Cellar Door Spring 2003

Cellar Door Spring

2003

Volume

28

Number

2

www.unc.edulthedoor

Dorothy Ball, co-editor Lauren Reynolds, co-editor Elizabeth Templin,poetry editor Emily Vasquez, art editor Selena Beckman-Harned, web designer Katie Melville, treasurer Michael McFee, faculty advisor

Staff Lisa Bevevino

Terry Bruns Lee Cannon

Kate Coxon Julia Hansen Jack Kimball Jennifer Kling Meredith Oates Lane Pearson

Celia Quinn Joyce Turner Laurel Wamsley

Cover: 4:30 in the Afternoon by Brenna Murphy Copyright Cellar Door Š 2003 Cellar Door, the student literary magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is published twice annually and welcomes submissions from all undergraduate students currently enrolled.

Guidelines for submission can be found on the web. If you would like to SUppOTt the arts by patroru2ing Cellar Door, please contact Michael McFee, the faculty advisor, at mcfee@emai1.unc.edu or by phone at 9'9-962-3461. Cellar Doorgratefully acknowledges the generous financial suppo-r of the UNC Student Government, the Blanche Armfield Fund in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of EngliSh Gift Fund.

poetry Kerri French Evan Gurney Derek Vanderpool Sarah Blackburn HannonyJohnson Charles Battle Elizabeth Doggett Megan Smith Wayla Chambo Jennifer Taylor Sarah Dunsmore

Two Poems/8 On Drinking a Pint of Full Sail Ale 125 Craft 126 Night 136 To the Half-Self I 65 Companion Poems I 66 Night Rirual/79 Two Poems I 80 Flight EZYI99, London to Edinburgh 195 Interplanetary Connections 197 Two Poems I ID8

prose Michael Pesant James O'Boyle Justin Ansley Michael B. Jones Jackie Sipes David Chapman Christopher Lamb

To Give Form or Meaning I f3 Small Story 129 Twice Upon a Time I 3f Stimulus/Response 139 YeJlow Roses I 7f News from Azazell 85 Rocket Science I 99

interview Dorothy BaH

Michael Collier On Emcees and Poets Laureate

art Brenna Mu rphy Erin Sullivan MererlithJenkins Lindsey Britt Audrey Barrett Deborah Dorland Jonathan Karpinos

Two Photographs I cover, 30 Untitled 17 Three Prints I rz, 28, 84 Unritled 138 China Market I 49 Sad Angell 70 Phil in Bynum 198

15'

2003

spring contest

judges

Mark Cox chairs the Department of Creative Wriring at UNC-Wilmington. His honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award and The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He has served as poetry editor of both Passages North and of Cimarron Review, has received numerous fellowships, and has served as Poet in Residence at The Frost Place. His latest books are Thirty-seven Years from the Stone (Pitt Poetry Series, 1998) and Natural Causes, forthcoming in 2004.

Robert Morgan received his BA in English in 1965 from UNC-Chapel Hill and his MFA from UNC-Greensboro in 1968. He is the author of three volumes of shorr stories, eight books of poetry; and four novels, including Gap Creek (Algonquin, 2000). which was awarded the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for F.iction and selected for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. He IS a professor of English ar Cornell University, and is presently the Blackburn Distinguished Visiting Writer at Duke University.

poetry First Place Kerri French

Late Night Sex on Daytime TV SecondPlace Wayla Chambo Flight EZY 199, London to Edinburgh Third Place Derek Vanderpool Craft

fiction First Place Michael B.Jones Stimulus/Response Second Place Christopher Lamb Rocket Science Third Place Michael Pesant To Give Form or Meaning

art First Place Erin Sullivan Untitled

photograph by Erin Sullivan

7

Late Night Sex on Daytime TV

If this were a soap opera, the music would come on before we made it to the bed, no need for knobs or remotes, electricity would live only in the spaces where we touched.

On television, the hidden parts would be shown in flashbacks between the sheets, our best angles wrapping each other past spiJled glasses of champagne, lipstick newly applied, with a subtle coat or a pair of heels predictably sunk into the pink Carpet of a Paris hotel room.

There would be no in-between shots of unwrapping condom, no clumsy reaching for bra,

8

or long rip of zipper, never in the backseat of a car or up against a bathroom stallwe would wake looking perfect come next morning, no worries except for what the writers may throw OUf way: a sudden illness requiring a miracle transplant, another woman who claims to be both my sister and your ex-wife, or perhaps a dead husband now alive, though the town all watched him fall from a bridge merely one year ago, leaving nothing behind except my three-month pregnancy and a note telling me he's so sorry, and it's all my fault.

Kern French

9

r ,

Snapshots of a Trip Home (or the night we left a poem as tip)

At sixteen, we drive past the houses of thirty-two year old men, examine purple station wagon clues: as if a gteen Carmy could take us further than these accents, these nights where we leave notes under doors, slide poems beneath the windshields of strangers found in bookstores and bars.

Between no i.d. and beer, we dial cross-country and reach the voice of forty-eight and notoriously in need of sex, or just Some reluctant girl to tell him he's wanted-later, it's twenty-nine and famous, too busy fucking women that resemble his wife, throwing up on favorite pairs of shoesand last week, she forgot his birthday, and this week, everything is a movie, mapped Out and on fire.

This is just another scene of running through the streets, forever in search of the script that will tell us the meaning of other people's lives, or what it means to settle for some waiter with crooked teeth, to believe that our crooked hearts will one day stumble past

fa

all of the wrong ones, the wrong nights spent knocking on doors, the flash of listening to grown boys ramble on about their dusty eight-track collections.

Fear of rejection makes them lie: today, he is thirty-three going on thirty-six, but yesterday, he was renting a house with peeling paint and a Southern porch; tomorrow he will give us magazines and deny that he has a girlfriend-all of them, nothing to show except some burnt out speakers and a salary that makes them laugh; and this one is just another poem, another story to wrap our pens around.

Read it out loud, we beg, as if the words need to be set free from the crumpled napkin, breathed into the feel of the tables moved too close together, the late hours of coffee refills and almost closing.

This town is a puzzle, and us, a few pieces missing. Like weeds, overrun.

He tells us that we are evolving: bright, urban things.

Kern French

11

Meredith Jenkins J2

To Give Form or Meaning

Story This is not a story, at least not in the traditional sense.

There is no climax and denouement; no beginning, middle or end; and there is no unifying theme. I am twenty-two years old. I've faced no real hardships in my life, saved no Doe from a burning building, and never been in love. A few weeks ago I suffered a nervous breakdown at a luncheon being given in my father's honor. This is being written, on therapists' recommendation, from the east wing of the Serenity Bay Hospital.

Places l. Coconut Creek Island, Fl. Suburban island living for those lucky enough to afford it. Ten square miles of small streets lined with Palm Trees and Bougainvillea flowers.

Modestly sized, but elegant houses. Nothing too big, gaudy or trashy; even though they can afford it, good taste and zoning laws take precedence. Fathers commute fifteen minutes every morning, via causeway and two bridges, to Downtown Miami where they spend their days in Banks or Law Firms. Darkskinned Central American women in pristine white uniforms wheel around stroUers taking people's babies to the park.

Moms work real estate, or interior decorating, or don't. Mine is

13

a "caregiver," though I'm not sure that's a real job. Our house is a pale yellow four-bedroom, three-bath on the cornet of Beachwood Drive and West Heather. On Tuesdays, the gardener comes, though no one ever eats the coconuts. The pool guy comes on Monday morning; I guess we used to go swimming in it when we were little.

2. Rollins College Campus. Wmter Park, FI. Pastel clad fraternity boys line the wooden benches by the spewing granite fountain. Dreadlocked hippie kids toss Frisbees at just lounge around on the green grassy quad. They all have nice Jeeps. Princeton Review College Rankings: #8 Small Class Sizes, #3 Best Place to Marry Rich.

3路 Sereniry Bay Hospital. I get to have my own room here because my parents have the good insurance. Double bed, flower print comforter, fake flowers in a pewter pot with fake Spanish moss. There are two framed pictures on the wall. One is "Paris at Night," the other is flowers. They feed us three meals a day, plus an afternoon snack in the Inunge. I like the Boston cream pie, if I feel like leaving the room.

4路 Matheson Day School. They filmed a movie here, called "Wild Things." You should really see it.

People I. Father. Robert Lancing Hurstwood,Jr. I didn't get to be the third. That's my nlder brother; he's thirty-two and works in Jacksonville. Dad was Senior Vice President, retired, at Union Planters Bank downtown. He has three children; boy, girl, boy; all of them grown. He's known as a Scotch drinker, cigar smoker, gifted sailor, seasoned angler, and a temperamental golfer. From 1996-7 he was Commodore Hurstwood at the Yacht Club. Lions Club, Mercy Hospital Board of Director, Orange Bowl Committee. BA University of Florida; MBA Stetson in Orlando. Grandfather of two (my sisrer), they caU him grumps instead of gramps.

2. Mother. Virginia Coleman Hurstwood.

Degree in Italian, Rollins College. White wine on Saturday evenings; ?loo~yMarys the next morning at brunch: no horseradish. [ennis an.yone? Not in this heat. She got raving reviews for her new Medlterranean_styJe kitchen. She is artistic.

14

Every January, she runs a Spagherti Dinner at the club raise funds for inner city scholarships. Sophomore year, when Ransom played Miami Central in the county baseball playoffs, she had to drive me to their field in Cutler Ridge. On the way there, four black kids were crossing the street in front of her car, so she hits the automatic door lock button and I swear it was so loud they all turned around. Volvo should really do something about that.

J. When I was a sophomore in high school I dated a girl named Corrine Mathews. She was a freshman. We spent a lot of time with her best friend Katy and her boyfriend James.

He was on the baseball team too, starting shortstop. Corrine was my first real girlfriend and my first real experience with sexual stuff. One night in the laundry room of this kid's house party she told me she wanted to have sex. Katy and James had sex. I was happy with blowjobs.

A week after our five month anniversary she broke up with me. She said she looked at the way Katy and James were together and knew our relationship wasn't as good. It's true.

Katy was prettier than Corrine, and I wasn't half as cool as he to

was.

4. Dr. Benson. I thought there would be a black couch to lie down on but really there are only two armchairs facing each other. He must be good because from my chair I can see his degrees on the wall. There are four of them. Also, his secretaries look like Tri Deltas from Rollins College. The first time I came in we talked about baseball. He played shortstop; I was second string first base. Endless opportunities for metaphors about my mental health. He's come to see me a couple times here at Serenity Bay. It was his idea that I start putting down my thoughts in this journal.

Drugs 1. Mom's bathroom cabinet, behind the dogs' heartworm medication. Pills, Pills, Pills ... Xanax 2omg. Twice a day, after a meal. I steal two and take them in the bathroom after homeroom. Nothing happened. Maybe they need to be m.ixed with some white wine.

'5

2. Sophomore year, Matheson Day Scbool. Morgan Rambler and I ride in his Volkswagen to deliver some pamphlets to the Chamber of Commerce. We're both in Student Council. He packs a small glass pipe with some bud from a fil.m canister. The smoke burns my throat and makes my eyes water. Morgan offers me some Visine to douse my eyes in before we get there, but I refuse. Who cares if all those folks know that Mr. Hursrwood's youngest son is a stoner?

Later in fourth period English Class I zone out staring at Mrs. Langley's desk. She's a Gator Mom, it says so on her coffee mug. She wants to save the whales and doesn't believe in censorship. Its all so easy; she's defined herself conveniently on a three-by-four-foot worn wooden desk. A silver apple opens up to reveal a delicious little assortment of hard candies.

Teacher.

3路 Senior Prom. I'm sitting next to my date, Margot Wainger, in the backseat of a black limousine. Everyone else is still inside the ballroom. She pushes her key into a baggie of white powder. Hands shaking, I take the key from her but spill the coke clumsily on the leather seat. She's pissed. No more for me.

Somewhere upstairs at the Delta house at Rollins. We sit in a room with the door Jacked. Rolled up twenties make perfect passageways from the table tops straight to our domes.

A few seconds after, I start to feel a cold bitter sensation in my throat followed by a tingling numbness that starts at my fingertips and shoots down straight to my toes. I leave the room to smoke a cigarette feeling about ten feet tall. The next morning I wonder if everyone at the party could tell how higb I was.

4路 Liquor. You drink until your head is numb and you forget who you are. You talk and talk to the closest girl to you on the couch. "I've had a crush on you since we met," you tell her. She eats it up. The next morning you forget that it even happened. Perfect.

5路 LSD. Who invented

this shit?

Meetings 1. Assistant Principal's Office.]unior Year, Ransom Everglades. Mrs. I-IoweJJ is the second to last left down the /6

main corridor. Big mahogany desk with a glass vase and rea! flowers. A silver bowl with potpourri and a few framed pictures on the desk of her family: husband, two daughters, nine and twelve, they go to the lower school. "Do you want to tell me why your school work is starting to go downhill?" "Why you've been missing baseball practice?" "I thought you were going to run for president of the senior class." l'Why do you keep staring at the wall?" "Look me in the eyes." "What happened to graduating with honors?" "College?"

2. I'm in the kitchen of our lovely island home. Mom has her elbows on the marble counter top and is rubbing her temples with a thumb and index finger. The other hand grasps a chardonnay. "Have we not given you everything you wanted?"

"Do you want to keep your Jeep?" "Go out on weekends?" "I don't need to get any more phone calls, your father is so stressed lately." "I'm not even sure he should hear about this, given his heart problems."

3. Dr. Benson's Office. On my second visit he hands me a ballpoint pen and stack of papers. It's a personality inventory. I'm stoned as a billygoat, and the black ink. seems to rise off the page and talk to me. Just decide who you are, tell us what's wrong. We'll fix you up and send you home with the bill.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

True or False: Other people's opinions are important to yOll. True or False: You hate your parents.

Who are you? Define Yourself!

Rites of Passage I. Some of the southwestern Indian tribes used to conduct ritua!s involving peyote. They had to eat it up and then go a long wa!k by themselves until they had a vision. I've heard of people who try to mimic these riruals now. They make a tea out of the peyote and trip for days. Apparently, a little while after you drink the tea you throw up violently, and then the hallucinations start.

2. When I was twelve the Ramblers invited us to fish the Gulf Stream with them on their yacht. Mr. Rambler had named the boar ~ Moveable Feast," like the Hemingway book.

We were trolling when one of the lines went taut and I reeled

'7

in a barracuda. It was a two-foot-Iong shiny silver beast with a pointed head and a gnarly-looking set of razor sharp teeth.

Morgan told me that the first time you caught a cuda you had to take the hook out yourself With my right foot I stepped on its tail and brought my trembling hands down to its mouth.

The fish was bleeding out of the gills, and when he flopped it splattered bright red blood allover the deck and my white tshirt. I spent about five minutes trying to jiggle the hook out without actually putting my hands in its mouth, when Dad walked over and cut the line with a set of pliers. He grabbed the fish and tossed it overboard with a tired look on his face.

He was hoping to catch a sailfisb that day. I was hit with a sudden feeling of nausea and leaned over the side to feed the fish. ). At Rollins I had joined the same fraternity as my dad. I didn't know it at the time but apparently they had a list of names and mine was On it on account of my father having been a Delta. For the first few weeks the guys there would take me out every night, get me drunk and high, and introduce me to girls. Afterwards, when we were pledges, we crawled around on our hands and knees while people screamed and forced warm liquor down Out throats. In front of us was always a trash can to puke in. I earned, after nine weeks of this, the right to wear a t-shirt around campus letting everyone now that I was affiliated with a group.

Voices There are no strange voices in my head.

Words I. Corrine and I had an afternoon ritual of going to her house and rollmg around in bed before her parents got home.

One Thursday I told her that I loved her. I don't know if I meant it or even if the word love really means anything at all. I think I Just wanted to hear someone besides my parents tell me that they loved me.

A while after that Corrine confessed to me that she had only said it back because she felt sorry for me. After we

broke up I wondered where she had learned to give such great blowjobs.

