Editor’s Note Ione (Tootsie) O’Hara
4
Execution
6
Shelter
8
Carina Gallegos
Pawn Shop
9
Kenneth Harmon
Gawking at the Straight Men in Hooters
Barton Kunstler
Star Collapse
Timothy Lahey
Robert Abbate
Movie House
Anne Benson
Cayuga Lake
Nancy King V. M. Jones Holly Day Stephen Massimilla Carolyn Taylor
15
Sedona Requiem (for Mary Ann Conway Sanford)
Dancing Bear
Scott Shay
12-13
16 18 20-24
A Second Before a Walk in the...
27
Following in the Footsteps
29
Carl Sandburg Elko January Letter from the Tower
33 34 36
It Gets So Hot in the South in the Summertime, 1940
37
Stephanie Dickinson Missionary Courtesan: In Starr’s Picture Parlor 39 Ryan G. Van Cleave V. M. Jones William Woolfitt John Sweet Timothy Lahey Nancy King Wayne Brindle
Irreconcilable
40
The Salve
42-47
Eventide
48
a phone rings in the house of the dead man
50-51
Scent
54
Fine Lines
57
On Visiting Chinqua-Penn in October
59
5
William K. Taylor
Untitled
7
Melissa Fulton
Untitled
10
Melissa Anderson
Pathway
11
Lydia Marlon
Vase
14
Jeremy Davis
“How Was Your Day Dear” (It’s Not Ok)
17
Jared Nottingham
Cabin at Eve
19
Devlin M. McNeil
Flesh and Wire
25
Jared Nottingham
Step into the Light
26
Callie Rayfield
Untitled
28
Randall J. Chesson
Winter Bikini
30
Robbie Player
No. 19 from “The Detour” series
31
Robbie Player
No. 2 from “The Detour” series
32
Robbie Player
No. 20 from “The Detour” series
35
Ruth Cline
Shadowboxing
38
Christina Matos
All Wrapped Up
41
Amanda Manganaro
Today’s Special
49
Lydia Marlon
Offguard
52
Christina Matos
Coupled
53
Melissa Fulton
Floating
55
William K. Taylor
Untitled from the series “Loss”
56
Vara Reese
Plunge
58
Devlin M. McNeil
Untitled
60-62 64
Contributor and Juror Bios Staff Bios
From the Editor
“Congress shall make no law... abridging freedom of speech, or the press...” Blah, blah, blah. If you’re a journalist, you know the rest by heart. If you’re breathing, you probably at least know the gist of the statement. We take for granted the power behind these few words, yet it is these words that allow us to say all others. They allow us to be creative and think and speak freely. They allow us to print this magazine, with the poetry, art and stories contained herein. Free speech at times seems like a catch 22– the very thing that protects the media to disseminate information allows a member of the Ku Klux Klan to march downtown in white robes screaming to a gathered crowd. And as much as we’d like to stop their hate-filled speech, they are protected by some of the strongest words in the land. To censor them would be to censor us all. But even with these words, censorship is still alive and well in this country. Political correctness is a form of self-censorship. Books have been banned and burned because they were deemed too provocative. And this year’s theme grew out of an incident that I just couldn’t get out of my mind. At our final poetry reading last year, I thanked the owner for the use of his facility. He said I was quite welcome, but if we wanted to have poetry readings there for this year, we would have to find a way to “weed out” offensive material. I asked him what that meant for open-mic sessions, since I have no control over who gets up to read and what they say while there. He said he didn’t know, but it couldn’t continue to happen. As the owner of a private establishment, that’s his prerogative. In fact, he was very nice about it. He explained that his coffee shop was a place you should be able to bring your family without worrying what would be said on stage. I’ve never been in the business of censorship, and after I thanked him again, I knew we would have to find a new venue for our readings. As you peruse this magazine, remember that the words and images displayed here are precious. Not only are they thoughts and emotions of an artist, but they also represent something sacred in our country. Think of those that fought to make the material in the confines of this manila folder acceptable for private creation, let alone public viewing. Thank you for being open-minded and allowing the ideas and thoughts contained in this magazine into your mind. That is true freedom, and we at sanskrit will support it eternally. I hope you enjoy your journey through the pages.
Jennifer L. Bonacci Editor-in-Chief
4
14” x 11”
Untitled
b&w print
William K.Taylor oc/ar
5
Execution Raleigh, North Carolina January 1995 Ione (Tootsie) O’Hara
2 a.m. two mothers sit silent, straight, watch the Pavulon seep into his veins. His lips move, words stopped by glass: I’m sorry to her mother. I’m okay to his. 2:12 two mothers leave, don’t speak or cry or meet each other’s eye. His mother will take spring daffodils, a handful, to his grave. Her mother will hoe summer’s weeds from zinnias, try to dig fourteen years of anger into the soil.
6 1.618033989
cdc
Untitled Melissa Fulton
48” x 48” acrylic on canvas TBT
7
Shelter Timothy Lahey
Someone moved the furniture while we were sleeping, and now we butt our shins in full light of day. Our familiar gestures, our talk, broke down in the middle of breakfast— all the china shattered loudly, spilling coffee everywhere, and we were left startled in our chairs, staring at the stranger, the spouse across the table. A few words after dinner, our unbidden doubts strewn carelessly like clothes across the bedroom floor, and our allegiances have shifted, like troops in the night. So we lie perfectly still in bed, eyes awake to the night buzz above us. Here the day is fingered about like a rock on the lips of the tide, worn smooth then cast off on the beach.
MjB
8
And the hesitant rain that fell on the roof now makes its exhausted impact on our cheeks; the breathless messenger does not tell us the distance it fell.
Pawn Shop Carina Gallegos
Driving now for almost a day, we stopped to buy souvenirs on our way east to Millennium. My mother bought a good day to die and my father got time in a bottle to drink with his gin (“A little something to improve my sleep.�) My sister paid for two medium smiles to use for public amuse. I found a life preserver on sale, a pair of leather wings, and a postcard with a picture of two human beings. But it was my brother the one that got the best of the deals; he bought a thought that had not yet gone stale.
9 23 6.01 10
Pathway
14” x 11” b&w photo
Melissa Anderson
10
Vase
5” x 7” stoneware
Lydia Marlon
11
Gawking at the Straight Men in Hooters Kenneth Harmon
This century has been long and hot heated by hatred Hitler longed for blue-eyed boys incinerating those wearing pink triangles Bubba licks his lips as Sandy presents him with her red-hot wings, plump, meaty, and delicious, with celery and blue cheese Bubba pokes his buddy Curt with an elbow as Sandy walks away with a twist like hot sauce she looks back—winks, smiles This century has been long and hot A funeral pyre heated with souls of women, blacks, jews, and homosexuals The Chinese murder their first-born if female Bubba and Curt guzzle their Bud in twenty-five ounce frosted mugs and suck the sauce from the wings of tender dead fowl They hoot and holler when the young black man for Carolina shoots a three-pointer sending the game into overtime This century has been long and hot Black men are drug behind trucks down gravel roads in Mississippi heat A young black man, a senior three weeks from graduation gunned down in Littleton by his two white brothers cause he’s a “Nigger jock”
{12}
Bubba and Curt pile the bones picked clean by the gnawing of alabaster teeth, white like carved gypsum ornaments: a bird, a dove? a hawk? It wants to FLY This century has been long and hot Hitler disposed of the “Useless Eaters:” Jews, homosexuals, the old he knew them by the “sign of the covenant” And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations On their eighth day of life thereafter, They were circumcised, and Hitler, with uncircumcised ear, knew them Bubba and Curt lick sauce-coated fingers drying them on t-shirts of stars and stripes as Sandy presents their check Curt grabs a handful of Sandy’s twist, flesh upon flesh, as she walks away. Bubba and Curt’s hands, flesh upon flesh, come together in a noisy high-five This century has been long and hot A young gay man, thinking he’s gettin’ lucky, is beaten with the butt of a gun tied to a fence post and left to die in the cold Wyoming night I watch them as they rise to leave scratching balls licking lips baring teeth Curt winks to Sandy as they walk toward the door. I wonder if they’re still hungry It’s getting hot in here. Sandy presents me with the skinny fried bird wings with celery and blue cheese. I think of raw meat and birds. I’m not hungry I eat the celery and blue cheese, but not the wings
13
7265748
“How Was Your Day Dear” (It’s Not Ok) Jeremy Davis
14
36” x 36” acrylic on canvas
Star Collapse Barton Kunstler
when a star collapses it shines one billion suns spews forth the minerals and atoms of life the last judgment, this eradication of day this promise of brushing whispering tangents, terrible dandelions, golden rhodian snow parachuting softly to the coastal interface limning barrier orbs and ray-sizzling space. as flocks of blackbirds through leafy branches whisk in subtle groups so as not to disturb the forest canopy and gather hidden in deciduous boughs before darting in swift striking groups of flight for what hidden reason no human can really know so too one wonders whether clustered emanations stalk star to star, driven by incarnation’s promise against the dust-blessed rock. explanation, pyramid the lens-inspired symphony exalting galilean star clusters, leeuwenhoekian microbes Kepler and Newton’s calculated harmonies only echoing original octaves of Crotona’s elusive sage. worlds we have found those strange and awesome devourings so that now we can imagine solar systems evaporating. the thought alone reduces our inventions to a raccoon prying the ashcan’s lid. we dare to imagine time when time itself declines violently into nothing and at every moment space compresses into hard-packed sub-atomic whatness we live emanations of thought to their bareness in matrices of dust we survive as in our midst even stars collapse.
