Gingko - Ginosko Literary Journal

Ginosko Literary Journal
Fall 2014
PO Box 246
Fairfax, CA 94978
Editors
Robert Paul Cesaretti
Maggie Heaps
GinoskoLiteraryJournal.com
est 2002
Member [CLMP]
Writers retain copyrights
Cover art:
enigmatic postcard from Germany
ginosko
A word meaning
to perceive, understand, realize, come to know;
knowledge that has an inception,
a progress, an attainment.
The recognition of truth from experience.
… the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with
the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human
life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his
powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a
little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect
and filled with astonishing life.
 Michael Chabon
CONTENTS
BONE FOLDER
11
Jason Price Everett
Incantation 12
The Naiad 14
James Mullard
THE AGE OF AIR
15
SUMMER NIGHT 16
LAST HOURS 17
WHAT ARRIVES 18
Eileen Hennessy
GRANDFATHER’S LOVER CALLS
19
Lee Varon
Walking with Jesus 20
' Woman 1950’ , from a painting by deKooning
Natalie Safir
Amulets From Imaginary Islands:
To Ward Off Poverty 22
To Ward Off Confusion 23
Roberta Allen
/hotel/ 24
### 24
^^^ 24
Rae Uddin
Dissection 25
Reach 26
The Chihuahuan
Lisa Olsson
27
21
Dispossessed 28
Emergency Room 28
End 28
Eruption 29
Eucharist 29
William L. Alton
A Still Forest Pool
31
Chris Barker
FIRE IS YOUR NAME AND YOUR MAKER
IN THE SCHOOL OF DESIRE 35
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
A Trip 36
Yesterdays
36
Rose Mary Boehm
D.J.
37
Erren Geraud Kelly
SILVER SPOONS
38
Tammye Huf
CLOTHESLINE 41
TONIGHT 42
WE THE WOMEN 43
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian
A Sterile Place
44
Catherine Evleshin
Horizon Line
49
Maureen Eppstein
The Coldirons
50
Sidney Thompson
Ravensbone
64
Cathy Rosoff
Geography
Mark Belair
76
34
The Name of Our Nature
Influx 79
Gray 80
78
Sandra Kohler
Nine Storeys Above Inner City
Alternative Medicine 82
Once I Lived 83
81
Ariel Dawn
Found Fragments 84
To a Former Lover in Minneapolis
Maia at the Mirror 91
86
David Glen Smith
TO REST
93
Kathie Giorgio
I See Beauty in All Your Little Fatalisms
Cistern Sestina
100
101
Molt
103
Smart For Hard Living
104
Adam Tedesco
Song for Soldiers 105
The Pleasure Of Remembering Has Not Been Lost
106
Maurice Emerson Decaul
The Old Woman who lived in the Cottonwood Cabin
m.j. cleghorn
Afternoon 112
Yellow Porcelain Tile.
Robin(s) 113
112
Jenny Aileen
Contextual Despotism 114
Undocumented Sex 115
Canola 116
Virginian Ilex 117
Inheritance/Iteration 118
Jonathan Doughty
107
Doc Gnarly
Mass 120
Etymology
119
121
Nate Duke
Spoke 122
Five-Foot Hand Grenade
Jinn 124
Planted 125
Pet 126
123
Sam Kolinski
Chortling One's Life Away
127
Kim Farleigh
DEPLOYED, MESOPOTAMIA 143
UNSPEAKABLE 144
AS THE INQUISITION FINALLY ENDS
BLUE NAVY 146
ENTERTAINING THE TROOPS 147
145
Catherine Gonick
Woman with a Hole in her Stocking
Something Understood 149
Waiting 150
My Father’s Voice 151
Promenade 152
Summers in Vermont 153
Anya Silver
TIME AND AGAIN
154
Timothy Caldwell
Artist Obsessed 158
Model in Love 159
Butterfly Night 160
Provençal Crosses 161
New Arrival 162
Claire Booker
148
LIVING IN SKIN 163
SUNDAY BREAKFAST 165
WHAT THERE ARE WORDS FOR
167
Jed Myers
THE ODDITIES
169
John Grey
Night at the Park
171
Harry F Rey
Execution in Slow Motion
173
Joanna Chen
WISH YOU WERE HERE
INERTIA 175
QUAKING ASPEN 176
AVOWED 178
174
Marilyn Ringer
noticeably bare 179
sparkling red wine 180
now what is the word for it?
181
Marina Manoukian
SIX STANDING CROWS 182
APART/HATE 183
CANLEY HILL 184
REDIRECTION 185
THE DAY FINDS ME 186
Meryl McQueen
THE TRUTH ABOUT FLORIDA
OBEDIENCE 191
187
Terry Ann Thaxton
Painting Rain 192
Did you hear that? 193
The Loneliest Species of Whale in the World
Wages of Sin 195
Anne Graue
At False Light
C G Fewston
196
194
Review: Tales from the Eternal Café
Janet Hamill
200
BONE FOLDER
He was sad and angry because his friend had died in a way
that made it suicide in everything but name and he sat in a place where they
used to drink and talk about Japanese literature and bullshit about work in
progress and he thought that his friend might be forgotten which would be unjust
because he was part of the resistance whereas the living collaborated and his
anger at himself coalesced into action of a sort and he went out and bought tiles
and a foam brush and a sheet of acetate and gloves and a mask and fingernail
polish remover and a bone folder and he made color copies of a photograph of
his dead friend with the right type of ink and he pushed the mirror image button
so that the image would not be reversed on transfer and he heated the tiles in
the microwave and placed each copy of the photo onto each warm tile face down
and coated them with the fingernail polish remover and smoothed them with the
bone folder under the acetate and applied the tile sealer to fix the image forever
and when he was done he took off the gloves and the mask and left the tiles to
dry and he was crying but he did not notice or if he did he thought it was the
fumes of the solvent in his eyes and then one night later that week he mixed up
a batch of cement and went out and fixed the tiles with the picture of his dead
friend to the facades of buildings all across the indifferent city and for the rest of
the year he smiled seeing the tiles in secret places or being denounced as
vandalism by the authorities.
Jason Price Everett
Ginosko 2014 Flash Fiction Contest winner
Incantation
James Mullard
The walls of the room are dust covered,
with small slits in the brickwork that bleed light.
In a small heap, a woman sits, staring
before her, into a colossal ochre mirror.
Scattered around are several honey pots,
lidless, exuding exotic smells, like nectar incense.
The woman leans over, and the sleeve
of her shirt falls into one pot, is made sticky.
Eyes still locked at her reflection, body
outstretched, she claws for the sticky paste.
The mirrored woman follows, smirking
with her, honey wadding on their fingers.
After a few scoops of the paste the reflection
turns, causing her hand to slip, stickying her thigh.
In the mirror, the flooring transfigures beneath
the reflected her – sat, instead, on a pasture of grass.
Speckled across the lawn are several inflorescent buds
that, bulging, bursting, abruptly open.
Large quantities of seeping fat are revealed from within
the little blossoms, each now limp.
The woman remains, gropes again for the jars,
and spreads more honey across her thighs.
With a snap, the fatty matter moves,
slithers across the grass, collects into a tower.
It trembles, unable to sustain, and collapses once,
only to collect, again, squelching as it moves.
She shivers, unsure to take action, resolving
to take more honey, swallowing it in measures.
The tower of fat begins to appear humanoid, forming,
with mutilated facets of limbs.
She reaches out, slowly, towards the creature,
honey dripping from her chin and legs.
It steps forward, collapses, and then crawls,
edging towards the glass, shattering the pane.
The woman leans back, her reflection fading,
as the being watches, dulled.
She notices, in its fatty hands, are long claws;
eyes widening, it pounces, clawing at her stomach.
Through the gash, honey oozes out in measures,
some already crystallised against her stomach lining.
The creature leans towards her, losing consistency,
and flows into her insides, until it froths out of her mouth.
The Naiad
James Mullard
As she drifts lithely down the silver-swirling river,
a nymph of the marsh foams at her mouth.
Wild spurts form at each corner of her pallid lips,
narrow rapids that current down to her chin.
Flagrant in her brattish thirst for the rivers kiss,
she hastily stoops down at the water’s edge.
As she moves, wisps of pubic reeds are exposed,
from beneath her skirt as she sneers at her reflection.
Our Nymph mouths words towards her echoed image,
and the stream responds, releasing a light fog.
With a pernicious laugh, she bends further down,
her miry body trembling as her arm extends.
Intoxicated by the mists, she runs her fingers across
the river’s tense mouth and its meandering limbs.
For a moment, it erupts into eager, crashing waves,
and then frogspawn collects on silent water.
by Eileen Hennessy
THE AGE OF AIR
birds in flight over begging-bowl
valley filled with nomadic
hamlets of flowers
aircraft full of smuggled strangers
who die in their hiding places
when the air shifts
the sky blocks the vents
SUMMER NIGHT
On summer nights we gather in the square to hear the numbers beamed out and the
objects
called up for the count.
Uncanny, the way the same things show up over and over for counting. Always deeply
practical. Always impeccably polite.
Counting brings to life our groves of still, white trees, our acorns in the park, our
sparrows nibbling on droppings under the outdoor restaurant tables.
There is no summer night without its count of the cars roaming in the commuter
parking lot, the shadows of ships quietly moving offshore. Everything is so open out
here. In fact, calls for head counts go out over the public address system. Sooner or
later there are enough heads to allow the counting of crosses to begin.
LAST HOURS
Had a good dinner. Talked with waiter
about bones, crusts, wine lees in glass,
service as righteous way. Talked
with friendly, ripped-ab truckmen
about work and duty. Watched
migrating geese shit on brown lawns,
prophets of false kingdoms,
scorpion come up from the deep.
Walked around town. Helped men rattle
door of closed welfare-aid storefront.
Practiced bus-riding to mall. Checked:
Speed. Longitude. Latitude. Last fight.
WHAT ARRIVES
Despite the existence of cement and a flight tax, millions of big, beautiful families with
frosted heads travel from city to city in municipal population exchanges, studying
nudes and their nestling habits.
Smoking, we lounge in building doorways and wait to see what will arrive and how:
usually by tunnel, now that the bridge that brought divers over the river to various
mating places has disappeared.
At night we’re at home and hungry and heavy on the sofa.
Sound of someone kicking the welcome mat away from the door.
Our excuse for not moving already a long time ago now clear.
GRANDFATHER’S LOVER CALLS
Lee Varon
Heat lightning
lighting the dining room table
like a mirror,
reflection of my family
a loom of despair.
This is the way it began:
My grandfather was having an affair
with Loretta Harding
wife of prominent businessman
The place I go back toA
The farmhouse
that night
by the swing hush of her neck
her breasts
her fine ankles
magic of her
skin.
After the shot,
my grandmother took him home—
letters became hieroglyphs
he could no longer
interpret
no longer write.
He saw her mouth moving
her thin lips,
a phone rang
she ignored it,
their eyes met,
the phone kept ringing
Walking with Jesus
Natalie Safir
My friend is telling me morphine
drove her hand to push
through the veil into another
dimension she cannot name
Her other arm also reached
for the first, testing her whereabouts
Then she pushed it through again
It was like the time, she says,
she walked with Jesus
holding his arm, tears flooding
her pillow in the hospital
“Your Fate is now, you decide”
appears on the tab of a fortune cookie
she cracks open as we chat
in the local chinese restaurant
"They deliver" I tell her,
"maybe this is your time"
but she is unconvinced
for she has tried many
times to return there
She purchases a dozen small bottles
of ginseng to enhance life, fiercely
clutching precious entry passes
' Woman 1950’ , from a painting by deKooning
Natalie Safir
If I were a botched autopsy
sitting on life’s toilet bowl
hands and feet amputated
breasts unevenly weighted
by clotted nipples
hair a stain of orange seaweed,
I could be that Woman
Tattered body blown apart;
the geometry of my pubis
was bisected in a different era
Two big eyes dominate my face
I carry the simple helplessness
of a doll who cries Mama;
she cannot resolve her missing belly
or say long words from a sketchy mouth
I am a preposition to grotesque form
even the artist cannot reconcile
by Roberta Allen
Amulets From Imaginary Islands:
2 stories
To Ward Off Poverty
The islanders rejoiced when Terry arrived on Kharis with an amulet to ward off poverty
though the Kharisians never considered themselves poor and were unsure why they
were rejoicing since they were happy living simple lives. That was before Terry, a
charismatic trickster, convinced them that money would make them even happier.
Immediately, dollar bills sprouted like weeds. Bank notes grew on trees. The money
was fake. But to islanders who used only seeds for trading, counterfeit currency was
as real as the seeds they now trampled underfoot.
To Ward Off Confusion
No one was particularly concerned when Celeste put her pajamas in the refrigerator.
But when she cut her napkin with a knife and fork during lunch at a fancy restaurant,
the inhabitants on the island of Siroca took notice. After the meal, they strode in a
group to consult Consuela, the Wise One. Sure enough, she gave them an amulet to
ward off confusion. If you give this to Celeste, she said, she will be fine but her
confusion may spread to all of you. What can we do to avoid that? they asked. Give it
back, Consuela replied.
by Rae Uddin
/hotel/
gorge the craving mind
gluttonous self-betrayal
gagging fingers purge
###
addicted to Her
one more hit, just one more hit
egoic OD
^^^
reverberating
hollow hallowed space between
behold: ecstasy
Dissection
Lisa Olsson
I love each part, my penetrating eye
each tendril, thread, it magnifies.
Different from me as light from dark
you scan the fabric of things afar
furious and calm weaves into whole
inextricable fibers, body and soul.
But come, bend down low with me
look at this rose, see as I see.
The stem a torso honed
buffed to basalt shine
prickles bare as bone.
The sepal a motherly heart
sensing when to swaddle tight
when to let go, break apart.
The petals’ face of winter white
sensuous and round, transient looks
fold to demur, curl to invite.
The rosehip’s generous womb, hiding
fruit for thousands more, tensile ready
berry for finch, thrush, waxwing.
To which do you incline
your head, your heart, your groin?
But oh, I almost forgot
you love the whole, and not apart.
Reach
Lisa Olsson
In the woods I see hands
hundreds of them like mine
reaching up. Sinewy fingers
that tease a lament from steel
wound strings; that pen latticed
tales for spent love and family
affliction to climb; that dab
with nightly brushstrokes
at pointillist sky portraits.
I head down to the sliver
of silver, a blinding beacon,
pressing as with muscular tongue
every trace of sweet and salt before
the mist, the morning, the vision
diffuse among swaying pines.
A false rain falls, blown
from spring’s first fragile leaves.
When I am far from parting
branches, circling gnats
and needled floor that gently
succumbs to passing feet
I will have my hands.
The Chihuahuan
Lisa Olsson
Nothing as still
Turkey vulture waits
jackrabbit hides
brown recluse stares
resurrection plants
play dead
Stillness tempts
deeper listening
to nothing
Miles of room
boring tentacle of yucca moth
No walls to contain
no strings to vibrate
no instruments to create
sound
from invisible strum of inaudible wind
Each movement swallowed
immensity
making nothing
of everything
Gurgling rush of Rio Grande
boom of nighthawk nosedive
summer storm of spadefoot song
Still as nothing
by William L. Alton
Dispossessed
It rains here ten months out of twelve and mold marks the homeless in their tents
under the bridges. You can see them squatting there until the cops come and move
them along. They huddle over little fires dug deep into the banks, eating old pizza and
hamburgers. When the sun comes out, they wander into the parks and sit at picnic
tables scaring little kids.
Emergency Room
They come and take my clothes. They come and take my phone, my cigarettes and my
shoes. They put me in a room with pale blue walls and a camera in the corner.
Somewhere nearby someone screams. I lie in the bed and try to breathe. Coming here
was a mistake. I want to go home. I want to walk into the rain and fade into a puddle.
But they have me now and there’s no getting out.
They come and we talk of suicide and insanity. They bring my pills because I’m talking
too fast and haven’t slept in days. They say there are no beds on the psych ward so
they’re going to hold me here. How long? I ask. Until a bed comes free.
I lie on the bed and let the Ativan wash over me. I let the noise of the nurses coming
and going lull to twilight. I want a cigarette. I want a Diet Pepsi. I want to go to sleep.
End
He was nearly dead. He lay in his bed, his breath worn and ragged. Pain made him
thin. His sons wouldn’t come visit. They were still angry and who could blame them?
How do you mourn a man when all you know are his fists?
Eruption
Hands, large and soft, rub along my ribs. His lips are fragile as frost on my chest. We
work together toward a common goal.
Eucharist
I am hungry for comfort. I have been taught to take the touch into my body as I take
the Body of Christ, on my tongue. I have learned the language of violence. Blood is a
verb. It acts on its own. When bruises rise, I weep because I can’t remember when I
last ate a meal without fear.
Now to the book and today’s piece. It is the birth of the twins. It
will be recorded without thoughts, only in description and dialogue,
like a black-and-white movie. I want it to be very convincing.
Maybe I’ll finish it today and maybe I won’t. I am very independent.
But the more I think of it−I am only independent in some ways.
That’s funny, isn’t it. Maybe I have a little monster blood in me. I
have been told that and sometimes I believe it.
Oh! What a day, so black, so damp and dour. It sets my stage
although it was a sunny day when the twins were born; there were
no portents unless the pleasantness of the day itself is a portent. I
wish I would get to it now. I am ready and the words are beginning
to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drip on the paper.
And I am filled with excitement as though this were a real birth.
Now I warn you−in this section you will see and hear some strange
things. And now I will get into it and may the words be very clean
and sharp like good knives.
John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel/The East of Eden Letters
A Still Forest Pool
Chris Barker
Grace’s ashen face is striped with the shadows cast by half-open hospital blinds
while her shoulders sag beneath her head as if she’s lost the strength to hold herself
upright. Joe sits immobile in the plastic chair beside her with his fingers digging into
the rim of the mattress.
‘He swore he would be here,’ he says.
‘Please, try not to be angry,’ she says.
‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ he says, ‘he’s all promises.’
‘It’s Rachel’s birthday,’ she says. ‘They have probably been held up.’
‘It’s irresponsible.’
‘Do you remember that birthday when we dressed Charlie up as a wizard in a cloak
with crescent moons and silver stars and he was so proud he played in it for weeks.’
Joe nods and strokes her arm with his bony hand.
‘Now he’s all grown up,’ he says, ‘and we have to sit and wait for him, like he doesn’t
give a damn.’
‘And do you remember the time we took him camping?’ she says. ‘Charlie climbed
up that massive farm gate so he could touch the horses and he fell right off. Bang! He
lay there with a face as pale as a sheet, moaning, "I’ve broke my arm, I’ve broke my
arm."
‘We thought he was spinning us another tall tale,’ Joe says.
‘You were cross as hell,’ Grace says.
Joe stretches out his hand and touches her cheek.
‘I was there that birthday,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ says Grace, ‘you were, that year you were.’
‘Too many birthdays spent overseas. And now he hates me,’ he says.
‘Please don’t,’ she whispers.
‘Facts are hard as diamonds,’ Joe says.
Grace glances up to see Lily stood in the doorway dressed-up in a sharp charcoal
trouser suit with her long dark hair tied back into a shiny ponytail. Charlie, who’s slung
on a pair of khaki shorts and a torn black T-shirt, slips into the room behind her like a
stealth bomber. Joe looks up and to catch his son’s eye, but Charlie ducks below the
radar as he bends to kiss Grace on the cheek.
‘How you going mum?’ he says.
‘I’m good,’ she says. ‘I get a bit tired, but the doctor soon fixes me up.’
‘Glad you could make it Charlie,’ Joe says, ‘You look rough.’
‘Save your worry for yourself old man,’ Charlie says.
Rachel let’s go of her mothers hand and runs towards her grandma.
‘It’s my birthday today grandma,’ she says with a giggle.
‘Happy Birthday sweetheart, how wonderful to see you,’ Grace says.
Rachel clambers up onto the bed and hugs Grace until she feels safe, like a little
girl tucked up in a warm bed on a cold night.
‘Oh watch out dear,’ says Joe.
‘Are you coming home today,’ Rachel says.
‘I don’t think so love,’ Grace says.
‘But I need you to be there so that I can open your present.’
Grace looks into her granddaughter’s green eyes and she knows that she will not
see Rachel blow out her six candles.
‘You should open your present without me, she says.
Lily edges towards Grace and bends forward to touch her hand.
‘Sorry we didn’t get here last night,’ she says. ‘Someone knocked the phone off the
hook. How are you?’
‘It’s good to see you Lily,’ Grace says, ‘sorry for all the fuss.’
‘We had people around,’ Lily says. ‘Otherwise we’d have been here.’
‘The police I believe,’ Joe says.
‘Oh yeah, thanks mate,’ Charlie says, ‘thanks indeed.’
‘How else could I let you know what had happened?’ Joe says, ‘since you wouldn’t
answer the blessed phone.’
‘They wouldn’t let Charlie drive,’ Lily says. ‘And you know he won’t ever let me get
behind the wheel’.
‘Charlie, we needed you here and you didn’t show,’ Joe says.
‘I am here now,’ Charlie says. ‘I’m here for mum, which is more than you’ve ever
been mate.’
‘For Christ’s sake, can youse give it a rest?’ Joe says.
‘I’m mean haven’t you got somewhere important to be? You must have a meeting
to go to or some mates to drink with or some woman who is waiting for you in a grubby
motel on the other side of town.’
‘I can smell the booze on you from here,’ Joe says.
‘Will you two please just stop it,’ Grace says.
Rachel grips her teddy bear in her hand and rests her head on Grace’s shoulder.
‘Blue bear wants to be with you,’ she whispers.
Grace shuts her eyes and as she breathes in the sweet scent of Rachel’s hair she
remembers the newborn Charlie as he lay sucking on her breast while Joe looked on
in awe. Her mind fills with an ancient bliss while the battle cries of her husband and
her son drift by in the distance like clouds in a windy sky. She is tired of who did this
and who did that, of whose fault is this and whose fault is that. She thinks: what if the
spark had come out of nowhere and the universe had just began to roll out: quarks,
bosons, protons, atoms, molecules, elements, gasses, stars, planets, life, mind, Joe
and Charlie and herself in an infinite matrix of cause and effect where no one is at fault
and no one is to blame.
Her mind softens and blooms like a lotus and as she releases her fear and her
shame she is transformed into an eagle perched high in a tree beside a still forest pool
from where she watches all kinds of wonderful and rare creatures who have come to
drink the clear water. Above her the night sky is sharp and cloudless so that she can
she see all the stars shine across the ages. And when she stretches out her wings she
floats without effort up into the firmament.
FIRE IS YOUR NAME AND YOUR MAKER
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Fire is your god’s
eye gleam the tiger that prowls your dreams
Fire is your sun and your rising
You had to tamp your fire
down hard back in the day of pointy bras
and girdles when a spark in the back of a Chevy
could knock you up Remember
when a fiery tongue could get you
burnt alive?
Fire in the hearth now that’s
a woman’s business embers
from Mother’s fire offerings
from the tree kitchen fire
bedroom fire birth fire fire
from the core of the earth When cauldron boils
there is no fire that can’t escape no fire
that will not leap and sass change shape
be burning snake in summer grasses
hot-breasted home wrecker
funeral pyre I ask you
how do you keep from burning
your love to ashes?
I’ll tell you how
Take a twig from the tree
Whittle a sharp tip
Mix Mother’s fire with yours in that ancient jug
you love Make ash marks
on white paper Write yourself down
your leap and your sass your hot-breasted
double-edged ax the tiger that prowls your dreams
your sun and your rising
IN THE SCHOOL OF DESIRE
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Theft was your teacher The chocolate you stole
from Mother’s secret place taught you to taste
dark milk bittersweet
The books you devoured in stolen time
not doing your job in the library stacks
gave you the lowdown on love
in every position You stole yourself far
from Father’s compass Lost North waylaid West
traveled East South took you on a ride a stowaway
on other people’s myths You lusted
after dark gods lost wax gods
carved in ebony gods gods with myriad arms
That was lifetimes ago
Now you’re old still studying
in the school of desire You thank every god
you stole every god who transported you
out of cubicles traffic jams bad breath encounters
with insular minds You make offerings
of bittersweet chocolate and wine
in any position still possible
though you know
love
that Dark God that thief beyond
the bedroom window bides
his sweet time
by Rose Mary Boehm
A Trip
You are cold.
Broken a little.
Bruised everywhere.
Try and sleep. You ache. Consider
your options. Scream.
The fuzzy edge of the moon.
Soon
you have light for a few
precious minutes.
You have become transparent.
You drift off.
When you wake you remember
and begin to untangle your wings
from the green web. In the unquiet
waters ripples my face and you know
who betrayed you.
Yesterdays
On the rim of my haunting
there is a place where
all those I have loved
merge with someone
I used to be.
I often conjure up your
face and it swims at the edge
of my vision. As soon as recognition
brightens your features they melt,
shy of the light.
D.J.
Erren Geraud Kelly
says he's gonna pull out his drums and
start playing again
i saw a trombone at a pawn shop
two weeks ago, i'm thinking about buying it
and joining him
because the feeling is coming back
D. J. looks old for a young man
everyone is addicted to something
the trick is not to let your addiction
become your life
they don't put starbucks in our
neighborhood
cos they think we won't patronize
d.j. was the first friend i made
when i moved to the neighborhood
we spent our childhood playing football in the street
and afternoons in high school marching band practice
i spent my high school days with my
head in the lion's mouth because i wouldn't
conform
i would rather die than do that
everytime i see d.j.
i want to knock that bottle from his hand
and smash it
and tell him to stop throwing his life away
12 ounces at a time
SILVER SPOONS
Tammye Huf
Harrison Davies sat in his therapist’s office, reclining in her La-Z-Boy chair that she
used instead of a couch. He appreciated the substitution. Stretching out in a La-Z-Boy
seemed more sincere, but he felt she should have hung a flat-screen on her back wall
instead of that landscape painting she had there. Even if she didn’t turn it on, a flatscreen would have helped the mental deception that he was relaxing in a comfortable
environment.
“So, listen,” he began. She always waited for him to start, to see if there was
anything on his mind. “How much longer do you think I need?”
“Need?”
“You know. To figure out what’s wrong with me.” He smirked when he said it.
“Do you think that there’s something wrong with you?” She jotted a few lines down
on her yellow notepad with a felt tip pen that scratched as she pulled it across the
page.
He lay back, considering the question, trying not to let the scratching distract him.
Failing. He wondered if all pens were quite this loud, or if this was a special condition
of being in therapy: that everything is amplified.
Dr. Anderson sat attentively on his right, waiting for him to get his thoughts in order,
thinking he was forming an answer to her question. She never interrupted these
thoughts, hoping for a great epiphany to one day come tumbling out of his mouth. But
then, she could afford to wait. She got paid $150 an hour to listen, no matter how
much he talked. She was in no rush. Once, Harrison sat there, just to see if she would
eventually say something, which she did not, so after ten minutes and twenty-five
dollars of passive-aggressive waste, he gave up and started talking.
“I’ve been seeing a therapist for the better part of a year. If there’s nothing wrong
with me then I’ve wasted an awful lot of money. And if there is something wrong, my
therapist needs to step it up and get to the problem.” He flashed her a smile to let her
know that he was just kidding, but not really.
She sat back in her chair, just past his peripheral vision. “How are you doing at
work? Last time you were telling me about a big client your firm landed. You called it
‘an accountant’s dream.’ How’s that going?”
