Red Cedar Review Red Cedar Review

Red Cedar Review Red Cedar Review

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Red Cedar Review

Volume 19 No. 2

Winter 1988


Copyright 1987 Red Cedar Review


Table of Contents

David Linton

Andover Price: An 8 X 10 with Cleire da Silva Gray........2

A Youthful Couple of the Times as Eavesdroppped on by 
Rosey Lavineau in Laffy Lemon's Happy Pan Cafe..........5

Robert Cooperman

Lady Mortmain Thinks of Her Daughter............................6

Alone........................................................................................7

Almost......................................................................................8

Robert Haight

The Muskellunge Remembers.............................................9

The Fear of Perch..................................................................10

A lex Argyros

The Kitchen Table (for Amy).............................................10

Andrew Cox

Driving Under the Influence..............................................12

Cheryllee Finney

The Hut.................................................................................14

Rod Murphy

The Time at My Aunt Sandy's..........................................22

Letter to Gorbachev............................................................24

Boogie in Bougival.............................................................25

Mark Rozema

Biking West Virginia.........................................................26

Kate Kaufman

Apricots................................................................................28


Rand Bishop

North of Jericho..............................................................32

Peter Siedlecki

Mediterranea...................................................................34

Scott Russell

Killing a Bat.....................................................................35

The Washer Repairman...................................................36

Portraits of Food...............................................................37

Susan Rawlins

Essential Rituals...............................................................38

Jan Schmittauer

Five Points Church Revival...........................................39

Michael J. Dunnebacke

They're Learning..............................................................40

Ten Year Prelude To:"Fuck Off, Dad,

Do Your Own Lawn.........41

Yin/Yang.........................................................................41

Deb Davies

Predictions of Love..........................................................42

Donna Trussell

Steve Is Really Good (a found poem)...........................49

Mark Shaneen

Who Lost Manitou to Big Screen TV's and Other

Tiny Sciences........51

Shadow Talking...............................................................52

You Will Never Understand Why I Do Not Like

To Go Fishing.......53

Contributors' Notes...................................................55


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David Linton

Andover Price 
An 8 X 10 
with Cleire da Silva-Gray

I. Equality? And Moot

Predestined Mateless Man? And Equals Poor 
Like some zygotic unicellular 
primeval twerp with a memory impaired 
he drifts along unable to expand.

It's been so long he has forgotten how 
the world admires a huge success like fire 
and wheels and passing on distinguished traits. 
And guesses-"i will be among the failed 
like gametes not recalling why they'd come." 
He's called the mateless man and he's been here 
since rich and poor relationships began.

A Mid-Life Man? And Equals Relative 
The day before he reached his fifty-first 
And woke to find the rates of change increased, 
like Nova time-lapse studies speeded up. 
The sun looked like a figure eight that looped 
the loop with Capricorn and Cancer lines. 
Midnight and noon occurred a pulse apart. 
The fulls and news of moons position changed 
as fast as teen-aged honeymooners can, 
and Albert Einstein called him up to say- 
"Price pal, it's relative to getting old."

A Calculating Man? And Equals Zilch 
Suppose he takes his more than fifty years 
then rounds it to the nearest integer 
and adds to that the meaning of his life. 
"That done i'd find my sum- it's fifty-one." 
And quickly multiplied reminds him that— 
"a zero multiplied by anything 
remains a zero at the bottom line." 
What is the use? The answer always comes 
to zip, no matter how you work it out. 
"By being nothing, nothing have i lost."

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A Weighty Man? And Equals Waste Retained 
A man who lives a burden to the earth, 
he seeks to make redemption in a book 
that lightens him as burdensome. And is 
the man who wanted to redeem himself, 
to sacrifice his life and load to print. 
He was surprised when he got heavier 
and heavier with every passing year— 
"the books i wrote not worth their weight in waste." 
It's time to ascertain his current load— 
he's body burden heavy, full of waste.

II. Equality? Poetic And Beyond

A Spacey Man? And Equal To This Time 
The troubles of time were threatening And 
the man to test creative innocence. 
His mind space called for help from heart's 
and soul's amazing miracles of poetry. 
These sainted miracles preserved his space 
for innocence by urging time in mind 
dimension sit— "sit still, recover, sit, 
think back." So troubled time sat back to wait 
a future test of Price's innocence. 
At fifty-one, his time test passed, And went.

Dichotomous? And Equals "Blame It, Yes" 
"When It comes down to It we all are twins 
who haven't anything worthwhile to write 
to one another living, as we do, 
in different hemispheres." Is this the source, 
the bottom source, or sources as It were, 
of constant struggle, father-mother-child 
of all the world? Could this be It And Price, 
the double-dealing underpin of sex 
and war and violence, of life Itself? 
No wonder It destroys the thing It loves.

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A Man Beyond? And Equals Here With Us 
Beyond his test his actions are rear guard.

In this regard he's learned to trust the blurb—

"This poet seeks to rectify his life.

He claims he did it all for poetry." 
Attaching blame is part of humanness, 
that part and parcel growing out of guilt.

In poetry dichotomy is healed.

"My poetry is me, me poetry."

Beyond his test his actions are appeased 
and all And's blaming poetry assuaged.

Dead-Failed Man? And Equals Real Gone Space Man 
Dead-failed indeed, he lives and knows the way 
the living live, continue to remain 
by definition with solidity, 
substantial--not imaginary, real, 
pertaining to an image formed by light.

And's differential rays converge in space- 
"Shazam, a zillion reals to see at once."

Indeed dead-failed, he's known his share of fire 
but can't communicate with us unless 
we live and write with hearts and souls like And.

-Andover Prive with Cleire da Silva-Gray, 
for Verdant City's Midnight Arts Review

4


A Youthful Couple of the Times

As Eavesdropped On by Rosey Lavineau 
in Laffy Lemon's Happy Pan Cafe

They waited for a good fish soup 
they'd read about in Kosmic P. Cookbook, 
a ghost-write-by-committee coterie 
and Verdant City monthly magazine.

My father called me Nowhere first,

he said,

then wed my ma and called me Sacrifice, 
but you can call me Masculine for now 
and later Powerful and Lionized.

My mother called me Shy Sedate and her 
Reflection, later on her Emptiness 
and Reverie. I am Sensational 
for now, but you can call me Pulchritude, 
then later All Dimensional,

she said.

The waiter served their hot fish soup. 
They wolfed it down impatiently. 
It tasted better than it read, 
she said.

Said he, 
if only it were called 
Eternal Present soup.

-by Rosey Lavineau, a Ghost-At Large, 
with David Owlinton, the Editor 
and Ghosting Principal—for KPC

5


Robert Cooperman

Lady Mortmain Thinks of Her Daughter

The act of love revolts her, 
she admitted in whispers 
on her last visit, her husband 
looking blacker than the panther 
exhibited at the zoo.

We left him with my husband, 
smoking cigars and pacing the library.

I patted her hand and kissed her, 
mouthed the usual platitudes 
about the will of the church, 
the purpose of all life, 
a husband's conjugal rights-- 
all the while my poor girl 
cringed farther from me, 
her sweating silence a castigation 
of what I had lived by 
even before my hastily arranged 
marriage. Then all pretence 
fell from me, like weights 
I had carried all my life.

"You blame me, child, as is only 
right. I never enjoyed it either, 
at least not with your Pappa, 
a good man, better than your William, 
who will never understand the mind 
of a sensitive woman like you.

Don't fidget, my dove, we'll see 
about an annulment. Thank God 
your Pappa can afford it, even if 
your oldest brother runs through 
our fortune like a bear after honey. 
Don't cry, your eyes will be ruined 
for the fancy stitch work 
you turn out so delightfully."

6


When I sent her to her old room, 
she looked lighthearted as a girl. 
I sighed, shook my head, rang for tea 
and a discreet glass of sherry.

Poor angel, poor unnatural daughter, 
the logical product of a mother 
saluted by more gallants and beaux 
than half the actresses who rouge 
their faces to cover the marks 
of French pox, my own acting 
competent enough to fool 
better audiences than her father.

Alone

Your second mother-in-law advised you 
to forget the child of your first marriage, 
after the judge awarded custody 
to her father. Your back stiffened 
as if a plank had been set into your spine, 
and you muttered something between teeth 
clenched like a wolf determined 
to tear its paw from the steel of a trap.

Now you feel like the desperate heroines 
of Victorian novels, wanting first 
a separate bedroom, next a separate life: 
unable to say exactly, even to the therapist, 
what it is about your husband that makes 
your skin crawl as if his hands 
were slithery hooves of slaughtered hogs: 
so much his mother's finicky, ambitious 
son, so little the man who seemed 
all lips and tongue when you courted.

You can't say even that, so you shout 
that you're much better at breaking 
things than at patching them together.

But it's your second daughter you think of, 
how she pushed out of you and into 
the proud arms of this husband, when all 
the time you were pregnant you thought 
she was yours alone, a bond between you 
no cutting of the birth cord could sever.

7


Robert Cooperman

Almost

It was almost a love story from a book: 
after two dates, you knew he 
was the man you wanted to marry, 
not because he made bells go off 
when you kissed-because he didn't. 
The ones who did, the long-limbed, 
good looking boys who knew it, 
driving their fast cars and handing 
you beers on love-wild rides 
when romance was an obligation 
of the flesh and nothing more— 
those boys were in love with their faces 
in their rearview mirrors; they dropped 
you, or you them, after a night 
or two of thrashing by a river, 
in a rented room, an absent friend's 
apartment; when you called and another 
young woman answered, all fluttery 
that was she now number one. "Honey," 
you wanted to say, "just wait a week."

But if there were no bells with this one, 
there was something much better: a certainty 
that there was nothing he wouldn't do 
for you, maybe because he had been 
a senior life guard, as silly as that sounded, 
and had saved a child from drowning once 
something he had told you, not to brag, 
but because you had asked him, 
and he had admitted to the bravery 
as if still amazed himself 
to have performed such a feat.

But looking at him while he drove 
you home, you knew he'd be 
dependable in every emergency.

And when he kissed you that night, 
he seemed so old-fashioned and shy 
you wanted to cry afterwards, not 
for balked pleasure, but that one 
chaste knight still drove the highways, 
thinking his girlfriend a princess 
in a fairy tale he was dreaming awake.

