Jeopardy 43

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Vivesection: Anatomy of a Living Magazine

Five Notes from the Editor-in-Chief

Discombobulation Lenae Day

5. VOLUME 43 It is is the last night before we send the magazine layout to the printers. The sun is starting to rise. As customary in student publishing, we worked whole night through. As I scroll down the pages of the inDesign document I start to have second thoughts. This issue is strange.

It is different from any Jeopardy that has come before. What will people think?

Will they be confused? For some reason I visualize the future. A hundred years from now, when they chisel through the 2007 brick in front of Old Main and pull this magazine from the time capsule, will they flip through the pages and say, “What the...”

4. LEGENDS In 1963 Western Washington University’s first literary magazine hit the stands— Synchysis—a beatnik chapbook of poems, prose, and artwork—a forum for free expression...well, that’s what it tried to be. The cover of the second issue was plastered with photographs of chopped up female dolls; a statement about gender. Statement too radical for the administration. Synchysis disappeared. But the following year a new magazine emerged, one that acknowledged, with its name, that “free speech ain’t free—Jeopardy.

Speaking out is a risk—you can lose your magazine—some people lose thier lives.

For the first few years Jeopardy was careful not to print anything that would shake things up. Then, in 1972, the new editor, Tim Kyle, wanted to readdress those feminist issues. He wanted Jeopardy to “finally contain a tight balance of men and women...in the historic interest of this war.” So Jeopardy ‘72 was all about sex. Bodies sweated, lovers talked out loud, women were tickled with feathers—real-life images of sexuality and gender. The administration was furious.

They frantically attempted to capture all copies. But Kyle had orchestrated a synchronized distribution and within hours every issue was in someone’s hands. After that, risk-taking became a trademark of the magazine.

During the seventies Jeopardy editors experi

Table of Contents

Poetry Caleb Barber

22 74

Emily Barker

112 An Acquired Taste

James Bertolino

17

Report Tavern Woman

25

Spider Posse: An EmbeddedWord Sestina Notes for: Man, The Egregious Ape, No. 1

Cece Briggs

82

Our Appetite for Pleasure

Luther Cassidy

46

They Stepped Over Her All Day

Denise Coen

24

Coarse: for Emily Dickinson

Danielle Crawford

84

Four Chambers for Tyler David Tandeski

Ian Denning

75

Japanese Umbrella

Lucy Elenbaas

105 Robot Sex Poem: to PKD, With Love

Seija Emerson

29

How to Live Alone

Mark Iozzi

90 99

Course Coverings After an Incident at Nairobi

Graham Isaac

73 80

Malcolm Kenyon

31 61 86

Alison Knappett

109 A Little Red

Krista Kondro

9

Journal Entry of a Somnambulist

David Laws

62

Voyage

Jessica Lowber

19 59

Solve for X Still Life with Oleander

Greg Macdonald

35

Some Times

Alison Mandaville

10

Clean

Carlos Martinez

110 Wallace Stevens 115 Whose Lullaby Is This Anyway?

Cavities The Future According to Johnny Quest 106 Somewhere in Colorado

Jessyca Murphy

40

Heidi Norgaard

30

In the Dark

Ben Packard

18

I’ve Forgotten How to Write

Timothy Pilgrim

24

Cell Phone Dolor at Seatac Airport

Nathan Rice

8

Hummingbird

Matthew Campbell 23 Roberts

Light Pollution

Aylen Elliot Rounds 58

Incident

Anastasia Stasko

88 89

I Can’t Save You, Baby, When the Empire Falls The Short Life of a Barista I Voted

Marjorie Steele

42

The Road to Nineveh

Eva Suter

39

Jake Tucker

20

Me and God

David Wheeler

72

Conversation Piece

August Friday Fresh Out of Proxies Family Album

imented. The changed its format almost every year. Some

The Penguin and the Polar Bear 102 Pussy

20

elevator, corner of champion and grand 107 Fiction

L yrics Anastasia Stasko

54

The Country Song

volumes followed themes. They highlighted northwest

Prose Taira Anderson

26 48

The Story of Fish and Saup: Or How Everything is Pretty All of the Time Regarding the Importance of Patience in Waiting Room Situations

Catherine Boody 92

Consolidation

D.E. Goodroad

11

Fish Stew

Jordan Hartt

98

Rain

Beth Huffington

96

Red

Sam Johnson

33

Three Occurrences of Childhood

Andrew Lovseth

107 The Death of Latin

Jessica Lowber

111 Soup from Stones

Miles Mattix

36

William Owen

Visual Art Taira Anderson

49 56 57

Nice Girl Restless Leg Syndrome Senorita Izabele

kelly björk

12

golden

52 60

Waterproof Ink Spray Paint, Not Bullets

Lenae Day

4 Discombobulation 97 Neptune 100 Kick Up Your Heels

Charissa Engstrom

8 Rita 9 Jack 108 Catsup Girl

Terra Fine

87

Well Met

Emily Fox

16 64

Lehi’s Dream X-Mas 1955

The Evil

Mark Iozzi

65

A Brute Night at Mona Harber’s Private House

34 91

Darjeeling Child Ascent

Marie Jackman

101 Tributaries

Ben Paplow

38

Recreation

Erin Jensen

53

Desolation

Alek Talevich

21

Gutters Lined in Gold

Jessica Lowber

52

Tongue Map

Sandra Lucke

13

Celeste

Jeremy Mattocks

104 8-Bit Pornography

Glenn Newcomer

114 untitled

Richard Olmsted

47

Essay James Bertolino

17, i

Script Bryan Willis

writers,

76

53

Noise Plus Signal

A Brief History of Golf in Relation to Man’s Connection to the Natural World

83

and the lord said, I will destroy man whom I created from the face of the earth.

Genesis 6:7,12 Time Flies but Airplanes Crash in the land of the blind— leading the blind—the one eyed man is king

Noelani Penney

32

Bells at a Playground, Hawaii

John Sloan

52 74 74 75

Bratz Over Barbies Untitled Film Still 67 Orientalism Still Flies Venuses Descending

Caleb Young

100 The Market

addressed new environmental issues, and tackled the great debates of the time. Nationally renowned write

Hummingbird

Nathan Rice After running through the blossoming explosion that is Spring— everything waking up and turning over to find the same sun, hurried movement out of bud and toward light all green growing, frantic sputtered notes of bird song that make a heart flutter at its own ceaseless beat as it lays down the rhythm for all of this music— I found a hummingbird plastered onto the grille of my Subaru.

Its green-blue iridescence caught my eye, and that long, nectar-loving tongue sticking out obscenely from a broken beak, so eager for the next, unknowable taste.

Rita Charissa Engstrom

s were printed in Jeopardy—James Welch, Richard Hugo, Annie Dillard, Charles Bukowski, Gary Snyder, Rita Mae Brown

8

Journal Entry of a Somnambulist

KristaKondro Darkness lowers over the verbena, moonflower, and Cereus Headlights penetrate the low fog of night Streetlights burn the darkness down Ellis St.— Speeding through the night, they are children.

Red light, green light Yellow light, red White and blue lights— Pull over to the shoulder.

You, in the beetle with the smoke filled cab— Pull over.

I need to confiscate your REMs.

A cat howls lowly and stretches, raking its fur in the alley between the houses, one broken claw after another moon-lamp eyes of phosphorus glow piercing the dark, drawing blank eyes to the thick shadows of velvet dark.

This half-light, half-wakefulness surrounding sinking into the dream trail late in the night.

It is still early still, don’t stir from the deep it runs in the family, this running asleep.

Jack Charissa Engstrom

—to name a few. But starting in the mid-eighties support for Jeopardy began to decline...(cont. on page 123)

9

Clean

Alison Mandaville baba once told me of the grottoes in Beirut where he swam as a boy Scrubbing down the kitchen, I’ve got my nipples in the lentils again, a premenstrual boner in my pants— I’m not myself or I’m my self the other way I am— all for a clean kitchen, a swept heart, a red room boom booming loneliness, speed, off-centered valves stretching to cover (the anonymous morning news, another bombing in Lebanon, some civilians, dawn) the dishwasher water lines into the sink drain draining all the water down, gone and the hose gushing gray like the word could.

Oh I would. I would rub the counter to its underpininnings, a pine frame stained, undersigned; there are no clues here as to why I won’t let anyone touch me.

10

Fish Stew

D.E. G o o d r o a d Heavy tears are in this, not buried deeply, but just below the sand, where fish live with lowered heartbeats until the rain comes. bouil•la•baisse: “bool-yuh-beys,” “bool-yuh-beys;” Fr.“boo-ya-bes” 1 : a highly seasoned fish stew made with at least two kinds of fish

—Roo Borson, “Summer Grass”

— Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary

i: satisfaction The sound of water fills my sleep, punctuated by the low, foggy horns of tugboats. My dreams simmer in the dark the way the river roils with fish in the spawning season, the way I remember bouillabaisse (tomato-red, salmon-pink, the colors of flesh and blood) boiling in the big stainless steel pot.

When a little extra money happened, a good week for our father at work or some other unexpected windfall, we would pull out the largest soup pot our family owned and put the Louisiana jazz records on the turntable; my sister and I would start to work on the carrots and onions with sharp kitchen knives, and curls of earthy roots would fall into the pot our father filled to the brim with tomato juice and basil, shellfish still in their shells, and every kind of fish we knew the names of. Boiling on the burner, the pot would fill the house with the scent of the ocean.

My sister and I liked clams the best. (We had windowsills lined and cluttered with clamshells. After we scooped up the clams with our spoons, we would suck the meat out carefully to maintain the integrity of the membrane that held the two halves of shell together. Then we could rinse the fish oils and tomato stain from the chalky gray ridges and build ocean beds of pearl-lined shells.) Our father would bring home the clams still alive, and put them to soak in a bowl of water sprinkled with cornmeal. As the clams soaked, they would suck up the cornmeal hungrily, spitting out the sand they had absorbed; then, as they cooked, the cornmeal would soften. Instead of chewing gritty muscle, we savored the soft, fat sweetness of a clam stuffed full. ii: flood I went with my best friend to the waterfront in Portland, Oregon, to watch the Willamette River climb the seawall and encroach upon the observation docks. Officials predicted flooding in the lowest parts of the city; they also told people not to drive downtown, but the warnings of officials, reporters, and parents alike fell on ears deaf with adolescence. We had looked down the seawall too many times to count, and explored the brick steps and alcoves and floating wooden decks that punctuate the waterfront. Neither of us could imagine the Willamette climbing so high.

Look, I said, pointing at a set of stairs we had climbed down a hundred times in summer. Look at the water! The river lapped halfway up the brick steps leading down to the alcove twenty feet below; the sight of such a familiar place made alien by the rising water filled me with a kind of excitement. Eeling past news crews, we (cont. on page 14)

11

golden kelly bjรถrk

Celeste Sandra Lucke

13

(cont. from page 11) clambered down to touch the turgid swirl of the river, and then rejoined the rest of the crowd to watch the water ascend a few more steps.

On our way home we decided to drive past the marina. The water had climbed until it nearly covered the road.

Later, settled in front of the television in our pajamas, with popcorn, we watched the live news coverage as the water reached the top step of the observation dock. We had gone down four steps to the surface of the water, and now that spot lay completely submerged. Since then, the river had also washed out the road where we had driven past the marina; had we stayed two hours longer, the flood would have left us stranded.

Much later, when we compared memories of seasons past, my best friend said she wished she hadn’t gone with me to Portland that night. The deep water going places it shouldn’t gave her nightmares. The winds, tearing at the trees and flinging fat drops of rain all around, pushed and buffeted her. (Rain does not fall downwards in these kinds of storms, but simply exists, in all directions.) She admitted to an uneasy resentment of my fascination with nature’s fury.

But it’s not fury, I tried to explain. It’s transfiguration. The moment when the water swells beyond containment, when the fish rise and swim, visible for the first time before they slip silently away. Where the two of us rested, the flood rose, and the circle of the observation dock became a boiling pot of soup. That the river eventually receded doesn’t matter; for that moment, we stood in a place that would soon exist as something else. This happens more often than we realize. iii: telepathy By the time the floodwaters recede, the mind has begun to conceive of winter, and the need for security, shelter, warmth—companionship for the cold, dark months. For my lovers, I make generous, steaming pots of bouillabaisse: an invitation, an outward display of affection. (Share this with me!) Fish becomes the symbol of love’s secrets hidden beneath the surface, the elusive touch, the scent of love made in the dark. This ritual of satisfaction binds us together.

He and I talk about being together again without speaking the words aloud. We exchange the banalities of ex-lovers, friends who haven’t truly faced what lies between them. I say one thing, but within, I say something different, and he hears it; I hear it too, echoing in the space between us. He says something aloud as well, but another layer rides the silence beneath. Two conversations happen when we talk, one flowing on the surface, the other washing silently beneath—the sense of what we do not say (as much as what we do) becomes comprehensible to both of us. Sometimes the inner dialogue and the outer overlap; the unspoken words break the surface and both of us understand. How do we do this? No reasonable answer comes to mind.

Why don’t you satisfy me, he asked once, and I replied: Why must I? Both of us, unable to accept either hunger or satisfaction: a desperation so delicious we shake when we stand together, wondering if we will taste that particular dissatisfaction again. I see his eyes in my mind when hundreds of miles separate us. He cannot define it, but neither can he let it go. If not love, then what is the ability to hear words left unsaid? Why is it not enough?

The truth is more complicated than that. There are he and I; the one he chose over me, the one he will never forgive me for, the pain we caused one another and the sex that hangs in the air... Through it all, we stand near one another, yet we stare warily across that gulf. We are kin, and he knows it and I know it, and love and pain and anger and friendship and separation and oneness are all a part of it. Not love: something entirely different. iv: (heartbeats) This Thanksgiving, I sit alone on the bank of the creek that runs through the woods where I grew up. Water gambols downhill toward the river, the wind off the ocean roars in the tall hemlocks. Fog steals in, transforming the woods

14

into a dim twilit fairyland swathed in white cotton cloud, where sound reverberates in strange, muffled echoes.

(Last year I produced a gourmet Thanksgiving dinner for twelve: an entire stuffed turkey, a candied ham, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes, green beans steamed with mushrooms and bacon, a spinach salad with hazelnuts, soft chèvre, tart raspberry vinaigrette, pumpkin pie and handmade rolls and bouillabaisse. His children and mine played in the creek together. We ate fish stew, and his youngest son eyed the floating bits and pieces of unfamiliar seafood, suspiciously extending one shiny white barrel of flesh on his spoon.

“What is it?”

“A mussel,” I told him. “It’s a kind of shellfish. They grow by the sea, and when the tide goes out, it reveals their shells crusted to the rock.”

The child remained unconvinced, by this explanation, of the wholesomeness of mussels: like so many of us, afraid to taste what we cannot define or understand.)

The creek rushes past. I imagine fish dancing in the water, though I know the creek hasn’t the depth for them.

Fish also carry the power of the shapeshifter, a flashing sliver of truth moving so quickly its definition becomes all but imperceptible. Essence of movement, the fish slips through the rising current, unseen until the rain swells the riverbanks and oceans beyond containment. Sometimes, glancing into the heavy, turbulent water, we catch a mere fleeting glimpse before it is gone. v: giving thanks No childhood supper I can remember matches the decadence of that fish stew, thick and rich with all the bounty of ocean and river, served to the strains of Cajun jazz in large, wide bowls, with Grandma’s best round silver soup spoons and warm, fresh white bread. To taste its hot salt-sweetness was to imbibe the Host, a celebratory Eucharist of satisfaction. (This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me...) Though the administration of the Eucharist traditionally occurs at Easter, its Greek root actually means to give thanks: a grateful commemoration of sacrifice.

This year, on Thanksgiving, I rebel. I graciously turn down invitations from lovers, family, and friends, and pay a visit to the cold mists of time. In the past twelve months I have only been alone once. Today I have things to remember—so very many memories, none of which have received their due. One day to honor the things I have to give thanks for, and the things I am thankful to have released.

It has been a flood year, and the shell where I contained my heart has boiled away, exposing the soft muscle as the tide ebbed. Between people, love tends to become a function of needs filled, fulfilled, forgotten, or faded... Yet the spaces between, where we connect, fill with something we have no words for: not love, not sex, not desire, not companionship or satisfaction. (Listen. Look. See the silver flashes of the fish darting through the current.) In flood years, the water rises until it swirls into our guarded spaces; it beaches some flotsam and jetsam, and steals away with our most precious possessions: synchronicity in its purest form, balancing love and loss.

Beside the creek, I shiver with the cold, and something else. (The universe sings, fool. Shut up and hear!) The music of the wind and water, the song of ascendance...

Ascend; dance. These two thoughts coalesce to carry me up and inward—a decadent and satisfying journey, pinkred and salty as the stew and the kinship that tie us together by blood and by love—where air rises from my lungs and blood moves in my veins, where joy beats time like a heart.

We know one another. It is, after all, perhaps enough.

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Lehi’s Dream Emily Fox

Spider Posse An Embedded-Word Sestina

James Bertolino Don’t be feeding me broth, she shouted.

Go find a cadaver, get some charcoal, and barbecue me some beast patties!

Steer clear of that carcinogenic, pre-packaged protein. I’d rather have a tarantula roast for my spooky tooth than eat

dumped him in the beast hole down by the creek. It was a spooky night. The kind where even the moon seemed carcinogenic, and dripped a green broth over the path. Later, when my dog dragged the cadaver home, I found three tarantula legs stuck to its forehead.

some spooky blue fat. But I’ll turn your brain to broth if you mess with my pet tarantula. Last person to do that wound up a cadaver. It was easy.

I cooked a stew of carcinogenic organs and fattened him like a beast, then

Immediately I called the tarantula posse and saddled our beasts. We were looking to make cadavers out of anybody doing harm to our spooky arachnids. What we found was a toddler, slurping broth outside the power plant.

“Hey little dude, this place is carcinogenic,” I told him.

He gave me a wide, carcinogenic grin that proved he’d been raised on tarantula milk. Couldn’t waste time, so we turned him into a pink broth. Then kicked our beasts to a gallop. Word was there had been some spooky activity down by the delta.

We could smell the cadavers, and heard

Noise Plus Signal JAMES BERTOLINO

When I was in graduate school at Cornell in the early seventies, we lived about five miles outside Ithaca. There was an AM radio station I used to listen to, and whenever I left campus and drove home I’d pass a steep hill that would interrupt the signal. I took an odd pleasure in anticipating the sound of a Beatles or Rolling Stones song fading away into static, then returning to full strength, as I rounded that hill and continued home. An interesting way of looking at literature and art in the twentieth century is through the relationship i

the chanting that always precedes a cadaver melee.

I was feeling carcinogenic––that special charisma that always spooks criminals. I can turn my face into a tarantula, eight eyes crossed, and no earthly beast has ever bested me. My leering spider posse pointed to three heads bobbing in broth.

It was a broth spiced with spider cadavers.

Those wet beasties, basted with carcinogenic tarantula grease, died with spooky squeaks.

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I’ve Forgotten How to Write

Ben Packard no, just forgotten how to practice weaving one image into the next into the smell of apricots frying in honey sauce, touching her lips with cream, together at last her hips in the mirror, my hands slipped around her waist the curve of her smile telling me “that’s where I want those hands,” the summer heat is singing through the voices of birds at the window the sound of her skin in my hands is as soft as milk

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between “signal” and “noise.” If you are tuned-in to your favorite radio station, the music you want to hear is the signal; what you don’t want is the noise, the static between stations. That is, unless you actually enjoy the interplay of noise and signal.

Rather than pursue a tight argument, I plan to throw out a series of examples of noise versus signal, then apply the wellworked concept to the making of poetry.

What follows is a tracking of the kind of thinking that provides the ground for my own poems, and for a number of other contemporary poets.

In music, examples of noise might obviously be those composers who bring wild tracks of nature or street sounds or machinery into their compositions, and thus have both noise and, via melody overlay, signal. Serial music, as composed by Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, is in some ways similar to field composition in painting, ii

Solve for X

Jessica Lowber It was an immaculate conception that’s for sure.

No two women could conceive anything in love With all those X chromosomes Except an X rated movie or Treasure map...

X marks the spot Where I kissed a girl.

Where I kissed you The freckle on your neck

where the relationship between noise and signal is subtle. With impressionistic painting the viewer transforms the image from noise into signal by retreating far enough from the canvas for the patterns to coalesce. In abstract painting the viewer often imposes a signal, and in true field composition it’s the absence of signal that is esthetically pleasing—comparable possibly to seeing the entire universe as one thing, with no discrete signals.

