U T T E R
N O. 3
No.3 Summer, 2013 Editors: P.J. Williams Kir Jordan Cover Art: Southern Surreal, Olivia West More information can be found at uttermagazine.com
utter
send forth the voice
In this issue... PoetryWishbone, Tidewash by William Cordeiro Newsfeed From the Unusual World by Jesse Mack Brief History of American Popular Music as found on 6"x6" sheet of sandpaper, 1 grit by Michael Lambert --------------------------------by Quinn White Quit]]luxurious woman by Kendra Bartell Carts, Hearts, and Wal-Marts by James Valvis Into/Between by Sara Williams NonfictionSpring by Jason McCall Visual ArtSouthern Surreal, Imminence, and Joy by Olivia West enveloped by Kevin Hinkle For Sale and Neptunes by Jennifer Tomaloff nothing never sleeps by David Tomaloff
enveloped, Kevin Hinkle
William Cordeiro Wishbone,Tidewash For each would-be quiver in the grass, I flip cupped hands for baby toads across the flats, sand trickling through, not tanned but scorched since I wear nothing but my floppy hat. Down dunes, cold waves collapse. One wood bee hovers, pivoting mid-air at cruise control, zips off, then curious, re-circles over, reading along with me out on the porch. I wake adrift—I’ve lapsed the afternoon. Then, clothed, I trek for miles on the beach past ruins: sun-bleached driftwood from a shipwreck tumbles up shore amid shell scumble, fishbones shucked of meat, limp bladderwrack, snail clusterfucks, and rockweed oozing over Styrofoam and lumber. I’m lured into a frenzy where the thrashing fish are thick enough to snatch up with my fists. The waves repeat themselves, like melancholics; wind builds and blurs the parabolic mounds. . . Grey seals poke snouts out as they play and frolic like sweet young boys. No wonder sailors drowned.
Jesse Mack Newsfeed From the Unusual World Good morning, beachgoers & petty tyrants. My throat is full of dry honey. I am eating my melon so seriously I can feel the hem of the angel’s skirt. A skirt is a way of laughing at others in secret. A peony is a rocket ship. A blanket is a very large bandana. If the button is an ancestor of the television, there are three distinct ways of holding a baby. But a black dog crouches in my view, so the darkness comes too early. Daydreams mean God is napping. In the beginning there was the eraser & a star was made of butter. The mattresses are firm in heaven, & dogs have forgotten their names. There is watermelon even in winter. The bomb, too, can be kissed. The parade is only ever beginning, though childhood was a myth to begin with. Because the moon is already in mid-sky, death is a hat made of blue paper. What I’m saying is: trees are beautiful. A month to a tree is a month to everyone. Even so, the continents go swimming in the same ocean in which people throw bags of guns. The sand doesn’t know what to do with our bodies. Look we are all just now getting dressed.
For Sale, Jennifer Tomaloff
Jason McCall Spring I’ll never dunk a basketball. That’s the first thing on my mind when the sun stays out after the street lights come on and the concrete begins to burn my palms in the afternoon. It was easier to admit infidelity, easier to admit I’ve had conversations with people who never existed past the echo of my voice. When a hand moved to my lap, I blamed my disease. When my disease moved me to the hospital, I blamed my ancestors. But the rim is blameless. Like Pope Urban VIII’s Earth, it doesn’t move. The rim is ten feet tall. That’s not that high. When I reach as high as I can, my hand is eight feet high. There are just two feet between me and the rim. I’ve jumped from trees and roofs higher than the rim. A ten foot fall might sprain an ankle, but it probably won’t break a neck. But it will break a spirit. In 1998, I was the best athlete I’ll ever be. I ran a seven-minute mile, flirting with trying out for football, and was mistaken for a man more than once. None of this meant shit in my backyard that summer. I ran a thousand sprints toward the basket and jogged away disappointed. I lost the ball on the way up. The rim rejected my attempt. I jumped and then forgot how to jump midway through. Dan Marjerle became my avatar. The highlights of him straining to put the ball over the rim with every inch of his 6’6 frame pushed more sweat in my eyes and kept me on the court until I couldn’t see any thing but the backboard and lightning bugs. If he could get there, I could get there. The height difference didn’t matter. After all, he was white. I was a magnet school kid. I could translate Latin and make sense out of triangles. On the court, most of my elbows were aimed at guys who said they were surprised I had time to ball between catching three buses to get to school and doing real homework. The kids at school made sure to let me know I was black, but that endorsement melted on the blacktop. Our skin tone wasn’t worth shit in the mall, and it was worth less on the court. The basketball court is one the closest things to meritocracy I’ve ever seen. It was one of the easiest ways to sort children from the adults, to witness a coming of age when the kid down the street grows seven inches or learns to dribble with his left hand. We grew into men or whatever else