The Kudzu Review: Issue No. 44

The Kudzu SPRING Review 2010

Copyright Š 2010 by The Kudzu Review

All rights revert back to their original owners upon publication.

The Kudzu Review is recognized by the Student Government Association as a registered organization at Florida State University.

We thank them for providing the funds to print this issue.

masthead EDITORS

Richard Beahm Allison Green

MANAGING EDITOR

ASSISTANT EDITOR

PROSE EDITORS

ART DIRECTION

Michael Shea

Ricky Di Williams

Ryan Clary Loren Vasquez

Skyla Walker

POETRY EDITOR

ART EDITOR

Erin Wilson

ASST. POETRY EDITOR

Jodi Hunt

Jenny Davis

MARKETING MANAGERS

Jennifer Chavis Virginia Lill

EDITORIAL & DESIGN ASSISTANTS

Laura Bradley, Mitchell Chamale, Darline Corchado, Jesse Damiani, Sammy Jo Evansen, Alexandra Flores, Phillip Garami, Mary Gibble, Andrea Grant, Bryn Hafer, Scott Horn, Matthew Matrisciano, Dvorah-Jaan Mitchell, Robb Mongole, Sean O’Leary, Robert Ponte, Lauren Pearson, Kevin Pinner, Ana Rodriguez, Chris Steer, Kyle Sullivan, Andrew Trostle, Marcus Weger, Rashanda Williams, James Windley

FACULTY ADVISORS

James Kimbrell Michael Neal

contents COV E R A RT P ROV I D E D B Y TA M A R D AC H OAC H

“Counterpart” 20” x 28” oil on canvas 2009

P RO C E S S N OT E S B Y J U L I A N N A B AG G OT T

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K A I T L I N C RO C K E T T

Love Poem that Needs Insurance

Where the Sun Takes It Straight, No Chaser

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RO B E RT G A I N EY

Mercy

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K R I S T I N A D I PA N O

Dear Tomorrow, Love Emily

Drifter’s Sonnett

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Z AC C A D Y

With Mom at the Beach House

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A M A N D A LOVA L LO

The Alligator Approaches

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L AU R E N D I M M E R

Natalie at Night

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S Y D N EY W E I N B E RG

The Wife We Both Needed

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Fin

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VA R I O U S A RT I S TS ( I )

Colleen Matthes & Chris Knight

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KEITH BRINKMANN

What to Say to Get Her to Sleep with You Again

M AT T H EW O G L E S B Y

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30

The Right Fit

S COT T Y G I L L I N G H A M

Last Try at Rape in the Woods

A N I N T E RV I EW W I T H J A N E S P R I N G E R

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VA R I O U S A RT I S TS ( I I )

Johanna Polk, Tamar Dachoach, Loren Miller & Ben Siegl

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LU K E M U N S O N

Still Life with Good Intentions

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L EV I T Y TO M K I N S O N

The Winter I Tried to Turn Your Concrete Porch

into an Ice-Skating Rink

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N AT H A N TAY LO R

Kentucky Gentleman

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Process Notes

by Julianna Baggott My advice is simple. You go out and get it. If you think you’re going to just wait for inspiration to strike you, you’re sunk. It’s over. As the old proverb goes: if there is no wind, row. I row.

I row everyday. I row even when there is wind so I’m making double-time. * * * Inspiration is a luxury I can’t afford. It’s not blue collar. It’s not white collar. It’s feather collar.

The thing you really want to hope for is that you like to row. In fact, it’s all the better if you love to row, if you love the calluses and the sore shoulders, if you love the circling gulls, and the vicious things -- the waters are teeming with vicious things. * * * Workshop? Yes. There are vicious things there — with big jaws, rows of teeth. But all the better to love the jaws and teeth. * * * What I’m saying is that you can’t pick and choose. You have to love it all — or at least accept it all. If you’re writing for praise, it’s over. If you’re writing for love only, close up shop. But if you love to write, then row on.

It’s the thing I know how to do. * * * Do you want something more practical? Of course you do.

You want me to tell you about agents and editors, about graduate school, about short cuts.

I don’t know any short cuts.

Except maybe this: Rejection. * * * Have a good relationship with rejection. Getting demoralized about rejection is the long cut. It wastes your time more than anything.

Instead, get a little fiery about it and bring the fire back to the boat. * * * You want me say something about revision.

It’s just that: you see the work again. You see it again. New. You re-see it.

And then you write that vision. * * * You want me to say something about craft, point of view, tense, structure, characterization and plot.

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You’ll learn these things. Stop reading for pleasure and take some things apart. It’s all in there. Every lesson you need to learn is in everything you’ve ever loved to read. * * * You want me to say something elevated.

But you already know what you need to do.

You’ve already told yourself the truth. * * * Write it.

Julianna Baggott is the author of Girl Talk, The Anybodies, and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, among many other titles. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Florida State University. She also co-founded Kids In Need - Books In Deed, a non-profit organization which provides underpriveledged children with free books. Find out how to contribute at http://www.booksindeed.org Process Notes

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KAITLIN CROCKETT

Love Poem that Needs Insurance Your dimple is a defibrillator for my lame brain heart.

And when you fawn over my topography I ripen like corn and fall to the ground.

I do not fall to the ground.

Dust open your eyes, sweet bean.

I am the cat that follows you home begging for a cigarette, the 50-Foot Woman dangling you like a rag doll.

Together we have the power to be a mythical sea creature.

Also, to bicker like crickets, you and me.

What fresh hell is this?

Our love reveals itself like a tooth in the mouth of some shellacked delta queen.

Throbbing, pushing against, threatening an extraction.

But that tooth ain’t going nowhere ‘til it’s good and ready— that is, I kiss you goodbye and don’t want to leave anymore.

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So if this ingrown love of ours is just too savage to look at, I’ll doff both our eyes then bird-dog your face like a damn hound.

Kaitlin Crockett

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ROBERT GAINEY

Mercy Creatures that pass on through this world before staying a spell don’t want names. I didn’t want to name this kitten. It must have been a McLaughlin kitten. Their cat was always having litters on account of them selling their corn in Davis, which gave them no reason to visit the vet in Edmund across the county lines. It wasn’t the first time a cat had chosen to have its litter under our front porch, but it was strange to me that I would find only one remaining kitten mewling there, hidden behind the flowering cactus.

Right off, I knew it was the runt of the litter. Its fur was sickly sticky with gunk, and only one of its eyes had ever managed to open. It went on crying in the manner that had attracted my attention, and now that I’d lain eyes on it, it had become my problem. I wish that I had been humming something as I went about my chores. Maybe I would have stepped past it and nature would have taken its course. Anyway, I couldn’t leave it there to go on making noises like that. I went looking for a shovel in the shed my grandfather built when he bought our family’s land.

Wary of fiddle-back spiders that liked to lurk on the handles of our tools, I pushed aside the post-holer, the heavy pick my daddy used to break up the clay of our land, and the axe that kept our home warm in winter using our sweat. The shovel, which was fit to work in the garden but not in the fields, had fallen into the back behind the rest. The only thing less used was the sledge, my grandfather’s own tool, which he had used to beat scrub jack and cacti back into the earth. It was so big and heavy, no other man seemed to be able to wield it. He had personally flattened every piece of underbrush on his two hundred acre plot over the course of a single, burning summer. It had seen other 6

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work while he had managed the land, often resting only as long as the man himself. Once it had held a place of honor next to the workbench, but now it was in the back, behind this shovel I had come for so that I could bury the kitten.

