Katie Davis: Audio Anatomy 37 Going out 89 Laura C

RED CEDAR REVIEW 2004 REDCEDAR R EVIEW General Editor Laura C. Tisdel Fiction Editors Joshua Landon Vinayak Prasad Poetry Editor Colleen Farrow Business Manager Kiel Phegley Webmaster Dan Roosien Assistant Editors Katie Barott Eric Canosa Emily Caskey Kristen DeMay Jordan Enzor Tim Howes Annie Kelley Nathan Lord Nicole Luna Inna Neyman Kate Puplis Emily Stoddard Ritik Tiwari Erin Riojas Eric Youngson Advisor Marcia Aldrich Red Cedar Review is an annual literary magazine published by Michigan State University undergraduates in collaboration with Michigan State University Press. Address all editorial correspondence to Red Cedar Review; 17c Morrill Hall; Department of English; Michigan State University; East Lansing, MI 48824; or email [email protected]. Manuscripts are read between August and May only. For submission guidelines, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the address above, or visit our website, at http://www.msu.edu/~rcreview. Subscriptions are available for $12 for one year, $23 for 2 years, or $29 for 3 years. For subscription information, please contact Michigan State University Press; 1405 S. Harrison Rd., 25 Manly Miles Bldg.; East Lansing, MI 48823-5245; 517-355-9543 x 130. Cover and text design: Michael J. Brooks ©2004 Red Cedar Review, Volume XXXIX ISSN 0034-1967 You Are Invited to Join the FRIENDS OF RED CEDAR REVIEW Please consider becoming a patron of Red Cedar Review. For the past 40 years, we have been committed to exploring all genres, by publishing both emerging and established writers. Your generous support will help us continue our mission of promoting excellent writing and providing a forum for creativity within the student literary community. Your tax-deductible* contribution can be made by check or credit card, and unless you wish to remain anonymous you will be gratefully acknowledged in the journal and with a letter of receipt. Friends of the Written Word Poetry section sponsor: $300 (includes one-year subscription) Fiction section sponsor: $300 (includes one-year subscription) Interview section sponsor: $500 (includes one-year subscription + one guest subscription) Art & Graphics sponsor: $600 (includes one-year subscription + one guest subscription) Volume sponsor (annual issue): $1,000 (includes one-year subscription + two guest subscriptions) Friends of the Spoken Word Your gift will support a variety of literary events on campus, including readings and visits from guest authors. Visiting writers have included essayist Tom Lynch and poet Diane Glancy. Event contributor: $500 (includes one-year subscription + one guest subscription) Event sponsor: $1,000 (includes one-year subscription + two guest subscriptions) Multiple year sponsor: $1,500 (includes two-year subscription + one guest subscription) Gifts Please complete this form, make credit card gifts and checks payable to Michigan State University and specify Red Cedar Review on the memo line. Send to: Michigan State University Press, Journals Division; 1405 S. Harrison Rd., Ste. 25; East Lansing, MI 48823-5245. Name _______________________________ ■ Visa ■ MasterCard Address _______________________________ Credit Card # __________________________ City __________________________________ Exp. Date _____________________________ State/Zip ______________________________ Email _________________________________ ■ I wish to remain anonymous *Tax Deduction Information: Contributions to Michigan State University Press are tax-deductible. However, according to IRS guidelines, the value of any goods/services (subscriptions) received in connection with your gift must be deducted from the gross amount of your contribution to determine the amount eligible for tax advantages and employer matching gift programs. Thank you for your generous support of this exceptional publication! iv REDCEDAR R EVIEW CONTENTS Editor’s Introduction 1 An Afternoon in Rome 55 Laura C. Tisdel, General Editor David Sapp Prelude and Fugue, in Minors 5 Coveting 57 Lesmana Lim Scott Larner America Discovering 11 Every Day It Matters Less 77 Columbus: Lover to the That I’m Not Tall One Who Had Loved Charles Harper Webb Mathieu Cavell The Personalities 79 Coloring the Shells 13 D. Harlan Wilson Carrie J. Preston Venice Daphne Running 81 Vicarious Motherhood 17 Backwards Amy Sumerton Lyn Lifshin Bird Song 27 Before Daylight Hits the Bay 83 Ruth Mowry Courtney Chapin The Heritage of Nymphs 29 Cold 85 Christine Junker Josh Hall Katie Davis: Audio Anatomy 37 Going Out 89 Laura C. Tisdel Heather Abner v vi Editor’s Introduction Laura C. Tisdel live with two third-year medical students on surgery rotation, and each Inight they regale me with stories of re-attaching fingers, the stink of cut- ting open a patient with gangrene, and near-fatal gun shot wounds that they cauterized shut. They are like starry eyed kindergarteners fresh off