The Bend 3.Indd
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The Bend Edited by: Dylan R. Reed Timothy Chilcote Kevin Hattrup Number Three University of Notre Dame The Bend Number Three Managing Editor, Layout and Design: Dylan R. Reed Fiction Editor: Timothy Chilcote Poetry Editor: Kevin Hattrup Front Cover Photograph: By Elizabeth Serafín Berruecos Detail of “Chicago Townhouse” by Manuela Montúfar Arroyo Back Cover Photograph: Mac Russell Copyright © 2006 The Bend Rights revert to author upon publication. Our graduate M.F.A. Creative Writing program is a two-year literary immersion. We offer work- shops with nationally acclaimed writers and literature classes with a distinguished Department of English faculty. Our community is small and congenial (we admit ten writers a year), and part of a large and lively intellectual community in the larger English department. We have a diverse group of all ages and backgrounds and offer a year-round program of visitors and readings. All students write a thesis-a collection of stories or creative nonfiction, a novel, or a collection of poetry-and work closely with a thesis advisor. The Bend does not read unsolicited manuscripts. Please direct questions and comments to [email protected]. Printed in the United States CONTENTS Renée E. D’Aoust Body of a Dancer 6 Tony D’Souza The Hall 11 Sonnenizio on a Line from Donne 14 Kathleen Canavan Coffee Shop 15 John Crawford Right on Red 16 Kevin Ducey She named the baby Don Juan 21 Whiteness of a whale 22 California 23 Cyndy Searfoss Airs Above Ground 24 Sarah Bowman Canvassing For A New City 33 Chris Gerben Rumble Strips 35 D.A. Sumrall A white suit in Memphis 36 Discretion 37 Dawn M. Comer Under the Sign of Sleepytime 38 Lynne Chien The Problem with Dreaming in Color 49 William McGee, Jr. Neither Heaven Nor Hell 51 Danna Ephland Gemini’s Dance 60 Gemini in the Suburbs 61 NoNieqa Ramos Abuelita in the Clouds 62 Amy Wray Irish Hunger 65 The World of Man 66 Michael Richards From Love’s Gravity 67 Amy Reese time at home 69 Colby Davis Inheritance 71 Sara Swanson Restoration 72 C. Kubasta Infidelities 76 Amy Faith De Betta A Number of Lives 77 Jayne Marek After the Equinox 84 Jackson Bliss The Blind Date 85 Mark Matson Interlocking Areas 89 Saw 90 Kevin Carrizo di Camillo The Gradual Calm (#134) 91 Cyndi Vander Ven 31 January 2006: Conjuring Light 92 Marcela Sulak Platitudes at Sea 96 Jeff Roessner Visitation 100 Traveler, Out of Season 101 Contributors 102 The Bend Editor’s Note Since this year’s issue of The Bend has found its way to you, one can almost comfortably assume a handful of things about you: that you are at least passably familiar with Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program, and also, perhaps, with some of the writers and poets whose work this journal chronicles. This third volume, like all the others, is a way for graduates and friends of the program to share—however momentarily—a glimpse of their work and often their lives with one another. For the reader I’ve imagined and for any reader, these pages are likely enjoyable and worthwhile reading: some of the latest poems, essays, and stories our writers and poets have to offer. For those writers and poets, however, these pages amount to the really top-notch sort of letters back home. The Bend: Number Three features work that approaches precisely this sentiment. Since all writing has its origin not only in its author, but also in a place—real or imagined, ideal or heartbreaking—it is fitting that this year’s contributors have chosen to share with you pieces aimed at or emanating from home. Their enormous talents and generosity has earned my gratitude and admiration. As ever, the guidance and support of William O’Rourke and all of the Creative Writing Program, but especially the innumerable favors of Coleen Hoover and the advice of Timothy Chilcote and Kevin Hattrup— my fellow editors—have proven invaluable. Lastly, I am grateful to you, our friends and readers, and this book is my thank-you note. I hope that you’ll enjoy it. Dylan R. Reed Notre Dame, Indiana, April 2006 5 The Bend Renée E. D’Aoust Body of a Dancer The body of a dancer is tired before it is worn out. The back fails. The adductors fail. The neck muscles are too loose. The neck muscles are too tight. The extension is too low. The extension is never high enough. In the summer of 1993, my body was recovering from a serious back injury. I’d strained the low- er back muscles