Volume 11
Issue 1
Contents
Poetry
“Lucas”
“Mr. Morris”
“Early Recordings
Vol. 1”
By Sergio Ortiz
By Harold Whit Williams
“Down the Street”
“East and West”
By Holly Day
By J.H. Martin
“Ax Man”
“Car in the Shop”
“George Herman Ruth”
By Amorak Huey
Fiction
“The Statue at the
Café Ephemera”
By Robert Kaye
2
Contributor
Biographies
Lucas
By Sergio Ortiz
We met one last time
before his corpse was washed.
I couldn’t get past
the stench of medicine,
and the thin skin and bones
talking from the wheelchair
stopped me.
The virus had finally stalked
every part of his body.
He said: Come, give me a hug.
I held on to a chair fearing
I’d faint, but I couldn’t betray
the hope invested in an embrace.
Lucas? Lucas… I didn’t recognize
the proud professor I once knew.
He found substance
in the gathering of friends.
I know because I am acquainted
with my sins, and all the ways
I’ve asked for an embrace.
3
Mr. Morris
By Sergio Ortiz
Mr. Morris was a tenant
in my house, and a friend.
He wore the night
on his skin, a panther
copiously sprinkled with stars
draped in spider webs.
After a long day’s work
he’d sit by the phone
in the kitchen
and counsel dying men
I’d never see.
When the virus spread
and independent living
was no longer an option
he wouldn’t complain, show fear
or pain even when I’d rush him
to the emergency room.
It was in a sweat lodge with Mr. Morris
that my feathers dropped as he rose
above the cornfield like a vision.
He said: Pray, little man,
pray that in the end you’ve given back
more than you took.
4
Down the Street
By Holly Day
he pours the cat food into the bowl
so lovingly, it’d make your heart melt
if you or anyone else
was there. half dry food, half wet, both expensive brands
for a cat picked up in an alley
a couple of years before.
outside, he frightens children
with his wild hair and rumpled clothes
his bad habit of talking to himself and shouting at pigeons
his neighbors have been heard to speculate
that there might be corpses buried beneath
the piles of trash in his back yard
but he never forgets
to feed his cat, show it love, bring it treats
even makes room for it in his bed
sleeps with furred cheek pressed to
furred cheek.
5
Early Recordings Vol. 1
By Harold Whit Williams
The first thing you notice
Is tape hiss,
A wavy analog breath
Building into cicada buzz.
Your Christian name
Displayed in spidery cursive
On a yellowed cassette cover.
A man mumbles, blue jays shriek.
A child’s voice chimes inDeep South inflections,
Honeysuckle sweet
And pine sap dripping.
In this voice you hear
A church hymnal opening, a
Merry-go-round squeaking,
A summer downpour on tin roof.
It responds to the man mumbles
With bird sounds and giggles.
You press rewind, play repeatedly,
Hearing the swish of corduroy.
6
East and West
By J.H. Martin
I met an old friend
On the train,
Sitting in the buffet car;
He used to be a farmer.
He laughed when he saw me,
In my old boots and shredded jeans.
I laughed to see him,
In a new suit and tie.
I had a hard seat,
He had a soft sleeper.
We sat, drank and passed
the time together;
East and West.
7
Ax Man
By Amorak Huey
You’re minding your business:
humming and strumming under a sweet gum tree,
thinking how bright and white that old sun is,
regretting what you don’t remember about last night,
wishing the blues cured a hangover
when here comes this crazy lady with a story
about granddaughter, wolf, picnic basket.
She’s making no sense but your baby left you this morning
looking for a new kind of adventure,
you’ve got to keep moving, no wolf
big enough or bad enough to keep you sitting still.
That hell hound on your trail for years
until you and the devil came to an understanding.
Mississippi crossroads, midnight, smell of honeysuckle,
summer air warm like water in the naked dark,
what big teeth you have, sir – the better to hear
you with, an appetite no music will fill.
Beat this howling mutt until you’re satisfied
then see about that picnic basket. You can tell
the wind is rising, high lonely whine in the pinetops,
and this girl in red, she’s got her eye on you –
come on, baby, won’t we have a time?
