The Kelsey Review is back in print!

As you may know, for the past two years the Kelsey Review has been publishing solely online, and while this accessible format is becoming more popular among literary journals and is a good avenue for showcasing our work worldwide, many of us longed for the good old days when one could hold the Review in one’s hands and touch it and smell it (because, yes, even though the Review does not carry the odor of an old library book, who can deny that smelling works of literature is a time-honored tradition?).

We are happy to announce that now, with the help of the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission as well as the good folks at Mercer County Community College, you can hold the Kelsey Review in your hands while you admire the literary crafts of the talented Mercer County area writers published therein. (As you can see here, of course, we are also continuing  to post the work from the print issue online as well, so we have the best of both worlds!) There are a few people I have to thank for helping this issue come together (with apologies to anyone I have left out): Thank you to fellow editors Roberta Clipper, Luray Gross, and Ellen Jacko; graphic designer Francis Paixao; Wendy Humphrey and Brad Kent; Kami Abdala; and Dr. Robert Kleinschmidt, the LA Division, and Dr. Jianping Wang at MCCC. Thanks to you all, to our wonderful contributors, and even to those who submitted but did not get in this time—please try us again next year!

In this issue, we have an exciting mix of art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from contributors old and new. Our cover art by Dave Olson is an evocative drawing of a “Man from the Thirties” that is reminiscent of a Van Gogh sketch. Poets returning to these pages include (but are not limited to) Lauren Fedorko, whose poem opens the issue, as well as Wanda Praisner, Lavinia Kumar, and Lois Harrod, whose poem ends the literary selections in this issue. New poet Lillian LaSalle shares a poem in memory of Maria Rodriguez, who was a beloved professor at Mercer County Community College. Our fiction includes two stories from Nancy Demme and an interesting take on the writing life from Arlene Feldman, among other stories.

We are excited to see our nonfiction submissions growing, and we include several in this issue, including D.E. Steward’s poetic and impressionistic piece and Judith Salcewicz’s “Panic in the Dark,” which describes her memory of the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Our issue ends with two book reviews. Former Kelsey Review editor Edward Carmien reviews Pecking Order, a debut book of poetry by Nicole Homer, who is a professor at Mercer County Community College and the editor of Aspirations (a literary journal of Mercer County-area high school students). Finally, I was honored to review Annabelle Kim’s debut novel, Tiger Pelt, which was published earlier this year. Annabelle Kim has been a frequent contributor to Kelsey Review, and her novel lives up to the promise she has shown in our pages.

If you are a contributor and didn’t see your name listed above, please don’t fret—there is so much work in this issue and not enough space to discuss it all! Also, of course, great works of literature need no introduction; they speak for themselves. I hope that readers of this journal will hear the voices within loud and clear, singing, shouting, commiserating, reaching across time and space and the boundaries of human disconnection to connect with you. Because that is what writing and art do—they connect. Even when we live in a time that may seem broken, artists have the power to build bridges across the shattered pieces of the world. I hope you will feel this connection when you read the words of the talented Mercer County-area writers and artists published in this issue.

Jacqueline Vogtman

Editor

Vida Chu

July in Hong Kong, stormy weather.
Every day ninety degrees
with severe thunderstorms.

I sweat inside rain gear,
steamy like a sauna.
Acquaintances gone vacationing,
relatives long deceased.

Gold jewelry and Chinese medicine shops
pop up at every corner.
Loud Mainlanders rolling new suitcases
crowd the streets. Only the old bakery
and the Cantonese-speaking school children
assure me I am back in my childhood home.

The stormy weather encourages
no tram ride to Victoria peak,
no hike on Dragon Back trail,
no swim at golden beaches,
no bargaining in night markets and Ladies’ streets,
no visits to Wong Tai Sin Temple and the Big Buddha.

Instead of noisy restaurants and shopping malls
I spend a day in the New Territories’ Heritage Museum
among dioramas of traditional villages,
urban New Towns, Cantonese Opera Halls,
Chinese brush paintings and calligraphies,
an unexpected exhibition of Bruce Lee.

Who would have guessed this famous Kung Fu Master
was a Philosophy major, wore contact lenses
for public appearances and all film shoots,
and loved to cha-cha?

On the ninth day as I am heading for the airport,
the sun breaks out.
The skyline of Hong Kong beckons.

