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Red Cedar Review


Volume VI, Number 2

May, 1968

Red Cedar Review is a quarterly magazine of the arts published at Michigan 
State University. Manuscripts may be submitted to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan 
State, E. Lansing, Michigan 48823. Please include return address and 
biographical information for Contributor’s Notes.

One year subscription is $3.50. Send $1.00 for single copies. Libraries and 
educational institutions may subscribe for $3.00 a year.

Copyright by RED CEDAR REVIEW, May, 1968. Permission to reprint material herein must be 
obtained from the authors. We request that RED CEDAR REVIEW be cited as place of first publication 
on any reprinted material.

©Massachusetts Review, “The Jellyfish’’ and Shenandoah, “Checking in.”


CONTENTS

POETRY

3

Charles Wright

Private Madrigal

4

Dobie Pasco

Another girl 
Wednesday 
Knowing

7

James Welch

City Days, Always Tried Happy

8

William Pitt Root

The Jellyfish

The City Dreaming of Horses 
“Checking in”

15

William Matthews

Reading Beside a Farm Pond on a March Afternoon 
Moving

17

William Nagy

Five untitled poems

22

Douglas Blazek

A Sphere jester/A severe gesture

Politics, at a Somewhat Lower Level

24

Jane Frink

August

Above Winter

26

Daniel Rendleman

The Morning of November

31

George Hitchcock

The Man with the Wicker Cigar

32

Brendan Galvin

In Locust Hollow

48

Mary F. Davis

Obit

52

Mitchell Bloomfield

The Mongoloid Child Watches Kite Flying

54

James Bertolino

Fire Sale 
Employed 
A second

57

Deborah Robinson

April's Love

58

Robert Vander Molen

Position #32 
Fishing with Jake

PROSE

33

Mitchell Bloomfield

Auction on Lincoln Street

PHOTOGRAPHY

Rick Sterry

Justin Kestenbaum

Jeff Blyth

Ronald Bernt


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RICK STERRY


CHARLES WRIGHT

Private Madrigal

Hung in the gathering leaves 
(Like cages, I say), the late 
Oranges swing in the rain, 
Balancing, now, back and forth.

We watch them through the window. 
If cages, you answer, they

Must be for crickets, bringers 
Of good luck, they are so small. 
True . . .

However, that black spot 
On each — that seems to lean out, 
That seems to proffer itself— 
Is not from any cricket, 
No, but something else which has 
No name, and will not ever sing.


DOBIE PASCO

Wednesday

The prettiest girl

Working in a Chinese place.

I eat there every day

Hating rice.


Another Girl

This Mississippi evening we sit on the beach and listen to the gulls. 
She's lived two blocks from the sea all her life and still hears the gulls. 
This afternoon I walked on the beach with thousands of them above 
me, driving me off, running from their screams.

"Why do you scream at me? I won't steal your food. I won't eat 
your young."

From a safe distance. "Keep your lousy beach. Choke on your 
garbage. I don't need sand in my shoes and shit in my hair."

Tonight I can love their sounds.

A skating rink where I met this strange quiet girl. Yellow lights 
off and on, wooden wheels grinding, pleasanter than the music. I go 
there often, but never skate, sitting on benches and talking to girls. 
She smiles and skates with all the boys without talking to any. She 
talks to me.

"I'm very shy and talk very little. I'm always afraid and never 
know what to say."

"My mother gives piano lessons to kids."

"We live in a house and have a pet squirrel."

I ask, "Can we walk along the beach sometime or go to a movie? 
Will we see each other sometime again?"

Her girlfriend was prettier than she so I wanted to know her. I 
never did, she was pregnant and married a sailor.

"Hold me but don't kiss me. We can lie in the sand."

"I'm from the North and don't understand you. I don't even know 
anything about Lee."

"There's a house here that belonged to Jefferson Davis. You can 
sometimes visit it on Sundays for free."

"You're so warm, Peggy. What do you think of?"

"My brother, in the navy, sends me coins from Morocco."

"It's late. We better leave."

"If I give you my address, will you write me sometime?"


Knowing

There are people above me

Living in code

The faucet turns, I hear water

They, lost sons and daughters

Washing


JAMES WELCH

City Days, Always Tried Happy

(For Virginia Burwell)

None will know her: That girl screaming 
out the window, "Holidays! Holidays!" 
Her boudoir, cluttered with monkeys, 
and I, a shade of gray in the court below, 
bouncing ball to brick.

No Indians paint corn in reds, 
assume face to write checks.

Company men twist their heads 
and plot to destroy rain.

Rub their charts in rose.

None would dream that we are lovers: 
the holidays, 
my face, her slippers, 
blue in crowds of tin.


WILLIAM PITT ROOT

The Jellyfish

There isn't much a man can do 
about a grounded jellyfish 
except step over it, or prod 
it with his walking stick, and if 
he has no walking stick, his shoe. 
My feet were bare, so I leaned 
to watch the waves relax around 
the shiny melted-looking heap.

The jellyfish didn't move, 
but then of course, jellyfishes 
don't. They navigate at best 
like bottles: When the tide shifts 
they bob and drift away. But who 
has ever seen a living creature 
with a note inside?

I found

an iridescent fish, uneaten 
and twitching still, inside the gluey 
drying bowel. I saw it jerk, 
expand its gills, then quiver, arrested 
loosely, loosely and forever.

It shone with link and green, blue 
and yellow, flashed profoundly silver 
in each spasm. I knew it was dead 
already, and only seemed to work 
to free itself.

As I tried to remove 
the notion from my mind, the mound 
it moved in, like a glassy brain, 
was taken from me by a wave 
that slid from the ocean without a sound.


The City Dreaming of Horses

Each dawn we watch the bus descend 
through lifting mist, come shining down 
an emerging hill's decline to the sea. 
We mount its trembling steps, feed 
the chattering meter quarters, sit, 
begin to sleep—but first sway round 
our tightly curved tidal bay, 
begin the lifting road up through 
the hillside pastures, passing every 
day the dewdrenched buckskin mare 
who comes to lean against the leaning 
fence and stare as, from our serial 
windows, we stare back before we 
enter the city dreaming of horses.


Checking in

at 1 A.M., dead tired, 
I watch two strangers 
carry out a third 
across their shoulders, 
stiff as a board.

In the step-down lobby, 
two whores and a jealous queer 
ignore the body 
as its eyes open to stare 
at me, and these roses for my lady.

An elevator grinds me up

to 3. Stepping off

I breathe again and stop 
to check directions: Snuff 
and canned spaghetti smells, pop

bottles along a hall

of dead wallpaper flowers. The slick carpet 
creaks along the narrow darkness full 
of doors locked on regret, 
sneak-thieves, and the wounded who can crawl.


