Spring 2003
A
student publication
sponsored by the Department
of Fnglish and Philosophy Murray State University Murray, Kentucky
Managing Editor: Assistant Editor: Production Editor: Art Editor:
Maranda Allbritten Shelly Harris Zachary Konkol Nick Alley
Poetry Jury: Dan Dietrich Tasha Duncan BJ Wilson Fiction Jury: Dan Dietrich Tasha Duncan Krista Matheny Carey Snyder Loree Stark
Faculty Advisors: George Hovis and Ann Neelon All student names are removed before the jurying process begins.
We would like to thank the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of English and Philosophy and the Department of Art. A special thanks to all the students who contributed and gave their time to this journal.
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Build and Destroy - Whitney Courtney Compass Drawing with Dragon - Michelle Moode Millennium Live! - BJ Wilson Blues Kind of Love - Charley Allen You Remember it Another Way - Dan Dietrich Waiting for Something to Happen - Jacob Heustis The Art of the Pitch - Jeff Walker Losing My Virginity on LSD - Dan Dietrich I Forgot - Maranda Allbritten And She Bought Me Cherries - Faith Boldt On Becoming a Frog - Ches Clark The Chimneys - Dan Dietrich Winch bearing - Nick Alley Screwdriver - Loree Stark Untitled - Whitney Courtney Witness - Charley Allen Disposition - Michelle Moode Poinsettia - BJ Wilson Care - Barry Lee Reynolds Games We Played - Dan Dietrich Come Forward - Margaret Harper To a Good Christian Wife I Know - Tracy Franklin Requiem for Wonder -Jeremiah Baldwin Untitled - Loree Stark Main Street Blues - BJ Wilson Self-Portrait with the Children - Katie Oller Outside - Carey Snyder Prelude - Charley Allen Repetition -Jacob Heustis He Saw Him Dead - Nick Alley Mechanical Embarrassment - Nick Alley Angels in My Bed - Ches Clark Ere - Barry Lee Reynolds In the Library - John Firestone Gulf Ghazal - Dan Dietrich
Great Pyramids dusty in bronze laser beams Parthenon sittin inna circle uh red flares Eiffel Tower's orange throat inflamed, white lights tracin from its forehead fly. The earth is juxtaposed on a screen. Unprecedented coverage-world squad.
St. Peter's Cathedral's back blowin up in blue spark Thames on fire; layin shadows on the Millennium Dome Brandenburg Gate's Moon full, back beyond the rockets' settling smoke.
A correspondent live by satellite confirms: no accidental missiles were fired.
There is love and then, there is love. See, it's like this: there's a kiss and then there's a "rubber-legged, can't come up for air, think I just might drowned in her" kind of kiss, there's a smile and then there's a "sweet jesus I better be repenting tonight lord because I'm gonna need it with a look like that, a cold shower and an hour of prayer and good lord forgive me now cause the things she's saying with those big green eyes are gonna send me straight to hell and I don't even mind" kind of smile there's a touch and then there's a "fire in my skin goes right up from the palm of my hand and if her fingertip lingers for longer than five seconds I think I just might burst into flames right here and ain't nothing in this world can do a damn thing about it" kind of touch there's a laugh and then there's a "god in heaven no angel ever sounded this pretty, not old Coltrane or Bessie or Billie - ain't a one of 'em that's got a note on this girl" kind of laugh. See, there's love and then there's "gonna throw myself right off the side of the world, rip out my heart and feed it to that old mangy railroad dog, gonna die right here and now if I ever so much as make this baby girl cry" kind of love. There's love and then there's "sprinklin' dirt in my coffee, drinking words over water, living on laughs and soft whispers and my ribs still not gonna show cause ain't a thing so sweet as what she's feeding me" kind of love. See, man it's like thisthere's love and then, there is love.
You REMEMBERIT ANOTHER WAY I could taste the Ohio river in the air. Broadway was packed like a bible-belt carnival. On every comer, young girls were singing country songs into karaoke machines. The humidity had made the street lights heavy when you floated by, pretending not to notice me. I followed you to the end of the block, where you stopped to watch a man behind a table: shuffling a penny under three empty walnut shells. I stood on the other side of the street, near a blind woman who was playing hymnals on an organ under a small mimosa. And when I finally tapped your shoulder to ask if it was you, I found out that it was and that it wasn't. It's a clique: how well we played those games in and out of airports and hotels, in Nashville and Miami. The agility we seemed to possess as we slid through sliding doors, turnstiles, and metal-detectors. A flight to Fort Lauderdale, reasoning it out by telling myself, "just think about the money you would have spent on booze." The two of us in your apartment, the El train rattling past your window, the sun setting somewhere over the gulf, the room surrounded by candles flickering shadows of us across the walls. Picking through our piles of clothes on the floor and driving to Coconut Grove. We watched young Latino boys singing into karaoke machines in front of cafes. We watched Hare Krishna's ring bells and dance through the crowded streets. A professor once told my class (it was either a human sexuality course or a human development course) that the happiest time in his life was when he was working, finishing up graduate school, and raising a couple of kids in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife that he had met in college - drinking tea, discussing the novels of D. H. Lawrence. I'm sure that we had run our conversation topics into the ground when it came time for us to make a decision and I had grown tired of sitting in exotic movie theaters watching films about the afterlife.
