Epiphany | A Literary Journal

Movie Plots

Amother of two, married thirteen years and living in a Westchester colonial with a solarium and a two-car garage, watches the docile, shaggy German shepherd that her children named Mickey fall upon and deftly eviscerate an injured starling grounded in her back yard. She realizes that what she loves about the man she loves—his passion and confidence, the way he insists on her primacy and beauty and utility in his life, the satisfaction he takes in the way she ages gracefully and decorates his house, the feeling that he would fight ruthlessly to keep her well and next to him, his success in business, his ambition to be loved and worth loving, his authority over the children, his constant return to and ability with her body in sex, his manner of projecting health and strength—is all arbitrarily focused aggression. That she is complicit. That she is a feathered reward for the grudging obedience of a violent heart.

—Nick Admussen, Spring 2010

The New Coat

Adam is in love with Minnie. Minnie Leonardt. Adam savors Minnie’s name, pronouncing it as if each letter were a different type of candy. He has been planning to take her out to dinner for months now. But each time I ask him about his plans, Adam says, “I got to get up enough courage.” Then he usually adds, “Minnie Leonardt . . . ” and pauses, engrossed in his thoughts. “Minnie is nice. She knows how I feel about her. I like Minnie a great deal.” Then he yawns as if the mere thought of the challenge exhausts him.

Adam has just been released from prison after having served thirty-one years for armed robbery, conspiracy, and two counts of murder.Adam feels naked. Every stare, every accidental brush on the subway pierces him deeply. He can’t shed what he calls his “prison cocoon.” He keeps saying, “I can’t find the zipper.” In prison, the cocoon served a purpose. There he knew how to behave and how to protect himself. But outside he feels skinless and raw. Sure, love would be nice, it may heal some of his sores, but since his release Adam has been trying to slowly reassemble himself. He had been dropped into a new and utterly alien sphere; his old self was shattered. Now he is putting himself back together, but it’s a slow process.

When Adam met Minnie, he learned that intimacy has a potential to terrify. As do crowds, ATMs, strangers, and even restaurant menus. Where do I insert the card? Why is this person staring at me? What am I supposed to say, order, eat, want, wear? And how am I, a homeless black exfelon, supposed to ask Minnie, a white working woman, out for a date?

Before Adam can find a woman, he needs to find a new coat. After thirty-one years in prison, a new coat is as good a way as any to start life on the outside.

—Sabine Heinlein, Spring 2010

Sway

I am sitting in a car with a man who is not my husband. It is lunchtime in mid-April. Ross, the man I am with, pulls out a thickly layered sandwich—turkey, lettuce, tomato, and avocado—carefully wrapped like a gift in aluminum foil. Little plastic bags of carrot sticks and cookies and a juice box with a straw peek out from his brown paper sack. I have no doubt his wife put this meal together for him. Ross has three children and his wife treats him like a fourth. This I have gathered from previous conversations in this car in the same parking spot over the past month. Ross is eating with relish, like a man taking as much pleasure in the act of chewing as in the satisfaction of a full stomach. I smell the vinegary mustard oozing out the sides of the bread and I have an urge to get out and sit for a while—at least until he has finished—in my own car parked five spaces away in a lot that is otherwise empty. But I don’t.

I don’t eat during these meetings. I am jittery and afraid if I do I might have a pressing need to go to the bathroom, or that my breath might be off when we kiss. That is how far we have gotten: kissing and a little caressing, as though we were recapitulating high-school dating. I have been the bolder one, letting my hands discover him, an invitation for Ross to do the same. That is why I am here: because I want to be desired, to be kissed and touched by an attractive man. So I wait until I am back at my office to eat my lunch. Ross assumes that I am dieting. He says it’s a turn-on that I’m making this effort to be sexy, and asks if it’s really for him or for my husband Seth. I tell him what he wants to hear. Ross knows who Seth is; once in a while Seth picks me up at choir practice where Ross and I have been singing once a week for the past two years. I suspect that before he made his opening move, Ross studied the two of us together—the older man, a bit starchy and distracted, and the younger woman, trying too hard to please—and decided I could be won over.

