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CO N T EN TS
Prose
Poetry
Cynthia Olson “BuICK SPECIAL”
Joe Love “Hidden Topography” 16 “Down in the Cows” 17 “In the Quarry at Rockwood Reservation” “Landscape” 19 “Two Winter Scenes” 20 James Owens “Where the Farm Was” 21 “RIven” 22 “Bloom” 23 Lauren Yates “The Great Unwashed” 24 “Theatrics” 25 “Participation” 26
Rosa del Duca “One of the Guys”
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"Fixation"
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Editor’s Note 5 About Us 4 Submission Guidlines 6 Bios and Credits 28
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UFM SEPTEMBER 2014, Issue 19
UMBRELLA FACTORY WORKERS Editor-In-Chief
Anthony ILacqua Copy Editor
Janice Hampton Art Director
Jana Bloomquist
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Umbrella Factory isn’t just a magazine, it’s a community project that includes writers, readers, poets, essayists, filmmakers and anyone doing something especially cool. The scope is rather large but rather simple. We want to establish a community--virtual and actual--where great readers and writers and artists can come together and do their thing, whatever that thing may be. Maybe our Mission Statement says it best: We are a small press determined to connect well-developed readers to intelligent writers and poets through virtual means, printed journals, and books. We believe in making an honest living providing the best writers and poets a forum for their work. We love what we have here and we want you to love it equally as much. That’s why we need your writing, your participation, your involvement and your enthusiasm. We need your voice. Tell everyone you know. Tell everyone who’s interested, everyone who’s not interested, tell your parents and your kids, your students and your teachers. Tell them the Umbrella Factory is open for business. Subscribe. Comment. Submit. Tell everyone you know. Stay dry
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hello there UFM editor’s letter - September 2014 I love it anytime Anthony asks me to write the editor’s letter for an issue of Umbrella Factory Magazine, and I especially love when he gives me the opportunity to write the letter for the September issue. In Colorado, September is a month of transition. We experience all of the seasons over the course of this month as we end the blazing hot days of summer and head toward the cold, snowy days ahead. There is often a 20 degree difference between the daytime high and the nighttime low. The tents in the farmer’s markets overflow with the abundance of fruit and vegetables that farmers must harvest and move out in time to prepare their fields for the winter rest. And it seems the UFM staff is not immune to this. Since our last issue, one of us has jumped the broom, and by the end of the month, two of us will have new day jobs and a new domicile. In literature and spiritual practices, autumn also symbolizes many of these ideas regarding transition. There are three that resonate with me as I consider the writers we are featuring in our September issue: balancing darkness and light, letting go, and acknowledging impermanence. I would say all of our writers have some element of all three; however, Joe Love and Lauren Yates were particularly gifted in balancing darkness and light in their poems. Any time a poem like “Participation” makes you both laugh and grimace, you know you have found that balance. And Joe Love brings both beautiful natural imagery and stark realism that inevitably comes with it in his collection of poetry. If I had to pick the winner for the idea of letting go, it would be “One of the Guys,” by Rosa del Duca. She holds nothing back as she guides us through the mental and emotional life of a woman in the military trying to sort out her truth, whether she likes what it is or not. And lastly, Cynthia Olson and James Owens show the value of acknowledging impermanence in their pieces. Olson’s “Buick Special,” is an uncomfortable story about the coming together and coming apart of a couple. And James Owens’ poetry, especially “Where the Farm Was” definitely acknowledges the impermanence of the things nature will take away and the reminders that they were there. And so I finish my letter, I try to stay grounded in these three ideas. I look forward to the autumn equinox, the revelry of Halloween, watching the trees change colors and drop their leaves, and my son who will one day be a man without any traces whatsoever of the child napping in the next room. I hope enjoy the pieces we offer this issue as much as I have. Read. Submit. Tell everyone you know. Stay dry. Janice Hampton
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submissions
Submission Guidelines:
Yes, we respond to all submissions. The turn-around takes about three to six weeks. Be patient. We are hardworking people who will get back to you. On the first page please include: your name, address, phone number and email. Your work has to be previously unpublished. We encourage you to submit your piece everywhere, but please notify Umbrella Factory if your piece gets published elsewhere. We accept submissions online at www.umbrellafactorymagazine.com
ART / PHOTOGRAPHY
POETRY
Accepting submissions for the next cover or featured artwork/photography of Umbrella Factory Magazine. For our cover we would like to incorporate images with the theme of umbrellas, factories and/or workers. Feel free to use one or all of these concepts.
We accept submissions of three to five poems for shorter works. If submitting longer pieces, please limit your submission to 10 pages. Please submit only previously unpublished work.
In addition we accept any artwork or photos for consideration in UFM. We archive accepted artwork and may use it with an appropriate story, mood or theme. Our cover is square so please keep that in mind when creating your images. Image size should be a minimum of 700 pixels at 300 dpi, (however, larger is better) jpeg or any common image file format is acceptable.zz Please include your bio to be published in the magazine. Also let us know if we can alter your work in any way.