"...lead the poor sap on until he has to write his way out." Ed McClanahan
-
'Write what you know," they tell me. They pinch the noses of all young writers and pour a spoonful of this advice down our unsuspecting throats. Good medicine. It will more than likely cure what ails us. Teachers administer it as a panacea for our various compositional illnesses. In my case, these infirmities boil down to the unfortunate fact that I cannot write at a level even approaching competence. I am, in cold truth, barely literate on any number of subjects. I don't know much. Sad, but true. I could blame the elementary and secondary schools I attended for my scandalous lack of proficiency in the arena where pen meets paper. I could rail against my teachers, in particular, for not endowing me with the skills necessary to write at the level required of me by universities, or in today's competitive marketplace. I could point my finger in a multitude of directions, wildly slinging accusations at everyone I believe responsible for my predicament. But, alas, I must lay the blame for this regrettable fact squarely on the shoulders of ego hominis unum. Numero uno. Me. Life experience alone should have provided me with realms of manuscript, volumes of text, each sentence dripping anecdote, aphorism, life wisdom. My resume reads like the panels of some incredibly intricate occupational quilt. I have been a farm hand (beginning at the tender age of eight), ice deliveryman, construction worker, boat captain, mill-worker, soldier, patrolman, draftsman, security guard, and safety inspector (for that still untapped gold mine of inspiration, the almighty petro-chemical industry). Throughout my life I have fished, hunted, scouted, explored, discovered. I have ridden horses and motorcycles, romanced maidens, fought dragons, married, fathered children, divorced, nursed a broken heart (That's why I left her, errr, she left me). I have been a singer/@tarist for a rock and roll band. I have boxed, played hockey, basketball, football, and baseball (where, curiously, I was a world-class pitcher stuck in centerfield - the coach mumbled incoherently about some essential quality being lost between the twisted gyrations of my windup and the
distressing heartbreak of my delivery -when I tried to correct this grievous oversight on his part). In other words, I should have learned something about something at some point on my extensive and wide-ranging journey through life. I have, of course, taken many lessons away from these endeavors. Too many to count, in all truthfulness. A story or an essay lies hidden within each, without a doubt. When I sit down and attempt to transfer them to the page, however, one unrelenting question assaults the quivering hunk of gray matter careening wildly against the insides of my cranium: "What if somebody finds out I don't know anything?" Because, let me tell you, sometimes I honestly feel like I don't know anything. Or not enough, at any rate. I could scream in frustration, gnash my teeth, cover myself in ashes and sackcloth. But I don't, of course, preferring instead to pretend that I do, in fact, know something. It would be disgraceful to admit otherwise. Besides, let's be honest, I wouldn't be the first shyster to b.s. my way into a B.S., or a B.A. In defense of my shattered dignity, it is my sincere belief that I am merely one of the millions of zombies who make up the ranks of the learning disenfranchised. I have come to the conclusion that the partially illiterate abound in the halls of higher education. Many times I have slyly surveyed my fellow scholars and future magistrates when they have received a writing assignment. It delights me to see them grimace in pain and fall to the floor convulsing violently, incapacitated by the dread that they, too, might be exposed as the writing frauds they fervently profess not to be. The corporate world, for its part, boasts no shortage of inept scribes. I derive immeasurable gratification from reading the memos and directives that spew forth from the offices of the captains of industry. I have analyzed specimens of these, so help me God, that have not contained a single complete sentence. These same journalistic gems do, however, feature enough spelling and usage errors to give a copy editor an aneurysm. I am now keenly aware of the vast chasm that exists between verbal and written communication. I have heard that all primates are born with the capacity for vocal communication hardwired into their genetic code. Human beings have been writing for 5,000 years, but they have been talking since they attained the top rung of the evolutionary ladder.
They most likely communicated through vocalizations and sign language (as the apes do) from the moment the first hominid metamorphosed from the ring-tailed lemur. Human beings, unless they are physically or mentally handicapped, cannot be prevented from learning to talk. Writing, on the other hand, requires an effort to be learned. Some languages that are spoken have no written form. Kudos to them, I say. Why muddy the waters of a perfectly good system by introducing a form that throws anyone who tries to master it into spasmodic fits? Nevertheless, I am forced by the evil minions of higher education to display my dexterity at this sneaky and problematic art form. So I will attempt once more to dig in my spurs and struggle to ride the snarling beast into submission. But I will do it my way (assuming my professors don't react too harshly and hang me by my presumptuous neck from the nearest statue of a beloved scholar and benefactor). I will write what I am. I will write who I am. I solemnly vow, from now until I spiral into the fiery eternity that most certainly awaits my wretched, illiterate soul, to forget about the complicated intricacies of my spectacular windup and just haul off and throw the ball. It is my sincere and heartfelt belief that, therein, hides the art of the pitch.
Glued to a chair in that strange, little, hot-glowing room where mirrors were covered and our eyes shone orange,
I saw you talking backwards, while I massaged breathing walls inside a meddling buzz, a sonar pulse where my thoughts moved tracers through dawn's television infomercial. Our hands patted our stomachs, our fingers circling.
I was convinced from that night on. That through the navel, a man could be pulled inside out.
And she bought me cherries for my train ride sweet cherries wrapped in a funnel made from pages of a old novel that nobody will ever read again. It was Friday, time for me to leave, time for me to say Goodbye for a long time, perhaps forever The early morning sun was too weak too tired to break free from the massive clouds. And like the clouds, my heart sagged and I wanted to pour out tears of rain. But I couldn't. But she did. And she let the rain fall freely fall openly upon this shoulder of mine.
We were able to choke out words of love and affection in a language that was not my native tongue, a language that has stolen my heart and has possessed my mind. And she bought me cherries for my train ride, sweet cherries.
"At the ancient pond ..." Basho
-
Trekking my grandfather's fields, my tender eleven-year-old bare feet straddle long rows of soybeans that stab up green from the yellow clay. My toes find bits of flint from the old Indian settlement on the hill and my squish-slap step startles a blue-tailed lizard who melts into a patch of dead grass. The April sun beats down onto my white arms, my pink shoulders, slicked with sweat, and I squint through the haze toward the farmhouse and barns. They glimmer wetly in the distance. I run a pasty tongue over my parched lips, a dirty hand over my clammy forehead, and bear left toward the treeline.
I hop out of damp, plowed earth into the shady undergrowth and the smell of honeysuckle, sticks poking at my naked ankles. I crunch downhill toward the swollen brown creek. Without hesitation, I plunge into the sound of water.
I stand under this canopy shade watching drizzle meet mist: sunlight illuminated orange. Hang my shoes and socks from a tree. Wade knee-high in the down-hill-slide of flowing creek: gliding over glass boulders, set water fall rush of crisp ice: invisible blue: amnesia flash: water across my ankles. Barefoot in the hills.
