MSR Fall 2003

Features:

Anthony Bukoski: The Land of Graves & Crosses
by David Bowen

Daryle Ryce: Timeless
by M. Scott Douglass

Fiction by Scott Yarbrough and Pat MacEnulty.

Reviews by George Held, Todd Hester, Frank Palmisano, III, and Rich Ristow of the following work:

The Mutable Wheel by Okla Elliott and Brian Zegeer, Goodnight Architecture by Gretchen Mattox, Lives of Water by John Hoppenthaler, New Century North American Poets edited by Joyhn Carmon, Donna Biffar and Wayne Lanter, Back to Choices by John Kennedy.

Poetry by Anthony Abbott, Paul Benton, Daniel Brenner, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, David Chorlton, Joyce Cochran, Michael Estabrook, Nancy Kenney Connolly, Brett K. Eastman, Doug Fritock, Cheryl Gatling, Giles Goodland, Carol Hamilton, George Held , Clark Karoses, Michel Steven Krug, Bruce Lader, Lyn Lifshin, John Newlin, David T. Manning, Richard Pearce, Tom Quinn, Jonathan K. Rice, Pat Riviere-Seel, Melinda Thomsen, Linda K. Sienkiewicz, John Sweet, Richard Taylor, Daniel Tricarico, Richard Vargas, Gerald R. Wheeler, A.D. Winans, Bill Griffin, William Woodruff, Paul Worley.

Cover Art: Human Vase by Regina Guerrero.

Paintings by Antoine de Villiers

Photographs by Cheryl Townsend, Gerald Wheeler, A.D. Winans, .

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Fiction

Scott Yarbrough
Charleston, SC

IN THE TALL TREES

I’d just about decided that there were no deer of the antlered variety anywhere within shouting distance of Suwannee County. I’d sat in a tree stand for two and a half long hours and finally wasn’t able to take it anymore, so I still-hunted down an old game trail for awhile. I found some spoor, droppings, but dried out, might well have been a month old; I wasn’t any Davy Crockett. I finally got so fed up that I pumped the double-aught buckshots out of my 870 Remington and put some number sixes in. Maybe I could get a squirrel or two.

I’d figured it would be just this bad when I told my step-father I’d go with him. That was what I got for giving in. For feeling guilty.

Five days of my first week of Christmas vacation from school spent there at Uncle Matt’s hunting camp, all because I was feeling guilty. This was the third day, and I still hadn’t killed anything but time and about three cords of the blackjack oak that always needed splitting for the wood stove.

I moved on through the edges of the cypress swamp I’d just come up on, walking so that the heels of my boots came down first, letting the rest of the foot follow slowly, moving around sticks and walking on the damp leaves and grass as much as possible. It was about as cold as it ever got in North Florida, in the 20’s, with a mean wind working its way back and forth through the woods. Squirrel hunting’s hard to do when it’s windy; you can’t see them slip along the branches when the wind is shaking the boughs harder than the squirrel would.

My breath was painting the air with white fog, and I was just about ready to hang it up and head back to camp when I saw a motion out of the corner of my eye in an old sprawling live oak on the edge of the line where all the cypress started. I froze for a second, looking for the squirrel I knew was there. He didn’t move. The little bastard had seen me and was staying put. I walked up to the tree and grabbed a clump of vines that were hanging down from way high up in the tree and started jerking the vine, hoping to scare the squirrel out from hiding. No luck. I crept on past the tree and stopped about sixty feet away under the edge of another oak.

I’d almost decided it was too damn cold to worry about one stupid squirrel when he made a small motion. I started easing back up to the tree. He saw me, but he didn’t freeze this time. He took off. I ran up to the oak; just as I got close he jumped from it into the next tree. I waited for him to be skylined over the top of the branch he was running on and threw down on him with my twelve gauge, seeing him over the flat top of the gun, the BB sight up there right on his shoulder. I shot and blew him out of the tree. It was a good shot.

I heard a loud crashing noise from somewhere out in that cypress as I picked up the squirrel, and then a rifle shot and a yell. Maybe James had gotten lucky.

I didn’t see any more squirrels and ended up heading back to camp after about an hour. I felt pretty stupid with just having one squirrel, but I could cut him up and give it to the cats and dogs that my Uncle Matt kept around his camp. They’d be glad for real meat.

I was almost through cleaning it when my step-father came stumbling in. The camp was a little frame wood cabin, with a wood stove and no electricity; it was in a clearing that was about sixty feet across and the same wide, and had a couple of tables outside for cleaning and all.

I almost laughed at the sight of him. Mud up to his knees, red-faced from the cold and everything, hat in his pocket, hair all straggly.

“Well,” he said, “where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“The deer. The goddamn deer you killed. I know you wouldn’t have shot unless you were after a deer.”

I flushed, held up the squirrel. “I got this on the way back in, is all.”

“That’s a small goddamn deer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Sam,” he said, “dammit. We are supposed to be deer hunting, not squirrel hunting. Deer spook at everything. You ruined my shot at a nine point buck today because you shot that goddamn rat and scared the deer off. What the hell were you thinking?”

Nine point buck my ass. He wouldn’t know a nine point buck if it came up and sat in his lap.

“Look,” I said, getting red-faced myself, “I didn’t see no deer. I just got tired of sitting on that stupid stand and was coming back in and saw the squirrel and shot it because I was bored. Okay?”

“We’re supposed to be deer hunting, you don’t go around shooting at every goddamn thing that jumps—”

“Why don’t you just lay off, okay? I don’t need this. I just don’t need it.”