-15-
Sedona Requiem for Mary Ann Conway Sanford Robert Abbate
I looked for the yellow blossoms of the Agave in Red Rock Country beyond the clearing of Pinon and Juniper and found the petals strewn beyond the base of thorny leaves. The pole-like stalk had already collapsed after a once in a life span flowering. The Century plant had grown to its full stature and clothed itself with petaled grave clothes. Mesas, buttes, and spires had kept vigil over the approaching demise whose suddenness could not be prepared for, even with opening buds’ presentiment: dizziness, racing heart, pounding chest, ringing in the ears, sleepless nights. Warning signs bloomed in fatal arrhythmia, when father found mother’s crumpled, rosette body on the bathroom floor.
16
24” x 19”
Cabin at Eve
acrylic painting
Jared Nottingham
17
Movie House Dancing Bear
I go to the movie house with my mother who whispers loudly through the trailers. She gossips about actors, their sex lives. Embarrassed, I look around to see no one else. In shades of silver bruised, cowering children bleed black; forced to work in silent movies, spending decades developing an elaborate language of symbols – in time for the advent of talkies. The rattle of the projector is maddening. A handful of melted milk duds turns my stomach sour. Mother smacks stale popcorn soaked with imitation butter. She gurgles the bottom of her soda cup with a chewed-flat straw, picks at the kernel shells between her teeth, leans close and whispers see, your childhood wasn’t so bad.
18
Flesh and Wire
8” x 10” b&w print
Devlin McNeil
19
Cayugaby AnneLake Benson B eside Cayuga Lake, I was contained. The water was dark, and the shores defined, tideless,
and permanent. It was not the ocean. On the
opposite shore lay one more raggedy upstate town, not the Antipodes of dreamland. I was marooned far inland, far from the bustle and clamor of the coast, isolated by this simple, rural glumness. A place of brown lakes and grey hills, a landscape devoid of drama; it seemed to stretch forever.
At the time that I lived next to Cayuga Lake, it seemed I could look only inward. And often, because my memory was so pitiless, I felt strapped down, forced to watch reruns of my own life. The episodes played back to me in disappointing black and white. After all this buildup, anticipation! I had been raised, after all. Brought up. Two parents had cared for me, made sure I was educated, taught me those Yankee things: independence, the value of work and reflection. And see how I ended up—beside this lake, surrounded by the tedious flatness of the landscape and confined by memories I couldn’t change. We were captives, the lake and I. We were perfect together. My husband had taken my children again, and now I was through fighting him. “Finished, through,” I said quietly to the lake when I used to walk beside its stillness. There were no howling storm winds here for me to shout curses into, no pound of surf to drive devils from my soul. There was instead that flatness, the lack of response, and the relentless absence of change. I was living beside the lake with a man. We had ended up together, we used to say. His eyes were a fathomless brown, and he had a scar from an accident that had split his upper lip in a way that, along with his mustache, disguised his expressions. So his smile could actually be a frown. He would sometimes look at me and say, “I need you to save me.” I couldn’t tell what he meant by this—whether his statement was purely ironic, or tinged with pathos as well. It was impossible to know what he meant. Where did we come from, I would wonder, and I would think how I didn’t know him, or why we got together. It was so hard for me to remember anything about why things had happened. Just that they had happened. I was obsessed with my own despair. I romanced that, not him. There wasn’t room in me. But we were kind. Perhaps being kind is easier. And because he wanted me to like the lake, and because of his kindness, I wanted to try to be happy there beside it. He told me things about the lake and took me for walks along the shore. Cayuga Lake is one of a group of lakes 20
in the “Southern Tier” of New York State called the Finger Lakes. Their names are mysterious and rhythmical, taken from the language of the Seneca people: Cayuga, Seneca, Onandoga, Canandaigua. I did not hear the poem that their names spoke then. Perhaps that was a symptom of my state of mind. These lakes are described as “moraine lakes” in geological terms. The glaciers of the Ice Age harrowed deep narrow scars that would later become the beds for their melted run-off. Cayuga Lake is four hundred feet deep, a mile and a half wide, and about eighteen miles
long, running from Ithaca in the south up to the marshy land where the New York State Thruway cuts across from Syracuse to Buffalo. Along the shore where we used to walk, the beach (which didn’t seem a beach to me) was covered with small dark slates, smoothed and rounded by the action of the water. Most of them were from an inch to three or four inches in diameter. It was hard to walk on them with bare feet. They slipped and slid. I remember our first walk along the beach. I had just come to live with Robert, and he was proud of his house and of his little piece of lakefront. He knew I would
love it. He was from around there, you see. While I, of course, was not. To get to the lake from the house you had to cross a very quiet road and climb down an old set of rusting iron steps which descended steeply about thirty feet along a cliff face, from a little platform to a narrow strip of stony beach beside the lake below. I was overcome with disappointment as I went slowly down into the dank coolness of the air trapped between the foot of the cliff and the narrow shoreline. The beach was a forty-foot-wide strip of dull stones. I think my face must have fallen because Robert suddenly became 21
breezily cheerful the way a nurse might, plumping the pillows for a patient who everyone knows is going to die. He showed me that the stones underfoot were, in fact, both beautiful and interesting. Many were marked with wonderful designs. Others were embedded with delicate fossils of leaves or insects. Then he showed me one which had a hole right through the center. “These ones with the holes are lucky stones.” He handed it to me; it was a gently rounded thing, grey, mottled with white specks. Carefully, he closed my hand around it, and I felt its cool, still sadness against my palm. I wanted it to flutter, to wiggle, and breathe, to be a little living creature in this somber museum of petrified things. I held the stone, waiting. Robert’s hand was still around mine. There was the soft rattle of the stones on the shore as wavelets lapped at them. An outboard motor droned in the distance. “A few years ago, I got beaten up,” Robert suddenly said, dropping my hand and looking away out over the water. “It was in St. Thomas one night; I had been playing in a band in a club down there. I was kind of drunk, walking home alone, late, to where we were all staying. Some guys jumped me.” “So what happened to your face—” “Wasn’t from a car accident. My own mother could barely recognize me when she came down to get me. I was angry for years. Didn’t write, didn’t play music, didn’t date women. But now I carry one of those around with me whenever I go anywhere far from here.” “You never know,” I said, looking at my stone and then at his face, wondering how it felt to be smashed to pieces. I wanted to kiss him, but he was closed up, distanced. Then, turning away quickly like a boy, Robert snatched up a smallish flat slate. With a little sideways hop, he flipped it expertly along the surface of the water where it skipped and bounced, leaving a row of perfectly etched bull’s-eyes. “Six, seven, eight—” At least eight skips. “Beat that!” And so we skipped rocks and I got the hang of it, while the light began to fade from the trees along the eastern shore as the sun lowered itself into those great wide fields and orchards behind us, which are the beginnings of the endlessness of the Midwest. Later that evening, we made a fire and brought down some marshmallows and roasted them. We drank rum, put on sweaters, and felt the fall coming. The rum and Robert’s kindness made me feel that perhaps I might survive here after all, even without the ocean. But the next morning, when I woke, dry-mouthed, to see the sun rising, I saw also that I was still in place, beside the dark lake. As time passed, I grew more used to things. Robert and 22
I got along, and I found a job as a cook in a local café a few miles away. The days began to be cooler. The college kids came back. I talked with my daughters once a week on the phone. I was OK, I said. Trying to sound as though I was managing fine—without them. Not to worry them. They began to stop asking when I was coming back. I walked alone beside the lake. It just sat there. Dark and deep. So silent. I gave up talking to it. And then one afternoon, in the late light, Robert and I were in front of the house raking leaves when I heard the high, unmistakable cries of the Canada goose. I’d describe the sound as mournful, because of the minor key of it, but it isn’t. It tears at the soul, but without sadness or hurt. I laid down my rake and came out from under the tree. We looked up. The sky was dark with the goose wedges, and the air began to swell with the notes of their song. They were thousands and thousands. “They’re coming to the lake,” Robert said, his eyes shining at me. I had never seen his joy before. The music of the cries seemed to stretch him, to pull him upward, toward the geese above him in the sky. He drew in a great breath, and exhaled with a slow sigh, his face radiant. We stood together, listening. From above came the cries of geese and from around us there was the brittle rustling of dry leaves in the wind. Finally, Robert was able to speak. His words tumbled out in a rush. “They’ll be coming down soon. This is one of their stops on the flyway, and they land on the lake in the evening to rest and find food. Come on, we need to watch them.” He took my hand. Together we crossed the road, and in the dusty autumn light, we stood at the top of the cliff, looking out over the water. We leaned on the old railing of the little platform at the top of the staircase, and let the late sun warm our backs, our shoulders touching comfortably. That moment was a beginning, perhaps. A second where our secret selves risked the first, careful peek at one another. Then, as we looked out at the lake, the first of the geese—the scouts, Robert called them—began to land, honking loudly as they did so. Gradually, at intervals of a few seconds, the multitudes descended. The assembly was orderly, even mathematically precise, but at the same time completely miraculous. Biblical. I could not take my eyes from the geese or from the lake. My heart was taken up with the chords of their song. Their epic. For about two weeks the geese came and went, and in the evenings their great rafts darkened the water. Lying in bed, I felt their mysterious, abiding power begin opening itself into me, trickling gently into my hidden places. Even to my secret heart, which had been guarding itself so tightly, the place I had so fortified with guilt. The geese were more than a wonder. They were godly. They
flew thousands of miles formed up in their patterns, found this lake, guarded their flocks by night, and in the morning they were off again, homing in on their own existence. They knew what they were about, and every day, they repeated it for me. Like a lesson. Do this. And the lake’s dark silence was a part of them; it came alive with them. Perhaps this change was first on its own list of secrets.
