Volume 1, Issue #1 (Summer 1995) ISSN Pending
Unless otherwise stated, authors retain copyrights over all work appearing in this publication. Individual articles, poems, and stories may be duplicated in accordance with the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law. Entire issues of Gruene Street may be electronically distributed in their original form for non-commercial use only.
DOUGLAS LAWSON is currently the editor of The Blue Penny Quarterly and Virginia Online. His fiction has appeared in The Willow Review, The Alabama Fiction Review, and other print journals. He received a Henry Hoyns Fellowhsip in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where he completed his MFA.
STEVEN G. KELLMAN is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at San Antonio and film critic for The Texas Observer. His recent books include The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (Twayne) and, as editor, Perspectives on Raging Bull (G. K. Hall).
JAMES CERVANTES received the 1987 Capricorn Poetry Prize for his latest volume of poetry, The Headlong Future, which was published by New Rivers Press in 1990. His poetry has appeared in the Altadena Review, Pacific Review, Starline, Blue Mesa Review, and other magazines. After much wandering, he has settled in Mesa, Arizona, and teaches at Mesa Community College.
THOMAS HUBSCHMAN attended Fordham College and has lived in Brooklyn for twenty years. He has published two novels and several short stories with small presses. His novela, Lies (published by Brooklyn Free Press ) was given special mention in the Best American Short Stories & The O. Henry Awards. He is currently a freelance editor, and consultant to Black Excel, a scholarship service for minorities.
SHERRY LEE LINKON is Coordinator of the American Studies Program at Youngstown State University. Her poetry has appeared in Bridges and Youngstown Poetry. She has also published articles on pedagogy and American Women's literature. A member of Shillelagh Law, she has recorded and performed Irish, Scottish, British, and American folk music since 1992.
COLIN MORTON is a Canadian who will serve as writer-in-residence for the '95-'96 academic year at Concordia College in Minnesota. His first novel, Oceans Apart, was recently published by Quarry Press of Kingston, Ontario.
JANET MCCANN teaches English and Creative Writing at Texas A&M University, and her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals throughout her career. The recipient of a 1989 NEA grant, recent publications include a book on Wallace Stevens and (as co-editor) Odd Angles of Heaven, an anthology of contemporary Christian poetry.
GEORGE PERREAULT is the author of two books of poetry, Curved Like An Eye and Trying to Be Round. He has served as writer-in-residence in Montana, New Mexico, and Washington, and currently teaches at Gonzaga University in Spokane. In addition to his teaching and writing, he edits the electronic journal, Research and Reflection.
AMELIA FORTENBERRY FRANZ also lives and teaches in the San Antonio area. She received her BA from the University of South Alabama and her MA in English/Creative Writing from Texas A&M in 1993. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared or will appear in The Texas Review, Morpo Review, The Blue Penny Quarterly, and English in Texas.
Autopsy Beyond a swinging doorway, I saw bodies, each cut in a Y pattern, from shoulder blades to pelvic bone. What else could I have expected, upon entering the morgue but skin the color of marble, laid open in the most convenient manner. No delicate technique is required, only the revelation of organs grown cold and a need to know why they had ceased needing to function. A three dimensional puzzle glistens in the heavy light, legs parted and genitals shamelessly exposed. I had opened the wrong door, searching for my brother, to identify his remaining dignity. No evening's warm erotica tonight. No drifting toward a gentle, evening sleep.
The Gun of A Dead Man The time I stumbled over that femur, remember? There's more to it. We found a pile of bones, too, with leathery strands still holding it all together, except for this leg bone. A coyote must have dragged it around and left it on the trail. It went rolling, me with it, down into an arroyo full of mud. By the time we came to rest, I was clinging to it like a baby to a bottle. No smell, the ball joint at my cheek was cool, smooth, almost kind in the bleaching sun. Gene, so amused by this nuzzling, just grinned down and mumbled something about shooting from the hip. Now, that would be a feat, even bedding down with the whole skeleton. And then Gene almost whispered--Look, he's got a gun--as I clambered up the bank to stare at the skull, its star shaped hole, and a weathered .357 magnum revolver, lying next to his left foot, or hers (the way the pelvis flared). You could see it was a snub-nose Colt Python, Pachmayr grips, too, over blue steel. I flipped it with my bone and saw the barrel was Mag-Na-Ported beneath the grime, probably hand finished, too, knowing this guy. We picked it up and were impressed-- the radioactive sites worked fine, once I cleaned them off. But the five unspent semi-wadcutters in the cylinder were hard to dig out; still, the trigger job was smooth as butter. We're just in awe--Pythons are expensive, but the custom job alone would cost at least $500, top drawer weapon. He thought maybe we might clean it up, take the whole thing apart, soak it in kerosene, sans grips and sites, finish up with a little Hoppes #9 and then some gun lubricant. But nobody wants the gun of a dead man. Gene ended up trading it for your old Army jeep, didn't he? And you never knew the difference. (previously published in Exquisite Corpse)
Spoor
In the dark of early morning,
I lift my heavy weapon and begin
to track myself in earnest
across Mogollon Rim Trail
down into the high desert gorges
between Payson and Mesa.
I find spoor
near Sunflower
under a cottonwood whose leaves
are a crowded audience,
clapping at my skill.
The scat has hardened,
even though the creek
remains full of noise,
and the occasional trout
manages to avoid
the hook, even in shallow
currents, until now.
Remnants of fish bone lie scattered
around cold ash
and a bed of broken leaves.