—Toby Tucker Hecht, Spring 2010

Contributors Spring/Summer 2010

Spring/Summer 2010

NICK ADMUSEN’s poetry has most recently appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Barrow Street, the Mid-American Review, and Blackbird. He is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, currently researching contemporary Chinese prose poetry and living in the Haidian district in Beijing.

APRIL BERNARD’s fourth collection of poems is Romanticism (W.W. Norton, 2009). She teaches in the Bennington M.F.A. Writing Seminars and at Skidmore College.

JEFREY M. BAKER is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has recently put together a collection of the poems from the kids in Soweto entitled “The Sound of the Sun,” and has hopes to organize a second poetry workshop for somewhere in India within the year. He is also at work on his own first collection of poems.

HARMONY BUTTON has a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mantis, AfterImage, BlazeVOX, Prick of the Spindle, White Whale Review, and Sleet Magazine. In 2006, she was awarded the Larry Levis Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

SHENA CRANE was born in Rhode Island and currently lives in Dana Point, California, with her husband. She is the author of What Do I Do Now? Making Sense of Today’s Changing Workplace, which was featured on the “Today Show” and translated into Braille by the National Federation of the Blind. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Men’s Fitness, National Business Employment Weekly, and other publications. At present, she is working on a set of essays and a novel.

RICHARD FELINGER is a writing teacher, former journalist, and 2009 nominee for the Pushcart Prize. He has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, and he won the 2008 Flash Fiction Contest at Red Cedar Review. His stories have appeared in other journals, such as Potomac Review, Willow Review, Audience, and PANK. He lives with his wife and son in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

SAMANTHA GILISONis the author of the novels The Undiscovered Country (Grove/Atlantic Press, 1998) and the The King of America (Random House, 2004). She has received a Mrs. Giles E. Whiting Award in Fiction and was a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction. Gillison’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and publications, including Open City, Descant, and American Writing and is forthcoming in Playboy. She grew up in Papua New Guinea and lives in Brooklyn.

TOBY TUCKER HECHT is a scientist and short-story writer who lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review, THEMA, Red Wheelbarrow, RE:AL, The MacGuffin, and other print and online literary journals. Her latest stories have included dancing somewhere in the plot, and she and her husband have, in empathy with her characters, taken lessons in East Coast Swing.

SABINE HEINLEIN just finished writing her first literary-nonfiction book, about three friends trying to adjust to freedom after having spent several decades in prison for murder. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Idler, the e-zine Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Die Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other places. She has been awarded a Yaddo residency, an N.Y.F.A. Fellowship for Nonfiction Literature, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. She lives with her husband, the painter Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, a cat, and two rabbits in Sunnyside, Queens.

CHRIS IOVENKO has published stories in Open City, The American Voice, Outercast, Farmhouse Magazine, and The Los Angeles Reader. He has written nonfiction pieces for The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Spin, and Details. His award-winning dark comedy “Easy Six” (Showtime, 2005) marked his feature writing and directing début.

STACEY KAHN graduated from Skidmore College with an English major and a music minor. Her senior thesis, “Music in the Works of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons,” was awarded honors and placed in the college library. Her short story, “Paper,” was published in the Skidmore arts journal, Folio. She worked for Continuum Publishing and Bauer Publishing as an editorial intern, and now writes for a music blog, Music Bytes. She is an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

A. B. MEYER is a pseudonym of the author of two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, which were published under another name. Her writing has often appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

CAROL MOLDAW’s So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems will be published by Etruscan Press in June 2010. She is the author of four other books of poetry and a novel, The Widening (Etruscan, 2008). A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an N.E.A. Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Moldaw lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

RICK MULLIN is a journalist and painter whose poetry has appeared in several print and online journals, including Measure, Unsplendid, Envoi, and The Flea. His chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, is available from Exot Books (N.Y.) and his book-length poem, Huncke, is forthcoming from Seven Towers (Dublin). He lives in northern New Jersey.

