Why I’m okay with the C on my first French test, in thirteen footnotes

January 2019 | nonfiction

Because it takes two extra steps to add accents with my keyboard and I “don’t have that kind of time.”[1]

Because “I hate to tell you this, but I have a gun,”[2] and “Could you sound a little less angry?”[3] and “I’m telling you, watch out for that bitch.”[4]

Because, “[security officers] became suspicious when they saw the suspect following women through the store”[5] and “We’re so grateful for those who have stuck with us during this time. They know who they are.”[6] and “He’s still the best man I know.”[7]

Because, ‘When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.” [8]and “Is this judge a really good man? And he is. And by any measure he is.”[9]

Because fluent, cadenced nonsense used to tumble from my toddler’s mouth like birdsong.

Because “there are very fine people on both sides”[10] and “3,000 people did not die in Puerto Rico.”[11]

Because “when you finally realize that you do not need to understand everything said, you will know victory.”[12]

Because of the plane trees.

Because “Hey man, I feel like if you’re going to criticize this country, you know, you can just leave.”[13]

Because it’s so far away from everything I’ve ever known and also, it’s so far away from everything I’ve ever known.

Because I understand too much of my mother tongue.

My mother

tongue.

 

[1] Anne Lamott https://www.npr.org/2011/04/18/135517274/beyond-bunnies-the-real-meaning-of-easter-season.

[2] My assailant. December 15, 1989.

[3] Faculty Meeting, April 2012.

[4] Former Colleague, April 2017.

[5] https://www.thecabin.net/news/2012-06-13/vilonia-teacher-charged-harassment.

[6] Former friend, former Vilonia teacher, Facebook post.

[7] Former friend, former Vilonia teacher’s wife, e-mail correspondence.

[8]https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/california-professor-writer-of-confidential-brett-kavanaugh-letter-speaks-out-about-her-allegation-of-sexual-assault/2018/09/16/46982194-b846-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.49302c94c5ad

[9] https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/09/17/sen-hatch-says-christine/

[10] Donald Trump.

[11] Ibid.

[12] How to Get Really Good at French. Polyglot Language Learning, 2017.

[13] Overheard, University of Central Arkansas Fitness Center, September 11, 2018.

 

by Stephanie Vanderslice

Stephanie Vanderslice is a prose writer and creative writing professor at the University of Central Arkansas. Publications include Ploughshares Online, EasyStreet Online, So to Speak and many others, as well as several books such as The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life (Bloomsbury 2017).

A Poem Interrupted by AM Radio, New York City, 1985

January 2019 | poetry

When the radio blasted

over the art gallery,

and Jim Morrison crashed

my only reading in the Big Apple,

eyes of famous poets in the audience

averted from my broken smile,

I wasn’t there—I went way past the headlights,

out past unrecorded tribal rubric,

airwaves drumming through me,

flew to a hideout on my own back streets:

Schadhouser’s yard, 1953,

one sticky afternoon

we beat each other up

on the same wedge of dirt

my mother, a little girl, played

Hopscotch on in 1929

between Cronin’s barn and a paint peel

on the fence of a three-decker—

who knows who lived there—

Cid Corman maybe

who moped down Annabel

muttering blessings.

 

That afternoon, my smile might have

made you grimace, too.

It does me, as my fingerprints

corrode this yellowed polaroid

the hostess was so quick to shoot

before she unplugged “Riders on the Storm.”

My father’s gift for the rare

true smile and my grandmother—

cloud hair, morbidly soft skin,

and tyrannical—come back alive again,

come back to me

through this photograph of a shudder

and a trace of alleys and shame

in my disrupted line,

her only recorded history

when, circa nineteen-ten,

she took the hand of the one

who kicked this broken smile

down the staircase of the spine.

 

by Michael Daley

Michael Daley’s poems have appeared in APR, New England Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, North American Review, Gargoyle, Writer’s Almanac, and elsewhere. Awarded by Seattle Arts Commission, National Endowment of Humanities, Artist Trust, and Fulbright, his fourth collection of poetry, Of a Feather, was recently published. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.

