The Five-Chord

fiction by Ryan Rickrode

Early in the morning, before the Hospice nurse lets herself in, Gladys goes to the piano. She slides her feet into the pink slippers she’ll be wearing the rest of the day, and she slowly shuffles into the sitting room. The long walk from the dining room, which is now her bedroom, leaves her pink sweater swelling with short wheezing breaths. It’s been a long time since she’s been upstairs. Sometimes she wonders about the dust up there.

Best of the Best: Lauren Bailey

Susquehanna senior and Logogram contributor Lauren Bailey was recently anthologized in plain china, Bennington College's national online magazine of the best undergraduate of 2010.  On top of being anthologized, Lauren's essay, "Convalesence," which was originally published in Susquehanna's Essay magazine, was selected by author/editor Phillip Lopate for the 2010 Bennington Nonfiction Prize.  Congratulations, Lauren!

Ryan Rickrode, editor

Susquehanna Alumni in the News

Susquehanna's own Marcus Burke, now a grad student at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, was recently featured in a PBS NewsHour piece marking the Workshop's 75th anniversary.  See it for yourself:

Drive

poetry by Alex Guarco

I told you I was lost in you,

like I was some one-hit-wonder radio lookalike,

only I

realize now that my misplacement was little more

than a feeling of place,

a feeling I’ve been waiting years to experience,

a knowing of where I was at the time,

a knowing that

there, with you,

was where

I belonged.

I wouldn’t go out and say it was love,

it was just whatever

two 19-year-olds are capable of

on a Wednesday night,

parked too far away from the drive-in screen

to see any the movie.

You know,

I’ve brought other girls to that drive-in,

in the same car,

laid down on the same couple of pillows,

even thrown the same blanket over us

when the second movie started.

The difference is,

no matter how many rows back we were,

with them, I always watched the movie,

and if we touched underneath the blanket,

or if they rolled their head over and smiled to me,

I’d smile back, squeeze their hand a little tighter

because I knew that’s what I was supposed to do.

But with you, when the intermission was over,

I let our bare legs get cold,

not really sure what to do,

like that blanket wasn’t even there.

So I rolled my head towards yours,

and we both

squeezed our hands tighter,

both

knowing that’s what we were supposed to do.

And after

catching each other in the act,

realizing we were too busy knowing and

too far from enjoying,

we got lost,

unsure what to do next, but

it was okay because for the first time

we found life.

---

Alex Guarco is a sophomore creative writing major at Susquehanna University. He's president of SU Slam Poetry and a member of the Ultimate Frisbee and Club Volleyball teams.  Alex has appeared in Outrageous Fortune, Variance, Tomfoolery Review, and Essay.

Also by Alex Gaurco: 8:30

Untitled

by poetry Amber L. Cook


When I emptied the contents of your skull

                           I was monogrammed into
synapses you would never use,
                              synapses that I snapped
like green beans, fresh
   from the garden bordered by mesh wire,


where I planted you as a seed
                            & covered you with soil &
gave you water like you’d bud
into a color other than
                                      red overlapping red
down your temple where I traced


my fingers in lines trying to map
                    my way to words you left sitting in
the saliva around your ceramic mug,
                                       eggs laying stagnant in
rain from weeks before,
                                           drying up in the sun.

I do not imagine the mesh wire to outline
                                  the perimeter of your body
or the preparatory paint recoating the outside of
your white house
                       where you would leave her alone
in photograph after photograph


for the photo album she kept
                                      on the nightstand and I
do not admit to your exiting before
entering, do not admit to your wound still emptying
                                                            out years after, 
or years before I could capsulate you in my palm.

---

Amber L. Cook is a senior creative writing and English secondary-education major from Long Valley, New Jersey. She has a dual passion for modifying the poetic form and teaching her students. She has formerly been published in The Susquehanna Review, Prick of the Spindle, Outrageous Fortune, and Rivercraft. Her plans include getting an MFA in Poetry sometime in the near future.

Coming next week: poetry by Alex Guarco

Asleep

fiction by Aaron Abel

The day Ethan died was the first day it snowed.  None of us really knew how to feel or what to say.  To be honest, I didn’t really know him that well. I stared outside my bedroom window, standing close to it and leaning my forehead against the frozen glass.  The aura of fluorescent streetlight illuminated the snow, making it look more blue than white as tiny flakes rapidly fell. It was 10:45. I had just gotten off the phone with Jon; he was one of the first to find out. He was eavesdropping on his mom while she was on the phone with someone else’s mom. Jon said Ethan drank half of a bottle of wine and took a handful of whatever he could find in his parents’ bathroom. Then he lay in bed and that was the end. He fell asleep and never woke up.

8:30

poetry by Alex Guarco

I ask him what he thinks Hell is,

if he’s ever thought about it.  He says,

an eternity with your mother.

laughing, he sinks into the couch,

sips from his glass, Jameson, Coke

thumb-clicking his way through our evening,

sinking, sipping low until his eyes follow suit

as predicted.

---

Alex Guarco is a sophomore creative writing major at Susquehanna University. He's president of SU Slam Poetry and a member of the Ultimate Frisbee and Club Volleyball teams.  Alex has appeared in Outrageous Fortune, Variance, Tomfoolery Review, and Essay.