When I got back to the cat, it hadn’t moved an inch. Its legs were splayed out beneath it. They looked like tiny crumpled socks. It was too far under the porch for me to get at it with my boot, so I knelt down and drew it out with my hands. A healthy cat, one that will live, is a warm ball of sunlight on skin. This animal was as cold as brick at night, and it shivered fiercely. I set it on the grass and stood up, placing the rigid heel of my Larry Mahan on the back of its head. I’d seen my grandpa do this with other strays. I suppose that he had made himself not hear, because the pitiful sound that came from beneath my foot severed my nerves. I took my foot away and sighed at the wad of white and black fur. I was glad my family was out of the house.

It wouldn’t have been easy to live down if they’d seen me too squeamish to do what needed to be done.

I dug the hole a ways off, at the far corner of our front yard, where the ground was soft enough to dig but nobody would notice the fresh earth. I guess somewhere along the way I forgot the kitten was only a small creature, and dug it two or three times what it needed to be. When I laid the kitten in the hole, it was tiny in comparison, looking up at me with its one eye, beginning to let out that pathetic noise again. It had gone silent when I picked it up, but it seemed to sense what was coming to it as I laid it down. I filled my shovel with the red, coarse sandy soil of my land, and stared down at the kitten.

“It ain’t my fault you were born in pain. There’s nothing I can do for you, puss.” I said. Its cries were hollow, as if the ground around it were eating the sounds. Try as I might, I couldn’t lay that first scoop of soil over it. When I thought about doing it, or went to turn my hands, I felt my nose stuff up like I’d breathed the dirt in myself. I didn’t mind burying the cat, but I wasn’t going to bury it alive. I dropped the shovel and went back to Robert Gainey

7

the house.

My brother must have taken the .22 from Daddy’s closet. He and his college buddies were always spending time at the back edge of our property shooting the cans they emptied, and the .22 fires cheap. I stood dumbly at door, looking in at the clothes hanging there, expecting to see the rifle even though I knew it was gone. Closing the door, I went to Daddy’s desk and opened the second drawer down, on the right, where he keeps his pistol when he goes to town with Momma. This, like many powerful tools, had been Grandpa’s as well. Grandpa had gotten it while in the army, and it fired a bullet the size of my thumb. I checked the gun and did the proper thing by not loading it until I was ready to use it, as Daddy had taught me to do with guns I didn’t own myself. I took one bullet with me. Grandpa had said that one bullet was enough for a Kraut, and I’d always thought that was some kind of dog. If it was good enough for a dog, I thought, it would work for my grisly purpose.

On account of my shaking hand, I had to squat and bring the gun real close to the gunked head of the runt. I knew that a bullet was faster than starving, or being buried alive. A bullet is faster than lingering in pain and uselessness. Grandpa had shown that mercy could come out of the barrel of a .45. He had chosen to end a life that had slowly turned to pain and decrepit uselessness. I was choosing to spare an animal the torment of a short, miserable life. In no way does that make us the same. The next moment, there was nothing left of the animal. No intact parts of its body, and no more of that suffering that it had been born with. I buried it, leaving no marker. Animals deserve mercy, just like men and women, but that don’t make them equal. People get remembered. Animals get buried.

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KRISTINA DIPANO

Dear Tomorrow, Love Emily Who knows anything?

It will come whether or not my lids fall for the dark. I know about the unicycle of the sun and the alarm on my Timex clock-radio.

Two dozen hours gone like the eggs that cracked Betty Crocker. If my heart is still doing the chitty chitty bang bang, then my feet will meet the hardwood and I will stub my toe on the corner of my dresser like I did yesterday, and the day before.

My name will remain Emily, and if it is not, then my flip flops, beta fish, and toilet paper will all have outlived me.

I will drive to the post office and clock-in. This small town and others, as far as Mabry Mill is concerned, will look exactly like an ant farm, all the cars in line, trying out for the next Groundhog Day Parade.

The echoes of the day are mismatched socks compared to the night, where dream tricks lead me under my bed or in the closet where my father will be waiting with a bottle of Seagram’s and the morning news.

Kristina DiPano

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ZAC CADY

With Mom at the Beach House Four flanneled months to buttress my mother being sad that I remember my childhood wrong.

Winter pavilion at the sea’s reassurance— Now no retention, only knowing until I see it disappear.

Mom is a floral manipulator afloat by her daisy pomanders, sprays of anthuriums, and blown rose pavés.

Terse over chicken salad because I had spooked scripts from the elderly with a pharmacist named Celeste— a swelling storm wets the windows.

The squall lowers the sky from cerulean to old silver; I know why the days are soup

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and why goldfish and BB guns are deserts and confusion.

But it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t been someone else.

Zac Cady

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AMANDA LOVALLO

The Alligator Approaches A matchstick of a girl sits like waiting fire on the dock, while the slippery purse blows spurts of air from leather nostrils.

Tangling limbs in leaves, he crawls across the pond’s bottom.

His eyes are on her leg— hairs pricking senses as tiny goosebumps climb up her knees.

A silt cyclone starts at her toes. She’s churning the water.

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LAUREN DIMMER

Natalie at Night This is the moment when the night fades to the shush of smoke stacks, blue-voiced.

You are nothing. Without the sun on your face, your lips bleed into skin. I am in the sidewalk paved and crackling, in the sour hum of late lights. A choice, listen: this is the moment when the night fades, no rows of girders clawing empty black shapes, star spaces, you. With your throat working, noiseless, you are nothing without the sun on your face.

These are my nights, caught with the bay of trains awake and howling, the rails poised for this moment, when the night fades to a thousand silent tongues babbling, the gray sun stealing below the horizon line, your voice with it: Nothing. Without the sun on your face and you lying close as the clock, everything spaced in twelve hours of useless clicking pieces, covered and coiled around this moment: when the night fades, you are nothing. But the sun on your face—

Lauren Dimmer

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SYDNEY WEINBERG

The Wife We Both Needed You said it to me first, the night our son snuck down to the kitchen and unscrewed all the light bulbs, you’d joked ruefully: “what we both need around here is a wife.”

I had to admit you were right. That night, I rotated what’d you’d said on the spit of my sleeplessness, and in the morning called in sick at work. I wanted her to be a surprise. How slight she was then, our Metve, nervously grappling her new ring in the passenger seat of our car, and so polite when I questioned her. The thin blonde hair twined around Metve’s delicate, translucent ears gave our bride the fresh look of a cinematic fraulein.

I was so happy then, waiting with Metve on opposite ends of our threadbare couch for the sound of your keys plunking into the dish by the door, and so happy when you strolled in and stopped, the astonishment cresting across your face and dissolving into delight.

From the start, Metve was perfect. When our son came home from school, there were tuna sandwiches and an aproned lap prepared for him in the den, and our bitter banter regarding your habit of abandoning clothing where it fell vanished just like your underwear from the bedroom floor. Neither of us had ever enjoyed rinsing dishes, vacuuming rugs, organizing the junk drawer, etc., but Metve positively relished these tasks. It was a joy to watch her, a golden bird sighted from the safety of safari, presiding over her nest. That evening we bolted the doors, kissed our boy’s scrubbed forehead, and hurried off to bed, where we knew Metve waited in the lamplight, picking at the bows on her nightdress. We entered; she stood, and her wafer-thin ears glowed orange from the light behind her. Never was Metve so magical to us as that night, when she detangled our curious hunger and fell asleep in the web of our arms. Regarding other 14

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revelations of that first, experimental week: I was relieved to discover Metve was not a snorer, and furthermore she had a way of asking questions—and then instantly, excitedly, recalling the answer herself—that made us both go weak at the knees.

