Fall/Winter 2009-10
tom oristaglio
scott summers
cindy childress
tom rechtin
james b. nicola
debra rymer
doug draime
corey mesler
rebecca schumejda
chris crittenden
arlene ang
joey nicoletti
brad johnson
lorie allred
elizabeth kay
alexander russo
nissa lee
kenneth gurney
jessi lee gaylord
keith brighouse
ajay vishwanathan
ethel rohan
william "cully" bryant
julie steiner
Steiner Interview
by Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Alex Nodopaka
Patrick Carrington
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
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Susan J. Cronin
Laryngitis
My words are piling up.
They’re scratching at the roof.
Some low, reedy notes
in no known key
stab through, red on red.
Fritz puts his hand
over my mouth. Still,
my lips keep moving.
“Nod once for tea,”
he orders, “twice for water.”
I nod five times,
then shake my head.
“No-o-o” I say and
a cacophony of coughs
tumbles out, propelling me
toward the bed. Fritz
hands me paper and a pen.
“In the kindergarten play,” he says,
“I played a non-speaking tree.
In retrospect, it wasn’t
all that bad.”
Nowhere, NJ
The scrub pines beside the highway
looked dead to me. You couldn’t catch a train
from here, you couldn’t hop on a bus, there were no sidewalks
down most of the roads and nothing in walking distance but a plague
of Wawa convenience stores. I could tell
that most of these kids would never get farther
than the next nothing town over, and I let them know it.
They already knew it and didn’t care. No one knew
what to call me. Was I really a witch,
as some five-year-olds suggested, the secret drunk
my parents feared, or just plain nuts, out of my mind, cuckoo?
I could be so well-liked if I could be anyone else.
Would I like to speak with the school psychologist?
Perhaps the Catholic Church could guide me. No. I was reading Sartre.
Did they understand what that meant, reading Sartre?
Did I understand what Sartre meant? All I remember of Sartre
is that Paris seemed lonelier than I’d imagined. I rented all three
foreign films
from the local video store. They were all more grim
than drinking cheap vodka in somebody’s mother’s ugly basement
or driving down the wrong side of the road
when you knew no one was coming your way.
Most girls appeared identical. They went to the mall
without me. The smart boys in my classes were curious
but shy, didn’t mind being my partner
in chem. lab, but that was as far as they would go.
Our class president told me
I received five votes for prom queen. Believe me,
I was as shocked and appalled as anyone.
Dinosaurs
Two little kids in the park fight
over whether dinosaurs ate
people or people ate
dinosaurs. Their mother lies
asleep in the sun, sunglasses askew, the backs
of her legs starting to glow pink. The boy, the older
child—or at least the bigger one—
fiercely on the side of the dinosaurs,
charges at his sister, a sharp stick
wrapped in each fist. The girl yanks
her tangled hair across her face like a ratty cape
and trips a few steps down the sloping lawn,
falls, yowls, “People, stupid!” I want to yell out to them, “Hey,
people did eat dinosaurs. Otherwise,
we would be dinosaurs.” I want to curl
my hand over the boy’s grubby hand and pull up
his sister by her smaller, grubbier hand and lead
both of them into the pitiful shade
of a late-blooming tree. I want to tell them this fact
is in the book I have been trying to read
while trying to enjoy this gorgeous morning in the park—
these children don’t look old enough to read, and
I doubt they would demand verification— but
I stop myself. I cannot lie
to these kids. I cannot look into their big,
dumb eyes and do it. I want them to grow up
and learn to argue using facts like stones
or at least to lie convincingly. I want them
to become paleontologists, I want them
to revive the dinosaurs just so they can
poke their heads into the vast, dark world
between those ancient rows of teeth,
just so they can see what will happen.
Susan Cronin graduated in 2004 from the MFA program at The New School.
Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, PMS: poemmemoirstory,
and Wicked Alice (online and print editions). She currently teaches at
SUNY New Paltz.
"O Fortuna 2"
Jennifer Balkan
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