Issue 22 - 1992

COE REVIEW - Issue 22 - 1992 

Editor-in-Chief 

James Nulick 

Senior Editor 

Scott Rettberg 

Business Manager 

Jen Beardsley 

Manuscript Readers 

Donald Berry 

Amy Bettinardi 

Nathan Forneris 

Chris Funk 

Kathryn O’Day 

Eric Rasmussen 

Faculty Advisor 

Charles Aukema 

Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Coe Review, Coe 

College, 1220 First Avenue N.E., Cedar Rapids, IA 52402. The editors invite 

submissions of fiction and poetry, which must be received between October 1 and 

March 31; manuscripts received between April 1 and September 30 will not be 

read. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, selfaddressed 

envelope. All manuscripts become the property of Coe Review, unless 

otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1992 by Coe Review. No part of this volume 

may be reproduced in any manner without written permission. The views 

expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or 

sponsors. Printed in the United States by Linn-Litho.

Table of Contents 

Fiction 

Scott Bradfleld 

Closer To You 

Robert Coover 

Man Walking at 24 Frames Per Second 

The Titles Sequence 

Nancy Sweet 

J 

Matt Osing 

Tuna on White 

William T Volltnann 

The Blue Wallet 

Chris Offutt 

Blue Lick 

Andrew Mozina 

Timmy the Tubercular Seal: 

A Story inThree parts 

Donald Berry 

No Stranger 

Poetry 

Matt Osing 

Submission 

Mogan David Wine (serve very cold) 

Celine’s Mother’s Day 

James Nulick 

Sunday Barbecue 

Houseshoes 

Ten 


Sideshow Fat Man 

Mohawk Hangnail 

Last Night

R.D. Drexier 

Koan 

Religion 

Jacki Thomas 

Pyromaniac 

Lois Marie Harrod 

At the Mobil Station 

Lucinda Mason 

Happy Birthday!! 

A.C. Brocki 

Experience 

S. Ann Clark 

James’ Dad 

Kendy Wazac 

WashDay 

SonnetforaSon 

Barb Martens 

Choices 

Chris Funk 

Dr. Arbuckle 

Korean Massage Parlor 

Tracy Orand 

drawing profiles of the presidents on 

your naked butt sunday morning 

Mylinda Grinstead 

That Mocking Bird Won’t Sing 

Untitled 

Pete Lauf 

Walking with Brigitte after Taps in August 

Troy Headrick 

Ass and Assonance 

Alexa Fenske 

SixthMonth 

ForJames

For Cody Until I Get it Right 

Pamela Oberon Davis 

The Scaglione Strawberry Disaster 

Advice To New Poets 

Contnbutor’s Notes 

Cover photography by Bob Campagna 

Inside photography by Debbie Landey

Closer To You 

Scott Bradfield 

Coe Review • Issue 22 

In the sunny mornings you chase the orange cat across the 

green grass. Underneath your feet the shelter, filled with the moon, 

the rain and the stars and the wind. And the orange cat lands on the 

fence, its orange tail twisting. Its dead sparrow on the crumbling 

brick barbecue. Big weeds from the barbecue, and the rusting iron 

gate and brown hollow snails all around. The dead sparrow says 

when you touch it. The yard says, the underground shelter says The 

underground shelter filled with everything that is not you. And the 

dead sparrow says to your fingertips, your tongue and your mouth, 

and then mother on the back porch shouting the No! The No stella! 

And you are no longer stella, and the dead sparrow falls to the green 

grass, its words still feathery and wet on your thick tongue. The No! 

in the air and the orange cat on the red fence, its orange tail twisting. 

And you think the No! at the cat, and with your mouth you say With 

your mouth you say The cat’s orange tail twisting. And the dead 

sparrow on the green grass. 

Breakfast time and you are stella again, every morning 

surrounded by the world that is not stella. House, sun, moon, table, 

cocoa puffs, liquefying margarine, sprays of black bitter crumbs, 

mother, marcie, tablecloth and dad. The grandma on the stuffed 

chair, with her food tray and cracked plates. And mother holds the 

big spoon. The grandma says Aaaah. Aaaah, with gerber peaches on 

her chin, and mother says Here you go, alice. Be a good girl, and dad 

says There she goes. Now she’s started. Dad doesn’t like breakfast 

and sits on the sofa, wearing his blue robe with the torn blue pockets. 

And says I thought I detected a minute there. I thought I detected an 

actual minute of peace and quiet in this goddamn house, and the 

grandma says Aaaah. Aaaah. So mother gets the medicine and you 

drink your juice. Orange juice in mother’s glass. And the marcie 

clacks her new pink shoes together, requiring more toast. The marcie 

wears red paint on her face today, just like mother, and the voice on 

the radio says Better. Brighter. More Beautiful. The noise of the 

6


world on your face. You can touch it with your sticky hands.The 

noise of the world that is not you, and then you say And then you say 

Dad says Great. Now they’re both started. It’s like a choraleone 

vast great vegetable symphony, and takes his coors out to the 

sunny back porch. 

The grandma’s tiny eyes are red and wet, filled with words 

and memories of words. She says Aaaah. Aaaah, her big veiny 

tongue extruding from her thin lipless mouth. Her mouth red and 

glistening, but not like the marcie’s mouth, not like mother’s. 

The gerber peaches are all gone, and now the grandma loves 

you even more. You and your soggy toast. 

And so you give her some. 

Every weekday morning mother takes you to the special 

school for special children. We just hope and hope, mother says. We 

just hope for the lord’s compassion and his love. You hold the seat 

belt’s bright silver buckle in your hands. The silver buckle is a big 

hard word, and pulls the belt very tight. Mother says the lord words 

again and again, and you put your hands together to speak the lord 

words too, feeling them between your fingers. Then you get out of 

the car at your school filled with special children. Big yellow 

bumblebees on a big wooden sign, smooth and you like to touch. 

This is your bright smile, this is your round stomach. Tea, tie, toe, 

tum, tah, tea mrs. evans says. Her bright red fingertips touch your 

teeth, your tongue, putting the words there. Tih. Tih. With the tip of 

your teeth, with the tip of your tongue. So you tell her the grandma 

word and she gives you a green m&m. And she says now with the 

tih sound. Taaah. Taaah. Tooth, tongue, tea, toad, tot, and shows you 

big pictures in her lap. A big green toad, a cup of hot tea. And you 

say the grandma word again, and mrs. evans has more m&ms. Red, 

yellow, black, orange, blue, brown. Because the grandma is a 

tongue, a tooth, a toad. And all the other special children make 

grandma sounds too in their big bicycle chairs with their broken eyes 

and big shiny foreheads, and you’re all tea tie toe tum tah tea, and 

scrub the stiff colored paper with bright crayons. The crayons snap 

when you break them, just like mouths. You play in the tanbark yard, 

bang blocks to music, eat graham crackers, and dad picks you up in 

7


his car with a coors in his lap. Who’s my little dollface, he says. 

Who’s my little cracked brain, my little wordless wonder. Kissing 

you with his rough face, taking you home to drink more coors on the 

slanting-sunny back porch. This is your yard. This is your bright sun. 

This is your green, green grass. 

Dad built the underground shelter in the yard because he 

loves you. In wars words fall and explode. In wars everybody falls 

wordless to the ground, wordless just like you. Usually wars are on 

television, but when they become real, dads dig holes in the ground. 

Big machines come into your yard and eat it. Strange men with hairy 

arms and beautiful tattoos. But then the war doesn’t come and only 

you are stella, only you and the wordless people on TV. You like to 

stand on the hard wooden lid. You like to point at the big steel pipe 

filled with spiderwebs and shrouded, mummified bugs. The hard 

wooden lid fastened with a big rusty padlock. And then you ask dad 

And then you ask him And dad says I built the goddamn thing so 

when the thermonuclear war comes and blows us all to hell and back 

we’ll have a warm place to go to the bathroom. Now give dad a kiss 

and leave him alone. And dad’s rough face says kiss. Kiss kiss, it 

says. How’d I know they’d fucking lay me off? How’d I know I’d 

blow all our savings on that goddamn water trap and the bastards 

would lay me off? And pulls his blue robe tighter and cinches his 

blue flannel belt, just like the seat belt in his rattling car. The same 

car they drove the grandma home in when the grandma lived in a 

hospital with the world’s other grandmas. 

The marcie has her own bed but at bedtime she lies on your 

bed to play. The marcie plays like mrs. evans and points, reading you 

the big red book and says This is the spider, the stone, the snake, the 

sock. And her finger says Point point point. Tomcat, teddy bear, 

toilet, towel, tripod, toad, and you are watching the goldfish in the 

round fishbowl. The goldfish mouth moves too, just like the marcie 

mouth, and you reach for it. The goldfish says The goldfish says And 

you say too 

And the marcie says the No! and grabs your hand. This is a 

tripod, this is a toad. Now which is the tripod? Which is the toad? 

8


And you make your finger say Point point point, and the marcie 

takes your finger from her mouth and says the No! You want to touch 

the marcie mouth, the hard round words. You want to take the words 

in your hand and put them in your pocket with the masticated plastic 

soldier, the stray pink barbie slipper, the broken crayon. But the 

marcie says the No! No stella! You’re a bad girl and nobody likes 

you. Now go to bed now! Now go to bed now! 

At night the grandma sleeps in the blue room, strapped to the 

crooked bed with the car straps, her eyes wide open sometimes. 

They are very hard clear eyes, eyes eyes, and the moonlight through 

the curtains talks in her room, but the grandma says nothing. And 

you say nothing back, wearing your soft pink pajamas. The marcie 

asleep in your bedroom, mother and dad asleep in theirs. You touch 

the grandma and she opens her big black mouth. Her thin hand 

touches you, grabbing. And you listen to the words in the grandma’s 

head, like the words underground in dad’s shelter. Spiders and 

glistening webs across the grandma’s window, tiny bugs blurring 

and buzzing. The grandma sees the bugs too, the moon and the night 

and you. And the grandma’s veiny hand grabs your pajama top tight 

and you can’t get away. And then you whisper And then you whisper 

And when the grandma’s eyes close again, you return to your bed 

and dream of dad’s shelter underground, where words echo and 

resound, hop and crawl. If only you could reach them. 

Some days you don’t go to school and mother takes you to 

the doctor and his gleaming silver tools on a clean white cloth. And 

you say the grandma words and the doctor puts a mirror in your 

mouth. And mother says She tried to point yesterday. She pointed at 

the yard and tried to say something. An ess word I’m certain. When 

einstein was five he couldn’t even tie his shoes, and little stella can 

tie her shoes. Mother shows you your shoelace and pulls, and so you 

fix it. And the doctor says Cognitive development, aphasia, 

phonetic, lexical and syntactic, langue and parole. And then mother 

takes you home to the yard where dad sleeps on the unsprung porch 

sofa, and then she goes away again. 

9


Underground in the shelter the moonlight’s waiting and you 

walk across the hollow yard and through the hot sun. If you carry the 

old wood chair you can stand and peer into the rusty metal pipe. You 

can smell the buried life, rich with words and water and rust. You 

reach into the pipe with your hand and pull out ropes of dust, 

collapsed spiders and glistening white insect eggs. Those are the 

words down there, you can hear them in the pipe. Stone sea sand 

sister snake sun song soon. And one spider blossoms in your hand 

and starts to tickle. You hold it in your hand and it scrambles around, 

this thin tickling word. Sssssss. Sssssss. Some words go up and 

down, other words go back and forth. The spider is a word. The surf 

the sand the sea. And you push it through the pipe into grandma’s 

world, where grandma waits in the dark. Spider. Spider spider. 

That’s what you and grandma say together, underground where 

everything is wet and thick and real. Spider. And then you hear a 

round word, and under the roses you see it. It is big and fat and green. 

Ur, it says. Ur. It’s wet in your hands when you lift it to the steel pipe. 

Toad, it says. Toad. A big green toad, a cup of hot tea. Ur. Ur. Falling 

down the long steel pipe where the other grandma waits for it. 

Sometimes the grandma cries at night when you visit, 

strapped in her small bed, dreaming of the hard wordless night and 

all the world that is not stella. The grandma dreams with her mouth 

open, her mouth black and hollow like the steel pipe, her cheeks wet 

when you kiss them. Like the shelter, the grandma is filled with the 

world that is not grandma. Words like crumbling concrete blocks 

and broken red bricks, weeds sprouting and the unsprung sofa and 

the shelter’s hard wooden lid. The grandma has an inside, too, and 

you touch the tip of the grandma’s teeth, the tip of her tongue, and 

the grandma says Aaaah---the everything word. Aaaah. The 

moonlight burying itself tonight in the shelter, spilling down the 

thick steel pipe with the swift-gliding bugs. You reach into the 

grandma’s mouth looking for words there, their hard glittering 

edges, like plastic toys lost in the overgrown yard. In the 

underground shelter, swamps and sculpted faces, pockets of 

fossilized bones and fuel, stones etched with prehistoric brains and 

skulls. Aaaah, the grandma says, her hands grabbing at you. Aaaah. 

10


This is the secret here, she says. The secret sound of words, the 

secret dream of everything that is not stella. You love the word 

already as you pull it from the grandma’s mouth, the grandma’s eyes 

round and wide and glassy with something which is not moonlight. 

This is hard. This is real. You place the word on the tip of your 

tongue, salty on your fingertips. Your throat hurts the word, 

growling like a dog. “Tor, taw, ter,” you say. And the moonlight 

pulsing in the shelter, and the toad hopping in the dark. “Tord, tawd, 

toad,” you say, and that’s it there. That’s the word in your mouth 

now. “Toad.” Its salty taste, its scaly skin. “Toad.” And the grandma 

doesn’t say anything, just looking at you. Very tired now, very 

sleepy. “Toad toad toad,” you say. And the grandma says Aaaah very 

softly, very tired. Goes to sleep and her mouth falls open. Then you 

hear the other word there. Sssss. Sssss. Sea sand spider. Spider. 

Spider. 

You say “Toad” at breakfast and mother gives you french 

toast with syrup, and you eat the syrup with your tiny spoon, and jam 

with your toast. “Toad toad toad,” and the grandma in her chair with 

her soggy food, dreaming of other words beneath the yard. “Toad 

toad, toad toad toad.” And mother gives you a big hug, and the 

marcie gives you a hate face. But dad says It’s original sin. My pure 

little brain case has fallen into the world of already fallen language. 

Great. More talk, more words. Everybody in the world will be 

talking someday. Today I think I’ll look for a job. I gotta get out of 

this fucking house. 

And mrs. evans says Cognitive aphasia, positive 

reinforcement, syntactic redevelopment, and makes mother watch as 

she feeds you more m&ms. “Toad toad toad.” And mother says I’m 

so grateful to the lord, and you open the big picture book and Point 

point point and everything is “Toad toad toad.” And then the other 

thing in the shelter, the other thing tickling in the grandma’s mouth. 

“Spire,” you say. “Spiner. Spider. Toad toad toad.” And everybody 

in the entire world loves you, just like mother. 

There’s no big rush, little cracked brain, dad says, you in his 

lap and the television on. There’s no real hurry. That’s all you’re 

11


hurrying toward. That’s all language is about. And the television 

says hostages in lebanon, preschool drug addiction, dioxides, acid 

rain and nuclear waste. 

“Fish,” you say. “Fish fish fish. Goldfish. Goldfish daddy.” 

You can still feel the wet squirming word in your hand. You can still 

see it falling down the long black pipe. And the marcie saying you’re 

in trouble now, boy. You’re in trouble now. The round bowl-water 

empty and opaque with tiny white feces. And next day mother says 

Where’s our family photographs? They were right there on the 

mantelpiece. And the marcie puts her fists firmly on her hips to tell 

them, but then you say “Mother. Daddy. Marcie. Grandma. 

Grandma.” All those words you found in the grandma’s mouth last 

night. And nobody hears the marcie say a thing. Now it’s the 

marcie’s words that don’t really matter. 

“Kodak,” you tell them finally, just to let them know you 

understand even big words, too. “Kodacolor. Kodachrome.” 

But the grandma is never happy when you visit, looking at 

you with her big black mouth open. Aaaah. All the world’s loud 

words resounding and spinning down there in the grandma’s mouth. 

You try to pet and soothe her. These are the words, you think. These 

are words right here, and the grandma kicks and grabs, gurgling 

where your hand is, and so you take your hand back. Grandma 

grandma. All the darkness inside the grandma grows and grows, 

whispers and whispers, moves and pushes. Everything’s better down 

there. Down there the grandma can be happy again. Down there the 

grandma can be grandma again. 

You lead her down the hall steps. Doo, doo, doo, doo. One 

two two four two one two two. The grandma holds the banister 

because she’s afraid. She makes different noises now, wordless 

noises down in her stomach and thighs and feet. Doo doo doo doo 

doo. All the shadows hanging from the walls and furniture and 

curtains, and opening the squeaky picture window, the grandma 

leaning against you, her body thin and frail and very soft like a giant 

stuffed giraffe. The grandma all hollow spongy bone. The grandma 

all sound and word and dream. Outside, the night is filled with stars 

and the big fat leaning moon, humming there, filling the steel pipe 

12


and underground shelter and grandma’s black mouth. Aaaah. Aaaah. 

It is cold, the grandma wants to say. It is hot. It is cold and hot, big 

and small, boy and girl, happy and sad. Aaaah. Aaaah. Everything, 

the grandma says. Everything, everywhere. 

The grandma doesn’t like the steel pipe, the buried shelter, 

the heavy moonlight down there just waiting for her. You try to help 

her into the steel pipe. Down there, the other grandma reaches too. 

Down there the other grandma pulls. But this grandma says Aaaah. 

Scared but she wants to know. Always the deep earth, always the 

black night. The grandma is like the orange cat, which clawed and 

ran away. Grandma grandma. You try to make the soothing sounds 

mom makes for breakfast. There there Alice. Be a good girl. You like 

your cereal don’t you alice. Aaaah. Aaaah. Into the steel pipe, but 

both of grandma’s arms don’t fit. Pull her down, the other grandma 

says. Pull her down to me. And grandma’s big black mouth wide, 

wide with all the words she’ll find down there. Everything words. 

Aaaah. Aaaah. And the moon all around, and the words down there 

waiting with the other grandma. Louder and louder the grandma 

gets. Louder and louder like the moon. Aaaah. And now you try to 

help her. Help her head into the big steel pipe, but her head doesn’t 

fit. Louder and louder, deeper and deeper, worlds and words. And 

lights going on in all the backyards, and lights going on in your 

house, too. Light, light. And the grandma crying for the other 

grandma, for all the words she can’t quite reach when the men come 

with big steel tools and cut the pipe away, and then pull grandma 

from it. 

Down there. Down there. Toads hop, snakes slither, spiders 

scramble and crawl. Moonlight talks and dark earth listens. Pih, pih. 

Paper, pin, pickle, paste, plate, pastry, pigeon, plant. Person. Person. 

And now the r words. Rih. Rih. Everything down there in the dark 

and the water. And grandma embracing everything too. Vast sunken 

cities, countries, landscapes and stars. Hissing rivers and steaming 

forests. Worlds down there, worlds and words. Rih, rih. Rock, robin, 

rouge, rasp, rattle. Dad’s graduation ring. The marcie’s transistor 

radio. And grandma, grandma coming closer. The grandma’s arms 

13


big and strong and beautiful now, reaching to hold you, reaching to 

take you home... 

You wake up. 

You sit up in bed. Everything is black. 

The marcie kicks in her bed, snorts and rolls over. 

Outside moon talks and deep earth listens. Down there. 

Down there. 

In the grandma’s room across the hall, the grandma’s bed is 

empty. 

Grandma down there. 

Grandma caught a cold, mother says at breakfast. Grandma 

caught a cold and went away. 

Then after breakfast you all get in the car together and drive 

to the cemetery. Round brown slopes and green hedges and tidy, 

solid tombstones and flowers in little vases. This is grandma’s new 

home, this big green yard. You all stand together under the low cloth 

awning and watch them lower the grandma into her new, dark room. 

“A bad cold,” you say, and mother squeezes your hand. 

“Grandma has a bad cold.” And everybody back into dad’s car. 

Mother snuffles into her handkerchief, and the marcie reads 

a Doctor Strange comic book. The King-size Summer Annual. 

“Grandma goes away,” you say. And so you all drive home, 

where the other grandma waits in the darkness. 

Maybe she’s found what we all hope to find someday, dad 

says, and now you are all driving into the driveway of your big warm 

house. The dark clouds breaking apart. Bright blue sky blazing 

through. And you want to tell dad the secret as he lifts you under one 

arm and carries you to the front door. Come on, my little sack of 

potatoes, dad says. Come on, my little fat bag of laundry. 

Dad is bigger, but you know the secret. 

“Everything,” you whisper. “Everything, Daddy.” 

14


Man Walking at 24 Frames Per Second 

from The Adventures of Lucky Pierre 

Robert Coover 

As he enters the jostle, getting dragged down the street 

through the snow and civil litter, the illusion of freedom fades and 

an enfeebling depression creeps over him like a slow lap dissolve, 

loosening his limbs and probing his sinuses like the onset of a new 

cold. News photos stare at him from wastebins and the corners of 

park benches, but he cannot bring himself to animate them. His feet 

crush something or other about once every eighteen frames, but he 

doesn't want to know what-what do I care about causes, he insists. 

He looks up. Just the usual snow, clouds hanging heavy like the dugs 

of a wet nurse, the odd suicide, nothing new. What then? He feels 

like he’s lost something, something infinite and irrecoverable. Ah 

well. Time probably, that's all, the old rue. He's always losing it, 

always in grief about it. Laymen pass, hardly even counting, content 

with shouldering one another off the frozen sidewalks and singing 

their timeworn mating hymns. He envies them, chins tucked in their 

collars, living in lyric time, suffering only on the odd birthday when 

they fail to forget. He probably lived like that once himself. Not any 

more. Ever since they hit him with the news that time was something 

that got shot past at twentyfour frames per second, he's been in an 

absolute panic about it. 

