While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime

2013

Art & Literary Journal

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Arapahoe Community College

Volume XLIX

2013

Artist’s Statement: Fired Sun

“Writing and photography and other creative endeavors weave in and around my daily life. I bought a Nikon D-90 a few years ago and its abilities, added to the limitless beauty in Colorado, prompted a surge in my visual creativity. This photo was taken in Littleton, Colorado, using the Nikon and is of the sunset on the night when the Lower North Fork fire be an: March, 2012.” Stacia Duvall

pro-gen-i-tor pr ’*jen*e*ter

1. A person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent. 2. A person who originates an artistic, political, or intellectual movement.

Produced every spring, Progenitor has consistently ranked among the top college literary journals in the country, receiving numerous awards for design and content. Progenitor’s 2012 edition was a finalist for a Pacemaker Award, considered the country’s most prestigious award in college media. The Community College Humanities Association also awarded Progenitor 2012 second place for its Annual Literary Magazine Competition in the Southwestern division and the American Scholastic Press Association awarded Progenitor a first place award for its 2012 literary magazine contest.

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Founded in 1967 as Thoughtworks, Arapahoe Community College’s Art and Literary Journal Progenitor adopted its current name the following year. The name “progenitor” is from the school motto “Progenitores Sumas,” for “We are the ancestors,” and refers to our responsibility to the coming generations. Synonyms of progenitor include “originator,” “source,” and “root.” The Progenitor benefits from the creative endeavors of our school, community, and the greater world for the enjoyment of all.

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Poetry Take Cover

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Theory Of Flight, Circa 1709

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Molly Martin Kathleen Willard

1st Place 2012 Writer’s Studio Literary Contest, Poetry

Monopoly

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Almost

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Abigail Warren Rosanne Sterne

Entebbe Road

33

While You Weren’t in Mexico City

43

While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime

44

Harlem Heat

50

Inner City

67

Remembering People

83

The Truth About Camels And Ducks

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Abigail Warren David Johnston KG Newman

Sharon Owens KG Newman Robert King

Fiction Marylin Warner

1st place 2012 Fiction Studio Literary Contest, Fiction

The Cup

15

The Taste of Neutrality

34

War and Peace

68

J.R. Stewart Charles Edward Brooks

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Petra Perkins

Art Fire

Laurie Tompkins

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“Best Of Ceramics” Fine Art Juried Exhibition

Do You Need A Tissue Sir?

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Drying Out

22

Can Not Contain

24

Fired Sun

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New Year Hoar 2

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Colorado Autumn Blaze

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Crisp Yellow Tulip

55

New Year Hoar 3

56

Belize

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Andrew Wenner

Robert Schroeder

Amanda Richardson Stacia Duvall

Colleen Daisy Weeks Christine Adams Christine Adams

Colleen Daisy Weeks Joyce McClain

Non-Fiction Right View Colleen E. Gaul

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1st place 2012 Fiction Studio Literary Contest,Non-Fiction

Outside The Window

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Sacred and Profane Dances

45

Flying Lessons

59

My Left Breast

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Michael Eltrich Annie Dawid Petra Perkins

Cindy Charlton

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Staff & Acknowledgements Editor..................................................................................... Joshua P. Sullivan Assistant Editor/Promotions............................................. Holly Huner Art & Photography Editor................................................. Jason Colburne Poetry Editor........................................................................ Lydia Farrar Fiction Editor....................................................................... Kathryn Peterson Non-fiction Edito . ............................................................. Juanita Pope Creative Director.................................................................. Mollie Rue Studio ACC........................................................................... Brian Wright

................................................................................. Josh Olson



Advisors:

Kathryn Winograd, ACC Writing faculty John Hall, Multimedia & Graphic Design faculty.



Acknowledgements: The 2013 Progenitor staff would like to thank the

following individuals and departments who made this year’s issue possible: Trish Angelo, Jim Cannata, Howard Golden, Jeff Mock, David Barrentine and the ACC E-learning Lab, and ACC Marketing. Also, many thanks to those who submitted their Volume 49

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stories, poetry, and art to the 2013 Progenitor.

From The Editor:

We are very excited to bring you this year’s edition of the Progenitor Art & Literary Journal! While assembling this journal, the Progenitor staff, comprised of Arapahoe Community College students, discovered and embraced a theme of fire and re-growth. This theme explores a unique connotation of the word “progenitor,” and furthers the investigation started by last year’s theme of water. We feel that while some of the pieces that we have chosen embody the often-overlooked creative essence of fire, our contributors have also harnessed a much wider field of experience. They have transformed their individual perspectives of the world into the art, photography, and literary works in the following pages. I hope that you find these pieces as enlightening as I have. The spirit of re-growth and change persisted during the design process of the Progenitor. First, after careful deliberation, the staff opted to change the name from “magazine” to “journal,” to better reflect the literary aspect of its works. A revamp of the Progenitor Online website has created an elegant and enduring design. Lastly, this year’s Progenitor includes the winning pieces from both last year’s Writers Studio Literary Contest and the ACC Fine Art Juried Exhibition. I would like to extend my thanks to all of our submitters, to the Progenitor staff, and to you, the reader. Without each of you, this journal would not be the same.

Sincerely, Joshua P. Sullivan

http://www.arapahoe.edu/progenitor-online/home.html 

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Editor of Progenitor Art & Literary Journal

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Molly Martin Take Cover

She’s lighting a Marlboro Red and like a high-pressure front leaving a path of unstable atmosphere she’s bounding through, storms brewing at her feet, dark clouds, thunder from tough black boots, and she’s lighting a Marlboro Red and

her tongue is electrified bright blue energy escapes from her mouth, lightning bursting leaving all singed before she’s done, and

she’s lighting a Marlboro Red and

in the midst of her squall, serene ocean eyes sweep carefully chosen survivors into her calm, the heart of her hurricane, and

she’s lighting a Marlboro Red and for a moment, blonde wisps fall quietly over pale skin like soft breezes over a white sand beach, but only a moment, then rioting gales rage again; she’s gaining strength, gaining speed, barreling through, and

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she’s lighting a Marlboro Red and...

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Marylin Warner The Truth About Camels And Ducks 1st place 2012 Fiction Studio Literary Contest, Fiction



The final straw snapped when Zack broke the camel.



The porcelain and gold camel was the tallest animal of the porcelain crèche.

Great-Aunt Myra had multiple manger scenes on display more than a month before Christmas, but when the camel toppled from the edge of the glass shelf, the old woman gasped and choked as if her heart shattered on the marble floor.

Thanksgiving had barely begun, the turkey still self-basted in the oven, and

already the day was doomed.

The four teenage cousins had all been gathered at the table near the display,

making crude comments and jostling over bean dip. Each had stood within arm’s length of the crime, and each was equally careless and awkward. All were potential culprits, worthy of suspicion, yet it was Zack whom everyone automatically blamed.

Zack, dressed like the Grim Reaper while his cousins were poster teens

for private academies. Zack, with the tear-drop tattoo, pierced tongue and flowing black cape. Of course Zack was guilty.

“Out! All of you!” Uncle Leon ordered when he saw the damage. He

clutched a crystal goblet of scotch and water, but only a few drops of water, like at a christening for Alcoholics Unanimous. It sloshed on his vest as Leon ordered the cousins outside. “Be gone, and don’t return until we call for you…or you’re old enough to vote!”

No one overrode Leon’s order. The teen’s parents --Myra’s nieces and

nephews--bustled about, salvaging camel shards, fanning Aunt Myra and patting her forehead with cool cloths. Adam, Tiffany, Zack and Beth, the not-so-great Volume 49

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nieces and nephews of Myra The Childless, filed out of her elegant townhouse with properly convincing displays of remorse.

Warner



All the cousins knew they were destined for significant accomplishments,

including Zack, despite his attire, yet while Leon watched from the door they trudged away as solemnly as last place entries in a dog show. But the slamming door behind them freed the pedigrees of their leashes. They raced through the November mist chasing each other, pushing and tagging, whooping at their freedom. Even Zack joined in the camaraderie. In spite of himself he actually laughed, skipping in the damp grass, his arms waving and his cape blowing, a crow flapping among peacocks.

“Way to go, Zachary, getting us outta of there like that,” Tiffany said when

they stopped for breath. She reached beneath her plaid wool skirt, fumbled among the pleats and removed a pack of cigarettes. With the flick of a tiny lighter she lit one and sucked wildly. “When’d you plan it?” she asked during exhale. “Smashing the camel to smithereens…did you plan it, or did it come to you in a flash?”

“I didn’t do it.” Zack puffed on the cigarette Tiffany shared with him. He

said in a haze of smoke, “If I’d broken the camel, I’d of owned up to it.”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Adam snatched the cigarette that made the rounds.



Watching them, Beth shivered beneath the wool of her school blazer. She

squinted at the row of grand houses in the distance. Porch lights winked in the fog. In the center of the green space, a lighted grassy common surrounded the pond where cat tails and flowerless lily pads accented the water. In keeping with the gracious tennis traditions of the compound, a cabinet marked Visitors’ Racquets



“Race you guys to the courts. Last one there plays suicide single…alone on

one side against the other three.”

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sat behind whicker lawn furniture. Beth pointed to the cabinet.



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Adam scoffed. Counting the months until Ivy League life and obviously

above such a pointless challenge, he sucked on the cigarette, posturing his superiority.

The others took off in a run. With Beth in the lead and Tiffany and Zack

neck-in-neck behind her, the trio raced toward the courts. They slipped down the damp knoll, grabbing at opponents’ hair and pushing to gain space, doing anything to win.

Too late, Adam tossed aside his smoke and joined the competition. Despite

his best long-legged efforts and lurching attempts to pull Zack down by his cape, Adam arrived last at the cabinet. The others prepared themselves with racquets and balls.

He was a poor sport by nature, and not in the mood to be humiliated by

younger cousins collectively determined to blast him.

Adam grabbed gear from the cabinet. “Change in plans, team,” he said,

pointing a racquet at the nearby pond. “I’ve got a better idea.”

While the others squinted through the

chain link surrounding the courts, Adam marched around the fence, past the wicker furniture and down to the pond. One quick, smiling wink at his audience, and he tossed a tennis ball into the air, raised the racquet and swung.

Slowly, awkwardly, like a feathered Moses crawling from bull rushes, a round white duck flapped its wings and waddled forward.



The ball blasted into the high grass at the pond’s edge.



The grass rustled. Slowly, awkwardly, like a feathered Moses crawling from

bull rushes, a round white duck flapped its wings and waddled forward. It looked as if it had slept with its head tucked under one wing for warmth. The duck blinked Volume 49

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up at Adam.

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The boy laughed, tossed another ball into the air, and blasted it into the

water. A pond-sized tidal wave washed against the bank.

The duck jerked and quacked. Its wings spread quickly, like a kite in a gale,

and the wild flapping lift d the duck above the water.

Adam stepped forward on one foot, pointed the tasseled loafer toe of the

other for balance. He leaned back with arm cocked, preparing to serve without a ball. The duck flapped frantically, beating the air and honking as Adam took aim and served match point.

His racquet hit the mark, blasting the breast feathers. The slam sent the

duck flound ring into the water where it fluttered and flapped…where it sank.

“Yes! Grand Slam!” Adam yelled. He did a little dance, his loafers heel-toe-

heeling in the grass as he waved the racquet overhead. “Still the champ!”

Again, the tall grasses rustled.



A brown duck, smaller than the firs , peeked through the stalks. This one

looked into the pond, straining its neck to see over the weeds, to focus on the final bubbles in the water. Then, as though sensing something terrible and dangerous, and equating the threat with the dancing Adam, the brown duck jumped from its weedy nest and flapped into the air.

Adam didn’t miss a beat of his dance. He leaned forward, gracefully raising

his arm and serving with a smooth, powerful arc. The racquet sliced the air again.



His racquet caught the brown duck with full force, a cruel whuuump that

hit it mid-air. For a moment the duck floa ed, hanging on fog, suspended in mist.

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Hard. Fast. Fueled by the adrenaline of the previous triumph.

Then, in a spin of feathers, it crashed to the ground.

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Warner



It lay pondside, jerking one webbed foot. Its head twisted strangely; the duck’s

eyes seemed focused on the weeds near its nest. The wide beak hung open. A low honking whimpered from the throat. The bloodied feathers rattled with hard rasps.

Clutching the chain fence, Tiffany and Zack stared in wide-eyed silence.

Beth, gasping at the first hit, had turned away when Adam swung at the second duck. She huddled in her jacket, sniffling and hiding her face.

“Kids! Dinner’s ready,” someone called from a distance. It was a feminine

voice, Adam’s mother or Beth’s, maybe even Zack’s. They all sounded the same.

Tiffany fumbled to hide the cigarettes and lighter beneath her skirt, and

Beth dragged their racquets back to the cabinet. Adam walked away from the pond, combing fingers through his hair and straightening his tie. “I’m starved,” he said.

The brown duck honked miserably, its webbed foot thrusting at air.



Without comment or banter, three of the cousins primped, tucking in

shirts, dusting link from their blazers. It was when they were ready to march off to dinner that they noticed Zack walking the wrong way, trudging down the grassy slope toward the pond.

He stopped beside the duck that now twitched, choking. Zack knelt beside

it, covering the dark trembles with the hem of his cape. As the hood fell from his spiked hair, Zack sucked breath loudly, shuddering in the mist.