We do not accept multiple submissions; please wait to hear back from us regarding your initial submission before sending another. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. All poetry submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes a two to four sentence bio in the third person. This bio will be used if we accept your work for publication. Please include your name and contact information within the cover letter.
SUBMIT YOUR WORK ONLINE AT WWW.UMBRELLAFACTORYMAGAZINE.COM 6/
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NONFICTION Nonfiction can vary so dramatically it’s hard to make a blanket statement about expectations. The nuts-and-bolts of what we expect from memoire, for example, will vary from what we expect from narrative journalism. However, there are a few universal factors that must be present in all good nonfiction. 1. Between 1,000 and 5,000 words 2. Well researched and reported 3. A distinct and clearly developed voice 4. Command of the language, i.e. excellent prose. A compelling subject needs to be complimented with equally compelling language. 5. No major spelling/punctuation errors 6. A clear focus backed with information/instruction that is supported with insight/reflection 7. Like all good writing, nonfiction needs to connect us to something more universal than one person’s experience. 8. Appropriate frame and structure that compliments the subject and keeps the narrative flowing 9. Although interviews will be considered, they need to be timely, informative entertaining an offer a unique perspective on the subject. Please double space. We do not accept multiple submissions, please wait for a reply before submitting your next piece.
FICTION Sized between 1,000 and 5,000 words. Any writer wishing to submit fiction in an excess of 5,000 words, please query first. Please double space. We do not accept multiple submissions, please wait for a reply before submitting your next piece. On your cover page please include: a short bio―who you are, what you do, hope to be. Include any great life revelations, education and your favorite novel.
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Buick Special Cynthia Olson
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prose
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o hear Jimmy tell it, Mom committed manslaughter and that was what kept them together. Dad, when you could get two words out of him, would shout about it being an accident and a long time ago and we shouldn’t talk about it and don’t-let-your-mother-hear-you! If anyone had bothered to ask Grandma, she would have said that it was unnatural for a man to ride in a car as a passenger alongside his future wife. Mom never left the city if she could help it, and until that first summer Jimmy and me spent upstate, I reasoned she never had any cause to learn to drive. She couldn’t swim either, and not having access to a car or a swimming pool myself, neither occurred to me as out of the ordinary until the year I turned thirteen when we began spending the summers away from Mom. The suburban mothers drove carpools, shuttling their kids back and forth to doctor and dentist visits, from swim-team to band-camp to softball practice, creating a circuitous buzz through the newly paved sub-divisions and the cleanly painted parking lots that buffered all commerce from the street traffic. I was mid-way through adolescence by the time I had my first swimming lesson alongside five and six year olds during that summer in Congers. Jimmy didn’t care to tread water and wouldn’t have given anyone the satisfaction of seeing him try. Instead he spent his time on the shuffleboard court where he clocked pucks at any barefooted kid who happened to be standing around. Jimmy knew he could do as he pleased up here with Mom miles away and Dad spending half his time at Mrs. Saldana’s two streets over. Jimmy was the one to tell me the story of Mom’s failed attempt to learn to drive. He barked Mom’s criminal past with enthusiasm and intrigue as we sat on a terry-cloth towel near the diving pool eating cheese-flavored popcorn. I’d heard the rumors before: the traumatic event that took place before we were born, which neither Mom nor Dad nor any of our adult relatives would confirm or deny, lending truth to it. Nobody gave Jimmy the story outright, but he was three years older and paid attention. It came to him in bits and pieces until it was whole enough for him to pass along to me in-between shouting at the dive team.