JUSTIN KESTENBAUM

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RICK STERRY

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WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Reading Beside a Farm Pond on a March Afternoon

The wind begins to turn 
the pages for me and I drift 
like a drunk in a skiff. 
Goodbye to eyes 
rotating in to watch 
self being watched by self. 
The wind sounds angry 
in the leafless trees, 
as if a grave were opened 
and found bare, thick 
with walled-in air.

I wake up in my skiff 
and feel each untentative 
heartbeat forcing blood.

I find the place I've lost. 
A heifer slowly swings 
his thick triangular 
white face

to watch me sit.


Moving

When we spurt off

in the invalid Volvo 
flying its pennant of blue fumes, 
the neighbors group and watch.

We twist away like a released balloon.


WILLIAM NAGY

I

As fast as whisker—

grass left the field brown

all the weeds on high ridge road are dead 
already

the hollow fall air

is widening the spaces between the trees, 
waiting to fill with color

flash night black 
and then collapse white 
under crystalline vacuum cold


II

The grass in the cemetery 
arches itself 
against the new cold 
over the writhing dead 
till the cold seeps into the ground 
and quiets them 
I, newly alive 
comfort myself 
with dreams

losing heat at the end of the summer 
The ground is through with its heat 
and womb-frozen death

lies within it

waiting to be stillborn 
in spring


Ill

I got a call last night

but what words

and telephones will tell me anything 
this early

the window trees

shine in my door's brown 
wood, my bedroom darkness 
with their yellow 
indignant with the cold 
surprised at their new color

no one has said anything yet 
this morning, but

the trees pull back

and cross themselves 
at the sight of telephone wires

the sun and morning 
leap from trees to windowpanes 
on the wires outside my window

birds sing deadletter conversations


IV

A gold 
buckled beer can 
scraped to silver streaking

menaces

the metal grating

of my 
neighborhood down the hill 
drain 
while a combustion

of morning mushrooms 
scrawls away

up the front grass

and the sun

that fires from bent metal flashings 
to soft white fungus

lit up gold 
touches the edges of the shadows with greed 
and gives them till noon


V

Tired as a tidal rock flat 
mud-slippery gray 
low tide

limp in puddles,

resting

slide down near 
the red-eyed fish 
trapped in pools, 
that swim away from me 
in circles

tide rising waves make them

whirlpool circular, 
spiral,

and the fish gleam red-eye taillight 
stares at me,

as they slide backward 
into the undertow.


DOUGLAS BLAZEK

A Sphere jester/A severe gesture

There is us

our flesh

&

then

there is our double

life

&

whoever created them

had better

have

a damn good reason!


Politics, at a Somewhat Lower Level

A little ruddy black dog 
snaps & barks at me 
the way a woman shakes 
out wet diapers 
every morning on my 
way to work.

every morning 
faithfully 
this little pest 
saves the world.

he is President,

Secretary of Defense & 
Attorney General all rolled 
in one,

too dumb to know the sun 
really doesn't rise 
at his command

&

thankfully 
too small to jump 
the fence.


JANE FRINK

August

August was the nightmare month 
when her morality faded 
along with her tan.

After passing a point

she ran out of self

and was stranded between

summer and fall.


Above Winter

A torrid river entered 
a forest to violate in snakey 
twists and turns. Emerging 
on the other side as if 
nothing had happened.

A lake had frozen into a 
plate of silver shiny and round. 
Acres of farm land were 
inches square and white 
And the bristle trees were skinny 
and too small to pick.

Clouds floated past 
the window Everytime 
the airplane took a breath.


DAN RENDLEMAN

The Morning of November

The air is peeled and fierce, dilating and rough-fingered 
Upon the hunched shoreline. I rummage the sand for snails 
And bones, but only startle a ragged fern.

The day's sun could be an old scar.

The trees suck and moan, sleepy children 
Fondling the dry dugs of dead flesh.

On hills where clover-lint once softened blunt June,

This hard season, this hard earth is fed with

Fish-belly skies, pale winds.

Basho's dark hands of life wring tomorrow's wash, 
The grey linen of rain. With an Arab's swarthy hand 
I piece the clay fragments, the jagged skull plates 
Of afternoon, glittering cold knives in my trailing sash, 
Plaiting smells and grass-warp 
Fixing their gull-teeth to my silk.

Here, on a weed-scarved beach, a shoving sea mounts ragged 
Stones and the keel-blank sand with bleached loins and hands, 
Sterility in this withered light, visionary salt. Speaking 
As into a wind my dim words bless each other.

I find the scars of a prophet writhing where the coral snake has been, 
Where churning eagles flash and devour clouds.

Golden lizards buckle trees. Buckle trees.

Reading the skins of a mind there are barns that suns bother, 
Stashed with last year's hay like hair in an old man's nose. 
There are woodcuts underfoot and corded

On my finger-smoothed shelves,

Skulls of scuttling crabs, thin as dead leaves, clean as light, 
Collect the heavy rain in their whorled sockets.

Yesterday's unopened mail sucks the tedium of air

And my dry etching of mirth.


RONALD BERNT

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RICK STERRY

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GEORGE HITCHCOCK

The Man with the Wicker Cigar

Observe him as he steps on the balcony 
to bless his squadrons of gasoline 
he holds seven jewelled microphones 
in his seven left hands 
his nostrils twitch

lava pours from the studs 
on his shirtfront

below him a sea of bouquets 
each with its head zipped 
in transparent green paper 
bursts into cheers

his mouth is like a teller's wicket 
his eyes are of silk foulard 
his teeth are certified winners 
he is smoking a wicker cigar

reassure yourselves declares 
this sweetsmelling pope 
of the flatlands

death is an illusion


BRENDEN GALVIN

In Locust Hollow

Under a green moon 
a bird creaks 
in an old tree.

In the orchard 
the woman collects 
a nightgown of feathers.

A house glides by.

The Portagee's coffin 
is half buried 
beneath a table 
in Locust Hollow.

His Bible falls 
open to moonlight.

He is not there.


Auction on

LINCOLN STREET

by Mitchell Bloomfield

Marcus Stein slept on the sofa wrapped in a motley of sheets, quilts, and 
blankets. The bad foot, like a swollen plum left out to dry, hung over the 
edge swathed in bandages. This was his first task on awakening, to treat the 
foot, and he dreamt about it, wrapping and unwrapping the bandages. The 
doctor had given him medicine which Mr. Stein had placed on the nightstand. 
But there was other medicine too, given to him by this doctor and 
still other doctors. Now it was all mixed up together on the nightstand so 
that he was no longer sure which medicine was for the foot. Ach! It didn’t 
matter; it was an old foot, eighty-five years. The doctor the last visit had 
said, “You’ve got a lot of mileage on that, Mr. Stein.’’ Him—he could afford 
to joke, a young man yet, even though he was getting bald, and Mr. Stein 
thoughtfully pointed that out to him.

