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Breech

since it was halloween anyway,
they carved a big jack-o-lantern grin
just above my pubic bone
and from inside that sinister smile
they scooped you out, pumpkin seeds and all.

i’d asked you to turn for months
towards the light, towards the exit sign,
towards that nice warm spot in me,
breeching seeming not just a position
but a breach in our contract
that you’d enter the world
not just loiter there, umbilical cord
looped around your neck
like a condemned man at the gallows
waiting for someone to kick the stool away.

in the end, they removed you
like tonsils, a lump of appendix, something
you get ice cream and mylar balloons for as a kid.     
as I lay on the gurney,  enough light above me
to bleach my bones, the nurses looked on,
and the residents, and the med students
and I don’t know, maybe popcorn was passed around.
I couldn’t see from behind the screen
where they carved me up like a big fat dinner carcass,
chirping away with their happy questions– “what’s the name?” and
“what would it have been if it had been a boy?”

it wasn’t till they held you over me,
a dangling cloud of blood,
my arms splayed out and strapped down that way,
Jesus on the cross style, that I realized for the first time
you weren’t something heavy I’d eaten for lunch,
a bowling ball implanted in a dream.
You were mine.
then they gave you to your father
and they wheeled me away.Kate Delany’s publications include a book of poetry, Reading Darwin, published by Poets Corner Press. Her poetry and fiction has most recently appeared in Art Times, Sotto Voce and Chicken Pinata. She lives in Collingswood, NJ with her husband Seth, daughter Samara, and cats Esmeralda and Emile Zola.

Where is the fox

when I can’t see her               
long tongue lapping
a drink from the leafy
pool in my birdbath

has she registered
with a political party
does she attend
home-and-school

night to fight against
sweetened drinks
in vending machines
as bad for her cubs

is she friends with
the doe and four
fawns who also
troop through

my yard or the buck
with his full rack
of antlers looking
like an insurance

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does the raccoon
advise the vixen
on mascara

length of eyelash
have they agreed
it’s silly
to shave their legs

will the fox catch
a neighborhood cat
will she lie down
with a lamb chop

topped with mint
and a paper ruffle
where do her feet
foxtrot at night?
Margaret A. Robinson’s new chapbook of poems, about breast cancer and love, is called "Arrangements" and is available at the Finishing Line Press website.  Robinson teaches in the creative writing program at Widener University and lives in Swarthmore.

Devon Drive

I am trying to remember blackberries
on my tongue, and my mother’s rolling pin
flattening out the oily dough for pies,
and didn’t dad lay the slate porch we etched in chalk,
and didn’t we nap on the hot slate
until our eyelids glowed orange,
and how many times did the woods drip secrets,
and how many steps were there to sock island
where silver minnows darted back    
and forth like underwater flags rippling,
and wasn’t it below the abandoned railroad tracks
where we dug in clay mines to shape ashtrays,
and what it was like to win that crab-apple fight
with the Rockwood gang. I know there was always
wonder, and when the sky streaked pink under
a pulling moon, weren’t our mothers
always calling us home. Pat O’Brien teaches Creative Writing at Penn State Brandywine.  Her poems have appeared in Philadelphia Poets, Mad Poets Review, and Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts. She lives in West Chester with her husband and two daughters.

ILLUMINATION: 2005

They took away our windows for two weeks,
ripped them from kitchen walls with wonder bars,
then nailed up sheets of chipboard, while we waited
for new windows to be manufactured
in a long steel building somewhere east of Trenton.
It was never really cold or hot inside, just dark,
just really dark; the place stayed dry
and we had fun one night shooting
insulating foam into the cracks before a massive
cold front blew across the Appalachians,
but even then the dark was working on us.
We had one trouble light, a single bulb
that sat inside an orange cage, suspended
from a hook above the pantry door. That,
and the TV’s nervous blue light, flashing
its parade of hooded men in orange jumpsuits,
bound and kneeling down on both sides
of the ocean: that was our illumination.
The windows came in, insulated, thermo-
paned, their sashes riding oiled blue sliders
like a guillotine. Light came through them,
made our canary hearts swing wide inside
their cages, but after so much dark,
we could not shake our boxed-in
bitterness: our view was not the same.Hayden Saunier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, 5 A.M., Rattle, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. A 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee, her first book of poetry, Tips for Domestic Travel, is due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2009.

