MSR Winter 2003/04
Features:
Matt Morris: Nearing Narcoma
An interview with the 2003 MSR Poetry Book Award Winner
by M. Scott DouglassPrick Farming: An Illustrated Mycology Report
by Shirley U. JestFiction by Nils Reid and Mary Ann Ruhl Thomas.
Reviews by Okla Elliott; Frank S. Palmisano, III; Rich Ristow; Sherri Smith:
Aspects of the Novel: a Novel by David R. Slavitt, Mistranslating Neruda by Matt Mason, Centuries by Joel Brouwer, Hammer by Mark Turpin, Ashtrays and Bulls by Robert Plath, Trading Futures by Nikki Roszko, The United Colors of Death by Mark Terrill, Sauce Robert by F.J. Bergmann, Leaving Maggie Hope by Anthony S. Abbott.
Poetry by Matt Morris, Chimyô Simone Atkinson, Suzanne Baldwin Leitner, Barry Ballard, Katherine W. Barr, Anselm Brocki, Louis Daniel Brodsky, Michael Brown, Gary Every, Robert Cooperman, Christopher Cunningham, Michael C. Dowdy, Kurt Cole Eidsvig, Brian Fugett, C. S. Fuqua, Pamela Garvey, Nathan Graziano, Joy Beshears Hagy, Preston H. Hood, III, Tripp Howell, Ralph Luttermoser, Frank Matagrano, Ken Meisel, Mitchell Metz, Eric Nelson, Diana Pinckney, David Poston, Judith Behar, John Repp, William Sheldon, Jennifer Rudsit, Sampson Starkweather, Kevin Sweeney, J. Tarwood, Kelley J. White, Dede Wilson, Wendy Wisner, Carol Wreszin.
Cover Art: Reverence by Mike Watson.
Paintings by David Chorlton, Mike Watson
Photographs by David Cazden and Keary Liu
Nils Reid
Centerville, OH
FORMOSAEvery night before he went to sleep, Weis smoked a single cigarette on the balcony outside the apartment. There was nothing unusual about the ritual except for the fact that he was a Mormon missionary, which meant that smoking—along with alcohol, tea, caffeine, drugs, necking, petting, masturbation, television, movies, radio, and sex—was expressly forbidden.
Weis obviously was a bad missionary, though you would never have known it from looking at him. His companion, on the other hand, was a perfect missionary, at least as far as anyone could tell. In fact, Roland Williams seemed to be perfect in every way. Tall, good-looking, and friendly, the kind of guy you couldn’t help but like. It was as though his soul simply pressed harder into the fabric of existence and pulled others towards him, towards that warm smile that radiated the promise of salvation, the reflection of his absolute faith and overall completion as a human being. Everyone was drawn to him on some level—the lonely people, empty people, angry people, everyone who was missing something inside.
People like Weis.
At the moment, as Weis lit his daily Marlboro from his secret stash, Roland was tossing and turning in the other room, a far cry from the confident, casual grace with which he normally carried himself. While awake, he moved as though born with an innate awareness of not just himself, but of every situation and every surrounding he might ever encounter in life, as though the world were being constantly custom created for his presence. At night, though, it was a different story.
* * *
Weis drew in the first long breath of heavy smoke and looked out at the still-lively city. The missionaries’ apartment was on the twenty-third floor, which gave an excellent view of the illuminated night markets still bustling with commotion, the scooters shooting along the narrow streets, the pale lights of televisions coming from some windows and the crimson pinpricks of electric altar candles coming from the dark apartments of others.
He looked out at those unknown lives, wondering who they were, what they were buying at the market, what they were thinking, what they wanted out of life, what they were dreaming. He wondered what they had wanted to be as children, and what it would be like to be them.
He wondered what it would be like to be Roland.
* * *
I can’t wait for the Second Coming, when this place gets burned to the ground.
That was what his first companion had said to him, moments after his arrival. They had just passed a flier advertising women’s lingerie fluttering across the ground. His companion had picked it up and violently ripped it into meaningless shreds—fragments of disordered feminine flesh released into the wind, and said, I can’t wait for the Second Coming, when this place gets burned to the ground.
He held the smoke a moment longer, feeling it burn the innermost parts of his lungs before releasing it out into the city air to join the accumulated exhaust and factory smoke and the exhaled breaths of millions of people.