we could be, and White Men Can’t Jump was our Stand by Me. And redbone girlfriend or not, none of us wanted to be Woody Harrelson. I wanted to be Wesley Snipes; at some point, every black boy in the 90’s wanted to be Wesley Snipes. I could jump flatfooted and grab the rim with two hands; my friends saw me do it more than once. And some of them would believe me for a few days if I lied about dunking by myself in my backyard or catching a put-back dunk in a pick-up game. Teenagers lie about a lot—where we bought our sneakers from, who gave us a hard on in seventh period—but part of growing up was learning the law. We didn’t need to see the gun in the underwear drawer or a trophy bra, but eventually, we needed to see the dunk. Some miracles relied on faith; some miracles had to be seen. Our miracles only mattered because of the heretics. When I see someone a foot taller than I am do lay ups, I turn into Nestor in the Greek camp. If I had what they had, the world would be covered in Plexiglas and blood. I would take the charging fouls and list myself alongside Gandhi and Elektra and the others who put god’s law in front of man’s whenever a man stood between me and the hoop. The attempt is the beautiful part; the Jordan logo doesn’t even include a basket, just a man trying to fly and succeeding for a sliver in time between rise and fall. I never liked Jordan. I was a Knicks fan until 1993. In the playoffs that year, I watched Charles Smith—a 6’10 wet piece of bread—spend the last ten seconds of game five getting his shots blocked by Jordan and Pippen. As a kid, I understood
Jason McCall, cont. birthrights. God made him tall for a reason; why didn’t he dunk? Why didn’t he try? Twenty years later, he’s still my battle cry for friends going to job interviews or friends going back and forth about whether or not to meet the pretty eyes waiting for them at the end of the bar. “Remember Charles Smith,” I tell them before they go to meet their challenge. “Go up strong.” And that’s what dunking is, really: a challenge from heaven. Whenever man defies gravity—through a space shuttle or wax wings or windmill jams—Sisyphus is still alive. The Trickster is clipping the beard of the All-Father. There are a thousand thousand warnings to keep our feet on the earth. Paradise Lost, Columbia, Icarus. Sportscasters crow about how many bad things can happen when the feet aren’t set. Every rec center has a “no dunking” sign. But these warnings are also a dare. The sign really says “Can you dunk? Can you dunk in a game?” There’s the crossroads of the playground gods, and nothing makes the playground gods smile more than someone who takes up their challenge and fails. Watch a player leave the ground looking for glory and find only the rattling echo of the rim. Sometimes, the rattle is thunder; sometimes, the rattle is a laugh. My father mangled his finger in a basketball net. He’s a chef and a sergeant, but it was the only time I’ve seen him bleed. Now, my father is diabetic, and I’m suspicious of every one of my cuts. I’m trading soda for half-calorie soda. I’ve spent years in the mirror shrugging my shoulders at my reflection and the promises we made. But when the weather turns warm, I’ll get back on the treadmill and sweat out my grudges. The number on the scale will shrink, and my calves will get hard again. I’ll walk through the sports section of the Super Target and grin at the kid chasing a ball down the aisle. I’ll make a promise to get back on the court this year. I’ll swear I’m just out there to switch up my workout. I’ll swear I’m just out there to sweat. And the rim will be there waiting for me, waiting to measure my failures and faith.
Imminence, Olivia West
Michael Lambert Brief History of American Popular Music as found on 6"x 6" sheet of sandpaper, 1 grit First, there was dirt. The dirt breathed, pushed on other dirt and out sprung milkweed, television, potpourri. Harry Everett Smith came like a firecracker from the bassinet, placed his left index finger directly between his eyeballs and evaporated into a small plate glass palette, shellacked Maypole and high-pitched squeal. John Lomax arrived on stilts shortly thereafter, his cottonmouth taffy nearly digitally remastered itself upon reading Harry's scrawl: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve." Firstlight the very next day he packed the trunk of his Hudson with 350 lbs. of the finest in portable recording wax cylinders, acetates, aluminum, and headed towards the bullfrogs and b-lines of Angola State Penitentiary. John knew without a doubt from the shivers running the length of his spine that they'd found what it was they were seeking. Huddie Ledbetter opened his yaw and out sprung murder ballads, thick tenor, gravel on a tin roof. They set him free to be paraded in prison garb after writing the governor for a pardon, which approved. If you lean real close to the hiss and cackle in the haunting vinyl grooves that remain, you can still smell the switchblade delta, the cleave of genuflect echoes, radium wind in the trees. Huddie Ledbetter picked up a calloused handful of copper soil; let it sift between his fingers. The hammer rings, and we swing, and we sing.
