brBLUE | RIVER

4.1Winter 2019

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Volume 4, Issue 1, Winter 2019

Creighton UniversityOmaha, Nebraska

brBLUE | RIVER

Managing Editors

Editors

Assistant Editors

Cover Photo

Katherine Tidwell

Aaron ScobieBryce DelineMalaz Ebrahim

Kristen BledsoeTyler FaisonHannah Clark

by Sean Crutchfield

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

POETRY

Eric Baus

Liam Strong

DS Maolalai

Mackie Garrett

Rose Ewing

Barbara Daniels

Simon Perchik

Anne Wooster Drury

Tina Mozelle Brazeil

Zebulon Huset

Matthew Pitt

Cassidy Kulhanek

Ben Ewing

4 Poems

Ode to Armpits

People in negative situations

Just into the First Warm Monday

2 Poems

Little Man and Horsie

Untitled

Ninetieth Birthday

3 Poems

2 Poems

Dormant Abductions

2 Stories

10 Photos

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PROSE

PHOTOGRAPHY

CONTRIBUTORS

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Imagine you are a freckle on a hand in Illinois. Now pieces of ice the size ofa house. Now entering Mars. This is grand. This is grand.

Eric Baus

The Astronaut of Ice Cream

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A face I couldn’t see concealed coral in its brains. An un-recorded chorus.An uncurling crowd.

Have a Good Storm

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A complicated herd attached to one branch. A palliative wind installed in thetrees.

Dog and Butterfly Heart

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An antique amoeba taught itself to sigh inside a grave an elephant ended upin but it always longed to be moss with the wiring of an empty egret.

The Ingrown Ghost

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Beach swale coagulates like leprosy the spring after my grandfather teaches me how to warm myhands while ice fishing. He cupped them under his armpits, flapping like the wings of a chicken.He teaches me how it puffs the swelter throughout my coat, cauterizes the heat. I’m reminded ofwhenever I haphazardly pounce into a mosh pit and instantly slide horizontal on the concretesweat of venue alcohol, lifted up by my armpits and shoved away, as if from a mother who lovesme too much. I hold my grandfather from behind on a snowmobile treading tufts of powderedglimmer, holding him by the gruff of his coat, by the film of ice yet to perspire. He tells meeverything falls into a pit sooner or later. A building, a plant, a coffin. Augured ice wallows inthe dark pit of the lake, and still we have no fish. Once, my grandfather carried me as a babyfrom the plastic bag handles of my armpits. He reminds me of the snow, how you can hold closea forest in springtime if you just cross your arms like an acorn sinking into soil. Begrudged, thewind removes us from the lake, a deodorant that spreads across our footprints to forget we evercame.

Liam Strong

Ode to Armpits

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but anyway,I have these poems;they’re unconnected,but they sort ofgroup themselves.

it wasn’t intentional - I never trustthose bookswhich boast of linked up poemsor short stories,as ifyou wouldn’t reada page of insightunless some protagonistfrom onesold cigarettesin another. butall the sameI can’t denythat it happenedto me. I call themmy “peoplein various situations”and like I said

it wasn’t intended - I write a poemand afterwardsit fits,and I enjoy the namingscheme,so there you go -

DS Maolalai

People in negative situations

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but alwaysthe situationseems to turn outto be negative.

that’s poetry,againand all over - negative situationsflocking overlike blackbirds. openinga poetry magazineand learning there’s painin the burn ward. you rarely getpeoplein positive poemswhich aren’t written specificallyfor children. the skylights upred and yellowin the sight of such unusualbirds.

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This many springsspin & counter-heavea flimsy beach ballquilted from bitsof fabulous trash,rubbery discards& my over-ampedexpectation – lookhow paint peelsfrom a forgottenused-to-be-marvelheralded near the highwayin 200 footsun-bleached billboard& now the clouds & thenthe drops & seedof all I don’t mindthe dust & grindof thinking what’sworth what, to have& sell dear oron the stealing cheat,I still want toout-dance every machinewith errant fingers,poorly clippedhangnails & bloodsoaks in my sockSpin & counter-weave in the placeI never knew

Mackie Garrett

Just into the First Warm Monday

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to misremember & sowe’ll make-out& wind-downin the sweetfrictions we’ve foundwithout waking up

