Author: wojo

Challenging Everest

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Emma Collins

 

High above the world stand the peaks of mighty mountains, beacons for humble humans to come and prove their strength, courage, and resilience. Humans are unable to turn away from Mother Nature’s challenges, driven by some unquenchable need to conquer and claim her. But in all her wild glory, she does not go quietly into that good night of submission.

Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak at nearly six miles above sea level (29,029 feet, up there with the cruising altitude of a commercial jet) has claimed more than 250 lives. In all her cold, barren, thin-air rapture the mountain attracts thrill-seekers from across the globe every year to risk their lives for glory. While most deaths are attributed to avalanche, such as the 2015 avalanche triggered by the 7.8 Nepali earthquake that claimed 22 lives on the mountain, many more were horrific climbing accident tragedies.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest chronicles the events that took place on May 10 and 11, 1996, when a freak blizzard struck the mountain while climbers were attempting to reach her summit.  The movie follows Adventure Consultants, a company that offers professional guides to take climbers to the peak. The commercialization of Everest’s summit is a controversial topic that continues to draw criticism today; the bodies of climbers who perished on the ascent still line the path to the summit. Rob Hall, played by Jason Clarke, first popularized guided Everest climbs and lead a team of climbers during the 1996 events. ) For those unfamiliar with the historic disaster, the following information may spoil the movie.)

Eight people perished in the blizzard, including Hall, whose body still remains on the mountain.  Adventure Consultants lost four clients. The movie tells a story of human error, survival, and loss.  For those willing to accept historical events being glamorized for Hollywood entertainment, Kormákur offers a stressful adventure that may often leave one feeling breathless with the thin air of impossible peaks.  The cast is well chosen, although at times there are lengthy scenes of excessive emotional examination that, while offering a heart-wrenching look into the events, can feel heavy handed.  The truth behind the story offers enough emotionally charged reality.

The movie’s portrayal of Everest shows beautiful, barren landscapes contrasted with lush and untamed wilderness, a contrast that underscores the foreignness of one of Earth’s most treacherous landscapes. Scenes of home life, specifically the domesticity of the family of climber Beck Weathers (played by Josh Brolin), help to articulate the almost familiar tone in which such a monumental tragedy is told. These were not strangers beyond the reach of mortal men: they were simple people with extraordinary dreams. Kormákur offers basic medical terminology to help articulate the impossibility of the human body at 30,000 feet, but it is through the sounds of labored breathing, pained cries, and frozen, half-dead stares that the challenge Everest is made plain.

While many specifics surrounding the climbers’ deaths may never be known, it is nonetheless heartbreaking to watch as those men and women, all seeking glory for different means, perish in the face of the unthinkable. Several aspects of the story Kormákur chooses to tell almost cause fury in the watcher, as some climbers die in the face of others’ ignorance. To go into this movie looking for a Sunday evening relaxation is to be foolishly misinformed of just what the story entails.

Entertaining? Yes.

Heartbreaking? Even more so.

Everest attempts to articulate something Hall himself died trying to instill in his climbers: respect the mountain. For in an instant, she can hurl you into oblivion.

Contributing Editor Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

 

Why Maria Edgeworth Matters

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Sean O’Rourke

Believe me, I know. A nineteenth- century novelist may not seem the sexiest subject in the world. But try this: think of Maria Edgeworth as a woman who attempted to exert her influence far beyond the boundaries that her patriarchal society had set for her, who worked in a rebellious and war-ravaged land, and whose own life was threatened by a massive uprising that would define political life in her country for the next century.

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth

Edgeworth was a descendant of English settlers, long since integrated into Irish society,  known as the Anglo-Irish. These people were often Protestant and landholding, but they occupied a liminal space: they were neither entirely Irish, nor were they entirely English. This put her and her family in danger when the Irish rose up in 1798 and she was forced to flee her estate by oncoming rebels. She also became one of the most influential novelists of the early nineteenth century despite, or perhaps because, she was marginalized, both by her ethnicity and by her sex.

She certainly does not hold this influence today though. Writers like Dickens and Austen have stayed a part of our literary canon and continue to influence writers and readers. Edgeworth has fallen by the wayside.

Turn your mind then from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Today we’re dealing with issues like sexism, xenophobia, and racism. Look at our election process. Look at how political careers are bolstered by these qualities. Look at how we allow ourselves to be divided even from people within our own country, by race, by religion, by politics, even by gender. We’ve seen many tragic instances recently of the desolation left in the wake of denying the basic humanity of our fellow human beings. In the light of viewing our broken world, I’m made even sadder by Edgeworth’s exclusion from our literary canon.

I challenge you to go to your local library and take out Edgeworth’s Ennui and read it. Look at how people in nineteenth century Ireland were divided by religious differences, by political differences, and by racial differences. See how women were excluded then as they often are now. And then look to see how much of these problems within the novel are caused by a stubborn refusal to communicate with one another as equals. In short, Maria Edgeworth identifies a lack of conversation in her society.

You see, Maria Edgeworth, since she was an Anglo-Irish landlord, was able to have conversations with a great many people: people of her own class, English people, and Irish people, tenants, and landlords. She conversed and from that found a philosophy of equality between English subjects and Irish subjects. She was not what we would now identify as an Irish nationalist, but she believed in equality for those oppressed subjects living under the crown.

Part of the problem with oppression is that it silences people. Many Irish were not allowed the power to converse in parliamentary debates because they were Catholic, or because they were not educated enough. In addition, since the Irish parliament in Dublin dissolved itself in 1801, there was no real political power in the hands of the native Irish and with Irish landlords. Religious, and economic differences also unofficially barred them from having many conversations with the Anglo-Irish and the English, especially due to the fact that many Irish people only spoke Irish, having never been taught English. Maria Edgeworth, however, through her book, is a champion of the conversation that was so repressed in this period.

In her book, the narrator travels to Ireland and has many conversations with other Anglo-Irish lords, with his native Irish tenants, and even with a loyal Scotsman who proves to be one of his greatest allies. These conversations lead him away from the philosophy of violent repression and towards a desire to educate his tenants and improve their lives and he only learns to do those by actually talking to them as equals. 

It seems a simple, perhaps even obvious solution to many systemic societal problems until you realize how little it actually happens. We are cloistered in our neighborhoods, in our jobs, in our college campuses. Our class system may be less obvious, but that does not make it any less damaging to those who get ignored and whose voices are silenced by our lacking the knowledge that having open and honest conversation could remove this silence. We could use a bit of education by Edgeworth.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that having the odd conversation with people you don’t usually talk to is going to end all violence and produce peace and harmony amongst all religions, nationalities, and economic classes. However, I think by seeing how Edgeworth uses conversations to overcome the boundaries, that we might be better able to deal with issues such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia more adequately, more peacefully, and more compassionately.

That has been one of the great joys of reading Edgeworth and reading in general. It’s one of those old ideas that your English teachers keep telling you over and over again: that what you’re reading is still relevant today. It’s one of those things we hear over and over again, take for granted, then fail to truly consider. With Edgeworth, the power, relevance, and potential application of literature becomes quite clear. This is what makes her so interesting and so incredibly important.

Sean O’Rourke is a senior at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. As an English major, he is a part of the Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society and aspires to teach English at the collegiate level.

Photo credit: Portrait of Maria Edgeworth. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015. http://quest.eb.com/search/300_209998/1/300_209998/cite

 

 

Panic Button

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16
 Assunta Del Buono / John Birdsall MR / John Birdsall Social Issues Photo Library / Press Association Images / Universal Images Group

 Assunta Del Buono / John Birdsall MR / John Birdsall Social Issues Photo Library / Press Association Images / Universal Images Group

by A.J. Andrews

 

Mom fell off the bed today and fractured her distal humerus, commonly known as the elbow. A knock at the door in the early morning caused her to startle and jump. Doc says she’ll wear a ring fixator on her upper arm for the next couple months, or until the bone and soft tissue heal. Nothing major.

Mom’s at Brookdale Oceanside Senior Living Center near San Luis Obispo, where grassy knolls tempt drought and panic buttons rest around the wrists and necks and in the hands and bed stands of the aged and infirm. She should have moved to Brookdale eight years ago, when she had two back-to-back massive heart attacks. But she was too proud. It wasn’t until her cardiologist told her she was at high risk for another heart attack due to her 86 years and declining health that she conceded.

Upon reluctantly moving into Brookdale, she acceded to the reception of a panic button only if she could place it on her bed stand instead of around her neck or wrist.

The ergonomic panic button fit comfortably in her wrinkled and vascular right hand, the same hand that held mine and dissipated my insecurities as a child. I’ve imagined her last seconds in my mind more than once since I was a child, but I never imagined the panic button. Or the cat.

One morning at the door of her apartment, unit E7, she found a caring couple inquiring if the Siamese cat seen wandering about the Whispering Oaks section of Brookdale was hers. Apparently the cat had a fondness for E7, and had been seen loitering around the unit for several weeks. Perhaps a former owner had lived and died there.

Mom has an unfavorable history with cats, specifically the Siamese that belonged to her first husband, whom she married at the age of 15. Her husband hated women. He was a trainman, a stiff-haired miser, set in his ways. This was in Appalachia in the 1940’s, home to the good old C&O railroad, hauling coal with enough swingin’ dicks to shovel it.

His savings accrued compounded interest, and he amassed a moderate fortune. The Siamese cat, he felt, was his lucky charm.  He was a drinker and a fighter and an abuser. He was superstitious at home and a Christian when he went to jail. He and that cat were kindred souls in meanness, perhaps brothers in a former life. He told Mom he found it on the train. She liked neither of them. Mom considered cats feral animals who take and do not give.

One night back in Appalachia, alone, with waddling baby girls 11 months apart in age drifting off to sleep, and her stress slowly ebbing, Mom took a seat in the living room to spend an hour before the children’s father returned from work.

Sitting in her chair with an opened King James in her lap, she saw the curtains covering the closed transom window—which was about eight feet from where she sat—swaying. I can only explain what happened next as an acute stress response. On the babies’ father’s liquor shelf sat an antique crysta,l Irish-cut brandy decanter. She grasped it by its neck and swung and thrashed at the curtains until a couple or several or many resounding thunks and piercing shrieks prompted her to stop. With heart racing and mind following suit, she thought, “I got ‘im,” and the curtains ceased to sway

From the ledge of the window fell the cat, making a final thunk on the trampled-thin nylon carpeting below.

When the cat woke up it didn’t walk right. Pondering an explanation and dreading retribution, she remembered it was her husband’s night to go to the The Depot, a hole-in-the-wall for trainmen to congregate and drink and get a woman or two before they went home to the wife and kids. So she had a few hours to spare and some laudanum to calm her down and help her feign sleep before the creak of the door and stumble of work boots on the kitchen floor signaled his arrival. But in the drunken man’s stupor he wouldn’t notice anything different about the cat.

 

                        ***

 

Back at Unit E7 in the Whispering Oaks section of Brookdale Oceanside, there was movement at the transom window was open a few inches. No breeze to note, but the curtain swayed. A Siamese cat put his svelte head in through the curtains first, and, not sensing danger, contorted herself in such a way that she slipped through the opening and proceeded to plant herself on the polyester-upholstered chair that sat beside the bed stand that held the panic button. Mom’s anxiety set in at the sight of the cat, her heart rate increased and the dreadful pain she at first attributed to her broken elbow spread to her chest and neck. The cat watched, licked its forequarters. The panic button beckoned, but was not pressed.

She looked at the cat tenderly, smiled, and went to sleep.

 

A.J. Andrews escaped Los Angeles to live in relative obscurity in Eastern Europe, where he milks goats, makes cheese and writes about challenges of human condition. This is his first piece of fiction.

Photo credit: Older People. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015.
http://quest.eb.com/search/158_2437433/1/158_2437433/cite

A Taste for Tea

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

 

Anna Liebling

 

I was never a tea person. Ever since I surreptitiously sipped my father’s iced coffee at the age of three, I have preferred the comforting smell of those oily, roasted beans. Tea can certainly be shared with a grandmother, and used as a sure remedy for a stomachache, but, in essence, all it consists of is hot water and some leaves. My apathy towards tea was exacerbated when my parents took my brother and me to live in India for three months to broaden our perspective and showing us that our comfortable, American way of life was not found everywhere. In India tea is as embedded in the culture as the bindi, that mark the foreheads of women.

For the first half of the trip, my family and I lived in the northernmost region of India in the middle of the Himalayan Mountains and stayed with a woman named Yaan Chen. Tea was made on her two-burner stove more times in a single day than I make my bed in a month. The first time Yaan Chen served me tea, carrying it on a tray, smiling, and saying, “Tea, Miss?,” I politely accepted, although I was not too keen on drinking it. Yet when that steaming cup of impossibly sweet chai slid down my throat, it was like drinking mother’s love in liquid form.

She served us tea several times a day, and for the first few days I enjoyed every hot, dense sip. However, after a week, I yearned for my familiar mug of coffee, and soon, even the sight of a teacup made me feel queasy. I accepted the chai anyway, because Yaan Chen had been so kind.

But one day, when Yaan Chen reverently bent over with her heavy tray of tea, I said, “No thank you. I’m really full.” Her smile faltered for only a moment, but it was enough to make me feel as if I had leveled a mortal blow. After repeated refusals, though, it became easier

Despite Yaan Chen’s struggle with English, she was able to communicate with us through her love and compassion. When I impertinently displayed my American teenage exasperation to my parents in front of her, she seemed to tacitly understand and never judged. On quiet nights, she invited my stepmother and me to cook dinner with her, showing us how to roll the flour for the chapati bread and pat it flat between our clumsy hands or how to fill the momo dumplings with just the right amount of vegetables. Yaan Chen laughed with us when our momos flopped over.

At mealtimes, she made sure that our plates were filled before she ate, and if she did not think that there would be enough for everyone, she would not eat, saying, “Oh, no thank you ma’am, not hungry.” Living with Yaan Chen showed me the virtue in being selfless and loving, peaceful and still.

At the end of two months, it was time for my family and me to continue our travels. On our last day with Yaan Chen, the air was filled with sadness. For the last time, our hostess prepared the tea. This time, when she offered her tray, I accepted with a sincere smile of gratitude for her many kindnesses. It was then, as I put the cup to my lips and drank, that it struck me that I genuinely regretted those weeks in which I had denied this drink, this ritual. I realized how much I would thirst for Yaan Chen’s steaming hot cup of chai, and even more, her omnipresent smile and the motherly affection that was steeped into every cup. Gratefully, I drank.

Anna Liebling is a former Clark University student now completing a degree in Environmental Studies at Naropa University, Boulder, Colo.

Photo credit: Tea. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015.
http://quest.eb.com/search/156_2408648/1/156_2408648/cite

La Nevada/The Snowfall

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

 

by Anna Liebling

 

La Nevada

 

Mi anhelo por ti es como la nieve–

cae levemente, pero acumula cada momento

con la intención de quedarse un rato.

Me enfrías los huesos y los puntas de los dedos,

y me haces ansiar el calor de tu aliento,

que es visible en el aire frío y me recuerda a

espirar.

                         Snow Covered Mountain Framed By Snow Covered Evergreen Trees Against A Blue Sky; Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada

                         Snow Covered Mountain Framed By Snow Covered Evergreen Trees Against A Blue Sky; Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada

 

The Snowfall

 

My longing for you is like the snow-

it falls lightly, but accumulates every moment

with the intention of staying a while.

You chill my bones and my fingertips,

and make me crave the warmth of your breath,

which is visible in the cold air and reminds me

to exhale.

 

Anna Liebling is a former Clark University student now completing a degree in Environmental Studies at Naropa University, Boulder, Colo.

Photo credit: Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015.
http://quest.eb.com/search/312_675353/1/312_675353/cite

Eddie and His Peacoat

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Tom Matthews

 

By Sirimiri at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons

By Sirimiri at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons

Eddie Florence usually wore the peacoat. It was his best winter coat, a Christmas present from his his mother. He never left the house without it on.

Eddie got off his train at Union Station and took the city bus to his house. He climbed up the steps of his family’s modest two-floor home and burst through the front door.

“I’m home!”

No reply. A bit surprised, Eddie placed his bags on the living room floor. He walked out into the kitchen and hollered. No answer. Not wanting to waste a minute of break, he grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down a note: “Going out. Call if you need me. -Eddie”

Eddie called up Sally and asked her to pick him up, and  minutes later he heard a car honk outside. He threw on his peacoat and hurried outside. Sally was parked in front of his house, checking her makeup in the rearview mirror.

Eddie climbed in. “Long time no see my friend, how are you?”

“I was awful, but now I’m great because it’s break and I get to see you, but mostly because it’s break.”

“Ah, but you said it, so you mean it.”

“Yes, Eddie, I was just dying to see you.”

He put his hand to her forehead, “Ms. Hayward, you are looking rather ill and could faint any second now, please, let me treat you.” He quickly leaned over and kissed her.

“I forgot to tell you I have mono.”

Eddie rolled his window down and spat.

“Looks like you’re gonna die with me.” She  winked at him.

They headed toward downtown.

“I can’t remember the last time I ate today,” he said.

“What do you mean you can’t remember?”

“I don’t know, but please pull in somewhere before I pass out.”

“No. You are a prisoner in my car now. We aren’t going anywhere. Except for a really long drive until you pass out, and I can throw your body in a ditch somewhere.”

They pulled into the parking lot of The Fix, a small 50’s style burger and shake joint. They were seated at a red booth across from one another.

“I want a chocolate shake,” she said.

“Just a shake?”

“Yeah, I’m not too hungry.”

“Are you sure? I don’t wanna hear you whine later.”

“Yes, I’m sure and shut up!”

Sally ordered her shake. Eddie ordered water and a burger with American cheese, lettuce, mustard, and ketchup. He stood up to take off his peacoat and hung it up on a hook attached to their booth.

He sat down and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. He put it to his lips and raised a lighter to it slowly.

“Eddie, stop! You can’t smoke in here!”

“Why not? I thought this place was like the 50’s.”

“You can’t smoke in here! What are you, crazy?!”

“Relax, Sally-boo, I was just messing with you.”

“You are such a jerk.”

“If you don’t relax we really will have to call up a doctor.”

Their waiter, a tall, burly man, who showed no sense of urgency, brought their food.

“Anything else?” he asked insincerely.

“Yeah, can we get an EKG for this lovely lady?”

“Stop it!” Sally blurted as she playfully hit his hand.

The waiter let out a sigh, mumbled, “Good one,” and walked away.

“Gosh, you’re an idiot. You can’t even make a waiter laugh, and they get paid to pretend to like you.”

“That guy probably doesn’t laugh.”

Sally mumbled, “Mhmm,” as she stirred her straw around in her chocolate shake.

Anyways, how are you? I mean, how’s school and all?”

“It’s good, I mean it’s, you know—school.”

Eddie was putting his burger away quickly. Sally noticed him eating aggressively and warned, “Slow down before you choke.”

Eddie looked up and nodded.

“Anyways, how’s school going for you? And please, don’t talk with a mouth full. Chew first.”

“It’s okay.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Uh. Not really.”

“Okay. Let me call Jake West, he’ll talk to me.”

“He’s a douche.”

Sally struck a stern face at Eddie and looked him in the eyes.

“Okay, okay, I’ll talk. But he’s still a douche. Anyways. I hate school. It’s awful. I’m surrounded by all these pseudo-intellectuals, and I can’t stand it. I mean, you can’t have a normal conversation with any of these guys. They all think what they have to say is the most prophetic, earth-shattering jargon to come out of a 20-year-old.”

Sally sat silently. She watched as Eddie became more and more excited with his words.

“They all walk around in their Oxfords and peacoats as if what they’re doing is so important.”

With a confused look on her face Sally interrupted, “You wear a peacoat.”

“What?” Eddie snapped.

“You wear a peacoat. You wore one here.”

“Seriously, Sally? My mother gave that to me for Christmas. You know how she takes gifts so personal. What, am I not supposed to wear it?”

“No, but why are you criticizing other people for wearing one?”

“Because they wear it for a different reason. They wear it because they think it makes them look important and that it accentuates their pseudo-intellect.”

Sally recoiled at  each word.

“Okay, whatever, Eddie. I was just asking how school was, I wasn’t looking for a rant.”

“Rant? Who’s ranting? You asked me how school is and I’m telling you.”

“Okay.”

“Am I not allowed to have an opinion? Am I supposed to think everyone is great? Is that what you think? Everyone is great? Everyone is just so damn funny and smart and nice?”

“Eddie, can you please stop. You’re causing a scene.”

“You think this is a scene? This is a conversation. We’re talking.”

“No. You’re being obnoxious.”

Eddie starting laughing in a high-pitched hysterical laugh.

“You think I’m obnoxious? Hahahaha!”

Sally was turning red. She stared at her shake.  She lifted her purse from the booth and put the strap over her left shoulder.

Eddie took a loud sip of water and finished it off.

“Are you gonna finish that shake?”

“No.”

Sally’s phone rang.

“Hello?”

Eddie sat there with a bored look on his face. Sally pulled the phone away from her ear and mouthed “sorry” to him.

“I’m at the Fix with Eddie…who’s there?”

Eddie got up and put his peacoat on and headed to the men’s room. Walking with his hands in his pockets and a pissed off look on his face, he replayed in his head Sally telling him she wasn’t looking for a rant. He kicked the door open and stormed in. “Rant! That wasn’t a damn rant. I can rant if you want!” He shouted to himself.

He walked up to a sink and turned on the cold water. He cupped his hands and let the water fill them and splashed it on his face. He grabbed a paper towel, and dried his face. He stood briefly staring at a picture of a jukebox hanging on the wall. He started thinking about how many fights jukeboxes must have caused when someone used the last quarter on songs no one else liked. He walked back over to the mirror and looked at himself for a few seconds. He punched the mirror. The mirror shattered instantly, and his hand started bleeding, dripping blood on the black and white tiled floor. He walked over to the paper towels and ripped a bunch out to wrap his knuckles. He took his peacoat off, walked over to the trash, and threw it in. He crouched down and frantically started trying to pick up pieces of the broken mirror.

The bathroom door swung open, startling him. It was their waiter. Trying to collect himself and not look too spooked, Eddie said, “Scared me there,” and walked out.

Sally was off the phone, and was sitting at the table reading the back of a ketchup bottle. Eddie walked up to the table.

“I don’t feel so hot, let’s go.”

The waiter opened the bathroom door and hollered, “Hey, kid!”

 

Contributing Editor, Thomas Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism.