2. Freshman year in college I met a girl named Sandy who lived down the hall from me in the dorm. She had short blonde hair and a really cute figure. One weekend a group of us went to a kid's beach house for the night. We got a bunch of beers and lounged in the sun all day. Sandy had on a yellow Brazilian cut bikini that all the girls are wearing these days; at least the ones with really good figures. I couldn't take my eyes off of her. That night I spent most of my time talking to her and sipping beers. I told her that I really liked her. She ended up leading me by the hand to a bedroom upstairs where J lost my virginity. When we were done Sandy wanted to cuddle and talk but I told her I wanted to go outside to smoke a cigarette and have another beer with the guys. Before we had sex I was a liar; afterwards I was a jerk.

J. There is this thing we used to do before all our Matheson baseball games. It is a sort of question and answer except that everyone says the same thing.

What are we?

Champions!

What are we gonoa do?

Prove it!

Theories 1. Six degrees of separation. There is a movie about this in which the Fresh Prince plays a gay guy. That makes him a good actor, a thespian. If you're a movie buff, you can playa game about it with Kevin Bacon. The basic idea is that everyone on Earth is connected to each other by less than six people. If I had unlimited time and resources, I could connect Dr. Benson to a four-year-old girl in a Bombay orphanage. Who cares?

2. Evolutionary Psychology. Because the main goal of existence is to procreate and pass our genes on to the future, humans have adapted a method to pick out the most suitable partners for reproduction. Men seek out women who are sex objects; women seek out men who are success objects. I can't deny that I'm drawn towards young fertile women, it's my

'9

nature as a human male. I don't think I want to be a success object.

3路 One degree of alienation. I came up with this nne on my own. No matter how close you are to someone, they still have someone else who they confide in too. Your wife may complain to you about one of her girlfriends, but when they're alone together she's telling her stuff about you. There are no real secrets and no such thing as intimacy. Don't be fooled.

Social Events I. Last year I went to Delta Fall Formal with a girl named Jenny Hearst. She is from Ft. Lauderdale and in a sorority. Her dress Cost $250. I wonder if she wiU wear it again.

At these things you get dressed up in a tuxedo, go out to dinner, and then go to some rented ballroom to get boozed.

Jenny talks all night about her friends and classes, and complains about her roommate,JiJI. If I listen and agree she will like me. If I call her afterwards, we may end up hooking up. lEI don't call her after that, she will complain about me to her roommate.

2. I go to a Jot of concerts with some kids I know They call them "shows." This past spring a bunch of us decided to follow a band on tour for a week. We get to the shows early and walk around the parking lot talking to other kids sitting on the back of their trucks. Usually they have drugs, and we have money. If I take enough drugs and the music is on point, something magical happens. I like it best when the drums are too loud and there is not a lot of singing. Also, the bigger the crowd, the better. As long as they keep playing I can usually forget that I even exist and just follow the lights with my eyes.

Some nights it's like the whole building and all the people in it and the band are just one big breathing organism, and the air is pure and good and satisfYing.

3路 April 27路 Robert Lancing HurstwoodJr., man of commerce, pillar of the community, gifted sailor, seasoned angler, temperamental golfer, etc. _ . has his life cut tragically short at the age of sixty-four. I found out later that he had a massive coronary after missing a relatively easy putt on the back n.i ne of the Coral Reef COUntry Club. He left behind a 20

wife, three children, two grandchildren, and a well-planned estate. Mother is a well-adapted person. She chose an excellent success object.

After the church service, we had a luncheon in OUf house. I had to cut my touring short and drive home from Charleston, Sc. My friends were devastated; my Jeep was supposed to drive them to three more shows. I don't know how they ended up getting home.

At the funeral and luncheon I wore a black suit with a dark blue tie. My father had a black knitted tie that he wore when his father died. My older brorher got to wear that. It means he is in mourning. He had flown down that morning on a fligbt fromJacksonviJIe. My sister was there with her husband and kids. The house was a zoo of familiar childhood characters: aunts, uncles, neighbors, people from the Club, and, of course, all of my father's esteemed colleagues. They had on their dark suits and dresses, they wore solemn funeral faces and offered each other quiet condolences and not-so-quiet anecdotes of Robert Hursrwood's fulfilling life.

I-retreated as soon as possible to myoId room, a prisoner in our lovely island home and subject to a torturous barrageof questions about school and compliments on what a fine father I had lost. Desperate for a way out, I searched through the duffel bag I'd brought on tour until I found the bottle of Sweet breath filled with doses that I'd bought at the show I squeezed and squeezed the little bottle, but nothing would come dripping onto my tongue. Still not defeated, I stuck the whole thing in my mouth and chewed until it turned into an unrecognizable pile of plastic shards. The plan was to put on some music, lie in bed, and lose myself until the whole mess was over.

My mother carne knocking on the door about twenty minutes after thar. She had on the same black dress she had worn to her father-in-law's funeral. I'll bet she was tickled it still fit. She insisted I come outside to get something to eat and talk to my brother and sister. I waited for that good heavy feeling to descend over me but nothing happened. I hadn't wanted to go out there sober, but I guessed the bottle really was empty. Maybe there was a bottle of scotch out for the old men.

21

When 1 walked into the living room everyone kept staring at me and yelling something but 1 couldn't figure out what. Finally; when my sister emerged in front of me and said it, I realized they were calling out my name. It sounded strange and alien to me, almost like the nonsense a baby talks. I must have looked pretry strange to the rest of them too as 1 stared at them with wide eyes and a gaping mouth.

My sister led me by the arm to the dining room where the patterns on the tablecloth started to come alive and dance among the plates of food. My stare fixed itself to the honeybaked ham and that's when 1 started to lose it. 1 saw a million tiny images of my father's face in the pinkish outside glaze of the ham hock. His entire essence seemed to imprint itself on every slice and 1 watched in horror as the glistening mouths of the mourners chewed and swallowed my dead father.

Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and placed a plate in my hands with two big slabs of ham and some macaroni salad. Everyone was looking at me nodding encouragement to eat it up. They were taking everything the old man had been and incorporating it into their definition of themselves. Soon they would be better off from having consumed him. He would add a personal touch to someone's speech at the next American Heart Association Gala. Someone would go to a job interview and say "yes, I'm related to him, the brilliant businessman, philanthropist, family man ... 1 miss him terribly, but his legacy is an inspiration to ali of us." They all wanted me to grab my share and dig in, to join in their feast of self-improvement and identification.

I freaked out, lost it, let my plate of food fall through trembling hands and shatter on the floor. I'm told 1 was swearing loudly and tearing food Out of people's hands. "That poor kid," they said, "is lost without his father." I remember being there, the sound of glass colliding with the wall but not shattenng, and the bitter taste of pills when my sister forced a couple of Mom's Valiums into my mouth and made me swallow T~e rest I'm sure is bu.ried somewhere deep in the place in my mind where people shove memories that don't fit in with their basic definitions of themselves.

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Apparently, my sister checked me in here, and I can leave as soon as I figure out what's wrong and start some sort of treatment.

Disorders 1.

Schizophrenia. This disease interferes with a

person's ability to think. clearly; manage emotions, make

decisions, and relate to others. People who suffer from it often have delusions and hallucinations. Most commonly people hear voices that normal people can't. There is no real cure, just some medicine that quiets the voices and makes you fat and sedentary. I don't think I have this.

2. Substance Abuse. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Then you go off drinking and drugs forever.

You join some group with other pathetic losers like yourself You have meetings where you hold hands and cry and thank God for letting you make it another day. Everyone there smokes like mad and drinks burnt coffee while you stand in front of them and tell them your name and story. No matter what you say a bunch of former drunks and junkies clap like crazy and yell "Keep Coming!" You become a recoverer.

No, I don't have a problem.

3- Dissociative Fugue. This one is fun. A person with DF adopts a new identity after leaving their old home and forgetting about their previous identity. They survive and sometimes even thrive under their new identities. Then, after a few months, they remember who they really are and go back home. Usually, the whole thing is ttiggered by a major stressor in their lives.

4. Depression. This normally involves a family history.

Common symptoms are paranoia, fatigue, and lack of interest in work, relationships and family. A lot of people cease to enjoy the things they used to love doing. Sometimes it can be brought on by a major stressor or traumatic episode, though most people believe that it's a biological problem in the brain, a lack of certain chemicals. Once diagnosed, you get some outpatient therapy and a set of pills that make every beer you drink about three times as powerful. Perfect.

23

A Shitty Poem "Power Moves" Give me an image.

Make me cool.

No, No! Not like that.

Don't]UST give me: WeH-worn khakis

Polar-TeeFleeces And Ralph Lauren Pink Make me cool for real.

Find me a vixen

Of Elegant Stature, With an angelic smile,

Country club graces, And mischievous tongue.

How about a trust fund,

Some fancy diplomas, A loaded revolver, An eleven-inch cock?

Pour me a shot.

Cut me a line.

Toss me some pills.

Give me a bong rip,

Of freshly bought chronic, On the last day of High School.

Send me a signal,

Real or Imaginary, That It'JJ all still taste good, Day in, day out.

For Fuck's sake, Make me that promise or I'm not taking another bite.

Michael Pesant

On Drinking

a Pint of Full Sail Ale

The mug sweats out a fresh Pacific rain As amber torrents shimmer through the drops; A spicy, bold Chinook aroma floods The nostrils, breathing Columbian mists.

And visions of my youth swirl to the head, Emerging soaked among Willamette suds.

I remember our house above Beef Bend, When cattle grazed by the Tualatin.

I would sit whittling on the porch at dusk, Stretched out before the Newberg valley to Watch coastal peaks melt the sun, as it plunged Into Alaskan oceanic streams.

To keep from bruising leafy greens, I skipped With soft steps under ancient Douglas Firs, Whisking by rhododendrons and lush ferns.

The scent of honeysuckle. Gleams of light.

And, in hushed harmony with mellow wood, The soothing dribble of a waterfall.

I feel my father, teaching me to cast Amid the autumn salmon runs that crowd The Clackamas, and landing silver kings.

We navigated sand spits, foggy dawns, Like herons in our graceful glide downstream, As golden bank side alders hailed our path.

The mug is empty now but residues Of memory cling stubborn to the rim.

I fill my glass again for him who could Not toast my recent catch. I sip and mourn.

The amber cascades shimmer in a sweat, And now he drifts with a cool Pacific rain.

Evan Gurney

Craft

1. Mulberry

It must be autumn in Van Gogh's painting, The Mulberry Tree-perhaps in France. The scene seems golden from the fall: bright brittle leaves still cling to branches, fanning out in quick swells like a tree on fire, flames curling through the early dusk, the air and yellowed grass pressed back, rippling in heat. No color from its fruit is left-the red, black, or white bunches plump with sweet flesh and juice long since consumed or harvested to flavor aperitifs.

And no silkworms inch through the foliage, no more precious COcoonsleft dangling next to halfdevoured heart-shaped leaves, plucked like berries of silken sacks. The tree finished for the year, all that remains now are the dried and sunburnt leaves still crackling in the cool night air.

II. Silk If you held it in your hands, it was like grasping nothing.

- Alessandro Baricco

Digested mulberry leavesharvested cocoons boiled, still ripe with pupae-uncoiling single strands, one by one, one mile each, bathed in dye, threaded, woven into fabric-embodiment of longing, as if spun suffused in pheromones trapped from moths that never were-glossy smooth cloth like nothing touching skin.

A fortune for false nudity, the thrill of openness still clothed, risk in safety, metaphor embodied, the automatic tenderness it brings to maker, bearer, VIewer.

Derek Thnderpool 27

Meredith Jenkins

Small Story

We are sitting around the living room, drinking from our green bortles. I had asked how everyone was feeling, and none of us could remember having felt anything.

Now we are waiting for Lillian, who has gone to get rhe onions. Christopher is playing solitaire half-heartedly.

Joan is smoking absently. Terrence is still trying to think of something to say.

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway, and we all turn toward the door. Moments later, Lillian is standing in the doorway holding a paper bag filled with onions, the light caught in her autumnal hair.

I fetch the knives, and we begin cutting. Gradually, tbe room fills with a yellow smell. Joan is the first to begin weeping. She encourages us to cut faster, and soon we all put down OUf knives. We are unable to cut for all the crying, The room fills with a fog so thick it beats like a heart.

We breathe it in and weep it out. It tastes lovely. I shovel it into my mouth with my hands. Soon, we have digested all the fog. Strands of Lillian's hair are stuck to her face. We sit in warm puddles.

"I feel much better now," I say.

Terrence heartily agrees.

It becomes dark. All the light is caught in Lillian's autumnal hair. She shakes her head, and it is like she has lit a sparkler.

James O'Boyle

Brenna Murphy

JO

Twice Upon a Time

Coy Madry was the first person I knew who died. He died a month after I started fifth grade. In my memory, Coy is hangingout at the end of one of the streets parallel to Main but far enough from the center of the grid that his truck was parked on the shoulder of a gravel road. I always imagine the truck as a late SixtiesChevy, the kind of boxy work truck I envisioned myselfdrivingone day. The truck is off-white with a thin brown stripe. Coy is hanging out with some of the wilder, Country-ishkids who play football or cheerlead at the high school with Coy and live within the school district but whose

parentsarefarmers, builders and electricians instead of professors or salesmen. They're drinking canned beer, sitting in the bed and on the hood of the truck, Coy and two guys and two girls. One of the girls is one of the guys' younger sisters, and she kind of likes Coy, and the brother is good enough friends with Coy that he kind of thinks they'd be good together.

Her name is Caroline, and for a few minutes sometime after everyone's a little buzzed, they move to lean against the hood next to each other, propped up on the elbow of the beerholding hand, so that the other is free for little flirtatious gestures, like the girl's soft touch of the boy's chest that accompanies her compliment of his shirt, or the boy's confident but gentle reach that draws a younger girl's hand to his face so that he maylook closer at the ting he has just said reminds him of hISmother's. He looks as if he may kiss that hand, and

Caroline cocks her head back with a little drunken sass and girlish excitement. She uncrosses her legs and moves to nudge his cowboy boot with her sneaker, but their eyes meet and he releases her hand, smiling at having nearly taken her young breath away and she looks out into the trees behind him, embarrassed but not scared off "I'll get us another beer," she says, taking his empty without making eye contact. He chuckles, letting her walk alone back to the tool box that holds a twenty-four pack and plenty of ice comfortably.

It's his truck, and he's the only guy with a prospect. Headlights come over the hill, but the engine accompanying them has none of the eerie qualities of a police cruiser. Coy turns his upper body to see if Caroline's getting any guff from her brother, or perhaps to wink at the guy if he looks up, and to make sure everyone is reacting appropriatelyto a passing car. AU beer cans seem to be temporarily out of sight but Caroline has the roolbox open. Coy hears the truck approaching over the nearest hill, accelerating.

Caroline didn't sec Coy's torso when it flew into the bed of the truck. When the drunk gentleman, who was later identified as (or at least presumed to be) a Mexican bricklayer, who was piJoting the other truck on the gravel road lost control and veered onto the shoulder, his bumper slammed into the grill of Coy's truck, sending cold beets flying out of the tool box.

One of the cans hit Caroline directly in the mouth, knocking out two of her teeth and leaving a circular bruise around her mouth for weeks. She fell into the bed of the truck face down next to her brother, while the pair on the tailgate were thrown Onto the grass behind the truck and rolled down into the woods a bit.

No one knew what to think at first. It was quiet, but for the steam coming from a punctured radiator. When Caroline was ready to look up, she asked her brother to move his arms and let her up. She had felt a male's arms cover her head when she hi t the bed and had assumed her brother was protecting her. But now he wouldn't answer. She pushed the ~ms off her and sat up to see Coy, in that nice shirr, lying on his back next to her with no legs and no sign of life in his eyes.

Coy's belt buckle with hi C h ' ...

I' .

IS rat er 5 uutra S on It lay wedged mro rhe h ood of the offend' In g ve I' I '111 I . . lie e, str 10 ding lip Coy s bhre ]2

jeans with his legs inside.

There was a memorial

service at our church,

and I

remember trying to picture Coy. I sort of knew him from being around the church-x-I knew I had met him in Bible school or somewhere.