Another noise versus signal operation is the human immune system, where at a very basic level, we decide between signal and noise constantly: what we admit to membership in our bodies is signal; what we kill or wall off is noise. Immune deficiency diseases are examples, at the micro level, of the inability to recognize the difference between signal and noise, and are thus models for what may be happening on a macro level in our society and culture. iii

Together we could create a roman numeral Pressing twenty fingers and Twenty toes I would drink of your 100 proof body I would think of Cabala How X is both birth and death And I would resign myself to you Name you Delilah Wrap our creation in the afterbirth of my hair And if X is to multiply, Then you and I would mother A generation.

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Me and God

Jake Tucker

Anastasia Stasko

When I pray, me and God go hiking we run up mountains skip rocks climb trees and stare off into space

Camel Lights waft in the Peugeot and caramelize the scent of patchouli soap.

When I pray, we play we have homerun derbies create small towns with mud and rocks we get dirty and drink juice boxes me and God, we laugh

The Highway 1-6-7 onramp gushes wind that chews our hair.

When I pray, I drown the weight of what I don’t understand pushes into my lungs flailing stops and strong hands take hold When I pray, God walks with me we sing country songs take pictures and frequent detours When I pray, God talks plain uses small words short sentences His face is expressive

20

I Can’t Save You, Baby, When the Empire Falls

Sunlight curls the plastic on the window and the dusty, blue dashboard.

One foot, flip-flopped, hangs out.

It blocks the side mirror.

She jams a pen into the tape deck where the mix-tape Bible is stuck.

It clicks, the hiss of music wraps around us, like ribbons of a lapping tongue

Maybe even at a planetary level.

If nature has been considered dangerous and wild, then we can say nature is noise.

If nature is noise, then humanity must be signal. When did humanity become signal?

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, one of the most significant books of the twentieth century, would argue that the introduction of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago would be the obvious point when man was no longer identified with nature, and thus became signal. We had for hundreds of thousands of years been one of millions of species within the fabric of nature.

Then we discovered that agriculture was a way to control, to hold power over nature, to amass wealth. Now that we have seen how disastrous non-tribal humanity’s separation from nature has been, there’s a growing impulse toward seeing nature as a vastly complex system of signals, rather than noise. iv

Gutters Lined in Gold

Alek Talevich Home is where the junky’s heart scurries to when the afternoon sun comes on too hot. Nothing throws the crimes of a person existing as a cancer into sharp reflection like the fat heat of an August sagging over the city. Beneath it, you burn fast.You can’t claw your way loose or find a rock or a lie to hide under. No amount of skag can save your skin from that kind of heat.

But here’s who I am: a lie when I wake up, a lie when I linger, a lie when I go to sleep. A lie to get me through lunch and across the street. Crimes, betrayals, justifications, interactions that all look like a D-student’s version of a Venn diagram; poorlydrawn, missing the point. A junky’s got no friends to call their own. We click as though we were

Gregory Bateson has argued that there is a family resemblance between the syntactical structures of human languages and the syntax of the universe, which would imply that if we are signals, it’s because we’re in the same extended family as plankton, water buffalo, mountains, moons and supernovas.

In physicist David Bohm’s holographic universe, his model goes beyond the duality of signal versus noise to the implicate order, which operates below the quantum level, where everything that exists is connected to everything else. From Bohm’s perspective, perhaps at some level noise is signal, signal is noise.

Signals require a scarcity economy, because by definition a signal must be more limited, and more precious than noise.

Once noise is recognized as having value, the signal economy collapses.

St. Augustine was in favor of keeping v

tumblers in times of plenty and then turn quickly on each other with the teeth of a mad dog, toothpaste foam on the lips and crazy piss in our eyes. Personally, I stare too long into the eyes of those that I speak to. A liar, like a politician or a piece of stained glass, becomes transparent when you hold him up to the light. We fade fast and willingly, and often hope to die young.

A God-fearing woman with a soup ladle in her hand once asked me why. She filled a bowl with something hot and watery and spoke as though she were teetering on the tip of Mount Sinai, giving the old hem-haw about interventions of a divine sort. And brotherhood.

Don’t forget the brotherhood. She talked up lambs and lions and second chances, meetings in dark places every Wednesday evening. She looked into my eyes for too long and tried too hard, so I smiled and took up my spoon. I smiled the way that people with money or a special kind of confident disease do. I smiled because I knew she’d understand, and because I could smell the stink of a fellow junky humping a new fix. It stood out like a drunk’s shit under the perfume of all that big-eyed piousness.

“But sister,” I said tenderly. “When I touch off a vein and leave this place, I don’t have to hide from the sun. I am the sun. I am the sun and I’ve got a home to call my own, and it would taste a lot like blasphemy if I didn’t think that God himself had something to do with a gift like that.”

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Report

Caleb Barber Meeting Ryuji on the way back from the chief’s house just after they had buried the cat was pure bad luck.

-Yukio Mishima I won’t tell my friend I read the book he loaned me beside the toilet, sick with flu.

But something like seasickness set in when I started it, sometime after midnight last Monday.

This incestuous 60’s Japanese novel, The SailorWho Fell from Grace with the Sea —a “masterpiece of taut violence” according to the jacket, “Dense in substance, far-reaching in allusion,” says Nation.

My bowels a broken faucet, my mouth a horror flick (certainly whatever was coming out of me could not be considered “dense in substance,” and you wouldn’t want to know why the cat needed burying), I finished and felt alright enough to quiver on my back and discover new patterns in the bathroom ceiling.

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the system whole. If we consider signal of a higher order, and noise of a lower order, then Augustine’s comment is relevant: “I held that, indeed, the higher was better than the lower, but better than the higher alone was the higher and the lower together.” In other words, to him, signal plus noise was best.

We are proud of what we’ve been able to do with computers, but computers use binary code which, compared to the way nature represents information, is stunningly crude. Comparing a binary system, with its yes/no, up/down, one/zero, to the fabulous richness and subtlety of a rainforest or mountainside or coral reef, makes it very clear that our selfcongratulation over our ability to express information, to make intelligent signals, needs to be moderate if we don’t want to be accused of either hubris or ignorance.

Arthur Koestler coined the term vi

Light Pollution

Matthew Campbell Roberts We were college freshmen, the three of us laughing swigging beer, driving dusty back roads through a picket of lightless pines with oldies cranking on the Falcon’s AM radio outside of Pullman.

We had Joey’s astronomy professor’s telescope the one not supposed to leave campus that he supposedly borrowed for his star chart project, a half-dome looking thing like the head of R2-D2.

I rode in the backseat with my arm around R2 holding her tight through the washboard

“holon,” to suggest those things that have discrete identity, yet are part of a larger system. The internet may be the great new model of noise plus signal: we’re individually like ants or termites going about our intense, but very limited enterprises, giving and taking signals, moving bits of information around.

But the internet as a whole system is a vast termite mound, a superorganism that gives off a rich, steady hum. A deep noise, a cosmic noise. At some point we may reach critical mass, when signal versus noise is no longer an issue, and the system leaps, perhaps briefly, to a higher order— maybe we’ll finally get something similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere.” A single planetary consciousness.

We are culturally, scientifically, philosophically, esthetically—even politically— at a point where we no longer have a consensus regarding the boundaries between vii

as we bopped and twisted did the mash potato, and spilled beer down my crotch like it was our last dance at the grange sock hop.

I’m not sure what we thought we’d see that night.

I only knew one of our headlights peered off into tree tops and the other disappeared into a zenith dissolved by interstellar dust.

When we finally arrived at a clearing (or the car stalled I don’t remember) a place Joey said his dog was mauled by a pack of wild coyotes, we mounted R2’s head to the hood and pointed her one good eyeball up at the waning gibbous moon.

None of us had ever seen anything like it, the craters, the mountains—we were really there.

And for once in our drunken lives we felt part of something like we’d made our own lunar landing, even found Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt, and what we thought were the moons of Jupiter turned out to be splotches of dried beer on the lens.

We believed more in ourselves that night than anytime we’d ever known.

We were invincible beyond a doubt, like the Columbia shuttle—you know.

23

Cell Phone Dolor at Seatac Airport

Timothy Pilgrim

for Emily Dickinson

Denise Coen

I have seen inexorable growth of cellphones sprouting like beans, some yellow, others slender, green,

My life has stood a grave unmarked, turf matted with fall’s glossed leaves, a bump of reservation soil

leafed out romaine, almost sweet, held near mouths, smelly tongues, decay of gums,

tended by city sparrows pulling worm weeds.

Seeds escape their beaks,

lies blown stale into shiny leaves.

Others, gold, peeled-back corn, sweet, cradled tight by sweaty hands

burrow into my grit, like small clams sticking their tongue-feet out,

sowing grime on kerneled rows.

And, black ones, sleek, like Asian eggplants, curved, petite,

kicking through my side to the surface, I stroke their umbilical roots.

held to waxy ears, shriveled, old.

Too often I have boarded flights phoneless, carried only hope to stow, noticed my thumb twitching, quite alone, not yet covered by a film of mold.

24

Coarse

noise and signal. Either we move in a Taoist direction, where we see the yin of noise and the yang of signal as being, together, an essential dialectic, or we move in one of two other directions: 1) the Zen of everything being noise, everything in the universe being equally important, or unimportant, and nothing that exists being focused on you; or 2), the animistic dream of the entire universe being signal, everything that exists being alive and ready to engage you, just you, right now, here, where you live. Such an environment would be completely meaningful.

In the 1950’s the poet Robert Duncan experimented with chance and unpredictability in his compositions. He discovered that, rather than such systems being of a lower order, employing chance procedures in creating poetry allowed the universe to manifest itself. Thus chance demonstrates a higher order, yet we have tended to think viii

Notes for: Man, The Egregious Ape, No.1

James Bertolino People walk by my plot, unable to see me.

Their high voices penetrate the umbra, settle.

I sense a foot, the weight of it sinks me.

One day a hand will reach down through the clay, through the question

Bugs have feelings too.

In a lightning storm, fireflies recognize the presence of the gods.

A brilliant entomologist, fired for her insistence that insects have rights, carried thousands of butterfly photographs to the highest window on campus and set them free.

The new University President informed the Board of Trustees it was time to require blood sacrifice as a prerequisite for granting tenure.

of fertile mud, stroke my treasured chest.

of the random as noise, and intention as signal. How could we ever imagine that our personal intentions would be more important than expressions of the universe? The most fully evolved poetry is always that which has been composed in a manner open to the brilliance and originality of chance.

I believe it is noise in a dance with signal, non-meaning engaged intimately with meaning, that generates the most faithful model of how chaos and cosmos define the universe. And sometimes we simply need the artful pleasures of the mind, moving in loops and leaps with no clear objective or argument, no easy coherence that might deflect perception away from joy toward the responsibility of meaning.

ix

25

The Story of Fish and Saup

Or How Everything is Pretty All of the Time

Taira Anderson I am perched on the arm of the sofa in the corner of the room. The room with four walls and corners and faces.

Where brick peeps through paint and reminds anyone who notices that other things have happened here. Perched and waiting for a story to happen. Eyes starving, ravenous, emaciated by a lack of color and breath and violin strings or string quartets. The voices are just snow flurries. Fluttering and thin and they do not stick. Or at least they do not stick for long, just barely touch and melt away. And I am just perched watching, waiting. Blinking to keep eyes from drying out. I’ve got to blink a lot.

The keg has just arrived and lines of people pop and flex their blue or red party cups. The pop flex echoes and echoes because it was the same last weekend and the weekend before, and it will be the same next weekend and the weekend after. Most of them are content with it: drunk fun, drunk laugh, drunk dance, drunk fight, drunk sex.

Pulling, peeling my skin from the wall, I shove myself into the keg line. Little bitter bird slipping off of the sofa’s arm, popping and flexing my red party cup.

Before this I was brilliant. Before this I was so much better than everyone else. I wrote about all the beautiful things like the slow decay of autumn leaves or the journey of pollen on the backs of bumblebees. I painted pictures of old people dying full of love and I photographed children who scraped their knees and learned what pain was.

But now I am here in this air that is sagging with the weight of exhausted exhales and stale sighs. It’s hanging around me and folding me into black and white. I hold my drink and think long.

“Fish!” someone yells, and I realize it’s Saup. “Fish!” Saup yells. And I am ripped from my thoughts. My consciousness shifts positions in my head, in my brain. Little doors open-close, little lights go on and off.

“Fish, man, I am so wasted, are you wasted?”

“No.” “Really Fish?”

“Really Saup.”

He needs convincing. All drunks need convincing. I can understand, surroundings don’t seem trustworthy when they wave and ripple and blur. So I breathe in Saup’s face and I follow his finger and I walk the line. Saup is convinced. And he is not solid; his limbs flop and twirl in the heavy liquid air and I swear I can almost see through him. Nothing about Saup is bright anymore, just a dirty opaque like the dusty glass in the windows of grandparent’s attics.

I have to tell you though, Saup used to be this beautiful boy. He was like a raindrop on your windshield that you didn’t want to wipe away. He really was. He played piano sonatas and smiled at the sort of strangers that needed smiles. But then...

But then all of the scientists and astronomers and NASA employees declared that Pluto wasn’t a real planet.

And his parents didn’t think he was happy enough, so they mixed pills into his food. Saup forgot what it was to be young and dissatisfied.

26

We are hugging now, Saup and I. We are hugging and he is patting me on the back with sloppy slaps as sloppy speech sputters from his wet lips.

“Fish.”

“Yeah?”

“Fish.”

“Yeah?”

“Fish, you are a good hugger, man.”

“Thanks, Saup.”

“You really are Fish, I mean it. I don’t just say these things, and I’m not that drunk.You’re a good hugger man.”

“Thanks.”

Saup is pretty drunk. He’s pretty gone. I mean, even further gone than when he is sober. It’s sad. It’s sad to see him so buried and cold. I can’t even tell if his fingers can feel anything anymore. I think I could test him. There are those tests where you hit parts of the body to see if they bounce back and fight you. There are those hearing tests, too. The kind Saup and I used to take once a year in elementary school. I could put those heavy tan headphones on Saup’s head and make the left ear beep high, then low, and watch to see if he raises his left hand.

Our bodies press and push into other bodies as we sidestep across the room. Everyone is a blended mush of skin and sweat, mouths and hair. We leave the party and it is like a cell splitting.

Saup leans into me lazily and blankets me like wet laundry. He can’t pick his feet up high enough, causing toes to drag and leave empty canals of soil behind him. We reach Bronco whose tires curl firmly into the driveway. I fold Saup up neatly on the passenger side bucket-seat and slide my hands around the navy blue vinyl. It is dark and I am clumsy. My fingers are met by the cold bite of metal and I snap the buckle of Saup’s seat belt over his lap and loop him through the shoulder strap. It’s like threading a needle and he is so thankful, he is so appreciative.

“Fish, you’re a good person, you know that?”

“Sure.”

“Seriously Fish, I mean, you’re here right now fastening my safety belt, that’s good.”

“Safety belts are good.”

“You’re what’s good, man.”

Creak-bang-rattle is what the door says when I shut it on Saup’s blurry explanation of why I am good and why safety belts are also good.

Climbing and struggling up into the driver’s seat of the rusting Bronco, I feel so heavy; I’m a victim of big hungry gravity. Bronco rocks, sways but fails to throw me as it slowly steadies. I am used to its motion and mass; both of us are, because it is ours. We bought it together when we were sixteen, after we had failed our drivers’ tests two or three times. There had been a small smudged ad printed in the local Little Nickel: Orange ’71 Bronco. We both like the color orange. We had both needed Bronco, to take us on adventures, to show us thick forests and steep hillsides, deep valleys and slick snowy mountain passes.

When we were eighteen and still thirsty Bronco once took us to Whaleshead Beach on the Oregon coast. It was December 26th. We’d always had trouble breathing after the holidays, all of that red and green, cruel complementary colors. So I picked Saup up, or he picked me up and we drove. We followed the dotted lines on an old map that was curled up in the corner of the glove compartment like a neglected tabby cat. Saup was great with animals and I was great with maps, so we treated it well and studied it closely. We passed through lowlands and highlands, maybe African savannas; everything was unknown.

27

When we arrived at Whaleshead Beach on December 26th it maintained high brightness but zero hue, everything was white. The snow was thick and we were mangroves, walking trees, lifting, shifting and planting our feet, slowly making our way towards the water. On the way we slipped on glassy tide pools and cried over frozen starfish. And then we reached the line, the line where the water met the snow.

Saup bent down, his back arching, each piece of his spine compressing and extending. He bent down and his hands followed smoothly until they were caught in the net of shoelaces at his feet. Saup untangled and untied. His eyes swam sideways at me, stopping once our pupil-planets were aligned. We untied our shoes together.

We untied our shoes and peeled away our socks and dug our toes into snowy soil. Cold wind rushed into my feet, wrapped around my veins, blew through my body and everything moved slower except for the black part of my brain, my worry spot. It throbbed with the pressure of thick blood and paranoia; it opened its mouth wide, rambling off things like “hypothermia” and “amputation.” But Saup was there and he was brave, and I was there and I was brave, and so it was decided that we had no time for black brain spots when all our eyes could see was white.

That’s how it was then, when Saup could still see in color and numbness did not exist. But now...

Now the engine hesitates, making sure we both know it is not easy, and then it gives.Tires begin to rotate. Bronco lurches into a slow roll, our heads jerk forward and back, forcing us to agree with whatever it might be saying. We drive. Saup is quiet. Maybe he is sleeping.

We drive and Saup has melted onto the window. Both of our faces look like mirrors because the moon is dripping its silver goo all over everything. And I think that I might suffocate from the pressure accumulating inside of my chest and the pressure accumulating outside at the crease of my lips. All that I am able to use as breath is fermenting in that narrow space that starts at the back of the throat and ends at the wall of teeth.

It’s not supposed to be like this, not with Saup and me. We are supposed to have those kinds of fireworks-conversations that boom and glitter, all quick and alive, followed by a necessary silence allowing just enough time to convince ourselves that those colors in that sky really did happen. I need this and Saup needs this. So the pressure at the back of my throat—the pressure that is full of words and speech—surges and breaks through my tooth dam.

“Saup?”

I say it slow, studying the way his name slips easy from my lips. “Saup?”

He rubs his eyes like little boys do. I could tell that he was dreaming of memories.

“Yeah Fish?”

“How do you feel?”

“Heavy.”

“Yeah? Me, too.” And I think we need water. We need water and to float and to feel light again. We need the coast.

“Saup?”

He does not answer. He is flat-cheeked against the glass and he is breathing softly without effort. Bronco’s tires turn fast running rubber over the dark contours of asphalt like fingertips gliding over braille, absorbing each bump and dip. A shallow-mouthed pothole briefly swallows a swift left tire, shadows shift, shake, stutter and Bronco totters slightly. Our bodies sway. Saup’s head is poured lightly onto my right shoulder. And I know that I will not stop at his place.

28

How to Live Alone

Seija Emerson Capture twenty or thirty large flies in a cup.

Put them in the freezer until they are unconscious.

Make twenty or thirty tiny harnesses out of dental floss.

While still cold, put the harnesses on the flies.

Tie the dangling ends to your bed frame.

Rouse the flies with a blowtorch.

Try not to burn their wings. At night, lie still and listen to them in their frantic short orbit, starving memento mori, parched for your salty face.

When they die, one by one, hang them like prisms across a sunny window, casting shadows like pepper on a yellow wall.

When they dry up, they will slip from their harnesses, and you can re-wind the floss.

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In the Dark

Heidi Norgaard Sometimes it feels so good to wrap my body in a wet towel and sit in a cold living room watching my skin shrivel like an avocado rind.

I’ll fall asleep like that in front of a cold, muted TV, blue light flooding a dark, dark room.

I imagine it makes my face look dead. that blue light. the hollows under my eyes mouth half open breathing hard. sometimes it feels good to be that alone.

August Friday

Malcolm Kenyon 1 On the Japanese bridge behind the restaurant what’s the word for that? she asks water lily, I answer and that? white water lily, I reply.

2 The scar from where she was pushed from the roof her red brown dark sometimes black hair her once broken curved little finger arcs around the black bowl sad clouds pass swiftly across her eyes in steady light from the side window the napkins are folded perfectly right now is very zen.

