Featuring: The Business of Small Press
an interview with Gargoyle Founder
RICHARD PEABODYFiction by Robert Fulton and Tamara Schiern.
Commentary by Frank S. Palmisano, III.
Reviews by Jarret Keene, Bill Wesse, Rowanne Joyner, M. Scott Douglass.
Poetry by Larsen Bowker, Lyle Daggett, Jough Dempsey, Ralph Earle, Arthur Gottlieb, David Jordan, Leslie Ann Keller, Kathy Kieth, Lyn Lifshin, Laurie MacDiarmid, Jennifer MacPherson, David T. Manning, B. Z. Niditch, Richard Peabody, Gail J. Peck, Daryl Rogers, Douglas Spangle, Sampson Starkweather, Trina Stolec, Eric A. Weil, and Dede Wilson.Cover Art by Karon Luddy.
POETRY Samples from this issue
Eric A. Weil, Raleigh, NC
Sex Ed
In defense of locker room jokes,
so much is learned between
the blank stare and the laughter,
a moment’s humiliation easier
than squirming in class. Thirty
7th-grade boys, 1966,
in striped tee shirts and Keds,
electric nerves kicking
in blue gabardine slacks
as the rule against denim
was still three years from failing,
pushing our Father-Knows-Best
suburb into the Revolution.
So when Coach Ryker asked
for questions, Bruce asked, “What
is petting?” And who knew less,
the loud laughers or me,
contemplating the neighbor’s
poodle? Then Ryker drew
the awesome one-eyed
reindeer to explain
the inexplicable plumbing
of girls. Did Coach say, “Plumbing?”
Slowly on the board he sketched
a snout-like vagina of a size
no pubescent penis
could hope to fill, the skullish
uterus bulging above,
then distant ovarian knobs
at the ends of Fallopian antlers
and the fertilized egg stuck
to the uterine wall staring
like fate’s own eye at us
mystified, silent boys.
No help that we were reading
The Hobbit, and given Ryker’s
scale, those ovaries seemed
goblin lairs just below
the lungs, one at the base
of each nippled mountain,
the brave monthly egg
marching out to meet
and be conquered by one
lucky minion of the spermish
hordes swimming, swarming
that unimaginable distance,
so many tiny whip-tailed
soldiers wasted charging
up the wrong tunnel…
“Questions?” No questions. No risk.
But back to the uncontrollable
risings and failings in my pants,
and what to ask my father?
“Anytime you got a question
about that stuff, just ask me.”
That deep voice from behind
the stock pages last week
banned Mad Magazine
when he saw the sticker
Save Water: Shower
With Your Steady.
Sampson Starkweather, Kilbernie, Wellington, New Zealand (last we heard)
Prehistoric Prophecies
Gypsy grass
Reading palm trees,
Pours Earth a cup
Of instant karma
Coffee.
Earth’s unfortunate
Revealed by whimsical
Wind, whispering
Sweet nothings in
Earth’s ear.
Shaking her head
In disbelief,
Like a swimmer
With water in her ears,
“No,
Not like this!”
She cried,
Raining down
Tidal wave tears.
Wallowing in
Apocalyptic self-pity,
Quaking in her
Fault-lines,
She blushes a
Red Sea.
Dinosaurs chuckle,
Nudging Angles with
Prehistoric elbows
As they gloat to God,
“Told you they’d fuck it all up.”
Jennifer MacPherson, Syracuse, NY
Dinner for One: Philadelphia
June 1999
I hate Chinese restaurants,
their Americanized, chop-sueyed and chow-meined food
weeping peanut oil, reeking of salts guaranteed to give you headache.
Every shopping plaza, no matter how small,
has such an eatery and I avoid them all.
But the Rodin Museum was closed, skies threatened rain, I was hungry a
nd this place looked different. Better. The sign proclaimed “Longs”
and a newspaper review plastered to the window
promised nouvelle Chinese cuisine. And the meal
was memorable: sweet and pungent soup thick with mushrooms,
its broth clear and biting, giant prawns with sliced mango,
baby ears of corn, asparagus cuts garnished with thin strips
of deep fried parsnip in a subtle pineapple sauce.
Plus a glass of good merlot.A man and girl sat two tables away, her back to me.
She had a broad New Jersey accent and deeply bronzed skin.
The man was middle-aged, in business suit and tie, with harried frown. He
talked about her mistakes at work, how to do better.
I heard “doctor-patient privilege” and “medical records” and “interns.”