 

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About the author:

Vida Chu grew up in Hong Kong, came to America for college, and stayed. She has lived in Princeton for over fifty years. Her poems have appeared in Kelsey Review, Princeton Arts Review, US 1 Worksheets, and The Literary Review. She has children stories in Cricket Magazine and Fire and Wings.

Ilene Dube

My mother surrenders her jewels. She empties three purple velvet sacks on my bed. One contains the gold, another the silver—bracelets and pins that had been gifts from me. The final sack contains the glittery antique costume jewelry she bought as a young working girl in the 1940s.

My parents are up from Florida for the summer. Having sold their northern residence, they are finding the unloading of tchotchkes and bibelots liberating.

Until they can figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives, they are renting a house five minutes from me. It is just the right size, with a brick patio out back surrounded by rhododendrons that bloom in every imaginable color—a detail probably more important to me than to them, as they were in flower when I previewed the property.

I’m thinking about selling all that jewelry to buy a farmhouse table I’d been coveting. That’s what happens when you come into a windfall—it makes you lust for more.

My parents appear happy in their summer rental. Tiny, the cat, has won their affection, and they are falling in love with the woman who owns the house, away for the summer. My parents knew right away that Alicia was a writer because she left them a five-page letter with instructions about the house, the cat, the mail.

She has asked them to go through her mail and weed out the junk and forward the important stuff to her. My father has seen that she supports various environmental causes, and he says he is falling in love with her because she reminds him of me.

My father compares it to the 1940s detective story, “Laura,” in which the detective falls in love with the eponymous murder victim, based on what he re-creates of her life.

My mother has been reading Alicia’s travel journals.

Perhaps I was attracted to the house because Alicia’s Persian rugs and vintage oak furniture were the same style as mine. From a few black-and-white photos of her in frames on various desk and tabletops, she looks to be about the same size as me, with the same coloring. Her tiny wire-rimmed glasses are like a pair I own, and even some of the clothes she has left behind in the closets are like the clothes I wear. A flute and music stand in the living room are not too dissimilar from what I have, and there, in the dining room, is the farmhouse table I have been coveting.

There are differences, of course. She has a huge hunk of cheddar cheese in her refrigerator—I would never have such a huge hunk of cheese. Maybe someone gave her the cheese and she left it for my parents—that’s the kind of thing I would do.

She has stenciled geese on the walls of her bathroom—there are owls on my bathroom walls. She has one son.

My father loves her eclectic CD collection.

My mother says her kitchen is stocked just the way mine is, with sea salt and different teas and teapots.

Alicia’s brother just happens to be my boss. It was pure coincidence that I found his sister’s place through the university housing office.

He told me her story, how she travelled to Greece, met a man she fell in love with. They married and she bought a house for them. They had a child, but then, apparently, the marriage did not work out because of his drinking. And so she left him and the house and came back with the boy.

She has worked at my job in the past—before her brother became the editor—and has written several novels she has not sold. My boss says they didn’t sell because they were written in a Victorian style. He says that if she wrote her own life story, she could sell a million copies.

For the summer, she has gone to visit her son who spent the academic year in Japan. He is 15.

I have told my mother that it isn’t right to read her travel journals. That is my biggest fear about leaving my parents alone in my house: that my mother will read my journals. “It isn’t right,” I emphasize.

I imagine myself as Alicia, playing my flute into the night, or sitting on the porch rocker in my nightgown, watching the fireflies as Tiny purrs on my lap. I wish I weren’t allergic to cats. I dream about going off to Greece, or Japan or other destinations, to leave a job and write novels of the heart.

Perhaps I should take the lesson from my mother and give it all away. Perhaps I should burn my unsold novels in the hearth. But I would still have another copy somewhere. It is like giving cuttings from your garden; the more you give away, the more that what you have proliferates.

On Tuesdays I pick up my veggies at the farm. I am inundated with greens—five kinds of lettuce, chicory, endive, Swiss chard, kale, collards, spinach.

After four days of seeing my mother every day since she has arrived, I skip a day. I call the next day to arrange a time I can bring her half the greens.

“What?” says my mother. “You weren’t worried about what we did yesterday?”

“No. Why would I worry?”

She tells me about all the shopping she did. She tells me how she went to my favorite stores, but they were not her cup of tea. Even still, my father grew angry because of all the time she spent in my favorite stores that were not her cup of tea. My mother can talk forever about the minutiae of her life. I try to get off the phone.

