Front cover by Rick Wilson
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Select Work, 2010 Edition
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Free
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Brooke N. Cooper
I can still smell the leaves
Turning color as they always do;
Red and golden falling in the autumn air.
Grandma cooking in the kitchen;
She had so many to feed.
Pa sat on the front porch,
Swinging back and forth telling his stories
Precise and to the point. I, however,
was the only one who cared to listen.
The planes and the ships, the bombs
and the death; all memories to him,
but new and exciting to me.
Just a young girl, too wise for my short years,
Would skip dessert to join him
back on the porch as he began again.
We’d swing away the afternoon,
Just me and him, to the sound of bombs
across the Pacific.
What I would give to have those autumn days
back, and to be able to hear his stories
just once more. And now we must take it upon
ourselves to pass them on, these stories of our past,
but I was the only one who heard,
and I fear I could never say the words that he did
with enough respect for those who fought to keep us
Free - a small word with a big meaning.
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Metamorphic
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Deidra Evans
My gaze is anchored to my reflection,
and I squint oceanic eyes, scrutinizing the parts of me that everyone else can see.
In a sudden, unanticipated movement,
my fingers dart up to brush aside a lock of hair.
A similarly abrupt motion
tugs down the hem of the shirt that I always sleep in.
After several minutes, I stop adjusting everything about myself,
even though I'm still not satisfied.
I stretch out my hand for a tissue and grimace at the familiar pain.
Retrieving my hand, I squeeze the finger with the paper cut that has been
hurting me all day.
Eventually, I stop dwelling on that, too.
I swipe the tissue across my lips,
transforming
my mouth from Hollywood shiny to natural and unadorned.
After sleep takes me, an angry man's face appears in my mind, his mouth wide in fury.
His fist rises above me, poised to fall full force.
I turn my head away from the coming blow and before my eyes is my mother, dying.
She sighs out her last breath, and I feel like my heart has crumpled under that delicate expulsion.
My body, aware of my mind's distress, twists and tosses to get away from it.
Is it my mind or the distress that it's trying to escape?
It causes my blankets to wrap around me tightly in a chrysalis that no longer lets me move,
leaving me vulnerable to the torments that plague my mind.
Jeering, hateful words come out of the shadows.
I'm standing under stage lights, with caked make-up covering my face and a huge fancy dress.
All of it is uncomfortable, and I want to be rid of it
despite what my cynical audience thinks.
Dread overcomes me. The overwhelming thought is, suddenly,
What have I done?
Those stage lights fall before me, but they are now a bonfire.
Someone is throwing masks into the fire.
The masks have every expression, every different kind of face, but they're being turned to ash.
They are my masks! Someone has to save them!
I turn around, looking for someone to help me, and there he is.
He is obvious perfection.
Somehow, I know that I love him . . .
but when I embrace him, his fond and radiant smile becomes fangs, and his face becomes a monster's.
At last, I awake.
In a frenzy, I fight my way out of the blanket that encloses me.
Finally freed,
I stride toward that mirror whose opinion used to mean so much.
My arm muscles tense, and my hand lashes out,
paper cut forgotten.
Something tumbles. Something cracks.
Now the glass is broken.
I look up at it to blink
in surprise,
and something falls from each of my eyes. In the sink lie two circles of blue.
In fragmented reflections of the mirror, I see
my true green eyes: the color that I'd almost forgotten.
This time, I don't stare for very long.
Instead, I look around for whatever it was that tumbled when my reflection got broken.
There, in the trash can. It's lip gloss that I recognize,
although I feel like it belongs to some other girl.
I won't bother getting it out.
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Ceramics Class (Day 2)
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Emily J. Stivers
The clay in my hands
is brown like chocolate milk,
brown like Obama’s face,
brown like bran muffins.
The clay in my hands
is pungent like mildewed washcloths,
pungent like muddied sneakers,
pungent like compost heaps.
The clay in my hands
is cool like river rocks,
cool like sour cream,
cool like museum sculptures.
The clay in my hands
is quiet like embalmed bodies,
quiet like outdated books,
quiet like blank cassettes.
The clay in my hands
is bitter like cheap coffee,
bitter like collard greens,
bitter like peanut skins.
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Waiting
Waiting
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Emily J. Stivers
Looking at your shoes
Looking at everyone else’s shoes
Scratching your wrist
Scratching behind your ear
Glancing at the clock
Glancing at the door
Listening for your name
Listening to personal dramas
Staring at the mildewed ceiling tiles
Staring at the hole in your jeans
Tapping your fingers on the armrest
Tapping your pen on your knee
Ignoring a stranger’s goiter
Ignoring the flies buzzing in the window
Smelling obnoxious perfume
Smelling cherry-flavored cough drops
Imagining yourself anywhere else
Imagining your name being called
Standing to stretch your legs
Standing when you recognize your name
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Sonnet
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Elizabeth L. Harris
A rocking chair upon the front porch squeaks
and condensation trickles down a glass
of sweet tea. Sunlight fills the sky with streaks
and splatters golden paint onto the grass.
