Issue 10: Reverie

faith in literature and art

reverie /. fiction

10 Ascension from Marcy Campbell

/. poetry

ISSUE

Peace

Dreams of a Body and Abounding Gifts from Laurie Klein and Brian Lowry

/.

nonfiction

To Dana Goldstein from Liz Laribee

/.

art

Thorny Locust and Gulliver’s Snack from Jeff Foster and Paula Peacock

Winter 0 8 / 0 9

$9.00

why

ruminate ?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. RUMINATE magazine was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward. Please join us.

On the cover: Jeff Foster. Fairy Ring. Manipulated Digital Image.

On the inside front cover: Jeff Foster. Thorny Locust. Manipulated Digital Image.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 10

Winter 2008/2009

RUMINATE (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by RUMINATE MAGAZINE, INC., 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website. For information on RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this operation and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to RUMINATE and supporting the quality work produced.

One year, $28. Two Years, $52. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at editor@ruminatemagazine.com. Send all subscription orders, queries and changes of address to RUMINATE, 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521 or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine.com. Subscription services are available through EBSCO. DISTRIBUTION RUMINATE MAGAZINE is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company, 1402 Avenue B, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 and through direct distribution.

Copyright © 2008 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.

RUMINATE is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Stefani Rossi, Stephanie Walker Megan Barnes, Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale, Libby Kueneke, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, and Jonathan Van Dyke Edie Adams, April Berry Anne Pageau

editor-in-chief senior editor associate editors readers interns design

contents

Notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Last

4 5 32 52

Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Poetry

47 Eucharist

Laurie Klein Peace Dreams of a Body Tethers

6 7

48

15

Fiction

16

9 Long Beach

Dora Dueck

Catherine Fiorello Afternoon Poem

Marcy Campbell

Karsten Piper The Flute of All Your Sorrows

Ellen D. Tucker Dry Bones

8

Chris Haven After Tornado

Kevin Shaw Julian Was an Anchoress

49

Brian Lowry Abounding Gifts

Janis Lull 46 Mary Magdalene

17

20 Ascension

Sara Kaplan The Masses Flock to Shoreline Drive Paddling the Salmon River

Liz Laribee

Jason Irwin Lorca at 5AM

Nonfiction

18 19

42 To Dana Goldstein 30

Kelly Wilson Longing in a Light Bulb

Jeff Foster

Jason Jonker A revival in Pepe’s Pizza, South Phoenix, AZ

cover

37

back cover

38 39

Leslie Bohn Vessel Sleep in Stone

inside front cover inside back cover

Renee Emerson Public Transit From Home

Art

31

40 41

Fairy Ring Thorny Locust Pretty Things The Dancers

Paula Peacock 33 34 35 36

Pearl #7, Stand Clear of Chopping Blocks Here No, Speak No, See No Gulliver’s Snack It Was Like That When I Got Here

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

Reverie.

I like just saying the word and how people ask you to repeat it, as if they aren’t sure it’s a real word or there are too many vowels for just three consonants. The staff here at RUMINATE also really likes this word, which is why we wanted to explore it and its daydreaminess, selecting it as the theme for this issue.

After much discussion, we wondered if reverie hasn’t suffered some in our culture, where the simple beauty of daydreaming or being lost in thought is rarely appreciated. Instead, efficiency, clarity, and productivity are prized.

Let me just pause here and say that I love efficiency, love knowing the most direct route to every destination, and all the keypad shortcuts on my Mac. So I am speaking to myself when I ask: Shouldn’t we also value moments where we truly become absorbed in thought, moments where our mind can roam and create and play, moments when we are the farthest thing from efficient?

And while daydreaming may not be the tidiest process, it allows for freedom, wandering, and soul-searching. And isn’t it probable that these wanderings have often led to some of our greatest ideas, richest art, and most insightful theology?

I’m not certain of this theory, but it makes me want to daydream more, just in case. And if reveries aren’t responsible for greatness, I am certain of their capability to create those moments of stillness, deep musing, and even worship, which each of us need and even crave. And this, in and of itself, is worth seeking.

I think the art in this issue can aid this search. In just the same way that artists use moments of free thought to create, so too can art create freedom within its readers. Like Jeff Foster’s photography in this issue, which invites a kind of daydreaming of the past, or Catherine Fiorello’s “Afternoon Poem” (p.18), which marks the path of one afternoon’s mundane and fantastical possibilities.

And then there is just good art—which this issue has plenty of—where, regardless of the content, we are given the chance to ponder, muse and meditate . . . or, sometimes even become lost in reverie. So, welcome to Issue 10. May you find these chances, and may we all have a slightly bolder reverence for reverie because of it.

Blessings, Brianna Van Dyke

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

ruminato

rs

NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.com

I recently received Issue 09 of RUMINATE and was impressed by the quality and caliber of the magazine. Evan Mann’s art was simply stunning and quite thought-provoking.

Also, thank you for caring about the intersection of faith and writing enough to produce such a wonderful journal that pays close attention to contemplation, communion, and the sacred nature of language.

David Harrity Nicholasville, Kentucky Dear RUMINATE, I have to tell you that when my magazine arrives in my mailbox I just start trembling with excitement. I am so eager to open it and enjoy every single page.

Please don’t stop producing/creating such an inspiring gift of words and images. And one other thing: My mom (who is also a subscriber) and I have such a marvelous time discussing your magazine. We live on opposite ends of the country so RUMINATE is one way we stay linked to each other.

JoAnna Battjes Kamloobs, British Columbia

I love what you all are doing. RUMINATE is a wonderful journal, and I look forward to the read when it arrives in the mailbox. It always provides moments of inspiration and reflection as I dive in and sit with an issue. Thanks.

Dan Haase Wheaton, IL

5

Laurie Klein

Peace Dreams of a Body A ten-fingered womb bears down, centering clay on the kicked wheel, the overlapped palms birthing a venerable means to contain, to conserve or carry—as in urn. Or bowl. As in the first jars, luring nomads to settle. One can shoulder only so much.

Exponentially squared, Abram’s stars gave way to roofs and goatskins to walls, raised with earth’s dough.

There’s an uprising now, in the potter’s hands. A throat opens, attuned to the ruinous potsherds from old wars shifting underground, death nosing through dirt: someone’s floor, a road, the neighbor’s garden. Time to straighten that neck and re-encompass emptiness.

A grail-in-progress, the body, shelved, hopes even the unfeeling air gradually proves itself an ally. Grit and water mastered by drought and fire, in the name of the wheel be the next vessel.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 2008

Laurie Klein

Tethers

It’s a weird eulogy, everyone fumbling for hankies, eyeing the clouds, the kites, your ashes. The Catherine Wheel, orange silk, twin hoops, is held aloft. Think hitchhikers, folks.

The wheels rise, providing the mother kite’s strong.

I imagine your thumb, its cuticle torn, then a muscular Virgin, downshifting heaven’s pickup—blue, of course.

Must tears ride shotgun with laughter?

Kite number one stirs as, leashed to its breastbone of balsam, the silk rings are freighted. Oh, little tin of remains with your cunning trapdoor, your chaste cargo— sheer gist—we below are but tissue, stretched over sticks, all our prayers, reels of string.

Laurie Klein’s work appears widely in Christian and secular journals,

anthologies, hymnals, and recordings. Grateful winner of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, the Predator Press Chapbook Prize (for Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh), and New Letters’ Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize, Laurie also wrote the classic praise chorus “I Love You, Lord.”

Her day job as an audio book reader for Books in Motion supplies funds for the writing life. Other times, you’ll find her kayaking, biking, and playing bluegrass with her husband, or jogging with their numbskull labrador, who answers to the nickname Lugnut.

7

Brian Lowry

Abounding Gifts Working alone in early morning dew, one knows the value of a sharp hoe and a good whetstone.

The two bless the gardener with reason to pause in the midst of unhurried progress to hear a chorus of wood thrush, oriole, and summer tanager as Rosa rugosa’s perfume graces the settled air.

Sacred gifts attend the man familiar with replenishing work and quiet prayer.