On the ground in front of him, the duck convulsed beneath the cape.



Zack looked around him, raking his hands through the grass. He found a

border brick, studied it for a moment--no longer than the measure of a heartbeat or a sigh--then brought it crashing down on the faint honking beneath his cape. Hard. Volume 49

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Fast. Twice, three times. Until the honking stopped, and the twitching ceased

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Tiffany buried her face against Adam’s wool jacket. Beth turned away. “Now that is one sicko kid,” Adam said, sighing. “God, what a loser.”

Gallantly, he wrapped an arm around each of the ladies.

Without a

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backward glance, he escorted them up the knoll for Thanksgiving dinner.

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Kathleen Willard Theory Of Flight, Circa 1709 1st Place 2012 Writer’s Studio Literary Contest, Poetry

for Bartolomeu de Gusmão There is something elegant about the early aviator’s theories of flight airships fueled by alchemy of either, an element extracted from the atmosphere fixat ve of stars in heavens. Without ether, his flying ma hine remains earthbound unable to lift off–– And that is what we all want to take flight li e swallows, a dream so common it bores our therapists, but we hunger to outsmart gravity to feel our bones empty and hollow, to record for all time our first instant o levitation. And understand his madness and hope his hypothesis ether attracts humans and inanimate objects to the sun after amber gathered in glass globes awakens magnets to elevate his metal plated ship will actually pan out. But then, we look at his drawing from the only surviving manuscript. His airship seems improbable with bird shaped sails, contraptions of pulleys and bellows, its underbelly of giant feathers and garish flag , and still parts of his theory are credible as his first experiments flew unmanned through Lisbo But wait, he burned his entire opus seconds before fleeing soldiers from the Inquisitio for what mortal dares fly and trespass in he ven? All of us, we are all heretics imagining ourselves winged and free.

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Colleen E. Gaul Right View 1st place 2012 Fiction Studio Literary Contest,Non-Fiction



I sit at my desk and twirl the conical straw hat I brought back from Vietnam,

admiring the idea, as well as the look of it. A hollow cone placed over a sphere with constant distance from fi ed points to fi ed lines. Simple, useful, beautiful. Holding the hat up to the window, I see the painted bridge, a written poem nestled between the palm layers. These hats inspire, as well as shelter us from sun and rain. The old woman in Hue who sold it to me warned if you lay a conical hat down with the point up, your luck will spill out. I never did, even during the long flight home when it was not easy to make room in the crowded overhead compartment.

Cancer is a frightening thing. any hint of it changes us in ways we cannot know

until it’s over, one way or another. Frightened is what I felt in October when I received the Come back for additional views call after a routine mammogram. The anniversary of my father’s cancer death was only a week or so away, and something inside me wondered if it was now my turn in the barrel, as he had liked to say. I dreaded the worry, the anxious waiting; a career in nursing had taught me

The old woman in Hue who sold it to me warned if you lay a conical hat down with the point up, your luck will spill out.

what lay down that lonely road, even if you don’t have cancer.

The magnification views were followed by a stereotactic biopsy where a

radiologist fires a spring loaded .14 gauge needle into your breast several times. It

of any kind. The results showed atypical cells, and too many of them. Neither wolf nor dog. Mostly it said I needed another biopsy – this time the real thing with anesthesia, a scalpel, tissue excision. It could be cancer, but it could wait. I wouldn’t change my life

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doesn’t hurt, but it is grueling, gruesome, and performed without benefit of medication

was the Radiologist’s response to my question about leaving on a long awaited trip to

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Vietnam. Of course it had already changed my life, but there was no point in dwelling on that. Ultimately, I decided to go to Southeast Asia and deal with the surgery when I returned, and that made all the difference.

Vietnam transformed me, though I didn’t know it at the time. It cast me into

a time and place I had not anticipated or imagined. The people sit in kindergarten chairs or squat on the streets of Hanoi, eating, drinking, talking. They are poor, but rich in community, family, and tradition.

Motorbikes swirl around like hornets, and I soon learned the only way to

cross the street was to abandon everything I had ever learned about such things. Do not look both ways before crossing. In fact, do not look at all or make any unpredictable movements. Step into the fl w and move forward. For while there is much danger in the speeding, beeping Honda Dreams, they will not hit you if you surrender to the reality your fate is not in your own hands.

There is a natural beauty in the low country called Vietnam, a small

piece of earth with a large population. This land does not give birth along with its inhabitants. Years of war, occupation, and war again have left a lasting wound that cannot be easily disguised. As is the case with attacks on the body, scars remain that speak of suffering, and the landscape is forever changed.

Yet

the history of the place, all that was lost there, is present and remains in the rice paddies, villages, cities, and cemeteries. The Vietnamese honor their dead. Every house has an altar for ancestor worship, and the altar is the most prominent place in the house. With a large photograph, candles and incense, it is a constant reminder of those who have gone before and are waiting. Mostly everyone in Vietnam receives two funerals – one at the time of death and another in about three years Volume 49

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when they dig up the bones to wash in rice wine and move to another, better location. By then the dead have met people they want to impress, and belong to another place.

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Those left behind give them a party and say goodbye, but the altars and tombs remain. The Vietnamese people live with their dead, but they let them go.

My own fears about dying were calmed by the rhythm of this going and

coming and going again, and a breast biopsy was a world away. I was struck by how meaningless it would have seemed to the women I met who could not have imagined such a thing – a sickness without symptoms that posed such danger. Their real lives offered quite enough in the way of hardship; no point in looking for what cannot be seen or felt. Still, there is No shame to give way to an elephant as our guide, Le Sy Quyen, told us more than once, and for good or bad I have always given way to the elephants in my life.

That particular elephant was with me as I traveled in the labyrinth known as

Halong Bay, the womb of the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea. It is a lovely, intriguing place, where junks, that aren’t really junks, putter among the limestone islands and grottos, journeying to the center and out again. I did not know where passage from one place to another began or ended, nor could I realize the significance of what was or would be. The search for emerald beauty deepened to a search for meaning and intention in my own life. Floating fishing villages and battered sampans led the way. The reward of suffering is experience.

There is a lot of hope in Vietnam, from their Uncle Ho to our new

American President. We can be and do better. The land is farmed by hand with plows and water buffalo. Farmers stand knee deep in water and irrigate the rice

their fathers before them. These are the same flooded fields that produced the famous water puppets now known all over the world and a delight beyond words

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paddies with antique wooden paddles, just as their fathers did, and their fathers,and

to behold. The fact that dioxin, phosphorus, and Agent Orange remain in the soil

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does not deter them. These are simply remnants of a war now over and forgiven. That suffering passed.

The Vietnamese eat anything and everything the world offers, and don’t seem

to miss the wildlife all but gone forever, the cats and dogs who live with them and feed them. The word pet has no meaning to these hungry people, but canaries sing from windows, puppies and piglets chase the children. All have a place and a destiny with the power of possibility embedded in every life. You might be and do better. A monk in Dalat reminded me what we live fl ws to us, and I wondered about my own action or inaction and how I might do otherwise. That same day a prayer at Truc Lam Buddhist Pagoda might have saved my life. I don’t know yet, but I wear the wooden mantra beads, burn the incense, and try to calm my busy, troubled mind. I can be and do better.

Ho Chi Minh City, old Saigon, is a place like no other with its French flair

and Asian air, inhabited by a people once lost between two worlds. When they forgot, a simple man in the north who lived in a stilted house remembered, planting trees from the south to remind him. The coffee shop where war correspondents and photojournalists met to gather their stories and their nerve is all but quiet now. The low murmur of conversation, soft clink of cups and glasses are reminders of those sad times. Cigarette smoke still clouds the air. I could not help but think of Indochine as I admired the Intercontinental Hotel or imagine the colorful flags and costumes of ancient Kings as I gazed at the barges drifting down the Saigon River. Sipping a martini on top of the Majestic Hotel, it all seemed so old, and new, forgotten and remembered in the thick humid air. Volume 49

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In some ways, the Mekong River is a big muddy mess, and, in others, it is

beautiful and mysterious. Where did and do these great rivers go, and where are they taking me. The Androscoggin, Amazon, or Colorado, I am carried into something

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and somewhere, inevitable, unfamiliar, and beyond my control. Like the rivers before, the Mekong took me with her toward the Gulf of Thailand, past banks covered in garbage, houses raised on stilts, canals hidden by coconut palms, and fishing boats with eyes painted on them to frighten crocodiles that no longer exist. Everything is swallowed in the vast delta; there is no escaping the forward motion. Only the time of arrival varies due to speed, the lack of it, or obstacles encountered along the way. The end is inevitable, and nowhere on earth is this clearer than floating in a boat into the Mekong Delta.

I returned to Colorado on the 16th day, flying into yesterday to get there. Rarely

are we so clearly given a second chance. The biopsy was not as terrible as I imagined.

I do not have cancer, at least not yet. I sometimes catch myself looking up at

the piano hanging over my head, and then I say a Buddhist prayer, which is any prayer to me, and think of Mrs. Viet and her primitive rice paper oven. It is possible it will be ok. After all, I have my good luck with me, the same good luck I carried home in an upside down conical hat. I am still discovering the gifts of Vietnam. Like treasures we hide and forget, they appear when I am searching for other things, and need them most. Vietnam has a lot to teach. I have a lot to learn.

In his book The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, When we

recognize and acknowledge our own suffering, the Buddha – which means the Buddha in all of us – will look at it, discover what has brought it about, and prescribe a course of action that can transform it into peace, joy and liberation. All any of us ever needs is the courage to go deeper. These

change within, and leaving the outside world as it is. That is comfort to me as I fasten the conical hat under my chin and remember the hard-bargaining shopkeeper in

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days, I am choosing faith and grace over doubt and despair. I am focusing on the

Hoian. I go along for that price.

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Abigail Warren Monopoly

You were winning, hands down, 10 years old and with Boardwalk, Park Place and hotels everywhere. Pleased, as you carefully tucked the pink 5s, yellow 10s, blue 50s under the edge of the board side. I was sinking fast sitting in jail Do not pass go Do not collect $200. You grew solemn upset with my poverty insisting I take the utilities. I said, “It’s OK, you’re winning, it’s just a game” (refusing to accept that) handing me handfuls of $100s Your socialist heart boy heart taking care of me, even then.

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J.R. Stewart The Cup



The fire flared and startled him away from a place that he couldn’t remember

as soon as he realized he wasn’t actually there. He stood up and discovered that his left foot was asleep. Staggering slightly, he tossed the last cold quarter-inch of his coffee and whiskey against the poor, drunken scrub pine that leaned like it was trying to escape the repeated dousing and the heat of the fir .

In the shadows away from the fir , the air was smokeless and cold, washed

by the wind and the river moving swiftly by. Moving to the fi e-gallon jug he’d set up by the stove, he rinsed his cup and put it, upside down, over the top of one of the aluminum poles that held up the front of the tarp that he’d rigged over the cooking area. He yawned hugely. He looked at the cup. He put it exactly there whenever he was out like this. It made a camp feel like home. Or how he imagined home to feel.

He was brushing his teeth when he had to admit that he was drunk. Not roaring

drunk, or bad hangover drunk, but drunk nonetheless. It became apparent when he spit the long stream of white foam out onto his boot. Chuckling, he mocked himself by staggering to the tent, removing all of his clothes, and flopping in a stage-clumsy way onto the big foam pad where his sleeping bag waited. He was snoring in minutes.

He awoke with a start and wondered why. Maybe it was too quiet. Even the

river seemed muted as it moved on down its chute, down to Bend, past Warm Springs and Maupin, over Sherar’s Falls to wind past Grass Valley, through Macks Canyon, to forgotten Moody above where Celilo had disappeared, to marry the Columbia and

the deep, cold dark.

He heard it begin somewhere down the canyon. Wind in the trees. He felt

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help spin the turbines, and finally out across The Bar where ships and bones sleep in

the air in the tent pause and gather itself before the rainfly began to chatter and buck.

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He heard the rolling snap of the tarp over the cooking area. The ancient ponderosas around the tent creaked and groaned as their backs stretched and turned. The gust died briefly but finished with a very strong blow that buckled and snapped all of the fabric he’d diligently erected. This flu ry was strong enough to give him a small thrill of fear.

He wanted to drift back to sleep, but then he remembered the cup. “Damn!”

He knew he had to get up. He’d never forgive himself if the cup didn’t survive this wind. It had survived other blows, but he had a feeling about this one. The cup had been a gift and had traveled in his camp box since that desert night when the sky was bigger and the shooting stars brighter than any other night he could call to memory. It had been their first trip together. She had presented him with coffee in the new cup before bed that first e ening.

“Jeez, lady,” he’d said. “You trying to keep me awake?”



“You can be awake if you want to be,” she’d shot back. “I’m more concerned

with keeping you up.”

It was a joke they’d shared until the sky streaked with light and the roadrunners

improvised their peculiar morning song. They drifted somewhere close to sleep as the sun rose and stayed abed until it got too hot. They could have stayed longer had they been lying separately, but each was unwilling to sacrifice the long, smooth heat of the other. They reveled in their glorious soreness, breathing the same air and talking through gentle bruised lips.

The cup was all he had left. She’d gone her bittersweet way in Bishop at

Christmas time that following winter. She was headed back to Kansas to see her mom and said that she’d come find him in the spring. But they both knew. All he said was: Volume 49

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“I’ll be in Oregon, I think.”