Someone had once accused this country of being beautiful. Some long-forgotten Filipino sailor on some long-forgotten ship had sailed past the island and called out to it, Formosa—beautiful island.
Perhaps it was just a matter of perspective; perhaps the land had looked beautiful simply because that man had never looked close enough to see anything different, because all land looked beautiful from the sea, for its possibility and safety, for thoughts of home, for the immortal mysteries of creation it harbored.
But whoever that sailor had been, he couldn’t stop the ship from pressing on, and he certainly couldn’t have waited the hundreds of years necessary to see what Weis had seen in the late summer of 1996 when he arrived to the sweltering, crowded heat of Taichung. By then, aside from a few rural mountain areas and a few isolated beach resorts, Formosa had become little more than a tragic misnomer, used only in the tourism brochures beneath panoramic photographs of the few verdant landscapes that hadn’t yet proven themselves worth pillaging.
Who was it who said that man is about as free as a slave walking west on a ship traveling east?Want the rest of the story?
The conclusion can be read in the Winter 2004 issue which is still available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
Chimyô Simone Atkinson, Davidson, NC
TABLED
My dining room table is covered
with unfolded laundry.Oh, it’s still clean – mostly.
It’s been there two weeks.
The cotton shirts will be hell to iron.
It’s pure laziness. I’ll get it later,
when this show is over.
Saturday morning. Sunday morning.
Tomorrow. Another week goes by
and the cat has made a nest
in a pile of socks. Those
will need washing again.If this table wasn’t here
this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.
Bureau drawers would seem
so much more logical and convenient.
I mean, what good is it anyway?
It’s been years, literally,
since I’ve been able to eat
a meal off this table. It holds
clothes nicely— being useful, if not
satisfying, in an inert sort of way.Half that pile of rags I hardly
ever wear. I could push them all
over the edge into a big hefty bag
and carry them to the trash.
(You have to clean, iron and fold
to donate to the Goodwill.)
I could put them back in the washing
machine and start all over again
hoping to somehow rinse time
and my delusions away.I know I need to put something else
on this table. Something daunting
like a big, red duct tape "X," or
Grandma’s light-up picture of Jesus.
I could invite my mother over
to chastise me for being so trifling.
Guilt is always good incentive.
But this is such a lovely space for putting
things on hold, procrastinating, forgetting
what’s right in front of me.Besides, folding these clothes
might actually change my life.
Nathan Graziano, Manchester, NH
TEACHING METAPHORS
I stood in front
of twenty-five adolescents
who were stunned by boredom,
watching the secondhand
on the wall clock
and drawing caricatures
of me in their notebooks.
I forged on and explained
that metaphors
are the beautiful women
in the Language Lounge.
Their long legs
crossed at the ankles.
Implied metaphors
blow kisses and flirt
with their eyes.
Extended metaphors
sweat in the sheets.
Payment for sticking around
for the entire poem.
And sexual metaphors
should be avoided at all costs.
A boy in the back
began to snore.A week later on an exam,
when I asked
for an example of a metaphor,
the same boy wrote,
“Fuck you, I hate this class.”Abstractions aren’t
for everyone.
Gary Every, Oracle, AZ
AMERICAN COOL
Rebel Civil War military bands
pawned their tools cheaply
to ravenous raucous ragtimers;
newly freed Negroes
who invented swing, ragtime, stomp, rhythm and blues,
and that jazz thing.
Brubeck beat out bad bebop boogie
for Beantown beatniks
while across continent
dapper dudes and delighted divas
dance to a blues backbeat.
Bored, I watch a Latin professor
drone on and on
about antiquity and schools of thought
but I know
that across the Atlantic Ocean
hipster Europeans
don mirror shades and overpriced blue jeans
trying to imitate American cool.
Carol Wreszin, New York, NY
FIFTH GRADE
Mars bars, Kit-Kats, Snickers
their wrappers crumpled balls –
multi-colored carnage
of kids’ cravings –
are stuffed into the slots
of scarred desks meant
for books, pencils, rulers,
while in the rear,
behind the thirty-three
note-passing
desk-scratching
gossiping
clock-watchers,
Melanie slouches
on the bare, hard chair
curled into a cocoon
sucking her thumb
wide eyes staring
inside herself
where everything
is stashed away.
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