Transitions and Transformations

Volume 7, Manifest West Series, Western Press Books

What changes, alters, undergoes renewal or metamorphosis in the West? The space shared and sparred-over in urban Oregon versus remote Colorado casts doubt on the concept of a true continuity to the west. Where and when do those frontiers, borders, or alterations in course occur? Each watershed and microclimate is a slight shift from the next, each city center and community hall a locus of both change and tradition, and the emotional landscapes can be as dramatic or serene as those on the map. Language can do some of the work of capturing that flux: tracking transition and transformation to get at the heart of a life lived. The poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction essays collected here raise as many questions as they answer about that often fraught, always exciting liminal space between the proverbial here and there, the now and now again.

Contributors:Eric Aldrich, Jeffrey Alfier, Betsy Bernfeld, Heidi E. Blankenship, Kierstin Bridger, Yuan Changming, David Lavar Coy, Tim Donovan, Andrea England, Matthew Gavin Frank, Rick Kempa, Mark Haunschild, Cynthia Hogue, Caitlin Horrocks, Charles Jensen, Lisa Levine, Stephen Lottridge, Jessica McDermott, Scot Siegel, Jared Smith, Victoria Waddle, Tim Weed, Susan Brown Weitzman, Lesley Wheeler

Manifest West is Western Press Books’ literary anthology series. The press, affiliated with Western State Colorado University, produces one anthology annually and focuses on Western regional writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Sep 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781607328728

Book preview

Manifest West

Transitions and Transformations

WESTERN PRESS BOOKS

GUNNISON, COLORADO

Copyright © 2018 by Western Press Books

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author of the work in question.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-871-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935636

Published in the United States of America

Western Press Books

Gunnison, Colorado

Cover image: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Works previously published, sometimes in slightly different formats:

Tim Donovan: Saving Brownie: Desert Exposure.

Caitlin Horrocks: Baseline: Territory Issue #3.

Sarah Brown Weitzman: December Apples: Blueline Vol. XXXVII, 2016.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60732-872-8 (electronic)

STAFF

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Mark Todd

MANAGING EDITOR

Elizabyth A. Hiscox

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Taja’Mir Butler

Jennifer Cirkovic

Wyatt Ewert

Shaye Gerrity

Brooke Gilmore

Aaron Goettel

Melanie Gray

Zoe Henderson

Shelby Herbert

Haley Horvat

Orevaoghene Koka

Lillian Leaver

Melissa Leckemby

Marlida Mear

Josiah Miranda-Troup

Elizabeth Ramsey

Kennedy Sievers

Abigail Van Kirk

Jay Ytell

DESIGN & LAYOUT

Sonya Unrein

CONTENTS

Introduction

Jessica McDermott

Ars Poetica

Springs Without Rains

Jared Smith

Like the Sun Over Primeval Earth

Cynthia Hogue

Cardiolesque (Phoenix, 2015)

the cloud of unknowing

Rick Kempa

Blue Windows

Tim Weed

Gunnison Gorge

Kierstin Bridger

Mother, Anthropologist

Disclosure:

Rick Kempa

Hushed Voices

Yuan Changming

YUAN: The Origin of a Family Name

David Lavar Coy

Shopping for Light

Caitlin Horrocks

Baseline

Lisa Levine

Like a Living Thing

Tim Donovan

Saving Brownie

Mark Haunschild

No. 6

No. 13

Andrea England

Midwestern Abecedarian

Sarah Brown Weitzman

December Apples

Scot Siegel

Main Street Revitalization

Eric Aldrich

Ponderosa

Matthew Gavin Frank

Fishing in Vain with Transmogrification

Heidi E. Blankenship

Climate Change

Gate 15: Borderlands

Betsy Bernfeld

Zero Percent Contained

Stephen Lottridge

Pilot Butte

Victoria Waddle

Rubies Out of the Sun

Jeffrey Alfier

Deserted Ranch at the Base of Ironwood Range

Reaping Red River County

Charles Jensen

East Hollywood Pastoral

Lesley Wheeler

Fifty-Fifty

Contributor Notes

About the Staff

INTRODUCTION

What changes, alters, undergoes renewal or metamorphosis in the West? The space shared and sparred-over in urban Oregon versus remote Colorado casts doubt on the concept of a true continuity to the west. Where and when do those frontiers, borders, or alterations in course occur? Each watershed and microclimate is a slight shift from the next, each city center and community hall a locus of both change and tradition, and the emotional landscapes can be as dramatic or serene as those on the map. Language can do some of the work of capturing that flux: tracking transition and transformation to get at the heart of a life lived. The poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction essays collected here raise as many questions as they answer about that often fraught, always exciting liminal space between the proverbial here and there, the now and now again.

Collected into alternating sections of prose and poetry the reader can explore a wide variety of ways the west and its inhabitants transform, transition, and often resist those changes. There are quiet alterations in these pages, meditative works on what a seasonal change brings to a backyard sentinel: an apple tree. An investigation of what a main urban artery in central Arizona can tell us about life and loss. Like a vein running through a populous and a personal history—a static route in constant motion.

These are issues of the moment, of the region. They speak loudly in these pages. Does the twenty-first century allow for a pastoral set in East Hollywood? Climate change is considered, as is the modern conundrum of true wilderness. Aging and losing and finding a way forward. Even the long-term cost of a ruptured immigration system and the way it confronts in even the most serene locations.

Those serene places are also here. Stands of Ponderosa loom, buttes and gorges emerge as places of solace, natural beauty and, yes, transformation. Often the natural environment has the last word, but it opens avenues for discovery—the philosophical slipping-in alongside physical hardship or a meditation on the barren, the foreboding, the spiritual recourse in such climes. Consider what follows an invitation to engage in the ongoing dialog of what is west, and what the West will be.

