an unknown person, or by someone I was fond of or had little to no feeling for, the poor chair would have been charming enough. But, here it is. And it is not.
BOOK REVIEWS
Dickey, James. The Complete Poems of James Dickey. University of South Carolina Press, 2013. Engine Books, 2012. $85.00. James Dickey ranks among the titanic figures of twentieth-century American literature. He and his work remind one of Norman Mailer and Robert Penn Warren in particularthe former because of the ecstatic and primal violence their work shares, and the latter because of the depth and range of their vision and how it plays out across many literary genres. Mailer and Dickey also share a self-mythologizing effort that made them larger-than-life (who does not hear an echo of Mailers Advertisements for Myself in Dickeys Self-Interviews?), while Dickey and Warren are both decidedly southern writers. In fact, an almost direct genealogy from Warren to Dickey can be discerned. But while useful comparisons might be made between Mailer and Dickey, particularly in their novels, for the purposes of thinking about Dickeys poetry, it is Warren who can lend us the greater insight. Dickeys poetry shares something besides its southern flavor with Warrens. It oscillates between unimaginably powerful and so bad it is almost embarrassing to read. Luckily for Dickey and Warren, and for their readers, they produced such copious amounts of poetry and in myriad styles that we can simply ignore the outright failures and enjoy the genius-level poems, of which they both produced many. In fact, I contend, it is something more than mere accident that Dickey and Warren should both have such exquisite successes alongside such dismal failures; there is something about their outsized ambition (in the best sense of that word), the long reach of their work that, yes, sometimes overreaches, that makes both these extremes of production not only possible but necessary. Lets take a look at a poem which is indicative of the energy and concerns found throughout Dickeys poetrythough it would be misleading to pretend any single poem could represent the range of his output, given how radically Dickey re-invented himself throughout his poetic life (yet a further trait he shares with Warren). Here are the opening stanzas of For the Last Wolverine:
The chairs ears are centered in my rearview as I drive my Xterra west to cousins in Portland; and then, from there down the rest of Oregon to Northern California cousins on the Mendocino coast. From there, on (Occupy) May Day, before I see my cousins around the San Francisco Bay, I steer the Xterraat the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge (a sight and a site that has thrilled me since childhood when my mom began bringing me here)westward, through the one-way-at-a-time tunnel to Bunker Road and then up into the Marin Headlands, to deliver the chair, by appointment, to the Mess Hall, for the chairs new life housing a diversity of artistic butts with other mismatched dining chairs, in whose hip-to-hip, apron-to-apron, shoulder-to-shoulder, ear-to-ear company, the Poets-father-made chair can become beautiful.
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THE BOOK SOUTHEAST REVIEWS REVIEW
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They will soon be down To one, but still he will be For a little while still will be stopping Flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned To extinction, tearing the guts From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat The heart, and, from it, have an idea (367) This poem is certainly about the extinction of species and perhaps about the constant threat of nuclear annihilation that pervaded the national consciousness in 1966, the year of the poems publication, but it is about poetry itself in equal measure. As Dickey writes later in the poem: But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs The mindless explosion of your rage (369) This poem is powerful, is infused with that green energy Dylan Thomas writes of so beautifully, but it is also social critique, critique of the state of poetry, and environmental critique of the modern world, with which Dickey was not much in love. Dickey finds ways to include all these themes many times over in his poems, from The Shark at the Window (a southern-modernist take on family and marriage) to The
Wax Museum in Hamburg (a meditation on Nazi Germany and power relations in history) to many more. Here is the first stanza Amputee Ward: Okinawa 1945, which until this volume had only appeared in a 1948 issue of Coraddi, the undergraduate-run literary journal at UNCGreensboro. Displayed in acreages of crackling light More hopeless than the spatulate cross Thrust by a withering sea, they lie In the immaculate percentage of their loss. (6) This poem shows Dickey as a formalist master and is an early example of his writing about the Pacific front during WWII, a theme that would continue on until his 1993 novel, To the White Sea. It would be impossible to give an adequate sampling in this short review, but suffice it to say that the over 700 pages of poetry found in The Complete Poems of James Dickey is a treasure with a staggering variety of bounty. But it is not solely Dickeys poetry that suggests this volume to poetry lovers and libraries everywhere. Ward Briggs writes in his preface that compiling and editing Dickeys poems was a labor of love and this is apparent on nearly every page. The generous and insightful preface and introduction should prove valuable for classroom use. The extensive notes by Briggs, the remarks by Dickey on the composition of certain poems, and various indexes included in the 213-page critical apparatus make this the definitive edition for literary scholars and diehard fans. And, what is perhaps the greatest achievement of the book, the painstaking organization of the poems in order of publication (with the year printed beneath each title) invites us to read the book as a sort of documentary of Dickeys literary development through his fifty-year career. I would strongly suggest that readers follow Briggss organization and take the book in from beginning to end. The effect is striking indeed. In the final analysis, The Complete Poems of James Dickey is a success on nearly every front. It corrects errors and omissions from the previous attempt at a complete or collected poems. It includes useful scholarly trappings (preface, introduction, critical apparatus). And it offers the best possible portrait of Dickey-as-poet. This is certain to be the definitive
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edition for decades to come. One only hopes that the paperback edition will be split into two volumes, thus allowing for a wider popular readership. At 960 pages and $85 in cost, the hardback will likely only end up in libraries and the offices of well-heeled academics. Dickeys poetry deserves this, but it likewise deserves a broad non-specialist readership as well. Okla Elliott
