Open Your Mouth and Say Something

       The Laurel Review comes to us from Northwest Missouri State University.  The Spring 2010 issue contains 63 poems, two essays, three short stories, and two reviews.  The cover design, by Kim Ziegler, is colorful and inviting.  So let’s enter.

       In nine paragraphs, less than two full pages, John Blair tells a powerful story in “The Fish.”  One character, no dialogue.  Walker is a sport fisherman who has drunk too much because what he “hated about fishing alone was that there was no one to talk to.”  He allows his jon boat to drift to shore, where he discovers another fisherman’s trot line and grows curious.  Thus begins his downfall.  Because of the story’s brevity, I don’t want to give too much away, except to say that what happens is nothing short of a perfect morality play, and I say that with the greatest respect.  There’s an echo of Hemingway here, Hemingway crossed with Roald Dahl.  You come away asking yourself, Would Walker have behaved the same way had he been sober?  Was it simply his human nature that led him to do what he did?  Did it come down to desperation borne of loneliness?  “The Fish” keeps you wondering long after you finish reading.

      In his poem “Kansas Freaks,” Walter Bargen tells us that “Death can / only be flat and lonely as Kansas.  This life of heat, / humidity, wheat, the official one.”  The title refers not only to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s first LP, Freak Out, which was important to the speaker in his Midwest formative years; it also refers to the Bender family, who in Parsons, Kansas, between 1871 and 1873, “bludgeoned, robbed, / and shoved through a trap door in the floor” at least 11 victims.  The frontier is called “horrific” and “festering,” and yet it’s not as horrific as “Kate, the Bender daughter,” who “lured men ‘with a tigerish grace.’”  Music, chiefly Zappa’s, is the speaker’s saving grace in such a barren landscape, such a barren childhood, and it’s only “Three decades later, at a luncheon held in juvenile detention,” that he learns from a newspaper article that “State officials decided to remove the story / of ‘The Bloody Benders’” from a “bronze roadside historical plaque.”  We discern from the end of the poem that it’s Zappa’s music itself which has prompted these memories, as it’s “on remastered CD’s” that Zappa sings, “’Kansas, Kansas, it can’t happen here.’”  This is one of the best Kansas poems I’ve read in a while.

     Miracles by definition are hard to come by, and in Jaswinder Bolina’s lovely poem, “My Face Instead of the Virgin Mary,” we live in an age when they can scarcely be found at all:

In an oxidation stain beneath the highway overpass

and in a smudge of oil on the window pane

and in the scorched surface of a slice of toast,

my face instead of the Virgin Mary.

     The speaker’s “plain face,” not that of the Virgin Mary, can be seen “in Lourdes and in Clearwater / and in Finca Betania.”  Even metaphor is a thing of the past:  “The sun is not a rose, red / helmet of evening, / the sky is not a cornea.”  In a way, this existential landscape is bleaker than Kansas in the previous poem.  Constellations are merely “winking beacons of the radio relay tower.”  Everything is what it is, and nothing is supernatural or special in any way.  The last line, “Why would you tell me the things that hurt you?” tells us that “my face instead of the Virgin Mary” is “unable to relieve or to heal you.”  This is a sad, despairing, yet linguistically beautiful poem.