He didn’t bother to get dressed. The wind chill caught his attention, but it

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was more invigorating than painful. He was now grateful for the whiskey burning those empty calories that made him feel warm. Still his breath plumed briefly before the wind snatched it from his lips. He almost got to the tarp before another gust put in it a big belly that stretched for the sky. He watched the cup dance on its pole.

The rain took him by surprise and wrapped him in a thin membrane. A knot

began to form at the base of his neck. He felt it when he reached for the cup. The

The gust died briefly but finished with a very strong blow that buckled and snapped all of the fabric he’d diligently erected

mere touch of it took him back to the desert, as it always did. Where was she? Did she ever have those children that she’d wanted? Probably. They’d be in school now and would climb into her lap for a good story when they got home, a story that revealed the magic of just being alive, of being a person who loved with the whole heart and was loved in a careful, complete way

by a special person, of having skin to stroke and kiss. God, could she tell a story. With a few simple words, she could show how things were, how they grew, how you wanted them to be.

The familiar ache of it stuck him now, but he knew what to do. He turned to

the tent where he could dry off and meticulously fish tomorrow’s water until he fell asleep. But the whiskey and his right foot betrayed him. He tripped hard against an upright chunk of fire ood that had served as his stool while he’d sat drinking before

of the concrete fire pit. It bounced in the air and made a half turn before it separated neatly into two halves. The handle left in a third stage, and it all came to rest in a scatter that transfi ed him.

Volume 49

the fir . He watched the cup fly from his hands and, in slow motion, strike the base



17

Stewart



As his foot throbbed in the distance, he stared at the pieces as the rain came

down. After a while he began to shiver.

He caught no fish the next day or the day after. He ran out of bait before

he ran out of hooks, but it was a close race. On the third day he switched to the fly rod, but the big browns lurked in the snags and sunken trees, which made it difficult fishin . Finally exasperated, he went back to camp and packed his stuff.

The pieces of the cup still lay on the scarred camp table were he’d left them.

Before packing the stove he made some coffee and poured it into the tin cup he’d had before meeting her. The coffee tasted dusty and strange. There was no whiskey to add to it and he didn’t want any. He rummaged in his vest for a cigar, snipped the end, and lit it. Walking back down to the river, he sat, smoking, on a rock that was still in the sun. He did his best to think of exactly nothing.

When he pulled out of camp an hour later, he headed north with the river.

The cup stayed where it was, pieces reflecting the morning sun. As the clatter of the truck receded, a crow flew in and settled on the table. Cocking her head, she eyed the glinting handle. Taking the shiny curve in her beak, she spread her wings and flew upriver, away from the noise.

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Laurie Tompkins Fire Ceramic Wheel Thrown And Altered-Foil Saggar Fired

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“Best Of Ceramics” Fine Art Juried Exhibition

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Andrew Wenner Do You Need A Tissue Sir? Ink, Watercolor, and Acrylic

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21

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Robert Schroeder Drying Out Hand Built ceramic Using Coilng And Slab Building Techniques And Fired To Cone 10

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Robert Schroeder Drying Out

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“Best Of Sulpture” Fine Art Student Juried Exhibition

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Amanda Richardson Can Not Contain Scratch Bored With Water Down Acrylics For Color

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Rosanne Sterne Almost The tree tips are goldenrod yellow, cadmium orange, bent and stained by sun, leaf stems clinging lightly to their grey spindling branches, thin dry bent bones, small sacks of wrinkled plum skins wavering, before wind and rain urge them down to the ground, melting them to detritus. With the scent of dim winter and waning ahead your quipping note arrives after so many years of days, And I again feel the blue fading shadow of your confessed almost-love of me, fall’s pumpkin left broken open in the street sharp orange shards, slippery seeds and connective tissue spilling out.

My cells have turned over and over, sloughed, renewed and refreshed so many times that I had nearly forgotten your half-love, having come to know love fully ripened, scented, oozing, and pouring over its brim,

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I want to know why, what moves you now, on this warm autumn afternoon, at this particular turning, what small insistent voices push you tot sting me hard with your happy lies, well wishes.

Love that is never almost.

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Michael Eltrich Outside The Window



He’d been there for quite a while before I saw him, a sagging black shape in

the rain, watching us from behind a large oak tree. His clothes looked like they were soaked, but he stood there anyway; watching, or maybe only looking. There was no one else to look at. We were the only ones in the campground: Karen and I, and the man behind the tree.

That morning we had left Cluj, Romania, planning to meet friends in

Budapest, on our way to Amsterdam and a flight back to America. As we approached the border, we drove through row after row of steel barricades, barbed wire, and tall watch towers with searchlights. It would be another fifteen years before the Iron Curtain disappeared from the middle of Europe, and Romania and Hungary were still separated by a wide band of concrete and steel that looked foreboding and desolate in the yellow-gray light of that cloud-filled April mo ning.

Karen looked out the window and shook her head.



“It looks like they’re ready for war.”



“It does,” I said, “but who are they afraid of ?”



“Themselves. These things aren’t here to defend Hungary. They’re here to

keep people from leaving.”

At the border gate, a short man with a quick air about him took our passports

into the offic . He returned in a few minutes.

“Americans!” he said, looking firs at my blue jeans, then at my long hair. The

expression on his face made him look as though he’d just bitten into something very sour. Volume 49

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“Photos?” he asked. “You have passport photos, yes?”

Eltrich



“We don’t,” I said. “I didn’t think we needed them.”



“No visa without photos,” he said, and thrust the passports at me. “Come

tomorrow. Maybe you can get visa then. With photos!”

We drove back a few kilometers back down the road and stopped at Oradea,

an uninspiring town we’d passed through only a couple of hours earlier. A small shop had a sign in three languages that promised passport photos while you waited. It smelled of chemicals and mildew, and we wanted to go for a walk instead of waiting in the cluttered little room. But it began to rain, so we went back inside and sat down.

By nightfall the rain had settled

in, washing the last bits of snow from the mountains and encouraging the fl wers that

“Why would the police watch us? We haven’t done anything illegal.” “Nothing we know about,” she said

were starting to appear, red and yellow and white, all over the countryside. We made dinner and drank wine in the van by the light of a battery-powered lamp. Afterwards, we lay on the bed and read about Budapest in our guidebook. I was half way through the section on restaurants, reading to Karen about apricot brandy and Gypsy violins at Mátyás Pince, when I saw him, thirty or forty meters away; a shadow in the rain beneath a large tree. Karen, wondering why



“Why is he watching us?” she asked.



“I don’t know. It looks like he’s just standing there.”



“Well, I wish he’d go away. It’s creepy, him being out there. It’s like he’s

spying on us.”

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I’d stopped reading, looked out the window.

A little later, when we were ready to go to sleep, I turned off the light. As I

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Eltrich

closed the curtains, I noticed the man was no longer there.

“I guess he got tired of standing in the rain,” I said.



“Maybe he was a cop or something,” Karen said.



“Why would the police watch us? We haven’t done anything illegal.”



“Nothing we know about,” she said.



The rain poured out of the sky, drumming on the roof and turning the

campground into a wide expanse of mud. Cold, damp air crept into our bed, our hands and our thoughts, and we pulled the covers up over our shoulders to ward off the gloom we both began to feel.

“What if they don’t let us cross the border tomorrow?” Karen asked.



“They will. We have the photographs the guy wanted. I’m sure we’ll get our

visas and be on our way.”

“And if we’re not; if they turn us back again?”



“We’ll try another border crossing.”



I was about to tell her that if it came to that, we could return to Yugoslavia and

just go around Hungary, when we heard a faint tapping on the driver’s door window.

Karen looked between the curtains behind the front seats.



“I think it’s that guy who was watching us earlier,” she said. I looked out. A man was standing there, his hands deep inside his coat



pockets. The collar was turned up, but it looked like it collected more rain than it shed.

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“Are you going to talk to him?” Karen asked.



“Yeah, I guess so.”

Eltrich



“Don’t open the door!” she said.



I slid between the curtains, sat behind the steering wheel, and rolled the

window down a few inches. Rain cascaded in, drenching one side of my tee shirt and stinging my eyes.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.



His head was bent down, and his jaw seemed clenched.



“Earlier, I was standing there.” He jerked his head back toward the tree.



“I know. I saw you.”



“Oh,” he said. “Well, you see I waited until it was safe.”



“Safe for what?” I rolled the glass down a little further.



“To talk with you. To talk with a foreigner.”



“Look, it’s late and we need to get some sleep. What is it you want to talk

to me about?”

He glanced around, even though there was no one in sight, and when he

spoke, his words were barely audible above the storm.

“Leaving,” he said.



The rain ran in waves down the glass, distorting the lights and trees into

strange, abstract patterns. It filled the spaces between my thoughts with a clattering



“Leaving? You want to leave Romania?”



“Exactly so. I want to … escape.”

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sound that came from all sides at once and made me unsure of his words.



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Eltrich



“You’d leave by yourself ? What about your family, or …” His face was

blank as a stone.

“Just me,” he said. “It’s the only way.”



Then he became more animated, his hands emphasizing his words.



“I’ll hold on to the bottom of your van when you cross the border,” he said.

“I’ve heard of others doing this.”

“But we’re going into Hungary. I don’t see what good that would do you.”



“No, no, don’t worry. It’s ok. See, I have money. I can pay you!”



He pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket. It looked like a mix of American

and Romanian money. Karen was sitting on the bed, looking at me, her wide open eyes posing a question I could not read and probably couldn’t have answered anyway. Or maybe it wasn’t a question at all, but some kind of statement about this man who seemed to be trapped in his own country. He leaned slightly forward then, as though he wanted to peer into our world and see what sort of life we lived there. His face was young and taut, nothing like the old man who had spoken with me a few days earlier about going to Chicago last year to see his brother.

“America is nice,” he had said, “but I come back to Romania because this

is my home.”

How could he leave and come back, but this man looking in our window had

to sneak out like a thief? Sure, East German guards shot people who tried to leave, and the Soviet Union sounded pretty bad with its KGB and its gulags, but here, in this beautiful country with no visible fence hemming it in, it made no sense. Then I recalled the man in a tavern in Bra ov who lowered his voice almost to a whisper when I asked Volume 49

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him about the government. He had leaned toward me at the bar, much like the man

Eltrich

standing outside the window, and told me I should be careful talking about such things because Ceau escu, the man who controlled Romania, had spies and secret police everywhere.

“Everywhere,” he said again, touching my arm lightly before downing his

beer and walking away.

The rain fell on us with great violence now, and the man pulled his coat

tighter. I realized I hadn’t answered him, but I had no idea what to think, or what to say to him for that matter. The rain ran over his face, and I saw he was shivering a bit.

“I’m really …” He looked up at me. “I’m really very sorry,” I said, “but I

can’t do that.”

The man stood there wordless in the rain, his expression unchanged.



“We could get arrested,” I said. “You and us.”



He looked into my face, and I wanted him to say something like “Don’t

worry about me” or “Never mind – I was only joking”; words that would let me roll the window up and separate us from his world, which seemed very unfamiliar now, and dangerous. I wanted him to allow me go back to my life on the other side of those fields of barbed wire and steel watched over by cold, narrow-eyed men; back to a street in Vienna, where I could sit at a sidewalk café drinking coffee on a sunny afternoon, untroubled by memories or conversations, while he would still be here in this deceptive prison of green mountains and nostalgic old men. But the man didn’t say anything like that, and it felt like a coil in my chest was

being wound tighter and tighter as he stood there dumbly looking in the window. He didn’t say anything kind or absolving or funny, or even angry. He didn’t say anything

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at all. He just turned around and walked away into the night.

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Eltrich



“I bet he was an undercover cop,” Karen said. “That was probably a con job

or a sting to see what we’d do.”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter, because we’re not going to do anything except

leave tomorrow morning.”

“I’m glad,” Karen said. “This country is, I don’t know – it’s making me

nervous now.” She lay back down and pulled the covers over her.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “About him being a cop. Maybe that’s why

he seemed so strange; because he was with the secret police.”

The light from a nearby building was diffused by the rain and the trees. It

shimmered in oily pools of water that had collected here and there and made tangled shadows across the ground that moved in cadence with the wind. I rolled up the window and made sure the door was locked.

Outside the glass was a life I could barely see, much less understand. The

man had returned to whatever reality he lived, we were free to leave. As I crawled into bed my chest tightened again and I felt a sudden twinge of concern.

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“He didn’t tell me his name,” I said.



Karen rolled over and looked at me.



“Who didn’t?”



“The guy I was just talking to. He didn’t tell me his name.”



“Well, you didn’t tell him your name either.”



“No. That’s right. I didn’t.”



I looked outside again. There was nothing out there but cold, empty rain, so

I lay back down, pulled the blanket over me and tried to sleep.

Abigail Warren Entebbe Road

It stinks here. It stinks of too many cars, boda bodas, matatus blowing black smoke from muffler from cheap, fucked up Japanese and Korean cars Sold to Ugandans, it stinks of tilapia, bug-eyed fish flesh its ho ed lip hanging in the afternoon sun by the roadside, next to the raw beef slabs stinking of meat mixing with car fumes, caged chickens, half dead, their necks droop, it stinks of sizzling palm oil frying the fis the wave of coal heat hits my legs walking by the crouching woman a sleeping baby swaddled on her back, she flips the f y over, oil spatters, It stinks urine mixing with red dust on my feet, It stinks of too many people crammed in a bus, someone pushed up against my back, someone leaning into my breasts, a child runs her fin ers on my arm, Hello maa-zoon-ga, hello maa-zoon-ga –the wanderers– wandering in her country, she reaches up to touch my eyeglasses, I let her fin ers feel the glass, the metal arms, my face, she quietly rubs my skin– the wanderer’s face–she smiles at me, plump girl with her straight, white teeth dark eyes.