3 Her ex-husband is on the phone threatening to kill her she smiles at me.

31

32 Bells at a Playground, Hawaii Noelani Penney

33

Stars and angels slowly swayed on small little strings in the shadows of the closet. Robbie lay in his bed with airplanes on his pajamas and a red and blue blanket up to his shoulders. The ground around him was dirt and the ceiling above him was not wood beams or plaster but thick twisting roots, damp with cobwebs. A slow warm wind smelling of vegetables sank on top of him, sending visions of muddy colors into Robbie’s eyes.

The latch on the closet door rusted and it creaked open. Little wooden angels broke their strings and flew out in slow sagging patterns while the stars simply fell to the ground. Robbie watched the angels weave above his head and did nothing. He could hear chimes ringing slowly from somewhere deep in the closet. A large dog padded to the bed. Its hair was thick and covered in dirt. The dog looked at Robbie and licked him until his face was streaked with mud. Robbie could see huge teeth behind its whiskered muzzle, but still did nothing.

The chimes in the air mingled with the fertile tones of the roots and soil. The breeze came again, now cool and smelling of bones and river. Angels began to whisper; the

At 8:00 it started to rain. Robbie’s clothes were soaked and the rain entered his pores like small little rivers, emptying into the various lakes and ponds that were lying shallow inside him. His parents were inside; he could see their bedroom light flashing on and off. The rain continued, Robbie cupped his hands and let it pool. His shirt clung to his ribs: Robbie imagined a second skin covering the old cracked and dry one. He emptied the pool over his head but still only felt rain. Now all the lights in all the bedrooms of the neighborhood were flashing on and off. Lightning flickered above him in quiet little sparks. Is rain just the ocean trying as hard as it can to join everyone else on land, is it getting itself killed? The lightning flickered stronger and then suddenly burst into a terrific strobe that matched the neighborhood bedrooms’. A thick and heavy thunder crashed onto roofs and collided with the cars in

dog stared expectantly. This is something that does not begin or end, Robbie thought as he shifted in his bed. And indeed, it never did.

Sam Johnson

Robbie walked quietly at night. Robbie’s cat walked quietly toward a heavy orange and purple bag of food. Small salmon eyes and scaly fins, troughs of milk with wonderful little strings of blood. Touching it, Robbie felt cold; his cat must have just come in from outside. Its claws were tied together with little strings of blood.

Opening the heavy orange and purple bag of food one morning, Robbie found a small possum with a broken back. Its hind legs still moved; its eyes still blinked. Robbie’s hands were tied together with little strings of blood.

their driveways. The streets began to hum with the vibration of the thunder.

Robbie could feel it in his body; clutching his sternum so hard he thought it would crack; the lightning so bright it seemed to go straight through his eyes and reverberate inside him. That summer Robbie made up a girlfriend; he never knew if his parents discovered the lie, but it wasn’t until years later that he realized why she existed at all.

Three Occurances of Childhood

Darjeeling Child Mark Iozzi

34

Some Times

Greg Macdonald white linen a restaurant window I imagine some times a candle, a menu, a meal I could pay money to make vivid my loneliness or leave dishes dirty some times on the table at home a checkered blue-and-white cloth when I return I will know someone was here.

35

The Evil

Miles Mattix The only good thing about having a broken leg, besides crutches, is that people can sign your cast. When I got out of the hospital, I wrote a couple of messages on my cast from made-up people, so kids at school would want to sign it, too, kind of like how street musicians put a couple of dollars in their own guitar cases. “Yo, Omar,” I wrote, “you are the shit. Say no to drugs and get well soon. Peace, Joe.” Right beside that I drew a purple T-Rex eating a drug dealer. Then I took out a pink pen and wrote in my best girlie handwriting, “You look soo hot in your leg cast and crutches. I have a cripple fetish. Call 606-219-8777.” I borrowed some of my mom’s lipstick and kissed the cast right by the phone number. It was hard to do, but the lip print showed up really well.

One of the lamer things about having a broken leg is telling the same story over and over again. In my case, it’s extra lame because my story is made-up, so I have to concentrate extra hard on keeping the details the same every time. When people asked at school the next Monday, I told them I’d fallen out of a tree. What was I supposed to do—tell them the truth? How I saw a cat on a random front porch and went up the stairs to pet it? How a lady came out of the house and I could feel the evil on her so strong that I freaked out and jumped off her porch? How she left me bleeding on the ground until the cops came? No way. Most of the kids at school have pets and take them for granted, so they could never understand how badly I want one. Plus, I have trouble explaining my supernatural ability to feel the evil. On top of that, they would probably think it was funny that I broke my leg in only a seven foot drop.

Everyone at my lunch table signed my cast. Melinda walked over and signed it, too. I had been praying that she would, but I didn’t think it was possible because she’s so popular. I was afraid she would see the note from the cripple fetish girl and think I was taken, but she didn’t mention it. She wrote on my thigh, and I had to concentrate extremely hard on not getting a boner. Miraculously, I succeeded. She wrote with my red pen, “Omar, you’re a funny kid. Get better soon.” I acted thankful, but I have to admit I was bummed that she called me a kid. “Guy” would have been alright; “stud” would have been even better.

When a couple of the jocks saw her with me, they walked over to my table. I think they were jealous. She left.

My friends went back to playing Magic, but I am always up for making new friends, so I introduced myself and asked them to sign my cast. One of them, who was chewing on a toothpick, said, “Okay, but don’t read it until I say when.”

After he wrote, his friend busted out laughing. I couldn’t wait to find out what was so hilarious. They walked off without saying when, so after a few seconds I decided to read it. It said, “HEY EVERYBODY, MY NAME IS OMAR AND I BLOW GOATS,” in huge black letters.

I shouted after them, “Hey, dude, what’d you write that for?”

He shouted back, “What are you gonna do about it, you little gimp? I could kick your ass even if you weren’t on crutches.” His friend gave him five, and they walked back to their cool table.

I started crying—angry tears, not cry-baby tears—but no one knows the difference in middle school, so I thought I should get out of there before anybody noticed. When I got outside, I headed for the woods that are just

36

across the street, because I wanted to be invisible.

The trail was muddy from the storm that morning, so it was slow-going on crutches. I had to concentrate hard to keep my cast off the ground. My right shoe got soaked. As I struggled along, I howled and cried and shouted bad words at those jocks. I made up some killer insults like “gooch poodle” and “flea tickling pickle itcher” that made me laugh a little bit even though I tried my hardest not to.

Then I heard footsteps behind me, and I stopped. The footsteps stopped, too. I had come around a bend, so I couldn’t see who it was, but I felt the evil on them. It was like talons digging into my spine. The footsteps started up again. I could see where the trail ended, and there was no way I could make it there in time. I heard loud wheezing getting closer. I clumsily lay down in some tall ferns beside the trail, and waited.

A man came jogging around the bend. I could see his veins through his skin. He wore a black sweatband on his huge, dripping head. His scraggly moustache made me wonder if he was a sexual predator, maybe one with a cripple fetish. I could tell by his wheezing that he smoked a lot of drugs, and drugs make people dangerous.

He started bellowing, “Where are you? Where are you?” in a deep, porridgey voice. Somehow I knew he was talking to me. As he got closer, the evil wrapped around me like an anaconda. He ran past me about thirty feet, and crouched and looked in the bushes on both sides of the trail.

“Sweety,” he said, like he was talking to a baby, “it’s time to go home now. I love you. I’ll give you peanut butter.”

That’s when I knew without a doubt that he was some kind of pervert. He gave up on the sweet talk, and shouted, “Where are you?” again. Then he put his face in his hands to think.

He stood up. He must have noticed that there weren’t any crutch prints where he was, because he turned and started jogging back my way. Now I could feel the evil growing like I had never felt it before. It was thick and full of beady weasel eyes. He kept shouting, “Where are you? Where are you?”.

I lay as close to the ground as I could. I was afraid if he stopped shouting he would hear my heartbeat. When he was in front of me, I stuck out my crutch and tripped him. He grunted, “Neuah!” and fell on his face. I freaked out, because I thought for sure he would catch me and rape me before I could get up on my crutches, but once I did, I realized there was nothing to worry about. He had hit his head on a big rock on the trail. There was a pool of blood forming, and he wasn’t moving. Still, I didn’t know when he would come to. I thought about cutting off his head, but I booked it towards the trailhead instead.

As I got farther away from him, the evil got thinner and thinner, and breathing got easier. I felt like a silverback gorilla—my crutches were my long arms. When I was about ten feet from the trailhead, this cute little hedgehog crawled out of the bushes. I looked behind me and the pervert still wasn’t moving, so I figured I could risk stopping.

The hedgehog had a bell hanging from its neck on a bright red ribbon. I snapped my fingers to attract it to me, and it walked over as tame as a dog. I sat down carefully so my crutches wouldn’t scare it, and I let it sniff me for a while. Then I grabbed it, ouch, and put it in my backpack. I left the zipper open a little way so it could breathe.

My mom made me post an ad in the classifieds that I had found someone’s pet hedgehog. It’s been three weeks now and no one’s called, so it looks like the hedgehog’s mine. It’s a she. I named her Harriet Tubman, because her nickname was Moses, and Moses in the Bible was found in some bulrushes by the Nile, kind of like how my hedgehog came out of the bushes by the mud. Tomorrow I’m going to sneak her to school in my backpack.

37

Hopefully I can whip her out and show her to Melinda really fast, without getting busted.

The few kids at school who believe me about my epic battle in the woods are really impressed. I’m praying that more people will believe me, because then they’ll know that just because I’m small, doesn’t mean I’m a pansy.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the pervert. I hope the evil has left him, and that he’s managed to forgive himself somehow, but I know I did the right thing in taking him down. It was my virginity, or his skull.

Recreation

Ben Paplow Taxidermy is a dead art, which is probably why I fell into it so completely. Anything useless always seemed to pique my interest. I started simply, with whatever roadkill I passed that was mostly intact.

Even half a squashed animal left a workable other half. I took those critters home, took them apart and gave them a new type of life. A tail for arms, two extra legs, I could create what never existed.

With practice, new and better ideas flooded my mind. The number of glassy eyed animals grew exponentially; the more I created, the more I wanted. My cravings led me farther from home, always searching, always wanting. Rarer creatures delighted me with the exotic parts I scrapped. Tails, horns, wings, even old collars all found use in my shop, but the menagerie would not stop growing.

My scouting drives lasted hours while I cleaned the highway shoulders. During one of these tips, after a snake I had seen turned out to be alive, I found a man’s body with a hole through the head.

38

elevator, corner of champion and grand

Eva Suter you know, she says, people have died in this elevator. i say, my high school auditorium was haunted. his name was charlie, he hung himself in the seventies, to protest the war. they probably made that story up, she says, as the doors rush open at her floor. when they cut the ribbon excitement in the air was palpable. tasteable. touchable. we’re on our way to be something now. a real city. the doors creak open. the mayor, the building owner, and a few reporters step in. they ride it all the way to the eighth floor, back down, and up to the eighth again. scribbled on a notebook, these are surely remarkable times we live in. this town is full of ghosts. every one of them has a space, a name, a story. show themselves in wine stains shadowy handprints littered cigarettes. this town is full of ghosts, not all of them are metaphors. everything is dying. like ideas, and people, and ideas of people. we are remembered for the damage we left behind. the doors creak open. a desperate expressioned woman enters. she holds a child to her breast. only two or three years old. he’s crying. no. he’s wailing. it’s been a hot summer. hottest summer. she hums to him gently. wipes tears off on the back of his sleeve. the doors open at my floor. i leave them in sepia tones. sometimes, the doors won’t close. won’t open. have to be coaxed and coddled. slam shut. bounce all the way down. refuse to leave the basement. whine childishly, before dropping rapidly from the eighth with a weeee, and a giggling thud.

39

The Penguin and the Polar Bear

Jessyca Murphy The penguin and the polar bear, bearers of the chocolate pudding.

In the frozen freezer of the North, these artic cardboard animals assemble mashed potatoes with a slice of ham, a slice of plastic separating the frosted gravy from the creamed corn.

Fresh from out of the microwave, my mother folds over the plastic film and slaps the synthetic tray onto the table.

My fork darts for desert only to be halted by the maternal hierarchy maintained in the land of TV dinners.

In 1986 at the first McDonald’s in Rexburg, Idaho, two minimum wage teenagers were making out beside the shake machine.

They shared the cramped backseat of a two gear stick shift Volkswagen enough times to shake out a tiny baby.

My childhood was trailer park sparkler marches on the fourth of July, swim suits in the bathtub and diaper table attempts to fly.

On all fours sharing snacks with the cat my face in the bowl mewing and munching like a three-foot tabby.

“You weren’t a mistake, honey, you were just unintended.”

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You were the fetal appendage impeding mother’s painting and daddy’s promiscuity.

My childhood was daycare drop-offs to distract from boxed wines, welfare lines, and “where the hell were you last night” fights, when forefinger splinters from scanning unsanded doorframes couldn’t split up hushed up stand offs.

gleaming off glaciers and the pointed peaks of icebergs.

Where the fathers of flightless birds held their daughter’s eggs between their webbed feet and feathered tummies.

Where the only camouflage is the cream pelt coating the black leather of a mother’s hide.

A world too cold for fighting, where there’s no war, no sand, just snow.

In 1992 at an army base in Des Moines, Iowa the commanding officers saddled up pock scared soldiers promising superhero pows and bangs on the sand banks of Mesopotamia, as if my dad was batman off to battle monsters in bad guy land.

My childhood became wartime wives, patriotic potlucks and yellow-bellied ribbons swinging from broken boughs.

Dinnertime dictated by the evening news for updates on the death count.

And every time the door would knock we would see a wooden box boarding up scorched limbs, and laced with a limp American flag.

“Joining the army wasn’t a mistake, honey, but I never intended to go to war.”

Never intended to heed the horrors of cockroaches the size of crows and I don’t what else he saw because that was all he told me.

So in my mind I put him in Antarctica with the penguin and the polar bear bearers of the sequined sun shine

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The Road to Nineveh

Marjorie Steele

I. the womb

“the Lord gave this message to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh. Announce my judgment against it because i have seen how wicked its people are.’”

- Jonah 1:1

i was a child in a church that lined its walls in windows which were tall and trimmed in wood so that the sanctuary was like the belly of a whale whose ribs were light, and whose intestines were pews and a grand piano, the congregation on its way to Nineveh. some of us were spat out after learning how to pray but the rest stayed, and decayed food for fish dust to dust.

II. Nineveh i met a child in a foreign place who stopped me on the concrete blocks beside a busy street. “am i a metaphore for something?” she said, her eyes huger than her face, arms wrinkled like ripe seed pods and both legs bowed out like a frog’s as she sat and stared, with pink lips and pink fingers and brown skin, no

42

hair – the sisters at the orphanage had shaved it off for lice. “yes,” i said, “perhaps for the Human Condition, for Social Injustice. maybe even for the Impoverishment of an entire generation of innocents. you’re a powerful literary device, even if a little overused.” she frowned, and crossed a million arms across her chest. “well that’s strange,” she said. “i’m only hungry. what about you? aren’t you hungry too?” looking down i saw a skeleton of my own, smelling sweetly of urine and with eyes gone glassy from wanting to be fed. the child and i exchanged some of what we each had – i my sandwich, she her humanity – then both walked away, both feeling emptier than before.

III. the vine the worm had eaten all the leaves and broken down the vine, Jonah’s shade, so Jonah writhed in the desert’s dust and cursed God. he had been watching for destruction in the valley, for God’s promised judgment of a sinful nation – Jonah was a righteous prophet. “what are you looking for?” the worm asked him from the dust, “Judgment has already been found. the most forgotten heap of rubble, bones and skin squatting in that city is less lost than you are lonely on this hill.”

“Jonah was furious. He lost his temper. He yelled at God, ‘God! I knew it...I knew you were sheer grace and mercy, not easily angered, rich in love, and ready at the drop of a hat to turn your plans of punishment into a program of forgiveness!’

So, God, if you won’t kill them, kill me! I’m better off dead.’”

- Jonah 4:1-5

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I once fell in love with a chef who plotted his way to my heart with trails of alder, salt, basil, saffron, cloves.

We’re looking at my sister’s back. A tall man is speaking, almost joyful with the fascination. A word: neuroblastoma. Finally, a word.

-Kristin Engler “We Never Said Cancer”

-Joshua Young “A story”

When you get in a car crash, you feel a little scared but more so —especially if you are the passenger—you feel kind of stupid.

-Matt Acosta “What-ifs: Choose Your Own Adventure or Relative Fiction and an Act of God”

-Peter Mack “Natural Order”

Did you escape from the zoo?

No, I’m a resident. Where did you escape from?

-Jimmy Marble “The ExtraOrdinary Day of Monsieur Panda”

JACQUES MR PANDA

Harold would often absent-mindedly finger one of his nipples in situations like these, about whose size he was extremely self-conscious, having earned himself the nick-name “Dinner Plates” in high school.

We would sit in the pulpits every Sunday and hold hands under the Bibles resting in our laps.

-Courtney Nicholson-Paine “Past Winters”

you found a deer broken and wet with blood.

It was still alive, twitching, watching you.

-Anne Treat “The Feast of the First Morning”

I’m funny like Jay Leno’s teleprompter is funny.

- Bobby Morgan “But you’re so funny” -Nicole Harris “Perpetual Movement”

She wears high heels made of gray suede her ankles, open to the street life.

-Ric Courtright “Because”

Chop, chop, goes the knife my parents gave him for Christmas

-John Zackel “Amiens”

The Battle of Amiens started in fog. Amy ended the night with wine.

There was a giant hole in the living room wall, behind her blue couch...

-Cameron Quinn “Spinning”

Toe-blood soaks her silken slippers But the real strain lies higher on the ballerina

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Edition 1

Jeopardy Webzine -Dave Ryan “Of Nomads and Diplodasaurs”

“I’m Peter the Great, and I was born and raised in Bangor, Maine. Now who the hell are you?”

-Krystin MacPherson “Places in Our Apartment”

In this dream a bear holds me tight below his chin.

-Rose Slaton “Checkmate”

-Leif Anders “The Cache Revisited”

this is like a smudge on silent film she typed on the clacking keys—

-Mickey Kenny “City of My Mind”

My heart is a candlewick Lit with liquid scripture melting like wax beads

The backs of my eyes were scorched by the sun; and the sky, like a record, spun.

Jeopardy Magazine does not end on the page.

Jeopardy.wwu.edu/2007 Western Washington University’s first literary-arts online magazine, displaying stories and art you won’t find in the print version of Jeopardy.

Featuring the creative work of: Matt Acosta Leif Anders Ric Courtright Kristin Engler Nicole Harris Mickey Kenny Peter Mack Kyrstin MacPherson Jimmy Marble

Bobby Morgan Jessica Nicholas Courtney Nicholson-Paine Cameron Quinn Dave Ryan Rose Slaton Anne Treat Joshua Young John Zackel

and also enjoy more pieces by: James Bertolino, Luther Cassidy, Ian Denning, Lucy Elenbaas, Seija Emerson, Allison Knappett, David Laws, Michael Mahler, Allison Mandaville, John Sloan, Marjorie Steele, Alek Talevich, David Wheeler

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They Stepped Over Her All Day

Luther Cassidy Or around; some only stopped to look. There was even one whose empty laugh reminded me of the day that boy turned his cat into a bomb when I was young.

Those hands that had laid open tuna cans on the kitchen floor, were the same little hands inserting a small stick of dynamite into that soft fleshy asterisk.

There was a struggle and somewhere between the boy’s fist and hot asphalt, the cat’s leg snapped.

This is important because: Have you ever seen a cat run on a ruined leg?

No matter where it crawls the sizzle of the fuse follows.

It was only then that I closed my eyes and plugged my ears.

I knew it was done when it smelled like the 4th of July: gunpowder and charred flesh and that laugh as empty as the wings of fallen angels.

Can God ever forgive them all?

A half dozen Our Fathers or six Hail Marys should do; but what about the cat?

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And what about my brother whose tears washed the war paint from under his eyes the day his Daisy accidentally found it’s mark. He spent all afternoon in the brush, covered in pollen and sweat, searching for that little bird.

He would later say that there was no such thing as friendly fire.

Now, I stand looking at this poor bird who escaped her shell and, taking to the air before she was ready, made it fifteen feet, to my cold concrete walkway. Blackbird fly into the light of that dark black night.

We are all only waiting for that moment when death might mean something. Will not even the other birds offer a moment of silence? Still, it is spring and the new black puppy next door will be over to collect you soon. So little bird, I will take a picture of you and solemnize my heart. But everything is too sunny, too bright for this occasion.

