ao:

 

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volume thirty. number one — |
 
a

 
The Red Cedar Review

 

volume thirty, number one, December 1993

Michigan State University
17c Morrill Hall, East Lansing, Michigan
 

 

 

 

 
Table of Contents

landscape and experience

When the Stillness is Quantum
FREDRICK CARDIN
Hope (The Joke)
JIM LEFTWICH
A Poem Circling in Search of Itself All Night
Nick BARRETT
Lunch
Douc RENNIE
I Am Writing
V.Q. WALLICK
a point of no return
JAMES COLLINS
The Cashier at 7/11
KENNETH May

shocking pink

When My Granddaugther Sleeps Over
ANGIE Marci
Kissing in Eighth Grade
Susan E. THOMAS
Fuse Box
S. RANSON
Nice
Lyn LIFTSHIN
The Poet’s Wife

MICHAEL RANNEY

15

16

18

19

20

21

2

25

26

27

28

29
iV table of contents

 

wicked, wicked ways

To Be Hollow
Mary WINTERS
Chicken
DAN MANEIKIS
Dutch Elms
Gary JULIANO
Wet Nightmare
HitrcH NELSON
The Foreskin of Jesus
HARRY NEWMAN
Claire and Lina
ToM BAER
Light From This Turning
LYN LIFSHIN
Nocturne
Mary D’ ANGELO

How the Heartworms Came to Petit Trou
KENNETH HUGGINS

biographies

33

35

36

37

38

45

46

57

58

59

63
 

Introduction

The Red Cedar Review has been published on the campus of Michigan
State University for over thirty years. It is one of the longest running
literary magazines and has been proud to publish such established
writers as, Margaret Atwood, Jim Cash, Stuart Dybeck Jim Harrison,
and Diane Wakoski.

For the thirtieth volume, number one, of The Red Cedar Review we
searched for a diversity of styles and subject matters in poetry, short
stories and plays. Knowing that high quality writing is made up of a
number of different tastes, Zachary and I chose this diversity. Having
very different tastes ourselves this diversity was easy to find. Out of the
hundreds of submissions we received from all over the United States and
a couple of foreign countries, we chose only twenty-one pieces. We then
divided them into three sections: landscape & experience, shocking
pink, and wicked, wicked ways. Though some pieces fit their sections
very loosely, we thought that the division into sections would be an
interesting twist for The Red Cedar Review. We hope this will appeal
toa variety of readers, and will enable you to view this issue on anumber
of levels. The following are brief descriptions of the sections included:

landscape & experience

This section includes works focusing on important elements of the
landscape and experience. Some of these landscapes are familiar, such
as fields, deserts, delis, and convenience stores, in which the writers find
value and pull meaning out of their every-day experience. These
experiences are things that we all might feel. Some may be shocking,
but most do not suggest that one must be tortured to be an artist. They
are not the things that only happen in those rare cases — those
exceptional few. This is the every-day turned into art, not exactly
traditional, but with a high quality and universality that will last. This
is the poetry and fiction that you will taste unless your taste buds are too
desensitized and can no longer taste mere apples but only strong liquors.
In the words of Charles Bukowski, “this is not just an apple / this is an
experience / red green yellow / with underlying pits of white / wet with
cold water / I bite into it...”

Laura L. Klynstra
co-editor
vi introduction

shocking pink

“Those pleasures so lightly called physical” — Colette: the most
powerful bond we, as humans, have is that of the erotic. We tend to think
of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. The late Audre Lorde
wrote, “I speak of the erotic as the deepest lifeforce, a force which moves
us towards living in a fundamental way. Only when that which is sensual
becomes devalued and objectified, does the erotic become porno-
graphic.” For countless years, what was thought of as “erotic” was
controlled by narrowly-defined, lustful male enthusiasm. It is a sign of
our times when both female and male writers, poets and artists have been
seeing sex in a nonviolent, positive light. For whether you call yourself
queer, straight, celibate or bi; whether you are a holy roller, leather-boy,
separatist, or g-girl, everyone has their own idea of love, of sensuality,
of healthy living. We must examine the erotic world in order to affirm
our learnings, expose our options, expand our limits, and confirm our
suspicions.

wicked, wicked ways

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want to peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.
—Gwendolyn Brooks

I would like to dedicate this section to a good friend, as well as the
photographer for this issue, Ruelaine Stokes. It has something to do with
the work that’s in here, the poems and fiction and all. They’re naked.
Not all our lives are tragedies nor is every poem an attempt to sing the
blues... but these soar! They’re the kind of writing that makes the meek
excuse themselves from the party, not because the hostess is showing off
her tattoos, but because the meek can never understand how they got
invited in the first place. It’s like Ruelaine’s photography, wild wild
wild! Mad mad mad... when you’re done with the book, go out and
dance. Get naked and dance and read out Emily Dickinson’s, “This is
the hour of lead—Remembered, if outlived, as Freezing persons recol-
lect the Snow — First — Chill — then stupor — then the letting — go

>

Zachary Chartkoff
co-editor
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

landscape & experience
 
landscape and experience 3

 

When the Stillness is

Quantum
by Fredrick Cardin

Dogs, even very large dogs, were afraid of him. He would laugh and
they’d lower their heads, move away. It was not his size so much — he
was big enough — or his plunging way of walking; it was more a force
that radiated from him: his laugh and perpetual grin were like denials of
belief in anything. My brother Bart Klondike believed in destiny, not
effort. And he didn’t care what anyone believed about him.

“The key to success in this world,” he told me, “is to be full of shit
and not know it, like Reagan.”

He believed you learned nothing from life except to laugh a lot and
trust little, for he had learned perhaps too much at an early age: when
Bart was eight years old his father vanished one day, never to be seen
again by the family he abandoned — only recently did we get some news
of him: he was dead.

Klondike, actually, is my half brother, the second of two sons my
mother had by her first husband, Jon Klondike, the owner of a tavern
which still stands beside a back road in the woods of northern Wiscon-
sin, looking no more or less run-down today than it did fifty years ago.

Though our mother refused to speak of her first husband — his name
was the ultimate obscenity that could be uttered in our house — we knew
that she’d had some communication with him at the time of the divorce.
For a couple of years there’d been the child support payments that he’d
made irregularly, from Chicago, until he disappeared a second time, this
time for good.

My mother’s name is Argenthieu now, and that is my name. She
remarried after the Second World War. My father, Pete Argenthieu, had
been a solider in that war, though he’d not done much, guarded a harbor
in Iceland, watching for Germans who never came. Bored, he had shot
rats with his M-1 and gone out cod fishing with the Icelanders. He rode
a horse up a mountain once, to look into a volcano, and had a few other
“war” stories he liked to tell, funny stories in which he was a harmlessly
inept anti-hero. My father was a patient man, a good enough husband
and father, though my mother, perhaps in an enduring shock of abandon-
ment, never learned to trust him. She would often accuse him, without
evidence of any kind, of being romantically involved with other women.
Sometimes she would even phone these astonished women to warn them
that she knew what was going on and that it had better stop.
4 The Red Cedar Review

Though I am an Argenthieu, Jon Klondike has been very much a part
of my life, ashadow on my mother’s soul, nearly as great and everlasting
a mystery to me as he’s been to my brother Bart. What I know of him
I have learned from my father — who had been a patron of Klondike’s
tavern before he vanished — and from Bart, who has shown me the
highway down which his father was last seen driving, away from a diner
on a curve at the top of a hill.

I saw a vestige of this diner years ago while I was in Upper Michigan
with Bart, who'd spent his early youth there — it was a high school
summer for me: Bart had come over One morning in his pickup truck and
invited me to go up north with him. My mother had granted permission
on condition that I return with a tribute of blackberries picked from her
father’s woods — her father’s woods they were to her still, though her
father had been dead twenty years.

We went first to the farmhouse in Upper Michigan that our grandfa-
ther had built with the help of his older sons, Klondike driving slowly
up the long dirt drive, through a field of grass rising to a crest: it was a
small white house to which a bathroom and a new kitchen had been —
added. All traces of the old log barn were gone. An oak and a white pine,
second growth, noble with age, stood at each side of the house. The trunk
of the oak bore the corkscrew scars of a lightening strike.

“Place looks a little different each time I come,” Bart said. “I guess
my memory’s not too good.”

Ted Bergstrom, one of our mother’s four brothers, lived here now
with his wife, Pauline. Because Ted, a shift superintendent at the paper
mill in Menimee Falls, never seemed too happy to see anyone, we didn’t
spend much time at the house, did littke more than announce our
presence and walk into the woods, to a small clearing where we filled a
coffee can with blackberries, eating plenty ourselves.

Afterward we took a ride on a road so narrow that the spreading
branches of maple and oak arched over us to form a canopy under which
birds swirled and parted at our approach. We moved in a tunnel of shade
dappled by sunlight that brought us eventually to U.S. 2.

Ata produce stand that some farmer had set up outside Iron Mountain
where the highway began curving down from the top of a hill, Bart
bought a few tomatoes, which we ate like apples, and I followed him
back from the produce stand to some tangled brush at the edge of a
woods. Nearly hidden in the brush was a water-stained concrete
platform that’d once been the foundation of a building. Bart looked at
it for a while and said, “This is where Jonny was last seen.”

The slab was all that remained of Len Purdy’s Highway Diner which
was burned down in 1948. Jon Klondike had stopped here to buy a carry-
landscape and experience >

Out pasty one summer afternoon in 1944. It was our mother’s former
Classmate and close friend, Mary Purdy, who had handed Klondike the
warm paper bag holding the pasty and then watched him drive down the
hill, away from Iron Mountain, never to be seen in these parts again.

“The asshole never did anything on an empty stomach,” Bart said,
and laughed his evil laugh, “not even run away.”

