The Muse spring.2014 The Muse The Literary & Arts Magazine of Howard Community College Editorial Committee Tara Hart Mark Keats Stacy Korbelak Sylvia Lee Rick Leith William Lowe Juliette Ludeker Ryna May Zachary Pajak Tim Singleton Student submissions reviewed and selected by editorial committee. Faculty and staff submissions reviewed and selected by non-contributing editors. Design Editor Stephanie Lemghari Cover Art Front: “Rebirth” by Debra-Ann Smith Back: “Fairy Dust” by Debra-Ann Smith contents poetry prose The Women Gather (for Asantewa) 4 Lenett Partlow-Myrick Sympathy for the Devil 6 Marie Westhaver Gifts 5 Barbara Brickman Life is a Playlist 18 Rick Brown Your Sunflower 14 Nsikan Akpan Concrete 28 Kalen Breland Scene at the Vacant Lot 16 Peggie Hale 50 shades of Beige 38 Claudia Dugan Rearview 17 Alexa MacNaught A Summer Night 44 Kevin Hughes Autumn’s Kiss 22 Ji Hyun Ryu My Religion? 48 Pattie Holy-Ilenda Words 24 Alexa Abee The Calm and the Storm 54 Marina Kovacs-McCaney Pretzels with French Mustard 26 Michelle Kreiner Thou Shalt Not! 58 Pattie Holy-Ilenda Betrayal 31 Lisa Arbareri This Pen for Hire 66 Robert Hamill Cannizaro Park 32 K.J. Kovacs Awakening 70 Nick Jones Rooted 35 Allysha Romero Seeing Circles 82 Bill Davis Violet 36 Mollie Rose Trail A Soliloquy for James Gatz 42 Emily Elizabeth Bellor Bullet 47 Aduragbemi Okiji art Leaves 53 Anna Sandacz Between the Shadows 13 Hebah Haddad What a Dancer Wants 56 Chelsea Green Ficus 23 Sarah English Golden 57 Michael Pileggi Barrels 27 Erin Kline Blue Infinities 62 Kalen Breland The Biggest Ben 34 Stacy Korbelak Love’s Wicked Cousin Dressed as a Twin 64 Torsten Schulz Beautiful Black Lungs 41 E. Hayes Hunger 77 Pattie Holy-Ilenda Untitled 43 Marina Kovacs-McCaney Captured 80 Dominick Hardy Budgie 52 Gabriela Mendoza For Ginsberg 84 Marina Kovacs-McCaney Memorial 65 Kalen Breland Rebirth 78 Debra-Ann Smith Fairy Dust 79 Debra-Ann Smith Lenett Partlow-Myrick Barbara Brickman The Women Gather (for Asantewa) Gifts The stretch and curves of Dogwood Road I bring you… would have us believe we have traveled far beyond the line of demarcation. Yet, not so far away our city sleeps. Hereford snores. Berries in the snow No one hears us split the night with ancient tongue— Mdupe, mdupe Ogun, mdupe; No one sees us lace the trail to wooded glen, to lodge. None but night hawk, deer, and star will ever know Wine where vines never grew We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon… Here below Grandmother Moon’s delicious glow, it is she who calls us; calls us to harvest, fire and wood, And calls us ritual, story and stone, to pray and sing, to cry and sweat our earthly Mother’s womb. Passage from the land of the dead. We have traveled far, we daughters of Africa, descendants of these Turtle Island shores, so far to rediscover where we belong. Somehow, we remember we are more than concrete, more than Why do you bring me… where we work and dwell, more than statistics, battered, martyr, shrew …And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.* Somehow, A candle to light the day? We recall a river runs through Dickey Hill, and so the women gather, dripping morningscape with dampened loins, with skirts perfumed in smoking ash from lodge to hilly bank, then onto Cherry Hill in search of water, seeding soil with sweat, cleansing stream with pure conviction and dreams on out to sea across this town, this Baltimore. *From “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell, recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young c 4 5 c Marie Westhaver Marie Westhaver Sympathy for the Devil My mother has turned into Keith Richards. Gradually, she has tapered kick out of the similarities. It could have been her best friend from off from eating real food and was existing solely on cigarette smoke high school, Marilyn Ames. and morphine (a combination of long-acting and short-acting pills), and the occasional swig of wine. She wasn’t always Keith Richards, A good day, to my mother, was one where you went outside and had a of course—she spent many years incognito as a housewife and cig. Beyond that, a glass of wine. Anything after that was gilding the companion for a few trips around the world with husbands number lily. one and two, but lately it appeared that Keith Richards had given A bad day was one where you showed up and Mom was high as a kite. up the hassles of hard rock and hot babes in favor of channeling dandelion-headed