Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 19, No. 1

Transcription

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Volume 19, Number 1
our Winter/Spring 2014 issue
featuring the winners of the COR Annual Literary Prizes
and National Student Writing Awards
(more information on the prizes)
(return to Vol. 19, No. 1 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.
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A Journal of Creative Works
Vol. 19 No. 1
“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
Winter/Spring 2014
ISSN 1083-5571
Special Projects Assistant
Cole Bucciaglia
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Southern Illinois University Carbondale
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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.
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Winter/Spring 2014
Volume 19, Number 1
Fiction
1
Troy D. Ehlers
Suzanne Hodsden
Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh
Dead Boy’s Wedding
28
Beth Morgan
Default Setting
58
Naomi Telushkin
Judah
71
Nonfiction Prose
99
Katherine Dykstra
Like Held Breath Leah Lax
Water of Sleep
112
Henry W. Leung
Quitting the Box
143
Abby Travis
They Say
152
Allison Backous Troy
Inertia
186
Amy Yee
Deckyi’s Journey from After Tibet:
Exile in India
193
Poetry
Dan Albergotti
Holy Night
14
Lauren K. Alleyne
How to Watch Your Son Die
Killed Boy, Beautiful World
16
18
Traci Brimhall
Brian Brodeur
Catherine Champion
In My Third Trimester, I Dream
My Own Death
19
Blight
20
Caliban, After
22
Nandi Comer
The Warning
Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City
Losing Between Manholes and Myths
23
24
26
Chad Davidson
In Ravenna
The Gothic Line
41
42
Erica Dawson
Midget Wrestling at the Dawg House,
Portales, NM
44
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Evolution
45
Rachel Heimowitz
What the Light Reveals
46
Sara Henning
Christopher Hornbacker
Amorak Huey
Losing a Child
49
Birding
50
North of Dowagiac the Human Body
Is 98 Percent Winter
52
Sara Eliza Johnson
Deer Rub
54
Dean Julius
Vandana Khanna
Augur 56
Parvati Rewrites Myth
57
Andrew David King
On Taking Down the Model Airplanes
from Your Bedroom Ceiling
86
Michelle Lin
Roundtrip
88
Brandi Nicole Martin
Steve Mueske
First Elegy for His Child I’ll Never Have 90
Poem That Forgets It’s a Poem
91
Jeff Newberry
How to Talk About the Dead
Spring’s Return
About Disappointment
93
94
95
Leah Nielsen
Tuscaloosa Poem
96
Matthew Olzmann
You Want to Hold Everything
in Place, But
98
Kevin Phan
Night Bells in a Landscape
126
Sam Pierstorff
At the Hotel of Irrelevancy
128
Caroline Pittman
Easter Poem
130
Jessica Plante
Descendants
132
Brad Richard
Confederate Jasmine
133
Amanda Rutstein
Ruined
134
Aaron Samuels
Stakes is high
136
Steven D. Schroeder
Nuclear
138
Peggy Shumaker
Past Middle Age
140
Brian Simoneau
Sonnet for the Guy Who Told Me
My Dad Was a Saint
141
Adam Tavel
Elegy for Phineas Gage Posing
in a Daguerreotype Portrait
142
Christian Teresi
For the Kingdom to Be Well
165
Daniel Nathan Terry
There Is No Way
The Boy and the Moth
166
167
Qiana Towns
Voyeurism
168
Eric Tran
Our Own Little Gods 170
Israel Wasserstein
Paleontology
171
Phillip B. Williams
Liner Notes to a Never-Composed
Session for A Love Supreme
Of Shadows and Mirrors
173
Corrie Williamson
Umbrage
176
Susan R. Williamson
Conjugal Fault
178
174
Cecilia Woloch
Istanbul
Teta
Afterlife
179
180
182
William Wright
183
Triptych for the Days Before
Her Passage
Contributors’ Notes
200
A Note on Our Cover
The four photographs on the cover are by Allison Joseph and Jon
Tribble. All of the photographs were taken at locations outside of
Grafton, Illinois, near and in Pere Marquette State Park around
the conf luence of the Mississippi River and the Illinois River.
Announcements
There were significant awards and honors this Spring for four poets
published in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry:
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Jake Adam York were honored as the 2014
Witter Bynner Fellows selected by the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry at the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey.
Denise Duhamel and Jeffrey Skinner are recipients of 2014 Fellowships
in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
And we are very proud to congratulate former Crab Orchard Review
intern and assistant editor and Southern Illinois University Carbondale
MFA alumnus Adrian Matejka on his recent awards and honors,
including being named a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in
Poetry and being cited as a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
for his collection The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group). The Big
Smoke is also one of the winners of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards,
which “recognize books that make important contributions to our
understanding of racism and human diversity.” And in addition to
these honors, Adrian is also a recipient of a 2014 Fellowship in Poetry
from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize,
Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and
John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize
We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists for the 2014 Richard
Peterson Poetry Prize, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and John Guyon Literary
Nonfiction Prize.
In poetry, the winning entry of three poems—“Detroit, Llorona,
My Heart, My City,” “Losing Between Manholes and Myths” and
“The Warning”—is by Nandi Comer of Bloomington, Indiana. The
judge selected three finalists in poetry, and they are three poems by
Lauren K. Alleyne of Dubuque, Iowa; three poems by Jeff Newberry
of Tifton, Georgia; and three poems by Cecilia Woloch of Los
Angeles, California. In fiction, the winning entry is “Five Deaths
of Ellie Marsh” by Troy D. Ehlers of Wayzata, Minnesota. The judge
selected two finalists in fiction, and they are “Dead Boy’s Wedding” by
Suzanne Hodsden of Bowling Green, Ohio; and “Default Setting”
by Beth Morgan of Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In literary nonfiction,
the winning entry is “Inertia” by Allison Backous Troy of Laramie,
Wyoming. The judge selected three finalists in literary nonfiction,
and they are “Like Held Breath” by Katherine Dykstra of Brooklyn,
New York; “Water of Sleep” by Leah Lax of Houston, Texas; and
“They Say” by Abby Travis of Somerville, Massachusetts.
The final judge for the poetry competition was Allison Joseph,
Crab Orchard Review’s editor and poetry editor, and the final judge
for the fiction and literary nonfiction competitions was Carolyn
Alessio, Crab Orchard Review’s prose editor. All three winners
received $2000.00 and their works are published in this issue.
Several of the finalists also chose to have their works published in
this issue. Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks
to all the entrants for their interest in Crab Orchard Review.
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 Richard Peterson
Poetry Prize, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and
John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize
2014 Richard Peterson
Poetry Prize Winner
Three Poems by Nandi Comer
(Bloomington, Indiana)
2014 Jack Dyer
Fiction Prize Winner
“Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh”
by Troy D. Ehlers
(Wayzata, Minnesota)
2014 John Guyon
Literary Nonfiction Prize Winner
“Inertia”
by Allison Backous Troy
(Laramie, Wyoming)
The 2013 COR Student Writing Awards in
Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Nonfiction
The COR Student Writing Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry honor
the exceptional creative work of undergraduate and graduate students who are
enrolled at least part-time in a U.S. college or university. Each winner receives
$500.00 and publication in Crab Orchard Review.
The 2013 Allison Joseph Poetry Award winner is “On Taking Down the Model
Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling” by Andrew David King (University of
California, Berkeley). We would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013
award: “Bird Without a Feather” by P. J. Williams (University of Alabama);
“Crawfish” by Tina Mozelle Harris (University of Oregon); “The Crickets
Remember” by Maggie Graber (Southern Illinois University Carbondale);
“Father and Son” by Tim Payne (University of West Georgia); “Painting Moreno
Valley” by Joel Ferdon (McNeese State University); “Sex-Ed” by Anna Rose Welch
(Bowling Green State University).
The 2013 Charles Johnson Fiction Award winner is “Judah” by Naomi Telushkin
(Arizona State University). We would also like to congratulate the finalists
for the 2013 award: “Bottled Chaos” by Lauren Sarazen (Chapman University)
“Chasing a Leak” by Casey Pycior (University of Nebraska-Lincoln); “Homeland”
by Christopher Linforth (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
(Virginia Tech)); “Nine Stories Tall and Hollow” by Lindsay D’Andrea (Iowa
State University); and “What May or May Not Matter” by Linda Miller
(Queens University of Charlotte).
The 2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award winner is “Quitting the
Box” by Henry W. Leung (University of Michigan). We would also like to
congratulate the finalists for the 2013 award: “1,000 Wednesdays” by Danielle
Harms (George Mason University); “Amblyopia” by Lena Moses-Schmitt
(Virginia Commonwealth University); “Cries for Life” by Kevin Davis
(Northwestern University); “Crucifixion Style” by Joel Newsome (Western
Michigan University); and “Who You Know” by Jessie Szalay (George Mason
University).
For more information about the COR Student Writing Awards and the past
winners, and about Allison Joseph, Charles Johnson, and Rafael Torch, visit:
CORStudentWritingAwards.siu.edu
The 2013 COR Student Writing
Award Winners
2013 Allison Joseph Award Winner
“On Taking Down the Model
Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling”
by Andrew David King
University of California, Berkeley
(Berkeley, California)
2013 Charles Johnson
Fiction Award Winner
“Judah”
by Naomi Telushkin
Arizona State University
(Tempe, Arizona)
2013 Rafael Torch
Literary Nonfiction Award Winner
“Quitting the Box”
by Henry W. Leung
University of Michigan
(Ann Arbor, Michigan)
Troy D. Ehlers
Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh
The first time I see Ellie die, she is dancing around the living
room on the balls of her feet, singing at the top of her lungs and
laughing whenever her voice squeaks or she messes up the words. Her
brown eyes glisten and her body moves with the grace of tall grasses
bending in the wind. Her arms move with the music, waving slowly
up and down as though she imagines she will take flight. As though
she can simply bypass the mundane banality of death: the dizziness;
the cold and aching limbs; the painful stomach cramps; the brain
muddled; the lungs heavy and sluggish, too weak to breathe. Ellie will
have none of that. She will simply cast aside her earthly existence. She
will slip free of her body like a butterfly from a cocoon.
This first death is one of denial.
I could not accept that Ellie was dead. I knew she had killed herself.
She was gone. But I could not bring myself to believe that all the beauty
and joy she’d emanated had been extinguished. Even though she was
deeply troubled and at times could be cruel and nearly violent, in the
days after I learned of her suicide, I could not think of her suffering. I
wanted to believe she had died with the same grace and beauty she’d
had in life. This was the only way I could have imagined her death.
She is wearing the white dress with the red flowers. The one she’d
worn when I’d seen her last, months ago at her home in Wisconsin.
She looked radiant then, too, happy and beautiful as she drank her
wine and laughed at some joke Jan’s husband had told. Even then my
heart broke a little each time she laughed—her cheeks dimpling, her
tongue curling up to touch her lip. Her laughter always managed to
seem both hardy and fragile at the same time.
I’d always expected she’d be laughing, even in the end.
She turns up her stereo and swallows the pills a half-dozen at a time,
washing them down with a bottle of Australian shiraz. I don’t know
what she’s taking, but it makes sense that she’s using pills because she is
conscious of her beauty. She can be insecure and fish for compliments,
for reassurance that she isn’t getting fat or old, but she knows she is
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striking. Gorgeous, in fact. She’d won a beauty pageant as a teenager
and modeled during college. So even as she plotted her own death, she
must have thought ahead to the funeral; she wouldn’t want a closed
casket, wouldn’t want some ghastly corsage strapped to her wrist to
cover a razor’s slash. And perhaps this irony is what starts her laughing
now. She has polished off the pills and a good portion of the wine. She
is dancing around the living room, enjoying the burning friction of her
toes on the carpet as she spins. The dress floats up around her waist. The
mirror over the couch spins past and she laughs as she announces: “I’ll
be lovely in my coffin! Even at my wake, they’ll be jealous!” She laughs
at herself and feels dizzy and nauseous. She stops, kneels, and lies on the
floor, careful with the wine. On her back, she looks up and remembers
how she’d played with her sister as a child—she pretends the ceiling is
really the floor and the floor is the ceiling. She swims along the carpet,
imagining she is flying, imagining she has already grown her wings.
I received two calls that evening. The first was from Jan, the
second Delinda. By nature women know how to handle such tragedies.
They know when you need a hug or soothing words or a bolstering
compliment. They can be cruel and cut you to shreds with a word,
but they are angels. Call it maternal instinct. Jan phoned first to break
the news of Ellie’s suicide. Then I was given just enough time to get
my mind around the horrible reality—but not so much time that
I would be swallowed by grief or self-blame. When Jan had told me
what happened, everything went gray. She kept talking, but her words
didn’t register. She might have told me the details of the suicide, but I
wasn’t able to hear them. By the time Delinda called, I’d forced myself
to accept Ellie’s death, but I conceded nothing beyond a dancing, easy,
laughing death. I nearly asked Delinda how Ellie had actually died,
but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
Delinda lived just forty-five minutes away, south of Minneapolis.
She asked whether I wanted company and invited me to dinner with
her husband and daughter. Pizza and hot fudge sundaes, she said.
Comfort food. When I declined, she worried about my being alone.
She tried to get me to reminisce with her about Ellie’s exploits in the
Venezuelan village south of Caracas; that was where we’d all met, the
dozen of us, and became friends on a volunteer mission to build an
orphanage.
“Remember,” Delinda said, “when she did body shots off my stomach
and danced on the bar while the bartender yelled at her?”
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“He wasn’t yelling at her,” I said. “He climbed up and danced with
her.” I remembered because I’d been jealous.
“Oh that’s right! He kept slicking back his greasy hair and winking
at her,” Delinda laughed. “And later she was dancing outside on that
muddy path when she slipped.”
“She nearly slid down the mountain.”
Delinda’s laugh was loud—it verged on becoming a wild cackle—
but I recognized the grief behind it.
“What I remember most was Ellie with the children,” Delinda said.
“She connected with them. Made them laugh. I always felt like a spectacle
in a fishbowl whenever the kids watched us work. I’d try to talk, but it
was hard enough to communicate, let alone entertain children.”
“She was one of them,” I said. “A kid at heart.” Delinda agreed, but
I knew she didn’t fully understand. Ellie was known for her contagious
laughter and scandalous behavior, but she could be wise, mature, and
sometimes (albeit rarely), she could even be a good listener. But as I
came to know her, I discovered she mimicked those around her. She
said smart things to smart people. She listened well for good listeners.
She had learned how to act maturely, but deep down, for good or for
bad, she was a child. And so when she took to playing with children
from the orphanage and getting them to aid in the construction, the
rest of us believed she was making profound use of psychology to reach
them; she was instilling in them a sense of pride because they would
live in a place they had built with their own hands. To the children
she became La Presidente. Every couple days, she rewarded one of
them with the rank of El Capitán. The new captain got to wear Ellie’s
Chicago Cubs cap (bearing its ‘C’ for Capitán) and preside over the
other children (her soldados, her soldiers). Two or three times a day,
Ellie whistled and the children lined up for roll call, inspection, and
to report their progress. In the evenings, Ellie and the children ran off
into the trees to play tag, hide and seek, or war.
Once, while exploring a path through the trees, I stumbled across
Ellie lying on her stomach, concealed beneath a canopy of daggershaped leaves. She shushed me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me to
the dirt beside her. When I brushed at a stream of ants crawling up my
arm, Ellie whispered, “Shhhh. I can hear him.”
I was about to ask who when I spotted her current capitán,
stalking through the trees with a long stick held to the crook of his
arm like an assault rifle. The boy scanned the trees and moved along
in a crouch. He stopped at a suspicious plant and poked it with his
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rifle before moving on. Gradually, as the boy vanished in the distance,
a broad smile crept onto Ellie’s face. I was captivated by the delicate
smile-lines feathered around her eyes, the sharp blade of her nose, the
mischievous dimples of her cheeks. Her mahogany hair was tucked
back behind her ear, which had three piercings but no jewelry. A bead
of sweat trickled from her forehead. I leaned over and kissed her cheek.
When she turned to me, I was relieved by her smile, unfaded. I hadn’t
expected to kiss her. I had found her attractive but thought her beyond
reach. If there was a right move to make next, I had no idea what it
was. I waited for her reaction. Her eyes opened wider and, ever so
slowly, her mouth stretched from a smile into an ‘O.’ Then she glanced
over my shoulder and yelled, “Aww, biscuits!” She scrambled to her
feet, laughing. The capitán had doubled back behind us. I watched her
run off, chased into the jungle. My kiss had meant nothing. I had only
kissed her while she was being a child.
“Ellie was an angel,” Delinda said.
A painful knot formed in my throat. “Look, Delinda. Thanks for
calling, but I’m not ready to talk about her. Not in the past tense. I’m
not ready to.…To reminisce.”
“I know you loved her, Michael. And she loved you. There’s no
shame in that.”
After I set down the phone, I wondered what she’d meant about
shame. I’d felt only shock. Shame hadn’t even occurred to me. The
word struck up in me a whirlwind of self-doubt. Was Delinda referring
to the way my affair with Ellie had begun? Was she suggesting that I
could have saved her? That I should have been there for her—not just
in the end, but during the entire time since her divorce?
Ellie might have been vulnerable when we met. She was in the
midst of a trial separation from her husband. Then again, she could
have been at her strongest and most liberated. At times it seemed she
was both. During our village orientation, she had been so withdrawn
that I was barely aware of her—a shadow lurking at the back of a
classroom. She sat with her head bowed low over her desk, disheveled
hair draping her face as she scribbled in a pink notebook.
I was the first person to actually talk to her. At the end of our
first day of labor, she came upon me, my hands ghostly white with
plaster dust, reading poems by Pablo Neruda. She remarked that she
liked his work and began sidling away shyly, but I stopped her, asking
whether she had a favorite. Her face lit up and she seemed surprised
that somebody would take an interest in her. El mar y las campanas
Troy D. Ehlers
was her favorite collection, The Sea and the Bells—Neruda’s last. She
quoted the opening lines of the first poem, in well-practiced Spanish.
Time passes not hour by hour, but sorrow by sorrow.
We became inseparable, and during the following days, her
attitude cycled through extremes. In the mornings, she was quiet and
sullen, but her mood could shift unexpectedly (and often dramatically)
and together we would be seized by fits of laughter. Eventually I
realized that her capricious and transient nature was part of what I
found attractive—she could be dark, mysterious, puzzling, and even
childlike; perhaps I had remained a bachelor only because I needed
such instability (she was anything but static—her legs were always
moving, tattooing some unheard beat, even as her mood vacillated
from dark to light). Ellie rarely slept—just an hour or two each night—
and one night (after we’d grown much closer), I sensed her pretending
to sleep, her breathing intentionally slow and regular, her body
unnaturally stiff. When she thought I was asleep, she slipped from the
bed, gathered her clothes, and tiptoed outside. I thought to follow her,
but she returned and shook me. She led me out to the hillside. A full
moon cast serpentine shadows in the mist-blanketed valley. Strange
animal calls sounded from the trees. She pulled my head down and
kissed me ferociously.
Ellie made a brave effort to hide her darker moods. She wandered
off to cry in solitude or vent her rage by jogging narrow paths along
the river. She’d always tried to put on a smile for me. I thought it was
the separation, but she suffered from bipolar disorder. Occasionally
she would start an argument or tell me how miserable she was, but
I never had more than a glimpse of her true anguish. I wished she’d
shared her darker emotions. I could have been a shoulder to cry on.
Maybe—somehow—I could have helped.
When the phone rang again, I was torturing myself with the
image of her crying alone in a darkened bedroom.
“Michael, are you crying?” It was Cindy. She sounded angry.
I wiped my eyes and said nothing.
“You better not be crying. That bitch doesn’t deserve your tears.”
Cindy had joined us several days late in Venezuela. She was Ellie’s
sister-in-law. The idea of a woman on a trial separation traveling with
her sister-in-law probably seems bizarre, but Cindy was not bound by
social mores. No one dictated who her friends should be and she saw
no conflict between her allegiance to her brother and her friendship
with Ellie. Perhaps even more remarkable, she befriended me despite
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the affair I was having with her brother’s wife. As Cindy herself once
put it: “I like who I like.”
She also said what she meant.
“She doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Cindy said.
I cleared my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
“She kept leaving little hints, little suggestions that she was
suicidal. How dare she do that to me? Leave that hanging over me?”
“She told me, too. It wasn’t just you.”
“She fucking knew better! She knew we would feel guilty. She
couldn’t pass up one last chance to manipulate us. To twist the knife
in the wound.”
“She was just hurting inside,” I said. “Finalizing the divorce was
the final straw for her.”
“Oh, don’t be naïve. It was all a big game for her, seeing how far
she could bend people out of shape and suck them into her dramas.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I shouted into the phone. “I miss her,
dammit! Don’t you get that? I loved her. Think of my feelings!”
“Ellie’s the one who didn’t give a damn about your feelings,”
Cindy said. “She’s the one who did this to you. She was incapable of
love. And what about her son? Her mother? Her ex-husband, me, and
all of her friends.…She sandbagged us all.”
“She just didn’t think she was good for us. She thought we’d be
better off—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. Ellie was a bitch and I hate her for
doing this! We’re all pissed at her, Michael. It’s not just me. Don’t cry
over that heartless piece of crap!”
I slammed the phone down on the counter, picked it up and
slammed it down again and again. I shook with rage. I bit my lip
and tasted blood. I stood up, toppling my stool behind me. I kicked
it away and punched the wall. The phone rang again, so I unplugged
it. When the answering machine began spewing my inane greeting, I
unplugged that, too, and hurled it across the room.
The rage burned in me, every muscle clenched and trembling.
I wanted to turn my fury on the world. I wanted to break things. I
wanted to hurt somebody. I kept thinking of what Cindy had said
about others hating Ellie. No wonder Ellie had felt so alone, with such
fickle turncoat friends. I was the only person who’d loved her, and
everybody thought it wrong of me to care. Ellie and I should have
stood together, united against this selfish, uncaring world. I grabbed a
couple bottles of beer and flipped channels on the TV. I wanted to see
Troy D. Ehlers
something violent. Nothing was violent enough. Every false, bleachtoothed grin deepened my isolation and anger. I drank and hurled the
bottles against the fireplace. An hour later my world was spinning as
I sank into unconsciousness. Shards of glass had landed on the couch,
scratching me as I tossed about. I remembered Ellie’s foul moods and
wicked temper. I remembered our fights. I remembered her shame and
grief at having fought with her husband in front of her son.
Ellie is shouting but I cannot hear her voice. Spittle flies from her
lips. Tendons protrude from her neck. Her face reddens. She chops her
arms through the air as she confronts her ex-husband and the young
woman in the blue halter top. The girl lunges toward her, but Ellie’s ex
grabs the girl’s wrist—just above the rubber bracelets popular among
teenagers. He yells for them to calm down. Ellie is furious. She was
bringing her son Tommy home at the end of a weekend and found them
making out on the couch. He’s done it on purpose, to make her jealous.
He’s always trying to hurt her. Ellie grabs a remote from the end table
and hurls it at them. It bounces off his shoulder and he cringes. Between
them, Tommy leans against the wall, crying and clutching his duffel
bag to his chest like a life preserver. He sobs and begs his mommy and
daddy to stop. Ellie grabs a black picture frame and sails it over the
girl’s head to shatter against the wall. A piece of glass ricochets and
strikes Tommy. A thin line of blood appears on his cheek. Startled, he
stops crying and stares at her. A tear rolls from his eye and mixes with
the blood. Ellie steps toward him. She wants to hug him and apologize.
She aches from having hurt him. Her ex stops her and points toward
the door, ordering her to leave. The girl has already scooped Tommy up,
and he’s clinging to her, crying on the girl’s shoulder. Ellie tries again to
reach him, but she’s pushed out the door.
She’s never felt as alone and empty and sick inside as she does
now, driving the highway that separates her old life from the void
ahead. Her tears make the road shake and blur ahead of her, a watery
mess of pavement and evergreens. She squeezes the wheel and pounds
a fist into the ceiling with a series of unsatisfying thunks. She hates
herself, hates being hostage to the tempest of her emotions. She swore
she’d never fight in front of her son, never let him witness what a lousy
bitch she was. She keeps picturing him, crying with the blood on his
face. He’s afraid of her. She knows she’ll hurt him again and next time
it will be worse. She can’t bear the thought. She wishes he could have
another mother, somebody stable. The sky is growing dark and the
cars have turned on their headlights—bright, accusing eyes coming at
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her and blazing past. The lights are mesmerizing, haloed in her teary
vision, and her fingers loosen on the wheel and her foot becomes heavy
on the gas. She imagines how easy it would be to veer into the lights,
meet them head on and force them to pass their final judgment on her.
But she won’t do it. She won’t hurt anybody else. Not ever again. She
takes a breath and cranks the steering wheel. She flies over a narrow
strip of grass and drives into a giant maple tree. A flash of violence and
pain, shrieking steel and breaking glass, and it is over.
With a stiff neck and crushing hangover, I awoke on the couch.
It was the middle of the night. My back and stomach itched like a stiff
wool sweater. I scratched my stomach and my fingers came away wet
with blood. During my fitful dreams, I’d been rolling in the glass. On
tiptoes, I made the bathroom without cutting my feet. The scratches
were superficial, but blood splotched my skin and clothes. I looked like
I’d been in a street fight.
I took some aspirin and considered cleaning up the glass.
Instead I wandered into the bedroom closet, retrieved the shoebox
holding my recent photos and keepsakes, and spread them out on
the kitchen table. During the peak of our relationship, Ellie had a
camera strapped to her wrist at all times—as if she’d been desperate
to preserve every moment together; as if she’d known anything that
good couldn’t last forever.
Despite my grief, it was impossible not to smile. She loved goofing
around for the camera. Without warning, she’d hold it off at arm’s
length and snap a shot of herself sticking her tongue in my ear or, while
I was smiling for the lens, she’d secretly be stretching her mouth into
a look of horror or cross her eyes and stick her tongue out to the side.
Then I’d catch her and confiscate the camera. She’d clown around and
model for me. Each time I snapped the shutter, there was another look
on her face, a different expression, a different pose—always beautiful
and ever-changing, never the frozen, meaningless smile most people
wear on film. Flipping through the images was like reliving her myriad
personalities: a mischievous grin, a brow-furrowed pout, a suggestive
smile, an angry middle finger, a side-stitching laugh, a graceful (and
somehow lonely) contemplation of the sky.
Her emotional instability frightened me. It thrilled me. This was
a woman I would never grow bored with. I could still be breathless
from laughing at her zaniness when she’d say something profound
and thoughtful, or draw me into an argument, or be crying on my
Troy D. Ehlers
shoulder. I was enjoying things I hadn’t in years—biking, swimming,
skating, skiing, going to rock concerts, food fights, games. It was like
being a kid again. Ellie was my fountain of youth.
Not long after Venezuela, she got divorced; I made her promise
I wasn’t the reason. I didn’t want to break up a family and wondered
whether we should go on. We took turns visiting one another—a three
hour drive separated us. At first it was weekends (she didn’t have
custody yet), then extended visits, and eventually a vacation: in the
dead cold of January we flew to Grand Cayman.
We rented a glass-bottom boat and picnicked in the harbor. Fish
swam up beneath us and moved in their mysteriously synchronized
schools, as if governed by a single mind. Ellie was silent for a time and
then she said, “Why are you here?”
I swallowed my sandwich. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t really love me.”
I put a hand on her knee. “Of course I love you.”
She slapped my hand away. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I wasn’t, I just—”
“You don’t know me. Can’t you see what I am? I left my husband. I
left my son. I have no friends. Nobody has any reason to feel anything
toward me but hate. Tell me why you love me. Tell me.”
“I have fun when I’m with you,” I said. “You make me laugh.”
“Yeah, I’m funny.” Her face wrinkled in disgust.
I took a breath. I wanted to brush the hair back from her forehead,
but it would only make her angry. “You’re beautiful, Ellie. And I’m a
different person when I’m with you. I do things I would never do on
my own.”
“I’ll bet you do.” She stared off across the water, her lip trembling.
“Nobody sees me for who I am. Nobody cares.”
“I care.”
“Take me back to the hotel, Michael. I need a drink.”
I began to realize the barrier between us. We could talk and
laugh. We could argue and cry, play together and have sex. Ellie
lived exclusively for me. Her life revolved around mine. The bond
was constant and compelling. But it didn’t reach into the heart of us.
This was codependency. In Grand Cayman I finally accepted that. A
significant piece of her soul seemed buried in a fathomless trench. No
matter how much we shared, she remained just beyond my fingertips.
I fought like mad, straining against the currents to reach her, but we
drifted apart.
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Sitting at my kitchen table, I picked up the photo of her on the
beach, all but her laughing face buried in sand. A knot formed in my
throat. The symbolism was too keen. It cut me. Had I given up too
easily? Had she been there all along, buried beneath a mere dusting of
sand? Maybe she only needed somebody to make an honest effort at
digging her out. I needed another chance. I wanted to go back. If only
I could return to that day, that month. I could have shown her I cared.
If I had a second chance, I would be relentless. I wouldn’t stop until she
accepted my love. She wouldn’t need to die, if only she believed.
Ellie is tired. She feels aged beyond her years. Her arms are
heavy and her joints swollen, decrepit. Her head is pressurized,
throbbing from the inside as she lets it loll back on the top of her
couch. The migraine has brought the auras again—yellow and red
shadows glimmering about the room like ghosts. In a better mood,
she’d talk to them. Tell them jokes laced with black humor. But she
doesn’t have the energy. Today she will die. This is not an impulse.
This is not a rash decision made in anger or desperation. She has been
gradually worn away, like a stone beneath a waterfall. Amazing she’s
lasted this long. She has served her purpose in this life. There is nothing
more for her. Only pain. Slowly she gets to her feet. The exertion causes
her migraine to flare. She stands still and breathes deeply, slowly, until it
abates. Delicately, she walks to her bedroom. Everything is ready for her.
She has tied a noose with her bed sheets. It hangs from her ceiling fan.
She thought of using bed sheets because of a conversation we’d
had. She told me she’d attempted suicide and I admitted that I had
once, too. As a child. “I tried to hang myself with a bed sheet,” I said,
“but the knot slipped.” Without thinking, she replied, “That’s too
bad.” We’d laughed madly until tears ran down our cheeks.
Ellie steps up onto her bed and looks through the noose. She has
spent some time braiding the sheets. She’s reinforced them with rope.
This knot will hold. There is no other way for her to die. She will die as
the man she loves had once nearly died. She wants to share this with
him. She wants to feel what he felt and taste the death that managed
to elude him. She knows he will hear about it. It might hurt him. It
might anger him. It might make him wish he’d held on to her. Or
maybe, remembering the moment they’d shared, it would make him
laugh. Somehow this death will affect him. That is all that matters. She
steadies herself on the edge of the bed and slips the noose around her
neck, slides it tight and fast. She fastens her hands behind her back
Troy D. Ehlers
with handcuffs—handcuffs they’d used in lovemaking. She steps from
the mattress and her body swings down. For a moment she worries
her feet will graze the floor, but they don’t. Her throat is crushed and
she cannot breathe. The last pulses surge harder into her brain and her
migraine explodes, sending jets of light across her vision. She feels a
horrible pressure in her skull and everything turns red. She thinks of
the man she loves. She imagines the grief he’ll feel and she’s overcome
with embarrassment and sorrow. She wants to stop this, undo it. She
wants to spare him the pain. She kicks her feet toward the bed, tries
to hook her toes on the edge of it. She tries to flex her neck, to hold
herself up. The handcuffs are too tight. She kicks and struggles, but
even despite the desperation, it seems she is falling asleep. She wants
to wake up and free herself. She wants to wake up. She wants.
The rest of that night passed in a haze and at some point I
fell asleep, hunched over the kitchen table. When morning came, I felt
restless, desperate to do something, anything. I didn’t have the energy.
I sat on the floor in my guest bedroom and sorted through an old box
of hockey cards I’d long forgotten. It was imperative I put them in
numerical order. Things all over my house needed to be organized:
books alphabetized, records categorized, videotapes labeled. I made a
list of things that needed doing.
Early afternoon, the doorbell rang. I cracked the door and peeked
outside. Delinda stood clutching her handbag to her chest. “What’s the
matter with you?” she said.
“What?”
“Your phone isn’t working.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, opening the door. “Sorry.”
“Oh my god, what happened?” she yelled.
I’d forgotten I was still wearing the blood-stained clothes. “It’s
nothing. Don’t worry.”
She stepped inside and lifted my shirt. “We need to get you cleaned
up.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me up the stairs like a child. I
followed her to the bathroom. “Do you have hydrogen peroxide?”
“They’re not going to get infected. It’s all scabbed over already.”
“Well, get in the shower at least. I’ll find some clean clothes.”
“I don’t need a shower. I’m fine.”
She stepped around me and turned on the shower. “I’ll set clothes
on the counter. Get in. You’ll feel better.”
She left me to undress. She was wrong about it feeling better. The
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soap and water stung on the cuts. Some of them started bleeding
again. I felt sick watching the pink water spiral down the drain.
After the shower, I got dressed in the sweats Delinda had put out
for me. I found her in the living room, putting glass in a garbage bag.
“I gotta hand it to you, Mike. You didn’t miss an inch. You were very
thorough.” Slivers of glass sparkled in the fireplace mortar.
I was ashamed, watching her clean up after me. I dropped down
on the step leading to the kitchen. Delinda sat down and squeezed me
to her side. “We’re going to get through this.” She held me for a while.
It was comforting. Nevertheless, it became impossible not to cry.
She insisted on making lunch. She left me to rest in the kitchen
while she finished cleaning up the glass with a vacuum. We talked
until Delinda was convinced I’d be alright. She needed to bring her
husband to the airport and watch her eighteen-month-old daughter,
Callie. She wanted me to come with, told me I’d enjoy seeing Callie
play—she was running around and getting into all kinds of mischief—
but I was too tired. I promised to call later.
Once she left, I tried returning to organizing, but I lacked
motivation. I felt feverish and empty. There was no sorrow, no anger,
and no pain. I had no thoughts or memories of Ellie. I felt nothing
at all. The closest thing I had to an impulse or clear thought was the
vague desire to just lie there, and do nothing.
I turned on the stereo and closed my eyes. I remembered the pink
water spiraling down the drain during my shower, the blood weeping
up from the slashes in my skin. The horror and emptiness made me
sick with vertigo.
I saw a vase of roses. The petals crumpled and dropped into the
water, dying it crimson.
I saw wine, spilling over the lip of her glass, staining the carpet.
I saw Ellie’s arms, floating on the pink darkening water.
Her body is trembling from the cold. Water drips from the leaky
faucet. The tiles are cold and hard against her neck. Sunlight grates
through the Venetian blinds and illuminates the dust. A fly buzzes and
thuds against the window. Outside, a truck rumbles past and children
shout in the neighbor’s yard. She lies there feeling nothing from her
floating body. The water has absorbed all sensation, even the pull of
gravity. She is vaguely aware that this is her last chance to experience
some emotion; she should feel anguish or sorrow, hatred or relief. She
should be overwhelmed with loss. She feels nothing but emptiness.
Troy D. Ehlers
Nearly the entire Venezuelan group attended the funeral.
Delinda greeted me with a long hug and kissed my cheek. Her husband
shook my hand and, from his other arm, Callie reached out for me. I
held Callie for a few minutes and Delinda had her repeat my name:
“Unca Mite.” I laughed and my eyes teared up.
When Cindy spotted me, she threw her arms around me, which
was uncharacteristic. She whispered into my ear. She was sorry for
saying those horrible things about Ellie. She was sorry for not thinking
of my feelings. I told her there was nothing to apologize for. People
shouldn’t be held accountable for what they do in grief.
Ellie’s son stood there in a tiny black suit, holding his father’s
hand. They were surrounded by family. I was thankful for not having
to speak to them. Nothing I could’ve said would have mattered. With
dear friends surrounding me, I caught only glimpses of the open
casket. Ellie looked beautiful, radiant with peace. The graceful ease of
her face lifted a burden from my heart and my breath became lighter.
uuu
Ellie steps outside and feels the warmth of sunlight on her
skin. A light breeze moves the hair on her forehead as she walks down
the driveway. She tucks her hair behind her ears and pauses near the
flowerbed. She kneels on the lawn and rakes some dried leaves from
between the daisies with her fingers. New buds are spearing up from
the soil, late for the season. She bends to smell the flowers and the green
scent of the junipers. Children laugh in the distance. She turns up her
face, and beneath this brilliant sun, this pale blue sky, she marvels at
how much, how overwhelmingly much there is to love.
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Dan Albergotti
Holy Night
My father said he wished the child were dead.
He didn’t say it in so many words,
but he said it. And it was Christmas Eve.
I breathed in silent tension next to him.
The news anchor said that of the seven
born to a black couple three nights before
the weakest child had gathered strength and would,
the doctors said, most likely now survive.
I’m sorry to hear that, my father hissed.
That’s just what this country needs, seven more—
of course he used the word. You know he did.
The television screen blurred to pastels.
I sat in silence next to him, the man
whose blood was my blood, whose eyes looked like mine,
and tried to breathe the thick air between us.
He was my father. This was Christmas Eve.
Lord of this other world, what will you make
of this? And reader, what will you accept?
That I stood up without a word and left
the house, got into my car, and then drove
to the pizza place as he expected
me to, picked up our order, and drove back
to that goddamned house to join my mother
and sister, who’d been singing Christmas hymns
Dan Albergotti
by candlelight at the evening service
while my father wished death upon a child?
Will you accept that I wept on that drive,
listening to Radiohead’s “The Tourist,”
wishing I could stop the world’s spinning cold,
drive off its surface and take to the sky,
break its gravitational hold, sever
myself from it forever then and there?
Reader, I hear your silence now, hear it
like I heard silence that night in the space
between my father’s words and the night sky
I could see through my windshield, one bright star—
impossibly distant, already dead—
pulsing its pure light through millennia
of utter void to meet my aching eyes.
Maybe it’s better that you have no words,
that I have no answer. Maybe better
to just recall the peace of that short drive,
its brief respite where music and silence
were one blessing and the dark night holy.
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Lauren K. Alleyne
How to Watch Your Son Die
for Miss Linda
When the grief comes, you monster through it.
—Rachel McKibbens
Watch his skin become a coffin
for his breath. Watch
his bones rise like phantoms
to haunt the twilight of his flesh.
Beneath the bedsheets of his lids,
see his eyes twitch, blind
and wandering; if opened,
they are the most beautiful glass.
He will unremember time
and laughter. His name
will become a strange music
in the foreign instrument of your voice.
Watch him lose each human border—
his tongue forsaking language,
his hands growing indifferent
to reach or touch, his heart sputtering
Lauren K. Alleyne
its final messages to yours.
Watch as he breaks from himself
and becomes a body so quietly
your tears thunder against his cheek.
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Lauren K. Alleyne
Killed Boy, Beautiful World
for Aaron Campbell
How slender the tether
between life and not-life,
between the big-eyed boy
of your childhood play,
and the call that tells you
he is lying beneath a sheet
waiting to become ash.
How ruthless with beauty
the world seems, clouds
tumbling in streams of white,
the sky dappled, then clear,
then blotted with rain; the news
of death and more death
streaming—some familiar
or foreign blood damning
every wet curve of the globe.
Still, you want to hold on to it,
this life that breaks you again
and again. You want to know
that poised as the world is
to drive you to your knees
with anguish or ecstasy,
you are in it to stay
as long as it will have you—
as long as you have anything left
to lose.
Traci Brimhall
In My Third Trimester, I Dream My Own Death
In week twenty-seven, I dream a conquistador
confronts me with unsigned Requerimientos.
I’d give up any god to save a life, so I sign
them all with a narwhal tooth dipped in squid ink.
Oracular tremblings come in week thirty, waking in warm
sweats after a holy fool who speaks only in vowels
warns I will resort to prayer. A thief prophesies
through week thirty-three—Resurrection is not ascendance,
he cries. It is the spirit rejecting heaven for flesh. His body
shines with the cruel radiance of a man who buried
himself alive and returned to laugh, dance, pick cupuaçu.
