The West Coast and Beyond - Crab Orchard Review

Transcription

A B ORCH AR
R
C
D
•
•
REVIEW
Volume 19, Number 2
our special Summer/Fall 2014 issue
“The West Coast & Beyond”
(return to Vol. 19, No. 2 web page)
Return to the Crab Orchard Review PDF Archive of Past Issues Page
Crab Orchard Review is supported, in
part, by a grant from the Illinois Arts
Council Agency.
A B ORCH AR
R
C
D
•
•
REVIEW
A Journal of Creative Works
Vol. 19 No. 2
“Hidden everywhere, a myriad
leather seed-cases lie in wait…”
—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October”
Thomas Kinsella
Editor & Poetry Editor
Allison Joseph
Founding Editor
Richard Peterson
Prose Editor
Carolyn Alessio
Managing Editor
Jon Tribble
Editorial Intern
Desiree Young
Assistant Editors
Emily Rose Cole
Loren Elise Foster
M. Brett Gaffney
Austin Kodra
Zach Macholz
Philip Martin
Alyssha Nelson
Staci R. Schoenfeld
SIU Press Interns
Austin Kodra
Philip Martin
Board of Advisors
Ellen Gilchrist
Charles Johnson
Rodney Jones
Thomas Kinsella
Richard Russo
Summer/Fall 2014
ISSN 1083-5571
Special Projects Assistant
Cole Bucciaglia
The Department of English
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Address all correspondence to:
Crab Orchard Review
Department of English
Faner Hall 2380 - Mail Code 4503
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, Illinois 62901
Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of
English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States
for individuals are $25 for one year, $40 for two years, $50 for three years; the foreign rate
for individuals is $40 for one year. Subscription rates for institutions are $28 for one year,
$56 for two years, and $84 for three years; the foreign rate for institutions is $48 for one
year. Single issues are $12 (please include an additional $10 for international orders). Copies
not received will be replaced without charge if notice of nonreceipt is given within four
months of publication. Six weeks notice required for change of address.
POSTMASTER:
Send address changes to Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Faner Hall 2380 Mail Code 4503, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale,
Illinois 62901.
Crab Orchard Review considers submissions from February through April, and August
through October of each year. Please visit our website, CrabOrchardReview.siu.edu, for the
latest guidelines, calls for submissions, and contest information. Most of our submissions
are now through CrabOrchardReview.submittable.com, so please do not send submissions
via postal mail unless you are certain we are open for postal submissions at that time. Crab
Orchard Review accepts no responsibility for unsolicited submissions and will not enter
into correspondence about their loss or delay.
Copyright © 2014 Crab Orchard Review
Permission to reprint materials from this journal remains the decision of the authors. We
request Crab Orchard Review be credited with initial publication.
The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor,
the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University
Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations.
“Printed by the authority of the State of Illinois,” 27 June 2014, 3900 copies printed, order
number 114043.
Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted
from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press,
1979) and appear by permission of the author.
Crab Orchard Review is indexed in Humanities International Complete.
Visit Crab Orchard Review’s website:
CrabOrchardReview.siu.edu
Crab Orchard Review and its staff wish to thank
these supporters for their generous contributions, aid,
expertise, and encouragement:
Barb Martin, Karl Kageff,
Amy J. Etcheson, Bridget Brown, Lynanne Page,
Angela Moore-Swafford,
Wayne Larsen, and Kristine Priddy
of Southern Illinois University Press
Heidi Estel, Patty Norris, Joyce Schemonia, and Kelly Spencer
Abby Allen, Shaylin Carlton, Kevin Savoie, and Savannah Broadway
Dr. K.K. Collins (chair), Pinckney Benedict, Beth Lordan,
Judy Jordan, Scott Blackwood, and the rest of the faculty
in the SIUC Department of English
Division of Continuing Education
SIU Alumni Association
The Graduate School
The College of Liberal Arts
The Ofﬁce of the Vice Chancellor for
Academic Affairs and Provost
The Southern Illinois Writers Guild
Crab Orchard Review is supported, in part,
by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council,
a state agency.
Crab Orchard Review wishes to express its special thanks
to our generous Charter Members/Benefactors, Patrons,
Donors, and Supporting Subscribers listed on the following
page whose contributions make the publication of this
journal possible.
We invite new Benefactors ($500 or more), Patrons ($200),
Donors ($100), and Supporting Subscribers ($50) to join
us. Supporting Subscribers receive a one-year subscription;
Donors receive a two-year subscription; Patrons receive a
three-year subscription; and Benefactors receive a lifetime
subscription.
Address all contributions to:
Crab Orchard Review
Faner Hall 2380 - Mail Code 4503
1000 Faner Drive
CHARTER MEMBERS*/BENEFACTORS
Rodney Jones
Richard Jurek
Joseph A. Like
Greg & Peggy Legan*
Beth L. Mohlenbrock*
Jane I. Montgomery*
Ruth E. Oleson*
Richard “Pete” Peterson
Peggy Shumaker
Carolyn Alessio & Jeremy Manier
Pinckney & Laura Benedict
Edward Brunner & Jane Cogie*
Linda L. Casebeer
Dwayne Dickerson*
Jack Dyer*
Joan Ferrell*
John Guyon*
John M. Howell*
PATRONS
Diann Blakely
Robert E. Hayes
Kent Haruf
Chris Kelsey
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Lisa J. McClure
Anita Peterson
Eugenie & Roger Robinson
Nat Sobel
Betty & Ray Tribble
David & Laura Tribble
Clarisse Zimra
DONORS
Lorna Blake
Chris Bullard
Heidi Czerwiec
Charles Fanning
Jewell A. Friend
John & Nancy Jackson
Reamy Jansen
Rob & Melissa Jensen
Elisabeth & Jon Luther
Charlotte and Gabriel Manier
Lee Newton
William Notter
Lisa Ortiz
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Lucia Perillo
Angela Rubin
Hans H. Rudnick
William E. Simeone
SUPPORTING SUBSCRIBERS
Serge & Joan Alessio
Joanna Christopher
K.K. Collins
Corrine Frisch
John & Robin Haller
Zdena Heller
Karen Hunsaker
Lee Lever
Charlotte McLeod
Peggy & Albert Melone
Nadia Reimer
Lee Robinson
Catherine Rudnick
Peter Rutkoff
Victoria Weisfeld
A B ORCH AR
R
C
D
•
•
REVIEW
Summer/Fall 2014
Allison Joseph and
Jon Tribble
Volume 19, Number 2
Editors’ Prologue: Where Are We Going,
Where Have We Been?
1
Fiction
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Alex Collins-Shotwell
The House on the Coast
18
Strike-Slip
25
Anne Elliott
The Pacific Madrona
53
Mirri Glasson-Darling
True North
66
Vanessa Hua
Elizabeth Parsons
Accepted
88
Bend Over Backwards
101
Marianne Villanueva
Crackers
123
Mimi Wong
Russell Working
Model Minority
135
The Day Job
157
Nonfiction Prose
Debra Gwartney
Her Hair
185
Waimea Williams
Sacred Valley, Modern Times
215
Poetry
Aliki Barnstone
In the Workshop
6
Gloria Brown
Laying Irrigation Pipe in the Fruit Orchard Before Dawn
8
Lauren Camp
April Christiansen
Riding the Rope Swing on
Billy Goat Hill
10
Kalakala
The Great Seattle Fire, June 6, 1889
12
14
Elizabeth Costello
Twelve Twenty-One Twelve, Nevada City
16
John Glowney
Map Making
Protest
Out on Turnigan Arm,
Resurrection Bay
The Whale Skeleton at Long Beach, Washington
35
37
39
Tom Griffen
Homer Stevedore
43
Leah Huizar
Hominy
Santa Monica
45
47
Rochelle Hurt
from The Gold Letters
[The evening before you left,
I watched you]
[Lydia, I wait for gold to spill over]
[Another dream, your hands full
of gold rocks]
[I am still as the stones on the floor]
Esteban Ismael
Christine Kitano
Bay Park
76
Lucky Come Hawai‘i
78
41
49
50
51
52
Karen An-hwei Lee
Horses of War, Horses of Hysteria
Meditation on San Joaquin Hills
Prayer for a Woman Named Xochitl
80
82
84
Jeffrey Thomas Leong
Browsing the Walls at the Angel Island
Immigration Station, I Seek the Lost
Tones of the Heungshan Dialect
At the Makai Market Food Court
85
Terry Lucas
Contra Costa
108
Diane Kirsten Martin
Contiguous
113
David Mason
Through Her Lens
Amaknak
115
116
Rajiv Mohabir
On the Occasion of Her Majesty
Queen Lili‘uokalani’s Birthday
Acridotheres tristis
Rhincodon typus
Indo-Queer Windward-Side
118
119
120
122
Jed Myers
Coho Run
146
Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
Portrait of Memory with Drought
148
Candace Pearson
Outside Tehachapi Prison
150
Kevin Phan
Some Things Which Filled Us with
a Sense of Loitering
152
Vanesha Pravin
Sleep, Wake, Sleep
154
Maxine Scates
Speed
155
Martha Silano
This Highway’s a Ribbon,
172
Kirby Anne Snell
Geography Lesson
Island Funeral
174
176
86
Rebecca Starks
Examination of Mono Lake
178
Kenny Tanemura
Evacuation Day
Great Depression
182
184
Lynne Thompson
Red Jasper
Shasta
201
202
Sevé Torres
Papi Stands at the San Juan Airport
The Blood Back Home
Sonnet: Puerto Rican History
204
206
208
William Kelley Woolfitt
Internees at Manzanar, 1942 (iii)
Paiute Woman at Manzanar, 1935
209
210
Maya Jewell Zeller
Another Dream for Jessica
Margaux Magnolia
211
213
Contributors’ Notes
221
A Note on Our Cover
The ten photographs on the cover are by Mae Remme, Justin Herrmann,
Allison Joseph, and Jon Tribble. The photographs are of locations in
Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington D.C., and Washington State.
Details about the photographs are available on Crab Orchard Review’s
Facebook Page:
www.facebook.com/CrabOrchardReview
Announcements
We would like to congratulate three of our recent contributors,
Kristine S. Ervin, Jim Fairhall, and Corey Morris. Kritine S. Ervin’s
nonfiction piece “Cleaving To” and Jim Fairhall’s nonfiction piece
“Núi Khê Revisited,” which both appeared in Crab Orchard Review,
Volume 17, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2012), and Corey Morris’s
nonfiction piece “Carp River,” which appeared in Crab Orchard
Review, Volume 17, Number 2 (Summer/Fall 2012), our special issue,
“Due North,” were all selected as Notable Essays of 2012 for The Best
American Essays 2013, by series editor Robert Atwan.
The 2014 COR Special Issue Feature Awards
in Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Nonfiction
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 COR Special Issue
Feature Awards in Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Nonfiction. The winners
were selected by the editors of Crab Orchard Review.
In poetry, our winner is Terry Lucas of Mill Valley, California, for
his poem “Contra Costa.”
In fiction, the winner is Russell Working of Oak Park, Illinois, for his
story “The Day Job.”
And in literary nonfiction, the winner is Debra Gwartney of Finn
Rock, Oregon, for her essay “Her Hair.”
The winner in each genre category—Poetry, Fiction, and Literary
Nonfiction—is published in this issue and received a $2000.00 award.
All entries were asked fit the topic of the Summer/Fall 2014 special issue,
“The West Coast & Beyond,” focusing on writing exploring the people,
places, history, and changes shaping these U.S. States, Commonwealths,
and Territories: California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawai’i, Puerto
Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the United
States Virgin Islands, and other areas which have been a part of the United
States beyond the Lower 48 States (excepting those States listed here).
Visit us online. Crab Orchard Review’s website has information on
subscriptions, calls for submissions and guidelines, contest information
and results, and past, current, and future issues:
The Winners of the 2014 COR Special Issue
Feature Awards in Poetry, Fiction, and
Literary Nonfiction
2014 Special Issue Feature Award
Winner in Poetry
“Contra Costa” by Terry Lucas
(Mill Valley, California)
Winner in Fiction
“The Day Job”
by Russell Working
(Oak Park, Illinois)
Winner in Literary Nonfiction
“Her Hair”
by Debra Gwartney
(Finn Rock, Oregon)
CO
R
CR AB ORCH AR D
•
•
REVIEW
Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble
Editors’ Prologue:
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
This publishing journey began five years ago in Illinois, or,
putting things more accurately, the journey began about Illinois. Crab
Orchard Review would reach its fifteenth year of publication in 2010,
but the year before was a very challenging time for our university,
the state of Illinois, and the arts in general across the country as
the effects of the economic downturn of the three preceding years
had taken their toll on all levels of funding and fundraising. With
an uncertain future ahead of the magazine, our editor-in-chief and
poetry editor, Allison Joseph, decided that if 2009 could be the last
year we would be able to put together an issue of Crab Orchard
Review, then the magazine we would produce would be a tribute
to the vitality of contemporary writing about and from the state of
Illinois, and our special issue “Land of Lincoln” was conceived.
Our prose editor, Carolyn Alessio, was born in the Chicago
suburbs and lives in the city itself today, and she wrote in the
“Editor’s Prologue” of the issue of two of Chicago’s literary giants,
Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and of the pull the state
experiences to this day between the rural and urban visions that
shape the people, the politics, and the land itself. She also examined
the erasure of both city and country that takes place in the suburbs
and wrote of the struggle to continue to preserve history where to
fight against a “paved-over sense of place” demands digging beyond
the surface of a story.
There was great satisfaction in completing our issue “Land of
Lincoln: Writing about and from Illinois,” and there was even greater
relief as it became apparent that Crab Orchard Review would be able
to plan for a future beyond our fifteenth year.
The next place that captured our imagination was the
American South. At this point, we were still thinking a year at a time
in our planning, and the idea for a “Southern” issue was Allison’s
Crab Orchard Review
u 1
Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble – Editors’ Prologue
suggestion. She felt after the immersion in the Midwest that came
with working on the “Land of Lincoln” issue that a trip down South
would be intriguing and informative, and it would reflect Crab
Orchard Review’s mission to publish diverse voices.
Our idea of “Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South”
brought us just that, and the range of explorations in the work we
received and were able to publish refreshed many ideas about the
South of the past and the present. Our managing editor, Jon Tribble,
was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and grew up just outside the city
only a few years after the unrest at Central High in 1957, when some
of the worst of the hatred and cowardice and some of the best of the
strength and courage of the South was on display. In his “Editor’s
Prologue,” he wrote of this legacy and of the connections through
family history to the Confederacy and the way suspicion and
landscape and story are as inescapable today in the South as they
have ever been.
By the midway point of our editorial work on the “Southern”
issue, we realized that if we were going to make it to our twentieth
year then we only had three more special issues before we had to
think about a twentieth-year special issue in 2015. So we considered
the possibility of making our 2012, 2013, and 2014 special issues into
a kind of anthology exploring the United States of America and its
regions as subject.
Of course, how those regions could be defined can be endlessly
debated—New England, Mid-Atlantic, Appalachian Highlands,
Southeast, Midwest, Heartland, Southwest, Mountain, Pacific Coast,
Alaska, and Hawai‘i would be just one of many possibilities—and
we had three remaining issues to work with for our “American”
anthology. After some discussion, we decided the final three issues
would encompass what we would title “the North” (roughly a
counterpoint to the “South” of the Confederacy), “Prairies, Plains,
Mountains, Deserts” (or what we would often refer to as “the Big
Middle”), and, finally, “the West Coast & Beyond” (California,
Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawai‘i, commonwealths, territories,
and areas of U.S. occupation, if writers decided to explore those in
their works). We knew these were not necessarily traditional regions,
but we were curious how these divisions would present us with
unexpected discoveries when published together.
2 u Crab Orchard Review
The “North” presented us with some peculiar problems. It
seemed early on in the process of receiving submissions for the “Due
North” issue that everyone was defining “North” by the weather and
we saw more snowy landscapes in poems, stories, and essays than the
worst winter outside of the polar regions.
The “North” was also predominantly being defined as purely
rural, as if Detroit and Rochester and Cleveland and Milwaukee
didn’t exist. To change this among the submissions, we put out
specific calls asking for work about the many cities that exist across
the region. We also found it helpful to call for submissions about
three specific states—Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—
when we realized that we were reading very few submissions which
mentioned these states in any way.
Our editor and poetry editor, Allison Joseph, explored the
challenges that came with putting together the “Due North” issue in
her “Editor’s Prologue.” She wrote, “Like many of the writers in this
issue, I am a product of this undefined region,” and she went on to
detail her particular experiences from growing up in the Bronx, New
York, attending college in Gambier, Ohio, and her life in Carbondale,
Illinois. As she wrote:
Perhaps my personal story illustrates there is no “true North,”
which is why this issue is titled “Due North” instead. We
wanted to go beyond placid snowy New England landscapes
to see what else writers had on their minds.
The submissions for the “Prairies, Plains, Mountains, Deserts”
issue did not surprise us when, at first, we found ourselves reading
quite a bit about all four landscapes usually devoid of people and often
in places which, if a particular location’s names or landmarks or flora
or fauna were not included, could have been anywhere across the
thousands and thousands of square miles of “the Big Middle.” There
were two things that became very clear from the earliest subsmissions
we read: the prairies and plains were lonely and the desert was dry
(we’re still not sure why the mountains weren’t characterized in a
similar way).
But we had learned from our own editorial experiences on the
previous “American” anthology issues and, by communicating with the
writers about the diverse possibilities we hoped to see represented in the
issue, the unique elements of the people, places, histories, and cultures
Crab Orchard Review
u 3
became a part of “Prairies, Plains, Mountains, Deserts” in ways beyond
our hopes for the issue.
Our managing editor, Jon Tribble, once again wrote the “Editor’s
Prologue,” and his piece was an exploration of travel through the
“flyover states.” But more importantly, the prologue was also a tribute
to a dear friend of Crab Orchard Review, the poet, editor, teacher, and
scholar Jake Adam York, who had died suddenly on December 16, 2012.
The prologue closed with a poem of Jake’s, “Pilgrimage,” that was
first published in our 2003 special issue “Taste the World: Writers
on Food.” In its opening lines, “Pilgrimage” speaks to the spirit that
brought us forward in the journey these issues have been taking us on,
the wonder of discovery that for editors means we turn the next page
and the next, knowing that with dedication and good fortune we will
find something we didn’t exactly know we were looking for but hoped
was there. As Jake Adam York wrote:
Well off the map, on roads
that branch like capillaries
into the blanks, we follow
the turns of rumor far beyond
the interstate’s shoulders, the travel
like prayer, so far gone
from any place we know…
So this brings us now to “The West Coast & Beyond,” our final
issue in this “American” anthology that we have come to realize could
go on for many more years and still not exhaust itself—just like any
living national literature should.
We are pleased to present the final edition in this series, an issue
full of unique characters—both native to their places and relocated—;
landscapes that are urban, suburban, rural, sublime, distressed,
lived-in, and resistant; stories and images and music from moments
of ending and beginning; and, most of all, a collection of authors
bringing their visions of “the West Coast & Beyond” to life through
their stories, poems, and essays.
Though we did not set out to do so, the four issues that make
up Crab Orchard Review’s 2011–2014 “American” anthology—Volume
16, Number 2, “Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South”;
Volume 17, Number 2, “Due North”; Volume 18, Number 2, “Prairies,
Plains, Mountains, Deserts”; and Volume 19, Number 2, “The West
Coast & Beyond”—include at least one story, poem, or essay about, or
work by an author born in or living in every one of the fifty states, the
District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. We have always known there is
a talented and diverse community of writers and materials to publish
all across this country and we are very happy that our experience
publishing these four issues further confirmed what we have known
these last nineteen years with Crab Orchard Review.
Crab Orchard Review
u 5
Aliki Barnstone
In the Workshop
That was the September when Berkeley was still novel
and I took photos of my new Earth: the crowd of us
sprawled on the Plaza’s brick because there on the Mario Savio Steps
Allen Ginsberg wore a long golden tie, played his harmonium
on a plastic chair, and sang “Tyger, tyger burning bright.”
A few chosen poets stood around the sage’s throne,
each taking his turn, and our friend from the workshop read
the poem we already knew was too beautiful
and too lacerating, the tracks on their arms
a map of shivers, the no-walls sex
they’d have anyplace, their glorious climb
to Inspiration Point at dawn—
the sun orange enough to eat,
uneaten oranges in their hands,
unoffered in the temple
heroin made of their bodies.
Then their stroll downhill was more
a free-fall or swan song over the Bay—
how mesmerizing the waters’ surface
where sun-glare whirled with fathomless
blues all the way to the Golden Gate
and anywhere they’d find
to crash—a mat of redwood
needles, some friends’ itchy mattress
in the flatlands, cardboard laid on concrete
below an underpass near the Marina.
When he read aloud, I wanted the high
to be metaphor—painlessness is a form
of radiance, only words, not the body
of the poet wasting away. And if underlying
his lines we detected disease, we were helpless to address it.
If I wanted, I’d remember what I called him clearly
Aliki Barnstone
as his attentive expression and thin body leaning in close
as I read my poem—my forgetfulness won’t disturb his state—
and if he heard his name he might turn back
to Earth from the high place where the dead go.
Crab Orchard Review
u 7
Gloria Brown
Laying Irrigation Pipe in the Fruit Orchard
Before Dawn
When bent wings of birds quiver
above nested chicks, farmhands bend
to groaning, straining, labor. Lengths
of steel pipe are lifted
onto a battered flatbed trailer coupled
to a restless tractor. Even shiver
of darkness cannot prevent sweat
from soaking cotton shirts that cling
and clutch work-strong chests and backs.
The idling tractor sputters, chuffs,
and coughs its readiness to work. It lurches
its burden forward and the men follow,
forming a quiet processional in the gray
incense of exhaust. Each man intones
a silent prayer that his work will serve
to quench the brown thirst
of the fruit trees that march in mute symmetry
toward the world’s barbed-wire edge.
Between the ranks of trees, pipe is laid
in deep furrows. Pastel light threatens
to breech the lip of sentinel hills at attention
on the eastern edge of the valley.
The race is to finish this task in half-dark.
Weathered hands marry
one length of pipe to the next, until
all are connected
to the one source. And the farmer
spins the wheel that spills the water
Gloria Brown
just as the sun spreads
across the face of this day.
Circling in a ceaseless loop, the seasons
with their list of chores etch the epitaph deeper
into the granite of the farmer’s life.
Crab Orchard Review
u 9
Lauren Camp
Riding the Rope Swing on Billy Goat Hill
We climb wood steps, slow our pace to fog spray,
plunk down on ghosted planks while shadows spill
and underfill around us. Light turns
just enough to shrink and roll away. It is now
or 20 years ago, the last time I saw him.
At the top of the hill, he says my name
so clearly it’s an invasion of privacy. I look down
on the alabaster church sitting slack in the dander
of light from our vantage point above tabulated hills.
It is autumn, a sensible morning.
He bunches his body into a rope
slung from a vast eucalyptus, and combusts
with fumble and need, a man who expects the earth
to come towards him and who knows
mending comes later if you fly fast enough.
What he would have done back then, in youth,
is what he did now: spin through rapture. The city rolled by:
Diamond Heights to Glen Park
and downtown. Did he see it, so fast?
He landed, his feet flaking dry dirt,
shirt torn at the elbow and ridges of spine
—and smiled, the way that is both now,
and the way I remembered.
He rose in the rocks in the hill, with the plait
of the rope still sort of around him.
Hiking down, back to his house,
he was slightly limp but not whining, and we knew
Lauren Camp
we were lucky to be under this generous sun,
finally professing light to everyone.
We knew the collision was ours. We were easing back
on time, which had made us grownups,
turned us around,
when what we wanted was what we were,
where we’d still go, who we might become.
Crab Orchard Review
u 11
April Christiansen
Kalakala
Beyond the sailboats
a submarine-shaped hulk lurks.
Rust streaks down to water.
When it leaves
I will fixate on its ghost:
The Peralta,
the second to last steamship built
in San Francisco Bay, melted.
Her steel hull was tugged
up the coast. She should be
more rounded.
Warm evenings on the Sound,
ladies dance to Joe Bowen
on the flying bird,
rest in the lounge as seagulls
dip past portholes.
Perched on a vibrating red stool
at the double horseshoe café,
a commuter forks sugar-cured ham
and potatoes, buys coffee
by the half cup.
Towed further north, then beached,
men secured her with rock
and sand, removed her relics:
a shrimp cannery, gutted, stagnant
in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
April Christiansen
Then the ephemeral drift
further back. Restored
beyond the sailboats,
the submarine-shaped hulk lurks:
a figment, buried in the water.
Crab Orchard Review
u 13
April Christiansen
The Great Seattle Fire, June 6, 1889
Everything take fire.
—John Back
A fitful wind blew through the open windows
as the cabinet makers above the paint shop
cut box joints, chiseled oak. On the stove,
an unwatched glue pot, a stream of black smoke.
Shouts. Pitched water. The surface glazed,
boiled over. Glue embers tumbled into shavings
littering a turpentine-soaked floor, and men
grabbed their coats, flew to the stairwell as flames
fastened themselves to the building’s walls,
inching towards the liquor warehouse next door.
Glass shattered, the crisp smell of burnt alcohol and paint
filled the sidewalks, and a crowd gathered.
Hydrants fizzled out, and in the background,
the ominous sound of the Opera House,
crackling. Smoke darkened the firmament, thickened.
Steamboats backed into the bay. In piano showrooms,
ebony and ivory disjoined, spruce curled at the edges,
and inside, hammers bent, steel wire snapped,
re-shaped. On tracks, cable cars went ablaze.
Men chucked burning sidewalk over cliffs,
ripped up planking in the roadway, and blew up
an entire city block, struck it with gunpowder
to obstruct the fire, but blocks kept going,
each lighting the next. Coffee houses, cigar shops,
April Christiansen
the Times building: a seething cellar of flame.
Horses, wild, unmanageable with fear, raced up steep hills,
trampled abandoned spokes and smoldering debris.
Even the undertakers were at a loss,
shuffling their costliest equipment into carts, racing
the flames, leaving the already-dead embalmed
in their cloth-covered caskets. Near the bucket brigade,
the confectioner stuffed his pockets with gumballs,
caramels, placed jars of jawbreakers, brittle, and licorice
on the street, left trays of candy apples and fudge
cooling on racks, to singe. Disoriented rats trapped on rafters
never made it out, suffocated or crisped.
By the time the fire reached the wharves,
an artificial dusk bathed the sky. In the morning,
among a mass of ashes, a list of survivors
and where they might be found in the heat and dust.
Then, before the embers cooled,
the bricking in of the remains.
Crab Orchard Review
u 15
Elizabeth Costello
Twelve Twenty-One Twelve, Nevada City
Here are the shops of dresses like dresses
of the past, less the corsets of whalebone.
Romance is better than history, which
tells us much too clearly that pyrite
isn’t gold. Let’s rest our ribs against
the lace, but trim away what itches.
Let their suffering be our glamour—
gathered bodice, crinoline, ruffles at
the neck. Take that, starvation and pestilence.
Our crocheted half-gloves transmit no ague,
and our fingertips are free of filth. Let’s
don the bonnets but forget to die in childbirth.
Nevada City, let’s light the lamps and bank the
fires. Twelve twenty-one twelve isn’t the last
day, but at least the wind makes fists
and boxes off the hot-tub’s lid, setting
the twenty-first century steam against sleet
like sleet that struck the miners’ faces
chilling them and their women to the bone.
At night they trimmed the wicks and
Elizabeth Costello
unbound their ribs, but could not unfix
their fortunes. Fearing a boundless breath,
hard-handed women wept.
Crab Orchard Review
u 17
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
The House on the Coast
One morning I woke up and realized that I could see the end
of my life. It wasn’t hard and fixed, like the crest of a cityscape,
but rather it shimmered like a polar horizon. This view of the end
was troubling, to say the least, but the shimmer was hope. I had a
chance—for something—if I acted quickly.
When I told this to a friend, who happened to be a therapist, she
gave me a look, something between pity and mirth. “You could be hit by
a car tomorrow,” she offered, and it did help, at least for a few days.
But then I woke up again, another morning, and looked forward,
straight ahead, and saw the days stacking up, the years like a tower of
blocks, and me climbing that tower with agility and care, too much
care. The goal was supposed to be to keep the tower from toppling. The
urge was to kick the whole thing down.
The confusing part was that the urge didn’t come from discontent.
I liked my life. It was more a physics thing, the pent-up energy in that
tower. Or maybe it was nothing more than gravity. Whatever the force,
I found I couldn’t ignore it.
“At least you didn’t wake up one morning and decide you’re a
cockroach,” my therapist friend said.
“I’m not the type to go mad,” I told her. “You know that.”
My partner of eleven years assumed that there was someone else.
Who wouldn’t? We hadn’t had sex in months. We’d even stopped fighting.
We came home from work, smiled at each other, made food, went to
meetings and read books, and drank wine. Lots of wine.
I left. Not her. I didn’t mean to leave her. Not even our life. I left
my life. But of course that included her, and our life, so to her it must
have felt like I was leaving her. Since that would be unbearable, I did
the deed surreptitiously.
I packed a few things in a suitcase and rolled it out the door to my car
while she was at work. I made it look as if I were going on a mere business
trip. Look to whom, I couldn’t say, since the neighbors weren’t watching, or
certainly didn’t care. I lifted the suitcase into my car and drove to the coast.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
When I was fourteen years old, I made the same ninety-mile
journey, from Portland to the ocean, on my bicycle. I almost lost my
life on that adventure, several times, to speeding log trucks. I’ve taken
other risks in my life. I’ve climbed mountains without the proper gear,
ingested hallucinatory narcotics, gone home from bars with strangers.
Never, though, had the risk felt so great as it did that morning driving
away from our home, suitcase in the trunk, my cell phone left on the
kitchen table so I wouldn’t be tempted to call or answer.
As I slowed through the speed-trap town of Dundee, it occurred
to me that she’d think I’d been in a car accident. She’d be calling the
police and hospitals by nine o’clock tonight. Quickly, so I could make
the call before she got home from work, I swerved off the highway and
into a McDonald’s where I used the crusty pay phone on the outside of
the building to call our home phone. I said that she shouldn’t worry,
that I’d gone on a trip. I paused for way too long, not wanting to just
hang up and yet not having a clue what else I could add. So I placed the
handset on its holder and disconnected the call.
Our friends would tell her I was cruel. The more thoughtful ones
would ask if I’d shown signs of a breakdown. Maybe both were true.
What I do know is that this leaving felt necessary. There were hawk’s
wings in my chest, flapping hard. I had an overabundance of chi. I’d
taken a curve too fast and couldn’t straighten out my course.
When I got to a sign that said “Oregon Beaches,” I took the exit.
My sinuses felt as if they were opening. I imagined singing when I saw
the sea.
I don’t know how I found the house. Blind driving. The same way
I found my partner, I suppose, it’s just where I arrived. Getting into the
house was easy. A sticker on the window next to the door claimed the
existence of an alarm, but the house was isolated, on a cliff above the
surf, and miles away from any police station. I would just drive away if
the alarm threat panned out.
I did pause here. The question why slid around in my mind like a
bumper car on a slick track, its circuit pole sparking. But the question
wouldn’t take hold, refused to join anything that resembled an answer,
just bounced off, bounced off hard. Still, I’m a rational being, and I
recognized my pending folly and the likely and terrible outcome.
Pausing, though, was the best I could do.
I walked to the edge of the patio and looked out at the ocean. The
blue and white, the vast wetness, the salty breath, these all satisfied
me immensely. I felt as if I could see most of the world from here, the
Crab Orchard Review
u 19
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
seventy percent that was water with its lovely trim of sand. This view
allowed me to ignore that other thirty percent, the peopled one, the
wars and waste.
The door was locked. But the window over the kitchen sink
pushed in easily. Hoisting myself up to its sill and then fitting my
body through the opening was almost impossible. I landed with one
foot in the kitchen sink, my crotch slung painfully on the sill, and
without the leverage to finish the job. No alarm went off—which at
that moment felt like my bad luck because how else was I going to be
rescued?
I lifted my head and saw the ocean, right there out the front
window of the house, and launched myself toward the view. I was
in, draped across the countertop and sliding to the floor, bruised but
pleased with my accomplishment.
That evening I warmed a can of soup and opened what turned out
to be a very good bottle of wine. I felt guilty about the latter and noted
the label so I could replace it. I slept better than I’d slept in weeks,
maybe years, and in the morning I left the door unlocked and walked
on the beach.
There were lots of very old books in the house, leftovers from
people’s childhoods, like Nancy Drews and Laura Ingalls Wilders.
Over the course of the next three days, I read these and ate small
healthy meals and walked on the beach each morning and evening.
On the fourth morning, I awoke to slashing rain and, while I
stuck to my schedule, I shortened my walks. Just before dusk, as I was
getting ready to open a new bottle of wine, the front door opened.
I recognized her from the photo albums. She was the only girl.
I’d wondered what it had been like for her, growing up with four
brothers. I knew one of them had gotten married in this house, that
the parents were both still living, and that she rarely attended family
events. Most of the pictures—the boys with their wives and children,
the parents who were now grandparents—did not include her.
“Oh!” she said without too much alarm. “I didn’t know the house
was rented.”
“Come in,” I said. “No problem.”
She looked around quickly. “Well. No. Of course not. It’s just that
usually, when the house is rented, it gets put on the online calendar.”
“Please,” I said. I’d almost become lonely by then, and anyway,
I liked her messy curls and the serious set of her mouth. “I was just
about to have a glass of wine.”
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
She dropped her duffle and took a big breath. She had the
appearance of running from something, but then maybe I was
projecting.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Her name, I knew from the albums,
was Henrietta. I was glad I’d cleaned the house so thoroughly the
day before. It’d needed it, and it was something I could give back. I’d
also, after much searching and finally finding a boutique wine shop,
replaced the fancy bottle I’d drunk with two more of the same. I sunk
the spiral into the cork and began twisting the handle.
Henrietta sat in one of the chairs in front of the window and
looked out at the blackening rain. I handed her a glass and sat in the
other chair.
“I’m not renting the house,” I told her. “I broke in four days ago.
I’ve just been staying here.”
She stared at me. Then she cracked a small smile. She thought I
was joking.
“I’ll pack now and go. I haven’t taken anything. In fact, I’m leaving
the house in better condition than I found it.”
She glanced around, as if to check on the truth in my claim. She
was beginning to believe me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
She really wanted to know, I could see that. I wished I could
answer the question the way it’s supposed to be answered, with
something clean and simple, like, “My name is Penelope Higgins, I
live with my partner Angie Weinstein, and I work as a paralegal in
Portland.”
Instead, I could only think of shimmering horizons and toppling
blocks. I wanted to give her a future answer, which was as preposterous
as the impulse that sent me here to the coast in the first place. She had
little patience for my stuttering attempt at an answer and she waved the
question away, as if it had been rude of her to ask, and said, “Stay.”
Then she dropped her face into her hands and began sobbing.
I didn’t know her well enough to even pat her back, so I settled
into my chair and watched the fat raindrops slosh down the long
windows. It was completely dark by now and I couldn’t see out to the
ocean, only the reflected images of two women, one doubled over and
one sitting upright. I listened to her wet gulps. I even sipped my wine,
not callously, just patiently. I envied her long cry.
She straightened, blew her nose and wiped her face on the bottom
of her T-shirt, bent one leg at the knee and tucked the foot under
Crab Orchard Review
u 21
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
herself, faced me, leaned her shoulder comfortably into the back of the
chair, and said, “I was always the fuckup. Cs instead of As. Pregnant at
fifteen. It wasn’t the morals they were angry about, it was the stupidity.
Abortion. Pregnant again at nineteen. This time I married the guy,
who left me a couple of months later without the grace of a divorce.
A musician. Yeah, rock. They might have taken my side if he’d been
classical, but no one expected anything of this guy from the get-go. Of
course they were right. For all I know, he’s dead, never heard from him
again and his band definitely did not ever see the light of day. But who
cares, because marriage is not something I need to do again.”
“You could still get a divorce—”
She waved the thought away. “Yeah, sure, of course, I know. Why
bother?”
“Okay,” I said, a bit ridiculously, as if she cared about my
validation. I cared, though, in an intensely spontaneous way, like my
wanting to affirm her choices was a giant metal snap popping me into
her narrative.
Maybe she felt the connection because she delved on. “Once Emma
was born, I didn’t need anything else. We were a complete world, all our
own. At first I thought I was being the cruel one, keeping the grandparents
from her. But then I became convinced they didn’t want to know her, were
even afraid, like she was too raw for them. They had other grandchildren,
smart ones who learned to read at three, their lives fitted out with all the
trappings, and I do use that word purposefully. With us, it was just me
and Emma. So I stayed away. We didn’t need anything else. I knew they
wouldn’t understand that, and I pitied them their lives so full of stuff. My
brothers made partner, got fellowships and promotions, accumulated
wealth, sold paintings. Even the gay artist one has made it.
“We were fine, me and Emma. I couldn’t explain that to them.
They’d never believe it, me with my library shelving jobs and periods
of unemployment. Me cashing the checks they sent, which I only did
because of Emma. I never would have, if it were only me.”
Henrietta unzipped a hard, inscrutable smile and looked behind
us, at the worn orange rug. “Twenty-one years ago today, Emma was
conceived, right there, on the floor, on this very rug.”
I thought she was going to get up and walk to the spot, maybe lie
down in it, but instead she shifted in the chair, faced forward with her
elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. Henrietta’s body seemed
to plump with a briny liquid.
“She died when she was three.”
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
In the long silence I wanted to ask, of what? The urge to garble
anything into that void was so great. I don’t know how I managed to
curb myself. Of what. As if that mattered even a little bit next to the
absence of this woman’s little girl.
“They all tried,” she said after awhile. “Every single one of them.
My father. My mother. All four brothers. They came to our apartment
for the first time. They sat with me. They sent more money. But all I
could feel was that Emma and I weren’t as valuable, that she wasn’t as
great a loss, as anything they could ever lose. I didn’t think they could
conceive of the love she and I shared.”
After a brief pause, she said, “I’m forty now. How old are you?”
“Just a couple of years older.”
She nodded. “I’ve decided to come home. Like, capital H. But
I don’t know what that means. Dinner with Mom and Dad? An
apartment in Portland? Does it mean forgiveness? And who of whom?
So I’m starting here. This house is my earliest memory of love. Reading
for hours on rainy days. Finding sand dollars and agates on the beach.
They had so much hope for me.”
She sat in silence for a long time, and again I didn’t speak either.
“I’ve had men,” she eventually continued. “One or two who
loved me, and one who I loved back. But it was never enough. Losing
Emma…she was three…is a gulf that can never be crossed.
“I’m still promiscuous.” She savored, took refuge in the word.
“I like to fuck.” She held up her wine glass. “Look. I’ve only had
three sips. I’m not drunk. It’s just the truth: an orgasm is the most
intense pleasure I know, and I’m afraid that if I stop fucking, I’ll start
mainlining. I’m a perfect candidate for a crystal meth habit. I’ll do
anything to interrupt the—”
“Pain,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
She did that hand-waving gesture of hers. “What do you think is
the next step? Call my parents?”
I didn’t have a clue how to answer.
“They never met her,” she said. “They did ask. I just never thought
they asked genuinely enough. I have to live with that, that I kept her
from them. I’m sorry.” She looked up at me, her eyes flashing and her
thin-lipped mouth open with grief. “The two most stupid words in the
language.”
Then she did drink the glass of wine, and I poured more for both
of us.
Crab Orchard Review
u 23
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
“Who are you?” she asked again, and so I told her, but briefly,
because it was clear to me that she didn’t need to hear my story—not
now, not here—about seeing the end of my life and leaving my partner.
Yet she listened with what appeared to be full understanding, and then
said, “You need to go home.”
I nodded.
“Stay tonight. Can I sleep with you? Not like that. But I want—”
After waiting for her to finish the sentence, and when she didn’t, I
nodded again.
We rose out of our chairs then and both put on our flannel
pajamas. We climbed into the big bed and silently moved toward one
another. I thought I was holding her, but she may have thought she was
holding me. The storm outside gathered force throughout the night,
and I slept little, but I felt tranquil in our cocoon of chance.
At dawn a flush of desire warmed me as the sun pinked up the room.
I hurried out of bed and made a pot of coffee. The rain had stopped, and
the ocean glittered almost obscenely.
I stuffed my things into my suitcase as quietly as I could and rolled
it out of the house, leaving the door cracked open because it wouldn’t
shut without a noisy thunk.
A deer standing on the hillside watched me load the suitcase into
my car. I badly wanted to walk back up to the porch, for a last look at
the sea, but knew my time was up. Just as I was getting into the driver’s
seat, Henrietta came running out of the house, breathless, her hair a
tangle of curls and that grim set of her mouth freed in a cry of, “Wait!”
I waited, and she walked across the gravel driveway in her bare
feet, wincing with the sharp pain in her soles, and put her arms around
me. Her flannel pajamas were still warm from the bed. She nestled her
face into my neck for a second, and then pulled back and gave me a
lickerish kiss on the lips.
Still no smile or goodbye as she walked backwards, toward the
house, tipping a bit from the kiss throwing her out of balance. I
climbed into my car, started the engine, and drove home.
Strike-Slip
You’re up on the roof of a house in the Hollywood Hills and
you’re surrounded by a darkness so palpable you can almost wear it.
Against the blackness you can see the Coliseum glowing halide-bright
to the south. Light travels farther than you’d think. Southeast is
downtown, half the height it used to be. West is a sprinkle of lights
from generators and Coleman lanterns before the dark spreads across
the ocean, a velvety cave that swallows the light whole. If you turned
around and crested the hills, you’d see light on the northern horizon,
toward Santa Clarita, where you’ve heard they still have power.
There are fifty major fault lines and hundreds of minor ones
underneath Southern California. They have beautiful names: the
Santa Ynez Fault, the Superstition Mountain Fault, White Wolf, San
Jacinto, Rose Canyon. They have names that sound like home: the San
Gabriel Fault, the San Andreas Fault, the Santa Monica Fault, Palos
Verdes, Malibu Coast, Sierra Madre. People in Kansas live watching
the skies for tornadoes, people in Florida live watching for hurricanes,
worrying about a disaster that might never happen. But you know this:
the ground underneath your feet is impermanent. It’s on its way to
somewhere else, just like everyone. You don’t wonder if there will be
earthquakes, because you know.
You and Sam and Elena got lucky because you were outside
when it happened, walking back to your apartment with tacos
from the truck that was always parked on Vermont. You remember
thinking that the sky was redder than usual, and then you stumbled
over something in the sidewalk and landed hard on your hands and
knees, carnitas scattering across the ground, and you yelled “Shit!” as
you fell but no one heard you. Sam and Elena didn’t hear you because
they were also on the ground, and you wondered if you were drunk
and you didn’t know why you were suddenly so clumsy and then,
almost in slow motion, you watched scaffolding fall from a building
Crab Orchard Review
u 25
and then you understood that the ground was shaking and it had been
shaking for what seemed like so long but couldn’t have been more than
three, four seconds. You grabbed for Sam and Elena and the three of
you crawled toward each other like kittens and you hung onto them
because nothing else was trustworthy: not the street, not the sidewalk,
not the cement wall next to you. A crack opened up right down the
middle of your apartment building and chunks of drywall started
falling out and you stopped looking at anything except the ground that
you were absolutely sure would yawn open right there and swallow
you. It made the deepest sound you’d ever heard, so low it felt like you
heard it with your spine. Asphalt and concrete buckled up around you
and every single car alarm was going off and then it stopped and your
knees were bruised and your palms were skinned but you were alive.
The three of you are as settled as you can be, now, in this house
in the hills. It was unlocked when you tried the door one evening,
a few days after the earthquake, and since you didn’t have to break
in you can lock it behind you. You checked that no one was inside,
hiding behind a locked door with a shotgun, and you found a case
of wine in the pantry. You sat on the couch and passed a bottle back
and forth while you made up a story about the family who lived there,
whose pictures were still on the walls: a white woman, an Asian man,
