Table Of Content

QUAD Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Lyrasis Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/quadliteraturear1998unse Strength, Carolyn Lewis quad The Literary and Arts Magazine of Birmingham-Southern College Spring 1998 y contents poetry art 4 Untitled front cover: whatever Newman -Glenny Brock -Lisa 6 Moss Beach, California back cover: Lift Up, Push In -Beth Rogers -David Smith J. Strength 8 TurkeyNeck and the Peanut Man 1 -Carolyn Lewis -Aimee Cleckler 3 Self Portrait CORNSHUCKING 9 -John Wilson -Liz Godwin 7 Ozymandias 10 Picnic -John Irons —Hunter Monasco 1 1 You're Not My Real Father 23 Eden -Brad Daly -Jerry Hinnen 22 Slow & Steady Wins The Race 23 Marushka -Chelsie Johnson -Glenny Brock 22 The Invasion Begins -Brian Spolans 28 The Final Face Andrew Bullington 24 Spring's Dawn -Lesli Bass 32 Written on the Body -Lauren Terry 26 Iron Gate Sculpture, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague -Simon Bevis 34 To All the Dead People I've Seen (About a Dozen) 27 Nicaraguan Man -Aimee Cleckler -John Wilson 36 Untitled 29 Weapon of Mass Destruction -Jennifer Heaven -Jamie Grimes 38 Hurricane Danny 30 Untitled -Liz Godwin -Carey Smith 31 Female Torso 40 Pilgrimage -John Irons -David Dorn 33 Dear Old Dad p rose -Murray Dunlap 12 Fuck MTV, and Fuck You Too 37 Untitled -David Dorn -Chris Forge 14 Concerning Lila 38 Birth of a Fairy -Glenny Brock -Julie Polk 42 My Concerns Are More Than Rational 48 Untitled -Ginny Ozier -David Dorn SelfPortrait, John Wilson untitled Ginsburg, you are dead & I am twenty, and I am unsure how to think about either one ofthese facts. I have a head cold. I am enjoying the air and light around me through muted and damp senses. I am seated beneath great sweet trees thinking ofmy beloved saying your name three times fast: — — "Allen Ginsburg Allen Ginsburg Allen Ginsburg. Isn't his name just nice?" The rolling, lolling syllables delightfully disabling our tongues. have looked toward your words awed and puzzled, Allen Ginsburg. I Bukowski accused you ofmewing, but ifthat's accurate, I'd say your purr, at the last, was just as loud as any howl. I am twenty; you are dead. Dare I use your death for my own poetics? I burned poems ofyours beneath these trees on the day you were buried, and threw prayers at this same sky. I remember my father speaking slowly of the first time he saw you on the street. He had never seen poet-flesh before, but there you were: plain as hair or lamp or floor, — smile small and hands in pockets almost awkward. And it delighted him that you were just a person. Just a poet person, ALLEN GINSBURG. & & I write shriek grin. Your death is heavy to me sometimes and sometimes the heaviness helps. How heaven, Allen Ginsburg? is You were surrounded by old friends and lovers on your so-called deathbed, so the papers said. And now the skies are telling me you are surrounded by friends and lovers again. When the rain falls just now, I decide it's you that sends it: the sweat ofangels, dancing madly, & & wings arms legs all tangled with yours. Wet dancing poetry-drops from the sky. — I laugh again my hair is wet & the notebook's wet. Your poems are wet and the earth is wet. You're dead & done, and I am twenty in the rain, writing poems & proudly praying, steadying myselfwith the certainty that I am capable of creation and may just be capable ofeven more. I am wishing that you'll rest in peace, and that I will live in frenzy. Allen Ginsburg, you are dead and I am twenty, and I am growing surer by the minute that things are as they're meant to be. You have fed the world some ofyour secret soul and the world is thankful for it. You have been made saintly and that has made me brave. I see which words are meant for loss and which are meant to save. & & I bless your words deeds heart, and dream of soulful, wordy fights. I kiss your words first & then my own, and swiftly say goodnight. -Glenny Brock Moss Beach, California 1958 We have come here to fish as my father did in his boyhood and he tells me of our history and my right to the cove. Here, on this rocky shelf, jutting into the ocean like a boxer's chin, he wants to teach me lessons learned at his father's harsh hands. The shovel cuts into coarse and dirty sand and lays its cold watery load my at feet. This is the part I hate. My frozen fingers stumble over jagged rocks and broken shells as I search for elusive pile worms, those delicacies the fish find irresistible. Another shovel full, and another, and then he stoops to help me do my job. He knows how sandpaper soil hurts cold hands and diverts me with lore ofthe cove: how these worms thick as fingers awoke one night and slowly marched by thousands toward the moonlit shore; ofthe doomed lovers who plunged hand in hand into the roiling surf and swim on eternally shifting tides; ofthe doctor who sat in his house on the bluff and wrote hundreds ofhymns as the distant breakers sang their muted roar to the broken reef. We walk slowly on seaweed-slippery rocks to the channels filling with fish and drop our baited hooks into the water. We fish and fight the rising tide together for two hours or more and when the blind hammering waves finally reach my chest and shoulders he leads me back to shore. We sit on the rocks and clean our catch, feeding fish heads to the raucous gulls. He stops and looks at me. Timing is everything, he says. I think he speaks of fishing. -David Smith J. Ozymandias, John Irons —— — — TurkeyNeck and the Peanut Man When the honey suckled in my Small southern town, TurkeyNeck harmless, hallucinating tramped his beat about the streets. Frail and black he walked, whispering in and out our air, impervious to whistling truckboys & & cautious children with fine white parents velvet on. Around the same time, the legless Peanut Man with his oily-brown paper bags would begin & speaking out about roasted, boiled Jesus. His spot on the corner was a preacher's paradise close enough to the Methodists' marble steps, and then some to the Baptists' loose change. I awaited their annual arrivals when they would summon the warm weather & talk the crocuses into petalling. On these spring Saturdays I'd walk with my daddy's hand to Teebo's for omelets and pass right by TurkeyNeck talking at the Peanut Man who propelled his red wagon with his raw black knuckles & never thought to hurt anyone either because he would've had to catch them first. Other towns only had one we had a pair of fixtures orbiting the square; They were as old and soaked in remembrance as theJunior League cookbook, Granny Annie's rum balls, or the MacMillan home with its superior white columns & lazy, well-fed goldfish in the pool. One spring, the rumor went around that TurkeyNeck had retired into winter. Ever since, the smell ofcrocuses has stilled my mind with an image ofa styrofoam Easter cross, laden with azaleas, the smell ofpeanuts after breakfast, & ofthese men whose faces were a part ofmy story before I could tell it. -Aimee Cleckler 8