Student Work

Opportunities abound for English majors to practice their craft. Undergraduate writers publish poetry and fiction in the student periodical, The Album, or the student literary journal, Cargoes.

In July 2005, Cargoes was awarded the Undergraduate Literary Prize for content by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Song of the Day

Can't go a whole day without a feast. Birds thicken the ground,
and we lay our cutlery aside. Grim, yes, and fat as swollen ankles.

The sparrow in my throat sneezes instead of sings. Hello, winter,
nice to see you slush the mud, nice to see you snot the air.

It's that kind of day. We have a song for every occasion.
Here is the song you bludgeoned your tongue on, all low notes

that sisterly, kind, frosting creaming the snow, you could not hit,
but my, how the song hit you. Children left wounded men behind,

corn cob pipes, a window to a tracheotomy; now the men of ice
whistle in their sleep and sing notes of praise. I curl into them,

bad lovers shuffling snow under my shirt. A new spine rides
my own like a sand dune. Where are the little people of summer

to crawl over, to sing my hair's sheen? I like an unsung hero,
holding my song of the day close to my ribs. What a high

note that stays in my humming cords! Will you reach over,
pluck the song from my lips, eat it like cookie dough?

Will you wait for summer to bake us clean, to break us neatly?
No crumbs, sister, lest the birds eat them on our way home.

Miranda Dennis
Cargoes, 2007

Forming Italian Cities

We made the outskirts of places with found leaves.
Electricity announced itself
pouring from voids
and sound, telling us pure songs
of deep grey walks along the canal
while the brighter chords cast our shadows
like the consort's face.

We saw the Egyptian papers,
undiscovered in Venice,
but making wings regardless
only bound with fibrous strings,
tested by the sacred cat's flight.

I stopped to examine the soaring writing
that directs the line-breaks of the streets and waterways.
For seconds, I poured over Oscar Wilde verse
printed
in script beside his face,
the trashcan angel,
Streghe brooms lean against
alleyway incantations. The wine colored
marks of expatriates spatter
bridges.

Nowhere in the lust bodied water we stood, but there the
rooftops
are made of my intertwined fingers
writing the arches and doors that float
above the murky green water
tonguing planted gardens through bars.

Looking up in sleep, I saw a plaque that spoke, "Padova"
and we drove there in a lion throated cart,
coaxed the
pigeons on the tail,
sang the water clean.

The observatory stood like a stretching arm,
holding Galileo's eye aloft.
Ducks saluted
from the streams below, gates
mouthed soft noises
with rusty bolt lips that locked the map.
(I tried to listen through the whistling red)
There two discs burned in a line and marked our bodies in one slow arc.

Jessica McGlew
Cargoes, 2008

At the Kitchen Table: two voices

I

I know you hate it here, living in a town that is dying.
Like the fish, everyone is leaving.
Pushing their homes across the ice
to Saint John to pack Cod into tins.

We have been forsaken
Cod on the cross
we sing their requiem.

When the fishnets are wet I mend them on the kitchen table
letting the sea water dry on the surface.
The next day the water is gone leaving salt.
Angry, you brush it to the floor
I step on it and it becomes imbedded in the woods grain.


II

We mourn:
gray skies and the whaling winds
I see the decay of the sea,
even the fish swam away.

I make jam out of cloudberries
pick them with my hands
and they stain my nails orange.
I mash them in a cobalt bowl
mixing in handfuls of sugar.
Grains fall on the tabletop, I brush them to the floor.
You step on it and it becomes imbedded in the woods grain.