Robert nearly drowned in the lake a few months later when he came to pick me up from work. It’s hard for me to think about what happened that day, although its details stay shamefully with me. At that time, early in the summer of our first year together, I worked in Ithaca, in a seafood restaurant on the lake’s southernmost shore. Robert often drove me, as we only had one ancient car between us. The restaurant had a garden with tables set on a wooden deck, right beside the water. Next door there was a rundown marina, with a few uninteresting boats tied up to its deteriorating docks. Robert would sometimes poke around over there while he waited for me, chatting with a couple who was fixing up an old wooden houseboat. They had plans to take it up to the Lakes, he told me, through the Erie Canal, down the Hudson, and eventually to travel the length of the Inland Waterway to Florida. “In that piece of shit?” I remember scoffing. Lake people were completely clueless. Robert looked at me. His brown eyes glittered with an unaccustomed sharpness. “It’s their dream.” “People’s dreams are usually what kill them.” The bitterness inside me lunging at an easy mark. The young couple. Their ratty boat. This stupid lifeless lake. Me. Peeling shrimp, steaming clams, boiling lobsters so customers in upstate New York could pretend they were by the seashore. My children were by the seashore. “Hey,” Robert had said, putting his arm around me gently. “Hey.” But he continued to visit with the young couple now and then, when he had occasion to wait for me. And so, that day, when I got out of the kitchen and saw that Robert wasn’t sitting in the car listening to music as he sometimes did, I walked over along the little canal which led to where the houseboat was docked in the marina. The canal water was muddy. I remember noticing how brown it seemed. I couldn’t get used to water that was brown. At the moment I thought that, at the moment I thought of how real water should be green or blue, I heard a terrible shriek. The woman on the houseboat screaming, “Oh! He’s in the water. Oh oh oh oh!” Over and over. Robert running, and me shouting now, seeing the orange cord which trailed over the side. “He’s electrocuted! Unplug it.” Yelling this to the woman. Her crying out, “Oh oh oh. He’s gone, my baby’s gone. My baby! He’s gone.” Like demented rock-and-roll lyrics. Me watching. Then yelling, “Don’t,” and Robert diving in. Disappearing into the brown water. Down. Robert and the woman’s husband were both
underwater. Now Robert did not come up. The surface of the water was still, and the woman’s shrieks had turned into sobbing little moans. Robert! I could not dive in. I was afraid, paralyzed by the danger which came welling up from the water. This water that was terrible and brown. Where you couldn’t see a thing. I was frozen, looking. Then there was Robert’s head, lips just barely above the surface. His mustache floated wispy, baring the scarred upper lip which it normally hid. Ruby lips. Suddenly, my own life receded, and I seemed to be part of a story, one with a beginning and ending that people could tell each other as they shook their heads, or set to music with a tragic refrain. Oh, my darling. Fighting to keep on the surface, his jaw rigid as he gasped for air, Robert’s voice was contorted by the great spastic heaves of his diaphragm. “I can’t see. I can’t see. I think I touched him. Somebody help.” There were people on the shore around me. Robert went under. Now the chef jumped in in his checkered pants and white coat. Then the big sandy-haired waiter named Jeff, who was still wearing his apron. The chef grabbed Robert. Jeff was the one who came up with the body. By the time they got the husband onto the dock, an ambulance had arrived. I had never seen a dead body up close before, except at a wake. I had certainly never watched a person die. Two paramedics bent over him, and with their oxygen tried to resuscitate him, but he was gone. The body was a bluish color. The wife moaning on her knees next to it, one hand clutching Robert’s. Robert who, also on his knees, was gasping, retching the brown lake water from his lungs. I heard a voice say, “Let’s get him into the ambulance.” They laid a dark blue blanket over the body, covering the face. I had been leaning over Robert, touching his shoulder, asking if he was OK. Feeling more than useless. I was a coward, and he was not. “Maybe you should go to the hospital, buddy,” said the younger paramedic squatting down beside Robert. “You probably have a lot of the lake in your lungs.” Robert shook his head no. “Thanks.” Just then, a breeze came in off the lake, and Robert began shivering. One of the waitresses appeared with a checkered tablecloth and put it gently around his shoulders. He began to stand, slowly. I was reaching out my hand to help Robert up when suddenly the wife came running back from over where they had been loading her husband’s body into the ambulance. It was then that I noticed how young and pretty she was. Saw how her reddish hair was dabbed with the paint from their dream boat, how her face was smeared like a child’s with dirt from her crying. She threw her arms around Robert, and held him tightly for a second. I caught her eye as I watched her hugging him. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, looking down at the dock as I spoke the words. Then she turned from both of us without speaking, back toward the parking lot. I heard her walking away, her feet crunching softly on the gravel. The 23
little knot of spectators and people from the restaurant gradually slipped away. Lost and gone forever, oh my darling. That was it, the refrain. Robert turned to the chef who had been about to go back with the others and said quietly, “Hey, thanks for pulling me out, man.” The chef shrugged. Looking embarrassed, he glanced over to the houseboat where the orange electrical cord still trailed over the side, unplugged now, but still sinister-looking, like a dead snake. “You just never know, do you? Shit,” he said, flipping his cigarette into the lake. Robert just stood, staring over at the boat, wrapped in the red and white tablecloth. I felt miles separated us. The next day there was a front-page story in the Ithaca Journal, with a picture of Robert and the crying wife kneeling next to the feet of the husband’s body as it lay on the dock. “Local man unable to save drowning victim,” the caption read cruelly.
Robert did get sick from the water that he had breathed into his lungs. Both of us were smokers then, too, which couldn’t have helped things. He came down with a lingering kind of “walking pneumonia,” which gave him a nasty cough. He was depressed and lethargic. One day he got a letter from the wife, which was so touching that it made us both cry. “I couldn’t save him,” Robert said as the tears ran down his cheeks. A stagnant gloom had come over our lives as midsummer approached. We staved it off as best we could with pot and rum. I went to work, and Robert puttered. He was a songwriter, but since the drowning, he said he felt empty. We got by. I hadn’t seen my children for nearly a year, except for a few days during Christmas, when I had gone to Rhode Island and stayed with an old friend in order to be near them. It had been hard for all of us, seeing each other for a few hours over a few days. Having no space to be alone. Having no answers to 24
their questions. I didn’t know what to do. Robert said, “Get a goddamn lawyer, and get the whole thing settled.” I said, “It’s not so goddamn easy, you know. First of all I don’t have any money. Money. Remember?” “Come on,” he said, his mouth impatiently working between its smile and frown. “You can work this out. No judge in the world is going to say that you can’t have your children!” “Oh shit, Robert, I just don’t want to talk about it,” I said, banging down the steps of the house on the hot July afternoon. As I crossed the lawn to the road, I could hear Robert coughing. I walked over the road and down the iron steps. I had gotten used to going down to the lake now that the weather was warm, and I found that I liked to sit beside it. The damp stone of the cliff radiated coolness. The lake’s torpor, its lack of movement, reflected my own. I stared out at the dark water, remembering the great rafts of geese. Wishing I was a goose. An Indian. A stone. How did people put their lives together? What were their lives supposed to turn into when they got all the pieces to fit? I picked up a handful of dark stones and dipped them in the lake. The dull brown water brought out their hidden colors like a conjuring trick and made them shine. I began arranging the stones along the narrow strip of very fine gravel next to the water that served as “sand.” I chose three that were especially smooth and pleasing. The big stone, the dark bluish one. That was me. The thin brown stone with the golden speckles was Emily, my older daughter, and Tina, my three-year-old, was the round little white one. I put them close together, so that they touched. Then I lay down next to them and closed my eyes. The lake lapped quietly. When I woke, the sun had gone over the cliff top and I lay in the coolness of its shadow. I heard Robert’s voice call from the top of the steps. The sound of it floated down to me in the slow, thick air of late afternoon. “Maybe we should get the canoe out in a little while, don’t you think?” He reaches to me, I thought. He reaches, and I am this hard blue stone. “It looks like it might be a perfect evening.” Can people save other people? “Robert!” I called back up. “You’re far too kind to me.” “I know,” he said, laughing. Coughing a little. And I heard the rattle of ice cubes as he sipped from his glass.
