The Laureate, 5Th Edition (2006)
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The Laureate Volume 5 Article 23 June 2014 The Laureate, 5th Edition (2006) Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/laureate Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation (2014) "The Laureate, 5th Edition (2006)," The Laureate: Vol. 5 , Article 23. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/laureate/vol5/iss1/23 This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the Lee Honors College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Laureate by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu- [email protected]. The Laureate’s mission is to allow undergraduate students at Western Michigan University a place in which to publish their works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and other creative works. The Laureate strives to be a professional and engaging journal that appeals to all. To The Readers: In your hands is the 2006 issue of The Laureate: Western Michigan University’s undergraduate literary magazine. The magazine is small, but should not be overlooked. I am proud of the undergraduates that have taken time out of their hectic schedules to write. I am even more proud, and honored, that many of them chose to share their work by submitting it for a chance at publication. My staff and I have selected pieces for publication that best seem to represent the broad range of style, genre and subject that the undergraduate student writers employ. This is my first year on the staff of The Laureate and my first year as Editor-in-Chief. In September, the idea of putting together a magazine seemed like a bewildering task and would have been impossible without the help of the assistant editors and the designers. If you’ve picked up this issue at our magazine release reading, thank you for attending. If this magazine has fallen into your hands by other means, thank you for picking it up. In either case, please enjoy and appreciate the work of the talented undergraduate writers here at Western Michigan University. In short, thank you all for reading and writing: please continue these activities perpetually, and with much vigor. Rose Swartz Editor-in-Chief THE LAUREATE EDITORIAL BOARD Editor-in-Chief: Rose Swartz Assistant Editors: Kevin Kane Justin Roberts Theresa Thomas Art Direction: Tricia Hennessy The Design Center School of Art Western Michigan University Design: Christopher Hall Cover Art: Heather Kowalski TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 Disappearing Kevin Kane 5 In Detroit Looking Outside Shawnti G. Brown 6 Free Clinic Shawnti G. Brown 9 American Anomaly Nicole Smith 12 How To Fill A Sabbath Afternoon at Gramma’s Robyn Seymour 15 Chicken Curry Nicholas Mui Ker Lik 24 Chores Logan Fritz 25 Iridology Dustin Hoffman 26 Laying on my back in a neglected garden, Kathleen Willard engaged in omphaloskepsis 27 23: X, Y Caitlyn Pelfresne 28 Expatriate Anti-Sonnet Rose Swartz 31 Holoday Surprise Justin Roberts 47 All We Have to Say Benjamin Myers 49 Days Spent Fixing Up Logan Fritz 51 Metallic Dress Chapel Taylor 53 Grandfather Jennifer Heuft 54 How to Spend Forty-five Minutes of Spring Logan Fritz 57 Flat Black Tires Allie Gruner 59 Why I Have No Eyebrows and A Funny Rose Swartz Looking Baby 61 At Knife Point Kevin Kane Back Cover Your hand Heather Kowalski 3 DISAPPEARING KEVIN KANE A young man walks past the bar, just opened for tonight in this horrid heat. The bricks look hot enough to bake bread with. He says hello to an old man who wears a black cowboy hat, and speaks very slowly in returning the greeting. The young man must lean in close to hear. “Made it to Monday,” the old man says. “Yeah, me too.” “Haven’t found a girlfriend yet,” the older man says. He looks melted to his bench. Two middle-aged men stand beside the entrance to the bar, leaning on either side and looking sideways at the scene as if they feel suspicion for the world itself. They watch with interest as the young and old man talk. The young man replies, “yeah, me neither.” “Why not?” old asks and young must lean in close to hear him. “Well, I know where they are, I just can’t touch ‘em,” says young. Old repeats: “Why not?” His skin wrinkles have more wrinkles etched into them. The mass looks sticky in the heat. “Well, I gotta get going but good luck with Tuesday,” says young. It was a moving conversation where young never quite stopped walking, but with each exchange moved a little farther away. Old says, “come back later.” “I’ll try,” from young, who has to turn around to say it. The