Shady side review

Spring 2012

As we move further into spring, we embrace the idea of change. And, with this issue, Shady Side Review introduces a new element to our magazine. Words and visuals work go hand in hand. In support of that, welcome to our inaugural issue featuring artwork. Our featured artist is Mihai Coman, whose photography illustrates international narratives through bringing our attention to colorful facades. These photographs pair with the written work here, reflecting and reminding: every liter-ary piece is a building, creating a home for real and imagined worlds. As always, the literary work we’ve selected sells nothing short of strange, underground, and often haunting. In fiction, we have Donald Trump action figures; the creation of words like “niss,” and writers who ask you to think about “yourself in dinosaur pajamas.” Our featured writer in nonfiction displays the breadth of his work with pieces that take us to his summer days as a kid where “trees turn into jungle, de-sert, outerspace...” to an adult traveling through Egypt. Poetry lends it-self to themes of love; each piece in this issue carries on a love affair (whether tumultuous or wonderfully ideal) with language, existence, and memory. In a way, all written work is about memory and a way to move for-ward from the past. Within a few short days, we will open the windows to a new season, one that represents hope and new life. To that we say, “Lift your glass. Cheers! Reflect on the last days of winter and read on.” -- Teresa Petro, Editor

IN THIS ISSUE

1 TRYSTING RICHARD PEABODY

2 LOVE — 1 JOHN MCKERNAN

3 I WANT TO PRESS APPLES ON THE FLOORBOARDS OF YOUR ATTIC

STEVE GOOD

4 LOVE — 2 JOHN MCKERNAN

5 THE ANSWER MARESA WHITEHEAD

6 SOMEDAY I WILL LIVE KIMBERLY BROWN

7 THE PEOPLE YOU NEVER MEET AGAIN ALISSA FLECK

9 LOVE — 3 JOHN MCKERNAN

10 IN SOME OTHER WORLD KIMBERLY BROWN

11 MIHAI COMAN

12 THE ANNIVERSARY ELLEN MCGRATH SMITH

13 NISS ALEX RIESER

14 PHANTOM PAINS ANNE FOWLER

16 WHAT DAVID MORICE’S POEMS ARE ABOUT

VINCENT RENDONI

18 THE THING THAT HAPPENED ROBERT ISENBERG

20 THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS ROBERT ISENBERG

23 VIEQUES ROBERT ISENBERG

TRYSTING Richard Peabody

(Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC) skinny dipping in the midst of power ties and haute couture I should come back in the daylight view the relics half-glimpsed Byzantine moon the word “Loggia” turns me on Lest I forget: damask skin intimacy luscious pool

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LOVE — ONE John McKernan

Someone’s sharp knife Peeled the words J LOVES J From maple bark Where a thin tattoo Of syrup Rose once to the white surface When Joe His finger over this scar He tasted The food green leaves eat Sweet Feeble but sweet

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I WANT TO PRESS APPLES ON THE

FLOORBOARDS OF YOUR ATTIC Stephen Good

I want to press apples on the floorboards of your attic, tow you away in blossom. my song of floodlights. tinsel-silent rain. a lamp’s wick. I want to sit two brussel sprouts at your kitchen table and crawl to you with salamander eyes— the waltz of poached egg and garage. I want to wait at the luggage carousel, watching your unclaimed bag go around. pour from me as though I were a carnival, winding my string of colored bulbs in the quarter-light.

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LOVE — TWO John McKernan

The ink The paper Need each other To heal Shadows in the skull To leash Midnight To dawn With a single word A single word Flowing Onto the eye Into the eye Can feed the soul forever

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THE ANSWER Maresa Whitehead

I have discussed life’s ultimate choice with the purple-plumed common grackle which perches on the tarnished green gutter across the alleyway from my fourth floor kitchen window while I chain-smoke Marlboro Menthols. When I dip the filter in a glass of ashy water and stand to shut the window, he meets my gaze with one yellow eye and trills his answer: Live.

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SOMEDAY I WILL LIVE Kimberly Brown

In a place greyer than this, miles stretching, veil of grey snow, grey as bones. You will carve your name into stone with the arrowhead of your childhood. These mountains bear the slope of your shoulders, curve of your neck. Where you hesitated, I buried secrets. But do you mind if years from now my skin still holds your fingerprints and always loves you? Tonight, I am awkward in front of store windows that are dark as mouths. They swallow my intentions. The snow falling makes me something different each 6 am minute I am left, trying to make loneliness some holy thing, but can only hope your body is never just a photograph.