Klondike and I looked down the hill in the direction his father had
gone: the highway curved away into dark blue-green woods from which
the dirty walls of granite bluffs rose — I always had the feeling when I
was up here that I’d gone beyond the edge of something into a zone of
debris: glacial deposits, failed farms, abandoned iron mines, ghost
towns in woods, a region of hanging on that my own father had let go of
less than a month after marrying my mother. (He had accepted an offer
of a transfer from the Gemlin-Frick paper mill in Menimee Falls,
Wisconsin to the corporation’s main office beside the Wohld River in
central Wisconsin. Locks and dams controlled the Wohld’s steep
descent to Green Bay, and banks and islands of the river were dense with
the brick fortresses of nineteenth-century wilderness conquest: mills,
breweries, churches.) Bart, at age twelve, had moved to the Wohld
Valley with his mother, stepfather, and older brother, Charles, and it was
there that I was born, in the river city of Falkirk, the first of Pete
Argenthieu’s five children.

“Standing here,” Bart said while looking at the remains of Purdy’s
diner, “I can’t help but think of pasties ... and that makes me hungry.”
Klondike had no particular schedule for eating and often engorged
himself when he did. A former rock-solid all-conference middle
linebacker in high school, he now had a rock-solid potbelly, which he
claimed was better than a spare tire—rock-solid potbellies were narrow
and stuck straight out, unlike spare tires, which were soft, went all the
way around, and jiggled. Ruggedly handsome, with thick sandy hair that
he combed back, Bart had some old brawl scars which did not seem to
belong on a face that wore a perpetual, if skeptical, grin.

We drove into Iron Mountain for pasties, stopping at a place just off
the highway. Bart led the way in, lumbering ahead of me to the counter,
knowing but not caring that tomato seeds had dripped on his shirt. The
young woman behind the counter regarded him as it seemed to me that
most women did, with a combination of amusement and concern. We
ate the pasties at Trader Lake Park and then returned to the woods by our
grandfather’s farm, though this time we would enter from a different
side, through a field that had been cleared by Olaf Burleson, our
grandfather’s neighbor.

Bart and I climbed a steep ridge at the center of Burleson’s field.
6 The Red Cedar Review

 

From the top, we saw an old wood-frame house against the woods, its
green paint nearly faded away. Near it stood alog barn with a squat stone
silo. Klondike announced that we were going to pay a visit to Olaf’s
widow, Norma Burleson, who lived here alone now.

We went down to the house. Mrs. Burleson did not seem in the least
disturbed to have unexpected visitors wandering across her field to her
door; in fact, she recognized Bart immediately and looked happy to see
him.

I remember her talking about her long-departed children, telling us
that her son in Virginia wanted her to come and spend winters there with
his family, but she wouldn’t do it, because she knew if she ever left this
place she’d never see it again. I couldn’t understand why she’d be so
worried about not seeing a place like this again.

Mrs. Burleson, who I guessed was in her seventies, studied us with
alert blue eyes. Her daughter Karen, she said, a high-school teacher in
Minneapolis now, had walked home from Morgan Mine School with our
mother.

Bart was at ease with just about anyone: he asked questions that
people enjoyed answering and he never stayed long enough in one place
to get bored or become a nuisance — you kept moving when you were
with him, and though you doubted he had anything specific in mind,
Often he did.

“No, [ve heard nothing of your father, Bart,” the widow replied to
one of his questions. “In fact, ve not heard his name mentioned in
years.”

Mrs. Burleson was seated on a worn sofa in front of a stone fireplace.

“Walter looks like his father,” she said, fixing her eyes on me, “dark
French, coast of the Mediterranean, not at all German like his mother.”

Genetics, I understood even then, was a subject of far greater interest
to the old than the young, for it was always from someone that old I was
hearing about origins and family resemblances.

“Bart, now, is lighter, like his grandfather, though you boys do seem
alike ina way —I’m notsure how to put it— in your bearing, I suppose.”

“We’re both insane,” Bart said, laughing. “They called our grand-
father the Mad Prussian, didn’t they? I hear he went looking for Jonny
Klondike with a shotgun after he found out Ma was going to have to
marry him.”

“No... no! That’s not what I meant,” Mrs. Burleson protested. “And
your mother was only sixteen when she married Jonny, and he was
twenty-nine. Who could blame your grandfather for wanting to take a
shotgun to him?”
landscape and experience 7

Norma Burleson had been a widow since 1926, when her husband
blew himself up with dynamite. Olaf Burleson had bought eighty acres
of woods in 1924 and, as my grandfather had done with a portion of his
own land, he’d began clearing it of trees and glacial boulders — these
were stubborn men, my grandfather and Burleson: with axes and saws
they’d cleared rocky, arctic patches of forest to farm soil not meant to
be farmed. My grandfather had worked at the lumberyard in Iron
Mountain and grown tired of living according to schedules written by
others. Schedules on a farm were established by nature, he had said, and
he’d rather be a part of nature than the slave of another man.

Some of the boulders covering this land were so large that they had
to be dynamited — the fragments were dragged away on horse-drawn
sleds, to be piled into rows or fences at the perimeters of forest. Olaf
Burleson had been blown up while placing a charge under a boulder that
stood as high as his waist and was half submerged in the ground. He had
dug a hole alongside the stone and decided that a dozén sticks of
dynamite would do the trick. The horse had bolted at the blast and Mrs.
Burleson, seeing the terrified animal pulling its empty wood skid at a
gallop toward the house, had known her husband was dead.

Klondike showed me the boulder of granite that’d gotten the better
of Olaf. It was split through the center, shattered on one side. Olaf’s
_ widow, believing this tragedy an omen, had allowed no more work to be
done in the field. Burleson’s farm became an unfinished monument to
one man’s dream of humble dignity. My mother remembers playing in
this field with Karen Burleson: Karen had been afraid to go near the
stone where her father had died.

Klondike, grinning as usual, looked at the big broken stone and said,
“Some men die quietly in their sleep while others... well... we can’t all
be geniuses who never make mistakes. Olaf, now, was no genius, but
he was smart enough to die painlessly, and it takes some class, not letting
death drag itself out — buncha relatives sitting around your bed wishing
you'd get it over with and croak... your own kids watching you waste
away... never knew where you stood with them... still don’t.”

* * *

Like Klondike’s father, my grandfather is legend, not memory, to
me: I never met him — he walked into these woods one summer
morning, as far as a creek ina gully, and it was there that they found him
the next morning. Klondike said he looked like he was sleeping. That
8 The Red Cedar Review

 

was the summer that the second World War ended and a year after
Klondike’ s father disappeared. These vanished men, giants of a small,
personal myth — grandfather Francis Bergstrom, born on a farm
somewhere in Germany; tavern keeper Jon Klondike, born in Vulcan,
Michigan — are as deep a part of me as my memory of the first house
in which I lived.

I followed Klondike, as he followed whatever it was that brought him
back here each summer, up an old logging road that moved from
Burleson’ s field into our grandfather’ s woods. We left the soft dirt track
of the road and moved through a shallow sea of bracken fern to a rocky
slope of birch and pine. I heard a creek below and knew where we were
going. Klondike showed me the oak, near the stream, under which our
grandfather had sat down and died.

It was my grandmother Lucy I thought of, though — I remember her
well: farm wife in flowered apron and faded cotton dress, heavy-boned
but not fat, a white-haired image of wholesomeness that was, like most
images, an illusion. She’d been superstitious, ignorant to the point
nearly of illness, compulsively warning me of all the evil in the world
and of all that I must never do or say or think — she had lived her life
in fear of retribution and I felt myself suffocating in her presence.
Human desire, the human capacity for pleasure and joy, was to her some
kind of horror, the devil at work in her senses. I couldn’ t imagine anyone
living as she lived, in a state of continuous denial, and when she died I
felt nothing, though I suppose she’d grown quite comfortable with the
simplicities and certainties of her ignorance.

I remember going to her funeral on a brutally cold day in February
of 1956 — her oldest son, Richard, had cried, and I’d never seen a grown
man cry before. I was the only child there among all those grownups in
their heavy overcoats. Klondike, who was in the Marines then, had been
in Okinawa, too far away to attend the funeral, but his older brother,
Charles, a law student at the University of Wisconsin, had come home
from school to drive us up to Quinnesec — my father couldn’t go
because it was his bowling night, but he let us use his car.

Before returning to Falkirk, Klondike and I stopped at the White
Horse Tavern in downtown Iron Mountain. Klondike ordered a glass of
beer for himself and an orange soda for me. I remembered a story my
father had told, about seeing my grandfather Bergstrom, wearing
overalls and shit-kicker boots, come out of the White Horse on Saturday
night roaring drunk—he had raised an arm and shouted a greeting to
someone across the street. My father had told this story in my mother’s
presence knowing it would make her angry and then he’d laughed at her
anger — in a well-fed society like ours instigation is often the only form
landscape and experience 9

of stimulation.

The owner of the White Horse, Nick Guyette, was someone Jon
Klondike had considered a friend. He looked like aman who knew what
he was going to hear before he heard it.

“What makes you think Jonny’s still alive after all these years, Bart?”

“You and I are still alive, Nick. Why wouldn’t Jonny be?”

“You and I are still here, Bart. The same can’t be said of Jonny.”

“Would you tell me where he was if you knew?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t I?’

Klondike laughed. His mistrust of others was a matter of attitude. He
never came right out and accused anyone of anything — he simply
ignored advice and kept plans of his own a secret until he was ready to
act.

We made one more stop on the way home, across the river in
Wisconsin. I waited outside while Bart went into another saloon, again
to chat with someone who’d known his father.

I got out of the truck and stood near the highway above Menimee
Falls. There wasn’t much here: a few taverns, some supper clubs, a
couple of gas stations, and a dilapidated bowling alley. I remembered
that my father had tended bar in some of these saloons before the war,
had worked in and gotten drunk in most of them according to my mother:
for better or worse, they were my heritage. But as I waited I wondered
what Klondike had meant when he told Norma Burleson that he and I
were both insane.

That he was insane was indisputable — his face might have been
studied like amap or chart of some kind, a lurid chronicle of his madness.
Before, during, and just after his years in the Marine Corps Klondike had
accumulated scars like a celestial body, unprotected by atmosphere,
collects meteor craters. There was, for instance, the split in his left
eyebrow: brass knuckles, Log Cabin Bar, summer 1958. And the dent
on his nose: crescent wrench, parking lot of the Paradise Club, Long
Beach, California, summer 1955. Klondike certainly had reason to call
himself mad — but me? What had I ever done? I was an honor student,
no angel perhaps, but never in serious trouble in my life.

