GUEST EDITOR: GLORIA FRYM
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FEATURED WRITER: MARY VOLMER
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VERY LIKE THE TRUTH
Once upon a time when cell division was a term used only in relation to segregated jail houses, Alfreda P. Warren crossed Grover's Street in Bellevue, North Carolina to get a closer look at the frilly blue bonnet in the window of Markinson's Clothing Store.
Had the good citizens of Bellevue been warned that Alfreda was a visitor to this place, that she had no idea that there was a difference between the right side of the street, as one faces south, and the left side of the street, as one faces south, well it probably wouldn't have made a bit of difference. Her shoes, on this particular day, were brown suede kick-alongs good for walking, but did not match the cottony blue frills of her dress, nor compliment the wide brim hat that angled around her head in an orbital manner.
Orbit was not a new word at the time, but the photographic evidence of the heavenly phenomena certainly was new and exciting, causing quite a stir in the Physics department of Bellevue State College, ten blocks west on Grover, and three blocks south on Manchester. Over the past few years studies of probability and statistics in physical systems had been taking a back seat to new photographic technology, much to the dismay of Dr. Fenny Winslow, a numbers man with a scorn for the visually inclined. For capturing images of planets easily displayed to the ordinary public had the odd effect of at once making the least literate man proud of human ingenuity, and frightening the most educated, Dr. Fenny for instance, for his sudden insignificance in the whole grand scheme of things--a scheme that became, with a photo of Saturn, its rings surrounding the wood grain swirls of atmosphere, less a matter of human theory (we think therefore…), and more a matter of human irrelevance (We need not have thought, for it--many its--exist with or with out our contemplation).
But, Alfreda P. Warren would never see the image of Saturn whose rings matched the manner in which she wore her hat. She waited patiently on the right side of the street as one faces south, for her cousin Jeff who was late. Jeff, having lived in Bellevue his entire life, and having known from infancy the difference between the right side of the street, as one faces south, and the left side of the street, as one faces south, did not think to warn his cousin about the customs of the place, for they were not customs at all to Jeff, or anyone else who called Bellevue home. Things were the way they were, and this was normal, and normal certainly didn't need an explanation, certainly didn't need to be taught. Not like Darwinian theory, the specialty of Dr. Neal Standson two doors down, but in the same hall as the physicists. Bellevue was only a small state college after all, with only one ivy-covered building belonging to those silly individuals in the Humanities department. Dividing the sciences into different buildings had not yet been deemed necessary, though the competition for funding was already causing tension.
Biologists, who for years were slicing and dicing dead things in order to study life, and the physicists who claimed to care nothing for life but did nothing theses days but search for it beyond the confines of the Earth, had begun to adjust to the fact that more and more funding was being allotted merely on the basis of utility. Can it be bought? For how much? Biologists had always had an advantage in discovering useful things, penicillin being the shining star (so to speak) of the new market of mass produced antibiotics. Physicists, well, they laid claim to theory and numbers, and now to a picture of a planet whose rings matched the hat of the woman crossing over to the right side of Grover street as one faces south, to look at the frilly blue bonnet in Markinson's shop window.
Mrs. Markinson was the first to see her, standing as she was by the stockings hanging upon the wall closest to the big glass display window, but did not notice anything strange, at first. Perhaps it was the glare of the sun, jutting over the Smoke Shack on the other side of the street, blinding her to color. In which case, she would not have seen how delicately the ruffle of Alfreda P. Warren's skirt accented the blue of her blouse, or that her shoes matched neither blouse nor skirt. She would not have noticed the white of her wide hat, or that her skin was, in fact, a rich ochre brown.
