The Trillium Spring 2004

The Trillium

The Trillium is the official arts publication produced by the students of Trinity College. The ideas expressed herein are not necessarily those of the faculty, staff, or adminis-tration of the college. Entries are judged on the basis of creativity, thought-provoking ideas, and freshness of style. The student co-editors do not know who the authors of the entries are. Managing Editor: Meghan Rosing Co-editors: Jessica Keller

Ruby Thomas Lindsey Willicombe Julie Wilson

Layout: Ann Eberhardt Cover: Raining

by Brian Kolb Title Page Artwork: James Allen Faculty Advisors: Cliff Williams, Production

Kristin Lindholm, Editorial Copyright © 2004. This material may not be reproduced by any means,

in part or in whole, without written permission from the authors.

April 2004

CONTENTS

MELISSA MUNNS Raspberry Chocolate BILLY REEVES American Love MARTA MCDONALD A Cloud Unbroken JAMES FISHER Band Room ANN EBERHARDT The Child Madonna GRETCHEN PALMER Inescapable RANDY HOFBAUER The Hole JUSTIN HARDACRE A variety of verities MARTA MCDONALD Break AILEEN TOROLA First Steps MELISSA MUNNS An Evening with Grandpa JUSTIN HARDACRE “Dare I Eat a Peach,” “Dare I Write a Line” JOSE FLORES On My Block CLARE WEAVER Movement in a Pond ANN EBERHARDT To You

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MELISSA MUNNS

RASPBERRY CHOCOLATE My eyes are two warm pools of muddy brown, rivers of unknown depth opaque to untrained eyes. Your eyes taste like raspberry chocolate, the perfect balance of rich dark sensuality and light fruity tenderness. When you permeate my shadowy surface, we feel the affinity a rose must maintain with morning’s dew and tremble together.

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BILLY REEVES AMERICAN LOVE I Love You, I Love You, I Love You Ow! You stepped on my toe for this I will leave and never look back. My pinky toe is bruised, you worthless pig. I hate you. I love you, I love you, I love you But you keep me from bowling and I keep you from work. Things were not meant to be, fishing and work must come first. I hate you. I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! Eh, I’ve lost interest. It’s just boring. We, and by we I mean you, have simply grown mundane. I’m apathetic to you and that’s worse than hate. I love you I love you I swear but I have to find myself. You’ve stifled my creativity with your children and I need to feel free. I resent you, no wait, I must hate you.

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MARTA MCDONALD

A CLOUD UNBROKEN a cloud broken by sun, she was fingers pressed on skin after heat a bath or sex leaving marks on body or memory only a while

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JAMES FISHER

BAND ROOM

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ANN EBERHARDT

THE CHILD MADONNA Charged with motherhood, she tightly held her doll of soft plastic, pink cheeks and red-lined lips. Her head curved over the glossy face rounded by light from the glare of the ceiling lamp—a cheap gold, unlike the shimmer of the metal box placed upon an altar while hidden tight within churned bread made whole. With loose whispers of a god who cradles the whole universe in his big hands, she rocked the rigid doll, a world of her own with her arms—a personal altar close enough to kiss with sober, swooping lips, and warmed by her tight hold, not frigid like the gold- enshrined box hallowed on high by candlelight. Told strictly of a sharp-beaked dove who sets alight all hearts in a ruddy blaze, the marrow of her whole body cringed, anticipating the descent of this gold- tipped creature. Instead, looking intently on the doll whose droopy eyes lulled sleep and wh ose lips, half-opened, invited safety with no need to alter or extinguish all held dear, she chose a different altar and left the one sitting in unapproachable light to others. Mouthed words of adoration lined her lips, worship of the fragile form caresse d by the whole bent of her body, holiness discovered in a doll with only the overhead lamp to paint it gold. No, she was not too childlike to perceive the fake gold- glow came from an easy switch. Her altar or idol would dim in other light. She understood the doll as lifeless plastic created not begot. Yet its light frame, hollowed with air, pressured a whole sensation of thoughts, softly pricking her wet lips. Thoughts of love endowed in kisses by lips of a small babe obscured within a box of gold—

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a strong light that does not burn but warms whole extremities, except when placed up high upon an altar, removed from any breath, giving only cold light, demanding that warmth be nurtured from a doll. Smiling, she gently touched the pink-cheeked doll and felt the soft give of human flesh—the light of the world hidden tightly, incarnate on the altar.

