here - Reija Roberts

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Poetry.Fiction.Creative Non-Fiction.Art
First Time
Writers Unleashed
First Time
Writers Unleashed
Volume 1/Issue 1
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
Reija Roberts
Copyeditor
Kate Hunt
Design/Production
Reija Roberts, Tommy Croft and Joanna Yuen
Feature Artist This Issue
Tommy Croft
Advertising
Reija Roberts
FIRST TIME is published 2 times a year and is available in Canada from
Magazines Canada.
General Guidelines
We accept submission of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction by little
known or unpublished writers. Manuscripts should be sent via email only.
www.firstimezine.ca
[email protected]
ISSN: 2340-6754
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the BC Arts Council and the
Canada Council for the Arts.
Contents copyright © 2010 FIRST TIME Magazine
Contents
Poetry
Fiction
Sakara by Zoe Klassen
3
I found perhaps
by Jennifer Markham
4
Saving Frankie by Nicole Harder 6
Scratch by Lamont Washington
0
Horsewife by Melba Moore
0
Calgon Can’t Take Me Away
by Diane Keaton
Three Poems by Gerome Ragni
0
0
Edgar by Frank Mills
0
Taxi by James Rado
0
Fireweed by Lynn Kellogg
0
Sugar Kane by Michael Butler
0
Root Down by Lorri Davis
0
Creative Non-Fiction
One of the Boys by Tina Pengelly 0
Jaundice by Emmaretta Marks
0
Everyone I Went To High School
With Is Dead
by Shelley Plimpton 0
Review
Russel F. Carlson reviews Ghost
Lights by Keith Montesano
Feature Artist
Tommy Croft is a photographer from
Northwestern Ontario. For more of
his art, visit: www.tomcroft.com.
0
Every Writer Has A First Time
From the Editor
I remember my first time. It happened at
home. I was sitting in front of the
computer with my Santa mug full of black
tea, geared up for a few solid hours of
procrastination before bringing myself to
start my homework. I was checking my
inbox when it finally happened.
When it finally happens to you, First Time
wants to boast the first notch on your belt.
Because no matter what happens next,
you’ll always remember your first time.
“We are very pleased to inform you that
your work has been accepted for
publication.” At first you don’t quite believe
it. Later, you go about your day and you
wonder if people can tell. You’ve always
been a writer, but it hasn’t felt real until
now.
First Time is the vehicle for your first time.
This is a magazine that doesn’t care about
your awards or brags. In fact, the only
stipulation is that you must be little known
or completely unpublished. Publishing cred
won’t get you anywhere with us.
Oh yeah. And your writing better be damn
good, too. This isn’t the place to showcase
the student pieces from your creative
writing workshop. Unless, of course, it
meets the aforementioned criteria. Make no
mistake: we are armed with rejection letters
and we aren’t afraid to use them.
But don’t let that scare you away. All of the
writers featured in this first issue are
virtually unpublished. This could be you.
There is so much untapped talent waiting
to be unleashed. First Time is dedicated to
sniffing it out first.
2
Sakara
Zoe Klassen
It isn’t that I can’t
travel,
isn’t that I have culture do a quantum trick,
once more with that old alchemy: ‘as at
home, so abroad.’
I hear its underbelly anyway,
condensing between the dry whirr of each
tourist’s camera, and
the exacted, steady hymn of peopled cities.
I am ruining your trip.
I am. Sick and tired.
I have thrown up
on the sand-hems of a pyramid:
I’m a lesser ruin, a quicker instance.
I’ll recover, and wonder
at the struggle lurking in each photograph,
your implacable presence.
It is that I am
sick
and
tired
and that these facts don’t
fit hyperbolic expression,
have burrowed into my atrocity
of a stomach, the jagged resistance of
inhalation.
3
I found
perhaps
Jennifer Markham
I peeked down
when the cushions separated
and found
A chocolate bar wrapper,
perhaps the munchies eater
was a diabetic
and needed it to live!
Four dirty tissues,
perhaps the snot rag creator
was sick at the time
and was too embarrassed
to carry them around.
A single penny,
perhaps the discarder
was superstitious
and wanted to pass on
their luck to me.
Perhaps these creatures were unaware
of the time capsule they created
together
between the seat cushions.
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Saving Frankie
“I’m just tired.” Tired of what? Tired of this
life, tired of fighting, tired of trying.