Mom and Dad were still new, and the resentments of years of duelling intentions hadn’t hit them yet. Or this is what I took away from the story and the present situation of their unacknowledged separation. Jimmy was fixated on the car. It was during the early days, when the gloss of their relationship reflected a future of new adventures for years to come, and Dad putting Mom behind the engine of a 1959 Buick Special was as close to foreplay as he was going to get after two-weeks of dating. The car was on loan from Dad’s Uncle Albert, who had made it big in bleach products and lived in a comfortable single-family home in Bay Ridge surrounded by a box hedge. It was an easy bus ride to Uncle Albert’s and that morning Dad was lectured on the gear shifting unique to this exact model for a full half-hour before the keys were handed over to him for the purpose of his automotive seduction, causing him to be late picking Mom up from her parents apartment on Gravesend. When she finally slammed the door and he steered in the direction of Breezy Point, she wouldn’t speak to him for a solid five minutes to make her point. Still, Dad reasoned, she was warming the vinyl. He was impressed by her temper, according to Jimmy. “She had a real kick,” I’d heard Dad say on more than a few occasions. I could understand the attraction Dad must’ve felt in those early weeks with Mom. It was as though she were demonstrating her passion for him, and that life would become infinitely more exciting and Dad a more passionate person just through association – as though she would help him to care about everything just that little bit more, because clearly she did. At the time of the lesson, Dad was an apprentice on the maintenance staff at John Dewey High School. For the past three years, he had big hopes of getting the lead once the senior maintenance man reached retirement. No more prying gum off the bottom of bleachers for him. This was the state of his expectations at the time he met Mom. Their date was on a Saturday and the destination was the parking lot at Jacob Riis Park. As they drove along
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prose Flatbush Avenue in the early August morning, the apartment buildings began to give way more frequently to houses and the store-fronts to modern shopping centers where people could purchase and browse, protected from the elements. A Key Foods super store recently built already had cars filling up half its lot by 10 a.m., along with a few trucks delivering Wonder Bread and Lucky Charms to this tail end of Brooklyn, where you began to wonder if you were in the suburbs or the city. It was one of those latesummer weekends when everyone is seeking an escape. Every bridge and tunnel and motorway out of the city was packed by Friday noon and those not making their way to the beach or the country were just as content to sit in the leafy back-yard of some suburban friend and enjoy the breeze afforded by all that wasted space inbetween buildings. The beach at Jacob Riis Park was a substitute for people without money, or friends who could get them to a further distance. All signs of commerce disappeared entirely as they passed through the causeway and toward the ocean where the clouds were just burning off in the mid-morning heat. Dad pulled into a spot well away from the cars clustered as close as possible to the beach. The hoards were still dragging their coolers and chairs and oversized straw bags through the sand, packed with any possible supply they could need for a day in the sun. Mom and Dad traded seats, passing each other by the front fender with a laugh, their first argument forgotten. “You’d better buckle up,” Dad said with a smile, “the road’s a bit rough.” Every word was an intimation of sex. The twelve days since he’d met her led him to self-abuse morning and night with visions of her lending to the release. They adjusted mirrors and the front seat, Dad’s hand reaching behind Mom’s plump calves to put pressure on the lever that would inch them forward just that little bit necessary for her feet to reach the pedals. She turned the ignition and they jumped forward with start. The pressure between the gas pedal and the clutch took some getting used to. It was all new to her. She tried out the turn signals and practiced turning left and right, and when they were ready,
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going in reverse and breaking for an emergency. When they both had tired of the outskirts of the parking lot, Dad agreed it was time to try a turn around the loop – the strip of road encircling the parking lot, running along the beach and connecting back toward the causeway. By then the horizon was already spotted with beach umbrellas and the tides had long since shifted. Anything could cause a kid to run into traffic. Something as simple as collecting a ball, or any little treasure that would bring greater amusement to a day at the ocean. The excitement of the surf, the glare of the sun, the distraction of the other children – any of these things could result in a parent losing sight of a child for the moment it would take for a horrible thing to occur. I imagined Mom levying blame on the parents. It seems the way the story would go if she were to ever speak of it. She wasn’t much of one for holding guilt close to herself, but the truth is I never once heard her talk about it, and even Jimmy was short on details when it came to this critical part of the story. “So how did it happen?” “Whatdooya mean? She hit the kid, ran him flat over.” “But why didn’t she see him?” “I dunno, blind spot.” “But what happened after? Did the kid die?” “Loyd, no one can say–it’s called traumatic memory.” Jimmy had just finished his junior year in high school, during which time he had learned of the existence of Sigmund Freud. “So you don’t really know anything,” I said. “Shut the fuck up Loyd. Who’s the one telling this story anyway? Hey, watch that diver on the board there, getting ready to jump. I’m gonna fuck him up.” And with that my brother stood, waiting for the moment when the diver, perched on his toes standing backward at the edge of the board, gaining momentum for a flip with the bounce of the board, could be “fucked up” as Jimmy began shouting “Shaaaaaaarrrrrrkkkkk!!!” at
his highest octane. It was juvenile, but the last time he’d shouted about the size of the divers’ Speedos, he was escorted to the curb by a lifeguard who called Mom to pick him up. She was a two-hour drive away at work cleaning teeth at Dr. Friedman’s. Mom, rubber gloved and interrupted from some bi-cuspids, gave him a different phone number, that of Mrs. Saldana, who said she wasn’t anyone’s mother and to call the boys’ father. By the time it got to Dad, Jimmy had walked to the Dairy Queen and back, and the story had been watered down and interpreted so many times that Jimmy was able to convince him that all he’d done was run on the wet pavement by the side of the pool, which was more than enough to get a kid suspended from pool privileges for an entire week in the sleepy suburbs. I was left sitting in the shade to contemplate Mom’s crimes. I could only fill in the details myself, later over the course of several years thinking about this one story. The details I invented made it more complete–they added a sense of explanation to the known events. I imagine she was in reverse, rather than driving around the loop. She could easily have been backing up, like Dad had just taught her, with an arm thrown round the back seat of the car, head craned, flirting, Dad catching her attention for the split second it took for the six-year old boy to run into her blind spot. She didn’t see him there at all, not even the shadow of his movement, and she never would see his face, even as he lay crushed beneath the car – the blood seeping through his body and into the cavities of his brain rather than onto the pavement. The ruined form of him and the knowledge of it would have been too much for her to look at. She would have remained silent, paralyzed, not even the instinct to turn off the motor–it was her first driving lesson after all. Seeing the boy would have been too much for her. All of her knowledge of the event would have been the shrieking of the boys’ mother as she ran to her child, crumpled beneath the fender of Uncle Albert’s Special.