His friends and teachers praised him as such an

affableguy. He was a decent nose guard for the high school, his parents adored him, and he really seemed to have loved]esus. I remember trying to talk to a friend of mine about the death, a friend who had actually known Coy. lilt's just sad," I said. "I mean) I only met him a few times, but now I'll never get to know

him."

That was the best

I could do.

BillySally hanged himself in the spring of that sanne academic year. I was able to indulge in the celebrity of the victim much more after his incident with a belt and a chin-up

bar. Almost no one at my school knew him, or knew how well I did or did not know him.

Billywas my age, but he attended the only Catholic school in town. I knew him through the Boys' Choir, although he wasn't a particularly close cohort in that group. He was, at best, a friend of friends of mine. We all had to be at rehearsal every Saturdaymorning, from nine to noon, and it was common for kids who were already friends to have sleepovers

OnFriday nights and carpool to choir the next morning. We were SOrt of forced to be an inbred social subset anyway; OUf time being devoted to singing like girls instead of hanging out with them or playing sports.

One Saturday, we arrived at rehearsal to bad news. All the adults looked serious. My dad dropped me off as usual to meet the Other boys in the parking lot before practice got gOing,and I noticed that a lot of the parents who normally did the sarnewere sticking around, talking quierly among themselvesand to Some of the boys. No one said a word until we ~ Convened to sing.

Our director, who was devoted

to this

cholf full-time, told us with honesty and acknowledgement

of

OUr curiosity what was so wrong.

h

He had the sanne note of seriousness in his eyes that

e had years later when, upset during an intermission

of a

concert in a sweltering Alabama church, he told us that if we

thought we were uncomfortable we should see his hemorrhoids.

"Billy Sally took his own life last night," he said, looking at the top of the piano in front of him through thick, grave glasses and sagging buJldog cheeks. "He hanged himself with his belt on the puJl-up bar in his closet. We will sing at the memorial next Wednesday and you will all get out of school to do this. We've called your parents: there will be no rehearsaJ today."

And so we were left to mill around and wait for our parents, trying to determine an appropriate way to act around each other. My friends and I tried to look as somber as the fathers. I remember wanting to be offended by some among us throwing a football. It came out, through a progression,of small, muffled conferences with Billy's close friends that BIlly had left a note that tore out his mother's heart. He had said that he didn't have any friends and that he couldn't believe his mother would insist on making his life so miserable. The night of the note, he had wanted to have a sleepover, but she wouldn't let him. Years later I would learn that Billy had set up the scene of an attempted suicide to scare his mother, rigging the dress belt from his choir uniform around the bar in his doset door and standing on a chair where he hoped to be found with the noose around his neck. He slipped from the chair accidentally He was involuntarily more successful in his death than he likely ever felt in his life-his mother looked terrified from then on.

At school, I was mysteriously aged in my grief I felt the glow of attention generated by my overly morose behavior that other kids feel on their birthday. I wrote heart-wrenching acrostic poems asking God why He'd taken someone so young.

I moped around for a week, informing, with my droopy eyes, anyone who approached of my ineffable level of disconsolation.

T~is.was also a guise to show adults that I was dealing with rhis m a healthy way; so they would stop reminding me, and all o~us, to tell someone if we were ever having bad thoughts like Billy. It could so easily have been prevented, after all. But that was what I wanted to do most: I wanted to think about what it would be like to kill myself 1 wanted to know if you would feel it if you hung yourself, I wanted to think about what I J4

wouldpossiblywrite in a suicide note. I wanted to be famous, anddyingseemeda pretty sure way to do that. But I never asked and never told about these fascinations.

Itoldeveryone that it didn't really hit me that Billy wasgoneuntil his coffin was carried under the choir loft and out the doorof the church, followed by the ominous swinging incense of the Catholic Church. The truth is, it never hit me.

Idid wakeup crying one morning, because I dreamt about his mother findinghim and I needed my mom. I cried in her lap and hoped 1 would have said "I love you rhough" in my note.

Justin Ansley

35

Night

Pittsburgh, '947 (

CI0 ck

-j-man

The tick tick ticking of that antique _ILl r IaV J' down the hall from where my Grant, 1t1(1L' 'he at night. just loud enough to help him stay ::1\\路1 ea

thi,ng eve:

路 her cbrand her 5 00, My Grandmother asleep beside htrnin relief to finally have her husbaru I hoJl1 -xr roorn. my father, asleep in the basinec in [ he nc.

I as . asslowY' (',["E1V, 5 Grandfather is unable to breathe, ,,1.'> '-h~d sheer , .r.irc I legs curled against the tuck of the ~ . " 'nrire Y d L heJ.dboaJ ' freshly washed and ironed so that he I" Ill' 路 r r 11S confmed, his back pressed up ag'l1 . 'Jrhef P''00\\' naked torso sweating Onto the whir路 c Ie. t

Gross Pointe, 19505 '01r5

I (:Jrher ,

Deep in my Father's childhood, Gr~~~C<ld from bed, hands reaching behind hI> to pull off the shirt he hasn't worn to enter the sea he hasn't seen in twenty years, the sea that is now a sea of garbage, food, shit. What is discarded he feels against his pale skin.

Breath held, eyes open he swims to the ship's belly to reach Out to cool steel, .. L _ ,

through feet of waste, he floats, he waits.

Washington DC, 1998 Yearslater my Father in the War Record Bureau studieshis father's ship, asksto see the pages, one by one, of the log book, recognizesmy Grandfather's penciled handwriting that recorded people coming and going, that charted the longitude and latitude .. of the ship "Livermore," named after a Union Chaplain in the CIvil War, the Destroyer never destroyed in four years of moving between the Bay of Naples and the North African Coast.

Sarah Blackburn

37

Lindsey Britt

Stimulus/Response

JustinDavis stared at the cracks chips and divots in

ilie eelTmg of the waiting room. There were ' 35 cracks

stretchingtheir crooked, black fingers between shadowy moundsof plaster. There were 56 chips, each a window reveahnga perfect polygon of the institutional gray paint c~ncealed beneath the whitewash. And there were Il,214 d,VOCS, the Iootprtms of #2 pencils that had, over the years, triedto punch through to the deep blue sky beyond. Most bouncedstraight back toward the floor, leaving a barely perceptiblegraphite dot as a record of the attempt. A lucky few got stuck after only a few millimeters of progress, though, andclungdesperately to their blind hopes of reaching the sun.

Henry,the janitor, pulled them all down in the morning.

Except for the ceiung and a scuff mark between JUstin's feet, the room was completely devoid of any notable features-any features at all. There were no pictures on the

walls

and no decorations on any of the thick metal doors that lined the hallway to his right. No plant sat in the corner to . disturb the room's symmetry with its imperfectly asymmet.nc~

leaves. Even the fire extinguishers were deeply recessed wtth~n the walls and hidden from view. Except for the evenly space , fluorescent lights that gently pulsed overhead at an . imperceptible-to everyone but Justin-yet constant eight cycles per minute, nothing ever ha?pencd at Pineview that 39

could be described

as out of the ordinary.

Nothing was allowed

to happen.

The waiting room was like a perfect white, rz-foot-bya-foor box-or a cage. ..

It was the Hih day of 1996. Justin had been wamng 814 seconds, he had run out of things to count after 14- He tapped out the treble portion of the first movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with his right hand and tuggedat a loose piece of rubber hanging from the bottom of one of hi, faded blue Converse All-Stars with his left.

"Mr. Davis?" a colorless, baritone voice bounced around the corner. He hopped out of the brown metal chair and sprinted down the hall. i

"Here, sir," he answered, sliding to a stop on the palegreen tiles just in front of the half-open door with a chirp.

There were 22 seconds of silence.

"You may enter."

Justin let the door shut behind him.

Mr. Downing sat behind a large, oak desk. He hada square chin and thick-rimmed glasses, but no first name, at least as far as anyone in the school knew. He also had a peg leg, which he thumped against the ground whenever he was angry, and meaty, beet-red hands that perpetually alternated between squeezing and releasing each other. The office smelled like pine cleaner and paper.

Justin flopped into a chair that forced him to lookup at a pair of gray circles beneath bushy black awnings. Beneath the distorted glare of his spectacles, Mr. Downing's eyes looked like two dull nickels with burn marks at their centers. They pushed Justin further into his chair and pinned him in place.

"We are not pleased with your progress," he said, in a monotone that spaced his syllables with the precision of a metronome. He slid a sheet of paper across the desk with an mk-stamed index finger. "Are you not happy with your accommodatIons?"

Thump I There were 287 words consiscing of [,342 typewrittent et~ers on the page. There were also 197 numbers on the pape, which sununed to 1,221, and which multiplied our to

40

717.526,482, leaving out the zeros. A look of frustration pulled at the corners of Justin's mouth.

"There's simply nothing here," he replied, sliding the

if there were, I wouldn't be able to see I'm only 15." He watched the sweat spots slowly spreading

paper back. "Even

beneath the armpits of Mr. Downing's tried to gauge the rate of flow; There

beige cardigan,

it.

and

were too many variables.

There were always too many variables.

He watched the man slowly melting into his sweatertell by cell, always dying.

"Either it works, or it doesn't," Mr. Downing interrupted.

Thump "The calculations look right. It should work. I can't tell you why it doesn't." Through the window over Mr. Downing's right shoulder, Justin saw a Tiger Swallowtail drift to rest on the sill. His yellow and black wings stirred in the gentle afternoon breeze,

and the sun warmed

his body.

"It's

the same thing I told you last time-the same thing I've been sayingall along."

The office air-conditioner suddenly switched on with an electric buzz, and the butterfly

disappeared

of the intake fan. '~yway, I just want to go home.

When

in the direction

do I get to go

home?"

"It's difficult to say." Mr. Downing tugged at the. handlebars of his moustache, then began to wring his left index finger with his right hand. "Your parents are coming tonight.

Would you like to see them?"

"Yes." It had been 34 days, 10 hours, 51 minutes ~d 19 seconds since he had seen them last. "Will they take me WIth them when they leave?" .

"I strongly doubt it. They're not pleased with you either," Mr. Downing said without inflection.

"They're bringing you a present, though-they say your last if you don't become more tractable."

Thump spraying 28 tiny bubbles of saliva that drifted towards the top of the desk. He ripped the dangling piece of rubber from his heel. "It's not the "I am tractable!" Justin shouted,

heat!" He jumped out of his chair and threw the hunk ofsole at Mr. Downing's head. It bounced harmlessly off the thick glasses and fell to the floor, leaving a faint smudge acrossrhe right lens. .

"What you are is worthless" Mr. Downing rephed, , . k pushing a red button located near the top drawer of~s des. then rolling his chair to the pale cinderblock wall behind him.

The rubber patch on the bottom of his peg leg squeaked like chalk against a blackboard as it dragged along the tiles.. .

"Then let me go!" Justin shouted, jerking off his nghr shoe and lunging towards the desk.

I

open. him.

As he darted to the left, the door behind him flew Two pairs of arms in white sleeves and gloves encircled

"No!" he shouted, jerking and twisting like a mosquito in the sticky strands of a garden spider's web. "It'snor my fault it's not quantifiable!" The arms wrenched him out of rhe room and back down the hallway, accompanied by the sound of a single Converse heel shrieking along the linoleum. .

"6,584 green tiles' 213 barred windows! r42 daysuntil Christmas ... "Justin's voice trailed off as he was dragged down the hall.

"Less than worthless," Mr. Downing pushing the door shut with a loud thunk.

muttered,

A single poster hung from one of the gray wallsof Justin's twelve-foot square bedroom. It was a plain white rectangle, broken up near the bottom by the phrase: "'Of all things is man the measure"'~Protagoras inked i.n small black letters. It was encased in nonreflective Plexiglas, and could not be taken down Or marked. To its left hu.ng a pencil draWing of Albert Einstein on a lined piece of notebook paper and a small, white sink.

The walls were composed of a total of 968 cinder hlocks, the floor 144 pine green linoleum tiles and the ceiling 8 4 acoustic tiles. There were no cracks or lines but there were 41] divots, One for each day Justin had spent at the school.

He was Sprawled on the plain blue comforter draped across. his bed, and staring blankly at the graphs and charts in the thick black textbook in front of him. He had memonzed

the 716pages long ago-on the first reading-but was required to spend no less than eight hours a day with the book open in front of rum. The problem, to him, had been apparent right from the start. Mr. Downing and the 18 permanent and 16 part-timemembers of the faculty, however, had made it clear thathis suggestion was incorrect, Of. more precisely, unacceptable.

"Fine. Let me go then," had been]ustin's first reply.

"Not until you get better. Not until your parents feel like you've gotten better."

Justin didn't really know why his parents had brought him to Pineview in the first place. They had told him, at first, that it was a magnet school for gifted children; he hadn't believed that for a second. The classes consisted of five students,each of whom was assigned a desk that was bolted to the floor and separated from the others by an average of six feet, eight and a half inches of space. The students, who varied in ages fromabout 12 to about 16, were forbidden from passing notes, talkingor communicating at all. They were never left unsupervised.Justin didn't even know the others' names.

They only ever worked on one problem, although it wasoften a cleverly disguised variant of that same basic problem: A=B(ghx), where A equals the quantity of a given stimulus, and B equals the quality of the response. The multiplier (ghx), seemed to be at the root of why they had all been brought there.

"Can sensation be quantified?" the problem asked. If so, there had to be some kind of constant, or series of constants,which translated, say, I2 pounds of force applied to one squareinch of one's arm into the sensation of 12 pounds of force applied to one square inch of one's arm. Mr. Downing believed that he and his group were on the verge of making a breakthrough and determining, precisely, both the parameters of the equation and the values of the three independent constants.

ForJustin, the implications were frightening. If one could, in fact, predict the quality of a response from a specific quantity of stimulus, then all of reali ty could be reduced to a handfulof equations. He reasoned that one who felt inclined, and possessed adequate leisure time to figure out the various 43

values of stimulus within a controlled environment, could,in fact, predict the future of all those within that environment.

More frightening, he reasoned, would be that one who hadthis equation and control over the sources of significant stimulus within that environment could turn those within it into semiconscious automatons, whose actions and reactions couldbe predicted and directed.

Justin shuddered briefly, and returned to examining the shapes of the curves plotting the relationship between the physical forces exerted upon a subject by the insertion of a needle for drawing blood, and the corresponding levelsof pain, as expressed by the grip force the subject applied to a sensor.

There was a separate graph measuring the saturation of nerve cells by neurotransmitters all the way up to their thresholds, and beyond, from recordings taken at an electrocution in Texas. The graphs all had basically the same shape, but the plots represented a faulty conclusion that was at the root ofall Mr. Downing's miscalculations: he, and the others, assumed that they were dealing with a closed system, and that his subjects were all and only sacks of carbon based, electrochemical reactors.

The halogen light over Justin's sink winked off.

He rolled over, placed his hands beneath his head, and started to connect the dots on his ceiling for the 25th time that day. He managed a Tiger Swallowtail, an elephant, a telephone receiver, a tree and 2,013 more shapes in the 14 minutes he allowed himself to dwell in his only distraction.

His parents hadn't shown up. There had been a brief phone c?Dversation, during which they expressed their most severe displeasure that he was making Mr. Downing unhappy.

They said he was threatening his future. They said he didn't understand.

But Justin understood. He had colors and flavors, which no one could ever count, except in the most arbitrary sense. And there were some things-c-things which proved the ~t~t~s . up today was not the same as the sun . un commg comlUg up tomo rrow; an d W hiic h he would never preten d were untrue.

L路

rus

44

d

Oaf.

A slight el ectr'rc . b uzz echoed through the hall outS! ide

1

Justin rolled off his bed, and shuffled to the door. He placedhis hand on the cool, brushed aluminum knob; he knew it wouldbe locked, but could never stop himself from rhecking. It didn't twist at all.

He turned ro the dull white sink. He ripped the picture of Einstein from che wall, balled ic up and stuffed it into {he drain, he always replaced the drawing after class, on the one sheet of notebook paper he was allowed per day. He turned on the cold water faucet and let it fun until the sink wasfilledalmost to the overflow drain.

