Summer 2010 EP Issue

OXFORD M A G A Z I N E

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Editor Leslee Chan

Managing Editor

Joe Squance

Fiction Editor Matt Weinkam

Nonfiction Editor

Evan Steuber

Poetry Editor Jonny Lohr

Staff Readers

Kasey Butcher Megan Edwards

Michelle Lawarence Jonathan Rylander Stephanie Weaver

Ben Wetherbee

Artwork Amy Chan

Sarah Morejohn Ryan Van Dyke

Cover Image: BatPoseidon by Ryan Van Dyke.

Logo designed by Emily Musterman

Contact For general inquiries: oxmag@muohio.edu

For fiction submissions:

oxmagfictioneditor@muohio.edu

For nonfiction submissions: oxmagessayseditor@muohio.edu

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oxmagpoetryeditor@muohio.edu

Special thanks to Dana Leonard, Eric Goodman, Joe Griffin, Amy Chan, Sarah Morejohn, Ryan Van Dyke, and Emily Musterman. Also, Carl Weathers. Established in 1984 and still currently produced by the graduate students of Miami University’s English Department. The views expressed herein are those of the authors, not the editors or sponsors. After first publication, all subsequent rights revert back to the author. Copyright © 2010 by Oxford Magazine.

A Glance by Sarah Morejohn.

SUMMER 2010 EP ISSUE

Contents

Predicates by James Best The Hulk is the Patron Saint of Scared Little Boys by James Best

This Scarred Wish by Jamey Genna American Pantheon by Anthony Alvarado

Tongue by Donald Illich There is nothing funny about a penis by Laura Wetherington

Contributors

The Hulk is the Patron Saint of Scared Little Boys By James Best

Predicates By James Best

Parents are bananas, like wood and bowling pins, they are not just hair and lips but become like them. Do what they do. Homes can be like toys, they will feel like records and always hearts, but they can also be a fever, can do what sticks do to bones. New vocabulary for my ‘situation’ says the guidance counselor in a voice she’s using to warm me, like I’m my hands, a winter machine. After these sessions I walk the railroad all the way to the shatterboard bridge, where I straddle the rusted struts to watch the swirling murk of the creek. I feel like a cloud and a glance. If a train follows me here, to this cobble boned span we will both shake apart. But for a while, I am like my house— a leg, an ending, a gesture.

For sixteen Saturdays, I’ve manned this paper house. Camped on this porch, been the last in-between. Inside, sleep is a trust and I am a guardian. For sixteen Saturdays, that red rust crusted Sable has parked, pointed at our house hummed with eyes out under the summer molt of that willow. That patient asp pretends sleep, but I see that single red cherry, burn, flicker right, burn. Any age is an awful age to suddenly become a man. These things I know: -If he leaves the car, he’s coming for her. -No cop on earth is fast enough. If there is a blessing for Louisville Sluggers, for boys half as big as grown men, for eyes to keep steady wake until that Sable gets up and growls away… Somebody, I’m asking.

 

First you look—a grave with a gray

marker—a space hardly wide enough to hold your grandfather. Next to him, a slice in the earth, is the place your grandmother’ll go. You wonder how they bury them without the coffins bumping into each other.

A white steepled church in the country, where they sold Christmas crafts in the back room. Your uncle Ronny buying bowls of ambrosia—marshmallow fruit salad from the local HyVee. The sugar and the buttered ham sandwiches required to keep a body in winter weight that never leaves.

Roads, straight and scraped free of snow. A scudding wind across the highway. Stop signs. A girl who’s really a woman, thirty years old, jumped out of her car, arguing with her skinny boyfriend. A guy strong enough to lift her, strong enough to carry her back to the car, gravel in her skin, or highway or ice. What image stayed in his mind, do you think, for the rest of his life?

What hasn’t changed? Stores that smell of fuel oil and plastic. The fronts of the stores still flat boards and painted signs, aisles in them with discounted gloves. Corduroy jackets. Overpriced soda, but gas is so low you want to pack it with you to take back to California. Lumber yards and bowling alleys.