8


Robert Haight
Robert Haight


The Muskellunge Remembers

The muskellunge remembers

the previous life when he was Ojibwa: 
a scent of burning cedar,

the hiss of its juices,

the long tongue of fire 
snaking into comers of night.

He learned from flame

to flick his arm until a trout 
squirmed in his grip,

so quick he could crawl out on a log, 
snap his neck-jaw-teeth...

The muskellunge remembers 
who called him Great Pike, 
remembers the sentence 
to settle inside whiskey bottles 
and his escape when he dropped his arms 
and swam away like an arrow.

Because the muskellunge remembers, 
woodsmoke makes better bait 
thought it is fit to be tied 
only in the full of darkness.

And because he remembers, 
you must throw him back. 
Try to eat him and his bones 
will choke you.

9


Robert Haight

The Fear of Perch

He watches the dentist 
slowly circle around him 
and remembers the perch 
he tortured as a child, 
shredding the white plastic 
of its mouth, 
forcing his middle finger 
into its gill.

Now the perch smiles 
pliers glistening from its fin.

For hours the perch pulls 
at the hooks in the man's mouth, 
twisting them in circles, 
stirring small eddies of blood. 
Finally the tip of a treble hook appears! 
The man gags on his stomach 
rising into his throat.

The perch pulls half the man's gut 
out his mouth and cuts the hook off.

The man listens to his own gills 
sucking at air.

The dentist hangs up the pliers and smiles. 
The man will pay a nominal fee.

Alex Argyros

The Kitchen Table _ .

For Amy

Often in the late morning, when 
you're alone, and you try to sum 
things up, you think of the girl 
you were when you made important 
decisions over a similar table, 
when you were drunk with the bouquet 
of fermenting fruit and your spirit 
as hard as the bones of the hardest boy. 
You're a wife now, and a mother.

10


The table is a father's parable, 
you think, or a husband's, in any case, 
it was never yours. It's their carving 
of worlds out of wood and privilege, 
it's their voice that survives 
the generations in the table's 
carefully bevelled edges.

You don't work, as they say, your days 
are spent caring for the house 
and for the child. But, dear wife, 
you make worlds too, when you wake up 
three times a night to comfort our 
screaming baby, and hold her tight 
against your breast for hours 
until her fear subsides, 
when you teach her the alchemy of 
words, the sacrifice of touch, 
the palimpsest of spirit and chance 
she draws when with your help she gropes 
in the dark for her lost toys.

It's your father's table, or mine, 
but you're its hierophant.

If you were to open the window 
some night as you return to bed 
after comforting our daughter you 
might see the moonflowers you planted 
underneath the trellis and remember 
the song you started humming 
in our garden one night ten years ago. 
Look around you, Amy, the silence 
you hear is a violin string tuning 
itself to the rhythm of your blood. 
Yours is the noblest art, the ancient 
ritual of drumming spirit out of 
earth. Shake your sleepy head, clear 
your eyes, run your fingers 
through your reddish hair, then look up 
at the sky and you might see 
the pale gauze wings you laid 
on the linden tree, and me, pretending 
to sleep, but transported by the music 
that still wells up inside me.

11


Andrew Cox

Driving Under the Influence

—Hair of Dog Woven into Shaggy Tale-- 
headline to AP wire story

Just when I think life's flat 
as a deserted highway in Texas,

I read in the morning paper 
about a blind man who let his dog 
help him drive, and am reminded 
of the blindfolded knife-thrower 
I saw once, tossing his cutlery 
at his wife spinning on a wooden wheel. 
He didn't miss,

nor did the dog 
(named Bud and now most likely a star) 
who was trained, said the owner, 
to bark twice for green, once for red. 
Upon hearing dogs are 
color blind, the owner said his friend 
could distinguish changing lights.

The knife-thrower, when 
questioned by the audience 
on how he did his feat, said 
he visualized each throw 
before he threw it.

I wonder if 
the blind man projected the street 
onto his skull, but the paper says 
the cops stopped him for weaving 
and charged him with driving 
while under the influence,

which makes me doubt the concept 
of mental rehearsal because I, too, 
have put the theory to the test:

12


I don't think the blind driver 
envisioned himself behind the wheel-- 
that's why he had the dog, 
putting his faith into the simple, 
knowing everyone gropes their way 
along the road, knowing there's no point 
in even trying to practice, that 
everyone has to adjust his own blindfold, 
grip the wheel of his own car, 
and set off for his own dear life 
under the influence of his own dog.

Figure without caption.
13


Cheryllee Finney

The Hut

On the street, Barb felt as if she had escaped. I don't really 
like her, that woman Maria, Barb thought. She's nice enough, 
inviting me over for "a real Mexican meal," taking an interest in 
my poems, but I don't like her, her type.

Even though the air seemed hot liquid and the heat rising in 
slow waves from the cement threatened to implode her skull,

Barb walked briskly, with long strides that ate the sidewalk and 
put buildings quickly behind her. She was trying to make the 
mile home before dark when she felt it—a swelling of gravity that 
seemed to pull her guts through her vagina to the hot stone. This 
is not how she usually felt when it started. She didn't count days 
or anything but she always had a little warning discomfort early 
on and then was ready. Suddenly nauseous and bloated, too 
heavy to stand, she thought maybe she should sit on someone's 
steps and wait for it to pass.

"Hey, chica!" a boy hollered from across the street where 
he had unthreaded himself from other boys and men knotted on 
front of the liquor store. "Guapa! Guapa!" he called, waving her 
over with his arm. He shouted something else in Spanish, a 
language Barb didn't understand, and his group laughed. She 
didn't live in this neighborhood and she had been told she got 
yelled at around here because she was blond, that the calls were 
harmless, part of Latin culture. Still, she was nervous and 
wanted to get back to her own street where the harassment would 
at least be in English.

Why didn't I go into that store to get something to use? 
she would wonder later. At the time, however, the thought 
actually did not occur to her. The store might offer rubbers or 
Preparation H, but never something as offensive and exclusively 
feminine as tampons. Sick, hot and not thinking too clearly, she 
kept walking, staring straight ahead, and pretended to ignore the 
boy, the group of men and the green/red flash of "Package 
Liquor". The territory seemed theirs.

Also, she was afraid she was beginning to show. 
Originally, she had chosen to walk in order to blow off steam 
after the scene at Maria's. She probably doesn't know how 
uncomfortable I was. Maria had even asked Barb back again, 
apologizing that she had never actually had a chance to look at her 
writing. Maybe she did know, though. Maybe she's cursed me, 
Barb thought and forced a smile.

14


Now a bus was out of the question. Barb's yellow shorts 
would be soaked through pretty quick and getting on a crowded, 
meandering city bus with red streams running down her legs into 
her sandals, well, she just couldn't. Thinking about it, about the 
color combination, made her more nauseous. Without checking 
her wallet, Barb knew she didn't have money for a taxi. And 
there would be no restaurants to duck into for blocks yet.

Maybe a friend will come for me, she thought. She felt 
embarrassed about asking but, feeling sick and out of options, 
she started to look around for a pay phone. Turning the comer, 
just a block ahead, the golden shell of a service station beckoned. 
Gas stations were pretty rare in this part of the city and since 
Barb didn't drive, she'd never paid attention to the few there 
were. She hadn't expected it, but she was sure glad to see it.

Some older men hung around outside, leaning against the 
station or sitting on the ledge where plate glass fitted into the 
cement wall. Barb wondered why the men were there; they 
didn't seem to be waiting for their cars. Most people around here 
used public transportation. She walked past them with tiny, 
mincing steps, holding her thighs together. The men, older than 
those at the store, were quiet, looking her over and, she thought, 
probably thinking she had to pee bad.

Catching her reflection in the glass as she opened the door, 
she thought the attendant might think she was a junkie who 
needed to shoot up or get sick or something. She looked that 
bad. She tried to smile.

"Could I please use your ladies room?" she asked. He 
hesitated and for a moment Barb felt like when she was eleven 
and had to buy her first box of pads; walking up to the counter, 
she had been sure that the old, hawk-nosed druggist, a man who 
had been in the store, at that counter, all her life, could look 
through her clothes and see it. That was ten years ago and only 
in the last couple had she felt comfortable buying a box of 
tampons without hiding them in with groceries or other 
purchases.

As Barb waited for a response, she noticed a sign-slick, 
neon poster board that screamed "BATHROOMS ARE FOR 
PATRONS ONLY" in hand-scrawled black felt-hanging just 
above the attendant's oily head, but he paused only a moment 
before handing over the key.

15


Barb moved dreamily out of air-conditioning into the 
pressing heat and walked, almost doubled over, to the ladies' 
room. The smell was pretty wretched and there was liquid on the 
floor but she gratefully pulled down her shorts and sat on the 
warm, sweating toilet seat. She thought about disease. Leaning 
forward, embracing her abdomen, she rested her head against the 
white tile wall that was only inches from her knees. The tile was 
wet with condensation. She thought, if I can just sit here for a 
while until I feel a little better, maybe I'll be able to figure out a 
way to get home.

Barb thought of Maria and the irony of the situation made 
her smile. Maria made bloodprints and would have something to 
say about this if she knew. Barb had discovered the prints only 
that afternoon, when she went to Maria's for dinner. Not that 
Maria kept them secret. They hung on the walls of her 
apartment.

***

Entering Maria's living room, Barb had noticed the 
pictures and while Maria peeled an avocado, she decided to get a 
better look at the sheets of spongy, gray newsprint covered with 
what looked like brown inkblots in symmetrical, freudian shapes. 
One looked like two men, lizard men with ridges along their 
backs, fighting over a gift-wrapped package; another was a 
skinny angel complete with wings and floor-length gown. All 
were surrounded by feathery, whispery strokes or impressions. 
Barb tried to think of something to say about them. She didn't 
know much about art—not even what she liked—but she was 
afraid that saying this looks like this or that looks like that would 
make her seem shallow.

She saw through the open door to the kitchen that Maria 
glanced at her from time to time while slipping rough-bark skin 
from the green, slimy flesh. Barb walked over to the kitchen and 
leaned against the door frame as Maria, her movements very 
precise, halved the avocado and scooped the brown moon seed 
from the pale cream center. Barb hated avocados; she thought 
they tasted like lard. She was afraid she wasn't going to care 
much for this dinner.

