Archives - Spring 2008

The spring issue, guest-edited by Leon Lewis, is rooted deeply in but not restricted by the landscape of the Appalachian region. It contains the work of a number of artists with close ties to its terrain, including Hilda Downer, Joseph Bathanti, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Chris Green and Tim Peeler, as well as a work by writers with an interest in the region and its culture.

Contents

LEON LEWIS
PreAmble

HILDA DOWNER
Picking Cherries up Howell Hollow

JOSEPH BATHANTI
The Cameraphone

CHRIS GREEN
Vent

CHRIS GREEN
Who I Am Writing To

ROBERT MORGAN
Inspired

ROBERT MORGAN
Pockets

ROBERT MORGAN
Singing to Make Butter Come

ANDRES FISHER
El Perro Ciego

ANDRES FISHER
The Blind Dog

ANDRES FISHER
The Language Issue

BENITO DEL PLIEGO
Yellowstone: sobre piedra amarilla

BENITO DEL PLIEGO
Yellowstone: on a yellow rock.

TIM PEELER
The Little League Coaches Were

PAUL CARROLL
Ode to St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Terre Haute

MARYROSE CARROLL
Column on the Pond

PAUL CARROLL
Song After Making Love

KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK
Multinational

KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK
Dog Dreams

KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK
Driving Home

LYN LIFSHIN
My Sister, Re-Reading 32 Years of Diaries

LYN LIFSHIN
Reading the Poem my Cousin Wrote That I Hadn’t

LYN LIFSHIN
The Cat’s Yelp in Black Light

SYDNEY LEA
Sex and Death

SYDNEY LEA
Pain

MARK VOGEL
David Cassidy clone

MARK VOGEL
Landscaping

MARK VOGEL
No Topeka Kansas

MARK VOGEL
The Words of Kids

MARK VOGEL
Empty

MARK VOGEL
Raytown Cockroaches

MARK VOGEL
What awaits

MARK VOGEL
Habit

MARK VOGEL
Midwest beauty

MARK VOGEL
Red rooster gone

MARK VOGEL
Why

CHARLES MOLESWORTH
Alain Locke: Race, Culture, and Value

ROBERT MORGAN
Robert Morgan at Quail Ridge Bookstore, Raleigh, NC

BILL SHERMAN
The Man Who Loved Wooden Boats

PHOTOGRAPHS

BOOMER SASSMANN
Redwood Rebar

BOOMER SASSMANN
Fiction

BOOMER SASSMANN
Experimental

BOOMER SASSMANN
Geared Up

Excerpts

 

JOSEPH BATHANTI

The Cameraphone

(The infamous East Liberty adult theatre)

Its very name to me was sin,
the marquis emblazoned with the naked
alphabet jutting over the sidewalk.
Too young to read the titles,

nevertheless I knew.
We never walked that side of the street;
and I dared not chance a peek,
so insistent was my mother’s white-

gloved hand around mine as she, tight-lipped,
snubbing the very air she breathed,
towing me along Penn Avenue.
But I had another eye (for desire)

that saw as though through scrim,
past the bored, over-lipsticked old woman
in her flesh-colored ticket booth
into the smoky lobby where men gathered

silently in darkness in the middle of the day,
not looking at one another,
but shuffling down aisles to sit alone
in the perfect pitch of their torment.

On screen flashed the writhing white things
men long all their lives to see
and end up paying for,
something back in their innocence

they might have called love
had they been able to speak of it.
Instead they took wives, and fathered,
remained in their ways good, silent

till the end, even on their deathbeds
unable to confess, certain
they must burn in hell—
and I, too, for having imagined them.

Like soldiering, or driving a car every day
to a mill job or taking out the garbage,
I knew these things only in the most distant way—
that some day I would have to be one of them.

 

ROBERT MORGAN

Singing to Make Butter Come

To coax the butter to appear you raise
the plunger, drive it in the crock and drive
it down again. But sometimes if it’s hot
or if the air’s too moist or pressure low,
no matter how you stir and dash and beat,
the clabber yields no butter. Sour milk stays
sour milk. You shake and beg the blinky swill
and nothing makes the butter come. You feel
there’s evil in the air, a curse is on
the chemistry and on your labor. Then’s
the time to calm yourself and stay yourself
and whisper to the crock of clabber, sing
a slow sad ballad or a hymn to soothe
the troubled sour. And soon the bits appear
like flakes of snow out of the depths and more
rise like the dead at resurrection, join
their tips and soaring bodies in the light
to form, from the corruption’s thickening,
a sweet and firm and perfect gathering.

 

MARK VOGEL

Empty

This house is bare to its bones,
the evidence carted away;
the wind sucked from the chimney.
The love and sweet sweat of breathing
have been transplanted far from this
abandoned effort.

Swing the door wide and enter with caution.
Smell the captive air and feel
the crack in the foundation.
See the animal inroads.
An emptiness supply store
in a warehouse down the road
flows to this door.
Freed daffodils party in the front yard.

 

KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK

Driving Home

The girl in platform pink flip-flops
stumbles in my headlights on the broken
pavement.
Beside her, the boy in the gray
overcoat pulls her from the road
in January rain.
My foot on the brake,
she was never in danger, except perhaps—

her face now contorted by tears—

from the misapprehension
that here in this fractured public space

unmended asphalt
absence of sidewalks
anonymous, glaring cars

she is somehow to blame.