Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson 1st Place Essay Sitting in the audience at a journalism conference, the speaker asks us to do a quick exercise. A roomful of reporters and writers collectively squirms. We are to free write for several minutes about a topic that we secretly wish to write about but have not yet dared explore. Then we are to turn to a neighbor and read it aloud. Each of us, in turn, must sum up the other’s topic in a single word. On my yellow pad, I jot down the words skin and shoreline. I know where I have avoided going in my writing and in the physical world. I am near the end of a long journal after being burned in a car fire and though I have written about the impact of my trauma in various ways, I have yet to confront the outermost layer itself. Of the self. My skin most often leads me to the operating room, not to paradise. I think I should subject myself to the hospital in the reporter’s role, go sit on a stool in the OR while grafting is done. This will trigger clarity or closure for me. I will be able to offer great insight and perspective. It will allow me to wring out any remaining demons and detach. That is what I secretly hope for as I scribble down a mish-mash of medical jargon and how I will dissect the pros and cons of artificial skin for the uneducated public. Montaigne, the French essayist invented the form. He had it right, essay translated means a trial. To make, discover or even stumble on a path in a story is often a struggle. Our lecturer punches the podium with a fist and admonishes us to compress an idea or theme into one word such as loneliness, disgrace, ego, failure, promise, wealth. When I read my blurb to my neighbor Constantine, a Russian journalist, he surprises me by saying my topic is about environment. After some thought, I agree. Skin is your ultimate environment. It is the barrier from germs that protects you from the outside world while it holds together all your slithery fluids, organs, bones, arteries and veins, tissues like a sausage casing. Skin is the largest vital organ. And because it is visible the epidermis can determine your fate. Skin may act as a shield or a barrier to others. In its color, marks, wrinkles, we are judged. Write what you know translates into use what you have, or what you have access to and deficits count as part of any story. During the conference, we are reminded to examine ideals in a story’s context and to counter the idea of any rosy paradise. This I know. When I first lay in the intensive care burn unit, everyone who entered my room dressed head-to-toe in gowns, hats, masks, gloves and booties to keep the environment sterile. I owned a 30% third degree burn and had plenty of ‘virgin skin’ to graft from but this had to be done delicately in a series over time. First, surgeons debrided the wounds. They scraped down until the dead tissue was cleared to prevent infection. You are kept on antibiotics and IV’s to replace the fluids that seep out. Sunburn is first degree, painful blisters mark second degree while a third degree burn means all seven layers that comprise skin down to the muscle are destroyed and require grafting. Until the doctors determine a good blood supply exists to nourish a graft or if the patient has too few unburned patches to graft from you use temporary skin. Cadaver skin can be used in critical cases to cover a patient’s open areas but no one can trade or wear another’s skin as the body rejects what is not its own in time. I used pigskin, the closest to human skin, that came wrapped in cellophane like coldcuts. I wore thin sheets of mottled pink and black pig under gauze across my forehead for several weeks. News media love to report on the latest techniques to ‘grow’ skin or praise the invention of synthetic artificial skin like magic. A stockbroker friend often calls me looking for tips on the biotech firms in the headlines that promote artificial skin. There are portfolio and patent dreams at stake. No one talks about the drawbacks of fragility, the pinky shine that never fades or infections, the end result of a flawed product. Grafts, taken off healthy skin with an instrument that works like a cheese slicer, remove three to four layers that are durable once healed but feel smooth like tissue-paper, stay hairless and look shinier than normal skin. I had a therapist point to the pocked, netted look of the grafts covering my arm and say, “That looks just like chicken skin.” The texture comes from a piece of skin graft being run through a contraption somewhat like a pasta machine that stretches the available skin to cover a larger area. The skin piece can be stretched up to six times its original size. But surgical outcomes always involve a