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boda bodas: small motorcycles mattutus: small vans used as taxies muzungus: white people

33

Charles Edward Brooks The Taste of Neutrality

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life’s business being just the terrible choice.

—Robert Browning, The Pope

Among the other items in his saddlebags, the courier carried the news of

Vermont’s admission to the Union. At the very moment when the rider dismounted before the town hall at Troy Junction, his hair flying in the March wind, the potter Knipperdollinck dropped dead two miles away. A week later, the contents of the pottery were auctioned off.

“I desire those two china statuettes,” Carrie John Phelps whispered behind

her hand to her twin sister.

“I was about to speak those very words,” Nellie John Forbes replied.



“We’ll draw lots,” Carrie Phelps suggested. “Only the winner will bid.”



“No. We shall bid with one voice. If our bid be successful, we shall draw lots

to divide the two statuettes between us.”

“Very well.”



The severe John sisters left the auction shortly afterward, each with a bundle

under her arm. Their parting in front of the pottery lacked all cordiality.

In the evening, Carrie Phelps and her spouse stood before their china cupboard,

admiring a figurine which now occupied the center shelf all by itself. An aura of ineffable sadness surrounded the object: made of finest clay and glazed with delicate shades of pink, ivory, and flesh, it represented the Hero of legend. Volume 49

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Brooks



“If my sister had accepted my original suggestion, I’d have Leander as well,”

Carrie Phelps pouted to her husband. “There’s something unnatural about separating lovers.”

A few blocks away, Nellie Forbes and her spouse contemplated the matching

statuette, this one in blue, ivory, and flesh tones. “At least I have him,” the woman sighed. “But doesn’t Leander seem to pine for his Hero?”

Almost at once, a coolness set in between the two families. Within a week, mere

coolness had ceded to a deep estrangement. After a month, all of their relatives, down to the most distant, had taken sides. A year after the potter’s sale, the entire community of Troy Junction consisted of two hostile camps, of more or less equal size.

Each and every day, the adherents

of Carrie John Phelps, the “Heroes,” and the

After a month, all of their relatives, down to the most distant, had taken sides.

followers of Nellie John Forbes, the “Leanders,” confronted each other under a cloud of impenetrable hatred.

The confrontations stopped short of physical violence, however. For the

balance of power between the two groups made it impossible for either side to feel confident of victory in a contest of force. Fear of being destroyed, and that alone, maintained the peace in Troy Junction. This uneasy calm was destined to prevail for two hundred years. ***

On the bicentennial of the Knipperdollinck auction, an automobile with

Volume 49



Canadian license plates pulled into the driveway of the Hellespont Tourist Home.

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Brooks

A thin woman in her sixties emerged from the vehicle and shuffled stiffly to the front door.

“Do you have a room for one night?” she asked the matron of her own age

who answered her ring. “Or even more than one. I’m driving to Florida, and I’m worn out already.”

“I do. With its own bath too.”



“Good,” the visitor said. “My name’s Leggie Smart.”



“I’m Slatie Belle Phelps. Do you need help with your things?”



“No. I’ll just bring in an overnight bag for the time being.”



From behind lace curtains and wooden shutters, the whole neighborhood

observed the movements of the Hellespont’s new guest. For in Troy Junction, visitors were few and far between. *** A month later, Leggie Smart still occupied the front upstairs bedroom at



the tourist home. And for a very simple reason: Something in the climate of Troy Junction had affected her arthritis—immediately and dramatically. After only twentyfour hours in the community, the gnarled joints in her fin ers had begun to straighten out. By now, not a twinge of pain afflicted her. Florida would still be there when she felt like continuing her trip, and freshly retired as she was, she was mistress of her own time.

On an April evening exactly four weeks after her arrival, she dined alone with

her widowed landlady. Volume 49

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“Mrs. Phelps,” she remarked over coffee, “I’ve admired your brooch ever

since I got here. May I ask what the figure r presents?”

Brooks



“It’s Hero, Ms. Smart. From mythology, you know.”



“Of course! I taught my eighth-graders about her. And the name of the

tourist home: it all fits to ether.”

“Some more coffee, Ms. Smart?”



The Canadian held out her cup and saucer. “Thank you. In Greek art, Hero’s

almost always shown with Leander, rather than alone.”

The landlady’s face took on a strange expression. “That wouldn’t do in Troy

Junction. Not at all.”

“Wouldn’t do?”



“No… Ms. Smart, you’ve been here a month now, and I gather from what

you’ve said that you might stay on for a while.”

“Yes?”



Slatie Belle Phelps rose from her chair. “Excuse me a second.” She stepped

into the hall and returned with the telephone book. “Just glance through this and tell me if anything strikes you.”

Leggie Smart eyed the landlady uneasily. “Well,” she said with a forced smile,

“I’ll see if there’re any Smarts. Maybe I have some long-lost relatives down here.” Under the letter S she discovered the Salad Bar, the Salvage Shoppe, Seductive



Hair Stylers, the Sestos Restaurant, and the Southern Dry Cleaning Company.

even Smith.”

“Look under P.”



“My word! Pages and pages of Phelps, but not another family name!”

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“How odd!” she exclaimed. “There are no family names beginning with S at all. Not

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Brooks



“Now turn to F, Ms. Smart.”



“Forbes, Forbes, and nothing but Forbes! What on earth?”



“There are two family names in Troy Junction. Just two.”



“How is that possible, Mrs. Phelps? It’s a fair-size town, after all.”



“It happened like this, Ms. Smart…”



And Slatie Belle Phelps recounted a chain of events linking the death of the

potter Knipperdollinck with the present day. A story so encrusted with legend that it must have seemed quite incredible to a mind not bred in the lore. But still, as the tale unwound, something true, and exceedingly sinister, loomed up inside it.

Abruptly, the landlady abandoned the singsong of her narrative and switched

to a tone of urgency: “You’ll have to take sides, Ms. Smart.”

“Me?! Take sides? What does any of this…business have to do with me?”



“You’ve lived in this house for four weeks. That’s enough to qualify you as a

Hero. But you have to say it. Everybody here has to make a profession of faith.”

“Mrs. Phelps, the only profession of faith I ever made was in my church.”



“This is a lot more serious than any church, Ms. Smart.” The landlady cocked

her head in a curiously menacing way.

“But I have nothing to do with all this; I’m just passing through!”



“I could give you a brooch like mine. A pink Hero brooch. Then the question

would be settled. It would be so simple.”

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“I…ah… What are the other brooches like?”



“They’re blue. Everybody in Troy Junction wears a brooch or a pin or

an ornament of some kind that shows allegiance. Most of us have tattoos on

Brooks

our bodies as well.”

The Canadian got up hastily. “Mrs. Phelps, I’m staying strictly neutral in this

dispute. It’s none of my business. Good night.”

Slatie Belle Phelps sat on at the dining table, staring pensively at the candlestick

consuming itself in the centerpiece.

Upstairs, Leggie Smart packed her largest suitcase and set it by the door,

ready to be carried down to her car at a moment’s notice. ***

When the shower ceased, the air smelled fresh, fragrant with early roses

and sweet buds. Windows and shutters opened to admit the emerging sun. People ventured outside and exchanged greetings.

As she strolled down Main Street, the Canadian examined the signs on

the businesses closely for the very first time. Almost every one identified a Forbes or a Phelps as proprietor or manager. The very names of the establishments often contained an unmistakable allusion to Hero or Leander, such as the Abydos Fashion Shop and the Priestess of Aphrodite Funeral Home. At the far end of the business section, she came upon a low brick building with a colonial-style sign by the door.



Public Library



Everyone Welcome



Hastening her step, Leggie Smart went inside and scanned the premises. They

might have been those of any public library in any small city in North America. Or,

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Knipperdollinck Memorial

for that matter, in the Ontario high school where she had taught for forty-one years.

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Brooks

She plucked the Tidewater Literary Review from the periodicals rack and settled down at one of the maple-wood tables.

Little by little, a weird short story drew her under its spell. Two bands of

anthropoids, intent on exterminating each other, prepared for the final showdown. Another creature, belonging to neither band, strayed onto the scene by chance and—

A cough jerked her from her reading. A woman gazed at her from the other

side of the table, with an expression bespeaking neither friendliness nor hostility.

Reaching into her handbag, Leggie Smart pulled out a packet of mints and

put one of them in her mouth. She held out the packet to the other occupant of the table and smiled.

The reaction was a stage whisper: “No, thank you. I don’t like the taste

of neutrality.”

Leggie Smart recoiled. At that moment, her eyes fell on a blue clasp in the

other woman’s titian-red hair. ***

The warmth from the summer day lingered on into the evening. The men

and boys sweated as they arranged tables along the sidewalks: metal and Formica ones from the school cafeteria, pine ones from the church social hall, and maplewood ones from the public library. The women and girls, setting out food and drink on the tables, paused from time to time to wipe perspiration from their faces. Several of the men unloaded big spools of rope from the hardware store truck. Hardly a sound reached the second floor of the Hellespont Tourist Home, although some three thousand persons were milling about in the street below. Volume 49

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At length, Johnny Jack Phelps, a giant in his mid-eighties, clapped his hands.

Brooks

Half the multitude fell into rows behind him. The other half formed behind Jackie Nell Forbes, a woman as old and as large as the leader of the opposing camp. Both of them held office through a kind of apostolic succession: a laying on of hands that stretched all the way back to Carrie John Phelps and Nellie John Forbes.

The two chiefs bowed to each other and stalked gravely, side by side, into

the Hellespont Tourist Home.

Leggie Smart woke with a start when the ceiling light snapped on. “What in

the world?!”

Two enormous octogenarians, a male and a female, were standing by her bed

and glaring down at her with obvious loathing. “What do you want?” she screamed. “Who are you—? Mrs. Phelps!”

Wrapped in her chenille housecoat, the landlady peered into the room from

the hall. “We can’t stand on the sidelines in life, Ms. Smart. We have to choose. I tried to save you, but you wouldn’t listen. Now we’ll have to divide you between us.”

“What in God’s name does that mean, Mrs. Phelps?”



“You’ll soon see for yourself, Ms. Smart.”



Without a word, the intruders forced the supine woman onto her feet and

marched her down the stairs. When the threesome appeared on the porch, cheers resounded in a mighty blast: “Hero!—Leander!—Hero!—Leander!”

In the street, the giants laid Leggie Smart on the manhole cover and wound

knot to secure their work. The end of one rope was unwound and passed along to a phalanx of Heroes; the other, to a line of Leanders. All talking ceased.

Volume 49

the ends of thick ropes around her legs, from thighs to ankles; they tied knot after

“Heave!” shouted the giants in unison.

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Brooks



Hundreds of townspeople tugged enthusiastically on each rope. The

bystanders, mostly women and children, drowned out the victim’s screams with unbroken chanting: “Yo-ho, Knip-per-dol-linck! Heave-ho, Knip-per-dol-linck!” After only a few minutes of exertion by the two camps, the woman’s body split apart. The streetlights illuminated the two bleeding pieces, still joined at the neck, in grisly detail.

The assembly broke into wild cheering: “Hooray!—Hero!—Leander!” And

new cries, never before heard in Troy Junction, went up on all sides: “Hero AND Leander!—Leander AND Hero!”

The crowd fell upon the food and drink. Caps flew from beer, corks from

whiskey and brandy bottles. Soon Heroes and Leanders, Phelpses and Forbeses, were swilling together and slapping one another on the shoulders. Among the younger generation, matters moved swiftly from shoulder-slapping to greater intimacy. With the Hellespont Tourist Home as the fulcrum, the festivities fanned out through all of Troy Junction. Someone set off the fire alarm; the ambulance siren wailed in the distance. ***

When the sun came up, dogs were snarling over Leggie Smart’s remains. In

what had been her bed at the tourist home, a young Phelps male woke up to find a young Forbes female in his arms. He sprang out from under the sheets and vomited on the floo . “You made me do it!” he bellowed at his erstwhile lover. “I was drunk!”

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“You swine!” the girl shrieked. “You’ll pay for this with your life.”



By noon, more than forty corpses lay in Main Street alone.

David Johnston While You Weren’t in Mexico City

Volume 49

Bosses made me easy targets. Inside a clockwork clockwork Mellow zodiacs blew by beading Sweat and Windex. Bleach Buckets Stuck out their raggy tongues. Baklava Went unsold. I’d pass an empty park— Drought and cloud Pinning my head across the moon Other side of town your Lebaron burned Maroon and doodled circles raged my letters. I drank. My outfit r peated. Tight as tar the honey clung.