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Richard Olmsted

and the lord said, I will destroy man whom I created from the face of the earth. Genesis 6:7,12

Regarding the Importance of Patience in Waiting Room Situations

Taira Anderson New York, New York, inside the JFK airport. Dad and I are waiting to catch a flight to Boston. We are traveling the east coast together because we don’t get along as father and daughter should. When I smile at him my lips stop short. And he is tall. He does not see things that are close to the ground, and he never heard a word from me for eighteen years.

He knows how to care about me now, and he wants to fix things. So we travel. We have read somewhere that travel creates little string-like bonds between one person and another. Travel will trick us into talking about the art in the Guggenheim; it will push us onto each Boeing 747 and force us to sit next to each other sharing sliver-sized armrests. I don’t mean to, but I cringe when our elbows touch.

It’s nine-something at night, late nine-something. Dad’s real tired. I can tell by the way his face droops and he moves slowly, like his blood is too thick to flow. We are sitting at gate 40-C. Everything is a shade of gray except the carpet. Each bare box-wall, the unending rows of armed pleather seats, the glistening linoleum, all gray. But the carpet is a deep sad blue, the sort of blue you might imagine the ocean to be if its water-life was extracted and all that was left was the color.

Travel is not creating conversation between me and Dad. Both of our voices have fallen asleep. My mind sinks and settles in silence. I am now the traveler-observer, the airport anthropologist.

There is a deep rip on the seat of the gray pleather chair that I have attached myself to, exposing its fatty foamy innards. It looks more like a gash, and I am almost surprised that there is no trace of blood. Crinkled aluminum gum wrappers and soggy lollypop sticks have accumulated inside of the poor chair’s wound. I think it must sting, and I want to clean the wound, stitch it up nice and pretty. I watch as Dad stuffs his sizzling plastic packaging into the rip on the seat of my chair, and for a minute the inside of my head flashes red and it’s alright for me to hate him.

My feet have been swollen since Paris, giant and pulsating. They are all red and mushy, spilling over the sides of my golden ballet flats and running across the floor like fleshy puddles. I am embarrassed, I consider amputation.

The air is messy with voices that are threading through it. Ribbons, ropes, twine expelled from intercoms and loudspeakers and tangling themselves up in knots that even an Eagle Scout could not dissect.

“Final boarding call for all passengers.” “Flight number 283 will be leaving at 10:45 due to mechanical issues, or weather, or both.”

There are people running slapping the gray linoleum with the soles of their Nike Airs or Kenneth Cole casual business shoes, leaving black and white dashes behind them so that others might follow. Frantic and red-faced, they raise their voices and inflate their lungs giving military orders to their party of travelers. Hoping they make the flight. Knowing they’ll miss it. Knowing they’re running and sweating in vain.

Others just sit absently in the gray chairs, busying themselves because doing nothing is not doing something.

Decks of cards hiss as they are shuffled too many times. Impatient wings of newspapers and magazines flutter and flap as the vacant reader glares at the alphabet. Little glowing aqua blue squares illuminate patches on the sides of

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Nice Girl Taira Anderson

49

faces cooing stories into their wireless phones.

I decide that if a person is not moving, if a person is not blinking, then they are not here. They are not here in these gray chairs or in 40-C or in JFK or in NYC. They are gone. Strolling through cities created by the subconscious. Living what is not real to anyone else. What is not real in any other place. But real in that neglected corner of the brain where imaginings are born, created, dreamt. They will only wake up to fly away.

Dad is just another waiting-room occupant, shuffling through his black Jansport backpack. It’s filled with large unlabeled Ziploc bags that slide against each other whispering softly. Dad keeps everything he possibly can in large Ziploc bags: salt, batteries, trail mix, MP3 player and headphones, prunes, pills, apologies, biscotti, personal hygiene products, chunks of dark chocolate, NA booklets, and pita chips.

We are still waiting.

My skin is chilled. The air conditioner works. Heavy layers of cold chemical air are sinking down out of metal slits and folding over me like thick blankets.

My winterfresh gum has lost all flavor, but it continues to hold purpose inside my warm pink mouth. I make sure to chew carefully and inconspicuously, lips held together so tightly that they melt into one another and seal up my face-cave.

Dad chews big and loud. He wants everyone to know that he is a man and he is eating. Repeatedly hanging his lower jaw down and down and then swinging it up quickly with a snap, teeth clanging, he chews. His mouth is a flip-book of the human mastication process.

All of that eating noise. I cannot stand that eating noise. It grinds deep and hard into my skull. My ears reach out for something else.

So I listen without invitation to a man as he talks on his cell phone. It sounds like his son is on the other end of the cordless connection. He’s a business man. All collared and buttoned up, buttoned shut. Black pants. Black shoes all shined, but untied. It was his child’s birthday. “How’d you like the play-set? Swings? Slides? Was it alright? I forget what it looks like. Okay, buddy. Okay, pal. I love you. I’ll be home in the morning. Put Mom on the phone.”

I see the little birthday boy handing the phone over to Mom, and Mom slowly removes phone from little birthday boy’s velcro palm.

Little birthday boy glares at me. He tells me I am lucky, and I know it. I’ve got Dad, and we’ve got travel.

Small voices drip-drop from the mouths of the crowd, splashing and pooling on the floors and the walls and the ceilings. Then the big voice rolls over the smaller ones like a wave rolling over the sand. Breaching the walls of aircondition-enclosed sky. Announcement: “Flight to Boston: Boarding.”

The alarm has sounded.We are all shaken. No one can decide if they are ready to stop waiting.We all have become such impressive waiters; we are all so beautifully patient like flowers that wait to bloom until the sun says to do so.

But the big voice insists. It is time to wake up, the plane is ready.

There is a wave of motion as people move like water and sway up to standing position.

I am swept up and swept into this tide of arms and legs. I have things to do now. Cramming my little notebook back into my brown two-toned backpack, clicking my pen shut, worrying suddenly about my ticket and my photo ID. Where are they? The small pocket? The big pocket? Tucked into a book? Lost?

Dad is the same as me. Frantic. Digging through a slippery mess of Ziploc bags. Thinking, “Which one? Which one?”

Travel is clever like this, making us into mirrors of each other, so a needle is threaded.

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Dad and I find our tickets. Of course we do. We are travelers, we are traveling, and we are good at it. Our slips of paper and cards of plastic find their way into our right hands, our more confident hands sprouting our more assertive fingers. And we stride proudly past the other fumbling passengers who are not quite as skilled as we are.

Both of us can feel it now. The prick-prick of needles shooting through us, the silent slipping of thread running behind the needles patching up the holes of lost time.

Announcement: “Final boarding call.� We are already on the plane. We wait for it to fly and we wait for travel. We wait for it to take us to the place where we are not, the place that is there on the other end of the dotted line, tantalizingly dangling in bold Times New Roman: New York, New York to Pennsylvania, Boston.

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Tongue Map Jessica Lowber (far left) Waterproof Ink

(middle left)

Time Flies but Airplanes Crash Richard Olmsted (middle right) Desolation Erin Jensen (far right) Bratz over Barbies John Sloan (bottom)

53

The Country Song

Anastasia Stasko

I have committed one murder in my

I stuck a

rusty

blade

It was a mistake

and, oh what a spectacle!

I called him up

and said, “Come celebrate!

Skippin’ over

that night

and it was a

between his eyes

He gave me presents of music and poetry

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life

and all

every

pathetic

time

one.

his

I take the cake and the blame for it

Let’s have a drink

and this

time

phone rang.

all.

I’m buying it.”

and when the wine flowed I knew it had to be.

it’s mystery

‘cause when he awoke he was lying in bed with me.

I made him at home.

Right before he left

I set him free. I showed him my weapon

he sat down at my feet reached up to kiss me

It was a crime of passion

Every

so

he

time

could

never

and he forgot his keys.

for

a

his

be

few

phone

free.

and

dirty

hours,

rang

buried

but

I

and I

had

to

was history.

have

them.

I put a bullet in his brain

him

inside

of

me

55

56

Restless Leg Syndrome Taira Anderson

Senorita Izabele Taira Anderson

57

Incident

Aylen Elliot Rounds it was those splinters of my mother’s voice, refracting her self-brewed paranoia that a girl should never be with an older man alone. but it was the stale coffee on your breath, too, your hands taking measurements so close to my own small fingers, & then the steps i had to take backward to stop your forehead from kissing my chin. that is how it happened, how it always happens, how any man transforms into a stranger; shrouded in a subtlety that only mothers and intuition can name. but in your language, i can only say: no incident occurred. we measured lumber together & then i drove home, winding my way through these empty streets.

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Still Life with Oleander

Jessica Lowber Chipped teeth fall out in clumps Broken like glass on the ground, I tiptoe around the whiteness Mouths moving, There has been a domestic dispute, I am on the floor bleeding from the face, someone wants to take my picture. Someone says, you don’t deserve this, someone says a broken nose is a felony, would you like to press charges.

I smile toothlessly at myself in the mirror, at the girl who is holding my heart, my spine and histories like a bouquet I grin my blackness distant as a map It is raining teeth on a tin roof. I light a fire, drink from my glass Outside I collect them like shells‌put them under my pillow and hope they will be replaced with sweet things.

But there is nothing to replace these memories underneath my pillow.

In the morning they are still there, white as Oleander and milk, and as sweet.

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Fresh Out of Proxies

Malcolm Kenyon I think every Christian should be crucified just so they know what it feels like.

I think every patriot should go to war and lie in rice at night listening while death tries to find them like waves of cockroaches turning over leaves with bayonets just so they know what it feels like.

I think every magnetic yellow ribbon on a SUV should mean ‘Someone in my family died, the violence I proposed came home to me, Marines in crisp dress blues, white gloves approached my door, stood gravely silent and handed me a flag.’

Spray Paint, Not Bullets

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Voyage

David Laws The St. Louis passes in the night, fog and dark choking out the stars.

At sea the nights and days blend into the unending torment of time.

Heat, cold, rain, wind, light, dark become identical to passengers who have no more feeling left than the blazing stars, the ashen moon, or the merciless oven of the sun.

On the shore and in the capitols of Europe, and around the world, many observe, but none will see.

Onboard are the hopeless.

trains waiting at the dock, pouring dark stench from smokestacks, eager for baggage: these Jews of Europe.

One crewman jumps overboard, another hangs himself in despair.

A thousand German citizens seek a new life overseas, anywhere, having lost their lives in Germany, but there will be no life in Cuba, no life in Canada, no life in Miami.

The ship’s cargo is turned away as the prow pushes aside the dark sea.

Even the young now feel the despair: a twelve-year-old child observes, “Nobody in the world wants us.”

Gustav Schroeder, Captain, sails his ship back to Europe, slowly, hoping for reprieve.

At less than half-speed the St. Louis sails east, facing the sun as it rises each day, every day closer to night.

Schroeder considers his few options.

Charged with the safety of his cargo, he decides upon a course that, for a ship’s captain, is unimaginable, the disgrace of career and command: to scuttle his ship off the English coast and evacuate passengers ashore in lifeboats. Food is running low, hope gone.

A gull screams overhead, as if sensing the desperate plans made by fathers to take the lives of sons, daughters, wives, to foil the death-

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Suicide watches are increased.

An escapee from the death camp in Dachau concocts and executes a mutiny, aided by desperate teens: they intend to run the St. Louis aground in South America. This hope is quelled.

Then, at last, a ray of sunlight: asylum, for a handful, in Belgium, more in Holland, and some in France.

On board, great joy, as the doomed depart to their new, too-short lives.

Those granted this apparent reprieve on the mainland will be butchered, either by furnaces or pale deathly gas, as history and Hitler consume Europe.

For the lucky remnant, acceptance into Britain, safe haven, a new home, and hope.

And the other players in this story?

Schroeder got his ship back home when war began, somehow slipping the St. Louis past the British blockade, but he was never allowed to sail again.

Leaders of Cuba, Canada, those of South America and Europe and, of course, the liberators of Europe, Churchill, DeGaulle, and Roosevelt, who had so catastrophically confirmed Hitler’s point—No one wants the Jews, therefore I shall destroy them— pursued their careers as leaders do, making war, and peace, as needed, giving important and timely speeches, writing clever memoirs, sleeping well, concerning themselves with trade, tariffs, and their reelection campaigns, inking bills, kissing babies, pretending to offer the hope that Jews of Europe never had.

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X-mas 1955 Emily Fox

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A Brute Night at Mona Harber’s Private House

William Owen Mona Harber rocked in the chair on her front porch, a steak knife attached to her arm. The sun had set minutes ago and her next door neighbors, the Hansons, flipped on their porch light, shedding yellow light on a small gray cat that was pouncing after a cricket in a bed of dandelions. Mona, waiting and anxious, heard little Kelly murmur something from inside the Hansons’ house, open the front door, and watched her hunch on the porch steps. Kelly, in her white nightgown, held out a piece of salted meat for the gray cat. She called for the kitty, and the cat, hesitant but hungry, prissily tip-toed to Kelly. After a few licks off the salty tip of the scrap, Kelly delicately placed the meat on the ground and the gray cat eagerly began gnawing. At that point, Kelly was able to gently pet the cat’s shoulder blades, but the front door screeched open and Ed stood in the doorway.

“Hey there, little Darlin’, time we hit the hay,” he said softly.

“But Dad, the kitty’s eating,” Kelly said.

“I see that, but it’s bedtime.You can see the kitty later.”

“But she’s so tiny.”

“Tell you what, little Darlin’,” Ed stepped onto the porch and kneeled, “why don’t you give that cat a name. Then she’ll be yours, and she’ll come back ever’ night.”

“Okay,” Kelly crouched closer to the gray cat who was still working on the meat, “I name you Mittens.” She turned to her father. “You know why I named her Mittens?”

“Why?” “Didn’t you know she’s got little white paws? Like mittens!”

“Okay, little Darlin’, time to hit the hay.” Kelly walked over to her father, he picked her up, brought her inside and quietly shut the front door.

Mona looked back out to the dim horizon that lined the field that stretched for miles south, where a strong presence of crickets, fireflies and fluttering grass generated an electric hum. A truck drove along the dirt road that separated Mona’s and the Hansons’ homes from the field; in the bed of the truck was a lumpy pile of something crude and black. The Hansons’ front door opened again and Ed stepped out onto the porch. The gray cat, licking the ground now, softly looked up to Ed while he quickly nestled a rifle into his shoulder, pulled back the hammer and shot Mittens in the neck. The gray cat bounced off the ground and lay still on its side. The pitbulls started up again, and Kelly screamed within her bedroom on the second story of their house. Mona slowly raised herself out of the rocking chair. Ed, picking up the cat by its tail, turned back to the front door when Mona yelled, “Don’t you be shootin’ no cats round my house! You get ‘em dogs barkin’!” But Ed quietly shut the door behind himself.

Mona sat back down in her chair with a groan. Another truck drove by, a blue tarp over the bed, country music crooning. It came to a stop just down the road, and turned off its headlights. Come sunrise, Mona thought, comes July Fourth, the day that marks the end of the contest. It was peculiar that it had been so quiet thus far in the evening. For five days now, the guns had been nearing, getting louder; the cats inside her house had been quarreling,

65

wouldn’t sleep on her while she watched television; and the Browns’ pitbulls had been whimpering and barking, endlessly. And that’s what got to Mona. Those goddamn dogs. She blamed them for her teeth. She’d been perpetually grinding her teeth, couldn’t help it. They had begun to erode, become serrated, sensitive to her icedtea, even sensitive to the wind that whirled from the field into her face. So she breathed through her nose, and could smell that pile of cat litter in her backyard.

It was a daily routine to dump out the ten or so litter boxes in the backyard. It was something that she disliked because on the other side of her backyard’s fence dwelled those pitbulls. There were three of them, the pitbulls, and the fence was flimsy, gapped, barely containing the dogs when Mona would step outside. The pitbulls would bark at a brisk wind, so as soon as Mona unlocked her back door, the dogs would tackle the fence and plunge their swarthy, hot heads through the slats—their ankles thin and strained. They were always wagging their tails, it was clear that they were desperate.

It had been a humid summer almost devoid of precipitation. But one rainy afternoon, Mona had noticed that the pitbulls didn’t dash to the fence when she was dumping the boxes; there they were in the middle of their dusty backyard, standing on their hind legs—their jowls snatching at the rain. They mostly whimpered, wagged and whimpered.

The Browns’ backyard consisted of a maze of ramshackle troughs, piles of rotten lumber with exposed, rusted nails, lush weeds, gnawed sticks, and deep holes that the pitbulls had dug to cool themselves on hot days. The back of the house, from what Mona could see, was supported by cinderblocks and long, warped four-by-fours; the roof, slumped and concaved, hung far enough down so that only the bottom of the back door could be seen, and shingles were dropping like lemmings.

Mona’s backyard was half the size of the Browns’, and was mostly barren above the dry, yellow grass. Only the white mound of cat litter occupied space just outside her kitchen window. Her house was a white rambler that Walt had built five years before he died. Since then, nearly twenty years had passed, and the house was still in good condition, even without regular maintenance. Besides, Mona always thought, she was not physically capable of doing much handy work, especially with the exterior. First of all, one working arm doesn’t allow for much labor. Also, her ankles and knees were always sore, they didn’t very much support the rest of her body. So she moved slowly, with a slight limp on cold days, and she stumbled a lot. She had let her gray hair grow down to her waist, which she kept in a thick braid pulled tightly from her forehead; she kept it tight this way because, she was certain, it smoothed the wrinkles and widened her hazel eyes.

Mona had never met the Browns. For one thing, nobody from inside ever visited the backyard. But mostly, they had never met because Mona hardly left her house to go to town. The two houses around Mona were a few among a dozen or so that sprawled ten miles west of downtown Sincera Creek. Sincera itself was erected with the support of the Swanson Brewery in 1923. Walt, a long time employee and supporter of Swanson ale, drowned in one of the brew tanks; a situation that, after the autopsy, left the town suspicious of suicide, and left Mona with his pension, the house, and with little reason to carry on with the people of Sincera Creek. Mona never had any children to tend to, and this had been an ever-present conflict with Walt, when he was living. She had taken to domesticating wild cats. Walt had begun to spend more time at work notwithstanding Mona’s new interest. By the time of his death, Mona had nearly twenty cats, all of whom hadn’t noticed Walt’s departure, all who found comfort while sleeping on Mona while she watched television.

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There were her cats, and there was Lee. Lee had been delivering groceries from Sincera Town Market every Wednesday for over fifteen years, since he was in high school. He would rap his class of ’87 ring against her frontdoor and Mona would shuffle all of the cats out of the entryway so that Lee could freely set the groceries inside. He never looked at Mona’s prosthetic arm, and that was fine with her. Instead, he always told her, while standing on the porch and lighting a cigarette, about what he was currently reading. He seemed to find a moment of pride in telling Mona about his books, his favorite being To Kill a Mockingbird. And Mona, accustomed to their weekly routine, slightly listened; she hadn’t read anything except Reader’s Digest for the last thirty years, but nevertheless enjoyed Lee’s young, square jaw, his slender frame, his buzz cut, and his snug wranglers.

The last time Lee had delivered groceries, there was a shotgun blast across the yellow field in front of Mona’s house. Lee hadn’t seemed to notice. He was different that afternoon; he was wild-eyed and anxious—a cigarette already drooping from his lip, his breath sweet from whiskey. When he set the groceries inside the entryway, he didn’t even step out onto the porch. Instead, he stood inside, gave a long look at Mona’s plastic arm, and craned his head toward the den where, behind the door, a tractor-like sound of purrs and scampering took place. And then he asked, “How many of ‘em cats you got, Miss Harber?” Mona had told him, in her terse, old way, that she never kept count and that that sort of thing ain’t his business. And then he asked if he might find an ashtray somewhere. Mona pointed to the one on the porch, and Lee, making an eager eye, hesitantly removed himself from the entryway to stub his cigarette. He thickened his chest and smiled.

“I sure do like those cats a’yours,” he said. Mona glared at him, gave him a new look that he had never seen.

“I just like ’em,” he said. Lee had a sudden awkwardness and tugged at his earlobe. There was another shotgun blast. Mona looked toward the field, which stretched all the way to Elder Mountain. Lee peered around Mona’s top-heavy figure, her upper body was like a bag full of fall leaves; this was what he had always told his friends. He stared into her house until she said, “good aftnoon,” and the door was shut.

The strangeness of those gunshots that afternoon had been explained on the evening news. An ordinance was passed by the county. There was, according to the state legislature, a substantial population decline in the South Carolina state bird, the Great Carolina Wren. This strong decline was attributed to the rampant feral cats that ranged Marrow County, and the problem was beginning to spread into other counties. The new ordinance allowed for local eradication: “only licensed guns are permitted, and the carcasses are to be properly disposed of at your local animal shelter,” the newscaster had reported.

