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Poetry
C 5 X - SPOT
Heightened through elevated states of awareness.
The one-way path leading to decency and acceptance appear darkened before swollen eyes.
An uncanny resemblance plays a major feature in what is now classed as ' undesirable '.
The situation causes tension, nerves and flushes of embarrassed hues.
Silent the dementia of time hastily passes.
A rapid pace sets all deadlines as vital.
To be completed / achieved with no / nor queries posted.
Salt laden - A lift of heads proves the sadness in occupancy.
So descriptive though eternally silent in an endless struggle.
EVE
Severed - Detached from long time favourable wish lists.
Fractured - Dazed ; Lost amid numerous choices.
Enticing options generate hesitancy and confusion among ranks.
To seek an outlet for pleasure, enjoyment and personal satisfaction.
Exhausted lights shine dim, shadowed by the path in which to follow.
An environment fuelled through hysteria and the underlining forgiving specifics.
TIER
A sideshow attraction generating flavoured views.
Moths to the light - A sense of irony presently showcased.
Again and slowly overtime thoughts stream to those less likely implied to utilise an own sense of imagination.
Growing larger on mass, untouched ideas swell to catastrophic proportion.
Options aplenty wallow down, forged into a personal belief that they appear useless and unworthy.
Assuming weariness has taken an everlasting,
The future face of existence grows with an enticingly populated strength.
-- all poems by Scott Villarosa
Fiction
Sour Girl
by Lisa Thompson
It was explained to me late one night, after the party had already broken up and the last of the stragglers had made it out the front door. My roommate Evan and I were sitting in the hallway that separated our respective bedrooms. He was on his tenth or twelfth Redhook, not unusual for a Thursday night, but he was in one of his waxing philosophical moods. I was as usual the perfect captive audience.
"There are two kinds of girls in this world," he said. "Sweet girls and sour girls. And they are both absolutely essential to the happiness of the modern American male."
"How so?" I asked.
"Sweet girls," he explained, "they're the ones you date. They're the ones that you take to the movies or out to dinner, the ones you can tell your mom about. But the catch is they make you wait until like your twentieth date before they'll put out. And then they want it to be this candlelit, romantic music-type event. And then they start with the questions- do you think I'm pretty? When are you going to take me to meet your parents? Do you love me?"
He paused to finish off his beer and conduct a half-hearted search for his cigarettes. I gave him one of mine and glanced down to the end of the hall where our other roommate Mindy was presumably screwing her boyfriend. Every few seconds, her headboard would smack up against the wall and cause this thud thud sound to reverb out across the hardwood floors and high ceilings. If Evan noticed, he wasn't letting on.
"Now, sour girls are a whole different story," he continued. "You don't want to take a sour girl out to dinner. You don't want to take her out at all. And you certainly never tell your mom, let alone your friends, about her. Sour girls are good for one thing and one thing only. Fucking."
Fucking.
"It's all about finding the proper balance between the sweet girl in your life and the sour girl in your bed. Therein lies the challenge."
I didn't ask him which category I fell into because I already knew the answer and I didn't want to have to hear him actually say it. Also I held some sort of vague hope that the simple fact that he was telling me these things meant that I had somehow transcended categorization in his mind. That through his eyes, I had ceased to be a "girl" and was now only seen as a "friend". Because as I scanned through my mental card file of semi-boyfriends and one night stands, I realized that other than my friends' boyfriends, Evan was the only guy I currently knew who I had not had sex with.
Okay, so not the only guy I knew. There was that guy Matt with the big brown eyes and the tattoos who worked at the café up the street. But definitely the only guy I spoke with on a consistent basis.
"Now Mindy," Evan whispered loudly, the grin on his goateed face widening. "Mindy is a sour girl that poses as a sweet girl. She likes to play it off like she's this pure and innocent little angel. She puts on a good show and nine out of ten guys buy in without a second thought. That's how she gets them. And then as soon as they realize that she's actually going to fuck them, for a moment they wonder, 'Could this be what all those love songs, all those dead poets were talking about? Could there really be a girl that I want to hang out with and fuck?' That's when she goes in for the kill. That's when she lets her sour self emerge. But it's too late for the guy. He's already trapped. The lines have blurred and there's no turning back. He's already locked into the relationship."