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KG Newman While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime

The stars were dimmed that night and I was thinking hard about My Very Excellent Mother and Pluto recently being stripped of planethood and how I couldn’t count on nine postgame pizzas anymore, much less one, or an operator for the scoreboard or nine innings or even one out, one more chance to fail. I sat barefoot in the centerfield sn w. There was no way of knowing when the fla es would stop, or why some rules we hold close end up exposed as an ice-ball of half-truth: Eight planets. The excitement you feel when you’re nine and can’t wait to get into double digits, but when you hit it, everything feels the same… My feet stayed warm from sunny games gone by but looking at my purple toes I became disturbed at the thought of losing the left pinkie and then my balance and the ability to take a sharp angle around third… It’s a strange but pleasant sleep— Pizza. Planets. Pinkie toes. And me, stubborn me, still hoping for the slightest chance of sun while dreaming of diamonds in wintertime.

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Annie Dawid Sacred and Profane Dances



He called us “the three primas,” and we loved our title, dancing furiously

in the converted garage/studio, old mono record player on the floor humming its Debussy beneath the sound of rain drumming an antithetical beat on the tin roof. As we pirouetted, sweat hit the mirror, and we fouettéd again and again, our taskmasters driving us relentlessly until, sore and stiff, we hobbled the fifty feet to the dining hall for meals. It rained all summer, except the day of our outdoor performance, a miracle at the time, as if the gods – definitely Dionysian -

Cristóbal named us, and we thrived,

working hard to please him, but Carol frowned whenever she heard him say it. “Primas!” she’d snap in disgust. She’d been one herself. Carol and Cristóbal were our bad and good cops, respectively, both shrieking “Cheeks! Cheeks! Cheeks,” urging us to tighten our gluteus maximus muscles as we jetéd around the floo , pretending to cover real distance on the wide lawns overlooking the lake, the stage for our performance on Parents’ Day.

ere rooting for our triumph.

We were 17, 16 and 13, all from pricey

East Coast suburbs of one sort or another.

He called us “the three primas,” and we loved our title, dancing furiously in the converted garage/ studio, old mono record player on the floor humming its Debussy beneath the sound of rain drumming an antithetical beat on the tin roof

the baby, defin tely the most talented and least serious among us. In private, we called ourselves “the three cheeks.” It was my third summer at Blue Mountain Lake Camp of the Arts, Maria’s and Amelia’s first and last

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Amelia, the eldest, me in the middle, and Maria

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Dawid



I was told Cristóbal and Carol married one another at 18, both escaping

repressive families – his in Columbia and hers in Kansas – for the dancer’s life in New York City. They stayed married all their lives, though both had partners of the same sex and did not resemble any married couple I’d ever observed within the affluent boundaries of West Egg. What did we know about sexuality, other than that everyone had some? Until that summer I’d been ugly and invisible, but suddenly, at 16, I’d been born anew in the country of desire. Male counselors flo ked to me to fli t, all of them several years my senior. I barely understood the process, except that the borrowed yellow leotard on my braless body attracted attention every time I wore it, when my black ones grew unwearably stinky, and laundry day was still to come. In leotards and sweatpants from breakfast through dinner, I wore no makeup, no perfume. After meals, I fed horses and mucked out stables, which, that wet summer, remained ankle deep in mud.

Amelia and I shared the “counselors-in-training” room in the Main House,

once the centerpiece of a grand estate. As a veteran, I knew how to enter or escape the room by means of a low, flat roof and mostly sturdy trellis, evading the ears of counselors in the adjacent hallway. One midnight in late July, as Amelia and I lay on our narrow cots discussing our difficulties with the lack of practice in our actual performance space, the window slid up. A sheet of light rain briefly sprayed Amelia, whose bed abutted the wall overlooking the roof, before a male body appeared, silhouetted in the frame. Artie the clarinet counselor, who had so admired my yellow leotard just that afternoon, was followed by Josh, who taught painting.

“Shhhhhhh!” Artie placed a forefin er on Amelia’s lips as she rose in alarm,

ready to scream. “We’ve come to give you massages.” Volume 49

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Since he’d climbed into the room onto Amelia’s bed, he stayed there, while

Josh, after slipping on the wet slate tiles, managed to hoist himself in and cross

Dawid

the narrow aisle to mine. Unexpected yet entirely natural, somehow, this nocturnal visitation, some previously unrealized instinct informed me that Artie was in the wrong bed, so I said his name and stretched my arm toward him. As if in a prearranged pas de deux, he accepted my hand, sliding his smooth fin ertips up my forearm, and followed it back to me, while Josh exchanged my bed for Amelia’s.

Had the married counselor couple down the hall heard the sounds of our

strenuous massage session, what would they have done? Inquired about birth control, perhaps. Since arriving, I’d been in love with the man of the couple, who had a curiously female name – Lynn – and a delicate grace to all his gestures, a quietness of speech. I liked his wife too, Jody, with her lean runner’s body and no-nonsense candor.

No one in the Main House was very old: Lynn and Jody the elders at 25, if

that, Artie and Josh both 21 that year and reveling in their freedoms. It was rumored, and later confi med, that Artie spent the remainder of that summer not only with me but with Pierrot, the drama counselor, alternating nights. And Josh, as the proverb went, chased everything that moved. Rain prevailed, keeping the grass a rich green; outdoor amorousness was difficult while not impossible, and the summer purred with yearning from beginning to end.

During the first week of camp, sensibly accepting that Lynn adored his

admirable Jody, I had turned my attention to Don, one of two maintenance men. So shy he could barely speak, his reserve drew me to him, long dark hair an enticement to my empty hands. We didn’t have our first conversation until the day he quit, he and the

instead of fixing outdated plumbing seven days a week, deep in mildew most of the time. Amelia and I stole away to their quarters to say goodbye, the old boathouse a

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other maintenance man having decided to spend the summer driving cross-country

flight of stone steps below the rest of camp. When I heard Greg Allman’s mournful voice singing “Melissa,” I launched myself, weeping, onto Don’s lap.

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The lack of future summoning our inexperienced selves to action, we kissed

and hugged and held hands all the way to the parking lot. As their Karman Ghia bumped up the dirt road, I cried from the grieved the taste of his affection and its immediate loss.

Parents’ Day dawned cloudless and warm. My family didn’t make the seven-

hour drive to visit, which I preferred, since I felt free without them, needing my annual escape to the North Country to breathe. Josh had designed our costumes as loose togas silk-screened with Matisse-like cutouts in bright oranges, yellows and greens against the white. We were barefoot, black leotards beneath, no tights or leggings to constrain us. Instead of the tinny sound of the phonograph in our studio, Debussy boomed out over the P.A. system, the same that woke us every morning with a cowbell, unfurling the French composer’s creation over the hundred or more acres of Blue Mountain. When the first chords began, harpist Nicanor Zabaleta fingering strings from the air, it seemed, the deep blue sky itself offered up the first movement, the danse sacrée.

We three primas jetéed out from behind a copse of maples in Cristóbal’s

original composition, our legs stretching wider and wider as if to encompass the lake, reaching and reaching. It all made sense now, the way he made us move, how we heard “Cheeks! Cheeks! Cheeks!” echoing inside us, our elders’ wisdom absorbed at last. I fell, rolled and recovered. The audience clapped spontaneously as I rose to join the others in the danse profane, all three of us unable to do anything but smile and leap and enter Debussy’s romance in the air.

Eventually, Artie undertook the defl wering he’d come for that night in the

Main House. During Christmas break from college, he ushered me into his bedroom in his parents’ home in Queens and locked the door. Though I’d prepared with a justVolume 49

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acquired diaphragm, he used a condom too, and while his father played ragtime on the

Dawid

piano 25 feet away, I whispered an unceremonious goodbye to virginity. The event was far less memorable than the full-body massage I’d received back in Blue Mountain, while Amelia experienced hers in the other bed, a thunderstorm serenading us for hours, the window remaining open.

Six months after my evening at Artie’s, his piano-playing father would hang

himself in the basement with a dog leash, where Artie would discover him, searching for a carton of sheet music he never found. Artie never slept with men again, possessed by the notion that his brief bisexuality had somehow engendered his father’s suicide.

At 50, I finally own the Debussy after years of trying to identify and locate

the very orchestration we danced to in the sun reflecting off Blue Mountain Lake. After Artie, there were many men, a few women, until I came to know myself as a happy loner and loving mother of one son. The harpist still summons romance from the air, only this air is Colorado dry, my open, treeless acreage soughing in high altitude wind. The snow-topped Sangres dwarf us here, so unlike the Adirondacks’

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soft green mounds, gentling dancers and spectators alike in a respite from the rain.

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Sharon Owens Harlem Heat

Harlem Heat-Gary Kelley 1997

Buxom beautiful woman, Creamy latte skin with Receding hues of champagne and honey, Dressed to the nines in a Silken pearl gown that Touts her curves and silhouettes Her womanly figur . Vivacious and animated, she Dances under the fie y yellow and orange Flames of the setting sun in the Harlem Heat. She moves her hips in a Sensual figure eight to th High pitched wail of a distant siren. She sways her body to the Swash-swish-swash of the traffi , And the power emanating from her hips Causes the buildings to move in time with Her rhythm. Illuminated windows watch while She rocks her hips east to west to the Clamorous murmur of the nomadic crowd. Her un-poised hands arched overhead Choreograph the moves and directs the Buildings, left now right. She swings and glides to and fro to the Jingle-jingle, pop and rock of the Underground train that causes her Body to shake and shimmy. She rolls her hips to a cacophony of the Loud voices of the men in hard hats, the Monstrous machinery and the Rat-atat-tat of the jackhammer.

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She is in the Harlem Heat, and She is dancing.

Stacia Duvall Fired Sun

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Digital Photograph

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Colleen Daisy Weeks New Year Hoar 2 Digital Photograph

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Christine Adams Colorado Autumn Blaze Digital Photograph

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Christine Adams Crisp Yellow Tulip

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Digital Photograph

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Colleen Daisy Weeks New Year Hoar 3 Digital Photograph

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Joyce McClain Belize Digital Photograph

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Petra Perkins Flying Lessons



“You have fear of flying, right?”



“Yes, sir, that’s why I’m here.”



“Takeoffs? Landings? Which? ”



“Yes.”



I couldn’t see his eyes crinkle beyond the aviator shades but his smile

was reassuring.

“Ahh… aviophobia.” Captain Bob, former Air Force captain, looked more

like Captain America – solid, wings on his epaulets, no-nonsense. A clipboard for a shield. I would go up with him.

“Ready to go?”



I shook my head. “Sure.”



I didn’t tell Captain Bob the story. In 1988 my husband, Terry, a pilot, had

kept his homebuilt airplane, a Sidewinder, hangared here at Centennial airport. I’d

18, took off together from one of these runways, for the last time. They didn’t come back. The Sidewinder crashed from a sheared propeller. Never did I envision -- in a million years or twelve -- returning to this place.

I’d never ridden in it. He and our son, Rod, almost 18, took off together from one of these runways, for the last time.

Here I am. Now what? Bob led me across

familiar tarmac to one of his flying club’s trainers. I walked my bravado to the small white plane, a Cessna 172… your ordinary aviophobe, on a leisurely Sunday ride.

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never ridden in it. He and our son, Rod, almost

I was 50 now and needed to overcome this dread. My job required frequent

airline travel. Never a calm passenger before the accident, I was worse after, fighting

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wild heart palpitations and hyperventilating during takeoffs and landings.

Inside, I buckled my harness. Bob examined the plane, checked items on a

list, cranked the engine. We taxied to the ‘run-up area’ for final checks then moved to a runway. As we awaited clearance I watched other planes and listened to pilots via headphones. At first I sat on my shaking hands, until we started to roll and gather speed. Then I white-knuckled the takeoff, gripping a door handle. We were still over the runway when I realized the tires had quit roaring. Bob pulled back the steering wheel -- the yoke -- and waved to the control tower.

“Are we going higher soon?”



“Soon as we get more lift.”



Well, get some.



I felt we would clear that building straight ahead, but wasn’t confident about

the potted tree on top. Then we were sideways. “Three Niner Whiskey east” said ATC (Air Traffic Control). Whiskey? Oh, I’d love one but I didn’t eat breakfast. My brain became mush; my neck, a stick; my heart, a drum. After the radio chatter dribbled off, Captain Bob got me talking so I’d breathe.

“We’ll stay low for a bit, just like the bigger planes,” he said, soothingly, unlike

his radio voice. Could this be safe, flying so low… so slow? We followed a truck on I-25 northbound. “Wyoming license plate,” I remarked. Bob laughed.

We flew higher, skirting Denver’s skyscrapers, then west, edging autumn-

streaked foothills, and southeast, spotting sailboats at Chatfield Dam. I’m relaxing, kind of. Bob invited me to steer. He made an impressive landing on the heels of Volume 49

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another’s hilarious zigzag touchdown. And then it was over.

“I want to take lessons.”

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Me?? Flying lessons?? Why?



“Great, we can arrange that.” ***



I still didn’t know why, but the next week I showed up. Bob didn’t. A last-

minute instructor switch gave me Randy, with his crushed cowboy hat, boots and plaid shirt. Randy was in a hurry. He pointed to a mountain range of clouds. “See that that hole up there?” Turning knobs and switches on the panel, he took off in a flash, ascending li e a rocket. “We’re gonna punch right through it!”

My dropped jaw didn’t protest once during this (w)hole episode. Was cloud-

busting FAA legal? We disappeared through a keyhole and reappeared inside blue outer space, skimming white heavenly puffs. “Heehaaaw!” Randy hooped. “How ya doin’ shweet-haht?” he said, mimicking Bogart in The African Queen.

“Oh, fin . Hunky dory.” Got one of those bags?



