MARGARET LAMB WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN/FICTION
2
Ablution
Curtains drawn throughout the village, mirrors put to bed. The women, sisters, wives and mothers will play pallbearers for a generation...
By MELISA ANIS Graduate Prize Winner
Gareth’s body was still warm when his mother undressed him to be washed. She had done this a thousand times when he was a child and occasionally as a teenager too. His father thought it would be a laugh to get the skinny little boy drunk with the lads. Passed out cold. Coal dust still on his face. He wasn’t the skinny little boy anymore though. Look at him. She was the proud mother of a handsome man. Strong. The three years he had put-in underground sculpted his wiry arms into muscular cutting instruments. His shoulders now like his fathers, broad and a little round. She lifted his right arm and ran the sponge from his shoulder to his wrist. The water fell heavy on the slate floor and the kitchen table held pools of the dirty runoff in its oaken grooves. The flame of the candle danced to the whistling draft from the rattling old windows of her grey stone house. Her mind wondered... Manon had always wanted a big family. She imagined Christmas around a fireplace with a big big tree and square parcels. She imagined a Christmas like the Nobles would have. Loud, succulent and full of charm. Gareth her only son and only child was never one for Christmas, never one for the event. Like his father, he hated the attention, even from his own mother. She put her sons hand to rest on the warm wet sponge. The warm water would loosen up some of the coal dust under his short nails. She turned to get a small blunted knife from the kitchen drawer, and as she came back to face Gareth again, she marveled at the gleaming wet body lying bare on her kitchen table. She would have to bury him in the same ground that killed him. Dead before he came up. Before his time. Next to his father. Her grief blacker than coal, she sang a song for the dead.
IAN MCKENNA/THE OBSERVER
JUDGES COMMENTS:
“Ablution” manages to evoke sadness without relying upon the clichés of sentimentality.
The Ugly One By RYAN LAWLESS Undergraduate Prize Winner
When we were 13, Laura invited me as a date to her uncle’s wedding. When she asked I made sure to keep my cool like the spies from my favorite stories, but it was the probably the happiest moment of my life. I pretended it was our own wedding. My parents and I had already been invited since Laura’s family is almost an extension of our own. So being Laura’s date just gave us an excuse to spend the night together. As soon as we got to the Galway Bay Hotel, we ran off to the riverbank with a bag of stale bread—we came prepared. I carefully tore off a small piece and placed it in Laura’s open hand. She threw it as far as she could into the water and it landed in the middle of the swans. Almost instantly, they gobbled it up and left only ripples galloping across the river’s surface. “Don’t feed the ugly one,” she ordered. One swan—the “ugly one”—had a crooked neck and grey messy feathers. It looked like an adult who had woken up for work in the morning before taking a shower and drinking coffee. When the swan bent its neck into the water to eat the bread, it made a nasally honking sound. It was hurt, just like my older brother a few weeks ago. He slipped on his skates during a hockey game. He couldn’t move much in the hospital bed and we had to spoon him mouthfuls of a special soup. Maybe this swan had been in some kind of accident, too. My mom made me wear a suit and I hated it. I had to keep my striped blue shirt tucked in and my jacket squeezed my shoulders: hot and scratchy. Laura looked comfortable in her dress. It was creamy white and laced with flowery designs that wrapped all around her body. The petals opened just below her protruding shoulder blade and dipped down along her back; the root stems rested above her navel. The wind blowing from the river made the dress flow behind her, revealing a pair of shiny black shoes. I wondered if dad had polished them, like my dad polished my own. What I have never understood about Laura is that she’s always serious like an adult. She never smiles and rarely laughs. But it makes her more beautiful. Not in a pretty eyes and hair way, but in a way that makes me try harder to impress her. To make her smile or at least show interest in whatever we’re doing. She’s a dancer and I think she must save all of her emotions for dancing. At her recitals (I’ve only missed one), I can immediately pick her out because she has the biggest smile etched into her face. As she twirls and jumps and leaps, she keeps her radar eyes fixed forward. She glares into the audience, or maybe through them. And she keeps the corners of her small lips curved into a red lipstick arc. “Here, throw the last piece.” “Let’s just throw it together,” she said. A normal person would smile while saying this, but Laura just quickly glanced into my eyes, squinted, and then looked back out onto the water. She cupped her pasty white palm over my own—they were almost the same color, but mine had a slight red flush. The swans circled below us, their hungry orange beaks ready to snap. We counted down from three and moved our palms apart. I traced my pinky finger along the web of veins that pop from her hand. She probably thought it was a mistake because she didn’t react. The bread fell down toward the river and landed on a swan’s back. Another darted over and plucked it off for itself. “Should we find more bread?” “No, let’s go inside,” she answered. She picked her toes up and spun on her heels. If I tried to do that, I’d probably have fallen or would’ve looked clumsy. We moved away from the river and walked back toward the hotel where everyone was talking, dancing, drinking. Laura always walked a few steps ahead of me. I’m not sure if it was on purpose, or if dancing just made her several steps faster. When she walked she kept her back straight, but her eyes pointed downward, as if she were more interested in the ground than in me or anything else. Back inside, music was playing. I recognized the sound of a piano and it was nice. But I didn’t like the man’s singing voice because I didn’t understand any of the words he was saying. They were just mumbled echoes. “This song is in my next recital,” she beamed, “let’s dance.” We squeezed past members of her family and into an open circle toward the edge of the dance floor. She tied her hair into a ponytail, even though it looked like she spent a long time having her hair curled. I knew her mom would probably be mad. I placed my right hand on her waist. She didn’t seem to mind, so I put my left hand on her shoulder. Her shiny black shoes moved two steps right and I followed. Then they moved forward, then backward. Eventually we settled into a pattern that I could follow. Everything around me melted away—I just heard the music. Soon I felt it sinking into me: it swirled around my limbs. The music became a muffled noise and controlled me like a toy car. I looked up at Laura after realizing I had zoned out and was surprised to see her already looking at me. She was smiling.
