MSR Summer 2007
Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
704-573-2516, contact us
Feature:
A Novel First
Susan Baldwin Leitner Interviews
Susan Woodring About Her First Novel, THE TRAVELING DISEASE
(Main Street Rag's first novel as well)Essays
At War With Words by D.S. Baldwin
Stealing Truth: Plagiarism and the Art of Fabrication by Carl F. ThompsonLittle Earthquakes by Stephen Roger Powers
Burt Halifax by David DriscollReviews by John Birkbeck, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Heather Jane Collings, Richard Allen Taylor, Carl F. Thompson, Julie Townsend, Richard Vargas.
of the following work:
The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner, Love at Gunpoint by Nila northSun, Another Woman Who Looks Like Me by Lyn Lifshin, Chains & Mirrors by Alex Grant, Piece Work by Barbara Presnell, Twelve Leagues In by Phebe Davidson.
Poetry by Heather Abner, James Babbs, Joan E. Bauer, Robert James Berry, Allegra Blake, Linda Hillman Chayes, Valerie Brender, Henry Berne, Sara Burge, Tess Christi, Carol Frith, Todd Christopher Cincala, Richard Luftig, Llyn Clague, Cathryn Cofell, Joanne Samraney, Robert Cooperman, Robert Dugan, Joy Beshears Hagy, Brad Johnson, David Jordan, Joan Payne Kincaid, Jeanette Leardi, Andrew Madigan, Buzz Mauro, Terri, McCord, Laura S. Moore, William Neumire, Alice Pero, Tom Nurmi, Shirley Rader, Charles Rammelkamp, Michael Riley, Rick Smith, Michael Wurster.
Cover Art: by Doug South.
Stephen Roger Powers
Madison, WI
Little Earthquakes On Friday of the most eventful week of their lives together, the parachutist plummeted from the sky and landed in the wooded cemetery across the street from their house.
His unfortunate and surprising death literally right in their front yard didn’t change anything, however.
Georgiana still woke up the next morning with her arm around her pillow, thinking it was Grant and mumbling to it softly, and Trinket said that this was sorrowful because it meant Georgiana hadn’t moved on at all and that Trinket had done nothing but waste her time. Besides, they’d just seen a parachutist die, for Christ’s sake.
And on the Monday of that week, late in the afternoon, four days before the parachutist came screaming from the spring clouds, their neighbor Mr. Bauer started digging for gold under the cottonwood by his mailbox. That was the day Georgiana finally told Trinket that she’d had dinner a few times with Grant at the Croissant de Lune, that she thought it all had gone fine so far, and that she was seriously thinking about getting back together with him and taking it very slow. A fresh start.
On Tuesday the ground started humming every hour on the hour for about four minutes. Georgiana wondered if Mr. Bauer digging for gold had anything to do with it. Trinket confessed she was furious about Georgiana seeing Grant again.
By Wednesday morning the hole was already five feet deep, mounds of dirt in a circle around the edge. Mr. Bauer stood in the hole, shovel scooping fast, clumps of dirt flying, t-shirt soaked through, only his shoulders and bald head visible above the hole. Georgiana thought it was a wonder he hadn’t hit any roots.
That was when Georgiana and Trinket also started setting up tables in the garage and marking pot holders, chipped ashtrays, dusty videos, warped polka records, tangled necklaces, and faded blouses with price stickers. They’d been planning this rummage sale for a while. Georgiana got out her wedding dress, the one she would have worn down the aisle when she married Grant, and inspected it carefully before putting it back in its plastic bag, zipping it up, and writing Best Offer on the price sticker. Selling it didn’t feel right, but neither did keeping it, not with things so up in the air.
On Thursday the ground was still humming every hour on the hour for about four minutes. It wasn’t a loud hum, just enough to make you feel vibrations under your feet and shake the windows. But it was annoying. Mr. Bauer denied having anything to do with it and resumed his digging after carting all the dirt away to his back garden with a wheelbarrow and carrying a ladder from his garage so he could climb in and out of the hole easier.
And Georgiana decided she’d really known all along that she was going to start seeing Grant again at some point in the near future, on a trial basis, as she’d put it to him at the Croissant de Lune, to see if things could be worked on. It was just that she didn’t know how to tell Trinket, who had been good to her. She only knew she was still in love with his wavy and sandy hair streaked with a little gray, his quick white smile, and his dazzling blue eyes that reminded her of marbles when he laughed.
Georgiana Starling. You might say she was a little troubled. Secretive. Maybe manipulative. Trinket probably would say this most of all, especially now. Georgiana was attractive in a cosmopolitan and sophisticated sort of way, but also a tad tomboyish. Tall and thin. One crooked tooth in her smile. Sharp features and a pointed nose. Shoulder-length auburn hair with some brown roots showing.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion can be read in the Summer 2007 issue which is available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
Heather Abner
Brighton, MI
Pulling Down Barbie’s Pants
at the 2006 Conference on College
Composition and Communication
It’s not a revelation
that students like advertising,
and websites,
and icons from pop culture,and that they’re savvy
at interpreting all that.It’s also why they can’t write complete sentences.
But I’d like to answer the professor
who told me I shouldn’t shit on theory,
that it’s something we must put on every day.Don’t get me wrong.
I’m glad you’ve finally decided to use Barbie
in the classroom.I’d rather read a personal narrative essay
about a student’s memory of shaving and tattooing Barbie’s head.But doesn’t that just bring us back
to the mantra “write what you know”?Barbie knows that underwear,
like theory,
is superfluous,
causes the dreaded panty-line.
That’s why she never wears it.
Todd Christopher Cincala
Pittsburgh, PA
Bigelow
The boulevard I drive
From work each day
Instead of the cross-town interstate,
Losing fifteen minutes to cruising
Through a neighborhood I once called homeStrange, in the good way
Old photos of yourself portray
Someone no longer known
Yet not entirely forgotten.A slow roll past houses
Owned by the same lousy landlords
Leasing to students too young to care
About creaky floorboards,
A lack of water pressureCouches on the porches
Where they slouch after classes
Swigging beers and filling
Recycling bins to their brimsWhere they still burn
Behind tapestries hung
In windows like cobwebs to smear the sun
Shades of nicotine and light
Bong resin brown;Future nothing
But a hazy conversation
Raised in the blaze of silence
While the stereo tracks are changingWhile the speakers hiss static
Over the porch railing
The students squint at my sedan
As I cruise byParanoid, at first
Until they see my suit and tie
Rolling home to the hills, to the wife and kids
Swearing to themselves, just as I once did
Never to end up that way.
Laura S. Moore
Charlotte, NC
Hindsight
Back when we were married
your eyes intended to hold me.
Long body stretched over mine
pressed me deep into the mattress.I remember
the ceiling was unevenly
spackled.The story goes
Great Aunt Berny explained her divorce
from Great Uncle June
to Great Grandma like this:When June
touched me
all I could think of
was a butcher knife
planted in his back.When I heard this story
years after our divorceI thought
Exactly.
Tom Nurmi
Austin, TX
Like Wasps
Hiving and digging out nests, they amass
and bury out back, along the asylum fence.
Sickness is like this, something inside
crawling out, incubating in hospital light.Patients bedded down, fluids measured
and hung from stands, the smell of skin
and iodine lingering in wards darkened purple
under a furious moon. Inhabited, bristling in the night.There is anger
and a barbarous kind of love:
the admissions fierce, cruel. The words hollow
and smooth as the watchman’s gun.We seethe and buzz about proportions,
about grace—giving a man last rites
only to have him live. Becausethis is the way we live,
our instinct measured in fluid and need,
our anger willing us to endure.
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