The Main
Street Rag
Winter 2009
Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
704-573-2516, contact us
Featuring:
Cathy Smith Bowers, The Candle I Hold Up to See You
Interviewed by Heather Jane Collings
Robert Boisvert, Long Dead Lover
Interviewed by LaTasha R. Jones
“Plain of Reeds” by Gaynell Gavin
“Mysterious Ways” by Jennifer Anne Moses
“Tell Me, This” by Scott Temple
“The Cartography of Love” by Charles Israel
Reviews by David-Matthew Barnes, Jessie Carty, Heather Jane Collings, Tony Gallaoway, Scott Owens, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Richard Allen Taylor, and Eric A. Weil.
of the following work:
Serena by Ron Rash, At the Axis of Imponderables by Neil Carpathios, Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction by George Hovis, Postmodern Bourgeois by David E. Poston, Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine by Ben Tanzer, Ohio River Dialogues by William Zink, Thirst by Patrick Carrington, Ghost Alphabet by Al Maginnes, Cities of Flesh and the Dead by Diann Blakely.
Poetry by
Justin Askins, Jene Erick Beardsley, Cathy Smith Bowers, Beth Cagle Burt, Llyn Clague, Thomas L. Conroy, Chuck Endsley, Chris Flowers, Carol Frith, Arun Gaur, Alex Grant, Gail Gray, Eric Greenwell, John Grochalski, Colleen Harris, Michelle Hartman, Richard Krohn, Chris Kursel, Lisa LaTourette, Lauren Lawrence, Ellaraine Lockie, Judy Longley, Sheila McGuinness, Gavin Post, Charles Rammelkamp, Margaret Rozga, Joanna Catherine Scott, Julia Simpson, Colette Tennant, Gerald Wheeler.
Cover Art: Sascha Burkard, provided by iStockPhoto.com
Jene Erick Beardsley
Paoli, PAAT THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
Below embarrassment, a homeless dog
Rhythmically rids its lust upon the blind
Backside of the local bitch with an impure hug.
The sky, that looks as though nothing were behind
It, is empty but for a distant monoplane
That, burning high sunlight and grinding its solo way
Through the element, sounds its monotony and strain.
In the lower air, above the unlicensed stray,
A flimsy mourning cloak, flying by spasm
Touches a wildflower here and there. The scene
Is America by representation: split into orgasm
And mechanism and a little sad loveliness between
Chuck Endsley
Concord, NCTHE GRAVEYARD
The machines became my world.
Their clang and screech,
an intoxicating lullaby.
Hidden paths through the world of dreams
illuminated solely
by the soft glow of their lights.
Our justice was swift and terrible.
We were doing God’s work,
the machines and I.
Fabricating the very cogs
that spun the world
and gave it that cloying sense of beauty.Honeysuckle and nightmares.
Night after night after night after night after night.
Until the sun rose,
and then,
the tedious walk to the car
and the drive home.
Colleen Harris
Chattanooga, TNFOR MY UNBORN SON
Better you stay
in the un-world, unborn
this place is not fit
for children, nor men.
Even Lucifer has taken
his light and gone home.I would never place you
on a stone in the forest.
The thought turns my throat
to ash, my praise to dust.
Let the naked altar stand
as proof of a father’s cruelty.My mother’s mother
a thousand times back
traded your life for an apple.
I would have struck
a better bargain, and cooked
the serpent over an open flame,
under that fruited tree.God never asks permission,
He would steal your rib as you sleep
and fashion your destruction.
Would you follow love
into desolation,
if love chose desolation
over you?You would be made a soldier
in an unwilling army,
to bludgeon hope
from the breast of the natives.
I will steal your rifle
and replace your fingers
with roses the color of blood,
your eyes with pearls of peace.
Joanna Catherine Scott
Chapel HIll, NC
AN INNOCENT IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death,
the whole of death, before life,
to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,
cannot be expressed.—Rilke
You come to me from a nine by seven cell,
one thin-mattressed cot, one high narrow window,
sealed, one obstinate commode.
Your ability to bear is greater than mine
because you have been sorely tested.
What is it that sustains you? Hope?Excess of being wells up in my heart.
And I weep for the child in the womb
who has blossomed in a cage of darkness,
for the mother without breasts or arms,
for the unrepentant father hiding in the wings
of your undoing, for the future which is aftertaste,
and the death that will leave none of us alone.Who has not sat, scared, before his heart’s curtain?
One on each side of wired plexiglass,
we approached each other warily at first
across a vast and ignorant yearning.
Now we know each other well.
Although to the patroller, with his clanking keys
and dull observing eye, not a thing has changed.Who has turned us around like this, so that
whatever we do, we always have the aspect
of one who leaves?Misery still oozes through the walls
like sewage into a contaminated well,
and humming over everything like fear
is fear. And yet there is that oldest of old joys,
there is you telling me a joke,
there is me laughing.