But, maybe, maybe one of the medicines would help.

He dreamt about the foot again. He could hardly bend over to reach it, 
so he moved the hassock close to the sofa, and after a while, after tugging and 
pulling on his leg, he got the foot on the hassock. That way he could work 
on it. He unwrapped the bandages and looked at the sores. They had turned 
all colors, and the foot itself had taken on the appearance of a beast’s forepaw. 
Remembering the biblical admonition against consorting with animals, he 
was disgusted.


Now he heard yelling from the bathroom. Benny was yelling in the 
bathroom. Maybe he had slipped and fallen in the tub again like last time, 
when there was no one to help. Finally someone had come, but it had been 
a long time with Benny screaming. Afterwards, Mr. Stein had called Harold 
and pleaded with him to come back to the store. But now, lying on the sofa, 
Mr. Stein heard the screaming again and wondered what Benny was doing 
in the bathroom at this time of night. He came awake for a moment. No 
one was yelling; the! house was quiet and dark and didn’t smell like morning. 
Ach, Mr. Stein thought, what good is a crippled son? Not even good to 
himself.

When he finally woke up, and could smell that it was morning, something 
was on his mind and he couldn’t remember. He didn’t feel like treating 
the foot, he was afraid to unwrap the bandages, so he hobbled to the kitchen 
to make tea. He moved through the hallway, like a blind crab, his back a 
humped shell, feeling along the chill walls with his cane. While the water 
was heating, he was trying to remember what was on his mind, but he kept 
hearing Benny yelling in the bathroom, so he went and looked. The bathroom 
was empty, so he went along the hallway opening doors until he came 
to the bedroom. Benny was asleep in his bed. Mr. Stein looked at his naked 
son, scrawny and covered with thick hair all over his body. A monkey, he 
thought, just like a monkey, and chuckled unhappily. He remembered a 
zoo he went to in Cardiff where there were monkeys just like this. He had 
gone there with Sofie; they had both laughed at the monkeys but she got 
sick to her stomach when she saw the ones with the red behinds. He didn’t 
like the ones with the red behinds either.

He went back to the kitchen and took a bowl of pears out of the refrigerator. 
This is what he ate. Pears and tea, and maybe once in a while a cracker. 
No one liked this. His sister who visited regularly from Cleveland didn’t 
like it, and his granddaughter who lived in the same city didn’t like it either. 
“Oi Gott,” the sister would say, “What kind of diet? Pears and tea, tea and 
pears. How can a man live on such food?” “Look,” the granddaughter, 
Gladys, would say, “he’ll eat what he wants. You turn up your nose, don’t 
you Gramps?” The sister wrung her hands, “Show some respect,” she said. 
Nonetheless, Mr. Stein liked his granddaughter. She wore pants and painted 
her toenails, and the sister didn’t approve, but Mr. Stein liked this. He came 
from Bucharest, no small-town Jew from the Pale. Also, she brought good 
things to eat; she knew how to cook. Even the sister’s cooking wasn’t bad, 
although not as good. Sometimes after they left, he would eat the food they 
brought, but whenever anyone was there he brought out the tea and pears and 
ate them whether he was hungry for them or not. He was pleased by their 
dismay. Once he told his sister, “You’re a stinky cook.”


He banged the cup down in exasperation. What was he trying to remember?


Finally, Benny got up. Mr. Stein could hear him tap-tapping to the 
bathroom on his crutches. He was urinating and Mr. Stein thought, I hope 
he doesn't make on the floor like yesterday. If Benny made on the floor then 
when Gladys, the granddaughter, came, she would raise hell. So let her, 
thought Mr. Stein, she's too fancy these days. Ever since she married the 
pharmacist, she was getting fancy. Now his grandchildren were fancy too, 
too fancy for Mr. Stein.

The phone rang, and Benny began yelling in the bathroom. Always 
yelling.

“Be still you bastard!” Mr. Stein roared.

“Pa!” Benny yelled, “Get the phone. Forchrissake Pa!”

The phone kept ringing and Mr. Stein munched a pear. Let them think 
he was dead. If he didn’t answer that’s what they would think. Only two 
weeks before he had fallen and struck his head on the coffee table. Then they 
had all come. He remembered their terror with pleasure. Soon the phone would 
stop ringing, then they would call Gladys or the nephew and send them over 
to see if he was dead. For that matter, thought Mr. Stein I wouldn't mind. 
It would teach that bastard yelling in the bathroom a lesson. He pictured 
them, all of them together, gathered around his corpse in the livingroom. 
But suddenly he remembered the foot, they would take off the bandages. He 
had a vision of the foot, fur and nails, and everyone staring. He got up and 
shuffled to the telephone, picked up the receiver and coughed into the speaker.

“Pa?” a voice asked, “Hello? Pa?”

“Who?” Sometimes Mr. Stein's hearing was bad and sometimes good. 
This morning it was all right, but he was trying to remember what it was 
he had forgotten about.

“Pa? It's Harold here.”

“Who? Sammy?”

“HAROLD, Pa. Can you hear me?”

“Sure, sure, I hear you fine. I thought maybe it was Sammy.” Harold? 
Mr. Stein wondered if he hadn’t talked to Harold last night. What the hell 
was he trying to remember. Anyway, he'd rather talk to Sammy. Sammy 
was the oldest. Why wasn’t he calling. Always Harold.

“So, what are ya doing Pa?”

“Sitting on the toilet,” Mr. Stein said, “what should I be doing?” Sometimes 
lately, Mr. Stein liked to be vulgar. He never used to be like that.

“Yeah?” the voice was weak with futility. “That’s nice. That’s always 
nice to hear.”


Mr. Stein looked up; Benny was clumping on his crutches into the livingroom. 
Mr. Stein wagged a finger at him. “Don’t you make a noise/’

“I mean about the auction, Pa/’ Harold demanded from the phone. 
“Whataya going to do?”

Auction? So that was it, what he was trying to remember. He might 
have forgotten the auction.

“I’m going to the auction,” he promptly announced.

“Listen Pa, I told you yesterday, STAY HOME. Whatdaya want, they 
should laugh at you?”

Mr. Stein held the phone out in his bent arm and faced it. “They’re ruining 
me,” he wailed.

“Pa, it’s the law, that’s all, the law. For the taxes and the bills, you 
can’t run a business that way. I toldya years ago—sell out, take Ma, come to 
Florida.”

Florida? Harold was in Florida, Sammy —where was it?— Denver, 
Sofie dead. All of them gone. Mr. Stein was one time in Florida; he remembered 
the ceiling fans turning around in the heat. The heat was awful; he 
had not liked it and Sofie had not liked it either, but maybe now with air 
conditioning? But Sofie was gone now, and remembering this again, Mr. 
Stein also realized that his son’s “take Ma” was a reproach.