their daughter. There was only one car in the garage so you tell each
other that they drove away, nevermind that everything in the house is
perfectly in place, nevermind that a box clearly labeled EMERGENCY,
a box that has ten gallons of water and enough canned food for a week,
is still at the bottom of the pantry. They got out, you decided, sitting on
their couch, drinking their wine. They didn’t die at school or at work
or out running errands.
Born in Southern California means born knowing about
earthquakes, born under the specter of the Big One that has been
coming your entire life. You knew more about it than you did about
the moon: you knew the Richter scale; the San Andreas Fault, miles
away out in the desert but still a thing to fear; you knew that the
northern end of it caused the ground in San Francisco to liquefy in
1906. You knew it was a strike-slip fault, the North American and
Pacific plates nuzzling one another at a geologic pace, the ground
catching and slipping, catching and slipping, insensible to anything
that happened on the surface. You knew, or at least you were always
told, that strike-slip faults were lateral faults. That California couldn’t
sink into the ocean.
The earthquake ended and you didn’t believe it. It had been
so long—ninety whole seconds, you found out later, staggeringly long for
an earthquake—that you thought it never would stop, that you now lived
in a world of constant rattling, but it did end and you stood, you looked
around, you were okay, you pulled out your phone to call your parents, tell
them you were okay, but the network was down and you saw a woman on
the corner, one leg trapped in the rubble of her store, garish piñatas and
figurines of La Virgen broken everywhere around her, and instead of
thinking, you just did. The three of you lifted rubble and pulled people
out for hours, you think, and you lost track of where the people went or
what time it was. You thought that ambulances and fire trucks would
come, and then they didn’t, and then the sun set and they still hadn’t, and
that was when you looked up, finally, to see so many buildings crumbled,
power lines down, trucks and SUVs rolled over on their sides, asphalt
asunder. Then you knew help wasn’t coming, not that night, and it still
didn’t occur to you that help might not ever come or that your parents,
instead of being worried about you, might not be okay. The sun set over the
ocean, over a new shoreline you didn’t know about yet. That night you saw
more stars over the city than you’d ever seen before.
The next morning, in the house with the door that locks,
you find boxes of cereal in the pantry along with evaporated milk and
bowls still in the cabinet behind a child lock, probably the reason they’re
not smashed on the floor. Sunlight streams in through south-facing
floor-to-ceiling windows that aren’t broken for some reason, but you’ve
stopped thinking about reasons: some buildings were split in two before
they were shaken into rubble and some weathered the quake without a
scratch. Some roads are perfectly fine and some crumpled like the icing
on a donut. Asking for reasons at this point is useless.
Sam walks in and plops a Southern California road atlas onto
the kitchen table just as another low rumble starts and everything
in the house starts shivering. She puts one hand on the wall and you
steady your cereal bowl. You’ve lost count of the aftershocks that have
clattered through in the days since the earthquake, these little shifts
and adjustments in the earth’s crust.
“It was in their car,” Sam says when it finishes. She reaches into
the cabinet for her own bowl, fills it with cereal and canned milk. “I
Crab Orchard Review
u 27
checked it out. The 5 goes right to Santa Clarita. It’s only twenty-five,
thirty miles.”
“We can’t walk that far,” says Elena from the next room. She walks
in and stands in the kitchen doorway.
“It’s less than a marathon,” says Sam. “Of course we can walk it.
We could walk it in a day. Two if we walk slow.”
“I don’t have good shoes for that.”
“Are you serious?”
Elena says nothing.
“Getting to civilization is worth a couple of blisters,” Sam says
in that dismissive tone you know Elena hates. “We’ll bring some
bandaids with us.”
“I’m not going,” Elena says, and leaves again.
“Elena,” Sam says, bowl with cereal and canned milk in one hand.
“Elena!”
You hear a door slam, and there’s a moment of silence in the
kitchen and then you start laughing because this is the exact same
kind of argument you had when you all lived in the same apartment
together, and you’re sitting here, eating cereal in this beautiful kitchen
with the sun flowing in. You laugh so hard you snort, and you look
over at Sam for confirmation that this is ludicrous. Instead she watches
you suspiciously.
The Los Angeles basin sank seventeen feet in sixty seconds.
That’s a little over three inches a second; blazingly, scorchingly fast
for the earth to move but imperceptible to the people standing on it,
already distracted by an earthquake. Even near the ocean, in the beach
cities, in Venice or Santa Monica, people wouldn’t notice—not until
the water rushed in, not until they were already under, buoyed against
the ceiling of a condo near the beach bought after an only daughter
graduated from college, a lifelong dream. No one would know until it
happened, because it wasn’t going to happen, because the San Andreas
is a strike-slip fault.
Elena wants you to come to the Observatory with her because
she’s too mad at Sam, so you bike over with bikes you’ve found in
abandoned houses. It’s on this bluff at the edge of the hills, a perfect
view of vast Los Angeles to the south, built in the 1930s before there
was so much light, when people could still see the stars. You’re a little
surprised it’s standing at all, though it looks like the east wing has
collapsed. You walk in through the front doors, turn on the flashlight
you brought and come face to face with a man wearing a Mayan
headdress. He used to be part of the ceiling, pointing to a circular
calendar that’s now in pieces around the floor.
You remember when you took Sam and Elena there for the first
time. Neither had ever been. Sam was new to LA, an eighteen-yearold from North Carolina on scholarship with a convert’s fervor
for the city, and Elena had grown up by the beach in Venice with a
housekeeper and designer handbags. The three of you walked up from
the parking lot at the bottom of the hill and stood looking over the
city, the perfect view straight down Normandie Avenue. You stayed
for the sunset and you watched the neon in Koreatown flicker to life
one sign at a time. When no one was looking, the three of you sat on
the railing and dangled your feet over, flip flops hanging down, Los
Angeles twinkling between your toes.
“I hope the gift shop is okay,” Elena says now.
Your flashlight picks out other painted faces and then you move
past them, down a staircase, down a sloping hallway, praying that
there’s not an aftershock while you’re in here. You and Elena hold
hands in the dark because there’s only one flashlight, and you walk
through the Gallery of Planets—dead TV screens and orbs on the
floor—toward the light and shattered glass that’s the cafe and gift
shop. As you step back into the sunlight you hear a click that you’ve
only ever heard before in movies.
“Stop,” says a male voice. You obey. “Okay, now, just, turn around
slowly.”
Your heart slams against your ribs and your hands float up almost
of their own accord in a universal gesture of surrender, and you turn
to find a kid maybe ten feet away, blocking the cafe entrance, with a
shock of curly hair and wide eyes, pointing a handgun at you, both
arms straight out. He can’t be more than seventeen.
“You can’t stay here,” he says. “This is our place.”
“We’re just here for a telescope,” Elena whispers. This catches the
kid off-guard.
“What?” he says.
“A telescope.”
“Are you fucking with me?” the kid asks. He frowns.
“She wants to see if her parents’ house is underwater,” you say,
impossibly audible over the sound of your heart.
The kid swallows and shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
Crab Orchard Review
u 29
Something moves in the back of the cafe, another kid you didn’t see
before, his arm held oddly stiff and wrapped in t-shirts.
“We can’t give you any food,” the kid with the gun says.
“Just the telescope,” says Elena.
The kid looks from you to her and back, then turns to the door
to the outside and very carefully puts the safety back on, pointing the
gun away from everyone.
“Sorry,” he says. “You can take a telescope.”
“Thanks,” Elena says, and you both turn into the gift shop. You
find an unbroken kids’ telescope in the jumble on the floor, and you
take some binoculars and a map of the night sky just for the hell of it.
When you turn to go the two kids are sitting at a table, talking, the kid
with the arm pale and sweaty and miserable-looking.
“Is your arm broken?” Elena asks him.
“I think so,” he says. He has floppy black hair and caramel-colored
skin.
She reaches into the backpack she’s carrying and takes out a bottle
of Advil. “Here,” she says. You look at her. What if Sam gets a migraine,
what if someone sprains an ankle?
He takes it, slowly. “Thanks, man,” he says. “There was some here
but I went through all of it already. It helps.”
The first night after the earthquake, you found emergency
services by the lights. Hospitals and fire stations had generators, if they
were working, if they weren’t totally destroyed. The Kaiser Permanente
hospital in Hollywood was okay and the three of you went there. The
absolute human chaos was worse than the minutes after the earthquake:
the screaming, the blood, the bones poking out of flesh. You remember
one woman so clearly, sitting on the ground against a wall, right side
covered in blood and right arm useless, hugging a crying toddler with
her left arm, both eyes closed. You felt nauseatingly helpless. That’s
where you felt the first aftershock, in the big entrance hall of the hospital,
hoping for food or water. This time you knew what it was right away,
and you squeezed your eyes shut and held onto a wall, telling yourself
it couldn’t get worse, and when the lights went out for a moment you
thought maybe you’d died. Next to you at the wall was a bearded guy,
maybe in his twenties too, and when the shaking stopped he told you
how much Los Angeles had sunk, that Beverly Hills was the beach now.
“Great for property values,” you joked, and to your relief he
laughed, and then he disappeared in the crowd again. It took you a
minute to realize what that meant, Beverly Hills on the oceanfront
now, all that land west of it underwater.
Elena’s been on the roof for an hour with the telescope,
looking west. Sam’s inside, packing three backpacks full of water and
granola bars from the pantry and cans of baked beans. You walk up
behind Elena, and you know she hears you, you’ve made plenty of
noise, but she doesn’t move at all, not until you walk over and put a
hand on her shoulder. Without looking she hands you the telescope
and points.
“There,” she says. You look and don’t know what you’re looking
for. “From where the 405 is, look a little up and west. Sunset is still
above the water, and right before Temescal goes into the ocean, do you
see that?” You’re looking and you don’t answer.
“The Village School,” she says, her voice rising.
You can’t follow her directions and you know it’s impossible to
see the high school from where you are. The angle of you and the
mountains and the valleys are all wrong. You already went on that
goose chase with her that morning—you had a gun in your face too.
You don’t see why she gets to pretend that her family is alive.
“I don’t think I’m looking at the right spot,” you say. She takes the
telescope back.
“That’s it,” she says quietly to herself.
You take it again and look through, follow the street that she
says and you still don’t see anything. “That’s not Temescal,” you say.
“Temescal’s underwater.”
She grabs the telescope so hard it hurts your eye. “It’s right there,”
she says.
“That’s just some building,” you say, and you think again of water
rushing in, up to the ceiling, and you can’t believe she’s being so
stupid. “That’s not the school.”
“Yes it is.”
“They’re dead, Elena,” you say. “Your parents are dead. Your sister
is dead. You’re not. Come inside and help pack. We’re walking to Santa
Clarita tomorrow.”
She doesn’t look at you, she doesn’t turn, she keeps looking
through that damn telescope even though you can see tears falling
down her right cheek. There’s silence.
“Fuck off,” she finally says.
Crab Orchard Review
u 31
After the quake you didn’t see the ocean for two days, until
the three of you were heading north, climbing into the hills, and
then you were afraid of it, afraid of how you would react to the sight:
Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Malibu, Westwood, most of
Culver City, gone, but you looked anyway. Another you thought how
beautiful it was, the top of the Mormon temple still shining bright gold
in the sun, the tops of every building in the glassy water, the freeways
skimming over it like bridges between mountains, the landscape you
had always known become new and alien. But at the same time you
thought of the water rushing in as the ground shook, and you thought
of how you could never do anything about it.
After Kaiser Permanente the three of you decided to strike
out on your own. There were far fewer people around than you had
assumed there would be, and you tried not to think about it. You didn’t
make eye contact with the piles of rubble that were the unlucky, old
buildings. Anyone in them could still have been alive and you knew
you couldn’t do anything to help them. Elena wanted to go back to
the hospital, sure that someone was in charge and working on getting
everyone out of Los Angeles, but you couldn’t stomach the idea.
Sam was the first to break into a house, wrapping her arm in a
Dodgers T-shirt she’d found and breaking the window on a front door
with a rock and then reaching through to unlock the door like she’d been
doing it her whole life. An alarm that didn’t matter went off, and you
went inside and found bottled water and blankets and cans of food and
no sign of the owners. The nice houses were the most deserted. Sam said
that the rich probably got out somehow, since the rich always seem to
manage that, but Elena started crying and you didn’t bring it up again.
That night you all go to bed in the locked house, Sam in the
master bedroom, Elena in the guest, and you in the kid’s bedroom.
You and Sam have decided you’re leaving the next morning, and Elena
said nothing so you assumed she’d come, she was just still angry with
you. You lie wide awake under the pink and purple comforter that
belonged to a dead little girl, trying to fall asleep, but instead you’re
thinking about your friend Melissa who was a waitress at a sushi
restaurant near the beach. She lived in Koreatown, though, so where
was she that afternoon? At work or at home? Then you’re thinking
about it again, the earth trembling beneath you and then the lights
going out, thinking of the water rushing in and pushing you to the
ceiling. You might never see Los Angeles again. No one might ever see
Los Angeles again.
You don’t realize you fell asleep until the aftershock wakes you up,
a sudden jolt when the earth shifts and then a slow wobble that feels
like being on a ship on the ocean. You let it rock you back to sleep.
Elena’s gone in the morning. You check every room twice, check
that she’s not just hiding in a closet for some reason unknown to you.
Finally you sit on the couch, shaking and nauseous. Sam is next to
you, staring at the wall across the room. Her eyes are red-rimmed and
bloodshot. Yours feel like sandpaper in their sockets. You take her hand.
“We should still go,” she says in a voice that is not Sam, that is
primal and deep and echoes from somewhere far away.
You know she’s right. It will be impossible to find Elena and
impossible to get her to leave with you. You know this, but you’re tired
of losing people, tired of giving in to the earthquake and accepting
this new life, this new Los Angeles.
“We should find her,” you say anyway.
“We can’t find her.”
“She’ll come back.”
Sam swallows and you see her jaw clench and unclench.
“My parents are still alive,” she says. You say nothing. You imagine
water rushing in. “I need to call them, I need to tell them I’m okay.”
“We can’t leave Elena,” you say. “She doesn’t have parents. She
wouldn’t leave us.”
“She did leave us,” Sam says. “We’re probably never going to see
her again, and so now I need to walk to Santa Clarita so I can contact
my parents and my family who are still alive and then I can go home.”
“Give her a day,” you say. You lean forward and put both hands in
your dirty hair and lean your elbows on your knees.
“No,” Sam says. “Today. We’re leaving today.”
“You’re leaving today.”
Sam swivels her head toward you and gives you a long look,
nothing but her eyes moving over your face. Then she gets up without
saying anything, walks into the bedroom she’s been using, walks back
out with a pack on her back. She buckles a strap around her waist.
“Don’t,” you say. “Give her a day, just give her a day and then I’ll
come.”
“You’re never going to come.”
“We can’t leave her here, not like this, not alone.”
Crab Orchard Review
u 33
“You’re letting me go alone.”
“You’re not her,” you say. “You’ll be fine, you can handle yourself.”
“Yeah,” she says. She looks at you for a long, long moment. “I
should have known,” she says.
“Known what?”
“You wouldn’t leave LA.”
You have no response. You suspect she might be right, she might
have dug her way to the truth, but the sun is glaring through the
windows and Sam is leaving and the city is destroyed and you don’t
know a thing right now except that you’re not going with her, which is
such a solid fact you could hold it in your hands.
“Don’t leave,” you say again. Sam gives you a long, hard hug, and
then she walks out the door.
You go back to the couch, you lie down, you let the sun come
in the windows and shine all over you lying there, for hours. Elena is
gone and now Sam is gone and you don’t know what to do, you don’t
want to be alone but you couldn’t leave Elena to go with Sam and Elena
didn’t even ask you, she just went. The sun slowly rises over the roof
of the house so it’s no longer on you, and you think of the boys at the
Observatory. They’re someone, at least.
You bike over and pull into the parking lot, the sun right overhead,
and even from far away it looks different. You don’t know how. The
east side is still folded in on itself, the central dome and the west wing
still okay, but something else is missing, something’s happened. You
go in and see the same Mayan painting, the man who used to point
to the calendar, and you look for the long ramp downwards but it’s
blocked now, the ceiling caved in.
The cafe, you think. You go back outside and walk around the
perimeter, in the sunlight, and as soon as you go around the corner
you can see that the whole cafe and gift shop are fallen in, shattered
glass and 1930s masonry everywhere. You can’t even begin to move
the rubble. There’s no way inside and there is nothing except the eerie
silence of a city destroyed. The Southern California sun is insistent on
your skin, covering you, pressing you down, and you stare and stare at
the rubble. You turn and walk to the railing. You sit on it, dangle your
feet over, Los Angeles below.
John Glowney
Map Making
Geography is blue mostly. Serene sheet,
azure mirror, the ink bottle
the map-maker capsized across his table:
Arabian Sea,
Puget Sound.
The rest is color-by-border,
sovereignty
streaked by migrations of refugees.
Massachusetts, for example,
the color of the paper on which they wrote
the Declaration of Independence,
China
the crimson of communist hordes,
India a potter’s clay of beggars,
dust, and cow dung.
So why this end, among all the ends of the earth,
why the thumbtack of destination
stabbed here
as if by a blindfolded man?
It’s the rule of surveys:
Crab Orchard Review
u 35
John Glowney
errors
are thrown to the North and the West.
I fled the plains,
the color of the Bible and a mouse’s
tail,
and L.A., when you looked back,
glowed like a motel light in hues of palms
and fool’s gold. No banana trees for us,
no cornfields unrolled like rugs,
only this green estate of steady rain.
Only beaches of moss hanging from the spill of an ocean.
John Glowney
Protest
WTO, Seattle, November 30, 1999
It’s a stand-off, and nobody is giving in.
The full block of Sixth Avenue in front of the Sheraton
is swimming with college students,
some dressed as turtles or butterflies, as if in a kindergarten pageant,
some carrying signs,
banners, flags, everything from Earth First to Free Tibet.
A misting rain mounts its own rally and uniformed cops
in heavy black shoes and black helmets
make a barricade of bodies across the Union St. intersection.
So when a scrawl of smoke from a teargas canister hisses up,
intense and white as silk,
the entire crowd turns like a school of fish
—you can see the reflective rain jackets, the bright colors flashing
like wind-stirred leaves in a maple—
and retreats fifty feet, then turns and again holds its ground.
The smoke makes a white dissolving wave
high and cold
in damp sunlight on the brick cornices and glass facades
like the ghost wake that marks our journey from here to there
Crab Orchard Review
u 37
John Glowney
sweeping along the bare, wet corridor of pavement
between the line of cops and the protesters,
shining, then fading, the gulf between them crossed
with the slogans of rebellion that boil out of the riotous protest
that is their hearts,
the lingua franca of the young, stray words, mere breath.
John Glowney
Out on Turnigan Arm, Resurrection Bay
Ptarmigan grouse limp the rutted gravel road,
dumb as loaves of bread,
a Denali red fox slinking fireweed a few yards behind,
showing, like an iceberg, only 10% of his guile.
The mud flats glisten in the massive tidal retreat,
glitter like sequined dresses,
and from the tourist turnout above
the shutters of Kodak and Canon
blink and click at the great exposed bottom.
In the Anchorage Zoo the sad llamas
chew the cold edges of the rain
and ponder their curious fate.
The cliff-nesters’ eggs wobble like tops
above the long plunge into Resurrection Bay,
and it’s all plunge—off the rocky promontories,
the cormorants and the common murres,
the bedizened puffins hurling themselves
into the gray-blue waters—all chop,
churn, surge, thrash. The Dall sheep
on the steep hillsides, born to this damp white cloudiness,
are perhaps on their way to heaven
and light-toed as ballerinas
Crab Orchard Review
u 39
John Glowney
answering the perilous question of the narrow path.
Bald eagles mate for life and beyond
any vow we care to voice,
the broad nests sometimes so built and overbuilt
the tree limb splinters, and still the pair returns,
year upon year, to repair and live
amid the precarious, accumulating wreckage.
John Glowney
The Whale Skeleton at Long Beach,
Washington
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea
for an acre of barren ground…
—The Tempest I. I. 44
They’ve roped him off with a rusting anchor chain,
a museum of one,
resurrected
from the warbling surf-song
that buried forty-five feet of whale
under stiff sand
out of reach of the bleaching sun
in homage to William Clark’s 1806 journal entry
noting the bones of a gray whale run aground
in the cold fog of an unnamed coast.
So now he’s back on the beach,
one of the tribe that turned its back
on land turned back again,
long skeleton, missing ribs,
the vaults of those enormous lungs
that once held a squall of breath
for hours,
the grayish, warm-blooded body,
scarred by parasites, the broad lips
for benthic feeding, fluke,
flippers,
the great cloak of blubber
we sawed off to light our rooms,
Crab Orchard Review
u 41
John Glowney
the great, four-chambered heart—heavy,
like ours—all gone.
A shaggy, many-stemmed dandelion plant
blooms where the cavernous stomach
processed tons of plankton.
The empty brain-socket flutters
with shreds of dune-grass.
Every summer the local merchants
host a kite festival
on the whale’s beach,
the sky for a week
sprayed with colorful plastic or cloth sails
that twitch and throb in the high sea-breezes,
almost out of sight.
And season after season
the convoys of pods tack south,
long voyages along far, dusty trails
so secret and old
only the whales can imagine them.
Tom Griffen
Homer Stevedore
I drive up the dirt road
after a twenty-four hour shift
pitching fish on Kachemak docks,
unloading angry boats
swollen with the salmon
I’ve gotten so good at sorting.
Pink, silver, king and red—
I can swipe them off the conveyor
and chuck them in metal bins
faster than guys half my age.
My Jeep floats past foggy halibut
outlined in lodgepole pines.
I smell of fish rot and skunk
from the junky old weed I smoked
with fugitives from the lower 48.
We hurl snowballs at forklifts
and at guys with clean overalls
until the echoing horn of a trawler
zaps us sober. Back to work.
We scatter and wave our hats,
then draw straws to see
who’s going in the hold
to get covered in guts
with no breaks all day.
There’s a guy who always volunteers
and is known for putting a flounder’s eye,
big as a peach pit
into his mouth—
then pretend to swallow it
Crab Orchard Review
u 43
Tom Griffen
and sometimes doing so
but not on purpose.
It’s morning. I think.
I should have passed on the beers
and gotten some sleep instead.
I speed fifteen miles per hour
past glowing views of the Spit
up the pitch to my cousin’s cabin.
I stop only to pick up a dirty guy needing a lift.
He asks me to drop him
at a church some five miles ahead.
He’s been hitching since Anchorage,
but Ohio before that.
He says I look tired
but I can’t be as tired as him.
He says he’s having trouble
with allergies or something.
He snaps into a fit of scratching,
says his eyes are filling up
with tiny, flesh-eating worms.
He asks if God can help.
I tell him that’s impossible,
the worms anyhow.
He covers his face with his hands
and I tell him I don’t know much about God.
His weeping keeps me awake.
Leah Huizar
Hominy
Consider menudo—a word like mundo which suggests a world
or, in this bowl, many spinning bodies. Glistening intestines float
over tender heaps of the unadorned hominy—de-hulled, lye-bathed,
and boiled
bare corn-cousin—anchoring the depths of deep crimson
chile broth. The stew appears Sundays in San Diego taquerias
where a sung homiletic of gut against spongy gut
rises in the patter and heave of slurping on slippery organs;
red stains like visible veins flow; swollen seeds burst in the cheek;
we eat. My father tells me of a place deep in Mexico’s gut
where everyone looks like us—hard tuft
eyebrows like slabs of cheap meat heavily cut, the kind
made soft over heat and time. Oh, infinitely variable
Mexican supper of substitution: Trade
tripe for carnitas—the diminutive flesh, the affectionate -ita,
as in carinita, little loved one, little brown
bouquets cinched by an effervescent rub of fat. Call this one
pozole—another bowl of hominy. In California’s Inland Empire,
my aunt’s stove simmers a drum-pot of soup, hums an incantation
older than the New World, a pre-Columbian stock bubbling at lips
lately made. In Mesoamerican myth, man was created
Crab Orchard Review
u 45
Leah Huizar
three times. The mud of earth made man mute and motionless;
wood turned him forgetful and soulless. Only the pliant
dough of two types of cornmeal could shape
the knots and joints, the twisted limbs of this human flesh.
Leah Huizar
Santa Monica
In the Golden Age of carousels, Charles Looff
planted pleasure piers down each coast through
the Roaring Twenties, the national diversion. Santa Monica’s
Hippodrome upholds her amusement pier’s promontory
tip, a music box sculpted eclectic in Byzantine, Californian
and Moorish lines. The carousel inside the arena swirls in circles,
and hand-cut wooden horses run round and round, lift and slide
down. Each thick mane rides in the wind of perpetual motion.
Marilyn Monroe lingered for weeks to watch the spinning; she wore
shades and a wig, and the conductor mentioned to her
she might get a job. The horses mesmerize even the Stars
with their limbs and bodies in shapely contours
rubbed into a buffed shine. Passengers still cling to palominos
in spiraling races going nowhere but right where they are.
Band organs, twinkling and brassy, chime from above. Always, the light
streaks and blurs until the whole pier wades in billowing golden haze.
And in that cloud, pier-goers float above the water like cherubs,
ruby-cheeked and glistening. The pier’s Ferris wheel revolves
like a water mill filling its buckets with sun. A few blocks inland,
pedestrians parade on Third Street’s promenade: psychic cats,
soap-boxers, magicians and rave-light dancers perform
for the swarm of evening walkers strolling in bare legs
Crab Orchard Review
u 47
Leah Huizar
bronzed and chiseled in city shadow and light. When the Spanish
first landed on this bay, they christened and blessed and named
it for the day’s feast, Saint Monica of Hippo. St. Augustine’s
mother wept as he swirled through philosophies for living:
hedonist, neo-Platonist, Manichean; she awaited
our Western father’s final conversion, believed
a bishop that it’s not possible the son of all these tears
should perish. Now, Santa Monica offers her name
to a city bathed in ocean water saltier than tears; her sons
and daughters in that golden light, turning and turning.
Rochelle Hurt
from The Gold Letters
Thousands of men leave home and family
in search of gold and find their graves.
—from a letter written by John Van Hoose,
a coal miner who left Kentucky for California
in 1849 in search of gold
[The evening before you left, I watched you]
Russell, Kentucky: August 16, 1849
The evening before you left, I watched you
as you stood at the cherrywood-framed window
in our bedroom. Ahead, the copper lake, cut
by a path of gold laid down by the sun.
You held your back to me, your waist tapered—
a black silhouette sliced from the orange,
the glare eclipsed.
You packed your eyes
with evening light, and refused to turn your head
away from that beauty. Now you don’t have to.
You can press those flecks of gold you find
into your pupils and bring them home,
pretend God won’t notice if you pray
with eyes closed.
John. In dreams, gold fills me—
white blood. I wake feeling for my eyes, lashes
crusted under my fingertips, so sure
that platinum light is spilling out, dribbling
from the corners. I’m afraid it will blind me
before I get word you’ve arrived alive.
Crab Orchard Review
u 49
Rochelle Hurt
[Lydia, I wait for gold to spill over]
Sacramento City: October 15, 1849
Lydia, I wait for gold to spill over
the banks of the river. I watch
the yellow weeds in the grass
for sprouts of brassy petals pushing
at last through the wet soil. I would
bring back seeds of gold for you
if I knew they would grow. But Lydia,
God has hidden all the gold. At home
mines clog at the mouth with His best
dead men. In dreams I see black walls
circling our children. Pray for our boys
down in the cellar of the earth.
Rochelle Hurt
[Another dream, your hands full of gold rocks]
Russell, Kentucky: November 20, 1849
Another dream, your hands full of gold rocks
held out to the boys, who laughed
until their mouths grinned up into their eyes,
faces twisted into fat dimpled patches of flesh.
But the weight of the gold was so great
that you fell to your knees.
Lord help us, I cried,
and He did: the gold grew soft and black
as rotten figs in your hand, and you stood up again.
But the boys were not saved—their eye sockets
turned black and sooty with coal. Coal crumbled
down from their little black tongues.
John.
If you scoop the sacred out of God’s earth,
you must bring home enough to feed us
for a lifetime. If our boys are sent down
into the mines, I fear God in His anger
will forever tuck them inside.
Crab Orchard Review
u 51
Rochelle Hurt
[I am still as the stones on the floor]
Sacramento City: December 24, 1850
I am still as the stones on the floor
of the frantic river. More—
I am still as stones in the ocean. I lie
just beneath the flood, a fish, my mouth open
for gold. It escapes me, as voice
escapes me in dreams when your head is turned
and I cannot see the angle of your jaw
where face meets ear, the tiny hairs.
I do not remember a freckle there, though
I know there must have been one.
I catch freckles of gold now and keep them
in my jar like fireflies, but only to guide
me through the mines when I get home.
Anne Elliott
The Pacific Madrona
Cherie Watson owned this patch of concrete, this queue, was
the queen of it. She rubbed one hand—short nails, chipped pink
polish—over her fresh braids and gleaming scalp, looked me up and
down with a slow shake of the head, then sucked her teeth. “Frankie,
why you even here? White girls can’t get in. You have to cornrow
your hair.”
“So? White people can get braids too.”
“Who’s gonna do yours? Cos I ain’t.”
Lareese Johnson, behind me in line, let out a loud laugh. Heads
turned. He kept a pick in his back pocket, the kind with the clenched
plastic fist. Hair was everyone’s business but mine. Mine was a short,
straight bob, and maybe a once a day brush. “Frankie in French braids.
Now, that I got to see,” said Lareese.
It was 1977. It was the Music and Dance portable building. We
were waiting to audition for the Madrona Middle School African
Drum ensemble. I did not feel very African. I had never hit a drum. I
had no business.
I was ready to step away when the door opened and a small
group of hopefuls exploded onto the cramped playground, followed
by Ms. Goodin, the music teacher. Beautiful, slim, yellow dashiki
and bellbottom jeans, large, natural Afro held back from her face
with a clip.
“Lareese, cut it out. Okay, next group. You, you, you, you, you.”
She ushered us in. The room was funky with Pacific Northwest
mildew, like all of the portables. It was me, Lareese, Cherie, and a
half a dozen kids I didn’t know. We sat on the dirty carpeted floor.
Too late to back out now.
“Okay. I’ll play this cadence on the cowbell, you listen.” Ms.
Goodin tapped the double bell. I concentrated: nine syncopated dings
on the high tone, a single punctuating dong on the low. She repeated
it several times. I thought I had it, but it was hard to remember. I
practiced with my finger on my sneaker, where no one could see.
Crab Orchard Review
u 53
Anne Elliott
“Cherie. You first.” Cherie seemed nervous. She tapped at least
twenty hesitant tones on the high bell, let the beat compete with
her bubblegum. Ms. Goodin took the bell, played the cadence again
correctly. I tapped along on my shoe. She handed the bell back to
Cherie.
“It’s not fair. I’m first,” Cherie said.
“That’s why I’m giving you another try.”
Cherie glared right at me and whacked the bell hard, her fist
against my head. Even I could tell she lost the cadence completely.
“Okay. Lareese.”
Lareese, confident, clear, tapped the pattern clean with a cocky
grin. I could tell he got it exact, though I couldn’t quite repeat it in
my head. The look on Ms. Goodin’s face confirmed his accuracy.
“Excellent, Lareese. Everyone hear that?”
The bell was suddenly in my hands. Cherie cold clocked me with
her eyes. “Go ahead,” urged Ms. Goodin. I froze. I closed my eyes,
tried to transport myself to a place of pure rhythm, and felt the stick in
my hand moving, striking the bell on its own. I opened my eyes.
Ms. Goodin nodded with surprise. “Nice, Francesca. Not exact,
but very close.”
I tried, repeatedly, to tap the cadence on the school bus seat
the whole way back home. We were the white kids, the city’s cultural
experiment, heading uptown to our Slumurbia, as Mom called it. Mr.
Sean, the only black person on this bus, shouted for quiet. He was the
bus supervisor. His job was to hold us off the driver in the Seattle snarl
of cars. He was also a Christian. I knew this because he kept on telling
me. Mine was the last stop, and we often ended up talking, just him
and me. “Say, Frankie, you know the story of the fellow who built his
house on sand?”
“Sure, I know it.” I was Episcopalian. I’d read all the Arch books,
those colorful paperbacks with Jesus stories and cartoons.
He leaned over the green vinyl seatback. “You kids aren’t getting
this in school.”
“They can’t teach religion. It’s separation of church and state.” I
think he liked talking to me because I talked back.
“But you kids really need this. A foundation. It’s all right here.”
Laid his big hand on the Book, leatherbound and dogeared. “You
know what they are afraid to teach now? Morals. Kids need to know
right from wrong.”
Anne Elliott
“Okay, but who decides what’s right?”
He looked at me like I misheard him. “You don’t decide. Right is
right. Wrong is wrong.”
“What about mitigating factors?” I didn’t even know what
mitigating meant, but it sounded good. I felt hot. That feeling I always
got when I said something stupid.
He looked ready to laugh. “I suppose you know a lot about
mitigating factors?” I got his meaning: are you aware that you are an
eleven-year-old white girl? Yes, I was aware. Boy was I. “What if a boy
hits a girl, is that right or wrong?”
“Depends on who the boy and the girl are,” I said.
His smile was condescending, but gentle. Teacher mode. “It’s
wrong. It’s wrong to hit a girl.”
“I disagree. What if the girl is bigger? What if she hurt his
feelings?” I had never contradicted an adult so directly, except Mom. I
couldn’t unsay it. The bus stopped at the end of my block. “We’ll take
it up again tomorrow,” I said, putting my backpack on.
“What if she hurt his feelings?” Mr. Sean said, laughing under his
breath.
“Bye, Socrates,” said the driver as he opened the door. I had no
idea what he meant. Something to do with soccer, which was not my
best sport.
“Lareese, stop!” Cherie shouted over the table. He was flicking
paper footballs at her face. We were supposed to be making a model
of the Volta Dam, using sheets of cardboard and a topographical map.
“Stop! I’m not playing.”
“Lareese, field goal,” said Juan Smith across from him. Held his
fingers in an H for goalposts. They did this all darn day. Why did I
have to be assigned to the Blue Cluster?
“Juan, Fat Albert, man, your breath stinks,” Lareese replied. True,
Juan did resemble Fat Albert, only nattier. He was always showing up
in brand new jeans. Probably busted through the waistband on the old
ones. But I’d been sitting across from him for weeks and never noticed
his breath before. “Dragonbreath. I’m telling you. Right, Cherie?” She
ignored Lareese, focused on a curved cut of her cardboard. She was
good at arts and crafts. The only time her mouth stayed shut. “Right,
Frankie? Poop breath.”
I really wished he wouldn’t ask my opinion. Juan retaliated with
the best weapon at his disposal: he took a full-cheeked breath like that
Crab Orchard Review
u 55
Anne Elliott
picture of Dizzy Gillespie on the bulletin board, then blew it all over
the three of us, hot as smoke, powerful, putrid.
Cherie held her nose and sidled away from him. Lareese fell to
the floor gasping, and I giggled into my hand. I couldn’t help it. It
was so logical—someone complains about your breath, then blow it
right back.
But Juan wasn’t trying to be funny. He gave me a cool glare over
the table, like, I’ll deal with you later.
“People. People, listen up.” Mr. Feinberg raised his arms, seemed
to be trying to check his temper. Sixty fifth and sixth graders sprinting
with scissors, pulling hair, standing on chairs. “People. I’m serious.
One. Two. Three. Three and a half.”
Ms. Peterson, his co-teacher, turned off the lights, which usually shut
us up. “Okay, guys, we need to clean up. Don’t forget, your permission
slips for camp Sealth by tomorrow. Lareese, what are you doing?”
He was lying on the floor under our table, under Cherie’s denim
skirt. “I’m looking at Cherie’s grits,” he said, prompting a peal of
laughter through the room, and a kick to the chest from Cherie’s
sandal. If I were her, I would wither. As if it would ever happen. I
owned one skirt, for Easter and Christmas. Mostly I wore my brother’s
hand-me-down jeans.
At lunchtime, Ms. Goodin posted the names of the new African
drummers and dancers on the door of her portable. Kids swarmed
the steps like mosquitoes. I held back. The list wasn’t going anywhere.
Cherie looked at the sheet, then scowled at me as she walked back to
her friends, so I had an inkling what I would see. After everyone else
was gone, I took a look. Ten boys, Lareese Johnson at the top. Two girls
at the bottom, like an afterthought. Me, and some girl Tina Zelenski,
who I didn’t know.
I should have felt elated, but I was scared. I stood on the porch of
the classroom, not ready to go back to my cluster, the Volta Dam and
Juan’s fire breath and Cherie armed with blue-handled scissors. The
door opened, startling me, and Ms. Goodin stepped out.
“Francesca! Congratulations!” She touched my shoulder like she
meant it.
“Look, Ms. Goodin, maybe it’s not such a good idea. I live up at
Northgate. I’ll miss my bus if I stay for practice.”
“Nonsense. You got in fair and square. You can take the activity
bus home. I’ll make the arrangements.” Then I got it. I was the token,
Anne Elliott
filling the city’s quota. Like the one white kid in each of the clusters
back in our classroom. It was so obvious.
I packed for Camp Sealth like it was really about camping:
hiking boots and a down mummy bag, strapped to my brother’s
aluminum backpack frame. When I got to school I felt like a fool.
Everyone else had normal suitcases and duffel bags. Except Lareese,
who showed up with a black, heavy-duty garbage bag filled with
clothes and sleeping bag and a pillow. Camping with a pillow—my
brother would laugh. Juan had a new designer suitcase with wheels
and a telescoping handle. “It’s just going to get dirty,” Cherie said.
On the bus, the kids split up, like we always did when adults didn’t
engineer it—straight down the racial divide, boys with boys, girls with
girls. No one would sit with me but one of the parents, a white mom,
who looked terrified. I decided she was on her own. Let her freak
out while boys bragged and punched and Cherie complained about
somebody pinching her boob. I looked out the window. Misty rain
hung in gray blobs around the Cascade Mountains. Hemlock trees
bowed their heads in the thick air, embarrassed for being so tall.
They put me in Snoqualmie, same cabin as Cherie, with eight
other girls and Ms. Petersen. The others nested immediately, claiming
bunks and rolling out Snoopy sleeping bags, as if we weren’t just
staying one night. Ms. Petersen was outside talking to the moms.
Cherie stood in the center of the floor with the new girl, the one
known as Light-Skinned Donelle. I didn’t know Donelle well. She was
in the Red Cluster. They were practicing cheers:
Hey Cherie!
Huh?
Hey Cherie!
Huh?
Introduce yourself.
Say what?
Introduce yourself.
Right on.
My mama’s name is Mary and my daddy’s name is Darius
And my name is Cherie cos I’m a sexy Saggitarius
I watched from my invisible upper bunk. I’d never noticed this
before, but Cherie was right. She really was sexy—confidently sticking
Crab Orchard Review
u 57
Anne Elliott
out her boobs, which were bigger than anybody else’s, as if the rest of
us had any at all—shaking her round booty in time with her rhyme.
Silly, but not totally. Working it. She had power.
“Fuck you looking at?” Cherie said, and it took a moment to
realize she was talking to me.
“That was good, Cherie,” I said, feeling a blush.
“What are you, gay?”
“No,” I said.
“You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?”
“No. I am not hot shit.”
Donelle laughed behind her hand. Cherie walked over to my
bunk, parked her face inches from mine, eyes fiery. She was tall.
“You better watch out, Frankie,” she hissed. Her braids shone in
the dim light of the cabin. Her breath reeked of sour apple bubblegum.
“Acting like you’re such hot shit. I heard the guys talking. Tonight, when
Ms. Petersen is asleep, they gonna sneak in here and try to hump you.”
Donelle stopped laughing, looked straight at me too, confirming
Cherie’s warning.
“Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep,” Cherie singsonged.
In the Longhouse later, I sat alone over my dinner and looked
around, at the boys Cherie warned about. Lareese: skinny as a rubber
band, strutting around his table. Juan: massive; his weight would crush
anyone. Juan looked right at me, two tables away, hatred and bile near the
surface. I felt my neck going hot. Cherie was flirting with Derrick, a large
boy who only came to school half the time. She chewed her gum and
stuck out her chest. He leered. He looked older than everyone, muscular
and unstoppable, like this wasn’t his first try at sixth grade. I felt the tears
come, unstoppable too, as I lifted macaroni and cheese to my mouth. I
wanted to go home. I had never wanted it more, to be with Mom and
my brother in our dirty kitchen, eating tofu or bran or whatever horrid
health food she put in front of me, listening to public radio.
I felt a hand on my shoulder—Ms. Petersen. “Frankie, you okay?”
I tried to pull it together, but it was hopeless. I couldn’t breathe. Snot
collected in my stomach. I felt sick. “Frankie, come with me.” She led
me outside, under a hemlock tree, in the misty air. “Take a breath.
Frankie, breathe. What happened?”
I could barely speak. “Cherie said…” choking now, “the boys are
going to come into our cabin tonight and try to…” a complete mess,
“try to hump me.”
Ms. Petersen didn’t laugh. “Cherie said that?” She gave me a wrinkled
Anne Elliott
tissue from her pocket. It was inadequate, snot streaming like a faucet,
but I was grateful. She lifted my face to look into her blue eyes. “Cherie’s
bark is worse than her bite. Don’t you think maybe she was trying to
scare you?”
“Well, it worked.”
“Frankie, think. I’ll be in the cabin. I’ll lock the door. Nobody will
get in.”
The rational part of me knew she was right. That night, I cried
quietly in my mummy bag, in the musty Northwest dark of the cabin,
wishing I had brought my pillow. And a snore, quiet at first, then a
steady rhythm, like a slow drum cadence, filled the room. Ms. Petersen,
or Donelle, or even Cherie—I did not care. It was the lullaby I needed.
On our hike the next day, Mr. Feinberg pointed out the peeling
brown bark of a tree. “The Pacific Madrona. Like our school!” Kids
groaned at the obvious, those who were listening. “It’s a real native
treasure of our region. And the wood is excellent for furniture making.
It makes a gorgeous veneer.” He seemed focused on the pale wood, but
I found the bark more interesting, and held back for a moment to peel
some of its curly brown roughness off for a souvenir. Crisp, papery,
fragile.
“I think they’re just dirty,” said the same white mom who had sat
next to me on the bus. She was confiding in me, certain I would agree.
“That bark falls all over the place. I’ve got one in my front yard and I’m
dying to get rid of it. My tree-hugging neighbors are trying to stop me.”
I touched the soft pale wood revealed by the bark I had just lifted.
“I like it,” I said, hoping to make my message clear: we have less in
common than you think. She looked at me like a puzzle, then turned
and walked up the trail.
Lareese hung behind too. We were alone. His face turned serious.
“Hey, Frankie, why were you crying last night?” His pants were grassstained and his hair was uncombed. “You okay?” Here, one of the boys
Cherie warned about. I wasn’t scared.
I picked apart the piece of bark in my hands. I couldn’t tell him
the truth. “I had low blood sugar,” I said.
“It hurt?”
“No, it just makes me emotional is all.” The group was around the
bend, invisible now. “Maybe we should catch up,” I said.
He nodded and walked up the hill. I tagged behind, trying to
match his stride.
Crab Orchard Review
u 59
Anne Elliott
At the end of the trail was a small alpine lake. The adults
distributed sack lunches. Cherie and Donelle took off their shoes and
socks and wetted their feet in the icy water, squealing and splashing
each other. I sat on a log and opened my lunch: PBJ sandwich, a sugar
cookie, and an apple. I took a bite of the apple. It was mealy and soft. I
must have been making a face because Juan, standing a few feet away,
pointed at me and laughed. “Whatsa matter, don’t like your apple? Are
you gonna cry?”
“Fat Albert, shut up. She got low blood sugar,” Lareese said, using
his royal pull. I wondered why I deserved it. Juan sneered and walked
away. Lareese waded in the water after the girls. I sat alone on the log
and took a bite of the sandwich, grape jelly and pillowy white bread.
Back at school, we had our first drumming rehearsal. The
drums were homemade, animal skin stretched over wine barrels. Four
big ones, to stand behind. Three medium-sized, with stools behind
them. And four tiny ones for kneeling on the floor. I got one of the
little ones, next to Tina Zelenski, a petite white girl with dark hair and
glasses. I recognized something in her. She wore tomboyish clothes
and had curly short hair, unstyled, without shame or apology. She
listened with a sincere expression, chewing her fingernail, while Ms.
Goodin taught us the parts.
Lareese got the starring role, the cowbell, the same cadence we
played in the audition, the one I’d been attempting on the bus seat and
my shoe and the side of my bed at night. “This is a West African beat,”
Ms. Goodin said, as if any of us knew the geography. The cowbell came
first, then the big drums, filling in the lower end with a syncopated
bassline, then us, the little drums, a simple, high filler. Then the
medium drums threw a staggered melody on top of everything. She
showed us how to use the edge of the skin to create a higher pitch, the
middle to bring out the deep end. The cowbell called us to ceremony
and there was a moment, after the final drum melody came in, and all
of us were in sync, following Lareese’s lead, when Ms. Goodin closed
her eyes and listened, transporting herself to a place where drums