8
Car in the Shop
By Amorak Huey
You ride to work with a man learning Hungarian
from Rosetta Stone CDs: voice coffee-thick
and rich as chocolate. Ride the bus home.
Walk to post office. Bike to store.
Roller skate to garage to check on your car.
It’s not ready. Pogo-stick home, followed
by a horde of small children with lollipops,
sticky fingers, emotional problems. Fly
to the park in a twin-engine prop plane –
a cropduster before the war, in the days
when there were crops. The pilot
talks too much, so you will find a different way back.
Steal your son’s Big Wheel for quick jaunt
to library, where you check out
three graphic novels and a memoir about cancer.
The Big Wheel has a red plastic hand brake
that snaps off at the bottom of the first steep hill.
You careen toward irrelevancy, a one-hit wonder.
The space shuttle crew offers to drop you
at school for the parent-teacher conference.
Your daughter is above average in most ways,
not in others. Hop a freight train headed for disaster,
thumb a lift until the highway runs out,
cross the water in paddle boat shaped like a swan –
they will call when your car is ready
but by then you will be accustomed
to making do, you will be riding high on moped,
dump truck, bright purple sailboat:
muscular wind at your back, course set
for tomorrow, next day, day after that.
9
George Herman Ruth Comes to the Plate After
Striking Out Three Times, Braves Field, May 1935
By Amorak Huey
Junk-throwing farmboy thinks he’s something now,
but he’s not worth last night’s gin, hawked and spat
in a yellow, phlegmy glob beside the plate.
Let’s let him know he ain’t the featured show.
He’s probably never touched a woman, knows
more about milking cows than screwing. That
fancy curveball will not work again. Bring the heat.
Here it comes. Piss on him. Swing. Look at it go —
knocked that sumbitch over the railroad tracks.
So what if it says Braves across this chest,
still the goddamn Babe. So it hurts to run, even slow,
rubbing it in. Close your eyes, you’re back
in Baltimore, Sisters calling you in to rest,
round third, ignore the pain, you’re almost home.
10
The Statue at the Café Ephemera
By Robert Kaye
Delaney felt like an idiot, frozen in the harsh light of his bathroom mirror, unable to conjure
the trick of tying his necktie. He dreaded attending this thing and had the strong impulse to hide.
As a first anniversary present, Delaney had given Zoë and Keith tickets to Café Ephemera,
a cross between circus and dinner theater. They’d attended the performance a few weeks before and Zoë loved it so much that she wanted to return immediately. For some reason, she told
Keith to bring Delaney. “She thinks you’re some crazy hermit,” Keith said. “Always working on
that junk heap house of yours, like you’re married to it.”
Delaney and Keith had been best friends since eighth grade. During the day, they worked
their respective Rescue Rooter trucks, fixing a monotonous assortment of plumbing problems.
Keith married Zoë a little over a year ago in an enormous ceremony at a country club where
Delaney felt like an orca whale on display in his best man’s tux.
These days, Zoë sent Delaney home before the two friends had a chance to watch half a
basketball game or dent a six-pack. “What’s a guy gonna do?” Keith shrugged. “She says the
snooze button’s busted on her biological clock.”
Maybe he would risk Zoë’s disapproval and skip the tie. For the hell of it, he tossed one insubstantial tail of fabric across the other. This time the triangular knot materialized at his throat
and he cinched it tight before it had a chance to escape.
***
Delaney followed the hostess across the room as she slipped around tables and chairs like
a flock of birds flowing around buildings. She stopped at a table on the perimeter of the room at
the Café Ephemera and tipped her bowler hat.
He found it difficult to fit his own bulk through the pinched passageways. Women wore tropically colored evening gowns, some with feather boas and costume tiaras. Men sported sharplapelled suits with handkerchiefs in breast pockets. Delaney became aware of the scuffs on his
old leather jacket.
“Sit.” Zoë pointed to the chair, her ample bosom surging from the neckline of her satin dress
in the same way Italian cheeses swell against waxed twine. Delaney squeezed into the tight
space between the table and a life-like statue of an acrobat.
“Relax, big guy.” Keith grinned, slouching into his chair, the sleeves on his suit riding halfway
up to his elbows.