Amy Dixon
Cargoes, 2007

The Monster Rally

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
- Adrienne Rich

No two snowflakes alike. Just ask Nanook
of the North, as terribly alone as he seems,
licking his knife to cut through the ice.
Packed snow may keep him warm,
but how would anyone know his body's warmth?
Documentary's dark interior keeps sensory
details at bay, and this one is hated
by the warm-blooded woman holding a boom pole,
really holding it, cracking jokes about
what she has done—oh god—and worse
to get to where she is? Do you know?
Do you grasp—really, you know, grasp—
this concept? Rotten innuendo

she keeps written down in a sketchbook,
passing notes to men twice her age
twice her girth half her intelligence
men who have tattooed Charlie Chaplin
on an inner thigh—maybe not even
their own. Men who have gotten off
to Buster Keaton, to the Marx brothers,
but not to Karl Marx. To hell with the dialectic
of control. To hell with less bang for the buck.

Will somebody listen to her?
She hates Robert Flaherty,
the accidental man, his work
up in flames; always a man
with a cigarette, eventfully so.
She swallows the entire pole.
Hey, hey, innuendo! Anyone
wanna watch a horror movie?
There are shoulders meant
to hide her tender face.

In her box room she watches Frankenstein
in hopes of learning a thing or two, mocking
the woman with kewpie lips as she begs
pleads with the nervous fevers of her man.
Just f*** him already, keep him at home.
She is not that woman, that prude hidden
under layers of fur and lace, nor is she the little
girl tossed into the water who can neither swim
nor saved the popped heads of flowers. But she is?
What? Dolorous, a frame still, ending credits.

Miranda Dennis
Cargoes, 2007

What Lefty did to Loraine

You made love to Loraine when she was a kid, but her body did not feel so young.

Here is what you knew at the time. At the age of sixteen you, personally, were familiar with all the body parts and some entry-level physiology and unlike Loraine had firsthand knowledge of what a person ought to expect when going there for the first time. Once the desire to kiss the sensitive area between her shoulder blades got planted in your head your guts became tight with a biting guilt: wouldn't it be right, and better, for her to make something more like baby steps toward an entrance into all that knowing? You took the issue up with your body and it was your body who convinced you otherwise.

Loraine was sixteen. It was an early morning at the end of February, a full moon, and a pretty long walk through the trailer park to wherever she was taking you. You puffed big breaths out in front of your face that made it look like you were smoking. Loraine smiled. When she shivered you made a point of wrapping her shoulders with your flannel overshirt, an old one you barely ever wash because it's practically threadbare. You were ashamed, you wished you'd woken up that morning smart enough to put on a different one; you wished you had more than three different warm shirts to choose from. It was so frigid at 4:30 AM that you had to hop from foot to foot across the floor and dig frantically through your laundry pile to find something made of an appropriate material. You layered up and cursed the fact that you could see your breath inside your own home.

At approximately 4:35 AM you arrived at the destination you'd both agreed upon, the back gate of the Tree Tops R.V. and Trailer Park, which was indicated by a large piece of plywood nailed to two particularly steady trees, about eight feet apart. You stood around the back of the sign, the side that wasn't visible from the street, where just about every young lover ever to sneak around in the middle of the night in Method, TX, had etched a word or two4 to commemorate the occasion. As you stood there examining the hieroglyphics and absently peeling some white crust out of the corners of your mouth, which felt altogether tough, inside and out, chapped from the wind, Loraine's hands appeared on your hipbones.

She guided you along two arm-lengths behind her, a real sensual leash, squeezing your hand from time to time as you stepped over fallen tree trunks, other people's firewood. At one point you had to hoist yourself up and over a fence. You had a pretty vague idea of where you were going: you were taking the long way around the perimeter of the trailer park to avoid chained-up dogs and lit windows. Instead of paying attention to where Loraine was taking you, however, you were far more interested in her body's peculiar movements as she tried to step lightly, avoiding broken branches, loose gravel, a tennis ball. About 30 feet ahead you spotted a possible destination, the remotest trailer, a red doublewide where nobody had lived since June, and you tugged at Loraine's arm. She turned her head just enough to wink at you with her right eye as she coaxed you up its termite-eaten front steps. She opened the screen door with one hand and jiggled the deadbolt loose with the other.

