A snake swerved like a drunk driver through the unkempt grass

Martha drinking her coffee from a chipped clay mug,

Sitting in her hammock

Under the dogwood tree

Listening to the saccades sing

“Oh to be innocent,” She thought

Martha saw the snake curling around itself beside her

She slipped her foot from her shoe

And dangled it in front of the snake.

“Oh to be poison,” She thought 

The Devils Nature

In the beginning there were angels who

glided through the light air, their hair pushed over

by the wind. One angel, curious grew

and began to subside. He fell moreover

on earth he tried to hide. He dug into

the earth and then he descended lower.

A hearth he hatched and his body then stewed

Scorched pale monstrous the hell roaming loner

This ‘angel’ grew worse because his dark shame.

The looming shadows following earths curve

For suns and moons, to him the same, he reigned.

Then heavens God could not stand to observe

A poison seeped to earth, that Heavens bane

The angels ambushed with treacherous nerve

And then the Devil did become his name.

Enemy of the Lord and Earth he served.

Then doom; the moon on a spoon the earth was flood’.

That pale hideous Devil drowned and died.

Th’ earth dried and a flame alit in her core.

The clouds arose, brought rain and life to shore.

On earth did evolution then begin

And now in Hell grown from flame was Satan.

Satan who then slithered up to earth and

Caused a female goat to stand and grow hands

And Lilith seduced young Adam away

From Eve, and with her sex warned him to stay

Now Satan on earth did prey upon Eve

An olive, ate did infect her diseases

From that tree she believed she was naked

She ran from pools into the deserted

Cain did crawl from Hell and bed his mother

And twins Hades Hecate wed each other

These twins did bed and then bare many sons

Pluto, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Dagon

Four brothers waged war among men, from Hell

Marathon, Salamis, Gaugamela

The victor stays buried we know not who

Is hidden from man in the oceans blue

Deep in the sea Davy Jones he may be

Asleep on an organ or sailing the sea

He will buy your soul at the highest fare 

Eternal life in the Locker to stare,

At embellished letters that tell the tale

Of the brothers, the twins, and Gods of Hell

El Torero

The mariachi trumpets sounded

And the steal gates holding back

That horned Hindi deity

Lunged out and asked my hand to dance.

Like a whirling dervish I spun around in the dust

Whipping up clouds of Aries breath

Congregations of small town Americans

Cheered for the Bull

Their bloodlust against life

Matched the hungry fans in

The stadium of the Coliseum as

Gladiators performed the same role I performed now.

Caesar turned down his thumb,

The President took communion,

The Pope smiled a grizzly mouth of gold teeth

The Bull let out a preaching wail

And his horn speared through my stomach and out my back.

And I lay there shish-kabobed on the Horn of religion

My guts exposed for the world to see  

And listened to the congregations fall silent

As they saw the same blood that ran through their veins

Trickle down the horn of the beast they cheered for.

The Jesus Bully

The Dixie Classic Fair brings the most interesting combination of smells together among some of the most interesting people you may ever see. Deep Fried Krispy Kreme Doughnut Hamburgers, live animals, including their shit, and puddles of vomit circled around roller coasters and tilt-a-whirl rides bake in the early October sun while you attempt to push through masses of boon dock NASCAR enthusiast, inner city gangs, church youth groups, grandmothers competing in quilting competitions, and middle school students free from their parents with pockets full of ride tickets and dinner money sure to be spent on cotton candy and funnel cakes.

The sun was barely warming the air before the fall breeze blew the heat away. I was the third wheel on my best friends second date with Kate Cavenaugh. Kate was one of the pretty girls in our grade. She had long red hair and would be elected Homecoming Queen our senior year. The school we went to was small, so social hierarchy was everything.  Andrew, my best friend, thought himself lucky to be out with her. Andrew had stepped into popularity because he was on the baseball team, and I came with him because we were best friends. I was cool, but not very athletic. I didn’t start swimming until freshman year and compared to the friends I hung out with I was fat.

We walked in between funnel cake stands and through chicken coops to meet up with all of Kate’s friends. In eighth grade being seen at the fair without your parents was a big deal. We were supposed to be meeting two girls on Kate’s cheerleading team beside a roller coaster called The Firebolt. People with tattoos and piercings were in abundance. It was as if Wal-Mart had herded all of their customers into a field and set up rides, food stands, and petting zoos. If we had chosen to go on the first night it was open being at the fair wouldn’t have been so bad, but the fair had been open for seven days before we went and the vomit, deep frying oil, and animal shit had built up. On our way to meet Kate’s friends we passed a clown in a dunking booth yelling insults at passersby’s.