weren’t wine barrels, and drummers weren’t students, but a true tribe,
her tribe, and she was the reigning princess.
On the activity bus, which was just a van, Tina and I were high on
rhythm, practicing all the parts together on the seat, probably making
the driver crazy. Tina gave a counterpoint to my constant tapping,
and now I didn’t have to hide it anymore. She lived on Queen Anne
Anne Elliott
Hill, a big detour, but I didn’t care. She studied jazz piano. Her father
was a cellist with the Seattle Symphony. Her mother taught voice. We
decided that Ms. Goodin was our favorite teacher.
Before we reached her stop, I asked her what I had been afraid to
ask myself: “Why did you try out?”
“You mean because we’re white? Is that weird? I don’t know why.”
“Me neither. But now I’m glad I did.”
“Me too.” Freckled skin and a pixyish smile. She got off the bus
in front of a big brown house with frenzied shrubbery and a peeling,
messy Madrona in the front yard. I sighed into the seat, warm with
belonging and purpose, and relaxed into the long ride to Slumurbia.
Tina and I gravitated to each other on the playground at
lunch. We tapped beats on the domed jungle gym, our own private
tribal hut. She wore a macramé necklace and a plastic mood ring from
a gumball machine. The ring clicked against the bar. “Hey,” I said.
“That sounds cool.”
“Here, you can try.” I put it on the tip of my thumb, then tapped
the now-easy cowbell cadence on the bar. She put her ear against the
metal, a few feet away. “Hey Frankie, try this.” She tapped on the bar
near her with a pebble.
I put my ear to the cool steel. Tina’s tapping resonated throughout
the hut, straight into my head. I saw Juan Smith approaching our
private domain, but we were safe inside, protected by the web of the
bars. He was too fat to get in. “Don’t look now,” I whispered. She
giggled, climbed the underside of the bars, then dangled upside-down
from her knees. I joined her, hung by my hands, whispered, “The kids
in my class call him Fat Albert.”
She laughed, freckled face flushed from inversion. “I would hate
to be his chair.”
Juan surprised me by climbing onto the top of the dome and
perching just above us. “Frankie, I see you have a mood ring,” he said,
in a friendly tone. “What color is it?”
“Maybe that’s none of your business.” I didn’t move away.
His expression turned. “It looks yellow to me. I think that means
you’re gonna cry.” He peered close to the ring, stealing its power.
Tina flipped right side up again, then stood defiantly on the sand
below, looking up at Juan. “She’s not going to cry.” Her saying it made
it true. I held my ground, hanging from the bar.
Juan looked down at me like a disease. “Hey Frankie, I hear
Crab Orchard Review
u 61
Anne Elliott
your mama got three teeth, and they crooked.” Then he did what I
never anticipated, he lowered his fleshy bulk onto my hands and sat.
Trapping me. The mood ring cut into my thumb and I was losing
circulation. Again, Juan used the best weapon at his disposal, the very
thing for which he was ridiculed. “Yeah, your mama got three titties,
and they point in different directions.”
“You don’t know a thing about my mom.”
He leaned down, looked hard in my eyes. “Oh, but I do. Your
mama’s nothing but a poor white trash hippy.” Maybe he could feel
my hammering heartbeat through his pants. He knew he was not far
from the truth.
“Juan, please get up.” My fingers were really hurting. I might have
to go to the nurse.
Tina looked scared. Juan wasn’t playing. “I’ll go get the supervisor,”
she said, squeezed through the bars, and ran off. She was only trying
to help. But now I was alone with Juan.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Juan said quietly, so only I could hear him.
“I’m gonna come to your house, and I’m gonna kill you and your white
trash mama and your drunk-ass daddy.”
“I don’t have a daddy.” I could feel the tears coming now. His goal
was nearly accomplished.
“Oh, poor baby, whatsa matter? You gonna cry?”
“You’re hurting my hands.”
“What?” he said with an innocent air, then he started whistling.
I twisted my body to look for Tina. Instead, Lareese strutted to the
jungle gym, followed by Cherie and Donelle.
“Look!” said Cherie, with a whoop. “Look at Fat Boy sitting on her
hands!”
“Hey Juan,” Lareese said, gripping the bars. His hair was perfectly
combed, his clothes neat, nothing like that day in the woods. “I hear
when your mama was pregnant with you, she got so big they had to
put her in a elephant hospital.” He laughed at his own joke, looking
over his shoulder for the girls’ reaction. Then back at Juan, who was
blushing now. “I saw a elephant running after her one day, going
mama, mama, mama. When she go to Woodland Park Zoo, they got
to take out the tranquilizer guns.”
“Shut up, Lareese. Your mama so skinny, she swallow a grape and
it look like she pregnant.” Juan moved to face his opponent, releasing
my hands, and I dropped to the ground. “She so black, she close her
eyes at night, she disappears.”
Anne Elliott
Lareese was unruffled. “Your mama so fat, she shop at the Ringling
Brother’s tent store.” He looked over his shoulder. Not at Cherie, I
noticed, but at Donelle. Pretty Donelle, pale freckled nose and Afropuff pigtails. Cherie noticed too, held her bosom out defiantly, but the
sexy Sagittarius was reduced to a shadow. One thing was certain: this
wasn’t about me at all.
“Here come the fuzz,” Lareese said. Tina approached, with Mr.
Sean, my favorite bus supervisor, in tow. Juan hopped off the jungle
gym, ran off, and the others dispersed.
Mr. Sean leaned through the bars and looked at me like an old
friend. “Frankie!” He smiled big, crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” The mood ring was still on my finger. The pearly stone
had turned black.
“We’ve missed you on the bus,” Mr. Sean said. “Well, I’ve missed
you. I miss our little talks.” Mr. Sean and his good old foundation. Is it
wrong for a boy to hit a girl? Too bad he didn’t see Juan threaten to kill
my family.
“Yeah, I’m on the activity bus now. I’m in the drum ensemble.
Tina too.”
“Girls playing African drums…” he mused. Not white girls, just
girls. “Well, I’ll have to come see your performance.”
Home, washing the dinner dishes, I told Mom what Juan did.
“He said he was going to kill us. He sat on my hands.”
“Do you really think he can kill us?” She wasn’t worried. Hands
deep in the suds, like any other night. She blew a long gray hair out of
her face.
I took a plate from her to dry. “Maybe he has a switchblade.”
“He doesn’t have a switchblade.”
“It’s starting!” my brother called from the living room. Roots was
on TV. All the kids had been talking about it. Big enough that Mom
would actually let us watch our dusty black and white set.
“Juan’s huge, Mom. Really huge.”
Mom looked at me, getting a clue. “Huge as in fat?”
“Yeah, he’s fat. And strong. And his breath is a lethal weapon.”
Still, she registered no alarm. “Did it ever occur to you that he
might have a harder time at school than you? Did you ever think he
might like you? Maybe he has a crush on you? Maybe you hurt his
feelings?”
Crab Orchard Review
u 63
Anne Elliott
“It’s starting!” my brother shouted.
“Go watch,” Mom said. “I’ll finish up.”
In the gray glow of the TV, I watched the whip against Kunta
Kinte’s back. They were making him change his name. Everything was
at stake: his pride, his history, his family. He was defiant, endured the
blows until he couldn’t. I cried into the couch pillow.
“My name is Toby,” he finally said, giving in to the pain.
Weeks later, I thought back to this moment, of lying on the
couch with my brother, heartbroken at the idea of a man giving up
his name.
It was the night of Open House, the African Drum and Dance
concert, with parents and teachers and even Mr. Sean the supervisor,
beaming at Tina and me from his front row seat. We took the stage
with our drums. We hadn’t cornrowed our hair, Tina and I, and in
our new yellow dashikis we looked stark white and preposterous. But
we rolled with it, growing used to our oddity. The boy drummers had
their shirts off, even Lareese, who had initially refused. Why not? Be
proud of your body, Ms. Goodin had said. I am proud, Lareese had
replied. It’s too beautiful to be shown.
He wasn’t wrong. It was beautiful, Lareese’s back and all the others,
gleaming dark and scarless in the stagelight of the Madrona Middle
School auditorium. I thought of Kunta Kinte, having the African
beat out of him, his back crisscrossed with evidence. And I thought
things must be better now, with people like Ms. Goodin working to
reclaim the lost thing, the precious, ancient treasure. Lareese played
the cowbell cadence and the rest of us, full of nervous energy, beat our
drums furiously, exorcising something, calling back the names of lost
mothers and fathers. In the audience, proud parents smiled, black and
brown hands snapping photographs, heads bobbing in time with our
infectious beat. It felt right, in Mr. Sean’s sense of the word.
But then the dancers entered, from the wings, and I noticed
Lareese’s eyes zero in on Donelle, pretty, Light-Skinned Donelle, her
naked back glowing in a bright printed halter top, her head sleek with
newly braided hair. She was lithe and sexualized, and all the boys in
the ensemble were in love with her. And a heavy reality became clearer
to me: that maybe some ancient treasures are harder to claim. Donelle
arched her back with an easy confidence I’d never quite seen in her pal
Cherie: a smug, quiet certainty that she was the true prize, the valued
pale veneer.
Anne Elliott
Cherie Watson was not in attendance, she who I thought was
queen. I dreaded her scowling face in the audience, then realized,
with a hard blue feeling, that I missed her, that without her scowl the
room was not complete. Years later, after the schools quit busing and
Slumurbia got gentrified and Kunta Kinte became somebody’s punch
line, that blue feeling sticks with me. That, and the cadence. I’ll never
lose the cadence—hard to learn, hard to unlearn—the hollow ring of
my hand slapping skin.
Crab Orchard Review
u 65
True North
Arguably, this all began with a compass. The day before I moved
to Alaska my little sister gave me a mariner’s compass, the kind with
a mirror for signaling and a ruler’s edge. It has a bright orange flip top
and letters in Russian, which isn’t a problem because a compass only
needs to have four letters and everyone knows what they stand for. The
word for “North” in Russian apparently starts with a “C.”
Barrow, Alaska, is in the top ten most northern communities in
the world and the northernmost place in the United States. In Inupiaq,
the native language of the peoples of Barrow, the frozen ocean
stretching uninterrupted by land, clear to the North Pole, is referred to
as the “front” of the world. Everything else is the “back” or “behind.”
About every few years or so, Search and Rescue has to go bring back
some idiot who wanders out onto the ice and gets trapped on the moving
ice out in the ocean. Nobody from here would dream of walking out on
the ice in winter alone unless they intended on killing themselves. That
said: I do not intend to pretend I understand what it means to live here
or be Inupiaq. I am a twenty-seven-year-old Midwestern, Caucasian
male, floating on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
It must be understood that this is not just a suicide.
The eventual results will be the same, but I find my death more of
an unfortunate side-effect; you don’t come to the end of the world in
order to better understand yourself—you come to step off the edge. All
across history you have explorers heading out blindly in one direction
or another, driven by riches, isolation, or general madness. A search
for direction and something which cannot be satisfied, even if you
circled the world twice over.
The magnetic North Pole itself is now moving at a rate of over
40 miles per year, toward Barrow, at record speeds. It is possible that
sometime in the future my body might cross points with the magnetic
pole on its migration toward Russia, but with all the sea ice, I will
never reach the geographic North Pole.
It is winter in the Arctic and the sun has gone down for the last
time until February, so I have already accepted that I will never see it
again. The moon is now my constant. It circles overhead at all hours,
pale and bulging as the hollowed-out joint of a knee, groaning in its
rotation through the socket of sky. It is a constant concern that the ice
overhead might come crashing down, but I did not come to survive. If
nothing else, I will eventually starve to death or die of thirst. Heating
my water with a fire is likely to melt the ground I’m floating on, and
to eat snow will result in certain death from hypothermia. The reality
is once the white gas tank runs out in my camping stove, I will die.
Unless, of course, something else kills me first.
I am as well outfitted for this kind of exposure as I could manage.
My friend Nanauq offered me the seal-skin parka his aapa used to
use, but I knew the emotional weight of it so I refused. Instead I opted
for Antarctic gear off eBay: parka, bunny boots, long underwear, and
an Antarctic-expedition grade tent. I also have seal-skin mittens with
wool liners, reconstituted military rations, and a high-grade camping
stove.
Nanauq saw me off himself on his snow machine. “I’ll give it one
more year,” he said as we each took a last pull of whiskey. “Then I’ll see
you on the other side.”
“The other side of what?” I asked.
“Of the world, you dumb tanik,” he said. “Heaven or some shit.”
I laughed and he laughed with me.
When he drove off into the darkness, I wondered how he knew
which way was home.
I first met Nanauq at the library when I got into town about
three weeks ago. We have what some people might call a suicide pact.
For the meantime, he works at the library as a security guard, telling
middle school kids not to chew tobacco and kicking them out when
they spit it all over the carpets and bathrooms.
When I first came up to Barrow, I planned to camp outside a few
days in my brand new Antarctic-weather-tested tent. I carted it in my
backpack like a great, slow-moving turtle. On my way out to find a
spot to set up camp I stopped at the library as they were closing, for a
few minutes of warmth.
Nanauq was coming off his shift and I asked him if he knew of
anywhere good to set up for the night.
“Find a real place to sleep,” he said. “Bears are hungry.”
Crab Orchard Review
u 67
“I know how to take care of myself,” I told him.
“You know polar bears will hunt humans? They’re not like other
bears. You can’t play dead with them or look scary.”
I had heard something similar, but not given it much thought. I
hadn’t even been out to Point Barrow yet. Getting torn to pieces by a
polar bear before I even got on the ice was not what I had in mind.
Nanauq laughed as he watched me think. He was a little drunk; at
the time I hadn’t known the water bottle he carried contained vodka.
“Makes you think,” he said. “I’ve got a snow machine. I can take
you to a hotel while you think about it.”
He drove me across the lagoon to the King Eider, but I had blown
through most of my cash on gear and it was too expensive. I ended up
crashing with Nanauq on the floor of his wood-paneled closet-sized
apartment, where I remained until a few days ago.
It is Nanauq’s plan to follow me out onto the ice a year from
now, in order to give himself one more year to try to make it work. He
will try to be better with his family. He will go to gatherings where he
does not feel accepted and try to get to know his nieces. His refusal to
attend church alienated him from the family early on, and it got worse
when he developed a drinking problem. The only person with whom
Nanauq feels a kinship is long dead.
When Nanauq was twelve or so, his aapa committed suicide by
taking off his coat and walking out onto the tundra. Nanauq calls that
going “true north.” As far as I can tell, he’s the only one who calls it
that. The phrase has his personal ring to it—a touch of bitterness and
black humor. Nanauq’s grandfather is not the only person to have killed
himself that way. There are a couple “true north” suicides in Arctic
regions every few years.
Though Nanauq’s extended family is Inupiaq and has lived on the
North Slope for ages, Nanauq himself was born in Fresno, California.
His mother moved him back up here to be with her family when her
father went “true north” in ’99.
“Tourists like to ask me all sorts of shit when they find out I’m
Native,” Nanauq told me the night we met.
“Don’t you know about it though?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve been
here since you were twelve. And it is your culture.”
“Sure it’s my culture,” Nanauq said. “I mean, my uncles go whaling.
My cousins know the language and everyone and their auntie is in a
dance troupe. I can’t pronounce my own name and I grew up just as
much here as California, but it’s still my culture. I feel it in everything—
everything but me.”
Nanauq’s name is the same as his aapa, the man who went “true
north” years ago, leaving his seal skin parka behind.
“You have it,” Nanauq told me later when he was helping me revise
my plan. “You’re trying to get on an ice floe. You know how crazy that
is? You’ll freeze to death if the berg doesn’t roll you over.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve got my own coat. If you still want to follow me
in a year, you wear it yourself.”
“What use do I have with my aapa’s jacket?” he asked. “I’ll run my
snow machine out on bad ice and drown the drunk half-breed way.”
“I’m not taking your grandpa’s coat,” I said.
“Ah,” he said and waved his hand. “You wouldn’t know what to do
with it anyway.”
When you stand on the ice, the darkness has its own sound. A
silent waiting, like sitting next to someone who is thinking.
A dim blue light trickles across the southern horizon at around
noon in place of a sunrise and is gone an hour later. This is how I count
the days. There have been four so far.
My iceberg is shaped like a closed fist with the thumb stuck to the
side. The part right above the thumb is vaguely climbable, bouldering with
blue ice that flattens out before heightening into a sheer cliff. I call that
landing below the cliff my lookout post. When I see the light from a
distant “sunrise” coming, I climb up and watch the blue-pink line widen.
I try to eat right afterwards down at my camp at the base of the
fist, in order to give some semblance of schedule. My meals consist of
reconstituted military rations on a white gas camping stove. I have more
of them than I am likely to ever need. When I get too cold, I boil water, but
the more I drink the more I urinate and that can cause problems. The heat
from my urine melts the ice and the last time I peed I heard the ice crack.
I’m afraid to pee off the side of the berg—its edges are thin and I’m worried
it might roll over on me. I try never to pee in the same place twice and go
in different spots so as to not weaken its structural integrity.
It is night right now, or at least I think it would be. The world around
me shifts and I can no longer tell if it’s the ocean or just the liquid in my
eyes. My limbs ache and cramp often from the cold and the skin on my
cheeks has hardened from frostbite. It’s nothing serious yet.
Despite the darkness, I find it very hard to sleep. When I do sleep,
it seems like it is only fifteen-minute intervals. I wake up feeling I
Crab Orchard Review
u 69
have dreamed something I cannot remember, an old memory in some
child-like sense of watery fear.
When we were young, my sister and I used to make up dreams to
tell each other. We wove the storylines together with images from real
dreams or TV shows until they became so abstract the only constant was
our place in them. I’ve tried to play the game with various girlfriends,
but they never seem to get the point. Out here, I’ve been making dreams
up for myself. It’s disturbing to always be in such darkness and never
dream. Like standing in front of a boarded-up house you used to live in,
unable to remember what’s inside.
Tonight’s dream:
Nanauq and I are out in his aapa’s old whaling boat. It is
summertime in the Arctic with 24-7 sunlight, much like there
is 24-7 darkness now. In the dream, Nanauq is the whaling
captain and I am the harpooner. His aapa steers the boat
by sitting in back, the position that requires the most skill. I
cannot get a clear look at either of their faces. We are heading
north, away from the point. In front of me I see the gray mound
of a bowhead whale, rising up out of the water. I look back at
Nanauq, but the only person I see in the boat is my sister. She
holds the Russian compass out in front of her.
The texture of the floor beneath my feet seems to change
and I look down to see a carpet of red. The boat has turned
into a skeleton of ribs and soft spongy flesh. We are trapped
together in the bowhead’s belly, like Jonah in the Bible or
Disney’s Pinocchio.
My sister says nothing. She looks angry.
I wake up.
“Sometimes I feel this pressure in my chest, all shook up like
a bottle of soda,” Nanauq said to me once in his closet-sized apartment.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You mean you need get out of
Barrow?”
“No. I keep having this dream that I’m trapped in a well. In the ring
of sky above I can see the sun and clouds, but I know I’ll never reach
them. I get this feeling of hopelessness, so deep and dark it’s like I’ll
never get out. The first time I dreamed it, I thought the well was Barrow,
but now I’ve begun to think that the well is me. I have nothing left to
distract me from myself. This place, Barrow, is spiritual. The tundra in
the summer covered in cotton and the water trapped in between the ice
floes, so still the reflection of the sky looks like glass. If you tilt your head
it feels like falling—very beautiful. But while everyone else is here to live,
I feel like I am here to die. I look at the frozen ocean, swelling out in an
endless beach and it’s maddening. The end of the world should not look
like a place you can walk to.”
I put my hand on his shoulder.
“I need to do this by myself,” I told him. “I don’t want to be the
reason you die.”
He laughed at me. “You self-absorbed idiot,” Nanauq said. “You
couldn’t be the reason if you tried.”
A green river of light shifts through the stars overhead,
pointing northwards like a road. My iceberg drifts soundlessly below
it. Earlier it creaked in the wind, but for now everything is silent. I
wonder how many people have felt this kind of silence.
The discovery of the North Pole itself is still debated. Two men:
Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, once classmates, both claimed to
have been there first. There is no land at the pole, only moving ice,
so it is impossible to know for sure. Historians think it might have
been Cook, who died after being released from years of prison for
mail fraud, thinking his discovery had been stolen by Peary. Cook
had lived a whole year on the ice, struggling to endure with only two
companions, Native Greenlanders, who were the reason he survived.
I wonder if, in his later years, he wished he hadn’t.
Sometimes I imagine the iceberg cracking and rolling over,
throwing me into the sea. I go down into black, crushed for a moment
under the tremendous pressure of the ice and waves, wracked with
shock from the cold and then—nothing.
I try to stay away from the edges, but there is something about
that vast blackness that draws me. It melds with the sky into a deep,
infinite sea of dark—the underside of the world, devoid of stars.
My right ear is no longer mine. I touched it without my gloves in
the tent earlier and thought something must be stuck to it, but then
realized that “thing” was my ear. I tried to rub the blood back into it
but my fingertips lost feeling in them before I could finish.
That ear will be the first part of me to die.
The blue light from the sun, far in the south, scatters across
the infinite horizon. It is noon at last. I imagine my sister and Nanauq
Crab Orchard Review
u 71
in their separate spaces, going about their days. Nanauq will have
just gotten up and be getting ready for work. His shift starts at one.
He showers, cooks eggs in a tiny cast iron skillet and eats them with
ketchup. He does not season his food.
“Does your mother cook with only ketchup too?” I asked him once.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “My mother puts spices on everything.
She loves pepper and thyme. She also doesn’t drink, goes to church,
and loves classic rock and soap operas on the BBC channel.”
Sitting out on the ice beside my camping stove, I try to picture
Nanauq’s mother. I imagine her as a light-skinned Native woman with
long black hair, sitting on a sofa in an Aerosmith T-shirt and slipper
socks in front of a fifty-six-inch flat screen, watching Downton Abbey.
Though it may be noon for Nanauq and his mother in Barrow,
my sister is three hours ahead of Alaska Time. For her it is three and
soon she will be getting off work. She works at a preschool and, by
now, her bright-colored clothes most likely contain residue of snot,
applesauce, vomit, and pureed bananas. She may be angry with me for
not returning her emails. Or she may not have noticed.
I don’t blame her. My choice to her would seem like gruesome
chance. An easy out. All my problems solved by a magnet. Mechanical.
An arrow pointing the way.
Soon the trickle of light in the southeast will be gone. The snow in
my pot has melted and roars with bubbles. I pour it into a cup and wait
for it to cool. The hot water pouring into my stomach is warm.
The brightest stars are behind me now.
Dream:
I am Christopher Columbus sailing west with the Niña,
the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I have come to the End of the
World. Turns out it was flat after all.
Around me the oceans of the world pour over the edge in an
endless waterfall. The stars rain in a meteoric curtain. Beyond
the edge there is only blackness. I am caught in a maelstrom
along the water’s surface and the wooden ship twists beneath
me, groaning in defeat.
I watch the two other ships, the Niña and the Pinta, tip
over the edge of the world and plummet into infinity. Only the
Santa Maria remains.
The wheel at the stern is in my hands and I can feel
splinters from it embedded deep and burning in my palms.
I try to turn the ship around but it will not turn, instead it
lurches sideways.
I am now approaching the waterfall horizontally, like a
corpse.
Blackness lies below.
It is storming.
I thought earlier today around noon I might have seen a polar
bear in the distance and began to panic, but a powerful wind overtook
the iceberg. I had just begun cooking my meal and spotted the bear
out in the water, paddling like a dog. It looked oddly harmless there,
even silly, as it slid through the waves.
The wind came up so strong that it rocked the iceberg and it tilted
forward as if it might roll over. I scrambled on my hands and knees
toward the lookout point, but was too late to save my stove. It fell into
the water with a pitiful plop.
As I watched it go, the wind picked up again, pushing me and my
iceberg away from the bear.
Now I am alone again, trapped in my tent by the storm.
The wind is a wild animal that whips the canvas of the tent back
and forth in endless attack.
The Russian compass says the wind comes from the east, pushing
me toward Russia. I try to picture islands I have seen on maps: Wrangel,
the Medvezhyi Islands, and Severnaya Zemlya. I have read their
names on maps but don’t know the translations. Ragged shorelines
trace through my mind in images of rock and waves.
A low moan comes from the ice below. The storm has wakened
a terrible animal at the iceberg’s heart. I imagine frozen mammoths
beneath the ice. Sea Serpents. Dragons.
Spray from the ocean pelts the tent.
I could just as easily fall to my death on the way up to the lookout
point as reach safety from the waves. It is too risky. I cannot force
myself to move.
The ice creature beneath me groans again. My iceberg is not a
dragon, but a house, sliding on its foundation.
I think of all the spots I have urinated in the last few days where
the ice might have weakened.
I survive the storm, but without my stove I have no safe way to
heat water. I tried to eat a frozen packet of military rations earlier today
Crab Orchard Review
u 73
and nearly cracked my teeth. I managed to chip off a piece and have been
keeping it close to my body in hopes that it will melt. I would put it in my
mouth, but I know that is the path to hypothermia. Without fresh water,
I have maybe a day or two left. My best chance is to put snow in my water
bottle and keep it close to my body, but who knows if it will thaw quickly
enough to drink and make it worth the drop in body temperature.
For the moment, I am still relatively comfortable. I can’t feel my
face or feet, but there is no pain. I am dying in pieces. Both ears and
my nose have long lost their sense of feeling. My head keeps getting
lighter and lighter, as if I am turning into air.
I take my sleeping bag and bring it to the lookout point. My feet
move like two giant clubs. It takes a long time to reach the landing.
The night sky spreads out overhead and a yellow moon is waning.
I remember last year when my sister got married and I sneaked
away from the reception to lie in the wet grass. The moon looked the
same. Laughter rolled out from the wedding tent somewhere to my left
and I allowed myself to feel lonely. I had been living in south-central
Alaska for three years and everything had changed in spite of me.
My sister had found and married a douchebag, whose greatest
accomplishment as far as I could tell was possessing overachiever
sperm that got her pregnant. I tried to talk to her at the reception,
but she didn’t seem very interested in anything I had to say. I told her
I felt lost. Far away from everyone and everything, and I didn’t know
what I was doing anymore.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of direction you take,” she told me,
looking somewhere over my right shoulder as if there were something
more deserving of her attention. “Even the wrong direction can be
better than none at all.”
The night before I left for Alaska, she and I sat up after our
parents went to bed, talking to fill the space between our separation. I
promised her I would email her every week and she gave me a compass
she found in a thrift store.
“What’s up with these letters on it?” I asked her. “What does ‘C’
mean? What direction is ‘C’?”
“The ‘C’ stands for North. It’s Russian. I tried to find you an
English one, but they didn’t have any.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I kind of like it this way.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I thought you might.”
I could sense her slipping away, the two of us floating apart on the
infinite tide of adulthood. Gone were the days when we would meet in
the window by the stairway and spend our nights looking out at the starscape over darkened fields, creating dreams for each other. All that seemed
to remain were two long and separate roads, winding through the world
while we watched each other getting further and further apart.
Dream:
It is next December. Nanauq does not follow me onto the
ice. He drinks less and spends more time with his nieces. He
takes his snow machine and rifle and goes hunting out on the
tundra with his uncles. He wears his aapa’s parka. For the most
part, he is happy. My sister writes him a letter asking about me.
A strange panic wakes me.
I am alone on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
The moon circles overhead.
I am very tired now. Too tired to climb down from the lookout
point.
On the horizon, a tiny glint of blue glows as somewhere far south
from here the sun peaks out over the rest of the world.
My body is tired, my lungs are tired, my heart is tired, and my
mind doesn’t seem to be working. None of it matters anymore because
I am not really human. I am following a magnet, and that is not the
action of a person, but of a machine.
I repeat the thought to myself.
Somewhere Nanauq is getting ready for work. Somewhere there
is ketchup on his eggs. Somewhere his mother already ate her eggs
this morning, seasoned with pepper and thyme. Somewhere my sister
is taking care of children who are not her own, feeding them a snack
of applesauce and bananas. Somewhere Peary’s American flag and
Cook’s note in a brass tube are buried in ice near the North Pole or
at the bottom of the sea. But I am here on the Arctic Ocean, floating
on an iceberg. And I am no longer human, but a lit match—a sheen
of streaming light, splitting the world open by the ceiling. Until the
sun and moon are caught in their eclipses above a bone-white earth,
stricken with leprosy and frozen flesh. And, as a lit match, I will burn
that earth, spearing it with my hands until the world flips over and our
ocean is our sky, filled with flickering embers of ice and luminescent
algae; the northern lights drowned in a hail of St. Elmo’s fire.
Until all light is gone and the yellow moon swims below in sunken
depths of sky, reflection circling overhead.
Crab Orchard Review
u 75
Esteban Ismael
Bay Park
in the rain smeared edge
of this skyline’s mauve throb
calm glass baywater rolling
in a lift of fog sheets
like steam in a mouth
that can’t unroll the tongue in
a cold dive thru cups of these
backwater Bay nights that go
with no end ever in sight
until we’re here at 6am under
marine layer thick as gray matter
of a brain, barely split
by a weak curvature of light still
too distant to matter as winter loosens
grip to spring & all this wet takes
to new air. as we pass a menthol
between the group of us, in this haze
of afterthought & vodka,
we live in the mist of this
moment—cold bench on bare skin still
lukewarm on Four Lok’s & adrenaline,
dropped thizzles. my skin
stretched bag paper around a pulse
of lit propane lamps & last night’s blue
strobe, my hands over this damp
concrete table to you as I watch
your eyes shift whole
constellations, the pale blur
of night’s motion: a slow gleam
on dark canvas. as I stammer
some Nerudian nonsense (lost
somewhere in the storm
Esteban Ismael
clouds of your hair), you
grip me by the neck & pull
me out this crowd of friends, from
crowds of thoughts like dark knots
on a noose. I could do this
for the rest of my life, splitting
tablets in half & scrawling psalms
on a half-pill watching you
swallow yours whole. even
the universe trembles
under your undulant bob
of throat.
Crab Orchard Review
u 77
Christine Kitano
Lucky Come Hawai‘i
Why settle for 35 cents a day
Stripping cane
When I can sleep with a Chinaman
And make a dollar?
—Translation of a Japanese field song,
sung by plantation workers in Hawai‘i
When night arrives in camp, you offer the men
your white body: their calloused hands root
through the humid dark for flesh untouched
by sun. They crave your breath, your cool hands
smooth as abalone shell, your fine feet
two slim canoes. While their wives sleep,
blistered from stripping cane in the sun
swathed fields, robes slip with a shiver
from your slender shoulders. Shoulders like
slices of white melon from back home, your cheeks
the pink blossoms from their childhood trees.
Night moves close, the web of stars encircles
the island, and onshore, waves continue to rise and break.
The rush of water like the sound of a skirt gathering
in a fist. Lucky come, they say, lucky come
Hawai‘i, Honolulu, Waialua, but the new vowel-thick
names hollow when you say them aloud. You know better,
that this hissing is not rain, but rats rustling the clustered
Christine Kitano
hearts of the banyan trees. Alone tonight, you watch
moths swirl through the cut cane, their paper-wings
attempting to beat their way free of the fields, their lit
bodies glistening like water. Those that disappear
behind the hills take the light with them.
Crab Orchard Review
u 79
Karen An-hwei Lee
Horses of War, Horses of Hysteria
for the Japanese American National Museum
In this space no writing desk, shelves, or furniture.
You are in a labor camp
alive and equine not human.
I taste the internment through my skin,
chains in the light over barbed wire
of euphemisms in a box. No
spruce for a coffin or a violin
with a flame and curl
hewn to sing.
Residents not evacuees. Safety council
not internal police. Relocation
not incarceration.
In shafts of light
drumming hope
we know we are not invisible.
Our long hair is untrimmed
in the hay.
In this space
one stable wide,
women sewed beauty out of nothing.
We are not Issei
Nisei or Sansei yet in a stall
at the Japanese American National Museum
we hear wind shriek over water troughs.
Karen An-hwei Lee
Shake our hair once
and weep although no one is there.
In a termite shed of blasting heat
or bitter cold
no in-between
we imagine ourselves as hummingbirds
nearly human
flying through stalls into light
to keep warring in that light.
Crab Orchard Review
u 81
Karen An-hwei Lee
Meditation on San Joaquin Hills
These hills were an inland sea.
Eons ago, a violent coastal uplift
shoved a bed of marine fossils to light—
oysters and charred plants
shaken after a temblor last week.
This fault runs under Laguna Niguel
and the San Joaquin Hills. Once,
no one knew about this zone,
quieter than the San Andreas.
Sage mingles with silk-tassel—
yet this fault is dangerous. It lies
so far under the hills, no one sees
where it begins.
I imagine in my mind’s eye—
Low hills at a distance from the coast,
black sage with silk-tassel.
Karen An-hwei Lee
I see a marriage with faultlines
running under a bed—
quarreling spouses drift apart.
Miles under the crust,
rugged fern evidence
exists for once-loved bones.
Wedded lives on a mantle
exposed to harsh weather—
How to heal the invisible
rifts as Los Angeles
slides past San Francisco
and Santa Ana drops into the sea
thirty million years from now?
Crab Orchard Review
u 83
Karen An-hwei Lee
Prayer for a Woman Named Xochitl
Core lessons from la vida in greater Los Angeles—
On Sundays, Latino males wait outside the buildings
on South San Pedro. Over a hundred men loiter not far
from the Fashion District. It is not a church. It is not
prison. I learned a woman’s name, Xochitl, is pronounced
So-chee. Water-flower. This woman traveled far south
alone to the borderlands where she hand-painted images
of the mother of Christ on bottles of water and gave them
to the immigrant families. The locked entrance to a bank
remodeled as a bookstore is not on Spring Street but Fifth,
on a corner where a farmer’s market sells honeycombs,
anise orange-flavored pan dulce, bolillos, y los duraznos
from peach orchards up north. Santa Monica Freeway
is called I–10 east all the way to Arizona. For a minute
my names in Mandarin and Spanish are Xochitl and peace
fragrant orchid. In Los Angeles, I pray these blessings
already exist for single women. May the dust of la vida
in this city bless our automotive feast of repentance,
our coughed mortality in the ash of burning sago-palms.
Browsing the Walls at the Angel Island
Immigration Station, I Seek the Lost Tones
of the Heungshan Dialect
And search for Hoishan hippy wah, the bumpkin knobs
of Namhoi village,
or hoity-toity timbres of Shekki City.
But on the Google Translate program, unwaveringly
read in “Mandarin” tenor,
set in romanized Hanyu Pinyin text,
its standard computerese, a pulverizing digital.
I know it’s there, what carved characters
cannot say in peruse of
that silent, bitten score of wood,
though plainly held, hurt inflection, a young man’s anger
and sorrowful tune, dripping sarcasm, or
a kind of wisdom set into grain.
Yet more what I want, to hear my father,
a would-be ah baahk, elder village uncle,
again demonstrate how he could take on nuance,
his mockingbird rend of where another’s lived
or gone, from the slur and aspirant
held inside a tongue.
Crab Orchard Review
u 85
At the Makai Market Food Court
I choose the laulau plate, lomi lomi and haupia,
each dish set in its separate well
of styrofoam, paid the Mandarin-speaking lady,
new owners of the old Poi Bowl
where 40 years ago I first ate the deep
green of taro leaf wrapped around a heart, salt fish or fatty pork.
Back then, Ala Moana’s food court, smaller, more intimate,
like that twenty-year-old on break from
begging the stubborn look that’s first love
to be true to some pure rule.
Today, all upscale, huge, but for my 8-year-old
and wife of 10 years sitting across.
There are things I’ve wanted again my whole life:
a first steamed laulau, or an ice-cold guava nectar gulped
at the pineapple cannery cafeteria, on break
from tin cans screaming overhead,
acidy slop souring leather
boots for good.
I saw it simple then, faithfulness or want of skin,
an inflection of nasal Chinese in a
girl’s Nu’uana Valley.
Absence glimmered, scattered these many years.
Yet, here I am in it another,
though that long again will never be here, I am.
A new mat of luau leaf, sea salt’s wealth,
sweet coconut yet slithers down the throat at end of meal,
truths I feared never once more
to swallow,
back in a form both square and jiggly,
and still, it tastes good.
Crab Orchard Review
u 87
Vanessa Hua
Accepted
It occurred to me that I’d become too comfortable with
breaking and entering.
Back from field training, I’d leapt onto the windowsill in a single
bound, no awkward scrambling, as though onto a pommel horse,
despite my combat boots and my Kevlar. I crouched, resting my
hands lightly on the frame. My ponytail bobbed and then went still.
In perfect balance, I could have carried a stack of books on my head, a
debutante but for the stench of dirt and sweat.
I tiptoed in the dark until realizing my roommates were out. As I
set down my ruck, an RA in the lounge shouted an invitation to join
a group headed to Flicks. A door slammed, and a basketball thudded
down the hallway. From the floor above, reggae blasted, competing
with the howl of a blow-dryer. No sign of the dorm settling down
Sunday night, not with the last of the weekend to enjoy.
Too tired to shower, I collapsed onto the futon for a nap before my
all-nighter. A sudden, strange lull descended, so complete it seemed
like I was in one of those sensory deprivation chambers that drive test
subjects insane. I couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone in the world
had disappeared. “Hello?” I called out. “Hello, hello.” No one answered,
and I fired up Julia’s laptop to fill the void with light and noise.
We met fall quarter, after I studied her for a half hour while she
sunbathed, her body long and lean in a black sports bra and board
shorts. On the lawn outside her dorm, the new one with spacious
lounges and nooks for studying, and where I wanted to live most. Julia
seemed like the kind of girl who adopted wounded birds and stray
puppies, willing to help a newcomer in need.
My bet paid off after I told her I had nowhere to stay because of a
mix-up in Housing. Officials said they might find something within
a week or two, but until then I’d be sleeping in the 24-hour room at
the library. What a way to start freshman year! Julia, a sophomore,
invited me to crash in the room she shared with her best friend. One
night turned into a week, another and another and then we were at
Vanessa Hua
the end of the quarter, Dead Week, finals, and saying our goodbyes for
the holidays. Without their knowledge, my roommates had aided and
abetted me. My classmates considered me no different than them, these
student body presidents, valedictorians, salutatorians, National Merit
Scholars, Model U.N. reps, Academic Decathletes, All-State swimmers
and wrestlers, and other shining exemplars of America’s youth.
The rejection from Admissions was a mistake. That’s what I
told myself, after I clicked on the link and logged onto the portal last
spring. Stanford had denied another Elaine Kim, another in Irvine
who’d also applied. I waited for a phone call of apology, along with an
e-mail with the correct link.
I hadn’t meant to lie, not at first, but when Jack Min donned
his Stanford sweatshirt, after receiving his acceptance (a senior
tradition)—I yanked my Cardinal red hoodie out of my locker. When
my AP English teacher, Ms. Banks, stopped to congratulate me, I
couldn’t bring myself to say, not yet. She’d worked with me on a dozen
revisions of my college essay and written a generous letter of rec, and I
didn’t want to disappoint her.
Another week passed, and I posed with Jack for the school paper.
A banner year for the church our families both attended, and for
Sparta High, with two students in a single class admitted to Stanford.
When I showed my parents the article as proof of my acceptance,
Oppa held the newspaper with his fingertips, as if it were bridal lace
he was preserving on a special order. He reeked of chemicals from the
cleaners, the stink of exhaustion and servility.
“Assiduous,” he said, praise for my hard work. My vocab drills, which
began nightly when I was in kindergarten, had fallen to him. For years,
he’d been reading the dictionary for self-improvement, and the words
we’d studied together coded what otherwise might remain unsaid.
“Sagacity,” I replied, thanking my father for his wisdom.
In June, with graduation approaching, I politely alerted Admissions
of its error.
“You haven’t received any notification?” the woman asked on the
other end of the line.
“A rejection. For another Elaine Kim,” I said, and only then did I
realize how ridiculous I sounded. Could I appeal the decision, or get
on the wait list? Ignoble.
No, she gently said, and explained that those chosen off the wait-list
had been notified two weeks ago, and she wished me the best of luck.
Crab Orchard Review
u 89
Vanessa Hua
All those hours, all that money. The after-school academic cram
programs. The cost kept us from moving out of our tiny two-bedroom
apartment, whose only amenity was its location in a desirable school
district and the stagnant pool where I taught myself to swim. Other
sacrifices: Oppa put off visiting the doctor until his colds turned into
bronchitis and then pneumonia. Umma’s eyes going bad, squinting at
the alterations she did for extra cash at the dry cleaners where they
both worked.
Stanford was the only school to which I’d applied, the only school
my parents imagined me attending. Other Korean families aimed for
Hah-bah-duh, Harvard, or Yae-il, Yale, but we wanted Suh-ten-porduh, Ivy of the West. On our sole family vacation, before my junior year,
we piled into the car and drove to Stanford and back in a single day, a
seven-hour trip each way—enough time to eat our gimbap rolls in the
parking lot, snap photos of Hoover Tower, buy a sweatshirt, and pick
up a course catalogue and a copy of the Stanford Daily, all of which I
studied as closely as an archeologist trying to crack ancient runes. I was
supposed to become a doctor, and buy my parents a sedan and a house
in a gated community. A doctor had a title, respect, and would never be
brushed off like them, never berated by customers, and never snubbed
by salesclerks. My sister, who sulked the entire ride to campus, wasn’t to
be counted on. Five years younger than me, a chola in the making, with
Cleopatra eyeliner and teased bangs, she’d turned rebellious in junior
high. She could take care of herself, and I’d take care of our parents.
When I asked the admissions officer if I could send additional
letters of rec, her tone turned icy. “We never reverse a decision officially
rendered,” she said, and hung up.
The problem, I came to understand, was that my story was too
typical. My scores, my accomplishments, and my volunteer work
were identical to hundreds, maybe thousands of other applicants,
and Admissions had reached its quota of hard-luck, hard-working
children of immigrants. I’d been too honest, straightforward where I
should have embellished, ordinary where I should have been fanciful.
My classmate Jack had launched his own startup, sending used cell
phones to Africa. If only I’d been a homeless teen or knit socks and
mittens for orphans in China. If only I’d had cancer.
I couldn’t tell my parents the truth, not after my pastor announced
my Stanford acceptance at church. If my high school classmates found
out, I’d become a joke. But if I spent time on the Farm, I’d discover
the secret of how to talk, how to act, how to be. When I became a
Vanessa Hua
full-fledged student, no one had to know I had been anything but. I
searched Facebook to see what incoming freshman said about forms,
housing, tuition, and classes, and told my parents I’d been awarded a
government scholarship, and a work-study job to cover the rest.
At the bus station, Umma pressed her papery cheek against
mine, and gave me a sack of snacks, puffed rice and dried seaweed.
My parents wanted to caravan up with Jack’s family, but I told them
not waste a day’s pay by taking time off. Angela wished me luck, less
surly upon realizing she’d get my room after I left. Oppa handed me a
prepaid cell phone and gruffly reminded me to call on Sundays.
“Cogent,” he said. Other words described me more aptly, that I
didn’t dare say: legerdemain, reprobate.
Early Monday morning, the room phone rang, Julia’s mother.
I was still up, typing notes for Hum Bio on her laptop, preparing for a
test I’d never take. Not strange at all, considering there was a word for
it—auditing—learning, but without credit.
Covering for Julia, I told Mrs. Ramirez she was at practice. She
had probably spent the night at Scott’s, from the men’s crew team.
They’d been hooking up, but he was also hanging out with other girls.
Scott. He couldn’t be trusted. Not after last night, when he’d come
by looking for Julia. It was late, late for her, usually asleep after dinner,
on the water at first light for crew practice. I expected him to leave, but
he’d sprawled onto the futon—my bed—and asked about my weekend.
“At the pool,” I said. I’d learned how to turn my pants into a
personal flotation device. Wriggling out, knotting each leg like a
sausage, my fingers cramped and slippery. Jerking the pants overhead
in a single motion, to fill the legs with air. How to swim on my side,