"What do you think of my prints?" Maria asked. "They are 
of my blood." Recoiling mentally, Barb did not answer. She 
had always been squeamish about blood. "What do you think?" 
Maria asked again.

16


"Did you cut yourself for them?"

"No, " Maria laughed gently--but, Barb thought, as if what 
I said was truly amusing to her—and dropped avocado halves into 
a blender, "I did not have to. They are made from my menstrual 
blood."

Barb remembered a friend of hers who had a series of 
photographs taken during the birth of her first child—spread 
crotch, first liquid gush, crown of hairy head, wrinkled face 
bathed in blood, hands gripping shoulders, etc.--and then 
showed them to a group over for drinks one evening. That time, 
Barb had not known better than to act embarrassed and say what 
she thought, that the photos were disgusting. "In poor taste" 
were the words she had actually used, waiting until the hostess 
had left the room for a minute to check on the baby. Everyone in 
the small group, men and women, jumped. Pregnancy, birth 
was beautiful; the beauty needed to be demystified; how could we 
face our deaths if we couldn't face our births. And, throughout 
the intellectual harangue, the garish, polaroid snapshots lay, faceup, 
bleeding over onto the coffee table. Really, she thought 
some things, like shitting, should be kept personal.

But she wasn't going to say this to Maria. For one thing, 
Maria, a widow whose "paying job" was as an accountant, 
seemed like a good person to know. She had started coming to 
the writer's group a couple weeks before. The group didn't take 
itself too seriously, as a group or as individuals, but Maria was 
very serious and pushed for public readings. Barb didn't wish to 
make a bad impression on the woman and, more important, she 
really liked Maria, or had. Now she was afraid Maria might be 
very odd, somehow threatening, and she weighed her fear of 
offending Maria against her desire to skip dinner and leave. 
Eating at Maria's struck Barb as not being very hygienic.

Maybe I'm being racist, Barb thought. Latinos were, after 
all, into graphic portrayals of blood. The stuff oozed from 
statues and paintings of their holiest saints. She was about to 
comment on this when it occurred to her that her observation 
might itself be racist. She decided not to say anything.

"Menstrual blood is very powerful, don't you think?" 
Maria asked as she walked past Barb into the living room. She 
was wiping the green from her hands onto a towel so white it 
looked cold.

"I hadn't actually thought of it in those terms," Barb said, 
turning to follow. She searched desperately for another topic and 
tried to avoid looking at the walls that now seemed obscene.

17


"Well, it has always been a powerful image for me," Maria 
said. "I have been doing much work on the subject"

"I can see that," Barb said. About twenty of the things 
were plastered to the wall.

"No, not these. These are for effect. For my mood." 
Maria pushed down the comer of a page that was beginning to 
curl. "I do my real work in a studio a couple blocks from here. 
These are to keep me thinking."

***

A car without a muffler roared in the gas station drive and 
jarred Barb into her surroundings. Leaning back on the toilet and 
shifting her legs to rearrange the cramps, she let her head flop 
against the wall behind her. She opened her eyes and peered at 
the neon light ring on the ceiling. Sluggishly moving aside 
matted hair that had stuck to her face, she looked around the 
room. No napkin dispenser. No toilet paper. No way out.

She knew she didn't have any tissue in her purse but 
looked anyway. Maybe she had stuffed a napkin from a fast 
food restaurant in there at some point. Nope. Nothing but a 
sheaf of her poetry and her wallet, which she knew contained her 
driver's license, library card, one dollar and some change.

Maria would probably not mind this situation at all, Barb 
thought. She would probably make something mystical of it. 
She had said she liked to look at "the flower" of her blood on a 
pad.

Staring at her stained underwear, Barb thought, so where's 
the power, Maria? Sometime soon she was going to have to get 
out of this cubicle but the idea of the sticky shorts rubbing against 
her was so distasteful that she held her breath, hoping this might 
help keep her from being sick. The nausea let up a little.

***

"There is a power in it that I am trying to discover," Maria 
had continued the conversation as she pounded out a tortilla 
between the palms of her hands. "Discover and communicate," 
she added. "It is an event for which I try to recover and create 
ritual."

"I'm not sure...," Barb began and broke off, not wanting 
to encourage Maria. Not understanding either.

18


"My personal ritual, such things as wearing red during my 
menstrual flow," Maria said, moving her hand in a way that Barb 
feared indicated Maria planned to enumerate all of her period 
fascinations. Barb was relieved to see that Maria wore a crisp, 
white shirt and black jeans. She looked very clean. "The red is 
for celebration. I use certain herbs at this time and certain 
incense." She stopped, looked at Barb and laughed gently. 
"You think this is strange?"

"I," Barb began, "I just never think of such things." She 
was sitting at the kitchen table watching Maria finish up the meal. 
The air in here was especially hot but Barb felt uncomfortable in 
the living room. "It's just a bodily function."

"Well, of course," Maria said. She turned toward the 
stove and slapped a flat disk of dough onto the cast-iron skillet. 
"I just had so much shame for a long time. The first time I bled I 
did not know what was happening. Nobody had told me of this 
blood. My mother must also have been ashamed. Now I think 
of it as power that has been denied, at least hidden or lost."

Barb was, at last, on familiar ground. Maria must be one 
of those goddess-worshippers, healing with crystals and burning 
sage for purification. She seemed more obsessed than any of that 
type Barb had met. And Barb was surprised. She wouldn't have 
guessed it of Maria, who seemed so efficient and modem.

Getting up from the table, Barb went over to the stove to 
see how tortillas were cooked. After less than a minute, the drylooking 
dough bubbled and Maria turned it for a few seconds on 
the other side. She patted out another one.

"You think I am something like a witch?" Maria asked, 
which was exactly what Barb had been thinking. However, Barb 
knew a few witches--or people who claimed to be witches-- 
young women who talked endlessly of feminine principles, held 
secret rituals with candles and did not eat meat. Maria had never 
seemed like that to Barb. Barb looked at the middle-aged, dark 
Maria. With her large brown eyes and full, scattered, black hair, 
Maria actually did resemble a witch and in a more sinister way 
than the others; Barb didn't need much imagination to picture 
Maria as Snow White's aging, beautiful stepmother. Barb 
chuckled and, trying to put things on a lighter note, told Maria 
that she did have something of an evil look about her. Maria 
laughed. A kindly laugh? Soft and lilting, it hung on the heat 
like a spell. "Yes, but, you see, I am Christian," Maria said.

19


"I don't really care about that, about any of that god stuff," 
Barb replied quickly, picking up on a possible subject shift. 
Religion, politics, even the weather would be better. She would 
try to force herself to banter lightly. "My family was very 
religious but with me, it never really caught."

"I use what I wish from religion," Maria replied. "From 
Christianity I take certain things that I weave with others. It is all 
an attempt at a whole pattern that will fit me." She scooped up a 
tortilla with a spatula.

"You mean you just take what you want? You make your 
own tortillas but you don't grind your own com. Something like 
that?" Barb said, trying to maintain the tone.

"Something like that," Maria laughed. "I don't embrace 
my culture entirely." She seemed to be lost in the thought as she 
stared at the last tortilla cooking. "What it is," she said, stacking 
the tortilla on top of the others, "is that I try, by studying 
religion, art, culture, to choose things for my life that will give 
me power rather than drain me. It is like finding the power of 
menstruation. In many cultures women were forced to go off in 
to the menstrual huts during their bleeding. They were 
considered too unclean to handle the food men ate or the items 
men might touch. So there they were, with no work, no kids, 
talking to each other. There would be steam, herbs, soothing 
teas. It is a ritual worth reestablishing. And, of course, the 
power of the blood was acknowledged. These things have been 
lost but not the myth of uncleanliness. I attempt a refocusing."

Barb wondered how far women would get in their careers 
if they took four or five days off each month to sit in a hut. 
Maybe the women could all be artists, sitting on blotting paper 
and then comparing the images. They could be creative and save 
on menstrual products at the same time. Barb watched as Maria 
glopped the guacamole from the blender into a bowl. The smell 
of something cheesey was in the air and Barb began to feel faint.

"It's the heat," she said, grabbing her purse from the back 
of the kitchen chair. "Really, I am sorry but I have to go. I think 
I'm going to be sick."

"You shouldn't go if you're sick. Lie down on the couch 
for a while," Maria said, bustling over and placing her hand on 
Barb's shoulder. "Well, let me a borrow a car and drive you 
home then," she offered when Barb said she just wanted to go.

20


"No, I think I just need air," Barb said. "I can't eat 
anything right now and I'm going to be lousy company if I stay."

"Has this happened before?" Maria asked. "Maybe it's 
something you should have checked."

"No, I'm sure it's the heat," Barb said, stepping out the 
door with her guilt at leaving Maria in the sweltering apartment 
with all the food that she had prepared especially for Barb.

***

Someone knocked on the door of the bathroom.

"It's taken," yelled Barb, afraid it might be the attendant 
coming to check on her. But no one said anything and the 
knocking ceased. Probably someone playing around, she 
thought. She was feeling better now. If fact, she felt completely 
recovered. How long had she been here? How was she going to 
get out? The bathroom didn't even have a sink so she could 
splash her face. She examined her shorts. They were ruined, 
soaked in the crotch and the insides of both legs.

Looking in her purse again, she decided she only had one 
option. Maybe, if she shredded the poems and stuffed them into 
her underwear, they would be absorbent enough to do the trick. 
She removed about five of them and started to rip them when the 
title of the top one caught her eye. She had never had any 
confidence that the poems were worthwhile. But these were her 
only copies. Even if they weren't very good, they were a start. 
Home was only a mile away and it must be dark by now If she 
walked and kept out of the light, she'd make it. She pulled up 
her shorts, and, turning, opened the door.

Night had fallen but the city was its own sun and for a 
moment she hesitated. Would she be able to avoid the light? Not 
wanting to face the attendant she left the key inside the bathroom 
and walked past the quiet men outside.

She walked a block, ignoring the car that pulled up and 
continued alongside her a ways. Staring straight ahead, she 
didn't realize that her stride had become long, almost loping. As 
she turned onto the street that led directly to her apartment, an 
early moon swung out from behind a row of buildings and hung, 
glutted, above the concrete like a beacon.