Brian Lowry writes from the southern Indiana farm he shares with his wife and young daughter. His creative work has appeared in Farming Magazine: People, Land, and Community; New Southerner; Avocet; The Herald Sparrow; The Quill; in HGTV’s book, Flower Gardening; on WFPL Radio’s HomeGrown; and in several newspapers. He is also the winner of RUMINATE’s 2007 Poetry Prize. Brian serves as a middle school counselor and English teacher.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Dora Dueck

Long Beach

She’s been walking this corridor of brown and ash-colored sand for nearly an hour, her walk an easy stride, her body warm with the motion, her head warm under today’s cloudless blue brilliance—surprising for February, season of winter storms. Eight or nine degrees Celsius, Lillian guesses; perfect. And the beach today nearly deserted.

She needs to reverse her walk before she is tired; she knows the distance back is the distance come. She stops; she turns. Turning, she grasps the previous hour as something solid, like a pebble she can pick up and hold. She was looking at the ocean on the one side, the ragged line of driftwood on the other, the sand patterns under her feet. She was mulling over work, her students, the class on calligraphy she’s teaching a women’s group at church.

But not once did she think about Jordan, her son, who died here a decade ago.

So now, an intake of air, hands darting to her face, and then she is trembling. This fact—this neglect—seems a victory. One she hadn’t waited for or imagined.

The waves foam as they sag back from the shore and sizzle, soft as a hush when the bubbles break, and she too, her breath releasing as a sigh, joy in her stomach rising. Settling again. A sensation of absolute stillness, of awe, like that moment when a brilliant symphony or opera ends, just before the audience goes wild.

Lillian grabs her cell phone out of a pocket. Somewhere nearby, her husband is walking too.

He says hello, with a question mark.

“Gord!” she declares. She hears the sea crashing against her ear through the receiver from wherever he is, hears the same crashing beside her, like breakers in stereo.

His voice is barely audible in the midst of it. “Lillian? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she shouts. “Everything’s fine. That’s why I called.

—Everything’s regular. —I wasn’t trying though . . . It just—” “Regular?”

“Ordinary. The place, I mean. As if—” “As if you’re local?

“Not local exactly . . . More like new, without—” “As if you’re a tourist?”

9

“No, no.” She wanted to say without connotations but she’s beginning to cry, a sputtering, coughing cry, not because he supplies words before she’s finished speaking —a habit he can’t seem to break—but because of her relief like phlegm that wants dislodging. She’s crying and she can’t talk but he’s repeating her name, soothingly it seems, and behind them both, the Pacific’s endless agitation.

“Regular as in ten years,” she tries again when her sobs calm. “That kind of regular. —If you know what I mean.”

“Lil,” he says, “That’s great.” Then, “You’ll be okay?”

She’s fine. She couldn’t wait to tell him but it was foolish perhaps. He’s baffled by her call. He says “That’s great” again and she’s thinking, Yes, indeed. In spite of Jordan’s death their marriage survived. What were the odds?

She says goodbye, says she’ll meet him soon, in the parking lot. *

Not the

past hour, but the last ten visits—the annual ritual—clamor around Lillian as she walks back, more slowly than she came. Clamor like the boys when they were small, tired and ready for bed, jostling her with their needs and existence. For ten years she and Gord have been coming here, to Long Beach on Vancouver Island.

At various seasons but once a year for sure, to remember Jordan, their firstborn. The first of four sons. “Over his depth,” it was said. Sucked under, surfing. Eighteen, and sucked away, his body never recovered. Officially, “presumed drowned.” There were witnesses enough.

Lillian believed they had to keep returning, to face the place, to stand at the only graveside they have for him, to renew their vigil on the shoreline of his being, his disappearing, their grief.

The first year here, she forced herself to imagine, over and over, the sensation of drowning, so she could be with him in his final moments, so he wouldn’t be alone.

Timing the length of hymns to how long a death by water might take, how many lines of “It Is Well With My Soul” she could get through before it might be true.

When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, “It is well….”

Were prayers efficacious backwards in time? She’d found herself pleading he would see something pretty in the seconds before he died that must have stretched as long as a dream. He had always hated falling asleep. “I’m afraid when I close my eyes,” he wailed as a preschooler. Then Lillian would sit beside him and coax, “Just close them.

You’ll find some pretty pictures in your head.”

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Issue 10 // WINTER 2008

But what did she know about drowning? One year, despairing of her ignorance, she nearly rushed into the ocean herself, let it overcome her, teach her everything.

Another year, she and Gord fought during both days at the coast—or she fought, rather, railing at his silence until she cracked it open with, “If you hadn’t encouraged his risk-taking so much with your favorite-Dad-pal routine—” “And if you weren’t so fearful,” he’d pounded back at her, “he would have learned to do it properly. Not going crazy to get away from his mother! Over his depth.” That phrase had appeared in the newspaper and now it was a hammer in her husband’s mouth. Lillian had screamed, and sworn, because he used it against her. Both of them were depleted by the time they departed Long Beach, but waiting in the line for the ferry to the mainland, they apologized. (She no longer remembers who did so first.) But each had named the guilt the other felt. The naming couldn’t be reversed.

It must have been the next year, chastened, that they scarcely spoke at all. It rained the entire time and Lillian wandered the beach for hours under an umbrella, arguing with the ocean instead, mocking its futile attempts at permanence. Each fresh mountainous surge mocked her back, every rising wave a ravenous jaw, lips curled like kale, the entire coast a roar, it seemed, from a massive throat in torment.

There were years—several, weren’t there? —when she sank into contemplation as if she’d entered cathedrals to Jordan’s memory on the beach, repeating tender litanies for who he’d been, wandering through his eighteen years, enacting recollections, throwing onto the water pictures she’d reproduced and poems she’d written, watching them float away or sink. Every encounter of water and shore seemed full of him then, seemed an affectionate kiss.

Four years ago she stepped into a tourist shop in Tofino and saw him, his straw blond hair and the red toque, but of course, after a second startled look, not Jordan at all but someone

The first year here, she forced herself to imagine,

over and over,

the sensation of drowning,

so she could be with him in his final moments,

so he wouldn’t be alone.

11

else. The false, unexpected sighting roused uncertainties Lillian thought she’d conquered, fears that the evidence of his death was a lie, that he’d arranged an elaborate ruse to start over without them and was back to celebrate escape, nostalgic perhaps over the self he’d abandoned at the edge of his world. She was angry those days over a simple case of mistaken identity, angry at the malevolence of a child’s death. As if he’d determined to break their hearts before anyone could get around to breaking his.

Some years, she gathered mementoes—stones, shells, knots of wood—like messages. Her favorite—and the only one she’s kept—was a creamy white sand dollar she discovered half buried beyond the tide line. When it dried, she emptied the shell’s slender cavity through its top hole. The tiny mound of metal-grey sand crystals sat on a square of paper beside the sand dollar for months. Eventually she threw the sand away and had Jordan’s high school graduation photo and the empty white shell mounted together in a wide black frame. *

By afternoon, clouds have appeared and it’s spattering rain. Lillian and

Gord have booked a room at the Long Beach Resort Hotel, their most expensive lodgings yet. They pass the hours until dinner reading and resting. Perusing the menu in the dining room that evening, they realize they’re both hungry for the same thing: shrimp appetizer, the beef entrée, raspberry cheesecake. Lillian is still too happy to choose something different than her husband for variety’s sake or mutual sampling.

She doesn’t care if the waiter supposes them dull.

Back in their room, they fill the soaker tub and climb in, laughing. Their limbs collide in the water; they feel light. They will soon be making love. It’s a good time, Lillian thinks, to ask about her husband’s morning on the beach.

He mostly sat on a log, he tells her. And it was good to get her call. He’s reached “regular” too, he says, but for him it happened last year. “I didn’t use that word, of course, but I knew what you meant.”

He pauses. “Recovered.”

“Kind of back to normal, though not original,” Lillian says. “More like mended.”

“Re-oriented.”

“Regular,” she says.

