Kudzu Review Summer Solstice 2012 Edition, Madison Percy Jones IV (Editor), Arthur Wilke (Editor), Robin Ward (Editor) [books to read to improve english txt] 📗

bad, something good will come. The plant life that Shigematsu encounters might be uncanny and why they are growing might not be explained, but it thrives nonetheless providing hope for future ecological life.


Works Cited:
“24 Phoenix Trees (China Parasol Trees) Exposed to the A-bomb.” Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. 2000. Web. 20 February 2011. <http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/tour_e/ireihi/tour_24_e.html>
Bukovac, M.J., S.H. Wittwer, and H.B. Tukey. “Aboveground Plant Parts as a Pathway for Entry of Fission Products into the Food Chain with Special Reference to 89-90Sr and 137Cs.” Radioactive Fallout, Soils, Plants, Foods, Man. Ed. Eric B. Fowler. New York: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1965. 82-109. Print.
Cameron, Lindsley. “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the World Sixty Years Later.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 81.4 (Fall 2005): 26-47. Print.
“Firmiana simplex-Chinese Parasol Tree.” Univeristy of Alabama at Huntsville. Web. 20 February 2011. <http://www.uah.edu/admin/Fac/grounds/CHPARASL.HTM>.
Ibuse, Masuji. Black Rain. New York: Kodansha International, 1969. Print.
Medvedev, Zhores A. The Legacy of Chernobyl. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. Print.
Nishita, H., E.M. Romney, and K.H. Larson. “Uptake of Radioactive Fission Products by Plants.” Radioactive Fallout, Soils, Plants, Foods, Man. Ed. Eric B. Fowler. New York: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1965. 55-81. Print.
Tredici, Peter Del. “Hibaku Trees of Hiroshima.” Arnoldia: The Magazine of the Arnold Arboretum 53.3 (Summer 1993): 25-29.
GYGES by André Babyn

The old fortune teller had died. We watched as they took her body out of the room across the hall. One night sometime afterwards, she visited us.
We had heard irregular noises coming from her room. Crime was on the rise in New Babylon, and we thought it might have been some hoodlums who had heard she had died and thought to rob her of her valuables before they could be re-distributed. In fact, the committee was to meet the next morning. In the meantime they'd left us with the key. But when we opened the door to her quarters the noise ceased and there was nothing there. Only her dusty furniture looming in the darkness. A teapot that had been turned over. We were frightened, of course, but the empty certainty of her apartment that night allowed us to believe we had imagined the noises we'd heard.
When we returned to my apartment we found the dead woman sitting on my couch.
The fortune teller gestured at her palm, and then at the leather chair at her side. A reading. I've heard it is bad luck to deny the requests of ghosts. Her fingers were unbearably cold. When she spoke, her consonants were glottal and she spat like she was enunciating mud. I understood nothing. But I acted as if I had, nodding. I hoped she wouldn't make me repeat her in the language of the dead.
She turned her attention to my companion, Sam. Sam avoided her gaze and shrunk against the wall.
The dead woman's limbs moved with the hesitating measure of a skeleton. Standing up, she left us.

That night I saw the old woman in my dream. She was holding my palm, and this is what she told me:
"A wardrobe stands in my room. Open it. In it you will find a wooden box. Take what you find inside. They are yours."
I went, hoping to find treasure. Instead, wrapped in paper towels, I found several hard, oblong seeds.

I don't know why New Babylon was spared the destruction that ravaged the rest of the city and the surrounding countryside. Perhaps, by chance, a vehicle of war drifted too far from its intended target. We've found their pieces—or what we assume are their pieces—all over the city. There is one, a complete one, not far away from New Babylon. If you put your head to its smooth walls you can hear its drone heart ticking. It is the most alive thing we have ever found in the ruins.
We are visited often by representatives of other survivors. For some we serve a function in their dim religion. Others, we trade with. Still others have made us their enemies. But our antiquated weapons, mined out of the ruins, are without equal.
It has been generations since the first survivors climbed out of New Babylon and greeted the new world. Maybe too long. The complex is beginning to crumble. A madness is spreading. Sam is one of the worst affected. He doesn't attend the meetings I've organized, and when I see him he snarls at me, as if I have unravelled everything. The old woman was a wound between us.
"You might think that's what you saw, but that isn't what you saw."
"What I saw?"
"Yes. What you saw."
"Then what did I see?"
"I don't know. An ape. A flock of pigeons. Dust."
"And what did you see?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing made your skin tighten? Nothing made you push up against the wall?"
"Yes. That was an involuntary response. I have a condition. It's insensitive of you to bring it up."
The only solution is to leave him behind, with all of the others.