JOSEPH RADKE’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Boulevard, New York Quarterly, The Journal, Minnetonka Review, Copper Nickel, and Natural Bridge. He teaches writing in Green Bay.

KAREN RIGBY (www.karenrigby.com) is the author of two chapbooks and an editor of Cerise Press. Previous work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Canteen, Quarterly West, and other journals.

JOSEPH RIIPI is the author of the novel Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (Ampersand Books, 2009). Recent writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Bitter Oleander, KNOCK, New Delta Review, flatmanCROOKED, Salamander, and other places. He lives in New York, where he is finishing his M.F.A. www.josephriippi.com.

HARILYN ROUSO is a writer, painter, social worker, psychotherapist, and activist who has worked in the disability-rights field, with an emphasis on issues of women with disabilities, for twenty-five years. She has written more than twenty articles and books on gender and disability, including Double Jeopardy: Addressing Gender Equity in Special Education and Strong Proud Sisters: Girls and Young Women with Disabilities. Recently, she has been working on a book of essays that combines the personal with the political as she reflects on her experiences as a disabled woman. Some of these essays, in combination with her paintings, have been published in the e-zine Ducts.

ANTHONY SCHNEIDER graduated from N.Y.U. with an M.F.A. in fiction. Born, bred, and buttered in South Africa, he lives, writes, and plays more tennis than is sensible in New York City. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, BoldType, Pindeldyboz, and the anthology The Encyclopedia of Exes, among other places.

MAKAMBO TSHIONYI, J.D. Some things about me: First, for what it’s worth, I am a recovering attorney; second, I am a medical student not too fond of blood; third, I love much more than just about anything else the coastline of the state of Oregon; fourth, I admire greatly Jean Toomer. O.K., the boring stuff: I was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was raised in Eugene, Oregon. I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I currently attend the University of Illinois School of Medicine. I have no white picket fence. “The Waif” is début fiction for me.

CYNTHIA ZARIN is the author of three books of poems, including The Watercourse, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as five books for children. Her new book, The Ada Poems, will be published by Knopf this September. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she teaches at Yale.

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It takes courage to create. In looking through the past issues of Epiphany I am moved by how the writers we have published have that kind of daring. They have explored urgent and complex issues, created mind-expanding imaginary worlds, and used language with extraordinary precision. Great writing should do just that.

Take Karol Nielsen’s essay, "Litmus Test," (nominated for a Pushcart Prize) in which she diligently sifts through her anguish about the rape of a friend on a Kibbutz in the middle of The Gulf War. Or the dark yet brilliant dream of George Olivier Chateaureynaud’s story in which he spins a fabulist tale of how a coin-operated firing squad casts a spell over a provincial French village. Or Bradford Brooks’ Dispatches from Africa in which he chronicles his astounding experience — a woman ravaged by leprosy, a cobra in the loo, and a amusing pathos about his own handicap in 115 degree heat. Or even Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott’s essay, "Down the Coast," which examines his repeated and frustrated attempts over five decades to make a movie. This kind of courage is the reason I continue to publish Epiphany.

—Willard Cook

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Tutorials

Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful—even if the meaning is only the act of telling.

—Dorothy Allison

Epiphany offers tutorials in fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry for writers of all abilities. Our teachers are all writers who have had at least ten years instructional experience.

Writers usually have material that they want to work on; other times, they simply have the desire to write. Either way, Epiphany teachers help inspire writers to face the emotional and technical challenges of writing.

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Contributors_Fall_2009_Winter_2010

Fall/Winter 2009-2010

TABARÉ ALVAREZ has an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has appeared in Reflection’s Edge and is forthcoming in Bewildering Stories. He lives in the Dominican Republic.

BIPIN AURORA has worked as an economist, an energy analyst, and a systems analyst. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West and North Atlantic Review.

H.V. CHAO is delighted to be making his print début in Epiphany. He is currently at work on Guises, a collection of short stories. He has never been to Moscow, but speaks often, and longingly, of going there one day.

GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD’s novel La Faculté des songes (Grasset, 1982) won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, while his most recent collection of stories, Singe Savant tabassé par deux clowns (Grasset, 2005), was awarded the Bourse Goncourt de la Nouvelle.