Wendy Xu. You Are Not Dead. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. $15.95. Maybe dont for another minute be afraid / of anything, Wendy Xu writes in her first full-length collection, You Are Not Dead. And it is easy to be unafraid while reading these poems because these poems ask the reader to give themselves fully to the moment, to ignore mortality but also be acutely aware of our own inevitable death. These poems seek a kind of acceptance, within the reader and within themselves. They explore. They collect, take notice, wander through impossible zoos because they can. They are experiential in the best kind of way, the way that draws the reader in and makes them want to stay just a little while longer. The collection, divided into six sections, the last of which is comprised entirely of poems entitled We Are Both Sure to Die, explores the ways in which the world is made up of things both significant and inconsequential. Xu masterfully merges these elements, writing with authority but also a pervasive playfulness. Her scope is vast. Sitting here underground, she writes, is the same / as sitting in a chairlift that spans several /mountains because I am paying attention. Through each of these poems, Xu urges the reader to be aware even when that awareness is uncomfortable or strange or even mundane. One way to be amazed, Xu proposes, is to be / less amazing and then pay / attention. Observation
then, be it internal or external, becomes a powerful tool, one necessary to attempt to understand lifes complicated, confusing, and wonderful mysteries. That collision is best felt in the final section of You Are Not Dead. We Are Both Sure to Die begins alternatively, Without coffee and only minor explosions / to spell our names and With the morning like a sledgehammer and that / is exciting and But I feel like a person again. Each iteration is celebratory yet melancholic, like a jazz funeral winding its way through narrow streets so the ghosts can no longer find their way home. By making the familiar foreign (and vice versa), Xu creates a world populated with absurd yet beautiful imagery as if from some wild dreamscape. Xu writes in one poem that it is always an unfamiliar kind / of knowing, and that idea seems at the heart of this collection. Removed from the recognizable, Xu argues, Everything / matters when you are reverently displaced. While much of the collection is permeated with a sense of wonder, an undercurrent of anxiety allows Xu to make statements like, You are part of other people but not / like them, and We are running out / of time without melodrama. I want to be some kind / of genuine, Xu writes, and that sentiment is felt throughout. The buoyancy of Xus lyric imagery carries the weight of such heavy assertions, but also lends them power. Xu grants the reader agency over loneliness and fear as much as over personal happiness. I will keep working / at the fulfilling, Xu writes, and seems to encourage the reader to do so too. What makes this book so necessary is that it gives us permission to feel joy in all its myriad formsjoy without any anchor, joy colored by sadness (and how nice it is to be allowed that sadness), joy for the end of the world and for its infinite possibilities, joy for humor and peculiarity and singularity and the fact that yes, we are all living right now, in this moment, and how amazing this moment truly is. Here comes / one more thing that makes / us matter, Xu writes, and that sentiment resonates to the very last page. Lisa McMurtray
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of which operate with and through varying degrees of difficulty. Managing Difficulty Lorig, Finn, Reines: Balancing Complexity and Accessibility in Three Recent Collections As a reader of poetry, I like to be challenged and surprised, excited by both the language in front of me and the layers of meaning and feeling that develop. Every collection of poems, every poem we read, navigates the fine line of finding balance between accessibility and obscurity, between testing and exploring the limits of a readers sensibilities and flat out befuddling them. We might term the former as good difficulty, the poet and reader together creating and discovering the various tensions inherent when the form /content of a poem push us toward an ever more complex emotional and intellectual construct. In the latter case, bad difficulty, a poem can lose its reader as a result of gratuitous technique, an unfocused core, indiscernible intent. I recognize that these arent the most rigorous scholarly terms, good and bad. But I stand by them insofar as a poem is often judged not by what energies went into its creation but by how successful it is at releasing those energies. And while good difficulty might amplify and shape those energies in a positive way, bad difficulty hinders the very creation and communication of those energies. At times, I might start to admire a poems sturdy construction but balk when I sense an empty core. At other times, I may be drawn to an energetic vitality of spirit only to turn away as a result of a poems slapdash composition, the haphazard nature of its development in both language and imagination. Im probably doing nothing more than betraying my own preferences as a reader of poetry. But weve all heard someone dismiss a poet (or poetry in general!) as being too obscure, too difficult. So its clear that learning how to manage difficulty, to channel it and work within its confines, is an important consideration for poetry those who write it as well as those who read it! In this essay, I will consider poetry from three recent collections, all
i dont finish because I am c. Carrie Lorig and the difficulty of presence The poetry in Carrie Lorigs collection, nods. (Magic Helicopter Press), is dense and, at times, imposing on the page. The text of some poems overloads the page. At first glance, the poems seem implacable and linguistically off-putting words clustered and jammed together like a thruway pile-up with sentences that mostly disregard normative mechanical rules. It would be easy to mistake these poems as nothing more than an attention grab, as displaying extreme facility with the more incendiary aspects of language but without any real intent. A reader might pause, wondering what type of difficulty they are encountering. Is this merely headstrong obscurity that betrays a weak spirit? But a sensitive and diligent reader is rewarded as real virtuosity shines through the initial flash. The poems grab our attention but, once we give it to them, they fulfill this by revealing a complicated tapestry where energy can form, develop and hit. Its intuitive poetry of