Vol. 01Winter 2011

stickymuckygooey

Vol. 01Winter 2011

stickymuckygooey

/// (Part One) Ordered Pairs ////// Emileigh Barnes (p.03) There Were Many Things ////// Emileigh Barnes (p.05) Love-Poles ///////// Julie Ann Brandt (p.07) You Are the Kenworth //////////////////////////// Wendy Buffington (p.09) A Stranger /////////// Jessica Comola (p.11) (Part Two) Carmen Miranda Speaks /////////////// Josh Davis (p.15) Blackout, Late Summer ///////////////// Paul Dean (p.17) A Picture of the Good Times ///// Tim Earley (p.19)

Domestic Poem ////////////////// Tim Earley (p.21) Body Snatchers ///////////////// Kevin Fitchett (p.23) (Part Three) Large for His Age /////////////// Dorothy Knight (p.27) Tell Me ///////////// Dorothy Knight (p.29) Mary-Kate Olsen and I Watch the Leonid Meteor Shower //////// Michael Shea (p.31) Enigma Machine ////// Travis Smith (p.33) My Name Is Joseph Michael Zendarski /// Joe Zendarski (p.35) Poets (p.37) /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

sticky adj \sti-kē\

1. a : adhesive b (1) : viscous, gluey (2) : coated with a sticky substance

2. : humid, muggy; also : clammy

3. : tending to stick

4. a : disagreeable, unpleasant <came to a sticky end> b : awkward, stiff c : difficult, problematic <a sticky situation>

5 . : excessively sentimental : cloying

(Part One)

Ordered Pairs 03

Now I speak to you in private:

(24, 19)The many things you warmed for me: On the train, you fed me white chocolate from your mouth.

(15, 12) Watching me change dressesin the rain, in the car,

(10, 6) I hadn’t noticed, is what you saidas you thumbed my ribmark

(5, 3)The unshaved spot on my thigh,my milked-up skin a gesture.

(2, 1)Later, the ligatures from my hair aroundyour wrist, and you were sleeping, or seemed to be.

(0, 0)The sometimes surprise, when the sea changed.

04 Emileigh Barnes

we told before they happened :the tenderness of a bruise before it appears on skin.

From inside the cabinthe only tell of high tide :us tiltingin wind.

Sometimes in sleepyou reached for me.There Were Many Things 05

06 Emileigh Barnes

Sometimes, not.

It was then I was alone, which was not the same as being apart.

This is what I knew :always, the sea will ebb, leaving the mud to thirstand split in the boatlight.

When I go downyou cradle me from further beneath

the sad and scary placeunholy as it may beyou meet me there.

When I go upyou toss me a linelet it arc and guide

play parachute cloud ponchorisk. loss. sublime.Love-Poles 07

08 Julie Ann Brandt

You Are the Kenworth

I am the road snake curved and black,I crawl these hills pastred dirt fields and shotgun shacks.

You are the Kenworth climbing my back, grinding your gears, moaning, You be Angie Dickinson, I’ll be Burt Bacharach.

We’ll go to Mexico and Rio and Halifax,eat smoked salmon on a stick, cross the North Atlantic in a skiff,

one big enough for all your eighteen wheels,O Romeo, Romeo, my eighteen-wheeling Romeo,this stretch of road is lonely

the roadside shrines the only companyI keep. The Virgin Marys and the crosses,the measure of our losses,

mark the miles to go before we sleepand promises made we did not keep.

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10 Wendy Buffington

A Stranger 11

To step into your sleep, a stranger there.Not only to find myself beneath your shoulder,smoothed firm as clay down the crest of your ribcage.Not only to know, without looking, your hand,a cool stone helmet at the head of my hip bone.

Stepping with cambric feet, thinnest linen steps,to let you sleep. I would be a stranger there,waiting in the swan of your breath, heart meetingmy palm in a one-handed prayer.

12 Jessica Comola

muck noun \ˈmək\

1. : soft moist farmyard manure2. : slimy dirt or filth3. a : defamatory remarks or writings b : rubbish, nonsense <mindless muck>4. a (1) : dark highly organic soil (2) : mire, mud b : something resembling muck : gunk5. : material removed in the process of excavating or mining

(Part Two)

Carmen Miranda Speaks 15

We sit on the roof and watch lights tilt away.Out here, in this vacuum so empty of angels, the wings of my feet are still plenty for me.