Under the guise of simply being a curious individual and not at all an uptight feminist-type that would feel defensive upon hearing such unflattering blanket generalizations, I posed the question of whether there weren't also sweet guys and sour guys out there in the world. How did he know, I asked, that these "sweet" girls he was introducing to his friends and parents didn't also have sour guys waiting in the wings? How could he be so sure that once he dropped them off after a date, they didn't wait for him to turn the corner and then go right back out for a night of raunchy sex with their guy on the side?
But Evan just shook his head, a flurry of ashes falling like snowflakes onto his jeans. "Girls aren't like guys. Girls want to be intimate. They want attention. They want to be loved. Some girls think they can get it through lively conversation, others through blow jobs and doggy style. Guys, on the other hand, they just want a steady supply of good sex and a nice looking girl to show off. And they instinctively know that the two are mutually exclusive."
I practically had to hold my breath to keep my calm façade from shattering into a hundred angry little pieces. Practically had to sit on my hands to keep from punching him in the arm or leg. How dare he sum up a whole gender in such simplistic terms! How dare he imply that all members of the female species can be lead so blindly in their pursuit of companionship!
But in yelling and crying and hitting and kicking, I knew I would only run the risk of further qualifying his statements, a classic "methinks she doth protest too much" scenario. So instead I said, "Which category did Kristen fall into?" even though I knew it was a sort of dirty maneuver considering the fact that he'd been drinking and was sleeping alone that night.
Even before I could get out the "sten" in "Kristen", his eyes dropped down to the beer bottle label that he'd been folding and unfolding origami-style over the course of our conversation.
"That was different," he said.
To hear him talk, you wouldn't think he was the type to mope around the house, blubbering like a seven-year-old girl for a month after his ex-girlfriend transferred to a university halfway across the country. He wore the same pair of paint-splattered sweat pants for weeks and went days without bathing. Only Mindy and I were witness to his temporary demise. More than once, I heard him on the phone telling his friends that he was banging some hot little Italian exchange student who was going back to Rome in two weeks. And that Kristen was calling him everyday, practically begging him to fly to Boston to see her, when in fact Kristen had told him she didn't want to see him, even after he'd maxed out his credit card buying the plane ticket.
"Then you can not deny that there are exceptions to the rule," I said, mostly because I wanted to hear him say it. Wanted to force him to vicariously reassure me that if there was one exception to the rule, surely there were others. But he wasn't in the mood to sooth my ego, even if he hadn't been so preoccupied with his own.
"Exception," he said finally. "There has only ever been and there will only ever be one exception."
It was getting late and Evan's sulking was crushing my buzz. So I left him sitting in the hallway, bemoaning his devastating loss all over again. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for him, but I was still angry about what he'd said and swore to myself that I would prove him wrong. Even if he didn't know it.
It took me three days to muster up the courage to go into the café down the street. Not that I hadn't been in there just the week before, but somehow everything changes when you know that your motives have changed.
Matt was working the cash register and the bitchy little redhead with the eyebrow ring was schlepping lattes. I pretended to be searching for something of utmost importance in my backpack, waiting for the line to die down. It's hard to be cute and flirty when you have a line of caffeine junkies pacing and clenching their empty coffee cups right behind you.
The bitchy redhead went on her break once the addicts were administered their meds, which was fine with me because I've never liked the way she raises her upper lip into a bastardized Elvis sneer whenever she sees me.
And then there was just Matt. Matt, with his passionate brown eyes. Matt, with his strong, tattooed arms. Matt, with that adorable little wave of golden brown hair that always fell over his eyes. Matt, my future boyfriend and living proof that the world is not the cynical, over-simplified place in which Evan claims to live. Matt, who stopped cleaning the steamer to stare right at me, right into my eyes.
"What can I get for you?" he asked.
"Latte," I squeaked. "Can I get a latte? Please?"
"Sure thing." His biceps twitched as he lifted the full pitcher of warm milk. The red and gold dragon on his forearm came to life, shimmying and swaying as he cranked the handle on the steamer.
"Hey, I think you're in my Thursday Bio lecture," I offered up, a wavering but necessary first step on my way to making him fall madly in love with me.
He set the latte down on the counter and wiped his hands on his jeans. "Yeah, you usually sit down in the third row, right, next to the guy with the goatee."