SWE
Step into the Light Jared Nottingham
12� x 9� digital
25
Untitled
12.63” x 8.25” b&w photo
Callie Rayfield
A Second Before a Walk in the... Scott Shay
Big fat Buddha bellied rain Bursting like rockets On the hood of my car Me sitting porch worn Like the chipped leper chair; In a sphere of screen And wicker. Pounding like thuds Of liquor drawn fists Or bats against piùatas, Dam busted sky Throwing heavy confetti Through its gauzy walls. Perimeter lost; Elemental bombs, Bust past wire And hit me. Half soaked now With nature’s fret, The inspired thing to do Would be to bust right out of here Like the Sundance Kid, Throw myself at that gatling sky.
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DcW
Winter Bikini
34B, size 3 mixed media
Randall J. Chesson
‘28
Following in the Footsteps Nancy King
I can’t see my son on the gurney. I can only see the beeping machines And the backs of white-coated figures. When I was my son’s age, I was afraid of doctors. Dad said I was accident prone. I don’t remember. I just remember his stories over the years: How I tumbled from the crib and cracked my ribs, And tripped over tree roots, And fell from the tractor, And smashed my hand in the gate, not paying attention, And burned my ankle on the lawn mower exhaust, And how once, I even gave my own self a concussion, Stepping on the blade of a hoe— It laying flat on the ground— The handle flying up. Dad was a gardener and taught me his trade. He could make anything flourish, And was constantly pruning and pinching back. “If you want something to grow strong and hardy,” he’d say, “You have to be mean to it.”
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No. 19 from “The Detour” series Robbie Player
30
8” x 10” silver gelatin print from digital negative
No. 2 from “The Detour” series
8” x 10” silver gelatin print from a digital negative
Robbie Player
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No. 20 from “The Detour” series
8” x 10” silver gelatin print from digital negative
Robbie Player
3.1415926535
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Carl Sandburg V.M.Jones
In a square room, plain as day there is dust and you and an old typewriter flashing together in the fractured light of a small, high window, and I see the stories and faces of Chicago through you, a reporter. In a corner bar, I see you seated alone in a dim booth made of brown leather drinking dark beer which sits on a seven-of-spades coaster. Peering from the corners of your eyes into every dusky corner of Chicago, you are another working-stiff. And then I focus on the tip of your pen, a wooden pen that makes things clearer, and you are sitting on three splintered planks inside a wooden boxcar with its door cracked enough for you, a hobo poet, to slow the fields of Missouri or Illinois, which state I can’t be sure, with your wooden pen, painting the speed of the train on wheat and wild grass paper in sweet honey from your inkwell, words that meet the beauty of the sky and the passing fields. And when the train pulls into a crowded station (perhaps Philadelphia or Boston or maybe Chicago), you wait until it starts up again, and hide in the rush and noise of fog and city and find another corner bar to paint new pictures with the same wooden pen, this time coughing up smoke and black moons and dipping into an inkwell of salt and rock with the borrowed grace of a hobo’s journey.
[33 }
Elko January Holly Day
A sinkful of dirty dishes left soaking overnight, a thin sheen of new-formed ice glistening on the surface of the gray water bits of bloated squaw bread half-frozen on the plates. I force myself to plunge my hands into the subzero cold, pull up the plug and fill the dented tea kettle to the top and turn on the stove. The heater must’ve gone out again last night I could feel the frost on the carpet through my thin cloth slippers–Roy tried to wake me at four o’clock this morning to get me to help him with his chores but I pretended I was dead so he went out alone. The ice-covered porcelain hisses violent as I carefully pour scalding water into the sink– dishes moan, threatening to crack but I don’t care. The sky outside glares bloodshot back at me, across a field of white peaks and dead grass comically showcasing my tired old man yelling at cows.
34 uncc
Shadowboxing
20.5” x 16.5” mixed media
Ruth Cline
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Letter From the Tower Stephen Massimilla
Darkness should have closed me from our loss, but ink that splinters near the corner of an eye is sure to find it. City retreated, remember? Rain marching into wind. Shouting left Behind. Drain pipes belching all night long like drunken soldiers in the corridor. Last night it would not have mattered if there were anything, anything to live for: my love sank with the black phlegm in your throat. Now morning cracks the glue that sealed my lids. Ticking, a gleam of beetles in their shells. A sheet of light slips under the door—a message. I live to reach for you, my memory, widow of mine. Come good, come bad, but come.
It Gets So Hot in the South in the Summertime, 1940 Carolyn Taylor
Heat waves rise like willowy spirits from blacktop roads as insects dive and float in pools of my sweat. Momma’s kitchen is a steam oven that holds crusted skillets of pork-laced food cooked in the morning cool for noonday dinner and six o’clock supper. We play bat and ball with Aunt Betty’s gingercake children on side streets and frogleg to safety when a roadster awakens amber dust and straddles homeplate. On Saturday Miss Janie comes to town unknots her hankerchief that keeps her change and buys lemon drops from Dodd’s Dime Store. She refreshes herself with tepid water from a broken fountain out back bearing a sign marked “Colored.” After church we drink lemonade on our front porch oasis as Gates of Heaven Funeral Parlor fans keep time with creaking rockers while paddle blades whine and strain to catch a breeze.
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All Wrapped Up Christina Matos
.38
10” x 27” x 12” coiling with various yarns
Missionary Courtesan: In Starr’s Picture Parlor Stephanie Dickinson
It is terrible to be beautiful. Pulled out of school after eight grades, my teenage grandma wishes her face was pocked as she sets her hands on his shoulders—her husband of two hours. Black lashed her blue eyes. Her sulky lips call out to wasps. Her cheeks, soiled gardenias. Her ears, lily trumpets. Outside it is 1906. Men wear their women out in rope-slung beds while children carry board-dolls wrapped in rags. Recluses live in sinkholes. Stink of dead animals taints drinking water. If she stays rigid she can escape his horses waiting to sniff her dress like confection before taking her into rank prairie grass to his farm. How many children will he expect? Lord, I love your fierce law.
Lord, I love your shimmering sword. She will go mad listening to him sit. Legs splayed, eyes studying his crude boots to be broken like furrows. Give her New Guinea. Leopards tearing flesh in raw jungle. Let her mutton leg sleeves be eaten. Her bird’s eye lace, saliva leaking down his jowls. Lord, I love your hard words: I lick them from Your Book. Exalted, Consumeth, Leper. How bovine he is, hands folded, not gripping the badger paws carved into chair arms. Meek as a three-legged milking stool. Take me as pleasure for the Almighty. Why did he find her in the church choir? She, twelve, and his cow callused fingers sickened her. She desires something fiercer. God, the evening wolf. The emptiness. She craves Him like Latin. He has seen her sneak into her brothers’ room to conjugate dead verbs. Will He lift her up, this being who looks made for a man’s pleasure? Not the iron kettle and lye soap with steaming baby clothes to ladle. She wants to rip her kinky hair. Lord, pluck me like spoil from his teeth.
Irreconcilable Ryan G.Van Cleave
Fishing off the gap-planked pier at Lake Lucerne, my father reached behind me and corralled a four-foot black snake by the tail. Jesus Christ! I was screaming as he bashed its brains against the sun-pickled boards, pinkish snake guts everywhere as I keep Jesus Christ-ing. When it was over, he said Sorry about that and let the ropey carcass slide into the water, we sat down and put our lines back for the fish that weren’t biting, the relaxation which wasn’t there, the conversation we couldn’t have. As the sun purpled into dusk at the distant lake’s edge, I felt like I had no choice, that I would bury my youth in the red earth of this Wisconsin land, that my best song would be woven into the silence of these rocks, this printless stone. I thought of that king snake—for surely that’s what it was, harmless and sunning itself there beside us–and how history is an event, and there in the growing cold, I could feel it parting around me like I was swimming through water which grew steadily darker, blacker until it hissed in my blood.
