Angela Brazeal

 

Angela Brazeal grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.  She received her MA in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2004.  Her graduate thesis, titled Space Under the Tongue, was a collection of short stories and poetry.  Her work has been published in local San Antonio university journals, Quirk and The Luminous Page, and her poetry has been featured in the San Antonio Express News.  Currently, she is an English Instructor at Northeast Lakeview College where she teaches English courses from Freshman Composition to American Literature. 

 

 

The Circle of Life

 

My mom is the recipient of grocery lists and

dirty looks from my grandma, who has,

since 1986, lived in my mom and dad’s house.

She is eighty-eight years old and can no longer

drive herself to Thousand Oaks Baptist church, or

to Sensational Hair (for a weekly wash and set), or

the Dollar Store (where she buys greeting cards),

or to the grocery (to replenish her supply of cashews).

When she hitches a ride with my mom, she

voices her discontent for various offenses:

chili that was too spicy, clothes left in the washing

machine on her washing day, or a phone call missed

when the line was tied up.  My mom first sits

in silence, eventually yelling back until

they scrapple like a mom and teenage daughter.

When grandma scolds mom, across the

kitchen table, for buying the wrong brand of Gas-X,

my dad and I hardly stifle our laughter, until

finally the snarls are directed at us.

 

 

The Basics

 

Before I could begin school at Woerther

Elementary, my mom insisted I learn several

basic skills. I must remember to always

put paper on the toilet seat, never holler

“I’m finished” from the bathroom and wait

for my teacher to help, and most important:

I must be able to spell my whole name. 

Just  “A-N-G,” like my dad taught me,

would not hold up in big kid school. 

After the trials of learning to spell the whole

thing, writing my Z in the right direction,

and leaving accidental pieces of forgotten

toilet paper on the all three toilet seats

in our house, I was ready.  When I arrived

at school, my teacher called me “Angie,”

which I couldn’t spell.  I went to the

bathroom to cry, and in my hysteria, forgot

to put paper down on the seat, and I knew

better than to holler for help.

 

 

 

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Jenna Bazzell

 

Jenna Bazzell is a third-year poetry MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a graduate assistant who has taught English Composition 101 and 102.  She has also been an intern with Crab Orchard Review and currently the director of the Saluki Writer’s Project volunteer- teaching creative writing.

 

 

Nightgown

 

 

Think of what ghosts we slip into, or they into us. Other lives, gone

or not, like a shadow at night, like a sprawling dark, your hand pressed

 

palm-flat, to the window, to know something shields us.

Tonight, call back the ghosts you refused—listen for their steps

 

from the ceiling to your floor—a pair of untied sneakers, a pair

of stumbling bare feet. Such nights like this you find you’re spun

 

in your mother’s skin: the olive complexion of her freckled shoulders,

her neck slender bent over a coffee table, over a crushed white line.

 

Hand-cupping it. The intuitive way you know the film of pill dust,

how to test for your pulse. Other nights you wake with your father’s face,

 

creased, concerned as old photos over the past and even more, the present,

or smaller things: bread crumbs under the refrigerator, your tulips

 

dying, one summer after another, and how to tell you what skin

they wear, too, slips back years as it was before money wasn’t around,

 

your mother waiting in parking lots for drug dealers before she was committed,

before we had to move in with her parents. But tonight, your skin wears thin.

 

Lets them in. Like a smoke-thin dark. Like how death might look

seen from another side. Ash-thin. No place to keep them but here.

 

Like this: remember each time you pressed your ear

to your mother’s chest against her nightgown, or mimicked

 

your breathing with hers, you listened for her song as she sang to you,

its simple refrain reminding you: sleep is the closest thing to dying,

 

you never forgot as she must still be ripping her life from the buttons,

but carrying around our lives in that moment together. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visiting Hours

 

 

And these walls won’t speak the words the nurse waits for,

that I have repeated and still don’t understand, that I am here

 

to see my mother, who is not dying exactly, but waiting,

no idea how to gauge time by the light of fluorescent tubing.

 

It’s low-level buzz robs each memory of sound, so that she

cannot recall music and voices, even the long sound of an

 

ashtray breaking against a wall. In her room, vents rattle

and sigh, cold air edges under the hospital bed, her eyes,

 

the color of iron; her face thin as the starched sheets,

her cheeks and collarbones sunken, the cotton gown

 

washed to the delicacy of lace, the rusty color of her voice

like dying light; her skin, her thinned legs, the rhythm

 

of her heart, now, mimicked in bleeps. Each day, she cups her hand

around my bicep as tubes dangle from the pit of her other elbow.