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THE PEOPLE YOU NEVER MEET AGAIN Alissa Fleck

This is a long history of not finishing things. How does one? This is a long history of forgetting and of not forgetting, of remembering lovers only by their limbs, not a love story. Skinny legs in an upstairs room— smoldering sliver moons in a farmhouse with ditch weed prairies in the cellar. Or sturdy legs, a mile-long cough, and problems with authority. Bicycle spoke legs, pedaling down cattail-splashed hills into a cow-shit sunset. The cheeky woman at the post office with unhealed paper-cuts; the cashier who mentions your sweatshirt when you buy only a double pregnancy test pack on the Fourth of July; a tollbooth attendant you pass in the belly of night— a moment’s decision to smile or not— you remember them as well. Something new waiting to be unfinished. You only dream about the people you’ll never see again, the ones who come and go like the smell of summer gasoline, silk sliding across fingertips, misheard conversations. When you wake up you want to track them down,

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you want to know where they stand on this or that, what indelicacies occupy their minds, whether they will become those people who use dental floss in movie theaters.

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LOVE — THREE John McKernan

Sleep’s tattoo Shadow’s tom-tom Your finger print Your lip print Your voice print In addition To your presence I love memory Especially your perfume In subtraction I will erase your fears Banish your false self Find you a passport to Eden But first I will take off your clothes

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IN SOME OTHER WORLD Kimberly Brown

It's no small thing when birds are loosed from the cave of your chest. We move between that and this, aware of our inside bodies: the closing throat, the tightening stomach. The mouth the tongue slips through to speak. We invite these restarts. Our centers pulse like memories sending us their meteors, tokens. We tunnel through the days thinking of blood as a bridge, knowing we are not empty, but full of borrowed, stolen things, what we take from each other. People drag their ghosts around by the neck here, keeping little ends behind their eyes: an hour, a spool of thread, a sentence.

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Romania’s past is often compared to present day North Korea as it involves an extended period of economic and cultural isolation at the hand of a dictatorial regime. For decades, western media and goods were largely outlawed, and a secret police enforced a series of cultural and ideological regulations prescribing everything from proper men’s hair styles to acceptable poetry. Much of the nation’s prior cultural heritage was suppressed, intellectual and artistic figures censored, and cultural institutions eradicated. Emphasizing uniformity, these stan-dards frowned upon ostentatious color and decor in architecture, leav-ing cities and towns today with a legacy of grey concrete apartment blocks, businesses, and homes. In 1989, the fall of Communism brought with it a new freedom and an insurgence of Western habits and values, often sudden and dramatic. From direct imports like McDonald’s to mashups of traditional Gypsy music and hip hop, the country is dealing with external pressures of globalization while trying to make sense of its recent history and searching its past for a unique identity. This series of photographs chronicles the progression of this cul-tural transition into the architectural medium. In the last few years, many urban and rural building facades have broken out into hot pinks, greens, and other exaggerated colors-seemingly overnight. The change could be interpreted as a search for identity, as the colors are somewhat reminiscent of architecture in nearby Germany, a culturally influential region. At the same time, the lack of moderation in hues could hint at a immature exploration of a newly-available aesthetic, reminiscent of a pre-adolescent learning to apply makeup. Then again, it may be as sim-ple as an honest celebration of color and self-expression. While dramatic changes like this are nothing new, the slow-changing and relatively permanent nature of architecture makes this development a reflection of a meaningful cultural transition. These fa-cades serve as a testament of a people that have at last won their free-dom of expression and are now faced with the difficult task of finding something to say that is both modern and relevant, but also their own. - Mihai Coman