What she saw was an elegant silhouette of a woman, just now reaching the sidewalk on the right side of the road as one faces south. What she saw was a man approaching behind this woman, swinging his arms as if they were propelling his body instead of his legs. She likely thought it was her son George, named for her husband's father, a name she didn't like, but didn't bother disputing. (Arguments to Mrs. Markinson were a horrendous waste of time, which is why she never joined in when her husband and son faced off against one another at the dinner table. Discussions they called them, even though the vein on her husband's temple would start to thump and his face would turn another shade of hypertensive red). Her hand went to her heart, thinking if her son was moving this fast, something must be wrong, and she was right, something was wrong. She was wrong. The man approaching the woman in the wide brimmed hat, was not her son. He was Earnest Longview, a thirty-something man, who in three years would run for sheriff and lose without ever considering that this day had anything to do with that loss. In his hand was a brick he picked up two blocks down where masons were building Harrison's Shoe store. (Still there today, selling Lebron James' first edition NIKES for one hundred and twenty seven dollars, the exact amount of money that Earnest Longview has just buried in his wife's petunia patch. He didn't trust banks. He didn't trust the law either, which is probably why he was walking so quickly with a brick in his hand, toward the woman with the orbital hat whose hand is now reaching for the door of Markinson's).
Now coincidence is not an idea scientists cater to. Coincidence is merely an event the causes of which have yet t to be discovered. Still, Dr. Fenny Winslow was not about to disregard the bit of luck that brought him back into the forefront of scientific thought, and coincidentally united the two contrary disciplines of Biology and Physics. It was a day of compromise, of unity, of reconciliation between the sciences as Dr. Fenny Winslow, physics chair and numbers man, walked into the office of Dr. Neal Standson (marveling no doubt at the smell of fulmagohide, and the sheer number of stuffed and gutted animals suspended in jars and pinned onto corkboards) to propose a joint project. "The human skull," he said by way of introduction, "has volume and weight."
Dr. Neal Standson nodded his head, but he was still thinking about his wife's birthday two days away, and how he never knows how she'll react these days to the gifts he brings home. The change, his mother told him in explanation. Dr. Standson, of course, knew about change. As an evolutionary biologist, Dr. Standson had been studying change and difference his entire life, but never in humans as Dr. Winslow proposed just a few seconds before Mrs. Markinson noticed that the elegant lady with her hand on the door was not a lady as she imagined, but a black woman, and the man approaching behind this woman, was not her son after all, but that scallion Earnest Longview with a brick in his hand. Mrs. Markinson would never wonder if she screamed at the black woman opening her door on the right side of the street as one faces south, or at the man bringing the brick down upon the head of the black woman opening the door. And Dr. Fenny Winslow, and Dr. Neal Standson would only scowl at the unfortunate dent in the back of this scull, wondering if they should report this detail in their notes, if the volume of this skull, removed now from the orbital hat so like the picture of Saturn on the wall behind them, would be very much altered by this dent.
In the end they decided to omit the detail, filling the skull with birdshot, comparing it to the skull of a recently deceased soldier, an orphan back from France, who, after serving his country, was now serving science. In the end Alfreda P. Warren's cousin Jeff did not press charges, did not even consider it, in truth, as relieved as he was that the Markinson's were not going to charge him for their store-front window, now shattered by the body of Alfreda P. Warren whose head landed, finally, just to the left of that pretty blue bonnet. He was forced only to buy the bonnet, blood stained now with the his cousin's blood, which he keeps, stain and all, in a trunk by the foot of his bed, along side an article linking skull size (in volume) to racial superiority.
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Mitosis
You were my symbiont,
the Prokaryote swimming through my cytoplasm-
you were the pigment that made the sun
a useful son of a bitch.
You were the Ribosomes on my
endoplasmic reticulum,
you were my golgi body,
the RNA coded for my DNA,
we were the code's expression.
We were the chromatid before the split,
strengthened by the centriols
before the spindle pulled us apart to the poles-
joined under one phospholipid
membrane.
She was the enzyme that stopped the reaction,
the mutation in the double helix,
endless variation interrupted by
an irrational impurity,
the unseen force behind
the crossing over.
So I sit
23 genes and no legs to stand on,
a nucleus without nucleic acid,
adenine without thymine,
a discarded victim
of natural
selection .
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FEATURED WRITER: KATE COLBY
Kate Colby lives in San Francisco, where she recently completed an MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts. She is a grant writer and curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and The LAB arts center, and is a volunteer writing tutor at Oasis, an organization supporting young women in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Bombay Gin, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Five Fingers Review, Shampoo, commonweal, 580 Split and Aufgabe.
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LIPONYM
They were busily painting them red.