Mona had been watching this while she sat on her plaid loveseat with three cats stretched over her. Outside, across the field, a series of gunshots rattled like firecrackers. Her den, which was bobbing with cat heads and purrs, suddenly exploded into a frenzy of skittering and hissing and hiding. The cats on her body tensed up and clawed, sprung off of her, left a number of cuts and scratches at which Mona cursed and clenched her jaw. She stood out of her seat, stepped over a litter box, and scarcely opened the drape to peek out her front window. There was another gunshot out in the field—a white flash lit the part of the field from which it came, not two miles away. The pitbulls had begun to bark and cry at full force. Another gunshot and another white flash. The dogs yelped and whimpered, screeching and loud.

Mona had then shuffled to the back door grinding her teeth. She swung the door open and screamed, “SHUT THOSE GODDAMN DOGS!” Her voice was breaking with age, and the pitbulls barked back with a quick, young hate. She slammed the door shut and saw one of the beefy, yellow cats mounting a slender, white one. It made Mona think of the way Walt would make sex with her, and she hated that. Her forehead throbbing, she unscrewed the clamp that was attached to her arm and stormed to one of the kitchen drawers. Sloppily, she screwed on an

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attachment from which protruded a thick, wooden spoon. In the field, there was another rattling of gunshots. Mona turned to bat a cat on the counter that reminded her of her father’s burial at the childhood ranch. The cat shrieked and flipped. Outside, the pitbulls howled. She then tromped toward the fornicating cats, swinging, on her way, at a short-haired, orange one that reminded her of Tommy Houston, her high school crush. Upon the loving cats, she smacked the male on the side, who tumbled once, darted into the kitchen—stunned and dizzy—and then scurried into Mona’s bedroom. The female barely moved. She just waited there, and Mona hated that most of all, so she took a wild swing.

She broke the spoon. It was an apparatus that she had taken the time, with hot glue and tape, to design for such discipline. Mona took an interest in concocting various attachments for her prosthetic arm, it had become one of her hobbies in addition to writing letters to various addresses in Specter, South Carolina. She used nuts and washers that Lee would deliver from the hardware store, and fastened objects like eating utensils, backscratchers, flashlights and knives.When she broke an attachment, she would always blush. It was a redness in her forehead and cheeks that made her feel disconnected, inadequate, but mostly victimized.

She had lost her arm as a little girl, when she was eleven. At the time, she lived on the outskirts of Slater Creek, on a rundown ranch with her father, Frank, and a few cats whose names Mona couldn’t remember. Her mother, Betty, had abandoned the two when Mona was ten, and caught a train from Scarsville to Specter, which, Mona had always thought, was an ethereal city, a place she had never been to, but knew that people never returned from.

Within a year after her departure, Frank had been drunk every day. Mona vaguely remembered those days; those days were full of red cheeks, like when her father broke a glass on the kitchen floor, and continued to walk barefoot, not noticing the streaks of blood his feet had been leaving. Only that striped cat, when he cut his paw and tracked blood on the linoleum in the kitchen rekindled that memory—otherwise, she didn’t remember those days very well. But as much as she tried, she would never forget when she hid in the treehouse in the backyard.

Five feet up a ladder, the treehouse hugged a massive oak. Frank had built it for her when she was nine, when he and Betty were planning on another child. It was sturdy with a solid roof and walls, warm and dry inside, a place where Mona had kept a jar full of potato bugs. She had hid inside the treehouse for a day before her father noticed that she was missing. And when he did notice, and when she wouldn’t answer his shouts for her to come home, he smashed his bottle upside the house and climbed onto the tractor that had been parked in the front yard for over a year. Mona had always been terrified when that engine started up. When she was terrified, she shook her jar of potato bugs, which always balled up and rolled around, helpless, submissive.

Frank had begun to drive the tractor into the backyard.

“Mona! Ya get home now!” he kept yelling, “ya get home now!” And then he said, “If ya don’t, I’ll be goddamned if I don’t knock your treehouse down!” The tractor neared the treehouse and grew louder, made Mona feel like her ears had been closed her whole life, and now she could hear, hear better and better, as the tractor approached. And then it stopped, growling in her ear. The pressure in her face was such that she poked at her cheekbone. She could picture the yellow, serrated bucket on the tractor raise, extend, and begin its slow wrecking. Mona shook the potato bugs again, shook as hard she could, and then stared inside the jar to see what had happened. Her father kept yelling, his voice breaking, pleading for her to get home. And then the cracking began. Daylight was shed. A breeze. The teeth pushed forward, into her house, the wood popping and splintering—cracking. She nestled into the opposite wall, but the bucket was inside, folding the roof, collapsing the floor, pinching her arm against the oak. And that had been all it took; the angry palm on the tractor’s levers, and then the panicked, jerky movement of retreating rusty gears to release the dangling little girl.

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The guns had been getting closer with each passing day. They seemed to be creeping across the field. The pitbulls hadn’t stopped for days—their barks aging, their yelps desperate, and Mona hoped for more rain. She kept peeking out of the front window. Stationwagons and pickup trucks sped by, there was more traffic. When she concentrated well enough, Mona could see cats chasing and pouncing in the field’s tall, yellow grass, innocent. The cats in her house, it was clear, were on edge, hadn’t been purring, been hiding and hissing.

With some canned white fish that Lee had delivered, Mona had set a trail of morsels from her mailbox to her porch steps. She sat on the front porch in her yellow bathrobe, waiting. She concentrated on the field. When a cat pranced nearby, she whistled the best she could, and scratched her hook against the grainy wood of the porch railing. On this side of the house, there were no nervous cats, and the barking was muffled, tolerable. On the porch, Mona only had to listen to the nearing but still muffled gunshots, and recently, distant hollers and cheers of the hunters.

It had taken only minutes before a clan of cats had discovered the white fish, about five of them. Mona whistled and scratched. Two, unhurried, made their way up to the porch where Mona had set a bowl of water and a platter of fish. As they crouched to eat, Mona crept up. Positioned next to the platter was a cat carrier in which she tossed the cats by their manes. Releasing a new cat into her house always resulted in more tension, more hissing and clawing, but Mona didn’t care—it wasn’t about that.

By the third day, Mona had caught over fifteen cats before Lee pulled up in his blue Chevy. Nervous, she stood up and situated herself inside the entryway, the front door cracked just enough to expose her face. In the bed of his truck, Mona could see a heap of cat carcasses. Blood was smeared along the rim of the bed. In the passenger seat, there was another man, somebody whom Mona had never met. He wore blade sunglasses and his jaw was as taut as a winter’s clothesline.

“Good day, Miss Harber,” Lee said, walking toward the porch. “I see you tryin to save some cats. Sure is nice a’you.”

“What you want,” Mona said, sternly.

“I wanna talk ‘bout those cats a’yours.”

“Why?” “See, me and a bunch of folks in town are havin’ ourselves a little competition. We’re gonna see who gets the most cats by July Fourth.”

“I don’t wanna have nothin’ to do with that,” Mona said.

“Hang on, Miss Harber. Just hear me out for a second. We pooled our money tagether, over fifty of us that is, and winner gets to split damn near six thousand with the team. I was thinkin’, Miss Harber, you could be on me and Gilly’s team. That’s Gilly over in my rig there,” Lee turned and pointed at Gilly, and Gilly nodded.

“So whata ya think?” Lee said, lighting a cigarette. A gun shot echoed from the field.

“You boys ain’t gonna get a goddamn thing from me. My cats are mine.”

“But Miss Harber, what ‘bout them wrens? They sure is pretty lil birds. State birds, even,” Lee said.

“I don’t give no hoot in the world for those birds, or your contest. You boys leave me alone. And don’t be comin’ round here no more, unless you got me a delivery,” Mona said, the door starting to close. But Gilly suddenly popped out of the truck, slung out a revolver, took aim, and fired. He missed. A thin, white cat, scrounging fifty paces down the dirt road, took off toward the field. Gilly, still taking aim, fired again and killed the cat. The pitbulls started up again.

“Woohoo, boy! Now that’s a goddamn good shot!” Lee remarked. Gilly inspected his revolver.

“See, Miss Harber, Gilly here is the best shot in town. We’re bound to win,” Lee said.

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“You boys get outta here!” Mona shouted, cracking her voice, “don’t be killin’ no cats around my house! Ya hear?

Go away!” Gilly put his revolver in his holster and looked at Mona. “Lady, you crazier than a shithouse rat,” he said.

Lee turned back to his truck. “Think about it, Miss Harber. Lots a’money,” he said. The two had climbed in the truck and drove to the dead cat in the road. Gilly jumped out, pitched it into the back, got back in, and they sped away.

Over the crickets, Mona could hear little Kelly whimpering in the Hansons’ house. She could hear her cats hissing and shuffling inside her house. The pitbulls were crying. Down the road, where the truck had parked, a dark figure emerged from the passenger side and began towards Mona’s house. In the other direction, in the distance that leads to downtown Sincera, a string of headlights approached, rocks and dirt crunching beneath the tires. Mona got up and stood in her doorway. Two trucks, including Lee’s, came to a stop in front of Mona’s house, their beds piled high with cats. Not far behind, a station wagon parked, lifeless whiskered faces pressed up to the windows. In total, nine men, drunk on Swanson ale and whiskey, staggered onto Mona’s front lawn. Mona, without a telephone, yelled to the Hansons’ where Kelly had gone quiet, probably asleep.

“Ed! Ed! Help me, help me!” The Hansons’ house was silent, a spiteful stillness.

“Miss Harber, no need to get yourself all bent outta shape,” Lee said, at the foot of the porch. With his sunglasses pressed into his skull, Gilly stood behind him, turning towards the approaching men, all toting rifles and shotguns.

He opened his jacket and fingered his pistol.

“Boys, them cats a’ours,” he warned.

“Lady, we’ll give ya fifty percent of the winnins,” one man said, his rifle on his shoulder.

“Ain’t nobody gettin’ my cats! They mine!” Mona barked. The men all moved closer, were tenser.

“Miss Harber, Walt and me were good buddies back at Swanson’s, and I sure is sorry to hear you had your struggles after his dyin’ and all,” one man said. He was an older man with a white beard and a plaid shirt tucked tightly underneath his perfectly round stomach. He leaned on a cane, had a rifle slung up against his shoulder, and had a genuine sparkle in his smile. “See, alls we wanna do is help you and your plight. Lots a’money in the winnins. Could buy yourself a real nice vacation.You could go to Specter n’get yourself a real nice dress.”

“She sho enough could use one of those,” slurred another man, and guffawed.

The mention of Specter twisted Mona. All she could think about were those letters she wrote everyday. The same letter to a different address, until all the addresses in the phone book of Specter are used up. A letter that read: Dear Momma, I know you live in Specter.Your old husband, Frank, he lived for quite sometime happy after you gone. He got his job real good in making money off wheat and sugarbeets, and making a new life for himself. He never hurt me, and we were loving until I had to bury him in the old ranch, next to the cats that you got for me when I was little. Remember those cats names? I ain’t got a clue in this world. It was a long time ago. But I am living happy now. I got me a family and a husband who works at the ale plant. I keep up the house, and tend to my little ones. My husband he travels to Specter all the time for business. I might go with him if I ever hear back from you and you tell me where you living.

Regarding, Your Daughter Mona

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“Alls you all wanna do is take my cats and make due with ‘em. Ain’t no way!” she screamed.

“Quiet your voice, Miss Harber,” another man said.

“You ain’t comin’ inside. It’s my private house,” she said.

“Miss Harber, we’re comin’ inside, and we’s gonna take your cats, like it or not. Fact of life,” Lee said, his tone deeper than she’d ever heard or expected. He put a foot on the porch step and a finger in his belt.

“YOU ALL GET AWAY FROM MY HOUSE!” Mona shrieked, and slammed the door shut. The pit bulls started up again. She turned the lock, her cheeks throbbing. She could barely stand the thought of going to Specter.

She thought about seeing her mother in a boutique, her flowing red hair down to her breasts, her green-eyed cold glare, and then she’d disappear behind thin dresses and silk blouses, like a ghost.

“There ain’t no way,” Mona mumbled, her voice was weak. She hobbled through her den to the back door— the cluster of cats swatting, hissing, jumping out of her way. At the front door, the handle jiggled, there was a thump, and then a huge wallop. They were going to knock the door down. She opened the back door where the pit bulls were fiercely barking, and her ears popped, opened as wide as they had ever been. She then turned toward her cats and began shoving them into the backyard. Most of them, freely escaping, disappeared into the darkness, toward the pit bulls.

“Get on now,” she said, frantically, “go escape.”

A crack and the front door swung open. Lee, the first to emerge, began firing at the cats, which were now flooding out of the back door. The men behind him barely squeezed through at once, and they tripped and fell on top of each other. But Lee kept shooting. Mona continued pushing cats out until she made eye contact with Lee, and then she went out the back door herself.

And there were the dogs, attacking and ripping at the cats. They busted through to the other side, and Mona, terrified, shook her limp hand as hard as she could, whimpering. She backed away from the slaughter, fell back onto the pile of cat litter. Frenzied, eyes full of blood, the pit bulls tore around the dark yard, chasing and snapping; the cats that were escaping were suddenly shot as they scrambled up the fence—most of the hunters had made their way into the backyard, and were gritting, grimacing, their shots drunk and keen.

Mona’s ears were ringing. She felt in her chest that her voice had died. She lifted herself off of the pile—the men firing, the cats squealing, the dogs’ trampling—and she walked away from it all, along the side of her house to the front yard, where the Hansons’ black windows stared at her, at her private house. She crossed the dirt road and entered the field. She thought about how she needed to leave. She needed to escape herself. Where nobody could find her and give her any money. Where nobody could find her and enter. Where nobody could find her and enter and make things go away. She was in the field, where the yellow grass was purple, where nearby fireflies unlit themselves, where the cats used to catch grasshoppers. She was in the field that leads to Elder Mountain. In the field where the wrens will sing songs for each other by sunrise.

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72 “If you truly love me, then please Don’t ask for Vegas. I want Everyone to hear the story of Us, and when I put our wedding Photo out on the coffee table, I want people to see us And not Sin City. I don’t want our Marriage just to be a conversation Piece. I want romance, I want

“We’re not going to Vegas!

Because it’s tacky, and I want to get married, Not hitched. I want a big Chapel with chandeliers, not Cranberry velvet and neon lights.

An ordained minister will perform The ceremony with a suit and tie, Not a washed-out rock-star Wannabe with rhinestones and sideburns.”

You said this.

I wonder if you’ll ever find A man who truly loves you.

You said this, Not 12 months ago, And now we meet again After parting ways, after You broke my heart when You slid into the crooks Of his open elbows.

You’re at the local Hitching Post, all flowers and white veil, The county courthouse across The street, and I don’t see Anyone but you and him.

My father to give me away When I take your name.

If you truly love me, You’d do this.”

David Wheeler

Conversation Piece

73

I’ve started drinking soda again, though I tell myself not regularly.

I still get schedule-an-appointment notices, still can’t afford it.

Brushing obsessively. All natural toothpaste.

Would floss, but keep losing it in trails around the bathroom.

Sometimes I run my tongue over them mid-day. During work, at a show, drifting off to sleep. I can feel coats and coats of former-food, working as miners, stripping away layers of enamel, creating caverns breadcrumbs get lost in. My tongue lingers.

Danielle is fascinated with that concept of Gretel, wears pink so people are more shocked when she says violent things.

I always notice when she comes in. She has big eyes, a semi-forbidden relationship with her German TA and curly blonde hair. Smirks when she laughs. She wears ruffled tank tops, sits next to me and leans over a lot.

Sometimes I’d see her and her boyfriend on campus.

Always on sunny days. She tanned pale, but it showed.

They’d stop and talk, she’d ask if we knew eachother.

I don’t remember his name.

My dental bills are huge. My dentist has one hand.

He is very good, asks me about my music reviews, knows Charles Cross, who wrote that book about Nirvana.

Defines my cavities as fossils from youthful indiscretions.

Nothing to worry about once work is done.

Gretel goes crazy with teeth nightmares.

Witch teeth. Wolfteeth. Her own, grinding, cracking, wearing down. Afraid she’ll eat herself, swallow her own tongue, lose the crumb trail and end up back in the oven. This, according to my classmate Danielle, in a story about Hansel and Gretel.

There are holes in my teeth.

Scrape plaque off, find rugged badlands of sugar-based agriculture and coffee-fed geology.

Graham Isaac

Cavities

Tavern Woman

Caleb Barber She said living now in the single-wide trailer was fine, As long as the cat is happy and the shotgun’s dry. She used to go with a sailor.

A merchant marine that played fast and loose. Easy with money, but wouldn’t put a ring on her finger.

Her teeth are all fucked up and her eyes are crazy.

She keeps asking guys with limp ponytails to arm wrestle.

Then loses, her fist sinking like a doomed vessel.

Untitled Film Still 67 John Sloan

Tribute Series: Cindy Sherman

Orientalism Still Flies John Sloan

Japanese Umbrella

Ian Denning —but they never expect the wind that blows rain up or sideways, the clouds that boil over the black cauldron of the hills, or the stoplights that sway like ships.

It is an umbrella from across the sea, delicate translucent skin torn, lithe aluminum skeleton bent upwards, like tree branches.

Tribute Series: Edward Said & Brad Cavanaugh

Venuses Descending John Sloan

Tribute Series: Joel-Peter Witkin & Diane Arbus

A Brief History of Golf in Relation to Man’s Connection to the Natural World

Bryan Willis Cast

Five actors required, doubling encouraged Narrator Scottish Gentleman Golfer 1 Golfer 2 Pro Golfer Caddy Developer 1 Developer 2 Infant Prodigy Infant Prodigy’s Father

Set: one chair.

Fade up on a distinguished NARRATOR sitting in an elegant chair. He (or she) smokes a pipe.

NARRATOR A Brief History of Golf in Relation to Man’s Connection to the Natural World. Scene One: The Scottish Highlands.

Cross-fade to a Scottish gentleman. He adjusts his kilt, prepares to putt with a crude, wooden club. He pauses for a

moment to savor the fine highland air.

SCOTTISH GENTLEMAN

Isn’t it grand?

He putts. SFX of a ball rolling into the hole as we cross-fade back to the NARRATOR. NARRATOR

(Attempting to hide the fact s/he created the previous SFX with a golfball and an oatmeal box.) Scene Two: Golf and the Fashionable Wardrobe.

Cross-fade: Two 1920s GOLFERS remove putters from their bag. They wear knickers, fancy shoes and caps. GOLFER #2 prepares to putt.

GOLFER #1

Did you feel that?

GOLFER #2

I’m sorry?

GOLFER #1

The sprinkles.

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GOLFER #2

Good Lord, you’re right.

GOLFER #2 turns to go.

GOLFER #1

That’s it then, you’re going in?

GOLFER #2

Heavens yes. My trousers, my cap. (Moves to go.) Shall we?

GOLFER #1 takes a moment to breathe the air, feel the rain.

GOLFER #2

Frank?

GOLFER #1

Damn the sprinkles. I’m putting!

They brace themselves against the elements/sprinkles. GOLFER #1 putts. SFX of a successful putt. Cross-fade to NARRATOR hiding the oatmeal box.

NARRATOR Scene Three: “The Swoosh.”

CADDY enters. He wears a hat adorned with the Nike logo. He reaches into the Nike golf bag and removes a putter shaped like a giant Swoosh.

CADDY

Here, sir.

GOLF PRO

(Swooshes in—Nike Swooshes on all parts of his body and clothing. He takes the giant Swoosh-shaped putter.)

Excellent.

He gets down on the ground to size up the 4” putt. He snaps his fingers.

CADDY

Your putter, sir.

GOLF PRO

Mm-hmn.

CADDY

Sir, if I may suggest—

GOLF PRO

Hey! I can handle this.

CADDY

Sorry sir, it’s just—

GOLF PRO

WHAT?

CADDY The air, sir. There’s a breeze.

They take an incredibly brief moment to feel the air. The GOLF PRO adjusts his stance and sinks the 4” putt—quick

cross-fade to NARRATOR making the SFX—cross-fade back to GOLF PRO and CADDY. GOLF PRO YESSSSSSSS!

What follows is the Mother of all Victory Dances: a humorless, clenched-fist-pumping whoop of epic proportions. The CADDY stands by.

CADDY

(Statue-esque.) Sir?

GOLF PRO

What-what is it?

CADDY

The second hole, sir—it’s this way.