JUDGES COMMENTS:
“The Ugly One” has a strong narrative voice--assured and authoritative, anchored in detail. TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER
MARGARET LAMB WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN/FICTION
3
American Africans By KRIAN SINGH Prize Runner-Up
“SOWETO has gone to the dogs.” “You think everything’s gone to the dogs, uwesilima,” Kabelo said, using his sleeve to wipe the froth out of his beard. “The city, the ANC, the president ¬-” “I named my dog after the president.” “The young people, the old people...” He went on, and nodded over the counter, to where a picture of Miriam Makeba hung between the bottles. There was a 20 Rand note pinned to the frame. She had been the shebeen’s first customer. “The women.” “So that’s where they’ve gone.” Nipho was staring into space, as high as the Hillbrow tower. “They certainly haven’t been coming to me, I know that much.” “The food, the weather, the drink - the Umqombothi.” “Now the drink I have nothing against,” I said, drumming my fingers on the neck of my bottle. “There’s your problem.” The light changed, as sunset tumbled in through the shebeen’s open door, blushing and bruised as a mineworker after a long day. Three teenagers walked in, laughing and slapping their hands together. “We can agree on the young people, at least.” “Look at those sneakers. They’ve been customized more than a car with Durban plates.” “Those Indian kids will pimp their ride. But a bafana will pimp his shoes.” Nipho wheeled around on his stool, squinting like a man trying to spot cheetahs in the savannah. “Biza amaphoyisa – Call the police, these boys are trouble.” “These boys wish they were trouble.” “Why haven’t they taken the stickers off of those caps?” “Never mind the stickers. They need to straighten out their hats.” Kabelo glared at the boys, his eyes as yellow as the n’anga’s rolling bones. “And pull their pants up while they’re at it.” “Unkulunkulu, belts are not supposed to go around your thighs.” “My nigga, my nigga.” One of the boys reached a hand out to the bartender, and slipped a 200 Rand note into his palm as their fingers locked together. “Pour until you kill us, brother.” “Americans?” “No, just a bad impression. The one in the back is Mama Nomsa’s boy: Wandile. He should not be drinking.” Kabelo sat up straight, and made his voice like a father’s again. “Haibo!” You knew you were old when speaking like a father made you sound young. “Wandile!” “That’s Wandile Tha Young God to you, boss,” The boy said, beating his chest once, twice and then a third time as he walked over. It looked like he was limping. “Respect the name.” “Shit, don’t even waste your time. Those old soldiers can’t hear you now. They’re up to their ears in sorghum beer.” The first boy swung his leg up, and for a moment I thought he was going to piss on the bar like a dog. But he just slumped into one of the stools, heavy as a corpse. “Come on, I’m getting thirsty here, brother.” The bartender poured them three glasses of Jack Daniels, and my lips felt dry as I watched the liquor quiver in the neon light. It had been a long time since I could afford that kind of medicine. Sorghum beer made your belly swell, and your breath stink, and it was only for the whiskey that white men ever came into the bar. But these were not white men. These were not foremen from the mines, or tourists from the suburbs that were hiding behind the city’s skirts. These were township boys: boys that I hadn’t seen working since they’re heads were at my chest. Wandile used to pull scrap metal from the dump. And the other two once sold little wire lions to the Americans, as if they themselves had asked the animals to pose. I knew their families. I knew that they should not have this kind of money. Now, the third boy, whose hat was so low that I couldn’t see his eyes, set his knuckles on the counter. He was as black as the labels on the lager, and in his swollen jacket and ragged jeans, he looked like a gorilla. The three of them might have broken out of the Johannesburg zoo, but as they choked down their whiskey and howled, I didn’t think they had the brains between them.
“Soweto is ours tonight.” The first boy stood up, swinging his leg wide as if to piss on the entire township. “Last time I checked: I was the man in these streets.” “Why not the country, Prince? If you’re so hot, why not the whole fucking country, huh?” The other boys snickered over their drinks. “Shit, this nigga wouldn’t even point a finger at Zuma!” “Well, I’d point more than a finger at his new wife: Number six.” The boys clinked their glasses together, and swallowed up their whiskey. “Word is bond; I’d point a lot more than that.” “That woman is old enough to be your mother.” Kabelo had his arms crossed over the counter, and his head hung so low that he was staring out at them as if from inside a cave. “And Zuma was a horny enough bastard to be my father, so what?” “Show some respect. Without men like that, Soweto would still be a cage. You like going out into the city? You like going to those European malls, dressed up like Americans? Then you should be grateful. Twenty years ago, the furthest you could get from this township was by going three kilometers underground, and scratching at the walls for gold.” “Zuma’s no hero,” I said, trying to start up an argument of our own, and shut the boys out. It didn’t work. “We don’t dress American,” The one called Prince said, spreading his arms as wide as Christ. “This is black, my brother. And black is beautiful.” Prince leaned on the bar, and pointed a finger up at the television that was blinking down at us. “Hand me the remote for this thing.” The bartender moved to hide it, but Wandile snatched up the remote as if it were a weapon, and slid it down the counter. Prince cruised through the channels, stopping whenever he found a face he knew: a black face. “See that?” He said, snapping his fingers at the President of the United States. “That’s black.” Click. Click. “That?” Now it was a man in shorts, too tall to stand up straight inside any house in the townships. He and the boy were wearing the same sneakers. “That’s black.” Click. Click. Click. Now a woman, wearing pants that were so tight they folded in her gut, bent over as if to pick up a coin. “Mhm mhm. That...” A man in sunglasses was walking around her, moving his hands like a translator for the deaf, as something like music played. “That’s black.” Click. He turned the television off, and jabbed the remote at me of all people. “So what are you?” “Sibusiso Radebe knows what he is.” Kabelo made a fist, though I could not tell if it was out of anger, or pride. “You’re just a confused kid.” “A Prince.” He and Wandile ground their knuckles together. “Respect the name.” Kabelo shook his head. “Bafana… when’s the last time you saw a black Prince?” The boy turned up his chin, but kept quiet, and the smiles of his friends’ faces began to droop. “All those people you see on the television – all those black people – do you know where they came from? Where their father’s father’s grandfathers came from?” The boys just stood there, dumbly. Kabelo had made schoolchildren out of them. “Africa. They were taken from Africa.” Kabelo stayed seated, but we were all leaning in a little closer, as if around a storyteller on a quiet night, or a fire on a cold one. “And do you know what they see, when they look back to where they came from?” This time, the boys shook their heads. “Death, Famine, Pestilence and War. Africa to them is where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come to graze in the grass.” The man rolled his great, weary shoulders. “What about history, then? Their roots? … Cha.” His tongue clicked. “Looking back, they do not see Great Zimbabwe. They don’t know Shaka Zulu. Instead they are fooled by tourist traps set by the English. Places like Sun City – that big, plastic African palace.” “I bet they saw Zuma dancing through the streets in his leopard-print loincloth,” I said, as my thought bubbles were being smoothened out by the sorghum beer. Still, they ignored me. “You are here, Bafana.” Kabelo pressed his finger into the bar, and twisted it as if snubbing out a fat, black cigar. “You are living it.” The old son of a bitch actually stood up then, while Nipho and I gaped like two men watching a cripple get out of his wheelchair. “You are African.” Kabelo put a hand to the boy’s head as if to bless him, and then took off his cap. “Let them see you.”
