Northridge Review

Fall '95

Northridge

Review

Fall1995

Wood

Family Tree Santi Tafarella

29 Ways of Looking at Wood 1

Chris Cole Yu 6

Alan Mills Rubbing ~R0d)woods

Mary Marco Blind Signs

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Jeff Schuetze Woodhouse

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Ann Holley

A~2e

Anna Bunyik Flat or Round

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Carl Bramblett

Sc26io

Audry Butera Mice 27

Cliff Eisner The Hardware of Autumn

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Kyle Me Dowell Saturday

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Tracy Hata ke For Love of the Night

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Anna Bunyik Sa~~ng

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Daniel Hall Dorothy and Buster

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Amy Reynolds Weaver's Escape

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Ann Holley Conceived

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Jeff Schuetze Starsandscrews

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Bitter Harvest Elizabeth Howeii-Maruschak

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Artwork by Brenda Swenson

Photography by Tom Moran

& Angie Young

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Editor

Angie Young

Editorial Staff

Sky Sweet Marielle Horton

Mary Marca Evelyn Cilva

Paula Landreth Marisela Gonzalez

Ruth Henson Gail Gaddi

Kim Marvin Anna Bunyik

Faculty Advisor

Jan Ramjerdi

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Special Thanks To:

The companies that supplied my friends with computers and scanners

I could use. The following names have been changed to protect the

innocent.

Sharon Myfriend Rob Knowitall

Warren the Bobcat. Celia Givenmethekeys

Marielle Vivitar &

Chuy

No Thanks to:

The non-existent metal boxes with QuarkXPress, Illustrator, &

Photoshop (not) provided by CSUN.

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Angie Young

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29 WAYS OF LOOKING AT WOOD I

i. There's something tight about trees observed Jesus. They want to be lean coyotes or Indians but can't be. So they're trees.

ii. Jesus tightened a vice on a nail, thought pear wood then said it in Spanish. Pera madera.

iii. Lumber imports increased fourfold since 1990. As has the Spotted Owl read Jesus.

iv. Sometimes branches get tired of being branches. Become perches.

v. I am 29 years old and never made a bird house thought Jesus.

vi. If the branches frame the mirrors and the mirrors never meet, who will frame the branches?

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T A F A R E L L A

vii. After Jesus took up celibacy he made 10,000 bird houses. Called them Celadas.

viii. Sometimes a door at the right angle is as good as a floor.

ix. A brick is just a waterwheel.

N X. 0 Jesus to Judas: R Instead of nails T try wooden dowels H

R for securing casket lids. Tap them in with the heel

D of a stiff shoe. G

E xi.

R A squirrel's tail. E A quill. v

xii. E Last night w

woodchips from Graziano's a stray cork, and three cocks, said Peter.

xiii. Jesus to Peter: The adobe bird house with the latticed window has a door.

xiv. Peter to Jesus: A sliver in a severed finger and a nail in driftwood: that's homosexuality my boy.

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xv. Clamps hold arteries. Cinderblocks shelves. Nails wrists.

xvi. Herodias: If you skin a dog and hang him on a tree first remove the bark.

xvii. Where Judas kissed a termite scurried.

xviii. When Pilate motioned to the mob Time Out! The non-basket-ball fans misunderstood and crucified Jesus.

xix. When they eased the nails out of Jesus the nails squeaked. The centurions swore Jesus was made of wood.

XX.

Nicodemus planted a tree over a tennis racket. When the roots grew the strings snapped. He did the same thing with a guitar. The tree he planted over the quitar was Jesus.

xxi. Thomas put his fist through Jesus' adobe facade and found pera madera. Mi Senor e mi Dios! He cried and bowed.

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xxii. Thomas called Mary Enjarradora and handed her a pear.

xxiii. Apples poured in a basket and snow from a pear tree shaken sound the same but one is more violent than the other said Judas.

N xxiv. 0 Judas R planted a pear tree T in an airbag. H

R Ten years later, when the bag vaulted

D from the steering wheel, G roots and limbs protruding E like wet veins

R from a giant heart, E Thomas died. v When they cut him I out of the car E pears poured onto w

the empty seat.

XXV.

Bobbing down river it looked like a beaver chasing another beaver's tail, but it was just a fetus and a pear.

xxvi. Some say Pinocchio knew the mother of Jesus well.

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xxvii. A Christian Guide to Forestry: Woods shaved and split, ok. Bibles cracked open, and The Word rightly divided, ok. Pussies shaved and legs split, not ok.

xxviii. Emily Dickinson? Also made of wood.

xxix. Sometimes wood gets tired of being wood. Becomes a crucifixion.

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CHRIS

COLE

THEATER 1. IMAGE- A LIT CIGARETTE. PERSON SMOKING. A GUN DRAWN. A WOMAN'S LIPSTICK LIPS. AN EXPOSED RIB.= THE MAN SEATED TO THE SIDE OF YU. HE WILL NOT STOP HIS RHYTHM. HE WILL CONTINUE HIS RHYTHM AND EAT HIS POPCORN. THE MAN IS HEAVY! HEAVY IN TASTE. HEAVY IN THE OBVIOUS. RETURN TO THE IMAGE. 2. IMAGE- BLACK BALD HEAD- DIALOGUE- "I TOLD THE MOTHERFUCKER! I TOLD THE MOTHER FUCKER!"- A GUN ANOTHER NOISE-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! =THE MAN SEATED BESIDE YU TOUCHES THE PERSON NEXT TO HIM. HE TOUCH­ES. YU TURNS BACK TO THE IMAGE. TURNS INTO THE IMAGE! CANNOT. ONLY TURNS TO THE IMAGE. 3. IMAGE- BODY LYING IN A TRUNK = SILENCE. SOMEONE SITTING TO THE SIDE OF YU LAUGHS. HA-HA-HA­HA-. 4. BODY LYING IN A TRUNK. THE MAN STILL GOES HA-HA. DOES YU GO TO THE IMAGE? BACK TO THE IMAGE OF THE MAN'S HA-HA? YU LEAVES THE IMAGE FOR THE MAN'S HA-HAAAA. HAAAA-HA. YU WATCHED. HA-HA THE SOUND JUMBLES ACROSS YU'S BELLY. IT WINKS AT YU'S CHEEK. IT IS ALIVE. ALIVE IS GOOD.

I I DAY-ONLY ONE THING HAPPENS

DURING THIS DAY- YU- "CAN YOU TELL ME WHEN MY APPOINTMENT IS?" OVER THE PHONE NURSE- "THURSDAY SIR, THURSDAY"

THEATER 1. IMAGE- BLACK COAT WHITE HANDS. = YU REMEMBERS WHAT MOTH­ER TOLD YU- "I AM YOU SON, I AM YOU SON." 2. IMAGE- RED CARPET, WALKING BLACK SHOES. = LIGHTS UP. YU WALKS OUT.

YU IS OUT. OUT LACKS WALLS AND CEILINGS. OUT DOES HAVE A FLOOR. YU CAN DEPEND ON THE FLOOR. THE FLOOR SURROUNDS HIM. YU CAN RUN, OR WALK, OR JUMP, ACROSS ANY AREA OF THE FLOOR. AND THE FLOOR IS FREE. HE CAN WALKJUMPRUN AS MUCH AS HE LIKES.

\ \ SOMETHING YU CANNOT SEE- Frank- "Just tell me why

Susan? Why?" Susan- "I don't know why Frank? I just don't know?"

YU IS TIRING HIMSELF AT THE CARD GAME. THE CARD GAME CONSISTS OF LAWYERS AND SENATORS. THEY DO NOT KNOW YU IS YU. YU ASKS THEM TO STOP BEING SO POLITE AND TO HAVE SOME FUN. "WHAT IS

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FUN?" THEY ASK. FUN IS- YU- "BUTLER BRING US OUT THE TRAY OF GUNS AND THE RACKS OF CLOTHING." THE SENATORS AND LAWYERS STRIP. THEIR NEW CLOTHES ARE POLYESTER PANTS, FLY COLLARS, AND WHITE LOAFERS. THEY EACH TAKE A GUN AND PLACE IT IN THEIR WAIST BAND. YU- "NOW BRING OUT THE LANGUAGE." THE LANGUAGE IS STUCK TO LARGE STRIPS OF FLY PAPER.

STRIP 1- "THIS CAN TURN OUT TO BE A BIG FUCKIN' SCORE YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER."

STRIP 2- "SO I TOLD THE COP, "GO FUCK YOUR MOTHER" SO HE GOES BAM, BOOM, BANG ALL OVER MY HEAD. SO I'M COMING OUT OF IT AND THIS BIG COP SAYS, "NOW YOU GOT SOMETHING TO TELL ME?" I SAID, "HEY, DIDN'T I TELL YOU TO GO FUCK YOUR MOTHER?"

STRIP 4. "WHAT DID I TELL YOU? WHAT DID I TELL YOU? LAY LOW, DON'T BUY A THING! YOUR GONNA GET US FUCKIN' PINCHED!"

SENATOR THOMAS LICKS STRIP 1. SENATOR THOMAS SPEAKS­"THIS CAN TURN OUT TO BE A BIG FUCKIN' SCORE YOU DUMB MOTHER­FUCKERI" SENATOR THOMAS CRIES. SENATOR THOMAS REPEATS THE SENTENCE. SENATOR THOMAS- "THIS CAN TURN OUT TO BE A BIG FUCKIN' SCORE YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERI" SENATOR THOMAS CRIES. WHY IS SENATOR THOMAS CRYING?

\ EXPLANATION- SENATOR THOMAS IS CRYING

BECAUSE HE WAS RAISED IN A HOUSEHOLD THAT BELIEVED THE ONLY WORTHY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION WAS 1950'S TELEVISION DIA­LOGUE.

I I EXAMPLE- MRS.

THOMAS- "IT'S TIME FOR SUPPER DEAR. NOW GO WASH YOUR HANDS." SENATOR THOMAS AS A

BOY- "OH MOM DO I HAVE TO?" MRS. THOMAS- "HURRY

UP NOW, YOU KNOW HOW YOUR FATHER GETS IF YOU'RE LATE FOR SUPPER."

SENATOR THOMAS HAS MADE PEACE WITH HIS PAST.

THE SENATORS AND LAWYERS HAVE LEFT THE ROOM. THEY BREAK INTO OTHER ROOMS.

ROOM 1- TOM- "WHERE'S THE GINGER ALE, HONEY? I LEFT IT IN THE ICE CHEST LAST NIGHT." LINDA- "I DRANK IT. I THINK." ROOM 1 'S DOOR IS BROKEN DOWN- LAWYER JONES- "WHAT DID I TELL YOU? WHAT DID I TELL YOU? LAY LOW DON'T BUY A THING! YOU'RE GONNA GET US ALL FUCKIN' PINCHED!" WHAT DID I TELL YOU? LAY LOW DON'T BUY A THING! YOU'RE GONNA GET US ALL FUCKIN' PINCHED!" BOTH TOM AND LINDA CRY. LAWYER JONES REPEATS STRIP 4 FOR TWO HOURS. TOM AND LINDA CRY FOR TWO HOURS. LAWYER JONES LEAVES, ASSUMING LINDA AND JEFF UNDERSTAND HIS POINT. THEATER

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1. IMAGE- COUCH AND CARPET TOGETHER. MIXED AS ONE ITEM FOR PURCHASE.= THIS IMAGE BORES YU. YU WAITS FOR ANOTHER IMAGE. 2. IMAGE- A LARGE WOMAN HOLDING A LARGE RED BALLOON. SHE YELLS- "OH DABNER! YOU DEVIL YOU!"= YU CAN PLAY WITH THIS. THIS LARGE WOMAN AND THIS LARGE BALLOON. THE YELLING OF THE WORD "DABNER." YU ASKS THE WOMAN TO POLITELY STEP OFF THE SCREEN. THE AUDIENCE SCREAMS. YU TELLS THE AUDIENCE TO­"LEAVE!" THE AUDIENCE DOES THIS. THE LARGE WOMAN HOLDING THE LARGE RED BALLOON SITS NEXT TO YU. WOMAN- "HELLO, ARE YOU DABNER?" YU- "DABNER IS DEAD." WOMAN- "BOO-HOO" YU- "THERE IS ONLY YOU, THE RED BALLOON, AND ME." WOMAN- "BOO-HOO." YU- "DO NOT GO BOO-HOO, IT IS DABNER THAT THREATENED THE LIFE OF YOUR BALLOON AND IT IS DABNER THAT IS DEAD." WOMAN- "PLEASE PUT ME BACK ON SCREEN. I AM SCARED." YU- "BUT I SAVED YOUR BALLOON FROM DABNER. YOUR BALLOON IS SAFE." WOMAN- "PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE. "YU PUTS THE FAT WOMAN AND HER RED BALLOON BACK ON THE SCREEN. YU LEAVES.

YU WAS TOLD BY SOMEONE -"YOU THINK TOO MUCH MAN. YOU THINK TOO MUCH." YU TOLD THE SOMEONE- "I DO NOT THINK! I EAT! I EAT!" THE SOMEONE RESPONDED- "I EAT TOO, SO WHAT!" YU- I DON'T JUST EAT! I EAT! EAT! EAT! SOMEONE RESPONDED- "I DON'T GET YOU. EVERYBODY EATS. I STILL SAY YOU THINK TOO MUCH."

\ \ YU EATS- IT HAPPENS AT THANKSGIV­

ING, THIS IS THE ONLY TIME THAT IT IS WITNESSED BY OTHERS. YU APPROACHES THE TABLE. THE TABLE IS APPROPRIATELY COVERED IN FOOD. YU IS NAKED. YU JUMPS ONTO THE TABLE AND HOWLS! HE RUNS ON ALL FOURS, CIRCLING THE TABLE. DEVOURING A SPECIFIC DISH DURING EACH RUN. THE ORDER OF DEVOURING DISHES- 1. SQUASH 2. POTATOES 3. PEAS 4. CORN 5. CAULIFLOWER 6. BEETS 7. TURKEY 8. PIE. YU'S FAMILY AND RELATIVES ARE SCARED.

THEATER

1. IMAGE- SKINNY TINY MAN SITTING ON A CHAIR. SKINNYTINY MAN SPEAKS- "I AM CAREFUL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I AM A SKINNY TINY MAN WHO IS SPEAKING." YU IS ANGRY WITH THIS IMAGE. IT IS YU'S BELIEF THAT SKINNY TINY MEN DO NOT BELONG ON SCREEN.

\ \ \ EXPLANATION OF YU'S BELIEF­

YU'S UNCLE THOMAS WAS A SKINNY TINY MAN WHO TOLD YU FROM THE AGE OF FIVE TO SIXTEEN- "I AM A SKINNY TINY MAN WHO SHOULD BE ON SCREEN! I AM A SKINNY TINY MAN WHO SHOULD BE ON SCREEN! I AM A SKINNY TINY MAN WHO SHOULD BE ON SCREEN!"

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THEATER CONTINUE YU WALKS INTO THE IMAGE. THE AUDIENCE SCREAMS. YU TELLS THE AUDIENCE TO- "GO HOME." THE AUDIENCE GOES HOME.

