Issue #31.7 A Double Issue: Sara Schraufnagel & Stefene Russell
Four Poems by Sara Schraufnagel
Not in Uniform
Shelly’s mom found the clothes with holes crumpled up in the back of the closet. She put on the ones from Hollister, smelling of body dysmorphia and perfume. The lace tank top that would show off Shelly’s massive boobs and her mom's flat stomach stretched like plains down to her hip bones. She took off her pants, now wearing the low-rise skirt that barely covered her ass. She walked like a runway model, making the holes from the sensors deeper, twisting other clothes around her fingers, mocking us. Our futile attempts to wear something on non-uniform days that my parents wouldn't buy for me and her mom couldn't afford. She dug her fingers into the makeup we hid in our underwear from the department store. Turned around with blue eyeshadow and berry lips. Look how good I look. She had a point.
First Job
We are behind the golf shop by the dumpsters, pretending we don't have to go back out on the course or replace the Miller Lite the middle-aged men love. Or maybe it’s just getting away from their wives and kids.
We have five minutes to pee, reapply lipstick, press down the wrinkles in our little white skirts. I’m waving my hands under the dryer. It takes too long. The same motion I'll use to clear cigar smoke from my face, the same motion I'll make when they say, Put one down for him, let’s see your swing, little girl.
Shelly gets more tips. She’s a performer. Sticks her butt out and winks. What’s to come translates into dollars in her bank account, or those soft green bills we'll count in the parking lot.
What Are You Gonna Do
Shelly’s mom was sitting in an Adirondack chair up north, and she patted the sandy blue one next to her for me to sit down.
Lit me a cigarette with the one in her mouth. You girls get into the Maker’s Mark yet? No, ma'am. Oh, you will. The mosquitoes were eating us up, but I didn’t mind
I just liked being close to her. She stared ahead. Cicadas chirping at the lake with its navy horizon. What are you gonna do in a couple years?
she asked, meaning when I graduated high school. I want to move to California and be a journalist. With that, she coughed up her drink. It went down the wrong tube, just like my words.
She was laughing hysterically, her varicose veins rising on her bony legs, slapping her thigh until it went red. Oh, look at you, she said. Just look at you.
The Coming and the Going
When I slept over at Shelly’s house, I could hear her mom come home from the night shift.
She’d start the shower, ready to slip into the mint green tile. Her tattoos putting on a show in the dirty mirror.
Scars visible from birth, scars from him, scars from her. The snake tattoo danced, but it was nothing like his—
the ones from Afghanistan. He was nothing like the boys she’d imagined as a girl,
the ones from bands she cut out of magazines. She’d come home often, eyes glazed over,
leaving again to go on a walk with wet hair and menthol cigarettes tucked under her boobs.
She left us behind then, and eventually every day that summer. Her voice would ricochet off the front door,
and she’d say things like, There are a lot of creeps out there, as we left the house wearing practically nothing,
into the darkness of the neighborhood, hoping something would happen, hoping that we’d get noticed.
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A poet living in Colorado, Sara Schraufnagel has published work in The Offing, Sonora Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Fourth River, Slipstream, and Midwest Quarterly. Her work also appears in a number of other publications.
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Photograph by Tiff Sutton
Three Poems by Stefene Russell
Solfège
solfège: (noun) sol·fège säl-ˈfezh. 1: the application of the sol-fa syllables to a musical scale or to a melody. 2: a singing exercise especially using sol-fa syllables. also: practice in sight-reading vocal music using the sol-fa syllables. —Merriam-Webster Dictionary
I grew up in Utah, where people baptize the dead.
I grew up with people who wear ritual garments under floral dresses and navy-blue suits. Brigham Young told his flock when they crossed the plains:
"I want you to sing and dance to forget your troubles." Each night, Mormon pioneers circled their wagons, stepped into the round, and sang. Search online, or ask your Mormon friends about "merry-go rounds," and/or "road shows." I know a poet who served as proxy for Marilyn Monroe at a baptism for the dead. Because I grew up in Utah, I believe in everything. Proxies get dunked in a baptismal font supported by twelve gold oxen. Surely someone has baptized Jenny Lind, Yma Sumac, Maria Callas? Once upon a time, a woman in rural Colorado declared herself "Mother God."
Then, she became Mater Dolorosa by drinking liquid silver. Joseph Smith's first wife, Emma, wrote a hymn to Heavenly Mother. Later, the LDS church kicked out six women for singing hymns to Heavenly Mother. I understand those psychonauts who thought they could hitch a ride on a comet
by eating vanilla pudding laced with strychnine. Ti and Do, tell me: where'd you hide Re, Mi, Fa, So, and La? Utah's number one agricultural crop is alfalfa, which is fed to cattle. I don't understand The Brethren church.
They sing every night, but think pictures and stories are evil. Joseph Smith said, hot drinks are not for the belly of man. Some say drinking coffee corrupts the astral body and degrades the flesh. Some say colloidal silver clears calcium from your pineal gland. I'll never be the congregant with the keycard to the church hidden in an industrial park. I'll never be the supplicant who knows the secret knock to the apartment church in Old Town. I just want to be helium — the kind that lofts the Holy Ghost.
King Salamander
Licking his mane, sleeking through wet
rocks in the creek, he chokes down violet flames in his throat.
He walks on two feet during the day. At night, he washes himself with a little
milk to break the spell.
He's albino, likes deep holes. Born half from
Adam and half not from Adam. He'll sleep in a well
if there's a bucket on a rope so he can rock himself to sleep, but he'll settle
for a clean basket
in a nice dark place. He likes cows, sheep, afternoon shadows, creeks, rocks,
leather that still smells like leather,
the shoemaker's daughter, the fisherman's daughter, the weaver's daughter, princesses, duchesses, nursemaids, milkmaids, brides, birds
singing with the voices of women, wet-nurses, shepherd's daughters, milk, river spirits, fruit-bearing trees, Turkish delight,
fish with pink flesh, early morning shadows, mangoes, clean baskets, clear water, and the whole world at night.
A Path of Totality
The Great American Eclipse shadows Kaskaskia Island for two minutes and seven seconds. I stand
in the dark cemetery with the living and the dead:
A dog named Yoda; Antoine “Butterfingers” Cassout,
drummer with the company of Montcharveaux;
and a poet I know, who recognized me first.
Every poem I’ve ever written began on the back
of an envelope marked Return to Sender.
Star clusters too small to be constellations
are called asterisms. The Coathanger contains 10 stars. The poet shows me his tattoo: the formula for
SDSS J102915+172927, a star that shouldn’t exist.
I wanted to write a love poem on the back of an envelope,
but not to him. A new star is called a protostar. When I was small, my mother took me and my sisters
outside at midnight to see an eclipse with a red moon. My mom said, a Mormon prophecy decrees that when the moon shall turn to blood,
metal birds will fall from the sky, then the world ends. Every night, every day an eclipse occurred, I worried about red moons. I don't see
metal birds today. I see swallows and pelicans, flying backwards, and a gold sun occulted behind a black
moon, its shadow shattering across the dark grass.
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Stefene Russell is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Orleans, a managing editor at Bayou Magazine, and a New Orleans Poetry Festival board member. She’s also an unrepentant fan of the British paranormal show "Help! My House is Haunted."
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