She tried to justify herself, interrupting, until he became frustrated,
said she would never understand. She whined how she really wanted
to hear everything he had to say but he sighed,
“This isn’t about work, it’s about you and me,”
and she accused him of involving Marla
and he snarled that Marla was none of her business and he was leaving but
she wailed that she hadn’t any money
so he waited for the bill, both of them utterly silent,
his body half turned away in rejection.And I wanted to rush over and say, “Here, I’m a psychologist,
let’s talk it over” like I wanted to do that time at JFK
when the young mother was beating her five tired and sleepy children
with a belt and screaming at them not to cry but I had to
catch a plane for London and didn’t intervene. Or the time
in the Emergency Room when the little boy threw a tantrum
and his mother complained that he never obeyed her
but I was called to have an x-ray taken of my battered ankle
so hadn’t the time to tell her that consistency was the key. Consistency.
You beat a kid and he cries. You ignore a kid and he does the forbidden.
You ignore your dinner partner and she knows it’s over.
I left before their bill came. Never saw them leave,
if she said anything or he did or how they slunk out of Long’s
into the Philadelphia dusk and the peaceful rain, drops falling one after another.BACK TO TOP
FICTION
Tamara Schiern
Signs from God
and Other Useful Revelations
I watch my friends. They remind me of this song:
Slippery fish, slippery fish
Swimming through the water.Suzanne. Suzanne applies to fourteen medical schools and doesn’t get into any.
But it doesn’t matter. She’s been offered a job in her daddy’s business, so I help her pack her suitcases for her move back home to Dallas, Texas.
Oh, no, it’s been eaten by a…
Tuna fish, tuna fish.
Caitlin. Caitlin applies to eight Ph.D. programs in Middle Eastern literature, with an emphasis on women in developing countries, and doesn’t get into any.
But it doesn’t matter. She has rich parents, so I drive her to the airport for her jaunt to Egypt, Jordan and the Promised Land.
Oh, no, it’s been eaten by a…
Octopus, octopus.
Julia. Julia applies to one graduate school: Harvard. She does get accepted, but it really doesn’t matter.
“Does one really need to travel three thousand miles away and pay thirty thousand dollars for a teaching credential?” I chide her.
“It’s not the credential, baby, it’s the men,” Julia replies. “Mom and Dad will give anything for me to bring home an Ivy Leaguer.”
A prized possession in sunny Southern California. I hug my friend and help her shovel her belongings into her four-wheel graduation present.
Oh, no, it’s been eaten by a…
Great white shark, great white shark.
Ashley. I’m imminently thankful to Ashley for claiming the official position of impotence in our circle. Ashley failed so many courses she had to stay in school for a fifth year. Possibly even a sixth. And she’s addicted to methanphetamine. It was the Scandal of the Century last year, as tantamount to our circle as the “Trial of the Century” to the country, but nobody speaks of it much anymore. I watched it happen. I watched the substance swallow Ashley whole, like a whale that opens its mouth and engulfs all the vulnerable fauna that gets in its way. I watched it happen and was thankful it wasn’t I who was unraveling so ungracefully in the Scandal of the Century.
So much for higher education.
Oh no, it’s been eaten by a…
Humungous whale, humongous whale.
Sophie. Me. I don’t apply to any graduate schools because I’m rebelling; but I get accepted into one, anyway. Norham College of Dentistry in South Dakota recruits me on the advice of my advisor, Professor Hanover, who, I believe, has the hots for me. But Dental School? In South Dakota? I regret telling my mother the news. Now it’s all I hear about and I wish it didn’t even exist. I wish South Dakota didn’t even exist.
I take three extra yoga classes the week of graduation. Breathe. Bend. Release. I contemplate alcoholism as a lifestyle choice.
The day of graduation, I stumble across the porta-stage. The glare of the sun taunts my dry tongue and weeping pores. Last night’s graduation party is still in my blood stream, and the Captain Morgan’s from the parking lot is mingling with it. I unroll the scroll the chancellor hands me and my life unrolls with it. My world crumbling before an audience of smiling aunties and waving grandmas. Cut off. Cut off from my life just as I’m realizing my full potential, just as I may be inching closer to figuring something out. Something catastrophic. Something akin to the Israelites and their scrolls or the Chinese and their Buddha.
My mother waves from the folding lawn chairs. The beaming matriarch arrived in town yesterday, and I spent the afternoon with her at the fabulous L.A. Zoo. We fawned over lemurs and tree sloths. And elephants. The guide said the elephants could leave the small pen if they really wanted, but because they had been caged since infancy, they never even attempt it. I’ve never attempted it. But I’m almost ready—was just getting there.
And now I’m alone in the pen.
I stare in bewilderment at my empty apartment. Vacated, as though quarantined. No Sam Adams cans decorating the counter. No tattered Nirvana posters tacked to the wall with leftover quake putty. Only a few coffee stains on the rug and a two-inch dent in the linoleum left as evidence that we ever even existed here. Happy graduation.
Oh, no, it’s been eaten by a…
Yes, yes, yes--we know how tacky it is to stop at an ellipse, BUT...
you can read the rest of this story in the Summer 2002 issue of MSR, still available from MSR for $7.