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11” x 14”
Today’s Special
b&w photo
Amanda Manganaro 2.71828182846
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The Salve
by V. M. Jones
Whitaker
A
fter meeting with a client near the 2nd Street Station, Whitaker, dressed crisply in a blue three-
button suit, leaves the dull-gold morning behind and descends the subway stairs. He is scheduled to be onsite today, an office building in West Philly that has been his project from the beginning. Too-hot coffee cooling in his hand, he glances at the Patek Philippe strapped to his wrist. Eight a.m. He remembers the impulse of buying the watch. White gold, widening in a reverse taper from the hidden clasp worn beneath the wrist, curling, blending into the white-backed face on top. Simple, black, workhorse hands, no numerals. The date and the words Patek Philippe over Geneve. “That watch is six thousand dollars,” the white salesman had said pedantically on a Saturday morning almost a year ago, seeing only, Whitaker imagined, a black man dressed in a jogging suit. The salesman’s eyes searched the store for more serious prospects, as if expecting the four-digit price tag to be sufficient riddance of a perceived nuisance. Then Whitaker spoke five words that must have hit the salesman’s ear like ocean spray on a hot beach. “Do you take American Express?” Whitaker placed the card on the counter so that the salesman could read the words CORPORATE and PLATINUM, which resulted in eye contact and the exchange of business cards. Below ground, he walks by a poster of Faith Hill, a shot from her latest album cover, her pillowy blond hair a soft aureole encircling her face, making it a fire of beauty inside a cooling, dampening eclipse. White people. Always capable of scalding beneath the surface. Stepping into the train car, he stands, as usual, near the sliding door. A recorded voice, that of a female supremely contented by the smoothness of chocolate or the generous talents of her lover, cues up overhead and makes Whitaker feel like he is in the land of Buck Rogers.“Doors are closing,” comes the mild warning and the doors press together with a vacuum-packed thhhfff. The poster and the voice have made him think of Bree, the lone “yes” to the locker-room query, “ever had a white woman?” They met as undergrads in a political science class, both nineteen, drinking from vats of liberalism that perhaps encouraged their dating. Study sessions turned into allnight talks and all-night talks turned into experimentation. “Do you love me?” she once asked after sex a few months into their relationship. “I’m glad you don’t confuse sex and love,” was his honest response, rolling over in bed to face her, but meeting only a damp breast hanging wide and white-pink, flushed from the strains of copulation. “So this is just about the sex for you?” she asked, her hand behind her head on the pillow, her eyes to the ceiling. 43
“No, I didn’t say that,” he clarified. “Then what are you saying?” she said in a tone that indicated his response would be momentous to her and also that she was holding all the cards. “I’m saying I do love having sex with you. That I know for sure.” He could see her eyes roll. “Well, what about you?” he said, turning the tables. “What is this to you?” “I don’t know,” she murmured, suddenly sheepish, playing defense. He had thought about asking her to introduce him to her family—shaking her father’s stunned hand, white on black—but didn’t think he would like the response. And then the question just leapt out, the question that ended their relationship as naturally as it had begun. “When am I going to meet your family?” he asked, knowing the answer. The train lurches on with the sound of sharpening knives coming up through the floor, and the voice says, “Next stop, 5th Street Station.” Whitaker remembers that only a few years ago, it was part of the conductor’s job, usually a black conductor, to call out the next stop. He wonders if some of the white riders had complained of the blackness in the voice. No, they wouldn’t have said it that way. White people are too tactful for that, too familiar with euphemism, driving pre-owned cars instead of used and saying “African-American,” thinking Nigger. They would have thrown a thin sheet over their proposal for a newer, sexier, whiter voice, and called it a move toward “greater professionalism” or “a streamlining of the subway riding experience.” Whitening. Bodies of all shades surround him uncomfortably. He tries to sip his coffee, but the brown liquid is still too hot beneath the white plastic lid. In the seat closest to the pole to which Whitaker’s ringless hand is gripped is a white man, Italian he thinks, reading a brochure from an Amish cheese farm. The seated man glances up and unintentionally, the two men catch eyes. The Italian quickly averts the stare. He begins a nervous stroke of his bare, pasty, sausage-like forearm and returns to the cheese, a tri-fold pamphlet resting on his protruding stomach. There is one other white face in the car, directly across from the Italian man, a woman wearing a pastel-green business suit. The soft color is a dead giveaway that the woman is not from Philadelphia. In Philly, as in New York, women’s business suits come in the holy trinity of fashionable colors: black, the Father; navy, the Son; and dark gray, the Holy Spirit. Anything else is a false prophet. She is hoping that her presence alone on the subway will conjure inside of her a brave new disposition, but instead she exudes, no, she spills in weak trickles the pith of herself—a scared Midwesterner feigning poise behind a pair of designer sunglasses. The rest of the faces are various shades of brown—blank and bored having ridden this route day after day inside the pencilgray tunnels. Whitaker feels pinched in, isolated, having lost what should be an inherent connection with his race, the very act of riding the subway an attempt to achieve exactly this, to not lose touch amidst his architectural life of building his wealth and reputation. Occasionally he feels guilty when, pressed for time, he hails a cab and is chauffeured to a meeting like Baron-Von-Sellout or just a regular old Uncle Tom. Of course, he doesn’t feel any closer to the lighter race—his neighbors, his clients, his co-workers. They remain permanently situated in their structured categories, never a real threat to venture into his world as anything new or unplanned, as friends. With his eyes fixed on his cinnamon-brown monk straps, Whitaker feels like a creature of another species. Nearing 5 th Street, the automated vocalist chimes in,
“In Philly, as in New York, women’s business suits come in the holy trinity of fashionable colors: black, the Father; navy, the Son; and dark gray, the Holy Spirit. Anything else is a false prophet.” “Approaching 5th Street Station. Doors are opening.” A black woman in her forties with fat ankles just above a pair of scuffed white Reeboks walks in and sits next to the white man with the cheese brochure. She brushes her hands beneath her squeezed-together thighs, flattening the clumped folds of her long gray skirt that have knotted beneath her girth. She is coal-black, her eyes surprisingly bright when emerging from a blink, two sharp dots on a chalkboard. Her hair is in a tightly pulled bun and her upper and lower lips protrude equally with no curve up or down so that she appears to lack sentiment one way or the other. They are a shade lighter than her cheeks and remind Whitaker of a double-decker burger, two charred patties, plump, meaty. He tries to find her beautiful, visualizing the perceptible heat rising above the African plain, sweltering so as to make the air bend rhythmically below the vast red sky. Through these images the years recede into her youth, sparkling eyes amidst a tribe, a family. She is full, not fat, as if bubbling from within, joy in her dimpled cheeks as he envisions her smile. He imagines her daughter left behind somewhere in the wilds of the Dark Continent. That they are in love—Jungle Girl Meets American Architect—and that this woman before him now is his mother-in-law. His African family. But here in America, he feels himself being shuttled through the earth like a burrowing mole, being chased by the lords of Madison Avenue and lassoed by the long, powerful rope of Faith Hill’s hair. The door is still open, the train on the brink of motion. The white woman in the pastel suit is shuffling what appears to be a map in her hands and suddenly, shedding any guise of self-assurance, jumps to her feet, anything but deftly, and rushes for the door. Whitaker’s attempted sidestep is not enough to avoid a slight collision of elbows as the woman passes. The coffee, being raised for another attempted sip, is catapulted toward his mouth that is suddenly ajar from the jolt to the elbow. Lips burn. Tongue goes numb. Whitaker yelps and the tourist is gone. “Doors are closing.” The train moves forward. “Here you go, son,” comes a deeply womanish voice, soulful, with roots that could only come from lungs imbedded in a chest as broad as the red African sky. The black woman with the fat ankles is African, clearly so, from the rough textured cadence of her voice. She is holding a black bag and Whitaker notices that she is wearing a hospital identification tag. He reads the letters R.N. and looks up and notices the divide of her lips, backed by yellow teeth, and sees that she is smiling, offering him a small, unused tube of ointment and a tissue to wipe the coffee-mixed spittle that has landed on his tie. “It will treat the burn,” she says with a timbre so piercingly beautiful that Whitaker cannot speak. He can only nod in gratitude, feeling the warmth of the salve on his tongue and a rising heat, as from the morning sun, on the side of his face.