____________

 Everyone hears about bullies these days, teens committing suicide because they were called ugly, fat, or stupid repeatedly. At the university level we are not immune to bullies, in fact no matter how old we are there will always be bullies around us. UNC Wilmington specifically writes in their Academic Catalogue an Unlawful Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation clause to prevent such bullying.

From the Catalogue: “UNC Wilmington affirms that students and employees are entitled to an educational and employment environment free from unlawful harassment or discrimination based on that individual‘s race, sex (such as gender, marital status, and pregnancy), age, color…”

It was March 26^th 2012, more than five years after going to the fair as a third wheel with Andrew and Kate. I was sitting in the outdoor amphitheater at my University letting the searing sun slowly burn me as I sat and scribbled notes. Brother Ross, a self-proclaimed open-air preacher, was preaching to the angry mass of my peers who were shouting insults and cries of frustration. Many students were seated in the outdoor auditorium but some were riding bikes through or just walking to class. There was no one type of student listening to Ross. I noticed fairly equal amounts of men and women. There were African American students listening, friends I recognized from Greek life, professors, faculty, and staff of the university all crowded around to hear this man. “Brother Ross” is the fire and brimstone preacher who has no philosophical, religious, or even public speaking credentials of any kind. He travels to college campuses around the state publically accusing students as they walk by of being homosexuals, whores, and prostitutes, even “Masturbating Perverts” which he called UNC Wilmington freshman Austin Robertshaw.

With large anti-homosexual and anti-pornography buttons pinned to his suspenders, I approached not Brother Ross but the plain looking woman behind him in the floor length gray wool skirt and long sleeve white blouse buttoned tightly at the neck. I kept thinking about the dunking booth clown I encountered in eighth grade, and it seemed that the woman in front of me had married one of these clowns. The uncomfortably hot looking woman was Ross Jackson’s wife whom I was most interested in interviewing. When I asked Mrs. Jackson for an interview she told me I had to ask her husband.

“Anything you have to ask my wife I can say for her.” Mr. Jackson told me when I asked permission to interview his wife. The blatant sexism he showed toward his wife was shocking. I could not remember a time when I had seen a husband show such dehumanizing chauvinism with his wife merely five feet away.

____________

“Hey porky, you couldn’t find a little girl to tow you around the fair?” Was he talking to me? The cartoonish dressed clown pointed at me after I turned to look at him and said, “Yeah you, sausage link, where’s your girlfriend?” I can’t remember if it was the surprise of being called a sausage link or the fact that an adult was calling me out in public for not having a girlfriend, but I froze and was completely lost.

“Ryan, why are you stopping? Do you want to try and dunk him,” Kate said. Part of me wanted to throw a ball, but a much larger part of me knew I would only embarrass myself further if I paid money to throw a baseball at the target and most likely miss. Andrew took out five dollars and walked up to the counter.

“I’ll have three,” He said. Now I wasn’t totally un-athletic but when football season came around I always auditioned for the fall play, and in the spring I would run track but usually finish second to last. It was one of the rare moments Andrew stood up for me while we were friends. He didn’t say anything to me about it, but we had been best friends and neighbors since we were born. I thought our friendship was more of an obligation, but when he pulled out five dollars to defend me against the dunking booth Clown I thought maybe, just maybe we weren’t just friends because we lived across the street.

____________

On UNCW campus, Austin Robertshaw, a nondenominational Young Life leader and member at Port City Church, sat down with me after listening to Brother Ross. Robertshaw said Ross was “Preaching as if there’s no Jesus and that we aren’t forgiven by his grace alone.” The bulk of my conversation with Austin consisted of how Brother Ross treated his wife and women in general. Robertshaw also brought up an interesting point about female equality. “God made Eve from Adam’s rib, not his head or his foot because she is not above or below him. She is his equal,” Austin told me. He was referring to Genesis 2: 19-23.

So I sat a while longer in the hot sun and interjected my questions with the shrinking crowd of students who had stayed after Mr. Jackson had finished his sermon. After rejecting any question I had pertaining to his personal life, or life when he’s not preaching, I decided to simply ask him if he thought everything the students said to him was condescending?

“Some people ask good questions, but my job isn’t to listen. My job is to tell you people what you’re doing wrong,” Brother Ross answered. Many people decided that the sermon was all an act, and Ross Jackson was simply a spectacle that stirred up talk about Christianity in hopes some people would become interested and begin to come to the Christian faith. I wondered, if this is true, if Ross Jackson calls students these terrible names because like the Circus Clown wants your money, he wants you to read your bible, maybe he isn’t really a bad guy but just someone trying to use a unorthodox way to convert people to Christianity.