4 days, 2 hours, 17 minutes I scrawl the letters and numbers in blue marker across the dryerase surface on the refrigerator door. I cap the pen and reach to get an orange out of the basket on the top of my refrigerator. Inserting a nail into the fruit, I pull the thick slices of skin away, slowly. Out of the corner of my eye, my daughter shakes her head and stares at the floor, like she's searching out scuff marks on the linoleum. I check her face, and then my watch. It is Wednesday, 5:13 p.m. She's moving out on Sunday at 7:30 - she says that's when her boyfriend is bringing the U-Haul. I say I've never been so ready for anything in my entire life. At 9:21 (and I know its 9:21 because The Golden Girls is on, and they just started the second commercial break, right after Rose told a St. Olaf story, and this always happens at 21 after the hour), Jenna interrupts the break to ask if I have an extra box she could pack her pictures in. I turn the volume down and ask what color confetti she'd prefer me to throw as she leaves the apartment building. "It doesn't have to be this way," she yells, retreating to her room. "I thought you wanted a supportive mother," I yell back. The sound of Dorothy and Sofia's bickering muffles her response. Fine by me. After another episode of the show wraps up, I go into the kitchen, pen in hand, ready to change the numbers. From the opening in the kitchen, I can see underneath her closed door. I peer for any small sign of light or movement. None. Looking back up at the board, I decide it may be too late to change the countdown for today. When Jenna was small, she used to disassemble everything my husband and I gave her. It started out with the knock-off Fisher Price toys from K-Mart. She would take whatever semi-sharp objects Jack and I would make the mistake of leaving lying around and use them to pry her way through the shiny red and yellow blocks of plastic into the mechanisms of the toy. With a butter knife and the copy of the key to my Honda Civic, she successfullymutilated a jack-in-the-box, a fire truck with a working siren, and a big-key keyboard. When Jack and I finally figured out what
was going on, and that she wasn't eating the metal screws for snacks, he would help her break apart and put together almost all of her presents. By the time she was ten, she had worked her way inside and out of a Barbie digital watch, an electric toothbrush and a foot massager. Every now and then, depending on the appliance, a piece or two was left out, but her projects still usually worked okay - except for the electric toothbrush, which, after being taken apart, only worked when held at an upward left angle. Jack left when she was 11. He explained himself pretty well - he had met someone else, we'd married too young, and the rest of it. Took care of the bills, arranged weekend times with Jema, and left. Eventually, he moved out of the state.
3 days, 10 hours, 25 minutes
She watches me change the countdown as she slices bananas for her cereal. When I pour a cup of coffee for myself, I hear her sigh, as though I am interrupting a very intimate moment between her and her breakfast. I ask her how she slept. She ignores me, staring hard as she attempts to slice each banana piece in a size most like the last. When she finishes, she looks up at me and speaks. "How long are you going to keep this up?" "What?" "This attitude. I'm only going to be here for three more days, you know." "Oh, I know." I nod to the board. "That's what I'm talking about. You weren't this angry at me when I left the first time. Or maybe you just didn't act as angry." "I don't think I'm acting now." I take a sip of coffee. "But I am thinking about changing your room into a guest room, so if you come back this time, you may have to pay rent." She leaves me with her bowl of cereal. Jema's obsession with assembling and disassembling didn't stop when Jack left, but it wasn't the same as before. She tried to break down and put together a VCR, but it never seemed to work right when she got it back together. At first she said she needed a different kind of screwdriver. Two tool kits, and several screwdrivers later, the karaoke machine and
neighbor's go-cart she took apart still didn't make it back to their original form. She met Charles when she was seventeen. She was working on a how-to class presentation and she went to a car shop downtown where she could shadow a mechanic on the weekends. Charles' dad owned the shop - it was a pretty nice deal, a flagship store for a small chain corporation. Charles was nineteen, going to the local public university, and before the year was over, he had shown her how to assemble and disassemble a car. I think he actually did most of the work. She leaves early that afternoon to get lunch with a couple of friends. While she's gone, I straighten up around the house. Going room by room, I dust and polish the wooden furniture, and clean the square glass tiles on the windows. When I get to Jenna's room, I stop for a moment before going in. Looking down to where the burgundy carpet of the hallway overlaps the cream carpet of her room, I wonder if this is a line I should be careful of crossing. I go in anyway, and set to work on the dresser in the comer of her room. Standing crooked and about an inch away from the beige wall in her room, the dresser is one of the last pieces of Jenna's childhood left in the house. I survey the heavily packed boxes scattered throughout the room, and decide it will probably be the only thing remaining. Pushing my lemon-Pledged towel into the comers underneath the dresser, I am reaching through dust and over the carpet when my fingers wrap around a rusted screw. I pick the screw up, and run it through my fingers several times, touching the once-sharp edges. Under the dresser, I reach around the back where the screw once went, fingers shaking until I find it. I put the screw in, and it sits in the loose hole before falling out again. As I run my fingers over the carpet again in search of more screws, I remember her curly black hair, like my own, poking out of a 5-year-old body behind the dresser as she moved the screws in and out.
3 days, 5 hours, 25 minutes I've just changed the countdown again when she comes in looking tired. I'm drinking my fourth cup of coffee, and she breezes past me,
stopping only a moment to look at the changed numbers on the board. "Haven't given up yet?" she calls from her room. I hear her moving boxes around - she's probably situating herself to continue packing. I continue sipping the coffee.She moves around for awhile. I stand up to go in there and talk to her, but sit back down. I go to my bedroom instead. After Jema had been dating Charles for awhile, she quit working on her mechanical projects. Charles was a great guy - real nice, always brought us both flowers at the beginning of every month. He took care of everything - arranged Jenna's doctor's appointments, took care of the cars and made plans for weekend trips when they had time off. They married four years ago after she got her associates degree at the community college. After the wedding, she got a degree in office systems. Charles bought a two-story house fifteen minutes from here, they moved in, and settled. She got a job doing receptionist work at the car shop, working part-time and subbing in for other people when they needed it. He said he'd pay for her way to graduate school if she wanted to do something else, so she did - for awhile. And then she quit. They were married for three-and-a-half years when she decided she was ready to move back home at 27. Time apart, she said. She never explained why.