Coming next week: fiction by Aaron Abel

Fever Dreams Pt. 2

by Kim Stoll

You woke at 2:46,

kicked the sheets from

your sweat-glossed legs,

to tell me about a dream

where a fish floats belly-up,

reborn under thin sheets of ice.

You were that fish.

Moved so painfully slow,

pressed your skeleton against

your flesh and could not escape.

Then you were snagged

and yanked to the surface,

gutted and scraped of

all your scales on

a mossy table.

Your eyes rolled between

the floorboard and back

into the lake

where the other fish

pecked away at them.

---

Kim Stoll is a junior creative writing major with a minor in film studies. Her poetry has previously been published in RiverCraft and her chapbook, Through a Pinhole.

Coming next week: poetry by Alex Gaurco

The Susquehanna Review is now online

The Susquehanna Review has gone digital!  Editors Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich, with lots of help from graphic designer Kathy Sheehan, have complemented the print version of Susquehanna University's national undergraduate literary magazine with a full online version of the magazine.

Blink: Ramayana, (part three of three)

nonfiction by Emily Northey

Yuddha Kanda

The Yuddha Kanda describes how a floating bridge is built to Lanka and Rama crosses it to save his wife.  He fights and finally kills Ravana and saves Sita from her prison.  To test her purity, he asks her to perform a trial by fire, which she willingly jumps into and comes out of unburned and whole.  Rama and Sita return to Ayodhya—Rama’s exile is now over—and he regains the throne.

Blink: Ramayana, (part two of three)

nonfiction by Emily Northey

In the fourth book of the Ramayana, the Kishkindha Kanda, Rama and his brother go to the monkey kingdom, Kishkindha, where they call upon the monkeys for aid in finding Sita.  One of the monkeys, Hanuman, finds out that Sita had been taken to a land called Lanka (believed to be modern Sri Lanka).  Hanuman takes a gigantic leap across the water, as depicted in the Sundara Kanda, and finds Sita.  She refuses to go back with him as she does not want to be touched by any male except her husband.  Hanuman agrees and then attacks Ravana’s palace before returning to Rama.

Blink: Ramayana, (part one of three)

nonfiction by Emily Northey

A Note from the Author

The Ramayana is a famous and ancient Sanskrit epic written by the Hindu sage Valmiki, during the 4th century, B.C.E.  The text depicts different societal roles—king, wife, brother, servant, etc.—and the ideal relationships expected to exist between them.  The Ramayana follows the story of Rama, the hero and prince of Ayodhya and an incarnation of Vishnu, as he struggles to reclaim his kidnapped wife, Sita (an incarnation of Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort), from Ravana, the demon.  The Ramayana is comprised of 7 books (kandas), each following chronologically the story of Rama and Sita’s journey.

BCN Subway

by Rob Rotell

I step onto the moving walkway in the spacious underground channel between tracks at Diagonal Station, and I lean against the glass shield, and relax. I’m tired, my eyes are red; I’ve just spent the last two hours walking in the dark, looking for a metro station after a late night movie at Yelmo Icaria Cinema. It’s past midnight, Friday going into Saturday, and the drunks, the drugged, and nicely dressed are out, crowding the subway stations, yelling in their languages, frotteuring and ignoring.

Driven

fiction by Mary-Kate Sims

I don’t really know what my wife wants me to do with these ridiculous coupons. Half off a colossal size toilet paper pack? Fuck, I didn’t think we went through that much toilet paper. It’s just the two of us. My uncle warned me about this. He warned me that wives make husbands do stupid shit for no reason. He didn’t tell me the stupid shit would be driving in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky for a colossal toilet paper pack because she has a coupon. No one lives here in Murrant, but there are always masses of people whenever the weekend starts. It was my wife’s hometown, where she grew up and all that crap. She was thrilled to move back home to Murrant. She must have been brainwashed as kid to love this desert of a town. I haven’t been able to make up a good enough excuses to go back to Ohio. Once she started reminiscing, about stupid shit like the small grocery store where she used to buy all of her gum when she was a kid—all of my arguments and excuses were null and void.

Scrape

a memoir by William Hoffacker

 On a clear night, at the end of a long car ride alone, I’m pulling headfirst into the space in front of my parents’ small suburban house when this jolt shakes my sleek new Honda, coupled with a slam-and-scrape that awakens my senses, dulled by the winding miles of I-80, with a rush of adrenaline. I panic at the thought of what’s been hit, what have I done, as my hands tighten around the steering wheel, ten o’clock two o’clock, and jerk it into a sharp left. The metallic crunch dies away, and I slam on the brakes before I can damage God knows what else.

Airplanes

fiction by Dana P. Diehl

He stood in the mouth of the hanger, his back to the girl in the green rain jacket.

“Any minute now, Deb. You’ll hear it first. Then right there, over the mountain, it’ll come.” His voice was low and tense. “It’ll just be a silver speck at first. You’ll have to look for the sun glinting against it. Now hurry, come out by me. You won’t see anything from in there.”