On Hiatus

Redux will be on hiatus until January 14, 2013.  Thank you for your continued support.  We're looking forward to bringing to light many wonderful new stories, poems, and essays in the new year!

#63: "Aubade" by Bill Beverly

                       

~This story was previously published in Indy Men’s Magazine (2003).

Sanders liked Tuesday on the subway, its sunken-in comfort, the lawyers happily moored in their battle suits. The papers thinned down and the tourists thinned out and the sleepy heads rolled behind their newspaper sails as the tracks dipped and swelled. Above the ground an August rain was falling, and at each station Sanders smelled it, warm and silty in the brushed cold of his mouth.

At Van Ness the man boarded the train, with a shaved head, a small paper bag held in at his belly like a dagger. Sanders was annotating the morning's news from the war, circling who was saying what about whom. But he sensed the man there, standing still, winnowing, gazing up the car. The doors slid shut and the man came up the aisle, glancing side to side, not looking for empty seats, but at the faces. Sanders reached down to touch his wife's thigh—she hated to be disturbed at reading—and he dipped his paper so she could see.

Her body stiffened on the padded bench.

She whispered, “Is this one?”

“Maybe.”

She lowered her paper, too.

Directly in front of Sanders sat a young Asian woman, perhaps Korean, hair so black and shiny it looked blue. The man in the aisle swallowed his breath when he saw her, and for an instant he froze, as if he'd forgotten something. Then his body carried him forward and he drew the paper bag away from what it concealed, and Sanders knew what he was.

#62: Two Poems by Anna Leahy

Editor’s Note:  Anna Leahy was on the inaugural Editorial Board of Redux.

~This poem previously appeared in Rhino (2003).

Recidivism

            Hill Correctional Center, 1991

The boys huddle on the playground,

whistle and play kickball like inmates trading

cigarettes—one with his lips

threaded together and him not saying

but listening to all he can think of now,

and another’s stare like someone

who knows it is twenty-four hours from

here to there, there to here,

like a soldier remembering limbs,

and the variety of ways they laugh and touch

to distinguish and rank themselves—

and their hands, all their hands

like my hands, simple, almost indistinguishable

like rosary beads and their repeated prayers,

even the small shiny space between

the Our Father and the Hail Mary:

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever

shall be, world without end.

I know of their uniforms—light

blue shirts, dark blue trousers, repeated wear,

a way to equalize with fabric

the rich kid and the poor kid,

the straight-A student and the one

who was left behind like the sixteen-year-old

who tried to kiss me,

put his big hands on me,

the way it made me feel, the forgetting

of the prayer—O my God,

I am heartily sorry for having offended thee

and I detest all my sins—the need

to revise later, the rapist and the carpenter

and the murderer and the altar boy, all the same,

just look. What else can you do

when the priest asks you

to hit him to help him

atone for his sins and be forgiven

but pick up the sturdy two-by-four

or that shiny chain with the nails

and swing away?

*****

#61: "Foot Notes" by K.L. Cook

~This essay originally appeared in Shenandoah (2002).

Feet are our primary proof of existence.  We are first identified by them: the nurses take us from our parents, clean the blood and womb fluids from our bodies, stand us on an ink pad and then on our birth certificates.  I asked a nurse why they did that when my second son, Tristan, was born.  Why not a fingerprint?  “The foot contains the more reliable markings at this age,” she said. “And we would hate to send you home with the wrong baby.” 

            We are a species of trackers.  We follow our quarry and identify our enemies by the footprints they leave behind.  We search for the fugitive, the absent parent, our ancestors by tracing their literal or metaphorical tracks.  On a recent PBS program, an archeologist shined a flashlight on footprints in a newly discovered cave, where there were drawings and a stone fire pit.  The footprints looked fresh in the dirt, as if they had been left there the day before.  The archeological tests revealed that the prints were over four thousand years old. 

            Feet are our basic mode of transportation, our direct connection with the earth, evidence of gravity.  The greatest track and field champions have always been those who win the sprints, those who can fly.  We may admire the endurance of the milers and marathon runners, but it’s Jesse Owens, Bob Hays, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Michael Johnson, and Usain Bolt we truly love.  They are the ones who remind us most of Hermes, the amiable fleet-footed messenger of the Greek gods.  The brilliance of the Nike commercials was their exploitation of our innate desire to defy gravity, to be like birds or gods, invulnerable, able to walk on air.

