C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag
Issue 1: Winter 2011
Editors
Nico Vreeland
Marcos Velasquez
Eric Markowsky
Sean Clark
Published by Chamber Four LLC
Cambridge, MA
2011
Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2011
Direct inquiries to:
[email protected] C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag, Issue 1, Winter 2011. “Detroying Herman Yoder,” Copyright © 2011 by Gregory Blake Smith. “The Black Wig,” Copyright © 2011 by Kim Henderson. “Comforts of Home,” Copyright © 2011 by Anne Leigh Parrish. “Creation,” Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Finnegan. “Ramadan, Jihad, and Azad,” Copyright © 2011 by Bilal Ibne Rasheed. “Heat,” Copyright © 2011 by Michael Henson. “Waiting for Home,” Copyright © 2011 by Ron Koppelberger. “After Reaching the Home of Juan Pablo Lorenz,” Copyright © 2011 by Marc Levy. “Water Song,” Copyright © 2011 by Terra Brigando. “Shriveled,” Copyright © 2011 by M.J. Fievre. “the presence of others,” Copyright © 2011 by D.H. Sutherland. “Grace,” Copyright © 2011 by Gale Acuff. “To an Old Poet Dying Young,” and “A Sargent Portrait, Maybe,” Copyright © 2011 by William Doreski. “The Transamerica Pyramid,” Copyright © 2011 by Yaul Perez-Stable Husni. “How to See Yourself,” Copyright © 2011 by Shannon C. Walsh. “Town and Country,” “Frog Pond,” and “An Outdated Globe,” Copyright © 2011 by Luca Penne. “Dementia (I),” Copyright © 2011 by Julian Smith-Newman. “A state of mind, like most things—,” Copyright © 2011 by Katelyn Kiley. “Unknown Destination,” and “Falling Asleep in the Afternoon,” Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Lawless. “Picture This,” Copyright © 2011 by Jenn Monroe. “Illumination,” Copyright © 2011 by Greg Hewett.
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Table of Contents
Fiction
Destroying Herman Yoder
by Gregory Blake Smith
The Black Wig
by Kim Henderson
Comforts of Home
by Anne Leigh Parrish
Creation
by Margaret Finnegan
Ramadan, Jihad, and Azad
by Bilal Ibne Rasheed
Heat
by Michael Henson
Waiting for Home
by Ron Koppelberger
Nonfiction
After Reaching the Home of Juan Pablo Lorenz
by Marc Levy
Water Song
by Terra Brigando
Shriveled
by M.J. Fievre
Poetry
the presence of others
by D.H. Sutherland
Grace
by Gale Acuff
Two poems
by William Doreski
The Transamerica Pyramid
by Yaul Perez-Stable Husni
How to See Yourself
by Shannon C. Walsh
Three prose poems
by Luca Penne
Dementia (I)
by Julian Smith-Newman
A state of mind, like most things—
by Katelyn Kiley
Two poems
by Daniel Lawless
Picture This
by Jenn Monroe
Illumination
by Greg Hewett
About the authors
About the publisher
Destroying Herman Yoder
by Gregory Blake Smith
In the gun store I couldn’t make up my mind. There was all that smug menace to choose from. I hefted revolvers and breech loaders, practiced executing the world with Mausers and Glocks. The store owner—his name was Ronnie—was very patient, answering my questions, overlooking my ignorance. In the end it was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 Special I settled on, swayed I suppose by the associations—fedoras, rain-slick alleys, platinum blondes and gut-shot punks. I have always been a classicist at heart, as even the Academy of American Poets recognized.
According to The Review of Wound Ballistics, the Glaser Safety Slug (one of which I have just discharged into a pumpkin to the right of Herman Yoder’s head) has a pre-fragmented core of compressed number twelve shot. It uses an eighty grain bullet rated at +P velocity, a design that causes the slug to expend its energy into the target, without excessive penetration and the danger of collateral injury.
I say all this to Herman Yoder, standing there in his living room, even that part about the +P velocity, smiling calmly the way madmen do in the movies.
It was not easy finding him. Yoder is a common surname in Iowa. Drive through the environs of the Amana colonies and you will see it painted sloppily on every other mailbox. I had to thumb though a dozen phone books, call this or that Yoder and impersonate lost high-school buddies, confused UPS drivers, until finally I located his house in a cornfield outside Wellman, just down the road from a wooden church on the National Historic Register, a mere eighteen miles from the high school he’d attended, twenty-two from the farm Grace Albrecht had grown up on.
“What kind of name is that anyway?” I say now, coming back from the pumpkin and plopping myself down in this sad Castro convertible. I keep the gun leveled at him.
“Yoder,” he says, as if that explained something.
“Not Yoder,” I say; and then like a punch line: “Herman. What kind of dick-ass name is that?”
The Review of Wound Ballistics. Don’t you love it?