One of the Guys Rosa del Duca
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D
uring my second week of boot camp, back in 2001, a drill sergeant blocked my way to the trash bins in the chow hall. “Are you wearing lipstick?” The question struck me as so bizarre that without any fear or hesitation, I looked him right in the eyes (taboo this early in training) and said, “No, drill sergeant.” “Are you lying to me?” “No, drill sergeant.” “Wipe your mouth.” I picked a napkin off my plate, wiped my mouth hard, and held it out to him. He frowned from the white napkin to my face. “Why does your mouth look red?” “I don’t know, drill sergeant. I wear chapstick, but it’s the plain kind.” “Lemme see it, private.” I pulled out the stick and uncapped it for him. He took it from my fingers, but just as quickly, shoved it back. “Get out of here.” Shit, I thought, jogging back to the platoon area. My naturally red lips were drawing attention, and attention was the last thing I wanted in this place. Maybe if I let my lips get chapped they’ll lose color. *** Later it was hair. The drill sergeants walked into the female barracks one day, ordered us to toe the line, examined our faces, and then punished those whose eyebrows looked like they had been plucked. Then, they told a few of the girls they should start shaving the fine hair on their upper lips “to meet regulation.” They held up scissors and told us the next time they came through, if any of our hair was hanging below our collars, they would cut it off on the spot. The model Army face was male. The cadences we chanted were from a male perspective. The uniforms fit male bodies. And why wouldn’t they? The Army was largely male. Women were late to the party, and therefore, an afterthought. In boot camp, and at drill with my National Guard unit, striving to be accepted as “one of the guys” came easily. I loved guys. I loved 1
measuring myself against them. I loved proving I was as smart and athletic and capable as them. I loved their lack of drama. But while winning their acceptance was satisfying and rewarding, it also came with an invisibility cloak. They’d crack comments like, “I don’t trust anything that can bleed for a week and not die.” They’d talk about the flavor of their girlfriends’ pussies or what girls from other platoons they’d like to screw while I stared at the ground, feeling like an imposter on the verge of being discovered. That’s why heading into Advanced Individual Training, or AIT1, I was set on deviating from my pure tomboy role. I wanted to be seen as what I was: a woman. Still strong, athletic and capable, but pretty and with emotions and desires. I knew I had potential—that the guys didn’t think I looked ugly or butch in uniform. After all, I had made “the list” at the end of basic training. I’d found out while I was lying on my bunk after lights out, daydreaming about eating a Snickers bar at the airport on my way home. Salvarado, who slept one bunk over, was gossiping with Ellis, who slept under me. Salvarado spoke with a thick Cuban accent and had made it known since Day One that she was a model in civilian life, which none of us believed. She had the body of a prepubescent boy and the poise of a hyena. She seemed to be battling a perpetual round of acne, and much to her rage, she was stuck wearing thick, Army-issue Basic Combat Glasses, (nicknamed “birth control glasses”). She did have beautiful, long black hair, but it had to be kept in a clumsy bun or braid all day. “Did you hear about this list the guys made?” Salvarado asked Ellis in a whisper. “What kind of list?” “A list of the hottest females in the company.” Ellis let out a snort. “The guys do that at my high school.” “Don’t you want to know who’s on it?” “No. I know I’m not. I’m bigger than half the guys here.” Ellis was at least 5’11” and solid, like a boxer. She’d been the only girl I couldn’t
knock around when we had pugil stick training. “Are you on it or something?” “Number nine in our platoon. These boys have no idea. Put me in civilian clothes and no question I’d be number one.” I rolled my eyes, thrilled she was being taken down a notch by the socialist way boot camp ran. Everyone wore exactly the same uniform and ate the same food and was issued the same gear and expected to memorize the same things and pass the same tests. No one had a better cell phone or the coolest car or a stockpile of high-end make-up. No one had anything. “Guess who’s number one for our platoon?” Salvaradosaid. I could hear Ellis unlace her boots and wrangle them off. “Hawn?” “She’s number two.” “Yoshira?” “No.” “del Duca?” I perked up, hearing my name. “Yesss.” Salvarado hissed. “What? She’s pretty. And she’s a way better platoon guide than Westfield. I don’t know why you hate her so much.” I grinned up at the ceiling. For two and a half months I’d been dressed up like a man. I’d rolled around in sand and mud and sweat through my uniform and hocked up phlegm so I could breathe and gulped down food like a cretin and yelled guttural yells and dug holes out in the woods to bury my shit. Yet while I’d been feeling ugly and crude and masculine, a bunch of boys had conferred and agreed that yes, I was a sexy girl. I turned onto my back and allowed myself to inhabit my hips, my breasts, my thighs, my lips. Ever since reaching base I’d ignored them. Mentally sheared them off. “No, I think del Duca’s pretty too,” Salvarado mumbled. “But she’s cute, not hot. She’s okay. Like I said, after graduation, when we put on our civvies, the guys’ jaws will hit the floor when they see me.” She did turn heads that last day, with her wavy hair down and her makeup making her fea-