COURTESY OF KRIAN SINGH
MARGARET LAMB WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN/NONFICTION
4
The Chapel By EMILY DOSCHER Graduate Prize Winner
The chapel is red with morning light. We squint our eyes against it as we seek out our places among the pews. We are here to pray—so we have been instructed by the large-eyed, thick-legged nun who teaches us. Though we were loud in the hallway, glad for a break from the New Testament and Sister Mary’s slow-blinking explanations of male arousal, we settle into stillness here, in a chapel so small that the normal-sized crucifix feels disproportionately large, even for God. We twist our hair around our fingers and arrange our legs uneasily; we look on as Jesus seems to mumble through rigid, bloodless lips, pleading to the father who has abandoned him. Sister Mary nods to us to begin. I suppose a gunshot would be an odd start to communal prayer. (Or maybe a logical one.) The room closes in with its odor of heat, a commingling of sunlight and radiator that smells like a humid palm. Inspecting the wound in Jesus’s side, I wonder about agony—a son without comfort, a son abandoned—and think that it is a human, rather than a divine, emotion. In all our reading, I have never seen evidence of the father’s agony, though I have often read about human stonings, sacrifices, and trials. How can he who has known agony himself ignore it in another? But the father has not known it, and so he knocks the cup closer to his son’s mouth, splitting his lip, in a silence so cold it should raise clouds of breath. I am not praying exactly, but thinking around the idea of God, feeling for a creator-like shape, like a couch in the dark: an uncomfortable, high-backed thing, handed down from my mother that I have long suspected does not suit me. I am the only one who makes it fifteen minutes without nodding off or checking her nails. “You might be a nun,” Sister Mary tells me as we file out, and raises invisible eyebrows. I do not tell her that I relate to Jesus not as a savior, but as betrayed kin. * Midday this time and the sun is direct, a disk slicing through the room that I squint against as Mrs. Brady flips through my essay. I think about the many uses of light in The Scarlet Letter, the way Mrs. Brady’s eyes flash as she says the word symbolism. It is all light and darkness in Hawthorne, all souls. Here in the chapel, light is simply a thing that makes it hard to see. Mrs. Brady has crossed out a whole page of my essay with a large red X; she has emphasized her displeasure with a long-legged, spiky “NO!” in the margin. I have never been so close to her. Her body seems to shudder with a gutrooted disdain, like hiccups. I’m afraid to look too closely at her face, so I stare directly into the light from the window. She delivers a homily about syntax while I lose all sense of the proportions of the room. I imagine my pupils narrowing into nothing. To my right, Jesus holds himself up by the arms; he looks exhausted. I think of agony, but mainly of shame. * Eighth period and I’ve escaped the creaking wooden floors of the auditorium to come here, where there is a piano and sun-warmed wood. I ignore Jesus supplicating behind me—I do not have time for him today, for his straining chest and forever-pain—and lean back into the quiet for another moment, the back of the chair like a hand on my spine. I am working on something, a melody that’s been building in my mind, a few notes I find myself humming during homeroom as I gaze down at the parking lot. Sometimes, I try to write a song by thinking a word: friendship, I command. Marie. Lindsey. Tom. What is an essence and how is it captured in clefs? Where are the chords that describe my brother or my friend? My fingers make nonsense sounds around a linguistic theme. The real music composes slowly, a series of patterns that spin in and out of each other, maddening and mathematical, surprising me over toast. Today, I sense a breakthrough; I lift my wrists. The ceiling rounds its back. I do not think about altars or agony or the sparkler-spit in my gut, only and then what if? And then? IAN MCKENNA/THE OBSERVER
You
JUDGES COMMENTS:
Emily Doscher’s essay illuminates Catholic girlhood in challenging way. She braids a thirteen or fourteen year-old’s experience in parochial school with some fascinating speculations on Christianity. The voice of the youthful narrator never strays into omniscience or adulthood, yet her observations and conclusions are sophisticatedly direct and disarmingly obvious. What does God feel when His son is killed? What are the ramifications of this abandonment? The philosophical ruminations of youth are eloquently described and the narrator’s attention is whisked away. Doscher offers the reader brief, yet vivid, insight into her narrator’s thought processes.