Delaney settled carefully to avoid toppling the statue perched behind him on its pedestal,
so realistic it seemed to breathe. The room held seats for perhaps a couple hundred guests
11
squeezed together on an open floor, bounded by booths and dark paneled wooden walls, the
ceiling a high onion-domed circus tent. Costumed servers whisked enormous trays of appetizers into place. People chatted, adjusted chairs and ordered drinks during a series of preliminary
diversions. The maitre d’, a thin man in tuxedo and pancake makeup, snatched fire from the ears
of audience members, then staged an argument with a waiter, culminating in a chase. A tray
of water glasses careened over the heads of the audience. The tray upended, strapped to the
waiter’s hand, glasses glued in place and glitter filling the air with novas of shattered spotlight.
Delaney thought about the half-laid flooring in his house, a fixer that required rescue after
decades as a rental. He felt warm breath on his neck, behind his ear—a moth wing touch. He
spun, the torque of his body screeching chair legs and setting ice cubes gyrating in water glasses.
The statue stood unmoved, eyes fixed straight ahead, more lifelike than any taxidermied deer.
Delaney tried to smother the paranoid idea that the crowd now stared at him, some laughing.
Zoë stifled a smile. “What’s wrong, you big doof?” Keith grinned so hard his gums showed.
Zoë’s look demanded compliance from Keith. A woman dressed in a tricorner hat, fishnet
stockings and elbow-length gloves brought their drinks.
Something grazed the short hairs on the base of Delaney’s neck, but he was ready this time,
spinning to catch the statute’s extended arm. The statue’s head cocked, a thin-lipped doll’s smile
on its face. The audience tittered in anticipation.
He released the arm. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And you are very strong?” She spoke in an Eastern European accent, maybe from one
of the places on the Risk board: Kamchatka, Siberia, Irkutsk. She rubbed her forearm.
Delaney sat too startled to reply, wishing he could disappear.
She stepped off the pedestal, serpentine arms conducting the music of her own movement. In
the light, he saw she was dressed in a gray leotard and makeup, even her eyes appearing to be
made of faux marble. Her pupil were on the same level as Delaney’s even though he remained
seated.
“You bet your ass he’s strong.” Keith grinned at Delaney, who had been an All-State tackle,
and could carry two heavy plumber’s toolboxes without a shrug.
“Excellent.” The former statue pronounced the word like the name of an exotic dessert. She
tipped effortlessly into a handstand, walked a short distance on her palms, collapsed into a forward roll and emerged strolling, as if this constituted normal punctuation.
***
Later, between acts, the statue girl reappeared, wearing a red leotard with flame-colored
streamers, flitting among tables and tossing acrobatic tumbles, flips and backward glances. Delaney’s heart raced at the sight of her. A man with a whip in each hand snapped off the emcee’s
hairpiece and made it dance across the floor just out of reach.
The emcee recovered his toupee and, in his bombastic Italian accent, announced the Evanescent Miss Olga. The woman who had been the statue stood under the spotlight, her costume
changed to a diaphanous black shift, skin more mineral now than when she stood on the pedes-
12
tal. She swooped through the crowd to select a volunteer, materializing out of the periphery to
stand before Delaney.
He rose from his chair, too flustered to take her extended hand. She led him to the center of
the room, plunging into a pool of spotlight.
“Will you be of assistance to me?” she said in a whisper loud enough for the whole room to
hear. “I am told you are very strong.” She curtseyed and cast her eyes downward.
The audience exploded in applause, whistles and hoots. Delaney squinted beyond the horizon of spotlights. He had never been comfortable at the center of attention—the introductions at
football games made his knees wobble. He remembered the touch behind his ear and shivered.
Olga looked beyond the audience, as if it did not exist.
“Okay,” Delaney said.
Laughter; more applause. A wave of music erupted from the band. “Brace yourself,” he heard
in a different sort of whisper. “Stand still. I do the moving.”
Weight pressed on his shoulders from hands and feet climbing him like a ladder. “Hands up,”
she said from above, pressing on his palms with hers, first one then the other and back again,
legs swaying gracefully in an inverted dance, gravity held in suspense. Applause came from
beyond the lights for reasons Delaney could not adequately track. He looked up once, but felt he
might fall backwards.