Bedtime Story

If we tell another day with-
out wasted breath
or furtive glances set
free from hazy dreams
and desire, I could pretend
your real life
away.  Standing on the ledge

with an eye on lamp-lit
streets, I’ll hold your
hand for that first step
into lands hewn
from letters or
shapes of cobwebs
and dew in the eyes of bright

Tigers who measure it out, all
even, and name the breeze.
And you are once again a World
War One flying ace with a shrug
to steel wings and I’m Billy
the Kid as I dust off
my britches and peek

through the sheet
to your unwritten
tale: a rhyme unraveling
on the crease of a carpet
aired out from your soles
as you forgive an old line
behind the coat and hat
of a gentleman’s

parade.  Here then the pen
on your page draws the hem
of my smile as poppies fall loose
from my tongue, one draught
to help you sleep
soundly tonight without stolen
sight to ever after’s addictions.Gwen lives and works in the West Chester area.  She graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2005, and was born in Santa Fe.

In Lieu of Flowers

In lieu of flowers,
we’ll bring that time you burned
toast and stunk up the whole down-
stairs, and the sound of your boots
through empty halls.  We’ll bring that

old brown hat, seven August meteorites,
and the hoarse Harrison, hoarser McCartney,
trembling, tired, joyous— only one more
time, I promise —helter skelter out the window
and into the open
     air.

We’ll bring the change from your pocket: pennies,
for luck.  We’ll bring the bar-
codes, the maps, the trail hiked so often as to feel
like coming home, now long and wicked, switched
and swiveled, green; we’ll bring the thunder
dodged all the unwound way
back to the car.

And we’ll bring that summer
the birds got into the woodshed,
pried the dry-packed Burpees,
     scattered
          cosmos
from door to hedge— that sum-
mer you let it all grow wild.
Gwen lives and works in the West Chester area.  She graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2005, and was born in Santa Fe.

Tupperware

[img_assist|nid=4777|title=Eddie by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=269]Tupperware, Ziploc, Rubbermaid. Circle, square, cube, cylinder, shallow rectangle, deep rectangle, long rectangle, almost-a-square-but-not-quite rectangle, big circle, small circle. Circle with the little spout thingy. Rectangle with the clicky edges. Green, orange, clear, clear with blue tint, clear with green tint, translucent blue, sickly sea green. Permanent, disposable, semi-disposable, Chinese soup takeout. Warped, melted, scratched, grated, scraped.

It was inevitable, but all the same he hadn’t thought they would get there so soon. Not one lid would match up with one receptacle. They had reached perfect Tupperware entropy.

Let’s make sure I’m not being premature, he thought, and so began to sort into the broad categories. Circles on the stovetop, lids on the right front burner. Rectangles on the kitchen cart, lids propped between the trivets and the cutting board. Squares on the little strip between the stove and sink, lids balancing in a pile over the edge.

He’d have to be careful not to knock them over.

He knocked them over immediately.

He picked the lids up and put them on the little bit of dishwasher that projected from beneath the microwave instead. The deep ones he piled by the coffee maker on the other side of the sink, lids propped between the olive oil and vinegar.

He stood in the center of the narrow galley that they pretended was a kitchen, all of them laid out within his reach, and checked them. He checked each circle container against every circle lid, and even when it was obvious that it wouldn’t fit, he went through the motions, pressing lid to container lip despite the inches that gaped between them, just to be sure.

But it wasn’t quite as precise as all that. The lids for the squares might have been rectangles, and the deep cylindrical containers could also be circles, so those all had to be cross-checked as well. There was one circle that kind of fit, and might even have been the original lid—he checked, and the brand was the same—but it had been so warped and stretched that he couldn’t make them come together.

Actually he could, but the slightest touch popped them back apart again. 

And so, half an hour after he had started, he gave up and put them all back in the cupboard.