immense feeling that asks a lot of its reader, but which delivers in ways that other pyrotechnic poetry fails to. The poems struggle to find themselves in their own language, fiercely following their own sound. Generative repetition is a feature of the way these poems move, as is a fierce willingness to let the poem play out to splay out in an effort to infuse the utterance with an energy more rich and complex than the simple denotative and connotative surface area of its language might allow. In an effort to wrestle with the difficulty of establishing presence both the weight and heft of the poem as well as the notations that signal a controlling consciousness Lorig shows deep faith in language and in the poem as substantial artifact of that faith. Those seem to be the two most notable features first, an ability to parlay the use of pyrotechnic language into complex and satisfying revelation, and second, the patience and fearlessness necessary to let the poem develop generatively and authentically without trying to wrestle it
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toward some kind of proscribed meaning. In Scatterstate (I do my knees), Lorig is able to make notes toward a lyric I, though the conception the reader is left with is anything but complete. Still, the writing develops organically and despite a purposeful misuse of parts of speech / misheard words, it creates linkages we can relate to: [] i lush out hard. i launch out hard because it frails good. like flows, like flower rodeos, i g r e w s o m e, i dark some, and grope myself into full glow. On its own, the velocity of this opening might be compelling, might create a sense of burgeoning drama in the creation of the I. But then we hit a phrase like flower rodeo which has an equal chance of either engaging the reader on the intuitive level of pure joy or of confounding the reader on the basic level of sense. Maybe this is the moment when the poem starts inching toward a variety of bad difficulty for some. In fact, those same readers might dismiss phrases like lush out hard or it frails good as nothing more than clever wordplay while others might inherently warm to the way she is able to get mileage out of the echoes of a torqued language. This illustrates the divisive nature of any poetry that relies more on the on-board engines of a reader than on purposefully creating a field that furnishes itself. The poet seems to shrug, unconcerned that not everyone will get it. Lorig is not this type of poet, though not one who relies on simple techniques and effects, with a hollow echo beneath the surface. This kind of ferocious play, a sense that Lorig is more concerned with riding out the poem-as-raging-animal than she is with grammar lessons or types of ambiguity, is vital to understanding her poetry. But what shes doing is much more subtle than that isnt simply an attempt to get us to pay attention by clobbering us with language. Lorig has the emotional fortitude to resist the easy pay-off and the intellectual smarts to let these poems develop on their own terms, searching toward some kind of identity across a wild topography of poetic styles: fragments, lyric lineation, or prose lines spread across multiple pages. Later in that same poem, the
speaker says hi, i know nothing about my own sound. how do you know anything about your own sound? and this admission rings as incredibly authentic and raw, an intensely personal way of looking at the self of the speaker as well as the construction of the poem as a field upon which identity can form and develop. This need to recognize the self / our sound, to understand its presence or absence, is tightly tied to the full glow of earlier in the poem, the coming-into-being that is enacted there. It Cant be Love / But It Must be Love (I am BUST LARD) demonstrates her faith in the churns and twists of a living language. She follows this sound through brief passages as well as over the course of massive chunks of text. Early in the poem she addresses some kind of primal figure: Loan Animal, you have to pick out a bone card, you have to find a feeling and hurt its tiny dead glow with your hurt. While the first two lines seem simply shocking, without the kind of clear tether to sense that a reader might need, the speaker more importantly establishes a pattern to deviate from, has initiated a powerful recitative. The third line here clearly veers back from the primal veldt to a human position we can recognize, though its all the more stunning for the close proximity to such weirdness. But, again, its the link thats important, that facilitates the final two lines, as dark a figure for love and compassion as I can imagine, but one that couldnt have been reached simply by saying it. Saying it in this way, starting weird and holding steady, is what allows it. Later in the same poem, Lorig gives full rein to this kind of generative language, starting 13 consecutive lines with the word US which she fearlessly seeks to clarify and enlarge and which initiatives a headlong momentum that carries the reader through the end of the poem. This three line, all caps rant is summed up by a final line, removed by a stanza break, and which characterizes the action of the poem overall: BRAID-
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ING ITS TONGUE TO PIECES. Its a key moment in a collection that is rife with the difficulty of establishing presence, a struggle enacted in the poems and not just a feature of their surface. Lorig seems to work line-by-line, or even word-to-word, her writing vibrantly alive to the implications of everything she puts down on the pages as she puts it down. A reader needs stamina to make it through the wilderness of her work and while Lorigs phrasing or word choice might appear to be a mere flash to grab a readers attention, she sinks her teeth in quickly and doesnt let go after the strobe dies down, developing that burst over the course of an entire poem. Thats one response to the cacophony around us to trick a reader into thinking shes taking a quick glimpse and then trap her in a brutal system of logic and feeling. Individual poems here are more like a fugue but a fugue for one voice that obsessively charts and recharts the same territory, embracing the very process of being human. It is a wisely nuanced response, recognizing that one way to notate a stable self amidst the emotional wilderness of other people is to relentlessly develop it, to add to it, to subvert it, to never give up. Carina Finns poetry engages in some similar processes. A reader thinks to remain safe while skimming the glitzy surface of Finns Lemonworld & other poems (coimpress). But while Lorig seems to work primarily in terms of the individual poem as system, Finn weaves an interdependent support structure for her work in which the book becomes the brain.