Nicole Harder
I knew he recognized the familiar urge of
mine to run, creeping up behind me like a
rogue wave. I’d stepped inside the dark core
of escape so many times, he knew what was
coming. And so, as always, I took refuge at
Grandma’s house.
Maybe it was the rain gliding like
molasses down my grandmother’s window.
Or maybe it was the terrible ticking of
the clock that perched on a wallpapered
pantry. Seconds sounded in the heavy air
like punches behind my eyes. Every one of
them reminded me of wasted time.
Whatever it was that morning, it gave
strength to my sadness.
My grandmother was throwing rocks at the
window from outside again. When I heard
them I jumped, spilling tea on my robe.
A week ago, I told my husband, Jake, it
was best to take some time apart. We were
driving home in our old Ford Mercury,
on our way home from his staff party. The
venue had been crawling with silver platters
of roe, sandwich fingers and champagne.
Pillars of tall, rich wives in Dolce &
Gabbana dresses lined the over-polished
floor. I hated every second of it.
“Fuck.” For the fourth time I uncoiled
myself from the corner of the couch and
made my way to the window. Grandma
had a problem with being sensible when it
interfered with being lazy.
“The door’s in the wrong direction,” she
explained the last time I asked her why she
couldn’t just come in to get my
attention. “I’m not going that way. I need
your help over here.” Then she’d pointed
to the barn. Other times it was the fence
line or the porch. “I’m old,” she said, “I’ve
learned some things.”
The drive home was silent for the first half
of the way. Jake drove and I sat in the
passenger seat staring blankly out the
window. Every ounce of my senses clung to
the flashing phone poles at the side of the
road in my effort to escape the
piercing quiet. Jake’s endurance of the
silence broke, and he started the exhausted
discussion, one we had played out so many
times before.
I opened the window this time with
obvious frustration and waited for her
demand. The rain had become stronger,
and the wind was picking up. I pulled my
arm back inside and wrapped my robe
tighter around me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, pulling his tie
loose.
Grandma was standing in the middle of the
yard in Grandpa’s awkwardly large rubber
boots. They haloed her knees, which were
wrapped in red woollen tights. An old belt
cinched her Khaki shorts at the waist, and
I held a rage of furious words back with a
deep, drawn-out sigh. I replied with the
same simple explanation I had given him
every time he asked that question.
6
a 60-year-old alpaca sweater hung on her
tiny frame.
the corner of the yard.
“Come on, girl.” She was addressing my
slow, disinterested stride toward her. She
only ever called her cows “girls.”
“Grandma, you’re insane. You’re going to
get sick in this,” I hollered down at her
through the rage of rain.
I stepped up into the shed and stood there
for a moment, my eyes scanning the tiny
space that at one time was so big to me.
It smelled like rotten wood, mould and
turpentine now.
“Well, good,” she shouted back. “You can
return the favour. Now come down here,
Frankie. I can’t seem to find my shovel.”
“What are you digging for in this?”
“This used to be my playhouse,” I said.
Grandma ignored me and clambered
through the rusted gardening tools leaning
in a disorderly manner against one wall. I
smiled, but hardly noticed. “I used to stack
all of my plates up on that shelf, where the
tins are. And I had a crib for my dolls in
that corner.”
“Potatoes,” she replied.
My name was Frances, but Grandma
refused to call me that. My mother had
named me Frances after the Catholic saint.
When she married my father she knew she
would have a girl and that she would name
me after Saint Frances just to spite my
grandmother. Grandma was an atheist and
loathed religion of any kind. And so it was
Frankie, from my first breath. My mother
became a devout Catholic when she fell in
love with my father, an American
Catholic from Minnesota. Grandma, of
course, didn’t approve for the sake of her
future grandchildren.
“Oh yeah?” Grandma said, “Did you ever
keep a shovel anywhere? Cause I sure could
use one.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I started pulling tools aside slowly,
half-heartedly. I slid them along the wall
with one finger, an inch to the left, as if I
didn’t want to disturb them. A rake, an old
scythe, a few brooms.
“They’ll end up living in little boxes, and
won’t scar like the rest of them,” she told
my mother on the day she married my
father. The words didn’t make sense to my
mother, but they made sense to me when
I heard them. I was fragile when I left my
parents’ home, and I felt everything.
