When we stole you
we also took the kitchen’s largest pot
and three round loaves of bread.
The pot you slept in sometimes.
The loaves became your favorite toys.
One you tore in half and used as a coconut
to recount for us Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
But we read the papers. We’re not such fools.
That’s why we’ve left you in this park.
Your front tooth we pulled so we’d at least have something.
It’s the only hurt we hope will never heal.
We take turns sucking it at night.
Each time it grows smaller, less distinctly bone.
I don’t know what we’ll do when it’s all gone.
In the Kitchen Where We Cooked Almost Nothing
The trick, she used to say, is to imagine it’s all beautiful, but that beauty has its place, or many places, that there is not one connected beauty, strung through the air and us, etc., but many beauties, splintered out, creating themselves constantly, and it was here, when she said this, that I began to hate either her or myself the most.
“So like micro-beauties,” I’d say.
“No, like stations,” she’d say. “Like each beauty becomes its own station and then that station fuels the place.”
“Like with gasoline,” I’d say.
And so on.
We had just gotten this old idiot dog, and it had gone into the backyard of a house we’d owned for only four months and dug a deep hole into grass that was barely ours and returned, to our broken kitchen, teeth around a faded collar that was, we realized, not his own.
He picked the collar to shreds before we could pull it from his jaw: us in that broken kitchen where we cooked almost nothing, hunched over this shaking thing with sad, dodging eyes, begging it for a kind of politeness it couldn’t know, our dumb hands out, some banal hope of preservation.
But of what?
“Give it,” she said to the dog.
“Give it,” I said too.
That night, or some night like it, she asked me about time. She wanted to know, before sleep, her hand on her stomach, whether I saw time as a promise or a bank statement.
“I see time as a cherry-dipped ice cream cone,” I said.
Or: “I see time as an overweight trapeze artist.”
Or: “I see time as a turd-clogged toilet.”
“I maybe don’t like you as much now,” she said.
“I see time as a thin man chewing food with his mouth open,” I said.
“Stop,” she said.
“I see time as a glowing smartphone,” I said.
She had similar things with sunlight and rain, I found, with distance and closeness, whether our exhales meant more than our inhales. Or she’d talk about patience and how it was a blanket, or how pride was a bruised pear, or a fish. She kept going on in that house with these theories, these kind burrowings of inert metaphor, soft quizzes of faith that I could have passed at any time they were so easy, but who was the me who could have done that? And who was the her who would have stopped asking?
She sent me an e-mail later, after it was only me and that old dog in that house I never wanted, after the dog had become a defiant heap of bald, brittle bone that slept at my feet as it does now, refusing, still, to die. She said in the e-mail that she thought of relationships as scales on which two people weigh and pair their failures, how the lightest of those failures become the early glue of two people, our failures, and so on.
At the bottom of her e-mail was a link to an online store where she sold bits of pottery and homemade keychains.
I remember thinking, I should probably buy one of these.
My Grandfather, Dying of Alzheimer’s on His Ranch in Ganado, Texas
Some nights, you sing, in-tune and off
Your rocker, keeping time with two spoons beat
Against your thigh, a sweet
And husky “Down in the Valley”
Until an unexpectoranted cough,
A gasping grand finale
Reminds how near I am to death.
You sleep diagonally in bed, cry out
All night for S—no doubt
Still haunted by her QVC
Deliveries, her baby’s-breath
Bouquet, the sun-brewed tea
She’d spill on any surface—your words
A schizophasic garden I want to tend.
I pray for fear and send
Each intercession up like the thin
Three-harmony Sabbath hymns the birds
Out-sing each week. Church, kin,
The land you cleared each fall for cords
Of winter wood and Balm of Gilead:
All gone to seed. Half-mad,
An avatar of age, gone piece-
Meal, you sing someone else’s words.
Tonight, when silence has lease
On you and all I can afford are lamp-lit
Dreams of planting cognates in the hollow
Of your mind—steed and swallow,
Wife and breath—let me go
To a secret place, un-understand, and admit
The words I do not know.
Fountain of Diana at the Louvre
Arm draped like a debutante’s
around her stag’s long white neck,
she’s not so school-girl gorgeous after all.
No swift strong hands to brush back
the hair from my eyes or stain my mouth red
with berries. Her eyes are emptied of seeing.
Her bow, an afterthought; her quiver, gone missing;
one of her dogs, very angry.
