Delmarva Review, Volume 10

By Delmarva Review

Amidst the uncertainties of life, people grasp for what is eternal in the human condition. They grasp for connection and for hope. A teacher recognizes the spark of awakening in a student’s eyes; regular customers become family at a traditional corner deli. Time-honored rituals celebrate commitment; poets find comfort in the familiar landscapes and the sights and smells of home. An educator struggles to reach a troubled student, and the possibility of love blooms between two injured souls.

This issue, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Delmarva Review, features 34 contributors from around the U.S. and abroad whose work touches on the themes of change and hope, among many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delmarva Review
• Release date: Oct 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370014477

Delmarva Review

Founded in 2008, Delmarva Review is a literary journal dedicated to the discovery and publication of compelling new fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from emerging and established writers. Submissions from all writers are welcomed, regardless of residence. We publish annually, at a minimum, and promote various literary and educational events, to inspire readers and writers who pursue excellence in the literary arts.Delmarva Review is published by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund, supporting the literary arts across the tristate region of the Delmarva Peninsula, including portions of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Publication is supported by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council, with revenues provided by the Maryland State Arts Council, as well as private contributions and sales.

Book preview

Delmarva

Review

Evocative Prose & Poetry

10th Anniversary Edition

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

Jessamine Price

RELIGION SEMINAR

BARN DANCE AFTER THE WEDDING

NORTHUMBERLAND LOVE SONNET

James Keegan

PENTECOST

LAZARUS DIES FOR THE SECOND TIME

Philip Barbara

THE CHURCH

Helen Wickes

ASH WEDNESDAY

SMELLING OUR WAY HOME

Gibbons Ruark

A CONVERSATION WITH GIBBONS RUARK ABOUT HIS COLLECTION THE ROAD TO BALLYVAUGHAN With Anne Colwell, Poetry Editor