 

And each day, we walk this stainless hall to a patio between

two wards, both solid brick, in which she stares past the sun-

 

bleached chairs and barberry shrubs, into a world

she has been barred from. She sits in a pool of sunlight

 

tapping a cigarette loose from her pack. She tells me

there are ways out of everything. But one day, turns into two,

 

then a week and sometimes a month. This time, it has been a week.

She walks back through the unlatched door, her hair lit

 

with sunshine, a cloud of smoke rising around her.

 

 

 

 

Turkey Creek, Alabama, 2004

 

 

Lampblack, coyotes drag their long howls through the moonlight

as pine trees nudge each other in the length of wind

                         and move from shadow to shadow.

 

The kudzu and the sweet gum drape over the gravel-slung road

                            where twelve gauge slugs sunk into the river’s clay banks

an up thrust of wheatgrass pods toss in darkness, as a series of telephone

poles stretch the length of dark ditches under a scalded sky.

 

 

 

          ~ Nick Flynn, Some Ether (2000 Graywolf Press)

 

I enjoyed this book.  Here’s what I said back when I read it the first time: “A significant portion of the poems have brilliant voices, sharp wit, and eerie lives that seem to continue outside of the book.  At his best he has a sensibility about the characters with relation to their environments that borders on perfection.” 

 

~ TM

 

 

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Leslie Adams

 

Leslie is a first-year MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a 2008 graduate of Mississippi State University, where she earned her MA in English. While attending Mississippi State, she served as a poetry editor for The Jabberwock Review and was awarded both the Eugene Butler and the Albert Camus Creative Writing Scholarships. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume II: Mississippi, and New South.

 

 

 

Fracture

 

I’ve seen already how I could hate your thin mouth,

the ragged teeth of the story a glass shard, a memory scar—

 

I have not yet learned to let time bear weight like a healed bone.

And the narrative is never linear,

 

the convoluted edges of other and self, that radius of wanting—

how expendable we become, how superfluous to each other’s lives,

 

with our simple human dependence on signs and omens

balanced like birds legging single stalks of grass in the hayfield,

 

wreathing the supernatural like a ring around the moon,

something we can approach but never address,

 

something we wait for, not the light but a diffusion of the light—

how we look with indulgence on ourselves, our simple human wants and weaknesses,

 

your shoulders worn to the thin blades of a child’s

that I would cover as if they are shameful,

 

if I could wedge my hands to that omen of bone

without breaking them, if I knew I could have them back.

 

           

 ~originally appear in the Cimarron Review

 

 

 

 

Wanting the Earth

 

“You will want the earth, then more of the earth—

it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive”

                                                          Louise Glück “The Sensual World”

 

So this is why imagination, like love, thrives on absence:

 

the light here won’t let us think;

we are ruined by accuracy.

 

the sea calls back its waves like a falconer,

each morning wakes into place on cue,

 

heat runs like the hot slap of sap down the ruined trunks of trees,

and the sky, unchanging as an eye, posing water,

drags horizon like the train of a wedding dress;

 

so studied, everything, so choreographed,

 

breaking down into other, compressing and reassembling,

sand clamoring back to shale and granite, formless and reforming—

 

so this is mortality, this is what the word means:

touch and the loss of touch, sight and the failure of sight,

 

the rain scattering pizzicato, the burden of the stilled string—

 

         

 

 

If the Child’s Face is a Small House

 

When we look again the sun will be gone,

although it will doubtlessly circle back to stand behind us,

discarding shadows at our feet. 

 

And the child who stands behind us, who makes us seem taller,

will also circle back to stand twelve years behind us,

and will call forward words that we are unable to hear at this distance,

 

waving frantically in greeting or warning,

and will not be lost in the coming dusk.,

and will not be silenced. 

 

But your face braces itself like the early lines of a house that will not shelter.

I have lived under your jaw for too long

not to recognize the grinding teeth like the sharpening edge of a knife.

 

I have seen your jaw set like a sun.

I have done this now for many nights, at your feet like a child.

 

Unlike me, the child is wise, and not easily fooled or caught.

 

I do not yet know if the child’s face is also a small house,

or whether I would be invited in.

 

Why should we question this?

 

The dead are aligned exactly as we left them,

and the unborn still whisk just over our heads like birds

for whom I half-cast the net and draw it back empty of even air.

 

Come here, little one.

I will not refuse you your questions,

and will not cast nets or accusations.

 

I dreamed each one of your teeth like unearthed seeds, but here, see,

they have been in my hands all the while.