Advanced Individual Training is where you are trained for your Army job, or MOS. In my case, it was fuelers school
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tures pop and her designer jeans revealing she did have hips after all, and her push-up bra doing its work under a V-neck, silk tank top. On the other hand, I returned to the realm of drab college student in no-name jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, my shock of hair falling the same way it had all summer, except now it wasn’t stuck under a BDU cap. I was such a hypocrite: a feminist who took pride in topping a list compiled by horny boys who had obviously been undressing me with their eyes while I strained to prove myself their equal. Heading into AIT the hypocrisy was more complicated. Everything was more complicated. UN weapons inspectors who had been sent into Iraq to investigate grainy satellite images that allegedly proved the existence of weapons of mass destruction had been yanked out of the country. Uncorroborated rumors Saddam Hussein’s regime was sending terrorists money had surfaced. President Bush had ordered the invasion of Iraq. It was only a matter of time before we were all called up. I wanted to find someone as disgusted with Bush as I was, as anguished by his role in this mess as I was. But if I couldn’t find that, I’d settle for the hottest guy who looked my way. I wasn’t going over to the sand box before having a fling. I knew there was a level of absurdity to me being primed for casual sex heading into AIT. A fling was something as mythical to me as a unicorn. I had kissed a whopping three boys in my life and had sex with one. And of course, there was the bizarre notion that I would find love in a place where romance was banned. *** I was outside the barracks, standing in formation, ready for the morning march to class, when I heard someone call my name. “Hey, del Duca.” I turned around and saw a short, muscular guy wearing BDUs so vivid I knew they hadn’t gone through ten washings yet. He was one of the poor suckers shipped here right after boot camp. “Yeah?” “So I got this friend who thinks you’re 2
The nickname for Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri.
real cute. You’ve probably heard of him. Kasey? In second platoon?” “I don’t know who that is,” I said, glancing at Hohns, next to me, who was listening in on the conversation, as was everyone within earshot. “You don’t know who Kasey is?” “No.” I shook my head. Hohns shrugged. “You don’t know. Who Kasey is.” he repeated, apparently incredulous. “Why would I? We’re in different platoons.” He held up his hands. “It doesn’t matter. Okay, look over at second platoon. See the guy on the end of fourth squad with the blue notebook out? That’s him.” Kasey was a hunk. Tall, tan, thick, with a babyface a little like the young Marlon Brando. And he had a crush on me? “He wants to know if maybe you want to go out next weekend if everyone gets a pass.” “Why doesn’t he ask me himself?” “What can I say? The guy’s shy. But a real good guy. We were buddies all through Basic at Fort Lost in the Woods.2” “I guess. Tell him to come say hi sometime on break.” The instructors let us socialize outside and use the vending machines for fifteen minutes twice a day. “So you’ll go out with him?” “Maybe. Probably. I need to meet him first.” The guy shifted his shoulders and let out a scoff. “Why can’t you just say yes?” I raised my eyebrows and finally read his name tag. Brown. “Because this is weird, Brown.” He held up his hands again. “Can I at least tell him you’re interested?” “Yeah. Tell him I think he’s real cute too,” I said, immediately feeling like some character in a high school drama—Dawson’s Creek or My So Called Life. Hohns let out a “pssst” and I whipped around. Drill Sergeant LaMonte had come out of the barracks and was charging toward us. I saw
Brown zip over to his own formation out of the corner of my eye. *** The next weekend, I met Kasey in the mall. I was feeling powerful in my tight jeans and black tank top and lean body that could kick all these mall-rat civilian girls’ asses at anything but applying liquid eyeliner and clinging to their boyfriends arms. My short hair fell down around my face instead of being pulled back in clips and my chest was gloriously free of my usual tight sports bra. The only part of the uniform I’d kept were the boots, because, well, they were really comfortable by now, and I preferred them over tennis shoes or sandals. “You look good,” Kasey said, standing up from a bench outside Macy’s. He had a soft, low voice, the slow cadence of a surfer or skateboarder. “So do you.” He was wearing a polo shirt, his muscles bulging out of the short sleeves, jeans, and white sneakers. We wandered and made small talk and ate a slice of pizza and then checked into a humid hotel with a bunch of other soldiers. The booze started pouring in. Someone’s bathtub became a makeshift cooler. After two beers I was warm and tingly and not entirely balanced. Making out in Kasey’s room, rumpling the tacky, flowered bedspread, I thought we’d stop somewhere between second and third base—build up to sex in a few weeks. Besides, I was on the rag, a detail I let slip after my belt came off, and his fingers started working on my top button. “Why don’t you just take your tampon out?” he asked, wedging two fingers into my waistband and tugging me closer. “But… I’ll still be bleeding.” With Aaron, sex during my period had been taboo. An unspoken taboo, but a very clear one. “I don’t care.” How mature of him, I thought. How progressive. Tipsy, but not drunk, pressed against the smooth, bare chest of this determined boy, I gave