trade-off. Anywhere you cut leaves a scar and scar tissue remains rigid. Grafts demand attention and try to wrinkle, shrink, and contract with amazing strength as they heal. I have had to wear pressure garments on my legs, arm and face 23 hours a day for 8 to 10 months to keep the grafts smooth and pliable. It is an ordeal. When a flawless alien-smooth expression is prized by a culture, it is easy to be seduced by surgery, the drama and the promise of repair. Boundaries dissolve when you view the raw meat photos of your own face with grafts removed taken during procedures. Boundaries skew when surgeons brag that they have been inside my face. The altered terrain of the body’s landscape leaves me afraid of being touched and afraid of not being touched. After I leave critical care with my face tight and grafted I embark on the reconstructive phase. This means for a chance at a semblance of a face I need to replace all the grafts with flapped skin. Flapped skin is full-thickness, cut down to muscle and moved with an adjoining blood supply. It is the texture of real skin because it is. Only since you take all the layers to put somewhere else, you have to then graft to the donor area. It is tedious as you have to train the blood vessels to follow the flap by repeated cutting and lifting or shaping tubes of skin to act as a blood bridge or conduit until the flap settles into its new home. My next surgeon plans out a year’s worth of 16 operations. You forfeit any modesty you may have had if you are a patient for a prolonged time. Being naked is nothing when your skin, your very shield of armor is ripped off. When my big flap goes sour, the blood vessels freak out and convulse, three-quarters of the flap from my back that is supposed to cover my face dies. The nerves, already cut, leave me no feeling when Dr. F comes to my room to examine the disaster. He has brought instruments. In moments, I feel him tugging, cutting, and sawing at the heavy folded flap that hangs below my right shoulder. He tosses strip after strip in the garbage and a nurse is summoned so the bag in the can is quickly removed from the room. Me, pieces of me, are thrown out, discarded. Tears run down my face into my lap. I feel flayed, exposed to my core, defenseless. A good narrative tackles why the writer addresses this topic now. How the surround, the bit players or setting offer some meaning and serve the storyline. The author must reveal layers. The story is about this, you tell your editor, and also about this, and this. As the intensity of my surgery schedule slackens, I try to balance the hospital world with life outside. In the company of Coralia, a pale but vivacious Transilvanian friend, I decide to confront the ultimate skin environment: the beach. Although Cora visited the shores of the Black Sea annually with her family for picnics and time off, she had always fantasized about tropical islands, palm trees, vibrant colors and sun. Cora is slogging through her doctor’s residency in the Bronx, NY and is desperate for a winter break. I know her as a friend of my sister’s husband who comes from Romania. We sift through Internet packages and make a plan. This will be her first foray to an island, any island and my Caribbean debut. Just contemplating an island beach causes me angst. This is my final frontier. I usually stay hidden in the shade, away from the sun that darkens my grafts on my arm and leg. I shop for a bathing suit for the first time in years and am relieved to find tankinis that are kinder than bikinis in coverage. This trip will be the first time I dare expose my map of scars. I also buy a white cover-up and #45 sunblock. While Cora dreams of diving into the ocean like a mermaid, there will be no swimming for me. I continue to wear a trach in my neck from my initial inhalation injury, which has healed, but the easy access for surgery made me keep it. With a hole in my windpipe, though plugged as I do not breathe through it, I can still almost drown standing the wrong way in the shower. Five months after September 11th, Cora’s Romanian passport is a problem. Though she has her green card, is an articulate tall elegant woman, she is forever judged not by her looks or worth but by her birth place that happens to be a poor country. Her pale cheeks are flushed and she is incensed as my bag trundles down the conveyor at JFK with no problem and she and her bag are diverted to an roped off inspection area. But the special x-ray machine is not working, so I follow Cora and her suitcase outside into the frigid February morning. Her boyfriend who drove us sleepily to the airport had taken our bulky coats with him. We shiver, stamp our feet and notice this line is only non-Americans. Of course, Cora’s ticket