My mother tells me that Alicia has tennis rackets and other sporting equipment in her closets.

“She does all that exercise, but she doesn’t eat salad. She should be eating salad.”

“How do you know she’s not eating salad?”

“Because I have looked everywhere and I cannot find a salad spinner.”

“Maybe she uses another method to dry her lettuce.”

“I tried that last night. I used two towels, but the lettuce was still wet.”

“Well maybe Alicia’s standards for the dryness of her lettuce are not as strict as yours.”

“I’m going to buy her a present. I’m going to use my coupon for Bed Bath and Beyond and buy her a salad spinner that I’ll use while I’m here.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want a salad spinner. I’m sure she would have one if she wanted one.” I remind my mother that she has told me Alicia does not have a microwave oven. This is obviously the way she chooses to live.

“Well, I need to have a salad spinner this summer. I’ll buy a salad spinner and leave it at your house for the winter.”

I am wondering how I can manage to take a look at Alicia’s travel journals.

I invite my parents along to a seafood restaurant on the river that I am to review. While we’re eating, my mother takes a New York Times full-page ad from her bag, unfolds it and lays it out on the table.

“What do you think?”

It is an ad for a winter coat. It is the middle of summer.

“What do I think about what?”

She sighs. “I just told you the other night. I have fabric I want to make into a coat for you. You were supposed to pick out a pattern. You don’t even remember.”

“I do remember. You just told me the other night. Who has had time to pick out a pattern?”

“Well, so don’t you like the coat?”

“It’s a nice coat but how does it close?”

“It doesn’t close—you just wrap it.”

“I need a coat with buttons.”

“But this one looks so nice.”

“It looks nice, but it gets cold in the winter. I can’t wear a coat that doesn’t button.”

“You can wear a suit underneath.”

“I don’t wear suits.”

“You can wear layers, then.”

“It’s totally impractical to have a winter coat with no buttons.”

“You have other coats that have buttons.”

My father pulls out the floor plans for their new house. At least they are a diversion to the waiter who might suspect I’m writing a review. My father starts telling me where their furniture will go. My mother disagrees on every choice. They are arguing over the furniture placement, and I zone out, taking in the ambience and decor and making notes on my pad.

“She’s not even listening to you,” my mother tells my father.

“I’m working,” I say.

My mother picks up a little tin of salt on the table. “I don’t like the way they do the salt.”

I’m thinking about a word to describe the fake fireplace.

“You should put that in your review.”

“I’m not going to focus on the salt presentation.”

“I read reviews,” she says. “They say, ‘my dining companion said…’”

I tell my parents we have to order everything—three appetizers, three entrees, three desserts. My mother says it’s too much food. “We’ll have to ask for doggie bags.”

In the end, all the plates get licked clean.

“The food was awful,” I say. “And the portions, so small.”

The joke is a family ritual; still my mother laughs.

She invites me for dinner the next night. I cannot think of a single excuse, and so I wind up going.

I go through everything in the kitchen. The dishes, I note, are not what I’d pick out. The salad bowl is nothing like mine. Only six of Alicia’s cookbooks are also in my collection. Okay, so we’re not doppelgangers.

Then I walk into the living room and see the book of flute music, the flutes under the electronic piano, the flute music on CD.

It is eerie.

My mother tells me the journals were on a table next to the chair. She says that Alicia must have put them there because she wanted my mother to read them.

I go upstairs to the bedroom. The journals are not on a table, but stacked in the bookshelf next to the chair. I slip them out of their places. The bindings are sturdy, with a picture of a celestial body on the cover—just like mine.

I carefully open the page.

The writing is tiny. She is in a cafe in Holland, feeling uncomfortable by herself, writing in her book.  Nah, not like me. I’ve never been to Holland.

I bring the journals down to my mother. “So have you read both?”

“Yes,” she admits. “But there’s nothing personal in them. It’s just about her travels.”

“Can I take them home to read?”

“Of course.”

“Just kidding.”

The next day my mother calls to tell me every store she went to, everything she bought, how much everything cost.

“Now that we’re so close, you’re going to get a lot of these nuisance calls,” she tells me.

“Okay.”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘you’re not a nuisance.’”

“Okay.”

The next day, my parents need to drive to Newton to my father’s old doctor to get his pacemaker checked. My mother is so excited, because they will be passing Costco.