They wouldn't let him have a mirror. They wouldn't givehima distraction. There were no reflective surfaces in his room.

He stared at himself in the pool staring back-the product of his daily act of creation. His dark brown eyes had longsince lost their sparkle, were being swallowed and subdued by the brown circles of fatigue growing beneath them.

Despitethe fact that he no longer got more than three hours of exercisea week, he was losing weight. His hair, though kept close cut by the school, always shot from his head in a thousand directions, and made him think of that guy in the electricchair. That man must have done terrible things-or at least Somepeople must have thought he did some cerrible things.

This place madeJustio feel like a terrible ching.

The Water was cool, and caressed his cheeks and neck like thousands of miniature hands.

Justin sat in the brown metal chair, staring up into Mr. Downing's narrow, blue-gray eyes. It had been 22 days, four hours and 11 minutes since their last meeting, the longest lapse since Justin's arrival at Pineview "So, l've heard that your mood has improved of late.

Youare finallysettling into your accommodations, no?" His Itft hand massaged the index finger of his right. His peg leg rubbed gently back and forrh beneath the desk; ir made a SWishing sound, almost like a eat's tail stirring dust against a hardwood floor.

"JuSt let me go. Please. I've cold you everything I " know,and looking at it more isn't going to change anythmg, 45

Justin replied. He grabbed the shoestring dangling from his left Converse, and began to tug on it furiously. After 18 seconds passed with no other response.jusrin shifted his focus to the windowsiII over Mr. Downing's shoulder.

Where the Tiger Swallowtail had been, a garden spider had spun a web. There were 21 insects wrapped and suspended from its cords.

Maybe they were

21

butterflies

sruffed back into their

COCoons.

When Justin turned back to Mr. Downing, he caught the only trace of a smile he had ever seen on that face.

Reaching for one of the black handlebars of his moustache, Mr. Downing ratchered down the comers of his mouth. "Well, what about the heat? Are you stili convinced there is a nonviable element within the system? The equation?"

"I don't know anything about that anymore,"Justin replied. He began to stare at his left Jeg which had started bouncing and fidgeting uncontrollably.

Mr. Downing's smugness was more caustic than the pine and paper scent. "I do know you can't tell people what they're going to do, or what they're going to say. You can't control them." He ran his right hand through his hair in an effort to smooth down some of the spikes. ''And why not? Everything in the world to a greater or ' not peep 1e.)"

Why No smile this time. Downing just stared.

"Because that kind of life, a life where you don't havea say, wouldn't be worth Jiving through," Justin replied, almost in a shout. "Who Wants to go through the motions if all there is to anything is JUStgoing through the motions? Motions beyond Ourcontrol ... " As he finished the sentence, the door behind clicked and creaked open.

I esser degree, conforms to our expectations.

. . Justin gl~ced Over his right shoulder, and saw one of Pineview's orderlies standing behind him. He was holding out a paper at arm's length and ... . take it.

-. motl0nlng silently for justin to He reached IINo." Justin seeon d .

for the paper with his left hand. sal

id

. qUIetly, after almost exactly two

He stood up from the chair, and stuck one of his handsinto the right pocket of his jeans.

Asthe man inwhite reached to grab him from behind, Justinshoved the aluminum chair into his knees, and fell into thewallto his left.

"What are you doing?" shouted Mr. Downing, his face a bushymask of putty being stretched to the breaking point.

Hewashammering on the red button behind his desk.

"What'" Justin asked, holding a #2 pencil in his right hand. "Didn't see this coming?"

He turned his head to the left, and pressed his neck towardsthe wall. He took the pencil in both hands and, with an arcing motion, jammed the sharpened point into his carraid artery,two inches above the clavicle. The soothing yellow of the pencil and the white of the hands that held it were bathed in a spray of bright red arterial blood. Tiny red drops misted and sprinkled across the paper that drifted to rest at his feet.

Asthe pencil slipped from his hands, the spray became a creek, then a river. The pencil landed point down, in the tOP of a blue Converse.

In the span of the several seconds that seemed like an eternity,Justin slid down the wall, wide-eyed and openmouthed, and collapsed next to tile paper at his feet: Summary of Predicted

Response

.

Tester Downing: "So, I've heard that your mood has Improved of lare. You arc finally settling into your accommodations, no?"

Subjecr Davis: 'Just let me go. Please. I've told you everything I know, and looking at it more isn't going to change anything." [Subject will grab and pull on his left shoesuing, then stareout the window] .

Tester Downing: "Well, what about the heat? Ase you still convinced there is a nonviable element within the system?

The equation?"

Subject Davis: "I don't know anything about that anymore. I do know you can't tell people what they're goi.ng to do, or what they're going to say. You can't control them."

[Subject's left leg will begin bouncing nervously, and he will run 47

his righr hand through his hair) Tester Downing: '\<\nd why not? Everything in the world, to a greater or lesser degree, conforms CO ou.r expectations.

Why not people?"

Subject Davis: [Subject will raise his voice] "Because that kind of life, a life where you don't have a say, wouldn't be worth living through.

Who wants to go through the motions if all there is to anything is just going through the motions?

Motions beyond our control." [Subject will turn his head to cite right when he hears the door open, and will reach for the paper with his left hand when it is offered to him) It will take subject Davis two seconds to read this sheet. He will calmly accept this as evidence that (ghx) has been successfully determined, and will begin assisting us in our efforts to quantify stimulus.

Michael B. Jon"

China Market by Audrey Barrett

49

Alan Shapiro and Michael Collier

Photograph by Megan Smith 50

Michael Collier On Emcees and Poets

Laureate

MichaelCollier does just about everything a poet can dO-he runsone of the most prestigious writing workshops in the COUntry, serves as Maryland's Poet Laureate, teaches at the Universityof Maryland at College Park, advises for the Houghton-Mifflinpoetry imprint and still has managed to producefourbooks of poetry, most recently, The Neighbor and The Ledge. He's also a highly decorated poet-his awards Includetwo NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awardfrom the Poetry Society of America and a Pushcart Prize, His translation of Medea will be published later this year.

When we talked at the Carolina Coffeeshop in Novemberduring his weeklong stay in Chapel Hill giving readingsand workshops, he had a shot of Irish whiskey, which he sipped alternately with a beer-a combination that see~s to be gathering speed with poets these days. He picked up this habit from Alan Shapiro, a professor at UNC and long-time friend from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Phoenix Poetry Series. (Shapiro, "1 take full responsibility for introducing Michael to the Irish Boi1ermak~r. It was only after meeting me that he became a two-fisted d~mker.j.

Collier warmed up quickly, speaking pasaioriately about the future and present state of poetry. The hour ~d a oui kl y a s we talked about current scandals m the half passe d qU1C

5'

literary world, his various jobs, his Roman Catholic upbringing, He is easy-going and energetic, important qualities for a man whose job calls on him to bring poetry to both the scholarsand the skeptics, Throughout our interview; he kept returningto the role of poetry to keep people on their toes) to be a voicethat, quietly or aggressively, questions how things are done aod challenges society to acknowledge its weaknesses, He talked about the importance of keeping up with the times, of doiog whatever it takes to stay fresh, and he puts this into pratticeby stepping out of the classroom and participating in poetry slams as "3 straw man." Which, of course, is another kind of classroom: emcees and poets laureate bringing their traditions and aesthetics into conversation.

Michael Collier I've never felt comfortable when I've felt intelligent. I always felt like I've been somebody else.

CeUar Door WeU good, perfect then. You've obviously had a lot of experience with students and young people writing, I was wondering if you've noticed any trends recently.

Michael Collier Well, that's an interesting question ... I don't think rye noticed any trends, The thing about learning any kind of art is that one makes the same mistakes that everyone else has ever made, and unless you're a real prodigy of some kind you have to go through that process. res difficult to leapfrog. ~hereJs another way to think of that: the older generanon usually finds th ..

I' a . e younger generauon wanting. tS typical parental relationship. I'm always wanting my students to have read what r read when I h ir aae.zhinki ng t hat the way to become a poet Ad' was r eu: age t don't. (laughs) . n so what I notice is that they 15'

They don't read what you h d negotiating with them and I a read. I m constantly , sUPPOse myself, in an effort J

to

figureout how to make sure that they're reading what I believe theyneed to read.

Cellar Door Well,what are the things we should be reading?

Michael Collier No one reads Robert Lowell anymore, and very few read John Berryman,Randall Jarrell. These were poets I couldn't havesurviveda day without having read. A dilemma any young poet has is trying to figure out for herself what should be read.

Poets aremore or less useful at any given moment. Their usefulnessmay be less apparent because of changing styles but youhaveto have faith they'll reappear at some point. TS. Eliot helpedrevive interest in the Metaphysical Poets, that sort of thing.

Cellar Door Do you think readers have changed? Because some people I talk to say,"Oh, back in the day of Coleridge, they appreciated poetry and people today don't." Do you think there's anyMichael Collier Well, that's invoking a' Golden Age. I don'r buy it. The old days always seem better because we romanticize loss ~d the past. Reagan tried to rally the country to his conservative causes by suggesting America needed to reclaim its grea~ and valorous past. Right now there are probably as many.serIous readersof poetry as there have ever be~~. T~1.eteachmg of creative writing in colleges and nniversrtres 15 ofte~ badmouthed hut one of the things it has done ... It ~as . and that IS a createdreaders of contemporary literatur~, . h done it has . if Tt ther thing It as â&#x20AC;˘ sigru rcant accomplishment. o. En lish departments, kept contemporary literature alive tn h g hem nOW is . bei raug t in t becauseso much of what is erog d Icure rather than li ature an cu theoretical, ideas about ter . s who have always been . . all the wr-iter . b literature itself. Iroruc Y'. ow the ones doing the )0 . derrucs are n slightlysuspect as aca h' from pr-imary sources. d do tca.e .tng the scholars usc to â&#x20AC;˘

1:

53

Cellar Door And I guess in a lot of introductory classes, you go through all the modern poets, because people can understand that better than reading solid Shakespeare and trying to write.

And people who want to write probably come to it through more modern sources too.

Michael Collier Right. I think this is a trend not only in English departments, but in just how we teach any subject. The focus is on what's contemporary and relevant, and that's more an indication of the late 20th century and early 21St century sense of what's important.

Cellar Door Have you seen 8 Mile?

Michael Collier I haven't, but I want to.

Cellar Door What do you think about all the new performance poetry, slams and battles; how do you think that's going to affect poetry as we know it?

Michael Collier I think it's exciting, It's another way to use language, ies another way to keep language alive as an art form. I don't feel any ~eed to quibble Over whether or not it's poetry. It certainlj has Its own conventions and they're different than the conventions I work in. I do make those distinctions; I would never ~retend that I'm a performance poet, although I've been roped mto participating with great fun in a few poetry slams.

Cellar Door Have you?

Michael Collier Yeah, well, as a gray beard, as a straw man.

54

Cellar Door Do you have any dope lyrics that you can drop right now?

Michael Collier No, no, no. As a straw man, you're not allowed to parody the other side, you have to read your staid poems and then lose.That's the function, that's the role I fulfill. You know Somerap lyrics can lay a legitimate claim to the ballad tradition.So, yes, this is a long-winded way of saying I want to see 8 Mile. Have you seen it?

Cellar Door I have. I really enjoyed it. There's

.

It

not as much poetry in

as I would have liked ...

Michael Collier Well there can't be because it's a movie.

Cellar Door But there's a moment when Eminem's character and his friendstartputting words over "Sweet Home Alabama," ~ak.ing fun of the way his life has gone, and of course, the end.

I m Sure you've heard about the battles: Erninertt versus other people,knocking on each other in rhyme and meter. It's pretty amazing to watch.

Michael Collier Yeah, I mean I think it's rhrilling, when you think fifteen yearsago or more when rap was appearing, it was a localphenomenon. Its c;nventions hadn't been laid down ~ut now rapand performance speaks to many different people 1.0 the culture.The attention that not only rap, but perform~nc:u poetry has brought to the spoken word is important, so I'm for it.

Cellar Door What about other movements going on like the Language Poets or the New Formalists?

55

Michael Collier Alexis De Tocqueville says in Democracy in Amena that art in a democratic society will resist: consensus as to what's good. imply, chis is the result of pluralism produced by democracy. He ralks about what the arts will be like in a democracy. And he says thar there won't be a kind of conseDS" about what makes up any given arr, and I thinkoneoftbe phrases is, he says "rhe production will be crude." But mainly what he's saying is that it's going ro be pluralistic. I believe this is what we are experiencing in many arts these days. \X1e ve moved from thinking about culture in a cohesive wayto an understanding of culture in this country, this weirdcounrry as comprised of many cultures. We should all be learningSparrish.

I find it fascinating.

You can literally see the cuJrure change righr in frontof you. There are many people who are terrified by this. We are" a battle, at least in politics) between a grotesque desirefora Reagan-like simplicity and the need to recognize the contending and contentious pluralistic entities of a new or renewed America, We see this played out, though in a less charged way, between so-called Language Poets and so-called New Formalisrs. I locate myself in the middle of this poetry batrle because of my aUegiance ro a parricuJar kind of lyric narrarive, rhough nor in the middle of the political bartle. I'm way Out on rhe Jeft. UnJike many poets, I believe that language IS trustworthy and that words have meaning} not one meanmg, but words are not totally indeterminate. And I also believe th~t a self speaks these words, a particular person-a particular v~lce~and it's not merely a voice created by particular hlstoflcal situations and necessities.

1

CeUar Door There's an interesting pull betwe~n individual and culture becaus di n e so many poets feel that they are recor 109a ehix~ple Or a Core sample of what's going on in culture andhew t ngs are rhi h I ,ngs r ar would be understood through rhe anguage later on, if nor directly.

Michael Collier Yeah,absolutely,and that's why, temperamentally, I'm notexclusivebecause I understand that, when you try and characterizethe moment you're writing in, or writing out of, or living in, you can't really understand it. If you're so sure about it, it'sgoing to limit your own work, it seems to me, and it's goingto soundprogrammatic.

CeUarDoor That's another thing: when you're crafting things, consciousness is so interesting. Again, a lot of poets will say theyworkveryhard at getting words down in a specific order, andother artists, maybe hip-hop artists, sense that they're beingalmostchanneled through, producing something that isn'tWhollytheir own. It's still them, but it's not as much their personalMichael Collier Well,I'm more on the side of the 98% sweat and work and2% inspiration, but I've also experienced what you call channeling. One of my favorite writers is the essayist and novelistJohn Berger. In his most recent book, The Shape of a Pocket, he talksabout how artists really don't create, in other words,they're not originators, so much as vehicles for their experience.He says modern art misunderstands itself when it thinksthat creation and originaliry are the goals of art. But as vehicleswe don'twait around for the muse; it's a proactive state.We answera call and avail ourselves as poets to language.

Languageis so complex, and so old that to think we're remventingit is a kind of arrogance.

Cellar Door I think one of the most interesting things about you: ~atestbook, The Ledge, is that there's so much archaic stuff lTI It: not the forms but the things you refer to, biblical . references,old Greek things ... is that what you're talking

about?

Michael Collier Well, I don't know ...

57

--Cellar Door Or have you had enough distance yet to tellwhatyou were thinking?

Michael Collier Well, haven't you noticed, I never know if I reallyknow what I'm thinking? In those poems, the Greek and Roman myths I learned many, many years ago at the Jesuit High .

School I attended in Phoenix, Arizona, started to riseuplike buried tires in landfills. They just started to come up, Ididn't ask for them. They began to present themselves as solutions to the problems of composition, really.

Cellar Door

I guess, as myths do. That's what they're there for.

Michael Collier Yeah, to call them archetypes is cliche, but it's true, They embody the way humans have related to each other forever. And then also, very personally, behind those myths,or in front, stands my Roman Catholic upbringing. How couldI escape such strong influences?

Cellar Door .

Right, especially in your poem "My Crucifixion," a vel)' Interesting manifestation of your Roman Catholicism. Do you get a good response to that poem when you read it?