Later, years later, I would be asking myself not why he had told the
widow we were both insane but rather how he had been uncanny enough
to know even then that I was indeed fundamentally like him — nota
brawler, but fierce: one who never followed, never joined, and never
forgot; one whose anger would carry him out into some cold region that
allowed undeluded observation — and that much I suppose I am:
undeluded, though it seems a dubious achievement, considering how
much satisfaction self-deception and ignorance have brought to somany
10 The Red Cedar Review

 

I have known, including my plodding grandmother, who believed that
the glories of God and Heaven would be hers eternally as a reward for
all she’d denied herself in life.

On the way back to Falkirk, in answer to a question I’d asked,
Klondike explained, “Insanity, Wally, in most cases is nothing but pride.
Most of us grovel to get what we want: we beg a woman for a little love;
we beg our rulers to treat us like men. Those of us who are incapable of
begging are considered insane.”

* * *

Bart had a way of blinking in and out of my life, and his arrivals,
though unannounced, were never complete surprises, because it was
only unannounced that he did arrive. While I still lived at home he’d
sometimes appear at dawn, the house swelling with his force and weight
as he crossed the living room to the kitchen table, to sit and have a cup
of coffee, a chat with our mother, in the morning light streaming through
lilac bushes outside the window by the table. Sometimes they’d sit
talking about characters I’d never met from their earlier life up north.
Bart would arrive laughing, irreverent observations flowing from him,
even if he’ d just had a fight with Carly, his wife. Once he showed up with
a bandage on his chin, explaining that he’d rolled his car off a road
somewhere during the night, left it lying there, out in a field, for the
police to dispose of as they saw fit — meanwhile, he’d be coming up
with a story for them, a good one, and peeing the beer out of his blood
while he was at it.

Bart owned a bar and grill near the river called Bart’s Midway,
named so because it was located about midway between the many
taverns of downtown Gemlin, a small mill town adjacent to Falkirk. The
Midway opened at eleven each morning and did a booming business at
lunch hour, steak sandwiches and burgers for factory and railroad
workers. At night, especially Friday and Saturday nights, the same blue-
collar clientele would fill the Midway to drink and play pool.

It was during the spring of my sophomore year at the university —
at a time when the madness which Klondike had foretold was beginning
to assert itself and push me toward a major in philosophy, a Career as an
unappreciated thinker — that Bart made one of his appearances out of
nowhere, after midnight, at my apartment in Madison: he was returning
from a solitary drive to Texas.

First there’d been a shaking of the entire building as he climbed the
two flights of stairs to my apartment. The door was opened to him by
Dominic Camerini, who lived there too — I saw Dominic step back in
landscape and experience 11

 

disbelief and alarm. Bloodshot eyes gazed in at him from the dark of the
stairwell. Klondike had been thirty hours on the road.

“Wally?” he said. “This where Wally lives?”

“You want— whom?” Dominic asked, with exaggerated formality
and skepticism.

“Bart,” I said, coming out of my room, “what a nice surprise.” And
to Dominic, “This is my brother, Klondike.”

“Well, in that case,” Dominic said in mock relief, for like anyone
who knew me at all well he’d heard enough Klondike stories to know
he’d opened the door to something unique and perhaps dangerous.

Sam Joslin, a longtime friend of mine from Falkirk who also lived in
the apartment, and who’d encountered Klondike on previous occasions
back home, came out of his room to have a look, as Klondike, seated on
the sofa, and talking much too loudly for the middle of the night, began
telling the story of his trip to Texas.

Mike Andrews, Bart’s boyhood friend from Iron Mountain, had
stopped for a beer at the Midway last week. Mike, who was in Falkirk
for a bowling tournament, had seen Arnold Fuches a few weeks before,
in Iron Mountain, when Arnold returned home for an uncle’s funeral.
Arnold, another of Bart’s old school friends, was a geologist living in
Houston now — he worked for Texaco, in geophysics and exploration.
Arnie had gone away to school and earned some degrees, including a
Ph.D., which made Bart very uncomfortable.

“Amnie’s okay,” Mike told Bart. “He fell off a bar stool at the White
Horse after the ten-year class reunion and knocked himself out.”

“Can’t be all bad,” Bart agreed.

According to Mike Andrews, Arnie had been intrigued by aman he’d
seen on a stage in Houston, a gangster version of Ed Sullivan, wearing
a pink shirt and yellow tie. The man had looked a little like Bart, thirty
years older though, and his voice was like something Arnie had heard
before: accent way up north, Iron Mountain maybe, Houston no way.

So Arnie asked a bartender about this guy up on the stage. He was
holding a microphone, playing it real straight, like he was Ed Sullivan,
except that what he was doing was interviewing some completely naked
girl who'd just finished dancing. The bartender told Arnie the man was
Curt Clark, owner of the place. He wasn’t sure where Curt Clark was
from, but he knew he’d lived in Chicago for a while.

Bart had left for Houston after closing up the Midway that night. He
stopped at home to pack a few things, told Carly what was up, and
listened politely as she threw a fit.

“IT don’t getit, Bart. This creep turns his back on you and all his other
responsibilities, obviously doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead, and you
12 The Red Cedar Review

keep acting like you’re missing out on something by not having him
around.”

“So what did you find out?” I asked.

Bart shrugged and laughed. “Place was called Ducky’s. I looked
Arnie up and we went there together. Arnie’s wife, Donna, didn’t like
the look of me, so kept my mouth shut while Arnie explained to her that
me an’ him wanted to go somewhere for a drink. Donna said okay, but
she needed the car for shopping. So we took my truck. Drove straight
to Ducky’s.

“Place had red carpet, wall to wall, so thick I could hardly walk.
‘High-class establishment,’ I said. ‘Won’t knock yourself out fallin’
Offa stool here.’ ‘Do something like that just once and you never hear
the end of it,’ Arnie said, and then he pointed out Ed Sullivan to me. Ed
was kinda big, you could tell at a glance he was someone didn’t put up
with shit from anyone — he was at a table by the stage, didn’t look like
anyone I knew, which didn’t mean much, cuz I don’t remember much
about Jonny, but I hadn’t come all that way to stand there scratching my
head, so I went up to ’im, told ’im who I was, and asked ’im if he was
my father, Jonny Klondike, who disappeared from Iron Mountain in
1944. He just looked at me for a while. ‘I’m from the moon,’ he said,
‘and I been to all the planets — they call me Man-in-the-Moon.’ Then
he raised up his hand, pointed at me, and some guy about seven feet tall
materializes from the dark and escorts me an’ Arnie to the door. So there
we were, back out in the parking lot, thrown the hell out after one
question, and Arnie says, ‘He’s a lot like you.’ I wasn’t finished
laughing yet when Arnie’s wife comes up outa nowhere and asks Arnie
what the hell he’s doing ata hole like this. Arnie stays cool, though, says,
‘I could ask you the same thing.’ ‘Don’t’ she says, and they start into this
who’ s-the-one-most-wrong routine — me for comin’ here, or you for
following me and not trusting me. So I said good-bye to ‘em both and
to Houston too... Wally, I’m awfully tired now, and if you don’t mind
I think Il] just pass our here on your sofa.”

* * *

My years as a student at the university were years of greater power
and dynamics than I was old enough to understand or survive. I’ ve never
been lucky, but one break I did get was a high number in the first
selective service lottery, though by then I was too far gone to care.

When I graduated in June of 1970 it was just another moment in the
drifting I’d been doing for several years already. During that summer
of ’70 Sam Joslin—a4-F because of his asthma— bought a Volkswagen
landscape and experience 13

van and drove off with his girlfriend, Frankie, to some commune in
Tennessee; and Dominic, by then, was already gone, for after the
cancellation of the rest of the semester’s classes during the riots in May
he’d returned to his parents’ house in New Jersey to begin a long fight
with his draft board — he had drawn the number 12 in the lottery and
then passed his preinduction physical in March.

I ended the summer alone in that shabby apartment on Brooks Street,
waiting without interest or enthusiasm to begin graduate school in
philosophy, for I’d won a fellowship — probably because no one else
had applied, from similar lack of interest. In September I’d be moving
to a smaller apartment above a bookstore on State Street.

Late in August, near the end of that nothing summer of waiting for
nothing, at three, one morning, the window next to my bed fell in on the
floor. What woke me was the house dropping down and coming back
up, aS ON a wave, accompanied by the knowledge, immediate and
stunning, of a tremendous explosion, its force too great to perceive as
sound.

I sat up in bed for a moment wondering if I should go out. There was
enough light in the room that I could see the window had fallen in. The
explosion had been on the campus, very near — a bomb, I assumed. I
got up, pulled on a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, put on sneakers without
socks, went down the two flights of stairs to the porch and started
walking toward Bascom Hill — the air smelled singed and I drifted
_ through it like a sleepwalker in a dream.

I moved across the empty lanes of University Avenue, toward
scattered pockets of flame I saw on the hill, feeling myself drawn by a
force other than my own will, for I’d become soenraged by the war, what
it was doing to everyone, what it’d done to me, that I’d gone over a
spiritual edge into a state of survival apathy. I moved through a garden
that formed a courtyard between buildings on the side of Bascom Hill
and found myself looking up into Sterling Hall, the physics building: a
hole four stories high had been blown in its south wall of concrete and
yellow brick. Somewhere in that ripped-open dark a man lay dead,
others injured. The target of the bomb had been the Army Math
Research Center on the upper floors of the building.

I heard sirens approaching and was aware of feeling almost nothing,
certainly not disbelief or shock, for what had happened here was nothing
different than what the U.S. government had been doing to the people
of Vietnam for the better part of a decade now — lightless hole, I might
have been looking into my own future. It was the history of the world:
fury begetting fury, fear begetting fear, outrage begetting outrage,
bystanders suffering, dying, alone, by the score, the thousands, the
millions. I believed in nothing but the solidity of my indifference.
14 The Red Cedar Review

 

Years later, while living in California, where I made my living
driving a bus, I returned to Falkirk on a vacation — I’d not been there
in three years. Klondike, divorced from Carly a number of years now,
and having recently broken up with his girlfriend, Marilyn, was living
alone in a two-and-a-half-story hundred-year-old house near down-
town. He was in the business of buying old houses like this, fixing them
up, and selling them. The living room was uncarpeted, empty except for
a worn sofa and a portable television sitting on a small table. He slept
on a mattress on the floor of a bedroom.

