Creative Writing Program - English Majors

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English & Creative Writing

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 Maybe God is my Uncle out in the middle of the woods hairy and sitting, contemplating the flow of the river, dead cats, and the salvation of souls. Or maybe he is wondering why people get hairier with years, or why he married this woman who knows everything, and tells you she knows everything, and lets you know that there is a need to repent, that God is watching and marking down the time you backed over the cat. Maybe when it is dark he hears it shriek -- cause something has that man stirred up. But it is probably just the fact that he is out there stuck with her and she is stuck with the trailer, with no plumbing and plans for a house he will build and maybe this is just life and maybe that's how it goes but my Uncle don't think so swinging by the river and scratching his head thinking about if that snake bites him will there be poison chasing his heart and will that woman take him to a hospital or is she going to suck the poison out since she is such a god damn genius, or is she going to pretend like he died out there, on the swing, alone when the police come to the rescue and she inherits that one acre plot of wood and his newly acquired inheritance, compliments of his dead father and she will take it all out to Arizona and sit on her porch with her son and his children and talk about this crazy man she was once married to -- for a spell. K. McDonald Cargoes, 2006 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 *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 110807