Gord’s speech is generally spare compared to Lillian’s; more precise. She knows this, accepts it. Jordan’s death has made her even less capable, in fact, of speaking to the point. She is wary—uncertain—of words. She can’t forget how others’ questions and comments piled up between her competing anxieties over Jordan’s body and his soul. He wasn’t baptized, not interested either, and some people had asked—directly or by implication—“Do you think he’s in hell?” As for his body, or the lack of it, they

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

But Gord never lost his faith in words.

He

reads

the

dictionary,

tests himself with computer word games,

loves to play scrabble. asked questions like “Was he eaten by fish?”

Once she said, “There’s nothing you can ask or say we haven’t thought of ourselves,” but she was disgusted with herself later that she’d given that away. Why not let people stew in their stupid sentences?

But Gord has never lost his faith in words. He reads the dictionary, tests himself with computer word games, loves to play Scrabble.

“Regular,” he’s musing now. “It’s a good seven-letter word.”

“But there’s no letter worth more than a one, is there?” she teases. “Not many points in that.”

“Well the ‘g’ is two, the rest are one’s, but don’t forget there’s a fifty-point premium if you put them all down at once.”

Gord pulls Lillian close. “Enough to win the game,” he says. *

The

next day, they drive back, east across the Island, stopping, as they always have, for a late lunch in Port Alberni. They listen to music as they travel, CDs that happen to be in the car—Johnny Cash in his best-of album, Fauré’s Requiem. They pick up groceries and office supplies in Nanaimo; they catch the evening ferry.

On the last stretch, from the mainland port through the Fraser Valley to Abbotsford, there’s no music, no conversation. Intermittent rain accompanies their separate reveries. Lillian has a sensation of coasting, still downhill but nearly finished now, like shushing to rest in the snow after a breakneck toboggan ride.

She decides she won’t tell anyone else that the annual ritual to Long Beach has run its course. She couldn’t bear to hear, “So you’re over it?” Over, under, in, between, at, and through: they’re simply prepositions, gestures in space. She inhabits them all.

13

Their borders are fluid. Survival is embrace; it’s also indifference.

They reach the turn-off to their city. Lillian thinks of their community, of their church, sometimes consoling and sometimes claustrophobic through a decade’s sorrow, so far from Long Beach once and now so close. The fault line aches, but this is home. Where she and Gord raised their sons, where Jordan lived with them.

It’s raining hard now. On the windshield are the sounds she loves—rain’s drumming, the swish of the wipers, like echoes of mountain waterfalls.

“Next year,” she suddenly says, “let’s go the other direction.”

Gord’s reply is a murmur, indistinct. Lillian glances at him, sees he’s in his Sunday evening state, already absorbed in the Monday of work. She’ll have to bring it up again.

They could go by her mother’s family home on the arid flats of southern Alberta; by her father’s family farm near the Trans-Canada Highway in Saskatchewan. Then on to Manitoba, to the city of Winnipeg where she grew up.

Gone that far, they might as well go further. To Ontario, where Gord’s family lived until they moved to B.C. For that matter, they might as well drive all the way to the Maritimes, to Halifax, to Pier 21. She’s heard you can look at the records of immigrants who arrived by sea. The names of her grandparents will all be there. What did they feel, Lillian wonders? Landing. Was the ocean still a danger to remember, safe on shore?

Dora Dueck is the author of the novel Under the Still Standing Sun, and many articles, reviews, and stories (most recently in Room and Prairie Fire), as well as co-editor of the 2008 Wiley release, Northern Lights: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Writing in Canada. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Chris Haven

After Tornado Some think God looks like a skyscraper beam and girder cast a shadow.

Others point to fields of weed and flower the smell of rain lightning storm shelter above ground, a moonscape.

The huddled emerge to crosshatched planks homes opened to the mind of God— toilet in the dirt planted like common sense cutting boards polished of every scar a rake with no tine photo without face alfalfa hay juts from a fencepost— on the edges of wind, transformation molecules estrange, rejoin seek a more perfect bonding.

Chris Haven grew up in Oklahoma where what can

come from the sky no doubt shaped his worldview. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Massachusetts Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Vox, Washington Square, and Confrontation. He teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

Every unyielding thing longs to scatter this is not the last time dirt will rise.

15

Catherine Fiorello

Afternoon Poem There’s no point writing in the late afternoon when dinner should be started and clothes switched from washer to dryer.

Catherine Fiorello is a psychotherapist and a church musician. Her poems have appeared in Haruah: Breath of Heaven, the anthology Families: the Frontline of Pluralism, and at utmostchristianwriters.com. She is the mother of five children in their twenties.

Poems should begin in the morning, before dawn, before shower and blow-dryer, before daughters’ tears, before packed lunches and the demise of a giant spider, apologized to, then clobbered with a shoe, before ridding the bathroom sink of long hair inches away from sliding down the drain to plug it, to make something go wrong, something stop, something begin a new scene, even if it’s buried in pipe elbows where gobs of hair bond with soap scum and the lost contact or earring.

Something needs to fall off the people mover, the one I’ve been on so long that when I step onto the stationary floor my feet skid forward, equilibrium dizzied by lost momentum.

Afternoons yield lonely, anxious poems, written for Victorian ladies who sighed over their needlepoint, played Scarlotti on dwarfed pianos, dressed for dinner and shook little silver bells for tea, while the sun set on skeletal dogs and children with ringworm in the alley outside.

But the afternoon light plays tricks.

It lures and wounds.

The sun hunches down, filtered through curtains.

The walls are glowing, curved and smooth as hips, fruit softens in the basket on the table, and somewhere I hear a bell tinkling for me to put on water for the Victorian ladies who wait, wait, wait, for the evening to bring hope.

And meatloaf.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Karsten Piper

The Flute of All Your Sorrows Do you remember as a child considering the sounds— how many flutes would overwhelm a trumpet? Could drown the bash of a kettledrum?

But you have grown, alone, and dangling now from your fingertips the single flute of all your sorrows having played it into exhaustion.

As wind skeins off the grassland, every strand catches the cold lip-plate and spins through the silver barrel in wisps so fine

Karsten Piper lives in Fulda, Minnesota. He teaches at

Minnesota West Community and Technical College where he has organized a little poetry festival the last two Octobers. If it flies for a third year, he’ll have to give the festival a name and invite you all to attend. Karsten earned an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his poems have appeared recently in The Dark Horse, Rock & Sling, Willow Springs, Cave Wall, and other magazines.

they have no timbre, tones too slight to stir dust.

And in the wind, each thread returns to cross the flute again, note upon note until winter-broken grasses begin to crash against old leaves, and for the first time a young bird opens the dark bell of its throat.

17

Sara Kaplan

The Masses Flock to Shoreline Drive On a tandem-bicycle, couples speed past me down the boardwalk and stop at the Snowie stand where tangerine, melon, & popcorn flavored ice debuts this weekend. With blue and pink ice in hand they make a beeline for the Selena Monument before they head for a ferry tour of the harbor, abandoning their bicycles on the docks. Maybe I look homeless because mothers pull their children close, close to the benches, to the railing. Away from me as if I’m some danger in my tattered shorts and t-shirt.

Let’s keep our grimaces because I, too, don’t want to get near them.

Twenty yards in front of me at the Selena Monument, droves of people with stained blue lips clasp their hands and suffocate the rock star, poised like a saint, in endless prayers.

The gulls make such a ruckus overhead flocking towards crushed Coors cans and Frito packs buried in the seaweed that’s sloshed its way to shore.

I pass the monument and mutter “Tom Traubert’s Blues” while nervous fingers massage rosaries and the tips of Selena’s stone tone nails. A young man wraps flowers around her wrist. Her carved eye-sockets look away into the bay, as if more intrigued by the incoming oil tankers speeding, and in their wake, a catamaran catches breeze.

I’m closer to my car, now, where Jesus Christ mounts a bronze boat statue across from Cooper’s Alley T-Head where the Yacht Club sits alongside the broken, reconstructed Santa Maria. Parking spaces as far as the eye can see. I breathe in the tangerine air and hurry from the circling gulls.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Sara Kaplan

Paddling the Salmon River

You,

you my friend, you sportsman you strap into the foam life-preserver and you paddle for hours in the morning.