Martha Catherine Brenckle

January 2019 | fiction, poetry

Phantom Limbs

When you burn your life down

to nothing

 

it takes a long time to rise

years of reaching out

 

With or without feathers, the sifting

through ashes, burnt bone, table legs

 

is difficult work: a shoe lace, a blue button, scraps of leaf colored silk

you don’t remember wearing

 

Memories you can’t recover, sing and itch like phantom limbs

you feel but cannot see

 

The eggs you crack for breakfast

held promise once

 

Home on Your Back

Every horizon is an invitation to start over

you remember this line as you make coffee

in the French press you unpacked earlier

you can’t remember who told you this

or if at the time it helped.

 

From the back porch, you look east

to the yet unopened sky

partially blocked with shrill green needles

huge pale gray clouds hover overhead

a hint of pale yellow showing through

you will see morning before light sparkles across the marsh

with its smells of sawgrass, earth, decay

 

not what your roots know.

Anxiously your toes curl

origins thin and pale under the balls of your feet

crimped inside your soul, not ready to dig down

to connect the familiar

with the unfamiliar

 

Behind you, boxes sit unopened

full of kitchen things wrapped in newspapers

furniture pushed into empty spaces

you will trip over chairs for weeks

until muscle memory takes over

and you make what you have carried here

home, another home

 

The only familiar sound is your breathing

orange brushes of words from other mornings

trapped in warm coffee, you hold

your youngest daughter balanced

on your hip, head buried in your neck and shoulder

her sticky sweet drool mixes with new smells

 

you try to imagine this is the place you live

your baby child oblivious of the world outside

her immediate view

encased in the husk of half sleep

her scent as known as your own

love me how big she mumbles into to your cheek.

 

A Cooper’s hawk flies over head, named for you

by the long sweep of its wings, the white tips of feathers

a predator you have seen before

you take refuge in its shadow

stretch your left arm wide like a bridge

girded between before and now

“This big,” you tell your daughter, “this big”

 

by Martha Catherine Brenckle

Martha Brenckle teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Publishing both poetry and fiction, sha has published most recently in Driftwood, The Sea Journal, Broken Bridge Review, Lost Coast Review, and New Guard Literary Review among others. In October 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for poetry. Her first novel, Street Angel, published in 2006 was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award and was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s Best GLBT Novel for 2006. Her short story, “Nesting Dolls” has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.

Untitled, Black

January 2019 | visual art

Untitled, Black

Untitled, Black

 

by Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a graduate of the fine arts program at Illinois Central College, East Peoria, Illinois, and received his B. A. from the University of Illinois. He is a juried Illinois Artisan for Photography through the Illinois State Museum. During his 35 year professional career as a communication director and specialist, he was a generalist and executive ghost writer, photographer, designer, and media-relations manager. A regionalist photographer, his images have recently been juried into exhibitions in Rhinelander, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; Fulton, Missouri; Springfield and Freeport, Illinois, among others. His work can be viewed at stephencurtiswilson.com.

Requiem*

January 2019 | poetry

Outside

lone mockingbird

perches on oak branch

holds his early service

 

Inside

Requiem—

benevolent din

spreads her arms

around hushed church

 

Outside

wind whirls

whips crusty leaves at

anxious autumn

 

Inside

cloaked in mystery

harmonies brush callused fists

rub tear stained cheeks

tongues of light

dance radiant lament

through stained-glass

 

Outside

sudden quiet—

has earth stopped turning

all trees frozen, seas dried up?

 

Inside

Dies Irae wafts over

undulating shoulders

stooped in wooden pews

choir incants

endless tangle of Latin

sounds anguish me—numb

 

Outside

rain begins weeping—

aeternam, aeternam, aeternam

sobbing, bleeding onto fresh-dug grave

 

*Inspired by Mozart Requiem- Catholic Mass for the Dead
Dies Irae- Day of Wrath, Aeternam- Eternal

 

by Marianne Lyon

Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.