“Oh, fine, I guess. You know. It’s churning through the books and meetings and
more churning and more meetings.”
As she nodded and scratched something onto her pad, he gasped and sat up in his
La-Z Boy, eyes wide.
He struck his forehead twice and grabbed his phone from his pocket, quickly
scrolling down the messages. “I forgot a meeting this afternoon.” He cursed under his
breath and squeezed the offending phone as if to crush it. He glanced at his watch and
stared back at the phone. “They’re angry,” he sighed. “I already missed a Mondaymorning conference on this account.” He shoved the phone into his pocket, leaving the
messages unanswered. “I’ll deal with this later,” he said as he settled back into the
chair.
There was just a little pause, and then she was scratching quite a lot.
“Are you enjoying your work on this account?”
He could tell that she was digging. That’s the thing about therapy. It’s not like you’re
actually having a conversation with someone. You’re giving a dissertation on your life,
letting another person poke through your closets and show you all the dirty laundry you
have stuffed in the corners behind the shoes and old shopping bags, far away form the
things you hang there and pull out and wear for the world.
“Working on this account is just like any other. I go in each day, and I concentrate
on getting through to the end.”
She leaned forward, observing him, hand poised to write. “How do you feel about
that?”
He glared at her. She knew he hated the feel questions, they’d had this
conversation before, but in spite of himself he had a response without even thinking
about it. It was just there, ready to be said.
“It feels like—say you’re running late and you’re going to miss breakfast, so you
grab a yogurt from the fridge, but all the spoons are dirty, and you don’t have time to
wash one, so you grab a silver spoon from the set you inherited from your dead
grandmother that you never use. And you eat the yogurt in your office and throw it
away, spoon and all, and go on about your day, and by the time you realize it, your
trash has been emptied, and the spoon is gone, and you just don’t have the energy to
dig through the garbage to get it back. I mean, it should be worth it to you, but it’s just
not.”
Her felt-tip pen went flying across her notepad. When it had slowed down
somewhat, she asked, “Why don’t you value the spoon?”
Harrison stared at the ceiling. This one he had to think about. His phone started
vibrating in his pocket, and he tensed up with anxiety, but he didn’t look at it. “Because
it’s not my spoon,” he said finally. “It has nothing to do with me. It’s just something I
inherited.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
He looked at the picture on the wall that should have been a flat-screen and closed
his eyes, sinking into the all-too-familiar comfort of the La-Z-Boy, listening to the steady
hum of the air-conditioning and the gentle purr of her computer.
“But the thing is, I want it to be. I want it to mean so much to me that I would dig
through an entire dumpster to get it back.” He could feel her watching him, analyzing
him. “That’s all I really want. To find a silver spoon I care about.”
Finally, Harrison thought, I am having an epiphany. There was a shift in the air, a
negative charge that turned positive, and he could breath a little deeper, like the steel
vice that held him in place was dissolving. His life stacked up like so many ticked
boxes in someone else’s list. His degree, his accounting job, his brownstone
townhouse with a car in the driveway. He had worked so diligently to achieve
something he had never wanted in the first place. He had a drawer full of somebody
else’s spoons.
They sat in a disjointed silence until she said, “That’s all we have time for today.
Same time next week?”
He looked at her confused. All these months he had been working toward knowing
himself, and now, in the middle of his breakthrough, she was dismissing him. As she
closed her notebook and put the cap on her pen, he saw himself through her eyes: a
giant silver spoon on her La-Z-Boy. He should have been worth it, but he wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
CLOTHESLINE Silva Zanoyan Merjanian
White bed-sheet flaps stories
crisp, flirtatious, free-style dance
a breeze intimate with its creases
searches musky scent of better days
billowing with slight hesitation
it tells, regrets, retreats, few secrets kept
clothespins pinch where memories fade
sunlight softens few tear stains
clumsily mended late night spats
cornered kisses, promises shred
damp, scratched, raw night tales
it waves against green shutters
dead geraniums catch peeled paint
squeak of rusted hinges
over swoosh of stories sliding
clutching frayed cotton fibers
clap of breeze against blush of cheeks
a breeze bored and out of breath
slaps, caresses, coaxes, pleads
remains tethered to dead-end romance
clothesline sags where white bed-sheets dance
TONIGHT
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian
Tonight a thousand eyelids will close on beautiful lies
and quivering lips will sleep unkissed
untouched by sultry blue jazz in the dark
tonight lust will blister on menopausal gritty tongues
and blind vultures will circle parameters of a man’s heart?
tonight middle aged men will look for love in midtown bars
and women selling artificial flavors to the tune of hallelujahs
will sharpen their knives
tonight poets will find the words to color their hell
and dip their pens in wounds that aren’t even theirs
tonight somewhere it will rain on wingless birds ?
their love songs mending broken pillows in high notes
tonight she will step out with her hair down, in new stilettos
she’ll blow a kiss with naked lips through the door left ajar
tonight, tonight’s no different than any other night
the walls are thin, the moon is skinned, blindfolds handed free
WE THE WOMEN
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian
We hold our liqueur ‘tween our teeth
celebrate sisterhood as spit and swear
see our moistened pitted tongues
flick and flatter in daylight
pregnant magnets spinning in flight
we lift and probe with glances, crawl through skin
lipsticked kisses bubble and pop in hazed air
to sink in pinks and luscious reds over raised glasses
acid traces bend bright cherry umbrellas
to hide glare of spiced faces and timid praise grins
we measure power in galloping breasts
enhanced, reduced, stretched, rounded, supported, bare
they wobble and trounce miles before our voices hound
to hold between our legs knowing smiles
gathered from each others lashed raw backs
we bring our mines to blessed hills with severed sights
flirt within our lips drawn thin over stringed feux pas
we lie in crinoline holding the devil hostage intrauterine
smoldering alone until rivalry rings grow dim
while we kegel our resolve in stories misty and grim
kiss kiss, let’s do this again soon
a lizard licks the last drop of sun off my skin
A Sterile Place
Catherine Evleshin
From my window, I stare out into the marsh, looking for trees big enough to climb,
but I see only dead stumps and gravel paths that snake around clumps of cattails. I
have lived so long that the skin on my knuckles is transparent. Not much left of me but
bones. I live in a sterile place where they call me Bob. I don't know if that's my name. I
can't hear very well, even with those squawky things they put in my ears so they can
shout, "Eat your dinner, Bob," or "Be a good boy, Bob, and swallow your meds."
People say that we are in the middle of the twenty-first century. I don't remember
much, but they tell me I'm older than everyone here. A lot of them must be pretty old,
because they have transparent knuckles like mine.
One day everyone gathered in the room where we eat, and a caregiver wheeled me
up to a table, where a big cake sat covered with candles. They told me I had lived a
century, all the way back to the time when the whole world was at war, and lucky to be
a small boy who didn't have to go and get himself killed. I recall the nights my parents
sat around a wooden box and listened to a man talk about millions of deaths. There
must have been a lot of people who didn't die, because I don't remember a time when
there weren't plenty of us around. But then, I get confused sometimes.
The sterile place has a garden where I sit on sunny afternoons. When it hasn't rained
for a while and the river is low, the boy who calls me Great-grandpa wheels my chair
down into the marsh, along the gravel paths that meander through the reeds. He sets
the brake so the chair can't slip off into the mud. In the quiet I turn on those things in
my ears and hear air bubbles popping out of the slime and insects rubbing their legs
together like miniature violinists. A black bird with a red spot on his wing clings to a
reed and cries for a mate.
During storms, the water rises and covers the paths. On those days, the boy doesn't
come, so I can't visit the marsh. He says the electric sky could burn out what little is
left of my brain, and the river might carry me away. When the fog lifts from my mind, I
talk to one of the computers. Words appear on the screen, and when I'm finished, a
caregiver sends them to the boy.
One day when the boy visited, he said, "Great-grandpa, you wrote a lotta weird stuff
last week. You talked about going to war against an army of worms." We both laugh,
but I'm not laughing inside.
That got me thinking back to the days when I lived with my family in a house at the
edge of our fields of alfalfa. I would climb trees near the house and pull plums from the
branches. They tasted good. Up high like that, I could see across the fields and think
about what I was going to do when I grew up.
When I walked through the field in front of the house, I would see a row of birds
sitting along the wire fence. They didn't scatter unless I got too close. Butterflies white, yellow, and orange - flapped and glided through the air and sometimes caught a
ride on my shoulder. I heard bugs go silent until I got past them, then they would start
up again, all talking at once, like the people in the sterile place.
The trees that grew on the far side of the fields were the best to climb and watch the
creatures in the pond. Fish no bigger than my fingernail swam with their brothers and
sisters, all turning at the same time. They never bumped into each other. On hot days,
insects with transparent blue wings darted back and forth and mated with each other in
midair. I think they were called dragons.
I could hear all sorts of things back then - small birds that sang until they found a
mate, then stopped singing and flitted back and forth to their nests feeding the chicks.
Giant birds floated on the surface of the pond that reflected clouds overhead. They
honked like the cars passing on the road. The only time the creatures in the pond fell
silent - when an airplane flew overhead. That didn't happen very often.
A fat muskrat got so tame, he would swim close and look up at me standing on a
limb. I would talk to him. "Hi there, friend. What are you up to today?" I guess we didn't
speak the same language. After staring at me with shiny black eyes, he would dive and
swim off into deep water.
Along the shallow edges of the pond, I could make out dozens of frogs half-buried in
the silt at the bottom. When they got tired of holding their breath, they would swim up
and sit with their eyes bulging out of the water. They had soft bellies and no hair, sort
of like me, but when they stretched and doubled their long legs, they swam like they
owned the water. Every now and then, one of them would let out a croak, jump with its
legs and big feet flapping the air, and land in the water with a splash. It made me
laugh.
When the sun disappeared behind the hills to the west, they talked to each other,
bullfrogs in deep tones and their little sisters in high-pitched squeaks, a rhythm that
started me bouncing up and down. One time the branch broke and I landed on the
ground. They stopped talking long enough to see that I was okay, then took up their
chorus again.
When I go down to the marsh, I look hard for those fat little frogs. I want to show
them to the boy, but all I see are crawly things that look like overgrown bugs. The boy
calls them land crabs. They don't jump or talk.
Once when the boy visited me, he brought me words written on a stack of square
leaves stuck together along one side. He said I wrote those words a long time ago,
before he was born, when everyone wrote on square leaves. “Look, Great-grandpa.
Your name, right on the cover.” The words made no sense, but I didn't want to ask him
to read my own name to me.
He wheeled me into a big closet filled with rows of square leaves crammed on dusty
shelves. I smelled mold and the boy sneezed. "They're called books, Great-grandpa.
Don't you remember? You wrote a bunch of 'em about the wars." I can't even write my
name now, if I knew what it was. He says, no problem, the computer hears everything
and nobody reads books anymore, except on the Internet, whatever that is.
The musty stacks of square leaves in that closet got me to thinking again about the
year the army worms attacked the alfalfa. My father said they weren't really worms,
because they changed into butterflies. Most years, a few of the little black crawlers hid
in the alfalfa plants, and no one paid much attention to them.
But that year they lived up to their name. From out of nowhere, thousands of them
inched across the asphalt road that led to town and headed toward us like invading
troops. My father looked worried, and gripped our heavy black phone in his hand. After
talking a long time, he hung the phone on the wall, and patted my head. "Everything
will be all right."
After lunch, he told us to stay inside. He stuffed a blue bandanna into his shirt pocket
and left the house. It was a hot afternoon and my sister and I wanted to go outside and
run through the sprinklers, but my mother said, "Not today. It's going to be dangerous
out there." She locked all the windows tight. I knew something important was about to
happen, because she let us eat cookies before dinner.
We sat at the kitchen table and dunked cookies in cold milk while she read The Wind
in the Willows to us. I heard the roar of an airplane overhead, so loud it drowned out
our mother's voice, and I shouted, "We're in a war!" My sister and I ran to peek through
the lace curtains. The plane just missed the roof of our house. With the bandanna tied
over his nose and mouth, my father stood at the edge of the field, waving a red flag.
The plane headed straight toward him and my sister screamed. He ducked just as it
reached the edge of the field. I thought the plane would crash, but the pilot must have
been good, because he flew straight down the field just a few feet above the alfalfa
plants.
Suddenly a white mist shot out of the wings, and I remembered back during the war,
when every night the voice in the wooden box told about things dropping from planes
to kill people. The pilot flew the length of the field, the white mist stopped, and the
plane rose into the air just in time to miss the tops of the trees. I was glad when it
disappeared and that awful noise faded in the distance. My sister wrinkled her nose.
"What's that stinky smell?"
My father walked about thirty feet along the edge of the field and looked across to
the other side. The airplane appeared over the tops of the trees and dipped down into
the field, again the white spray poured from the wings, all the while my father flapping
that red flag like crazy. The plane was now headed straight toward our house. The
windows rattled as it zoomed over the roof. I saw the frown on my mother's face, but
she said, "It's okay. We're not in a war."
Twice, I thought the plane was gone for good, but it returned with more white spray.
This went on until the trees grew long shadows as the sun crept toward the hills to
the west. The sound faded and I heard my father's footsteps on the path to the back
door. When he opened it, his clothes hung damp and his hat brim sagged into his face.
He cleared his throat and spat into the dirt at the side of the door. My mother brought
him a bathrobe so he could leave his clothes outside. He smelled horrible, and my
sister gagged. He disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the shower running for a
long time.
The next morning my father started out to the fields and I asked if I could go with
him. He made a face like he didn't want me along. He usually liked it when we walked
out together. It was already getting hot, but he told me to put on my winter pants, thick
socks, and canvas shoes. On the way out the door, he tied a clean handkerchief over
my nose and mouth. "Is the plane coming back?" I asked.
He smiled without showing his teeth. "Not today." When we got to the field in front of
the house, he held my hand and told me not to touch anything. He looked hard at the
alfalfa plants that stood tall as my chin. "Do you see any worms moving?"
I saw lots of them dead and shriveled. My father and I stood still for a long time,
listening for sounds. The butterflies were gone, and not a single bird sat on the wire
fence. Silence, like I'd never heard before. My father's face became a map of lines.
We walked down to the pond. The flying dragons were gone, and no fat little frogs
poked their eyes out of the water. The muskrat swam up to look around, then dived
and disappeared. We headed back to the house.
Years later, I got a call from my mother to say that my father had died. "He’s out of
his suffering." He'd fought cancer for years.
Last week, the boy who calls me Great-grandpa wheeled us down along the path
through the marsh, and once again, I looked hard for the fat frogs, but all I saw were
overgrown bugs and the black bird with a red spot on his wing. He still hasn't found a
mate.
In the sterile place, I watch the big screen in the room where we eat dinner. They
always turn down the sound, but one night I saw dozens of children who looked like
skeletons. I guess they have nothing to eat where they live. An old woman behind me
complained, so the caregiver changed the picture to one that showed a whole screen
full of trees that stood twenty times taller than a man. Their twigs looked brown and
shriveled, like the dead worms in my father's field.
Today the boy arrived carrying a square gadget. "Great-grandpa, I told my teacher
about the messages you send me, and she said our class could make a collection of
stories to put on the Internet." He held up the device and pointed to its small screen. "If
you tell me a story, I'll put it in the book."
I rub my transparent knuckles and the fog lifts from my brain. "When I was a boy, I
lived near a pond filled with birds and fish and a muskrat and..." I glance out the
window at the marsh. "Frogs."
The boy looks confused and I spell it out to him. "F-R-O-G-S."
"Were they like little dinosaurs, Great-grandpa?"
"In a way. They were my friends." The boy studies the word on the screen. "Go on,
Great-grandpa."
"One year millions of worms crossed the road and attacked my father's alfalfa fields
like an invading army...."
First published in Animal Literary Magazine, May, 2013
Horizon Line
Maureen Eppstein
To limn a life in perspective
I’m told you need to define
a horizon line eye level to the viewer.
From my hill of years the view is fluid
as in watery, but also
as in unpredictable.
On the sea’s face a wall of fog
moves in and out like histories
remembered and forgotten.
Sometimes silver striates the sea
with such a glitter of insight
I am bedazzled and cannot look.
Sometimes fogbank and ocean
merge with such blue-gray unity
it seems the horizon rises
so that I stand on the shore,
dwarfed by a surf of knowledge
that pounds at my ignorance.
Sometimes the sea becomes invisible,
the white air a questioning emptiness,
a finger-touch of damp against the cheek.
The Coldirons
Sidney Thompson
Ruth Coldiron lived in a cabin on a parcel of bottomland between Blue River and
Island Bayou, and due to these barriers, the homestead was impossible for a posse to
reach without giving advanced warning to the few residents of the area, with only a
single solid road leading to it. Mrs. Coldiron lived alone, a widow with a green thumb,
whose cabin was heralded as something of a Hansel and Gretel house of flowers
instead of gingerbread. She was also a mother of two heathen sons, Wayne and
Thomas, wanted for multiple counts of murder and train robbery. She supposedly lived
alone.
Midway between the Coldiron home and his camp at Corn Creek, where his small
outfit of two men and two wagons waited, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves stopped
for the night under a cluster of pines in a desolate forest and finished his meager
provisions of salted pork and corn dodgers. With his massive hands, he then twisted
the heels off his shoes and fired his Colt three times through the brim and crown of his
droopy felt hat. Late additions to his tramp disguise, consisting also of patched
overalls and his naturally matching black skin and unwieldy mustache, splayed across
his face like an old paint brush.
The moon was full tonight but distant, no bigger round than a .45 caliber entry, as if
he’d made it himself.
A full moon usually meant nothing more to Bass than what it was. He preferred to
believe he was too Christian to be superstitious. But if the full moon was a distant one,
he was sometimes reminded of his Van Buren home when he was a slave and happy
child, not yet told what he was, sleeping on a pallet on the floor of a cabin overlooking
the Arkansas River and the military post of Fort Smith on the other side. Some nights,
when his mother and the other slaves in the quarters had fallen asleep, if he knew the
moon was full and low enough in the sky, he’d crawl past their beds to the front door
and pull the plug of sack cloth out of the knothole to scope the moon. He’d then slowly
back away and view the moon-filled knothole from the stitched stars of his quilt, and
with the stars he could feel beneath his palms and naked legs, and with the moon he
could see, it was as if he were outside with the night, and older, and on the prowl for
outlaws, as if he were a free and right man. As if he knew his life would come to this.
In the shade of a mimosa tree behind the slave cabin were the graves of an older
brother and sister, one stillborn and one a month old. He would help his mother keep
the graves tidy, gather up the blackening blossoms and fernlike leaves and twigs and
sweep the dirt. Then as if practicing to sign his name, how he’d sign it his entire life,
he’d draw crosses in the dirt with his finger. "They spirits is with you, Bass," his mother
would tell him many times. "You remember, you is always more than just one boy."
He’d asked once what their names were, and she’d told him they didn’t have names
and didn’t need them. "Because you got yours," she’d said.
He thought of his brother and sister, and his mother, and the Good Lord Himself,
when he thought now about what he strove for. Nothing less than to turn back evil
more and more and not less and less. To reverse the trends of man and the history of
the world, if he could, and to call evil out for what it was. A rapist, a robber, a
murdering horse thief—one man and one woman at a time. Like Jacob in the Bible, he
could outsmart and outfight whomever he needed and still be a righteous man, or as
good as Jacob was good. And if he had to lie and connive and disguise himself as
Jacob had done in order to win his father’s blessing over his elder brother, Esau, then
Bass would do that, too. He would follow in Jacob’s footsteps because Jacob proved
you didn’t have to be that good to be good enough to turn back evil and win God’s
favor and forge your own nation, because even though Jacob was bad, he wasn’t too
bad, and that was the key.
After so much reflection, Bass grew tired and let himself sleep. At the first sound of
predawn birdsong, he rose with alertness from his bed of pine needles and continued
his twenty-eight-mile trek to Mrs. Coldiron’s cabin.
The only other time he’d traversed such a distance on foot was twenty-one years
ago, in 1862, when he finally did what he’d dreamed of doing for much of his life: he
took the law into his own hands by throttling his master, George Reeves, drunk and
belligerent at the time, and broke for the freedom of Indian Territory. That was at this
same time of year, in spring, when he was twenty-five.
It angered Bass that people like the Coldirons sought the lawlessness of Indian
Territory for the wrong reasons.
He’d heard Lighthorse policemen use the Coldiron homestead as a landmark to
describe the location of good hunting grounds for boar and deer. Where else would
wild boys hide? The last time a deputy had gone looking for them at their mother’s
was three weeks ago. Bass’s posseman had read the report aloud to him, how the
misguided deputy had ridden up in the middle of the night, all the way from Atoka, with
seven possemen and an Indian scout. The report said that there were no signs of the
sons or of any stolen property, and that the mother was clearly ignorant of their
whereabouts, having collapsed into tears upon learning of her sons’ crimes.
Late in the day Bass passed half a dozen children, Indian mixed with Negro,
watching him from a swamp. A skeletal red hound pup wandered out of the weeds to
sniff his shoes and followed him close to an hour, until Bass spotted a rat snake, and
penning its head with the tip of his cane, he grabbed the tail and swung its head
against the ground. The pup danced as Bass peeled the snake’s skin from around its
mouth and then yanked it all the way off its body as if it were a sock. Once he dropped
the rope of meat, the pup stopped following.
Approaching twilight a double colonnade of daffodils, touch-me-nots, and bearded
irises beckoned him off the road and onto what must have been the right path. Ahead,
azalea bushes and day lilies and more irises bloomed in thick clouds of color around
the gray cabin and around the pig pen and outhouse, all pitched in a row on the edge
of a wood. In flower boxes hanging below each cabin window grew tall pink and
lavender and yellow tulips, like lollipops.
It was no exaggeration of exhaustion when Bass slouched up the front step, hewn
from a cypress stump, and stopped on the first creak of the porch boards and sighed.
Leaning forward on his mud-tipped cane, flat-footed in his mud-caked shoes, he
stretched his long arm out and knocked and called hello.
The muslin curtains flickered in the window to his left just before the porch boards
rippled beneath him from movement inside, just before the door opened. The woman
reminded him of his own mother, with her graying black hair and strong, square frame,
faded flowered dress, and thick bare feet. She was as unafraid of him as she could
be, waiting patiently for him to speak.
He removed his hat and crushed it to his heart, giving her a humble nod. "Sorry to
take you away from your family this evening," he said, "but I’m real hungry, ma’am, and
wondering if I could beg a bite to eat, just anything. Don’t matter. A hog scrap’ll do,
ma’am."
She held her forearms across her chest and studied him down to his shoes.
"Where you from?"
"Trying to get back to Paris on nothing but a rickety cane and two blistered feet,
ma’am. I’ve come a long way, and I’ll be honest, the men of the law’s after me.
They’re hard on my trail for a trifle, even shot at me three times, and I mean close
ones, see—" He showed her the holes in his hat.
"I’ll say," she said.
"Yes, ma’am," he said, setting his hat back on his head. "Now, this is my first stop,
so if I’d be putting you out any, I can try elsewhere. I’ll understand."
"Nonsense," she said. "You come on inside. I will gladly give you something to
eat."
"Yes, ma’am," he said. "Thank you, ma’am." He bent over to unlace his shoes, and
the two sets of handcuffs he’d sewn on the underside of his overalls pressed against
his ribs. He sucked in his gut to relieve the pressure on the stitches, and he
inadvertently gasped.
"Be careful." She reached out to steady him.
"Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am," he said, rising up on his cane. Gingerly, he
hulled his feet from his shoes. "That’s better."
"Good. Well, come on inside," she said, then backed away to let him by. "Just us
tonight. You ain’t interrupting nothing."
He dropped his left hand near his pocket where his Colt was, and with his cane in
his right hand he lowered his head and stepped into a kitchen with a table with four
empty chairs. He looked elsewhere, toward the hutch and basin, toward the rocker
and knitting stand, then beyond the pot-bellied stove to two back rooms with doors
standing open, showing beds in the rooms. But from what he could see in the scant
light from the two front windows, her sons were not here. And there didn’t appear to
be a rear-entry door for escape. Her sons were slippery to have been seen slipping in
and out for months and to have never gotten caught. He knew of four deputies and a
dead Pinkerton who’d failed.
"Glad to have the company," she said. She shut the door behind him.
"Yes, ma’am. Me, too. Me, too. Been awhile."
She patted the back of a chair. "Have yourself a seat."
"Thank you," he said. He hung his cane on the back of the chair and sat down. He
watched her open a cupboard on the hutch and take out a covered plate. Her feet
whisked across the sandy floor.
"Not much, I’m afraid," she said. She set the plate in front of him and pulled away
the fabric of an old flour sack to reveal, he couldn’t believe it, salted pork and corn
dodgers. "But help yourself. I done ate."
"No, this is more than generous." He didn’t hesitate to collect a slice of pork and a
corn dodger and pop them into his mouth.
"I got some mesquite jelly to help those dodgers go down, if you like mesquite jelly."
He was still chewing, unprepared to speak, so he waved her off.
"Well, you’ll need something to make them go down." She returned from the
cupboard with a glass and a demijohn hanging on her thumb. "Don’t get excited now
because this is just water. Don’t keep nothing harder."
He shook his head and swallowed. "Much obliged, ma’am." He brushed his hands
on his pants legs, then reached for the demijohn. He unstopped the cork and filled his
glass. "And, ma’am, I don’t want to alarm you if you was to see this here side arm
peeking out my pocket." He plugged the cork back in the demijohn and withdrew his
six-shooter, laying it on the table. "You can hold onto it until I go if you like. Up to
you."
She smiled with a nod. "I appreciate that."
"I’m Jacob, by the way." He tipped the brim of his hat, and his thumb slipped
through one of the bullet holes.
She noticed and snickered. "And I’m Mama," she said. "Everybody calls me
Mama."
"Yes, ma’am," he said. "Nice to meet you." He reached for another corn dodger,
and Mama reached for his pistol, taking it by the barrel and walking away, into the
bedroom on the left. He didn’t expect that. Behind her door he heard only her sandy
feet start and stop, start and stop.
He drank his glass of water and refilled the glass.
She returned and sat across the table. An unlit oil lamp and a box of matches sat
on a doily between them.
He smiled and sandwiched a slice of pork between two corn dodgers.
"You know, I’ve got two boys, and they’re always wanted by the law, being pursued
by the law."
He nodded. "Law’s getting tougher and tougher these days."
"I tried to tell my husband this weren’t no place to raise them boys, free land or not,
but he wouldn’t listen." She rested her chin in her hand and looked off toward one of
the windows as if from that distance she could see anything more than the light of
dusk through the swirls of the hand-blown glass. "I blame the place more than them
boys, though. Boys will be boys, you know?" She cut her eyes at him. "You know,
don’t you?"
"Unfortunately, ma’am."
She stretched her lips in a taut and level smile. "Glad to help."
"I appreciate it," he said.
"Soon as you’re done, we got a creek out back. It’ll do you good for them blisters to
get a quick dip."
"Yes, ma’am," he said. "I know I must be ripe."
"Well, that, too." She rapped her knuckles on the table top, then stepped away.
Bass gave the cabin another once-over, registering the location of, and distance
between, doors and possible weapons in case later in the dark he needed a stove log
or a knitting needle or to dash from room to room or find his way outside—because he
considered it now a good sign Mrs. Coldiron had taken his pistol. Apparently, she was
allowing him to stay the night.
When she returned from her bedroom with a bath towel and a half-melted bar of lye,
he’d cleared his plate and was brushing crumbs out of his mustache.
