“Words, like eyes, are windows into a person’s soul, and thus each writer, in some small way, helps to enrich the world.” --Mark Robert Waldman
Writer Advice
“Words, like eyes, are windows into a person’s soul, and thus each writer, in some small way, helps to enrich the world.” --Mark Robert Waldman
Writer Advice
Jan 2012- Mar 2012
FLASH
Special thanks to all who submitted pieces focused on a moment that changed their lives. We appreciate you sharing your work.
Here are the ones we most wanted to share in this issue.
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Was That You Who Brushed Against My Arm on Houston Street?
By Martha K. Grant
Was that you who brushed against my arm,
joshing your buddy as you passed?
You elbowed his ribs and laughed, again,
like two scoundrels pulling a fast one
on the truant officer, the shared secret
binding you together for life.
It was me you pulled the fast one on, remember?
a fast come in a dark hospital,where you said you'd kill me if I told?
That shared secret has bound us together,
for life.
Did you even know my name?
Does the memory of a child's foot
thumping the bed to the rhythm
of your thrusts haunt you also,
in the dead of dreamless sleep?
Can I tell now—or will you
come back and kill me?
Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry, Martha K. Grant divides her creative time between writing and fiber art collages. Negotiations between her competing muses continue at her home studio in the Texas hill country north of San Antonio.
By Carolyn Donnell
April 1995. All I wanted was a passport. But my birth certificate was not accepted. Born in California, but adopted in Texas, they wanted either my original birth record from California or adoption papers. My adopted parents had died many years ago so I couldn’t ask them for help. I’d always heard adoption records were sealed so I didn’t feel very optimistic, but I called California’s Bureau of Records.
"You’re in luck," the clerk said. "Texas never filed adoption papers, so your record isn’t sealed.” She sent me a copy.
Amazing! After all this time, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call. The same was true for the adoption papers.
I poured over new information and investigated for a while to no avail. One night in a pique of frustration I emailed everyone in CompuServe’s directory in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado with the surnames on the certificate. Several weeks later the answer arrived.
“Ethel was my grandmother and I think Lotta Mae might be my Aunt Pat. Call me. Greg.”
My hand trembled as I dialed his phone number. A soft baritone voice answered. I told him I thought Lotta Mae might be my mother.
Total silence came from Greg’s end of the phone. I almost hung up. Finally he said, “I’ll talk to my dad. I’ll call you back by ten o’clock tonight.”
We hung up. Yeah right, I thought, but about 9:35 p.m. the phone rang.
Greg’s excited voice said, “You’ve found the right family, alright. Dad knows all about it. He’s at a meeting tonight, but will call tomorrow.”
The next morning the phone rang right on cue. My uncle’s first words were, “Oh honey. I hoped I’d get to meet you someday.”
I immediately began to cry.
He continued. “We’ve always thought about you and prayed you were OK.” We talked for a while.
My uncle and cousin(s) live in Texas. My mother and sister live in Minnesota and an aunt lived in Seattle. Big family. I got the passport, but I didn’t make it to Europe. Fate had other destinations in mind.
Carolyn Donnell’s short stories, poems and essays have won awards and been included in California Writers Club West Winds Centennial and South Bay Writers Branch’s 2009 anthologies, plus Story Circle Journals and Anthologies 2008-2010, Sand Hill Review 2007, Celtic Women Winter 2007 and others. Blog.
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By Val Bruech
Fear and anticipation meet
Past and present touch
Our eyes seek each other:
mine are brown, his amber and suns reside in them.
The last time I looked into these eyes they were, I think, blue. It was
thirty-three years ago.
The view from the hilltop is shrouded in fog as we speak of places we
have lived, people we have loved, ideas that matter.
We walk to the garden and he listens intently as I describe his biological father.
We descend down uneven stone steps and I wonder
Is this an alleluia moment
or
merely a curiosity-satisfying interlude?
In this space
The heart finds a new dimension.