3 days, 5 hours, 25 minutes "You know," she says, looking at her watch, "I only have two days, nine hours, and 32 minutes." I'm fixing an omelet. Bacon with extra cheese and onion. I flip it over with my spatula, watching the droplets of grease jump across the pan. "I'm talking to you," she says in a sort of sing-song voice. "So, does this mean you've decided to cut all this out?" "Cut what out?" "You know - this attitude." "What do you expect me to do?" "Well, I'm moving out in a few days - you might want to ask me a few questions about my boyfriend." "U-Haul boy?" "His name's Jared."
"Hmrn." I slide the omelet onto the plate and sit down at the table with the paper. I open the paper to page 6A - obituaries and divorce proceedings but then stop and put the paper back down. "Where did you meet him? Are there a lot of single men in the UHaul business?" "He doesn't work for U-Haul. He's just driving the U-Haul." "Oh. That's nice." "He is nice." "Don't you think your husband might be interested in that information?" "Doubt it. He's too busy with work to worry about much else." "He's probably too busy working to pay off the loan for the school you dropped out of." When I say this, her eyes fall to the floor, and it looks like she isn't going to say anymore. I'm surprised when she opens her mouth again. "You might like him if you got to know him." Her voice is softer now. "who?" "Jared ... my boyfriend." "I think you should have just stuck with the last one you had. He was willing to put you through graduate school. It's hard to find one with money who won't leave you behind." "Don't you mean it was hard for you to find someone who wouldn't leave you behind?" After she says this, my fingers start trembling. I shove the remains of the omelet through the door of the plastic wastebasket, push my seat to the table, and retreat to my bedroom. Jenna and I don't talk about Jack very much. He's re-married with two kids now. He called once or twice in the years after the divorce, but didn't have much to say. Jenna still sees him a few times a year and speaks with him every week or so. I'd rather not. I can't count the number of men Jema has brought in here since she left Charles -each one she thought she would leave again with. Friday nights, I began expecting my Lifetime television programming to be interrupted by the slam of the door and the sound of her feet, heavy against the floor, as another relationship fell apart. I watch her with them - quiet and
unassuming - not at all like she used to be, as she waits for another chance to leave. Now she has it.
2 days, 2 hours, I1 minutes I'm changing the letters with a red marker when I hear her footsteps padding into the kitchen. I hear the noise of liquid poured into a glass, and the sound of a chair being pulled out from the table as she sits down. "I'm sorry." She apologizes to my back. "For what?" I ask, putting the finishing touches on the board. "For what I said earlier. About Dad leaving." "Oh." "What I mean is - I shouldn't have sunk to that level. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with Jared -" "Who?" "You know who." "Oh - him." "Yes, Mom. Him." She's getting angry again. Her voice always lowers when she gets upset. "That's really why you're moving out, isn't it?" "No, Mom. We've already been over this. I got a better job. I have enough money now to get my own place." "But it still has something to do with him, right?" "I don't want to talk about this anymore." "Why not? You brought it up." "Because I can't talk to you when you're like this. I can't get anything across to you because you won't listen to me." "Sounds like a problem, then." "Yeah, I guess so." She's quiet. Several minutes pass before she speaks again. "I think it is probably best if I don't stay here tonight. I'll just come back tomorrow to start getting the rest of my stuff." I drink some coffee, sit down at the table, and open the paper Maria Adams, a Clarksville resident, died of natural causes at 88. Jema stares at me, as if waiting for a response. I turn one page, and then another, and then another. She stands up and leaves.
1 day, 4 hours, 42 minutes
The board has been freshly changed for all of 5 minutes when I hear Jenna's voice and another voice coming through the front hallway. The apartment is small, and the voice is distinctly male. "I figure we can get half of the boxes today and the rest tomorrow." I can barely hear her voice for the sound of boxes scraping against walls in the narrow hallways. "That's cool. Do you still need the truck at 7:30?" He sounds busy, like he's looking over everything that he has to make room for in his house. Like he's not sure if he has room to fit my daughter into his life. They take several loads outside. I don't see him once - I make a point not to look outside of the kitchen. The newspaper print blurs in front of my eyes, and I catch myself reading the divorce proceedings two or three times. "Mom, I have someone I want you to meet." She pops her head in the door, smiling, before I have time to do anything. "All right." "Jared, this is my mother. Mom, this is Jared." He's tall and thin, not at all like Charles, who was sort of short and stocky. His hair, brown and disheveled, falls over his eyes and past his ears. "Nice to meet you," I say, unsmiling. I pick up the paper again with my already ink-stained hands. I look at my daughter, and behind her I see a toaster on the cabinet surface, the same red toaster she took apart and put together when she was twelve. I think about handing her the toaster now, in front of U-Haul Boy, and seeing what she would make of it. I look back to my paper instead. I can feel their eyes watching me, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him shuffling from one foot to the other, hands in his pockets. He sniffs, like he has a stuffy nose, and I can sense his head turning, looking out the door for a possible escape. I turn the pages, familiar now, and wait. They leave after a few minutes.
1 hour, 10 minutes
I haven't changed the board. But I keep checking my watch as each minute passes.
When she arrives again, she is by herself. "Where's your boyfriend?" I say it even though I don't really expect a response. "He's in the truck." She doesn't make eye contact with me. She arranges the brown cardboard boxes on the burgundy carpet in some sort of order only she understands. "Are you going to call when you get settled?" "I doubt it." "You aren't even going to let your mother know that you're okay?" I'm half-joking when I say this. "Why do you care now? Don't you have some confetti to throw?" I don't respond. I have nothing to say. I sit in front of the television, and flip through the stations in hopes of an unscheduled Golden Girls marathon. I see her, seeing me, watching me flip stations so fast it is obvious I can't catch a glimpse of anything. My watch is on the nightstand. I pick it up and run my fingers over the back casing, wrinkles searching for the familiar grooves on the edges - the marks of the cut of a butter knife. "I'm leaving." I don't look her in the eyes when she says this, but out of the corner of my eyes, her face looks emotionless. I change the stations several more times, and then stop. I open my mouth just as the door closes.
I heard her crying, saw his hand go back, fist clenched, knuckles glowing white in the moonlight Pulled out a crumpled pack, lit a cigarette and chose not to listen, to feign blindness in the night.