"Here," she said, handing him the soap and draping the towel over his arm. "Take
the path by the outhouse. Straight back."
He smiled and slowly stood up. "Thank you, ma’am—I mean, Mama."
"That’s right," she said. She reached for the matches. "Better hurry."
The path by the outhouse led him through mesquite, cedars, and cypress, to a sand
bank freshly marked by horses. He lowered to his haunches. There were two sets,
one shod and one not. Upstream and down, the creek widened and darkened, but the
passage for a horse here at the bend would be an easy leap.
He held his breath and listened for hoof stamps or whinnies and blows from horses
maybe being tied to a tree somewhere out of sight.
When he heard nothing but a breeze rattling the high boughs and then closer a
trickle of water dripping from the wings of a goldfinch, he decided to relax and undress
and jump in.
Of course, his dip would be quick. This water was as cold as Corn Creek. He froze
going under, even as he thrashed—his heart and mind and nerves all wired up and
electric as Thomas Edison’s famous bulb.
He hung the towel over the porch rail to dry and set the soap on the rail beside it,
then opened the cabin door. "Woo," he said, shivering, back in his undershirt and
overalls and bullet-holed hat but still cold.
"Feel better?" She was rocking in her rocker and knitting in the lamp light.
He laughed and shut the door. "I’ll tell you in the morning."
"Well, good, I was hoping you’d know you was welcome to stay the night. People is
people with me."
"God Bless you, ma’am."
She angled her head toward the bedroom on the right. An oil lamp dimly flickered in
it. "I done fixed up my boys’ room for you, so make yourself at home, Jacob. Get
some rest. And I’ll make sure to see you off in the morning with something a might
better than leftover corn dodgers." She chuckled with her eyes closed, and like his
mother, her whole body jiggled.
"Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am," he said, nodding. He removed his hat. "You’re
mighty kind, mighty kind." He approached her, still nodding. "I got ten young’uns, five
boys and five girls, and the most beautiful wife. I’m blessed, truly blessed. I just want
to get home to them."
"Well, they need you more than you can know. It’s going on four years since my
husband passed and we weren’t all that close, kind of growing apart really, but still
every day it’s hard to believe he ain’t anymore with me."
"Yes, ma’am," he said. "And Indian Territory, like you say, it ain’t the best place to
be raising boys, or girls for that matter—too much freedom if you can believe that. But
the same goes for a place like Paris, being so close by. What’s in your backyard gets
tracked in the house, am I wrong?"
"No, you right," she said, her knitting needles clicking like a telegraph.
"I grew up with no freedom and done wandered long enough across Indian Territory,
and I can tell you both ways is no good. I keep praying one day I’ll find myself on a
middle ground."
She stopped rocking and collapsed her hands around her needles and yarn. "I’ll
pray tonight for you and your family."
"And I’ll return the favor."
She smiled and started her rocker, continuing to work her needles.
He clasped the bedroom door behind him, and on the table beside the lamp he
found a vase of three freshly clipped tulips, one of a different color. He lowered his
nose to breathe their sweet scent, then undressed to his underwear and climbed into
Wayne and Thomas Coldiron’s bed. If they didn’t show by morning, he would pretend
to leave and stake out the creek instead.
He snuffed out the wick and prayed that he would have the opportunity to teach
Wayne and Thomas right from wrong and to find Jesus, and that he wouldn’t have to
kill them. But if he had to, that he wouldn’t have to in front of their mother.
He prayed, too, for his own sons and daughters, who were growing up too quickly
during his long and many absences as a deputy. He prayed that they would never
stray from Jesus the way the Coldirons had. That they would find that middle ground,
if they hadn’t found it yet, and that they would hide there—hide—and hold on.
*
*
*
A sharp but muted whistle deep from within the woods cleaved him from his sleep,
though apparently he hadn’t been asleep long, waking with full clarity and lifting his
head from the feather pillow to hear Mrs. Coldiron’s rocker rocking emptily. The cabin
jostled as the soft pad of her weight drifted away, across the front room to the front
door.
Holding his breath, he heard the wood-on-wood slide of the brace board, then the
front door open, making the bedroom door knock on its latch. On the porch Mrs.
Coldiron whistled an answer, high in the palette, and immediately came the rumble of
horse hooves.
Bass rolled out of bed onto nimble feet and pulled on his overalls as the horses
neared. Then as the horses halted in a scramble out front, he unlocked his door,
letting it swing wide. He leaned on his cane in the doorway as if he were afraid to
leave the safety of the room, and listened to their murmured voices. He didn’t want to
appear as relaxed as he was.
The murmurs continued back and forth outside, and then there was silence. Then a
horse nickered. Then boot heels struck the porch. A young man, and another one
behind him, walked through the open door, matching the description of Wayne and
Thomas—two white men of medium build and dark hair in their twenties.
The first one, who was mustached and carrying a side-by-side Remington shotgun
by its pistol grip, strode up to Bass and stopped three feet from him. He didn’t aim the
barrels at Bass and the hammers weren’t cocked, but his fingers rested on both
triggers.
"So, nigger, who are you?"
"What did I just say to y’all outside?" said Mrs. Coldiron. "Be nice, Wayne—both of
you!"
Bass sized up the other one, the younger one, Thomas, with sideburns to his jaw
line and a Winchester rifle held across his chest. Both brothers wore their pistols
tucked in the waistband of their jeans.
"Jacob Jackson," said Bass. That was his pastor’s name, and it wasn’t the first time
Bass had used it.
"Yeah, but why you running?" asked Wayne.
"For introducing spirits," said Bass.
"That’s it?" said Thomas. Outside of his sideburns, the only hair on his face was a
mangy splotch of fuzz on his chin.
Bass nodded. "That and for shooting my way free, I suppose. So when I heard
y’all’s horses, I just knowed the law had done found me."
"And they come close to getting you, we hear," Wayne said.
Bass nodded again. "I hear the law’s after y’all, too."
The brothers looked at one another, then at their mother.
"I’m sure glad we can join forces for the night," said Bass. "Safer in numbers, you
know."
Wayne grunted. "Mama trusts you for some reason."
"Well, she’s a fine woman," said Bass. "Anybody can see that. But if I’m in the way
now, I can go."
"No, you won’t!" said Mrs. Coldiron.
Bass stood straight on his cane. "No hard feelings, really, ma’am," he said.
"I said no," she said. "We ain’t putting you out at this time of night. My boys know
how to sleep on the floor." She shuffled toward her bedroom. "I’ll get some blankets."
Wayne shrugged. "Floor’ll be nicer than where we been sleeping."
Thomas laughed. "That’s for damn sure. A bed’ll spoil you. Let it spoil you, old
man. I don’t want it."
Mrs. Coldiron returned with an armful of blankets, then left again and returned with
pillows. Then she left once more. By this time, Wayne and Thomas had moved Mrs.
Coldiron’s rocker to the kitchen, spread their blankets on the floor, and taken off their
boots and coats and were lying in their clothes with their guns beside them and
passing a bottle of whiskey. Bass was taking his turn having a snort when Mrs.
Coldiron came out of her bedroom carrying his Colt six-shooter out in front of her by
the nose of the barrel as though she were toting a dead rat.
"I reckon with my boys home you can have this back," she said. "Just watch after
them’s all I ask. I know they’ll do the same."
"Yes, ma’am," said Bass. "I owe that to you and more." He handed the whiskey
bottle to Thomas and accepted his Colt with a quick glance at the brass cartridges in
the cylinders to check she hadn’t unloaded it as a trick, before slipping the pistol into
his pocket.
Mrs. Coldiron turned to her son Wayne and stooped to pat the top of his head.
"Y’all been getting along, not fighting again, right?"
"I only needed to embarrass him once, Mama," said Thomas.
"Shit," said Wayne.
"Uh-huh," said Thomas. He took a second swig from the bottle before passing it to
his brother.
Mrs. Coldiron held her forearms across her chest, eyeing Thomas. "Who else you
got to rely on out there but each other?" When he didn’t answer, only picked at a
loose thread on his blanket, she spoke louder. "Listening to me?" she said.
Still not answering, ignoring her, Thomas ran the thread between his upper front
teeth.
"You know," said Bass, "I always say, ‘You choose your friends, but the Good Lord
chooses your family.’ You know, who you gonna trust more—your judgment or the
Good Lord’s?" He smiled, but only Mrs. Coldiron appeared to pay him any attention.
Wayne was pulling off his socks. Thomas was still working the thread through his
teeth. "That’s what I tell my young’uns when they start to get cross with each other.
Makes you think."
"Sure does, don’t it, boys?"
"Course," said Thomas, lowering the thread and pausing to swallow, "the Good Lord
didn’t mind crossing His only begotten son, did He?"
Mrs. Coldiron consulted Bass. "See what I’m talking about? What I’m dealing with
here?"
"Yes, ma’am," said Bass.
Thomas reached for his pistol. "What if I was to take up a gun like so and aim it like
so," he said, aiming it at his mother and drawing back the hammer, "and if I was to fire
a ball a lead smack between my mama’s eyes out of some kind a sacrifice for
humanity? Would you bow down to me then, Mr. Old Christian Man? Would you say
heaven was in my eyes and the Holy Ghost was in my heart?"
"Hush your mouth and set down that gun this instant, boy!" said Mrs. Coldiron.
"All for the same humanity, by the way," said Thomas, "whose judgment we can’t
trust in the first place. That make sense to you?"
"Thomas Lee!" said Mrs. Coldiron.
Wayne threw his socks at Thomas and laughed. "Enough already."
Thomas eased the hammer down and tossed the pistol back on his blanket. "Just a
point."
Mrs. Coldiron wagged her head, keeping it down.
Wayne gestured to Bass with the bottle, but only a slosh was left, so Bass politely
waved it off.
"Go on," said Wayne, pumping the bottle at him. "We got another."
"Much obliged then," nodded Bass. He took the bottle by its neck, gave the whisky
a swirl, then drained his swallow slowly, thinking things through. His best chance at
arresting the Coldirons without bloodshed was to corral them, yet very soon he’d be
expected to go back to bed. He wiped his mouth and watched Thomas bite down on
the cork of a new bottle. It’d be a lot easier for Bass to do it like every other lawman
and simply draw his weapon down on them at this very moment and fire away if they
budged, spilling out their bright blood before their mother’s eyes if he had to, but that
didn’t seem the most logical or Christian way of going about making or keeping peace.
That’s why he never fired until fired upon, a code he lived by, a vow he made to God
when he took the job, and with these close quarters, he wasn’t about to give the
Coldirons a chance at a free crack at him.
"Well," said Mrs. Coldiron. She took a deep breath and gave Bass a look that
seemed to say, Help me.
Bass shrugged and handed the empty bottle to her. "I hate to go in there to sleep,"
he said, "and shut this here door."
Wayne’s and then Thomas’s eyes rolled upward and froze on Bass.
"What if somebody or even a whole bunch of somebodies was to crawl up and try to
try something? Being separated in different rooms, we couldn’t be much protection to
each another."
"What you getting at?" said Wayne.
Bass lifted the tip of his cane and pointed at their pallets. "If y’all gonna insist on
sleeping on the floor, why not on the bedroom floor with me? That’s my thinking. I just
wanna get home like y’all done. But if deputies come busting through that front door,
you won’t have much of a chance to reach like I will. Back there, we all got a fighting
chance. What y’all think?"
"You want to know what I think?" said Thomas. He tipped the bottle up, gulped,
belched, then passed the bottle to Wayne. "I think what I think," he said, "is you need
to settle down, Negro. I think what I’m thinking is we’re perfectly situated right where
we are."
Mrs. Coldiron gave Bass an expression of concern. "I really would sleep better
knowing y’all was together, too."
"Mama?" said Wayne.
"Please, boys," said Mrs. Coldiron.
"Ah, hell, whatever, I don’t care," said Wayne. He took a drink, then handed the
bottle to Bass and pushed himself to his feet. "I just want to get some sleep."
"Jesus, nobody’s coming tonight or we’d heard," said Thomas, not moving, except
for lolling his head back with his eyes closed.
Bass turned and entered the darkness of the brothers’ room. He fumbled for a
matchstick on the bedside table, praying Thomas would change his mind.
"Don’t be difficult," Mrs. Coldiron said in the other room. "I just want what’s best for
you."
The lamp glowed, then Wayne walked in carrying a tangle of guns, a pillow, and a
blanket.
"Tommy, please, for tonight," said Mrs. Coldiron.
"Goddamnit, Mama," Thomas said in the other room, "you want me to take that
bottle from you and break it in your mouth? Goddamnit, I will!"
A scuffle commenced and the empty whiskey bottle Bass had given Mrs. Coldiron
skittered across the floor, followed by the clatter of gun steel. The floor vibrated,
making the flames in the lamp dance over the bedroom walls as Thomas stomped into
the bedroom with nothing in his arms but his weapons. Mrs. Coldiron shuffled in
closely behind him with his blanket and pillow.
"Here you go, Tommy" she said, spreading the blanket carefully on the floor. "You’ll
feel better after you get some sleep. You’re just not sleeping enough, son."
With the space on the floor evaporating, Wayne at the foot of the bed and now
Thomas between the bed and door, Bass climbed into bed and stretched out above
the covers, still in his overalls, keeping his handcuffs and six-shooter close.
"If I hear something funny," said Mrs. Coldiron, "I’ll knock on the wall."
"Yes’m," said Wayne.
"Well," she said with a glance to each of them, though Thomas was lying face down
and not seeing her, "good night, boys."
"Good night, ma’am," said Bass.
"Night, Mama," said Wayne, rising again to his feet. He swept the door behind her
and dropped the hook in the eye latch.
Bass reached for the wick wheel on the lamp, and once Wayne had squatted back
down on his pallet, Bass smothered the light.
He wriggled his body as though he were nestling for sleep but was actually
positioning himself closer to the edge. Then when there was silence, it was broken
only by an occasional slosh of whiskey, followed by a swallow. The brothers passed
their bottle back and forth between them, as if Bass were no longer in the room or they
believed him to be asleep.
"Like old times, ain’t it?" said Wayne, speaking softly.
Thomas groaned in agreement.
"Was like camping out in our own room," said Wayne.
"At first, maybe," said Thomas. "Then we realized he was putting us out of our
damn bed forever."
"Because Mama put him out," said Wayne.
"Yeah, but a man would’ve taken the floor sometimes."
"True," said Wayne.
"Course, we know Daddy weren’t no man, or Mama would’ve been the one in here
with us."
"Yeah," said Wayne. "That’s true, too."
At some vague point it had become clear to Bass that they had stopped talking and
wouldn’t again. From that point on, Bass lay quietly between his own delayed breaths,
listening to theirs, which would fade sometimes and he’d believe they were waiting,
postponing sleep, too. Then their breathing would deepen and lengthen momentarily
and one brother would begin to snore but then would wake himself, and then the other
one would start and stop.
To guard against sleep and to mark time, Bass recounted what he knew of his ten
children. He began in reverse order, from Homer, the youngest at age one, to Sally,
the oldest at nineteen. He’d run through his memory of their history before, estimating
that two hours had passed, and two hours was the time he needed. Sound sleep
wasn’t reliable any earlier.
Like her father, Sally’s favorite color was red. Red licorice, red bows, red barns, red
roses, red horses. Bass remembered teaching her the word Oklahoma, Chickasaw for
"red people." Fluent in all languages of the Five Civilized Tribes, he was always
teaching his children words.
Bass had noticed that Thomas and Wayne had been asleep non-stop since the birth
of Alice, his sixth, so when he reached the end of what he knew of Sally, he confidently
unfastened the bib of his overalls and began breaking the stitches on the handcuffs.
His deputy marshal badge was pinned on the underside of the bib as well, so when the
handcuffs were free, he refastened one side of the bib but not both, wanting the badge
side to fold down and show them who he was.
He stretched a leg over the edge of the bed, then once his toes touched the floor,
he rolled his weight off of the bed and onto his foot and stood without a sound those
two boys would ever hear. The small curtained window provided very little light, but
enough light to make out the arms and hands of white men.
In slow, small steps he neared the foot of the bed, then bent down without hesitation
and scooped a bracelet around Wayne’s wrist and clicked it locked—ready to fastdraw his Colt if they roused, but the click roused neither. That was the easier hand,
though. Wayne was lying on his back with his hands at his sides, so Bass would have
to carry the cuffed hand across his body in order to chain it to the other.
For better balance and defensive posture, Bass straddled himself over Wayne with
his feet firmly planted away from the blanket on the wood floor, ready to drop down on
Wayne’s chest and pin his arms with his knees, if need be. He took a deep breath and
held it, so his own breathing wouldn’t cover the sounds of theirs, then lifted Wayne’s
hand, and it was the dead limb of a child. No resistance, no manhood to Wayne’s
nerves whatsoever. The second iron click didn’t even rouse Thomas.
He collected Wayne’s shotgun and pistol and set them on the bed, then crept
toward Thomas, searching out the open floor with his feet before putting his feet down.
A floorboard creaked, but again no one stirred. Thomas was even asleep on his
stomach with his elbows forked out, his wrists perfectly exposed side by side on his
pillow. The Good Lord was answering prayers early this morning.
As before with Wayne, Bass straddled himself over Thomas, then leaned down
unceremoniously and locked the handcuffs on him in rapid succession. Of course, no
one heard that either. All there was for Bass to do now before his long trek back to
camp was catch a little shut-eye, too, being too early and dark yet to travel.
He collected Thomas’s rifle and pistol, hid them with Wayne’s under the covers of
the bed, and crawled back in bed beside them. He took in and then let out his first
good breath since leaving the bed minutes earlier and thanked God for it. Everything
since arriving at the Coldiron home had gone as easily for him as he’d fathomed—a
sign of God’s blessing. But this was not the first sign, which was why, with his Colt
drawn and cocked, Bass was able to fall asleep almost immediately. His gift of sleep,
which he could will himself into and easily wake from, was a blessing, too, like his
being ambidextrous with a gun. Blessings had been mounting his entire life.
*
*
*
Bass woke revived hours later to a blue dawn and sat up to find Thomas and Wayne
still asleep in the same position. He eased the hammer down on his Colt, grabbed his
cane and hat, and stood to the floor.
The young fools. He kicked Wayne in the ribs, then Thomas in the leg. "Come on,
boys, let’s get going from here." He flicked the latch on the door and watched them in
their confused half-sleep try to use their arms and groan and reach for absent guns.
"Y’all under arrest is what’s going on," said Bass. "Got your subpoenas at camp.
They’ll be read to you when we get there. Come on." He stepped through the open
door and rapped it with his cane. "Hurry up, now."
Thomas charged headlong at Bass, but Bass spun his gun around, caught the
barrel in his palm, and swung fiercely, striking Thomas high in the cheek with the butt
of the handle. Thomas dropped to his knees.
Bass looked at Wayne, crouched in a stance to run at Bass, too. "Step up, son," he
said. "I don’t mind beating the devil out of both you."
"You’ll have to," said Wayne, charging him, and Bass cracked him across the face,
too.
"Boys?" The word went up frightfully behind Mrs. Coldiron’s closed door.
"Mama!" Wayne called and banged his fist on the wall.
Thomas steadily cursed as he wobbled to his feet. Blood trickled from a cut across
his cheek that was nearly identical to the one beginning to open across Wayne’s
cheek.
"Mama!" called Wayne.
"Don’t forget y’all’s boots," said Bass.
Thomas walked out first, still steadily cursing him.
Mrs. Coldiron’s door flung open and she rushed out in her nightgown, her hands
open and flailing, her fingers spread, no steel in them. "What’s happening?" she said.
"Where y’all going?"
Bass waved his Colt so she could see it. "I’m taking them in, ma’am, so step back."
"You’re the law?" she said. "You’re the law?"
"Yes, ma’am." He clinked his badge with the nose of his Colt. "Deputy Bass
Reeves, and I’m taking them in."
"That nigger deputy?" said Thomas. "You shitting me! You?"
"You’re the law?" said Mrs. Coldiron, too stunned to raise her voice. "You come into
my home and you’re the law?"
"Damn you!" grunted Wayne. He charged again, and then Thomas a half a jump
later. Bass struck them back down, one after the other, and Mrs. Coldiron let out a
scream.
"I do appreciate everything, ma’am," Bass told her. "I really do." He turned to her
sons, struggling on all fours to stand back up and bleeding across their faces. "Hurry
now, and get your boots on. We got ourselves a long walk ahead."
Her sons finally did as they were told, while Mrs. Coldiron wailed and stomped her
feet.
Bass unlocked the front door and opened it wide to yellowing light, the tied horses
snorting at the rail. He stood on the porch putting on his shoes as Thomas and Wayne
and then their mother came out behind him.
"We ain’t really fucking walking with two good horses right here?" said Thomas.
"Yep," said Bass, "so we better get a move on quick."
"That’s goddamned ridiculous," said Thomas. "How far?"
"You’re an evil man," said Mrs. Coldiron.
Bass turned away from Thomas. "Sorry you feel that way, ma’am." He turned back
to Thomas. "Look, I ain’t stealing your stolen horses unless I have to carry your
corpses back. You might rather walk like I’m doing." He gestured with the Colt for him
and Wayne to walk ahead and he would follow.
"You’re a pig-slopping nigger motherfucker!" screamed Mrs. Coldiron. "A real dirtywhore of a nigger-devil motherfucker! You know that! That’s what you are!"
Bass had once been described in the Fort Smith Weekly Elevator as having coalblack skin. Never mind that he was actually light brown with visible freckles on his
cheeks. And it was predictable how the reporter would describe his arrests. Deputy
Marshal Bass Reeves came in Sunday from an extended trip through the Territory
bringing twelve prisoners who were registered at the jailer’s office, including Wayne
and Thomas Coldiron, white men charged with murder and larceny. His blessings
were usually whittled down to cruel, unrecognizable facts. This was the case for most
lawmen, though, when bloodshed was avoided. Not the case for men like Wyatt Earp,
who’d abused his authority for personal vendettas and was glorified for it, or Pat
Garrett, who’d killed unarmed men, or Dallas Stoudenmire, who’d killed innocent
bystanders, or Wild Bill Hickok, who’d gotten confused in shootouts and fired upon his
own deputies. Those men, of course, were white and all badge, heedless from blood
thirst, which made the feat more remarkable, a blessing indeed, that Ole Bass, a
colored man of forty-five years, a deputy for twelve of them, had survived as long as
he had without tragedy.
Bass thought when he stopped at the edge of Mrs. Coldiron’s property to pluck one
of her red touch-me-nots to slide under his badge that he’d find her dropping back.
But she screamed ever louder and continued off her path and up the road after them.
For three miles she harassed him.
There was no scent to a touch-me-not, but it was a beautiful, delicate thing.
Excerpt of the novel Ravensbone
By Cathy Rosoff
VII.
Russell
1933-1983
Russell Cates was born dirt-poor during the Depression in Marlon, Texas, a tiny
rural town about 40 miles outside of Dallas, to a degenerate gambler father and a 17
year-old high school drop-out mother. At seven Russell came home from school to
find some thugs beating up his father while burglarizing their tiny trailer. At eight, he
sat in the courtroom, his head on his mother’s shoulder, as a judge sentenced to the
electric chair the Mexican who had murdered his father after drunkenly catching him
cheating in a high-stakes poker game.
When Russell was ten, his beautiful 27 year-old mother began dating Aaron King, a
50 year-old oil tycoon she had met while working as a waitress at a diner. Within a
year, he married Russell’s mother and promptly adopted Russell, whom he decided he
would turn into the son and heir he had never had, one who would live up to his own
great name and one day take his place as the head of King Oil. To do that, he would
have to make the boy strong and hard like he was. He knew this would no be an easy
task. The boy was a timid crybaby and a mama’s boy, his weakness no doubt a result
of his father’s weakness and degeneracy. (Weakness and degeneracy were traits he
loathed, loathed so much he would never hire spics or niggers to work for him, no
matter how much cheaper they would work for him than a white would. They would
end up costing you far more than any white worker would in the long run, stealing from
you with their laziness if not their sticky fingers.) He knew he would have to be cruel to
be kind, to turn him into the man, the real man, his father never was.
And cruel he was.
When Russell refused to call him Dad, he beat him with a belt so badly he had to
sleep on his stomach for a week. When he refused to get into the pool when he tried
to teach him how to swim, he threw him in. When Russell refused to try to swim he let
him flay around in the water. Her mother eventually jumped in and “saved” him and he
ran up to his room and locked himself in it. Aaron promptly locked the door from the
outside and told him he couldn’t come out or receive any food, until he got back into
the water. When nearly two whole days had passed, he would have been almost
impressed with the boy’s determination had it not been for his rage, which caused him,
when his mother was out, to knock down the door, carry the boy in his underwear
down to the pool, throw him in, and walk away.
Ignoring his screams as he headed inside the house, once inside he watched him.
A small knowing smile crept up his face as he watched his adopted son gradually stop
flailing, start to tread water and eventually dog-paddle to the edge of the pool.
At 21, Russell King graduated with honors from Texas A&M University as an AllAmerican football player, as devoted a son as Aaron could have ever hoped for. He
immediately became such an obsessively devoted protégé of his at King Oil that after
two years, Aaron realized that if Russell were to have a wife, he would have to find one
for Russell himself and so he did. He introduced him to a 21 year-old cool Grace Kelly
lookalike named Mimi Baker, a Texas aristocrat whose family’s name was far more
valuable of than their old rapidly shrinking fortune. Less than a year later they married
and ten months after that, they had their first child, a son they named Kelly. Three
years later, they had their second child, another son they named Brian.
In 1965, Aaron died of a heart attack at aged 72, leaving his 32 year-old adopted
son to take over King Oil.
In some ways, the burden of losing his father and taking over the family business at
such a young age felt lighter than that of being a father. As an only child himself, he
found it unfathomable that two children borne from the same parents could be so
different. While the blonde blue-eyed Kelly was a stunningly beautiful child who was
both a natural athlete and leader amongst his peers, his younger son Brian was his
opposite in every way.
Plain, almost homely, with mousy brown hair, brown eyes and a weak chin, his
vision was so bad he had to wear coke bottle-thick glasses even in nursery school. In
nursery school and kindergarten his teachers complained that in class he couldn’t sit
still, frequently “spaced out” and spoke out of turn. They also claimed he had trouble
getting along with the other children as he was so prone to fits of bossiness and
agitation and commonly interrupted their games to aggressively insert himself in them.
His first grade teacher, who also told him Brian seemed to “learn more slowly” than
his classmates, suggested that he send him to a child psychiatrist. The nerve!
Treating him like some sort of crazy freak just because he was a bit spirited and
rebellious! His child wasn’t a crazy person and he wasn’t going to turn him into one by
treating him like he was.
He just needed to be guided by a firmer hand than the average child did. A much
much firmer hand. And if he had learned anything from his beloved late father (whom
he never for a second thought of as his “adopted father”), it was how to guide a
troubled child to success with such a hand. He certainly never hit his son with a
closed fist, but he gave him many spankings, occasionally with a belt and/or with his
pants pulled down when he had provoked his anger particularly badly. When he
started being bullied at school, instead of calling his teachers as he had asked him to
do, he taught him how to box, reserving his Saturday mornings to do weekly lessons
for a few months in the fourth grade. “Trust me, one day you’ll thank me. They’ll just
bully you worse if your teacher gets involved and they know it was me who made a
call. It’ll make you look like a scared baby who needs Mommy and Daddy and Miss
Simpson to fight his battles for him. Is that what you want? This way, they’ll see that
you can take care of yourself and won’t take any guff from them.”