“Bend arms.” More applause. He yearned to be able to see. An occasional silken contrail
whispered across his face, weight constantly shifting. He could not retain the surplus resources
to be nervous, consumed by an intoxicating vertigo and the thrill of her touch.
***
The next week, Delaney returned alone to Café Ephemera. He found himself ushered to a
table near the stage with a middle-aged couple celebrating their anniversary and a group of three
girlfriends from a law office who talked and giggled among themselves. He felt like an idiot for
not understanding that Zoë must have requested the position at the table by the statue in advance. A large bald Asian bodyguard of a man already occupied the chair in front of the marbleized Olga.
Delaney watched the surprise in the man’s face when Olga brushed the back of his neck,
astonished when she spoke. Olga’s body soared around the man’s head balancing on his hands
and shoulders as if exempt from physics. Delaney ached to be the one in the spotlight with her.
The Asian man staggered during an intricate series of aerial maneuvers and Olga plunged
toward the floor. She saved herself with a deft swing from the crook of the man’s elbow long before Delaney could bolt from his seat.
The act concluded to explosive applause, the Asian man smiling and bowing alongside Olga.
She did not hold his hand, as she had Delaney’s. The spot extinguished. When the lights came
back up, she had vanished.
I would have done better, Delaney thought. I did better.
The middle-aged woman seated at his table said she had a son Delaney’s age and two grandchildren. What did Delaney do? Had he seen the show before? Why was he back so soon? He
13
knew the next question would be and why are you alone? Delaney had run out of answers and
wondered if he should excuse himself and slip away home.
“Hello.”
Olga stood beside him with a smile curved like an unplaced piece of jigsaw puzzle, close
enough for him to detect the warmth radiating from her body.
“I hoped—” He ached to confess that he had wanted to be the one selected from the audience.
She smiled slightly and shrugged, as if to say why not? “Wait for me after. In the parking lot.”
She turned and walked away as the main course arrived.
“And how do your know her?” The middle-aged woman asked.
***
A few hours later, Delaney waited in the dark parking lot under the spotlight of a street lamp,
nervous as if still on stage. He startled when Olga emerged from the darkness.
They went to a nearby bar. Her clothes appeared to belong to the nineteenth century: a black
coat with many buttons over a simple dress; boots laced to mid-calf adding four inches to her
slight stature. Delaney was unused to carrying the weight of a conversation. They sat in a booth
and she ordered a vodka martini with three olives—her supper, she said. Afterward, they walked
to a nearby club where she danced, rapt in her own world. Delaney self-consciously struggled
through a repeating set of hitches and jerks and felt guilty watching her, as if caught stealing.
She came home with him, the sex indistinguishable from her performance: acrobatic, ethereal
and liquid. She made no sound beyond a few whispered instructions.
He left her asleep in his bed the next morning and went to work, euphoria and exhaustion engaged in a tug-of-war for his mind all day. In the afternoon, back at the shop, he told Keith what
happened. “You dog.” He grinned. “You dog!”
He found a note inscribed in a sketchy hand on the dressing table, advising him that the address and phone number below were temporary. She was looking for her own place after living
with the trapeze artist in the cast for too many months.
A day later, Delaney offered her a separate bedroom in his house. It turned out that she did
not require a separate room. Her possessions fit into two suitcases and a hatbox. A month later,
he still had not seen the hat.
***
Delaney roused from a deep sleep to find Olga absent from the bed. He seldom stirred at
night, sleeping soundly from the physical nature of his work and the exhaustion of his first month
of cohabitation.
He listened, holding his breath. Maybe she had gone to the bathroom. Perhaps she was a
dream.
No, not a dream. The numbered red glow of the alarm clock showed three-eleven AM and
illuminated the dent in the pillow made by her head. Delaney rose.
He found her squatting atop the window seat in the back room, a gargoyle staring into the
blackness of the neglected garden, arms wrapped tightly around her knees, completely naked.
14
Marbled capillaries made her appear frozen in the cold room, gray eyes wide open with the look of
a child hiding under the covers from some monster.