old ladies. You never knew what you were going to find—it could be Mom sitting up in bed, naked from the waist down. She might be dressed and ready My role in my mom’s rock star life was smuggling in the wine when I arrived, with an alarmingly bright lipstick on and enormous disguised as “apple juice” and other innocent beverages. Once or twice marshmallow sneakers with Velcro straps on her feet. a week, I would show up and stuff the “apple juice” empties into a bag, destined for refills at my house from wine boxes the approximate She might be sitting in her bathroom, winding her hair around a size and capacity of a gasoline can, all the time wondering if Mom’s curling iron, and she would turn around to say that Ashley (my niece) unspoken plan was to be deliberately eased out of this world on a was in the living room. I would say, Ashley? She lives in San Diego. cloud of pain killers. Pretending it was apple juice was for my uptight sister, so she wouldn’t have to face the boxes of wine with the easy- Never mind, Mom said, only I can see her. spigots-for-old-ladies. Sometime the place would be a WRECK—underwear and used In my sister’s mind, there was no time like the present to turn over a tissues everywhere, newspapers and papers strewn all over the floor, new leaf and stop drinking and smoking. In my mind, there was no one of her blankets wet from a wine spill. She wouldn’t be wearing point in giving a starving dog a rubber bone. There had been a recent her glasses or her oxygen, and who knew how long that had been off? incident where my sister ratted out the wine boxes Mom had in her She would rave about how the coming Wednesday was the last day refrigerator to Nurse Ratched at the assisted living facility, and there she would be doing secretarial work for the Masons. I said, Mom, you had been a stormtrooping incident and the wine was confiscated. I were never a Mason (trying to imagine her with a fez and a secret had to call Mom’s doctor and tell her that if the problem was Mom’s handshake). She countered that she was so. I said I didn’t think they medication and alcohol, that she had to tell them to give her less even let women BE Masons and she said, Oh, yeah, they have their medication and let her have a few glasses of wine. Which she did. So own thing now. now we were pretending it was apple juice. I tried to distract her from the newfound obsession with her career On my walk through the hallway to my mother’s room, I always with the Masons (don’t worry about it, Mom, it’s the drugs talking) passed a room where the occupant displayed a collage of photos and convinced her to bring some cookies with her—she was shaky and outside her door. The central picture was a high school portrait that I knew she hadn’t eaten anything. (Okay! Mom crowed, let’s bring the was classically my mother’s era, with the same hairdos and Peter Pan cookeroos!) collars. I made a mental note to tell Mom about it—she would get a c 6 7 c Marie Westhaver Marie Westhaver My mom wanted me to help her shave her legs before we left, which “The Smoker’s Oasis” was printed in that faux “Arabian” style writing was like running a potato peeler around the jaggedy, nobbly edges on the self-contained ashtrays outside, three-foot high, black, of a twig. (My own calves, by no means supermodel quality, looked elongated genie bottles, like some trashed out I Dream of Jeannie vessel fabulous by comparison.) I looked at her, a scarecrow propped up washed up on the shore. There was a hole at the top for you to flick against the pieces of a fractured spine, and it made me rethink all your butt in with the hundreds of others in Jeannie’s smoked-out those cracks I stepped on as a child. basement. The only thing I don’t like about living here, my mom said, is waiting Just beyond the genie bottle were a couple of benches along a path, for a smoke. and this area attracted a lot of the residents who either wanted to sit outside for a spell, or were about to head off for a walk or resting from I was sitting on one end of the bed with my mother, looking over her one. There were always more men than women at the Oasis, maybe knobby knees, drawn up like a folding umbrella and thinking about because it was the closest thing to a den of iniquity you could find on the people who perished in the hospital during Katrina because they the premises, and there were always some regulars among the smoking couldn’t get out of the building.