Poemm Emoir Stor Y 2 0 14
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Melissa Boston poemm Number Thirteen/2014 Elya Braden Jenny Burkholder Kristi Carter Alison Chapman Melissa DeCarlo emoir Stephanie Dickinson Heather Dundas Lauren Fath Yolanda Franklin story Naoko Fujimoto Madelyn Garner Inez D. Geller Juliana Gray Mary Grover Judith O’Connell Hoyer Jessica Jacobs Carrie Jerrell Suzanne M. Levine Callie Mauldin Victoria McArtor Heal McKnight Antonya Nelson Christina Nettles Inés Orihuela Tina Parker Shobha Rao Cynthia Ryan Mia Sara Sonia Scherr Julia Shipley Hilary Sideris 2014 Susan Terris Whitnee Thorp $10.00 Julie Marie Wade Diana Wagman .. PMSpoemmemoirstory 2014number thirteen Copyright © 2014 by PMS poemmemoirstory PMS is a journal of women’s poetry, memoir, and short fiction published once a year. Subscriptions are $10 per year, $15 for two years, or $18 for three years; sample copies are $7. Unsolicited manuscripts of up to five poems or fifteen pages of prose are welcome during our reading period (January 1 through March 30), but must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope for consideration. Manuscripts received at other times of the year will be returned unread. For submission guidelines and to submit online, visit us at www.pms-journal.org, or send a SASE to the address below. All rights revert to the author upon publication. Reprints are permitted with appropriate acknowledgment. Address all correspon- dence to: PMS poemmemoirstory HB 213 1530 3rd Avenue South Birmingham, AL 35294-1260 PMS poemmemoirstory is a member of the Council of Literary Maga- zines and Presses (CLMP) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Indexed by the Humanities International Index and in Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, PMS poemmemoirstory is distributed to the trade by Ingram Periodicals, 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000. patrons College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama at Birmingham The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham Patti Callahan Henry Margaret Harrill Robert Morris, M.D. C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D. friends Sandra Agricola Andrew Glaze Will Miles Daniel Anderson Robert P. Glaze Dail W. Mullins Jr. Rebecca Bach Randa Graves Michael R. Payne George W. Bates Ron Guthrie Robert Lynn Penny Peter and Miriam Bellis Ward Haarbauer Lee and Pam Person Claude and Nancy Ted Haddin William Pogue Bennett John Haggerty Kieran Quinlan & Randy Blythe Richard Hague Mary Kaiser James Bonner Sang Y. Han Jim Reed F.M. Bradley Jeff Hansen Steven M. Rudd Mary Flowers Braswell Tina Harris Rusty Rushton Jim Braziel Jessica Heflin John Sartain Karen Brookshaw Patty Callahan Henry Janet Sharp Bert Brouwer Pamela Horn Danny Siegel Edwin L. Brown Jennifer Horne Juanita Sizemore Donna Burgess William Hutchings Martha Ann Stevenson Linda Casebeer Alicia K. Clavell Lanier Scott Isom Lou Suarez John E. Collins Joey Kennedy Susan Swagler Robert Collins Sue Kim Drucilla Tyler Catherine Danielou Marilyn Kurata Maria Vargas Jim L. Davidson Ruth and Edward Adam Vines Michael Davis Lamonte Daniel Vines Denise Duhamel Beverly Lebouef Larry Wharton Charles Faust Ada Long Elaine Whitaker Grace Finkel Susan Luther Jacqueline Wood Edward M. Friend III John C. Mayer John M. Yozzo Stuart Flynn James Mersmann Carol Prejean Zippert staff editor-in-chief Kerry Madden managing editor Bethany Mitchell senior editors Bethany Mitchell, Memoir Taylor Crawford, Fiction Cheyenne Taylor, Poetry assistant editors Neil Bagley Jordan Price Halley Cotton Laura Simpson Sarah Jennings Jason Walker business managers Heather Martin Nakia Lee Bethany Mitchell administrative assistants Taylor Crawford Bethany Mitchell cover design Michael J. Alfano cover art “La Iglesia” by Inés Orihuela, watercolor on canvas. production/printing 47 Journals, LLC contents from the Editor-in-Chief i poemmemoirstory Madelyn Garner The Garden in August 7 Victoria McArtor A Good Seasonal Depression 9 Inez D. Geller Taffeta 10 Judith O’Connell Hoyer Folding Sheets 12 Jessica Jacobs Black Abstraction 13 Hilary Sideris My Bluff 15 Melissa Boston Edna, Sleeping at Grand Isle 16 Mia Sara Sonny Jim 17 Tina Parker Sunday Night 18 Raising Jesus 19 Susan Terris O’Keefe Country 20 Suzanne M. Levine Eve, Poland, 1942 22 United Air 23 Carrie Jerrell Love Poem for Route 66 24 Love Poem for the Tallgrass Prairie 26 Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip 27 Julie Marie Wade red 28 Elya Braden Sweeter than Today 30 Jenny Burkholder New Year’s Eve 32 Kristi Carter When a Ghost Touches Your Body 33 Naoko Fujimoto Electric Bills 34 Whitnee Thorp Coal Sweet 35 Yolanda Franklin Vindictive Grace 36 contents… Juliana Gray The Mobled Queen 38 Thrift 39 Ophelia 40 poemmemoirstory Alison Chapman The Paradise Within 43 Heal McKnight Traffic 57 Lauren Fath My Hands, Remembering 65 Christina Nettles Death of an Independent Bookstore 77 Cynthia Ryan Rough Edges 81 Stephanie Dickinson