Delaney made no attempt to wake her. His sister sleepwalked after the family moved across
country, and he remembered her terror the few times she awoke in mid wander. He turned up the
heat in the room so Olga wouldn’t get cold and watched her for thirty minutes, then returned to
bed.
Lying awake, Delaney realized he knew nothing of her past. Images of rape, death and atrocity filled the void. A village burned while she hid under the stairs, afraid to breathe. Her imagined
history became too brutal to contemplate, although he could not keep himself from it, like testing a
broken finger still in the splint. Her past must explain the sleepwalking.
Delaney slammed awake when six o’clock triggered the alarm. Olga’s small body lay turned to
the wall, isolated in a clump of blankets at the edge of the bed like a corpse dumped by the side
of the road. He approached closely to make sure she still breathed, careful not to wake her. His
heart pounded.
That evening, Olga said she was from Eastern Europe. Where exactly? “I could show you on
a map, but the maps have all changed. Really, I am from Ohio.”
***
The relationship continued, exhausting and dimly illuminated, for another month, then two, then
three. She departed for work via bus to the Café Ephemera before Delaney arrived home, so
they barely saw one another during the week. He ate the dinners she left on the stove, heavy on
cabbage, potatoes and ham hocks. He tried in vain to nap in the evenings, setting his alarm for
eleven PM because he insisted on picking her up from work rather than let her take the midnight
bus—although she said it did not bother her in the least.
Several times a week he awoke to search her out standing rigid in a corner, crouched in the
closet or, once, lying under the bed itself. He sometimes draped her with a blanket, which led to
fretting that it might cause her to trip when she moved. He cranked up the heat and removed the
covering before returning to bed. She always slept naked, but the encounters were anything but
erotic.
“I have a restless soul,” she said with a shrug when asked about the sleepwalking. She accepted his gift of flannel pajamas with little penguins, but shucked them off after pulling the duvet
over herself. Too confining.
One Saturday, he saw a big bruise on her arm and asked what had happened.
“A man I am balancing on collapsed. Too many big men are weak in this town. They may require me to use a platform instead.”
Delaney felt secretly relieved.
***
Five months into the relationship, Delaney went to the show on another pass. He waited in the
ornate lobby decorated with velvet wallpaper and enormous mirrors, less impressed now that he
knew the building had once housed a car dealership. Delaney had to duck under the chandeliers,
something he had been oblivious to on earlier visits. Olga had warned him he would not be in the
15
act that night. The management had required changes.
A small man with a broad smile and the relaxed walk of an athlete approached, his tuxedo and
derby marking him as a cast member. Delaney feared he was about to be asked to leave.
“So you are Olga’s friend?” The man’s accent resembled Olga’s.
“Yes.”
“I am Kef. I will juggle the hats and play the accordion and otherwise help out. Olga and I are
friends from Montreal. I hope this does not make you uncomfortable?” He smiled, self-assured,
impossible to dislike. As they shook hands, Delaney felt relieved.
“Very strong,” Kef said. “This is good. Olga needs strong.” He patted Delaney’s shoulder.
“Enjoy the show, my friend.”
Kef did indeed juggle hats and other objects with amazing speed and skill. He played the accordion and sang a passionate song in a consonant-laden language. The program guide listed
the Moscow Circus and Cirque du Soleil in his blurb.
Olga used Kef as the support in her act. Kef, though much smaller than Delaney, used his
body as a counterweight to fling her skyward. Olga sprang into the void off the high dive of Kef’s
palms and the air left Delaney’s lungs. Kef caught her at the last instant and sent her sweeping
toward the tent summit in swirls and twists, the silk trailers of her costume lashing as she pirouetted weightlessly. The pair had practiced, and not just a little. Throughout the performance,
Olga remained in her separate world, enraptured in an intimacy that Delaney could never hope to
duplicate.
***
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Delaney said in the car that night.
“I told you management made a change.” She shrugged. “You did not ask what change.”
“And you didn’t think I’d like to know you’re crawling all over an old boyfriend every night?”
Delaney hadn’t discovered his own scorched emotions until he began to speak.
Olga held silent for a few moments. “You are angry, but you have no cause. When there
are too few beds, you sleep with family instead of on the floor.” She spoke as if rehearsing stale
choreography.