21


Rod Murphy

THE TIME AT MY AUNT SANDY'S

I Late September, 1962

It's just Aunt Sandy and I

with Uncle Joe gone to Newark each day for work.

Her freckled hands smell of Jergen's lotion 
when she folds kleenex into squares 
to put under her china coffee cup.

She dries the bathroom sink with a towel

each time the water is run.

At lunchtime she makes breast of turkey sandwiches, 
fills out my plate with orange slices and cookies.

I am nine years old in Avon-by-the-sea, New Jersey 
and when we walk up Fourth Street to the ocean 
the beach looks to me like my aunt 
without her make-up on.

All the sturdy umbrellas are gone, the canvas windscreens 
with their salt-crushed stakes have been rolled away. 
Adele, Gordon and all the bridge players 
have moved their game indoors.

The lifeguards are back at Montclair State.

My older sister has gone home to Pittsburgh without me 
because my elbow is still shattered 
packed in plaster and itching.

For the first time in my six summers here

I have stayed on past Labor Day-

two extra weeks of mending at my Aunt Sandy's

where coffee percolated every morning,

where the meals are all on time,

where every bed gets made.

Late afternoon when we walk along the boardwalk 
past the closed salt water taffy stand, 
only the old men

with hair coming out of their ears and noses 
are still interested in the ocean.

22


II. Early November, 1985

Uncle Joe hugs my wife, 
picks up our two children.

We were here just last summer.

Today we arrive before the other out-of-towners. 
Aunt Sandy had wanted an extra month at the shore, 
had stayed in Avon late into October.

I can remember the look of Avon without the tourists, 
but I cannot picture Aunt Sandy like this.

A stroke, an aneurysm, death.

In the morning, while my uncle showers upstairs,

I make coffee in her kitchen: 
scoop grounds from a yellow and black can, 
plug in her electric coffeepot and 
wait for it to perk.

Figure without caption.
23


Rod Murphy

Letter To Gorbachev

"Only a madman would have walked away from the 
proposals we had on the table."--Mikhail Gorbachev 
after the Reykjavik talks in 1986.

Open it now, now that the alarum has been given.

We've been stockpiling for this very moment. 
You have seven minutes.

Karanganda has nine.

Push your own buttons, if you so insist.

It won't matter

You've seen the reports.

Nothing you can launch will get through. 
All that wasted throw-weight. Pity. 
Eighteen of ours will be enough. 
You know which cities. You know. 
Open the little package.

Why not?

Have you found the porkpie hat? Put it on. 
Oppy's shadow.

Press the finger circles as indicated.

Figure without caption.
Figure without caption.
Repeat many times.

Hear the ticking? Hear your pulse? 
Continue.

Smell the square.

Figure without caption.
It's the cologne I wear.

Your wife remarked on it.

Go on.

Rip off the rectangular slip at the bottom.

Eat it.

Do you have Stolichnaya close by?

Taste how paper 
goes down. Why not?

Care to press the finger circles again?

Here, do this.

We've been waiting.

Kiss the paper.

I had a black Lab once

who kissed the vet's hand that put him down. 
Kiss the paper.

It is your summer at Sevastopol.

Kiss it goodbye.

24


Boogie In Bougival

(un homage 'a Renoir)

My red beard will be grown out by then, 
my straw hat pale as Sauterne and pulled down low 
will provide the proper dash of whimsey and style, and

you in the holiday dress with bustle and scalloped edges, 
bursting with crinoline, will bend back from the waist, 
your weight given to me as I want you to give me

your eyes, your eyes dark as the mussels served to us 
in a tidal pool of private herbs and clarified butter, 
your eyes that I would savor like each feel of each shell.

My lips will be perfumed with Margaux, my tongue 
will swirl with Boursin and freshly steamed artichokes 
when we began with a gavotte, a country waltz, 
a remembered turn from the Slavonic dances.

You will laugh at my Celtic kickings and together 
we will promenade in a ritual for two.

All those top hat bon hommes and ruffle-sleeve grande dames 
will see their first Texas Two Step, will have to 
step aside for our double dipsy-doodle.

Will we show them the funky chicken, the freaky-deak, 
the oak tree, the dead bug and the pogo?

We can jitterbug like bees in the noonday mums,

We will moonwalk and cakewalk twice around, 
will slamdance like desperate Houdinians 
trying to extricate you from your skirt hoops.

When they come to collect the wilted beer, empty carafes, 
the bread crusts, the oozing slabs of camembert, 
we'll boogie there in Bougival until the paint runs dry.

25


Mark Rozema

Biking West Virginia

Her copper hair is in a bun, 
some loose strands floating 
silky as milkweed 
to her freckled shoulders. 
She smiles at you, placid 
as your coffee; with one look 
you know her name is Norma 
and she has worked eleven years 
in this truckstop 
ministering to vagrants.

In the men's room you give in 
to curiosity and buy a SCREAMER 
for only fifty cents. Guaranteed 
to drive your lover wild.

It looks like a spiked collar 
for a squirrel. You stuff it 
in your pocket before Norma 
sees you with it. Suspecting 
your depravity, she loves you 
anyway, and has left a pocket-size 
Gospel According to John 
next to your plate.

Through Blue Ridge towns 
thick with the Holy Spirit 
into the emerald sweep 
of hills shrouded in mist 
and the tight weave 
of dogwood and alder 
mitten hands of sassafras 
sudden jump and tumble of streams 
speaking in tongues 
merging in a frenzy of praise.

26


Which language is that, 
you ask an old man with a voice 
like a barbed wire fence.

Holy Ghost language, he says. 
Which way to Phillipi?

Doesn't much matter which way 
the road turns in West Virginia, 
you always wind up in the next town.

In a cow pasture 
there are three crosses 
welded of five inch pipe 
and painted pastel blue. 
You sleep at the foot of the cross 
and wake to bellowing Holsteins. 
First rays of the sun 
split into rainbow 
by dew that gathers itself 
and drips from the downy 
underside of tall grass.

You ride hard and arrive spent 
in Parkersburg at dusk, where 
nothing moves but the Ohio. 
Metallic, old, inscrutable, 
the way a thing is itself 
and nothing else. All at once 
you are free to plunge into it, 
leaving your old life on the surface 
like a film of dirty oil, until 
what remains is only yourself, 
transparent, glistening 
on the far bank.

27


Kate Kaufman

APRICOTS

The madwoman has beautiful eyes, light brown with flecks 
of green in them like the first leaves; they flash when she talks. 
No one can get over how beautiful they are, how beautiful she is. 
In fact, she is admired extravagantly. She shrugs off the 
compliments, but secretly she is pleased, secretly she lives for 
them.

I tell her that all that praise isn't good for her, but she never 
listens.

The madwoman sings when she works in her garden, 
sometimes loudly, sometimes in a small and private voice. She 
sings songs that no one else in the world knows, songs she 
learned before she was ever set down on this earth. Her 
knowledge is from worlds away from this world, from the time 
she was a creature of swiftness and light, so glorious she would 
blind us all if we could see her as she was then. Once, when she 
was a child, the madwoman saw a Roman candle. She had been 
like that, yes, but instead of flaring and dying, she had burned 
for centuries, and she flew from planet to planet like a shooting 
star. She tells me that she remembers, just before she goes to 
sleep, certain details from that life, before she was trapped in the 
insignificant and uncertain body she has now. Of course, I don't 
believe her.

The madwoman loves her garden. "If we could live at the 
center of the earth, we would all be healed," she tells me 
sometimes. "The power is there. Our desires would be 
satisfied." As a child, she traveled once to the core of the world, 
tunnelling like a mole, determined and gray with dirt. At the 
center of the earth were diamonds as large as houses, filled with a 
gold light. There were regal people who walked slowly, so that 
one had time to admire them. They acknowledged her as a 
person of power, and were kind to her, but they sent her back in 
the end, to her yard, to her garden. "Someday, you will come 
back and stay forever," they told her, to console her. Now, she 
is able to see the plants breath, and if she looks long enough, she 
can see through the earth as if it were glass. She sees the roots 
stretching down, as we all stretch, toward that faint glow of light. 
She sees worms turning the earth in a tedious, steady motion, 
hoping to go far enough, but never reaching that promising, gold- 
colored glow. Then the madwoman turns over herself, and 
watches the leaves opening and closing like mouths, drinking the 
air.

28


When she was a child, the madwoman was so aware of the 
breathing around her that there were days, weeks, when she was 
unable to move. She knew the floorboards were still living 
plants, straining and groaning in their efforts to free themselves. 
The walls were filled with mice and beetles, she could hear the 
secret scraping of their feet. She felt the blood in her veins 
pulling her down, moving toward some conclusion, toward some 
ocean. It was effort enough to sit very still, rocking only a little 
back and forth, keeping time with the turning of the earth. At 
night, she would go to bed exhausted, limp, one arm hanging 
over the edge of her narrow bed, a salute to a stronger opponent. 
Whe she got a little older, the madwoman nearly died. Her blood 
gathered its strength in an effort to escape from her, pumping 
faster and faster, heading toward the tips of her fingers, and she 
knew it would burst through her fingernails and she would die. 
Her blood would shoot like cannon fire across the room, 
exploding over the window and wall. But she was wise with 
other knowledge, as I've said before, and she clenched her hands 
to keep her blood inside her. She dug her fingernails into the 
palms of her hands to bury them, to brace them against the 
pressure; a little of the blood leaked out but she kept the rest 
back. Her mother and father tried to pry her hands open, because 
they had always wanted her to die, but she was stronger than 
they were. When the doctor came, she screamed an explanation 
to him, and he understood her, even over her parents' echoing 
voices. He gave her a shot to slow the blood down, to slow its 
monstrous race toward her fingertips, and it saved her life. At 
the age of eight, the madwoman fell in love with him.

But not in love. I tell her. Not at eight. She only smiles, a 
knowing smile that I particularly hate, and says nothing.

