Gabriel Gudding An Ditch They have leftht uth a lone at latht There are logth and thtarth to thtub our toeth and catch too at our eyeth: Thith ditch ith gloriouth. Look at them! The night’th jarth, the thtrange daubing wellth of light: You over me then like a thtar!, our legth twining below our grointh. Your deep fish. My hand-ache. My handth walk into the China of your boobieth. Making love in thith ditch ith gloriouth Gabriel Gudding’s first book, A Defense of Poetry, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in November 2002. He’s an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University. Recent work appears in New American Writing, Mandorla, and L’Bourgeoizine. John Hennessy Shaved Head Forget contingencies from weather and wind, my ex’s head was shaved, the shortest bit of stubble growing in. With darkened arching black eye-brows, Betty-Blue mouth penciled red, jet patent-leather trench and high-heeled boots, she seemed more mannequin for Fashion Ave.’s penitent spread than enemy to brass at Camp LeJeune. Simply and grudgingly put, her talk was action. Invincible in Bell- Atlantic block and tack, she converted non-coms and saved CO’s, harped flint and skinned the chair of military courts through well-pitched cheek, prompt dispatch from the War Resister’s League. She looked good even on a bicycle, hemming left through traffic on Fourteenth Street, locking up on Lafayette or Grand. She doused for me to celebrate–marched right through human waste and Bowery puddles, stretched her legs over the last old-fashioned hobos up to East Second Street. Those ancient days, our vestibule was manned by crack-dealing Stan, a concierge of wit and improv, half his face scored by orange scars from hydrofluoric burns. He kept the place safe. But I had gone, cleared out behind a gang of kids from Bronxville high on catnip wins, shell-game victims. Left Stan my toaster, shelves, a wire bird-cage, and, for once, nothing to say. Except to ask if he could touch her skull. Even now it makes no sense. Her precedents I knew lurched out of focus: photos from France after the Vichy fell, Jeannes and Sylvianes who’d made Nazi moll; those Belfast girls last-ditched by soldier boys or peelers; two- toned Bergen-Belsen, bald sister to Ft. Santiago. Then Squeaky Fromm, the other Manson moms, at Charlie’s trial. Extremes of Joan of Arc, or even Buddhist nuns. Hated, chastened– or chaste, at least. Not what you’d run (I ran) your fingers satisfied across, the stubble surprising, soft as mink or chinch, and arch your back, as I did once she found me uptown, say yes I give again when she went down– and faster now, quick as the television dropped after dishes to the curb–or slipped gradually up, the seconds separating as slowly as but more exquisitely than ticks off expensive fifty-minute hours– and some community service–all gone, and just as easily forgotten the raft of former friends I’d cursed and floated off the island. Shaved head, her slender neck, dark shoulders–that was half– or less–her most convincing argument. John Hennessy's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ontario Review, Salt, the Sewanee Review, the Yale Review, New Letters, Pleiades, and Fulcrum. He currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ada Limon The Lady in the Hardware Store Gets Sad Again The black flag rustles in its nest of sky, some think on it as an omen shoved into air, but this is a delicate matter of history as it moves like a fish’s tail, and its audience of pigeons follow in formation to their rooftop landing, their flight patterns obeying the call, an army’s return to its cement kingdom by the water tower on Roebling Street. Today, she is jealous of the person who holds the flag, wants to be the one to say, Come home to me, and hear wings answering from a distance. Ada Limon is originally from Sonoma, California. She received her M.F.A. from New York University. A two-time Pushcart Nominee and a 2001 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, she recently received a N.Y.F.A. grant and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Slate Magazine, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other publications. She lives and breathes in Brooklyn, New York where she co-curates Pete’s Big Salmon Reading Series and is nearly happy most of the time. Lisa Pearson Paradise c. 1989 With quotations from A History of Paradise by Jean Delumeau 1 In the Tnugdal Vision of 1149, a monk saw Purgatory divided by a wall. On one side of the wall stood those not entirely evil. They escaped the stench of hell but the rain and wind was constant, the days long. On the other side were those not entirely good. There was a meadow of joy through which they could walk, and the fountain of life flowed from which they could drink, but they could not smell the grass and flowers nor taste the water. On both sides of the wall, everyone was waiting. Perhaps some of them thought themselves already in hell or in heaven. And if the wall fell? 2 In paradise, men and women are like little children: their faces shine like the sun, their bodies are made of the light of the stars, incorruptible. They are bold and confident without confusion, glad without fear. 3 Every shop window, dusty and gray. Inside, pyramids of faded boxes, dented tin cans, defeated plastic sacks still sealed, chipped green bottles. Inside them, laundry detergent, elbow macaroni, tiny sausages, boiled potatoes, salt, beer. Oftentimes the window displays were empty, only the drape of red cloth, whitened like a sick tongue, lay wrinkled and bare. There, on the corner, where the street names have been changed from that of one little god to another, in the store window, there remained only a small paper tag leftover from an item long gone, the string undone and curled like a tiny white snake, basking in the winter sun. Handwritten: “Fragment of Happiness Found in Paradise.” 