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

work into the night, clearing the mangled wires and hauling debris away; the repetitive dull yellowing flash of their trucks casting a stark image in darkened living rooms. Morning comes, with the coppering sun washing out the grey skies into deep shades of blue that grow richer as they crown the horizon. Miniature ravines have formed along the driveways, dry now and clotted with leaves and twigs from last night’s downpour. The week-day begins, and cars begin to jet down Wells Avenue like any other working day, some slowing to survey the damaged Maple. In the yard next door, the massive limb boldly lies among the grass. New shoots of vibrant green leaves bud out from the twigs, the grounds nutrients still rushing through its woody veins. As the day shoves on, city workers return to shred the mighty arm into thousands of pulpy shards, and the buzz of the machines shrieks as it is fed. I see several neighbors standing in front of my house, and so I venture out the front door, hoping to learn of the tree's fate.

"Well the tree's gonna have to come down," She explains, holding a photocopy of an older image and motioning with her hand, "It's completely rotten on the inside. I tried for years to repair it, but these things happen." A man is standing next to her; he adjusts his glasses and wipes his brow. He explains that he grew up on the street and had supplied the old picture. The image is black and white, around the time of World War Two or before, and for a second the whine of the buzzsaw is drowned out, and my mind shifts back seventy years. Two young girls, dressed in Sunday clothes stand on the very sidewalk of which we reside. The picture is taken from my front porch and in the corner is the tree, younger perhaps but still as mighty as today. On the other side of the photograph is a wooded area where the cemetery has now spread, a thick tangle of brush. Further back, a now abandoned farmhouse looks vibrant, and people can be seen on the front porch. The neighborhood of Five Points is new and still full of empty lots, the edge of town. At one time, Wells Avenue was the main road up to Monte Sano mountain, the numerous grocery stores selling provisions for the visitors on weekend getaways to the mountain of health. All the while, the champion Maple stood watch, observing the world from its majestic vantage point.

A week passes, and thunderstorms are again predicted for the weekend, and I wonder how long the tree has. From my living room couch the tree puts on a daily show as it gestures with the breeze and the leaves flitter and curl. In the fall, it's hand shaped leaves are dyed rich hues of red and yellow like some alchemical process. It's a sense of beauty the human race has yet to decipher. On Friday night another storm passes through, and the tree creaks and moans and sheds more twigs and leaves. And again Saturday arrives with a fresh wash of blue skies. Around ten o'clock the familiar droning note of a city truck in reverse is heard, and soon the street is filled with cherry pickers and helmeted employees armed with oversized chainsaws. They ascend high into the tree traversing its limbs and gauging their work. Sections of the tree begin to come down, crashing onto the pavement in dead weight. The dismantling takes all day, and as night falls I think of the vision trees have and of the human frivolity they are silent witness to. In the morning, the tree is gone; the massive trunk is sectioned off and trucked out. All that remains is an empty sky and a lonely breeze searching for another heaven-reaching treetop to caress for eternity.
JANUARY CROCUSES by Chris Jackson

Love, we inhabit strange weather.
These lacked a normal season to coax them towards spring,
and sent their shoots into the coal-tweaked temperature,
excused themselves too soon from their wintering.

Their heads go into unpredictability,
peeping at the air, like conspicuous spies.
They were duped by what we have done to indemnify
ourselves against the dark, our costly strategies.

I hate to see them fooled in their confessed desire,
this crocus-y need to be and grow, and thrive.
Each deserves better, but the frost will meet them here.
Like us, love, they know not how to live, but how to strive.

CIRCLE AROUND THE MOON by W. C. Bamberger

Adapted from A Light Like Ida Lupino,

A novel in progress.


