RCRRUFOUS CITY REVIEW

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Rufous City Review

Issue 4.2011 Editor in Chief: Jessica Bixel www.rufouscityreview.com

ru·fous cit·y re·view \ˈrü-fəәs ˈsi-tē ri-ˈvyü\ (n.) Where industry encounters raw earth in a heightened passion of expression; see also: the best of what can be read. Origin: [Latin] red; rusted memories; russet sparrows; random whimsy; really great writing.

The authors and artists published herein retain all rights to their work. All content is protected by law. © 2011 Rufous City Review

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On the cover: “Rusted Gate” by Andrew Louis Marnik, an artist currently residing in Providence, Rhode Island. He is preparing his debut release, tentatively titled "In Transit;" a collection of his photography and poetry from 2004 to the present.

This issue was an exercise in patience. The poems were slick, hard to come by, and seemed to shift like smoke over water, unable to settle. Even so, the songs are old and they seem to know their own burdens. Here memory is like thick perfume, cloying—a scented cover for panic. Things are disappearing, between these pages, and uncertainty is rife. It is easy to get lost, cloaked in dust, shadows of unreliable light between freight trains… be wary and enjoy your stay.

Want to be here? Find more information, including our submission guidelines at www.rufouscityreview.com.

Rufous City Review is a coalescing of music, passion, whimsy, expression, truth, obsession, and art. The people involved are selfish enough to demand a place for all of these heavy realities and altruistic enough to provide a passageway…at least they’d like to think so. Here, industry encounters raw earth and the landscape is Rufous City. We invite you to lay down some roots.

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Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick graduated with her Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2010. She recently completed her first full-length manuscript of essays and poetry and has a chapbook in print. Some of her work has been featured or is upcoming in magazines in the US and UK, including: 3:AM Magazine, Night Train, Phantom Kangaroo, chum, Sein und Werden, among others. She writes in New York and Texas. BOOK OF GAIGEMON V I found a better digging ground, says the boy with beaks in his hand, a shovel—leftover bodies quiver beside him—an altar of sorts for the dead, birds caught– mouths open wide. See the earth, he says, it speaks to me. All the living have gone. What am I doing here then? I ask. The boy hums hymns of dirt for the ritual. We mix their blood with loam, he says, Help me. Feel the warmth of their wings. I think I’m the way home.

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Robert Vaughan’s plays have been produced in N.Y.C., L.A., S.F., and Milwaukee where he resides. He leads two writing roundtables for Redbird- Redoak Studio. His prose and poetry is published in over 125 literary journals such as Elimae, LITSNACK, BlazeVOX, and A-Minor. He is a fiction editor at JMWW magazine, and Thunderclap! Press. Also the editor of Flash Fiction Fridays for WUWM. Evaporation I’m a rose, wilting; faded color against your denim lapel I’m a free thinker melting in the stillness of August pondwater scum I’m a peace projector a debunkler, a hypnosis therapeutically induced I’m tracing my past of lives unlived, parties given but never received I’m a caretaker of a homeless heart, a one-way ticket to your wavering smile I’m evaporating even as we fly.

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Chris Crittenden teaches environmental ethics for the University of Maine and does much of his writing in a hut in a spruce forest, 50 miles from the nearest traffic light. Possessed there is no sin in standing alone and tasting the cinnamon in rain, or bending low behind a hoof print of the last free-roaming god. trains go by as a continent fills up with wires. blizzards of ants rebel on the edges of octane and cement. hurt patience keeps him wandering, desperate, as if there were a buffalo somewhere in the cold greatness of the miles.

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James Valvis’ work has recently appeared in Arts & Letters, Blip (Mississippi Review), Breadcrumb Scabs, elimae, Front Porch Journal, LA Review, Nimrod, Pedestal Magazine, River Styx, Verdad, and is forthcoming in Hanging Loose, GW Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Night Train, and many others. His full-length poetry collection, How to Say Goodbye, is forthcoming. He's a former soldier, a former writing instructor, a former mailman, and a present domestic mogul. Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in C.K. Williams Poems Save me! Save me! A long straight razor, glinting, slicing down: balls, balls, and all. Silver in the silvery starlight and then you remember, and they're dead again and appear again, their own after-selves, their own ghosts like shades of lives never to be lived. Like people in poems without wings, scattered as though by a gale-- far as a star; and how long will it take to take us even such a partial way back? Just more of the miserable mysteries of that time. Your life, what then, what then-- only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.

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Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in Carol Guess Poems At that moment who can blame us when we bleed? We steal time together, together shimmering a frozen ocean into angels. Who would I be if I stayed close to home without me inside her? The clock ticks into focus, unstoppable with scars, obscenely small, like names disabling the molten hands of the clock. Liking the perfume of angry breath,

of Puccini tossed like a coin from a speeding car, voices, simply dissolved, sugar in water, the sound reminded me of names drizzled in fitful patterns like festive stars. Calling me by the name I said was mine, the whole world's waiting for this girl to bleed.

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Tina Barry’s stories and poetry have appeared in several publications including Exposure, an anthology of microfiction from Cinnamon Press (2010); Fractured West; the Boston Literary Magazine; and is forthcoming in Elimae. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she’s an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing at Long Island University. She can be reached at tbarrywrites@yahoo.com. Penny Candy Rows of sweets on green-edged glass. Teeth tear a tiny colored dot from a long roll of white paper. A star disappears on the tongue. Thank you for the card with the lovely sentiment. Thank you for the flip-book with the woman dancing, bird wing elbows, knees this way and that. And the one with two iced cakes for breasts, her waist lost in a cloud of calico, white bloomers snagged on a short black boot.