When the madwoman has to go to the hospital, she takes 
three things with her: her own toothbrush, a ring which (she 
says) was given to her by the doctor who saved her life, and a 
copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, which she bought for herself on 
her fifteenth birthday. As a teenager, the madwoman lived, so as 
not to provoke her parents, a "normal" life, "insipid and stupid," 
she says now. She made the honor roll and went to dances in the 
gymnasium, sewed clothes in home economics class and made 
love to her boyfriend in the finished basement of his family's 
home. She lost her virginity at fifteen, and liked sex because she 
found she could separate herself during it, floating above the 
struggling bodies on the floor, pleased and a little amused. She 
liked the way her skin looked, dressed in the silk of her sweat; 

29


she liked her boyfriend's astonished gratitude. It made her feel 
powerful, it was a way to tap into her other, unearthly 
knowledge. Her other source of power came from the sonnets. 
She memorized each one as if it was an incantation, and even 
now, if you say to her, "One hundred and sixteen," she will 
answer, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit 
impediments love is not love which alters when it alteration 
finds. . . " She repeats this sonnet to herself in the hospital, 
surrounding herself with those favorite words, a charm worked 
against the people there and the things they do. She tells me of 
her plans, scores of them, to get even with the hospital people for 
their probing drugs and needling questions. Burning her bed 
withmatches stolen from a nurse. Separating from her body for 
good, and watching them scramble around her with paddles and 
wires. Unclenching her fists so that the bood would shoot like 
fireworks over the clean white walls. "I keep my own counsel," 
she says. "Just wait."

I tell her that maybe it would be best to give up her struggle 
against this world, her attempts to move toward her other, older 
place; that she'd be happier if she led her life at a low and even 
level: her garden, her sonnets. Not the doctor. Not the core of 
the earth. But, as I think I said before, she never listens to me.

When she was nineteen, in college, the madwoman lived 
through a particularly satisfying phase, taking lots of drugs and 
sleeping with a different man nearly every night, surrounded by 
the sweet and biting haze of marijuana smoke. It was her 
strongest period, and she had complete control—over herself, her 
lovers, and even the physical world. One night, she fell asleep 
and dreamed that her dorm room was a different color, with new 
posters on the walls, a red and green quilt on her bed, and a 
flowering plant on her windowsill. When she woke in the 
morning, her room had changed to please her, to fit her dream. 
And, there on her hand when she reached out to touch the quilt, 
was a ring set with a pale blue stone. She knew at once it was a 
gift from the doctor who had treated her as a child, the doctor she 
loved. He had died in a car crash three years before, on her 
sixteenth birthday. Now he was in touch with her again, as she 
had known he would be.

The madwoman was twenty when she became pregnant 
with the doctor's child. Her mother began to cry instantly when 
the madwoman told her, as if she had a tiny hose hidden behind 
her eyes. Her father said she must marry the man who’d gotten 

30


her into this, or else get an abortion, he didn't care which. The 
madwoman did neither, of course. She stood the pain as long as 
she could—waves of nausea with the force to pitch her sideways-- 
enduring it because she wanted the doctor's child. When she 
couldn't stand it any longer, she asked a woman in her dorm 
what she should do. "Apricot juice," the woman said promptly, 
as if, the madwoman said later, she had been waiting to be asked 
"It's the best thing for the first three months, to help with the 
morning sickness. Are you keeping the baby?" The madwoman 
drank apricot juice every day, many times a day, until everything 
in her field of vision seemed to take on a gold-orange cast, until 
time became liquid. Things dissolved in front of the 
madwoman's eyes. "It was a trick," she says now. "That 
woman was paid by my father to tell me about apricot juice. 
Now I know it causes miscarriages." The madwoman had a 
miscarriage, or believes she did. She is sure she did not have the 
baby, but at this point nothing seems to have remained very clear 
in her memory. At times she remembers having killed the 
woman in her dorm, and at other times she can only remember 
slashing the side of the woman's face with a piece of glass. She 
remembers the glass, thin and cold in her hand.

During her most recent stay in the hospital, something 
disturbing happened to the madwoman. One evening, when she 
was sitting quietly on her bed, watching the particles of air turn 
gold and then blue, an orderly brought her dinner to her on a 
tray. Veal and broccoli. Nothing with bones, everything cut up 
nicely and arranged on the plate. And, in one comer of the tray, 
a dish of apricots.

"I acted without dignity," the madwoman tells me. She 
threw the dish under the bed and got her hands around the 
orderly's throat. The orderly was a tall man, but the madwoman 
has large hands, long fingers, and she is the strongest person in 
the world. She would have killed him without trouble, but other 
people came running from everywhere, from the halls and 
closets, from under the bed and out of the walls, like beetles. 
She had been caught off guard, and caught hanging from the 
guard's throat. She had made a mistake.

While people shouted to each other and brought restraining 
straps and needles, the madwoman struggled on the floor like a 
fish on a dock. I feel her struggle, her heartbeat in my ears, her 
arms pinned to the cold linoleum but still trying to fly upward. 
She frees one hand. I feel it shake, and the ring is a blur of blue 
light.

31


Rand Bishop

North of Jericho

North of Jericho 
you bus the military road 
bom amid the earthen huts 
napalmed in a recent war, 
skirt the brooding mountain 
of the forty days and nights 
now capped by cloistered monks, 
escape the baked Judean floor 
and rise into the treeless 
former bedouin hills 
now greened by water from the sea 
sanctified with chemicals 
amid Zion diplomacy, 
flirt for miles with the barbs 
of the double fence 
a short commando crawl 
west of the river used by John 
once to christen God.

On this road on recent noon 
a schoolbus of children 
received a lifelong lesson 
from their neighbors' bullets 
bought from bartering nations 
bewildered by their surplus arms 
and recently on this road 
a busload of believers 
following in their Lord's footsteps 
was gunned down in the Israeli dirt 
by people dispossessed 
of what was Palestine 
and you momentarily expect 
the sullen work party 
milling by the road to pull 
their rifles from their robes, 
splinter glass and give you 
hot black desert death.

32


Figure without caption.
Then the bus emerges 
from the heat for lunch 
beside the Sea of Galilee, 
an hour and a half relief 
from the conscientious guide's 
grating righteousness 
ever since Jerusalem;

you delight in fish descended 
from Peter's blessed catch, 
gaze at the moving palms 
whose fathers shaded Lazarus, 
and full of food and thought 
don rented swimming trunks 
and in the heat and dust 
north of Jericho 
immerse yourself at last 
in the sweet cool Jesus water.

33


Peter Siedlecki

Mediterranea

A branch whips once 
in a coincidental wind 
and sends its fruit 
into the grass.

I am standing somewhere 
near Epidaurus I suppose 
—I feel the spirit of 
Euripedes. Resting in 
its uselessness, the olive 
forces itself on me. It 
wants to be the conceit 
of my metaphysical poem.

My poem, wanting to be 
properly tragic, not 
expecting to be metaphysical, 
protests, for its subject 
was to be a man,

a man who hid from his 
insignificance like an olive 
drying uselessly in the growing grass, 
inhaling vapors in the hope 
of inflating wrinkled skin, 
but instead, 
infecting the sweet air 
with exhalations of bitterness.

My poem hoped to be about a man 
who would turn his face away 
from every glassy surface 
that might have flashed it back at him,

a man who could never know himself 
but in the meanings of his own words, 
the words which others now erase 
wherever he had written them, 

34


a man reduced to smudged and 
partial phrases and garbled memories 
that still rattle in the ears 
of people weary of redundancy,

a man reduced to dust 
that collects at the base of walls.

His face is there, 
erased and disassembled, 
in a residue of thin words 
waiting for coincidental wind.

Scott Russell

Killing A Bat

When you have to kill a bat 
dread comes 
with his rat-skin wallet, 
in it a piece of chalk 
to drag across the black 
backdrop 
of your thoughts.

In these thoughts mathematics plays 
its part. The bat's ears, 
you deduce, must be 
parabolic 
to retrieve the signals it sends, 
in them dread's outline, 
dread's table of contents.

And in the workings of its wings 
there are equations 
for lift, drag, propulsion, deVinci's 
strange ideas about

what people could devise 
if they would dream 
if only they would try.

35


Scott Russell

The Washer Repairman

The woman's eyebrows, he notices, are plucked to death. 
There is a kid crying, smelly, mouth 
surrounded by hour-old jelly smear, 
red barrette hung at the end of a blond lock.

And there the woman sits, frowning 
through the haze of her cigaret, 
about life, about ever becoming a high-fashion model.

He sees the issue of Vogue laid 
open before her on the formica dinette table top. 
He leans his bare elbows upon the surface 
and feels the slight colloquial chill, 
the disposable life, 
seep into his joints.

He wants to ask her 
why she doesn't wipe the kid's 
face clean, open the window 
to let in the neighborhood air 
full of the trike squeak 
and chained dog bark, run off 
and become a high-fashion model 
just like that. Under her thin brows 
she is an attractive woman.

She would look into her coffee a long time, 
look as if for one of those deep sea fish 
with transparent bodies and needles 
for teeth to surface, to poison 
the compliment. "Do you 
really think so?" she would think. 
"Gimme a break," she would say, 
tossing a glare at the kid.

The whole time, the kid 
would scream as if to be let out 
of this life, this place 
thin enough to slip 
between pages.

"No, really, I mean it," he would say, 
as he closes his tool box, 
gives his belt a hike, 
and sits again, across from her 
like her future.

36


Portraits of Food

The challenge is not to make 
the mashed potatoes look 
like ice cream, the gravy 
hot fudge. It is all 
context like Chinese, 
one color meaning many things, 
depending on texture, 
smell, temperature.

Wavy vertical lines mean heat, 
or anger, or party streamers, 
but when placed above a hot fudge sundae 
mean mashed potatoes and gravy, 
the way ketchup on a street 
means tragedy, or blood 
on a hotdog means sports.

What color is tuna salad, gray? 
Why do we eat gray?

And then the river valleys 
in lettuce. What 
am I saying? But just imagine 
the farms along the Loire, 
the fat blue coveralls, the black 
moustaches, the cat 
about to lunge from the hay. 
The olive is 
all knowing, an 
Arab custom.

And who weeps for the coney island? 
Bits of glass in an open wound?

You cannot open your mouth wide enough 
to contain it all before it spills 
making a muck of things 
like honesty or true love, 
all the photographs 
of hunger in the world.

37


Susan Rawlins

Essential Rituals

Since I live alone I usually need 
to take out the trash once a week.

A quick blitz Saturday morning starts 
in the study with a basket of drafts 
and the empty envelopes my poems came back in, 
into and out of the bathroom, out the back door, 
eight steps in, out the back door with the garbage, 
in the back door, turn the lock, turn the bolt, 
return the wastebaskets—done.