I’ve broken so many bones— Skated and sledded into bloody trees—failed Olympian.

My efforts are Promethean.

You, immortal friend, who barely bruises barefoot on the striated rocks that shelve the river, watch when the green canoe angles into the water and floats.

I can’t direct the push, make it go where I want to go. The paddles slip

and you say, not trying, what’s wrong with you, not trying, such a child.

I fling the paddle in the water, you grab it, the boat knocks the shore. After I unbuckle the life-vest, toss it into the slow currents, I stand by the shore long after you bend down for the life-vest, push the boat into the water, and take off into the evening river.

Sara Kaplan teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Del Mar College. She received her MFA from the University of Idaho, her MA from Miami University, and her BA from Sweet Briar College. She has been published in the following journals: LIT9, The Cincinnati Review, Antioch Review, New Vilna Review, The InLand, The Meadow, Talking River Review, and Harpur Palate.

19

Ascension

Marcy Campbell

There was a moment, thrust into the night sky as he was, that Bowen

felt closer to heaven than to earth. He believed the perfect place for suicide was at the top of the Ferris wheel at the Oakland County Fair, and he finalized his decision, thinking that this act, juxtaposed with the neon atmosphere of the fair, would add a touch of irony to his life’s story. Irony wasn’t much, but it was something.

Bowen imagined the newspaper reporters. They would wonder how a man could commit such a desperate act amid such exuberance. In searching for an answer, they would surely comment on his size, trying to determine if he had passed the 300-pound mark, a “Guess Your Weight” game that the carnival barkers would have been eager to play. The reporters might assume that depression over his weight had led to his death, and some would reprimand themselves for such a hasty conclusion. After all, outward appearances don’t always contain the truth about a person, a lesson Bowen’s parents and other well-meaning adults tried to teach him when he was a child. But, he recalled how those same adults often forgot the lesson themselves.

Bowen remembered when he was six, and a little boy around the same age moved into the house across the street. Bowen’s mother had urged him to go over and make friends, and he reluctantly went, already frozen with a shyness that would complicate his adult life and a size that ran contrary to his age. Adults took one look and sighed, shook their heads, thinking this was a problem that would not go away. But, the neighbor boy didn’t seem bothered by it. He noticed it, of course. One of the first things he said to Bowen was, “You’re really fat, aren’t you?” Bowen answered truthfully, “Yes,” and that was it. They started playing in the mud and setting up forts, creating secret hideouts.

It was the little boy’s mother who had stared and asked Bowen how old he was. The play dates occurred less often due to the mother cringing at the way Bowen’s bulk crashed through her rooms, a magnet for potted plants and crystal vases, perched on narrow tables in narrow hallways.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

That was long ago, nearly 40 years, but not forgotten. Just another chink in the armor Bowen built up around himself that had lately been rusting away, leaving him raw and pink-skinned, exposed. He knew what he was going to do when he walked up to the Ferris wheel operator, a greasy man with shoulder blades visibly poking through his thin T-shirt. Bowen handed him his ticket and said, “I’m alone.”

He was counting on the carnie being careless and not listening for the click of the safety bar across Bowen’s lap or else being too embarrassed to fumble with it, attempting to press it into his thighs. Bowen thought he would be able to pop up the bar and just tilt forward and tumble out. He planned to wait until the third rotation, until his seat was at the very top, the closest to the sky. He envisioned an ascent into the heavens, a picture he remembered from his childhood book about the saints.

The saints looked so peaceful, so noble. Eyes focused upward, feet encircled by cloud pillows, they rose from the rubble of all on earth that was evil or heart-wrenching.

Bowen imagined himself in those clouds. He did not for a moment imagine what another person might—a skull-splitting descent, bones shattering as they hit the other cars on the way down.

Most of all, Bowen had not imagined another passenger. He was already seated and nervously sweating when a teenage girl came bounding through the gate and squeezed in next to him. “I’m alone, too,” she said, and the way she said it struck him because it was without any of the apologetic sadness that he imagined the phrase in his own head. He pushed closer to the railing, wanting to ensure several inches of visible leather between his left leg and her right.

It was a difficult task but helped by the fact that she was extremely thin, just a shadow of a girl in jeans and a tiny, blue tank top that left her belly button exposed.

A silver ring sprouted from its center, matching the one in her right eyebrow. The carnie walked to their car and placed the bar across them. Bowen heard the click.

The girl placed her hands on the bar and gave it a tug, chipped blue fingernail polish flashing in the neon of the funnel cake stand next door.

“I want to make sure it’s tight,” she said. She didn’t look at him. She could have been talking to herself.

21

It was her piercings

that made him think she would be more hard,

Bowen nodded at her, gave a slight smile. He felt the sweat staining his shirt under his arms, a result of walking around the fair in the hot night, although walking in any temperature caused him to sweat and his heartbeat to rise in a thumping crescendo. Before joining the line for the Ferris wheel, he had bought one corn dog, one elephant ear and a large Coke and sat down on a bench near the livestock barns to eat. He had avoided walking down the crowded midway aisles where the games were located, always embarrassed by the shouting of the carnies. They would not insult his size because, after all, they wanted him as a customer. In fact, they often said nothing, preferring to call instead to a man behind him with a girl on his arm to “win one for his sweetheart.”

Bowen shifted in his seat and put his hands on the bar, allowing for more space between him and the girl and also allowing the cool air to stall his sweating temporarily. The car started to move with a slight jerk, and the girl’s arms went rigid as metal pipes.

“I don’t know why I ride these things,” she said. “I’m scared of heights.” She stared straight ahead as they rose. Into view came the pirate ship swinging like a pendulum into the air, hesitating, then swinging back to the screams of its riders.

“How about you?” she asked Bowen.

“No, not really,” he said. “I’m not really scared of heights.” He noticed her knuckles white on the bar. “Just don’t look down.”

She laughed a tinkly little laugh, not the kind of laugh he expected. But, he wasn’t all that sure what to expect. He hadn’t been around many girls her age, not since he was that age himself, and not even then, since he was far from popular with girls. Being an only child, he didn’t have any nieces or nephews around. Girls her age sometimes brought their cars into the auto repair where he worked, but he rarely spoke to the customers, preferring to leave that to the counter staff so he could bury his head under the hoods and focus solely on engines and alternators.

It was her piercings that made him think she should be more hard, more worldly, something other than a white-knuckled pixie with a tinkly laugh.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

more worldly, something other than a white-knuckled pixie

with a tinkly laugh.

As they hit the top of their ascent, the car stopped, and Bowen leaned forward slightly, causing it to tilt.

“Don’t do that!” the girl said. She countered his tilt forward with her own tilt backward, her spine pressed against the seat.

“Sorry,” Bowen said.

It was still the first rotation. He hadn’t planned to do anything until the second or third, but it became very clear to him that he would not be able to get out of the car easily, if at all. The bar was jammed down tight and, although he had taken care to let his stomach, the largest part of him, hang over it, he was not sure he could wiggle out.

What’s more, any of these actions might have risked her life as well. Whenever Bowen came across a news story about a depressed man shooting his entire family and then himself, he always muttered about how the man got the order wrong.

Why not kill himself first? Save the others.

“Why are we stopped?” the girl asked.

“Sometimes it stops so people can get a thrill out of hanging up here in the sky,” he said, although he wasn’t positive that was true.

It had been several years since his last Ferris wheel ride, and he didn’t remember if the ride stopped like this. What he did remember from that ride was a feeling of freedom and weightlessness at the top. He had happily carried that memory with him and now, as he felt it again, a map of goose bumps spread over his skin then disappeared as quickly as they came.

“I’m not getting a thrill,” she said.

She was on the inside of the seat and was able to look at the spokes of the wheel all the way up, but had nowhere to look now except across the fairgrounds, same as Bowen. There were hordes of people everywhere, in line for the rides and the concession stands. Bowen looked down at them. He saw a young couple necking behind some bleachers and saw a little boy yank the ice cream out of his

23

sister’s hands to her immediate screams of protest. He was smugly satisfied at being the eye in the sky, the surveillance camera of the midway. His eyes took in the newly formed group of carnies below the Ferris wheel. Their ride operator was talking to the group, and they all took turns pulling at a large red lever and shaking their heads.