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Marc Vincenz was born in Hong Kong to Swiss-British parents during the height of the Cultural Revolution. He currently lives in Iceland where he works as a freelance journalist, poet, translator and literary critic. He is Poetry and Non-Fiction Editor for the international webzine Mad Hatters' Review, Managing Editor of MadHat Press, and is a member of the editorial board of Open Letters Monthly. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Metazen, FRiGG, MiPOesias, elimae and Inertia. A chapbook, Upholding Half the Sky, was published by GOSS183: Casa Menendez (2010), USA. A new e-chap, The Propaganda Factory, is forthcoming from Argotist ebooks later this year. Seed And in this dust this final hour the eyes of foxes like coins press up against the glass and these buckling winds hands torn in ravels of snow grasping faltering for the walnut tree and in this cocoon white sunlight whispers the sky bends and this the golden mean this stillness of offspring lintels in the eaves stretching straining and in this endless dust eyelashes like paper wings flicker their certainty unknown here in my final chamber three children the last of their kind one upon another sleeping sleeping

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Alicia Hoffman lives, writes and teaches in Rochester, New York. Recently, her poems have appeared in BreadCrumb Scabs, Boston Literary Magazine, Pirene's Fountain, Umbrella and elsewhere. After John Ashbery She walks the pretzeled halls of the gallery with aplomb. She balances marbles – round orbs of words – on her tongue and bites. She tastes of strawberry and dairy farm. She shoulders extremity with ease. She brushes rough elbows with the caricatures of literati. She is, indeed, a freight train. She is older than you or I will ever be. She collects vintage buttons in Danish blue cookie tins. She flips a switch and the city catches fire. She likens the darkness to the underbelly of seal. She could never swim. She never earned the red bathing cap after all those years at Camp Hiawatha, though she once locked a girl in an empty room. She is cruel. She dreams of young fawns in green forests. . She is a young fawn in the green forest of an aging body bent on breaking. She wants to know what you want with her. She never studied linguistics at the liberal arts college. Now, she always leaves the tin toned telephone ringing. She just brushed by you on the bustling street. She did not speak. You never noticed. Consider yourself lucky. She once had a sudden flash of insight. She likened it to lightning. It was only lightning. Now, she bell-curves into a ball in her bedroom. Now, she has nothing to pray to, only wishes she could spill her bucket of perception onto paper, that the world she inhabited consented to be shaped into poem.

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Frank Rossini grew up in NYC & now lives in Eugene, Oregon. He has published in various magazines including The Seattle Review and Wisconsin Review. our lady of the blue notes in the church of our lady of the blue notes a madonna holds a small bird in her prayer- clasped hands her mother rests beside her light with evening’s grace on the wall icons African fathers poets of sky song Earth chant the A train’s sway & chatter the watermelon man’s green calls in the church of our lady of the blue notes bassman thrums a fourstringed cross drummer crashes metal into fire saxman conjures breath to flesh sleeping spirits to holler to shout in the church of our lady of the blue notes a madonna opens her prayer filled hands a blues flies out

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Recent books from Lyn Lifshin: THE LICORICE DAUGHTER: MY YEAR WITH RUFFIAN, Texas Review Press, ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME from Black Sparrow at Godine, following COLD COMFORT and BEFORE IT’S LIGHT, DESIRE and 92 RAPPLE. She has over 120 books & edited 4 anthologies. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com Moving By Touch that afternoon an unreal amber light 4 o’clock the quietness of oil February blue bowls full of oranges we were spreading honey, butter on new bread our skin nearly touching Even the dark wood glowed All Afternoon We read Lorca by five snow blurred the glass. February. I leaned against those chill panes. Gypsies burned through the snow with apples You in the other room I was thinking don’t let this be some warmth I can move near and never know

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Michael Lee Johnson is a poet, freelance writer and small business owner from Itasca, Illinois. He is heavily influenced by Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Allen Ginsberg. His new poetry chapbook with pictures, titled From Which Place the Morning Rises, and his new photo version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom are available at: http://stores.lulu.com/promomanusa. Sassy and Savory the Wind I'm the Windsor of the wind, the wayward, the soul man lover, walker of the spirited pre-night freedom is the galloping horses of my two legs.

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Brandy McKenzie is a poet living with her family in the Portland area, where she teaches college writing and literature. Her work has been published in more than two dozen magazines, most recently including Conte, Literal Latte, and Tiger’s Eye, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Alert A jay screaming in the back yard—panic, panic panic. Imagine living your days like that: every movement that short, shrill shriek, this limited vocabulary for your knowledge of the world. Maybe, eventually, it trails off into meditation, followed by two quick cracks; maybe it doesn’t. That same insistent query rising again and again in your throat: who? what? who? what? It doesn’t matter, neither the question nor the answer, just the choke of urgent knots. Every passing cloud. Every distant cough. Every telegraphed move you, yourself, make, shivering through late summer limbs and carving shadows from the dusky light.

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Guideposts, Paths, Tips, and Tropes Caterpillars. That’s what this should be about: the pretty cliché of transformation, or even the story in that book about pilgrimage the story of the moth warmed by the eager touch of children passing its cocoon from hand to hand, the anticipated damp birth, the condemnation of the misshapen wings crumpled to fit the mason jar chosen as a means of viewing. The slow agony of the broken moth departing, still in sight of twenty curious children. It should be a story like that: metamorphosis, the ugly duckling, a phoenix rising from the ashes, and then perhaps the sight and comprehension of the disappointing dream. All those stories we know now by heart, no matter the ending, the triumph or failure. What matters is how we know: the pattern, the predictability, the familiar and the understood, the surety that when we place the next foot down, we walk a certain path. We think the path should be well-marked. We believe it should not vanish at first touch, leaving nothing beneath us, not even a sense of firmness as we press down.