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Cross-fade to NARRATOR.

NARRATOR

Scene Four—

GOLF PRO

(In darkness.) I haven’t finished my Victory Dance—

NARRATOR

Scene Four: Wildwood International Golf Course.

Cross-fade to two DEVELOPERS unrolling a large blueprint. This scene may be delivered in another language, real or imagined, as long as the underlined words are clearly English.

DEVELOPER 1

So. What do you think?

DEVELOPER 2

(Looks around.) Too many trees.

DEVELOPER 1

Well of course there are too many trees. It’s a “rainforest.” Use your imagination.

DEVELOPER 2

I don’t see where the clubhouse goes.

DEVELOPER 1

Beside the casino. Next to the Marriott. (Points.) “Putt-Putt,” BaskinRobbins—sports bar. Pro-shop, gift shop, mini-mall. Driving range.

DEVELOPER 2

What if we put the mini-mall there?

DEVELOPER 1

No, no. The mini-mall should face the gift shop.

DEVELOPER 2

The mini-mall should face the “Putt-Putt.”

DEVELOPER 1

No, no—

DEVELOPER 2

That’s the logical progression: “Putt-Putt,” mini-mall, Marriott.

DEVELOPER 1

Fine. You want the mini-mall by the “Putt-Putt,” we’ll put the mini-mall by the “Putt-Putt.”

DEVELOPER 2

Fine.

DEVELOPER 1

Fine.

DEVELOPER 1 & DEVELOPER 2 Fine.

They turn away from one another—they take a moment to look out at the landscape.

DEVELOPER 2

We still need a tag line for the marketing campaign.

DEVELOPER 1

I’m fully aware of that.

DEVELOPER 2

And I appreciate that awareness.

DEVELOPER 1

Don’t rush me.

DEVELOPER 2

Rush? Who’s rushing? You think I’m rushing? Far be it from me to—

DEVELOPER 1

“Wildwood—It’s Where You Want to Be.”

DEVELOPER 2

...Lacks passion. Boring.

DEVELOPER 1

OK.

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DEVELOPER 2

Yeah.

DEVELOPER 1

All Right. How about... “Wildwood—WU-HOOOO!”

An awkward moment.

DEVELOPER 2

I’m not sure that translates.

DEVELOPER 1

Unless you hear it.

DEVELOPER 2

Yeah. That’s a limit.

DEVELOPER 1

Hmm.

DEVELOPER 2

Wait. Wait.

DEVELOPER 1

What.

DEVELOPER 2

I’ve got it.

DEVELOPER 1

What?

A big breath as DEVELOPER 2 communes with nature.

DEVELOPER 2

“Wildwood—Feel the Green!”

DEVELOPER 1

...I like it...I like it a lot!

A communal laugh as we cross-fade to the NARRATOR referring to an foreign language dictionary.

NARRATOR And now, the conclusion of A Brief History or Golf in Relation to Man’s Conne- tion to the Natural World. Scene Five: “Wildwood—Feel the Green.” Cross

fade to DAD on his hands and knees. He’s coaxing his INFANT DAUGHTER—who’s

wearing a large diaper—to sink a short putt.

DAD

The putter is a part of you. An extension of your arm. The golf ball is a part of you, the grass, the hole, it’s all you, it’s in your control. Don’t think, just feel it, breathe it, go with your instincts, just—Fo-Cus. Clear out the past, the future, any preconceived notions of stardom or fame or amassing the type of fortune only made possible by the sponsorship of a multi-national corporation. Forget all that. It’s just you and the ball...Just-Just Do It! PUTT THE BALL...Honey?

INFANT DAUGHTER closes her eyes. Breathes the air. Communes with nature. Smiles.

Cross-fade to NARRATOR who points his learned finger and is about to explain something, and then doesn’t.

Fade to black.

The End

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The Future According to Johnny Quest

Graham Isaac “Imagine a boot, stamping on a human face, forever.” —George Orwell, on the Future Imagine a boot, running through the mud, chased by giant crocodiles for the span of twenty three-minutes, commercial free chased by angry, spear wielding natives, soviets shooting lasers on loop, forever. they’ll have the technology for that.

Imagine the floating cars, the all-rounded architecture; now hear the soundclip: Race Bannon rising from the swampwater, throwing barrel in hand, shouting “TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT THIS, YOU HEATHEN MONKEYS!” victory. Another continent safe for Democracy.

Now hear that clip sampled into a Beastie Boys song, played forever at upscale high-school dances “rr-eg-rr-eg-rr hea-heathen monkeys” see the unsuccessful irony and blank looks from people you thought you knew better when it becomes slang again.

Imagine a world where all it takes is a well-thrown barrell to make things safe for Democracy Now picture the oncoming riots, how the lucky ones will live in submarines and hovercars, how the communists win but we can’t tell the difference, it’s all shown on a wall of televisions fifty feet tall and sponsored by dvd sales A boot, stepping off of a platform, to a podium, forever a gloved hand perpetually waving a clip being loaded into a gun, forever

80

Now picture the underground hideouts, the nicknames they give you “molemen” and secret subsidies from shovel companies barrells are outlawed, confiscated Imagine always being ten years old and your home is an airplane every morning you wake up 4,000 feet above sea level, and three feet above your bed, levitating while your best friend adjusts his turban just last night your dad saved you from enemy spies (what we called terrorists when they were white) but every last night you were tied to a missile, every morning you wake up over somewhere else you haven’t been that isn’t safe yet now Imagine the swan dive, the crashing the last episode, twenty three minutes of burning wreckage hungry looking tanks rolling through empty buildings re-running in perpetuity the unsuccessful ironies, watching the TV while protests rage on outside, boxy-looking robots silencing the dissidents with claw-like “hands” and laser eyes recycling bodies for meat-wafers stored in secret barrels victory speeches recorded and shown on loop forever.

They’ll have the technology for that.

81

Our Appetite for Pleasure

Cece Briggs It is the morning of election results: two thousand and four. The coast line along the Lummi reservation is seamless; smells of crab legs and gasoline.

A muscle bound dog lies dead on the road.

In the yard a burning barrel spirals with graceful green flames and someone sculpts a bald eagle out of garbage bags.

A little boy waiting for the bus shapes his hand at me—like a gun.

He follows my car with it—our eyes locked—pulls the trigger and kicks back his arm before I crest the hill. I could have sworn I saw smoke lifting off his thin fingernail.

My sternum stings with the wound of nothing. I wear the guilt of stolen land in my jowls. Dehumanization flashes in all the windows—blue light, suck of marrow.

Dear Mr. President, We wish to inform you that we have lost our appetite for pleasure.

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83

in the land of the blind—leading the blind—the one eyed man is king Richard Olmsted

Four Chambers for Tyler David Tandeski In Memoriam [October 1, 1999]

Danielle Crawford I. It stinks like cotton swabs turned cold beside Mother’s under-ripe belly.

Six months have passed.

She sits, waits: hunched, hurt on that inhospitable bed.

I can’t tell her this, but she’s aged a decade in a day.

Never looked so frail: a daisy, withered by the worst of winters.

The October sky— Mom’s crying again, laying above peppered linoleum, under so many lights there’s nowhere left to hide.

She’s naked, barren beneath the gown.

I try to resist, but join her, weep.

The doctor’s eyes are dull with mock concern.

I, twelve, confused, want to escape.

In their crisply clean uniforms— uniform sterility— they stare, then speak: The human heart has four chambers…

How were we to know God gave you only two?

84

Years of wait and worry plagued my parents.

Mom’s stiff as the starchy parchment paper she’s now lying on.

Emotions repressed, her words are strangled: It’s done.

II. Did we make the right choice?

After the initial miracle of you, I guess we believed in invincibility.

An age-old wish, the desire to rewind.

Would it have been selfish—?

We thought of the steps you never took.

We kissed the ground you never set foot upon.

Since you’ve been gone, we’ve lost our footing, our solid ground.

I try to picture what you’d be like now.

I’ve dressed your name up in costumes, cloaked your memory with denial, anguish, rage… anything I could muster, paralyzed.

I don’t wish to remember you this way.

I’m back where I began: without a clue.

The cotton, the clothing, that cold room, my memory, too— it’s all too white.

I can’t help but wonder if, taken, you took color from our lives.

‘99. Now seven more.

You would be eight, Tyler, had you survived half a heart and Down Syndrome.

I’m greedy; I want you next to me.

You still are my brother.

I think of you, whose footprint—only an inch!— left a lasting imprint.

The human heart has four chambers…

Your heart was stronger than mine for letting you go. We need your malformed heart to mend our own.

85

Family Album

Malcolm Kenyon There was an austerity about us that didn’t bode well those square-toed shoes plain dull women who’d given up on life in plain drab faded cotton dresses who never smiled I’m not sure from pain of chronic illness or incurable melancholy snapped in black & white against white picket fences with laundry behind them we could not have amounted to much in uniforms of several wars & nationalities those snapshots one finds abandoned in pasteboard boxes in antique shops you never know who survived we silently unsmiling bore our wars & depressions & children the look of failure captured en passant.

86

Well Met Terra Fine

87

The Short Life of a Barista

Anastasia Stasko The

Short

Life

of a

Barista

In the summer I rode the bus to the tallest building on the West Coast to make Americanos for millionaire lawyers who don’t tip or smile. I made friends behind the register. Andrew sold me Northern Lights and Purple Haze and I could smell it all day bound at the bottom of a Chex Mix bag. Taylor brought in Pulp albums for me to burn. She didn’t say anything when I returned them with cracked cases. Jon patted me in passing and called me Gorgeous but told me not to lean. Jessi indulged me in espresso milkshakes and sun signs. He listened when I said I was in love.

Tyshaun told me I made him feel guilty the day before he got married. He went back to Walla Walla when he violated his parole. On my last day it rained.

I read too much into the music mix Andrew made just for me.

He was a married man with a phone number meant only for a hash connection. I just wanted to know someone would miss me on Monday.

88

I Voted

Anastasia Stasko I want cunnilingus from my class president.

If only just to feel the collapse of his buoyant curls as I press his nimbus lips to mine.

I want to be softly whipped by his busy tongue.

While I watch him give the advice that he has wrapped his hands around I want those hands, even more around me, filled with my thighs.

Sweet tissue will peel with friction that’ll only make him quiet.

89

Course Coverings

Mark Iozzi Around 2005 I wheeled my grandfather down a sterile corridor of his nursing home. I asked how he was doing. He didn’t answer, so I spent time looking at framed photos of him with distinguished men in Italian suits.

Around 2002 I ventured onto a cobblestone street near midnight. Pushed my way past prostitutes and dealers to find a phone booth that would make international calls. She was at work when the line connected. We only got three minutes, but the contact kept me going for two more weeks.

Around 1960 my dad acquired a seemingly fool proof system for blackjack – double the bet each time, until you win. Two weeks later, he spent the next six months sleeping on the street.

Around 1974 my dad took a shot of something hard before marrying my mother. He couldn’t understand a word of the Danish service.

Around 1981 my grandfather finally got into so much trouble with his New Jersey, wise guy connections he had to move out to Oregon. My grandmother didn’t go with him, but nobody will tell me why.

90

Around 2001 my dad sat me down privately to explain why I should never get kidnapped by revolutionaries. It could create problems for the family.

Around 2003 a girl and I celebrated the Shiva festival by drinking some thing extra special at a cafe in India. I spent four hours in terror, chasing agiant fly around our room. The girl puked in the shower at 3 am. I stayed awake until dawn, watching colors swim on the cement ceiling.

Around 1971 my mother’s raft capsized in the Jordan River. She was pinned under long enough to never get into a small boat again. An Israeli friend was pinned under long enough to die.

Around 1970 my dad passed up a job as a mercenary in Uganda and went to build bomb shelters in the Golan Heights. He says it’s easy to assimilate to the intermittent falling of shells.

Around 1997 my mom was screaming. I don’t remember why. My brother kicked a hole through the wall at the top of our stairs. My dad patched it over. I don’t think anyone outside the family could tell, but the new texture never quite matched.

Ascent Mark Iozzi

91

Consolidation

Catherine Boody Let’s Reverse.

This summer, flying backwards into Kansas City. I’ve refused to reconsider this city for the last two years. This city, this home. Oh, I’ve considered the people. But no, not the city.

But right now, I’m reconsidering everything. Reconsidering linearity. Right now, everything is coming together. The history, the past, present, future of me. This should be an explanation of myself through anecdotes. An introduction. But all the memories, they all bleed together. Converging at once. Like this: 0 All of it, everything. I can’t make sense of it. How can I? Look at that? Everything crashing at once. Like an awful fatal 50 car pile up. I am trying. An exercise. To make the non-linear linear again. Inevitably, I will fail.

This is about finding a common place. With only my hands to guide me.

Let’s start in August. In Kansas City. This balmy city. This sticky city. This is my home. With amorphous trees and shrubbery, clumping together and sickly weeping while simultaneously creeping that green, balmy, sticky creep. Always in clumps, seldom alone. This is my foliage. Perhaps a place can be described best by its foliage.

Here in this city, the trees clump in small groups together, cloistered, intimate and humble. With sincerity. Much like the people of this city. Yes, they clump and cloister intimately and sincerely. Not for show. Genuine.

This city has no mountains, no water to distract. Here, our natural beauty is the people. And with bodies as our only remarkable organic monoliths—they stand naked, bare, unabashed, unveiled—they have no choice. These bodies are the monoliths of the plains.

To be completely honest, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to trade this humidity for mountains and puddles. I could take a break from school. I could get a good job here, become that intriguing, mystifying server in a swanky lounge of a bistro. Learn about wines and balsamic reductions. Sea bass and sauces. I could start all over. In dresses and a rambling wooden apartment. With crisp, honestly polluted air. Myself as a monolith. _________________________________________________________________________________ o To make myself a monolith: Step 1: Retain a static, stable quality amidst a city in constant motion.

Step 2: Make myself beautiful. *

92

* Like so many things, of course beauty is inherited. Beauty as in grace. My mother is beautiful in her round brown body. No, she’s not fat! She just wears these motherly ribbons of folded skin around her, wearing them as a sash of a matronly beauty pageant queen. She is dark, with darker freckles. Her hands are smaller than mine, slender and appropriately feminine. She has bad teeth, rotted from coffee and sugarcane. A crazy cackle. A bilingual speech impediment. Her hips move like jellyfish when she dances. I suppose I have her beauty in my genes. However, I am a good five inches taller, thinner and fairer. My mother looks like a Puerto Rican Queen. Hair thick like Medusa’s snakes. I look every bit the convoluted mixture of a child that I am.

This summer I danced in short skirts and drank expensive gin. This summer I sang, “objectify me!” and allowed his hands, a decade older than mine, to run from my neck to my stomach, lower. He thinks he’s in control. Perhaps I am a feminist in this way—SUBVERSIVE. Two nights ago I kissed a foreign neck.

This morning I wrestled in bed with a domestic collarbone.

This summer I seduced. I was seduced. Into red nail polish, Winston Lights, yoga mats, tattoos, different cities, dressing rooms.

This summer I took his leathery, calloused hands, his ten fingers, and pushed him away. _________________________________________________________________________________ Fast Forward: I am inside Bellingham. This lazy city. This soggy, draining, heavy city. I return to carpet, green, low ceilings. I return to mud. To dancing in stretchy pants. I return with failed fecundity. I return to financial aid and rent. At 19, this is the life I have chosen.

My Mother too was divided. Divided between two islands.

One wears sugar cane, machetes, bare feet and coconuts.

The other carries the Empire State Building, snow.

2 Islands.

2 languages.

For 17 years.

At 13 she starts working.

She’s 53.

40+ years.

At 17 she moved into a studio apartment.

At 16, a fiancée.

A socialist.

An advocate.

A radical.

She irons her hair.

She still does.

But now she has to dye it black.

93

On the weekends here, I have lazy mornings. I wake up next to red beard, and he ties me to the bed until after noon. He makes me breakfast. He stalks my bedroom. What led us here?

What is the middle ground between these two cities? What occupies the middle?

0 To me it’s a seminal sunshine day with fried grass. Maybe this is how it happened: We drive across Missouri plains. Shuttling to the airport in a mid nineties Toyota. Father drives. Mother jabbers with that angular voice. I watch my city disappear in yellow, driving sunshine.

Now, we are in this white jetting thing. A white shell, with navy blue organs. A blimp with wings. A placebo, a false remedy of a thing, that takes off a skinny runway and catapults me in between where I was and where I’m going.

We are flying, flying, flying non-stop, across the country, Mother and I. We sit on the same airplane, but apart.

Dozens of rows of sterile blue seats, strangers with plastic bags, backpacks, tote bags—miles of synthetic canvas blends separate my mother and I. She sits in a window seat, an overly gesturing and generous gay couple next to her. I can see their flailing arms gesturing repeatedly from where I sit.

Mother comes along to insure my sanity and a safe transition. A safe flight into Bellingham life. And in ballet classes across America, teachers tell their students that the beauty of the dance lies in the small transitions, not the big movements. Smooth transitions birth fluidity, so they say. My transition was turbulent, quite literally.

The air on the airplane is bizarre—thick and hazy, it lulls me into half consciousness. The air weighs down on me, makes me heavy, rooted. No, it has glued me to my seat. We are hurtling through space in this monster. We are breaking through clouds, breaking through a continent, a time zone. We are headed two hours into the past and no one even notices.

I’m sitting in an aisle seat. An old man gets up, walks toward my seat. How can he unglue himself from this thick air like that? He just wades through it with no resistance, easy. Like a moon man. Stands in the aisle, leans on the back of an empty seat in front of me. A lumpy woman across the aisle stares.

He finally passes. Becomes re-glued to his own seat. I watch his nodding head for the rest of the flight. And the flailing arms. This is not Kansas City or Bellingham. This is an airtight preservation chamber. This is a suffocating time capsule. Is this liminality? This is my transition. But this isn’t so graceful—no birthed fluidity.

The rest of the flight’s turbulence sways and manipulates us, making our seat-belted bodies violently jerk. The air is gluing everyone in place now, solidifying everyone with into jerky, pushy motions. Until we land.

Single file waiting.

Opening into an airport.

Outside the airplane [our placebo captor, our time machine] Washington is dark and raining. Green and melting.

We departed a yellow Kansas City on a navy blue Southwest 737, and landed in the EverGreen Washington state.

To me yellow and green make blue.

(This is about liminality)

94

Right now, my head is nestled between Bellingham and Kansas City. Mother was like that too. Her head nestled between Puerto Rico and New York. What we’re trying to do here, see, is to do away with this dichotomy.

I’m trying to find my middle ground. Mother found hers quite literally in Kansas City.

I am split between two boys—one a foreign shadow, ghost, illusion. The other is a domestic reality waking in my bed.

I am split between two races. I am half Puerto Rican. I am half white. My skin looks muddied, off and olive. And I do not know Spanish or how to use Sofrito or fry platanos. Conversely, I do not know how to bake white sugar Christmas cookies or how to make my Father’s Thanksgiving stuffing. I do not know prayers in either language. I am liminal. I am in between. I am my middle ground.

This is about sewing up the splits. Mending the divisions. Compiling the history. With hands that know nothing but keyboards. With hands that are acquiring calluses of their own, while learning how to sew.

0

95

Red

Beth Huffington When we lived like sea-going gypsies for a summer, my family and I were once holed up in harbor because of the threat of a storm that never came.

The sky was violent, incredible armies and fortifications of orange and blue battling away in the clouds, warring for days. Below, the land and sea and wind were all gray, wet, and rough, making our blue boat feel like a mere shell. So we played the safe game, and here we were, three days in this tiny pale fishing town.

There was a man gutting salmon on the dock in our marina. He was taking them out of great big plastic crates of ice in his gray boat, their square shapes so blue they made my teeth ache. Some of the fish were still flopping. A crack like a whip against the metal rail, and he made sure they weren’t by the time they landed on his stained wooden table. Three quick slashes of his cold, live knife and a flick, and he had the fish laid open.

The dock cats and I crowded close to see.

The salmon were red inside their silver skins. The very purest sense of the word. A deep, translucent crimson, gem-like and yet too vital to be ruby. Too pure to be exposed to light and air and the weight of our eyes.

I could taste that red, standing there on the gray dock and shivering in my short pants and summer tank top. I knew that it would be crisp and rich, the essence of life and blood and the color red. Sweet and quicksilver. My mouth watered. He threw scrapes of the raw flesh to the cats that crowded our bare and booted feet, and I envied them.