Those years directly following our marriage to Metve were happy and productive ones. Thanks to all the abundant time that was Metve’s greatest gift to us, you were able to enter into a widely televised amateur baking contest that challenged contestants to recreate famous inventions past in cake form—and you, with your clever fondant visions of sliced bread—you swept first place and dined on your creation with the entire panel of leading culinary experts that had selected you. And I, also with time on my itching hands, accepted the urgent exhortation that I join that troupe of international scientists whose daunting task it was to reposition the moon in the sky, when all calculations indicated celestial slippage. The gratitude with which the awestruck citizens of this earth showered me when the press announced that the divine maneuvers required to refasten the moon upon its cosmic hanger were masterminded by me—well, those showers really belonged to the eternal spring that was our beloved Metve.

Our mutual advancements enabled us to move from our honeymoon hovel to the dream house (all the more desirable for its proximity to the nation’s best middle schools) we’d only eyeballed in the pre-Metve years. Ours was a vibrant household during this time. The vicious fights that rang out from other porches along our street like the clanging of crude bells never once interrupted our harmonious domesticity, and our son reported regularly that his classmates, all from less progressive homes, lacked parents as accomplished as we.

It was particularly heartwarming to observe the tenderness Metve had for our boy, and he for her. When he was struggling with that monstrous project on Greek mythology, whom but Metve oversaw the enlargement of his graphics onto poster board? And what ever would we have done that family movie night when he choked on a popcorn kernel, if Metve’s materSydney Weinberg

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nal instinct hadn’t prompted her to glance over, and register his frantic pallor in the flickering light? We shudder to think of it.

Sometimes we forget to remind Metve how much we love her, and she resents us for it. To fix things, we—you, me, even the kid—developed a special schedule, all very hush-hush, in which every two weeks one of us must surprise her with a small treat: carnations, chocolate truffles, a sample of new perfume, etc. Then Metve is so delighted by these tokens of appreciation that she glows like a lit candle and warms us each in turn with her embrace. On holidays, we go all out. Our last anniversary, we presented a tearful Metve with a spa trip, and the year before that we got her a Kitchenaid mixer.

And wow, Metve really loves that mixer! Actually, we had to conduct a sit-down chat concerning her weekly cookie yield, which would have been commendable were she employed in a bakery, but less so in the context of our household. The increasing plumpness of Metve is one thing, but that of our kid, by God, is another entirely! This is our promising boy we’re talking about, with his fencing trophies, his wit, his sharp eye for detail... scene or no scene, we had to take Metve aside and make clear that neither she nor he need acquire pounds as if planning a lengthy sojourn to England. Eventually she calmed down and saw our point, and our lives continued on peacefully.

Of course, like anyone in our position, we understand that our investment is inclined to depreciate with age. It’s not that we haven’t broached the topic of trading Metve in—but this was purely hypothetical, conducted in the manner in which one might conceive of names for the yacht one will never own. Furthermore, we did so safely out of Metve’s sensitive earshot, while she was occupied downstairs with our son’s impending late night arrival from a much-anticipated date. The truth is, we’ve heard talk—hard to avoid such talk—of fresher, more flexible models.

There are heaps of deserving, if less successful, couples who’d be more than grateful to acquire a used, yet well-preserved wife like Metve at discount rates. And we have our image to protect, our status to advance, and not to mention we, like Metve, aren’t 16

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getting any younger—who could blame us for seeking firmer horizons, for groping at the promise of she who dangles ripe and red from the branches of our eyelashes? Metve’s always been so understanding—surely she would understand the evolution of our needs?

But we talked it over, talked sense into each other and ourselves until we sweated sense and sighed: we couldn’t do that to the kid. What would he do without Metve? For days, we tried to reconcile our resolve with mundane encounters: Metve boiling eggs and sausage, humming flatly, her nose an oily bridge between two eyes that again and again misread our appetites; Metve in bed, fortressed in by eiderdown and flatulence; Metve clearing up our work papers before we were finished, a slave to her insane passion for regulation... we don’t recognize her anymore! Oh Metve, you automaton, you Nazi, Metve—we cry, we whisper, we peter out on the shores of deaf ears.

So Metve toils on, so our now teenager learns the weight of pauses, the value of eyeballing, and so you and I begin to long for those spare moments we have alone together. We discover that we barely know each other after all these years, cautiously we reveal our old hopes and dreams to each other like embarrassing tattoos, we confess the superficiality of our work and ourselves, we confess how very old and decrepit and cynical we feel.

Then there is a night—that night is a pivotal cue in our lives does not escape us—there is a night when we decide, ever so unwisely, to go for a drink at a seedy bar as if we were still young and daring, and there we meet Metve’s enemy, the nemesis in whom we even now can barely believe.

One thing leads to another, and we set up (clandestine) house with the nemesis, our unbelievable princess, and we love the Semitic landscape of her in profile so much that we will gladly pay the fantastic price that she demands. Thus we enter the era of perverse arrangements, of short-lived two-wifed lives, and the irony of this redundancy we will not appreciate until much later.

So our nights become caviar stolen from Metve and lavished on the richness of the other, and always we are creeping home, Sydney Weinberg

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sticky with guilt and pleasure. We are figments in the would-be bigamist’s imagination, hazarding the canals of our chosen one, whom we forget we cannot know like Metve. Of the nemesis, we know the fabric of her tongue, which is a masterwork of fashion; we have applauded the acrobatics of that deft wet fin as it darts along our spines, or intuits what exactly we wish to hear, and washes our ears with those words. We assume this alone is worth knowing. What heaven the delirium, the escape from Metve!

And what hell the return, because Metve is our destiny. It matters little whether Metve on some other decisive night trailed us to that pristine apartment, and raised binoculars to our six-footed waltz from a balcony opposite, or whether she just read us like walking clues one innocent dinnertime, and from then on knew.

What matters is her pupils turned to lead and we couldn’t bear the deadly weight of them; we sank like geese. We sank back into the comforting pillow of her. Our memories reappeared like truant children, talking so fast we couldn’t get a word in edgewise: How dare you betray Metve?

Don’t you know you owe Metve everything?

Grovel before Metve!

But Metve can stomach no groveling. By now, her hair is gray as the dusty shelves that were always proverbial in our house.

Worse than her forgiveness is Metve’s own memory, which never takes vacations. Metve knows us better than the hunter knows the deer whose organs he has fondled, scraped and stewed.

Which means she doesn’t have to listen when we talk, because she knows from experience the cheapness of talk, especially ours.

Before we know it, the kid packs up and goes to college, and every time we see him again—you, me, and Metve—we’re shocked by the minute changes in him—the longer face, the fatter vocabulary, the pierced eyebrow—as if each Thanksgiving the university sends us an updated version of our son, and we must all be grateful and adjust. Even Metve, who can’t take us seriously, who won’t have serious conversations with us, who’s losing her language, who’s becoming more foreign and more familiar at the same time—even Metve wilts between his rare phone calls, and 18

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blossoms at the watering of his voice.

Lately we’ve adopted the custom of teatime at four on the back porch, just the three of us. Metve brings the china in on a tray, and we all sit and inhale the steam off our cups and impose patterns on the various intersections of the yard trees as distorted through the screen. After so many years, we’ve run out of things to talk about. We watch Metve pick a flea out of the cat and think of how gracefully she’s aged, and the feeling we have for her at this moment is as nice and natural as swallowing. The moments the two of us have alone are scarcest yet these days, but even when she’s not around, we don’t say aloud that we hope Metve will outlive us.

Sydney Weinberg

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COLLEEN MATTHES

Untitled 4’ x 2.5’

oil on canvas

2009

Colleen Matthes

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Untitled 4’ x 2.5’

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oil on canvas

2009

Untitled 4’ x 2.5’

oil on canvas

2009

Colleen Matthes

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CHRIS KNIGHT

Self Portrait 9” x 12”

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oil on canvas

2009

Saturnalia 24” x 24”

oil on wood

2009

Chris Knight

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The rot finds root 19” x 24”

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oil on canvas

2009

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KEITH BRINKMANN

What to Say to Get Her to Sleep with You Again Baby, you and I are only reincarnated fruit flies.