In the years since that day I decided to dancerather than let my weak heart call the shots, I’ve come to love my astronomer’s voice.

When a star starts to dwarf, says the astronomer, nothing can slow down the bloom of its pulse. I know what he means. They called me star once.

I was their goddess of plantains and red orchids. I was their lady of hummingbird summers, the keeper of grapes and of pod-fresh vanilla.

Sometimes he tells me his theories. His pale eyesskim the skin of my shoulders, my knuckles, and knees. He admires my neck. I still love to sparkle.

I still love attention. And yes, I still smoke.The astronomer points out the horse-headed nebula.Sometimes we kiss and write postcards to God.

16 Josh Davis

Blackout, Late Summer

It’s midnight, the heatof Mississippi just nowbowing low near the bed.

I light a candle, listento dirt daubers scratch the woodwork, imagine

their thin, small bodies patching pipe organ nests.What a small symphony

these insects pull downfrom the rafters like blackviolins to hum the veiled dark.

I’ve seen the work they’ve laidout while I slept, knocked down the dirt pocked high with a broom

or a hose. I hold the candleup, see them work and let the candle burn down low.

I think of my wife in bed, her body laced in a dress of moonlight and dreams. She twists the cigarette, blows

a plume of smoke that bloomsin the ceiling fan. How swiftthe procession at night. Here,

the language of lying down, every hand left wanting, a bed, a hole, a home.

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18 Paul Dean

A Picture of the Good Times

I love you you keep doing the same things.You broke some things. You broke some more things.I was tapping you on the shoulder, saying, Break things.I was turning cartwheels in front of you, yelling, Break things!The mailman keeps doing the same thing,but I don’t love him.Twice a year maybe we try different things:I threaten to buy a snowmobile.I stand atop the television and announce my intentions:I must and I will and then everything will be O.K.You build a fire in April in the middle of the afternoon,smoke the sparrows from the chimneyand warm the house until our ears sweat.You sweep spiders from the cornersand I jump from the first floor window, grab the lawnmower, and cut crop circles in the yard.I burst through the door, pointing.See, see. It’s true, I say.Yes, yes. Mystery lives, you say,beating spiders to death with a broom.Short of running from each other, arms high in the air, laughing,to opposite corners of the earth,we tape a picture of the good timeson the refrigerator door.I say now I will love you.You say now we can keep doing the same things.

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20 Tim Earley

Domestic Poem 21

My body refuses to cohere with airand sunlight, instead it flies away from youat tremendous speeds, pools into corners,makes ridiculous agreements with time.(We have eaten together in every kind of weather).You follow the edge of the sky like a dainty murderer,skim more consciousness from the consciousness of birds,seethe in morning light like the morning lightis the simplest of animals.(We have traversed the gloamingwithout roaming).I am delirious under the auspicesof your body, it carves a tongue in noise, sneaks inside my body, a starveling, a near calamity.(We have planted flowersand slept for hours).

22 Tim Earley

Body Snatchers

I learned that from behind Bill Clinton’s body I could do anything. His eyes poked out of the cover of The Journal Sentinel,

I’d freeze, hold up the paper, wait for a girl to walk past, moaning the headline in a southern accent.

That summer our neighborhood poked holes in everyone, the princess, Mike Holmgren, Bob Uecker on a popsicle stick,

at the ballgame, his eyes dotted for the crowd to push-out with permission.

So from looking, we moved to tongues, like with sex. I licked the air through Uecker

like he and I’d discovered a new flavor together. Fifty thousand peopleat the stadium, floating above bodies

we paid just to watch breathe. Once, all I wanted was to crumple my tongue between a hole

of paper, shock the neighbor girl out of her husk without one touch.

I slide behind lifesize Brett Favre at the Texaco, do a Mona Lisa

on the girl stretched to the glow of the refrigerator—pulling her in, her arm lifting

like underwater, her hair teased into unlocked smoke, her shirt liftedfrom her chest by two invisible pinches,

my tongue hatched from cardboard, baiting the air like a light switch, Favre turned on

that season everyone had to watch out. Peoplewere changing, busting through their 2-D bodies.