Michael Collier It's a good poem to read at the slams.

Oh yes, I bet.

r Yc

Cellar Door

Michael Collier t makes me cOmpetitive. (laughs)

OUr trump

card ...

Cellar Door

Michael Collier

I dont know if it's a trump card, but it works. I mean there'sa case when you never know what's going to work poem...

as a

Cellar Door Andsomethings are scary to put in poems, just on subject matter ...

Michael Collier Yeah,yeah,and that's what I like about rap and performancepoetry, is that there's a way in which decorum, albeit averydifferent kind of decorum, creates a form which allows Someappallingand disturbing things to be said.

Cellar Door Well,manypeople who consider themselves liberal and nut racistandnot homophobic and generally not horrible peoplecansaythat they appreciate Eminem's skill but don't likebissubjectmatter; people have a hard time embracing botb.

Michael Collier Iunderstand that, and I guess my own feeling is that what Eminem says is within the range of human experience.

He'snot making things up but rather his songs, his performance,embodies a reality it does no good to deny Whenyou listen to rap music, essentially what's being talked aboutare realties mainstream culture would rather ignore.

Newspapersgive us prose versions of rap, if you think about it.

They are filledwith stories about drugs, murder, gangs, sex, homelessness-you name it. But we don't require newspapers to be sold with a warning label. I suppose this acknowledges thepowerof art that music is considered danger?~s. h ' . al 1 Arrur i Baraka, t e At the Dodge Poetry fesnv recent Y'. d include a PoerLaureateof New Jersey, re~d a poe mdthat at Se rernber 11 that referenceto a story that was g01.Og aroun Plm . e World Trade Towers ew to stay Israelis who worked at th 1 heard this story about the home that day. I remember when 59

Israelis, I thought it sounded like an urban legend and couldn't possibly be true. Baraka's mention of this set off a firestormof protest. Clearly it was a stupid thing to do and repulsivebutit's not something he should loose his laureateship for, whichis what the Governor of New Jersey was pushing for. What Amiri Baraka is saying is, "I don't believe the official version of this event. I don't believe the orchestration of patriotism andgrieE I'm not going to walk in lock-step with everyone," so I didn't have much problem with it.

And what do you expect from a poet? It's our job to provoke.

Cellar Door I guess the question is what you expect from a poet laureate, though.

Michael Collier Well that's a problem. That's a huge problem. Poets aren't good at representing official positions-the status quo.

Official poet is an oxymoron.

Cellar Door Do you think you've ever done anything to threaten Maryland?

Michael Collier Not really. I don't think I've had the opportunity, butI always speak my mind. I'm a different poet than Amiri Barak.

He's provocative but he's Dot malicious not evil as some have portrayed him to be. ' Cellar Door Do you ever have to do official poet laureate things like poems for governors?

No and I wouldn't governor? (laughs) I

60

Michael Collier H d . ow 0 you write a poem for a â&#x20AC;˘

Cellar Door I don'tknow, I think people still do it occasionally ...

Michael Collier No, they do. I think the poet laureate of North Carolina,FredChappell, has been called on by his governot to writea poem for a specific occasion.

Cellar Door That'sso archaic: it's wonderful, but it's so strange to me thatthereare still poet laureates. So what's your position as poet laureate,if you don't write sonnets about governorsj how

doyoufit into the scheme of things?

Michael Collier Essentiallywhat you become is a spokesperson for poetry,andI'm comfortable with that. That seems to be a goodthing,to get poetry out to people who don't normally reador think about it, that's good. I go to a lot of schools, libraries ... Rotary Clubs. (laughs) Cellar Door Ohwow.So I guess you see a lot of different kinds of people.Do you hold workshops, too, or do you just bring poems?

Michael Collier SometimesI do, but primarily I'll read my own poems or I'll readfavorite poems and I try to get people to talk and ask me questions about poetry.

Cellar Door What do you find is your most open audience? Older or younger?

Michael Collier Well,that sort of goes back to your first question, are thereanytrends, and I think that anyone coming to poetry for the first time, younger or older, they essentially have the same

questionsabout it. So I don't find that age makes much of a

difference in terms of the questions. I do find people are surprised that everyday language can be used to make poems.

Occasionally I find can't convince somebody, well, more than occasionally, that poetry is accessible and interesting. I've been accused, and who knows maybe they are right, that what I'm doing is not poetry.

Cellar Door Really? They say that?

Michael Collier Well, maybe not directly, but they'll express their doubt by asking me questions about rhyme. Why don't your poems rhyme? Why doesn't contemporary poetry rhyme? Sometimes you can't get past these preconceptions concerning poetrybut what I try to do is have them listen to a poem of mine that contains internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, and I'llpoint out where a line has regular meter. Sometimes these strategies help. By and large people are very open and eager to learn.

Cellar Door And they can relate that to what they know about poetry, what they've been taught.

Michael Collier Yeah, and the other thing is that sometimes they think that poetry is not supposed to be accessible. Usually when I go out to read as poet laureate, I'll read really accessible work, that's one concession I make) because the idea is to invite and entice: and to get questions going. People in the audience are sometimes surprised, and they tell me so, that the poems seem to be accessible.

CeUar Door What about Bread Loaf? You've been with Bread Loaf for a while: you attended when you were younger, rightJ and now you are the director of it. How has it changed through the years?

Michael Collier Bread Loaf is foremost an institution

, it's been around

almost80 years. Institutions

resist change and yet at the same

timetheyare strong enough to he tinkered with. Bread Loaf has alwaysbeen an exciting and dynamic place, it was so when I first attended in 1981.When I became director, I wanted to keepthe energyand excitement the Conference generated but wealsowantedto revamp the program so that it was less hierarchical,more democratic, a truer reflection of the culture

atlarge.

Cellar Door Somoreworkshop and less apprenticeship?

Michael Collier Well,more opportunities for everyone to participate andinteractwith each other, less alienation and

condescension.

This would reflect the pedagogical changes thathad takenplace in literary workshops just about everywhere except Bread Loaf I also wanted to hire faculty whowere first-rate teachers.

Cellar Door I'veheard that it's become a lot less predatory, I don't

knowif that'srelated ...

Michael Collier Well,that was the hope, too. If we focused on the workshopsand had teachers who were respectful of that, there wouldbe muchless anxious social behavior. But the culture has changedand so there is less of the bad behavior of the sort you'rethinkingof Cellar Door The culture of America too or just the culture of Bread Loaf? ' , Michael Collier .

People are much more aware that you don't have t~e

fightto treat another human being as merely a sexual object.

Alsothere'slessdrinking generally, and drinking used to be anotherlegendaryBread Loaf activity. The Conference IS an easierplaceto he for everyone, including the faculty. Most

participants

feel as if they are getting

what they paid for.

Cellar Door Another thing you recently started doing is the Houghton-Mifflin poetry series. Or that's what I hear frommy sources.

Michael Collier Yes, I'm an advisory editor to the poetry program. I oversee the poetry list and will help to develop the program.

This is thrilling work because Houghton-Mifflin has a wonderful list of poets and its one of the oldest publishers in the country. Houghton-Mifflin published Emerson!

Cellar Door I know a lot of poets, and writers in general, are nervous, a little wary of getting involved in publishing because it's kind of behind the curtain, and they like to stay in the nonmechanical world of writing, but that doesn't seem to bother you.

Michael Collier I've always felt that it's important to do the next thing that comes along, and to challenge myself, and I like the idea of a poet being Out in the world, I like being in the world, but that's my temperament.

Cellar Door So that's how you stay out of strict academia?

Michael Collier I guess so, though I don't really make a distinction between unlversi ties and the so-called real world. It's all real ro me. Actually, I find the "real world" surreal. It depends on your perspectIve, nght? By taking up different challenges I learn ~ornethJng different about the human predicament and it also In forms my poems. All of this makes me feel more alive, and you know, that's good because one day I'll be dead.

Dorothy Boll

To the Half-Self

Yourmother has this theory meant to smooth awaysome of the complexities of parenting, to invent a root

forchildhood deviancies: rhildrenwho look like oneparent are more likelyto act like the other-a long-held belief less scientific than maternal

but proved just often enough to leave gapingholes in ancestry, in a family wherephoto albums are scattered

withragged edges framing a haze of memory: young mother, two infants, and the headless man who never emerges from film or conversation.

Mom's words sent you early to the mirror-examining

her contribution

to whoyou would be: a fresh exposure of a girlish face seen in sepia prints, sameCurveof lips into smile, smattering of freckles across cheeks, sun-sprung hair-and then to your ongoing tour of birth certificates,

grandparents, microfilm ... dead-end genealogy, hopingto grasp those unremembered years wherethe rest of you might be.

Theydidn't know the faceless man, couldn't findhim in your eyes or hands, supposing that allyou are is everything you will be: as if inheritance is one-sided-you,

the product

of a single surname. The other, a filled-in blank.

Harmony

Johnson

65

Companion

I.

Poems

As She Gets Ready

The toothpaste's out of place, I think my shaving cream is in the tub, beside it sits her pink razor that never seems to dullshe rubs her burning legs with cool lotion, then towel-wraps her hair and sprays deodorant in one motion.

She slows, puts on her face, displays

66

the fiction of her lips and skin, conceals each new freckle she finds with careful dabs, and I begin to see how grace in her

unwinds and winds these days, these well worn chores-

she finishes and says Attyours.

II.

And As She Leaves

It's over now,

her hair is fixed into a bun that seems to squeeze

brown hair to blondeit pulls restricts

the smiling face she used to tease me out of sleep at dawn, wanting us there in bed to move alone

and together_ she loves flaunting this coy Control

and I am prone

68

to giving in.

But where is she,

that dawn-lit gitl?

Still there, I know though oddly now my eyes can't see

beyond the bun, the skin,

the show.

Too easily she leaves the room,

mumbling, I think, I'll he back soon.

Charles Battle

Sad Angel by Deborah Dor/ond

7째

Yellow Roses Oncewhen Matt and I were packing for Tampa I ~oppedmytoothbrush into the toilet and fell out of love with m. Hewouldn'tloan me his spare-he said he needed it in case heeverdid something as stupid as dropping his own toothbruh . . I had been S mto a to ilet. A few weeks earlier ~~teptedto a graduate program at the University of Southern orida, butI didn'twant to live in Tampa. I was waiting on myacceptance to NYU. Graduation was three weeks away. I . hadconvlllcedmyself that NYU didn't want me, and that I coulddo Worsethan a life with Matt.

I sat on the couch arranging my prints for my final photographyportfolio, listening to Matt play his guitar. When I deCIdedto be an art major Matt said I was wasting my parents'money. He wasted his time every night learning the samewhiny punk song by The Ataris on his guitar. ~e didn't evenknow the name of the song. The first; line was This pen can'twrite loneliness no more," and that's what he c~\led the SOng when I asked. He mumbled the lyrics under his breath.

When he forgot which chord carne next, he started over, Strumming and mumbling. .. .

Matt wanted his best friend Shan to move 10 With us.

Her boyfriend had thrown her Into a wall a week .before. Matt aid I was going to be as pissed as I was _.. calle d me at wor k and S .

I d d my toothbrush into the toilet. I told him I roppe.路 . . th e nme did ' 路f h arne because 1 was Ieaving after graduation.

Intcarclsec, 71

ly ap and gown hod b en hanging from the bathroom door the bcginning of April. Matt ignored it and ralked abol" how mol II would be whcn we could rake hari's two-year-old

"nce

von, (;ag " to th playground, I, would be like we had our OWll bJb , h . 'Old. I pull ·d my headphones from underneath a sea of mpcy'gJrelle boxes and half-eaten bags of chips. I tried co drown OUt til . \lrumming, the mumbling. Matt reached over and pulled rhcm off my cars.

"1 m I ·nrning [hili for you," he said.

1

'" h?"

"Il

au,

you like this song."

my pcn here, it can't write lonelines no mnr ." I " h·d melodramatically and put my hand comy for h ad " was tarning it because he felt guilty abour h.ln "V;'ah,

n\c)\lI~

be ausc

10.

• hal v .r, I'm trying t c••II<ah( ut wanting to be happy."

make you happy. You al,,~\s

I pla cd my headphones on h is ears and plugged ,hem onCo h" amp. " ow I'm hal py."

Jt looked down at his shoes, The mumbled lyrics I.lel< d ba kground noise. I pulled an entire piece oHake I Ih r from th ouch, leaving a bare POt of flufry whitt Ut(on

"II rard • n thing from .. '0"

yet?" he asked .

"I'm making you a graduation pre enr at work," btl worked for a sign company. To gct the job he Ie don rh appl.cation and said he graduated high school.

II a ked if I wanted to adopt a cat, a if a new rat ould m k II kay that hari was coming. I said I would Ihllll< bour It. I nipped through the finished porrion of rol' I, nd he wen, on fucking the ong up a little less each h tarred ver, I met Matt three years ago. I was a ftc hman wo . . ,.

Ma (uII are I OISC. tr came in carrying rwe hoebox f u'iCd 0" hacing Greensboro and all of orch Carolina.

Th Os w re his ticket to Houston, Texas. He was 20 ,oth no l b. no car, and no high school diploma.

It was his sho<S I I

1

noticed first-blue Converse One Stars. He never smiled, but I fell in love with him.

He said he liked the way my ponytail was bleached blonde and the rest of my hair was brown. He promised to say byebefore he got on his bus, but he never bought the ticket.

The next day he took me to lunch. In a month we got an apartment on Mendenhall Street only a half a mile from the school.

I decorated the bathroom with a HeUo Kitty shower curtain and bathmat. Hello Kitty curtains in the bedroom and HelloKitty cushions on the dining room chairs. He decorated the livingroom with movie posters and lined the entertainmentcenter wi rh Star lWlrs actions figures. Along witha cartoon kitty and a star fleet, it was just us; Matt never talked about the future and things were fine.

The spare bedroom was called "the Texas room."

Matt hung a cowboy hat from the back of the door and put cowboyboots next to the bed. On the wall he hung a Texas map and blown up picture of Galveston Beach where he used to surf. On the dresser sat a vase of fake yellow roses and across the ceiling hung a Texas flag. Then one day he said he wanted us to take the Texas room home after I graduated.

After a year Matt, along with his star fleet and passion for Texas,didn't seem as cool. He totaled my car and lost his license. I had to drive him to work every day even though he said I didn't know how to drive. If I had just picked up his cigarettes after work the wreck would not have happened.

My father would not have stopped speaking to me for months.

Then the toothbrush went into the toilet, and I was with him because I clidn't have anything else to do. Things were different. He couldn't make rent half the time, but he had money to buy the latest Queen Amidala doll. I tried to cry 10 see if I feltsad about falling out oflove with him, but I nevercould.

When I started applying to grad school he started talking about Texas and our life together. But I hated cowboy hats and yellow roses. I hated it when he talked about the rush he got skateboarding in the sweltering Lone Star heat. He said there would be a million things there for me to take pictures

73

~ncl k,ll 10k • han\ b he I Coulel 4" f.n.' nUl( ""'IV'ln u) work Or I m ph COl (l,I, ...... 1 II ,I/ltl lull.llth· .1 tartphntn • III • I I. I ,n/l 1'''''11 I,k "I .Inc to m.l ....

1""- II nl ...1 '.1 .•' h"" nd. m, ,Ihu ,,'Ih nu' II.... " .. o. .."".1. Ih u, k -nv I w,{h Y pnnlN "I

...

,,1.1 h.

hUll

tI"

,t

.h,. hun.

• I 1'''1 .1., II h" IlIlll r o"d ,10 10 ,nil .11 II "'tl u' I .hd,,', tilt n nlt"

n' ,n III<' If

"",m

," .<1 .IIOUI ~h.n h"

tup,d

m. pullon m

.,.duo."

ed

II> rl

Cltln

,.

_,

{

nc The h<

little ••• lund,

b," th<n lied. "'

-

"-'t you're making me do. I'm 22 and I'm pulling out my hair because of you." She said she cries at night because she doesn't 10-. Gage.