We circle her for a hint of moon as the day’s last
lean-in light sculpts its quarry: the two of us, bereft
of one another, hearts beating fast to slow
the mute recriminations of marble and fine dust.
Transplant
In seats mud-rusted from the years of use
we perched, drawn in the wake of the blue
tractor: its tires, black and deep-cut, tread
like chiseled stones. Between us, steadily,
the transplanting wheel turned and turned
and turned, took our seedlings to the dirt.
They seemed small and limp in our hands;
they held strange pallor. We knew the land,
harsher than a seedbed, was made of hazard.
The sacrosanct sun, we swore, would burn
these roots. The field would yield few leaves.
Still, we gave ourselves fully to the machine.
Nothing will live, we told each other like a song,
and each year, at the harvest, we were wrong.
Dead Ringer
You in a hotel lobby—
no, your double,
trench-coated man
with leonine hair.
My sternum on fire,
the room still
cocktail-hour dim
with small lamps
like embers.
Selfishly, I think:
miss me. See my
shade in one of our
old haunts. She’ll see
right through you:
masquerade knight
feigning he’s set down
his lance and chest plate.
A Welcome to Waccamaw Issue 13
Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University. This issue was launched December 8, 2014.
I would like to welcome to our masthead Hastings Hensel, who joins us as poetry editor. We are thrilled to have him aboard. Thanks to Joe Bueter and Caroline Cahill, our poetry readers, who worked with Hastings to select the poetry for this issue.
Our graduate editorial assistants offered invaluable help in selecting and editing work across all three genres: Schuler Benson, Jenifer Butler, Todd Fulmer, Lindsey Holt, Laurie Jackson, Amy J. E. MacKenzie, J. Thomas Minton, Samantha Riley, Krystin Santos, Jordan Serviss, Allison Tanner, Sarah Waldowski, Paul Warner, and David Weber. We are very grateful to them for their efforts.
In this issue, you will find exciting new work by some of our best contemporary writers: fiction by Sara Backer, Mika Seifert, Karin C. Davidson, and Mike Scalise; creative nonfiction by Lucille Lang Day, Karen J. Weyant, and Jacqueline Doyle; and poetry by Jake Ricafrente, Lisa Ampleman, Charlie Clark, Jenna Le, Dore Kiesselbach, Andrew Mulvania, and many more.
Our next reading period for unsolicited submissions will be from January 1 to January 31. Please note that we only accept submissions online via Submittable.
Thank you for reading. We hope you enjoy the issue.
Welcome to the Redesigned Waccamaw
Welcome to our newly redesigned Waccamaw. I am pleased to say that beginning with the upcoming issue I will serve as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, working alongside our other stellar editors: founding editor Dan Albergotti, fiction editor Jason Ockert, and nonfiction editor Joe Oestreich. It’s been a pleasure to help out this past year and I am excited to assume this new role. The Athenaeum Press, housed here at the university, will serve as our publisher.
Waccamaw will continue to bring you high-quality work in two issues a year, with one more exciting addition: the journal will now involve student editorial assistants, offering the student body at Coastal Carolina University the chance to learn about editing and publishing in a dynamic, hands-on environment.
I hope that you will look around the new site and enjoy sparkling work from the archives—including, for example, Jake Adam York’s poem “Self-Portrait as Field” from Issue 3, Lou Gaglia’s story “Hands” from Issue 9, and Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams’s essay “Glass House: The First Moment of Her Leaving” from Issue 12—and perhaps, if you are inspired, submit your own work to us during our open reading period this month.
Many thanks to the Athenaeum Press’s digital content coordinator, Alli Crandell, for the magazine’s beautiful new look, and to all of you for reading. Here’s to Waccamaw’s bright future!
Cara Blue Adams
Editor-in-Chief
A Welcome to Waccamaw Issue 12
Welcome to the twelfth issue of Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University. This issue was launched October 31, 2013.
I want to thank Joe Bueter, Caroline Cahill, and Hastings Hensel for their assistance in selecting the poetry for this issue, as well as Jason Bordt for the work he did assisting fiction editor Jason Ockert. I’d also like to welcome to the Waccamaw masthead Cara Blue Adams, who joined the Coastal Carolina University Department of English in August. Thank you, Cara, for your help with our fiction and nonfiction submissions for this issue.
As the new year approaches, change will be coming to the journal. Look for a redesignedWaccamaw in 2014, and check back here for updates about future submission periods and issue launch dates.
Thank you for reading. Welcome to the river.