By CHRISSY PUSZ Prize Runner-Up
You’re a girl or a woman or something like that on the cusp of twenty, two whole decades, and you cannot believe that you haven’t yet gotten yourself in check. You knew to expect superfluous dramatics and aching lows while a teenager because that’s what every young adult novel on the market today suggests. But that’s the problem. You are no different from everyone else. You are one hundred percent average. You go to an average college, not an Ivy League like your best friend, and you secretly envy that her degree will hold more weight in the job market even though you two share the same major. You are a common female of common face and less-than spectacular build unlike the girls with whom you went to high school who went through dates like the underwear they obviously forgot under their grey kilts. You like common things like wedding shows and makeup and really aren’t that interesting to talk to. You have no outstanding talents unlike the great artists and writers and musicians you’ve met and you feel yourself sinking further and further into anonymity and mediocrity. You are not special. And you suppose that is why you cannot get yourself in check. If you had a great future you could look towards that and know that life would improve. But you know that you do not. You will be lucky to get a job, any job, after college and will be even luckier if you can sustain that job. You know that you will sit at home just as you do now and watch as the number of friends you have dwindles continuously into nothing. You love the people you’ve met in college but you know that in five years you won’t even speak to them. They will move on to different jobs and different cities and different lives and they will forget you just as your high school friends have. But that is life and you can pretend you’ll be happy for them and their accomplishments because they all deserve it, don’t they? You like to believe that you’re doing something right because you weren’t one of the girls from high school who had a baby or got married, or both, and was condemned to a life in a mother’s basement pretending domesticity is exciting. But you know that you are probably just as condemned as those girls are. You know that that boy you’re seeing might have to be your way out of yourself and that is the most terrifying realization you’ve made as a teenager. You know that if you’re a good girl and sit on your hands and paint your lips pink someday that boy or a boy might do you the favor of marrying and inseminating you because that’s the only real talent you have isn’t it? You were born with a functioning set of female organs and have the ability to sustain life which actually sounds much more impressive than you think it is. You could be a little housewife who cooks and cleans and bounces babies but how can that be an option when you’ve spent your entire life fighting that? Hasn’t feminism liberated you from needing to enslave yourself to be a respectable adult? And how respectable is domesticity anyway? Because society damn well hates motherhood and you know that. You see that mothers are berated for building careers and berated for devoting themselves to their children. And you wouldn’t respect yourself if you let yourself get married and have children, but
the world would pity you if you were “the maiden aunt”. You’ve really run out of options and you’re not even twenty years old yet which terrifies you. You’re petrified of being alone but you’re just as petrified of being a worthless cog in society. You wish you had been born extraordinary but you weren’t. You’ve got about two years left before you are completely useless and time is running out. So you sit on your bathroom floor and cry because your best friend doesn’t want to see you and your boyfriend and two other friends all went on vacation because it is easier to be sad about loneliness than to be sad about mediocrity. You were number two your whole life, which is a pretty high number, but you can never be number two in the world. So you lie on the floor and laugh at all of the creative ways you could end your life because maybe you could be extraordinary in death? Maybe you could make a great party of your funeral and make people cry and remember you for the good that you didn’t bring to the world. You could be the basket case with the heart of gold. Everyone needs a posthumous hero and maybe you could do that? But you laugh again at yourself because you know the letter you leave behind would have to be equal parts dramatic and poignant and you know you could never reach perfection in that way. Plus, it wouldn’t be right to leave your mother like that because she would be sad and blame herself even though she’s never done anything. It was all you. You were the one who was never good enough. You were the one who wasn’t born gorgeous or talented or exceptional in any way. So you get up from the floor and go to bed because you’re not even special enough to go through with it. You haven’t got the courage. Valor would have made you exceptional. But you can dream big. You can dream of the day it’s safe to die. You can dream of having a lot of money and a pretty apartment. You can dream that your best friend will stop hating you for growing up. You can dream that everyone will one day be sorry for not counting you extraordinary. You hope that sleep will kill you but it does not. You consider talking to someone but you know that that would be useless. You’re not exceptional enough to be depressed or anxious. You’ve survived no tragedy nor fought any demons. You’re not special enough for the pills that would make life a cloud. You laugh because when you asked for pills you lost two and a half friends because one of those friends was special and you were not. She was worthy of pity and love and those delicious delicious pills. But not you. You loved her once but now you resent her for being special, even if just to those people who you once counted as your friends. Soon you will be twenty and your best friend will ask you the same question she asks you every year, “what have you accomplished?” and you will tell her you haven’t accomplished anything and she will tell you to start accomplishing. You hope that you will accomplish one day. Two whole decades and nothing to your name. You are fat and ugly and untalented and are losing friends by the moment. Congratulations. You’re no one.
MARGARET LAMB WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN/NONFICTION
5
I’m sorry I wrote about the Bunker By RACHEL PRENSNER Undergraduate Prize Winner
My first forays into nonfiction were Tumblr posts I wrote the summer after my sophomore year of college. The idea was to write things I was willing to show people, unlike the scattered, half-finished short stories I’d attempted since community college, which wandered through scenes and redrafts that were no better than the originals. I always started them with the intention of capturing some moment of epiphany I had while daydreaming on the subway or marring fresh snow walking across campus or resting after a jog, and they were always long on emotion and cutesy details and short on what the fuck I was trying to say. When I blogged about something that I thought might come off us flippant or provocative, I asked myself if it was worth it, and probably erred on the side of caution. I’d gone to a conference with people from church at the beginning of that summer, which had inspired me to value my time at home and show grace towards my family members and humankind in general. I was trying hard not to push the limits, whereas my other college summers I was out late with my friends, smoking as we went for winding drives on back roads or, after we turned 21, heading to the bars downtown. I wrote about religious doubts I was having and adjusting to the environment of a Catholic university after my Evangelical upbringing. I wrote about my theory of how the Christian world fetishized Jane Austen, promoting her novels as models of how respectful Christian young people should go about courtship, which went something along the lines of: “granted, the books are old-fashioned, and some of their norms no longer apply, but they depict a world in which men and women really respect each other and each other’s bodies, which is the only environment in which pure love can bloom, isn’t it?” I could analyze books on my blog, whereas I felt I couldn’t come out and say the messages we’d received about sex and dating were toxic. My high school friend commented on one of my posts: in a similar vein to the jane austen influence, i sprayed a note for a crush with my cologne (sampler, given me by my dad). because duh, that’s