raising my dummy rifle out of the water. The calm I felt, as splashes
ricocheted around me.
“Water combat training,” I said.
“Bad ass,” he said. Then I had realized he wasn’t making fun of
me. He was checking me out, his eyes following the line of my legs,
up to the powerful curve of my thighs in a pair of running shorts. My
body had changed under PT, turned harder, stronger, faster and the
hours I used to devote to studying I now spent jogging on Campus
Drive and lifting weights in Arrillaga.
I blushed, trying to fasten the buttons of the shirt I’d tossed over
my sport bra.
Scott had long eyelashes, so lush he could have been wearing
Crab Orchard Review
u 91
Vanessa Hua
mascara. The air between us had thickened. His deodorant had a
woodsy, musky smell that made me think of plaid and lumberjacks.
His phone had buzzed, a text from Julia. She was waiting for him at his
place, he’d said, and loped off.
Although I’d dreamed I would find lifelong friends at Stanford,
women who would be my bridesmaids and men to pal around with and
maybe date, I remained apart as ever. Not nerdy enough for the nerds, not
Asian enough for the Asians, not enough of anything for anyone. Except
for Julia. Because I was a cul-de-sac, not in her circle of jock friends, she
trusted me with her secrets. Her fears about Scott, her complaints about
our roommate Tina, so spoiled, so careless with her money.
I pushed Tina’s mess away from my corner. She’d begun encroaching,
her textbooks, her crumpled jeans, her energy bar wrappers, and hairballs swirling like the Pacific garbage patch. Tina was Chinese American,
the daughter of immigrants too. From Grosse Pointe, she was used to
being the only Asian and had run with a popular crowd in high school,
the sort who totaled their BMWs while driving drunk or high and had
their replacement rides the very next week.
Before break, I told them that Housing found a spot for me,
though when the new quarter began, I said it fell through. A few times,
I’d walked into the room and the conversation stopped, and I knew
they’d been talking about me. Although it might seem strange that
they never locked me out, they were too polite, too trusting of a fellow
classmate in need.
My stomach growled. Security was lax on campus, but the dining
hall at this hour wasn’t busy enough to sneak through the exit for
breakfast. Freeloading didn’t seem like stealing, not exactly, with
more than enough food and classroom seats to go around. I only took
what would go to waste.
I dug through my ruck, searching for my ROTC assignment due
that afternoon. Although the corps had been banned on campus during
Vietnam War protests, Stanford students took classes and trained with
battalions at other local colleges. I’d slipped through a loophole, easily
able to sign up because of the lack of formal communication between
schools.
I hitched a ride three times a week to ROTC, with a pair of
Stanford seniors, who’d both committed to serving eight years in
the Army. Friendly but not looking to make another friend, not with
graduation and a likely deployment to the Middle East looming. Still,
I was grateful for the assignments in military history and equipment
Vanessa Hua
some treated as a joke, and grateful for the rank of cadet. Grateful for
the ruck, and the Kevlar that gave me a look of purpose, compared to
the Stanford students dressed in shorts and sandals all the time, like
they were going to the beach. BDU—battle dress uniform. LBE—load
bearing equipment, harness, canteen, first aid kit, and ammo pouch. I
was proud to speak the language of ROTC, proud I could navigate in
the dark, armed with a map, compass, and a piece of paper. Finding
the point, finding the code, finding the pirate’s buried treasure.
Flipping open my binder, I found a flyer urging Stanford cadets to
apply for the ROTC honor roll with the attached form and an unofficial
transcript. A reminder I didn’t have grades, and wasn’t enrolled, a
reminder I should give up and go home. Surviving day-to-day brought
me no closer to becoming an official student. I imagined my father’s
disappointment, my father’s words: ignominious, mendacious.
After re-applying, I was waiting for my acceptance from Stanford.
Sometimes in lecture hall, biking through White Plaza, shuffling
through the dining hall, and at my café job, I sank into the illusion that I
belonged here. No different, common among the uncommon. My fingers
moved over the keyboard, typing out my classes from first quarter and
a grade for each. Three A-s, and a B+ and a B: I wasn’t greedy. If only
I’d been given the chance, it would have been my transcript. If—no. The
problem sets were impossible and I probably would have flunked out
of pre-med. I hurled the binder across the room, hitting Julia’s dresser,
knocking over a corkboard plastered with photos of her friends and
family. Propping it up, I tried to straighten the crooked pictures of us
goofing around, wearing sunglasses and singing into hairbrushes.
Julia burst into the room, back from crew practice. With her broad
teeth, broad smile, and glossy chestnut hair, she’d make a good show
horse. She swept past me, reaching for her birth control pills. As she
broke the foil and tipped one into her mouth, I shoved fallen photos
under the futon with my foot. When she reached for her laptop, I slid
it away, snapping the lid shut. She reached again.
“Sorry,” I said, but didn’t hand it over. I said her mother called,
hoping Julia might thank me for covering for her. She didn’t. She
didn’t thank me for resisting Scott’s considerable charms. She hovered
as I restarted her laptop, its hard drive whirring and hanging.
“Never mind,” she said, grabbed her dining hall pass and left.
The day had barely begun, and I’d pissed off the one person who
cared about me here. The laptop woke up, and the file popped open
to my fantasy list of grades. If only those could be my marks. That’s
Crab Orchard Review
u 93
Vanessa Hua
when it hit me: an unofficial transcript would be easy to fake, without
requiring a watermark or school seal, Courier font in Microsoft Word.
With it, I’d apply for the ROTC honor roll. I’d never become Dr. Kim,
but with a resume listing my honors and awards, I’d get an internship,
and later on, a job to support my parents. A back-up plan. Weren’t
tech startups full of dropouts? I hit delete and dropped my A to a B+
in Hum Bio. It didn’t seem fair to give myself an F for a class I wasn’t
enrolled in. I decided the grades should reflect my efforts and no one,
knowing the lengths I’d gone to, could question mine.
Over the next few weeks, my luck began to turn. With my
faked transcript, I made the ROTC honor roll, received a ribbon for
my uniform, and sent the newsletter listing my award to my parents.
It wouldn’t be long until I received my acceptance from Admissions
after re-applying, I told myself. Scott was coming around more often,
too. Flirting, when he brushed a leaf out of my hair. When he helped
himself to dry cereal from a bowl in my lap. The first guy to pay this
kind of attention to me. His casual touching, as if I were a prized
possession. Nothing could happen between us, not if I wanted a roof
over my head, and yet I found myself hoping that each knock at the
door meant him.
When Julia tried to tell him she loved him, he’d acted weird
and left in a hurry, she’d confided. Just before I left for weekend field
training, I found the futon folded up, heaped with dirty laundry,
sweat-stained athletic bras and balled-up panties, a move territorial
as a dog pissing on a fire hydrant, potent as a radiation symbol not to
touch. I turned to find Julia in the doorway, Scott standing behind her.
She drew herself up, and told me I had to be out by next Friday, when
their families were visiting for Parents’ Weekend.
What if I spent those nights away and returned after the weekend?
“From now on, I’ll stay out one night a week,” I pleaded. She bit her lip.
“Two nights. Please. I’ll keep out of Tina’s way.”
Mentioning our roommate seemed to remind her of their arguments
against me. Julia straightened. “It’s Housing’s responsibility. Not ours.”
I tried to catch Scott’s eye—she’d listen to him—but he was suddenly
intent on his texts. Had I imagined his attraction? For him, a game, a reflex.
“I could pay,” I said. I had a couple hundred dollars saved from my
job at the café. Although their room and board had been covered at the
beginning of the quarter, I could give them spending money.
“I have no choice,” she said.
Vanessa Hua
“You have more choices than me,” I said, shouldered my ruck and left.
On the drive to field training, my head ached, tender as an
overinflated balloon.
I stumbled through the mission, to clear an abandoned house on the
training course. First the squad leader forced us into a ditch. Soaked, our
BDUs clung and chafed, then stiffened in the rising heat of the day.
“Cover me while I’m moving!”
“You got covered!”
“Moving!” I shouted, running flat out for three seconds, my heart
pounding in my ears. I wanted to go on and on, to clear my head of
everything but the task ahead. Hurling myself into the dirt, into the
rocks and burrs, a hard landing that stole my breath. When I swiveled
my dummy rifle, scanning for enemies, Julia appeared beneath a tree. I
aimed. Her life, in my hands. I’d never felt so bright, like ten thousand
flashbulbs going off and then she vanished, quicker than I could have
pulled a trigger.
When I returned to campus late Sunday afternoon, red-andwhite balloons had sprouted, along with vinyl banners, temporary
stages, and areas cordoned off for Parents’ Weekend. The window to
our room was locked, the shades down. I jogged around to the dorm
entrance and waited for someone to let me in. I fidgeted in my muddy
boots. If I were a cartoon, a gray cloud of stink would have trailed me.
At our room, I reached for the doorknob and then dropped my hand.
From now on, I had to knock first.
When I entered, I discovered the futon remained folded up and my
belongings were missing. I sank to the floor, everything I’d been carrying
these past months crushing me. Julia rushed towards me, her arms out,
with the same concern that had welcomed me to campus, a concern that
I’d have to kindle if I wanted to remain her charity case. “There’s been
a fire,” I said. The cleaners burnt down earlier this month, I added, the
lie turning more real with each detail. I could almost smell the burnt
remnants of the shop, see the collapsed roof and charred timbers and
smashed glass, and the melted plastic bags. Taste the sickly-sweet ash
floating in the sunshine. My parents were out of work, and sticking them
for the bill for room and board would bankrupt them. She hugged me,
enveloping me with the scent of laundry detergent and clean-living. I felt
guilty for aiming at Julia’s mirage during field training, even if I hadn’t
meant to, even if near heat-stroke had put me in a trance.
I became aware of my stench, its density, crowding out the air in
Crab Orchard Review
u 95
Vanessa Hua
the room. Julia said she would take up a collection around the dorm,
to help my family get back on our feet. Tina hadn’t budged from her
bunk. Bullshit, her expression said.
“We can talk to the RA in your new dorm, too,” Julia said.
Stiffening, I drew away from her. She was wearing an over-sized
Stanford crew sweatshirt—Scott’s. The song ended and in the silence,
Julia added that my sister had friended her online. “She wanted
directions to our dorm.”
My sister and I had never been close. Umma had promised me
a baby brother and when Angela arrived, sickly and translucent as a
tadpole, I had been disappointed.
I jumped up. “What did you tell her? Did you tell her I was moving?”
“For Parents’ Weekend,” Julia said.
How easily Julia thought she could get rid of me, how little I
mattered. She’d showered me with goodwill until she lost interest in
me, as if I were an Easter chick sprouting scraggly feathers.
Tina opened the window, breathing through her mouth, making
no effort to hide her disgust at my reek. Both their sisters were going to
spend the night here, she said. “We’ll be on top of each other. But we’re
used to that.”
“I didn’t think you’d be psyched to see Tina’s family,” I said. “Doesn’t
she get whiny around them?”
Julia opened her mouth, speechless. The secrets she’d whispered
to me in the dark were on fire, sticky and searing as napalm. Fighting
back, I felt as exhilarated and terrified as I had been on the training
mission. As Tina lit into her, I fled outside. My weekly calls home had
dwindled to once or twice a month, from a half hour to a few minutes.
My sister answered on the first ring.
“Don’t do this to them,” I said.
“To them?” Angela asked. “You think I want to spend all weekend
in the car with them?”
Bedsprings creaked and I pictured my sister on her back, her
narrow feet propped up on the wall. “They bragged at church about
the honor roll and Jack’s parents asked if they were going to Parents’
Weekend. Got them excited about visiting No. 1 daughter.”
“I have midterms,” I said. Gas prices. The expense. The drive. The
hassle of registration.
Each excuse sounded flimsier than the last.
“I get it now,” she said. “Why I couldn’t find you in the school
directory.”
Vanessa Hua
I had nothing to negotiate with, nothing but the threat of what
would happen if the lies came to an end. “If I move home, you’d be
back on the fold-out,” I said.
Silence. “Maybe they’ll stick you there. Or kick you out.” She paused.
“It’s time they stopped thinking you’ll save them.”
Time I stopped thinking it too.
When I returned to the dorm, I found my stuff in the lobby.
I wouldn’t have a chance to apologize. It took a couple hours, dozens of
trips with an overstuffed backpack to the library—carrying all my books
and clothes at once would make the clerk at the front desk suspicious—
but I managed to hide everything deep within the stacks. I was a mess,
drenched in sweat, and my hair matted against my scalp, and still filthy
from field training. In the restroom, I splashed water onto my face and
into my armpits. My shirt became soaked, and after I leaned against the
sink, the crotch of my pants too, as though I’d peed myself. When the
door swung open, I hid in a stall, trembling. Opprobrium.
My sister had relented and promised to keep quiet, but I had to
find another place to live within a few days, before Parents’ Weekend
started on Friday. When I canvassed dorms in search of roommates,
people weren’t as friendly to strangers, not like the beginning of the
year. Cliques had formed. Eventually, I might find a way in, though
not before my family arrived.
My routine saved me. Although I could have stopped going to
class and ROTC, I would have had too much time to think about
Julia, and how she’d turned her back on me. Blessed with so much,
she’d accomplish everything she set out to do while I’d slip into
insignificance, a footnote, if anyone remembered me at all.
I saw her once, by an ATM at Tresidder, and debated whether if I
should confront her, or convince her to take me back in. When Scott
showed up with smoothies, we locked eyes. After he kissed the top of
her head, I bolted. Her—his—their rejection felt like Stanford rejecting
me all over again. Everything here was sunnier and brighter, with an
ease that blinded people, that made them forget about imperfection
and turned them heartless.
The day before Parents’ Weekend began, the notification arrived
from Admissions. I logged onto the portal, feeling as though no time had
passed, as if I were a high school senior on the cusp. The screen flashed.
“It is with great regret that we are unable to offer you admission…you are
a fine student.…want to thank you for your interest.…”
Crab Orchard Review
u 97
Vanessa Hua
Denied. Everything, everything, for nothing. I didn’t belong at
Stanford, never did and never would, in limbo, not here or anywhere,
not of the present and lacking a future. Denied. I must have logged off,
must have exited the library but what I remembered next was Jack,
my classmate from high school, calling my name. He rolled up on his
bike. I hadn’t seen him much, except in big pre-med classes, and by
mutual unspoken agreement we never sat together. He’d gone preppy,
with floppy bangs, khakis and untucked button-downs, after joining
an Asian frat. He mentioned our parents were caravanning up, and
would take us to lunch at a Korean restaurant tomorrow.
The news of my deceit would spread through the church, among
the only people my parents trusted. I gasped.
“You can wait a day, can’t you?” he said, and grinned.
“I haven’t had Korean food since winter break,” I said weakly.
After we parted, I narrowly avoided a collision with another
cyclist and a wooden bollard. No one loved me like my parents, and
I’d returned their love with lies. I collapsed in the grass, watching
students and professors zooming by on their bikes, and joggers in
sunglasses in tight, shiny workout gear pounding past.
I couldn’t stop my parents. But I could stop Parents’ Weekend.
Though people here pretended to be laid-back, they couldn’t,
wouldn’t be stopped from reaching their destination. Calling in a
bomb threat wouldn’t be enough. The situation called for something
bigger, something louder, a credible threat, of the kind we’d been
studying in ROTC: insurgency.
Everything fell into place, except for one detail, one that
had nothing to do with what I planned but explained everything I’d
been driven to do. Minutes before dawn, I crept outside my old dorm,
where I found the window cracked open and the room empty. After
crawling inside, I searched for the picture on the corkboard of me and
Julia lip-syncing, the only evidence of my months here.
Gone. Trashed, like she’d trashed me.
The room phone rang and rang, but I didn’t answer. Julia’s cell
phone began buzzing, forgotten and left charging on the floor, and
when I noticed the caller ID indicating her mother, I answered. I’d
been making excuses for Julia for so long, I couldn’t stop. Mrs. Ramirez
said they were starting their drive and wanted to know if Julia needed
anything. For a second, I almost said she was at Scott’s. Mrs. Ramirez
didn’t know her daughter was hooking up with Scott, who Scott was,
Vanessa Hua
or that he wasn’t much for relationships, but I said Julia was on the
water, and promised to leave a note.
I stared at the background photo on the phone, her and Tina,
their heads tilted together, eyes crossed, sticking out their tongues.
Friends, best friends. Julia was certain of her love, and her family’s,
certain about everything, everyone but Scott. The tighter she clung,
the more he pulled away, and if she lost him, then she might begin to
feel as abandoned as me.
I texted Scott, “I love you.” Now we were even.
The sky was starting to lighten. In the center of campus,
nothing stirred but squirrels. At the base of a palm tree outside the
Registrar’s, I planted a liter bottle of gasoline stuffed with strips of
a tee shirt. The golden gasoline sloshed back and forth, a storm in a
bottle. Back home, palm trees were common, but not like the ones on
campus, which were rumored to cost a year’s tuition. The fronds were
lush, a country club’s, and fallen fronds seemed whisked away before
they hit the ground.
When I heard the whine of an electric cart, I ducked behind a post
and a groundskeeper went by. I’d have to hurry. I set down the letter,
sealed in a Ziploc and held in place with a brick. Though I’d written
it at the end of a very long night, the words had rushed out, with the
inspiration I wished for in my college entrance essays. I ranted against
rich kids and the parents who spoiled them, acting like they owned
the world. Like they were the world itself. I taunted them, implying I’d
scattered booby traps and bombs around campus.
Dousing the tree with gasoline, I lit the wick, which sputtered
with the delicious hiss of a lawn sprinkler. The syrupy fumes made me
giddy with the happiness I once thought I might achieve here.
In White Plaza, I left another copy of the letter and lit another
firebomb. I might have predicted the investigation, news stories,
the Facebook fan pages—“Elaine Kim rocks!” My mother in nearcollapse, propped up by my sister, at the county jail. Her face, awful
and old, marked by grief as all her hard years had never marked her.
My father asking why, not in Korean, not in SAT words, but in the
plain English he reserved for customers. For strangers. His hope—his
hope in me—would do me in. “I can’t,” I would say, my voice breaking.
“I can’t lie anymore.”
His caved-in expression. “You have to tell everyone the truth.
Telling me won’t help.”
Crab Orchard Review
u 99
Vanessa Hua
Yet if I had been thinking clearly and stopped, if I had retreated, I
would have missed the moment when I became mighty and billowing
as the smoke drifted into the stratosphere, with the crackle and roar
of a wildfire. The dizzying smell of gasoline, of charcoal, of ash come
alive. The flaming palm tree the most spectacular of all. An enormous
Fourth of July sparkler, a gold-orange celebration burning on and on,
a monument, a memory that would far outlast my time here.
Elizabeth Parsons
Bend Over Backwards
It started with a cigarette girl, you know; we saw that girl
stumbling out the Eye-and-Eye bar on Haight Street, about to kiss
asphalt just as we turned the corner. I’ve lived in this neighborhood
under rent control for twenty years. These kinda girls started back up
in the 80s, maybe. It was the idea of some dot.com smartass no doubt:
revive the strolling cigarette girls of the twenties. Make them modern
and campy with chocolates, condoms, junk toys, (and cigarettes); let
them loose on the unsuspecting drunks and watch the money roll in.
“Peachy Puffs,” they called them, and the kid was right. No drunken
yuppie hipster would flinch at paying ten bucks for smokes when the
seller was a pretty girl in a purple wig and a tight skirt. So in they
swarmed, pink and painted and ruffled, most of them looking like a
cross between a Bettie Page, Shirley Temple, and a rock ‘n roller type,
what with all the tattoos and piercings and all.
Sal and I had just finished a 10-hour shift in the warehouse, and
were still in our work grubs.
“C’mon, man,” he told me, slapping my back. “Need a drink.” It was
only Wednesday, I thought, but what the hell: it had been a long day, all
right; I’d torn my hands all to shit and my temples were pounding from
the steady stream of sawdust and paint thinner. So I counted the bills in
my wallet, and we headed out. Enough for one or two, at least, and Sal
promised to buy the first round.
It all happened in a matter of seconds, of course, but I remember it
in slow motion: we were turning, were taking that right from Fillmore.
Me, I was a little dizzy still, and I hit my shoulder against the brick side
of another damned realtor joint. When I looked up, there she was, not
twenty feet in front of us: a swarm of ruffles and pink and cellophane
lifting up as if on a wave, arching, twisting, then crashing into the gum
and piss-stained pavement. And it was like some heavenly piñata had
up and exploded above her head: a rainstorm of lollipops, Marlboros,
pixie sticks, and those fuzzy-ended light-up things—the ones that
look like psychedelic dust mops.
Crab Orchard Review
u 101
Elizabeth Parsons
And there was the gangly guy—sitting on his usual stool outside,
checking IDs, beneath the old-fashioned neon sign (“Eye-and-Eye
Club: Wide Open at 6 am”). With his frozen hair, the way it shined
blue-black, I always thought he looked like an older, longer Elvis, if
Elvis were tattooed and made of pale and ruddy clay. That guy didn’t
seem surprised. He looked down at that clump of girl face down on the
pavement—her fingers outstretched, grasping at it, gently, as if soothing
a baby to sleep—and he switched the stub of cigarette to his left hand.
“So guess you don’t want that candy, then, girl?” said Elvis,
sucking in a breath and hacking out a laugh that rang too loud, in spite
of the chatter and music that spilled from the bar into the outdoors.
No response from the pavement. At that point, one of the regulars
who had stepped outside for a smoke tossed aside his cigarette to
kneel down beside her. He was in coveralls, an electrician I guess, or a
mechanic. I watched as he lifted the hair from her face, gingerly, as if
lifting a blanket from a sleeping child.
“Damn,” he said.
“Well, shit. Get ’er up,” Elvis said, resigned.
“Don’t think that’s gonna happen, Buddy,” the electrician replied,
his voice a little higher than I would have expected. “Grab that $5 over
there for me, will you?”
Elvis bent down and picked up the bill from the foot of his stool.
He glared at the electrician for a moment, and handed it over.
Until then, we were just staring, Sal and I, because the last thing
we expected was to see this tumbling, big-chested Vegas-type nearly
kill herself with her graceless gymnastics act. But when the patron
said “dollar,” I blinked and saw the bills that spread out from her
tinseled body like offerings, and I saw Elvis was looking now too,
counting, probably, wondering if the spread was bigger than what he
had collected tonight. The girl was gurgling into the pavement—what
sounded like a sad and terrible yodel—so I bent down to help collect
too, and Sal followed my lead. The wind had already died down, and it
was a Wednesday so the street was relatively sedate. Lucky for Peachy,
we weren’t crackheads or speed freaks and we both just got paid, so
when she came to—if she came to—she’d be able to pay off her boss
and maybe keep a little for herself. Maybe the night wouldn’t be a total
bust. And I’d done my good deed for the year.
The electrician took a full seat at the curb and, lulling the girl’s
head on his tattooed forearm, he scooted it so that it rested on his
thigh. She moaned, drew her knees closer to her breasts—there’s a
Elizabeth Parsons
sign, I thought—and a sliver of drool slid from her lips, making a dark
circle on his leg.
Sal and I busied ourselves pooling the money together as the
electrician watched us from the ground. We weren’t damned thieves, I
thought. We counted it, $43 and change.
“Here,” I said to him. His thin fingers reached up and that’s when I
realized my mistake—the electrician was a woman, a manly one, sure,
but not that unlike anyone I’d seen around the neighborhood, guy or girl:
tattooed, short, greased hair, a silver-studded ring that dangled from an
eyebrow. But those were breasts between her shoulders. A woman, all right.
I placed the wad in the electrician-woman’s hand, looking her in
the eye so she’d know I meant it. “We’ve gotta get going.”
“You should stay,” the electrician said. “Gotta wait til the EMT
gets here.”
“What?” I spat. “We were just passing by.”
Sal was peering down the street at the Tornado now, at the cluster
of smokers lingering outside—the usual suspects: Tony Day, Jay with
his hat on backwards. That kid who started coming around last month
with the medical grade, the one they called Doc. Between the buildings,
the sky had faded to gray. The bar’s “Open” sign seared into it.
“Gotta stay,” she repeated, her voice deep and sure, resting her
hand on the girl’s head like a pet. “You’re witnesses. This girl is hurt.
They’ll want statements.”
“Fuck,” Sal exhaled, like he’d been holding it in all this time. “And
here I just wanted a beer.”
“Yeah. Just another day,” Sal offered, glancing at his feet. He
seemed to be contemplating a run. The man had a mortal fear of cops,
anyone who wore the badge, in fact. We’d only worked together three
months but the first time he came through, his cheek all bandaged
up and he was walking with a limp. He looked straight at us boys
huddling over our lunches and said, “Never trust a badge.” It wasn’t
long after that he was joining us for happy hour. He wasn’t the nicest
guy, but we respected him for that—he didn’t speak much, and when
he did, it counted for something.
I slipped a cigarette from my pocket, lit it, and turned to him.
“Go on ahead, Sal. I’ll talk to the damned cops. Get your beer at
Tornado. Tell ‘em I’ll be down in a few.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea—” started the lady, but I interrupted
her.
“Hey, we don’t need to both be here. You want someone to make a
Crab Orchard Review
u 103
Elizabeth Parsons
statement, I’ll stay. But let my friend go. Him and cops have a funny
history.”
She looked at Sal, then at me, and then something seemed to click
in Sal’s head, that he wasn’t going to stick around to get permission from
this bitch, and at the same time, the lady seemed to realize it too, so she
dropped her dark eyes and went back to the girl. Peachy had gone quiet
now but for the occasional hmmm. Sal slapped me on the shoulder and
started to shuffle off. He didn’t look back at us: not at me or at the lady or
the girl, not at the skinny Elvis, who had scooted his stool a little further
away from us and was staring out at the street intently.
I took a moment to shoot the electrician-lady a look, then pressed
my back into the wall. Now it was just us and Elvis, although business
was picking up and he was busying himself with IDs and taking covers.
Just us and that sorry mess of girl, the people who walked by, circling
us, sometimes stepping over her, that heap of broken candy. All this for
a beer, I thought. That’s what I get for leaving the house. Welcome to the
fucking neighborhood. Right, Sal?
I imagined we had kept walking; I saw us settled into the red vinyl
stools at the Tornado, talking about the fucked up Peachy girl and what
a strange way to start the night.
I drew in on my smoke, moving my head slowly back and forth
so that the grain of the brick scratched against my skull. I was tired of
this shit. I hope this lady doesn’t try small talk to make the time pass,
because fuck knows when the cops would get around to responding.
The girl didn’t seem to be dying; they’d give her some fluids, pump her
stomach maybe. I busied myself with the traffic whizzing by, trying to
guess the make and model of each car: Chevy Impala, Honda Accord,
a refurbished Mustang. I could still feel her without looking, though,
the electrician-lady’s eyes grazing me up and down, doubting me. I’m
a simple man, lady, I thought. All I want is a beer with my buddies.
It must have been fifteen minutes until the ambulance showed
up, and the cops rolled in a minute or so later. I saw the cruiser easing
its way up Haight—lights without sirens always seemed funny to me,
like the street was on mute—and finally double-parking next to the
Impala, just in front of the bar. Elvis eased himself off his stool and
slipped casually inside.
The next few minutes the EMTs hovered around the couple on the
ground.
“Tell me what happened.”
“How do you know this woman?”
Elizabeth Parsons
“Is she on any medication?”
I lit another cigarette, waited my turn. The cruiser sat motionless,
its lights still fluttering over the walls of the building, until finally the
doors opened and out stepped two cops: a white guy, skinny, with a
typical cop’s haircut and swagger; a black dude, older, who, judging by
the lines around his mouth, had seen his share. The white guy seemed to
be chewing something as he approached. Is that why they sat so long in
the car, I thought. Eating a fucking sandwich? I felt my forehead getting
warm. Cops were always buzzing around where they weren’t wanted—
but when you actually needed them, they were busy stuffing their faces.
The cops joined the EMTs, who had removed the Peachy from the
lap of the stranger, lifting her gently from the pavement to a stretcher,
easing her head into some sort of metal contraption.
“It’s in case there was a spinal injury,” the electrician-lady said to
me, looking at me, but I kept on looking straight ahead, thinking, I
didn’t ask. The stretcher was rolled up to the ambulance, loaded inside,
the doors shut. A moment later, the van was pulling into traffic, and
there goes my evening, I thought. Just like that, a whole night wasted.
It was the fuzz’s turn to ask the questions. The black one hung back
as the white guy approached. He looked too young, I thought. And not
so much different to any of the asshole jockeys I went to school with:
too comfortable in his stride, which wasn’t a stride at all, but sort of a
graceful waddle, on account of his muscled thighs.
“Ma’am,” he said, speaking to the electrician-lady. “You first. Tell
me what happened.”
“Sure,” the woman responded, standing up to watch the ambulance
turn a corner. “This girl—”
“How you know her?” interrupted the cop.
“I don’t.”
“Go on.”
“This girl, she stumbled out the door here. I had stepped outside
for a smoke; all I saw was the girl come flying out the doorway, her
cigarettes and candy and shit going everywhere.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. I guess she took some bad stuff or something. Or
took too much; she looked pretty messed up—”
“Why don’t you leave that for us to decide.”
“Sure,” the woman said, her voice a bit uncertain.
“‘Yeah sure?’ How about ‘yes sir’?” he said, pulling a small notebook
from his breast pocket.
Crab Orchard Review
u 105
Elizabeth Parsons
“Sorry—?”
“Sir,” I stepped up, not wanting this to go on any longer than it
already had. “This lady here was trying to help. She sat with that girl
for fifteen minutes or so while we waited on you.”
“Waiting for me?” The cop looked up from his notebook, raising
an eyebrow. “Was I talking to you? I was talking to the lady here.”
“I know, Officer. But— ”
“Sir,” the electrician-lady said, seeming to regain her resolve.
“Excuse me, but we were just trying to help.”
“Why were you bothering her?”
“Sorry?”
“Were you bothering that girl? Why was she laying on you like
that? You two girlfriends or something?” He smiled at that, made a
clicking sound with his tongue.
I knew where this was going. I had dealt with this type of cop
before: the type that never got enough respect in the neighborhood
and came back to take that respect. You couldn’t argue with these
types. Not in San Francisco, not in this neighborhood, anyway. I
prayed the lady would go along too.
“What do you mean, Officer? I was trying to help.”
“You talking back to me, lady?”
“What? Sorry?”
“Quit saying sorry. I said, you talking back.” It wasn’t a question.
I tried to peer over the cop’s shoulder to see what his partner was
doing. Wasn’t this why they had partners? To keep the assholes in line?
But the black dude was just leaning up against the cruiser, staring
straight ahead.
“Sorry, sir, I was just trying—”
“I said quit saying sorry, Dyke.”
Oh God, I thought. Please let me get to Sal. Shut up, lady. Just take
it; let it be. Let the asshole think he has the upper hand.
“Officer—” I pleaded.
“Get the fuck out of here, you. I don’t want to hear anything else
out of you. Leave this to me.”
I looked around again, but the black cop had retreated to the
cruiser. His gaze was downward, as if reading a book.
“But Sir—”
“Get the fuck out of here unless you want to come downtown like
your dyke friend.”
I didn’t need to hear any more. She wasn’t no friend to me, and
Elizabeth Parsons
besides, Sal was waiting. Maybe some of the boys too. This wasn’t
my business. Not the thousands of asshole cops, not the thousands
of good Samaritans who stick their noses in when they shouldn’t. I
nodded, shoved my hands in my pocket and gave the electrician-lady
one last look. She’d probably be O.K., I thought. But she wasn’t looking
my way, she was stepping backwards as the jock cop slid two thick
hands around her elbows. “What?” she was saying. “What?”
God that beer would taste so good. I wanted to feel it sliding down,
freezing up in my chest. Maybe I’d still be able to catch a bit of happy
hour. I hustled faster, the cold licking though my pants. I pressed my
elbows in tighter. It was getting cooler, all right; a fogless day meant a
freezing night, my dad used to say—you gotta dress for four seasons
in one day in this damned city. I stepped up to the silver doors of the
Tornado, and felt the air slice my cheeks as the cruiser raced down
Haight.
Crab Orchard Review
u 107
Terry Lucas
Contra Costa
…I will make the wilderness a pool of water,
and the dry land springs of water.
…the streams whereof shall make glad the city.
—Isaiah 41:18
Psalms 46:4
Imagine no San Francisco Bay. Only golden fur
hills shedding rainwater to the river, methodically
emptying an inland sea in the east into the nameless
ocean, beached a long day’s journey west. Imagine
cliffs not yet formed that will separate northern tribes
from the peninsula left when the earth lifts itself up
and the valley cracks and sinks like the center of a cake
taken from the oven too early, before the guests arrive.
Instead of a skyscraperscape pinned to the horizon,
mammoths, camels, giant sloth along the riverbank
in herds, a cloud of dust, not yet stuck to moist creases
in a human face or the palm of a hand as it grips
a spear or cradles a baby’s head after it passes
from a mother. Imagine ten thousand years
later, sitting in circle, bearing witness to the birth
of the bay, glaciers melting, the ocean rising
enough to reverse the river and flood the valley
with sponges, jellyfish, sea squirt, sharks. Imagine
Terry Lucas
the surprise of a camouflaged, saber-toothed tiger
circling the first village, flint piercing its side, smoke
curling through the still air like the shed skin of a snake.
✴ ✴ ✴
Every morning painters climb single file up the catenaries:
climb to the top of each tower, where the cradles rock
between the peninsula and the headlands,
the Pacific and the cool gray city. Bussed
by salt and fog, the bridge’s vermilion lipstick smears
and fades by sublimation directly into the gaseous state.
They apply PMS 173 continually—the anchorage,
abutments, bowstrings—paint occasionally dripping,
splattering five hundred feet below onto the cement
balustrades at seventy-five miles an hour—
a bicyclist’s helmet, a tourist’s wrist, splashes of flame,
stains on sidewalks, marks on flesh that turn black
and then a permanent gray: proof that they were here,
proof that they crossed through the Golden Gate.
✴ ✴ ✴
Some fold their laundry the night before,
place lambskin sweaters chest down on the bed,
cross sleeves behind backs, turn ribbed cuffs up,
sides in, bend cotton bodies into thirds or halves,
stack them neatly into cedar drawers.
Some line up ponies and riders on polo shirts,
Crab Orchard Review
u 109
Terry Lucas
underwear devoted totally to bottom shelves.
Some never touch heaps of dirty clothing, leave everything
for lovers or parents to dispose of…
Some type up notes in Times New Roman: poems,
diatribes or bizarre encomiums. Some make videos
in drag, drugged on popular culture. Some merely hum
as they climb over the railing and stand on the ledge,
gaze at the piled-up city, the waves that suck life in
under the bridge, then out to the ocean again.
✴ ✴ ✴
At the top of the ramp in my parking garage, I wave
my plastic card with electromagnetic strip. The mechanical arm
faithfully bends at the elbow, then lifts. The pedestrian warning
blares, but I honk, just to make sure, before I turn right,
then left on Columbus, and North Beach is aswarm with pleasure
seekers. The Purple Onion, The Stinking Rose, Specs, Cafés Divine
and Trieste. Through the Marina with the black diamond bay
off to the right, a lone runner, reflective tape on hands and legs. Disembodied
bones thrashing the air. Golden spots beneath the span appear,
footlights to an empty stage, before the play begins. Then the curtain
of trees in the park rises and the bridge appears, the claret towers square,
the further one resting inside the near, both sights on a mile-long rifle,
the flashing gunmetal rain behind the rain, blowing sideways
across the fiery barrel. I speed through in the center lane.
Am I drifting or is it the swinging deck beneath
the smoke-filled sky, above the kneeling waves?
Terry Lucas
✴ ✴ ✴
High on the hills above Niles Canyon, fog collects
horse silhouettes. An infinite number
of ways to say this gathering of flesh, huddled above
the silver river, cleaving golden hills to the east,
fresh waters flowing west to the brackish south bay,
then north where they meet the sea: a rip
tide opens up the shoreline, page by torn
page, mud sucks at mossed-over beams
of piers swaying with the tides, red-winged
blackbirds singing sunrise: electric
blossoms scattered, thistles. And Mt. Diablo rises,
rises, the Pacific plate continues feeding
the continent through its faults,
spitting out greywacke, chert and shale
piled up for bobcat and kit fox to stalk a stray
lamb or fawn, an occasional concolor
cougar taking down a full-grown doe
before the sun warms its riffling coat:
deep beneath the still surface
waters roil inside the machinery
of the estuary, move toward the saline gate,
thickening like muscled hindquarters
hitched to a plow, leaning into its harness
as it passes under the Dumbarton,
the San Mateo, the Bay bridges, past Alcatraz,
Angel Island, San Quentin: the waters
Crab Orchard Review
u 111
Terry Lucas
make their final approach, where kite surfers are
flying beneath the bridge, catching the wind, lifting
the chop, spinning before landing
in illegible white caps, beside a steeply-keeled Coast
Guard boat, figures in orange decontamination suits
lined up on the deck, circling an imagined point
of entry, the black diesel smoke drifting toward the fog,
a lugubrious shadow rising, the cutter
completing its final circle, then angling back to perpendicular,
as the waters break through their harness and rush through the gate.
Contiguous
Don’t you wonder about the panhandler
on Fremont and Market, sharing his day’s
proceeds with his pink-nosed pit? Or
Frank Chu, with his sign of 12 Galaxies?
What about the World-Famous Bushman,
hiding behind the branch he shakes
at passers-by, or the matching—from pumps
to pillbox hats—Marian and Vivian Brown.
Who are they and who are you, staring out
from the glass eyes of your apartment?
Do you wake in a sweat on an October
night with stars, the moon a fat orange
and the temperature pushing 90°
and remember a silver filigree ring buried
under the azalea, the mute orphan who lived
with his uncle, your father who gave you
the back of his hand? Do you, like Frank,
dream of aliens? I’ll bet the man on Fremont
dreams about Thunderbird and wakes up
as if he drank a whole bottle of fortified wine.
Nights like this, with windows wide, you can
hear the rush of the freeway, like the sound
of whitewater Ronald Reagan had piped
into his bedroom for insomnia. Nights like this
Crab Orchard Review
u 113
we lie naked, contiguous in this warm
ocean that flows around our backs and breasts
our arms our throats our lips, necks, thighs.
David Mason
Through Her Lens
The eye seeing becomes not I
but seen leaf, raft of tiny sticks
in the cold dark brew of a pond.
I stand outside of her and see
her seeing, so become not I.
A rain not rain enough to wet
soft light on hawthorn bark, on moss,
on dune grass where the muffled surf
like conversation to the deaf
makes distant comprehendingness.
Is that a word? Oh, never mind,
but watch the spotlit mercury waves,
the boulder breakwater curving out.
She aims and goes out with it, far
into the story of the world,
and what she would come back to, here,
would be a lover loving her
for looking outward into there.
Move out through the dissolving lens,
the rain not rain upon your skin,
the eye not I, the going gone.
Crab Orchard Review
u 115
David Mason
Amaknak
After a shift of killing crab by thousands
you punch out in the dark companionway
and walk the plank from hull to gravel quay
to make good use of the last rain of the day
for squinting into, booting it by the sea.
The lives you held in your hands
were split in two, but were they really mute
when legs and claws went into the boiling bins,
when brain and back were ground to a fine powder?
You walk the thought off, leaning into the wind
as onto the rocks the surf pounds harder and harder.
Death is never remote.
It follows you like a brother in ptarmigan hills.
Death in the ruined bunker of somebody’s war
where shattered glass and condoms strew the floor,
the whistling wind and tapping strand of wire.
Death in the drunken fisherman’s stony stare
and the storm of mewling gulls.
Death in the open stench of a rotting seal.
Death in the bleached tangle of driftwood limbs.
Death in the sunken fleet in Captain’s Bay
and the bay itself where schools of sockeye swim.
Death in the weather having its rainy way,
the way you learn to fail.
David Mason
For sooner or later the shore will turn you around.
You follow its edge to the steaming barge where you work,
rain in the work-lights, beams in a driven cloud,
death in the daylight, death in the coming dark,
death in the song you forgetfully sing aloud
over the shell-covered ground.
Crab Orchard Review
u 117
Rajiv Mohabir
On the Occasion of Her Majesty
Queen Lili‘uokalani’s Birthday
Dear Lydia Lili‘u Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamaka‘eha,
Dear imprisoned poet,
First the crown flower garlands on your bronze hands,
then Kumulipo translated for English lips. First,
the nation and then the grace of refusal to entreat treason.
Next the sea change. Next the annexation. Next
the angry 21,169 fingers and a sea of ink. Then the broken
feathers of the ‘Ō‘ō and Mamo.
Then the Americans with guns.
Today in Ray-Bans and Jersey Shore eyebrows:
I kū mau mau. I kū huluhulu.
Today Elderts gunned down on the street,
today Deedy wet with whiskey walks free.
Today the ‘Ō‘ō and Mamo are extinct. Today:
Stand together. Haul with all your might.
Dear Queen of this nation, Dear Queen of Pacific salt
and tears, Dear scepter and fragment
of cushion, Dear just Lili of heaven,
From you, true love shall never depart.
Rajiv Mohabir
Acridotheres tristis
The quarrelsome bird is a poet named “mynah.”
His tongue roves the world over, this homeless mynah.
Kanchan stole Popo’s songs we dance to in London.
For his each coolie chord she instead struck a minor.
In her Brampton project Aji dreamt of Guyana,
her bones sown in a field like the story “Cow-Minah.”
Afta’ me book come me cousin dem a-vex. Dem
bin wan hear dis story befo’ me mek ’em mine? Na.
In Mānoa, a Kanaka Maoli woman claims,
“Haole are invasive, it’s just pretend this term ‘kama‘āina.’”
kalapani ke par wali kasturi sirf eke ki nahin.
zamin hile, barf pighale kiska chehera dikayega aina?
(Ambergris from across seven seas is not just of one.
When land shifts and ice caps melt whose face is in the mirror?)
Cast off, Paul Raimie Rajiv, your each name a shipscrape, the horizon entices and your moorings are minor.
Crab Orchard Review
u 119
Rajiv Mohabir
Rhincodon typus
Once you swallowed a man
and the earth followed. It poured out
a placenta of knotted clots and krill
in a birthing ceremony.
This skin is a sieve.
Once a man jumped into the coral
and rode your dorsal into darkness
and you held the sun pelagic in your chest
to chart the gouge across the abyss burning
in your own gold. You dove
into silence you could not break,
gripping wonder between your lattice of daggers,
until the sun dusked and you sank
beneath the sheet of horizon.
There is joy in night. It summons you
between continents to whisper prayers into its ink.
Once a fisherman took off his face;
mistook himself for a shadow,
and plunged his hook
into your new moon night
to implant his false god of fear
into your liver until you surfaced
Rajiv Mohabir
gasping, Let there be light.
And what flared from you, scattering as a herring
shoal, shot in beams through your skin,
as you took his hand and kissed it? Now every
voyager looks over the bow to see you.
What darkness endures if this body is a lantern?
Crab Orchard Review
u 121
Rajiv Mohabir
Indo-Queer Windward-Side
barsaat mein samandar dagariya bhaiye
behet nadiya bhala kaun rok paibe
Against the trade winds Your Aji teaches you
the force of her songs; you sing in her voice but your
family still disowns you. Your Puas roost
around a table and black tongue you with curses
like marbles thrown to trip you, to split your head
on the cement. They are vexed you survive; that you
pick yourself up from the pavement to voice strains
on how to be expelled, cross the black waters of
uncertainty, how to thrive in Diaspora,
the sun flaring in your chest. In this time of fading
binaries their hate is cockeyed and witless;
yours is a throat that will not abide silence.
In the monsoon the river floods into a sea,
who can possibly arrest a river’s flow?
Marianne Villanueva
Crackers
In December 2012, I finally emerged from the wild mountain
fastness of the Philippines. My left shoulder had a tattoo of a python,
my right a tattoo of a kris, the blade of choice of the mountain tribes.
I wore a necklace of red parrot beaks. I spoke only in monosyllables.
They said I was crackers.
They made me register at the Palo Alto VA for a psychiatric
evaluation. The attendant asked my age, and though I had not thought
about it for many years, I replied that I might be 41 or 42.
My mother, God rest her soul, was a saint. She passed away when I
was still in grade school. My father was the kind of man whose idea of
spoiling us was to give us Happy Meals, every single day. While I was
“away,” my father died, my sister inherited all his money, and there was
nothing left for me.
My first night back in America, I couldn’t sleep. The quiet made me
jumpy. People don’t realize how noisy the jungle is. When you know what
to listen for, you can tell who is next to you, who is a few feet away, who is
just on the other side of that bamboo thicket. Night is for hunting. It’s an
active time. Here, though, the night is so quiet, it’s like being dead.
Just before dawn, I would fall asleep surrounded by my women—
Tapia and Tota and Naca—who liked to sleep curled up around or
on top of me. Tapia was the smallest. She couldn’t quite get her arms
around my waist, so it was she who was usually on top. Tota and Naca
happily settled for sleeping on either side. I fell asleep feeling their soft
breath against my chest and my shoulders. Vines would open their
milky white flowers in the warm night air, and the scent was heavy
