MEADOW the 2015 TRUCKEE MEADOWS COMMUNITY COLLEGE Reno, Nevada The Meadow is the annual literary arts journal published every spring by Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. Students interested in the creative writing and small press publishing are encour- aged to participate on the editorial board. Visit www.tmcc.edu/meadow for information and submission guidelines or contact the Editor-in-Chief at [email protected] or through the English department at (775) 673- 7092. The Meadow is not interested in acquiring rights to contributors’ works. All rights revert to the author or artist upon publication, and we expect The Meadow to be acknowledged as original publisher in any future chapbooks or books. The Meadow is indexed in The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. Our address is Editor-in-Chief, The Meadow, Truckee Meadows Commu- nity College, English Department, Vista B300, 7000 Dandini Blvd., Reno, Nevada 89512. The views expressed in The Meadow are solely reflective of the authors’ perspectives. TMCC takes no responsibility for the creative expression contained herein. The Meadow Poetry Award: Sara Seelmeyer The Meadow Fiction Award: Joan Presley The Meadow Nonfiction Award: Zachary Campbell Cover art: Laura DeAngelis www.lauralaniphoto.com Novella Contest Judge: Brandon Hobson www.tmcc.edu/meadow ISSN: 1947-7473 Editors Lindsay Wilson Eric Neuenfeldt Prose Editor Eric Neuenfeldt Poetry Editor Lindsay Wilson Editorial Board Todd Ballowe Erika Bein Harrison Billian Zachary Campbell Jeff Griffin Diane Hinkley Molly Lingenfelter Angela Lujan Kyle Mayorga Xan McEwen Vincent Moran Joan Presley Henry Sosnowski Caitlin Thomas Peter Zikos Proofreader Zachary Campbell Cover Art Laura DeAngelis Table of Contents Nonfiction Zachary Campbell A Drunk and a Shepherd 53 Fiction Toni Graham FUBAR 14 Dave Andersen Settlement 42 Joan Presley Circus 72 Orville Williams Too Beautiful for This Place 85 The 2015 Novella Prize Jerry D. Mathes II Still Life 111 Poetry Caitlin Turner Americana, 1971 7 Badlands 8 Atom Richards Virginia City Cemetery 9 In Memoriam Of Racer #7 96 Milla van der Have The Comstock Lasts 10 Tee Iseminger Morning After Halloween, North Las Vegas 11 Foreign Exchange 60 That Year We Moved the Bed Next to the 69 Window Travis Truax The Potomac 12 Sean Prentiss Opening Day 13 A. Loudermilk The Elephant Man’s Signature 27 Inkling 28 Darren Demaree The Expanded Areas of the Sculpture 29 Genevieve Zimantas Stopwatch Realism 30 Sleepwalking 31 Lori Lamothe Black Sheep Café 32 Girl Who Played with Fire 33 Susan Gubernat Blue Tooth 34 Sara Seelmeyer Peeling Stars 35 In the Shape of Hercules 36 I Cannot Remember If I Loved You 62 Taylor Graham Preemie 37 Monet’s Angels 99 Oakley Merideth First Animals 38 Christopher Locke The Last of the Open-Heart Astronomers 39 How To Write a Poem and 94 Save Yourself From Drowning Robert Lee Kendrick My Own Boss 40 Applied Physics 41 Joseph Fasano Genesis 45 Alexander Akre Set the World Aflame 51 In My Rucksack 52 Allison Thorpe Blackberries 58 Chelsea E. Shepard Looking at the Valley Behind Her House 59 While Contemplating Abortion Sandra Kolankiewicz Indiscretion at the Dinner Party 61 William Doreski Between Germany and Poland 63 Kieley Smith Man Marries Pet Goldfish and Takes It to 64 Baltimore Aquarium for Honeymoon Jessica Drake- The Artist to Her Lover 65 Thomas Courtney Cliften In Case You Were Wondering 66 Everybody Loves Mike 107 C.C. Russell Hooked 67 Carli Simons The Sycamore 68 Nathan Slinker Letter in Shades of a Desert 81 Letter with Two Visions 82 Letter with Dilapidation and Rifle 83 Letter with Rain 84 Lori Howe En Route to My Father’s Funeral 91 Jeffrey Alfier On a Meal Set Late in Fall 93 Patrick Cabello Father, Feeder 95 Hansel Mark Janssen Four Keys 98 Victoria Kellie Not an Elegy 100 Grandmother finally Drowned 103 Terrell Jamal Terry Dragged Stars 102 Jessica Morey-Collins Turn, Turn 105 Hannah Chalk Sand Box 106 Iron 108 M.L. Brown Swinging Out, Knocking Back 109 Chera Hammons Fishbone 110 Comic Janne Karlsson 71 Contributors Notes 166 Americana, 1971 Caitlin Turner Nothing ever happens here. Rocks and half-eaten fruit are tossed on a corrugated tin roof, topped by a painted sign that announces Peaches! fervent as a Baptist revival. Its Coca-Cola steeple and rays of power lines jut out of the dyed-blue sky like a promise. Forty years away, I cross the same stretch of highway toward Memphis, trying to find God in the red urgency of We Cash Checks and Family Dollars signs, telling myself that splendor can be a sunlit