Well, at least he knows who he is, why he suffers-he should 

be carrying his jewels of office out in the open, but he feels 

vulnerable in this spectral flux, and faintly irreverent. No, no, he 

does not know who he is, who does he think he's kidding? Maybe in 

fact that's just what he's been losing. Laying waste his identity at 24 

fps. Maybe it's Cassie's fault, maybe she's messing him up. He 

remembers sitting at an editing bench with her one afternoon, 

looking at a reelfull of spliced-together goof-ups from the 

cuttingroom floor: the tagends of orgasms, flash frames, miscues, 

foggy runouts and blistered closeups, jittery tracking shots, clumsy 

wipes-all of it joined together just as she's picked it up: forwards, 

backwards, emulsion in or out, grease-penciled, notched, or 

15


punched. Cassie is perversely fascinated with all the peripheral gear 

of film, things like black leader, glue, magic markers, static, shims 

and sun guns, perforations, ident trailers, edge numbers. Sitting 

there, he's watched himself on the editing machine fall out of bed 

and out of focus, go limp in a stockyard, sneeze in the middle of a 

gamahuche, withdraw wearily from the ass of a cleaninglady, the 

lips of a chambermaid, and the quim of a queen, all decorated with 

water spots and cinch marks, get hung up in a child-star and 

overexposed in the subway, scalded in the shower and stuck in the 

revolving doors of an office building. 

-Ouch. You're depressing the hell out of me, Cassie. 

She winds onto a medium shot of him walking through the 

crowds of a city street in a snowstorm. She locates a moment when 

he steps off a curb, plays it back and forth, back and forth, sometimes 

slowly, sometimes more quickly, just that brief movement, stepping 

down, glancing at the traffic, his weight shifting, prick dipping then 

bobbing up again. 

-Why are you showing me that, Cassie? I feel like a goddamn 

ass! 

She zooms in on his eye, catches just the downward tilt of the 

head, the left-to-right roll of the eye, the dim background blur of part 

of a sign on a passing bus, a block letter “D” in soft focus, sliding 

back and forth past his head, as his head drops slightly in the frame, 

his eye moving left, right, left again, then back up, over and over, 

that “D”, blurring by, his head... he becomes completely absorbed, 

forgets it's himself, just that simple pure motion, nothing, yet a 

thousand things to see there, and all of it locked into an elemental 

and irreducible whole. 

-All right, it's beautiful, Cassie. But it's only six frames. Onefourth 

of a second. Put that on the screen and pfft! it's over before 

you've seen it. 

She doesn’t reply. 

-Is that why you've never made films, Cassie? 

She starts cranking on the rewind. He thinks at first that she's 

hurrying ahead to some other scene, but she just keeps winding the 

film up faster and faster. He can't see anything, just a meaningless 

blur, and he wonders if maybe she's freaking on him. Then, slowly, 

16


an image begins to take shape in the hiss and rattle of passing 

footage: it is he, Lucky Pierre, in slow motion, dreamily afloat in a 

cosmic whirlwind of past faults, getting it up... and up... and up... 

spraying semen like seeds... like stars! He becomes hypnotized by it, 

fantastic, doesn't even feel the cold, watches waves of females 

floating by like schools of fish to absorb the fall of cum, writhing on 

meadows where it showers down like dew... then slowly it begins to 

wind down, the image fades, there's just the noisy blur, the parade of 

fuck-ups, and he's back on the streets again, cold, hungry, lost, 

tainted with cinch marks and water spots, slowing down, down, 

unable to go on, ducking into an open doorway to get out of the wind 

and save his life. 

17


The Titles Sequence 

from The Adventures of Lucky Pierre 

Robert Coover 

(Cantus.) In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a 

tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in 

the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting 

distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting 

unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, 

the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow 

epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city. 

And now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the 

darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold 

wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful 

luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the 

tenebrous absences behind the eye. 

And still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its 

fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, 

piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through 

its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an 

unclean widow, an emergence from C, a titular C, tentative and 

parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle 

searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a 

balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth. 

The glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at 

the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of 

tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring 

its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are 

none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at 

last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now 

blurring, now defined. 

Now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and 

upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of 

vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the 

chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, C to 

C and F again, she findeth no rest. How many have died here? 

18


The plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an 

afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. Overtaken 

amidst the narrow defiles. Continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual 

illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. 

All her gates are desolate. The eye courses the valley to its yawning 

embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright 

tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and 

woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her 

virgins are afflicted. Gravis. Innig. In bitterness, yes con amarezza, 

she is with bitterness. 

Beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted 

to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet 

one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight 

with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum 

to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just 

beyond, just below... 

Ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end 

and exposed like an open grave! The light flares and wanes, flutters, 

as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of 

harts. 0 woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, 

and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. 

Angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the 

tremulous matinal gloom. 

Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the 

surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at 

the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. 

Flickering neumes. VAGINAL ORIFICE. LABIA MAJORA. And 

not a propylaeum: a PERINEUM. ANUS. Alas, despised because 

they have seen her nakedness. C to C and F again. Like the echo of 

letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and 

turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of 

a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: URETHRA, 

CLITORIS, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the 

light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the 

coldest hour. Crying: her filthiness is in her skirts. 

Between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below 

the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters 

19


suspended mysteriously in the archway-FLESHY PILLOW, now 

sharp, now diffuse-beyond and through all this, we see the distant 

teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore 

she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats 

ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway 

in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like 

frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow 

is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the 

wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL 

CANAL, it is snowing on the city. 

0 Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the 

afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of 

the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands 

could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified 

himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant 

things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine 

of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, 

rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of 

lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, 

chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of 

colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark 

alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding 

snow. 

Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of 

metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary 

man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a 

walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided 

barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, 

between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: 

forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his 

risks-or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian-crossing sign, blurred by 

the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing 

under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and 

narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the 

snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own 

wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their 

dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, 

20


brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and 

airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, 

the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the 

morning traffic. 

His hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his 

overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is 

all but buried in his winter habit. Only his eyes stare forth, aglitter 

with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his 

nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed 

out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. His 

mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his 

two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am I doing out here? His 

hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth 

from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: 

his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice 

crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen 

crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, 

struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on 

keeping their brains from freezing. 

Oh, my poor doomed ass, I’m in real trouble, he whimpers to 

himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth 

clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the 

only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him 

warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, 

sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, 

who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play 

the fucking hero? 

He walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, 

feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up 

anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup 

two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, 

maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, 

through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting 

the world’s glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing 

along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic 

compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, 

whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and 

21


get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after 

all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: 

Lucky Pierre. 

The swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a 

kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless 

rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily 

forth. Subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and 

there’s the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. 

Tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead 

fetuses, old shoes. Cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash 

decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending 

heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and 

crumpling into snowbanks. Above the crowds, a billboard asks: 

WHAT IS MY PRICK DOING IN YOUR CUNT, LIZZIE? Six 

blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: 

FUCKING ME! FUCKING ME! O SO NICELY! Smoke rises from 

a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming 

themselves by the ruins. Distant crackle: trouble in the city. 

Somewhere. 

A little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers 

up at the light, now changing from green to red. Her spectacles are 

frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at 

her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. The man, trying to catch 

the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, 

glissandos right into the old lady’s humped-over backside, bowling 

her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. There 

is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her 

down. Old as she was, it’s still all a little visceral, but soon enough 

the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the 

dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest. 

-Pity, someone mutters. 

-Life’s tough. 

-Where’s the street department? Goddamn it, they’re never 

around when you need them. 

The light changes, the old lady is trampled away. There’s the 

blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, 

and snow. Thousands of feet. Going all directions. Whush, crump, 

22


crump, stomp. Crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. 

Someone’s pocketwatch. Beer cans. Crump, crump, crump, a kind of 

rasper continuo. Windup toys and belt buckles. Bicycle sprocket. 

Ticket stubs. All those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, 

almost whispering: That’s right, Maggie, lift your arse and whush, 

crump, crump, tickle my balls! Oh christ, it’s cold! It’s too fucking 

cold! 

Listen, get your mind off it. Think of something else. E.g. 

comma green places. Where it’s warm exclamation mark. That’s it. 

Chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? 

Come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a 

tree, peeks out, showing her ass. He bounds over fallen trunks, 

crackling branches and dry leaves. Splashing through a brook. Up 

mossy rocks. Delicious stink. Yeah, good, moving along now, keep 

it up colon. Cavorting in soft grass. Some kind of music... 

(Front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, 

spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: BLAAAAT!) 

Cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that’s good, Cissy’d like 

that, all’ antico, right. Her handsome ass aglow in the sun. He licks 

it, tongues her cunt. Yum. She kicks him, springs away. They circle 

each other. Hah! She scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll 

about, flutes fading, rest. Mmm. Silent now in the sunny green 

meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing 

more than a playful wind in the fading forest. Yes, good. He pokes 

his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about. 

(Sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened 

with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. City streets, 

buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by) 

Sshh! Getting there! Twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in 

the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, 

back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. He 

hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own 

style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer 

breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at 

the stamens, slip in and out of septa. Distantly: the sound of muted 

trumpets- 

23


BllaaaAAAAAAATTT! He jumps back to the curb, but too 

late, a bus bearing down on him-THWOCK!-whacks his prick as it 

goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is 

bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen 

of them. He catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the 

street, an advertisement spread across its rear: I CAN SEE HER 

CUNT, GUSSY! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back 

window, staring at him. The crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, 

curse and weep: 

-What is it like, Nelly? 

He hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, 

looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. He 

finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. 

Over a photo of the Mayor at a public execution of three small 

children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the 

headline: A LARGE HAIRY MOUTH SUCKING HIS PURPLE 

PRICK. 

Aw hey listen: fuck it. Quit. Yeah. 

He sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his 

battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, 

feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter 

snatch of the diatonic aubade. Something seems to leave him, some 

spring released, a slipping away... 

No! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. Forget that shit, 

fade it out, no more messages, pick ‘em up and put ‘em down, hup 

two three four, he’s running along now, prick waggling frantically, 

stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, 

close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it-oof! sorry, 

ma’am! 

-Good morning, L.P.! 

-Good morning, love! (Whew!) After you! 

-Thank you, Mr. Peters! 

-Morning, sir! Thank you, sir! 

-Ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? 

24


J. 

Nancy Sweet 

The alarm went off and my arm jerked from beneath the 

covers to hit the button for another 20 minute’s sleep. But I was 

awake. I knew it. I never went back to sleep. I pulled my robe around 

me and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. Then into the shower. 

As I stood there with the hot water pouring over my head I thought 

I heard the doorbell buzzing, so I rinsed off in a hurry, threw a towel 

around me, and ran out the bathroom door only to hear my alarm 

going off again. 

I shut it off for good this time, went into the kitchen and 

poured a cup of coffee. I threw an ice cube in it so I could drink it 

right away. “Oh shit, it’s almost noon,” I said as I pulled my clothes 

on, “I gotta get going!” I ran out the door to J.’s house, screeched to 

a halt in the driveway behind her apartment building, and ran in the 

back door. When I pushed the elevator button and it didn’t open 

immediately, I decided to walk the three flights to her floor. I panted 

down the hallway to #306 and started banging loudly. 

“Wake up, J., it’s me! Come on, open up in there. We gotta 

get going!” 

More banging, and then, as I pressed my ear to the door, I 

could hear movement inside. She’s awake! The front door opened 

slowly, and there was J. looking like she always does when she first 

wakes up - hair all mashed to one side, a huge T-shirt slipping off one 

shoulder, and wearing those stupid giraffe slippers with the necks 

flopped over to one side so the giraffe heads lay sideways on the 

floor and dragged along the ground as she shuffled around in the 

morning. 

“What time is it?” she mumbled. 

“It’s time to get up. Time to get down to the Neighborhood. 

We have to get enough for tomorrow too, it’s Sunday, and no one is 

ever around on Sunday. How much money do you have?” 

With a slow sweep of her arm J. pointed to her oversized 

purse lying in a heap of clothes next to her bed. 

“I don’t know, you count it.” 

25


“Okay, you go get in the shower. Here, I brought you some 

coffee.” 

J. slumped down at the table, arms hanging loosely at her 

sides. Her head slowly tilted forward till her lips met the coffee cup 

sitting in front of her. She took a few sips, seemed a little more 

awake, and stumbled off toward the shower. 

“Hey, those giraffes have absolutely no hair on the sides of 

their heads where they drag on the floor. They look ridiculous.” 

“Oh, shut up!” she retorted, “My dad got these at Neiman 

Marcus for me on my 18th birthday.” 

“Well, for Chrissakes, J., you’re 26 years old now, it’s a 

wonder they still have heads!” 

While J. was in the shower, I popped Janis Joplin’s Greatest 

Hits into the tape player, picked up her purse and unzipped the big 

side pocket and pulled out the wads of bills. I could never quite 

believe that she just shoved money in her purse like that. Mine was 

always perfectly neat, all bills facing the same way, in order 

according to denomination. Here were wads and wads of bills and 

change just crammed in the pocket and zipped up! 

I laid them all out in piles, tried to unwrinkle them the best I 

could, and counted out the change. I looked through the rest of the 

purse and found a $20 dollar bill in her checkbook, and $7 in the 

little zipper pocket. I heard the water shut off in the shower. 

“How much do we have?” J. asked as she swung around the 

corner from the bathroom, towel wrapped around her middle and 

one wrapped on top of her head sticking up about a foot. 

“I don’t know yet. God, you’ve got money all over your 

purse. How do you keep track of it?” I asked. 

“I don’t.” 

“Oh, J., here’s our favorite part,” I yelled. 

I jumped up, threw my arm over J.’s shoulder, and we both 

stood there with our fake microphones in our hands singing along 

with Janis Joplin, 

Come on, come on, come on 

Take another little piece of my heart, now baby 

You know you got it 

If it makes you feel good 

26


Oh, yes, indeed 

“So do we have enough money, or what?” J. asked, reaching 

for her cup of coffee. 

“Yeah,” I said, “enough for what we need. If we want more, 

we can always drive down tomorrow and see if anyone is around. 

Get dressed, and I’ll get the stuff out so it’s ready when we get back.” 

I put the money into a neat pile, stuck it in my purse, and got 

out the little black box. I took the empty pizza box off the table, 

brushed away the crumbs, laid out the spoons, one on each side of 

the table, washed out four syringes and laid two apiece next to the 

spoons. 

“Come on, let’s go. What are you waiting for?” said J. 

I looked up to see her standing there fully dressed, hands on 

hips in mock impatience, with a wide grin on her face. 

“You bitch!” I yelled. 

We laughed as we ran out the door and down the three flights 

of stairs. We pushed open the back door and headed toward J.’s car. 

We always took her car. She had a 1977 Olds Cutlass Supreme. I had 

a little Fiat. 

“Why do you suppose I always get the tickets when we’re 

drag racing home?” I asked, sliding into the seat. “You’re always 

ahead of me going 95, and I’m screaming along behind doing 85, but 

I always get the damn speeding tickets. I paid $20 out three times 

last month - twice to the same cop!” 

J. seemed to think about this as we pulled out onto Sheridan 

Road. 

“You know why you get the tickets?” she asked. “No, why?” 

“Two reasons: First of all, the cop knows my car is faster than his -” 

As I burst out laughing, she said, “Now wait a minute - and 

the second reason is, now that the cop got $20 from you two times, 

he’s going to say to himself every time he sees your car -’Oops, there 

goes my $20 dollar bill, better go get it.’ I mean, how many gold 

Fiats are there going 85 miles an hour down Lake Shore Drive every 

night between 2:00 and 2:30 in the morning? About one, right?” 

“Well, you’re about half right,” I argued, but this car can’t 

beat no cop car.” 

27


As we pulled onto the Drive, J. floored the car. In no time we 

were doing 90 mph. “Hey, cool it,” I said, “It’s the middle of the day, 

slow down, J. Geez, when I’m doing 85 in my Fiat, it’s buzzing like 

hell, and it feels like I’m about two feet off the ground. This is like 

a fucking limousine, you don’t feel anything.” 

We slowed down by the time we got into Uptown. By then, 

the traffic was heavier. Then we swooped around the North Avenue 

exit curve and went west to Milwaukee Avenue. 

“Ah, yes, the Neighborhood,” I said. “I can smell the dope. I 

can see the junkies. Look, there’s Kenny. Remember the time he 

took my $20 and said he’d be right back?” 

“Shut up,” J. whispered loudly as we turned on to our side 

street. “Do you see anybody? Do you see Jose?” 

As we cruised slowly down the street, I could feel that 

something was not right. Suddenly we saw three cops jump out of a 

car parked against the curb. They ran straight for Jose who was 

sitting outside on the top step of his front porch. He knew enough not 

to move when he saw them coming. They grabbed him by his arms, 

drug him over to their car, and threw him face down on the hood. 

They kicked his feet apart, and when he tried to lift his head, they 

grabbed him by the hair and pushed his head down onto the hood 

again. 

We sped up a little, turned our heads straight ahead so the 

cops couldn’t see us gaping as we drove by, and disappeared around 

the corner. 

“Oh shit, now what do we do?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” said J., “They won’t bust him, he never has 

any dope on him, or inside his house. They can’t do anything.” 

“Well, let’s get out of here. We don’t want to be sitting 

around the corner when the cops leave. Let’s go over to Armitage 

and get an Italian Ice, then go back.” 

As we sat on the curb chewing frozen lemon rinds our 

thoughts turned to ‘What if’s.’ 

“What if they’re still there?” I chimed in first. “We’ll be sick 

as dogs at work tonight. What if no one is there? Then what do we 

do?” 

28


“Let’s go back. It’s been 45 minutes,” said J. As we pulled on 

to_____street again, there was Jose, sitting on his front porch just as 

before. He jumped down all five steps and ran to meet us. 

“I was wondering if you guys were coming back,” he smiled. 

“Here, have an Italian Ice. Are you all right?” asked J. 

“Bueno, but my cabesa hurts like hell,” he said. “How many 

do you ladies want today?” “We’ll take eight, we have $160,” I 

jumped in. “We might want more for tomorrow - say, where is 

everyone on Sundays anyway?” 

“Shit man, I go to church with my family, but I’ll meet you 

here at 2:00, okay?” said Jose. 

“We’ll be here, definitely,” said J. 

The ride home was always very fast - even considering that 

all speed limits were obeyed, of course. As we entered J.’s apartment 

door the usual inaudible sigh of relief passed over both of us. J. 

kicked off her shoes and put on her ridiculous slippers. I ran for the 

glass of water and the spoons, and soon our heads were slumped 

over to one side just like those stupid slippers. 

29

Tuna on White 

Matt Osing 


I’ve got a sandwich. Tuna on white, wrapped in wax paper 

so they’ll know it’s mine, won’t eat it for me. This sandwich is gonna 

get me beyond the thank-you bleat of the limited egress system, 

through a door, another shift, eventually a payday. It’s the reason I 

never bitch, why the nurses all like me, why I get stuck with all the 

enemas. 

I get to watch failed career jocks with serious doubts smirk 

behind my back. Me with the hot water bottle and hose closing the 

doors one by one, thinking about my sandwich, how the kitchen staff 

should knock off the commodity cheese and surplus bananas, as 

these foods are binding. 

The residents are glad to see me because I tell them it’s all 

garden dirt to me. I like Sheila the best. For one thing, she agrees 

with me on things. Like when I say how nobody really knows the 

backs of their hands. “Faces maybe,” she says, but Sheila agrees, 

most people are lost. Shelia admits she is, says she’s tired of all the 

other aids speaking mother-ease as if she were an infant. Sheila’s 32. 

I tell her how I’m sick of the smirkers calling me big-guy, thumbing 

me up, high fives, telling me, “Hey, Rock-n-Roll Big Guy, Rock-n- 

Roll.” 

Sheila closes her eyes as I put her in the left Simms position, 

on her side, her one atrophied leg bent just so. Gloved, I stimulate 

her bowel with my index finger, insert the nozzle and unclip the 

flow. Sheila smiles to herself, and I know I’m right, right about 

people. 

Sheila has developed a hemorrhoidal tag, her anus like a 

tightly clustered raspberry pushing out one of it’s drupelets to ripen 

faster. People don’t really consider the backs of their hands. 

Sometimes when we wipe we get shit on the base of our thumbs. 

I showed Sheila a trick. If you splay your fingers, and press 

palms and fingers with another’s hand, then stroke two of the fingers 

as one, one yours, one theirs, it’s exactly what it feels like to touch a 

dead man’s finger, in exactly that way. Sheila will try it with one of 

30


the nurses. The nurses like Sheila and will humor her. I’ll be in the 

breakroom in my chair by the suggestion box, having my sandwich. 

31

The Blue Wallet 

William T.Vollmann 


The thing you dislike or hate will surely come upon you, for 

when a man hates, he makes a vivid picture in the 

subconscious mind, and it objectifies.- Florence Scovel 

Shinn, Your Word is Your Wand (1928) * 

1 

I loved Jenny most when, sitting beside her at sentimental 

movies, I would look away from the big screen where the beautiful 

actress was about to leave her lover forever, and see Jenny sitting 

upright in her chair, her black button-eyes concentrating so hard on 

the film, while she chewed and chewed her gum so earnestly, and I 

ran my forefinger below her eyes to verify that her face was wet, that 

Jenny was crying for the people on the screen, crying in perfect 

placid happiness over this debacle that had never happened; and I 

knew that after the movie was over Jenny would forget that she had 

cried, but she would feel refreshed by her tears. - How harmless it all 

was! Sometimes I myself, reminded by the actress of my own 

failures, would be scalded by a single heavy tear; but this would not 

be a good feeling, and I would have to stroke Jenny’s wet eyelid 

again with my finger to be soothed. 