Churches and bars, old houses restored, and some plowed over.

Plastic storage units. Condos on the edge of town, unpurchased. Everyone’s working at the one last ethanol plant that’s still on-line.

Main Street is empty but there are more people in the bar than expected.

Haircuts stuck in one style. The lady who waits on you smiles—she knows your dad and wonders which one you are, hasn’t seen him since he gave up drinking. Service and curiosity stamped together.

Your mother’s shape and her house, too—the same. Her teeth in disrepair. You hardly dare write it down.

The rooms upstairs cold, but neat, and full of stuff: beds with quilts in layers, dishes, dolls, and china—glass in shelves to the ceiling. The windows cracked and taped. The curtains, soiled from the wind

and rain and snow that seeps onto fabric, leaving watermarks like abstract paintings.

The lawn that was cleared of trash two years ago when you were home for the first grandmother’s funeral, filled up again with plastic water bottles, rusted metal loops, a bed throw forever in a heap.

Why is it dark things get noticed? Is that just how you see things?

The parents’ farmhouse falls down around them and you think how others won’t show—too educated or too rich. Too happy? You admit you don’t know. Too impatient to listen to your dad stumbling around with his words, saying how he’s doing this, could do that with his house, his cattle. You know your thoughts are unfair.

You know his best days are behind him. You hug him from the back while he drinks his coffee at the table. Wonder how long he can keep working. The worst thought is that your mother will go before him. You can see she’s on her way.

Her brightening doesn’t occur. You know she’s sad her mom died; she’s sick, too, with the flu, but there’s something else missing—some spark or gleam you saw when she came out to visit you. Something that was there before, even when she was walking up the hill to the house, winded.

Think about how lifeless your grandmother was—her face was not her own. She didn’t have the shape. Sure life had gone out of her, but sometimes they look like they’re sleeping. You hate to see that emptiness.

You’re surprised that your father wondered what you thought of God. You can still capitalize His name. When the minister said, “Even the lowliest swallow will have a place,” you thought of your dog. How it would be great to see him again—lifted, restored. No more scratching on the wall trying to eat his skin free of pain. You ask for faith. It doesn’t seem fair that such a good dog goes into the ground unrewarded just because he isn’t human and can’t believe.

You ask your grandma for a sign of some other existence, but if it’s simply a matter of belief then what do the dead

need of the living? You know you won’t get a murmur.

You think about stories of other people’s religions, wondering who’s right and wondering why more people don’t even question—people on the edges of the country and in the middle. Death and blizzards and a child’s death and suicide and the wind and gunshots and a hand stuck out the car window lost to a semi driving by.

You want to look up old friends, but are embarrassed by long silences and you don’t know how or what to ask them and neither do they. Still they’ll be angry to find you’ve come and gone. Your sister’s not afraid to talk, though, and she knows what to say. You’ll listen and write it all down later, and she’ll be mad at the parts you got right, but she didn’t want to hear—how she cried drunk over your grandpa’s grave one night with your cousins, something you never got the chance to do because you lived so far away and didn’t have the money. Something she didn’t want you to know or she would’ve told you sooner.

It’s no wonder your grandmother made dolls and quilts and grew flowers all her life, waiting for butterflies to pass by. There’s nothing to do here but sit around and talk about the ones who didn’t come for the funeral—you’re able, for once, to resent openly. Besides you’re already on their shit list. You know they’ll be sorry, though. Someday it’ll hit them, regret the only wound that can’t close. Still, you’re tired of your own perspective.

A girl jumped out of the car while it was still moving. A Mexican pulled a knife on a white kid. The town’s worried about the immigrant population. The Mexican stores. Every time you go home, it’s like this. There’s someone paying a ticket to the town council for ripping up all the real estate signs and moving them around from lawn to lawn. That’s a good joke, you think, and something to do, and the cops are assholes for pressing charges, but they need something to do, too. You drive around the town, the high school, the cemetery, the bars, and wonder why it’s all still there.

