Glassworks

A Publication of Rowan University's
Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program

the beauty & utility issue

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nonfiction

Rainbirds | Mary Beth Hunter

via cosmobc

The space shuttle is a mechanical marvel; over two and a half million parts must tend to their own business while getting along with the others in order to launch over four and a half million pounds and bring two hundred and thirty thousand pounds worth of powerless orbiter back down again. And yet the roar from the engines which propel it produces so much of one natural reality—sound—that it must be controlled by another. This triumph of human engineering would shake apart were it not for the most basic element of life. The same great washes of the ancient sea lapping at the base of the launchpad, the earliest pathways of this nation, the very conduit of conception—this enables the movement of the symbol of the modern age.
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Field Research | Jillian Schedneck

via Roberto Trm

Their stories, their answers to my questions about national identity, about creative expression, about what it’s like to be an Emirati woman, are at times vague, misunderstood, uncritical, even sorrowful, but more often joyous and piercingly true. How will I give these meetings—these question-and-answer sessions—shape and meaning? How will this field research finally make any sense?
     For now, I’ll start with the long black cloak.
   The young Emirati women I meet wear black cloaks and headscarves, but that doesn’t begin to describe their variety. Their cloaks, called abayas, are patterned with black beaded flowers, with red sequin swirls, with lace cuffs, with ruffles and folds and luminescent shine. Some are cut sleek and slimming; others are loose and modest; some are open in the front, revealing jeans, a patterned dressed, sparkly top. The rest have their abayas fastened tight. Sometimes their sheylas, the black headscarves, rest on their shoulders, exposing pinned back brown hair, other times the sheyla hangs loose as they charmingly rearrange its folds, or it is fastened in place to show off a coiffed fringe. Other times, their faces are wrapped up securely, lovingly, features peeking out stark and unframed by hair. Their sheylas have subtle patterns of silver stars, purple blossoms, the country’s flag, on the corner that falls next to their cheeks. Few do not cover, not yet or never will. In their homes, they wear dresses, jalabiyas, designer flip-flops, golden-coloured belts, sweatpants. Sometimes they hang their abayas on hooks by their front doors.
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art

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Glassworks Apprentice Community Outreach

Winter 2014

BUY / PRINT

ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS

interview

Science Fiction &
the Gay Community:
Interview David Gerrold
by Joseph Berenato & Katlyn Slough

Moving Pictures:
Interview Eric Dyer
by Jane Blaus, Jason Egner, & Karen Holloway

poetry

We Argue About Where to Hang
the Picture of the Sparrows
Bill Neumire

& how to pronounce
your great-aunt’s name, which letters
are silent. Our dead relatives
are an archeology obsessed with time.
But I’ve been thinking about infinity
& how we’re wrong to worry.
Graffiti under the bridge says
there will be a suicide at the river
in the late afternoon. Has it already happened?
Will it happen? Will you go?
When I draw, my father is a bullet-
shaped freighter, smoke
graying night sky over a part of the sea
no one visits. Some days a lamp
without a shade in the garage.
“Happiness comes in absorption,”
said my father cutting branches
in his grass-smeared gloves,
or at least those are the words
I grafted on him like a circa
tagged to old bones.
He never talked, the blades in his raw hands,
the whiskers of not enough time
graveling his face.
I do not mean that the sun wasn’t warm
or that he was removed
or that he never held my mother
like a crutch. Those were all there,
buried in his silence.
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opinion

Cross-Genre
(Before It Was Cool)
by Amelia Thatcher

Blogging:
The Post-Memoir
by Christina Schillaci

Google Poetry, Authorship,
& Copyright
by Jason Cantrell

review

Haute Surveillance
Johannes Göransson
by Katlyn Slough

In Times of Fading Light
Eugen Ruge
by Joseph F. Berenato

All of You on the
Good Earth
Ernest Hilbert
by Stephanie M. Kohler

fiction

Roadside Memorial | Stephanie Devine

via Greg Thomas

You don’t really know how much time passes before the ambulance arrives. You watch Jacob pacing in the yard, peering into the windows of the car. She is slumped over. “Should I get her out? Should I move her? I don’t think I should move her.” You don’t respond. The paramedics come and get in the vehicle. Without doing much of anything they pronounce her dead. They try and ease Jacob by saying it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s a rainy Friday night and she’d probably been drinking, speeding. She lost control, hit it head-on. Instantaneous.
    You go back inside during the extraction but you can’t help but peek again through the blinds as they carefully lift the sixteen-year-old girl with blood-matted blonde hair from the wreckage, her right arm shaking like Jell-O, and zip a black bag around her the way you might zip a garment bag over a wedding gown. The police have a couple questions, the neighbors gawk. Late in the afternoon a tow truck comes and pulls the jeep out of the yard. You run your hands over the red paint chips, the knick in the tree trunk. You frown. Jacob kisses your forehead and says, “If it wasn’t for that tree, she’d be in our living room.”
    In the days following the accident you read and watch every news clip you can find. Most of the photos include your house, the red jeep, the red door, some of them with Jacob in the background holding his hand over his mouth. A tragedy occurred last night on this quiet Dilworth road…. You learn that Stacey Williams was a junior who ran track and was on the honor roll. You keep repeating “Can you believe this?” to no one at all.
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