RE: THE ANNIVERSARY Ellen McGrath Smith

Mad Ludwig lived in Neufschwanstein. We walked behind the army spies in their efficient trenchcoats to the knobby spinal top of the hill. The Alps were ice-blue sequins all across the breast of Europe, cleanliness that gave me a particular sort of headache — not a migraine, but a lack of one which somehow in the scheme of things was worse — the way a hearse without a coffin can seem worse. The stairways of his castle were the exact structure of the stereotypical maniacal laugh, tapering toward the bottoms and the tops. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have seen Europe. Karl Icahn sailed down on his golden parachute. I set him in the throne room. It was 1989. Then I took him out and inserted a Donald Trump action figure. Donald Rumsfeld did exist but hadn’t been product-licensed yet; the Berlin Wall still stood. Under a skylight near Lake Lugano, the feathers of ten dozen geese were snow upon my nudity. Hallucinating Margaret Thatcher reading The Economist just one floor beneath us, I spread my toes and quartered our new marriage like good beef in the best kitchens: pros and cons and tenderloins. The army psychiatrists kept us restrained in the back seat while they bickered about where to check in the night after next. In the proc-ess, we both formed our own opinions on Fiats and switchbacks and postmodern goats. Two decades later, you ask me to sit down and chat, as if I might have the answer to the problem of Swiss cheese. A lady bent down with a key near a wall of cement. That was Italy. And what if they were our in-laws, our custodians who seemed to love the Autobahn because it was so far away from anything like birth that even coughing seemed extra-neous? And if one night at the grand hotel I wished to slip out the tran-som and turn into Heinrich, the waiter who spoke as many languages as there were currencies, is that the champagne or the aspirin talking? If the town was just the way it was 500 years ago, can we agree I didn’t know what love was any more than we can now reverse the apparition?

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NISS Alex Rieser

Is there a word for that specific optical illusion a mirror makes in a restaurant where the whole place looks twice as big and congested as it is? I’m going to create a word: “niss” it means the experience of using a term your whole life and not attending to the fact that it has a different meaning. That’s how we got here. I was reading something on the bed and she was hunched over my computer, reading a poem that I’d left open on the desktop when she made that comment about how she does-n’t mind that I write about her having Cancer, she minds that I write about her having Cancer instead of talking to her about it. I wavered from what I was reading and then said it: “‘sup?” She said, “Are you asking me to dinner?” Now we’re here at this Vietnamese restaurant on Irving Street and I see across the room in the mirror two people who look exactly like versions of us slouching into their soup. In the reflection things are dis-tant in the way that during the relationship ‘it’s a long story’ will after-wards become just the story, and after that ‘just someone I knew.’ “Actually, I’d prefer that you don’t write at all.” Niss.

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PHANTOM PAINS Anne Fowler

When I was seven years old, my arm got torn off by an industrial sized icing mixer. That’s my big dramatic moment. When my friends get drunk and bitch about things like oh, my parents got divorced when I was twelve and now I have daddy issues or I was addicted to meth for five minutes and that makes me really interesting, I pull the arm card. I point at my tee shirt sleeve all deflated and flappy and say just that, when I was seven years old, my arm got torn off by an industrial sized icing mixer. I work at the bakery where I lost my arm. My father owned it, I took it over full time after my girlfriend left me for some guy with both his arms and a huge bank account. I don’t miss her, but I miss our son. We named him “Lou” after my dad. It’s amazing how a baby fits perfectly in one arm, like somehow I entered fatherhood with only exactly what I needed. She was pregnant when we met, so I guess Lou isn’t my biological son, but when you give someone something they learn to love so much they tend to make it theirs. They own it in a certain way. It owns them too. After Lou was born, stress began to inflame slowly and seamlessly until eventually it rose to look us in the faces and we wondered how we missed it growing. We had a child and no money and, sometimes, that’s enough break everything apart. I would do anything to just feel my son’s hair again. I want to put my hand on his blonde head and rake my fingers through and listen to him breathe out of his stuffy little infant nose. I want to feel him rub his face on my collar bone and grab for my mouth because I’m making kiss-ing noises and he wants to feel where it’s coming from. I can’t stomach the sound of removing a band-aid, or pulling duct tape off of the roll. I haven’t been able to since I was seven. The noise of ripping gives me phantom pains where my funny bone should be. Out of sight out of mind doesn’t work for ripped off arms. Actually, it probably doesn’t work for anything. I was told later that it was actually amazing that I lost my arm, that I must have had it at exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Looking back, I wonder why the hell the blades on an icing mixer are so

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fucking sharp just to stir icing. The world is full of excess, I guess. I clean out the mixer every night before I return home. The butter cream hits the sink in globs, thins out, then is washed down the drain. I hate to see it go.