“Do you want anything at Costco?”

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

When they return, she invites me over to see what they’ve bought me. “It’s much nicer than Alicia’s,” my mother says.

It’s the farmhouse table, I’m thinking. My mother presents me with a set of blank journals.

At the end of the summer, my parents pack the car for their return to Florida. My mother has the extra salad spinner on her lap. As they back out of the driveway, the wheels slide down the apron and thump onto the asphalt. I see their heads bob and already I miss them so much.

 

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About the author:

Ilene Dube’s personal essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Atticus Review, Huffington Post, Kelsey Review, The Grief Diaries, and U.S. 1 Summer Fiction. She writes a weekly arts feature for Philadelphia Public Media and is a contributing editor to Urban Agenda, Princeton Magazine, and U.S. 1 Newspaper. For 20 years she was arts and features editor for the Princeton Packet newspaper group, during which time she won first-place awards from the New Jersey Press Association and Suburban Newspapers of America.

 

Allen Appel

I receive daily emails from digital book services announcing works downloadable to my Kindle. Most go for between $.99 and $3.99 but one or two are free. If a list includes a free action thriller, I’ll consider it.

Some who have read these books submit reviews, which can be perused by potential buyers. I tend to download three or four highly-praised books each week. Since I only spend an hour or two each day reading, books tend to stack up in my Kindle library.

I’ll start a book and if I find, after a few pages, that I don’t like it, I’ll delete it and go on to the next. If, after the first few chapters I find I’m only mildly interested in the outcome, I’ll table it and start another book; at a later date I may decide to return and finish it. As a consequence, I often find myself shuffling back and forth between stories and mixing the plots up in my mind. Then, when I try to recall what I’ve read, I get some strange narratives.

A beautiful thirty-something brunette sits alone at a Parisian outdoor café sipping café au lait and nibbling on a prune Danish. Passers-by mistake her for a fashion model but she’s actually a Mossad agent, proficient in Krav Maga, Kung Fu and karate. She can fire her Glock with unerring accuracy and devise weapons from whatever is at hand – apple cores, chewing gum wrappers, anything within reach. She’s fluent in French, English, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Russian and Mandarin and can pass for any nationality, male or female. She is called Tanya and no one knows if she ever had a last name.

As she brushes pastry crumbs off her ample bosom she becomes aware of a man sitting alone at the next table. He’s tall, muscular, has piercing blue eyes and a full head of wavy black hair with just a touch of gray at the temples. He looks up, their eyes meet, and there’s an instant connection. He picks up his cognac and croissant and joins her.

They converse. He says his name is Arnold and he’s an international real-estate broker. He represents a syndicate who want to buy the Eiffel Tower and use it as a condominium for outdoors enthusiasts. But he’s really Mike Steel, an art restorer and former Navy Seal, now a mercenary under contract to the CIA. He’s an exponent of Ninjutsu, a crackerjack pilot, and is deadly with firearms, knives, boomerangs, and blowguns. He’s fluent in English only, but he has an adequate command of French and can hold his own in Cajun, Ebonics, and Esperanto. He came to France to find and terminate an international terrorist known only as the French Kisser. He has completed his assignment and is taking in the sights of Paris while awaiting new orders.

She tells him her name is Marie, a phlebotomist from Nantes on holiday. While she’s talking, he receives a coded message on his Mickey Mouse watch, which is really an experimental high-tech device with hands that spell out messages in American Sign Language. He is to return to the United States immediately. In true ninja fashion he disappears in a puff of smoke.

Alone now, she checks her phone for texts and learns that the Mossad is renting her out to the CIA for a top-priority mission. She is to fly to Washington immediately, steal a car if necessary, and report to CIA headquarters in Fairfax by 8:00 the next morning.

As she hurries back to her hotel to pack she is attacked by three members of the Albanian Mob seeking revenge for their associates whom she killed in a previous book. Unmatched in hand-to-hand combat, she leaves two of them dead and one alive, but a soprano. She gets to her hotel, packs, books a flight, and calls a taxi to take her to De Gaulle airport.

Even though she sees only his back she recognizes the taxi driver as a sleuth she teamed up with in another series. He’s an American, a former cop, now a private eye, working incognito while combing the streets of Paris for his client’s granddaughter, kidnapped from an estate in Rhode Island and sold to a French pimp. He asks for Tanya’s assistance. She tells him maybe in the next book – right now she has a flight to catch.