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GRETCHEN PALMER

INESCAPABLE

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RANDY HOFBAUER

THE HOLE

Most men are born. I am not. As far back as I can remember, I have been confined to this dark space without sound or anything at all. I call it “The Hole.” What I eat is whatever my hands feel that is not attached to the ground and has a somewhat desirable odor to it. I drink at a spot where I can feel droplets of some form fall from above. I call it “Heaven’s Rain” because I don’t know what it is, but it falls from aloft and nourishes me in a manner that makes me feel divine.

There are many out there that exist, I know. I cannot hear them, but I can feel small rumblings every so often of a man or machine. But it was only recently that I found hope in this. I began to have a small flickering come through from above, perhaps of a divine guidance. But, if my memory has failed me, and it has before, it may be that I have lost my sense of what direction up is and which direction down is. Therefore, it could be hellfire slowly rising, merely flickering into the hole.

But no matter what, it is temporarily my blessing. It allows me to actually be able to see little portions of the walls, the temporal scabs and lacerations on my hands and feet, or even the brambly hairs coming down from my chin and upper lip (though they feel more like they grow from my teeth, they itch so much!). Many men escape their first prison in one way or another. A large majority are born out of the womb by the freeing of the mother from the sentence given by the father. It shall rarely ever, if it does, last more than nine months. Some die in the process of their punishment, some live.

You may ask, how do I know all of this? If I am in a small black area with absolutely nothing to read or say or hear or speak of or do or anything like that, how can I be this way? How can English dominate my tongue and how can I understand the basic needs of life and death? Beginnings and ends? Birth and doom? Well, my friend (if you are that), I would like to know the same thing. For it seems as if I have known this ever since the beginning of my turmoil.

Yes! You heard me! My life is turmoil. That does not mean I suffer unjustly. I learn to accept consequence s and take responsibility in this mere hole that I am in. Is it a tunnel or a pit or what? I don’t know, exactly. The flickering of lights, however, has led me to believe that I am below, not above. The mere rationality of man can only tell me this! I have been able to get around a bit at times, there is a small exit that leads into a

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longer space (what seems to be a corridor) to walk down, or crawl. That’s another thing I need to correct. I don’t walk. I crawl. It was (or felt like) years until I actually found the opening leading to the larger space. Therefore, I lost all use for my legs. How do my feet scab and cut and bleed and pus? I do not know that. One minute I am asleep, the next I awake with the wounds.

It’s hard to actually find your way around the tunnel and back again. What felt like the other day, I was crawling for what felt like hours when I suddenly noticed something of stark contrast to my usual vision of nothingness. It was a bright something that was the size of five pinpricks, a straight diagonal line that went from above to below.

What felt like many years ago, I had found a pulpy matter that was damp beneath Heaven’s Rain. It took me what seemed to be a bit of time until I finally realized it was a damp piece of paper. I had wondered how it got there, but perhaps it was sent from above with the rain. Either that, or the devil himself had sent it to me to write my final epitaph. If the latter is true, I hope to never finish this as to never fall into his hands.

But I wondered if I had? God does not exist in dark spaces, I kept telling myself for what seemed like a long time. But the five pinpricks of light provided the much-needed divinity to properly write my lines of what has gone on for this time. Writing utensils do not exist in the Hole, I believe they are forbidden. That is why I question if the paper is from God, perhaps the Devil wishes to torment me. As long as eternity remains the only guide of time and as long as no earthly efforts to tell the difference between an hour and a year have succeeded, I believe I am stuck to face a fate worse than hell.

And maybe, maybe! Yes, maybe this “Heaven’s Rain” drops from below to above and is drunk by me. No, that’s not the maybe. The maybe is that perhaps it is the Devil attempting to convince me that I need to live in order to finally see the divine? Maybe if I stop drinking . . . but the thought has made me thirsty. I must take a drink.

I can only feel the rain. It is tasting the same as it always does and has flavors of an earthy chalk to it. My tongue seems to want to cringe at times when it accepts the damp, expecting nothing but the dry air that goes through the Hole. The reason my tongue does this is because it is so dry and cracked now, it no longer feels as if it’s an organ of my slimy body. The mucus almost seems to have escaped me for a better place being that it is not even used anymore. However, if I sit beneath the Rain for what may seem to be several hours (perhaps THIS is a way that I can tell time!) I can gather enough on my tongue to make it more satisfied. Sometimes I feel as if my body is in revolt against me.

