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Accepted Entries

 

Art

Red Corinna	Light Switch
by Bridget Keough	by Reva Fairbairn

 

Poetry

"Math" by James Best

"Sweet Heaviness and Coconuts" by Laura Bohon

 

Essay

"Champagne Glass" by Bonnie Barlow

 

 

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Math

 

We start with a simple equation

You + I

should equal a we or us.

Pythagoras is not so sure,

neither is Kierkegaard, or Dr. Laura.

Math was never friendly,

failed Trig,

still can't figure triangles,

though Isosceles kicked it with Odysseus.

Searched my mind,

like couch cushions,

for shiny forgotten theorems.

Then I worked us out on paper.

First, it's elementary.

Multiplication tables at dinner,

Two hands added make ten.

We kissed once, and didn't stop.

Minus the pasts,

we hide like cheat sheets in damp palms.

Squared by effort.

Add long equation talks in my car,

under a tutor moon.

Divide individual fears, subtract the doubt.

Story Problem:

One heart is traveling from Michigan,

at the speed of sound, the other from

Florida like hurricanes.

Why did they meet in Idaho?

Geometry.

The numbers complicate.

Calculation a must.

My eyes (point a)

in your eyes (point b)

plot lines we can't even see.

You move to a lower latitude

and I drive across icy planes

memorizing point, halfway and closer

like Blackfoot, Malad, Orem,

your street, your house, your arms.

We try algebra.

x being me,

y-you(?)

parenthesizing us

outside influences:

a=self help books, magazine philosophies, thrice divorced therapists

b=distance

c=time apart

(x + y)a - b - c2 = the future

But the pi of love,

numbering off into infinity

measuring worlds at light speed,

shall ever increase us

and we will expand and expand

till we explode

supernovic

and our molecules

race the void

shooting ions and you-ons

until (we)

hand in hand

at a city hall

sin

and cosin.

 

By James Best

 

 

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Sweet Heaviness and Coconuts

The sunburnt air is full

of sweet heaviness and coconuts

and I am marooned,

stuck here in this sun-shrunk land

making patterns in the sand

as you sail into the bright sunlight,

becoming ohsosmall until the light blurs my vision entirely.

 

I roam the shores, pondering the flotsam,

not daring to toss the shards away because

there may be a bit of you in them.

Wander into the waves, let them flow through my fingers

feel you beckoning in the undercurrent

as I let the water offer what comfort it has.

 

After all, it held you once.

Lulled you safe in its salt water sanctuary.

 

We are that much closer as I

gather the ocean around me and

feel on my face the sunlight

you disappeared into.

And all around me is still your smell

of sweet heaviness and coconuts.

 

by Laura Bohon

 

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Champagne Glass

By Bonnie Barlow

 

I own one champagne glass, though I don't imbibe-which isn't the point at all. But rather

it's that there isn't a need for more than one.

 

I sit quietly, alone in the early hours of a summer evening, postured on the steps outside my

apartment door, inhaling the soft, perfumed air into my lungs like I am a fish and it is the

sea.

 

The Russian Olives are in bloom.

 

And for a week, maybe two, the city streets will smell like a woman passing by. Men will

turn their heads to look, and find the laughing concrete sidewalks empty. Or, if by chance a

girl steps onto her front porch to retrieve the paper, or to water the geraniums, dressed in

the sun-dress she's just found at the local second-hand shop on main street, he'll see her

and stop to strike up a conversation. All the while he attributes the delicious smell to that

barefoot girl, barely a woman, and she turns Calypso, binding him with the words slipping

over tongue and straight, white teeth.

 

A few months later the leaves of that tree will whither and fade, and entwined in each

other's arms, heat still pounding heart-to-heart between them, he'll ask her why she doesn't

still wear the scent that first drew him into the tangling web of her hair, her shape, her secret

world of girlhood. And when winter comes and the branches of those olives trees are

covered in snow and magpies are half crazy for a scrap of food, he'll see himself out of her

front door without noticing the empty flower pots where the geraniums once grew, and he'll

never return.

 

So I sit with my champagne glass, filled with watered-down apple juice-it's six-thirty, I don't

want anything too sweet. I glance down my lonesome street and rest my head against the

iron railing that leads down the steps. There's not a soul in sight. The three of my children

sleep, sweaty in the front room, exhausted from child's play in the heat of the June sun, too

tired to notice that I've slipped out to enjoy the massing gray clouds and the humid breeze.

I lift the glass to my lips and take the liquid in between my tongue and the roof of my

mouth, swallow and sigh.

 

Glasses usually come in sets of two, or four. I used to own a set of sherry glasses and one

other champagne glass, but they've broken. Living alone, besides the three little gems of

virtue and heartache that sleep inside the apartment, I never found the need to replace the

broken stemware. What is the use?

 

I finish the juice and set the glass on the porch. I walk barefoot across the street to where

the great Russian olive twists from the ground skyward. A delicate burst of yellow blossoms

grows at the base of each silvery leaf, and the sticky scent creeps into my nostrils as I pinch

a sprig from its branch.