THE ROAD TO BALLYVAUGHAN

LIGHTNESS IN AGE

Lisa Lynn Biggar

ON THE HARD

Brian J. Koester

UNCLE HAD A BLUE DOLPHIN

TO MY BROTHER ERIC, WHO KILLED HIMSELF

Sam Grieve

SHOES MADE FOR WALKING, SHOES MADE FOR FLIGHT

Kristina Morgan

HOSPITAL VISIT NUMBER 19

Ed Granger

WINTER STORM WARNING

AT THE GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA

MARY TODD

Benjamin Mangrum

HARD LESSONS IN MARRAKECH

Gilbert Allen

RIGHT TO WORK

FAMILY MUSIC

CLEAN FUN

Lowell McKay

AT NIGHT LIKE A BROKEN KING

David Bergman

THE MAN WHO KNEW BETTER

THE MAN WHO HAD LUCK

Jeremy Griffin

THE FUTURE IS NOT FOR SALE

Emmy Nicklin

THE GOLDEN HOUR

Sara Orozco

STORM NICKELS

Ivy Grimes

WHAT FISHING MEANT BACK THEN

DANGER

Jennifer Highland

(1) THE BODY

(2) THE BODY

(3) THE BODY

(4) THE BODY

(5) THE BODY

(6) THE BODY

Desirée Magney

KATHY

Jacob Appel

EXAMPLE

CONCURRENCES

SOLID GROUND

Paul Watsky

WHO GETS CANCER

TALKING TO MYSELF

Ginny Fite

UNMENTIONABLES

Gail Overstreet

THE PHILOSOPHY OF STARS

Susan Mockler

BECOMING

GEOLOGIC TIME: THE PRESENT IS THE KEY TO THE PAST

Michael Smith

VYOTOR OR A NOTE FROM TONIGHT’S SOLOIST

Holly Day

THOUGHTS FROM THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

ON PAPER

WORDS OF WISDOM CONCERNING WATER

Jackson Armstrong

LINDSEY THEN

Carol Matos

WHEN THE EARTH ALMOST DIED

MY MACHU PICCHU

MY COMMANDER

Pat Valdata

36,000 CHICKENS

HOOVER

Robert Sachs

THE CATCHFLY

Marsha Mathews

ISLAND GIRL IN HEMPEN PANTS

SCRIBBLING IN HEELS

IF YOU WANT TO BE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN

Leslie Pietrzyk

DARK VS. DARKER

Jane Miller

PICKING CHILDREN

CHICKEN GOD

MAKING THE AUTISM CUT, 2010

Kate Blackwell

BIG BEAR, LITTLE BEAR

Book Reviews

Anne Colwell reviews THE ROAD TO BALLYVAUGHAN

Harold O. Wilson reviews HARD-BOILED ANXIETY

Suzi Peel reviews THE FAWN ABYSS

Stephanie Fowler reviews THE NIGHT IS YOUNG

Ronald Batistoni reviews FOR BETTER AND FOR VERSE: WORDS AT PLAY

CONTRIBUTORS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Delmarva

Review

VOLUME 10

Emily Rich - Executive Editor

Bill Gourgey - Managing Editor

Wilson Wyatt, Jr. - Chairman

Anne Colwell - Poetry Editor

Wendy Ingersoll Perry - Poetry Reader

Harold O. Wilson - Fiction Co-Editor

Melissa Reddish - Fiction Co-Editor

George Merrill - Nonfiction Co-Editor

Cheryl Somers Aubin - Nonfiction Co-Editor

James O. Sullivan - Nonfiction Reader

Vickie Welch Lewelling - Copyeditor

Charlene Marcum - Proofreading

Cover Photograph: Recycle by Cal Jackson

Special thanks to our Chesapeake Voices Contest judge, Laura B. Oliver, and to our readers Steve Fry, Adam Gattuso, Vipra Ghimire, Graham Gillette, Fadzi Kasambira, and Chris Reeves.

Delmarva Review is published annually in print and digital editions by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund, a nonprofit organization supporting writers and the literary arts across the Delmarva Peninsula and surrounding states. Additional support is provided by tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council, with revenues provided by the Maryland State Arts Council. The content of each issue is determined solely by the editorial board.

Delmarva Review welcomes new prose and poetry submissions from all writers, regardless of residence. Editors consider only those manuscripts submitted according to our submission dates and guidelines.

General correspondence can be sent to:

Delmarva Review

P.O. Box 544

St. Michaels, MD 21663

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright 2017 by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008215789

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-9745011-5-1

ebook ISBN: 9781370014477

Preface

Things change. Sometimes it happens almost imperceptibly: the solid ground you thought you stood on shifts a bit beneath your feet. A friendship fades, a lover cools; a once infallible parent reveals his flaws. Other times, change is more pronounced. A daughter must become her mother’s caretaker, a spouse becomes violent, a disease invades the body at an alarming rate.

Amidst the uncertainties of life, people grasp for what is eternal in the human condition. They grasp for connection and for hope. A teacher recognizes the spark of awakening in a student’s eyes; regular customers become family at a traditional corner deli. Time-honored rituals celebrate commitment; poets find comfort in the familiar landscapes and the sights and smells of home. An educator struggles to reach a troubled student, and the possibility of love blooms between two injured souls.

This issue, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Delmarva Review, touches on the themes of change and hope, among many others. It is a special issue for those who worked on it, a milestone of our dedication to publishing the finest in literary arts. It also marks a change for us, as we take our leave from our long-time sponsor, the Eastern Shore Writers Association, and head off as a newly independent journal. We honor the past and look toward the future with high expectation.

The issue also features the poet, Gibbons Ruark, who is interviewed by poetry editor Anne Colwell. We’re pleased to share two of Ruark’s poems from his wonderful collection The Road to Ballyvaughan.

The Road to Ballyvaughan is reviewed in the back of this issue, as are four other exciting books by Delmarva writers.

We are proud to announce that Jeremy Griffin is the winner of our first-ever Chesapeake Voices prose contest. Contest judge, Laura Oliver says Jeremy’s piece The Future is Not For Sale, is sophisticated, with strong characterization, especially concerning the psychologically ambivalent state of the protagonist.