“Someone like you, Wally,” he said during a pause in our talk,
“straight-A student, pre-med at one time, coulda been anything you
wanted to be —I can’t figure it out: what the hell are you doing out there
in L.A. driving a bus?” .

“Looking something in the face and telling it to get fucked.”

Klondike’ s face went blank, indicating the occurrence of thought. If
he was startled by the vehemence of my reply, it didn’t show.

“You an’ me, Wally, we aren’t planners — but this doesn’t keep us
from being part of someone else’s plan. This is a world of planners, little
men at big desks, and big-shouldered men with mandates. It’s easier to
take after you quit giving a fuck.”

He got up then, went into his bedroom. “Got sumthin I wanna show
you,’ he said, “letter came about a month ago: some answers don’t come
until it doesn’t matter anymore.”

The letter was from a lawyer in Phoenix notifying Bart of the death
of his father, Jonathan Klondike. According to the letter, Bart had
inherited a portion of the Klondike estate — specifically, these items: a
collection of beer bottles, some of which were rare, and a Chevrolet
pickup truck that needed a new transmission.

“I got a brother down there, and a stepmom — name’s Vicki, she’s
younger than me.”

Klondike, for once, wasn’t laughing. When he looked at me I felt
myself being watched by the men I’d never met — Jonny Klondike and
my grandfather Bergstrom, each of whom had gone a very long way to
get away from something. I’d found them as they’d found me, looking
out at something, or into it — Klondike’s eyes were a raging quiet of
knowing all that would happen and that it wouldn’t be much. It was
enough to get anyone running. You’d never stop knowing, but running
was better than doing nothing.
landscape and experience 15

 

Hope (The Joke)

by Jim Leftwich

When I wind up in the desert
I want the turquoise

left front door

of a Chevrolet

beside me

It’s going to be hot out there
Rolling down the window
might help
16 The Red Cedar Review

 

A Poem Circling in Search
of Itself All Night

by Nick Barrett

At the end of this typical and grungy Buffalo bar, with his elbows
pressed against the crackling red rail, my dead grandfather raises his
beer for a toast and blows a puff of blue cigar smoke the size of a small
donut though a hole in his throat. A candle flickers under a portrait of
Sinatra draped with a black stone rosary, the Labatt’s Blue sign hums as
my uncle and his friend order our first round. The workmen who fill the
place after the day shift know by my clothes and the way I talk that I am
not from here, maybe a cousin or nephew of someone who made it out,
that said good-bye to the Whistle Pig — the best one pound frank
wrapped with bacon and broiled you will ever eat — to the drunk Indians
on the reservation and their tax-less gas and smokes...

My grandfather plays the role — he stares blankly, at the wall as if he
has just lost everything in a wreck or fire, the sudden shock that
expresses itself for months or even years in a look as vast and vacuous
as the sky. He knows we don’t want him here — my uncle’s friend,
Stacey, gets loud to distract us — Nick, do you think I have a woman’s
name? If you closed your eyes and someone said Stacey ina deep raspy
voice, would you see me? I close my eyes and listen, smell his warm,
beer-laden breath — Well you know what? This name gets me laid all
the time, especially with the Canucks; they come over to buy gas andt.p.
and then hit the bars — something exotic in the name Stacey. Last week
these two old broads — and another voice chimes in, You’re always with
the grandmas — and I notice my uncle moving quietly over to talk with
my grandfather.

It’s hard for the bar to watch — every man thinking he has or he’ Il have
to do something soon — in a bar like this one, or at home. My
grandfather told me once that I should never expect to hear him say / love
you to my mother or grandmother or anybody else because he cared
more than that, learning later from my uncle that he despised the
hollowness of the word love, that even this word was more ruined than
the sugar coated sound of amor in his native tongue. He could not
understand how anybody would do that to themselves, choosing to say
landscape and experience 17

 

instead that he had passion, pasi6n. Someone had told him that it came
from the Latin word for destruction and harm and that, to him, made
sense, and more accurately described what he felt about life before and
after he had his larynx cut out, and part of his pancreas — a long line of
parts to g0. Now, my grandfather and uncle prepare a board of chess like
they have for almost thirty years every night in the Gonzalez home —
a game after work, and a beer, a reason for both men to return.

I remember my uncle calling Kansas City to tell me that if I wanted to
see my grandfather I better come now, and my first thought — I wonder
if he will know whol! am, and then, I wonder if it matters if he knows who
I am — Nick, you’ve gotta understand, he went crazy, we couldn’t deal
with himanymore. Iknow Ma drove him nuts, but he jabbed his eyes out
with his I.V. so he didn’t have to see anymore, and he tried to drown Ma
in the tub and I told my uncle to fuck himself and the doctors with
quiescent faces said diabetic fit and he raised his hands above his head
the afternoon before I arrived and said that he was finally dying and
dammit Nick he thinks he talks to God. He told me yesterday that he felt
like he was inside some glowing light and he started to walk toward it,
and that when they cut out his larynx he said he felt the same thing, but
was too embarrassed to tell anyone, but not now, shit and he died,
nothing spectacular, my grandmother rests her head on his bloated body
and I get paged in the Buffalo airport to meet my uncle here.

By this time the workmen have begun to cheer reverently for the living
— one talks about his boy just born and the trouble with bills, but it’s a
boy, and another just slopes into his seat and chews hot wings methodi-
cally for the living, and I hear Marie behind the bar yacking to her father
who owns the place... When they have finished, almost day break, my
uncle stands, rolls two marble kings in his hand and says flatly, good-
bye, tomy grandfather and wants to mean it. And when we get to his car
to drive, the late walls of fire from the U.S.. Steel and defunct
Carborundum rise again, and I listen to him tell me what a game it was,
and his father’s story, and we believe together that to die is a terrible
thing.
18 The Red Cedar Review

 

Lunch

by Doug Rennie

Two girls sit eating lunch in a deli. Outside is rain but the restaurant
is warm. They sit at a glass-topped table and talk as they eat. One is fair-
skinned, blue-eyed, her blonde hair tied in a pony tail. She is dressed in
black stirrup pants, red-and-green argyle sweater Over a white turtle
neck, calfskin tassel loafers. Her clothes say rich. Her nameis Courtney,
or maybe Missy, and she lives in a fourteen-room house with 150 feet
of lake frontage. She takes tiny, precise bites from a thick turkey
sandwich. Between swallows she talks animatedly to her friend, a larger
dark-haired girl in jeans and a handknit sweater of medium blue and rose
and pale yellow in a Southwestern pattern. A $300 Dooney & Bourke
purse hangs from the back of her chair. Their talk is of school activities
and friends. So, like the juniors throw a party for the seniors and they
take a few kegs up the hill and, like, party all afternoon, says the blonde.
The dark one nods and sips a spoonful of her Thai curry soup. How fun,
She says. Yeah, the blonde says. The dark one nods again.
Hmmmmmmumnr, she says. Pony tail’s eyes open a little wider. She leans
forward. Deb is, like, having a party at her place this Friday night. Judy
and Teri, and, like, everyone is going to be there. Her parents are going
to be gone. The dark one looks up from her spoon and smiles. How
funnnn, she says. They talk another twenty minutes. Boys, classes,
parties. How boring school is, how hard it is to find cute guys who are
nice. Dances. How funnnn. Graduation, college, marriage, kids.
Hmmmmmm. Dark hair says I gotta pee. She gets up and walks away.
Pony tail stares out the window. At the heavy rain and leaden sky. Her
face darkens. What is it she sees? May’s prom that she will not attend?
Losing her virginity a month later to a boy she will never see again? Her
sorority house at Pepperdine? Or is it the man she will marry whose face
she stares at? Humming to himself as he fires bullets into the heads of
their two young daughters, then moves the black revolver’s muzzle to
his own temple twelve years from now?
landscape and experience

19

 

[Am Writing

by V.Q. Wallick

I am writing

to let you know

that you are not as beautiful
as you used to be.

Grow your hair

and put your levis back on.
20 The Red Cedar Review

 

a point of no return

by James Collins

bitterness crowds my body
as I climb upon a bus

I knew it wasn’t temporary
my chains told me so

yesterday I could order coffee
now I am served without a menu

years have gotten on
where I don’t know

seems like only yesterday
I was tipping a waitress
landscape and experience 21

The Cashier at 7/11

by Kenneth May

I’m in her gold frames.

We nod. It’s the third time
here after midnight

this week. A paper in Spanish,
grammar to guide the way,

I feel small as a third grader.

Coffee from the bottom pot
sealed in a foam cup,

Bic Lighters & lottery tickets
remind me of good luck
stuck on a long voyage —
when I just want to get going.

I stand behind a trucker

chewing Skoal. Her smile

of false teeth: my grandmother
kept hers in a dish near the bathtub.
_ Orange & green shirt

ironed for wrinkles, she asks

if I want anything else,

I shake my head & she works

the register as I search pockets

for 68 cents & something to say.
 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

k

in

ing P

shock
 
shocking pink a

 

When My Granddaughter
Sleeps Over

by Angie Macri

When my granddaughter sleeps over,

She likes looking at my costume jewelry
And my necklace with the crystal ball.

She also likes watching me play Solitaire
And putting my aces above the seven piles
With a soft slapping sound.

This afternoon I get up at two

And feed her hotdogs and chicken noodle soup.
I eat Saltines from the wax paper package,

Pour two glasses of orange juice,

And add vodka to mine.

The soup reflects yellow on her face

As she watches.

I go to the bathroom,

Brush my teeth twice, and wet

My neck and wrists with Emeraude.

She sits by me at the kitchen table
Twirling the crystal ball necklace
As I play Solitaire and listen

To the local hospital report.