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UNTITLED CHUNKLET #1

Uncategorized

– Sam Hutchings

 

    “The remembrance aspect being one of the primary differences between the two.”
    “Between a nightmare and a night terror?”
    “Yes.”
    “And go ahead and remind me real quick how this relates to my initial inquiry, like at all?”
    “Restrain your ponies, I’ll get to it. I’m told patience is up there next to cleanliness in the hierarchy of virtues.”
    Oggie and P— at this point had assumed the ossified postures of Post- Vigorous-Copulation atop Oggie’s now sheetless and near-narcoleptically soft bed. The pair both now completely sated and utterly spent, physically speaking; sporting their respective suits of birth, and facing a ceiling whose color in this particular light could only aptly be classified as devoid of color. Oggie is flat on his back, right ankle X’d upon the left, with his right arm laced beneath P—‘s femininely wettish neck, absently spooling the ends of her long tawny hair on his pointer finger. From this particular position, he was never quite 100% on where exactly to rest his free arm. P— is angled in slightly to his torso, her right leg draped somewhat demurely over his; her right middle finger drawing to & fro in soft vectors from Oggie’s navel to that knobby-thing at the base of his ribcage.  Her left arm cannot be seen.  Their aggregate flesh is damp. It seems almost reptilianly moist.
    Oggie had ruminated internally a few times on just why exactly it was that post-coital snuggling had asserted itself as the preeminent forum for divulging psychic traumas, (and/or) previously untold tales of woe; like this sort of chitchat and spiritual-tilling seemed almost requisite after the tidal surge of hormones and personal fluids had ebbed. He strains to raise his chin to chest level, emitting little throat noises as his head reaches 90° to survey the whole scene.  The apartment’s unbolted door is rectangularly hemmed with light the color of neglected teeth, and articles of clothing are strewn about in reverse-dress-order in a trail leading to the bed, which to Oggie sort of resembled a perverse and thoroughly disturbed retelling of Hansel & Gretel. This observation was left unvoiced.
    The TV at the foot of the bed was still on full blare, its blue pacifierial light insinuating itself into the bedrooms equalizing darkness.
 “See, nightmares, more often than not, are lurid visual experiences.”
 “Yes, I’m familiar with the basic concept of nightmares.” P— is raising her voicing incrementally in an attempt surmount the television’s deafening roar. She recognizes the two-toned program as I Love Lucy.
“Okay, then I’m assuming you can probably recall the general feeling of waking up following one of these subconscious horror-shows as a child.  When you jolt awake in black desperation with fluttering lids, snuffing that stale nighttime air, clawing at an image that both recedes and remains in the nothingness that encircles you.”
“That sure is the long way around of describing it. I would just say I remembered awaking in horror.”
“Yes, horror. Horror is exactly what I am referring to here.” Oggie pauses a beat, taking the silent moment to perform a slight genital readjustment; that which he promptly suspects is not as quite as discrete as initially intended.
“Oh sorry, am I like crushing your…thing?”
“Nonono I’m okay.”
“Are you sure, I can–”
“No, no. I assure you, all four of us are just fine. They’re a fickle bunch.”
“Hmpph…Okay.” Laughter chased whatever quiescence remained in the room. Lucy is once again grappling with chronic ineptitude, this time at her new occupation, tasked with wrapping chocolates at spine-snapping speeds at the local candy factory.  P— had always found something markedly unnerving about the laugh tracks in these television shows that seemed to exist long before the advent of color.  It dawned grimly on her once that the majority of the laugh track’s participants from these prehistoric programs had more than likely at one point or another, well, expired; like, what she was currently hearing was the disembodied laughter of the dead.  It was a realization that had risen in her like some dim astral body. “So horror…”
“Ah, yes. Okay, so horror.” Oggie seemed insistent on elongating the first syllable of the word, making it sound more like ‘hawwwr-or.’ He continued. “The nightmares horror is being exerted onto you by some thing separate from the self. Some ghastly threat placed upon your personhood.  Now what that thing or threat is exactly, well, you are entirely at mercy of your dank subconscious. But make no mistake about it; they all act as antagonists whose main prerogative is to apply menace and horror on the protagonist. On you. Whether it be a machete-wielding maniac, or some perpetually grinning clown from hell’s very own flames, or-”
“Or a fully-tumescent Mr. Peanut,” P— inserts vacantly.
“Or a what? A what now?
“Never mind. Different story. Different day. Keep going.”
“You are like Freud’s wet dream, woman.”
“Am I going to see a point to all this galloping across the horizon any time before dawn breaks?”
 “Again, patience. I’m getting to it.”
The drapeless window parallel to the left side of the lover’s tousled bed gave way to a view of the bare boughs of an incongruous and thoroughly withered willow tree, that which presumably had succumb to some ghastly botanical pathogen or something like that; it’s prematurely nude and stricken appearance making it stand out more so among the encompassing trees, those which were almost lambently twinged scarlet and the color of pressed bronze in the early stages of their autumnal ritual. The complex webbing of branches, still black and slicked wet from a light sheet of dusk rain, appeared vaguely vascular overlaid against the faint milky lume of a now cloudless urban night sky.  It was a sky that possessed the dilute purplish hue of a real nasty bruise.  The thumbnail of moon had a somewhat somber pathos about it; it looked sick, like the rind of something citrusy long past its prime; and amid, there lay a smattering of meek and pallid stars, which neither P— nor Oggie could hope to identify with any semblance of accuracy.
    “The lion’s share of my attempts at a point here remain that a nightmare’s horror is applied on the self through means of an extrinsic force. A person. An object. An entity.”
    “Yes, we’ve established this. Some thing to repel against at sleep’s ragged edge.”
    “Exact-a-mundo. Some force to fear, to flee from beneath quivering and potentially soiled bed sheets.”
    “Which you are saying was not, in fact, the case during your prolonged childhood stint with night terrors? There was no thing you feared…or bed sheets you soil–”
    “No, as far as I can recall there was none of that in any of these episodes of mine. There was no force or entity applying horror. Nothing winged and nefarious that would chase and pursue, that would nip at my heels before inevitably jettisoning me out of a hellacious slumber and into that sort of soft malarial light that accompanies all predawn awakenings.  Actually more often than not, it was my very own mother who would wake me.  It wasn’t until much later that she would inform me that my – and I quote here – ‘blood-curdling’ screams would snapshot her awake, sending her hurtling off the downstairs sofa as if shot out of some imperial canon, through our dim-lit kitchen, over the family dog, up the 13 creaky steps to the second floor, and into my room; where – again, I was not made cognizant of this until much
later in my adolescence – she would discover the grim sight of her son, and again I quote, ‘thrashing epileptically’ and in full-on death sweats, and apparently largely unresponsive to any sort of soft coos or fervent reassurances of maternal love and safety.”
    “_____.” P— cranes her neck to look up at Oggie’s face, that which was only partially illuminated in the television’s ghoulish sheen.
    “Now I of course, as previously stated, remember none of these preceding occurrences.  My memory of these bouts skip on like a scratched disc; I can only recall coming to, all frazzled, breathless, my throat all sandpapery, undoubtedly from all that sleep-screaming, and my heart thwamping inside me like some tribal war drum. That’s all I remember. Well, that and the sweat. And believe you me, when I say sweat, I mean S-W-E-A-T. I’m talking perspiration akin to that of a promiscuous woman stuck in a religious assembly.”
    “But you have absolutely no recollection of what may have caused all the screaming and thrashing and sweating and what not?”
    With his free hand, Oggie theatrically curls his pointer into his thumb in an annular fashion to form a large fleshy 0. “Zilch. Nada. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”
    Any movement that ensued following the gratification of sexual desires seemed to posses the languid economy of post-feast carnivores, or like people navigating beneath really deep water. Oggie readjusted again – genitally speaking – this time more conspicuously.
    “Shitshit, are you sure I’m not-”
    “Don’t fret. The Kingdom’s Crown Jewels remain, in large part, unharmed. A little chaffed, but unharmed.”
    P— rotates her eyeballs, which Oggie cannot see, per say, but rather can like intuitively sense.
    “_____.”
“‘Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!’” The choir of disembodied laughter sings.
     “_____.”
    “Can you at least turn it down for a bit?”
“Fine. I relent.”
“Thank you.”
“What I can recall, however, is one night in particular before all this night terror business got started.  I must have been around 7 or 8, y’know that age when you are still vaguely cherubic and moony-eyed; and as was per usual for these times, I was fending off the seemingly omnipresent threat of bedtime, that which seemed to descend upon me alongside dusk’s gauzy veil; a threat which I, like most children at that age, attempted to ward off as if it were some occult deity, utilizing what modicum of guile I had at my disposal within my interior arsenal.  And after much hemming & hawing, and pleading, and cajoling, and slitty-eyed bargaining that my bedtime be lengthened for just one, just one more commercial break; I finally acquiesced to my mother’s gray insistence that it was, in fact, ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ a phrase that she employed ad nauseam, and still even to this very day induces a full-body wince in me, that which is no doubt some sort of Pavlovian type response after years and years of dreaded repetition.”
“‘Bedtime for Bonzo?’ As in that old ancient Reagan flick? The one where our former POTUS’s primary opponent for screen time was a literal chimp?”
“The very same.” Oggie employs the heel of his right foot to rub what appears to be a severe itch on the mid-level of his left shin, an act that is performed in a very cricketish fashion indeed.
“A chimp, which he attempts to infuse with his own 50’s brand of Father-Always-Knows-Better-Than-Your-Dumbshit-Ass streak of moral probity? Like that ‘Bedtime for Bonzo?’”
“_____.” Oggie lets out a chilly shiver.
“Boy, is that movie steeped in a grim sociopolitical irony.”
“And I can still remember trudging up each one of those creaky stairs with that especially heavy-footed mournful weight in my steps, which was and always will be the ubiquitous signifier of adolescent dissatisfaction; and like slogging through all those paternally mandated “Nite-Nite” rituals, e.g., putting on my PJ’s, brushing my first set of chompers, the cleaning and general maintenance of my various creaks and crevices-”
“I hope you remembered to tinkle, young man.”
“–and finally after much ado, getting under my sheets and shutting off my bedside Roadrunner Collectible lamp, and finally being there alone in this formless black silence of my childhood bedroom, I remember… I remember this sensation.”
“Sensation?”
“This sure as shit was no mere feeling. It was visceral, it was clearly and distinctly a sensation.  Lying there alone, on this fairly traumatic and seminal night, I can recall with bell-like clarity the sensation of being utterly entombed in this desolate silence that seemed to sweep over me all at once, like the billowing of a black and formless cloud not only around, but within me.”
“Are we sure this wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill childhood aversion to the dark? There’s only a little shame in–”
“No, I remain certain that what I felt at that very moment was not your standard issue sphincter-loosening fear of the dark, well, at least not this particular time.  At that moment, in that room, there was no outward force applying horror, nor any fear at what terrible thing may be behind all that blackness.  Only terror. Capital-t Terror, which arose from within the self, induced by the sheer fact that there was nothing there at all.  And lying there on this particular night, at that particular moment – I wasn’t trembling or cowering or anything like that – I was still, wholly and deadly still, with my eyes fixed upwards at a ceiling that I could not see; at that particular moment, I came to realize something for the very first time–”
“_____.”
“- that one day – a day that may or may not lie far off in the distance, but one day nonetheless – I would die.  That I would like keel over and kick the bucket and die and like completely cease to be something, and instead of being that something that I’ve always been, become nothing, and then be this nothing for the remainder of time; time which stretched out before me in this grotesque and almost immortal silence and into a bleak and edgeless infinence; and while I am this nothing; planted or scattered, or buried at sea or whatever, the world would just keep turning and turning without me, like I was never even here. Like all of this never even mattered. I now understand the U.S. adult’s unconscious terror of involuntary silence; the silence that we seem to spend our days avoiding.”
“_____.”
    “Now, I know this must sound kind of melodramatic or banal or whatever, the whole coming-to-terms-with-your-imminent-mortality shtick, but to a 7/8 year old kid, a child – a child who is kissed and coddled and wholly reassured to the fact that the world is like constructed around them, that they exist not in the world, but rather that the world exists for them and their own very personal and private pleasure and utility – this is a tremendously jarring realization.  For example, do you remember the first time you encountered one of your grade school teachers outside of their designated confines of authority? Like in the chilly fluorescent-lit produce aisle of the grocery store, or in line at the local Cineplex buying Sno-Caps?  When that icky feeling of stunted peculiarity swept over you, and all you could do was stare a glazed stare, head cocked to the side like a perturbed mutt as you came to realize that your teacher didn’t like dematerialize after the clock struck 2:15 in the PM and then rematerialize at 9:30 the following AM to aide you with sticking all your shit in your custom finger-painted cubby and usher you to and from recess to play kickball or wipe the dribble off your chin after naptime? That
this teacher not only existed outside of your field of awareness and independent of your personal needs and usage, but also presumably had a life separate from your own, and rote chores to perform, and eggs to purchase with expired coupons, and Sno-Caps to eat, and maybe even kids of their own to kiss and coddle and wholly reassure.  Make no bones about it, every child is a solipsist. And for any and all children who are taught and hammered with the supposition that the world exist solely for them, the onset of the surefire reality that they will one day cease, and that the world shall and will continue on just dandy-fine and peachy-keen without them is a ghastly moment of awareness to say the least. I say to you here and now, that right there was the very first of an innumerable line of tiny death’s in my short life.”
    “_____.”
    “So getting to your question.”  

 

 

Fighting for the Home Front

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Noah Keates

Over the centuries, the nations of Europe have gone to war over religion, land, political influence, and countless other points of contention. In the nineteenth century, however, we see European wars being fought not so much to overpower foreign enemies but to further a nation’s internal agenda, using war as a kind of political activism.

The aim of war was often to encourage nationalism, and politicians regarded death and destruction a price worth paying to achieve a spirited national unity. In some instances, however, this drive for national pride yielded horrific results and left nations vulnerable and unstable. The trick was to find an acceptable level of death and destruction while gaining the socio-political advantages of going to war.

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Russian Tsar Nicholas Romanov II both played this dangerous game.  Bismarck successfully led the nation-states of Germany into wars that furthered his agenda of uniting Germany, while Nicholas watched his regime collapse as the Russian army fell to the Japanese.

What led to such drastically different results?  On the 150th and 110th anniversaries of these two campaigns, it’s interesting to analyze the social and political factors that produced such varied outcomes and observe the reverberating effects that these conflicts have had on modern warfare.

The Proclamation of Wilhelm as Kaiser of the new German Reich, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18th January 1871, painted 1885 / imageuest / Bridgeman Art Library / Universal Images Group

The Proclamation of Wilhelm as Kaiser of the new German Reich, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18th January 1871, painted 1885 / imageuest / Bridgeman Art Library / Universal Images Group

During the last half of the 19th century, no politician manipulated warfare to aid his internal agenda more successfully than Bismarck.  When Bismarck entered the political arena in the 1860s, Germany was a divided array of nation-states lacking central leadership or organized politics.  Bismarck saw an opportunity for a powerful German nation of unified states under a central government, but tensions among political parties throughout the German states made this nearly impossible to achieve internally.   In 1862, Bismarck, then Prussian prime minister, turned the eye of the German people towards the small Danish provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, which were populated by many native Germans.  Bismarck declared war on Denmark, putatively to protect the political freedoms of the Holstein region from Danish influence, though he kept a shrewd eye on the long-term political progress that the move could incur.

It worked. Bismarck’s call to arms not only united the German states but also strengthened the political bond with Austria, a powerful neighbor. Hostilities broke out in early 1864, and after only eight months of fighting the Danish suffered major casualties at the hands of the far more powerful German and Austrian forces and were forced to sign the Treaty of Vienna, surrendering nearly all of Schleswig and Holstein.

The success of this relatively small war was not lost on Bismarck. It instilled a sense of patriotism in the citizens and demonstrated Germany’s military might.  Buoyed by this triumph, Bismarck manufactured two more similar wars.  He first turned the animosity of the German people towards their recent ally, Austria, using the excuse of a small dispute over the ruling of the newly acquired Schleswig and Holstein provinces.  This short war of 1866 produced an overwhelming German victory and helped achieve Bismarck’s goal of uniting Prussia and its surrounding states into the North German confederation, which was segregated from any unwanted Austrian influence.  Bismarck went on to a third decisive victory, this time against the French, resulting in the unification of Prussia and most other German states.  Bismarck would have a lasting effect on Germany, leading to the nation’s bold military aggression in the First World War.  Bismarck’s public agenda of instilling a universal empathy among all German speakers would be later warped by German Chancellor Adolf Hitler as a justification for his tyrannical conquests in the 1930s.
The German wars of Unification showed the usefulness of warfare for political progress. By capitalizing on the growing patriotic fervor and the desire of the German people to protect their fellow German speakers, Bismarck was able to execute his military operations with general public support.  Each of these brief but impassioned wars encouraged a growing nationalist sentiment that led eventually to unification.

Tsar Nicholas II blessing a regiment leaving for the Russo-Japanese War, 1904, Russia /imagequest /  Universal Images Group / Rights Managed /

Tsar Nicholas II blessing a regiment leaving for the Russo-Japanese War, 1904, Russia /imagequest /  Universal Images Group / Rights Managed /

In contrast, according to scholar Chris Trueman, Tsar Nicholas Romanov attempted to manufacture a war to create a sense of patriotism in his restless nation.  When Nicholas came to power, the Romanov family had ruled over Russia for three and a half centuries, and critical flaws in the Russian political system had been revealed.  The Russian people felt repressed by the traditionally strict regulations set by the Romanov leaders, and a lack of food brought a new sense of discontent towards the Tsar.  Nicholas hoped that a military success would engender nationalist sentiment, and he turned his attention to remote Japan. Tensions had existed over control of the crucial Russian trade post Port Arthur on the Korean peninsula, and in 1904 these tensions erupted into the Russo-Japanese war.  Shockingly, the far superior size of the Russian army yielded no apparent military advantage as Japanese forces continually drove back the foreign militants, and by 1905 the crippled Russian army was forced to retreat from the Korean peninsula nursing a wounded honor and thousands of wartime casualties.  Anti-Tsar sentiment increased, as did the decay of Nicholas’s authority over his vast nation.  Roughly a decade later in World War I, once again in the midst of Russia’s military failures, the deflated Russian populous finally overthrew Nicholas.

Why did this military operation fail so dramatically while Bismarck’s were so successful?  A key difference lay in the simple geography of the combat.  In declaring war on Denmark, Austria and eventually France, Bismarck aroused an animosity of the German people towards their closest neighbors. According to historian James Graham, the citizens of Prussia and all other German states had experienced the past political tensions with these neighboring nations, and Bismarck was able to fan the flames of these tensions.  Additionally, Bismarck argued that his forces would be fighting to protect fellow German speakers, with whom they could identify.

In contrast, Trueman points out, Japan was a distant, shrouded island to most Russians. The task of mobilizing the Russian armed forces across such a vast expanse simply to reach the battlefields proved thoroughly dispiriting.  Additionally, a lack of knowledge of Japanese society and of the true Russian military objectives sealed fate of the Russian army as they fell at the hands of the Japanese forces.

These two wars, fought not for the purpose of extending political influence, but rather to improve the internal influence of their respective leaders, displayed several key factors about modern European warfare.  Even in the midst of such new powerful military technologies as the industrial revolution had brought, the emotional mindset of the soldiers still proved a critical factor in the success or failure of each war.  The German wars of Unification and Russo-Japanese war illustrated an important element of nationalism: citizens will fight to extend their national pride, as in the German states, but citizens lacking any initial sense of patriotism will be hard-pressed to increase their national pride when thrown into the horrors of modern war.  These two military confrontations certainly displayed the true equation of success for manipulating warfare to aid an internal agenda; although the conquests of Bismarck and failures of Nicholas each played out on a relatively small scale, these wars of nationalism laid a strategic blueprint for many of the wars that would follow.

Works Cited

The editors of Encylopaedia Brittanica. “Russo Japanese War.” Encyclopaedia Brittanica. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

“The Franco Prussian War.” World History International Project. History World International, n.d. Web. 25 May 2015.

“German Danish War.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. N.p.: n.p., 2015. N. pag. Print.

Graham, James. “History Orb.” Was Bismarck the Key Factor in the Unification of Germany? N.p., n.d. Web. 24 May 2015.

“Issues Relevant to U.S. Foreign Diplomacy: Unification of German States.” Office of the Historian. U.S. Department of State, n.d. Web. 25 May 2015.

Kohn, Hans. “Nationalism.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. N.p.: n.p., 2014. 1-4. Print.

Trueman, Chris. “The Russo Japanese War.” History Learning Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2015.

Lighting a Path for Women Writers: Maria S. Cummins’s The Lamplighter

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Tom Matthews

 

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women” were the famous, spiteful words of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to his editor, William D. Ticknor. Hawthorne was incensed at the success of Maria S. Cummins’s novel, The Lamplighter, published in 1854. “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter,” grumbled Hawthorne, “and other books neither better nor worse?”

Granted, this was the nineteenth century; Hawthorne’s question was probably circulating the minds of many competing writers. His term,  “damned mob of scribbling women,” was a clear attack on the significance and credibility of women’s writing, yes, but it may also be that Hawthorne was perplexed as to how this “mob” was achieving such success.

                                                                             Nathaniel Hawthorne / Photo. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 15 Sep 2015.  

                                                                             Nathaniel Hawthorne / Photo. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 15 Sep 2015.  

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Lamplighter was a bestselling novel published by John P. Jewett. Although forgotten now, the novel was a huge success in its time, a success commonly accredited to the savvy marketing of Jewett.

Jewett began the marketing campaign with advertisements that explicitly predicted the success of the novel. ‘A GREAT BOOK COMING,’ Jewett announced, noting his company had “in press, and will publish about the First of March, a work of extraordinary power and ability, one which will rank among the very best productions of American or Foreign Genius.” It is interesting to note that Jewett says nothing about the author, giving the work an air of inherent mystery.

Ironically, Cummins’ acceptance of this anonymity was a submission to the very marginalization of women highlighted and challenged in the novel. This doesn’t mean, however, that Cummins was a hypocrite. At the time, male writers dominated the American literary world, and female writers faced much more difficulty having their work published and taken seriously. Cummins’s decision to agree to anonymous advertisement can be seen as a sacrifice in order for her work to receive fair and equal treatment. She may have felt such a sacrifice was the only way to give voice to the ideals she felt were unrepresented in American literature.

                                                                                                                                                     Maria S. Cummins / Wikipedia

                                                                                                                                                     Maria S. Cummins / Wikipedia

Cummins was unknown before The Lamplighter, and Jewett feared the novel would flop if the public knew its author was an unpublished woman. His advertisements piqued interest in the novel, as he hoped. Cummins’ anonymity did not last long, however, and she was asked to contribute to several Massachusetts newspapers. So Jewett’s strategy not only garnering interest in the novel but also (unintentionally) created a demand for Cummins’ writing.

The novel achieved bestselling status and was released in multiple editions, targeted at a wide-ranging audience. Scholar Susan Williams writes, “Soon after The Lamplighter was published in 1854, it became readily available in a variety of formats: children could enjoy a picture book with a heavily abridged plot; art lovers could admire sumptuously illustrated editions; and travelers throughout England and Europe could purchase inexpensive railroad editions.” This ensured an audience beyond that of middle-class American women.

The book’s success was more than a financial one. Cummins not only produced a quality story with The Lamplighter but also created an activity for women that was entertaining and full of value—one that women could feel satisfied engaging in. “This cult of domesticity sanctioned reading,” writes Williams,  “especially for women, as a productive way to fill one’s leisure time: to read a female Bildungsroman such as The Lamplighter was to participate in an activity that combined entertainment with the inculcation of virtue.”

Hawthorne was merely playing his part in a literary period of elitism that looked down on bestsellers. This highbrow literary elitism, although very much alive in the nineteenth century, did not affect readers’ response to The Lamplighter or their perceived literary value of the novel.

It may also be that Hawthorne felt his publisher was not as competent as Jewett and that he was losing sales. Williams points out that Hawthorne’s publisher was a competitor of Jewett and suggests, “Hawthorne may also have been diplomatically questioning the comparably poor performance of his own chosen publisher.”

With The Lamplighter, Maria S. Cummins claimed a place for women in the literary market. Furthermore, it both proved that women are more than capable of producing valuable work and paved the way for future women writers. Whether Jewett knew it or not, he was part of something significantly bigger than a successful marketing campaign.

Photo credits:

Contributing Editor, Tom Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism.

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The Essay

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Sasha Kohan

 

Like speak I can if write I could, easily come
the essay would.

Building the tower of Babel. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest.  

Building the tower of Babel. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest.  

To spell the what I paint out words —
to light from shadows, and thoughts
or birds.

Bursting of minute hands full my gray mind,
fragments or phrases without which I’m blind.

The letters a little feel some like their sound
(sinking up floating shapes or in the ground)

but made of what are they
and do they stick how?

Gilt so my voice is and thin is my head —
to ever cling possibly voice can what’s said?

Shall it I string like a drag through wood dense?

There’s a sky in no ink
and no pencil in sense.

 

 

 

Contributing editor Sasha Kohan is a student at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in English and Screen Studies. For more of her work, see http://www.sashakohan.com.  

 

Photo credit: http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1241113/1/132_1241113/cite

Bitten

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Tom Matthews

 

Close-up of a suture held in a pair of forceps. / Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest.

Close-up of a suture held in a pair of forceps. / Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest.

A dog bit me once. And dragged me on the ground. Scraping skin against asphalt. And they all asked, “Well, whose fault was this?” Surely not the dog’s. He was guarding his territory. He was in the right, in his head. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I felt his sharp white teeth dig into my leg. The stitches healed the holes. And as I think of that dog tonight, I can’t help but sympathize with it, for it was brave in a moment of danger. And to this day I am fond of dogs, even after feeling the deep bite of that Rottweiler’s teeth.

And you’ve shown me your teeth many a time: laughing, crying, or singing in rhyme. I come knocking at your door just to see it once more. Will you open up and present it to me? Or sink them in and scrape my skin across asphalt for whose fault none other than my own, for I, and the stitches, will reap what I have sown.

 

Contributing Editor, Thomas Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism.

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Photo credit: Web. 15 Sep 2015. http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1273072/1/132_1273072/cite

Earthquake

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Akriti Sharma

                                                                                                           “Destruction of Heritage and Culture” / hoto by Drishika Dugar

Four a.m. on a Friday, exhausted after a night out with friends, I am stirred by the familiar notification ring from BBC news on my phone. I turn over in bed to face away from my phone, now shining brightly, demanding that I check it. I wonder if there is an option to mute the news notification at night. Frankly, I don’t really  care if the Duchess of Cambridge goes into labor.

A heartbeat passes and there is a tap on my door. The tap turns into a knock and before I know it my roommate, Shreya, is pounding at my door. She sounds scared. “There was an earthquake back home,” she says.

