open palm print spring 2013

$4.00ISSN 2164-2699

spring 2013

Copyright © March 2013 by Open Palm Print

Open Palm Print is a Michigan-based literary magazine currently accepting nonfiction, fiction, essays, and poetry, as well as photography,

drawings, and other two-dimensional art forms. Check us out on the web at www.openpalmprint.com.

The views contained herein are solely those of the author or artist and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Palm Print.

All rights revert to the author or artist upon publication.

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fr iend by David Birkam

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Blue by Anna Goodson

Last night I jumped out of the tallest tree in Coleridge Park. I only ended up with a flattened lung and bruises covering my skin like a thin winter coat. On the way to the emergency room my older sister squeezed my hand so hard that I screamed. Tubes stuck out of my throat like many-legged insects. I remember my sister’s face, her lips pulled back in a frown that never ended, her hair still wet from her evening shower. But mainly, I remember the pale blue on the inside of my eyelids.

In the hospital they put me in a room with a view of Coleridge, where my sister and I used to go when we loved each other more than I loved pain. We were fierce back then, biting at each other’s hands and throats until we tasted the iron of deep earth. I watched a young girl and her father on the playground, fascinated by the way their hands found each other, how they held each other’s names in their mouths. My parents said, “How are you feeling? Do you need some crackers?” Outside the father pushed the girl on the swings and she yelled and yelled for more.

My sister came in every day and sat by my bed. She didn’t talk; she came to make me feel the silence. We understood each other the way plants grow, how their roots extend deeper into the soil as they try to get closer to the sun. We used to collect seashells,

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especially conches, which smelled like salt and loam and something I would later recognize as desire. We would fight over them, break them, plant them in the garden, eat small pieces of the shell on dares. In the middle of the night I would often startle awake to find her lying in bed, ear calmly pressed to a conch, a second conch placed over my mouth. “I’m listening to you breathe,” she would say. I don’t remember when we stopped loving each other like that, effortlessly, organically. Was it the first time she found me in the bathroom with my veins open, red lines tracing the inside of my arm? Was it the day she found me by the kitchen sink, vomiting up our father’s half-used cigarette? I always watched for the smile when she pulled me back to land. In the hospital, she slept, her mouth tucked up at the corners: Daedalus, three months later, finding a feather in his hair and laughing himself breathless.

***

When the little girl wasn’t at the park, I watched the other patients. My favorite was an old man with a wrinkled head who shuffled by my door several times a day to flirt with the nurses. They called him “Mary Sunshine” and brought him watery applesauce and a county newspaper; he read it back-to-back and promptly forgot everything. He’d slowly maneuver down the hallway with his walker and his many IV drips, his feet in women’s slippers, and shout, “Hello Mary Sunshine!” into all the doors. When he reached the nurse’s station he stood there with a grin and those bright pink slippers and shifted his weight back and forth, back and forth, for maybe five minutes. Then he dinged the little bell a few times, cleared his throat, and sang “My Merry Oldsmobile,” his voice a faulty blender. The nurses put up with him for a few minutes and then escorted him back to his room, them grimacing, him singing the whole way, a blue vein jumping in his throat.

Spring 2013So Long by Trevor Grabi l l

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Pulse by Br yan McAttee

A spinet thrums chords from an open window next door,rolling percussion in the traffic, and summer strings

wind through bottles in the gutter to create bass lines.A chord on every corner pulls men home, from taverns,

slowly. Wine braids with breeze, making their bodies swaylike vines of willows that conduct the city

to crescendos. Nighthawks gather on sidewalkslaughing in tenor and soprano. High-heels snap

off the concrete, like fingers after a song, as they dancethe avenue. Threads of moon hang off the sky painting it

Jazz. Tonight the streets are full of pulse.It throbs in streetlights, scrawling lyrics

in cursive with sewer steam, humming in the vibratoof a tattooed man’s throat while he waits for the bus,

and floating from overpasses like a horn playersighing before filling the valves with music.

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I Don’t Feel Repulsive by Greg Teachout

My mother is in the next aisle, telling someone off. What’s unique about the way my mother tells off a stranger is that she also gives them an education. She says things like, Just so you know? We can hear you. We can hear you because these walls of cereal don’t actually block out sound, so when you’re an aisle away from somebody, maybe that’s not the ideal time to start making fun of him.

I think this is hilarious, so I unleash a sort of nasal keening sound that I imagine sails high and far and fills the grocery store. I feel that keeping joy to yourself is a sin.

I’m not really in a position to peek around the corner, but it sounds to me like the woman who my mom is berating and educating makes the sort of plosive flapping sound that one makes when one is trying especially hard not to laugh and laughs anyway. I assume this is because the woman is nervous and sobered by my mom’s confrontation and just beginning to feel very guilty at being caught ridiculing the less-fortunate, when here it comes again, my sound, and the irony or something makes the woman spit a laugh between pursed lips. This, too, I find hilarious, so I let the sound fly again.

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Shoppers generally possess all the manners that drivers lack; obviously, it’s a matter of proximity. There’s accountability. Plus it’s a lot harder to cut in front of a tired old dignified face than the anonymous perpetual smile of a bumper and headlights. Even still, people can’t help but comment on me, roll their eyes, whisper behind walls of cereal.

I am like a meteor: the impact of my entrance into a grocery store creates tides of feeling. Ripples of discomfort, and of gratefulness. Some people look at the ground, others take care to meet my eyes (which is admittedly difficult). But regardless of your position, I cannot be ignored. Seeing me, half-rictus crawling up my face, winking eye—it plucks something inside people that’s much older than civility. A repulsion borne deep in their biology. It’s hardly their fault, when they react the way they do, any more than it’s their fault when the sight of vomit, for some people, begets more of the same. So it’s altogether understandable when someone like this woman, who I have yet to see, hidden beyond all these cornflakes, says to her friend that I sound just like a vacuum cleaner. I don’t, by the way, but that’s not the point. It doesn’t reach anything inside me to hear that sort of thing.

My mother, however, is a different story. She used to lower her head and pretend she didn’t notice how people reacted to me. I think that there must be a sort of shame in having squeezed something like me out; at least that’s what I see in her face. But since she started going gray, ”early,” it’s almost as if she’s just waiting for someone to ridicule me so that she can strike. I think of us—my mom and me—as being like a shark in the grocery store, swimming through cosmetics and produce until we smell blood—a comment here, a dirty look there—and then it’s all chomping and guts and guilt as my mom reminds people of the arbitrary nature of the cosmos, of how lucky and ignorant they are, of what

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