2 

“I got in a fight with this fucking fat woman!” cried 

Bootwoman Marisa, who was now a bicycle messenger. Her legs 

were covered with bruises like rotten apples. “Right when you get to 

the end of the block you go up onto the sidewalk. And there was like 

a Mack truck coming right at me, and it was totally obvious that I 

was not gonna to be able to fucking avoid it unless I put on my 

brakes to skid to like avoid this woman. And I told her, I go, MOVE! 

I yelled really loud; I go, MOVE! and she goes, No!” - and, imitating 

the woman’s voice, Marisa expressed this determined negation in a 

birdlike screech - “and she stands right there, and I go, Fine! I’m 

* Marina del Rey, California: DeVorss & Company, P. 74. 

33


gonna hit you! - So,” she laughed, “I hit her, straight on. - And she 

throws me off my bike! She fuckin’ throws me off my bike, an’ my 

bike is goin’ that way; I’m goin’ this way, and I just got off and 

punched her in the face!” 

“All right!” yelled everyone, with enthusiasm as blue-white 

and glowing as the most powerful cleansing powder. This 

enthusiasm could have eaten holes in walls. 

“Jesus! BAM!” screamed Marisa, so loudly that the dog 

began to bark. “And I start screamin’, ‘Bitch, what in the fuck you 

think you’re doing? Bitch! And she’s opening up her little purse, and 

I’m just waitin’ on her. Bitch! Bitch! And she goes, ‘Well, you were 

in the wrong! You were in the wrong!’ - and this black guy steps 

between us and goes, ‘Come on, don’t get in a fight,’ and I go, 

‘BITCH! YOU NIGGER-FUCKING WHORE!’ - and she turns 

around and she goes, ‘You got that shit correct,’ and I go, ‘Of 

course! You’re too fuckin’ fat for a white man to fuck your lousy 

ass!”’ 

3 

Marisa never liked me as well as I liked her, partly (I 

suppose) because I wore glasses and did not know how to fight 

hand-to-hand, in the knightly fashion of skinheads and other streetconquerors, 

but partly also because my girlfriend was Korean. She 

did like me enough to be polite to Jenny, it being one of the rules that 

if somebody was your friend you did not fuck around with his lover, 

as was demonstrated when Ken’s girl Laurie went up to Dickie at a 

skinhead party and touched his shoulder to ask him for a cigarette, 

and Bootwoman Dan-L appeared from nowhere and warned Laurie 

to stay out of her territory unless she wanted to get beaten up. So 

because Jenny was in my territory Marisa tolerated her. - After all, 

Marisa did like me O.K. - This must have been why she sometimes 

came over and cooked me breakfast: huge omelettes with 

mushrooms and cheese and bacon and red onions, while in a 

subordinate frying pan her home fries sizzled obediently, becoming 

the golden-brown of Jenny’s skin, at precisely the moment when the 

cheese melted and the mushrooms were done and the steam rose 

from the titanic omelette like a chord from some cathedral organ, 

and Marisa would start doing the dishes that had piled up in the sink 

34


and say, “Boy, your girlfriend doesn’t take very good care of you, 

does she? What a mess this place is,” and I’d stand beside her at the 

sink and feel good that Marisa was being good to me; and 

meanwhile I’d be drinking whiskey out of the bottle because I was 

hungry, and the sun swam through the fog and I felt dizzy and Marisa 

shook her pretty bald head at me and buttered my toast. Whenever I 

asked her to, she’d tell me stories, such as how the Pretty Boys who 

peddled ass on Polk Street moved into the Pink Palace and then the 

Sleazy Attic and became the Bootboys so that they could die early 

because the Bootboys were such severe skinheads (“Almost all the 

skinheads are already dead,” sighed Marisa, “all the good ones”); 

and while Marisa went back into the kitchen to finish doing my 

dishes, her bootsister Thorn told me about how when she was in 

London her boyfriend Luigi got his eye popped out by the Italian 

Fascists, and then Marisa came back and told me about how when 

she was a thirteen-year-old girl in Chicago she started going with a 

skinhead named Sean, who was eighteen or twenty, and Marisa 

loved to hang out in Sean’s apartment, which must have resembled 

the workshop of a medieval armorer because scattered through its 

dark dirty chambers was a Camaro in pieces - hubcaps under the bed 

(so I imagined it), bucket seats emplaced against the living room 

walls for conveniently screwing Marisa and other girls, the shiny 

silver exhaust pipe by the door to hit enemies with, the carburetor 

serving to deploy old socks and dirty underwear and a black leather 

flight jacket to best advantage, while the gas tank was actively 

poised beside the window, still full of gasoline and ready to be 

hurled down onto the dirty icy street like a flying bomb; and 

presumably Marisa and Sean must have always been stepping over 

screws, and the windshield was in the cold dark moldy bathroom, 

covered with grime; and buckler-plates of chassis hung overhead in 

Sean’s bedroom, and the battery slowly leaked its acids through the 

floor; and now I have come to the end of all the auto parts that I know 

(except for the fan belt) - and Sean also possessed a stolen stop sign 

still in its cement base; possibly this was his hatstand. Although 

Marisa had not become Bootwoman Marisa yet, she loved and 

admired Skinhead Sean, so she tattooed Sean’s name on her body 

and started unrolling her secret capabilities by piercing her ears half 

35


a dozen times and doing fucked-up things to her hair, none of which 

things Marisa’s mother cared for, which was an incentive for Marisa 

to do them because Marisa’s mother treated her like a baby; when 

she used the leftover batter to make a final tiny pancake she’d say, 

“Oh, there’s a Marisa- sized pancake!” - and that really bothered 

Marisa. At that time, going to school started to bother her, too. Since 

she liked Sean better than she liked that listless two-hour commute 

from the North Side to the West Side, through cold dirty snow, with 

the cold wind blowing through the rusty railings, Marisa began 

sneaking down to the basement on those dark winter mornings 

instead of going to the bus, and when she heard the door-slam of her 

mother going to work Marisa would run back upstairs and dive into 

her warm bed and wait for Skinhead Sean to let himself in and hop 

into bed with her and watch TV until her mother came home at the 

end of the day, and then Marisa and Sean would go back to Sean’s 

metal-happy apartment. - Sean was very strong. One time after she 

and Sean broke up, Marisa was at this AOF show, and there was this 

skinhead band named The Alive going dwuuungg! on their bass 

guitars, and one of the guys in the band picked up on her, and Sean 

slammed his head against the wall. BAAAAAAM! until the blood 

spurted out, and Marisa thought that was the coolest thing, and then 

Sean threw him off the stage, and Marisa loved it. - Years later she 

met another Sean in Marin County when she and Thorn were over 

there trying to pop some virgin boy-cherries, and wily Marisa bet the 

new Sean two hundred dollars that she had his name tattooed on her 

body (which of course she did). Sean went for it. - Poor Sean! - Since 

he didn’t have the two hundred, he found himself under a universally 

acknowledged obligation to get her stoned on his dope for the rest of 

her life. * 

* Of course this was not quite as good a scam as the one perpetrated by the bum 

in the Panhandle who comes up to you and bets you that he has your name tattooed 

on the head of his dick regardless of who you are, so of course you fall for it and 

he unzips his jeans and flicks his thing, and there on the head of the glans, sure 

enough, are tattooed the words YOUR NAME. 

36


“Now, tell me about how you decided to become 

Bootwoman Marisa,” I said, eating my eggs (eggs very lightly done, 

Marisa told me, are called “scared eggs”), while Marisa and Thorn 

sat at the table to keep me company, Thorn smoking and staring out 

the window and crushing her cigarette butts into a mug while Marisa 

drank tea (she never ate what she cooked at my house; she cooked it 

only for me). 

“Well, I didn’t decide to be Bootwoman Marisa,” she said, 

“it was sort of like a gift.” (At this remarkable commencement my 

mouth fell open, and I was in such a state of suspense that I almost 

became incontinent.) 

“How’s that?” I said. “They invited you?” 

“Okay. I don’t know if you knew me ‘way back when, but 

when I would hang out on Haight Street and shit, I used to wear like 

really funky makeup. Really funky makeup. I don’t know. I guess I 

had a much different attitude back then, about a lot of things. One 

day, Dee was like walking Rebel, right? And I saw her. So I was like, 

‘Hey, why don’t I go with you?’ And so we went, and we sat in the 

Park for hours and we talked. She was just like, ‘You look like a 

freak, Marisa! She just laid it right out, and she said, ‘You look like 

a freak, and none of us want to hang out with you if you’re gonna 

look like a freak.’ So, we went back to her house, and she sat me 

down, and she took off all of that freaky makeup, and she said, ‘Now 

that’s it. If you want to revolt against the world, you know, I hate the 

world, too, but it all comes from inside, and if you do it from the 

outside, people aren’t gonna respect you at all and you’re never 

gonna get anything you want.’ Then I sat down, and I took off all my 

stupid jewelry and shit, and the other Skinz were like, ‘That’s 

good!’” - Marisa pounded on the table. - “‘You have the potential to 

become a Bootwoman!’” - She pounded again, so that all the 

silverware jumped. - “And that’s what it was.” 

“You must have had your feelings hurt a little at first, when 

she said that about your makeup.” 

“Well, no,” said Marisa. “I didn’t really have any reason for 

doing it. I never did. I just did it. What the fuck. It’s just one of those 

things, you know.” 

“Did you feel different when you got your head shaved?” 

37


“Well, fuck, yeah! It was cool. It was pretty cool. People 

started treating me with a little more respect. I stopped getting like 

black eyes every other week,” she laughed, “and Spike started 

teaching me how to fight. That was fun.” 

“Why did you use to get black eyes?” 

“Because just everywhere I would go, people would look at 

me and just think I was some sort of fucking weirdo, and punch me 

in the face. That was lots of fun!” 

“What would you do then?” 

“I’d punch them back, naturally. But I didn’t know how to 

fight for shit. And I’m still not like the best, but I can defend myself 

a lot better than I could back then. See, now I’d rather fight with a 

large stick. Like last night.” 

“What happened?” 

“When, last night?” she said nonchalantly. “See, I went out 

looking for this girl, right? There’s this girl on Haight Street, and 

she’s a total lily. She’s a freak now, and I wanna... change her mind. 

I wanna let her see my side.” She chuckled. “And I’m gonna do it 

with a stick!” 

“How do you know her?” Marisa and Thorn hissed 

contemptuously at me for this idiotic question. “I don’t know her,” 

said Marisa patiently. 

“You just know the way she looks, huh?” 

“Yep.” Both girls laughed. “Yep,” said Marisa. “She’s 

definitely got like an attitude problem. I was really freaky looking. 

She’s a nothing. She walks around in this leather that’s big enough 

for her to fucking live in. And it’s got like DROOLING IDIOTS 

written on the sleeve and all sorts of punk rock shit written all over 

it, and she walks around and she like hangs on all the guys. She’s a 

total bimbo. Definite bimbo. So, I think we need to send her to Boot 

Camp! What about you, Thorn?” 

“Mmm,” said Thorn boredly over her toast. 

4 

I had been Jenny’s lover for more than a year. She had never 

told her family about me. The fact that I was white was a problem, 

although Jenny and I both struck each other with bludgeons of the 

heaviest loyalty whenever one of us was so unguarded as to consider 

38


swimming away from the attachment like a slippery fish. Jenny 

laughed and laughed whenever the sun came out, whether it was the 

sun in the sky or the less reliable sun in my blue-steel eyes, for, as 

her cousin Alice explained to me, there are many different suns; as 

evidence, Alice cited the tale of the great Korean poet who got drunk 

in front of His Majesty and composed the following lines: “I see 

three moons: One in the sky, one in your eye, and one in your cup.” 

- When Alice stayed over, Jenny and Alice slept together in Jenny’s 

waterbed and I slept on the living room couch, because although 

Alice knew that Jenny and I usually shared Jenny’s bed, Alice had 

not actually seen evidence that we did; if she had, she would have 

had to tell her mother, even though she loved Jenny and knew that 

Jenny would suffer when Alice’s mother (who was so conscientious 

as to place folded tissue paper inside the family’s shoes to keep them 

from accumulating dust overnight), was obliged by reason of that 

conscientiousness to call Jenny’s mother on the phone; in the 

meantime Jenny and Alice and Alice’s friend Ivy went out with me 

to a Korean restaurant on Geary Street; while I sat at a corner of the 

table stirring the raw egg and raw beef around in my cold metal bowl 

of Yuck Hwe Bi Bim Bop, the others laughed and talked in Korean 

and conducted symphonies with their chopsticks, turning hunks of 

marinated chicken and beef and tripe on the little grille which the 

unsmiling waitress had placed in the center of the table, and the meat 

sizzled and the yellow flames shot up and warmed our faces; and 

every now and then Jenny would take a wet lettuce leaf and shake it 

down onto the grille to discipline the flames. - “Ooh!” she cried 

gleefully, holding up another chunk of smoking meat. “Intestines!” 

The Korean girls all had tiny mouths and smooth taut faces. 

When Jenny smiled, her face was like a wide golden shield. They 

talked about movies which they had seen. “It was such a comedy,” 

laughed Alice. “I couldn’t believe it.” - “I heard it was really bad,” 

said lvy. - “I just liked the title music,” said Alice. - They talked 

about Jenny’s brother Richard, mostly in Korean so that I did not 

obtain a lengthy catalogue of his imputed qualities, but the way the 

Korean girls sighed through pursed lips made it clear that Richard 

had lapsed into error, and from the occasional English phrases which 

were thrown to me in afterthought I gradually came to understand 

39


that he was seeing a Korean-American girl who had Caucasian 

ways. “He’s so serious about her,” said Alice in melodious surprise. 

“But she knows nothing about Korea. I don’t think she wouldn’t fit 

too good in with the family.” Alice saw me looking at her and took 

an earnest unsmiling bite of her tripe. 

5 

Sometimes when Ice was too drunk to take care of himself, 

Marisa and Thorn had to help him piss. Thorn would lean him up 

against a wall and hold his shoulder and grip the seat of his pants. 

Marisa would tell him to put his dick back in his pants, and if he 

couldn’t do it she’d do it for him. 

6 

In the summertime Jenny took me north so that she could 

splash around in cool lakes, and she’d coax me in, too, so that we’d 

be holding hands and wading deeper and deeper, trying not to walk 

on the pointed stones, which pricked our feet almost pleasurably like 

spicy food; until when the water was up to Jenny’s thighs she’d jump 

in and then I’d jump in and the water was cold and the sun was hot 

and Jenny would be laughing and calling to me, “Come on! Make 

big swims! Big swims!” 

7 

“Have you ever made watermelon punch?” said Marisa, and 

I said no, and she leaned forward confidingly and said, “All you’ve 

gotta do is take like a watermelon, remove the rind, and put it in a 

blender - not for very long, though, just because all it is is water. You 

don’t want to chop up the seeds. And then you put it through a 

strainer to get the seeds out, and you can put as much alcohol in it as 

you want, and you’ll never taste it. It’s pretty cool.” 

“I’ll have to try that,” I said. 

“You should do that!” growled Marisa with a hoarse friendly 

kind of toughness. 

“On Jenny and her pretty roommates,” I said, eating my 

scared eggs - and there was one of those transitional silences, as 

Bootwoman Marisa came to herself and remembered that I was not 

as pure and wholesome as I had pretended to be, because I stooped 

40


to racial shame with Jenny, and she turned to Thorn and said dryly, 

“Jenny is his girlfriend.” 

“Oh,” said Thorn, knowing enough from Marisa’s tone to 

take on an air of distaste, although she did not yet know Jenny’s sin. 

“And,” grinned Marisa, screwing her voice into a cheerful 

singsong, “She’s going to look really gross by the time she’s forty!” 

I laughed, but as I recall my laugh now it seems to have been 

a somewhat insincere, wooden laugh, my empire of humor already 

riddled with termites, and Marisa moved in for the kill, saying, “I’m 

warning you, Bill, dump her while you’ve still got the chance!” - and 

to Thorn she explained my shameful secret, in the parentheses used 

by two people speaking of a third’s terminal disease: “(She’s 

Oriental.)” 

“I’ll pass that on to her,” I said, still laughing in my loud 

insincere way, and Marisa said rapidly and coolly, “You do that, Bill. 

You just do that.” 

8 

I had a party, for which Jenny made artichoke dip, kahlua 

cake, sweet- and-sour chicken and a variety of other foods, abetted 

by her housemate, Margaret; and Marisa and Thorn were invited. 

Most of the other guests were Jenny’s Korean friends. When Marisa 

came in, she cried out, “Hey, Bill, I brought you a present. We were 

at the St. John’s Grill, and we stole you this ashtray fair and square!”, 

and I was touched and thanked Marisa with a big hug, but Jenny’s 

friends contracted, and I took Marisa and Thorn into my bedroom, 

away from the drinks, and closed the door so that we could shoot my 

airgun, and the girls laughed at the target and yelled, “That’s 

Cougar’s head! - That’s Rona’s face! I’m going to kill that slut!”, and 

Marisa shouted, “KEE-lore!” - meaning, “KILLER!” Thorn and 

Marisa mainly stayed in the kitchen after that, helping Margaret mix 

up drinks, since this affair was a little quieter than the skinhead 

parties which often started in early afternoon when you pulled your 

boots on and buttoned up your black jacket nice and tight and took 

the bus down to the Tenderloin or the Fillmore where you knocked 

on the door of a garage and two beefy Skinz looked you over and 

took a dollar for beer and one of them stamped your hand with a 

dinosaur stamp to verify that you had paid, allowing you to go on 

41


through the garage and up a passageway that took you into a barren 

courtyard of stamped-down dirt with rickety apartment buildings 

towering around you, and skinheads and bootwomen permeated this 

snakepit, some ascending the fire escape to the first-storey terrace, 

the second-storey terrace, the third-storey terrace where things were 

dark and rotten, and at any point a skinhead might block your way 

and you’d have to be awfully polite to get past him and keep 

climbing to the fourth-storey terrace where Bootwoman Dan-L 

yawned and scratched her new-shaven head, and Marisa sat on the 

stairs with other skinhead girls in a pool of beer, which trickled 

slowly down the stairs in a nice uncaring way, like Ice’s piss, losing 

itself in Marisa’s jacket and under Marisa’s leg and behind 

Bootwoman Kim’s shoulder and so on to the ocean. For the most 

part Marisa said nothing, because she was already very stoned. * She 

stared out across the world; you could see clouds here, and dirty 

windows, and laundry hanging from distant fire escapes, and at any 

time you could look down on the yard as if from a low- budget 

watchtower, to see the Skinz lined up at the beer keg to pump Bud 

into plastic cups for themselves, their buddies, their girls; and in the 

middle of that grey sad space there was a grey sad tree that rose three 

storeys; and the Skinz tied a rope around a cupful of beer and threw 

the rope up around a branch of that tree and caught the free end and 

started raising the cup very slowly and carefully until it was about 

thirty feet high and then they began to swing the rope back and forth, 

back and forth as they raised it, the beery pendulum whizzing 

merrily over everyone’s faces, and then the Skinz got excited and 

started really yanking with their big tattooed arms and the cup 

upended at about fifty feet and rained beer on everybody and some 

girls in black frowned and said, “Fuck you,” and some Skinz 

laughed, and some individuals were not noticeably affected. 

Everybody was getting a little drunker and louder now. Some guy 

* This was not too long after Marisa lost her job at the bakery on Castro Street 

because the owner read an official government report that skinheads were racist 

and sexist. - What a surprise! - “I don’t have anything to say about that,” said 

Marisa defiantly. - “Well, I can’t have someone working here with those opinions,” 

said the owner, whose boyfriend was Jewish. Marisa told her to fuck off. 

42


ambled up to Nazi Joe and asked him what his boot size was. Nazi 

Joe stopped talking to his friends and turned around very slowly and 

said, “Why, do you want to steal my boots?” He knocked the guy’s 

head against the wall and punched it hard five times! Blood burst out 

of the guy’s ears. After that, my friend Ken kept going up to Nazi Joe 

and asking him what his boot size was. Nazi Joe only laughed, I 

guess because it mattered who asked him. Later on, it got dark, and 

things really got going; Ken got drunk and took a girl whose face he 

never saw into the basement and porked her against the wall. - So 

Marisa and Thorn, in short, were not entirely at ease in the more 

ideologically flabby surroundings of my party where Jenny and her 

friends talked about Macy’s and other topics which Jenny forgot 

about later, and everyone else stood around the living room table and 

sipped the Chivas Regal which Jenny had bought me down in L.A., 

or else they sat on the sofa and talked about new innovations in 

computer programming, such as the UNIX chip that was due on the 

market for micros, and with two of my favorite mechanical 

engineers I discussed the possibility of printing books on plastic 

paper, and I took my schoolmates Paul and Nancy into my room to 

show them the 1902 Tamerlane edition of Poe that Jenny had bought 

me for my birthday for a hundred and fifty dollars, and Jenny came 

over to make sure that I was eating the food that she had made for 

me, and Nancy and I discussed five books for five minutes, and then 

Paul and I each had another drink, and Jenny had another drink, and 

I went back to the kitchen to visit Thorn and Marisa and joke with 

them about the size of my dick. - “That’s nice!” they chorused 

laughing. I leaned up against the refrigerator and they leaned up 

against the sink, and I drank tequila and beer and tequila and beer but 

Thorn drank lightly in order to make sure that Marisa drank lightly, 

because Marisa got violent when she drank too much. - “San 

Francisco used to be the skinhead capital of the world,” sighed 

Marisa by the sink. “Now it’s so pathetic, it makes me want to puke.” 