When Tanya gets to CIA headquarters she’s ushered into a conference room where she is surprised to find, seated between two senior agents, “Arnold,” who is now formally introduced as Mike Steel, Delta Force veteran and amateur archeologist. The two are to pose as youthful activists and infiltrate a nefarious secret organization.

A consortium of ultra-right-wing billionaires is plotting to assassinate the president and vice-president. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, a puppet of the consortium, would then assume the presidency and pave the way for a coup.

Tanya and Mike are to offer their services to the consortium as junior apprentices and destroy it from within. Mike says he has a cousin, a master of disguise, who can make them appear twenty years younger. Mike calls his cousin and makes arrangements.

After driving all night they arrive at a dingy saloon in Ho-Ho-Kus run by Mike’s uncle. Tanya instantly recognizes Mike’s cousin, working behind the bar; he’s the ex-cop/private eye/cab driver she last came face-to-back with in Paris. He explains that he found the missing granddaughter but it was too late – she had married the pimp and had no intention of returning to the dull life of an heiress in Rhode Island, so he came home to sponge off his father while waiting for another lucrative case to come along.

After hours of trying on youthful wigs, applying makeup and sticking on faux pimples, they squeeze into grungy, torn jeans and can pass as the college freshmen they will pretend to be. And there, unfortunately, the book ends. In order to learn what happens next I’ll have to buy the sequel, which is available in hardcover only, and costs $12.99 plus shipping.

 

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About the author:

Allen Appel was born in 1937. He received his BA in English from Brooklyn College in 1959, and his subsequent career involved developing computer applications. He began writing in high school, where he had a column in the newspaper, continued writing in college as a columnist and editor, went on hiatus for close to 50 years, and resumed putting his observations in writing in 2003 when he moved to an active adult community, where he writes for the community newspaper.

Lauren Fedorko

in california they burn christmas trees on the beach
        charred pineplumes travel for miles
the scorched-out past-lives smell of singed needle, burnt bark
out with the old
            cover with new
so easy
      to shake the past year, make it float like dust
         then snuff it out
                     smoke spiraling once-flame
so easy
      to erase the sorrow of a brokenness past
tell me how to shake the hurt from my skin
          strip it from my bones) &
                howl it) to the moon
                         tell me how to bury it beneath me—plucked
            (out of heart
in california they burn christmas trees on the beach
      & they let them roar till they’re blue(black)         toppled sideways
          taken out by           the tide
they ignite their past year & bow to their new year
      & i long to know how they unknow
                 how they let go
                                        tell me how to bury memory that’s not yet dead
                                        tell me how to blend the seascape just right
             if it only takes a match
             i’ll strike one

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About the author:

Lauren Fedorko, M.Ed., is an Adjunct Professor of writing at Rutgers University, teaches AP and Honors high school English, and advises a creative writing club for her students. Her passion for writing is longstanding and ongoing, composed mostly of poetry and creative non-fiction. She enjoys exploring, photography, good company, and traveling the world every chance she gets. Her work has previously been published in the Kelsey Review.

D.E. Steward

Walking Shillington, foot by foot along the short-dimension low-perspective sightlines and perceptions of a detail-conscious savvy grade school kid, house corner to porch, house by house along the street, his birthday dogwood tree crowding the porch

Sites and locales hallowed by literary description magically invested with promise of certain notice down the line, preservation in amber

A woman in the strip-mall magazine store with romance novels, how-to, health, New Age, car-truck, porn, three of his titles in paperback, goes on about how she taught him how to dance, that he made it back for every class reunion and always MCed the show

Says she’s only read the book in which he mentions her, says most people around town haven’t read him at all

It’s all exactly like another of his class-reunion New Yorker stories

Pompous, detail-weighted, stuttering, dry, preoccupied

Damask-violet-stiff-vestment-mothball-dry

A woman in the town offices coming out to smoke crossing and uncrossing her legs precisely as in a story about one of his characters in estrus

Whenever he’s back in town people say they all seem to know he’s there

Probably he will haunt this matter-of-fact eastern Pennsylvania highway town for a few decades more