And that was when it hit him. Even if they got a new piece now, it would have to go back in that cupboard. Even if she found one—and she would find one, briskly, efficiently, in those early hours before he was even awake—it would eventually go back into the cupboard and be lost to him (if not to her). All he could do was shove them back into that space where they angled and jostled against one another and the rest of the dishes, big lids below and small lids tucked in on the side, always threatening to spill over and knock the drinking glasses to the floor.

He could take them out and throw them all away, but they were hers, really. So many of them had preceded his residence in the house, so who was he to relegate them to the trash? What if a lost lid turned up in the dishwasher or under the kitchen cart? There might still be one that fit, and his rashness would have lost it.

Twenty or thirty pieces. Two people. Ten years. Moderate use. Potlucks, takeout, Christmas cookies from one or the other set of parents. And none of them fit together any more.

He thought about chucking them all and going to the store to get new ones, but then he realized that in another ten years he’d be right back in the same spot, so why bother? And the next ten years would go by faster than the last—a smaller fraction of a life, after all, a more-or-less quarter versus a more-or-less third. And once another decade had gone by, he would be standing in the same spot looking for lids, wondering where this one had come from, how this other one had gotten so badly mauled, why none of them would fit, and how she kept finding ones that did.

He opened the cupboard again. Cramped kitchen, cramped cupboard, the house itself too small. It had always been too small, though it hadn’t seemed that way back when they still came together with a satisfying snap on the sofa, at dinner at the kitchen table. When they still fit so well together in the bed, arriving at the same time, the bedtime ritual after the late news and maybe some stupid show with cops and lawyers or a bunch of doctors whose names she could remember but he never could, the do-si-do in and out of the tiny bathroom, the arm that fit beneath the pillow, the nose that fit into the small hollow at the back of the neck, the hips that pressed up into hips from behind. The fit of his dreams and her aspirations, hers still well formed, his scratched and warped and melted and maybe not fit for fitting anywhere anymore.

Laptop, cellphone, camera bag, hard drive. Car keys, office keys, passport, wallet. Toothbrush, medicine, deodorant, toothpaste. Sport coat, rain jacket, winter jacket, sunglasses. Underwear, trousers, jeans, socks, dress shirts, t-shirts, sweater. Manila folders, books, notepads, manuscript. Pocketknife, favorite pen.

J.A. Klemens  is  a biologist who lives in Philadelphia.

BJ Schaffer is Dead

[img_assist|nid=4773|title=Cornfield Indiana by Vincent Natale © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=132]Twenty years ago I was famous.  Not so famous that my torrid affairs with young starlets were covered by national magazines, and being thirteen at the time, that wasn’t really much of a problem.  I was famous enough that strangers followed me around the Montgomery Mall when I went shopping.  Famous enough that even now, a lifetime away, I can still Google “BJ Schaffer” and find web pages ranging from IMDB to Wikipedia that relate to acting jobs I did before I was old enough to drive.  It is a surreal thought that, a hundred years from now, all of this information will exist in some massive computerized database, and there will be no mention of anything I’ve accomplished since.  I could cure cancer, win a Pulitzer, run for President, and someone, somewhere, would shrug and say, "Yeah, but didn’t he used to be on TV?"

I have no one to blame but myself.  When I was nine, I suddenly decided that I wanted to be an actor, and my parents were crazy enough to listen to me.  We were directed for advice to the only person in my hometown with any professional acting experience.  Bill Hickey had appeared in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” as an extra for about half a second, and was therefore qualified in our eyes.  He told me to learn to sing, dance and act.  If I got good enough at any of those three, the rest would fall into place.  
Strangely enough, Bill was right. 

I haven’t thought much about this stuff  for  nearly twenty years, but by my recollection I won two major dance competitions, which secured me a meeting with Cathy Parker Management.  She began getting me auditions, and in short order, I’d appeared in over twenty national television commercials, performed in two major productions at the Walnut Street Theater, done a skit on Saturday Night Live, and worked as a regular cast member on the Nickelodeon series “Don’t Just Sit There.”   

My mom recently visited the Walnut Street Theater, and was shocked to see my photograph is still hanging in the lobby.  I guess the cleaning person never got the memo advising them to take it down. 