I don't know what happened 
about wastebaskets when we all lived at home, 
but the garbage went out every day, 
spilling out over the small white can, 
soggy in extra bags: refuse and rejected food, 
old salad, wrappings from Safeway's best beef, 
Cheerios boxes, chicken bones, fish bones, dog food cans, 
tooth-scraped artichoke leaves and asparagus stems, 
cracked crab shells, leftover lunch we forgot to take, 
mashed Baby Ruths from my father's pants pocket, 
cookies my mother gave in and admitted had died.

"I'll give you a dime to eat these raisins," she said. 
"Make it a quarter and you've got a deal."

"A quarter ? For a quarter I'll feed them to the dog." 
"Feed them to the dog."

"Seriously. I'll give you a dime to eat these raisins."

She began dinner at 3:00. With an on-going shopping list 
she sat and asked, "What do people eat ?" 
She honked for us to come out and help 
with the grocery bags which became garbage bags 
as the slow sinks heaped with shreds, utensils, pots and pans, 
limp vegetation, trimmings, layers of lettuce.

Sometime before 6:00 she called us into the kitchen 
and gave each one a damp and dangerous bag.

Taking the fifth herself, she said, "Please walk this way," 
stepped out in some outrageous style, and led us 
past the dog pen to where three great green garbage cans 
rusted and bulged. She put her bag in first and 
left us to somehow smash the lids back on.

38


Jan Schmittauer

Five Points Church Revival

A rigid pyramid of Food Club 
creamed com flanked 
by two cans of Joan of Arc kidney 
beans grace the altar. "Jesus, come fill 
your lambs!" Pastor Ed exhorts, 
his bald head shining like the collection 
plate, while plump penitents with bellies 
full of Johnny Marzetti sidle alongside 
the benches like so many fair goers 
now resting tired feet for a slide 
show on "The Grains of Pickaway County."

White shirts and red bow ties straightjacket 
three towheaded brothers who methodically 
kick the front pew. Edgy already, 
do they envision the path to heaven 
as endless acres of soybeans to be tirelessly 
mown down with a gleaming green John Deere?

The congregation raises strains of Old One Hundred 
while Pastor Ed lifts the crumpled bills skyward 
and the Kingdom Seed, three plump teens, thump 
tambourines, sing "Magnify the Lord" and ask God 
to keep them pure as Mama's bleached 
sheets flapping on the line.

A box of Gideon's International Testaments yawns 
half-opened in front of the piano; wooden fans stir 
the air like an overworked mother unable to ease 
the lumps from her mashed potatoes.

And all the while, Jesus, bathed 
in the green light of what appears to be 
a comet's tail, kneels by a boulder 
in the Garden, prays 
for these souls who pray 
for calves to be delivered, 
bottom land to be salvaged, and Dear God, 
mortgages to be met.

39


Michael J. Dunnebacke

They're Learning

I sell midnight groceries.

He came in and nearly fell,

having forgotten to stomp the snow from his shoes.

His coat was unzipped

and the buttons of his shirt

were not aligned as intended

by the long-dead original designer of the button-up shirt, 
(God rest his soul).

"Box a' condoms," he uttered 
red faced and in a hurry.

"Anything else today," I said, 
in worn-smooth delivery.

Lincoln's face on the crumpled five, 
he rolled like dice across the counter, 
had lost all ol' Abe's reputed patience.

I handed him the first box I could grab, 
having grasped the urgency of his errand.

Ringing it up, I looked up just in time

to see him rushing the door,

(a 'keep-the-change' gesture if ever I saw one).

"Your change," I offered.

"She's waiting," were his departing words.

The door closed, deflecting my customary,

"Thank you and come again soon."

A fiftyish-looking woman with her loaf of Wonder Bread 
and a jar of Jif cradled in her arms 
stood before me staring at that door, 
a look of exasperation and disgust 
gaining momentum across her brow.

"Will that be all," rescued her from her bout 
with the morality of her likely successors.

40


Ten Year Prelude To:

"Fuck Off, Dad, Do Your Own Lawn"

Having shoveled half the walk,

I was met by a strange creature 
who had my four year old son's face 
but the body of Mr. Olympia.

He was bundled up that much.

If he'd have had a stamp on him anywhere

I'd have hidden him from any passing mail trucks.

I was relieved that I'd already 
shoveled closest tot he mailbox.

My wife could have been a postal Michelangelo; 
our son being her packaging masterpiece.

He greeted me with his miniature 
pink plastic version of a shovel.

It's amazing how many children's toys are work implements. 
The poor children.

Even the toy industry is conspiring

to enslave them into the labor jungle 
even before they're out of diapers.

He was so enthusiastic about "helping Daddy."

I suppose anything is fun the first time.

I could see the toy scam had already gotten its grip on him.

As we finished I instinctively gathered

this package of a son into my arms as if to say,

"you don't know what you're getting yourself into."

Yin/ Yang

I've resorted to hugging

my laundry 
immediately upon its 
liberation from the dryer.

They appreciate it,

and I appreciate it

but for converse reasons.

I, for the warmth, 
they for the chill.

We compliment each other nicely.

41


Deb Davies

Predictions of Love

The first time I saw Lisa, she was standing in the shadow 
of a dormitory, clinging to a dark haired man, and crying. They 
were swaying together, in that painful, upright embrace couples 
use when there is no place for privacy. I was walking up the 
dorm steps just before curfew. No men were allowed in the 
dorm then, except for the parlor, where they lounged ill-at-ease 
against the piano, or sat spraddle legged by Chinese vases used 
as umbrella stands. I couldn't help looking at Lisa and her friend 
huddled together. Her blond hair glowed in the door's opening 
light, and I could see the outline of the boy she was with, slight, 
short, wiry, turned away from me.

The dorm boasted heavy mahogany tables, clumps of dust 
on the floor and canned pineapple with each meal. The women 
who lived there, referred to as "upperclassmen," were juniors, 
Seniors, and graduate students. One of the women was married 
to a student in France. Another had married, and divorced, a 
man from Traverse city. They had both been warned not to 
speak to virgins in the dorm.

In spite of the dust, the pretension, and the crowding, I am 
not sorry I stayed there that year. I met an extraordinary set of 
women: a freckled, blond Jewish woman who talked of nothing 
but sex; a six foot two Swedish girl who talked only to her plate; 
Boston socialites who stole the Chinese vases and dropped them 
out of windows; my ethereal red haired roommate, who could 
and did say "fuck a duck" in French, Latin and Greek.

One of the women I met that year was Lisa. Her roommate, 
Annette, a rotund, comfortable brunette, confided to me that Lisa 
was in love with an Irish poet. They had been friends since 
childhood, Lisa and Tom. Now Lisa wished to break off the 
friendship. I thought of them rocking against each other, and 
said nothing at all.

Second semester, Annette married a law student. My 
roommate became a housemother and moved to the first floor, 
where she kept a shrine, with votive candles, burning under her 
boyfriend's picture. Lisa and I moved in together and became 
friends in that slow, drifting way some friendships have. We did 
not talk to each other about personal things.

42


She was earning a teaching degree in special education, 
and minored in Spanish to further an interest in South American 
poets. She had a record called "Una Quena A Traves De Los 
Andes," high, thin piped recorder music she played constantly. 
She loved Capote's "Christmas Memory," and walking barefoot. 
She had the thickest soled feet of anyone I knew.

Of Tom, I knew only that he and Lisa went hunting near 
Chelsea. They took potshots at rabbits and drank bourbon from 
a bottle. They went off together wearing bluejeans, wool shirts, 
and boots. I also knew they did not make love.

Tom had heavy eyebrows, a boxer's jaw, and the catlike 
cleanliness of some blue collar workers. His fingernails were 
broken and looked as though they ought to be dirty, but never 
were. He took an occasional class at Eastern, worked in a 
factory, and treated both efforts with equal disdain, seeming at 
ease only when tramping through the woods. I never saw any of 
his poetry.

I could understand why he would be in love with Lisa. 
She had short, straight blond hair she cut with nail scissors, blue 
eyes that held compressed amusement, and skin so fair it showed 
the underlying tracing of blue veins. Her nose had been broken 
when she was a child, and was slightly thickened near the short, 
straight bridge. That and the short hair gave her almost Roman 
beauty. Her face was oval. She was tall, with long thighs, a 
small waist, and full breasts she tried to conceal by wearing 
men's shirts over her clothing. The dorm's art students did 
charcoal sketches of her, nude.

I had coffee with Annette and told her how much I liked 
Lisa.

"She'll have an unhappy life," Annette prophesied. " Have 
you been home with her?"

"No," I said, startled.

"She's going to marry her father someday," Annette said. 
"You wait and see."

I stayed with Lisa at her parents' home in Marshall, that 
summer. They lived in an old brick house with cavernous high 
ceilings and a garden full of intertwined tomato and four o'clock 
vines. It took me a while just to get used to the feel of the place. 
For instance, their bathtub was never clean! When I first noticed, 

43


I stood with my eyes averted, as though staring at the grime 
would be a breech of privacy. Her brother remained shut in his 
room, playing Bob Dylan albums at top volume. Her father's 
father, a spent irascible Irishman, virtually lived in a great, 
walnut four-poster bed. Their dining room was shrouded in 
viscous floor to ceiling curtains. Blue oriental rugs were soft 
underfoot.

It was Lisa's mother who impressed me the most deeply. 
A tall, heavy breasted woman with a chignon of thinning blond 
hair, she kept a blue painted rocking chair in the kitchen, and 
rocked and read and talked to anyone who floated in . She wore 
old fashioned cotton dresses, heavy shoes and cotton aprons. 
She fixed us smoky tasting tea and marvelous fresh brewed 
coffee, insisting on serving us from thin pale blue china cups. 
She fed us white coconut cake with thick white coconut frosting. 
She made her own bread, picked cherries and made her own 
cherry pie. A gold eyed calico cat followed her about the kitchen 
waiting for the chance to jump into her lap. She hung upon our 
every word, relaxed and laughing. The basement was filled with 
dirty laundry from the landing down, but Lisa's mother seemed 
to own all the time in the world.