Femi While Femi stands on the subway platform, her mind, as usual, is elsewhere. The train is like a chute to her past and Femi cannot help but slide back with her thoughts along its course, taking her beautifully, painfully to her native home. The ride from 5th Street to the hospital takes less than ten minutes each day, but over the years she has dreamed innumerable miles and hours of her life in that space. At times she wonders what it is about this seemingly stale environment that causes her to conjure up her past, why in such a crowd she feels so alone, so estranged amidst the whizzing buzz of an urban commute. These thoughts could just as easily possess her in the quiet confines of her one-bedroom apartment, but there she always seems focused on there. She doesn’t float away through whatever magical portal it is inside her middle-aged head that leads her across the ancient frontiers of space and time, her own footsteps, her own past. It is the subway that holds the key to that mental door. Perhaps the action of the sliding doors or the cold feel of the metal seats triggers her thoughts. Or the chromatic sparkles, so much light reflected, coming from the stirring of bodies and the speed of the train. Or maybe it is merely the impossibility of focusing on it all, on the incessant activity of life, that causes her to tumble into the familiarity of that which she knows and can control, herself. Specifically, her African self, living alone so far away from home. She is here, she tells herself, to work and live and make enough money to live well, better than she could have possibly imagined in her country. She works to send money back to her parents and her brother who, unlike Femi, married and stayed in Nigeria where he makes traditional garments called ashoke and agbada, but not enough money to support even his own family. Ten years ago, she offered to pay to bring her brother to Philadelphia, but her father discouraged the idea and sent her a postcard with a picture of the Lagos harbor on the front which read, My dearest daughter, Your older brother is staying in Nigeria. As you have heard me say Femi, “even as the archer loves the arrow that flies, so too he loves the bow that remains constant in his hands.” Your loving Father 45
“It is January and the arid burn of desert dust is at its peak in Nigeria. The gritty air pelts and the torrid heat douses the black faces along the banks of the Benue River.” Her father calls regularly to inquire about money. On the phone he often says, “Remember Femi, the bird that remembers its flockmates, never misses the way,” to which she always replies, “Yes, Father, I remember. But you must realize that it is little by little that a bird builds a nest.” Sitting on the subway, Femi sometimes feels like a speck of dust carelessly being thrown through an air duct. A cold and separate particle, a fleck in the air alongside but not accompanied by thousands of other specks of dust. They are all being pushed, not by the wind, but by each other, by human pressure, by invention, American ingenuity and competition. She is being pushed by obligation to her family, perhaps by love, but pushed nonetheless, and at times, she wonders if she made the right choice to leave her homeland. Waiting at the 5th Street Terminal, Femi remembers the day she left her Nigerian village. She sees herself walking away, falling into the wind. She is fifteen years younger carrying a canteen full of water from her parents’ well just outside of Lakoja. She knows these drops, the last trace of her family, will sustain her and yet she is saddened knowing that they will soon be consumed. She is wearing a loose-fitting blouse called a buba, full of pale tones to combat the sun: lemonade yellows, unripened oranges and pinks the shade of cat paws. A hot and steady exhalation from the viscera of the continent pushes her westward, drawing her clothes tightly to her back and flapping them noisily out in front of her. It is January and the arid burn of desert dust is at its peak in Nigeria. The gritty air pelts and the torrid heat douses the black faces along the banks of the Benue River. Along the path that will eventually lead her to the airport in Lagos, amidst the rock, are burdens left by the wind. Animal carcasses attracting the hungry living and human bones in need of proper tribal burials. Thirty-one-year-old Femi—Ahh! She thinks about what 46
it would be like to be thirty-one again!—herself a Yoruba, has no choice but to walk around these things. She walks without stopping because she knows that if she stops she might stay forever. She remembers the morning of this faraway day, her father saying to her, “Femi, no frog is tied by a rope to a pond,” and her reply, “Yes, Father, but as the frog journeys, he will always find new ponds to live by.” This recollection catalyzes new memories as if breaking open a door long rusted shut. Her father’s voice is telling stories of stately kings and queens and simple fathers and daughters. Femi sees her child-self beside an adolescent version of her brother, both listening to their father tell about how oil would smooth out all of Nigeria’s problems and make them all live like kings and queens someday. Along the path she dreams of American shoes. Nikes and Reeboks. She had seen such shoes while studying to be a nurse in Lagos in the early seventies, though at that time their names were Converse and New Balance. In America they would be plentiful like the spreading African sky. She thinks of her past and mingles these thoughts with dreams of an unknown future. She knows that on the eighth day of her life she was named Femi, which in the Yoruba language means love me, and as a woman she feels that she has been well loved. As she walks, she can hear the wind in the ìgbá trees mimicking the sound of the Benue’s current. These sounds are wide and hollow in the open spaces between villages, as if they were the singing of ghosts sent to keep her company along the path. As she approaches downtown Lakoja on foot, the pidgin-English voices of the market begin to outweigh the euphony of the wind and the water. Femi walks through trying to sidestep the taxi drivers’ pleas of “Lagos, I de go!”—pidgin for “I’m going to Lagos.” Lakoja is still small, but the noises seem amplified as if compressed and then suddenly released like a jack-
in-the-box. The city smells of cayenne and fried meats. As she passes through, she turns to see buildings shrinking in her eyes, the clamor recoiling into its box as the city fades. Femi hears the wet-dry ghost-songs resume, only broader, as she walks along the merger of the Benue and the River Niger to a bus station that is just coming into her sweat-smeared vision in the distance. It is at that moment that she realizes for the first time that she is walking the path that will take her to the bus that will take her to the plane that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean and into a new life in the West. The bus driver is playing music to which the bus seems to be swaying as it tries to avoid the giant cracks and potholes in the road. A man sings in an unfamiliar African tongue, effortless thunder, and Femi pictures him as muscular with brown hands gripped around a microphone, spraying sweat and spit into a nightclub crowd, his eyes closed as he falls more deeply entranced by his own voice. Clutching her seat, Femi remembers the seventies in Lagos, going to dark clubs to hear King Sunny Ade, who really wasn’t a king though the people treated him like one, singing his juju in the local dialect. And Sonny Okosun whose reggae was so new and fresh, so powerful it made her stand and smile irrepressibly. She can see that her memories have grown with her mind, filling it as she aged. She filled it by reading Achebe and Soyinka and then when the rest of the world anointed them good she felt wise because it was something Nigerians had already known. Along the journey’s path, she wonders what will become of all of these memories—if maybe they will remain as only that, or if it is true that in America all things are attainable and anything is possible. She hopes for dodo in America. Fried plantain in a hot pan, sugary. Lagos is as she remembered it. Swarming and hot. Even here, on the water’s edge, the wind is scorching. The same hot wind that roams the open plain freely, shaping it as a glacier or a river might scrape out a valley in America, now scrapes at Femi’s skin and begins to overcook her thoughts like boiled yams, turning them into mush. Exhausted, she can only sit and wait for the plane. Back at 5th Street, Femi’s drifting mind stirs with the coming force of the train. The station shakes and as the lead car passes a cool rush of air awakens her fully. She enters the train and sits down next to an unshaven Italian man smelling of cheese. His white shirt is untucked and only buttoned over the eight inches covering his inflated belly. The wan skin of his face is loose as if it were somehow affixed to his hairline and over-stretched in order to get around his giant nose,
the slack gathering around his chin. He is reading something and only occasionally looks up, exposing dark crescents of flesh beneath his eyes. Before Femi can get settled in her seat, a young woman in a pastel dress brushes past her hurriedly and leaps out onto the platform. Femi hears a yelp and turns to see a tall man has spilled his coffee and burned his mouth. She feels the burn of African dust. The vividness of her memory swells in her chest and almost transports her home. She can hear a ringing in her ear; the hollow sound of the vacuous train? the wind? her father’s voice? Or is it the feel of love within, taken from a family and a homeland and carried inside, compressed like the noise in Lakoja, like many years remembered in small moments of time, now springing forth? “Here you go, son,” she says, handing the tall man a tissue and a salve from her nurse’s bag. “It will treat the burn,” she adds, and he nods in gratitude and it is Femi who feels healed. The train is moving forward mostly, making only brief stops, like the perpetual procession of life and its rare moments of reflection. Passengers shift, and the subway jerks on; the world can be like a wrench with all its twists and pauses and sudden yanks. She reclaims her seat and as the train moves forward her body tilts and Femi is dangling between reality and her Nigerian reverie, as if having been submerged deep in the ocean, diving into dark peaceful currents and now breaking into the uppermost portion of water, sunlight visible, a cold, mechanical boat waiting. She is sinking back, her eyelids struggling against weighted air. The Italian man has flinched and Femi knows that her relaxed body must have leaned too far and bumped into his arm. She glances over, noticing visible blue veins beneath his skin like knurly rivers on a map. He does not react except to bury his tired eyes into his lap pretending to read. A cue. An American signal not lost on Femi despite her alien birth. She takes it and ignores the incident, returning to her thoughts, knowing that this man beside her is full of hate. She feels it leaking out of him, his leg pressed against hers. He despises her and yet she is too full of memories, too full of hot wind stored up inside and still sustaining her, to hate him back. The train rolls on smoothly and Femi knows that every object, every word, every thing can potentially elicit the past from the depths of our minds. She resettles in her seat and just before her dreams take her back, she is halted by the tall man’s hand on her arm. “Thank you,” he says and exits the train.
Eventide William Woolfitt
I want to speak of devotion. Does the toll road dodge the river? They are bound to meet. You give me swirls of lunar-shine, a summons to rest on your marshy banks after the sweat of the day; you send radar signals that lead me from exile, dragonflies that balance on my nose, blue eddies to soothe my charred knees after I crawl through the coals. For things you give me I owe, moreover you forgive me when we both know a brigand should be strung from the gallows. You call the ferryman, and if he’s out to lunch, you help me build the piers stone by stone. Next time I will return in disguise, something for you to enjoy without mending. Old shoes, old corduroys, a pot of leek soup— what else breathes comfort? Traveler and inn, sandpiper and sky, breakwater and waves— they have a habit of meeting again. Migratory birds, old friends, prodigal brothers— they find their way home.
