MEN WALK Sergio Perkins Vapid half men, afraid of cold, Join the warm parade of stone idol-bearing cowards. Hollow-noise making with ear-numbed slogans The half men walk Selling slogan warm fire to the weak. Weak and cold, the half men Join the warm big coward parade Bearing blood burning torches In daylight; They crawl in the darkness Of their torch lights Seeking flowered paths On sand-clogged, desert hills. The half men walk The half man's walk. 2 A GREEN THUMB Jacqueline Baddley It would have been all right if spring had never come. During the winter nothing had happened, and nothing was likely to happen as long as the weather remained cold, and Mrs. Simons kept the radiators going. In a way, though, it is quite possible to hold Mrs. Simons to blame for everything that happened, both to the others as well as to herself. Not that she had intentions, but she was two things a boarding house lady is stingy and not too bright. She shouldn't have been in such a hurry to turn the heat off so early in March. March is a tricky month, and she should have known that the first warm day is usually an isolated phenomenon. Mrs. Simons' boarding house was one of the many clapboard fronts elbowing each other for air around tthe area of Second South and Third East in Salt Lake City. Her boarders were all manner of itinerants: lonely people with no hope in life other than dreary jobs, an occasional young and confused person from the hinterland seeking fame and fortune in a city that so rarely grants it, or as in the case of Al Taggert, a lonely, broken, old man moved inland to vegetate and die. Al differed little from the other boarders in the house except in his background and his prize possession. A seaman by trade, he had been forced into retirement by a crippled back and advancing years. He had, as he often exclaimed to youngish-old Bess Wilson third floor rear, "escaped that mother-bitch of water; she'll no more twist and rack my bones with her impious moods." His prize possession was a huge, tropical plant with long feelers and leaves twice the size of a big man's hand span. When Mrs. Simons first spied this flamboyant flora, it aroused in her dull bosom all the envy of a niggardly soul, for she fancied herself a 3