When he still came home with occasional bruises, Russell stopped the boxing
lessons but refused to call his teacher. He would have to learn to take care of himself
– in his own way. Maybe all this would be a blessing in the long run, toughen him up –
just like the guy from that Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue” whose Dad gave him
a girl’s name so that the abuse he would get from it would eventually turn him ultratough. A boy like Brian certainly needed to be tougher than most.
It was with this reasoning that he often ignored or only mildly punished Kelly when
he teased or even bullied him, which at times was frequent. He sometimes wished
Kelly had a kinder heart, but boys particularly alpha-boys like Kelly, were kind of
heartless, weren’t they? It was just part of growing up. And he never really hurt Brian
and only stole from him – at least to his knowledge, at least where there was proof –
once – when he was ten and he stole three dollars out from his room and his mother
saw him doing it and it was only three dollars and then he grounded him for a week
accordingly. (He was too old to spank. Three years later, he wouldn’t feel that Brian
was and would fail to see the irony in that.)
Brian’s mother handled him better than he or Kelly did. Mimi would let him spend
hours with her and he would be still and silent as she taught him how to play cards,
cook and bake. At first he saw his time with her as a relief but found it increasingly
disturbing to find him playing bridge with ladies and bake elaborate pastries with such
ease. But the relief and his wife’s comfort with the whole thing overrode the discomfort
so he let it go.
When he was 11, however, his mother woke up one morning complaining of a
terrible headache. She went to the bathroom to get some aspirin. She was declared
dead less than 20 minutes later by the paramedics. She had died of a brain aneurism.
After that he softened his touch with Brian, who became far quieter and withdrawn,
and so did Kelly, who certainly did not become a friend to his brother but ceased being
a nemesis. In some ways, his mother’s death actually seemed to improve his
behavior. Maybe, he mused, he was just trying to get his mother’s attention before.
Maybe he was intentionally trying to get Russell to chastise and punish him so his
mother would feel more sympathy for him.
When Brian was sixteen, he became friends with a pair of twin boys in his class.
Normally this would have thrilled Russell. He had brought classmates home
throughout the years, but only sporadically and the faces usually changed after a brief
period. With these boys, however, Brian had seemed to form real friendships. Yet
something about these boys gave Russell a bad feeling. Part of it was with their rock
n’ roll hippie style, but only part of it. They were also sullen and quiet around him to
the point of rudeness and acted as if it was a huge imposition to even have to
converse with him for a few seconds. When Brian’s grades started to drop and he
bumped into his school’s headmaster at a fundraiser, he asked about the twins and his
fears were realized. The twins were new students who were rumored to be drug
dealers though he had yet to be able to prove it.
A confrontation with Brian ended with a room search exposing a stash of pills and
marijuana. He promptly sent him to a six-month program at a wilderness camp for
wayward teens run by born-again Christian hippie ex-drug addicts that was known for
questionably harsh tactics but had helped a cousin of Mimi’s stepson, who had been a
teenaged drug abuser.
When Brian ran away about a month into his stay, the hippies instructed him to not
to let him back into the house should he return home or ask to. Therefore, when he
showed up a week later, he placed him into a locked mental ward. Yet only a couple of
weeks afterwards, he was caught having sex with one of the orderlies, a young man in
his early twenties. He subsequently, per Brian’s psychiatrist’s advice, allowed him to
receive gay-aversion therapy.
Soon after his 17th birthday, he returned home and things were actually quite
sedate and conflict-free for the duration of the summer. A little too sedate and conflictfree for Russell to feel entirely comfortable.
A few days before school began he seemed high. When Russell asked him to
enter his pockets he refused. When he slapped his face, his son hit back, or tried to,
with a closed fist. Eventually restraining him, Russell searched his pockets, an action
that, later on, he would often regret. He extracted a syringe and some brown gummy
stuff, which he had had the misfortune to learn from the hippie wilderness peoples’
pamphlets was black tar heroin.
He removed all his money from his wallet,$413, threw it at him and told him to pack
his things and leave.
Only after he had kicked him out of the house did he tell Kelly, who was a rising
junior at his alma matter Texas A & M University, about what had happened with the
orderly and the gay aversion therapy.
Russell had no contact with his son until a year later when he called him from jail
after having been arrested for armed robbery, contritely begging for his help. He
wouldn’t give it to him.
He was sentenced to ten years in prison.
About two months later, Brian was murdered. A fellow prisoner, a black man named
Delon Hughes, was tried for the crime. Five other prisoners, three black and two
Latino, were tried as accessories. The prosecutor argued that Hughes and the other
six men had gang raped Kelly before Hughes broke his neck.
The prosecution lost its case and no one was ever convicted for Brian’s murder.
Russell never attended the trial but followed it closely through contact with a
sympathetic prison warden. He never told Kelly about the rape part but he suspected
Kelly probably could figure it out on his own.
As he himself did, Kelly, who was a senior in college, had a muted somber
response to the death. The funeral was just a graveside affair attended by the two of
them. Russell couldn’t bear anything else. He hoped his death wouldn’t have too
great an impact on Kelly’s spectacular college career. Though his grades were nothing
to write home about, they were good enough to keep him on the football team, where
he was a quarterback with a realistic eye on a professional career. There were
whispers that a scout for the Dallas Cowboys might come to see him play. He was
also was engaged to a girl named Gwen Russell would have been picked out for Kelly
himself if he could have, an heiress to a cattle fortune whose model-like blonde beauty
was only rivaled by Kelly’s own. (Their friends nicknamed for them Barbie and Ken.)
A few months later, Russell watched in dull shock as he saw his son throw away
his chance of playing for the Dallas Cowboys or maybe any NFL team. But just as he
began formulating ways to try to convince the scout in attendance to come back, to
explain about his brother, to tell him it was all temporary, Kelly was tackled. Badly.
The doctors, even the best ones in the country, told Russell Kelly’s football career
was definitely over and his right leg would always be a little weaker than the left.
Gwen was surprisingly supportive. Until that is, she abruptly broke off the
engagement soon after his injury. He assumed his initial impression was wrong and
that she was a fair-weather fiancée until he bumped into his mother a month later and
she uncomfortably informed him that she only left him after she caught him cheating
on her.
Then about two months before graduation, Kelly was caught cheating on an exam
and was kicked out of school. Russell knew he could probably prevent the expulsion
through a hefty endowment but like his son, he was plagued with the kind of tired
apathy that prevented him from actually doing so. Instead, he did what all fathers like
him with difficult sons like Kelly did; he put him to work for him.
But by work, he really meant “work,” sequestering him in an office where he gave
him just enough responsibility that Russell could retain a certain level of credibility with
his subordinates and Kelly could redeem himself to Russell and prove that one day he
might be able to become a true protégée of his just as he had been of his father’s.
Kelly soon proved himself, however, to be the epitome of a spoiled rich undeserving
brat; taking three hour lunches, showing up to work late, leaving early and appearing
drunk at work with increasing frequency. He even heard whispers amongst the young
employees that he used cocaine. Within the year, Russell was considering firing Kelly,
and taking the lazy way out: giving him a small trust fund to live on and sending him on
his way.
Then the strangest thing happened. Almost overnight, Kelly changed. It started out
with him just being an obedient adequate worker – coming in on time, seemingly sober
and the like. But then Kelly blossomed, really blossomed, to the point that he started
reminding him of himself when he was his age and started working for King Oil under
his father’s tutelage.
Only somewhat of himself at his age, however. He couldn’t say totally.
Kelly had none of the gleam in his eye, none of the passion, he had displayed. He
was incredibly responsible, hardworking and always displayed a strong willingness to
learn whatever Russell, any other of his superiors or even his peers, were willing to
teach him, but something was almost forced about it. As if he were an actor
performing a part. This wouldn’t have bothered Russell so much if this element of his
behavior didn’t extend into their personal relationship. He had started spending private
time with his father again, playing golf, hunting and fishing (but no longer watching
football), but he seemed like a genial robot programmed to act like the Kelly he had
known before Brian’s death.
That had been over two years earlier.
VIII.
Kelly
1981-1982
In the summer of 1981 Kelly King was sitting in a dive bar playing hooky from work
when he heard a faintly familiar voice say his name.
It wasn’t until the speaker sidled up to him and noticed his furrowed brow that he
finally said, “Randy Jericho.”
Kelly tried to hide the discomfort on his face, though Randy’s amiably smirking face
revealed that he had failed.
When Kelly was a high school freshman, Randy was a new junior funded by a
football scholarship. His talent was so fierce in the sport that was the state’s religion
that even his lower class background served as no impediment to quickly becoming
one the most popular boys at the tony school.
Within months, he was injured so badly that Kelly heard that he had lost his
peripheral vision in his right eye. His scholarship was promptly revoked and all Kelly
had heard of him after that was that he suffered occasional seizures and had, after
graduating from his local public school, gone on to work sporadically in low-paying
menial jobs while living with his mother. He was also rumored to have developed a
drinking problem. This seemed possibly true given that he was in a bar, a really
crappy one at that, in the late afternoon on a weekday.
He didn’t really want to talk to Randy and would have thought Randy would have
really not wanted to talk to him, but Randy’s friendliness was so aggressive Kelly didn’t
have the energy to fight it. Soon, however, he began enjoying his company as they
bonded over their old alma matter, shared adolescent acquaintances and football, or at
least football before their injuries. Yet half an hour into his conversation, he noticed
something a little odd. Randy didn’t have a drink.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him with a drink since he had sat down.
“You want a drink? Bartender-”
“No thanks.”
“Don’t worry, I’m buying.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to talk to you.”
As if trying to make sure his words had had their proper impact on Kelly, he waited
a few seconds before continuing.
“See, you and I, we have more in common than you think. So much more in
common. I, too, know what its like to want to drown yourself in drink after your spirit’s
been torn apart by sub-humans – brown beasts who don’t deserve to even breathe the
same air as you do.”
“Randy, what are you talking about?”
“Why do you think I’m able to be here in this bar – in the afternoon - when all I want
to do is do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s –”
“But – but – what does that have to do with me?”
“I know about Brian.”
Kelly’s mouth suddenly felt so dry it became a bit harder to breathe.
“He’s the kind of cautionary tale that no one listens to. That’s the problem.”
“But – ” His voice collapsed into a near-whisper. ”How did you know?”
“There are no secrets in this world, Kelly. Just hidden truths waiting to be
unearthed.”
“A..What do you want, Randy?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. What matters is what you want. And what you want,
I think, is not be who you are right now –”
“What do you want, Randy?”
“I want an hour, just one hour of your time. And I want you in that hour to keep a
completely open mind. Just an hour.”
Less than an hour later, Kelly sat next to Randy in a narrow pew in a small cleanyet ramshackle church just off the highway outside of the city. Sitting with them was a
group of about 20 men, all seemingly blue-collar, all seemingly older than Kelly and
Randy – mostly 35-55 in Kelly’s estimation. Some of the men stared at him
sporadically. Then one of them got up and headed toward an organ and another man
with a clerical collar under a cheap-looking suit came out and stood behind the pulpit.
Of medium height and build, the latter man looked than an adult animatronic version
of Howdy Doody, with his ultra-neat rust-colored hair, waxen lineless pore-less skin
and primary-blue button eyes.
“Let us rise us now and open our prayer books to page three,” he said.
As they all rose, Randy handed him “prayer book” that looked more like a stapled
leaflet than an actual book. As the organ music started, Kelly began awkwardly
following along and singing what he thought was the church staple, “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
He soon, however, started to find the tune not quite recognizable and realize that he
was signing unfamiliar phrases about serpent’s seeds and beasts and future wars.
Just as he began scanning the lyrics he had been mindlessly singing, though, the
music and singing stopped and everyone sat down.
There was a moment of heavy ponderous silence. The Howdy Doody man dropped
his head and then lifted it. He began to speak quietly and slowly, his faintly Southernaccented voice as cold and flat as his button eyes.
“I don’t know if any of your listened to my radio program a couple of nights ago.
But if you did, you may have heard a particularly lengthy discussion I had with a
woman who called in. She had one of those hard strident voices, predictably tinged
with a New York accent that I’ve found is quite common amongst feminist females.
She asked me, in a quite agitated voice, if I had even ever met a Jew. And I told her
that I had. That my mother had, in fact, married a Jewish man after the death of my
father; a man, who was basically a carpetbagger and sold my father’s failing steel mill,
the last in a business that had lasted since before the Civil War, immediately after
marrying my mother before taking her back up North with him. She then asked me if I
had ever known any other Jews. And I was honest with her and answered that, at
least to my knowledge, I had not. “
“Then how can you hate all Jews? ! she bellowed Just because you haven’t liked
the single one that you’ve met?’”
“Because they killed my father, I answered.”
“She then said, But I thought you said, earlier in the broadcast, that blacks killed
your father.”
“They did, I replied, but my father’s killers were mere puppets whose strings were
being pulled by Jews. You see, my father was a good hardworking man, a man who
hired many of the blacks in the Birmingham community, even ones just fresh out of
prison. He put food on half of the blacks’ tables in the city, just as his father had and
his father had before him. And I can’t say they were grateful. The blacks aren’t a
grateful people. But they at least had the respect to know who was putting food into
their children’s bellies, and to keep their complaints to themselves. Not that they had
any reason to complain, but lazy people always feel a bit cheated when asked to do
actual work.”
This last phrase, said with a smile and a wink, provoked titters from the
congregation.
“But that all changed when an uppity arrogant black named Martin Luther Kong – I
mean, King – “
With another knowing wink and sly half-grin, he got another chorus of laughs.
“ – began convincing them that their lives weren’t good enough – and that the men
who so graciously gave them roofs over their heads – weren’t treating them well
enough. And suddenly my father goes from being their protector to some sort of evil
villain. “
“And so they decided to go on strike.”
“Now, strikes are normally a peaceful affair, but most strikes in this country are
usually conducted by white workers. And whites are a race possessed with a level of
intelligence and impulse control to understand that conflicts can be resolved without
violence and act upon that understanding.”
“Blacks, however, are different.”
“They have no such intelligence or impulse control because they are not even fully
evolved humans, but instead sub-humans.”
“Like their fellow non-whites, they are the beasts of the field, who as readers of the
book of Genesis know, were the subhuman creatures who existed before God created
Adam and Eve. These subhuman creatures, these beasts, had no souls and only the
capacity for the most basic rudimentary thought processes.”
“So during the course of their strike these beasts quickly turned from strikers to
rioters and from rioters to murderers, mauling my father so badly we couldn’t even
have an open casket funeral.”
“At first, the murder and the subsequent triumph of Kong’s efforts didn’t quite make
sense to me.“
“I simply could not understand, could not fathom, how we whites could fight a battle
with our gross inferiors – and lose.”
“It was not until I had the good fortune to meet the Reverend John Lester Toohey
that I would finally get an answer to that question. He explained to me that those
blacks that had killed my father and even Kong himself were mere puppets. And who
were their masters, pulling their strings?”
“The spawns of Satan and Eve, who lain together and begat Cain, who then lain
with the subhuman beasts of the field – the ancestors of the niggers and the muds –
and begat the Jews.”
“But wasn’t Jesus a Jew? I asked the Reverend. “
“That’s only what the Jews want you to think, he answered. They are capable of
even brainwashing a whole world of unsuspecting whites to interpret scripture the way
they want them to. This is the extremity of their demonic power.’”
“But if they have this, power, this demonic power? I asked him, How was Hitler able
to kill and torture six million of them in concentration camps?”
“And how do you know he did that?, he asked me.”
“Well I know it from the history books, I replied.”
“Books that are put out by the publishing industry which, like all media industries,
are dominated by Jews.”
“But what about the pictures? I asked.”
“What? The pictures in the history books put out by Jews? Don’t you know that
photos can be doctored or taken out of context? Cannot a photograph of an
emaciated man seem like one thing if it is left out by the picture’s publisher that the
man was actually a prisoner of war dying of a disease contracted while in battle and
another if one knows the truth of the picture? ”
“But what about the survivors?’”
“Survivors who all, by their own admission, are Jews.”
“But why would they do this?”
“For sympathy. “
“To produce guilt and shame in the white man.”
“See, before the war, the white man had some sense that he had a demon in his
midst. He wasn’t sure, but he had the sense of unease one has when he’s in the
woods and he somehow suspects that a bear is somewhere nearby. He can’t see one;
he can’t hear one. But he somehow, in some faint way, just feels it. And he suspected
that that demon was the Jew – and so he discriminated against him. But not
completely. Just enough to hobble him, but not enough to slay him.”
“Not enough to stop the wily demon-Jew from perpetrating the greatest hoax in
recorded history.”
“And the white man bought that hoax – hook line and sinker. And after that he
stopped discriminating against him. In fact, he not only stopped discriminating against
him, he gave the Jew-demon his very own country. “
“But this was not enough for him.”
“He was a glutton who would never be full until he had fully, completely subjugated
the white man. Not destroying him in body – if the body was destroyed, who would
serve him? No, what he wanted was a lobotomized castrated white man – to be his
eunuch slave who would do his bidding and cater to his every whim.”
“Yet he knew he still had a limitation in meeting this goal. He was small in number,
very small. He needed some soldiers for his army. Soldiers who wouldn’t even know
they were his soldiers. Soldiers who would think they were fighting not for him, but for
themselves.”
“And so when Martin Luther Kong being – a bit smarter – than his fellow beast
brethren – began riling them up – convincing him that the white man who had cared for
him for so long and put the food in their mouths, the clothes on their backs, and the
roofs over their head – was wronging him – the Jew saw this as a golden opportunity.
“He knew the black was not capable of winning the civil rights movement on his
own. He simply didn’t have the courage or the character or the intellect for that.”
“And so he decided to help him. To support him not only in the newspapers and in
the dining rooms of influential whites, but on the front lines.”
“And that is why, if you look really carefully, and look at the whites who fought side
by side in the trenches of Kong’s movement, who rode the freedom buses and so
forth, you’ll see that they were actually not white at all.”
“But Jewish.”
After the service ended, Kelly was trying to make a hasty exit when he heard
Reverend Henry Goode’s voice behind him.
“So what did you think?”
“UmA.it was quiteAinteresting.”
“You mean it was quite silly,” he replied genially.
“I didn’t say that. ”
“You didn’t have to. You don’t exactly have a stellar poker face.”
“It’s just aAbitAhard to swallowA”
“Just a bit? I would hope for a smart educated young man like yourself if would be
extremely hard to swallow. I would expect nothing less.”
Kelly had no intention of returning to the Thursday evening service at Reverend
Henry Goode’s Church of the One Christian Truth. But the next Thursday evening that
was exactly where he was.
Geography
Mark Belair
my childhood home / an old / clapboard / two-family affair in a connecticut mill town /
sat on a side street that inclined up to main / an incline that made me who i am today
across the tilted street from us / an obese florist lived above the small / fussy shop
from which she banned children / having none herself / and from which she sent her
older / cancer-stricken husband out on deliveries / claiming / with a theatrical sigh i
heard from outside / that the hill was just too much
next door to us stood a fine baptist church / the black worshippers / dressed to the
nines / flooding downhill sunday mornings to praise god with joyful hymns and
tambourines / all too festive for us grim / silent catholics whose cold / bleak church was
reached / more appropriately/ it seemed to us / by climbing up
an auto body shop clanked on our other flank / young mechanics with ducktails and
greasy hands repairing battered cars right in the road itself / one getting his leg
crushed when a raised car / spitting its jack / went for a downhill roll
and a set of lost brakes on a local dairy truck / cost my best friend freddy / knocked off
his new red bike / his life
but the incline to main was not the only fact of geography to form me / not at all / for
there are four seasons in connecticut / dense woods / lush lakes / and outcroppings of
rock that remember / through long wintry nights / the warmth of the sun
With eyes that already held more than human intentness, the baby
stared into the depths of the crystal monolith, seeing but not yet
understandingthe mysteries that lay beyond. It knew that it had
come home, that here was the origin of many races besides its own;
but it knew also that it could not stay. Beyond this moment lay
another birth, stranger than any in the past.
 Arthur C Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey
by Sandra Kohler
The Name of Our Nature
The creek's a blade of light that cuts
morning. I'm flat, blank. I’m afraid I’m
losing my subject: intense interactions
of the human heart. My head's a chaos
of shreds and patches. I need a grandchild,
a roomer, an affair. I need to tie red
rags to my black suitcases so they signal
me from the carousels, wave brightly as
they fly by. I need bananas I need time,
an hour or two of a light that's not broken,
breaking. Why do we love what scares us?
In my dream, it's snakes: my son tries to
keep them away from me, but here they
slither, two long ones. He insists we kill
and eat the old dog that belongs to us.
Afterwards, I complain to my husband,
"who do you think actually had to do
the killing?" I will slay the old dog of
our sorrows and cook him to feed my son,
yet I won't eat the flesh, consume what I
have prepared. I don't believe a word I'm
saying but truth has nothing to do with
my assent or refusal. These tales will not
exist unless I invent them. It's Heraclitus
I need here, for the right enigma. As I raise
the knife, the dream dog insists "you are
my sister." I'm torn to pieces. Who shall
I play with, my son or the dog? How do
I choose, what do I turn to game that is
deadly earnest? What earnest can I give
of what my heart intends? The name
of our nature is longing.
Influx
Tuesday’s rain is so gray I need to turn on lights
in the morning kitchen. Tuesday after a holiday,
so Tuesday doubled with Monday meaning:
resumption of the routine, real. I come back up
to the bedroom where my husband’s sleeping, wrap
a blanket around me instead of a robe, stare out
at the wet green grayed world, remembering that
in my dream a tribe of children are visiting, I put
them all to bed in different places in the house,
makeshift arrangements, realize there’s an extra:
a baby abandoned not on my doorstep but in
my bedroom, bed. I take him in, wondering why
he turned up, whose he is, accepting his presence
as part of this influx of children, a new regime
in my life’s history. Outside, cars on wet roads,
the sound that’s woken me for a string of days,
continual, replicated: an iteration of Tuesdays.
The east’s layered mass, gray to muddy taupe,
heavy, fraught. A line of local geese goes over,
heading north. I am going to drink my coffee,
empty my bladder, put on different shoes
and an attitude in which I can walk and talk
like the ordinary gods. I am going to make do,
make love, make poems, make a life incisive
as the vee of geese that goes north as I write.
I am going to be ready for what day doesn’t
bring and unready for what it does.
Gray
24 degrees with wind. The skies pallid, not the intense
cold's vivid azure, that hard hue. The scene is gray white:
the street's macadam paled by salt, the sidewalks, a dull
sheen of cold light everywhere. The branches of the gingko
tree across the street etched into disappearing gray twigs,
the silver plane vanishing above them I hear before and
after seeing it. My husband walks into the study wearing
a knitted gray hat. A briskly walking figure comes down
Tonawanda Street, hooded, down-encased. The fire
hydrant's yellow head is a stroke of another climate. All
the color's drained from the house fronts: yellows, pinks,
creams, rusts, browns infused with gray. Evelyn's red truck
across the street is frosted, glazed. Sitting at my computer,
there's a perfect echo on its screen of the room's light:
Venice, the gray white scrim of afternoon shimmering
over the Salute. I have come to live in another city of
watery skies, pale radiance, mutable, volatile. Not an
island like Venice, yet this life seems isolation, an island
nation surrounded by tides varying with the moon,
fluctuating barrier, not absolute but contingent. Living
so close to the lives of others that I hear their footsteps'
rise and fall, still they are unknown planets, distant,
veiled in watery layers gray as the scene before me.
by Ariel Dawn
Nine Storeys Above Inner City
Torn dresses, sarongs and bedclothes hang over August, the glare of stone churches
and clock above London Drugs. The sun like the alien lights of an operating theater.
When I close my eyes I shrink and grow: small as a pen nib, then ink spilling
under swollen lids. I’ve lived here a month and the room is still confused with whiskey
boxes.
My love left me a black linen nightgown and a diary: it fills my lap, the faded
leather. It opens like a hemlock forest and I float between lines --paper cuts before I
write the end or even the stars-- it closes with belts and metal and a long pin on a
string.
Nine Storeys Above Inner City: First published in Bare Hands Poetry
Alternative Medicine
This nun tried to heal me with Reiki. Her hands were wings and my skin the air, the
fog. She had a cottage by the sea and a bird she wanted babysat for a night, so I went
to Queenswood with my lover.
The bird hung in a blue kitchen. It sang of God and waves and gulls and shit and
feathers slipped through the bars until I covered the cage with a dark cloth.
In the medicine cabinet a bottle of muscle relaxants and in the living room
crystals and Jesus shots, we swallowed each other and crawled to a high single bed
by the window.
The stars and Jupiter. He was a centaur in the salt wind, he was a boy. I was old
enough to be a mother, though I’d barely developed breasts or a heart.
Alternative Medicine: First published in Tenement Block Review
Once I Lived
Once I lived in an abandoned brothel at the heart of Chinatown. Windows faced a
narrow red alley with dancing shafts of light. Underneath the dark painted walls were
rumors of pornography.
There was a girl, Dolores, half-asleep and laughing. She spoke of tunnels,
catacombs, opium, gambling. She waited naked in gold rooms above a service station,
while far down her body, through invisible doors and ritual rooms, she wrote poems like
silk brocade and velvet whispering.
In our place the sun never set or rose. Dolores had fatal diseases, so we made a
list of cafes, galleries and theaters. When it was dark ants crawled from the walls
toward what was edible --berries, cake, meat-- and they drowned in our cups of tea,
the leaves I wanted to read her.
Once I Lived: First published in Bare Hands Poetry
Found Fragments
David Glen Smith
i.
The mirror reflects a dense image of myself
in the mornings and evenings, when the halflight
pours out into the room, an open vase
spilling image, shadow. When I turn to face
my face, this is when I lose recognition
of the man you once knew; transformation
into a winged egret, silent metamorphosis,
grey-tipped feathers turning in excess, spiraling out towards—
This is the hour Caravaggio
worked, the time of modeling, of imitatio,
transference of a boy’s flesh from urchin
to saint, dirt still under the nails, the skin
glowing with street life, with pale mirroring
of the city to canvas, to paint, echoing
ii.
Recently, I dreamt about your hands, cold
against my own, stressing the differences
we always felt, but never acknowledged, until—
and strange, after four years, your image still holds
my memory tight, reshapes my words—that since
your leaving—still lie along the mind’s edge.
You were beautiful to me. Once. Certain
as the sounds of approaching rain,
the dampness in the distance, yet inherent,
undeniable, as motions through trees, spent
emotions we collected. Do I lie, tell you
I discovered someone else, someone new?
Do I tell you his beauty is like a fine, dense rain,
as a flood of levees, drowning out the horizon line—
iii.
—towards the waning moon, visible even
now at this hour of the morning, a paleness
repeating my freckled nature—and your hands
white as winter sunrise, fragile, a dangerous
flirting with strangers, moving always
to replace me with another—
One summer, for politics, I shaved
my head down to nothing, to a brief blue burr,
transforming my face to a wartime criminal,
pink triangles sewn on my clothing, my coats.
Death grinned, accented his soft bones;
the skeleton exposed in my facial features
left me, not as a plump Caravaggio boy,
but as the painter Schiele, withdrawn, the language cloyed
To a Former Lover in Minneapolis
1.
Without provocation,
from the swells
of the unmade bed,
my subconscious pulls you into view
encased in a raw youthfulness.
Once again, you rise in my dreams:
shirtless, luminous,
dark hair glowing in the warm,
grey room.