do you want the real thing // or are you just talking?? Carina Finn and the difficulty of substance The language in this collection is brash and dexterous, running as fast as an addict between different registers of language references and pastiche, echoes of quotes, dynamic neologisms, sharp declaratives that seem imminently now. Individually, her poems might be readily dismissed by some readers
as nothing more than pop trash aphorisms, casual and ephemeral as a text message, but the relentlessness of her control demonstrates another way to sustain the brash flare of attention these poems signal with. The difficulty here is in seeing through the morass of trendy jargon to the real substance it hinges on. Finn, like Lorig, is able to achieve some local velocity through the use of word collisions (such as firstgravesummer in Quiet Possibly Rock & Borrow Rose) and she exploits a fearless palette of typographical novelty (the poem Opiumfavour ends with a black triangle for example or some of her more recent work which pushes this envelope even further). At first, depending on your aesthetic leanings, your tolerance for so-called difficulty in poetry, these might seem to be either minor annoyances or the whiff of genius. Undoubtedly, Finn has your attention, and when you add in the fact that most of the poems look short on the page, we have here a poetry that seems tailor made for just this jittery moment in our societys attention span theater. Still, some might feel as if they are confronting a shiny suit of armor, expert construction and flourishes, but empty when you knock on it. But to dismiss Finn or her work based solely on a surface assessment would be to miss out on the tangible pleasures and powers evident here as well. Lines that signal something clear about the self of the speaker are rare, but telling: I want to go on a safari I might be afraid of from the first poem, Purr, or [] who / even uses sentences anymore. from Twinning. Whether or not a poem needs to signal and develop some kind of controlling consciousness is grist for another essay, certainly, but it is also obviously one of the many ways a reader can come to be drawn into the emotional edifice of the poem through sympathy and connection, through empathy and recognition. That Finn is able to manage this relationship in just a few brief flashes, absent of any real chronological or emotional narrative, speaks to the efficacy with which she deploys her lines throughout the collection, the tone managing to create a much bigger picture. Consider the poem Cairo, Y R U So Cruelll xXxX, seven lines in four stanzas. Its difficult to parse out what happens in the poem, but
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it has undeniable energy and verve. The opening couplet is perhaps the most lucid moment, and it tellingly suggests some kind of collapse or slackening which remains important in the poem: emptysleep, where did you go? / last nights party was fueled by balloons. It seems clear, however, that the speaker (and Finn as writer) isnt trying so much to notate a scene or relate an emotional episode, as she is managing energies and impressions, to build the pathos and loss enacted by those first lines into the frenetic violence suggested by maxikultur breaklights in line four, to prepare for the weight of the philosophic truism the poem ends with, such tan moods only love newrules. By manipulating the implicit energies, the connotative value, of these lines, Finn holds the reader firmly as she does throughout this collection. Her neo-trash sprezzatura belies the immense emotional and psychic weight rendered here. But nowhere is this more powerful than when considering the book as a whole. The colossal pile-up that Lorig manages line by line in her poems, Finn accomplishes with the breadth of the collection overall. Reading it, I felt frantic as if my inbox kept pinging with newly delivered missives I couldnt answer fast enough, my phone blowing up but out of reach. Its overwhelming but substantial, purposeful, with the nuanced weight that doesnt come from quantity alone. Reading Carina Finns poetry, we see a whole segment of culture smiling back at us, malevolently. Though the words and phrases call to mind the condensed flippancy of Twitter, the faux-urgency of the cell phone text message, even the etched screed on the subway wall, Finns masterful accumulation dispels the irony and generates a monumental SOS. The poems dont ask to be delivered from the (lemon) world they live in, no, but there is immense anxiety ghosting behind every utterance, a frantic inability to put the stuff of this contemporary landscape, as well as the stuff of the soul, in the right places. The difficulty of substance is played out in the actions and reactions of the speaker, as well as in the language of the poem for the reader. Finn accomplishes this through being incredibly selective with what she reveals and how she reveals it. Each fragment for the poems almost always feel partial, in media res is chiseled from the landscape around
us. But what happens if this task is left to the reader? Imagine a poetry which attempts to take in the whole of everything, where the attention is unfocused, slack but all encompassing. In the poetry of Ariana Reines, the difficulty is one of sorting the lines and images, but also the mechanisms of the self. Whereas Lorig struggles to announce her own arrival, and Finn tries to clear room amidst the clutter, Reines tries to predict a future where the soul and the body, where spirituality and pragmatism, fuse together. One of the things immediately notable in Reines poetry is the apparent lack of artifice, the surge of primal energies that seem to dictate her lines, her breaks, the trajectory of the poetry itself. She strikes me as an oracle, riding the crest of her own work along with us. However, thats not to say that her poetry isnt structured or rigorous, rendered artful. But it does feel (and I use the word purposefully, since the intuitive energies are so strong here) as if Reines is more open than most to the wild mysticism of what poetry can deliver to both reader and writer.