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Offguard
6” x 12” terracotta
Lydia Marlon
49
a phone rings in the house of the dead man John Sweet
by midnight the need for god has passed at one a.m. a phone rings in the house of the dead man rings again and the widow pulls away from it locks herself in another room and by 1:30 the waitress is exhausted is out of pills and cigarettes and can’t remember the chain of events that brought her here
50
can’t remember her boyfriend’s name only the feel of his fists walks out the truck stop door at quarter after two with a man she’s never seen before and starts her life again and the cook punches out at three and the widow is awake again by four she sings but softly no one will ever go hungry in a room filled with silence
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Coupled
18” x 8” x 9” stoneware
Christina Matos
SAFC
<52>
24” x 48”
Floating
acrylic on hardboard
Melissa Fulton CUC
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Scent Timothy Lahey
Each of a thousand thick-fingered farmers held up an overripe melon at the appointed hour, and all at once from the farthest reaches of their fertile pastures they parted the sweet flesh with a single stroke of the heavy blade, finding resistance at first in the rough outer rind, but then the knives carried through, gathering speed inward until the flesh was split, setting aloft that soft scent that wends its way past the houses of neighbors and the cement school yard, finds its way like an undulant flock of starlings, through the turning trees that line our road just now, dropping down to us like a kind of remembering. We shake slightly with the growing chill, and are quiet with the flickering of secrets about us. It is here that we lose hold on worries and possessions, and we too are opened up, loosened from our bodies, and sent up on the late hour wind of the last summer day.
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2326
Untitled
11” x 14” b&w print
William K.Taylor
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Plunge
12” x 8” color print
Vara Reese
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Fine Lines Nancy King
We knew the line between love and hate was fragile As the spider’s filament that anchored the web To the top step of our attic stairs. We left the web hanging, gathering dust, and spring, When we exchanged bundled woolens for crisp cottons, Another layer of dust. At each season’s end, back again, more weight added, And us both careful when crossing Not to snap the fine line. Still careful the times, finally, when I’d climb Into the attic and touch the soft-sider luggage, Wanting to stuff it tight as an egg pouch and leave, But wouldn’t, because he didn’t want that— And the times when he did, but I didn’t— And we crossed back and forth, Back and forth, until we began not to care, Both of us letting our indifference gather like dust Too heavy on a web of fragile filaments.
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Untitled
8” x 10” b&w print
Devlin McNeil 306
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On Visiting Chinqua-Penn in October Wayne Brindle
You covered all the bases – paintings, sculptures, tapestries, mosaics, furniture, carefully selected, packed, and delivered to present the height, the zenith of multi-cultural, diversely religious taste – Moses receiving the law from the hand of God as it reached down upon the fireplace, Madonna standing with glorious radiance upon the mantel, Buddha sitting quietly across the room, observing the nothingness of your lives, as dark dogs scampered from the house to the cemetery beyond the rose garden. Shrines and altars everywhere, none more puzzling than the aging, worn prayer seat at the foot of your bed. Did you kneel there as you pondered to whom to direct your prayers, and whose word to read? Old leathery books, overlooked by revered monkeys who neither hear nor see nor speak, led by the Koran in Arabic and Persian, glowing calmly with gold leaf, blessed by organ pipes blowing hymns early Sunday mornings, boldly chiding Vishnu in his prayer niche near the door. A Spanish-cross chandelier guards the way to Chinese lanterns and green screens, watched over by naked maidens painted on ceilings and sculptured on walls, over enameled tiles on desks devoted to Christ. You collected the world’s hopes and philosophies, searching for meaning in every port and museum, yet died without heirs, with books unread and lessons unlearned, your hulking home cluttered and speaking with every tongue but your own. Outside, your garden grows quiet in the autumn wind, but the roses are gone.
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W riters Robert Abbate is a graduate student in the English M.A. program in composition and rhetoric. He received his undergraduate degree in 1982 from Penn State University in Liberal Studies. He earned an M.A. degree in Education from the University of San Francisco in 1994. He taught middle and high school English for five years before becoming a graduate assistant in the Writing Resources Center. He is a teacher consultant for the UNC Charlotte Writing Project. Anne Benson works as the business manager of an art gallery, at the circulation desk of the Providence Athenaeum and as a freelance editor and proofreader. She has given up being an adjunct professor along with waitressing and tending bar. She used to fly planes, and also spent several years at sea. She writes about all of this and lots of other stuff she has and hasn’t done from her home in Providence, Rhode Island. Wayne Brindle was raised on a farm in Kansas and now teaches Greek and religion at Liberty University, a liberal arts college in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has a doctorate in Theology and has been writing for journals and magazines for 20 years. One of his dreams is to publish a poem in every major literary magazine in the country. Dancing Bear lives in San Jose, CA. He is Editor-in-Chief of Disquieting Muses (disquietingmuses.com). Dancing Bear is the host of a weekly poetry show “Out of Our Minds” for listener supported KKUP 91.5 FM in Cupertino, CA. Holly Day lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband, Sherm, and her son, Wolfegang. She spent most of the past year co-writing a book with her husband (The Insiders’ Guide to the Twin Cities) that should be out on the travel-book shelves by June of 2001. Carina Gallegos was born in 1979 in San Jose, Costa Rica, where she still lives with her family. She is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the University of Florida and an English and Art History minor. Gallegos plans to make a career in the literary and fine arts fields when she graduates. Kenneth Harmon is a native North Carolinian. Currently he resides in Pineville, NC, and is working toward an M.A. in English at UNC Charlotte. He writes, “effective poetry is poetry that makes us both think and feel. The real beauty of the art lies not just in the beauty of the language itself, but in the emotional connection made between the poet and his or her audience.” His work has appeared in Lonzie’s Fried Chicken Literary Magazine and sanskrit. V. M. Jones, a graduate of UNC Charlotte, an ex-vagabond and the son of a missionary, has been anchored in Charlotte for seven years. He hopes to attend graduate school in the fall to pursue an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Nancy King worked 26 years as a cafeteria manager at an elementary school. She retired to work for her husband as a used-car salesman. Now, retired again, she hopes to have more time to feed this poetry addiction that’s been plaguing her for the past 10 years. Barton Kunstler is a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with research interests in creativity in education and organizations, ancient Greek society and electronic commerce. He has written for various professional and scholarly publications on those topics. He is originally from New York City and received his doctorate in Classics from Boston University in 1983. His recreational interests include Tai Chi, rollerblading, listening to jazz, history and especially hanging out with his kids. Timothy Lahey, a graduate of Georgetown University and the Duke University School of Medicine, is finishing his residency at the University of Utah, where he will serve as chief medical resident. He lives with his wife, a schoolteacher and speechwriter, and their two-year-old free verse poem, Benjamin. Benjamin’s current project involves deconstructing Dr. Seuss and Bill Peet. Stephen Massimilla has received a fellowship, M.F.A. and M.A. from Columbia University and a first prize from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches writing at Barnard College. He is also a visual artist. Ione (Tootsie) O’Hara writes poetry and fiction and teaches writing to international students. She has been an instructor at UNC Charlotte, Central Piedmont Community College and the English Language Training Institute at UNC Charlotte. O’Hara enjoys hiking, gardening, ceramics and time with friends and family. Nature and landscape strongly influence her and are present in her poems and stories. The talented Scott Shay is emerging as a budding creative force among young poets. The twenty-year-old aspiring world conqueror fuses fantastic imagery with a heavy rhythmic zeal to create unique pieces of work. There is an undeniable musical quality in the tone of his poetry. Not surprisingly, Shay also is an avid singer/songwriter. Look out for this kid! John Sweet lives with his wife and son in a small, drafty house in the all-too-real town of Endicott, NY. He works a number of jobs at any given time, and has spent the last 10 years refusing to explain why he writes what he does. His most recent chapbook is “Seasons of Rust” (Via Dolorosa Press).
Carolyn Taylor is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of USC Lancaster in the discipline of theatre and speech. She is a lifelong resident of Lancaster, SC, the mother of three and the grandmother of five. She is a lover of the arts and has spent a good portion of her life in performing and teaching. Much of her poetry is centered on growing up in the South. Ryan G. Van Cleave is the Anastasia C. Hoffman Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing. His most recent books are “Say Hello” (Pecan Grove Press, 2001) and the anthology “American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement” (University of Iowa Press, 2001). William Woolfitt tries to spend part of each year living in Bandera, Texas; Alton and the White Mountains of New Hampshire; and his grandparents’ farm near Nestorville, West Virginia. He has worked as a backpacking guide, a teacher of many subjects and an editor or assistant for three journals: SnowApple, Kestrel, and Whetstone: a Tool for Honing Edges.