But peace like this can’t last the night entire.
The clouds darken before the sun is set.
The rain begins to sprinkle the barbed wire
and keeps on falling ‘til the yard is wet.
I watch lightning splinter a tree in two
behind the neighbor’s house. It nearly lands
on Fido’s pen. The wind tries to undo
the plants I had set with my own two hands.
But by tomorrow—yes, I do expect
blue skies, bright sun, and the neighborhood wrecked.
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Walking on Sunshine
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Marissa Howard
Darkness is a welcome friend on this particular night. The city streets are deserted on this side of town, save for the occasional street-corner vagrant. The beams from the spindly lamp posts are my only companions. I have no idea what time it is, but my guess is that it’s well past midnight. It doesn’t really matter about the time though. There’s no one waiting up for me, and I have no immediate destination. I just knew I couldn’t have stayed another minute in that desolate building, staring at all the filing cabinets and cardboard boxes that contained the remnants of the past twelve years of my life.
From the ground up, I developed that newspaper into something to be proud of, not some slanderous, low brow effort like so many others. Insightful articles written by journalism’s finest up-and-coming minds covered every inch of its pages. In the beginning, it made a name for itself. In the beginning, life was great. But the days of stopping off at a newsstand in the morning to pick up the daily paper have apparently come and gone. And now, after tonight, my newspaper will become history as well. It was only a short while ago that I turned the key in the office door for one last time and locked what was left of my hope inside.
Hope. What a funny thing it is. Just have hope, they say. Everyone needs to have hope, because he who has hope has everything. Right? Sure. Wise men say he who has hope is the fool who has not met reality. You always hear about hopes and dreams and all that jazz, but what does it really amount to? Nothing, obviously, or I wouldn’t be walking the streets, jobless, at this time of night. No, I don’t need hope. It’s done nothing for me.
I keep walking toward the outskirts of the city, passing darkened windows and those ever-present lamp posts, mile-markers on my aimless journey. The frigid winter air is an icy blanket around me, but I barely notice. I’ve learned that numbness is a side effect of the absence of hope.
“I have been one acquainted with the night,” I breathed in little puffs, the lines of a Frost poem suddenly coming to mind. “I have walked out in the rain—and back in the rain, I have outwalked the furthest city light.”
I paused my slow stroll in the middle of the street, beginning to laugh at myself. “Yeah, that’s me,” I said, “Crazy man, all alone, walking the streets and talking to himself. Crazy hopeless man . . .” I trailed off, focusing on the bridge up ahead. “All alone, left to his own devices. Reciting poetry.” I started forward at a steady clip now. “Yeah, that’s me.”
The face in the moon seemed to sneer down at me, the starts all winking their timeless, undeterred success in my face. “I have looked down the saddest city lane,” I said, quoting dear old Frost again. It’s the only bridge on this side of the city, but it’s not something to be laughed at. A plunge into the icy water below would kill a man, even a hopeless man. I shook my head, a slight smile on my lips. Yes, I thought, I have been one acquainted with the night.
The smooth railing of the bridge beckoned me over. As I looked over the edge, I could see the massive rocks jutting out from beneath the water. Enough to kill a man, especially a hopeless man. Hope is the source of all disappointment, the source of all evil. Hope is the thing that makes us dream, and we all know dreams never come true. What a mean thing hope is. What naïve lives it makes us lead. “No more,” I said, climbing onto the bottom rail. “Hope is a liar, and I’ll have nothing to do with it.”
The water sparkled under the gray skies. I abandoned Frost in favor of Langston Hughes, for he seemed fitting in that moment. “The calm, cool face of the river, asked me for a kiss,” I said to the placid surface below me. Just as I was about to finish off another chapter to be chronicled in history, a strange thing happened. A ray of light shone right in my face, nearly blinding me for a second. I stepped back from the railing and on to the concrete of the bridge, shielding my eyes with a hand. Slowly, gradually, the rays of light began to increase in their intensity, lending an ethereal quality to my surroundings.
When I finally gathered my bearings enough to take a look around, I realized what I was witnessing. It was sunrise. The sheer beauty of this sight took my breath away, and all I could do was stand there on that bridge, speechless, as I watched the sky go from a hazy blue to a pink, and then to varying brilliancies of red and orange. It was a magnificent thing to behold.
Sunrise. The dawn of a new day, the possibility of finding something greater than myself to believe in, and the hope to persevere. With one last look out over the river, I turned to head back in the direction of town, the sun warming my skin. Hope is everything a man needs. After all, he who has hope has everything. Right?