BACK TO TOP
RAISING THE DEAD
by Ron Rash
Iris Press (2002) 75 pgs.
ISBN: 0-916078-54-X. $15
PoetryI didn’t expect to find ghosts in the pages of a book of poems. Ron Rash has conjured the forgotten dead with such truth and quiet power that I sometimes wonder whether he is more of a necromancer than a poet. Raising the Dead chronicles the history and destruction of the Jocassee Valley in the South Carolina Mountains. In the early ‘70s, Duke Power Company built a dam that turned the valley into a reservoir. As a result, hundreds of bodies had to be dug up and reburied, and Rash finds this event to be an eerily poignant symbol of the restlessness of the human spirit, a symbol of the way in which the living are bound to the dead, the dead to the living.
The lyricism here is powerful in its gothic evocations. “Last Service,” the opening poem, is a dense rite of “rolling graveyards,” “quick-dying streams,” “obsolete bridges,” “hymns of resurrection,” and “farms already lost in the lake.” This poem is one of many that serve to complete a portrait of a place forsaken by both God and man. Yet the landscape and its people are so vivid and believable as to be significant in their otherworldliness.
Rash’s work here transcends the exquisite craftsmanship of his previous books and achieves something closer to transubstantiation. As an example: “The Search.” It’s winter and a search party combs the woods at dusk for a senile black woman who has wandered far from home. The first night is fruitless, and so is the next day. Finally, they find her “back against a tree like she’d been waiting.” Here Rash achieves lift-off; his language becomes lyrical, incandescent: [a] harvest moon broke through a patch of clouds./ We raised her in its light and lantern light,/ and looked into a face the frost has burned/ as white as dogwood blossoms in the spring./ A soft breeze stirred the leaves and then lay down,/ the way a weary hound settles to sleep./ It was so quiet. No one seemed to breathe.
These poems are shadowed by death. The Great Equalizer has rendered them all the same color. The moon—symbolic of the afterworld—has harvested another soul. Death has left them breathless, speechless; it is everywhere present and offers no release from the unendurable. What else can these white men do but return her to the “hollow far up Painter Creek”? It is Josh Burton who “held her first, cradled her against his chest, stumbled down the ridge.” They each take a turn carrying her down to the valley, as they should, because they owe her that much, this woman they’d barely known when she was alive. Rash reinforces the notion that the dead are helpless and require the living’s care to find peace, a proper burial, simple respect—those things that Duke Power Company never obliged when they uprooted the dead and flooded their graves.
In Rash’s South, few profit from and many struggle with death’s aftermath—financially and spiritually. These are people who have nothing except severe dignity and a deep respect for each other’s fleetingness. They are gone now, and we will never see their like again, except for the brief glimpses of embodiment, horror, and benediction Rash bestows us in his poetry.
Reviewed by Jarret Keene
DOSSIER
by Stepan Chapman
Creative Arts Book Company (2001) ISBN: 0-88739-280-6. $13.95
Short StoriesOne of the great pleasures in the life of a chronic reader is the discovery of a previously unread author as talented as Stepan Chapman. Dossier is a jewel box filled with uncanny treasures. I can hardly wait to get my hands on his novel The Troika, winner of the 1998 Philip K. Dick Award.
About halfway through, I thought I had the first story in the collection, “The Rainmakers” figured out. I was wrong of course: utterly wrong. So what if the story didn’t end with the Ray Bradbury twist I mistakenly expected? I was more than satisfied, and well surprised: nice piece of misdirection, that.
Even though I am generally intolerant of third-person writings, “The Quest” hooked me in the very first paragraph: You’ve been hiking across this terrain for weeks, uphill all the way. When landslides roll past, you dodge muddy cardboard boulders.
This piece is by turns odd, bizarre, astonishing, manic, disheartening, and frightening. The finale is utterly and doggedly real—and don’t forget to gulp down that near toxic dose of your favorite antipsychotic medication before unfurling your ragged, leathery wings to flap the acrid smog away from the suddenly yellowing pages.
“Minutes of the Last Meeting” slouches sideways through time to a distorted reflection of Imperial Russia. The range of its invention is vast as Asia herself, and it tosses off ruinous images by the cluster. Jules Verne, may I introduce Dr. Oppenheimer!
In “At Her Ladyship’s Suggestion”, Chapman delineates an edifice of Gormenghastian proportions within a mere 26 pages, and redefines the meaning of decay in compound and dumbfounding variety.
A number of mythic shaman encounters with inhabitants of the Inuit spirit world are included for your edification; these stories are inhabited by cantankerous, willful people who are at times obtuse, but always human.
Those familiar with the short stories of the late John Collier will no doubt also appreciate Chapman’s forthright, burnished style. Repeat after me: this is not science fiction… this is not science fiction… this is not science fiction.