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“YOU’VE TWISTED IT. ALL UP.” After her declaration, my wife clutched our pillow—we share half of a single feath-ery slab—in a way that rattled my nerves: as if she weren’t collecting bearings, but belong-ings. Still groggy, owing to sleep aids swallowed and the fitful spray of dreams they’d pro-duced, she wrapped a palm around a bedpost. “There was no boat topped with frosting. I told you that those fields were frosted over…” “You said they were covered in frosting. Which I took to mean cake. That you tried smoothing before the storm, but the giant knife you held was too sharp…” “Storm? What storm? And my knife was for protection, not spreading.” “You described it like a makeshift spatula. That you used to row over…” “What row? I didn’t row, row anything.” She yanked her nightshirt back on. I didn’t deserve to see her nude, seemed the subtext. When a bad dream from last night spiked her awake, my task was simple: listen to her relay it, preserve its memory, then repeat it back to her the next morning. And I’d failed miserably. Or had I? I know I’d yearned to make good on her soft request. It had at the time she’d made it seemed crucial to the heart of our marital covenant: love, honor, cherish—and transcribe. Right alongside making your beloved soup when ill. Or assure they were in the right after tiffs with siblings. Tennis racket in hand, she sat at our bed’s center. Pretending to navigate our mat-tress (our bedspread’s color did resemble butter frosting), listing side-to-side. “Ooh, look at me on my cake boat. Stuck in the oven. Better row away before I burn! Like I would waste a REM cycle on something that stupid. What kind of low opinion do you have of me?” Cradling my knuckles, I told her she’d never mentioned an oven. Until now. Maybe she was the one rewriting details? “My dreams are my chessboard, honey,” she shot back. “Don’t you dare move around the pieces I’ve arranged. Try to be Grand Whiz Master with my rooks and bishops.” “Grand Whiz Master?” “Grandmaster. Wizard. Whatever. I’m dazed. Elocution isn’t the point.” “What is?”

Matthew Pitt

Dormant Abductions

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“Your invasion of my fertile imagination. Even if I said ‘frosting’…” “Oh, now you might have said it?” “If I did, if I said row, still doesn’t mean it’s your image to alter. Any dreamt knife is my intellectual property. You turning it into an oar or putty knife or shiv amounts to fraud.” Here’s what our morning had come to: divvying up possessions of our uncon-scious. I can’t deny a bit of envy creeps in when it comes to her dreams; I barely recall mine at all. Maybe I do feel imaginatively barren when she reports them, enough to tres-pass into her territory when she lays out a key for me. Maybe there was appeal in abduct-ing her dream. Raiding then raising someone else’s creative vision as my very own. But admitting to my own version would negate it. I wouldn’t do that. “Know what I think,” I said instead. “You’re hurt because I made something more interesting from your mutterings than what you actually dreamt.” Oh, that was it for me. Just then our kids trundled into the bedroom—luckily, and unfortunately. Luck-ily, because their sudden presence briefly saved my bacon. Unfortunately, because they’d arrived with separate charges. They weren’t irked because I’d tried to rewrite and make off with their dreams; no, I’d actually appeared in theirs, promising pancakes. Not just any kind, but blini, a term neither kid knew from buckwheat, but had sounded scrumptious as they slept. Now, at dawn, they didn’t feel obligated to dress for school if all I offered was dry cereal. Our dog in the kitchen eyed me warily too, dodging my open palm. It seemed I’d overrun the sleep sovereignty of everyone I knew. Heading to work, my thera-pist called: in light of her dream—where I’d scoffed at the validity of her research publica-tions— she felt it right to sever our patient/practitioner path of discovery. My supervisor was delighted to welcome me into the office, as I’d spun compliments in dulcet tones all night about his long-range plan for the firm. His cheer lasted, though, only through lunch, when our compliance consultant chewed us out, me specifically, for the mockery I’d subjected her to the night before, badmouthing her training sessions as nothing but lax time sucks. “We’ll see how lax it feels this Friday.” She ordered an all-weekend spot check, required attendance for us all. My supervisor sucked in angry air; this wrinkle would ruin allotted custody time with his kids, the riverboat cruise he’d planned and promised for

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months. “All thanks,” he muttered, “to your dormant, meddling ass.” And so tonight finds me isolated, encircled by shrill white lights, hopped on high-voltage coffee and Adderall, hoping not to fade, placing my hand in icy water each instant I turn drowsy. I cannot afford to dream into more doghouses. Tomorrow I’ll be exhausted, wretched, but perhaps patched up with these important people ringing my life. Five times now I have read the recipe for blini, and believe my kids will be full of com-pliments when the dish greets them in the waking world. I’d dream of it, if the stakes of slumber weren’t so high.