Her lips form an “O”

As she inhales my cigarette smoke
And asks if I ever win.
26 The Red Cedar Review

 

Kissing in Eighth Grade

by Susan E. Thomas

I’ve stopped looking like those moments.
I hear that you’ re married.

Remember that we clamored

over the bridge,

Sstammered up

in our bodies—it was how

we started.

(We'd said, “It’s just practice

until the boys.’’)

Lara, we knew how to do it.
shocking pink 27

 

Fuse Box
by S. Ranson

When I saw you last night
I wasn’t sure
at first
If it was you
Your peacock, poker straight hair hung like rods about your =
like fibre optic phone wire
Or thin fibre filament of a 70’s glow lamp

Your face had changed

Somehow sterner — more serious

But when you reclined back into your seat

Your hips thrust forward with the easy slippage of a rockstar

On the train that afternoon
I fantasized about you
That I pinned you up
Against the wall

and fell into you
_ Like a ghost
The particles of me
Mingling with the spit
In your mouth
28 The Red Cedar Review

 

Nice
by Lyn Lifshin

floating thru chairs

then opening

your hand

snakes in thru corduroy

my slip rides up the sun

makes the rug into a wool beach
sand ass apples a wave of

thighs opening

and mouths suddenly too a

crack touch the pink smell

the sleek breathing flesh moans

a taste is nipples

bumping and your sail of blood
shove of bone tongue

traveling into this moist

lips opening the first bang of

hair and clothes rise from bodies
tremble the warm buttons rubbing
scratch of your mouth there

the damp nylon crotch

petals dissolving in a water my silk
hips you open and your fingers
under plunge so are pressing lips there
and your flesh
root shining

rocks your heat to my belly and my
legs spread so wide

greedy for the whole boat of you
in me you lovejuice dipping these
Sloppy hills of cunt and you

put your good

hardness up me opening

skin rooms pounding

and circles slide your raw stem
my nails pull you

tighter

in and the slap of licked flesh oil
Shocking pink 29

 

waves lunging and teeth

that eat everywhere ramming

the slit wet

Opening and spread so

wide and splitting bite the sweet hot ache swell
your bomb breaking

too sucks the whole room up

fur zippersbeercans :
and the seat hair of groaning and sperm
till your cock bud throbs more

to ball me over and

again better than summer

deep and nice

bringing everything

home
30 The Red Cedar Review

The Poet's Wife

by Michael Ranney

The poet favors shabby clothes,

a vest strained with wrinkles,

corduroy pants and

long-sleeved checkered shirt

to complement his ragged graying beard.
Beside him she knows she looks elegant,
velvetly styled,

never wondering what image they make
sheltered beside each other.

When he reads she watches

from the second row,

seated sideways to scan his audience,
to assist their responses,

the snickers, groans and sighs,

knowing the lines that cause the sounds
she’s heard them so often before.

He’s writing all the time,

even during their nights in bed,

eyes spinning behind closed lids,
poems gathering like holiday families
inside his still silent head.

She loves him for his words,

for all the songs he sings,

for the way his lines wrap her around
like the arms and legs of making love,
for the way he touches her

his fingers never leaving the page.
Later wall leaning she watches him
work the celebratory crowd,

index finger extended

from wine cupping right hand,

holding forth on meter and tropes

for the knot of women who listen.
Finally tired she nods once

and his observing eyes

rise against his brows.

Outside the ivied college building
shocking pink

31

 

she soundlessly finds his hand

to feel the man again

behind the clothes,

beneath the words.

Hands entwined and legs in rhythm
they drift away laughing together

into the well known texture of their life.
 
 

 

 

 

wicked, wicked ways

 
 
wicked, wicked ways a

 

To Be Hollow

by Mary Winters

Store window mannequins —
they have been made to
Overcome our limitations:

our bent for blemishes,

our lack of proportion,
symmetry; our frailty in
bruising, aging; our wont to
snarl, to bawl; our
restlessness and smells.

But they are punished for it:
stripped naked in public,

we see what they lack —

no body hair but woven mats
for eyelashes; no nipples;
undetailed mounds where
sex should be; swivels for a
joint; toes that will not part.

Their bouts of unblinking
loveliness between the torment:
wigs snatched away and

heads removed, stacked in a
corner; limbs twisted off or
bent to breaking angles.

They are sleepless, unable to
die — only to be superseded for
fashion’s sake. Where do the
old mannequins go? In what
room are they pressed together
eye to eye and left —
36 The Red Cedar Review

 

Chicken

by Dan Maneikis

with the courage

of two six-packs

he balanced on the rail
and braced himself
against the 140 tons
of steel

that soon would
take him away,
leaving many
shaking

their heads

and me on my
tenth beer
wicked, wicked ways 37

 

Dutch Elms

by Gary Juliano

Circling what was once our house
I’m consumed in green dashlight,
so goddamned jealous my heart’s
a fist knuckling through my chest.

Streetlights bend in silent interrogation

as his silhouette crosses from the shaded

kitchen window to hall. Upstairs, my daughter’ s
bedroom’s lit. My son’s is not.

Next door the neighbor’s had an elm
removed, the trunk cut low to the ground.
Diseased, I guess, as were the rest

on this block; an unstoppable blight

which worked its way down

until the leaves were strangled,

and branches fell away, and what was left
Standing was just standing in the way.
38 The Red Cedar Review

 

Wet Nightmare

by Hitch Nelson

The room was empty. How can so much dust collect in one corner,
Vic thought. Vic stumbled and fell to the center of the room where there.
wasn’t so much dirt. There he sat lotus-style and closed his eyes.

He imagined he was swimming in Amaretto. It was sweet and
sticky, and he was able to keep his head above the surface by treading.
Even though he wasn’t swallowing much, Vic began to feel drunk.
Alcohol was being absorbed through his skin. Vic tired and began to
struggle. He gulped the Amaretto. The sweet, powerful aroma saturated
his senses. Vic was laughing and panicky. Then his drunk, tired body
sank below the sticky surface.

* * *

In a spooky occurrence across the city, a young Swedish girl was
dreaming the same exact thoughts as were being experienced by Vic. Or
was Vic experiencing the thoughts of her dream? Or both? At once.

Hadley awoke and laughed at her silly dream of poor Vic. She was
still laughing when she reached for her toothbrush, but as she squeezed
the paste onto the bristles, she couldn’t remember what it was that had
made her laugh. Anyway, she was late — to work. She had to make
breakfast for Mr. Larssen — her sixty-eight year old employer.

Hadley had come to America through the “Swedish pipeline” — a
flux of Swedish girls flown into the country to work as live-in house
maids. She received a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week and got
meals and room and use of a car.

This moming, she would serve breakfast and put lunch in the
refrigerator so that, after straightening up the house, she could call ona
friend or go shopping or to the beach until evening.

* * *

Half a world away (or half an hour, depending on traffic), Mrs.
Patty Penntree sat in her Glendale living room signing a twenty-dollar
Check for the “Anonymous Witness Hotline’ s” fund-raiser. She noticed
the pen in her hand. It was a gift from her husband for their tenth wedding
anniversary, along with a complete assortment of pens and pencils; each
inscribed with “God Loves You and So Do I’.
wicked, wicked ways 39

 

Patty thought of Peter, her husband, and recalled how, as a young
lady, she had been infatuated with Bobby Sherman. She wondered now
if she had ever stopped being in love with him. Patty used to lay on her
bed and listen to his albums, staring at his face on the cover.

How cute she had thought Bobby Sherman was, and how cute all the
boys at B. I. O. L. A. thought she was. One of them even married her;
the Reverend Peter S. Penntree.

While courting, he called on her three nights a week between six and
eight p.m. with flowers and occasionally a book for them to read
together.

“We must be strong my loved one,” Peter had said, “for we cannot
trust ourselves to be together — especially on weekends. God is testing
us.”

Patty smiled and agreed in reply, but inside she was frustrated and
felt stifled. She didn’t want to marry a minister, but her parents had sent
her to B.1.O.L. A. and they wouldn’ tallow her to goanywhere else. She
felt like a prisoner. She never met any other boys and the school rules
were very strict. But at night, when all the lights were out and her
roommates asleep, Patty fantasized about running away with Bobby
Sherman. She fantasized until she was too tired for specific thoughts and
just felt happy all over.

Vic was walking down the spacious sidewalk of nowhere. That is,
Hadley was dreaming again. Or both, really. Vic met a man who didn’t
like cowboys.

“T don’t like cowboys,” the man said.

“Oh?” replied Vic. ;

“IT don’t like cowboy songs; I don’t like cowboy stories; I don’t like
cowboy hats; I don’t like cowboy bars; I don’t like cowboy jokes; and
I DON’T LIKE COWBOYS!”

It appeared that the man might become violent, so Vic ran away to
visit his girlfriend, Susan.

They performed the usual foreplay, then for variety reveled in the
lustful pleasures of a Mexican Moon-job and the always satisfying
Croatian Lobster. Before the blood had even returned to its normal
circulation, Vic took a five-dollar bill from his shoe and handed it to
Susan saying, “Thanks, you’re worth it.”

Vic and Susan had a tragic break-up. Their last conversation went
like this:

Vic: “I don’t want children — I want you.”
40 The Red Cedar Review

 

Susan: “But I want children.”

“And what if we don’t like them? We can hardly send them back.”
“But they’ll be ours. You’re not willing to compromise.”

“Sure I am. Let’s start out with a goldfish and work our way up.”
“I love you Vic.”

“So do I. I love you, too. Why are you so Adam Ant?”

“Adam Ant?”

“Adamant!”

A murmur of voices and the crashing surf awoke Hadley from her
Sleep. She scanned the Malibu beach crowd and recalled her dream.

“You're getting pretty brown,” Eva said. “Are you still sleepy?”

“Oh, just a dream,” Hadley said.

“Did I tell you I wrote back to Ulf?” Eva asked.

“Oh good. Just send it. I don’t care what it says.”

“I said, or should I say, you said, ‘I really miss you and can’t wait -
to see you when I return, love, Hadley.’”

Hadley was blank. She never loved Ulf in Sweden. Now that she
was away, She couldn’ t bear his loved-soaked letters. But it was easier
to let everyone believe what they wanted to. Besides, if she ever did start
to love him, all the ground work would have already been done.