I took a drag, and didn't move, didn't think until someone screamed to call the police, poor young girl's blood getting ready to stain the pristine white of our innocent suburban hands And I took another drag, stepped out behind the car to the number of the plate, the make and model. And I wrote it all down on the gray blank slate in my head, watched his fist connect with her lip, and forgot.
I saw her blood spray carnival confetti red against the half-fogged glass of the window.
I took a drag and wondered what the hell she had done so wrong this time.
I didn't think, didn't yell, didn't move, just listened to her cry notes from an old time hymn whimpers of words I could not quite recognize mixed with the percussion slap of fist and cheek.
I watched her head go back and bounce against glass, eyes swollen so tight, I could almost pretend she was smiling.
I took a drag, heard the sirens in the distance, I took a drag, stepped back up on the curb
I took a drag and thought well, maybe she deserved it.
PoiNS~ T T M My brother made an eclipse keeper
By fashioning a shoebox so it could catch the sunA tiny yellow dot on some cardboard And as we drove our Christmas drive I rode in the back seat alone. On the floorboard a poinsettia was set in a woven basket I never noticed The bare scattered trees cast purple shadows on the snow The sky an awkward azure, not a cloud kept the sun. And I wondered if my sight would've not been different If the moon hadn't intervened. In a partial eclipse's apex You will have in your box a gold bean.
I remember flowers with primary colors, Rising from a white hill in clusters The headstones hidden under the snow. We ascended that slope stoppedTurned left They were my grandfather's favorite flowers And my brother took them in his thin arms, The other leaving his box on the passenger's side And we stood in the quiet, our breath white in the cold wind. From where did the scorn come, when he came to see me? I let it go into the fluff of his coat, under his arm watching the other - his head held above the headstones looking forward and into somewhere Backs to the sun.
I stand watching Granny take the medium blade cutting a vertical line down the sunken spot in sister's neck I feel unsure of Granny's actions but she states "it will help her breathe" and I believe because Granny is always right I watch as Granny cuts crescent shapes on either side of sister's nipples shaping fleshy gills again and again I panic but hold it inside knowing that Granny understands more than myself sister is not crying all must be well
After school, in a playground: The squeeze palm of a pink, Rubber, dime-store ball. Two exaggerated steps a long cocked Wind-up sent into the black-top Ricochet the bricks "Off the Wall" Sailing lob. Caught on a fly: out. Off the bounce: a single. And around the block: Streetwiffle (tennis balls took out Too many front-room-windows, Too many games end to the scatter-book). Middle man-hole pitcher's mound Quick pitch curves. Run The four-way for bases. Summer "It" with twenty kids Pushing sprints down gangways, Bailing o f porches, Long-step-striding across garage tops - the alley and the comers out-a-bounds. Until the streetlights came on.
Surely you are not really so damned surprised that he might suggest somewhere other than the bed, than the dark. Surely you are not as shocked and titillated as this. Lady, have you ever grabbed him by the anything, pulled him to the doesn't matter and shouted instructions? How is it that you are not sad?
- Tmcy f
~NKLIN
the seagull sails the air his support the white-bodied creature trusting the wind calls to the men below gazing toward the sky the sailors listen in awe and wonder of this being his orange hued beak screams of salvation attention spans decline as time flies and the bird of supernatural go-between annoys in flight the nuisance dives the nuisance feeds the nuisance gives a fresh coat to the cars below white like his feathers no longer ships, no longer sailors no longer providence inspired calls for the waves of postmodemism and their seas of nothing hand a little boy some alka-seltzer and silence the voice of God.
She stands up. She's holding an apple. As she tells me why she's leaving, I stare at the apple - the last piece of evidence that she's doubting her cause. It hops effortlessly back and forth between her open hands, but her fingers shake in the tiniest bit every time the red skin meets her fingertips. I take this as a good sign. Her words are flying past me, a whiz of syllables like a language I have not encountered. Moneytimealcohol. My own fingers are wrapped tightly around a coffee mug that reads "Martha's Donut Shop." I stare into the cup, light brown with milk and sugar and briefly wonder what it would be like to swim in an ocean of instant cappuccino. As I look back up at her - a mess of red cheeks, fighting words, and an ongoing blur of Red Delicious - I think of the things I want to say. I look back down to my coffee instead. As she continues tossing the apple, her fingers grow less shaky, her words less painful, her cheeks less red. I begin to think this is a language 1 can understand. My mouth opens without me consciously urging it to. As I begin to counter, I look up to see her back, and the apple, solid on the table.
Is that you Fox? bouncin above the grassblades & disappeared downFrantic lost gone right/gone left &disappeared down in the waistblade grass & gone under this dark wood lot the city ain't cut yet. They'll be by Soon enough w/ the tractor again ima big green blaze; shave the land down dead & bare the Squirrel-Bird-Coon
Opossum-Alleycat coves & the black trash creekEast of the carwash West of the dairy queen. Is that you Fox? in the dark orange downyour jump glide step n'jump n' glide downstill as the nighttime town? Lookin back t'ward the path you took ta get where you are. Is that you Fox? gone! Back the way you came.
Alejandro, Marihelena, Louis, Jose, Alfredo, Maria, and little Lucero. Once, I was there with them, Six hundred miles south of the border, Where there is no sign to welcome you to Villa de Arista, Where there is no running water, Where for toys they play with sticks, Where they're only going to school, if they have pencils. In the dirt, we sat. Marbles, we played. "Cristo Me Ama," we sang. Together, we prayed. "Adios, espero verte en el cielo," we said. Fransisca, Fransisco, Stefan, Alma, Miguel, Cristian, and Jenny. Now, my thoughts are there with them, Though I am a thousand miles north of the border, Where more than a plastic tarp shelters me from the rain, Where there will be plenty for me to eat, how I wish that I could share, Where doctors and medicine can ease my every pain, Where cold desert winds do not blow across my bed, while I dream of them. Spanish to talk with them, I'm studying. Toys to take to them, I'm collecting. Songs to sing with them, I'm learning. Prayers of God's protection for them, I'm praying. To when we meet again, I'm looking. Alejandro, Marihelena, Louis, Jose, Alfredo, Fransisca, Fransisco, Maria, little Lucero, Stefan, Alma, Miguel Cristian, and Jenny.