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myself The Test. I imagined myself the next day. Then the next week. Then the next month. The next year. Would I regret sleeping with this hot guy? No, I concluded, forgetting all about using this same, mindblowingly faulty litmus test when joining the National Guard in 2000. No, I was going to enjoy this fling while I had the chance. The next weekend, I was even more confident. I had a fuck buddy. I’d never imagined myself having a fuck buddy. But in our last few hours of weekend freedom, everything changed. “Why are you so quiet?” Kasey asked. I’d been standing at the hotel room door, looking out across the parking lot, waiting for him to get ready so we could grab breakfast before returning to base. I shrugged. “I’m just thinking.” “Why don’t you watch TV or something?” I glanced at the cartoons he had blaring. “Because it doesn’t interest me.” “You are the weirdest girl I’ve ever been with.” The soft quality of his voice was gone. I turned around and found my arms gripping each other in awkward hug. “What do you mean by weird?” “This,” he waved his arms. “Standing there staring off into space. Is there something wrong with you?” “No. Like I said, I’m just thinking.” “Why don’t you talk?” “What do you want to talk about?” “I don’t know. Anything.” “I guess I don’t talk unless I have something to say.” He grabbed his wallet off the bedside table, and on opening it, shook his head. My eyes traveled over his compact body—a body you got from long hours at the gym and steady doses of creatine—his manufactured tan, the way he fixed his hair, his frat boy clothes, his expensive white shoes, and a slow dread crept from my stomach up my throat. He wasn’t a shy and sweet “good guy.” He was an asshole jock. I thought about my own body—how in the shower girls sometimes asked me if my breasts were real. How the drill sergeants had singled me out to model the Class A uniform for the company’s officers when we were getting fitted. How Kasey had teased me for my ridiculously long legs, had asked me if my lips were “natural,” if they were “always swoll like that.” I caught a glimpse of myself in the wide mirror over the sink at the back of the room. I saw the same scrappy girl I’d always seen. Slender,
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yes, but awkward, with huge hands and feet and an unattractive profile and thin hair that looked stringy whenever I tried to grow it out. I saw me. Did everyone else see a girl who’d gotten a boob job, who botoxed her lips? Did Kasey see a self-conscious fool who’d be an easy lay with a little flattery? I leaned into the door frame and shrank into myself. “You want me to be all bubbly and flirty, don’t you?” I could picture exactly the kind of girls he’d dated in the past. Girls who wouldn’t entertain the idea of joining the Army to pay for school in a million years. Kasey shoved his wallet in a back pocket. “Well, yeah, flirty would be more fun than what you are now. Hey, can you pay for the room like you offered last night? I’m broke.” “Sure.” I turned back around and stared past the parking lot to the green swath that was Ft. Lee, for once looking forward to covering myself head to toe in camouflage—marching in rhythm in a sea of camouflage. I wanted to hide, to disappear, to be “one of the guys” again, even though I knew I’d never really been one of the guys. Time and distance revealed that not even the guys had been “one of the guys.” The boys around me had been caught up in their own struggle to be seen as manly men. That is the lure of the Green Machine, its gears clicking and whirring and whispering almost. See some action, earn some scars, watch the great maw of death open and close. Then you’ll be one of the guys. A hero. Or is it the Green Machine that’s whispering? Could be Hollywood and Washington and the news. Could be the ads on the subway or the boss’s daughter or the boys next door, racking up virtual kills. I was 17 when I signed a six-year contract with the National Guard. It became my biggest regret. And now that we’ve settled into a new sort of peacetime, I hear the same ads back on the radio. Join the Guard, defend your community against wildfires, pay for school, be a hero, just one weekend a month, two weeks a year… I imagine struggling kids like me thinking exactly what I did. That the possibility of war on the horizon is far-fetched. That putting on the uniform to pay for college is the responsible, adult thing to do. That proving you can be a soldier is beyond badass. Perhaps it’s up to the rest of us to box up some new whispers and send them off to Washington, Hollywood, the high school down the street.