When I say I and you say you Ariana Reines and the difficulty of prescience Reines has the remarkable ability to give shape and form, real flesh, to her words, and the poetry in Thursday (Spork Press) veers between the sacred and the profane with dizzying speed. Which is to say she is successful at conflating the vulgar and the spiritual, at turning delight into shame and then into pure joy. Shes able to fully embrace the whole experience of living, to truly embody the process of thinking, all with an apocalyptic vigor that makes her poems compelling. Her strength can sometimes make for difficult reading intensely private or personal subject matter hurled at the reader in sprawling unpunctuated bursts. This is similar to how Lorig demands her reader hack into the dense thicket of language to try to find some evidence of presence, to how Finn dares her reader to locate real substance amidst a
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barrage of glittering junk. A reader of Reines poetry can feel like theyre undergoing some kind of sance or ancient tribal testing and might dismiss her work as the ravings of some kind of charlatan. But a reader with an adventurous and well-equipped heart can manage as the voices come from all sides, can successfully navigate the language, outlast it, and is ultimately rewarded with forceful revelatory visions and wisdom. The poem considered here (the book invites us to read it as a single poem, albeit with occasional breaks brought about through white space) takes as its central dynamic the struggle to give voice to a complete version of the self, instead of providing instructions for how to define a particular self or how experience might shape that self. Reines recognizes that one of the central difficulties of our times is to grope toward a realization of identity, the effort needed to navigate the bleed between public and private spheres. She invokes this complex spirit early on: Your tongue is in my mouth I will suck you through the god in my mouth He lives in the back I am his student I will suck you through the god in my mouth Whatever man you say you are The poem is a torrent of language that seeks to enliven its motion, to actualize it and thus provide grounds for uncovering a different layer of reality one thats pure, unmediated. Her voice, then, is the agent through which illusions fall and the world itself can stand, revealed and shimmering. Immediately following this rapturous opening, the tone of these declarations turns sexual as Reines names real names, abandoning the messianic language for proper name individual identities. This is the challenge in her work, at times, trying to hold the overarching spiritual truth in mind while the words start to meld with the physical. But, of course, this is part of the point, too. Its all a prayer meant to bring the separated halves of the world
together, meant to find the truths in the you and I we sometimes get stuck in. This isnt a task accomplished through meticulous application of craft, but for honest confrontation of the energies involved in the process. Reines opens up, here: And I am scared I am scared Stiff Scared stiff Scared to use words the way the lord uses them She takes her charge seriously, the stuttered repetition characterizing the way she is approaching her task. A reader might be put off by this hesitancy, which perhaps seems sloppy, but Reines has faith in the power of the unadorned utterance to break through to an authentic incantation. Indeed, she sees herself as a Hag herbalizing and scrying the dark / [] I drop the wiggling toad into the pot / I stir the smoking magic stew / I say the words like a poet [.] Its easy to take Reines at the surface level of her work. Its an obvious feature, but readers need to be patient and diligent enough to see the intent behind the method. This, perhaps, speaks to the larger difficulty each of these poets Lorig, Finn, Reines addresses by virtue of their work. On the surface, the work might appear to tend toward raw artlessness. The work discussed here can be visceral and willfully uncrafted, pouring out in an unfettered or unchecked manner that has you thinking maybe the words were dashed off quickly without reflection or the mindful consideration that is necessary for robust insight. But each of these writers, in her own way, writes with her body, her whole spirit, bringing all of herself to the page with every word. The readership for poetry is perilously divided, and those who favor one camp or methodology dont often understand the limits they are inside of. And so segments of the tribe turn off to work that would otherwise infuse their souls with necessary light. I started this essay, and pro-
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ceeded, by talking about the difficulties that each of these writers deals with, but the larger difficulty to be overcome is by all of us readers. We need to be prepared for difficulty, prepared to embrace what the poetry tells us because it certainly doesnt care what we tell it! Reines says I dont care if you think I dont know what Im saying / I know what Im saying, and that defense applies to all three of these women equally. The challenge is for a reader, then, to believe that and be open to the revelations and pleasures that come from reading difficult poetry of deep conviction and truth. *** Section titles come, in order, from Carrie Lorigs Cattlehurter (when i am sick feeling), from Carina Finns Minty Adventurefair, and from within Thursday by Ariana Reines. Nate Pritts
Susan Crandall. Whistling Past the Graveyard. Gallery Books, 2013. $13.98. On the eve of Fourth of July Starla Claudelle of Cayuga Spring, Mississippi is put on restriction again by her grandmother. This time for popping the nose of Jimmy Sellers, turd of the century, and all round nasty boy who horridly knocks over little girls just for fun. Sellers is your usual bully and like many bullies knows the virtue of turning his nasty off in front of authority figures and thus has the neighbourhood grannies and mothers hoodwinked into believing hes a little saint. Not that Starlas Mamie needs reasons to doubt Starlas unladylike ways. It matters little to Mamie that Starla came to Priscilla Panichellis rescue, who has conveniently trundled home without providing any evidence, after all Starla is forever running her mouth, getting into trouble at school and is the daughter of a woman who ran off to Nashville to become a singer.