The grid of asphalt and concrete is stamped down, impressed upon, the earth. Above ground, the incredibly complex network of black cables and wires hovers above the streets, in suspension by stripped and naked trees. Below ground, drably colored pipes race each other in angular patterns. Tubes of space widen and elongate, grow into concrete skinned sewers that follow the roads overhead. Back over-land, pipes rise up to entangle and entangle with wires reaching out, creating strange and cubist shapes upon the landscape. The black wires bud bulbs, ceiling fans, toasters, hairdryers, televisions, and other, stranger fruit. A covering of wood, brick and shingle envelops the entire mass, secreted put. The buildings spread out from a central area at an exponential rateUnderneath and before this expansive and expanding artificial organism lies nature. Trees, grasses, vegetation, animal life move forward in generational spirals, fragile and rhythmic. Beneath the city, roots intertwine pipes; above, grass shoots pushing, cracking through concrete sidewalk pavements. Tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, snow, erosion, hail ... subtle and overt: the resistance unrelenting. Look harder, slower, closer; through the movement, people appear... The wires entangle arms, legs, buildings confine, pipes pump, selves diminish... Strange whirring noises; one man caught in the cogs, one woman, lost in the plumbing, a child, eating of a boxy flickering blue fruit... Underneath and before the expansive and expanding artificial organism lies dots and dust, specks and motes, men and women-
I remember the moon was full when we went to get tattoos, old symbols for zodiac signs, black runes scarring our left shoulders. A bonding ritual, maybe, I am still not sure, we were friends, then, but still not quite close enough to gamer matching scars, but I wanted something to touch, a raised brand to feel forever and remember you. And you were nervous, short of breath and sweating. We walked outside to wait, looked at the full moon weighing heavy in the night sky, sat on the sidewalk and talked without really saying anything. I sat so close that my knee kept grazing yours and by the time they called us in, I was giddy and reeling from the magic of the night, the electricity of each touch I claimed was accidental.
I went first and let a man whose name I cannot recall dip his needle in ink and then into my skin, and back again. I grimaced and bit my lip, picturing you to get through the first moments of pain before the adrenaline kicked in. When I was finished, you took my seat and I insisted on holding your hand. I held on tight and stood beside you, spouting off lines from movies you liked, and messing up. On the ride home, we scrunched up close in the backseat, giggled and sang. And I wanted Wes to take the long way back, relishing the heat of you against me, the sound of your voice tickling my ear. The car was jammed full and I think they all knew before we did that something was about to change. Later, we celebrated our new scars with beer and shots of Tequila. Later, still, I found you alone in the kitchen and handed you a poem. You read it as I swayed and waited, nervous of the line I had crossed. You smiled, crossed five feet that felt like ten miles, and kissed my forehead. I closed my eyes and inhaled, somewhere inside sure that the feel of your lips on my skin was a goodbye of some kind. You kissed my cheek and before I even had time to react, moved on to my lips.
On a Saturday in the middle of February, she was holding a wet white wash cloth to his forehead. Every time she wiped it over his face, it pulled off more red. Her name was Jewel. She was a short fat woman with bad skin and frizzed out brown hair, and Mike McMam had fucked her twice. The first time he was drunk. The second time he was lonely. Mike's eyes were squinted and watery. One already had a purple halo around it, and the other was swelling over. Jewel was wearing her bartender's apron. It had an embroidered Claire's in bad cursive across the top. Claire's was the tiny sports bar in the bowling alley where Mike worked. "Jesus Mike, he really got you good." "I know," Mike spat blood into a bucket between his feet and watched his hand shake. She was leaning in close to his back as she patted his forehead. She smelled like Camels, beer, and some kind of cheap shampoo. Her huge breasts kept brushing his back but he just sat up straight, staring ahead at the karaoke stage in front of him. There was a cowboy singing on the stage. He wore a broad brimmed white felt cowboy hat, turning red and green and blue every time the lights pulsed a change in the song tempo. His shirt was buttoned up to the neck and he was wearing a string tie with a longhorn holder hitting him in the center of his chest. The buckle on his belt reflected every light and shadow off of a chrome plated rattlesnake curled around a guitar. He was singing Have You Ever Seen The Rain. Credence. Mike had already sung Have You Ever Seen The Rain that night. He'd already sung a lot of things. "You're going to have some bruise," Jewel whistled slow and deep. Mike nodded. The cowboy had just finished kicking the shit out of him in the parking lot. It had been years since Mike remembered losing a fight. Just five minutes before, though, he'd been pleading with a man kneeling on his chest pummeling three of his teeth loose and his vision blurry. At first Mike had caught the upper hand. When the yelling spilled out into the parking lot, he threw the first punch. He always threw the first punch. It caught the cowboy right on the chin and knocked him back a few steps.