All we’ve known is a massive dumpster world.

We know nothing of the hatred of chimpanzees.

Your taste is a salad of avocado and feta cheese. You didn’t ask Superman to come inside you, but he did, leaving his red briefs under the sheets.

Now is only alive in the daydream

of a melody and meaninglessness.

I’ll never forget

what you left outside my front door.

(An acrylic on canvas painting of the back of her neck.

Fingers lifting hair— A few fall loose like the long line of the kite, small in the moonlight.

I could fit the painting in my back pocket.)

Follow the murmurs of tea and window-mounted air conditioning units.

You do have nice tits, but they are only partially responsible for my love.

Sweetheart, we too are growing old, and for all we know, the universe is shaped like an apple core, or the dirty tub water 28

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waiting to drain.

And the rain always comes from a direction we don’t understand, a place we can’t visit on the weekend. We are outside of ourselves, we occasionally feel, but the suffocation of our bones and blood veins makes itself known whenever we sleep alone.

Victory is hard to imagine.

Our wisdom is all burlap and calico.

You become more and more affable the more expensive the beer is you drink.

I tend to think organized religion can shove it, just like everyone else our age.

My salvation is found under umbrellas and inside paperbacks.

Come inside and I’ll show you a poem I wrote.

Keith Brinkmann

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MATTHEW OGLESBY

The Right Fit It is five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and so unexpectedly quiet one can hear the click and hum of lamps blinking light down on the empty parking lot outside Tallahassee Mall. Dick Hayes, widowed and eighty-one, carefully steers his Cadillac into a handicapped spot, not because he’s handicapped, but because the spot is nearest the entrance and he likes the convenience. But he can’t find her permit to hang from the rearview. He checks first the glove box, then the center console, then reaches around back into the smooth leather pockets behind his seat and hers.

But he finds these compartments empty and ghostly cold, scattered about with sticky cough drop wrappers and scraps of paper ripped from legal pads—folded lists enumerating future plans.

Remnants of little use to him now.

He plans to use her permit until one of them expires, but can’t find it now, and there simply isn’t time to look, so he backs out, carefully repositions his Cadillac in a legal white-lined spot and steps outside. The air is cold and bitter in the premature dusk.

He hurries across the darkening lot, the asphalt glittering in the lamplight, a cruel wind pushing at his back. Outside Macy’s he stops and stands a moment looking up at the big blinking Christmas tree on top of the roof. He is thinking about how nice it feels to get away from the house when suddenly the entrance doors pop open and a boy appears. He resembles her grandson, except he wears a black shirt and a black leather belt tucked into black slacks that hang high over black sneakers and taut black socks. There is a brass name tag clipped to the breast of his shirt distinguishing him as a maintenance boy. He glances at Dick, then looks down the way they do, and without greeting or gesture squeezes into the tiny space between the faded brick exterior of Macy’s and the hedge of bush meant to hide it. He bends 30

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down, flips a breaker, and the spectacle of coiled light disappears.

They are left standing in the pale gray light of dusk.

“Guess I better hurry,” Dick says.

The boy just grunts.

Dick pulls open the heavy glass entrance door, nearly suctioned to its frame, and leaves the howling December wind behind. Inside, it’s suddenly peaceful. Mannheim Steamroller’s folksy rendition of “Little Drummer Boy” plays softly over the loudspeakers and warm air blows from the ceiling vents, wrapping around him like a down comforter. The hardwood crackles and pops beneath his feet, encouraging him, suggesting a sense of new beginning. He’s recently fallen on hard times, but that’s all over now and here he is, alive still, with an opportunity to do something good.

By then even the diehard holiday shoppers have disappeared, leaving Macy’s in picked apart disarray. Stacks of shirts and pants hang discarded over chair backs—lay crumpled in corners abandoned. Food court wrappers and overturned soda cans litter display racks strewn about with mismatched shoes. Across the way Dick spies a large red CLEARANCE banner swaying above a table piled high with ties. He walks over, keeping in mind simplicity.

Something simple, preferably solid or striped, that’s what her grandson said, right?

“What’s it for?” Dick remembers asking.

“A dance.”

“Is there gonna be any drinking?”

“No, no, no—no drinking. It’s a school thing.”

“All righty,” he’d said, not believing him. “Anything in particular I should look out for?” But he can’t remember what was said after that. He is powerless in the face of memories, especially those he’d like to forget. His mind had drifted back a year, back to the evening—he does not like thinking of it. Focused now, he digs through the ties and in no time finds a green and blue plaid, simple enough.

“How bout this?” he asks aloud, speaking to her.

“Looks like something a Boy Scout would wear.”

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31

“Fair enough.”

He digs up another tie, this one with more flair—glossy pink with teal horizontal stripes. He leans back, displaying it against his own denim button-down. “How about this?” he asks.

“Not really his style.”

“Didn’t think so.”

Next he tries a simple black one, holds it eyelevel, imagining her there beside him. “How about this one?”

“He’s not going to a funeral!”

And so it happens—tie after tie he imagines her teasing dismissal. This is one thing, unfortunately, that has not yet abandoned him: the clarity of doubt. “Are you serious?” she says, laughing—a phantom across the table shaking her head in disapproval then wheeling around with a flick of the wrist.

On his way around the table he passes a mirror hanging from a mahogany column and looks into it. His reflection is frail, battered, tossed away, thin gray hair matted to his forehead, jeans rumpled—very much the bewildered old widower he’d feared becoming. Ah phooey, he thinks. These mirrors are intentionally thin—a subtle ploy meant to trick customers into believing they’re skinnier.

But what’s more? He notices how drastically he’s shrunk over the past year. He tries straightening his shriveled posture, believing it’s the mirror that won’t cooperate. He smiles at the face in the mirror, it smiles back, and what catches his attention more than anything are the deep ridge-like wrinkles, the discoloration, the damage, and his tiny searching eyes—the physical manifestation of some grief. He shakes his head, sighs, then drops the tie he’s been holding back into the pile of rejects.

“No, of course not,” he says, looking down at the candy-cane patterned Ascot. “These aren’t really in style anymore, are they?”

Her grandson is finicky, knows exactly what he wants and if he can’t have his way, well—by God that isn’t going to happen.

Dick says this aloud, repeating it like a mantra. He himself is very much the same: obstinate. He can relate on that level. Never did let her have a dog. He doesn’t like dogs—they are filthy, 32

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obnoxious, and dumb. They lick their own butts and leave coats of fur on the couch and terrible odors in the corners of the house after a day spent alone.

Frustrated now, he refolds the discarded ties with less care than he usually would. His hands are knobby and calloused, but proudly so. He rose from the son of a poor, alcoholic father, to a Johns Hopkins graduate in Mechanical Engineering and all on his own dime, the work of his own industrious two hands. He’s risen to the occasion before and he will do so now. None of the discount ties look exactly right, but there’s a reason for that. Discount ties won’t cut it. Her grandson deserves better than that.

He needs to find the gentleman’s department. Trouble is, he doesn’t know where to start. He’s shopped this mall frequently, but always with her. Looking around, he finds not a single sign pointing the way—only large red CLEARANCE banners swinging from the ceiling and wall-length advertisements displaying doting mothers holding their infants.