“Oh again?” I’m thinking of the 4.0 magnitude ’quake  that hit three years ago. But when I open the door and see her face I know something is wrong. I pick up my phone to read the notification. “7.9 Magnitude Earthquake slams Nepal, hundreds presumed dead.” My heart drops, my brain stops momentarily, yet somehow I find myself out in the dining room with my laptop and phone. My roommate sits by me, going through the news on her phone.

“The minute I read Dharahara fell, I knew it was a big one,” she says.

Dharahara was a national monument, a tower that overlooked Kathmandu city. Hundreds of people climbed it everyday.

“I still hadn’t climbed it yet,” I find myself foolishly saying.

The images on my laptop are horrific. At my side, my phone is trying to connect to my parent’s number, but keeps failing. According to the news, the lines were down. According to the images online, half my country is rubble. I stare at the photographs mindlessly, feeling numb, scared, and lost. The phone call cancels, and I notice three missed calls. My mother called me three times an hour ago.

It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. She had called not once, not twice, but three times, and I had failed to pick up because I had been out. Had she called me to tell me she was okay? Or had something terrible happened? My roommate was frantically trying to contact her family too.

Shreya and I stared dumbstruck at images of the destroyed neighborhoods where we had grown up. I stare at an image of Patan Durbar Square, which was a 20 minute walk from my house. It was one of the three Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley, which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Built almost 500 years ago by the Malla Kings, this complex of temples, courtyards, and a magnificent palace built mostly of iconic red brick had been a magnificent example of Newari architecture within the Kathmandu Valley.  The images on my screen showed piles of these lying on the ground, tourists and locals alike looking shell-shocked.

The house was quiet and Worcester slept  peacefully. Halfway across the world, Nepal was in ruins, people buried under collapsed buildings, and many were injured. I would later find out that thousands were dead. In our little dining room, my roommate and I sat silently , still unable to contact our families. Right now, there was nothing we could do from so far away.

An hour later, another news alert  set off my phone. Two people were dead. The earthquake had been of a “violent intensity’, the ground swaying at unimaginable magnitude.

“I wonder what it felt like,” I thought out aloud.

The last earthquake to hit Nepal had been in 1934, and since Nepal lies on a major fault line, another devastating earthquake had long been expected. We had several earthquake drills in school each year, I used to always look forward to them as a way to miss class.

The thirteen-year-old me who had no conception of the destruction an earthquake could cause her country. The thirteen-year-old me who did not know at the time that she would be fortunate enough to never have to experience the horror of April 25th 2015. That’s what I was told later, by friends and family over the weekend, that I was fortunate to not be there. But that does not sit well with me.

My family had been separated at the time of the earthquake. My younger brother was at home and my parents had been driving. Was I fortunate to not be with the three people that I without a doubt love the most, during such a traumatic experience? I am fortunate enough that an hour and a half later I received a call from my father. I am fortunate enough that my family survived. I do not, however, feel fortunate to have been in Worcester when the earthquake struck.

This might be an emotional and irrational thought of a twenty-something, but my initial feeling that weekend and the following week was guilt. I felt guilty for sleeping in a bed while my grandparents slept under the night sky, their home on the verge of collapsing. I felt guilty for laughing with my friends on the morning after,while thousands of children cried over lost family members. I felt guilty for living comfortably a thousand miles away from what really was my home.

I stayed up until the crack of dawn that day, unable to sleep and responding to messages from friends, including some that I had not spoken to for years. Many of us were scattered around the world, and we felt helpless. We shared the guilt, too. We asked ourselves why we were away. Nepal was suffering, and we were out of the country, seeking “a better future.”

Aspiring students leave Nepal to gain a better education. Less than a third return. Some of those who return are dying to leave again. It took a natural disaster that destroyed our country to make us realize how much we wanted to be home close to our families. Everyone cried, everyone was scared, but from so far away there was nothing we could do but wait for more news.

My father’s first words to me that night had been “Don’t worry.” That is something I was and still am unable to do. It hurts to see a country that had been shaken by a royal massacre and has endured a decade long civil war finally get back up on its feet, only to be knocked down again. All of this, within my lifetime. I feel guilty right now, sitting in the comfort of my apartment writing this, while my brother and a hundred of other high school students in Kathmandu sit down to write their final examinations, a week after this disaster has struck. Most of them, having already been accepted to Universities for the fall of 2015 in America must give the exams to be eligible for their offers.  So they can come here and make a better future for themselves. So they can come here and join us in what I can only describe as an immigrant’s guilt.

Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home.

Photo credit: “Destruction of Heritage and Culture” by Drishika Dugar – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Destruction_of_Heritage_and_Culture.jpg#/media/File:Destruction_of_Heritage_and_Culture.jpg

God’s Eye

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Emma R. Collins

                                                                                                                                      Helix Nebula / Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech

                                                                                                                                      Helix Nebula / Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech

    The day she died, I became a man of God.

    All my life, ever since Dad went up with the Jupiter missions, I was a child of science. I grew up truth-seeking. I was all-knowing. There was no myth nor legend that could escape my inquisitive, ever-probing mind. I hollowed out the world one line at a time between the pages of books upon books upon books. All the planet was a wonder to me. I marveled in the majestic and fragile beauty of circumstantial chemical bonds.

    When Earthly wonder became mundane I turned my lusting to the stars. It was only natural that as an adult I found myself stepping into Dad’s silver boots. Twenty-two years later, I watch over the Genesis Project, a lone, benevolent engineer drifting through the infinite emptiness. I am inside the womb of the Eden shuttle. I am her child, we are her children, cradled so lovely within her titanium and steel. She is a good shuttle.

    My shuttle.

    Yes, it is mine, all of it. All of them, my cosmic siblings in utero. They sleep in their artificial wombs, sleeping while I drifted, while I watch.

    I became a man of God the day she died.

    I look out into the thunderous black beyond Eden’s sound womb and hold the edges of the viewport with white knuckles. I am still sick in the seat of myself, that place where hot things go when you feel good, and cold things when you don’t. I am pale around the edges of my jaw and lips, but it had been at least twenty-four hours and the vomiting was finally over. There is nothing worse than vomiting in zero gravity. I try to collect the mighty calm of the universe from that small, insignificant window, breathing slowly, tasting Eden’s faint, metallic breath. It will take me several moments to slow the rapid beating of my human heart.

    A tear wells in the corner of my eye, rippling free with the faintest trembles. It is a tiny silver pinprick of glinting life that catches the light of God’s Eye as it drifts before the view port. That’s what I have decided to call the nebula that came into view off the starboard wing over a month ago. For a long time I called the roiling blue dusts that haloed the core of brilliant gold Draco’s Eye, but now, remembering her rubies, I know what it truly is.

    God watches me.

    I gaze into the brilliant shimmering of that omnipotent nebula as though I could take it into my skin and dissolve into its dust. I want nothing more than to return to that place of peace, the place we all must come from, and to which we all must return. That is where Eden is taking me. I close my eyes to force away the last of the tears. They drift from me and I must turn from them, because the sick feeling is back, and I need to distract myself to make it stop.

    But I cannot keep the memories from resurfacing. I am not God. I am not strong enough to face this on my own. I need His grace to hold me and protect me from myself. I move slowly as my body drifts through Eden’s hollow. I try to keep myself busy with the electrical system. There had been a few shorts recently and I know that if I don’t keep a close eye on them, Eden may turn on herself. But even as I sift through the and fibres and tracts, I cannot stop it.

    I am not God.

    In hot, heavy flashes my chest tightens and I taste something at the back of my throat. I am thinking of her, how she was before. I am thinking of the smell of her hair, of the way it moved in the sunlight. All the women on the mission cut their hair, but she had kept it long. She had kept it long even through training, even when she was no more than a sailor on a ship. She flew for the Navy, that’s why they wanted her. Pilots, it was always pilots. They kept a close eye on the men and women who dared to do what God had not intended.

    But maybe it was just because she was beautiful.

    To me, there were no other women. From the first moment I saw her face, to the moment they put her away in Eden’s womb, I was in love with her. I am still am, in love with her, even though I must bear the burden of her absence now. The space she left in the fabric of the universe is a festering pit in my chest.

    Alone.

    I am completely alone.

    Her name was Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn Eve. She was kind, intelligent. She spoke to me sweetly, even though the others thought me odd. I like to keep to myself, and to the people who are strong and sought out for these kinds of things, keeping to oneself is odd. But, that was one of the reasons they had picked me, because they knew I could be alone.

    But now, I am so completely alone.

    I strip a wire to fix a connection, but my mind is no longer with Eden. I am back in the days when I would watch over her as she slept. I was her guardian, her protector. I was charged with the responsibility of her life, all their lives, but hers was the most precious. Every day I went to see her, every night wishing her peace before I slept. I grew to know her even in her silence. No man could have loved a woman more.

    But it was lonely.

    Is lonely.

    I am so completely alone.

    To think of it now will only make me sick. But I can’t help myself. I should have seen it coming. Humans are not meant to be alone, even if they seek it. Humans are not meant to be left with only the sounds of their thoughts to keep them company. You see, our thoughts, our racing whispers that spin and spin and spin in the infinite emptiness of the universe, are louder than a rocket’s roar. I was drowning in the sound of my own mind. And she was there, my riptide, my unrelenting tsunami, washing over me and taking me under.

    Gwendolyn.

    She dragged
me down, down, down into the darkest reaches of man, until the unraveling of loneliness was more than I could bear. I remember it as a daze, but I know I was completely awake. It was no dream. It was no fantasy. I was in charge of every flicker of every fibre of my body. And still, I did not stop it. The surging and crashing in my mind were too great, and I had been drowned too deeply by her undertow.

    I didn’t think she would wake from the stasis. They’re aren’t supposed to unless Eden tells them to. That’s the beauty of technology, the beauty of God’s plan. Because even as I held her, kissed her, I never thought she’d wake. I was blind.

    It happened in the midst of my drowning. I was gasping for air and suddenly her eyes were on me, eyes like brilliant sapphires. I could see all our world, all myself in them. I saw God, and He saw me. He knew me, knew what I had done, and so I knew what I had done, and suddenly the tides fled and my oceans dried up. I became parched and barren. All that was left was the weight of my sin.

    Blood in zero gravity looks exactly like rubies.

    As it drifts through space, it catches the artificial light, magnifies the star light. It sparkles, brilliantly. It is one of the most beautiful things you could ever see.

    She screamed. She wasn’t supposed to be awake.

    Her body was fragile, my sweet Gwendolyn, after sleeping for so long. What I did is unforgivable. Her heart seized from the shock. All I had wanted was to love her. I tried to bring her back, tried to force Eden’s pulse into her. But Eden would not have her. She was aborted and my hands were red. With every shock she convulsed hideously and I think that was when I first vomited. I couldn’t do it. I am not God. She was gone, and I had killed her.

    And God had watched me do it.

    I gave her back to Eden’s womb, because I could not bear the idea of her body being lost.  She would go with them, wherever it was they ended up. They would take care of her and I would go to God.

I must go to God,there is no other place left for me now.

    But first, I must fix the wiring.

    I slip the panel back into place and check the circuits. Everything works. There is no illness of Eden’s that I cannot cure. I just can’t bring the dead back to life. I am not God. I wipe away more tears as the memories begin to subside. My hands are shaking as I return my tools to their bag. I need to check the panelling in the upper compartments. If I don’t keep myself busy I know today I will go to God.

    But she’s there.

    Gwendolyn.

    My Gwendolyn.

    Here.

    I cannot breathe. I am frozen, holding on to the wall so that I don’t drift away like a fool. I cannot speak. I can only stare.

    As naked as the day she was born, she is more beautiful than any goddess. Her hair is undone. I undid it. I set it free. It moves softly around her face, as though in water. I grimace, catching my breath then. Her face, her beautiful, gentle face, it is a mask of rage. There is a darkness in her soft blue eyes, one that fills me with a cold, hollow feeling. I swallow back the sick of my guilt, the tears floating away from me in great numbers now.

    “Gwendolyn,” I gasp. I want to reach out to her and beg her forgiveness. Dear God…please. Let me repent. But my body refuses to move.

    I do not see what she holds in her hand.

    When the pain goes in between my ribs, it is short and quick and makes me give a little gasp. At first I do not understand. And then I see them, all around me.

    Brilliant, beautiful rubies.

    I look down to see the utility knife buried in my chest. She has made no sound, her jaw tightened up in an ugly snarl. My rubies float slowly towards her as my pulse forces them out. They splash against her bare skin. She screams and the moment is shattered. She has killed me and she sobs now, trembling, heaving, shaking in her birth throes. She comes alive now, violent, thrashing and screaming. She is so unlike my Gwendolyn that I am scared, not for my death, but for her rebirth. What have I done?

    I try to speak, gasp. She slaps me and screams again.

    I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…

    I see God in her eyes. I see His wrath, feel it plunged into the chambers of my punctured heart. My rubies go everywhere in Eden’s womb. They splash and break across her smooth, plastic surfaces, slithering little ounces of me into her. Gwendolyn is still screaming, a ragged, terrible sound.

    I reach out a hand to soothe her and she slaps me again, hard. I see flashes of white, my head twisting to look now out of the view port. It has grown dim. My world grows dim. But I want to see it. Just one more time. I want to see God’s Eye.

    I reach for it, but the rubies are all around me. I am sick.

    I feel small.

    I am not God…

    I am not God…

    I am…

    …God…

 

Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

Paddy’s Pub Gets No Respect

Fall 2015, Uncategorized
                                                                                                The cast of always sunny in philadelphia / Photo courtesy of fx networks

                                                                                                The cast of always sunny in philadelphia / Photo courtesy of fx networks

Dumpster babies in tanning beds. Cannibalism. An abundance of glue huffing.  Milk steak, rum ham, and an obscene amount of alcohol. These are just a few of the key tenets that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is built upon. Set in the dive bar Paddy’s Pub, Always Sunny revolves around the lives of the bar’s five employees. “The gang” consists of Dennis Reynolds, bar owner, narcissist, and sociopath; his twin sister Dee Reynolds, who alternates between bartending, nursing her own alcoholism, and trying to revive her failing acting career; Ronald “Mac” McDonald, co-owner of Paddy’s and degenerate/karate enthusiast; Charlie Kelly, the insane bar janitor and self-proclaimed “wild card”; and Frank Reynolds, father of Dee and Dennis, lover of eggs, and the financial support behind most of the gang’s schemes. From this description alone, one would think that this show is purely trash—and at times, one would be absolutely correct. Yet despite the copious amounts of literal garbage, scenes in strip clubs, and general debauchery, the charm behind Always Sunny comes from the razor-sharp writing and satire employed by the creators of the show (who all star as main characters). The show has gained a huge cult following, airing on FX from 2005 until 2012; it then moved to the sister network FXX, where it currently runs (and has been renewed for its twelfth season).

With consistently impressive ratings and a plethora of fans, the next logical progression would be critical acclaim. And while Always Sunny is commended by critics, its cult status seems to be set in stone, as the show has yet to win a single Emmy award. With sitcoms such as Modern Family, 30 Rock, and The Big Bang Theory sweeping awards, it is important to identify what separates Always Sunny from these similar yet radically different programs. Always Sunny is a potent genre mix of “friendcore” sitcom and workplace comedy, whose interest in making points through shocking satire overpowers any desire for mainstream appeal.

Mittell Jason’s  book, Television and American Culture, references shows like Friends as examples of narratives that “focus on a group of adults bound by friendship instead of family or career”. Always Sunny follows this model of a “friend sitcom,” three of the characters are actually related, but the relationship between all the characters regardless is one of both utter hatred and dysfunctional dependency—similar to a family. Combine this with the classic setting of their mutual workplace—Paddy’s Pub, perhaps the least professional work environment of all time—and you have It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Both friend and workplace sitcoms are not a revolutionary idea; in fact, one could argue that television is currently going through a genre cycle in both instances, with the surge of popularity in mockumentary-style shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation, and friend-centric sitcoms like Big Bang Theory and New Girl. The difference between these shows and Always Sunny, however, stems from a lack of genuine love and compassion between the friends. As a result of every character being morally askew, they are all incredibly self-centered, and each is appallingly willing to sell out the others in a heartbeat. They steal each other’s money and cars at every chance and physically harm each other in attempts to get ahead; the self-explanatory episode “Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire” (Season 3, Episode 7) is a prime example of this. It is truly questionable how any of these people are even friends with each other, until it becomes apparent they do not have anybody else. Their friendship is built upon mutual need for some semblance of a job, and the fact that their personalities are totally incompatible with people who exist outside of their depraved playground, Paddy’s Pub. Episodes rarely, if ever, end with a “happy ending” or “lesson learned”; more common are arrests or fistfights.

The show’s dark humor and constant iniquity is clearly a point of contention for many, as pointed out by Always Sunny’s apparent lack of awards. The episode “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award” (Season 9, Episode 3) is a thinly veiled metaphor for their deficiency of academy acclaim. The gang unites to try and win Paddy’s Pub the “Best Bar” award; this goes exactly as well as their real-life attempts at winning Emmys. Feeling that they are too “fringe,” the gang takes a trip to a nearby award-winning bar, where they observe charming banter between the staff, a token black friend, and a “pretty but benign” female character. They then try and replicate these facets (all common tropes of award-winning shows), with absolutely disastrous results: their amiable jokes come off as crass, their token black friend brings more friends (“Black bars don’t win awards. I don’t know why, but they just don’t”), and Dee’s poor comedic timing and excessive makeup fall flat. The episode ends with a rousing song from Charlie in which he eloquently proclaims: “I don’t need your trophies or your gold/I just want to tell you/Go fuck yourselves.”

And at the end of the day, what is more representative of Always Sunny’s approach to comedy and awards than this? The gang questions whether it’s their location, but dismisses this idea saying “that new bar down the street won a ton of awards” which is presumably in reference to Louie, the critically acclaimed show that also airs on FX. They try and change their approach, style, lighting, and patronage, but at the end of the day, there is no other explanation for their failure than the characters themselves. And yet this is the source of the show’s appeal; the characters, which serve as “turn offs” for many, are also the sole reason for the show’s success. This is not only in a literal sense, as three of the main characters literally created the program. Always Sunny, functioning as nearly a purely episodic show, relies on its deadbeat, alcoholic, morally-corrupt characters to move the plot forward. And whether that approach is appealing or horrifying is truly up to the viewer—and the Academy—to decide.

 

Eva Maldonado studies journalism and media/screen studies at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. She is pursuing a career in creative journalism and/or writing for television. Her interests include breakfast, food, comedy, and napping.

Denise Levertov, Poet and Mentor

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Michael True

                                                                                                                                      Denise Levertoc/Photo by Michael True

                                                                                                                                      Denise Levertoc/Photo by Michael True

A major American poet of the 20th century, Denise Levertov left her mark on the rich literary history of Worcester, Mass., through her readings from the late 1960s to the 1990s, her friendships with local writers, and her 1974 poetry workshop at Assumption College. She, Robert Bly, and Stanley Kunitz helped to launch the Worcester County Poetry Association, Inc., now in its forty-fourth year. In addition to her recently published Collected Poems, she is the subject of two excellent biographies: Donna Hollenberg’s Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Revolution, and Dana Greene’s Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life.

A special legacy is Levertov’s influence on local poets, including the late Chris Gilbert, Mary Fell, and John Hodgen, who have since received national awards. At a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Worcester Review, Hodgen remembered Levertov’s reading at the conclusion of the Assumption College workshop: “Denise filling La Maison Auditorium on a hot summer night, the crowd so enraptured, the room spilling over, so crowded each poem made you hungry for more, so crowded I sat out on the lawn under the window where she was reading, so filled up with poems I was writing even then.”

Sometimes regarded as a political poet because of her powerful renderings of the effects of the Vietnam war, that is a misleading classification. Poems such as “Live at War” do convey a sense of that tragic conflict and the suffering of the Vietnamese people:  “We are the humans, men who can make/ ….who do these acts,/ who convince ourselves/ it is necessary/…burned human flesh/ is burning in Vietnam as I write.” The same is true of ”The Altars in the Streets,” a response to that war based on Levertov’s time there with Muriel Rukeyser: “all the shed blood the monsoons cannot wash away/ has become a temple,/ fragile, insolent, absolute.”  As with poems by veterans such as Bruce Weigl, it speaks for the Vietnamese people struggling to sustain themselves in the crossfire. As with her love poems and religious poems, the war poems succeed through an artistry of image, sound, and argument.

During the years of her involvement in the anti-war movement, including the arrest and trial for civil disobedience of her husband, Mitchell Goodman, Levertov was occasionally overwhelmed by the effects of the war on people back home. The natural world offered her some solace, as in “Concurrence”:

each day’s terror, almost
a form of boredom—madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good–
and each day one,
sometimes two, morning glories,
faultless, blue, blue sometimes
flected with magenta, each
lit from within with
the first sunlight.

Her friend and mentor, Robert Duncan, worried about how all this might threaten her poetic gift. But her admiration for the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who faced a similar dilemma, encouraged her to face the challenge as a person and as an artist. As did other major poets such as Rukeyser and Robert Bly, Levertov provided a vivid and reflective rendering of what it felt like to live in the U.S. at that time.

Although born in England, where her first book was published, Levertov successfully appropriated a style in the American tradition of Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the early Modernists.

Her lyrical gifts were astonishing, enabling her to convey a sense of awe, not only in the early love poems, such as “Bedtime,” but also in the religious poems, such as “Annunciation” and those set in the Pacific Northwest, such as “the mountain’s daily speech in silence.”  Her selection in The Stream and The Sapphire traces the growth of a deep religious sensibility in poems comparable to the great religious poems by John Donne, George Herbert, and 17th century metaphysical poets.

The daughter of a Hasidic Jew who became an Anglican priest and of a descendant of the Welsh mystic Angel Jones, as a young woman she considered herself a skeptic. She returned to Christianity, the religion of her youth, and was baptized a Catholic while living among the Catholic community in Seattle, where she died in 1997. It was a gradual unfolding, one might say, described attentively and movingly by biographer Dana Greene. It originated, she said, in the process of writing “Mass for the Feast of St. Thomas Didymus” and an oratorio on the disappearance and deaths of innocent clergy and laity in El Salvador in the 1980s.

The reader can trace Levertov’s assent to religious faith in “Flickering Mind” and “A Traveler,” which concludes, “I’ll chance/the pilgrim sandals.”  “Annunciation,”which first appeared in the Catholic Worker, is a powerful rendering of the Virgin Mary’s assuming a responsibility imposed upon her: “We are told of meek obedience./ The engendering Spirit/ did not enter her without consent./ God waited./ …Consent,courage unparalleled/ opened her utterly.”

Now, two decades since her death, the eloquence and power of Levertov’s work are more obvious than ever, as her work is appreciated by larger audiences of readers, critics, and scholars. And the younger poets among her Worcester audience were fortunate to have the benefit of her presence and her influence.

Michael True, Emeritus Professor, Assumption College, Worcester, Mass. He is the Co-founder of the Worcester County Poetry Association, Founding Editor, Worcester Review; and Co-founder of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions. He has taught at colleges in the U.S., India, and China. His books include An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature, 1995; A Daniel Berrigan Reader, 1986; People Power: Peacemakers and Their Communities, 2007; and Prairie Song and Other Poems, 2013. True is a Featured Writer and is happy to be contacted by Journal writers seeking advice. He can be reached at mtrue@assumption.edu.                         

Old Things Are Always Worth More

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

“Come’ere and take a look at these,” he’d say. “What do I got here?”

“Oh, more coins, Grampa Ted?” I’d respond.

“Huh? What?” He was slightly hard of hearing, mind you.

“Coins. Coins, yes?”

“Yeah. Well, take a look through ‘em and take what you want.”

There would be a pile—of varying sizes each visit—that contained random coins. Most were simple denominations: pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Occasionally, I would find something more intriguing or valuable, like a half-dollar, or a foreign or antique piece, which was always a thrill.

Grampa Ted would tell me not to take the whole pile because I should “save some for the other grandkids” as well. (My cousins and I were in the midst of teenagehood and therefore had to be imbued with the art of sharing.) He would ask me what the coins were, as if he hadn’t seen them before, even if the coin in question was a humble penny. I would oblige, of course, and tell him what it was if I knew. And because I visited so often, I would get the most from the piles. Not only that, I would get to cherry-pick the best of the bunch. I was a self-made coin collector because of Ted, though for him, the name of the game was learn quick or get called an asshole.

The ordinary ones coins I rolled in coin-wrappers and deposited at the local bank. The extraordinary ones, which were older (thus deemed “rarer”) than their lackluster counterparts, I kept. I also held onto the special coins that were unique in origin or age.