This Scarred Wish By Jamey Genna

Fiction

The gravel roads, the two highways leading like a cross into and out of town.

They are arguing now—as it should be. “They read the will (without me).”

What will you do when your own sister gets the plastic organ you wanted? Already changing the story, saying she asked for it first. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but she’s the youngest, she’ll get it.

And your mother’s favorite. You never learned how to take.

Your mother now, always giving, take this and take that, it’ll fit.

Wouldn’t you have liked your grandmother to give her stuff to you when she was alive? Christmas magazines, golden teapots, washrag doll stitched up with a jack-in-the-box mouth. Alive. Joy there

she could’ve seen, instead of this scarred wish.

Your mother will die, too. You can see it in the way she sleeps,

her glasses fallen halfway onto the pillow, the open book on her blanket, pages falling closed, while you look.◊

Drink by Amy Chan.

American Pantheon By Anthony Alvarado

westward with musket and hamburger muscles the west goes wandering like a woman with her feet on the ground History continuous with dinosaurs and the ghosts of redwood trees and dollar bill headed president’s all growing pot and talking shop, wiping hands on rags and shaking their heads in unison “Oh, the demise of this more perfect union!” “Cincinnati put down your ploughshare and take up your sword” they whisper and words shivers along the coaxial cable of our collective spine urging until it snags upon the red and yellow snarl of McDonald’s traffic like a ruptured balloon hung high over the overpass. Let us go downtown, the lynching is undercooked and the ice cream vendors sing banjos and ukuleles jangle their glass skeletons in the window-shops, where await blue toothed mannequins with perfect skin and our Great White founding fathers and Ronald Reagan as well. Here at the galloping rust bridge when California falls into an Ocean, past the supine and enormous red Indian we will awaken from our dreams of pumping blood by the barrel and these rain gods will baptize us in cold hard cash anoint us with oil Lincoln will take your hand with milk pouring from his mouth and honey from his eyes and say – thy kingdom come.

Tongue By Donald Illich

Did you witness my tongue driving to the mall? It was dripping profusely, looking for a taste of material goods.

On the other hand, my lips stayed home, chapped, blistered, and busted. It was tired of being a portal, of letting in food that was too spicy and damaging its red skin. The tongue bought a thousand ice cream cones, licking them before they melted. It wrapped around the candy canes, panted at the Porsches in the center of the walkway, tried on new boots and cowboy walked around metal studs for his tip. Lips counted the hours the tongue would be out. It kissed walls, furniture, my human body, but nothing would let him escape his wet fate. We’re not getting dripped on. You’re on your own. The tongue would come back and they’d dance at the dinner table, divorce impossible, my meal the only one allowed them, declared at my birth when both suckled, but one let loose a scream.

Circle of Life by Ryan Van Dyke.

There is nothing funny about a penis By Laura Wetherington

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Contributors Anthony Alvarado lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. He writes a regular column - DIY Magic for Arthurmag.com. His collection of short stories Throwing Bones is available from Gunbaby Graphics and can be found on Amazon.com. He is the editor of the online journal Axe Handle Collective. His work can also be found at: anthonyalvarado .wordpress.com. James Best lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Valerie and their collection of terminal plants. His indifference to their plight fuels his writing. He also loves ice cream. Besides poetry, he works in television and writes web series.

Jamey Genna teaches writing in the Bay Area of San Francisco. She received her Masters in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Her short fiction has been published in many literary magazines such as Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, Eleven Eleven, Georgetown Review, and The Iowa Review. Donald Illich has published work in LIT, Passages North, Nimrod, The South Carolina Review, and several other journals. He was awarded Honorable Mention for the Washington Book Prize. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.

Laura Wetherington is a graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program and UC Berkeley's Undergraduate English Department. Laura is a co-editor at textsound.org, has work in Bombay Gin and Verse, and has work forthcoming from Little Red Leaves and The Journal of the New American Epigram. Her manuscript was just named a finalist in the National Poetry Series. She teaches at the New England Literature Program and at Eastern Michigan University. When not thinking about poetry, she is thinking about the mysteries of living in a body.