Flat-faced Shillington, a parody of Lady Murasaki’s Kyoto, Steinbeck’s Salinas, Faulkner’s Favorite Street in Charlottesville, Caldwell’s clay-country Georgia, Hemingway’s Key West, Simon’s Alsace, Chekhov’s cottage in the Crimea

Driving southeast for the farm in Plowville, listening to a writer interviewed on NPR who runs consciousness raising writing workshops for corporations, the book, Poetry and the Survival of Soul in Corporate America

New Yorker cartoon of the gates of hell, one marked corporate, the other individual

The fabled expansive awareness from the American experience going defunct

Thomas Wolfe generally unread, The Web and the Rock out of print for years

Maybe it should be for others to come shuffle around our resonant continent for us and wax our floors

The European critic in the passenger seat replies archly that the European perspective necessarily only enhances what’s already laid down

Plowville’s lonely stone farmhouse set there on the slope of its treeless pre-Allegheny hill like a rabbit resting in the grass

In the lonely American way

From which he drove off to high school with his father every morning in their old Buick, where in recent years his grandfather and mother died

The next farm lies on the back slope of that hill by a spring, the writer sold the family house well before he died but kept some land, allowed the neighbor orchard rights on fourteen acres between the two places, used to appear every year to collect the rent

His gorge of memory, back and forth over home ground, again and again

Unremarkable as an old picture of a family dog, recollection from far childhood of a poignant moment or phrase, of an object in hand, a smell, the angle of the light

Madeleines supporting recollection of the ordinary past in hallowed place locale

Like record piles of the past, logs, daybooks, old diskettes, abandoned hard drives, data sheets, photographs, forgotten audio and video tapes

Our narrow little memory banks, private sums of things

Owl pellets under the fir tree

Tiny bones and hairs and bits of moleskin

Banks of myrtle with the tiny folded violet flowers opening soon after the cold is gone to ground-cover green covering buried bits of plaster and lath, sheet metal snips and rain gutter trash

In the southern part of the county, closer to the Turnpike, farmers plant soybeans for growing mash for the company owning the battery-broiler operation nearby

Cycle of weeks, broilers out via technicians in long white coats and hardhats arriving in big rigs, steam clean everything and then fresh chicks back in

Tons of antibiotic-laced food weekly, fetid air for a hundred yards out from the end doors, houseflies in clouds, flies in plague numbers hatched from maggots on the carcasses of broilers dead in the litter

Barn swallows flourish on the flies, swirl nearby

Our ways of raising chickens, calves, hogs and even dogs and cats bode a blank future that partially defines our own

Porky Pennsylvanian plenitude with an indelible plattdeutsch base line across its strangely extended washboard valley countryside

Its old farms by their springhouses

Trees press toward the old cropland Pennsylvania fields in brush-to-cedar-to-maple-to-oak succession, big hardwoods waiting at the edge to take back the fields

Boles, limbs, branches arched, poised, high and close, within, the edge of the dark

Twenty-five miles north of Shillington, as raptors fly it, up the Schuylkill over Reading and then up along Maiden Creek to its top springs above Lenhartsville on the Kittatinny Ridge, the easternmost comb of the Allegheny Front

From the Hawk Mountain knob there at fifteen hundred feet, watch them fly by, as they have in fall migration since at least the early Pleistocene

For two million years they’ve passed across this grandeur of locale that supersedes still another class-reunion story

Peering down on the battery poultry farms as they fly southwestward along the ridges headed for the Gulf of Mexico, the vultures, perhaps the eagles, must pick up the Southern Berks County chicken litter smell

If anybody around Shillington ever looks up at the raptor migration in wonderment, no one knows about it from what he wrote about awareness there

Driving back toward New York, the European critic watched the rump patch of a northern harrier rocking and tacking V-winged off across long meadows and asked if it was what Americans sometimes call a chicken hawk

 

credit: D. E. Steward, “Settembro,” Lynx Eye, 1/9, Winter 2002, Low Osos, CA

 

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About the author:

D.E. Steward: Creeping up on a thousand publications and way beyond what he hoped to accomplish as an independent writer, D.E. Steward has never had a pedestrian job since college, and never published anything he is ashamed of. He has never studied writing, he didn’t even major in English, the only thing he has ever taught is swimming, and he tries to feed respect for the printed and pixelled word.