Jubilate. Week forty I spy rogue angels, jealous
of their god’s fertile will, impregnating virgin orchids
in the rainforest. They promise to trade the ecstasies
of the anther cap for my first-born daughter and, before
I can say no, I wake to my water broken, my dreams
crawling out of the river, maculate and toothed,
insisting, Even before you imagined us, we knew you.
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Brian Brodeur
Blight
I was born in a city with a river running beneath it.
Summers, the chemical stink of textile dyes
seeped up from viaducts under the streets.
Two bridges spanned a lake to the northeast
that fed into the river underground.
We heard of those who walked the bridges at night
and climbed guardrails, scaling the trestles
to leap into the water, disappearing.
We heard a lot of things: the newborn boy
dumped in a Papa Gino’s ladies room,
the ServiceMaster van with painted windows
parked by the playground woods, two teenage girls
found naked in a ditch near Great Brook Valley
where we were told never to go at night.
Bored, we’d steal fresh cemetery flowers,
and pitch them at each other, shattering
blooms with a bat that gave us special power
because we’d heard Yastrzemski owned it once.
Sticky with strips of black electrical tape,
it belonged to Joe Camuso down the street.
When Joe showed up one day without the bat,
he said his dad had split it beating a man
he’d caught that morning pissing on their stoop.
“Dad wasn’t even drunk,” Joe said, grinning.
Police tape fluttered there until it tattered.
The night Joe’s dad got off on self-defense,
my own dad staggered home after the party
at Stony’s Bar, waking my stepmother.
I heard the thud of boots dropped on the floor,
Brian Brodeur
voices murmuring through the drywall.
“I’m sick of all these Blacks,” he said. She shushed him:
“Quiet, the kids will hear.” “Sorry,” he said,
“I mean these African Americans.”
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Catherine Champion
Caliban, After
Call it inheritance, that currency of moon,
my mother’s temper that was never quite my own.
And still I know nothing of what moves it all,
what chicanery hides in the dive of fish, the tinny whir
of beetles, and whether I remain my own, or subject
to some chimerical constancy. I am tired of spells.
Spells of books, spells of whiskey, of winds.
But in solitude, I must atone for their phantoms,
even though they are gone and not missed,
because the night’s engulfment of sea is enough
to make a child of anyone. I speak towards the aerial,
asking for my mind, and what words the wind carries:
Still, into the night the sky pulls the tide.
Still, a ship’s eye, and no stone is settled.
And in shatterable sleep you’ve unspun
what is known—the sod before sea,
your shiftable home
Nandi Comer
The Warning
for Ai
So many beautifully bloodied sounds
tucked under my chin, breaking
under pressurized note. I’ve made it
through night working lines into a damp thigh,
a stalled truck, a woman humming
into her husband’s ear. Without occasion
or motive, I’ve buried voices. I’ve studied
the slow motion of carving
breast meat. I shadow the butcher’s
cut. I feel my face’s open grin
when I sharpen my shears.
The baritone of a bruised man’s
chuckle rattles my lungs. A child’s star-like
hand reaches across my belly. I have to yank
them out. I had never heard wanting
strapped to a boy’s wrists
until I tied him down, made him sing.
I’m a borrower of voice boxes, a surgeon
of tongues. I am warning you: you ought to stop
loving me; you ought not lay your story
on my counter; you ought be careful
before I take you up by your throat,
before you find yourself barefoot
in my kitchen, mute and panting.
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Nandi Comer
Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City
Another ripped night, another dank song,
another bloated head of a headline child
bobs in your river. Loaded barrel woman,
pumped piston city, seven of your boys
rushed a townhouse door for jewelry,
for a cable box, for a game console,
tossed over kitchen tables, turned another
boy’s face to mush. And you? You’ve gone and gave up
their ghosts. Singing a murderous sinfonietta
you make another girl, another son dance
on waves of your wails as if each bullet
were a small celebration missile. I know
this lost loveluck is not your fault. You do not mean
to change a father’s body to canopy
and shield, into a dead weight your daughter
will tuck herself under until your singing
is done, but I’ve watched you strained with moan
and hymn. Your living room floor scattered
with obituaried flaking faces.
I’ve seen your organ arms’ frantic wave. The length
of your fingers curved around carnation stems.
Each night your skin twists mourn to mourn. Beating
chest woman, yours is a solitary grief
whose wailing provokes the next hand hooked
Nandi Comer
to an infant throat. Weeping woman,
foolish mother. I’ve tried to sing your praise song,
but each of your river-drowned children
is a clanging cord in my throat. “Don’t stay,”
you warn. You refuse to protect me.
Still, I drag myself to you, kneel and kiss
your oily asphalt knees. No one knows
your grieving songs, our love of graveyard strolls.
If only to fondle the fringes
of small caskets, I come back. I retreat.
I come back. I retreat.
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Nandi Comer
Losing Between Manholes and Myths
Here, girls keep ears tuned to heavy thunder,
rippled sky, and cloudbursts—not to boys’ eyes
following hemlines, nor catcalls from rooftops,
nor a sweet shepherding palm at their waists.
It’s the rains that dump women curbside,
wet and cored. It’s never an unmarked taxi
or stumbling through our stone town’s dark dawn.
October is a constant downpour.
Sidewalks overflow. Water whirlpools
at every corner. Red awnings sag
and drip. The storms in this town
have already drowned many women.
If a girl is not careful she gets pulled
underground through an uncovered manhole.
She won’t fall into a ditch, or come back
with one broken limb. It’s not the dragging
that swells their thin arms, not mouthfuls
of gravel, not their tongues snipped off
and jammed in mailboxes. A drizzle turns
to thrill then threat. Knuckles washed translucent
can’t endure the pull. I know
what your newspapers say, but our men
don’t turn their steering wheels down a dead-end street,
they don’t stop in front of a house
she doesn’t know. She will not need to kick
Nandi Comer
or scratch or plead that her father
is willing to pay ten times he asks
if she just makes it home. I’m telling you
every southwest corner does not lead
to a knot she can’t loosen, or
a stained cloth she can’t spit up. Lower
your window. Breathe the heavy humid
air. Fear the streams of gutter water
rivering through the town. Flood rain takes
girls with muck and waste. The sewers make
them bloated. It’s the storms that send
their bodies crawling through piping
towards a lake where all bobbing heads spring up.
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Dead Boy’s Wedding
The boy in the coffin was young, sixteen almost seventeen,
and wore a suit two sizes too big for him. A ring of pine boughs
crowned his head and obstructed a clear view of his face. His family
crowded at his feet, heads bowed and close together, leaning against
one another for stability while a priest stood over his head and
chanted the somber tenor notes of a funeral song that vibrated in the
pre-dawn air. Everything else was quiet and still, and the scene’s only
witness was Ruth Marfinescu, the American wife of Sorin Marfinescu,
esteemed historian and archeologist. She was not wearing her glasses
and thought the entire tableau some sort of great black beast with
amoeba-like borders that undulated but never moved from its fixed
space on the sidewalk beneath her apartment. It was an abomination
sent from hell to terrorize her.
The song had woken her and sent her to the window to see the
source of the noise, swear at it, shame it to silence, and return to her
bed to sleep however long she could before the church bells began
their daily routine. This bell song would signal the start of the day and
blast through the block of flats with an ear-splitting cacophony of song
that would mark every subsequent hour throughout the day. There are
three churches in Braşov within a mile of each other, and none of them
agree on the time. The first two minutes of every daylight hour are
filled with the arrhythmic clanging of bells.
The Lutheran Church with its one large resonant bell started, and
a few moments later, the atonal melody of the Catholic and Eastern
Orthodox churches joined in with their collection of smaller bells. After
the last jarring chord, life would start. Old women would beat their rugs
in the courtyard, and milkmen would push squeaky-wheeled carts past
open windows, calling out and hoping to make a sale. The newly minted
cellist next door liked to get an early start on his criminal ministrations
to his instrument. The silence of the hours before the bells rang was a
precious treasure that Ruth guarded with a religious fervor.
Her knowledge of Romanian vulgarities was limited, but not
Suzanne Hodsden
preclusive. She retrieved her glasses, bent in half over her bedroom
windowsill, and warmed up one of her favorite phrases of damnation,
something about making skis out of an enemy’s broken femurs. She
was about to let loose with it when she saw the singer, dressed head
to toe in black, was most likely a priest. She was raised Baptist, and
though she’d long since stopped talking to God with any regularity, a
healthy fear of hell stopped her short of swearing at a man of the cloth.
Then she saw the boy. She gripped the sides of the window and didn’t
move until the bells began. Only then did she take a step back and
slam the window shut, a primal instinct of self-preservation.
Even through glass, the bells shook her by the bundle of nerves tied
tight around the top of her spine and shattered against the hard bone of
her skull. They rattled the thin walls of the soviet bloc-style apartment
she shared with her husband. The apartment was fourteen by twenty-two
feet, and, in the airless summer heat, the stench of two humans could be
overwhelming if not properly ventilated. The window was only shut for
seconds before she began to stifle, and she sagged under the weight of
Romanian hospitality. She and her husband had visited his mother the
night before, and rules dictated she accept whatever food or drink was
offered to her lest she cause offense. More often than not, it was drink.
Ruth couldn’t compete with people who’d been training their
heads and livers for an entire lifetime, and Romanian social gatherings
always addled her brains and good sense. So much so on that morning
she’d been poised to scream at a funeral. She swallowed that ball of
guilt whole, down into her gullet to mingle with the pickled contents
of her stomach.
Sorin was up and rooting around in the kitchen, and she walked
the five feet to the foyer, if it could be called that. A four-by-five foot
space contained three doors to three rooms: the bedroom, the kitchen,
and the bathroom. Each room was smaller than the previous. Sorin
was leaning out the window, observing the scene with a toothbrush
in his mouth, nothing in his expression to suggest anything he saw
on the ground was out of the ordinary. More surprising, given the
direction of his eyebrows, was the fact his wife was out of bed.
Her mother once told her anything she ever wanted to know
about people could be worked out in the first hour of their day. Do
they open a window? Wear slippers? When does coffee get involved?
How many cups? Do they dress before breakfast? What paper do they
read? The first hour is crucial because it’s rare for people to lie. It just
doesn’t occur to them, her mother said. Give them an hour, and they
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are awake enough to know others are watching them. Sorin woke with
the sun and was always well out of bed before Ruth opened her eyes.
After nearly six months of marriage, she barely knew him at all.
“There’s a dead person on the sidewalk,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He must be buried.”
She stood transfixed by the sight of her husband in his jockey shorts,
stretching out the cricks in his back. If not for the silver in his hair and
beard, his awkwardly thin body could be mistaken for an adolescent’s.
They stood and stared at one another until the previous day’s argument
woke up and put on its shoes; and when it did, his sigh of resignation
sent the toothbrush swinging to the corner of his mouth. He pushed
past her on a resolute path to the bathroom before she could speak.
She cut around him and shut the bathroom door behind her.
Usually Sorin respected his strange American wife’s insistence upon
using the toilet in solitude, but he hesitated only a moment before he
pushed the door open and scraped her knees in the process. He spit
into the sink. The mix of toothpaste and silver in his hair made him
look rabid. His head bent to rinse his mouth, and he met her glare for
glare. If the yelling was to continue, he apparently wanted to do so
without toothpaste in his mouth.
The tub was filled with pillows and thick wool blankets. On nights
they went to bed without speaking, Sorin packed the bathtub full of
pillows and slept with his head against the soap dish. He made a show
out of stretching out his back, throwing a glance into the tub with his
makeshift bed and then back at her while he dried his hands on the
towel, one finger at a time.
“What is wrong?” he asked.
“I’d like to pee in peace, that’s what’s fucking wrong.”
“Hug my ass.”
“Kiss. Kiss your ass. That’s the phrase, Sorin.”
“You can do that, too, if you’d like.” He leaned against the sink
and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Who died?”
His expression sobered. He left the bathroom and shut the door
to let her finish. Through the crack, he told her their neighbors on the
first floor had lost their oldest boy.
“Alex?” She’d given Alex one or two English lessons in exchange
for his wealth of Romanian vulgarities. Sorin didn’t answer.
Suzanne Hodsden
She walked out of the bathroom on knees that wobbled, made her
way to the kitchen, and looked out the window. She could see him now
and the abundance of greenery that pillowed and haloed his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her words were mostly air and barely
achieved any sort of audible tone.
Sorin rummaged in the fridge and removed some milk and fresh
cheese. Poking into the bread box, he seemed discouraged by the
makings of his breakfast. He spoke without looking at her.
“You need anything from the store?”
“Answer me.”
She didn’t need an answer. She already knew why her husband
hadn’t mentioned the death of a child. If he told her, she’d think about
Jacob, and Sorin and Ruth did not discuss her son. Alex was not much
older than Jacob had been when he died. She’d buried her son in a
confirmation suit two sizes too small. The casket she’d bought him
was too big, but her teacher’s salary hadn’t been able to afford a custom
order. The coffin’s extra space was enough to accommodate Jacob’s
soccer ball between his feet alongside a few contraband heavy metal
CDs she’d found under his bed. She’d placed a worn copy of Trumpet
of the Swan under his right arm. The book had been gathering dust on
his bedside table, waiting for him to be through with the boy wizard.
Ruth looked down at the funeral gathering and searched faces
for the mother but couldn’t distinguish her from the rest. All their
faces were downturned and shrouded in clean white handkerchiefs.
She struggled to recall the woman’s facial features or hair color.
Though she’d passed her in the stairwell countless times, she couldn’t
remember the woman’s face. She thought to herself that if God had
any mercy in His heart, He’d have taken her, too.
A woman in the block opposite appeared in her window with a
small rug. She shook it with so much vigor it snapped. She showed no
concern for the display below her. It was a day like any other, and there
was work to be done. Passersby were completely disinterested. The boy’s
death was just a fact of existence amongst a swirl of life: clotheslines of
wet underpants, the reluctant ignition of car engines, and small children
racing to reach the school on time. The mountains that framed the
small valley city of Brașov looked on from the distance unmoved. Ruth
steadied herself against the window. She wanted to shout at them, to tell
them to stop and pay attention, or to at least be quiet, for god’s sake.
“They should stop,” she said. “It’s like they don’t see him. Why
don’t they see him?”
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Sorin put his hands on her shoulders, a light touch that asked
permission. When she didn’t flinch or pull away, he let them rest there.
“Are you all right?”
She cleared her throat. “Why is there pine in the casket?”
“It’s for his wedding,” said Sorin, as if that explained it.
The flies outside began to buzz. The sun made them greedy, and
she wasn’t sure she wanted breakfast at all. She went to the sink and
poured herself a glass of water.
“Wedding?”
“It’s a Dacian thing, a pagan custom from before the Romans,”
he said. He disappeared into the bedroom to dress. She followed him
there, using both unreliable hands to hold her water glass. She waited
for him to continue, but he was busy pulling on a pair of black pants
and a T-shirt.
“Look,” he said when fully dressed. “If we had been married here,
there would have been pine at our wedding. If I was not married, and
I died tomorrow, I would marry the dead. They would put pine with
me to take to my wedding.” He pushed his keys into his pocket and
hooked his wallet onto a chain on his belt loop.
“Any one dead person in particular?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I do know that no one in Romania
gets out of marriage.” This last bit he said mostly to himself.
Ruth finished her water and put the glass on the bedside coffee
table. Sorin waved his arms about, dismissing her and any more
questions she might ask.
“It’s tradition.” For all his status as a scholar of history, there were
certain things Sorin believed should be accepted without questions.
He was halfway out of the apartment and called over his shoulder.
“You sure you don’t want anything?”
She nodded. When the door had shut behind him, she went into
the kitchen to make coffee. She boiled enough water for two and sat
at the chair closest to the window to observe the scene. One of the
mourners wrapped his arms around the woman standing next to him.
The woman pushed him away.
Ruth had been in London for a conference, a year after sickness
claimed her son and left her a childless single mother. Sorin had
approached her sitting alone in a hotel bar. He asked why she was
by herself, and she answered that she didn’t like being with people
anymore. She warned him away. “I have a sad history,” she said.
He sat down anyway. “Everyone in my country has a sad history,”
Suzanne Hodsden
he said, in reference to dictators, secret police, and national starvation.
He reached out and pushed up one corner of her mouth. “But we smile
anyway. When we can’t smile, we drink.” He said it so seriously that she
laughed. “Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’ll fall in love with you.”
She married him not long after because she didn’t want to go home.
In a way, Ruth had fallen in love with Romania before Sorin. In America,
her sadness infected everyone around her—her family, her students. In
Romania, a bit more didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Her husband appeared on the sidewalk below and negotiated past
the people crowding his path to the corner shop. His phone rang and
he answered it, speaking loud enough for her to hear that he spoke
in English. He confirmed his plans to attend a party at the museum
that night. He said he didn’t know if his wife would attend or not. She
watched him disappear around the corner.
She dug through dressers and put on everything she had that
was black. She tied her unruly hair up into the neatest knot she could
manage and ran down the stairs of the building. She would stand
sentinel even if no one else would, but looking down at Alex, she
couldn’t see anything but Jacob. The priest covered the casket with a
lid carved with roses, a cross, and concentric circles. The water she’d
drunk welled up in the back of her throat.
In the courtyard, a large white conversion van backed its way
down the sidewalk and stopped in front of the funeral. Two men
jumped out, came around, and opened the back doors. One was
smoking a cigarette, and she hissed at him.
“Put that out,” she said, and he returned her request with a blank
stare. She rephrased her words into Romanian, saying something that
amounted to “Extinguish your cigarette, man who has had sex with goats.”
The priest looked up at her and shook his head. The mourners
shuffled their feet toward the van and ushered the coffin inside. She
sat down on the steps against the steel railing and closed her eyes. The
van started and drove away, leaving a cloud of exhaust. Though she
knew the funeral had left, the smell of the pine clung to her nostrils.
The bells signaled the start of the next hour, and she cupped her hands
over her ears to drown them out. When she opened her eyes again,
Sorin stood in front of her, holding a plastic bag full of eggs.
He fried enough eggs for them to share and put some yogurt
into the mix as a treat. He ate with a determined gusto and asked what
she had planned for the day.
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Suzanne Hodsden
“Do you have Romanian lesson today?” he asked. “Do you teach?”
She’d picked up a few classes on American customs and traditions at
the University of Transylvania located downtown. She wasn’t listening
to him.
“Trumpet of the Swan,” she said. She was disappointed in her
choice. Why not A Farewell to Arms, To Kill a Mockingbird, or maybe
Catcher in the Rye? She’d chosen a child’s book instead of something
that would teach him how to be a man.
“Trumpet of the what?”
She started at his voice. “Swan.” She held her hands out in an
approximation of the bird’s size. “Large white bird. Long thin neck.”
“Ah,” he said. “lebădă. Da. I know this bird.”
“It’s a book,” she said. “About a swan that can’t make any noise so
his father steals him a trumpet. It’s a book for children.” She shook her
head and dismissed the topic.
“Have you a copy?” he asked. In order to improve his English,
Sorin had been systematically reading every book she owned. In a way,
he was reading her. Peeling back the layers of her, one page at a time.
“Not anymore,” she said, and returned to her breakfast.
“Do you want to talk about Jacob?” He waited. “Ruth?”
She looked up. “You have egg on your face,” she said. She was
about to explain that she meant literally rather than figuratively and
stopped herself. She reached across the table and brushed the food off
the corner of his mouth. “You shouldn’t eat so fast.”
“What-eh-ver,” he said. He’d learned that particular American
expression of the dismissive from her, and the way he said it—complete
with requisite hand wave—sounded like a young girl from California.
She kept the information to herself and began to eat, a smile turning
her mouth up at one corner.
Their neighbor drew his bow across his miserable stringed monster
and started the first few chords of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, each note a
grunt and a groan—a squeaky cry of despair from a beautiful instrument
that deserved better.
“Oh, God,” she said. She clenched her teeth and dropped her fork.
Sorin got up and banged on the wall. He yelled something about
the neighbor’s ass and lightning bolts that she didn’t fully understand.
The museum where Sorin worked was hosting a party in honor
of its new exhibition of Roman artifacts, and the bells had rung sixteen
more times before Sorin finally convinced his wife to attend. Patrick
Suzanne Hodsden
Deane, the architect of the event and the museum’s largest donor,
was an unpleasant Irishman with the close-set eyes of a rodent. Ruth
didn’t think much of him, but his Romanian wife, Monica, was her
only friend outside Sorin’s family.
Monica greeted her at the door with a kiss on both cheeks and
pulled her into the party. Sorin smiled at her and told her to have
fun, and for a while, she did. Monica introduced her to foreign
investors as the wife of their resident genius. The genius in question
was cornered by a group of Belgian monks who sipped graciously at
cups of quality Murfatlar wine and nibbled at the edges of enough
food to feed the city.
Monica abandoned Ruth after a half hour or so and disappeared
into the crowd to greet the ever-flowing stream of new guests. Ruth
retreated to the open bar. Monica took the responsibility of being
married to a rich and powerful English-speaking man seriously. She
was a nice woman, a smart woman. Ruth valued her friendship—so
much so that Ruth didn’t punch Patrick in the face when he grabbed
a handful of her ass and told her he would’ve bought more food if he
knew Americans were coming to the party.
Sorin was across the room and didn’t witness the scene, but Monica
did. She motioned for Ruth to follow her into an adjoining room, and
stashed away amongst Neolithic pottery shards, she told her what could
and would happen to Ruth if she continued to pursue Patrick.
Ordinarily she avoided comments on Patrick’s rampant infidelity,
but after three glasses of wine, her tongue was off the leash. “My ass
coming within three feet of his hand does not make me an adulterer.”
“I don’t know why you feel you must destroy everything you touch.”
“What have I destroyed?”
“Look at your husband,” she said. She pointed at Sorin, so deep in
conversation that he’d missed everything. “You’ve been fighting again.
He told me.”
Ruth’s mouth closed over the air she inhaled to use for a rebuttal and
she walked away through the maze of stone legionnaires that were missing
arms, legs, or the occasional head. She pulled Sorin out of his conversation
and told him she was leaving. When he asked why, she told him. He rolled
his eyes, dismissed Patrick as harmless, and kissed her forehead.
“Monica doesn’t realize that you’re a dog.” He smiled in a way that
suggested this was her most prized quality.
The Belgian had the decency to disguise his laugh as a cough into
his napkin. She took ahold of his hand and told him in creaky, collegeCrab Orchard Review
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classroom French to please excuse her husband for being an asshole.
The monk shrugged and answered her in English. “What do you expect?
He’s Romanian.”
Ruth stepped on Patrick’s foot on the way out, ensuring that he
felt the full advantage of American weight. She was halfway down the
street before Sorin caught up with her. The heels of her boots echoed
on the cobblestone: staccato displeasure.
“You are mad at me now?” Sorin caught her arm, and she swung
around inches from his face.
“You called me a dog.”
“Well?”
“Well, go to hell!”
“You like dogs.”
“Not the point, Sorin.”
Lights in the windows began to flicker into life. Sorin lowered his
voice. “Dogs are loyal.” He tilted his head and looked at her. “They’re
pretty.” He brushed a piece of her hair behind her ear. She batted him away.
“In America, you don’t call a woman a dog.”
The street was narrow, and houses on either side were within earshot
of their conversation. Several curtains shifted, scattering the light inside
into puddles on the pavement. Ruth knew who was on the other side.
The old women of Brașov were more accurate than newspapers and
more widely circulated. Ruth—the American woman with the sad eyes,
living in Romania of her own volition—was the stuff of gossip legend.
Who was she? Where was her family? She was the mother of a dead
child, they knew, but no one knew the exact details for certain. Sorin, by
what was assumed to be a strange genetic aberration, refused to share
them.
“We’re not in America,” said Sorin. His marriage gave him an
automatic U.S. visa. The fact that he hadn’t left yet made him Brașov’s
biggest fool.
“English is not my first language,” he said. “Or my second.”
“Well, bravo for you.” She began clapping, and the sound echoed.
More lights came on in windows. “Yay! Everyone come out and join
me in congratulating the man who knows three languages. Yay!” He
grabbed her by the wrists.
“Ce pula mea!” When Sorin swore, he returned to his native
language. Ruth was familiar with the phrase and knew its meaning
approximated something like goddammit. Alex had instructed her
not to use it because pula was the word for “penis” and Alex told her,
Suzanne Hodsden
with great solemnity, that it would give the wrong impression. The
pair of them had laughed like loons.
Sorin took a deep breath. “Everything is a fight with you now. I
do not understand. I do not remember this of you. You were peaceful
before. What has happened to change you this way?”
“I was always this way. Before, I was just…”
“What?”
Numb, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She thought about the
sidewalk again. She thought about Alex. “Romanians have wakes in
their homes.”
“Wakes?” Sorin scratched his head.
“They keep the dead at home until burial?”
“Yes. What about that?”
“How long was he there?”
“Who? Alex? Three days.”
She calculated in her mind how many fights that added up to.
How many arguments, screaming matches, and sleepless nights had
she taken part in while his mother was downstairs sitting next to her
dead child?
“You should have told me.”
“Would it have made a difference?” The bells began again for the
last time that evening and the proximity of the Lutheran Church made
the ground vibrate.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“What?”
She bent over, fingers splayed over her stomach.
“Say it again,” he said. “I want to hear you.”
She raised her voice. “Fuck these fucking bells!”
She pulled away from her husband and started to walk home. An
old woman in a kerchief and pajamas came out onto her front walk
and began sweeping the steps. She stared into Ruth, straight through
her, with eyes reduced to narrow slits. Ruth picked up her pace. Sorin
followed her, a few paces behind the entire way home, and didn’t say
another word. He pulled the blankets and pillows back into the bathtub,
and though she told him he didn’t have to sleep there, he told her it was
his preference.
Ruth woke the next morning to their cellist neighbor. He’d
moved on from Bach and had set out to attack Beethoven with a cruel
sort of musical vengeance. She rolled over and stretched her arms
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into the empty space next to her and remembered that Sorin had slept
elsewhere. She buried her face in the pillow and smelled the henna he
used to try to hide the gray in his hair.
Sorin was in the kitchen speaking on the phone. “Buna, Mama.
Da, totul este bine acum. Calmează-te!” He raised his voice, no doubt
to speak above his shrieking mother. “Pentru ca o iubesc si este a mea.”
She shifted the grammar around in her mind and translated the words.
Because she is mine, and I love her.
She got out of bed and put on a clean pair of pants and a fresh
shirt. While Sorin sat at the table with his head buried in his arms and
explained to his mother why he hadn’t the sense to marry a Romanian
girl, his American wife slipped out the door, out of the building, and onto
the street. Her stomach rumbled with its request for the breakfast she’d
skipped.
Any farmer who was worth anything sold his wares on the edges
of town at the marketplace, and the largest of these markets was three
blocks from her apartment. People and about a half-million specimens
of fresh fruit, vegetables, and flowers were crammed into an area the
size of a sports arena. She made her way to it and disappeared into the
noisy throng, determined to find the oldest seller there. The young
ones, she’d been instructed by Sorin, were swindlers and only sold
produce imported from other countries. If she bought from the young
vendors, and she usually did because they spoke English, Sorin would
know and admonish her for it.
The older ones pulled and picked their produce from the vines, the
trees, and the dirt the morning of sale and had the freshest merchandise.
Farther down the rows, she saw old women in skirts and intricately
colored head scarves loading all manner of things into metal basket
scales. Old men were sitting on chairs with their feet kicked up onto their
counters, smoking cigarettes and tapping ash onto broken concrete.
Their vegetables were smaller but more vividly colored and still warm
from the sun. Nothing was more than a day old, and some others were
only hours out of the ground. Ruth passed a large stack of carrots with
dirt stuck to them, still black and moist.
She walked up to the oldest man she could see and asked him for
two plums, Sorin’s favorite. The man wore a large leather hat and a
sweater that was two sizes too small over his round belly. He smiled at
her and began loading a bag full with handfuls of fruit.
“Nu,” she said and held up two fingers.
“Da, știu.” he said and continued to cram plums into the plastic sack.
Suzanne Hodsden
She didn’t want two kilos of plums, she just wanted two plums.
She held up her fingers again and then pointed to one plum and then
another. “Un, Două,” she said.
The language barrier notwithstanding, they continued with a
concise conversation using nothing but eyebrows and the universal
language of the body. His brows knitted together: Who on earth
wants to buy just two plums? She raised her upper lip to the left and
raised one eyebrow: Who on earth wants to buy two kilos of plums?
His lips pursed and he looked her up and down: Normal, god-fearing
Romanian women who care for their husbands by making copious
amounts of jam. You are not one of them, obviously.
She rolled her eyes up and blew a bit of sweaty hair out of her face:
Obviously. Now give me my fucking plums. With great and hostile
ceremony, he dropped both into the plastic bag, and they landed with
resounding thumps. She dropped too much money and turned: Ass.
He lit a cigarette: Babylonian whore.
On her way out, she passed the flower stand and, on impulse,
bought a pine bouquet from a gap-toothed gypsy child with bare feet.
The bouquet was tied with a red ribbon and was interspersed with roses
and pine cones that were still fresh and closed. She inhaled its scent and
wrapped her arms around it. She sat down at an available bench by the
bus stop and bit into her plum. The juices ran down the side of her face,
and she wiped it clean with her sleeve. The old man sitting next to her saw
her do it and smiled. He held a plastic bottle of pàlinca brandy between his
knees, and he poured two small Dixie cups full and offered one to her.
When she hesitated, he frowned. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy his
pàlinca unless she shared with him. She took the cup and handed him
the plum she was saving for Sorin. He thanked her for it and asked
about the pine. Without looking at him, she told him that her son had
gotten married.
“Felicitări!” he said. He smiled at her through brown, crooked
teeth. He pulled her to him and kissed both of her cheeks. He bumped
his cup against hers. “Noroc!”
“Noroc,” she said. She took the drink, and it burned her throat the
way it always did.
The bus arrived and the man stood and offered to let her get on
first. She waved him away and told him she was waiting for a different
number. He kissed her cheeks again and jumped onto the bus. He said
something to the bus driver, and the driver waved. “Felicitări!” She
waved her thanks, and the bus rolled away.
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Suzanne Hodsden
She sat alone there and enjoyed the heat of the sun. She licked the
stickiness from her fingers, the combination of plum juice and pine sap
that was both sweet and sour. Everything was silent in that moment.
The world stopped and stood still the way it sometimes did, until the
bells started ringing again and she realized she wasn’t breathing.
The taste of pine was strong on the tip of her tongue and there was
a small pool of plum juice in her mouth. She held the bouquet close to
her face and breathed deeply. The crowds of bustling Romanians around
her were transformed from busy working people into wedding guests,
laughing, dancing, and crying out. They told stories, remembered, and
speculated about the future with wide emphatic hand gestures and
booming voices. Bags of groceries became large white wedding gifts that
anticipated the needs of a new couple. She searched the crowd and tried
to identify bride and groom but couldn’t make a clear decision.
She rose from the bench and began the walk back to her apartment
and her life. Though she was no longer in possession of plums, she
carried the bouquet with both hands, planning to put it in water at
home to keep it fresh and alive. As she walked, she wondered if Sorin
had left the house and hoped he hadn’t. She wondered who her son had
married. She wondered if the girl was treating him right.
Chad Davidson
In Ravenna
Three boys, old enough to hurt someone,
young enough to think it doesn’t matter,
sat outside the small green plot I came to.
Dante’s grave. All of us pulled there,
experiencing gravity, out of control
for different reasons. I could not prepare,
really, for facing this, just as these boys—
smoking too deliberately, collars relieved
like rose petals from the extravagant
ceilings of basilicas—could not understand
their own indifference, or why they huddled,
stared when I walked by. They were a type
of beauty, as far as beauty is ignorant of itself,
disdainful of place: that casual square,
Franciscan façade, that entire city turning
under the swelter of an afternoon, June
in the marshlands to the east. Sometimes,
I stand in front of history and feel nothing.
Then, some wrecked mosaic, awkward
in the transom of a secondary church, behaves
just so, as if the artists thought of me and all
my imperfections. Sometimes, people gather
in the hearts of forgotten cities, and I hate them
for their nonchalance, the terror in their boredom.
They have been dying here for millennia, these boys,
and there is little I can do, on this casual trip
in the heat, map in hand, to guide them out.
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Chad Davidson
The Gothic Line
That evening I must have crossed it, racketing out
the cobbles in an orange city bus to Casalecchio,
suburb of Bologna on the Reno’s banks, to dine
with a family I hardly knew, traversing the boundaries
of small talk, the awkward translation of need,
with the owners of a café near the school
where every day I filled blank lines with the proper
noun, or conjugation in the remote past, for which,
I later learned, modern Italian has little use.
What was I doing as I stamped my feet, then ticket,
ascending the stairs at the bus stop, huddled
in half literacy and the cheap coat I had to buy
when a winter I never knew descended? I must have
transgressed some imagined checkpoint between acquaintance
and friend, some shoreline pocked with the unintelligible
artifacts of embarrassment and xenophilia,
as Mina buzzed me up to a linened table and the foreboding
of their furniture. In Italian: mobili, the movable,
the transient—like me on the long ride to Casalecchio,
repeating my scant vocabulary to the cobble’s stutter.
And it’s not the tortellini served that night, handmade, curled
in a silken broth, or the fizzy wine, which my host, Constantine—
Chad Davidson
from Costante, constant, forever—bottled himself.
Not even some idea of the exotic, which surely
I still felt then, one season into my becoming, my beginning
Italian like a wounded machine sputtering its declensions
to the sound of their transnational sympathy.
That, after all, could be anyone’s. But the grandfather
who arrived after dinner and spoke a broken dialect
gauzed in bookish Italian—another kind of wound—
whose eyes, when Mina introduced me as the American,
glazed over then burned through me, or the version
of me forever fixed in his past, in an Allied tank
entering Bologna, and this man holed in the hills
on the Gothic line, while his wife gave birth to a daughter
in a shelter outside the city, the periodic sentence
of bombardment imposed on Bologna concussing
around them. And though I confess now my ignorance
of that war, that I learned best the gothic cathedral
of its history while in Bologna that winter, still
I knew enough to understand what he didn’t say
in an Italian that sounded like this: you
who liberated the streets in your machines, who delivered
my daughter from the fire hills, from the noise of our wrongness,
still I see men like you, blue-eyed bringers of the marketplace,
bend over your youth to hold my hand like you’re doing now,
like you will continue to do, your calling, your curse—
for you shall occupy forever one person to me, constant, immovable.
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Erica Dawson
Midget Wrestling at the Dawg House,
Portales, NM
And this is not the place that god forgot;
it is the place he left alone. The allin-one. The bar. The liquor store. The squat
of a pool player eyeing the pocket. Gall
is what it is. This town that takes a spot
of dirt and turns it to a storm, a squall,
dust, blush. The only hope is rain will blot
it. This, the rouge on the cheeks of a plastic doll,
an old woman way too made up. But, rot
has no place here, nor age, nor death, nor pallbearer. There is no soil inside a plot
of stone. And yards are stone. The urban sprawl,
the quote-unquote downtown construction’s wrought
with gravel. Still, here is the poster’s scrawl.
Weekend hot ticket. Fight. And no, we ought
not say midget. And no, we shouldn’t call
Winner or Loser; but it’s goddamn hot
and you pronounce Dawg raw as the crawl
of cattle in its shit. The flies will swat
at you. This, where god forgot to maul
the surfaces, where brown and green lie taut
as sunburned skin, where everything is tall
compared to everything, and when you fought
it, it loomed over you. It left you small.
Evolution
The wings return into the bird to nail him
—Paul Éluard
The discounted self is housed in steel and screws,
a you that’s forged and saved. The way you move
is shaped by unheard clicks and pops, these small
pieces of you floating in a pass of blood and tissue.
My hand on skin is also hand on hardware, the supple
and scented cover now one part of a couple:
the other half resists my gripping caress
probing for your industrial edge, crafted
for you before they sliced you through.
You are cyber, hollow, filled like a stranger
and say it feels worse than a phantom limb, or a graft
from the dead. What’s in you not human—you dream
of steel cells drifting up into your heart and
turning it into tin. Of hardened breasts and hands.
Wake and ask if I could love an industrial shape
that your soul filled like a racket of birds, moving
through the forged ribs, the hollow lips.
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Rachel Heimowitz
What the Light Reveals
Har Hazaytim
Marble boxes cover this Jerusalem hill, graves
crumbled and aged, the color of teeth,
row after row facing east; buried
here are you who will rise
first, call back to the others, enter
the world of endless life. Your names
echo through generations,
like the lamplighter who walks, torch in hand, moves
slowly from one grave to the next,
sending a glow into the darkening
night. Or perhaps just a match
set to a wick of pure olive oil,
the light clean and clear
as a summer day, sunlight
so bright we hide our eyes,
and fruit that ripens only
in the long heat of the summer sun,
fruit whose names define us:
Tamar, Te’ena, Rimon, Zayit,
whose shade shields us, whose
pips and stems compost back into the soil
on this eastern side of the hill,
where lights come on slowly with the dusk—
Rachel Heimowitz
East Jerusalem with its cacophony of cars
and marquees, the green lights
of minarets kindled
one after the other, dotting the way
far into the folds of the desert.
Muezzins who call out,
one leading to the next—
voices, mournful, undulating—pleas
so like the shofar cries
that drift up these stone stairs, call us
back to where we come from— this umbilicus
that whispers a soul to a soul. Your names:
Keila, Pessel, Shaindela, Ruchel: you,
who loved to knead the dough: you,
who danced the hem
of her wedding dress to pieces: you,
who died in the Grodno Ghetto,
giving birth on a dirty floor,
and though we never knew your stories
our souls still told the truth, the death
was not easy. This is why we can’t sleep.
And the wind that once
blew cold in Belarus, now hot
and dry over this eastern hill.
No more lamplighters:
we are Nava, Odelyia, Yael,
and electricity now scrambles
the light between the words,
whispers rise like mist, a simple
wish that wherever we are
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Rachel Heimowitz
we can hearken back to the sweet pink
of a western sky, the last kiss of daylight
as traffic fades, the stars unveil
themselves, the muezzins now quiet. Wherever
you are, tell us why we need any answers,
tell us what any light will reveal.
Sara Henning
Losing a Child
That summer suspended between highway
and hard pedal, you couldn’t have known
how nitrous turns on a body
with dreaming—so in mine, I coax a rabbit
from our cat’s incisors, because he smelled
of burnt hyacinth, too sweet and feral
to be swallowed, as desperate things are,
by any directive but longing, though his chest
was a crushed orchard,
though blood was a song of entanglement
soothing his lungs. So in mine, your Chrysler
still idles on the highway’s shoulder
because on the way to the clinic, you pushed
my legs apart on the backseat’s cold-lush leather,
so you could know how it felt to have me
under you, so split open, when you
were still a father. And after, the diner
where we pretended we hadn’t made a body
had walls stung by cigarette smoke,
an anonymity that pooled around us like harsh
light on linoleum, other lovers hidden
inside intimacies that fooled them, and I
thought of the rabbit whose body, too supple
to call elegy, I drowned in sweeter water.
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Birding
They burst from the brush line,
a fragmenting cloud of bodies,
each set of wings beating against
gravity’s touch. The guide fumbles
his binoculars, thinks he sees
a certain plumage, red-rumped,
in among the barn swallows
as they wheel and turn away.
I called on you yesterday, I swore
your mother answered, or perhaps
her ghost smiling but barring admittance,
my small finger still on the bell
as she appeared in that doorway
to send me off from a dream.
I could only turn, hands in pockets,
hurry off with a memory—
our first outing,
you point out a nightjar
darting from beneath the blue-tongues,
swooping in bold claps
intended to drive away
a predator hungering after a clutch
nested in the shrubs.
Now, just two paths of flight
forever un-entwining. No,
what you plan is not always
a Kirtland’s warbler flying
as on this spring day. I can’t see
where it lights until I don’t bother looking.
A woman’s dress is too short
for birding and far too red.
She never spoke and she might
have come over from Oleana, I can’t imagine
what her address could be, I’d like to,
to someday hear this uncertain singing
laid bare without the weight of watching
empty-handed, to be called with music
as if it were I who had long been awaited.