He strikes off in the opposite direction, but finds no sign of life. Every department is empty, checkout stations orderly but vacant, coupons stacked neatly beside their registers, bags hung nicely underneath. Everything looks as though it has been deserted in preparation for some disaster. He can hear the echo of his own footsteps, so he begins informing her grandson about Ascots, speaking aloud because there is no one to be surprised by that. Truth is, silence frightens him.

“It’s more of a European style,” he says.

A man needs to know this sort of thing. What works best according to what occasion: casual, fancy, a mixture of the two. He himself has never been a gaudy dresser, though he does prefer garments with color and flair. More than anything, however, he trusts his intuition. He knows the right fit, but only once he’s seen it. His instincts are deeply ingrained, having developed over years of embarrassment. His mother stitched stove-pipers and knickers so he could bear the numbing Baltimore winter sans hand-me-downs. She covered his shoe soles with cardboard to keep them from wearing before she could afford another pair.

Matthew Oglesby

33

He’d grown up ashamed, but grateful. That much could be said.

Would her grandson be grateful? He hadn’t always been. Matter of fact, his careless commentary had often bruised Dick. “Keep the receipt,” Dick once overheard him say regarding a birthday present he’d spent the entire afternoon searching out.

“Try to understand,” she’d say.

“It’s inexcusable—the way they act. All of them! It’s as though we don’t exist, like we’re not flesh and blood, just like them!”

“I know, I know,” she’d say, laughing. “But try to understand.

He’s still young.”

It was easier to absorb these blows with her around to calm him. Now he’s grown soft. And like his weakening body, of which he’s become a trapped tenant, he is more easily humiliated, his feelings more brittle. Lapping Macy’s for a second time now he has wandered into a cruel and baffling fog. He looks around, feels lost and very confused. Where is he going? Where has he been?

“Where the hell is everyone?”

In the silence his whispers echo and he wishes to have them back. Shouldn’t have said that, wouldn’t have said that if she were here. It was she who curbed his inclinations, she who made him a better man. Across from where he stands, between two perfume counters now, he spies the archway that opens into the rest of the mall. It hasn’t been shut off yet—the mall isn’t closed.

But where the heck is everyone?

He approaches the archway, drawn by the faint echo of water slapping water in the food court fountain. When she was hospitalized he and her grandson had each dropped a penny into the fountain on the hospital’s ground floor and wished her luck. But he’d done much more than wish her luck. He’d prayed feverishly and with devotion, the very way she would’ve expected. The senior neurologist at Tallahassee Memorial—a short, curt, angular man with a Spanish accent—had advised him not to worry. He’d said he had to. The neurologist had amused him by agreeing to it in moderation.

Approaching the archway he thinks about what little good 34

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these prayers did, remembering with certainty that she is gone and that is all that matters.

Then a voice cuts in over the intercom.

“Five minutes till closing.”

Something white-hot streaks across his chest, sickening his gut. He has no tie and no time. They are going to close up and kick him out, or else lock him inside. This can’t happen. He turns around, feeling vaguely nauseous, and walks in the general direction of an exit sign. Over and over again he sees her grandson throwing a fit when he turns up empty-handed. He sees him convulsing as she had—body stiff, skin white, fists clenched, arms outstretched at a right angle like those of a praying mantis, head cocked, eyes rolling back in her head. And he hears it too: that gargle of mucus and foam as she slipped out of consciousness, away. During the first seizure he didn’t panic. He knelt down beside her, waiting as she recovered consciousness, praying she recovered consciousness. Then he helped her back into bed, propping her up using two pillows she’d kicked to the floor.

She recovered but couldn’t recall her name and spoke as though there was a thick wad of cotton beneath her tongue, padding her speech. It hadn’t been that way the second time. There had only been two.

He does not like thinking of it.

Presently he begins to lose balance, feeling now as he’d felt stepping off the hospital elevator that second time. Then something pops inside his head, sounding like wind in a tunnel.

Ahead the exit sign flickers red, wavering and becoming more radiant. Then it pulses and everything around him takes on sickening shape. At some point or another he cannot tell one moment from the next.

He finds a chair and sits, keeping his head down, mumbling to stay calm.

“Sir?” It is a faint, familiar voice.

“Sir, are you okay?”

Through clenched eyes he sees a dark figure crossing the aisle.

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Then he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” Dick says, glancing up. It is the maintenance boy, dressed in all-black. “Just needed a moment to sit. I got carried away looking for this, for this—” “For this what, sir?”

But the words won’t come. It’s as though they’ve been kidnapped and carried away. He tries fixing his gaze, but everything shutters—pulls in and out.

“What’re you after sir?”

After.

“Dick,” she’d say, catching him in the pantry. “What’re you after?”

She would brush him aside and quickly locate whatever he’d reorganized the pantry shelves trying to find. If only she were here, he thinks, together we would find the perfect tie. But she is gone now and that is something he must get used to.

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KAITLIN CROCKETT

Where the Sun Takes It Straight, No Chaser First, see the skyline in the bag lady’s brow sag. Say hi to the fisherman bowed over the ledge with a pack on his back.

Watch sea gulls scuttle beneath the legs of bankers eating greasy cubans.

Two girls on a yellow bench share a cigarette in front of the arcade.

Their shoulders are touching.

How many reasons to love, to love the clan of kittens peddling on the steps of St. Mary’s.

Listen! The custodian sweeps tonight. The banyan tree beside the Peacock Motel says J.S. loves Paul forever. Best tapioca pudding is a place on the outskirts where a waitress with Fuck You tattooed on her bicep stacks styrofoam cups to the ceiling.

Kaitlin Crockett

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SCOTTY GILLINGHAM

Last Try at Rape in the Woods Lit by fire and sullen shoulders sweat out the demarcation of where our friendship lies, inside this faceless brown tent.

We wanted soot, didn’t we? We wanted to ask for it, but hairy saliva came up and only a splash of vomited hard candy.

It wasn’t until someone shouted, “Break out your Holy Guns,” that we tore anything.

But then we shaking did—poor ladies, they only wanted meat loaf nights and sugar lumps and two vehicles locked in the garage.

By that fire, we ruined their martyr minds, we filthied even the socks we left on and shawdowed over relenting orange faces.

Only stealing, and grasping at our own contentments. If they fell, it was their fault, we said later. We coughed the life out of our cigarettes and stared at the rain-fly.

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INTERVIEW WITH JANE SPRINGER

BY ROBB MONGOLE In 2006, Jane Springer won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize of Poetry for her debut collection, Dear Blackbird. She has taught many classes at FSU, from where she graduated with a Ph.D in Creative Writing. Currently, she teaches at Hamilton College in New York.

Robb Mongole: Who are you currently reading and what is the last memorable poem you’ve read?

Jane Springer: I just finished reading Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and a Lemon, a lyrical nonfiction piece that marries art with poetry, and the most memorable poem I have recently read is “Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought” by Andrew Hudgins— a soulfully digressive and witty, narrative poem.

RM: Have you felt any added pressure since winning awards like the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and having your book published? Have your writing habits changed since then?

JS: I don’t think of awards so much in terms of how they create pressure as much as how they create opportunities. Occasionally editors ask to see my work, now, and I’m still so accustomed to receiving form-letter rejections that it makes me want to write and ask if they have made a mistake, perhaps, and meant to query someone else.

As to my writing habits, they have not changed much since college, in that I prefer reading and writing to most other activities, so I’m good at finding time to do both.

RM: How do you feel about digital publication? Do you think Springer Interview

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physical publication still has a strong future?

JS: I rather enjoy digital publication—it allows me to sift through new poems from a wide variety of journals, such as the Three Penny Review, New Letters, and The Missouri Review, that are not available in local bookstores, or even my college library.

Then, when I find magazines that publish poems I admire, I am able to subscribe to them and receive more of the same, in print.