Artists Melissa Anderson is a senior working toward a B.F.A. with a concentration in photography. Her work deals with how an individual’s perspective of reality may shift far from the norm due to internal conflict. She feels that in the mind of the individual, beautiful things can become ugly without changing at all. Randall J. Chesson is a third-year graphic arts major at UNC Charlotte. Interested in many genres of art outside of the computer graphic arts category, he chose to take a fiber elective. The guideline of this particular assignment was to deconstruct an existing garment or garments and reconstruct them into a new garment. This “Winter Bikini” was constructed from secondhand children’s winter accessories into a provocative woman’s bikini. Ruth Cline is a senior at UNC Charlotte working towards a B.F.A. with a concentration in illustration. She has always enjoyed drawing and painting people and hopes to have a career in portraiture. Like most children, Jeremy Davis grew up watching cartoons. His art relects advances in society as well as pop culture. He enjoys presenting images in an approachable manner and at the same time touching on aging, domestic conflict and reflections of youth. Melissa Fulton is a senior at UNC Charlotte, working on getting her B.F.A., with a concentration in painting. Her work mainly consists of a blend of figurative and abstract compositions. Amanda Manganaro has always enjoyed every different type of art medium. She recently returned to UNC Charlotte to finish her degree in the fine arts with a concentration in fiber. With a wide background of graphics, photography and 3D art, she hopes to teach at a college level in the future. Lydia Marlon has been studying ceramics since 1995. Even though she has explored hand-building, throwing on the wheel is her technique of choice. When she sits down with a few mounds of clay to throw, there is a wonderful sense of meditative peace. She feels as though the world is very chaotic and being able to be alone with a medium like clay proves to be the healthiest retreat. Christina Matos graduated in December of 2000 with a B.F.A. concentrating in ceramics and with a minor in psychology. She intends to pursue art education here in Charlotte. Devlin McNeil is a junior in the Art Department at UNC Charlotte. She is currently working towards a B.F.A. concentrating in both photography and art history. McNeil uses photography and poetry as a means of personal expression, feeling appreciation of beauty can be found in the simplest of forms. She feels that intense emotions can be evoked from the minimal and her work is a reflection of such evocation. Jared Nottingham is currently a senior art major, with a concentration in graphic design and a minor in printmaking at UNC Charlotte. The majority of his work is done digitally, although he also enjoys painting, drawing and other media. Nottingham does not consider himself strictly a graphic designer, but an imagemaker as well. Robbie Player is currently a senior at UNC Charlotte studying photography and graphic design. He has been interested in fine art since junior high school, when he concentrated in painting and drawing. He finds that he can best manifest his feelings and thoughts through the photographic medium and looks forward to developing that skill at graduate school. Callie Rayfield is a senior at UNC Charlotte working towards her B.F.A. with a concentration is photography. She will be graduating in May 2001. Vara Reese is an art student at UNC Charlotte. She will graduate with a B.F.A. degree in photography and a minor in film studies. She hopes to move on to a graduate school as a filmmaker and become a director of photography. William K. Taylor is a senior photography and graphic design major at UNC Charlotte. Through photography, he is able to convey his thoughts and emotions with great effectiveness. His work ranges from documentary to a loose, more gestural style.
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Jurors Art Timmy Hord is the artist and photographer of Hord Studio, located in the historic Dilworth area of Charlotte, NC. Her commissioned works include black and white archival portraits, copy restorations of damaged photographs, the use of alternative Polaroid techniques and photographic and freehand oil portraits. For pleasure, she produces art for artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake in several mediums: scenic photographs, Polaroid transfers and emulsion-lifts, still life and scenic oil on canvas and watercolors on paper. An accomplished bagpiper as well, Hord and her husband Ed Krintz are the founders of the Loch Norman Pipe Band based in Huntersville, NC. Joie Lassiter has pursued private studies throughout Europe in major art museums and had three years of personal study in philosophy and psychology. She attended Greenhead College in Yorkshire, England, London Royal College and Mesa College in San Diego. She presently owns Joie Lassiter Gallery & Art Consulting Services in Charlotte, NC. Carol Mitchell moved to Charlotte, NC in 1996. She graduated from Kenyon College in 1977 as a studio Art major. She completed her Masters in Mental Health Degree at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1982. Returning to her art studies while raising her three children, she studied with graduates of the Maryland Institute of Art and The Schuler School of classic realism. She began teaching at the Braitman Studio in 1997. She has exhibited her work in many juried shows. A graduate of Queens College, Christie Taylor is Director and Partner of Hodges Taylor Gallery, which is celebrating its twentieth year in uptown Charlotte. She is an active member of the arts community and serves as the President of The Light Factory.
Literature Sandra Govan, a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, has a doctorate in Liberal Arts from Emory University, and teaches American and African-American literature. Her essays have appeared in Black American Literature Forum, Erotique Noire, The Novello Anthology and many more. Jim McVey teaches creative writing and 20th Century American literature in the English department at UNC Charlotte. His fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals around the country. Martin Settle was born in 1946 in Quincy, Illinois. As a person born in the Midwest and 15 miles from Hannibal, Missouri, he was profoundly affected by the culture of small river towns and the books and humor of Mark Twain. It is from these sources that he finds sustenance and inspiration. Settle currently teaches in the English Department at UNC Charlotte. His greatest gifts have been his spouse Deborah and his daughter Hannah. Julie Townsend teaches argumentation and fiction writing at UNC Charlotte. She also has published fiction and non-fiction stories. Currently, she is working on a rewrite of a book that she hopes one day will get published, as well as working on a screenplay with Glenn Hutchinson, her writing partner.
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Copyright ©2001 by sanskrit literary-arts magazine and the Student Media Board of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
All rights reserved by the individual artists and authors. Printed by Jostens Printing Co., Winston Salem, NC. 3,000 copies of sanskrit literary-arts magazine 2001 were printed on 100 lb. Mountie Matte text stock and Tag stock for the cover. The magazine contains 64 pages, perfect bound and drilled with eyelets.
Type is 10 point Schmutz Cleaned at 105%;
Titles of pieces are done in Army Chalk. Other fonts used: Acoustic Bass, Acoustic Light, Badhouse Bold and Light, Attic, Crackhouse, Cleanhouse, BIGHOUSE, StampFont. “Cayuga Lake” used Darling Nikki; “The Salve” used Letter MT Gothic Oblique and Bold.
Produced on Power Macintosh G4 computers, using a Polaroid Sprint Scan 35, Epson Perfection 1200U flatbed scanner, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Illustrator 8.0 and Macromedia Freehand 8.01.
Cover design by Jennifer L. Bonacci with the assistance of LouAnn Lamb. Illustrations for “Cayuga Lake” by Trey Walsh. Illustrations for “The Salve” by Jordan Beall. All other pages designed by Moriah Cowan, Jordan Beall, Trey Walsh and Jennifer L. Bonacci.
Thanks to our student readers: Ashley Collins, Liz Dreesen, Lana Evans, Bridget Heaney, Cathy McClure, Kristin Smith and Laura Vaccarella.
Special thanks to Wayne Maikranz for the standards and devotion that make Student Media; Nate and Tom for their scrubbing skills; Bill Hall for his commission; Ralph James for his timeliness; LouAnn Lamb for her barrettes; Mark Haire for his superior rubber band aim; Maryellen Whichard for her money laundering; Todd Ward for his earrings; Kevin Snook for his “special” relationship with computers; Dean Butckovitz for his coordination; Jackson’s Java for the venue; Alisha, Mike, Stephen and Meredith for their support; Awesome Lawrence for his Ph.Diety; Jason Hughes for his success; roommates/family/ spouses for their tolerance; Bonnie E. Cone for her basement; and you, the students of UNC Charlotte, for the cash.
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Staff Jennifer L. Bonacci, Editor-in-Chief, spends her days consuming far too much mass media, repeating her favorite words “gingko biloba” and flinching uncontrollably from flying projectiles, usually rubber bands. Although she sleeps more now that she has stopped working for the newspaper neighbors, she is often forced to get up and write down design ideas that come to her in the midst of REM. She is constantly on the lookout for the perfect thing to say after all those short jokes at her expense, so if you have a good one, let her know. On her farewell tour with Student Media, she plans to graduate in August and continue her education elsewhere, but what she really wants to do is direct.
Moriah Cowan, Associate Editor and Art Editor-in-residence, is serious when she puts “fun” and “math” in the same sentence. How she ended up working for a lit-arts mag, we’ll never know. She is a rough and tumble kind of gal, being the only engineer in the basement of Cone, and beating people up in rugby for recreation. Her aspirations include constructing fine feats of architecture and successfully driving a year without totaling her precious Escort.
Tamara Titus, Literary Editor, is unusual in many ways: she loves lima beans, she has extremely legible handwriting for a southpaw, and she considers her mother-in-law a close personal friend. Her favorite pastimes include eating lunch at Mr. K’s, visiting her friend Jefferson, and attending the Black Dog Writers’ Workshop. She is looking forward to graduating in May so she can spend more time practicing yoga and writing. Her fiction has appeared in The Distillery: Artistic Spirits of the South and is forthcoming in Cottonwood and Emrys Journal. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
Nicole Schulz (no “t,” like the Peanuts guy), Assistant Literary Editor, managed to survive her first year at UNC Charlotte. Many would call her weird, with her “fun” skirts, 30-barrettes hairstyle, always mismatched socks, doodles and notes all over her hands and arms, and numerous addresses in the first semester. Her excuse: “I’m an art major!”
Trey Walsh , Design Editor, enjoys all things obscure. Here are just a few other things that inspire him: random lines that create shapes, rust, anything live, the sound of cars as they pass through water, the short time just before the seasons change, textures, the smell of the air after it rains, and the color red. He is always lifted by a soft breeze.
Jordan Beall , Assistant Design Editor, is a liberally moderate conservative who loves talking about himself in the third person. Jordan Beall is just a regular guy with the same hopes and dreams as the reader, especially if that reader is Jordan Beall. Raised in Charlotte, NC, Jordan Beall’s hobbies include making art, writing drivel, and helping people, but only when other people are looking. Jordan Beall has accomplished much in life, but he’d trade it all in for a little more. 438786
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