Burrowing down through the abyss was equally heart-stopping and soon we

arrived at Destination Practice Area, over quiet eastern plains.

“Just push the yoke forward, like this.” Randy demonstrated.

The nose

went down. “See your speed? Faster.” Pulling back on the yoke raised the nose, so



“Meaning…?”



“The plane would stop flyin . I’ll show you later.” I must have blanched.

“Today let’s get the feel of turning. Simple wide turns.”

My foot mashed the right rudder. We turned right.



“That was easy.”

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we slowed. “Don’t pull back much,” he warned, “or the wing’ll stall.”

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“Jes’ like ridin’ a horse.”



Altimeter above ground: 1200 feet. “Perfect,” he said. “Maintain this

altitude while turning.” I made a gradual turn but lost height. “Okay, go back up.” Ten times later I nailed it.

The lesson was over too fast. I liked the feel of ‘pulling G’s’. By the end of

the second lesson I was swaggering and bought a leather jacket. Who would have guessed? A face-off with my worst fear. No one, including my grandkids, could have been more shocked.

For weeks I practiced steep turns, 180s, 360s, tight turns, swift altitude

changes, and slow flight where it seemed we’d drop from the sky. One skill difficult for me to master was the foreign language of the radio. I learned precise ways to communicate with control towers, quickly enunciating minimal words, also sharing traffic and eather warnings with other pilots when not in a tower’s vicinity.

Lucky to have excellent eyesight, I could detect power lines, people, and

praying mantis in the far distance. Once, we were behind a Mooney, both preparing to land at the isolated Front Range airstrip near Denver International Airport, when I spotted a deer near the runway. Excited, I punched the radio button and warned the Mooney pilot, “Deer, it’s fi e o’clock, heading south.” Silence and then a male voice: “Yes, dear… I know, dear… I’m coming straight home, dear.” I found that, sometimes, air jockeys cautiously risked radio jocularity.

I was cautious, too… overly cautious about landing. I couldn’t get my nerve

up. It paralyzed me. “See that band-aid way down there? You have to land on it.” I’d rather rip a band-aid off a fresh scab. Volume 49

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Repeatedly, Randy would have to take over the controls after I’d fl wn the

entire lesson. Or I would try to land and then, at the last second, chicken out. I’d

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managed takeoffs, why not landings? Sometimes I felt like crying in frustration but stowed those unseemly tears. I could sense my instructor’s frustration as well. One day he said, kindly, “Know what, shweet-haht? If ya wanna be a pilot, ya gotta point this baby down sometime.” I went home thinking hard about his message. Did I have “the right stuff ” to be a pilot? I wasn’t sure but I had to find out soon ***

“Cessnas are tough workhorses,” said Randy, as he guided me down to my

first bucking bronco touchdown. How embarrassing. Afterward I practiced descents and touch-and-go’s, one after another, hard-bumping on concrete, fin ers crossed I wouldn’t fracture the wheels. Finally, right out of the blue, so to speak, I made a smooth, perfect landing. I zoomed up to the traffic pattern and did it again. And again. Three, in a half hour. I want a cold beer.

Randy: “O-kay, you’re PIC now!”



Me: “Yayyyy! What’s PIC?”



Randy: “You know… FAA for Pilot-in-Command.”



He didn’t dwell on soloing. Nor did I. I wasn’t ready. Weeks later I had a

substitute teacher who asked how many hours I’d accumulated. “About 35,” I said, sheepishly. I knew most students earned their licenses in 30 to 40. He said, “You should’ve soloed by now. Let’s see what’s going on.” He gave some flight directions. I executed all his commands, though sluggishly. The instructor frowned. ”Here’s the



I wanted Randy back. Randy had sour breath most days, but he wasn’t sour

grapes. Yet, I knew the man was right.

The next week Randy headed me to the

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problem: the plane is flying ou; you’re not flying the plan .”

Practice Area, leveling at 3,000 feet. I’d radioed ATC permission to use that airspace.

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My assignment? Create an intentional stall, a.k.a., Make the plane stop flyin .

Slowly I raised the nose. Up, up, until the wings lost air. With zero lift we

began dropping and buffeting. A stall horn blasted. Can’t-Do-This! Can’t-Do-This! Using all my skills, I tried stabilizing the plane’s ‘degrees of freedom’ – yaw, pitch, roll. Is this my showstopper? Buffeting frightened me. Randy took the controls.

I repeated; I stalled; I recovered. Again. Again. Finally, I was flying the

airplane instead of it flying m . I also realized, at last … Terry could not have recovered.

I religiously practiced engine failure maneuvers: 1) turn off engine; 2) begin

glide; 3) scout for/identify unobstructed landing site; 4) lose altitude slowly; 5) radio position to ATC. 6,7,8) Don’t panic, Don’t panic, Don’t panic.

Winter days were often bone-freezing. After snowfalls I perched on a ladder

to scrape ice off wings, struts, fuselage, nose, tail, and propeller for 6:30 a.m. lessons. In spring I plowed through sudden wind shears. On sweaty summer days, with fullyloaded fuel, I repeated prolonged takeoffs in Colorado’s ‘high density altitude’.

I

refined short-field takeoffs, mid-field landings and completed pilot ground school in ten weeks, scoring 98 percent on the test. I became fluent in ATC lingo and achieved navigation proficien y. I drilled ‘slipped’ landings, where I descended at a slant, dropping like an elevator exactly on the big white numbers that indicate runway direction, e.g., Runway 1-7 for 170 degrees. I channeled Chuck Yeager’s “right stuff ” on every landing, flaps or n .

The ATCs all knew me (You again? Over) -- my voice, my call signs, my

special problems. One problem was maintaining constant altitude. I would sink Volume 49

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from 1000 to 900 feet in the pattern. I wouldn’t notice losing 100 feet since my attention was locked on keeping up critical airspeed. ATCs sometimes positioned me, helpfully, interleaving my touch-and-go’s with jets to learn needs of different aircrafts.

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I met new ATCs, beyond my locale, on extended lessons which included two evening flights spanning the no th-south jeweled nightlights of Denver. ***

The big day came when Randy said I was “ready for the rodeo.” The week

before, he’d announced I was close to soloing so I’d spent endless days of anticipation.

“Wish me luck.” I climbed into the PIC seat and initiated the checklist.



Randy climbed stairs to the control tower in case he needed to speak with me

on radio. I taxied into position. ATC: “Three Niner Whiskey. Cleared for takeoff. Good luck.” I sucked in a lungful and exhaled as I rolled. The plane was lighter with just one person so we launched like a bird, popping up fast. I guided 39W into the pattern.

Six months of Randy’s voice commands spoke in my mind. Watch airspeed.

70 knots. Check altitude. 900. I pulled back, gaining 100 feet, made three square turns and set up for final approach. I pointed down, extended flap . I felt the exhilaration of instant drag, of gravity’s pull. Rear tires down, I flared the nose, eased the front wheel onto the tarmac. Textbook. Traversing the taxiway, I felt something crack. It was my big smile, at Randy waving his cowboy hat. I braked in front of him and scrambled out for a hug. He cut off the bottom half of my shirt – a solo tradition. I was half a pilot!

In weeks I completed three solo journeys -- to Pueblo, to Kansas, to Nebraska.

Randy called the FAA for my final test. ***

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When I’d logged 65 hours, twice as many as the ‘average student’ (a male, in his 30s)

“Perfect Rocky Mountain day,” said the FAA test conductor, checking my

logbook.

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I was scared from headset to toes. Not of flying, but failin .



Here’s the upshot: I shot up from Runway 1-7 a student, and one hour later

I returned a licensed private pilot. “You got it, Grandma. You did good.”

I stayed in the cockpit while Mr. FAA went inside to do paperwork. Randy

came to sit with me. I told him the story and we both liberated those tears.

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KG Newman Inner City

Sparring kittens on each corner. Priests, rabbis, monks surround the claw-offs; they toss around Monopoly money. Loser must haul respective carcass into street, where it’s stomped to a pulp by a parade of faceless glass people stretching up and down the avenues… Many of us don’t even notice. A man had stubbed his toe on the jagged city sidewalk and is now busy hunting down the concrete company. He lights a cigarette and throws still-lit match into a trash can consisting of one wailing baby and newspaper: Epidermal charcoal scent evidence of an illusion, when cracked, one can never go back to believing…

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I cannot lie. I am afraid. A pickpocket bumps by and suddenly I have more cash. Every stranger I see has a smile for me, and the priests keep asking if I want to play. Am I not who I thought I was? I only know the world has gone mad and that the glare from the parade’s reflection which I have worked so hard to avoid, is beginning to hurt my head.

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Petra Perkins War and Peace



Lawrence sat cross-legged on the floor of the old aunts’ kitchen, playing

soldiers. They were staggered on opposing sides, flanked by cannons, just like in the newsreels at the picture-show.

To collect soldiers he’d been to every Co’cola machine in town to fish out

bounties of bottle caps from the receptacles. He and his buddy, Otis Jr., both ten, had made quite a haul during summer but found they needed even more as the war continued to escalate. They spent July and August shooting air-rifle , and the bull, on the cool side of the chicken house, sharing a Lucky Strike now and then and blowing up the Axis soldiers.

Battles often lasted hours; sometimes they fell asleep in the

hay, lulled by trains whistling from the station a mile east. At the start of school Otis Jr. had gone to live with his grandmother in Alabama, so Lawrence was left alone to mastermind the war.

On the cracked black-and-white linoleum floor he mounted his bottle cap

brigade. They were troops for front-line and surprise attacks, backup and cover, trenches and fortification. Co’Cola caps represented the home boys; Nehi were Brits; Grapes were German “Sour Krauts”; Orange Crush caps were reserved for Japanese POWs. He used an ice pick to remove the inner cork circles, for foxhole sandbags. This made the caps lighter for explosions, especially in dirt. But since it was raining he was in the kitchen today. Lawrence positioned the soldiers strategically.

“Y’all ready to start frying this mess of doughnuts,” said Aunt Bertha in her

Miss’ippi drawl, “or yew just gonna pay me to cool my heels?”

The sisters made doughnuts only when it rained because the kitchen was cooler

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and dogs gathered – as if a homeless animal conventionon – the sisters’ back stoop

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under the awning to stay dry. Bertha could be counted on to throw doughnut scraps out to the mob, so it had become a tradition. Their own yard dog, Buster, pushed his nose on the screen-door, with a pathetic low whine, trying to persuade someone, as he had done unsuccessfully every day for twelve years, to let him inside. As he was a dog, he knew from the familiar smell of hot lard that today was The Day. Buster loved doughnuts more than any old mutt in Mississippi.

”You never paid me for sittin’ pretty, and I am pretty,” said her sister Cassie,

and then she went back to humming along with a song playing in the parlor.

“Turn that danged radio off, sassy Cassie,” said Bertha. “The battery,” she

said battry… “it’s gonna die and we can’t charge it on account we don’t have any gas ration left.” The massive wood-cased floor radio, connected to a 12-volt car battery behind its cabinet doors, was used strictly on special occasions.

“Nooo, ma’am. I’m playing my music. I have to have my tunes when we do

doughnuts, you know that.”

The sky, heavy with low clouds, made the kitchen dusky in mid- afternoon.

Oil lamps cast shadows, deepening the dark grease spots faded on floral wallpaper. Bertie was working up to one of her fit , Cass could tell. A fifth of Early Times stood on the table between them like a sentinel.

Bertha leveled a test spoonful of thick dough into a pot of sizzling oil.

“Lordy, these gonna be goo-ood. We haven’t had these sugah babies in a month of



The boy placed matchboxes as battlefield bunkers for soldiers with artillery.

He’d found his soldiers guarding the chicken house when he went to get the coal oil

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Sundays. Hoo-ee!” She turned up the flame under the pot.

(“Larnce, go git the coal-all.”) It was Lawrence’s duty to fill the stove, lanterns, sconce lamps and fancy lamps in the dining rooms and bedrooms. He had learned to use the

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galvanized can with corrugated sides and wire-bail handle. First he placed the Whistle Junction Gazette on the table in case he spilled any. Then he decanted the lamps over the newspapers, pouring with his tongue stuck

On the morning of doughnut day, Lawrence had gone out to the oil drum to fill the glass jug with kerosene (“Don’t bang the screen-door, Larnce, I told yew!”). He’d slowly poured it from the jug into the fixture that fed three stove burners.

out to one side, cleaning soot from chimneys, trimming wicks before he returned lamps to chimneys.

“The

bursitis,”

Bertha

announced,

upending her shot-glass.

Cassie hummed along with Dinah Shore’s

“Blues in the Night”.

Then she began to

sing… My momma done told me… Step, sway. A man is a two-faced. Bump, grind. My momma done told me…

“Yeah, sister, your momma done told you.

A lot of good that did.”

Hellzbellz, here we go, thought Cassie. I’m gettin’ the mollycoddles now. She downed

a swallow from a tiny glass.

No one was counting but the spinsters had shared 23,000 evenings in that

yellow daisied, kerosene-reeking kitchen with the coal-all stove, an imposing blackand-chrome contraption with iron claw legs and hissing water tank.

It was like a

third sister spewing steam, heaving her sighs, groans, and cackles. xOn the morning of doughnut day, Lawrence had gone out to the oil drum to fill the glass jug with kerosene (“Don’t bang the screen-door, Larnce, I told yew!”). He’d slowly poured Volume 49

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it from the jug into the fixture that fed three stove burners. Aunt Cassie and Aunt Bertie breathed down his neck to make sure he didn’t spill.