Window Box
Upstairs, the dog has dropped its ball. New life,
it bounces twice. New life mimics the old,
a thought which might bring comfort, might bring grief.
(Claws click like ice on ice, dogs do as told.)
I overdo. Like Kierkegaard or like
these flowers in their box, bedaubed with dew.
(Bedaubed—a word for writing, not to speak.)
With dew, the yard appears greener than you
might guess. Mornings like this, I’ve seen two rats
tumble the field so joyfully I think
they must forget they’re rats. But no rat forgets.
No scuffling rat, no Kierkegaard, would shrink
from this movement so like the orbital leap
from text to text. Rats tumble in their place—
bedaubed like Kierkegaard, in bloom, in sleep,
who knew that every flower overstays.
Improvisation on Newsprint
Say it’s true that they found her a mile from her house,
hands and feet tied behind her. (The reporter writes
she did that to herself, but only after she
ingested a lethal dose of morphine.) So say
it’s true police were aware of her for years, that
they had responded to no less than 13 calls
without a witness present or forthcoming, and
that by the window where he allegedly stood,
they never found so much as a cigarette butt.
(which is what they look for, butts, or candy wrappers—
boredom being a universal condition.)
The cops didn’t mind, really, but you can only
check the closets so many times. (The reporter
assures us her condition, although rare, is not
unheard of.) So it’s true, all of it. The theory
now goes that in the beginning there may have been
a certain someone who called a certain number
of times, but that all the attention scared him off.
And yet, a routine had been established, and she
simply took up the slack.
I can see it. We all
like to think we’re noticed. She might, on some level,
have depended on those calls. Maybe they sounded
almost neighborly—He’d ask after her daughter
and she would make sure he remembered his mother.
He’d call to tell her that the roof needed repair
or that the car’s engine sounded off. He might
have left notes, little things, reminding her to cook
the chicken in the fridge, or that the porch lights burned
through the night. Who could blame her if she kept it up?
It’s natural to improvise, and, anyway,
virtue’s in action, right?
How just like him, she must
have thought. And the further she went, the easier
it got. After all, who would believe it—someone
as pretty as she had been beating herself blue?
So when they found her, it gave them pause. Maybe they’d
misjudged her, they thought. (It’s what I would think.) But they
brought in an expert. He tied himself up the way
they found her in nine minutes flat. (The reporter
says that the morphine would have given her fifteen.)
Mike Smith teaches at Delta State University and edits Tapestry, a literary magazine focusing on the Mississippi Delta. He has published three collections of poetry, including Multiverse, a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Arkansas Review, The Atticus Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Magazine, and The Notre Dame Review. In addition, his translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012.
The Astronaut
Belief requires lack of proof:
I think there will be stars because
they’re gone. Now you.
Now that you’ve gone
to prove again what absence takes
(the planetary heart, the stars)
I know belief as true. Thank you.
Blank verse. That’s what the sky
is made of: stars unrhymed,
imagined lines, disordered,
from satellite to moonshot,
wrought down here, by hand.
A line that stops—from me to you.
I know the stars, or one:
I know just how to spin within a hole
until the sun comes up.
Belief the planet turns requires proof:
absence, sense, a place
I’ll never see, payloads
rocketed into the sky.
Belief will end. Stop. Stop.
It ends—if you are gone.
Roadkill
When I find you, darling, in the night
curled on the rug in the living room,
insomniacal as the TV—
though the dog’s happy, the coffee cake’s happy,
the chamomile tea’s happy—
and you’re crying, and I ask what happened,
and you answer, “roadkill,”
for a moment I’m sure you mean that’s
what we are in the universe, because
that’s how each day makes us feel.
A clump of hair in a drain, pickings,
as the moon makes of the furniture an X-ray.
With my hand like a little paw,
I hesitate, then touch your shoulder.
Crossing Peachtree
Atlanta, even your magnolias
smell like credit cards—
they are pretty, sure,
they’re grand. Always
the whine of power blowers
like a thing strangled,
its last cries. Hear
the fountain tinkle
in the erotic shade
of a Japanese maple.
Atlanta, the twinkle
of your glass raids ill
in me. I’m trying to love you
without getting in the car.
Icarus at Lake Acworth
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster…
—W.H. Auden
Waterlogged and barely floating
in a cove of Lake Acworth,
a dead blue heron draws flies,
bobs in the wake of a bass boat.