4 In paradise, peace prevails. There is no theft, no strife, no greed, no duress, no divisions. All property is held in common and wealth is not esteemed. Everyone lives in a condition of relative happiness without desire as nothing more is needed than what everyone already has. There is no hunger. So harmonious are the people here that they eat only one kind of food each day and everyone eats the same. There is just enough for everyone. There is no want. There are no poor. All the inhabitants have two tongues to carry on two conversations, one of which is so quiet you can hear it only if you listen carefully, but children born there begin that whisper at a very early age. In paradise, only believers live–heretics and unbelievers, once they arrive, are either immediately converted or fall to the ground stone dead. And there is no lying here. You cannot lie in paradise. 5 It is said that paradise still exists on earth but is impossible to reach, as far away as the moon from the sun, the bottom of the ocean from the highest mountain peak. Encircled by a wall of fire, and ringed by an expanse of chalky white desert in which only the most poisonous and ferocious of creatures live, the gates of Eden are open to only those with a highly auspicious passport or a mandate from God. There are many who have tried in vain to reach paradise. They died from exhaustion from rowing against swells of waves, the noise of the water rendering them deaf, the salt blind. Or they died from the wounds and stabs of stumbling in circles over rough terrain through darkness–no moon, no stars–where demons set little traps to trip men underfoot. Or from the madness of visions from which there is no refuge: Some men have entered Eden but so besieged by visions, they did not know where they were. Legions of cherubim stand guard at those fiery gates. They have wings as iridescent as the rainbow, as broad in span as a monstrous bird of prey. They are vigilant, these cherubim: no one is allowed into paradise and no one is allowed out, though there are exceptions and escapes. But it is most difficult to determine on which side of the gate lies Eden. If you are let in, have you then been kept out? 6 Paradise is both the place where history begins and the place where it ends. –St. Ephraem 7 Here, where the mountain abuts the moon, is paradise, protected by an impenetrable darkness. Imagine any want and it can be fulfilled. Everything in excess. There are perpetual springs, an abundance of fruit and flowers, the most voluptuous of fragrances and tastes–just a breath of an orange will feed a man for days. There are rivers of jewels and oceans of milk, and the streets sparkle in the sunlight. There is merry-making beyond the reach of evil, no fear of punishment, no fear of death. Millions of loyal men ready for any battle. And there are thousands of glorious marvels whether of divine providence or mortal ingenuity: five-footed frogs and two-headed cows are but two small examples. Paradise is the world of infinite possibility. 8 When the Wall fell, it nevertheless remained. For months, more than a year. Every day, from almost any part of the city, you could hear the chime-like din, the constant ching-ching of hammers pounding spikes to split the concrete into rocks, bigger and smaller chunks to hold in your hands, the smooth faces of them colorful but indecipherable–the words and pictures drawn there like a little snippet of a dream, now silent. In the spring of 1990, I met a Polish man on an airplane between New York and Berlin. He told me he was pouring concrete, spray-painting it, breaking it apart, then selling the chunks, fictitiously labeled, to department stores in the United States. A killing, he said. Everyone in America wanted a little piece of freedom to hold in their in their hands. If you took all the pieces sold in the United States, he told me, you could build another wall to split America in two. Maybe along the Mississippi. God, I love the Americans, he said, they will buy anything. At the base of the Berlin Wall, particularly in places where it was hammered down to hip-height, slivers of concrete and mounds of dust rose like rock and sand in a desert. You could imagine dunes laying waste to the city. But the winds rose often in spring, and a thin film of dust clung to windows and doors, and the crumbles of rock gathered in the sidewalk cracks. That’s where it went: everywhere and nowhere. 9 Paradise is not useless though no one lives there anymore. Lisa Pearson ’s work has appeared most recently in Mississippi Review Prize Issue, Chelsea, Aufgabe, and Fiction International, and The Alsiso Anthology (UK). She coedited the anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions and currently lives in Los Angeles. Christopher Tonelli Out of Your Hair On looking at Chagall’s Midsummer Night’s Dream I too, at times, feel like a goat of a groom, groping you with my ungainly hand, my unwieldy nonhoof. It, it appears, is the feature I am most proud to offer you. Or at least that part of us at which I cannot stop staring Though I really like my colorful horns. The devil himself has been dive-bombing them all evening, though he seems a bit distracted, riveted almost, by my very average ears, imploring me, as if even he’s fed up, to do something good. Someone should tell him that it’s just not his thing. He’s even recaptured the attention of one of The Angel’s (the lead singer I think) who luckily has quit it and just stays put clutching his dunce fiddle. I am concerned, though, about my perfectly oval eye, growing more enormous, possibly feeding off of your fading visage. But if you could see this tree the lake… Maybe it is my hand –see here it is– I don’t know. You seem a bit exhausted by my yellow goatness, standing there with an expression that reads: Honey, please…the guests as you cover up my hard-on, now showing under my brown trousers, with that blue fan is it? Originally from New Jersey, Christopher Tonelli received a B.S. in Zoology and an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University and taught at NCSU for two years as a visiting lecturer in the English Department. Currently he is working on an M.F.A. at Emerson College where he is the poetry editor for Redivider (formerly the Beacon Street Review) and a reader for Ploughshares. He has been a finalist in the Alligator Juniper national poetry contest and a semifinalist for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award.
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