CASPER CLOETE has no boxing background apart from watching the occasional fight on television and taking out his frustrations on the heavy bag in his garage. He enjoys writing about the challenges that ordinary people face and is trying to sharpen up his prose in between juggling two programming jobs. He lives in Johannesburg and is previously unpublished.

GREGORY CROSBY lives and (in theory) works in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Court Green, Rattle, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, Jacket, and Poem; most recently, his work was included in the 2008 anthology Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (University of Nevada Press).

LAVINIA CURRIER is a filmmaker whose adaptation of Balzac’s Passion in the Desert won several picture and directing awards at film festivals in Rome, San Sebastien, Telluride, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a new feature film from an original screenplay, Oka! Amerikee.

MARGARITA DELCHEVA graduated from N.Y.U. with an M.F.A. in Poetry. She is from Sofia, Bulgaria, but she currently resides in New York. Her work has appeared in CutThroat, Oak Bend, Chronogram and the Meadow. She dances Argentine tango, practices Zen Buddhism and enjoys oil-painting in her free time.

Catalan poet ERNEST FARRÉS, born in Igualada in 1967, lives in Barcelona. A journalist who works on the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia, he has written three volumes of poems: Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (1996), Mosquits (1998), and Edward Hopper (2006), which has been published in English by Graywolf Press.

MICHAEL FERCH recently opened his own law office in New York City, and is an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his son, his wife, and her cat. He may be reached at: michael@ferchlaw.com.

NAOKO FUJIMOTO was born in Nagoya, Japan. Her recent poems are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Passages North, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. She is currently practicing to say “I do,” and she purchased a sparkling-February wedding dress last Thursday.

EDWARD GAUVIN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has been an ALTA fellow and a resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and this fall is participating in the Writers Residency Program at Ledig House. His collection of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s short stories is forthcoming from Small Beer Press, and other translations have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions, Words Without Borders, The Cafe Irreal, Two Lines, Silk Road, Absinthe, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and The Brooklyn Rail.

JEFFREY GUSTAVSON is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef, 1994). More recent work has appeared in Bomb, Fence, and Just Outside the Frame: Poets from the Santa Fe Broadside (Tres Chicas, 2005). He is an alumnus of the Montana Artists Refuge.

APRIL NAOKO HECK’s poems have appeared most recently in Artful Dodge, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, and Borderlands: Texas Quarterly Review. She works as the reading series coordinator at the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program.

KATHLEEN HEIL is originally from New Orleans. Her work recently appeared in the English and Spanish editions of The Barcelona Review and is forthcoming in the inaugural issue of Thirty First Bird Review. Kathleen also contributes to The Best American Poetry blog. Her website is kathleenheil.wordpress.com.

ASKOLD MELNYCZUK is the author of Blind Angel, Ambassador of the Dead, What Is Told, and The House of Widows. He teaches at UMass Boston and in the Graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

SCOTT F. PARKER lives in Minneapolis. He received his master’s in Writing from Portland State University. “Rule-Breaking” is a chapter from a memoir-in-progress, to be called The Joy of Running qua Running. Other chapters have been published in The Ink-Filled Page and on writersdojo.org and nwrunner.com. He has contributed essays to several books on pop culture and philosophy.

DAVID RAYMOND, a painter and sculptor, exhibits in the U.S. and the U.K. and Europe. He is Professor of Fine Arts at Merrimack College in Massachusetts and is a contributing editor for Art New England Magazine. He lives in New Hampshire.

ARIELLA RUTH was an assistant editor for Letters to Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community, released Winter 2008 by Saturnalia Books. She has interned at Small Press Traffic, a literary arts center in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in the online journal Other Rooms Press. She received her B.A. from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in 2008 and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the Writing and Poetics department at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the graduate assistant for Bombay Gin, the school’s literary journal.

ANNIE SANDLER was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She attributes her love of writing to her family, the city, and her friends (those living on and off the page). She currently lives in Brooklyn. She especially thanks her mother.