Valerie Bruech. tries to be attuned to the world as she practices law in Portland OR.
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By F. Armstrong Green
I am the waking dead. In the sea journey of life we do not think we will die in the next moment. But far out in the Caribbean sea in the darkest dead of night I awoke in my bunk on a 65' sailboat with a constrictor around my chest. Heart attack. I told myself, “Be calm. Go back to sleep. Either you’ll wake up or not; those are the alternatives.” The lapping of the waves, the slapping of the shrouds, and the uterine roll of the ship lulled me.
The luff and snap of sails brought me back. I’d made it through. My life was not neat but I had work to do.
I said nothing to Captain Steve. He had already saved me from drowning on a previous adventure.
We arrived in port in St. Augustine and after the impatient formality of flying the quarantine flag and clearing customs we sailed up to Jacksonville on a day so clear you could see everything above and below the sea.
I called my book-loving friend and told her what happened to which she said I must speak to her husband the cardiologist. Rudy said I needed to come to his office immediately. A year after a seven by-pass surgery I passed a treadmill test with flying colors—only to sit down and die. “Stand back,” I heard and found out later that was the second time they hit me with the paddles. Ventricular tachycardia, they said.
That was twelve years ago and a total of five deaths—only to be saved by the shocks of an implanted defibrillator. In that time I have developed diabetes, lost a cool million and my wife, and my house is in foreclosure. I waded the slough of despond but touched solid ground because my protégés continued to publish rather good novels.
I have a ken I can never predict but when something happens, I see that I knew it would. Six weeks ago I was wheeled into the hospital lab for a chemical stress test. I’d had another heart attack four days earlier. I asked the nurse what the mortality rate for the procedure was. She said in twenty years they’d never lost anyone. I said, “There’s always a first time, you know.”
The doc said I did great on the EKG but at that moment I felt that old boa constrictor and asked quick for a nitro. It did nothing. I asked if it were fresh. The nurse said the date on it was far out. Just as I started to ask for another one, the doc put his hand on my chest and my arms and legs flew up in the air. The doc twitched pretty good, too. He told me later that I had two tachycardias in a row.
F. Armstrong Green leads a fiction writers’ workshop, The Bard Society. Members have published more than fifty novels (some best-sellers), numerous short stories (some prize winners), and a short story collection that won the Iowa Writers Workshop prize. He’s been published in The Sewanee Review and elsewhere.
By Jane Person
dead
no grief that morning
shallow breathing
diapers and morphine
awareness gone
only restlessness
a plain woman died
gone with no mourning
this great day of peace for us both
Jane Person lives in Petaluma. She likes to think of poems as paintings—mixing and layering of words, scattering of emotional colors to create a collage of human experience. She strives to make her poems accessible and intimate.
By Kehaunani Hubbard
Lifting the thin, stiff sheet, the vision of my husband’s body punches me in the belly, and I choke on the bitter ICU air. My left hand covers my mouth, stifling the scream in my throat. His torso is a ragged path of stapled flesh, from just below his sternum to the top of his pelvic bone. I cannot believe this man whose body has been ripped open is my sweet, sweet Wade. Standing next to his shattered body, softly rubbing the worry crease between his eyes, I exhale the only truth I know, “I don’t believe.”
I place the sheet tenderly back over his body, careful to keep a whisper of air between the linen and his abdomen. His eyes are closed. I watch his steady breathing. The anxiety I held in the waiting room suddenly recedes and I begin to sob, leaving me hiccupping for air. I can’t keep up this façade, not with his belly sliced open. I am betraying him and ashamed of my hopelessness. But I finally see the suffering man who has replaced my husband. For me, Wade died on that Wednesday, though he would live an additional four months. And he fought that cancer every single day, even refusing to die up to the end. But on this day I lost faith, because there is a time to let go and this was that time.
Kehaunani Hubbard started writing poems when she was eight years-old, fashioning them after her favorite author, Shel Silverstein. Originally encouraged by her second grade teacher she continues to write many decades later. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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