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Blue filters through your eyes, two crescent moonscupped by lids watching me beaming. 

Our lives grafted skin to skin, cut and then sealed like cambia of maples exposed and wrappedin cloth to heal.

My thumb traces your words cupped by lips trusting that a bud breaks into a shoot, separation shed, leaving one.

Rose Ewing

Cambium

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I find pleasure in positioning myself at eye levelto examine the Boston Fern on my porch,edging closer until it’s perfectly focusedprecisely on each yellowing frond. like the warmth of smiling or a note repeated and  hammered on a single keyI follow the divots along the edges with my thumb then step back to watch the air dip underand elevate the shining leather into a plume  I’m circling words  the melody swimming catching streams of sunlight and shadows in green.

Every Song in E, I’ll Cover the House in Green

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Barbara Daniels

Little Man and Horsie

You should stop swayinglike spoonbills feeding,those gorgeous pink birds

sliding bills sidewaysthrough blue water. Don’ttry to climb my white ribs.

You can climb redbudsand slash pines. Once in a storeI saw hundreds of Horsies,

wooly bodies, stiff brown legs.I screamed at their black marbleeyes. You little men, your souls

sweet as camellias, go ahead:pray at prayer breakfasts,pick orange blossoms, toss

back some spiced shrimp and grits.

For a trip to the beach, packyour parachute, fishing gear,

fins. Don’t sing in public whilewearing your bathing trunks.Don’t leave Horsie out in the sun.

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Simon Perchik

Untitled

These ashes never had a chanceand though you sift for ventsyour arms grow longer, tugged

by the great weight between two fingersstill wobbling in a slow climbing turnthat needs more time to grieve

to embrace this table, become woodthe way an abandoned millstonewill catch fire on its own, begin again

with one sun where two should beand from its light the unbearable silencetrying to reach down, come close

–your arms are about to burnleave your body as smokepulling aside your hair to look for bones

for underground streams wet enoughto pull the Earth into your mouthas the word for lifted by hand.

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Anne Wooster Drury

Ninetieth Birthday

Ninety years is a pile of acornsheld in the palm of a handor a fistful of letters

from a collection of well-written stories.Little boys forgotten in librariesgather lilacs and appleblossoms for

secret mothers, nothing ever forgotten.Like an orphaned ghost carrying a rosaryhe disappears between two novels

in the rare book room.Out comes a good man trailed bysmall children.

Ninety years, a pile of leavesshivering before the wind,everything forgiven.

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To be born a woman is to know… {beauty} needs much laboring --Yeats

Crowds of daises nod along the roadways,wild irises flare low in the woods,and I almost believe beauty is that easy.

But fire pinks bloom red beside my door,each petal ending in a zigzag.It would take hours of bending

and five snips per bloom to pink themwith shears. I push my hair backand pull my belly in, not much

compared flowers that tunnel throughthe dark, hoist stems and leaves,before fashioning their exquisite details.

Tina Mozelle Braziel

Fire Pink

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Like a girl spritzing the air with Charlie,then stepping into it, eyes closed, arms open,transfigured by scent, my dog’s face softens

and her mouth widens as she drops and rolls,makes a biscuit of her body, a biscuitsopping up the last delectable smear.

Now take my Dad. Make him potato salad.Chock it full of onion, celery. Riddle itwith boiled egg and paprika. It won’t matter.

Anything other than French’s Yellowor Bama Mayo makes his nose curllike a wine connoisseur tasting a turned vintage.

No one brags on Dad’s finely tuned palate.Not even me. And it isn’t gravymy dog’s after, but some carcass

ripening in the sun. Soon I’ll wash herfur clean of death. She’ll lick me, I’ll kissDad bye. Each giving the other her own.