The cover art, Recycle, by Eastern Shore photographer Calvin Cal Jackson, depicts shucked oyster shells ready to be re-used as beds for newly hatched oyster larvae.

On behalf of the dedicated staff at Delmarva Review, I hope you will enjoy this tenth anniversary issue.

Emily Rich

Editor

Jessamine Price

RELIGION SEMINAR

Week one, I tell them love your questions;

live with them like weird but kindly roommates.

Around the antique table, eleven students nod.

The twelfth looks down—the girl at two o’clock,

blank and lovely as a Byzantine Madonna,

majestic and sullen teenaged Maestà.

Week two, we juggle theories:

Brahman, avatars, nirvana, bliss.

We wrestle koans, talk the Tao.

She rolls her eyes, looks down,

carves her name in lead

along the wooden table-lip.

Week three, her eyes are always out the window.

While we brood on Adam and the snake

she stares into collapsing summer—

rain-drench drives across the shingles

and plunges from silver eaves,

maples sag in the darkening wind.

Week four, one phrase reaches her,

a buoy in the floods:

The Holy Ghost.

She looks up, speaks:

"I felt Him run clean through me—

that stormy night the priests brought out

the golden chalice with the Host

and held it up for our praise,

we called out words of worship with tender

lungs, we split ourselves in half

and felt like angels,

thunder groaned and lightning stung—

we fell into Christ with joy,

we spoke in tongues, we wept,

we burned with silver flame."

We hearken like stones

around the book-stacked table.

The grief, the joy, the wonderness of those tidings!

The maze of shining creases on the sky—

the trembling tearing at the air—

the sobs, the winking stars—

the crowding breaths rolled up together—

the running shadow-clouds, the flames—

a thousand aroused souls calling like gulls—

Week five, she’s fierce and still again

and somewhere otherwhere

up some narrow tower

whose base I cannot seek to find.

BARN DANCE AFTER THE WEDDING

Your houses and barns have gathered to welcome the traveler—

here breathes the ease of speech, the grammar of love returned.

You told me for this dance you need a partner.

Under the Dragon and Bear, the night-struck barn

rattles and whirls—feet pound wood

like hammers in a Viking siege.

Can I forgive you for your joy that beats like drums?

You waltz the constellations round the sky,

remote and strong as stars,

two matching wings

beating together across the humming night,

moth-soft, persistent, cherishing fragile things.

I want to be a tree and root down deep

the hollow, to sift for something lost and whole,

the secrets that burnish dust to glittering crumbs

of granite, mica, shale—the tunes

that leap the heart and turn it light.

Tomorrow I take the road that reaches north.

I won’t come back until I learn the language

of the risen dead, or learn to dance.

NORTHUMBERLAND LOVE SONNET

I knew, the night the bed collapsed, when you

jumped up to light the candle and make repairs;

I knew among the hungry lambs and pairs

of kissing gates and wool-blown grass. I knew

between the chemists and the low-flung view

of Camel Hill, before the narrow stairs,

embracing in the muddy yard that bears

the black tea smell of burning coal, I knew.

It’s time for me to go now, not annoy

you further, flee this cripple-willed spring

of the northern hills, but still I’m lingering here.

Next door, the neighbor’s parakeets—rose-ringed

and Hispaniolan—sing with captive cheer,

and half my heart would stay, and budget joy.

James Keegan

PENTECOST

for G.S.

They had eaten their breakfast with him

in an old diner car up on blocks beside the tracks

it used to run on—that is not historically accurate

but it is true.

It was winter, a patchy ice lacing

the corners, darkening with soot, clouds level and hard.

The coffee was strong and hot, the eggs greasy,

over easy, delicious.

They ate what they could afford and smoked and listened to

him dismantle their lives—he tore them down

like abandoned buildings, he tore them down like tenements

and raised wildflowers in the rubble of their hearts.