Born to teenage parents Starla has been living with her strict, religious grandmother Mamie whilst her father, Mamies son, works on an oil rig. Mamie has threatened Starla with reform school on several occasions and when Starla is caught enjoying the fourth of July fair by Mrs. Sellers, in direct violation of her restriction, she knows that this time Mamie will send her to Reform school for sure. Starla does the only thing a feisty nine-year-old can do in such a bookshe runs away to Nashville in the hopes of reuniting with her mother and begin living the life she remembers, with both her parents under one roof, before she came to stay with her grandmother. The year is 1963 and Susan Crandalls Starla Claudelle is picked up, walking towards Nashville, by Eula, an African American woman driving home from delivering pies who also seems to have with her a small baby. A white baby Eula has kidnapped and thus begins Starla and Eulas unlikely journey together. From here the novel quickly devolves into a compendium of what-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong: Eulas abusive husband, who decidedly understands the ramifications of a black woman bringing home two white children, tries to drown Starla; Eula kills her husband to protect Starla and then goes into shock; Eula and Starla are run off the road by a racist man as they travel to Nashville; when their truck breaks down Eula and Starla try to get help but are turned away by other black families; they meet Miss Cyrena, a woman active within the NAACP, who helps them and whilst Eula tries to make money to get the truck working she is almost attacked by some white men; in Nashville Eula is nearly raped, outside a church, by a group of African-American men and when the pair finally find Starlas mother nothing good comes of it. And all through these trails and travails Starlas red rage, Crandalls refrain to characterise the feistiness of her narrator, justifiably erupts but this particular response, such as shouting at racists because they have run over a dog right after said racists have tried to attack Eula, quickly becomes annoying and is often counterproductive placing the lives of Eula and Starla in danger. This leads to a larger problem with language Crandall chooses and sentiments Whistling Past the Graveyard tries to evoke. Case in point, on page 190 Starla thinks, I stood and watched, feeling again like a polar
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CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
bear with regular bears and even if the reader is meant to sympathise with Starla feeling like an outsider, out of her depth amongst people she has never had the opportunity to know, there is something disquieting about this analogy. In fact, it can be read as offensive after all arent polar bears the largest bears on the planet? And regular bear is a description that suggests that polar bears are not a bear in the same way that other bears can be considered members in the same family. Moreover what is a regular bear anyway? This suggests that polar bears are irregular if not somehow exceptional, an idea that has obviously uncomfortable overtones that need not be spelt out. Additionally, there is an undertone, as is sometimes found in novels that tackle race relations that alludes to the trope of black people needing to be rescued by whites. A minor example of this is Starla looking at the schoolyard for African American children and thinking about how when she got older I could help get some swings for this playground. What does work for this novel is Starlas voice, but the dang thing was gonna be stuck till the devil serves popsicles. Crandall endows her heroine with a rambunctious tone, admittedly at times tedious, at times contrite but overall earnest in the way only a nave childs voice can be. Another coup dtat in Crandalls corner is the realistic and painful portrayal of Starlas realization that her mother is not who Starla thought she was. Those scenes set in Lulus Nashville apartment are raw and heartbreaking. Starla finds out that her parents have been divorced for a while and that her mother is married to another man and does not want Starla to come live with her. When her father finally arrives to pick her up the relief expressed in the novel is not simply felt on the page. Another saving grace in this novel is Crandalls creation of Eulas ache for a child and Starlas ache for a mother. And to Crandalls credit throughout the novel there are moments when she makes her characters try to reach for morefor instance, when Eula and Starla are at the church in Nashville and Starla realizes that she was keeping Eula from finding a place to fit in, a place that might make her forget all about turning herself into the law for killin Wallaceand these attemptsdespite other concerns one might have with this novelsometimes succeed. Misha Rai
PAMELA BALLUCK teaches writing at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where she earned her M.F.A. in fiction and Ph.D. in creative writing and literature. Her nonfiction has appeared in Prime Mincer and New World Writing (formerly Blip). Her fiction has won various publication prizes, including the Competition for Utah Writers (Western Humanities Review) and non-publication prizes such as a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her fiction has been a finalist in The Southeast Reviews Worlds Best Short Short Story Competition, has appeared in, among others, [PANK], Freight Stories, The Ocean State Review, The Way We Sleep, and flash fiction as prose poem in Barrow Street. Parts of a Chair is part of Self Storage, a nonfiction collection in progress. SHANNON BEAMON is an aspiring writer from the coasts of North Carolina. Last year she completed UNC Chapel Hills undergraduate Creative Writing program and now works with a group of friends and fellow writers to mutually hone their work and get it out there. She has been published in The Cellar Door, received an honorable mention in New Millennium Writings short-short competition, and was thrilled to see her one act play A Different Kind of Music produced back in her hometown of Currituck last fall. JASWINDER BOLINA is the author ofPhantom Camera, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry from New Issues Press, andCarrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Hispoems and essays have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines.He teaches on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program at the University of Miami. CHRISTINE BUTTERWORTH-MCDERMOTT is an associate professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches creative writing and fairy tales. She is the author of a chapbook, Tales on Tales: Sestinas, and a full-length collection, Woods & Water, Wolves & Women. She has been published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Stream,RATTLEandSliver of Stone.She is thehead editor ofGingerbread House Literary Magazine. DON BOGEN STEPHEN DANOS is author of the poetry chapbooks Playhouse State(H_NGM_N Books, 2012) andGravitational(The New Megaphone, forthcoming). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Anti-, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, cream city review,Forklift Ohio,iO: A Journal of New American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is Editor-in-Chief of Pinwheel and serves as Editor-at-Large for YesYes Books. JENNIFER DE LEON is the winner of the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize. Recently, her essay The White Space was selected as Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ms., Briar Cliff Review, Brevity, Poets & Writers, Guernica, The Best Womens Travel Writing 2010, and elsewhere. She has published author interviews in Granta and Agni, and she has been awarded scholarships