Physical publications will exist, I believe, as long as the electricity continues to go out.

RM: What authors have played a big influence on your poetry?

What are some other elements that have influenced your work?

JS: Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has influenced my work as much as anyone—I love how his mythological cities seem more real than the ones on the map, and I love how his otherwise average characters may grow wings or turn into Jesus at the drop of a hat. I am also influenced by Van Gogh — I love his thick brush strokes, folkloric themes, and intense use of color. I’m most at home with a work of art when it alters reality well enough that more realistic landscapes seem bland, by comparison.

RM: Do you make use of any creative outlets besides writing?

Any hobbies that you are passionate about?

JS: I have taken up downhill skiing since I moved North—it’s a wonderfully terrifying sport that my son is much better at than I am—he’s only six years old, and I like how giddy he becomes when he passes me on the slopes. The most creative passion I have, in other words, is my son.

RM: Much of your imagery deals with Southern small town life.

Has moving to New York changed what you write about? Do you find that small town life is the same everywhere?

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JS: In the South, I wrote about the South because it was a miserable, hot, little hell hole that I couldn’t see very far past. Now I write about it because it is a utopian tropic full of lively, diverse characters. So yes, New York has changed—not so much what I write about—but how I perceive what I write about.

Up here, there’s no such thing as a “small town” this far north, as far as I can tell, there are only quaint little “villages” with cute stone churches. Darling chipmunks leave tracks in the snow. The people have whole cabinets devoted to tea and there are no alligators, shotguns, sweet cashiers, or barking dogs. Each 2000-person-or-less town I have lived in has been utterly, uniquely weird.

RM: Some of the poems in Dear Blackbird deal almost entirely with childhood and horses. What role did horses play in your childhood?

JS: Well, the one horse I knew in childhood didn’t like me any too well and threw me the ten or so times I tried to ride him.

The horses from my book lived in a barn where I shoveled shit for a year between “real” jobs, as an adult. My relationship with them was more favorable, I presume, because I fed them and cleaned their stalls. Even then, I wouldn’t say they were fond of me, as there were many days I came a day late and dollar short with the oats.

RM: Your three “Dear Blackbird,” poems are a change of pace from the rest of your poems (and some of my favorites.) What was your inspiration for writing them and why did you choose to write them as epistolaries?

JS: Thank you for the compliment. I wrote the blackbird poems as letters because they came to me in letters—and the voice they are in came from the unknown. I can tell you that I was thinking a good deal about America’s mythology when I wrote those poems, we’re too young a country to have a vast array of myths, Springer Interview

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but we do have OZ with its sprawling fields and proliferation of crows. Those among us who have been scarecrows know what it is like to stand in a field, wanting to come down from a pole, and they have felt the distance between swift wings and straw arms.

RM: What habit do apprentice writers need to break?

JS: I think the answer to that question is different for everyone. Some folks need to form the habit of reading three hours a day and writing three hours a day before they look for habits to break—others need to break the habit of needing approval or praise from their peers, parents, and professors, before they as much as put their pens to the paper. All of which is to say that writing requires little more than otherworldly discipline and a brazen spirit.

RM: If there was something you could change about your undergraduate career, what would it be and why?

JS: I’d smoke less weed, snort less coke, and take more classes in sculpture, banjo, and Japanese Culture, because the former list left me with bad spelling and a void where words like “antecedent” should be, and the latter list, in retrospect, seems charged with the real fun I missed out on.

RM: If you had to hide an elephant somewhere, where would you hide it?

JS: I’m more likely to use it for a centerpiece.

RM: Finally, what do you miss most about Tallahassee? (Friends and family is cheating.)

JS: I miss FSU students, the Sahara and Black Dog, The Warehouse, goats eating kudzu off trees in the mall parking lot, that little bar with the buckhead—his antlers stacked with the dis42

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carded rings of divorcees, and the other bar with the bug-zapper on the pool table, I miss the limbs in the streets after hurricanes and the water up to your hips on Gaines, Jesus-billboards, Bill’s Mini-Mart, gold teeth, drawls, and one person, in particular, whose name it would be cheating to name.

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KRISTINA DIPANO

Drifter’s Sonnet If my home was an old cardboard box or a Jansport backpack or something—then leaving would be easy. Concrete foundations, cedar beams, and all that weight holds the stale dust that tickles anima with acquiescence.

I am not like others: free to roam the asphalt and remaining sprouts of green, as a gypsy with an accumulation of brass bells, beaded necklaces, and lost identities beneath her skirt. If you think about it, confinement isn’t such a pickle.

It has this tendency to hold in small pieces of presence that might leak out of a zipper or scatter in a blanket of air. If you lose your mind, you will be able to find it under the bed or on the end of the kitchen counter near the coffee pot the next morning.

Last night, instead of sleeping, I woke up at 3am to paint my toenails cherrybomb red without having to worry about bears or raccoons.

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JOHANNA POLK

Old Neighborhood Dog black & white photograph

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TAMAR DACHOACH

45/55

20” x 28”

gouache and ink

Tamar Dachoach

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You, stacked 20” x 36”

monoprint

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LOREN MILLER

Knife 18” x 24”

watercolor and guaoche on paper

2008

Loren Miller

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Samson (with televisions) 24” x 48”

acrylic on panel

2009

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BEN SIEGL

Ajax & Cassandra 54” x 24”

oil on canvas

2009

Ben Siegl

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LUKE MUNSON

Still Life with Good Intentions In any other context, we would say “Barbaric!”: the pale face cut up and served in tapers, like the wax-white tilapia fillets we had for lunch: one thinks of obelisks, of course, all displayed anesthetically.

This is what we call a transfer of perceptions, and it’s horizontal. As such, it levels, like a bulldozer, but we may be seeing it out of sequence—no, that’s not right, the scene is in another sequence; distinction says “Hello,” occasions a way, and then gets in it.

So yes, cut the face up, rearrange it in always new places. This is exceedingly moral, and the closer we get to moral excellence, the uglier, and more immoral.

Wasn’t it said, and didn’t I say it, nobility responding to horror? Didn’t I cut the face up, so I could put it together?

Didn’t I take you apart, in the trenches, like Suzuki suggested, and meditate on the emptiness of your skull? Your skull that was empty of a skull. If I am disgusting, don’t I bathe? Isn’t this is a question?

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Nose. Peach-colored nose. Peach color.

Lips widening. Widened enough to fit a bite-stick. a swollen tongue, an apple; part two, screw onto a head which you will slide onto a silver platter that we save for special occasions, and we are feeling very special.

Part three, get back here, I’m not finished with you.

If I am angry enough, I will demand a person.

If I am agitated enough, I will demand a house.

If I burn the house down, I will have rows of timber misaligned. If I am benevolent, I will save the house, and this is exceedingly mimetic.

Luke Munson

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SYDNEY WEINBERG

Fin I’ve had it with poetry: I can’t write it. I’ll leave it to those who know what they’re doing, gathering accoutrements at obscene hours the quill, the blood, the shit-stick— for here are the stones here the paper, the eraser, and the razor, here the monster sanding my fingers down to nubs forking my tongue knotting my eyeballs by the strings beneath my chin, oh imagine the wait for eyes to raisin.

You might write then, you might observe the world with your head thrown back. I overflow my banks with words which drown no one, demolish no houses, but stamp the postage of the earth across my forehead. I am voted best mailman of Auschwitz, blind and in love with my terrible white letters until the sun burns up and there are no metaphors for the way we go out.

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LEVITY TOMKINSON

The Winter I Tried to Turn Your Concrete Porch into an Ice-Skating Rink Had I fallen on the ice that never came, I would see where you are.