shopping district of aged, crumbling buildings housing coffee shops and clothing stores ends suddenly into hot open space devoid of shade or benches. The road heads into a residential district, out into the heat. Young turns around and heads back the same way, without crossing the street away from the emerging scene around the bar. Young stops and looks across the street first. A small, narrow alley leads behind the set of stores on the other side and on the wall, a mural of grape vines spreads across the bricks. The alley looks immaculate except for small piles of dust and dirt from the bricks. All the stores across the way are closed. No one walks along the avenue. The air itself hazes before young’s eyes, making the street seem too wide to cross. Old watches young walk back up. 4 Young: “Hey, take care,” toward old. Gaining animation, pulling himself unstuck from the overheated bench and pointing at the bar, old asks, “Can I buy you a drink?” The finger looks made of wax, shiny and inhuman. Jutting from an equally strange, sculpted hand, it points toward the entrance to the establishment. Young feels the two men standing beside the bar’s entrance looking at him, waiting for his reply. The question rings around inside of young’s head. The sound of the voice which struggled so hard past the thin, cracked lips echoes and young can’t decide if the words themselves aren’t still out there, suspended in the heat, waiting to evaporate. Young continues walking, carefully lifting one leg and putting his foot down, suddenly scared of tripping. The sets of eyes follow every movement. Even after he lies by saying, “no, that’s alright, I gotta get going,” and begins to walk down the sidewalk toward the closed shops and dusty masonry, the question echoes and chases. IN DETROIT LOOKING OUTSIDE SHAWNTI G. BROWN 5 I A blanket, goodwill sofa, soaked with last weeks rain. Here is her house, under the Jefferson. Dealers drive by. They come in 1970’s Monte Carlos, Impalas, Cadillacs, rims merely a sphere of light, paint, sweet colors to be licked. Plant workers speed past in Cougars and Eclipses, striped for dreams of speeding away. Executives cruise by in chromed Beamers, a chic Benz, in sleek Porsches, always black with tinted windows. Wild teenagers survive in green Neons, always dirty, always a bumper bungee jumping off the back. Her house is a window to everything outside her mess. II The drugs are not from the hands of my brother, he presses his prints into ink, then to paper, then to cell walls, then to tearful eyes he has not known since mom passed. Always like this it must happen. Young boys chained for crimes that fit their wardrobe, Officers can’t ignore the outside appearance and see it’s the outskirts, the big houses, the deceiving wealth. Like hives, hundreds of slots filled with tempting sweets, like adult candy, and kids like candy best. So out go the bees to all of our flowers. The tallest, most bright, surviving the weeds. Pollinate our boys and count their profits as they wilt. Brown to black to ash. III The patients of Eloise insane asylum scattered into the city, making for worse pest than roaches. Orkin man quit that day, leaving us no spray to cleanse our already suffering streets. My father compared it to the leaf trucks with no cover so the dead confetti decorated our parks with the rest of the trash the suburbs so graciously deliver as yearly gifts, perhaps to thank us for taking attention from their sins. Murder capitol of the world, but this is not the Devil’s home. It’s the hotel he checks into between business trips, always sure to leave a mess. 6 FREE CLINIC SHAWNTI G. BROWN A little girl, maybe ten, sits across from us in a room of nervous strangers, sharing a magazine with another girl, maybe seven. Their eyes swim in a page of straight, thick hair falling over cosmetically carved to perfection faces, supported on slick, stick bodies. Even in this VIBE, that’s supposed to be their reflection, they see no similarities, and it is their own fault? All of us sitting under a mirror that swallows 2/3 of the wall. Every time our green film covered corneas hit the wall we see our smeared faces painted with a person we do not know. We see our mistakes. Our mascaraed eyes asking, what are we doing here? how did we happen? 7 A woman, one of us, walks in from the doctor’s door. Her face is so defined, beautifully designed structures in her sienna brown skin, shaming her chest, which is plunging towards the floor like two rusty anchors. her body droops like a dying sunflower. Her head so heavy, it falls to her knees.