That was the last time Mike connected. He swung wildly a second time and the cowboy, still holding his chin, leaned back and punched Mike so hard in his exposed ribs that he heard the wind rush out of his lungs and he felt two of his ribs break. Mike's back slammed the door of his own rusty Ford, and he sank to the ground, eyes wide, trying to suck in breath. The cowboy had on pointed mock alligator boots, and as he kicked one into Mike's face, he could feel his eye swelling already and his nose clogging with blood. When the air came back to him, all he could do was moan. At that, the cowboy knelt on his chest and began wailing on his face. When the police showed up, it was Mike's cousin. If it had been anyone else, they'd both have been arrested for sure. As it was, Mike told his cousin to let the cowboy go. He didn't know why he kept the son of a bitch from getting arrested, but he had. The cowboy didn't say anything to him. He simply gathered himself and returned to the bar. Mike had to be helped inside by his cousin, until Jewel ran out and took him. "Poor baby," she'd said into his ear, and then loudly, "Aren't you going to arrest that fucker, look what he did. To your damn cousin, darnmit." Mike tried to wave her off, but she was ignoring him. Mike's cousin just shrugged, asked her to calm down and told her that Mike wasn't interested in pressing charges. "Well, I can at least throw his ass out of the goddamn bar then can't I." "Yes, ma'am, you've got all the freedom you want to kick people out." "Fine - Hey Asshole, you're fucking out of here right fu-" "Don't." Mike sounded stupid. A mouth full of mashed up teeth and bleeding gums made any attempt to talk sound like more or less emphatic grunts. This one was more emphatic. "Let him stay. " Somehow Jewel had figured out what he meant, and she shook her head. She didn't try to argue. She just put ice in a washcloth and sponged at Mike's head. As the cowboy stood on stage, tall and composed, Mike saw him dead. He saw him on the side of the road bound up with wire, his mouth stuffed with a dirty sock. He saw him bloody lashed to a tree with bruises shaped like rocks all over his body. He saw him shot. Simple. No blood
really, just shot. Dead. For a moment Mike never hated someone so badly in his life. He spat out a tooth that he'd tongued loose. Almost everyone who had been there before the fight had returned. Bob the owner and proprietor of the Happy Trails Karaoke Night had come back inside and resumed his seat. The guy with the flat top had a cigarette punched between his lower lip and his handlebar moustache. Mike didn't know if he had even moved when the fight broke out. A quiet couple was sitting in the corner where they had been, each one looking a different direction, and neither of them ever looking at the stage. Mike never actually saw them drink, but somehow the alcohol always disappeared. The cowboy was still on stage, and Jewel was busy with Mike's head. Other than that, Mike could make out the balding head of Rockin' Jimmy swaying back and forth out of sync with the music. Rockin' Jimmy was retarded. Mike didn't know what exactly the hell was wrong with Jimmy, but Jimmy acted just about like all the retarded people on television that Mike had seen. His mouth was always open and he could have been twenty-six or forty-five. Jimmy worked at the movie theater, cleaning up garbage that shitty teen-agers left behind. After that, every weekend, he took the bus to the bowling alley so that he could sing karaoke. Mike always thought it was silly when people called Jimmy's style singing. Jimmy sang karaoke in the same hesitant halting way that he talked, sometimes spitting out a bunch of words all at once halfway through a sentence as if he were making up for the slow start. Jimmy also rocked. He actually swayed back and forth at all times when the music was going. Away in some other place, never in time to the music, Rockin' Jimmy wasn't really there. When the music stopped, though, like clockwork, Jimmy clapped. Besides Jimmy and a few others, the place was empty. "Ow, what the hell is that?" "Sorry, hon, I put some rubbing alcohol on the rag, I don't want you to get infected." "Well tell me next time before you go and do some shit like that. The last thing I want right now is more damn pain." His words were slurring less and less now that he'd gotten some feeling back in his tongue. Jewel didn't respond, but she kept dabbing his head with the alcohol. The cowboy was tapping his foot in rhythm to the song. Mike had been tapping his foot to the song earlier when the three
girls walked in. Fine young women, college girls. The kind that never came into a dive like Claire's. Mike thought that the best way to describe them was clean. They had tight pants on and frilly blouses, and their hair managed to catch the shitty bar lighting and reflect back highlights. They'd walked in and sat at the table next to the stage when Mike was in the middle of singing Hurt So Good by the Coug. He was staring so hard that he neglected the monitor and screwed up the whole last third of the song. The girls didn't notice. Immediately, they buried their heads in the selection book, looking for whatever college girls look for in karaoke bars. The song ended. Jimmy clapped. And Mike went back to the bar where Jewel was clearly irritated. "You like what you see there?" "Its good to see someone close to my own age." "Hell, honey, twenty-one and twenty-seven ain't that close." "It's closer than twenty-seven and forty-two." Jewel blushed. Mike asked for another beer and he didn't notice as she slipped and slammed two glasses together in her hands, shattering them. He didn't notice the blood on her hand when she set his glass down, and he didn't notice the glass half full of foam. What he did notice was one of the girls, a tall brunette girl nearly six-feet tall, with a low cut black blouse and a diamond cut where her cleavage began. Mike noticed the diamond, the flesh pink and the black line where the crease of her breasts began. Mike noticed until she noticed him. When she tapped her friend and pointed at him, he looked away. Now he was looking down at a bucket slowly filling with his blood, two teeth somewhere in that mix, and he felt sick. The three chairs where the girls had been sitting were vacant, and the three behind them were arranged like a fan around them. Mike didn't hear the music stop, but he heard Jimmy clapping. Suddenly Bob had a hand on his shoulder. "You're name's next on the list, Double M, are you sure you still want to go?" "Yes." He tried not to say too much. "Now, Mike, I don't know if you need to be doing this." "I'm fine, Jewel. Now? Bob." "Yeah, if you think you're ready, son." Nodding, Mike stood up, his right leg felt dead, so he dragged it as he walked, limping through the tables and chairs. The guy with the
handlebar moustache blew a smoke ring and looked the other way as he walked by. Bob patted the top of his back as he walked by and he tried to smile. Dried blood pulled at his cheek and so he stopped trying. The cowboy was sitting close to the stage, drinking beer out of a bottle, his bottom lip puffed out with tobacco. He spat on the floor and stared at Mike. The bells on the door rang quickly when the cowboy had first walked into the bar. It was between songs, and Mike looked up from his beer. Everyone looked up from their beers. Everyone except the girls, they remained focused and giggling at their selections. The cowboy sat at the table next to the girls and gazed at them from under the brim of his hat. Mike was called to the stage. He sang The Dance by Garth Brooks, and he sang it to the girls, staring at them and belting it out, even once beating his breast for dramatic effect. Once or twice one of the group would look up and then mumble something which made all three laugh. When he finished, Jimmy and Jewel clapped. The cowboy and the girls did not. Back at the bar, Mike watched as all three girls climbed on stage and half babbled half sang Brittany Spears' Baly One More Time. He just stared. He thought that they looked so awkward in a sexy kind of way. When they finished everyone clapped. The cowboy sang next, and Mike wheeled his stool around at the opening of the song. It was The Dance, the song he'd just finished. That fucker couldn't steal Mike's damn song. He was singing it better, too. There was a weird emotion in the cowboy's voice, which made Mike feel suddenly shallow and flat. The girls noticed. They were all looking up at him, and the cowboy kept his eyes fixed on nothing at the back of the bar. Sometimes looking at Mike. Shit eating motherfucker. Mike would try to nod and smile back when the cowboy looked at him, but he felt too stiff. The song ended and everyone clapped. The cowboy stared at Mike as he returned to his seat, waving his hand at Jewel for a beer. Mike looked away. When Mike sang Unchained Melody and Killing Time and the cowboy followed suit, he was pissed. He sat at the bar staring holes through the son of a bitch while Jewel leaned in close to him. "Calm down now, babe, maybe he doesn't know that you're not supposed to take other people's songs." "Doesn't know. He knows, and if he keeps it up, I'm going to tell him about it."