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WHAT DAVID MORICE’S POEMS ARE ABOUT Vincent Rendoni

David Morice is sixty-two years old, tender, and kind. He loves puns and hard candy, just loves them both and although he doesn’t know com-puters or e-mail, David Morice is handy with the toolbox and a real green thumb. He has every right to be proud of his children and their children, but he would never boast, not David Morice who speaks in a gentle, whiskeyed baritone and only ever fantasizes about Mrs. Morice. David Morice is also a writer, something he has kept hidden from your town of Iowa City until today. David Morice is only telling you this be-cause his first book, a collection of poems is about to be published by the University of Iowa’s Press. The collection consists of one hundred po-ems, one hundred pages in length, that he has been writing everyday for the past one hundred days. The first of David Morice’s poems is about you. You are incredulous. You ask him how he did it, how it was even possible. David Morice smiles in his soft way and says, “I go from the beginning and work my way to the end.” David Morice gives you a copy, and you sit and read it in front of him as he comments on the weather. The first poem begins with your birth and the next is about when you were four and crying in dinosaur pajamas when you first learned you were going to die someday. The next few are about your pre-adolescent and teenage years: trading bubblegum cards with your older brother that ran away from Iowa and never came back, being beaten in the showers at summer camp, and making it to State with your soccer team and falling just a little bit short. Your firsts are in there too—all of them. You turn all sorts of red. By your late twenties, the text is not quite English or anything else, but is still in a language you can understand. Letters and lines begin to sepa-rate, breaking down and spilling out of the page. You have to know what David Morice knows about you, so you keep on reading. Finally, you are

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at the poem that is about this moment. David Morice gives you a warm two thumbs up. You are more than half past the book of your life. Some part of you doesn’t want to know what happens next, but you keep on reading. You think about yourself in the dinosaur pajamas.

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THE THING THAT HAPPENED Robert Isenberg

Dad splits logs in the leach field. He wears overalls and flannel. The af-ternoon is late and still hot. Mosquitos hover and black flies spin. Spears of light shoot through the evergreens and pierce the leaves and tree-bark. The only sound is the axe’s smack, then the whine of wood pulled apart by gloved hands. I am nearby, and I’m an expert daydreamer. The trees turn into jungle, desert, outer space. I’m four years old, and no sensation is constant. Now I’m crawling through caves. Now I’m a racecar driver. Here lie King Solomon’s Mines. But really I’m just crunching through the grass, sweat-soaked and bug-bitten. Another summer day wanes. The same as all other summer days. And then sparks fly. Just like that. The air around my Dad blooms with orange specs. “Wow!” I say. Just wow. Because I’ve never seen anything like this. Such violent, spontaneous light. Surprises are rare, here in the woods. The slow ad-vent of leaves and mud and snow don’t allow for sparks. So I say wow in my light soprano, because the sparks are beautiful and jarring, and I love that they have burst, that this has happened. But then there’s the headache. A sharp pain throbs above my eye. In that instant, I’m no longer wowed, but sick with urgency: I must walk the gravel driveway. Must get home. Lie down. Drink water. Then I can’t see – my vision is washed over with maroon. My eye-lashes stick. When my lids open again, only a blink later, Dad is running toward me. His face is contorted with fright, his arms are wide; he rears to scoop me up. Suddenly I’m flung into the air, slung over his shoulder, and the blood that’s streaming from my face is all over Dad’s shirt, too – both of us smeared with the violet blood of my head, and there is more coming, so much more. But my screams won’t linger. They will muffle with time. I will remem-ber writhing on the couch, squealing through the blood-soaked gauze pressed against my skull; but the cries will echo with distance, the voice of another person. I’ll remember Mom groping the telephone receiver. I’ll recollect nothing of the drive to the hospital, whether it’s a car or

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ambulance, how long it takes, what I do inside. If there is a waiting room, the details of my wait will be erased. Now there is the operating table, experienced in flashes. “Is it deep?” says a surgeon. “Yeah, it’s deep.” “Definitely deep.” This is all the dialogue I’ll keep. The only human voices from this day, tensely reporting how deep it is – whatever it is. For now, it’s all a mys-tery. I have no idea that Dad mis-swung his axe, that the axe’s head struck rock, the steel splintered, and so a spark – a shard of enflamed metal – shot square into my head. A half-inch lower would have blasted my eyeball. A little faster, brain-damage. I don’t know any of this, so the scene is only surgical masks and wire-framed glasses, latex-covered hands disappearing beyond my field of vi-sion, then pressure against my head, then a needle pulling thread. These things will stick. These are my souvenirs. If I must be shot in the head by a chunk of fiery metal – and if it must be the freakish mistake of my own father, who makes so few mistakes – then I must salvage what I can. The wound will heal, scar over, and even the thin trench will recede and vanish. In the decades to come, I’ll point to the ghost of this scar, mere skin and eyebrow. I’ll even forget which side received the blow. The memories will muddle, and the trauma will fade. I’ll never grow to fear axes or stones, and months will pass without me even thinking of the accident. One day this will be my party trick. Did I ever tell you about getting shot in the head? This lede will signal uproarious laughter. But that will happen later. For now, I am four years old, and I am just old enough to fear being dead. I know that I won’t come back from it. This thing that’s happened, whatever it is, might erase everything. This white room may be the last thing I ever see. Maybe everything ends now. What have I collected so far? What have these four years amounted to? If I have the chance to wake tomorrow, and I leave this hospital, touch my stitches with a trembling hand, join kindergarten, make friends, learn long-division, shed my training wheels, fall in love a hun-dred times – if these things happen, how much of this day will come with me? What can I keep? How long can I have it?

