Issue 2
Table of Contents
Contest Winners and Finalists
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Bios

Poetry

Authors
Barbara Schweitzer
Nancy Tupper Ling
Daniel Donaghy
Bonnie Naradzay
Gerald Huml
Boe Barnett
Elizabeth Rodriguez
Antonio Sacre
Miriam Sagan
Lynn Veach Sadler


Barbara Schweitzer
Chicory

The chicory on the corner of One Forty-six
and Admiral blooms this December one in
Providence; bright blue bells jangle ribald
in the gray spring-less air while black
tires spin heedlessly by them, by the blooming
out-of-season chicory-blue that clashes with the
bruising horizon and the storm coming through.

The first snow is predicted, two to four this
afternoon, this December one afternoon,
bent to fall around the chicory here beside
the cars, light-stopped cars, heart-stopped
ringing of the blue bells in my eyes beside
the street, the so-busy city street, spots of
blue in the drab block hugged between the
sidewalk and the curb, eager on this day
to be sprung, to linger, to bloom, to flaunt, to flash
to bray against the grays, to brazenly ring blue bells
to the highways, to sing unseasonably for the snow
to fling unreasonably into the snowfall its plucky blue
to chant itself a dirge, for soon it will be buried, roots-
first, and then the salt trucks will finish it up,
spraying their briny death into the nor-easterly elixir,
into the whiny depths of yet another late-arriving winter.

It is impossible to remember to forget to
want to share with you the chicory blue
blooming where we have been, but you are
gone like spring, gone before the first snow
plow, never were definite like the blue flower
anyhow, never were true—people are not—
not like this brief splotch of chicory blue,
not delphinium or larkspur or periwinkle or
violet or sky or your eyes—but chicory blue—
on the stripped and tarry block, beside the street
where One Forty-six meets Admiral, at the traffic
stop that changes every one and a half minutes, that
draws me from the blue chicory cups drinking down
the winter storm to the green go-ahead blinking me on.


Nancy Tupper Ling
Jasmine

You’re about to board the plane.
I’m home, counting leaves;
dark spindly masses linger in your cup.
I’m not searching for divinations.
Just wondering: how the brittle, the weak,
awaken and resurrect under hot water,
steep a home to fragrance?
How many branches beg
this body to sing?
And, what remains here for me—
the way the tea singed your tongue,
the way it clings to my lips when you leave?


Daniel Donaghy
Nockamixon Lake

Far from the city that closed on us
like a fist all June and July,
away for a few minutes
from the family reunion
and its cooler of iced Millers,
I pencil dove into the lake
with all of my clothes on,
my body stiff as a nail
as it cut through the water
that darkened as I sank,
bubbles rushing up like smoke
as I sliced down and down,
pushing up with my palms,
driving deeper into what
we never felt in those row homes
set like teeth along greasy avenues––
not freedom exactly, but something
like it––a boundlessness
my lungs ached against past
mud-silted sunnies and bass,
beneath the staccato of outboards
and screaming children,
my father’s black lungs drifting away
with my mother’s black eyes
and her cries in the hallway at night,
the Sisters of Saint Joseph
vanishing when I closed my eyes
to their Bible passages
and the prayers we said by rote,
sinking past drowned logs
until my foot wedged between rocks.

On the bottom of the lake
I hung like a balloon fighting
to free itself from a greedy boy’s hand,
flailing my arms in the cloud I made,
squinting against the vise closing
in on my temples, looking up
to the sky’s white rim along the surface
where like a bird a beer can fell,
the twig of a cigarette, and then my father,
who couldn’t swim, fell face first
toward the last bubbles I could push
from my nose and mouth.
He held his arms straight out
as if across a canyon, roaring to me,
touching first my hair, then my face,
my eyes leading him to the foot he freed
from the leather basketball sneaker
he’d worked overtime to pay for.
When he patted the back of my leg,
I pushed off and burst toward
the exhausted air above the lake,
my arms churning like oars,
thinking even then only of myself,
not knowing until later how
he’d known where to look for me,
how he’d calmed everyone
before he dove by swearing
that he wouldn’t come up alone.



Bonnie Naradzay
House on the Patuxent River

Leaning back in wheezing chairs,
we prop our feet, eat apple cake
with raisins soaked in rum, and read
aloud in turns from Bishop’s poems.
Shapes of otherworldly firs emerge,
anchored in the ghostly fog.
We enter dreamy divagations in a bus
and pause to slide the glass doors open
for the cat, fur slick from spats of rain,
mewling back inside to claim a seat.
The driver’s a local who stops for moose.
The sky is darker than the water now.
Torrential rain arrives and surges through
slender willow trees to meet the sea.
Winds raise the spirit-level, and water
overflows the pilings. The bulwarks
are submerged, cattails sway in choppy
waves, and crab traps clang against the pier.


