“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” --Sylvia Plath
Writer Advice
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” --Sylvia Plath
Writer Advice
April 2012- June 2012
FLASH
Special thanks to all who submitted pieces focused on a moment that changed their lives. We appreciate you sharing your work.
Here are the ones we most wanted to share in the Spring issue.
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By Judy Williams
Snap! Just an instant, frozen in time -
A yearbook of memories
In pictures and rhymes
Here’s Alice, so beautiful, Queen of the May.
Her court stands beside her, so happy, so gay.
Everyone’s clapping, a musical sound,
Newspaper clipping drops to the ground.
Newspaper headline, two years down the road.
Newspaper headline, leaves your heart cold.
Leaving for Paris the very next day,
Alice, so special, is taken away.
Her body parts strewn so far and wide
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Seemed nothing was left for those who survived.
For Alice was murdered at only nineteen,
Her boyfriend, a madman, slashed all her dreams.
But Alice lives on in these pages today.
No matter his evil, she won't go away.
These pictures yield memories long buried and dead;
Guiding a heart through pain and through dread.
A prism of tears yields second sight,
As Alice, long gone, smiles with such light.
Judy Williams is an attorney, living in Los Angeles. She also writes poetry and recently, has started writing songs.
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By Allie Marini
We stopped for gas station coffee on our way to the beach. We always sat in the lifeguard station to talk; it was always nighttime when we went. We parked behind Barnett Bank because it was close to a hotel that I never bothered to learn the name to, I just called it the Mermaid Chair place. It was a retro hotel, one of the ones that has survived since Hollywood’s tourist mecca days of the 1950’s, with a spiral staircase leading up to the second floor, where there was a carved stone chair and colored glass mosaic of a mermaid. He didn’t understand why I liked it and he never had to; all that mattered was he parked deliberately so we would walk alongside it.
It was two days after Valentine’s Day, unnaturally cold in Fort Lauderdale and we were unprepared for it. He offered me his sweater. It smelled like Drakkar. We were friends and went there to talk on weekends in the middle of the night. His friends made high school hell for me. He never intervened. I never held that against him. At night, near the mermaid chair, it never mattered.
He told me about a letter he mailed to a girl, crushed that she had not, would never, write back to him. I listened jealously; I always checked my locker for a note that said something besides, Beach tonight?, Lunch at Pizza Ranch? or Need a ride home?
Even with his sweater, I shivered. Legs dangling off the edge of the lifeguard station, he hugged me from behind. He had finally noticed me, and I was furious with myself for feeling grateful. Can I kiss your neck? he asked, pretending it was platonic. On the water’s horizon, two ships passed each other, twinkling lights deep blue against the mournful nighttime skyline. They look like your eyes, he said, turning me around to kiss him.
I knew he would disappoint me, that I was his second choice and that I would only exist to him at night, in a lifeguard station where no one would see us. However hollow, it was a memory that I chose to make. My only regret is that he never saw me in the fullness of proper daylight the way that I always saw him. Staircases spiraling both upwards and down, thrones carved in stone and the glitter of stained glass under starlight should have warned me. What use is a chair to someone who can breathe underwater?
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Allie Marini Batts is a New College of Florida alumna, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Allie is pursuing her MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles and fractions still confound her. Read more at: http://kiddeternity.wordpress.com
By Stephen Mead
Small voice, husky,
the answering machine wreathed
with rings of that smoke-----
Voice of sorrow
telling facts:
Time, place,
while another good man, an angel
visiting, has gone down...In the meantime frost has licked the lawn
I raked only yesterday, the magenta leaf piles,
the purple cabbage dug for a tub
gun metal blue.....
They were encysted by dawn with diamonds;
the fog echoing all of that.....I see this, receiving word of his leaving
& footsteps of the day-workers on the sidewalk
come & go, & gruff motors rumble, turn over
turgid in this November chill
melding all with his roommate's voice
coming over my phone-----
Time, life, sorrows,
it seems there is no stopping you.
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A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer and maker of short collage-films. His latest project, a collaboration with Kevin MacLeod, is entitled "Whispers of Arias", a two volume CD set of narrative poems set to music, http://stephenmeadmusic.weebly.com/
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By Christine Stump
The bawl of sirens stopped abruptly, close to home, and even at 13 years old I knew things had gotten out of hand. The fighting downstairs had gone on for hours, recently dissolving into an almost hallucinatory melange of moans and angry shrieking. The Paramedics’ entry changed everything.
The addition of people in uniform somehow made it very simple. Standing at the top of the stairs looking down into our living room as if it were a stage, my choices for the future became crystal clear: the manic madness flailing on the couch, the dejected helplessness weeping on the hearth, or the crisp capability of a life in uniform.
After more than a decade in Emergency Medical Services, I’ve learned that the uniform doesn’t supersede the other identities; it contains them. When the uniform comes off, the images of the night do not. The clarity of the starched shirt, protocols, and polished boots sets the memories of people and sirens, fragments of light, into a kaleidoscopic pattern of meaning and, yes, even beauty, waiting for someone to look down from just the right angle.
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Christine Stump balances her now part time duties as a Paramedic and Educator in Emergency Medical Services with teaching, supporting and writing about the home practice of yoga.
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By Gail Eisenhart
We walk the endless hallway
and find Mom in her bed, eyes closed.
Her white hair, like icing on a cinnamon bun,
spills onto the pillow. We hold her
hand and remember the young mother
who scolded as she straightened our hair
and shushed us out the door
to morning mass.We rub her back now and whisper
it’s time to rest, then kiss her
withered cheek, fully aware
when we return
it will be cold.
Gail Eisenhart’s poems can be seen in, Assisi, Jet Fuel Review, New Verse News and New Mirage. A retired Executive Assistant, she works part time at the Belleville (IL) Public Library and travels in her spare time, collecting memories.
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By Kehaunani Hubbard
Lifting the thin, stiff sheet, the vision of my husband’s body punches me in the belly, and I choke on the bitter ICU air. My left hand covers my mouth, stifling the scream in my throat. His torso is a ragged path of stapled flesh, from just below his sternum to the top of his pelvic bone. I cannot believe this man whose body has been ripped open is my sweet, sweet Wade. Standing next to his shattered body, softly rubbing the worry crease between his eyes, I exhale the only truth I know, “I don’t believe.”
I place the sheet tenderly back over his body, careful to keep a whisper of air between the linen and his abdomen. His eyes are closed. I watch his steady breathing. The anxiety I held in the waiting room suddenly recedes and I begin to sob, leaving me hiccupping for air. I can’t keep up this façade, not with his belly sliced open. I am betraying him and ashamed of my hopelessness. But I finally see the suffering man who has replaced my husband. For me, Wade died on that Wednesday, though he would live an additional four months. And he fought that cancer every single day, even refusing to die up to the end. But on this day I lost faith, because there is a time to let go and this was that time.
Kehaunani Hubbard started writing poems when she was eight years-old, fashioning them after her favorite author, Shel Silverstein. Originally encouraged by her second grade teacher she continues to write many decades later. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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