2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

functional in the extreme. “Holes,” by Teresa Milbrodt, is a brutal, yet
tender narrative of a daughter who vainly struggles to support her
broke and penniless family by driving holes into her hands and then
joining the circus as a freak. A tale within the story relates how her
grandfather, who had holes in his own hands as well, managed to support
his family. This impressed upon his granddaughter a sordid longing
to do what he did. Its content and words are not so much abrasive as
painful to read. We are left gasping for air by a humanity that is beyond
rational. The daughter feels she has to be a parent substituteweaving
her narrative through self abuse and mutilation with the candor
and desperation of a helpless child.
The poetry in Nimrod gives the writers a lot of space and therefore
lets them take chances with different forms that improvise and devise.
A twenty first century ghazal ends every other line with the word green;
evergreen, across the green, boiled greens, ending with the naming of
Errin, by his mother as dismal in this writer’s mind. “Erinn,” she says, “I
named you for an island, and I see how she sees me, foundering at sea, a
doomed speck of green.” (By Erinn Batykefer; thus an autobiographical
prose.) A poem by Susan Dworski Nusbaum is somewhere between the
comic and the divine. In “Psalms,” she sings praises to a husband who,
“spot cleaned my green sweater, sorted my underpants, underwire bras,
nightgown, without a word, all accounted for, shining.” In “The Disowning,”
by Jessica Moll, one grows nostalgic for Stephen Crane’s “A
light in the Forest,” as she recalls going out into the world, leaving
family, “Beyond the town, forest beyond the forest, swamp more forest.
Animals I do not know, Gods I do not know.” These writers have
gone out into the literary world with a body of excellent work, some
armed with college diplomas, others with freshness and honesty that
are a joy to read.
Awards are given for works submitted. Fiction can be up to 7,000
words, and poetry can be short or long (3 to 10 pages.) Deadline for submission
is April 30th, with an entry fee of $20. For submission guidelines,
go to www.utulsa.edu/nimrod.
144 Santa Fe Literary Review