“Why aren’t we moving yet?” the girl asked Bowen.

“I think there might be a problem,” he said. “Look down there.”

“I’m not looking down there. Describe it to me.”

He mentioned the several men gathered around the lever. He didn’t mention their puzzled looks or the crowd of fair-goers who were starting to gather and point. He didn’t mention the couple several seats down from them, fumbling with a coat over their laps, taking advantage of the delay. He didn’t mention that the riotous, pulsing colors all around them were starting to make him dizzy. Bowen closed his eyes, but he still saw the colors on the insides of his lids.

With his eyes closed, he heard her take a deep breath. She said, “I’m okay. I’m actually okay when we’re not moving, and I’m not looking down.”

He opened his eyes. “Good.”

“What’s your name, by the way? If we’re stuck here, we might as well get to know each other. It will take my mind off it.”

“Bowen,” he said. He was expecting the puzzlement in her face that was characteristic of most people when they heard his name for the first time. “You can call me Bo. Bowen is an odd name. No one calls me that.”

He almost said that his friends call him Bo, but caught himself, ashamed. He really couldn’t call his co-workers friends, though there was one guy he used to have a beer with on Friday nights, but he moved away months ago. His parents never called him Bo, and they were deceased now anyway. He’d been stuck in a rut, dragging himself into work, eating his lunch on a bench in a nearby park when it was sunny, or in the corner of the dingy breakroom when it wasn’t, and coming home, making dinner, watching TV and going to bed, only to start it all over again the next day.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

He sometimes marveled at how easy it was to spend months without having a meaningful conversation. He resented the world for that and hated himself for not having the strength to put forth the effort required to get to know people. His mother always told him, since he was a young boy, that new friends weren’t just going to come up and knock on his door. So, on several occasions, he had made an attempt to strike up conversations with whoever was handy. The mailman, the grocery checker. He had even joined a weight-watching group, thinking he could combine his need for social interaction with a reduction program. But, listening to the sad stories of all those equally chubby people had made him even more depressed about his own life.

“I don’t think Bowen is so odd,” the girl said. “My name is Candy.” She extended her hand, which disappeared into Bowen’s thick palm.

“I hate my name,” she continued. “Do you know there was this woman in my town named Candy, and she married a guy with the last name Barr? It’s insane.”

“Why don’t you change your name?” Bowen asked. “If you hate it so much.”

“My mom said I could when I turn 18, but I don’t know if I will. What’s a name anyway? It doesn’t say anything about who you really are.”

Bowen said, “That’s true.” He didn’t argue with her logic, although privately, he didn’t really believe it. He felt that his clumsy, oafish name was a critical part of the tightly entangled mass of attributes that made him who he was. He had taken teasing about his name as a child, just because it was different, and he was different.

As a child, he knew what other kids said about him because they weren’t afraid to call him fat to his face. But, adults are more polite, hiding their vicious thoughts behind smiles. So, he imagined what they might say. He saw an attractive woman in the grocery store and pictured her telling her husband about the huge man who knocked over a display of canned soups. Or, if he saw two of his co-workers whispering about something, he assumed it must be about him, maybe something he did wrong on the last car.

He did not have anyone at home to tell him he was paranoid or to counteract any of his feelings of self-doubt by pointing out his positive traits. Because he was alone, Bowen

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It was a clinical gaze, thought that no one would miss him if he was gone. It was not the first time he had these feelings.

He remembered back in high school, when he took a handful of sleeping pills, and his mother found him lying in the bathroom, called an ambulance and had his stomach pumped. When the news got out at school, one of the boys sneered at him when he walked down the hall. “Girls take pills,” he had said to Bowen. “Men know how to do it right.” The boy made his hand into a gun and held it up to his head, pulling the imaginary trigger.

Years later, shortly after his mother died, his father having passed two years before, Bowen became enormously depressed by the emptiness of the house he had shared with her, the silence. He would turn on the TV the second he came in the door and fall asleep to it at night. He thought of getting a pet, but worried that if something should happen to him, the pet would die because no one would know about it.

It was around that time that he had decided to fall asleep in his running car in the closed garage. He started the car and absent-mindedly fastened his seat belt, tightly buckled for a journey into the unknown. He sat back and soon noticed a new sensation in his head, clouded, muddled, heavy. He didn’t like it. He unbuckled the seatbelt, turned off the car, hit the remote to open the garage door—causing carbon monoxide to spew into the driveway—and went inside. Once he was back on the couch, in front of the TV, he felt bad for trying to do it and felt bad because he couldn’t do it. A failure either way he looked at it.

This latest idea, too, hatched in a moment of loneliness. On his birthday, drinking a beer and toasting himself, he saw an advertisement for the fair on TV and wondered about the safety of the rides, recalling how a boy was seriously injured in a roller coaster incident many years ago. A flash of inspiration, the Ferris wheel plan seemed to be a good one. In the morning, less hazy than he had been the drunken

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

like a doctor’s, and amazingly

it didn’t seem to bother him.

night before, it still seemed like a good idea. But, again, it had not come to fruition.

“I think I’ve done it,” Candy said. “I think I can cross my fear of heights off my list.”

“Your list?” Bowen asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I made a New Year’s resolution to cure myself of all my phobias. I still have to work on swimming in lakes. I don’t like not being able to see the bottom. I don’t know what’s down there.”

Bowen said. “I stick to pools.” Although he had considered lakes, as most people tempted by suicide do. Drowning is easy enough, but takes time and Bowen feared that sensation of sinking to the bottom, a snarl of aquatic plants wrapping his legs together, his arms to his sides, permanent immobility.

“Do you make resolutions?” Candy asked. Bowen thought she was trying hard not to look at him, sure that she was thinking the obvious. Bowen had read that losing weight was by far the most common resolution. Most people gave it up by February.

“No, I never have.” Bowen said. “People make resolutions, but they don’t keep them.

They quit smoking for two days. Seems pointless.”

“Well, not everyone’s like that,” Candy said. Bowen caught her profile, her jaw jutting defiantly and her eyes looking down now, tentatively, just a slight tilt of the head, a glance.

“What are all those people doing down there?” she asked. “You didn’t tell me there were so many people down there.”

Bowen noted that the crowd had grown larger. There were frantic mothers calling to their children that everything would be all right. Someone in a uniform . . . policeman? security guard? . . . was talking to the carnies.

“Don’t worry,” Bowen said. “I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.”

Candy sighed and propped her elbow on the edge of the car. She rested her head on her hand, looking at Bowen. He felt naked while her eyes scanned across his double-chin, the sweat circles under his arms, the stomach overhanging the bar. It was a clinical gaze, like a doctor’s, and amazingly it didn’t seem to bother him.

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“Let’s make some for you,” she said. “Some resolutions.”

Bowen put up his hands in defense. “I didn’t agree to this,” he said. “Besides, it’s the middle of the summer.”

“Doesn’t matter. You can make them anytime. There aren’t any rules here.”

“True,” Bowen said. He fell silent for a moment, contemplating the sky. She’s right, he thought. There weren’t any rules at all. He could get up in the morning or stay in bed, go to work or quit his job and find a new one, move across the country, the world, or stay where he was, live or die. He heard Candy clear her throat, realized she was waiting for him, while he was staring stonily into space.

“It doesn’t have to be giving up something bad,” she said. “It can be doing something good. What have you always wanted to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have time to think about things beyond work and sleep.”

“Oh, you sound like my dad. Pretend you don’t have to work. What would you do?”

There was only one time in recent memory when Bowen considered taking up a hobby. He had visited an air show in Chicago where the planes looped around and dipped dangerously close to Lake Michigan. Someone had handed him a brochure for flying lessons, and he left it on the kitchen counter for a month before deciding it was a silly thing and throwing it out.

“I wanted to fly once,” he said.

Candy laughed. “It has to be real!”

“I mean in a plane. A pilot’s license. I thought about getting one once.”