He told them everything

the world told them was important

was wedded to the death of what they could be.

He told them that forever from then

their lives would be hard and their voices heard,

believed, resented, silenced,

spread and twisted and commandeered.

He told them the hardest truth:

that it is not now, that it is not

tomorrow, that it is not ever too late to

become what you have learned to teach

yourself you cannot be.

Outside the diner

the January wind howled down the cinder block

canyons, foreshadowing the emptied kingdoms

of their hearts, foretelling the grief and loneliness,

the salt despair of his absence, the ice morning

of the future when they would shake themselves

awake, step onto the cold floorboards of their heartbeats,

shrug on the tattered hats and Goodwill overcoats of their souls

and try to imagine themselves back into life,

when all those griddle hot words that wafted

around them like coffee steaming and the coarse bite

of home-rolled smokes, when all the words that had been

like saying grace at Thanksgiving around a loaded

farmhouse board, when all those words had flown

like gray doves before the winds of winter, or huddled

like lost hobos and boozers under some blasted trestle,

aching for enough trash to burn into a bad lie of warmth,

enough bourbon to spark the blood or bury the brain.

They would dig their hands down in their hopeless pockets,

wrap their coats tight around their blasted ribs, duck

their hat brims to the skid of slicing snow and shuffle in their

sorry shoes to the same diner, where the white letters on a

red scream of sign would tell them they could not go anywhere

but on—that what they needed was not there.

They will stand, they know it, in the grainy light

and find themselves somehow together again, and somehow

whole and able-bodied. They will not know what they know

already then, they will not foresee what is beginning. One

will hand out smokes he had reserved for himself. Another

will cup his lighter flame fluttering but holding as other

hands join to feel and protect it. One

by one they will light themselves into communion. One

will blow out a stream of smoke that will be

whisked away down the deserted street and he

will look at them all and he will say first,

Remember.

And it is pain. And it is relief

from pain. And it is the start of a pain they

had never imagined possible, despite what

they had lost, despite what each of them had seen with his own eyes.

LAZARUS DIES FOR THE SECOND TIME

The final sun comes to me again.

I would not ask a soul to pray it off.

The former dullness seeps into my brain,

And my lungs heave out a rattling cough

The sounds familiar in my failing ears.

The man who one time called me back is dead

Himself. He will not order me out into the years

This time. I’ve heard that voice ring in my head

On every day of my recovered life—

Bringing me back to myself from an idea

That, no matter how I’ve tried, I cannot half

Recall. What was it like? they asked. "Did you see a

Place that looked like paradise, the face

Of the Lord, angels singing in the skies?"

Lazarus, one said, "you have been dead four days.

What was it like?" I thought of several lies

To make their questions stop, but said instead,

"Death is no place for the living to speak of.

If I sat down with God and ate of the soul’d bread

Or fell into the sun and burned with heaven’s love

Until I blazed, if I could tell you so,

Would it change a blessed thing you do?

Would death be any more a place you’d long to go?

Where I was today other than here with you

I cannot say except I say ‘the grave.’"

I do remember a turning around

To the hard sound of my name. The voice gave

Me no choice in the matter. When I found

Myself alive and bound blind with cloths,

I could make out a vague light ahead

And my name (I thought). I stood there like a lost

Child, unable to move because he’s so afraid

Of drifting deeper into dark

Until his father’s voice commands

Him to come with a sternness to shove all the stark

Fears back—Lazarus, come out—the child understands

That the man expects to be obeyed

And so I understand that I

Am again being ordered out to be saved—

I understand—yet I confess I am afraid to die.

I have heard that in his final moment

The rabbi believed he’d been forsaken

By his own father. I wept at that since it meant

That one who’d conquered death in me could be so shaken

By his own living as to forget what he knew.

No place for the live man to speak of his death.

No place for the risen man to go out into

When all his flesh tells him is how to take next breath

And love the bright and biting air. So, Death, come forth.