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Amorak Huey
North of Dowagiac the Human Body
Is 98 Percent Winter
And ninety-nine percent bottles of beer on the wall,
lukewarm domestic buzz, wood paneling, neon horses
trotting in endless circles. God forbid
someone opens the door, brings outside in:
blustery swirling reminder of the wife at home tucking
my kids to bed so she can touch herself
in front of Dancing with the Stars, couch springs eternally
creaking, homemade hand job the best we can do
when it gets dark so early: this particular point in history,
the least interesting of times. Two stools down
a woman I’ve known since high school offers a smile
that’s half-hearted and even less promising: what passes
for flirting in this weather. Her husband’s second-shifting
at the plant and they’re both supposed to be glad
for the hours: these hours: any hours. Because it could be worse
though it’s not always clear how. Can’t even smoke
in here anymore, all I’m asking is a little heat,
spark and pull and breathe in the poison I choose.
Keno cards pile up in drifts, numbers freeze together: loser
begets, well, you know. Time and a half’s long gone and my jokes
aren’t so funny when the punchline’s always the same—
Amorak Huey
the bartender’s polite enough to laugh for a while,
wise enough to know I cannot tip
but only tip over. At least the fall from here isn’t far.
Below a certain temperature, flesh begins to fail.
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Sara Eliza Johnson
Deer Rub
Deep in the forest, where no one has gone,
where rain bloats the black moss and mud,
a deer is rubbing its forelock and antlers
against a tree. The velvet that covers the antlers
tears into strips, like bandages unwound.
The rain scratches at the deer’s coat
as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers
of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones
of a saint in the crypt beneath a church
at the end of a century, when the people
have begun to think of the bodies
as truly dead and unraiseable,
when children have begun to carry knives
in their pockets. Once the last shred
of velvet falls to the ground, the deer
bends to eat it, nearly finished with ritual
and altar, the tree’s side stripped of bark
while someplace in the world
a bomb strips away someone’s skin.
The deer’s mouth is stained with berries
of its own blood. Then, the deer is gone
and the tree left opened, the rain darkening
Sara Eliza Johnson
red against the hole in the sapwood.
The storm grows louder and louder
like a fear. The deer will shed
its velvet four more times before it dies
of disease; the tree will grow its bark
again. Each atom in each cell will remember
the body it had made in this place, this time,
long after the rain flushes the river
to flood, long after this morning
when the country wakes to another war,
when two people wake in a house
and do not touch each other.
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Dean Julius
Augur
Great River, Muddy Water, its coastline channels, troughs through
my memories like landscape—cross-stitching of glacial hands—
sallies over levee early in springtime, moseys out late in May.
In June, we fished the cane-brakes—catfish taut on the trot—
my father tossed back the rubbery skin, shucked bone off
flesh like cob from a husk—took only a couple of strokes.
Midsummer, deep in drought—sun like a fever blister—
my father and I hunted the sandbar for arrowheads—Delta’s
humid desert—put sharp ones at the bottoms of our pockets.
Heat-drunk, we listened for tow boats, horns bleating in the distance
till they drew us to river like bugs to the zapper,
large-mouths toward spinners on a crank bait.
At the shoreline, where land’s edge steeped into river,
we found a whitetail dead on the bank, her skull brittle
like vellum, scattered ribs—an augur in the sand.
We took the chert-points from our pockets—still warm
in the palms of our hands—made an epitaph next to her body.
The channel-tide lapped in slowly. We watched it swaddle her in.
Vandana Khanna
Parvati Rewrites Myth
I won’t miss the dirty hive of your hair,
your slow drone of a chant that lasts all day.
In this version, I’m done with kindness,
left it in my last life, with my cheap glass bangles
and cotton sari. I am my own constellation
of pathetic stars, built my loneliness twig by twig—
lit it on fire to keep me warm. I can’t pretend
to care even as the butter burns to clear, even as
I never learned the names of trees. Spiteful in white,
I’ve lost the bride’s red parting my hair, the gold
at my ankles. Enough with all this jungle, with its
shiny tongues, sloppy mouth. I’ll leave you
to your cave, your brilliance, spit your name out
like paan from my cheek—walk out of the tight cluster
of trees, the sun’s hot tone on my head like a drum.
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Beth Morgan
Default Setting
“Fat people don’t go to heaven,” Christy said, licking her spoon.
“My teacher said that.”
I stared at my daughter across the white expanse of the kitchen
island. “In Sunday School? Mrs. Paley?”
“Yeah. She says you can tell how godly someone is by how thin she is.”
I shook my head. “You don’t believe that, do you, honey? Do you
really think God cares how much somebody weighs?”
Christy picked up her ice cream bowl and rinsed it in the sink. “I
don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Mrs. Paley says if a person is obedient
to God, then she’ll want to be pleasing to his sight, so she’ll be thin.”
“But that doesn’t mean somebody who’s not slim won’t go to heaven,
does it?”
Christy pulled out the top rack of the dishwasher. “Mrs. Paley
says, ‘God sees greed and gluttony as sin worthy of death,’ so yeah, it’s
like if you’re fat, you displease God, and he won’t let you go to heaven.
You won’t be saved.”
“Don’t you think what’s inside a person and how they act is more
important than body size?” I handed her my bowl. “Don’t you think it’s
better to worry about poor people or fighting injustice than how you look?”
Christy finished loading the dishwasher before she answered; she
never lets me load it because I just pack the dishes in, dump soap in
the door and turn it on. She always rinses everything first. Her friends’
mothers do it that way, she says, because then the dishwasher stays
clean inside and nothing ever sticks to anything.
“It’s not about how you look. It’s that being obedient is really, really
important.” She slouched against the granite countertop. “If you’re fat,
you’re obviously not obeying God, or even listening to him. You’re putting
the food god ahead of the real God. You can’t serve two masters.”
“I’ve never heard of the food god, Christy. Your Mrs. Paley pulled
the food god from somewhere besides the Bible and twenty centuries
of Christian theology. Is this part of your church’s teaching or is it just
Mrs. Paley?”
Beth Morgan
“Mrs. Paley lost a lot of weight at the Weigh Down Diet Workshop
at church and they talk about the food god all the time. They help you
see it’s really Satan that’s tempting you with food and when you see
that, you can resist cake and stuff.”
Christy came back to the island and sat on the stool across from
me. Immanuel, our cat, a Maine Coon who will certainly not get into
cat heaven if weight is a criterion, jumped onto the stool next to her.
“It’s like Pastor Bob says,” she continued, stroking Manny’s head, “fit
bodies serve as a witness to God. He said if other Americans—even
other so-called Christians—see us as fat, we sabotage all our work—
all the church’s work—in saving their souls.”
“So-called Christians? What is a so-called Christian?”
“You know, like Catholics or other people who go to church but
aren’t born again.” Christy buried her face against the cat’s tawny
body. “Do you think I’m fat?” Her voice was muffled by the fur.
“No!” I said. “Is that why you’re so worried about Mrs. Paley?
Because you think you’ll not go to heaven because of your weight?”
She leaned back and shrugged, but didn’t look at me. She’s a
beautiful girl, my daughter, with dark, expressive eyes and smooth,
unblemished skin. She’s not bone-thin: she’s what they used to call
full-figured, but she’s certainly not fat.
“The Bible doesn’t give weight as a criterion for getting into
heaven, Christy. In fact, it doesn’t give any physical criteria: weight,
color, race, gender. Just faith. Isn’t faith enough for you?”
Christy splayed her hands against the surface of the island, dark
nails gleaming under the fluorescent light. “Mrs. Paley says that when
Jesus comes, it’s like a groom coming to claim his bride—and we’re the
brides, so we have to lose weight, exercise and always look our best.”
She took a deep breath. “She said Latanya and I should go to the Weigh
Down workshop to lose weight.”
“She said that in class?”
Christy nodded.
“That was awfully insensitive. What did you say?”
“Nothing.” Christy stared at her hands for a while, then squinted
her eyes and started scraping the polish off one thumbnail. “But after
class, she told us the church would probably even pay for it, if she asks.
Like a scholarship, except it’s not school.”
“Did you tell her we’re not living on welfare? What could it cost,
fifty dollars? A hundred?” I banged down my coffee mug. Immanuel
jumped down and ran upstairs.
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Beth Morgan
“Sixty-five. I didn’t know what to tell her. She’s trying to be nice,
I guess.”
Nice was not the word I’d use. I hadn’t met Mrs. Paley but, even
so, she had not impressed me with her theological background, her
common sense or even her common decency. Why the church had
chosen someone so uniquely unqualified to teach teenagers about the
Protestant faith was beyond me. But then, Christy and I had done
battle over this church before with little progress on either side. As
much as I would have liked to, I could not forbid her to go: the divorce
agreement stated she be allowed to attend the church of her choice.
“What did Latanya say? She’s a bright girl. Is she going to do it?”
“Yeah.” Christy finished off the thumbnail. She stared hard at the
remaining colored tips.
“Christy, do you want to?”
She shrugged, then nodded.
“Are you really afraid you won’t go to heaven? Is that it?”
She squirmed in her seat. “It’s kind of complicated. Mrs. Paley
says God doesn’t like it when we get fat, because we’re listening to
Satan, so we won’t go to heaven. But everybody else says we should lose
weight just so we look good.” She shoved a stack of magazines across
the counter. “Look at these. Every one of them talks about losing
weight, but they’re not Christian magazines. Mrs. Paley says these
magazines—and all the celebrities and stuff on TV—are controlled by
Satan too. And if we lose weight because we follow these magazines or
some other non-Christian way, Jesus will know that we’re not losing
weight for him but for our own selfish reasons. I have to go to the diet
workshop at church, Daddy, so I know I’m losing weight the right way.”
“Christy! This is the biggest pile of crap I’ve heard yet from this
so-called church!” I slammed my hand on the counter. “Mrs. Paley is
wrong, completely, totally wrong. This is not in the Bible. And to imply
that even if you do want to lose weight, you have to do it right under
the eye of the church? Come on, Chris, you’re smarter than that!”
“But Daddy—”
“Christy, I studied this stuff. I grew up with this stuff. I know the
Bible better, chapter and verse, than anybody at that church and I can
tell you it does not include a single sentence on the godly way to lose
weight vs. the sinful way. Weight control is never mentioned in the
Bible, ever. If you want to lose weight—and I still see no reason why
you should—we’ll cut back on dessert. We’ll eat salad. We’ll eat fish
and chicken. Just stay out of that crazy workshop!”
Beth Morgan
Christy launched herself off the stool and stormed out of the kitchen.
Damn. Every time I shout at Christy, I want to cut my tongue out. I
took a swallow of cold coffee and dumped the rest into the sink. I wasn’t
wrong about the workshop, I was just wrong in yelling at a naïve, fifteenyear-old girl. Christy wants to please her mother, she wants to please me;
you can’t serve two masters, but it’s not the ones she thinks.
I stood outside her bedroom door. “Christy, I’m sorry for shouting
at you.” I raised my voice to be heard over the loud music. There was
no answer, but I hadn’t expected one. Like her mother, she was slow to
forgive; unlike her mother these days, she would eventually forgive.
Christy had chosen to live with me; with her devotion to the
church, I was afraid she would live with her born-again mother.
But the religious issues lie between us like the sorrows of Job. I ask
questions that separate mindless obedience to the church from an
understanding of how to live a good life. I even flatter myself we have a
Socratic dialogue going on but most days we’re reduced to the narrow
tenets of modern life and religion. I ask, “What is right?” and find that
it means rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I ask,
“What is truth?” and find that it means believing in Biblical inerrancy
even in the face of rock-solid science. I ask, “What is a moral life?” and
find that it means obeying the Mrs. Paleys of the world.
I looked down at Immanuel, who lay sprawled on the carpet.
Though Christy’s bed is his favorite place to nap, he flees when she
puts on music. Like me, he hates all the rap, hip-hop and whatever else
she listens to these days. “How did we come to this, Manny? How did
a good Christian like me end up being tarred as an infidel?”
I grew up in the proud, liberal Protestant tradition. My father
was an elder at Riverside Church in Manhattan where the Reverend
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., presided over the nation’s clergy in their
efforts toward nuclear disarmament, civil rights, and against the war
in Vietnam. Coffin stood with Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan,
and thousands of other courageous men of faith in the fight against
the imperial America of the Sixties and Seventies. My parents spoke of
Dr. Coffin with a respect bordering on worship.
Christy’s church, here in the hills of southern Ohio, is the new
evangelical face of Protestantism. Christy tried First Presbyterian with
its gothic towers and Bach preludes, and pronounced it “conservative,
stuffy, boring;” to her, this New Promise Congregation is exciting
and “fun.” However, in spite of a jeans-clad congregation of seven
thousand, a rock band and the promise of no theology whatsoever,
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Beth Morgan
they are more conservative than the mainline Protestant churches.
They don’t care much about the traditional Christian concerns of
poverty and injustice, but they do care about other people’s political
views and sexual habits. And now, apparently, they care about weight.
“Funny thing happened after class today, Christy,” I said, setting
up a chess game.
Christy sat across from me, fingering her white queen. “What?”
she said.
“A girl came up to me and said she really looked forward to the
class. She told me she reads those Chicken Soup for the Soul books—
somebody gave you the one for teens, if you remember—and she
thinks we just need to realize we’re all the same under the skin.”
Christy dropped the queen in her place and shrugged. “That was
kind of dumb.”
“Yes, exactly. Then she said, ‘It’s hard to understand what you’re
saying in class. Could you speak more clearly?’ I said, ‘I’ll try. I’m
from New York City originally and people tell me I still have an
accent. You’ll get used to it. As I’ll get used to yours.’ She jumped
back about three feet and exclaimed, ‘But I don’t have an accent. I’m
from Ohio!’ Can you believe that?”
Christy, who was born in this accent-free state, looked at me for a
long moment. Then, finally, “I get it,” she said.
I teach college-level philosophy, but I teach it at a regional
university better known for turning out local businessmen than
scholars. The students who come to the introductory courses in philosophy
are not prepared for reading and writing, much less philosophy. And
yet…as cynical as I am, I admire these kids who come from homes where
philosophy is synonymous with self-help, where a surprising number
of students are the first in their family to attend college and whose
determination to figure out something better in life compels them to try
something so difficult and so financially unrewarding as philosophy. That
being said, the girl who reads Chicken Soup books had done what I once
thought impossible: she had reduced Plato to drivel.
“I signed up for the diet workshop at church,” Christy said,
standing in the doorway of my study. “It starts Tuesday night.”
I raised my eyes from the stack of mid-term papers. With all the
white meat we’d eaten lately, I’d dared to hope. “I can’t say I’m pleased
to hear that. I thought we were doing pretty well on our own.”
Beth Morgan
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Whatever.”
I bit back my usual classroom retort: I hate this “whatever” the
kids use so provocatively. “What does your mother think?” I asked.
“Does she approve of Mrs. Paley?”
Christy nodded and slid into the leather chair beside the desk,
dislodging Immanuel, who stretched, yawned and settled himself on
her lap. “They’re friends, sort of. Her daughter works with Mom at the
hospital. She’s the one who got us to switch from First Presbyterian.”
Christy and her mother never felt welcome at First Presbyterian.
Not, Dominica admitted, that anybody ever said they weren’t, but it
wasn’t like our New York church where the congregation reflected the
city’s diversity in their faces, clothes and lifestyles. Oakwood’s First
Presbyterian Church was dominated by the kind of people who had,
for generations, refused to even let Catholics live in their suburb, never
mind Jews, Hispanics…or blacks. They’ve made their peace with that
issue—more or less—but the First Presbyterian congregation still
reflects Oakwood’s long history by being mostly white, mostly upper
middle class and very restrained when dealing with new members.
New Promise, on the other hand, views anybody who walks through
the door as a potential soldier in the army of the Lord and welcomes
them accordingly.
“Did you tell your mother you signed up for the diet workshop?”
“Yeah, she went with me after church. I had to have her sign that
it was OK.”
“Then she approves?”
“Yeah.” Christy fluffed Immanuel’s fur as he kneaded her thigh.
A long pause. “Christy?”
“She signed up too,” Christy said in a rush.
I hadn’t seen my ex-wife in months except behind the wheel of
her car. Had she gained weight? Or, maybe she too believed she would
not be raptured up unless she met the church’s stringent weight
requirements. Or…maybe she was trying out the dating scene. God
knows it’s hard to contemplate that at this age, even if your weight is
normal. Dominica has a figure like Christy’s and comes from a family
of large women; her size never bothered her before.
“I never thought your mother was overweight either,” I said. “Besides,
doesn’t she work weeknights?”
Christy shrugged. “She’s back working days on the pediatric ward.”
“So you’ll be spending Tuesday nights with her?”
“Yeah. She said she’d call you to talk about it.”
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“It’s OK if you spend Tuesday nights with her—I just don’t like
what you’re doing.”
Christy kicked the footstool. “Now she’s working days, she wants
to talk about me living with her.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. Sometimes I’d wake up
in the night and get that sudden clutch of fear that Christy might go
live with her mother. As much as I’d reassure myself that I’d see her
often, it didn’t do much to still the anxiety; it’s different than living
with someone. Christy has always been the best reason to come home
at night. And, in my worst three-in-the-morning fantasies, Dominica,
who only reluctantly came to Ohio because of my career—and still
doesn’t like it—moves back to New York and takes Christy with her.
“Is that what you want?” I asked sadly.
Christy shrugged. “I don’t know, Daddy. Mom says she’s lonely.”
The only sound in the room was Immanuel’s purr. He adores
Christy and he mopes whenever she’s away. Dominica is afraid of cats—
though she admits only to loathing them—but it would be mean to point
out that Manny’d be left behind with me. I shout, but I’m not mean.
My own sorrow aside, I did not want Christy to be assaulted daily
with the New Promise version of life. Bad enough she thinks she’ll go
to hell for an extra ten pounds, but what if she doesn’t question the
New Promise default setting of thin, white and Christian? What if she
assumes those are the only people who matter in this country? Or in
heaven? What if she chooses to go to a narrow-minded Bible college?
Not Wheaton, I could stand Wheaton, but somewhere like Bob Jones
where they teach everybody to submit to their pastor and their God,
and women to submit to their men.
“I wish you’d never gotten divorced!” Christy suddenly burst out.
“It’s so stupid. It’s not like either of you is going to get married again or
anything.”
I spread my hands in supplication. “No, I suppose not, not soon
anyway. But your mother and I are going on very different paths—”
“Great, Daddy, you take a different path, and I pay the price! I
don’t want to choose who to live with, I want to live with both of you!”
“I can’t join your church, Christy, and that was very important to
your mother.”
Christy looked at me with the sullen teenage expression she rarely
affects. “You’re selfish,” she said in a low voice.
“Would you have me lie and say I’d been born again? How can I lie
about something as fundamental as faith? I can’t honestly do it, Christy.”
Beth Morgan
“You could change your mind.”
“Not when everything I believe is treated with contempt. I’m an
old-fashioned Christian—your Granddad and I marched under the
banner of the—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah—”
“Don’t you sass me, young lady! What I believe is important
enough to take a stand, important enough to risk losing what I love
best in my daily life.”
She gave me another sullen look. “Like what? Your job?”
“You, my dear Christy. Living with you.”
At eight o’clock on a chilly night in November, I drove to
the New Promise church to pick up Christy. Dominica had, in the
nationwide shortage of nurses, been obligated to cover the local
shortage on diet night. I was so relieved to see that her commitment
to sick children had not been compromised by her commitment to
salvation through thinness that I did not make my usual protest about
setting foot on church property. I left the car in Jubilation, one of the
distant sections of the lot. On the way to the main building, I passed
Redemption and Salvation, both full of minivans and SUVs festooned
with yellow “Support-the-Troops” magnets: with Wright-Patterson a
mile down the highway, the military—the Air Force in particular—
enjoys great support around here…and little criticism.
The story of the founding of New Promise seems apocryphal, but is
apparently true: Pastor Bob heeded “the call,” drove up from Arkansas
in a beat-up Pontiac, put on his jeans and Hawaiian shirt and started
knocking on doors. Four new subdivisions of cheap housing, full of
unchurched young families, were all ready for Pastor Bob’s message of
come as you are, listen to rock music, enjoy free babysitting and fill up
on Krispy Kremes after every service. The new church complex, with
a sanctuary that seats six thousand, was completed three years ago. It
has a gym, a pre-school, an elementary school and a café with a drivethrough latte window.
At Dominica’s insistence, I went to a couple of the services. The
first sermon was on tough love—they’re in favor, but don’t spank
children under a year old—and the second on voting for “family
values” candidates. The sermons are short, upbeat and not at all
rigorous, with most of the service given over to rock music. The songs,
distilled from mainstream rock, are simple, repetitive pop tunes that
wouldn’t be out of place at a prom, with everyone dancing cheek-toCrab Orchard Review
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cheek with our Lord. The mighty God of the Old Testament has given
way to a warm, fuzzy Jesus who held out his arms on the cross because
he wanted to hug us this much. The church wasn’t the only thing that
split up the marriage, but it certainly was the main one.
In the vast concrete lobby, I stopped short, startled by three new
plasma-screen TVs high on the walls, each featuring gyrating young men,
backed by guitars and drums. A mob of coffee-drinking evangelicals
congregated at tables outside the café, the drone of conversation not
quite masking the monotonous beat of Christian rock. New Promise
claims to be a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church but you certainly
couldn’t tell it from the music, the décor or the crowd in the café.
“Hi, Daddy!” Christy emerged from a side hallway. “Did you see
the new TVs? Aren’t they cool?”
“Yes,” I said, “very cool.” I nodded at the tall, dark girl who had
followed my daughter across the lobby. “Christy tells me you have one
of these cool, plasma screen TVs, Latanya. She’s been agitating for one.”
“My dad bought the first one on the market, Dr. Robinson.”
Latanya smiled. “And he’s replaced it twice already—”
“There’s Mrs. Paley.” Christy pointed to a blond Christian soldier
marching toward us.
Mrs. Paley, a ramrod in a white pantsuit, frowned as she took in
my sweatpants and Yankees cap. You’d think picking up your daughter
wouldn’t require a suit and tie, especially from a church where the
pastor preaches in jeans.
“Nathaniel Robinson,” I said, holding out my hand. “Christy’s father.”
Mrs. Paley extended a thin hand. She barely touched my palm,
pulling back as if afraid her hand wouldn’t be returned. Christy’s eyes
darted between me and Mrs. Paley while Latanya scanned the room
over Mrs. Paley’s head. She suddenly grabbed Christy and pointed.
“There’s Kate and Emma! I knew they’d be here!” With that, she
dragged Christy across to the café where two blond girls leapt up and
shrieked at their arrival.
I smiled at Mrs. Paley and gestured toward the TVs. “Your church
certainly is up to date with technology. We don’t see that kind of thing
over at First Presbyterian.”
She glanced up. “Yes. We find it brings in the young people. Nat, I
need to talk to you about Christy. Dominica and I—and the church—
are concerned about her living with you.”
I groaned inwardly; I was hoping to avoid a serious talk with Mrs.
Paley. I said pleasantly, “Well, Christy is free to choose where she lives
Beth Morgan
and she has chosen to live with me. I understand that Dominica isn’t
happy about it, but I’d like to keep discussions of it within the family.”
“As a church we have a responsibility to our members—and the
community—to intervene when we see problems. Christy is a bright,
beautiful girl, but she is putting on weight—”
“Mrs. Paley, Christy’s weight is well within the normal range—”
“Weight is an indicator of bigger issues. Overeating is an indication
of spiritual hunger, a void that cannot be filled by food, but only by
God. Christy fills herself with junk food—”
“No, no, no! Christy eats a balanced diet—”
“And goes off to McDonald’s after school. She kept a food diary
for two weeks so we know.”
“She…well…all teenagers eat junk food sometimes. In teens, it’s
hardwired.” I tried to make light of it. “She doesn’t do it regularly.”
“The point is, Nat, she’s hurting. She seeks fulfillment and her body
is paying the price.” Mrs. Paley leaned in. “What do we worry about,
Nat? The safety of our children. Think of it this way: if Christy follows
Jesus, she will be safe through these difficult years of adolescence and
early adulthood. She will be in God’s arms, safe and sound. Without
God, anything can happen—drugs, alcohol, sexual experimentation.
And by starting small—controlling her weight, trusting God, seeing
that God is pleased with her for her discipline and obedience—she can
go on to resist the temptations of the world. But it is crucial that she be
in a Christian home environment and you are not providing—”
“It is a Christian environment! I am a Christian! I go to church every
Sunday. I teach a Sunday school class. What more can you ask?” I took a
deep breath. I really needed to collect Christy and get out of there—
“You do not provide an evangelical environment. For you, I
suspect, it is an intellectual approach to religion, a scholarly approach.
That is not the way of being truly intimate with God. Christy needs to
learn to pray, to listen to God and to obey—”
“You think your church is the only way to God and it’s not just
Christianity, but a subset of Christianity. How can you insult the
majority of Christians by saying your way is the only way? Never mind
the rest of the world’s people who don’t even follow Christianity!”
“But Christy is a born-again Christian and so is her mother. It’s
you who deny Christ and leave your daughter frightened and confused.
She has a spiritual void and she’s seeking to fill the void with popular
culture as well as food. In your care she listens to rap music that
glorifies violence—especially against women—and watches movies
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Beth Morgan
laden with sex and violence.” Mrs. Paley fixed me with icy blue eyes.
“Have you heard the lyrics to the songs she listens to?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even stand the noise. And yes, I did
know that some of the lyrics were pretty graphic, but I trusted Christy
to have more sense—
“Rape, beatings, knives, guns. And the singers? Arrested for
beating up their wife or girlfriend. Arrested for drugs, gun possession
and robbery. These are the role models your daughter is exposed—”
“Listen, Mrs. Paley, Christy’s mother and I are professionals—we
provide excellent role models for our daughter—”
“Nat, the most popular role models of color are rap singers and
sports figures. And those role models promote the image that to be truly
‘black,’ you don’t succeed with your brains or by hard work. How can
Christy escape from the pervasive images of violence and crime that your
community offers as the norm except through Christ? How can you deny
your daughter the safety of God when your community—”
“As the norm? As the norm? Our community—my community—
is this community! I live here and work here. I go to church here and
Christy goes to school here. And where Christy lives is none of your
business!” I grabbed Mrs. Paley’s arm. “You’re trying to make my
daughter over into your idea of a good Christian—one who is thin,
white and submissive. And who follows your version of ‘discipline’ and
‘obedience.’ I want her to think—”
“Is there a problem, Mrs. Paley? Can I be of assistance?” A smooth,
blond man loomed up next to me and placed his hand on my outstretched arm.
I suddenly realized how we looked: I tower over Mrs. Paley and
outweigh her by a hundred pounds. I am a white woman’s worst
nightmare: a large, angry black man. Looking past Mrs. Paley, I could
see we had the attention of everybody at the café tables, including
Christy and Latanya, the only other members of the darker nation.
I shook off the man’s hand, unloosing my grip from Mrs. Paley.
She stepped back, rubbing the spot where my thumb had pressed.
“No,” I said, “she doesn’t require assistance. I’m leaving and
taking my daughter with me.”
“Daddy,” Christy said, after we dropped Latanya off. “I don’t
want you to be mad.”
“I can’t promise I won’t be, Christy.” I turned down our street.
“It’s been a trying evening.”
Beth Morgan
“I told Mom I’d live with her.”
Even when you expect something—and I did—it can hit you like
a truck. I suppose I could have smashed the car into something or
my fist into something or gone back to take out Mrs. Paley and the
whole damn New Promise church complex, but I did not. I punched
the remote. The garage opened its maw as smoothly as ever and we slid
into the gloom.
“Are you mad?”
“No,” I said. “Not at you, not at your mother. If that’s what you want.”
“I’ll still come over a lot.”
“Yes.” I stared out the windshield at the shelves I built along the
back wall. “Tell me why, if you can. Just tell me why.”
“Mom and Mrs. Paley and the whole church are worried I can’t
be a good Christian if I live with you. Like Pastor Bob tells everybody
about relationships with friends, if one friend is a believer and one is
not, the relationship is doomed.”
“I am a believer! And you’re not my friend, you’re my daughter!”
“It’s even more important because parents have so much influence.
Jesus says, ‘some seed fell among the weeds and the weeds grew up and
choked the good plants.’ Pastor Bob says that a lot.”
“Am I choking you, Christy?”
“Not like that, Daddy! I mean, it’s hard when Mom is telling me
one thing and you’re telling me something else. I guess I’d rather be
safe than sorry.”
“And God and this church offer you safety?”
“Yeah. If I do what they say and be obedient, everything will turn
out OK.”
“What will turn out OK?”
She shrugged. “Like my whole life. If I listen to God’s voice, he’ll
tell me what to do.”
“And did God tell you to live with your mother?”
“No. I mean, he didn’t tell me, like I don’t really hear him yet, but
Mrs. Paley says I will hear him if I’m quiet enough and it’s important.”
“So in the absence of God, you listened to Mrs. Paley?”
She didn’t answer.
I closed my eyes. Everything I stand for, everything I teach rages
against mindless obedience to any one person or—even—one deity.
Thousands of years of study and thought reduced to securing your
safety in this dangerous world by dieting. And yet. And yet…like most
parents, I’d give my life to keep my daughter safe. Mrs. Paley struck
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a nerve: Christy is a child of her time and it is a dangerous time. I
cannot be sure that Plato, Augustine or even my lodestar, Immanuel
Kant, can keep her safe…even if she grasps the lessons they teach. Do
all those ancient white men have anything to say to a black teenage
girl facing options they never could have imagined? It is certainly less
difficult to obey one hard-and-fast set of rules than to create your own
path. Do I fight back? Do I keep up the dialogue that has brought her
little but confusion? Does her God-backed safety net trump subjecting
her to more harangues on behalf of what I believe is a good life, a
moral life, a thoughtful life? How can I not fight back?
But…can I keep her safe?
“What, Daddy?” Christy was halfway out of the car.
“Nothing.” I opened the door. “Nothing.”
Naomi Telushkin
Judah
In East Jerusalem, the call to prayer begins at dawn. In West
Jerusalem, where I sprawled in half-sleep, its remnants crept into my
ears. I dreamt Judah was awake, the prayer his voice, crisscrossing over
my skin. I grasped for his mouth, his neck; only air. The cascading
Arabic was coming from the other end of the city.
Judah stood wrapping black leather straps around his left arm and
right. I told him the call to prayer was in my dream. He put a finger
over his mouth and gestured to the siddur in hand. He swayed. The
Modeh Ani, an opening list of thank- yous. He thanked God for giving
him the ability to distinguish between night and day. He thanked Him
for not making him a slave, a gentile, or a woman, and he thanked
God for returning his soul to his body after each long night. I watched
from the celery-green blanket, the tan sheets. Judah blessed God for
straightening the bent.
I was impatient to let the morning in. Judah had the luxurious
home of an ambassador but it was not spared the Israeli method
of blocking the raw desert sun—stripes of thick metal over each
window. Light filtered in across Judah’s glasses, but the room was
left dark and I could not distinguish night from day. I announced
this to Judah. He said mild, mid-prayer, “That’s because you don’t
thank God for it.” He blessed God for clothing the naked. I told him
I was naked. He ignored me.
From first grade until twelfth, I davened every morning and
afternoon. (Judah: “Or you were supposed to.”) Twelve years of diligent
prayer, all extinguished my second weekend at Vassar when I handed a
taxi driver a five-dollar bill on a Friday night. I told him I’d just spent
money on Shabbat and he asked for a tip. It was that night, in a basement
smelling of perfume and Natty Ice, that Christopher spilled gin on
my shoes. He took me to dinner a week later and ordered us shrimp
cocktail. Everything about Christopher was exotic. (“You were seduced
by seafood.”) Christopher had a ski lodge in Vermont and a boat in
Connecticut. His father shook his hand instead of hugging him.
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Naomi Telushkin
At first I told Abba I had a close friend named Christine but by
December break I was fed up. I told Abba I had summer plans to go to
Argentina and Peru and that I’d be going with Christopher. Abba told
me he would stop paying my college tuition. I called Abba heartless. I
told him I loved Christopher before I said it to Christopher.
(Judah was sad about this, more than I expected—“My heart still
breaks over things my sons said years ago.”)
Two months later, Abba told me he was sick. The summer after
my sophomore year, I received a phone call during a weekend at
Christopher’s beach home in North Carolina. Jewish law demands the
body be buried within twenty-four hours.
Christopher’s parents booked me a flight out the next day. I told
Christopher, lying beside him that night, that I wanted to read. He
said, uncomfortable, “We’re not big readers,” and I said, “But you
have a library.” We traipsed downstairs into the mahogany room and
Christopher pulled out a copy of Adrienne Rich poems. I tugged at him
and pulled him down on the carpet. He thought I wanted comforting.
I explained, lying on the auburn and navy carpet of the library, what I
wanted instead—and Christopher raised a hand and obliged.
The first time I went out for dinner with Christopher’s parents,
I wore a simple red dress without a back. Judah interrupted,“I hate that
dress, you look so cold.” And then, “Naturally the WASP family would
love the dress that makes you look cold.”
“How do I look cold?”
“When you wear that dress, you inhabit it. You walk into the
restaurant, just waiting to glare at everybody.”
“I never glare.”
“You glare in that dress.”
Judah had a natural eloquence. Born in London and educated at
Cambridge, he also spoke French and a passable Spanish. His Hebrew
rolled from the back of his throat, as if he grew up wandering the
shuks. Judah was the ambassador to India and this fine-tuned even the
very edges of his speech, until everything he said rolled off the tongue
carelessly and beautifully.
I told Judah I wore the dress again, to a French bistro the summer
after graduation, where Christopher and I had a very civilized breakup, a very civilized end in a red dress without a back. (“The glaring
now makes sense.”)
I arrived in Tel Aviv on a post-university program and stayed
Naomi Telushkin
on. Moved in with two Americans and a French girl. Our apartment
is a renovated music studio, practice rooms and rehearsal spaces
turned into bedrooms and bathrooms. We encounter students taking
cigarette breaks outside throughout the day, trombones and flutes in
their arms.
From my living-room window: two muscular men constantly make
love. My bed thumps nightly from the vibrations of live music, beggars
bellowing a broken Hebrew, the sound of hurtling glass. Street cats
with bitten-off ears wail like children.
Judah davened for forty-five minutes. He removed the box from
his forehead, wound the leather straps inside it and asked if I would
pray as well.
“Of course not!”
Judah laughed. Our running joke—that one morning I will agree.
He told me he would be leaving for Berlin in two hours, Mordechai the
driver would be coming to get him. I could go with him to Ben Gurion
and then back to my apartment. My apartment is in Florentine, South
Tel Aviv, a half hour from the airport and so I agreed, “Since it’s close by.”
Judah said, “You would have agreed no matter what—you’re going
to miss me.”
I told him that I had big plans for his four days in Germany and
wouldn’t even notice he was gone.
“What plans?”
I shrugged. “Someone took me to a play last weekend.”
Judah smiled and sat down and acted unthreatened. I told him
that it was a terrible play.
“Of course it was.”
“It was political—”
“You know how much I hate political art,” Judah said, and I
imitated his accent. “It’s no brilliant West End of course,” when Judah
interrupted. “Now, bullshit aside, who took you to this play?”
I was honest. “A Canadian—young—”
“The journalist?” I told him journalist was a stretch—the Canadian
wrote restaurant reviews for an online expat site for Tel Aviv.
“What expat site?”
“GoGo Tel Aviv or something.” I looked at Judah. “He bought
me a beer afterwards because he was reviewing the bar and got a free
drink. That’s the kind of evening it was.”
At this Judah relaxed. He was an ambassador.
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Naomi Telushkin
Judah and I had breakfast downstairs in the garden. The wooden
chairs had grown damp overnight. The sun warmed them, heated
up the orange and fig trees, the pink and ivory flowers, the stacks of
books underneath the table. Judah made espresso from his espresso
maker and steamed milk so I could have a cappuccino. I told him it
was brilliant, and he hit me—a playful hit, morning hit.
“I don’t sound like that,” and I crossed my legs.
“Bloody ’ell, no,” Judah said, “I’m going to be in Berlin in six hours
at a meeting—and I need to review my notes.”
I asked what the meeting would be about, and Judah said, “It’s
going to be full of apologies—apologies, apologies.”
When Judah gives me an answer like that—Subtext: Don’t ask me
any more questions, I’m sick to fucking death of non-questions and
non-answers—Have you any idea the sheer monotony of the life of an
ambassador?
But I couldn’t resist and asked: “Oh? Apologies?”
Judah snapped and said, “Yes, apologies for your goddamned
United States,” until he saw my smile and threw his notebook at me
and said, “Satisfied?”
I let him know I was. I said, serious voice, remember-last-nightvoice, “I’m very satisfied.”
Judah blushed, he can’t disguise it, British pallor. He blushed and
said, “I’ve got to review these notes because I don’t know anything
about Germany and I don’t know anything about Syria,” and he
disappeared inside the house.
I dangled my legs over the chair and thought about the Canadian,
whose first name was a last name, Freeman, and who had ended the
date by marching me up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. Who
threw open the unlocked door, greeted the dark kitchen by yanking me
in by my hair and who threw me into my bedroom and hit me across
my face because I had asked him to. Because I had said, the first night
we met, at a champagne bar off Rothchild, where he had bought three
bottles of champagne, “Are we going to go home together?”
When Freeman said, “Yes,” I said, a tease, “But we barely know
each other.”
And Freeman said, as we left the bar and he stretched out his arm
for a taxi, “Then we can be whoever we feel like being.” The profound
poet, Freeman.
And then, in the taxi: “What do you want me to do to you?”
And then my voice, a whisper—though perhaps louder than I
Naomi Telushkin
thought, given that we were three bottles in, “Whatever we do tonight,
make me do it.”
Not every man can follow this request, it’s a system, a way of
knowing—it’s not any of the expected things. Judah sat me down our
third week together and, ambassador-style, syrup-voiced the method
from me, but even then—I couldn’t explain what is all instinct, all one
layer underneath eye contact—that sudden intake of breath, flash of
understanding—Oh, you would play this game with me, this sordid
little game—
“It’s not because he’s rude to the waitress or grabs your arm when
he disagrees with you or anything forceful or obvious like that—”
“Then what?” Judah asked, nervous he radiated the mysterious
quality himself.
I struggled, fumbled, “It’s all—the public persona.”
It was the way Freeman took me to the play. The entire walk into
Yaffo, Freeman was nervous. He spoke too quickly, rushed through his
journey to Israeli citizenship—the business contacts, the ulpan classes
to learn Hebrew. We passed ramshackle markets selling bright yellow
spice bags and I registered little of what he said, only watched him
move. Assessed the power of his body, his long torso. I tried to connect
the two: nervous voice, powerful body.
We entered the theater lobby where an Indian man and a Danish
man greeted us—professors from the University of Haifa, who knew
Freeman, who told me they loved him, and suddenly Freeman was
all booming voice, possessive hand on my shoulder, introducing me
like an item, confident. I caught the eye contact between him and the
Indian professor, and I realized, Oh, you’re a performer—you like a
role.
In the taxi, when I made my proposition, Freeman was a performer
and remained a performer, right up until the morning when we made
instant coffee. Laura, my housemate, asked the topless Freeman in a
bemused tone if he wanted some of her milk, and he smiled and said,
“Thanks, that’s nice of you.”
I got up to toast bread and Laura said,“What happened to you?” A
bruise on my arm, on my cheek, two blue circles on my upper thighs.
I said, “I crashed into two tables,” and Freeman laughed and told
Laura, “She was kind of wasted,” and Laura laughed, “I’m sure.”
Judah was disappointed by this answer.
“A performer? Everyone is a performer,” and I said, “Well—not
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everyone likes to play that sort of role—it has to be someone who is
secure and insecure at the same time.”
Judah said, “Everyone is secure and insecure at the same time,”
and I said, “Are you going to tie me up or not?”
Judah said, “I still don’t understand,” and I said, “I just know—
someone hands me a book from their bookshelf a certain way, and I
just know.”
Judah gazed at his bookshelves. Elegant white wood, glass panels.
Titles in French, Russian, English, Hebrew. Judah said, “Have I ever
given you a book?” and I said, “Christopher, Judah, I was referring to
Christopher.”
Judah said, “And if you were referring to me?”
I said, “I really can’t say.”
“Did you—sense it the first time we met?”