JAINA SANGA received her Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of a critical book on Salman Rushdie’s fiction and editor of two volumes on South Asian literature. She lives with her husband in Dallas.

MRIGAA SETHI was born in New Delhi and raised in Bangkok. Her work has previously appeared in Folio, Seneca Review, and The Bangkok Post. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she teaches composition to undergraduates.

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her new work is forthcoming in Alimentum, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, and Poetry International. Her collection of poetry, Water the Moon, is forthcoming (Fall 2009) from Marick Press. An editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), she also plays a Chinese zither. She lives in Paris and New York www.fionasze.com).

LARA TUPPER is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teaches fiction writing at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. Harcourt published her début novel, A Thousand and One Nights, in 2007.

LAWRENCE VENUTI translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. Recent work includes Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), and Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006). His version of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper won the 2008 Robert Fagles Translation Prize.

CATE WHETZEL is a graduate of Indiana University and Kenyon College. She lives on the north side of Chicago with her husband, poet Ben Debus, and teaches poetry in the public schools through the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanzas program. Her book reviews have appeared in Indiana Review and The Other Journal (online); her poetry has appeared in Breakwater Review, and is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review and storySouth.

Some Answers

I don’t remember, I was in a blackout.
I don’t remember, the city was in a blackout.
I don’t like myself very much.
I don’t like your wife very much.
We climbed down forty-three flights of stairs.
We walked five miles in paper-thin sandals.
This way to the train station.
This way to the park where trees will hide us from planes.
True, the signs are confusing in that part of town.
There were X’s marked on the eyelids, that’s how I knew
the people were dead.
Because I prefer whiskey to gin.
Because the horse wasn’t close enough to the fire.
Because her ten fingers flamed blue toward heaven.
Because pomegranates, when ripe, split open easily.
Because he was an ordinary white guy.
Because they didn’t have any other medicine they used
Mercurochrome.
That’s right, they used vegetable oil.
That’s right, he took the last rice ball.
He turned the key.
He didn’t mean to.
The tomatoes didn’t help at all.
Because silk was rare.
Because the priest liked a drink.
Because the hospital was gone.
Like the clouds of ten storms gathering on the horizon.
I only thought I was in love.
The scar on her cheek, reddish-purple, continued to weep.
He told a different version of the story.
It never belonged to him anyway.
The sound of airplanes scares her now.
She has difficulty expressing her feelings.
You should be tender.
You should probably leave now.
You should look closer.
The first step is admitting defeat: the prayer goes like this.

—April Naoko Heck

Under Green

April 2006

1
April is the
first poem too
young for cruelest

time I wrote when flowers
wrote rainbows wrote birds too
young for memory then and

now is only just today my
love is well come home

first daffodils forsythia flash
the old gray world with grade
school yellow, scilla grounds
it blue, one tulip’s red with yellow
pistil stamens still the same

Down the street from the green
school where lines form the red
school waits
My love checks
his blood now, wet rubies
on his fingers
Love lives
on what is lost, draws
blood, colors us in

Hawk got dove
today. Sharp-shinned
hawk. Mourning dove. Beside
the garden pulled feathers, plucked
down, pecked at entrails wet with
blood, ate, flew low with
what was left— bird
heavy with bird

Sudden snow dusts ground,
maples red with early flowers,

snow turned rain will bring them
down, wash blood from broken

bodies, push up and out
green, out hidden leaves

Tulip closed against
the cold,
snow bent it
down, made a smooth white
egg of it,
its own heat
broke it open red

with him my love better
now each day break but
days do not begin end
break have never been
break so much with any
one break since I break
I hold will not break

Fifteen years, thousands of
days, millions of minutes
since that April summer

day when I, my own
one as-long-as-we-both-
live Love, said yes. Yes I do.