Gerald Huml
Drive

It was the time insects splattered against the windshield.
Begin again. It was the time I splattered insects against the windshield,
the beginnings of rain like transparent stars as my pickup truck
shot down the interstate, pollen damp on maroon steel. I gathered the arguments: There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.1 Nevertheless,
the needle of the speedometer trembled at eighty-five.
I was late. My fiancée three counties away warned me
not to develop a pattern, lateness like her father.
The trees went by at a steady rate, bristling with wind
that made me keep both hands on the wheel, and focus.
I wanted to watch the trees, radiant foliage to my left and right,
a hawk circling above with a dark underside. I imagined talons
stained everlasting by the fortifying blood of rabbit.
From that height and with those eyes, one is ruthless.

* * *

Hours ago in the mall bathroom two teenagers entered
loud and dressed as skinheads, their jackboots and T-shirts ridiculous to a human being conscious this century.
The stink of beer and cigarette smoke wafted off them. I finished at the urinal and glanced towards their laughter,
rejecting how they pissed broad zigzags on the wall.
I washed my hands. The peripheral vision of the mirror
warned me when the taller one stood beside me, his smile
an upturned corner of bone when the lights went out.
“Faggot!” and a fist grazed my temple. I had sidestepped
the power delivered to the mirror, the crash and his scream bringing the other on top of me and into a wall, hard.

* * *

The mileage was full of nines, the odometer turning
a message in black and white—as if I cared. Outside the cell tower blinked in three places,
a metal scaffold built to a point and growing larger
with each erasure in the windshield. I’d climb there to think, past the diminishing Xs of steel lattice work,
up where the ladder rungs quit, but I don’t, the antennae and I together at one hundred and eighty feet—where nothing matters
but grasp and the speeding headlights below.
A prince, therefore, must not care about being criticized for cruelty . . . it is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.2
The rain would be cold with such thinking. Never mind the lightning.

* * *

A punch to the face, another in the stomach, blackness gave way
to stars exploding, the whirl in my head and knees
tempting to sink to. I heard the flush of a woman’s toilet
and dropped back into pain, reached down to that place
where only survival matters and hit through what was on top of me.
Each knee and elbow, each punch and kick shot out from my body
till I had the satisfaction of hand holding throat, squeezing
until my hammer fist collapsed nose, the crack that of an ice tray and the immediate flow, warm, as I dropped him.

* * *

The left lane was clogged. A Mercedes bumped along at the speed limit
parallel to an RV. I tried not to tailgate, flashed my lights
then high beams. The Mercedes driver tapped his brake lights at me
and slowed to fifty, waving at me with his middle finger, his eyes
felt in the rear-view mirror, believing that his time and behavior
were superior, that he could do as he liked with impunity.
High beams on and accelerating, I could see the registration numbers on his license plate as I neared and ever-so-gently nudged his bumper.
His response: a dramatic increase in speed and the desired lane change.
War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will . . .
to secure that object we must render the enemy helpless . . . 3
I cut my lights and outdistanced all nearby cars.

* * *

Only breath moved in the men’s room. I listened to labored inhalations while moving along the tile, felt the pipes shudder as toilets flushed. Light hurt in the awakening. The burst of fluorescent lights
revealed a spider-webbed mirror, a hundred replicas of my face
distorted and bloody, shimmering with each movement.
On the floor writhed two pitiful excuses, the remains of one
nursing his crushed fist and rolling in glass, the other
unconscious,
blood spilling from his misshapen nose. He quivered, was pale,
the last image as I ran out the door and bumped someone.

* * *

The interstate exit announced itself finally, and I took it. My lights shone on a sign
riddled with buckshot. I slowed to a stop, looked behind me and both ways,
nothing but my idling pickup truck awaiting my commands.
I signaled left and listened, signaled right and listened to the repeating blink.
In the distance, above the trees, the town’s upper hemisphere glowed:
a halo of lit homes, closed shops, street lights, and traffic light eyes.
I turned left for town. The way, punctuated by farmhouses,
curved and rose alongside property boundaries, wooden fences that ceased on the outskirts of town where the first stoplight
reddened.

The light overhead remained fixed. Past the intersection, past the familiar
right turn was the driveway to her house. There she waited.
Worried.
I imagined her in the dark with television, the phone beside her, holding a pillow.
The stoplight unchanged and no one around, I drove through the intersection
and continued my way. I thought of rationalizations and my convictions.
I thought of consequences, the police, the rest of my examined life.