has been flagged and at the gate she is pulled aside and wanded. When a security woman rummages through her toiletry bag and pulls out each item I think Cora may either curse or cry. Violation of privacy is one reason she left a former Communist country to come to America. In St. Martin, our feet sink into the pillows of cool powdery white sand at Orient beach. By day, we stay huddled under an umbrella or palm tree for shade. We are the only ones using sunblock. Surrounded by tan topless or totally naked pink smoking French people, I feel like we have landed in the middle of a basking elephant seal colony. We cannot help but notice the women look good, most all the men do not. Cora squirms at the unabashed nudity. Though she is a doctor, she is modest. The mild trade winds, waves, and our pink frosted guavaberry coladas lull us. It is a treat to travel with someone because I am used to going places solo. But as Cora strolls down and disappears into the turquoise water with a wave, I can only imagine a cool slip into the envelope of water. I am denied the quiet blue intimacy with the ocean. In my envelope of skin and scars, I often experience the sensation of being stranded on some distant shores even then I am nowhere near water. I had never imagined how a fire could erase an entire face. I lost my eyebrows, eyelids and eyelashes, my lips, nose, my once perfect shell ears now look gnomed, my hairline was drastically altered. The only things I recognized the first time I saw a mirror were the shapes of my teeth and my brown eye color. For a time, I believed in the myth that doctors could fix me. Now I see scars as badges earned like girl scouts do and worn on a sash. My scars contain a power that shocks or disarms people. “Can’t they do something about this?” asks a thoracic doc tapping my right leg. My leg, grafted from hip to ankle, is colored brownish with purple seams. It bothers me least because it works fine. The left leg shows the pale white squares that mark where grafts were taken from much like a tailor’s cut out patterns. The problem with the grafts is that I have no feel for hot and cold. No nerves exist. But I am bothered more about how the scars speak volumes and exert their own presence. When I walk into a restroom and a young woman at the sink lets out a gasp bordering a shriek. “At least you’re alive,” she says half recovering her composure after asking why I look the way I do. I feign indifference to her reaction. These episodes feel just a bit anti-climatic. I had never thought of the tropic as a topic but since my burn I have felt pressed behind a window looking out at other peoples’ interactions. I pretend I am on a skin scouting expedition and call island-hopping research. Pass the rum. On Tortola, chickens strut at the tiny airport as we wait for the jeep to bring our bags in from the toy plane we have flown in on. On the narrow road, we pass sheep shaved for heat, cattle, blond donkeys and chickens everywhere. Yachts gleam in the harbors. Whereas St. Martin’s climate felt scorching except along the water’s edge with a dry scrubby interior, Tortola looks hilly, green and lush. We imagine we have found utopia until roosters scream like rusty alarm clocks way before dawn. Cora is absorbed in reading, Won Ton Lust, a book she found on the hotel shelf. I choose Death by Dressagefor the title. The days drift by as we drag our chairs clockwise to stay half-in half-out of the shade from the tree fronds. We squint to watch pelicans diving for fish. A faraway sense subdues you facing waves that ruffle up onto the sand with their sequence unending. Being on an island, a temporary castaway offers a perspective to think about what is permeable and what is fixed. We slice into succulent mangos that we buy at a roadside stand and find out are imported from Dominica. We try breadfruit, a large gourd-like fruit that tastes exactly like Wonderbread. We eat at a waterside shack called Islands’ Delight in view of the sunset between two camel humps of land. I savor the heat of the roti spices on my tongue as the water turns to black liquid ink. Cora muses over her serious boyfriend, her career direction, fellowship choices. An island offers a place apart to examine, be introspective, forget, renew, decide. Compared to my friend, I feel static. I leave Cora on the beach and take a taxi up the winding roads. I signed up for a horseback ride for something to do. I am a little stunned when I see the sorry specimen that is my mount, a scruffy spindly creature with the grand name of Starlight. I debate whether it is best to decline or to pay the money to support this business when a tall Rasta man named Shadow, wearing a knit hat in the Jamaican colors, appears. He studies me as