By the time I was twelve, my name appeared in the Horsham Township “Who’s Who” Directory.  It was a red booklet with the names of all of the important people in that small Pennsylvania town where I grew up.  It was the same town where my dad had been born and raised, and where he served as a police officer.  My grandfather and uncle lived there, too.  Small towns have a strange way of reacting to celebrity.  It’s slightly infectious.  At ten years old, I was given carte blanche to cease attending school with any kind of regularity.  The superintendant and I were on a first name basis.  It didn’t matter what tests I missed, what school programs I did not get involved in, what educational foundation I lacked.  They wanted me to perform at the talent show, which I did, dancing in a green and silver “space man” outfit designed by my mother.  They wanted me to be in the school play.  To this day, I can recite the lines of Prince Chulalongkorn, from “The King and I.”  When you are an ascending star, just beginning to acquire the smell of that alluring narcotic "fame," it’s impossible for people to not want to attach themselves to you.

It was routine for me to go to school for a few short hours, then leave to be driven to New York City.  I’d spend an hour in Manhattan auditioning, then return home.  I did this several times a week, for about three years, until I finally began living in Manhattan.  I remember my father looking at my first paycheck for “Don’t Just Sit There” in wonder.  My weekly pay was roughly $1,800.  My old man looked at me and said, “Jesus, B., you make more money than I do as a cop.” 

I spent every night learning lines, or practicing scenes for auditions.  We constantly plotted which career move needed to be made next.  The beat did not slow down on weekends.  These were devoted to dance, voice and acting classes.  To this day, I sometimes dream of riding in an empty car for endless stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike.  The road goes on and on and I never arrive where I am going.

By 1988, at fourteen, I was burned out.  You can only spend so many hours on the Turnpike, eating rest-stop cuisine.  You can only spend so many nights in motel rooms.  You can only go for so long before the reality of adolescence sets in.  When your laurels rest on being the Boy Next Door, it’s all downhill once your skin starts breaking out, your voice squeaks when you talk, and your body begins to change.  Plus, there’s always another, cuter wannabe waiting in the wings.  After four years of semi-celebrity, I just wanted to be a normal kid.  That’s the sign they hang on you when you are a child-actor.  “He’s such a normal kid,” they say.  Bullshit.  Normal kids play baseball.  Normal kids get used to turning in homework assignments.  Normal kids have friends.  Real friends.  Not phony show business friends.  

[img_assist|nid=4776|title=Springtime Swirls by Allison Levin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=198]Of course, when you remove someone from their natural habitat during the most fundamental years of their life, you can imagine it’s not the easiest thing for them to simply get back into the swing of things.  When I returned to my hometown in the middle of 9th Grade, I found myself a complete outcast.  People had developed deep friendships, forming groups based on shared interests, which I could not hope to penetrate.  Students took tests that they’d had years to prepare for, even if it was by simply learning the discipline of doing their homework.  I had none of those things.  At that point, I could not even join a sports team, because, at the age I should have been trying out for varsity, I’d hadn’t kicked a ball or swung a bat since Little League.

By the time my peers began to consider which college to attend, I’d become so used to answering the question, "When are you going to go back to acting?" that I really expected to make a big return to show business.  But the harsh reality is that contacts dry up fast in that world.  Also, it costs a lot of money to go back and forth to New York City, especially when you have no income and have to begin worrying about paying rent, buying food, gas, etc.  Unfortunately, at that point in my life, I had nothing else.  By the age of eighteen, I had to seriously consider the fact that I was a Has-Been.

Nothing fills me with dread as much as the shows on VH-1 about former Child Stars who became drug addicts, or are still plugging away, desperately seeking to recapture that glimmer of fame.  Eddie Munster is an old man.  He still goes to conventions dressed up in his old costume, hawking autographed photos.  Scott Schwartz, the kid who stuck his tongue to the flag pole in A Christmas Story and starred with Richard Pryor in The Toy, started doing porno.  Even the more legitimate, mainstream performers like Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan.  I look at what these poor kids have become, and I have to think that maybe, just maybe, if the people around them had waited to thrust them into the very adult world of the performing arts, they’d have a better foundation on which to build a decent life.  Maybe not such a famous life, but a good, decent, normal existence.   