While I was there, a phone call from my parents told me 
my grandmother had died. That night I could not get to sleep. 
Lisa's mother brought me a tray with a bowl of potato soup that 
looked oddly white in the dark of the room. I've never liked 
cream soups, but she propped up my pillows, and sat with me 
while I swallowed it down, soothing and bland. I soon slept 
and woke in the morning feeling oddly rested, as though her 
silent offering had absorbed my pain.

In contrast, Lisa's father, small, short, dark and good 
looking, was a fit, abrupt man, with a jockey's build. Every 
morning he appeared at the breakfast table, wanting his two eggs 
over easy, his lightly cooked bacon, his buttered toast with 
homemade jam, his coffee in a china cup and his copy of the Wall 
Street Journal, which he promptly retired behind. The sound of 
his chewing was as regular as the cat's purring. He rarely spoke 
to us. When he did, evenings, it most often had to do with 
politics. He would put the paper down and drill us with 
questions about an editorial he thought we should read. He was 
a Democrat, which impressed me, because Democrats were 

44


liberal, whereas my parents were Republicans. He read The 
New Yorker sitting in his chair evenings while his wife took his 
father a supper tray.

I asked Lisa's mother if she tired of waiting on people.

She clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me 
thoughtfully.

"My parents died when I was very young" she told me. "I 
quickly learned I could live without someone to love me, but I 
couldn't stand living without someone to love."

Lisa and I separated after graduation. We wrote one 
another and her letters were more personal than our conversations 
in the dorm. She stopped writing Tom and dated a series of 
besotted athletes, dark, trim, jutting jawed, held at platonic arms 
length. Then she fell in love. She sent a picture of the fifty-five- 
year-old, twice divorced jazz professor, who taught her to try 
drugs and like John Hurt's "Coffee Blues." Jack was, she said, 
very smart, and very very funny. She had a prescription for birth 
control pills. I looked at the picture with unease in the pit of my 
stomach. The jazz professor was small and dark, with horn rim 
glasses and wiry hair.

It's funny how you want, need your friends to be happy. I 
had taken a liking to Lisa that is hard to explain. She was in 
some way without affectation and, like a child, very vulnerable. 
She could have been beautiful, but she never bothered. Her eyes 
focused out, as though looking for the glint of waves slapped 
back by wind.

She sent me long letters from California, enclosing pictures 
of seals basking off the northern coast. The letters were, 
however, not very happy. She was working at a private school 
for educable adults. One of her pupils, a thirty year old who 
came barely to her waist, was passionately attached to his 
transistor radio, and when it bounced out of a truck in which he 
was riding, he dove after it and broke both legs. The principal 
where Lisa worked became psychotic and thought the staff was 
planning her demise. Lisa was the only trusted instructor. The 
principal babbled for hours about teachers attacking with knives, 
and Lisa helped have the principal sent away. Lisa and the jazz 
professor contemplated marriage.

Then Lisa was in Michigan, married, not to the jazz 
professor.

45


"Machu Picchu," she repeated. She looked much the 
same as she'd looked in the dormitory, except more tan. Her 
nose was peeling and her face was freckled and thin. Her 
husband looked-well, you must know how her husband looks.

He is dark haired, slight, inches shorter than Lisa. He then 
had a rough short beard, and eyes that glanced from face to face 
as though he expected one of us to strike him.

"This is Marc," she said. "We were married in Lima."

He reached over and shook my hand, then shook his head.

"Lisa," he said. "I am tired. You will forgive me?"

She spoke in a quick undertone to him in Spanish. They 
waved at each other and he found a spare bed and collapsed.

"Poor Marc," she said, sinking into an armchair. "He's 
going through what I did when I met his parents. They're 
Swiss. He speaks mostly French, you know. Some Spanish. 
That's our best language. Sometimes," she shrugged, "it just 
wears you out."

"You met him in Peru, then?"

"On my way back from Machu Picchu. My second trip," 
she said. "The Inca ruins are eerie...granite cliffs and everything 
so green you'd swear you were underwater. And the birds...the 
birdsong is fabulous. I'd been before, with Jack. But I wanted, 
just once, to go back on my own."

"You met him on the way back from Machu Picchu," I 
repeated.

"You needn't make it sound like a television romance. To 
begin with, I had dysentery," she recalled. "Then I got 
pneumonia, or so the doctors tell me by looking at scars on my 
lungs. Then I got my period. All of this, jolting along on a local 
bus, having cramps, sitting stuck between wicker baskets of 
garlic and wood cages of table-bound guinea pigs. I was running 
a fever and I must have been delirious, because I left my 
backpack...Tampax, underclothes, medicine, everything at a rest 
stop. I got off the bus not knowing what I was doing, only that I 
shouldn't bleed all over the seats. I walked off the path, spread 
my sleeping bag and collapsed."

I tried not to squawk with alarm.

"I was so miserable." She explained. "All I wanted was 
to curl up with my knees to my chest."

"And your friend came?"

46


She nodded. "Marc had noticed I was turning green. He 
followed me and found me...he looked after me for three days. 
Dosed me with antibiotics, gave me his T shirts to clean myself, 
fed me tea, told me French nursery rhymes. My sleeping bag 
was ruined," she said with a grimace. "We slept in his sleeping 
bag and he never, you know, touched me. He left as soon as I 
could fix my own fire and food."

She paused, head tipped on one side, remembering.

"I tracked him down," she told me. "It wasn't hard. He's 
with the Swiss Peace Corps in La Oroya. It's a little town in the 
mountains, near Lima. Marc was dipping goats when I found 
him. Goat dip is nasty stuff...very purple, very smelly. He 
smelled as bad, I think, as I did when he met me."

"He's Swiss," I said, trying to put my thoughts in order. 
All I could think of were watches and chocolate, very orderly.

"He went to school in France," she said, "but grew up on a 
farm. White stucco bams, bee hives, goats. He's big on goats 
for poor countries. He says goats are hardy, easy to feed, and 
don't exhaust the soil."

"Do you help him in La Oroya?" I asked.

"I have my own job there, thanks to all that Spanish. I 
work with the women and write up what they say."

Marc emerged from the room where he had been sleeping. 
He no longer looked shell shocked. Lisa put her arms around 
him and he smiled at me.

"She's been telling you how she chased me, yes? You 
know, she was relentless. I had to marry her to control her 
shamelessness."

They visit us now and then, Marc and Lisa. He is 
studying in Florida, learning how to make things grow without 
pesticides. When he finishes they will go backs to La Oroya, 
back to the sheep dip and pumpkins weighing fifty pounds.

They have a daughter whose name from Peru is Yusha, the 
nickname of a bird that flutters through green tress. Yusha's 
eyes are gray. She has a small round mushroom face and soft 
blond hair. The last time I saw her, she had a barrel of bone and 
feathers showing under a flopping, borrowed, red snow suit 
hood.

Yusha wanted to stay and wallow in snow drifts. The 
whole family is tri-lingual; Lisa speaking French, Marc 

47


conversant in English. They all speak Spanish when they 
are irritated. Nevertheless it was in English that Yusha 
attacked her mother.

"You big stupid-dumb," she said. "I don't want to go 
home."

"Come here, Yusha," Marc answered. "Come here and I 
will help you take off your wet things."

I looked at Lisa and we grinned at each other. The kitchen 
was redolent of the meal we had shared. I had served 
home-made wine. Marc had brought black bean soup, and 
his own home-made bread. The kitchen had that special 
feeling rooms achieve so rarely...when they are full of people 
who are taking care of friends, and who feel that for a while, 
they have all the time in the world.

I do not think it was her father Lisa married. She is not, 
you know, a big stupid dumb.

48


Donna Trussell

Steve Is Really Good

(a found poem)

Lisa-

Steve is really good

and if you like him when you meet him 
try to get him to talk

(don't be afraid to talk yourself, 
about anything sincere 
whether it's deep or not.)

But if he starts to say ANYTHING 
LISTEN hard and tune in.

If you like him.

I'm open for questions.

Vicki

Vicki,

This seems to be a strange situation 
but I will take your advice.

I am looking forward to meeting this person. 
Lisa

Lisa—

Don't be afraid to pull out a cigarette 
but make him light it.

Later, if you can stand Winstons, 
make him want to give you one.

Love, Vicki

49


Figure without caption.
50


Mark Shaheen

WHO LOST MANITOU TO BIG SCREEN TV’S

& OTHER TINY SCIENCES

(In response to William Barillas)

WHO runs with their eyeballs open to the sun

WHO sets colored paper to the wind because there are no more leaves 
to fall from the trees

WHO wants to catch big snowflakes with a butterfly net 
because monarchs have given up Michigan for Kansas

WHO peals the dead lips from a burnt frog and pastes them 
on his older sister’s forehead while she sleeps

WHO are all these people running aroung scratching their 
heads and biting their nails

WHO chortles like gut-busting hyenas when something isn’t funny

WHO will build us the skyscrapers to climb up and jump off of

WHO must put a brick in their toilet

WHO must wonder why the brown-dirt-brown garden no longer 
harvests ruby-crowned tomatoes and the sacred enemies of cold: 
onions and garlic

WHO must use grandmother’s Arm and Hammer Baking Soda 
instead of toothpaste with fluoride

WHO says the call of a hawk reminds him that birds are not symbolic 
that Manitou can tell you birds have changed

WHO says seagulls were never seen so far inland. Swans did not 
always mimic pigeons

WHO masturbates with his eyes open to the trees, to a cuckoos third 
clutch of young

WHO bangs a drumstick on broken sewer tops 
(broken bum rhythm, broken bum weapon)

WHO picks flowers for their hats, throwing pennies at brick walls

WHO is sipping papaya juice in the shade--behind the bars and 
all day drunks of life

WHO listens anymore anyhow

WHO must scream obscenities to be heard

WHO MUST BLOW THEIR BRAINS ALL OVER THE PUBLIC 
TO SAY YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT ME

WHO never opens their eyes at all

51


Mark Shaheen

SHADOW TALKING

leave the light, I feel like talking

SAYING THINGS like when I’ve been drinking I change my mind a lot

saying things like how to bend a WASPS ear

SAYING THINGS LIKE AN APPLE A DAY

saying things like you eat what a monkey eats

and you get thyroid problems

saying things like oh, you know, I want to lie on your braided rug

saying things like YOU PISS ME OFF

saying things like lets pack bean bag snow chairs in your backyard 
lets pile a soft hill and jump out your bedroom window

saying things like your not fair, you spoke twice in one breath

saying things like only you would invest the time to prove a fact 
saying things like go jump in the lake

saying things like I have that gift for you that I haved saved and saved 
but you never came to pick it up

(so I opened it myself)

saying things like drop dead

saying things like love it or leave it

saying things like I bet I know who’ll win the game

saying things like so do I

saying things like I want to suck your dick

saying things like when I am quiet I am happy

saying things like I knocked my friends knuckle half way down his wrist 
with my pelvis when I was 12

saying things like I fell from a tree at McCabe’s lot when I was 12

saying things like you’d think we were in Seattle with all the sullen 
gray faces we have here

with you in your room above the backed up toilet 
across town in a Michigan snowstorm

saying things like turn off the light, I’m tired, let’s go to sleep

52


YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND 
WHY I DO NOT LIKE TO GO FISHING

You never understood why I didn't like to go fishing.