Once in awhile, with the five pinpricks, I like to think that

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there is a crack somewhere that will burst and let all chaos order itself to the divine contrast of the nothingness. I wish that a puppet show could organize itself against the wall and allow me to become a part of it, to become an actor in this major puppet show where God would finally be. But of course, my mind is convincing me otherwise once again. God does not exist in dark spaces.

The five pinpricks are making good use of themselves in order for me to write. My long fingernails have a satisfying point to them that when dipped beneath Heaven’s Rain, into this muddy murk that is below the Rain, they make useful writing utensils. I wish that I could order each finger to write its own letter so that I could write five times faster on one hand, ten times on the other. I have counted my fingers; do not ask where I learned to count because I have wondered the same thing all of this time.

It is as if one minute I was born, the next I was doomed. I have been dying since birth, yet the only power that seems to sustain me is that of the Devil himself. I said it before—God does not exist in dark spaces. And the scariest part of all that is this: If this place that I have spent my entire life is the only place that truly exists, and these sounds and lights and wishes and dreams are merely a figment of my mind and the Devil is sending it all from a source making itself appear as God . . . let me make this simpler, simpler. If this is all from the Devil taking on an alternate form, perhaps God doesn’t exist. Or is the Devil God? Or God the Devil? Is he the Great Masochist?

Or this psyche . . . the chaotic nature of my psyche. Perhaps the Hole has developed a disorder within me, and if this is truly, literally and ultimately the only place to exist, then God simply doesn’t. Because I realize that without God, there can be no Devil. There is two or none. Or one acting as both. But I remember (don’t ask how) a phrase that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” One cannot sustain oneself with a divided nature. As for me at this moment, the water is the only thing that sustains me, and my wish for ignorance around me to worship a being that I know so well, merely because I am a Great Inventor and Architect.

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JUSTIN HARDACRE

A VARIETY OF VERITIES A variety of verities I’d readily concede to see your chin lift up, eyes smiling at me. Solomon slipped for beauty like yours. He paid for the meals, he opened the doors. He bought flowers and Ashtoreths and bovine plated gold. Beauty turned his heart; for women his soul sold. Vicarious learning . . . on me is lost: I want only to woo you, regardless of cost My soul may be forfeit, but you make it alive; My senses enlarge when you are nearby. And feeling so greatly, I feel you are cold. And so I’ve lost both when the whole story’s told.

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MARTA MCDONALD

BREAK If writing on walls calms you feel free— free to fail as you say as you expect to and everyone watches to see: but I have watched you since birth and can say you held me one night calmed me said I only needed soft cooing like mama, you said I could feel sadness coming soon. Well it was in my bones and deeper the day you freed it the sadness you had refused in a manic burst of permanent markers and letters to God. Now I am not there to see to cheer you on because release is needed when life is all holding.

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AILEEN TOROLA

FIRST STEPS

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MELISSA MUNNS

AN EVENING WITH GRANDPA “Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.” –Anthony Brandt I meekly crept into his room in the old farmhouse. His eyes sought me, not recognizing my identity but begging my service. He managed to weakly stammer the word “bread” in a voice that was no longer fully human but resembled the squeak of a helpless bird. I honored his request and retrieved a slice of wheat from the refrigerator, but when I presented it to him, his mouth refused to form the “thank you” he so desperately wanted to say and I so desperately needed to hear. This is the only clear image I have of my grandfather. The next time I remember seeing his face, four years later, he rested not in his bed but in a casket. In spite of the fact that I never really knew him, or maybe because of it, my grandpa is the person with whom I would choose to spend an evening. I wanted to describe an encounter with someone famous, influential, or historical—Mother Theresa, Mary Magdalene, or Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps. I thought a big name would impress my readers, but my heart refused to concede. It kept pointing me to the chasm of yearning this question opened within me. Instead of choosing a philanthropic or spiritual hero distant from myself, my heart embraced the man who still remains close after all these years. My grandfather has always occupied a place near to my heart but far removed from my life. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease soon after my birth, he progressed into its final stages just as I grew old enough to appreciate him. We never held a true conversation or shared a real hug, and I always longed for such intimacy. During the seemingly hopeless, wearying moments of my life, I habitually yearned for someone to sweep me into his arms and comfort me in a way that only a grandfather can. The older I got, the more I wanted to be Grandpa’s little girl. I craved someone big and strong to admire, a rock for my turbulent adolescent world, someone who would see a hint of beauty in my soul and love me simply for who I was. If I could gain a night with my grandfather, I would pour out my soul, telling him of my triumphs, struggles, shortcomings, and aspirations. My life story would fall freshly on his ears, untainted by previous awareness. I would relate my longing for his presence in my life and tell him how, although God had filled the deepest crevices of my heart, I always felt a pang of loneliness when I watched a granddaughter rest her head on her grandpa’s shoulder. When I finished my confession, he would smile tenderly, take me in