YUISKINNY TINY MAN IMAGE CONVERSATION YU- "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE SKINNY TINY MAN." SKINNY TINY MAN- "WOULD YOU LIKE TO SWITCH?" YU- "YES." SKINNY TINY MAN- "I'LL SIT OUT THERE UNTIL YOU'RE DONE HERE." THE SKINNY TINY MAN WALKS OUT OF THE IMAGE. HE SITS IN A SEAT. YU IS NOW AN IMAGE. THE IMAGE OF A SKINNY TINY MAN IS NOW A REAL SKINNY TINY MAN. THE SKINNY TINY MAN ENJOYS BEING REAL. THE SKINNY TINY MAN LEAVES THE THEATER.

YU IS NOW WATCHED BY PAYING CUSTOMERS AT THESE TIMES- 12:30, 2:30, 8:30, 9:30.

12:30 SHOWING YU STARES AT THE AUDIENCE. THE AUDIENCE IS BORED. THE AUDI­ENCE DECIDES TO PERFORM A PLAY BASED ON AN AUDIENCE MEM­BER'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. YU CONTINUES TO STARE AT THE AUDI­ENCE.

THE PLAY IS TITLED- "GRANDPA YOU'RE MEAN TO ME." DIALOGUE-

GREG PLAYED BY JOHN- "GRANDPA YOU ARE MEAN TOME!"

GRANDPA PLAYED BY PHIL- "I AM MEAN TO YOU GREG! lAM."

JOHN- "WHY GRANDPA WHY!" GRANDPA- "IT FEELS GOOD! IT FEELS GOOD! THAT'S

WHY! THAT'S WHY!" THE AUDIENCE APPLAUDS AND LEAVES.

2:30 SHOWING YU ATTEMPTS TO SHOCK THE AUDIENCE BY PHYSICALLY MUTILATING HIMSELF.

AUDIENCE REACTION- AUDIENCE MEMBER TOM- "I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY."

YU WALKS OUT OF THE IMAGE. THE IMAGE IS BARE. YU IS TIRED OF THE THEATER. THE THEATER IS TIRED OF YU.

YES I AM!"

I I THEATER SPEAKS- "I AM! I AM!

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I walk through woods. (Bare feet bleed on sticks, stone/stones.) I stroke sanguine bark. I stroke skin, ancient and hard like dead time and the (worm) world that keeps cruel track (of prophecy). Wood gives like gray stone beneath

the light tracing of my bleeding hand. I squeeze it hard, let loose angel-flood. I stand beneath old ... (I fell cold, I'm coffin-cold.) old monoliths that never bend (fall) to angry/silent Death

and Her creeping, never weeping (I'm day dreaming) dogs. I run from dogs past (the past) those rough skinned columns holding out stained glass. skies. I tear (red) skin from my arms, feed it to my loving hounds

I howl with them up into the waking leaves. I howl (with them) and cower from the dying sound. Redwoods feed on angel blood and I offer my broken hands, give of my life my worthless

gift. I let sap pour forth from my tired veins, and I let vampire, red (dead) pyre, red red (burning) fire pull my life into the bark, soak life into the wood/red-bark, suck my blood with pulsing bark.

RUBBING (RED)WOODS

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s MULTI-VOICED POEM

Text inside par-en-(thesis) might be a separate voice, may be one voice or many voices interacting (being in-clue: dead), may even be questioned poised to the poet/speaker.

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Dead dogs pull ribs from out my cage. Dog tongues lick/push tongues toward mY heart, push sharp tongues (inch by inch) to move lungs the other way. Redwoods never rot (fill with bugs).

Red-woods never de( compose).

Redwoods never die until they fall from high (the sky). 1 feed my human (way to human) heart (start) to never mortal bark. Dead/red/wood never rots (I'll rot). Rot, on the blood-forest floor,

I'll rot when dogs are done with me and want to free me, alter me, finish eating me like art-work, hold up my (red) artwork to the (empty) social critics, free me (pre-text construction).

I'll be un-(con)-structed like bark torn from bleeding wood, (red) bark d is/gard-ed, a corpse rotting (red) to feed red/wood (hungry) trees fragment/flesh you can't have. It's for dogs (worms) writhing in the ground.

A HYPERMEDIA POEM

The visual elements add another level on(2) poem/text. The reader is give-(N) choices. You are given choices about what/when/how you read. (You don't need to read this.)

SELF AWARE POETRY

The poem's language is self-aware and its construction plays (weighs) with the way it is seen and heard. Its structure is/was based on (simple) math (magic square); its own syl-a-bles can count themselves.

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The freeway signpost loomed up then passed over her head. She watched the next one as it got bigger and bigger then passed overhead. If she drove up to each sign and then onto the next one she wouldn't have to think about where she was headed and what she would see when she got there. In this way she drove to the end of her journey without really looking where she was going.

He paced up and down in front of the clock. He tried not to look at it but only succeeded every other minute. His feet hurt but still he continued to pace. It gave him something to do so he wouldn't have to think about what was going to happen when she walked in the door.

The old road was badly in need of repair. She turned the rental car careful­ly up the narrow entrance and slowly pushed down on the gas pedal. Last winter's snows had left ruts and holes everywhere. She wondered whether he had called the county and whether they would be by soon to fix it. She watched for deer as she drove past the scrappy trees. The forest hadn't had time to regrow after the winter. The manzanita was big though, enough to attract some deer. In this way she avoided thinking about the old sagging porch and the door and what awaited her.

He stopped and thought he heard a car. Yes, it was a car. Slowly, slowly it made its way up the old road. The old road was badly in need of repair. He must remember to call the county in the morning and tell them. He glanced out the window, then hurriedly looked away, afraid to see it wasn't her. He waited.

-How're you doing, Hal? She asked as she handed him the suitcase. -Just fine, Anna. Good trip? -Yeah, long though. I'm tired. She looked at his bulging knuckles as he gripped the handle of the case

and heaved it into the house. She followed him into the bedroom and didn't look at the kitchen. She shivered as the cold smell of pine needles stirred her senses. She remembered last year and their parting.

-I've got some stew on the stove. He looked at the sinews working in her hands as she snapped the clasp and opened the suitcase.

-Maybe later. I think I'll lie down now. And rest. He nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly. She sat on the bed

suddenly and sighed. Pushing the suitcase aside she kicked off her shoes, pulled back the covers and slid under them, still in her jeans and sweater. Her head hit the pillow and she sunk into sleep.

He paced up and down. He lit a fire. He warmed the stew. He watched a 12

doe outside the window, feeding with two fawn. He stirred the fire then sat still in the old brown plaid easy chair. She was in there a long time. He glanced at the clock. He wondered if he should try to wake her. He stood up, then sat down then stood up again and went and looked out the window at the moon, silver and still in the sky.

She opened her eyes and wondered where she was. She had been dreaming of large green road signs swelling in front of her, then shrinking, like balloons. But she couldn't tell what they said. The letters were jumbled and she couldn't make them into words.

She smelled the cold green air and knew she was back in the cabin. When she moved, her leg hit a cold spot in the bed and she bumped up against the suit­case, still open and waiting. She sighed and sat up shivering. Then she began to rummage in the dim light for her sweater amongst the carefully folded three-day supply of clothes in her case.

He heard the floor creak in the bedroom and knew she was awake. The fire was low so he put some more wood on and crossed to the kitchen to warm up the stew again. He set up the table for two. What about a candle? No. Too much. Just the red checkered napkins and the two bowls with the faded snow scenes on the sides. He sliced off two hunks of bread and put them on a small plate. He should have made salad. He forgot how much she liked salad. Too late. He heard the bedroom door open and turned in her direction.

She felt warmth and smelled the stew and smoke of the fire. She was drawn to the flames and hurried over to them, shivering in spite of her sweater.

-Are you hungry? he asked looking at her flat stomach. -Yeah, a little. -Sit down. He scooped the stew into the bowls and placed them on the table. She

crossed the room and sat looking at the steam rising and the chunks of bread on the plate. He placed two mugs of coffee in front of them and they began, silently, to eat.

Their spoons clinked on the bowls. She noticed he still slurped his coffee, just a little at the top of the cup, like he used to. His beard had more gray in it and his hair curled over his collar. A sudden wind creaked the branch of the pine tree outside against the porch roof and she jumped.

-S'OK just the wind. -I know. It startled me. She began again to eat but an uneasiness had gripped her and she no

longer enjoyed the food. She glanced at the kitchen and saw blood on the wall. She startled again.

-What? What is it? -You ... you wall-papered the kitchen. The flowers .. .! thought ... Nothing. He glanced uneasily at the kitchen wall. -Yup. I thought it cheered the place up. -Mmmmm. He scrubbed and scrubbed and still he couldn't remove all the blood. And

the paint wouldn't cover it all. The outline of the spatters was clear when it dried. In the end all he could do was paper over it and hope the memories would fade in

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time. When they were finished he quickly gathered up the dishes. -Sit down, Anna. I'll clean up. She sat by the fire in the small rocker with the faded yellow flowered cover.

The house seemed so cold. She leaned forward and reached out her hands to the red and orange darting flames. Outside, the tall pines hummed with the breezes. The occasional screech of a night animal startled her and kept blood pounding in her temples.

He finished in the kitchen and sat across from her. -Windy out there. -Mmmmm. -Listen. I know you just got here and I don't want to push ... -Hal, please. Don't. He leaned back in his chair. He wanted to do it right. She meant more to

him than anything else. He ached for her but he had waited this long, he could wait some more. He just wished he knew if she still blamed him.

She began to rock as she watched the flames dying down. She had missed the quiet of the mountains. In the hospital, in the city, the noise and busy move­ment had left her exhausted. There was nowhere to escape to. Of course, at first, she had craved the company and the comfort of people and voices and constant motion. Then later, it had begun to wear on her and she longed for the peace of the mountains. At first, he had visited her every week. He had made the long drive down the mountainside and along the freeway and sat with her for three hours every Sunday, first in the hospital and then at the half-way house. They never discussed what happened, but it loomed like a giant between them. She couldn't look in his eyes. Not yet. She knew the pain rested there.

He stoked the log with the black metal poker and watched the end of the rocker as it rose and fell, rose and fell. She had put on white socks inside her old slippers and her feet moved up and down with the chair. She rubbed her hands together in her lap. The fingers were thinner than he remembered. The scars had faded a little but they were still visible - reminders. Her dark hair was longer and her face had more lines. She had lost a lot of weight in the hospital. The food was tasteless, she said. Or she had lost her sense of taste too.

The walls creaked and she gasped as she saw the knife slicing through the air. She held up her hands.

-What is it? He leaned forward in his chair. Fear tightened his chest. She lowered her hands and shook her head. -Nothing. It's nothing. I'll be

all right.

She could see Jesse's face on the first day he came to stay with them. His shy smile, piercing blue eyes and the full black beard. He was too shy to look at her for very long and she felt drawn to make him feel at home. He needed a place to stay during logging season and they could do with the extra cash. He stayed in the old cabin.

At first Jesse disappeared right after dinner. Then he took to lingering a little over coffee. Hal played chess with him but he noticed Jesse watching Anna

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while she sewed or read. Once they got to talking about religion. Jesse's mother had left when he was a baby and he had been raised by his strict fundamentalist father. Jesse got real excited and loud, not like himself. Hal felt uneasy and changed the subject.

Jesse worked in the camp while Hal drove the trucks. He came home from work before Hal. Anna looked forward to the extra attention she got from him.

-Here, let me carry that wood for you. or, -I'll haul the trash out to the bin. A lady shouldn't have to do things like

that. -I'll do the weeding. You shouldn't get your hands dirty. Jesse made her feel young again, vibrant and alive. Hal was a good man,

but Anna began to think that after ten years, he didn't appreciate her like he should. Jesse was careful to back off when Hal was home and somehow this made his attentions seem more exciting.

Hal picked up another log and threw it on the fire. Anna stopped rocking as she watched the muscles of his arms flex with the exertion. Suddenly she was tired again.

-I'm going to sleep.

The sky outside was dark when she awoke. She turned and the sheet tugged beside her. Hal was snoring on the other side of the bed and she looked curiously under the blankets. He had placed himself on top of the top sheet but under the blankets. Bundling - she thought and rose up from the bed. She shiv­ered as she dressed and used the bathroom. The ashes in the fireplace were still warm and she stirred them and put in another log and lit it. She smiled with sat­isfaction as it caught. She could still do some things.

Her smile faded as she crossed the room towards the kitchen. Jesse's laugh, the noise, the blood. She carefully looked only at the stove and the coffee pot and the cupboard door handles. In this way she was able to make coffee and keep the memories cold. She took her steaming mug to the fire and stood close to it. She could feel the front of her legs begin to warm.

Shy Jesse in her bed. The first time she felt thrilled, guilty and excited. The second time he was more aggressive. So different from Hal. How many times? She lost count. Every time Hal had a long trip. Every time he was away over night.

But then the excitement wore thin as the strain of the deception began to tell on her. She made excuses to Jesse. She argued with Hal over small, silly things, but she wanted to scream at him.

-Don't you realize what's happening? Don't you care about me?

Jesse became more and more insistent. He threatened to tell Hal if she didn't cooperate. He would come home in the middle of the day and demand she go to bed with him. She lived in a constant state of fear of being found out. Many times she thought of confessing to Hal, but what would he do?

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-You're up early. Hal's voice startled her but she managed a wan smile. -There's coffee on the stove. -You made it? Good. Thanks. He poured it then stood next to her at the fire, close but not touching. -1 thought you might like to take a short hike today. You know, see all the

changes, get in touch with the mountain again. Suddenly she realized that's exactly what she needed, what

she'd been craving all these months. -I'd like that. -Get dressed and I'll make us some sandwiches. We can watch the sun rise

from the ridge. Hal smiled at her.

He was surprised how much her muscles had atrophied. She was able to walk uphill only ten minutes before needing to stop and rest. He wanted to get to the top before the sun's red rays pierced the sky. They stumbled a little in the dimness but made steady progress.

She felt the old high altitude sharpness in her chest as her breathing became labored and she struggled to make it up the trail. She hated to stop so frequently but Hal never complained, just waited until she could go on. A twenty minute hike stretched to forty-five. At the top the air was cool and clear. She sucked it into her lungs greedily. They sat on the rug Hal put on top of a rock. The crisp cold pine smells pierced her memories.

Jesse got bolder. His hand brushed hers at dinner. A caress on her but­tocks in the kitchen as Hal was finishing his coffee. She begged him to stop.

Hal noticed a difference in Anna with Jesse. She had an edge. He knew something was wrong. The flush in her cheeks the quick glances. He hoped it would burn itself out.

-Here. Eat something. Hal handed her a wrapped sandwich of salami and cheese. They ate, sur­

rounded by the frantic sounds of the birds calling to each other, and drank from the thermos of coffee. They watched the sky lighten. The air around them was damp and Anna shivered. Hal put his arm around her shoulders lightly and moved closer.

Sierra Sue's birthday party. The men and the few women of the camp gath­ered at the local cafe/bar to celebrate. Anna wore a bright red dress and put her hair up. She looked great. Hal couldn't keep his eyes off her. The jukebox kept playing and Anna was asked to dance by the other men. They always gave Hal a quick questioning glance before taking her hand. He smiled and nodded and tapped his feet along with the music. He enjoyed seeing her dance. The beer was flowing and the men were drinking, but Hal sipped slowly. He rose once in a while to dance with Anna himself.

-You're the prettiest woman here, you know that? -Ha! I'm the oldest, you mean. -No I don't. Age and beauty don't cancel each other out. You'll always be

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beautiful to me.