To Each

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A dozen bees stagger inside the hummingbird feeder.I toss it away afraid they’ll sting. But cold-stunnedand sugar-drunk, they won’t let loose.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve found mice burrowingin kibble I kept in a metal can. I theorized thenthey had laid in wait for me to lift its lid and turnto feed my dog before they leapt from a dark shelf.

Now I’m learning ways to fold myself around you,I know how they softened their bodies. How they pouredthemselves up, then around and down between lid and can.How even their bones seeped through those crevices.

The first time I made love, I didn’t stopthough every fire ant in that field surged over my knee,sunk mandibles deep before pivoting to bite again.

May we all find ourselves that ravenous,eager as bees funneling fuzz and wing throughbeak-size metal holes, that obliviousto how tattered or trapped we’ll become.

Sugar Drunk

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A few blocks off,

an old ambulance’s siren lets loose one long moan— like a wounded coyote

after finally dropping

the dead pup it had been

carrying

all night.

Zebulon Huset

By the Scruff, 2 A.M., Santee, CA

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The girls sorted Skittles  according to the color of empty Fanta bottles  to refill from a handle of vodka less for flavor infusion than tye-dye. One thin wall apart, the boys had unearthed the .38 Special cherished by their host’s father and took turns spinning the revolver on their stubby digits—

like little John Waynes.  Their handle of vodka was reduced to an empty plastic shell already.

Here is probably the best placeto end this—if we want a happy story.

Concert Pre-Game

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I have old sheets hung over the window. The flowers on the thin white cotton dance in the morning breeze, doing not much to keep out the gnats, but speckling the soft light with delicate shadows. These parts of my room feel sleepy, less sacred.

This day is an hour old, and this body is older, but my tin-can coffee is fresh. The scent rises from an unwashed mug and mingles with the dust of my home. I cannot clean the dust because of my allergies, and the dust accumulates, and in turn my allergies grow worse and worse. I have learned that much of life progresses in this way. Thank you, Mr. Coffee.

What remains of my family stands in the corner of my room; a five-foot-tall stand-ing mirror (of cheap wood—maple, with lesions, and only a simple line border carved at varying depths) from which I can witness my entire single-room home. As a child I stood in my grandmother’s room for full afternoon grasping the frame of this mirror, observing the reality inside, desperately seeking the bridge, path, or doorway linking its world to mine. I only found wood. One day the realization set in that there was no door or path outside the mirror, and suddenly the mirror made sense. I stood in the corner of my grandmother’s room, and with a running start, launched my small body into the glass with a flat “smack!” The mirror would stand with a tilt from then on.

All mornings start the same way. I wake up and lie still and silent until my twin-bell clock gives me permission to rise. I get water for myself and the plants. I brew coffee, and sometimes masturbate, though not as often as when I was younger. I sit in silence and drink half of my cup of coffee while robins hunt worms in the yard.

I don’t bother with bras anymore. Truly, my breasts were never remarkable, but now they hang flat and low and, beneath my work smock, tend to vanish completely. I pull a blue collared shirt over my head, tugging down the armpits and fastening the buttons up to my neck. I pull on my linen work pants—soft trousers, I no longer feel comfortable in khakis—and watch my body in the mirror.

Cassidy Kulhanek

All Mornings Start the Same

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I look like my grandmother as I pull my pants up. The waist hem forces my thighs to converge and dimple, until it finally rests atop the curve of my body that used to be hips. I pull the waist band together with some effort, cinching first the metal clasp, and then the small marbled acetate button. The lower part of my stomach balloons under pressure; this may be something all women experience, or perhaps just the women in my family. I struggle with the zipper.