“Thanks for writing for me, Eva,” she said.

“Hey, I was just thinking,” Eva said. Hadley looked at her. “What
if Ulf really doesn’t love you either and has someone else writing his
letters, too.” The girls laughed, amused that their deviousness might be
shared.

“How did you vote in the last election?” one man said to another.

“I voted against fixing the roads, but for the lottery and releasing
Jesus,” the other man replied.

“But your neighbors voted to crucify him.”

“Yes, but it was the tenth proposition. They probably didn’t even
read it. Most people just vote ‘no’ automatically.”

“So Jesus was crucified?”

“oes.

Vic and Susan passed the two men and continued down the
sidewalk. Hadley’s dream-thoughts were present too, but no one paid
them any attention.
wicked, wicked ways ay

 

“I was in love with a collie once,” Vic said.

“Stop it,” Susan said.

“No, seriously. She was a beautiful lassie with a snow white and
golden-brown coat. We had something special. It’s ironic too, but she
didn’t like to do it doggie-style.”

“Vic, I can’t take this. I really need some time away from you,”
Susan said.

“That’s OK, you spend too much money on drugs anyway.”

“You don’t even care.” Susan was about to cry.

“Look, if you were fourteen,” Vic said, “I’d ask you to run away
from home and live in the trunk of my car. But since you’ re over twenty-
one, there’s really nothing left for us to do together. I mean, you could
marry me, but I’d rather marry a fat, ugly girl and have an affair with you.
That would keep our sex life exciting.”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” Susan said meekly. “I just
need some time alone, to get away.”

“I can give you aride to the bus station then,” Vic offered. “Or wait!
We can fill the kiddie pool with whipped cream, tie each other up, and
invite friends over and make a movie.”

“T need to sort myself out,” Susan said.

“Are you an aquarius?” asked Vic.

“You know I am, why?”

* * *

“Miss Hiedlberg, wake-up please.” Two professional-looking men
in dark blue suits were standing over Hadley’s bed.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. They flashed badges.

The taller of the two said, “We’ re federal officers, ma’am. Sorry to
disturb you, but you’ ll have to come with us.”

Oh my God, thought Hadley. She was going to be deported for
working without a visa.

“I’m agent Dobbs from APTS — the Anti Psychic-Terrorist Squad.
You are involved in a psychic-terrorist plot.”

Almost simultaneously, a similar scene was taking place across
town, as Vic was brought to the APTS building (which was disguised as
an out-of-business Chevron station).

Hadley was also taken to APTS headquarters.

“Are we out of gas?” she asked. There, Chief Margarita explained
to her:

“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Hiedlberg, but you’re being used by a
psychic-terrorist in a plot that threatens the entire world.”
42 The Red Cedar Review

Hadley’s heart beat fast and weak. She was afraid she would be
deported to Sweden and have to face Ulf, so she eagerly agreed to help.

The chief introduced Hadley and Vic.

“My God, I dream about you all the time!” she exclaimed.

“T’ ve heard that before; I even use it myself,” Vic said.

Hadley’s eyes were fixed on Vic. The chief continued.

“We're up against Bobby Sherman — a powerful force which can
destroy all of us — even the world — if we don’t stop it.”

“Bobby Sherman, the singer?” asked Vic.

“That was many years ago,” said Chief Margarita. “He has evolved
into something BIG! No more washed-up or has-been. He’s tran-
scended cult status to become a psychic entity whose power is as great
as his appeal is narrow.”

All this talk and excitement of the day and meeting ahandsome man
who lived in her head was getting Hadley hot. She wanted Vic.

“In fact,” said the chief, “we’re quite certain that Bobby Sherman
has only one fan in the world. This is causing an incredible back-up of
psychic energy—just like a big shit caught in a tiny toilet. If we don’t .
stop him now, he could...he could become a God.”

Hadley was frightened. She moved closer to Vic. The chief wasn’t
through.

“Using specially trained psychic German shepherds, we located the
two of you. You are the first step towards a world controlled by Bobby
Sherman. But we’re lucky. Yousee, Bobby Sherman, asa singer, didn’t
know an octave from his asshole. Likewise, he is crudely groping with
his new power and, by a psychic coincidence involving the death of
Conway Twitty and the advent of premenstrual syndrome as a topic for
social discussion, the two of you have come under his influence.”

“What’s that mean?” Vic asked.

“Tt means we have to find the lone Bobby Sherman fan and destroy
his only link to our world.”

Then the chief took Hadley aside and explained that Vic was aliving
manifestation of her dreaming mind. He was given life only through
Bobby Sherman’s influence.

“We tried to tell him earlier,” the chief said, “but he just laughed and
said no wonder he’s never been to a Dodger’s game.”

“Does that mean I shouldn’t get his phone number?” Hadley asked.

“Just come over here and get some sleep.”

Hadley read transcripts of Neville Chamberlain’s speeches to
parliament until she was drowsy and fell asleep. Her dream-thoughts
and Vic went out in search of the last Bobby Sherman fan. With the help
of one of Chief Margarita’s psychic German shepherds, Vic headed for
Glendale.
wicked, wicked ways 43

 

Meanwhile, Patty Penntree sat in her Glendale living room. She
was writing a letter to her mother and watching Phil Donahue. Her
anniversary pen fell from her hand. Patty thought of her husband, then
of Bobby Sherman. The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mrs. Penntree?’”’

“ves.”

“I’m arepresentative of “The Bobby Sherman Fan Club’ and I was
wondering if I could stop by today and tell you about our group insurance
plan.”

Patty was in near shock. ““The Bobby Sherman Fan Club’?! Yes,
please do.” Her breathing became uncomfortable and her face flushed.

Two minutes later, Vic rang the bell at the Penntree residence.
Chief Margarita nervously paced at the ex-Chevron station. It was time
for him to snap at a subordinate. “Damm it! What’s going on out there?”

“Shh Chief, you’ ll wake Miss Hiedlberg and then Vic will be on his
own.”

Mrs. Penntree answered her door. Hadley began to stir.

“Hi, I’m Vic,” Vic reached into his coat, “from “The Bobby
Sherman Fan Club.”” He grabbed the hand grip on his cocked .45. With
the flick of his thumb, he unlocked it.

“Please, come in Vic.”

Vic drew the gun and leveled it at Patty. At that instant, the essence
of Bobby Sherman felt the grave peril it was in at the threatened loss of
its only fan. Bobby Sherman materialized in front of Patty as Vic fired
ashot. Bobby Sherman was unphased and came towards Vic. Patty fell
in fright and watched the scene from the floor.

Vic and Bobby Sherman were locked in a tangled embrace. Patty
noticed how different Bobby Sherman looked in person. He was a lot
shorter than in pictures or on television, and without all that make-up on,
he wasn’ teven that cute. “He doesn’t even have acute ass,” she thought.
“I was in love with this?”

Patty’s faith in Bobby Sherman wavered and so did his power. Vic
freed his arm and shot Bobby Sherman in the stomach, twice. This time
the rounds weakened him — Bobby Sherman was becoming mortal. His
face twisted and a moan leaked out. But Vic was weakening also, since
his independent existence came from Bobby Sherman’s power.

They fell writhing to the floor in a grappling match. They began to
take on grotesque shapes, making Patty sick. Her love for Bobby
Sherman died and like a puke stain on a carpet, the two struggling forms
dried-up and faded away except for a slight odor.
44 The Red Cedar Review

 

Hadley was breathing hard and sweating as she awoke. “It’s over,”
she said. A cheer went up around the ex-Chevron station.

“Bobby Sherman is once again a harmless nobody,” declared Chief
Margarita. “My girl, you’ ve just saved the world from a terrible fate.”

“Don’t forget Vic,” Hadley said. “He was great.”

* * *

On the way home, Hadley had the men in the dark blue suits stop
at a drug store. She bought a large bottle of sleeping pills. Hadley took
three and slipped into unconsciousness in search of the man of her
dreams.
wicked, wicked ways

45

 

The Foreskin of Jesus

by Harry Newman

Did an enterprising rabbi
slip It up his sleeve
during the Circumcision
thinking this is a kid
who’s going places as
he surveyed the manager

was It kept in a shrine
Its own tiny sepulcher
peeked at with reverence
worshipped prayed to

as It gained in value

did It glow in the dark

was It simply discarded
tossed away unrecognized
lost to the refuse divine
fold holiest of relics

is It sought to this day

by the most sacred orders

or did It rise as well

on the day when He rose
rocketing toward Heaven
from wherever It lay

to be reunited at last

by the right hand of God?
46 The Red Cedar Review

 

Claire and Lina
by Tom Baer

Walled, terraced, an immense French provincial house in CLEARWATER,
FLoripa; as elaborate within as without, all is perhaps the least untended;
both in their late 40’s, old friends CLAIRE BurT (with CLEARWATER
FEDERAL Proprietress of it all) and Lina SARANToOs live there.

Scene 1

CLAIRE BuRT
calling down the length of the house
Lina?
there is no response, thus again:
Lina...

Lina SARANTOS
barely heard
Wha...

CLAIRE BURT
steps towards Lina from the house-centered kitchen
Did you get any...
enter LINA

LinA SARANTOS
How in hell did you and Walter... This damned house... It’s no
wonder... Coffee?
to the refrigerator and up with coffee
How come y’never put in an intercom... Something... Have
like...
CLAIRE gestures to intercom
Megaphones f’r everybody...
Lina picks up on the intercom, knows of its unattended, failed
State; the two friends have had this conversation
The damned thing’s broken... I remember...
glares at no particular object, hands CLaIr—E the coffee can
It’s goddamned irritating... Y’can’t hear anybody, y know?
to sink to wash cups, saucers; over-her-shoulders of the coffee
to CLAIRE at coffeemaker
wicked, wicked ways 47

 

Got it last night...
seats herself at the kitchen table
How’ d it go?

CLAIRE BURT
The bank wants the damned place.

LINA SARANTOS
picking up her tabled packets of “Sweet ’N Low,” she flags a
packet |
How many of these?

CLAIRE BURT

her attention gained
One.