“You,” he said, “you’re ruin-ing me. You let them take the business. . .”

“Business? what business? The business ended years ago, you shoulda 
closed, Pa.”

Benny began to shout, “Lemme talk to him for chrissake Pa, lemme talk 
willya?”

“Oi! He’s going to kill me!”

“Pa, stay away,” Harold pleaded over the telephone, “don’t make a disgrace.”


“For chrissake Pa, lemme talk willya?” Benny was shouting.

Mr. Stein pressed his hand to his temple. “Fifty thousand I paid my 
father. In cash I bought him out. For what. For my children; if not what 
else? Fifty thousand into his hand. They take from me my life.”

“Listen,” Benny was shouting, “Lemme have that lemme talk to Harold 
for chrissake willya Pa.” Benny clumped towards him on his crutches, one 
bony arm reaching out of the pajama sleeve towards the phone.

“Get away!” Mr. Stein screamed. He raised his cane and struck his son 
across the shoulder, “Monkey.” The telephone clattered to the floor. Mr. Stein 
had to sit down on the edge of the sofa and it was some time before he had the 
energy to reach down, lift it up, and replace it on the hook. By that time 
Benny had stopped crying and was watching the television.


His foot was killing him.

Mr. Stein wanted to wear his best suit, his favorite, for the auction, a 
pin-stripe gaberdine with a vest he had bought in Cleveland after the war; 
he had forgotten when he bought it and could not see well enough to notice 
that it had faded and become so dirty that the pin-stripe could not really be 
seen. He could not especially see in the darkness of his house with the perpetually 
drawn shades, a custom Sofie had brought with her from the old 
country, and so he identified the suit by feel. He was certain when he found 
the masonic pin in the lapel.

Mornings were different once and Mr. Stein remembered this as he dressed. 
Sofie was up first and cooked breakfast while Mr Stein said his morning 
prayers. Both Harold and Sammy were with him in the business. Benny was 
at the military academy in Pennsylvania after having a little trouble in the 
public high school. Becky too was a young schoolgirl, not yet married to 
Dov, the greenhorn. There was more to eat in the mornings then than tea 
and pears Mr. Stein remembered ruefully.

They all lived in the new house on Maple Road with the glazed brick 
chimney, a screened-in solarium, and a fake Greek statue made of plaster; the 
contractor had suggested the statue, and it caught Mr. Stein’s fancy at once. 
Mr. Stein had built it with the profits from the business in the two years after 
he had bought out his father. It was in a better, new neighborhood, and 
Mr. Stein liked to imagine that the people who drove past were admiring the 
home of Marcus Stein which boasted a Greek statue on the front lawn. Sofie 
was embarrassed, however, because the statue was, after all, a nude woman. 
For her he bought a marble bird bath which sat under a birch tree modestly 
in back.

Every other Sunday they drove in the Buick to Cleveland where the elder 
Stein, retired now, with seventy-five thousand in the bank lived with his 
beloved library and Mr. Stein’s sister; the sister was pleased to have him in 
the house, she was sweet but not very pretty, and hadn’t married. There, 
they would sit in the livingroom, Marcus, Sofie, Becky, and the sister, the 
women silent with folded hands on their laps, and drink tea, and Marcus 
and his father would argue business; Marcus viewed his father’s books and 
his amateur scholasticism with disdain. The boys drove the Buick around 
the neighborhood.

At length the sister would tire of the discussion, “Come Becky, come 
in the kitchen. We will serve some cake.” And in the kitchen she said, “You 
cut these out of the pan and put them on the plate while I take out the jam.”

“I don’t know how,” Becky said.


Everything the sister said, Becky didn’t know how. And when they 
went back to the livingroom, the sister had said reproachfully that it was a 
disgrace, a young girl shouldn’t know anything about a house, and Sofie 
simply looked down at her hands and said nothing, and Marcus said, not to 
the sister, but to Becky, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to know, you’re a 
rich man’s daughter.’’

Can you imagine? the sister would later say, in the bad days, that’s what 
comes of this, Marcus, that a girl should know nothing.

He married her through a broker to an immigrant, a strong boy, maybe 
not such a good head, but from a pious family, and earnest enough to do 
the carrying and other menial labor in the store. On her wedding night, she 
came screaming back to the house. Whose fault was it? Mr. Stein asked 
himself, how was he to know the man was a brute, an animal? He grew to 
detest her husband, Dov, for his stupidity and went back on his promise to 
make him an equal partner in the business like the boys.

It was the following year the trouble started. First with Becky, then 
with Benny when he came back from the military academy in August, his 
head full of crazy ideas. Only to himself, Mr. Stein admitted that the 
craziness had started before the other one, the sleeping sickness that crippled 
him; to everyone else he explained that the fever had affected his 
mind and made him nervous, but that was later. The trouble started that 
year, in the fall. Trips without warning, charge accounts, and then the letters; 
letters he wrote to congressmen, to the secretary of state, to the newspapers. 
Mr. Stein imagined that people on Lincoln Street were beginning to laugh 
behind his back. Finally he locked Benny up in one of the bedrooms upstairs 
and put the key in his own back pocket. Three times a day he opened it, 
in the morning, at midday when he returned for lunch, and in the evening 
when Sofie brought food. She could not have the key. During the day she 
sat in the livingroom with the drawn shades weeping while Benny shouted 
and broke the furniture in the locked room upstairs. At night she pleaded 
with Marcus, but he was unrelenting. Only when Benny calmed down could 
he come downstairs and spend an hour with the family.

One night he escaped. In the morning they found a rope of sheets knotted 
together at the end hanging on the outside of the house from the window. 
The Chevy roadster was gone. Mr. Stein pulled up the sheets, so that the 
people driving past wouldn’t see, and spent the morning in the synogogue 
pounding his breast.

That time Benny was gone for two months. Finally, the police called 
from Texas and Harold went on the train to bring him back. When they 
returned for weeks Benny lay on the bed in the unlocked room staring at 


the ceiling while Sofie nursed him.

Mr. Stein threw Dov, the immigrant, out of the store, and Becky came 
home; she was pregnant with Gladys and wanted to know how the baby 
got out. Sammy left home and the business and went out on his own. The 
eldest.

What had gone wrong?

Mr. Stein finished dressing, and felt to make sure his tie, a clip-on given 
to him by a customer who drove a milk truck, was in place. The masonic 
pin, his fingers told him, was in its place on his jacket lapel. He struggled into 
his overcoat and waited for the cab. As he stood looking out the window the 
phone rang again. This time Benny, still sitting in front of the television 
set, didn’t shout or make a noise; and this time Mr. Stein didn’t hesitate to 
answer, he knew where he was going. He peered into the receiver, "Who?”