Anna really loved him at that moment and knew again that he really did love her. The tension of the last few weeks released. Then Jesse inter­rupted them. He was drunk. -Hey Anna, hows about givin' old Jess a dance?

He twirled her away from Hal without even a nod. Hal was left standing in the middle of the dance floor looking bewildered. Anna watched him as Jesse danced her roughly across the room.

-Tonight, he whispered loudly in her ear. -No, Jesse, no. -After we get home, you come to my cabin. -No I won't. I'm through with you. -If you don't, I'll come looking for you. -Hal will kill you. -Not when I tell him how you seduced me. He'll kill You. Then he laughed. The music had stopped and everyone looked at them. She

slunk back to Hal's side and sat down as Jesse continued to laugh and the next song came on.

-What's the matter with him? -Jesse's drunk, Hal. He doesn't know what he's doing. -I don't like the way he's acting. -Don't let him spoil our evening. C'mon dance with me again. Hal smiled and took her hand. They danced very slowly. Someone dimmed

the lights and the few couples shuffled slowly around while the men left at the bar sipped their beer quietly and watched. Jesse kept his back to the dance floor.

Hal and Anna left soon after that. She opened her heart to him once more and they made sweet love in their cabin. She fell asleep in the circle of his arms. She woke up to the sound of a car engine as someone dropped Jesse off in the middle of the night then helped him, noisily, into his cabin. Anna cuddled closer to Hal and drifted back to sleep.

There was a rustle of undergrowth behind them and Hal and Anna turned to watch a buck as he wandered slowly through the trees stopping to munch on the manzanita and crop the low grasses.

-Look, a four-pointer, whispered Hal. -He's magnificent. Oh, how I've missed this life. -It's been here, waiting for you. -I know, I know. The buck trotted slowly away from them and they turned back to the sky as

the first pale rays of the sun broke the horizon.

Anna lingered in bed the day after Sierra Sue's birthday party. She was tired and didn't want to face Jesse. The men were gone by the time she got up and she hurried about the house cleaning and wondering how she was going to cope with Jesse. She was chopping vegetables when she heard the old porch creak and turned around to find Jesse standing in the doorway.

-What do you want? -What do you think I want? Anna gulped, put down the knife and wiped her hands on her apron. -Jesse, we have to have this out. I'm not going to continue with you. I think

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it would be best if you found some place else to live. -Oh, you do, do you? You think you can seduce me like that

then just discard me like ... like yesterday's potato peelings? Anna was frightened by the vicious glint in his eye, but she knew she had

to remain calm. -Jesse, I don't believe for a moment you were victimized by me. We had fun

for a while but it hasn't been fun for me for a long time. It's over. That's it. You can stay in the cabin until the end of the summer if you can't find another place ..

-No, Anna, it's not over. You adulterer. You whore. He came towards her slowly. She backed up against the counter as he

reached out and gripped her chin in his hand. His powerful fingers squeezed her face tightly and tears sprung into her eyes with the pain. Jesse pressed his face close to hers and she could smell the beer on his breath.

-You will do as I say. Still holding her chin he ripped her blouse down the front with his left

hand. She gasped and tried to twist away from him. Her hand found the chopping knife on the counter behind her.

Quickly she pulled it out and thrust it against his arm. He yelled and jumped back, releasing her, as the skin sliced open and the blood gushed into the wound.

-Bitch! He screamed and twisted the knife out of her hand. She turned and reached for the knife drawer and he stabbed the knife through the back of her hand, pinning it to the countertop. She screamed in pain. Jesse grabbed her hair and pulled her head back against his chest.

-I'm gonna make you pay, Bitch. Anna couldn't move and she couldn't speak. The pain was excruciating. All she could manage was a whispered,

-No, please. Jesse pulled the knife from the counter and her hand, as he yanked harder

on her hair. His arm dripped with blood but it didn't prevent him from holding the knife to Anna's throat. She felt faint. The room wheeled around her.

-And now, you will be punished. Jesse laughed, just like last night in the bar. Her thoughts flew to Hal. He

would be fifty miles away by now, driving the logs to the mill. She felt her knees sagging and the fight left her.

The sky slowly reddened and Anna began to sweat. She watched as the red and orange streaks filled the horizon and slowly, slowly the tip of the red ball began to rise.

Hal had forgotten his lunch that morning. He liked to eat outdoors on his way back from the lumber mill. He decided to go back for it. His mind was filled with the memory of Anna in her red dress. He felt connected to her again. It was a good excuse to see her before the long drive.

The lumber truck wouldn't fit up the road. He pulled it into a clearing and took a short cut through the forest. Anna dancing, Anna laughing, Anna in his arms last night. Anna's scream echoed in the woods. Hal stopped dead, then crashed through the trees. The branches dragged at his clothes. His foot slipped in the damp leaves, but he kept plunging forward. Panting, he broke out of the trees. One stride across the porch and through the door. Jesse's arm, the blood.

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Anna's hand, the blood. In one smooth motion Hal reached for the loaded shotgun kept by the door. Jesse turned and let go of Anna. She crumpled to the floor. Hal saw a clear target and squeezed the trigger.

Thunder filled the small cabin and Anna watched as Jesse's face disinte­grated and his scarlet blood spattered the kitchen wall. His body slumped next to her and she stared in horror as his brains hung sideways out of the remains of his skull. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

The sun was almost fully above the crimson horizon and Anna leaned weakly against Hal's chest. The tears ran freely down her face but she uttered no sound.

Hal held her to him and wished he could take her nightmares away, and his own guilt and pain.

Anna caught a glimpse of Hal through the horror of bloodfilled images. The thunder filled her head over and over. Jesse's head exploded over and over. In between she saw Hal put down the shotgun and heard his voice as he picked her up.

Anna screamed and punched at him as he carried her into the bedroom and gently laid her on the bed.

-Honey, it's ok. It's me, Hal. -No! No! No! He wrapped her hand and called the sheriff. She didn't know him or

respond to his words. She continued to scream and stare blindly in horror. He sat with her until they sedated her and took her away. Then he waited until the sher­iff and coroner finished. Why didn't he call out to Jesse? Did he have to shoot? He didn't know.

When he visited her she never cried. She just jerked and stared into space every so often. She never mentioned Jesse - or his death.

When Hal came to visit her in the hospital he told her of the coroner and the hearing and the "Justifiable Homicide" verdict. All she could see was Jesse's face as it blew apart and his blood as it spewed on the kitchen wall. She fought them, but the images kept appearing - at first several times a minute, then every minute, then every five minutes, then ten and eventually, just once an hour. It took months. As the visions lessened she began to function again.

And always there was Hal. Every Sunday he came and sat with her and stroked her hand and her hair and talked of the mountain and the deer and life in the lumber camp.

Hal kept his arm around Anna until her tears stopped. They watched as the deep red in the sky lightened, then faded. They packed up the rug and hiked back down to the cabin. She saw again the sagging porch and the clean table. She looked at the fresh new wallpaper in the kitchen and at the sanded scar on the counter.

-Anna, can you stay with me, here? -I want to ... but I don't know. The memories ...

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-will fade, will heal. In time. Give us the time, please. She looked at him and at the pain and the longing in his eyes. Inside, for a

moment, she knew hope. She held him tight.

Tom Moran

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wood house jeff schuetze

Wood flats, flatly fall on wood-structured wall. Wood wildly walks across booky-stacked casing, cabinets and loud speaker housings. wood finds its way down wise hallways of dimly-lit wiring. wood-stains stain wood in an artificially woody manner, key ring-holders too. Kitchen tables reek of rising wood from floor. Rising, vaporous to wood-based ceilings. 1\Visting, cracking up through to blackedly noiseless attic.

Fathers waltz across wood while winding son's neck. wood creeps have crept down son's throat. Finding it, father must chop-chop gagging wood-gorged hacking. Better to chop-chop than talk-talk. Glasses focusing through forest-encrusted larynx, father reaches for seeds sprouting steadily in son's creepy hollow. Shadows lurk in murk-watered burrows, clutching, wind stalling.

Blonde-eyed, wide-haired sister stares, palms outward in the secret gesture of young shrubs, willowly. Father sees small daughter, and shouts, tree-brained at her. Cherry pits swim about the air between them, so she returns south to her apple orchard.

Meanwhile, prune-faced, son hacks barking, bark spat­tering his face, tree sap running from his ear-holes and eye­sprockets. Pa-face smiles fruitfully, scratchy beard spread­ing, hair separating. Pit pulled from wood-pecked crack.

Son grows vertical, stiffly reaching for sun, solarly past the dense forest-covering of redwoods. Father leaves, fol­lowing the hunt into acres of kitchen oak, rustling dryly.

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• • • =.e • •

Ann Holley

Nine and eleven my older brother kisses me. We promise to grow up, marry, but only i do.

Nights i dream, pulling him from the sea; platinum curls wrap around my fingers. He is still alive.

i am giving birth to his big blue water eyed child, from a rib God is taking from my side.

He plucks out my ribs, one by one, saying with each, this one isn't right.

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Fat Anna Bunyik:

Francesca bought a cat even though I'm allergic.

I told my mother that I like women and she told me that it wasn't a good idea for me to get involved with a woman and I asked why and she said do you remem­ber how bad it hurt when you broke up with him and I said of course and she said with a woman it's ten times worse.

She named her cat Sheila after her ex-girlfriend which I thought was romantic.

Nicole bought a lottery ticket last Friday night and she lost but then she decided to treat us all to Chinese food anyway and she ordered Peking Duck and they brought it over with the head laying on the dish and I thought that was pretty gross but I ate it anyway because I love duck.

Francesca promised me that she would keep the cat in her bedroom so it wouldn't bother me.

After we got through with the Chinese food Nicole had to go because her boyfriend was waiting for her so we decided we should go home too primarily because we didn't have a boyfriend waiting for us.

After three weeks the cat was all over the apartment.

You have just had the worst allergy attack of your entire life and you're itching and sneezing

and your eyes are all puffy and watery and you grab that fucking cat by its tail and

toss it out the front door not caring if it runs away and gets hit by a truck

in fact you're hoping that's what happens because that bitch promised she'd keep it out of the way

and she didn't just like she didn't care that you considered her affair with Nicole cheating just like she didn't tell

you that she had crabs just like she didn't tell you 23

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that her mother killed herself and that she planned to do the same just like she didn't call you before

swallowing down a glass of Pine Sol and now you wish the cat was back

because even though it made you feel like hell she's gone and that cat was hers and now that's gone and that feels worse than a runny

nose and watery eyes.

"We may divide characters into flat and round. Flat characters in their purest form, are constructed round a single idea or quality." -E.M. Forster

The first time I met Francesca her stomach was round and mine was flat because she was seven months pregnant with a baby conceived in an alley with two arms tied behind her back and an elbow in her mouth and I always loved that about her because it was a guarantee that she would never be flat even after that baby came out of her all blue and suffocated.

"The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way." -E.M. Forster

The cat pee was the first thing I smelled when I walked in the door. The Pine Sol was the second.

"It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any feelings except humor and appropriateness."

-E.M. Forster

Remember that scene in Heathers when Heather # 1 has just drank down

the glass of Draino and her last words before diving head first into the glass table is "Corn Nuts?"

I wonder what Francesca's last words were. She used Pine Sol.

[Flat characters] remain in the mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality ... All of us, even the sophis­ticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art." - E.M. Forster

1!'JfJl<e Dtiii.y ll Jf'«JJilJlJIJJdi Jf'Jrtiii.JIJJC<e§Ctiii. ll B<ectEJm<e lfK«JJ!J)]JIJJcdl..!b 24

1 think it would not have hurt so much if the plumbing hadn't backed up on the same day that found my lover and my best friend and my last chance at permanence lying on the floor with an amber Pine Sol mustache and wide empty eyes.

My mother was right when she said it hurt more when a woman breaks your heart than when a man does and I hate nothing more than admitting that my mother is right about anything.

francesca bought a cat even though i'm allergic.

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At dawn, I went out to the street. The sun still low in the sky, gathering fury, birds still silent. If I could explain to you about this emptiness-how I never went to sleep last night. watching the moonlight filter in through slats in your blinds, budweiser churning in my stomach. I didn't search your scalp for bruises, just rested my hand on the jut of your hip, imagining a scorpion's tail, yours, wrapped around us both. Hours ago, when it was still your birthday, we were only dimly aware that we had lost control. We laughed so hard at the boy walking outside your house, taking out his sex, pissing on the sidewalk as he walked. We joked he would confuse the dogs, this strange claim for territory. He was too stupid, I said, to walk backward away from the arc. Do you remember I wanted to kiss you in the hallway? You began striking your head against the wall, hard. Hard. Smiling, closing your eyes from the pain, you said you don't know me as well as you think. I kept begging you to stop. My eyes fixed on your head, the wall, watching for red circles to appear on the white white plaster. You wanted me to watch you turn upon yourself with greater violence, needing to show me how you sting: scornfully and without hesitation.

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A. The mice hide in the shadows, behind the fish tank, the living night light, and watch the angels and goebies swim around like songs. Watch his cartoon hands pull the music from the strings.

A. He sweeps the floor twice a day and keeps all the food in high places. He never calls the exterminator.

B. They don't eat there anyway. They go next door. Cheese and crackers, slightly moldy, sit on a plastic Barbie plate from McDonald's, he hasn't done the dishes all week.

B. The kitchen has glass display cupboards to show off fancy dishes. But his wife took them all when she left. And the vacuum, and the mop. She left the broom though, and the sponges.

B. He has some warped Tupperware, he shouldn't have put it in the dish­washer. He got it at the $1 store in the mall. The mall. One stop shop­ping. There is even a grocery store in the parking structure.

B. It used to be a nice apartment, it was a nice building. The parking lot had rainbow puddles after it rained. Maybe all aging, divorced plumbers have mice.

A. Four o'clock, the mice squeezed one, by one, through the hole in the wall, the one behind the worn olive velvet couch. Time for practice. The harpist played every day at four. He wondered why he'd retired from the symphony orchestra. He'd always been revered, appreciated. But everyone else was exciting, intellectual, amorous. He was just an old man who had seen each city so many times, he didn't look anymore.

A. He played for the mice, and for anyone else who might be able to hear through the walls. Everyone appreciates an audience. The purple notes swim around the room like fish. They float up and get killed by the ceiling fan. They waft out to the dark wood paneled walls, and the dust spiders eat them. One sneaks out through the hole behind the couch. It lands in the plumber's tool box just before he closes it, off to an overflowing dishwasher.

B. He arrives and opens his box, shy note beautiful ends, he listens and smiles.

A. The mice gather around the harp after he has gone to bed. They quick-27

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ly, haphazardly capture notes and throw them into a paper lunch bag. The harpist dreams he's trying to go into the orchestra music hall, there is a party in his honor, but the doorman won't let him in. He realizes the doorman looks just like him.

B. The mice carry the notes next door. One mouse crawls into the bag and rearranges all the notes. They open the bag. The notes, barely audible sing for the sleeping plumber. He dreams he's at the Hollywood bowl, the symphony is playing. He's pouring wine into two glasses. There are mice in the tree.

