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Poetry & Flash Fiction Contests

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Poems by Cafag�a | Fiction Excerpt by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Poetry Judge

BIO NOTE:

Marcus Cafag�a is the author of The Broken World (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996) a National Poetry Series selection, and Roman Fever (Invisible Cities Press, 2001).

His poems and critical reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Field, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, and Xconnect as well as in the following anthologies: Anthology of Magazine Verse, The Beacon Best of 1999, Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists, and Poets of the New Century.

He teaches in the creative writing program at Southwest Missouri State University.

BOOKS BY MARCUS CAFAG�A
The Broken World, (University of Illinois Press, 1996), paper, ISBN 0-252-06550-6
Roman Fever, (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), cloth, ISBN 0-9679683-4

Poems

by Cafag�a

The Prophet of Georgetown Park

Sometimes I have a great notion
to jump into the river and drown.
� Lead Belly

Not one face craned over the rail
could really see the man who rose from his jump
off Grace Street Bridge to the dead

canal that moats their condos from the street.
Not one of them could feel his bleeding

hands or feet, the ragged sleeves
he thrashed through three feet of rainwater
and waste, as if he were the one

called by the voices of the drowned
to tell them what happened here
was no visitation. Only once the wind seized

his Senators cap into flight, did the crowd
on the bridge squall out in disbelief,

the ambulance drivers and cops kneel
at the bank's edge. All that guarded them
from the man's lurching disregard

for the world's end were accident reports
they'd heard over walkie-talkies. In the canal
the man had seemed to perish.

Yet none of the EMT's
who hoisted his body out alive,
who cuffed him to a stretcher
and bandaged his wounds, could imagine

what an unacceptable place
his head was to live.

Rat Anesthesiologist

She remembers a white rat
lifted from a cage to a towel spread on a card table
in the kitchen, where her nine-year-old hands
cupped ether over the whiskered nose and mouth
until each tiny pink foot
hung limp upon its tendon.
Her older brother, in his Beatle bangs and scrubs,
imagined himself a doctor, smuggled rodents
home from his late shift at the lab.
One night he opened an incision
down the throat to the sternum;
she dabbed up blood and kept
their patient sedated as his pen knife
sawed the quivering
cherry-shaped pituitary gland
from its stalk in the brain. She remembers wondering
if, like The Incredible Shrinking Man,
he thought the rat would disappear in his hands,
but only blanched when the ether
wafted to her nostrils
and the sewing needle's haphazard tail
of thread through skin
tugged the long wound shut.
She marveled at her brother like a god
as he peeled apart the dusty fur
to expose red and blue organs
in translucent sacs, and there
between the lungs
in electric thump, the systole
and diastole of her frantic heart.

Flash Fiction Judge

BIO NOTE

Thaddeus Rutkowski teaches in NYC at Pace University and the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA. His novel Roughhouse was a finalist for the Members' Choice of the Asian American Literary Awards.

His stories have appeared in Fiction, American Letters and Commentary, Asian Pacific American Journal, Columbia Review, CutBank, Pleiades, Artful Dodge, The Laurel Review etc.

His work has been anthologized in Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon (Anthology Editions), Help Yourself (Autonomedia), The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth), and The Naughty Bits (Three Rivers/Crown).

For more of Rutkowski, go to Google and type in "thaddeus rutkowski" (you should get about 240 hits, or try "thad rutkowski" and you should get 60 hits in e.g. Salon.com, poetz.com, poetrycentral.com, reading between a & b, salt river review, cutBank, www.nthposition.com (click on "poetry," then on "thaddeus rutkowski"), www.land-grantcollegereview.com (click on "archives"), and www.surgeryofmodernwarfare.com.

An excerpt from Roughhouse: a novel in snapshots
(Kaya Press, NYC, 1999)
ISBN: 1-885030-26-6

UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ...

Don't stick a dry bean in your nostril and poke it with your finger until you can't reach it anymore.

Don't stick a fork or other utensil into an electrical outlet or, in your own words, don't play with the plugger place.

Don't ride your bicycle at full speed across an active roadway without looking both ways or stopping.

Don't take a magnifying glass outside on a sunny day and incinerate ants.

Don't light a firecracker and hold it in your hand until it explodes and leaves a wet, circular blister.

Don't stuff match heads into a closed metal pipe until the device has the killing power of a grenade.

Don't place a shotgun shell on its end and hammer a nail into its firing cap.

Don't pretend you are shooting BBs at a paper target when in fact you are shooting at human beings.

Don't tie a child to the crossbar of a swing set and leave him to be discovered by his mother.

Don't bait your schoolteachers by giving them quizzical looks when they are trying to lecture on serious topics, like civics and physics.

Don't break into the school building through a rooftop trapdoor and steal as many video recorders as you can carry.

Don't stand by the highway and throw goonies through the windshields of passing cars.

Don't shoot songbirds with your .22 in a safety zone or even in a non-safety zone.

Don't argue with your parents so intensely that you get sent to a foster home.

Don't fight with your foster parents so much that you get sent back to your original home.

Don't disrupt a local wedding ceremony and make the newlyweds' relatives beat you like a pi�ata.

Don't stare at a slab of hashish the size of a chocolate bar and then smoke it.

Don't knock on the door of a fraternity house with a baseball bat and shout, "Send out your biggest brother!"

Don't antagonize a shirtless man by digging your fingers into his pectoral muscles and lifting him off the ground.

Don't say to the person returning the gloves you left at a bar, "If you can take them from me, you can keep them."

Don't get thrown through the bar's window in such a way that the glass leaves a gash down your back.

Don't, as you are leaving for a new life in a different city in another state, even think of coming back to where the trouble began.