and sweet. Here in the U.S., the strongest smells are the ones that come
with the cleaning ladies: ammonia and Lysol. I think it’s these smells
that cause my nightmares.
They flew me home. All I asked for was a seat by the window. I
looked at the green earth vanishing, I looked until there was nothing
below but clouds. To calm myself, I made a list of the things I had
learned while I was in the mountain fastness:
Crab Orchard Review
u 123
Marianne Villanueva
1. I learned how to speak to birds, lizards, bats and many
other wild animals.
2. I learned that sickness is caused by evil spirits.
3. I learned that the best time for hunting is one or two days
before the full moon.
4. I learned that a strong man has many wives.
5. I learned to banish loneliness.
The forest abounded with a tiny species of monkey, Tarsius pumilus,
whose eyes and ears were regarded by my tribe as a particular delicacy.
The doctor asked if I had seen any other Americans during my time
in the wild mountain fastness. Perhaps missionaries? I said that I had not,
but my tribe told stories of a man named Father Nal-Buan, whose skin was
white and whose thighs were as wide as tree trunks. He had died in the
long-ago time before Jesus. But he could still be seen, from time to time.
He was very tall, almost seven feet, and very hairy, and was said to favor
Marlboros. Even when he wasn’t visible, the cigarette smoke was a dead
giveaway.
I knew that they would come for me eventually. The night
before my captors arrived, the crickets were louder than usual. My wives
were restless. Naca wept, for no apparent reason.
In Palo Alto, freeways stitched the hills, full of angry,
buzzing cars (cars had given birth to monsters: huge SUVs that reared
up suddenly, from various directions). I longed to possess one of these
machines: they seemed to harness so much power. The people driving
were like sky spirits, moving fast as lightning bolts.
“You must pass a California driving test,” they told me.
They said there were other machines, big as whales (though I had to
ponder this: I couldn’t be sure I knew how big whales were, any longer),
and these were called buses and ran day and night, at regular intervals.
They offered to have one of the nurses accompany me to the corner of El
Camino and Page Mill Road, and show me how to board one.
But anyway, why bother with cars, the doctors said. Your head is too
full of other things right now. Besides, there are so many new driving
regulations. Finally, they had to spit it out: the psychiatric evaluation
alone would be enough to prevent me from getting a driver’s license. The
evaluation said that I posed a danger, not only to others, but to myself.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder” was the term they used.
Marianne Villanueva
I asked for my notebooks. They said that all my belongings from
the time before had been placed in storage, in the Army Street Facility
in Potrero Hill. I protested that I was not in the Army. They refused to
respond to this. Instead they told me there was a man who kept careful
tallies of the amount I owed the government. The storage rental fee
would probably run, they said, close to a hundred dollars a month.
But they would forgive that, if I would just promise never to fraternize.
Fraternize with whom, I asked. Who do you think I might be
fraternizing with?
Nurses, they said. And doctors. Outside of your counseling sessions.
And anyone from the wild mountain fastness. They added, You might
become agitated. And you know what happens when you become agitated.
I was confused. I could not understand why they thought
anyone from over there would be in Palo Alto. America was too far
for any of them to walk to, and they had no planes. No one wanted
to leave the wild mountain fastness for a place where the Paper
God ruled all. Furthermore, you could not land on American soil
without documents, and the I-Na-Ko had no birth certificates and
no passports and might be stopped at Customs for things like having
plant spores sticking to their flesh.
The biggest problem was convincing the doctors at the VA that I
was an ordinary person. And that such an ordinary person as myself
did indeed fall in love with the wild mountain fastness. That was the
one true explanation.
Cut it out, the doctors said. Stop talking about love. What do you
know about love? Your relatives say you never wrote.
No need to sneer at me, I said. Love means children. Who I love
unconditionally. Love means intense sex. For as long as three days (I
observed a blonde nurse, from the corner of my eye, wrinkle her nose
at that last one!) at a time.
I told them I had fallen in love 162 times and that each of my three
wives had produced children. In all, I had 31 children, all of whom
were born perfect, with warm skin and hazel eyes and abundant hair
and ten fingers and ten toes and the little nub in the belly that signaled
power.
You had no right, they said. No right to father those children. The
idea—! They curled their lips scornfully, as if seeing, in their minds,
the little black angels.
It was great, I said. A man must have company.
Who needs company, they said. Ridiculous! Call someone.
Crab Orchard Review
u 125
Marianne Villanueva
Who? I asked. Who should I call? The Pentagon? Besides, there
was no cell phone reception in the wild mountain fastness.
“This one’s a joker,” the doctor said. And I realized that he was
talking to someone who was not in the room. I remembered, from
before, that people were usually deceitful. The ones with you in the room
would smile; but the ones watching through little peepholes would be
shaking their heads.
How could they speak of duty, when all they did was talk and
make scribbles on pads of yellow ruled paper? In the wild mountain
fastness I was happy. Every year, a child or two or three was born. I
lost one wife to another man, but the tribe chased that man away and
returned my wife to me. My other wives were much more loyal: they
said they were content, living with me.
The VA doctors said: The Director-General has forbidden it. It says so
right there, in your official recruitment letter. Look at the bottom of p. 6.
I couldn’t help thinking of the children I had left behind. If I could
only have been assured of their welfare. During the rainy season,
typhoons and the resultant mud slides were a constant preoccupation
in the wild mountain fastness.
The young doctor, the one with four eyes, continued: In Bangkok,
where you were stationed for three years—
—?
You filed only two reports in three years.
I became furious. I began to sputter: So, so, so?
The government paid the rent of your apartment and what did you
do? Brought in whores. There was a girl named Ericha—You remember
her? The one who worked at “Wild Things?” The one who sniffed glue—
I became hot, and cold. Then hot again.
Fraternizing with the locals is a violation of the terms of
your contract! Ericha was a member of Thailand’s most notorious
underworld gang! She also passed information to the Chinese!
Information that was used to deceive the American government!
Those words doused my spirit. I realized I would have to take a
hard look at all my remaining assets.
In the VA Hospital, I had my own private room. The walls were
painted a pale yellow, there was a TV bolted to the wall, and bed
that could go up and down and fold in the middle. But I couldn’t
understand the straps on my arms and feet.
They gave me injections, night and day. I loved these injections.
Marianne Villanueva
They gave me beautiful dreams of my people in the wild mountain
fastness. I was there once again, in Kalawitan. Where the jungle
bounded my valley on all sides.
Whenever I happened to open my eyes, the tall, dark nurse, the
one who looked like he was from Mumbai, or some Indian city, would
be sitting in the chair next to my bed. He was always doing crossword
puzzles. Every time I opened my eyes, his hand would begin to shake.
I knew he was aware that I was watching him. Without looking up, his
right eyebrow would rise, ever so slightly. Or he would start stretching
his legs, as if they’d gotten cramped from sitting so long in the chair.
One day, I let it be known how much I liked peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches, I hadn’t had one in so long. A nurse with a pug nose
brought in a steel tray that contained one slice of bread on a white
plate, one tiny jar of peanut butter, a small, square packet of blueberry
jam, and a plastic knife. I requested that she unscrew the lid of the
peanut butter jar, and said that I would be glad to do the rest. For
some reason, this made her angry, and she stalked out of the room.
What was I supposed to think, looking at all these ingredients? Peanut
butter is simply peanut butter, a slice of bread is simply a slice of bread.
One cannot say Abracadabra and expect a peanut butter and jelly
sandwich to materialize. Did they think I was a magician?
There were two men wearing lab coats who patroled the corridor
outside, at all hours. I would request tea, and my request would be
delivered to the hospital commandant. They said that if I didn’t cut it
out, I would be sent to Fort Leavenworth, which I later found out was
in Kansas. It would take many days to get there. I didn’t believe them.
They wanted to know whether the I-Na-Ko (which was the
name the Americans called my tribe, but was not the name the tribe
used to refer to themselves, yet another cause for confusion) could
be persuaded to work with the CIA, and were the women really as
beautiful and as wanton as they had heard?
Actually, I said, the women are not beautiful at all. Because of
inbreeding, a majority of them are cross-eyed.
I pretended to give them directions to the precise location of the
wild mountain fastness, but when I should have said North I said
South, and when they asked which road they should take from the
coast, I made up a plausible sounding name: Hagbayon. The true road
was named Akdula, which means “heart” in their language.
One of the career paths they encouraged me to explore was
Forensics School. During periods between injections, the counselor
Crab Orchard Review
u 127
Marianne Villanueva
said, I could go to dances or play bridge, which was what all Forensics
students did; it apparently helped them to relax.
This, if I remember correctly, was how they put it: A career in
Forensic Science offers many possibilities.
I had seen enough forensics on CSI. I watched CSI all the time, the year
before I disappeared into the wild mountain fastness. I even remember
the name of the older actress, the one with lovely, reddish hair: Marg.
After a while, from having to answer so many questions, my
memories became jumbled up. Sometimes, I even forgot how many
years I had spent in the wild mountain fastness. Sometimes I thought
it had been two years, but at other times I thought it might have been
closer to seven or even ten.
These were the things I missed: the strange clicking sounds the
women made in their throats when they were aroused. I had formulated
a theory that this was vestigial evidence of the time the people had been
lizards.
I missed fireside chats, and hanging by my thumbs from tall trees.
I missed watching the tails of blue-breasted birds flickering in the jungle
half-light.
Things I did NOT miss: mosquitoes the size of Labrador retrievers
and the furry black beetles that crawled all over my face at night when
I was trying to sleep. And chiggers. And leeches. And how hard it
rained when it did rain, and how I would wake in the middle of the
night because of the monotonous sound of the rain dripping from the
leaves. It can drive you crazy, that drip drip drip.
There were fearsome creatures on the other side of the mountain.
The I-Na-Ko talked about them constantly: CIA. See-yah, See-yah. See
you? They could make fire at will, from the ends of a stick. The fire could
be aimed like an arrow. It was impossible to run from these things. I saw
the burn marks on the people’s shoulders, backs, and thighs.
Big birds come, they said. And whoosh whoosh, the trees go flat.
Americans? Big men? Shades?
Yes. See-yah was CIA.
They called Americans the Sky People, because they always arrived
on big, gray birds with curling blades of iron that went round and round
and round.
It was hard in the beginning. My first weeks in the wild mountain
fastness, I developed a severe case of dysentery. Then the I-Na-Ko
showed me how to use a plant with fan-shaped yellow leaves that grew by
Marianne Villanueva
a mountain spring. They swore that the leaves had medicinal properties.
After I began the leaf-smoking regimen, I could hang from the branches
of trees as they did, exactly like one of the screaming monkeys that
launched themselves from tree to tree, high in the forest canopy.
During one of my VA sessions, a doctor showed me a very large
book that he said was a dictionary: the Merriam-Webster, 12th edition.
He placed it on the table between us, turned it so that the words faced
me, and opened it very slowly. With his right index finger (I might
add: a rather long yellowish fingernail), he scrolled down the page and
finally stopped at a word: “Hemisphere.”
What is this word, he would ask me. Do you know what it means?
I could not tell him.
The doctor was Middle Eastern—either Iranian or Iraqi, I couldn’t
tell for sure. Beneath the white lab coat, I knew what he was hiding: fur,
metal, perhaps even an AK-47. When I first met him, it was the exact
middle of July. Why would any sane person wear a lab coat in such heat?
Peeking from beneath the hem of his gray trousers were green
alligator shoes. A smell wafted upwards: rank, like decay. Like forest
earth. Like the ooze between tree roots in the jungle.
Do I want this, do I want this, do I want this.
Later, later, later.
Talk, they said. Talk to us. As soon as you have given us the
information, you will be at liberty. You may enroll in any California State
University (They suggested Cal State Hayward, for the Forensics School.
Or for the Viticulture). You do not even have to take an entrance exam.
The doctor told me to memorize as many definitions as I
could. Luckily, I had an excellent memory, which served me well when
I had to learn the language of the I-Na-Ko. Now, in front of my doctor,
I had only to glance at a page before I had memorized all its contents,
down to the last syllable.
One day, a doctor confessed that he had been instructed to spy on
me, and to inculcate propaganda about American benevolence, with the
sole purpose of spiriting me back to the wild mountain fastness, where
I would be expected to infiltrate an offshoot of Al Qaeda called the As
Jemaah. The doctor began to cry. He said he felt great pity for me.
The As Jemaah had taken root in the wild mountain fastness
because Osama bin Laden’s brother had married Miliyanah, a member
Crab Orchard Review
u 129
Marianne Villanueva
of a Philippine tribe called the Teduray. The Teduray lived in a deep
valley, just on the other side of the I-Na-Ko’s wild mountain fastness.
To emphasize the importance of my mission, I was given newspaper
clippings which described the torture and beheading of American
missionaries. The rape of brides. The enslavement of native children.
Look, I said to them, I emerged from the wild mountain fastness
on my own volition. I was taken to Manila by a ship called the General
Larry D. Lawton. Whenever I stood on deck and saw the Stars and
Stripes above the brig, I saluted.
The manner in which the VA doctors attempted to break my
will was both devious and strange. In the pre-dawn darkness, I would
be hauled out of bed and given a cold shower. Then I would be handed
the dictionary. I would be instructed to read and memorize. And so forth.
In the end, I was coerced into admitting the error of my ways. I
was forced to deliver a videotaped confession. Some time passed. Then,
one day, a squad of soldiers came and forced me into a helicopter. I
couldn’t believe it: they air-dropped me back into the wild mountain
fastness. But the I-Na-Ko were hiding. Either that or they had
abandoned their usual territory. For three days I wandered, weak and
weeping, through the jungle. I could not understand how an entire
tribe of over a thousand people could disappear, just like that.
I discovered, tangled among the branches of the baobabs, piles
of American leaflets, dumped from helicopters in preparation of
my return, urging, in big black letters: SURRENDER SURRENDER
SURRENDER.
I radioed to the military base in Cotabato, and a helicopter pilot
came to retrieve me. I climbed aboard, my heart breaking.
I did many things to pass the time in America: I sold Tupperware.
I answered phones for a cell phone company. I even worked, for a few
months, as a salesman at Barnes & Noble. I acquired carnal knowledge
of women of all shapes and sizes, though my favorites were the loud
women I met in bars, the ones whose eyes sometimes, like my own,
leaked sadness.
After a long while, the government left me alone. I was still
required to see a doctor at the VA Hospital, twice a month, but they
let me keep the dictionary and eventually I got a job as a reference
librarian for the Palo Alto Public Library. One day I noticed that the
pages of some of the books in the fiction section were being eaten away
Marianne Villanueva
by the small black beetles that people around here call Dollar Bugs.
The White Troll, otherwise known as the Head Librarian, peered at me
over her bi-focals and said the bugs were “perfectly harmless.” Then she
added: Surely you wouldn’t let little bugs like that scare you.
I didn’t know why she used the word “perfectly” and I did not like
her tone. As I explained to the authorities later, her speech struck me
as condescending. Even, insulting.
I had not intended to strike her. There was a sudden crack, a sound
like that of a car engine starting. The Troll fell backwards and I don’t
know where she went to. To this day, I can’t tell you what happened.
Perhaps she realized she was late for another appointment and had
taken a shortcut?
People transform all the time. Ask the I-Na-Ko.
I must get back to compiling my dictionary.
I told my psychiatrist about my mother, who was from the
Philippines. I didn’t know her well, though I am sure that she was an
excellent mother. She died when I was five. She left behind, in addition
to my father and me, her parents and nine younger brothers and sisters.
They all lived together in a thatched hut by a river. The Americans who
were friends of the other tribe, and who provided them with the guns,
would frequently repair to the river and stare openly at the women who
were playing and splashing around in the water.
I told the doctors this: My father was a private in the 124th
Infantry Regiment, the one that fought in Mindanao in 1945. He wrote
a 15-page memoir about the experience, which I found under his bed
one day, while I was searching for the place where he kept his rolled-up
dollar bills. On the title page was a dedication to “My Commander in
Chief, General Douglas MacArthur.”
My father wrote about crocodiles sunning themselves on the
riverbanks, and piranha churning the water, which he said was brown
like roast coffee or molasses, except for the silvery flashes made by circling
piranha.
“I have bite marks,” my father wrote, “from the time when a
school of piranha attacked. Absolutely vicious creatures, piranha. I
was lucky to escape with my limbs intact. A local girl who happened
to be washing her husband’s clothes was just a few yards away and
heard my anguished shrieks. She pulled me out of the water.”
The rest—my mother was pregnant soon after. To escape the
wrath of my mother’s husband, who was the son of a local chieftain,
Crab Orchard Review
u 131
Marianne Villanueva
my father took his native bride and fled the islands, forever. I was born
in California a few months later.
I remembered my father sometimes opening a long, rectangular
box inside of which lay a kris. The kris had a nasty, heavy, dark-colored
blade, serrated like a bread knife, and an ivory handle. It was, however,
dull as a butter knife. Was that a memento of my mother’s first (native)
husband? I liked to think so. My father let me think so.
My father said that my mother’s first husband used the kris to
cut sugar cane. I see him in my dreams, but always from behind. My
view of him is powerfully mysterious: the man has broad shoulders.
His shoulders are slick with sweat. The knobs down his spine are
prominent and hard, like a column of small marbles. The dreams
always end the same way: Just when the man seems about to turn, just
when I think I am about to see his face, I wake up.
They named me Lucifer. Why that name? I didn’t want to be a
Lucifer, but the woman, my mother—whose name was Matilda, whose
mother had named her that because she liked the Australian song—
Well, Lucifer is my name. A strange name, one that ensured I
would have no friends. Ever.
The parish priest refused to baptize me, because he was
superstitious and afraid. After all, I had been named after the Devil,
the King of Evil.
So I grew up Lucifer, loveless and friendless—enslaved by a name
that conjured subterranean forces, temptation, worldly evil.
The psychiatrist asked me if I was still in touch with my mother’s
family. I retorted: Do I seem crazy to you? My mother, I suspect, had
me out of sheer contrariness. And I can never quite forgive her for
giving me that name, which almost killed me.
I met a patient at the VA whose name was Loki. His hair was curly
and dark and skimmed his shoulders. His eyes were enormous—
tarsier eyes. Upon first hearing each other’s names, we cried and fell
on each other, embracing like brothers. His eyes were really amazing,
the pupils ringed with grayish aureola.
He was from Texas. His parents were artists and made their living
by selling paintings of the Sulphur River. That river has water that is
yellow, yellow as the Yangtze, which is another river filled (according
to my father) with lovely maidens, all scattered along the riverbank,
washing their husbands’ clothes. Have I told you about the giant
fish—five times bigger than a shark, who crawls into the shallows
with flippers shaped like human hands? In evading the clutches of one
Marianne Villanueva
such river monster, my father was forced to cry out for help. A lovely
maiden, hair as dark as night, arms as white as pigeon feathers—
On the riverbank, that was where my father sired my brother,
whose name was Archangel.
Why Archangel? Who knows? Everyone in Santa Ynez wanted to
be my brother’s godparents. My Filipina mother stood with her eyes
cast demurely downwards. Where did she acquire such a white baby?
My father, of course, was what she told everyone. His family genes were
strong. She didn’t know what happened with her first-born, me, but this
second one was definitely in the family line, a line that stretched all the
way back to the first wagon train to cross the western plains, it had taken
six months to reach their destination, the city of hills.
The parish priest, the very same one who had refused to baptize
me, anointed my brother the Archangel’s forehead with great care. The
priest’s eyes seemed to burn as he lowered the back of my brother’s head
into the font. My brother’s eyes rolled directly back into his head. What?
Why? Someone had pinched him, hard? He squawled and my mother
had to spend the next half hour rocking him in her arms and going,
“Shhh, shhh.”
Crackers, this was what they called me. This is a word that is
hard to explain. On the one hand, I used to have the things just before
bedtime, my dear mother would bring me the plate with a few slices
of cheddar cheese, a few crackers, and a glass of the purest white milk.
She had milked the cow herself. She would show me her veined hands,
large and sore and slick from working the cow’s udders….
Her face was always wreathed in shadow. All I remember clearly
was her brown hands, extending the plate with the crackers and slices
of cheese. I don’t even remember her voice, though I imagine it must
have been melodious.
Of course, my mother is long departed. She never knew of my
desire to visit the Philippines. She might have tried to talk me out of it.
That country? BAH! She would say. And she’d spit. She was a great
one for spitting. She said everyone did it, back in her home country.
My father tried to cure her of the nasty habit. Once, with his belt.
But, BAH, BAH, she kept going.
Eventually, my father gave up. Or he had a stroke. He was paralyzed,
he couldn’t move a muscle below his neck. My mother was bringing
strange men home at night. I would hear them in the guest bedroom.
I would go to my father and hold his hand. We both cried. My
Crab Orchard Review
u 133
Marianne Villanueva
brother the Archangel burbled happiness from his crib. My forehead
burned with the mark of that Evil One.
“My father!” I cried. “Please, turn your face away! Do not look!
Spare yourself!”
Out of stubbornness, or perhaps pride, he insisted on keeping
his eyes wide open, he insisted on listening to every second of my
mother’s perfidy.
I married when I was 18, and my son was born six months later.
Luke was not even a year old when my wife left. She had been suffering
from postpartum depression and I thought it in her best interests to
hide all sharp objects from her, even one as innocuous as a letter opener.
I came home from my dreary job as a checkout clerk at Safeway, and for
the first time, our apartment felt huge. I felt the difference right away,
even before I heard Luke crying. He had been strapped into his stroller,
which my wife had positioned in front of the TV, which was on VH-1.
There was a bottle of sour milk next to him. She had insisted he wasn’t
too old for the bottle, but I knew she was simply lazy.
I stopped taking evening classes at the community college because
I couldn’t handle everything: the Safeway checkout job, the homework,
Luke. And the guilt of what had happened: that he might have been
alone for hours. I didn’t like to think of my wife that way, but I hated her.
When we used to talk about our dreams, she said she’d always wanted
to be an Early Childhood educator. I asked her what that meant, and she
said she wanted to operate her own preschool someday.
Now I comb the newspapers, the classifieds about this or that
preschool. Because if I find her, I will tell what she did to Luke. I will
demand that she be fired. A woman who could do that to her own son
doesn’t deserve to be with children, ever.
When Luke is older, and can be entrusted to a day care center, I
plan to take up folk singing.
If there is one thing I hope to pass on to my son, it is that he must
bring joy and enthusiasm to everything he does. As soon as he gets a
little taller, I will take him hunting for wild boar and teach him how to
weave a fine thatched hut.
Mimi Wong
Model Minority
Sanie Lam walked to her beat-up, once-silver-now-gray Acura,
which was located neither on the White Side nor the Yellow Side—as
the two halves of The Valley High School parking lot were colloquially
called—both of which were packed with Benzes, Beemers, and SUVs.
Here, the sixty-forty split between the white and the Asian American
student body manifested in a literal divide. As Sanie was not involved
in any after-school sports, she had no need to park on the White Side,
which was conveniently located closest to the gym and locker room
entrances. Positioned nearer to the school office and main academic
buildings, the Yellow Side (aka the “Asian Side”) usually filled up first.
Having overslept and consequently missed first period, Sanie had
been left to find a spot on the old basketball courts by the football
field, now used as a makeshift lot by the smokers and potheads, whose
ethnic backgrounds were evenly spread.
As Sanie turned onto the main road, she drove past the firehouse,
police station, and small commercial strip that constituted the scenic
Old Downtown. The restaurants there were the kinds with white
linen napkins (meaning they were overpriced). The stores consisted of
consignment shops selling clothes for old ladies and boutiques filled
with decorative knick-knacks and rococo antiques. Suffice it to say,
it wasn’t the kind of place for a teenager. The only marginally “cool”
hangout spot was the coffeehouse, which also served sandwiches and
gelato, and had a pool table downstairs.
At the intersection, a crossing guard waved forward a line of
kindergartners, accompanied by mothers and nannies, heading
home for the day. Passing her old elementary school at the foot of
the hill, Sanie turned onto a steep, one-lane road. She shifted gears
and felt her car hug each curve, which she could now anticipate
almost without looking. Sometimes a deer, unfazed by its human
neighbors, would calmly meander into the middle of the road. She
had been a passenger in the car with her dad for more than one scare.
She pulled into the driveway and parked the car at the top of
Crab Orchard Review
u 135
Mimi Wong
the hill, where the panoramic view was admittedly spectacular. The
house overlooked the flat expanse of Silicon Valley. Rolling hills and
woodland stretched on behind the house. Once part of an orchard,
a lone crab apple tree and some sort of citrus-bearing fruit tree were
all that remained in their yard. The house itself was old, consisting
of only one story and a carport, no garage. Her parents’ updates had
included building a pool in the backyard, slapping on a fresh coat of
paint and trim, and planting a garden in the front. Sanie’s mother had
originally elected to grow roses, but the deer kept getting at them. So
her dad started a vegetable garden instead, using chicken wire to keep
hungry critters out. Dependent upon the season, he rotated various
crops of tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage, radishes, and chayote. She found
him crouched in the dirt, surveying his work.
“You’re home early.”
“It’s a…minimum day.”
“What was that?”
“A half-day.”
“That’s nice. You want lunch? The squash is ripe. They’re going to
rot if we don’t eat them. How about I stir fry them with pork and heat
up some rice? I’ll call you when it’s ready. Keep your door open.”
“Okay.”
“Ah, Sanie? Your mother keeps calling. You should call her back.”
She had already gone inside the house. It was not like her to cut
class, then lie about it. She was normally a good student, if somewhat
unmotivated. She was what Harvard University admissions officers
jauntily referred to as a “happy middler,” satisfied with performing just
well enough. Yet, despite the fact that she did not see herself in the same
league as the other Advanced Placement students competing for the
top spot, the fear of failing was still a persistent anxiety for her. It was
precisely this selective pool of students—with their unimaginable load of
AP courses, obscenely elevated GPAs, and 1600 SAT scores, the school’s
proudly admitted applicants to Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech—the crèmede-la-crème, that made her uneasy. Every parent knew what a diploma
from the “Number Two Public High School in the State” was worth. The
exorbitant amount of money in property taxes they paid annually to live
in the affluent neighborhood afforded them the luxury of being able to
send their kids to receive the finest education that outranked even the
most expensive private institutions in the Bay Area. The numbers don’t
lie: “Highest standardized testing scores in Santa Clara County three
years in a row” read the bulletin on the school’s front lawn.
Mimi Wong
Sanie thought about her best friend, Lynn, who had been forced to
transfer schools at the beginning of the spring semester owing to the
fact that her parents could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood
after Lynn’s father lost his job. The bubble that was the economic boom
of the Internet start-ups had at last burst, leaving many Silicon Valley
residents out of work. Sanie, whose parents were both in real estate
and therefore in the clear—that is, until the market imploded a few
years later—was secured in her enrollment at VHS for the time being.
She had never been more miserable.
The kitchen filled with the smoke of green peppers that her
father had burnt in the frying pan. The spicy air made her throat burn
and her eyes leak hot tears. She was forced to abandon her backpack
and books in the hallway so that her hands could freely shield her face
as she made her way toward her father.
Humming jauntily at the kitchen counter, Arnold “Arnie” Lam,
aged 63, had grown wider over the years as he shrank in height. Still,
he liked to think of himself as a looker, as he had been in his army
days, and he thanked his maternal grandfather for the full head of
hair that remained. Standing on a wooden crate, which served as a
makeshift step stool, he hovered over a cutting board full of sliced
daikon radishes he was in the process of pickling. Into the jars filled
with murky green juice and scraps of onions and jalapeños, he would
dump the daikon chips before applying a vacuum seal—his most
recent purchase from the QVC home shopping network, which Sanie
blamed for all the useless hobbies her father had taken up since her
mother left.
“Daddy.”
He remained unmoved from the chopping block.
“Daddy, the tutor is coming at five.”
Setting down the knife, Arnie wiped his hands clean with a
dishtowel and turned to face his daughter.
“What’s that?”
“The tutor is coming today,” she repeated.
“The checkbook is over there,” he grunted before returning to his
vegetables.
Sanie would never have claimed that she and her father were
particularly close. He subscribed to an old-fashioned style of Chinese
parenting—that is, raising a child from a distance. At least she was
lucky that he never hit her, as she sometimes heard of other Chinese
Crab Orchard Review
u 137
Mimi Wong
fathers doing. The only time she could remember being punished was
for crying too much when she was two or three years old. Instead of
comforting Sanie, Arnie locked her in the bathroom. Well, technically,
he closed the bathroom door on her without locking it, but she was
too short to reach the handle by herself. Alone in the bathroom, she
continued wailing until her mother came home, got her out of there,
and unleashed a fury upon her father. From then on, she assumed
the role of Parent Number One responsible for disciplining Sanie,
in addition to managing her education and general upbringing. She
didn’t believe in punishing children with timeouts or grounding
them. Instead, not unlike the cliché of a Jewish mother, she raised her
daughter with a healthy dose of guilt to discourage bad behavior.
Sanie shuffled over to the kitchen table, whose surface had not
touched a warm plate since the family’s last dinner together a little
over three months ago. Since then, Sanie had grown accustomed
to her father taking his meals in front of the television, and hers at
her desk, usually with a Japanese manga open in front of her. At the
present moment, the table supported nothing but the piles and piles
of paperwork her father brought back with him from the office now
that he was working from home. She sifted through a week’s worth
of unread mail before she found the slim, leather-bound book.
Behind a Tupperware container full of loose change, Sanie fished for
a pen, which she used to make out the weakly sum of $180.00 owed
to her tutor. As costly as it was, the three-hour session at what Sanie
calculated to be $1/minute was a small price to pay to secure a place at
a top-tier school, her mother had reasoned, especially since the money
was coming out of her husband’s account and not hers. It was the least
he could do after the years she devoted to their unhappy marriage and
to their daughter who had never seemed to need her, anyway. But she
had extricated herself from those responsibilities now, hadn’t she?
As usual, Sanie signed the check herself under her father’s name.
His signature came as naturally as her own after the countless number
of checks, tardy slips, and the occasional parent-teacher conference
exemption form she filled out on his behalf. After tearing it neatly
along the perforated edge, she tucked away the check for safekeeping in
its usual place by the telephone under the naked, fat-bellied Buddha—
one of many figurines collected by her mother that overlooked various
rooms in the house. Her mother wasn’t religious, Sanie would explain
to guests. She was merely a hoarder.
Mimi Wong
At 5:06, she heard Jimmy Poonawalla’s bright red Mazda pull
into the driveway. She was there to intercept the door before her father,
now stripped to his undershirt and boxers in the den watching a WWII
special on the History Channel, had a chance to hear the doorbell.
“Sorry, I’m late.”
He barreled through the front door with his binders, book bag,
and study guides. Sanie directed him to their regular study area in
the dining room where her homework, textbooks, and flash cards
lay waiting. The typical session ran as follows: an hour Trig, an hour
Physics, and the last hour devoted to the SATs.
“What do we have this week?”
A mélange of origins nested in Jimmy’s hard-to-place accent—a
reflection of his birthplace in Lahore, a childhood spent in Surrey,
and university education in Boston. He was all business as he seated
himself perpendicular to Sanie, who enjoyed the small pleasure
of being able to sit at the head of the table when she studied. Like a
coach assessing the game plan, he listened attentively as she rattled off
a list of upcoming tests, problem sets, and labs due. After a moment
of consideration, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together,
signaling that the play was in motion.
“Have you ever been accused of doing something wrong? I
mean, something really bad?”
An hour later, her tutor looked up from her problem set he was
correcting. He frowned.
“I beg your pardon?”
Regretting the question, she remembered one time when he had
left one of his black binders at their house after a session. He called
the next day inquiring after its disappearance. There was no sense of
urgency in his voice that she could detect. She recalled that he had
been very pleasant and chatty over the phone, nothing out of the
ordinary. She reassured him that she did, in fact, find his binder and
that she would leave it for him the next time he came over.
After hanging up, she had gone over to the table just to double check
that the binder was not one of hers. As she leafed through, opening the
binder to a couple pages at random, she was surprised by its contents.
She had expected the usual test prep materials, maybe some SAT
vocabulary lists or Quantitative Reasoning math equations. Instead,
what she found seemed to be pages copied from an operational manual
for flying a small, single-engine plane, flight diagrams and velocity
Crab Orchard Review
u 139
Mimi Wong
charts and so forth. The events of September 11th were still fresh in
everybody’s mind, though perhaps somewhat mitigated by the fact that
California was some three thousand miles away from the Twin Towers.
There was no rubble to sift through in the Bay Area, no toxic dust to
be concerned about. She recalled how on the day that it happened, one
sophomore girl had burst into tears because she thought her father
was on a business trip in New York, but the scare was short-lived when
she found out he was actually in Boston. Later it came out that one
of the victims from the Pennsylvania crash had been a resident of the
neighboring town. But apart from that isolated story of heroism, the
community surrounding VHS remained, for the most part, untouched
by tragedy. Distance helped to lessen relevance, it seemed.
Sanie never confronted Jimmy about what she found in his binder.
She simply closed the cover, left it, and waited until it could be returned
to its proper owner. A while later, she may have mentioned her discovery
to her best friend, who returned with some sarcastic remark, over which
they both laughed. For her own selfish purposes, Sanie reasoned that
she wasn’t about to turn her tutor over to the feds. Regardless of whether
he may or may not be a terrorist, he had helped improve her SAT score
by almost two hundred points, and that’s what mattered.
He handed her homework back to her.
“This last answer is wrong. Check your math.”
When war broke out in China, Sanie’s grandparents were
forced to flee the province of Hunan. Gong Gong, as Sanie was to have
called her mother’s father, came from a well-to-do family. Po Po had
worked at a bank—a rare accomplishment for a woman back then
and a sign of good education. They would not be able to carry their
wealth with them as they ran, and so they buried their gold in hopes
of recovering it one day when they could safely return home. They
also bid goodbye to the other members of their families, assuring each
other they would be reunited in the future. They died without ever
setting foot in China again.
This was a story imprinted upon Sanie since childhood by her
mother, Iris. She had only the vaguest memories of her grandfather,
who had passed away when she was a baby. Her grandmother had been
regarded as the family matriarch. Sanie remembered that her health had
been poor in the years preceding her death, which made her seem older
than she actually was. But even as her spirit diminished, Sanie intuited
her grandmother’s familial importance, observing how she was beloved
Mimi Wong
by uncles, her one aunt, her many cousins, and of course her mother.
Iris, often with Sanie in tow, paid frequent visits to Hong Kong, where
she had grown up and where most of the Tams still resided.
“Your mother was a great beauty,” Second Uncle liked to
reminisce. “Prettiest girl in the village.”
Sanie absorbed this information very thoughtfully. Like many
young girls, she worshipped her mother until the age she began to
resent her.
Her father’s family she knew less about since his parents had
passed away before she was even born. Arnie was a good deal older
than her mother. When out with her father, just the two of them,
usually either accompanying him to the grocery store or bank, Sanie
was often mistaken for his granddaughter.
Iris Tam was just out of graduate school when she met Sanie’s
father. With her master’s degree in early childhood education, she
had landed a job as teacher at a Montessori preschool. Her employer,
Mr. Lam, was not in the business of education but rather land. He
owned the property and the school, but most of his money was in
cheap residential properties he had acquired in the 1980s and now
rented to lower-income immigrants families. From these tenants, he
also recruited some of his best workers—all Mexican. Arnie liked to
brag about how good his Spanish was. Of course, he only hired them
as contractors, construction site managers, and builders. He left the
bookkeeping and secretarial work to a small staff of young Chinese
women. And that’s where Iris came in, as he was looking to expand the
preschool to a second location. Thanks to the rise of yuppie parents
willing to drop a small fortune to ensure their young toddlers’ head
start, the pre-K business was booming.
Now, it wasn’t hard for Iris to hold Arnie’s attention once she
cornered him in his office. Her eyes twinkled as she laughed at his
attempts show off his wit. But what kept him interested was that—
unlike the other girls he took on who flitted about his office filing
papers and who were generally reliable when it came to executing
tasks with clear instructions, but otherwise were completely lost
when left to their own devices—Iris came to him with ideas. She had
suggestions for how to operate the program more efficiently, how to
hire more qualified and less expensive teachers. This woman was no
dummy, Arnie liked to joke.
He initially promoted Iris to run the second location, but eventually
she was overseeing both schools. Then, next thing he knew, over dinner,
Crab Orchard Review
u 141
Mimi Wong
she was offering him suggestions for how to expand his other
businesses. Again, it didn’t hurt that she was a knockout. But more
importantly, she didn’t seem like the run-of-the-mill, wide-eyed
provincial girl who had just moved to the states looking for a green
card. She was educated. She was ambitious. And a few months later,
she was pregnant with Arnie’s child.
The room was dark, the winter sun already dipping toward the
coastal mountain peaks. The phone stirred Sanie from her Saturday
afternoon nap. She was sleeping all the time, it seemed. Her mother
thought it was because she wasn’t getting enough vitamins.
“Hello?”
“Oh my god, get up already.”
“What for?”
“Just hurry up and come over. My sister is driving everyone crazy.
I need to NOT be in the same room as her. You have to help keep me
distracted before we get into a BIG fight.”
“Okay.”
Twenty minutes later, Sanie was lying on top of Lynn’s twin bed
in a room that she shared with her younger sister. One side of the
room was decorated with posters of old movie musicals and porcelain
figurines of ballerinas. The other, soccer paraphernalia and field
hockey sticks crossed like an X on the wall. The door was closed, but
they could hear her older sister, home for the weekend, making a scene
downstairs. Lynn rolled her eyes.
“She has, like, a martyr complex or something.”
Sanie was picking balls of lint off of Lynn’s pilling comforter.
“How is it over there, not being at VHS?”
Lynn shrugged.
“It’s fine. Way less stressful.”
“I still can’t believe they kicked you out.”
“Oh no, they didn’t just kick me out. Some crazy bitch followed
me home after school, found out where we had moved and shamed me
for breaking the law. Fuck that school.”
“I miss your old house. Remember when we used to walk home,
like, literally running, afraid we would miss Sailor Moon when it came
on after school?”
“God, we were such dorks.”
“You were such an egg.”
“Well, you’re a banana.”
Mimi Wong
Sanie was in sixth grade the first time somebody had called her that.
It might have been another Asian classmate who had said it. At the time,
it was a slap in the face, implying that she was some sort of wannabe—
yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The rationale being that she
1) didn’t speak Chinese at home, 2) didn’t play an instrument, and 3)
followed the white girls around at recess. Which was a stupid thing to
say because she didn’t follow the white girls around. It was only one girl,
Lynn. They had joined the middle school choir together.
“Didn’t that guy, whatshisname—he had that high voice—Edison,
Erwin or something like that—have a crush on you?”
“Edward Yee. And no.”
“It’s true. Everybody knew it.”
Sanie wrinkled her nose.
“Are there any cute guys in your classes?”
“Nah. They’re all dumb jocks or whatever.”
Below, more yelling ensued.
“Have you talked to your mom?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
“No.”
“If it were me, I’d want to know…”
The slamming of the front door rattled the ballerinas pirouetting
on Lynn’s shelf, which was followed by the squeal of car tires peeling
out of the driveway. From the kitchen they heard Lynn’s mother
preparing dinner. It was assumed that Sanie would be staying. They
watched as the household cat—a fat, longhaired tabby with chocolate
brown swirls—rubbed himself against the doorframe. Lynn cooed.
“Come here, my little Cocoa Puff. Come here. That’s a good boy.”
The familial pet bounded over onto Lynn’s lap and settled in for a
good scratching.
Before Iris’s disappearance, the usual mom-and-dad bickering
had morphed into something darker, angrier. The fighting had
a reached a boiling point, and from both sides came a spew of
accusations, from their mouths the hissing of base words Sanie had
yet to learn how to use. But when the strident voices and frequent
slamming of doors eventually did subside, she discovered the silence
that followed even more disturbing.
Marital strife and family drama was supposed to be the stuff of TV
and salacious town gossip. She recalled that while in the 7th grade the
Crab Orchard Review
u 143
Mimi Wong
middle school had hired two new administrators. The new principal
was a humorless, balding British man by the name of Mr. Walker,
which the kids pronounced “Mr. Wah-kuh” as a way of mocking his
stuffy style of speech. The new vice principal Ms. de la Rosa was in her
early thirties but might as well have been in her eighties with her newly
instated dress code forbidding girls to wear tank tops (a disappointment
to both male and female students alike). Only recently did Sanie hear
the tale of how a student caught the pair emerging from the bathroom
at the same time, and next thing everyone knew, Mr. Walker had left
his wife and run off with Ms. de la Rosa in one of the most glorious
scandals ever come to pass in their affluent, suburban bubble.
Otherwise, Sanie didn’t know many other kids with separated or
divorced parents, especially not any from an Asian family. Divorce
may have been a typical part of life in an American culture so
accustomed to disposable goods, but it represented a level of excess no
decent Chinese family—with their strong sense of filial piety and class
snobbery—would permit. A stable family unit was standard currency
for bragging rights, not just a trivial stereotype externally constructed,
along with straight A’s and a Mercedes in the garage. At the age of
sixteen, Sanie had long known the world she was expected to live up to.
The first thing she noticed was the kitchen table. It had been
cleared.
She found her father outside with a net skimming leaves out of the
pool. He was meticulous about cleaning the pool. Although he never
hesitated to bring one of his guys over to fix a leaky roof, replace the
boiler, or prune the branches of a tree swaying too close to the house,
he insisted on maintaining the pool himself. He swept the leaves. He
checked the chlorine levels. He cleaned the filters. It was at the deep end
of this pool that a deer had once fallen into and found himself trapped
early one morning during Sanie’s elementary school years. The nonstop
sound of splashing from the struggling deer had finally alerted her
parents to the trouble. From the kitchen window, Sanie had watched as
