NORTHERN NARRATIVES a Collection of Poems, Essays, and Short Stories by the Citizens of North Dakota and the Red River Valley
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NORTHERN NARRATIVES A Collection of Poems, Essays, and Short Stories by the Citizens of North Dakota and the Red River Valley NORTHERN NARRATIVES A Collection of Poems, Essays, and Short Stories by the Citizens of North Dakota and the Red River Valley Volume 2 Published 2018 Collected and Produced by the following Fargo Public Library Staff: Sunny Branick, Melisa Duncan, Andy Gustafson, Cheryl Lackman, and Lori West. 2018 iii Copyright © 2018 by Fargo Public Library Cover art copyright © 2016 by Jack Dura All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. First Printing: 2018 ISBN 978-1-387-81947-8 Fargo Public Library 102 3 St. N Fargo, ND 58102 www.fargolibrary.org ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the Friends of the Fargo Public Library for their funding and support of this project. We would also like to thank the community volunteers who donated their time judging the sumissions, including the NDSU English Honor Society. v vi CONTENTS Introduction ....................................................................................... 1 Poetry .................................................................................................. 3 Doppler by Steve Aakre ..................................................................... 5 Visitors by Nolan Alber ..................................................................... 8 I Am Your Boss by Barbara Beckman ............................................. 11 Spilt by Dakota Breen ...................................................................... 12 Parley by Anastasia Gustafson .......................................................... 14 The Pilgrimage of the Wild Turkey Tribe Across the I-94 Trail by Anastasia Gustafson .................................................................. 16 Changes by Nancy Hanson .............................................................. 17 Winter by Nancy Hanson ................................................................. 18 A Blizzard’s Blast by Pagyn Harding ............................................. 19 Goodness, All This Stored Sunshine by Dave Jameson ................ 20 Russian Olive Trees at Hughes Fine Arts by Dave Jameson ........ 22 Voices of the Prairie by Mari Jameson ........................................... 24 When Each of Us Has Gone Our Way by Nicole Jasperse ........... 25 Celestial Dance by Bibi Khan ......................................................... 27 Broken by Hannah Khan ................................................................. 28 Life of a Universe by Reagan Lemar ............................................... 29 Aggravation by Renee Loehr........................................................... 30 Security by Renee Loehr .................................................................. 31 There’s Nothing Scary about Potatoes by Anna Lynch ............... 32 Breaking Free by Stephanie Wilson ................................................. 33 To Be Someone by Stephanie Wilson ............................................... 34 Ode to Coffee by Eileen Youens ...................................................... 35 The Parking Lot, at Night by Eileen Youens ................................. 36 Essays ................................................................................................ 37 Top Five on the Curb by Renee Loehr ........................................... 39 A Sharp Mind by Raymond Scot Sorrells ......................................... 43 vii Short Stories ..................................................................................... 49 1968: Fade to Black by Neil M. Frederickson .................................. 51 Shooting the Dog by Dave Jameson ................................................ 61 Pride and Joy by Lyle Jorgenson ..................................................... 73 The Funeral Dress by Kim Larson.................................................. 81 The Assassin by Anna Lynch .......................................................... 93 A Murder of Crows by Dan McKay ............................................. 101 Pipestone by Nolan Schmidt ........................................................... 121 Traffic Safety by Raymond Scot Sorrells ......................................... 129 Kisses for Puppikins by Jennifer Thurman ................................... 135 viii INTRODUCTION Welcome to the second volume of Northern Narratives. This anthology features selected poems, essays, and short stories submitted to the Fargo Public Library during the Winter Read-A-Thon, which ran Jan. 8 – March 4, 2018. We hope to make the project an annual event. All pieces are written and self-edited by citizens of North Dakota and the Red River Valley. Judging was done by the NDSU English Honor Society and community volunteers. We hope you enjoy this publication. Northern Narratives is funded by The Friends of the Fargo Public Library. To learn more about the Friends, please visit their webpage. www.fargolibrary.org/friendsofthelibrary The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Fargo Public Library or the City of Fargo. 1 2 POETRY 3 4 Poetry DOPPLER by Steve Aakre When we were young time inched slowly as a schoolroom clock ticking toward the final bell. All the year crawled: Spring, a thaw that could not come soon enough; Summer, a sleeping dog day; Fall, the darkening descent to the permafrost of Winter. Our time sprawled out to horizons we could not see. Unrelenting, the days lingered like boring guests who would not leave. So much time was on our hands, dross weighing us down. We wasted what felt worthless, not sensing time would become priceless. Someday. Someday came in our middle ages: cascades of birthdays, holidays, first days, last days, daycare and nights caring sleepless through the fevers and nightmares of our children. 5 As events and memories amassed we wished time would slow down, but sensed the lesson coming, unrelenting: life’s gravity pulls us faster and faster, the pitch of life rises as our future rushes toward us. We christen the future in the babies of our babies, but as we hold these grand new lives we feel our past compressed: “It seems only yesterday when you took your first steps,” we tell our grown children, knowing the time will come, too fast, when days will leave us like guests who had their fun and left us for better times with other hosts. We cling to our measure of moments, precious and radiant like flowers that show their richest shades when summer is ending and leaves shrivel, blooms vivid until the killing frost. Our memories dance with our dreams, confounding what was with what might have been. 6 Poetry Time compounds our confounding. Experts theorize that time is relative, bending and stretching across the arc of the universe; but for all that matters to us each day, all that we see and taste and feel, all that feeds our sure and certain hope, time is the constant acceleration and we are the variables. As life recedes and days race away, seasons pass like days, the pitch of life falls, harder to hear, unrelenting, retreating faster and faster, pulled by the overpowering gravity of the empty darkness to horizons still unseen. 7 VISITORS by Nolan Alber My mind turns over thoughts of movie stars like Paul Newman, Patrick Swayze, or Brad Pitt. Pinnacles of what we consider “the male form.” I mull over their blind confidence, their ability to attract by presence, and the simplicity with which they can act as slick as water running down the backside of a duck’s streamlined feathers. I run statistical comparisons of these men against other male forms, like the stereotypical plumber, taxi driver, or engineer. All far removed from the aforementioned transcendence. I picture how they’re portrayed by the general masses as incompetent in all social situations, or off-putting by mere existence (despite the fact that all the plumbers I know and all the taxi drivers I know and certainly all the engineers I know are quite good people, and ravishingly handsome or beautiful). Even still, the sands left in the sieve present us with two polar-opposite images of humanity, as directly different as the midnight moon and the lunchtime sun. 8 Poetry We could pick out the differences between these specimens, these rough representations of humanity, as easily as identifying a cockroach from a Monarch. However, we have an undeniable bias while recognizing those of our own species. Entertain the thought, for just a moment, that visitors have come from a distant galaxy and welcomed themselves onto Earth like uninvited college friends who have mistimed their new apartment lease and need a place to “crash” for a few years. They may hail from Venus, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, or, to the subtle delight of middle school classrooms everywhere, perhaps they came from Uranus. The origin is not of importance, really. The idea of import, instead, is that these visitors, green-grey and dark red in color, with tentacles sporadically placed like a potato’s eyes, and gaseous fixtures where we expect a myriad of limbs, all blur together as one impression of the “invader.” We do not see their individuality. We do not see their Brad Pitts (who have just the right asymmetry between the fourth and ninety-second tentacle). We do not see their plumbers (who have a stereotypically nasty