“What kind of a pilot? Like United Airlines or like a little plane of your own?”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” he said. He chuckled as he imagined himself crammed into a cockpit. Maybe hot air balloons were more his style. He could learn to fly those. Bulbous and lumbering. They would be less intimidating than a long, sleek plane. Candy was tilting forward now, daring to look down.

“What were you expecting me to say?” Bowen asked.

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“I try not to expect anything from people. That way I won’t be disappointed.”

She looked at her hands, picked at the fingernail polish. “I could see you flying.

Sure, why not?”

He was about to mention the hot air balloon idea when the ride bolted to a start, and their car began its descent. A cheer went up from the others on the ride and the bystanders on the ground. When they reached the ground, Candy hopped out of the car. She offered a hand to Bowen and helped him out, called a “good luck” to him before she disappeared into the crowd.

Bowen walked to the line for the pirate ship they had watched from above. He stuck his hands in his pockets and jangled some loose change while he adjusted to the change in altitude.

Marcy Campbell’s work is forthcoming in Another Chicago

Magazine, Quiddity, and The Rambler. Her poem “Traffic,” was a winner of the Moving Minds: Verse and Vision Project and was recently published on nearly 1,000 buses in metro Cleveland.

She is presently completing her first novel.

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Jason Irwin

LORCA AT 5AM In the kitchen so the light won’t wake you I’ve got a half gallon of Greek wine and a hankering for something stronger.

Lorca’s Absent Soul, its spine bent, its pages dog-eared opened on the table.

Outside, city lights burn like votive candles.

I hear the faint rumble of thunder or the subway.

The marble floor shines beneath me.

In its maze I see a gypsy girl dancing atop a volcano, a headless dog chasing a knight on horseback. Roskolnikov’s bloody axe and myself: a soul lost in the rabble of being and not.

Jason Irwin grew up in Dunkirk, NY. He earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and in 2006 won the 2006/2007 Transcontinental Poetry Award. His first fulllength collection Watering the Dead was published in 2008 by Pavement Saw Press. He has had work in various journals including Off the Coast, Lumina, Sycamore Review, and more.

He lives with his wife Wendi Lee in Pittsburgh, PA. 30

Kelly Wilson

Longing in a Light Bulb In a medieval-looking chandelier shaped like a wheel, with metal spokes pointing from the center out to light around it, suspended from the high white ceiling, one bulb has burned out.

The eye is always drawn to absence.

But how to take away the thing removed that lingers in its absence?

How to remove the sprung filament still flickering unseen that hangs on and on—long distant milky way, endless unknown galaxy—this sky in the ceiling.

I cannot see the thing I feel that casts a shadow on all I see.

It hardly has to do with light.

But please—whether you are out there looking up or not sharing this sense of longing—at least unscrew the unlit bulb that’s hanging over me.

I can’t reach.

Kelly Wilson is currently working on her MFA in poetry at Indiana University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Indiana University Writer’s Conference.

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ruminations

ARTIST’S NOTE

paula peacock lives in Longmont, Colorado, where the “Old

Masters,” the joys and tribulations of raising two of her grandchildren, and God’s nature are her source of inspiration. Her works have won many awards in national as well as regional and local exhibitions and can be found in numerous private collections throughout the United States, Canada, England, Italy, Indonesia, and Holland. Paula is an associate member of the Oil Painters of America, co-founder of the Saint Vrain Contemporary Realists, and is the curator/art director for The Old Firehouse Art Gallery in Longmont, and teaches the joy of oil painting for beginners.

Paula Peacock was born in Texas in 1954, raised on a small ranch among a loving family of talented musicians, singers, and songwriters. She moved to Colorado in 1982 and worked fifteen years in a high stress, corporate environment. Searching for something more meaningful, Paula made a huge career change and started working in the medical field with quadriplegics and paraplegics. But unfortunately because of a very painful back injury, she had to leave her nursing career. The injury made her feel useless and unproductive. Great depression set in. She thought she had found her life’s purpose only to have it snatched away.

After much prayer and even a powerful dream, Paula knew she had to paint; but she knew nothing about painting. . . literally nothing . . . and very little about art. The entire idea of painting seemed quite absurd, but she was consumed with it. She felt confused and convinced at the same time. Confused because she couldn’t figure out how “the art thing” could ever be someone’s purpose in life, or how art could help others or leave a positive mark on the world. But the inspiration was so strong and overwhelming that no one or nothing could convince her otherwise.

Following her inspirations and intuition, Paula embarked on an incredible journey of teaching herself about art and how to paint. She painted from dawn until late into the evening unaware of the time of day. She painted fourteen to sixteen hours a day and spent additional hours in the library pouring over books. Furthermore, she felt no pain in her back.

Now, years later, Paula has worked hard to become the artist she is today. Inspired divinely, she now knows that it is not her place to question her life’s passion, but to simply know that it is. An established painter since 1999, her sole purpose when painting is to celebrate the form, color, and exquisite design we see around us everyday and often take for granted. She portrays ordinary objects with an emotion and sensuality, rich larger-than-life colors, a touch of elegance, and provocative interplays of light.

Working primarily in oils, her paintings reflect a combination of classical table top still lifes, layered symbolism, and a touch of subtle wit. Viewers are often reminded of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch masters, yet Paula’s works involve simply staged contemporary subject matters with results that can be both thought-provoking and peaceful to the eye and mind.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Paula Peacock. Pearl #7, Stand Clear of Chopping Blocks. Oil on linen. 12” x 16” inches.

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Paula Peacock. Hear No, Speak No, See No. Oil on linen. 18” x 24” inches.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Paula Peacock. Gulliver’s Snack. Oil on linen. 8” x 10” inches.

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Paula Peacock. It Was Like That When I Got Here. Oil on canvas. 5” x 7” inches.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Jason Jonker

A revival in Pepe’s Pizza, South Phoenix, AZ It’s loud in here, gaudy with the noise of arcade games, and the carousel’s shrill calliope.

The pizza’s good, but it’s peripheral to the gluttony of prizes cluttering the walls: fart cushions, skateboards, and karaoke machines.

It’s an odd place really for a revival.

But these South side charismatics take God anywhere, singing Si tuvieras fé como un grano de mostaza even as mothers chew pizza and children change coins into tokens. I’d leave but it turns out my neighbor’s grandkid plays the bass in the Jesus All-Stars and she catches my eye.

She’s ecstatic that we’re here, hugging my kids one after another. She shuttles over to our table with some of her grandkid’s birthday cake and Pastor Tony takes the microphone. He insists that in someone tonight is stirring a hunger for the gospel message.

Next, a celebrant dances a little ballet folklorico for the Lord and there’s a youth group rapping “go Jesus, go Jesus, go Jesus, Huh!” Seems like some sanctified, Chicano vaudeville.

I give them credit, though, these red-letter Christians, soul-fishers, imitators of that ultimate incongruity: God made vulnerable, made a child, made to die.

I bow my head a little for the sinners’ prayer while my youngest exchanges her tickets for a vial of disappearing ink.

Jason Jonker writes: “I am a husband and a father of three

girls living in Phoenix, AZ. I have been writing poetry and comedic nonfiction for about 17 years. My work has appeared in Lily, The MacGuffin, Lunch, the November 3rd Club, and Big Scream. In my spare time, I play guitar and mandolin in a bluegrass band and attend various bluegrass jams and festivals around the Valley of the Sun.”

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

37

Renee Emerson

Public Transit Memphis International We crease the geography of scrolled and unscrolled clouds.

Frayed, hangdog, they trail us to the city. We trail ourselves; we can never leave anything behind.

We cross the continent for a room—for marrow-colored walls, witness of the old regime— Lowell, Sexton, and Plath.

Where a new breed writes of cereal, motherrage, their hands becoming amphibious (they web before me) and where overripe fruit, my fitful pride, withers to the pit, on the stem.

Now circling, we begin our slow descent.

And circling, I feel the small adjustment in the bone mechanics of my inner ear.

The Green Line Underground, on the margins, we wait for a ride on the shuddering train; all the selves study artificial selves, reflections in the artificial night, cobalt windows.