Lina SARANTOS
does a “Sweet ’N Low” for C1aire and three for herself
Wha’ did Judson say?

CLAIRE BURT
He thinks he can hold them off... Something in the law about
“if in residence”... Apparently they can’t or can kick me out.

LINA SARANTHOS
That son of a bitch...

CLAIRE BuRT
Judson? No.

LINA SARANTHOS
That Walter son of a bitch signing y’r house away... ’N I could
make a good case out for Judson... Have you asked him,
spoken yet about his end if and when... Y’ just may wind up
with two suitors... Clearwater Fed and Judson.

CLAIRE BuRT
pours coffee for two
I just don’t give a damn anymore, I haven’t the strength... All
I want to do is just get through this winter.
48 The Red Cedar Review

 

LINA SARANTHOS

not concerned
Then?

CLAIRE BURT
I'll have t’do something, figure something, just get the hell
out of Florida, go up t’my brothers, go to work, something.
sips coffee
You?

LINA SARANTHOS
It’s your place, Claire...

CLAIRE BuRT
Oh?
both women laugh

LInA SARANTHOS
Well my ex-son of a bitch is as fucked up as yours... No, fucked
over, he says.

CLAIRE BuRT
Lovely.

LINA SARANTHOS
Hey, y’invest, y’invest; except those two stupid bastards... What
c’n I tell ya... I may get something with the diocese... Patronikos
thinks maybe they’ll have something.

CLAIRE BURT
You’ ll be okay.

LINA SARANTOS
bitter laughter
Sure, the world is waiting for the sunrise...
touches her breast
Me... It can hardly wait...
taps her breast
Y’ve already got the evidence...
drinks up, rises from table
Oh, what the hell... Another day, another nickel...
studies her friend
wicked, wicked ways 49

 

A real live wire t have around...

recalls

D’y’ ever think of Tampa, the kids, startin’ out, when we just started
out?

CLAIRE BURT
Too long ago...
rises from the table with cups and saucers; on her way to the
sink
You for Spyros?

LINA SARANTOS
It brings me a half a hundred... Believe me if I didn’t have even
that little a week... Y’can’t blame the poor asshole... I don’t
think we’ ve had a customer this week. Lookers? a few; buyers?
she shakes her head, is on her way to her wing of the house
Not one... The antique market?
offstage, unheard by Claire at washup
F’rget it.

Scene 2

The house, early evening, a fire going; a bottle of wine at her side, a glass
._ inher hand, seated on the floor (what other than massively broadloomed)
Carre drinks and listens to the stereo MANTOVANI. Work day’s end,
enter Lina hastily.

Lina Sarantos
picking up on CLAIRE’S presence
Christ, it’s cold...
unwraps LINA
Florida, Florida...
CLAIRE raises the wine
Absolutely, lemme get a glass... —
is to the kitchen, and returned, leans over; CLAIRE pours a bit,
the least bit, tipsily
And I see you’ve gotten a head start.

CLAIRE BURT
Got the job with the county.

Lina Sarantos
50 The Red Cedar Review

happily

Hey...

She kisses CLAIRE a loud one on the cheek, grabs a hunk of
carpet and sits with

The school?

CLAIRE BURT
waves, fingers, an arc
Schools.

LINnA SARANTOS
Y’show the kids the art...

CLAIRE BURT
Yeah....

LINA SARANTOS
Clark?

CLAIRE BURT
That’s how.

LINA SARANTOS
America, America....

CLAIRE BURT
I don’t like it either.

LINA SARANTOS
Listen, y’ got a job, don’t knock it...
teases, laughs
Maybe they’ ll give me one.

CLAIRE BurRT
If I can, you know...

LINA SARANTOS
touches her friend’s cheek
I know... So?

CLAIRE BURT
So... What so?
wicked, wicked ways 51

 

LINA SARANTOS
Any further good words, nifty happenings, Charlie?
waving her friend off is CLAIRE

CLAIRE BuRT
That man’s too much for me... I can’t handle him, he can’t
handle him... Where he’s comin’ from....

LinA SARANTOS
I can’t figure him... You?

CLAIRE BuRT
Lina?

LINA SARANTOS
Yeah?

CLAIRE BURT
pours another for herself, tops off Lina’s glass to Lina’s hand
halting limit
D’ you listen to a word I say...

LINA SARANTOS
I mean all that money, why in hell the booze all the time? what
for? I don’t get it. He’s probably got a secret past, a deep dark
secret past.

CLAIRE BurT
My brother the same... No past... I mean the same as everybody
else’s anyway... The usual lousy... They just start when they’re
kids... Charlie, my brother, both of them...
laughs
And in the same damned way... The morning after... Both of
*em’d go around finishing off what was left in the glasses from
the night before... Really... C’n y’ believe it? Both of ’em...

LINA SARANTOS
Hey, anymore I’ ll believe anything... Somebody told me twenty
years ago I’d be damned near on the street when I was 48, I’d
say they were crazy... Home, money, children, no cares, a regular
life, no problems, nothing... Only my father, my father said, we
were crossin’ this abyss, abyssos, the Greek word, I don’t
52 The Red Cedar Review

remember... but we were all on this wire, crossing, and all the
time... All the time... Hey...

she drinks; CLAIRE leant back against a couch, Lina lays back,
stretches out, on the carpet, holds her wineglass with care;
both women listen somewhat lengthily to the music

Ohb-h-h if it could only be like this...

Lina waves toward “out there”

Keep out there out there...

C1alRE laughs softly

Y’wouldn’t like it?

CLAIRE BURT
pours
Couldn’t stand it...

LINA SARANTOS
Sure y’couldn’t...
rises on one elbow, sips lightly, spills some on her chin, her
blouse, sits up at once
Oh! Pig...
studies carpet
Did I get any on the rug...
wipes her chin

CLAIRE BURT
Don’t worry about it.
phone rings

Lina SARANTOS _
E..
she shakes her head
The phone...
she commences to rise

CLAIRE BuRT
waving it off
Let it ring....

Lina SARANTOS
risen
Pil get it...
CLAIRE rising
wicked, wicked ways oe,

 

CLAIRE BURT
All they want is something.

LINA SARANTOS
Tell me about it...
toward kitchen, the phone; her eyes into CLAIRE’S eyes
Could be one of the kids....

CLAIRE BURT
I guess
Lina’s at the phone, picks it up

LINA SARANTOS
Hello?... Yes... Wonderful... How’s the baby?...
beckons CLAIRE
She’s right here... Good, dolly...
hands the phone to CLAIRE, is happy for CLAIRE, herself

Peggy.

CLAIRE BURT
Peg?... Where?!... Of course, baby... I'll
half on her way is CLAIRE
Oh?
more quietly
Of course... We'll look for you... Peg?... I love you...
phone down, to LINA is CLAIRE
Walter’s picking her up, the airport, she left Sam, she’s leaving
him, something...
each studying the other are LiINA and CLAIRE

Scene 3

The house, evening; PEGcy’s at the kitchen table, CLAIRE nips something
from the microwave, sets it before her daughter, seats herself.

PEGGY
Y’didn’t have ta, Mom.

CLAIRE BURT
I shouldn’t have, I know, certainly.
Peg laughs
54 The Red Cedar Review

 

PEGGY
Thanks...
pokes at her plate
A helluva note; right, Mom?

CLAIRE BurT
You?
PEGGY
Yeah.

CLAIRE BurT
As Lina would say, “Hey...”

PEGGY
How’s Billy?
Shaken is our CLAIRE

CLAIRE Burt
I haven’t been up in a month...

PEGGY
I figured if it was okay, we could go up and see’m; Dad said
he’d lend us the car...It’s been a year...I really want t’see’m,
y know?

CLAIRE BURT
I know.

PEGGY
I miss him...
CLAIRE nods
D’y’ think he’Il still recognize me?

CLAIRE BuRT
Of course.

PEGGY
muses
Brother idiot Billy, Daddy idiot Walter, sisiter idiot me... It’s
all cute, right?
wicked, wicked ways os

 

CLAIRE BurRT
shrugs
As we make it, I once heard... I don’t believe a word of it... It’s
all cute...
raises a hand
Better than... The word? the word I’m looking for...

PEGGY
The baby’s beautiful, happy, she’s huge, you wouldn’t recognize
her...

CLAIRE BurRT
Pictures, pictures, I want pictures....

PEGGY
rises, is on her way to her purse, the living room
Wait until....

CLAIRE Burt
of that microwaved but a moment before
You've hardly....

PEGGY
It c’n wait, Mom, the plane, ate... Want you to... Brought them
for you and Dad....
opens purse, probes it

Scene 4
Night, none is present
CLAIRE BurRT

distantly offstage

Night, dolly.

PEGGY
"Night, Mom.

CLAIRE BURT
See ya in the morning.
56 The Red Cedar Review

 

PEGGY
You too.
distantly offstage a door is shut, a distance to tread...CLAIRE
enters the living room; distracted, distraught, it is now winebottle
and glasses to kitchen; seeking, pursued, it is PEGGyY’s coat, gloves,
scarf to closet where, upon shutting the closet door, it is CLAIRE
mute, then slowly raising, stretching out her arms and crying
vastly:

CLAIRE BuRT
What is this monster!

LINA SARANTOS
offstage, distantly
Wha...
a distant trod, at last Lina is perceived
What?
C1alRE Shakes her head
So?
wicked, wicked ways

37

 

Light From This Turning

by Lyn Lifshin

I have lost touch with
distant trees,

the wind you brought
in your hair

and lilac hills.

Something different
bites into the river

and the river of lost days
floats over my tongue

Love, you are like that
distant water, pulling
and twisting,

you turn me

apart from myself

like some frightening road,
something I don’t want

' to know.

Still, let my

hair float slow through
this new color,

let my eyes absorb

all light

from this turning
that has brought us
here, has carried us
to where we are,
we are
58 The Red Cedar Review

Nocturne
by Mary D’ Angelo

In a night so quiet

you can hear the spiders cry,

I eat the scented air:

Spicy, pined, berried,

as fresh as the meat of an orange.
My dreams are moored to the mainland,
tied to a different light.

