Issue 06: Epiphany

Editor’s Note: Issue 06

My husband is agitated that I am hanging on to our home’s landline. Granted things have changed from the days of “the telephone chord curled against her lips” as Bethany Carlson describes in her poem.

But, I just don’t want to let go of our phone – the one connected to my home, not my person. There issomething collective or communal about a home phone. It was the phone I fought over with my brother when he realized that girls were more than just irritating interruptions; it was the phone I carried into the bathroom and sat on the floor believing in my unalienable right to a private conversation. The phone rang and was usually picked up with no knowledge of what lay at the other end of that pulsing sound wave or optical fiber, always a surprise. And my phone number, just one, not office, cell, and home, was a part of my identity: 465-8258. I loved the sound of that rotary phone 4 click, click, click; 6 click-click-click; 5 click-click-click. People knew my number, it was an actual place, the place I sat down for dinner with my family at five o’clock sharp every weekday, the place where I lost time playing outside past dusk and hearing my Mom yell “Amy! Bedtime!,” the place I pulled the covers over my head at night to drown out sounds of frequent yelling. It was not some air wave connection that could find me on aisle 4 of Wal-mart or in the waiting room of my gynecologist. It connected my friends, family, and even strangers to my home, where I felt most me, painfully and sometimes happily me. So, here I am in 2007, fearful of relinquishing the home phone and afraid I will have no place to be found, no grounded connection.

Our theme for this issue is Epiphany and after struggling to find some large important event to write about, our contributors shook me back to reality and reminded me that epiphanies often occur in simple, everyday moments. In fact, it seems these simple moments were created for epiphanies. I read Paul Willis’ poem “Mariposa Grove” at the end of a busy, thoughtless day and found myself emotionally undone by the quiet revelations of a “wet meadow of deep woods.” In this issue, our artists have given us many wonderful gifts of simple transformation where “snapping peas between my teeth” feels like grace, “neutrons splitting isotopes” astound us; a cup of coffee “dissolves dreams, satisfies, and bides time,” and a photograph in a newspaper reminds us that joy is possible in the midst of intense suffering.

The season surrounding Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas, the night the Magi brought gifts to the newborn Christ, is a celebratory time. It is anticipated, longed for, and finally comes to fruition with food, gifts, and fellowship with friends and family. It is my temptation to think these events are trivial, that the act of creating, preparing, and eating food, or spending days thinking about and buying gifts for friends and family, or hanging lights for hours to then spend more hours removing them after a month or so is silly in the midst of the great suffering I see around me. And, maybe there are times that it is silly and should be set aside for pressing needs. But, I am reminded as in Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone that it is in these ordinary events that the human spirit finds rest. It is these ordinary events this ravaged, guilt-ridden boy soldier longed for. It is in
pursuit of these ordinary events that wars are fought and endured.

God punctured time and space, changed the course of history with the birth of a weak infant to parents of little reputation and power. He provided the most epiphanic moment in history to an unremarkable time, place, and people. And for this, I am encouraged, because, except for my daydreams, I live in the ordinary and need to see the extraordinary in the tiny bug my daughter insists on keeping in her pocket during church, in the face of a friend listening shivering in a car outside a coffee shop, in the laughter-filled home that can, for a little longer, b reached at any time through a line of light extending from your home to mine. So, we at RUMINATE wish you many extraordinary ordinary moments this Advent season.

Love,

Amy Lowe

Senior Editor

Post Script: In this issue, one particular story stretched the staff of RUMINATE, challenged our understanding of the structure and intentions of a story. Stephanie Dickinson’s “Klara’sBoy” is a story of murder, beautifully written and developed. We are shown events in a murderer’s childhood, abusive relationships and unrealized hopes; the murderer is humanized and even found to be worthy of pity. But the author, as do all good authors, puts the question of this murderer’s value and worth in our hands. We must decide whether one of the most horrific criminals in history can or should be forgiven, can or should be saved, and whether his murder or any murder is ever justified. What was the epiphany in this story? Was it one that was never seized? One that could have occurred in this boy’s childhood, a teacher confronting him about his cruelty to rats, or a mother standing up for him when his father threatened a beating? Or is it our epiphany, one that we might have while reading at the end of the day or in bed and struggling, hoping for this child to be scooped up and loved, to be shown grace, to be changed. In the end, we found our faith strengthened by the wrestling this story creates, and we hope the same for you.

Newspaper Photo

a picture of children skipping
in Africa through a swarm of locusts
barely visible white
teeth, flailing arms and legs
the caption tells me what I see –
children playing in a locust swarm­––
one of Mystery’s million
swarming manifestations:
Only children know how
to play in a plague.

Luke Hankins is a student in the Indiana University MFA. program, where he holds the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. He is an associate editor of Asheville Poetry Review, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Marginalia Online, The Modern Review, The Other Journal, Poetry Southeast, Southern Poetry Review, and the anthology, Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations.