2.
Do you ever recall
the night I pulled you
out of the Afterlife?
No words exist
to explain the guttural sound
which woke me,
that alcoholic rattle
at three in the morning
which clattered from your throat
as we lay grounded, living within
our empty lives: a bare mattress
in a barren room.
Your body choked— wet with sweat
and bile—trying to spew
out the evening’s alcohol,
to retch out life.
Yet you remained unconscious,
inert, not comprehending the full tide
of compensation left to pay back.
We transformed to an ugly pieta:
me supporting your holy head,
David Glen Smith
the naked body translated
to a new level, transported
to an aspect of divinity,
a new awareness—
3.
I never understood
why you wanted Death to rise
within your life, personified
as a trick in his late twenties.
Glassy-eyed. Coked up.
His right arm flicking ashes indifferently
as he lay next to you
in the dark, without emotion,
as he breathed in smoke,
considering the hairline cracks
running along the ceiling—
considering your t-cells spinning languidly
in thin-walled veins. Sometimes while you slept,
he would curl beside you, caress your forearm,
and tap inside the elbow to raise
the lines of green-blue channels,
to loosen out a casual
bruise for a matter of days.
He would watch it fade
from a dark violet to a sickly green.
Under half-closed lids,
his eyes measure
the distance of the future
from the edge of the bed.
4.
For a number of years
I had not dreamt of you.
Your ghost memory
avoided my room until
last autumn, when your body
was found as a moses-tongued swallow
trapped in a decaying house.
For me, your death remains
an unquiet frustration, a stone
cast between hands,
shifting back and forth,
restlessly. Agitated as a murder of crows
or a coven of ravens.
Remember how I once wrote
of feathers falling from your dark hair?
Every action from your comb
brushed out pinions, a collection of dark wings—
proof of actuality of your moment.
5.
As a mild bruising, forgiveness stains
within— spreads out,
rearranging impressions.
Or as uncertain stigmata,
discoloration left behind on bed sheets,
suggestions from past histories,
overt as cigarette burns and IV drips,
rusty blood pooling in small blotches,
the casual splurge of semen.
We carry these stains
within our lives
as a funerary shroud,
a coarse muslin,
wrapped closely against the skin,
as we step trembling
into the Afterworld.
Only I lied when I told you
that sins of the past were forgotten.
It is the same lie
I offer my son at night
rocking a sense of security
into his blood. The same lie
which repeats in my head at eventide,
when personal histories reel out slowly—
6.
Some stories are never resolved.
They spiral within themselves
in infinite loops of lost conversations—
some people clutch their denouements
tightly, as a clutch of dried flowers
or fading paper blossoms.
Like myself: it all falls back
to the beginning, the core memory
of you and I in side-street alleys,
between warehouse bars
by the riverfront, groping
to find the other’s cannibalistic desire,
reaching within to pull forward
a sense of truth hidden
in the folds of damp clothing—
7.
Afterwards,
when you moved
from the waters of the Material World
and stood surrounded by hands
lifting you forward,
pulling you upwards,
was Ruth there as well to raise
your trembling into her fixed resolve?
I want to imagine her
supporting your coarse frame
drying off the slick waters
from your full body
from your fresh trembling
in the strange new air
of the Here After.
I see her paleness
slowly unknitting the threads
of what was left of your mortal coil,
bringing your essence
into an ever-changing light,
a light burning away all colors,
blurring individuality into
the new collective of awareness.
A soft rocking of assurance.
Maia at the Mirror
David Glen Smith
Maia dreams of a river where white wolves run
until she realizes it is morning;
then she pulls back her hair, confronts the mirror,
looks at herself underwater, between tides.
In her hands she feels scissors; thinks
of the white wolves. She watches herself move,
hold back the hair, and begin to cut away at the image.
In a few minutes she holds a bright comet tail, her pale hands
twitching.
She knows her lover will
not understand. She knows Diana had liked to comb
out the thick braid between her fingers,
dress the lean body in medieval-white gowns, place
her nude arms around the waist. Her dolphin eyes
staring at the two of them.
Maia, feeling the apartment closing in,
imagines herself in Anam, walking towards the bay,
braiding pearls in her hair,
brushing sand from her lover’s legs. She feels
her dress growing wings— they raise her over the surf and the shells,
her hair becoming caught in the sun’s mouth.
She imagines herself in Anam,
sees in the distance old men leaving the sea
with large, gray loaves bundled on their backs,
walking towards the city for the open market.
She has a different name, something that sounds like
Julia or Michaela, but no— something
like Sarah.
It’s then, she sees Diana
stooping in the sand, picking stray shells,
dull pebbles. Maia’s shadow darts behind her,
in the shape of a wolf’s open mouth, pausing before
the incoming tide.
TO REST
Kathie Giorgio
You are walking home from the bus stop when you come across an envelope, there
flat on the sidewalk, twenty feet in front of you. It’s nothing new, there’s always trash
here, just part of the day to day detritus that collects when people are too lazy to wait
for the next trash can. The envelope lies smack in the middle, splotches of puddle all
around, but you can see as you get closer that it’s dry. A fresh dropping then. In the
gray of late winter, it’s a pristine cream. The flap side is toward you, and it’s sealed.
Picking it up, you turn it over. No address. No name. Nothing. And so clean. All the
way to its corners.
It’s card-size, like the greeting cards you pore over at the Hallmark store on Sunset.
You like the Hallmark better than the Factory Card Outlet, where cards are only sixtynine cents. Hallmark’s cards are pricier and somehow, they make you feel like you’re
more sincere when you shop there. Like Hallmark cards have impassioned thoughts
tucked into them, thoughts that couldn’t be stopped by practicality or the economy.
You don’t actually buy many cards though. Thought or not, economy or not, there is
no need.
You consider placing the card on a low brick wall, out of harm’s way, so that the
person who lost it can find it. But then you move ahead, and the card moves with you.
All down the block, you consider what could be in that envelope.
A birthday card, with bright red and blue and green balloons, a verse chortling
morbid over the years.
Maybe a pastel anniversary, with barely-there wedding bells embossed on the front,
and words that recall a gown and a tuxedo, some children, more years, and a steady
love.
The love leads your thoughts to romance and you wonder if this is a romantic card,
one of those bought on the spur of the moment, money spent (Hallmark prices) on
love unnudged by a holiday.
Or maybe it’s for a new baby.
At home, you collect your mail, then stand at the counter to open it. And the
envelope too. You play nonchalant, hard to get, leaving it for last, and then you work
at it carefully, lifting the flap, with no tear other than the separation of the glue. You
wonder if someone licked it to stick, or if they had one of those little sponges attached
to a plastic tube that you fill with water and use instead of saliva. You always thought
those would be for the superbly busy. No time to be intimate, even with an envelope.
The card inside is gold, pale in the center, giving way to a mottled orange glow at
the edges. There are leaves. And a dragonfly. The first words you read are, We’re
Thinking Of You, which makes you smile, as if the universe dropped this message
from the sky, just for you. How nice to be thought of by the universe. How nice to be
thought of. But then the next line stops you cold. In the loss you feel>
It’s a mourning card. A condolence card. A card sent to the living after someone
else has died.
In the loss you feel,
there is deep sadness.
Those lines bring them back, the various losses that you feel. The people who
were there and then were undeniably gone. The ultimate definition of gone.
Sometimes, with a death, it seemed to happen in a matter of seconds. But the other
losses, the unexplained ones, go on still.
-your mother. Passed for eight years now. A stroke, followed quickly by another at
the hospital, and then dead in the middle of the night. There was no time to prepare
for her absolute exit. No way to return to normal. For over six months, you were
poised in mid-conversation with your mother. A sale at Target, did she see the flannel
sheets? A funny item on the news. But when spring came, and the first robin
appeared, and you picked up the phone to call your mother and realized she wouldn’t
answer, the grief washed over you like a rainbow’s end, sunk into the ground. Your
mother kept calendars for years, showing the dates of the first robin. After clearing out
her things, you’d kept the calendars, looked at those circles, red, around dates in
March, a few in April, one in February. That spring, you threw them out. All but one.
The year you were born, the first robin showed up five days after you did. Now, when
you see the first robin, you head to the cemetery, grace your mother’s grave with
yellow daffodils and scattered birdseed.
-your father. Invisible for thirty years. You were ten years old when there was an
argument and you heard the door slam. It was, according to your alarm clock, a few
minutes after two in the morning. The next day, you sat on the front step, waiting for
your father to come home. You didn’t usually; you finished your homework right after
school and then spent the rest of the time until dinner watching game shows and
reruns of Star Trek. But on this day, the front step. And for the next two weeks, the
front step. Until your mother begged you to just come inside. It was a long while
before you stopped listening for the strike of a match as your father sat in his chair,
lighting a cigarette before asking you how your school day was, if you’d done your
homework, to see your report card. Before your mother could dispose of it, you took
your father’s book of matches and hid it in your room. Thirty years later, you still do a
google search every third Sunday in June.
-your friends. So many scattered, here and there, like glitter from a shaker jar.
When you graduated from high school, there wasn’t an internet yet. Friends became
Ma Bell’s long-distance charges and then quickly written notes, then Christmas
newsletters, then hasty signatures. All that’s left are photos in the yearbooks you keep
in your closet. There were new friends here and there, popping up like spring crops,
but then plowed under with fall’s harvest. You never knew what you did. Not enough
phone calls? Too many? Too many sentences beginning with “I” or “You should”? You
don’t know. Now, there are only the people at work; you talk with them, laugh, share
lunch, sometimes an afterwork drink. You smile over their photos of children, sign
group birthday cards, wedding cards, baby cards purchased, of course, at Hallmark.
But on the weekends, when you go to the movies, you go alone. If you go at all.
-your job. Oh, remember that one? Yes, you’re working now, but there was that
job. The one you loved. The one that made you want to get out of bed in the morning.
Until the layoffs. You mourned for weeks, the loss of something that wasn’t even a
someone. And then you found another job. Nine to five. You found some laughs and
shared lunches in a crowded cafeteria. But in the morning, you hit the snooze button
over and over until the absolute last minute. And past. Often, you’re late.
You look down at the card on your counter. The gold shading out to orange. Not
orange, not really, that’s a bright soda color. A harvest orange. Autumn. Sunset. You
read the next lines.
But in the life you celebrate,
there is even
deeper meaning.
You and the card sit down on your loveseat.
You think about that word, celebrate. The life you celebrate, and you wonder
whose life you do. You wonder about who the card was for, whose life he or she was
celebrating, if he or she was celebrating at all. You think of Kool & the Gang’s song,
Celebrate, and its verse immediately, alarmingly, twines through your head. “Celebrate
good times, come on! There’s a party goin’ on right here, a celebration to last
throughout the year. So bring your good times! And your laughter too! We’re gonna
celebrate your party with you. C’mon now.” And you look around and wonder, what
party? What celebrate?
What life? Whose?
That word, celebrate, so close, you think, to celibate. Change the i to an e, throw in
an r, you have the same thing. But their meanings just don’t run parallel. They run
away in opposite directions.
You wonder if that’s why celebrate is so far out of your vocabulary. You wonder if
you don’t celebrate life because of your celibate life.
In the loss you feel, there is deep sadness.
You touch the golden dragonfly between the We’re Thinking Of You and In the loss
you feel. You can almost cup the delicate engine of its wings, trapped beneath your
fingers. Then you turn on the television and set the card on the cushion beside you.
Canned conversation and images flow around you and there are stories to follow, but
while you stare straight ahead, you still see the soft orange by your thigh. There is one
more item you can add to the list. More than one. A group. But one in particular.
-your lover(s). The last, a five-year relationship. Almost monogamous. It was an
affair and you knew going in that those lasted only an average of twenty-four months.
You knew from reading the magazines. You knew from Oprah. And you knew from the
others. But this one, five years. He said he loved you. He called you his best friend.
While he was married, you met at your place, spent evenings watching movies on the
couch, then climbed the stairs to your bed, where you could pretend for a while that he
would stay. That in the middle of the night, when you opened your eyes and saw that it
was a few minutes after two, you could reach out to him and touch a warm shoulder,
trace his mouth that would lift in a smile you couldn’t see in the dark, but you could feel
in the moist split of lips, the tease of a tongue. There could be love at two o’clock in
the morning.
But he always had to go back home. To her. Long before two o’clock, the only
thing you touched, when you reached out, was the dark.
And then suddenly, he was no longer married. And he was gone. You didn’t stay
that night either, you were the one that climbed out of bed, at his place, his new place,
that first night on his own. He kissed you and told you he wanted to date. To
experience. And he gave you a card that said he’d always think of you. That you
always have a place in his heart. That envelope was blue. And it wasn’t sealed. He
hadn’t touched it with his tongue, or even a sponge. You climbed out of bed and he
walked you to the door and you carried the card home. You keep it in the top drawer
of the bedside table on what you still consider his side of the bed.
Celibate. Celebrate life.
You leave the card on the counter, not back in its pristine cream envelope, but
tucked under the flap. Caressed on both sides by the glue that might have been
moistened by a thoughtful tongue. And then you go to your side of the bed.
In the loss you feel, there is deep sadness.
****
In the morning, you rush for work, having been caught up with the snooze button
again. Your coffeepot has a timer and you bless it as you move around your kitchen,
sipping from the mug that was brewed before your eyes even opened. The card, its
soft orange glow a match for sunrise as well as sunset, captures your attention, and
you flip it open to see the rest of the verse inside.
And in the memories
you cherish, may there be
so much goodness and love
that they will offer comfort
when you need it most
When you need comfort the most is when you suffer a new loss, and somehow, the
memories don’t provide for that. The first robin, a father’s struck match, the looking
forward, a lover’s shudder. Did it help to think of years-ago calendars with spring-
circled dates as the shared side of your bed grew cold? Did it help to think of a halffilled matchbook while your mother choked a last breath without a single final word?
Or when a career suddenly spiraled down into a pink slip and business cards that no
longer mattered? No. Of course not.
You wish you’d never picked up the envelope. You wish you’d left it to blend in with
the low brick wall. You scoop it up to pitch it into your garbage can when the streak of
a penstroke catches your eye.
At the bottom, under the printed With Sincere Sympathy, is a single name. Kelly
Kogan. You flip to the front of the card. We’re Thinking of You.
Back to the name. Singular.
Which makes you wonder. Why get a We’re card if you’re all by yourself?
You tuck the card under the flap. And then you go to work.
****
At lunchtime, you sit around a circular table with your co-workers. The noise of the
cafeteria surrounds you, reminding you of school lunches. You huddled then too, with
your brown paper sack and your yearbook friends, and you talked about the others and
yourselves and teachers and the world. Here, you make yourself a salad, rich with
ham and cheese and hard-boiled egg, topped with a parmesan dressing, and your coworkers join you, some with salads, some with sandwiches, a few with the meal deal of
the day: sloppy joes. You all talk around full mouths, trying to get in as much calories
and conversation as you can in the hour off, and everyone makes fun of the other coworkers, everyone complains about the boss. One of the women announces an
engagement and there is a group grab for her hand, a sudden admiration of the
twinkle there. A man mentions that his son is walking now and how exhausting it is,
and how you only want babies to walk until they do, and then you wish they were
teetering on their diapered butts again. The table laughs.
And then you bring up the weekend. Any plans? you ask. Maybe a movie?
There’s a new one opening at the Majestic, maybe someone would like to come
along? Grab a drink after?
There is a pause, forks held still, sandwiches midway to mouths. And then smiles.
Excuses. Busy, they say. Family. Dates. Some other time. They quickly clean up and
scatter like glitter back to their desks. You still have salad left, and ten minutes of your
lunch hour, and so you scoop lettuce around and finish. A clean plate.
Then you return to your desk as well. You reflect smiles the rest of the afternoon.
Laugh at a joke during a coffee break.
But in the loss you feel, there is deep sadness.
****
After setting up your coffee pot for the next morning, you go upstairs to bed. You
bring the card with you, envelope and all.
You undress in the dark. You undress your side of the bed. The other stays
tucked. There is a smooth and full pillow on top. All queen size sheet sets seem to
come with two pillowcases. You used to think that was hopeful.
Moving to the made-up side of the bed, you sit at the foot and look around. In the
sitting area by a small television, there are two slipper chairs. Downstairs, your island
counter sports four barstools. Your living room has a couch and a loveseat and a
recliner, as well as a rocking chair tucked into a little reading nook, one of your favorite
places in the house. There is a dining room with a table for eight. A guest room with a
fold-out futon.
The card is in your lap.
We’re Thinking Of You. Kelly Kogan. A plural card. A singular person. A We for
an I.
Carefully, you slide up the bed, not wanting to muss the sheets and blanket. You
touch the drawer where a card tells you that you will be in someone’s heart forever.
The drawer below holds a calendar, a date circled in red in March of a long ago year.
There is a half-filled book of matches, a fistful of useless business cards. In the closet,
there are yearbooks. You set the envelope, flap side up, then stand the card on top of
it, on this end table that you still think of as his. Then you walk around and get into
your side of the bed.
You can’t see the card, but you know it’s there. At two in the morning, you can
touch it, feel the upraised edges of its words. You can glance your fingers over the
silent dragonfly, stroke the pristine cream, the reminder of day to day detritus.
We’re Thinking of You. Plural. Singular.
Who?
In the loss you feel, there is deep sadness.
“Oh, I see it,” she said. “I am older now. Your world has no roof.
You look right out into the high place and see the great dance with
your own eyes. You live always in that terror and that delight, and
what we must only believe you can behold…”
 C S Lewis, Perelandra
I See Beauty in All Your Little Fatalisms
Adam Tedesco
I’ve reached the most radical fringe. In the veins of every stone I see bad things the
universe is going to do to us. If you’re at a party and you look around, you’ll see all the
births. I see blood mixing with water. It’s so elegant that it really begs this silly
question: What’s the chance of a neutron saying goodbye? I’ve gotten comfortable in
the enormity of particles; losing sight of the math pulling us from the reified. My
narrator says: See yourself, ushered out of past arrangements, now silenced in a
valence of womb.
Everything is ones and zeros and halves. Belief has nothing to do with this. Not
tonight. The charges are there. I walk across the room and feel them as we touch
knees. You ask me how I can believe in something I can’t explain to my four-year old. I
ignore the question. I can’t explain you to my four-year old. Not tonight.
Cistern Sestina
Adam Tedesco
The kind of dream we’re creating has broken hands
And I can’t find the hand holes, can’t find the spot I buried you
So I crawl the cisterns perimeter palming the earth for your heat in the stretches
Between missing you and remembering that now you’re that death I know inside
So I kneel to you and light a candle and think I descend the stairs of the temple
But I never really leave anything but my head when I’m drinking
To worship you, to say your prayer I begin and end with drinking
Then sit alone at the bar scribbling with these useless fucking hands
Pretending they could ever get good at holding anything but my temple
I’m shaky again remembering I once had something, anything but you
In the places I let myself fall apart in exhaustion, in the invisible inside
Now I’m sweating this out, laying here as time stretches
I wake cold most days shivering alive, lying to myself about how time stretches
It’s these lies that lead me to you, to the prayers, the drinking
That surround my worship, the bivouac I look for you inside
Until I’m on my knees again, seeing with my hands
Laying myself flat and taught to try to lure you
Watching the doors, waiting for you to descend from the temple
It’s just one more lie I tell myself, knowing no one ever leaves that temple
Built by sick men like me who stab themselves to see how the wound stretches
When you reach inside it and pull out something wet and red, something like you
Sliding out of your mother while I was laughing and drinking
While I was holding the sick back and pounding the bar with these stupid hands
I was already letting you become something dead inside
Now there’s a park full of cairns made out of dead things inside
They’re perfect, like the ones we see on the walk to the Stupa from the temple
It’s hard to believe they were made with these shaky hands
When the ground beneath them warms, the earthen surface stretches
Then all the dead things fall down and I start drinking
Once I can bear it I start sifting through the piles looking for you
I’m wondering if I’m really here or if I’m dead somewhere inside of you
Considering the possibility that every outside is someone’s inside
Maybe we’re just falling through increasingly slower insides when we’re drinking
I’ve seen the insides of all of them, every delicate temple
I try to forget their glistening; sitting here feeling how, in time, the body stretches
Wondering if you were something I made with my cock, or my hands
How many more of you will I need to build myself a temple?
Where I can sit in acceptance during these stretches
Between remembering you and waking from the dream of broken hands
Molt Adam Tedesco
Always hold the
sense of holding
My mother’s friend
in a murder-suicide
Twenty years ago
I want my to be my
Mother’s only friend
Twenty years ago
I ask for her
Prediction, if I could
Be a different person
I wanted a gun to make it
Happen quickly now
I’m going to die
Always playing me first
To take it back, the telling
The waiting, the finding
We press a drop of good
From this stretch of strip malls
Shingled and brick-faced
It makes me
Hold my phone
In a blood embrace
Holding still
A different person
Assuming there is
Good here still,
Even in the ocean
As it fucks itself
Back together
Smart For Hard Living
Adam Tedesco
Roots and tuberous fibers lay atop the pile of salvaged things I thought contained the
possibility of becoming beautiful again. Grass is coming home where I turned
everything over with a yellow machine two years ago trying to outsmart rainwater. I
made a mountain out of little patches of ice melting and dug a moat at the crotch of the
hill. I desiccated the tendons of my hands shoveling stones into that hole, imagining
them as different parts of your body, wishing they were, in the summer after you left us.
Song for Soldiers
Maurice Emerson Decaul
All of us beautiful & young we were beautiful & so young
our cheeks sunken by hunger
our youth squandered on the whims of grey headed men
Eyes distant & lifeless
death waits to offer us as sacrifice to the undertaker
all of us beautiful & young we were beautiful & so young
Each just one of an infinite number
time immemorial, restless
our youth squandered on the whims of grey headed men
When shelling is relentless
they say: build a deeper bunker
all of us beautiful & young we were beautiful & so young
& after the war, narcotics make us listless
& too many of us fall into an unshakeable slumber
our youth squandered on the whims of grey headed men
& none are guiltless
not the warmonger, the pacifists not the taxpayer
all of us beautiful & young we were beautiful & so young
our youth squandered on the whims of grey headed men
The Pleasure Of Remembering Has Not Been Lost
Maurice Emerson Decaul
You love us, when we’re heroes home from war
with stories withheld until loosed by liquor or
sex or years or much reading of the war poets.
You love us still, we boys, pleasant & industrious
rage full & murderous, blood alone
makes the grass grow greener & higher, sight
alignment sight picture slow steady
my rifle is my only friend
& you love us mothers
& wives remembering the memory of your sons
as fondly as you do
& it matters-Your nostalgia, when the boy
in the photos, the man who promises not till death
has had his capacity to love smalled by distance.
The Old Woman who lived in the Cottonwood Cabin
by m.j. cleghorn
The old woman lived in a cottonwood cabin in The Butte or what the town people
called The other side of the river and always in hushed tones. She had lived in a cabin
made of cottonwood tree, since before there was a town not made of cottonwood tree.
The old woman had lived so long along the dead silt river, that no one could remember
her name. But everyone knew of the Old Woman who lived in the cottonwood cabin on
the other side of the river was. And that was enough.
Now she was dead, and that caused a stir among the town people, who‒ between
the two lodges named after things they liked to hunt and three churches, one being
congressional, the other two non-congressional‒ felt a certain something. Everyone
agreed the woman deserved a decent burial. The undertaker went to the cabin and
hauled the body back across the river, but somehow that didn’t seem right. The old
woman had always lived in the Cottonwood Cabin, on the other side of the river in The
Butte. Now she was about to spend eternity with the town people. It was the main topic
of conversation at the Burt’s Drug Store and Soda Fountain, Buds Gas N’ Dine, The
Ice Hole Bar, Kay’s Food and City Hall where The Mayor had just won re- election in a
split vote.
The discussion ran the usual course.
“Hey, Joey!”
“Hey, Rusty.”
“We’re neighbors.”
“Yeah, how long that been?”
“Oh, a while.”
“Say, how ‘bout, that weather?”
“Oh yeah, how ‘bout it,”
“And the river?”
“Yeah, the river.”
“Say isn’t that something about the old woman in the cottonwood cabin?”
“Really something.”
“And how about that weather?”
“Oh yeah, and how about it?”
It was decided. The old woman in the cottonwood cabin had died during break-up.
Now was the late May thawing. The dead could never be buried in winter. The ground
was frozen solid, more than six feet under. The loved and lost were kept in a big
community meat locker and morgue, tunneling beneath the bank, until early summer.
Summer was funeral season‒ a time between the last snow and the first salmon. It
was the time to lay the old woman in the cottonwood cabin to rest. Everyone who
didn’t need to be anywhere else that day, made their way over to the other side of the
river in The Butte, to do right. There had been very little talk of just what the right thing
was, but the town people understood how to improvise. If the cows went dry and died
in winter and you liked crème in your coffee, naturally you would use canned milk
instead. Improvise. If the first freeze hit before you could finish your house, dig out the
basement and live there until next year’s thaw. Improvise. A tired iron woodstove and
your woodpile will keep you warm and alive at 30-below zero, without power. Water
can be melded from ice and boiled. Fish can be caught and canned. Current berries
and crabapples make good jams. Improvise. If a church burned down, the bars on
Main Street were closed on Sunday and empty. Improvise. Use it up, wear it out, or do
without. All their days were painted by improvise; it was the only way of life they knew.
Most of the town people chose this place out of desperation. They came north from
desperate places with names like Fishkill and Turnback. They came from places in the
mid-west and Oklahoma and Michigan, with dirt still under their fingernails. They came
from days of sharecropping. They knew work. Barehanded. They cleared trees and
planted sharecropper food. Food that could be counted on to fill their hungry, tired
bellies. Food of their fathers and mothers and grandfathers. Honest food that was
pulled from the earth with willing hands. Potatoes. Cabbage. Carrots. They knew
hardship, but it did not make them hard. It made them kind. Alone in a wide wild
country, a cold country, tolerance equaled survival. The town people had a code of
honor and many unwritten laws, accepted in silent agreement. The town people did not
know the old woman who lived in the cottonwood cabin, but they knew of her, and that
was enough.
In all the years that she had lived on the other side of the river, no one could
remember ever visiting the old women in the cottonwood cabin, no one was sure what
to do once they got there. The town women brought funeral food. Funeral potatoes
cooked by the congregational church ladies. A tried and true favorite, consisting of last
year’s potatoes pulled from cellars (number 2’s), boiled, chopped and mixed with
homemade mayonnaise and onions and salt and pepper and paprika and dill. Noncongressional church ladies liked to add a few cups of celery. Funeral cakes: the
prevue of the congressionalist women. Mrs. Howard Dunn was the undisputed queen
of the funeral cake. It was a highly prized art with its own category in the town fair. The
rules were simple and stanchly ad headed to. Nothing fancy, no bright colors. It was
not a birthday cake or a wedding cake. It was a funeral cake. Plain chocolate icing (not
milk‒ too light,) or caramel. Defiantly, no fillings. Frivolous. And of course there would
be funeral casseroles. Green bean. Noodle. Canned soups. The drinks played an
important role. Ecumenical. Coffee, lemonade and Russian tea. Russian tea was
mandatory, concocted from powered orange drink, ice tea mix and cinnamon. When
hot coco was in short supply, Russian tea fit the bill. This, alongside refrigerator rolls
and a few stray cookies, was funeral food. It was laid out in a solemn procession by
the town church women, on makeshift tables butted against each other, in a long
straight rows, covered with sewn together sheets (plain.)