“Yes—in the way you spoke about Ha’aretz.”
“I said Ha’aretz was an excellent publication.”
“But you said it so sarcastically that it was vicious.”
Judah said, “I’m not vicious.”
I added, “And then you insulted my apartment.”
“I never insulted your apartment.”
“You made comments about the heaps of garbage.”
“Is your sidewalk not littered with heaps of garbage?”
My apartment in Tel Aviv: camel-colored tiles on the floors.
My bathroom: a broken window, hot air on the sink. I can hear
my neighbor gargling water. My room: drenched in sand from the
constant forays to the beach. If I lift up my shoe, sand falls out. If I
pull a shirt off the hanger, sand falls off. Sand seeps in between my
toes. Sand covers our blue sofa in the living room. The living room
windows are streaked—sand and pigeon shit. There is construction
going on outside, has been for the last six months, and will be for the
next six months. South Tel Aviv is such a dilapidated area that taxi
drivers sometimes refuse to take me there, turning off their meters
and warning me of the danger I’m putting them in. I pay triple and
they drop me off, warning all the way about avoiding the shachor,
shachor—the blacks, the blacks.
The immigrants fleeing Sudan come here, having been rejected
from Egypt, and live in a limbo in Tel Aviv. They live in a park seven
blocks and seven universes from my apartment, grass filled with
heroin needles, and they sell DVDs and folding chairs, waiting for a
visa or approval or money. When the taxi drivers speak this way about
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the immigrants, I want to say, “Remember when we were strangers in
a strange land,” a quote directly from the Torah, but of course I don’t:
One, I sound like a jackass and, two, my Hebrew isn’t good enough
to say that flawlessly, and three, they would pull away and say, Daati?
Daati? My standard answer: “No, but my family is religious,” to which
they are incredulous. I know it’s my way of dressing—a religious girl
in Israel has her knees, elbows, and collarbone covered—but I take it
deeply, take it personally, and think—Is it radiating off of my skin? Not
holy, not holy?
Judah came back with two manila folders, papers bursting
from them, and said, harried, “Berlin, Berlin, Berlin.”
I kissed him.
“I can’t do this now,” he said. “Nuclear talks are failing.”
I said, “Iran, Iran, Iran.”
Judah said, “You think I’m obsessed darling? Let me introduce
you to men who live and breathe Iran.”
I met Judah because I first met his son. A phone call from Ima
that there was a boy in Israel that she wanted me to meet: a boy
named Natan, whose father was the ambassador to India. Wasn’t I
interested? I told Ima of course. In the seven years since Abba’s death,
I went out with every boy she suggested. Judah asked me if I really did
this, and I told him I would always go on at least one date. Ima said
Abba would have been so pleased. Natan’s father had been his close
friend from yeshiva.
I met Natan at midnight at a café on Dizengoff. He wore a military
uniform, he was in Intelligence, he had a car at his disposal and he
sounded very important. He recently returned from a business trip
to Lebanon. I sat there, drinking hot coffee in the hot night, sweat
gathering at the nape of my neck, hearing about Natan’s brilliant army
career. He asked what I did. I told him I was a journalist. He said,
“Left or right?” I said, “I do art reviews.” He didn’t ask me any more
questions.
When Natan tried to kiss me at my garbage-ridden front door, I
pulled away, told him I was religious.
“Really?”
Natan invited me to his home for Friday night dinner and in
deference to Ima, I accepted. It was there I met his father and his
brother Avi—a house full of men, his mother divorced his father when
he was fifteen and moved to New York with another man.
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Judah recited Kiddush over an overflowing glass of Shiraz, “For an
overflowing life,” and he sliced and salted Challah, we said a blessing
over the bread and Judah asked me about myself.
I told him I was a journalist working for Ha’aretz. He said, “Oh,
oh,” in that pitter-patter way I’ve come to associate with Judah. “Oh oh
dear me”—a little tiptoeing mouse, but, underneath, he’s seething.
Natan said, “And what do you think about Ha’aretz?” and I
said, “I don’t write anything political, I’m basically barred from writing
anything political, they have too many political writers, I write for the
English site, about art in Tel Aviv, and cinema and gallery openings,”
and I kept going, in that rambling way, until Natan said, “All right,
all right.”
Judah said, “It’s a very respected newspaper—”
Natan said, “It’s the only one people in other countries read—”
Judah said, “Really, it’s hugely respected,” and I said, “Working
there is a lot of fun.”
An unbelievably stupid response, as this is Israel and Israeli
politics and Judah, and Natan expected words along the lines of
riveting, challenging, fascinating, and devastating. Natan picked at
his roast chicken in disgust and his brother Avi asked for more wine.
I asked Avi what he was up to and he said he’d just returned from
two years abroad. The Israeli trajectory—three years army, three years
wanderer—Avi had been wandering in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
I asked about Bangkok and he said, mouth full of Moroccan rice,
“Bangkok is horrible.”
I don’t know why I said working for Ha’aretz was fun—I spent
my days hidden behind a computer as journalists shook cups of
NesCafé, yelling about West Bank settlements, the Sinai border, Gaza,
nuclear arms in Iran, growing Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. My
first week, Amira, the editor-in-chief peered over my computer, wild
black hair spilling over my screen, to ask in strong cigarette breath if I
knew, “Where the fuck Gary was,” and when I answered that I hadn’t
seen him, she said, “Well if you do, tell him he’s a fucking prick,” and
went back to her office, the door a resounding slam. Gary appeared
moments later to ask where Amira was, and Amira shrieked from her
office, “Gary, Istanbul!” and Gary vanished.
A short-haired journalist broke down sobbing the following
week, her mother’s voice yelling on the other end of the cell phone, and
Amira appeared in her usual huff and shoved her off the chair. “Come
back when you’ve pulled yourself together.” The journalist insisted,
Naomi Telushkin
“I’ll stay, I’ll stay,” to which Amira gave her 200 shekels and said, “Get
a nice lunch and come back tomorrow.”
Amira stomped off in her hot pink platforms, hair billowing off of
her, a vicious British accent so different from Judah’s gentle cadence.
I thought, My God, I want to be like Amira. She’s what a snappy little
column about art people would call a “powerhouse.”
I reflected on this: I want to be a powerhouse and I want to be
powerless. A circle wider: Are they the same thing?
Judah said, “Remember, the masochist always becomes the
sadist,” and expounded—“The sadist thinks they are in control,
but the masochist is in control because the sadist is doing what the
masochist wants, even knows the masochist pretends as though he’s
doing what the sadist wants, and eventually, the illusion of power will
vanish and the sadist will realize that the masochist has all of it.” To
which I responded, “Are you saying you think I’ll change?” To which
he responded, “I was talking about the pervasive victim mentality in
Israeli diplomacy,” until I saw his smirk, and he said, “Don’t think I’ll
always carry the ball and chain.”
Amira sent me to review an art gallery in Neve Tzedek. A brownstone, different installations on every floor, the windows wide open for
the scents of the sea.
The first floor—a young artist, half-Israeli, half-Moroccan. A
series of sculptures called Banana Beach. Judah and I toured: a room
of staggering terracotta figures. Red-pink, camel-pink, clay people
in desert colors, arising from piles and piles of sand. Sand dumped
across the floor, people had to step on it, it seeped into my sandals, the
flimsy leather straps. The figures—nine feet, twelve feet—wore bikinis,
smoked cigarettes, held surfboards, held chopsticks, kissed. We
stopped in front of a ten foot man holding his penis. His expression
frozen in concentration, his stomach muscles clenched. Judah said,
kicking a pile of sand, “Monumental.” I said, “Masturbation.”
Judah said, “A great work of art.”
“What should I write down?”
“That you found the gallery erotic.”
“I feel like erotic is too simple.”
He was sarcastic: “Too simple for an artist of this stature.”
We walked into the next room. A piece called Lebanon. A winding
staircase in the center, white, leading nowhere, ending right before the
ceiling. One light on the staircase. The rest of the room bare.
Judah asked, “What was your first fantasy?”
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“The usual. Slavery.”
The next room: All the lights off. Projected maps taking over the
walls. Maps of Egypt, of the Judean desert, of the Red Sea, an ancient
map of Mesopotamia. In red letters, handwritten, on the map of the
Sinai: My Baby’s Gone.
In the dark, I said to Judah, “There is a scene. In Aida. She is first
introduced to the man, the Egyptian man, who she will fall in love with.
When they first meet, he is the ship captain, she has been kidnapped.
He strips off his shirt, he asks her, “You know what happens now, don’t
you?’ And there was a silence in the theater, this enormous Broadway
theater, waiting for her to answer. And then he tells her, “You are going
to wash my body, wash my feet.”
Judah said, “Continue.”
“She was the princess of Nubia. She was such a powerful woman.”
Judah asked me if I found it better or worse that she was such a
powerful woman.
I instantly said “Better. He uses her power, he castrates it.”
“Castrates?” Judah was amused. Castrate was for the nebbish, the
anxious Jew, the shrew wife.
“Controls, fine. He controls, not castrates.”
Castrate was the man I was told to be attracted to. The man so
terrified of women he wouldn’t leave me, the man so insecure, he would
do anything to please me, the unselfish lover, the un-Christopher.
Christopher’s mother would feel different. Castrate to her suggested
only the castrati, the soprano men from centuries ago; the time she
told me that the lead role in Wagner’s Julius Caesar was written for
castrati. Freakish, perpetual boys.
Judah asked again, “Slavery?” and I confessed another—the
Southern gentleman with his hands digging into me, my housemaid’s
shoulders….
Amira called me into her office and asked me to review a
play—a play at the Tel Aviv Opera House, a play called Drum, a play
about two men who fall in love. I asked why it was called Drum and
she said, “Ask the director, he fucking loves to prattle,” and gave me two
tickets to go, and called the director, a gay man who spent three years
in Amsterdam, to tell him that I would be interviewing him after the
show. She warned me that his lover had written it, so I should phrase
my questions carefully. “His lover is also the main actor.”
Who to take? Freeman was out—so impossible to be with, so
Naomi Telushkin
overbearing—the limitations in bed were exhausting in conversation—
Keep me silent as we fuck against the wall; I don’t want to hear
you talking in real life. In my mind, these rules were logical but in
Freeman’s mind, the sadist dominated the entire outside world, not
just the dark whimpering bed-corner. So Freeman, out. I thought of
the British journalist who sat next to me in Ha’aretz, but really, it was
all a game until I could accept that I wanted to ask Judah. But Judah—
the religious ambassador at a play about gay lovers in mid-Tel Aviv?
Judah said, “I would absolutely love to go,” and when I said, “Your
reputation,” he said, “I’m not an actor, nobody knows what the hell the
ambassador to India looks like.”
The play was a love story between a Russian and an Israeli, the
Russian having snuck into Israel with false Jewish papers. He wasn’t
actually Jewish, something the Israeli discovered when they spent
their first night together and the Israeli said, stunned, “I’ve never been
with an uncircumcised man.” The Russian told the Israeli that his
family was still stuck in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova. The Israeli
said, “My family is only several miles away from me, but they too are
stuck—they live in Hebron.” The Russian gasped. Hebron was where
the most extreme, the most religious Jews resided. The Jews who woke
up before dawn to push the fence a few inches more—to get three more
inches of Jewish land. The Russian said, “Hebron?” and the Israeli said,
“They could never accept me for who I really am, and now they want
me to marry. They have a girl in mind.”
This kind of dialogue back and forth until a plan is hatched—to
tell the Hebron family that he has met a woman, a Russian woman,
and wants to marry her instead. “Won’t they want to meet her?” the
Russian asked, and the Israeli declared, “They’ll never dare come to
Tel Aviv.”
Judah checked his watch. I said, tongue close to his ear, “I bet the
Hebron family will come to Tel Aviv,” and sure enough, they arrived
in religious attire, the father in tzitzit, the mother’s hair covered
in a scarf, the sister and her skinny husband. The Israeli paraded a
friend around like she was his girlfriend and the Russian like she
was his girlfriend’s brother until all hell broke loose, everything was
discovered and the Israeli screamed, “This is what I want to fight for!
Not your fences, not your Arabs, but this!” and he kissed the Russian
hard on the mouth, gripped his hips and shoved them into his body.
The kiss had ear-pulling and tongue. The Hebron family disowned
him and the Russian said, “You are free!”
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When the curtain rose, I said, “Not your fences but this!” and
kissed Judah.
He squeezed my hand. “Don’t think you’re getting away with
taking me to this.”
We met with the director at a bar next door afterwards, picked
at slices of white cheese and olives. The director and his lover draped
their arms across each other as the lover confessed that he actually had
grown up in Hebron. His family still didn’t know. The director smiled and said, “Still don’t know?” and fed him an
olive.
I feigned surprise at the autobiographical confessions and said, “Oh?”
The director made fun of me.“Such a journalist. No questions, just
‘oh, oh.’” Judah said, “Let her beauty get the answers.” And the lover
said, “So much beauty.”
The director looked at Judah. “You’re a lucky man, look at this
beautiful woman,” and Judah said, “Uh huh.”
The lover said, “How did you meet?” and Judah said, without
pause, “She was my student.”
“What did you teach?”
“A history of U.S.-Israel relations.”
The director winked. “Was she a good student?” I almost laughed
out my wine—it was too close, too clichéd, too silly, the word “good,” the
meek student, and I knew Judah agreed. He stroked my arm and said,
his nail digging into my palm under the table, “No, a very bad student.”
We all laughed but I saw the director gaze at the ring of circles,
blue on my upper arm and back at me. His eyes lingered on mine and
without thinking, I nodded. The director nodded back and casually
rolled up his shirtsleeve to reveal his own set of circles, and I saw, faint
but perceptible, the trace of welts around his neck.
The lover ate another olive and said, “This is my second play,
I’m writing another on Russians,” and the director said, “We want to
celebrate tonight, want to join?”
Judah said hesitant, “Celebrate?” and the director said, “At a club,
a special club.”
I stepped on Judah’s foot and said, “We can’t. We’re meeting my
family tomorrow for breakfast.”
The director said, “A shame,” and reached for the wine bottle next
to Judah’s hand. Judah reached for it at the same time and their hands
touched. The director pulled away first. “So sorry!” Already in character.
The pleading voice, the grovel—I’m so sorry, so sorry. Judah played his
Naomi Telushkin
role as well, an abrupt “Please,” as he poured his third glass and I saw the
hunger in the director’s eyes. I wanted to hiss, “Pull yourself together.”
Judah and I left and in the taxi. I imagined the director in a dog
collar and it disgusted me.
Judah traced my thigh. “Now about that punishment.”
I said, “The director was interested.”
Judah said, “I’m very upset about tonight.”
I said again, “The director was interested.”
“Great.”
“Did he strike you as pathetic?” and Judah said, “No.”
“But a little right?”
“I suppose.”
“Wasn’t there something really depressing about him?”
“He was an artist, artists are depressing.”
“He was depressing!” I said. “We know he was depressing,” and I
leaned against the window of the cab.
Judah said, “Is this a game?” and then he said, angry-voice, “Don’t
you dare use that tone with me.” I gazed out the window, exhausted
suddenly. I said, weary, “O.K., I’m very sorry.”
Judah went on a diplomatic mission to Geneva to discuss refugees
and victims of torture. He returned solemn. We met at a café, a late
night café, one of hundreds in Tel Aviv, one of those cafes that served
everything, salads and sandwiches. I asked for a glass of wine. Judah
asked if I was getting food. I said I wasn’t hungry.
“Forget it, let’s get out of here then.”
“Why?”
“Because there are too many people, I can’t hear anything.”
“Where do you want to go?”
Judah said, “Your apartment. I’ve never seen it.”
The sand castle.
In the apartment—I apologized for the heat, the layers of sand,
the harsh glare of the kitchen.
Judah said, “Turn off all the lights, I don’t care.”
I turned off all the lights, I sat down next to him on the long blue
sofa. Judah told me he’d met victims of torture and they shared their
experiences. Judah told me that they all said the same thing: that torture
is the expression of four emotions: pain, humiliation, fear and anger.
And that the operating assumption is that the one being tortured is
allowed to express three of these emotions: pain, humiliation and fear.
But if they express anger, they will only receive more pain.
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Judah was very invested, his expression was twisted, his eyebrows in
a diamond. He said he couldn’t get over how they spoke, these victims,
they spoke with a great deal of calm. Though they said they had been
filled with anger, filled with an anger they couldn’t express, Judah said
he saw none of it. He said they were light-filled, peaceful, he said they
were not ruined, ragged. He said they all had scars somewhere on their
bodies, permanent remains of what had happened.
I asked him if this surprised him, if all he had expected of people
with these scars and permanent remains was to be full of vengeance
and rage.
“I hold on to grudges over nothing. Every day, I’m angry about
something—”
“Although if they chose them to speak, they probably chose the
people who weren’t still angry, they probably chose the peaceful ones—”
“Probably, but even so, how is anyone peaceful?”
“Don’t you have to be, on some level, to keep on living?”
Judah said, “Look, I have to say this. I’m uncomfortable with the
parallels.”
I said nothing.
Judah said, “Aren’t those our rules?”
I said, “No.”
Judah said, “Are you allowed to be angry with me?”
“Yes.”
Judah said, “You spoiled little bitch. People have been tortured
and here you are, romanticizing it.”
I looked at him.
Judah said, “You spoiled little bitch. You’ve had everything and all
you want is the whips and chains.”
“I haven’t had everything.”
“You’re like those upper-crust city children who think it’s fun to
be impoverished, who think it’s artistic—”
I stood up, but not with urgency. I stood up, guessing the sequence
of events: Judah grabbed my arm and shoved me back down in the
chair. He was a tall, slim man, he had a narrow physique, and somehow,
he was stronger then me and I enjoyed this about him.
Judah shoved me back into the chair: “You spoiled little bitch.”
He undid his belt. I waited. I watched. And in the silence that felt
long, but might have been short, I walked over to Judah and took the
belt from his hand. I might have hit him with it, he might have said
nothing if I had. The belt dropped to the floor.
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Judah kissed me and I kissed him back. We kissed quietly. We
kissed very, very, gently. Like a religious couple; unsure, unknowing.
A religious couple with confines; with God encircling the kiss. An
Orthodox man and woman, praying every morning for the ability to
distinguish between night and day.
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Andrew David King
On Taking Down the Model Airplanes
from Your Bedroom Ceiling
This is the summer of our disbelief:
flight, the chance thereof, the dogfight dangling
over your bureau, drunken on G-force.
Below, sheet-wrapped, our heads so close I believe
in telekinesis. But it’s all physics:
a push one way, then the other, bone-clink—
and there. Newton’s apple falls, the earth leans
toward it. The A-10 Warthog darts
at evil’s squinting bull’s-eye. Machines
lassoed by yarn, straight lightning bolts
of lint spun invisible with years:
splotched green wings seek jungles, altitude;
camo paint a giveaway in these suburbs.
From those stuccoed skies we must seem
a damn sorry pair of opponents, no enemies
to speak of, surrender our plan all along—
tired of walking the fields beyond the gate,
plank-arms teasing updrafts, waiting for fingers
to snag. Wind passed us for crows
and Cessnas, but now, I think, it helped us float
through crosshairs of wheat, two wind-up toys
who wound up worshipping speed,
necessary ingredient for miracles: run fast enough
atop the water and the pond hardens to stone.
Andrew David King
The Wrights, cocksure in the corner,
can match the B-17. The spy plane should fear
the biplane. Let eight scarred knuckles
be steering enough. Let the plastic pilot stay molded
in his mission: these deserters
send salutes with scissor-filled hands
and phantom-limb parachutes, weightless weight
of the strings that let us safely down.
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Michelle Lin
Roundtrip
Beneath me, trees shrunk to moss,
the Rockies, a tea-stained napkin,
then New Mexico nothingness.
Buildings like miniatures in a museum
my father took me to see. Or,
like those at Mulligan’s mini golf
my father and I loved. Both places,
the same. Mirrors of foundations
laid down long before. Houses
no one can live in: a windmill
with wings low enough for me to touch,
a temple the size of a washtub, faith
I could grasp in both hands.
My father used to hold my hand
in airports, afraid to lose me
in the crowd. I’d play a game,
close my eyes and pretend I was
blind. Let him lead me through
a world of only sound.
But how does one remember
without seeing? Nothing
but ghosts that were maybe
never there, the soft thuds
of a golf ball knocking
Michelle Lin
in empty rooms. Even the sky
is always changing. A cloud
wisps into a face, into a palm,
into air. As I speak, words
die as breath. People in airports arrive
and leave. As quickly as they came,
they are gone. How many strangers
come here every day? Each one,
someone we will never see again.
And every man in a buzz cut,
wearing a polo shirt and wristwatch,
looks like my father. I search
for myself in small stores.
In the spinning racks of roadmaps
against the glass door. In all the snowglobes of places I have been.
And sometimes, in a golf glove
stitched with my name
that slips around my fingers
perfectly, like someone’s hand.
I press my nose against the window
and see, not how everything is
so small, but how my breath
shadows the glass
for only so long. It’s only
when I land I realize
how fast I was going. The brakes
screaming out the yards, the distance
pealing up in dust. A small, shining ball
returning through the green.
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First Elegy for His Child I’ll Never Have
Tinctures, they call them.
Herbs used primarily as pesticides.
Not to be taken recreationally.
Not for anyone with a history of stroke.
Not for those who value their organs or skin.
Not for the faint of heart, the shoddy-livered,
the wide-eyed, the twitching, those who hemorrhage
with the dawn. O red sun rising!
O stained sheets and murder techniques
that leave a girl seizing and rug-burned
on the floor! My body is a crack whore.
Let the uppers rush in. Waltz of the arteries.
Cobalt dissolved in alcohol.
Blue Cohosh is deadlier than Black.
Steve Mueske
Poem That Forgets It’s a Poem
This is a poem in the form of an epistle.
A ripe weed, flowering thistle, this,
My epistolary poem. It says Yes!
Because all things are permissible.
Even this missive disguised as a poem.
Concealed, like a pistol. No a
Pistil. Because language flowers.
Like “Eros” in the letters of “rose.”
Castile in the petals of Damascus.
Dear Reader: This is a poem about being
Touched. A poem touching itself,
Though not reaching
Orgasm. It says, As above, so below,
Like a flash of panties under fireworks;
Platonic or Joycean depending on your view
Of epiphany. It’s about seeing, or
Not, or seeing then not, like the apostle
Paul blinded on the road to Damascus.
Because of Paul, it includes an ass and
An angel. It does not include,
Although it could, Noah
Driven mad in the arc of a wooden womb
By ceaseless rain, laughing hyenas,
The she-and-he thrum of a million insects
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Steve Mueske
Driven by the imperative livelivelive!
This poem worships the dog
Of our ancestors, a piebald little beast
Draped in purple satin. It eats bran
For breakfast. Has a guest appearance
By Christina Aguilera. A lisp. A box
With a broken hasp. Your animating voice.
This poem, a torus, does not labor
Under the illusion of Beginning
And End, and asks you to annihilate
The difference between you and I, even
The meaning of words. It’s a humble boat Cast into the water. An old man folding
A thousand boats at the edge of Lethe,
Each bearing a candle for the new world.
Jeff Newberry
How to Talk About the Dead
Mention them by name only if you must. Give them death’s privacy.
Let them be no more than ghosted syllables, word-shapes.
Talk about their hands, the lined palms, a lifeline that branches
to anabranch & disappears. Remember veined wrists, purple
& thin as pine saplings. Resist the urge to turn those lines
to words. Talk about the smell of a now-empty room:
cinnamon & lilac or alcohol & sweat, the presence they left
behind. Do not quote the dead. Their words will not
resurrect them. Instead, remember only the timbre of a voice,
how it brought you here, now. You grunt & gasp toward meaning,
a traveler in some foreign land, each ached sentence a muted plea.
The natives could take you for dumb. They pity you instead.
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Jeff Newberry
Spring’s Return
Think of frosted windows,
sleet mornings,
grayed-out afternoons—
dawn’s edged blue silence.
Months after Christmas green & red
bleached to a memory,
after the bright slant-light days
of mid-winter,
the air like feathers blooming
in our mouths.
Now a cardinal on the back fence
(splintered, latticed),
brilliance of red, eyes
like the rounds of tenpenny nails.
The head jerks once,
twice. Then, it wings
into the rowed slash pines,
gone, as he’d arrived—
sudden, unbidden like a season.
Jeff Newberry
About Disappointment
Early spring afternoon—
pre-bloom, the dogwoods spider
out like capillaries. Blackbirds scattershot in a peeled sky.
Their silhouettes dart like spent shells.
I’ve learned about disappointment by studying shadows,
how they grow with my body’s tilt, break
left or right, according to the sun’s
charted angle. Don’t look at it my mother warned
the year an eclipse darkened daylight to a dishwater dinge.
Believer I was, I stared at the sandy soil beneath my feet
& wondered how something hidden could blind me.
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Leah Nielsen
Tuscaloosa Poem
Back when it didn’t cost too much to drive around
in the big old Chevy pickup, listening to country music
static its way through the speakers, back when
good peaches were a drive away in any direction
and hawked from roadside stands with watermelons
and birdhouses made of gourds and painted
red, white, and blue, back when I wore your old jeans
cut off and flip-flops flung off, my feet with hot pink
toenails propped up on the dash, the windows open
because the Freon was out again, back when we lived
in a place where women took handguns to garter snakes
for fear of the snakes frightening them every time
they got out of the car, and back when Miss Curry
was alive and called from across the street, Ya’ll come over
here and fix you a plate. That man’s been working
in that yard all day and I know you didn’t cook, back then
was when I first heard Seven Spanish Angels and wept
at Willy and Ray’s voices together, all gravel,
all lived lives. And say what you will about the South,
I’ve been enough places to know racism hides about
as well as a 3-year-old in every corner of this country.
Here I am, here I am. I can’t tell you how much
of my heart is there or why. Tuscaloosa seven years
gone from our lives, tornado gutted, and still complicated.
It took me seven years there to realize I needed to budget
an hour or so to go to the post office, that the grocery
store was always going to include some version of
What you plannin’ on makin’ with that? That it was always
too hot for Gs, so we dropped them, that you can never
wear a turtleneck before November and even then
you’ll be pretending it’s autumn, that there are a million
stray dogs and feral cats and nothing to be done,
Leah Nielsen
that that clay cannot be garden soil no matter
how you mulch it, that copperheads and cockroaches
were just part of it, that the asylum cemetery—the one
where the bodies were buried upright to conserve space,
where the stones marked only col. had slipped from the hilltop
down into a corner pile and the graduate students took
some kind of ground x-rays in search of what they called
anomalies—that cemetery stuck between the river road
and the river itself could never, despite effort, be repaired.
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Matthew Olzmann
You Want to Hold Everything in Place, But
you can’t hold it all. You can’t keep
time from crumbling, or everyone alive just by
holding your breath. You can’t stop sleep
from covering the faces of your friends. Cheap
motels, blood in the sink, nail clippings and hair dye—
you can’t hold it all. You can’t keep
the continents from shifting, or the deep
wells of memory from going dry.
Hold your breath. You can’t stop sleep
from erasing another day. The cold sweep
of moonlight. Photographs. Your lover’s thigh.
You can’t hold it all. You can’t keep
your hair from the drainpipe, or the beep
of the alarm clock from telling another lie.
Holding your breath can’t stop sleep
from burying this year and the next beneath a heap
of fresh earth. These sparrows. This white sky.
You can’t hold it all. You can’t keep
holding your breath, but can’t stop until you sleep.
Katherine Dykstra
Like Held Breath
I was eight when I watched my mother nearly drown. The
water slide had already spit me out, and I stood waiting for her beside
the sloshing catch pool, my bare feet warming on the concrete. Eager
to get back in line, go again, I watched for her pink and blue one-piece.
My mother’s slender body careened out of the tube sliding smoothly
into the shallow wading pool. But instead of surfacing, she flipped and
fought her way to the bottom. Facedown, her arms and legs thrashed
under the water, her black hair searching. I stood by the pool, mouth
open, silent.
A whistle pierced the din. Lifeguards charged through the pool.
When they reached her, they lifted my mother out, a feather in their
hands. She emerged, wet hair in her face and gasping for air.
Once she caught her breath, she mixed apologies with thank yous,
promising she was fine and needed no more help. But the lifeguards
insisted she accompany them to the first aid station. This was three feet
of water; she was in her 30s. I followed a few steps behind, embarrassed
at the scene my mother had caused.
She checked out OK and the lifeguards let us go. The sun was still
bright, but the afternoon was ruined. When my mother asked, we agreed
just to go home.
My mother was the center of my world. From the time I was
young, she told me stories of our special bond, formed, she said, when
I was just a baby. Our own mythology. My birth had not been easy, she
said. I was a month to the day overdue, and my mother labored all night
to bring eight-pound me into the world. When the doctor placed me in
her arms, I exuded a clear-eyed awareness. My mother propped me on
her knees, and we looked at one another, both of us marveling. The nurses
tittered about our instant connection. In all their years they’d never seen a
newborn so calm and alert. I was, my mother said, the best baby.
I was born on the winter solstice. My parents brought me home
on Christmas Eve. My father was studying for his PhD at Hartford
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Hospital, and my parents lived off campus in resident housing, a lowrise brick building wedged between a fire station and a police station. We
were never wanting for sirens, she said. They swaddled me in a bassinet,
which they placed under the ornamented tree in front of the picture
window. I spent my first night at home under winking Christmas lights.
From the beginning, my mother said, she could take me
anywhere: restaurants, the movies, dinner parties. She and one of the
other residents’ wives both had newborns. They would bundle us up,
strap us into strollers and trudge through the snow, around the park,
downtown for hot cider. The other baby inevitably ending up in tears,
bleating, my mother said, just like a goat. I’d look at him from where I
was slumped, as if flummoxed by his anxiety. My mother would nurse
me, and I’d fall asleep, oblivious to our fretting companion, napping
the whole way home. I didn’t cry, my mother said, until I was two. The
joke was that my brother, John, born four years after me, cried until
he turned two.
My father finished his residency within the year, and we moved
to Omaha where he’d been hired in the microbiology department at
Creighton University Medical Center. While my father worked, my
mother made me her shadow. If she was deadheading roses on her
knees in the garden, I was playing on a blanket in the grass beside
her. If she was bestowing a welcome gift on a new neighbor, I was on
her hip. If she was laying out lasagna noodles in the kitchen, I was at
the table in my high chair. And, once I could walk, I followed her. She
narrated her actions, explaining how to pull a weed from its root, how
to roll the dough for the cinnamon buns so they’d keep their shape.
My mother went back to work when I was two, taking third shift
in the laboratory so she could be home with me during the day. She saw
me off to preschool, then went to sleep, pulling herself from bed in time
to pick me up. After dinner, she followed me upstairs and dressed for
work as I put on my foot-in pajamas. When she came into my room in
her squeaking rubber shoes and stark white lab coat, the smell of which
reminded me of the sterile air and fluorescent light I’d encountered at
her lab, I’d have the covers up to my neck. She’d sit on the edge of my
bed, holding the book so I could see the pictures. I preferred closing my
eyes, listening to her voice, low as a lullaby, and feeling the heat of her
body through the covers. As if I focused on her closely enough I might
still the moment and keep her from leaving.
After she said “The End,” she’d kiss me on the forehead and
whisper, “Goodnight, my rose,” click off the lamp and close the door.
Katherine Dykstra
When I heard the garage door’s roar, I knew she was gone. The same
roar let me know she was home again.
Each night her leaving was a new devastation. I’d cry until my
father came into my bedroom, sat down beside me, shushed and
rubbed my back. But it was little comfort.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like my father. He had sparkly blue eyes he
kept behind tortoiseshell glasses, shaggy brown hair and beard, which
reminded me of the Muppets I saw on TV. He let me crawl on him
while he lay on the living room floor and read the paper. He lifted me
onto his six-foot-two shoulders when we were in crowds so I could
see more than the backs of knees. And once when standing in the
driveway upon returning from the mall, when I opened my fist and
watched as the iridescent ribbon attached to the helium balloon I’d
just been given hurried out of my hand and sailed away, my father
went all the way back to the mall to get another just to stop me from
crying. I loved him; he just wasn’t my mother.
When his soothing didn’t stop my crying, he’d call my mother
from the kitchen phone, “She won’t stop. She wants you.” He’d set the
phone on the table, come into my room and scoop me up, all tears and
anguish, bringing me into the kitchen and holding the receiver to my
ear while my mother assured me that she would be coming back.
On my mother’s 35th birthday, two months after the episode
at the water park, a PTA mom from down the street dropped off a
card. Inside she’d written, “It only goes downhill from here.” They’d
laughed in the entryway; my mother put the card on the refrigerator.
After school John and I sat in the living room with my father as
dusk fell through the open screen door and in the kitchen my mother
skinned the Italian sausages that would go into the spaghetti sauce.
I was on the floor at the oak coffee table, my legs, both asleep, folded
frog-like at my sides. Inhaling the bitter lemon scent of the polish my
mother had dusted with earlier that day, I peered up to the book open
in front of me. There, I read a sentence and copied the first few words
onto a sheet of lined paper. When I finished, I looked back up and
read it again, this time remembering three or four more words, which
I wrote carefully in round letters, taking pleasure in what I assumed
it must feel like to write a book. After I finished the first paragraph, I
stopped to rest my hand.
John was curled up on the love seat in front of the TV, turned up
just loud enough for him to hear and my father and me to tune out.
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My father sat on the sofa behind me, legs crossed, glasses on, reading
a medical journal, highlighter in hand.
“Dad, where’s Nevada?”
“It’s in the southwest, right by California,” he said, highlighter in
mid-air, glinting eyes watching me over tortoiseshell frames. “How far is it?”
He looked up toward the ceiling, “Well, probably about twenty
hours in the car.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“I’ve been to the city of Las Vegas, which is in Nevada. Why? You
want to go?”
“Well, have you ever been to Death Valley?” I held out the book
so he could see the photographs of the windswept desert, ripples
like waves running through the sand. As he leaned in to answer, my
mother yelped, a sound like she’d been burned.
“Susan, you OK?” my father asked.
I followed him into the kitchen and found my mother clutching
her back.
“What happened?” My father put his hand on her shoulder, looked
down at her hands, at the sauce simmering on the stove.
“I got a shock, in my back. It just startled me. I’m OK.” She smiled.
She looked afraid.
The shocks became frequent. With no warning, she’d go rigid,
clutch her back and cry out, making me go tingly with fear. When I
asked, she complained of pain that ran like electricity down her spine.
There were other strange behaviors too. Her knees would give and she
would catch herself on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t open a jar of
peanut butter. As she strained, I thought she was teasing; I had always
brought jars to her. She had trouble seeing across a room. Or I’d find
her leaning against the wall in the hallway, her olive skin drained of
color, dark eyes fixed on nothing at all. Dizziness, she’d say and laugh,
she’d stood up too fast. I didn’t laugh with her.
Mom told her doctor about the electricity in her back; he told her
she had the flu. Rest, he said, would help. When it didn’t, she went to
other doctors. Many of whom worked with my father. We moved to
Kansas City after John was born, so he could take a job as the director
of microbiology at Research Hospital. I recognized these doctors’
names from the annual Christmas parties we hosted at our house. She
told them about her symptoms, and they began the tests.
I learned what an MRI was, an EMG, a spinal tap, a CAT scan. I
Katherine Dykstra
knew the MRI made my mother panic. My father had to hold her hand
and talk to her over the knocking so she wouldn’t move and blur the
pictures of her brain. I knew that for the spinal tap she had to lie on her
side while a nurse slid a needle into her spine. I also knew that all the
tests came back inconclusive.
I learned too of illness, what an autoimmune disease was, the
symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, Epstein-Barr, and brain tumor. I was
nine and I could explain the purpose of the myelin sheath, the effects
of its deterioration. Yet I didn’t know what any of it meant for us. Did
my mother have a disease? If so, why did the tests come back negative?
If she wasn’t diagnosed, would she live on like this? Would she get
sicker? Sicker faster? What would happen to her? To me? When I took
my questions to my parents, they furrowed their brows, looked into
their laps. “We’re still learning,” they told me. “Your mother is seeing
the very best doctors. You shouldn’t be worrying. Everything will be
fine.” As I entered fourth grade, it began to feel as if my mother spent
more time in doctors’ offices than she did at home.
The mood in our house had shifted. We went from breezy and
light, my mother weeding in the garden, my father flipping silver
dollar pancakes on Sunday mornings to waxen and dark, my father
and mother whispering over dirty dinner plates unaware that the
sun had set on them and they were sitting in the shadows. I used to
find them embracing in the middle of the kitchen, the foyer, by the
laundry room, my father a head taller bent slightly over my mother. I’d
squeeze in between their thighs, balance on my father’s feet and rest
my head on my mother’s stomach relaxing into the rise and fall of her
breath. Now, I’d find them on the stairs on the way up to the landing,
heads bent together, or cross-legged on their bed in the middle of the
afternoon, their faces wan. When I climbed onto the bed, asked what
was happening, they told me they were just talking.
Even though, my parents explained to me that my mother
was sick, and that this meant things would be different, though she
complained of feeling weak, of being tired, her behavior didn’t fit
with anything I knew of sick. When I was five, I caught pneumonia. I
couldn’t sit up, could barely lift my head, everything my mother gave
me to eat made me wretch. I wound up in the hospital where they fed
me intravenously. Back home, I didn’t eat until a family friend brought
me a root beer float. A black cow was what she called it. The drink
stayed down and I subsisted on floats the entire time I was ill. My
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mom was sick, but she ate as she always had. She still went to work,
vacuumed the house, tended her peonies bursting in the backyard.
She didn’t look sick either. She had always been thin, all angles like
an exotic bird. She had large dark eyes, a long nose, and thick midnight
hair that she swept back like curtains with tortoiseshell barrettes. So
different from my friends’ mothers who wore their hair cropped and
permed into little helmets. Just before we moved to Kansas, my mother
cut her hair into curls that stopped at the nape of her neck. When she got
home, she dissolved into tears by the grape trellis in our backyard. Cheeks
flushed, her brown eyes distraught, my father had laughed, “Susan, you
could be bald, and you’d still be beautiful.” But she never cut her hair short
again. Now, sick, her hair was still long waves, her eyes as wide.
The disconnect between the way she looked and the way she acted
frustrated me. I felt slighted when my mother promised to take me backto-school shopping then grew tired before we’d bought a thing. Or when
she left me at the pool with a neighbor’s family because she needed to go
home to lie down. I didn’t have many friends and could feel, in the sigh
that came from the girl my age as I moved my towel and jellies over to
their squat, my imposition solid as a thumb in the back. Or when we’d
rent a movie, and halfway through, I’d look over and find her asleep.
From the couch I peered through the dim light at her bony body folded
haphazardly on the love seat and imagined shaking her until she woke
up: “You’re missing it.” Instead, I watched the movie alone.
My mother held her breath when she slept, its slow escape
a guttural moan, a boat motor on idle. The sound was usually shortlived, Dad right there to nudge her awake. One night, while my father
was away, my eyes snapped open to blackness and the droning noise.
This time it didn’t stop. As if conducted by darkness, it charged
through the house and filled my room. I lay still under the covers, my
ears sharp to the groaning, a monster at the end of the hall.
She’s dying. She’s dying. She’s dying.
Gathering up my courage, I slipped out of bed and crawled toward
the noise, staying on hands and knees as if the sound were something
I could evade by moving slow and low, something I could rescue my
mother from. The hallway was miles, past John’s room, up a half flight
of stairs, the guest room. Outside her bedroom, I was scared to enter.
I was scared to stay outside. The moaning seemed tangled in my own
throat, making it difficult to breathe. It magnified when I opened the
door, getting louder as I crept to the side of her bed. Unable to bear it,
Katherine Dykstra
I reached for her. Sudden silence. My mother lifted her head, her hair
mussed. She squinted at the clock glowing red in the dark.
“What are you doing up?” she asked, pulling me off the floor, into
her warm bed.
“I thought you were dying,” I said.
“Oh no sweetheart, I’m fine, mamma’s fine.”