- My flatmate Martin came in and grinned at us uncertainly. - 

Meanwhile my other guests drank margaritas and walked around the 

living room table and stood up and sat down and talked and avoided 

Marisa and Thorn, while Marisa and Thorn avoided them; and Jenny 

drank Old Bushmill’s and got very dizzy. Thorn told me about her 

43


drawings (she has since been accepted by a fine art school), and 

Marisa told me about the time she had belonged to a ballet troupe in 

Australia (which I have never visited and therefore enjoy 

imagining), getting picked up on wherever she went, not that she 

cared since she knew she’d never see those men again; and at the 

Hotel King’s Cross in Sydney she played strip poker in the boys’ 

room until the Director came back, so freckled Marisa had to get her 

clothes back on real fast and crawl out on the window-ledge to get 

back into her room, and the Director saw her, so she bitched Marisa 

out for that and then Marisa had to be watched for days and days, 

until finally there was a free day when members of the troupe could 

go out in groups, but Marisa said fuck this shit; she was going to 

hitchhike, so she set out for a fleamarket to buy her San Francisco 

friends some stupid Australian T-shirts and the Director saw her 

sneaking back and wrote up a report on her for that, too, but Marisa, 

who at that time had greenish-red hair which was short in some 

places and long in other places (and in other places still it just went 

tiiing!), didn’t care because at the fleamarket she’d gotten picked up 

by some guy who was really good looking; meanwhile everywhere 

they traveled around the circumference of this reddish-brown 

continent, a more faithful admirer still followed Marisa in a 

chocolate-brown Rolls Royce, and she would always get mixed up 

and try to get in on the driver’s side instead of the passenger side 

because the roads and cars were opposite from the ones in America, 

but Marisa’s admirer just laughed; he was about forty, and the 

Director, who was seventy-two, had a big crush on him, not that it 

did the Director any good; and then the troupe danced at the Sydney 

Opera House and another man fell in love with Marisa and took her 

out to dinner, but the Director caught her sneaking back into the 

hotel late at night, totally fucked-up, so Marisa was barred from 

dancing for the next two performances, and in the next city the guy 

in the chocolate-brown Rolls Royce gave Marisa enough pot to get 

the whole company completely stoned, which she did, so they had to 

call off the next performance, and Marisa got expelled from the 

company, although they couldn’t send her home early because that 

would have cost too much, so she got to stay on and get into as much 

trouble as she wanted. Finally the company had to stop boarding her 

44


with families who had sons. The people were cool in Australia, 

except that they spread Veg-i-mite on toast. 

9 

At the party, Jenny’s blue wallet disappeared. She did not 

notice until the next day because she had drunk too much. Jenny was 

very careless with her belongings, and had lost her wallet several 

times before. Once we were coming home from a movie, and just as 

we got out of the car Jenny realized that she did not have her wallet. 

We drove back to the theater and did not see it; we went to the bar 

where I had bought Jenny a drink and it was not there; then we saw 

it lying in the middle of the street, miraculously unrifled. Evidently 

Jenny had dropped it while unlocking the car. So I was now certain 

that the wallet would soon be found, but it wasn’t. Jenny was in a 

frenzy of anger and panic. Her keys were gone, too. Evidently she 

had left her wallet and keys on the table all night, beside the drinks 

and potato chips. 

“It was your friends!” shouted Jenny in my ear. “You invited 

them here! This is your fault! And they took my keys, so they can 

break in to your apartment and my apartment and my car! And they 

have my goddamn credit cards! You’re responsible for this! I bet 

Marisa’s down at Macy’s right now, buying bluejean things. Oh! I 

got a headache that just won’t go away. I told you not to invite those 

Nazi Skinz, ‘cause they’re delinquents!” 

“Let’s look for it downstairs,” I said. “Maybe you left it 

there.” At that time, still convinced that the wallet would turn up at 

any moment, I still did not understand how angry Jenny was. I 

preferred to be entertained with her ludicrous image of Bootwoman 

Marisa going to Macy’s. 

“In this instance, I just remember it so vividly,” Jenny 

insisted, “‘cause what I did, I left the wallet in the car, then I went to 

your room directly, thinking I had the wallet with me, but I didn’t, so 

I went back and got it, and I sat down and I put the wallet there. As 

it is, the only places I could have put it is in the kitchen or in the 

living room. Who else would do it? It had to be your goddamn 

skinhead friends!” 

“They wouldn’t do anything like that,” I said. 

45


“They came in with a stolen ashtray!” Jenny screamed. 

“Maybe they wouldn’t steal from you, but they don’t know me. Far 

as I’m concerned, you can forget about me if you ever see them 

again. Sometimes I hate you so much. I don’t know why I ever hung 

around with you. You don’t ever care about me. You think your 

criminal friends are more important. Top of everything else, I bet 

you’re glad they stole my wallet and keys. I’m telling you, I don’t 

ever want to see those bad girls again.” 

“Jenny,” I began, but she hit me and said, “Don’t say ‘Jenny’ 

like that to me! They have my wallet and my keys. What am I 

supposed to do now; I want you to look all over the house again. 

Look through the trash. Maybe somebody threw the stuff away by 

mistake. I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight.” 

We did not find the blue wallet. 

“I told you they were like that,” Jenny said. “You better 

promise me right now that you’re never gonna see those skinheads 

anymore.” 

“No,” I said. 

“Then you’re not gonna see me anymore,” Jenny said, tears 

rolling down her plump golden cheeks. Jenny did not mean exactly 

what she had said; she meant only the worst thing that she could 

think of. 

10 

“At first I thought they were really funny,” said my flatmate 

Martin, preparing to embrace the views of his class. “But then I 

decided they were kind of frightening when I realized that they were 

serious.” 

“I don’t think they did it,” I said. 

But Martin was certain that they had. 

11 

There are times when you know that something is not right 

anymore or that something is over, but with that knowledge comes a 

sick premonition of what it will mean to you, as if you suddenly 

realized that the ground was dissolving under you, and under that 

was darkness and dirt and crawling bugs, and you want the comfort 

46


of solid ground back so much that you will keep to the thing that is 

not right, willing it to be right for another day’s journey a few 

thousand more steps, because you want to not think about the dark 

hole waiting for you, and if you can delay the collapse of the ground 

you will certainly do it. I had felt this way toward my relationship 

with Jenny on many occasions, and I felt it now regarding distrusting 

my friends. I could not believe that Marisa had taken anything, and 

I could not believe that anyone else had taken anything. 

Jenny hardly slept for two nights. - “These skinheads, these 

Boot women,” she said, “I wonder if they disapprove of me. I 

wonder if they hate me ‘cause I’m Asian girl. Maybe they want to 

hurt me. I mean, they’re Nazis!” - I had not told her what the 

skinheads said about her, but even so she knew that one night a 

month or two from now, when we had forgotten the incident, Marisa 

would come sneaking up to the door and unlock it with the stolen 

keys, and then Dickie and Mark Dagger and Chuckles and Blue and 

Yama and Hunter and Dee and Spike and Nazi Joe and Ice and Dan- 

L would then come charging up the stairs and Dagger would shatter 

the banister with one kick of his Nazi boots and Yama would smash 

in the curtained glass door of Margaret’s room and start hitting 

Margaret over the head with a chair and the rest of them would come 

back into Jenny’s room and find Jenny and me sleeping on her 

waterbed and Dickie would slit the waterbed with a sharpened tin 

can and the skinheads would yell at us, “All right, where’s the 

money? Where’s the money?” - and Marisa would tell me I had one 

minute to get out and leave Jenny to her fate, and then Yama would 

hit her in the face and say, “Shut up, bitch! We’re gonna carve ‘em 

all!”, and Chuckles and Blue would piss into our faces and Ice would 

begin to dismantle the living room stereo with tender care. 

12 

After two weeks, Jenny became resigned. We took to 

locking her door and my door with the deadbolts, which had not 

been used before, and which Jenny had not had keys for. Her face 

was still puffy with tears. For Jenny, who loved clean things and neat 

things and organized things despite her own carelessness, the loss of 

the wallet was an aesthetic disaster as well as a security risk. “I wish 

I misplaced it,” she said mournfully, “though it really doesn’t make 

47


any difference, ‘cause I still have to go through all the hassle. It’s 

been so many days now. Get me a new bank card. Call about my 

driver’s license. I’ll cancel Macy’s card. Now, today I want you to 

eat a good lunch ‘cause I’m gonna cook the Mom’s meat for you. 

Promise me you’ll eat a good lunch. Do you promise? And you want 

frozen chicken nuggets?” A little later she was humming a Korean 

song about barley fields. 

13 

Meanwhile, Jenny’s other brother Adam came up for a visit. 

He was a slender self-confident young man who liked to wear polo 

shirts. Jenny adored him and was always calling him long-distance 

late at night to give him advice, which I am not certain that he 

consistently followed. The look of a baby brother still clung to him. 

He and his friends from Yale carried in a bucket of giant clams which 

they had gathered on the beach. Jenny dumped the clams into the 

sink at once and began scrubbing their shells with soapy steel wool 

to get rid of every subversive germ; in Jenny’s world, as in Marisa’s, 

every alien must be sterilized. She steamed the biggest ones, who 

sighed futilely through their excurrent siphons; the rest I popped into 

the freezer for five minutes to weaken them so that their numb 

adductor muscles would be unable to resist my knife; already sick 

from the long oceanless ride in the trunk of Adam’s car, they cracked 

open in easy surrender to their sushi doom. I carried them out on a 

plate and set them before Adam, who sat at the dining room table 

loudly laughing with his friends, these boys evidently respecting 

him as their leader, much as Izutsu and Sagara respected Isao in 

Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses because Isao was going to turn 

them into rightwing extremists and then become divine by cutting 

open his belly in a ritual rapture that would most likely make the sun 

explode behind his closed eyelids; I imagine that Adam’s clams felt 

this way when I slit them open; but Adam accepted them without 

seeing either them or me and passed them to his disciples, who cried, 

“Adam! Adam!”, and Adam gave one clam to Jenny and then ate 

one, and passed the clams to Izutsu and Sagara again, who doubtless 

were learning how to become divine with him at Yale. - “Well, 

Adam, do you need anything?” I said. He went on talking to his 

friends. But when he saw me in Jenny’s bed, his jaw fell and he 

48


shook his head very slowly and went out, leaving the bedroom door 

ajar, and before driving home the next day he taped a note in Korean 

to Jenny’s door. The note said: “Elder Sister: I was very disappointed 

about your boyfriend. I was ashamed of you. Please think of Mother 

and Grandmother.” - How to explain this revulsion that the colors of 

the rainbow feel for each other? 

In her nightgown, biting a juicy peach, Jenny sat down on her 

waterbed and called Adam. I had made her do it. “I’ll be there late,” 

she said. “Can you do me a favor? Tell Grandmother not to sleep in 

my room. Margaret and I will be sleeping there. Another thing. Rent 

me a couple movies. And tell Mom to take the big car to work. And 

tell Richard not to go out with the big car early.” 

She swaddled herself in blankets. “Now, I keep forgetting to 

tell you this, but you’re really rude leaving that letter. What do you 

mean, honest opinion? And you were really rude. He kept trying to 

talk to you, be nice to you. You acted like a brat. - What do you 

mean? - Adam, you really have to behave. What is honest opinion? 

No. Listen to me. Listen. Bill’s my boyfriend, and you have to - 

Adam! - Listen! Listen! LISTEN! You say you love me, but if you 

do, you have to respect...- Listen! LISTEN! 

“Adam, I don’t understand why you think things that way. I 

want to know why you came to that kind of opinions. You have to 

defend your opinions. - No, you have to provide a reasonable cause. 

You can’t say, I just don’t feel good. Adam. Adam. Adam! I know 

you’re upset. But you cannot just act on first impressions. What do 

you think now? What do you think now? You see, you don’t know 

him and you said things that really hurt me. I want to understand 

why you wrote that letter, why you behave that way. -Just because of 

appearance? In what way? What do you mean, you don’t remember? 

I’m not criticizing you, I’m asking your opinion. Just because one’s 

different? That note you wrote said you’re ashamed of me. Why, 

why, why, why? What type? What type is he? He didn’t do anything 

to you.” 

She made her little brother cry on the phone (which gave me 

satisfaction), but he still hated me. 

14 

49


If this had been a Chekhovian story, or a tale from de 

Maupassant, the blue wallet would have turned up eventually, 

proving by its determined refusal to be elsewhere that all suspicions 

had been reified to the point of logical and moral death, so that now, 

as all the thought-chains strained inside our brains, and the little 

homunculi downshifted the thought-gears to provide maximum 

mechanical advantage in their futile attempt to drag the blocks of 

leaden trust back to safety, those corrupted metal concepts hung 

upon the summit of that black waterfall that everything goes down 

eventually, and the homunculi did their dwarfish best but the chains 

snapped and the trust careened down the waterfall and fell into the 

spray below and we never saw it again, but the blue wallet remained 

to remind us of our limited beings. 

In fact, I did find Jenny’s wallet eventually. It had fallen into 

a paper bag under the living room desk, along with her keys. 

We went to other movies, and Jenny sat with her knuckles 

pressed raptly against her cheeks, happily crying at the spectacle of 

a newly imagined romantic disintegration. 

15 

A month before Marisa’s seventeenth birthday, Jenny and I 

met her at a party on Haight Street. In the doorway it said: S.F. 

BOOTWOMEN - THEY’LL ROB YOU OF YOUR MONEY, 

YOUR PRIDE AND YOUR MAN! Marisa did not have her bicycle 

messenger job anymore because she’d come riding into some Bank 

of America office tower with an urgent message, and a secretary or 

petticoat executive had looked her up and down in a sneering sort of 

way, so Marisa called her a bitch or possibly a fucking bitch, and the 

bitch had complained and the messenger service had lost the B. of 

A. account and so Marisa was fired. -Jenny and I were sitting 

together on the sofa listening to the Supremes going, “Ba-by, ba-by! 

Where did our love go!”, at a volume suitable for launching killing 

vibrations through our tympanic membranes and into our bony 

labyrinths and so into our membranous labyrinths to cause special 

damage; and Jenny was trying to get me to dance with her. 

“Come and dance,” she said. 

“I don’t feel like it,” I said. 

“Please dance with me,” she said. 

50


“No,” I said. 

Marisa came into the living room and started dancing by 

herself, looking very soft and furry with her sweater and the grey 

downy stubble on her head, and Marisa’s eyes were closed, and she 

danced and danced on the rug, and Jenny said wryly, “Marisa! Pull 

him up and make him dance. I’ve never seen him dance” - and 

Marisa came over and stared expressionlessly into Jenny’s face, and 

said coolly, “And you never will.” 

For Jacob Dickinson and Janis Kibe Dickinson 

51

Blue Lick 

Chris Offutt 


The funny-talked lady gave me a ten page test that like to 

drove me blind marking in little circles no bigger than a baby catfish 

eye. When I was done, she said I was precocious. Then she called 

me a poor dear and I got mad on account of Daddy telling me never 

to let nobody say we were poor. He said to fight them if they did. I 

put my dukes up and she saw how mad I was and asked me whatever 

for in that funny-talked way of hers. 

I told her straight out, and she said, “I don’t mean poor like 

that, there’s other ways.” She just set and looked at me, real pale like 

she never got out much. On her back was a new flannel shirt, still yet 

with the folding marks not wore out. She wore red-laced shiny boots 

and jeans. I’d never seen a woman wear blue jeans before unless it 

was somebody’s granny but she wasn’t that old. I put my fists back 

down. 

She kept looking at me like I was some kind of black snake 

that you ain’t supposed to kill or the rats will eat you out. If you see 

one you just watch that old snake to make sure it don’t get too close. 

My Daddy said he went and chopped a black snake in half when he 

was little, and his own Daddy tied him to a bucket and lowered him 

down a well over killing it. Daddy seen stars and it full day. Down 

below it was blacker than a cow’s insides and the brick well-walls 

were slick as snot on a glass doorknob. He said they’ve got glass 

ones down to the courthouse. Daddy ought to know because he’s 

been there plenty, which is why I took them precocious tests 

anyhow. 

She wasn’t a state lady and she wasn’t from town. She was 

some kind of lady from off that got sent here over me and my 

brother, who can’t talk plain. He can’t say his Rs or his Ls, and 

there’s some sounds he don’t even know. I’m the one to understand 

him most. He ain’t precocious. What he is, is a singer, singing made 

up stuff. Daddy calls him Little Elvis. 

That lady, she went and reached her hand over mine and it 

was the smoothest thing, smoother than a horse’s nose hole, which 

is pure soft. She held my hand like you do a frog when you’re fixing 

52


to cut its legs off and eat them. I let my fingers lay real still so they 

wouldn’t wiggle and give her no big ideas. Mommy always did say 

I was full of big ideas. She took off two summers back and we ain’t 

seen hide nor hair of her yet. Daddy used to say “fuck you bitch” to 

her and that was one of my brother’s songs till we went to live with 

Granny where Daddy grew up on the Blue Lick River. Granny filled 

my brother’s mouth full of lye soap over that song. He never liked 

her after that and called Granny the fuck-you-bitch when she was far 

enough away, like out back at the toilet by the river. She goes in there 

at least a hundred times a day. I don’t know where it comes from 

because she’s skinny as a broom straw. 

Daddy got out of prison early over there not being nobody to 

raise us up but Granny, who’s old as God. The funny-talked lady 

asked if I knew why Daddy went to prison the first time. I knew all 

right. Daddy’d told us a million times about wrecking his car and 

waking up thinking he was dead. What he done was run his car 

ninety mile an hour off the road by a Shell gas station and plow 

through a fence into a horse. He woke up and the horse had come in 

the windshield on Daddy, covering him with blood that he thought 

was his own. A tree was blocking the S off the Shell sign, and Daddy 

said he seen them big red letters and knew right then he’d died and 

gone to where everybody always said he’d wind up anyhow. The 

horse’s belly had tore open and half a colt was hanging out with its 

legs on the floorboards. Daddy thought he’d turned into part goat, 

like the devil. 

They locked him up a year because the man whose horse it 

was didn’t like losing two at once. Daddy said he’d never got a 

record if he’d had the good sense to hit a mare that wasn’t knocked 

up. Plus the car was a borrowed car. When the man he borrowed it 

off heard how he run through a pasture fence into a horse, the man 

claimed it wasn’t borrowed after all. He took to watching out for us 

when Daddy was in prison. He watched good, I reckon, because 

Mommy lit out with him. After Daddy got out of La Grange, the 

man’s barn burned down and people said it was Daddy done it but 

nobody told the law. 

Daddy came home with two tattoos smack dab over his 

titties. One said “Evil,” the other said “Live.” Daddy said they were 

53


the same word, only spelled backwards. Little Elvis wrote on his 

ownself with an ink pen and Daddy laughed like a wild man when 

he seen it. You couldn’t read what was wrote but Little Elvis swore 

up and down it said Mountain Dew. It wasn’t even letters, more like 

worm tracks on the river bank. 

Daddy’s feet stunk bad, too. He said it was from wearing 

shoes all the time in La Grange, even in the shower and bed. Little 

Elvis started wearing his shoes to bed only Granny said it got the 

sheets muddied up and Daddy took her side because there wasn’t no 

mud in the joint. He said they had boys like girls in prison, too. Little 

Elvis wanted to know if their feet stunk, and Daddy laughed. He said 

we’d know we were grown up men when our feet had a good solid 

stink to them. Little Elvis wanted Daddy’s socks so he could hurry it 

up. Daddy said that was bad luck and we’d have to find another way. 

Little Elvis wanted bad to be a man and I started thinking on 

all the things that’s got a smell to them. Grasshopper piss for one. 

Polecats and rotten eggs. Road kill, too, but I didn’t feel like fooling 

with dead stuff. A boy that used to live down here did, and the state 

took him for cutting them animals up. He made his sister show me 

her thing once if I’d give him a bat my Daddy killed that got in the 

house. After seeing her poon, I wanted that bat back. I just know he 

cut it up. 

The only other stinking thing I could think of was the toilet 

shack which Granny called the White House. She planted 

honeysuckle around it to cut the smell but it drew mud-daubers big 

as tree frogs. Me and Little Elvis went to the woods mostly. He used 

poison vine to wipe with once and never did wipe again after. 

A month ago, I had to go bad and it was night time, with the 

moon not even white on the river. I sneaked out to a pine where the 

dead brown needles below was soft and would cover the smell up. 

Daddy was off fox-hunting and everybody else in the world was 

asleep but me and it felt fine, just fine, being in the woods alone at 

dark. Then the hunting dogs got on my trail and started howling. I 

had to climb that pine, getting stickered by needles every branch. 

Dogs were barking below me, trying to claw their way up the trunk. 

They ain’t a dog in all creation that climbs trees. That’s why trees are 

here, Daddy said, to give varmints somewhere to get away to. 

54


Them dogs wouldn’t leave and I had to do my business so 

bad it was hurting and I got scared it would back up in me like a 

culvert in a toad-choker. What I did was just go ahead and go. First 

I pulled my pants down and kindly hung onto the tree and let my 

hind-end aim through limbs I wouldn’t have to climb back down on. 

I cut loose and the dogs jumped like somebody’d set them on fire. 

They were catching it in the air and eating it and then jumping again. 