There was kind of a fourth category: the “what the heck is that?” category. Anything that wasn’t a coin went here, and no, there was absolutely nothing valuable in these piles. Bus tokens, car fuses, and tiny chunks of metal were common.

“Grampa, this isn’t a coin. It’s a washer.”

“Huh? Goddammit, do you want it or not?”

I can remember one occasion when I was presented with a green, gallon-sized glass whiskey jug full of pennies. Frankly, the sentimental value it had to my grandfather, I was told, did not outweigh—although it seemed that the jar outweighed a neutron star—the fact that the container of pennies was just plain cumbersome. This jar contained nothing more than post-1980 pennies. They literally weren’t even worth their weight in copper since the government began using zinc and other fillers instead. And they really weren’t worth being put into coin rolls. After I had rolled them, I realized that I had earned fifteen bucks, which was like working for two hours at a minimum-wage job. It took an hour and a half to just sort them and roll them. I never told Gampa Ted that I deposited them. I can imagine his reaction.

“You did what?!”

Other occasions were more “profitable,” a word I didn’t like to use because it made it sound as though I only visited Grampa Ted for the coins. That was true for a while, I suppose. There were many visits where he would give me extremely special coins. Sometimes he’d give me pure silver. I would often get half-dollars, and I liked to hold onto the ones from before 1970.

One time, he gave me a coin from 1827, which I later had appraised. Turns out it was worth about $200. He was excited to hear that but disgruntled that someone would spend that much money on a coin.

One day he handed my dad a scrap of newspaper to bring home to me.

“Grampa thinks you should go to this,” my dad told me.

“Lemme see,” I said.

It was a newspaper clipping for a coin show in some town nearby. It mentioned sales, appraisals, and trading, as well as the opportunity to rent spaces.

My dad continued, “He also sent you this.”

He handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

It couldn’t be.

“Jesus, dad…” I paused. “I would love to go. Will you go, too?” I finally asked.

“Well, we’ll make a plan—maybe some weekend—to check it out. It’s about a forty minute drive from here.”

    It wasn’t more than a couple weekends and we were off to the show. I was really looking forward to it. Grampa Ted had never been to one of these, but he seemed to have an intuitive sense that I would enjoy it. I still could not get over the feeling of the twenty-dollar bill in my hands. I wanted to keep it forever, but he would certainly not have approved of that. If he was going to give me a small fortune, he would at least expect me to use it as he had intended.

When the day arrived, we drove off not knowing what to expect. The hotel where the show was being held had numerous signs advertising the event, so I figured it must have been popular. One of the signs read “Monthly Rare Coin Show.” Upon entering the building, we walked past some dealers who sold coin essentials such as coin-rolls and sleeves, as well as guidebooks on coin values and those pre-assembled collection kits like the 50 State Quarters Collection people bought for their kids all those years ago.

The admission was usually one dollar—because that would keep those who weren’t all that serious about coins from taking up room on the floor—but with our newspaper clipping from Grampa Ted we got in for free. He would have been so proud. We also got to enter a raffle for “a randomly selected coin valued between ten and twenty dollars.” While we were standing there, I signed up for the mailing list, so that I would always know when the next coin show would be rolling in.

We stepped onto the floor, felt the musty air of mildewed coin wrappers, and quickly realized our rookie status. Everyone looked the same, they all looked like Ted. Why wasn’t he here? Oh right, the only thing he hated more than hordes of humans confined to small spaces was the act of spending money.

“Um, where are the people other than the old white guys?” I asked.

“You think you’ll find women or children here?” my dad quipped.

There were more than sixty tables, and each had its own stacks of coins, paper money, rare metals, stamps, and similar items. Old white men held out magnifying glasses to inspect their purchases. Elderly customers bought from elderly dealers, who yelled across the coin cases about the price of silver bullion being particular high that day.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care.

Approaching one table, I talked to a dealer—in a very suave tone, might I add—about my h
ope to pursue mercury dimes.

“The 1916-D I have here is worth more since it is above XF grading,” the first of the old, white dealers said.

“Ah, yes, 1916-D. XF. Of course,” I followed up. Smooth.

Walking table to table, I managed to buy many one-dollar items, such as a 1943 German 1 Reichspfennig coin which attracted me with its moss-green color (though when I arrived home and turned it over, I realized it had a Swastika on it…oops). On a lighter note, I found beat-to-death buffalo nickels that some guy was selling for fifty cents apiece. I was unsure what year they were, but I didn’t even care! Then I thought I hit the jackpot with a 50 Franc Moroccan coin dated from 1371. “Old things are always worth more,” I thought. I learned after my purchase from another dealer that the date was relative to the calendar of Islam. So 1371 really meant something like 1951. Lame.

With a pile of coins in hand, my dad and I left more enriched than when we walked in. From many of the dealers, we had learned about the rating systems of coins. We learned which ones were the best to start a collection. We were taught how to keep our coins in the best condition for resale. I even kept the silver dollar I received as change at one of the dealer-stands.

No, neither of us was an expert at coin collecting. But Grampa  Ted wasn’t an expert at this either, so I didn’t have to worry about impressing him. I couldn’t wait to tell him about these people spending all that money on little chunks of metal! On second thought, I had better spare that detail. Old or new, he didn’t believe that anything was worth more, especially a coin sold by some anonymous dealer. All I know is that the older our relationship got, the more it was worth to me.

Nick Porcella  is a recent graduate of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., where he studied English and philosophy. He is now a part of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the same institution. See more of his literary work at Entropy Literary.

 

Mother

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Anashua Madhubanti

                                                                                                                                                      photo by sasha kohan

                                                                                                                                                      photo by sasha kohan

The day I finally find myself visiting a sequence of past events in my life, Mother had slipped into a coma, where I imagine her surroundings are darkness, as opposed to the bright, sterile light of the waiting room, where I sit without feeling, unable to distinguish where the hard edge of the chair ends and my thighs start, where one more hour of a machine beeping and the vapid reports of a subordinate doctor will push me farther into the numbness of my own mind. The hospital glass is dark with specks of light that shine like stars, and I look out, trying to find another space in time, only to be drawn back to the reality of my own existence, the stars burning into my reflection. Mother is distant from me now, more distant than she has ever been, more distant than the day in March when I heard her hushed voice on the phone with the doctor, more silent than the silence in the ultrasound room when the core of the curve of my belly was projected onto the screen for the world to see in the first of a series of violations to come.

That day in the doctor’s office, my life really started. Before, everything swam in a haze of incoherence. But after those few minutes in that office, I achieved a new awareness – the awareness of my womb, which held the capacity to be the size of a raspberry and a cavern, all at once. Suddenly, in a moment, those narrow confines of muscle, mucous, and liquid made room for a lifetime of dreams, possibilities, and unbearable losses, each the size of blue elephants. A whole sea of submerged marine animals filled up the space in my womb. There were trees whose trunks were hung with yellow and green mosses, and an undergrowth alive with creatures that looked strange and smelled strange and hummed darkly.

With the knowledge of the new universe I carried within me, I walked out of the doctor’s room, and the world outside became remote to me. I saw everything from a distance; it was as though my feet did not touch but merely glided over the crowded streets of my city, Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. I heard the usual noises, the cacophony of cars honking, the chicken seller’s coarse calls rising out of the bazaar. But over the din of it all, I could not recall anything I heard. They meant nothing to me.

It was spring and the sun was still making its way to the tropics. The day was warm but not unbearable, and when I reached home I found father sitting on the front porch, drinking sweetened milk tea and eating digestive biscuits. Avoiding his eye contact, I crept into the bedroom, closed my door, cried, and made the call to break the news to D. We were both silent for a long time, because we did not know what to say or do, and the silence was comforting. When I saw him in the afternoon, I knew I had changed, but though he could feel that I had changed he could not define what had changed. ‘Why do you have your thousand yard stare,’ he asked, and all I could think about was something I had read in a book, the name of which was lost to me then. If two people meet after a long time, they both imagine themselves to have changed greatly, but neither can perceive the other to have changed very much. To him, I remained the same person that I had always been.

That afternoon, D and I made love unhurriedly, slowly, painstakingly, as though it was the most important thing in the world. But it would be wrong to say that D and I made love, for, really, the three of us made love. The whole ecosystem that had grown out of my womb made love with us. The tops of the trees bristled together, the tall elephant grass danced in the wind, a tidal wave rose from within the sea and swept over everything. And afterwards, the three of us were together on his big, white bed which seemed to rock like a boat.

Later, we reached a decision. Or rather, a decision was reached. “It would be stupid,”’ he said, “And what about college?” I agreed, for life was long, and we were just at the start. He stroked my hair as the last of the sun seeped in and warmed his bed. ‘I never noticed your hair was brown,’ he said.

After a while, I asked him, “Should I tell Mother?” “You have to,” he replied.

That’s when it started, the silence. Silence when I told her, silence afterwards, it was as though her voice was silenced. Even on the phone she whispered. And I, sitting in my room, put together all the S-words I knew like a string of pearls. Silence. Shame. Society. Seclusion. Sex. Silence. Shame.

One day soon, she said, “Come, Daughter, we have to go. Tell your father we’re going to your aunt’s.’” But I sat in my room, not in any hurry to get moving, and I stared at the open pages of a book before me. At some point, my tea turned cold, someone came in to put fresh laundry in the drawers, and finally, the shadow of my father crossed the door. ”What are you reading?” he asked me. ‘Siddhartha,’ I said. Father talked at length about his dislike of Herman Hesse and words streamed out of his mouth, of which I only caught a few. My father looked old in the light. He had missed shaving spots of his beard, which were grey specks against his dark skin. His was a life that had no time for mysticism or romance. Having come of age in a decade of wars, he was truly modern, and the specifications of bombers interested him more than magical realism. The images of burning Buddhist monks were burned into his mind, and he had quit Eastern mysticism altogether. Though I felt immense affection for the man, I also knew that if he knew my situation he would never forgive me.

My mother entered the room in haste, made excuses about where we were going, and soon I found myself in the car, the unreality of the city rushing by. Though she sat only a seat away from me, the distance between us was so great that I could not touch her, even if I had reached out for her. The rest of what passed between us that day remains hazy to me, for all I remember are the cold whitewashed walls of the medical facility and waking from a deep sleep with a start, only to confront a hollowness that resounded within me. The calm waters with landscapes of hills underneath had disappeared; now there was the tremendous crashing of waves on barren sands. And I found myself more alone than I had ever felt. Everything I had imagined was no more, the name that was so real to me now sounded laughable, and I felt my worth as a person to have lessened. I was without purpose. I found myself stringing together S-words once again. Silence. Stillness. Sanity.

At that time, one thing I had not wondered was why she had helped me, especially when that meant going against her morality, religion, and honor. It had meant days spent making excuses for my appearance, as intrusive relatives had asked her one question after another. “Why does she look so sickly? Why did she lose so much weight?” What had happened to me, asked my father, unable to put together the connection between my sudden emotional withdrawal from the world and my hourly physical withdrawals into the bathroom. Many other things surfaced to me at that time, the most ironic realization being that I was only beautiful when I was sickly. Relatives, fat aunties in monstrous hair buns, snickering cousins in skin-tight jeans, suddenly took it upon themselves to comment on how much weight I had lost, and how beautiful it made me look. As they complimented me and suggested new clothes that I was now worthy enough to fit into, all I could think about was the dead-chicken smell I carried in my nostril everywhere like a bane, that would make my stomach turn when faced with food.

Mother, Mother, I had always wanted to ask, why are you still here for me? For the next five years, neither of us ever mentioned what had happened. I moved on with my life, broke things off with D, flew ten thousand miles to painfully separate myself from my roots, changed house, found bits and scraps of paper that were clues to my Mother’s life, of which I took no notice in the perpetual hurry I found myself in. Yet, sitting in the waiting room, I had begun to piece my mother’s life together.

I recalled the love-letters, hidden away from prying eyes for many years, containing illicit conversations with boys, testimonials to the subversive South Asian teenager that existed within the Mother figure I had always known. I thought of the imprints upon the notebook pages where her first rose must have been, and I thought of her first kiss, which must have echoed from her feet to her breasts. I imagined her marriage at eighteen, a hasty affair, pushing her forward into a societal role that she was not braced for, only to be solidified by her first and only pregnancy, me.

I had always held Mother in such reverence, that I too had been a part of the societal forces that shaped her. My own secret was so taboo that I had to tuck it away and forget it, in doing which I had to put away a part of my own history. It left many gaping questions that I should have addressed, except both our selves had been shadowed over by the same system of shame and silence. In the waiting room, for the thousandth time in my life, I was putting together S-words. Shame. Silence. Suppression. Subversion. Self. The list would keep growing longer in the years to come.

It was only when faced with impending loss of such magnitude that I could put into perspective the other great loss of my life.

Anashua Madhubanti, a geography major at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., is from Bangladesh, but believes home has no geographical location.

 

Strong

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Scott David

Ian Grimm wanted to be part of the Boston Marathon bombing.  

“We’re all victims, Marcy,” he told his wife. “You, me, anyone who was touched by this.  As much as those poor bastards who actually got limbs blown off.”  

“If I were you,” his wife advised, “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this.”

But it was too late.  Ian had already begun experimenting. He had started with non-Bostonians, of course, those sweet yearning souls who had reached out from the West Coast and Budapest and Auckland to see whether the Grimms were OK, persons whose concern was gratifying and touching, but ultimately based on the same impulse Ian had: to be a part of something greater.  

To satisfy the needs of this audience to feel connected, Ian had fabricated a few details that exaggerated his personal involvement: shrapnel embedded in his backside; ringing ears; blood-spattered forearms; and the shrieks and wails of the dying nearby.  None was precisely true, but his sister in Cleveland was especially grateful for these particulars, because she had desperately wanted to talk about the incident with someone who would understand Boston’s draw on native daughters like herself. The bombing, she said, had literally changed the course of her life. She could offer no sympathy for the killers (mercy was not hers to authorize), but she had experienced a profound and renewed sense of gratitude for her own health, her children’s brilliance, the lack of a military draft, the first ripening tomatoes in her garden, and the relative peace of Cleveland Heights.  

“Thank you, Ian, for your service,” she whispered.  

Unable to retreat from his inventions, Ian doubled-down.  He protested that he had only done what anyone in his shoes would have done: rescued a grown man with a leg wound by putting his fingers three inches deep into the man’s femoral artery.

“You’re so brave,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it.”

“Sometimes,” Ian said, “when you’re tested, you learn things about yourself.”

Having achieved such a gratifying connection with his sister, Ian turned to studying the genuine victims’ first-hand accounts of their experiences.  According to most accounts, there were 275 wounded, and he pored over the account of each and everyone of them and purloined only the best details.  When he had the facts sufficiently committed to memory and had polished and developed his story for a local audience, Ian tested a provisional version on select Bostonians.  

The feedback was good, the commiseration most gratifying.  

“I had no idea,” most of them said.

“Yes,” Ian confirmed, “I had come down to see Marcy finish, with the girls in tow. Had it been a moment earlier….”

“You’re lucky.”

“Thanks be to God,” Ian agreed.  

Patiently correcting people when they got the facts wrong, Ian variously positioned himself and/or the girls near the first bomb or the second, outside the Forum Restaurant or at the finish line, or, finally, looking out for his beautiful bride on the catwalk above the finish line among the press and paparazzi.

Marcy, who had in fact been stopped just short of Kenmore Square by the cops and told the race was over, initially hoped Ian’s story would quietly go away if she ignored it. Later, she shot him dirty looks, and yet, when his interlocutors at a dinner party politely involved her in the telling, she offered very careful, very noncommittal answers so as not to give Ian away.  

She was the first to agree the experience had changed him.

She was the first to say he was not the same man.

Ian loved her for these concessions.  For her restraint. If she hadn’t truly loved him, Marcy never would have humored him and indulged his storytelling.

At the prompting of well-meaning friends who heard his tale, Ian set up a foundation. It was nothing formal. The funds he collected he just deposited in his own bank account and tracked them in a separate spreadsheet until his Kickstarter and Facebook pages went viral and he lost count.  

Soon after, at a dinner with Marcy’s extended family, Ian solicited additional donations from her relatives.  Marcy’s brother the lawyer was present.  Playing idly with his smartphone, he asked whether the foundation had applied for and received nonprofit status from the IRS, and he politely suggested that Ian again recite the facts of that terrible day so that all might be edified by his example.

Gratified, Ian launched into his account.

Marcy’s brother let him rattle on for half an hour, before he took one of the story’s inconvenient loose threads and pulled.  

“How exactly was it,” the litigator asked, “that you saw the bomb explode and yet shrapnel hit you in the ass?  Not the front side.  The ass.”

“Well, it was sort of on the ass.  I was kind of turned sideways.  You know what I mean?”

“On the catwalk?”

“Right.”

“Shrapnel shot a half block down the crowded street and hit you standing twenty-five feet in the air on a catwalk.  On the ass.”

“Exactly.”

“Show me the scar.”

“It healed nicely.  There’s hardly any ….”

“Show me.”

Marcy begged her brother to stop, just stop, and her mother repeated, “Stop, just stop,” and someone spilled a gravy boat, and Marcy’s brother zeroed in for the kill.

“Pull down your pants, you son of a bitch!”

With great dignity, Ian loosed his belt and pulled his pants and underwear down about a quarter inch.

The litigator snorted derisively.

“There was no shrapnel, was there, Ian?”

“Not exactly.”

“And you don’t have a press pass, do you?”

“No.”

“So you weren’t on the catwalk?”

Ian hiked up his pants and buckled his belt.  

“More like, sort of close by,” he admitted.

“In fact,” the litigator said, as if delivering a closing argument, “if I had to guess, at the time of the blast you were actually holed up in a bar in Southie nursing your fifth beer and complaining to anyone who would listen that Marcy had decided to run without inviting you to join her. Isn’t that right?”

“Well…”

Her brother pounded the table. The spilled gravy boat jumped.

“Isn’t that right?!” he shouted. 

Ian gaped and stammered and finally said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you are a liar,” the litigator suggested politely, “trying to fleece your own family for a few bucks.”

“Stop it!  Just stop it,” Marcy cried. “I wish this damn bomb had never happened.”

She looked directly at Ian.

“I wish,” she said, “I had never married you.”

After the dinner, which Marcy’s family would be talking about for years to come, Marcy begged Ian to give his story a rest.  

“For God’s sake. Turn the money over to the OneFund.  If you really want to do something for the victims, run with me next year, OK?  Isn’t that enough?”

 “Run?  The marathon?”  Ian was aghast.  “I couldn’t even consider running.  Not anymore.  Don’t you understand, sweetheart?  I thought you understood.  The bombing traumatized me.  Crowds — they skeeve me out.”

“I understand that right this minute I’d love to loop a shiny pair of New Balance around your neck and pull the laces tight.”

Despite his wife’s misgivings, and despite his grand humiliation at the hands of her brother the litigator, Ian persevered in telling his story.  He had no real choice in the matter.  There were greater truths than what could be proved by some pompous windbag.

Besides, Ian had spent much of the foundation money. Though he had tried valiantly to meet expectations of the donors by spending on things and causes he believed anyone would support, like for example, a bomb-free marathon (with a bit on the side to pay himself a small salary and housing allowance, of course), Ian eventually siphoned some funds to support causes equally worthy but perhaps not equally universal (e.g., casino gambling in Massachusetts, in which he had a small stake as a real estate broker). Ian had reasoned that the giver was happy and the recipient more so.

    Moreover, the genuine fraudsters, who were in Jersey on the day of the attack but filed for recompense from the OneFund on behalf of a dead aunt formerly resident in West Roxbury, made Ian’s claims to having been present positively benign by comparison.  Unlike them, Ian’s heart was in the right place.  And, truth be told, it could, after all, have been Ian.  He hadn’t been in New Jersey that fateful day.  As Marcy’s brother had so skillfully gotten him to admit, he had been in a bar in South Boston complaining loudly about his wife.  Not ten blocks away.  Well, maybe ten.  Or twelve.  But the point was, it had been mathematically possible for Ian to have been present at the finish line.  Had his luck been different.  Had he been, for example, more supportive of Marcy.

Accordingly, as the pain of Marcy’s brother’s cross-examination faded, Ian quietly shored up some of the more obvious contradictions in his account.  He retold the story frequently, and he told it well, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.  Indeed, though he didn’t reveal this conceit to anyone, Ian considered himself to be the unofficial poet laureate of the bombings.  None other had yet emerged, except the unnamed bastard who fashioned the phrase Boston Strong but failed to trademark it.  

And no matter what Marcy’s brother had to say about it, Ian was now a better person than he had been.  A kinder and more patient father.  A more empathetic lover.  A more engaged citizen of the Commonwealth.  Now, for example, Ian genuinely welcomed — even craved — another municipal emergency, so he could respond to it with the same grace and courage with which he had imagined responding to the bombing.  He was absolutely certain that he would rise to the occasion.  Or, maybe not certain, but part of the thrill was not knowing whether he’d run from the blast of toward it.

In the next few months, while waiting patiently for that next municipal emergency to present itself, Ian steeled himself against intervening with bullying parents or abusive boyfriends too much in their cups.  Such injustices simply weren’t a big enough stage for his ambition.  He only cheapened his connection to the bombing by getting involved in these essentially domestic matters.  So he didn’t respond to people who called his bullshit.  Or those who tailgated him or called him a faggot or treated his wife or children badly.  

At the bombing’s anniversary, while Marcy gave a second shot at completing the marathon, Ian brought his girls to the crime scenes.  He explained the physics of the pressure cooker bomb (which he called the Crockpot Bomb, because he thought it was endearing). Together, he and the girls recited the names of the dead and injured.  Not all 275 claimants, which number seemed preposterously high to Ian relative to the twenty or so actual victims.  Just the principal injured.  He wasn’t accusing anyone of faking it, but in Ian’s humble opinion a booboo on the knee couldn’t compare to a prosthetic limb.

“Isn’t that right, girls?” he asked.

As they had been taught, the girls loyally agreed that only bona fide amputation could elicit their sympathy.  (Their mother’s road blisters, for example, would earn only studied contempt.)

Outside the Forum Restaurant, Ian and the girls left a pair of sneakers.  They were a child’s size five, which not only made them more pathetic and cute and entirely devastating, but also would deter homeless people from taking them, and they’d be therefore more enduring and more likely, for example, to be preserved in the future bombing museum.

When Ian learned authorities were no longer allowing backpacks at the Marathon, but instead requiring all belongings to be carried in clear bags, he trained his eagle-eyed daughters to spot non-conforming bags.  As they identified likely suspects, he personally hacked apart several such packages with an axe he had brought along because you never know when you are going to have to cut your way through police barricades or temporary viewing stands to reach the victims of some civic disaster.  

The judge who presided over Ian’s case let him off with a mild warning and a fraternal fistbump, after Ian testified to his intimate connection with the bombing and his still fragile mental makeup and his adorable girls and his plucky wife, who had finished the course in record time, all of whom he loved so very much.  

Years later, Marcy would make jokes at Ian’s expense, saying, “I stayed with Ian because after the whole bombing fiasco I
felt I had seen the worst of his character.”  

Everybody laughed at her wry recollections, and Ian was OK with that.  He had nothing to prove.  He had been in the right, and he knew what it took to be a hero, and he knew what it was like to be in the shit when the shrapnel was flying. And when you’re right and a hero and have been deep in the shit, it was OK when people laughed and called you ridiculous.  When it came to questions of homeland security, Ian would rather his wife and his girls rested easy and stayed unafraid and remained blissfully unaware of the dangers that lurked in backpacks and crockpots and the terrible things men had to do to keep the enemy at bay.

 

Under various pseudonyms, Scott David has published dozens of short stories, a memoir, several novels, and a guide to wine and cocktails.  He lives in Boston and Provincetown, Massachusetts.  For more information, go to scottdavidboston.com. Scott David is a Featured Writer and welcomes correspondence from Journal writers.

Death and His Wife

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Laura Barker

                      Egon Shiele/ Bridgeman Art Library/ Universal Images Group

                      Egon Shiele/ Bridgeman Art Library/ Universal Images Group

Death couldn’t find any toothpaste. He opened the cabinets above the rust-rimmed sink. All he could find were little plastic packets of floss, his wife’s antidepressants, and the candy-colored bottles of Bubble Fun that his son used to love. Death swept a finger along the metal shelves and frowned at the grime that coated his nail. Their apartment was falling apart, with them still inside.

Death popped his head out the bathroom door, “Honey, do we have any toothpaste?”

Death’s wife, Lisa Mercy, stood at the kitchen sink. She was three pills into her daily nine-pill routine. There were so many different ones, some squat, some oily, some square, some teal. They all came in acid-orange containers, each one promising to be the miracle drug to bring back the sunny-smiled bride Death had married ten years ago. She took two more pills before answering her husband, “In the top drawer.”