Days before, He came to the city
named for peace, where there was, where
there is, temple or mosque, no peace, riding
an ass or the colt of an ass, riding on branches
or clothes strewn in His path—
But if the city
gates with different names, gates built on top of
gates, could lift their heads, if the stones,
bombed, refused, could rise together—

In the newly discovered good
news, the disciple named betrayer

is asked to sacrifice the man
that clothes the master: flesh

shed, not risen, death the good
gate to that which is no body

New seeds, green and red, female and male on one
tree, or meeting in air, buds like the buttons
that open the body—
But papery pale
beech leaves blaze the trail that leads
to the hill where just-dug graves—

12

tree gone willow
last winter fallen
taken stump hollow
hole now

and air where last
year vertical script
wrote early spring’s
green news

Last year lambs, panicked by our
traffic, ran under their mothers, we

ate them later, we love the humble,
we eat and drink at the wooden table,

but the lamb was before the slaughter
of thousands in Egypt, and now in Eden

thousands, and bombs for the next
country, they say, war, we love that too.

Traffic halts, trees bleed
seeds beside the road,
reddened air, sudden

clouds, Behold the time
is coming, or is it come
this holy day of death?

April’s more
red than green,
when I wrote at seven
the busy maple I didn’t know what
the maple was doing,
but now I’m fixed
on magnolia: rose bullets on one side
of this tree and opening open-
ing open on the other

But would one want
one’s body, made to make more
bodies, take, eat, heavy with bodies, would
one want one’s body back?
Enough
the empty tomb, shed clothes, the lily, its open-
ing throat, broken shell, out and into
air that molds itself to all this is

Back through all that was before
I could meet you on the corner

I wrote, a second “April,” another
you, but here we are, bodies not

the bodies they were, yours
healing, mine on hold, I thought

this would be for love, Love,
but it’s body. Love’s body.

hyacinths now, follow the scent, trees
white where they will be green, but
you walk more slowly now, and in
the woods we walk on what’s
fallen, we walk on rot

Fallen we say but in the war
movies we see it’s
bodies being

felled: in air

for a moment,
where, as if toward beds,
they fall back, breathless, taken

sweet showers cruelest month
lilacs last in green endures lines

drawn between the pale green leaves
dotting trees and the brown exposed

where there was snow, mixed, he said,
what we want with what we've had

Then, beneath the green cave, the red
room paled, I had no room, I wrote,
for anyone, was early done, but

you have opened a house, young
blood flushes my skin when come
sweet thoughts of your my body

Room in mind for body while
body rests, waits,
room in deeper
mind of dream for what’s denied,
not recognized,
room if we re-
cognize, know over again each
other, for you and me, two
all day in this one house

Trout lilies shooting through
dead leaves stamens stretching
red pistil pushing yellow
up—
You lying low then sitting
standing lying down again with me
all well again you are my spring

Nothing new in this green and
red, them and us, leaves sheer

like lingerie, deeper now, trees
crotched, deeper, roots—no,

we’re not, we cannot root or
rise, we’re crouched between

creeping phlox on an old
grave, someone’s still coming up
through the stems of these rooted green
others, our distant relatives that
rise, start over and over

Touch skin to touch
muscle move blood find
bone
to make blood
rise, blood held by veins
flesh skin
to meet dear
body flesh Love not in blood
shed but in that clear
rush to see through body

Trees finding greens, coloring in
out to the edges, skeletal shadows
becoming shade, landscape painting
as it erases itself—
our lessened
bodies learning each day to be
what they are becoming

Out, or coming out,
dogwood, white and pink lace,
bride and her maid, lilacs breaking
their dark knots—

We are out on this
safe street, while a war, not broken out
but being made, is making more wars

still blue through half-
green trees and you
beside me now
safe, but

what are those
pale bee-y things
paused hawk-
like in our path?

Heavy with memory, this, old
Aprils, self with self, my,

it, lilac with lilac
will not fly—

But body still moves
to body, like to like or almost

like, even now I am learning
love in the school of desire

City of Lights

One night when I was perhaps two, I stood up in my crib when my parents came in to say goodnight and announced to them, "I'm all alone."

"No, no," my father explained, "you're not alone. You have us."

"No. You have each other," I told him, "but I'm all alone."