Delaney started the car, but did not drive. Maybe he would finish the flooring in the back
room, hammering all night, working himself to sleep. He hadn’t done anything on the house in
months.
“One thing you should know,” Olga said. Delaney’s hands vice gripped the steering wheel,
heart beating in time with the cylinders of the engine. “Nobody at the Café is permanent. Acts
change, every season. Maybe my contract will finish. I know next week.”
That night, he awoke to find Olga missing from the bed, but rolled over and returned to sleep.
***
Olga’s name did not appear on the cast list for the spring season. A spot opened in the sister
show in Montreal. Maybe, she said, she could rotate back in a year or eighteen months. Delaney
did not ask whether the arrangement had been at her request. He felt both shattered and relieved.
16
In the month that remained, Delaney awoke most nights with Olga missing from the bed, but
he did not seek her in the corners of the house. Once, he left the floor in the back room strewn
with tools, scraps of wood, and even nails, but he could not sleep thinking about what might
happen and cleaned up the hazards before she left the bed.
The trip to the train station was strangely routine. “You men,” she said as they stood on the
platform. “Always wanting to make a rescue.” Her eyes remained tearless as a taxidermied
deer’s. The two managed a stiff hug and limp kiss. The relationship had lasted almost exactly
six months. Delaney realized as she boarded the train with the hatbox dangling from its cord
that he still had never seen the hat.
***
A week after Olga left, Delaney went to Café Ephemera well before show time. He found
Kef in the parking lot at the rear of the building, not yet in his tux, a cigarette pinched between
thumb and forefinger. He looked smaller than before, framed by the side of the building, his
ribbed long sleeve shirt frayed at the sleeves.
“My friend!” He extended his hand. “How are you?”
“Good. I’m good.” They stood side by side, looking into the parking lot, as if some vehicle
might arrive to relieve Delaney’s awkwardness.
“Let me guess,” Kef said. “You wish to make sense of the sleepwalking?”
Delaney was surprised Kef knew what he hadn’t realized himself. “Yes. Exactly.”
Kef seemed pleased, a man with the right tool for the job. “First, you should know that Olga
is from Ohio. Her family is immigrating when she is seven. Her father works on stone and
brick, an expert on making them new. Res-tra-shun. How do you say it?”
“Restoration?”
“Yes. Res-toration. Who knows that you can get visas for this? He makes a good business
in Ohio. I wish I had such skills.”
“They’re both alive? Her parents?” Delaney expected them to lie in a mass grave on the
other side of the world.
“Three years ago, yes. They drove to Montreal to see Olga in the show. We come from
near the same place, but Olga hardly remembers, she was so young. The move to America is
difficult on her. Children make fun of her accent. Acrobatics is a good place to hide.”
Delaney remembered his own childhood as a boy too large and slow. Football rescued
him later. Then football was over, with nothing much to take its place. Kef smoked while Delaney looked at his shoes. He’d never felt so stupid. “I don’t get it. Why does she sleepwalk?”
“She sleepwalks because she looks for a hiding place,” Kef said with a shrug. “Something safe, like home, maybe?”
“Oh.”
Kef took a lung-filling drag of his cigarette and flicked the butt toward the pavement,
grinding it against the blacktop with a practiced twist of the ball of his foot. A miniature performance, precisely executed.
Delaney shifted his feet, but could not leave.
“What about you?” Kef said.
17
Delaney shrugged and looked at the streetlight in the parking lot, its slice of light not unlike a
stage spot.
“Ah. Maybe—.” Kef backed up, assessing distance and height. “Stand very still. Raise
your arms like—.” He flexed his arms above his shoulders with an up and down pump, implying
weight. “Yes? Why not?”
Kef backed into the dusk. Staccato footfalls quickened across the blacktop. Delaney stiffened his arms as a significant weight laddered up his shoulders. Kef balanced on Delaney’s
hands, inverted, his weight pressing toward the center of the earth. Adrenaline filled Delaney
as he struggled to remain perfectly still.
18
Contributors Biographies
Holly Day is a journalism instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband
and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music
Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities. Her poetry has most recently appeared
in Bottle, The MacGuffin, and Not One of Us.