what you do when penning a letter to your love...if it’s 1750 or never. As I edged into more personal territory about the family or high school or faith, my parents were uneasy, but intrigued by becoming almost-characters in something published on the internet. Sometimes their friends told them about my posts at church or school events. They asked to see my blog and read through it on the desktop downstairs, posture stiff, peering intently at the screen, not used to reading anything longer than an email on the computer. Towards the end of the summer, inevitably, I wrote about them. They had this hobby which they sometimes called “disaster preparation,” but more commonly “plan B” or “the Bunker.” My dad, and some of his friends spent many of their free weekends during that time designing, securing, and preparing a hideaway where my family could go and be safe in the event of an economic collapse. One weekend my dad drove to the Bunker in our family’s old mini van, its inspection two years lapsed, packed to the gills with junk including an upright piano. On the way, he stopped at the hospital to do rounds. Before he got on the highway, he got pulled over by a cop, who asked for his license and registration. My dad handed him his license. Then he said, “You’re never going to believe this, but a mouse ate the registration.” He handed the cop the tiny scrap that was left of the document, teeth marks around the edges. According to my dad, the cop said, “You’re so far outside the bounds of normal, I don’t know what to do with you.” He loves telling this story. My dad had always had a Swiss Family Robinson, going-where-no-man-has-gone-before kind of mindset. He took us on camp-outs and hikes and thrived on the uncertain and not-according-to-plan, perhaps because of his years working in the ER. He tirelessly ironed out the finer points of the hypothetical community that would form in the event of disaster, even collaborating with a lawyer friend on bylaws, which he referred to as the “Mayflower Compact.” The obsession began when the bailouts were being passed, which he blamed on Obama, and worried would result in utter chaos and “people rioting on the streets.” (Incidentally, he also predicted the Obamacare reforms would cause doctors to riot, though this prediction was based on his insider’s discontent with the system in general, rather than the specific bill.) He talked about how our country’s debt problem was unsustainable, why he and my mom didn’t believe in consumer debt and paid off not the principal, but the entire balance of their credit cards every month. As he drove me to church or a friend’s house, he’d extemporize on the subject, ending with something aphoristic like, “Americans just don’t know restraint.” Neither he nor my mom were ever discreet in talking about the Bunker, but demanded utmost secrecy about where it was located. My dad told me somewhat despondently last weekend that one of the buildings that makes up the Bunker is visible from the road. They’ll have to plant a hedge of trees, he said. The reason for this secrecy, of course, was security, because if the major urban areas were all desolated, dependable food supplies gone, and long-distance transportation near-impossible, then everyone would be looking for something exactly like the Bunker. But that’s not to say this was an apocalyptic project. My dad doesn’t believe the world is ending. That said, “You’re going to be glad it’s there when the time comes, Rachael,” is a common refrain from both my parents. My mom was angry with me when I wrote about the Bunker not, she told me, because I’d written something personal about her on the internet, but because I’d compromised the security of the Bunker in the event of disaster. (To admit she was embarrassed was a concession she would never make). But it seemed there was a part of her that felt exposed when she warned me about selling out the family because I was “scraping the bottom of the barrel” of things to write about. And I sympathized, because the story was not wholly mine to tell. IAN MCKENNA/THE OBSERVER
JUDGES COMMENTS:
Rachel Prensner’s essay describes a young girl’s vulnerability and attempts at self-expression in a sympathetic, matter-offact way. She tries to come to terms with parental obsessions. Growing up often involves seeing your parents objectively for the first time. The family she has left is tinged with paranoid survivalist strategies and absolutist thinking. I found this girl intriguing, as she mixes skepticism about religion and human nature with out-of-left-field theories about Jane Austen as a template for Christian romantic love. I thoroughly enjoyed the way her mind worked.
ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES
6
I Close my Eyes and Imagine Myself as a Blind Lover Do these fingertips have hands that they belong to, or do all warm things belong to each other? Maybe they are not fingers, but young peppers still on the bush. Some sweet tobacco smelling strands of hair fall, dead in the way that dirt is, a collection of treasured dead.
Mindfulness, Mid-day
I belong to my humming pulse and the film on my teeth, and to the legs of these ants kissing my wrists.
There are a few sensations on my skin: icy bumps, fingerprints, drops of sweet sap.
But what can I know; still some light seeps through to my eyes.
By WALLIS MONDAY Prize Co-Winner
(In bed at night I pull apart my hips, trying to spread myself outwards, make myself flat like a bear-skin rug in front of the fire place. I stretch myself looking to fill my own space, feel my own pieces.)
By WALLIS MONDAY Prize Co-Winner
There are a few sensations there: sweat, maybe, senseless toddlers on the bus who reach out for my arm, not knowing my sensations are contagious.
COURTESY OF WALLIS MONDAY
I can forget about everything but myself I washed the rest of your blood out of my hand towel this morning and it felt like just one ounce of maternal feeling, some sort of warning and I gave my feet the kindest bath, a warm thanks for carrying me across asphalt. I pick pieces of glass off of my bathroom floor: in the future I will take care of nobody.
By WALLIS MONDAY Prize Co-Winner
Mind
They were both black all over with short soft fur and they were bigger than blue skies when my grandfather would pick me up and walk me towards them, saying mind them now, go ahead, touch, all slow and steady and five feet off the ground. Because cattle are wary of things as small as what I was, my big brown eyes might make their big brown eyes nervous as though I were a coyote and not a child with overalls and a bowl cut.
Mind, II
I don’t know if you have ever chewed on a long sweet length of straw, but somehow still your body reminds me of tough calloused feet walking on gravel. By WALLIS MONDAY Prize Co-Winner
JUDGES COMMENTS:
COURTESY OF WALLIS MONDAY
1. Moonlight Night
TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER
These are poems one can easily inhabit. The metaphors are rich and residual. “Maybe they are not fingers, but young peppers still on the bush” But it is the directness and the aesthetic effect that gives Mindlessness its immediacy and beckons us to enter the poems, to witness what is vivid and private.
By KAREN LODER Prize Runner-Up
I’d say let’s go but we’re already in a Shining! silver crystal universe with silver crystal stars. Maybe there’s a better place where the planets have faces. What if ancient gods are aliens? They flew away, far away back to where they came from.
New moons are always disappointing because Missing! who asked for a new one anyway? Sometimes it’s better to remember old moons than to create new ones. Things we’ve enjoyed in the past cannot turn out bad and promises are broken.
My cigarette is a short-lived star. Shining! It burns quickly and rushes towards my face. The fire would have spread when I threw it on tinder if it weren’t for the cigarette chemicals. Yuck chemicals! But beer is a chemical. The conversation ends.
I’m afraid of the future! I’ve said it! Say it too! Missing! Who knows maybe space will loose humanity and the silver crystal universe will gradient back to black. I hope the phases of the moon aren’t cyclic battles of good and evil. Would you really want to hear the same song played forever?
Silver crystal future on Earth because it’s special. Remember? Why is the moon there anyway? Do you love us moon? Together we make quite the pair in a ballroom. Dancing like no one is watching. Because no one is. Remember.
They say the sun shines like the future but Ouch! It hurts too much to look! Is the future really constructed by destruction to cause pain? Not necessarily pain. Beer is a chemical. And the moon has two sides. It changes remember?