For two nights I slept in rhe Texas room with Gage hile Shari and Matt slept in my bed. Matt sent me flowers at tk on the third day after she came. Yellow roses. The card UJd,"To Alison, I'm sortie I was an ass Hole. I want us to rk things out and allways be together. We can leave here d go to Houston. It'll be just us and we can get a KiTTen. I.ov., Mall."

Ishowed rhe card to my manager Erin.

"That's kind of sad actually. I'm sorry your boyfriend a moron,"she said. I smiled and carried the roses into the k room. Everyone at work thought I loved Mart, so they lned [0 srep around the fact that he was an asshole.

I Ilnlgh[ened the used record bin for an hour and told Erin .lbour hari moving in. She said Matt was fucking Shari. I aplaincd that she was just having a hard time-that they had .. ayed up all night talking before falling asleep. Erin asked ~l Iwasgoing to do after graduation.

I cried and said Matt .nd I were staying together. We were getting a house, and a c canda mailbox with our names on it in Houston.

When I got home from work Matt shoved me back OUI the door before I could look at the mail. We were odopting a cat from the Guilford Counry Animal Hospital. On lhe drive over he wrapped his hand tightly around the handle Ibove the passenger seat and told me to slow down. 1 walked hind him on the way inside mouthing, "Fuck you, high

hoof drop-out."

Inside Matt had already found the kitten

he wanted.

I

led for him to ask which one I liked.

"I like that one in the back," he said.

"The gray one that's licking itself? Ugh.

I like the

tt one-"

"No way, dude, we're getting the gray one." I looked from the cage, overcome with doubt that Matt could take Mtof a cat.

"They all do that," he said, moving toward the recepdon desk. Before he could say anything this fat lady dre-sed in a bright pink windbreaker stepped around the 75

corner holding a key. Matt grabbed the gray kitten fromthe back and held it by its belly, stroking the back of its neckas the woman cooed to the rest of the cats. The woman satdO\\'TI next to us in the waiting area as Matt struggled to keepthe kitten from jumping out of his arms.

"How old are you two?"

"I'm 23. My girlfriend's 22/' Matt said.

"Sometimes people get a cat, then have a kid, and don't want the cat anymore," she explained, looking at me.

"You should think about that before you make your decision.'

I imagined Matt IO years from now, sitting on his rippedcouch still trying to learn to play that dannn song, mumbling lyricsto himself as his wife set the table and his kids ripped the rest of the leather from the couch. Maybe I would take the cat with me when I left.

"Wouldn't that be cool?" Matt smiled. He hadn't smiled at me in public in a year.

"I really hope you don't mean having kids."

"We could have a little baby. It'd be our little babr Like Gage," he said.

I thought of how when I painted my toenails Matt blew smoke in my face and told me to go outside. The smell bothered him. I couldn't imagine spending the rest of mylife or the rest of my

or even the rest of this month with Matt.

20S

of my toothbrush in the toilet.

I rolled my eyes and told him to go make babies with someone else.

I thought

rule."

"Whatever.

'ahb e ,

We could take it to the playground. It'd

ecause

having kids is something

that 'rules.â&#x20AC;˘

.

The woman took the cat into the back and we satin sdence barely h Idi h d . h ki ten . a ng an s. She finally emerged WIth r e vrYh .a nuniature orange bandana tied around its neck. en we got home Matt . t f: spent two hours trying to get It ou rom underneath the couch. Then he picked up his guitar.

I sat on the cou h hi . es fI h c warct ng the cat paw at torn plee o eat er; Matt mumbled his s . intended to b . h ong. I asked If he ever ÂŤ egm t e second verse. and love is overrated . 1 ' He put his guitar d "There .. It eaves you devastatedOWn. ere."

"That's. the dumbest song I've ever heard."

Onthecounter there was an envelope.

He'd made it

tothemailbox beforeme and that was why we adopted a cat.

NYU. Thick.I wasin. I waved the envelope in the air with a faintnopethathewouldbe happy for me. I could leave. He rouldkeepIriscat.

Shariwas00 her way out the door. She was wearing a blnkseqeincd sleevelessshirt, holding a beer in one hand and Gage's limpwrist in the other as he squirmed to get away from neroShe wasgoingto see her ex-boyfriend.

"Mattsaidyou guys wouldn't mind babysitting tomgnt,'shesaid. I walked past her into the kitchen.

The eat wasdrinking milk and eating canned tuna fish fromakitchenfloor I hadn't seen in two years. Matt had cleaned whileIwas at work. He took out the trash and scraped themoldfrom the sink. Because if the kitchen sink dcesnt smelllikeshit I migbt stay, I thought to myself. In three yearshehad not cleaned but the mold had been scraped fromthe sink. The empty cigarette boxes were in a trash can that wasn't overflowing.

I tookmygraduation gown into my room. I didn't

Wantto walkin the ceremony. None of my friends or family otherthanMatt were coming. On the bed there was note that said,"Turnoffthe lights." A pale blue light glowed from the bathroom.He'd made a sign for me at work. It bad my name Onit surrounded by blue stars. My name was even spelled correctly.

Yellowroses, clean kitchens and signs with my name,

!twasaU goingto make me want to stay.

Matt was in the bedroom closet

.

t,

. h h' feet kicke

wrt

1S

t hroughthe wall. He glared at me for a moment.

d

"Too smart

for me now: huh chief?"

Ie ' h c1aset w all?". I "Puck off, and why is there a ho e m t e ,

I

.

â&#x20AC;˘

asked.

f

t"

"Ineeded room for my: ~e . h t stupid song?"

"Why aren't you practlcmg" t a "Because it doesn't

matter.

77

shrugged him.

I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him up. He my hand off and banged his head into the wallbehind

"I know you're just going to leave me."

In the bathroom a pair of skateboard trunks wereon the floor surrounded by hroken glass. I told him it was immature to throw skateboard parts at mirrors.

Shari was going back to her redneck hoyfriend for another black eye. I was goiog to New York to get awayfrom Matt.

"I'll pick

it up tomorrow;"

r didn't

care when he picked it up. Most of my bag' were already packed for New York. I'd packed them beforeI was accepted.

He mumbled something about giving up on something that had lasted three years. He offered to get ridof all the action figures.

"We don't have to get the mailbox with our nameson it or have babies or anything. We can do whatever you want," he said, crying as he struggled to pull his feet out of the holein the closer, r said I wanted New York and someone who wouldn't mind if I dropped my toothbrush into a toilet.

Jackie Sipes

Night Ritual

A tiny silver box with creaky hinges sits beside her bed. Before sbe sleeps eacb night, she empties two sets of baby teeth into ber hand and shakes them about, like plastic rattles the children used to have,

until she replaced them with oranges in their crib one night because the noise made her head ache.

Silencing them,

she presses hard,

between her palms and waits for tiny imprints to form: pink and stinging little bites in a jumbled, pomegranate

cluster.

She likes to line them up in rows, much straighter than they ever were in the children's crooked, screaming mouths.

The rows on her pillow are silent,

white soldiers frozen in time, awaiting command.

Running the smooth and strong incisors between her wrinkled fingers, grinding them together as if they still bite, she is proud of the perfect enamel.

Elizabeth Doggett

79

Odalisque

The pure desire was what we both saw fIrStHer eyes,

half-hung, eclipsed by shadedhours inside, shades drawn, laid out in bed awake,

damp like tears of pain or pleasure, numbed, glowing like unheard whispers,Iowcome in."

II,

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

Her lips, tongue-moistened, slightlyparted,red with usc, with lipstick,

with what mutes,

entice or challenge? Her wet, white teeth exposed, to taste-the bi rrersweer thatwaits. " . come tn.

Her legs, one raised, draped in robes that slip and touch her thighs, inside, the way streams invite

to light and silky ease, like slowly wading into a calm sea.

"Come ill, she says.

"Desire." h

,

.

e saId, head tilted under Odalisque.

r echoed

his "desire",

"b cautiously, ur her desire or his?"

I-Ie looked at me. .

80

Andnow; here, looking up at him, so close we blur as if in shallow water.

Eyesblur, lips lose shape, and all we see is breathing.

I feel my skin like canvas, wonder whose soft fire his brush might strokethe glow I see in him, or he in me?

Megan Smith

81

/',/It

I '"

.1

â&#x20AC;˘

Mermaidbeauty untouched mystery unsolved,

unsolvable. Obsession of sailors and poets.

Yet I can only think about their oddity, grotesque, I've read that they would lure and lie and trade their home and all they know and love to have a human soul, to belong to another world-some fantastic, imagined world where they can never, will never belong.

Megan Smith

Meredith Jenkins

News From Azazel S?mehow,the first surprise snow always seemed to Comedunng Monday morning rush hour. My friend Devin saidthat was one of the laws of Chicago weather. This year, though,it is Saturday night, while I am walking to Karen's h,ousewhen the first flakes descend. Karen is turning 25 and Im on myway to a wine-in-a-box party. I don't know any of herfriends. I wouldn't even know her if we didn't work together. She is not the kind of person I was friends with in college. Karen has absolutely no sense of tact, no sense of the unsaid. Right in front of customers, she'd discuss the rash she Wasdeveloping on her scalp, or her boyfriend's shortcomings (making sure we all got the pun), or the worst, my sex life. "All myfriends are gay,"as though it not only made her exciting andliberal,but it also gives her permission to say whatever she wanted to me. Karen never fails to work into our conversations something about blowjobs, hair dye, or Janet Jackson. That was as deep as 1 went) as far as she was concerned. She thinks this makes her funny and brave) that she is "breaking taboos." She wears tiny skirtS and high heel sandals. Her blond curls would often dip into the lattes she inexpertly made. She disgusts the women and intrigues the men. She horrifies me.

The birthday girl herself, wearing a green sweater with a splash of red wine acrosS the front, greets me at the door.

Behind her, I can see groups' of stylishly boring men and women drinking.

"Can you believe it's snowing?" I'm tryingto make small-talk. I have that terrible feeling of being a tiny fishin a tank full of sharks.

"I know, it's not even Oc-toe-ber. Have some food.

Get drunk already. No one's here yet." She must he on red Solo cup number ten. I want to leave. None of these people look interesting to me. They look like ... Karen's friends.

Instead of leaving, I pour myself some wine. I stareat my shoes. When you go to a party, and the one person you know is the hostess, and she's already smashed and it's not even 10:3째, and yOll don't even like her anyway, you're only asking for misery.

"Hello. Are you the carpet inspector?" I look up.

"What?" Black frame glasses. Golden brown eyes.

"You look like you might have something to say about the carpet. You're examining it pretty carefully." Panicked,I thought: What if he does think I'm the carpet inspector' What then? A smile. I-Ie's teasing me. He doesn't even know me!

Play it cool.

"I have nothing to say. About anything." Gray turtleneck.

Another smile, a dimple on his chin.

"That's safe. How do you know Karen?" The smellof cologne. Something like the day after a storm. Earthy. Strong enough to make my hair stand up, but not so strong that I could taste it in my mouth.

"We work together. She only invited me today. I'm not really friends with her. You?" "She's my sister."

"You're kidding." Uh-oh. run in the family?

Whatever

she's got, does it

"Nor officially. But we grew up next door to each other. Our moms are good friends. Karen is wonderful. You just have to kinda get past her-" "Her obsession with gay men?" He likes Karen. This ruins everything, right? I remember my friend Devin saying "Compatibility means you and your bOyfrjend hate all the same people. n Can you pass judgment On someone based on who they think is wonderful? Is that fair' B if I . 't . ecause 1 so. Just can 86

acceptsomeoneinto my life who thinks Karen is wonderful.

Or isit moresensible to judge someone based on deep brown eyes anddimples? Iextend my hand.

"I'm Joe." "I'mGreg. I'm leaving for France tomorrow."

"Of course you are." Why do I even waste my time?

"I'llbe home in three months. But let's write, ok?"

Nov. 20m DearGreg, Ifeellike this is silly. We only met that once, but I promisedI'd write. So, here we go. After you left Karen's, she openedher gifts, which were predictable (think urban-chicutilitarian-with-a-twist-of-gay: aromatherapy candles, nail polish,Ani tickets, and cigarettes-I guess I'm probably insultingyou,because likely one of those gifts was from you, butanyway)and her neighbors dropped by, which as you know is a bigvictory, considering their ... previous behavior towards her. Ileft at about 2. By that time, there was almost a foot of snow on the ground. "It never rains, but it pours. And of COurse my apartment was freezing because I left the window open. My dog was angry.

How is France? I'm sure it's indescribable in a few words,but just tell me some stories. What's your day like?

Mineis dull.

Looking forward to hearing from you. >l

Joe.

PS: We should title our letters.

This is "Treading Lightly."

Dec.3'" DearJoe, "TheNews from France" .

This i , ill t all Do you know how thrilled I was S rsn t S Y a '. living the life I've to hear from you? Here I am, In France, 1 highlight f d the abso ute so ar wantedto live since I was t15, anonce Dont, ree t: 1 s illy. wasa letter from. a du dal e I My roe day is . ... leisurely. .

D0 you k.now France 1S unre'fi that plans vacations for celebrities what I do? I work for a rrrn . manager" for France and d ...

I' a "desunanon an politicians. m h I'Il travel from one end of this Italy. So for three mont s,

country to the other, making offers, getting deals, and sampling.

Next fall, I do the same in Italy. Can you believe jobs likethis exist? So, this week, I'm still in Paris. r get up at 10 orso and eat free breakfa tin rhe hotel. I have appoinrmenrs all morning.

I check in with my boss. I hang our in parks and practice my French (which is not so good). I drink coffeein . cafes. I smoke Gauloise cigarerres ("Toujours liberte"). I'vehit all rhe major museums and sights. Tomorrow, I will spend all day ar EuroDisney.

I will bring you back some francs because they won't be in circulation after the New Year. Er vous? Wbar fillsyour day? I don't believe in "dull" days. Tell me about rhe store.

I've never worked in retail. I consider it the Final Frontier.

Karen has some good stories. Wri re me soon, Greg Dec. ra'"

Dear Greg, Thanks for your Jetter. You don't need to flatterme; my writing you can't possibly be the highlight of your day. (Of course, your letter did make my day yesterday. My only mail Was from you and d' d Iivi . ere It car companies. But then, l'm not o~nf France.)

Whar fills my day' Well, today was my day CPt B' I untIl noon, watched Oprah and ate Cracklin' Oat ran. pur Water in c a1 .' hippies tl h ere ,nOt milk. My parents were Sprained t~ughr dairy was the coot of all evil. If! Send green e:r e, my ~lom.wou1d say, "Green energy,Joe! bandage Or a TV~ ,to were .It hurts!" I never saw an Ace I Azazel, to the park lOner A unril,gOt to co 11 ege. r took my d og, I was a Religious Srud' . zaze/lS. rh e B I'bI"IC al word for wasrelan d ' Stu d路res majors do' Thres major ,0 D you kn Ow what Religious " ey Work at chain b k M路 YJob is a job. l'r S Work I' 00 StOres.

I, . ve wanted to live sinc 1 . t s certainly not "the life h ' e Was 15" I . ave lwed when 1 was r c." 1 '. t s more "the life I could f: d ). ate din nco Mandy. We made s a h . nCr With my neighborlbest [fclcvision for Women) a p s ~ttl. Watched Lifetime F路 I I If I ' speCIal 0 SaJ.1 Ole c. were a celebrih.~ 1 n Y Field 110 Sail .J. 5 ie Would b 've y figure. e my celebrity mother

~7

~i

88

I am currently in the process of applying to be assistant manager at the store. This would be the first time in mylifethat Ireceive a salary, not an hourly wage. Do not confuse this with a raise. The amount of money would stay nearlythe same, what would change is the frequency they give ittnme. And I'd get (Glory!) stock options. 1think 1have a goodshot, after all, I've worked there forever. 1 just wouldn't wantto get transferred, though. At least, 1don't think. What wnuldIdo without these near-fatal Chicago winters?