Gladys’ voice, if it was anxious, betrayed nothing; it was cool and arranged 
like her carefully sprayed hair and the tailored blouses she wore; it 
spoke languidly through a wreath of cigarette smoke, "Grund-pa. . .”

"Who?” Mr. Stein feigned again.

"Listen Grandpa, just what do you think you’re up to!?”

"Harold called?” He knew Harold must have called; that’s how she 
knew. So she, they, were worried. Good, let them; they had all left.

"I’m going a little while to' the auction.”

"Listen you old faker, if you don’t behave yourself, I’ll come over and 
put you to bed.”

Mr. Stein began cursing her; outside the taxi blew its horn; at once, 
Benny began to shout.

Mr. Stein screamed into the telephone, "All morning he was yelling in 
the bathroom, the bastard.”

"Grandpa,” Gladys said, "you’re only making things worse, you know 
that don’t you?” But he had already slammed down the phone and started 
for the door.

The driver, a scrawny West Virginian, whose arms stuck out beyond 
the cuffs of his tankdriver’s coat, stood shivering in the early morning, propped 
against the puffing cab; but when he saw Mr. Stein shuffling down the sloped 
side of the lawn to the street, he ambled over to help him. "I can do it myself,” 
Mr. Stein said, but could not offer much resistance. The driver released 
his arm when he got; to the door, but then he got stuck in the doorway, one 
leg on the sidewalk and one on the floor of the cab. He struggled to bring one 
leg together with the other, either inside or outside the cab, but he was too 
weak; they remained apart where his tardy muscles had abandoned them. He 


poked about with the cane in the interior, a single antenna feeling the darkness. 
“I used to jump in the trees for the nuts,” he said.

“How’s that?”

”A young boy,” Mr. Stein explained with exasperation, “I jumped in 
the trees for nuts. In Rumania, for nuts.”

“Well, yor gonna break the ones you got like that.”

“Who?”

At length, the driver put one hand under his buttocks and the other under 
the tardy leg and hoisted. “I can do it myself,” Mr. Stein wailed, but fell 
into the seat with a sigh. The antenna wiggled reproachfully in the rear 
view mirror as they drove off.

“Helluva morning to go out,” the driver said, but Mr. Stein blinked 
ahead through the windshield.

“How’s that fella doing, yor boy isn’t he?”

Suddenly Mr. Stein was terror-stricken. How does he know? he wondered. 
Did Sammy send him?

“The boy who fell in the tub. Don’t you remember? I helped pull him 
out?

Now Mr. Stein remembered. Of course, the cab driver.

“Sure, sure; it was nice, very nice; you’re a good boy.”

“Shoot, that’s all right. Sure a bad thing to be crippled up like that.”

Mr. Stein wondered: Should he tell him? He decided to tell him. Sammy 
hadn’t sent this man; this was the cabdriver. “He was hollering again this 
morning in the bathroom.”

“Naw.”

“Yessir,” Mr. Stein affirmed, “Hollering like you wouldn’t believe.”

“That’s sure too bad to be crippled up like that,” the driver said.

“I have this sore on my foot,” Mr. Stein confided. He bent down over 
it in the back of the cab, so that the driver couldn’t see him. He wanted to 
unwrap the bandages and look to see if the fur and nails were still there. 
Wasn’t there fur and nails on the foot this morning? He lifted a yellowing 
brow up over the seat; the driver was straining to look in the mirror. Again, 
the terror. Maybe Sammy had sent him. No; it was the time with Benny 
in the bathtub; that’s where he was from.

“Maybe you have a sore foot?” Mr. Stein asked hopefully.

“Naw.” The driver’s tone suggested that a sore foot was just one more 
among the many things he did not have.

Mr. Stein poked at the foot with the tip of his cane.

“Maybe you oughta see a doctor, huh?”

Mr. Stein snorted.


Doctors. So what good? Did they help Benny? As soon as he saw what 
was what, he sent him with Harold in the Buick to the Cleveland Clinic. He 
sent with him also a signed blank check and one-thousand dollars in cash. A 
week later standing in the office they told them there was nothing they could 
do for the sickness from Africa. From Africa? “I have money,” he said, 
“Take all I have,” but they said it wasn’t that, there just wasn’t anything 
they could do. The fever was gone and there wasn’t anything to do but wait 
and see. So they carried Benny to the Buick and took him home. After that 
there were other clinics; but they couldn’t do anything either.

Doctors.

Mr. Stein sighed and gave up on the foot. “You heard about my auction?” 
he asked the driver.

“What’s that?”

“I’m auctioning off the business,” Mr. Stein lied, I am taking my son and 
going to Florida.”

“Yeah? Boy, that sure is the life.” The driver rubbed the orange bristles 
on his chin and contemplated something outside on the street.

“You didn’t read about the auction?”

The driver shrugged and rearranged his bare large hands on the still cold 
wheel; the khaki army jacket had bunched up on his forearms. Mr. Stein 
puzzled his ignorance, why hadn’t he heard about the auction? He pictured 
how it would be, comparing it to the time when his competitor of thirty years 
ago, Levy, had finally sold and went away with his wife to—where was it?— 
California. Mr. Stein remembered fondly the noise and activity, the big 
shot buyers from Akron, even the newspapers sent a reporter. He took a 
statement from Levy, him standing there, his bald head sweating nervously 
beneath the ceiling fans. “The city has been good to me for which I’m grateful, 
believe me. But there comes a time a man should. . .” “How many years 
in business, Mr. Levy?” And Levy reflected this, tapping his ringed fingers 
on a well-filled vest. Even Mr. Stein, in a flush of excitement, bought a car- 
load more than he planned. So what? It sold.

There comes a time. . .” Mr. Stein began to address the driver.

“You wanna be left off at the store or the restaurant?”

“Who?”

“Where you wanna go?”

Mr. Stein thought a minute. What time was it? The auction wasn’t until 
eleven. “Pauley’s.” he said, “take me to Pauley’s.” Each morning Mr. Stein 
stopped at Pauley’s for breakfast. He used to go only for lunch but that was 
before Sofie died. After that, he went for breakfast and lunch, walking the 
two blocks between his store and the restaurant painfully, nodding with 


exaggerated dignity to the other merchants who greeted the familiar hunched 
over probing shape as he passed their windows. Usually he wasn’t hungry; 
he had his pears and tea before.

But that was it—part of the reason he would not heed Sammy and Harold 
who wanted him to go to Florida. Here he was known, here he was respected. 
Only a week before the store was closed down—when was that, 
how many weeks now?— Johnson, from the bank, offered him a cigar in 
Pauley’s. "Fifty-five years in business? My God, that’s remarkable,” Johnson 
said, “Here, allow me. Eighty-five years old? Well, well. They don’t 
make them today like they used to.”

They had reached the main street, Lincoln Street.