* * *
During last light,
you track prints across linoleum
by laying your left cheek
against its cool surface
at the open kitchen door.
The dust-shift gives the feet away
in shallow but distinct relief,
like tracking squirrel through frost
on a cold, blue morning.
A silhouette before the TV light
helps me draw a bead
on this thin form
that squats before the screen.
Shall I skin myself from top to bottom
or do it by halves,
like peeling off the shirt
and then the jeans?
My prey looks up, startled,
then smiles,
the trusting, old doe
that everybody needs.
(previously published in Visions-International)
Three Mile Island The Amtrak conductor introduces it like a distinguished guest. I see it now there in the distance, four curved stacks in the mist, seemingly bolted to the earth, with black root-like pipes reaching down. I think I hear it churning above the train's rattle and roar, spilling out poisons, belching its particles of deadly air. I remember sixth-grade science and my quest for the Universal Solvent. I wanted it for its power, I just wanted it. Imagined it dripping through the bottom of my test tube, through Mr. Inman's desk, the tiled floor, the cement foundation, dirt, strata, bedrock, to the earth's core, where it would rest darkly spinning forever, a substance like blood. It was the opposite game from lying in a field and looking up, making your mind go toward infinity, pushing, thinking more and more space, gazing past clouds until you were lost in cloud, your head a cloud. Three Mile Island disappears into the past. We are not children, the train moves on over the blank green fields toward Philadelphia.
Coming Back From Okanogan You cross the river east south east and note how volcanoes and irrigation define the West and that maybe taking separate cars is not like anything else: how you have to calculate ahead and behind and the traffic decides not just for you but for the one who trails, with a pickup between, through towns where they play eight-man football and at least half the cheerleaders are virgins but each of their breasts is its own little animal, and you pay more attention to every curve, whether she's keeping pace and when you have to ease a while and how, when snow begins to spit as you twist down the Coulee, it asks that you weigh everything twice: the dusk, the impending miles, the trucks slow and heavy with hay: it's not like conversation, or marriage, or even like making love; it is what it only is: a late afternoon in mid-October, driving back from Okanogan through the weathered hush.
Vespers Tonight in Mission Park, the homeless offer up their battered tale: "That kingfisher by the river, he's bigger than an eagle" and I speak as I've learned to the gentle mad, those voices tangential to mine, a promise to be careful. "Oh, there's no need to worry," they say, "not you -- he's just carrying off the dead." And I remember that bird: One night on the plains the seven-foot hawk knocked upon my dreams, took me carefully into his claws and lifted with long, sinuous strokes, above sectioned fields, wheat and cattle and little tree-wrapped towns, above the abstract demarcations that scarify our days, above pain and hunger and the stale crust of habit, above the black edge of life itself. And when he was done with me, set down and draped his wing across my shoulder and showed me to the door. Still, there are days, even whole weeks which pass and I forget to think of him, that great bird of mercy. But tonight, from this place beside the river, please may he hear, better than an owl, the cooling embers of my brother's brain; may he hear the caught breath of his wife and children held until their sides ache even in their sleep. Come down, great bird, kingfisher or hawk, come down to the dark side of the planet and lift, lift my brother clean.
Dancing Naked on the Mesa It's spring and I'm climbing again rising through pinon and alligator juniper into the lives of birds and the open face of the sky, shirt thrown back, pants, everything down to skin flung to music, to the guttural urge for a chant older than language, older even than names -- this raven croak, this head-back cry I aim wherever you could be hiding, every sandstone swell or shadow, every delicate hint wet and green, and I'm dancing, dancing to the darkhaired friend, to the wing drum, dancing with a feathered strut and flutter and the long shriek of mated falcons as they plunge toward earth and barely slide apart into this dance, this naked hot and dusty dance, this always and forever ache I ache for you.
Temporary Meaning Things sit around, decompose, or get thrown out. This is what I think of the broken hoe and a blackened orange while neighbors hammer and grackles drop and stab into the watered lawn. Now, at this moment, the universe clicks into place, admits quite openly that all is pointless and bestows temporary meaning on several philosophies. At what point, I wonder, will it dawn on everyone? Should I run to the fence and ask, "Have you gotten it yet?" Instead, I yell: "Your repairs are useless!" The mindless hammering stops and it occurs to me that I am the chance generator of a silent wave that rolls in all directions, sucks everyone into its undertow and never spits them out. Or that I'm the last to catch on and the first one tossed naked onto the long awaited Mohave beach. This would explain a sign that says "Psychic Dump." It would also explain how easily birds have learned the ring of a cordless phone, and why everytime they sing, I run to answer. (this poem will appear in Tumblewords: An Anthology to be published by the University of Nevada Press)
Neighbours Fall mornings we bent over our gardens side by side, paused to compare tomatoes. At times I heard Sting on your stereo as you must have heard Chopin on mine, but we never raised the volume in anger. We neighbours believe in the music of shared spaces, like the 'cellist I read of in the news, who used to play Albinoni each day at four o'clock on the main street of his distant city. For that one brief movement the low, lone voice of his instrument silenced even the snipers on nearby rooftops, but for weeks now he has not been heard, and here the wind has turned cold. We have shut up our windows for the season, listen only to private thoughts, turn the page on a photo of lovers' bodies clasped in death, still lying between the lines. Snow drifts silently into our gardens, heaps against the fence that joins them, while in that distant city a father burns all the leaders' hardbound speeches to cook his family's evening meal. Tomorrow, he says, they must warm their hands by the weak flames of poems in paperback.