The mayor and the townspeople decided to give the old woman a casket of
cottonwood. The high school Woodshop teacher. Mr. Smith “Smitty,” who was also the
janitor, had overseen its construction. He’d known the old woman as a boy. His father
would sometimes bring the old woman extra moose meat from the family cache. They
would share hot cups of rosehip tea, homemade sourdough bread and canned
salmon. They would talk about the river. The weather. The old woman would show
them her garden, a tangle of wild dog roses and raspberry brambles, surrounding
patches of purple turnips and birch woods, alive with loud ravens and chickadees.
The casket was fashioned from an old cottonwood tree believed to be at least
three hundred years old, according to old Mr. Burns, who counted three hundred rings
when the tree came down. “Old America” is what the town people called it. It was Feld
and stripped, the boards kilned for a week at Burns sawmill. A tribute to the old
woman. Her body had been prepared free of charge by the town undertaker. The town
church women had dressed the old woman in a grey taffeta grown from the 5-and-Ten.
Her white hair was combed back from her face and lightly dusted with a lily scented
powder. The women dabbed a faint pink gloss, called sunset twilight, across her lips.
She was even fitted with a pair of pearl satin slippers.
Early that morning the men had set up the tables, followed by the town church
women who laid out the funeral food. Next, the town Hearse with the old woman in her
cottonwood casket now returned to her cottonwood cabin on the other side of the river.
Small groups of people gathered talked among themselves in hushed tones. No one
wanted to be the first at the buffet table. The mayor, the congressional and noncongressional preachers were huddled in contemplation. They had an idea. Brother
Sam from the Church of the Stumps, suggested that since the old woman’s
cottonwood cabin was already hanging halfway over the broken river bank, why not
tuck her casket inside? After all, it was her home, and the place she loved most in life,
then let nature do the rest.
The mayor said “What about bears.”
Brother Cain said “How about we catch it on fire and shove it in the river?”
Brother Sam of the church of the stumps objected on account of the fact that the
old woman who lived in the cottonwood cabin was not some kind of Viking. After a fair
amount of rock kicking and mosquitos swatting, a decision was made. As Brother Tom
sat respectfully hatless, on the big orange backhoe borrowed from the town’s Snow
removal shed, the townspeople bowed their heads and watched as the pall bears from
the lodge escorted the old woman in her cottonwood casket back inside her
cottonwood cabin, gently placing it between the bed and the little cabin window,
framing the icy blue mountains against the may sky. The only sound was the sound of
old glaciers melting into the maundering river.
Quietly the men shut the door behind them, heads bowed.
“Dear Lord,” the Mayor began the eulogy, “we wish Gods speed to the old woman
who lived in the cottonwood cabin on the other side of the river, a place she loved, and
thought fill with wonder. May the mighty glacier filled Matanuska river currents cradle
her and make her journey past Cook Inlet, into the Gulf of Alaska and beyond swift and
sure.”
The “amen” was drowned out by the roar of the back hoe doing did its job. The
town people stood near the water’s edge and saw the snug Cottonwood cabin slide
sideways into the churning silver river, right itself, and float away. The rest of the
afternoon was spent enjoying the wake and complementing the old woman’s good
sense in all things. And even though, the town people didn’t know The Old Woman
Who Lived in the Cottonwood Cabin On the other side of the river, they knew of her.
And that was enough.
Billy was displayed there in the zoo in the simulated Earthling habitat. Most of
the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City,
Iowa. There was a color television set and a couch that could be converted
into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the
couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting in deeral gold, except in the kitchen and
bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the center of the floor.
There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the
couch.
There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The
television didn’t. There was a picture of one cowboy killing another one
pasted to the television tube. So it goes.
There were no walls in the dome, no place for Billy to hide. The mint green
bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got of his lounge chair now,
went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.
 Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse Five
by Jenny Aileen
Afternoon
the threading through the buttons on your shirt mean the most to me as does your
handwriting just like your arm around my restful body your resting body is my favorite
centerpiece on my favorite table in my favorite memory with ease I love you so whole
and rich am I when you are so close to me that I feel I am lying at the deepest oceans
floor and the closest bad thing is as far as the next galaxy which thrives on the hope of
one day meeting a thing as grand as the very threading on the buttons of your shirt.
Yellow Porcelain Tile.
I realized that I had never fully placed my feet flat on the cold community tile bathroom
floors. But finally and unintentionally, I let down from the platforms of them and
experienced the way of comfort in a place I share with others, on yellow square tile
that knows things and sees people that I do not. Now that we have truly met, maybe
the tiles will whisper things about me to others that rest their feet bare on them and
maybe my secrets will slither from the mouths of the grout and enter the pores of the
bottom of strangers’ feet and maybe I will finally be a part of people I do not know in
ways that I will never see.
Robin(s)
Your quick pulse and the slow coming gasoline You’d disappear and set the table for a
view of the downtown I’d leave The best decision of your life was the worst for me but
it left you relieved Turns out I was just unfamiliar with the safety features But I thought
you were comfortable with my stature, I thought we were the same brand of creature
Legs on the wall, thoughts mixed in with the cactus breeze I couldn’t breathe, it was
okay. I should have known then that I didn’t outweigh your desire to resituate but in the
square, running through the streets, I missed you, but you didn’t miss me. My hands
made you tear after a week spent apart, I accepted everywhere that you have ever
been or seen. But you didn’t miss me. We hid at the end of your driveway, you up on
the hill, or up against the overstated bridge that you pulled me down from still. Is it
possible that it was the day we spent in the dark of a basement? I never got enough of
you to myself. Dark American nine o clock Spirits, Or was it a little helicopter landing
pad on top of the lofts I shouldn’t pretend that I can’t still hear it. Hell knows that I can.
And I suppose a day will come that your smirk becomes all the pasts I’ve seen, Or you
pain will just really mean nothing to me. I shouldn’t writhe now in the loss of your
name, For when I lose your voice my life will really be back to ‘same’ in the most
terrible way.
Contextual Despotism
Jonathan Doughty
Arterial power vectors intersect at odd angles
In their games of Kerplunk
And in that incipient clearing’s
Capillaried bounds
Misshapen figures emerge
United in their untiedness
Doing battle, ready or not
New ships sailing full and harbor-bound
Become such in seizing a right
Without the singular basis on which to
As new horizons emerge only from those beyond
Once pledging silence
But finally daring
Then speaking
Ears to the shells, a cacophony of voices
All soliciting the sovereign’s exception
The law – that guarantor of figures to break it, that
Sly prophet of itself, says
Be, and it is
Specimens of deviance already assured as
Pettish petty despots shake and strain so in their tiny pulls
Locked in position on shifting grounds and imperfectly competing
Against rivals to their access
What a curious shame how
Praise iterates now in irony and ennui
While hate still awaits
Fresh new readings by brave figures flexing their limits
Nudging and elbowing others to clear enough wordspace
Busting trust and nuts
And witch-hunted syllables burn just as once did entire volumes
As others have problems turning the other ear
Undocumented Sex
Jonathan Doughty
Comfort and safety sought in off-limit spaces
Such a rich, satisfying thrust
Crossing a tight, guarded border, back and forth
But lack’s desire always risks
Ending in returns to exclusion and confinement, and a
Weighted tyke bequeathed to a collective traumatized, semi-functional
With penchants for lasting, cold silence under the threat of return violence
Undocumented and never forgotten
Canola
Jonathan Doughty
Squeaky silo doors prick ears
Inning outing plowing seedling space
That pleased the eyes and swallowed the hunger
Desire’s deposit forced in a fertile furrow
Rain is coming, bringing growth
And ceasing sheds
An archive of your unwant
Just barely bare life
Grounded in your own field
Sustained for a mere term,
A few seasons
If your crop’s untoward
Uproot it with ease
By hand or machine
Harvest time!
Extract every bit of its precious essence
From the rich loam expanse
Where earlier trod the wild mare with a gang of stallions
Hale and coupling
Post-yield loss mounts
With reaping done
Storage drips in torrents without a bung
But its level does not diminish
While it saturates the inside
Nothing will sop up
This bitter biofuel
Virginian Ilex
Jonathan Doughty
A bottom lip wasting from a freshman habit of dip
Split finally once Ilex left school for cool summertime Appalachia
Cracking into its class schedule had been breezy with a lovinghearted aunt
Running computers at our school
Both wanting it to last on and in similar pains
Despairing of its sordid past, a road trip to retrieve some semblance of
Manhood seemed well at hand
Northing, by a shotgun heart eating itself out of hunger and a Google sextant
The mountains held nothing but fug and misplaced direction
And the causes against loneliness left untouched
By the fall
Ilex had increased bodily with great legs of cottage cheese and liver
Of slow, deliberate failure
Inheritance/Iteration
Jonathan Doughty
The creator revived just as the author died
Missing the mark, original sin was pointedly unseated
But soon replaced by structure’s genesis, suspension of ignorance.
Nonage to limit, absence at core, and fetish of text all
Found lovers of god with guilt and man’s critics with angst
The fall of man and that into humanity could not transcend
For the deception was an angel of light and a lucid cogito
Holy saints and perfervid scholars invoked in defense
Looked on from beyond in times of martyrdom and suicide
Glossolalia fell upon the once-provincial
And the reception unto
Eternal life provided
Just time enough
For discourse
Unceasing.
by Nate Duke
Doc Gnarly
On your ways between Katahdin and Springer following the white stripes of the
Appalachian Trail you must see many other boys in their forest green and khaki
fatigues. I hope your beard has taken up the life of the Shenandoah. You still teach
boys the power of their noses, as they smell you long before they see you. Hiking
through the night so the bears can’t see you. You told me there’s always room for one
more in the iron shelters of the Smokies. When last we spoke you were eating
mashed potatoes out of a dog bowl and telling about your five walks over the vertebrae
of the Appalachians. I have too much to do and cannot be contained to the single
activity of walking, but I hope that you do not stop. The white blazes, they will carry
you.
Mass
And how do we move with that kind of certainty in these vaguely unique days
in which even the q’s are g’s and the things in your ribcage could not be found in one
acre of Ozark forest. We were never quite interested enough in water for its merit of
motive power bereft of judgment. In response to an inquiry into the identity of “we”, the
corporation requests that you consider all those questing for that unique callipygian
form of happiness and the particular sense of confederacy bound to arise in such a
unification of purpose. Today we left our journal at home and found our mutual center
of gravity to be untethered to its usual array of denser bodies.
Etymology
I’m a bit of a snow-weather scientist so I’ve been watching the long spider-string
of my saliva hang to this branch in an effort to prove my hypothesis that it will freeze
before my hands do.
Conducting my experiment I am surprised by the sight of the snow-mantis
lumbering down the icy road. From my porch I can hear the ice bouncing off of his
exoskeleton. I worry that the fellow might perhaps be cold but upon reflection I realize
one needs blood to experience such sensation.
He’s halfway down the hill on my street when I see the little four-wheeled fourcylinder sedan that has no business driving about in this weather round the corner past
the tracks at the top of the incline. The great beast slowly turns one black compound
eye its direction. The sound of tires spinning out and the car begins its slide. With
collision imminent between chitin and steel, great folds open to shake the ice from twin
red sails on the fellow’s back. He rises through the trees with a shattering of frozen
branches as the car spins underneath him.
I always thought he was too big to fly and it turns out my spit did in fact freeze.
by Sam Kolinski
Spoke
I was sightless in Aviemore, when we vaulted across bridges
and bridges of cobbled stones on hired bicycles. From behind
I watched your flesh leap with the excitement of activity.
Adrenaline always stirred your blood. Though the eyes didn't
want to open then, you did well to conceal your anger, me turning
up the night before at 6am, soused in drink.
It was a warm-up to our nights under a hot, alien sun
where you rode a motorbike with a head crammed
full of Absinthe and told the police to fuck off
in four different languages, none being one they - or I could understand. When you came round and signed off
our contract you admitted that weekend was the beginning
of the end, it signalling our ugly, stuttering death throes.
Today the hands stumbled across a photo of you from up
in the Cairngorms, hippy headband and peace sign thrown up,
feigned smile obscuring something. I see it now, a year later.
Behind those little laurel green spokes, hosted in puffed sockets,
lay a forewarning, chroma distilled by the thick set of sadness.
Five-Foot Hand Grenade
You kicked through the door with furrowed brow
arriving with my contents in a black bag
for a fourteen month pattern to repeat itself.
The eyes vacant and the dismissal pulled your pin
and insults were hurled into the room, hatred spitting
from the canyon of your mouth like jets of flame
jumping from welded steel. With a forked-tongue no fragment
of us is left untouched, the safety of your own limbs unimportant
as a five-foot hand grenade is detonated at the surface of the bed.
Vocal chords sending shrapnel spiralling up into the sky,
into ears, everywhere. Its radius submerging the room,
the lethal paroxysm lines the walls with smoke, and with that,
that's us. The door is slammed, though the closure can't be heard
over the awful shrill of memories, wounded.
Jinn
[jin] noun
i.
ii.
an intelligent spirit of lower rank than the angels,
able to appear in human and animal forms and to possess humans.
derivative; hidden from sight.
As lamp is rubbed to illuminate
room, you arrive. Logged on.
A bellow booms around the skull.
In the heady fracas, possibilities
clamour, trip over the limbs
of each other. Are rendered useless,
action deferred until thoughts can
be scooped up and assembled.
Before time can even drink you
you claim your disappearance
with three wishes left un-asked
and three wishes left un-granted
taunting the mind from top-lined
QWERTY small-squared homes
above a pelagic smoke of neon blue:
Y.
O.
U.
Planted
i.m Emily Willow
For months she stood facing sash and case
before she wilted, letting a duped moon
slice sharp shapes across the wall.
Heart a sere and sable bulb barely
beating, thinning cigarette stemmed
between twin fingers of eelgrass.
Biding time until taproot finally dissolved
below the floorboards, that nourished
nothing but her mother's moonlit thoughts.
Pet
“Silence is a true friend who never betrays”
Confucius
Whenever you wrote, it knew.
Its eye flashing a laser red,
excitement flickering from pinhole.
Familiar stomach leap and kick
from sight of lid lifting to reveal
crimson diode. Often it would
vault up into palms without duress,
coltish, its collar a slick wrapping
of silicone. I would play with it.
Speak back through it, rarely resting,
its stomach tickled with tacked-on
thumb print. Now I am convinced
it is unwell, or worse, has succumbed
to sleep or death. For two months
it has hid away in hollowed craw
of bent duvet, eye wound shut
though still showing - just to make
it known – that at some point in time
close by, it – piqued - had ceased up
and stopped winking altogether.
Chortling One's Life Away
Kim Farleigh
It was early spring, country time, and I had decided to go on an excursion, the
organizer, Marga, saying: "William, you're back."
People in trekking clothes were spread out across a drying footpath in front of a bar.
Continental vapors dramatized the heavens.
I'd met Marga years before in one of her events. Remembering names was her job.
People were income.
She introduced me to a woman whose big, green, cold, beautiful eyes glared with
arrogant dryness, no amiable enthusiasm.
"Is this the first time for you in one of Marga's excursions?" I asked.
"Yes," Bell said, turning away to speak to a woman she knew.
The battle for recognition had begun.
Because I was left standing alone amid people I didn't know, Marga then introduced
me to a woman called Charo: lively, dark eyes, smiling, saying: "I have to speak to a
friend over there."
She dashed away.
Being left alone again, Marga then inflicted me upon Enrique whose insincere
ebullience reflected his wish that a meteorite would annihilate me in a flash of
fortuitous fortune. Savage female indifference would have side-stepped the problem
with ruthless panache, no astronomical assistance required.
"Enrique speaks English," Marga said, her enthusiasm undying.
Enrique's concerned irises emitted subdued panic. He had to speak to me all day!
And in English!
His worry became relief when I said in Spanish: "I've been living in Madrid for fifteen
years."
His skull smile became grinning alleviation; so I said: "But, Enrique, I'm going to
harass anyway all day. Si, Enrique, todo el ..."
He cackled.
"I see you've got that British sense of humor," he said.
"Australian, Enrique; and you don't understand. You're going to hear about my
grandmother's gardening and about my fish and turtle collections. And it's going to
happen all day. It's going to be hell, Enrique; an inferno."
His eyes now exuded life.
"Thanks for warning me," he said.
"Warnings make torment even more beautiful. That's my motto."
He had thought I had wanted to spend all day with him! The arrogance we are so
rapidly exposed to. But arrogance helped sharpen sarcasm.
I resembled a weird creature causing horror and then escape. But I wasn't a weird
creature: I was just a man.
I boarded the bus quickly to avoid having to sit beside someone who wouldn't want me
beside them. There weren't enough people to fill the bus, so I knew I could leave a
not-so-innocent victim alone.
Charo and her friends grabbed the back seats, their chortling a barrier against
unwanted male attention. They could giggle all day while wondering where that
handsome executive was who was supposed to adore them as if they had fallen from
heaven. And when their lives hadn't reached more satisfying planes they could still
convince themselves they had had "a fantastic time," "fantastic times" substitutes for
angels transporting us to paradise. They probably did yoga, meditation and reiki, and
other mystical activities that stopped self-analysis, while creating false insights,
misleading "self-awareness" and deluded "sensitivity", none of this changing the lust
for tall, handsome and rich. Sometimes just tall and handsome; but then you really
had to be handsome.
We passed detached buildings, indiscriminate, rectangular, multi-storey lumps
orientated at awkward angles. A man was gesticulating enthusiastically a few seats
ahead of me while talking to a woman whose facial expression never changed, a
lifeless mask glued to that woman's face as she nodded and nodded and
nodded.....The man's hands danced, his explanations continuing, the woman
sometimes smiling, never responding, indiscriminate, rectangular, awkward-angle
lumps passing by. And still the man waved those hands, the woman nodding and
nodding, smiling when decorum demanded it.
Was he too nice to recognize indifferent dryness?
He was about fifteen years older than her and the same height. She was pretty. He
talked and explained, undeterred, amiability defeating pride. I found persistence
mystifying. A woman once told me that women who surrendered because of
persistence, after initially not having been interested, lacked self-esteem. I found that
difficult to believe. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, was that contact defeated
the woman's initially shallow ideas about what she thought she needed, the man's
character like a wallop over the woman's head, knocking sense into a previously
deluded brain. This can happen if a woman is forced by circumstances to be with
someone who she would have rejected had she had the opportunity to rid that man
from her life at the outset. They didn't learn from that, believing the man had been
exceptional, rather than the circumstances, the situation, not the man, creating the
unexpected.
Marga came down the aisle with drinks and pastries.
"Why are you sitting alone?" she asked me.
I got up to sit beside a woman who was by herself, the woman in an aisle seat and
when she refused to move to the window seat I went back down the aisle and sat
beside a woman who was sitting in front of Charo and the Gigglers.
"Hi. My name's William," I said.
"I'm Maria," she replied. "Where are you from?"
"Australia. Are you from Madrid?"
"Yes."
She then looked out the window, indiscriminate, rectangular, detached, awkward-angle
lumps passing by. The gesticulating man was still talking, unperturbed by female
unresponsiveness, his generosity magnifying female empathy.
Charo and the Gigglers continued having "a fantastic time." Only their ages and their
voices' ages distinguished them from schoolgirls.
Their conversation became serious when one said: "She thinks happiness only comes
from looking for a boyfriend or having one."
"What about just enjoying life?" Charo asked.
She didn't get an answer, so she repeated the question, and still she didn't get an
answer, the other woman talking on as if she hadn't heard the questions, me thinking:
Enjoying life, except when tall, handsome and rich appears.
Maria undid a latch holding her bag's strap to a handle on the backrest of the seat in
front of her.
"A good idea that," I said, pointing to the latch.
"Yes," she replied, nodding ebulliently.
Her enthusiasm looked genuine.
"Too many women get robbed," I said, "because they don't attached their bags to
things in bars."
"Exactly," she said, looking out the window.
This confirmed her inaccessibility. Pink cherry blossoms dotted emerald slopes. A
white horse faced a stone barn. Leafless grapevines surrounded a granite peak. A
church tower rose above an abandoned farmhouse, rafters through broken terra cotta.
Maria started reading a book. The Gigglers giggled. The persistent man continued
entertaining himself. His "listener" nodded like a rocking horse. A lone man was
planting seeds in a vegetable patch beside the road, everyone lost in little worlds.
One of the Gigglers was slim and curvaceous with reddish hair. Her blue eyes shone
with the delight caused by an interaction that she had to interpret as meaningful. I
found enforced silence more preferable. Giggler bonding fended off unwanted beasts.
The redhead satisfied Charo's need for "a fantastic time." Charo had to have "a
fantastic time." The more "fantastic" the time Charo had, the more her barrier of bitter
gaiety could be erected against her imagination's vision of the inadequate.
If I had had said more than five words to anyone, somnabulance would have gripped
the other person. I didn't care. I was going to a new place. And it was just one day.
People generally can't deal with such insecurity. For me, it's a challenge.
The bus climbed into mountains. Mist removed peaks from view, sky eliminating earth.
Then we were in a valley, sunlight, through a gap in the grey-black mists, illuminating a
village. Dark slopes contrasted with the village's golden illumination, reddish roofs and
yellow walls inviting against dark-grey mists, spring with winter. Any comment on this
trip could take me from one season to another, nothing expected, nothing guaranteed.
No one on the bus cared if I existed. But that wasn't too different from the wider world
where people pretended they did. On this trip such pretences weren't required. I was
in the opposite situation to Charo. Vulnerability permits anything within reason
happening, even a genuinely fantastic time. Charo was using other women to have "a
fantastic time." How long can you sustain delusions?
Near our destination, the driver entered the wrong village. The road we went down
was so narrow that anyone on any of the balconies that faced the road could have
touched the bus's windows.
The village's first house had been abandoned, timber nailed into glassless windows,
interior rotting away, exterior retaining a weathered beauty of exposed bricks
illuminated by sunlight. Visibility had been cut to meters. Balconies drifted by as we
headed down hill, perspective having gone from long-range beauty, touched by
darkness and light, to shadowy, enclosing facades, imaginative possibilities reduced to
claustrophobic reality.
We stopped in a deserted main square. Murals covered a wall behind which rose pink
cherry blossoms upon a green slope under a granite peak, the silence filled with
tranquility. A balance between claustrophobia and long-range visibility had been
found.
The driver spoke to someone on the bus who knew the region. Then we went back up
the narrow road, no one appearing at any of the street's windows, the abandoned
house's broken terra cotta like broken teeth.
"I didn't see a bar in that town," I said.
"Yes. It's strange for Spain," Maria replied.
"The houses are probably owned by people who live elsewhere," I said.
"Probably," she replied.
"They probably come here on holidays to escape," I said.
Maria nodded in agreement.
We passed plough-up fields. Distant inclines became hills that ran parallel to the bus,
the churned-up, dark-brown soil dried out by heat.
We entered our destination. Returning light lit up the village as the bus stopped. Then
shadow returned. Silent changes in nature only occur because of alterations in light,
like sudden realizations without drama.
Clouds fled in a brisk wind.
The woman who got off the bus in front of me turned around and looked at me and
said: "You."
She was holding a camera and wanted someone to take a photograph of her with a
friend. Disbelief made me question what I had just heard. I acted as if I hadn't
noticed, my face suggesting otherwise. This haughtiness was sublime. Maybe she
thought she was Cleopatra?
A guy leaving the bus behind me took the photograph. Explaining what had just
happened to me to any of the people in the group didn't cross my mind. Only women
can criticize men public ally, not the other way around. One day equal rights might
even exist. Perhaps it's for this reason that so many women believe in their behavior's
purity? And what else could be expected if there's no punishment for outrageous
arrogance?
Insults often come unexpectedly, stumping us into supineness, punishment therefore
rare.
I followed some people towards the town's edge, reaching two women in yet another
attempt to enter human conditions.
One said: "William!"
"Lola!"
I hadn't seen her for years; nor had I seen her on the bus.
"How are you?" she asked.
"Not bad," I replied, "all factors being equal."
The sun, escaping cloud, illuminated Lola's smiling, round face. She must have been
sitting up the front.
"William and I met years ago," she told her friend, who looked away with bitter disdain.
The blonde friend had cold, dark eyes. Her blood-colored glasses induced thoughts of
vampires. She would have made an excellent Nazi concentration-camp guard. She
couldn't bring herself to just say: "Hello." Lola seemed oblivious of her friend's
rudeness, probably because no one had ever told Lola what a bitch her friend was;
and I wasn't going to do it either despite my grand philosophies. We hope others will
do the dirty work, another reason why punishment is rare.
Lola kept smiling, not perceiving her friend's icy unsociability. I wondered if Lola had
dragged her friend into this against her friend's will, the friend silent in protest. I was
just happy to see Lola's pleasant face.
We headed towards a building that was partly obscured by trees. Yellow flowers
dotted green weed before a black-trunked tree that rose behind other winter skeletons,
the building's sunlit wall glowing with calcium brilliance amid green boughs, eyes
drawn through varying vegetation to symbolic destination, like Cezanne. Focused
people strip superfluousness from existence to negotiate paths that lead to real
fulfillment, no time wasted having "fantastic times," people's arrogance tolerable if you
have an initially hidden talent that sustains you.
Weeds, leaves, trunks, flowers and twigs, amid pink and white cherry blossoms, stood
before the only stable entity in that constantly changing mixture of vegetation.
"Have you seen Lawrence lately?" Lola asked.
"Around Christmas," I replied; "and you?"
"Not since I last saw you. Now I can't go to his group."
"Family?" I asked.
The five-word rule demanded comment-shortening. Women abhor concentration
without incentive.
"Yes. I see my daughter on Sundays. She speaks English even worse than me."
Lawrence's meeting occurred in English. I smiled, not wanting to deter her
friendliness. When indifference is possible, amiability is limited. Only through mutual
amiability can you develop the confidence to have fantastic times.
Lola's round face housed burgundy-colored glasses, hair dyed orange. She exuded
inoffensive sweetness, the first person that day, apart from Marga, who hadn't
immediately produced superiority. Had I looked like Omar Sherif then indifference
might have evaporated.
The destination housed an exhibition about local flora and fauna. The concentrationcamp guard showed her hate for men by studying objects she probably had never
been interested in before.
The chunks of wood I observed, removed from local trees, were weightless, their
gorgeous grains like marquetry. Porcelain, life-sized models of vultures, eagles, owls
and other birds of prey, hanging from the ceiling, turned in the slight movement of air
that ran through the room, the birds observing the potential prey spread out beneath
them on the tundra of the room's floor, those models' living counterparts' elegant,
carefree efficiency exposing our limitations, the things those counterparts wanted in
their grasp as they sailed like surfers on the wind's waves, their impartiality not coming
from pessimism or egotism; but from having attainable goals.
Marga organized us into two groups. A guide was to take each group on a different
route. The first twenty people to have registered for this excursion were in one group,
the rest in the other, Lola and I in the second group with the concentration-camp
guard, the Chortlers in the other group with Enrique.
"Very lucky, Enrique," I said. "I was going to harass you all day. But there'll be other
occasions."
The lines radiating out from Enrique's eyes disappeared because of a now sincere
smile.
"Smiling, Enrique, isn't going to help you when judgment comes," I said.
My voice quaked with insight.
"It's only a matter time, Enrique."
I whispered, darkly, Enrique cackling.