Quinn White ________________________________________________________________________ My mother was a tornado, she carried me met lakes she carried me slowed she carried me. My mother was a tornado, slowed over hills. A small tornado, witnesses say a cute funnel barely knocked over a milk crate. My carrying mother sounded sounds I've found not in talk but in shells, mopped hallways, descent's ear pops, not words although my mother was a poet-Does she feel my weight now I imagine we talk? Do you remember me? No, she replies. I remember a stretch, a blanket. My mother was a child too. I have a photo. She’s my age sitting before a white-iced cake. She wears a white pouf dress. She carried me like a stone? Like an indoor umbrella? An idea, she says. Did you consider keeping me? Yes, but yes, but why ask? My mother was a teenager. Sweetheart-shaped someone said her face was I haven't seen and searching anywhere but my head feels like looking under what I think it'd be like to look under a dead person's sheet once they're dead. She bore me. I read poetry. I read a man’s mother bore him over a burning city. She was a rope of smoke. I'm writing these poems about what happened, my mother says. You mean me? I mean a time, she says, a wound. He writes his mother was a braid of smoke, wound smoke. My mother was a twister.
nothing never sleeps, David Tomaloff
Kendra Bartell Quit ] ] luxurious woman Sappho fr. 25, tr.Anne Carson Every woman needs to own a blowtorch; it’s the body that takes too long to combust of its own accord. Rosie the Riveter says that watching sunsets makes her vomit, people calling the crimson and blues “romantic,” colors of her fiery tools usurped by some quaint notion of attachment. Every woman should read her worst enemy’s palm before death, the skin, there; just beneath the right ring finger would have predicted the loss of virginity at thirteen and three months in the back of an abandoned Chevy. The years grown, toughing up and tightening. The semester spent wrapped in sweaters, her body rejecting. Every woman can watch Cinderella’s opening credits, but then turn off the tape—there’s no room for doormats and waiting for the shoe to fit. Just enough to see how a body becomes understood. Every woman must cut her own hair once, just to see how it feels to be uneven. It can be paid for and fixed. Every woman touch the patches on the roof of her mouth, scraped sweet by hard candy, the bloodsugar harsh and ragged; a rough tonguing unknown before
James Valvis Carts, Hearts, and Wal-Marts Weekly my parents would dress and drive to the local Wal-Mart. They didn’t need to buy much. It was just a Tuesday night out. Cheaper, quicker than a movie. Few things would go in the cart. They might buy dog food, tinfoil, spend the rest of the time striding the aisles looking at products they neither wanted nor desired. I still remember them walking the thin rows side by side, not talking, not laughing, my father judging a jar of pickles, my mother staring off at a display. Maybe it was just me who saw their organized and empty basket as a metaphor for their marriage. But maybe not. Who knows? I just know when I go to Wal-Mart with my wife, I make sure to dance in at least three of the aisles, fill our cart with unneeded things. **
Neptunes, Jennifer Tomaloff
Sara Williams
Into/Between I. We didn’t wake to breath. We woke to broken teeth and bloody gums. The air shamed our lungs and grew us tails. The nurses wrapped our tiny bodies in goatskin blankets. Our wings flew south.
II. There are no forms, only organic memory flags and shape shifting lessons. We grew into/between parents. We grew apart. You became the goat in wolfskin, I the wolf.
III. Everyday dad sloughed off your wolfskin and played the big bad story over and over until your body was raw. I hugged the door you cried behind. I knocked between the punches you tucked under your skin. Your skin calcified and sunk into rock.
Sara Williams, cont. IV. The color of a door, then a fist— and my face fades. I drowned in covers. I almost shrunk down to nothing. You pulled scraps of dinner from your pocket, pushed them into my hands, my mouth.