I swung around and stared at him for a moment and was a little surprised at the widening of his eyes and his half-step back. He still hadn’t forgotten last August. Neither had I. I stalked off around the side of the building to chop some more wood.

 

Want the rest of the story?
The conclusion can be read in the Fall 2003 issue which is still available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

BACK TO TOP

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Poetry

Anthony Abbott, Davidson, NC
THE MAN WHO WRITES WITH HIS EYES
for Joe Martin

 

The man who writes with his eyes blinks
the letters into existence. He creates
from nothing. Trapped in his body

he is carried on the jet by willing
hands. “Does he understand anything?”
a moist-eyed lady, asks. “Everything,”

his wife answers, and she is right.
His eyes see even the small lines
around our mouths that speak

of who we are. On the ship, curiosity
seekers ask if he is Stephen Hawking.
He could be. He knows even our thoughts.

In St. Petersburg at the Hermitage
Museum, he finds a ramp for wheelchairs.
The guards refuse admittance.

“This entrance is for Czars and Heads
of State,” they say with grave authority.
He smiles by raising his eyebrows

and asks for the letter chart. “Take me
up the stairs,” he spells with his eyes,
and so they go, the man first, in a small
desk chair borrowed from the entrance
hall above, then the three-hundred pound
wheel chair, hauled up the grudging stones

by five strong, limber men. Inside
he sees the white dining room
where Bolsheviks stopped time

and the thin gold leaf on sumptuous
painted ceilings. He sees the Prodigal
of Rembrandt, the son held by the

father’s loving hands. At the end,
when they bump the wheelchair
down again, the guards salute

in admiration. Later, he will see
Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen
and he will write with his eyes

of their many wonders. But always
in his heart he will hold the Hermitage
close, remembering how they hauled

the chair up the cold stones, how he
froze in wonder at the high gold leaf
and the peacock in the glassed-in clock

and the strange loving hands of the father
bringing the Prodigal home at last.

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Giles Goodland, London, England
GOD'S RELAUNCH

God relaunches himself,
and starts to sell cans of [H]is bodily products.
A new relics industry springs up,
retailing things out of stock since the Middle Ages:
divine bones, sheets of skin, hairs.
One woman who bought His shinbone
was suddenly cured of a bowel disorder
she hadn’t even known she had.
Several blind people thought they could see
before being run over in their rush to proclaim this. 

God doesn’t even have to advertise,
He merely wills people to buy. 
He soon affiliates with the large multinationals
although He only deals with religions
that have roughly unitary gods.
And God Himself grows. Church attendance
goes through the roof. Even atheists
can’t resist his tasty ready-meals.
People no longer have to argue over
the meaning of Communion,
they can buy sides or ribs of God 
and hold a barbecue in the church.

Only the Pope is angry, and a schism
develops, until God calls a course of plagues
on the eternal city and the Vatican disappears
in a chasm, straight down to hell.

God can’t understand why he’d never done this before,
when there was so much to be had down here,
and at such good prices.

But all the time He knows there’s something

He’s forgotten, until He finally accepts

the call that’s been following Him for months, for years.
His secretary says, Sir,
it’s your son on the line.

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Linda K. Sienkiewicz, Rochester, MI
CLEVELAND ROCKED

 

Jimmy Ley’s Blues Band rolled
on stage in the Viking, Jimmy
in his black bowler, a looped
Magritte portrait minus the apple, blue
long before he hit bottom,
and Nance and I teased
the speed-whacked, bow-tied drummer,
spinning like dervishes in fringe
and leather on floors sopped
with beer and peanut shells.
The bone-rattled roadie lifted me
like an inflatable doll, up and over and
everywhere in between, a booze-fueled
dance until shoes and bottles flew.
Cleveland belched smoke and grit,
rocked until the Tequila sun rose,
lovers giving it away free
spilled into the streets and we drove
home with a dead grackle in the grill
of my Plymouth. That was
a Friday night before the flames
on the Cuyahoga were doused,
the Viking sank and the flats cleaned
for spandex suburbanites to glitter
under fake coconut trees. Valet parking.
Cover charges. Bouncers in suits. The Mistake
on the Lake was graced with the Rock
and Roll Museum, a cubist phonograph
of a building with a huge needle plunging
into Erie where Ley gasped his last tune.

Now I tour the Rock Museum with my son.
My history must be here, somewhere,
but the display cases deny it,
Nance is in a trailer park
in Encinitas with a broken foot
and the solitary face reflected
in the glass backs away. I press
the button again and hear Janis wail.

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Jonathan K. Rice, Charlotte, NC.
PET PSYCHIC

 

She holds her hands above the urn on the table
in front of her
like hands over a fire to warm them.
The ashes of a dearly departed terrier
speak to her from the grave,

"I am here doing fine. I love you.
What a great master you were. There are
others here I know. The gerbil who belonged
to the little boy downstairs. The orange alley
cat I used to bark at, that got run over
by the garbage truck; the one we saw mangled
by the curb on the way to the vet. Even the
neighbor’s parrot, that big green and yellow one
you hated so much. I remember how you laughed
at the droppings on the old lady’s shoulder.
There are lots of other dogs here, too. I’ve been
talking with the ones that have been put down.
They say it’s like falling to sleep, then you wake up
here. It’s kind of blurry at first, then you realize
there are no people, just other animals. And there’s
plenty of food and sunshine. Nobody bothers
anybody else. I even saw a lion lying with a lamb.
Don’t worry about me. I have to go."

Her client trembles, pulls several tissues from a box
on her lap, pats her eyes gently, and wipes her nose,
clearing her voice and softly thanking her
for this glimpse from the other side.
The pet psychic says "Your welcome. I take cash
and personal checks."

 

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