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and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Macondo. The editor of Wise Latina: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), she is also working on a memoir and a novel. JOHN DEMING is the editor-in-chief of Coldfront Magazine and his latest chapbook is 8 Poems (Eye for an Iris Press 2011) and his most recent EP is tugboat ep (BozFonk Music 2011). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Augury, The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, POOL, The Agriculture Reader, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. He holds a BA in Journalism from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Poetry from The New School. He lives in New York City and teaches at LIM College and Baruch College. OKLA ELLIOTT is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others.He is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and three poetry chapbooks. His novel, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (co-authored with Raul Clement), is forthcoming in 2014. MATTHEW FEE is currently a student at the University of Utah and is the author of Genesis (forthcoming from Gauss PDF, 2013). Recent work is published or forthcoming in journals such as The Laurel Review, Everyday Genius, Sixth Finch, Salamander, Lemon Hound, Pebble Lake Review, and The Cortland Review. RACHEL CONTRENI FLYNN was born in Paris and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. Her second full-length collection of poetry, Tongue, won the Benjamin Saltman Award and was published in 2010 by Red Hen Press. Her chapbook, Haywire, was published by Bright Hill Press in 2009, and her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was published in 2005 by Tupelo Press, after winning the Dorset Prize. Shehas receiveda Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Artsand two literature grants from the Illinois Arts Council. Rachel is a graduate of Warren Wilson College MFA program, and sheliveswith her familyin Maine where she serveson the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Colby College. COLETTE GILLs Thoughts in a Russian Museum is from a new manuscript, Satin Caravan. Her poems appear in Oberon Poetry Magazine, Rhino, Smartish Pace, Tar Wolf Review, The Texas Review, and others. A chapbook, Silk & Sting, was published by Finishing Line Press. She is an archaeologist, who has also taught foreign students writing at Rice University, in Brazil and Venezuela. KAT GONSO teaches writing at Northeastern University and is a member of The Writers Room of Boston. Her short-short fiction can be found in American Literary Review, The Southeast Review, Fringe, and the textbook What If: Exercises: Writing Exercises for
Fiction Writers. Winner of Prism Reviews 2012-2013 Poetry Prize, JONATHAN GREENHAUSE has received two Pushcart nominations and is the author of a chapbook (Sebastians Relativity, Anobium Books, 2011). His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Moth (IRE), Popshot (UK), Rabbit (AUS), Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He and his wife live in Jersey City and are currently being raised by their newborn, Benjamin Seneca. KELSIE HAHN holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, 1/25, NANO Fiction, and others. She lives in Houston, TX with her husband, Stephen Cleboski. ELIZABYTH A. HISCOX is the author of the chapbook Inventory from a One-Hour Room. Currently pursuing a doctorate, she has served as Managing Editor and currently serves as Poetry Editor for Third Coast at Western Michigan University where she has also served as Layout Editor for New Issues Poetry & Prose. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Gulf Coast, Haydens Ferry Review, and elsewhere. JOHN HOPPENTHALERs books of poetry are Lives of Water (2003) and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), both with Carnegie Mellon University Press. His third collection with CMUP, Domestic Garden, is forthcoming in 2015. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P, 2012). His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, West Branch, Christian Science Monitor, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Subtropics, and Copper Nickel, as well as in many other journals, anthologies and textbooks. For the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact he edits A Poetry Congeries and curates the Guest Poetry Editor Feature. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University. ALISHA KARABINUS is co-founder and Executive Editor of Revolution House magazine and an MFA candidate in Fiction at Purdue University, where she is also the Managing Editor of Sycamore Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Passages North, the Raleigh Review, PANK, and Per Contra. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband and two children. NORA KIPNIS grew up in the suburbs of New York City and studies at Oberlin College. She has edited for One Story and Oberlins Wilder Voice, and her journalism has appeared in the Bedford-Katonah Record Review. Survival in the Preparatory Environment is her first published work of creative nonfiction. STEVE LIGHT, a basketball point-guard following upon Nate Archibald and Pete Maravichand akin as well to Chris Paul, Steve Nash, Earl Boykins, and Willie Somerset--is also a philosopher and poet. JULIA LOFASOs writing has appeared in McSweeneys Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, and Edible Queens. She lives in Queens, where she is working on a novel and a short story
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collection. GIANMARC MANZIONEs poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Raritan and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School in 2004, and he currently teaches composition and creative writing at College of Central Florida. In 2006, Parsifal Press published his debut collection of poems, This Brevity. He currently is at work on a second volume of poems, and he has a nonfiction book forthcoming from Pegasus Books titled PIN ACTION:Small-TimeGangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and theTeenage Hustler who Became a Bowling Champion. ELIZABETH MCCONAGHY received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, St. Louis and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her work has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly Journal and Western Humanities Review. LISA MCMURTRAY is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry from Florida State University. HEATHER MICHAELS is a fiction writer in Chicago. She is the second-place winner of the 2012 Chicago Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Contest for College Fiction. She spent the last year teaching bilingual kindergarten. She is currently at work on a childrens picture book and a young adult novel. SARAH FAWN MONTGOMERY holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from California State University-Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has served as Prairie Schooners Senior Nonfiction Reader for several years. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including Confrontation, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, Georgetown Review, The Los Angeles Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, Zone 3 and others. JOHN A. NIEVES has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Haydens Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and Cream City Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry and is a 2012 Pushcart nominee. His work has also been featured on Verse Daily twice recently. His first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judges Prize and is due out in early 2014. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Salisbury University. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. KATHRYN NUERNBERGER is the author of Rag & Bone(Elixir, 2011) and an assistant professor of English at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as poetry editor for Pleiades. Recent work can be found in Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. LESLEY OLDAKER is a Swiss based emerging fine artist, who uses painting and photography as mediums to express her visual response to the question of ones relevance and belonging within groups of people in public spaces.Born in the UK and currently living in Zrich, Switzerland.