Apparently my father sat down in a chair and burst into tears. My mother used to say that these words of mine were what convinced them to adopt my brother.

What was it about my statement that made my father cry? Perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part, but I hope that on some unconscious level, he knew my words were true.

When I was little my mother often told me, "If I had to pick between having your father or having you, I would pick your father." This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable and honest statement because, given the choice, I also would have picked my father.

In 1958, James Jones decided he wanted to live in Paris for a few years, and so my parents, newlyweds still, moved there, neither one of them speaking a word of French. This was seven years after the publication of From Here to Eternity, a novel based entirely on my father's experiences in the peacetime, pre-World War II army. The book, which won the National Book Award in 1951, was published worldwide, and sold over three million copies in the U.S. alone. The film, starring Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster, won eight Academy Awards in 1953.

By the time they moved to Paris, he'd written two other novels, Some Came Running and The Pistol. All three were best-sellers, and Some Came Running was made into a Vincente Minelli film starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin.

They moved into a little one-bedroom apartment on the quai aux Fleurs, a block from Notre-Dame. Over the course of a year, my mother suffered several miscarriages, but eventually she became pregnant with me. Five months into the pregnancy, she had some complications, and total bed rest was recommended. My mother, for the next four months, was confined from the nightlife she loved.

At the time, my father was writing The Thin Red Line, his Guadalcanal combat novel, and my mother lay flat on her back in the bed, listening to him clacking away on the typewriter in the next room. One day, the laundry man arrived just as my father was writing one of the saddest scenes in the book. Sergeant Keck, a die-hard, solemn, no-bullshit veteran, during an attack, in a moment of foolish excitement, pulls a hand grenade out of his back pants pocket by the pin. Sergeant Keck makes this terrible mistake, and, realizing it, in the three or four seconds he has left, goes off by himself to die.

My father got up and opened the door and there stood the old laundry man, carrying their clothes. My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears flowing, and the laundry man could see my mother through the door, lying hugely pregnant in the bed. As my father reached for his wallet, the laundry man threw up his hands and said, "Ne vous inquiétez pas, Monsieur! Pas de problème!" Don't worry, Sir, no problem! And he refused to take my father's money. "You pay me next time!" My father, with his very limited French, couldn't convince the kind man to take his money.

Countdown

Three old rowboats
tethered to the dock:
Three old mongrels
lapping at the trough.

Two young saplings
swooning in the breeze:
Two, yes, maidens,
lovelier than trees.

One white marble
lost along the road:
Countless stars and planets,
spilled as if in code.

Cobble Lane

Contributors Spring 2009

ADAM L. DRESSLER serves as the assistant editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and as the review editor of Perihelion. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.

ANNA KUSHNER was born in Philadelphia and first traveled to Cuba in 1999. Her current projects include a memoir about a family divided by divorce, exile, death, and politics, a translation of Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House (forthcoming from New Directions), and a translation of The Autobiography of Fidel Castro (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). She was a finalist for the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize in 2007. Her essays have appeared in The Bucks County Writer, Crab Orchard Review, and Wild River Review, and her translations have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, and the anthologies Writers Under Siege (New York University Press) and The Global Game: Writers on Soccer (Bison Books). "Olor a Cuba," originally published in Epiphany's online edition, was included in The Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books).

GEORGE FRANKLIN's poetry collection, The Fall of Miss Alaska, was published last year by Six Gallery Press.

KAYLIE JONES is the author of five novels, including A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. "City of Lights" is an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, to be published by William Morrow in the fall of 2009. Her Web site is kayliejones.com.

KEITH HENDERSHOT was born in Tennessee, educated at Bennington, and now lives in Brooklyn.

KIMBERLY FELTES has written several teen advice books. Her fiction has appeared in The Girls' Life Big Book of Short Stories. She works as a freelance writer and editor and lives in Minneapolis and New York City.