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IVIy first date in years took off on the wrong foot a sign perhaps I should have viewed as a clue to the moon's renewal of its timber rights to the house of foiled opportunities but I'd wearied of the paneled vault of my wooden heart and held out hope for any chance to sup on the ambiance of such sumptuous company novice that I was to this season wherein I find myself still a curious time seemingly frozen at a vague point amid summer's neon hotpants and the hardware of autumn when trees hold public forums to air their views on imminent change within the color scheme of leaves and those serpentine rings skinny and hidden from sight encode yet another year into the flawless record of grain

Ah but I took few chances then and through one unintended wrong turn as the sun chalked up the day on its endless tour through the umber fields of dusk I arrived at a lumber yard hours before any doors would open the valet was genial voicing his concern for the high cost of higher learning and grieved the fate of a favorite child mortgaged to finance a burning ambition to specialize in twig grafting with an eye he explained to corner the market with the perfect post-modern toothpick

Grasping by then all that was lost I managed an understanding smile and tipped him my last wooden nickel small token to the heroic trials of luck those Herculean tasks through which pass the seasonal folly of all our ambition to love

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The Hardware

of Autumn Cliff Eisner

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I NEED SOMETHING COLD, SOMETHING WET. I AM DYING OF THIRST AND HEAT. I AM DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO STAR­BUCKS. I GO IN AND GET A "GRANDE" MOCHA FRAPPUCHINO. SOME OLD LADIES GET UP AND I STEAL THEIR TABLE. THANK GOODNESS JEFF NUMBER 2 CAME OVER LAST LIGHT AND GAVE ME MONEY FOR HIS PORTION OF DINNER. I HATE THE DECOR IN HERE PLASTIC FEELING TABLES AND EVERYTHING IS SO CLINICALLY CLEAN. WOOD IS SUPPOSED TO BE WARM AND INVITING AND I GUESS THAT IS WHY THERE IS SO MUCH OF IT IN HERE, BUT IT HAS ALL BEEN LACQUERED TO DEATH. IT'S NO LONGER WOOD; IT'S PLASTIC. THIS ISN'T A COFFEE HOUSE, IT'S A EVIL TRAP FOR YUPPIES. THEY COME IN THINKING THEY ARE GOING TO EXPE­RIENCE A "SAFE" ENVIRONMENT. A FRIEND POINTED OUT A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO THAT IF THERE WEREN'T ANY PLACES LIKE THESE, THE YUPPIES WOULD COME IN THE "REAL" COFFEE HOUSES. I FEEL LIKE I'M GOING TO FALL ASLEEP.

I WAKE UP AROUND 1 P.M. I DON'T FEEL LIKE BREAKFAST SO I MAKE MYSELF SOME CHOCOLATE MILK. I HAVE ERRANDS TO DO, SO I GET DRESSED. ONCE AGAIN I GET ANNOYED THAT I DON'T HAVE ANY BROWN SANDALS. I BOUGHT DARK BLUE AND BLACK. BRUISE COLORS. I WANT BROWN SANDALS. EVERY­THING ELSE I'M WEARING IS IN SHADES OF BROWN AND WHITE. I NEVER THOUGHT I'D BE THE SORT OF PERSON TO ACCES­SORIZE. I WEAR THE BLACK SANDALS. I MAY PICK UP SOME BREAKFAST WHILE I'M OUT.

ON MY WAY BACK TO MY PLACE I SEE SOME KIDS PLAYING AND LAUGHING AND SCREAMING. A CUTE GIRL IN A BATHING SUIT IS CHASING THEM WITH A BAG OF ICE, TOSSING CUBES AT THEM. I REMEMBER 6 YEARS AGO. I CHASED TWO KIDS ON THE LAWN BY THE THEATER BUILDING, ROARING LIKE AN AN1MAL. A SPANISH TEACHER YELLED AT ME. I WANTED THAT MOMENT TO LAST FOREVER. THERE WAS NO CUTE GIRL 6 YEARS AGO.

I WALK INTO TOWER RECORDS AN HOUR LATER. I DIDN'T GET ANYTHING TO EAT. ALL I WANT IS THE NEW JETHRO TULL ALBUM AND MAYBE A MAGAZINE TO READ. THEY DON'T HAVE

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:EITHER. I ASK ONE OF THE PEOPLE WORKING THERE IF THEY'VE PUT THE }\LBUM SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THE STORE. HE GOES TO THE "T" SECTION. I SUGGEST HE GOES TO THE "J" SECTION. HE GETS SNOOTY AND TELLS ME NOT TO TELL HIM HIS JOB. THE CD ISN'T IN THE "J" OR THE "T" SEC­TION. I ALREADY LOOKED. I WANT TO KILL THIS GUY. I TAKE THE CURVED pART OF THE CROWBAR AND HOOK HIM THROUGH THE CHEST. FOR SOME REASON HIS GASP SOUNDS LIKE A POP. I TOSS HIM INTO A DISPLAY AND HIS HEAD HANGS OVER INTO THE OTHER AISLE. THIS IS ALL A FANTASY, HE LOOKS THROUGH THE ENTIRE JETHRO TULL BIN AND TELLS ME IT ISN'T THERE. NO KIDDING. I WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO HELP ME. I END UP LEAVING. I'LL GO TO ANOTHER TOWER RECORDS ON THE WAY BACK HOME.

I'VE SPENT 15 MINUTES LOOKING FOR A PARKING SPACE. IT'S HOT. I HAVE NO AIR CONDITIONING. I WANT A SPACE. I FIND A SPACE. I GO INTO THE MALL AND PASS THE STARBUCKS THERE. MAYBE I'LL GET SOME­THING TO DRINK. I SHOULD EAT SOMETHING. ALL THE THINGS THAT I WENT SPECIFICALLY TO THIS MALL TO GET ARE NOT HERE.

I WALK INTO TOWER AND FIND EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. I AM HAPPY. I SHOULD HAVE GONE TO THIS TOWER FIRST.

I AM DRIVING AND LISTENING TO THE RADIO. ALL MY STATIONS ARE PLAYING COMMERCIALS. I'D PLAY A TAPE, BUT I WANT TO LISTEN TO A SPECIFIC GROUP AND I DON'T HAVE THAT TAPE IN THE CAR. WHENEVER SOMEONE ASKS A QUESTION DURING A COMMERCIAL, I RESPOND IN A LOUD VOICE. MY WINDOWS ARE DOWN AND PEOPLE ARE GIVING ME STRANGE LOOKS. THE WORD NO!!! FIGURES PREDOMINATELY. I JUST WANT TO GO HOME. ONCE AGAIN THE WOOD BALL THAT I DRILLED A HOLE IN AND STUCK ON AS A STICK SHIFT KNOB COMES OFF, AND I SCREAM NO! NO! NO! NO! FOR A FULL MINUTE AS I SWERVE AND TRY TO SCREW IT BACK ON.

I AM HOME AND IN PAIN. SHOULD HAVE FIGURED I'D HAVE AN INSULIN REACTION. I NEVER ATE. I WISH I WASN'T DIABETIC. I AM ON MY BED WITH A HUGE HEADACHE AND A STOMACHACHE. I WILL THROW UP. I WANT THIS TO END.

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I have always appreciated the death of artificial lights. This is where dreams are made clearer. I am intrigued by the phosphorous wonder of:

pinpoint-punctured stars & pearl-sphere moon.

I am beyond the fictional, fabric of flesh. I dwell and dream with the shadows gathering in the forgotten, sacred nooks of the household gods.

Outside is a shadowbox of: trees, building, sidewalks,­sleepy-silhouettes defined in intoxicated indigo. I feel only beauty. Such frenetic things as: anxiety & fear, exist only in the day's well-lit, mortal moments. I embrace serenity, there is no pain. I feel I wi II suffer no real harm, ... only life.

IGHT

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1 left her that night she fell out of the tree. I couldn't understand what it was about that tree, that tree she loved to climb, that tree she loved ... more than me. But she loved that tree and I loved her but I didn't love that tree. I should have.

1 was at the grocery store. I was at the grocery store buying food even though I had plenty of food at home. I spent money even though I didn't have any on food I already had. I was at the grocery store filling basket after basket, buying food and spending money and wondering if she'd come out of the tree yet.

She hated shopping. She hated shopping and so I shopped all the time. But I didn't love shopping. I hated to shop. I hated shopping more than she did but she hated it so I'd do it. I'd shop because she hated shopping even though I hated it too.

I wasn't sure why she insisted on climbing the tree that night but she did so I left. I left when she started climbing the tree. We had been fighting. We had been fighting and she walked out and I knew when I heard the slam of the back door that she'd be climbing the tree. She'd climb the tree to stop the fighting and so I left.

It may have been more dramatic if I had taken out a knife and stabbed her in the heart. Stabbing her in the heart would have been much more dramatic but maybe extreme. I could have thrown cans at he"' letting them pound into her head. Cans pounding her head would have been dramatic. But instead I went shopping.

The doctor said she shouldn't have climbed the tree but I knew that. I hated that tree and that's why she climbed it even though the doctor said not to. The doctor said not to climb the tree that I hated at her last appointment and at her last and at her last but I hated that tree so she climbed it.

I dropped the bags when I saw her lying at the base of the tree that I hated. dropped the bags allowing the cans to roll down the drive. The cans rolled down the drive when I dropped the bags to run to the base of the tree I hated. I ran to the base of the tree where she laid.

Wouldn't it be dramatic if she were pregnant. The drama of a pregnant woman lying at the base of a tree. Lying at the base of the tree with blood and baby oozing out and painting her thighs with a dramatic smear. The drama of a baby lost from one slip of a branch, one fight over grocery stores and overfilled pantries. Wouldn't that be dramat­ic?

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The doctor said she shouldn't have climbed the tree and that falling wasn't good for a pregnant woman. Pregnant women shouldn't climb trees and they shouldn't fall either. Falling is bad for pregnant women. The doctor said she hadn't lost the baby even though falling from the tree was bad. But I knew that.

It would have been more dramatic if she had lost the baby. If the blood and baby had come oozing out. The ooze would have been much more dramatic. A puddle feeding the hungry tree that I hated. A river of baby and blood running down the drive and swallowing the cans as they roll away. The baby and blood swallowing the cans as they try to escape down the drive.

The doctor mentioned she hadn't lost the baby and that she would be fine. He men­tioned she would be fine but she wouldn't be able to walk. But she'd be fine. I knew that wasn't true. I knew that wasn't true and I asked to see her and he said okay because she was fine. So I went in to see her, to see her not walk, to see her fine.

I'd gone shopping that night she fell from the tree. She'd be fine, but not as fine as if I hadn't gone shopping. Five minutes earlier and she may have been more fine. But she would be fine because even though she couldn't walk, she hadn't lost the baby. The baby hadn't been lost when she fell from the tree and so she would be fine.

Is paralysis dramatic? It would have been more dramatic if there had been the blood and baby river of ooze, but paralysis is dramatic too. Paralysis when your love to climb trees. Climbing trees that other people hate makes paralysis dramatic. Loving a tree more than you lover is also dramatic. But not as dramatic as losing the baby.

She looked at me when I came in the room and she was fine. A white blanket covered legs she would never use again and they were still. Her legs stayed still though her voice quivered. Though her hands and shoulders quivered. Though her soul stayed still. Her soul stayed still and her legs stayed still and she said, "''m fine."

It would have been more dramatic if she had kicked me out. It would have been more dramatic if she had kicked me out yelling curses in a rage. Curses flying from her mouth about five minutes earlier and rolling cans were of string beans we already had plenty of. It would have been more dramatic if she were to have kicked me out but she couldn't kick because her legs were very still under the white blanket. Paralysis is dra­matic when your soul is in your legs. Paralysis is dramatic when those legs are still.

She hadn't lost the baby. She told me she hadn't lost the baby after I saw the white blanket and after she said I'm fine. She was fine and the baby was fine even though there was no baby.

It would have been more dramatic if I hadn't told you that.

She hadn't lost the baby because there was no baby to lose. There was no river of baby and blood running down the drive because there was no baby and there was no blood. There was no oozing puddle feeding the tree because when she fell from that tree that I hated so much, that tree that I begged her not to climb, that tree she loved more than me, when she fell from that tree she hurt her back but not the baby because there was no baby to hurt.

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She had told me she hadn't lost the baby and I said there was no baby to lose. I said there was no baby to lose and she said she hadn't lost the baby. I told her she would be fine. I told her she would be fine even though it was a lie and she said she knew. She said she knew she would be fine because the baby would be fine, the baby she hadn't lost because it was never there to begin with.

It would have been more dramatic if she really had been pregnant. It would have been more dramatic if she had lost the baby that was there to begin with but she did­n't. It would have been dramatic even if she hadn't lost the baby. But there was no baby to begin with and I just don't know how dramatic this is.

She said I was lying about there not being a baby. I said I was lying about her being fine but I was not lying about there not being a baby. She said I was lying. She said I was lying because there had been a baby. She said I was lying because she hadn't lost it. I said I was lying, but not about the baby. I said I was lying about her being fine.

It would have been more dramatic if I was lying about there being no bab~ but I was­n't. It would have been dramatic if she had really been pregnant, if I had been wrong. It would have been dramatic if I had been wrong about there being a baby. If I found out right then that she was pregnant. If I found out right then I had been wrong. But I wasn't wrong and I wasn't lying because there was no baby.

She said the fall had been tough but at least she hadn't lost the baby. She said she wanted it to be a surprise. She said she wanted to tell me about the baby but that she wanted to surprise me. She said the surprise was ruined because she fell from the tree that I hated. She said the surprise was ruined because now I knew about our baby. She said she was having my baby and that she hadn't lost it. She said she was fine.

It would have been more dramatic if it really was true. It would have been dramatic if she had really been pregnant with our baby. If it was a surprise. If it hadn't been lost in the fall from the tree. If she was going to be fine. But there was no baby. There was no surprise. There was no baby because she was my lover. There was no baby because she was my lover and I'm a she and so there it is. There was no baby lost because she was a dyke. There was no baby because I was one too. There was no our baby because that was impossible. It would have been more dramatic if there was. But there wasn't. It would have been impossible.

She said she would be fine and so I left. I left her with her still legs and her still soul and her still birth. I left her with herself. I left.

It would have been more dramatic if I had gone home and chopped down that tree. It would have been more dramatic if I had chopped it down in a frenzied passion. It would have been dramatic if I had done anything. But I'm not very dramatic and so I just left. /left her that night she fell out of the tree.

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I remember seeing a poodle panting for air out of a Cadillac and seeing on the news that dogs die that way and not believing because life is much too ordered and harmonized for an oversight by some excited tourist from Ohio, lucky to win sixteen nickels after sinking twenty silver dollars, to stand a poodle stiff and dead in the back seat.

Dorothy forced a tear out and said goodbye to Buster, who cared less about life than he hated his loyal keeper. And Dorothy cared a lot-a lot about keeping a dog a dog and a master a master.

so through his insight Buster won the freedom of indifference toward his distracted benefactor, reconciling himself to wait until he can wrest a settlement from god for his pain and settlement and hoping that celestial lawyers won't break his back.

The pound was crowded but her playing quarters were heavy. Before she reached to swat Buster for selfishly dying, she decided, generously, to attribute the cause of her inconvenience to the damned Las Vegas heat in April.

Dorothy pondered and mused and pondered: "Buster was old. He'd want me to enjoy my vacation ... I know ... all winnings for Buster! It can't cause too much of a problem if I throw him away; Don't people flush their goldfish down the toilet..."

Fueled with reason, she rushed to the nearest supermarket for the lawn and leaf baggies and twisted Buster up tight and, after depositing him in the dumpster, rushed to resume the order of desert harmony.