96

Neptune Lenae Day

97

Rain

Jordan Hartt Davy was raping Uma next to the woodstove and I could hear her muffled gasps as she struggled and thought maybe I should help her but the rain was pounding from the sky—I’d been smoking the spices of methamphetamines for two days and it felt like there were warm bubbles in my veins and percolating out the top of my head and the rain felt like it fell directly into my bloodstream and into the sap of the massive cedars that towered far above our cabin and I could feel every drop of sap inside those old-growth giants that we chainsawed, periodically, the three of us, to buy groceries and rain fell onto the mossy lawn of our backyard and rain dripped from the gutters of our cabin and rain fell with a crush on the salal, and the blackberries, and rain fell on the scrawny dog hunkered in his small house, and then there was a scream, which made my heart jump. The scream was like a gunshot, and then it was over. The scream, I mean. The rain continued and the rain fell on us, rain muffling the scream, and the dog, and the blackberries, and the salal, and the cabin, and even the cedars, yes, and me, and the woodstove, and the rape, yes, that was muffled too, our lives, here on the coast, are muffled by the rain, yes, and if I hadn’t been there that morning and if these typewritten words weren’t here there wouldn’t be anybody left who remembers that the rape happened.

98

After an Incident at Nairobi

Mark Iozzi Even still, I can see that water running full with blood, mixing with orange clay in little waves that pull at the shore.

I remember the hot, metallic air heavy with a smell like sweat only sweeter and more alive.

I watched that day as one leopard gingerly touched its tongue to the thick, red surface, before darting back to the scatter of weeds.

99

Kick Up Your Heels Lenae Day The Market CalebYoung

Tributaries Marie Jackman

101

Pussy

Jessyca Murphy “hey, baby! is your pussy that color?!” their phallic ford flatbed screeched through three stoplights before I could figure out what they were yelling about.

I could only assume that they were referencing the dyed hair on my head because the hair on my pussy was packed in away tightly in my pants.

When their eyes scanned my cotton candy strands maybe it reminded them of the rosebud centerfolds peaking out of daddy’s porno pile or the Pepto Bismol cum shots squinted through scrambled cable channels that made them think pink = pussy.

I spent the rest of my walk home trying to imagine how these boys arrived at their conclusion, that their most rational course of action would be to proposition the shade between my legs?

“Why, Nigel, I do say, the color of her hair quite resembles that of a vagina.”

“Do you suppose she intended this association?”

“Well by golly, let’s ask her.” but they didn’t stick around long enough for a fucking answer.

102

If they had, I would have told them: you, boy in the burnt-out pick-up, you, my dear, do not want to know the color of my pussy. if you laid eyes on my labia the layers would suck you in like the sun exploding on itself you would be awestruck by the awesome abyss that is my pussy. you do not want to tread on its skin. my clit is an eclipse like a burning blitz that could melt the flesh beneath your blinks. my pussy is a fuchsia so bright it would blind your double barreled eyes before they shot a second glance between my thighs. my pussy is a mother fucking black hole with a gravitational pull so strong that one glimpse would mutilate your matter into particles smaller than dust. my pussy would part to pour the red seas sealing off any chance of your escape. the blood boiling to liquid fill your lungs your tongues choking on the could-be cartilage of babies that could grow up to be ladies that you would one day scream at on the streets. if only these streets had given me a second chance I would scream ask me again, boy! ask me, do you still want to fuck with my pussy?

103

104 Jeremy Mattocks

Robot Sex Poem to PKD, With Love

Lucy Elenbaas Sewing Machine One day a sewing machine gave birth to twins. I’m the father, but of course she won’t let me see them. I took advantage, she says, but at the time she had no qualms, that little bitch. But really, I’m quite fond of her. Will you tell her that? If you see her?

Robot One night I slept with a robot. The next morning, he rolled over and asked me to marry him. “What! You think I can be bought for so cheap?!”

“But I love you.”

“Well, alright then.”

Coke Machine One day, I got in a fight with a Coke machine. It’s hard to say who started it except that pretty soon we were rolling all over the floor, licking each other’s wounds.

105

Somewhere in Colorado

Graham Isaac The last anyone saw of him he wore a ripped green hat kicked mud off his boot treads and let the rain put out his cigarette Sheila, the waitress, hair knotted like fingers, didn’t remember much except he didn’t make eye contact, eat his bacon, or tip looked a bit like everyone else, but pulled tighter killers and vagrants make better song titles, he used to say watching trees die in october with some sort of grim fascination that, each year, looked a little bit more like an album cover citing johnny cash, the stones and his own father colorado is a big one and the police don’t cross state lines he always talked about ranches in wyoming swamps outside of baton rouge snakebites he got on the road between missoula and talahassee anywhere with open space or low overhangs his ripped hat is collecting perspiration in a town with more bars than churches fryer-grease floors where tricks and pancakes turn he’s stirring his bacon through eggyolk remains with a borrowed fork

106

the last anyone heard of him was a popping, fading phone call a few hours out of colorado springs voice quivering trapdoor hinges creaking with rust, resignation and smoke sounding like he was about to order another drink or maybe become his own favorite song title

The Death of Latin

Fiction

Andrew Lovseth

Eva Suter

we had been laying there for hours The morning my father died I found i had been thinking about dinosaurs myself alone in his house. There I wandered through the corridors and extinction offices of my younger years. Soon I discovered I was in his library. Over is such a precise word his lifetime he had amassed a towi muse if their demise wasn’t ering collection of biographies and maybe the consequence of histories, immense volumes of poprehistoric prophylactics etry and literature. As a child I often tar condoms in the days marveled at the overflowing shelves, before the discovery of fire. and later I often felt overwhelmed as though I would never catch up. extinction I sat down and sifted through the pages of his books, skimming over i open and close my hand the paragraphs and passages that staring at the thumb filled them. Then after many hours our breathing is just off I noticed a small spill of black liquid from synchronicity had accumulated on the hardwood floor. I bent down and dipped my if i were a dinosaur forefinger into the puddle. It was i think i would like to be a stegosaurus ink. with the plates and spikes.

It was sometime later when I noticed certain anomalies in my father’s think maybe extinction wouldn’t be so books. There were errors—neither bad typographical nor grammatical— yeah, with a tail like that. but omissions from the page. Soon I noticed their occurrence with frequency. It struck me finally that all of the punctuation had disappeared Commas periods semicolons colons and question marks All were lost Absent too were the articles, adjectives, and adverbs. I glanced upward and noticed the small spill of black ink had risen into a reservoir that filled the room knee-deep. Then before my eyes the verbs vanished

107

Catsup Girl Charissa Engstrom

Daydreaming dissipated, whistling wilted, flourishing faded. The books lost any significance; they became

108

A Little Red

Alison Knappett We were both late to class, imagine!

with a note from my father in its place.

Imagine: My, what long legs you have!

My legs go spirals just to keep up.

Remember: I am a little red riding on my bike through the woods.

But I don’t have a grandmother, you don’t either.

I know because I saw both funerals and cried to see you in black.

But you would never be late to class.

I know.

I know because I know you.

Listen: Your bushes are unfriendly.

I know because I hid in them last night, their spiky leaves poking into my arms, my mouth and up my skirt.

I was a virgin before that night!

You walk through the woods?

What a coincidence!

I live down the hill.

Where is there to go in the woods but down?

Do you like to go down?

Please: You walk too fast and you were awake during the hour of the wolf.

I know because I was awake and peeking through your window.

A little red riding the dark of night.

I just wanted to watch.

Do you like to watch?

Look: Blood trickles between my legs but you are color blind to the little red lines running past my thighs.

You will not know why your bush is gone tomorrow morning

a

treasury

of

nouns.

Dewey

Dell

You don’t know me.

But do you dream of spirals?

Bundren

and

baseball,

lighthouses

and

the

109

Wallace Stevens

Carlos Martinez Sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep and I wonder what my ex-wife is doing, and the cats are scattered across the rug, or sleep one on top of the other, and I wish I had a bird to wake me every morning with an original song, and I wonder how it is that poets become beautiful, I think my bright, white room is gray and I think about Wallace Stevens, about him in that lovely black and white photograph, where we see his right side as he faces left, and he’s dressed in gray flannel, the perfect insurance vice-president, and his gray hair is swept back, and he looks not only dignified but beautiful, and I wonder what his wife thought as he prepared for bed, as he took his clothes off, the gorgeous suit of woven gray flannel, and though I know I shouldn’t think this, I wonder what kind of underwear he wore, white briefs or patterned boxers, if he wore executive length socks, if in that moment when he stood there he felt less poetic, paunch bulging his tee shirt, if Mrs. Stevens waited for his pure white body to be undressed before she turned the light off, and if in the dark, in bed, him in his expensive pajamas, she still loved him

110 Second

World

War.

Until

the

names

of

people

and

places

faded

Soup from Stones

Jessica Lowber On the riverbed with only running water and infinite gray pebbles as company she was alone.

The pebbles were smooth and thick, she was Adam before them, pointing and naming into existence, “you are no vacancy” “you are 2.99 breakfast” and “you are blueberry lip gloss” and “bus number 232” “free couch” “open ‘til 4am” “honk if you love pu**y.” She looked at her creation and saw that it was good. But something deep inside of her was lonely—so she named one stone “apartment door”—placed it to her side—took another stone between her fingers and rubbed it on her lips and down her body, naming it “woman.” And she saw that it was good. Still loneliness was an empty well in her belly which felt like hunger. So she started to devour—a riverbed of memories—stone after stone dropping down her throat. Ex-lovers and familiar faces, wine labels, late night phone calls, Dear John letters, grocery aisles, coffee shops, street names, and bank statements, all slipped like carrots and bullion down past her lips. By the time she had eaten every stone on the riverbed—her tongue had become a well-traveled gravel road. Full and heavy with the stones of her creation—she walked into the river and let the memories carry her to the bottom.

111 as

well.

Only

things

remained,

reminded.

Finally

they

too

disappeared.

An Acquired Taste

Emily Barker I. At 10 years old I took my grandfather’s large, leatherbound edition of The Guiness Book of World Records and read, horror-struck, about a man who ate a television—whole. He broke up the screen first, into small bits, which he swallowed with the slow gravity of a priest breaking bread for communion. It took him one week to finish. He later went on to eat a mailbox, half a bicycle, and a large portion of a VW bug, before dying of internal perforations.

At 6 and a half I watched disgusted as Brady, a brutish redhead, scraped the school paste off the applicator stick with small, hard, teeth. He finished off the bottle with greedy speed, then licked it clean with pink, thin, tongue. But he grew up, and last I heard, is now a plastic surgeon living somewhere in LA. II. Now at 31, I watch my daughter, 8, eat paper. She tears a magazine page into thin ribbons and chews with a determination akin to that of the VW eater from my grandfather’s book. I tried to take away all of her magazines, but she found other things.

I open books to find thin strips gone from the margins of Shakespeare, bites out of the corners of hiking guides, pages of recipes half—devoured.

Hollowed

112

encyclopedias

and

wayward

atlases

were

all

that

was

I beg for normalcy: “Honey, people just don’t eat books.” But she glances at me with only a halfhearted attention. I pray that she grows out of it.

That she won’t, at 25, be included in the list of freaks who spent a lifetime accumulating tattoos and growing out their fingernails to record lengths.

III. But then it happens.

13, and no more demolished hardbacks, no more poetry anthologies with poems slashed down the middle, missing half the rhyme and meter.

She wears too much eyeliner, reads Cosmo, wears thongs, slams doors, dates an older boy, dyes her hair straw colored, sits on the phone in her room, refuses to eat, doesn’t talk to me anymore.

I can’t stop skimming torn pages.

left.

I

waded

waist-high

through

ink,

struggling

to

113

untitled Glenn Newcomer

climb

114

out

through

the

window.

Stained

yet

undamaged

Whose Lullaby Is This Anyway?

Carlos Martinez When I lived at home, in the house no longer mine, I stood in the doorway to my children’s room, late at night, to watch them sleep, watch them move, arms tossed over their heads, blankets kicked to the floor I’d pick up, put on them again, wrinkles in the fabric smoothed.

I’d think of the ocean their covers resembled, of how their nightlight was like a three-quarter moon. I’d stand still, making sure nothing untoward happened, the doorway a battlement I patrolled, allowing the dog in and the cats to sleep with their young masters.

That’s what I used to do. Some nights, when I’ve had too much rum or bourbon or double White Russians, I stand on my deck smoking a cigarette. I watch its smoke rise, watch the real moon, watch its light fall into the darker room of the world.

I

found

my

way

to

safety.

115

It

116

s wa

d

har to

leave.

Contributors

Taira Anderson is a student, so usually she is learning things, but on certain days she is paid $7-and-somethingcents each hour to press buttons and smile. Currently, she lives on a slope of asphalt in a beige townhouse shaped like a shoebox. Her past works include: ______ .

Caleb Barber is a graduate of Western Washington University, with a BA in English/Creative Writing. He is currently an MFA candidate from the Whidbey Writers Workshop in Poetry. He works days in Bellingham at a machine shop.

Emily Barker likes puppies, coffee, paradox, and things that are detrimental to her health. She doesn’t like soda, classical literature, winter, or looming graduation. She thinks writing is “totally awesome”, and hopes that it will remain in her life for as long as possible.

James Bertolino taught creative writing for 35 years, most recently at Willamette University. He has received eight national or regional awards for his poetry, and had nine volumes published. There will be more. kelly björk was born and raised in tacoma, washington. björk is in her 4th year at western washington university. she is a studio art major with a focus on drawing, and absolutely despises capital letters.

Catherine Boody grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, and has resided in Bellingham for almost three years. She’s an English Literature major with an emphasis in Film Studies. She hopes to be living in Prague by fall.

Cece Briggs is a recent graduate of Western’s English Department. She currently lives in Bellingham and is writing as if nothing else matters. She hopes to have a full book of poetry published within the next year.

Luther Cassidy grew up in Port Orchard, WA. He is a Creative Writing major at Western.

I was just nineteen but bored of the college scene. Feeling trapped between a bunch of computer screens. I discovered hip hop and took a new direction. Graff renewed my interest in artistic expression. Two years later, the New World Order’s in progression.

Denise Coen can be found roaming the streets of Boston looking for things that remind her of Bellingham. So far the trees are wrong, mountains are gone, and only one-way streets come close. She studies writing at Emerson for her MFA. Danielle Crawford is currently working on an Art and Creative Writing concentration at Fairhaven College. She dedicates this poem to her brother, who lives on in the hearts of her family and in heaven above.

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Lenae Day is currently majoring in Studio Photography and Creative Writing at Western. She also performs as a soloist with Northwest Ballet Theatre in downtown Bellingham. She lives with her husband Derek and two cats, Lumpalumps and Genghis Khan.

Ian Denning is a senior at WWU. He studies Creative Writing and wants to blow your mind, play videogames, and drink beer.

Lucy Elenbaas will graduate from Western this spring with a Master’s Degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She is the managing editor of the Bellingham Review and an editorial intern at the American Review of Canadian Studies. She likes cats and tea and editing papers.

Charissa Engstrom is a recent Western graduate. She has lived in Washington roughly seven years. Her dad, also an artist and an evangelist, moved her family around to various states and two provinces until they made their home in Washington. She is constantly fascinated with exploring the abstract world in painting, and has enjoyed challenging herself with the process of it for the last five years.

Seija Emerson is a recent graduate of WWU with a BA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis. She plans to continue her studies, and is investigating various Creative Writing MFA programs.

Terra Fine originated in Minnesota, but now enjoys her life here at WWU as a Sculpture major. Fine’s drawing “Well Met” shows cubist sculptor Louis Nevelson in all her eccentric glory, with physical characteristics that connected the artist to her subject on their first “meeting” through Cecil Beaton’s dramatic portrait photography.

Emily Fox graduated from Western Washington University Winter 2007 with a BA in Painting. In the fall she will be attending Brigham Young University for an MFA degree. She likes swimming and horses.

D.E. Goodroad graduated from Western in March 2007 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English. Prior to attending Western, her fiction was published by The Phoenix, the student literary journal at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington.

Jordan Hartt graduated from Western Washington University in 2001. He is published in many literary journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Black Zinnias, and Colere, and is a frequent magazine and newspaper contributor.

He is currently the managing editor of Experience, Centrum’s magazine for the creative life.

As a child, Beth Huffington’s father read to her every night. Storytelling has always been an important part of her life, and always will be. It just took three majors and seven years of college for her to figure this out.

Mark Iozzi is in his last quarter at Western, finishing up a degree in Political Science and Creative Writing. At this time next year, he hopes to be someplace warm, preferably below the 30th parallel.

Graham Isaac graduated from WWU in 2004. He lives and writes in Bellingham, Washington.

Marie Jackman was born and raised in Palmer, Alaska and she is currently a senior majoring in Studio Art at WWU. Marie’s artistic area of concentration focuses mainly on photography, and her work often relates to themes of body image, mapping, and geography.

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Erin Jenson likes like to fly her kite in the spring, eat thimbleberries off her thumb in the summer, listen to the rain tap on fallen leaves in autumn, and closely inspect a single snowflake before it melts under her breath in the winter...sometimes her camera accompanies her.

Sam Johnson is currently a sophomore at Western Washington University.

Malcolm Kenyon is a former Assistant Professor of Technology at WWU, retired manufacturing engineer and gunsmith, now teaches ESL for the Whatcom Literacy Council, writes lots.

Alison Knappett held a pencil with her fist until the third grade. This was rebellion. She spelled “intelligent” with only one “l” until the tenth grade. This was a statement. She hit her head against a cement wall in her junior year of college. This was on purpose. Really, it was!

Krista Kondro was raised at the base of Mt. St. Helens in southwest Washington and grew up in the little town of Toutle—a place people know as the Shell station or Drew’s Grocery along Spirit Lake Highway on your way to the Mt. St. Helens monument. Since the age of nine she knew that Creative Writing and obtaining a collegiate teaching degree in English from Western should be on her life’s docket. So, naturally, here she is at Western.

David M. Laws is a former Editor-in-Chief of Jeopardy Magazine and a 2005 graduate of Western Washington University, with a degree in English with a Creative Writing emphasis. He has been published in several journals and magazines including past issues of Jeopardy Magazine and, most recently, in Tribute to Orpheus, an anthology of music-related work to be published this year by Kearney Street Books. When he is not writing, proofreading, factchecking, or editing, he enjoys walking his dog, playing with his model railroad, working puzzles, gardening, and disturbing the complacent.

Andrew Lovseth graduated from Western Washington University in 2006 with a degree in Creative Writing. He currently resides in Bellingham, Washington.

Jessica Lowber is a senior at Fairhaven College, her self-designed concentration is Poetry and Fine Art: Evoking and Honing the Marginalized Voice. After completion of her degree she hopes to become a graphic illustrator. Regardless of what the future holds, she will live passionately and fully.

Sandra Lucke has shown her art in group and solo exhibits. For 7 years, her art representative business provided organizing of regional art exhibits, fundraising, media publicity and photography. She has a B.A. in Fine Arts from Western Washington University. She lives in Bellingham, WA U.S.A. Greg Macdonald has been advised to divulge only that when he is not writing he is thinking about writing, and that he prefers a Pinot Noir, or a fine single-malt Scotch. Although he has no children, he has a novel in progress, and he will conceive many new poems.

Alison Mandaville teaches Literature and Writing at Western Washington University. She will spend 2007-2008 as a Fulbright Scholar in Azerbaijan, teaching literature, learning about Azeri women writers, and writing about her adventures.

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Carlos Martinez has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles and has taught literature and creative writing at Western since January 2002. He’s been published in local and national anthologies and literary magazines, and reads frequently in western Washington, and occasionally elsewhere. His new chapbook, Meanwhile, Back in Kansas, was just published.

Miles Mattix still lives with his parents and is a junior at WWU, in Creative Writing. He gardens for the power elite on Monday and Wednesday. He enjoys singing, yammering theology all night at the Horseshoe, and wooing a woman rumored to be a naiad.

Jeremy Mattocks is currently enrolled in his first year at WWU, where he’s pursuing a BA in creative writing.

Jessyca Murphy has no idea what she is doing with her life Glenn Newcomer is a Fine Art/Photography major originally from Olympia, Washington. In addition to artsy things, Glenn also enjoys zombie movies and exploring.

Heidi Norgaard is a Creative Writing and Art History double major at WWU. Her poetry is often personal and autobiographical. She likes to focus on the still moments in between actions and the energy that resonates in those places. richard olmsted was born in the skagit valley, against the unrelenting encroachment of industrialized civilization. he keeps his pencil sharp to remind his enemies it is stronger than the sword, but not so different either. he has recently been released from the hostage crisis of western washington university, and is looking forward to the return to a sane and healthy way of living. www.richardolmsted.com William Owen graduated from WWU last spring and now resides in Seattle where he works as a researcher and is beginning his first novella.