of the erector spinae group doing the choreography of one of the teachers at the University of Montana while at the American College Dance Festival. Gus Solomons jr. was judging, and the piece made it into the final performances. But I’d spent the entire college dance festival on my back in a motel room in Ogden, Utah. I literally could not move. The teacher had been very nice—she’d given me flowers—but secretly I blamed her move- ment—I blamed her—for injuring my back. She incorporated spirals into and out of the floor in her choreography but gave no instruction on how to use your abdominal muscles to protect against over-twisting your back. It’s a common mistake of an amateur or beginning choreographer to expect a dancer to recreate movement by imitation rather than by technique. A choreographer doesn’t have time to teach technique in rehearsal, but since a dancer usually works for next to nothing, the least a beginning choreographer can do is not ruin her body. After two months of inactivity, I auditioned for a summer scholarship to the Graham school sponsored by the Montana Dance Arts Association. They’d brought in Myra Woodruff to adjudicate. Myra was currently in the Graham Company and later I heard she became Maurice Béjart’s muse. I won the scholarship everyone wanted: Graham. By then I wanted out of Montana. I’d moved there from Seattle, which is where I had grown up. In Montana I expected to find a cowboy and live on a ranch. Lots of cowboys know how to dance even if it is just line dancing. But instead, I found dance studios for the second time in my life and started moving my body. Alone. Inside. No cowboy. I wanted to dance. My body had to move. My body could barely move. To this day, I can tell you the injuries of all my friends. I can tell you their physical problems more than I can tell you their family history. I can tell you that my friend Stef has trouble with her neck and sometimes with a knee. I can tell you my friend Heather injured her left calf muscle and that she was terrified because she’d never had an injury before. She didn’t know what the rest of us were talking about when we said a strained muscle hurt so badly. I can tell you my friend Mara had trouble with her lower back. I can tell about another friend who had a herniated disk and spent six immovable months on her back. The doctors told her she would never dance again, and she told me she couldn’t imagine her life without dance. I can tell you almost everyone at the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance had trouble with their lower backs. I can tell you my friend Sandra occasionally has a glitch in her hip. I can tell you about a young woman named Kathleen who was slated for the New York City Ballet Company whose teacher ripped out the muscles in her right hip 6 The Bend area because he forced the leg to her ear to show her she wasn’t working hard enough. That teacher was Perry Brunson. He was an amazing teacher. Placement, alignment, discipline. We lost him all those years ago to Karposi’s Sarcoma. That was at the beginning of AIDS. We didn’t say AIDS back then. Don’t tell anyone about the aches and pains. The body of a dancer is a perfect instrument. It is honed. Even when it shows the effort with modern dance (as opposed to showing no effort with ballet), the body is still a tool, an expression of the soul. And if the soul isn’t interesting… forget it. The body, Martha Graham says, never lies. My body lied all the time. The tiny spot on the front right of my hip, on the top of my iliac crest, was on fire by the end of my dancing life. I couldn’t let anyone touch it; the pain sent my face grimacing, involuntarily. I didn’t tell anyone I used to spend days in bed, trying to get my low back to release the spasm. In rehearsal, I often wore a flexible neoprene back brace. There was Velcro on one side, and I wrapped it tightly around my lower back. The neoprene held my sacrum together. I wore green polypro shorts over the top of the brace to warm up my hips. My boyfriend Chris followed me from Montana to New York City, and he would bring me aspirin while I lay in bed. Then we tried ibuprofen. Then we settled on naproxen, using the product Aleve. I remember Chris begging me to lift weights, to try some toning exercises for my muscles, to re- think the way I was training my body. He also told me to lose weight—I was 5’5” and 118 pounds— and it pissed me off so much, I didn’t do anything else he suggested.