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Weavers Escape Amy Reynolds

Write it shameless cobble0 driven cob-in-web. DuPlessis (67)

A Modernist Meditation

She pauses with the book on her lap; the sunlight washes through the air like a bright hand and she feels the long soft swoon of the words she has been reading break upon her, foaming and green, dense and powerful. The tree arches and bends over her head, flaming leaves insubstantial before the flood. What use is it to form phrases or to struggle here under the tree with her hand raised, thus, to mark at her forehead the point of pain? The children tumble about on the grass, their voices striv­ing for precedence; she cannot hear them for the tumbling of words, like the crushing weight of an iceberg of unbearable symmetry bearing down upon her like a ship; the ship inexorably steams out into the open sea as she flounders in its wake, wounded, her mouth opening and closing upon empty air.

The personality of the artist at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itsel~ so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic is like that of material Creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwo'*' invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Joyce (215)

What she found in the book, and in others like it: over-heated language, metaphor that leaps from the page in search of the precise embodiment of the emo­tional state of the character, language that seeks to mirror that state. Intensity and com­pression followed by languor or the sentence spinning out into a still pond. Somewhere in the reeds a bird cheeps lonelily .

.. . the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

Eliot (434)

The book drops out of her hand to the floor and falls, fluttering leaves, shaping the dream. She is walking in a green and darkened wood. She hears the child calling from far off, recognizes not a name, the name she gave her, but a shape, a force. She who was inside, she who resists, who will not stop talking, who will not release her, whom she will not release. The firstborn. This shape melds to hers, interleaves, inter­sects. Walks away into darkness. She hurries, calling to her, but the trees are all alike in the dim light and the ground is covered in mist and vines. From somewhere in the dark woods she hears her desolation, the whimper of exhaustion; she is an orphan child,

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without family or home; she has been crying forever.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.

Eliot (434)

She hears in the distant room the crying of the child and when she comes to her, she cannot awaken her from the dream. The child screams and thrashes.

The desire to comfort, to stamp out this fear and rage compels her to hold the child, the thrashing rejection an affront; she is determined to overcome the rejection. A cloud crosses the moon and deeper darkness falls across the wall. The small body arches, flings her arms and legs, furiously screaming fighting arms that clasp in love and fear and imprisonment. Then the child's fist crashes against the mother's face like a ham­mer. Blood runs warm down her face from her nose; but this blow settles the battle and the child falls back into a feverish sleep.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes. Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of win­dows? ... / should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Eliot, "Prufrock" (13-14)

Where is the maker? The artisan falls back, paring her nails while the child hurtles into sensation and the preying mantis waits in the ferns like a critic.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self­sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality ...

T.S. Eliot, "Tradition & The Individual Talent" (433)

She sits on the bed beside the now deeply sleeping child; she rubs the child's back with one hand, comforting, insinuating her touch into some new, more accept­able dream, and presses the bridge of her nose with the other hand to stop the bleed­ing. She wonders if the bone is broken, and the breaking-what is breaking between them as the child grows, as rejection seethes behind this childish face? She picks up a broken toy, a once beloved doll whose arm has been heartlessly amputated, a soldier thrust into service against the invincible mother-creature, she who enclosed, she who will not let go, she who will not stop talking, who will not release, from whom she can­not release without this terrible damage, this havoc upon everything in the pink and ruf­fled room.

With the others all asleep the house is quiet, except for the insistent press of the ash tree against the roof behind the bedroom, except for the hissing whispers of the dry eucalyptus when the wind blows.

She had her desire of him, she touche~ she received the maximum of unspeak­able communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift

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and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlet'ft the mystic body of reality.

Lawrence (312)

In the brush at the side of the house/ possums shuffle in the darkness. They sound like people walking blindly in the dry leaves. When she finally must go look/ when the sound draws her -she knows it is only possums/ but yet-she shines the flashlight in their eyes and they freeze/ masked like skulls. Only the tips of their noses move/ wet and pink in the dead white of their faces .

... Early morning light-but this need not be insisted oni because there must be great freedom from "reality. " Yet everything must have relevance.

' Woolf/ Diary (141)

She takes up the book again/ finds there impossibility and beauty; there is a "bright surface" there that blinds her/ sends her out into the yard to look up at the stars. The moon is so bright the stars wash out/ overwhelmed/ and they fade under the white lash of the full moon/ as she fades and quails/ blinded under the language lashing her now. Undeterred possums forage under the leaves for insects at the side of the house. She sits in a lawn chair under a bowl of sky1 as if she were under glass/ with God look­ing through the glass at her/ at her bleeding face/ wondering what she would do if He dropped a spider in/ or a praying mantis. A Praying Mantis/ His pious favorite. She had found one that day in the ferns/ a tiny one/ newly hatched/ light brown against the green. The infant mantises scatter from their mother as if from a starving wolf-all those who escape her quick/ pouncing arms are welcome to survive to be caught and killed another day/ or catch and kill for themselves. As she bent down to look it looked back at her/ bulbous triangular eyes considering whether or not she ought to be eaten. It soon turned back to its job/ searching the underside of the frond for wicked bugs to say grace over.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Eliot (80)

One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion/ the determination not to be cut off1 not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene­so-in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted/ she thought/ dipping her brush deliberately/ to be on a level with ordinary experience/ to feel simply that's a chair/ that's a table/ and yet at the same time/ it's a miracle/ it's an ecstasy.

Woolf/ Lighthouse (299-300)

"We rise at dawn/ we take up our books again/' she said. "We hold the child in our arms again/ the dreams of the night forgotten/ relegated to the attic where night­mares wait for the sun to go; we make of the day something that looks like life/ again. The spider is caught and killed; the mantis retreats to the underside of the leaf; we think we are making order from our chaos/ while the maker pares his/her nails and chooses its words carefully from its book of phrases. Under "M": "the mantis retreats to the underside of the leaf."

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II The Possibly Postmodern Response

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?

Durrell (225)

It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams. Woolf (274)

She would say, if anyone asked, though no one ever did, that the answer would have been "insurance." Several kinds. Life insurance on her husband. Health insurance for when she got sick. She held the children's hands in line at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, directed them to say "please" and "thank you" to the people who served the watery soup, a hunk of bread. "Do yourself a favor/' she would say. "Buy plenty of insur­ance." Mortgage insurance. She moved off to the tables with the kids clinging to her coat. These days she kept them close to her always. She couldn't have them out of her sight. They sat at the long rows of tables and began to eat, hungry, too hungry, having just driven in from Riverside the night before. Too cold out there. She was trying to think what to do next when one of the workers sat down across from her.

"My name's Peg/' the woman said. She thought, "Peg Leg/' so she would remember her name, but didn't reply. "How are you doing?" the woman pushed on. "How does it look like I'm doing?" she said. "Like times are tough." "No shit. Can I get a place to sleep here tonight with my kids?" "We're full tonight. I'll give you a voucher for one of the hotels." "Like I would fucking go downtown to one of those places? You've got to be

kidding." The woman winced at her language. The kids just kept eating. "It's better than the street." "What is? One of those disgusting places?" The woman looked at her, cold-eyed. "You know, not taking a voucher can be

viewed as willful endangerment of your children's welfare. Is that how you want it to look?"

So she took the stupid voucher and after dinner they headed downtown to the hotel, which, as she expected, was worse than a dump. They were trying to sleep, squeezing together for warmth, it was really cold, and then at about one-o'clock some~ body started shouting in the hallway, and then some shooting started up, and they got under the bed until things settled down. It was times like that when she thought about her husband, and she got really angry at him for not buying the fucking insurance, and for being such a shit-head as to die on her. What the fuck was that? Dying was such a chicken-shit thing to do.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fouu, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obses­sions, unemployed, sensually derangect wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

(Bey 4) 40

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She woke up to someone rifling around in the room. She lay there in the dark, she could hear the children breathing close to her ear on each side, and she could see in the dim light through the window the shape of someone in the room. Someone large, a man, heavier and bigger than her, digging in her bags and things. She kept her breathing even and shallow. She didn't move. After awhile he found something he wanted, opened the door quietly and closed it softly behind him.

Since the trace is not a present but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itse/~ displaces itse/~ refers itse/~ it properly has no site-erasure belongs to its structure.

Derrida (24)

She woke up cold, her nose cold, her hands outside the sleeping bag, cold. The alley was dark, except for the street light down at the end of the block. The little girl was crying, behind her. She heard someone breathing, not the girl, not the boy, beside her on the other side. She turned around to see a figure bending over the girl, touching her. She was glad she had a knife then, and she never for a minute regretted sinking it into that person's chest. Still, she didn't like the sound of the knife scraping through bone, and she didn't like the mess, and she didn't like having to wash the blood off the girl's face, and she didn't like how silent the girl was after that, after hav­ing been a kind of remarkably happy child. She found some money in the man's pock­ets, enough for bus fare. The next morning they took the bus to Bakersfield, and the next day they found a ride with some farm workers up to Sacramento, and after a few days there, having made some money picking apples, they continued North.

Similar/~ feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a "subject," to be pro­jected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings, but affects. And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bea"' she-dogs). Affects transpierce the ~ody like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization velocity of affect.

Lawyer Brutally Stabbed in Downtown Alley

Deleuze & Guattari (9)

Los Angeles, CA. He was a young man on the way up in the prominent downtown law firm of Sullivan, Swindle, Jackknife and Lastchance; a twenty-eight year old recent law-school graduate with a wife and small child. Little did Jonathan Stephens realize he would be the victim of yet another violent crime on the mean streets of this city. LAPD Investigators surmise that Mr. Stephens was walking to the subway after a late night at the office when he was robbed and stabbed to death. Co-workers reached for comment today said that he often worked late, and was very dedicated to his job. "He was the kind of guy you could always count on." Said Peter Blakely, a junior partner at the firm. "We are very saddened by this tragic event." A private funeral is to be held tomorrow at Our Lady of Holy Innocence. Meanwhile, police detectives say they will leave no stone untumed in their search for the killer or killers of this young man.

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The TAZ is "utopian" in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, life's penetration by the MaNelous. But it cannot be utopian in the actual meaning of the word, nowhere, or NoPiace Place. The TAZ is somewhere.

Bey (111)

* * * * We found her while on a foraging expedition to Seattle, standing in a doorway

in the rain with her children. The children both had terrible coughs, white faces, burn­ing up with fever. She looked stunned, catatonic. We see this a lot, and frankly, we can't rescue every one we find. We're concerned about spreading tuberculosis among us, for one thing, which is now running rampant in the southern cities, and reaching here because of the criminally inadequate public health care system. But there was some­thing salvageable about her, under the dirt, the matted hair. How she'd avoided getting the children taken from her we couldn't say, but that pointed to a certain resourceful­ness, which would soon run out, as soon as she took the children to the emergency hospital. Two of the women in our group went up to her and they talked a few min­utes. And then she came with us. We hit a bank after that, with her and the kids in the back of the van, warming up. We had dry clothes for them to change into, and warm food. Antibiotics back at camp.

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate.

Bey (110)

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?

$200,000 Taken in Mysterious Bank Robbery

Foucault (275)

Seattle, WA. This town will soon replace Los Angeles as the bank rob­bery capital of the world as yet another Capitalist State Freedom Bank was burglarized during the night. Police are stymied in the investiga­tion of the crime as no clues were left by the perpetrators. Deepening their perplexity is the total failure of all alarm and camera systems in the building and the vault. "It's as if somebody just waltzed in, took the money, and waltzed right back out again," said Detective Lance Dunderwood, of the Seattle PD. "We haven't got a clue." Police are linking this robbery to a similar crime at a Capitalist State Freedom Bank in Boise, Idaho last week, and a another robbery in Bellingham, Wash. Both these robberies were also accomplished without triggering alarms, and have also left police baffled.

I am awake only in what !love & desire to the point of terror-everything else is 42

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Just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Bey (4)

For a long time she stayed in the woods with us. She taught herself weaving. She made beautiful angora coats from the goats we raised. She became known as the Weaver, and soon that was shortened to just "Weaver" and that became her name. We never knew her name-in-the-world. I would come home from hunting and she would be at her loom near the doorway of the cabin, working, sunlight in her hair, the colors of her cloth brilliant in the light. The two older children would be playing with the new baby in the grass outside the front door. The older ones didn't seem to have any lasting effects from their ordeal; they were growing strong and tall, and both helped with the chores in the community: hunting, growing marijuana, hacking multi-national corporations' networks.

By this time we didn't need to rob banks anymore, we had the technology to tap phone lines and steal all the power we wanted. Every few months we'd send scouts down to Babylon to commit acts of sabotage, scour for provisions and bring new recruits and they always came back with three or four people, dirty, miserable, but with some skill or some quality we could use, and a desire for disappearance.

Winters were hard but we were able to store provisions to keep us fed and warm. Of course we kept plenty of guns for protection and for hunting. We were con­tent to watch the outside world spin itself out into entropy and chaos, to send our spies and agents out now and then to give it a little push, to let it burn.

As power "disappears," our will to power must be disappearance. Bey (131)

* * * * She's sitting beside the open door, light streaming in. Pretty picture. She's

before the loom and the shuttle is going back and forth, warp and woof. She hears the children outside. And then I made some kind of transition to her first husband's death in an accident. I'd come up with something terribly clever and interesting: here, it went something like this: the police came to the door to explain the circumstances of his death, which were 1) a foggy road; 2) an after-hours business meeting at a downtown bar; 3) a couple of margaritas on an empty stomach; 4) "the woman in the car with him escaped unhurt." Lost after that. Amateur mistake, flipping between files, saving the wrong one, the work lost. I lie in bed cussing, unable to sleep. How do I get the words back? A circumstance entirely created by technology; a piece of paper you could eventually find, crumpled, scribbled on, smelly with cat pee, perhaps, smeared, but salvageable. Not disappeared into cyber-space. Staring into the dark I try to recon­struct the brilliant prose I'd composed, trancelike, tapping back into Joyce's deified creator, Romantically involved, on-line, with Inspiration herself, leaning back in my chair, the keyboard in my lap, squinting slightly into the screen, sweating a little, excited because it's going right for a minute, I'm on a roll, I think I'm writing really well.

The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait togethe"' regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods.

Delillo (326) 43

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But what have I done? I've created this poor creature, raving, lost. She was on a roll for a while there, too. Things were good. Then I killed her husband, took away her job, her home, her health, left her with children to care for on the street, had her daughter molested and then made the woman a murderer. Of a perfectly nice man, probably. Actually, the man was a good samaritan, bending down out of concern, pulling the blanket aside to check her pulse because the night was so cold; all week, street people had been found dead of exposure; he had a child of his own at home, and her sweet face reminded him of his daughter, the safety of his own life, the privi­lege he enjoyed and felt humbled by; his wonderful career, the beautiful wife who even now was pulling something wonderful out of the oven for his dinner, something which would be nearly cold, but still delicious, by the time he found his way back to the suburbs of- Lancaster? No, he's not nearly so escapist- he lives on a nice street in Glendale, bought the house three years ago, has been fixing it up. They intended to sell it soon, but have fallen in love with the place. His wife planted hydrangeas in the yard because they remind her of her grandmother's old house in the midwest, and because if you put nails in the ground around the roots the flowers turn a darker blue - or is it purple? The rising young lawyer bends to check the child's pulse. Her skin is cold under his fingers. She begins to cry in her sleep. He remembers the terrible dreams his own child used to have, the night terrors that would cause her to thrash and scream, and the time she flung out her fist and nearly broke his nose. But that's another story, someone else's story.