The first group left with their guide. We received information on the efforts being made
to protect the local environment. The wood was light because the trees grew rapidly,
substance sacrificed for height, ascension inferring survival, freak conditions not an
issue. Some forests are a hundred million years old, roots deep, trunks solid, boughs
so high that they have survived all contingencies to flourish in skyscraper green.
You exist if you provide light to sleek timbers.
We went along a path in a wide valley. Conversation flowed freely for the first time that
day. My comments led to communication, not escape, my star avoiding inky clouds. I
had a conversation with a woman about international politics. Lola and I discussed
love and relationships. The concentration-camp guard preferred the artic wasteland of
her silence. A supernova wouldn't have extracted her from darkness. The others
chatted freely.
A woman, with short, dark hair, wearing trekking pants and a herring-bone coat,
intrigued me, her pale skin dotted with light freckles. She was wearing red-framed
glasses; she listened to everything she heard, never exuding pessimism or distaste,
never turning away; she wasn't going to remain single for long, assuming she was
unattached.
We passed pink and white trees, delicate explosions of beauty on gentle slopes. A cliff
rose to about a hundred meters from a long rise of rocky ground, granite boulders
visible in tough earth, the cliff indented with caves from which vultures took off and
swirled around without having to move their extended wings in flights of exquisite ease.
My envy for their freedom upon the wind's waves reflected my unfulfilled desires. Bird
after bird swooped past the vertical cliff before looping around to sail high above us,
mocking our torment with liberation. Being human, and hence mildly dissatisfied, I felt
begrudging admiration for those gliding throwbacks to prehistory that were doing what
they had been doing well before evolution had produced primates. Dissatisfaction
avoided them as they hovered with perpetual freedom.
Perpetual freedom, the human dream, occurs for those living by the sea who have
mastered the waves and who don't have to make a living doing something they
wouldn't do if their lives didn't depend on it, many ways to surf.
Through the guide's telescope we observed a female vulture in a cave tending to her
offspring. Nature had provided the vultures with high abodes. Such homes would
have been expensive in the human realm. Some people expected such things without
working, ultimately depressing, however, having unreal expectations.
We walked parallel to the cliff to head back to the village where the bus had left us. A
fast-flowing river shot by beneath us on our left. The cliff cast a shadow on our right.
Fractured mists left blue above. In the popular imagination vultures were vile, this
based on physical appearance. General perception required improving.
I walked behind the herring-bone woman, listening as she responded enthusiastically
to the guide's comments about vultures. The guide was young and good-looking,
natural that The Intriguing One should listen to what the guide had to say, the content
of the guide's comments interesting enough anyway; but that didn't mean those
comments would arouse interest in themselves. Content is insignificant against
deliverer, most male speech creating few favors at first.
The river's music enchanted ears disposed to listening; maintaining a sharp rhythm
with pitches and cadences that never bored delighted the ear blessed with the gift of
humble concentration.
A tree's white blossoms inspired the concentration-camp guard to step in front of me to
take a photograph. I had to step around her; had I continued walking I would have run
into the back of her. Her eye for nature's beauty contrasted with her hate for men.
Millions could have died before her and the flights of butterflies would have left a
deeper impression on her psyche. Only masochists would have wanted to have
spoken to her, attracted by the sadistic threats she looked capable of handing out, her
blonde hair no doubt striking with black leather. Her arid expression suggested that
positive sentiments were beyond her. If this is your attitude, why not go to the country
alone?
Because they're still hoping miracles will fall from above. Hoping for something
amazing without you lifting a finger appeases human imagination. If birds of prey just
have to be born to be able to glide around, enjoying a dramatic freedom, why can't we
have the same experience without having to work? Believing holy figures exist reflects
the need for miracles. The longer the miracle is delayed, the more disillusioned the
miracle-seeker gets with poor substitutes for the sublime, something sublime about
those short-lasting, white blossoms shining like lamps. Given that the human world
was without the miracles the "sadist" required, she probably sought solace in nature
that offered aesthetics without effort, helping to avoid the real problem, distractionrepressed disillusionment creating the face of distaste.
The bus took off to meet up with the other group that had gone on a longer walk.
Purple mountains rose behind undulating light-green that spread away from the road.
Black clouds behind the peaks sat above torn radiance that gave the light-green a
taffeta sheen before velvety mists. Lightness and darkness, glamorizing each other,
glorified everything in a world of differences.
The bus stopped at an unpaved parking spot at a sharp bend in the road that fell into a
ravine, rocky slopes engulfing falling asphalt. The soil's infertility meant that vegetation
had to grow rapidly to survive. Different species abounded because infertility didn't
permit one plant's dominance. Each plant had its little patch that it tried expanding,
aridity not permitting expansion, nutrient socialism preventing aristocracies in barren
worlds.
The Chortlers were coming up the hill, not chortling, their long walk finishing with a
steep incline, nothing funny about finishing long walks when the final gradient's second
derivative climbs with each step, much easier expecting miracles, this charming the
mind.
Everyone was now back on the bus. I didn't sit beside Maria, but in the only spare
seat available. Maria would probably appreciate this, humility in her detachment.
Charo and the Chortlers returned to rear-seat safety. Their "fantastic"-time hilarity
would protect them from beasts devoid of the miraculous, the miraculous ones,
watering plants that spouted with ignorant hope in the ecosystem's arid soils, too busy
to make this trip.
We headed down hill, stopping before a restaurant whose glass frontage faced a
brown river, a village, on the other side of the river at the top of a long cliff, like a
natural extension of a geological event.
We lingered. Nobody wanted to enter the restaurant first. The bloodless battle to
decide who you sat with had started, my target The Intriguing One; making positioning
look natural was essential for wonderful coincidences.
I trailed into the restaurant behind The Intriguing One, ground-level dog fight,
sidewinders poised to strike, the room's size excellent for error adjustment.
The Intriguing One sat facing the river at a table at the other end of the room. I hit the
after-burners, zooming to the end of the table, making a sharp turn, flying down the
table's window side to a spare seat almost in front of her. My barrel roll's brilliance
would have delighted the Red Baron, my target one place to my right on the other side
of the table; but I didn't know if she was friendly, until she asked: "Where are you
from?", her expression open and warm.
"Many," I replied, "would say another planet."
Her round, pale face ignited beautifully.
"When did you reach earth?" she asked.
A personality garnished with inquisitiveness. Such tastiness doesn't remain single for
long.
"Fifteen years ago."
"To Madrid?"
"Yes. Ground control picked me up in late 1999."
"Your speed coming down the other side of the table," she said, "made you look like a
spaceship."
"On a mission from Mars," I replied.
She was free of indifference, but I still wasn't prepared to discard the "five-word rule."
No one was sitting in front of me because I was facing the other table that connected
with ours to make a dog leg. Lola sat at right angles to me where the two tables met.
She faced the concentration-camp guard whose sour face made the brown river
resemble the Gulf Stream.
"What's your name?" The Intriguing One asked.
"Translated into earth languages," I replied, "it's William. And yours?"
"Eugenia."
"A variation," I joked, "of genial."
Her widening mouth made me think: Maybe this day might end up being worth it after
all.
She wouldn't have been able to have understood my double meaning. Genial in
Spanish didn't mean genial; but genial was what she was. And she might also have
been a genius. Right then, I was more concerned with geniality than with genius and
my ingenious remark arose because of her geniality.
From where I was I couldn't talk to her non-stop because people on her left wanted to
speak to her as well. However, I was in an excellent position to observe. Being a
voyeur I was in perve heaven. The Chortlers were with a guy called Luis who would
have made the ideal partner for Lola's friend, Luis as miserable as the concentrationcamp guard. I suppose some people just haven't recovered from losing the only
decent relationship they know they're ever going to have, eclipsed by realistic
perception. When Marga had introduced me to Luis the look he produced suggested
he had just been confronted with a slimy creature that had evolved in a sewer. He
managed to maintain that miserable expression all day, as if concrete had set over his
face just as he had discovered that his share portfolio had collapsed. Some people
take too seriously what they don't have, hammered into submission by severe visions
that limit their vision of relevance.
Eugenia asked: "What are the normal dishes in Australia?"
She had just found that, in fact, I was from a place like Mars.
"We eat everything," I said, a comment with a connotation in Spanish that doesn't exist
in English. "Especially beautiful Spanish girls."
Her laughter was bright-eyed resounding.
"We also eat crocodiles," I added. "We eat them before they eat us."
"Who's winning the battle?" she asked.
Her smiling face made light-hearted comments impossible to resist, the first step
towards love.
"We're too smart for them," I continued, "but they're too quick for tourists; so it's fiftyfifty."
Her guffawing had wholehearted titillation. Her eyes quivered with joyous surprise.
"Especially tourists," I went on, "who can't read English signs that say: If you're
standing here, you're probably already dead."
"Having you ever seen a crocodile?" she asked.
"No. I can read English."
Her mouth widened into an ovular ring, her chuckling heard over a clashing rumble of
chatter.
"You should work for the Australian Tourist Board," she said.
"I'd put an advertisement on the web site saying: Crocodile meat required. No English
necessary."
"We should do this with the vultures here," she said.
"I'd like to donate to the cause," I replied. "I'd prefer it if my remains went skywards
instead of just rotting in the ground in a place no one would visit."
"If you died," she asked, "how many people do you think would be affected?"
Only irrepressible curiosity can yield such unexpected inquiries.
"Only a few would be genuinely affected," I replied. "Although some people's deaths
can cause expected reactions. I was surprised by my reaction to the death of Luis
Aragon - for example."
"Yes," she replied. "I reacted like that once to the death of a famous Spanish TV
personality."
"We don't know what we're capable of emotionally," I said, "and being conscious of
that is a good thing."
"Exactly," she replied.
Unassailable evidence that I could lift the "five-word rule" came later in an 11th century
church whose wall paintings had been recently returned to their previous brilliance. I
now felt I could say anything and she would take an interest. Women's attitudes
change in a nanosecond; you see the film of resistance being lifted from their eyes in a
flash that signals that you've gone from dull ordinariness to having rare talent - just like
that; and just like that those wall paintings had had time's molding barrier removed to
reveal the expertise below.
The figures in the paintings exuded contentment, spiritual fulfillment, no depictions of
evil or temptations that dominate many religious paintings. These figures were just
plain satisfied, as if eastern religious belief had existed in medieval Christianity.
Eugenia's eyes glowed with concentration as I explain this to her.
"Interesting," she said, "because these paintings were done when Augustine began
asking down-to-earth questions about Christ, like what he did every day."
"Yes," I replied. "There's something earthly about these figures' contentment. They're
not defying gravity by floating in clouds in surreal dreams. Augustine was the first man
to climb mountains as a hobby. A natural-born trekker with his feet on the ground."
The figures weren't floating amid luminous vapors with winged angels.
"Facts are the most beautiful things," Eugenia said.
The type of comment gets women into bed.
Going back to the bus, she asked me what I did for a living.
"The impossible," I replied.
"What's that?" she asked, smiling.
"Attempting to insert the language of Shakespeare into the Spanish brain," I replied. "I
believe it's genetically impossible."
"You're an English teacher?" she asked.
"That's the standard title," I replied.
Her mouth in my estimation had become a succulent ring of kissability.
"And you?" I asked. "Are you on the threshold of glorious immortality?"
Her personality shattered deadpan conversation; she unconsciously induced the
poetic.
"Unfortunately," she replied, "I'm trapped in rut-like repetition."
"Oh, so you've got a normal job?"
"I'm in the marketing section of an IT company."
"So you use your irresistible charm to dazzle the innocent?"
"Usually, I just pray they say yes."
"Yes is my favorite word."
A slight wind shivered spring's early boughs.
"But are you innocent?" she asked.
"No; but I love being dazzled. And you're doing a fine job. I'd promote you."
We sat beside each other on the bus, ignoring the return-to-your-seat rule. The
Persistent Gesticulor, sitting behind us, cheerfully pointed out our misdemeanor. His
smile could have amused a corpse.
"Please don't report us," I asked. "Public condemnation would shatter us emotionally."
"I believe," he said, with flippant irony, "that justice must be done. You are both facing
a million years in purgatory."
"I hope so," I replied. "I love purgatory."
This man, who deserved company more than most others, was sitting by himself. He
wouldn't have been sitting by himself had Spanish women as a group been interested
in the things they claimed they were interested in, the woman who had been beside
him on the ride out from Madrid now sitting on the other side of the bus beside a
woman who wasn't inclined to talking, escape from unwanted charm having been
affected with mean-spirited efficiency.
The bus left. The vast orange glow illuminating the west deserved a fanfare, not
silence, although awe induces quietude, the sky's lantern held up by darkening land,
the soothing tranquility in that expanding pastel reflecting the tranquilizing intimacy that
had developed between Eugenia and myself, our words resonating in a demulcent
connection that opposed the trip's initial indifference, like revenge against swift
judgments.
Charo and the Chortlers were chortling in their back-seats bastion, Charo keeping the
dream of a fantastic existence alive by announcing to a man on a seat before her that
she and the Chortlers were going to be going out dancing next Saturday night. The
others had a week to escape from a commitment that would have only produced
distraction followed by emptiness.
In Madrid, police lights flashed at a major roundabout. People wearing crash helmets
and carrying sticks faced the constabulary. Amid shouting, sirens and placard waving,
Eugenia and I started holding hands, separate from the turmoil.
"I had a great day," she said.
"Me, too," I replied.
In a metro station, the train came while we were kissing. It left when we were still
kissing.
Charo was by herself on the other platform. She pretended she hadn't seen us; but
we were the only thing she saw, her grim mouth tight with brooding emptiness.
by Catherine Gonick
DEPLOYED, MESOPOTAMIA
Venus picks up the gun.
She’d as soon shoot as make love.
Sex is just rape,
killing is sweeter.
She can’t remember her mother,
that foam.
Mars can’t either.
He weeps in the sand
and they send him home.
UNSPEAKABLE
The sweet queen of suicide is a jealous lover.
She would be all in all to you,
so murmuring, lies
that you’re her only love
and need no longer listen
to the words of any other.
She makes it very clear that
you can only hear,
and only you can hear,
her voice, as she prepares you
with unceasing fragrant blandishments abloom,
her reddest hugest flower
filling up your life right to the top
until you choke on petals.
She takes majestic seat asquat
your nearly murdered mind,
refusing to admit that
we persist, your friends,
who also love, and seek to serve you
as you silence and forget us in your trance.
Against her will we stand
disorganized as dust motes
waiting in deaf light
to hear you question her.
AS THE INQUISITION FINALLY ENDS
She wears the high white
wig of last century’s lady,
sporting birds in a garden,
minarets reaching for heaven,
sometimes a ship in full sail.
In her belly occasional screams
of the painfully damned
make known their dungeon.
Below it her bottom is bare,
she’s lost footing, been drained
like the floor of an ocean
before a tsunami. Her tides turn
up only in dreams of flotsam
an alchemical pelican scans
for any boxed relic, salvaged
from her still-floating soul.
Racked and ruined by questions
past belief and reason,
she is unconfessed, unshriven, ready.
Her guard turns the key to her cell,
her inquisitor kisses her hand.
Comes the release, into a next world
of Romantics, those quaintly new-style
worshippers of feeling.
BLUE NAVY
each to an own small craft
warned against this sea
in not a race not to the swift
yet equally not set
adrift must navigate
without a compass
skilled or hapless
sailors all
on call try wind and stars
motor, radar, satellite, and manual
or hope some raise
white flags and pray
for rescue by some larger ship
sub, container, cruise, and even pirate—
that cannot exist
not on this sea
where each frail helmer
must subsist on ever harder tacks
and frustrated craft-tocraft communication
on this sea without an island
so full of boats that
ply through calm and storm
alike without a compass
until the dotted blue horizon swallows them
ENTERTAINING THE TROOPS
(in memory of Eleanor)
By day she was only a clerk
in the shipyard office
no riveter showing off
rosy strength hoisting steel
For her the thrill came on Saturday night
dancing favor to sailors
in need of fast company
before shipping out
Far away a world dying
here only excitement
men going
maybe not coming back
The Big Band played
and she felt their softness
floppy white collars
shoulder bones gentled by flesh
and their fleshy boners
hard as a man’s
soft parts can get
flutes that sounded music
safely on the bow
of her married, covered hip
by Anya Silver
Woman with a Hole in her Stocking
Such a universal female gesture,
a woman grabbing the seam of her stocking,
tugging it forward over the exposed toe,
tucking it under her foot so the tear won’t show.
There’s something graceful and humble
about the way she will balance, crane-like,
on one foot, cradling the other in her hand,
her back bent, her face tilted downward,
trying to hide the damage of the splintered
floorboard, or an untrimmed toe nail.
Sometimes, while she’s leaning over,
a strand will float loose from its ponytail.
Then she’ll stand, recombing her hair
with her hands, repair after tiny repair.
Something Understood
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
--George Herbert, Prayer (I)
We were talking about beauty, three women and I,
and the oldest among us, still lovely in face,
told another, You should go on the cancer diet.
It’s the best way to lose weight. And like a wisp,
I rose from the gossip and took flight,
and my breath carried me to heights hidden
behind the clouds of that dark day, above birds
crowding in great black flocks in the park.
I knew I had entered forever the world of the ill.
I would never return to that other, open life
of carefree women peeling tangerines.
Sheared off, I was, like the umbilical cord
of my friend’s newborn, slashed by her hip bone
as he was pushed too early into a cold birth.
Waiting
I wait for some sign—for an animal, seed, cycle of the moon—
that will break through the membrance separating falsehood
from truth, or this moment from always, that will clarify
the meaning of a blood test, or a glowing PET scan,
my life’s mysteries speechless as an eye in the palm of a hand.
I know that symbols bend and bow the sheaf of atoms
that separates me from the rest of the world: like the owl
in the backyard, huge, grey, sitting motionless in the pecan tree.
I wanted to leap up and clutch it round the neck, as in a child’s dream,
and let it fly me somewhere so dark I could no longer see my own body.
I would lean into that cloud of darkness, let it catch me in its lap.
Then I might understand suffering. Where it comes from,
where, like woman after woman after woman, it goes.
My Father’s Voice
“So when the deep bells/break, a cracked/tinkle remains.”
--Johannes Bobrowski
I missed his death, missed holding him
one last time, my arms enfolding him easily,
after he’d lost the bulk of my childhood.
I missed him again, when I beheld the grey body
in the casket that I had wanted to recognize
and embrace, but whose face was stiff and hard
beneath my lips, whose hands were smooth and cold,
not the soft veined hands I’d expected to hold.
I knew when I lay my head on his chest,
briefly alone in the candle-lit sanctuary,
that what I held was no longer my father.
But still, I wept when the remorseless priest
gently pulled the blue shroud over his head,
tucking him in and sealing the steel lid.
Where, then, could I find my father?
Not in the clothes my mother had washed and folded.
Not in my dreams, or in stacks of old Russian books.
Then I remembered having saved his messages
on my voice mail for this very day—
an abandoned phone from before the final sickness.
And again, I heard it: his hoarse voice, Anyulinka,
the old endearment, and pleas to call him soon
(how merciless the innocent dead!).
My father, worrying about lost glasses,
then comforting me, It always will be better.
Oh Papi, as I listened to you speaking to me,
the tree outside the window filled
with small, dark, clamoring birds, as though
your soul had scattered into that flock
and you could still sing, as you once did,
Gospodi Pomyluj, Lord have Mercy,
bowing and crossing yourself slowly,
three times in a row, during the liturgy.
Promenade
Marc Chagall, 1917
While he holds her hand, his bride hovers
above him, fluttering like festival streamers.
Above the crooked green houses, she drifts;
sailing above the church’s dreaming domes.
Frightening to imagine how easily he could let her go,
how quickly she would whirl beyond his reach.
Only a single hand yokes her body to earth.
She’s so light, all mass blown out of her bones
as though she were an egg,emptied by breath.
But her lover won’t forsake her. They’ve shared
a heap of red tablecloth, plum cake, wine.
A blue tree blossoms, longing, towards them.
Their arms are a single cord, fingers entwined.
And look—she’s safely moored to him.
With his other hand, he nestles her soul,
a plain brown bird pleased to settle its wings
while her body, instead, soars skyward with joy.
Summers in Vermont
There were evenings
we rolled, clover-smudged, down hills,
the sky a red horse pursued by a black.
Magic honey slackened my mother’s
shoulder so she could swim again.
During the day, we read first editions
behind curtains, like prim Victorians.
The days were holy,
like the stinging, sacrificial bees,
or the deep lakes we dreamed of,
gleaming in mountains too tall to climb,
or the low voices of Russian refugees
recounting the losses of the exiled.
I can remember my parents murmuring
histories I knew I shouldn’t hear,
evenings when my sister and I lay in bed,
she sleeping and me thinking up stories
in which I possessed powers far beyond my own.
I wanted to control the weather,
to make the sun blister and the clouds storm.
TIME AND AGAIN
Timothy Caldwell
The blazing heat of an Illinois August burns my skin as I walk from my car to the
door of the funeral home, but I barely notice it. I’m wearing my body like a small child
wears a parent’s coat, hiding inside it, insulated from the outside world. Inside the
moist coolness of the building, the funeral director greets us with a half smile, friendly
but not too cheerful.
“Who are you here for?” he asks.
“Bertson,” my partner, Liz, says as she takes my arm. He extends his arm toward
the door on his left. She leads me into a large rectangular room where several rows of
wooden folding chairs face a small table covered with a white cloth. A dull pewter urn
sits on a table, surrounded by flowers and pictures. Their vivid colors make the urn
look more unnatural, more sinister in its dullness. I feel both drawn to it and repelled by
it.
Liz guides me to a front row chair. My son’s ashes are in that urn. A part of my
brain understands this, but my heart can’t accept what my mind tells it. I push the
words away: If I don’t believe them, they cannot be true. This wasn’t supposed to
happen.
Rob’s doctors said they could control his cancer. It was a lymphoma, for God’s
sake—lots of people have lymphomas, don’t they? It was chronic, they said. He was in
his thirties—young, they said—so he would probably live a long life. Probably. Maybe.
Perhaps. If—always an unspoken if.
I was with him just ten days ago. I took him home from the hospital, and Cara and
the kids—Diana and Joey—were excited to have him back home. Rob and Cara were
hoping he would be approved for a stem cell transplant. The process was dangerous,
but he was young and, as he said with his lopsided smile, “Except for the cancer, I’m
healthy.”
I said good-bye to them the next day. I would see him in Chicago where he would
have the transplant, I said. When I hugged Rob, he said, “Love you, Dad.”
I kissed his cheek and said I loved him too. How was I to know those were the last
words he would ever say to me? What would I have done if I had known? Would I have
driven back to my home in Michigan? Would I have stayed with him untilAuntilA?
I feel like my brain is folding in on itself as questions, images, and noises swirl in
the hollowness inside me. I lose time.
I’m back in the hallway of the ICU, outside his room. On the other side of the
curtain, the click-click of the respirator pushing air into his chest is replaced with
obscene, wet, whooshing sounds as his breathing tube is removed. Bile rises in my
throat; my legs feel both weak and heavy. I lean against the wall. Liz is with me; she
puts a hand on my shoulder.
In the crushing silence, the machine is pushed through the curtain by a gloved
hand, its wet, dripping tubes dangle in failure. The curtain opens.
I’m afraid of what I might see, but I can’t stop myself. Cara sits beside him, holding
his hand. His eyes are closed; his lips droop unnaturally, their muscles stretched by
the breathing tube.
I don’t want to go in, but I feel like I’m under water, and the current is behind me,
pushing. I resist but it pushes, pushesA
I’m standing beside his bed; my hand is on his face. I kiss his warm, smooth
forehead and whisper in his ear, “I’m sorry.”
Despair drops over me like a blanket. My mind tells me there was nothing I could
do, but my heart pours its condemnation into my veins. A father’s job is to keep his son
safe. I failed him. I know it is not rational, not sane, but it does not go away. I failed
him.
I feel a light touch on my arm, and one nightmare morphs into yet another: I’m in
the funeral home, and I’m at the table, touching the urn. Liz is standing beside me with
her hand on my arm.
She says something but I don’t understand her. She speaks again. “Do you feel like
meeting Rob’s friends? Several of them have arrived for the visitation.”
Anger uncoils itself inside my chest. What I want to say is, No. I don’t want to talk
to anyone until I make sense of this damned urn. I don’t want to make nice, smile
through my tears, and hear that everyone loved him. That’s what obituaries say, isn’t
it? He was forty-god-damned-years old. Whatever is in this urn is not Rob. Where is
my son? No! I don’t want to talk to anyone!
“Are you all right?” she asks.
I wipe my eyes and take a deep breath.
“I’m okay, I guess,” I say. “Sure, I’ll meet his friends.”
I watch her take my hand, but I don’t feel it. I watch myself as though I’m looking
through a camera, seeing my body moving, but feeling nothing. She leads me to the
main entrance, and somehow I smile and nod at the strangers who invade my misery.
Rob’s friends and coworkers come in couples, somber-faced, uneasy until they see
all of his family, including me, in his fantasy T-shirts. Some of the shirts bear coats of
arms of knights and kings from his role-playing games; others are imprinted with
dragons, castles, Star Trek characters, and fantastic battle scenes.
“We’ve seen Rob in those shirts,” his friends say. They tell stories about ways that
he used fantasy to make their lives happier at work. Their memories provoke both
tears and laughter, brightening the dour surroundings of the funeral home.
Their memories stir mine, bringing back images of Rob as a small child. I am pulled
back to the time when his love of fantasy was awakened; his first Halloween.
***
It was 1973 and my wife Karen and I lived in Orono, Maine, where I taught at the
university. Robbie was three years old and a big fan of Sesame Street where he first
heard about Halloween.
Mid-October he appeared in our bedroom door before dawn, a blond bundle of
energy in footy pajamas with a burning question: “Ith today Hawoween?” And his last
question at bedtime was, “Ith tomowo Hawoween?” So we were all relieved when
Halloween finally arrived. That evening when I walked into our apartment from a long
day of teaching, he ran to me and announced that tonight was Hawoween and that he
was going twick-or-tweeting with me.
Karen said that he had been ready to hit the road in the morning, with or without his
costume, and he was so excited that he barely touched his lunch and had skipped his
nap. She predicted that he would fall into a coma at any time.
He did not want to waste time eating dinner. As he sat at the table, pushing his
food around his plate, I thought about things to say that might encourage him to eat. I
remembered his growing list of what he wanted to be when he grew up. Fireman was
the latest addition to astronaut, Superman, cowboy, and professional wrestler.
“You want to be a fireman when you grow up, right?” I asked. “You’ll have to be big
and strong to be a fireman, so you should eat your dinner.”
He thought about this for a moment, then said, “I’ll be a short fiwman.” Karen left
the table and went to the kitchen. I heard a giggle coming from that direction a second
later. We gave up on dinner.
As he squirmed into the Batman costume he will wear over his coat, we rehearsed
what he would say on the trail.
“After you knock on the door, what do you say?” I asked.
“Twick or tweet!”
“Right. When someone gives you candy, what do you say?”
“Tank you vewy much.” We rehearsed this several times.
Karen stayed home to hand out candy, and Robbie and I headed out into the Orono
night. The sidewalk was crowded with supernatural beings, ghosts, aliens, President
Nixon, and other strange creatures. Robbie held two fingers on my hand, and his grip
tightened when various creatures passed us. As we came close to the door of the first
house, I was sure my fingers were squeezed bloodless as we climbed the two steps to
the small stoop at the front door.
“Knock on the door,” I said. But before he could, it opened, and a tall witch holding
a bag of candy greeted us. I felt Robbie’s arms around my leg.