Death pulled open the drawer. Nothing but a stick of deodorant and random Lego pieces, “Nope, nothing here. I think we’re out.”

“How can we be out, I just bought like twelve at Costco.” Lisa started towards the bathroom, but stopped herself. She turned back towards the kitchen sink and grabbed her water glass. “Check the lower cabinet,” she called.

Death sighed. Looks like it was going to be a mouthwash day. He closed the mirrored cabinets and blinked at his reflection. People always pictured Death as cloaked in a threadbare black robe with a gleaming white skull and skeletal fingers that beckoned people to their graves. In reality, Death looked much less gaunt. He was a tall, bespectacled man with thinning brown hair and teeth that badly needed braces. He wore college sweatpants and a t-shirt instead of the medieval robe, and carried an iPhone instead of scythe. It was an average phone, with a chipped glass cover, but it had an app to inform him of the latest death. It buzzed, and Death would have to put on real pants and escort the deceased to the Other Side. Not a glamorous job, but it paid the bills.

Death unscrewed the bottle of mouthwash “Oh, before I forget,” he called out the bathroom door, “Guess who I met yesterday?”

Lisa dug her nails into the glass at the sound of his chipper voice.

“Remember that singer you used to really like? Peaches?” Death threaded a waxy string of floss between his fingers, “Yeah, she died yesterday. Man, she did not want to cross. Kept whining and complaining about how she deserved a second chance, and how she didn’t do that much cocaine.” He rolled his eyes, “Divas.”

He listened for her to gasp or give him that little chuckle where he could hear her smiling, but he was greeted with hollow silence. Death went back to flossing. He should be used to it by now. Lisa had been sulking ever since Death carried their son across to the Other Side. For some reason, she blamed it on him. It wasn’t his fault that David fell off the swing set and broke his little neck. Death didn’t force him to pump his legs higher and higher, sending the swing so high that for a second it seemed to defy gravity. Death didn’t tell him to jump off to see if he, too, could hover in the air for that magical moment. The only thing he did was hold his son’s hand as he passed onto the Other Side.

Lisa had begged Death not to let David go. She begged, she bargained, she cried, she even threatened to divorce him. But Death would not compromise his responsibility. He had made no exceptions for his own father or best friend. He’d carried the best man at his wedding over after he was hit by a group of joy-riding teenagers. Sure, it was sad, but it had to be. Mortality was as much of the life cycle as birth was. Death only wished Lisa could see it this way.

Death’s phone buzzed again. With his free hand, he swiped to the home screen, “This might interest you,” he said.

Unbeknownst to Death, Lisa was lying face down on their collapsed couch. She rolled onto her side and saw the little toy duck David used to love that had slipped under the TV cabinet. Shortly after his son’s parting, Death had quietly donated all of David’s toys and clothes to charity, but every now and again, Lisa would find a stray sock under the sofa, or Goodnight Moon wedged under their bed. When she found them, she started towards her son’s room, and then when she remembered, a horrible sound would catch in her throat, and she’d lock herself in the bathroom with a bottle of vodka and a trembling handful of aspirin until Death came home.

Death laced floss between his fingers, “Oh, and guess who was my last delivery of the day? Mrs. Doris!” Death chuckled, “Oh, Mrs. Doris. Such a trouper. She didn’t complain the whole way down there. She even said–you’ll love this–she said ‘That damn head ache’s finally gone!’”

Lisa remained on the couch, eyes fixed on the toy duck under the couch. She rolled her sixth pill between her fingers. Lisa had been to a slew of psychopharmacologists, who also listened to her worn story and prescribed a rainbow of pills: Zoloft, Celexa, Sarafem, Xanax, Prozac. The drugs made her brain feel hollow and numbed the ache in the center of her chest, but nothing could get rid of the pain of being too busy on the phone to take a good last look at her David’s sweet gap-toothed grin as she sent him to his last day of school.

The phone perched on the edge of the sink buzzed. “Huh. Danielle Brooks. Isn’t she the nice little sixteen-year old from down the street?”

Silence.

Death shrugged, “Hope it wasn’t anything too bad. She was a sweet kid.” He pulled back his lips to check his teeth, “Looks like we need to book a new cat sitter pronto.”

Lisa covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t stand the way that Death talked about it. Like dying was nothing more than a spilled glass of apple juice. It didn’t bother her when she was young, and the only people dying were friends’ grandpas and aging rock stars. But as she grew older, the people who were dying became closer and closer to her. First it was her college roommate, who died in a plane crash. Then her best friend from high school, when cancer came roaring back to fight a third time and won. Then her sister, who was crushed under the wheel of a truck after she pushed her son to safety.

The deaths kept growing, a horrible weight building between Lisa’s shoulders. She’d beg Death to overlook one death, and even held onto his legs to prevent him from collecting her father. But years of screaming, pleading, and threatening didn’t even put a dent in Death’s dedication to his job. Then David’s death came. What killed Lisa was that Death didn’t even let her have a few seconds for a goodbye, a final hair smoothing, a few words of love that he could carry with him into eternity. No, he just helped his son off the ground and delivered him before picking up the phone. That destroyed her.

Death peeked his head out of the bathroom door, “Hon? You okay?”

Pretending not to hear him, Lisa stood up and walked back over to the stove. She stirred the eggs half-heartedly.

“Well, T.G.I. Wednesday, am I right?” he laughed to himself. Lisa didn’t even move, “Hey, know what’s getting me through this week? Our date this Friday.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair as he walked out of the bathroom, “You know, we haven’t gone out in forever. But this Friday is gonna be great. A fireside table in the Oak + Fig, a piano concert downtown, maybe a few cocktails afterwards….” He walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. Lisa startled so suddenly that Death drew back, “Hey, take it easy, tiger. You act like you’ve just seen the Grim Reaper!” The joke was almost as old as he was, but it never failed to bring a smile to Lisa’s lips. But with her back turned to him, Death couldn’t be certain.

Death started back towards the bathroom, but stopped just before turning the corner. “Hey,” he said quietly.

Lisa turned around. Her eyes were glassy. Her face still looked young, but was creased around the eyes from years of crying.

“Just wanted to say you look beautiful today.”

Lisa smiled, but her eyes looked even glassier. She turned back to the eggs. “Scrambled?”

“That’d be perfect. Thanks, hon.” Spirits lifted, he went back to flossing. He always knew just the right thing to cheer his wife up.

Once her husband left, Lisa opened the sliding door to the balcony. She took a step outside, the cool cement chilling her bare feet. Her bathrobe caught in the late September wind and billowed around her. Lisa took another cautious step forward. She gripped the metal bar and looked over the edge. The city was spread below her like a child’s drawing. The tiny cars looked like beetles scurrying along thin strips of grey, and the trees looked like drops of lime candy. The playground just below them was empty, making all the army-green play equipment look lonely in the middle of the urban jungle. It was too much like the little worlds she’d make with David in their playroom out of Tinkertoys and Legos. She could still see his small hands interlocking the wooden toys together, carefully outlining a world that would be destroyed seconds later.

Lisa clutched her bathrobe closer to her, closing the gap between her breast and her robe. The smell of exhaust made her head feel light. Wordlessly, she lifted herself over the balcony’s railing and rested her feet between the metal bars. Her stomach pitched as the wind gently pushed her forwards and backwards over forty stories of nothingness. The wind howled in her ears and blew her untidy strawberry blonde curls around her like she was underwater. She leaned forward, fingers still hooked under the railing, and looked down. Her grip loosened.

Death’s phone buzzed.

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Laura Barker was born in Chicago and is a junior at Clark University, pursuing an English Major with a concentration in Journalism and Creative Writing. She enjoys reading, is working on a novel (The Brycean Files), and is active in musical theatre and student government.

Photo credit: Death and the Maiden . Schiele. Encyclopedia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 June 2015 from

http://quest.eb.com/search/108_310816/1/108_310816/cite

Bothered and Bewhiskered

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

 

by Thomas Anania

 

Moustache, mustache, or ’stache–the word stirs a powerful feeling of pride in those brave enough to affect them. Many a man, (and perhaps some women) have sported mustaches: Tom Selleck, Mahatma Ghandi, Mr. Moneybags. The community has been swelling in numbers recently, perhaps due to the shaggy romanticism sweeping the nation. With television programs like IFC’s Whisker Wars, we’re undoubtedly entering a renaissance of facial hair as self-expression.

Braided beards and waxed ’staches aren’t over the hump of stigma yet, however. The American Mustache Institute released a report in 2013 pertaining to the lack of workplace advancement for hairy-lipped employees. The AMI claimed that the “mustache ceiling,” or the lack of whiskers at the upper echelons of the corporate world, was due to the “ESPN factor.” ESPN, a network largely consumed by males aged 21-45, features many correspondents, most of whom have smooth faces. Constantly being subjected to these correspondents sends the message to guys everywhere that to be professional one must be clean-shaven, wear a suit, and have a terminally vanilla sense of humor.    

THE AUTHOR/CELINE MANNVILLE

THE AUTHOR/CELINE MANNVILLE

While society has slowly started to accept beards and even  man buns, resistance on the upper lip front has been stiff. For the longest time facial hair was considered taboo in the workplace. Whiskers just weren’t professional; there was no room for them between luncheon whiskeys and grabbing the secretary’s ass. Disney only started allowing employees to wear beards in 2012.

In addition to the baby-faced workplace, mustaches have come to be associated with “that creepy guy down the street who watches everyone through his blinds.” The entertainment industry reinforces this ridiculous notion by portraying many sleazy antagonists with mustaches. Think Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones or “Pornstache” in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black.

I myself was recently subjected to mustache prejudice. When meeting someone for the first time there is a script that almost everyone observes. “Hello, I’m… It’s nice to meet you…yada yada.” Well, what do you say when the first thing out of someone’s mouth is: “Nice mustache, you look a lot like a pedophile.” You can respond in two ways. Lower yourself similarly and offer, “Nice forehead. You look like a billboard.” Or you can ignore it: “Yeah, nice to meet you too.” I chose the latter because, let’s face it, there is a double standard. It is perfectly acceptable to deride people based on their facial hair but not on any other facet of their outward appearance.

As a society we may like to believe that we have moved past the notion of judging by outward appearance, but I say: nonsense. Electing the first black man to the Oval Office has not made this a post-racial country, so why would a television show about facial hair change everyone’s attitudes toward the mustache? A lot of work has yet to be done with the attitudes of the general public, which is wary of any change, unless, of course, it’s been repackaged with “20 percent more” and smothered in barbeque sauce. Whether we acknowledge our prejudices or not, they have to come to an end. I invite everyone to put down your razors, join the hairy horde, and stand for bewhiskered equality.

 

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Thomas Anania studies Economics at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Spokane

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Samuel Simas

 

The pasta simmers, and steam floats up into the stove light. The glow turns the kitchen walls yellow like cigarette-stained teeth. Mac curls and uncurls his toes in his rocking chair, the wood creaking. I take a blue dish towel to wipe away the silvery thread of drool from Mac’s face. He smiles at me, toothless, happy. When I pull the towel away, he says: The first star landed somewhere in the two-hundred mile stretch between Missoula and Spokane.

The night it fell, he says, people in Spokane had salted their driveways and strapped chains onto their tires for the winter storm. Channel 7’s Phil Arlee predicted snow high enough to lose your knees in, snow we weren’t ready for so early in December. When it fell, he says, you could see a pastel purple smudge of light chasing a clear moon-sized orb from every window in Spokane.

 

The heating element glows red and then blackens like a slow-motion stoplight across from the fire station. Water bubbles up and over, sizzling on the stove-top. I nab it and bring it to the steel colander in the sink. I turn on the faucet, and water gushes noisily out. Mac raises his voice.

Everyone went to find it, he says. Spokane, Missoula. Everyone. They loaded up their trucks and took off on I-90, chasing the orb to where they thought it landed somewhere between trees and snow.

Busker went by himself, Mac says. Took your red Chevy and drove an hour and a half, watching the trees of the Lolo Forest pass underneath falling snow. He wanted to drive until the Lolo kissed the Cœur D’Alene Forest. Once you passed the mid-point, you were on your way to the other city, through Montana. Busker didn’t want to go so far. He worried if he did, then he wouldn’t be able to make his way back.

 

MICHAEL DUNNING / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Universal Images Group

MICHAEL DUNNING / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Universal Images Group

Busker and I still shared the beat-up Chevy. It’s a good, sturdy truck that served us through more than one glacial winter. The bed is rotted out now, but it’s still good for a haul or two of wood during the fall as long as we don’t take too much. We’re holding onto it because the cars in Sandusky Automotive are too expensive for my income. We probably could have afforded the newer model, navy blue, if Busker were able to keep a job.

Mac continues: People went missing, he says. Most made it out of the woods after a day or two, he says, and the ones who could tell the trees apart by the scars on their trunks came out soonest. Busker made it out just fine, but somehow he lost his pants along the way.

 

I take off my wedding ring and wash my hands for the third time, but the smell of dead fish and deli-meat still overpower citrus-scented soap.

It was never a particularly beautiful ring. Busker picked out something the color of coal instead of a diamond. When he gave it to me, he explained it was a special stone. Worth more than a diamond, but it never shined. That was fine though. I didn’t need it to shine. . I loved it because Busker gave it to me, and it was all he had to give.

I look toward Mac, who slurps back saliva and looks at the shadows dancing on the wall from the soft glow of the television. He likes to watch it on mute and read the subtitles. He thinks it will keep his mind sharp.

 

When Busker knocked on the door, Mac says, his mother and I thought it was bad news. No one ever comes around late at night with anything good to say. Unless they’re expected.

His nose was bright red, the color of a cooked lobster, Mac says. And he wasn’t wearing pants! His hands and legs were turning dark purple from the cold. We brought him in, put him next to the fire with a glass of whiskey, and asked what happened.

He told us the long line of brake-lights leading from Spokane out towards Missoula looked like hunting season — the way trucks parked along the road towing carts behind. People crawled in and out of the trees searching for the bit of star they swore they’d seen fall. Some people let their children tag along in snow gear like tiny Michelin-men.

But he didn’t tell us if he found what he was looking for. He shook his head, eyes wide like a doe, and sipped away until the whiskey put him to sleep. He didn’t seem right. That’s what his mother thought. But he hasn’t seemed right since, has he?

No, he hasn’t, I say, And the purple never left his hands.

 

The man who had come back that night was sadder than I’d ever seen him. He looked like a boy who had lost his favorite pet to a truck charging down the road. A little hollow, a little scared.

I strain the pasta in the sink. When the steam fogs my glasses, I see the outline of Mac in his chair, the kitchen, and the low glow of the yellow light for a minute before it clears. My eyebrows pull together out of frustration, and I work as fast as I can to spoon the pasta onto paper plates. My hands don’t want to cooperate, and I drop some noodles onto the floor. Mac fidgets his arms and pushes himself up in the chair.

Stay there, I say. I’ll bring it to you,

What a good girl you are. What Busker did to get one as good as you, I’ll never know.

I set up the tray next to Mac’s chair and place the steaming plate of pasta on it. I sit down across from him to eat. It needs salt. I go into the kitchen. Busker is sleeping in the next room, his snoring like the low rumble of an engine. Called in sick again. I grab the salt and bring it with me to the sofa. Mac starts talking again.

Anyway, he says settling back into his chair, Busker took off after the thing. He thought if he found it you wouldn’t have to work another day in your life. He wanted to get you that car you two had talked about down at Sandusky’s.

 

Busker had been gliding from one job to another since a month after the star fell, never getting fired, never finding anything that made him happy. He started as a mechanic in the town over working on BMWs. Now, he was working as a third-shift security guard at the hospital.

I make enough money at Rock’s to keep the apartment and take care of us, but I wonder how long I’ll be able to do it before bludgeoning some high-maintenance customer.  

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t have to take care of Mac, too. He isn’t too needy, but he is there everyday when I get home from work, rocking away and reading the television subtitles, holding his bladder to the point of bursting because he can’t make it to the toilet.

He gets his social security check and spends it on licorice, ice-cream sandwiches, and those spongy orange circus peanut candies that no one eats besides the old and the batty.

 

When Busker stepped out of the truck, Mac says, it was quiet except for the voices in the woods. Snow up to his knees. He went on like that for an hour and didn’t make it more than half-a-mile into the thick.

Mac pauses to eat. He gums the pasta for a while, his lips stretching out like a duck bill, uninhibited by teeth. The television is muted, so I have no choice but to listen to him. I check my watch. 8:43. Almost time for Mac to doze off in his chair after his pill. I know how the story ends, how Busker finds nothing but somehow loses his pants.

Mac swallows hard and coughs. Busker searched for four hours, he says. He was convinced he’d find it. But then the sun started to turn the sky pink, and Busker thought about turning around and giving up.

Silence except for Mac’s labored breathing as he spoons in the last bit of pasta.

But he kept going,. He kept searching until the sun’s glare on the snow blinded him. He finally headed back to the truck. Four hours out and four hours back. He walked the entire time with you on his mind.  And just before he got back to the road, Mac says, he found it.  

 

As far as I knew, Busker hadn’t even come close to the fallen chunk of moon-rock. He had come back that night, face contorted with sadness, and hadn’t smiled since. I set the spoon down onto my plate, thinking Mac may have dozed off and started dream-talking.

Yup, he says, He never told you.

I watch Mac rock to the beat of music I can’t hear. His eyes are closed, and his voice is barely louder than a whisper.

He found it?

Sure did.

He found it less than one-hundred feet away from the Chevy, he says. Hadn’t noticed it when he set out into the woods. Must’ve been too dark. The impact had hollowed out a hole in the snow so deep he thought it was a foxhole at first. Then he saw the steam coming from it. Bent down, thinking someone must’ve torched a fox. But then he saw it, glittering in the snow like a diamond. Then, when he picked it up, the
rock turned coal-black,. The rock came off purple on his hands, like chalk.

He came back to town and waited two days. He hid the star wrapped-up and stowed away in the dash of his car. He brought it to the jeweler’s in town. They said every Tom, Dick, and Harry had come into their store the past week with their versions of the space rock.

Busker handed it over and said if he couldn’t sell it, then he wanted to turn it into a ring for you. The jeweler took the rock and looked at it through his magnifying glass. Looked up at Busker and then got to work. Busker didn’t have to convince him he found the real one. I think the jeweler knew.

Mac nods his head to let me know he is falling asleep.

Well, why didn’t he tell me? I ask.

I don’t know, Mac says. For the same reason he never told us how he lost his pants, I suppose.

 

I collect the plate from Mac’s tray and set everything into the kitchen sink. I look at the wedding ring. I’d never thought it was anything special, just an odd colored stone on a silver band. It is always cold to the touch, no matter how long I wear it.

Mac snores in harmony with Busker in the next room.

Why hadn’t Busker told me he found it that night?

I walk to our bedroom, leaving Mac to the muted flashings of the television. The doors usually creak when pushed open, but it was so cold the wood had shrunk. It opens soundlessly.

Busker sleeps restlessly. He scrunches his nose and turns to the side.

I pull the door shut behind me, afraid I’ll wake him.

I sit by his side. The curtains are open, and the night sky is still.

Busker rolls over and stops snoring. He reaches his hand out and grabs for mine. He holds it in his and strokes his thumb over my dry skin, my fingernails, my thumb. He finds the ring and presses it.

I squeeze his hand.

I know, Busker. I know.  

 

Sam Simas is a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island’s Library and Information Science program. He has served as an Intern for GrubStreet, Barrow Street Press, and as a reader for The Ocean State Review. His fiction has appeared in The Corner Club Press, Steam Ticket, and others. Sam is currently the editor-in-chief at The Rocky Point Review. As a Journal featured writer, he welcomes correspondence, and can be reached at simassamuel@gmail.com.

 

Photo credit: Meteor. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from

http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1300413/1/132_1300413/cite

These Are Dark Times For Robots

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Cara Yacino

 

Victor Habbick Visions / Science Photo Library / universal Images Group

Victor Habbick Visions / Science Photo Library / universal Images Group

I was born into an iron world
assembled in the winter of ’93 and proudly
Made In America.
My wind-up heart has more horsepower than a Mustang
and it’s twice as reliable.

I’m not the only one.
At any given moment there are seven billion
glazed glass eyes and stretched iron smiles
on any given street–
manufactured sleepwalkers.

We pretend we’re flesh.
“Social justice” “Family values” “Empowerment”
prevent mass mechanical malfunction and
distract us from the rust.

We tell our iron children stories of the past
a distant time when human meant more
and upgrades meant less
as we bask in a monitor’s pale blue glow.

Hearts have fragile gears and many cogs
that whirr and spin and sometimes
jam.
We search for thrills
yet we fear the junkyard.

Yesterday,
I slipped on a patch of ice
that my ocular module missed.
Wires frayed and sparked under silicone skin
and there it was, a drop of red.

Sometimes I wonder who wired my circuits.
I was born into an iron world
without an iron care to give
and yet I bleed.

 

 

Photo credit: Humanoid robot, artwork. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from

http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1212265/1/132_1212265/cite

Port. Man. Teau.

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

 

  1. PORT

WILKS'S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU

WILKS’S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU

The world’s been portmanteau’d
By phones with eyes and fruit;
Not to mention androids, who were
Supposed to take a different form.
And the corners of rooms now
Read to you, flamed and kindled.
Padded rooms and glaring dooms.
So many numbers replacing numbers
Bar codes bearing heavy loads—
Never ending, never bending,
Always trending, forever sending,
Generations generations generations.
The world’s been portmanteau’d
By silver screens and things called memes,
By applications, Abbrev.s, sugar and spice—
Technology’s nice.
The world’s been portmanteau’d
And no longer has a face.
 

  1. MAN

We’ve reached port, Man, too!
Screams the captain, O Captain, mine.
No names on a ship, only faces.
Ghoulish faces, grotesque faces—grotesque
Faces front and says to us
We have reached port, Men!
Calling to us, zombies of the boat.
Months-long journey done and
We have reached port.
O my Captain, I wish you knew our names!
There is a man with a name,
John Proctor’d and calling for John Proctor.
All you can say is that we have reached
Port, Man. We have reached Port, Man.
We have reached port having been together
For long months, wrought with scurvy
Fraternity and bleeding from orifices.
You rats! We’ve reached port! Leave, Man, too!
Go away! Why do you stare at me so?
“Because it is my name!”

 

  1. TEAU

Natalie Portman, too.
Why, she’s pretty and she knows things.
She has a face and she has a name,
She has a soul—
Named Natalie, Natalie Portman,
Natalie Portman does not deserve pronouns.
So from now on, she, er, Natalie Portman
Gets no pronouns!
Natalie Portman was walking one day
Down the block, it was Wednesday, when
Natalie Portman saw Natalie Portman’s reflection
In a cold mirror.
So Natalie Portman, looking at Natalie Portman,
Too, saw Natalie Portman’s image and
Smashed the window into a million small bits.
Natalie Portman worried that Natalie Portman
Was now cursed, forever cursed. Natalie Portman
Cried and cried and cried and cried and cried
For Natalie Portman.
Natalie Portman has a name! Natalie Portman
Has a name!
Natalie Portman is not a portman, nor a portwoman.
But Natalie Portman does have a name.
Natalie Portman does have a name.
And that is more than I can say for the rest of us.

 

Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

Photo credit: WILKS’S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU, OPEN, 1867. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/300_660054/1/300_660054/cite

Visions of Foster Excerpt

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Jeremy Levine

 

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       “I’m just saying,” Evan was saying, wielding the diner’s glass ketchup bottle, “if Dunkin’ sells doughnut holes, someone should be selling bagel holes. Little rolled-up balls of dough, stuffed with various kinds of spreads. Cream cheese, butter, jam.”

        “How is this about my story about Cheryl’s breakfast?” Clint asked.

        “It’s not. It’s about my bagel project.”

        “Fine. How would you get the fillings in there?”

        “How do they get the jelly in the Munchkins?”

        “How would I know?” He gestured for the ketchup bottle. Evan handed it to Clint, who began shaking it over his burger with little regard for how the high volume of condiment would soggify his sandwich. “But maybe there’s something different about bagels that makes it not possible.”

        “Or, I’m the only person who’s had this idea so far. Oh Jesus.” He dropped his grilled cheese sandwich back onto his plate and drained his film canister-sized water glass. “That was so hot.”

        “I’m pretty sure everyone’s had this idea before,” Clint said, watching Evan fish into the bottom of his glass for an ice cube.

        “Why haven’t you done it, then?” Evan popped the ice into his mouth.

        “I figure everyone else had tried and failed.”