firefighters arrived on the scene, only to stand around scratching their
heads. How were they to lift a full-grown stag out of the pool? It had
been Sanie’s father who grabbed his trusty net and herded the exhausted
animal to swim to the shallow end, where he could not have run any
faster up those steps, out of the pool, and back into the woods. One
could still find hoof-shaped holes on the concrete steps in the pool.
“Daddy?”
Mimi Wong
He seemed to not hear her. She called for him again.
“Yes?”
“What’s going on?”
He looked up at her. She glanced at an old duffel bag that she could
only recall ever being used to pack for ski trips now sitting outside the
backdoor.
“Your mother is coming home. She doesn’t want to see me, so I’m
leaving before she gets here. Just wanted to do one last sweep. You
know your mother won’t do it…”
He trailed off, as he finished with the net and set it down.
“When did you guys decide this arrangement?”
“Yesterday.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
Sanie followed her father out to the carport as he placed his bag in
the trunk.
“So you’re leaving?”
“Your mother will be home soon.”
After watching her father drive away, Sanie went back into the
house and waited. An only child, she had grown accustomed to being
by herself, though she was secretly afraid of the dark.
It was almost midnight when she reemerged from her room. She
brushed her teeth, took out her contacts, and changed into pajamas. She
remembered that she had left the lights turned on in the kitchen and
dining room. She went to the window, peering past the underbellies
of clamoring moths and abandoned spider webs, into the darkness.
There was no sign of Iris’ car. It occurred to her that someone could
be out there, watching her. Feeling paranoid, she flipped off all the
switches except one, before running back into her room. The one by
the front door she left on, just in case, to light the way home.
Crab Orchard Review
u 145
Jed Myers
Coho Run
The tall estuary grass bends low
toward the rocky mouth of the river—
a weave of broad green bands
left wet and aglow where the braided ebb
current swept hours ago. Each swath
its own shade, true to its own
ghost of a snaking channel, each ribbon
of blades a glancing incidence
and reflection under the gray of clouds.
The water’s pull has painted its flag
on the low-tide hours, ragged stripes
the greens of spring and summer—shadowy,
silver, and blue greens, all the brushstrokes
stalks and thin strips of exposed
river-grass that bows and bows
in repose, as in reverence,
as if it knows the next flood
tide will rise. The sea will invade
the river again—these stems
fresh-immersed by the millions will stand
and dance, undulant in the ripple matrix,
glad to hide the homecoming silvers
who must pass under the eagles’ gaze.
We’d come to watch these great birds
gather in the overhanging alders,
see them arc down wide and seize
live shimmers from the shallows. What
we’ve found, arriving in cloudy quiet
between the shows, in the slack
time of memory and imminence,
Jed Myers
all the long grass flat on the stones—
no word for such act in our mouths,
no hope for such bow in our bones.
Crab Orchard Review
u 147
Portrait of Memory with Drought
We were fourteen when the city declared an embargo on
rain, shut off the valves and drained the town—toilet bowls,
waterparks, birthing pools: anything too slick with wet.
No one would name the threat, but we’d catch our parents
whispering to each other about war. Some of the water went
renegade, rushed through forgotten pipes and sprung up
wherever the ground gave way—often in high schools and
girls’ bedrooms, where heels were already digging for a way
out. Our classroom flooded, and Mr. L’s algebra was annexed
to isolation in a trailer at the far end of a dusty field. The
walk there was long, longer on the way back, and sometimes
we’d linger to avoid the dry noon heat. At night, we’d gird
ourselves against the parched air and rub our faces with
Vaseline. We’d walk miles to abandoned canals, creep past
the caution tape and PENALTY FOR LOOTING signs to
collect fossils: mostly fragments of glass, unmatched shoes,
the occasional bedpost, dulled blades, keys. Then, we’d load
our bodies into tubs, packing our bounty around us, and
soak in the substance of found things. We’d come to school
bruised and chafed, with splinters embedded in our shins,
badges of our transgressions. Girls had been taken away for
less, but this is not why Mr. L asked me to stay behind that day.
The floods kept coming. The city used the last of its assets to
erect a water tower as tall as the Rockies to the east. I stopped
scavenging for the solid, took instead to scooping water into
jars I hid under the bed. I had seen what war made bloom
in a man, could still feel the tip of the feather caress my feet
until giggles turned terror, see his fixed grin, hear him tell me
how dismantled wings could unlock in the skin a hunger so
vast it gorges itself, devours touch until everything turns fire.
All around the town, men strapped with vacuums sucked up
guerrilla lakes and fed the liquid to the tower like sacrifice.
Everywhere I looked I could see hunger creep into the corners
of these men’s mouths. I followed to rescue the droplets they
missed, would gather whatever water I could. Found strands
of hair and bits of bone in the absence left by every pool. I
stacked jars under my bed. High enough to lift the mattress
to the ceiling. I slept among the glass. They wanted to see the
city on fire. I hoarded puddles like secrets. Trapped a tsunami
under my bed. They fed girls to the tower like sacrifice. I
gathered myself into glass. They set us all on fire. Cracked
every jar. Unleashed a tsunami. We let the city drown.
Crab Orchard Review
u 149
Candace Pearson
Outside Tehachapi Prison
Giant posters in the Tehachapi High School gym
promise Blue Hawaii, imagined by inmates
of the men’s correctional facility. Amid crooked palm trees
and threat of lava, I look for secret messages,
pleas for escape, while the boy I came with speaks
to anyone but me. Something happened between the time
he invited me to the prom, this boy I barely knew,
and my arrival at his house twenty miles from home.
An old girlfriend reappeared, perhaps, as old girlfriends
will do. She may even be in this cavernous room
watching me, as I stand alone, encased in taffeta
blue as a mythical sea.
Sometimes you say yes on impulse; in a quickening
heart, you hold up 7-Eleven with a toy gun, walk out
of a store wearing cashmere no one will miss or dance
with a stranger because fireflies formed a nimbus
around his hair and you couldn’t admit
that it was a trick of light and dark. My date
trolls the edges of center court, huddled in whispers
with his friends. This is what I know about men:
they speak in a code of shrugs and silences, of odd-long
glances and laughter like the throwing of bones.
I study a life-sized poster of a surfer. In one curling corner,
the artist’s signature: Lonelyboy.
Candace Pearson
I picture rolls of paper and paints laid out in the yard
where men earn points making prom decor.
Asked by the parole board, how did you spend your time,
will Lonelyboy (meth addict, car jacker, thief) say,
I have been redeemed by gentle deceit? Outside,
the Tehachapi mountains send off sparks, a phenomenon
of granite and contracted heat, revealing for a moment
places where it might be possible to hide.
Crab Orchard Review
u 151
Kevin Phan
Some Things Which Filled Us
with a Sense of Loitering
Rose bushes we failed to water died
in rows. In wheelbarrows we stacked
hundreds for the compost.
A drift of pigs on the loose
crashed the apple orchard—
our sweetness, plundered.
The economy of bruises.
“Eyes for an eye” or
“karmic debt.”
A country dog flagpole-chained
on a tight ligature at the vineyard—
her water bowl chipped, in dust.
Orson’s ingrown toe suddenly pulsed
green viscous, & Doctor Whoever
hoisted the snipped toe between forceps.
Pigs trucked along Highway 1.
5 a.m. Pink snouts jabbed through
half-rotted planks.
The instant the hillside eroded
our temple backslid, gold-leaf
& statues peppered the hillock.
Kevin Phan
85-hour work weeks. My spine
compacted under brick loads—
bloody stools dyed the toilet water.
Crab Orchard Review
u 153
Vanesha Pravin
Sleep, Wake, Sleep
Central Valley, CA 2009
Now you know to separate intuition
from paranoia. This is why you
look down or look away reflexively.
Down lies the earth, the trusted repository.
Away is a country with spectacle so seductive,
you become a voyeur, forgetting the self,
forgetting a self is even there to be forged.
It is a strange time, a strange new race:
the pundit sharing platitudes, the surgery-face
over-shares—their fifteen minutes continue
to be renewed. So many, in their silence,
absorbing trivia about people they’ve never
met. The throat is dry and the mare
at ease. In a fenced field, grass shorn,
soft and white. So much joy in this world.
The curved horns of the goat. The beavers’
gazebo, built of saplings gnawed to stumps.
One day, a rare gift: a kit fox in daylight
turns around, stares right through you.
Or does it? Do you discount your way of
knowing, of telling, assume it has failed?
A life burns, crystals form in its char.
Sometimes living filaments cut through—
the sky becomes a meadow, the world playfully
inverted. You run barefoot and your arches
rise below the brush of cumulus. Hills are
cloudy with scrub and starred with cattle.
The teats swollen, the udders inflamed.
You float into the slow and steady rise of
methane and the milk is drunk, and the cheese
hardens in its rind and you sleep, wake, sleep.
Maxine Scates
Speed
Back to the task of cutting each withered rose
into its bucket, jay screeching, warbler trilling,
someone hammering in the distance. Back to the still
life wondering if we ever left though the family gathers
to remind us of the container out of which we spill
yet are most surely held by or so say the aunts
of the twenty year old who got the engineering gene
from a long dead great uncle. But, toasts given,
the party was fine and there was time for dinner
with an old friend, a trip to the Getty Villa featuring
a classical garden though as we read about Getty
we were struck by how the biographers left out the part
about the kidnappers who cut off his grandson’s ear
when the old man would not pay the ransom. But
didn’t he love art, and haven’t they given back most
of what they stole, and isn’t the museum free,
the garden wonderful, planted with pomegranate,
peach and plum, with lemon-scented thyme, sea pink,
lamb’s ear and fig trees? These were the stillest moments,
these and those spent in front of a bust of Polyphemus,
his one gaping eye, and lest we think things had not
always been as they are, a Roman Bronze, A.D. 25,
of a “Coin Bank Shaped as a Beggar Girl,” coin slot
cut above her breast, hand outstretched. The next day
we took my mother, whose 95th birthday we’d celebrated,
back to downtown where she said the streets
had been moved and the hills grown smaller and this
was true of Bunker Hill, shaved away for its towers,
Angel’s Flight climbing its gentled slopes which we
came upon after we drove the route she’d walked to school
and found the same school and the two vacant lots
she’d cut through to get there that had stayed vacant all
Crab Orchard Review
u 155
Maxine Scates
of these years. Heading north a day later we passed
through the James Dean Memorial Junction and as I’ve
just found, got the facts wrong. He was not alone.
His and another car met head-on. He was twenty four
and though Giant’s plot had hurled him into
a swaggering middle age, nothing imagined the old man
he’d be had he lived. Soon, a motorcycle raced beside us
on a frontage road, a train roared from the opposite direction,
our parallel lives meeting and lasting only a second
as we sped on to our motel where the day before a flash fire
had burned 110 acres between I–5 and it,
right up to the pool, singeing the trees but sparing the caged
parakeets, and started, said the nine months pregnant
receptionist who had fled and not gone into labor,
by the usual suspects, either a homeless man or three boys
out behind the Del Taco.
Russell Working
The Day Job
Heh. Showed him, Won McManigal thought, glancing at his
boss for the day, who was steering the van out of a customer’s driveway
onto the switchbacked street toward the San Fernando Valley floor.
In the side mirror he checked out his coworkers in back, Mexicans in
paint-splattered white coveralls thumbing their wages, one of them in
a cowboy hat. Showed their asses, too, he thought.
Won was a thirty-six-year-old American with a strong Korean
face, a gymnast’s build, and long hair spilling out of a bandana
knotted pirate-style in back. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves
torn off to show off his tattoos of a USA flag, a Raiders logo, a howling
wolf, and the head of Tommy Trojan. As fate would have it, he was
crippled in one leg, and when he walked any distance, he used
crutches, the aluminum kind with C-shaped metal cuffs encircling
his forearms. But his leg brace allowed him to move around without
crutches, hands free, so he had found work for today as an interior
housepainter.
It was his first honest day’s labor (albeit off-the-books) since he’d
gotten out of jail, a case that involved some chump who’d shown up
late for a rendezvous at a tavern only to find his girlfriend making
out with Won, the lucky recipient of her congeniality because he
happened to be sitting next to her at the bar. The guy had drawn a
buck knife he’d carried in case the occasion presented itself to gut a
moose in suburban L.A. Won had had no choice but to take the blade
away and offer a demonstration in turkey carving. Naturally, this act
of self defense had landed Won, not his assailant, in Men’s Central,
since the chick sided with the boyfriend. Homeless and jobless, he’d
been recycling bottles and cans until last week, when he had heard
about the day labor site here in Woodland Hills. Since then he’d been
showing up every morning at sunrise on Fallbrook Avenue, between
Ventura and Del Valle.
He stood with a hundred Mexicans and Guatemalans and God
only knew what other day laborers ( jornaleros was apparently the
Crab Orchard Review
u 157
Russell Working
term, English being outlawed for normal communications in L.A.
anymore). The men swarmed every car that pulled up, even a Prius
driven by some girl who’d obviously taken a wrong turn and was
bug-eyed with terror. As who could blame her? The workers hollered
and thumped their chests with their stubby fingers to indicate: Pick
me! They all knew the names of the crew bosses, the remodelers, the
construction foremen. The men shouted, “Hey, Jimmy, remember
me?” “Tim, I work for you!” Often the transaction was in Spanish,
rendering Won the alien in his homeland. Of course, nobody chose
him. When the bosses saw his crutches, they looked away. He
moved to the back of the crowd, but that put him at a competitive
disadvantage.
The other laborers mostly ignored him, or glanced at him with
pitying looks, as if asking, What trail of misfortune brings you here,
gringo? His eyes replied, Who the fuck’s asking, Juan Valdez?—and
they looked away. Once he was offered half an egg salad sandwich
from 7-Eleven. Down the hatch. Until today, that was all he had to
show for a week’s worth of hustling.
But today a red van marked DECKER INTERIORS had pulled
up and the boss stepped out into the crush of men: a tall white guy
who looked around uneasily and asked for three men. Won spoke up:
“Hey, mister, I speak English.”
“You’re not Mexican?”
“Hell, no! U.S. citizen.”
“What’s your name?”
“Won.”
“All right then, Juan. You for starters.”
“No, not Hwon, W-O-N. It’s Korean.”
“Got it. I’m Paul Decker. Get in.”
As Won hobbled up, the crowd grumbled, and somebody, maybe
the guy in the cowboy hat, who they called Sebastián, muttered
something that probably meant crippled. He was a squat man with
an Eskimo’s goatee and a face kneaded out of river mud. His eyes
were turned down at the outer corners. When Won held his gaze, the
vaquero blinked.
Paul’s eyes took in Won’s crutches. Clearly, he was having second
thoughts, but he did not know how to back out. “How come you’re
doing day labor if you’re a citizen?”
“Beats McDonald’s,” Won said.
“There’s a lot of climbing on ladders, and you’ll need your hands.”
Russell Working
“I can get around without the crutches,” Won said. “Look, I
been out here every day for a week, and nobody’ll take me. I done
construction before, painted houses.” This was a lie, but he was
good with his hands, knew how to repair plumbing or fix just about
anything that went wrong with a car. “Them wetbacks won’t be able to
keep up.”
The hardening around the other men’s eyes showed they
understood, but having alluded to Won’s disability, Herr Decker
apparently felt unable to worm out of hiring him.
“All right, but I don’t want to hear that word on the job,” Paul said.
“I don’t need conflict on my crew.”
“You da man.”
Paul selected two others: Sebastián and a gawky man with
sideburns, both of whom wore tool belts that indicated construction
experience. Won grabbed the front, and the others sat in back, amid
the brushes and stepladders and buckets of paint. As they drove, he
vowed he would show them all.
Which he had. Even volunteered to paint the ceiling, the
roller flicking in his eyes all day. Refused all breaks, worked through
lunch, even when Paul said, “Dude, you proved your point. Sit down
for a minute.” Heh. Afterwards, his neck was crimped and his back
hurt. As they zigzagged down Cerrillos, they passed palms with
plaited trunks, Hondas and Volvos parked flush against houses on
stilts, a wall topped by plaster lions sporting the hairstyles of 1970s
pop stars. Obviously a rich neighborhood. Not Hollywood rich, all
right, but fat and sassy for sure: pharmacists, lawyers, and dentists,
like the couple Won had worked for today, a husband-wife outfit who
thanks to the miracle of tooth decay could afford a hillside home with
a pool table and a deck out back and a sex Jacuzzi overlooking the
smog bowl of L.A. The dental duo even had a housekeeper (Mexican,
like everybody else in California), a plump girl in a uniform the color
of a spanked bottom, who refused to speak to the crew when they
showed up to spread out tarps. Somebody had forgotten to tell Her
Hispanic Majesty about the repainting, and she was upset. Never
mind, Won’s mood today was unspoilable.
The jornaleros laughed at a joke they chose not to share with mere
gringos. Won’s crutches lay on the floor between the front seats. Was
that amusing?
Tell me about it, he thought. Beats crippled brains, amigos. Look
Crab Orchard Review
u 159
Russell Working
at them, dragging things down for everybody including their own
dumbass selves. What’s wrong with May-hee-co, where you got a
cornfield and a burro and can shoot tequila poppers at the cantina
Friday night with some señorita? Sounded like a nice setup to Won,
especially when you factored in the fishing, two thousand miles of
coastline up and down Baja. But instead they blow their savings to get
to this smoghole to work one-day gigs that didn’t pay jack thanks to
an endless supply of men similarly desperate for work and ignorant
of constitutional rights. Which, come to think of it, there weren’t any
no more.
As for Mr. Paul Decker of Decker Interiors? Preoccupied, not an
asshole, didn’t try to short you on your pay or be the best friend of
the working man. But Won smelled a phony like everyone else on
earth. Driving a Ford E-Series van with his name on the side like
some celebrity DJ doing live broadcasts from a shopping mall. Won
would’ve bet a hundred dollars Paul had never slept in it. Fuck him.
Fuck them all, these “struggling small businessmen.”
Paul’s foot was working the brake, brow furrowed. Probably
ruminating on what shade of white was whitest of all. Clearly, the dude
had never suffered a day in his life. You saw guys like him everywhere,
miserable about the hand life had dealt them but oblivious to the
gift of two healthy legs as they jaywalked through traffic, sprinted
for a bus, swung at a softball pitch, jogged a mile in steps no bigger
than their shoe size, or kicked their buddy sidelong in the ass while
carrying a tuba home from middle school band practice. But instead
of being grateful for his legs, dancing his ass off every goddamned
day, he probably never played a sport and only clanked weights three
times a week on a Universal machine.
Won had been born Song Won-ki in Taegu, South Korea, and
his birth parents had dumped him in an orphanage after he contracted
polio as a baby. He retained only a single memory of the orphanage,
of a girl playing with a red ball. He hit her and took it away. That set
the pattern. He was always taking and hurting. When he was five he
had been brought to the States (legally!) by a childless couple named
McManigal, who owned a gas station in West Hills. But he could not be
good, no matter how hard he tried. Smart-assed his teachers, fought on
the school bus, shoplifted candy and MAD magazines. His dad kicked
him out of the house when he was eighteen after he stole their best
friends’ jewelry during their Fourth of July barbecue. He still felt bad
Russell Working
about that, because the Davises had been like second parents, giving
him presents every birthday and Christmas.
These days he didn’t complain about his lot in life, but he bore
on his shoulders a boulder of rage and grief for the Won McManigal
who had never been given the chance to be. He had an athlete’s gift,
he felt it in his arms and chest and hips, the parts of him that worked,
in his mind, even, in his gut, in the way he read football plays on
TV. He would have been one of the greats. People gave him pitying
looks when he spouted off his I coulda been a contenda spiel, so he
kept it to himself nowadays, but it was true. He would have been
quarterbacking his team, the Raiders. But as it was, in high school
he had been one of the managers, popular among the athletes, most
of whom he could beat arm wrestling, having muscled up with every
step he took on his crutches. He knew the playbook as well as the
coaches. One day, the first- and second-string quarterbacks were
warming up on the practice field, each heaving the ball to a receiver,
who caught it and handed it to the other passer to fire back. Won
grabbed a football from a net bag and rocketed it, knocking their ball
out of the sky. Everyone looked around for the culprit, their glances
passing over Won and moving on to likelier suspects, then returning
in disbelief to the crippled kid slapping the dirt from his hands.
“Jesus, Won,” Coach O’Connor called. “Too bad you can’t scramble,
you’d beat these jokers out of a job.” Heh. A taste of the glory that
should have been his.
They pulled into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven at Fallbrook and
Ventura, and Won’s triumphant mood faded as he thought ahead to the
night on the streets and the hustle for work tomorrow. The Mexicans
piled out of the back and headed off, but Won remained where he sat.
“So, how’d I do?” he said.
“Gotta admit, you showed us all up,” Paul said.
“So you’d hire me again?”
“Obviously, if I needed— I mean, I don’t have a job going every day.”
Paul glanced at the passenger door, willing him to clear out. But
Won persisted, “Don’t we need to finish the job on Cerrillos?”
“I’m not trying to be cagey, but it’s one day at a time.” Paul
scratched at a drip of seagull crap on the windshield beyond the
smeary arc left by the wipers. It was outside the glass, dimrod. “I’m
dealing with some serious shit,” he added. “My wife’s disappeared.”
“I hear you. Girl dumped me, once. Gotta pick up the pieces and
move on. But next time you need a crew, I’m in, right?”
Crab Orchard Review
u 161
Russell Working
Paul’s face tightened. “No, see, she vanished. Kidnapped, or—”
He shook himself. “Sorry, I’m—Yeah, you earned it.”
Only then did Won shake his hand and get out.
Before heading to his campsite nearby, he entered a phone kiosk
in the parking lot, the plastic hood crusty with dried puke. (Where
better to projectile-vomit than a phone booth?) He plugged in the
quarters and called Janey, his ex. Today was the third time since his
release from Men’s Central that he’d tried to speak to his seven-yearold daughter, Carroll, named after Pete Carroll, former coach of the
USC Trojans, although Janey insisted on calling her by her middle
name, Amber. So far he hadn’t succeeded in getting the girl on the
phone. But with eighty dollars in his wallet, he felt confident enough
to call again.
Won had not held a regular job in two years, since the sheet metal
factory, where half the employees were illegals. (Undocumented, my
ass. They had plenty of documentation the bosses were happy to
accept: Social Security cards, birth certificates, driver’s licenses—all
of them forged.) After a mishap in which Won bolted a piece of steel
to his hand, a doctor said Won qualified for a SSI benefit of $674 a
month. He signed up, although a quarter of the total was deducted
to cover his overdue child support. He didn’t begrudge Carroll the
money, but Janey was getting welfare even though she was living
with a guy named Tim who ran a Safeway produce department, a
matter she concealed from the authorities. Meanwhile, Won was
sleeping in his 1995 Dodge van. Two years ago, things had taken a
turn for the worse: he was arrested for the bar fight, and he lost his
SSI benefits while in jail. Now he needed to figure out how to get
them reinstated. Trouble was, his documents had been in the van
when it was forfeited, prosecutors arguing that he had been drugrunning because they had found marijuana residue from a previous
owner in a floor mat. This was infuriating, since they never did file
narcotics charges, and of all the mistakes he’d made in life, drug
abuse was not among them. Doping was not the way of Pete Carroll,
the Trojans. Lacking the use of his legs, he did not wish to fry his
brains as well. Tough shit: the prosecutors kept the fucking van. So
now he had no home, no wheels, and no SSI. And no employer would
hire an ex-con and a bum.
He hoped Carroll would answer the phone, but he heard Janey’s
fat voice.
“Hey,” he said. “Me. Can I talk to Carroll?”
Russell Working
“My answer hasn’t changed.”
“Come on, she’s my daughter.”
“Neglect your child support for a year, and suddenly you want to
chitchat?” Janey said. “I told her you’re behind in your payments. She
needs to know what her daddy thinks of her.”
Best he knew, he was legally entitled to visitation, but now
that Janey refused him access, he had no idea where to turn. The
cops wouldn’t give a shit. He couldn’t afford a lawyer. If there was
a document he needed to fill out to get some judge to consider the
matter, he had no idea what it was. He was left to plead: “Why are you
poisoning her against me?”
“Tim’s a better dad than you’ll ever be,” Janey said. “You should
see the presents he buys her: Breyer horses, a cowgirl outfit. She
adores that man.”
“Before you go on the warpath, I got good news. I found a job.”
She snorted. “Doing what, armed robbery?”
“Housepainting. I started this morning. I can send you fifty
bucks today.”
“You got paid already? What is this, day labor?”
“No, the guy hires Mexicans, but with me, it’s a supervisory
position.”
“Ha!” Janey said. “Won McManigal doing day labor with a
bunch of beaners. Fitting irony. I bet you’re sleeping on the streets,
aren’t you?”
“What ‘fitting irony?’” said Won. “I’m bossing them, not working
with them. Come on, can’t I at least say hi to Carroll?”
“No, she thinks you’re still in prison, and I say—”
“So tell her I’m out,” he said. “And it wasn’t prison. Men’s Central.”
“—and I say—all right: jail, prison: she don’t know the goddamned distinction. I say, let her think that. She gets upset after you
call. Last time, she threw a tantrum with Tim, and things got out of
hand with her hiding under the bed and him having to drag her out.
If I ever see some of that cash, I’ll feel different.”
“I told you, I’m sending it today.”
“We’ll talk when it gets here.”
Bitch. Won slammed down the receiver. He headed uphill on
Fallbrook, planting his crutches, swinging his legs and body forward.
Pain shot down his spine. The weakness leaving the body, is all. At
Del Valle, paralleling the freeway, he turned left and headed east past
a line of stucco houses and apartments on this side and, on across
Crab Orchard Review
u 163
Russell Working
the street, a strip of dry brush and trees and a chainlink fence that
buffered US 101. Two blocks ahead, some men were standing there,
bums like himself. A burnt smell reached Won’s nostrils. He could
see a charred mattress was leaning against the chainlink. With a sick
feeling, he began galloping, legs-crutches, legs-crutches.
Where Sale Avenue T-boned into 101, a pedestrian walkway
crossed under the freeway. Won pushed through the Mexicans
gathered there and entered the tunnel. The air smelled of burnt
lighter fluid, and the tunnel was filled with scorched bedrolls and
mattresses. Some asshole had come through and ignited their
belongings. Won had taken his daypack with him, so he still had his
clothes, but he had lost his blanket and mattress.
“Fuck,” he said.
The others had followed him in. Sebastián, the guy in the cowboy
hat from today’s crew, said, “Maybe it is the cops. They no like us.”
A furious discussion followed, juro fidelidad a la bandera de los
Estados Unidos de América.
In fourth grade, Won had been required to memorize the Pledge
of Allegiance in Spanish, and whenever Mexicans jabbered, it took
him back to a classroom full of children placing their hands over
their heart and speaking in tongues. He used to remember this in
Men’s Central, where the muttered schemes of the Latinos were not
so innocent, all those Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia with their
tattoos of an eagle on a cactus or a blue hand with a white M on
the palm. Won had hung with the whites, who accepted him as an
honorary honky, even those with IRISH PRIDE or bladed swastikas
inked on their pimply chests. Between the Mexicans and Salvadorans
and Asians and Crips and Bloods, the whites were outgunned, and
Won was a good man to have on your side. As far as his own race,
the Vietnamese and Cambodians and whatnot were foreigners
to him, with their cultic taboos and ching-how-dow kind of talk.
They regarded Won as a banana. The whites themselves (crackas,
the blacks called them, a term that hilariously reminded him of a
kindergarten snack of saltines and peanut butter) were a sorry-assed
band of Übermenschen: scrawny crank addicts with dirt-colored
teeth, shirtless fatsos wearing sleeves of ink, muscleheads making
Churchillian declarations about what the White People Shall Not
Stand For, but comporting themselves meekly when led past a cell
full of Niggaz With Attitude. They would have laughed to see him
now, standing in the dark with a bunch of “Hispanics.”
Russell Working
Who were sizing up Won as they spoke. He heard, “No, no,
no,” and “gringo.” But then Sebastián, talking rapidly, mimed a pair
of crutches paddling like oars, and they looked down at their own
sootprints. Fuck them, he had better things to do than serve as a
freak show for illegals. He lunged out into the dayblind.
Sebastián called, “Hey, Juan, wait.”
“It’s Won. W-O-N.”
“OK, man, but listen: they know some guys who got the
apartment. Maybe room for us, sleep on a floor couple nights if we
give some little money. You want to come?”
“Your friends didn’t look too happy about that,” Won said.
“Ignore those hombres,” Sebastián said. “I say them, ‘We are on
crew together, Juan and me. He is OK guy.’”
There was nothing threatening in Sebastián’s melancholy eyes,
but if they were planning to mess with Won McManigal, bring it on.
These dwarves were in for a surprise if they thought the crippled guy
would be a pushover. Anyhow, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to
sleep indoors and maybe get a shower.
Won followed the men to a two-bedroom apartment on
Woodlake in which seven others were already staying. The place
smelled of beans and tortillas and stewing carnitas and sweated wine
and beer. After a discussion, Sebastián asked Won for ten dollars. “Is
OK, we stay here a couple nights.”
That evening Won seized the opportunity to wash up. The place
wasn’t the Hilton, for sure. A box of used toilet paper sat by the can
(you guys planning to Fed-Ex it home?), and the shower curtain bar
was covered with drying socks, which he piled on the back of the
toilet. He wrenched open the louvered glass window and aired the
room of its diaperish fug, reminiscent of Carroll’s toddlerhood.
Won pulled off his shirt and scrubbed it in the sink with a bar
of soap, admiring his reflection—the powerful shoulders and slim
waist and long hair and handsome face that made chicks hit on him
in bars, God love them. Knife marks crisscrossed his chest, lines
and Vs and gouges that girls loved to kiss, unlike the ugly surgery
scars on his legs, which he never let anyone see, for he removed his
pants in the dark. From the waist up, you could’ve mistaken him for
a pro athlete. Won McManigal, tell me about that series. Three heartstopping throws right through the defenders. Touchdown scramble on
fourth and goal. Did you ever doubt you could pull it off? He’d reply,
Troy, it’s not about me. I knew my teammates would come through.
Crab Orchard Review
u 165
Russell Working
Something classy like that. He flexed for the mirror, fists over his
shoulders. Those pecs and deltoids, those abs a heavyweight could
hammer away at. Maybe it was gay, but it turned him on to look at his
own torso, seeing himself through the eyes of a gorgeous woman. He
slopped his shirt in the suds, rinsed it, wrung it out. He would dry it
overnight on the balcony.
Now for your filthy hide, McManigal. He sat on the closed toilet
seat and untied the shoelaces of his right shoe, on his good leg. Just
as he was kicking it off, the doorknob rattled. Any fool could tell
somebody was in here.
Won called, “Occupied!”
His left leg took more effort. The twin bars of the brace were
attached to the sole of his shoe. He peeled the leg of his jeans
down from the top and ripped open the Velcro straps on the brace;
only then did he untie and loosen the shoe and crawl back out of
the whole unit, pants and brace. He stood it in a corner. Beneath
the brace he wore long underwear in all weather, to prevent it
from chaffing his skin. He peeled off the underwear—graying and
frayed—and scrutinized his legs. Quite frankly, they stank, of sweat
and the grime of homelessness and something deeper—a crippled
odor, as he thought of it, the stink of polio, or its lingering aftercurse
in the muscles of this useless leg, with its puny foot like that of a
Chinese concubine. On his good leg, the scars were thin pink lines
dating from when they’d shortened it to match the other. On the
left, however, the scars were pink and puffy thanks to the dumbfuck
doctors. The night he’d come home from the hospital he had woken
up screaming. Mom had held him while Dad called the doctor, who
said post-op pain was normal. It was Won’s first surgery, and his
parents sat up with him holding his hands and praying with him.
Only when the cast came off did the doctors see: big freaking scars
like pink tapeworms. He could see guilt and anger in the faces of his
parents, shock of his “medical team.” Oops. Oh, well, you’re crippled,
who gives a shit how ugly you look? Nobody thought to apologize to
Won.
He washed the long underwear, too. Without his brace he was
helpless. He hopped on his good leg into the shower. In jail the shower
was his most vulnerable time, but due to his ferocity and his alliance
with the whites, he had avoided assaults and rape. Keeping a hand
on the wall for balance, he soaped himself—the powerful torso, the
uncircumcised dick, the legs that diminished the further down you
Russell Working
went. His soapy hand awakened a ticking in his loins. It had been a
long time since he had gotten laid, not since before jail, when he’d
had a van he could bring girls home to. He would have appreciated
the chance to jerk off, thanks very much, but the bonehead in the
hall pounded on the door again. Probably dancing around holding
his crotch like a preschooler. Won finished up, dried himself on the
hand towel, and dressed in the same stinking jeans. But he quickly
washed the spare pair of Levis and underwear from his backpack.
The banging intensified. He opened up to find Sebastián and two
others lined up outside. “Is you, Juan? What is wrong with you, you
washing clothes? I almost piss my pants.”
“Sorry, Sebastián, didn’t know it was you.”
Slam.
That night they ate carnitas and beans and corn tortillas.
(Strange, though: no guac or nacho cheese.) As they sat in the living
room, several men declaimed toasts, and Sebastián, who had forgiven
Won, asked him for one. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he objected, but
Sebastián said, “Say in English. I translate.” So Won cleared his
throat and looked around at the expectant faces, and goddamn it all
to hell if he didn’t feel a beery sense of the brotherhood of all fucking
men. He had to hand it to these guys, taking in a homeless gringo
like him. He thought of saying this, but to preserve his position, it
was necessary to act as if this was his due. After all, he had paid for
his space on the carpet. So he said, “To the senoritas!” No translation
was needed; the men roared their approval. Afterwards was a poker
game in which Won cleaned everyone out, winning $163 toward his
deadbeat dad debt. A great evening in all, even if his success at cards
spoiled the mood of the others. Sore losers was all.
Late that night, six men, Won included, crashed in the living
room, sleeping in their clothes. Beside him, Sebastián crossed
himself and prayed silently. This sparked a pang of memory for Won:
of praying with his father who sat on the edge of his bed. Our Father,
who aren’t in heaven. Most of the others nodded off right away, by the
sound of it, but his back and neck hurt too much to sleep. Sebastián
shifted and cleared his throat.
Finally Won whispered, “Hey, Sebastián, how come you guys
come to L.A.? Why not find work in Mexico instead of this shithole?”
“Oh, this is not shithole, man,” Sebastián said. “You should see
where I live in Mexico, that is shithole.”
Crab Orchard Review
u 167
Russell Working
“Heh. But it ain’t fair. You’re taking our jobs.”
“No American want the jobs we work,” Sebastián said.
“I do.”
“You are the exception.”
“Others would, too,” Won said, “if the bosses didn’t use you guys
to keep the wages down.”
“You want to argue me, man, but you cannot because I no
disagree,” said Sebastián. “The bosses, they are advantaging us. What
else can I do? Is very bad at home.”
“Well, at least you got two good legs.”
“True,” Sebastian said gravely. “I am lucky.”
Sebastián had migrated from Mexico City, where he supported
a family of six. His wife also laundered clothes and cleaned houses.
But there was no way to make ends meet, whereas here in L.A. he
earned enough to wire money home. He had come alone, and he
missed his family, especially the youngest, Efrain, who was nine. For
a time he had shared an apartment, but when the day jobs became
scarce he was forced out.
“So it’s better living on the street than in your own bed in Mexico?”
“Oh, no. Living under a bridge is the most bad. Sometimes you
can’t asleep, you sitting with your eyes open all night, because you
think, maybe somebody come to look for trouble. You know what I
mean, you live the same. Maybe gangs coming and shoot, shoot, shoot
your body. Back in Mexico City, I got a home. But like I say, no way to
support.”
“I got a kid I’m supporting, too, a girl,” Won said, “but my wife
never lets me see her.”
“So you know what is to miss someone.”
“That’s for sure.”
“What is her name, your girl?”
“Carroll,” said Won. “Named after Pete Carroll of the USC
Trojans, greatest coach in college football. But they forced him out.
It’s a racket, the NCAA. This is real football I’m talking about, not that
pussy-footin’ soccer shit you guys watch.”
“American football? This is the sport I no comprehend. Big men:
boom! These hats they wear, crashing.”
“Maybe someday we can watch a game on TV, and I’ll learn you
the rules. You’re in America, man.”
“Yeah, I curious this sport very much.”
Nearby, somebody spoke, probably telling them to shut up. Sebastián
Russell Working
yawned and settled down, but Won lay sleepless in a room fumigated
by beery snores. So Sebastián was a dad, too, the poor bastard. It was
always the dads who missed out on seeing their kids, who had to work
in faraway cities or were deployed in Iraq or were denied visitation
because they were bums living under a freeway. As he slipped toward
sleepfulness, he remembered how Carroll had been back when they
were still living together. A total brat, tantrums every time you told
her to put on her shoes or stop confiscating some girl’s doll in the
sandbox. A lot like her dad, truth be told. She was a tomboy, and the
McManigals were always stopping their little monkey from falling
off jungle gyms or dashing into the street or yanking the ear of their
neighbor’s beagle. Nowadays she was into horses. While surviving on
SSI, Won would go out at night, raiding Dumpsters for bottles and
cans, tossing aside the smelly plastic packets that he was disgusted to
discover contained globs of dog shit (who the hell packaged up dog
shit?)—all to save up and buy her a Groovy Girl Midnight Star Horse.
It was a stuffed pony, mostly black, with a flowing purple mane and
sparkly hooves and a saddle detailed in white, pink, purple, and green.
What Janey had said on the phone today had stung: that what’s-hisface was a better daddy than Won.
Won yawned and rolled on his side, his backpack under his
head. In Men’s Central he’d been sustained by memories of Carroll,
like the time they’d gone horseback riding, Won sitting behind, the
girl in front holding the saddle horn, singing her “pony song.” A
rip-off: three dollars for three minutes, but she loved it. The nag,
shivering off flies, had plodded in a circle, head down, and when the
ride ended Carroll and Won tried to hand her down to Janey, she’d
screamed and clung to the mane. She’d been what, three?
No doubt, a daddy’s girl. Hated the doll parties that Janey staged,
the pink dresses. She’d rather go out on the lawn with Daddy and play
catch, scampering this way and that on her pudgy legs.
My daughter can run, he would think. This body of mine has
fathered a child who can walk and jump and skip, like practically
every other human on the planet. He never envied her. He rejoiced. It
redeemed his ruined physicality.
Sebastián began pledging allegiance in his sleep, juro fidelidad a
la bandera. Funny. You see them out on Fallbrook, elbowing out the
guy on crutches, and it never occurs to you they’d left families back
home, had borne sorrows of their own.
Well, solly, Challie, Won McManigal wouldn’t be painting
Crab Orchard Review
u 169
Russell Working
houses for long. The next time he saw Carroll, he’d have a wad of
cash in his pocket, a thousand bucks in the bank. A million, heh.
The lottery. He’d slip her a hundred and say, “This is for horse stuff.
Clothes, toys, bed sheets: whatever you want. Don’t let Mom know.”
If only he could hold onto this job. What if housepainting did
turn into a regular gig? You could always hope. If he worked hard, if
Decker Interiors grew, maybe Mr. Celebrity Housepainter really would
need a fulltime foreman, keep these jokers in line. The job wouldn’t be
bad if it weren’t for the pain in Won’s spine.
But pain was a phantom, a nothing, a nada, was the weakness
leaving the body. If it hurt, it meant he was earning. Which in turn
meant he had a chance of seeing Carroll again.
He stretched, and his hand brushed Sebastián’s rolled-up jacket,
which Señor Howdy Doody had moved off of. Won’s fingers found
their way into a pocket and discovered a smooth bulky thing. A
wallet! Dipshit, don’t you realize these jokers might rob you? He
removed it from the pocket and traced his finger along the opening.
Fat with cash. How much? No telling in the dark.
A righteous anger boiled up in Won. He plunged the wallet into
his pocket. And froze, mortified at himself. Then quietly he gathered
his crutches and backpack and slipped out the front door.
He descended the stairs, cut down the alley in back and turned
at the corner under the L.A. nightglow, where he paused under a
streetlamp in front of an ivy-covered house to count his take. More
than three hundred bucks. Also a California driver’s license with the
name Sebastián Ramirez on it. How’d he get that? Won pocketed the
cash and the license. Maybe he could sell it. A plastic picture holder
fell out of the wallet. Won picked it up. The only photo was a family
portrait. Didn’t look like Mama Cass Ramirez was starving to death,
no matter what Sebastián said. The youngest child, maybe five, was
sitting on Sebastián’s lap. The happiness in his eyes caused a stiletto of
remorse to stab up under Won’s sternum.
Should’ve robbed somebody more deserving, he thought. But this
is American money, amigo, capisce? Not yours. Our money. Mine. He
flung the wallet and the photo into the ivy.
Let the prosecution now call multitudes of witnesses confirming
that Won McManigal is a prick. No contest, your honor. But I got to
see Carroll again. She was the only one in this whole whirligig world
who gave a rat’s ass about Won McManigal. If he didn’t fight to see
her, she’d think Daddy didn’t love her.
Russell Working
Then it hit him that the sole person on earth who would
understand this was the cowboy sawing logs up there on the floor of
that stinking apartment. Fitting irony though it may be.
Crab Orchard Review
u 171
Martha Silano
This Highway’s a Ribbon,
and this is where the ribbon
ends, oily and slick, gray
bridge over gray water.
This is where the ribbon
frays, bumper to bumper
to 7A, Shoulder Closed
and every leaf in flames.
In this asphalt forest,
rubus made for you and me,
laced with butadiene, paradox
and illusion intertwining
like these brambles
with the English Ivy. Yellow
poplars yell at the dog
with its head out the window,
at the lumber-lumbering trucks,
while a sign announces,
with arrows in three directions,
Only, Only, Only. Me-n-my blinker;
you-n-your lane, all of us Legacies
because we’re the thread in the fabric
of America’s freeway system,
a golden valley dreamed up
by GMC, all of us American
Dream drupes too poisonous
to eat. As I was driving I saw
those endless brake lights,
saw you joining the bloodorange maples, tailpipes wagging
for the goop extracted, spewed
into lakes, sounds, seas; sulfur
and silicates sloughing from tires
Martha Silano
into creeks. All of us messing with the pH, screwing up
the salmon’s gumption to spawn,
while scattered on the median,
impossibly magenta, innumerable spent-butterfly wings. This land Tacoma-choked, Rubiconriddled, XLT, 370Z. From the .com castle to the PCB-laden waters, this land is made for making
time, good time. For Focus
and Fusion. For Escape.
Crab Orchard Review
u 173
Kirby Anne Snell
Geography Lesson
Chuuk, Micronesia
Here, there is no word for green.
Just six thousand miles of blue Pacific
to reach anywhere with a name I knew
on my childhood’s classroom globe.
Here, children ask me where I’m from
and then ask what kind of an island
Illinois is. They have no name
for those brown grass horizons,
highways, any borders but the tide’s
pressing lines, the beach’s drifting
sands—in any direction,
a ten-minute walk to crash into waves.
We paint a map on the school’s wall,
colors and continents spreading
across cinderblock like fantasy.
They’ve never seen this before,
don’t understand how colors
equal countries and black lines mark
borders between one place
and the next. They don’t know how
you can stand in the middle of green
or yellow or pink, walk for days
and weeks and never dream of ocean,
never imagine the pull of the tides
Kirby Anne Snell
on your heartbeat. All they know
is this forever rising blue,
the waves that stop
their lives short.
They ask where they are
in this rainbow mystery.
I point to the speck of black
on the far right edge, almost
invisible, an afterthought
dot of marker on this painted
panorama. They go quiet,
cover their home with fingers,
fit their whole world
beneath a thumb.
Crab Orchard Review
u 175
Kirby Anne Snell
Island Funeral
Chuuk, Micronesia
Our uncle dies in the morning
while we walk to school.
Drinking his coffee thick
with sugar when we leave home—
fallen on the cookhouse floor with stopped
heart before we’ve reached
the far end of the island.
The news is there before us.
Children, dismissed and bored,
steal chalk and scrawl their names
compulsively on blackboards, empty
desks, cinderblock walls.
Classes are canceled.
On this small island,
he is everyone’s uncle.
We turn home, tide chasing us
back through the taro patch.
He is already laid out.
Limbs separated from the concrete
floor by a woven mat, sagging
jaw draped in a rag. Outside,
his brothers craft a hasty coffin
with boards from his own hut—
chasing the work of tropical heat
on stilled flesh.
Women swell the house
in weeping waves. Men
brace the walls, cross-legged,
silent. Children, brought to pay
Kirby Anne Snell
respects, press his wilting hands.
Together we sing the night away
from his body.
We cannot be alone.
Morning’s silence kills the echo
of nails hammered into the coffin’s warped
lid—covering the body of a man
whose name we will no longer say.
Shallow sand behind the house
receives the box.
Children, freed and bored,
chase each other compulsively
across the narrow beach
into the sea.
Crab Orchard Review
u 177
Rebecca Starks
Examination of Mono Lake
When the war is over, there will be time enough
to pull through the thread.
—the Sewing Machine Historian of Vilna
1.
If lakes rise to patch where the land’s rubbed thin