Reviewed by Bill Wesse
All Weekend with the Lights On
by Mark Wisniewski
Leaping Dog Press Book #2ISBN 1-58775-002-3 $14.95Short Stories
Mark Wisniewski’s stories are gritty stuff. All Weekend with the Lights On includes short stories of love, lust, loss, rejection, horror, acceptance, as well as occasional and perhaps surprising in contrast, hope and humor. Characters are real people, working class men and women, young and old. They are not necessarily ones we would like to identify with, but ones who touch close to home at unexpected moments and in disturbing ways.
Wisniewski paints with voice. One of the more haunting stories in the collection, “Unknown Rook”, is told in the excited tone of a baseball fan recalling a recent game and performance of a new star rookie. It is only after being caught in the character’s excitement that we realize the narrator has been witness to a much more horrific spectator event.
The voice of a young woman, a high school basketball player, tells the story of “Birdie.” Birdie is the new freshman star of the Girls’ Varsity team. We learn more about how different Birdie is as she faces the hostility of those who think she plays “too well for a girl.” Though this is Birdie’s story, we learn about the narrator and her acceptance of those who are different especially as Birdie reaches out in a moment of vulnerability and humiliation.
Many of these stories are snapshots of the lives of people as normal and bizarre as the rest of us. “The Work I’ve Invested” takes place over a few minutes in Central Park as the main character, Ron, holds a dogless leash. He interacts with two other people in the park and as they share with him far more than even a close friend would want to know, we begin to get a picture of Ron. His silences and observations about the others build a picture of his loss.
In the story “Airstrip”, Wisniewski captures the naivety of a young college student approached by a woman in a pastoral setting. She convinces him to ride their bicycles beneath a landing plane. Sure that this is a strange and surreal foreplay, he returns to meet her each evening. Only at the fiery end of this tale does the student, as well as the reader, realize the real objective of this deadly game.
Wisniewski’s stories leave a shadow, a bruise that begs to be touched. Readers will want to contemplate the subtleties of this work. They will want to spend time considering the central character of each story, who was it really about? They may find that these stories touch familiar notes and present truths with which they may not be comfortable. Wisniewski’s stories are certain to haunt long after the lights are out.
Reviewed by Rowanne Joyner
BONE & JUICE
by Adrian C. Louis
Triquarterly Books, Northwestern University Press (2001)
ISBN 0-8101-5116-2, $16.95I read my first Adrian C. Louis poem in a 1992 issue of Coffeehouse Poets’ Quarterly. I heard his voice and knew the tone: restrained anger. It was one of those moments that stays with you, like a scene from a movie the mind replays again and again, O this chapped-ass cowboy hell. O this cow turd state of mind.
I feel I know Louis, although we’ve never met. I’ve heard his voice in the next room, turned the pages of his life and it is real to me, even though we come from different worlds. I have walked the streets of San Francisco with him, ridden shotgun in his T-bird on a dusty road to White Clay, Nebraska. I’ve endured the madness of aging love, the love of aging madness, his voice in the next room guiding the way.
Since that first encounter, I’ve purchased or otherwise acquired six of his books. Bone & Juice is the most recent and probably the most valued because it found me.
Like many of his previous books, Bone & Juice speaks to us about the hardship of reservation life, about reconciling the dominant religion with the Indian heart, about prejudice and poverty—but not just socio-economic poverty—a poverty of spirit. This is a collection of love poems written by a hardened man who has overcome addiction and alcoholism, feeling his age, his mortality, skidding toward the end while desperately trying to hold onto what he values most in the world: a wife who is slowly dieing of Alzheimer’s.
He sets the stage with his first piece, “Valentine From Indian Country”: Yes, this is Indian Country/ and we are bone and juice,/ twelve frothy ounces of moon/ drool, a touch of inexact wistfulness,/ wry evaporation, and eventual extinction. In America there is no truer place/ for us to worship our terrible beauty.
From there he guides us through visits with his wife who lives in a nursing home and their sad, yet childlike relationship. We hear their silly laughter as he howls, the Moon, the Moon-ee-o! and when he drives down the road with her in the passenger seat, his lower denture wedged on his nose, and they come across a Dead Skoonk.
He intermingles these vignettes with the loneliness of being without his wife’s companionship, the temptations of alcohol, other women, suicide. The growl of the language used in previous collections has mellowed, but the gravelly tone of a man who has downed his share of shots, smoked his share of Marlboros, and burdened a fair amount of heartaches is here.
In the end we envision him driving into his sunset on a dusty reservation road, listening to Waylon and Willie as he leaves us with this message for his wife: Upon the ghost road,/ hand in hand,/ our dry lips dark/ with cherry blood,/ we’ll sing our song/ of what was us./ When the chokecherries/ ripen, look for me.// I’ll be there, I promise.
Highly recommended.
Reviewed by M. Scott DouglassBACK TO TOP
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