This is the hinge between streets, spine of city, clamoring on steel. Broken things and trash on the tracks in our pockets in our hands.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Widow the darkness with light: cross the Charles to Harvard, to Alewife, past sailboats skimming waters like singlewinged doves.

Renee Emerson

From Home 1.

Moving North, we learn an empty house,

6.

My pretty eye—drawn.

Yours—closed.

the look of a room as a cavity to be filled.

My feet are bare.

My foot is pushing down.

And we are moving forward: accelerated, drawn, closed.

We learn to portion and take everything to keep, in labeled boxes that make angles and a jigsaw fit.

2.

Leaving home: the untying of lives from lives.

3.

With makeup our mothers teach us how to construct a pretty eye, how to close that eye, to turn it the other way.

4.

In the story, the sisters cut portions from their feet, to fit the shoe.

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7.

I have forgotten to call this place home.

8.

In the Smokies, vacationing and young, we ate at a catfish place where you catch and kill from a pool.

Walking in, my sister’s shoe (She was walking in my shoes, shoes that did not fit) fell in the water. My sisters held my heels, and I reached, belly in the slime of the concrete bank, and I pulled her shoe from the waters.

The prince knew when the blood seeped over the bridge of the foot, down the pointed heel.

9.

The boxes shift in the back.

The rear window—obscured.

The sun—obscured by the clouds rolling in from the North.

5.

Cushion wedding dishes with winter sweaters, cradle picture frames with newspaper, perfumes with plastic bags. Nothing will break.

It will all fit.

Renee Emerson is earning her MFA at Boston

University. Her work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Keyhole Publications, and Sojourn, among others. She lives outside the city with her husband and two cats, Ralph and Waldo. She dreads the approaching winter, knowing that no amount of wool or down will get a Tennessee girl through a Boston winter.

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Leslie Bohn

Vessel Naked, silver maples tangle in the valley, a fog rising among the cedars and the pines and the leaves of nameless trees that still cling to the ends of their branches, a hesitation before the commencement of winter. We walk along the ridge my father and I, I behind him watching his feet sink into the slick dark layers of brown leaves and black earth. We could slip beneath this mantle. While our fingers grew gnarled and long and deep into the dirt and the land fed us, our bodies would feed the land. With our descent into the hollow, the fragrance of the moist earth grows richer, heavier, sweeter, settles into our lungs like the frankincense and myrrh of my childhood, those mildewed books and oil spills sprinkled with detergent wafting from the open basement window.

He stabs the air in front of him. That’s where they bed, he says. I see the nest, flattened leaves among the briars, and imagine the whitetail curled in that dimple, his tawny face resting on a delicate ankle, the mud dry on the hoof.

A stream twines narrow across our path. Cool water touches my lips, but I am afraid and ashamed to be afraid, and I pass the cup to my father who drinks deeply.

The small, sun-bleached skull of a deer lies grinning against a sapling. I take it up and carry it within the crook of my arm.

And sometimes when I remember this, I will remember the skull lay before the stream and that my father held it in that clear, meandering ribbon until the empty cavities filled with water. Then he pressed the bone to his mouth—a long draught— before placing it in my hands.

This is the host, the vessel, the body, the blood; drink from it.

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Leslie Bohn

Sleep in Stone

Dear to me is sleep,

still more to sleep in stone while harm and shame persist,

not to see, not to feel, I am content.

Speak softly, do not wake me, do not weep.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Use your chisel, sculptor.

Bring me forth from this rough form, refine me.

Then my veined body will resemble real flesh, a pall over a collar of bones, and my eyes will follow you.

See visions in your slumber of your work in the great chapels,

reclining on tombs of statesmen and clergy,

looking toward the door four hundred years from your own entombment, their bodies rubbed clean of days spent bent, busy over the nuances of interphalangeal joints,

those that stretch two fingers out for blessing and those that curl the hand into a fist.

Echoing whispers filtering in like the sunlight through skinny glass windows,

the movement of people through the sanctuary, plastic Kodak cameras flashing, the nicotine hair of old translators, translucent on their scalps, bright stars among circles of tall, young students burdened with backpacks of compact disc players, hair wax, condoms, credit cards, and journals.

Their palms sliding against a cold, stone breast for luck, shy pilgrim’s kisses on the feet of austere saints.

As you lay on the canvas below me, hair graying from the hours of soft marble flying from the edge of your tools, I wish for sleep, as well.

Plait my hair, rest my head on my wrist and grow poppy flowers around me.

Let me dream for these doleful years ahead.

Wars and the peaces that come between wars will all pass by me silently.

Pink-mouthed children, sun-beaten men, and you, will die.

Happy me, never to know the bone-twist of sorrow, only the nectar of dreams.

I will rise with the sound of your footsteps on the silent graves of the church.

Leslie Bohn writes: “I’m a terrible excuse for a country girl; however, the wooded “hollers” of Tennessee are where I learned to appreciate family, chocolate gravy, and the sacred in everyday life. I am currently a master’s student at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion and have work forthcoming in Whistling Shade.”

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Liz Laribee

To Dana Goldstein, (My Childhood Best Friend Who Very Well May Have Forgotten Me In This Gap Of Seventeen Years Since We Were Alive and Seven At The Same Time And Making Primordial and Dangerous Allegiances Binding Us Together Against The Second Grade and Tim Welchons On the Blacktopped Playgrounds of Ossining New York, A Mere Handful Of Miles Up the Hudson From Sing Sing Prison, A Place and Concept I Never Visited And Never Fully Understood The Significance Of Until Years Later And In A Different State When I Watched A Lot of Crime Drama Marathons) I don’t totally know that I believe in God anymore. (I will later retract this statement, but you should know that I mean it in a way that isn’t totally safe to express and that has given me heartburn at least twice.) That’s one thing that’s changed. You were Jewish. Probably you are still alive, and probably you are still Jewish. We’re both old enough for marriage, and I would be making another “probably” assertion here if I didn’t so totally hate feeling rushed into that absurdity.

Anyway, back to the Jewish thing. I may have known you before I had heard of things like hell and damnation, but there’s a possibility that I HAD heard of it and thought you were going there. In the event that that was the case, and if the certainty of a seven-year-old means anything, I’m sorry for that. I don’t have a talent for certainty anymore, and I usually land on the thought that the Jews are, at worst, a little silly for eating huge stretches of unsalted Saltines.

Anyway, back to the God thing. Wait, one more other thing. I am scribbling into a notebook in a coffee shop, a thing that makes me feel sexier than my haircut makes me feel. (I remember mostly your bangs: tiny moons of gold folding over your eyebrows.) There’s this moment when you glance around and catch the glance of the only other person scribbling, and even though neither of you are very attractive, there’s still sex in it. There’s a knowledge of good and evil, a certainty that the other would know things about caesura and mis en scene and

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Yeats. The wild gut rush of a possible alternate ending of your life, with your elbows resting on either side of a yellowed sunset porch swing. But when the glances down happen, you are saved by the realization that even though he has an arm tattoo, and arm tattoos are cool, it’s a bad tattoo. And now, a guy you remember remembering from college just swaggered in with a guitar to play, and the sex in that has overpowered everything else in the room, canceled everything else out, and the shift in power has numbed you flat, and you can finally focus back on the notebook and God and the present tense and the Jews.

I don’t totally know that I believe in God anymore. Or else, the stench of theology has finally drifted up to the rafters, and what’s left is the hunch of men to the ground, waiting and holding arms out to each other full of bread and dollars and help. Mostly, Dana, I want to believe that we can help each other. That there is beauty left in the corners of this world that hasn’t been stamped out by jealousy and anger. I remember once when you invited me to come to your house after school, and I told you I was busy. Actually, though, I

But it’s mostly the deep deep holy things,

and the guttural certainty that I envy,

that I remember remembering. had been invited to Shanae’s house, and I knew that at her house I would find a swimming pool and Fruit By the Foot and joy and glee. I knew at your house I would find only matza and joy and glee. Mathematically, I was in the right. But I know I wronged you, and even though you most certainly don’t remember even me, I am sorry. But Dana, matza sucks, really. I always liked the idea of being Jewish, mostly because I like throngs of family and tradition and community and deep deep holy things all in the same backyard party. And I like the sort of guttural certainty that I imagine comes from stooping low to light the candles on Friday night. And you get to read backwards sometimes, and that’s neat. But it’s mostly the deep deep holy things and the guttural certainty that I envy, that I remem-

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ber remembering. My dad is an Episcopal priest. You may remember him (likelier if you remember me, actually). He looks exactly like he did back then, except that his mustache is grayer and he drives a Prius instead of a motorcycle. I look exactly like I did back then; or else, my haircut does. I wear fewer sweat suits now.