They felt the thorns of it and her in their sides recalling the crown of and its disembodied
purposes bleeding like hearts in the dust, while he again, not the queen, though she always did prefer to hide in rubies; she has no use for fickle diamonds.
They wondered if he asked if they were red or white.
Was it the long-stems, her cheeks, the wine, the slow dancing
and she wears colored glasses? The shade of itself is neither
here nor there and have you ever really seen one that color,
anyway, but no one's dared to say:
the same and
same and
similarly different referent
is a (is a) same
by any other name.
She's out for blood. Seeing red. They'll keep quiet and their heads.
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A LOOMING DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER - PDF
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FEATURED WRITER: TERESA BURNS GUNT
Teresa recently completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lynx Eye and Mary On-Line Journal. Her story Magic Fingers was a finalist in the Phoebe 2004 Winter Fiction Contest. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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WAKE
They're all watching to see how I'm bearing up. But I keep my eyes straight ahead, stare past their faces painted with make-up and false grief. Faces that were always quick to avert their eyes from the black and blue face I wore to town too many times. Only old Molly Greer who cleans the church ever looked at me, her narrowed blue eyes punctuating the obvious question, "Why don't you leave?"
She's part of the busyness of women now, managing the cakes, chicken casseroles and fruit salads--gifts to sustain me. But I have no appetite. The women's voices drift overhead, complaints about the weather as if today should be anything but hot. They keep shooing the orange striped cat I've been feeding on the sly. I start to tell them to let her be, but I can't make my lips form the words and Elsie Barnes puts her out. I just sit in silence, in the rocking chair I'd intended for holding children and watch them, back and forth, their low-heeled pumps tick tapping against my scratched wooden floor. I look beyond their dyed hair-do's, out the window to the flat horizon. The long gravel track from my house points to the main road, where my mailbox tilts to north from its own run-ins with his drunkenness. Just yesterday I dreaded the fall of the sun to suppertime. How I hated the sound of those tires coming home. No more.
His friends from the plant crowd the dining room, smoking and lifting glasses, inventing sloppy eulogies, embellishing memories of a man I can not recognize. After Paul was in the ground, they were all quick to offer their condolences for my loss. But my loss isn't him.
Father Thomas is flushed from the heat and the sherry. He pats his protruding belly and shouts false protests as Trudy Johnson hands him a slice of her cake. She tells him the service was, "Lovely. Just right." As if he feels me watching he turns, his black eyes hooded by ragged eyebrows catch mine and widen. He looks quickly away and tugs at the Roman collar around his neck. When he looks back at me he's wearing his made for mourning face.
After I lost the baby, I'd whispered to him in the dark confessional that I was afraid Paul would kill me, too. "Now, now," the priest had clucked, "You know it was nobody's fault. These things happen." He'd called it God's Will and reminded me of my duty, to be subject in everything to my husband in order to achieve a state of grace, or risk eternal damnation. The very thing my mother taught me from her own knowledge of a living hell. Be a silent member of the flock, something fixed, like a church pew for sitting on. I never went to Father Thomas for Confession again, though we went to Mass every Sunday. Paul passed the plate. I wonder again if Paul ever confessed, his hands throbbing from the work of ensuring my subjection. What did the priest ask of him?
I occupy myself with counting the people coming and going in their somber black dresses and suits. Every time someone passes through the screen door, under Jesus hanging resigned on the cross, I lose my place and begin again. It helps me hold down the sound I've kept trapped in my lungs, growing louder and louder all day.
I wish they'd all go. And take their simpering smiles with them. They all just came to have a sniff around. Free coffee and cake. His friend Jake puts his coffee cup down on my best tablecloth, the one my Grandmother made long ago for my "hope chest." I can feel the stain his cup burns into the now yellowed lace.
Through the window, I see the cat where she lays under the hot, white sun and stretches. Rolling on her skinny back, wrestling with shadows, then a passing moth. My hands ache and I realize I'm clutching them together, tight in my lap, twisting the wedding band that grips the flesh of my finger. I wonder if I'll have to cut it off. It's hard to breathe in this house, with these people, his people, whom I've lived beside, an outsider all my married life. The wooden screen door bangs shut as someone leaves. Footsteps thunder down the porch's wooden steps, and the cat jumps up, arching her back in indignation. I feel pride for the way she ruffles her fur and leaves.