Amorak Huey’s poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Oxford American,
Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Nimrod, Gargoyle, Poet Lore and other journals. He recently left the newspaper business after 15 years as an editor to teach writing at Grand Valley
State University.
Robert Kaye’s My stories have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Cicada, Snake
Nation Review, Pindeldyboz, The Palo Alto Review, Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Kimera, Artisan and Carve. The Rose and Thorn nominated him for both the Pushcart and Story
South Million Writers prizes in 2006. Currently he is writing a novel called Taking Candy from
the Devil, which is (for the moment) completed and sent out into the wild.
J.H. Martin was born in London, England. In search of joy and experience he hitched and
wandered across Europe, then made his way to the Far East and traveled extensively in the
wilds of China where he now resides, and has done for 8 years, as a recluse in the Sichuan
countryside.
In April 2009, his first short collection of poetry entitled Spring Wanderings was published in
China by Rivers & Lakes Press
Sergio Ortiz has a B.A. in English literature from Inter-American University, and a M.A.
in philosophy from World University. His poems have been published, or are forthcoming in:
The Acento Review, Poesia, The Driftwood Review, Words-Myth, The Taj Mahal Review, and
other journals and anthologies. His chapbook, At the Tail End of Dusk (2009), was published
by Flutter Press.
Harold Whit Williams’ work has appeared in Concho River Review, Atlanta Review,
Zero Ducats, and is forthcoming in Oxford American. He works in a library at the University of
Texas and has played lead guitar for the band Cotton Mather.
19
Staff
Colleen Carter
Becca Craft
Stefani Goode
Amber Harrington
Jim Horinek
Jeris Jeffries
Michelle Lewis
David Pilon
Brittany Thompson
Layout and Design - Jim Horinek
Cover Photo - Jim Horinek
Graphic Element - Jeris Jeffries
Dr. John Hodgson, Editor
Advisors
Dr John G. Morris
Dr. Hardy Jones
Dr. Bayard Godsave
The Oklahoma Review is
an electronic literary magazine
published through the Department of English at Cameron
University in Lawton, Oklahoma. The editorial board consists of English and Professional Writing undergraduates,
as well as faculty advisors from
the Departments of English and
Foreign Languages & Journalism.
The goal of our publication
is to provide a forum for exceptional fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction in a dynamic,
appealing, and accessible environment. The magazine’s only
agenda is to promote the pleasures and edification derived
from high-quality literature.
-The Staff
The views expressed in The Oklahoma Review do not necessarily
correspond to those of Cameron University, and the university’s
support of this magazine should not be seen as an endorsement of any
philosophy other than faith in -- and support of -- free expression. The
content of this publication may not be reproduced without the
written consent of The Oklahoma Review or the authors.
20
Submission Guidelines
The Oklahoma Review is an electronic literary magazine published through
the Department of English at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. The
editorial board consists of English and Professional Writing undergraduates, as
well as faculty advisors from the Departments of English and Foreign Languages &
Journalism.
The goal of our publication is to provide a forum for exceptional fiction, poetry,
and creative non-fiction in a dynamic, appealing, and accessible environment. The
magazine’s only agenda is to promote the pleasures and edification derived from
high-quality literature.
The Oklahoma Review is a continuous publication, now in its eighth year.
We publish two issues online each year, Spring and Fall. Although we accept
submissions at any time, our general deadlines are as follows:
To have your work considered for the Spring issue: January 15
To have your work considered for the Fall issue: September 15
All works must be submitted electronically to The Oklahoma Review.
Submissions are welcome from any serious writer working in English. We will
neither consider nor return submissions sent in hard copy, even if return postage is
included.
Writers may submit the following:
As many as three (3) prose pieces of 30 pages or less.
As many as five (5) poems or translations of any length.
As many as three (3) nonfiction prose pieces of 30 pages or less.
Files should be sent as e-mail attachments in either .doc or .rtf format. If an
attachment is impossible, writers may submit their work in the body of their e-mail
messages, noting specific format criteria when necessary.
When sending multiple submissions (e.g. five poems), please include all the
work in a single file rather than five separate files.
Authors should also provide a cover paragraph with a short biography in the
body of their e-mail.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please indicate in your cover letter if
your work is under consideration elsewhere.
21