A lecture class of over a hundred students and he not only knew where I sat, but even whom I sat next to.
"Is that your boyfriend? The guy with the goatee?"
I forced a laugh to hide my horror, all the while swearing never to speak to or be seen in public with Evan ever again.
"He's just my roommate," I said. "I don't have a boyfriend." Dumb, dumb, dumb. Could I sound anymore pathetic if I tried?
"How much for the latte?" I asked, anything to change the subject. Matt just shrugged his shoulders.
"It's on the house."
I thanked him, and with nothing left to say, took a tiny sip of the warm frothy beverage he had made just for me.
"Hey, you wanna go for a drink after I get off work tonight?" Matt suddenly asked. "A friend of mine works at a bar just down the road, the Irish one on Clement. It's a pretty cool place."
"Yeah," I said. "That would be fun."
A drink! Not quite a romantic candlelit dinner, but a definite step in the right direction. Conversation, a few beers in a relatively well-lit public place, maybe a game or two of pool. And all at the bar where his friend worked, and where other friends of his would inevitably congregate. I was well on my way to dinner, even dinner and a movie. We'd be twirling pasta, crunching croutons and sipping wine at his parent's dining room table before the month was up.
I'd never dreamed it would be this easy.
Matt got off of work at 9:00pm and we walked down to the bar together. We soon discovered that we held the same opinion that our Bio professor looked like an eerily heterosexual version of Richard Simmons, if there could be such a person. We also agreed that the skinny girl with the round little glasses who always sat in the front row and asked about a million stupid questions every class was practically unbearable. And, as it turned out, we even shared the same fundamental belief that the only lecture that hadn't been utterly boring was the day we covered chromosomal abnormalities. Matt thought the single X's with their webbed hands and feet were the most fascinating, but I held strictly to the opinion that there could hardly be anything worse than being an XXY- growing up a seemingly normal little girl and then suddenly sprouting a penis at puberty. We agreed to disagree.
We took a table directly in view of the entry to the bar. The bartender looked about forty and wore a faded Hawaiian shirt. "Is that your friend?" I asked.
"Naa. He doesn't work Sunday nights."
He doesn't work Sunday nights.
"He has an early class Monday mornings."
An early class. Of course.
"So, what do you say we eliminate the middle man and just order a pitcher?"
Drinks were consumed. Conversations about friends, family, dreams and aspirations were had. Three games of pool were played. An almost perfect evening.
All the lights in the apartment were out as we approached my front door. Nobody home.
"I'd ask you in," I said, "except that I have class in the morning."
Matt was very understanding. "I had a good time tonight," he said. "I'd like to see you again."
I suggested Thursday, an ample four nights away so as not to seem too anxious.
"I don't mean to be forward or anything," Matt said, "but would it be okay if I kissed you goodnight?"
Swooon.
Warm, soft lips, like little pillows pressed against my mouth.
Delicious.
"Maybe you could come in for just a little while," I said, swayed by the pleasant tingling sensation between my legs.
A hot and sweaty night of sex was had, followed by at least an hour of chamomile tea and further discussion regarding lifelong hopes and dreams, followed by another round of hot and sweaty sex. Much fun was had by all.
I had to catch the 9:15 bus to make it to my 10 o'clock class and had no choice but to leave the sleeping man behind in my bed, hoping that he might later run into Evan on his way to the bathroom.
Political Science 110. Goddamn those G.E. requirements. Class was long and boring and torturous, so much so that I cut my English and Philosophy classes and headed home. Matt was gone, but had left his smell tangled up in my sheets and a note on my pillow.
Hey, it said. Had a great time last night. See you on Thursday. Maybe we can grab something to eat? Matt.
I had done it. I had overcome my sour nature. I was neither sweet nor sour, but a tasty combination of the two. Just like pork.
I broke from tradition and stayed clear of the café. No seemingly innocent walk-by's, no spying from behind the tinted windows of the bookstore across the street. I wasn't going to fuck this one up.
But every day and every night, I thought only of Matt. Of how he'd wanted to go into veterinary medicine every since his dog had been hit by a car when he was six. Of how he'd nicknamed his three year old niece "Ladybug". Of what I'd say the first time I met his parents. Of how our children would likely inherit his smoldering eyes and full lips. Of how he'd done that thing with his tongue?