V. We grew apart. I howled wide enough to grow me wings. You were mute, or your howl was caught between layers of skin. A car hit you sideways. Your skin ripped right off. You stared dumbly. I emptied my own wolf out, slipped into the bright, crisp belly of chaos.
VI. I couldn’t hold on so I went to bed to mend, I shed wings of dust, pulled the paper over my wounds, watched it absorb and bloom reds.
Joy, Olivia West
KENDRA BARTELL is currently an MFA candidate at UW Seattle in Poetry, after receiving a BA from Cornell University studying the Reading and Writing of Poetry. She received the Robert H. Chasen Memorial Award for Poetry in Spring of 2012. Poems are currently in or forthcoming in Mare Nostrum and So to Speak. WILL CORDEIRO received his MFA from Cornell University where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate completing his dissertation on 18th century British literature. His work appears or is forthcoming in over seventy journals, including recent publications in Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, Raintown Review, Memoir Journal, Harpur Palate, and VERSE online. He is grateful for residencies from Risley Residential College, Provincetown Community Compact, Ora Lerman Trust, ART 342, and Petrified Forest National Park. KEVIN HINKLE is a photographer whose serious forays into photography began primarily with abstract and minimal images, but more recently, his repertoire has expanded to include layered photographs (which he calls "fusions") that incorporate 2 or more of his images combined into works frequently noted for their painterly appearance and sometimes for their suggestion of Japanese art. Many of these images, like the abstracts, depend heavily on line, shape, color, and texture but less so on negative space. Kevin's work has appeared in exhibits throughout New Jersey as well as in exhibits in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and California. His photographs have also appeared in literary magazines such as the Tulane Review, Grey Sparrow, the Baltimore Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. MICHAEL LAMBERT lives and works in Brooklyn. In 2012 his work received the Thomas Hickey Creative Writing Award from the University of Wisconsin--Platteville and was nominated for the Carson Prize. His poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Midwestern Gothic, Mixed Fruit, Unshod Quills, and elsewhere. His debut collection is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks late summer 2013. He lives online at: michaelvaughnlambert.tumblr.com. JESSE MACK lives in Somerville, MA and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in journals such as Columbia Poetry Review, Bodega, MOJO/Mikrokosmos Literary Journal, Printer's Devil Review, and elsewhere. JASON MCCALL is from the great state of Alabama, where he currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and he is the author of Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize). DAVID TOMALOFF is a very important something. His work has appeared in several chapbooks, anthologies, and in fine publications such as Connotation Press, Metazen, Heavy Feather Review, The Northville Review, CBS Chicago, Necessary Fiction, HTML Giant, A-Minor, Pank, and elimae. He is also co-author of the collaborative poetry collection YOU ARE JAGUAR, with Ryan W. Bradley (Artistically Declined Press, 2012). Send him threats: davidtomaloff.com JENNIFER L. TOMALOFF is a treasury analyst. During off hours, she seeks to find meaning within the largely ignored aspects of common existence through photography. Jennifer is the editor and publisher of Bending Light into Verse: bendinglightintoverse.com JAMES VALVIS is the author of HOW TO SAY GOODBYE (Aortic Books, 2011). His poems or stories have appeared in journals such as Anderbo, Arts & Letters,Barrow Street, Hanging Loose, LA Review, Nimrod, Rattle, River Styx, Vestal Review, and many others. His poetry has been featured in Verse Daily and the Best American Poetry website. His fiction was chosen for the 2013 Sundress Best of the Net. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle. OLIVIA WEST is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama with a major in Digital Media, a minor in Creative Writing, and a hankering for adventure. She has been making art for as long as she can remember and loves making it in any form, from oil painting to charcoal drawing to digital painting. Starting this year, Olivia will be attending the Savannah College of Art and Design to pursue her MFA in Themed Entertainment Design. After that, she hopes to create projects and experiences on the grand scale. And hopefully there will be plenty of adventures along the way. Utter is Olivia's first publication.
QUINN WHITE'S poems appear in or are forthcoming from journals such as Sixth Finch, Word Riot, Weave Magazine, Bayou Magazine, and Hot Metal Bridge. Her chapbook, My Moustache, was published in 2013 by Dancing Girl Press. She can be found online at quinnwhite.net SARA WILLIAMS resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan. An avid reader, writer, and teacher of poetry, she works as a creative writing lecturer at Eastern Michigan University and Writer-in-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Program in Detroit. Work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Bakery, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Four and Twenty, and Rufous City Review.
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utter
send forth the voice