Glassworks

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

SPRING 2014: print & digital issue

READ | BUY

fiction

Struck | Carol Guess & Kelly Magee

credit: Bo Insogna via Flickr

Every girl’s been struck but me. Lightning has taken more from my family than any war. It’s taken pigment and nails and IQ. Memories. Platelets. Gave my aunt hepatitis, caused my cousin’s stillbirth. Cured my sister Lanie of diabetes and ever getting cold. She glows now. Slightly, so you wouldn’t notice unless you knew her from before.
My time is coming. No one knows why it’s only the girls who get struck, but it doesn’t matter why because that’s how it is. You can’t escape it. They say it hurts but it’s over fast. Afterward anything can happen. If you heart stops, you better hope someone nearby knows CPR and isn’t afraid to touch you. Lanie’s heart didn’t stop, but she was paralyzed for two weeks after, and she said she smelled fire the whole time. She communicated by blinking, but all she’d tell us was that something was burning. Her hair was singed off, so that made sense. But she also said she kept thinking of this phrase, “Get her out of the water,” and she didn’t know why. Didn’t know who said it or where she’d heard it. She thinks it was some kind of premonition, and that it has something to do with me.

READ FULL ISSUE

nonfiction

Robot Cormorant | Michael Hess

credit: Kabilan Subramanian via Flickr

I am not one of those birders who keeps a lifetime list of all the birds I have ever seen, nor am I the type of birder who keeps a list of all the birds I have not seen but that I do really want to see. I am simply a person who every so often looks up and sees a bird or birds that catch my eye. Right now, I am sitting on a bench at Cherry Beach in Toronto, and a few birds catch my eye that are flying onto a peninsula across the harbor on the Leslie Street Spit. The birds appear to be flying into a large group of trees with white trunks whose leaves have been stripped away. Perhaps the leaves are only obscured by a light fog. I would like to investigate these birds and these trees, so I hop on my bike and head toward the Leslie Street Spit.

READ FULL ISSUE

art

see more

spring 2014 | buy - print

Glassworks Spring 2014

A magazine of literature and art.

ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS

interview

So, Sing On:
An Interview with Ernest Hilbert
by Stephanie Kohler & Brian Maloney

Make a Difference: An Interview with Chris Rakunas
by Jason Cantrell,
Steve Royek &
Christina Schillaci

poetry

Song on Your Birthday
Donna O'Connell-Gilmore

Deep pink buds of apple tree
break into pale pink blooms,
conceal the oriole. I hear his notes,
free-ranging, melodious.
He plays a piccolo.

Now he emerges.
His flame-orange feathers
eclipse the apple blossoms,
dazzle against the jet black head,
black wings with startling white bars.

I wonder if he sang this way
the day when you were born,
in this tree younger then, blossoms more profuse,
while I inhaled and pushed the final push,
bloody gush, and couldn’t raise my head.

Then your voice, a singing wail, arrested me.
I beheld you wet-skinned, matted hair, blinking.
How you dizzy me.
How you eclipse the bird.

READ FULL ISSUE

What Does it Take
to Change a Town?
Terry Martin

Only sand. For six days, I’ve watched
five Tibetan monks of Drepung Loseling
lean easily over a raised square platform
hour after hour in open concentration,
tapping fine lines of colored sand.

Holding a chakpur in one hand, each runs
a metal rod along the funnel's grated surface.
Herbs flow like liquid, sound like a chant.
Grain by grain, the monks tap colors of intention.
This art is prayer.

Men who embrace peace carry themselves differently.
I could love them, I think, kind unlined faces,
eyes like grandmothers', compact bodies draped
in flowing maroon robes. Could run my hand
across soft black bristles of brush-cut hair,
bury my nose in brown necks, smooth as wind.
They summon tenderness.

What will those of us who have learned
to hold on tightly with both hands
take away? At the end of the week
they sweep the table clean
scattering colorful grains to the sea.

READ FULL ISSUE