These days I cringe when I hear friends talk about signing their kids up with a modeling agency.  You know, the one where you pay thousands of dollars to have a "portfolio" made, and the agency promises to start sending your kids on "auditions."  I always react badly when people suggest my kids have what it takes to "get involved with show business."  Don’t I know that my son has the personality and looks to be on a sitcom and become America’s Boy Next Door?  Of course he does.  Don’t I see that my daughter is beautiful enough to sell oodles of Pampers or Gerber’s baby food?  Of course she is.  But that will never happen. 

[img_assist|nid=4775|title=Blossom by Vincent Natale © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=130|height=221]Children should be children.  They should play, learn, get scraped up and brushed off, lose big games, win bigger ones, dance with a sweetheart, lose him or her to someone else, get a better one later, have big sleepover parties, and grow up without the pressures of having a career, or the expectations of an entire small town to be successful.

         BJ Schaffer is dead. 

         He was just a commodity.  A face in a photograph, a television personality, a small blip on the bright, vast universe of Entertainment.  You can know everything there is to know about him on the handful of web pages that still mention him, or bear his likeness. 

Me?  I’m a guy who worked at a gas station to make ends meet while I went to the Police Academy.  I scrubbed toilets, worked landscaping and mopped laboratories late at night.  At 34 years old, I’m a police detective who makes his living putting bad people in dark places.  I’m a father to two children, and I can tell you that their love and admiration means more than the vacant adulation of the masses on any level.  It’s been a long, curving road toward the man that I am now, and to be honest, I sometimes struggle with how to tell people that I used to be on television.  It’s an embarrassing subject.  My life is not a famous one, and unless you’ve been where I’ve been, you might not understand why I’m glad for that.    Bernard J. Schaffer is a police detective in the Philadelphia Suburban Region. He is a lifelong resident of Montgomery County. His previous work has appeared in "American Police Beat Magazine," "Comic Zone," and "The Enemy Blog." 

Local Author Profile: Walt Maguire

[img_assist|nid=4680|title=Monkey See by Walt Maguire|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.encpress.com/MS.html|align=right|width=150|height=235]What if apes were living side-by-side the human species, wearing Urban Outfitters, taking public transportation and even talking? What would they talk about? That’s the question author Walt Maguire seeks to answer in his new novel Monkey See (ENC Press, Summer 2009). Laced with wit and satire, Monkey See follows Ed, a Bonobo ape, as he struggles to find his place in society. Complete with a love story, ethical uncertainty and lessons in ape etiquette, Monkey See is sure to leave you seeing the world from a different perspective.

Tell me about your new novel, Monkey See.

It’s set in a time when not only have scientists cracked the code for giving animals intelligence, but it’s becoming a little too commonplace. Ed, a young ape, is trying to find his way through the new social order, stuck halfway between American pop life and what the other apes want – finding a job; getting an apartment; going to parties; planning the overthrow of humans, or not. I’ve described it as Planet of the Apes from the ape’s point of view, but it’s more a coming of age story…with bananas and robot tanks.

What research did you do when writing your book?

Quite a lot – I was already interested in Jane Goodall’s work, and I knew about the Gorilla Foundation’s work with sign language, though like most people I’d never really studied their research. Apes have been studied, trained, and written about since at least the days of the Greeks.

What inspired you to include advice on “throwing inter-species dinner parties, parenting do’s and don’ts, conducting your own fiendish experiments, taunting caged monsters?” It must have been great fun to write such advice.

Fun? It’s very serious stuff. Okay, maybe not. I originally just planned to do a short etiquette book, but I soon found myself filling in a plot. Also, I discovered I don’t know anything about etiquette. But there were a lot of “rules” spread out through the movies, things that had never really been catalogued in one place. I had fun fitting them together coherently.


What was the most challenging part of writing your book?

I was so wrapped up in the story it took me a while to realize that a story about talking animals could be misinterpreted as a metaphor. I wanted to be careful that I wasn’t unintentionally making an anti-immigration argument, for instance.  I’m talking about actual talking animals. The point I was trying to make is that monster stories are moving from being a metaphor for discussing social issues to being an actual, possible situation. Something I hadn’t planned for the book is a running commentary on parenthood – the scientist who’s “enhancing” these creatures is, when you get down to it, a bad parent. He brings them into the world and then abandons them emotionally, not to say twists them to his own ambitions.