“See that?” Mr. Stein tapped upward with the cane against the window, 
“You know what that is?”

“Yeah, you showed me that before.”

They cruised past the Stein building, now a supermarket. The brownstone 
letters towering four stories above the squat downtown of Millersburg, were 
nearly eroded. Mr. Stein had fought to save it, built in ’twenty-eight, but no 
one helped, so what could he do himself? Sammy was gone, Benny was already 
crippled, Harold wouldn’t co-operate, and Dov already was a joke. 
So it was lost to the bank, Johnson at that time had nothing to do with it, 
a good man, Johnson, and not so bad cigars either. From that time on Mr. 
Stein rented. Harold had wanted him to leave then, go to Cleveland, maybe, 
where things were said to be better, but Mr. Stein said no, he belonged here, he 
wasn’t beaten yet.

In front of the restaurant, the driver pushed the flag down and looked back, 
rather skeptically, at Mr. Stein. “That’ll be one-thirty-five.” Suddenly Mr. 
Stein remembered that he didn’t have any money. The day before he had 
trudged to a neighbor’s house to borrow a dollar for milk; then he had called 
Harold to tell him he disgraced his father before strangers. Who could he 
borrow from here?

“Put it on my account,” Mr. Stein said.

“Now you know I can't do that.”

Mr. Stein spread his hands out dramatically and rolled his eyes. “No 
money, I haven’t got money.”

“No money?”

Mr. Stein wagged his head and slapped his hands down on his knees, “Nosir, 
nothing!”

“Well now, you can’t go riding around in a man’s cab without no money. 
I think I’m just gone to take you home.” First Mr. Stein wailed; then he 
thought. Finally, he took off his wrist watch and offered it over the seat.


The driver held it in front of his face and sniffed. “Now what am I gone 
to do with this?” he demanded.

“Collateral,” Mr. Stein said, “you keep it for collateral.”

The building had been the bank’s collateral; but even his word alone was 
good enough. Marcus Stein’s word was always good, and Mr. Stein told the 
driver so.

“Oh jee-sus, all right,” the driver said and reached over the seat and opened 
the back door. “Say, I was wondering, that boy of youn. He sure is crippled 
up; how’d he ever get crippled up like that?”

Mr. Stein struggled with his legs again to gain the sidewalk. Once there 
he leaned back in towards the driver, his arm extended. The driver watched 
in fascination as Mr. Stein’s short tapered fingers closed together until the 
nearly transparent ends held a minute wrinkled section of space. Mr. Stein’s 
eyes bulged out under the yellow brows with the intelligence. “A mosquito,” 
he said, “like that. A curse on my life.”

“A mosquita?” the driver asked, astonished; but Mr. Stein, his overcoat 
dangling at his ankles, was already probing his way across the sidewalk, through 
the falling snow, a blind crab holding to the shore.

Mr. Stein left the restaurant where he had been dozing —how long he did 
not know— and walked up the snow-clogged street. Everywhere the snow 
was dark with the industrial grime of the town. Although a few Christmas 
decorations had been put up, they could not dispel the gloom and commercial 
decay of the main street. Half of the store rooms were empty, the “For Lease” 
signs lay on the floors behind the windows. No new merchants would fill 
them; one by one, the old ones had sold out, moved, retired, died. The new 
ones went to the shopping centers in the Heights.

Once the Merchants Association talked about making the street into a 
mall. They had asked Mr. Stein and the owner to tear down the marque, 
but he ordered them out of the store. He liked it, even admired it. It stretched 
along the entire front length of the building, a romanesque structure with milk 
glass insets. And, above it, towering vertically along the building face, the 
sign he had salvaged from his own building, the one the bank took, which 
proclaimed STEIN’S in large block letters reading downward. The letters 
were painted a deep burgandy on a white background edged in black, and 
electric lightbulbs outlined each one.

It had not been turned on for several years, and the bulbs broke and rusted 
in the sockets and most of the paint had flaked away.

Mr. Stein recognized his store when he saw the sign looming ahead in 
the snowfall, but he was disappointed; when he had thought of the auction, 
he had imagined it lighted and winking. He struggled on until he reached 
the foyer.


Where were the people?

The windows, the foyer, the interior, everything, was empty. Mr. Stein 
felt his way along the store window to the door and found the notice of 
attachment which he had made one trip before to see. He could only read the 
largest print at the top —BAILIFF’S SALE— but that was enough. Sherman, 
who ran the dry goods store next door, had read the date and time to 
him.

Could he have made a mistake? Come too early? Or worse, it was over 
and he had missed it. If Sammy found out, he would laugh. And Benny, 
that bastard, would tell him; for that he could talk all right. He felt for his 
wristwatch, but it wasn’t there. Where was it? What was the time? But 
the clock in the restaurant. . .

Ach! People were coming.

Several men entered the foyer, overcoats turned up against the snow and 
came towards the door. They stopped in front of him.

“Pardon me.”

“Who?”

“Could you let us at the door? We have to get in.”

Mr. Stein stepped backward and flattened himself against the showcase 
window; his body shook with anger and fear. The men towered over him, 
faces hidden by overcoats and the darkness of the winter afternoon.

Who sent them, he wondered, Sammy?

“Stein!” The shortest figure, a bearlike man with a head set forward on 
a tilt from the shoulders, dusted the snowflakes from his Chesterfield and took 
off his hat. Grossman.

Grossman owned the discount store in the new plaza; he had come in 
after the war and made a killing on TV’s and appliances. Mr. Stein and 
Grossman had quarreled over seats for the high holidays in the synagogue. 
They had taken the seats away from Mr. Stein when he hadn’t paid his dues, 
but he insisted they belonged to him and not the newcomer. And when he 
wept to Gladys over the telephone she said it wasn’t really the seats they were 
quarreling about and that he should pay his dues like anyone else. That time 
they didn't speak to each other for a month. Finally, on a Sunday, she brought 
a nice roast chicken with potatoes and it was all right again.

The bailiff unlocked the door. He was a young man who wore glasses 
with clear frames which slid down on his nose. “Stein?” he asked Grossman 
who shrugged, “It’s not necessary for you to be here, Mr. Stein.” But Mr. 
Stein muttered something about this being his store, and the bailiff coughed 
embarassedly and went in. Grossman and the other one followed and Mr. 
Stein followed them and shut the door behind him.


Inside, the storeroom was barren except for a thin line of washing machines, 
a refrigerator and odd pieces of furniture stretched across the middle. The 
mezzanine had sometime ago been walled up with plastic sheeting by the 
landlord to save heat. The former office located in the rear with glass enclosures 
which stated in stenciled lettering the terms of credit—easy—had 
been abandoned, and in its place Benny and Mr. Stein had built a kind of 
fortress with some files, a safe and two wooden desks. They had spent an 
entire day, morning to night, doing this, the crippled son on crutches and 
the humped over father tugging and pulling the things down the center of 
the floor. There they were close to the merchandise and out of the dark unlit 
rear of the storeroom. There was an office chair for Mr. Stein and a stuffed 
easy chair for Benny and a waste basket beside it where he discarded half- 
eaten fruit. Even now the area smelled of rotting banana peels.