It is time to pitch my limbs

to these dark woods,

dwarfed by trees taller

than Thai sunflowers,

taller than thoughts of

returning home one more time

for one more bite of

a pink salmon sun,

drawn into a jewelled darkness
where the moon hangs like an opal
in a black tiara’d sky.
wicked, wicked ways 59

How the Heartworms Came

to Petit Trou
by Kenneth Huggins

It was during the time that the Major’s wife was pregnant that the
heartworms came. They swept along the ocean waves just like the
Caribs and the Spanish had long centuries past, and they washed across
the islands of the sea. They didn’t come to Petit Trou at first. At first
they hit the outer islands and the cities like San Gabriel and Guadeloupe.
But everyone in Petit Trou had heard stories.

First, the dogs would go. The worms would creep into their mouths
or noses while they slept. They’d travel down their arteries and curl up
in the chambers of the heart, and there they’d mate and make more
worms that curled up white and tiny in the ventricles and auricles and eat
away the vena cava. They’d slide into the lungs and fill them up like
water filling up a ship. And if the carcass of a dog were opened up, the
worms would spill out like a pile of tiny skeletons. Outside, the dog
would wince and curl into a ball as if it wanted to surround its heart and
keep the pain from coming in. The pain, however, was already in. And
there was nothing anyone could do. The dog would howl and squeal.
He’d shake all over with convulsions. Then he’d die.

Although the world had reached the age of science, no one under-
stood the heartworms — why they came or why they went beyond the
dogs, which they had never done before. They got into the parakeets and
myna birds. They got into the cats and donkeys and the cattle and the
mules. They got into the howler monkeys. Then they reached the
people. And no one knew a way to stop them.

In Petit Trou, the people heard of stories from the outside world, of
people dying in the streets, of children’s bellies popping open from the
pressure of the worms. Whole families died and rotted in their homes.
So many died that people had to push them all together into giant holes.
So many died that people walked around and over them as if they were
a stand of trees that some big wind had flattened to the ground.

One traveler told of what he saw in Mirimire.

“All dead,” he told them. “Everyone except a baby girl. I found her
crying in her hammock. Right beside her, on the floor, her mother lay
there dead. And then the baby shook, and then her eyes looked up, and
that was all.”

He bowed his head.
60 The Red Cedar Review

“We're lucky,” said the man.

“Shh,” a woman said.

And she was right.

At first it seemed that Petit Trou was lucky. The heartworms stayed
out for a while, and people started saying that the harbor’s narrow
opening was good for something after all. It kept the heartworms out.
But not for long. The first sign came when children found a howler
monkey staggering down an alley back of town. They said he staggered
like a drunk and reached out to them, like he needed friends to hold him
up. His long prehensile tail dragged useless on the ground. And then he
grabbed he’s heart and fell face forward. Doctor Barleyman himself
conducted the autopsy. But everybody knew what he would find. The
worms spilled out all over.

After that the people started burning clothes and bed sheets,
throwing out old food and anything that might be tainted. The doctor
told them “build the bonfires up and drive the humors out.” But no one
knew what humors brought the worms. They didn’t understand at all.
And then the people started dying. Not everybody died, not every
animal, but many did. And that was all it took to break the town apart.
The rich had houses in the hills, right by the tennis club. The governor,
the mayor, the prosecutor, and the district engineer, the Colonel, even
Doctor Barleyman, the Douglases and all the officers with gold and
silver epaulettes, they moved into the hills.

Mrs. Douglas said at first she wouldn’t go.

“We can’t just leave them here,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”

But then the Major touched her big round belly.

“We’ ve got to make the baby safe,” he said.

So Major Douglas and his wife and all their friends moved out of
town and up into the hills where no one coughed and no one shivered.
Everyone played tennis, and their clothes were smooth and white. They
shuffled decks of cards and sipped cool drinks and barely heard the
sounds of weeping from the town below.

Nobody knew just why the heartworms didn’t find the club or any
of the tennis players. Doctor Barleyman would say they’d left the
darkness and the tepid humors down below. But down below the people
only shrugged and shook their heads. “No heart,” they said, “no
heartworms.” Then they buried all their dead.

The plague took one of every four in Petit Trou, a better average
than in other towns. The village square became a burial ground. And
underneath the ancient banyan tree of Handy Juan Garay, where lights
at Festival had always hung, markers for graves went up:

Here lie the dead of Nivelle Street
wicked, wicked ways 61

 

Here lie the Baniwars; I alone remain

The marker all were wooden, and the words were painted on. There
wasn’t time for carving stones.

And then, as quickly as they’d come, the heartworms disappeared.
Nobody understood. But Petit Trou came back. And all the islands of
the sea came back. The earth began to turn upon its axis once again. But
on one who had stayed in town forgot the tennis players who had moved
into the hills and stopped their ears up when the weeping came. And no
one from the tennis club moved back to town. |
 
 

 

 

 

biographies

 
 
biographies 65

 

Tom Baer’s plays appear in Chicago Review, Mississippi Review,
Sou’western, Ohio Journal, and Onionhead and have been staged by
New York’s Theater-Studio, Love Productions, Purdue University
Theater and Denver’s Changing Scene.

We were unable to obtain biography information on Nick Barrett.

Fred Cardin graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in
1970. After withdrawing from graduate school he worked for the
physics department at U.W. During this time he read the classics
trying to teach himself to write fiction. After moving to California in
1975, he made his living as a city bus driver. In 1981, after returning
to Wisconsin, he found an agent in New York to find a publisher for
the novel he had spent the last decade writing. He has yet to find a
publisher, and “When the Stillness is Quantum” is his first fiction
piece to be published.

We were unable to obtain biographical information on James Collins.

Mary D’ Angelo currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. We were unable
to obtain further biographical information.

“How the Heartworms Came to Petit Trou” is based on Ken Huggins’
novel Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth. He is married and has two
children. He makes his living writing and editing textbooks for the
insurance industry, and has lived in Decatur, Georgia for the last
sixteen years. He has fiction in Other Voices, The Bellingham Review,
and Magic Realism.

Gary Juliano currently lives in West Rutherland, Vermont. We were
unable to obtain further biographical information.

Jim Leftwich currently lives in Chanetterville, Virginia with his wife
and five children. His poetry has been published in Five Finger
Review, Sycamore, Clockwatch, Some Ear, and Tin Wreath.

Lyn Lifshin has written more than eighty books and edited three
anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most
poetry and literary magazines in this country, and her work has been
included in many major anthologies of recent writing by women. Lyn
has given more than seven hundred readings across the country and
has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell Univer-
66 biographies

sity, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Hutington Li-
brary. She has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at
universities, colleges, and high schools throughout the Northeast and
has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and
Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the
Jack Kerouac Award for her book, Kiss the Skin Off, Lyn is the subject —
of the documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. Acompanion
volume to the film: Not Made of Glass/Lyn Lifshin Poems 1968-1989 is
among Lyn’s publications.

Angie Macri is currently finishing her master’s degree in English at the
University of Illinois, and will join the graduate creative writing
program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in January, 1994,

Hitch Nelson was born in America during the Johnson Administration.
He has written other short stories and completed two novels while
working professionally as a pilot and a scientist. “Wet Nightmare”
marks his debut as a published author. His interests include music
production and the visual arts. His future plans emphasize becoming
established as a writer. He is currently spending a year overseas.

Dan Maneikis is currently hanging by a thread with a rolling rock in one
hand and a camel in the other.

Kenneth May, a native of Indianapolis, currently lives in Virginia. He
is the author of the chapbook, Somewhere Down Low.

Michael Ranney is a forty-seven year old writer and owner of an
underground construction company. He received an MFA from the
Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1971. He has poems
published in ZYZZYVA, The Small Pond, Orphic Lute, Wind, and
Amelia.

Sadi Ranson is a Finsbury Park, London native, feeling quite at home
in Boston. Her fiction has been published in Prisim, intl and Ex Libris.
Inspiration picks up force from Thoreauvian Sauntering and, of course,
the ever-present encouragement and honesty of Bat.

Doug Rennie is currently living in Portland, Oregon. We were unable
to obtain further biographical information.
biographies 67

 

Susan E. Thomas was born in Warren Ohio, recieved a BA from Ohio
University in 1990 and an MA from the University of Southern Missippi
in 1993.

Ruelaine Stokes is a poet, photographer, and teacher living and work-
ing in the Lansing area. She coordinates a monthly open-mic. poetry
reading, as well as the annual Dead Poet Contest both held in East
Lansing. Her favorite color is red, and she really likes wool socks in the
winter.

V.Q. Wallick currently lives in Los Angeles, California. We were
unable to obtain further biographical information.

Mary Winters’ publications were law-related until 1991. Since then
her poems have appeared in Black Buzzard Review, Northeast Journal,
Onionhead, Painted Hills Review, Potato Eyes, and Sheila-na-gig.
They are forthcoming in College English, Kansas Quarterly, Poetry
East and The Poetry Book(Gypsy/Vergen’ Press). “Only One Promise”
was recently chosen as a Plainsongs Award Poem. Grace Itself Invisible
is forthcoming as the second place winner in Pudding Magazine’s 1993
National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her chapbook
Combat was published as the January, 1993 issue of The Golden Argosy.
- She works as an attorney in a civil Legal Aid office in Newark, New
Jersey. A New York City resident since 1970, she was born in Pittsburgh
and grew up in Cincinnati. She is currently studying with David Lehman
in a poetry master class at The New School.
 
With Special Thanks...

to Ruelaine Stokes for sharing her beautiful photography with us, for her
wonderful patience and sincerity, and for her mediating skills which
helped us out a lot.

to Erin McCarty for helping with the reading of the fiction manuscripts,
for giving her time and her knowledge of short fiction.

to Joyce Klynstra for countless hours spent typing and for doing all of
those little things that I never thought I would have a chance to get to.

to Matthew Q. Thorburn for his amazing editor’ s eye, for taking one last
look at the RCR, for answering all of my questions about which way to
face the smart quotes and how to make the two-line titles look tighter,
for his witty and good-natured spirit, for his friendship in poetry, and for
everything else that would have made laying out this book alone
impossible.

—L.K.
 
 

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