Tusitala

“Writing can function like a magic carpet! If you let your imagination soar on the wings of the words within these pages, there may be no end to the places you can go. Feel like viewing the world from different heights? Care to peek down on the familiar and see it in new, wondrous ways? Feel adventurous enough to paint old scenes in new colors? Then take a journey into the writings on these pages and you may just discover that you do believe in magic—the magic of creative writing”    

Dr. Judy Dozier

Read Tusitala  2010 - 2011

Picture 26

 

For the first time since the magazine’s first publication in 1935, Tusitala— the College’s premier literary magazine—launched electronically with a brand-new website and E-Book in 2011.

Published annually during the spring semester, Tusitala stands as both an outlet and showcase for the very best student and faculty poets, prose writers, photographers, musicians, and artists of nearly any variety.

 

Fragments: Tusitala 2011

Years Forward - Karen Larson

Yes,

Age is a tangled nest,

The rest

Are yet to be woven

 

But weave they will,

Want of years,

This path, I guess

is chosen.

 

Remember a weft

Can’t work backwards

And that sometimes a thorn

Holds poison.

 

Make most of much—

A nest is such—

Until one gets a rose in.

 

Drum Hands - Sammie Clifford

In Mexico at a rehabilitation center in the Sonoran Desert a man sang to me on a sand chipped chair. His rough cacti hands, open palms against his jeans, drumming in the lonely room.

And I remembered those hands. The stranger I had left begging for American coins and second chances. For an esophagus unmarred by crack smoke.

Drum hands on my spine, finger words, finger music. Only he could hear the water music, distorted rhythm of the rain outside. Verses, choruses and bridges breathed to the furthest tips of his fingers, moistening the pads and I was the instrument. The bass and snare of these gutter rivers expanding ripples of heat on my back. Will you open the window, Dad? I love this song.

He drums nonsense against his strained thighs. An elegy to drought and arid deserts. A tune I’d never recognize if not for the hands that were playing.

 

Bohemian Shortscript 117 - Garrett Pluhar-Schaeffer

And it’s as I breathe longingly

And it’s when I imagine embracing

And when you stare, I-

When our eyes meet but hands never do

 

I cry of innocence

And beloved heaves

I do wish, deeply,

Your body next to mine

 

And even in moments until then

I clamor with the thoughts of lonesomeness

I wring hands with no knots

And hold the air as I would hold you

 

Real Musicians - Gabe Phillips with poetry by Alexey Vassilev