Grossman plopped himself down in the chair, his feet straight out and 
propped up on their heels; the bailiff half-sat on Benny’s desk. The other 
one —who was he?— stood beside Grossman. Mr. Stein was still walking 
towards them; as he approached, the bailiff had begun to mutter through the 
legal recitation. “. . . in and for the county of Newark. . he was saying.

Mr. Stein stood in front of them and pounded the floor with his cane 
and stared at Grossman, “What do you bid?” he demanded. The other one, 
who stood beside Grossman, cackled. The bailiff chewed his lip and considered. 
“Mr. Stein, perhaps you don’t understand. This merchandise is the property 
of the court. I’m selling for the court, not you.”

“I know the law,” Mr. Stein said with dignity.

“Well, then, let’s continue. . .” The bailiff fumbled with the paper 
and began reading again.

“Who’s he?” Mr. Stein interrupted pointing at the other one, the one 
who stood beside Grossman.

“You never met Joey?” Grossman bellowed. “My son Joey. Say how- 
dayado to Marcus Stein, Joey.” “ Of Stein and Company,” he added generously 
and fished a cigar from his pocket.

Mr. Stein executed a peculiar little curtsy and made a movement to shake 
hands, but Joey looked upward at the sealed up mezzanine. “How do you do,” 
he said. Mr. Stein spread his hands and grimaced. The bailiff continued 
reading. Joey occupied himself with a festering pimple on his cheek. Mr. 
Stein could not see this, but he could see the essential outlines of the other one, 
and he compared his own sons at the age of twenty.

Three men. Not like this, skinny like a cat with a sick face, and the 
big adam’s apple, but tall, like Sofie’s family, all of them, and good looking 
with black curly hair, even Benny once. The girls went crazy for them. On 


Sundays they drove past the store on Lincoln Street in the Buick, from the 
house on Maple Road. Becky wore a white dress. Once a month to his sister’s 
in Cleveland where his father lived with the books.

“Four hundred fifty, the lot,” Grossman said.

Was it Benny, yelling in the back of the store? Falling down in the 
bathroom?

“Just sign here, Mr. Grossman. . .”

Becky wore a white dress, he told her: you’re a rich man’s daughter. . .

“Four hundred fifty, your check, Mr. Grossman. . .”

He stood in the zoological gardens in London gripping the bars of the 
cage, inside the monkeys scampered and grinned sticking their flaming buttocks 
up at him, and Sofie cried, oi Marcus! pointing down with her parasol 
and he looked down and there he saw in place of the patent leather shoes he 
had purchased for the photograph to be sent to the parents in Bucharest, the 
feet of an animal fur and horny nails, sore and infested with lice, . .

“My check is good. Four hundred fifty. . .”

Mr. Stein’s wail pierced the dark storeroom and rolled down the flapping 
plastic. “Ruin-ing me,” He sobbed, “your bastard four hundred.”

The bailiff chewed the temple piece of his glass frames, his nose covered 
with sweat.

“Fifty thousand, I paid my father cash into his hand and bought him 
out. Me!”

The other one, Joey, looked at his nails, his lips wet and black. The 
adam’s apple worked up and down, “What did you expect? A fortune? 
Personally, I wouldn’t put this borax on the floor. A special maybe.”

He had stood there smirking, Mr. Stein’s father, his gold-rimmed glasses 
perched on the wings of his nose, gray goatee twitching, fingering the bag 
of money from the bank. He could go back to his books, now, to the studies. 
He was no businessman, Mr. Stein thought with contempt. In the back Benny 
and Harold, schoolboys still helping with deliveries, stood silent now with 
wide eyes. Mr. Stein had thrown into his reluctant hands, against the dare, 
the bag.

Should I count it, Marcus?

Leave me in peace, do I need you?

Your children should become such vipers. He picked up his hat, You. 
You want, you will be someone, but you are no more than dung.

“Strictly low-end,” said Joey.

Mr. Stein raised his cane high in the air against the mocking black smile, 
screaming with the downward curve, and the knotted sheets parted: Benny 
was falling, falling from a secret bedroom, thumping against the siding, 


nicking away the fresh paint with his elbows, yelling Papa Papa Papa and 
crashed away into the night. Sofie looking from the window past the 
smiling lilacs towards the darkness said kindly, my wounded bird.

Gladys saw the ambulance light revolving from the top of the hill and 
the cluster of people. She charged through the stoplight and pulled her 
stationwagon up across the street. She jumped out without parking it, 
pulled a scarf over her curlers and ran across the street. The waitress was 
standing there shivering, arms folded around herself, and said when she recognized 
the granddaughter, “I called as soon as he left, I did,” but Gladys said, 
“That's all right,” and pushed past her. Inside Grossman, hat in hand, 
approached her, shrugging nervously. "An old man. . .” he said emphatically.

The police had put the body on a stretcher and covered it with a blanket. 
They had tucked the cane and one lost shoe underneath it. Only the bad 
foot stuck out, clumsily wound with gauze. Before they took him away, she 
covered it up.


MARY F. DAVIS

Obit

I think again my friend

About the calf's liver and sauerkraut 
That we were going to wash someplace 
Away from here where piety 
Prohibits public beer.

And we who lived

On promise of some joy—

I heard us saying

That will be the dinner

We will see the day

Together we will celebrate

This vigor of ourselves, e'clat

Of what we know, our derivation

From the wit of all this time, ourselves 
The belch of progress, precipitate of earth 
In silks and wools. My God the swath 
We would have cut elongate

In some beauty that we all 
Could smell.

We were so

Democratic,

The brightness of our slander

Our grieving

Of the small and deafened ear

The cool of safety in an every day,

And sitting at a dirty drugstore

Counter with our coffee, how we whooped 
It up, the perjury

Of body on this soul.

They lived with furs

Beneath them on the promise of the night, 
And I would put, I had it planned,

My pied fox hat

Where you could touch it

Tender to the fingers

After eyes of you had burst 
And you were only nearly 
That time very dead.


JEFF BLYTH
JEFF BLYTH



RICK STERRY

Figure without caption.

Figure without caption.