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Bertha ladled dollops of dough into bubbling grease. A second pot readied

on the burner, on the brink of boil. “They’re gonna be enough doughnuts for the whole danged church!” she said.

“Bert, don’t profane in front of Larnce,” said Cassie. She’d made the “O”

shapes, punched the holes, and wiped flour off her hands with a tea towel embroidered PEACE ON EARTH.

“And who went and made you God this week?” Bertha said then poured

another measure. “First Momma gives you the brooch before she died, then Pastor puts your name before mine on the funeral board even though I was first-bo n, and now I got yew sayin’ how sweet I talk?” Bertha sucked life into a Kool and parked it on the lip of the ashtray.

Lawrence moved two soldiers within pointblank range. “Bang, baanng!”



Cassie dropped the worthless pinkie glass into the sink and sipped straight

out of the bottle. The sisters stood side by side, lowering and turning doughnuts to bob and brown. “Are we doin’ this again, Bert? Cain’t we get through one blessed day without your tongue fallin’ off the wagon?”

Bertha got straight to the point, tapping her cigarette ash. “Miss. Goody.

Two shoes! Well, Momma knew the truth. You broke her heart when you ran off with that two-timer Clayton.”

Cassie wiped her brow with the hem of the red-checkered apron. She moved

before Bert would really start to fry.

“Bertie, dearie… Momma always loved me but she never played favorites.

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to change the subject because she knew when Clayton came up it wouldn’t be long

I think you’ve forgotten how she spanked the evahlivin’ tar” … tah … “out of me for

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what you did in the outhouse.”

Bert sipped another, then handed the bottle over. “I don’t care a whit what

you think, Miss Priss, I didn’t do that. I didn’t put that half-dead snake in there to scare Momma, like you told her.”

“I know you didn’t. You put it there for me and then she went out instead and

it scared the b’jesus out of her.”

The cats prowled on window ledges, staring into the kitchen. They hissed at

each other, backs arched. Dogs nervously paced, waiting for someone to come near the door.

Cassie rolled out some dough, floured it, and rolled it more, slamming the

roller down harder with each spread. Bertha shook the white dough hard off the spoon and accidentally flung a pile onto her sister’s face. Cassie stepped back, wiped it off with the tea towel. She dipped her own spoon into the batter for a half doughnut’s worth and fired a sal o across the checkered floor at Be tha, smacking her shoes.

Lawrence moved the cannons into position.



The music wafted… Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, nonono,

anyone else but me, nonono, anyone else but me… Bertha took three swigs of bourbon without breathing, inched forward to re-load onto a spatula, and aimed into Cassie’s hairbun. Bullseye!

“Clayton was happy as a clam with me until you chahmed him, you little

snake chahmah, with your clevah, clevah ways… dancin’, singin’ right in his baby face, makin’ him crazy as a loon.” Volume 49

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There was brief cease-fire while they both lit cigarettes, a Kool and a Lucky.

Smoke clouds hung over the kitchen. Doughnuts mounted into heaps, either being

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fried or cooled in their freshly glazed sugar coatings.

The dogs could smell progress as they formed their spy ring by the screen-

door, whooping and howling to beat the band on the radio. Restless cats pawed each other, down and dirty now, skirmishes in mud.

Bertha said, “Yew think Clayton’s a prince, but he’s as ordinary as pig tracks!”



Cassie took a significant hit off the bottle and discharged a larger weapon, a

soup ladle of dough, lobbed square into Bert’s brassiere which stuck up over the “V” of her apron.

Bert wadded up a handful of dough and slapped a blow to Cass’ kisser.



Cass came running at Bert with a warm sugah doughnut and squished it onto

her nose.

They stopped for a quick drag.



“Don't go walking down lovers' lane with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone

else but me, nonono… ‘til I come marching home.”

Bertha stumbled into the parlor, stared at the radio, face-on with the enemy.

She turned the knob up on the Andrews Sisters as loud she could.

“Chattanooga choo choo… there’s gonna be… a certain party at the station…. Woo hooo.”



Then she ripped its little knobs off and yanked the cord from the battery.

Cassie swooned on the davenport. Back to the kitchen, both stopped to refuel from the bottle, no rationing.

Soon the airspace was filled with floating flour along with doughnuts -- fried, raw, and half-cooked – flying li e softballs at the Sunday baseball game.

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Lawrence flicked the ice pick to the rims of the bottle tops to set off explosions.

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Chi-boom, yadada! Chi boom, chi boom! Orange Crush and Grapes upside down (casualties). Some leaning (wounded). Only Co’Cola troops were carried to the field hospital for triage.

Then… all quiet on the Southern front. When the Four O’clock left Whistle

Junction on time a sudden silence occupied the kitchen. The clamor’s surrender and the stink of charred grease drove Lawrence to get up from the floo . Allies had won today’s battle, again.

Aunt Bertie was down and out -- her sticky head lolled partly under the

hushed stove.

Aunt Cassie, snoring, slumped in a clump in the corner.

Dough

oozed its lava from the walls and ceiling. Spatters coated nearly every surface.

The

boy peered into the pots: golden doughnut holes had shrunk to dozens of small hard shiny pieces, like copper pennies in the church offering.

Seeing the boy, Buster jumped up on the screen-door in frenzy, balancing on

his hind legs, squealing a better-than-average appeal. Lawrence watched him perform his circus act, smiled, and then opened the door. At first Buster didn’t know what to do. He seemed paralyzed except for drool dripping from his black lips, but then got the gist and tore headlong through the house, wet fur flyin . Other muddy dogs exploded in from the chicken house like thunder and lightning, followed by three dirty cats. The animal convention had moved to a nicer venue on this, their lucky day. And what a sweet day it was! Doughnuts, dough, sugah treats everywhere.

Lawrence drained the last drop of bourbon and surveyed the spoils of war.

Opening his aunts’ purses, he took a dollar from each, lit a Lucky, stowed one behind his ear, and banged the screen-door on his way out to the picture-show. Volume 49

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Cindy Charlton My Left Breast



I’m not crazy about my prosthetic breast. It’s heavy and it’s hot. It has a

partially erect nipple, like those perky breasted mannequins in the women’s sections of department stores. My real breast doesn’t constantly have a partially erect nipple, so when I wear the fake I try to catch a cool breeze, just to even myself out.

Several years ago, right after I got my prosthetic breast, I had it lying out on

my bed. I was surveying it closely—excited about wearing it for the first time. I left my bedroom for a moment. As I was walking back down the hall towards my room, I saw my four-year-old son, Colin, standing by my bed petting that rubber breast.

“What are you doing?” I asked

laughing.

My husband, Michael, was behind

me drinking in this scene. Eyes lit up, smile spreading, he was obviously proud of his son’s manly behavior.

As I was walking back down the hall towards my room, I saw my four-yearold son, Colin, standing by my bed petting that rubber breast.

“I like the way this feels,” Colin cooed

in his innocent little boy’s voice.

After days of admiring my new breast from afar, I decided it was time to get

personal with the thing. I put it in my specially made bra and donned the underpinning with much pageantry.

It was special, this breast, and I wanted to treat it special.

revealed a fairly normal, not special, looking chest.

My blouse was evenly distributed across my bust line not bunched up on the

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I thought that it would make me look special too, but the honesty of my mirror

left side, which was a good change. I surveyed the entirety of my torso, scrutinizing one side then the other. Even I couldn’t tell which side was real and which side

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wasn’t. And for a moment—one precious moment—I forgot about the horror that lay beneath that fake breast. And Then There Was One

My mother had two friends who were diagnosed with breast cancer, in the mid

70’s. Both women had mastectomies—breast and lymph nodes were not left untouched. Both endured grueling chemotherapies and radiation therapies. One survived.

Being in my early 20’s, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrific than losing

a breast. Thoughts of having my young lovely body carved up like a turkey—“I’ll have the breast please”—made me shiver…violently. In my naive young woman’s mind losing a breast did nothing to secure life.

I drove my mother crazy with the”whys” and “what if ’s.” I wanted her to say,

“It will never happen to you.” But my mother knew better. She had lived long enough to know—especially after burying her friend—that anything could happen to anyone. She was right.

On Thursday, February 13th, 1997 “anything” happened to me. At forty

years old, my life as I had known it, ended. I lost my left breast. Ironically it had nothing to do with cancer. The Bug

I first heard the term, “flesh eating virus” while driving to work one morning.

NPR was broadcasting a story about a California woman who had contracted this disease. Listening intently, I was certain that this poor woman was literally being eaten alive. The commentator reported that she was “fighting for her life.” As the broadcast ended, I had visions of Leprosy dancing in my head. Volume 49

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It was two years later when I felt the first symptom. The furthest thing from

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my mind was illness. The flesh eating whatever was never even a consideration. I thought I had pulled a muscle in my left shoulder. I had no idea, no inkling that something was seriously wrong. But at that moment in time I was headed straight for the entrance of the Twilight Zone—even without the appearance of Rod Serling. And like every Twilight Zone episode, once I was engaged in this process, there was no turning back. On February 15th, my left breast along with all the tissue and muscle was removed from my chest. On March 8th, my legs below the knees and my right hand and forearm were amputated. All in all, I was one of the lucky ones; I got out of the Zone alive, but certainly not unscathed.

When I emerged from my 45 day drug induced coma, I couldn’t wrap my

mind around what had happened. Just like the woman I had heard about on NPR, I had somehow contracted “the flesh eating virus.” My Infectious Disease doctor, or as my nurses referred to him—the “ID doc,”— called it “Strep A Necrotizing Fasciitis,” or “NF”, not the flesh eating virus. Twice wrong in one name, it is not a virus, nor does it eat flesh

“When the Strep bacteria enter the bloodstream, they become toxic destroying

subcutaneous tissue. In your case, they destroyed muscle (Myositis) too.” The ID doc looked over his dark rimmed glasses, eyebrows raised to his hairline.

Did he think he was lecturing to a medical student? Had I been in my right

mind I would have asked for an interpreter, or at least a dictionary.

“I’ve only seen a few other cases of NF in my career. It’s rare; approximately

Myositis like you did…that’s exceedingly rare.”

He was serious in tone, but his eyes were dancing, almost like he was excited to

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1 in 365,000 people contract Strep A Necrotizing Fasciitis per year. And to get the

be in the presence of greatness. I felt a bit of a celebrity, but quickly realized it was the

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disease that was the big draw. In the world of Infectious Disease bacteria play the main stage. Then he dropped the bomb. His words literally changed my point of view.

“You are exceedingly lucky to be alive.”



My left breast, two legs, and one hand seemed a small price to pay for one life.



My Oh My Oh Michael



I was intact—two breasts, two legs, two hands—when I met Michael. I’m

not the type who generally falls for guys easily, but oh my… Michael. He lit up my world, fathered my children, and took care of me when I lost almost every body part I came into our marriage owning. He loved me complete, incomplete, completely.

When I began my walk on the dark side, Michael began his constant vigil at

my bedside. He was my eyes, ears, and voice. It was he who had to endure the real threat that I would not survive. But the true test of his love was proven over and over again in the choices he made to up my chances of living.

I was unconscious when the time to amputate became necessary to my

survival. So the decision was an easy one for me…not so much for the man who had promised to “have and to hold me for better or for worse.” I don’t recall if he promised to have and to hold me all chopped up.

Lucky for me, Michael understood that in my case anyway, the sum of the

parts was absolutely not greater than the whole.

Motherhood and Wifehood

After my six month hiatus from wife and mother, I came home and began

the emotionally arduous and physically demanding work of re-claiming my life. Doctor appointments, out-patient rehab, and re-establishing myself as wife and Volume 49

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mother became my day to day.

Charlton



I was a stranger to my eighteen month old, Colin, and a dangerous one at

that. Every time he got close to me, he hit his little forehead on the rigid outer edges of my prostheses. It taught him to steer clear of me, and it broke my heart. I had to ease my way into his life, one bedtime story and one toy car at a time. Michael built a table for Colin and me to race our cars on, and gave us every opportunity to re-form the bond which had been stripped away from mother and child.

Slowly, I regained my balance. I changed diapers, made soup and love, and paid

bills. There were struggles along the way that first year, but eventually I established my new normal, single-handedly, and without legs. My husband and children expected nothing less from me merely because I was missing three limbs. In their eyes, I was wife and mom, not a porcelain doll. The normalcy of my life overshadowed the “abnormalcy,” and I never once considered how I was going to live the whole of my life without my once beloved left breast. The Pictures

My physical therapist told me that “doing stairs” would help build those

“needed quads” and improve my balance for walking.

I thought that balance

improvement on a flat surface was a better choice than stairs. But he was Sensei, the guru of walking; I was Grasshopper. We moved the home office to our basement, which ensured my PT’s recipe for success. I was filing in my office one afternoon, and found an unfamiliar manila envelope stuffed in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

I pulled out the contents of the envelope, and realized that I was holding

comprehending what I was looking at. Then it began to dawn on me. I was looking at 8X10 color glossies of blackened ulcerated limbs. My right hand, clawed and birdlike,

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photographs of some sort. I looked at the pictures—stared at them actually—not

stared right back at me.