"Shush," he says, gently. "Honey, don't cry."

':As we helped people on the street," said Red Cross worker Jennifer Harrison, "we could hear children crying, like blowing in the wind. It just feels like a dag­ger in your heart. You couldn't see them. You just heard their voices."

Los Angeles Times, April 1995

He thinks the mother is dead. She seems lifeless. An empty wine bottle is close by. Perhaps she's drunk herself into a stupor, or she's an addict. Is that another child, curled up there on the other side of her? He can hardly bear it, that people are made to suffer this way, that they bring on their own suffering as well. He tries to pick up the child, but the blankets are tangled, stinking. Suddenly a shape rears up, he sees the whites of the woman's eyes, the glint of her knife. He feels the grinding crunch as the knife goes in, blood comes out. In the very dim light, he can see the spatters of blood dropping on the child's white face. He is conscious that he must not collapse on top of her, falls to the side.

Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life; it is now a voluntary effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence.

Foucault (264)

There, I've killed him again. There's a kind of inevitability, happening here, isn't there? Look, don't feel sorry for him; like most people he has a story he tells about himself and it's mostly mythology. He hates his wife's cooking for one thing, the endless tuna casseroles. The house closes in on him when he comes home; it's too small, not com­mensurate with his phenomenal success. His wife has taken to sleeping all day, making him take the child to day care in the morning and then curling up in a ball in bed,

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assorted bottles and pills beside her on the nightstand. She's been working on killing herself on the stuff for several years now. Of course at night she can't sleep. She goes out in the yard, in the beautiful yard she used to work on, now filling up with weeds and overgrown hydrangea bushes, and lies in the lawn chair. He sees her out there, just staring up at the stars, washing out her pale blue eyes in the moonlight. He closes the window. He's taken to keeping a stash again in his top drawer. He rolls himself a joint and sits in the dark smoking it. Starts to feel a little more mellow, a little like his old, law school self, he used to be a funny guy, a guy who could make girls laugh at his jokes, a popular guy. After awhile he likes himself better. He rolls another joint with the very last of the bag. His wife comes in. Unwashed black hair, she's dyed it again. She says, you better get a trap for those disgusting possums. I hate them and their fucking ugly rat faces. You better get some traps. Ugly voice. She wrecks his mood. He doesn't feel so mellow anymore. He grabs his jacket, car keys. Where are you going? she asks him. I'm going out, he says. I'm going to get some possum traps for you right now, I am going out right now to the Office of Animal Regulations and get you some fucking ugly pos­sum traps. Good, she says. Then more sweetly, Bring me back another bottle of wine, too, wouldja?

Better to kill that one off. Kill them both off. Legal, allowable. No moral responsibility. The luxury of the author, leaning back,

paring my nails. Even so I couldn't; I've bitten my nails all right down to the quick. So why must I insinuate myself into the narrative-rise from the authorial dead to speak? What am I trying to explain, or am I just trying to theorize my t.v. sensibilities, my Steven Botchco voice?

When I write, I am not writing for myselt or even (grosso modo) as myself. I am writing the voice, a voice, one bricolaging, teasing voice of a working. A raw exhilaration. At ruptures. At relativizing the "univer sal." At creolizing the "metropole. "At writing a feminist feministe-female bolus of scrapping and loving orts into existence. Writing not as personali"trt writing as praxis. For writing is a practice-a practice in which the author disappears into a process, into a communi 't'Yt into discontinuities, into a desire for discovery.

DuPlessis (172) What about the child? Is it possible to commit child abuse against a narrative construc­tion? I'm the one who lays the child down to sleep in a downtown alley, the one who brings the man to her, who has her mother carry a knife, put the mother in such a state that she rises up like a fury and kills this man. I'm the one who puts words in the moth­er's mouth, she says "fuck" a lot because she doesn't see the sense in so-called "cul­tured" language anymore, she's sunk too low to waste her time; but it also shows that I can use language like that, that I'm not afraid of street talk. But the man's wife uses it to show how ugly she is, her ugly heart, her child-brutalizing, pathologically depressed, nasty secret heart. And I make it so .

... he [sic] is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and choosesi in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction ... The author is therefore

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the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

Foucault (274) imagine opening your front door and standing on the step. how strong is your fear? relax/ take a deep breath. imagine walking down the path to your gate. how strong is your fear now? relax. imagine opening the gate ...

Marlatt (89) She sits on the floor in her bedroom cutting out little pieces of construction

paper with her pink scissors, while in her head swirl two stories: one about a woman who drowned her children in a lake. Another about a man who shot his little boy in the driveway of the boy's mommy's house. These stories keep spinning around, mixing up with the Rug Rats cartoon where Reptar destroys the city, but it's really Tommy and it's really the babies just playing. Just playing. She didn't know if the stories were true. Maybe it was people just pretending like in a movie. But it was something she heard the grownups talking about, all the time, and the people on TV talked about it a lot, too. She didn't see how a mommy could drown her little kids. She could hear the TV in the other room talking about it right now. Her mother passed in the hallway on the way to the bathroom and closed the door. She could hear her inside crying, and when she needed to come in to pee, she kept knocking and knocking, and finally her mother came out, her eyes red and puffy. She didn't know why she'd been crying. Her mommy wasn't talking either. Maybe her mother was mad at her. She thought about how mad her mother could get, how her eyes could shine at her all of a sudden, like flashlights shining into her eyes. She could make herself look like a monster with her black hair flying around her head, long like a witch's her face turning red with the screaming so that she had to stop up her ears it was a trick she had just closing her ears so she didn't have to have to have to listen just look like she heard pretend like a movie pretend to hear what was coming out of her mouth until the snakes and spiders would start dropping out dropping on her face and s~e would have to run away hide under the bed and she comes after her screaming with long claws pulling at her ankles and she hears her own voice screaming and then her mother's voice cuts through like the screeching of her Daddy's power saw in the garage she feels the black hair like snakes on her legs she digs her nails into the carpet and watches the darkness of the under­the-bed-place slide away from her and her mother will have the belt or the yard stick and there was no getting away from her now and and

she sat there on the floor cutting out pieces of cardboard humming to herself thinking about the mommy who drowned her kids in a cold dirty lake and the daddy who shot his little kid in the driveway. She cuts the pieces smaller and smaller listening to her mother in the next room talking on the phone, talking about the woman who put her kids in the lake, the grownups all talking about it all the time.

On the back of the Cheerios box: "What You Need" and "What To Do." (It's a recipe)

.. . shrill/ hysterical/ sentimental/ washing up then dirtying/ obtuse/ querulous/ unsuccessful/ critical/ synthetic/ ruining ...

DuPlessis (172)

They will say that this rhythm is impossible/ it is jump~ it flickers like something 46

whose technology is imperfect or has gone awry. And besides is collage really a tactic adequate to what I must get from it, to where I must go?

DuPlessis (53)

* * * *

He wakes to a bright light. His eyes burn. How long has he been out? He is in a hospital. Smell of disinfectant. He can hardly breathe, sharp pain in his chest. He has survived the attack, a miraculous recovery! He looks around him. There is his wife, her long black hair carefully brushed. She looks- better, somehow. She has their daughter with her, big round eyes staring at him. He realizes for the millionth time that the child looks just like her motheri he sees nothing of himself in her. The wife opens her mouth to speak and he hears nothing but the quacking of a duck. From his child's mouth erupts the barking of a squirrel.

What does she want? How can she write the unheard selt the discredited selt the self-divided, self-rejected selt the self uncompaniable with other women. Is this problem solved by a feminist practice?

DuPlessis (57)

* * * * Weaver heard gunfire in the woods first. Then she saw Joshua running through down the hillside with his rifle in his hand and he was yelling to get inside, to get the children inside. He was running beautifully, dodging the trees, slipping and sliding down the long slope and then she saw them coming over the ridge behind him, more slowly, picking their unfamiliar way carefully, men in camouflage with automatic weapons. She and the kids stood paralyzed, watching him come down the hill and then the other men stopped, several of them raised their guns, and then the shots came, and she saw Joshua's arms go out, the rifle fall, the bright redness across his chest expand as he falls forward, rolling like a doll down the hillside.

I have engaged in some trek through poly-present languages. Heterogeneous and self-questioning, judgmental and poly-valent craving and craven-this is the practice. The pleasures of a doing, an on-going-ness, a finding, a coming to, a beginning again and again. The sense of totality is gone, the swing to climax deflected. Swerve from the end as end. The practice is trying to articulate critical leverage in form or language, to cite and transpose, to encircle and enter wedge­wide, to parodYt to exaggerate, to slow up, to offer gesture inappropriate to genre, and genre riddled with its own gestures.

DuPlessis (66)

I ran as fast as I could, my mother pulling at my hand, holding on so tight I thought she would break it, dragging us through the woods as it got dark. The trees are all alike in the dim light and mist covers the ground. Vines tangle around our ankles. She was looking for our hiding place, the place Daddy had fixed up just in case, that's what he said, just in case but he never said what that meant. Now I knew what that meant. I could hear the men in the dark trees behind us. We could hear shooting and people screaming and bulldozers coming and the houses crashing the walls crashing against each other while the bulldozers come and dig holes in the woods and the people are screaming I can hear my aunt and my cousins screaming and the shooting goes on and on. She finds the place and we dig through the blackberry vines that

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scratch and cut us we push through, my mother carrying the baby, holding her tight against her, and we crawl in, we find the wooden door in the hillside, we squeeze inside of a black hole. My mother closes the door and it is completely black inside. We can hear the screaming going on and on. My mother nurses the baby to keep her quiet. My brother and I hold hands while the soldiers pass by again and again we can hear them shouting and laughing our people screaming our houses burning.

This seems contradictory to you/ doesn't it, that to understand what is real/ I have to make use of what we call fiction. But that's how it is. And you and stories? I like them short/ but there should be no shadow of doubt about death. We will need long stories. And you and theory? There is no theory without representation/ though abstraction sometimes nourishes my decisions. So from prose to prose we continued talking ...

Brossard (25)

R Weaver pauses at the loom, gazes out the door to the sunlight washing through T the trees like a bright hand. As there has always been, there is only the struggle to sur­H vive from moment to moment. Everything temporary. The trees arch over the cabin; the R r children tumble in the grass, their voices striving for precedence; the baby sleeps. She n hears her companion, Joshua, chopping wood. She bends back to her work, the shut­a tie swiftly slipping back and forth, the warp and woof of fabric growing, colors gleam­E ing. Soon Joshua comes back in and takes the rifle out of the gun case. He interrupts

her, bends to kiss her cheek, he will be back soon, with dinner, he says, and goes out, R

into the woods. E

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And behind all these questions/ we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?

Foucault (275)

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Works Cited

Bey, Hakim. "The Temporary Autonomous Zone." T.A.Z. Autonomedia, anti-copyright, 1991.

--"Chaos". T.A.Z. Autonomedia, anti-copyright, 1991.

Brossard, Nicole. "Uitrasounds." Resurgent: New Writing by Women. ed. Lou Robinson and Camille Norton., Univ. of Illinois Press, Chicago: 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. Nomadology: The War Machine. Semiotext(e), Columbia University, New York: 1986 (9).

Delillo, Don. "White Noise." Viking Penguin, New York: 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. "Difference." Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass., Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1982. 1-27.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Pater-Daughter: Male Modernists and Female Readers." The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., New York: 1990.

---"The Pink Guitar." The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., New York: 1990.

Durrell, Lawrence. Justine. E.P. Dutton/Pocket Books, New York: 1965.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York: 1964."The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men."

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis & Ronald Schleifer. Longman, White Plains: 1989.

Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Viking Press, Viking Compass Edition, New York: 1975.

Lawrence, David Herbert. Women in Love. Penguin Books, New York: 1979.

Marlatt, Daphne. "Litter.wreckage.salvage." Resurgent: New Writing by Women. ed. Lou Robinson and Camille Norton., Univ. of Illinois Press, Chicago: 1992.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Harcourt, Brace., New York: 1931.

To The Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York: 1955.

A Writer's DiaN. ed. Leonard Woolf. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1954.

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Conceived

-~ ~- ~- -- --

' \1111 I l<>IIC\'

Paradise is an absurd red bird, a blonde and naked angel sucking on black licorice salt candies, ice wings wrinkled white and clean,

a wayside peach pie pealing a pink tangerine, a seer, a Sibyl, or olive Venus girl with coralvine lips blooming a daisychain grace,

light like a feeler on a butterfly lit across your cheek, smiling, fresh green leaves falling from her lips as you kiss her father,

never feeling the purple thistle grow, her sweet, soft, honey pot belly swelling-just turned 15.

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r

starsandscrews jeff schuetze

jimmy grows bored.

Jimmy is watching television. His television is small and is sitting on a t.v. tray two feet from the couch. He is flipping through channels, not finding anything he really wants to watch. Flipping, flipping. He is watching reruns of programs he used to hate as a child, but now finds somewhat interesting. Somewhat. He is flipping from program to program, the clicking of the remote irritating even him. He keeps flipping.

He's thinking about masturbation, something that always enters the picture when he's bored. Jimmy is in the picture. He's thinking hard. He's switching the remote con­trol to his other hand. He begins touching his pants, rubbing his dick through his pants like he's rolling dough. Like a baker rolling dough. Nothing is happening. He's rolling dough, nothing happening. He leaves it alone.

He's been sitting on this couch here for hours/days/weeks/months/years. Images are burning themselves onto Jimmy's face. The television set has been on for the same amount of time. Not into his mind; onto his face, his skin. The remote has been in his hand for the same amount of time. Burning, burning.

Jimmy has noticed the color on the set has gone out. He is trying to remember when. Perhaps during reruns of old black and white television shows. Probably, but he isn't sure. He is trying to remember, but gives up, feeling futility creep over him like slow sap catching a bug, turning to amber.

He's trying to remember the last time he went to the bathroom, the last time he ate, the last time he moved, but gives up on these lines of thought, realizing their unim­portance. He's trying to remember.

He's reaching for a beer on the floor next to his foot, but as he's raising it to his lips, he is seeing about a dozen flies which have crawled into the bottle and drowned. Ill insects intoxicated. A dozen drunken flies drowned in beer.

He's letting himself fall asleep, hoping to wake up with some inspiration. He's hoping, but not hard.

the street Jimmy is on his way to the liquor store. This is his inspiration. He wants to buy

some pot, the good kind, the green kind. The good, green kind. He'll take the brown, but he likes the green. He's feeling matches in his pocket. He has a box of them. Wood matches. In a box. Heads red (brown). He's still thinking about the green kind. Soft and fresh, almost moist. Almost. Green and moist, like a pubic-patch of spinach. He's feeling it. He can almost feel the hair/buds running through his fingers, twisting them, pulling them off, rolling them between his fingers. He's rolling it. Rolling them.

He's kicking cans along the way. Old, rusted cans, he's kicking. He's kicking cans and cigarette butts that he will flick on the way back, that aren't even there yet, but he kicks them anyway, in anticipation. A shadow is falling across his vision. A brown haze is covering everything. Silver. Brown and silver, like an artsy ad you'd find in an artsy magazine. Jimmy is looking at his hands, yes, they're the same color as everything else, brown and silver, with wavy purple lines where his veins should be/are. He's kick­ing cans. He's putting his hands in his pockets.