—Elizabyth A. Hiscox, Managing Editor

JESSICA MCDERMOTT

Ars Poetica

The bird, like silk on the sidewalk, bird song

lost beyond sky, dropped flat before sunset,

before darkness forces small birds inside

wire-like oaks until morning. Dead-set

to push the bird off the sidewalk, the young

girl turns sideways, sliding her foot, eyes down,

she inches death, staring at its bird-tongue

the width of a needle. This is normal.

This small death beside red tulips, this bird

is beautiful, but when I pause and look

I say, That’s sad, isn’t it? Her unheard

nod—my not knowing what will remain

come morning. All we have is this sun,

this image, this girl and bird, this undone.

JESSICA MCDERMOTT

Springs Without Rains

For J

I

From the bus window, I see a man smoking

a cigarette on his porch. Somehow,

he reminds me of you. Smoke ribbons

catching street lights like little clouds moving

ever into darkness. You’ve never been

a smoker, never lived in Denver,

but I know you’ve stood in the cold staring

at the blank night, wondering at the shapes

of windows and stars. Wondering how you

ended where you started, alone on a porch

with your memories.

II

Before we got back together for the second time,

you winter-hiked all alone. I showed up

when you’d returned. I thought you’d died

of hypothermia. Your wet socks hung

on the back of a chair, and I begged you

from the couch to trust me. When you

said we should be apart, I told you

that you didn’t love me. How cruel I was

when I was young—so afraid of losing

you that I always did. There’s still

something about the cold and the lonely men

that remind me of you, nights without

stars and springs without rains. I remember

hugging you there, once you agreed to try

again. I should have cradled your cold feet

in my hands, should have warmed you with soup

or a blanket. I should have left when you told

me to leave; I shouldn’t have made my leaving

your memory.

III

A tarot reader told me I see my fears

in my dreams. I often find you there,

in my sleep. I am twenty again,

and we are watching the sun-set peach

and fade behind blue mountains, in

the valley where we fell in love. Maybe

the biggest loss isn’t losing but forgetting:

forgetting the exact shade of peach, its halo

shape in the sky, forgetting the need to take

your hand just to feel your skin, the warmth

there. One day we will both die and maybe

before then, you’ll think of me. You’ll

remember the apartment with shag

carpet and mold in the walls, your Levi

comforter, the lovers you made love to

beneath it, and I’ll be one of them, one

of the reasons you loved, one of the reasons

you stare into the night and let your mind run away.

JARED SMITH

Like the Sun Over Primeval Earth

I like to think of sunshine

coming over the mountains

and filling each green fiber that grows

with the distance of uncounted miles,

but justice starts before that because

of the lives that settle into the silt of oceans

and the so slow grinding of continental drift

and the seeds that were planted millennia ago,

the earth rolling over into itself, rising upward

toward where the air is more thin and pure

and those seeds begin then to branch out as lichen

and moss springs at last from almost lifeless rock peaks

so that after time has been forgotten, gone unmeasured,

those soft and vulnerable green tendrils begin to reach

that sun

that came from beyond memory and beyond meaning.

Like this, I think of genetic memory beyond time

and of the seeds of human misunderstanding reaching out

and trying to carry human growth one more step beyond

this pitiful bag of rags we carry on our bone. We try,

but in the flash of a lifetime captured on media, most

things are done too fast, and what is fast is mostly wrong

and is buried in the arms of nations turned against each other.

I know it is the little things unnoticed that go on,

that get passed from one generation to another, one

Harriet Tubman, one Martin Luther King, one Kennedy,

one Gandhi, one starving boy not exposed to media but

stretched out upon the mountains, draped beneath the cosmos,

cold and dying but reaching out toward that greater source

of life, that sun that breathes life into our souls across darkness

that makes a difference across the raft of generations, that

builds justice beyond the understanding of tired men

and is justice that brings peace to those we never know.

CYNTHIA HOGUE

Cardiolesque (Phoenix, 2015)

1

You crumple

into a rictus–spell of–

pain in chest.

A black cat in the yard full of cactus, mesquite,

appears the morning you have the heart attack.

Earlier you’d left her water.

We leave for ER /

                         because you cannot

                                                                      stop for Death.

2

You soar away

            to die,

                         revive.

I follow the siren, the

flashing of the distant light,

shorn

from you. Later, I’ll feed

the black cat as if

to save you.

CYNTHIA HOGUE

the cloud of unknowing

for Norman Dubie & Elizabyth Hiscox

I while at canyon’s edge

on mesa jagged-cut. far below:

an ample cloud beneath which

the river’s centuries’ flow

of late drought-stopped–

a drouth of vertue,

and dearth of all repentance–

I stand in the reddening light

of earth’s ruin, our knowing

reaching of the tipping points,

to see the length of dry riverbed,

to then cross the bridge willed

ignorance spans,

painted blue to blend with

the vaster blue above

where rests wisdom’s

lucid stone, not rising and not sinking:

I wish this one thing could stay true,

be counted on.

the bridge sways in a widening wind.

the cloud gyres.

RICK KEMPA

Blue Windows

We sit on a pair of rocks beneath a huddle of immense cottonwoods and fuel up on whatever protein and sugar we can scavenge from our depleted packs: the last peanuts and M&Ms, one final slab of jerky, dark and dense like the narrows we’ve been navigating, a precious wedge of dried apricot that glitters in the late-day light like a Colorado River rock. I produce an ancient chunk of bagel, wave it at John (who cringes), and savor it.

All day we’ve been working our way in reverse through the drainage system