        “This is why nobody votes.” Evan pointed an accusatory french fry across the table at him, ketchup dripping onto the table in prodigious splotches.

        “Is that why?” Clint asked, mopping up the wayward condiment.

        “It is.” Evan didn’t help Clint out with the ketchup absorption effort. “It’s called the collective action problem. I read about it.”

        “Where?”

        “I don’t know, wherever you read about this stuff.”

        “That’s not really what the collective action problem is.”

        “Regardless. When a bunch of people have the ability to do something, the incentive to actually do it yourself is incredibly small.”

        “I guess that’s true.”

        An intermission of munching followed. Evan had finished half of his sandwich (apart from the crusts, which he never ate) when he broke the silence with “You and Cheryl are pretty serious, huh?”

        Clint finished chewing. “We’ve only been together a few months.”

        “Yeah but you’re living like you’re pretty serious.”

        “Whaddaya mean?”

        “The story you told me about making her breakfast and meeting your editor.”

        “What about it? Girls sleep over at your house and you make them breakfast, are you serious with any of them?”

        “No, but the fact that you thought that swinging the ever-so-perilous run-out-of-the-house-and-cook-her-breakfast maneuver even qualified as a story that I would be interested in alerts me of something serious.”

        “But the two of us,” Clint made a little pointing gesture so that Evan knew that he was the one being referred to, “have been friends for so long, this is the kind of stuff we talk about. I’m out of really good stories.”

        “Well, we could be talking about more interesting things than a breakfast you made three weeks ago, but you shot down my bagel idea.”

        “Hey—”

        “Look, all I’m saying is that your readers better not get shafted by your new definition of a good story. Because they don’t want to read three hundred pages of you making breakfast.”

        “Well—“

        “And that, when you two do settle down and have your 2.5 kids, don’t forget about me and all the bullshit you put me through over the years.”

        The patty on Clint’s burger nearly slipped off the bun. “Have I made it seem like that that’s what’s going to happen?” he asked.

        “I don’t know. The breakfast thing seemed like a bad sign.”

        “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.” Clint raised his teeny diner glass. They clinked and Evan tossed his back so one or two ice chips unstuck themselves from the bottom and fell into his mouth. He crunched on them for a little while, then said “So, once you saved the world by preparing breakfast, how’d your meeting with your editor go?”

        “Fine. This book is weirder.”

        “How so?”         

        “Like, it’s kind of fucked up, structurally speaking.”

        “Why’d you write it like that?”

        “It just felt like it needed to be that way. The narrator’s life is totally collapsed—“

        “Spoilers.”

        “And so it didn’t feel psychologically right for the story to be told in a normal way. It needed to be more haphazard because, as she remembers it, that’s how she sees it. Trauma isn’t chronological, it just all hits you at once. Like if you were sentenced to twenty years in prison, the effect of that dread would happen to you all at once, as a unit. You wouldn’t think about the fifteenth year and then the sixteenth year.”

        “Ok.”

        “Did that make sense? I’m going to have to explain it a lot and I don’t want it to not make sense.”

        “No I think it makes sense. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I can’t really put it in context, but that didn’t sound too out in left field.”

        “Thanks.” Clint picked at his coleslaw and spent a minute or so ogling a particularly Kramer-esque gentleman across the diner. “Besides, I would never ask Cheryl that kind of question.”

        “About your writing?”

        Clint nodded.

        “Why not?”

        “She hasn’t really gotten over the fact that I’m a famous novelist.”

        “Hey, Mr. Modesty.”

        “I mean, it’s true. And sometimes, you know, it’s great. Like, I’m sure it helped me get that first date—”

        “Helped?”

        “Shut up. But I can’t run an idea by her because she still has too romantic a view of
the whole process. You’re jaded enough to give me a real opinion.”

        “Plus I’m not wooed by your incredible breakfast-making skills.”

        “That too.”

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He likes to read, write, and write about weird novels. 

 

Mad Men and the Poetry of Television

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Sasha Kohan

 

The older I get, the more I see how watching TV can be like reading a poem. Only a few shows have struck me in this way – despite my deep affection for Gilmore Girls, Parks and Recreation, and other shows, their poetry is not as resonant as that of, say, Lost or Breaking Bad, or even The Office (for a little while). Of course, not every sitcom will be a “Road Not Taken,” and not every drama can be a “Howl,” but when each episode rings so truly to the humanity of its characters and is equally if not more potently beautiful when perceived as part of a larger story, the poem becomes more visible. When each rewatch further embeds into your subconscious how we are it and they are us, and with each revisit, these realizations slowly guide you towards something like an answer to a question you hadn’t yet asked, the poetry becomes clear. Maybe nothing strikes you at first, but maybe when it’s over the sheer richness of what you come away with overcomes any sense of an ending, the fullness of the story somehow leaving just enough blank space for you to look forward to one more careful reading.

Some shows are like this for me; now, I’m thinking of Mad Men.

  JON HAMM

  JON HAMM

“It’s the real thing!” The final statement of the series looms over its ninety-two episode arc in retrospect, casting the light of a question over everything we’ve seen before; what is The Real Thing? The dichotomy between real life and the life advertisements would have us believe is attainable has always been one of the leading forces of Mad Men; Sterling Cooper, as a glamorized beacon of the in-between state, where its troubled employees inspire manufactured ideas of happiness for the rest of us to consume, is a purgatory for Don Draper and the others, who come face to face with their ideals every workday (and sometimes weekends) and yet find themselves unable to produce such fulfillment in their own lives.

This fundamental failure to connect the dots between the flaws of reality – sexism, racism, rape, and cancer, to name a few – and the impossible dream of perfection pervades the life of every character. When modest co-heroine Peggy, whom we’ve seen climb from secretary to copy chief, deems Stan a “failure” for being content with his work instead of trying to find something better, we – particularly my generation, I believe – are uneasily reminded of ourselves, of the need to try harder, score higher, and make more, which unconsciously determines perhaps one too many so-called “life-changing decisions,” even when we are convinced we make such choices ourselves. Her realization that there’s more to life than her job reminds overachievers everywhere that sometimes good is good enough.

The impossible quest for perfection, however, is far from the pursuit of happiness – it’s being able to tell the difference that finally releases most characters from their self-imposed suffering. Betty, for instance, was quite the opposite of Peggy in this regard: whereas Peggy valued her work above any expectations of her gender, letting opportunities for marriage and motherhood fall behind the prospect of a career, Betty tried and failed for most of her life to believe that marriage and motherhood was enough. When an old friend forces her to question how satisfied she is with everything she once wanted –“I thought they were the reward”– she starts thinking more like Peggy (who, incidentally, starts thinking more like the unexpected workplace feminist Joan, who has always been capable of thinking for herself but is now free to think only for herself). The attraction to an ad man like Don is obvious, for Betty is nothing if not the ideal consumer, always living just the life ads said she should – she married a handsome man, mothered three kids (when the housekeeper went home, of course), wore the right clothes, smoked the right cigarettes, and maintained the image of charm and grace she thought every woman should.

But there’s a danger to “shoulds” – as Don learns in the final episode – and this is ultimately what the show teaches us; there is no right way. Even the folks at Sterling Cooper know it, they’re just doing their job by trying to sell it to us under the guise of what it is we really want – which the finale title, “Person to Person,” articulates in its most basic terms. In the significant mid-season-seven pitch to Burger Chef, Peggy recalls the remarkable feeling of knowing that, during the moon landing, while she and Don and the rest of the team were watching on TV in their hotel room, everyone else she knew and didn’t know was watching their TV too, sharing the experience and “doing the same thing at the same time.” She notes the “pleasure of that connection,” and that they were starved for it.

This rivals only one other pitch on Mad Men for its potent authenticity; as with Don’s nostalgic approach to selling “The Wheel” in season one’s finale, Peggy here taps into an undeniable truth and a basic human anxiety — to sit down to dinner, for example, away from television or music or anything that isn’t the people sitting right in front of you, then look them in the eye and share a meal and conversation – Peggy herself wonders, “Does this family exist anymore?” The question is still relevant, and the connection is one we still starve for. When the IBM supercomputer suddenly becomes part of the Sterling Cooper company in “The Monolith,” it is this connection that is threatened, and this threat which eventually drives some of its employees insane; when a father first sees his child do something that makes him mean the love he thinks he is supposed to have, as Don realizes with his young son Bobby, it is this connection being formed; and with every phone call made to daughters, lovers, and friends (brothers, clients, and nieces), it is this connection we are aching to imitate – but it’s not The Real Thing.  

Don Draper ought to know this more than anyone, but he’s the last to figure it out. His crucial struggle to relate to those around him has never been more clear than when, in a group exercise during his climactic retreat to California, he is instructed to simply express how he feels towards another human being. Looking around the room with utter blankness, his partner finally pushes him out of frustration which leaves Don only more bewildered. Taking cues from a number of similarly confused and isolated protagonists from major Italian directors of the 1960s – it’s no coincidence that Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) is mentioned at one point as Don’s favorite foreign film – Don grapples with his inability to accept himself throughout the series, as his Dick Whitman past continues to haunt him in spite of his apparently tried-and-true “move forward” strategy. (Indeed, Don looks more and more like the man he might have been as his season seven road trip goes on, until he’s finally seen in a flannel and jeans, having shed everything external that made him Don Draper.) In the same vein as Red Desert’s Giuliana (Antonioni, 1964) and 8 ½’s Guido (Fellini, 1963), Don’s emotional moment of epiphany centers around his ability (or rather, inability) to love and receive love.

Although the finale makes this clearer than ever, Don’s fundamental sense of detachment is foreshadowed as early as the very first episode, in a remarkably revealing conversation with client-to-lover Rachel Menken. “Mr. Draper,” she says during one of their earliest exchanges, “I don’t know what it is you really believe in but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There’s something about you that tells me you know it too.” While Don manages to brush the moment away and their relationship (both business and personal) is short-lived, it is obvious why Rachel, of all the many, many women in his life, is the one who reappears to him during one of Mad Men’s signature surrealist moments in the final season’s opening scene. Rachel isn’t the only woman to have Don figured out over time, but
she is arguably the one who is both most and least like him. Her ability to empathize is striking to Don, but not something he can name or learn himself until much later, for although most of Don’s life has been spent “in another man’s shoes,” so to speak, he has never put himself there for the sake of understanding someone else, only to hide further from himself.

“I don’t think I realized it until this moment,” Rachel tells him in the same conversation, “but it must be hard being a man, too.” Bringing gender into the exchange – another one of the most important facets of the show – Rachel also presages the arrival of Leonard, a stranger and crucial character seen only in the finale. Leonard is a foil to Don in many ways (invisible, whereas Don is used to turning heads) yet both face the same essential struggle – the one Rachel articulated ninety-one episodes before. Though much of the series rightly focuses on the realistic sexism and mistreatment of women at the time, Don and Leonard’s group therapy session proves how right Rachel was; for all the shortcomings of the privileged (and probably white) male, there are arguably few demographics who are more emotionally repressed. We see this in Don’s gradual decline, and Don sees it, and himself, in Leonard. No longer forcing the belief in his individualism or trying too hard to project or create the connection he craves (as he did with the enigmatic waitress Diana), Don genuinely relates to this stranger and finds himself uninhibited, for the first time, in his physicality; hugging Leonard in a moment of sincere empathy, Don finally sees The Real Thing.

Perhaps your twenties are supposed to feel this way, or perhaps it’s because my generation is among the most lonely and confused there has ever been, that I felt I understood Don Draper so much – for he, of all tragic and redeemed anti-heroes, is most certainly lonely and confused. These are some of the most significant feelings of Mad Men, explored kaleidoscopically through the nuances of each character as he or she struggles through separate and intertwined journeys. Through each of the show’s seven seasons, these perpetually shifting impressions of the cycle of isolation and reconnection take many forms, and existential notions of identity and purpose are subtly woven throughout the narrative more and more until the finale’s spiritual peak. Fans like me who initially took interest in the show for its notable 1960s setting will be satisfied to see evidence of the era’s counterculture (an infrequent but always welcome visitor for viewers as it enters, interrupts, and edifies the lives of Sterling Cooper’s staff) in full bloom at last as we get a final glimpse of our anti-hero in the company of his fellow human beings. “People just come and go, and no one says goodbye,” he laments in frustration near the end of his journey – an obscene hypocrisy, considering the vast number of people and places Don himself has left behind – but he knows this already, that “people can come and go as they please,” that they will and they do. With nothing left but the possibility of a new day and new ideas, the poem of Mad Men closes out its final stanza, and leaves us to turn off the TV and sign out of Netflix, to see ourselves and those around us – face to face, person to person.

Contributing editor Sasha Kohan is a student at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in English and Screen Studies.

Photo credit: MAD MEN (2007) – JON HAMM.. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 29 Jun 2015, from 
http://quest.eb.com/search/144_1471287/1/144_1471287/cite

Jimi

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Tim Farrell
 

HENDRIX PLAYS AT ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, 1970

HENDRIX PLAYS AT ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, 1970

And the rocket’s red glare–
his rifle of peace
captured the distortion of
bombs bursting in air.

Brow creased and jaw clenched,
arm locked around the stock,
he triggered the explosive notes
behind the Star Spangled Banner.

Woodstock, where
Jimi’s battle took place.
On stage he played
For the land of the free,
and the home of the brave.

 

 

 

Tim Farrell is a poet and an artist in various media. He currently is exploring the medium of glass at the Worcester Glass Studios in Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

Photo Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/158_2445670/1/158_2445670/cite

Drowning in Poetry

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Drowning in Poetry

by A.J. Huffman

 

Superstock/universal images group

Superstock/universal images group

Pages crest like waves, crash
against my feet.
The tide is rising, swallowing my conscious
thoughts.
The words run
together, pack tight, soggy grains
in child’s pail
I hope to flip them over, build
a castle or fort
to crawl inside.  Instead the moat grows
fins, teeth.  I am
trapped inside my own creation,
searching
for remnants of letters that might fit
to frame a bridge.

 

 A.J. Huffman is a widely published poet. Her new collection, Another Blood Jet, is available from Eldritch Press.  She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and is the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. Her email is poetess222@live.com and her press site is at www.kindofahurricanepress.com. As a featured poet, she welcomes correspondence from other Journal writers.

Photo credit: Small Bridge and Beach. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 22 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/107_293793/1/107_293793/cite

Getting Familiar

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves (2000), is an arrogant book. It asks readers to not only surrender their understanding of physical space, or even their understanding of the horror genre, but their understanding of narrative, narrators, and text (a word which here means both “the contents of the story” and “ink on a page”). There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the book, but one always has the impression that it’s happening for a reason. To read and finish House of Leaves is to trust Danielewski to be intentional about his experimentation. 

The likely reason people endure (and even enjoy) House of Leaves is that, despite its zany methods, it delivers a very clearly-cut story.

Danielewski’s fourth novel, The Familiar, is less easy to grasp. It will be released over the course of 27 volumes, the first of which came out this May. So far, it is about a little girl named Xanther, her parents, and a kitten she finds. Easy enough. But then there’s the Mexican gang, the drug addict in Singapore, the Armenian cab driver, the cartoon character from Venice who appears for only two pages, and two mad scientists in Texas whose roles in this sprawling work are exceptionally vague as of now. One might even argue that barely anything has happened so far.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

Despite the unwieldiness that comes at the beginning of any 27-volume series, The Familiar is still interesting for a reader who is already familiar with Danielewski’s work. His style (excluding, for now, typographical experimentation) is at its strongest here: he marshalls independent voices for each of the ten narrative perspectives, each of which would be completely distinct from all the others even without their distinct formattings. Still more impressively, each of those voices perfectly reflects each of the characters’ psychologies, which are also exceptionally thick for the beginning of such a long series. All of this:, the syntax, the characters, and the book’s governing psychology, come together to create some frightening themes which creep into focus by the volume’s end.

Still, the first part of The Familiar is fighting an uphill battle in terms of getting its readers to commit to these various storylines. Some of them are readable and hilarious (Shnork) and some of them are well-developed and so psychologically poignant that we stop caring about some of their more annoying tics (Xanther and her family), but others are very hard to follow because of their broken English (Jingjing), and still others are just not very interesting as of yet (Luther). The temptation to skip passages is hard to resist, and the only thing that kept me from doing so was my trust that Danielewski was doing something important with these sections, and that skipping them would bite me in the ass come volume fourteen.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski's signature style.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski’s signature style.

Danielewski’s trademark is his typographical experimentation, which more or less succeeds here. Some of the tomfoolery is understandable: each narrator has a different typeface as well as a designated color in the corner of the page. Some of the techniques from his earlier work, like placing just a few words on a page in order to encourage faster page turning, thereby increasing the sense of urgency, feel completely at home here. The purpose of some of the other components of the experimentation are still incomprehensible, though, such as the entire first forty-three pages, some of which is  very pretentious prose about death and war and such. Some narrators only use very small parts of the page for their writing, and the few full-color two-page spreads which seem to lack any context are also indecipherable as of yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that may become tiring.

The first volume of the familiar, subtitled “one rainy day in may,” was released this may. volume two, “into the forest,” is due out october 24, 2015.

A reader’s willingness to A) take this book out of the library; B) finish it (which, despite its size, won’t take too long, because of the formatting); and C) wait eagerly for Volume 2, says much more about the reader than it does about the book itself. It’s a question of trust–whether you expect that Danielewski will successfully pull all that is unclear into focus and whether you think that all of his whackiness does have purpose. The Familiar promises to be an incredible novel, but only a reader who believes in Danielewski (and, to a certain degree, believes in experimental literature’s ability to deliver effective stories by virtue of their jazzing around, rather than in spite of it) will ever think so. 

If this is a field that is completely unfamiliar to you, read some other experimental literature first, then read House of Leaves, then The Familiar. This recommendation carries with it the frustrating (and unoriginal) undertone that some people are not smart or experienced enough to read certain books. This is not necessarily the case. In all cases, trust is something which must be earned. You would not lend your car to a complete stranger. You would, however, lend your car to someone you have known for several years. Don’t let Mark Danielewski drive your car until you know he’s a good driver–he’s planning on borrowing it for quite some time.

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He enjoys folk music and burritos.

Charles Olson, [my] Whirld Saviour*

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Casie Trotter

 

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Ezra Pound is famous (and infamous) for a lot of things: writing the Cantos, reinventing American poetry, and supporting Fascism. The third, which involved radio broadcasts he made in Italy supporting the Fascist cause during World War II, landed him in a mental hospital for 12 years after the war.

It was during this time that Charles Olson, a budding poet, began to visit Pound, providing comfort and conversation as Pound awaited the results of his trial for treason.1 Olson also worked through a lot of conflicted feelings about how someone who could produce such beautiful language could also spew so much hate. Later, after the hospital visits stopped, Olson would shout through the mail at Robert Creeley about Pound’s shortcomings, sometimes using their letters to speak indirectly to his former “Papa”: “Look you old bastard if you want open war come on it and get it.”2

But before that, Pound wrote to his attorney in the early St. Elizabeths days, “Olson saved my life.”3

For the past year and a half, the same has been true for me. It happened first in sudden leaps, then gradually—an instant love affair with his epic, Maximus, my first semester of grad school; then an easy decision to make a line from my favorite poem into my first tattoo—“hungry for every thing” (I spent days examining the deliberate space between the last two words); then a slow but all-consuming coming back to him at the lowest point in my five-squared-years-long life.

casie trotter/CASIE TROTTER

casie trotter/CASIE TROTTER

One day I picked up the book, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. In my roommate’s words, it was like I “absorbed the whole thing without even having to read it.” It went everywhere with me. In a drive-thru lane one afternoon, I tried to turn while reading and slashed a line through my thigh with my pencil; when I got home and showed it to Amy, I said, “I hope it scars.”

That’s the kind of commitment that Olson brings out of you. When someone makes his whole life scream at you on paper, you listen. You let it open you up. There’s no time for questions of practicality, of whether or not a course of study is “sensible,” of whether it will get you a job. When love comes, you eat it. That’s why the Olson tattoo on my forearm is in a place always visible when I want it to be, to remind myself not only that hunger comes before anything else, but also that it never quite goes away either.

At least, that has been my experience of this poet who’s been dead for forty-five years, gone a generation before I was born. The time collapses when I come to his words, come to taste and see what his life gave him. Over the course of those months following the Olson-Pound book, I snatched up everything I could find by him or connected to him, gathered all the pieces into a fragmented whole: over fifteen volumes of his letters; virtually every book about him on the library shelves; dozens of articles and special issues found in academic databases; and all the collections of writings.

In that process, Olson and I developed a metaphysical closeness. It felt like he was with me. Words keep people breathing beyond the space they once contained. When Michael, the (living) love of my life appeared in the middle of my year with Olson, at first I told him that he would have to wait. I made him sit with me watching CO read on YouTube to celebrate the dead guy’s birthday. Even when I found myself preferring living flesh to a printed one, the latter burrowed its way into me to keep warm for the winter.

By the time the actual work of my master’s project came around, Olson had grown even bigger, more real. Connections between us multiplied: the same love for learning and respect for “scholarship” coupled with rage at and doubts about academia; the hatred for abstractions; the craving to be a “whole” person; the ceaseless hunger, openness, and love. There were things I couldn’t talk about (or tell in their fullness) to anyone, but I could read them in Olson. Over the course of 210 published poems, 15 essays, his book on Herman Melville, two plays, and several hundreds of letters, I traced the stages of his development and how he turned into the person I’d come to love so viscerally. Some days, the heaviness would blot out all but the space he’d dug into me, make me start to wonder if I’ll ever feel the same kind of love from a blood-pulse hand as I do from his.

This is where the story gets a little harder to tell, because it brings up things that people don’t like to think about. To say that I got “suicidal” that summer after Maximus would probably be a stretch, but it’s the word that has the most roots in it for how I felt then. There were days in New Orleans, left to my brother’s empty apartment and Lake Pontchartrain, when I would drive across the water and have to consciously tell myself not to drive into it. Sometimes, whole weekends were spent in bed, stroking his words on my arm and trying to feel them underneath the skin, in the blood. I didn’t have to tell Olson these things because he’d already written them, lived them in his own bones.

Days, weeks, months like that prepared me well for understanding how someone whose vast output had such a lasting influence could also feel “grim,” as he once told friend and writer Frances Boldereff, convinced he should just stop writing.

These past two years with Olson have brought me to a place where the words to describe him mean less than the ways I’ve come to embody him. I’ve read his words so many times that they run through my head and into my own work without me fully realizing it. In a way more physical than spiritual, I feel his ideas make sense of mine, put the pieces together of how to inhabit a world.

I don’t know what all this says of me. But on the low days where the grimness sets in and threatens not to leave again, Olson keeps me open to what’s coming, even if “openness” means being sprawled on the ground.

 

Casie Trotter is from Owasso, Oklahoma, and has lived on Elysian Fields in New Orleans and in a Chicago soup kitchen. Casie has been a featured poet at Short Order Poems in Oklahoma City and her work is forthcoming in This Land. She was awarded  two research grants to study in the Charles Olson archive at the University of Connecticut. Read more of her work at somethingliketwentysomethings.wordpress.com

 

Notes

* The phrase “whirld saviour” comes from an angry letter Olson wrote to Robert Creeley on June 19, 1950. It was spurred by Creeley’s mention of some disdainful things Ezra Pound said about Olson, which reminded him that Pound had referred to him dismissively as a “world saver”—it turned out to be a very sensitive subject. See pages 109-11 of The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Vol. 1. Ed. George Butterick. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

1 For more context about this relationship, see Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Ed. Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman, 1975.

2 See the same letter, p. 110.

3 For more context, see Cornell, Julien. The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the aTreason Case. New

York: John Day Company, 1966. A copy of this particular letter is on page 71, though Cornell mistakenly identifies Olson as “a doctor who apparently gave him some comfort” (70).

 

Bones

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Charlotte Rutty

 

                         Dante Fenolio / Photo Researchers /Universal Images

                         Dante Fenolio / Photo Researchers /Universal Images

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     The day after the first dream, I meet Jeremy. In this dream, crocodiles are falling on me. I’m running—it must be through the woods because it’s dark and green all around me. Crocodiles seem to take shape out of this heavy greenness, as if perhaps they are made only of leaf and shadow.

     I know it’s stupid but when I wake up I check for claw marks on my back, for blood in my hair. I am clean. Still, I can’t shake the green haze it leaves me in, and before I know it it’s five in the afternoon. I let myself in after work and find a boy in my living room, in banana-patterned boxers, waiting for my roommate to wake up.

     I want to talk about my dream. “I dreamt of crocodiles last night,” I tell him.

     “Okay,” he says.