as the Paiutes tell it, then when your level falls
does it mean the land’s begun to heal, like skin?
The brine-fly eaters were worth the salt they seasoned with. By thin they dealt no judgment,
no wound, but the common weal—they saw with each haul
how the land changes hands that work its easement
beyond all recognition as their own,
until it shrugs them off, indifferent.
Mending has meant tearing old seams open,
wrecked passable gettings-by, themselves traumas:
the shy migration of Wilson’s Phalarope
denied vistas through the Sierra Nevada,
springs that once cemented clouds of limestone
diverted to steam L.A. fitness saunas,
the pattern foraging beaks dart and sew
in screens of brine shrimp, dilated and diluted—
California Gulls, more poor historians. 178 u Crab Orchard Review
Rebecca Starks
2.
Given that the recent ruling against pollution
wind-blown your way may have reversed this trend,
how long a view should we take of these uprootings?
As long as you have a new frontier, you’ll defend to the death of what you meant to improve the slide from short-sighted to cosmic end. Late-combers of my shores who come to root
and thread among these stranded tufa staves, blind to their futile prairie dog salute,
with each step send up swarms of flies in waves
that set, magnetic, in newsprint, raising a screen
between them and the lives it keeps at bay.
Pore too close, the letters start to bleed.
Tufa, light as loofa and opera buffa,
scrubs history clean. It isn’t travertine—
curried and pounded to a smooth bouquet
by the palms and feet of a blind crush of pilgrims—
or sand that’s pedaled into drifts, but beautycum-junk. Beside the protean Colosseum—
gone from circus, fortress, monastery, to shrine,
quarry, cemetery; misuse to museum;
shroud to drop-scene clouds slip to change behind—
I’m nothing more than a rusted colander,
relict, in which what’s been poured in remains.
3.
Rodin once famously called sculpture ‘l’art
du trou et de la bosse.’ The art of the lump and hole.
Do you consider yourself an artist, a sculptor? Crab Orchard Review
u 179
Rebecca Starks
More a vessel, if a lake can be a vessel
of what it spurns, and drop without breaking.
The towers, though, could be my Gates of Hell:
castles of sand crumbling up, rude and vacant;
pitted, ragged crusts of sun-bleached plaster poured over the muffled profile of the mason—
its dense, congested, oncogenic vapor
lacks the bluster of skin or muscle, bone.
It has the look of pathos without nerves.
A witness to its menagerie—iguanas
and saints, koalas and hurrahs, jeers and ghouls— glosses all but the Sirenic yawns
that give him pause, like the skull-and-bone chapel
mortared as Évora’s memento mori
under the epigraph: Time Immemorial.
4.
The more you pause, the further on your journey
you’ll be, the priest’s grim poem ends—meaning near
Death. Who is this witness of whom you speak?
He’s in a long hall of a thousand years.
Dragged to the light, his eyes track interstitial
holes in the round, each despairing as it appears—
none are copies, none originals;
curios, scraps of Darwin’s il-fa-presto
pressed punctuated into quasi-fossils
whose Braille ripples with the account of a ghetto
sewn by a man with open-eyed needle—
make it quick. But all the wrongs he embedded
Rebecca Starks
never threaded their way out of the cradle he harrowed into the light, forgetting that paper,
like all that’s lived, is biodegradable.
Though within each shifting cell the inverse
is true: had he rigged the twisting ladders’ rungs
its exiled DNA would have been preserved.
5.
That binary record of life and its extinction
assumes a mind to read it in the future.
If we don’t colonize space, will there be one?
Single cell-fossils found entombed in the tufa
give you clues where to look for life on Mars:
in basins like mine where minerals intrude
and concentrate, until the hope they harbor
of a less common fate evaporates—
the same sun and meteorites bombard
us both. What’s certain in this twilight age? Coyotes running along the land’s new scars
gorge on Eared Grebes where they once safely staged;
green rabbit brush takes cover, tipping its fur
in salt. Beneath me, bubbles of impatience
form testaments to what endures, while mirrored
on the surface hands lined like nets, or nests,
skim larvae quick as spirits, before they rise.
Gathering clouds, unsecured, as if to test
a long red thread pulls through another sunrise.
Crab Orchard Review
u 181
Kenny Tanemura
Evacuation Day
This area was ordinarily lonely and deserted
but now it was gradually filling up with silent,
labeled Japanese, standing self-consciously
among their seabags and suitcases. Everyone
was dressed…each according to his idea of
where he was going.
—Monica Sone, from Nisei Daughter
I think I would have worn a sack suit,
planning my Ivy League career
after the war, & who knows if there would be
dances in camp. Nisei swung
like Goodman & Parker
& Dorsey & Ellington,
jitterbugged & quarterturned in quick steps. Takes
some learning to turn a lady too
& the men did
study up, Lindy Hopped,
knew what was to be
known. I’d at least look like a free man
in a sack suit
even if I wasn’t, might make me
feel some inner liberty
with those 3 buttons on my
jacket, with a single vent
in the back. Cuffed pants
holding me up
like crutches might,
heavy, thick cuffs
keeping me straight & neat
& not suspect. Grandma wore
Kenny Tanemura
a blueprint shirt dress
like a shield, as if hateful gazes
could bounce off the shoulder
pads, clink off the wooden buttons,
get snagged in the sash
belt. Suffocate there.
As if the puffed sleeve
could blow it right back
to the offender like a poisoned
kiss. She was like that,
tough even in crepe.
Look at the way she dressed
her son that day,
in a thick gray wool
suit, as if the bulk &
fiber of it would keep
the freezing sentiments
from his skin, would retain
enough air to keep him alive.
She put him in a starched shirt,
refusing to let a wrinkle show.
Like the way she used to
cover his head with a hat
in the heat, & hold his hand
walking from one farm
to the other for work.
Crab Orchard Review
u 183
Kenny Tanemura
Great Depression
In the Great Depression, there was dust
in your hair and in your shoes, your sleeves
were rolled up with it and there was dust
in your squinting glare, as if you were watching
someone or someone was watching you.
My father tried to eat the dirt and it
covered his face, making him darker than the
sun’s stain on his skin. But he didn’t
know the frayed denim of his suspenders
were unraveling, didn’t know the calluses
on his feet were a response to pressure.
You protected him from it and
he doesn’t know. Your sodium level has gone
up again, like the weather yesterday,
and your son won’t let the doctors give you
more electrolytes, has sent you back to the hospice
where you can be comfortable.
I tell you this because you don’t know
where you are. It’s the bitterness most will remember
you for. Why didn’t you ever tell them
you were a tenant farmer and still
saved to buy a house, learn and teach
the art of tea, collect kimonos? You guided
your son safely through the long roads between
farms, put a hat on his head and held
his hand, and you never told him the contract
with the landowner could be broken by
anything, that anything can be broken.
Debra Gwartney
Her Hair
A few years ago, I got an email from a stranger who’d discovered
I have a thing for a long-dead missionary named Narcissa Prentiss
Whitman. She wrote to tell me that an Oregon university had a piece
of Narcissa’s hair in its archives. The school she mentioned, Pacific
University near Portland, was one where I, it happened, taught summer
writing workshops, and where I’d sat many times on the hard pews in
the chapel of Old College Hall to listen to student readings without an
inkling that above my head in a storage room, and contained in what
I imagined to be an innocuous box or cloth bag of some sort, was hair
off Narcissa Whitman’s very head.
That is, if the stranger was correct and this piece of hair had been
wrapped up and preserved for posterity, a stinky strand, a spiderinfested wad matted in its slow decomposition to dust. Why was I
chomping to see it? Why was I so eager to study what I assumed had
been unkindly whacked from the woman’s skull?
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was a protestant believer who’d
traveled three thousand miles to do God’s work in 1836, the first
woman missionary in the West, the first—so they say—white woman
to cross the Rocky Mountains, the first white woman to give birth to a
white baby in what was then Oregon Territory.
On November 29, 1847, she was also the only woman to be killed
during a massacre that ended thirteen other lives, an attack perpetrated
by those she and her husband had come to save, the Cayuse people.
After she was dead, her body crumpled in an irrigation ditch, the band
of marauders who’d torn through the mission near current day Walla
Walla smashed her head with rifle butts and tomahawks to, under
tribal tradition, keep her from moving on to the after life. That’s how
much they loathed her.
The hacking of her skull must have released her hair into the
wind. Is that what happened? There are plenty of apocryphal reports
about strands of hair strewn about bloody Waiilatpu, and plenty of
Crab Orchard Review
u 185
Debra Gwartney
tales about men who visited the mission to tuck a lock of Narcissa’s
strawberry-blond hair in their shirt pockets for good luck. Stored
upstairs in the Pacific museum—was it a nineteenth-century mountain
man’s memento mori?
I’d already seen one curl of Narcissa hair, picked from the fields
of Waiilatpu. A strand of blond, clean, bloodless hair, looped into a
circle, tied with a ribbon and glued to hearty cardstock in an ornate
frame. This hair sits inside an antique cabinet in the archives of
Whitman College, an institution named after the dead missionaries,
Narcissa and her husband Marcus, in Walla Walla. “A lock of Mrs.
Whitman’s hair found at Whitman Mission March 1848 by James
Ballieu presented to Whitman College in 1888 by Mrs. America
Grant.” So says an inscription, beneath the oval of hair, printed in
intricate scroll. Ballieu had tromped through Waiilatpu some months
after the massacre, after the rescue of the survivors, after the chasing
off/killing of the Cayuse by Oregon’s newly formed militia. Ballieu
retrieved the hair and held it as a souvenir until he died and his family
turned it over to the college. A single pale curl, yellow as fresh butter,
behind glass, which frankly failed to disclose a single thing about who
Narcissa was even after I stared at it; even after I waited for this wisp
of protein to cough up some sense of her. (What did get to me was
the color—whimsical, a sun-kissed blond, and I think of Narcissa as
anything but whimsical.) What did I think another unloosed hank
would tell me about Narcissa Whitman that I didn’t already know?
Still, I was determined to see Pacific’s twist of hair.
It’s a mystery why Clarissa Prentiss named her temperamental
first daughter Narcissa. The other girls were Harriet and Jane and
Mary, and there was another Clarissa born there at the end. Why
Narcissa? Because of the trite rhyme with the mother’s name? Or the
flower? It had to be the latter. Mother Clarissa did not usually go in
for trite though perhaps she had a fondness for this cousin to the iris.
Neither Clarissa nor the Judge, Narcissa’s father—not exactly educated
people—were likely to have read the Narcissus myth, and if they had
they would have condemned it as pagan storytelling: the beautiful boy,
dearly loved, could not return affection, so Artemis cursed the callous
child to be entranced by his own image in a pond. Self-adoration to
the point that Narcissus lost contact with all others and even with
his own bodily needs until he could neither eat nor drink and died
of starvation (though some versions of the myth have him stabbing
Debra Gwartney
himself, his spilled blood providing the nourishment for the spring
flower with a spot of red at its center).
If Narcissus’s vanities were legendary, so were—to the handful
who knew her well—Narcissa’s: she prized her long blond hair with
a tinge of red, yes, but she was especially proud of her singing voice.
People jammed into the Prentiss living room, some riding over from
the far corners of New York’s Steuben County, if Narcissa was putting
on a performance. Even as a child, every song she belted out was in
celebration of God. “Christians were melted to tears, and hardened
sinners bowed their heads and wept bitterly,” wrote a man from her
village of Prattsburgh, who’d squeezed into the house for a concert.
Clarissa, whose religious fervor bordered on fanaticism, didn’t
much like the concerts. Mother Prentiss wouldn’t allow herself to grin
or to laugh: a reflection of her piety. She urged her daughter to contain
her pleasure in kind. “I wish Narcissa would not always have so much
company,” the mother is said to have muttered often to her husband.
Clarissa had been swept into a movement that consumed New
England—sinners tumbled to their knees to beg for God’s mercy and
to open their hearts to Christ throughout what was soon called The
Burned Over District. This was the Second Great Awakening, and
Clarissa was a devoted servant to its newly espoused ideals: “all who
exercise repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus will
be immediately pardoned and justified…through the merits of the
Redeemer.” Mother Clarissa was born again, and soon led Narcissa
to a revival meeting—where those who accepted Christ as a personal
savior, a relationship unsanctioned by organized religion before this
time, wept and moaned and threw themselves to the ground.
The experience exploded like a cannon in eleven-year-old
Narcissa’s breast.
Narcissa had lifted her face toward God since infancy (with
Clarissa’s aid; at Clarissa’s bidding). After the revival, the girl excluded
most thoughts and relationships but this one with the Father and
with the Son. And, well, with the mother. By age fifteen, Narcissa was
committed to getting herself a missionary post no matter what, and
Clarissa was keen on this very shape for her daughter’s future. The girl
would give herself up to a spiritual life rather than settle for an ordinary
marriage and child-raising. No house full of squalling babies and
delicate vases and furniture for Narcissa—this daughter was destined
for bigger things.
Despite the Good Works done by their sister, though, the BostonCrab Orchard Review
u 187
Debra Gwartney
based missionary board refused Narcissa when she first applied. If
she was to go West, as she desired, the board wanted Narcissa to be
married. You’d think they’d worry about some other matters, as well:
Narcissa’s complete lack of contact outside her cozy New England
town, for one, or her stunningly naïve notion of others’ desire for her
religion. But, marriage was the board’s sole concern. The aim was to
send out married couples to bend and mold the natives into productive
citizens and members of the faithful flock.
But Narcissa showed little interest in marriage. Instead, she went
to school to learn to be a teacher, a necessary skill for a missionary.
Some afternoons after classes, after prayers, lovely Narcissa sat talking
with a certain young man, a sniveler, a whiner, who probably gave off
a putrid stench in the only dark suit he owned, but a man who, she
was certain, needed her counsel and her strict views on faith. He was
soft, round-faced, pissy when there was no apparent cause to mope,
and ostracized from the others because he’d been born to a mother
who wasn’t married—unforgiveable back then. The man his mother
later wed loathed the boy, whipped the bastard boy, and cast him out
of the house as soon as the boy could possibly make it on his own.
Henry Spalding used this unhappy childhood to turn himself into a
complaining and manipulative man. Everyone said so. Here at their
school was the enchanting (and bossy: everybody said so) Narcissa
giving him her attention. Because of his unfortunate birth, a benefactor
had provided for Henry’s education, money to attend seminary and
become ordained as a minister. (The irony being that Narcissa’s future
husband, whom she had not yet met during the school years, was doing
all he could to raise funds for seminary. His heart’s desire since he
was a child was to be the Reverend Whitman, this Marcus who hadn’t
exactly had a grand childhood, either. After his father died, Marcus
was sent to Massachusetts to live with Uncle Freedom Whitman, who
spent the next ten years ensuring that Marcus was a “pious boy,” a
life of rigid worship that led to a missionary life. However, there was
no money for expensive seminary and no benefactors in the wings;
the family could spare funds only for medical school. Disappointing!
And yet with no other choice, Marcus had to settle for Dr. before his
Whitman, a lesser title that Spalding never let him forget.)
Back to school days: Henry Spalding was completely taken with
the generous-hearted and unyielding-in-her-faith young woman—
all that kittenish, flowing hair, all those pretty songs from her pretty
throat—who often listened to his carping and urged him in his
Debra Gwartney
prayerful quests. Maybe she was surprised, but no one else was, that
he was smitten and could accept no other, not ever, for his wife. Henry
Spalding, who desired a missionary post as much as the object of his
affection, proposed to Narcissa. He proposed marriage as well as a
journey across the country to the Dark West, where they would bring
enlightenment to the heathens and be together, apart from friends and
family, relying devotedly and exclusively on each other.
When Narcissa refused this smelly young man, flat out, no
question, no need to think it over, he was furious. He wouldn’t let
her rejection lie, and thus began to hound her. With letters, missives,
with visits she didn’t want. He came around to the Prentiss house; he
begged for her attentions at school. No, no, Mr. Spalding. Leave me
alone. Finally the father told the suitor to get lost. And at that point,
his beloved, the darling Narcissa, became Henry’s enemy. The darkest
of evil and selfish women. The one to be squashed, the one to be
condemned. As one biographer writes of Henry Spalding, “He would
not forgive her until she was dead.”
How could Narcissa have known that eight years after meeting
and spurning Henry Spalding—a period during which he wrote
to the mission board to defame her, urging members to reject the
flighty Narcissa for any mission, she is a horrible woman!—and also
a period during which he married a well-grounded but mousey and
frail woman named Eliza Hart—he would be the only acceptable
board choice for the journey to the frontier? Narcissa had briefly
met, and quickly gotten hitched to, Marcus around her twenty-sixth
birthday, and she did so only because this doctor—who seemed nice
enough, docile, a little sickly with a pain in his side he couldn’t selfdiagnose and yet able to build her a decent house while filling native
souls with God’s love—could get her assigned to a post in the West.
The two couples, neither one happy about the pairing, would, their
bosses instructed, travel side by side for three thousand miles, for five
months, little fresh food, one chance to do laundry, their only bed the
hard ground. No reality show producer could have planned it better.
Over here, the spurned and ugly Henry ladling on the insults every
day; on the other side of the camp, Marcus too distracted and perhaps
overly kind, a man unaccustomed to the level of nastiness spewing
from an ordained minister, to slug Henry in the paunchy gut. Eliza
was busy doing everything she could not to keel over and die (the rest
thought for sure that she would. Pretty much daily). And morningsick Narcissa was left to wonder—I just have to believe she did—why
Crab Orchard Review
u 189
Debra Gwartney
her God had stuck her in a cauldron of unhappiness with this ugly,
bitter man. “He is one who never ought to have come,” Narcissa wrote
her mother about Spalding in one of her heavy letters home (loads of
letters home, many with carefully worded complaints about her lonely
existence, her friendless days). “My dear husband has suffered more
from him in consequence of his wicked jealousy, and his great pique
toward me, than can be known in this world.”
He would not forgive her until she was dead.
The Pacific archivist was kind and young and, it turned out,
tantalized by the story passed on by the stranger and my description
of what I had decided had happened (the tale in my mind being that
Narcissa’s hair was off her murdered head, transported from the
burned ruins of Waiilatpu by someone who’d been there, stored these
one hundred sixty years later in a closet in Forest Grove, Oregon). She
was up for spending an hour or so searching for that creepy hank of
hair—we’d both agreed that hair from a person long dead is creepy,
though neither of us could say what creeped us out about it.
Once the archivist had unlocked the closet door in the far corner
of the second floor, and we’d both squeezed into the narrow space, she
began pulling down boxes, apologizing for the mish-mash of stuffupon-stuff and for the lack of organization. The university was the
first to be established west of the Continental Divide, packed to its gills
with history of the frontier. The young archivist set a box promising a
nugget of such history on a center table and opened the lid to a hill of
cracked and yellow human teeth piled against one side. In the corner
of the room, a horsehair coat hung from a jerry-rigged rack. Another
container held an early optometrist’s display of glass eyeballs. But no
strawberry blond hair. No tangled wad—or so I had it in my mind—
scooped up from the gravel of Narcissa’s death place. I got antsy and
I squeezed past the archivist, sneezing from things-grown-dank-andmusty dust, and pointing to high shelves. I stepped on a stool to reach
for boxes myself, wanting to see everything, the whole of it. The young
woman held up a hand. That was enough, she said. Give her time. She’d
do some investigation, she told me as she ushered me out, and would
get back to me.
I drove home disappointed about not seeing the hair, but
working on the mystery of from there to here. My connect-the-dots
game wasn’t yet connecting. Let’s say someone had picked up a handful
Debra Gwartney
of hair off the bloody Palouse plains around Waiilatpu a day or two after
Narcissa’s death—I was guessing one of Narcissa’s adopted daughters,
the Sager girls, though they don’t mention their new mother’s hair
in accounts of the massacre and that seems a strange omission. But
stick with this idea, that one of the four Sagers who’d survived the
massacre had retrieved the hair. Not the youngest, who was a toddler,
but the others who were fond of this woman who’d taken them in
after their parents died on the Oregon Trail. In my mind, Catharine
Sager, the eldest—or maybe Elizabeth, the second—wound and tied
and transported the hair with her when she was finally rescued from
Cayuse captivity on a freezing cold night in 1848.
Which leads to the question of how the hair got out of a Sager
girl pocket and onto the shelves of this little museum in Forest Grove.
Pacific, first called the Tualatin Academy, was founded in the late 1840s,
chartered by a brand new legislature (a full ten years before statehood)
as the first university of the West. The school’s founder meant to house
and feed and educate orphans off the Oregon Trail, all those kids who
found themselves in the middle of the vast nowhere with nobody
to care for them and no place to settle (the Sagers were far from the
only ones to suffer this fate). Once the school got the nod from a most
nascent government, it needed trustees and one of the first trustees, a
man most eager to take on the role, was named Alanson Hinman. It
took me a while to figure it out, but here was my lynchpin.
Hinman had arrived in Oregon Territory at the height of
the mad rush of emigration: he was a single man in one of the several
wagon trains to roll through Waiilatpu in 1844. He decided not to press
on to the Willamette Valley with the others; he’d stay at the mission
and find a good post with the Whitmans, who’d had eight years to
create comforts and the assurance of food. After the death of their one
daughter, who drowned in the nearby river, Marcus and Narcissa had
packed their house to its studs with abandoned, orphaned children—
twelve total, including the recent arrival of the gang of Sagers, seven
weary, sick children who’d never before even stepped foot in a church,
let alone lived a God-centered existence. Marcus hired Hinman to
serve as religious guide and teacher to the children.
What did Hinman know about religious pedagogy? Nothing. Yet
he expressed a willingness to instruct the youngsters of the compound
and, perhaps more thrilling to the Whitmans, he was ready to convert
to their faith. Hinman was first in line when Marcus offered a day of
Crab Orchard Review
u 191
Debra Gwartney
river baptisms that spring. Sure, save his soul, dry him off and give the
man a teaching job.
In the schoolroom—originally built to educate the Cayuse, a
scheme that had been abandoned—Hinman made up for his lack of
skills by bullying the children. He was downright awful and, with
some of the boys, the verbal ire became slaps, kicks, whippings. He
was, according to Catharine Sager, “one of those small-souled tyrants
that could take delight in torturing helpless children, and who, under
a cloak of religion, hid a black licentious heart.”
But when the children complained to the Whitmans about Hinman’s
pointed boot and rod, they were told that, “whatever the teacher did
was right.”
Hinman moved on after less than a year—to the relief of every child
at Waiilatpu—though only because he was ready to seek a different kind
of fortune and not because the adults had finally decided to protect their
children from daily corporal punishment. The Whitmans were fond of
their newly converted friend and apparently sorry to see him leave—he
took his new teaching credentials, such as they were, and went to work for
a different school. Two years later, Marcus convinced the Boston board
to set up a mission for Hinman near The Dalles. Marcus sent his nephew,
Perrin Whitman, to help. How teenaged Perrin fared at the hand of this
quick-to-violence man isn’t known, but at least the young man was away
from Waiilatpu, from certain death, when the Cayuse attacked and killed
every male (over the age of twelve) in the compound. When he heard
about the Whitmans’ deaths, Hinman hurried far away from any hint of
unsettled Indian tribes, somehow landing a position for himself as trustee
of Pacific University. The location of one piece of Narcissa’s hair.
Here my version of the story suffered a gap. Narcissa dies, head is
crushed, hair flies about, someone picks up a strand, probably a Sager
daughter, and…passes it on to Hinman? Unlikely. The Sager girls had
no affection for the man. Once he left, they didn’t want to see him again,
ever. Hinman didn’t stop by Waiilatpu on his way out; like Spalding,
he left it to others to rescue the fifty women and children held hostage
by the Cayuse. There’s no indication that Hinman even saw the four
surviving Sagers again, nor did he arrange to have any of the twiceorphaned girls—who had nowhere to go after their second set of parents,
as well as their brothers and a sister, died in front of them—brought to
the school created expressly for Oregon Trail orphans. Jerk.
So how did he come by Narcissa’s hair?
Debra Gwartney
About a year after my first visit to the Pacific archives,
I contacted the new archivist at the university and asked if I could
search again for the strand off Narcissa’s head. This time the answer
was no, I wouldn’t be granted access to the room. The archivist would
do her best to locate the hair and would contact me when she had.
I waited. I wrote her again. I waited some more. I arranged to drive
to Pacific, three hours from where I live—if I was standing in front of
her, she’d have to let me look through boxes, right? She suggested we
cancel the appointment, because she hadn’t yet located any hair.
Then, a week or two later, I got an email from the archivist with
a photo attached. Narcissa’s hair. I printed out the photo and sat on
the soft chair in my studio, staring. There it was, the piece of Narcissa
I’d been looking for. To what end, I still don’t know. In fact, the blackand-white image in my hands brought up more questions, solving not
a single riddle, about Narcissa Prentiss Whitman.
Pacific’s piece of Narcissa was not a loose lock of hair—not in the
least like the curl I’d seen at Whitman College, tied with a ribbon. This
was not a strand picked up off the desolate grounds of Waiilatpu as I’d
thought. The picture in front of me was of a wreath. Maybe two inches
across. A complex, skilled bit of art constructed entirely from human
hair. “Narcissa Whitman’s hair, braided by her and sent in a note to
Alanson Hinman who spent the winter of 1844 at the Whitman Station,
and was in charge of the Dalles Station in 1847 at time of massacre.” So
states that anonymous note—shaky handwriting—accompanying the
pale, blond wreath of human hair. So. It was mailed by Narcissa to that
wretched man Hinman as a gift.
The discovery of the wreath of hair spurred me to contact the
newly hired archivist at Whitman College. Might you have any other
pieces of Narcissa Whitman’s hair? That was my note to her, and she
responded that in fact, yes, in the archives at Whitman College—and
despite my visit to that room years earlier when I had been told that
James Ballieu’s souvenir was the one and only—she had five.
As soon as I could manage, I got to Walla Walla, into the basement
of the Whitman library, to sit at a large table in the archives where the
kind assistant archivist, Bill, had already piled five envelopes, each of
which held a strand of Narcissa Whitman’s hair:
1) Out of the first envelope came a loose strand of brown hair,
not even close to blond, and looped onto a piece of paper, on
which is written this note: “This is supposed to be a lock of
Crab Orchard Review
u 193
Debra Gwartney
Mrs. Dr. Whitman’s hair. It was in this book in 1867 when
Reverend Cushing Eells gave this book to Mrs. Martha Jane
Bessy. Signed, Marion B. Bessy.”
Dated May 22, 1929.
2) A slight strand of yellow hair, loose, without the adornment
of a ribbon or even twine, along with this letter:
Escondido, California, 9/29/1899
President S.B.L. Penrose, Walla Walla, Washington
Dear Sir:
I have in my possession what is said to be,- [sic] a lock of
Mrs. Mark Whitman’s hair. Mrs. Rector, a former resident of
Washington, tells this story concerning it.
As Mr. Rector and another soldier who had known Mr.
and Mrs. Whitman were assisting near the spot where the
unfortunate victims fell, at the time of that fearful Massacre
of the Missionaries in 1845, a lock of golden hair lying on
the ground before them caught their attention. On closer
examination, the soldier whose name she had forgotten said
‘There lies a lock of Mrs. Whitman’s hair.’ Then gave it to
Mr. Rector, who gave it to his wife, who recently gave me a
small part of it when I told her I thought I could find some
surviving friend who would cherish so sacred a relic. Can you
ascertain through some of her friends whether her hair was
golden or if this probably belonged to some other victim of
the massacre? If this can be identified, I shall be happy to
send it to her nearest relative or convey it to the college at
Walla Walla as a relic.
Hoping to hear from you soon, I will close this note of
peculiar import.
Sincerely,
(Mrs.) Sarah M. Wyckoff
Debra Gwartney
Escondido, California 10/12
Pres. S.B.L. Penrose
Dear Sir,
I am happy to return this lock of hair to the place that
holds so dear the missiary [sic] and devotion of Mr. and
Mrs. Marcus Whitman. No doubt the cruel ax that ‘cut their
quivering flesh’ as they lay dying severed this lock from her
head and it laid concealed for nearly two years—as I think it
was in 1849 that it was found by the two soldiers of the war
with the Indians of that time.
I have retained but a small part of the lock I send you.
When we think of your college we can but pray that its future
usefulness may be commensurate with the sacrifice it cost
this sainted couple who gave their lives for it.
Sincerely yours,
Sarah M. Wyckoff
3) In the third envelope, a folded black square of card stock
and a letter:
Narcissa Whitman’s Hair
Hopefully this will remain with a sentimentalist for I
am one when it comes to things like this. Inside is part of
a single hair from a curl of Narcissa’s, which she gave to a
girlfriend prior to her departure in 1836 for Old Oregon.
The curl is normally at this time on display at the Rushville,
N.Y., Central School with Marcus Whitman’s 1826 license to
practice medicine. One short hair, which had become loose,
was saved and divided into three pieces, of which this is one.
Be Careful Please.
Signed, Ross Woodbridge, Pittsford, N.Y., December 12, 1970
Crab Orchard Review
u 195
Debra Gwartney
I opened the black card stock and promptly called Bill over from
his desk. “Someone took it! You’ve been robbed,” I insisted, jerking
the card toward him. He studied the surface in his quiet way, and then
pointed out the faintest evidence of a human hair. I peered in closer:
and there, on the black card, I saw it—stapled and then scotch taped.
One-third of one single hair.
4)In the fourth envelope, two letters and, clearly, the oldest
strand of hair.
A tight circle of gray—maybe just dusty and aged to a color
that’s nothing like the others—tied with a ribbon, glued to
a thin piece of paper, on which is written, “Mrs. Whitman’s
hair.”
San Luis Obispo, Ca. July 2000
Dear Mr. Dodd,
I sent you a lock of Narcissa Whitman’s hair and I want to
tell you how I understand it came to me.
When my parents, Roy Whitman and Kathryn Eells had
to dismantle their home, I inherited the writing desk of
my grandmother and the lock of hair I sent you was in the
small drawer.…At Sarah’s death, the desk was acquired by
my parents and subsequently came to me. According to the
book “Father Eells” by Myron Eells, Cushing Eells arrived at
Waiilatpu a day after the massacre and therefore he probably
would have acquired the lock of hair at that time. This
information is partly from “Father Eells” and partly from my
parents.
Sincerely,
Florence Eells McLennan
The first four envelopes laid open in front of me, the letters folded
out on the table, each strand of hair sitting on top of the note that
described its origins. Bill left me alone unless I called him over in
Debra Gwartney
mistaken panic. The young woman archivist stayed in her office. They
let me handle the letters, even the ones over a hundred years old. They
let me touch the hair. They let me touch the hair!
It turns out we all had a Narcissa Whitman hair story, those people
who’d donated their strands of hair and me. They had their stories, I had
mine. We all yearned in our own ways to make Narcissa what we needed
her to be, to serve the causes we needed her to serve. Hair all around me,
tied, untied, stapled and taped, on the table, unsheathed, mine to absorb
and ponder on this one afternoon, cells from her body—blond hair
and brown hair and one piece with a reddish tint, and one piece gray.
The donors wanted to believe the hair came off of Narcissa’s head. But
how could it? The blond so blond, the brown so brown. Snipped from
the same person’s head? I don’t think so. I read over the letters again,
beginning to notice more mistakes, the ways in which these people got
their facts wrong; the ways in which they were desperate to hold to their
own notions of who she was, owning her somehow because they held
a smidge—one-third of one single hair!—of what was once (maybe)
attached to her.
The Eells great-granddaughter who’d found the ring of hair in her
desk, for instance: no, the Spokane-based missionary Cushing Eells
had not gone to Waiilatpu the day after the massacre. Nowhere, in any
survivor’s account, is he mentioned. If he’d gone to Waiilatpu he could
have buried his friends and prayed for their souls—instead, to the great
consternation of Henry Spalding (who was on the border of Waiilatpu on
the day of the killings, but ran away as soon as he got word of the attack,
leaving his nine-year-old daughter to fend for herself), a nearby Catholic
priest prayed over the slaughtered bodies as they were put in the ground.
Why was Cushing celebrated as someone who showed up to Waiilatpu
to help the survivors? Because in fact he had done no such thing.
And what of the Wyckoff woman, who had no idea about the
Whitmans (Mark!), and who was not acquainted with the men who’d
found the hair at Waiilatpu. She’d strong-armed the Rector woman to
hand over part of the memento carried away from the mission, that’s
all. “The ax that cut their quivering fleshes”? Where’d she get that?
No ax was used to kill anyone. Marcus died of a tomahawk to the
skull and a bullet to his neck. Narcissa was shot. And as much as Mrs.
Wyckoff wished for the college to live up to the saints who’d died for
it, the Whitmans had not, at least in my research, planned or dreamed
of an eponymous institution of higher education. They wanted only to
convert native souls to their God.
Crab Orchard Review
u 197
Debra Gwartney
Who did this Wyckoff woman think she was to make up her own
version of how things went down?
But of course, I’d done the same. I’d been sure, for so long, that
the Pacific hair had come from Waiilatpu, post-attack. I told others
that very story about the hair stored in Pacific’s archives, describing
how the strand had been retrieved after the killings, pried from the
bloody ground, and somehow, by someone who’d been to Waiilatpu,
eventually made its way to the Pacific U. Wrong. I’d been certain one
of the Sager girls had saved the hair, and it gave me comfort to think
that they had at least some remnant of their new mother. Wrong. My
version had nothing to do with a woven wreath of pale hair, intricately
designed. Nothing at all to do with a tender gift sent to a man I had
condemned, Alanson Hinman.
When I opened packet number five at the archival table in
the basement of Whitman College, I discovered a second wreath of
Narcissa’s hair, not dissimilar to the one stored at Pacific. Except. Except
the hair is dark brown. Except the weave is neither as skilled nor as
intricate—nowhere near as elegant. This one, the accompanying note
claims, Narcissa made for her husband’s nephew, Perrin Whitman.
For her own reasons, Narcissa spent precious free hours squinting her
eyes, her bent and overworked fingers holding taut a long strand of
hair, folding it around a set of pegs, shaping a wreath.
But, wait, had she woven her blond hair into a perfect wreath for
Hinman? Or had she woven her brown hair into a less-than-perfect
emulation of the original wreath for Perrin? (And in this case, who in
the world made the original?)
And why is the distinction important to me?
Perhaps because, from the very minute she died, Narcissa became
the property of others. Even her hair. Her death has been used as
leverage, excuse, justification; she became one of the central icons of
the frontier West because she died horribly, because her hair was strewn
hither and yon. The violence of her demise spurred more violence: nearly
every Cayuse person dead—shot, hung, starved—in the years that
followed. The martyr’s dome of light, cast on Narcissa with particular
brilliance, gave countless others a truth to cling to. The Sarah Wyckoffs
of the world cannot allow Narcissa to be real. The Sarah Wyckoffs want
a saint dumped in the dirt, quivering flesh and all.
It seems that I’m equally set on viewing her as a woman who
made a string of mistakes, a woman who’d do anything to please her
Debra Gwartney
mother, who volunteered for a mission she was completely unfit for. She
was a woman who longed for friends, for connections, a woman who
sent out wreaths of hair to lonely men, as if to say, do you see me here?
She was real to the Sager girls, Mrs. Whitman, and maybe that’s why
I—in my conjuring of a story that suited my sensibilities, that I clung
to for too long—decided that one of the young girls had ventured out
onto the frosty meadow for the hair. Elizabeth or Catharine, sent by the
Cayuse to gather bones of the dead dragged from the shallow grave by
animals. She’d bent down to pick up yellow hair from the crisp rye grass.
She held that hair tight in her fist, and later shared it—the last bit of their
adopted mother—with her sisters to carry away from Waiilatpu.
The Sager girls were sent out to gather scattered bones, but there’s
not a whit of evidence that they returned with any hair.
A few years after they were rescued from Waiilatpu, scattered
from each other now, the Sager girls heard from their dead father’s
brother. He sent Catharine a letter, informing her that he existed and
that his father, their grandfather, was still alive. Catharine shipped the
letter to Elizabeth, who cherished the link to her past more than perhaps
the other girls. In a long letter to a relative she’d never met, the second
of the Sager daughters pours out her soul. Why wouldn’t she? After
the massacre, Elizabeth and her sisters were abandoned by the adults
who’d survived the attack of Waiilatpu. They heard nothing from their
adopted parents’ relatives, nor were they taken in by other missionaries.
No offer of succor from Spalding. Instead, they were dumped on the
doorsteps of those who did not want them, turned into washerwomen,
unpaid house servants. Elizabeth was separated from the last of her
family, her sisters, as alone as she’d ever been in her life. No mother,
no father, no Dr. or Mrs. Whitman, no brothers. Could there be a more
plaintive letter than the one she wrote her uncle? Elizabeth begs him
to continue their exchange, to be her friend. She shares gory details of
the massacre, the blood, of the every-minute fear and promise of death;
witnessing the killing of both brothers, the burial of her little sister. She
does not refer to Narcissa’s hair. However, she offers to share a piece of
herself with those she would fiercely love if only she could meet them.
What did she have on this earth to offer except for her hair?
I have a great many questions to ask and I expect you
will think them silly but I have such a curiosity to know
everything. When you write to me I want you to answer them
Crab Orchard Review
u 199
Debra Gwartney
if you can. I want to know if you are a married man and who
you married and if you have any children and what their names
are. How many brothers Father had and their wives names if
they are married and I want to know what my father’s mother’s
name was before she married. I want to know what my father’s
age would be if he had lived and my mother’s. What state he
was born in and what month and what day of the month. If
you have a lock of his hair please send me a piece and a piece
of Mother’s if you have any. Send me a lock of yours and dear
Grandfather’s too. Sister Catharine sent you a lock of all of our
hair. And if you could send us Grandfather’s Daguerreotype
we would prize it as highly as if it was Grandpa’s own self. I
don’t know what I would give to see him. I always said if I had
a Grandpa I would be so happy. I thought he was dead. I was
surprised when you wrote us that he was still alive. I will send
you three pieces of my hair. Please give one to Grandpa and
give one lock to your oldest daughter, if you have one. If you
have none keep it yourself. Give the other to my other Cousins
if I have any. Write me as soon as you get this letter if you please
and give me all of the particulars.
Your affectionate niece,
Elizabeth Sager
Lynne Thompson
Red Jasper
Swift Coronas and vintage Mercedes-Benzes serenade—piston
strumming piston—as they cruise Highway 134. Radios
blare the twin talk-talk of the born again and arena football.
James the Godfather croons this is a man’s world for the lady
boomers who still believe it as they veer south onto the 5,
skirt Chavez Ravine (and every displaced Ruiz, Ramos &
Rodriguez) built into fields of faux diamonds for every boy
who prays to play past summer. Every driver slows for the
cops or eighteen-wheelers, loops the River Los Angeles with
its confessions buried in concrete under a stubborn scent of
smog, last bloom of jacarandas, and can’t-squeeze-a-dropof-rain-until-tomorrow. Some of us turn north onto the 110
and head for our weekend so there’s simply no reason for
all this horsepower to come to such a hard stop just south
of the arroyo seco except that yesterday, minutes fell back
into the groove they came from and today, rush hour finds
itself shrouded in a dark so black all we can see in the early
November sky is a hunter’s moon, that orange-red gem, that
highwayman gathering up our lost seasons.
Crab Orchard Review
u 201
Lynne Thompson
Shasta
Echoes are real—not imaginary.
We call out—and the land calls back.
—Terry Tempest Williams,
An Unspoken Hunger
Even on a hillside covered with narcissus,
day opens its throat
to sing to the constellations: of thunder
and its lover, lightning;
of the wing-swoop of a Cooper’s Hawk.
Every light has its own melody:
dark in places not yet shadowed,
a full palette for the artist who thinks she is
if she could only recall the last time
she told herself that it is true.
Day’s song returns again
and again whether or not we listen.
We are calmed by it. We are reminded.
Perhaps you remember the song of Castle Crags
whose granite spires look down on Úytaahkoo—
the White Mountain re-named Shasta?
The mountain—formed by the fury of a volcano
two hundred million years ago—was the site
(like almost every other whose native name
has been erased) of a battle between inhabitants
and settlers who drove the locals away.
No matter.
If you climb from the trailhead and go through
the mix of pine and fir and cedar, you will pass
Root Creek Trail and its eponymous watery bed.
Climb a little more, a little more. Amble among
Lynne Thompson
the boulders, over the flat rocks. Listen for a soft
breeze through manzanita as you gain elevation.
Call out Úytaahkoo until nothing’s left but the timbre
of voices. Call her name; she will not resist you.
Crab Orchard Review
u 203
Sevé Torres
Papi Stands at the San Juan Airport
the ticket in his left hand
the time to go on his right wrist
left leg rhythm ready
he stands shifting weight
across the axis of his hips
the airbus to the U.S. foreign
like the sound of Santos
on American lips
his speech a bilingual blend
English and Spanish accent heavy
he fixed houses and railings
opened pool halls and restaurants
ran numbers and took brown bags
of money to Chinatown
summers he sent my dad and uncles
out to slang snow cones on the corner
of Lincoln and Claim
the money for food to feed family
pork chops like butter
wholesale rice and beans
and in the pitch black of night
he would mix split pea with chicken noodle
a story my father would tell me
the world was fixture in his memory
as they drove he pointed left then right
over there where you get your engine fixed
Sevé Torres
here if you need someone to paint your house
he owes me, he will never forget
in the backyard he would bury liquor
ferment into strong throat burn
and he would sing hum
Puerto Rico into his house
his eyes and hands like
ceiba roots stand face-to-face
with Huracán tropical
even drunk they run ground
Torres strong
stubborn big vision where even an angry
sunovabich becomes the music we live by
Crab Orchard Review
u 205
Sevé Torres
The Blood Back Home
When the sky shreds itself open in a fit of lightning
and the rain that’s pouring from the heights begins
to shake and careen toward my outstretched hand
that is how I know I am from this place called home.
When the roofed wooden beams sweat into my palm
and the shadows cast by candlelight flicker onto walls
the sound of a coquí call brings me my mother tongue
translates an entire island in sound whistles home.
Sometimes I swear I hear the Spanish in me rear up
on a clad horse in the sun reflecting Christ’s cross
into the eyes of the Taíno man that crouches to his side
one hand on his knife the other over his heart and home.
The African boy ripped from his island my Grandfather’s
kin captured and hauled up out of his land’s belly
the slit across his ankle finishing the wood hull of the Galleon
sparkling a weathered bronze color into its new home.
The sound of all the machetes swinging into sugar cane
a swoosh and crack grasping at the fallen sweet between
sun stroke and desperate will, en la casa there is only salt
soaking into the fat of a pig roasting a temporary home.
Sometimes I wonder if we are all nomads ripped out of
our mother’s hands and left to fend for ourselves in strange
lands where no one cares if we find the men who fight
inside of our flesh clawing their way back to home.
Sevé Torres
And when we get there finally after all that struggle
and we kiss the ground bent double over our history
and our present what will we find at the end of our longing
will it be a blade cutting sharp into our tongue
our language spilling out onto another battlefield
where we will have to fight through the blood back home.
Crab Orchard Review
u 207
Sevé Torres
Sonnet: Puerto Rican History
after Jack Agüeros
The turtle longs to claim the island it left smoldering
In the clutches of countries that burn people like cheap tobacco
Wants to reconstruct itself with a hard shell painted Taíno red
Suck the earthly paradise back into the Pumpkin’s oblivion.
Now there are walls with guards that keep vampires at bay
The crucifix replaced by shadows that wear dollar signs
From the bodega to the old brick streets of San Juan
From the national bank to the dirt-packed roads of Caguas
The piraguas man selling passion fruit syrup on ice shaved fine
The brown man in blue police uniform heeling a dog with jackboots
There are people here now whose hands conjure magic
In coffee fields tobacco rolling tomorrow’s sweet fire