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THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS Robert Isenberg

We push through the crowd, into the tomb. The corridor is wide, but it’s packed with tourists. They speak German and French. They wear tacky T-shirts and floppy hats. They barely see the hieroglyphs before shooting them with their digital cameras. We press along, one half-step at a time, first on smooth concrete and then down a ribbed incline. Kylan turns around and cocks an eyebrow. She sees me smirking. She also sees the ear-buds I’ve inserted, whose cord connects to the iPod in my pocket. “What are you listening to?” she chirps. I can’t help but chuckle before handing her the iPod. I press play. Kylan frowns at first, because she doesn’t recognize the eerie instru-mentals. Then it clicks: It’s the soundtrack to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spe-cifically, the “map room scene,” in which Indiana Jones channels sunlight through a staff and pinpoints the location of the Ark of the Covenant. Kylan shakes her head, laughing, and hands the iPod back to me. “You’re such a dork,” she scoffs. Kylan’s mother has always wanted to see the Valley of the Kings. Ever since she saw the mummy of Tutankhamen as a little girl, and stood transfixed over that alabaster tomb, Laurie has always wanted to see Egypt. Five children, one divorce and copious debt got in the way. But now, at age sixty, she has the chance. Kylan and I have flown with her to Egypt, so she can see the ancient temples in person. This is not my kind of travel: five-star hotels, tour buses, a hokey guide named Mohammed, an all-inclusive cruise down the Nile. Even when I’m settled and gray, I hope never to choose this kind of tour-agent excursion. But Laurie is downright giddy to see the ruins first-hand, and this makes Kylan happy, and that makes me happy. I am old enough to enjoy being an escort, to negotiate with cabs and barter in the souk on Laurie’s behalf. Were it not for Kylan, Laurie would never see her beloved Valley. Nor would I. Bourgeois tourists and aggressive hawkers are a minuscule price to pay. But the Egyptian government knows the value of its monuments,

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and when we approach the tomb of Tutankhamen – the regal corpse now returned to its sacred burial ground – we learn that viewing the tomb costs an extra $20 each. And nowhere in the Valley of the Kings are we even allowed to take pictures. “I don’t need to see him that badly,” I say. “But you two go ahead.” “We’ll meet you by the cafeteria?” Kylan says. “Sounds perfect.” We exchange smiles and part ways – Kylan and Laurie into the car-ven cavern, I toward the hills. The problem with tours is that you’re never alone. There’s always a buffet to eat or a 5 a.m. wake-up call to receive. On “Egyptian Night,” we were required to dress in dishdashas and dance to Arabic pop-music – a celebration that made the cruise’s all-Egyptian wait-staff cringe. Even in the blazing 105-degree heat, the sun-deck is always scattered with rosy American tourists. Since this trip is designed for Laurie, I am satisfied to smile and accommodate her every whim. In a way, I feel like a doting grandfather, not a potential son-in-law. And the role suits me, given the circumstances. But now, I can finally wander off. I have 35 minutes to do whatever I want. So I climb the hills. The Valley of the Kings is nestled among crusty mountains, each baked the color of papyrus. As I hike the dusty trails, the Valley and its tourists recede, and when I reach a certain ledge, the rocky terrain spreads out majestically below. They’d aren’t mountains, but the escarpments rise higher and higher, doubling over themselves, until they become sheer vertical walls, smoothly crowned. The darkness of the shadows is stark against the blinding afternoon sunlight, which radiates goldenly on every sandy surface. This memorial is so different from the pyramids – the tunnels were dug into rock by trusted teams of workers, who used mirrors to light their way. Not only did they mine hundreds of feet into the ground; they also chiseled elaborate scripts and painted them in vivid hues. In many tombs, the color remains. And yet here they are, a fair distance from Luxor, across a river and hidden among steep cliffs. “Hello!” a man cries. His voice echoes across the barren rock. “Hello!” I call back – to two men, dressed in turbans and robes and perched high above. “Come here!” the one man calls, and he waves me upward. When I reach them, they ask me the usual questions: Where am I