Gaynell Gavin
Columbia, SCPLAIN OF REEDS
I stand inside the doorway with my rifle. The door I’ve just stepped through disappears. Usually to clear a hooch, you walk right through it, in the front door, out the back, only now a grenade flies in through the back door, and that door disappears too. I crouch in a corner. The dirt floor turns to wood and tilts; the grenade rolls toward me.
I hear my wife tell me to wake up, feel her hand on my back. I don’t sleep anymore that night.
Why did I go? I could say I’m from a line of fighting men—the Revolution, Civil War, my dad in World War II. I could say I was wasting myself in college, majoring in booze and girls. I could say I grew up on John Wayne movies and thought I’d be one of the good guys fighting for freedom. I could say my mom didn’t want me to go, and I didn’t want to do what she said. I could say I don’t know.It didn’t really happen in a hooch. What really happened was my point man saw a camouflaged gate. I followed to cover him. He didn’t trip the wire his first time across the trail. He tripped it the second time, after he turned to come back. He got some shrapnel in a leg, but I got most of it. I was looking down because my feet were tangled in undergrowth—it reminded me of this snaky Medusa hair I’d seen in a book in my high-school mythology class, a strange flash of thought, and it saved me. If I hadn’t been looking down, what went into my helmet would have gone into my face and head. What do you call that? Luck? God? What determined who lived and died? Looking down? A good helmet? A good medic?
I hear my medic’s voice. “Hang on for me. You’re stable. I’ll get back to you, but I gotta keep this guy alive as long as I can. Hang on.” So they tried to find out what they could from the enemy soldier next to me, while I waited for him to die, and wondered if he had one of those Born-in-the-North-to-die-in-the-South tattoos. Later, a lieutenant I should have shot got my medic killed.
Before daylight, one morning I see a VC soldier walking down this trail with a lantern swinging from the barrel of his AK-47. Rules of engagement say don’t shoot anyone carrying a lantern before dawn. Farmers going to market carry lanterns, so the theory is anyone carrying a lantern this early is a farmer, but the theory doesn’t work. I’m gonna shoot the guy, only the lieutenant won’t let me, and I know anyone so stupid should be killed before he gets us killed. So I almost kill him right there, but I stop myself.
After I got hurt, that fool charged an enemy bunker with grenades in both hands. When he went down, his men didn’t know he was dead. The medic who saved me crawled forward to help him.
Our medics were great guys. Most carried weapons, but even if you’re armed, you can’t really protect yourself when you’re taking care of injured men, so we covered them. We took care of them, and they took care of us. The only man I saw who didn’t have fear in his eyes when I looked in them was an unarmed medic, a conscientious objector, “Doc CO.” The rest of us were afraid almost every second. We sweated fear in our sleep. Anyway, the lieutenant goes down, my medic crawls forward, two more men follow to cover him, and they’re all killed trying to save the dead lieutenant. The captain’s already been killed, so now the unit has no commanding officer, and the radio operator has to take command.
Lt. Wendel Callahan. We called him Whinny, not just because of his name but also cause he sounded like a horse when he laughed. We called him plenty of other names too. I shoulda killed that bastard the morning he wouldn’t let me shoot. I hate him, and since I finally came back to the Church, I pray to God to help me stop. I want to believe there’s a God who loves us, but it’s hard to reconcile.
There was another lieutenant. His company was marching along a tree line, perpendicular to my company, which was marching toward the same tree line in a flooded field. The VC opened fire. I saw him go down, waded forward, pulled him back.
I put my arm around him, half carrying and dragging him while he tries to walk, when he says, like we’re at a party, “What’s your name?” I say “Spencer, Sgt. Spencer—yours?” He tells me it’s Brash, Jay Brash. So they fix Lt. Jay Brash up and send him back to the field. Later, in the hospital at Fitzsimmons, I hear he was killed just after I got hurt.
If you thought anybody was safe, you were wrong. I was based at Dong Tam but almost always out in the field. I had this friend, Johnnie Noreen, all through grade school and high school. Strange—two guys from this little ten-thousand-person farm town surrounded by fields, ending up at the same base thirteen thousand miles from home. Johnnie’s one of the support troops, not a grunt like me, so I’m thinking he’s okay—come in from the field one day and ask where he is. For one of the longest and worst minutes of my life, nobody answers.
The damn beers weren’t even for him. He went to get them for a couple other guys. He’d just left the bunker when the perimeter was attacked. The found him a few minutes later, on his knees against sandbags outside the bunker, still holding a beer in each hand, killed—shrapnel from short rounds in his brain.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion to this can be read in the Winter 2009 issue which is available direct from MSR for $8 at
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