Notes
1 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil
2 Niccolò Machiavelli from The Prince
3 Karl von Clausewitz from On War

Boe Barnett
Father

This is for you
I ran into you
at Lowe’s you
were with your
wife who got too
close who is not
my mother I was
with your young-
est for the first
time you know
him but me
you would have
recognized any-
where my hair
is just like yours
at my age at my
age you had my
half-sister you
left her mother
for the woman
who became my
mother who left
you a gutter full
of leaves and full


Elizabeth Rodriguez
Banana Bread

Mrs. S, the lady
of the house next door
came to call
with a pan of banana bread
to welcome me
to the neighborhood.
She had heard
I was a lesbian
and was relieved
I didn’t flaunt my lifestyle.
She watched Ellen Degeneres
every morning but not
everyone was as understanding.
I looked at the crumbs
clinging to the side of the pan
and considered telling her
I believe in being open-minded.
Heterosexuality isn’t a choice, after all.
They’re just born that way.


Antonio Sacre
I Need A Poem

I need a poem tonight
I need a poem right now
to hold my elbow and run its fingers through my hair
to quiet this
I need a poem whispered right here in my ear,
chin on my shoulder, breath hot on my skin,
sexy slow and sweet
I need a poem, sliding down my throat,
silky smooth and sensual,
filling my belly from down deep
I need a poem,
dancing in my eyes,
chasing light to optic nerve to the very center of my brain
I need a poem, kicking my ass,
one foot after another,
moving me out of this room into the world
I need a poem, stinking up my nose,
rotting like death that brings new life.
I need a poem spreading wide and taking me in,
making me forget where I am and reminding me
why I even bother
I need a poem

Miriam Sagan
Found Poem

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University
Announced in January
That the color of the universe
Was pale turquoise
Three months later,
They admitted that they made a mistake
And that the true color of the universe
Is beige.


Lynn Veach Sadler
Pressing My Own Olives for Oil

I thought Grandmother Teitelbaum was
Grandmother T-i-d-a-l B-o-m-b,
was always expecting,
not only Generic Catastrophe,
but its specifics.

If Grandmother Teitelbaum’s lips and fingers
ever stopped moving,
cataclysm would come again upon
not just my immediate relatives
but all Jews left in the world.

At my first Hanukkah at Aunt Esther’s,
lo, Grandmother Teitelbaum walked slowly forth
each of the nine nights
to appropriate the lighting of the menorah candles,
offering not blessings but admonitions.

Her eyes bored into my soul as she lit the candle
that would light the others in turn:
“Press your own olives for oil.”
My eyes triple-bugged the second night
when Grandmother Teitelbaum declared,

“Never let an elephant crush you.”
I wore her on my sleeve from that moment.
She unfolded my destiny—as I knew instantly—
in her remaining Hanukkah pronouncements:
“Oil, not war, is the miracle to be glorified.”

“Eat latkes and pretend to like them.”
“Luck is required to get the Gimmel,
but nobody likes a ‘Gimme!’ boy or girl.”
“Mordecai is encrypted in the ‘Maoz Tzur.’”
“Be a shamus.”

“Study until you can say what happened to
Yonatan’s fellow heroes of Hanukkah.”
“Attend the difference between
riding a beam of light
and being a beam of light.”

The Hanukkah celebration in our household
includes my telling the tale of Grandmother Teitelbaum,
replete with a game of dreidel.
Our children know the dreidel’s four Hebrew letters
(though I emphasize Gimmel)

and their reference to the “great miracle”:
not just Judah the Maccabee
leading the Jews to victory against the Greeks
and re-taking the Temple,
but the minim of sacred oil that lasted

the eight days required to make more.
I have always insisted
that we play for latkes,
and there has never been a problem
with having a “poor winner.”

I became a shamus,
seeking to solve ancient mysteries
and those of Grandmother Teitelbaum,
though she, I like to think,
was playing on the shamus or “servant candle”
that lights the other branches of the menorah
and is of a different height to avoid confusion.
The first letters of the stanzas of “Maoz Tzur,”
the Hanukkah song you may know as
“Rocky Fortress,” spell out “Mordecai.”
While I have never solved the mystery
of the fates of all the Hanukkah heroes,
I can tell you that their brother Yonatan
was crushed by a war elephant,
doubtless the original of the one to which
Grandmother Teitelbaum referred.
I have tried to ride the beam of light
sent forth by Grandmother Teitelbaum
during that Festival of Light.
I have tried to be a beam of light.
I attend the difference even as I
press my own poor olives for oil.