New Jersey Noir 88 Mary Grover Love for Jumpy Insomniacs 103 Julia Shipley Let Us Now Praise Rural Women: The Things They Jettisoned 110 poemmemoirstory Shobha Rao An Unrestored Woman 117 Callie Mauldin Temp 124 Melissa DeCarlo The Rosary 133 Sonia Scherr Pearl 135 Heather Dundas House Menu 152 Diana Wagman Rom Com or Rose and Jack Live Happily Ever After and We Are Not Really Surprised 167 Antonya Nelson In the Land of Men 172 Kerry Madden Interview with Antonya Nelson 183 contributors 195 FROM THE editor-in-chief Dear Reader, My grandmother, Elizabeth Baker, slept late every day and ate a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup with crackers for breakfast while watching The Young and the Restless followed by the noon news for weather, more soaps, and an early bird supper around three o’clock. She said three rosaries a day and went to evening Mass at five with my grandfather so long as the weather held up in Leavenworth, Kansas. When it didn’t, she kept a home supply of the Holy Eucharist near her statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She did crosswords in the evenings, drank a watery highball, and smoked a cigarette with an ivory holder and ended each day with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. When Meals on Wheels started coming to their home, leaving brown bags on the doorstep with sad peanut-butter sandwiches and bruised fruit, I knew it was the beginning of the end. It made me anxious to think of losing them, but my grandparents didn’t seem bothered by the sacks of lunch on the porch next to the glider where we’d sit in the eve- nings if it were cool enough. And it was on that porch in Leavenworth that my grandmother, Elizabeth, told me stories. She told me about playing Kate from The Taming of the Shrew at Saint Mary’s College in Leavenworth as a young girl and how she’d heard someone in the front row say during a quiet moment, “She likes the sound of her voice.” Then my grandmother paused and said, “And you know what? I did.” She talked about visiting her big sister, Maime, in the nursing home, who was eighteen years older, and in and out of dementia at the time, but Maime woke up long enough that afternoon to see Elizabeth—a spry age of seventy-five—and say to her, “Sister, you need to lose that stomach.” Elizabeth loved stories and books—mostly volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and always the latest Catholic Digest and mysteries too. I tried to read her a Flannery O’Connor story once but she made me quit. It was too much. But she loved telling stories, and she taught me about the power of stories, not only in the telling, but in withholding juicy and critical information too. “You don’t need to know about that,” PMS.. i she’d say, even when I’d beg for more details. But her devotion to stories and her love of me taught me to adore stories and to crave more, which is what we have here for you, dear reader, in this jam-packed issue of poems, memoirs, and stories in our new issue of PMS 13. Amongst the poetry offerings, we have Susan Terris traversing through O’Keefe’s country to Suzanne M. Levine’s boxcar in Poland to Jenny Burkholder’s New Year’s in Beebe, Arkansas. We linger in these luminous poems and so many others, including Juliana Gray’s trilogy of quintessentially southern loss—a canvas of marriage and death in quick succession, grieving sisters, and mourners bearing Publix chicken. We even have Carrie Jerrell taking us along Route 66, through the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas, and on other childhood family trips where the pos- sibilities of the future are etched big and bright, nourished with pudding pops and Wonder bread. Alison Chapman’s sequel to her PMS 9 essay, “Milton’s Captive Audience: Teaching Paradise Lost in a Maximum Security Prison” returns us to Donaldson prison once again in her new essay, “The Paradise Within.” She revisits the friendships forged with inmates serv- ing life sentences paralleling the death of her beloved father. In “Rough Edges,” breast cancer survivor Cynthia Ryan takes her studies of breast cancer in homeless populations to a more personal level as she inter- views her friend Edwina, a breast cancer survivor from the streets of Birmingham or “Bombingham,” as the city was termed at the time during the 1960s. In another Alabama-based story, Crissy Nettles of Monroeville details what it’s like to watch the dream of an independent bookstore shutter in the hometown of Harper Lee and Truman Capote due to lack of interest even with shoppers like the Lee sisters themselves, Miss Nelle Harper, and Miss Alice. We have fiction from Heather Dundas’ wrenching story of a marriage when illness strikes mean and hard; Diana Wagman’s tall tale of Jack and Rose; Sonia Scherr’s story of a little girl, Pearl, searching for her real self among adults; and Callie Mauldin’s story of fragility in the heart of New York City with a backdrop of seafood-themed restaurants and a temp job in the Empire State Building.