On my elbow, or the lower part of my knee— where it’s always hard to shave the hair away. My childhood affinity to pick scabs even after they stung and the blood beaded would have been my rabbit’s foot, the scar forming like a snapdragon— which Gramma taught me to make talk, squeezing the outside, their silk tongues stretching back to pollen uvulas.

I guillotined them from their stems, not wanting to bend to hear my voice, watching mimicry in shades of violet with clear throats.

And this is the winter they cannot say

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anything wrong and so they are silent while your ashes are spread in the Poconos, their roots able to tell whether or not they have already spoken.

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NATHAN TAYLOR

Kentucky Gentleman Todd’s funeral is tomorrow at ten in the morning. The funeral home where the service is going to be is this little white house just outside the center of town. The house has this sign in front of it with some silly little picture of a sailboat heading down a river into a red sunset. I see the picture of the sailboat, coasting down that peaceful river towards the end of time, and I think of how my best friend’s mangled body is probably sprawled naked on a table in a dark corner in the basement of that little white house.

I’m looking at the invitation that stands on our kitchen counter. It’s got a picture of Todd on the front, and I recognize the moment. My wife took the photo, and I was standing next to him with my left arm around him. I’ve been cut out of the picture, but you can still see my hand on his shoulder. My hairy knuckles and my wedding ring too. He smiles from ear to ear.

“Honey, can you set the table?” My wife Theresa is standing in front of the stove, grinding pepper into a pot on the red hot burner.

“Yeah,” I say.

When I finish, Theresa brings in the food. Mashed potatoes, green beans, and a big steak from the butcher’s, all meticulously arranged on two white ceramic plates. Between us is a vase at the center of the table that holds putrid water and a tired white rose that droops over the glass lip.

“How is it?” she says, forking a few green beans into her mouth. She looks up at me, smiling, stressing wrinkles that have been deepening for years. “I tried something different.”

“It’s dry.”

“Oh.” Her face is just visible over the vase, and she looks tired.

She gives her steak a few prods with her fork. “Do you want me to make you another one? The way you like it?”

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“No, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

I could have been sitting right here. Right when his body was crushed by two tons of fiberglass.

“I had your suit dry cleaned today.” Theresa pours gravy onto her mashed potatoes. “It’s hanging on the closet door.”

I nod.

She says, “I can leave work at nine-thirty and pick you up here, then we can go.”

I look over at the card on the counter. Todd’s smiling face, red with drunkenness. My hand on his shoulder.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to make another one,” she says.

“You know,” I say, “We don’t have to go together. I can just meet you there.”

We finish dinner and clear the table. I’m rinsing my plate in the sink when Theresa asks me if I need anything, and I tell her no, thanks. She tells me that I am an asshole and she storms off to the back porch with one of her novels.

I grab a handful of ice cubes from the freezer and throw them into a small glass. I open up the cabinet by the window and the bottles inside rest in a neat little row: Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, 1792, Maker’s Mark, Jim Beam, and Kentucky Gentleman. Typically, I’ll save Kentucky Gentlemen for when the day’s drinking has already killed off my taste for good bourbon, but I find myself craving something foul. I unscrew the cap and fill the glass. It’s satisfying, seeing the cubes of ice cling together as they melt away.

When you swallow, good bourbon goes down smooth, and then an intense warming sensation shoots up your throat and into your nose. It blankets your entire head, and then trickles all the way down to your toes. It’s one of those feelings that you think will last forever. But the Gentleman is not good bourbon.

The Gentleman goes down hard. The warming sensation comes up like a blast of fire from the exhaust of a jet plane, and it tugs your nose hairs on the way out, just for good measure. “It’s like living and dying in every sip.” That’s what Todd used to say.

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When his boat slammed against the sharp rocks on the shore, he had a woman named Sherry with him instead of me. She made it out okay though. A helicopter came in and took her to a nearby hospital. Aside from a few bumps and bruises, she got away with a sprained ankle. Todd had been trying to screw her for a while, and he died trying to screw her.

“You’re turning your brain into mush.” Theresa stands over me, clutching a paperback with curled corners to her chest. I’m sitting on the sofa watching a tampon commercial. She says, “I’m going to bed.”

“Alright,” I say, eyes on the television. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

I count the sound of her footsteps as she climbs the stairs, and I imagine the rosy pads of her feet that I used to massage every night before we made love.

On the television, there’s one of those cop mystery case-solving shows, and the primary suspect is explaining to the detective that he is a psychic. He can’t read minds, he says, but he can see people’s futures. All he has to do is touch a person, and he can see every possible route their lives may take. He says he can make anyone do anything. He mentions something about Chaos Theory. I start to entertain the idea when the detective tells him he is full of shit and hits him with a chair.

I am standing at the bottom of the staircase looking into my own eyes. Hanging from the wall is a framed picture of myself from six months ago holding my wife. We were on Todd’s boat and had been drinking all day, watching him fail miserably at chasing around other men’s women. “He’s harmless,” my wife would lie to the women’s boyfriends and husbands, and I would distract them by offering them a drink and talking bourbon.

There’s no telling how many times Theresa and I saved Todd from getting beaten by protective young men.

Todd introduced me to Theresa. He told me that if I was smart, I would marry her, and if I did, he had to be the best man. I did, and he was. Something about Todd, no matter how many things the years stole from us, when we were with him it Nathan Taylor

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was like being newlyweds again. The love came back.

We enjoyed it when we loved each other again, but we wanted to be able to do it on our own. So we decided to try. We took a weekend for ourselves and I got tickets for a musical that she loves and I made reservations at the place I proposed to her, a little restaurant called Bel Giorno. I was even going to get on one knee and recite the exact words I said years ago that I still kept in my sock drawer. I got her a ring with a diamond that was twice as big as the first one. We were all dressed up and walking out the front door when we got the call.

They told me that Todd had no idea it was coming. It was dark and he was drunk and screaming across the water at top speed and he couldn’t have seen anything in front of him if he tried.

They told me there were some who saw it happen. They would have warned him, they said, but the roar of his engine was so loud that he never would have heard his radio. All they could do was watch.

Now the ring is in its little box in the back of my liquor cabinet.

There are a dozen more pictures on the wall going up the stairs, placed in chronological order with the most recent at the bottom. The idea, my wife has told me, is that we can relive every year we have spent together every morning when we come down the stairs. But now, as my eyes jump from picture to picture, I see my wife get slimmer, her face younger, and her eyes brighter.

At the top of the stairs is a picture of us at our wedding. Cake smears both our faces, and our smiling lips are pressed together.

A piece of icing is perched on her left eyelash.

I stumble into the bedroom and Theresa is still awake. She’s sitting in front of a mirror in the corner brushing her hair. She’s something out of a ghost story. The translucent maiden who died starving, sitting in front of a mirror, forever brushing because her hair was never quite straight enough.

My wife’s reflection is staring at me. I clumsily kick off my shoes and begin fighting the buttons of my shirt.

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“Did you put your bourbon away?”

I think of the Kentucky Gentleman sitting on the table in front of the couch, and the glass, too.

“Whoops,” I say. I throw my crumpled shirt on the floor and fall face first onto the bed.

“That’s alright,” Theresa sighs to herself, “It’s not a big deal.”

She turns her head as she examines her hair and I can see the left side of her face. She is still wearing her earrings.

“I think we should divorce.” I roll my eyes around. My contacts are dry. She turns and stares into my eyes, looking through me. “You want me to say it again?” I blink a few times.

“You’re drunk.”

“This will never work.”

“Don’t say that.” She stands up and faces me as I lie limp on the sheets. Her fist squeezes the handle of the brush. She is still trying to hold on. “This is about Todd.”