There is struggle sharp enough to chisel a machete into paper
In blood the steel earns the right to call itself Borikén.
Internees at Manzanar, 1942 (iii)
That winter, needles and the ink-brush
drop from her dumb hands, she spits out
juniper tea, and her lips are the color of tin.
She burrows under the rough blanket.
Nobu saves the last mesquite branch,
decides to burn the spindly twigs instead.
Curled around her on their cot,
he tells her he’s seen a branch
shaped like a snake, he can draw out
the head and rattles, a few knife-strokes,
then he’ll sand, rub, and wax the body,
expose its grains,
and add nail-eyes, a wire-snip
for a tongue. She mumbles some reply.
Pressed between his feet,
her feet are ice he can’t heat. He tells her
he’ll grow spinach and radishes in the spring,
give her mesquite’s reddish-brown
heartwood held within the cream
of sapwood, its encircling rings.
Crab Orchard Review
u 209
Paiute Woman at Manzanar, 1935
On her back, she carries the mass
of willow shoots. She cuts them young,
bearing few leaf-scars, not yet come
to branch or bud. With clamped teeth,
pinched fingers, she frets each shoot,
tears it in three. Boiled until supple,
the snarled yucca-roots dye her fingertips a deep maroon. Devil’s claws—
black seedpods that curl like tails—
these she plucks from thorny shrubs,
soaks in water five days, then must
bury in damp earth five more days,
before the claws soften, can be
peeled into strips. Thin as smoke,
she finds new willows weeding up
along the creek, crowding other trees.
She makes more withes, a rising
pile of splints. The chaparral
and the gullies give her materials
that she needs. She has known
willows to grow near ditch-leaks,
a trickle, a bed that’s all but dry.
What looks meager can fill her,
overflow her seed-beater and bowl,
her mouth and eye.
Maya Jewell Zeller
Another Dream for Jessica
The space beneath your porch was haunted
by a dead baby named Willard
whose grave stone we found in the cellar
and hauled up so we could read the dates.
He knew what pain was. He’d lived
only a few months and he was watching
when we spilled things on the floor,
he was listening when we told each other
the secrets of growing up, of history lessons
and the changes of girls. After these twenty years,
I still think of your place on that hill
across the fields and lonely cottonwood trees
where a paint-peeled saw horse
sits between the house and an outbuilding,
where your father hung and beat
the dirt basement out of the carpet,
his crow bar riding its burgundy and white
flower pattern so the morning glories bloomed
and bloomed again while it buckled under metal.
This is your father who, after bending
all day, pounding nails into someone else’s
roof, came home to put a pot in the corner
Crab Orchard Review
u 211
Maya Jewell Zeller
to catch the rain. You loved him. You thought
he was the only man for you, his arms
thick with their work and scooping you,
still at twelve, to throw over his shoulder.
Your mother stood in the kitchen
smoking her cigarettes, thinking of how to make
her hair more blond. She bought you bras
for fifty cents at the thrift store in Astoria,
and you wore them until the straps
grew thin and gray, then passed them on
to me. I burned them in our barrel
because I did not yet have breasts
and anyway, if I had, I’d want something white
and new to cover them with, or black
as that damp gap under your porch where I’d keep
Willard company while we waited for you,
until your body’s movement across warped boards
sent flecks of light through the darkness
like the sky between our houses
where we could see thousands of stars
and, beyond the wood smoke of our valley,
each other’s bedroom lights blinking,
holding the night in, keeping it safe.
Maya Jewell Zeller
Margaux Magnolia
The week of your birth, the freeway bridge
collapses into the Skagit River
and your parents name you for the band
and the street and the sweetness that comes
from those trees in spring, their heavy blossoms
opening like mouths, like yours even in sleep
when you dream of milk and mystery.
When the metal and concrete fail, that bridge
takes with it a gold pickup I picture
transporting tulips, hay, and canola
across this wide green valley where today
my friend and I stop at the Rexville Gas
and Grocery, having driven from Spokane
to Bellingham to meet you, briefly, and now
return to the east. Wet rhododendrons
sit sticky and freckled, and clouds hang heavy
like breasts or like hungry babies lying
on this lap of land where lichened barns
and spired churches interrupt the expanse
of planted food. On our way out of town
we drive Chuckanut past this incline
of sword fern and the lovely canopy
Crab Orchard Review
u 213
Maya Jewell Zeller
of bent trees, outcrops of sandstone, this whole
old mountain of fossils you can’t see unless
you know where to look. Even then, you stop
your car and put away your camera,
as you should when you first meet a new baby.
Her cells are millions of years of stone,
that mountain of fish bone and bird’s feet,
the trunks of tropical palms and fanning leaves
from the Eocene. She knows secrets the river knows,
and no human language to speak.
Waimea Williams
Sacred Valley, Modern Times
Our weekly Hawaiian chant class concluded with an
announcement that traditional Easter Island stone carvers had
created a fifty-ton statue in the mountains outside Honolulu. It was
ready to be “walked” down to the coast. Could we provide chants to
address the ancestors, the winds and rains, and protect the workers?
Every month our kahuna group received all sorts of requests,
and Hala and I decided this sounded pretty interesting. Creating and
moving a statue was a serious project, not another hotel opening. He’s
thirty, I’m sixty, both of us passionate about hanging onto Polynesian
authenticity before it slips away. In the last decades Pacific Islanders
have reestablished their ancient links: twenty-six nations and three
billion people scattered over the world’s largest ocean, connected by
language, religion, and the coconut. We agreed to go, even though
for him it meant a drive half way around O‘ahu to get to the North
Shore. Neither of us could imagine moving such a large statue even a
short distance. How long had it taken the carvers to make? Whose idea
was it? All we got were directions to a cattle gate on private property
in Kualoa. Bring your chanter’s regalia. And don’t be late because
everything will be filmed.
Early Saturday morning I went to meet Hala, in my mind now
referring to Rapa Nui rather than Easter Island. He was a step ahead
of me in having been there—a tiny, rocky triangle fifteen miles by
seven in a distant, cold part of the Pacific. On his visit several years
ago, he said native residents had composed welcome songs on the spot
and danced in a no-shame style that put the raciest hula in the shade.
Many women went topless but thighs were always covered.
On the North Shore coast I was let through a locked gate by
an employee of the former ranch that still owned the area. Once a
sacred landing site for ocean-going canoes, all local fishing crafts had
lowered their sails in respect when passing by. Hala already waited
inside the gate, so I followed his truck over dirt roads twisting into a
valley backed by a U-shaped curve of mountains. Soon we were lost
Crab Orchard Review
u 215
Waimea Williams
until he spotted a hand-drawn sign flapping in the breeze. FILM, and
N GEO, with an arrow to the right. His truck bumped ahead toward
an open-sided building left over from the days of raising beef. Farther
inland, wide grassy meadows were lined by green cliffs ranging back
at least a mile, narrowing and coming together in peaks. Thick clouds
and sheets of mist shifted their colors from white to violet to gray to
deep purple. Hala laughed and called out that the carvers and the
statue were back there, getting drenched.
We parked in bright sunshine amidst about fifty people in black
polo shirts. A film class from mainland America, one of them told us.
They milled around with a camera, sound booms, a clap board, lists and
schedules, shouting directions, questions. On the ground lay a coil of
thick rope a yard high. A group surrounded two older white men who
were apparently in charge. Six chanters had come and our leader told
us to get ready. We went off to do the local-style change room: Open
both doors on one side of your car, slide off T-shirts and shorts, duck
if you’re a woman, shed underwear and tie on full-length fabric printed
with traditional designs, add seed necklaces, and a feather headband of
bright yellow that imitated the plumage of an extinct bird.
A one-hour delay was announced. In the meantime, who could
help farther back in the valley? Hala and I were eager to see the
carvers and the statue, and went off in a jeep driven by one of the
film crew. We stared up at the cliffs on either side on the valley, free
of power lines and cell phone towers. The heights gave off a sense of
mesmerizing stillness; lush, with the vague remains of ancient terraces
for farming, clusters of pale green medicinal kukui trees, patches of
silvery gray pili grass used for thatching houses. In the distance white
strips of waterfalls fed meandering streams. We were in Ka‘a‘awa Valley,
named for a fish, or an insect, or our favorite version, “rolling ‘awa,”
for the intoxicating drink, once so abundant that heaps of harvested
roots were rolled downhill. The entire area, we decided, had many
abandoned temple sites. And burial caves high on the cliffs. Perhaps
some were untouched.
Hala nudged me as the jeep approached a large sign. On our right
in black, red and yellow, the familiar logo of a tyrannosaurus—big
jaw full of jagged teeth and the title, Jurassic Park. The driver slowed
to let us take it in and said we were in Hawai‘i’s backlot. It was a goal
for movie fans from all over the world. A little farther on another
sign stood below a dirt bunker, for Windtalkers, then another for
Mighty Joe Young, set in front of a tall cage with additional text, Here
Waimea Williams
the great ape….There were eight or ten signs, also for hit TV shows.
We stopped counting and stared ahead.
The ground became muddier as rain sifted down from the peaks
half a mile closer. The jeep reached its goal, an open tent piled with
boxes of Costco snacks and drinks. Hala and I got out to help load
everything. He asked about the statue. The driver said it was being
trucked in from Honolulu; otherwise he didn’t know much, everything
was in the hands of the two men from the magazine.
Back at the staging area more people had gathered, including a dozen
members of an extended Rapa Nui family. They were young parents,
slim and attractive, soft-spoken, their children well-behaved. Our
leader chanted a personal greeting for each of them. Then everybody
dug into the Fritos and Pepsi while waiting for what came next.
Hala circulated and came back with more information: last year
the two older white men had gone to Rapa Nui with theories about
how the statues were moved from the stone quarries to positions all
over the island. One was an archeologist, the other a historian. The
pair became convinced that instead of using rollers, Rapa Nui’s ancient
inhabitants had raised a finished statue upright and laboriously rocked
it back and forth, “walking” it to its final location. They returned
to the States, commissioned a replica, alerted the leading Rapa Nui
family (who now lived mainly in Minnesota), and decided to film an
experiment in Hawai‘i (for practical reasons). A truck with a crane arrived. Half an hour later, a bulldozer drove
in. No one could quite explain what either piece of equipment was for,
but the replica had been made in Seattle and put on a container ship.
This was confusing, although Hala and I thought maybe Northwest
Coast tribes that made huge traditional sculptures had been involved. So much for Rapa Nui carvers creating a statue in the mountains here.
Now we waited for the replica to be delivered over the mountains
from the dock in Honolulu. By midmorning the film students became
restless—too many people with too little to do—and they fussed over
digital readings and speculated about the weather. The peaks at the
end of the valley remained overcast. Above us, brief pounding rain
showers alternated with breezes that drove off scattered clouds and
let in stark sunshine. A minute later there were sprinkles, then more
brightness that reflected off the wet grass. The camera crew agonized
about lighting angles.
On the nearby road an orderly line of ATVs appeared, all the riders
wearing identical red helmets. Hala and I exchanged puzzled looks,
Crab Orchard Review
u 217
Waimea Williams
then another group followed in a bus, on its side a large advertisement
for movie tours. The tourists waved as they headed up the valley. The
bored film class waved back. I began to feel strange, disconnected.
Few Americans outside the Pacific had been aware of Rapa Nui
until fifteen years ago when Kevin Costner made a well-intentioned,
expensive flop of the same name. During the nineteenth century slavers
sold most of the population to South American plantations 1500 miles
away. Now the native people had sympathizers. Maybe that was why the
leading family lived in such an odd place as Minnesota, for its schools,
hospitals, easily available food. From there to Rapa Nui meant a twentyhour plane trip with four stops, but in modern terms the island was
only borderline habitable—tiny, wind-whipped, fierce ocean, one little
beach. A 1980s resort hotel had gone bankrupt, was sold, resold, then
occupied by activists, who were jailed in Chile, which still claimed the
island. Families uprooted long ago had hung onto genealogical chants
that established land ownership being fought out in a Santiago court.
Finally a flatbed truck drove in from the main road. The film crew
cheered its approach. Hala remarked that the boxed load looked pretty
small for a full-sized statue weighing fifty tons. We still anticipated a
majestic image in black lava rock. Three men using power tools took
half an hour to demolish the wooden crate.
The figure lay on its back and was made of pale gray cement. From top to bottom a vertical casting seam ran down the middle. No
brow line. The eyes were shallow indentations as round as pie plates;
the nose a stub resembling a beak rather than the prow of a war canoe;
the mouth a crooked scratch; a vague chin. The two men in charge
beamed. One chanter who embraced every religion in the world
murmured that this was indeed an ancestor.
“Made of marine cement,” Hala whispered. “What the highway
department uses to patch potholes.” The weather at the end of the valley continued to change every
few minutes. Filming would take place here, we were told, because
the crew could count on at least some sunshine. The bulldozer cut a
walking path that allowed for a background of misty mountain peaks.
Chains were wrapped around the figure’s neck. There was a roar as the
crane slowly hoisted it upright. At about seven feet tall, it was maybe
half the size of an original, and so flat and featureless it resembled a
gigantic gingerbread cookie.
“Three tons tops,” Hala estimated.
The pile of rope was unwound and passed to volunteers standing
Waimea Williams
ready to walk the figure half a mile to the coast. I pictured them
harnessed like Ten Commandments slaves hauling pharaoh’s statue.
The figure straightened up, then swayed forward ominously.
Everybody fell back several yards. The crane operator raised and
lowered the statue twice more. Each time it tilted at a forty-five degree
angle when it touched down. Discussions broke out. If the chains were
removed, the figure would fall on its face. The rear part of the base was
level, but the front portion curved inward according to tradition, but
this statue was too flat to stand on its own.
The chanters were told to go ahead anyway. We lined up in front
of the crowd that had backed away. The camera was aimed on us and
our leader began a series of blessings in Hawaiian. Some people bowed
their heads as if uncertain how to respond. Everybody else stared
solemnly, listening to ancient prayers none of them understood.
When we finished, the head of the Rapa Nui family slipped away
and returned with a heap of steaming chicken meat on sleek green
banana leaves. Smoked in a stone oven and stripped from the bones,
this special dish was offered to symbolically feed the statue. Hala
eyed me with a smile, looking pleased by such an authentic rite of
hospitality. This was extended to the crowd and everyone got a moist,
tasty bite. Additional blessings for the volunteers and their pathway
were chanted. The statue remained in place at an angle, the chains
still around its neck. With initial ceremonies concluded, the two men
in charge discussed how to proceed. One insisted there was nothing
wrong with the design, or the casting. The curved front of the base was
the correct “rocking mechanism,” which would allow the statue to be
walked. Their voices became tense and they withdrew for privacy.
By then catered lunch had arrived and everybody else gathered
at the old, open-sided ranch building. The chanters put away their
regalia, changed, signed releases, and ate. Hala told me many Rapa
Nui people said that over centuries, the statues had been moved or
knocked down by tsunamis or earthquakes. Others believed the
ancestors had simply walked by themselves from the stone quarries to
line up above the ocean, or to stand alone on a hill.
“That makes the most sense,” I said.
After lunch every one waited for further developments but the
men in charge were still arguing. Hala and I decided our part in this
was over. We couldn’t even guess how much the entire project cost, but
figured it was probably a lot more than both of us together earned in a
year. He regretted having taken a day off work.
Crab Orchard Review
u 219
Waimea Williams
“See you in chant class,” he said with a huff of disappointment.
We walked to our separate vehicles.
I drove away to await whatever film version of the walking statues
might appear a year from now. Something felt as if it had been wrong
from the start, the original description of the event no more than a
fantasy. Maybe as the request for chanters was passed on, it had turned
into what cultural practitioners wanted to hear: that traditional Rapa
Nui carvers had been found, and they’d created a fifty-ton stone
replica in these mountains, and knew how to get it to the coast using a
technique no one in modern times had figured out.
Or it simply came down to those haunting statues that exist as a
kind of mystery to nag foreigners who can afford such fascinations. Slavery and Catholicism had crushed out the old Rapa Nui culture so
links to other parts of Polynesia were now faint, although there. Yet if
the men who commissioned the cement figure couldn’t get it moving
without a crane, the film would end up on a shelf.
At the exit I stopped for a convoy of trucks going past on the
main road. They were loaded with construction equipment, and the
fellow at the old ranch gate said all were headed for the Polynesian
Cultural Center. Farther up the coast, the enormously profitable theme
park owned by a wealthy church was getting a multi-million dollar
renovation. It had been designed by the architects who built Disneyland.
I wondered if the cement statue might end up there, a practical
solution for something so large and unwieldy. It would stand straight
if sunk into the ground. Then a new show could feature a Rapa Nui
birdwoman dancing in a palm grove and singing to a flock of butterflies.
Before the official reopening, invitations were sure go out to chanters
throughout Honolulu to participate in an elaborate dedication. A good
time would be had by people of all ages.
The last trucks passed on and I headed in the opposite direction.
Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. She is the
author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Dear God Dear, Dr.
Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press), Bright
Body (White Pine Press), and the reissue of her book, Madly in Love, as
a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary in 2014. She is Professor of
English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri–Columbia,
where she serves as Series Editor of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in
Translation.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of the novel, The Big Bang Symphony,
and the forthcoming novel, A Thin Bright Line. Her recent fiction has
won the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, the
Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts
Council Fellowship, and a Yaddo residency. Gloria Brown is a native of California who lives in Vacaville. She is a
student in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in
Ohio. She works for a nonprofit college scholarship foundation.
Lauren Camp is the author of three volumes of poetry, including The
Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith Publishing), selected by World Literature
Today as an “Editor’s Pick”; and One Hundred Hungers, forthcoming
from Tupelo Press as the winner of the 2014 Dorset Prize. She hosts
“Audio Saucepan,” a global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public
Radio KSFR101.1FM, and writes the poetry blog, Which Silk Shirt. She
can be found online at www.laurencamp.com.
April Christiansen earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas.
Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Pebble Lake Review, and
she won third prize in Two Review’s Poetry Contest. In 2012, she
was selected to present poems at the Southern Writers Conference in
Oxford, Mississippi, and she is a grant writer in northwest Arkansas.
Alex Collins-Shotwell has been published in Mixed Fruit and CRATE,
and she is working on her first novel. She received her MFA from the
University of Virginia and lives in Los Angeles, California.
Crab Orchard Review
u 221
Elizabeth Costello’s work has appeared in publications including
Fourteen Hills and The Promise of Berkeley, and she was a finalist
for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Last year, she composed
poetry for and performed in the experimental dance-theater piece
hOPPhomage in San Francisco, California. She writes about art (in
350 words or fewer) at www.elizabethscostello.com.
Anne Elliott’s fiction has been or will be featured in Fugue, Hobart,
Witness, The Normal School, and other journals. Her novella,
The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, is forthcoming from
Ploughshares Solos in Fall 2014. She lives with her husband and many
pets in Brooklyn, New York, and works by day in the financial industry.
Mirri Glasson-Darling lives and writes in Barrow, Alaska. Her short
fiction has appeared recently in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review and
bosque (the magazine).
John Glowney is an attorney practicing in Seattle, Washington. His
poems have appeared in the Southeast Review, ZYZZYVA, Poetry
Northwest, Crab Creek Review, River Styx, Green Mountains Review,
Connecticut Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review,
Northwest Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Tom Griffen is an MFA student at Pacific University, and “Homer
Stevedore” is his first published poem. He lives in Carrboro, North
Carolina, where he curates the “We Are Carrboro” photography project.
Debra Gwartney is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Special
Issue Feature Award in Literary Nonfiction. She is the author of the
memoir Live Through This, a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. She is coeditor, with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American
Landscape. Her recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The
American Scholar, and The Normal School. She lives in western
Oregon, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific
University.
Vanessa Hua is a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing. An awardwinning writer and journalist, her work has appeared in the New York
Times, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, The New Yorker, Salon.com, and
elsewhere. A former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, she
has reported from China, South Korea, and Panama. Leah Huizar is a Mexican-American writer and native Southern
Californian. She received an MFA from the Pennsylvania State
University and her work has appeared in the Acentos Review, Nashville
Review, Christianity & Literature, and other journals. She also runs
Aestel & Acanthus Press, a traditional handset type printing studio.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of The Rusted City, a novel in poems
published by White Pine Press. Her work has been included in Best
New Poets 2013, and she is the winner of the 2013 Richard Peterson
Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review, the 2011 Rumi Poetry Prize
from Arts & Letters, and the 2011 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger
Mountain. Her work has also been also published in Mid-American
Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate
in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Esteban Ismael was born in National City, California, and raised
two blocks away in San Diego. He has received university awards and
fellowships, including a Rackham International Research Award to
various cities in Yucatan, Mexico. His poems have appeared in Verse
Wisconsin, Kweli Journal, and the Acentos Review.
Christine Kitano is the author of Birds of Paradise, published by Lynx
House Press. Her poetry has earned several awards, most recently an
Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center of Bethesda,
Maryland. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she teaches literature
and creative writing at Texas Tech University. Recent poems are
forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Atticus Review, and Miramar. Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy and Ardor (both from
Tupelo Press); and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books), winner of the Norma
Farber First Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone
Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and
Translingual Migrations was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World
Series from Cambria Press. She earned an MFA from Brown University
and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The
recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and
teaches in greater Los Angeles, where she is a novice harpist.
Crab Orchard Review
u 223
Jeffrey Thomas Leong’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review,
Flyway, Bamboo Ridge, Asian Pacific American Journal, and other
publications. He received his BA in Asian American Studies and his
JD, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his
MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in June 2014.
He lives with his wife and daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Terry Lucas is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Special Issue
Feature Award in Poetry. He is the author of If They Have Ears To
Hear, winner of the 2012 Copperdome Chapbook Award, published by
Southeast Missouri State University Press. His poems have appeared
in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2012,
Great River Review, Green Mountains Review, and MiPOesias. He is a
poet, editor, and writing consultant, living in Mill Valley, California.
Diane Kirsten Martin’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in
FIELD, New England Review, Poetry Daily, ZYZZYVA, Harvard Review,
Narrative, and Cutthroat. Her work won the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from
Smartish Pace, was included in Best New Poets 2005, and has received
a Pushcart Special Mention. Her first collection of poems, Conjugated
Visits, was published by Dream Horse Press.
David Mason served as Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014.
His latest books are Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade and Davey McGravy,
tales in verse for children and adult children. A native of Washington
state, he divides his time between Oregon and Colorado.
Rajiv Mohabir, a VONA and Kundiman fellow, is the author of the
chapbooks na bad-eye me (Pudding House Publications) and na mash
me bone (Finishing Line Press). His poetry appears in or is forthcoming
from Drunken Boat and Lantern Review. He received his MFA from
Queens College–CUNY, where he was editor-in-chief of Ozone Park
Journal. He is pursuing a PhD at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle, Washington. His collections
The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids
(Sacramento Poetry Center Press) are forthcoming. He has won the 2012
Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award from Southern Indiana Review and the
2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in Prairie
Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.
Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry and
an MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana
University Bloomington. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in [PANK], Muzzle, Kinfolks
Quarterly, and Callaloo. She is a native of Fresno, California.
Elizabeth Parsons is a writer working in southwest Virginia. She is a
graduate of Hollins University Creative Writing MA program. Her work,
primarily in journalism and creative nonfiction, has been published widely.
Candace Pearson’s Hour of Unfolding won the 2010 Liam Rector First
Book Prize for Poetry from Briery Creek Press. Her poems have been
published in fine journals nationwide and in several anthologies. She
lives in the Los Angeles hills.
Kevin Phan’s poetry has recently been accepted for publication in
Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cider Press Review, Subtropics, Fence, and
elsewhere. In 2013, his first poetry manuscript was a semifinalist for the
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and as a finalist in the
Colorado Review Book Prize.
Vanesha Pravin is a lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program at the
University of California, Merced, where she teaches creative writing
and composition. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate,
Callaloo, and Many Mountains Moving. Her first book, Disorder, is
forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix
Poets Series.
Maxine Scates is the author of Undone (New Issues Poetry & Prose),
Black Loam (Cherry Grove Collections), and Toluca Street (University
of Pittsburgh Press). She is also co-editor, with David Trinidad, of
Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. She lives in
Eugene, Oregon.
Martha Silano’s most recent books are Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia
Books) and The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing
Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Her recent awards include the James
Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review and the Robert and
Adele Schiff Poetry Award from Cincinnati Review.
Crab Orchard Review
u 225
Kirby Anne Snell is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the
University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has appeared
or is forthcoming in Measure, Think Journal, Unsplendid, and other
journals. From 2009 to 2011, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in
the Federated States of Micronesia.
Rebecca Starks’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slice
Magazine, Carolina Quarterly, Raintown Review, Poetry Northwest
and Grey Sparrow Journal, among other journals. She has a PhD in
English from Stanford University and currently teaches in the Osher
Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont.
She lives in Burlington with her spouse and sons.
Kenny Tanemura has an MFA from Purdue University. His poems
have appeared in Best New Poets 2013, the Iowa Review, Rattle, Chicago
Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He teaches ESL at
Apple, Facebook, and other companies in Silicon Valley.
Lynne Thompson’s latest poetry collection Start With A Small Guitar
was published by What Books Press. She has new poems forthcoming
in Prairie Schooner, Weave, and an anthology scheduled to be
published in 2014 by the Pacific Coast Poetry Series.
Sevé Torres lives in New Jersey, where he makes his living as an adjunct
professor of English and Creative Writing at Camden County College
and Rutgers University–Camden. His work has appeared in Stay
Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth and Dismantle: An Anthology of
Writing from the VONA/Voices Workshop.
Marianne Villanueva is a writer from the Philippines and the author
of the short story collections Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila,
Mayor of the Roses, and The Lost Language. Her work has appeared
in the anthologies Charlie Chan is Dead, Manila Noir, Another Kind
of Paradise, and Philippine Speculative Fiction. She has also co-edited
an anthology of prose and poetry by Filipino women, Going Home to
a Landscape.
Waimea Williams was raised in rural Hawai‘i. Her debut novel, Aloha,
Mozart, was published by Luminis Books and received an Honorable
Mention (2nd place) judges’ citation, for Excellence in the “Aloha
from Across the Sea” category of the 2013 Hawai‘i Book Publisher’s
Association Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards. Williams has also received
scholarships to the Bread Loaf, Squaw Valley, and Napa Valley Writers’
Conferences and a Ragdale Foundation residency. She has published
three nonfiction books about Hawai‘i and was the 2012 winner of the
Chariton Review Short Fiction Prize.
Mimi Wong was born and raised in Northern California. She graduated
from New York University with a BA in English and American
Literature and a minor in Creative Writing. Having completed a first
novel, she is currently at work on her second. She lives in Brooklyn,
New York.
William Kelley Woolfitt is the author of Beauty Strip (Texas Review
Press). His poems and short stories have appeared in the Threepenny
Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Water~Stone Review, Shenandoah,
and Ninth Letter. He is an assistant professor of English at Lee
University in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Russell Working is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Special
Issue Feature Award in Fiction. He was born in Long Beach, California,
and he is author of two short story collections—Resurrectionists,
winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa
Press; and The Irish Martyr, winner of the 2006 Richard Sullivan Prize
in Short Fiction from the Univerity of Notre Dame Press. He and his
wife, a Russian journalist, have two sons.
Maya Jewell Zeller’s first book, Rust Fish, is available from Lost Horse
Press. Her poems have appeared in New Madrid, Floating Bridge
Review, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Humanities Review, and
Squalorly. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and
two small children and she teaches English at Gonzaga University.
Crab Orchard Review
u 227
the Crab Orchard Series
in Poetry
2010 Editor’s Selection
Series Editor, Jon Tribble
Heavenly
Bodies
Poems by Cynthia Huntington
“This is a poetry of woundedness
and defiance. Heavenly Bodies
has a stark integrity in its
refusals to beguile or comfort;
no one could call it uplifting.
Yet there is something bracing,
even encouraging, in the hungry
survival of this sister of Sylvia Plath
and in her self-insistence: I do not
give up my strangeness for anyone.”
—Mark Halliday
“Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is the most searing and frightening
book of poetry I have read in years. The poems arise from pain and illness,
from the body’s rebellions and betrayals, and yet they are also curiously
exhilarating, even redemptive: perhaps because they are utterly free of selfpity, and find the means—through the sustained ferocity and invention of
their language—to transform suffering into a vision so bold it must be called
prophetic. Heavenly Bodies is a remarkable collection, on every level.”
—David Wojahn, author of World Tree
2012 National Book Award Finalist!
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
88 pages, $15.95
paper, ISBN 0-8093-3063-6
978-0-8093-3063-8
Available at major retailers and independent bookstores, or from
southern illinois university press
Orders & Inquiries • TEL 800-621-2736 • FAX 800-621-8476
www.siupress.com
in Poetry
2013 Special Selection
Abide
Poems by Jake Adam York
“In his body of work, poems of sheer
beauty, grace, precision of image, and
technical skill, we find a profound
intervention into our ongoing
conversations about race and social
justice, a bold and necessary challenge
to our historical amnesia. Jake Adam
York is one of our most indispensible
American poets, and the presence of
his work in the world—his vision, his
enduring spirit—is for me, and I think
for us all, a guiding light.”
—Natasha Trethewey,
United States Poet Laureate
2012–2014
“Jake Adam York was the finest elegist of
his generation, and his ongoing project, an
intricately layered threnody for the martyrs
of the civil rights movement, also made
him one of the most ambitious poets of
that generation.… It is thus bittersweet to
observe that this posthumous collection is
his finest… Abide is, in short, a marvel.”
—David Wojahn
96 pages, $15.95 paper
ISBN 0-8093-3327-9
978-0-8093-3327-1
www.siupress.com
in Poetry
2013 Open Competition Award
Millennial
Teeth
Poems by
Dan Albergotti
“Albergotti’s poems are passionate
and yet skeptical of the things they are
passionate about. He writes of family,
love, poetry, and the world around us
from the perspective of history, even
the perspective of the cosmos, and that
knowledge imbues his poems with a cool
understanding of the limitations and
strengths of his warm heart. Millennial
Teeth is a wonderfully ambitious
collection of poems that soar while still
remaining grounded in the world…”
—Andrew Hudgins,
author of A Clown at Midnight
“Albergotti… is by turns a religious poet,
a formalist of great inventiveness, and
a subtle wit.… Even heartbroken, even
schooled by loss, Albergotti sings of love.
In an age of flash and chatter, this is
a book of soulful, serious poems.”
—Patrick Phillips,
author of Boy
ISBN 0-8093-3353-8
978-0-8093-3353-0
www.siupress.com
in Poetry
2013 Open Competition Award
Zion
Poems by
TJ Jarrett
“In Zion, TJ Jarrett maps a new language
for reconciling racial and cultural
tensions that few poets would have the
courage to approach, much less subvert
and transform into a conversation of
equals. She has a compelling story, she
has the ear to make the language sing,
the alertness to metaphor to make it
interesting, and the drama to make it
stick.… TJ Jarrett is a name that we
should remember.”
—Rodney Jones,
author of Imaginary Logic
“One simply must relish the superb light
and a captured sense of darkness as avenues
of lyric survival, the exemplary wealth of
both human suffering and wise knowing
in these poems that make reading Zion
as much a warding off of spirits as it is a
celebration of language and remembrance.”
—Major Jackson,
author of Holding Company
ISBN 0-8093-3356-2
978-0-8093-3356-1
www.siupress.com
Crab Orchard Series
In Poetry
2014 OPEN
COMPETITION AWARDS
Announcement
Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University
Press are pleased to announce the 2014 Crab Orchard Series
in Poetry Open Competition selections.
Our final judge, Adrienne Su, selected USA–1000 by Sass
Brown and Errata by Lisa Fay Coutley as the winners. Both
winners are awarded a $2500 prize and will receive $1500 as
an honorarium for a reading at Southern Illinois University
Carbondale as part of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary
Festival. Both readings will follow the publication of the
poets’ collections by Southern Illinois University Press in
September 2015.
We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts
in our Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.
Crab Orchard Review’s website has updated information
on subscriptions, calls for submissions, contest information
(including online submission information) and results, and
past, current, and future issues. Visit us at:
CR AB ORCH AR D
•
•
REVIEW
&
Southern Illinois
University Press
2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Open Competition Awards
2 winners – $4,000.00 and publication each
(Online submissions only: CrabOrchardSeriesInPoetry.submittable.com)
All unpublished, original collections of poems written in English by United
States citizens and permanent residents are eligible* (individual poems may
have been previously published). (*Current or former students, colleagues, and
close friends of the final judge, and current and former students and employees
of Southern Illinois University and authors published by Southern Illinois
University Press are not eligible for the Open Competition.) Two volumes
of poems will be selected from an open competition of manuscripts submitted
online through Submittable.com between October 1 through November 18, 2014.
The winners will each receive a publication contract with Southern Illinois
University Press. In addition, both winners will be awarded a $2,500.00 prize
and $1,500.00 as an honorarium for a reading at Southern Illinois University
Carbondale. Both readings will follow the publication of the poets’ collections
by Southern Illinois University Press.
The entry fee is $28.00. For complete guidelines, visit CrabOrchardSeriesInPoetry.
submittable.com or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:
Jon Tribble, Series Editor
Crab Orchard Open Competition Awards
1000 Faner Drive
in Poetry
2012 Editor’s Selection
From The
Fire Hills
Poems by Chad Davidson
“These lovely, complex poems are
the notebooks of a cultural commuter,
written during his journeys back
and forth across the Gothic Lines
that divide present from past,
memory from experience, private
from public. They are bravura
performances, full of the nimbleness
of mind and form that I have long
admired in Davidson’s work.”
—Geoffrey Brock,
author of Weighing Light
“Italy is the origin of so much that we take for granted in our art, architecture,
cuisine, literature, politics, religion, history, language. In From the Fire Hills—
part pop-cultural Virgilian Guide Book, part twenty-first-century Grand Tour
Baedeker—Davidson traverses this storied, incendiary terrain with what he has
elsewhere called his signature ‘Bigfoot Poetics,’ as comfortable among the supper
talk of cryptozoologists as it is among the pages of supermarket tabloids.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar,
author of Vanitas, Rough: Poems and
The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry
88 pages, $15.95
paper, ISBN 0-8093-3323-6
978-0-8093-3323-3
www.siupress.com
in Poetry
2012 First Book Award
Seam
“How thin the seam between this fierce
book and all the poet’s countrypeople who
haven’t lived to read it. Faizullah has made
a courageous and shaming book. I hope
this book will be translated everywhere.”
—Jean Valentine,
author of Break the Glass
Poems by
Tarfia Faizullah
“Seam reaffirms that imagination is
the backbone of memory, the muscular
fiber that enables us to re-grasp our
humanity. Raised in West Texas,
Faizullah examines the catastrophe that
haunted her parents’ life in America
and in turn haunted her: the sisters,
aunts, and grandmothers raped in
Bangladesh in the 1971 liberation
war.… Faizullah twines a seam where
the wounds are remembered, fingers
quivering, spooling, and unspooling
what we know of healing. This is a
powerful debut…”
—Khaled Mattawa,
author of Tocqueville
ISBN 0-8093-3325-2
978-0-8093-3325-7
www.siupress.com
A Call for Submissions
Special Issue:
20 Years: Writing About 1995–2015
Crab Orchard Review is seeking work for our Summer/Fall 2015 special 20th
Anniversary issue, “20 Years: Writing About 1995–2015,” focusing on writing
inspired or informed by the experiences, observations, and/or cultural and
historical events that cover any of the ways our world and ourselves have changed
due to the advancements, setbacks, tragedies, and triumphs of the last twenty years.
All submissions should be original, unpublished poetry, fiction, or literary
nonfiction in English. Please query before submitting translations. Writers
whose work is selected will receive $25 (US) per magazine page ($50 minimum
for poetry; $100 minimum for prose) and two copies of the issue. All editorial
decisions for the issue will be made by the end of January 2015.
The submission period by postal mail for this issue is October 1 through
November 10, 2014. (There are earlier dates for online submissions to our
Special Issue Feature Awards.) Mail submissions to:
Crab Orchard Review
20th Anniversary issue
Faner 2380, Mail Code 4503
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901
USA
Address correspondence to:
Allison Joseph, Editor and Poetry Editor
Carolyn Alessio, Prose Editor
Jon Tribble, Managing Editor
For general guidelines, check our website at:
CrabOrchardReview.siu.edu/guid2.html
2015 COR Student Writing Awards
in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry
The Charles Johnson Fiction Award
The Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award
The Allison Joseph Poetry Award
$1,000.00 prize in each genre
All Entries must be submitted through SUBMITTABLE
http://CrabOrchardReview.submittable.com/submit
(opening for submissions on January 18, 2015 – February 18, 2015)
The COR Student Writing Awards competitions are open to all undergraduate
and graduate students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents currently
enrolled (at the time of the submission period) full- or part-time in a U.S. college
or university. Previous winners of the COR Student Writing Awards may not enter
again in a genre they have previously won. Prose entry length: only one piece per
entry, up to 4000 words for fiction or for literary nonfiction. Poetry entry length:
only one poem per entry, up to 3 pages in length. Entrants may only submit in one
genre—Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, or Poetry—but entrants may submit up to
three separate entries in that genre (one story, one nonfiction piece, or one poem
per entry). There is a small processing fee ($5.00 per entry) to pay for the cost of
the online submission system. Since the purpose of the COR Student Writing
Awards is to recognize and publish three outstanding student writers each year,
entrants may only submit in one genre—Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, or Poetry.
However, entrants may submit up to three separate entries in that genre (one
story, one nonfiction piece, or one poem per entry). Please do not submit work
in more than one genre and do not submit more than three entries in that genre.
One winner in each genre category—Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Nonfiction—
will be selected by the editors of Crab Orchard Review. The three category
winners will each receive an award payment of $1000.00 and be published in
the 2016 Winter/Spring issue.
For complete guidelines for the COR Student Writing Awards, check our website at:
CrabOrchardReview.siu.edu/COR_SWA.html
CRO
Fiction
◆
Poetry
CR AB ORCH AR D
•
•
REVIEW
◆
“A magazine writers admire
and readers enjoy.”
Crab Orchard Review, the
national literary magazine from
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, has received awards
from the Council of Literary
Magazines and Presses and the
Illinois Arts Council. A one-year
subscription is $25 for 2 issues (mail
check or order online*). Subscribe
for some of today’s best new writing.
Essays
Crab Orchard Review is supported, in part,
by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council,
a state agency.
Subscription to Crab Orchard Review
___ 1 year ($25 mail or order online*)
2 years ($40)
3 years ($50)
Single copy ($14)
Single copy International ($24)
___
___
___
___
___
Supporting Subscriber ($50/yr)
Donor ($100/2 yrs)
Patron ($200/3 yrs)
Benefactor ($500/Lifetime)
1 year Subscription Intl. ($40)
Name
Address
City/State/Zip
Please begin my subscription with Volume
Number
Send payment to: Crab Orchard Review, Jon Tribble, Managing Editor, Dept. of English,
Mail Code 4503, Southern Illinois University, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901.
Phone: (618) 453-6833
* CrabOrchardReview.submittable.com
Cover Images:
Excerpts from
photographs taken
in various locations
by Mae Remme,
Justin Herrmann,
Allison Joseph,
& Jon Tribble
© 2014
•
ISSN 1083-5571
$14.00
$14.00us Vol. 19 No. 2
& Beyond
00192
•
REVIEW
in print since 1995
Crab
Orchard
Review
9 771083 557101
CR AB ORCH AR D
published by the Department of English
Christine Kitano
Karen An-hwei Lee
Terry Lucas
David Mason
Rajiv Mohabir
Jed Myers
Elizabeth Parsons
Candace Pearson
Kevin Phan
Vanesha Pravin
Maxine Scates
Martha Silano
Kirby Anne Snell
Rebecca Starks
Kenny Tanemura
Lynne Thompson
Sevé Torres
Marianne Villanueva
Waimea Williams
Mimi Wong
Russell Working
Maya Jewell Zeller
Volume 19, Number 2 Summer/Fall 2014
CO
R
Aliki Barnstone
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Gloria Brown
Lauren Camp
April Christiansen
Elizabeth Costello
Anne Elliott
John Glowney
Tom Griffen
Debra Gwartney
Vanessa Hua
Leah Huizar
Rochelle Hurt
Esteban Ismael
Crab Orchard Review
In this volume:
The West Coast

The West Coast and Beyond - Crab Orchard Review

Transcription

Similar documents

a must-see property before deciding to build!!!

Trip to Chudleigh`s Farm

How to make... A Thong Crab

Artic King Crab flyer

the Crabby Mary® 10.50

NIU DPT Class of 2017 is hosting a 5k at Jonamac Orchard! • Date

Preview - stanfordhouse.com.hk

The 7 th Annual Orchard Beach Car Show

5 Exhibits To See In NYC This September

A is for Adopt A Spot B is for BIG Spring Clean