I didn't like the wet cloudy worms we'd have to pull up from undersod 
that left little brown and clay clumps under my fingernails

I never knew if it was dirt or entrails

but I knew the smell, and the smell remained with me for many years, 
On rainy days in April I would not leave the house until the sun had 
come and dried all the asphaltworms

and every time I would try and knot one onto a hook 
he would squirm, break open and ooze all over me 
writhing a tortuous wriggling

You used to slice them into three with your father's deer-hunting knife 
so you would have more bait to catch more fish 
but I knew these worms had three hearts

Once you caught a garter snake near the lake, remember 
how we tried to hang him by the neck, and failing 
we threw him over the drop-off and watched a big black bass 
swim away with the snaked tail trailing from his mouth 
whipping side to side 
fighting a death in this large-mouthed stomach 
how I laughed when you laughed

And whenever you caught a little fish 
the marginal sunfish, bullhead or bluegill 
you would rack it against a tree or 
lay it in the grass and watch it slowly waste and die, poking the eyes 
out with a stick

But I think your true triumph over the little fishes came 
when you would cake them in the sand and watch them drown 
in the dirt 
clogged gills 
sun parched

Well, the last time I went swimming I saw a fish with big staring eyes 
and I thought he might have recognized me

because wherever I swam, I saw the fish staring at me 
not really afraid, just staring at me

And you will never understand why I do not like to go fishing.

53


CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Alex Argyros teaches literary studies at the University of 
Texas at Dallas. His most recent work has appeared, or is 
about to appear , in Grain, Boundary 2, The Literacy 
Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review and Stone 
Country.

Rand Bishop has travelled in Africa, the Near East and 
Europe; worked as a copyboy on the New York Times; 
served as a Foreign Service Officer on West Africa; has 
taught in Michigan, Ohio, California, Florida, Quebec, 
and as a Fulbright Professor in Gabon. He currently 
teaches English at a branch of the State University of New 
York in Oswego, New York. His poems have appeared in 
several publications, including Kansas Quarterly, Long 
Pond Review, The Madison Review, and Ufahamu.

Robert Cooperman lives in Bowling Green, Ohio. His 
poetry has appeared in College English, The Southern 
Poetry Review and in many other journals. He is currently 
working on a sequence of poems about the lives and deaths 
of the Romantic Poets.

Andrew Cox — an exiled Southerner—lives with his wife 
Terry in one of the greatest baseball cities of the world, St. 
Louis, where the two of them hope, in spite of themselves, 
to live well and prosper.

Deborah Davies recently completed the Creating Writing 
Master's Program at MSU. She is teaching freshfolk at 
Jackson Community College in fall 87 , and is working on 
two novel manuscripts.

Michael J. Dunnebacke just graduated from MSU with a 
BA in English. This is his first publication.

Cheryllee Finney is a former editor of The Lansing Beat 
and The People's Voice. She earned a BA degree in . 
political science from MSU, where she now works as a 
secretary. She lives near Sparrow Hospital and 
Resurrection Church in Lansing.

55


Robert Haight lives in Kalamazoo and teaches writing at 
Western Michigan University. Some of his recent poems 
have appeared in The South Florida Poetry Review and 
New Delta Review. I have poems firthcoming in Celery 
and in the anthology Contemporary Michigan Poetry, 
which is being published by Wayne State University 
Press.

Cornelia C. Hornosty, a poet living in Dundas, Ontario, 
Canada, is originally from Chicago, has published widely 
in Canadian literary journals, as well as in some US 
journals, has a BA from Oberlin College and an MA from 
McMaster University in Ontario, both degrees in French 
Literature.

Kate Kaufman studied in the MFA program in creative 
writing at the University of Montana. She was recently 
awarded a 1988 Michigan Council of the Arts grant for 
fiction and is taking a leave of absence to work on a 
novella. Apricots is her first published story.

David Linton lives and writes in Sebring Florida. His 
work has appeared in Karamu, The Windless Orchard and 
Blue Light Review. His work has been accepted and in 
forthcoming in Poet and Critic..

Susan Rawlins is a free-lance writer. Her poems have 
appeared in such publications as Grand Street, Feminist 
Studies, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest and the Christian 
Science Monitor. She lives in Berkeley.

Mark Rozema writes: I am not sure where I am living or 
what I am doing. I am moving to Missoula, Montana in a 
few weeks, and I hope to enroll in the MFA program at the 
University of Montana. I was attending Calvin Theological 
Seminary in Grand Rapids up until last November.

Scott Russell lives with his wife and son in a two bedroom 
cedar shake house with a slate roof and bad eaves in Flint. 
He is the Director of the Writing Center at University of 
Michigan-Flint and a student in MSU's MA program in 
Creative Writing. He's been published in Burning World, 
Great River Review, Kansas Quarterly, Passages North, 
and Samisdat among others.

56


Jan Schmittauer is an Assistant Professor of English at St. 
Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She has been 
published in Gambit, Commecticut River Review, Hollins 
Critic, Sojourner, and George Washington Review. She 
received her MA in Creative Writing from Hollins College 
and her PhD from Ohio State.

Mark Shaheen is working toward his BA in English at 
MSU with a secondary degree in Theatre. Aside from 
work and studies, Mark is interested in music composition 
and studio movement. This is his first publication.

Peter Siedlecki is a Professor of English and Director of 
Visiting Poets series at Daemen College; Fullbright 
Lecturer in Poland, '82-84. He has been published in 
Nantucket Review, Stone Country,Terra Poetica, Green 
Feather, and elsewhere.

Donna Trussell works for "New Letters on the Air," a 
radio literature program, and edits a music magazine in 
Kansas City. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or will 
soon appear in The Massachusetts Review, Poetry 
Northwest, Confrontation, Puerto del Sol, West Branch, 
Colorado North Review, Oyez Review and two 
anthologies.

57


The Red Cedar Review would like to show warm 
appreciation for the support and sponsorship of the 
following persons:

Douglas W. Lawder 
Linda Wagner-Martin 
Joseph J. Waldmeir

James McClintock

Jay B. Ludwig

David Scott

Howard Anderson

Herbert Greenberg

If you would like to become a sponsor of the Red Cedar 
Review, send your contribution to Sponsorship, Red Cedar 
Review, 325 Morrill Hall, MSU Department of English, 
East Lansing, MI 48824. A sponsorship of $20 or more 
entitles the sponsor to a year subscription to the Review.

58


Red Cedar Review

Executive Editor Carol Bracewell

Editorial Staff Elizabeth Sherbourn Matt Deiner

Lisa Kloeck Louise Dawson 
Kirsten Kinzley

Photographs by Michelle Melis

Illustrations by Leonard Mahoney

RCR logo by Robert Foster

Typing by Bracewell, Kinzley, Kloeck and Sherbourn.

Layout and design by Bracewell.

The Editor would like to thank Al Drake, Victor Paananen, Sharon 
Tyree and Jay Ludwig of the MSU English Department; Cliff Bennett 
of Laser Page; Julie Loehr of the MSU Press; and special thanks to 
AEGS and our sponsors for their essential contributions.

The Red Cedar Review is a student-run magazine of the arts published 
at Michigan State University. Submissions of poetry, short fiction, 
drama, graphic art and photography may be mailed to the magazine 
at 325 Morrill Hall, MSU Department of English, East Lansing, MI 
48824. Please include SASE.

The price of the current issue is $3.50. Sample back issues are $2. 
Year subscriptions are $7.50. Due to the increased costs of printing 
and production, the price of future issues will be $5, year 
subscriptions, $10. Present subscriptions will be honored. Changes 
effective 1/1/88.

Other books by the Red Cedar Press for $2.50 each.

Postcard Mysteries......................fiction by Al Drake

Love at the Egyptian Theatre.....poetry by Barbara Drake 
This entire issue was typeset on a Macintosh computer with MacWrite 
by Macintosh and Pagemaker by Aldus Corporation.

59


Henry James

AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

A Study of The Ambassadors 
by Courtney Johnson, Jr.

"We have been waiting for a critical demonstration that can 
move our appreciation of The Ambassadors one step further. We have 
been waiting for the kind of breakthrough that happens regularly in 
scientific studies, the kind that happened in literary studies with Leon 
Edel's 'The Architecture of the New York Edition.' I believe Courtney 
Johnson's study is such a literary breakthrough."—Lyall H. Powers

Dr. Johnson excels in providing answers to questions raised by the 
critics. He introduces a new and refined thought in his examination 
of the controversies that encompass James's work and deftly analyzes 
that heightened level of consciousness where James believed 
"treasures" and "sources" yielded artistic expression.

ISBN 87013-245-8 200 pp.

Ernest Hemingway

SIX DECADES OF CRITICISM

Edited and Introduction by Linda W. Wagner

This collection of essays is a celebration of the intensity, mystery, 
comedy and tragedy of Hemingway's life and work. The essays 
explore such topics as his women characters, family relationships and 
history, social and literary life, poetry, and most importantly, his 
major works of fiction. Linda Wagner once again demonstrates her 
consistent vision for discriminating criticism . Every essay reflects 
on yet another facet of Hemingway's personality and writing, 
proving once again that the man can still fascinate after Six Decades 
of Criticism.

ISBN 87013-250-4 350 pp. with index.

Michigan State University Press 
East Lansing Michigan 48824-5202