He's taking a last drag on the cigarette that big lady with the heavy make-up threw out the window of her (silver) car, who passed him by without a glance, without so-much-as a glance as he was thinking in his head. Thinking. She just casually tossed it out her window, not realizing/caring that Jimmy was violating its trajectory toward the gutter, Jimmy casually catching it in midair and immediately putting it to his mouth in a smooth, unbroken arc, pressing the lipstick-smudged butt to his lips, a trail of saliva stretching from the end of the butt. He's almost finished inhaling, but is not quite done yet. As Jimmy is taking that last drag (he's not quite finished yet), the car backfires

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speeding away, jolting Jimmy for a second. In that second, the butt detaches from his fin­gers and rolls under a fence into an empty lot full of weeds. He is exhaling. He is watch­ing the cigarette rolling under a fence. He is starting to bleed. He is exhaling.

The (brown) sky stretches, hurting Jimmy's mind looking into forever. Stretching. He's wondering how infinity looks like, what infinity sounds like, if he was in infinity if he would know it. Rolling clouds. Actually he's not thinking about anything that deep, he's thinking about how he's going to get the money to buy the pot. He has been inspired. That's all. Pot. The dough to buy drugs. He's thinking hard, but nothing is coming to him.

No cars are passing him by (except for the lady, but that was previously) as he continues walking down the street, walking, walking, into monotony, into an endless (infi­nite) street that stops at the liquor store. He's stopping.

the store Jimmy's walking past Funyuns, Cheetos, and Blue Com Chips to get to the Jolt

cola parked in a refrigerator at the back of the store. He is almost becoming excited. He leaves a trail he doesn't notice. Bleeding. He must drink something when he smokes pot. Dripping. He must drink something whenever he smokes, period. If he doesn't have a drink in hand, he won't smoke, even though the craving is still there (disregard Jimmy smoking the cigarette thrown out of the car by the woman). He is stepping on something sticky as he makes his way back to the front counter.

N Jimmy is at the front counter, scanning the various brands of pot he can buy: Doo-o Bee, J's, Wacky-Tabaccee. He is trying to choose. Now blood is trickling on the floor in R big, dark (brown) drops. Pooling around his ankles. He's choosing doo-bee but can't pay T because he only has a dollar twenty-two in his pocket. He's inspired. Now, disappointed, H he is buying the drink and two cigarettes, two regular cigarettes, pulling the money from R his pocket, not noticing the chiclet dropping from his pocket, along with some lint and a r paper clip. These objects fall, hitting the pool of sticky blood, drowning, mammoths in D tar-pits. G Jimmy is walking out the door, lighting one cigarette, stuffing the other behind his E ear, and opening his Jolt, all within the span of time it took you to read this sentence. The

door is closing with a jangle, bells ringing. The store manager isn't calling him back into R the store, even though Jimmy has forgotten to take his twelve cents change. E

v the way back The sky is getting dark. Jimmy is tilting his head, his reptilian eyes taking in the

E falling nights. Jimmy is starting to see space peeking through, stars winking from beyond w the (silver) sky, barely visible, moving, streaking across the sky, across his vision. It is

cold, but Jimmy is not. He is suddenly feeling light-headed, looking at this sky, or maybe it is just the angle of his head, causing him to feel strange. Eyes flicking. He does not know. Cold-blooded. He knows he is suddenly feeling afraid. Afraid of the night grow­ing bigger, afraid of those stars, which are reflecting off the (brown) ground and asphalt of the street.

He is flicking his cigarette butt to the sidewalk, watching sparks sizzle, flying up, then is watching as the butt rolls under the fence guarding the deserted lot full of weeds. The bleeding stops. Watching the movement of the cigarette/sparks/ash, he grows dizzy. He suddenly feels lighter than the dust rising from the sidewalk by the light of the street lamp illuminating the skeleton of what used to be a car on the other side of the road. His feet aren't touching the ground, he bicycles them in the air, growing c loser to the lamp, burning, burning, insects and moths buzzing around his head as he gets closer. Twisting, turning, flying, burning.

He is inspired, knowing what is about to happen. Knowing this, he is falling into the street the instant the only car for ten minutes

passes. Descending. It is a big car. Falling. It isn't slowing down. Coming. All the car is seeing is a shadow blocking the light of the street lamp. The shadow is growing closer. Closer. A spider web is appearing on the windshield of the car. A shattering spider web. Jimmy is being struck as you read this, flying across the sidewalk now, hitting the chain­link fence even now. He is inspired. It is only in this instant, as he springs back into the street, repelled by the fence, a lattice-work of depressions on his skin and clothing, that he

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begins losing inspiration. He's hitting the street, his face is smearing on the street, the bone of his cheek grat­

ing on the hard, uneven surface. His bone is exposing itself to the world. Exposing, unearthing. He is laying, face down, on the street, his momentum (finally) stopping. Now he begins to see a bright red (red) puddle grow around his body, breaking the monotony of silver and brown hues which cover the area. He is trying to be free of the puddle, but the more he tries to move, the worse it gets.

Jimmy is laying, face down, on the street, looking at a rusted screw grow blurry before him, a piece of glass beyond that, the gutter beyond that, the fence beyond that, the weeds beyond that, a house boarded up beyond that, some trees beyond that, some severed telephone lines beyond that, stars beyond that.

Tom Moran

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BITTER HARVEST Elizabeth Howell-Maruschak

A pale rose-colored sun still hung low over the woods in back of Plain Dealing, a crossroads community in northeast Louisiana, and although it was mid-June, the early morning hours that Spring of 1946 had remained pleasantly tolerable. But Miss Mae knew from her seventy-two years, that same sun, now merely warm and comforting, would soon tum a blazing white in the blue, cloudless sky and its heat would be harsh and punishing. Work that could be done early was best taken care of.

And so, mindful of pecking order lest there be fighting, she stood in her back­yard throwing shell com from her apron to her chickens: first, to the silky-feathered Rhode Island Reds, then the Dominicks with their pink combs and yellow legs and, finally, the guinea hens, all gray and white-mottled. It was a chore in which she took daily pleasure.

"There you go, lovies," Miss Mae said, casting out another handful of com, and watching as the chickens pecked and clucked contentedly.

It occurred to her then, in that peaceful moment, that she hadn't seen Pearl about yet and she glanced beyond her yard to her neighbor's front porch. The porch swing had caught a light breeze and creaked ominously back and forth, but otherwise all was quiet and still. Unusually quiet and still.

Miss Mae pondered this strange occurrence. By sun up Pearl often had a day's work done, a habit she'd followed most of her life, and hadn't given any signs before now of letting up on. At least not any Miss Mae had noticed. It was a thought to be reconciled.

And then a memory came to Miss Mae, sudden and unbidden, like the arching leap of a lake trout caught by a flash of sunlight. And across a span of twenty years, she heard Pearl's voice, the voice of a woman still young and no stranger to hard times, a widow all ready, and a mother. It was Pearl's voice, true and clear.

"When me an Wild Bill was farmin' over there in the Mis-sippi Delta, why it weren't nothin' for us to be in the fields pickin' and it dark as pitch 'cept for a little ole rim o' moon still out and the sun no mor'n a promise. I'd just lay the baby down on the end on my cotton sack, and me and Wild Bill would commence work and wouldn't let up 'til sundown."

Pearl Thomas was as steady and reliable as a live oak in a high wind. Always had been, Miss Mae said to herself, and emptied the rest of the com from her apron to the chickens which still clucked about the back steps. Why, a body could set a clock by Pearl's comings and goings. That's why seeing Pearl's place so quiet was such an unusual thing: it just wasn't in Pearl's nature to let the day get away from her, not when there was work to be done.

And then that same small, hard knot, the one she'd felt a dozen times or more these last weeks, began to form itself anxiously in the pit of Miss Mae's stomach. And suddenly there wasn't any other thing to contend with: Miss Mae headed across the yard, straight for Pearl's, oblivious to any constraints her weight sometimes put on her.

The water bucket had fallen off the pump handle and was lying on its side in the Johnson grass, Miss Mae noted dimly, but she never stopped to pick it up. Instead, she unhooked Pearl's gate and walked solidly toward the porch. She was halfway to the front steps when suddenly she stopped short.

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"Well, you are a caution, Mae Russell," she said under her breath, "a regular caution." Couldn't Pearl slow down a little if she wanted to? Wasn't she entitled? Especially with the added burdens Pearl was carrying. It wasn't any license for her to go rneddling if Pearl wanted to start her day off later, was it? No, it was not. But, Lord, some habits were harder to break than a suck-egg dog.

Miss Mae turned resolutely from the porch. "Get about your chores, Old Woman," she chided softly, and walked from Pearl's yard down the narrow dirt path that led to her garden.

A heavy, grating sound startled Miss Mae, and she looked over across the road and saw Junior Southall opening the grocery store. When he turned, Miss Mae waved.

"Mrs. Russell, how're you doing this mornin, ?" Junior called. It was always 'Mrs Russell' with Junior. He'd tried calling her 'Miss Mae' for awhile, but nothing much came of it. Change didn't always come overnight with Junior.

"Doin' very well, Junior. Is Annie Kate tending the post office today?" Only Annie Kate got Miss Mae's letters and seed catalogues in the same box, despite hands that were fluttery as a gust of partridge.

"Said she was." There was a lilt in Junior's voice that hadn't been there since Annie Kate had miscarried their baby back in April. And, my, how unfortunate that had been.

"I'll be along in awhile then," Miss Mae called as Junior waved and went on inside the store.

She unlatched the wire gate and went into the garden, allowing the peacefulness she always felt in this place to wash over her, gently submerging any niggling uneasi­ness she still harbored about Pearl.

Before her the garden glistened with dew, its colors vibrant in the early morning sun: yellow squash lay among large, flat-leafed vines that trailed down the row, and firm, red tomatoes grew on sturdy plants that were near waist high. A few rows over, she had purple-hull peas and bell peppers that were green as shamrocks and big as a man's fist. Her victory garden was the closest Miss Mae came to pride.

Victory garden. The words caught in her mind like fishhooks on a sweater. Why, nobody was calling them victory gardens anymore, she reminded herself, and mean­dered down the row. Not now that the long War was over, and Mr. Roosevelt had declared on the radio that we were, indeed, the victors.

Perhaps so. Certainly our boys were continuing to arrive home daily, and if the folks at the Monroe Morning World and the Delhi Dispatch knew anything, they were being "welcomed with outstretched arms and the healing balm of love and safety and homecooked meals." (That's how they'd written it, one copying the other.) But for some, Miss Mae thought sadly, that would not be enough. Not victory, nor love, nor safety, nor homecooked meals. Not enough to make them whole again. Not now. Maybe never.

And with such thoughts, with the sun warm across her shoulders and the June air heavy with the fragrance of honeysuckle, Miss Mae's mind drifted uneasily back to Pearl.

"Miss Mae! Miss Mae!" Pearl had yelled that dark, wet afternoon three months ago in March, when Miss Mae had been moving her dahlia bulbs off the front porch out of the cold. She'd looked up and across the road to the post office in back of Southall's store, and there had been Pearl hurrying toward her, waving a letter jubilantly overhead. "Miss Mae! Sonny's coming home. My boy's coming home from the War!"

The War. It seemed to Miss Mae, thinking back on it, that one day Sonny had been all legs and elbows, and the next day he'd been tall and strong and handsome, and

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everyone in Plain Dealing had gathered in front of Southall's to see "one of our own off, to defend the Right." That's how Junior had put it. Oh, we'd been proud, she thought now, snapping a brown leaf off a tomato plant. We'd been so proud.

"You watch your back, boy!" Luther Copes had called out over the small crowd that gray morning in '43. "Them Japs is mean devils. Sooner cut a man's gizzard out than say howdy."

"That's the God's truth, sho' 'nuff," Mighty Red Tallblood agreed. "I sure ain't aiming to do no gettin' acquainted, Mr. Copes. Least not on pur­

pose! I expect I'll just shoot first and do my talkin' later." "That's the ticket, Sonny," someone yelled to a background of cheers and hand­

clapping. "Don't go gettin' your head shot off tryin' to be no hero," old Granny Simmons

sputtered through a mouthful of snuff. "No, m'am. I don't reckon I got the grit it takes to be no hero." But he did. Sonny had been a hero over there at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and his picture had

been put in the Delhi Dispatch long with a fine write-up. A write-up long on praise and glory. Read over and over in Plain Dealing. Especially by herself and Pearl. That had been in the Spring of '45. And after that Pearl hadn't heard anything at all.

Until that dark, wet day three months ago in March. And there'd been Pearl about to bust with joy, waving that letter over her head, yelling, "My boy's coming home from the War!"

And he had. Tall, sandy-haired Sonny Thomas, Marine Corporal Milo Thomas, had stepped off a Greyhound bus in front of the cotton gin next to the store. Had stepped off that bus one morning in early April, Miss Mae recalled.

But Sonny hadn't come alone. No. Sonny had come back from the War with a head full of horror dully reflected in dark, haunted eyes. A head full of horror and a real­ity that shifted unnervingly between Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Plain Dealing. All that. And a Japanese bride he'd met in California. Folks had stayed away from him on all counts.

And that had been a shame. A shame among many wrought by War. And shared by many: Americans who'd been rounded up like cattle by their own government and put in relocation camps. Caught up in a national panic. Because they looked like the enemy. No more reason than that.

And military hospitals that, wittingly or unwittingly, thrust terribly disturbed men back into families and communities. Often families and communities that didn't understand terms like "psychotic behavior, periodic, the result of war related stress." (That had been in papers found stuffed at the bottom of Sonny's footlocker.)

Some tragic result was in the papers or on the radio almost monthly. But there were other tragedies, less notable. And other terms, no more understood. Or when understood, made no difference. Especially in rural communities. Terms. like "nisei" and "sansei." Wounds were raw and patriotic fervor still high. And a Japanese was still a Japanese.

"I'm an American girl, Miss Mae. Sansei," Noriko had cried one gauzy twilight in May as dusk was settling in. "My parents are Americans, nisei. Why can't they under­stand that?" And then Noriko's face, a face as sweetly innocent as a china doll's, had contorted with anguish.

"Poor, poor Sonny. Oh, Miss Mae, if only I could get Mrs. Thomas to listen!" Noriko's dark Asian eyes peered anxiously at Miss Mae, and her voice dropped almost to a whisper. "I was only a nurse's aid. I know so little. But, Miss Mae, I can see.

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Anyone can see. Sonny's not getting better. He's getting worse! The fits ... " Noriko had wept openly and unashamedly then and Miss Mae had thought her

own heart would break. But nothing she'd thought of to say had been of much use. It would seem to Miss Mae much later, that things might have been different if

folks in Plain Dealing had warmed up to Noriko, had listened to her warnings. But that would have been asking a lot, given the fear, given the ignorance, given the prejudice: the times and the place and the circumstances had conspired against them all.

Miss Mae bent down and absently pushed aside a leafy sweet potato tendril. Something crawled onto her hand. She gasped and jerked back, startled swiftly into the present by tiny, spikey jabs against her skin. She shook her hand vigorously and a small metallic green and brown beetle fell at her feet and scuttled down the row. Oh, my. She'd have to spray again, be more vigilant. So many things could ruin a garden. And the danger not even recognized until it was too late.