As the door swung open you quietly asked her how she knew about the broken lock on this particular doublewide and if she'd taken any precautions to ensure that no one else would be dropping by that evening. Loraine laughed and cleared her throat. Your eyes were still adjusting to the light but you could just barely make out the edges of her: she was standing on top of something, a chair perhaps, pulling on a string. She was going to open a window shade. Very quickly you suggested that that was not a good idea, what if someone decided to look in and they could see you? She pulled the chord and lifted the blinds up a few inches anyhow.

Lefty, it is at this point that you have chosen to forget exactly what came over you. You liked and have always like her long black hair, the way pieces of it constantly get caught in her mouth, which is exactly what was happening when you placed your hands on the moonlit back of her. The notches of her spine stood out white and rounded like exposed bone as you peeled off both your flannel and the clothes she'd been wearing beforehand.

You have suffocated the most vivid, bodily details of your one and only encounter with Loraine Goodstock beneath a mumbled system of abstractions. But you cannot argue that the two of you -- and here I mean you and your body -- did not bring her to something like a sudden and ecstatic rushing of blood during which she held on to your shoulders as though she might sink through the ground and be lost without you. You shipwrecked yourself against her hipbones.

Loraine insisted upon looking you in the eyes while becoming not only a woman but also a pregnant one. All your doing, thereby exposing your precarious situation: you are not a rapist but a father. You had no intentions of abandoning Loraine in the literal sense of the word. If you had decided to be a bit more sensible about the whole situation you would gladly have accompanied her to prenatal visits at the doctor's office. You would have driven her all the way to Abilene. You would have told her 99 year old grandmother, Eunice, whose eyesight was failing, that you were a kind friend from school who happened to have a reliable car. You would have saved your money and given her everything she could possibly need.

You've got work acquaintances in other counties who have gone to prison for statutory, and you learned from their mistakes. Loraine stood passionately in your kitchen holding a dull paring knife up above her head, blade pointed down, eyes shut, her right arm crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Her belly was covered by a bright yellow sundress that would have hid everything well enough until just a week or two ago, and you knew from books you'd taken the time to read recently that the topmost part of her pregnant curve, now so troublingly visible, is called the fundus. The hand holding the knife was shaking. From where you sat at your dining room card table you couldn't quite tell what the knife was pointed at -- perhaps you, you thought, or her belly. Rather than gently entreating her to put the knife down, Loraine, you reminded her that her seventeenth birthday was in fact coming up quite rapidly, at which point you'd only have a year to wait before things would become "safe" and you could be like a real family, all three of you, together. Perhaps living in your very own home?

You held a think silence, the two of you, in your living room/bedroom/kitchen, the only room in your house besides the master bath. After a few beats Loraine exhaled and dropped the little knife onto the laminate countertop with a clunk. She lifted her dress, reached her hand into the hip pocket of her jeans, slid out a beat-up pack of DownHome Grown cigarettes, most of which were bent, and placed one in the center of her mouth. She held the pack out to you in her right hand. You declined; Loraine shrugged her shoulders and pulled a green lighter from out of the pack. She lit the cigarette in her mouth and dragged slowly. You watched her. A silver dish commonly used for the ashes of your cigarettes and the cigarettes of friends, certainly not meant to be used by your very depressed pregnant lover (who was not really your lover anymore) sat on your countertop. So did Loraine, carefully: she pressed into the drab olive laminate countertop with her palms and pushed herself up, planting her bottom by the old, derelict toaster you once bought from the Goodwill. She smoked the whole thing until it was gone, at which point she tossed the filter into your kitchen sink and left through your creaking front door.

You have known several women, Lefty, but you have only known Loraine Goodstock once. You have only known one Loraine Goodstock. Later on that evening (and now, sitting on a lonely bar stool at The Barn Owl with your friends who are not friends), you wanted to know what you could have possibly been thinking. Also, you were overcome with the feeling of having eaten too many oranges: why did you let Loraine walk out of that door, having left her cigarettes on your kitchen counter and being so young and visibly afraid?

Leslie Jarzabski
Cargoes, 2007