Its wings expand in the sludge,
fill with the water beneath them,
spread over the rest of its body
that rots among cattails and reeds,
feeds creatures I cannot see.
From the bridge where I walk
with my children, the wingspan
appears out of place, worn
by some exiled angel, or a boy
who took flight only to fall,
drown in this lake, drift to this inlet
where no one seems to notice.
Motor oil laps the heron’s feathers,
gathers with bottles, plastic wrappers,
fishing line at the reservoir’s edge.
Days from now, even these wings
will descend to silt, decompose,
dissolve into all that remains,
recede in the relics of our own myths.
The Third Egg
Far from woodland or savanna, a rafter
of wild turkeys, at least a dozen in my yard,
their black bellies and iridescent wings
glistening in sunlight. Behind the glass,
I sat still and watched, repulsed
by the fleshy caruncles across each head,
the jiggly red wattles and dangling rope-like
flaps of skin on the throat,
and from the center of the breast, a tuft
of small feathers that had failed to grow.
They waddled and strutted and swiveled
their long necks like periscopes.
They dipped their beaks into the bird bath,
investigated the feeders, and foraged
the ground for seeds and nuts.
They cast long, dark shadows.
Two hens moved away from the group
and poked the piles of dead leaves, as if
looking for something they’d lost.
The biggest gobbler looked in at me.
I heard his low-pitched drumming noise.
He was not afraid, but I clutched my belly,
beating with child, this time my last hope.
I prayed hard that these feathered creatures
were no omens or portents, just birds on a stroll.
After they left, I searched outside for a feather,
an amulet for the seed blooming inside me.
Entreaty
You get high, I’ll have a drink. They’re just words,
same as sediment, same as palpate. Let’s make
something small to steward together, one
little saxophone player with a reed
in his mouth. You can grow thin and still be
yourself, coax a beard and button your coat,
while I’ll keep wanting it all: every man
and woman I meet. But we’re done
throwing chairs at people we don’t really
love. Hand me that bottle, kiss me goodnight,
spin me around our old kitchen.
The Bright Forever
You will be leaving soon, drifting to where you cannot find me—our days a flock of blackbirds gone south for the winter. I miss already your words at play: laughter that breaks the skin of the river again & again. Behind the house, smoke drifts from the neighbor’s chimney, the birdbath’s empty—I have no words for this: I am lost in the crunch and click of the frost—its voice an accusation: I do not want you to forget my name but when you do, promise to remember what we had, to linger in every goodbye like the last wren at the feeder, like the salt on your skin after making love. Our time together was marked by more laughter than tears—these notes, they’ll continue sailing; there is nothing else like them.
Sometimes Winter Comes When You Least Expect It
Like a winter day that arrives in June when there’s nothing to do but drink black coffee, watch the rain, so too will the thin white inch of memory round your neighbor’s corner, disappear down the block. Like touching my finger to your lips, so too will the day-long mist sharpen something for us, perhaps our image of how life could be on a different street. St. Francis stands by the birdbath, his arms opened to us. If not for the rain, I’d call it a miracle. The wind gusts obscuring your face, any thoughts as to why we remain so devoted to the return of winter—its forced isolation. That thin white inch—is it a wound that will never heal, a promise continually broken? My finger breaks the mirrored water, soothes your lips—a healing you desire, but for reasons that are all my own.
Faultline
We’re drinking coffee at the shop on Grove
when my aunt’s DNA starts to rumble. Nerves
shake to the surface, shear waves ripple
her cheeks. Her eyes tremble,
and she waits. Quaking over the precipice,
I buckle under memories—a childhood spent
washing my hands then checking, over and over
through the night. I clutch my cup against tremors,
feel its heat, solid and slick. She says
the meds are working,
and I look into the black chasm
of my mug. Maybe you won’t
need won’t need
them, she says. Maybe you’ll be
fine fine be fine.
She blinks hard and fast like a child
trying to remember what
she already knows, and she starts
the stories again. Suicides. Rages:
my grandmother hurling blue Delft
at my mother’s head, ceramic raining
from the wall. One by one,
portraits tumble. The faces
fall. Paint pops, and the gilt
frames crack. I grapple with their weight
and try to rehang them, to square
splayed corners with the edges
of my mind. We walk to my car in silence,
and with door open, she leans in to say goodbye.
Remember, we’re survivors.
And swinging it shut, she clips the frame
of her oversized glasses. They flip
from her nose, dangle from one ear.
She stares straight ahead.