Anyway, back to my dad. There’s this catchphrase that comes up sometimes in his sermons about God being always pleased and never satisfied. As in, God clapping those old hands in delight over the adorable act of my finally waking up from a month-long funk of disaster, and, the insistence that I learn from this something other than sardonic satisfaction in my own waking. Another thing that’s changed is that I learned a lot of words since I was seven, Dana. One of those words is “sardonic.” Another of those words is “Russia.” A reason I learned those words is that I am a person who has learned to love the learning of words and how they shape thinking and how they fling from the tongue like noodles. So when I hear that God is certain of a delight in who I am but is also certain that I can become even more like Liz than I ever have been, it feels great and exhausting. It’s later now, and the notebook has long since been flung across my room into a pile of other notebooks slimly dented by half-strung strings of poems and stories. A secret I have for you is that I have never, ever finished a paper journal. Not even close. My laziness catches up to me and slaps my face around to other things. Another secret I have for you is that threatening the disbelief in God is like a Christian’s meth-amphetamine. It makes the heart race. The problem really, Dana Goldstein, is that I really actually do believe in God. Almost every scrap of theology on my table has been slyly fed to the dog while my mom was looking the other way, but I can’t quite shake a wild gut rush of a possibility that there really is beauty in the corners. It seems like my faith has stretched along my skin because it’s been there too long and I eat a lot of carbs. But I think, despite myself, I have a certainty that could rival even the Jews. I know for certain that you knew me at a time when I was still eating paste and when I didn’t understand what “sardonic” means. (I still really don’t.

I am going to google it soon. I really only know it because I have a house mate who is studying for the GRE, and he talks a lot.) I just googled it, and “sardonic” means “sarcastic.” I mean, it’s pretty fitting.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Anyway, back to your bangs. There is a beauty that I will always think of when I think of your bangs, and I wonder if either of us would have anything more than hello to say to the other now. Once we had covered paste, prison and the alarming whirl of color in New York leaves in the fall, we would have only smirks and hmms left, I suspect. I wonder what God would say to me now that I have learned a couple things about good and evil. I hope you are well, and I hope you are still Jewish. I like thinking of you that way. I am interested in what you think about God and paste.

Cordially, Liz Laribee

Liz Laribee lives her days in Central Pennsylvania where she learns slowly how to pick out the German influence in the people surrounding her.

She holds an English degree from Messiah College and is involved in community development in Harrisburg. She has been published in RUMINATE, Christianity Today, Georgetown Review, Cedarville Review, Minnemingo Review, and Claremont Review.

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Janis Lull

Mary Magdalene Her hair Pours over his bare feet, silk Between the toes, Sticking a bit on the wet Spots. She repents Her life, shiftless, Down on her knees, supple As oil, as hair, as tears. Have mercy.

She shines, but the god’s in shade, As we’re shadowed here, by sin And the dim museum. She lights Our way, naked, weeping, cleansing Not the god, of course, but herself.

Sunk once in cool flesh, she burns now With love. She is the lesson.

What he thinks, reclined in gloom, Staring, perhaps, at his host, Can’t be told. But dear Lord in heaven, can’t you just Feel her hair on your hot feet?

Janis Lull is professor emerita of English at the University

of Alaska, Fairbanks. She now lives in Tucson, Arizona, which is the opposite of Fairbanks, with her husband and her dog.

Her favorite poet is George Herbert.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 2008

Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Eucharist I knead the bread leavened with beer, stew a lamb shank in a pot of lentils, prepare a salad of apples, walnuts, and raisins, sweetened with wine and honey.

No one ever had herbs as bitter as this late season lettuce.

My friends gather at dusk, a motley band of ragtags, fleeing from the Philistines of academia: a Marxist, a Hindu, a Wiccan, a Charismatic Catholic, and me, a lapsed Lutheran longing for liturgy.

Later, having drunk several bottles of wine with prices that could have paid our grad school rents, we eat desserts from disparate cultures and tell our daughters tales from our deviant days.

We agree to meet again.

Gnarled vegetables coaxed from their dark hiding places transform into a hearty broth.

Fire transubstantiates flour and water into life-giving loaves.

Outcasts scavenged from the margins of education share a meal and memories and begin to mold a new family, a different covenant.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a PhD in British literature from the University of South Carolina. She has been published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and serves as assistant chair of the General Education Department.

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Kevin Shaw

Julian Was an Anchoress Julian leaves the cloister because she is tired of talking.

Out of the living tomb, into the living air.

From now on she whispers hosanna to the smell of foul air and pattering of bare feet, scattering leaves beneath her own treading toes.

This is the city, which breathes down her neck and then quietly excuses itself to drink from a homeless man’s cup.

Knowing so, she finds the man and unfolds her habit— filling his cup with her own.

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

Kevin Shaw is a senior at Redmond High School in Redmond, Washington.

He’s currently applying to college, so feel free to call your local university and tell them how much you love him! His work has appeared in Third Order Magazine. He edits for Haruah and TeenAge Magazine.

Ellen D. Tucker

Dry Bones

In this world there is all that is solid, lasting, factual: boulders that buttress a wavering shore, towers that slice the city air, bound leather books drawn from the shelf, opened to ordered, numbered pages. Then there is all that grows across the hardening face of things: moss, wakened by rain, knits garments for rock, mold clouds marble, and fingers, moist, trace verse along a leaf, curling up a corner.

Jerked back to a field now lost, strewn with the bones of elders, Ezekiel faced the evidence of history.

But God commanded, Prophesy! and once again it started: dry bone sprouted sinew, pink flesh plumped the ivory shafts, skin crept over flesh. What was this feeling wish that ever clothed the rigid fact? He would not say he welcomed it, until God gave him Breath to call forth breath.

Earlier in her life, Ellen D. Tucker traveled frequently, following a career-changing spouse and seeking teaching jobs. She now works from home as an editor and mother, venturing out mostly through poetry.

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Friends of

RUMINATE

We would like to thank our 2008 friends, whose generous financial donations have helped established RUMINATE at the intersection of faith, literature, and art.

Benefactors

Scott Ackerman Kim and Steve Franchini Kelly and Sara McCabe Darwill Press Jesse and Carly Ritorto Ralph and Lisa Wegner John Zeilstra

Patrons

Chris and Becky Pitotti

Sponsors

Everyday Joe’s Coffee House Darla Korrey Josh and Nicole Roloff

If you are interested in becoming a Friend, mail RUMINATE MAGAZINE 140 N. Roosevelt Ave Fort Collins, CO 80521 editor@ruminatemagazine.com

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Issue 10 // WINTER 08/09

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LAST NOTE

“Something always shows up to jar us awake: a child’s question, a fox’s sleek beauty, a sharp pain, a pastor’s sermon, a fresh metaphor, an artist’s vision, a slap in the face, scent from a crushed violet. We are again awake, alert, in wonder: how did this happen? And why this? Why anything at all? Why nothing at all?”

Eugene H. Peterson From Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

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Jeff Foster. Pretty Things. Manipulated Digital Image.

Jeff Foster is a digital artist and photographer whose work is influenced by the artists Hieronymus Bosch, Gustav Klimt, and J.W. Waterhouse. He lives in Missouri with his wife and teenage daughter. His work has been published in Picayune Literary Review (New Mexico Highlands University), Lumina (Sarah Lawrence College), and is forthcoming in Redivider (Emerson College). More of Jeff ’s work can be found at www.dormantphotography.embarqspace.com

Jeff Foster. The Dancers. Manipulated Digital Image.