When I was very small, I thought that when death came, it would
come for all of us. I imagined Mom, Dad, John and I, huddled like
monkeys on the couch in the living room, something angry and
raging outside. This is how we would wait and this is how we would go,
heads together, arms chain-linked around each others’ backs. I didn’t
think it would hurt less, only that there would be less fear in our being
together. Lying now in the cave of my mother’s curled body, I knew
that that wasn’t how death happened, that we left the world alone and
one-by-one. And that many times there was no warning.
Winter fell like an anvil, the cold night crushing much of the
day. When I got home from school, the house was dark, no one having
bothered to turn on any lights. The shades still up, the moonlight
streamed in making long shadows. The only sound, the groaning
heater. Upstairs it was quiet.
I shrugged my backpack off onto the couch knowing it was
against the rules, but also that Mom couldn’t get mad if she couldn’t
see it; once she came home from work and had climbed into bed, she
didn’t come downstairs if she didn’t have to. Mom liked to see us after
school, expected us to come up and check in. Instead, I rummaged
through the chip drawer and found a bag of Cheetos. In the living
room, I flipped on the TV, flopped onto the couch, aware that I was
avoiding the inevitable.
On The Facts of Life, Mrs. Garrett introduced the new girl. Jo wore
a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet.
Five minutes went by, ten, then, “Katie…?” my mother’s voice
floated down the stairs. “Katie…?”
I watched Jo take off her helmet, shake out her long black hair, just
like mine. Jo seemed tough, unruffled. I wanted to be Jo. I heard my
name called again. I took a deep breath and forced myself to climb the
stairs to my mother’s bedroom.
Her shades were drawn, making her room even darker than the
rest of the house. It smelled of unwashed sheets and stale hand lotion.
By the light of the little black and white my father had hauled up from
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the basement, I saw my mother propped up on a cloud of pillows. She
was wearing the same threadbare red plaid flannel pajamas she always
did. They swam on her. Made her look like a hospital patient. Her dark
wiry hair splayed like a sea anemone on the pillow, hollowing out her
cheeks. When she saw me, she smiled.
“Hi!” she said, her voice a croak. She cleared her throat. “Hi.”
“Yeah, hi.” John was snuggled under the covers beside her. His
head rested on her shoulder; his arm flung over her stomach. John’s
favorite stuffed animal, Baby Maurice, which he’d given to my mother
to keep her company when he wasn’t there, was wedged between them.
My mother patted the covers beside her, her eyebrows lifted, but I
didn’t move from the foot of the bed.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Anything exciting happen at school?”
“Not really.”
“Do you want to watch The Facts of Life with us?”
I knew I was supposed to say yes. To climb under the covers and
snuggle up beside her like John. To give my mother a stuffed animal to
comfort her. But I couldn’t. John was too young; he didn’t get it. Our
mother might die; she might leave us alone. But if I hardened myself
like Jo and chose not to see her deteriorating, if I pretended that she
wasn’t sick at all, then I didn’t have to worry about what would happen
to me if she was gone.
I twisted my hands together. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m kind of
tired. I think I’ll just go downstairs and take a nap before dinner.”
“OK.”
“Can I go now?”
I heard her say, “Sure,” but I was already out the door.
The days were short and bitter, which meant that my father’s
annual med-tech Christmas party was fast approaching. I groused about
having to help with the preparation in the week leading up to the party,
but in truth it was one of my favorite times of year. My mom spent whole
days in the kitchen baking rumaki and truffling chocolate. She rolled
soft cheese in crushed walnuts, folded spinach and scallions into cream
cheese, spread it on tortillas and rolled it into pinwheels. She fashioned
Christmas ornaments for each of the families—one year out of wood,
another clay. I stayed at her side, watched her hands move.
John and I were encouraged to visit with the guests, but we also
Katherine Dykstra
had responsibilities. One was to take the guests’ heavy coats and pile
them on my parents’ bed. The other was to circle the first floor with
appetizer trays my mom filled in the kitchen.
As I walked around with my tray, one of my dad’s techs pulled
me aside. She asked how I liked fifth grade, whom I had for a teacher,
whether I had classes with my friends.
“So…have the doctors come up with anything yet?” she asked,
leaning in.
I stood dumb for a second, the tray wobbling in my hand. “No, not
really.”
“How did the last CAT go?”
I did my best to answer, using the same words I’d overheard my
dad use: “They don’t know. They don’t understand. We’re still waiting.
We’re hoping.” But each question was a barb, its existence proof that it
didn’t matter how I pretended, my mother’s illness was real.
“She sure looks great,” she said.
I looked over at my mother smiling and talking and laughing and
holding onto the wall for support.
My father came home one Saturday afternoon and called us all
outside to the front of the house. Stepping into the Spring day, my eyes
adjusting to the sunlight, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
“What is that?” my mother said as the screen door clapped shut
behind her.
Parked in the driveway, incongruous beside my mother’s woodpaneled mini-van, was a little red sports car, a watermelon Jolly
Rancher catching and tossing off every ray of light that shone down on
Cherokee Lane.
“I traded in the Subaru,” my father said with a shrug.
The Subaru was a hatchback the color and shape of a cardboard box.
It had been everywhere with us. We’d driven it from Omaha when we’d
moved to Kansas. My parents had taken it to New Orleans, returning
with the hatchback brimming with frozen shellfish—a sunset in the
open trunk. And Mom had wrecked it one winter during an ice storm.
Coming down an ice-slicked hill Mom felt the tires let go of the road,
and made the split decision to steer into an embankment rather than
stay on the road and risk oncoming traffic.
“John,” my mother had said, “We’re going to run into that brick wall.”
“OK Mom,” John said stoically from the back seat. It was one of
Mom’s favorite stories, illustrating John’s unshakeable trust in her.
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This new Subaru, an XT according to the silver scrawl on the back,
looked like one of John’s matchbox cars. It had a long flat hood like the
bill of a duck, racing stripes down its shiny red body and only two doors.
“How are the children going to fit back there?” my mother asked
peering in at the two tiny bucket seats.
“Their legs are short,” my father reasoned. “They’ll be fine.”
“Mark, they won’t be short forever.”
“I like it,” I announced to my father who smiled, almost blushing,
and nodded as if this were the only thing to say. I turned to look for my
mother to agree but only caught her back, as it disappeared into the
house, the garage door screaming shut behind her.
My mother’s opinion of the car turned out not to matter. My dad
only had the car for a few weeks before he totaled it. Pulled into an
intersection and was hit sidelong. The XT collapsed like a folding chair,
a tin can to a forehead. The passenger side pushed so far into the car, its
door left a gash that ran racing-stripe-like down my father’s right leg.
“What if Katie or John had been in the car?” my mother asked,
her eyes flashing.
My father stopped sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. A couple
of times, early in the morning, I saw him duck out of the guest room in
his underwear, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. When I peered into the
stark little room, I saw that the sheets on the guest bed were rumpled.
One afternoon while my mother and I were running errands, I asked
her why. We were stopped at a light, the car quiet.
“Why’s Dad sleeping in the guest room?”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “Well, honey…the noises I make
in my sleep keep your father awake. And…well…it’s just easier if he
sleeps in the guest room.”
“Really?” I turned toward her, but she stared straight out the
windshield.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Then she was in tears, head bent toward the steering wheel, her
hands palm up in her lap. I put my hand in hers.
“What’s going on?” I asked, tears coming to my own eyes.
She didn’t answer. The light changed and cars honked and she
looked up, wiped her face, smearing mascara under the soft part of
her eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I’m fine.” She smiled as if to reassure me.
Katherine Dykstra
I didn’t feel comforted. “Maybe we can pick up some shish-kebabs for
dinner on the way home. Would you like that?”
My parents had taken to talking quietly and cloistered away,
which gave our house a charged feeling, as if at any moment it might
ignite. One night, after we’d finished dinner, and cleaned the kitchen in
silence, my parents walked directly upstairs into the master bedroom.
I stood in the kitchen in the glow of the fluorescent lights that got
left on overnight, clinging like glowworms to the cabinets’ underside.
It dawned on me that maybe rather than talking, they were fighting. I
listened hard for a raised voice, but heard nothing.
Desperate, I flung open the cabinet over the glowworms and
grabbed a dinner plate. My heart pulsing in my ears, I held the plate in
both hands, raised it over my head and then screamed and slammed it
down onto the linoleum. It broke open like an egg, three large shards
surrounded by a bunch of little pieces, and dust.
I heard footsteps clomp down the hall in my parents’ bedroom,
the door swing open.
“Katie?” my father yelled.
I took shallow breaths. His heavy footfalls crossed the landing,
came down the first set of carpeted steps to the second floor and down
again to the entryway, over the marble foyer, past the living room,
through the family room and finally into the kitchen. I stood with my
back to him, waiting for him to see what I had done.
“What on earth?” he said.
He knelt down on the floor in front of me and picked up the larger
shards, which he put in the trash. He used a broom to get the littler pieces.
When he was finished, he turned to look at me. His glasses
catching the light, he picked up a tablespoon, held it like you would a
tuning fork and then crashed it down onto the countertop. I flinched.
The cream tile cracked, a miniature spider web. The wood that edged
the counter sunk where he struck.
He turned around and walked back upstairs.
My mother paged through Newsweek on the love seat, her long
legs folded beneath her. An article about a newly discovered illness
had made the cover, and her job demanded she stay current.
The magazine had an image of a tick magnified to the size of
a grapefruit, hairy and menacing, splashed across it. The story was
illustrated with a photo of a young boy who had a rash that looked like a
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bull’s-eye on his thigh. My mother’s knuckles grew white as she stared at
the boy in the picture. Clutching the magazine, she ran into the kitchen.
“Oh my God, Mark,” she said breathless. “Look at this.”
The summer I was six, long before my mother nearly drowned
at the water park, my family vacationed in a cabin by a lake deep
in the Minnesota woods. Next door was a small cattle farm, where,
behind a fence, cows shuddered and swatted flies in the shade. My
family fished off the dock and sat in the sun, cooked on the grill and
played into the sunset.
One morning as I emerged from the lake my mother stared at
me in horror. She whisked me inside, yanked off my swimsuit and
began peeling the leeches from my goose-fleshed body. She fussed and
worried as I bled and bled and bled.
The leeches were the story we brought home with us, the thing
that got talked about, not the reddish swelling ringed like Saturn that
my mother found near her panty line. She did go to a doctor. He said
it was a spider bite, treated it with Benadryl. It went away.
The caption in the Newsweek article said the boy, from Lyme,
Connecticut, got the rash from the bite of a tick. After, he came down
with an undiagnosable illness that had symptoms similar to a number
of autoimmune diseases; it had the most in common with multiple
sclerosis. Doctors speculated that he’d been bitten in a wooded area
in the Northeast, where the ticks migrated by deer, though any large
animal, such as a cow, could carry them. Infected ticks had been found
all over that area, including in the Minnesota forest.
One Saturday morning the fall after my mother diagnosed
herself with Lyme disease, she popped her head into my bedroom. I
was reading Nancy Drew on the floor, my elbows embossed with the
short shag of the carpet and stinging.
“Want to go on a walk with me?” she asked. The walking, which
she did daily, arms pumping as she went around the neighborhood,
was part of her plan to regain her strength. The aggressive course of
Rocephin she’d begun that summer had killed in a matter of months
the virus that she’d lived with for four years. The electricity that shot
through her legs and spine had ebbed, her energy had returned and
her balance. Her strength would take work, but it would come back,
this unlike the way it was before she got sick.
Katherine Dykstra
I had expected that after the diagnosis my family would snap back
to a time before the water park like a rubber band. That my mother
and I would rediscover our special bond, my father would hang out
with us after work, the strange silences would stop. I expected laughter
at the dinner table, John and I playing dress up in the evenings and
performing for our parents who would sit on the couch, arms around
one another, hands on thighs, and smiling.
Instead, my father and mother sat John and I down on the bed one
August evening and told us that they would be getting a divorce. My
father, having seen my mother through her illness, moved out.
“I don’t think so,” I said to my mother and looked back to my book.
“But it’s beautiful out.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the page before me until she sighed and
walked away.
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Water of Sleep
The old metal door to the mikvah at the back of Dallas’s
Tiferet Israel Synagogue shuts behind us with a clang. “The mikvah’s
in there,” Seema tells me, giving a nod aimed at the dim interior. She
switches on the lights.
Levi is waiting for me at Motel 8. His parents are expecting
us—tomorrow, but we came in early for this.
“You think they’ll figure out we’re already in town?” I said, back
at the motel, Levi lifting our suitcase onto the luggage rack.
“It’s our secret,” he said. He turned to me then, his eyes shining.
I picked up the car keys. “I have to pick up Seema,” I said, but he
stepped toward me, close enough to feel his warmth.
“Soon…,” he said, looking down at me. I swallowed. He added,
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Go on in,” Seema says, pointing inside to the small tiled pool
and railing. A moth flaps against the dull yellow glow of the ceiling
fixture. No one else is here. “You get ready in there,” she says, indicating
a bathroom beside the pool. “Call when you’re done.”
I linger under the hot shower, rivers down my back, pelting wet
heat, remembering the first time I sat down with Seema to study with
her. I was still a Dallas high school girl in red overalls and saddle
oxfords, smitten by my girlfriend. I had no idea that I would wind
up studying at a Hassidic institute for women, or that within three
years I would have an arranged marriage and find myself at a mikvah.
Oh, but it was fascinating the way Seema decoded the Bible’s Hebrew
words and letters, ancient commentaries unfolding around the text
like a mystical conversation across centuries.
“The Torah begins the story of Creation with the letter ‘bet’ which
is also the number ‘two,’” Seema said, “because God made the world
in twos, dark and light, good and evil, male and female. The pairs of
opposites are all mixed up now,” she said, “but a life lived by Jewish
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Law reveals God’s original truth. Good and evil become clear, so we
can then choose correctly. That’s what God wants.”
I squirmed at her binary world, good and evil, male and female,
thinking of shades of gray and not understanding where I could fit
myself into that picture. But before the open Hebrew Bible with its
complex web of commentaries, I was the ignorant one. If Seema said
Jewish Law was God’s Truth, who was I to question?
I began to need that Truth.
Shower over, I step over the edge of the pink tub into married
life. Mikvah will be part of that life, every month. I look around. I take
a pink flowered towel from a pink wicker shelf over the pink toilet and
wrap myself, shivering. The place is a cliché of relentless femininity.
“I’m ready,” I call out.
We meet near the pool, at the rail, and Seema shuts the door
behind us. The mikvah room is small and square, covered in pink
tiles. The light over the pool is dim, the air warm and humid and
laced with the smell of chlorine. Seema beams and holds out her arms.
“Well now!” she says, as if summing up how far I’ve come. I think, she’s
treating me like a queen—the Hassidic metaphor for a new bride. The
bride, an escorted queen. There’s a knot in my stomach. I tell myself,
the mikvah will wash that away.
Seema inspects my back for stray hairs with a tap tap of her fingertips
on my wet skin—I must be perfectly clean to go into the water. But I’m
wet and naked before this admirable motherly woman who is touching
my skin. I flinch at her touch. Worse, I understand yet don’t understand
how her touch is a breech—there is something inappropriate about
exposing myself like this to a woman, something I won’t identify, but
it doubles my embarrassment until I almost can’t speak. Then I have to
drop the towel altogether and descend the stairs into the water. I cover
my breasts with my arms as I go down to the pool, but the water is still
and clear to the pink tiles at the bottom. No place to hide. The awful
sense of exposure washes away any welcome or blessing I had hoped
to find in the water, erases awareness of my waiting husband, makes it
difficult to pray in this holy moment.
Seema tosses me a washcloth—I must cover my hair before
pronouncing God’s name. God is waiting for this immersion that
will make the categories of opposites come clear again and set the
world into proper order. As I spread the cloth over my head, falling
drops from my hands make a watery echo in the room. I extend my
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arms and lower my body until warm water touches my chin. I bend
still deeper, bow my head as if in awe, sink beneath the surface, wait,
then emerge.
“Repeat after me,” Seema says, and there’s pride and motherly
fondness in her voice. “Blessed,” she says. Baruch.
“Blessed,” I say. “are You, O Lord” atah adonoi eloheinu
“are You, O Lord” Three words at a time, she leads me through the prescribed
blessing, al mitzvas tvila.
Then I sink again beneath the surface into an airless place far
from the world and go into fetal float. Under the water, I expect the
shadows of my past and of my parents to dissolve and wash away. That
is my prayer, for the holy water to dissolve my past. I will emerge with
a cleaned slate and create a new self. I focus on this fierce duty, on what
I should be, will be, before God.
I come up, get a breath, go under again, into the water of sleep,
seven times under, up, down, like the seven circles I paced around
Levi under the wedding canopy, Rabbi Frumen’s voice counting the
circles, five, six, seven, for the seven heavens up to God. Then I stand
on tiptoes, head above water. Another breath, and I go under into the
water of blessing, into marriage. When I come up the last time, it’s
supposed to be like a birth. Rebirth.
I am ready for my husband.
But as soon as I see Seema, holding out a bath towel like a curtain
and looking away out of respect, the sense of terribly inappropriate
exposure returns; I wish she’d just leave and let me get to the bathroom
to get dressed. Head down, I take the towel from her and quickly wrap
myself without breaking my stride. As I hurry away, I leave a trail of
wet footprints behind on the marble floor. That trail of water, already
evaporating, is my wedding train.
At Motel 8, blinking orange neon flashes through curtains
and the roar of Loop 635 traffic through the walls. Sheet, blanket and
bedspread cover my trembling body. The rumbling air conditioner is
set on frigid. The wig is on a stand next to Levi’s hatbox, his black hat
in it, our one suitcase open on the dresser. My long skirt is hanging
over a chair, headscarf on the floor.
I know my unmoved body in this bed as a failing. I don’t know
what it is to desire him. I know I should; I know I should long for him.
Leah Lax
Levi’s face is kind, his step eager. He is taller, older and wiser. He
stands over me and gazes down, his mouth in a little smile.
There’s the little stab of fear at his sudden weight on the bed, my
intake of breath, the smattering of black hairs on his chest. I reach for
him reaching for hope, that Levi will pull me into a warm circle and
protect me, hold me and keep me, that I can trust him to do that, love
him for that. I can give myself to him for that, even with no flutter
in me. He pulls the covers back to look for the first time, at his wife
he still only knows as a hint of curves beneath layers of cloth. I don’t
move, barely breathe. Shyly, in wonder, he touches my arm. “You are
my first,” he says.
I jump the smallest of little jumps. “And mine,” I say. He moves
his hand, slowly, reverently.
I stay very still. I don’t have to look—at the stray curled hairs on his
chest or the dark line that descends to encircle his navel and broaden
below. I don’t have to think how large and rough his hands, how I wish
they were delicate and soft, how his body seems too hard and almost
threatening when it would be so nice if it was gently, softly form-fit to
mine. I tell myself, this is my husband. There is an intensity of focus in
his face I’m coming to know. His nostrils flare.
He moves his hand over my hip, his movement uncertain and careful,
the expression on his face one of wonder. Reverence. Sense memories, not
images, flicker through my skin: someone holding me, crooning to my
infant self. Lisa, she says. Easy, I tell myself, beginning to tumble into a
swirl of past and present, dream and breath, trembling, some distant fear I
don’t understand a receding pinpoint on the horizon. I am on a tall swing
at a nearby park where I’d go alone, working, building toward soaring
weightless freedom. I’m hungry, then voracious, and I pull Levi to me. I
open my eyes to the enormous relief of pleasure washing everything away
just as I launch from the swing, catapulted into air. It’s true, I think, I can
will myself into this—just as I am pitched shouting through the air to a
mountaintop beneath gasping stars.
His jaw hangs open above me, astonished, but then he is panting,
driven, and I am trapped between his big hands and knees, flexed
and powerful, as he forces his path. Grit my teeth. I near panic. Don’t
move; it will be all right, but he continues and I am certain I can’t bear
another moment, until his own trembling, his sigh.
The bride purchase sealed by the signed marriage contract is now
complete, our intimacy blessed in advance by the mikvah water. Levi
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tumbles down beside me, throws his head back on the pillow. “Wow,”
he says. “Wow!”
He pulls me close and I sink into his arms. Forget the trapped moment,
the aversion after he entered me—I am in his strong arms in a vulnerable
naked moment. After the long loneliness, it is magical to fall back and be
held like this, to trust someone enough for that. It seems incredible that
this man has pledged his life to being my refuge. My unorthodox desires
don’t seem to matter in the face of this security, this sanctum. In his arms,
I say, “I didn’t know how alone I was. Until I wasn’t.”
“You’re not alone,” he says. He nuzzles my hair, tightens his arms.
“You have a healing touch,” I say around a lump in my throat. I lay my
hand over his and settle in against his chest. Home, I think. This place near
you is home. “I could love you for this,” I say. Just then, Levi pulls away.
“We have to separate right now,” he says.
“What??” He gets out of bed. “No!!” I say. He looks apologetic. “Dam niddah,” he says. “Virginal blood. It’s
the Law.” Here it is, that ancient fear that has been drummed into both of
us, the mystical threat of a woman’s blood that formed the Law on
marriage and now rises up like a wall between us.
“And cover yourself,” Levi says. I grab the sheet to my chest, find the scarf. “But I’m not bleeding,”
I say. The ghost of my father has climbed into this bed. “No matter,” Levi says. “I’m still not allowed to see you after.” He
shrugs. “There are plenty of women who don’t bleed the first time, I
read that, but that’s the Law for the marriage night, just in case. We
can’t touch for twelve more days.”
“I know the halacha,” I say. The Law. Why had I thought it wouldn’t
apply to me?
Near the bathroom light, Levi takes a hand towel to wipe himself
clean. Of me. He inspects the towel carefully for blood. Nothing. “Get
dressed,” he says in a firmer tone. I grab my gown from the floor. Levi
gets into pajamas and settles into the other bed, turns his back and
falls quickly asleep.
Late into the night, I lie awake wondering why the sense of
finding home was so fleeting. I tell myself it’s just twelve days until
the next mikvah night when we will be free to sleep together again.
Leah Lax
My childhood home comes back to me, how I walked around clutter
and unspoken betrayals, how I want us to repair that history. We will
make a clean orderly home structured by the clean order of the Law.
Our children will feel safe because our Hassidic God has rules that
guarantee respect and good behavior—God’s safety net. Forget the
pesky amorphous need looming up again. I tell myself, grow up. Have
a woman’s patience. Levi’s warmth, his smell, linger in the sheets.
Slowly, I fall asleep thinking, this was our wedding night.
Austin. Levi and I develop a routine. We leave early in the
morning for classes at the University of Texas, although not at the
same time. I wear the requisite long clothing and covered hair. It’s a
short walk down Manor Road to the campus, under the I–35 overpass
and then between the football stadium and LBJ Library for daily cello
practice in the music building, and then on to the rest of the sprawling
campus. The campus is alive with forty thousand students, walking,
laughing, talking, bicycling, lounging on grassy areas and on the
old sculptures and fountains, visiting, studying, strumming guitars,
trotting in and out of huge buildings. Sometimes I greet other students
as I walk, and there are even a few with whom I awkwardly chat.
At home, we dip daily into Hassidic books for study, labor over
Hebrew and Yiddish, share a vort of Hassidic thought over the Sabbath
table, exhort one another with aphorisms—surround ourselves with
holy words. We practice peppering our speech with expressions of
faith and self-abnegation. Baruch hashem. Hakol bidei shamayim.
Bless God. It’s all in God’s hands.
When I need, I ask Levi for money. I’m careful to let him decide
what time we will eat dinner, or what we will eat, pushing myself
every day to use a respectful tone. He doesn’t demand this of me, but
a growing guilty patter of Hassidic teaching in my head is easing me
into my new role, like a rasp steadily applied to my rough edges. But
I’m the one grinding myself down, pushing away feeling, demanding
my own compliance.
Levi seems to have his own tools to bring himself into line. But there
are times when I hand off the weight of a decision to him yet again, that
he is hesitant, uncertain, perhaps burdened. Or lonely. Then he pulls
himself up as if it’s a great effort and issues the final word.
I grow quieter, become indecisive. Already within these first weeks
of our marriage ‘separate’ roles have become ‘separated.’ Our exquisitely
choreographed roles leave us unspontaneous, heavy-footed, isolated. At
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times I wake with a weight in my chest. Levi tosses and turns. Neither
of us seems to understand why. Then each day I take my cello off to the
music building. There I find space inside of myself that is only mine.
Somehow, in a stark little practice room, the cello sings.
At home, the choice of music, when we have any at all, is his.
Before I can get back to the mikvah, my cycle returns, causing
another month to pass in which we aren’t allowed to touch. My days
pulse with the counting rhythm the Law imposes on marriage, and
with the memory of Levi’s arms.
To use the mikvah nearest our Austin home, we drive ninety miles
on I–35 south to San Antonio where there is a little mikvah inside
Rodfei Shalom, an old orthodox synagogue in a decaying part of town.
Mikvah attendants are supposed to be women, but when we called the
synagogue rabbi about gaining entry, he ruled that Levi had to come
with me because it is unsafe there at night. His wife, he chuckled,
long ago announced she was no mikvah attendant, and there is little
demand in San Antonio to hire one.
We aren’t supposed to tell anyone which night is mikvah night, out
of modesty, but we had to tell the rabbi in order to arrange to pick up
the key. We first meet Rabbi Kornbluth and his wife at their partially
opened door, their faces like two moons. I stand half hidden behind
Levi. “We just came for the key,” Levi says, to their discomfiting “Come
in. Come in!” Soon we’re perched on their formal sofa, balancing
delicate china cups of weak tea on gold-rimmed saucers.
The Kornbluths are old, in their fifties at least. Unlike Hassidic
beards that have never been touched by a blade, Rabbi Kornbluth’s
beard is trimmed close to his face. He and his wife only look at Levi,
only address Levi.
“What are you studying?” she says.
“Accounting,” he says. “I’m working on an MBA.”
They nod approval.
In a way, I prefer it this way, no eyes on me, because beneath their tea
conversation is the tacit understanding that we’re here so that I can go to
the mikvah. I feel certain that fact creates an inevitable, shared image in
the room, as if I’m standing nude right there on the Persian carpet.
“Sugar?” the rabbi’s wife asks Levi.
The old ornate synagogue is a hollow looming thing in shadow,
too large, we’ve been told, for its aging dwindling congregation. It is
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well after dark, and the area around the building is unlit, as is the
broad cracked veranda. Levi grimaces and jiggles the key in the lock.
“We’re gonna get mugged,” I whisper, glancing down the empty street.
Levi’s shoulders are high and tight. “Shluchei mitzvah,” he says.
“Don’t worry.” There is no danger for those engaged in a commandment.
Finally, we tiptoe through the empty lobby where prayer shawls
hang on the wall like body sacks, through an echoing foyer to the door
marked as the women’s bathroom. We look at each other, then Levi
opens the door, and another on the right. “My God,” he says.
Someone must have been here earlier. The floor is wet and an
electric heater is left on, weakly glowing coils and a frayed cord in a
puddle. Levi yanks the cord from the socket.
The heater hasn’t done much. The room, just big enough for the little
pool, is narrow and dank and cool, a humid sheen over the tiled walls. I
crouch and touch the water, and wince. Then, I stand, resolute. “Turn away,”
I tell Levi. The rabbi may have ruled that Levi has to be my attendant
even though that means seeing me uncovered before immersion, but we
can minimize Levi’s exposure. I turn my back to strip off my clothes,
pull off the headscarf, run my fingers through my short hair.
The water isn’t cool. It’s cold. I force myself to go in and down,
Levi watching at the rail.
Under the water, it’s too cold to think of symbolism or to try to
make this act into a prayerful thing. The monthly rebirth, seventh
heaven, emergence from holy water into purity, all starry ideas I was
taught that floated through my first mikvah—become superfluous in
the stark clarity of this cold immersion, no place in cold reality for
dreams and ideas. What is left is God’s command. Swift obedience.
Why, I think, it’s the act, this cold dunk, that is the thing. Not some
flowery effort at transcendence. Holy obedience. Up now, above the
surface wet and shivering to gasp a breath and splutter shaking
blessing words into damp air.
“Amen,” Levi says from above, like an affirmation of my epiphany.
He pronounces it awmeyn.
But, I think, he’s warm and dressed.
I force myself back under. The fierce shivering effort fills me with
religious pride. Up again, teeth chattering, to brush water from my
eyes and blurt out in fast Hebrew It should be Your Will O God that
the Temple berebuiltspeedilyinourdays, and Levi responds with a quick
automatic amen. We are machines. God’s machines. God working us.
I immerse again with new strength, up, down, seven times in all. I
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will be strong from this. I stand the last time, head just above water,
shivering so that I can’t speak.
I am again purified for my husband. Levi holds up a towel just as
Seema once did. I walk up the steps, drops yet again cascading off wet skin,
numb this time, take the towel from him, get dressed, and we go out to the
car. We slip the key into the Kornbluths’ mailbox, then rush home ninety
miles over the night highway. We are aliens skimming across this sleeping
Texas Hill Country, with its laconic people, its rivered lands.
Something happens during sex that night, our second time.
Even though I again respond to Levi’s gentle persistence, I am removed,
dispassionate, stuck in passive obedient mode, in spite of my body’s
response, and there’s a lump of loss in my throat throughout as if I’ve
swallowed something. At least, I don’t panic or feel trapped when Levi’s
form hovers above me, his knees and hands hemming me in, don’t feel
much of anything. But late that night as I start to drift off to sleep next
to him in his bed, he again wraps his arms around me. I nestle into the
pillow we are once again allowed to share and heave a sigh. Loneliness
abates once again. How I have waited to get back to this, I think, this safe
place. Everything is worth this. Levi falls asleep then, wrapped around
me, his chest in its slow rise and fall, and I thank God that the days of
separation have passed. I think, is this love? I want this to be love. I tell
myself I am home.
Slats of morning sunlight through yellowed blinds. I wake
feeling caught in something, then I sit up in full blown panic. Levi’s
mouth is open in his sleep, his night yarmalka fallen off his head. My
heart is racing. I try to catch my breath. I can’t seem to get out of this
box. What is this box? A swarm of everything I’ve stuffed down for
months is rising, overtaking me. Awake now, I splutter, “Why didn’t
I think?” I gasp and jump out of the bed, turn and grab Levi’s arm,
shake his shoulder. “Wake up!” I say.
“Wh-what?!” he says, struggling, his voice rough from sleep.
“What is it?!”
“Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I know?” I say. “But I did know. Of
course we knew.”
“What?” he says, raising up on one elbow. “What?” I’m standing over him, still shaking him. “We had sex last night!”
“And?” he says. “And we didn’t…we can’t use birth control!” 120 u Crab Orchard Review
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“And?” “What was I thinking? I can’t have a baby!” “I don’t think,” he says, and, “But you knew perfectly well.” “I was wrapped up in wedding stuff!” I say. I’ve been floating on the wedding dream and the Rebbe’s blessing/
command, get married, be a good Hassidic girl, do the right thing.
No harm comes to those doing a mitzvah. The joy in the wedding air,
misty picture of happy families, the family we plan to build that will
be everything mine wasn’t. But all that is suddenly very different from
the very real babies that will form inside nineteen-year-old university
student me, maybe one already has, a baby that will overwhelm my life,
derail school, that I won’t know how to care for—a baby we could hurt.
As I was. I’ll make all of my mother’s mistakes.
“I can’t do this!” I say. I’m shaking. “No!” I say. I sit down on the bed
and sob. “I can’t get pregnant. What have we done?”
Levi sits up, gropes for his yarmalka. Then a little gasp and his eyes
widen. He puts a hand on my arm and whispers, “Do you think you are
pregnant? Already?”
“I don’t know!” I moan. Then it’s as if I can hear my mother saying Lisa. Lisa! in my ear.
Lisa, Listen to me!
I’m not Lisa any more, I tell her. Don’t call me Lisa. So why do I
feel stuck inside this “Leah” as if I don’t even know who that is, or
where I am?
Lisa, my mother whispers. I try to reason with myself. Being Leah means becoming a mother.
I knew that.
If you get pregnant, you can’t come home. You don’t mean “home” to me any more. Besides, that can’t be true.
Levi’s my home.
But I’m no longer teetering between then and now, between Lisa
and Leah. I finger my ring. I know who I am. So why am I in a panic?
(Come home!) When I even think of being pregnant, why do I see myself
dashing this way and that through a maze of Jewish Law with no way
out? (Lisa! Listen! Come!) Where is home? (I told you so, she whispers.)
But even away from my mother, with a baby I could become her. My
children could get hurt. There has to be a way out.
“I had to study the laws about marriage before the wedding,” Levi
says in a reasonable tone. “The Law’s not so rigid. Really. Sometimes birth
control is allowed—if you’re sick and pregnancy would be harmful.”
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“I’ll die if I get pregnant,” I say. “Inside.”
“If the Law gives a concession, that’s not breaking the Law. If
you’re sick,” he offers again. “You know,” he says, “v’chai bahem.” He is
conciliatory, and kind.
V’chai bahem is both a promise and a command—you will live
within the laws, and the Law will let you live. That’s what we’re taught,
that Jewish Law is both stern and loving, with built-in flexibility for
human need. The Law is supposed to be a good parent.
It is clear that Levi is willing to look for a legal concession, and has
faith that there is one for us within the Law. My panic ratchets down a
notch. I think, he’s in this with me.
Levi doesn’t say whether or not he wants a baby. That would be
irrelevant, even inappropriate: Babies aren’t chosen; they come from
God. But, I think, maybe he’s also afraid. We have no money. His wife
doesn’t seem ready to mother a child. Then—another tailspin. “The
Law gives a concession for sick people??” I wail. “What good does a
break for sick people do me? I’m not sick! I just can’t bear the idea.”
Levi gets up, in pajama bottoms and undershirt with his tzitzis
undergarment on top, white strings hanging to his knees, a knitted
sleep yarmalka on his head. I flash an image of his naked silhouette
above me in the night.
“Wait. I’ve got a book,” he says. “I remember something I read.”
Our whole life in a book. He goes and takes a volume from the brickand-board bookcase in his office, with both Hebrew and English print
on the front. Then he clears a space at his desk and sits down to read.
I go splash water on my face. Try to breathe. Brush my teeth. But
the minutes are heavy.
Then he comes out, open book in his hand. “Look at this,” he says,
and reads: “Conception involves a mystical relationship between the
father, mother and God. To interfere with that relationship by stopping
the natural process is to thwart God’s Will, a grave sin.”
“Oh boy,” I say.
“Wait,” Levi says. He flips to another page. “It seems there’ve been
times when Rav Moshe has allowed birth control. Listen.” He reads,
“Although a condom is forbidden, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein has ruled
that other types of birth control that create a simple barrier and do not
affect the natural process by killing sperm or preventing ovulation can
be allowed if necessary for the mother’s health.” He looks up. “Like a
diaphragm,” he says.
A sliver of hope. “For the mother’s health. Is the mother’s mental
Leah Lax
health part of that?” Then, “Wait! Rav Moshe allows it?” I say. I just
realize who Levi is quoting. Panic returns.
It had taken me a while to figure out the hierarchy. There are justplain-rabbis, like Rabbi Frumen, who lead individual congregations
as spiritual shepherds. They are also kind of like lawyers, qualified to
impart to their followers expert knowledge in the Law. But even they
defer to a rav, a rabbi who is more like a judge. He can rule on new
applications of the Law, or parse out thorny conflicts between people.
Or grant dispensations. A rav can do that.
The Rebbe is both rabbi and rav, but he chooses to stand above all
that. He is our guide, our inspiration. But when people write him with
problems that can be addressed within the Law, he writes back, “ask a rav.”
Rav Moshe Feinstein, who Levi quoted, is venerated among nonHassidic orthodox, but our group of Lubavitcher Hassidim do not
speak well of Rav Moshe’s leniencies, even though the Rebbe himself
has been known to send people to him who need his gentler rulings.
Only the Rebbe can bend like that. Otherwise, we should turn to our
own.
Levi frowns. “Maybe we should ask a Lubavitcher rav first,” he says. “Can we find one who will understand?” I say. “We’ll go to the top,” Levi says. “We’ll ask the head Rav of
Lubavitch. We’re Lubavitcher Hassidim. He’ll take care of us.” It’s confident Levi, trusting the system and the privilege of
membership within it, who calls and requests the conference. It’s Levi
who tells the rav, after our breath-holding wait, that “My wife feels
unable to bear a child.” It’s Levi who explains the problem. My problem.
I listen in modest silence on the extension for the rabbi’s decision about
my body, my life.
“So what do you want?” the rav says. “Could we use some sort of birth control?” Levi says. “We don’t do that,” the rav says. His tone is dismissive, as is the
silence that follows.
Levi falls dumb into that silence. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t
defend me.
An awkward pause. I wait for rescue, heart pounding. No! Then
I make myself speak. My voice comes out unnatural, untried, every
word laced with the guilt of immodesty. But each word I get out is
another step forward through an unfamiliar passage. “What if the
woman could get hurt?” I say.
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Leah Lax
“That’s different,” the rabbi says. “But then I would need a letter from
a doctor.”
A doctor. My word about my body isn’t enough. I swallow. “What if
‘the woman’ is physically healthy,” I say, “but she can’t bear the possibility
of, of…?”
“Are you talking about psychological harm?” the rav says. “I guess I am,” I say. He laughs a cold laugh. “You want permission to break the Law
because motherhood is difficult??” This silence is filled with my inadequacy as a wife, as a religious
woman, as a future mother. Finally, I say, “But I read, we read, that Rav
Moshe….” “Well then,” the rabbi says, now clearly annoyed. “Call Rav Moshe.”
One night, two months later, I lock myself in the bathroom
and position myself in the space between toilet and tub. Behind me, the
nylon curtain is wet with droplets from morning showers.
We called Rav Moshe the next evening. We weren’t allowed to
speak directly to him, but we spoke with his son, his representative,
the great rav sitting in judgment nearby. “My father says you will bear
Jewish children in joy,” the son said. “You may use a diaphragm for
one year from this date.”
Now, two months later, I put the top down to the toilet, pull off
my scarf and shake my growing hair back and off of my face. Levi is
waiting in the other room.
Since receiving Rav Moshe’s permission, we have both been
finding slivers of freedom. We allow one another that. Levi wears blue
jeans, goes to the symphony, indulges in beloved old movies, even if
such secular things are deemed soulless by the Hassidim. I’ve renewed
interest in my university studies. One of my Art History professors
has offered to mentor me in an independent project studying the
architecture of Gaudi. I’ve even stopped wearing the wig on campus,
learned intricate decorative ways to arrange scarves instead over my
hair that now hangs audaciously long and free beneath the scarf.
But at home, even with my uncovered hair and his blue jeans,
we still have our roles. Levi makes the decisions, controls the money.
I’m getting to know him. He has little need of casual touch and great
concern about his obligations. At times, he surprises me with a gift
or a kind word, but in general he’s awkward about my needs, often
doesn’t seem aware of them. Our separate roles seem to reinforce his
Leah Lax
awkwardness, as if, with his job so clearly defined, it’s difficult for him
to develop new empathy for mine. That would be crossing a line he
doesn’t seem to know how to cross any more. Perhaps he never did.
But Rav Moshe has given me something. I pick up a yellow plastic
case from the counter and take out a thin rubber cup stretched over
a rounded spring. I’ve come to enjoy the sploosh of cream into the
quivering rubber bowl, the way that I have to pinch and fold the spring
in order to lodge it inside me just so against thinly sheathed bone. The
diaphragm is teaching me my body’s inner folds and secret chambers,
giving me time without babies to learn. I put my right foot on top of
the closed toilet lid, left foot on the floor, pull the full skirt up to my
thighs. This is Rav Moshe’s gift: a kosher brashness I’m gaining from
this new body knowledge.
Now without consequence I can cross the line Levi can’t seem to
cross—right into his bed. And I do. I approach him for sex again and
again. Even though I have little physical desire, I do it anyway, always
pleased with his happy response. I do it for connection, and for the
aftermath in his warm arms. Sex seems the only way to get to that safe
place. Besides, the alternative of always being near him yet apart, on
my side of the Hassidic divide, is lonelier than being alone.
I’m trying with everything I have to make sure being in his arms
still feels like coming home. Then, I test it again, and again, because,
more and more, it…doesn’t.
I open the bathroom door and go to him.