The Castro convertible isn’t the only sad thing here. The whole house is sad in my considered opinion. A suburban rambler, circa 1970, an out-of-place eyesore with its pseudo-modernist horizontals, low-pitched roof, the nonsense of a lawn abutting cornfield on three sides. There’s a little windmill in the front yard. Maybe five feet tall. And in the backyard a split-rail yard swing. Very rustic.
Somewhere, acres away, a harvester is running. Rolled up in my back pocket I’ve got my well-thumbed copy of Action Comics #187.
He asks for the second time who I am, and for the second time I tell him. I am Ichabod Sick, I say, which is more or less true.
“What kind of name is that?” he has the nerve to say and I smile, make a checkmark in the air to show I appreciate the bravado.
“Sick,” I say and cock the Special. “That’s what kind of name.”
Twenty years ago it had been a choice between Ichabod and Orlando, dactyl or amphibrach. I took a poll of friends and enemies. Orlando, it was felt, had a certain flair which, in my warmer moments toward myself, appealed—thick, Harlequin Romance hair, a chemise open at the throat, maybe a casement window dusted with Tuscan moonlight. Or so I described it years later to an interviewer from The American Poetry Review. But Ichabod had a doggy tenacity that I thought would stick by me when the going got tough. When I handed the official papers in, the Cambridge District Court secretary had grimaced.
“Sid Vicious,” she’d said. This was 1981. “Johnny Rotten. Is that the idea?”
Herman Yoder, on the other hand, looks like a Nashville reject. A blonde-streaked mullet that’s already getting on my nerves, a ripped “Achy Breaky” t-shirt, blue jeans. I caught him barefooted and about to shave, which gives him a particularly vulnerable air. It’s a pleasure to find him so easy to hate.
I tell him to sit on his hands. To put his hands under his thighs and keep them there. This was something my high school chess coach taught the chess team to do. “Think,” he used to say. “Then think some more. Don’t take your hands out until you understand the position on the board.”
“Think,” I tell Herman Yoder now. “Then think some more. Don’t take your hands out until you understand the position on the board.”
He wants to know what he’s supposed to think about.
“Crime and punishment,” I tell him.
In addition to Herman Yoder, and Ichabod Sick, and the pumpkin with a bullet in its brain, the other sad entities in Herman Yoder’s living room are a television, a couch, photos of what one surmises is Herman Yoder’s family. Tucked in between two chairs there’s a bookcase filled with diet books. Taped on the picture window, facing out, made of construction paper, are two black cats, a witch on a broomstick, and an impossibly orange moon.
On the end table beside me is the 1990 Clear Creek Amana High School Yearbook (faux-leather binding, faux-gilt lettering). I open it at the back and start paging through it. There’s a Zelinsky, and a Zeiner. And then there’s a Yoder. Three Yoders actually—Anna, Eva, and Herman. We ask the Herman in the photo if he knows that he will grow up to wear an Achy Breaky t-shirt like a capital-L loser, and then flip to the front of the book.
Aaron, Abbott, Adamczyk—you should quit now, we tell ourselves, but the pages keep turning—Adamson, Ahling, Aiken....
And then there she is, her eighteen-year-old self looking at me from off the page without reproach or shadow, in one of her cape dresses, and with a prayer veil covering her hair, and with that smile of hers, and for a moment the world shimmers again, coheres, and the urge to kill living things that has been hovering just above the Castro convertible drifts toward the open window.
* * * *
The first time I saw her I was twenty-five and she was twelve. I was a hotshot in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the lithium/valproate cocktail that had gotten me through college was still working, and I was living with a girl who liked to expose her breasts to me as if they were a force of nature. Her name was Judith, and she was ironic and Jewish and thought Iowa was a hoot.
It was at the Steam Days Celebration in Kalona, where Judith and I had gone because that’s what we did on weekends, attended rural Iowa as if it were a local talent show. There were restored tractors and harvesters on display, steam-powered antiquities with belts flapping and pop valves hissing. A Bingo game was being called over a PA system. We walked around and made fun of everything, ate bratwurst and roasted corn, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s bare limbs. Judith had on these big sunglasses that made her look like Jackie O. And I had on a tank top because in those days I was lean and had nice arms. We turned into the main tent where pies and fresh-baked bread and handicrafts were being sold. It was Judith who spotted her.
I captured the moment beautifully in “The Atmosphere Cleaves.” That sense of another world intruding on this one. A higher world depositing here as a joke or a parable—or just to rub our noses in our lame, drooling, mud-caked, manic-depressive inadequacy—a splash of clarity. She was with her mother, standing behind a card-table with a checked tablecloth flung over it, selling jars of homemade preserves and jellies, the two of them in Mennonite dress, their hair parted in the middle and swept back under a little cap, their bodies in unflattering, homemade dresses that covered their arms and dropped to their ankles, identical Reeboks on their feet. This was nothing to me. I had gotten used to seeing Mennonite families on shopping excursions in the malls around Iowa City. But there was about this girl a lucid beauty that was blinding. Not Hollywood or Vogue beauty, understand. There were no flaring cheekbones. She had only as much mouth as was necessary. But her face was perfect. A beauty as bare of ornament as an equation.