the school bus from their first day, only every giddy anecdote they tell carries with it the urgency, the importance, of life and death decision. In the presence of their daily achievements I often find myself hesitant to share: the light through the half windows of the basement office drapes across my computer screen as I skim furtively through Chicago Manual of Style and find to my delight that, yes, a semicolon is needed! As my housemates chatter on, stethoscopes swinging around their necks and hands buried deep in their white lab jackets, I stare tragically into the pile of submissions I am reading and feel my gut sink. Is what I am doing, editing a literary magazine, studying literature as an English major, vital? The image of my housemate thawing out frostbitten toes in the emer- gency room brought to mind radio essayist Katie Davis’s description of her stories about Adams Morgan, Washington D.C. as an attempt to “create an anatomy of the neighborhood”—there is a creation, or at least a re-anima- tion, in writing that is medicinal, healing. No matter the subject, writers unify or reclaim a body. They grab scraps that seem irreconcilable and coax them to adhere. A severed hand floating unattached in space is not nearly as poignant as the hand that reaches out for you from a graceful arm, just as the hills of Berkeley were never as sensuous as they are when conjoined with the image of a curve in a lover’s hips, as in “Before Daylight Hits the Bay” by poet Courtney Chapin. The surgeon sets the clavicle bone at the perfect angle to the rib or grafts thigh skin to face seamlessly and the body is made whole again; the writer sees a tear—an awkward silence in conversation or a glance of longing—and she writes in the missing pieces, reconciles the moment to itself. Amy Sumerton unravels the tensions between nanny and working mother in “Vicarious Motherhood,” and suddenly the anatomy of that relationship is recognizable, nameable, and whole. As a babysitter, I read that piece and my role fell into place: where I saw frustrating amputations in 1 2 LAURA C. TISDEL logic ( the mother is short with me about the cluttered playroom and does- n’t notice I made dinner) I see a solid trajectory; I understand and I sympa- thize. A well-written piece has the surgical precision to connect action to motive, to reconnect a reader to her childhood, her job, her family; to heal her in a way that no anti-biotic can. This issue of Red Cedar Review also begins to map out the anatomy of a writing community. The mission of Red Cedar Review has long been to cul- tivate a community of writers in East Lansing, and, for our editors, to culti- vate a sense responsibility to that community. The vast majority of pieces in this issue are local finds—the editors put out their feelers and came back to me with award winning undergraduate work, with short stories by alums and grad students, and with student cover art. Our authors may have sat beside each other in coffee shops or walked past each other on the way to class but are finally linked together in the pages of Red Cedar Review. The work of local authors has been grafted to submissions that the edits sifted from the submissions box and, although the work may have come to us from distant points, it resonated, was as familiar to us as our own hand. I find excitement in all of this and in that way this issue bears my mark. As General Editor I’ve tried to transmit my sense of happy anticipation, my feeling of being the cartographer of new terrain, to my staff. Each poem or story we accept is a discovery, and when we can see where it clicks into the big pic- ture of our issue I glean something like gestalt. The work we have chosen glows with freshness and invigoration; this is a youthful issue sprouting with pieces that are pioneers of originality, that surprised us. In sending this issue to print I have the sense of sending a child out into the world. By the time the final product is bound, many of our authors and editors will have graduated or gotten new jobs or moved across the country. During a time when the merits of the Liberal Arts are considered in terms of budget cuts, I find great comfort in knowing that at least this issue will spin out its own course, independent from the future of those who put it together. Complete in its own anatomy, it can speak for the student editors that were animated through its editing, were made complete through the process of producing literature. © 2004 Hannah Stevens 4 Prelude and Fugue, in Minors Lesmana Lim prelude he first thing you notice about the Shriner’s Hospital for Children is the T vast expanse of handicapped spaces in the parking area. It immediately imparts a sense of grim pragmatism to an edifice built upon the most opti- mistic of ideas–that children who need special medical care should be able to get it for free.

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