 

 

Lillian LaSalle

In memory of Maria Rodriguez, beloved professor at Mercer County Community College

Cancer, you don’t win. You never win.
You go as far as the body and under our feet.
You lose every time.
You are not faith or family,
healing or hero,
mentor, warrior, or legacy.
You go this far. You do not
enter the pearly gates.
You are not victorious.
You did not change her course
of gallantry, brilliance, and beauty.
You had no authority to tell her how to live.
Cancer, where is your sting now?
You messed with the wrong one.
She lived her life—
Her seed is sown.

 

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About the author:

Lillian LaSalle has been a resident of Mercer County for over 28 years. She is the Executive Director of the Office on Aging for Lawrence Township and has been writing poetry since early elementary school. She was also a family friend of Maria Rodriguez, who worked for the EOF program and was a beloved professor at Mercer County Community College. Lillian states, “Brave soul Maria fought the good fight of faith against cancer.” Lillian’s poem, “Cancer, Where Is Your Sting?” was first published in CURE’s online magazine in early 2017 and is reprinted here with the author’s permission in honor of Maria Rodriguez.

Judith Salcewicz

I grew up in the fifties in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, a small town bordered by the Raritan River. I was taught to be polite. I didn’t talk back to my elders but kept a mental checklist of ways I’d be different.

I was only six when I stood on tip toes to peek into Cassie’s carriage. It was disappointing. I expected stripes.

“She pushes that zebra baby past my house every day,” my aunt had said.

At six I couldn’t understand she was calling Cassie a zebra because of her interracial parents.

South Bound Brook was just a mile square. Everyone could sit on one of the stools at Van’s Soda Shop. There were no boycotts, no protests but some things were not quite right.

I was ten when a black friend joined in a game of jacks I was playing with my girlfriend, on the sidewalk in front of her house.

“How nice that you came to play today,” her mother said from the doorway in a tone an octave higher than her usual speaking voice.

I stared at her too-wide smile stretched tight over lipstick-dotted teeth. Later we sat on the steps and she brought us cookies and Kool Aid in Dixie cups instead of the usual sparkly Lucite ones.

“I’ll serve everyone in my good dishes,” I thought. My resolve to make a difference strengthened as I grew older.

Ten years of Girl Scouting delivered the promise of building confidence, character, and finding my voice. At campouts we sang, “Kumbaya” and “Let There be Peace on Earth.” Maybe peace could begin with me. Bob Dylan sang, “The Times They Are A-Changin.” I wrote, “Don’t Break My Bubble,” a play about an idealistic young man disillusioned by false promises and hypocrisy. As thrilling as it was to see my words come alive on the stage, my greatest hope was that my words could affect others.

The Girl Scout motto is “Be Prepared.” Skills and adventures acquired through scouting helped prepare me for what was to be one of the pivotal experiences of my life.

Older scouts are encouraged to use their leadership skills. In the last half of my senior year of high school, I helped plan a conference that would take place in a hotel in the Poconos. I worked with other scouts to organize the entire weekend which would be attended by dozens of girls from several nearby states.

We’d open with ice breakers, exchanges of small tokens of friendship, and a swim. When our planning committee visited the hotel to work out event logistics, we were impressed by the Olympic-sized pool situated in a glass-walled atrium. It was big enough for our entire group. We planned water activities that included lots of beach balls.

The crux of the conference revolved around a guest speaker and discussion groups that would build on a theme. We chose Global Relations. Many of us were graduating from high school. Our learning focus would help prepare us for going out into the world.

I volunteered to recruit the guest speaker. I knew the perfect person: Mr. Porter, my U. S. History teacher.

Mr. Porter was the only black teacher in our high school. We discussed the Civil Rights movement in class and listened closely to his answers. We understood the indignation of Rosa Parks and were inspired by Martin Luther King Junior’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

My class was fascinated when Mr. Porter talked about his two years in Micronesia serving in the Peace Corps. Micronesia is a beautiful island country. Like ours, it was once a colony.  As we studied our country’s struggle for freedom, we learned about this tiny nation on the threshold of independence.

Mr. Porter had taught English to young people there who knew they would be able to provide for their families with the education they coveted.  We liked to imagine ourselves in the island paradise. He described the students he taught in so much detail we almost felt like we knew them. I was confident that my Scout sisters would find Mr. Porter’s stories as fascinating as we did.

Then everything changed.

On April 4, 1968, the day before our conference was to begin, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.  I met with Mr. Porter after school. Tears were in his voice as he explained why we needed to talk about the tragedy that would affect all of us. I agreed.