“I should have been there,” I say.

She says nothing.

“He’d be alive if I was there.”

“No,” she says. “You’d be dead too, you fucking idiot!” Her brush flies across the room and puts a dull pain in my side. It bounces off the bed and onto the floor. Theresa stands there with her hands at her side, her fingers clenched around invisible throats. She is crying, but her eyes are brimming with ferocity.

“Maybe you should have been there, you’re so in love with him.”

Theresa slams the door when she leaves the room and I jump from the bed. I jerk open the door and Theresa is walking down the stairs. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” she says.

“Don’t.” She grabs her car keys from a hook by the door. I take a picture from the wall, the one from our wedding, and I am surprised to feel the felt on the back. She begins to turn towards me when I hurl it over the banister.

The corner of the frame pierces the hardwood floor and little pieces of glass pour across the ground at Theresa’s feet. She jumps back and trips over herself into the front door.

Nathan Taylor

61

“Shit.” I rush to the stairs and I put my foot too far forward.

One hand on the railing isn’t enough, and I try to catch my balance on the wall, but I end up swiping my hand across three or four pictures, sending them tumbling down before me. I slide down the stairs with my left leg pinned and pulled back under me and I land in a puddle of glass and broken picture frames.

I feel bits of glass and wood dig into my back and I extend my hand to Theresa, but she scrambles to her feet and flings the door open before running out into the yard.

My leg throbs, and I roll over onto more debris that sticks into my chest. I push my hands into the glass and stand up. Pain tears through my hands and chest and back, and I remove the last picture from the wall, the one of the past year of our lives.

I run out into the yard and the door of Theresa’s car slams shut. She turns the ignition as I stagger onto the pavement in front of the car. The headlights unleash a flood of light onto the driveway and I shield my eyes with my right hand, my left grasping the framed picture. I hold the picture out through the light, hoping for something. Anything.

The wail of the car horn rips through the air and I send the picture soaring towards the windshield. The blasting horn dies with the sound of cracking glass. I hear the wooden frame scrape across the hood of the car and clatter onto the driveway. I fall to my knees and blood drips from my stinging body, freckling the pavement with a ring of red blots.

I hear the car door open, and I strain my eyes to see Theresa, but the headlights blend everything into white.

“Theresa?”

I listen for her soft voice to tell me that everything is okay. I listen for her to say that this isn’t my fault, that she understands.

But instead I hear the sound of her feet slapping against the sidewalk until it fades into nothing. All that remains is the gentle whir of the engine and the sound of my neighbors standing in their front lawns in their robes and slippers, holding each other, talking in hushed voices.

“Theresa?”

62

The Kudzu Review

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Keith Brinkmann is sick of pretending. After graduation this spring, he will join the Carthusian order. If he finds this is not his vocation, however, he will film a documentary about life in Bozeman, Montana. Actually, he will probably move back in with his parents and work as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

Zac Cady is a Creative Writing undergraduate at FSU. He is interning with science fiction publisher. Zac works and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Kaitlin Crockett is a senior Creative Writing major graduating Spring ‘10.

A lover of art and the written word, her dream is to be a bookmaker and independent publisher.

Multimedia artist working in photography, video and audio, painting, drawing, and soft sculpture, Tamar Dachoach enjoys combining different media and constantly learning new techniques. Themes such as human anatomy, psychological phenomena (disorders, skill acquisition, sleep, fear) and the absurd occur widely within her work. She will graduate from FSU in the spring of 2010 with a BFA in Studio Art. Lauren Dimmer is an undergraduate Creative Writing major at Florida State University who loves neoformalism, structure, meter, and rhyme.

She firmly believes that the most radical poems of the postmodern age are Elizabethan sonnets. Her work has been published in Connotations Press: An Online Artifact, and the Yeti. Her other hobbies include class warfare, swimming, and chain smoking expensive menthol cigarettes.

During her undergraduate study at Florida State University, Kristina DiPano decided to double major in Psychology and Creative Writing in order to have a more inventive license in her exploration of humanity. Along with taking workshops in all genres offered, she served as a leader for the English Creative Writing FIG cluster. She looks forward to continuing her pursuit of creative writing at the graduate level.

Robert Gainey is a Creative Writing major graduating in April 2010. He’s from St. John’s County, where he plans to return and enroll in EMT and Firefighter courses. Currently, he is a member of FSU’s First Responder Unit. His writing has been influenced by his time as a lumberjack, his duties as a medical responder, his family, and his travels abroad. All he has learned can be summed in the following: life is good, and all bleeding stops.

Scotty Gillingham is a Creative Writing major at Florida State University.

He laughs a lot and spreads himself too thin, but that doesn’t stop his pow-

erful willingness to forsake all things for a friend. If he could, he’d learn and know the arts of blacksmithing, woodworking, art, bicycle maintenance, music, traveling, tattooing, cuisine, distilling whiskey, cartography, volcanology and general mayhem. He says he wants to talk to you.

From the depths of his lair, dimly lit by a sourceless incandescence, Chris Knight adorns canvas with pigmented oil. Locked away with only tomes written in forgotten tongues as company, he projects his indirect understanding of the surface world in the form of mythic imagery. Forever lost to the land of men (and women, as he reasons), his legend is poorly understood by scholars.

Amanda Lovallo is a senior Creative Writing major set to graduate in the fall. She hopes to continue studying poetry in grad school and avoid getting a real job for as long as possible. Amanda is happy to be published in the Kudzu Review alongside her classmates.

Colleen Rae Matthes is currently studying in the B.F.A. Studio Art program. Raised in a military family, Colleen spent her childhood tramping about Navy bases along the eastern coast, but will always claim Florida as her home. A lover of oil painting, fine wine and ranch dressing, she hopes her work seduces the viewer.

Loren Miller’s paintings tend to reflect the fact that he was born and raised in a country town in Northwest Florida. He loves the ideas of heritage and nostalgia, especially how they relate to memories. He loves the rural South and how spiritual the outdoors can be.

Luke Munson is a senior majoring in Creative Writing. He hails from Oklahoma and misses all the cattle.

Matthew Oglesby grew up in Atlanta then moved to Tallahassee in the fall of 2005. He will graduate this spring with a degree in Creative Writing.

This is his first short story.

Johanna Polk captures life in a 5x7.

Benjamin Siegl is a third-year Studio Art major currently enrolled in the BFA program with a primary focus on drawing and painting.

Nathan Taylor is a Creative Writing major. Born in Fort Lauderdale, FL, he grew up in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. He hopes to relocate to Los Angeles after he graduates. He’s been writing on his own since he was a freshman in high school and plans to continue as long as he can.

Levity E. Tomkinson was named after a license plate her mom found in an advertisement in an issue of Sports Illustrated. Being a server and having to

introduce herself, she gets many bad jokes about levitation. Writing about her family members and their past makes her feel justified in her writing, and she would like to thank them for their inspiration and perseverance.

Without them, she might have never found her “gold mine.” Her Pit Bull/ German Pointer mix named Rinlee (aka Baby Rinrin) can give hugs and kisses on command and is the love of her life. Recently, she bought a very pretty dress.

Sydney Weinberg finds writing her own biography somewhat uncomfortable. In the future, when she is very famous and successful, Sydney will have minions for this sort of thing. Said biographies will go on at length about the early flowering of Sydney’s extraordinary gifts, invite comparison with other famous and successful people in all earnestness, and hint darkly at her destructive tendencies/alcoholism/spousal abuse as proof of her delicate and artistic nature. Sydney, by this time a reclusive cat lady self-exiled in the foothills of the Pyrenees, will refuse to comment.

Special Thanks to Jack Clifford & Scott Kopel