Late that night, they begin—transporting dreams that I will
not, cannot, acknowledge in the daytime. In my dream, my most
passionate alluring lover is a woman with black curls and tapered,
delicate hands.
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Kevin Phan
Night Bells in a Landscape
Bees were stitching the ripped-up sky. Sky of torn
bed sheets, needles on wings. Nothing mended. I launched clusters
of spit & grew cherry blossoms. The temple’s honey
darkened. Seeds matured into wildflowers. I took long exposure
photos of azaleas brought into being by starlight. Trudging
muddy grounds, my socks lapped the damp. It’s all I had:
dryer-melted raingear & a blue heart rinsed in a bowl of ocean.
Ralph scheduled my absence: each new moon ceremony
I worked the 8-ton German bell—a sacred feature
whose note-pours fractured through the redwoods. I rocked
the tongue on the thick rope & thought of Neela,
her sweet, Indian wings, our samosas from scratch &
pies in every oven. Pigs dismantled our garden,
uprooting arugula. The moon clicked red on the downbeat. I opened
my heart to my main man Nathan, penguin tattoos
on his forearms. He was always about to smoke, mindfully
rolling loose tobacco, cleaning statues dripping scented
bargain thinner. Prayer wheels hummed in bearing butter
to generate the milk of loving-kindness. May all beings
be happy. Half the world starved. Ringing the bell,
I dedicated merit, my heart open to crew leader
Itaru, his pealing broken syntax was a reminder he lived
between countries. My roommate Orson
spent all winter hang-glided low through depression.
Kevin Phan
James Bond novels were his only lift & sense
of flickering golden feathers. Look, it’s true: I often
rang the bell & felt taped open.
When it hurt to think of lean, punk-rocker Kara—
her tomato & blue cheese sandwiches, our love
of Leonard Cohen— I knew I longed for a brink
& safety net to catch me as I fell right down
through the ductwork of want. Yes, my alphabet
was too loose. My consonants dropped
like tape measures to the ground. I knelt.
I picked them up again. Ringing the bell,
I meditated on apple trees in dry soil, moss licks,
vineyards, prayer flags, prayer wheels, glacier
melt, oxygen, pinched nerves, blood brothers,
reunion kestrels, reunion owls, laughing owls.
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Sam Pierstorff
At the Hotel of Irrelevancy
You check-in but no one checks you out
anymore. You are that summer song from
20 years ago that melted ghetto blasters
to bare shoulders as you traversed the neighborhood
looking for a piece of cardboard wide enough
to backspin upon—your legs, helicopter blades—
your head, the tip of a carpenter’s drill.
At the Hotel of Irrelevancy, a typewriter is placed
in every room for you to write letters to the wife
you’ve never stopped loving, even for a second
when you saw another woman’s smile.
A lava lamp illuminates a Bible on the desk
next to a can of Tab soda. You open them both
for the first time in decades, then dive into
the queen-sized waterbed, rubber waves
bubbling beneath you. This, you imagine,
is what a rubber duck feels
in the bathtub with a toddler.
Soon you become seasick, drowning
in dreams of your own irrelevancy.
Suddenly, you’re Vanilla Ice. Axl Rose.
David Hasselhoff. You are Monica Lewinsky’s
blue dress. You are a singer who can actually sing,
a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.
Sam Pierstorff
You are as irrelevant as truth in the 21st Century,
as talent, as love before sex. You sir, are the broccoli
in a kid’s Fraggle Rock lunch pail. You are as evil
as a carbohydrate. No one wants you anymore.
You are poetry in the life of a high school football player.
You are morality on MTV. You don’t exist.
When you wake up, you realize that your bed sheets
are made from the fleece corpses of used Snuggies.
The balcony window in your 13th floor suite
at the Hotel of Irrelevancy is wide open
so you take your first steps outside,
over the ledge, and fall until you too
become a distant memory that others
will soon look down on.
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Caroline Pittman
Easter Poem
I don’t want to leave the red dust of the world,
silt of a Georgia lane between pear trees, hot
under the quick-rotating balls of my feet.
What I want to leave is the belt that unfurled
here to strike my father. I want to keep
the honeysuckle splayed through wire squares
of farm fence, the drops of nectar slipped
down each flute of petal by two gold hairs
of stamen onto my tongue. I want to keep
on running, keep the mud caked in my treads
from pushing up a rocky Swazi hill, weeds
caught shredded in my shoelaces from steep
footpaths webbing the mountains. I long
to keep the wind across my ears, the dustclouds
following a bakkie across the lowveld,
the hilarity of children chasing
after it with yells. What I want to leave
is the contaminated creek, kindly
fetched, mixed in bottles that suckle agony.
The hoarseness a night of ululating gives.
Stay, please, voice and throat, heavy morning
moon out the ward window, sleep and kiss.
Morphine, needle, blue sheen of emesis
bag—go. I want to keep on throwing
Caroline Pittman
myself along the road, translating light
with cones and rods. I want the simple cross
of oxygen through my lung’s porous
borders, to breathe in air glittering with motes.
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Jessica Plante
Descendants
Loneliness is solitude with a problem.
—Maggie Nelson
Memories, tinged with purple,
tinged with red—from periwinkle
to myrtle herb they swarm the cargo
hold to be held. Like children
made of cloud, we do not trust their current,
their pulse, though they fill each empty decibel in us, make the attic howl. Wind
can never be trapped or it will die.
But jars of swirling wind, eons old.
No one knows how we watch, nor where.
Now the world is a jar full of wind we see
through aging glass and aging eyes.
And, yes, we are birds laid on our backs
so we do not fly. And bolts of blue cloth
we can never wear. But, patient sister,
think of how we fell head first
in a backwards dive, and trust we had
no chute but safely have arrived.
Brad Richard
Confederate Jasmine
(New World Elegy)
Not true jasmine, love: star jasmine, woody liana,
trader’s compass, soul’s wheel, five fingers
of a merchant’s proverb: it shows the good man’s way,
my love, to white stars massed in shaggy vines
along our backyard fence, so many names chained
beneath the sky, broken alphabets crawling
like the blood of children through the streets
of home, the blood of children in our streets—
No, not true jasmine, truer, death
in our mouths at morning, mouths blind
as a ship’s hold, blind to the words borne
in that slop and cess, words sold for their perfume—
Love, so many truths along our backyard fence!
When we bought this place, I hacked the vines
clear to their trunk’s thick shaft near the ground,
and you said, jesus, how long has this been here?
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Amanda Rutstein
Ruined
I tell it as it is: parts of myself just
beyond repair—a book left to the rain,
the ink indistinct, pages dry-warped.
She does not want to hear this kind of truth.
Wants, rather, to see the me she thinks she’s known,
searches for her in my eyes,
kisses one cheek, and tells me I am good and whole.
I wish I could give in to this. I wish his weight
weren’t tied to other love: his angry grip
on the back of my neck to other gentle hands
that want to tangle my hair, his insistent
mouth to other softer lips that wish to find
mine willing. Whole girls preen, arch their backs,
offer their throats fragile. I know better. I shoulder
fear like a heavy child, mine. We pass a house long
abandoned but not unkempt. Thick drapes
line the windows, sun-bleached and locked
tight. On the porch, someone’s put a box
Amanda Rutstein
for the leftover cats. They pace the landing
and side-eye our passing, as though to guard
the place they can no longer enter and could never
protect. It’s like this, I think.
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Aaron Samuels
Stakes is high
after Marcus Wicker
Sometimes the police arrest black people
for no good reason. They fill the air with mace,
barricade all but one exit, watch the blind black faces
pinball through a chemical funnel. I assume
you have never experienced this; you would not know
that the tear gas follows your held breath and closed eyes
like a homing missile looking for an entrance,
scratching at your nostrils, your opening pours.
It too wants an escape
from the world it was brought into without choice.
But I assume blackness
is not satisfactory justification for you. There must be
a reason! If you were black, as I am black,
you would have your reason,
clear as mace fog against your eyes, but I assume,
since you are not black, that I have once again returned
to this dream where there is no beginning
but I close my eyes and find myself—always—
at a podium explaining to white people
the world. In the dream, I have both eyes open,
the room of white people listen carefully
as I present charts and graphs that detail wage inequality,
accounts of brutality, and they applaud loudly. I assume
in the dream, I am a white man. I am not positive I am white;
after all I can only see the audience through my own eyes.
But if I am not white, then why would they listen. Perhaps,
I am a college professor. Perhaps I am CEO of a global
nonprofit with a sustainable agenda. Perhaps I have
a large weapon, or a large army surrounding the audience
with bayonets, and light sabers, and bazookas. Perhaps
I have forced these people through a tiny door
Aaron Samuels
and held their eyes open as they dragged into their seats.
Perhaps my face is not peeling on the concrete floor,
my lungs not puffy and filled with pepper and blood.
Perhaps my mouth is smiling and offering the entire theater
a bounty of forgiveness,
instead of burrowing my front teeth into the salty meat
of the officer’s ankle.
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Steven D. Schroeder
Nuclear
Our moms were bombshells,
all steel and fuel and triggers.
Our dads were demagogues
who said the bomb and meant it
must be obeyed. They fit together
better than military and haircut,
we thought. We fought if they split
war from head. We had sex
dreams involving missile silos
and mushroom clouds. Our sisters,
their code silence, handcuffed
briefcases failsafe on their wrists.
Our brothers launched by accident
and moonlight. Woken by the hotline,
we pushed the button designated
retaliate and, when that dysfunctioned,
one marked meltdown flashing red.
The same old argument was over
who started fission chain reacting first.
The philosophical discussion
What would you do with your last
minute alive? devolved into a lecture
on battery life. Our husbands balded
due to radiation poisoning and lost
most of their eyesight to the blast,
they claimed. Our wives also got sick
of canned beets and concrete bunkers
and wanting to believe the claims.
Dogs gone, we trained pet
grievances to carry water. We traveled
desert waste, horizon close
as closure, where other survivors
Steven D. Schroeder
told us colder. The fire in winter
caves painted shadows on the bedrock,
our shadows in the shape of broken.
Our sons and daughters were fallout
that drifted deep in rifts but we called
snowflakes, pure like in the stories.
Our sons and daughters were.
Our children.
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Peggy Shumaker
Past Middle Age
We have begun our bending,
bending as before us our ancestors bent
their gaze fierce and straight when young
then curving toward earth as they aged.
In our shape we echo
each wave past its crest breaking
we echo the ridge of the dune fallen
we echo stalks of fireweed bloomed out
nodding as seedpods explode
nodding as winds carry away
what will rise to live another day, nodding
as we return to nourish black soil.
As We Reflect
wood and seeds
4x8x8
2004
Vivian Visser
Brian Simoneau
Sonnet for the Guy Who Told Me
My Dad Was a Saint
Saints don’t come from dumps like this. They come
from towns untransected by train tracks or tainted
rivers passing rows of molting tenements,
from cities where every block’s a work of art
and spires scrape clouds, every window stained
in prayer. Sacred steps don’t tread these streets:
even the blessed must feel the weight of brick,
history’s consumptive grating in the chest.
But today—in the shade of a willow, water
gracing over the dam, walls of a mill rising up
to meet a ceiling of sistine sky—a saint’s
not an impossible thing, and the dust slipping
through sunlight’s almost beatific, almost
beatific and almost beautiful.
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Adam Tavel
Elegy for Phineas Gage Posing
in a Daguerreotype Portrait
The tamping rod that burst the shell your skull
stretches forty three inches long & wears
your name spelled wrong. But Phineas, you bear
it in both hands again for gullible us
who lap the myths—you beat your wife & kids
then drowned in booze until the seizures came.
All our horrors thrawn: a teacupful of brain
spilled upon the floor as blood & vomit slid
beneath your boots & still you begged for home,
childless, unwed, a mother’s sparrow-hand
to daub your mangled brow. What cerise foam
she wipes away. Those eleven years you stand
each migraine’s throb along your stagecoach ruts.
Each dusk the mustangs lick your good eye shut.
Henry W. Leung
Quitting the Box
1.
I’ve known ashy soft boxing rings near the best pizza in
Berkeley. I’ve known dank rings, spotlit in San Francisco while men
in darkness spilled beer and sidled up to ring girls. I’ve known a coarse
ring inside cold brick, at the edge of Oakland’s warehouse piers. I’ve
known poor university rings—ring after ring like dormitory bunk
beds—rings in dimly reflected light, rings in overexposed fluorescence.
I’ve stood alone and waited in rings, and I’ve ducked into rings
where someone else waited. I’ve been knocked down in rings, then told
to wipe the sweat-damp debris from my gloves when I stood again.
I left every boxing ring thinking, only: Never again. You couldn’t
drag me back.
My boxing teacher was a woman called The Hurricane, who’s
in the pros now with a record of 12-4-1 and two knockouts. She’s
been called the female Manny Pacquiao, a hero of Filipino America,
even though she doesn’t speak Tagalog. But this essay doesn’t have to
be about race or authenticity. In boxing, in the martial arts, in any
fight—in theory—it doesn’t matter who you are. It only matters that
you keep moving.
The Hurricane was a fellow brown belt at my dojo, and I bowed
to her just as I bowed to Sensei, my martial arts teacher. I was a
teenager; they were beautiful, strong women. This essay is about the
wax between gaze and body, about the stage of performed violence
and unrequited love.
2.
The Hurricane embodied our school. Our priorities were, in
order of importance: stability, mobility, defense, and clean punching.
Stancework was everything, and power came from being grounded in
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Henry W. Leung
the earth. To advance meant to sink forward, as though ducking into a
box. Punches were not punches; the goal was “berry-picking,” snatchpull, snatch-pull.
She once fought a fundraiser exhibition of fourteen rounds based
on the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” fight, fourteen rounds she fought
consecutively against a rotating tag team. It was part of the eternal
project to improve endurance. Stamina, we were taught again and again,
is how much your body can take. Endurance is how well your mind
can suffer. The fundraiser was for her coach’s newborn son, who had
tricuspid atresia and underwent several open-heart surgeries in his first
week alive. It was the disease of an incomplete heart.
A week before the exhibition, I sparred with her. This was in the
Alameda dojo, lined in green Zebra mats. Our threshold stood between
a bus stop and a rock garden; our walls were covered with full-bodied
mirrors in which we stared and struck at ourselves for hours every day.
By the end of our first round of sparring, my nose was gushing
red on the sea-green mat. I’d look her in the eye, then I’d flinch and
look away. The Hurricane’s coach plugged my nostrils with jelly, told
her that headshots were off limits, and wrapped thick padding around
me. The Hurricane kept punching. I was three inches taller and fifteen
pounds heavier than her, and I still felt her knocking on my ribcage.
Later, when she unwrapped her fists, when she let her hair down,
when she laughed, she became a different person. From Medusa to
Odalisque. My secret admiration and my inability to look at her
colluded with my fear of the ring.
While driving back and forth for errands one Sunday, I caught
glimpses of The Hurricane’s training from early morning to late
evening as she was egged on by her coach. Half the room was cordoned
off for conditioning circuits: the obstacle course for swift short steps;
the jump rope; the push-up platform; the inclined sit-up bench; the
punching bag; the wrist weights. The drilling never stopped.
But she was smiling.
I know what it is to be pushed. I’ve trained the lightswitch rage
inside me. But a smile—that was a new lesson. It was something like
grace. It said, to me, the fight was more than just about surviving.
Then, weeks later when I mentioned it to her, she said: “The truth?
The smile’s just a lie, a ruse. When someone’s out to break you, just
act happy and no matter what happens they’ll get no satisfaction. You
don’t have to believe your own smile.”
Henry W. Leung
3.
We practiced a Japanese martial art, but boxing blew into
town like a stranger from the city. Here is a map of that world:
Martial arts is theory. You’re just kicking and punching the air.
The only real simulation of a fight—including gouged eyes and crushed
tracheas—is a fight. Pick a madman on the street and hand him a knife.
Short of that, there is boxing.
We were not a dojo that taught the sixth sense of danger evasion.
We taught you to get hit, wake up, and fight back.
In the martial arts, if you don’t train as though your life depends
on it, you might as well be dancing. How you fight is how you die is
how you live.
Quitting was the only sin, the grand treason.
We boxed as martial artists. This meant a low, wide stance,
eyes focused not on the gloves but the direction and weight of the
opponent’s feet. This meant throwing jabs with an exhaled susurrus of
shh-shh-shh through the mouthguard, and throwing power punches
with a grunt, a yell, a guttural kiai.
This meant we were unconcerned with winning; more important
was not losing. What mattered was integrity, honor, respect. We were
often told this story of the Judo champion:
A reporter stayed for the end of a Judo tournament and interviewed
each of the three winners about his strategy. The bronze medalist said,
“I begin training when the sun rises, and do not rest until it sets.” The
silver medalist said, “I challenge and fight the best men of every style.
When I conquer one, I go on to the next until I’ve mastered all styles.”
But the gold medalist was not to be found. The reporter tracked him
down and found him at his home, with his daughter on his shoulders.
They played joyously. The reporter requested a moment with him, then
asked how he’d prepared for the tournament.
He said, “I pay my debts. I visit my relatives and pray to my
ancestors. I put my house in order, and I wash myself and my clothes
so if I die my sensei will not be shamed.”
My own sensei, who was just a few years older than me, told
me once that she would’ve been a kindergarten teacher had she not
become a martial artist. She batted her eyes at nobody, and when
men entered the dojo to hit on her, she deflated them by responding
with respect.
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Henry W. Leung
They would say, “Damn! You fine, girl.”
And Sensei would say, with her feet firmly planted, with the
muscles in her legs and back holding her upright, no part of her body
slouched or unaware of itself, “What can I help you with, sir?”
Or they would say, “Why don’t you give me a private lesson
sometime, baby?”
And she would say, “Would you like a business card? Give us a
call and we’ll set you up with an instructor. Thanks for your interest.
Excuse me, I’m going to continue teaching my student now.”
It was a kind farce of innocence. Always with a smile. She taught me
that our only power is self-control. She taught me to possess every inch
of myself: control your body, control your mind, control your life, then
control your destiny. Each one just another costume, just another layer.
Sensei wanted me to box to prepare me for my black belt and
to plough a new path behind hers, but I could never satisfy her. The
Hurricane wanted me to box because she had chosen the art and
owned it, but I was terrified of her.
I loved and hated boxing. I still do.
I love the presence, the impulsive clarity, that a fight demands.
The mind speeds up until no room is left for language. The sensation
approaches the freefall of skydiving, that maximum velocity that feels
like floating, that perilous peace.
Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel: “Far from always wanting to
forget [their existence, men] suffer, on the contrary, from not being able
to possess it completely enough, estranged citizens of the world, exiled
from their own country. Except for vivid moments of fulfillment, all
reality is for them incomplete.” He was writing about novels. But he
was an amateur middleweight, too; he boxed. He understood that once
you’re in that vivid moment, time loses its linear narrative, because
presence doesn’t plod forward from plot point to plot point but, like
a lyric, stays in one place and rises in intensity. All you see are gloves,
cadences, openings.
The diet at its best was two slices of pizza an hour and a half
before a fight or workout—for the carb rush. The cheese had to be
chewed thoroughly or it would churn the stomach.
The diet at its worst was the Olympic diet, meant to primitivize
the body while replenishing muscle mass. Four hardboiled egg whites
before practice, four more after, then ten to fifteen more throughout
Henry W. Leung
the day, with protein shakes depending on body weight. Dinner was a
blanched steak: cheap beef boiled and rinsed a dozen times to sieve out
the fat and juice, until leathery and gray, until smelling like roadkill.
Fruit was acceptable. Boiled vegetables were acceptable. No sauce, no
oil, no salt, no bread, no rice. Weeks of this.
I hated trading blows with friends, and trading blows with
strangers. There is no dignity in violence. I hated the entrapment, the
dancing around with bound and padded hands, the fight I volunteered
for, the fight that never resolves, the fight I wasn’t permitted to quit.
And I hated sucking spit from my mouthguard. Wearing someone
else’s sweaty headgear and pressing that damp foam against my
forehead, wearing old gloves that left a sandy residue on my fingers.
Getting hit in the eye and losing my place in the moment, getting
phased out of it. I hated getting hit.
Once, I was called in to the dojo to spar with a woman in
the martial arts track who had no interest in boxing, a woman with a
toddler son. She was taking a belt exam and had to spend two minutes
sparring in the ring. The bell clanged. I charged in and winded her with
a shot to the solar plexus. Her hands came down and I recognized her
terror, a shrinking in the eyes. I stood square with her and pounded
away at her face, one-two, one-two, for thirty seconds as I’d been
instructed. Then I backed off to let the judges, her friends, her family,
see if she’d fight back.
This went against all my training. Never slow down, never drop
your guard. Never think about the way your friends or family see you.
Keep the angry face on, but don’t get angry. If you don’t make it count
on the mat, you won’t make it count on the street. Don’t talk in the
ring. Leave your feelings outside.
But respect and honor in the ring are fictions, necessary lies. I
presented my forehead to her with my guards down by my chin. She
kept her eyes down. Her punches barely reached me. I couldn’t just
stand there, so I jabbed at her body with slow, kneady punches, and it
hurt me to see how much she flinched.
The judges awarded her the belt. I never saw her again.
I thought about my own mother, who’d brought me to this
country and raised me alone with quiet ferocity. I thought about the
lightswitch rage, how it has to be turned on for the fight to be real,
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how you have to strike at enemies so hateful they’re not even human.
Otherwise you’re just throwing punches at yourself in a mirror in a
beautiful, small room.
One night when I was eleven—barely a white belt—my mother stood
at a bus stop in Oakland, where she’d just tucked my grandmother in
to sleep, in the area where my aunts have been robbed and beaten more
than once. Three teenagers surrounded her and demanded money. She
had none, she tried to explain in her stilted, high-pitched English. She
only had a bus pass and dinner’s leftovers in her grocery bag. They didn’t
believe her. They grabbed the bag and started patting her down. One
reached into her bra. She ran. She ran, screaming for help.
I’ve been angry since I was young, and my rage for those boys
has no switch. I didn’t handle it as well as my mother when she told
me what had happened. I didn’t carry away a lesson. I still replay that
night in my memory and try to fill the blanks. Did they laugh? Which
language did she scream in?
4.
It’s possible I joined the martial arts looking for some kind
of father figure, and instead fell in love with strong women who
understood the nature of power and violence more than I ever will,
women for whom the lightswitch rage is a mysterious blues, an
exaltation after loss.
I was nearing my black belt when I had a dream about Sensei. In
it, she bowed and handed me her black belt. After I tied the belt around
my waist she stepped forward to hug me twice: she wrapped her arms
around me, almost let go, then pulled me closer. Then another of her
students took me away. He walked me to a copse of trees and said,
“Why does the monkey hide his loneliness?”
In high school, I sometimes ditched classes to practice at the dojo
in its quieter hours. Sometimes I vacuumed the mat or cleaned the
windows. I was asked more and more often to lead group classes or
teach lessons when schedules were hectic. I repeated the language
I’d learned—power equals speed plus lock—though nothing is retold
without being reclaimed. Sensei’s sensei (before he became The
Hurricane’s coach) had built his style on primal basics: saving one’s
life by beating an attacker to death with a rock. Sensei was half his size,
so she built her style on decisive basics instead: assassin-like precision,
relaxation until the point of contact.
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And I built mine on the illusory conviction of speed. The trick is
in the stancework: stay low, keep your feet moving, pretend to know
exactly where you’re going. Spiritual basics: put your faith in stories, in
lineage, in a fight larger than yourself.
But that was a box I built, another ring I’d ducked into and
couldn’t leave. A closed religion. My image of Sensei slowly merged
with my image of an ideal, until the person herself was completely
displaced by myth. She became my Beatrice.
When I graduated from high school, she said she’d come to the
ceremony, then didn’t. Because of the hierarchy to our relationship, I
never could ask why. I went to Stanford for college, far enough to move
out but close enough to return for training on weekends. Sometimes
I’d come off my three-hour sequence of Caltrain, BART, and bus, to
find that Sensei had forgotten I was coming back.
By my junior year in college, I was asked to teach whenever
I came home, and I came home less and less. I developed tendonitis
of the wrist from a number of mistakes, including bad push-ups and
training with weapons heavier than I was ready for. Once, I dislocated
my shoulder while practicing for a demonstration. When I told Sensei
I couldn’t hold a broadsword in my right hand, she told me to relearn
it in my left. The show must go on, the river keeps flowing.
Later that year, Sensei and I leaned against the fence of a
restaurant near the dojo, both of us facing the street, our arms and
ankles crossed. The Hurricane and her coach were inside, waiting to
order. A policeman wrote a parking ticket for my car while I named my
reasons for quitting, for burning a bridge. I’d been with Sensei ten years.
The violence was getting to me, I said. Stagnation, I said. Money,
politics, neglect. Masks. Restlessness. Fear of success.
But no reason for quitting can absolve the quitting. It doesn’t
matter why. What would bother me later was not knowing what I’d
given up on. Myself? My training? My relationship with Sensei? These
distinctions were more subtle than I’d thought. I would spend years
unstitching myself and my martial art from her. I still don’t know if
all I am is unpaid debt.
Sensei told me then that she had three options. One was to plead
with me to stay, which she would never do. Another was to force me
to stay, which would be unfruitful. The last was to let me go, to let me
learn from my mistakes.
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We agreed she would always be my sensei, whatever that meant.
She told me not to come back begging to return, but with something
to show for myself.
I nodded and tensed my jaw. She said she still trusted me.
It broke my heart.
5.
A couple years passed and I got older. I spent six months abroad
in China and began to learn Tai Chi, a martial art without aggression
in its execution. I took several trips to New York and spent more than
one homeless night ghosting the subway lines. I studied in England,
caroused in Dublin, was depressed in Italy.
What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, but I still have
tendonitis and a bad shoulder. My right middle knuckle was flattened
by a board I broke at a bad angle. Between my first two knuckles on the
left I have a scar from sparring with handwraps but no gloves, which
got out of hand and became a game of Bloody Knuckles. When I stub
my toe on a desk, I get angry at the desk.
My last year at Stanford, I discovered Frost Amphitheater,
a derelict outdoor stage at the edge of campus, surrounded densely by
trees and a seven-foot fence. Way before my time, The Grateful Dead had
performed there. So had Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and Ray Charles.
Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington…
But now it was used for conferences, once a year at the very most.
I usually snuck in at night, when the moon pulled tree shadows
like dark bodies across the stage. The automated sprinklers, the wind
through the brush, and the creatures stalking branches all added to
the howl of nature’s chaos-noise. Raccoons and skunks kept their
distance from me. One night early in the year, I brought a sleeping bag
and camped out on the stage.
I brought girls out there, sometimes at midnight to spook them
into romance, sometimes in the late afternoon when we could sit and
watch the trees in the sunset. My roommates and I used the space
when we learned to firebreathe, whistling lamp oil over torch flames.
On restless nights I went alone with a skateboard, the severe grind and
clap of which never bothered the animals.
One afternoon I brought a classmate there to catch her up on Tai
Chi lessons from the university club. I brought a broom and we began
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by sweeping the concrete stage. Midway through the lesson, a head
peeked out from the trees: it was a young boy probably visiting the
campus who’d also hopped the fence. He and I stared at each other
across the clearing until, I believe, it was communicated that one of us
belonged and the other didn’t. He left.
I started going more often, alone, early in the morning or late at
night, to practice Tai Chi and—before I knew it—my martial art, and
then my boxing. No gloves, no mouthpiece, no sweaty headgear. No
lineage, no duty. Just the pulse and impulse of the punch and the clear
shh-shh of my breath.
That evening outside the restaurant, which afterward felt less like
quitting and more like breaking up, Sensei had said that she not only
had a strong relationship with herself, but she believed in her martial art.
She’d always told me, “The arts teach you how to live with yourself.”
Maybe I was never practicing self-defense. Just self-sufficiency, and
a long look into someone else’s warm window. Maybe I was learning a
way to be more alone, and this is really an essay about loneliness.
By the time security banned me with a fine for trespassing, the
amphitheater had become my sacred space. My last day there, I went in
the afternoon in broad daylight, climbing the fence with a cloth-bound
Tai Chi sword strapped to my back. A peeping Samaritan called the
police to report that someone had come with a rifle to shoot squirrels.
When the police came, they spread out and crept in, flanking
my stage from the corner entrances, each one’s palm resting on a
pistol grip. My unsharpened sword was on the ground. And me,
I was shirtless and shadowboxing, in the zone, in a space of breath
and movement, constant, untouchable, like the sun’s great eye rolling
imperceptibly on.
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They Say
They say that in the end she lost her mind completely. That
the pain became so extreme she wasn’t herself any longer. That she got
mean. That she started attacking the people who were trying to save
her—her owner Janet, the vet, the vet tech, and everyone else there at
the barn that night who’d gathered around because they’d never seen
a horse this sick before.
They say they first knew something was wrong when they saw her
standing lethargically in the back of the pasture, and that, because she
bit at her sides and kicked at her own stomach, they knew it was colic.
They say they knew it was worse than the mild upset stomach she got
anytime the weather changed suddenly, because this time she shied
away from their outstretched hands and ran when Janet went to see
what was wrong. Tango never ran away from Janet.
They say that as soon as the vets arrived—after they cornered
her in the pasture and after Janet wrestled a halter onto Tango’s
head—they pumped her as full of drugs as they could without risking
permanent damage to her stomach, kidneys, and liver. That, when the
medication failed to ease Tango’s pain, they took her into the arena
and got her walking, because walking was the only thing that would
keep her from laying down and thrashing on the ground, which
would only make the colic worse. That they tried tubing fluids and oil
into her stomach to clear any obstructions in her digestive system—if
that’s even what the problem was, because with colic, you just never
know. That, when this did nothing, the only remaining option was
surgery. But to have surgery, she would need to be calm enough
to stand in a trailer for the almost hour-long drive to the nearest
veterinary hospital.
They say that this is when she began kicking at them with her hind
legs and rearing and striking at them with her front legs. And then
came the biting—the kind of biting that draws blood. Biting first at
them, and then at herself. That she was so crazed there was no way
they could get her into a trailer, that even if they could, she would tear
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it apart, that she would kill herself struggling against the metal walls
that held her. That, just before they made the final decision, she started
throwing herself down onto the ground, that she refused to stand up on
her legs any longer. That she rolled and moaned and contorted her body
from the pain. They say that after whole minutes of uncontrollable
thrashing, sometimes she would stop and just lie there, flat out on her
side, and breathe. And then she’d groan, and start the rolling again.
That they resorted to the whip to get her to her feet again—striking
her out of mercy, out of desperation. They say Tango had moments
of clarity when she stopped fighting against herself and struggled to
her feet, her legs splayed wide and shaking like a foal’s, only to throw
herself down on the ground again a moment later and start the rolling
all over again and again and again.
That, once she’d thrown her seizing body down for what they
realized was the final time, she started slamming her head into the
ground. That she beat her own face into the sand with such force that
it bled.
I imagine she’d worked herself into such a frenzied sweat that the
sand coated onto her sides and neck and clotted in the blood on her
face, around her eyes, and in her nostrils. They say there was nothing
anyone could do to make her stop. And that, in the end—less than
an hour after they had found her sick—her owner, my friend Janet,
stepped back and nodded, and the vets went running to their truck
for the syringes.
Janet called to tell me what had happened immediately after
the vets left. In the following weeks and months, I heard the story
repeated by the vets and many others who were at the barn that night
and now, every time I think about Tango, I cannot shake their voices
from my head. My own voice joins the chorus too, trying to explain to
friends and family how a stomachache can drive a horse into a frenzy.
Even though Tango had never officially been mine, even though I’d
only seen her on brief visits home over the past several years, I was
the first person Janet told, because we still thought of Tango as part
my horse, too. I’d trained and ridden Tango through high school and
college, and Janet’s urging and Tango’s personality were what kept me
riding horses when all I wanted to do was give up on a sport I was only
then beginning to question.
I imagine them trying to find a way to get her to hold still for long
enough that they could clean a spot on her neck, shave the brown hair
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down to her skin, and find the vein to first administer the sedatives,
and then the final series of injections that would kill her as kindly as
possible.
I contrast these images of Tango’s final moments with how I most
vividly remember her, forever waiting at the fence line, the one knee
crooked and swollen from early arthritis, her bay coat flecked with red
paint as she strained against the clanging metal gate, bobbing her head
up and down, whinnying for our attention. Hurry, hurry, she seemed
to be saying. I’m ready, I’m waiting. Pick me, pick me, pick me. She
would stand with one front leg curled up under her body, the joints
folded tight as she rocked the raised leg forward and back, begging.
I remember how, when we walked down the long driveway to her
pasture, Janet or I could call to Tango and, even when she was way
out in the field, she’d always gallop to beat us to the gate. Or, if she saw
me or Janet walking down the driveway while we were doing chores,
she’d run to the gate and wait—just in case we were coming for her but
hadn’t hollered her name yet.
Once the arthritis in Tango’s crooked knee got too bad and it even
stopped looking like a knee, we chose to retire her. But she was only
thirteen years old (which is, by average standards, at least seven years
too early). I wonder sometimes if she didn’t understand why she’d
been retired, or why we didn’t pick her as often as we used to once we
stopped riding her. I can’t help but wonder if the stress and confusion
of retirement was the reason Tango started to colic more and more
frequently after she stopped working
After Janet told me what had happened, she said the sentences
that still make me stop still:
“She loved her job so much. You know she hated retirement.”
And, later in our conversation: “She loved you.”
No matter how much I want to believe that Tango was waiting
for me during all those hours at the gate, those sentences—echoed too
by the saying voices of friends and witnesses—nevertheless make me
raise my eyebrows in skepticism and question my own beliefs about
riding and training horses.
Bound up in those words are the assumptions that many horse
owners make without even thinking: that a horse can understand
it has a job, that a horse is capable of love—love not only toward a
human, but also toward performing a task it has been trained and bred
to do; that a horse has a memory capable of comprehending that it
used to do one thing, and no longer does it; that a horse is capable of
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something like nostalgia. That a horse is capable of self-reflecting in
the way humans do.
Can we say that horses emote love? Or merely express pleasure?
And what about the people-pleasers? Some horses are eager to work
with people, while others are resistant. How much of this behavior is
intrinsic, like evolution and breeding; and how much of this is trained,
a learned response? Where does love come in? What do we assume,
and what can we know?
I wonder why it matters to me whether or not Tango loved.
That word, love, is so human, and it concerns me because the
language of human emotions dominates what we say about how
animals can and cannot experience. I hesitate to use the word love
because it carries so much weight. If a horse can love, what else can it
feel? What is the feeling of love breaking?
In his essay “An Animal’s Place,” acclaimed cultural and
environmental critic Michael Pollan attends to the most common
discussion surrounding debates about our moral obligation toward
animal treatment, evaluating their emotions based on an ability to feel
and respond to pain. Paraphrasing Daniel C. Dennett, an American
philosopher and cognitive scientist, Pollan says, “we would do well to
draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience,
and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a
few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of
pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry,
regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.”
Some say that the problem of describing animals in the language
of humanness is how then human-centric that way of saying becomes.
That using words carrying specific human connotations skews our
perceptions of animals and can actually prevent us from treating
animals as beings in their own right. But at the same time, some
say that it is important to determine whether an animal’s ability to
feel emotion means an animal is also capable of self-reflection. That
animals with a greater awareness (like dolphins and primates) should
be treated differently from those less emotive (like chickens, cattle,
and insects). Some require hard scientific evidence, and some say that
looking in an animal’s eyes is all the evidence anyone should require.
Because of what Janet and the others have told me about that
night, I can say that in the moments preceding her euthanasia, what
Tango felt was very much real pain. That much is obvious. But was she
suffering as Dennett defines it? Does it matter if Tango was humbled
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before the worst pain she would ever experience? I wonder what was
going on in her head when she started attacking Janet, the other person
we all say Tango loved. I will forever wonder if she beat her head into
the ground in an effort to beg her keepers that she just be allowed to
die already.
I also wonder about the way Tango would run to the gate when I
wanted to ride her, and like the voices, I cannot shake from my mind
the image of Tango waiting at the gate during the four years after she
was retired. What was she waiting for?
Consider this: Tango did not wait at the gate for hours when she
was in regular work. She would come when she was called, but she
didn’t stand alone at the gate staring at the barn or the driveway while
the other horses ventured out onto the acres of rich pasture. When she
was still being ridden—mostly by me and Janet, but occasionally by
others—Tango would actually run away from certain riders. But once
we all stopped riding her, she began her endless wait.
I want to believe that, left alone and given less attention because
she was retired, Tango wanted to be ridden and didn’t understand
why no one would ride her anymore. I have been riding and training
horses for over half my life. To keep doing this, I have to believe that,
on some level, horses enjoy being ridden. I want to, but hesitate to say
that Tango loved and missed working and training and competing. I
wonder if, in her retirement, could Tango have wondered and worried
herself into that final colic?
Tango waiting at the gate wasn’t the picture of stereotypical
depression, but her bobbing head, that front leg curled impossibly
tight under her belly, the red paint on her chest—Janet and the others
started calling her neurotic. I want to believe that Tango loved being
ridden, but I also know that I taught her to expect it. Could taking that
away from Tango have stressed her to the point of that final colic?
In these moments of guilt, I wonder if I can continue to ride horses
at all.
If I am to continue riding, I must accept that part of me needs to
believe that Tango loved her job.
Tango, we say, was a bit of an attention-hog. She loved having
an audience. She was cheeky and playful. If I didn’t ask her to do
something in the way she wanted to be asked (if I used too much
pressure on the reins, or squeezed too tightly with my calves, or didn’t
praise her often enough), she’d let me know by stopping dead in her
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tracks and would protest no by tossing her head straight up in the air.
But of all the horses I’ve ridden, none have been so focused, so driven
to succeed and please her rider as Tango. When she was working and
jumping, nothing could break her concentration. And she never let on
if she was in pain. She showed signs of arthritis, but only superficially:
no horse should have golf ball-sized pockets of fluid and calcification
growing around the joint of a knee. Even the vets said that no horse
with such extreme arthritis could possibly be pain-free. And yet, Tango
rarely took a short or lame step in her life—not before retirement, and
not after it, so we created the narrative that, at just thirteen years old
when she was retired, she was still young beyond the limitations of
her body. She did not fit the picture of an old, worn out animal ready
to live the last of her days as a shaggy lawn ornament. Tango retired
with the body and stamina and mind of an athlete—all except for her
front knees. All I needed was to look into her eyes—bright, curious,
and eager. The visual contradiction made projecting a human-based
narrative onto Tango easier, one that we could use to explain why she
seemed frustrated, stuck standing at the gate while we moved on, rode
other horses, and moved away.
But Tango was really a sort of glorified pet. A hobby. Nonessential,
some might say, in comparison to necessary animals used for
consumption or transportation or plowing fields. Like the overworked
horses pulling overloaded omnibuses and street cars during Boston’s
1860s, necessary animals bred for the purposes of consumption are
still—with few exceptions—often treated as objects or machines
rather than living, feeling beings. Although Pollan uses the perhaps
dated context of Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation to connect
his discussion of animals and pain to the problematic treatment of
the world’s remaining necessary animals, he does hit upon a central
contradiction of the animal welfare discussion: that those who work
with animals regularly for hobby or as pets see them in a different
light from those who rely on using animals for production. Even those
of us who eat meat are a long distance from the farm. Meat products
are often packaged in such a way that makes it easy for us to ignore
how our food reaches the table, and that our food was once living,
breathing, and walking around. The way we encounter animals on a
daily basis drastically affects the way we look upon them.
Referencing moral philosophies espoused by René Descartes,
Pollan writes, “To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal
Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological
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sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles:
animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking
person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture
depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who
operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone
else.” Out of our culturally instilled need and historical reliance on the
less attractive uses of animals, many—workers and consumers alike—
willingly participate in this glaringly obvious contradiction. Many of
us do not want to see how our steak and chicken and pork arrive at our
plates—we do not want to see the cages, and we certainly do not want
to see the slaughterhouses because we will see pain, and we will see a
degree of suffering.