     “I have this theory,” I say, by way of explanation, “that dreams just circulate the city, and if you’re sleeping close enough to someone you can swap. Where were you sleeping last night?”

     “Uh,” he says, with an uncomfortable glance at my roommate’s door. “Not here.”

     “I know,” I say. “Lena never brings boys home at night.”

     He clears his throat. “Does Lena bring a lot of boys home?”

     I look at him with a little pity. “Yes.” I don’t tell him that every afternoon, I come home to find another of Lena’s lovers in his boxer shorts, whiling away the hours until Lena wakes up and looks at him again with that silver glow of hers. Nor do I tell him that when she does wake up, she will not be looking at him like that again.

     Instead I tell him that he can stay for dinner if he wants, but that since we are not the sort of roommates who share food, he’ll have to settle for granola and skim milk. This seems to be the only thing that Lena eats.

     “Do you think I could go and get my clothes first, if I’m really quiet?” he asks, and because he looks so sad, I ready his granola for him while he slinks off to Lena’s room like an abused cat. Scraggly and unimpressive, he is one of the many lovers of Lena who are nowhere near her league. I think that his confidence in his own sex appeal has been badly inflated and then popped in the space of about five hours. Still, I reason, he’s not so bad looking. His eyes are dark and his cheekbones are high.

    â€œShe sleeps like an angel,” he says when he returns. I’m surprised to see that he’s wearing glasses now. They give him an elevated look, accentuating the cheekbones rather than hiding them.

    â€œAn angel?” I say. “Lena sleeps more like a vampire.” Every morning at three she comes home from her night shift at the hotel. The door unlocks and then locks again, the hall light outside my bedroom switches on and then off again. And then she paces and paces, up and down the creaky floorboards of her bedroom. She haunts our apartment like a murdered woman. When I wake up she is always in the shower singing gospel songs. I don’t know what she does all day, after padding out of the bathroom with her streaming silver hair and shutting herself back in her bedroom.

    â€œWhat’s your name?” I ask. I make a gesture for him to eat his granola, even though I’m still standing at the stove watching him.

    â€œJeremy.”

    He doesn’t ask for my name so I tell him. “It’s April.”

    He looks confused again. “It’s January.”

    â€œMy name,” I clarify.  â€œApril is my name.”

    â€œOh. Right. I get it.”

    â€œWhere do you work, Jeremy?”

    â€œThe library,” he says absently. “On March Street. I hope I don’t get fired. I didn’t go back after my lunch break.”

    Lena’s lovers usually don’t. Today is Wednesday but Lena is beautiful, and when she touches your arm in the line at Subway, the library is not the place you want to go back to.

    â€œI work for a Russian guy,” I offer. “Mr. Mikhalev. Do you speak Russian, Jeremy?”

    â€œNo,” he says. “Lena told me her mother was Russian.”

    â€œSometimes I wish I spoke Russian, so I could understand the things Mr. Mikhalev mutters about his clients. When they’re rude to us he calls them names after they leave, but when I ask him what he’s saying he can never find the words in English. You should eat your granola—it’s awful when it’s soggy.”

    He takes a bite and gives me a milky smile. “You’re right, it is. What do you do for this Russian guy?”

    â€œLots of things,” I shrug. “I’m his personal assistant.”

    â€œHi Lena!” Jeremy says, jumping to his feet.

    I turn and see Lena in the doorway, wrestling her long white-blond hair into a bun. She’s dressed for work in the coarse navy polo, its Best Western logo perched over her heart. Her name tag glints silverly. LENA.

    â€œI’m running late,” she says brusquely.

    Lena’s an art school dropout who seems to have chosen the life she lives with some amount of purpose. She requested the overnight shift. She requested me, too, in a way—after my former roommate’s mental breakdown she responded to my classified.

    â€œWhere are you going?” Jeremy asks, but she’s already gliding out the door and clicking it closed behind her.

    Jeremy turns to me. “Maybe you could give me her phone number? She forgot to give it to me.”

    I just shake my head no. After Jeremy leaves, I find his number pinned to the fridge.

                                             ***

In the warm but feeble winter-morning light, I eat breakfast alone. I savor the steam over my mug and the sounds of Lena showering, singing gospel music as the water thrums around her. You may slip, you may slide. Lena’s voice is viscous like honey. Stumble and fall by the roadside.

     Apparently she likes h
er showers scalding, because when she opens the bathroom door the steam billows around her like  a white dress. Still, Lena’s skin remains as pale as ever; not a tinge of pink betrays the temperature. She is so white as to appear silver—white-blond hair, pale skin, luminous gray eyes—and she gives off a sort of lunar glow as she pads down the hallway to her bedroom. Don’t ever let nobody drag your spirit down.

     Her lover for the day is a boy in blue striped boxers. When I get home from Mr. Mikhalev’s that afternoon, he doesn’t greet me. He looks at me haughtily from beneath a pronounced brow line.

     I go to the fridge and take down Jeremy’s phone number, twirling it with my fingers until it’s curled up like a little wisp of smoke. It’s a tenuous connection, I know.

    â€œShould I call Jeremy?” I ask the striped lover, taking a seat beside him on the couch.

    He folds his arms across his bare chest. “Is there any food in this house?” he says.

    I pull out my telephone and call Jeremy. “You’ve reached Jeremy!” the phone chirps. “Leave me a message!”

    â€œIt’s April,” I tell my telephone. “Lena is not going to call you.”

                                             ***

In the second dream, I am not running from crocodiles, but eating them. It leaves me in a better mood than the first one, but with a funnier taste in my mouth. For some reason in the dream I expected them to taste like lettuce; instead, they had a thick, leathery flavor. It has persisted all day and through an entire pack of chewing gum.

                                             ***

     The dreams trouble me. I feel hazy again, like something green is haunting me, and I dread having a third dream of crocodiles. I stop at the library on the way home and find myself in the 612s: human physiology. I select a big, somnolent-looking book called The Science of Sleep, by S.W. Miles, which hasn’t been checked out since 1983.

     Jeremy’s at the circulation desk when I get there. He looks quite librarial with his glasses and his high cheekbones, stamping book after book for the man in front of me.

     “May,” he greets me.

     “April,” I say.

     “April. Nice to see you again.”

     Thinking that maybe he believes my coming to the library was a pretense to see him again, all I say is, “I guess you didn’t lose your job.”

     “I told them my cat had to go to the ER,” he says. “I felt bad about it.”

      I shrug. “You couldn’t help it.” Poor Jeremy—boys like him are helpless.

     “The Science of Sleep,” he says. “Still investigating that theory of yours?”

     “I keep dreaming of crocodiles, Jeremy,” I confide in him. “I don’t know what it means.”

     He shrugs. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Have you been watching a lot of Steve Irwin lately?”

     “You think it’s stupid,” I say. “But it’s frightening, Jeremy, it really is. They’re not like regular dreams. I’ve had two now and I don’t want to have a third.”

                                             ***             

A week later, I have a third. It’s the day I come home and find Franklin on the couch in his tartan boxers. Unlike Jeremy, he doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed about it. He is more muscular than Jeremy, which might have something to do with it.

     “Hey,” he says to me. He’s picking at what seems to be my guitar and he lifts some of the fingers on his right hand in greeting.

     “What did you dream about last night?” I ask him.

     “Nothing,” he says. “I don’t dream. Haven’t in seven months.”

     “That’s terrible,” I say.

     “I remember the very last dream I ever had. I was in a red latex balloon and when I poked the inside it popped. Outside, everything was yellow and I was falling.”

     “What a fascinating dream,” I say. “I bet that means something.”

     Franklin shrugs. “Nah, I’m not superstitious like that. When I was little my ma used to make me take a bath in saltwater on the first day of every month, for good luck. I got enough superstition from her.”

     “I’m not superstitious either,” I clarify.

     “Actually, my ma died last week,” says Franklin, his voice like a little boy’s, and puts down the guitar. I offer him some granola.

     There’s a banging at the door. It’s Jeremy, and when he comes in, wild-faced and out of breath, he doesn’t seem to notice Franklin.

     “You’ve got to help me, April,” he pants. “I ran here all the way from March Street.”

     “Jeremy? What’s wrong?” I say. He doesn’t look hurt. “Are you hurt?”

     “Yes,” he says. “I mean I’m hurt in my heart. April, I’m in love with Lena. I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to help me.”

     “Jeremy, I want to help you.” I want to help him. Like I want to help Franklin. But it’s out of my hands. Lena doesn’t love anyone. She’s just not that kind of girl.”

      He shakes his head forcefully. “You don’t know her like I do. She’ll change her mind, I know she will. You just need to talk to her. Sheâ
€™ll listen to you, April.”

     Lena has never listened to me in her life, but I want to help Jeremy, and besides, I like the way he says my name. I like the way he says Lena’s name, and I want him to say my name like that. “Okay,” I concede, “I’ll talk to her, but I can’t guarantee anything. And remember that I’m only trying to help you, so if it doesn’t work out you have to promise not to be hurt.”

      He beams at me with his milky teeth. “I promise. You’re a real friend, April.”

     That night, I set my alarm clock for three in case I fall asleep before Lena gets home. I don’t. Instead I lie awake thinking about Lena’s teeth and Jeremy’s teeth, and his teeth on her teeth. When I hear the door unlock I can’t believe that I’ve spent four hours this way.

      I creep to her room on ghost toes and find her combing her silvery, waist-length hair. This is something that I never knew she did, for it always looks uncombed, like a plant reaching its untidy roots toward the floor.

     “Hey Lena,” I whisper, my voice no more than a little exhale in a cold room.

     She doesn’t like me to be in here. “What is it, April?” she asks smoothly, suspiciously.

     I perch on the edge of her bed but feel like I suddenly don’t know what to do with my legs. “Um. You know that boy who was here a few weeks ago? Jeremy?”

     Her big gray eyes are completely empty. “Jeremy?”

     “Yeah. With the banana boxers? Dark hair? High cheekbones?”

     “Oh yes,” she murmurs. “I remember the cheekbones.”

     Her skin is so silvery I want to touch it to see if it’s hard. I take her hand in mine, as if we’re friends and I’m helping her through a tough time. Her palm is smooth.

     “I saw him at the library last week,” I tell her.

     “Okay, April. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.” She pulls her hand away.

     “Just that,” I say, and withdraw to my room, where I dream that tiny crocodiles are crawling across my skin like ants.

                                             ***

I go back to the library to tell Jeremy the bad news. “It’s not going to work out, Jeremy. It’s just not.”

     “It’s just not? Why not?”

     “She’s not right for you. Trust me.”

     “Did she tell you that?”

     “Of course she did. We’re roommates.”

     Jeremy chews on his lip as if it’s nourishing him. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

     “Oh Jeremy.” I slide my new book across the circulation desk toward him. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. S.W. Miles isn’t giving me any of the answers I’m looking for—all he’s taught me is that my entire pons shuts off when I sleep. That’s part of my brainstem and it shuts off so I don’t actually do the things I’m dreaming I’m doing. So I don’t run and kick and claw. So I wake up clean.

     Jeremy stamps it without looking at the title. “I don’t get it,” he says. “She seemed to really like me.”

                                             ***               

In the fourth dream, the crocodiles are coming out of my eyes, like in the urban legend about the baby spiders that hatch from your cousin’s daughter’s friend’s cheek. It doesn’t hurt—the crocodiles are still just made of leaf and shadow, so it is more like crying than like giving birth. But it makes me want to throw up, and when I wake up, I do.

     The day after this dream, Jeremy kisses me. He’s shown up out of the blue again. Banging on the door again. But this time, he’s calm.

     “April, great news,” he tells me. “I made a mistake. I don’t care about Lena, and I’m not sure I ever did. April, it’s you I care about.”

     “Me?” It’s not that I think Jeremy has ever lied to me, but something doesn’t let me believe him. “That’s called displacement,” I want to tell him. Instead, I keep quiet, maybe because I think I can hide it from myself that way. That’s called denial.

     Because I like it when Jeremy kisses me. His lips are sugary and they help to take that persistent taste of leather out of my mouth. And I’m eager for him to share my bed, for it will give me the perfect chance to test my dream-swapping theory. I will take anybody’s dreams in exchange for these crocodile ones.

                                             ***          

I stop dreaming. I stop sleeping. Instead, Jeremy and I lie side by side and listen to Lena pace. The sound soothes us; we can see each footfall in our minds’ eyes, the slender gray foot, a hand through the uncombed hair. While she is at work we listen to each other’s wakeful breathing as we wait impatiently for the pacing to begin. We don’t need Dr. Miles to teach us what insomnia sounds like. We are shamed insomniacs: we pretend to sleep, for each other’s benefit, and it makes our breathing shallow but measured, distinctive.

     As dawn rises bluely outside my window, we stare at the ceiling with our ringed eyes, watching it become gray. One room over we can hear Lena’s dripping voice, far clearer than it ever reaches the kitchen table. Don’t let nobody drag your spirit down… We stop eating breakfast so that we can lie here longer and listen before we have to put our feet on the cold hardwood floor and traipse to work. Jeremy and I now live in a shared haze of fatigue, like some foggy dream that we have both stepped into.

    We eat our dinners with Lena’s lovers and talk with them about Lena. About her hair, her eyes, her soft padding feet. I can see that her room still tugs at Jeremy with some invisible string. He can’t keep his eye
s off of its flaking white door, which seems like an impassable barrier though it is made of cheap and flimsy wood.

     “Don’t you want to know what Lena’s thinking?” Jeremy asks me. “Like if she’s thinking about us?”

     But I’m no good at finding answers. I finished Freud and moved on to Sheila Meyers, Ph.D., whose book—The Midnight Journey: A Spiritual Guide to Dream Interpretation—told me I was not sufficiently earthbound. But nothing helps. What doesn’t haunt me by night haunts me by day.

     One night I fall into a deep sleep around midnight. A fifth dream of crocodiles is starting—in it, I am finding that I myself am made of leaf and shadow and have sprung claws; I myself am a crocodile—when it is interrupted. Jeremy is shaking me awake.

     “April,” he whispers. “April.”

     For a moment I think he is going to scold me for breaking our unspoken insomnia pact, but he doesn’t. He says, “I need your help. Come to Lena’s room with me.”

     “What?” I say with sleepy stupidity. “Lena’s room? Why? She isn’t there.”

     “I know, that’s why we have to go now. I need to take something. A picture.”

     “Steal something? When she’s not there? Jeremy, I’m a good roommate.”

     “Not steal. It’s mine. Well, it’s of me. Listen, I just need to see this portrait she drew of me. She never showed me.”

     “What are you talking about?”

     “You know the day we met?” He doesn’t say, “the day I slept with Lena” because he thinks I believe he loves me.

     “The day you slept with Lena.”

     “Slept with Lena?” Poor Jeremy. He is too often confused. “I never slept with Lena, April.”

     “What? You didn’t?” I think about this, the parade of boys in their underwear. Blowing off their jobs to not sleep with Lena while Lena sleeps alone.

     “Never. You think she has sex with all those guys?” He sat up in bed and moonlight spills across his small chest so that it glows silvery. His words tumble out one on top of another. “She took me into her room and told me to take off my clothes. Which of course I did. It was the middle of the day. She made me sit on the bed while she drew my portrait. I had exquisite cheekbones, she said—that’s exactly what she said—and she wanted to capture them. I was happy just to watch her draw, you know. If I could only have a drawing of that.”

     “She drew your portrait?”

     “April, I need to see that drawing. I was starting to fall asleep, asleep for real—like a really deep sleep. And then it just hit me, this—this need. I have to find it.”

     We slip out of the envelope of my bed and it’s cold in the apartment. I don’t blame him for not wanting to venture alone to Lena’s bedroom. We’re both a little afraid of it, as if it really were haunted by a murdered woman. Inside it feels distinctly off-limits.

     Jeremy flicks on the light and we squint like blind little voles. “Here,” he says, moving toward the closet.

     “I don’t know, Jeremy, this feels wrong,” I say. My voice sounds so feeble in this room.

     “I just need to find this one picture,” he says, opening the closet and rifling around in the shelves. “Here.”

     He pulls down a big portfolio of papers, and as he opens it they tumble to the floor. Dozens of pencil drawings skitter about the room; in a moment they have all landed and a sort of paper-white silence falls over the apartment. The drawings are all of men, maybe a hundred—naked, covered, awake, asleep, close up, from afar. Jeremy’s has fallen at his feet, and he picks it up to study it.

     It shows only his face, unbespectacled, the cheekbones shown to full advantage. But though the features are Jeremy’s the face is not. It is cold and hard in a way that only Lena’s face could be. I shiver.

     I toe the papers gingerly. “Well,” I want to say, “well…well…”—lump in my throat, words leaping hurdles to pass through my lips—“Well, where’s mine?”

     I’m on my hands and knees, rifling. I’m a good roommate. The other drawings show exquisite collarbones, exquisite jawlines, exquisite noses. Heaped on Lena’s floor is a collection of exquisite bones. We grow icy looking at it—our hair feels silver; our eyes feel gray.

     “You’ve been in love with Lena the whole time,” I tell Jeremy, folding my legs and sighing on the floor. “Just don’t think I never knew.”

     “You can talk,” he says. “You’re in love with Lena.”

     We can’t defend ourselves. We are helpless and small, and no good at finding answers. There’s nothing for us to do now but give the portraits one last gentle kick, turn around, and switch off the light in that cold silver room.

Charlotte Rutty is a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she studies English and environmental science.

 

Photo credit: African Dwarf Crocodile. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from

http://quest.eb.com/search/139_2011459/1/139_2011459/cite

Ash Wednesday

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Jessica Hoops

 

They tell us we are made of dust, but I have faith
That I am a being of sunlight, ink, pollen, and steel.
My wings are no longer bleached a blinding white,
The last painted feathers now swirling to the floor
With a motion like leaves that have slipped through
The grasp of an ancient elm’s bony fingers.

People step over them as if they are living things,
Delicate blossoms to avoid trampling underfoot,
But to me, they are already dead, poisoned by the bleach
I soaked them in every week for seventeen years.
My sneakers crush them into the carpet;
My forehead remains unmarked, untouched.

The others crowd around the copper-framed mirror,
Standing on tiptoe, finger-combing their hair,
Admiring the pristine brilliance of their wings.
I try in vain to discretely pluck a feather that
Stains my own with a single brushstroke of indigo
And refuses to be concealed by the folds of my gown.

No one notices anyway, not the feather,
Not the ungainly dance of my fingers across the piano,
Nearly losing their balance on the final chord.
No one can see that my lips remain motionless,
A half formed “we do” ricocheting across the back of my teeth
As my eyes fill with tears for all the wrong reasons.

I am drawn to gazes rather than ashen crosses,
Searching for the essence of what I had fabricated.
My expression does not reveal that I am equally baffled
By the natural hue of the wings folded across my back,
Not sure if they are a glorious bouquet, or a tangle of weeds
That I foolishly cultivated but should have destroyed.

 

Photo credit: Ash Wednesday. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 22 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/300_256969/1/300_256969/cite

 

 

Godong/Universal Images Group

Godong/Universal Images Group

Writing on the World

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Photos by Kim Allen

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We all want to leave our marks on the world around us, in one way or another. Those marks may come from an urge to ornament or to disfigure, from a need to communicate or a desire to tell the world to go to hell. They are the utterances of human beings trying to communicate.

Kim Allen is a photographer in Worcester, Massachusetts. You can see more of her work here.

Adamant Man

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Brandon Marlon
 

                  prisma/universal images group

                  prisma/universal images group

Man is the animal believing himself human.
Man is the animal habitually supposing
what sort of animal he is.

Male ontogeny is a tedious process.
Well-endowed, he swings himself wildly
and hacks with a machete across
muggy jungles as if infuriated by foliage,
then urinates circularly to demarcate
his domain; boorish and brutish,
adamant man will have his way
with the world then spit in disgust
at the recently conquered. For this reason
every adamant man must have
an even more adamant mother.

In his hubris, adamant man forges
and welds, asserting his aptitude,
confident in his honed will-to-power
or at least in his heavy-duty leaf blower.
The more adamant man is the more
laughable. Spare a care, will you?
Pity poor adamant man, Adam-the man-the ant.

 

Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. (Hon.) in Drama and English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry has been published in Canada, U.S.A., England, Ireland, Greece, Romania, Israel, India, Pakistan, and Singapore. His is a Journal Featured Writer and can be reached at brandon@brandonmarlon.com.

 

Photo credit: Roman Art. Relief commemorating the victories of a gladiator represented in various struggles with adversaries. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest, Retrieved 29 June 2015 from http://quest.eb.com/search/300_169719/1/300_169719/cite

 

 

American Child

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Emma Collins

 

             Emma Collins

             Emma Collins

Down I-295 coming up from Rhode Island there’s a stretch of shadowed corridor, a sinister unlit highway.  The turn signals wink as people drive along that darkened passage, fireflies dancing in the falling dusk.  Carcasses of animals line the shoulder with their broken bones, blank eyes.  Somewhere between the blackened blood of a doe and the silvery sinew of a possum I tell you I love you, rattling around in your old Ford pickup.  My teeth clatter and you barely hear me as I shout over the rattle and roar.

The sky burns purple, an angry color swollen by a noon-time storm, passed over now.  The reds and the yellows vie for a place in the heavens and your eyes as you flick your face my way, glancing quickly, one hand draped over the wheel, the other coddling the gear shift.  I see Orion in the matte blue of your irises while your mouth works, a handsome red-lipped fish gasping slowly.

I guess I drew the air out of your lungs with my confession, and we miss our exit and the turn signals wink away and the stars are just peeking out from under evening’s skirt.  You curse under your breath and duck your head the way you do when you peek from under the brim of your work Red Sox cap to merge right. The sky flames.

I lock eyes straight ahead. The smell of fresh-born leaves on the chill of an early spring evening caught in the back of my throat.  I bite down with teeth that were stained by the last disappointing iced caramel latte you bought me when the day was still sweat-hot.  I didn’t know what else to say now that my voice cracks and I’m swallowed up in the rattle and cough of an exhaust manifold you’ve been threatening to replace.  The clouds are deepening with rich violet and you find your way back to the stretch of blacktop that will eventually take us home to your apartment with the creaking floor boards and molding bathroom tiles.

I surprise myself as tears start rolling down my face and I’m embarrassed because I’m wearing Dad’s old Army jacket with his name over my heart and Daddy didn’t raise no crybaby.  I sit tall in my seat while I watch you out of the corner of my eye.  You stumble over your words because the whole thing is so childish, so high school. I’m not even sure if I hear your excuses, not really anyways, because I’m looking up at the first stars winking to life through a windshield splattered with bird shit and bug guts and I almost laugh myself.

Somehow we crossed into Massachusetts, the old Minutemen valleys collapsing slowly inwards.  I close my eyes and imagine sinking deep into the dark earth that raised me from Cali roots and Irish blood.  By the time I realise you’ve gone quiet again I’m already thousands of miles away.  When I open my eyes you’re asking with my name and I don’t hear you right so I have to cock my head and cough a little, shaking out the stardust that’s gathered in my breath.

Not today.  Not on this highway.  Not now after I looked at the blank eyes of that dead doe and wondered where her fawn had gone.  I just smile at you and shake my head.  A joke, a funny little thing for a long journey, something to take our minds off of the rattle and clunk and shimmy that’s beaten us to vibrating pulps.

I settle back and hook my heel up on the dash while the radio pops and fizzles back to life.  Something country for our New England ignorance crackles to tune and I hum along off-key.  I’d look good astride a thick-muscled pinto with a chestnut mane, one bright blue eye, one soul-black.  I think about big-sky country even if I’m not into faux cowboy boots and Daisy-Dukes.  I’m gone while you dredge up some off-hand topic that will steer us clear of anything too touchy that might make you stop and think awhile.  The sky is velvet blue as we pull back into the city and you grind the gears on an uphill.  I’m tight in my gut thinking about tonight on the air mattress I re-inflate every night before we go to bed.

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Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

 

The Hotelier’s gaining ground with Home, Like Noplace Is There

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

By Thomas Matthews


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Credit: Nick karp

Credit: Nick karp

The Hotel Year made its debut in the summer of 2009. The self-proclaimed anti-pop anarcho-punk quartet met in high school and united together as a result of other (band) projects falling through. They put out their first release We Are All Alone independently on blank CDs from Wal-Mart. The CDs featured a red spray painted on logo that was a “T”, “H”, and “Y” morphed together. They gave them out for free at their shows, which were typically at town halls, skateparks, or houses. 

A lot has changed since those shows played regularly in high school.

In February of 2013 the band signed to the prominent indie label, Tiny Engines. 