         Reflexologists tell us that every erogenous zone in our bodies has sensors in our feet.  I’ve heard a reflexologist claim that he can, by simple pressure to my foot, make me cry, recall my birth, or have the most intense orgasm I’ll ever experience.

#60: Three Poems by Terri Witek

~These poems were originally published in JMI: Journal for the Motherhood Initiative, as part of “A Manual for Children Leaving Home” (2011).

How to Make Friends Using Bat Wings

                                                                       

Maybe the last time you tried them on

they somehow galled or grounded you.

It’s certain that when you hung them up

(you’d also been trying to sleep lanternless)

they hovered, sighing.

Perhaps it’s time to move more than air.

Pulling them a body’s width apart,

ask a stranger to slip the left wing on

then stand out-of-doors together

until night alone can fill the chinks.

“Oh, but the body’s everything,”

sign some real bats then,

caroming among the palm trees

like smaller, more frantic fronds.

                                   

*****

#59: "The Crucified Bird" by Patricia L. Meek

~This story previously appeared in Puerto del Sol (1994).

            The bird of prey had been left hanging on the wire fence, its wings pulled to their fullest length along the barbs. The wind kicked up dust, the tips of the feathers twisted in the breeze, and for a moment I imagined the bird in flight.

            Dad saw it, too, and he pulled the station wagon over to the side of the road. I was tired and didn't feel like working, but I unbuckled my seat belt, took a breath of air-conditioned air, and opened the door to the searing California heat.

            Dad was already sweating before he got out of the car, and he wiped his face with the white towel that he wore around his neck before crossing the road to get a closer look at the bird. As he took light meter readings, I studied him. I watched the methodical way he prepared the photograph—checking and rechecking tiny numbers, twisting his moustache while standing at the exact spot, changing his mind, finding a better angle and twisting his moustache some more. If someone had told me six months earlier that I would be helping my father take pictures in the San Joaquin Valley during his sabbatical, I would have said "impossible."  It wasn't that I disliked my dad; it was just that I was eighteen. I had found a great summer job helping young kids write stories at the YMCA. I was dreaming about an apartment, all-night parties—I was even humming the Star Spangled Banner. Then my mother told me that Dad needed my help. For six hundred dollars, I was hired out to my father. It was as simple as that.

 

#58: "Thugs Like Us" by CD Mitchell

~This memoir previously appeared as "Memphis" in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley (2006)  

Rachel and I left our apartment on June 14th, 1996, closing but not locking the door that swung on a splintered jamb. The swat team and DEA agents had ruined it with that battering ram they used to break in. We drove fifteen miles south to Brookland. I’d arranged earlier in the day for Larry White to meet me there at two o’clock with a brick of crystal-methamphetamine. We were taking it to Memphis, where a buyer would pay twenty thousand dollars cash for it. The buyer was the DEA.

Time and focus have a direct relationship that has always amazed me. It seems the further we are in time from an event, the easier it is to focus on it, and understand the insanity that gripped us. There is the perceived reality of the moment--and the truth, that can only be understood and accepted with time and reflection. Time has helped me to accept what happened that day in Memphis. Time has relieved me of the guilt for what I did. I know I did the right thing at the time; it took me years to realize I did it for the wrong reasons.

            I have changed the names of everyone involved to protect the guilty. No one was innocent.

 

The day started uneventfully, which was good for a change. We got up early--unable to sleep. But the clock kept ticking, and finally the time to leave arrived. Rachel sat in the kitchen, playing with her hands. She’d gone to the window and looked outside two different times while I spoke to Sanders on the phone. As the agent in charge of the Memphis DEA, Sanders oversaw the whole ordeal.

“What do I have to do?” Rachel asked.

“You’ll drive me to Brookland to meet Larry. I’ll ride with him to Memphis. You’ll come get me when it’s over. I can’t tell you anything else.”

            “Go to hell,” she said.

“Sanders hasn’t told me anything. I have no idea where we’re going or what’ll happen when we get there. All I know is you’ll need to come back here and kill an hour before you leave for Memphis.” I got up and walked to the window. Ever since the bust, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they still watched us, even listened to our telephone conversations. I spoke to Rachel as I looked through the curtains. “We’ll have a bunch of paperwork to do. You might as well go to Landry’s when you get there. That’s as good a place as any to wait. Sanders promised he’d send someone to get you and bring you to wherever we’re at.” I turned from the window and walked to the front door. I stepped out on the porch. Someone sat in a car across the street. I took a breath of warm air and walked back in. The apartment reeked of cigarettes and stale beer.