Ross Jackson’s message comes across as confusing or hypocritical at many points in his speech. At one point he says, “Christians can’t go worship with sinners.” In Mark chapter two Jesus spends most of his time with sinners. In the Bible, which Brother Ross bases all of what he says on, Jesus makes it a point to sit down with many sinners and talk with them, even to pray for them.

Hearing Ross Jackson call students whores and sluts as he pointed at them and threw his bible on the ground was heartbreaking to many in the crowd. The policewoman on duty making sure Mr. Jackson stayed within the legal limitations of his public speaking said, “I can’t do anything unless he threatens someone, I hope he does do that.” But is condemning strangers to eternity in hell not a threat enough?

Many students left the sermon thinking Brother Ross may have had a hidden agenda for coming to our campus. Could the point of Ross’ spectacle be simply to get people thinking about religion? There is definitely more discussion about Christianity after Brother Ross comes to campus. What led me to believe his zealousness is genuine are his followers. Ross Jackson, like most bullies, has a posse of similarly minded individuals. This posse, made up of his wife, two men, and another wife, follow Jackson around and believe his interpretation of the Bible. While these four individuals did not speak or preach to the extent Mr. Jackson did, they backed him up when he came under attack. The younger white male who held the sign listing the many different types of people going to hell was the most outspoken of his “followers.”   

It seems Ross Jackson’s public condemning of the UNCW student body is, in fact, a spectacle only to the students. People come to see the crazy Christian man call a sorority girl he’s never met a lesbian or a whore. It’s very obvious Ross Jackson acted against the Unlawful Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation section of the Academic Catalogue. By condemning students to hell as they walked to and from class, and insulting female students to the point of tears on our own campus, there is no excuse for the University to continue to let this bully preach on our campus. There is no actual substance to Brother Ross’ sermon, he simply draws a crowd because like the clown in a county fair dunking booth, he is a bully and people are fascinated with bullies.

____________

I was walking away from the amphitheatre shaking my head in amazement thinking about those baseballs Andrew picked up in my defense. He threw each of those baseballs as hard as he could at the little red and white target. When all three had missed he turned around, red in the face from exertion and from embarrassment and walked back to where Kate and I had been watching. I didn’t say anything to him about it, and he didn’t say anything to me. We walked away from the dunking booth, Kate tugging Andrew behind her and I trudging beside him turning left and right to avoid the huddled mass of people listening to a man in a clown suit publicly address their most personal insecurities.  It hadn’t really mattered if Andrew had dunked the clown or not, people would still huddle around the booth. Offending people is often the most effective way to get them to listen to you. 

Aging at the Aquarium

The toddlers soft pale hands were wrapped around the medieval looking shell of one of the horseshoe crabs while the crab’s sword like tail slashed about. “Philip, can’t horseshoe crabs sting with their tail?” Philip was acting as the human encyclopedia for all things nautical while we explored the North Carolina aquarium at Fort Fisher, Kure Beach.

“No, their tails are really just for steering while they swim. Horseshoe crabs don’t really crawl like most crabs, they bend their shell back and forth to propel them through the water much faster than other crabs.” Philip and I were both starring in amazement at the toddler feeding bits of squid to the upside down animal. I could tell Philip was amazed by the inner workings of the crabs feeding habits. I was more amazed at the toddler. Living on campus at college I hadn’t realized until now how long it had been since I had seen a child. It was almost like once I had left youth behind, it had disappeared from the world all together.

Philip was a biology enthusiast and was studying Zoology at Virginia Tech. We hadn’t seen each other since high school graduation, but he was in town so we both felt obligated to see each other, mostly because we had been really great friends before senior year. Philip was staying with his parents at the beach a few miles away from my college, UNC Wilmington. I think it was his parents who pressured him to tell me he was in town.

I looked from Philip back to the child as he squealed. The crab pulled the hunk of thawed squid from his fingers. His mother was now holding the shell and egging the boy to drop the food into the horseshoes mouth. There were at least ten horseshoe crabs in the touch tank, along with an equal number of rays and three or four large hermit crabs. Philip had taken the pile of frozen squid the aquarium worker gave us and was methodically flipping crabs upside down and dropping the food into their mouths.

A group of elementary school students walked into the room, where we were, squealing and jumping up and down in their single file line behind a very tired looking middle-aged teacher.  There were nine students so I assumed there was either another group of rascals bouncing around on the other side of the building, or this group of nine was special. None of the kids seemed intelligent or exceptionally unintelligent to be a part of any special education program. “I’m a rainbow fish, Mrs. Oakes! I’m a rainbow fish!” One of the girls in the middle of the line was shouting to her teacher and suddenly all of the children were claiming to be different aquatic animals.

“I’m a Shark!”

“Well I’m an electric eel.”