If the Earth and moon collided they would surely kiss! We should become two moons: one silver, one black two silver? no black? Half silver half black? half black half silver? Checkered or striped?
If the Earth and moon collided they would surely kiss! We should become two moons: one silver, one black two silver no black? Half silver half black half black half silver? Checkered or striped? A swirl!
ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES
7
Unsaid By TRISHA TOBIAS Prize Co-Winner
I. You are bubble gum And spring rain. You are violet, Indigo, Cobalt, Swirled ‘til all I see Is the path I painted to you. I abandoned my brush; I fled my creation. The colors bleed and spread. II. I forced your hands into the wet earth, Let it stick to your skin. Your parents scolded you for making a mess. I let you take the fall. I slept in peace; You begged God to cleanse you. III. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Time watches us play our game. The rules are simple: Believe you are infinite, That the universe sees you, That you are relevant. Convince yourself there is time to waste Here in bed with me. Pretend you have any power at all. IV. You were never enough. V. Your name clings to my lips Drips like syrup Don’t speak; let it hang. You are not ready. I will never be.
Six Words By TRISHA TOBIAS Prize Co-Winner
Dusk fell on us too soon. Followed your dreams; led us nowhere. But your voice slept beside me. You didn’t want to be found. Burnt matches, frozen fingers, missed glances. Silence tells me everything worth telling. I am free; I rescue myself.
STEPHANIE TWYFORD BALDWIN/COURTESY OFTRISHA TOBIAS
I am ocean, sweat, and soul. Watch my silhouette escape your gaze. Dawn breathes and our past expires.
Sometimes By TRISHA TOBIAS Prize Co-Winner
Sometimes, I remember the rhythm of your words, and the song exhausts me. Sometimes, I stay awake until the horizon fires to life, then curse the light for touching my skin.
JUDGES COMMENTS:
Tobias shows the ambition of wanting each line in the poem to be a meaningful, satisfying morsel. What is accomplished is authority. When the persona says “I abandon my brush; / I fled my creation” or “Dawn breathes and our past expires,” we know it is true. In the poem sometimes we move from economy to lovely poetic prose where lines are epic: “Sometimes, I fight myself. The heart rages, falls to fragments, cries for notice. I shut it up.”
Sometimes, I fight myself. The heart rages, falls to fragments, cries for notice. I shut it up. Sometimes, I light the firecracker, watch it sail through the sky, see it burst into myriad shades of crimson and gold, wait for someone to realize that I’m a firecracker soaring to a final destination too. Sometimes, I write their name, erase it, write it, erase it, write it, erase it, blow the paper away and swear to never abandon my keyboard again. Sometimes, I hold my own hand. Sometimes, I forget the rhythm of your words, and the silence exhausts me.
ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES
8
Seconds From Supernova BY RAVEN DILTZ Undergraduate Prize Winner
Maybe you are a star two seconds from supernova Some beautiful explosion a moment from detonation And I can see the sparks trailing from your fuse So I curl up closer, anticipate the warmth. You throw light over me like a blanket and mistake it for my own. I have never been part of such a lovely deception. At night I search for your heartbeat in my sleep, Press my ear against my pillow until I find my own rushing in bursts against capillary walls. Blood is blue until oxygen touches it, cold. But with enough oxygen, everything burns and you are a breath of fresh air. Maybe when you touch me, I am not shivering because it is cold.
Force BY RAVEN DILTZ Undergraduate Prize Winner
You are the sound a subway makes, the way it sucks all the air from underground and then gives it back, Doppler dappled wheels tipping on tracks, brakes squealing. Blowing my hair into my eyes, drowning out the sound of street performers, you are a noisy kind of silence. You are the explosion above my head on the Fourth of July, the way I go breathless waiting for the echo of something beautiful. You are lifting my hands into the air, trying to catch a piece of gold dust, even if it smells like smoke. You are the undertow, sunburn on the back of my neck and knowing the danger, knowing that I do not swim strong enough, but wanting to slide with it anyway, wanting the depth to become irrelevant. I hear you at concerts and sometimes if I play my music too loud, the rumble of bass pounding against the space I breathe into, until my lungs stop fighting, until my heart is the sound of a reverb and I can’t think around the noise. You are New York City and fireworks and oceans and music. You are a force to be reckoned with. I am a pigeon, a sparrow, a seagull, an indoor bird. You are the west wind. I tilt my wings and let you blow me away.
TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER
JUDGES COMMENTS:
Raven Diltz, Seconds from Supernova (five poems) Seconds from Supernova explores a universe of emotions. The success of the poems is in the attention to detail, which brings these images to life. The poet uses light as a connecting thread to great effect. “You throw light over me like a blanket and mistake it for my own”; “(Because I wouldn’t know how to drape you over me without bending us both out of shape)”; “But I have never been a pale slice of a tree, an empty round exploding” and plays with interjections and conjunctions to create a dubious and disarming mood.
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
chick’en,
tort’oise (-tis), cat,
a man is talking to a bird in bird words as the people on the corner by the diner where I eat conventional eggs keep their pace and do not hear
with my khaki husband who deemed it insufficient considering the paint and the work all the work that went into sheltering chickens
the invisible bird trill company! company! hi!
we could not agree about killing them I compromised by naming them all the same name
this is the scant overlap in the language of birds and men and only some men the ones who wear tattered khaki the eggs I eat are salt and cholesterol that coats the mouth the yolk is not shocking orange like the backyard eggs my chickens began to lay the day I left I palmed the first return cracked it carefully revealed the firm core before scrambling peppering and sharing
9
a chicken is not particular they were calm despite the cats that jangled their latch as though they were not attached to themselves either they could not tell each other apart unless a caterpillar happened between them then frenzy
when I die whittle my bones to toy soldiers for my friends to count lucky let their children stage battles with me and break the tiny arms made of my arms should a polished bit of tibia shaped as a gunman become trapped in a curio cabinet I want you to smash it the tortoise shell comb tagged under museum glass like evidence is a shame
from a distant coast I heard of their demise and recalled their fine buff feathers
the exoskeleton carved to cup a human skull
company! company! hi!