Ben Packard is a Sophomore at Western and is considering majoring in English.

Ben Paplow is a bad influence and you are no longer allowed to be friends with him or go over to his house.

Noelani K. Penney is a first year student at Western who plans to eventually combine her interests in science, writing, and art into a career. In the meantime, she enjoys living in Bellingham, reading, writing, hiking, biking, taking pictures, painting, swimming, traveling, gardening, and (usually) the rain.

Timothy Pilgrim is a Pacific Northwest poet (and journalism teacher at Western Washington University). He has published over 60 poems and is working on a collection, Autopsy for Hope.

Nathan Rice currently resides in the Galapagos Islands on the belt line of the planet, where he teaches ecology and measures baby giant tortoises. The Pacific Northwest is his home.

Matthew Campbell Roberts was born in Napa Valley, California where he attended a one-room schoolhouse set in the middle of a vineyard. His work has appeared recently in PrairiePoetry.org, Windfall, Whatcom Places II anthology, The Methow Naturalist, and Tribute to Orpheus anthology. He was a winner of the 2007 Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize and will be offering his soul to graduate school in the fall.

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Aylen Elliot Rounds is a former assistant editor of Jeopardy Magazine, and graduated in 2006 from Fairhaven College. He is currently serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and hopes to begin graduate work in autumn 2008.

John Sloan uses photography and other mediums to question and explore female stereotypes in our society.

People often seem surprised by this until they learn that he is the father of two young girls. www.johnsloan.net Anastasia Stasko, from beautiful Auburn,WA, wants nothing more than to get into a Buick and drive away. In her senior year at Western Washington University she discovered MySpace, got super pumped about songwriting, and was a featured musician on NPR’s All Songs Considered Open Mic. Things are starting to look good to Anastasia and she is now ready to put in the work and have some fun. Hear more of her music at myspace.com/anastasiastasko Marjorie Steele is a senior here at Western, and will be finishing her degree in Creative Writing at the end of spring quarter. Despite peer pressure and the writing community’s push to enter an MFA program immediately after graduation, Marjorie will not be doing so. Instead she will be moving to mid-Michigan with her new husband and starting, hopefully, a long and glorious career in the pursuit of social and environmental justice.

Eva Suter currently resides in Bellingham, where she rides her bike and contemplates deep meaningful things.

Alek Talevich has, with any luck, graduated at this point. He can likely be found flipping burgers and working on collaborations with both Lines and Blood Productions in Bellingham, as well as with local dramatist John “Mexican Robot” Allis. Send donations.

Jake Tucker is a 5th year senior here at Western and will be getting a secondary education certificate in social studies. He’s been writing poetry for about three years and just released a chapbook, The Greco-Roman Wrestling Tournament That is My Heart. He reads regularly at the Monday night open mic at the Fantasia Coffeehouse in Bellingham.

David Wheeler is currently a junior at WWU and is majoring in English. Along with writing poetry and fiction, he plays piano and currently holds a tutoring position at Western’s Writing Center.

Bryan Willis serves as playwright-in-residence for the Northwest Playwrights Alliance and teaches playwriting for the WWU Theater Department. His play Sophie was commissioned by BBC Radio and has been produced around the U.S. and U.K. Bryan’s golf stroke is embarrassing, but he once won a free game at the Parkland Putters.

Caleb Young is an ‘05 Graduate of WWU and has had his photography or poetry published in the last three editions of Jeopardy. He is a new father (of a baby girl), a husband, a twin, a filmmaker and a friend. He is directing a film, with his twin brother, this summer with real actors—on real film—and a really small budget.

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Volunteer Evaluator Name Find A L A N N A T R I T T P W A D S A L E G

T D R E G E O R K A N U A H S P N E M N

S E L A C S N A G E M R Q Y B I N I I U

R E T S I L L A C M Y E L H S A A F L O

S F G E G P S M N H E L E Q Y D H W Y Y

S E E D N W A X A K A L S O A S I H B R

M W L N I H J N N M G I F N F L L I A E

W O H A A R N P B I K F I L N E D T R B

W K N C C A D E P U U E U W U I E T K M

J E I I H S R L B N L L O S R N B A E A

M R S H C J A A O L F L Y K H A R K R Q

E I O L E A H I E O N E Z J C D A E T S

H N S N E T H B D E W I Z B O E N R E J

G N S T N Y E U A Y F N K F C I D C R X

E E K A Y N M D M M L A O D N M T E R A

N P M M N F N C R P B D P H O A C F A U

J A M E D A A Q C Z H S T M S J V J F A

S F T D M D F L Z A W R O V I I Y J I M

J T D A L L X N L T I N E T L Y M O N S

K A T I E B O R O V I N A Y A Y V M E N

Find the names of Jeopardy’s amazing volunteer art and literature evaluators in the word jumble! These individuals provided an invaluable service to the magazine by helping to judge and score nearly 1000 submissions. Their time, effort and dedication are greatly appreciated.

Art Evaluators:

Literature Evaluators: Emily Barker Danielle Bennett Katie Borovina Samantha Bukis Alison Cochrun Jamie Daniels Amanda Enlow

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Danielle Fillerup Erica Ham Anna Hildebrandt Hannah Hong Amber Jensen Shauna Kroeger Ashley McAllister

Lydia Scales Megan Scales Alanna Tritt Leif Whittaker Mishon Wooldridge Amber Young

Misty Fall Terra Fine Monica Humphrey Wesley McCain

(cont. from page 9)“The bottom line,” wrote 1993 editor Rosalee McLaughlin as her office was being dismantled “as accountants tell us, is that Jeopardy has ‘no real function’ at this school.” After the materialist surge of the eighties, free speech was no longer a right, but a product, viewed in terms of profit, not in terms of content.

Jeopardy spent the nineties operating out of a janitors closet in College Hall. But with the help of advisor-extraordinaire Kate Trueblood, Jeopardy recently reclaimed its turf in the Humanities Building. Slowly, the magazine has been recovering. In 2004 Jeopardy became an internal publication—exclusively for Western students, staff, faculty, and alumni. The focus is to spread these voices as far as possible. These are frightening times—free speech is not something we are fighting for, but something we are trying to get back. University3. LITERATURE IN 2007 funded arts magazines are one way of doing that.

Refutation of Cartesian philosophy that divorces There is no corporate censorship. Only a group of idea from medium. Physicality. I feel therefore student editors who are free to choose the prose, I am. New celebration of materiality of books. poetry, and art that goes into the pages. Here Artbooks. Cybernetic fiction. Interactive texts. the Western community can publish what matters See: Mark Z. Danielewski & Jonathan Safran Foer. to them, not simply what makes a profit. That is New media ecology. Literature as website. Podthe ‘function’ and the mission of this magazine. [information pieced together from scarps of paper found inside cast. Spoken Word CDs. Postmodernity. Braided my desk] prose. Narrative structure deconstructed. Magical realism. Reality deconstructed. Posthumanism.

2. THANK YOU! Identity deconstructed. Memes [Jeopardy 2007 I would like to thank everyone who made this issue is a living body of text with mimetic threads that of Jeopardy possible, especially Kate Trueblood run like muscles and tendons through its pages, whose dedication has kept this magazine alive— CD tracks, and urls. There are the obvious threads Jim Bertolino for over 20 years of support—all like God, family, and politics. Then there are some of our amazing volunteer evaluators who made reoccurring images that the editors didn’t anticiit possible to judge over 950 submissions (a new repate—airplanes, fish, death, loneliness, machine cord since we became an internal publication!)— sexuality, and cats (For some reason an alarming Lydia Scales who went above and beyond the call number cats showed up in this edition. They wanof duty for any volunteer—Alanna Tritt who der through the stanzas and paragraphs like hunrescued the new Literary Publications Alliance— gry strays. Believe it or not, this was unintended Robert at Fantasia Poetry Night for sponby the editors.).]

soring the Jeopardy Poetry Feature—Cara Jaye for sponsoring our first art exhibition—Jackson Long and his students at the Fairhaven Recording Studio who sponsored Jeopardy’s first Spoken Word CD— Western Galleries Director Sarah Clark-Langager for allowing the magazine release to be celebrated among fine works of art—Dawn Dietrich, Kathleen Saunders, and Elsi Vassdal Ellis for spreading the memes of cybernetic fiction, postmodernism, and bookart that shaped this edition of Jeopardy—Thomas Yount for his assistance with the sheet music—Jeff B. who helped out with the cover design—Matt R. for his dedication and abil1. S.L.’s WINDOW (4 WEEKS AGO) ity to manage a 20-person volunteer staff—Ryler D. So at 5pm on our submission deadline I get for bringing in his radical ideas and managing the Spoken this frantic phone call from a woman driving Word CD project—Julia M. for being supportive and toward the university. “Are you still open? for planning the art exhibition—Ryan S. whose innovaStill taking submissions? I’ll be there in five tive designs went beyond the greatest visions of the ediminutes!” I wait for her in the office until tors—the poor significant-others of the editors: Sheana, she rushes in clutching a manila envelope.

Scott, and Jessica, who put up with our 15-to-24-hour “I’m so glad I made it in time!” She is an long workdays during crunch time—all of the scholarolder woman, probably my mother’s age, ship donors and financial aid organizations that and after we both finish complaining about allowed me to be a part of this university and magazine— the campus parking situation, she pulls the and, of course, all of the amazing writers and art1981 issue of the magazine from the bookists who ignored the risk of rejection and chose to submit shelf and opens it to the table of contents. their work (There were so many amazing pieces! It was “That’s me,” she says, pointing to a name, “You guys printed my work 26 years ago.” difficult to choose between them!). With the support of She shows me other names in the magamembers of the Western community, Jeopardy has grown zine: old friends, lovers; people she will incredibly within a single year. From the bottom of my never see again. And suddenly I get this individual-system-of-memes-and-agents (I’d say “bottom strange feeling, like I’m ooking at something of my heart” but I feel that would not be genuine since we sacred, like the object she is holding is no deconstructed the heart/soul concept decades ago) and longer a mere magazine but a window. on behalf of Jeopardy Magazine I thank you all! 123 (cont. on page 128)

The Creators of Jeopardy

Interviews by Matt Russoniello

Samara Hayley Steele, Editor-in-Chief

Matt Russoniello: Samara, my favorite editor-in-chief! Give us the juice!

Samara Hayley Steele: I am a graduating senior and a student of Fairhaven College, as well as a WWU English major.

MR: Juicy! But we know there’s more to you than just your impressive academic resume. You must enjoy all sorts of classy things!

SHS: I can’t say that isn’t true. Well, I enjoy red wine over white, writing, unicycling, science fiction, cyborg anthropology, costume design, martial arts, singing in the shower. I also like cheese very much and wish the days were longer so I could watch the sunset.

MR: Fantastic! Let’s play hardball: Future plans?

SHS: Travel the world, starting with Japan, where I will began teaching English in July. Then settling down at graduate school (whichever one will take me). I want to keep writing and hope to take some beautiful pictures along the way. Maybe, someday, I’ll have kids.

Ryler Dustin, Associate Editor & Spoken Word CD Director

Matt Russoniello: Ryler, so good to see you again! Let’s get right to it, shall we? Tell me what you’ve been up to!

Ryler Dustin: I’ve been writing and performing poetry for the past three years. My tight flow has appeared in Bear Creek Haiku, The Front Range Review and Chrysanthemum. I also have my own chap book, We’ll Vanish Like Cities.

More importantly, I’ve got a MySpace page (myspace.com/rylerpoetry ) with a calendar of where I’ll be spitting rhymes, which have been called by some critics, “straight-up-diagnosable.”

MR: Impressive!!! Any plans for life post-Jeopardy, post-graduation?

RD: I plan to maybe win a few Nobel Prizes, mostly in literature, but maybe one or two in economics. I love money!

MR: Intriguing! Any parting words?

RD: Ryler says SUBMIT! (To me, not Jeopardy!)

Julia McDermott, Associate Editor & Art Coordinator

Matt Russoniello: ‘Ello, Julia! As a graduating senior majoring in English Literature, do you have any general insights into the questionable minds of likeminded students?

Julia McDermott: Through experience, I have decided that English majors have the greatest excuse for insanity.

Really, who wouldn’t go nutty after jumping from one fictional persona to another and then having to reflect on it?

MR: You’re special to all of us because your initials are the same as those of Jeopardy Magazine! What other small facts, perhaps organized in brief list form, would tell us a lot about you?

JM: Well, I love my crazy German family, my dog, sleep, talking, laughing at myself, books, smoothies, sandy beaches, jeans, and oh-so many kinds of food.

MR: Wonderful! And how about after you leave Western? Any special plans then?

JM: I hope to work in Editing and Publishing. Beyond that, I aspire to travel, read a new book every week, become a gourmet chef. Who knows how that’ll turn out…

MR: I’m sure it will turn out just great!!!

Ryan Scott, Graphic Artist & Jeopardy Online Director

Matt Russoniello: Ryan, you are the group’s anomaly in two ways! First of all, you are the sole graphic designer on this project! Secondly, you are the one freshman in a group consisting almost entirely of graduating seniors! How has this experience been for you?

Ryan Scott: Not so bad. Luckily all of you senior editors are pretty nice people.

MR: We are pretty nice! Spread that around, would you? How did you get into graphic design?

RS: I started my senior year in high school. By the end of the year I had started my own business, Ryan Scott Designs, which is how I’m paying for this whole “college experience” thing.

MR: So impressive for so young! Care to take a shot at outlining your future?

RS: I’m going to keep working as a professional designer while completing a major in graphic design. I’m not thinking too seriously about post-college life yet; I’m just trying to get through the rest of this year.

Matt Russoniello, Associate Editor & Volunteer Coordinator Matt Russoniello, Interviewer: Everyone, myself especially, is dying to know something about you!

Matt Russoniello, Editor: I’m a Creative Writing English major with a minor in Film Studies. I prefer the company of a good album or book to that of a bad person, I talk exclusively in references to pop culture phenomena, I live for snow and the magic of winter and I worship, unhealthily, great writers from Vladimir Nabokov to Aaron Sorkin.

MR, I: You sound like a smarty! And your (sure-to-be fantastic) plans for the future?

MR, E: Write something wonderful. And travel, starting with England, because I love their accents and their television ‘programmes.’ Then Iceland for the Björk factor.

MR, I: Oh so cosmopolitan! Anything else?

MR, E: I’d love to work in television, think up something more sophisticated than The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll. Maybe, one day, I’ll teach myself how to use my fancy camera. Also, I’d love to meet a polar bear and/or a unicorn at some point.

Index

Things We Like to Talk About Airplane Alone Asterisk Augustine, St. Avocado Beer Bellingham Belly Bird Birth Blood Blue Boner Boot Bratz™ Cat

Child

Christian Christmas Clean Cockroach

33, 53, 81, 94, 123 14, 15, 22vi, 24, 29, 30, 58, 69, 92, 107, 111 46 21v, 22vi 29, 30 23 93, 94, 95, 118, 119, 120, 121 42, 84, 111 8, 18, 26, 41, 46, 67, 69, 110 19, 50, 94, 105 11, 15, 25, 28, 33, 37, 44, 48, 68, 69, 71, 96, 98, 99, 103, 109, 121 8, 9, 17, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 48, 50, 61, 65, 69, 82, 94, 96, 111 10, 36 80, 96, 106 53, also see: 74, 75 9, 22, 27, 33, 36, 40, 46, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 96, 110, 115, 118, 123, also see: 64 9, 15, 26, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 50, 62, 66, 68, 86, 93, 107, 115, 118, 119 61 44, 95 10, 38, 48, 84, 112 41, 61

Condom Creation Cunnilingus Cup Daisy Dark Democracy Death/Dying/ Dead/Died Dirty Dog Drunk Eucharist Father

Family Fetish Fish Floss God/The Lord Gun Hate

107 19, 111 89 26, 29 46, 84 9, 11, 14, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 46, 50, 62, 70, 71, 78, 93, 94, 109, 110, 115 80 17, 19, 26, 29, 30, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 61, 62, 63, 66, 70, 71, 82, 107, 112, 123, 125 20, 26, 35, 55 17, 21, 23, 33, 37, 65, 66, 67, 71, 82, 98, 115, 119, 125 21, 23, 26, 27, 68, 70, 71 15 11, 41, 46, 48, 62, 65, 68, 72, 76, 90, 94, 95, 105, 106, 107, 109, 112, 118, 121 9, 11, 15, 21v, 61, 70, 86, 91, 96, 117, 118, 123, 125 36, 37 11, 14, 15, 26, 27, 28, 42, 69, 93, 96, 123 29, 30, 73 20, 21, 25, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 84, 123 46, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 80, 82, 98, 119 48, 67, 68

8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 37, 44, 46, 59, 72, 84, 85, 98, 117, 121, 123 Hunger/Hungry 27,43,65,81, 111, 114, 123 22, 31, 75 Japanese 80, 106 Johnny 26 Keg 21, 73 Linger 18, 21, 27, 28, 42, 48, 50, Lips 89, 111 Lonely/Loneliness 10, 35, 43, 111, 123 5, 14, 15, 19, 26, 37, 43, Love 44, 50, 72, 88, 105, 110, 111, 123, 124, 125 68, 84, 85 Memory 22, 36, 88, 120, 121 Monday 9, 17, 21v, 23, 28, 62, 94, Moon 115 19, 40, 41, 58, 68, 71, 77, Mother 84, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 103, 109, 123 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 50, Mouth 59, 96, 109 5, 9, 14, 17, 22, 23, 29, 30, Night 33, 41, 44, 46, 48, 54, 61, 62, 65, 73, 81, 90, 93, 105, 110, 111, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123 10, 44 Nipples see: Signal Noise 26, 27, 48 Party 25, 82, 89, 110 President 67, 68 Prosthetic Heart/Heartbeat

Pussy Rain

Rape Red Sea Sew Sex Signal Sleep/Asleep Technology Television/TV Tenure Thanksgiving Tongue Tooth/Teeth Umbrella War Womb Worm Zen

102, 103, 125, also see 111 11, 14, 15, 22vi, 26, 28, 33, 44, 55, 59, 62, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 94, 98, 106, 119, 120 37, 98 9, 10, 11, 15, 26, 27, 31, 33, 36, 37, 48, 68, 71, 93, 94, 96, 99, 103, 109, 124 15, 22, 62, 75, 81, 92, 96 95, 105, also see: 50 5, 14, 15, 26, 37, 67, 105, 123 see: Noise 9, 11, 21, 28, 29, 30, 48, 63, 66, 70, 73, 90, 110, 115, 125 80, 81, 119 14, 29, 30, 40, 66, 80, 81, 112, 125 25 14, 15, 95 8, 20, 24, 53, 73, 89, 99, 103, 111, 112 17, 21, 28, 33, 36, 50, 59, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 93, 96, 112 75 5, 39, 41, 46, 61, 63, 86, 110 42 24, 43 24viii, 31

(cont. from page 123) A window made of ink and paper. A window you can hold in your hands. “It’s pretty amazing,” she says, “how each issue of Jeopardy seems to capture the year it was printed.” And then she looks at me like she is expecting something...

Welcome to 2007. I hope you enjoy the view.

Samara Hayley Steele April 16th

J e o p aCDr dTrack y List Spoken 1. Aylen Elliot Rounds – Incident 2. Eva Suter – elevator, corner of champion and grand 3. Seija Emerson – How to Live Alone 4. James Bertolino – Spider Posse 5. Jake Tucker – Me and God 6. Ian Denning – Puddlejumper 7. Peter Mack – excerpt from Natural Order 8. Leif Anders – The Cache Revisited 9. Mathew Roberts – Light Pollution 10. Emily Barker – An Acquired Tasted 11. Danielle Crawford – Four Chambers for Tyler David Tandeski 12. Lucy Elenbaas – Robot Sex Poem: to PKD with Love 13. Miles Mattix – The Evil 14. Mickey Kenny – City of my Mind 15. Jessyca Murphy – Pussy 16. Anastasia Stasko – The Country Song 17. Graham Isaac – The Future According to Johnny Quest 18. Sam Johnson – excerpt from Three Occurrences of Childhood 19. Malcolm Kenyon – Fresh Out of Proxies 20. Jessica Lowber – Solve for X 21. Carlos Martinez – Wallace Stevens

Jeopardy Magazine © 2007 Western Washington University