She has exhibited in group shows in the UK, Switzerland and USA and has recently had 2 pieces of her work shown around parts of London, UK as part of the Bus-Tops Olympiad public art project funded by the England Art Council. After achieving a distinction in the Foundation Diploma of Art and Design, UK, she is now studying for a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting. Lesley is currently on a 2 month full artist residency at the DaWang Cultural Highland, Shenzhen, China exploring the relationships, interconnections and purpose of figurative groups on the streets of the new city of Shenzhen and in the surrounding rural villages, through a series of large scale paintings. JEAN-BAPTISTE PARA is a poet, art critic, and editor of the esteemed French literary review, Europe, founded in 1923 by Romain Rolland. He has published several volumes of poems, Arcanes de lermite et du monde, Une semaine dans la vie de Mona Gembo, Atlantes, and La faim des ombres; a volume of art essays, La Jeune des yeux et autres excercises du regard; and an especially marvelous study and biography of the poet and art essayist, Pierre Reverdy. He has also translated into French numerous works by 20th Century Italian writers among them Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Conte, Camillo Sbarbaro, and Alberto Savinio. ALLAN PETERSON is the author of four books, Fragile Acts (McSweeneys Poetry Series), a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle and Oregon Book Award; As Much As (Salmon Press); All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize), Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Prize 2001) and six chapbooks. His next book, Precarious, is forthcoming from 42 Miles Press in 2014. NATE PRITTS is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Right Now More Than Ever. His poetry & prose have been widely published, both online & in print at places like American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Court Green, Gulf Coast, Boston Review & Rain Taxi where he frequently contributes reviews.He founded H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press, in 2001 & serves as Director & Prime Architect for its various endeavors. MISHA RAI is from Haryana, India. Her fiction has appeared in the Indiana Review and currently contributes toThe Missouri Reviewblog. She has been Assistant Fiction Editor for the Mid-American Review. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Fiction at Florida State University. She is in the process of writing her debut novel.At present she serves as Assistant Fiction Editor on The Southeast Review. RON SALUTSKY CHRISTINE E. SALVATORE received her MFA from The University of New Orleans. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Egg Harbor Township High School, and in the MFA Program at Rosemont College. Her poetry has recently appeared or will appear in The Literary Review, The Cortland
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Review, Mead Journal, Prime Number Magazine and in The Edison Literary Review. She is the recipient of a 2005 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. SAM SHABER has toured nationally and released nine albums. She currently fronts alt pop band, The Happy Problem, based in her hometown NYC. As a writer, shes been published in national music magazines including Musician, Performing Songwriter, and Acoustic Guitar. This is the opening chapter from her upcoming memoir, I Am 40. GLENN SHAHEEN is the author of the poetry collection Predatory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction collection Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). He is a founding editor of Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary, and serves on the board of the Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, VIVIAN SHIPLEY teaches at Southern Connecticut State University. Her ninth book, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased (Southeastern Louisiana University, 2010), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, received the Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the Connecticut Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing. Greatest Hits: 1974-2010 (Pudding House Press, Youngstown, Ohio, 2010) is her sixth chapbook. She has received the Library of Congresss Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community and the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry. Other poetry awards include the Poetry Society of Americas Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from University of Southern California, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from William Faulkner Society, NEPCs Daniel Varoujan Prize and the Hart Crane Prize from Kent State. Raised in Kentucky, a member of the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni, she has a PhD from Vanderbilt University. NANCE VAN WINCKELs text-based collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Diode, Ilk, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. Excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and Hotel Amerika. She has had visual work in various galleries, juried and solo shows, and museums. Her sixth collection of poems is PACIFIC WALKERS (U. of Washington Press, 2013), and her fourth book of linked stories, is BONELAND (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. KATHRYN WELD is a mathematician and a poet living just north of New York City. She received her PH.D. (in Algebraic Topology) from the CUNY Graduate Center, her M.F.A. from Sewanee School of Letters, and has done editorial work for the Boston Review. Her poems are forthcoming in the Midwest Quarterly, and Storyscape Journal. She spends summers in a rustic family home in the Adirondacks. ELIOT KHALIL WILSONs poems have been published in dozens of journals. His first book of poems, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, won the 2003 Cleveland State Poetry Prize. He currently lives in Golden, Colorado. ALLISON WYSS grew up in Fort Wayne, IN, earned an MFA from the University of Mary-

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THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW

PUBLISHED AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

Email: southeastreview@gmail.com Internet: www.southeastreview.org Cover art courtesy of Aini Tolonen

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