Pretty soon they were fighting over scraps. When I was done I 

couldn’t get my pants up on account of needing both hands to hold 

on to the tree with. 

The men were coming out the ridge and I heard them arguing 

over whose dog was at the lead, and whose fox it was. Somebody 

shined a flashlight on me while the others pointed guns. They started 

laughing, and one said to Daddy, “I told you your dog was a shiteating 

dog, he’s done treed your boy.” 

Daddy stepped right up to the man and said, “You wouldn’t 

say such if I weren’t on parole.” Daddy put his gun down and looked 

around at all the men and said, “You’uns tell the law I ain’t no gun 

if he shoots me.” Then he hauled off and hit that man square in the 

face and knocked him back in the brush. 

Daddy started kicking dogs off the tree trunk until there 

wasn’t none left. The men were cussing fierce, trying to sort dogs 

out. The man Daddy had hit was whopper-jawed and he had his rifle 

in both hands aimed right at Daddy. Daddy put his arms up real slow. 

Him and the man looked at each other and the rest were backing 

away. Daddy turned to the tree real slow, looked at me and said, “Let 

go damn it.” I didn’t want to but did. Pine branches swarped my face 

half clean off and Daddy caught me. He turned back to the man, 

holding me in front of him. The gun was aimed right at me. 

“Your own boy,” the man said. 

He turned his gun and shot Daddy’s dog and stepped into the 

woods and he was gone and all the others were gone, and Daddy let 

me down and we stood there in the dark while the hound dog sound 

got further way until there wasn’t nothing to be heard on account of 

that shot scaring all the night critters in to not making a peep. 

Daddy’s best dog was dead, its throat blown out. He made me 

promise not to tell Granny how the dog got killed. 

55


Because Little Elvis wanted to be a man, I took him out to 

the White House and we hung our feet down through the hole. He 

sung, “We’re stinking our feet like old dead meat,” over and over. 

Mud-daubers had tunnelled a nest in a high corner and I seen them 

but it was too late. They landed on Little Elvis’s head and started 

biting and he tried to run, but forgot he was stinking his feet and fell 

down through the hole. He grabbed hold of my legs. Then the muddaubers 

were on me and I was screaming and Granny come out and 

said later she’d thought one of us had an eye poked out from all the 

hollering. She saw me half down the toilet hole and took me by the 

arm like I was laundry. Granny worked past me to snatch Little Elvis 

by the hair and haul him up, his head one red bump from muddauber 

bites and his feet stinking all the way past his knees. Granny 

about busted the White House roof off laughing. She said Daddy fell 

in once when he was a boy, and Little Elvis thought that made it ok. 

“In here?” he said. “Daddy fell in here?” 

“No it was a different place,” Granny said. 

What they did back then was move the White House when 

the hole filled up and she said Daddy’s old hole was over where the 

turnips were growing now. Little Elvis got the idea that Daddy’s feet 

stunk from turnips. He stomped them all summer, not leaving none 

to eat, and groundhogs got the mush. He’d lay in the dirt and sing, 

“Daddy’s feet don’t get burn up cause he mashed them in a turnip.” 

The only way of keeping him out of the garden was tying him to the 

door but Granny’s hands were too stiff and twisty for making good 

knots. I turned him loose every day. 

We called Granny the fuck-you-bitch to her face because she 

locked us outside till dark and made us take our clothes off and 

hosed us down before we could eat supper. We weren’t allowed to 

wear anything in the house because of the dirt. All summer our shirt 

and pants laid outside till morning. Sometimes we found Daddy 

laying out there, too. His head hurt so bad he had me to water him 

with the hose. Little Elvis would grin and sniff at Daddy’s boots so 

he’d know man-smell against the time he was one. Daddy said we 

were a damn sure pair of stand up boys. 

When the sun moved over the ridge, he crawled to shade and 

along noon he’d light a cigarette and talk to us. “Shoot to kill,” he 

56


said, “never wound. Fold a three-flush after five. Don’t give women 

gifts. Always throw the first punch.” Stuff like that he’d tell us, 

useful stuff that we were supposed to never let go of. I didn’t, but 

Little Elvis can’t remember much from day to day except food. Once 

he forgot how to ride a bike and I had to learn him all over again. 

One morning we found Daddy asleep in a borrowed car 

behind the house. He let us help him take parts off it, and we threw 

hubcaps, headlights and bumpers in the river. He unscrewed a 

quarter panel and put me and Little Elvis to tearing it up with tire 

tools. We beat and scratched until the car was stripped down like a 

go-cart and you could see how the gears worked. We broke all the 

glass out, too. Daddy stuck the big pieces in the back of his truck and 

drove away. 

He came back with half-melted ice cream cones and we ate 

what was left of them, looking at the car. Daddy said we could make 

a dune buggy of it. He’d drive us anywhere we wanted to go-- 

wherever, we’d just go with sleeping bags, fishing rods, and night 

crawlers. We’d see the world living on fish and ice cream, siphoning 

gas at night. 

While we sat there watching the river, two police cars came 

to block our road. A big bald-headed cop told Daddy to sit on the 

grass while the short cop talked on a radio. Daddy didn’t say 

nothing, he just sat. Two more cars showed up, not police cars but 

regular cars. The men weren’t wearing cop suits but they acted like 

they were, and when one took his coat off against the heat, he had a 

pistol on a strap that went over his shoulders. He put the jacket back 

on when the bugs got to him. They’re bad on the river but they don’t 

bother me and Little Elvis because Daddy said we’re river rats and 

mosquitoes know better than to fool with us. 

The two cops who weren’t cops had clipboards. They looked 

that car up and down with me watching and Little Elvis riding his 

bike and singing, “Police car squashed my daddy, police car 

squashed my daddy.” He rode in a circle which he’s not good at, and 

kept wrecking until Daddy took him in his lap. 

The man with the hid gun said, “It looks like the car all 

right.” Then he asked me how long it was here. 

“What,” I said, “the river?” 

57


He didn’t like me saying that which was fine by me because 

I didn’t like him telling Daddy to sit under the tree. Not even Granny 

tells him what to do. 

“We need a warrant,” the other man said. “Nothing that kid 

says will do us any good.” 

He smiled at me the way I’ve seen teachers smile when they 

think I done something bad and they’re pretending it ain’t bad so I’ll 

talk about it and they can give me a paddling. I got twelve licks once. 

Six for saying thank you when the teacher said I was wise, and six 

more for laughing after the first six licks. It hurt so bad it was laugh 

or cry. I had to laugh because I couldn’t cry in front of everybody. 

Daddy said river rats never cry. 

The men who weren’t cops had that look on their face, like 

they wanted to give me a paddling but didn’t have the reason yet. 

“How long’s this car been here, son?” the smiling one said. 

I looked at him and then at the car and could hear Little Elvis 

singing, police car squashed my daddy. 

“I ain’t your son,” I said. 

The other man grinned and shook his head. 

“That’s my car,” I said. “I’m putting it together. Daddy ain’t 

helping or nothing. We’re aiming to dune buggy it on out of here.” 

One man laughed but the second one got that teacher look 

again, like he finally had his reason for a whipping. 

“There’s not a dune for a thousand miles any direction from 

here,” he said. 

When I told the funny-talked lady all this she said that’s what 

she meant about precocious, how telling the cops that lie was 

precocious. I didn’t like her knowing right off it was a lie because 

when Daddy heard me say it, he said it was the pure truth. The bald 

cop pulled out handcuffs and the short one said, “Not in front of his 

kids.” They made Daddy get in the back seat of the police car and 

drove away, right through the yard to the road, leaving big tracks in 

the grass and I wrecked my bicycle trying to catch up, bent the rim 

bad. I pushed it back to Little Elvis who sat with his bike in a big 

mud hole. When I couldn’t get him to come out, I sat down with him. 

We smeared mud all in our faces and planned to break Daddy out 

and they’d not know who done it because of the mud. 

58


The funny-talked lady kindly grinned over that and said, 

“Some people don’t always cooperate with people who can help. I 

hope you’re not one of them.” 

I didn’t say nothing and she asked if there was anything I 

needed. I’d never thought I needed anything but if she was asking, 

maybe there was. So I said, “To get Little Elvis back from the place 

the state put him.” 

I missed hearing him sing those songs even if they were 

dumb as ditch water. Many’s the time I tried to make some up but 

they never came out right. Daddy always did say I sang like a 

combination lock, no key. It was Little Elvis who got the talent in our 

family, which was ok with me after I found out that I was the one got 

the precocious. 

I wouldn’t mind too bad talking to Daddy over that tore-up 

car business either. The owner was the same man whose dog treed 

me and who Daddy knocked down. I was the one who had to go and 

climb that pine, get the dog killed, Daddy locked up, and Little Elvis 

took. 

I reckon Mommy’d never run off without me to bust in on 

her and that neighbor man one night when I couldn’t sleep for the 

racket they were raising. I screamed out, “You ain’t my daddy.” He 

looked at me back over his shoulder from where he was hunkered 

down in the middle of the bed like picking worms off tobacco and 

said, “Damn sure ain’t, runt.” He kicked me full in the head barefoot. 

Then he slapped Mommy in the jaw and I seen her naked buried 

under him with her hair in her face, and her eyes crazy. 

“Go on and get,” she said to me. 

I ran out of the house, into the dark and way up a hillside. I 

didn’t tell the funny-talked lady what it was I done up there that 

night, because what I done was hold off crying every which way. 

Jabbing a locust thorn in my hand worked best. Then Mommy and 

the man was gone and me and Little Elvis got moved into Granny’s 

trailer and Daddy was home for a summer. It was a good summer, 

too. 

The funny-talked lady hugged me right then, just reached out 

and yanked me to her new-smelling flannel shirt and held me against 

her body. I tried to squirm away but it didn’t do no good. She started 

59


in crying and that seemed like a good time to try and get a look down 

her shirt front. After a while she let me go and said there was hope 

for me, she could save me. I told her I didn’t want to be saved. 

Granny got saved four times, the last after Daddy went back to La 

Grange. Getting saved meant smiling at all the people who didn’t 

like you, and they smiled back like they did. 

The funny-talked lady closed her eyes and said she didn’t 

mean church saved, there was more than one type of that, too. She 

said my test scores showed potential. I asked about Little Elvis. She 

didn’t say nothing and I could tell it was over not wanting to lie, 

because I used to do Granny the same way until finally I just went 

ahead and lied without the not wanting to getting in the way. 

“What about him,” I said. “What about him?” 

She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned her head to 

mine and looked right at me and talked quiet. 

“You’re it,” she said. “You got all the potential for both of 

you. I’m afraid your brother is slow.” 

I didn’t like that one speck. There’s ‘tarded boys at school 

and Little Elvis ain’t a bit like them. They’re big and mean and can’t 

even zip their own fly. 

“You lie!” I yelled out, and hauled off and smacked her, 

aiming for her face but only got her arm. She caught me and hugged 

me tight again, just like Mommy did the neighbor man when he hit 

her, and I did my best to look down her shirt until finally I gave it up. 

I just went and gave up everything. If they could take my daddy and 

my brother, they might as well take me away, too. 

She turned loose of me and didn’t say nothing but drove me 

on out the road to the trailer. She said she’d come by tomorrow. Then 

she tried to laugh and said she’d bring some bug spray. I got out and 

walked in the tracks the tow truck had made dragging Daddy’s 

borrowed car away. I couldn’t stop thinking on Little Elvis, and I 

tried to make up a song but it wouldn’t take. I went down on the river 

bank and looked at the place where we’d thrown pieces of the car in 

at. There was nothing but river, not a rat in sight. I sat there till a mile 

past dark. 

60


Timmy the Tubercular Seal: 

A Story in Three Parts 

Andrew Mozina 

Part 1: Timmy the Tubercular Seal Is Brought Into 

Fictional Existence 

Timmy the Tubercular Seal went a-wandering the weescreaming 

paths riverway. He crouched and scuttled and flopped 

along, a-laying down farts and adjusting his visor, meanwhile 

plinking a marching tune on a xylophone strapped to his back and 

manipulated by his flippers through a series of pulleys, ropes, 

winches, and hinges. 

Timmy shouted his feelings at the passersby, such as, “A 

heigh ho, you fuckwad! You’re dirt and grime and your face needs 

peeling. Your rectum is a squirrel haven and your forehead reminds 

me of a board game played with pins and needles.” 

Others of his feelings were as follows: 

“I’m not very tall, but I’ll fight to the last drop of blood. I 

don’t care whose.” 

“I love the tall grasses because they don’t strike me and 

because they stroke my lubricious flanks with whispering tone 

winds breathed from their fine planty pores. A hey, a hey!” 

His feelings, disjointed and unpleasant as they were, 

activated the scores of rabbit tongues, tongues detached willfully 

and with malice aforethought and brought to Holy Place, where they 

were charged with capturing Timmy the Tubercular Seal, and for to 

bring him in for questioning, an inspection, an ear job, refueling 

(midair), a saurkraut dousing, a descanting upon, and to replace his 

several flippers with modern appliances unsuited to flapping, such 

as the wash machine, the gerrymander, and the electric eel’s tiny 

fangs -- but mainly for the questioning and the descanting upon. But 

these acephalous, anurous, abrachial tongues, lacking hunting 

facilities, had until moments quickly approaching, foundered on 

61


their mission, and instead writhed upon themselves, dreaming of 

absorbifacients with long range power, drooling pus from their 

diseased areas, and misbehaving to the chagrin of their several 

elders, who asked for quiet but were answered with shouts and the 

sounds of sexual non-couplings among the tongues. 

Yet the tongues just then completed their mission with 

masterful inadvertence as Timmy the Tubercular Seal wheezed into 

their slippery patch -- attracted instinctively by the moisture no 

doubt -- en route riverway. The tongues had little to do but support 

him with their thin wet armlessness of muscle as he fell upon them 

(his xylophone going silent) and lay still. 

Part 2: Timmy the Tubercular Seal Is Questioned and 

Descanted Upon 

Timmy adhered to the sea of apodal tongues. This was in the 

vicinity of Holy Place where the Pouch Dog extracted her tribute and 

mangled the fingers of her helpmates with ratchet and slam of 

drawer. She was a beautiful cauldron of pouch dog, sleek and 

manifold in her enchantments and modes of reproduction, of which 

she had seventy (excluding apomixis, practiced involuntarily, 

though for kicks), of which twelve involved fire, sub-which four 

involved the burning of genitals, other sub-which three involved the 

burning of land at precisely three cubits away, other sub-which two 

demanded the burning of the juices that ease congress, other and 

summatory-to-twelve sub-which three involved random 

combustions of materials and/or concepts, in the vicinity or at great 

distance, such fires being particularly arousing since to the perceiver 

they effected either spontaneous revelation of themselves or the 

unpredictable prospect thereof, such actualities or expectations 

exacerbating sexual anticipation geometrically; and of the 

remaining fifty-eight methods let it only be said at this point that 

they were autoerotic in their pleasures and hermaphroditic in their 

mechanisms, though, in at least one relevant case, not partnerless in 

the sense of partner as untouchable yet tangible object of sex fantasy. 

It was for this relevant case that the Pouch Dog desired to interrogate 

62


and descant upon Timmy the Tubercular Seal, for such questioning 

and tirading would lubricate and tumesce (respectively) her to a 

startling degree and effect the mode of reproduction whose spawn 

was the creepy crawlers, who would rise from the slime of her litter 

to form trucking companies, run banks, auction pictures, and 

reconstruct the private driveways damaged in the last outbreak of 

blacktop madness (in which God-granted regulations regarding 

carports and their runways were scotched, breached, and otherwise 

ignored in a feeding frenzy instigated by a petulant pelican named 

Rusty, which left tarpaths honeycombed, not to mention 

impassable). These purposes revealed change Timmy’s situation not 

a whit as he lay in feeble proneness, his lungs expanding and 

collapsing; incidentally, whose frangible lungs made steel taverns 

out of balloons and showed the white man how to bowl. 

It was clear and well-known that the fifty-eight methods 

were the preferred methods, for as a by-product they involved the 

generation of luminous orbs observable from inside the Pouch Dog’s 

brain, that is, via consciousness, such luminous orbs being coated 

with happy scenes of woodsy frolics and kneebreaking leaps from 

theater balconies to stages of wood chips and crumbled bas reliefs of 

Achians leapfrogging with glee as mortal Hektor is dragged round 

and round moribund Troy, such luminous orbs also being coated 

with what gives candy its sweetness, such luminous orbs also being 

conceptually bountiful in terms of notions to live by, such luminous 

orbs also engendering the good old rush in the loins lickety-split. 

And so the Pouch Dog questioned the consumptive, blood-breathing 

seal posthaste. Her questions revolved around the tying of shoes and 

the debasement of currency, the hardening of water as it freezes and 

the viscosity of certain grades of motor oil. His answers, cogent and 

concise from his point of view only, consisted of almanactic facts 

describing fifty years of snow falls in the Piece of Shit Mountains as 

well as the average tundra temperature of Timmy’s home continent 

during the cruelest month as well as the wattle density of an 

umbrella bird, such bird symbolizing sexual potency to the 

anaphrodisia-stricken seal. The Pouch Dog was pleased by the non 

sequiturs her questionee offered, not knowing, of course, that what 

the Tubercular Seal’s autistic mind thought something was did not 

63


correspond to anything that anyone else ever thought or 

apprehended about the thing, so from his point of view he was not 

providing non sequiturs to her arousing questions, but rather making 

incisive replies which he hoped to remember and turn into a book. 

And yet, surprisingly, while formulating these ideal replies, 

ideal for both the Pouch Dog’s arousal and his own penchant for 

accuracy (though for separate but equal reasons), he dreamed of 

lotus-eating, dreamed of unpredictable sex with homosexual 

elephants, dreamed of lacing his tongue with tar, so that when he 

licked envelope flaps they would fasten securely and not burst 

asunder from the perturbations of their contents: in one important 

case, a clan of specially bred gerbils, on whose shaved backs was 

written correspondence to Timmy the Tubercular Seal’s faithless 

mother, whose contacts with divinity turned out to be of the tensile 

strength of Silly String and which, having snapped, cast her into 

grave, but up to that instant, graveless despair. The writings upon the 

blind, hairless gerbils were to the effect of, and actually consisted in 

words the same: “Cheer up, for you have at least not ruined my life, 

but to put it positively, have improved it, though sometimes when I 

express my feelings they are as follows: I hope you consume the 

sweet distillation that accretes in the corner of a lemming’s eye when 

an infection is brewing there, and that the pungent precipitate tastes 

good and becomes a need that rivals your love for sniffing your own 

spoor and your wish to breed with a badger. Or feelings such as: I am 

a manatee masseur and a carbuncle’s carbuncle, a bidet-breathing, 

bolus-blowing, blasphemous blatherskite, who is furthermore 

inwardly commanded and extracurricularly doomed to call onto the 

terrestrial carpet the God-the-father who has forsaken Me-Mother- 

Dear -- Ah, I weep! It is these feelings that are incompatible with the 

good job you’ve done unto me, Good Mother!” 

These gerbils were signed: “Your masturbating sadist of a 

son, Timmy the Tubercular Seal.” 

But while Timmy dreamed in such ways, the Pouch Dog 

descanted words which were both lacerating to all self-esteem for 

miles and also usable to build homes, they were so sturdily 

constructed. She asserted that Timmy the Tubercular Seal’s nose 

should be ground up and used for perfume, that his ears, though 

64


small and otherwise unobtrusive, should be removed, reinforced 

with clay, shellacked, baked and used to hold, each, a single rich 

chocolate -- for she could see no benefit in these features of the 

wayward seal being used otherwise. The main argument on this 

score was the utterly shiftless life Timmy had led up to that moment, 

constantly shuffling on towards this or that body of water, sending 

whiny correspondence to his mother that was continually bursting 

its envelope, scattering scabrous, rabies-ridden rodentia, scurrying 

hairlessly to die squealing deaths covered with ink. One subordinate 

argument being the permanently ridiculous look on the Tubercular 

Seal’s face, not improved at all by his habit of twitching his whiskers 

and nodding at any one who intimidated him in an act of selfabasement 

the Pouch Dog described as beneath the dignity of a 

jackal. Another subordinate argument being his outstanding debts to 

a certain sardine merchant, which he made no effort to repay and 

which sent him on his peripatetic way, a fugitive from justice, a 

sniffer of trash cans, a free-loading debaucher (when a situation 

could be found), and an often aggressive panhandler who demanded 

outrageous donations for the privilege of hearing him tap his pepless 

marching tunes on a xylophone missing several of the keys 

necessary to properly play the songs ostensibly performed. For her 

concluding remarks she said upon the slightly shimmying, tongueadhering, 

dreaming seal: 

“I have surrounded so-called sexual deviance with the 

seventy ways of congress and reproduction of which fifty-eight do 

not involve fire, sub-which thirty-four involve painting the portraits 

of incredibly thin men who try to conceal their naked bodies among 

forests of birch trees which, through a congenital love for gravity, 

grow mainly horizontal and not vertical, other sub-which twelve 

involve the precise arrangement of silverware on a dusty plain 

constantly run over with a fine-toothed comb by a herd-of twicehumped 

camels, who have to be helped to their feet each morning 

and fitted with their fine-toothed comb because their nightly 

ingestion of a grog distilled from the toe-nail clippings of wandering 

banshee squadrons so neutralizes their neurons and snaps their 

synapses and crackles their pops (yeomanny testicles with a density 

known as lead to the tenth degree) that, if left to themselves, they 

65


would damage turf and sing for the end of wheat rather than perform 

their function; these camels continually disturbing the silverware 

with their comb so that the sex act is prolonged until the silverware 

can be returned to its proper precise arrangement, thereby distending 

the awful beauty of engorgement asymptotally in the direction of 

infinity; other sub-which seven involve being locked in small areas, 

other sub-which four involve excessive ingestion of popcorn, other 

sub-which and-summatory-to-fifty-eight one involves the 

concentrated gazing at, and questioning of, and descanting upon a 

certain tubercular seal named Timmy.” 