You glance at a shape you never noticed, and one day, like you reached on tiptoes and peeked behind new eyes, it’s alive.

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24 Kevin Fitchett

goo noun \ˈgü\

1. : a viscid or sticky substance

2. : sentimental tripe

(Part Three)

Large for His Age 27

He was large for his agea body suitedto football, hockeyand school yard scufflesa body meantto emerge red-faced and triumphantcrowned with tousled hair and grass-stained jeansthe sort of boythat other boys follow.

She watched himround unblinking eyes rivetedto his stoic facenodding unsmilingly at his instructionswhile her tiny legs swung gailyfrom her perch on the end of his bed.

She chimed an inquiry,inane and softly quiveringand he of the fragrant arm pitsmelling of sweat and dirt and filched cigarettesthrust her head thereand demanded that she refer to him now and always as the master of the universe.

The front door opened and slammedletting some of the night air inlaced with car exhaust and dust from the trainswith the tinny smell of bloodfrom an aprontossed haphazardly on the chipped formica.

28 Dorothy Knight

She watched him steel himselffeet splayed widechest thrust forwardbrotherprotectorinstructormotherhis upper lip stained with the red kool-aidthey had earlier put too much sugar in.

They listenedto cabinets swinging on protesting hingesand to the air creepingfrom the sides of the freezer door.He hitched his worn levis to hips made ampleby hundreds of thin, unscented,two-ply squares

they had, together,stuffed inside his clothesto keep him safe.

Tell Me

If she had asked how little prepared I wasto be her mother,I’d have told her how she screamedwhen I touched her neck,tucked her chin, wouldn’t let me wash it,and summer sweat would ring.I’d have told her how long it tookfor the bite mark on her thigh to fade,how she cried when sunlight hit her face,riding in the backseat,and I only turned up the radio.I’d have mentioned I taught her to duckat the name on her birth certificate,an epithet,and she loved dehydrated space ice creamI brought home from a class field trip. I’d have told her I locked her on the porchwhen she woke at night, screaming,hands balled into fists,pistoning her Barney blanketto the end of the bedwith the heels of her feet.I never set the cordless phone down.I carried her planked body outsideand wouldn’t let her back inuntil I heard her quiet through the door. She had a walker ringed in an aluminum bumper,hard little wheels that crushed my feet,zwieback teething cookies smashed in her seat,her hands that reached for me.She smelled like WIC gifted Simulac,vitamin D milk that was never the same after the freeze. If she had asked, I’d have told her I was the only girl on the blockdrinking Juicy Juicy from the can all summer break,lying with my face pressed to the floor vent grate,while a pillow tilted the milk in her bottledown to her lips. But she didn’t,and she was waiting. I told her she’d been a fat baby, a Michelin man,a caterpillar floating ass up in the garden tub,that she was beautiful,that I could tell we were related,that she looked just like me.

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30 Dorothy Knight

Mary-Kate Olsen and I Watch the Leonid Meteor Shower 31

November, 2009.

Dusty-voiced radio pop(s) like bottle rocket fuse spittingin wet autumn grass and she’s wearing bootsagainst the dew. Hawking tickets to a roadside star-show, she babbles passenger seat through steam-pumped words. We see headlightsfirst. Dirty minivan drafts bumpagainst my car like cold beerfoam in belly. Then, break, and scrub pines rustle with ghosts of wild boars or cartoon deer. Orion’s pissinghimself with anticipation overhead. Sparksover telephone wires and she kisses my cheek like a Bubblegum pop song caught in the headlights of the passing pickup,in the half-drunk stomach of the night.Leo roars his mating call of leftover spaceand in darkness I’m filling her body with shooting stars.

32 Michael Shea

Enigma Machine

for Genevieve

Your first inheritance was the name of whatever hurricane spun like a roulette wheel in the sea when you were born. You just missed “Ferdinand.”

And when your grandfather died around Christmastime, he willed you his Enigma Machine, the last one not in museums. Lunatic typewriter, gobbledygook black box.