What Saves Us

Half on the earth, half in the heart, the remedies for all our pains wait for the songs of healing  – Joseph Bruchac

ART SAVES LIVES—
A bold pronouncement on the bumper
of a little black Honda tells
what I’ve come to believe:
that a sonnet might heal us,
an aria could save us.
Perhaps the light of Christ
might just show up in a Cezanne.
Remember how David played his harp
to quiet the mad ramblings of Saul?
In my town, harpists still play for dying
patients, lowering blood pressure, easing
their pain with strings instead of needles.
Did you know that in the rubble of Sarajevo
a drama company formed, performing
for anyone who would come to a bombed-out
theatre?  Even now, young men in prison
cells write poetry as if it mattered, turning
hardness of hearts like soft clay on a wheel.
Peter at fifteen, his basement room
a black tomb of anger and despair,
where Marilyn Manson blared in his brain
and the walls hid psychedelic secrets––
It was Mozart, it was good wine, and the Psalms.
It was that other wine at another table
that carried us through the valley
of the shadow back to still waters.
What saves us may simply arrive as Yo-Yo Ma
on his cello while lentils simmer,
or some lines by Mary Oliver read
to a pattern of light and leaves
that the wind offers up.

Mary Van Denend lives and writes in western Oregon, though her childhood was spent in many places. Poetry of place speaks deeply to her. She has published work in regional journals such as The Asheville Review, Eloquent Umbrella, Wellspring, and others. She is the mother of four grown children and a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Apologies to the Shakarkandi Wallah

Nestled in spent coals,
in a clay bowl that sits in a box on the back
of the Atlas cycle he is pushing through this market,
is all that remains of his day’s work:
a single, once-warm sweet potato.

Since morning, he has peeled and sliced and sprinkled
dozens of these with lemon and spices,
and now, with less than an hour to go
before dark, I see him lean hard
on his handlebars.

I know what it would take to send this man home early:
one plate for me and one for the kid
picking through the garbage bin on the corner just ahead.
But today I can’t find the stomach
for cold shakarkandi. And now

he is swinging himself up
onto his cycle, wobbling,
on his way to the next market;
and now he is calling: shakar—
shakarkandi!

Michael Creighton is a fifth grade teacher who lives in New Delhi with his wife and three kids. His poetry has appeared in kaleidowhirl, The Sunday Oregonian (US), The Asian Age (India), and Verseweavers, the Oregon State Poetry Association’s annual anthology of prize winning poetry.

Laundry

      In summer I caught the towels beneath the lip of the wringer and dropped them into a Rubbermaid laundry basket like limp fish into a bucket. The towels had swished around the agitator in the belly of the Speed Queen washer, a big white pail of suds on four legs, its wringer sticking up like a crooked arm, a drain pipe snaking down its side. My mother pulled the towels from their rough bath and fed them through the yellow cylinders of the wringer into the rinse tub, careful of her fingers, and then adjusted the wringer two notches toward me and sent the towels through again, from the rinse water to my waiting hands and my basket. The towels, then the denims, then the thin pillowcases I had to coax. I held them just long enough to smell myself up with Tide and wrinkle my young skin, then dropped my catch to the basket to be carried out to the clothesline. And all summer Mom kept saying we used the old Speed Queen instead of an automatic toploader because it was easier on well-water, wouldn’t run us dry, since we could do twelve loads in the same water bath and not have to run fresh water for each. But it was a drought summer, and in early fall when the air got chilly enough to dry the towels stiff as leather, the well ran dry anyway.
      She drove us in the truck out to Beatty Church and we filled milk jugs at the hand pump, the same place we got water for a foot-washing or a baptism at Beatty. I remember the ways we used the jugged water that first night, in particulars, for we had to be sparing. In a shallow sink, we washed the eggs just laid by the hens, scrubbing loose the clods of shit and sawdust, and I had my mouth washed out with water and soap when I called it shit on the eggs and not manure, and my sister heated water on the stove to clean our faces with before bed. The water made itself holy because of those particulars.
      I cried on our third dry day, but Mom said that once, when we were babies, she ran out of cloth diapers, so she took the ones only peed in and hung them out to dry on the line, not because the well had gone dry but because she was too worn-out to run them through a wash. She hung them out tinged yellow, dry soon enough. And it wasn’t so bad, so we’d be fine. The rain would come, the water table would rise.
      And when we hauled the pump’s water again from the truck to the basement, and the gallon jugs hung heavily in both my hands, I learned that water could be as heavy as stones, and that you had to wait, sometimes for days, for the world to be renewed.

A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Geez Magazine, and Bellingham Review, as well as a few other journals. She is currently working on a novel and teaching writing as the Milton Fellow with IMAGE and Seattle Pacific University. She and her husband Mike have spiritual roots in a tiny Mennonite fellowship in Indiana, a group that eats soup and bread together after worship each week, and they are seeking such a community in their new home city, Seattle.

Mother and Child

Julie Pointer. Mother and Child. Solar intaglio print. 8.5 x 15 inches.

Julie Pointer is a senior at Westmont College studying art and English. Her latest medium of choice is printmaking, but she is in the midst of working on her senior show involving prints and collages. Julie’s artistic sensibilities were greatly inspired during the semester she lived in Orvieto, Italy, and hopes her future endeavors will lead her back to Europe. She is currently pursuing a small venture in card-making and other paper amenities, which are sold in a small shop in Austin, Texas, where Julie lived this past summer.