adorns nothing does not sweep hair from a cheek
the invisible bird and the man who loves her keep talking
you cannot steal time like you steal knives like you use a jam jar for water toilet paper for your nose set them on the sill, your window curtained with someone else’s monogrammed towel makes me think there is more than one way to skin a cat, as folksy folks might say—my tongue is loosed and your body is a door out and in and out of here (our heap of city shoes notwithstanding) where here is not quite New York but the placeless momentum against which we are smashed
a tortoise is better alive but now that it’s done I want to warm the shell in my palm or secure a French knot primly if I were curator I would wear it to the grocery and say it was made of plastic I would wonder at the violence of turning one perfect thing into another
Car’ōlīna par’akeet, silent trees that might be sycamores temper the dance hall blare until green wings— impossible parrots a pair unaware of the man at Brooklyn College who will guide us to their nests at no cost he says we may offer seed but may not wear orange which upsets the birds mysterious but not exotic to this coast pet store simulacra the new indigenous parrots for whom Carolina parakeets left a hauntable space to perch in the dead child’s bed and wear her face
By SHEA BORESI Graduate Prize Winner
sil’verback, in a glass box marmosets chirp alarm as a child’s voice ascends seven eight nine ready or not I can see you behind the bandicoot but he means behind the cardboard headstone in the extinct species graveyard how cute says the mother she snaps her children before the sign the middle one with his cheeks full of pretzels like a ground squirrel, strawberry blonde youngest dressed as a princess as reapers circle with smeared faces after the zoo’s costume parade in his enclosure the silverback averts his tired gaze as each child in turn places her smile in the missing space where the head of the great cutout bird would be so the wings appear to be their wings
IAN MCKENNA/THE OBSERVER
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
10
Delphi
Growing Up with Monet
By MARIE LA VIÑA Prize Runner-Up
By MARIE LA VIÑA Prize Runner-Up
The myth goes thus: Zeus released two eagles at opposite ends of the world and they met at Delphi. And what mind doesn’t keen to the sound of a beautiful lie at least once in a while? When we were younger, didn’t we believe in these ruins? Now with the oracular magic of stones laid bare by sunlight, the question still begs to be asked,
Then it comes back to me, what my teacher said. He was going blind when he painted them, wearing specially-tinted glasses.
no longer expects an answer. Since oracular always meant the mediator would be cast in doubt, meant precisely she could be mistaken, her words written in water, light and unsettling as wind. And possibilities were never possible until they occurred in real time. Beyond event, all else is speculation. Besides the gods were deaf, Delphi, and mute. Today I sit in your ruins, amidst a history of asking, and there are no voices. In any case, I haven’t come for answers but simply to see, to wait for what happens, blind to its coming until it comes. But to the ghosts, or the memory of them, whose eyes believed,
You think it is written, but it isn’t?
To Johanne in Haiti By MARIE LA VIÑA Prize Runner-Up
“Lightning streaks across the sky as lava flows from a volcano on Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier.” —Reuters, April 17, 2010 “Three years after Haiti was devastated by a powerful 7.0 magnitude earthquake, many residents are still suffering from the impact.” —Reuters, Jan. 12, 2013
and backyards. Eyes behind eyes that do the real seeing. A shy but marvelous iris at the epicenter of sleep.
from which we drink. The eye is an aperture embedded in a body. At twenty, all I had learned of the world fit these definitions. Dream is an act by which the mind takes a stroll around the neighborhood as the body sleeps. Betrayal, a thorn concealed by petals. Suffering, the length of this thorn and its sharpness. Vanity, that by which a bird measures the sky with its body. Courage, the attempt of this bird.
Three years later, the volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull, “island mountain glacier” ash floats over you like snow on windy wings in reimagined broadcasts of Aprils past. Something TV static sings of, spliced together on a newsreel, defies geography. As I left Manila for New York three years ago, someone was on his way to Havana in the novel at my bedside. When news, novels, nightmares drew from a single well, daily I drank and dreamed of laughter—but whose?— mingling grief and forgetfulness. If it echoed, maybe the earth was listening. Who else could hear? I put the world on mute for years at a time. As dogs tamed by hunger whimpered, didn’t birds skirt the makeshift stakes of your campsite? Nearby the boats quivered in the twisted harbor. Water made moonlight ripple. I was out there. The North Atlantic between us. When you were roofless, I was windowless in Kings County. Have never been to Haiti, may never go. Johanne, I’ve been sleeping in a warm bed all these years. Do the stars keep you up at night?
Couples
Something inside me was shaken. I began to suspect there are worlds apart from ours, with wormhole-portals scattered through our attics
Some things I learned while young: to make a statement true, add an unremarkable if. Explicate the assumptions; assumptions fill the wells
whose ears believed in the future, in the erratic voice of wind, how could I say, Wait. Be calm.
TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER
Now and then I forget the awe I felt, at six, upon discovering Monet’s water lilies in a book.
Forgiveness, the notion by which the blind do not envy us our eyes. The eye is an aperture embedded in a body, and the body expires. Monet, like the whippoorwill in a rhyme I called whimperwill, from the age of six, I have searched for your nymphéas in life and have found the world in its vastness—such immensity—radiant and gorgeous and lacking.
TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER
By MARIE LA VIÑA Prize Runner-Up
She wore the ring like talisman, like amulet. He heard her smiling clearly as the alphabet. He couldn’t give her reasons, only rhetoric. She wrapped her arms around him like a tourniquet. She couldn’t write him love poems, only limericks. He couldn’t give her answers, only asterisks.
