Professor Patrick Lewis Grangerford, Pre-Law, & Graduate Physical Sciences, & Co-Chair of Dept.

(By Madeleine MacDougal)

“Professor Patrick Grangerford,” read the gold letters on the door of room 228, which is where Professor Patrick Grangerford teaches. He has 137 pupils to whom he lectures at nine o’ clock in the morning, and again at four in the afternoon.
His pupils enjoy him and his classes are full. In fact, Prof. Grangerford has just been given a salary raise, but he has yet to learn this; instead, as he packs his things–a favorite pen, or a coffee mug given him by a student–into his bag, he’s thinking about his little daughter at home, who’s just started liking Barbie and who watches Dragon Tales on the TV. Just like on every other Thursday afternoon–it is Thursday, and Prof. Grangerford is flying to New Orleans this weekend–he locks the supply cabinet, shuts off the overhead, and then pulls the shades to.
But something happens, and he does not pull the shades (and maybe the janitor would question this, but he wouldn’t ever have an answer for why). Prof. P. Grangerford either forgets to pull them, or else is stopped--prevented physically from doing so–and something has caused this (because it can't have been any fault of his own).
Actually, Professor G. is probably in the act of doing so when, crawling onto the window frame to reach a shade, he looks through a window pane and sees something through it. He cannot understand, at first, what he's seeing, so squints, but something has undeniably clumb onto a high-up windowsill within the stairwell of another wing, and is (probably) clutching its knees (or maybe it's lying prostrate); but, anyhow, that figure in the window is a person–a startling person–whom Prof. G. knows (after he recovers from the sight) is in distress.
After a few minutes’ elapse, he has come through a couple hallways and has found the stairwell and the phantom. She is sitting, and she is dangling a leg where it rubs the glass. She’s oblivious, even though Professor Grangerford knows that his phantom (no longer a phantom, but a person with a thought and a will) has heard his tapping shoes on the polished floor.
“G’deevning”–his words are not so loud, nor so sudden, and are almost expected.
A nod replaces reply. He becomes frustrated.
“Are you all right?”–this time, his words seem to break the atmosphere, and they sound frustrated. The creature, the girl, must know that the words are for his gain, and not for hers–but they are truly spoken out of concern.
“Yes.”
She speaks in what is almost a cough. Professor G. hears the dry lips tear apart before the utterance of speech, and it seems the very muscles in that unattuned throat have nearly forgotten their use.
“Mmm hmm.”
His action has proved ineffectual. The Professor's reaction evoked by this student is useless. Suavity has failed him: he climbs the stairs and his tapping shoes tap down along another hallway around the corner.

Retrograde Creation

Let there be no light to flaw the dark.
Let sky
and land
and sea form into one.
Let Adam’s feet
return to clay,
and breath,
Let it d i f f u s e
before it pass the tongue

Into the crumbling man turning earth
Into the black gas, choking,
Into mechanical turning of earth
Into rivers, streams yet-smoking

While some billion counted crowns are fed
Necessity commercialized, electric shocks;
Some billion-dollar industry thanking,
(moments some billion years undoing).

Earth bled, Say, and shrank to nothing.
Say I shrank and nothing bled,
That my lips one dark breath choked
On indecision|Barring Eden

This
no sword.
This
(in my head).

The Elicitor Volume XXIV is here!

Please join us at the Pleasant Street Tea Company on Monday, March 21 at 3:30 pm to celebrate the arrival of the 2009-2010 (Volume XXIV) Elicitor with a special preview of the 2010-2011 (Volume XXV) issue, which will come out in June.

Volume XXIV includes work by Sarah Zuidema, Madeline MacDougal, Tyler Devlin, Micaela O'Connor, Joanna McKinnon, Wes Dunn, Maryka Gillis, Alexandra Hanley, Hannah Sumner, Pauline Cruz, Elizabeth MacDougal, Kristina Bandoni, Alex Bigger-Allen, Philip Curcuru, Ryan Fulford, Kara Papa, and last year's editors Eric Brown, Amy Carpenter, Hayden Wilson, and Terri Moody.

The preview of volume XXV includes a photograph by Lucas Olson, microfiction by Nicole Dahlmer, and a poem by Elizabeth MacDougal.

Join us!

......... ...-elizabeth macdougal.

Low Expectations (By Elizabeth Macdougal)

When this mottled sycamore no longer breathes
Nor wants of limbs they hewed to clear the view
Of that, the breath of this transpired to dew,
Young waterway gone brackish, salt marsh greaves
I could recall from grasses now frost sheaves,
Divert my mind from roads salt-crusted, cracked
That brackish turn the sweeter water (cast
By car tires, trudging, gritty splashes; leaked
To huddled roots corroding froze-bark sleeves
Tucked up, tight, pericyclic; toxin-wracked),
Could overlook, not focus my fault shared,
Or silent tongue, preserving (hushed) the soul,
To know of somewhere's influence yet spared,
That time dispensing which: facile--until.