I was not born to be anything more

Than what I am—what I felt blessed with in rebirth.

Alive. Dancing alive on the broad steps at Death’s own door.

Philip Barbara

THE CHURCH

The boss tells me to shorten the line. Yesterday, it was out the door and down the sidewalk, almost to the 47th Street diamond district. So many people itching to get in, eat lunch and get back to their office. Keeping them out of the doorway is one of his big worries. "I don’t want a scuffle to break out. I don’t want this place in the New York Post," he says. Leo behind the counter with me thinks the boss just wants us to move the hot dogs faster, make the sandwiches faster. We look at one another and shake our heads. No lines? We know it’s not gonna happen.

It’s his father’s name in lights over the door, Putnick’s Famous Kosher Cafeteria, and I’ve seen him fire people. Like Manuel. One morning there was a flap over a big catering order, how many sandwiches were corned beef, how many pastrami. The order went out and then it got busy as usual for lunch. When things thinned out afterward I thought everything was forgotten. But the boss walked over to Manuel and said, Take off your apron. You’re through here. He had a small brown packet with Manuel’s pay all ready. Manuel was right about that order, but the boss is like that. I’m waiting for the right moment to point out he doesn’t run a mess hall at an army barracks. We got autographed photos of Howard Cosell, Gene Wilder, Ed Koch with Bess Meyerson, Billy Crystal, Paul Simon and Walt Frazier on the walls. When the boss isn’t busy he stands below George C. Scott as General Patton. Why not be seen with Sophia Loren as the Madonna? But I try to keep peace.

He did accept one of my suggestions, that we offer the police a 10 percent discount so someone in blue is always here. I keep a table for them so they have a clear view of the door. Everyone worries about terrorism again, smaller like Orlando or San Bernardino, not another 9/11.

The boss has ideas of his own. Maybe we can do more phone take-out platters. That’d ease the situation, he says.

I look at him like he’s a total rookie. We tried that before. You gave take-out platters special names like ‘Yankees’ Home Plate.’ Totally flopped.

He nods, recollection kicking in. Oh right. Why didn’t that idea fly?

Look, the food tastes better eating in. People like the atmosphere. I look out over the room: bright light streaming in through the windows, the smells of steamed meat and grilled peppers and onions. The boss looks too and nods again, he knows he has a nice place.

When you cross the threshold here, the atmosphere changes you. When I started 18 years ago, I thought it was just the heat in winter and AC in summer. But that’s not it. It’s more than that.

As lunchtime nears I’m pondering the problem, keep the line short. I’m distracted, though I go about turning the franks and the knishes and steaming the rolls so they’re just right for my regulars. The counter window steams up and plates begin to clatter. About 11:45 a.m., right on time, people start sliding trays down the line and I’m forking it over, slicing the corned beef and pastrami, piling it high the way they’re used to. I’m looking out for Florence from the U.N. who told me she’ll be here with some special guests, and I’m wondering who. At about 12:10 p.m., my favorite couple comes in. As usual, they’re mooning at each other and take their sandwich and dogs on a shared tray, pay, and walk to the center of our universe: the ketchup and mustard stand. They give the plastic bottles a squeeze, a dab of mustard and a dab of ketchup. They take seats across from one another at a small table, not wanting to miss the other’s slightest wink. The music is playing, and as I’m looking across the room, I can clearly hear one of my favorite tunes above the din, that Barbra Streisand song about people who need people, how they are the luckiest in the world. I feel everyone’s contentment too and sing to myself…

A feeling deep in your soul,

Says you were half now you’re whole

No more hunger and thirst…

I watch some people walk in alone but then share a table, smiling to one another by introduction and then sitting quietly ruminating with their food and their thoughts. That to me is a sense of things right in the world.

A customer jolts me back from my dream when he orders a Nova lox omelet with onions, wanting salted butter with his rye toast.

Sorry sir, we don’t serve salted butter.

No salted butter? You have salted everything else. Can you send out for some?

He sounds like the butter might be a