Wednesday night. One more night, a simple twenty-four hours until we met again. I decided it was safe to indulge in a quick detour past the little Irish bar where it had all begun.
Four college-aged guys and a small blond girl occupied the table Matt and I had shared. The bartender was delivering overflowing pitchers of beer to their table, and I wondered if maybe they were Matt's friends, friends who I would soon be calling by their last names: Hey Smitty, pass me a beer and Yo Anderson, can I bum a cigarette? And then there was Matt, returning from the phone or the bathroom. Beautiful, dreamy Matt. My instincts were faster than my brain and I was out of sight long before he'd made it to his chair.
Matt pressed his lips to the rim of his pint glass and I thought, I'm going to marry this man. And then he pressed his lips to the mouth of the small blond girl and I thought, I'm going to destroy this man. Late that night, I found little solace in painting the words Prick, User and Lying Bastard on the café windows. Even dumping the festering contents of the café's trash cans into the entryway and pouring warm chunky expired milk over the door handles couldn't dull the sickening feeling in my chest and in my gut. As I worked, I cursed Matt for being Matt. I cursed Evan for being Evan. I cursed Kristen for making Evan what he was. I even cursed Mindy for her ability to temporarily straddle between the heaven and hell, night and day, life and death worlds of the sweet and the sour girl.
Once I was a sour girl who thought she could be sweet. Now I am just a bitter girl who knows better.
Personal Essay
Wagons
by Alan Newberry
When I was a boy, we all had wagons. Wagons to pull our friends in , to make into floats for parades, and to pretend we had cars.
Wealthy (we weren't wealthy) boys had wooden wagons with slats that fitted on the sides and white wall tires. Poor boys (we weren't poor) had red metal wagons which looked like fire trucks but were hard on knees when using as a pretend car. I had a wooden wagon without slats that was truly my favorite possession. It accompanied me all around the neighborhood for many years. In fact when I was in Grade 6 and still wearing short pants to school, I played with my wagon!
Well today it is all changed. The red metal wagons are still in the stores but they are smaller and still hard on the knees. The deluxe versions have wooden slats attached to the metal -- they look funny. Pure wooden wagons are a thing of the past, probably only available in a garage sale or a second hand store. Also wooden wagons can't be left outside. Which brings us to plastic -- everything is available today in plastic,including the best and most expensive wagons. It is a tough plastic, the removable sides and front are plastic, and the handle is plastic. These did not exist when I was a boy, but they do now and they are great wagons, flexible, large, and bullet-proof against rain, hail, sleet and snow. And now my grandson will have one from his grandparents to celebrate his second birthday. They are for children over 1.5 years. He may still be using it in Grade 6 too!
Book Reviews  Timbuktu by Paul Auster Paul Auster is an accomplished writer having given us amusing and poignant tales of interior stories of chance and intent. In Timbuktu he treats us to the thoughts and emotions of a dog, a special named Mr. Bones. Mr. Bones is the soul companion of one Willy Christmas, a once talented student against whom drugs, mental illness and bad treatment have conspired. Willy and Mr. Bones travel America spreading cheer and letting fate lead them. The problem is that Willy is dying which will forever change the life of Mr. Bones. Since he was a puppy Willy was the only master that the canine had ever known. We are treated to this particular dog's knowledge as he searches for a new master and reminisces about his old one. As is typical Auster works, Mr. Bones muddles through chance, magic and a unique perspective to give the reader some important insights into humanity and the often cruel and illogical way we act. Willy's fits of creativity are either the work of genius or the product of sickness. There are the poems of Willy's youth when he was full of promise, through to the hall of smells he created to empathize with Mr. Bones. Towards the end of the book the dog ends up living with a family after Willy dies, and he is introduced to the idea of the family vacation. The only concept of vacation Mr. Bones knew before was when Willy's mother would throw herself on the couch and exclaim that she was on vacation. The world that Auster creates is fantastic as in his other books. The action unfolds more as an emotion then a narrative. With flashbacks and clairvoyance we are treated to a unique vision that only Paul Auster can create.
-- Reviewed by Lance Anderchuk
Editor/Publisher: Christina Newberry
Contributors:
Lance Anderchuk
Alan
Newberry
Lisa Thompson
Scott Villarosa
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