I packed for the conference listening to news stories about the assassination and the riots that were beginning around the country.  Mr. Porter would arrive on Saturday. Friday night activities would be up to us. One change we knew we could make was the words to grace before our meal. Johnny Appleseed Grace was our favorite. We altered it.

The Lord is good to me
and so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need

Then instead of “The sun and the rain and the apple seed,” we added “Dr. King and his dream may it live in me.”

 The Lord is good to me.

After dinner, ice breakers, and a friendship token exchange, we put on bathing suits and rubber swim caps that snapped under our chins and got into the water. The pool was crowded but we were having a great time with new and old friends. We decorated the air with beach balls and filled the room with laughter.

Then the lights went out. We were in complete darkness in a crowded swimming pool. Many screamed. I was in deep water. Someone clutched me and we both went under. I clawed my way to the surface not knowing the grabber or where she went.

There was no backup generator.

“Is this a riot?” someone asked, escalating the scream volume.

A whistle blew.

“Girl Scouts are courageous,” shouted the lifeguard who was obviously a girl scout.  “We need to be quiet and calm.”

In an instant, silence swallowed the chaos.

We were instructed to swim to the side of the pool. Helping hands hoisted swimmer after swimmer. Flashlights arrived guiding the remaining girls as they left the pool. They were not powerful enough to illuminate the entire pool.

The room was cleared except for the leaders and committee members. Was anyone still in the pool?

Suddenly there was a rumble and a flood of light appeared. Hotel staff drove cars up to the huge windows. The high beams were enough to ascertain that everyone was out of the pool.

Our late night gathering included a discussion on what we did right and what we could do better next time.

Mr. Porter arrived early the next morning. We talked about the evening scare. Not a whisper could be heard as he spoke.

“Scouting believes that girls can change the world. This week the world mourns the loss of a man with a dream, a dream that can live on through each of you.

Scouting calls girls to be a friend to all, and the world needs us to recognize that inclusive friendship.

Change is hard. It’s the only way for an acorn to become a mighty oak. I challenge you to nurture the acorn that is inside each of you.

I think you have experienced firsthand that darkness generates panic, but it is possible to control our actions and mend the broken parts of our world.

Some of you might join the Peace Corps like I did. Even if you don’t, you can make a difference where you are, but you have to believe in yourself and the importance of your actions.”

As Mr. Porter continued, we believed in the possibilities of what could be and we resolved to be part of the process. Our group discussions were electric. We were still in school but we mattered.

After the conference I rushed into my house excited with the possibilities of what could be. As I entered the house I overheard my grandmother talking to my dad.

“He’s dead. Now maybe things will get back to normal.”

I knew we had a long way to go.

 

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About the author:

Judith Salcewicz has lived in Mercer County for over 40 years, where she enjoyed teaching and running the Community Service Program at Notre Dame High School. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, travel, volunteering, gardening and spending time with her grandchildren. Retiring and joining the Lawrence Memoir Writing Group has helped her reconnect with her passion for writing. In her story, “Panic in the Dark,” the experiences she describes from the weekend that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated affected her life and her teaching career. One of her proudest teaching accomplishments was creating an anti-bullying program that her students presented to dozens of area grammar schools.

Lavinia Kumar

The sun is setting on the farm,
I sit alone in the darkening room, listen
to Lauder sing Roamin’ in the gloamin’.

The milked cows are back in fields
swill-filled pigs grunt, roosters are at rest,
though the hens still mutter in their nests.

I watch the beloved record go round,
see the dog peer in a speaker, then find
a deeper voice to fill the twilight gloom.

 Robeson’s slow sad bass rumbles his hurt,
the needle easing it out – his body achin’…
tired of livin’… but ol’ man river… keeps rollin’ along.

 

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About the author:

Lavinia Kumar’s poetry book is The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Her two chapbooks are Let There be Color (2016) and Rivers of Saris (2013). Her poetry has appeared in several publications in the US and UK such as Atlanta Review, Colere, Edison Literary Review, Exit 13, Flaneur, Kelsey Review, New Verse News, Orbis, Peacock Journal, Pedestal, Pemmican, Symmetry Pebbles, Lives You Touch, & US1 Worksheets. She is a member of poetry groups in Princeton and Pennsylvania. Her website is laviniakumar.org.