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his arms, and begin to dance with me. His eyes would whisper a message to my soul, expressing all the comfort, assurance, and love I yearned to feel. I would rest my head on his shoulder and soak in the time-stopping beauty of the relationship I had always wanted. And as we danced across the floor, he would gaze at me with a nostalgic look in his eyes, finally thanking me for the bread I had given him all those years ago.

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JUSTIN HARDACRE

“DARE I EAT A PEACH,” “DARE I WRITE A LINE” much less “dare I eat a peach” than “dare I write a line?” something permanent, unfinished occupying space and time waiting to be embarrassed my subconscious spews forth words and I only assemble and conjugate the verbs. how much of me is buried in the tricky dark grey matter and I will never know it except for phonemic disasters embarrassment envelopes me I’ve hardly said a word (you should stop your reading now and listen to the birds. messengers of gods they say, most secretive of things. more than you’d expect: Poetry on two wings.)

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JOSE FLORES

ON MY BLOCK I never understood why the good die young On these heartless streets where they live by the gun. Murders & accidents on a daily basis Caskets bein’ lowered, all shapes & races. I think back to the night when Angel was taken from me A bullet meant for me that put my best friend to sleep. June 5, 1998, fate of a gangsta heavyweight who met his bedplate, another G in the death rate. I think of Avers, Belden, Springfield, 3 blocks Considered naked if you ain’t armed wit’ glocks. So much steel you’d think it was Fort Knox Corpses droppin’ but da focus remains on Wall Street stocks. Oh God—why’s it gotta be like this Blood & guts—kids killin’ kids Pyramids of grandkids with closed eyelids Look at what the devilman on my block did. A man was speedin’ in the midst of his nightlife Hit the curb, went airborne & took a person’s right-to-life. So many hurts & pains, people dyin’ in vain Kids with crackbrains, but who can explain? The shame of the world, insane in its membrane Bush won’t spend time with us, he’s too busy with Hussein. And bin Laden, while lives are rottin’ Fathers are breakin’, mothers are pill poppin’. It’s like the White House treats the streets like cocaine Snorts us up, gets high, but ignores all the pain. Restrain from us so must be inhumane An internal migraine so they dose on Novocain. So here’s a lil’ vision for those in position, More like a petition for a brave politician. What’s your definition of America’s mission Cuz if it’s peace, we got ours but we’re loaded with

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ammunition. Oh God—why’s it gotta be like this Blood & guts—kids killin’ kids Pyramid of grandkids with closed eyelids Look at what the devilman on my block did.

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CLARE WEAVER

MOVEMENT IN A POND

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ANN EBERHARDT

TO YOU No, not really, I don’t care so much anymore. In this season of brilliant death and large spaces, it’s hard to haul up the immured senses of long ago and breathe life into deadened pasts. I step forgetting the life revolving around the forever presence of your judgment. Tucked tightly inside my chest you told me, always, why my choppy form did not incite lust or at least a generous assessment. My mind, yes, was beautiful, right? My form ignored or obscured by flashing wit but yet never quite redeemed. True, I have carried you long and in this releasing it is I who lose a limb, am forced to limp. In losing you, a sense of fullness withers; unrelenting joy over a boundless world is stayed. I have found a boundary. You are no longer endless. In losing you, my body gains precision. No more lackadaisical murmurings of perhaps. Honed strength forces movement. I am oiled and ready. And slippery. I cannot catch myself, hold my trout-like scales and look, strangely, at my bulging eyes and widening mouth. Dipping, I gasp for air in my new surroundings of undefined positions begetting oddities of structure. My home turned foreign; my dog turned mean. And all this to tell you: no, I do not. I cannot. I can no longer caress long-winded talks brought on by smell of you. I sacrifice the guilty taste of your name; I crawl atop the altar for lack of ram. I name myself

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an unworthy lamb. Dying only so I may live. (But secretly as I burn I hope it may be incense pleasing to you.)