Molly crouches her willow thin body beside my chair, her fingers soft on my wrist, asking in a whisper if there's anything I need. Her blue eyes hold mine and she nods as if to say, don't worry, they'll be gone soon. And for a moment I clutch her hand.
"Yes," I say, "open a window. Please." She has to pound her gnarled fist against the jamb before it swings open. A breath of air fills the room lifting up all my history that dusts the surface of this narrow place. His house.
"I need some air," I say. My voice is high and their chatter quiets. Two pairs of hands seize my arms to help me up, as if I'm ancient, as if I'm broken. I shudder out of their grip and hurry through the gap they make in the smoke-stale room. I slip out the door, let it fall softly behind me and hurry down the front steps to follow a cat's path over my sun-warmed gravel, follow a brown moth's spiral into my bleached clean sky.
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FEATURED WRITER: LEWIS WARSH
Lewis Warsh is the author of three novels, Agnes & Sally, A Free Man, and Ted's Favorite Skirt, two books of stories, and numerous books of poems, including The Origin of the World and Avenue of Escape. He co-edited with Anne Waldman the historically important Angel Hair Anthology which includes work by some of the best New York School poets. He is Associate Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn.
email: lwarsh@mindspring.com
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THIRD PARTY BILLING
Lewis Warsh
Aeschuylus might have said it
to his wife or mother
on a bitter day, stoking the fire with a tong
hung over, hung out to dry
a day of pigeon feathers
& unmarked tomb
Maybe he whispered it while everyone was sleeping
the cowgirls with their lariats
the brushfire which smelled like yams
*
One minute I was playing with my friends
in the gravel outside our house, sifting the rocks
through my fingers like old parchment. The next minute
I was on the running board of a Studebaker, watching the chrome
horse glide over the mountains. The brakes
didn't work & we went over the edge.
That's where they found us, with our heads intertwined.
*
There are other beginnings
no less startling, but starting out
the pavement disappears
under a thicket, the clouds are
the consistency of brick,
a mirror image floats in a puddle.
The clouds flail above linoleum strips.
The lemons ripen as we speak.
There's a cherry on
top of the whipped cream in the glass
the waiter just brought you if you hadn't
noticed but now you're saying you ordered
something different & they should take
it back.
*
Thoughts in my head like
radio static, like twisted wire.
At the bottom of a swamp
looking up at the light.
Swimming out too far until
you can't touch bottom.
Floating on my back with
the sun in my eyes. Going
under, staying under,
until you can no longer breathe.
The blanket makes hills over my knees.
Who can sleep?
*
All eyes are on the woman
at the top of the staircase.
Mess things up so you have something
to complain about later.
Maybe she's down at the bar,
having a nightcap.
Iranian influence in China via trade routes.
Tu Fu 712-770.
Back in France, he was notorious for having sex
with all his women models, but in Morocco he couldn't
even see their faces.
*
You gave someone else the time of day.
"For a casual night on the town…."you may
wear the merenguie-colored sweat socks.
Be careful whose ego you inflate without knowing it.
There's a killer in the middle of our dream
& it isn't me.
Then you rush forward, feet first, thought second.
Then you fall through the net in a lapse of attention.
Then you swim to the shallow end & swim back
without stopping. Now it's all you can do
to stay in one place for five minutes. And still,
for a short time, I will languish in your presence.
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KIT ROBINSON
Kit Robinson is the author of The Crave (Atelos), 9:15 (The Post-Apollo Press) and 15 other books of poetry. His work appears in Lingo mark(s) and Shampoo.
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THE GRAMERCY PARK
Much to say
more to write
still more to keep in the mind
Arkadii said that
I think that
in the cab on the way in from Kennedy
Cat licks paws in air shaft window
I hear scales
in adjoining room
Momentum builds up
over the course of
(a) one or two decades
(B) a seven game series
(c) the doors to Russia
have come off in time
Khorosho na ulitse
It's nice outside
the space between thoughts is enough