But heavens, what was that racket? Miss Mae looked across the garden rows. Nettie Sue Harris's rusty, old pickup clanked to a halt at the crossroads, and Nettie Sue stuck her freckled face out the window. "Hey, Miss Mae!" she yelled.

"Looks like your cows are givin' good, Nettie Sue," Miss Mae called out, motioning to several large milk cans standing in the back of the pickup.

"Yes, m'am! I cain't hardly keep up with my deliveries. But old Belle got over in Mr. Cope's pasture yesterday and ate her a bait of bitter weeds."

"I declare to goodness! There's no trusting a cow." "No, m'am," Nettie Sue grinned. "Well, I better get on 'fore my milk turns to

blue johnny!" Gravel crunched as Nettie Sue pulled the pickup onto the blacktop and, waving, headed north. Miss Mae, her hand shielding her eyes, watched 'til the pickup rounded the curve.

The sun was well over the woods now and heating up. With the back of her hand, Miss Mae wiped an errant wisp of hair from her brow and was surprised to find she was damp with sweat. She'd better quit lollygagging and be done. Her apron was already full of tomatoes and squash and snap beans anyway. Plenty for supper, come evening.

At that moment, a hummingbird flitted in among the honeysuckle, which had bunched itself along the fence, and Miss Mae stopped to watch its tiny, iridescent wings beating the air. Beyond the fence and down the gravel road, by the shack where Mighty Red told fortunes for fifteen cents, a train wailed low and mournfully, a contradiction in the bright, promising morning.

And though there were some who might have thought that small incident a kind of warning, Miss Mae did not. Later, she would say that she'd expected that day to go along much like any other. But she'd been wrong.

The bean vines rustled. Miss Mae turned. Pearl Thomas hurried down the garden row, glancing furtively over her shoulder.

"Why, Pearl, you're gettin' a mighty late start." "Ssss-s-sh," Pearl waved her hands, cautioning. And up close, Miss Mae saw

that Pearl's gray eyes were wide, even fearful. Miss Mae felt a chill at the back of her neck.

"Why, what's wrong, Pearl? You look like you been rode hard and put away Wet."

"It's Sonny, Miss Mae," Pearl said urgently. "He's in another one of those fits. The worst yet." "Why, I never heard a sound."

"Sonny's got every window shut tight and the doors bolted. I snuck out just now. Sonny's been dozin'. Noriko and me has been up with him all night." Pearl stopped long

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enough to catch her breath. "Miss Mae, he ain't hisself." A terrible understanding lined Pearl's haggard face.

And as if to confirm her words, the front door of Pearl's house slammed open, and Milo Thomas stumbled onto the porch. Pearl squatted quickly behind the thick bean vines, giving Miss Mae a clear view of Milo. At least she thought it was Milo.

The man she saw on Pearl's porch looked wild and unkempt and terrifying. He stomped, legs wide apart, from one end of the porch to the other, his large head twisting from side to side, his eyes - looking red as coals from where Miss Mae stood­searching for Pearl. Matted hair hung in his face and Milo's barrel chest, bare but for a mass of thick hair, heaved up and down as he sucked in great gulps of air.

"Ma-a-a-a!" Milo bellowed. "Ma-a-a! Get back in here, Ma. They're comin'! They're comin', Mal" Suddenly Milo hunched over, swiveled on his hips, an invisible gun in his hands, a grimace contorting his face. "Come on, you J ap bastards, come and get it!" Milo sprayed the yard with imaginary bullets.

"God-a-Mighty!" Miss Mae whispered, as Milo jumped inside, slamming the door shut. Pearl sobbed softly and clutched Miss Mae's ankles. Miss Mae dumped the vegetables from her apron and knelt down in the warm dirt beside her friend, the bean vines offering a comfort she'd never envisioned. "Pearl, Pearl," she said gently, "we've got to call for some help ... "

"Not yet. Not yet, Miss Mae. He'll settle down in a while." It was a plea more than anything.

Miss Mae took Pearl by shoulders frail as a sparrow's. "Pearl," she said evenly, "Sonny needs help." It was a fact she'd tried more than once to tell her friend: for the killing Sonny had seen and the killing he'd had to do during the War, had left wounds no amount of surgery could reach. They were left in his head as surely as the shrapnel that lay inoperable near his spine.

Sonny needs help, Pearl," she said again, softly. Pearl gazed up then, her small face so full of pain and helplessness that Miss Mae looked away, for to view deliberate­ly such things seemed to her a shameful violation of decency.

"They'll take him to Pineville." It was a flat statement Pearl had made. "That's likely," Miss Mae agreed somberly, for neither woman was a fool.

They'd heard of other sweet boys who'd been changed by the War. "I cain't let them take him yet, Mae. Not my Sonny. Not to Pineville." Tears

coursed down Pearl's face. "What else can we do, Pearl?" "I don't know, I swear to God, I don't know." A moment passed. Suddenly

Pearl looked up, her shoulders straightened and a firmness set in her jaw. "I'd be oblig­ed if you could loan me two dollars, Mae." Miss Mae blinked.

"Why, certainly, Pearl. But..." Pearl was up on her knees now, her eyes level with Miss Mae's. "It's for Noriko.

I got to make Noriko get on the bus, away from Sonny. She can go over to my sister's place in Rayville. And when things is settled down and Sonny's better ... "

The two women shared a brief silence, truth glazing their eyes like snowcrust. Finally, it was Pearl who spoke.

"Tomorrow, I'll go over to Mr. Southall's and call down to Pineville. Make arrangements, you know." Pearl looked somewhere beyond Miss Mae. "It ain't certain they'll lock him up. They got all kinds of drugs nowadays."

"That's a fact," Miss Mae allowed. "Why, they're working wonders with some ... "

"I better get back, then. Sonny will wind down in a while. He ain't slept none. 58

When he does, I'll get Noriko out of the house." "The bus won't be here 'til twelve, Pearl. What if ... " "I ain't got no other choices, Mae. Once Noriko's out of the way, I can handle

sonny." "Pearl..." Pearl lightly put her hand over Miss Mae's mouth and a wan smile

played briefly on Pearl's lips. "I know my boy, Miss Mae. I know Sonny, fit or no fit." Miss Mae nodded.

"Best we hurry, now," Pearl added, urgency tingeing her voice. Miss Mae reached in her bosom and unpinned four dollar bills which she

extracted and handed to Pearl. "Noriko may need the extra," Miss Mae said quickly. Pearl nodded and leaned over to hug her friend. Suddenly there was a loud crash,

like wood splintering and both women jerked apart and got to their feet. "Goddamn J ap whore, that's all you are!" Milo raged over Noriko's thin, frightened screams.

"No, Sonny. I'm a good wife. I love you, Sonny!" There were unmistakable slaps and the thud of Noriko's small body as it slammed against a wall. Pearl ran down the gardenrow and into the yard, taking the steps to her porch by twos and began beat­ing on the front door.

"Open this door, Sonny! It's Ma. Let me in quick." "Pearl, don't..." Miss Mae called as she ran out of the garden and stood facing

Pearl's house. But Pearl never let on if she heard her. The door slowly opened and Pearl slipped intothe house. Miss Mae stood star­

ing at the spot where Pearl had been a moment before. The house was again closed and silent, as though nothing at all had touched that tranquil setting. But a foreboding, heavy and thick, like the yellow air before a cyclone, settled over her. And Miss Mae walked slowly to her back steps and went on inside the house.

Miss Mae's small kitchen was dark and soothing, a relief from the bright sun that had begun its sure climb toward noon and from the earlier, unsettling events. A small aluminum pot sat on the cookstove, the coffee aroma from it spilling into the room.

At the eating table, remnants of biscuits and salt pork remained on her plate as Miss Mae pondered the soundness of Pearl's decision to go back into her house: the kind, gentle boy Miss Mae had known all his life had been nowhere visible in the men­acing, war-ravaged brute that she'd witnessed. Could Pearl handle him? Should she speak to Junior or Luther? Why hadn't they heard the commotion? She sipped her cof­fee and thought what prudent thing she might do.

Miss Mae sat on her screened-in side porch, her view unobstructed. Alert, she was now confident she'd hear if anything went on.

Across the road she saw Luther's old, brown Ford coupe pull up under the shed of the cotton gin and he and Junior got out of the car and went into the gin. Just know­ing they were close by was a comfort. That, and the fact that things continued calm and quiet over at Pearl's.

And relieved, Miss Mae settled back comfortably in her fat-cushioned wicker chair. And that's where she was, reading the Delhi Dispatch, her table fan whirring soft­ly beside her, when Noriko streaked across the yard toward Southall's.

Miss Mae put her paper down. Noriko's short legs pumped as fast as they could and her black hair whipped out behind her like the mane of a wild mare on open range: she never looked right nor left, just crossed the highway at a full run. Miss Mae stood up.

Lord God, what time was it? She glanced at the bigfaced watch she kept in her dress pocket. It was five minutes 'til twelve. If Milo woke up before the bus got there ...

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Miss Mae eased out the screen door and stood under the chinaberry tree, with a view of Pearl's house and Southall's. Noriko was half hidden under the shed of the cot~ ton gin. Where was the bus? Dear God, let it be on time.

A dog barked over at Luther Cope's house and then fell silent. And then Miss Mae heard the drone of the bus coming around the bend. Hurry! she thought, and saw Noriko dart from beneath the shed as the big Greyhound slowed, and pulling half off the road and onto the gravel, stopped. Its doors wheezed open.

"Ma!" Milo Thomas shouted, his rage carrying loudly on a noon breeze. "Ma, where's the prisoner? Where'd she go? I gotta take her to the command post. She's a goddamn Jap spy, Ma! Nori-ko-o-o."

"Sonny, calm down now! Noriko ain't no spy, darlin'. Come on and lay back down for Mama."

The bus doors closed, and Miss Mae glimpsed Noriko at the back window, her heart-shaped face a mask of fear, as the driver geared down and pulled the bus onto the road.

"Come on, sugar ... " Pearl was saying, and then Miss Mae could hear murmuring and she imagined Pearl coaxing an exhausted Sonny onto the bed. Thank goodness, Noriko was out of harm's way. Things would be all right now. Pearl could handle Sonny. She'd said so.

A chinaberry fell out of the tree, landing with a soft thud at her feet, and Miss Mae jumped nervously. Well, get on inside, Mae. You're edgy as a horse in a new har~ ness. She turned toward the house. That's when Pearl screamed.

"Noriko's coming back, Sonny! She's coming back! Oh, my God, Sonny. No! Son-n-ny ... " And then there was a loud, guttural cry that was unmistakably Milo's.

"Pearl!" Miss Mae yelled, running toward the house. "Help! Help!" she screamed over her shoulder and Junior and Luther Copes bounded from the cotton gin and ran toward her. "Pearl!" Miss Mae yelled from her yard. "For God's sake, answer me, Pearl!" But the only reply was the slap of shoe leather against blacktop as Junior and Luther crossed the road and came abreast of Miss Mae.

"What's happening?" Junior yelled. "It's Milo! He's gone crazy. And I'm afraid ... " "A-i-e-e-e-uh!" It was Milo and the sound had come from the far reaches of hell. "Pearl-1-1," Miss Mae screamed, trying to break loose from Junior's grasp. "Get your gun, Luther!" Junior yelled. But as Luther turned to run, laughter, high

and piercing, maniacal, came from Pearl's place. Luther, Junior and Miss Mae stood wide-eyed with terror, unable to move.

Slowly, slowly Pearl's screen door opened. Corporal Milo Thomas walked out on the porch, half hidden by the shadow of a gathering cloud. He moved from the shadow, still obscured by the bright red cannas that grew waist high at the porches edge. But Miss Mae could see that Milo was in full dress uniform, red, white and green ribbons emblazoning his chest.

Milo stood ramrod straight, slowly he lifted his arm. In his hand was a large samurai sword, and as he raised it aloft, the afternoon sun danced off the long, silver blade. On it was the head of Pearl Thomas. Her eyes open. Frozen in disbelief

That had all happened in '46. Milo had been put in the Pineville Insane Asylum where, six years later, he still fought the War with the help of other inmates. Noriko had worked for anyone who'd hire her and managed to save enough money to get back to San Diego where she'd fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse.

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Pearl had been buried down the road in the cemetery at the back of Harmony Baptist Church. In the Summertime, Miss Mae took a fruit jar of fresh-cut zinnias and placed them on Pearl's grave each Sunday. Red-orange and yellow and pink. Pearl had loved zinnias.

Junior still opened up the store early, but Luther took over the cotton gin. Annie !(ate had successfully delivered a healthy, red-haired baby girl in '47 and they'd called her Rachel. And Nettie Sue delivered milk the way she always had, but she'd gotten a new Dodge pickup. Some said that Mighty Red had gotten the cataracts taken off his eyes and it had destroyed his fortune-telling business, mystery having been a large part of his success.

No one much talked about what had happened back in '46 anymore. The Korean War had come along by then and Milton Berle was on television and Sugar Ray Robinson could still knock a guy's socks off: life had just kept pouring over what had happened, like sand in a creek bed.

But Miss Mae never forgot. And Summer nights when she lay in bed with the windows open, and the crickets chirping, and moonlight washing over the yard, Miss Mae thought about Pearl, and Sonny and Noriko. And she pondered the ways of war. And wondered where victory lay.

Tom Moran

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bios

Alan Mills Last seen exiting the 405 north at Sherman Way.

Angie Young seeking higher learning through deep meditation.

Anna Bunyik Forgot to take her medication and hasn't been seen since.

Amy Reynolds My temperature is 97.5 degrees. I weigh far more than I should. I have two children, and a husband that spends his time remodel­ing my kitchen, four cats, and when I grow up I want to be a flight atten­dant.

Ann Holley Currently reading the Tao Te Ching, again.

Audry Butera Born and raised in So. Cal. and refuses to grow up.

Brenda Swenson is taking the fifth on this one.

Carl Bramblett Writer and graduate student, general neurotic and has pub­lished here and there.

o Chris Cole Graduate student. That's it. R

T Cliff Eisner Loves vanilla ice cream. H

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Daniel Hall Graduated from CSUN in 1994, History. Currently at Loyola Law, 2nd year evening student. Works as a clerk for a law firm in LA

Elizabeth Howeii-Maruschak It's possible I am the oldest living college stu­dent in North America. I don't care. I'm having so much fun at CSUN I'm thinking about running for homecoming queen. I figure my blue hair will give me an edge.

v Jeff Schuetze Lifetime highlight: played an extra in Leprechaun Ill.

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w Kyle Me Dowell Cannot believe anyone eats vanilla ice cream.

Mary Marco graduated, yes, received her B.A. from CSUN writing program in December 1995. She is currently pursuing her Master's in writing at CSUN. She has raised five children,lived in four countries, had three last names, two careers and one grand-dog.

Santi Tafarella Currently not reading the Tao.

Tom Moran is an inveterate lensmen.

Tracy Hatake ... the latter portion of my name is a garden, night-blooming, and growing beyond the angry sexuality of female flowers, and tendril trip­ping to canon with "Disorientation." I am not contained in names. Words blossom ...

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SUBMISSIONS

The Northridge Review accepts submissions year round. Manuscripts should include a cover page with the author's name, address, telephone number and titles of works submitted. Send manuscripts and art­work to:

Northridge Review CSUN English Department California State University Northridge 181 1 1 Nordoff Street Northridge, CA 9 1330

Remember the SASE if you want us to return your manuscript.

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