Fast-forward to 2015 and The Hotel Year, now The Hotelier, have released two more albums, changed their name, and have accumulated a new audience—the latter thanks to the band’s 2014 release, Home, Like Noplace Is There (HLNPIT). The name change was a result of complaints from people confusing the group with the similarly titled band “My Hotel Year.” 

The hotel year summer 2009

The hotel year summer 2009

While the name change was bound to start some chirping, it was the release of HLNPIT that really got people talking. So much talking that the band has been labeled leader’s of the “emo revival.” This so called revival refers to a resurgence of music influenced by 90’s style emo play. Alternative Press included The Hotelier in their “12 Biggest Moments of the #EmoRevival in 2014″ piece and referring to vocalist Christian Holden’s lyrics, stated, ” ‘I called in sick from your funeral / the sight of your body made me feel uncomfortable’ is already set in stone as one of the best all-time emo lyrics.” 

An interesting compliment to say the least.

But The Hotelier wasn’t really worried about revivals or genres when crafting HLNPIT. Holden virtually shrugged his shoulders in a Tumblr post talking about the album and their recent labeling of emo stating, “I guess we’re emo now” with a self-created emoticon shrugging. The focus instead was on the complex topics the album grapples with—loss of identity, mental illness, addiction, and power. Topics less commonly found in a genre dominated by male fronted groups singing bitter songs about getting dumped.

Pitchfork.com streamed the full album online a week before its initial release, giving The Hotelier access to audiences previously not reached. National spotlight was inevitable.

Looking past the album’s national attention, more important, is the album’s ability to examine certain topics/ideas and to present them to people that wouldn’t necessarily think of such topics/ideas in the ways that the album demands. What might appear on the surface to be typical “pop”-punk songs, filled with catchy choruses and hooks, a closer examination reveals much more. 

For example, the political implications of mental illness and work are dissected on “Your Deep Rest.” And fans are exposed to this dissection whether or not they recognize it when singing along to lyrics, “A conscious erasure of working class background /Where despair trickles down /Imbalanced chemical crutch/ Open up/ Swallow down.” The album is full of (similar) insights on social structuring and the personal suffering that is a result of such structuring, and they’re all packaged and presented carefully in the form of catchy, punk—or should I say, emo songs?

 

Home, Like Noplace Is There, Tiny Engines

Home, Like Noplace Is There, Tiny Engines


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It only took a few months for HLNPIT to be out before The Hotelier would begin to start playing sold out shows.


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They have toured relentlessly in support of HLNPIT and sell out popular venues such as New York City’s Webster Hall and Philadelphia’s Union Transfer—venues with capacities of 1,500 and 1,000. And with a few full U.S. tours under their belt, are now ready to hit Europe this spring for tour with Emperor X.

 It Never Goes Out album release show 2011

 It Never Goes Out album release show 2011

I caught up with The Hotelier’s Christian Holden to talk about how the band’s been handling this welcomed, but humbly unexpected growth. 


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–    How’s tour with La Dispute and Title Fight going?

CH: It’s kind of wild as far as playing in front of that many peeps, first time in a while I’ve been anxious playing in front of other people. Everyone’s nice though. And some nights the shows have people who just bring us soda whenever we want.

–    I remember seeing everyone in the band play in other local Worcester bands before The Hotelier. Sam in Second Half Of The Season, Chris in Point Of View, you in Oregon Trail, and Ben in Modern Guilt. All of these bands were drastically different style wise. Can you talk about how The Hotelier came about?

CH: Yeah we all played in different bands when we were in high school. Sam and Chris played in heavier/grindier/screamy bands and Zack (former member) and I played in pop bands. The Hotel Year started because I had a bunch of pop songs left over that I wanted to do. Then everyday after school, since we all went to high school together, we’d all just go to Sam’s and play together. Ben joined this year but has always sort of played more progressive stuff. However, we are learning that him living in Tennessee for however long he did made him good at playing sad country stuff which is perfect.

–  I remember (when I was fifteen years old) going to see you guys play shows at a church and other similar, small places around the Worcester area. Now, (six years later) if I can afford it, I have to pre-order a ticket at least a month or two in advance. Can you talk to me about how the band has handled this transition?

CH: Basically, we’ve been pretty blessed with a couple things starting out: local bands who we thought were great and really didn’t do anything, friends bands who were friendly and experienced, and a really solid local infrastructure when we started. We never had a situation where we saw a band that we knew who “blew up” and thought “daaaaaamn I wanna do that!” We just sort of had these bands who were really good and that was good enough for them. We had sort of low expectations for what our band was going to do and only raised them when they seemed realistic. So, what I’m saying is, we always had fun being in this band. Every time there is some sort of transition like playing to a group of people I can call out by name, and then to a more intimate larger group, and then to over a thousand people I’ve never met, and everything in between…every time a transition like that happens we readjust and make it fun/work/something we want to do.


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–    Who were the bands/people that got you involved in the punk scene?

CH: Probably Chris from our band the most. He knew everyone when we were in high school. Bands I really liked were like Last Lights/Morris/Apparitions. Those kid’s bands have always been great. Peeps that kind of “showed us the ropes” and by that I mean peeps that were influential to how we think about our band were Scott Ayotte/Greg McKillop/Anthony Richards.

–    In previous interviews when asked about next steps for the band you said, “not as sad,” can you explain this?

CH: Well, when we write, we write albums. As in like, the album is the piece. And this next “piece” we are working on is brighter/warmer and more like 5am on your porch as opposed to 3am in your bed.

–    Your writing is very poetic. If you look online the structuring of line breaks and formatting of the lyrics for HLNPIT appears poetic, is this intentional? Do you write poetry? 

CH: I don’t know, dude (hippie voice). I just kind of write stuff. I usually can’t write without cadence and melody so songs are mostly where I do my writing. I write short stuff sometimes. 

–    Any plans for “further down the road” after The Hotelier?

CH: I can’t really speak for everyone as far as their life goals. So I’ll just say music stuff. But, Sam has said this’d probably be the only band he’d be this active with. Ben has expressed dreams of being on retainer as a guitarist for some huge pop star. Ben loves playing guitar. Chris makes kind of really sick hip-hop beats. I imagine he is going more toward that producer route. I have kind of had this philosophical disenchantment with pop music and song structure so I’d probably do something not like this but kind of like this.

–    Who has offered you invaluable advice in regards to being a musician and what was it?

CH: I feel like Scott (mentioned above) kind of instilled in us this sort of “no one is going to want to help your band without getting something out of you” thing back in the day. We had grand dreams of releasing our own records and that always being enough. That wasn’t true, but I feel like the loyalty we had to our friends bands and our own work has really kind of shaped how confident and self-reliant we are as a band now.

–    A few months back you posted an update on Tumblr talking about 2014 and its happenings. It was a deep reflection— you stated you no longer wanted to play as a band in Worcester anymore. Can you talk about how you came to this decision? 

CH:  It’s not really a decision. We probably won’t stand by it. I was just moody. I was just worked up about how this one kid was treating me. He kept touching me as if he was gaining something from it because he was weirdly idolizing me. I don’t like that ever, and I just especially didn’t like it in that space. And I like, wanted to talk about how important those spaces are to me and how weird our band has become to a certain extent. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just like when people really like your music, and some people do really like our music, it just sort of junks up my head. People thinking they know me. People treating me like I’m an object or experience. I just like Worcester DIY (Do It Yourself) spaces because no one gives two hoots about it. It makes everything feel more real.

–    What happened to your lawyer Jack?

CH: We used to have a fake manager “Jack E Dhuppe: Attorney of Law” who answered all our emails. We have since fired him because people stopped thinking it was funny.

Note: This interview was conducted prior to the band’s spring tour with Emperor X and has since been published after noted tour. 

Below, watch The Hotelier play the first track off of Home, Like Noplace Is There, “An Introduction To The Album,” at Groezrock—an annual music festival held in Meerhout, Belgium.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjWUQZTl9yM&w=854&h=480]

Listen to Home, Like Noplace Is There in full below and order it from Tiny Engines here. 

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/17043416″ params=”visual=true&show_artwork=true&callback=YUI.Env.JSONP.yui_3_17_2_1_1432686249254_12004&wmode=opaque” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

Upcoming tour dates:

Contributing Editor, Thomas Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism. 

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Taylor Clark’s Got Nerve

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Warren M. Singh

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Lying on his back inside a cramped capsule on top of a missile with the destructive power of 3.5 million tons of TNT, Alan Shepard was growing impatient. Scheduled to launch on the Freedom 7 mission in 1961, he was set to become only the second American to go into space. But there was an issue: one of the flight techs didn’t like the pressure of the fuel lines and stopped the countdown. Strapped on top of 37,405 pounds of explosives, he uttered the immortal line, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle.”

It was something out of Hollywood: a cool, snappy one-liner filled with bluster, but in Shepard’s case, it wasn’t hot air. 

 As the thousands of pounds of propellant ignited below him, buffeted by massive forces as the missile freed itself from earthly confines, his heart rate remained as low as it would have been if he was bored and making small talk at a cocktail party.

Taylor Clark wonders how he was so calm. Under massive and unimaginable physical stresses, the man was cooler than a liquid nitrogen cucumber. Surely there was something to his unflappable demeanor that set him apart, because in addition to intensive training and military experience. Shepard definitely had The Right Stuff. Clark explores fear, poise, and performance under pressure in Nerve, a literary tour of “serenity under stress and the brave new science of fear and cool.”

Clark draws on stories of unflappability from all over, from such diverse sources as a nuclear submarine officer who saved the world during the Cuban missile crisis, an emergency room surgeon at a major trauma center, and Laurence Olivier’s stage fright.  

The author admits early on that he himself is a basket stew of neuroses, and that he endured a bit of good-natured ribbing when his friends and colleagues found out that he was writing a book about fear and cool, but that just makes the journey more interesting. Instead of an exercise in academic storytelling, Clark uses lessons from the different arenas he explores to build a picture of grace under stress, what it is, what it involves, and how to get it.

The most important thing that emerges is that if you don’t think about what can go wrong, or about what you shouldn’t do (“don’t lose track of the ball, don’t fumble the catch, don’t trip”), and instead focus on what you can do and what you have direct control over (“keep your eye on the ball, keep your hands steady, take it one step at a time”), it becomes possible to harness the power of fear productively.   

It’s a bit of a confusing dichotomy, though. Aren’t fear and courage opposites? Maybe in theory, but the physical symptoms are the same. It’s no coincidence that the instinctive biological response to stress has been dubbed the “fight or flight response” ( or being the operative word). In a strict sense, nerve has connotations of both fear (bundle of nerves) and courage (to get up the nerve), and the title is aptly named with this in mind.

Nerve is a funny, entertaining, illuminating, and ultimately hopeful ride. Through stories of stress and the science of strength, Clark shows us that if we approach it in the right way, there really is nothing to fear from fear itself.

Warren Singh is a bookworm and wiseacre who sometimes goes undercover as a writer. He also occasionally pretends to be studying chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. Sinecures, paeans, and disproportionately massive bribes may be proffered at probablystillsomewhatincorrect.wordpress.com

 

Kanye, Master of the Media

Spring 2015, Uncategorized
Kanye West performs at the Point Theatre in Dublin

Kanye West performs at the Point Theatre in Dublin

by Thomas Anania

You may call him an arrogant asshat, a loudmouth, or an obnoxious waste of human consciousness. He and his flock regard him as an iconoclast, a god, the unrivaled musical talent of this generation. I argue that Kanye West is a true advertising genius, a David Ogilvy of our times.

After his most recent stunt at this year’s Grammy Awards, Kanye West is basking under the warm media spotlight again. During the presentation of the Album of the Year award for Beck’s Morning Phases, Kanye charged the stage and almost got his hands on a microphone before showing some restraint, shrugging, and returning to his seat. Many thought we were going to be blessed with another VMA 2009 rant, during which he told Taylor Swift that she was not worthy of the award and that Beyoncé should have won. Many believed the whole act was a prank. Surely Kanye was lampooning himself?

No.

“I just know that the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us,” he said. “We ain’t gonna play with them no more.” It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the same injustice from six years ago necessitated the same response.

Beck answered questions from the press with grace, agreeing that yes, Beyoncé should have won for the sake of just being Beyoncé. As for Kanye himself, even a disrespected Beck couldn’t find it in his heart to curse Kanye. “I still love [West] and think he’s a genius. I aspire to do what he does.”

Explaining his actions later in an interview with Ryan Seacrest, Kanye said, “So the voices in my head told me go and then I just walked up like halfway up the stage.” The voices were likely a symphony of perfectly harmonized auto-tuned muses.   

With a head as big as Kanye’s and a discography to match, it’s hard not to appreciate his genius. He’s skilled in so many media, including poetry, producing, scowling, and fashion design. He even has a knack for discovering new talent (you’re welcome, Sir Paul McCartney). But the one thing that Kanye excels at above all else is marketing, specifically marketing Kanye. As the old adage goes, “Any publicity is good publicity.” Kanye’s flamboyant manipulation of entertainment journalism is where his true genius shines through. Kanye knows that acting prim and proper at an awards show is boring. Whereas crashing Beck’s speech got the press so hot and bothered that they had to get the post-show interview.

Though most of the coverage has been overwhelmingly negative, the backlash from this stunt is already subsiding. His new track, FourFiveSeconds, is a hit. Whether this most recent success is validation of his Grammy stunt and attention-whoring behavior is debatable. What we do know is that  Kanye loves media attention, knows how to get it, and is currently rolling in it.

Thomas Anania studies Economics at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

 

photo credit:Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 19 Mar 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/115_2770855/1/115_2770855/cite

God’s On First

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Audrey Dolan

Red Sox Rosary/www.jmjblessedbeads.com

Red Sox Rosary/www.jmjblessedbeads.com

I have two religions: Christianity and sports.

I’m not equating God and Tom Brady (though I fear I have made the comparison in the heat of the moment). I guess you could say that I’m a person of faith with a borderline unhealthy dedication to Boston sports teams. Whether my parents intentionally did it or not, spirituality and the love of sports have been deeply ingrained into me.

My first visit to Fenway Park was when I was eight years old, on the city’s famous Marathon Monday. We had the day off of school, and my parents felt it was a  perfect time for my first baseball game. 

Boston Red Sox vs Toronto Blue Jays, 11am start. Mid-April, winter winds still lingering, the whole family in Red Sox sweatshirts. The concourse was a sea of people and I was engulfed in foreign smells. Running up the ramp and stepping into the stadium’s afternoon light was a divine feeling. I had never seen anything so large and grand in my life. We sat six rows back from the dugout and I watched as the players walked by, their pristine white uniforms progressively getting dirtier throughout the game. There was pomp and circumstance, laughing, cheering, and singing. I was a spectator, not only of the game but the crowd. As we exited on Yawkey Way, I looked back and waved goodbye. It was the first of countless visits.

My introduction to “the Nation,” as Red Sox fans refer to themselves, came before the dawn of a new era. I watched the Red Sox go from mediocre, to good, to great. The night we won the 2004 World Series, breaking the 86-year losing streak, I saw my mother cry. Not an overwhelming sobbing, but a silent, gentle cry.

When you walk into a place of worship, there is a sense of tranquility and relief. You have come to be in the presence of something holy, as well as to be drawn into the community of your fellow believers. I get that feeling when I step into Fenway Park. I know I am about to see something amazing and unique. There will never be a game identical to this one. I take my seat, breathe in the air, admittedly a mixture of anticipation, outfield grass, and beer, and my soul feels at peace. I am at church and am ready to see the beautiful splendor of God.

There are two important aspects of religion, the individual relationship you have with your deity, and the community that surrounds you in your practice. In understanding and following sports, there is an individual relationship you create. It can be something you do alone, on your own time. And when you venture out to bars and stadiums, you become engulfed in the community of your fellow believes. Together you cultivate this community and this bond. A mutual love brings you all together.

Being a part of a sports community can be just as meaningful and spiritual as going to church. It gives you something to believe in, something to lean on, something to look forward to. There is a support system. It is giving yourself wholeheartedly to something that you have no control over. Both religion and avid sports fandom require a lot of blind faith.

My position may seem extreme to those  who have never had a soul-moving experience at a sporting event. To equate a deep dedication to a higher power with a baseball game doesn’t make sense or even seem right. And at face value they do not appear to be at all in the same realm. But I am not alone in this feeling. Both congregations teach faith and unconditional belief. If you deeply believe, you do not stray when things get tough. Win or lose, up or down, your belief and dedication is continual. In being faithful, you have the ability to look beyond the hard times, beyond the bumps in the road, the scorecard and the stats. You achieve understanding of the way the world works. The community, the passion, and the purpose it gives you remain long after any game or service ends.

At a baseball game, amid all the screaming, nail biting, and heart palpitations, there are moments when there is stillness in the crowd. The air hangs heavy with anxiety and anticipation as we collectively wait for the make-or-break moment. In that silence, I experience something holy and pure. Everyone should have this. Everyone should feel the undying, deeply rooted love that comes from putting your whole self into something. Both the stadium and the sanctuary are holy ground.
 

Audrey Dolan is a sophomore at Clark University, splitting her time between the Psychology and English departments. Her not so secret ambition is to pursue a career as a creative writer.

 

 

 

 

 

Land of Saints, Scholars, and Sights

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Emma R. Collins

the author at the cliffs of moher/photo by andrew andraka

the author at the cliffs of moher/photo by andrew andraka

A girl stands in the security line at Boston Logan International Airport, laden with bags and hopes and fears. She has said goodbye to her family, her friends, her nervous black mutt with the wide brown eyes and half-flopped ears. Nine months, an entire school year, is a long time to be away.

But she shouldn’t worry. Soon she’ll stand where giants once stood, the blue Atlantic foaming and dashing itself against an ancient causeway built of myth and legend. She’ll hear the western winds whipping along the boundless cliffs of Moher. She will feel the rains fall in Wicklow that soften her hair.  She will know that the winking stars in Bray are the stars she has always known.

She will find herself lost in the Dublin streets that bubble with a thousand tongues and she will wonder at the familiar tucked against the new. She will spot the golden arches of a McDonald’s, but duck into a fish and chip shop that fries up the morning catch.

She will sit with scholars at Trinity College and walk across the ancient blue and grey and black cobblestones of Front Square. She will wander the forest paths of Glendalough softened with needles and the scent of still waters and sense the history that lies in the quiet shadows.

Soon she will forget her fears. She stretches to peek out the small airplane window and smiles seeing the new land below, verdant in the warm Irish sun.
 

Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.  She is currently studying at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

 

After the Beekeeper: the Flight of Lady Lamb

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Sasha Kohan

At 25 years old, Aly Spaltro is no stranger to the small ironies and binaries of modern life. As her moniker, Lady Lamb, suggests, there’s a powerful sense of grace in her music and persona, alloyed with the sweetness of a teenage girl who shyly started teaching herself to play guitar and experiment with making music in the after-hours of her part-time job at a video rental store. Since these early undercover days, Spaltro has come a long way. “I ain’t no warrior or king,” she roars in the final chorus of “Vena Cava,” the opening number on her second studio album After (Mom+Pop Music). Knowing that anyone who has heard her work would beg to differ, she is quick to qualify, adding, “But how I am one when I sing.”

                                                                                                                                                      aly spaltro is lady lamb

                                                                                                                                                      aly spaltro is lady lamb

I was first introduced to Lady Lamb The Beekeeper (a name that came to her in a dream, and which has since been shortened) as a senior in high school, when she was hardly known beyond the corners  of our shared state, Maine. Her first studio album, Ripely Pine (Ba Da Bing! Records) came out shortly after I started college and experienced a rapid procession of feelings from first-breakup devastation to homesickness to newly-found self-reliance and spirit. Spaltro recently told Nylon magazine that she can now see the songs on Ripely Pine as “very dramatic” and “kind of all over the place emotionally,” but at the time I felt that lines like “You make me into an egg without yolk” and “I still need your teeth round my organs” were written specifically for me. Ripely Pine was almost all I could stand listening to that year. With an offhand blend of unusually long and uniquely structured songs, Spaltro’s first album covers a range of adolescent attitudes, from the intimacy, betrayal, and complexity of “young love” (I really hate this phrase, but what else do you say when someone’s young and in love?) to a pure and quiet affection for her family.

Almost all Ripely Pine’s songs can be seen this way: is it about love, or family? Heartbreak or home? Even in these simplistic terms (or perhaps, especially), it’s easy to see why the album would speak so much to a kind of dramatic, very emotionally-all-over-the place 19-year-old; as the composer and wordsmith of such lyrically beautiful and universal expressions, hopefully Spaltro isn’t embarrassed by that.

With this in mind, After seems an appropriate title for the follow-up. Listeners expecting a development, a grown-up looking back at a distance to her reckless teenage years, might very well feel satisfied with After. With a sleeker stage name, succinct song titles, and shorter song lengths, Spaltro shows some real adult-like temperance and maturity (like her debut, After has only three songs that even come close to acceptable radio-standard length, but lacks the added boldness from Ripely Pine’s five songs stretching over the five-minute mark). The twelve-track album is more polished in both mixing and vocal quality, with nothing that comes near to the raw voice cracks in “Regarding Ascending the Stairs” or the sung-screamed  lyrics of “Crane Your Neck.” Only two songs explicitly deal with romantic relationships as Ripely Pine did, with the rest either crossing into home and family territory or leading listeners somewhere else entirely.

The recurring words and images in the lyrics are telling: apples, ghosts, and airplanes; birds, blood, and Jesus. Indeed, her infatuation with the vocabulary of eating, death, and animals is reminiscent of the major motifs in the literary nonsense genre of Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll and adapted by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Oranges and nectarines (not to mention strawberry cake) appear, as does chewing, gnawing, and most prominently, starving. Lines like “I could be cracked open like a cartoon watermelon” demonstrate Spaltro’s stomach for potentially gruesome imagery combined with the comical, almost like Wallace Stevens. As with Stevens, playing with the notion of death is clearly important to Spaltro as well, as images of ghosts, skulls, and graves intermingle with her details of ordinary life and often descend through nonsense surrealism into absurdity. “You will become your most favorite color” is her idea of death (from After’s poignant “Sunday Shoes”), while disembodied descriptions like “You with the watercolor eyes, you who bares all your teeth in every smile” are distinctly whimsical and evocative of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.

 And although cats have yet to appear in one of Spaltro’s songs, she does show a Carrollian affinity for creature comparisons, incorporating such “rabid beasts” and “handsome animals” as mice, wolves, dinosaurs, and alligators into her often surreal imagery and metaphors. Deer, ants, whales, and lions appear, but Spaltro’s true affection is for birds–crows, vultures, sparrows, and now an eagle with a fish in its beak. Often, hand in hand with these animal allusions are bodily references to limbs, organs, and bones. Spaltro’s attention to details of the body makes each song feel like a dissection as she severs eyes from their sockets, ribs from their cages, spines and clavicles from their exquisite bones structures. Even after severing the parts she needs, though, the body is often further disfigured by incorporating the language of animals into its description; just as Ripely Pine’s opener “Hair to the Ferris Wheel” has such lines as “It’s a zoo in your room when you part your lips” and “Let’s crawl all over one another like crows on a carcass,”  the fairly existential “Spat Out Spit” furthers and exemplifies the thematic association between the human body and an animal one. “Animal hearts, pumping that animal, animal blood,” Spaltro sings lightly and low, leading into the main question of the refrain: “Was I born wild? Have I been asleep this whole damn time, dreaming up a life? Will I awake to find that I’m deep in the woods and I’m snarling on all fours?” This chorus actually brings up other themes in the Lady Lamb catalogue, from the viewing of humans as savage animals to the recurring ideas of infancy, sleeping, and dreaming. Newborns appear almost as often as apples, and the repetition of “asleep” and “awoke” throughout both albums reinforces her uncanny ability to make even unremarkable details of life feel like a dream.

More so than these perennial images, though, it is clear that what has remained consistently important across Lady Lamb’s discography thus far–and is even more prominent in the new album–is her love for home and her family. The language of travel weaves throughout her songs, but when it’s about love, the plane crashes, the ship wrecks. When the song leans towards home, nostalgia takes over and we are painted a golden map of Spaltro’s memories, spanning from her New England roots in Maine and New York to Arizona and Arkansas. Her parents, sister, and brother are all mentioned, and always in tender solo songs featuring only Spaltro and her guitar. “Ten” comes near the end of After, an ode to home ripe with affection for her sister, best friend, and mother. The song was the closer to Lady Lamb’s recent album release shows in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, and it left the audiences the thought that “there’s a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes, once our eyes finally close.” After all is said and done, after the droughts, gore, crashes, slaughter, swords, and pistols, she knows where she ends up, and she knows where she comes from.

SashaKohan is a student at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in English and Screen Studies. For more of her work, see www.sashakohan.com.