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In the hours before fireworks ring out your inherited independence, youcrisscross lines of ketchup and mustard in a dance across the top of your hot dog asthe smell of the sweet white Wonder Bread bun and still-steaming sausageintermingle with the scent of artificially sweetened tomatoes and the slight spice ofvinegar and mustard seed, and at the moment when you first taste your masterpiecethe small burn of mustard to your tongue triggers your pores to sweat and feels justlike the sun heating your shoulders on an August afternoon you spent in Richmond,Virginia, walking near the state house and eavesdropping on French touristschattering near this confederate monument or that one, crossing in front of an all-white governor’s mansion and an all-white capitol building to reach a cobblestonestreet flaunting a historical marker declaring this path a crucial component of theAmerican slave trade in this state, and you envision the bodies of men, the bodies ofwomen, the bodies of children all in transit to an all-white auction house, and yoursweat drops on the cobblestones bear the bricks’ memories of bloods from before,and the whole time the sun is deeply burning your pale skin while you areshouldering the burden of your inherited violence, and that violence is bubblingwithin you and you could almost scream, “my God, why would anyone come toAmerica?” and you take your eyes off the stones long enough to plunge your sandalinto a pile of dog shit, and you remember the feeling of stepping in similar piles inyour yard as a child, running to your father as he takes the cover off of the grill.

All Mornings Start the Same

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We here at Blue River try to make a serious effort to let all forms of art be seen,For this issue here on out, we will be showcasing the photographer Ben Ewing.

Ben lives in Bloomington, Indiana. The photos he takes are masterful and filled with narrative and life.

You can find Ben on instagram: @bcewing

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Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: The Tranquilized Tongue, (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, (Wave Books, 2004). How I Became a Hum is forthcoming from Octopus in 2019. He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver.

Liam Strong is a transgender-non-binary writer and the former editor-in-chief of NMC Magazine, Northwestern Michigan College’s creative arts magazine. Currently, they’re working on their Bachelor’s in English at the University of Wisconsin-Superior while working as an English tutor, as well as a staff writer for White Pine Press, where they write news and music reviews. You can find their works in these latter publications, as well as Impossible Archetype, Painted Cave, Dunes Review, Rusty Scythe, Monday Night, IDK Mag-azine, 3288 Review, and Leaves of Ink. They live in Traverse City, Michigan.

DS Maolalai has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Gar-den” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019)

Mackie Garrett studied literature, small press publishing, and creative writing at Illinois Summer School for the Arts, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Western Michigan University. In recent years, he has joined the Iowa City Press Cooperative, where he takes and teaches letterpress workshops, collaborates with other artists, and prints poetry broadsides, event posters, zines, and chapbooks for 508 Press. His poems have appeared in online and print journals including Iodine Poetry Journal, The Fourth River, Plainsongs, Sandpiper, and Bombus Press.

Rose Ewing earned a degree in horticulture at Auburn University and then relocated to Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and two cats, where she works as a gardener. Rose is a songwriter who dabbles in poetry, philosophy and drawing.

Barbara Daniels is the author of Rose Fever, published by WordTech Press. Her second full-length collection, Talk to the Lioness, is forthcoming from Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, which previously published her chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen. Daniels’ poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and oth-er journals. She received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Anne Wooster Drury is an educator and poet living in southeastern Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Blueline, The Aurorean, Gravel, RavensPerch and other print and online journals.

CONTRIBUTORS

POETRY

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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.

Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press) and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press), has been awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship, an Eco Poetry fellowship from the Magic City Poetry Fes-tival, and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand on Hydrangea Ridge.

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Louisville Review, Fence, Rosebud, Meridian, North American Review, Portland Review, Texas Review and Fjords Review among others. He publishes a writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily with its print companion Note-booking Periodically and is the editor of the fledgling journal Coastal Shelf.

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Matthew Pitt, a St. Louis native, is now Associate Professor of English at TCU, in Ft. Worth. He is author of two fiction collections: These Are Our Demands (Engine Books), a Midwest Book Award winner; and Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Prize. Individual stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, BOMB, Oxford American, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Epoch, Conjunctions, and The South-ern Review, and have been cited in numerous “Best of ” volumes. His work has won awards from the New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mississippi Arts Commission, Bronx Council on the Arts, and Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Taos Writers’ Conferences. Additionally he is Editor of the journal descant, and Associate Editor for West Branch.

Cassidy Kulhanek is a studio artist, writer, and comedian based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She has taught courses in printmaking at the University of North Carolina, as well as having headlined improv comedy shows and performed stand-up as a part of the Franklin Street Comedy Festival in 2019. Her prints, drawings, and installations have been exhibited across the United States. Her visual arts, comedy, and writing processes all explore experimental and conceptual approaches to each respective medium.

CONTRIBUTORS

PROSE