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A flashba k of a morphine induced nightmare I had in the ICU hit hard. I

was dressed in a satin red and green plaid Christmas dress, laying flat on my back on a bed. I had no arms—no legs. Only my head was sticking out of that dress. People were in my room taking pictures of me. I was screaming at them to stop, but I had no voice—no words were able to form. I felt violated, ashamed of what was happening.

I thought it was just another crazy morphine dream, but here was proof

positive that this dream was more than just a dream; the pictures were taken.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” Hot angry tears fell on those rank, putrid,

foul pictures.

Michael came running. He saw the pictures lying on the floo .



“Why?” The word escaped barely audible. I was scared to open my mouth

for fear of vomiting on the carpet.

“I thought that maybe you would need to know… someday… why I had

to make that decision,” he said. “I wanted you to know how bad it was so you’d understand why I had to make it.”

Michael was not an overly emotional guy. He stated these words with such

logical reason that it stopped me dead in my watery, tear stained tracks. I didn’t want to admit it, but it made sense. I would like to have held onto the drama for a few more minutes, but Michael was so annoyingly right in his reasoning that he put it to rest before it got the chance to ramp itself up.

“Shred ‘em,” I said, wiping away the tears.



It took me awhile to understand that my husband took those pictures not

because he thought I couldn’t handle my situation, but because he was the one who Volume 49

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needed the reminder. He needed the reassurance that the only choice he had was to

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allow amputation… chopping off pieces of the wife he so adored.

By the time I figured it out, Mi hael had permanently left our family. And now the cancer



Michael was diagnosed with Stage IV Adrenal Cortical Carcinoma, an

extremely rare cancer of the adrenal gland, two years after my home-coming. The oncologist looked at Michael, in awe, almost disbelief that he had him as a patient.

“In my twenty-fi e years of practice, I have only seen one other case of

Adrenal Cortical Carcinoma.”

The words rolled off of his tongue as easily as marbles roll off tables. It

took me months to get the name right, and I choked on each word.

“You are literally one in a million, Michael,” the Oncologist said.



His doctor looked serious and concerned, but I couldn’t help notice the same

look of excitement in his eyes that my ID doc had. Rare diseases, amazing statistics, their patients…we probably earned our docs the medical conference trifecta.

Michael’s eyebrows rose. He looked at me and with a sarcastic smile and said,

“Hmmm, you’re 1 in 365,000, and I’m 1 in a 1000,000, why can’t we win the lottery?”

But Michael did win. Like Tessie Hutchinson in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery,

Michael got the piece of white paper with the black dot. He was a dead man, not by the hands of family, friends, and neighbors... but by the ruthless heartless hands of cancer. I left the Dr.’s office that day knowing that “all good things must come to an

end.” Chaucer was correct. Everything good—or bad—ends. It just takes longer for the bad to go away. My husband, the man who loved me wholly, died way too soon.

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On July 4th, 2001, my friend, my lover, my Michael left this earth accompanied

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by spectacular booming fire orks. And just as fire orks imprint the night sky and fade away; he too left his imprint, but his is permanent, unfading, forever on my heart.

My life, once again, was changed irrevocably—not by choice or design. Coming to Terms



Just the other day, I was looking at my prosthetic breast lying at the ready on

my bed. I remembered the conversation with my mom so many years ago. How I said the things I said about losing a breast, and making a vain assumption of myself to her—especially after the death of her friend—was unbelievable. The memory made me cringe. I thought about how self-centered and naive my statement was about being ready to risk my life to save a breast. For a brief moment I felt ashamed of how I acted—what I said.

As I disrobed, and started to dress for my day, I took in an incredible image.

I was standing in front of my mirror in all of my glory, one breasted, one handed, and wearing glorified sticks for legs. The absurdity of this image and thoughts of old Star Trek Cyborg episodes sent me into peals of laughter.

My twenty-year-old self would have been mortifi d by this catastrophe. I

wondered if my devastating illness had occurred without Michael’s validation of my womanhood—regardless of my absent breast—would I have survived it, or would I have died from sheer unadulterated vanity.

I composed myself and continued getting ready. I contemplated wearing my

prosthetic breast knowing that it would give me a more polished finished look

My twenty-year-old self reminded me that I looked oh so much better with

it placed neatly beneath my blouse. But my fifty-yea -old self, the self that has been Volume 49

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through two wars, covered inside and out with battle scars; the self I have come to love more than I thought possible, decided “nah.” It’s heavy and it’s hot.

Robert King Remembering People

How easily they come to mind, the Swede sitting in the Baptist church’s first r w, his head nodding lower at each verse, or silver-haired Mrs. Shepherd, watchful, stern in her busy body, or, thinking of contrasts, the Unitarians to whom belonged the heavenly blonde Nancy from high school and Bill, my friend, a violinist with glasses. Who knew what would happen? Everyone, now: Bill a scientist my age, Nancy never to be my age. And thinking now of high school, our innocent companions, there was the kid, “crippled”, we called it then, the word itself twisted, who hauled himself up the stairs, one wrenching lunge for each step. Needing to find something to praise, we marveled at his muscles. Although the Baptists would be lifted up in sunset clouds, the Unitarians

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ascend to a logical music, and I would alternately stumble and saunter through life, as we call it, I now mainly remember that boy, dragging his bent legs one foot at a time, foot at a time, laboring hugely toward whatever lay above us all.

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Juanita L. Pope Growth coming out of fi e Progenitor Staff Interveiw With Dr. Tony Cheng



The 2013 Progenitor celebrates continual growth—growth coming out of fir .

Philosophically, fire can be destructive, devastating, and most definitely difficult. Fire, metaphorically, can be interpreted as challenges, obstacles, trials, and life’s lessons learned only by coming through tedious times with noted growth. Fire can be seen as passion, drive, ambition—all good things.

Dr. Tony Cheng, Colorado State University Forestry Associate Professor

and Director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, uses nature to show how growth comes on the heels of devastation. He says, “There are the penstomen plants whose growth response is to smoke. They need smoke to germinate. A few weeks after fir , we see new growth coming.”

Many of our contributors in the Progenitor 2013 give witness to their personal

fires and triumphs in the art they share. Like a plant’s growth in a forest, it seems writer’s growth is most stunning after fir . For example, a writer going through cancer molds her experience into a powerful poem that touches countless lives. Then, there’s the person who lived a heart-wrenching childhood and somehow makes art of the ordeal, writing a short story with striking beauty and dignity.

In forest burnings, interestingly, there are three categories. First, cool fire—

burns low to the ground. Second, mixed severity—burns the ground area but does not burn to the height of tree tops. And third, fire severity. All categories result in some form of forest destruction and, most importantly, new forest growth. Dr. Cheng says, “When plants grow, roots absorb a lot of nutrients and carbon. When fire burns vegetating plants, the fire actually releases those nutrients in the ground. Release of nutrients that are piled up in plants release baby plants. Nature is adapted to situations Volume 49

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like fire to sustain its needs and to o through the natural growth cycle.”



In the life of the artist there are many categories of fire-insti ated experiences.

Within the Progenitor 2013, each contributor displays a strong fie y ambition, fueling personal growth in the natural cycle of being an artist.

Certainly, just as forest fires release nutrients hoarded in plants, fires of life

can jolt artists into digging deeper into themselves and their life experiences, releasing the energy stockpiled and sometimes locked up in psyche, heart, and mind. It is in these deeper places that new art emerges—fresh, edgy, rich, and beautiful mosaics, like the works here, in Progenitor 2013. In the words of Dr. Cheng, “Taking fire out of the forest changes how forests evolve. Diverse mosaic forest structure is the result of fir . Forest suppression of fire creates no mosaic growth.” What we learn here is that to be artists, we must remain open to all the elements: fir , drought, and sweet monsoon alike.

Dr. Tony Cheng is Associate Professor and Director of Colorado Forest

Institute with Colorado State University. He holds a PhD in Forest Resources from Oregon State University. His interests include forest governance, policy, and administration, specifically collaborative, participatory strategies that attempt to sustain both resilient forest ecosystems and the well being of forest-reliant communities.

Selected Articles and website:



of Framing, Scale, and Building Sustainable Capacity” Journal of Forestry



110.8 (2012): 415-420. Web. 15 Apr.2013 .

Colorado State University. Colorado Forest Restoration Institute. CSU, 2013. Web.

15Apr.2013. http://coloradoforestrestoration.org/

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Williams, Daniel R. et al. “Community Wildfire Protection Planning: The Importance

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Contributors

*Christine Adams is currently a student at ACC, working towards BFA in Photography.” Her photograph is a reflection of passion in capturing the beauty of Colorado.” COA Photography. *Charles Edward Brooks was born in North Carolina. He holds degrees from Duke University and the University of Lausanne and lives in Switzerland. *Cindy Charlton is a professional speaker and published author. She has published in three Chicken Soup for the Soul series, inMotion magazine, and Happenstance. *Annie Dawid, author of three books of ficti n, teaches AP English at the Custer County High School in Westcliffe, CO. She will teach her second workshop at the Taos Summer Writers Conference this July. *Stacia Duvall is a photographer and writer who explores the beauty of place and the teachings of time through her photographs and her Winsomebella blog. *Michael Eltrich writes about lives changed by travel, love and war. He and Lynn Rider make their home in Denver, but they love traveling in South-East Asia *Colleen E. Gaul is a Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist with a private practice in psychotherapy. She lives in Conifer, Colorado with her life partner and Bouvier des Flandres, Sy. *David Johnston lives in Boulder with his wife and two kids. He plays banjo for his work. *Robert King’s Old Man Laughing was a finalist for the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. He lives in Greeley and directs the website www.ColoradoPoetsCenter.org. *Molly Martin writes poetry and nonfiction and will soon graduate from Metropolitan State University of Denver with a creative writing degree. *Joyce Mcclain loves photography. “Everything about this form of art fascinates me. The light, the subject matter, the technical aspects, and the alternative processes, all allow me to express myself. I consider myself a seasoned photographer lucky enough to have ACC as a partner in my career.” *KG Newman was born and raised in Denver, Colorado and is a recent graduate of Arizona State University. Learn more about him at kylenewmanjournalist.wordpress.com. *Sharon Owens is a budding novelist pursuing an associate’s degree in creative writing at Volume 49

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Arapahoe Community College. *Petra Perkins writes essay, fiction, poetry, humor, memoir. Her literary hero is Nora Ephron. An exciting aerospace engineering career is in Petra’s rear-view mirror. *Amanda Richardson is a senior at Mountain Vista high school taking AP studio drawing and painting; this is by far her favorite piece that she’s done this year. *Robert Schroeder is a contractor and a ceramics student at Arapahoe Community College. His piece won Best of Sculpture for the Juried Ceramics Show at ACC.*Rosanne Sterne is an award-winning poet, watercolorist and flu ist. Her first poetry chapbook, Dancing in the Gaps, was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press. *James Stewert: Jim has worked as a tech writer, musician, truck driver, laborer, mechanic (of both vehicles and musical instruments), house painter, business owner, salesman, and, through it all, a writer and poet. He lives in Oregon. *Laurie Tompkins: After retiring from a building engineering and construction career at AT&T, *Laurie Tompkins began working in clay. For the past 7 years, her passion has been making both functional and artistic pieces, altering and pushing them to add movement & volume. *Marylin Warner is a writing teacher, coach, and editor. Her weekly blog, “Things I Want To Tell My Mother,” has won several awards: http://warnerwriting.wordpress.com *Abigail Warren currently teaches writing, literature, and poetry at Cambridge College. She is also a recipient of Smith College’s Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize. *Colleen Daisy Weeks discovered the hoar frost, which requires below freezing temperatures, clear skies, and river fog, at Wagon Wheel Gap on the upper Rio Grande. *Andrew Wenner is 18 years old and loves sharing his creations with everyone. *Kathleen Willard’s poetry appeared in Bombay Gin, Matter, & Pinyon Poetry Review. She received a fellowship to attend

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the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

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Submission Guidelines Progenitor only accepts only original material that has not been published elsewhere. Submissions for the 2014 Progenitor including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenplay excerpts and art and photography will be accepted from September 1st, 2013 and must be received by February 17th, 2014. Entries may be emailed to [email protected]. Progenitor is produced by the Literary Magazine Production class at Arapahoe Community College, Littleton Colorado. Funding for the publication is provided by the English Department. To insure impartiality in the selection of pieces submitted for publication, contributor’s names were removed prior to evaluation by the staff. Opinions expressed in the Progenitor do not necessarily reflect those of the Progenitor staff or the administration, faculty, staff or students of Arapahoe Community College. Submissions are the sole property of the contributor.

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Colophon Progenitor 2013 was created using Adobe InDesign CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6. Typefaces were Garamond and Garamond-Bold. Our printing was done by MIDO using Sterling Dull 70#, White paper for the text pages and Topkote Dull, White 100# for the art pages. Cover is Topkote Dull Cover 100#, White paper with Soft Feel Satin AQ.

Copyright 2013 Progenitor. Rights revert to the author upon publication with

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the provision Progenitor receives credit.

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Christine Adams Charles Edward Brooks Cindy Charlton

Petra Perkins Amanda Richardson

Annie Dawid

Robert Schroeder

Stacia Duvall

Rosanne Sterne

Michael Eltrich

J.R. Stewart

Colleen E. Gaul

Laurie Tompkins

David Johnston

Marylin Warner

Robert King

Abigail Warren

Molly Martin

Colleen Weeks

Joyce McClain KG Newman

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Sharon Owens

Andrew Wenner Kathleen Willard