POETRY
UFM
issue19 / 15
Joe Love
Hidden Topography The roar of the summer wind is parked on Highway 100 just outside New Haven beside a little rock along the side of the road It has gathered its cousins and is making plans for infiltration of the landscape just as soon as winter is done with its moaning The waters now stirring in a stream outside New Haven are debating coming summer floods in various stages based on the healing of the winter’s broken bones The houses that the people are busy being in sleep in their yards and dream in fits of summer days that lurk like a promise of soon left alone
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Down in the Cows Down in the cows where the fertilizer’s strong like a box of sulfur matches doused quick by the wind we stand beside a heifer licking clean her newborn calf Erica in dungarees wants to pet the hoofed giant so Grandpa picks her up and lays her tiny fingers on a short-haired patch of shank He sets her back down and we watch the mother clean standing there in the dung that smells like rain and wind settled in a creek Soon the bath is over and we head back up the hill where the clouds come together letting loose on the fields coming down in the cows
UFM
issue19 / 17
Joe Love
In The Quarry At Rockwood Reservation A wall of rock with a hallowed quarry smooth wind-beaten rain-rounded rock rising to the blue sky with four rugged pillars holding up a quarry echoes rocks, small pebbles roll down a short hill where my foot steps and changes the terrain forever as I wander through the ancient place dark and red rust-red beneath the blue sky
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Landscape The horizon is swaths of siding and windows The foreground is grass closed flowers and puddles the sky is trees curving away from each other— a green world with birds and trucks a painting that hangs and moves my window
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issue19 / 19
Joe Love
Two Winter Scenes 1
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2
What earth we remember
Snow grows from the trees like flesh
that green summer thing
white cotton candy limbs
is gone beneath this white winter
against black trunks
where a month of snow
slanted but straight
still covers a land too cold to melt
reaching over for another helping
the sheets of ice
of winter beauty
while the frozen shadows
I was about to comment on the sight
of forty mallards shading the sky
looking out the car window
black and green
but Erica spoke first
against a blue
saying she had never even noticed
cast drifting darkness
those trees before
over hidden life below
taking the words from my mouth
James Owens
Where the Farm Was a tractor in the shape of a tractor lost in kudzu a drift of blood wets a widowed uncle’s mouth, when night mauls the empty house darkness drips from the eaves the only weather in years
UFM
issue19 / 21
James Owens
Riven How? When through leaves bars of light slanting heavily and behind ordinary things, the colors [ I am trying to speak ] but shivering in me like a drenched child. This longing for a breath to tear it all open sunlight beaten like foil onto the darkness clean dust / clean wind and the sky and the sky and the sky
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Bloom One day the darkness lifts and loosens its weft as if in answer to our wait, and this is morning --the improbable lace of new leaves where snowy light breaks from their edges and scatters among branches. This is a world inside us, but not only inside us. “Not only� is the glint and glimmer of the clarifying forest during an hour when the busy, subtle hands of the wind are brightening small-as-thunder, thousandfold blossoms into our breath.
UFM
issue19 / 23
Lauren Yates
The Great Unwashed Prodigal (adj.)- wastefully or recklessly extravagant On Sundays, I pluck each cracker from my paper cup like I’m choosing a spouse. I vow myself to each goldfish, search for missing smiles, or the ones with one eye. Those ones need me the most. The room smells like bleach and clay like everywhere that isn’t home or some dumb store. I know Mommy will be mad at the paint on my sock. That’s what she gets for flipping them down the way I hate. Mommy says I don’t hate, but I do. Miss Tanya tells us about “The Prodigal Son.” I like the TV better than when she talks. I never know what to do when she looks at me. She picks on me for chewing on my Bible straps, then the other kids turn and look. It’s another cartoon where the animals walk better than the people. The boy who left home spent all his money. He fights a pig for an ear of corn. I didn’t know they had corn in the Bible. When he goes back home, his dad isn’t even mad. I thought you only get money when your parents die. He must have been a nice guy. I eat a donut with sprinkles in the car. Mommy asks me what I learned and I tell her about The Prodigal Son. She asks what “prodigal” means. I say it’s when you leave then come back because that’s what happened in the story.
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Theatrics At the community college across from Home Depot, we gambled with Dum-Dum lollipops. We would watch old WrestleMania tapes, and bet on our favorite performers. Yokozuna was always my pick. Our teacher used wrestling to teach us about acting. He declared himself a knight, and made a play out of a movie based on an opera. When I lost the lead to the cornrowed blonde, I drew on a mustache and a wool coat, my solo—“When the Foeman Bares His Steel”—replaced with the theme to Cops. We opened every fire exit. Whatever door we ran out of, we couldn’t re-enter, like the chase scenes from Scooby Doo. This was our teacher’s Sistine Chapel, his excuse to sing “Feliz Navidad” after telling fake, bad news. The Saturday my family went shopping in the desert, Mom laughed so hard, she couldn’t breathe. We spun off the road into a field. The sky tie-dyed itself Northern Lights, the winds strong enough to topple the priciest of weaves. I began to float up toward the sky. As the little green men beamed me up, I looked down at the women rolling on the ground, their flooding eyes, their shaking shoulders—“Remember her running around in that hot, wool coat?”—bad-mouthing the Sistine Chapel, making no effort to save me.