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from, what brings me here, do I prefer Obama or Bush. Then the one man, Ahmed, ushers me to the entrance of a tomb. There are no tourists here. Ahmed points into the darkness with a flashlight and glances at me. Then we climb down a long set of wooden steps, into the tomb’s bowels. Electric lamps dully illuminate the passageway, but Ahmed brightens the ceiling with his flashlight. Large white shapes blot a blue background. “Stars,” he says. He points to other images – gods, nobles, lots of sacred text – and at last we reach the tomb. This is my fourth day in Egypt, and I have seen every kind of alabaster tomb, but still the translucent stone enthralls. We slink around the enormous stone box, and when I examine the large square windows in the wall, Ahmed shines his light into the empty ante-chambers. “Stolen,” he whispers. “Everything stolen.” Standing in the dusty dark, I consider how wrong we are to be here. Only the gods and reincarnated Pharaohs were supposed to see these in-scriptions. These were resting places, for the brief dream of death, be-tween one lifetime and the next. But when the mummies stirred, re-freshed and eager for air, they had specific plans: to awake alone with all their finery. Nobody expected the tombs to serve as time capsules or museums. The arrival of mere mortals, much less casual visitors, insults the Egyptians’ intent. Yet the tradition of abuse is long: No sooner was each tomb sealed than grave-robbers plotted to break inside. Such rob-beries date back to the reign of Ramses IX, about 3,100 years ago. When we resurface, I hand Ahmed the equivalent of $3 and thank him. I scuttle down the path, back to Kylan and her mother, and as our tour-group moseys toward the exit, the hawkers swarm us. They shove flutes and postcard booklets in our faces; they grab our arms and ges-ture to ranks of shisha water pipes. “My friend, what is your name?” they demand. “I have good price for you!” We hack through the crowds, wielding our arms like machetes, until the bus emerges. Mohammed is already there, smiling and waving his tour-book. “This way!” Mohammed calls. We lumber onto the bus, some of us laughing, others looking dazed and sunburned. Merchants continue to wave at our windows, smiling and holding their wares aloft. But the heat has withered us, and our itin-erary can’t be changed. The bus makes a U-turn and rumbles down the hill, away from the Valley, the tombs raided one time more.

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VIEQUES Robert Isenberg

Before the crash, we were free. Our scooter careened around long curves, past rainforest and fields, under traffic lights dangling from wires. The moped engine hummed and quieted in spurts, all from the twist of the throttle. So much power invested in a single sunburned wrist. The wind ballooned my cargo-shorts, cooled my sweaty feet, whis-tled behind my ears, whipped my sunglasses, washed along my half-bent arms—and the road was ours, shared only with slow-moving pickup trucks, a stray sports car. Before the crash, Kate roped her arms beneath my armpits, tied her hands over my sternum, and I felt her so close, pelvis and breasts pressed against my back, how she trusted my eyes, my balance, my mas-tery of speed and rhythm. She had left her boyfriend, moved into a new apartment, flown me down to Puerto Rico—all because of a chance meeting in New England. We believed all this was right, that I was her rugged future. She had swallowed her fear of mopeds and mounted the seat behind me, and together we whizzed through Vieques, our jungled island. At the cove, we plodded through the sand and admired a turquoise horizon; we posed and took snapshots, lathered each other in suntan lo-tion, dipped toes in the rolling waves. The sun warmed our shoulders and faces as if it had risen just for us. Then we revived the scooter’s mo-tor and pulled forward, down a sandy beachfront trail. But the grainy land couldn’t hold us. The wheels slipped. We fell sideways. We tumbled, like laundry, and the scooter—suddenly heavy, hulking—threw its dead weight over my leg.

* After the crash, the wheels still spun, but the only sound was ringing. My thigh was scraped, maroon with blood. My arm and elbow, too. My hip burned, and I pulled back my T-shirt with shaking hands to see the freshly rashed skin beneath my hemp belt.