Part 3: The Pouch Dog Comes: Timmy’s Function 

Performed, He Is Granted Fictional Death 

At this moment the Pouch Dog exploded in an orgasm best 

described as wet. To illustrate the point, the flow from her manifold 

orifices related to this one among her many modes of congress and 

reproduction swept away the gasping Tubercular Seal from his seat 

on the panting tongues and carried him and his happily plinking 

xylophone to swollen riverway, where he found the water to his 

immense liking, where satisfaction bloomed on his surface like the 

crocus, and where he felt he had performed some function well: 

being the masturbatory and reproductive aid to a certain Pouch Dog, 

who was now going to repopulate the planet with creepy crawlers 

who would perform still more functions. Though he had some 

feelings that his mother would not like very much at all, there was 

great satisfaction rolling and rolling Timmy the Tubercular Seal’s 

way as he rolled and flopped, a-laying down farts, his way out to sea, 

because, my good friends, instrumentality uber alles! 

66

No Stranger 

Donald Berry 


Death was at the door that evening. Winter had fallen upon 

the mountains and Death caught a free ride on its frigid winds. Inside 

the pine cabin the old man sat by the fire place watching the flames 

eat away the wood as Death raised his knuckles and knocked on the 

door. The old man did not want to hear the knock so he didn’t. Death 

knocked again but the flames continued to burn and the old man 

continued to watch. Death passed through the door, leaned his scythe 

against the wall and hung his cloak neatly on the coat rack. The old 

man turned to Death. “I don’t remember inviting you in, and you can 

shut the door behind you on your way out,” the old man said dryly 

to the bare, seven-foot skeleton. 

“And good evening to you,” Death said, seating himself in 

the large, red-felt lounge chair opposite the old man’s rocker. 

“Sure, have a seat.” 

“Thank you.” 

The old man looked Death in the eye sockets, “I’m not 

coming with you, you’re too late.” 

“No such thing as too late when it comes to me.” 

The old man turned back to the fire without reply. He pulled 

his army blanket tighter around his shoulders and leaned closer to 

the fire. Death made him cold. Death’s voice sent a sensation across 

his body that was like being naked next to a winter windowpane. The 

old man breathed heavily, expanding and contracting his nostrils. 

“Why tonight? After all those times, why now?” 

“That’s like asking the sun why it rises. You’ll never 

understand me, see me as an escort if you must, an escort to a world 

with out the perception of time, the perception of the body.” 

“The body? Whad’do you know about the body? You don’t 

even have a face!” 

“Yes, but I have a great smile.” 

The old man’s vision skipped nervously from brick to brick 

on the hearth in front of the fire as sparks jumped out, glowed 

orange, danced on the brick and disappeared into black, smoking 

specks. There was silence. The old man’s breathing increased so that 

67


his blanket rose as his chest expanded; he felt trapped and blurted, 

“I’m a... I won’t... I refuse to die, it’s my life!” 

“Who ever said anything about your life?” Death said lifting 

an arrogant finger bone. “Look, I’m not here to engage in a banal 

argument. My job is.” 

“You think I don’t know what your damn job is?” The old 

man grabbed the arms of the rocker and hoisted himself up. “You’re 

no stranger to me! I’ve seen you before, don’t play games. I’ve seen 

you in the eyes of the young men you took from me. I felt you’re 

bony hand when you grabbed the breath from their lungs. You spent 

many nights hiding in the shadows of our bunkers. And I’ve smelled 

you. I’ve smelled your work. I’ve smelled your death. I thought I 

knew you then, when I’d finally become accustomed to your stench, 

but I never really knew you, not until I slept with you, until I held 

your coldness in the morning. Then I knew you and you were like 

my shadow and I asked you to let me come with you, I wanted to be 

with you but you wouldn’t reply. They took you from my bed, but 

you had already gone.” The old man paused, then walked away 

toward the far end of the room, opened the cherry-wood cabinet 

there and pulled out a dusty bottle of Chivas Regal. The label had 

turned yellow with age and the cap was brittle enough to be opened 

with no effort. The liquor was warm and a vaporish heat burned his 

throat when he drank it. 

“Don’t know what I’ve been saving this for,” the old man 

reflected. He put the bottle to his lips again and drank until the heat 

in his throat rushed through his whole body and the liquor ran down 

his neck. He turned to Death. “I’ve been on the wagon for two years, 

but what the hell, I’m dead.” The old man walked towards Death and 

stopped at the glossed mantle piece above the fire. He drank from the 

bottle again and savored the firey feel on his lips. “I used to drink 

this crap like I had a whiskey geyser in my goddamn yard. It put me 

in the hospital enough times. Why didn’t you take me then? I 

wouldn’t have given you any trouble.” 

“I cannot answer your question, but in all fairness I will tell 

you this: you want something you can count on, you can never count 

on death. My coming is not something you plan nor is it something 

you request. All you can do is live with the knowledge that- 

68


eventually I will come. It is not as though you didn’t know about me. 

You claim you saw me in the war and that you could smell and feel 

me. And the night I came for your wife and slept with you, you say 

it was then that you knew me like your shadow. But you knew me 

long before this. You have known me since your first Autumn, since 

the first time you saw me draw the color from the leaves and wilt the 

flowers in your mother’s garden, since the first time I killed your 

crops with a midnight frost. You saw me in the patterns of life itself. 

But now you are angry at me because I didn’t take you when you 

wanted to die. Come now, you are sixty-seven years old and you face 

me like a child, except children do not fight and come with little 

fear.” 

The old man’s jaw tightened so he drank from the bottle 

again. “Can I help it if you have terrible timing?” The old man’s 

throat was constricted with anger and blue veins were beginning to 

bulge in his wrinkled neck. “I thought life followed a logical pattern. 

I thought people left when the time was right. How can this be the 

right time if I’m just now finding some sort of peace after all these 

years? I haven’t felt this way since... since she was alive.” The old 

man could not look at Death. His dark eye sockets and permanent 

grin offered no comfort. The old man lifted a tarnished picture frame 

off of the mantle piece above the fireplace. Inside was a photo of his 

wife, sitting on a park bench on the coast of San Francisco, with the 

sun shining on her dark curls. The old man had taken it the day after 

he arrived home from the war. “Did she come quietly? Was there any 

pain?” The old man’s voice was almost a whisper. 

“It was the fever that brought me. I was a relief, I believe.” 

Death said, while looking out the window, sensing the elk and other 

animals that were trying to hide from winter. “She did not fight me 

and she closed her eyes when I took her breath.” 

The old man drank from the bottle again. He looked at the 

fire and saw the night-black wood shimmering with smoke. “There 

is a girl, a girl from the town below the mountains,” the old man’s 

voice was slow as he set the picture frame back on the mantle piece. 

“Her name is Shelley. She comes up here most of the days she’s free 

and we play chess together and drink coffee or we take walks in the 

woods. I tell her stories about my life and what I have seen and she 

69


takes them down in this little notebook of her’s. She’s great, she just 

lets me talk on and on and she stays interested, like I was pulling 

tricks out of a hat. It’s just wonderful, I guess. It’s like living the best 

parts of my life over again. And she’s beautiful. She’s got these big 

blue eyes the size of silver dollars and long, curly, hair that shines. 

I’m young again when I’m with her. I’m alive. She is the only visitor 

I ever get and it’s because of her that I don’t want to die anymore.” 

The old man turned to Death. “I will not come with you.” Death was 

quiet. The old man was gripping the neck of the bottle so tightly that 

the joints in his fingers ached. Death was still looking out the 

window. 

Death reached into the small, wooden cigar box on the coffee 

table next to the chair where he was seated. His finger bones made a 

drawn out rattle as they slid under the lid and grasped a thick cigar. 

Death clenched the cigar between his teeth and lit it by touching the 

end with his index-finger bone. The smoke rose up into his skull and 

permeated through his eye-sockets and the ear-holes. Death opened 

his teeth a little and blew three perfect rings. “Life is a lot like these 

rings,” Death inhaled and blew three more. “They hang in their form 

for a second and then ‘out, out brief candle’ and they disappear. Life 

is nothing to hold on to. It can’t offer you the pleasure that death can. 

There is no peace in life, after a war you should know that. Man kills 

man to preserve his life but then man must continue to kill each day, 

every day. There is no rest from it. It is the vicious cycle of death that 

makes life what it is. I don’t offer you anything to be afraid of, I 

understand you, I know what you’ve been through. I am offering you 

exactly what you have always wanted, always needed. I can give you 

eternal peace. It’s what you deserve. Here, take my hand.” Death 

stretched it out to the old man like the frame of a dead maple leaf. 

“Don’t be afraid, just hold it.” A thin cloud of cigar smoke 

encompassed Death’s skull. The old man felt a tiredness run through 

his body; it was the kind that men feel in their bones. He placed the 

Chivas Regal on the mantle next to the photo of his wife, walked to 

Death, knelt, and took his hand. 

“I... I just think that maybe, maybe now I can find something 

that will make my years worth all the pain. Maybe I can find an 

answer to who I am or maybe just, just be happy.” The old man 

70


looked at the floor. “I have wanted to die so many times before. I 

wanted to leave this life because I felt below life, below death.” 

“Think back to the pain old man,” the cigar tip glowed 

through the thickening smoke. “Death was what you wanted then. 

death was the only answer, remember? Death was the only thing that 

made sense.” The old man did remember. He remembered each face 

that had died in his hands; he remembered every face. The thought 

was always the same when he could feel no pulse - lucky. Lucky 

because those faces never again had to witness the horrors that only 

exist in war, nor would they ever have to live with the memories of 

those horrors, the horrors they committed. 

“I remember,” the old man’s voice was a whisper of a 

whisper. “I am ready. You are right, I want to die.” 

There was a knock at the door. “Helllooo, are you home? It’s 

me, Shelley.” Shelley’s voice was playful and full of life. “Are you 

sleeping in there?” Death looked to the door and then to the old man 

and then back to the door. His permanent grin seemed to grow. “So 

now you want to die?” Death released the old man’s hand and put the 

cigar out in the ashtray next to the cigar box. He stood and walked 

to the coat rack where he picked up his cloak. “Do you really want 

to die old man?” Death asked mockingly, pulling his hood over his 

skull. 

“Yes, I... where are you going? Wait I... “the old man’s hand 

was still poised in the air where Death had left it. “I want to die, I 

want to die!” 

“No, you will have to wait your turn.” 

“But you said... “The old man protested from his knees. 

“I said nothing.” 

Shelley could be heard unlocking the door with her set of 

keys as the old man closed his eyes and clenched his fists in 

frustration. 

“If you’re not taking me then why’d you co--,” it hit him like 

a diamond bullet in the forehead. Shelley thrust open the door. 

“SHELLEY RUN! The old man’s heart beat in his ears as he 

dropped to all fours. “RUN Shelley. Get away from here!” He 

yelled, snapping his head up like a wolf howling at the moon. 

71


Shelley stood frozen in the doorway with the frigid wind 

blowing her hair. She tried to form words with her lips but she could 

say nothing. “Don’t you see him?” The old man pleaded while 

scrambling up from the floor. The old man turned and pointed to 

Death who stood behind him silently caressing the curved length of 

his blade. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong... if you’d just calm.”, Shelley’s 

voice was shaking and tears were beginning to form in the corners 

of her eyes. “Please stop, you-you’re scaring me.” Shelley took a 

step into the cabin but before her foot could touch the floor the old 

man whipped back around to her and she cringed away from him. 

Inside the old man’s mind there was only the white blankness of 

confusion that ran through his entity and tensed every muscle. All 

that was clear was the need to get Shelley out. “Stay right there, 

don’t come in,” the old man commanded. He backed up, opened the 

cigar box and thrust his hand into the neatly stacked cigars. His hand 

emerged from the falling brown cylinders grasping a silver, twoshot, 

Derringer pistol. The old man pointed it directly at Shelley’s 

forehead while he said in a taught voice, “Shelley, I want you to turn 

around and walk out of that door. I want you to take your keys and I 

want you to start your jeep. Then I want you to drive home and 

pretend this never happened.” 

Shelley began to walk backwards. “Please... I’m sorry... I, I. 

I don’t understand this!” Shelley rushed blindly towards the old man 

with her arms stretched wide, she wanted to hug him, she wanted to 

make this all go away, the fear the confusion the warning shot from 

the pistol stopped her completely. 

“Leave!” the old man ordered as she ran out of the cabin and 

into the cold darkness of the night. “You will never touch her Death, 

not while I’m alive,” the white blankness returned as the old man 

turned and saw that Death had disappeared. The old man was alone 

again in the cabin. The fire was crackling and he heard the thudding 

hooves of elk in the forest, an image of his wife came to his mind. 

The sound of Shelley’s jeep starting up broke his trance and he 

stumbled outside. 

Shelley did not pull out, she began to roll down her window 

and the old man fired the second shot that ricocheted off the fender. 

72


She jammed the jeep into gear, popped the clutch and shot forward 

into the darkness. She fumbled for the headlight switch, finding it, 

the night was illuminated with a twist of the wrist as the gravel road 

came into focus with the tree line and stark shadows and the elk 

frozen in the middle of the road with its full-size rack spread like the 

wings of a great, black crow. The jeep plowed into the buck’s flank 

with a deep thud. The jeep came to a dead stop as Shelley’s head was 

driven into the steering wheel. 

The old man stood outside the door. He could make no more 

sound than the wind. He ran to the jeep, the buck laying before it, 

antlers snapped in several places and a steaming split in its side. 

Blood ran from the split, melting the snow. The old man pulled 

Shelley’s limp body from the jeep and laid her on the ground holding 

her head in his hands. Her forehead was swelling into an unnatural 

form and her nose was pushed over to the right. The blood that ran 

from in between her golden hairs and out of her nose was black 

under the moonlight. Shelley made a gurgling sound as her chest 

heaved up and down with no rhythm. She was choking on her own 

blood. The old man squeezed his face against her chest trying, in a 

way, to press his life into her body. All he felt was her blood cooling 

on his cheek. 

Shelley opened her eyes to see who was holding her. She did 

not see the old man, she saw Death. Death pulled back his hood 

revealing his smooth, white skull in the moonlight. Shelley stared 

into the depths of his eye sockets as Death put his long finger bones 

inside Shelley’s mouth. He put his wrist in and then pushed down so 

that his elbow joint was at her lips. Shelley could feel Death’s arm 

go down her esophagus and it was like swallowing ice. Death 

touched her lungs and took the breath from them. Shelley saw his 

grin and then saw nothing. 

Her gurgling stopped. The old man checked for a pulse, 

none. The voice pent up inside the old man’s chest was released, 

“Deeeeattthh! Take me too! I want to die! I told you, I want to DIE! 

Take Me.” The old man fell to his back. “Where have you gone 

Death? Don’t leave me, take me with you.” The only answer was his 

voice echoing between the mountains. 

73


Submission 

Matt Osing 

Dear you: 

If you only knew the editor, 

you’d know what became of the poems you sent. 

You’d be aghast. He was glad you use those 

peel off address stickers. He had to pull it 

off slowly, like a bandaid from a wound that 

should have air to heal. 

He took your postage, your envelope too! 

for a bleeding mothers-day card. He was glad 

to send it on time for once. 

But buck up, he made sure he didn’t see 

your name. And if it’s any consolation, one 

of his teachers told him once that the 

greatest poet has but one name, that being 

Anonymous. 

Sincerely, 

75


Mogan David Wine (serve very cold) 

Matt Osing 

In order to go to the seminary, and get away from his family 

at the age of fifteen 

my dad picked peas for tuition money 

he sold pints of his own blood, he told me 

so that he could buy his books 

and become a pastor 

And when I was fourteen or so 

he confirmed me for holy communion 

So I got my first taste of that cup 

that chalice 

that kneeling 

that answer 

all that wanting 

lining up 

and going around the chancel rail 

With a wafer of host stuck to the roof of my mouth 

I tried to look deeply into that cup 

but all I saw was the reflection of my own nose 

in the color of the Mogan David wine 

that I knew Trinity Lutheran used 

You got just enough wine to warm your mouth 

like getting your lip busted 

during touch football 

the taste 

there was a way you felt good about it 

It made you a better player 

76


Celine’s Mother’s Day 

Matt Osing 

Someone’s mom... pissed herself... an island in the hall... 

two wheels, and two feet... dead center... a puddle of pee... 

again. So now I gotta get a mop... the wax on the linoleum... 

stripped...again...the janitor groans... the sight of the dull spot... 

my name... the duty roster... again...it’s his morning... not this 

nursing home... anyone else’s Mom... for that matter...again... 

what I’m thinking about.... 

77

Sunday Barbecue 

James Nulick 


At the age of 3 (19 years ago), 

I watched my father catch fire 

as he was priming the carb on his 

‘57 Chevy pick-up truck. My Uncle Lloyd 

was cranking the engine over while daddy 

primed it with a 4oz. brake fluid can full 

of gasoline. The carb backfired, my dad jumped, 

and fuel spattered his chest, arms, neck and upper 

torso. He was aflame within seconds. Pops threw the 

can down and fell on the lawn, trying to extinguish 

he flames with the wet milky crunch of green grass. 

Didn’t work. Dick Van Dyke is 

a liar. Pops ran around the yard, 

screaming insanely, air smothering him out, a lit flare 

burning inside his lungs. 

Oxygen was his only enemy, he couldn’t breathe it in or 

expel it out. His throat was seizing up fast. 

Oxygen also fed off of him, eating him up like fresh Styrofoam 

as his eyes happened upon the hidden greenness of 

the garden hose. About this time, Ma came out of the 

house, the Sunday tv now having to go unwatched, 

performing for the sake of saving face. Ma screeched and whipped 

me up into her arms, I remember the scent in the air, 

white bread burning at mach 3, eyebrows singed by the 

campfire. Dad was attempting to force 

the spigot free now, but he had 

tightened it just this morning to keep me from turning it on to play 

in the water, summer sun beckoning brown sugar skin. Too bad! 

Now it was useless, for daddy’s fingers were sizzling away 

like frying bacon. I heard him shout 

(nothing more than a whisper), “I want to die!” Then he 

lay down on the grass to die, underneath the cool shade 

of our carob tree. Uncle Lloyd slipped out of the truck (not more 

78


than 30 seconds had passed since he had bumped the ignition), 

his old gray chino pants slick against the black-diamond interior. 

“Sue! Grab that blanket!” So Ma dropped me back down to 

Mother Earth and helped Uncle Lloyd sweep up the blanket lying 

underneath the truck (both of them not realizing that gasoline had 

spilled on it, as well), rushing over to Pops and attempting to 

smother the fire out. This was a mistake, as the concentrations 

of fuel hidden deep within the fabric now burst forth with an 

orange glowing fury. Pops was whining as Evelyn, our next-door 

neighbor, leaned out her door (telephone in hand) screaming, “I 

called the paramedics!” as 911 was not in use back then. 

Ma, Pops, and Uncle Lloyd were all huddled together now, as if 

playing touch football, and I could only contribute weak sobs to 

their harsh little game. 

The happy red of the fire trucks gleamed merrily 

as they flashed around the corner, men jumping onto the 

asphalt while the engine was still in motion, bringing foam, 

smiles, and comfort. The sidewalk in front of our house 

was now a Sunday matinee as all of our friends and neighbors 

came to enjoy the free entertainment, 

their mouths agape, eyes glittering. 

In 20 minutes the scene would be over, then they would 

shuffle disappointedly back to their homes, returning 

to their television sets and dinner tables, their nostrils still filled 

with the remote, pungent smell of burning flesh 

as mothers checked on 

their pot roasts and tuna casseroles. 

But they have forgotten all about me, for the moment, a silent 

witness screaming in my own agony, wanting all of the attention for 

myself. Piaget was wrong, I am not being egocentric. I look down 

into the pinkness of my fingernails, but they 

tell me nothing. The firemen are loading up 

now, taking Pops away, and the only ones left with a 

clear mind are myself and the windshield in my father’s ‘57 

Chevy pick-up truck, the sun glinting joyfully off of our 

wet, delicate corneas. 

79


Houseshoes 

James Nulick 

these houseshoes I’m wearing are thick warm boat hulls 

deeply embedded with wool. I pull them on 

and trot around the kitchen 

during the early morning hours, my brothers 

still tight in their beds with sleep, both on 

top bunkbed, I having the bottom bunk for myself-- 

parental logic: cause I’m the younger one 

Kitchen smells of vanilla bean extract and 

piping hot cornbread, looking rather sacrificial 

in its black skillet. Shovel a mouthful into my 

hands and it is warm, the Argo cornstarch woman 

melting in my mouth, hot butter tickling black cavities. 

I hurry back to my bedroom, only Dad catches me 

in the hall, fresh from his morning ritual, 

newspaper in hand as the pungent aroma of warm shit 

wafts in from the bathroom, makes the chewing process 

take a little longer, harder to swallow-- 

yellow flecks of cornmeal hiding between pink gums and 

loose baby teeth, I slipsliding on the carpet, 

trying to keep my balance 

What are you doing wearing my houseshoes? 

they’re too big for you... take em off and go 

back to bed. 

So I hand him his fatherly trophies and 

slip into my bedroom, my brothers fast 

asleep on top bunk, intertwined legs and entangled 

arms, struggling for warmth beneath Wile E. Coyote sheets. 