What is your favorite scene in Monkey See?

There’s a scene where Ed is worried about Gigi and tries to get help from a militant chimpanzee named Chekchek. The chimp hates Ed for being so easygoing, but he thinks Ed has secret information Chekchek needs for his revolt. The more they talk the more Ed drives him crazy. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to writing a Three Stooges routine.

“They remembered what we had made them think unimportant. We wanted them to type, we wanted them to speak, and we did not care about trees to their way of thinking. Cogitomni watched the great muscled back disappear into a pine and thought We cannot explain ourselves to them either.” This is a central idea to your book. Do you have any underlying social commentary in this passage?

One of the things I ran across in my research was a comment on the nature of language, which said, basically, that even if animals learned English, their frame of reference would be completely different. It reminded me of all the remarks over the years about “people not like us” – it ties back to the old idea that prejudice is largely based on assuming the other guy is somehow sub-human and unworthy of fair play.  The human race is very creative at making excuses.

What do you hope readers think about after reading your book?

Lunch, first. Buying more copies of  Monkey See as presents, second.  And caring a little more about what happens to those who depend on them, which I would count as third unless you plan to invite someone to lunch or buy them a copy of the book, in which case “caring” immediately leapfrogs to first on the list, and well done.

Local Author Profile: Dennis Tafoya

[img_assist|nid=4579|title=tafoya|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=66|height=100]In a phone interview about his first book, Dope Thief, Philadelphia author Dennis Tafoya marveled at his “incredible luck” at being published by Minotaur Books. He talked about a woman who first read him on the web and introduced him to the amazing “big picture editor”, Laurie Webb, and then to a manager, who found him an agent, who then sold the book…“It was like winning the lottery over and over again,” he said.

 

Dope Thief, already highly acclaimed by early reviewers, is worthy of Tafoya’s good fortune.

 

Although Dope Thief is categorized as crime fiction, it is truly a literary novel in which Tafoya says, “I played with the conventions of the genre but didn’t let myself become limited by them.” Early in the book the reader learns that 30-year-old Ray, the principal character, was in “juvie” before his sweetheart graduated high school, before she died in the stolen car he was driving. With a mother who abandoned him and a father in prison, Ray thought he was born to be “in the life” of crime.

 

Readers are artfully transported into Ray’s heart and mind through Tafoya’s straight forward, in-your-face description. Tafoya said, “I have an impulse to be terse. I try to be evocative in a short space.” For example, when Ray’s step mother wishes him Happy Birthday, Tafoya writes, “He could smell her, stale Arpège and Marlboros; and the house, something fried from last night, wet dog and dust and Lysol. The smell of home.” Later Ray’s memories were described as like “reading a terrible book and not wanting to read more pages because you knew the story just got worse”. In the same way, I couldn’t stop reading the book but dreaded how it would end.

 

The action, often searing with brutality yet softened by introspection and glimpses of redemption, involves the lucrative, sordid business of drugs: street dealers, crazed meth-heads and big time syndicates. It is set in Philadelphia’s suburbs where Tafoya grew up and adjacent rural Bucks County where he now lives. “Although I had a conventional childhood, albeit with my share of teenage stupidity, I was always fascinated by crime. I never knew hard core criminals but I understand desperation and like Ray, I often question myself about how we get where we are.”

 

Although Dope Thief is his first published book, Tafoya has been writing since high school. “I had to put serious writing aside after I got married and when the children were growing up,” he said. Continuing to work full time in industrial sales, Tafoya is in the process of writing a new mystery book. “I write in my head as I drive along between clients and then start real writing at home after dinner,” he said.

 

Tafoya says his family is “thrilled, excited and maybe a little surprised” about his new-found success. Although he notes “there is nothing like children and a copy editor to help to control any run-away ego!” Tafoya deserves to feel proud. Not only did his publisher recognize a terrific new author, but the title Dope Thief is his own and he even designed the cover.

 

Dope Thief is available online and in bookstores on April 28th.

 By Christina Weaver, author of the memoir, What You Lose on the Roundabout