I asked you to write me as you vacation in Italy, but what do you do, Genevieve, Genevieve? You are as cruel as fate. I will always write you back, though your each letter comes to me spy-proof, a crypto mess, mysterious as the one white hair on the nape of your neck.

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34 Travis Smith

My Name Is Joseph Michael Zendarski

and I would like to hug you all day long,or, at the very least until the topof this here escalator. Honestly,I’d be delighted hugging you alonginto the Houseware aisle, while you selectan oven thermometer and a canopener. We’ll hug all over.I’m serious. And such an idiot. Would you—would you—would you mind hugging meon over to the rolling pins? I hada biscuit accident on Saturdayand, rather tragically, my old pin crackedin half. And after (I will only bea minute) we’ll hug wherever youmight choose. Inside a tire?They’re over by the windshield wipersin Automotives. We can hug atopa ping-pong table, stacks of dinner plates,while on the intercom or piles of bathmats. Maybe, steal the forklift keysI’m almost certain hugging in midair .Or we could hug in shopping carts. We’ll sitor stand, and hug and roll the length of aislesof artificially sweetened juiceand bread, and bear hug, frog hug, horse hug, dudehug, monkey hug, tyrannosaurus hug—we can invent new hugs, like robot hugsor farmer hugs, and hug our brand new hugsall over. Then we’ll go our separate ways.

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36 Joe Zendarski

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Bios

Emileigh Barnes is a third-year MFA student at the University of Mississippi, where she has served as poetry editor for the Yalobusha Review. Her first chapbook is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her poems have appeared or will appear in Cutbank, Sentence, BathHouse, Strange Machine, and other journals.

Julie Ann Brandt is editor of The Guidebook: A Poetry Journal and considers herself a lover of culture, variously conceived. When not collecting remnants of ancient, artistic, and religious culture, she fritters around in cloud, pop, and underground.

Wendy Buffington has worked as a newspaper copy editor, tea shop owner, historical society manager, lawyer, street vendor and cross-country bicyclist, riding from Florida to Alaska via Mexico--no pay but great working conditions. She desperately wishes she could add the job of “human shot out of a cannon” during the grand openings of 84 Lumber stores, but alas, she was beat out of this po-sition, likely as a result of nepotism. She lives in Yocona at the end of a dirt road with Curley, a seventeen-year-old cat, and a neurotic, but adorable, dog, Mack.

Jessica Comola was born and raised outside of Austin, TX where she grew up on a combination of Emily Dickinson verse and Edgar Allen Poe ghost stories. She currently lives in Oxford, MS where she attends Ole Miss as a graduate student in the MFA program.

Joshua Davis recently spent nine days in New Mexico watching hot air balloons. He believes himself to be the child of selkies, and his favorite fruit is the persimmon.

Paul S. Dean is a second year MFA candidate in poetry at The University of Mississippi. He lives in Water Valley, MS, a gutted, ex-railroad town with his wife, an oil painter. He pays attention to his dreams, sometimes writing them down on paper.

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Tim Earley is the author of the poetry collections Boondoggle and The Spooking of Mavens. His work has appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, and other journals. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Kevin Fitchett is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. He is tied for second in career goals for Lakeland College soccer. Recently, he was “racked” on Jim Rome’s radio show, The Jungle.

Dorothy Knight is from Kingsland, GA, frequently wears the wrong shoes for the occasion, and believes that mauve is a color more akin to magenta than a soft, grey pink. She is willing to argue about this using a limited and regionally-spelled colour vocabulary based in nowhere near where she’s from.

Michael Martin Shea is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow in poetry. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Meridian, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, Epiphany, PANK, and elsewhere. He likes the word “ineluctable”—yes indeed, that is a fine word.

Travis Smith attends the University of Mississippi MFA program and serves as the poetry editor of Yalobusha Review. “Enigma Machine” originally appeared online at Wag’s Revue (wagsrevue.com).

Joe Zendarski spends most of his time writing lousy poems. On occasion something mediocre happens and he writes something that doesn’t make him or the people who happen to read the poem blush terribly. He spends the remainder of his time building large, fancy houses.

Book Designer: Adam CassidyMiami University, 351 Print Design Systems, 2011Poetry by University of Mississippi, 2011Typography: Helvetica designed by Max Miedinger, 1957

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