BERNICE KILDUFF WHITE & JOHN J. WHITE CREATIVE WRITING PRIZE
11
Periplaneta Japonica By X.M. GRIFFITHS Prize Winner
The only possible explanation is that it crawled out of the dirt of my running shoes after a walk through the mud in the High Line. Of course I am limiting myself. It could have come through the air ducts. A scientifically minded child in one of the neighboring apartments may have lost his dear pet. However it happened, I had to accept the fact that I was harboring a roach in my home. Not just any roach. Periplaneta Japonica. I know this the same way I know that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a former KGB operative in East Berlin or that Kerry Washington wore a crop top while pregnant to the SAG Awards: it appeared on my Yahoo! Homepage. The invasive species was recently discovered in New York. Its unique structure supposedly allowed it to survive our harsh city winters in the outdoors. Seeing it on my kitchen counter sent a nostalgic tingle down my spine. We always had cockroaches. Periplaneta Americana. I was born into a house with them so how could I be at all responsible for their existence? Despite this, my mother always berated my filthy living habits as the reason for their incessant propagation. In my teens we moved to Westchester. A quaint but overpriced one-story with an expansive basement. Best of all it was wholesomely, wonderfully roach free. At least until we moved in. It was our mistake to move with roach infested furniture, harboring unhatched eggs. I say “our mistake,” but again I was only thirteen so how could it be my responsibility to choose which furniture should literally be thrown to the curb? I was reminded of the times a certain cousin would prank call us on the telephone asking to speak to “Roach”. “ “There is no one named Roach here,” I would say. Giggling she responded, “You have so many there you can’t let me speak to just one?” I promptly hung up. Another roach, another memory. I am in the seventh grade pulling a book from my opened bag. A few seconds later a fat juicy roach, Eurycotis Floridana, walks across the conjoined desks set up in tables of four. The exact source was indeterminate for the teacher and other students but of course I knew la cucaracha had sought refuge in my bag only to choose this most opportune moment to embarrass me in front of my current crush, Felicia. No. On second thought her name was Sarah or something like that. I picked up a magazine, a high brow British film monthly I contributed to every now and then just to keep up my reputation as a critic, or more accurately, conceal the fact that I was a hack. I raised it over the placid roach ready to crush it using David Cronenberg’s forehead. Reconsidering my stance I allowed it to walk over the magazine cover and held it cautiously. Could I make it all the way to the lobby and outside without someone noticing what I was carrying? Could I set it free by opening a window and casting it to the wind? Japonica? I was by no mean an expert on Latin or scientific classifications, despite owning numerous unopened texts on both subjects, but even I could tell what it meant. Yes, it fit perfectly well in the home of a clandestine Japanophile along with the bookshelves lined with the works of Soseki or the traditional hand carved bamboo door leading to the bedroom with screens made of the finest rice paper. Imported—all the way from San Francisco. I had recently come back from a tour of Asia yet this was the most exciting and unexpected thing to happen in my life in quite some time. Who could I talk to about this? I was on good terms with a well-educated and cultivated group of high minded acquaintances as well as low-life, blue-collared, philistine friends with whom I unabashedly indulged in hard drugs and other forms of so called “degenerate behavior”. Where in this cross section of camaraderie could I find a compatible soul to have an intelligent conversation about roaches without fear of revulsion? How would such a conversation go? “So I have decided to adopt a roach.” “Great, what kind?” “Periplaneta Japonica?” “Real nice, I didn’t even think you could get those in this country.” And so on.
I set the magazine down and closed my eyes so I could not see where the roach went. When I opened them it was nowhere in sight. My next encounter with the roach was weeks later when I pulled the latest hyper-violent and over sexualized Swedish hardback thriller from my library. There it was, nestled between the upper bindings. It looked particularly moist and contemplative. A viscous secretion oozing along its rear dorsal surface, a defensive response meaning it felt threatened. However at home or uneasy it may have been, its presence there was completely unacceptable. I violently shook to book open holding it by the front hardbound flap. The roach splashed through the air before landing on the Canadian Oak hardwood floor with a hollow thud befitting its mass. It scurried away with renewed animation before disappearing under the radiator. Another night, another girl. We, Homo Sapiens, took a cab back from the dinner party, thrown in the honor of some hotshot socialite retiring from his pure sinecure post in the city government. I had no right to be there with the pressed and preened and glistening glitterati— after all my apartment was infested with roaches. I wish I remembered that fact before deciding to bring her back to my place. It could have saved a life, but it was the furthest thing from my mind as she cycled between sucking my tongue and biting my lower lip. This was not a random hookup. I knew her, or she knew me rather. She ran alongside me on my jogs through the High Line when I wanted to avoid running into my other paramours around my neighborhood. “I can’t wait until you see my new tattoo,” she said, coming up for air a few steps away from my apartment door. “I think you’ll have fun finding where it is.” “I can’t wait to make you breakfast in the morning,” I responded airlessly. I plunged my tongue back into the abyss of her mouth before she had a chance to grasp the inappropriateness of my utterance. It was a force of habit. I was clueless when it came to talking dirty and was so selfish in the act of making love that I could not guarantee anyone’s satisfaction but my own. The sentiment seemed to be that that was alright because I would make up for with breakfast. My French Toast, Belgian Waffles, and Spanish Omelets were more enticing than anything I could offer in the bedroom. We stripped to our undergarments in the master bedroom. I could already tell where her tattoo was. A garish emblem of Brazilian pride couched under her left bosom. I must admit it was a bold choice for a redhead that spoke Portuguese with a Boston accent. I kissed the spot tenderly then bit it hungrily. She let out an enchanted squeal before pushing me away onto my king sized mattress covered in Egyptian cotton sheets, thread count 1500. “I’ll be right back,” she said turning. She walked into the master bathroom with her high heels still on. I closed my eyes as she closed the door. A few seconds later she let out another squeal, this one of pure terror. I heard a lot of banging and the sound of my assorted toiletries crashing to the floor. The entire fracas lasted perhaps ten seconds. I sat up as she opened the door, a transformed disheveled mess. She now only had one shoe on. She held the other in her hand, the sole facing outward where I saw the crushed vertebrae of my beloved pest. In a wailing voice she tried to explain herself, “I’m sorry I just saw it came out of nowhere and I panicked. I didn’t mean to overreact.” I tried to act surprised and apologize for having a roach in my home. It felt like apologizing to the driver that ran over my dog. “Gee mister, I sure am sorry Sparky always ran into the road like that. I hope you didn’t bang up your car too much.” Another minute, another awkward silence. She tried to resume our physical relations. I did the best I could given the circumstances but the feeling was gone. I could not believe my friend, posthumously christened Yamato, met his end to an overpriced pair of Italian stilettos. Needless to say after that night I never spoke to Heather again. Or was it Cindy? Wait I think her name was Courtney, definitely Courtney. No Samantha…
ANIL JADHAV/FLICKR
FRONT COVER PHOTO TYLER MARTINS/THE OBSERVER FRONT AND BACK COVER DESIGN TAYLER BENNETT/THE OBSERVER