MITCHELL BLOOMFIELD

The Mongoloid Child Watches Kite Flying

Bobble-headed in the press of air 
she lolls across the field 
to where the lovers stand 
and launch the tissued frame; 
threatening ravage, the wind 
sails it out in a tangent line 
whipping out yards of cord 
searing fingertips;

she trembles, 
limbs knock, one crosspiece 
on another. She traces drowzily 
the taut and sunbleached curve of cord 
reaching to 
metallic red 
and green 
shattered vowels 
printed on the sky 
flutter 
skeeter sideways 
somersault in 
tossled March 
tethered by a will she cannot comprehend 
Where does kite yearn 
the kite yearns upward to the bubbling air.


One half hour and two hundred threaded feet 
spent in the bluster

They agree to cut the string.

Her eye rolls down the knife edge and the pits 
Where sunwash eddies in and faints away 
the meaning sinking in: a cleaver;

freedom!

the severed cord!

she grins; the tardy tongue 
a snail, wriggles from its shell 
but then: 
seeing the tissued thing 
stricken in a stomach-churning 
drop from heights 
cut off from all sustanance, 
she chokes 
reels away in dumb-circles 
cowers beneath the inverted sky 
and gropes for home.


JAMES BERTOLINO

Fire Sale

In rummaging thru life

I accepted bribe money 
from car thieves

though 
mother was pleased 
with her blank idiot 
said I was better'n any petunias 
grown by herself 
or death

besides

dad worked

even when he fumbled fingers 
at buttons

and did yesterday's weeping

and later

I thought manfully about sex 
hugging a water-cooled 
pneumatic drill 
still clearing

uncle Frank-the-Captain's throat

I'll tell ya

but don't be difficult 
under the musk 
of a mind in new lodgings 
cause

for some of them

my urine is medicine!


Employed

I quit my job this morning.

They couldn't understand

ducks

rippling across my mind, 
from shore to weeds and back 
or down for grub.

What's more I didn't care 
for their caring to keep me 
behind a counter. Blue

moving into green on the hills 
and the black snake

with red stripes the length of its body

stretch my eyes

beyond books,

tell me I'm right,

I'm right.


A Second

The breath 
of strange feet 
on my stair

wrinkles 
the tissue

and for a second 
I die

on the stool.


DEBORAH ROBINSON

April's Love

You said "my love" like I am when you came home from your 
"date"

when you wired your box-voice into my idiot house.

You dared to call me "love"

and make demands.

Dared to say you want me.

I, wearing my black hat 
wearing my teeth like bones 
wearing a poem that hates you, 
you dared to ask for soap and me.

I loved you until you kissed the plasticene cunts.

I loved you until you became weak 
until you needed two cunts five cunts 
so many cunts your cock turned black.

You asked had I gone out.

You asked that!

O sure. So I could walk around with my bouncing eyes 
expecting to leap upon you naked and sperming on her 
body and say hi.

Hi, love, perhaps.

I'm going to pull the chicken wire out of myself.

Bite my fingernails.

Tie hair on your moles.

Jab rocks between your toes.

I'm going to chew all the hair from your butt.

I'm going to run to the ocean wearing herringbone 
flaunting my sex 
stroke my body into a dress 
paint my mouth 

grow fat and bleed to death.


ROBERT VANDER MOLEN

Position #32

Position #32

She said

And I grunted

Beginning to dream

Of a stagecoach and me

Wearing black to my toes

She said I couldn't tell her

I said fine


Fishing with Jake

The water dropped steep right away

A few feet from shore

On the end of the stubby dock

Fireflies invisible

In the morning with drapes still pulled

And cars in drives

Where he rented the water south of Holland

Cottages

And in the lake a fishermen gas station

Where we stop before running the channel

The sun risen across state

And Jake having called the weather station

At the coast guard base

Stares out to sea with his hand on the motor


CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

CHARLES WRIGHT is a Tennesseean who teaches in the Writing Center of the 
University of California at Irvine. "Private Madrigal" will be included in The 
Dream Animal, his next book of poetry, due in June from House of Anasi, Toronto. 
WILLIAM PITT ROOT, whose first book of poetry will be released sometime in 
early 1969 by Atheneum, has published in "The Atlantic," "The Nation," "New 
Yorker," "Beloit Poetry Journal" and "Lillabulero." He is a 1968-69 Stanford 
Creative Writing Fellow.

GEORGE HITCHCOCK is a widely published San Francisco poet and editor of 
"Kayak."

BRENDON GALVIN is a doctoral student in English at University of Massachusetts. 
His poems have appeared in "The Atlantic," "Prairie Schooner," "Malahat 
Review," "West Coast Review," and others. He has poems forthcoming in "Massachusetts" 
and "Hudson" Reviews.

ROBERT VANDER MOLEN is 21. His first book of poetry, Blood Ink, was published 
last year by Zeitgeist Press. His second book will appear by the same press 
in September. He is now hoping to find a publisher for his first novel.

JAMES BERTOLINO is 25 and lives with his wife in Oregon. He recently finished 
in anthology of Pacific Northwest Poets published by Quixote Press. His own work 
is currently appearing in "Quartet," "Northwest Review," "Trace," and "the 
goodly co."

DANNY RENDLEMEN lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, is 22 years old, and 
is a student at Central Michigan University.

MARY DAVIS lives in East Lansing, Michigan.

WILLIAM MATTHEWS is co-editor of "Lillabulero." He has poems coming up 
in "Kayak," "Quarterly Review of Literature," "Shenandoah," "Kumquat" and 
others. The Winter 1969 issue of "Tennessee Poetry Journal" will be a William 
Matthews issue. He'll be teaching writing at Wells College, Aurora, New York, 
next fall.

DOBIE PASCO is an artist from East Lansing. This is his first publication. 
WILLIAM NAGY is a philosophy major at Michigan State. His poems have appeared 
in recent issues of "Red Cedar Review."

DOUGLAS BLAZEK is a San Francisco poet who edits Open Skull Press. He has 
published widely and appeared in the last issue of "Red Cedar Review."

JANE FRINK is a social worker in Saginaw, Michigan. This is her first publication. 
JAMES WELCH is a Blackfoot Indian from Missoula, Montana, where he is doing 
graduate work at the University of Montana. His poems are scheduled to appear 
sometime this spring in "Poetry."

RICK STERRY has returned from a year of teaching at Otaru University on the 
island of Hokkaido in Japan. He hopes to be camping in the woods of Nova 
Scotia when his first novel, Over the Fence, is released this June by Houghton 
Mifflin.

MITCHELL BLOOMFIELD, a native of Athens, Ohio, is a graduate student in 
English Literature at Michigan State.

DEBORAH ROBINSON is also from Mount Pleasant, is also a student at Central 
Michigan University and is in love with Daniel Rendleman.

JUSTIN KESTENBAUM is an Associate Professor in History at Michigan State. 
His photography has previously appeared in "Red Cedar Review."


STAFF

EDITOR Craig Sterry

FICTION Brian Slaymaker

TECHNICAL ASSISTANTS Peggy Case

Etta Abrahams