I double up and fold into bottom bunk, turning over and over, 

wrapping myself in a cocoon of warm, piss-stained blankets 

Mom and Dad are arguing in the kitchen now but I 

80


can barely hear them over the roar of our ancient heater, 

its engine sighing tiredly while I struggle with cold sheets 

and eternal longing for warm toes, my feet smothered 

underneath a thick moist caul of polyester. 

I’d jump into the top bunk with my brothers but they 

have already established the rule that a triumvirate 

is impossible, would only collapse the structure. 

For Michael and Andy 

81


Ten 

James Nulick 

My mother named me Jamie and I also had a cousin 

named Jamie who was the same age I was-- 

at Sunday meals one of our mothers would call out 

Our name and both of us would respond with hesitancy and 

confusion 

(no, not you honey, My Jamie) 

Both of us had rust colored hair and dark eyes and we would 

often wear each other’s clothes, even though we knew 

Our mothers would scold us for it-- 

Jamie and I had a three-sided wooden box with a hole cut in the top 

set up deep behind the lush green tapestry of trees and grapevines 

in my backyard, far away from the limited view my mother had 

outside her backyard window, and everyday after school we would 

eat cookies and milk my mother fed us and then we would journey 

into the backyard and undress each other in our secret fort made of 

quarter inch plywood and solid strong two by fours 

(we built it ourselves), 

kissing each other gently on the lips as we explored our bodies with 

meticulous fingers and the warm wet tips of sandpaper tongues-- 

Once I took him in my mouth and he tasted like warm peppered 

mashed potatoes, the kind Mama made 

(soft and buttery, they would glide right down your throat) 

We would hold each other tight in our bony arms, our honeycolored 

skin ripening with the inevitable summer sun, we would hold each 

other and pretend we were twins who had the same Mom and Dad 

and 

owned a matching set of hornet yellow motorcross bikes, racing 

them 

in the powdery fields behind my house 

I’d say to him Jamie, do you have to use the bathroom? 

82


or he would ask me that, and one of us would say 

Yes, let’s go, 

so we would pull our underwear on 

one leg at a time as we hopped and tumbled 

out the fort door, walking through the delicate tangle of underbrush 

to the three-sided box that stood in the johnson grass 

directly behind our fort 

Jamie would pull his underwear down to his scarred ankles and 

sit on the wooden box 

(the hole cut in the top was about the size of my clenched fist) 

I would get on my knees and watch closely as his sphincter 

opened and pumped, opened and pumped, a tightened-down 

softlipped muscle 

as he struggled to rid his body of all that shit, and I was amazed 

at how wide that small dark puckered mouth could stretch, 

moist 0-ring, a delicate starfish opening her arms to release 

a startled captive, unwanted prey-- 

He would shyly glance into my eyes and ask how does it look? 

I’d say like shit and we’d laugh 

One summer my house got flooded with a terrible onslaught of 

roaches and my mother called the pest control man-- 

He came in his white coveralls, strutting about the kitchen with 

his silver tank that looked like a fire extinguisher to me and 

sprayed his poison all around the house, inside and out-- 

When he left my mother examined the backyard, dragging me along 

with her, my small hand in hers, and I watched her carefully 

as she poked and prodded, evaluating his work, 

sniffing at the corners of the brickwork, 

checking under the eaves to make certain the wasp’s nests 

were vacant, small curled bodies lying motionless on the ground 

below the contaminated paper apartments, and when she inspected 

her grapevines and her favorite peach tree she accidentally 

discovered 

83


my three-sided wooden box 

Jamie, what is this? 

I don’t know, Mama 

johnson grass and cattails poked up through the hole and I 

shivered when I thought how much it would hurt if I were to 

sit on one of those-- 

I was hoping she would not kick at it or pick it up, fearful she 

would discover the contents inside 

I reckon he did a good job, let’s go inside and eat 

After supper I stuffed my flashlight into my cutoffs and 

stumbled into the backyard, searching for the box 

When I found it I poked the beam of light onto its floor and 

was horrified to see small white bloated maggots writhing 

in the shit my cousin and I had joyously made, their little bodies 

twitching against the hollow stems of dying grass that 

sprouted up through the hole, Our hole 

I picked the box up and held it against my bare milkwhite chest, 

moist pregnant commas wriggling against my naked skin, 

engorging themselves, tickling me-- 

I carried it in my arms until I reached the backyard fence, then I 

tossed it over into the alley, and when my mama called my name 

from the back door the tears came, they came hard and I cursed her 

as I slowly walked back to the house, I cursed her and the tears came 

when I realized I hated her. 

For my beloved Jamie X. Refraction 

84

Sideshow Fat Man 



Bang Bang Bang those little paper snap pops against the 

plywood panels at the side of the tent the watchers jump back barely 

misses their faces this highschool quarterback type crew cut letter 

jacket pretty boy face bundled full of muscles with his cheerleader 

girlfriend in tow a little entertainment after the big game here you go 

jocko Bang right in front of his face he nearly wets his pants the 

cheerleader shrieks I laugh and laugh and laugh jocko looks upset 

the attendant waves them on to the next exhibit here comes a farmer 

International Harvester hat John Birch Society pin his wife in her 

homemade dress poking her husband in the ribs teasing him about 

his pot-belly him pointing up at my bench saying hey now Martha 

bet I could eat two thousand of your cherry pies and still not have 

rolls like the ones on that guy four hundred and seventy one pounds 

twice the size of me now you just forget all those things you said 

about me needing exercise Bang right at the tip of the green brim of 

his cap billy joe turns red I laugh and laugh and laugh as his wrinkled 

country face curls up and the attendant waves them on I remember 

the taunts at the playground Fatty Balloon butt Dough boy 

Michellen man Lard ass throwing rocks at me pushing me around 

kicking me look at this it doesn’t even hurt the pig when we kick him 

in his fat belly he’s got lots of extra padding does it hurt you cow 

look at the fat pig look at him cry can’t help it I’m a Fat man might 

as well eat wake up in the morning to a steaming hot plate of ten 

fried eggs a crispy side of bacon forty eight pancakes a quart of 

maple syrup a gallon of milk a gallon of orange juice a mixing bowl 

filled with oatmeal a loaf of toast and two sticks of butter it’s my job 

screw the world anyway never been able to be anything but fat sit up 

here on my wooden throne staring down at the watchers so satisfied 

with their position with their pretty little bodies so up high in their 

own minds such good moral upstanding normal people but from up 

here I see them for what they are gnarling little animals pieces of shit 

and in come two beautiful college girls the type I dreamed about but 

could never see never talk to never touch because I was surrounded 

by the layer the thick layer of cellulite the giggles in the high school 

85


hallways the pointing shunning the occasional bit of pity that was 

almost worse than the cruelty and the two girls look sick and then 

blond says how would you like to have sex with That I bet it’s not 

even possible I bet he never has couldn’t reach it through all that 

blubber the brunette giggles can you imagine him taking a shit no 

way he couldn’t fit on the toilet he must have had a special one built 

for that massive bulk of ass and they walk out towards the doorway 

Bang right beneath her pert little cheery chin she bumps back into 

girlfriends tits Bang above their cute little puffy fluffy hairdos they 

duck Bang right over their pristine little asses they fall to the ground 

prostrate sobbing as they crawl their way out of my tent the attendant 

waves them on and I laugh and I laugh and I laugh. 

86

Mohawk Hangnail 



Kill the police kill the police break a bottle over somebody’s 

head electric twang distortion louder the band’s name is Hangnail 

the band’s name is Hangnail set fire to the equipment burn down the 

highschools blow up city hall that’s right into a parking lot crowbar 

shatter windshields Bowie knife slit tires and scream and drool and 

scream cut down the pedestrians blow shit up for the sake of 

Anarchy freedom to do freedom to say freedom to destroy Da Da 

Razor Hangnail speakers shake the walls hear the noise hear the 

noise slam dance jump on to the people bang drums until the skin 

breaks shit in front of a gourmet restaurant throw glass in a crowded 

room yell fire in a crowded theatre stomp on the writhing masses the 

band’s name is Hangnail the band’s name is Hangnail the hair is 

orange green purple Mohawk Da Da Razorstraight up transmit 

Anarchy tear it down get fucked up how ever you want get fucked 

up until you vomit vomit some more get used to the taste of bile on 

your tongue vomit into the crowd vomit on the starving children kick 

those boots till you hear something break do it again if you can’t 

understand the song can’t understand this music go die go throw 

yourself in front of a train give me money for screaming on stage 

give me money to break the old records on my nose ring swings a 

pendulum the pendulum is really razor come closer and you’ll find 

out find the right decibel distortion the one that shatters your ear 

drums yes I was disturbed as a child yes the music is madness about 

headaches that will never disappear migraines that bang around in 

your skull do you understand what I am saying will I have to rip off 

your fingernails to make you understand you don’t like my mohawk 

because it’s different I don’t like your face think I’ll smash it in I’ll 

steal what I need and rob what I don’t yes I do like the sound of 

alarms as the storefront window breaks dance up and down as I 

cackle you don’t like the chain that I’m wearing it’s there to whip 

against your head I like to watch you bleed love me on the stage love 

me on the stage spit into the audience kick towards their faces you 

people are useless I kill you with my eyes I kill you with my eyes the 

band’s name is Hangnail the band’s name is Hangnail do injury to 

87


small animals Razor Da Da Hangnail piss in the street bums hair too 

smoky to breath in the bar that’s the way I like it the sounds of the 

angry people the music is about hatred the music is about hatred 

about breaking the wings of a bird about breaking the cripple’s 

wheelchair the people are all kept in cages the cages are all made of 

steel and underneath the overpass drink cheap wine bang your head 

against the pylon are you to stupid to understand that the band’s 

name is Hangnail the band’s name is Hangnail you’ll learn to love 

the chaos you’ll learn to love your master smash the television set 

with a baseball bat shoot off his kneecaps if you like him eat the 

roadkill eat the roadkill catch the semen in your eye Hangnail 

Mohawk Da Da Elvis is dead Sinatra will be killed Elvis is dead the 

streets where I’ll steal your food send in the messenger cut out his 

eyes use your boots to crush in the Anarchy God is dead God is dead 

the United States of America is sucking a syphilitic cock burn down 

the strip malls shoot the president burn the post office burn the books 

and the band’s name is Hangnail the band’s name is Hangnail. 

88

Last Night 



Three months earlier at the home 

Which in spite of its ice cream parlor 

Checker boards and floral prints had 

The clinical aura of an ugly shit house 

Factory of death 

Uncle Dave teased him, to goad him 

Back into the use of his legs 

But he said that they had carried him 

For seventy-seven years that 

Now they were useless 

Uncle Dave prodded memories of boyhood 

Great Depression errands done for 

Stale loaves of bread, swept floors, 

Stolen beers and dances with young girls 

Clumsy but alive, the brothers laughed at 

Nearly forgotten tricks played on each other 

And the neighbor's cat 

That afternoon I fed him watermelon 

He couldn't take down the solids but the 

Juice was sweet as he swallowed 

He had finally made it back 

To his own bedroom where he was in reach 

Of all his books and gadgets and 

The woman down the hall 

Didn't scream all night 

Pain was slowly fading, 

Chapter coming to a close and although 

He was diapers he could still 

Reason and hold out his hand 

To firmly grasp mine he told me 

Not to make the same 

89


Mistakes he'd made and he made 

Me feel that I was his hope that 

Dreams are the essential part 

Never to forget 

I fed him vanilla ice cream - 

We couldn't help some of it 

Dribbling onto his collar 

We changed his shirt, he 

Couldn't do it himself, 

Shallow breathing itself a struggle 

His flesh rolled as if independent of 

Skeleton all had once been a solid 

Connected organ of life 

The vapors were slowly rising as the 

Colostomy sack splashed against his belly 

We put on his shirt, I smoothed it 

Against his back, gave him his pills and 

Kissed him Goodnight 

Next morning after the phonecall 

I smoked and drove over to the house 

The psychic container was empty 

He'd left while his corpse was asleep 

Though the pale cloud had taken him 

I felt no anger 

Uncle Dave stared down at the table 

He shook, seemed distant, apart 

Fifty years after bombing 

Divisions of Nazi tanks 

He was now the only survivor 

I felt no shame as I hugged 

My brother tight and shared 

His tears, our grandfather dead, 

90


Brought closer to the blue flame, 

Its long slow burning fade... 

For Paul Anton Rettberg 1913-1991 

91


Koan 

R.D. Drexler 

This morning 

As he does every morning 

Richard Nixon, clad in saffron, 

His wavy, brylcreme laced hair long gone, 

Walks the twisted paths of Kinkakuji, 

Lost in contemplation 

To the world and himself. 

His life now 

Is taken up by meditation, 

Exercise to strengthen both 

Body and spirit, 

And simple food. 

At this point Richard Nixon falls into the green pool in front of the 

Golden Pavilion. He floats face down for more than a minute in the 

light green algae laced water, like a large saffron turtle. The other 

monks look on with detached curiosity. Several tourists, however, 

are upset. A man, undoubtedly an American, rips off his coat and 

shoes in the chilly morning air and plunges into the pond. He 

executes a perfect racing dive slicing the green water like a bayonet. 

He swims to Richard Nixon, turns him over, wraps his arm around 

his chest and hauls him to shore. The tourists cheer. The monks look 

on. 

When asked about world affairs 

He demurs. He knows 

All antagonisms are ingested 

By time. He knows 

The shrieks from Cambodia 

Are just bones. 

He has achieved this distance 

92


With some difficulty, 

The long hours 

In the lotus position 

In the freezing, Zen temple, 

The cut from the master’s rod 

When he broke concentration, 

The longing for cottage cheese 

And catsup, 

And the bourbon of power. 

No one thought 

He could give up what he had struggled 

A lifetime to get. 

No one thought 

This least distanced of all men 

Could conquer himself, 

Could conquer the world of desire, 

Could see the void 

In the waters of power. 

The hero tries to find out how he fell in. The tourists are surprised 

he isn’t Japanese and thinks he looks vaguely familiar. The hero 

wants to give Richard Nixon his coat. He yells at the monks to get a 

towel or blanket or something., He wants to know where they can 

find a warm room. The monks don’t understand English and, 

therefore, don’t answer. Richard Nixon doesn’t seem at all 

concerned. He tells the hero he doesn’t know why he fell in but that 

it is not important. He thanks him for the offer of the coat but says 

he is not cold. Richard Nixon walks away leaving the hero upset and 

the tourists troubled by the fact they can’t place him. The monks 

don’t react. 

Richard Nixon resumes 

His walk on the twisted paths 

Of Kinkakuji. 

He is soon lost in contemplation 

To the world and himself. 

93


His mind is occupied 

With the koan 

Nansen kills the kitten. 

Did Nansen 

Realize that beauty can never be 

A matter of indifference? 

Did Joshu the disciple 

Realize that what Nansen thought 

Doesn’t matter 

94


Religion 

R.D. Drexler 

He is overseas Chinese. 

He speaks English, Mandarin, 

Bahasa Malay, Hokien. 

He tells me he is Christian 

And that he is born again 

And asks me: “And what are you?” 

“Have you been baptized?” he asks. 

“Was it total immersion?” 

He hates Western perversion 

Especially inversion. 

I try to give my version. 

He asks: “What do you believe?” 

He hates modern life, he says, 

Abortion, communism, 

Condoms, capitalism. 

He tells me his vision 

Of human abolition. 

He asks me: “What do you think?” 

I want to dismiss him, I’ve tried. 

He is crazy enough, at first. 

He won’t look at me. He answers 

All my questions with his questions, 

My answers with statements of fact. 

Nonetheless here in Singapore 

I find that I often agree. 

We better the world for the worse. 

As we make things fat for the flesh 

We find we care less for the flesh. 

Sometimes I long for destruction. 

95


My Christian heritage speaks up, 

Reminds me that all flesh is grass, 

That my flesh is ashes and dust, 

That rich men can’t pass the strait gate, 

The pure shall inherit the earth 

That creation shall end in flame. 

Then I’m repelled by the whole, sick mess. 

I’m repelled by the crucified Christ, 

By Margery Kempe howling dog-like 

For potent males she takes to be God, 

Repelled by the sex-damned stench of priests, 

By the leavings of protestant cant, 

And by this lust for Armageddon. 

Repelled by this student’s fox-like face 

And his taking the rumple of sex 

Pressing on it the clean folds of death, 

By his taking the mess of the world 

And imposing a microchip life 

Because he thinks the silence of God 

Awaits his particular advent. 

And I’m repelled that his eyes won’t meet mine, 

By the fact he prefers violence to sex, 

By the fact when he tells me he would kill 

The whole world to see his dream he smiles 

And by the fact that at heart he loves death. 

In the forests of the night 

What beast is born? what beast is born? 

What long awaited child of light 

Awaits the thorn? Awaits the thorn? 

In the depths of the human soul 

What beast is born? what beast is born. 

96


What child of light to make us whole 

Lusts for the them? Lusts for the thorn? 

In the midnight of my heart 

What beast is born? What beast is born? 

Will I stay or will I part 

For the fruit or for the thorn. 

97


Pyromaniac 

Jacki Thomas 

He was never mother’s 

anything. Might have been. 

Dropping rocks 

to spark along 

the railroad of too many Sundays 

and nobody telling him 

...what to do... 

That was his first secret. 

They told him about hell. 

He was all dread and guilt, 

then bitter with philosophy. 

...it would be an escape... 

That was his second secret. 

He wanted to see 

if the flames knew him yet. 

If the match would swell to roaring face 

consume his jersey, 

his young flat-creased nipples, 

the boat ribs of his chest, 

and willow spine. 

Would they tear down to hip 

blade and ball joint still squatted? 

His arrow shaft thigh bones 

falling like teepee poles? 

It hasn’t happened yet. 

He tries again, 

measuring safety in anonymity. 

The flames haven’t named him. 

It will be his last secret. 

98

At the Mobil Station 

Lois Marie Harrod 


The mechanic 

wears a ribbed T-shirt 

and hasn’t washed since Sunday. 

His beard is always beginning, 

and when he appears at the driver’s window 

he smells of tuna and gasoline. 

Where have you been, he asks, 

as if I have any control over my needs. 

I haven’t seen you for so long. 

His accent shifts from 

the smoothest Spanish, 

abruptly Pakistani. 

Such a nice day, cash or charge, 

you should take it off 

and come with me. 

I know it’s August and the water 

in Round Valley is as warm as it will ever be. 

I hear the pump nozzle clicking, 

but he’s too short to reach 

the center of the windshield, 

and I don’t let him check the oil-level stick. 

99

Happy Birthday!!! 

Lucinda Mason 


I wish 

Mother had kept 

her legs closed. 

100


Experience 

A.C. Brocki 

On hearing people say 

that in their teens and twenties 

they thought they would live forever, 

I never quite knew what they meant 

until Bette Davis died, 

Tucson gave up its desert 

to green lawns and condos, 

Europe lost its magic, 

favorite restaurants closed, 

and after my second divorce, 

I realized they meant 

they thought they would 

want to live forever. 

101


James’ Dad 

S. Ann Clark 

He planted his finger. 

That’s what he said to me. 

When you’re only planting a small plot 

there are few seeds in the planter. 

He was using his finger to move the seeds around. 

When the blade came round he wasn’t quick enough. 

Down in the hole, his finger remained and the blade lopped it off. 

The machine doesn’t know the difference between flesh and seed. 

So his finger got planted, 

covered up neatly with soil, 

sprouting blood. 

Saved him from going to the war in Vietnam. 

He stayed home and learned to shoot deer and eat venison. 

Damn good shot too with his sawed-off trigger finger. 

102


Wash Day 

Kendy Wazac 

Watch me hang my laundry, 

old men. Peek 

through your peeling picket fence. 

T-shirts and towels mock 

the glint in your gray eyes. 

Turn back to desultory talk. 

Rock and rock in your rusty chairs. 

My last load, 

toothless old men. 

What you wait for 

in the late afternoon sun. 

42C bras, black lace bikinis. 

103

Sonnet for a Son 

Kendy Wazac 


It’s all my fault the milk is gone, and when 

you pour the cereal box, no granola 

fills your bowl. You could have English muffins? 

scrambled eggs? toast and jam? You’d rather not. 

Of course it’s all my fault your socks aren’t clean, 

your shoes are lost, the comic books you keep 

on the counter are gone, your favorite jeans 

are buried at the bottom of a heap 

of dirty clothes. It’s all my fault you have 

to straighten up your room, clean the hamster 

cage, wash the supper dishes, do your math. 

You’ll prob’ly get an F, but I won’t care. 

I shouldn’t be surprised at your complaints; 

it’s all my fault you’re here in the first place. 

104


Choices 

Barb Martens 

There are no headstones here 

no marble or granite engravings 

no lilies, dates, names carved 

to tell us who they’ve been. 

But simple, flat bronze markers 

you cannot see unless you dare 

to walk on those who lie 

entombed beneath your feet. 

Lawn crypts they are called 

where lovers do not lie 

side by side, but rest, spent, 

one on top, the other underneath-- 

an embrace more intimate 

than thousands felt before. 

But who do those who lived alone 

lie with in the crypts? 

Do they rise for weight of union 

with a body thrust down, 

or stonily reject their 

new found companion 

105


Dr. Arbuckle 

Chris Funk 

The difference between me and licensed tattooists is that i’m an artist. 

the sample books were laden with 

dagger handles marked with swastikas 

Dixie Land Yosemite Sams 

sacred mushrooms 

and Japanese Kabuki 

Is this going to hurt me? 

the artist blows his nose and cares enough to 

change his jaundice rubber surgical gloves 

he even throws in the colored ink for no extra charge 

It all depends on how you interpret the pain 

if pain is an orgasm, then it’s good. 

he swabs the blood of this 19 year young pretending to be a 

cryptic gang leader of the Oakland Diablos or the North-West 

Invaders 

Light me a fucking cigarette Bill. 