I've decided that if I do not get the AM job, I'm going back to school. Make good on that high school degree, as they say. Although, if I can't climb the corporate ladder at Borders Booksand Music, I'm not sure how I'd fare in the college world.Part of all this is unease at the thought of having a Borders career-that this isn't just some transitory thing I'm doinguntil the next thing I do. The difference between "I'm workingat Borders" and "I work at Borders." The finaliry of thating-Iessverb.

We shall see, we shall see. Don't forget those francs.

Yours, Joe PS-This letter was originally titled "I Can't Believe He Called Me'Dude" but is now "The News from Biblical Wastdand."

The phone rings as 1seal the envelope. It's my boss at Borders, telling me I got the job. The carch? In two months they transfer me to a new store in San Diego. 1have unnl the end of the week to decide. 1could call my mom, who will tell meto stay. Her attitude is to keep everyone as close to the homestead as possible. She'd stop at nothing. Bi-weekly dUU1er " tt' ng me up w1th miSgulded ofrers, new linens, even to stOp se to1 keep me wlthm . . local ything al) young .women (f or1 re Id,anall M.andy who would tell me to go ' .

And beSides, t here' ere 5 no haIIenng range. cou C t use is that?

Wh ut want me to stay. a . h . d .

M.y fri.end DeVlfl- says t at no one b ..

POlOt ill asking for a V1Ce. 路 ce l'ust for conftrmatlon. of alrea dyever really asks f orOWad1vtneed , to get out of here. Tb e tuue . h as made plans. I kn ew Just think, I could end my days spent come for something n路 en tS 1 could finally see the dodgmg . K ar en'S corn.m a winter . ld rudeerien without flu shots. I don't ce Pacific- 1 CoU e:x:p

wait until the end of the week. I call my boss right back and take the job. I will start as an assistant manager on Monday and leave for San Diego on February 15'". The one niggling regret is this business with Greg that apparently will remain unfinished.

I mean, sure I've grown attached

to

this idea I've

constructed in my head about "what it would be like with reg," but [ know that's dumb. It's just conjecture. I imagine he thinks so, too. Who am I to have any expectations of him?

AU this flirting comes easier because of the distance. If he'd

been in hicago all these months, I'd have probably never called him. Dimple be damned.

He will return probably around the same time I depart. Maybe we can make out in the airport. Or at least hug and make meaningful eye contact. Have a Lifetime moment.

Dec. 22 Dear Joe, Thank you for your letter' My parents were antihippies. My mom didn't know how to use an oven. I ate at Karen's all the time, Green energy? Wasn't that a cartoon?

It has been raining in Paris. Very romantic. Last

night, I got caught in it and I had to hide out under a bridge.

JUSt me, the Seine, and a couple of stray dogs. Until a big tourist dinner cruise went by. Nothing stops those things' Not even rain! I can't teU if I miss home or not. I don't know jfI'll be ready to leave. I miss the people (you and Karen) but not the place. My one criterion in looking for a job was travel.

Lots of travel. I don't like Chicago much. Not like you. I bet you'll never leave, even if you get thar promotion (Good luck, by the way). That's cool, though, to feel so at home omewhere. You should come here! Don't you and Karen have vacation time coming up? Hey, I hear they're opening up a Borders on the Champs-Elysees ...

Ok, I gorta run, but write back soon. It's amazing to me how well we've kept in touch. Do you feel that? Title: "Cross-Atlantic Courtship".

Yours, Greg

90

Jan. 4 Greg: Happy New Year' How do you say that in French?

Haveyou spent any Euros yet? This will be quick, I'm writing youon my dinner break. That's tomato soup you see in the cor~er. A Border's Cafe specialty. I'm sure it'll be a big hit in Paris.There's news to tell you, but it'll have to wait. Karen justpaged me, so it looks like dinner is over.

Talk to you soon, Joe. PS-Title: "Soup's on."

I have entered a mindser of"rnoving away." All month I've been tying up loose ends, calling old friends, and packing.

I started packing way too early, that's how I know I'm excited.

I'mnot sure, but I have a suspicion that my Mom is planning a moveto California. Just to be close. The only issue I've avoidedis Greg. I've tried to cool it down in the last few letters, but he's pushing in. But what's he expecting, anyway?

Even if I weren't leaving, it would be very strange to hop into a relationship after just a few months of letter-writing.

And anyway,I am leaving, so it's a moot point.

Feb.

2"'

Dear joe, "The Crucial Moment" This is our tenth letter! I have never had a correspondence like this) with anyone.

I am already feeling the strings of home (and you) tugging. I will leave France in just over rwo weeks. It's been unreaL So successful. And not just from a business standpoint either (although I did get a lot of good work done and the home office loves me). I mean successful from a personal standpoint. I don't know if Karen told you, but I met you just as I was coming off a really awful relationship.

Awful for him, for me, and for just about everyone we knew; Of course, It started out ok but he just was a total nihilist. I'd go out of town for a week , and he wouldn't leave his room. He'd lock the . I I'd door and drink. until he was sick. That's not romantIC. never met anyone so dependant. Don't get me wrong, I'm not 9r

flattering myself. It had nothing to do with me, I know.He just had a lot of problems (more issues than a magazine rack,as they say). What I wanted, as I told Karen, was a manwho could stand on his Own. That's you. I know this soundstot~ly ridiculous, but our letters have really opened my eyes as to what a relationship could be like. And in a way,the distance has helped me reveal myself to you. There are no distractions.

I have my life, and you have yours, and they only meet in these letters. Could I have gotten to know you like chisif I'd beenin Chicago these last few months? No way. I know it's not that smart to lay all this out in a Jetter, but I don't want to wait until I see you. I would just chicken out. So, I guesswhat I'm asking is, Can a person fall in love in writing? BecauseI think I have.

I come home in the morning on February13th (the day before Valentine's Day). Probably not enough timefor you to write back. Let's have dinner. I'll be jet-lagged, but it's ok.

Bizarrely Yours, Greg I have been Jiving out of boxes these past few days.

Today is Saturday, and my 24-year tenure in Chicago ends on Monday. Of course, tonight is the big dinner with Greg, who has no idea that this fantasy he has of "Bizarrely Yours"is just that. A [,1J"asy. I have been agonizing over his last Jetter.

Karen called, ostensibly to inform me that Greg was coming [0 my place straight from the airport. Her real agenda, though, was to pout about not being let in on "our secret letter-writing romance." She behaved like a hurr puppy.

"Why didn't you tell me? I could have told you so much about him."

"There was nothing know about him." dare?"

to tell. And nothing I needed

to

"So, are you guys going to consider my party your first

"K . aren, I really don't think we're going to consider anyrhlDg Our any thin H . . g. ave you forgotten that I'm leaving Cl ucago>" "Yeah well gu I

ess

h h

W 0

. as no idea about that?"

"I know. I'll ten him tonight."

"That's kind of an assholey move, dontcha think?

Kindof a cock-tease, aren't you?" I could hear the woman Karenwas serving gasp.

"Uh, how about you help the customers and forget aboutit, ok?" That's not true anyway. I am not a cock-tease. lr was mail! It wasn't for real. It was nice, but gee, wouldn't it begreatifrelationships really were like that, but they're not' Everythingwe said (or wrote) to each other, we were able to consider,to pore over, to scrutinize. No worry about saying thewrongthing-I've got White Out! I mean, 1 could make anyonefall in love with me rhrough the mail. It's not hard. I guessthe question is whether I wanted to.

"Whatever. All I know is that he'll be rhere in a few hours.Youbetter figure something out, because he's not

taking this as lightly as you are."

I reel awful. I did not ask for this. I did not flirt with him. I did not lead him on. I only answered his letters. He initiated. Why do I feel so guilty about leaving him? I did continuewriting him after 1 found out I was moving. And I shouldhave told him. But I teally had no idea where his rnind hadtaken all of this. 1 mean sure, I'd wondered if there could be something, but what's the point? You can't really get to knowsomeone on paper. I'm not leaving him. There's not evenanything there to leave. And yet, I know as soon as he walksin that door I'm going to be fined with doubt about San Diego. What if he's right? What if I'd be walking out on a goodthing, maybe the best good thing I'll get?

Ok, enough of this.

"Knock,knock. Is this the right place?"

"Hi Greg, I'm in the kitchen." . III "What's with the boxes' Are yOU redecoratmg.

The same eyes, glinting from behind the same black frame glasses. . dow What am I the wm路 .

All my rehearsed speeches flew out doing' I want to hug him. I doo't. Again, he finds me stanng at my shoes.

93

"No, Greg. I'm moving to San Diego on Monday. I should have told you, but 1had no idea, . , about anything you wrote in your last letter."

Greg stayed silent for a minute. "1 feel very, . ' stupid."

"Don't feel stupid. 1 should have told you. I didn't realize you'd be coming back with so many expectations until ... 1don't know what this is. I feel confused and awful. I'm sorry."

"I mean, don't you feel a little like you're walking out on me?" There is anger underneath his voice. If I relent, I will spend the rest of my life hating him in a dozen small resentful ways. Where is that infallible logic I knew I'd worked out this morning? Restate my thesis. Keep my cool.

"No. This was entirely theoretical. It can only be theoretical. Even right now; with you standing in my house, it feels totally wrong. 1 almost feel like screaming, 'What are you doing here?' We are only on paper. It doesn't count in real life.

Or, you know, in person life. It is just so much easier to write than to speak. It doesn't automatically transfer for me. I'm sorry that it does for you, but, whatever. Okay?"

Greg walked right out the open door. 1 can't blame him. There is absolutely nothing else to say. It was undoubtedly the most un-begun, unfinished headache of a relationship either of us had ever been in.

March r" Dear Greg, Title: "Eureka." It's the state motto meaning "I have found it". It' S not Bibli . , ' B" .1 cal, It 5 Greek. It is beautiful here. u~s, trees, clean au (compared to Chicago) and no seasons.

I didn't kn . b ". ' ow It, ut this IS the life I've wanted since I was fifteen. Sorry this is o nlY a postcard. I Just ' wanted you to have my address. I hope you are even better than well.

Yours, Joe PS-Hello to Karen.

David 94

Chap1llf1'

ig t EZY 199, London nh

to Edinburgh

I. The rain doesn't go all the way up.

1 remember that as we break through the clouds that seem like sky into a northern summer night, clear blue and slowly deepening, released from grey into a world of fading sunset and fresh starS, JUSIfor this short flight.

Soon enough we start to sink again, the clouds around us like a mist and I can see the city sparkling through ripS in the cover, prettier from up here. Closer, closer shapes becoming roads, houses, patches of Held and hill until the sick thump of landing brings me back to earth.

II. I watch twO women kissing in the airport, voices low with the excitement and relief of falling intO one wacher after absence.

I memorize them-one is tall and fair, the other smaller, darker-does

it matter?

95

It is a little airport, late night flight, and there are looks of wonder and disgust.

I try to look away,afraid my gaze will feel no different from the others.

How could they know I'm watching them in envy, and I wish

them well? They glance at me a couple times, no recognition,

pull together and move off, stiJl wrapped lip in reunion,

going horne.

III. Did they know they were beautiful) They seemed to know it so well that there was no need for knowing,

each reflected effortlessly in the other's eyes. They have their quarrels, their jealousies, those places where the edges don't quite

meet. They must. But I see only that returning.

Heading back to temporary horne where no reunion waits I f~el.transparent, not quite solid 111 this place.

Twatch the dark bus window where the ligh rs, trees, buildings ail pass through my face.

U7,zyla Chanzbo

On Interplanetary

Connections

Sunsetting purple, red behind a doghairednavy station wagon's torn back seat andmyhands crossed, fingers interlaced, right alongthe curve of the cushion, lined up straight withhorizon and the eyes I knew were blue because my mother told me so-I

was

facingbackwards though she kept saying not to unbuckle my belt or turn around and I unlaced my right hand fmgers, reached out, touched the glass and I could tell the glass touched the car's frame, which touched the tires, and then the road, and others, until water stopped

the pavement. I could see my hand, the glass, the tires, the roads, the water, setting sun, bluesky,blue eyes were all just one big thing, some cosmic dream of the older writing me

thinking this really happened, thinking I got it, a three-year old in mom's junk wagon headingaway from Texas toward New Jersey, two different names for places people live.

I swore for years it was true, first memory of childbood and all. Then one day my mom informed me, laughing: when we moved up North, honey, we took a plane, you cried nonstop.

Jennifer Taylor

97

Phil in Byn u m by Jonathan Karpioos

Rocket Science .

LesterEvernham was drawn to rockets like a moon

to

Its.more" rnassi \an assrve pet,

pulled ineluctably through warped E .. into perpetual orbit. He had an . tnstetruan space-time mtraetablI . to straddle an upward-bound missile, . . e ongmg , IS hai au as he streaked through the atmosphere and smgemgh mtoltithe see t ril expanse of space, a celestial cowboy with a mu lI-stagedhorse beneath him. But eleven year-old Lester pur physicalimpossibilities aside, for his precocity tended t~wardsthe physics that shot and propelled rather than those t at tethered and contained. For him things like the attn I osphere and laws of gravity were meant to be broken, and or those with sufficient fortitude and determination, it could be done without such encumbrances as cabin pressure and 1

deflectiveheat shields.

Lester'srocket obsession had begun when his firstgrade class spent a unit on the space program and watched for a week as their teacher painstakingly assembled a model 'Titan IV,of ApoUo fame. The class, which had taken no part in the rocket'sconstruCtion, then looked on with glee when Mr. Hartke took. it outside and pointed it towards the front of the school. He touched one ignition wire to the other, sending the ballistic pointed tube careeni~g~ro~gh the window of the girls' batnroom nc"t co the pnnc\pal S office.

Mr. Hart.ke was summarily fired, but Lester was hooked. He returncd home that day and neglccted to even tell

99

his mother the story that would make the next day'sfrontpage, but remembered to ask his father for a model rocket kit. ')\ rocket?" (~Titan IV" "How much?"

"Five dollars," Lester lied.

When they went to the hobby shop the next day,they found that the price was actually $39.95, but Mr. Evernharn assented, seeing it as an opportunity for obligatory father-son bonding.

That afternoon, after two hours of painstakingdecal work, which Lester insisted upon doing precisely as the instruction manual dictated, Mr. Evernham left the garagefor the comfort of the den. He told Lester to come get him when it was time for the fins and engine, but Lester never did, a~dhIS father was glad. Lester completed the rocket by that evenmg, and as the setting sun gasped through the smog of Greater Atlanta, his tiny hands touched the ignition wires together, and the I/soth scale Titan shot into the crepuscular darkness. He could not see its parachute deploy, but trusted that it had. He made no attempt to track down the rocket, though it was presumably intact, because the return to earth was not important for Lester. It was the trip up that mattered. .

Lester's obsession was cemented in the piercing whish of that launch. The Evernham front lawn averaged three launches per week over tile next sixth months, as Lester pleaded first for more rocket kits and then for the less expensi-:e wholesale materials-body rubes, fins, parachutes,. and en8'Jnes-to construct Customized rockets to which he did not give names. Mr. and Mrs. Evernham were all roo happyto ~blige thc~rson, and were dearly pleased to see him immersed ~n.s~methmg constructive. They even got in the habit of Jommg one another on the porch to watch his launches, though Lester never asked them to do so. . "What kind is this one?" his mother would ask, fingering her frosted hair. j<\

'D'" he.

.

.

AL hi'路路. would answer, always referring to the engme size. rrer S lllJtJal burst fd . o ecoranve emphasis Lester became concerned only with po e d fi . '. dI L . w ran Unct1onallty, an err Ius" projects essentially unadorned. '

100

"Wham-O!"his father would shout as the rocket tore

skyward, "Good one, buddyl" Another launch, another deployed parachute, another descentto the suburbs of northern Atlanta. The range of the landing area increased proportionally to the size of the engine; by thetime seven-year-old Lester built and launched his first 'F,' thepenultimatein engine sizes available at the local hobby shop,hisfallingrockets were straying throughout the county.

Puzzledpecan farmers found them in their fields, befuddled homeownerspulled them from their shrubbery, and at least one IJili-birthday pool parry was interrupted when a five-foot long 'E'splasheddown in the middle of a Marco Polo game.