“We must have intercourse,” Judith said, parting the red slash of her lips and poking me in the ribs. “We must sample her wares.”
What I remember most, and what made it into “The Atmosphere Cleaves,” was the sudden sense of my own carnality, the nakedness of my limbs, my shoulders, the bare crankshafts of Judith’s collarbones. I saw myself, saw Judith and me, as this girl must have seen us—in our vanity, our sex unredeemed by any glimmer of love. Judith did all the talking, sampling the various jellies and preserves—plum, peach, apple butter—commenting on each and asking questions. Each time it was the mother who responded, even when Judith directed her questions at the girl, who stood there shy and overwhelmed. The only word she uttered was “Grace” when Judith—from point-blank range—asked her her name.
“Grace,” Judith repeated, and the word slithered in the grass and disappeared under the side of the tent. “And how old are you, Grace?”
“She’s twelve,” the mother said, handing me the change. She noticed my hand tremors. The lithium.
“And do you say your prayers every night?”
A glaze overspread mother and daughter. They were used to this. The sly harassment, the indirect ridicule.
“Come on,” I said, taking Judith by the arm. She smiled her Scarsdale-Vassar, we-have-to-be-going smile, and let me lead her away.
“Well, that was fun,” she said when we were back outside the tent. We watched a threshing machine clank along.
“Your tits were taking up all the oxygen.”
“My tits—” she said, appraising herself—“belong on Mt. Rushmore.”
And that would have been that. The girl would have been slimly decanted into my first book of poems, made her way into various anthologies, and that would have been an end to it. Except that six years later I saw her again. Saw her in a reprise of that first time as if reality had cribbed from my poem—the checked tablecloth, the antiquarian sunshine, the chuffing machinery in the background....
I was back at the Workshop, this time as teacher, Judith long gone, lithium/valproate succeeded by Tegretol, which was succeeded by Cibalith-S. I had been through some tough stuff, including a couple of hospitalizations, during one of which I fell in love with this anorexic girl. This was at Mass General, on a ward called Bullfinch 7 where they put the schizos and the self-harming bipolars and the teenage girls with one foot in the grave. We were quite a crew, sitting around the dayroom, half of us talking to the ficus plants and the other half looking like they’d just flown in from Dachau. I was in a manic phase, taking twenty showers a day, and this girl—her name was Lydia—she was trying to get rid of her body. We were a pair. We’d go into her room, close the door against the rules, and she’d say my name over and over—Ichabod Sick, she’d say, like she was tasting the words, Ichabod Sick—and she’d describe herself, name each body part like an inventory of disgust, as though what I was doing to her was a punishment, one more way of mortifying her body. Her pelvic bones stuck out like faucets. Frangible, I whispered to her like a sex word. She died two months after I was released.
So I was out there at Iowa just trying to hold myself together, keeping my distance from the grad students who wanted to drink beer with the Semi-Famous Young Poet, watching Love Connection in my room, or driving for hours through the dirt roads that cut the Iowa countryside. Sometimes I got out and walked through the cornfields, locked myself into a row and just walked, the stalks of corn like blinders on either side of me, and forward the only direction. It was during one of these excursions that I happened upon Steam Days again.
What had been so striking about her as a twelve-year-old—the simple beauty, the asexuality that was so pure that it tipped over into sexuality—was somehow still there in the eightee
n-year-old, but now under the yoke of her dress, under the long dropping fabric, there was also the soft insistence of her breasts, of her hips moving like a pledge or a promise. To the poet Ichabod Sick—standing off to the side in lithium-soaked wonder—it was the Marriage of Existence and Essence, the pure Mennonite spirit poured into the physical vessel of a lovely young woman.
“N-32,” a voice called over the PA system. I went up to their table and smiled like a pilgrim.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” the daughter answered.
“Do you remember me?”
She threw a look at her mother, smiled to try to cover what she must have considered the rudeness of not remembering me.
“Your name is Grace,” I said.
“Yes...”
“I wrote a poem about you.”
At which mother and daughter again exchanged looks. “B-8” the PA announced.
And then I did one of my idiot-savant things. I reached out and touched her. With my fingertips I touched the girl just where her hair swept under her cap. In another second I think the mother would have screamed bloody murder, but I started reciting “The Atmosphere Cleaves,” and the sound of a poem suddenly in the air—with its music and illogic, like the English language had suffered a mental breakdown—stopped her. They waited until I was done—until the poem with its liquid eroticism and spangled angels, its Bingo game running in the background, had appeared and vanished—and then the mother inserted her forearm in the space between her daughter and me.
“You should go along now.”
“Did you like it?” I asked.
“Yes, but you should go.”
“I didn’t understand it,” the girl said. Her mother shot her a look as if to say who cares whether we understood it, you little fool, but the girl kept her eyes fixed on me.