UFM
issue19 / 25
Lauren Yates
Participation To Angela Chase Yours was when you called Anne Frank “lucky.” You had said it to yourself, unprepared to back it up. It was a test that makes you explain why true or false— you can’t just name a 50/50 chance. After your teacher eavesdropped on your private conversation, reminding you that Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp, you said, “She was trapped in an attic with this guy she really liked.” Mine was when my teacher asked how I would punish my students if I were school principal. I said I’d host rock concerts each morning, and when the guilty would stage dive, I’d make the crowd take two steps back. “Who are you, and what have you done with Lauren?” he asked. I blamed the can of Mountain Dew I had guzzled at lunch. This is how we learned to keep our hands down, to blame our ideas on our “time of the month,” to never admit we hold all the cards.
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Fixation After Barbara Hamby My Lucifer, unwitting Muse, dog-eared Vonnegut, afrobeatnik third eye: howls escaping from your headphones, wailing about secrets, about infidelity, about analyzing life until there ain’t nothin’ left. Then you shuffle by in your black-and-white Adidas, hair in twists, wearing the striped sweater of nihilistic intent, quoting the rants of Holden Caulfield in your blog like you never didn’t know him. I never asked to know you, to want who I can’t have, when I can’t even love myself. And every fiber of my being yearns for reciprocation. What is there to return, what is there to feel? You meditate on truth, fallen angel in the parlor of rebellion, blasphemous goodbye, bright and morning star simpering like crickets in the palms of daybreak. Your musicality radiates from subway chatter and overheard profanity down El Camino Real. I take in your ballad at my post office mailbox, in the abandoned echoes of daydream monologues. You’re a philosopher exploring theory of mind, a cartographer mapping the labyrinth of your deepest desires. Tell me again about desires—demonstrations of divine sadism. Tell me about human empathy, the animated faces of wordless expression, the metaphysics of free will, my beginning and my end, alpha and omega, my fortress in the land of chic. Blasphemous hustler, let your idealism simmer, your wit, your mojo. I come to you an amateur, a neophyte, a lowly scab in the strike against ignorance. Give me my melody, my song, my one-hit-wonder of all that is cliché and unknown. But I can’t be the other woman, your girlfriend, your aspiring Playboy bunny, only 10-bucks-a-throw. Your highness-whoyells-his-ideas-into-the-ears-of-echoes, your every quirk spellbinds me. Each day I wake to your entourage vibrato; I am held captive by your brooding stare, empress of liberal doves. You visit in my dreams when the sky is a force of darkness viewing light through peepholes, your flaws an aphrodisiac, a love drug, a fast hit in the basement from the ecstasy of words.
UFM
issue19 / 27
bios
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Rosa del Duca is a writer, journalist and musician. She is very close to finishing a memoir, War Against the War, which chronicles her transformation from military recruit to conscientious objector. When she’s not working on creative writing, Rosa fronts the San Francisco folk band we.are.hunters., and helps crank out the news at NBC Bay Area. Her work has been published in Cutbank, Grain, River Teeth, CALYX and Crack the Spine. You can read much of that work and listen to her music at www.rosadelduca.com.
Joe Love lives in St. Louis and teaches at universities both east and west of the Arch. His work has
appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry Pacific, Poetry Super Highway, The Oddville Press, Crack the Spine, Bangalore Review, From the Depths, Drunk Monkeys, Bellowing Ark, and other journals.
Cynthia Olson completed a Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh with a
focus on fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Every Writer, Bite Magazine, The Hackney, and Read This. During the day she works as a freelance writer and editor for UNICEF and other nonprofits. She is currently chronicling an obsessive process of reading Joyce’s Ulysses with a forthcoming memoir, Looking for Leopold, and can be found online here https://twitter.com/7ecclesstreet
James Owens’s poems, reviews, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals,
including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Poetry Ireland, The Stinging Fly, The Cresset, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in central Indiana and northern Ontario.
Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using tiny objects and what is considered to have no worth by
the mainstream. Fabio lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com. Fabio is a regular contributor to Umbrella Factory Magazine. His piece “Drops and Brollies” is this issue’s cover art.
Lauren Yates is a San Diego transplant who is currently based in Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared
in FRiGG, Melusine, The Bakery, and The Legendary. Lauren is also a poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly. Aside from poetry, she enjoys belly dancing, baking quiche, and pontificating on the merits of tentacle erotica. For more information, visit http://laurentyates.com.
UFM
issue19 / 29
stay dry.
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issue19 UFM