Featured Author: John L. Stanizzi

October 2024 | poetry

FRAMED

…for my father

 

To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song

in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.

– Arne Garborg

 

He spent years in the basement

at war against forgetting.

Scissors and tape were his weapons,

the conflict relentless,

his ability to recall

anything was vanishing.

 

He cut up hundreds of old photos,

following the lead of his demolished brain.

Anything he believed excess

he cut from the photo-

trees, cars, houses, the sky.

It was the people he was holding on to.

 

Like the cat pushing his whiskers into

the corners of walls,

my father rubbed against

the corners of his longing,

leaving a vague imprint of his losses,

the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.

Memories he was

not even aware were lost,

had been swept away.

 

The chosen were taped

somewhere into a cheap frame

he’d buy at the drug store across the street,

until he could no longer remember where it was.

 

If someone struck a match

in the trashed warehouse of his brain,

that person was cut from a photo

and taped into his new dwelling-

The Frame of the Familiar.

 

Everyone overlapped-

the newborn, the aged, the dead,

the teens, the young adults…

it made no difference

whether they had known one another or not,

as long as he thought

he might have known them from somewhere,

from some time now omitted.

 

To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,

the one person he was still sure he knew.

He’d hunt for a place

to tape himself

in this new world, part color,

part black and white, part sepia.

 

There were giant people, tiny people,

torn people, faded and stained people,

in this multi-colored person-scape

comprising only those folks

he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,

even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant

made it into a frame.

 

When a frame was completed

he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,

its walls covered with frames,

grab his Black &. Decker

and drill straight through the frame

and into the wall.

 

Done.

Onto the next.

 

He had discovered a way to resurrect

some inner joy,

but the imperative was

to tape securely

lest someone get separated

and forget their way back.

 

He tamed the rough, curled edges

of the old photos with Scotch-tape,

and brought generations together,

a congregation of the living

alongside their ghost kin,

a population of his own design

of faces remembered,

or faces

he thought he remembered.

 

John L. Stanizzi

John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.

Because the Night

October 2024 | nonfiction

That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio. But some nights we were all right, driving on a dark desert highway, cool wind in our hair, except it was Florida in August and you could swim through the humidity, and the smell of boiling oranges oozed from the Tropicana plant.

That was when we rigged an 8-track under the Dart’s dash, and blasted our own music—screaming along with Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” as we thundered down I-75 from Gainesville to Tampa, to the theater where Patti had fallen off the stage the year before and broken her back, but this night she refused to stop singing and howling and flinging her marionette body around, even as the lights came up and the loudspeaker complained that we should all exit the building immediately.

That was when we drove back through shadowed cow fields, headlights dangerously dimming because an alternator belt had broken. We fired accusations: “What’s wrong with your stupid car?” “Why don’t you help me figure out what to do, instead of giving me shit?” We found an all-night truck stop that could help us out. The radio behind the greasy checkout counter moaned, don’t it make my brown eyes blue?

That was when we returned to the hovel in the student ghetto, to the bed with tangled sheets that never got washed. We put on “Aqualung,” drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run sounding wrong and dirty and hot. Then, one of us said it. It just slipped out.  And the next album dropped with a flat clunk down the record changer, and the needle hissed as it hit the first grooves.

That was when 10cc sang, I’m not in love.

Kit Carlson

Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Short Fictions. She has recently published in EcoTheo Review, River Teeth, Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Wrong Turn Lit, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.

Pillow Talk

October 2024 | fiction

We just had sex. But I wasn’t thinking of you.

When you pulled me to your chest, your head resting on my hair, I was thinking of my old physics professor. Wondering how he’d have fucked me if given the chance. When you breathed a sigh over my face and whispered, That was amazing, I wondered how he’d have spoken to me in an after coitus-glow, if he would have noticed that I wasn’t feeling it with you because there was still so much hurt tangled in the sheets of our shared bed. You kissed me, but it wasn’t gentle.

I think that guy from the record store would have kissed me softly, with his fingers playing silent songs along my spine. Perhaps then he would have pulled me closer if I tried to move away. But you just let me roll over to my side of the bed. It’s a familiar position for me, my back turned to you, and I wonder how you can bear not to see my face. Aren’t you curious about what’s running through my mind?

My friend from the restaurant would be. He would have been tugging my hair and saying, Please let me into your head, and I would’ve said, Of course. Because I’d want to let him in, to feel that intimacy with someone who doesn’t want my back turned, who doesn’t let me turn my back. Is that so much to ask?

But you would say, yes, it is actually, because there is nothing more that I need to know about you. I have checked all of the boxes and seen the necessary disclosures. But what you don’t see are the men shuffling through my head like a deck of cards, or the ones I swipe on when I hide in the bathroom with my phone. You don’t know about the people I kissed, and how they tasted sweet after we shared a chocolate souffle. Although none of that matters. We just had sex, and you’re not thinking of me. But I’m thinking of you.

Sophia Carlisle

Sophia Carlisle is a creative currently living in the Midwest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Diet Milk Magazine, Erato Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere. She enjoys wistful stories of all kinds and has a particular soft spot for the ghosts we let linger.