As I moved a box away from the back
corner of the shed, something caught my
eye. It was covered in dust but looked so
familiar. I lifted it from the clutches of rake
teeth and pulled it out into the damp, grey
light of the storm.
I put on my coat and Grandma’s boots and
made my way around the house. By the
time I got around,
Grandma was heading toward the shed in
“This old tin,” I said, vague memories stirring in my mind. Grandma turned around
7
and knelt down, as if she had been looking
for it all along.
pieces inside, somewhat like my
recollection of them. There wasn’t much to
see, just some old feathers and rocks. But
there was something about them that made
my shoulders drop. Remnants of comfort
and courage came through from the past. I
smiled and picked up one of the feathers.
“There’s the damn thing,” she said. “Do
you remember this?”
I tried to dig back into my childhood. I
remembered Lite-Brite on Grandma’s
kitchen floor. The pegs got stuck in the fir
of her moccasin slippers. I would giggle,
watching them cling to her feet like little
neon monkeys.
“Do you remember now?” Grandma asked,
resting her head against mine. “There was a
sparrow in the field, nearly dead. You found
her and brought her back to me. We spent
three days nursing her, but she just couldn’t
heal. When she died you ran to your room
and stayed there for two days straight. You
wouldn’t even come out for dinner. I had to
bury her alone.”
I remembered Grandma’s basement. I
would go down there and pull all of the old
books off the shelf. I’d open them up and
press my nose inside the spine, smelling
them.
I could still feel the ache in my heart when
I’d seen the bird along the fence line. Her
chest was rising and falling frantically, as
if she was trying to spare the last bit of air
in her small lungs. I had picked her up so
carefully, afraid of breaking her. I could feel
her heart racing against my palm, wishing
she knew that I executed every small step to
the door of Grandma’s house for her
comfort. It felt like it took hours to get
there.
“All good memories, Grandma.” I smiled,
lifting a hand to my cheek.
She chuckled and unfolded her legs from
under her, groaning the way a grandma
does. She was getting comfortable on the
floor of the shed, her sweater bunched up
around her hips and chin, her legs curled
up to the side.
“Open it,” she said.
“Jane. I named her Jane,” I said, pulling the
feather between my fingers.
I hesitated for a moment.
“Well come on, Frankie. Break the darn
box open.”
“That’s right. And this…” She reached into
the tin and pulled out a stone. “Grandpa
built a bridge over the creek in the back
and named it after you.”
I dug my nails into the rusted edges of the
lid and circled around the corners, prying
it off slowly. Grandma waited with a soft
smile on her lips, peering over my shoulder.
“Yeah. What was it? Frankie’s Cross?” It was
made of peeled birch, white and
shining against the dark green hemlocks.
We had woven pussy willows into the
The top came off with a jolt, rattling the
8
arched railing.
them closed. You kept them to remember
you can’t run.”
Grandma held the rock up into the air,
examining it.
I thought about Jake. A week before I
decided to leave, he had had his mother’s
ring re-sized for me. I knew what that ring
meant to him. He had left it untouched for
years after she died. I guess he knew he had
to do something to keep things together.
“Frankie’s Cross,” she echoed. She put the
rock in my palm. “When Grandpa died
we had that big storm come through the
valley. The creek flooded and wiped out the
bridge.” She chuckled and shook her head.
“You left here and swore you’d never come
back. And you didn’t. Not for six months.”
“I need you to know I love you,” he’d said,
sliding it down my finger. “It’s all I have left
of her, and it’s with you.”
“I don’t remember that.” I turned to face
her. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She
looked at me with such sincerity and
heartbreak. Her green eyes, wide and undaunted, were heavy with urgency.
God. And then I left him. The same way I’d
left Grandma to bury Jane.
“Go back home, Frankie. You’ve outgrown
that old box.”
“You’ve never been able to face things,
sweetheart. You always run and hide.”
I put my face down and stared blankly at
the tin, not wanting to look at her. She
lifted my chin.
“But you’ve always been a dreamer. An
explorer. And I knew when you were out of
that box cause you dreamed up
solutions for all of our problems. You could
just never fix your own.”
I couldn’t stop the surge of tears from
coming. They had been waiting a long
time.
Grandma pulled me close and held me
until I felt the strength to look at her again.
She took the tin from me and began
putting everything back in.
“We put these things in this tin to keep
9
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