The road to the south was not as long and arduous as we expected. I have heard it said that beyond the crumbling rock that defines New Babylon's sphere of influence the land is harsh and barren. This is not so. It is hardly paradise. But scrub grows here and there. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of tall fields of wild grasses, and the sound from the insects is so loud it's almost deafening. We have seen a few trees—the quick-growing sumac—large enough to provide us with shade. There is no equal to the lightness of being felt when, in repose, we are caressed by a soft, moist breeze.
The merchants had told us the people of the plains were cannibals. We've had our troubles.
On the second night out of the city we lost one of our number—Lucinda—to a spear thrust through the heart. And Emile's left shoulder, as he was reloading his weapon, was mashed to paste with a club. On that night we were lucky to have the good weapons we smuggled out of New Babylon. Since that time we have added vigilance to our armoury.
Only the wild men are dangerous. The nomads with their semi-permanent dwellings and large herds of sheep and goats bring us no trouble. Their hospitality is unparalleled. There is a root that grows principally around their settlements—the natives call it "chikrot"—that, when dried, is a humble and nourishing substitute for our tea. We have taken to smoking it with them. At night, with their cattle milling about.

There is a city in the south. Its name is Gyges. We have established a school there, teaching what we've brought with us from New Babylon. In the courtyard I planted the seeds that I found.

The seeds sprouted. The tree that grew up from them provides fruit, red and firm, which we eat in the shade on hot afternoons.

Kudzu Biographies

Aaron Poller currently works as an advanced practice nurse-psychotherapist in Winston-Salem and teaches Mental Health Nursing at Winston-Salem State University. He has been writing since the 1960′s when he studied poetry with Jean Garrigue and Daniel Hoffman while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared recently in Barnwood Poetry Magazine, Eunoia Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Writing Disorder, Cherry Blossom Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, Poetic Medicine, The Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine and Palimpsest. He lives in a small house with his wife, four rescued dogs and three rescued cats.

W. C. Bamberger’s recent books include the novel On the Backstretch, and two translations: Louis Levy’s early twentieth-century Expressionist novel, Kzradock the Onion Man, and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah, and the chapbook Two Draft Essays from 1918, by Gershom Scholem.

Much of Rob Baum’s poetry is written for performance but has appeared in Alaskan and Australian anthologies, and journals such as The Journal of Peace and Conflict, Nashim, New Contrast, Making Connections, and Boxcar Poetry Review. Rob performs in improvisational movement, circus and theatre, and directs disabled practitioners. Her feminist plays feature strong, desirable roles for women: Every Woman’s War premiered in Singapore, 2006. Rob’s research publications include Female Absence: Women, Theatre and Other Metaphors (Peter Lang, 2003) and journal articles on African ritual, dance, race/gender issues and identity politics; a book-in-progress concerns trauma and memory.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature's Best Photography. She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds, RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash, Alabama Coast, Alabama Seaport and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.Only visual artist published in the Taj Mahal Review June 2011. Youngest artist to be displayed in Charnwood Art's Vision 09 Exhibition and New Mill's Artlounge Dark Colours Exhibition. www.eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com

Sue Blaustein’s poetry has appeared in the New Delta Review, Verse Wisconsin, Isotope - A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Wisconsin Academy Review, Blue Fifth Review (online), Wisconsin People and Ideas, and Kudzu Review.

Peter Branson’s poetry has been published or accepted for publication by journals in Britain, USA, Canada, EIRE, Australia and New Zealand, including Acumen, Ambit, Envoi, Magma, The London Magazine, Iota, Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Nottingham, Pulsar, Red Ink, The Recusant, South, The New Writer, Crannog, Raintown Review, The Huston Poetry Review, Barnwood, The Able Muse and Other Poetry. His first collection, The Accidental Tourist, was published in May 2008. A second collection was published at the beginning of last year by Caparison Press for The Recusant. More recently a pamphlet has been issued by Silkworms Ink. A third collection has been accepted for publication by Salmon Press, EIRE. He has won prizes and been placed in a number of poetry competitions over recent years, including firsts in the Grace Dieu and the Envoi International.

A professor of English and pedagogy, Salma Ruth Bratt is a second generation American with an interest in the literature and linguistics of immigrants. She loves her sweet