Long before the 21st century, when animal personhood and animal
rights debates began growing louder, those who actually worked with
and trained animals for necessary purposes recognized the value of being
sensitive to their animals’ emotions. In Man and the Natural World: A
History of the Modern Sensibility, British historian Keith Thomas cites
an eighteenth-century writer as saying that “the conventional methods
of training dogs and horses would have been absurd if the animals
had been machines, lacking understanding.” Thomas describes how
professional horse-breakers depicted the character of their charges,
using anthropomorphic adjectives like “stubborn,” “stupid,” “bright,”
and “willing,” as well as having “courage” and “generosity.” However,
rather than viewing these emotions as a sort of intellectual construct,
this anthropomorphism is described more as a tool for training
purposes. A benefit, and not an obligation. In Elizabethan times, too,
Thomas explains, animals and their keepers often slept under the same
roof—because such an intimate relationship with each individual
animal was said to benefit both the productivity of the animal and the
owner: “Shepherds knew the faces of their sheep as well as those of their
neighbors, and some farmers could trace stolen cattle by distinguishing
their hoof prints.”
But, despite this seeming step toward the human approach, a
suspension of disbelief still occurred when convenient: the same
animals that were personified were still sometimes kept in quarters
far worse than today’s confines, and were also fattened and bled and
baited in methods long outlawed for their cruelty. It wasn’t even until
the 1900s that necessary working animals were given a break, when
organizations like the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals began establishing programs like Nevins Farm,
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where city horses used by rail companies could vacation for a month
at a time when they needed rest.
In making sense out of these contradictions, Thomas says: “It
was not these necessary animals, but the unnecessary ones, hounds
and lapdogs in particular, which received the real affection and
the highest status”—and, therefore, the kindest, most merciful
treatment. Although Thomas refers specifically to dogs, these words
ring startlingly true for horses as well. Today, few horses are used for
truly necessary purposes—the few remaining working police horses
could be easily replaced, and pleasure horses abound as pets. Some
live at boarding facilities, as Tango did, and some live on hobby farms
and in back yards. The glaring exception to all this is in how some
competition and race horses (all unnecessary) are trained—their well
being is often compromised for the sake of profit and short-term high
levels of success. But to the trainers, these horses are the necessary
means to their livelihood, just as cab horses were to their cabbies.
Sometimes the suspension of disbelief Pollan and Thomas mention
occurs out of ignorance today, when we don’t know any better and
follow the same method of training used by those who came before us.
But, sometimes it happens when the drive for success leads to tunnel
vision, compromising the horse for the sake of profit, of success, or
to keep a client satisfied. In that case, we ignore the truth, or deceive
ourselves in saying that there is no other option, or we refuse to see
what a horse is attempting to communicate.
Perhaps it is through human-based descriptions of personality
that we can better understand horses, but this still doesn’t satisfy me.
I am all too aware of how anthropomorphism can go too far when
characterizing the personality of horses. We called Express, the horse
I owned and rode before Tango, when I was fifteen, a cantankerous
red-headed girl. A fiery chestnut color with a mane that stood up
like a mohawk and refused to lay flat, Express was—to put it gently—
opinionated. At feeding time, she would beat her front legs against
the stall door and would rattle her bucket in its holder. She would
scrape her teeth against the metal grating of her stall partition until
the wear on her teeth became noticeable to the unpracticed eye. When
I rode her in the arena, Express would pin her ears and try to bite
at other horses as they passed us. And as my then-instructor and I
brought Express up the levels of training—our goal was to compete
at the national level—we became accustomed to waiting out Express’s
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phases of what we interpreted as crankiness. Whenever our training
became more demanding, she’d do nothing but buck and rear and
fight against me every ride. We said she had a bad work ethic, that
she was lazy, that she just didn’t want to have to work harder. But the
truth we eventually discovered was that she had a condition called
Kissing Spine, with five overriding vertebrae in her back located just
underneath where the back of the saddle sat. Any time the muscles of
Express’s back tensed, any time her muscles got sore or fatigued from
our trying to train her too quickly, any time she even rose her head too
quickly, the vertebrae in her back would pinch.
Is it going too far to say that Express’s (mis)behavior when under
saddle was actually her attempt to communicate very real pain, and
her (mis)behavior in the stall an expression of stress and very real
dread at being ridden yet again?
After we found out what was truly going on with Express, I fell
apart. I didn’t trust my trainer, and I didn’t trust myself or my ability
to read horses. I gave Express time off from work, tried to give her
time to forget all the pain—suffering?—my bad riding had caused. But
even after more than a year of rehabilitation and trying to teach her
to relax with a person on her back, I realized I’d caused too much
psychological damage. Even though Express trusted me more than
anyone else, she didn’t trust me enough to let me ride her.
Horseback riding is, inevitably and irreconcilably, a self-serving
act that will, no matter how good one’s intentions are, cause some
degree of stress and wear-and-tear on the horse’s body. Express was
the most naturally talented and athletic horse I’ve ever ridden. But
all that was lost because I failed to see her behavior for what it was.
I didn’t set out to take advantage of Express, and I didn’t intend to
hurt her. But intentions are beside the point, and I can’t ignore the
unintended consequences of riding and training horses. The average
working horse will eventually develop arthritis and will experience
wear-and-tear on its body, sped by the repetitive nature of riding in
circles in an arena and carrying the weight of a rider. I fear that, in
our inadequacy, we bounce between extremes, and too few arrive at
a happy medium. At the extremes—both damaging—we suspend
disbelief and use animals to our heart’s content with little concern
for ethics, or we anthropomorphize so much that we see only what we
want to see. In When Elephant’s Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals,
Jeffry Moussaif Masson and Susan McCarthy relay American author
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s words: “Our kind may be able to bully
Abby Travis
other species not because we are good at communication but because
we aren’t.”
Anthropomorphism as a tool—at least as a tool of interpretation—
is dangerous and unwieldy. After I realized what I had done to Express,
I wanted to stop riding. I wanted to quit the sport that had made me
so driven to win at competitions that I failed to understand what in
retrospect seemed like very obvious signs.
I was at the barn late one night taking care of Express—just
brushing her, just spending time with her, trying to find a way to
connect to her again—when Janet approached me with a halter and
lead rope in hand. “Go get Tango and ride her,” she said. “Someone
needs to ride her. She spends all day in the pasture just getting fat.
That’s not good for her.”
Tango didn’t know much when I first started riding her. She knew
the basics of go, stop, turn left, turn right, and not much else. I didn’t
expect anything out of Tango, and I didn’t put any pressure on her
to be the best at anything. But the more I worked with her, the better
and better we got along. Before I tried doing any serious training
with her in the arena, I took her swimming in the lake and rode her
through the woods and in the fields behind the barn. Tango helped
me remember how to ride a horse for the pure enjoyment of it. Once
I started competing her, I learned that the best way to keep her mind
fresh and happy was to ride her out on the trail or in one of the fields
and just let her gallop. On the trail that led to the quarter-mile hill,
the best place for a good run, Tango would transform from plodding
with her head hanging low to the animated jigging of a horse coiled
with endless energy. When I’d take her on these gallops bareback,
with no saddle between me and her, I could feel her heart beating in
anticipation. Because the trail wound sharply around ruts and fallen
trees, I’d have to hold her back until we reached the very bottom of the
hill. And then, I’d simply let a little slack into the reins, and she’d leap
forward, stretching low to the ground and propelling herself with such
force that clods of dirt would fly out behind us. The feel of galloping up
that hill with Tango felt like nothing short of the freedom of flying.
Even though I believe it, I still feel as though I’m impressing my
own views on Tango when I say that she loved being ridden. Whether
or not Tango loved galloping and jumping and competing are things I
will never know for certain, and I cannot assume what I cannot know.
I am also willing to admit: I am afraid of the implications associated
with assuming that a horse is capable of loving its job. If Tango loved
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what she did, how many horses hate what we train them to do? And
how many horses protest when they are unhappy, but aren’t heard?
I do agree with Pollan’s warning that “As humans contemplating
the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against
projecting on them what the same experience would feel like to us”—
that freedom of flying—but empathy enables me to say: as a rider and
horse owner, it’s my responsibility to be sure that no horse I care for
should have to endure any degree of pain—or suffering—if it can be
avoided. Yes, Tango loved to gallop and jump. But, as her rider, isn’t it
also my responsibility to look out for her future? When Express was no
longer of use to me, I sold her. Even though I was only eighteen years
old and didn’t know much better, I’m not at all proud of that decision.
Or with Tango, the knee was already misshapen at age eight, when
Janet got her, a year before I started riding her. I wonder sometimes if
I hadn’t trained and competed her so much for even the short couple
of years, if we’d taken it easy and hadn’t jumped as big or galloped as
fast, if the arthritis would have been slower to develop, and if she could
have had a few more years of easy riding in her. We always knew the
knee would be an issue, and we assumed we’d have to put her down
when the arthritis made daily life too uncomfortable for her. But she
didn’t last long in retirement, and it was the colic that got her. How
could I have balanced riding Tango with looking out for her long-term
physical and psychological health? The questions build and build, and
the voices of every side of every facet of every argument build and echo
and I cannot shake them from my conscience.
The first time I saw a horse euthanized, we walked Buddy,
the aged gray gelding, out to the little grove of woods where the most
special horses on the farm were buried. He was old—older than
twenty—and no longer able to keep weight on, so his hips and ribs
flagged out beneath his coat. He’d lost more and more weight, and
the vets finally said it was time. His body was beginning to fail, and
he was too weak to live comfortably from day to day. Even still, as we
walked slowly down to the grove, Buddy stepping a little gingerly, he
carried his head high. A hole had already been dug, and the only other
eyesores were the tractor in the distance and the two parallel chains
laid out on the ground before us. In total, there was one vet—Bruce—
and one vet tech—Michelle—present, plus the horse’s owner, Heather,
and four supporting friends, myself included. As the first heavy
sedative took effect, Bruce wrapped his hands around the sides of
Abby Travis
Buddy’s halter and guided him down to the ground, making sure that
he landed on the chains, which would be used to raise the body up and
then lower it into the hole. Once Buddy was lying down, we were able
to gather around. Buddy’s head rested in Heather and Jessica’s laps.
The rest of us took our places around him, patting and talking to him
as Bruce administered the final injections. It was, by all accounts, the
most peaceful, most carefully planned death we could have witnessed.
Near the end of our conversation on the day of Tango’s death,
Janet—who has cared for horses for over twenty-five years and has
seen many bloody and fatal accidents—said, “I never want to see a
horse in that much pain again. If I had known she would die that way,
I would have let her go a long, long time ago.”
As in, when Tango’s knee stopped looking like a knee, when we
retired her? Or as soon as she was born, when they saw that crooked
leg, and could imagine what kind of problems it might cause? Or after
it became clear that Tango was a chronic colicker? Because if vets know
one thing about colic, it’s that if a horse colicks once, it’s forever prone
to colicking again and again. It’s a natural impulse to want to protect
the beings we love from pain and suffering. Pollan writes, “The one allimportant interest we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is
an interest in avoiding pain.”
Just as no one can predict the fatal car crash, no one could have
predicted Tango’s final colic. We often expect at least equally humane
deaths for animals as we do for humans. In some cases, we’re actually
swifter to choose death for our animals. We’re able to hold on to
people through life support, and sometimes delay death for weeks or
months or years. What I can be glad of is that the custodians of horses
must be practical about which animals they attempt to save, even if
for no other reasons than logistics and expense. Unlike a human, or
even a dog or cat, horses will rarely tolerate a cast on a broken leg, and
attempting to stabilize and contain a horse restricted from movement
is not feasible for the average horse owner. Even the most basic colic
surgery costs thousands of dollars, and recovery and life after colic
surgery is not at all easy. And unlike a dog or cat, at the end of the day,
we just can’t carry our horses up and down the stairs, no matter how
badly we want to justify keeping them with us a little longer.
I’ve always hesitated at the word “use” when I talk about what I
do with my horses. I don’t like the implications of that word—that I
sacrifice the horse for my own enjoyment, that no matter what I do, I
will in some way hurt the animal in ways I can only begin to fathom.
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Abby Travis
I am the one saddling, bridling, and riding the domesticated horse.
These are the hard facts of my relationship with horses. But, I have to
admit, that it’s the core truth of any horse-rider situation, any humananimal relationship.
Amongst the voices circling and theorizing, I stop once more. I
look up and find myself caught in the realization of a fact as inevitable
as death. A fact that is—for me—the largest, most irreconcilable
contradiction of them all: The things we love are hurt by the way we
love them.
It is from this place that we must begin again by asking: How,
then, must we proceed?
Christian Teresi
For the Kingdom to Be Well
Plaques around the zoo claim that during the siege
the residents did not eat the animals.
After all the birds, rats, and pets were gone, there was warmth
Over the gnawing sound the body makes when no longer
Fooled by cakes of water, sawdust, and imagination. They looked
Skyward at the useless creatures made of stars. Bright rockets
Screamed, splintered bone, some escaped to somewhere still
Cut too close, and closer still. There was where the saw caught,
Goes tough, then continued writhing through the bone. There was
What little drink and humor was left to share. The zookeeper gave,
Butchered the wonderful mammals whose bellies ached more
For unbound grasslands, and ached for the minutes between birth
And walking when their mothers licked their slick bodies to get back
Some nourishment they’d given. They devoured what they had
Cared for sometimes. Joy was unworkable, so they consumed it
With hours spent neglecting funerals. No longer was there use
For the sunken spectacle of exposed ribs, and they laughed skyward
At the creatures made of stars. Beasts ate other beasts, and flowers
For occasions became dreamlike. The bricks and beams of rubble
Were hymns. Out of the clicking sound of winter were hymns.
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Daniel Nathan Terry
There Is No Way
There is no way to un-see the dead
doe, her body stretched out below
the split rail fence of the long-abandoned
gas station along the highway. She is beautiful
in the way empty buildings caught in the right light
can be. Beautiful with dandelions gone to seed
between her folded, unbroken forelegs.
Beautiful, the cold sun rising, bright and bloodless
behind each white gone-flower. For a moment,
before the wind rises, grace returns
to all fragile halos. There is no way to see
these clouds of light and not see the pillow
you once slept on beside me; each night
its down receiving your wishes and dreads,
each small vane and rachis billowing in the cotton sheath
taking you in like black ink into paper as it lies
beneath the pen.
Daniel Nathan Terry
The Boy and the Moth
Blue night and the hammer of the sphinx
moth’s wings as it chisels through heavy air,
as it tunnels up and into the throat
of the spine-white bloom of the angel’s
trumpet. Or is this upward thrust
and percussion of need closer to the snap
shuffle of a deck of cards, hands of a gambler
who is finally winning?
No. It is the remembered rhythmic flick of the red jack
of hearts clipped to the swift spoke
of a bike ridden by a boy who is ready to go
farther than ever before, the dark man’s house
only a few more hundred pumps of thigh and bone
away, now. Whatever I’ve done, whatever I’ll do,
though some find it beautiful and some will recoil, I’ve always done what I had to do.
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Qiana Towns
Voyeurism
Many […] live in a dream world of beautiful backgrounds.
It wouldn’t hurt them to get a taste of reality to wake them up.
—Weegee
I speak forcefully to the image: If God is
a woman of her word, let me look once
and never again.
Here in the safety of the future, I stare
at a woman’s broken body. Her ruby
red nails and rouged lips hold
my eyes until I begin to chuckle
at her misfortune. It is a kind of laugh
reserved for awful instances—
broken falls, cries of desperation.
Were it not for her severed limb, snapped
and pointed straight toward heaven, one
might mistake her for an actress
penned between a dream and paycheck.
The caption says she is Adela
Legarretta Rivas, struck by a Datsun
as she crossed Avenida Chapultepec. Even
as she lay dying or dead on a sidewalk, her beauty
transcends fortune. In the distance
a small sea of gawkers pause to stare
as if repulsion could save a life, then look
past Adela’s body into oncoming history.
Qiana Towns
Whoever said the eye can see through
to the soul of man must not have
owned a camera. Whoever said man
cannot claim to have seen
a thing until it is photographed must
have been a disciple of Weegee.
If you arrive at my sickbed, confused
at the state of my body, remember this:
if I look alive, I must be
dead. The only way to keep me
here is to look.
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Eric Tran
Our Own Little Gods
My wife and I, we prayed our own little gods into the world.
First came the gods of necessity. The god of cancer cells
shrinking. The god of getting through the hurricane. We
thanked them with altars of stargazer lilies. Tins of dimpled
mooncakes. Jackfruit sliced down the center. As they became
more numerous, we became more pious. Thank you, god
of penicillin. Bless us, god of pensions. Altars spread eagle
across our lawn, plates of persimmon spilled in the mulch.
Neighbors stared. But we prayed and birthed the god of selfesteem. Then came everyday gods. The gods of headaches
(one of migraines, one of hangovers, one of brain freeze). The
god of stubbed toes. Next day shipping. Soap scum. We had
to get thrifty with offerings. Hotel matchbooks for the god of
lottery scratchers. Lottery scratchers for the god of stoplights.
We became gods of finding new ways to make gods, to serve
them. We became gods of neglect. To get our attention, our
kids played gods. I’m the god of finishing my plate, they said.
The god of tying my shoelaces, you are the gods of nightlights.
We said, We’ve been the gods of being blind, of course, you
are the gods of the commute home. All of us will become the
gods of all of us and we will praise ourselves by setting free a
flock of white balloons.
Israel Wasserstein
Paleontology
These tracks are dinosaurs’—
our guide, white teeth, a ten gallon hat
and new boots—and these are human.
Note the toes. Peeking between the adults’
legs, I see two sets of prints,
one inside the other, and four—I squint—
no, five digits.
Four thousand two hundred ninety two
years ago, give or take,
the dinosaurs fled through here,
as Noah’s flood drowned
everything behind them. Humans, fleeing
God’s wrath, ran with the dinosaurs. His face
is smooth as a child’s, his hair salted.
I crouch over the prints. The great lizards
were here once, and I need to believe.
I tell every adult who will listen
someday I will be a paleontologist,
will discover new dinosaurs. I imagine
great Triceratops battling Tyrannosaurs,
Apatosaurus shrieks heard by missionaries
deep in African jungles.
In groups at the walls of the Texas riverbed,
we cautiously chip away, dust, examine
flaking rocks hoping for fossils,
some ancient—perhaps six thousand years.
Sweat curls into my eyes.
The sky is wide, pale, featureless.
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Israel Wasserstein
After lunch we gather in the tent.
The preacher reads to us: Genesis,
Job, Revelation. We are in the last days,
our gnostic truth recorded on gold leaf
and ancient stone, if the World
would open their ears. The crowd cries
Amen, prays for this wicked generation.
Knowing the beginning, we know
the end. At dusk, I stalk through the canyon:
the earth is alive with the roars of monsters.
Phillip B. Williams
Liner Notes to a Never-Composed
Session for A Love Supreme
Where a horn wailed loose
the pericardium. Where a horn
shook loose the lips around it.
Beauty in obsession: brass
pulls the sound of bone from bone,
the cries of bed springs from
the living. Forgive the dead, moan
over graves, unravel your tongues
and toss them inside the casket.
Death is never-ending, ever-asking,
is every place and therefore placeless,
mindless phenomenon. Gowns
and gowns of crows fashion the trees.
Broken moths litter the streets
beneath sheer cloths of rain. Wings
drop from their carcasses like a gown
drops from the shoulders of a broken
hanger. Lungs could outmatch
a storm. Coltrane counted the moths
he burned against his sax’s gleam. The hot
suede of diminished wingspans.
My grandmother dead in her bedroom
beneath my room. My footsteps map
her death and that death moves
with me, in me, a pulse hymning
where remembering should be.
These sudden acquisitions more
sudden than a high-stakes song. The score
of a hungry murder preparing to fall.
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Phillip B. Williams
Of Shadows and Mirrors
A ghost floats between my father’s ghost
and me. Haunt me if you want, history,
bough shadow looming through my living
room window and across my neck
where an umbilical cord had once claimed
each yet-born breath. When I die I’ll die
clutching final words on the final inhale.
If I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die, I think,
as I avoid remembering the last time
I saw my father yellowed and bejeweled
with drug-rot and face craters where skin tried
to hide in skin. The base of my family tree
fumes of alcohol and smoke from still-hot circles
of crack pipes. In that world between slumber
and hunger I’m headless and holding two heads.
I hold both facing right, so that one’s looking
away from me and the other’s looking at me. I hoist
the one looking away to my shoulders. He must
sense something beyond the blindness of a self
that believes in trees with syringes and bones
for roots. My mother’s Caesarean of me
means she birthed tragedy hidden in bloody regalia,
royalty scared of choking on bark broken
from the husk of a decrepit man. I love him, still,
despite his struggle for home-coming, to have
a throne and not a grave that looks like lips
folding in when rain weakens the muddy perimeter.
The darkness to fear is not the darkness
earth makes of itself but what earth would tell us
if it parted those lips, emptied its sweet,
sweet house. My grandfather salted every threshold
to keep evil from entering his house. I heard
Phillip B. Williams
that salt stinging an open wound means it’s cleaning
out demons, but maybe its crystal mirrors
are unwelcome, the body never wanting to see
its own inner ugly, like a body inside another body
strangled by its own life cord. Would that we could
make any pair of eyes see us new. Musicians
play for survival on every other corner
in the Delmar Loop. One man leans deep into
the chords, into the hollow where nylon stretches
to capture his sweat, his salt, so nothing darker
than the pit of the guitar can get inside or get out.
In the pit of addiction my father was almost ran over
by my mother on the south side of Chicago, genetic
near-blindness had him walking in the streets
with only his ears and feet to tell if a bus
would greet him before a Chevy’s grille. Was in
a bevy of reeds by a filthy lake on the west side
where I heard a whistle break from the stalks
and imagined a bodiless head calling for its body.
Why leave behind a head unless it’s always led to danger
or boredom, the advent of dark flirtation?
What else did my father hear in a speeding car’s
screech and horn? My mother barely recognized
the torn down man and he didn’t see her at all,
squinting between high and death. It’s death
that blinds with excess clarity, like seeing someone
stripped to his essentials, a tree minus nest or leaf.
Beneath branches, hidden in sunset and a mesh of weeds,
insects decipher a cat corpse as the copse goes black.
Exposed bones critique the dusk, sharp as a branch
on a signless road: Where turn for the next
hunger? How long until these small mouths fill?
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Corrie Williamson
Umbrage
for Deborah Digges
Certain spring days I can conjure you
hissing stone, lilac, hive. How the air
must have cracked open when you died,
your ready fists full of earth, and maybe
it was more than the morning sun
flushing the forsythia leaves that made
me shiver. And maybe not. I would
have been bent over a book of ruins:
To build is to dwell, you said, though
it’s never that simple. Lascaux,
Chauvet, those caves your mind
moved through like wind with their stacked
beasts: horses, lions, stranger and lost
things drawn atop each other, or a series
of heads, webs of legs—whether herd,
lineage, nightmare, you didn’t say.
Two ways to make a handprint—
the prehistoric artist coats the palm
and finger undersides with ochre or burnt
bone, presses against stone: a positive
image. For the negative, the hand
is laid bare against the wall, pigment sprayed
Corrie Williamson
around it like music from a reed,
the surrounding space flaring into portrait
of absence. I can’t explain the wet
bitterness socked in my chest that I didn’t
know of you when you lived. What
I would have done with the knowing
doesn’t matter, but here’s news you missed:
they’re saying the beasts with many painted
limbs and heads would have changed
by torchlight, would, cast alternately
in flickering light and shadow, become
sequence, become motion, could have raised
and lowered a single strong neck, or
heaved through stillness and raced along the wall.
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Susan R. Williamson
Conjugal Fault
Conjugate Faults: Patterns of conjugate faults—provided
they formed together—can be related to the orientations
of the principal stress axes.
It’s all in the rocks. Sedimentary, metamorphic,
and igneous: plutonic, volcanic.
What happens to them, happens to us.
Layer upon layer, fire, ice, pressure.
School, elementary, high, and after if you wish.
Fire can make the metamorphic rock, and hormones
can make love happen. And then there are the people
who fall into the traps. Sweet traps and axes of stress.
Why can I not do without you? Here’s where I live, axis
of stress. The street name and house number are not
clearly displayed, but the earthquakes, famine, tornado,
and hurricanes, the twisters and tropical depressions
show clearly on the Doppler. Bright colors red and green,
yellow elemental and digital all at once.
Conjugate the verb said the French teacher in class.
Conjugal visit said the prison guard after the judge.
Conjugal fault—mine or yours. If anything, we will
always find ourselves pressed against one another—
until some force pries us apart.
Cecilia Woloch
Istanbul
By the roots of my hair, some god got hold of me
—Sylvia Plath
It’s always this knife edge with you and sometimes I walk it as
if I know how. In my flame-colored dress and my silver shoes;
in my dying beauty, Istanbul. One smoky kiss and the tastes
of anise and apple and honey fill my mouth. One sweaty
dance and the sky turns to coin. Violins in the air above me,
tambourines shimmering at my hips. The waiters are setting
a fish on fire, having first doused it in indigo. And who is this
woman, unveiled, in your arms? Who am I kidding that this
is safe? Lifted and carried into the twilight, into the traffic
of screeching gulls, into the gold-spiked, glittering breeze.
Istanbul, when do you ever sleep? You press my head against
your chest and croon your mournful shepherd’s love song as
if all desire is holy. It is. What to do with your heart like a
pomegranate, then, but split it, eat? You keep spooning spices
onto my plate. I insist that nothing’s too hot for me. I step
over puddles of piss and soot, past men warming bread over
coals in the street, on makeshift braziers on broken sidewalks
in the shadows of sultans’ tombs. The dead in your dreams
who still speak to you. I’ve come this far to hear my name
unfurled through the final call to prayer. I’ve come this far to
smell the sweet ash of my own life as it burns.
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Cecilia Woloch
Teta
for my great-aunt
Teta, it’s winter in Pittsburgh again
—darkbrick city of smokestacks and soot—
and we’re walking up Broadway Avenue,
past billboards and vacant lots,
through the slush of snow and cinders
as the streetcars slur past—ghosts
in our flowered babushkas and shabby coats,
shopping bags weighing down our arms.
We’ve bought cans of beets, heads of cabbage,
meat ground fresh that we’ll squeeze into fists,
and we don’t flinch when the crew-cut kids hiss,
D.P.’s, at our backs; we’re not ashamed anymore, at last,
to have come from nowhere, nothing, dirt—
the village you fled as a young girl, gone,
the houses burned and the fields you worked
into rows of green grown wild again.
Once you spooned honey into my mouth
because my arms and legs were like sticks
because I itched and wept and wanted,
more than sweetness, to know who I was.
But you sighed, No one wants to remember that stuff—
how you came to this new country, stinking of ship;
how you sold bootleg hootch for cash,
your own smooth flesh for a rich man’s song—
the fat growing fat on the fat of the land
while you buried one child in a pauper’s grave,
raised two others on blood money, prayer;
all your sins in a basket too heavy to lift.
Your body already a heap of grief
Cecilia Woloch
the day you slipped in the alley and fell
in the garden you’d made of ground bone, ash,
under a slit of tin-washed sky.
And then you never stood up again.
I watched as you shrank in your narrow bed,
blind, but you gripped my hand and sang
the old song of the little bird in a tongue
I still don’t understand—dark syllables fluttering
just out of reach—until you were shadow, whisper,
gone—your whole life a ragged story
stitched into breath, unstitched again.
Teta, we’ve never been much in this world,
although we were many, too many, once—
the children’s children who circled your table,
blowing out candles, eyes tilted like yours;
our faces the same face all over again,
the face of the stranger wherever we turned—
my cousin the Cossack, the Gypsy, the Jew
my cousin the dark Slav, my cousin the slave.
And we’ll never belong to this place
where you came with your one suitcase
tied with rope, with your shape like a shadow
risen from earth—some mute root pulled
from a meadow where wildflowers blazed
in the summer and winter lay down.
This is America, Teta, you’re dead
and our dying means nothing here.
Give me your bags.
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Cecilia Woloch
Afterlife
I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I’m dead.
Spindly flowers and waist-high grass and the shadows of
clouds across that brightness, shifting, like so many ships in
the sky. I want to be all in one place, at last, but vast, a sea
by the side of the road. I mean green, and I mean poppies
and daisies, everything blooming at once. And I want to
be, again, that hard-nosed girl who pushed face-first into
the wind. Who stood up to the sun, big-mouthed and brave. I
mean, if I’m going to die, let me live. Let me wade out into the
darkest part of the night and name myself. Wild-haired bitch
of the mongrel stars. Moon on her shoulders. Dirt-rich, proud.
William Wright
Triptych for the Days Before Her Passage
1.
We walked into the valley of dark, our sight
pinned to the ember of the single star the falcate moon
could not douse. That was the dusk we learned the blue bowl of air
had tipped and littered the valley with grass, delicate as hair
and changeable as water for the shuttered eye (changeable as stone,
rhythmic as blood-crux in the salamander or goat,
rhythmic as the green-core of moss or elm).
•
For years my mother smelled of sour bread.
I’d carry her down the mountain in the blue dark
on my back near the swale where we’d build a fire
in the summer cold.
The bones behind her face had sunken, and I saw her pulse
tick shallow in the shadow of her throat.
Her voice was no more
than leaf-crackle,
no more than kindling.
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William Wright
2.
What she remembers:
That in the summer of her seventh year,
storms slanted in and engorged the rivers
and creeks until all waters buckled high,
shattered the levies and bit to the quicks of berms:
Houses that did not kneel and drift away moldered.
They moved the whole town eight miles north—
•
That in her ninth year she came back to the creek
then in drought and walked barefoot
the dry bed’s limb-trash and alabaster—
That something in the slim sun-spears made
her look up into the unshackling of April
and witness a horse skeleton, brown-white
as the soles of her feet and silty hands.
She looked long at how vines twined its brisket,
at the strange philodendron head, drained
of flesh, brainless and almost comical in
its stillness, staid and smiling long with gothic
joy at the sheer oddness of how the Earth had reined it.
•
William Wright
That the winter of her thirteenth year
in the frigid mineral-scent of dusk, the Harman
boy breathed warmth on the small hairs of her neck,
the whiskey on his child’s breath, how they leaned
into one another in the blindness and purity
of the killed grass beside the creek, the water frozen
pure to the floor, where stunned curves
of minnows flashed tinny and motionless
under the stars’ arc-light.
That the thaw snapped and pocked the air like gunshots
so that in the first hint of spring the Harman brother
slew the boy she kissed and dragged his kin down into the gorge.
3.
What she cannot foresee:
That centuries the warped door of the moon will open,
house roofs will crumble as the horse bones gripped
in the long-fallen oak will fall themselves, then grind
down with years, fold as dust and meld with the specks
kept there of the murdered boy, millennia-old, both
now in the earth proper, slack and slow as a laggard.
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Inertia
Once, when I was little, I watched one of the birds attack its own
reflection in the side mirror of a truck. It hurled its body again
and again against that unyielding image, until it pecked a crack
in the glass, until the whole mirror was smeared with blood. It
was as if the bird hated what it saw there, and discovered too
late that all it was seeing was itself.
—Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin’
In the south suburbs of Chicago, where my parents met and
where my mother and I were born and raised, both the roads and the
past rise up in a convergence of purpose: to strip bare, to confuse, to
root you and your loved ones to a land that vaguely remembers being
promised something good, something that never came through.
But if you take Sauk Trail from the Indiana border through Sauk
Village and Chicago Heights, you will spot single white stone markers
lining the roadside. They mark the homes of settlers who hid runaway
slaves on their journeys north and east, another leg of the Underground
Railroad. You might believe that the south suburbs deserve a little more
credit; you might imagine that the graves were proof that the south
suburbs could lead to some kind of freedom, that we could lift up our
heads and give ourselves to others without fear, without expectation.
That we could look behind us without turning into salt.
And if you grew up here, the way my mother and I did, that’s what
you believe yourself to be: salt, stone, a woman suspended between
trailers and wilting soybean fields, those white markers blurred by
speed and forward motion, your heart pushing both forwards and
backwards, an inertia that always keeps you still.
If you take my father through Chicago’s south suburbs, he
will show you where mobsters ducked the feds in old Chicago Heights,
and where John Cipriani ran a speakeasy in his family restaurant. At
least, my father believes that there was a speakeasy there; as the factory
delivery man, Dad got free meals between deliveries, and stories of
the Cipriani saga between bites of fettucini. He brought the pasta and
the stories home, and at dinnertime, I would slurp the thick sauce
and listen to Dad talk about the old Italian, his voice smoothed with a
casual reverence. “That guy,” Dad would tell us, “is tied up.” He would
swipe his nose with his thumb and look at us knowingly, his blue eyes
clear and gleaming above his mustache. “If you get what I mean.”
Chicago gave the south suburbs the idea that they would prosper.
German and Scotch-Irish immigrants, after settling the curved wet
face of Lake Michigan, built brick houses on the city’s near southern
plains. Steel and lumber passed through here, and the runaway slaves,
and miners who took Sauk Trail out west during the gold rush. Lincoln
Highway, running parallel with Sauk Trail to the north, was the
country’s first east-west transcontinental highway; this crossed Dixie
Highway, the road connecting us to Miami. Chicago Heights, which
sat at the Dixie-Lincoln intersection, named itself “The Crossroads of
the Nation,” and so claimed itself, and the south suburbs, as America’s
stopping point, as a place to pause and see the rise of commerce, the
unfolding of industry in its decades of smoke and fire on the Cal-Sag
Channel, the cornfields and their ripe green sways in the wind.
Cipriani’s family, following the Germans and the Scots, trickled
down from Little Italy, a near south side neighborhood bordering
Pilsen and Little Village, footed by the Chicago River. The city’s
neighborhoods rode each other’s backbones, Polish legs thrashing
against Mexican elbows, black jaws set against Dutch gazes. It was
enough to drive the older immigrants, Cipriani’s family included, as
far down Western Avenue as they could go, spreading east towards
Indiana and westward on Lincoln Highway and Vollmer Road. They
begat second and third generations, and the Crossroads of the Nation
quickly filled with two-car garages and grocery store chains, which
Cipriani’s family supplied with bags of vermicelli and jars of sauce.
White steeples dotted Lansing and South Holland, and the tiny brick
bungalows of their congregants flanked either side of Torrence Avenue,
Western Avenue’s eastern parallel. The suburbs became a boom town,
and like all boom towns, believed they were an oasis, an empire; in
Park Forest and Homewood, you could buy fine jewelry and Cadillacs,
and the hills of the Olympia Fields Country Club, when hit with the
morning light, pulsed with an almost Mediterranean green.
But this was not the story that my father knew. Dad told us
stories about Albert Taco, one of Cipriani’s friends, who visited the
factory while Dad loaded trucks and ate lunch. He was a mobster, and
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my father claimed that Taco had ordered some fairly nasty hits on his
associates. “I took a look at this guy,” Dad told us, “and I thought,
‘Man, don’t hurt me!’” And Dad would laugh, and sip his beer, and
sigh. “It’s not every day that you come across a guy like that. I’m pretty
sure that he’s got a hideout in Phoenix to avoid the feds.”
Dad and his siblings, eight in all, bounced between the states of
the Great Plains while my grandfather, a principal by trade, ran school
districts in Wyoming, Nebraska, and finally Richton Park, where my
parents, unbeknownst to each other, attended the same high school.
After a semester at the University of Wyoming, my father spent a few
summers laying railroad track in Louisiana, where the slow overhangs
of swamp air muddled his already muted ambitions. He moved to Park
Forest to recoup his losses and save money on rent. He watched his
parents’ dog and tended bar at the Front Row, a dive at the corner of
Governor’s Highway and Sauk Trail. Walter James was a regular there,
as was his daughter, Barbara James, a skinny girl whose flirtations always
bordered on the sarcastic. Dad served her Heinekens and watched her
dance in the bar’s florescent lowlight. Numbers were exchanged on
napkins, or matchbooks. A few weeks later, my mother was pregnant
with me. Dad didn’t answer his phone, and my mother sucked her teeth.
In the south suburbs, this wasn’t the most unexpected turn.
“Growing up, there was nothing here,” my mother would say,
swinging her arm out the window as we drove down Lincoln Highway
towards Matteson, the town where my grandfather raised her. We
drove down Lincoln Highway at least once a week, making trips to the
library, the mall, places where we could find something to do. On the
way, Mom would tell us stories about the passing landscape, what she
remembered. “You could ride your bike down the street with no fear
of getting hit by a car. There were no cars. I would ride up to Dairy
Queen, the only place to go, and then I would just ride up and down
the roads, going nowhere.”
In the 1960s, when Mom was a child, Matteson was the farthest
western reach of the suburbs, and Lincoln Highway was a scenic route,
its trees and wide fields an inviting view for passing tourists. Grandpa
James ran a motel at 4343 Lincoln Highway; vacationers and truckers
packed the small gravel parking lot, and my mother spent her summers
wiping down bed frames and folding dirty towels. Grandpa James,
who survived the Depression without soap, who sailed a Navy boat
around Finland without a good shower, saw cleanliness as a luxury.
“It was enough to make you gag,” Mom would say as she clicked
the cigarette lighter into place, pulling a smoke out of the pack with
her teeth. “The walls were just coated in grime. Do you have any idea
what people do in motels? All that place needed was a bottle of bleach
and a wet rag.”
Their house sat right next to the motel, and my grandfather raised
my mother and uncle there alone; my grandmother alive but divorced
from my grandfather, who had taken from my grandfather as many
punches as she gave, whose picture sat in my mother’s filing cabinet,
her pearls and smooth skin a mystery beneath the dusty frame.
Grandpa James taught his children, and especially his daughter, that
their mother was no good, that she was a drinker and a whore and a
liar. And the fact that my grandmother, who left when my mother was
ten, did not write or call after the divorce was sufficient proof.
“We were not allowed to talk about her in the house,” Mom told
us as she flicked cigarette ash out the window. “She was bad, bad, bad,
and there was no question about it. We just had to accept it, that she
was gone.”
Grandpa James would sit his children down at the table while he
made their dinner, exhorting their mother’s vices while he opened
cans of lima beans and plucked feathers from pheasants. “Do you want
to be like her?” he would ask, the raw birds speared with broken quills,
my mother and uncle unmoving, spellbound, held by a grudging
force. Grandpa James kept them at the table until their plates were
empty, telling them over and over again that their mother did not miss
them, that she was the worst kind of mother they could have had. That
his daughter should do her best to stay clear of her mother, because she
could be just like her, after all.
And my mother ate her father’s words and carried them with
her, rode her bike along those nowhere roads. She watched I-57 being
built, the interstate cutting clear across Lincoln Highway, bringing
the motel chains that would force Grandpa James to sell his motel:
Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Motel 6. She saw the neighborhoods fill
with black people, stirring the old fears of the immigrant families,
who flew to Indiana and found comfort in subdivisions whose only
fences were high property taxes. She rode past the shopping centers,
their windows smeared with grease-paint-lettered ads: Records Bought
and Sold, Magic But True Diet Pills, All Gold and Bonds Accepted.
“The Crossroads of the Nation” became a gridlock, the factories either
moved to Mexico or replaced with machines, that nineteenth century
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industrial confidence now a specter, the old freedom roads buried
by interstates that drove you past the dying neighborhoods without
having to go through them.
Grandpa James died from congestive heart failure; a bubble
bloomed on one of his arteries, and Mom tended him at home, that
same voice that held her spellbound at the dinner table high and hoarse
with the sound of his dying. Afterwards, she let her brother Richard
sell the house while she rented an apartment in Richton Park, a mile or
two east of her father’s house. She and my father were married a year
after I was born, and my younger brother and sister soon followed. We
bought a house in Indiana and followed the white flight to the town of
Lowell, where my parents planted apple trees and built a swing set in our
backyard. It was paradise; Mom had finally escaped, had found promise
elsewhere. There was a creek running behind our backyard, and Mom’s
hollyhocks and petunias burst in tiny trumpets along the garden fence.
Dad drove over two hours a day back to Illinois to deliver Ciprianni’s
pasta in the south suburbs. Sometimes he brought the delivery truck
home and let me sit in it, the aluminum of the seats cool and bumpy on
the back of my legs as I sat in the driver’s seat, running my hands along
the steering wheel. I loved long drives, the stretch of time between places,
staring out the window at the passing landscape. And I loved my father,
who was gone most nights, taking courses on truck driving and computer
science, trying to find a career that would cover the mortgage and keep
him moving—he did not like to be bored, or to sit still, for long.