MARK O'DONNELL's plays include "That's It, Folks!," "Fables for Friends," and "The Nice and the Nasty" (all produced at Playwrights Horizons), and "Strangers on Earth" and "Vertigo Park" (both produced by Zena Group Theatre). He wrote the book and lyrics for the musicals "Tots in Tinseltown," "Hairspray" (with Thomas Meehan, for which they received a Tony), and "Cry-Baby." He collaborated with Bill Irwin on an adaptation of Molière's "Scapin," and co-authored a translation of Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear," both for the Roundabout. For Manhattan Theatre Club, he translated Jean-Claude Carrière's "La Terrasse." He has published two collections of comic stories, Elementary Education and Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (both Knopf) as well as two novels, Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay (both now in Vintage paperback). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Canto, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Harvard Magazine. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lecomte du Nuoy Prize, and the George S. Kaufman Award.

MARTHA TENNENT was born in the U.S. but has lived most of her life in Barcelona, receiving her B.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona, and serving as the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She has regularly translated between Catalan, Spanish, and English, and recently edited Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translating and Interpreting. Her translations have appeared in Two Lives, Words Without Borders, eXchanges, and Review of Contemporary Fiction.

MARTIN EDMUNDS is the author of The High Road to Taos and co-wrote, with Lavinia Currier, the screenplay for "Passion in the Desert" (1997). New poems recently appeared in A Public Space.

MERCÈ RODOREDA (1908-1983) is one of the most important Catalan writers of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland after the Spanish Civil War, she worked as a seamstress while writing the novels and stories—Camellia Street, The Time of the Doves—that would bring her international fame. In the mid-sixties, she returned to Catalonia, where she continued to write.

MIRA PTACIN is editor of LUMINA, Sarah Lawrence College's M.F.A. literary magazine. She lives in Manhattan with her husband Andrew and their little dog Maybe and is writing a book about the uterus and the American Dream.

NORMAN FILZMAN writes: "Ten years of serving...no stories to tell...none to fabricate...only scenes remembered I used words to bring to life."

PAMELA BROWN lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and teaches Shakespeare, poetry, and drama at the University of Connecticut. Her poetry chapbooks include Small Daughter Also Buried Here, Letter Poem, and East Main, and her poems have appeared in Public, Frontier, and P/rose and Introductions. Her play "The Ice House" was chosen by the Boston Directors' Lab for production in 2003, and in 2008 her plays "As We Like It" and "Annunciation Shikaku" (co-authored with William Owen) were staged at UConn Stamford and Dixon Place.

PETER GOODALE was a painter who exhibited at the Jack Tilton Gallery, in New York, and at the Nielsen Gallery, in Boston, among other places. In 2001, a show of his wooden sculptures on religious themes was held at St. Peter's church, in Manhattan. A book of his poems, More Bounded Air, will be printed by the Woodside Press later this year.

SALLIE BINGHAM's books include After Such Knowledge, The Touching Hand, The Way It Is Now, Passion and Prejudice (a memoir), Small Victories, Upstate: A Novel, Matron of Honor, Straight Man, Transgressions: Stories, Cory's Feast, Nick of Time, and, last year, the short-story collection Red Car. She has also written and produced many plays, and in 1994 founded Santa Fe Stages.

SUSAN RUEL is a writer and fiddler in New York City. As an undergraduate, she took Monroe Engel's writing classes at Harvard, and she studied with John Williams in a doctoral writing program at the University of Denver. Her publications range from short stories and poems to newspaper and magazine articles on global affairs, music, travel, and other topics. With Sorbonne professor emeritus Daniel Royot, she co-authored two books on U.S. media history that were published in France by Ophrys and Didier-Èrudition.

RON SAVAGE has published more than eighty stories worldwide. Some recent publications include Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, Film Comment, and Mercury in Israel. Ron has a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology and a doctorate in counseling from the College of William and Mary. He has worked as an actor, a broadcaster, a newspaper editor, and for twenty-something years as Psychologist Senior at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Elizabeth McElrath

Elizabeth McElrath grew up in Virginia, and she is currently attending Old Dominion University. She is studying creative writing, and is hoping to eventually write for a living. However, understanding that she needs to support her habit of writing, she plans to possibly teach after she gets her degree. "Pocketed Coins" is currently her first story that has been published.