storefront, a photograph can be a prayer. Meadow 7 the Badlands Caitlin Turner Waking up in the morning underwater and I am certain that the cracks in my palms are rivers, pointing out the directions we should drift. But sometimes I want you closer, in a driveway or doorway with sunlight floating through your open mouth. Something weightless and familiar, to stand in the kitchen without speaking, to laugh and drink until the sky becomes a color that no one has ever named. (I tell you that I don’t miss you anymore when you wander, but even then, I know that to not touch your hand is a mistake. To walk one in front of the other is a mistake.) While I stay awake at night waiting for the paintings to speak, you wait for them to sigh. By dark your body is smaller and glowing. You are headlights going south. 8 Meadow the Virginia City Cemetery Atom Richards The only way to get to the ghost town is to traverse the grade. On the way up, I tell her, “I’m going the long way,” to make our time last. “By ‘long way’ (she makes air quotes with her fingers) do you mean far out into the desert where you can bury my body and no one will know?” On New Year’s Day, we walk on warped wooden sidewalks of this old mining town. The rotting planks complain under our heels. The last time I held a girl’s moist hand, my father still breathed Nevada’s cold dry air. Her hand is slightly cold in my warm palm. It sweats first. Along twisted broken asphalt, smattered with snow, we finish our trek to visit the dead, to read the names on their stones, organic bodies that were replaced with granite angels and timelines, their graves now covered by hard crunchy snow, held down in place by the crystal blue sky—the sun attempts to bring us warmth. We breathe thin air. I quietly hope we’ll meet and visit the dead again. Meadow 9 the The Comstock lasts Milla van der Have One more warm day. Once more the fay-like hum of the tarantula hawks, those wearied spirits of garden, once more the hummingbird and the apparitions of lizards on stone, once more the wind astride in the trees and perhaps you and I can conjure up an image of horse, wild upon the lands. Bring them to our grass, if you will, the stallion lingering, his strong-ridged back turned towards us and huddled in a corner at the far-end, the mares. One more day like that, a young colt still unwieldy on its newborn legs. 10 Meadow the Morning After Halloween, North Las Vegas Tee Iseminger The neighbors are out in legion, the mothers climbing into two- tone Subarus whose odometers march in step with each dollar the husbands bring home, their receipt-stapled bags stuffed with fur things, sateen things, things they bought on credit only days ago and have now have scrubbed the right amount to remove chocolate stains but keep the like-new luster, and the fathers look away as they pull out of the short drive- ways, continue their own important work of scraping the dried entrails of pumpkin off the front porches, pretending at raking the rest of the leaves before giving it up for a nap. The children have given nothing up to the morning. Their eyes bloodshot their skin buzzing they play at the same dry-run demonry and candied drunkenness of the night before, but more earnestly now, unencumbered by bulky costumes and polite parties, now that the sugar has had a chance to work through their small, beating bodies and glaze them in bravery. 1987, and I was 14 and in the dark dance hall with the made-up girls, the monsters and witches, third coke in an hour clutched so hard I couldn’t feel my fingers, Randy there again with his clear bottle, says have some, pours it in the can, and then does it again, and I limber, and the rest of the night is a blotted shine of myself in the bathroom mirror, in The Reflex, the dry heaves and princess tit-pinching, until Randy and I are laughing, coughing in the wet middle of Tonopah Avenue cold, our shoulders aching, the doors locked and still more than an hour until our parents would come. The Subarus are pulling back in, loaded with new bags, last night’s princesses running out barefoot to the driveway, boys still out back, wild-eyed, wielding what they can find, and the mothers hand over two or three bags, say, You can help scramble eggs, breakfast for dinner again. And the fathers are waking up, rolling toward the window, blinking in the glare of their boys’ twirling weapons, wondering again if they should paint the house that shade of skin-beige or sky-blue. Meadow 11 the The Potomac Travis Truax At the bridge you grinned like a woman returning home after five years gone.