In a way, this was what brought my parents together: the desire
to live a better life, a deliberate kind of amnesia. If they could recast
their histories, my parents would be able to erase their mistakes, their
memories of how things were. My father could drive a truck, see the
country, discover new landscapes. And my mother could set up house,
fold clean sheets, plant a garden. Be the mother she never had.
One muggy afternoon, my father plopped me in the front seat
of his Lincoln Town Car. “We’re going for a ride, Red,” he told me,
and I buckled my seatbelt with glee. I remember the excitement so
well because what followed was a revisitation, an inevitable line of loss
drawn with the bright orange ash of light down the white paper of my
father’s cigarette, which he lit while we coasted past the apple trees, the
wide-brimmed hollyhocks trumpeting in the wind. My father flicked
his ash out the window. “We’re going to go see our new house.”
We left the windows open as we drove, the expressway winding
us around the concrete factories and large green hills, which did not
exist in Lowell, Indiana. I did not notice the methane gas pumps
jammed into the hills’ turfed sides, the sod an easy cover for landfill
trash, but instead leaned against my dad’s arm, letting my hand wave
outside the open window, slicing fast through the block of air.
We came into Sauk Village through the back, following Sauk Trail
to Torrence Avenue. We pulled into the driveway of a small one-story
house with a red door. The backyard here was smaller than ours. I
would have to share a room with my sister. “It’ll be different here,
Red,” Dad said, standing outside the window of my future room. “But
this is where we’re going. Let me take you to 7-11 to get a Slurpee.”
We drove westward out of Sauk Village, heading back onto 394
and the Dan Ryan Expressway as the sunlight receded. A month later,
we returned with a U-Haul. I asked for another Slurpee, but Mom,
who was driving this time, drove straight down Torrence Avenue to
223rd Street, turned on Yates and then Strassburg Avenue, our new
street. She kept one hand on the steering wheel, the other wiping tears
from her face.
In Sauk Village, we huddled on the couch to avoid the streams
of earwigs that the summer rains invited through the plumbing, and
we ate American cheese on English muffins for days, waiting for my
father’s paychecks from the siding company that folded a month after
our move. Dad gave up Ciprianni’s for the job of assistant manager,
which he took without much consultation with my mother, who took
us on long, sullen drives down the roads of her childhood to keep us
occupied, who kept us spellbound by what her memories conjured,
looking for recompense for what she had lost.
And my father, after losing his job, became an immovable body
at rest, wrapped in a bathrobe on the fraying loveseat that he bought,
secondhand, from a furniture warehouse, another step in that series of
failed attempts that brought us back to the suburbs. Our move converged
many lines of history: the crumble of landfills and industry, the
community college dropouts, the blank-faced liquor stores that sprouted
between the infamous strip malls, the drywalled bars, the proofs of a
history that we thought echoed Rome, even in its ruins. From the bar
stools of Tui’s, the bar at the corner of Torrence and Sauk Trail, you could
just see beneath the shades to the cornfields that lay across the street, dry
and dead but, through the dark green window glass, vibrant, almost alive.
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The Walgreens sign flashed red in the sky above, and beers were a quarter
a draft after six. In the south suburbs, what you thought was promised
and what you got as a deal were seen as two distinct things, the promise
fading in the background while the deal, sweet and cold as ice, popped
open instantly in your hand for a quarter, for a moment, for a lifetime.
In the car, my mother drove past 4343 Lincoln Highway. The
house and motel were gone, replaced by an apartment complex with
black glass windows. The apartment sat between a Kentucky Fried
Chicken and a nursing home. My mother gazed over the site of her
old house.
“I used to have a tree there, my tree,” she says, letting her hand drop
outside the window. “I used to climb it, and my father built a swing on it
for me. It is still there, I think.”
I roll my window down, trying to see if the tree is still there. Ash
from my mother’s cigarette flies through my window and hits my eyes;
Mom does not notice but keeps talking, the story rising with the smoke of
her cigarette into my lungs. “I would just climb it and sit in it for hours,”
she said. “It was a place I could hide in when things in the house got
bad. I would just sit on my swing and go back and forth, waiting out my
parents’ fights until I could go to bed. There’s not much else I remember.”
The ash blurs the tree into a black line, my eyes stinging. Is this
what my parents thought, buying that Indiana house with the white
picket fence? What did they remember, what did they believe, and
what do I believe as I keep looking back years later, my life lifted from
the circuit, my heart somehow afraid that it is too late to turn?
In the car, I blink back the ash and keep staring out the window,
measuring the stretches of time between the stoplights, the time that
I will spend in motion, not at rest but moving, which is freedom even
if all the roads run parallel, even if the rotting scenery simply rotates
the same front lawns with their cracked sod and straggling petunias.
I suck my teeth when my mother turns south, taking Cicero to Sauk
Trail back east to Sauk Village, the freedom in which I hang cut from
me by the return, the trip home. We pass the white markers and I
watch them blur past us; I breathe in my mother’s smoke and drive
with her through the grid, the roads to nowhere.
Amy Yee
Deckyi’s Journey from After Tibet: Exile in India
D eckyi’s problem began with what seemed like a great
opportunity. In March 2009, she heard from Tibetan friends that a
multi-national call center in Delhi needed Mandarin speakers to
make calls to China. When they heard about the job, Deckyi and her
husband, Dhondup, had been living in India just a few months. They
fled from Tibet in the fall of 2008, first to Nepal and then on to India.
By December they arrived in Dharamsala, the small hill town that is
home to the Dalai Lama and 12,000 Tibetans. Deckyi and Dhondup
couldn’t speak English or Hindi so they couldn’t find any work. For
the first months of life as refugees in India, they were helpless, like a
“new baby,” Dhondup lamented. They had brought their life savings
with them to India but that wouldn’t last long, so they jumped at the
chance to work. Their salary from the call center in Delhi would have
been a much-needed lifeline—if only their boss had paid them.
Dhondup was a tall, thin man in his early 30s with a few wispy
hairs on his upper lip that passed for a mustache. He had a gentle
air and spoke slowly as though pondering his words. In contrast to
Dhondup’s rangy frame, Deckyi had a plump face and a slight double
chin. Deckyi’s ample bosom suggested a steady solidness and she
always appeared calm, reserved, shyly serious. Although she could
understand only a few words in English, her dark eyes had a knowing
alertness. Many Tibetan women are named Deckyi, after the Dalai
Lama’s mother, just as so many Tibetans (men and women) are named
Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama’s given name. Before fleeing to India,
Deckyi lived in Lhasa and attended Chinese schools while growing up
so she spoke Mandarin fluently. In the absence of English on her end
and Tibetan on mine, we relied on Mandarin to communicate.1
1
I was born in the U.S. to immigrants from Hong Kong and grew up in
Boston. Who would have thought that the Mandarin I learned in college and
during two years living in China in the 1990s would come in handy with
talking to Tibetan refugees in India?
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Amy Yee
More than a dozen Tibetans were already working at the call center
and acquaintances encouraged Deckyi to join. Dhondup and Deckyi
didn’t know anyone in India when they arrived, but in Dharamsala they
met other Tibetans through an informal but broad network of refugees
and exiles. Through word of mouth Deckyi ferreted out information
about housing and job leads. After deciding to try working at the
call center, Deckyi and Dhondup took a rickety overnight bus from
Dharamsala to Delhi at the end of March. The bus rattled so loudly over
the bumpy, twisting roads that it seemed like screws and metal would
come flying off the vehicle. For the first part of the night, the bus wound
its way down the curvy mountain roads lined with pine trees and
around gut-clenching hairpin turns until the road spread thankfully
flat and deposited them in Delhi’s teeming sprawl 12 hours later.
It was a big call center with hundreds of people chattering away inside
a cavernous office about 30 minutes drive from Majna Ka Tilla, the Tibetan
colony wedged on a slice of land in north Delhi near the sewage-choked
Yamuna River. Most of the call center workers were Indians, but there
were also some Africans, Chinese, and Tibetans. There were even Indians
at the call center who made calls in halting Mandarin. Sometimes the
Indians called Deckyi over to help them when they couldn’t understand
the Chinese person on the other end of the line. Deckyi didn’t ask how the
Indians had learned Chinese; it was another one of the mysteries of life
in India. Looking for answers and explanations in the daunting crevasse
between two languages and cultures was too much trouble.
The work was not hard: calling hospitals in China, asking them a
list of questions that appeared on a computer screen and recording the
answers. What kind of medical equipment are you using? Does your
hospital plan to buy new equipment in the next few years? Deckyi repeated
the questions over and over. She could actually read and write Mandarin
better than her mother tongue since she hadn’t learned Tibetan in school
and only spoke it at home. Fluency in Mandarin was actually to Deckyi’s
advantage. It helped her find work in Lhasa and prosper; and at first it
seemed to offer unexpected opportunities in India. Even Tibetans in exile
in India knew the value of Mandarin. Deckyi had already begun teaching
basic Chinese to neighbors and friends in Dharamsala: monks and a
young Tibetan man who was taking a break from his studies in England
to volunteer. Some Tibetans hoped to one day go home and they knew
Mandarin would help them get a job or find better opportunities.
Others were unlikely to go back, but were learning because the Dalai
Lama urged all Tibetans to learn Mandarin so they could communicate
Amy Yee
with their “Chinese brothers and sisters.” For years, the Dalai Lama
encouraged contact and communication between Chinese and Tibetans
in hope of fostering better relations. This grassroots effort had no impact
on jumpstarting the stalled diplomatic talks between the Dalai Lama’s
envoys and Beijing. Perhaps it was because there was no progress in
breaking this impasse that the Dalai Lama hoped some headway could
be made between ordinary Tibetan and Chinese people.
Many Tibetans took the Dalai Lama’s words to heart. In Dharamsala,
Tibetan refugees crowded not only into free English classes offered
by non-profit organizations but also into the few Chinese classes. I
attended one of these classes held in a tiny room where Tibetans sat
on the floor on blue, square cushions, eyes fixed on their Mandarinspeaking Tibetan teacher as they sounded out tones and words in
sing-song unison. As a Chinese-American, I was the unexpected object
of excited attention in the class, not as an adversary but as a potential
teacher.
The work environment at the call center in Delhi was familiar to
Deckyi, who once held a coveted office job in Lhasa working for an
electronics company, while Dhondup managed an accounting firm.
Deckyi was surprised that she and Dhondup got the job in Delhi so
easily. After they arrived in the city, they went to the call center for a brief
interview in Mandarin and then were hired the next day. In contrast,
getting an office job in Lhasa, at least for a Tibetan, was difficult and
competitive and took years of perseverance or connections or both.
On March 22, Deckyi and Dhondup started work at the call center,
as recorded in Deckyi’s diary—a flimsy school notebook where she
documented her days with brief entries written in Chinese characters.
After that first day, she felt a pale glimmer of relief—one of those rare
moments of brightness in a year darkened by turmoil. “We are actually
happy here,” she wrote in her diary. Her happiness proved to be fleeting.
On workdays, Deckyi and Dhondup woke up at 4 o’clock in
the morning to be ready when a company van picked up the Tibetan
workers from Majna Ka Tilla at 5 o’clock each day. The cool respite of
Delhi’s early spring faded with each passing day. Through April the heat
grew oppressive and stirred mosquitoes, lice and red ants from their
winter stupor. For 3,500 rupees a month, about $70, Deckyi rented a
windowless box of a room across from Majna Ka Tilla that was entirely
bare except for a single bed and a light bulb. Rent was an onerous
expense. Eventually they added a small table to the contents of the room.
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Amy Yee
At night, when Deckyi lay in bed with mosquitoes whining in her
ear, the bareness of the room and the tenuousness of their new lives
were amplified by memories of what they had left behind in Tibet.
They owned an eight-room house in Lhasa that she and Dhondup had
bought in 2006 for 280,000 yuan (about $35,000). It was a two-story
house and they had two TVs. It seemed impossibly extravagant now as
Deckyi mentally caressed those memories in the dark. When Dhondup
described the house to me he mournfully sketched in his notebook a
large structure with several rooms layered like cubes. They had never
imagined that they would leave behind their hard-earned house and
middle-class lives in Tibet to become refugees.
When Deckyi and Dhondop first arrived in Dharamsala they were
stunned to see so many Tibetans walking the winding streets of the small
hill town in the foothills of the Himalayas. There were old and young,
people from the west and east, their origins recognizable from their chupa
tunics and how they wore and tied them, spiky-haired urban youth from
Lhasa, former nomads with weathered faces, teachers and journalists,
shop owners and traders, monks and nuns from Tibetan monasteries and
nunneries in India that were bigger than those in Tibet. Who were all
these Tibetans and how did they get to this place? Deckyi and Dhondup
wondered. The answers were as diverse as the Tibetan exiles themselves.
Some were born in India but most had fled their homeland under a variety
of circumstances, some driven by pragmatism, some for better education
or religious study, and some forced by terror and desperation.
The newest of these refugees were pushed across the border by
the events that Chinese-speaking Tibetans refer to as “san shisi” in
Mandarin, or “three fourteen.” China refers to significant events by
their dates, for example, “liu si” or “six four” indicates the Tiananmen
Square protests of June 4, 1989. San shisi refers to March 14, 2008, when
protests and demonstrations rippling across Tibet erupted in violence.
Deckyi and Dhondup didn’t participate in the protests but they did do
something seemingly inconsequential that would abruptly break the
upward trajectory of their lives.
At first the Delhi call center seemed like an oasis. It was
spacious, brightly lit and as soon as they stepped inside they were swathed
in the decadent silk of air conditioning. Three shifts of employees
worked around the clock so the room had the unblinking feel of a place
suspended in time. A canteen served Indian food for lunch that even
Deckyi conceded was not bad. They could take breaks from the computer
Amy Yee
monitors and phones, but apart from lunch, Deckyi and Dhondup
worked non-stop to finish as many questionnaires as possible before their
work day ended at 3:30 p.m. Each completed project fetched 500 rupees,
about $10—no small sum for the average person in India. Deckyi worked
quickly and in the first five weeks finished 33 projects. Between Deckyi
and her husband, they earned 33,000 rupees, just shy of $700—more than
a year’s rent for their room in Dharamsala.
The promise of their payment took tantalizing shape in Deckyi’s
mind and it sustained her through pre-dawn wake-ups in the stifling
dark; long hours under the fluorescent lights; and restless nights in
their desolate room itching mosquito and lice bites. With the money,
perhaps they could buy a plane ticket to another country if they could
manage to get visas.
In Lhasa, Deckyi and her husband had solid jobs with good
prospects for the future. Adjusting to India was difficult. She wasn’t
used to Indian food, the slimy lentil dal and vegetables overcooked
into unrecognizable lumps, and the dirty streets of Dharamsala where
cows plodded alongside people and stray dogs disrupted her sleep with
their frenzied barking. They felt helpless, even in Dharamsala where
thousands of Tibetans lived alongside Indians, where snowcapped
mountains like those at home were visible in the distance. She wasn’t
used to asking people for help with mundane tasks like buying
vegetables at the market where Indian vendors spoke Hindi and
English. She felt like a child, Deckyi repeated.
In their first months in India, the enormity of the events that
forced them to leave Tibet weighed heavily on Deckyi and Dhondup.
They had been fortunate enough to save money in Tibet, but they had
paid hefty fees for permits and a guide who led them across the border
from Tibet to Nepal. When they finally arrived in Dharamsala, the
expenses added up: blankets, bedding, clothes for the cold winter,
kitchenware for the small room they rented for 2,400 rupees ($54)
a month, food and toiletries. What drove them out of Tibet seemed
trivial, but had cost them so much. Was their journey worth it?
In October 2009, Deckyi and Dhondop had recently started
English classes at one of the non-profits centers in Dharamsala where
Tibetans could learn English. Nearly six months had passed since they
had left the call center in Delhi and returned to Dharamsala with their
hopes in tatters. The first time I went to their room to tutor them,
Deckyi showed me her class textbook and looked at me without
Crab Orchard Review
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Amy Yee
comprehension when I asked in English: When did you come to
India? Why did you come here? We switched back to Mandarin and
my questions elicited sobering answers. Deckyi had a slick smart phone
from China that had an electronic Chinese-English dictionary. With one
fingernail coated in chipped red nail polish, she wrote a Chinese character
on the touchpad screen. A word in English popped up and she tilted it
toward me. Zhengzhifan. “State criminal.” I shook my head. They did
not kill or harm anyone or damage property or divulge state secrets. I
thumbed through Deckyi’s red Chinese-English dictionary and found the
word naming. “Political refugee,” I wrote in English in her notebook.
Even in an English lesson you couldn’t avoid the weight of their
misfortune. I learned new Chinese vocabulary when Deckyi told me
about how she had come to India. Zhua, bianje, tongzinshen: catch,
border, permit. I jotted down the words in pinyin in my notebook for
future reference. At first Deckyi and her husband were shy and regarded
me quietly like frightened cats until I took the lead and asked them
something, anything, in English. I was surprised that Deckyi was only
30 because she looked older, even when wearing a teal-colored T-shirt
emblazoned with a surfer and the words “Newport Beach, California.”
She had a small, pert nose in a chubby face, yet wrinkles pulled at the
corner of her eyes.
One morning, after a few of our lessons, Deckyi took the lead.
She had prepared a list of questions and phrases. They were written
in English in her notebook and she wanted me to verify them. The
first one puzzled me. “Our life is very knotty.” I looked at the words
blankly. “Where did you get that word?” I asked. Deckyi pointed at
the smart phone. She explained in Mandarin what she meant and I
unfurrowed my brow. “Here. This is better,” I said. I took her notebook
and wrote a sentence. “Our life is very hard.” Deckyi repeated this in a
soft voice and surprisingly good pronunciation.
Then she showed me another sentence she had copied into her
book. “Can you help feed at the public trough?” Her phone was not
so smart after all. After some back and forth I deciphered the proper
translation. “Can you help us get our salary?” I wrote in her notebook.
Next she announced that she wanted to sell her calligraphy. “You
know calligraphy?” I asked. “Where are you selling it?” Shufa—I did
remember this word in Mandarin. Now was her turn to look puzzled.
What she really meant was jewelry, shoushi. The smart phone had
given her the wrong word again. I pointed to a gold ring with a large
square piece of jade on her finger. Jiezhe, ring. Shouzhua, bracelet. She
Amy Yee
nodded. That’s what Deckyi was doing that morning: trying to get a
price from local shops for the few pieces of jewelry she had.
Deckyi and Dhondup lived near the main Buddhist temple
in Dharamsala in a building surrounded by construction. All
throughout Dharamsala, hillsides were being gutted and carved out,
scaffolding erected. Precariously tall buildings sprouted from the
earthquake-prone ground to accommodate the growing influx of
tourists, students and residents. Several senior monks lived in their
building too and sometimes the sound of chanting and murmuring
prayers drifted down the dim, cement-floored corridor. Usually, the
sound was drowned out by construction from the adjacent building.
Power tools shrieked and sparks flew. On the stairwell, I had to tread
carefully to avoid puddles of wet cement.
In Deckyi and Dhondup’s room, two single beds formed an L along
the walls. Quilts were piled on top, folded lengthwise like soft sausages
so the beds could be used as sofas during the day. There was a television
in a cluttered cupboard topped with small silver cups. On the wall above
it were several silk thangka tapestries depicting sitting Buddhas, along
with a large photo collage of the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa, the
twenty-something head of another school of Tibetan Buddhism who
had fled Tibet when he was a teenager, much to the embarrassment of
China. In the photo the beefy-faced Karmapa peered knowingly over
the top of his round sunglasses, as if monitoring the room. In one corner
sat a table heavy with books and papers and an old desktop computer
covered by a sheet. In order to use the computer someone would have to
sit on the bed. The window looked out onto an overgrown patch of grass
that hosted a rubbish heap littered with discards from the construction
site—plastic bags, wood shavings. Two dark doorways in the room led
to a small kitchenette and a bathroom.
One gray afternoon, the electricity winked off in the middle of
one of our English lessons. We continued as though nothing had
happened; power outages are common in India, as routine as clouds
passing over the sun. In the hazy half-light, Dhondup repeated
several English words over and over, almost to himself. Then, without
thinking, he stretched out in repose on the bed where he had been
sitting, as though lulling himself to sleep with the mantra of the new
words from this new land.
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u 199
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions), and a
limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press). His
collection, Millennial Teeth, will be published in the Crab Orchard
Series in Poetry from Southern Illinois University Press in Fall 2014.
He is an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University, where he
teaches literature and writing courses and edits Waccamaw.
Lauren K. Alleyne is an assistant professor of English and the Poet-inResidence at the University of Dubuque. Her debut collection, Difficult
Fruit, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014. She’s proud to be a
Richard Peterson Poetry Prize Finalist for Crab Orchard Review.
Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton),
selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize,
and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have
appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The
New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry 2013. She’s
received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Brian Brodeur is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes
(Autumn House Press), Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press),
and the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (White
Eagle Coffee Store Press). New poems and interviews are forthcoming
in the Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. He curates
the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over one
hundred and fifty interviews with poets. He is a George Elliston Fellow
in Poetry in the PhD in English and Comparative Literature program
at University of Cincinnati, where he serves as an assistant editor for
Cincinnati Review. Catherine Champion grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has her
BA in English and Philosophy from Amherst College and her MFA in
Poetry from the University of Oregon. She currently lives in Eugene,
Oregon.
Nandi Comer is the winner of the 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry
Prize from Crab Orchard Review. She is currently the poetry editor of
Indiana Review. She is pursuing a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African
American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has
received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Virginia Center
for the Arts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo,
Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and Third Coast.
Chad Davidson is the author of From the Fire Hills, The Last Predicta,
and Consolation Miracle, all in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry from
Southern Illinois University Press, as well as co-author with Gregory
Fraser of Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches. Davidson has
work appearing or forthcoming in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly
Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, and he teaches literature and
creative writing at the University of West Georgia.
Erica Dawson is the author of Big-Eyed Afraid and The Small Blades
Hurt. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2008,
The Best American Poetry 2012, Birmingham Poetry Review, Virginia
Quarterly Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is an
assistant professor of English and writing at University of Tampa,
teaching undergraduates and low-residency MFA students.
Katherine Dykstra is nonfiction editor at Guernica. Her essays have
been published or are forthcoming from Shenandoah, Gulf Coast,
Poets & Writers and the anthology Twentysomething Essays by
Twentysomething Writers. She won third place in the 2013 Real Simple
Life Lessons Essay Contest. “Like Held Breath” is part of a memoir-inessays on which she is currently at work.
Troy D. Ehlers is the winner of the 2014 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize
from Crab Orchard Review. He has published fiction in the Louisville
Review, Quercus Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and the pulp fiction
anthology Love Free or Die. His novel-in-progress was a finalist for
Wilkes University’s James Jones Fellowship. He interned at Milkweed
Editions, edited Minnetonka Review, and earned an MFA from
Spalding University.
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere
(Salmon Poetry), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and
Crab Orchard Review
u 201
her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, Crazyhorse, and
Blackbird. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary
magazine Memorious.
Rachel Heimowitz is a poet living in Israel. Her work has appeared or
is forthcoming in Spillway, Prairie Schooner, Oberon Poetry, and Poetry
Quarterly. Her chapbook, What the Light Reveals, is forthcoming from
Tebot Bach. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Sara Henning is the author of a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias, and
a full-length volume of poetry, A Sweeter Water. Her poetry, fiction,
interviews, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in
Verse, So To Speak, American Letters & Commentary, and Willow
Springs. She has poems anthologized in Women Write Resistance:
Poets Resist Gender Violence.
Suzanne Hodsden is native to the Midwest but has lived in the UK,
Prague, and Braşov, Romania. She is currently living and working
in Bowling Green, Ohio while she pursues her MFA in fiction from
Bowling Green State University. This is her first fiction publication.
Christopher Hornbacker is a PhD student at The University of Southern
Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Outside In,
Synergy, and Contemporary American Voices. He is a member of the
editorial staff of Memorious.
Amorak Huey teaches creative and professional writing at Grand
Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac
Circus, is forthcoming in 2014 from Hyacinth Girl Press, and his
poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2012, Hayden’s Ferry
Review, Menacing Hedge, Rattle, and other journals. Follow him on
Twitter: @amorak.
Sara Eliza Johnson’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the New
England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Boston Review, Southern Indiana
Review, and Memorious. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation
Writers’ Award, a Winter Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, and a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference. Her first book, Vessel, was selected for the 2013 National
Poetry Series and will be published by Milkweed Editions.
Dean Julius is an MFA student at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro and assistant poetry editor at the Greensboro Review. A
native of the Mississippi Delta, he received his BA in English from the
University of Mississippi and a Masters of Education in English from
Delta State University. His poems and other work have appeared or are
forthcoming in storySouth, Confidante, and Gently Read Literature.
Vandana Khanna’s debut collection, Train to Agra, was the inaugural
winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and her
second collection, Afternoon Masala, won the Miller Williams Prize
and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2014. Andrew David King is the winner of the 2013 Allison Joseph Poetry
Award from Crab Orchard Review. He studies philosophy and
literature at the University of California Berkeley, where he serves
as the Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Poetry Review. His poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in Arroyo Literary Review, ZYZZYVA,
and Spillway, and he regularly contributes to the blog of the Kenyon
Review.
Leah Lax holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of
Houston. She has published award-winning short fiction, prose
poetry, essays in anthologies, a major opera (with NPR broadcast), and
a world-wide traveling exhibit. “Water of Sleep” is an excerpt from her
memoir manuscript, Uncovered. She is represented by Gail Hochman
of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
Henry W. Leung is the winner of the 2013 Rafael Torch Literary
Nonfiction Award from Crab Orchard Review. He earned his MFA in
fiction at the University of Michigan, and has served as a reviewer and
columnist for the Lantern Review. He is a Kundiman Fellow and the
author of the poetry chapbook Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe Press).
His prose and poetry have appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Cerise
Press, and ZYZZYVA.
Michelle Lin is a poet and artist from Torrance, California. Her
latest work can be found in ZYZZYVA. She is an MFA student at the
University of Pittsburgh, where she also teaches composition. Her
website is michellelinpoet.wordpress.com.
Crab Orchard Review
u 203
Brandi Nicole Martin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the
minnesota review, Salt Hill, Harpur Palate, and PANK magazine, among
others. A Florida State University alumni, she is an MFA candidate in
poetry at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Beth Morgan previously published short stories in the Kelsey Review
and is the author of the novel, The Family Plot, which was published
in 2013. She recently completed her second novel, The Con, which she
hopes to publish in 2015. She is currently doing research for a historical
novel based on the life of Nannette Streicher, a 19th century Viennese
piano maker and friend of Beethoven.
Steve Mueske is a poet and electronic musician from Savage, Minnesota.
His books include Slower Than Stars (forthcoming) and A Mnemonic
for Desire. His poems have been published in the Massachusetts Review,
Court Green, Hotel Amerika, CURA, Fulcrum, Crazyhorse, Third Coast,
and elsewhere. He can be found on Soundcloud and Facebook.
Jeff Newberry is the author of Brackish (Aldrich Press) and the
chapbook A Visible Sign (Finishing Line Press). With Justin Evans,
he is the co-editor of The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake
Nation Press). His writing has appeared in print and electronic
journals, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Chattahoochee
Review, and Waccamaw. He lives in Tifton, Georgia, with his wife and
son. Find him online at http://www.jeffnewberry.com.
Leah Nielsen’s first collection of poetry, No Magic, was published by
Word Press, and her chapbook Side Effects May Include is forthcoming
in the journal The Chapbook. Most recently, her poems have appeared
in Fourteen Hills, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, and Rattle. She
teaches at Westfield State University in Westfield, Massachusetts.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books),
selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize. Currently, he is a visiting
professor of creative writing at Warren Wilson College and the coeditor of The Collagist.
Kevin Phan graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in
English Literature in 2005, and the University of Michigan with an
MFA in creative writing in 2013. He was the recipient of two Hopwood
awards: the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize and Theodore Roethke Prize.
His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Fence, Pleiades, Gulf
Coast, Colorado Review, Sentence, CutBank, Fiddlehead, and Hayden’s
Ferry Review. He is currently a Zell Fellow.
Sam Pierstorff received his MFA in poetry from California State
University Long Beach and became the youngest Poet Laureate in
California when he was selected to the position in 2004 by the city of
Modesto, where he teaches English at Modesto Junior College. He is
the editor of Quercus Review Press and creator of The Ill List Poetry
Slam. His debut poetry collection, Growing Up in Someone Else’s Shoes,
was published by World Parade Books. He is currently working on a
new collection of epistolary poems, writing a YA novel, and training
to be a ninja warrior.
Caroline Pittman lives with her husband and four children in Atlanta,
Georgia.
Jessica Plante is former poetry editor at the Greensboro Review and
a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro MFA
program and the MA program at University of North Texas. Her
book reviews and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the
American Poetry Journal, Birdfeast, The Collagist, storySouth, Tirage
Monthly, North Texas Review, and Writer’s Bloc. She lives and writes
in Tallahassee, Florida.
Brad Richard is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently
Motion Studies (The Word Works), winner of the 2010 Washington
Prize and runner-up for the Publishing Triangle’s 2011 Thom Gunn
Award for Gay Male Poetry, and Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry
Press). He directs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter
School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Amanda Rutstein received her MFA in poetry from the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro in 2010, where she served as a poetry
editor for the Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared in the
Greensboro Review, as well as the 2013 anthology What Matters.
Aaron Samuels, raised in Providence, Rhode Island, by a Jewish
mother and a Black father, is a Cave Canem Fellow and a nationally
Crab Orchard Review
u 205
acclaimed performer. His work has been featured on TV One’s Verses &
Flow, and it has appeared in Tidal Basin Review and Muzzle Magazine.
His debut collection of poetry, Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps, was released
by Write Bloody Publishing in Fall 2013. More information can be
found at: http://aaronsamuelspoetry.com/.
Steven D. Schroeder’s second collection of poems is The Royal Nonesuch
(Spark Wheel Press), which won the 2014 Devil’s Kitchen Reading
Award in Poetry. His poetry is available from New England Review,
Barrow Street, and The Journal. He edits the online poetry journal
Anti-, serves as co-curator for Observable Readings, and works as a
Certified Professional Résumé Writer.
Peggy Shumaker’s most recent book of poems is Toucan Nest: Poems
of Costa Rica. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She was
Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2010–2012. She edits the Alaska
Literary Series at University of Alaska Press and Boreal Books, an
imprint of Red Hen Press. Both series showcase literature and fine
art from Alaska. Visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com.
Brian Simoneau lives in Connecticut with his wife and two young
daughters. A recipient of a work-study scholarship to the 2013 Bread
Loaf Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in the Georgia Review, Boulevard, Cave Wall, Mid-American Review,
North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other
journals. His collection River Bound won the 2013 De Novo Prize and
will be published by C&R Press.
Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award and his chapbook
Red Flag Up was recently published by Kattywompus Press. He is also
the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming 2014), and
his poems appear or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review,
Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, West
Branch, and Cream City Review, among others. Naomi Telushkin is the winner of the 2013 Charles Johnson Fiction
Award from Crab Orchard Review. She is an MFA student at Arizona
State University. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been published
in the Citron Review, Tablet, Emprise Review, Folio, Bare, Travel Belles,
and the St. Petersburg Times Magazine.
Christian Teresi’s poems and interviews have appeared in literary
journals, including the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon
Review Online, Revolver, and the Writer’s Chronicle. He is the Director
of Conferences for AWP.
Daniel Nathan Terry, a former landscaper and horticulturist, is
the author of four books of poetry: City of Starlings (Sibling Rivalry
Press, forthcoming 2015); Waxwings; Capturing the Dead, which
won the 2007 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition from the
National Federation of State Poetry Societies; and a chapbook, Days
of Dark Miracles. His poems and short stories have appeared or are
forthcoming in the Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, and New
South. He serves on the advisory board of One Pause Poetry and
teaches English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington,
where he lives with his husband, painter and printmaker, Benjamin
Billingsley.
Qiana Towns earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University
and an MA from Central Michigan University where she served
as poetry editor for the online literary journal Temenos. Her work
has appeared in Tidal Basin, Milk Money, and is currently featured
at poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and
assistant editor for Willow Books and Reverie: Midwest African
American Literature.
Eric Tran received his MFA from the University of North Carolina
Wilmington and is an MD candidate at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. His work appears or is
forthcoming in Indiana Review, Hobart, and the Star 82 Review.
Abby Travis is writing a book of combined memoir and literary
journalism about the subculture of training competitive sport horses
and the ethical and philosophical implications of miscommunication.
She is an editorial assistant at Ploughshares, and her work has appeared
in Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, on the
Ploughshares blog, on Powell’s Books’ Review-a-Day, and elsewhere.
Allison Backous Troy is the winner of the 2014 John Guyon Literary
Nonfiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review. She holds an MFA in
creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. Her work has
Crab Orchard Review
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received a Notable Essay recognition in Best American Essays. She has
been published in Image Journal and the St. Katherine’s Review.
Israel Wasserstein’s poetry collection This Ecstasy They Call
Damnation was named a 2013 Kansas Notable Book. His poetry has
recently appeared or is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, Scissors and
Spackle, Blood Lotus, and Wilderness House Literary Review.
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels
(Art in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). The winner of a 2013
Ruth Lilly Fellowship, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in the Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry,
The Southern Review, and others. He is currently a Chancellors
Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and poetry editor of the
online journal Vinyl Poetry. His debut full-length collection, Thief in
the Interior, will be published by Alice James Books in January 2016.
Corrie Williamson is a graduate of the MFA program at the University
of Arkansas, where she was a Walton Fellow in Poetry. Her poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Journal,
Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Shenandoah,
which awarded her their 2013 James Boatwright Prize for Poetry. Her
debut collection, Sweet Husk, is the winner of the 2014 Perugia Press
Prize and will be published in July 2014.
Susan R. Williamson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A
Poetry Congeries at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Sanskrit,
Smartish Pace, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry East, storySouth,
Streetlight, Virginia Quarterly Review, among others; and anthologized
in Letters to the World and Poetry Daily. She holds an MFA from New
England College and serves as the Assistant Director of the Palm
Beach Poetry Festival. Cecilia Woloch is the author of five collections of poetry, most
recently Carpathia, published by BOA Editions. She has received
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink
International, the California Arts Council, and others. A member of
the creative writing faculty at the University of Southern California,
she also conducts independent workshops for writers throughout the
United States and around the world, most recently in Paris and Istanbul.
William Wright is author of seven collections of poetry, four of
which are full-length books—Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press,
forthcoming), Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press),
Bledsoe (Texas Review Press), and Dark Orchard (Texas Review
Press). He is series editor and volume co-editor of The Southern Poetry
Anthology, a multivolume series celebrating contemporary writing of
the American South, published by Texas Review Press. He also serves
as a contributing editor for Shenandoah and recently won the Porter
Fleming Prize for Poetry.
Amy Yee is an American writer and journalist who has been based
in New Delhi, India, from 2006–2013. Her journalism has appeared
in the New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic.com, The Nation,
Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She writes frequently
about Tibet issues. Her poetry has appeared in Salamander, J Journal,
Bayou, and Aunt Chloe.
Crab Orchard Review
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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
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
Glaciology
Poems by
Jeffrey Skinner
“In Glaciology, Skinner’s perceptions
often seem to balance on the very edge
of unbeing. What is broken beckons
to us, alive in the lens of his attention,
constantly undone and remade in
shifting, dazzling patterns. Funny,
surprising, verbally sharp, and ruefully
aware of danger at every turn, these
poems shine with a fierce love of the
world.”—Cynthia Huntington, author of
Heavenly Bodies
“Few contemporary poets capture the severe
lonelinesses of American manhood with such
clarity and cold, honest wit as Jeffrey Skinner. ‘I
have been hired by divine gangsters—’ he says,
‘Reason my work is invisible.’ I have admired
his taut, strange work in book after book. He’s a
pilgrim.”—Tony Hoagland
Copublished with
Crab Orchard Review
ISBN 0-8093-3273-6
978-0-8093-3273-1
www.siupress.com
in Poetry
The Laughter of
Adam and Eve
Poems by
Jason Sommer
“The Chinese have a word for it: hsin,
heart/mind—and Jason Sommer has it
in abundance—a probing intelligence
that feels for what it sees, the insight the
more acute for its connectedness. Here
is a beautifully modulated existential
anguish, knowledge from the stunted
tree that bears the fruit of exile, an
unerring ear for the music of thought,
ruefulness, the full monty of candor, an
ironic awareness, and most movingly, the
avowal of what is beyond irony.”
—Eleanor Wilner
“Plainspoken, ferociously and tenderly
energetic, enmeshed in history even
while it yearns for the miraculous, this is
a fabulous book by a fabulous poet who
deserves what he has surely earned: a wide
and enthusiastic audience.”—Alan Shapiro,
author of Night of the Republic
Copublished with
Crab Orchard Review
ISBN 0-8093-3278-7
978-0-8093-3278-6
www.siupress.com
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
Special Issue Feature Awards
in Poetry, Fiction, &
Literary Nonfiction
$2,000.00 in each genre
All Entries must be submitted through SUBMITTABLE
http://CrabOrchardReview.submittable.com/submit
August 15, 2014 – October 1, 2014
Entry Fee: $25.00 per initial entry/$10.00 per 2nd or 3rd entry
All entrants receive a year’s subscription ($25.00 price)
(additional entries receive one back issue each entry)
Entries should fit the topic of the 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.
Poetry entries should consist of one poem up to five pages in length. Prose entry
length: up to 6000 words for fiction and up to 6500 words for literary nonfiction.
One initial Special Issue Feature Award poetry entry, or one story entry in fiction,
or one essay entry in literary nonfiction per $25.00 online entry fee. If you wish
to enter a 2nd or 3rd entry, please follow the instructions for a 2nd or 3rd entry
and use the “2nd or 3rd Special Issue Feature Award Entry.” Entering a 2nd or 3rd
entry will each cost $10.00. A writer may send up to three entries in one genre or
a total of three entries if entering all competitions, but please do not submit more
than three entries total. One winner in each genre category—Poetry, Fiction, and
Literary Nonfiction—will be selected by the editors of Crab Orchard Review
to be published in the issue and receive a $2,000.00 award.
All entries will also be considered for publication in the Summer/Fall 2015 special
issue, “20 Years: Writing About 1995–2015.” Regular Crab Orchard Review
contributor’s payment rates ($25 (US) per magazine page. $50 minimum for poetry;
$100 minimum for prose) apply to any accepted work that is not a genre winner.
All editorial decisions for the issue will be made by the end of January 2015.
CRO
Fiction
◆
Poetry
CR AB ORCH AR D
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“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
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Crab Orchard Review is supported, in part,
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The photographs
are of locations
outside of
Grafton, Illinois.
In this volume:
Steven D. Schroeder
Andrew David King
Peggy Shumaker
Traci Brimhall
Leah Lax
Brian Simoneau
Brian Brodeur
Henry W. Leung
Adam Tavel
Catherine Champion
Michelle Lin
Naomi Telushkin
Nandi Comer
Christian Teresi
Chad Davidson
Beth Morgan
Daniel Nathan Terry
Erica Dawson
Steve Mueske
Qiana Towns
Katherine Dykstra
Jeff Newberry
Eric Tran
Troy D. Ehlers
Leah Nielsen
Abby Travis
Matthew Olzmann
Rachel Heimowitz
Kevin Phan
Israel Wasserstein
Sara Henning
Sam Pierstorff
Phillip B. Williams
Suzanne Hodsden
Caroline Pittman
Corrie Williamson
Jessica Plante
Susan R. Williamson
Amorak Huey
Brad Richard
Cecilia Woloch
Sara Eliza Johnson
Amanda Rutstein
William Wright
Dean Julius
Aaron Samuels
Amy Yee
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in print since 1995
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Featuring
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published by the Department of English
$14.00us Vol. 19 No. 1
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Vandana Khanna
Lauren K. Alleyne
Volume 19, Number 1 Winter/Spring 2014
Dan Albergotti
Crab
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Cover:
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© 2014

Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 19, No. 1

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