It was undeniable; the frost in the air was beautiful. It hung in tufts like silver pollen above the deep black of the bay. It gathered into a halo around the hazed moon, glowed, a pocket borealis in the snug long channel between the dark pickets of the evergreens. Lincoln knew something about the numbers of heat, its sluggish gain and its terrible quick loss, knew why frost was so rare this time of year even in the chill northern air of Michigan, knew it took more shed BTUs, more heat lifted off into clear space or lost on a quick, lickerish wind to change 32 degree water into 32 degree ice than it did to drop the vapor in the air from a comfortable temperature to that dangerous 32 ledge. The same was true for passage the other way. Science and the finger poking into the top of the water barrel both proved just how thick was the wall of resistance at the change-of-state line, how stubbornly nature herself resisted any drastic change of affairs, how violently heat had to pound against that wall to move one way or the other.


The peninsula’s cherry growers, the few who would listen to him at all, had impatiently humored him as he tried to explain it, his hands shaking to suggest water molecules shivering on the threshold of change. They hadn’t believe him, not really; not even when Lincoln had gone to his truck, opened his glove box, and showed them the table in his refrigeration manual—a relic from the days when he had hoped to find regular work on the peninsula. But he knew these same growers had decided to take some abstract comfort from the idea, anyway. What interested them most was the fact that ice forms in blades and needles, gradually accumulating to a mesh of cold coating on the blossoms. It’s good to know your enemy, one of them had told him.


Now here it was, breaching that wall of resistance—frost, twisting in the moonlight like cotton candy crackling around a spindle, settling on the beaches for the third time this season since the trees had begun to stir and swell. High in the air it was a faint tiara, and on the ground it was like the grit beneath a diamond cutter’s stool. A change-of-state was intent on coming in, damn the difficulty.

“Frosting pisser,” Lincoln said, and he went to the saw shed to get the Drunken Dutch Maid.

Lincoln took down a witch-black kettle and set it on the dirt floor next to the Maid and the pots. From out of the wood box he lifted crumbly slabs of pitch pine stump and dropped them into the pot. The punky wood was as red as cinnamon from the sap that had settled down into the stump after a fire had stripped the pine’s needles. When the pot was half full, Lincoln took the yellow vinyl-coated anchor from his workbench and began to pound. When he stopped the pot was packed with splinters and a salmony paste midway between wood and a primeval oil. It would burn with a hunkered-down, earth’s core heat. He scooped handfuls of the sinus-burning pulp into the ancient smudge pots, lit them, and snapped their lids shut. He kicked up the kickstand and rolled the Maid out the open door. Jumping on, he began to pump, hard.

His Uncle Earl’s crony Otis Asio had created the Maid from a salvaged German bicycle-built-for-two (Indian on the faux tank, horn button in his war bonnet), a pair of Army surplus Lyster bags, four brass sprinkler heads from the back nine of a once-and-never-again golf course that was now a vineyard, and what Otis had called “old Volkswagen radiator hose.” Old Volkswagens had never had radiators, but it was never a good idea to question Otis. The problem was that he was honest: if Lincoln asked, he’d answer, and the phrase “accessory after the fact” would haunt Lincoln’s conscience for weeks. Otis had named his smudging machine the Drunken Dutch Maid because its silhouette was nearly identical to that of the figure on the old cleanser cans—“Only yours has its skirt ripped off,” Otis explained, “so you can see how skinny Michigan farm girls really are”—and because it would list wildly side to side as the rider pedaled.


Above the creak of the swaying pots Lincoln heard a small plane, a nasal song in the key of futility, and knew the dairy queens were flying tonight, looking to catch refrigerant and bottle smugglers on the bay running with lights to cut the cold haze. The Department of Environmental Quality pilots never succeeded in arresting anyone, their instruments unable to read the peninsula’s whispery energy register. It had occurred to Lincoln and everyone else north of Lansing that their snarly ancient Beechcraft Bonanza—split-tail fiberglass peace sign in the sky—was doing more to dilate the ozone cervix than all the smugglers’ boats chuffing along the shorelines, and all the free-range oxides—mon; di—and carbons—chloroflouro—snaking up from the old beaters running its washboard veins combined. A cadre of refugee Cuban mechanics had come north in the late 1970s and the life expectancy of any old Detroit iron had expanded exponentially.


Lincoln reached the end of one of the long orchard lines, and doubled back between the next