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Kate examined her hand, the strawberry gash between her thumb and index finger. The torn skin formed a crown around the wound, and the blood was already grimy with sand. But this sickened me only half as much as her eyes, bolted wide with fright. For everything—the land, the machine, and the man she loved—had betrayed her, flung her to the ground, torn her open. After the crash, I bundled her against me, and we hobbled down the road to a cantina. The place was dark and empty, and the bartender had no first aid kit. So we ordered vodka and dampened wads of paper nap-kins. I pressed the alcohol against her hand, and Kate wriggled in her chair, the burning forcing tears, and she stabbed me with her downcast eyes. We sat there, trembling, clammy, now weary of this day. We rode home, in the sunset, then the lamp-lit dark. She shut her eyes and buried her face in my neck, waiting for the sound of that infer-nal engine would finally quiet. After the crash, we couldn’t remember what came before it. I wouldn’t father the children she yearned for. She couldn’t imagine life in Pittsburgh’s driving snow—not after all the years in Graceland and San Juan. I still ate meat, and she abhorred it. I was still young, unkempt, itinerant, and she was ready for grad school, a yard, good furniture. The crash had scratched the bike’s paint and dusted the machinery with sand. Still, the rental shop returned my deposit. A lucky break. But the crash had cracked us open, and the fissures widened—phone-calls farther apart, letters ceased, voices faded, until each vanished wholly from the other. After the crash, the crash was all there was.

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CONTRIBUTORS

KIMBERLY BROWN lives in Buffalo, New York. Her work has previously ap-peared in Voices from the Attic, Volume XVII, Generation Magazine, and Backbone Moun-tain Review.

MIHAI COMAN is a Romanian-born photographer living in New York. His current work explores the recent explosion of color in Romanian architecture.

ALISSA FLECK is a poet from Minneapolis currently pursuing her MFA at The New School in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Argos Books an-thology Why I am Not a Painter, FutureCycle Press's anthology American Society: What Poets See, NY__ magazine, online at Thoughtsmith and Failbetter.com (forthcoming in February) and elsewhere in print & electronically.

ANNE FOWLER is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has recently com-pleted her MFA at Chatham University. She still lives in Pittsburgh and says things like “jag-off” and “slippy”. She is the non-biological mother of a tea-cup Chihua-hua named Nico who she dresses up like other animals that aren’t Chihuahuas.

STEVEN GOOD lives happily with his girlfriend in Seattle, writing in spare time, and missing the East Coast.

ROBERT ISENBERG is a writer, photographer and stage performer. His book about the postwar Balkans, The Archipelago, was published by Autumn House in 2011. He is currently working on One Million Elephants, a book and one-man-show about Laos. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

ELLEN MCGRATH SMITH teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Flash fiction in Weave magazine. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Re-view, Cerise, The Same, Kestrel, Oranges & Sardines, Diner, 5 a.m., Oxford Maga-zine, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Descant (Canada), and others.

JOHN MCKERNAN – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska – is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives - mostly - in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. He has published poems in many places from The Atlantic Monthly to Zuzu’s Petal. His latest book is Resurrection of the Dust.

RICHARD PEABODY is a French toast addict and Native Washingtonian who edits Gargoyle Magazine and has two new books coming this fall-- Blue Subur-ban Skies (stories/ Main Street Rage) and Speed Enforced by Aircraft (poems/ Broadkill River Press). He’s also edited (or co-edited) nineteen anthologies. He teaches fiction writing for John Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. www.gargoylemagazine.com.

VINCENT RENDONI is a current MFA student at Chatham University. He has been previously published in Fiction Brigade and Arcturus, and released a chapbook entitled "In The Methow Valley."

ALEX RIESER is an MFA student and is currently living in San Francisco with his fiance. He has published poetry and criticism and his works appear most re-cently in Switchback, Ploushshares, and LEVELERpoetry, his works have been anthologized in the Feathertale Great Works in the 1st Person Anthology, and his first chap-book Emancipator is available from New Fraktur Press.

A writer since childhood, MARESA WHITEHEAD hails from South Caro-lina. She is currently a candidate for the MFA degree in Creative Writing at Chat-ham University in Pittsburgh, PA, She has been an active member of the gothic subculture for over 12 years, and her work exudes her obsession with decay in all of its manifestations.

Shady side review Spring 2012

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