Time passed and rockets grew bigger. He rook to the Internetto order all engines above 'G,' to circumvent the over18age stipulation. Surgeon-like in his precision, Lester's rocketswere at the zenith of craft and aerodynamic detail, and hislaunchsafety record was 100%. Neighborhood crowds gatheredto sec his rockets, which grew past man-sized, roar off his flame-blackened driveway and into the beyond. Lester wouldgrimacewith ecstasy at the piercing screech of the launch,andsmile as he felt the searing heat of the concrete through his shoes after the rocket had disappeared. Looking up at the sky for his rockets, which frequently shot out of sight, Lester alwayswondered how high they really flew, if the specs Onthe engine were accurate. How far was out of sight?

At age 9 he was profiled by the local Alpharetta paper.

It was lucky for him no serious rocketeers saw the photo, for they would have known that no nine-year-old could legally launchK:-enginedrockets, which soared off the ground via 20,000 newtons of force. in fact, he had forged his father's signatureto receive the advanced rocket certification requisite for ordering such engines, as they con~aine~ near. weaponsgrade propellant.' By the time Lester s certtftcatlon went through, the Evernhams were spending over a tho~sand dollars a month on his rocket habit. But can you put a pnce on ~ C h' I' sfu P with his son?, Mr. Evernham asked himself Jar er s re anon . "f e is 'Justeuphemism for "explosives," as it consists ," Emgme 0 cours , 'all' f â&#x20AC;˘ .ving amounts and concentrations of processed nitrate essenn yo V~J-' urn at a fixed rate, pro duci h ucmg trust. compoun ds t hat b 101

as he purveyed each credit card statement.

Though they rarely spoke to one another, his parents were so proud of their son, watching from the porch as dozens of onlookers gathered for each launch. Launches rook place only monthly, owing to the time needed for such largeprojects.

They saw little of Lester, sequestered as he was in the garage every day after school, but were always eager to see what their little rocket scientist had done this time when he wheeledhis newest one out onto the driveway. Even his older brother Peter turned out, jealous of the attention Lester receivedon launchdays but thrilled by the awe-struck girls tbey brought.

Though he hated to involve his father in his rocketry any more than he had to, Lester knew that he must when it came time to move onto the '1.' One spring night, aweek before his ro'" birthday, Lester approached his father's recliner, FAA Waiver in hand.

"Dad?" "Yeah, buddy, what's up?"

"T want to launch an '1.'"

"Great, man. You know where my credit cardis."

"Well, there's this form you have to fill out first."

Lester had already completed the pages of technical information; he had requested a maximum altitude of ),000 feet and carefully diagranuned the schematics of his rocket.

Mr. Evernham signed the final page.

Two weeks later, William B. Evernharn received FAA per~ssion to launch an L-grade rocket, not to exceed 5,000 feet In altitude. A week after that the zj-pound engine artived In the mall, with a Shipping charge of over one hundred dollars.

As one of the most prolific rocketeers in the country, William B. Evernham was known throughout the Internet roclcetry ~omm~nity,and such orders were not hard to fill. He unmedlarely installed the engine into his already complete rocket body, which h db·· b . a to e tipped sideways to get throug the garage door' Bu tth bl . . e assem y of the rockets was moving • The size of Lester's rockets \Vas lead' h . mg to \V at residents of N art h ern G corgra" conslderceJ paranormal Ienechs of small Cars d ·fi· phenomena; rockets the b rr tmg to earth sus c d d f resulted in frantic calls to local sheriff! IP n e rom parachutes s. n mosr cases, locallaw 102

pastthe capabilities of young Lester. He frequently had co ask Peterfor help lifting things; though even the largest rockets werenever exceptionally heavy, as their body tubes were hollow, Lester was unableto place the nose cone on top of an eightfoothodyhy himself, for example. Peter masked his fascination witha scowlas he handed the fiberglass cone CO his brother, perchedatop a ladder bought expressly for that purpose, but Lester was oblivious.

The next year passed for Lester in a series of rocketbuildingtimetables. Order the body, fins, cone, parachute, and flame-retardantwadding. Wait. Construct the rocket body.

Completethe tedious FAA Waiver. Wait. Receive approval, order the engine, bigger than last time. Wait. Install the engine. Launch. While other fifth-graders drew hearts or skullson their notebooks, Lester drew complex schema of future rockets within his. His grades were deplorable, though neither of his parents actually deplored them. ''A'D' in math?

Haveyou seen his rockets?" his father wrote on Lester's failing report card before sending it back CO school. Because his mothershuttled him to a more posh private school closer to Atlanta rather than have him attend the hick school he was zonedfor,none of his teachers or students actually had seen them.

But in Alpharetta, which is not so much a community as a conglomeration, Lester's launches were the rage. The crowdwas an odd blend of affluent suburban neighbors and indigenousGeorgians, the latter for whom the launches were somethingof a mainline injection for their vehicular sports habits. People knew to bring earplugs, and to move back the viewingboundary each subsequent launch, as the engines .got bigger. Police turned out; partly for crowd safety, mostly Just to watch. All vegetation around the driveway had long-since been scorchedaway and the Evernhams were lucky to have a drivewaysuffi~iently long so that the exhaust flames did not ignite the house as the rockets shot up and past it. But the not be happier with their son, and saw a nearEvern hams c ould c onsidered the rockets to be errant test launches from Ft. enforcement .' the notoriously obtuse . d cdeclined to pursue the cases WIth Benrung, an USAImy.

103

certain future for Lesrer at NASA, despite what his math grades might suggest. They told the judge so at Peter's arraignment for drug possession.' The judge politelyagreed, saying that he had enjoyed Lester's last launch, but that the Evernhams should consider focusing attention on their other son as well. "Maybe we should get him a rocket kit!" his father said.

In truth, not much attention was even given to Lester, but that was mostly of his own doing. He spoke of his rockets only when he needed something. In fact, the other Evernhams spoke only when they needed something. Dinners passed wordlessly, Mrs. Evernman absorbed in her neuroses, Mr. Evernham in sex with other women, Peter with drugdeals, Lester with rockets. But Mr. Evernham poured the energyofa week's worth of non-conversations whenever Lestercamewith a rocket-oriented request.

"Dad, I need you to sign this form."

"Yeah, what you doing now? Bombing the Germans?

Eh, buddy? The Germans!"

"I want to launch an '0.'"

"What's this one going to cost me?"

'1\bout two-thousand for the engine."

"Ooh, that's a lot, buddy."

"It's the biggest."

"The biggest? We going for outer space this time, eh, Neil Armstrong?" ((My ceiling is 25,000 feet."

The FAA approval came back with a stipulation to tilt the ro~ketslightly to the north, so as to avoid any planes ascendmg from or descending to Hartsfield International ~rpoJrt. ~ester oriented the launch pad accordingly, and when his a arnved, he was ready for only the third launch of a rocket of that rna . d . h gruru em t e country that year. The Int~rnet was abuzz with reports ofWrlliam Evernham's new project, but Lester made sure not to reveal his launch location

,I'Of. "IfyOll 're gOlOg . to bring that in here " . me!"M f. Evernham had Jd P , YOU better share WIth to erer; Peter did because he liked to he P id r h路 ' n r usu a1Iy share, howcver, ru rcr IS weed.

a

J

so as to prevent out-of-town visitors.

But Lester never installed the engine. Rather, he orderedanother one, saying in his FAA Waiver that his previousengine had malfunctioned and a launch was thwarted.

Mr. Evernhamsigned the form, and several weeks later, another 48-pound'0' engine arrived. Lester lugged that engine off to thegaragewith his other one. For weeks he tinkered with the engines.From the top of each, he removed the charge that blewthe rocket's payload open after the propellant had burned, releasingthe parachute. He delicately cut the bottom strata of solidpropellant fuel, the part that burned first, producing the initialburst of thrust, out of one of the engines. He placed that engineon top of the other. Lester's math was not good, and there were no figures for altitude potential for a combination of two '0' rockets, but he guessed that giving the rocket two successive engines to burn would carry it at least to 50,000 feet, since the altitude capability of one engine was 25,000. But Lesterwas really counting on the hope that as the rocket flew further awayfrom earth, the pull of gravity would grow weaker, allowingthe second engine to propel it past 50,000 feet and up and through the stratosphere.

His math and physics, of course, were sorely inaccurate, but dreamers look kindly on advantageous estimation. The culmination of five years of carefulprogression and planning had been reached, and Lester looked at his final rocket, a to-foot behemoth of fiberglass and aluminum and concentrated explosives, with a blend of pride and nostalgia. On the ground beside him lay an enormous polyesterparachute, purchased at great expense by his father, bur for which Lester felt no remorse for not using.

With the engines installed and the rocket finally ready, Lesterspoke up at the dinner table that evening, though Peter was the only one who heard him.

"I'm going to launch myself into space."

"I hope you fucking do, fucking moron."

Lester brushed him aside as a Luddite. His parents, on the other hand, seemed to miss the declaration-his mother . entertaining fantasies of her own death while his was agam ., .

C th rc"';ned fantaSies of fucking his therapist. In the fa er ente . eks both would increase their visits to their commgwe , .. . cherapistS to multiple times a week, though Mr. respective a.'-.

â&#x20AC;˘

°5

1

Evernham would never score.

After dinner, while Mrs. Evernham silentlydid the dishes, Lester asked Peter to help him move his rocket outside.

With a "shit," Peter acquiesced, and the two brothers rolledthe rocket out on the enormous doUy Lester had had constructed when he moved to 'F' engines. With some exertionandcare not to break the fins, they tipped the rocket upright onto the launch pad at the end of the driveway. As Peter headed wordlessly back inside, Lester dragged the ladder out to the driveway.

In the twilight, Lester worked atop the ladder with duct tape, rope, and a portable stadium seat that Mrs. Evernham used to take to UGA football games, back when they still went. Lester had had plans for that seat (or a very long time, since the day he felt the ground shake when he launched his first 'G' and watched it disappear above him, trailing smoke and fumes and obsession. It had a cushioned seat and coBapsible back, allowing for comfort while seated and . convenience while carried. A growling bulldog glared from Its seat. With the duct tape he securely fastened the seat ro the side of the rocket, embarrassed somewhat at the crudity of his makeshift saddle but intent on securing it as tightly as possible.

He made a SOrt of searbelr out of the rope, and put a couple more layers of tape over aU his points of attachment just for good measure. When his homemade cockpit was complete and secure, he returned to the garage and readied the ignition box as he had done so many times before. With the ignition wires attached to the engine, he double-checked the connections in the box, assuring himself that his fate was inexorably contained within the flip of a switch, and that faulty wiring would not result In. the unforrunare dilemma of being strapped in his seat, perpendlCular to the ground six feet below him with no way ro get down. Once Lester pushed over the ladder' he had no plans of coming down. ' Out of his bedroom window. Peter caught a glimpse of Lester ~,Jjmbjnginto the rocket seat and muttered a 'What the ~ck; .. ~he authorities would ask for weeks afterward why he didn t realize what wa g . .

S o1Og on and tell someone when he saw Lester get tn the Scat and P I . ,erer cou d never produce an answer.

He JUStwatched, while his mother filed h il th .k . er .nar s to e quJC 106

andhisfatherdozed, a bit drunk, in his recliner, as his brother pushedoverthe ladder and flipped the ignition switch. The ferocityofthe launch shattered the windows of the house and meltedthebumpers of nearby cars, and before anyone besides Peterevenknewwhat had happened, Lester was ripping rhroughthe incipient darkness, astride 400,000 newtons of thrust,fightinga battle he could not win against a massive earth that wouldnot let him go.

Christopher Lamb

'07

On Edward Ruscha's Scratches on the Film

"What I hope (whenI hope) is that we'll see each other again,.. and again reach the VEIN in which we loved each other.

It existed. It existed:"

-Frank

Bidart, "To the Dead"

If it ends, as al1 things must, I heara saying most unfortunate:

final, frustrating, even, but grounding,

too, in the same breath-

if it ends (I still cannot say the word ''when'')Hit ends, I hope that it would end like this: scratchy white lines on film thin and precise, like pin stripes, only scattered mapped onto. existing there before, or more intentional, like nOJ

108

tornstrips in canvas, yes wherethe hero, or heroine as the case is, in fact, has dug her knife deep inro the screen, and gripping tightlyyes,hold on, -tightly, she rips down in one swift line.

These lines will cover my screen when it ends, and I will stand there (maybe as I do now), staring, listening, staring again while listening to the scratchy record-player sound, the subtle crackle-fuzz of a film beautiful for its silence.

I might cryprobably will, as I do sometimes, only when I shouldbut Old English letters will tell me that it isfine it is all fine it bas always been fine.

9

10

On a nearly golden, maybe faded bronze, screen darker letters will remind me of

The End: evoking the now sad present, the wonderful present in the face of ali

that has past.

Sarah Dunsmore

lID

Spit Shine

In Midwest towns, in the thick of summer, heat rises from the ground in waves, almost visible, and on the edges of town, at the peak of day, high school kids detassel corn, mow lawns, bail hayall of this done with haste, a flurry of arms and grain and seed, picking it up to sling around overhead

and into trucks to haul away, then

down to pick more up again as

if

the constant movement might somehow speed the heat, hurry the work, or pass the time quicker-urge the approach of

III

Evening: the sun retreats; a different energy rises; they change from work clothes into cleaner clothes they might use for work tomorrow but they won't think of that tonight while the trucks they would haul dirt in now race down dirt roads for the grip they feel of wheels grounded but flying.

But some spit shine them, each evening as if they could erase the scuffs and dirt forever before they cruise them down Main

fI2

wherethey will pass each other waving and turn around

at the light, passing others winking at girls they imagine riding with them, arms that would be resting around beautiful shoulders, bare and smooth, but instead they wave and circle again, thinking only of tonight, not of the work they will do tomorrow,

not of the heat or the fields and fields of dust and hay.

Sarah Dunsmore

1I3

Contributors Justin Ansley is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from Carrboro, North Carolina.

Dorothy Ball is a junior English major and Creative Writing minor from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Audrey Barrett is a senior Environmental Studies major from Houston, Texas.

Charles Battle is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from Atlanta, Georgia.

Sarah Blackburn is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from Durham, North Carolina.

Lindsey Britt is a junior Studio Art major from Rutherfordton, North Carolina.

Wayla Chambo is a senior Music major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

David Chapman is a senior Dramatic Arts major and Creative Writing minor from Chicago, Illinois.

Elizabeth Doggett is a junior Women's Studies major and Creative Wei ring minor from Shelby; North Carolina.

Deborah Dorland is a junior Studio Art major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sa:a11 Dunsmor.e is a senior Anthropology nunor from KnIghtstown, Indiana.

major and Sociology

Kerri French is a senior English m . d C . TVT." . ajor an reanve wnnng nunor from Greensboro , North C aro I路Ina. Evan Gurney is a junior English rna' d C. .. . f rom Canton, Oh.io.

Jor an reanve WrItIng minor

l MeredithJenkins is a sophomore Journalism Communication major.

and Mass

HarmonyJohnson is a senior Journalism and Mass Communication major and Creative Writing

minor

from

Hendersonville, North Carolina.

MikeJones is a senior English major and Creative Writing minorfrom Palm Springs, California.

Jonathan Karpinos is a senior Classics major from Chapel Hill, Norrh Carolina.

Christopher Lamb is a junior English and History major from Burlington,North Carolina, currently studying in Chile.

BrennaMurphy is a junior Studio Art major from

Chattanooga,Tennessee.

James O'Boyle is a junior from Burlington,

North

Carolina.

Michael Pesant is a junior Psychology major and Creative Writing minor from Miami, Florida.

Jackie Sipes is a senior English major from North

Carolina.

Megan Smith is a Latin American Studies major and Creative Writing minor from Pleasant Hill, California.

Erin Sullivan is a junior English

Cary, North Carolin

major and Italian

minor from

a,

Jennifer Taylor is a senior English minor from Charlotte,

North

major and Creative Writing

Carolina.

Derek Vanderpool is a senior History major and Creative Writing minor from Baton Rouge. Louisiana and Las Vegas, Nevada.

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