He'd told him about it alright. As he was stepping up onto the stage, Mike could feel something wet on his cheek, he knew it was blood. The cowboy was chuckling. He laughed harder as Mike started the song. W e both lie sound asleep in the dead ofthe night ... though we both lie close together, wefeel miles apart inside. Mike was onstage when the three young men walked in and were greeted with squeals and hugs from the girls. The cowboy looked over at them and then back up to Mike. He lifted his request paper, Livin O n a Prayer, the song that Mike was in the middle of. Mike dropped the microphone and stepped off the stage. "You son of a bitch, you know that's bullshit, don't you?" "You'd best be easy, little man, I'll kick the shit out of you." "You couldn't kick the shit out of shit, mother fucker." The cowboy laughed. Mike spit in his face. Behind him Mike could hear the holy shits and check it outs from the new college boys. The cowboy wiped the spit from his chin and pointed at the door. Mike followed him. The crowd of college kids followed behind. Turning as he got outside, Mike took one last look at the tall brunette as she leaned against the wall with her friends and she laughed out loud when she caught him staring. "See that shit? That creep's been gawking at me all night." Mike heard her as he turned back around. He didn't think. He clocked the cowboy in the mouth.
Every rose has its thorn, just like every night has its dawn, just like every cowboy sings a sad sad song. The cowboy was banging his fist on the table and laughing now, and Mike watched the silhouettes blur and the lights dim in and out of focus. He felt wetness on his cheek again. He couldn't sing. He was gasping and holding his stomach. He lifted his hands to his face and the screaming nearly popped his eardrums. It was him. He was crying, sitting down on the stage, spitting out blood. He saw himself dead. Lying in a puddle of blood and oil next to his truck. He saw the cowboy standing over him, laughing. He saw himself dead, and he couldn't move. The lights pulsed and they pulsed in his head. The music was gone, and the bar was silent. His sobs echoed through the mic. Then Bob was behind him, his hands under Mike's armpits, helping him down from the stage. Tears were running down his face. He wasn't even trying to walk.
Jewel caught him up in her arms about three feet from the stage as the cowboy fired a string of spit at Mike's feet. He was really crying. It hurt for him to sob. Somewhere he could feel two parts of what used to be one rib rubbing together, and he leaned into Jewel as she backed him towards the bar. His non-swollen eye was closed, and he didn't open it until he smelled bleach and cigarettes. Jewel had taken him into the bathroom, and she was running her hands through his hair. Tears dribbled off of his face and he could feel the dried blood pulling and cracking as he moved his mouth. Jewel's big palm was on his neck, big and sweaty and hot. She was whispering to him, and she was leaning into him. His back was against the wall and her breasts were smashed against his body. The frizzled hair in his nose smelled faintly like coconuts and plastic. She leaned her head back, keeping his body pinned with hers, and kissed his swollen and broken lips. He closed his mouth but she opened hers, flicking her tongue across his mouth. Now her hands were under his shirt, rubbing up his stomach and his chest. He pushed at her shoulders, trying to get her away "No, no, I'll make you feel better. You know I will." Her breath was already ragged and she had her hands down his pants now. He was getting aroused and he didn't want it. Jewel was already starting to moan. Her body temperature must have gone up five degrees. She pulled down her own pants and lifted up the apron, and she leaned onto him. He closed his eye and thought about the college girls. The clean girls with their tight pants and shirts. The looks on their faces when they sang songs, eyes half closed, sometimes feeling the music for just a second before giggling at taking themselves too seriously. Through a crack in the unclosed bathroom door, Mike could hear the rich voice of the cowboy. I guess that's why they say e u e y rose has its thorn. Jewel was moaning loudly in his ear now, rocking back and forth against him, the heat from her stomach and breasts wrapping his skinny body. Like a lumpy wet blanket, her skin enveloped him. She smelled like sweat and beer. He couldn't look at her, so he stared out the door. Amongst the crowd he could only see silhouettes, most of them were still. Jewel gasped in his ear. The only gray moving against the black was rocking back and forth out of rhythm to the song. The song ended. Jewel sighed. Jimmy clapped.
They had all been gifts from meporcelain and painted plaster, bow-and-arrow cherubs, and one that played Amazing Grace. They had all been precious to herfeathered and framed with flowers, smiling and singing seraphim, St. Michael defeating a snaky devil, They had all been syrnbolsof a devotion (doomed), of a relationship (ruined), of some star-crossed silliness that we wanted to work and begged each other to believe. Now they all are brokentoken fragments to say all the unspoken the unsaid the silence the. Now they all are shatteredscattered in my shocked sheets that never expected never wanted never thought these angels. Now we're all in piecescreases in my blankets cradling the remains of sweet dreams, sharp points pressing into my back my mind my heart my.
Never forget nights When Mothers-in-law Stop hating Daughters-in-law When just outside the door Winter Sundays Are frosted by crunchy snow Fathers and Friends Surround living room fireplaces That lurch with an alcohol flicker So sacrificed Mothers can Hiccup muddy vomit Onto lifeless sagging breasts While little Boys Clutch grandmother Bibles Staring obediently down at shoes And Grandmother shawls Wipe away their names Again and Again
This enormous constellation dome floats atop the gulf tide. Shattered stars: blue and green glide right across this gulf tide The waves' fingers are pounding out a sonata into the shore. All dancing to the rhythms of the ocean's grieving tide.
I thought I was finished chasing her across these evening skies. Midnight, collecting moonlit shells washed in with the leaving tide. White sand island beach, grassy dunes, the impetuous drive; the stars are fading - their ebb like a crushed tide. Chasing her shells while trying to catch the tail of a star, my hands moving through the sand and sky like a thieving tide. Why does the serenity of this night bring her name to my lips? Dan, you should know that this woman dances like a gulf tide.