I shake my head. He admits his horses look rough but assures me how hardy they are, how their small barefoot stature carries loads more efficiently up and down hills than a larger animal. He complains how much bigger Americans are becoming year after year and that this is a problem. I am small and lightweight myself and so consent to go. We trek down the steep sloping road; Shadow tells me about the white Arabian he used to have that led the island parade every year. He points out a retired horse named Romance in a big field who looks pretty good. He rides a peppy pony-sized chestnut he calls Jerry who bounces along in front as Starlight shuffles softly behind. We pass a burly construction worker in his hard hat and white overalls on a white mini-mule headed up. The man’s feet almost touch the ground and I see the truth of using these smaller beasts of burden. Shadow recounts how this is the way of old-time transportation as vehicles swerve by us on the blind corners. The heat is intense. He asks if I have gone to Bomba yet. We had passed by the motley beach shack renowned for serving drinks spiked with hallucinogenic during full moons near our hotel. I have outgrown that stage, I say and Shadow laughs. I had seen a news report on Bomba months ago on TV concerning a wealthy girl later found lifeless on a beach and the three wealthy young men suspected of her murder stuck in the island’s dank jail. All were tourists. I distrust the orchestrated myth of hedonism and am losing my infatuation with the supposed escape from reality that islands inspire. I start to feel weary in paradise. But even little Starlight perks up when we step onto the white crescent beach of Cane Garden Bay where yachts drop anchor. We lope our small animals around sun worshippers greased on their towels and wading bathers. The day feels both scripted and alien. As we shuffle through the line at the small departure gate, I am waved through but Cora is again detained. When she joins me, I am afraid to ask but she tells me the security ladies questioned her about me. They wanted to know if I am a 9/11 casualty. I smile at the new mistaken identity, the near celebrity status accorded drastic injury. When I was first burned I was told I had a long road ahead. How long? I pestered every professional but no one would utter any real clue. I settled on 10 years as a frame for normality, even though I had watched a documentary where at 20 years out from his burn injury, a man named Dax remarked only now did he again enjoy his life. I did not think about how my magic number hovered and dominated my mood. But when 10 years came and passed, and my surgery was far from over, I crumpled. A draining depression reduced me to someone who barely left her apartment or even her bed. I entered dark periods that lasted months. I kept my doctor and surgery regimen for the sake of action. Only now, at 17 years, I am done. Only now can I say my many doctors have achieved reasonable, livable results. Surgery has plain tired me out. I have exhausted my veins. I have added scars upon scars in the quest for a functional, presentable face. I started with a 30% surface area burn, now I must be up to 60% in area scarred from surgery repairs. After more than 80 surgeries, I cannot inflict any more on my body. But there is one last operation. I never expected to cling to my trach like a pacifier. But the white plastic trach with the red button was a security connection to the intensive care world – a passport into special rarified sphere. Without it, I would surrender my access to OR ease and comfort. I would give up my role of patient that offered me a purpose and identity. I had acclimated so well; I had made the foreign so familiar, I knew I would feel naked, vulnerable without the four-inch tube resting in my throat. It is symbolic as one of the first procedures done on me. It is synonymous with breath, with air. I got to the green draped OR awake, sitting up on the table and gargle with lidocaine as instructed. After the thoracic doc snakes a scope down the back of my throat and pronounces all clear, the trach is removed. A bandage is placed over the opening at the base of my throat. I have a tan line choker left as evidence of the cotton string used to secure my long worn trach. I am to wait four weeks to see how much the hole shrinks on its own, advises the thoracic specialist in a confidant tone. In order to feel whole again, I need this hole to close. I need to finish this medical odyssey. I wait to see if nature will close the opening and seal me up. After three months the hole is a slit. I wait, wanting to swallow the memory or trauma, injury and loss. I wait to see if I can leave this shore I have walked so long and swim again.