Does it hurt Roy, as much as the one on yer leg? 

Just give me the fucking cigarette, asshole. 

Roy’s stomach tells lies as it winches like Jell-O in turbulence 

each drop of $1,000 per 4oz. bottle, F T A approved posited into his 

epidermis 

seeping to his cheeks, the red poison of Arbuckle infecting 

his numb virgin spinal cord 

Love is temporary, but a tatoo lasts forever 

they’re very addictive. 

106


Arbuckle belches, the grey faded dragon on his belly is set into 

motion 

sliding from his right sagging pierced nipple to the bottom of his 

waist where 

the head of the beast is left smoldering over the 

cracking leather sable gun holster which is 

hog tied around his gut with 

an American made degreased SoftTail drive chain 

You keep flinchin’ boy i’ll put another notch on this and 

i’ll mess up the tits on the tat fer free. 

shoving back the vertical handle of the 1920’s style dentist chair 

which 

contorts Roy into a position that only birthing mothers are permitted 

to experience, 

Arbuckle finds a more lucrative angle 

a perspective where he is eternally chiseled into Roy’s arm as 

side way razors slide. 

107


Korean Massage Parlor 

Chris Funk 

i played doctor with other cartoon big head little body people 

who lived outside my mother’s enforced play area boundaries 

doctor bill came from outside those lines to work in the office next 

to my home 

kara (a 4 year old Korean refugee adopted by the Perkins across the 

street) came from 

outside those lines as well to see doctor bill, and i appreciated that as 

i did not want to be the patient 

kara was a hypochondriac -- she was never ill and 

she came for weekly examinations despite her fear of the needle 

doctor bill knew what was best, kara didn’t 

the examination room -- a mattress covering an S T P stain over a 

cold cement foundation, 

a reminder that Dad’s Lincoln Town Car would be back at 5 and 

would remain in the examination room until 7 the next morning 

doctor bill’s office hours were from 7 to 5, but he actually 

worked for only 1/2 an hour each week 

i think bill leased the office from Dad 

and that was o k 

i worked for doctor bill, i was the nurse 

i held kara’s arms 

i was also the anesthesiologist 

the harder kara’s nails embedded themselves 

into the unexposed flesh of my arms, the harder i would slap the 

smooth underside of her sunken jaw 

i was doctor bill’s favorite nurse, he liked my technique 

he said his needle always poked cleaner holes when 

kara didn’t move, didn’t resist. 

108


drawing profiles of the presidents on 

your naked butt sunday morning 

Tracy Orand 

cathexis or no 

i am drawn to humps 

of lovepassion, less jerky 

than riding a camel 

on a gritty hot sand 

in your eye kind of day 

and i’d kill for an eye 

dropper full of you 

my index finger traces 

and hints at a brow 

bone furrowed, confused 

and you prematurely 

guess george bush 

because you think he 

is on my mind 

descent of a nose 

accidently i make nostrils 

too large but it was fun 

to erase my mistake 

the graceful skating 

of my index on globular 

mounds of ice 

and i try not to tickle 

for you have such 

a sensitive butt 

george washington you say 

hah hah i laugh 

wrong again 

109


wavy hair cascading 

beyond the cliff 

your thighs protest 

with goose pimples 

and i am tempted to play 

connect the dots 

with the boyish freckles 

but to confuse you now 

would be cruel 

abraham lincoln 

and i know you are lost 

and leading me on 

to be indulged with these exotic 

curly cues, i roll 

you over admiring 

your deposit of dark curly 

cues on my sheets 

and begin another 

sketch with my finger 

paints and i will call it: 

art consumed 

and who was that man 

you drew on my butt 

and i saddle up close 

cause i want to forget 

his name 

was ronald reagan 

and i descend 

110

That Mocking Bird Won’t Sing 


There is too much bare skin on my body at night 

When Neptune shines his cresent lamp through my window 

Illuminating large pools of tallow colored flesh 

That blind bed bugs and keep them underground 

I try to take refuge beneath a sheath of quilted bedclothes 

But the shroud suffocates me makes it too hard to breathe 

I am not a submarine I cannot submerge myself beneath a surface 

Stay there in solitude substain my vital signs and life support 

There is something more to me trapped there in reflection 

Beneath the waxy ripples of the water 

Something apparent something solid like 

Fields of broken clay pots speckled in green moss 

Shattered sharp edges that have kissed a brick wall and 

Now filter through my veins emerging from my fingertips 

To tease me with flaps of skin and tiny red dots 

That cannot be seen at night above or below the surface 

So I close my draperies watch my body turn away 

Pale green numbers on my alarm clock quickly fade 

And in the morning the mocking bird cries to me 

Where is my diamond ring


Untitled 


I’ve seen something behind my eyes 

Something more potent than those little squiggles you get 

From staring at the sun or watching 

Blood cells pump through the veins of your eyelids 

Your eyelids were beautiful before they were opened 

Sliced around the sockets to disappear 

I remember kissing them shut 

Now I often bring my knuckles to my lips 

Pressing them together ever so softly 

So the nerves can just barely feel the pressure 

Synapses aren‘t bridged so closely 

And the signal takes longer to get through 

Before you came back she had toadstools on her 

Forehead and drool on her chin 

The Bell company wasn’t as kind to me 

I could never get that signal through 

The lines were always down 

As though the wires had been purposefully cut 

I use wire cutters now to twist tight bands 

Around the necks of my saplings 

We never grew saplings together 

You left sliced off your eyelids and threw them at my feet 

They fell behind me and I never looked back 

I didn‘t see the blood spilt on the clay covered floor 

I swept them up with fragments of your left over offspring 

And piles of dust that made you all 

113


Walking with Brigitte after Taps in August 

Pete Lauf 

trees in the kettle moraines don’t sleep 

and neither do we 

as we walk past nocturnal oaks and cottonwoods 

wind swayed and staggered above slivered grasses 

lip skip gallop down and up a glacial gorge 

to pause prone on the gravel incline 

heads and arms uphill 

my mouth makes peculiar sounds 

though you seem to like it 

“You paint pretty pictures” 

Van Gogh painted landscapes of the grounds outside his insane 

asylum 

but your summer dress is floral cotton drapery 

magenta and yellow ribbons that climb your shoulders 

flowered vines along shadowed boulders 

thumb-nail petals adorning thin cloth 

which cascades over your breasts to rest below 

at mid calf exposing the soft sheen of your unshaven legs 

we roll to rise and embrace but I can’t help but tremble 

as my fingers explore the furrows of ribs along your back 

fossilized riverbeds 300 feet in the air 

at Devil’s lake where turkey vultures soar on warm upwellings 

I rub my cheek on yours and enjoy the poke of tiny pebbles 

your hardened nipples against my chest 

a hoot owl’s call caresses 

as wandering hands take in our rises and depressions 

wise voices from the base of our skulls 

whisper what animals would do 

114

Ass and Assonance 

Troy Headrick 


I’m the fool who sits 

at the swimming pool 

and watches. 

The people splash and thrash 

and the young infant-kids 

dash 

until the lifeguard blows his/her 

whistle and yells, “don’t run, 

slow down!” 

And the water is turquoise like an 

artificial sky inverted 

(brought down to earth) 

and condensed to become 

liquid. Why is it that 

people crave this water so? 

Enough even to go under it and swim 

full of held breaths, the 

stale wind? 

Because it cools the hot skin and 

is the escape--it being 

the nearest thing 

to a new world, one without 

borders or 

seams, one full of wet 

dreams. 

And the teenage boys stand off 

at the side 

and scheme how to jump in near her 

(the one with big ones) 

and cop a quick handful 

of squeeze. 

The way those boys stand 

one knows that there are 

115


hidden erections poking 

in all directions; that is why 

the air outside is so warm 

today because of this convected sexheat 

suddenly 

released. 

But isn’t that why we fools come to 

swimming pools 

in the hot afternoons? When 

it would be so much easier 

to sit under an air conditioner 

(man-made arctic--cheating nature’s 

melting desires) 

and just chill. 

116


Sixth Month 

Alexa Fenske 

the three mothers mine 

an unusual story 

worse now that I too 

shall be a mother 

the first mother 

tall and beautiful 

covered with Indian jewelry 

myself at twelve clumsy 

they cancel school 

people come from Europe 

to pay their last respects 

the second mother comes too 

in the midst of a nasty divorce 

but I don’t remember seeing her 

or if she said something nice 

and after they marry she says 

my first mother 

was a horrible person 

that my father was better off without 

while he cried in a doorway 

I shook on the floor in a pile 

believing I would leave there 

under restraint but now 

years after leaving home 

we get along and she 

agrees that I am too young 

at your age 

she says I had three babies 

a husband who beat me 

saggy breasts and various 

other afflictions 

so go ahead and do it 

someone else 

117


will want it more than all 

of us put together 

(which I find out later is untrue: 

the next day her son calls offering 

to sell my baby for me 

as if he’s doing me a favor 

but I know he just needs the money) 

and the third mother 

is really the first mother 

from whose womb I came 

but she was young too and 

so the story goes 

she tells me one day 

our first meeting in person 

my father was in the service but 

they all were then 

it was Vietnam and he 

was handsome she produces a photo 

she says he drank a lot 

still he wanted to marry her 

so he could beat her 

probably molest me when 

I was too young to speak 

he even raped her 

after you were born she says 

and then wrote to say 

he and his new wife would take you 

the next day she gave me away 

she tells it with tears 

but I am grateful and tell her 

I went to Europe twice 

private education for life 

and no one beat me 

so now we are friends 

one day in a drunken splurge 

she writes begging me 

please keep your baby 

118


don’t go through the pain 

you should understand I say 

of all the mothers you 

ought to understand 

119


For James 

Alexa Fenske 

a letter from New York tells us 

you are unemployed. tired of serving 

bagels to suits so you up and leave 

for research announce that you 

want to hang out street corners and alleys 

to see old men purchasing young boys 

with dimes and maybe you too 

can earn some keep. or when it is warmer 

to live with the homeless for research, more 

stories of the city of course your writing 

flourishes with the poor and I wonder how to 

get experience of my own. and then 

remember at seventeen being handcuffed 

sodomized on a sunny day before the movie 

in the living room his roommate laughs another 

one down while my friend gasps she was the one 

who wanted to meet older men now 

this. we feel we will be living here forever 

even though at night our mothers call 

we return home guilty and glad to still be 

someone’s child. 

only to find a week later he leaves 

not me though for a wife named Carrie who 

is older like him and probably likes it, 

you know, that word that my father would 

cry over if he knew someone did it to me, 

baby girls are so sweet and our fathers 

kiss us thinking no one would ever and then. 

six months later she tells her own father 

he has left with the car they just bought 

closed the account took all her money 

and left her alone to make payments on a house 

he wanted. “he fucked me up the ass,” she 

120


says and her father says yes 

but it’s only money and he 

will go to Hell (having long since 

forgotten me) while he really 

drives to Mississippi for babes and a 

decent blow job not believing in God. I thank 

myself that I wasn’t old enough to marry 

and that I didn’t 

like it but maybe if you stay long 

he will pick you up on a corner and you 

can meet him too. 

121


For Cody Until I Get it Right 

Alexa Fenske 

at first I found you unattractive 

so many freckles it was hard 

to tell the shade of your skin 

your hair I thought was too big 

too long and too curly and 

too long unbrushed I believed 

surely his hands must tangle 

snag and tear pieces at a time 

from your tender scalp 

so it was years before I liked you 

before I wanted to touch you 

and your voice still makes 

my flesh jump and crawl away 

when you beg for attention 

like a new puppy after all these years 

it was years before we spoke 

of our obsession with breasts 

yours smaller than mine ugly 

with freckles but still 

you let me touch them once 

and I liked you more 

but then the sun rose 

and he took you home to bed 

122


The Scaglione Strawberry Disaster 


(For Ernest Scaglione) 

Because they were 

like round blushed asses 

and made his taste buds thunder 

as if struck with nectar 

he began sleeping with them. 

He felt the way they 

parted beneath him 

erect nipples 

freeing the savage sweet odor 

of a Marrakesh fruit market 

as they crushed 

against his skin 

like many warm lips. 

Sometimes, 

he assembled several 

boxes of berries 

into a Seurat female form. 

Mounting her he screamed 

feeling the mounds slush 

like crushed passion flowers 

as he rolled himself 

hard and sticky 

into his bright berry woman. 

He thought I would laugh 

my silly high laugh 

face strawberry red 

nervous hands aflutter 

at my neck 

when he confessed. 

I didn’t laugh. 

I thought it glorious 

to lust so much 

climaxing with them 

123


those brilliant mashes 

of berries and cream 

red splotch sunsets 

on percale sheets. 

124

Advice To New Poets 



send a tight, clearly phrased cover letter 

with your coffee-stain-free manuscript 

of five poems or less 

poems should not be overly long 

be sure to enclose a return 

stamped envelope with each manuscript 

so as not to be branded 

a SASE criminal 

never submit poems about dead elk, 

the wind in your hair, right-to-life 

or the moon over the South Bronx 

each poem should be picked clean of fatty adjectives 

do not bore or annoy the editor 

by calling after 6 months 

to find out if your poems have been 

accepted or digested by the frumious muse-beastie 

never sleep with the editor 

this promotes poet burn-out, 

causes infections of the stream-of-consciousness 

and births wimpy images 

endeavor to make the editor happy by 

sending money, donating state-of-the-art equipment 

and giving yourself and everyone you know 

an annual subscription to the publication 

expect no payment for your hard work 

poet’s create for the love of creation itself 

if you want fame and fortune 

become a plastic surgeon 

125


Contributor’s Notes 

Scott Bradfield is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The 

History of Luminous Motion, hailed by the Village Voice as 

“an accomplished first novel about a brilliant and psychotic 

child trapped in dubious battle with reality.... Bradfield 

captures Phillip’s doomed battle against conformity with 

compassion and dark wit.” Mr. Bradfield was born in 

California in 1955. He taught for five years at the 

University of California, Irvine, where he received his 

doctorate in American literature, and presently teaches 

English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Closer to 

You was reprinted from his short story collection, The 

Dream of the Wolf. Mr. Bradfield is presently at work on his 

second novel. 

Robert Coover is the author of six novels, The Origin of the Brunists, 

The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, 

Prop., The Public Burning, Spanking the Maid, Gerald’s 

Party, and his latest, Pinocchio in Venice. He is also the 

author of numerous short fiction collections, including 

Pricksongs and Descants, In Bed One Night and Other 

Brief Encounters, A Night at the Movies; or You Must 

Remember This, and Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus 

of the Chicago Bears. The two fictions reprinted here, 

“Man Walking at 24 Frames Per Second” and “The Titles 

Sequence,” originally appeared in The Adventures of Lucky 

Pierre. This is what Michael Malone had to say about 

Gerald’s Party: “If Agatha Christie on hallucinogens 

dreamed a murder mystery comedy, and if Freud and the 

Marx Brothers brought it to the burlesque stage, with 

additional dialogue by Beckett, sets by Dali, casting by 

Berger and Pynchon, and program notes by Sartre, the 

result might be close to Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party.” 

Born in Charles City, Iowa, and educated at Indiana 

University and the University of Chicago, Mr. Coover has 

been the recipient of the Faulkner award, the Brandeis 

University Creative Arts award, a Rockefeller fellowship, 

126


a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy award, a 

National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Rea award 

for the Short Story. He has taught at Bard College, the 

University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton 

University, Virginia Military Institute, and Brandeis 

University. Since 1981, Mr. Coover has been the writer-inresidence 

at Brown University, where he currently teaches 

hypertext fictions in the English Department Intermedia 

Project. 

Nancy Sweet is currently in her senior year at Coe College. Nancy is 

graduating with a B.A. in English, with an emphasis on 

student teaching. She lives in Cedar Rapids with her fiveyear-old 

daughter, Danielle. 

Matt Osing is a non traditional student earning his B.A. in English at 

Coe College. When not studying Chaucer, Mr. Osing 

rehabilitates autistic children and uses any spare time he 

has to feed his singsong into his 30 lb. Olivetti. He resides 

in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 

William T. Vollmann is the author of three novels, You Bright and 

Risen Angels, The Ice Shirt, and Whores for Gloria, as well 

as a collection of short stories, The Rainbow Stories. Mr. 

Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959. He graduated 

summa cum laude from Cornell University, where he 

studied comparative literature. For several years Mr. 

Vollmann lived in San Francisco, where he closely studied 

the habits of persons in the sexual services trade. You 

Bright and Risen Angels, his first novel, was hailed by the 

New York Times Book Review as “the ingenious creation of 

a unique universe whose bizarre characters and events 

illuminate our own.” In 1988 he won a Whiting Foundation 

Writer’s Award, as well as the Shiva Naipaul Memorial 

Prize for The Rainbow Stories, the collection from which 

The Blue Wallet was taken. The Rainbow Stories will be 

available in paperback in July of 1992, published by 

Penguin Books. Also keep your eyes open for Fathers and 

Crows, (July 1992, Viking) a novel, and Thirteen Stories 

127


and Thirteen Epitaphs, to be published by Pantheon Books 

in January, 1993. Mr. Vollmann uses his spare time to study 

young female Hispanic prostitutes in Mexico City, drawing 

their luscious bodies from memory. These woodcut 

drawings will eventually be published in his forthcoming 

Butterfly Stories. Mr. Vollmann currently resides 

somewhere in California. 

Chris Offutt was born in 1958, and raised in the Appalachian 

Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. A collection of his award 

winning short stories, titled Kentucky Straight, will be 

published with Random House in September, 1992. His 

memoir, Open Winter, is forthcoming in the winter of 1993. 

He lives on the Iowa River with his wife and son. 

Andrew Mozina is a recent graduate of Boston University’s M.F.A. 

writing program. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. 

Donald Berry is a native of Evanston, Illinois. He is currently a 

sophomore at Coe College majoring in English. 

James Nulick was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1970. From age 12 to 

19 he worked alongside his father in his father’s wrecking 

yard. Mr. Nulick removed auto parts, assisted customers, 

operated a Holmes 440 tow truck, and cut up scrap iron 

with a Victor blow torch. Mr. Nulick’s hobbies include 

beekeeping and stock- car racing. He still resides in 

Phoenix and is hard at work on his second novel, American 

Chrome. 

Scott Rettberg is a native of Chicago, Illinois. He is graduating this 

year from Coe College with a B.A. in English and 

Philosophy. Scott claims his own life is filled with echoes 

of the meaningless void, what Heidegger would call the 

Being unto Itself, characterized by periodic episodes of 

blind suburban rage. He is working on a collection about 

growing up in Reagan America. 

R.D. Drexler is an English professor at Coe College. 

128


Jacki Thomas lives with her husband, David, and their three 

children, Sarah, Katherine, and Jordan, in Madison, 

Wisconsin. Jacki says the things she most enjoys in life are 

her children, her husband, and mud bogs. 

Lois Marie Harrod resides in Hopewell, New Jersey. 

Lucinda Mason is a concerned citizen from Denver, Colorado. This 

is her second appearance in the Coe Review. 

A.C. Brocki is a resident of Santa Monica, California. 

S. Ann Clark lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 

Kendy Wazac is currently a junior attending Coe College, majoring 

in English and Sociology. She lives in Cedar Rapids with 

her husband and five children. 

Barb Martens is a junior at Coe College majoring in English. 

Chris Funk is currently a sophomore attending Coe College. Mr. 

Funk informs us that he enjoys good friends and good 

music... sounds like a Michelob commercial, huh? 

Tracy Orand is currently an undergraduate studying psychology at 

Coe College. 

Mylinda Grinstead is a Senior at Coe College majoring in Art. She 

has been accepted into Dartmouth’s Graduate Ceramics 

program, and plans to begin her graduate studies next fall. 

Pete Lauf is an undergraduate attending Coe College and a devoted 

environmental activist. 

Troy Headrick comes to us from Lubbock, Texas. This is his second 

time around in the Coe Review. 

Alexa Fenske graduated from Coe College in January 1992 with a 

B.A. in English. She is moving to Colorado Springs, 

Colorado in May. 

Pamela Oberon Davis resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she 

cultivates wild strawberries in the springtime. 

129


A NOTE ON THE COVER 

PHOTOGRAPHY: 

Bob Campagna 

FRONT COVER 

Lorencita and Reycita are special friends of the Pueblo 

people of Taos. When I return to their northern New Mexico home I 

am often privileged to photograph them attired in their latest 

ceremonial shawl. In the distance is Taos Mountain, Pueblo 

centerpiece and protector of the sacred Blue Lake, source of the 

Pueblo’s water. Blue Lake was returned to the Pueblo people by the 

U.S. government in 1969, almost a century after it had been taken. 

Lorencita and Reycita are good, gentle people with a ready smile for 

me. 

BACK COVER 

My friend Angela guided me into the Velez Paiz hospital 

maternity ward where she works in Managua. She and the other staff 

are proud and spirit-filled. 

They nurture the beautiful Nicaraguan children born into this 

nation which for years was ravaged by a U.S.-backed Contra War, 

and still feels the effects of the U.S.-orchestrated economic 

embargo, a drought, runaway inflation, the 1988 hurricane which 

left 300,000 homeless, the 1972 earthquake which killed 15,000, 

and the late 1970s revolution which found the Sandinistas victorious 

in 1979 (a victory affirmed in 1984’s free election and undone by the 

U.S.financed UNO victory in the 1990 election). 

I have twice visited Nicaragua to see the face of the enemy. 

This baby, born in poverty’s throes, died the day I took this picture. 

My friends, this nation on which we made war is a nation of 

children. This warfare continues in various forms claiming innocent 

lives: the children. This must stop. 

130

Issue 22 - 1992

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