“I want to be a dolphin!”

“I’m the lobster! I’ve got pinchers, Mrs. Oakes, look!”

“I’m SpongeBob.”

“Ooo, I’m Patrick!”

Suddenly the children veered off from typical sea creatures and began to yell names of characters from the television show SpongeBob Squarepants. After all nine of the students had adopted a new name, either Gary, Sandy, Mr. Crabs, or Larry the Lobster, they continued past the horseshoe crab touch tank and gasped at the two story glass tank filled with sharks, giant rays, and a variety of other large fish.

The brown haired toddler ran out of squid and was now splashing his hands on the surface of the water. His mother wiped his hands, pushed back his brown curls and slid him into his stroller. In the corner of the shallow open tank I saw a horseshoe crab stuck on its back. Its legs were convulsing and it was bending its shell back and forth trying to turn itself over. Then another crab rammed the overturned one and flipped him back onto his feet. I’m still not sure if the crab realized his fellow was stuck, or if the tank was so small he had no choice but to run into him.

“Did you see that crab turn the other one over?” I asked Philip.

“What? No, I was looking at this manta ray. What happened?”

“Nothing. Lets go downstairs to the Octopus.”
             My favorite animal was an Octopus. I loved how they could fit into almost any shape. They are extremely smart animals; great at camouflage. We walked to the tank and I saw a yellow sign that read, “Octopus temporarily not on exhibit.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s my favorite animal.” Philip was preoccupied looking at the jellyfish, which admittedly were also very cool. But, the jellyfish were no Octopus. “Hey Philip, do you want to go? I think we’ve seen everything after we walk through the fossil section.”

“Yeah I’m about ready to get some lunch. Do you know any sushi places? Looking at all of these fish has kind of gotten me in the mood.” As we were leaving, Mrs. Oakes’ class was pressing their hands and faces against the glass of the puffer fish tank attempting to get one of the fishes to puff up. Philip and I had spent two and a half hours strolling through the many tanks of fish, turtles, and sea creatures and still hadn’t talked much about high school. It was easier to talk about fish and elementary school life than everything that had happened senior year.

How to make Sweet Tea

Every Sunday growing up my family would come home from church and while we ate lunch at the kitchen bar my mother would brew four galleons of sweet tea for the week. Sweet tea was a staple of my mother. She would pour from her glass pitcher over the round half circle ice cubes the refrigerator made; it was practically religious.  During the summer my mom would cut lemon and squeeze it into her drink.

Karen, my mothers friend, would walk across the street after I got home from school and sit with my mom on the front porch in the wicker rocking chairs while they talked and sipped. When I walked outside to get my homework journal signed I would hear bits of their conversations about women in the PTA, or about who had been interviewed on Good Morning America. Karen’s son, Andrew, was my best friend and in my class until fifth grade. We stopped talking when we were sophomores in high school.

My sister never learned how to make sweet tea because she was awful in the kitchen. She was much more like my father who was from New Jersey. My sister got angry quickly, she never read a book from cover to cover, and didn’t have her first paying job until she was a senior in college. Mom taught me how to make sweet tea when I was in the eighth grade.

You can never make tea right your first time, and rarely your second or third. There’s a good bit of feel when you measure the ingredients. To start you need four cups of boiling water. The problem with measuring four cups of water is some of it will boil so you need to put about four and a half into your pot. Before your water comes to a complete boil, you need to start adding a cup of granulated sugar. The sugar needs to be added slowly while you stir the water with one hand so the grains dissolve before they touch the bottom of the pot. If the sugar touches the bottom of your pot before it dissolves it will burn and your tea will taste thick and bitter.

After you’ve mixed all of your sugar into the boiling water you need to take the simple syrup you’ve made off of the stovetop and drop in one galleon size tea bag. My mother always used Lipton tea bags because they came in a family size bulk box at the Lowes foods on the corner. After you’ve taken the syrup off heat you have to let the tea steep for at least twenty minutes. If you leave the tea bag to steep for less then twenty minutes your tea will be weak and if you leave it in for much longer than twenty minutes your tea will be strong. I like my tea a little stronger then my mother made hers.

The worst mistake you can make while brewing sweet tea is to leave your syrup on the stove while it steeps. If the tealeaves continue to be boiled the tea will get very bitter and dry. Once the tea has steeped with the lid on your pot, remove the lid and pull the bag out quickly. There will be some tea trapped in the bag with the leaves but this is too strong so do not press the teabags to drain them.

Now that you have made the concentrated tea, pour it over a galleon pitcher full of ice. The tea is only five cups but as it melts the ice the tea syrup is diluted enough to drink. Pour over ice and enjoy with lemon during the summer or mint leaves during the early spring.