I picked him up. “What do you say?”
He stared at the witch.
“What do you say?” I repeated.
“I fogot,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the witch. She asked to see his bag. He
was paralyzed, so I held it out for her. She dropped in some candy.
“Say thank you,” I said. He buried his face in my shoulder. “I can’t,” he said. I
thanked the witch and carried him back to the sidewalk.
He looked into his bag as soon as I put him down. “She gived me candy,” he said in
a surprised voice as he pulled several pieces from his bag. I stop him from stuffing the
wrapped candy into his mouth.
“Only one piece for now. You choose,” I said, taking the candy from him. I held it in
my hand as we stood under a dim streetlight. With his face inches from my hand, he
pondered his choice before taking one. I helped him unwrap it, and it disappeared into
his mouth.
“Does it taste good?” I asked.
“Mmphf,” was his response. I decided that this was too good for Karen to miss, so
we went back to the apartment.
As soon as he saw her, he said, “That witch gived me candy, and I eated it.” Karen
looked at me with a frown.
“Only one piece,” I said in my defense. “This is too much fun. You have to come
with us.”
We threw some candy into a small bucket and put it outside our door. He jabbered
at her all the way back to the sidewalk.
This time when he encountered the other trick-or-treaters, he explained to her, “He
a ghost. He not a weal ghost, he a boy weawing a mask,” or “He a astwonaut who
goes into thpace on a wocketship.”
By the third or fourth house, he told us to wait on the sidewalk while he went to the
door. “I do it,” he said. He glanced back at us to make sure we were watching over
him. After several more houses, he asked to be carried. It wasn’t long before his body
sagged.
Now the past and present flow together. He grows heavy as sleep releases him into
my arms. His head is warm against my neck, and his breath smells like candy.
The night air is chilly, and I can see his breath mingling with mine as I carry him
along the tree-lined street. The faint smell of a wood fire is mixed with the sweet,
earthy smell of the leaves that crunch under my feet. The bare branches of the trees,
dim in the streetlights, extend over us in benediction as the voices of children fall away
and the small-town silence envelops us.
I grow weary, but home lies just ahead. I am content because he is with me, soft,
warm and innocent, trusting me to take care of him. I will not fail him. I am doing what
a father does—protecting my son as darkness embraces us.
Soon we will be home where I will keep him safe from harm. I will kiss his warm,
smooth forehead, then I will lay him down to sleep through the long, long night.
by Claire Booker
Artist Obsessed
Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Aggregation: One Thousand Boats’ installation
features a rowing boat encrusted with fabric phalluses.
Dickety dick goes her fierce little needle
counting the stitches it’ll take to mend her;
stabs into softest winceyette,
moulds them, names them,
these gorgon heads that turn her to stone,
cock-a-hoop girths that flop on the rowlocks.
The world is buttered thick with phalluses –
somehow you know she’ll never lick the knife
because Daddy did something he shouldn’t;
turned her into a fisher of men’s whitebait, afloat
in her ghost white boat: what a haul of men’s cods.
Only once, she lay in the boat’s open mouth,
let the netted snouts snaffle at her bleeding places,
felt the length of each uncluttered oar.
She will row herself clear –
cut through the black waters of a long vigil.
Model in Love
after Walking Woman by Alberto Giacometti
Later there will be postcards –
prints of body parts signed in her own
meticulous italic, telling
how she misses
the warm moulding of his hands;
that splash of water
when she was only possibility.
For this, she is grateful,
and though she might have hoped
for arms
(or even a head)
she is glad of those pubescent breasts
with their dab of nipple;
the smooth sweep down into nut brown
buttocks.
There will be time enough to tell him
that she has let herself go.
From her billowing window she dreams
of a cluttered atelier:
turps, clay, clatter of wire-cutters,
plaster of Paris; misses
how he came again and again
simply to touch
the intelligent slope of her shoulder.
Other arms have circled her since.
Though lovers pluck her
as they might a courgette flower
(for taste and decoration)
still she knows that a girl should be free
to walk as she will –
that a pedestal impedes
no matter how tenderly it kisses
the stems of her feet.
Butterfly Night
Still you do not wake,
though your back is a strait
all fleeted up with turquoise sails:
square-rigged, lace-fine grapplers
sunk in your brine.
Even now, when the wind lifts
and each fluttering vessel weighs anchor,
hauls you up
into night-drenched blue, swaying
on the hammock
of your own mortal weight,
a drunk ship
listing through constellations,
still, you do not wake –
pitching and plunging
in Cassiopeia’s pleats, dazzled
by light from her bold moons,
distance, like air, keeling
around you.
Provençal Crosses
I’m at the edge of the known world – the old chapel
with its skim of lizards, sun-bleached stone.
My brother has drifted with his butterfly net,
disinterested in where I’ve flown.
Tops of monumental graves stare
out over propped walls like corralled horses.
High in its slatted cage, the bell claps and I wonder
where the chimes go; whether they hang
blind in the cave of immense sky and who
makes the bell sing each hour. I am too young still
to know that even God can be mechanized –
that there will be just this one time
as I skirt the sharp elbow of shade and see crosses
scattered, glistening across the track
intricate as lacewings: pewter, maroon, gun-metal blues;
not one larger than a mayfly.
These are not daisies to be picked, nor the weightless
shells of small snails. These are unfixable –
free to grow wings and soar
when the mistral blows from the west.
New Arrival
That sly slant of eye hoards a foreseeing
loose of words or knowing.
He does not dream as I dream now
but as a sill gathering drops,
a dome’s dark space absorbing whispers.
I could breathe in each last lash of him
– fatness of fingers half furled,
smell of shelled peas.
Such is the feel of new pricked dough
lightly brushed with milk.
The lazy crescent moon, tipsy
on a bellyful of night, is hammocked
in winter branches. I’ll watch the sky roam
panther black, count stars as sheep,
not close my eyes for disbelieving.
LIVING IN SKIN
Jed Myers
I walked away from our tents on the sand
till I was a dot to any who’d look.
I went to my knees and bent
till my forehead pressed on the grains of the world.
I waited like that. It wasn’t surrender
or prayer. I wanted to hear
the silent thoughts of my planet. My dear
brain fizzed with insolent mutters—
it is a cartel of incessant
businesses. Food and water,
stature in the eyes of the other
wanderers who fussed back in the camp,
plus the thought-graffiti’d subway line
night and day up and down the spine,
the crowded stations of the desires,
the attendant fears like yellow-eyed
rodents and lizards clacking the stink
in the inky-black sewers—I’d arrived
in the quiet white desert to hear the crank
and whine of the ten thousand tiny live gears
of the body’s mind. The interior
shafts and tanks of the city of self,
its clicking monitors, cracked mirrors,
its clumping traffic—all here
in the nowherest place I could find.
I raised my head and let it fall—almost
pounded my brow on the sand, and again,
encouraged somehow by the hurt and the sound,
thud of the brain’s case into the ground,
a ringing in the ears’ nerves, each impact
a moment of starry thoughtless blindness,
a touch of out-of-itness.
But I wanted in, access, through
this aloneness out on the silicate dust.
I elongated myself, my arms
outstretched, palms pressed together
as if to dive through the wind-ripples,
under, for the pearl of an answer.
I held still, but something flew from me.
Out of the mineral mouths of my bones’
lacunae, down, toward the heart of the earth,
beseeching a presence I doubted was there
in the nickel-iron alloy core
hot as the surface of our sun,
I might’ve uttered something pure—
short chorus of longing that comes with living
in skin—I’ll never be sure. I rose
and returned, scuffing the ubiquitous
ridge-signature of the wind. I listened—
a distant rhythm. Was it outside
or in? I was thinking
of water, smelling the smoke-scent of dinnerA.
The world and I must sing to each other.
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
Jed Myers
At our wooden booth in this crowded neighborhood
breakfast spot, over eggs to order
and grapefruit mimosas, we talk
about all our grown kids’ courageous launches
past college, into forestry, theater,
writing, and business. More coffee
and dashes of hot sauce, more apricot
jam spread amply on butterless toast,
and we reminisce—floats
down roaring torrents in Oregon, limestone
cliffs carved by surf into beast-forms
on New Zealand’s South Island coast, snowshoeing
powdery creek valleys in the Cascades—
we and our restless young who still choose
to do things with us, while our hair whitens
and thins. The past becomes palpable
substance, and of it we’ll spin
the ventures to come—the next trek
to trout streams in Patagonia, sojourn
in Lisbon to listen to live saudade,
stay in St. Petersburg some future May
when the scent in the air is of cucumber fish,
and someday Jerusalem, to eat olives
with Isaac and Ishmael. The past—
its salty innocence, its reassuring
bitterness, real as the pit in the fruit
worked free in our teeth—we will taste
what is still possible in it, as if,
while our memory-arroyo’d skins still shine
in the window-light over breakfast, we’ll live
to traverse the crests of the Caucasus, dive
the Belize Barrier Reef, search out
the shtetls our ancestors left, and breathe
the peace we must believe someday will settle
even upon the Golan Heights.
Our foreheads and cheeks are moist
with the mild fever of hopeful talk—thinning
skin glistening like stones in a creek.
Stones, dreaming nothing, worn smooth
in the constant thoughtless current of snowmelt
through countless springs. We’ll be leaving
our tips on the table soon, heading out
to take care of things, call the kids,
and ask them when they’re next coming home.
WHAT THERE ARE WORDS FOR
Jed Myers
Intactness—it was apparent. Our wills
in the freezer safer from fire, stainless
wires in all the kids’ smiles, the hello
kiss of our soft collision somewhere
between the front door and the kitchen before
dinner—no conscious question, secure.
O steady glow of the little wick fires
we’d let the young ones light at the table
on Friday nights, thanking the cosmos
for bringing us to this moment (the lights
wavering most to quivers of breath
we’d call laughter). Supple, intact,
so like the mountain ash, grown taller,
shading the south of the roof even after
we’d added the second floor. Our bedroom
window framed the red berry bunches—
the branches gave side-to-side in the wind
and so did not fracture in storm. Intact—
a matter of form flexing to forces
the world will deliver. Those years,
our elders in distant cities lasted,
blew kisses through the phone into the kids’
ears, sent birthday packages, visited,
withered, shuffled and wheezed, intact
as long as they did. Even the death-squalls,
those various cancers that opened
like swirls of emptiness, first under one
grandfather then his estranged wife, proved
more portals for tired souls than ruptures
in anyone’s life. Grief was our planting
a fig tree in the backyard, a bed
by the front walkway bright with red geraniums,
tea and old snapshots, seeing the dead
sure of themselves, seeming still with us.
Intactness was a weave of beliefs,
a knitting in from the edges we did
where the fabric was rent or moth-eaten, such
that we and the world remained of a piece.
Our firstborn broke his wrist on the ice
and the bone fused across the fine crack
in weeks, splinted. Our middle one dove
teeth-first to the curb—the dentist jacketed
what was left intact. We were pleased.
A sudden shift deep in the earth shook a few
heirloom dishes off shelves and sent fissures
up through the foundation—we had the place
retrofitted. It was as if
the bonds of love held by their give,
alive, nonrigid, fluxed with hope.
How is it, then, that our marriage stiffened
and broke? And it seemed to shatter
our daughter. I can still hear her
pounding upstairs in tears when we told her.
Through the seasons, though, she rewove.
I don’t know what the limits are,
what impacts fragment beyond repair,
outside the web of what there are words for,
murderous facts that leave mute witnesses’
souls brittle inside their chests.
The thousandth child starves in Aleppo,
the next adolescent isolate fires
his dad’s semiautomatic rifle
into the flesh of his terrified class,
machetes sever carotids of villagers
down to the last in the name of one god
or anotherA. Maybe this is where
nothing’s intact—where here becomes
nowhere. Here is the world
where our daughter came back—we could say
the blow she took was not so severe.
That must be part of it. She could still talk,
and someone intact somewhere could hear.
THE ODDITIES
John Grey
By the toppled tombstones
of the historic graveyard,
an old wrinkled woman wails,
a young boy
in a sackcloth shirt,
plays a fiddle
while a girl,
her head shaved,
holds out her hands
to show the world her blood some people stop
and toss them coins,
others hurry by
with their heads down,
a drunk would join them
if he could only climb over
the rusty fence -—
the hag reminds me
of a Macbeth witch,
the boy is the
evil twin
of the young Paganini,
as for the girl,
I can't decide between
St Joan or Bernadette they're a team of course,
as only such disparate people
truly can be .a harsh croaky warble,
the cat-whine of
bow on strings
and unexplained
dripping crimson wounds watch long enough
and there's a place for them
inside the watcher ~
but oh mercy,
what do I do with the drunk?
What is to give light must endure burning.
Viktor Frankl
Night at the Park
Harry F Rey
I find your taste
Intoxicating
I find it quite a thrill
To take you down
In one fell swoop
To never drool, nor spit, nor spill
I want it all
What you can give me
More if you have the time
It's important that you
Do not fear me
This fear is only mine
You recall that night
We walked past a park
Me with my sleeping bag
You and your precious ‘art’
How afraid we were, of this dark unknown
Those figures in the mist
Never mind sticking to that straight road
And the rising steam that hissed
Yet come the day
As it may, as it surely does
We walked again past it, back the way we came
And found ourselves stuck in mud
Not only was this a place of darkened nights
But it also stole the light of day
Wide open concrete spaces
Where surely grass should be
I slept in cold, on that night, and my head faced towards the door
Yes I broke the rule, millenniums in force
Or simply human nature
That you never sleep
With your head to the door
For one never know who will come
But I did that night, as you well know, the pillow falling back into dead space
For the alternative would have been
To have my head rested against instead, that park view window pane
And we thought it was bad at night
But so much worse in the day
It sucked in all the light around it
Its patrons suspicious, just because there they stayed
We soldiered on, we marched right through
Whatever fear we had was conquered
Like most of the people, most of the time, that day we were not murdered
And like it is, in that story there
The one you know so well
That fear is something; it’s there at night, but just as real in blinding light
What is worse is the night that comes,
When we so boldly walk into a dark unknown
With a peculiar absence of fear
The park that I would not turn my back on, as I slept in your spare room
Is one we walked through, hand in hand, in the pitch black bowels of the day
We might as well throw iron dice
For that is what the choices are, my friend, to gamble away our lives, to meet a bitter
end
To take hold of that fear, that truly exists, that moves around at night
But the darkness cloaks it in lust
But you know nothing of the darkness that comes at night
To take that fear, and invite it in,
To live with it, to be afraid of it,
Day, by day, by day.
Execution in Slow Motion
Joanna Chen
Long before the severance pay, the indecision,
the uncertainty, the closing of foreign bureaus,
the need to double up, to do without, make do,
make it work, the pressure to deliver on time,
all the time, the deadlines and the dull dread,
my head began to roll. It rolled recklessly down
alleyways never visited, down barren hills
where no stories grew and no disasters happened,
aside from my own. Motionless, the rest of my body
continued to sit obediently at its desk, trawling
the wires and the web for new angles and sharp takes,
yet my head kept rolling down hills and wadis,
snags of olive branches tangling in my hair, wild
hyssop catching in the golden twist of my earrings.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Marilyn Ringer
Wherever you are
you carry your memories,
helixed proteins shaped in sadness,
and the glad yellows of suns setting
into seas of blue thought.
The ache of the weight
of your life, palpable in the bareness
of fatigue, the soft depression
left by sorrow, a soul embossed
with a notary’s seal,
the truth that can be sworn
in front of a stranger.
Wherever you are
you have forgotten
the what, or when,
or where of Neruda’s sonnet,
the dark space between
the shadow and the soul,
the synchronicity of eyelids closing.
Wherever you are
you build hopeful structures,
temples to possibility, mirrors of light.
You warm yourself by the flame
of offering. You dance
in sweet smoke,
the incense of conciliation,
supplication, desire.
Rest my friend
wherever you are.
It is the winter of a new world.
INERTIA
Marilyn Ringer
I have my own flashings,
the red blinks of warnings ignored.
My body idles in neutral.
I rev it with my pedal foot.
This morning there are intruding smells
and the bitter taste of Chinese herbs
meant to cure the mystery of ailment.
I feel the dark-eyed circles
on my orbital bones, sleepless tattoos
of a dream-filled night.
The Blessed Virgin sits on the edge
of my bed swinging her foot,
a blue-robed girl impatient
for a joy ride. We laugh as she floats
into the February moon. Its cool,
demanding light full of bud leaf,
and the aspirations of limbs.
QUAKING ASPEN
Marilyn Ringer
~Populus tremuloides
Exquisite shiverer, you devil me.
You are not one, but many
who make the one whose roots
seek dark matter, become primordia
to capture light, the parent tree
a hidden system.
You are the lure self-cloned
and groved, disguised in filigree
and sway; a pliant core that survives
deep winters, arid summers,
whose ovate leaves transform
the waste of my breath
to rarefied air.
I want to give up my resistance,
describe your flattened petioles,
note the raucous skree, skree
of a Steller’s Jay,
but you want more,
demand a witness,
an homage to your power,
how you trick the wind,
hold it in your small hands,
make it sing.
I bow my back
against your difficult beauty
while beneath the ground
a million-year-old being
waits upon the next ice age
to cast its seed.
AVOWED
Marilyn Ringer
I do not know whose eyes perceive
my finite movements toward light.
Each letting go, a small cry,
each forward move a Monarch’s
migratory assurance of what can’t be known.
The genetic certainty of cells
propels the forebrain
with its stumbling feet,
while a heartache of hope
wins each moment even as it is lost
to the next, and must accept
the impermanent flow
that is like air, necessary and sacred.
Tears are not only the salt of sorrow.
by Marina Manoukian
noticeably bare
soup: only on good days. the thickness bolds appearance as heavy-handed fountain
pens once did.
sugar: take care. necessary for coffee but not countertops.
rolling tobacco: the blended concoction of cause and effect
cups: utterly dependent upon mug size, shape, weight. don’t forget air pressure and
wind patterns.
pen: after some time the under finally becomes a line. a form of meditation.
sparkling red wine
an interval. a set of real numbers. the difference between two pitches. the duration
between two events.
make it lighter, too heavy, weight-wise. too much, emotions-wise. flame for the fire.
to patronize:
to be condescending, to frequent as a customer.
how many times, too many clocks, how many clocks, how much clocks, how much is
a clock, how many instances, how many moments, too many moments, not enough
moments, never enough instances,
when you cut a picture out of its frame it still fringes.
fringe, jean-shorts, daisy duke whoever, fray, frayed bits and pieces hanging off, the
edge, peripheral, extreme, television.
girl to doll to poppet to puppet. progress connotated by progression of sorts, of types,
of kinds.
sort, type, kind, somewhat, reorder, fold the laundry put it back in the drawer, ask for
a refund and get more, fingers clicking towards the amazon, black keys make music
don’t they, category, symbolizing, characteristics, bread and wine, nature, nice, polite,
not cruel.
nails, fake bones, aesthetic, trendy, potential for decoration, tools, paired with
hammers, walls, beds, region, meditation
well, the beginning of an explanation, okay, how are you doing, water, at the bottom
now what is the word for it?
comfort
the word rings like a summers bird
at 4:33 in
the morning
right before gulls will leave and bird may migrate
if they so choose.
sleep comes to those who know what to expect
what is just as it should be.
a shoulder is only a shoulder if it’s there.
a bed is a bed only if it’s comfy.
no. not if it’s comfy. that pays no matter, it’s
broke now
of course.
one is too
one is too
one is just right
said the locks
on the doors
broken
refurnished
remade
SIX STANDING CROWS Meryl McQueen
Huddled like rabbis in a field
Of dying rye, six standing
Crows scratch a coarse meal
From dust and dirt. No command
Or edict tumbles from flat sky. No
Rain. Skullcaps of slick black
Feathers dip and nod as bow
To cello, the rhythm halfway back
To darkness. The gathered stalks
Are crumpled moths, wan and wasted
By timid clouds that balk
And twist at first blue taste of
Rain. Flow and wet, that covenant
To seep and grow, is crushed to dry
Retreat. The animals’ mute sacrament
Of final feast calls out the sky.
They rock on talons in the ruins, these birds
Like men of duty, men of prayer
Who conjure rivers from dead words
As weak as a promise. Where
Would we be without the harvest
Of grain and glory? The ink-dipped
Corvus flock stopped here to rest
But we are weak and ill-equipped
To save the day.
APART/HATE Meryl McQueen
There it is: twelve hundred plots
Of ground, sanctified with gold
And pressing
Greed. An enviable spot
With homes for diplomats, bold
Bankers. The green address
Of need. Want shelter, crave
Safety, pray for swift return
To order
And to calm. Ark homes, brave
Barricades, electrocution burn
For borders
Crossed that don’t deliver.
Clipped lawns, stucco, faux thatch,
Roman columns,
Every one a pool. A river
Of servants, open the hatch
To morning’s solemn
Trade: luxury for
Livelihood, lights and water
The wait
A decade or more.
Both sides, sons and daughters
Of monied apart/hate,
Off to somewhere.
Some to school.
CANLEY HILL
Meryl McQueen
Follow me up to the criss-cross
Stump on Canley Hill. I will
Slip early from the trundle by the
Groaning fire, sloshing in Graham’s cracked boots.
My hands will snap stems of
Daisies in the north field, through the
Last paddock where Jeremy the plough horse
Died in his sleep last spring.
My breath will bite the empty air, frosting
Icy baubles on the gentle slope.
When I feel the slack on my calves—
Shallow tread, easing gravel—
I will whistle with the dawn owls
Retreating to their glowing
Nests of mouse fur pellets and shredded bark.
Come quickly, then; trace my even
Steps from your curled loft mattress on the
Pounded earth. You’ll jump—
I know you’ll jump.
Land on coiled springs from the ladder,
Leap, rocking on calloused hands for
Balance and soft courage.
I will leave the door ajar. Momma’s
Torn brown coat will be
Swinging on a nail in the barn.
It will be cold—late winter cold, with
Knotted hands and jackhammer claws.
It will be dark—lying sun dark, with
Whimpering light and purple bruise shadows.
Walk two to one, two to one in my trail.
Find me where the oak and the maple trees
Croaked in the hail-bent storm.
Cradle your slingshot.
Carry pebbles in your pocket.
Bring my gun.
REDIRECTION Meryl McQueen
Motherhood snapped shut her
Tiger jaws, ground
Assumptions into
Bloody, bony red
Redirection. I
Dribbled heart and guts like
Wet ink on the long
Scroll of four decades
Past. History ran
In blotted, eager
Creeks to the open
Sea of my new self.
Motherhood: this death,
This resurrected
Flux of truth and dare.
THE DAY FINDS ME Meryl McQueen
Step into that space
Again, where the trees and wind
And distant pulse of
Traffic find their place
Between the rainbow birds
And the end of the day. In
Or out, with or
Without is easy word
Play when the game
Is the game. They leave at
Eight-oh-nine. I am
Alone with verse and voice, the same
Dredge-and-drag to peel away
The others’ closing in. Sweat.
Shower. Eat. Sit. Wait
Until the solitary day
Finds me. Today? Too long,
Too late, the clunk of the
Latch at the gate, the stories of my
Life return to tell me they belong.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow, eight-oh-nine.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FLORIDA
Terry Ann Thaxton
1. Landscape
Yes, we have coastal plains.
We have limestone, sugar cane, oranges, and shrimp.
We have uplands and theme parks:
Disney World
China Land
Holy Land Experience
—and, although we should, we do not have Hurricane World.
We have Celebration—a real town where, despite all the noise
from Downtown
Disney,
white boys would never even try to find frogs
in the ditch,
but where neighbors live in their own private enlightenment, and a deer:
real / imagined / made by Disney / who cares?
greets you as you find your way inside. Celebration is like any other town
in this state of pure and soggy summer heat.
We have women who climb into trucks.
Perhaps you’ll see garage doors open wide, tables spring up
in driveways, the owners selling Bibles, broken cribs,
a dining room table with three chairs, a bicycle missing a chain.
Eventually the houses kill everything.
Florida is a place where you can sing your own hymn.
I’ve seen more than a dozen hotels named “The Sea Shell.”
We have state prisons—one named “Liberty Correctional Facility.”
We do have a state full of flowers,
and many conversation pieces in the landscape.
2. Sinkholes
Our cupped hands hold our hope, and so we water our passion flowers, but only on
Thursdays and Sundays as the law allows, and only before 10:00 a.m. or after 4:00
p.m. The aquifer beneath us is falling, and every year more sinkholes swallow our
trees, our houses, our cars.
One year, May ’81, in Winter Park, a car dealership fell into the sand: Three-hundredtwenty feet wide, ninety feet deep. At the bottom of the sinkhole: dozens of Porsches
crushed, and an old woman’s house. It became a festival, a carnival—hot dogs for
sale, balloons, T-shirts! a real celebration.
In the Summer of ’75 I learned to drive past funeral chapels and nursing homes, where
dominos and go-fish and other games were locked inside white stucco with my
grandmother. I stuck my toes into award-winning sand. I stared at boys’ trucks,
watched the buttonhole of evening try to become darkness, though most evenings,
remained partly the color of tea.
3. De-Segregation
In September 1969, when I started fifth grade,
my daddy said, Just our luck, because across the room
was the bussed-in face of George and other kids
whose dark skin looked smoother
than the words printed in my book.
Mrs. Darcy was reading again
from Genesis, because even though
ours was a public school,
it was her duty, she said, to teach us
the Word of God.
She paced in front, holding the big book
in one hand, raising and lowering
her other hand for emphasis on sin and evil
and Eve tempting Adam with that apple,
and then the note in my hand, having been shipped
across the sea of white faces:
I like you.
George.
4. The Children Are Tired
It rains here.
Portions of torn-up
railroad lines have become bike paths
for those who can tolerate
partial sunshine. Most of us
stay inside and watch plastic flamingos in our yards.
Eggs don’t roll. We have at least
one man who rides his lawn mower
with his belly showing. Woodstorks mosey
along roadsides. Over their heads,
as they muddle through water, their bills
make circles on an evaporating calendar.
The sky is neurotic, a canyon of heavy breath.
5. Free Orange Juice
At the Florida/Georgia border:
clouds, rain, and free orange juice,
and down the center of the state,
more registered hate groups
than in any other state.
You must have the code at the gate.
If you move here, you must paint your house
only in the colors approved
by the Home Owners’ Association (earth pastels are best).
At first we appear to be without defenses, but we have spent years
developing tractors and statues
that were more in the mood to be palm trees.
I try to believe there are more than two otters left
in our state parks. Household trash walks right into our swamps,
pulling the plug on raccoons and snakes.
We burn crosses in our neighbors’ yards, and we believe
we have the right to carry guns in holsters.
We shoot our neighbors for not putting the garbage
on the curb, or we shoot our non-neighbors
for not living in our gated community. We stand on the side
of the road as if we are crosses
or cows waiting for a single car to stop
and give us the right to mention the weather,
to close our doors, to plant devastation.
OBEDIENCE
Terry Ann Thaxton
A parent is the perpetrator in most homicides of children under age 5. –
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007
The day is curious with rain.
Nearby a car wishes for a different route.
The storm will never end. The flowers, unfolding,
are spoiled and fearless:
our late summer guards.
And there is nothing inside the plastic garbage bag
found in the swamp
except the polite, once popular blonde girl, no longer
—a window into her own
solution, into what she thought might be
the nervous wind of her life.
by Anne Graue
Painting Rain
(puddles like whales
houses of shark's teeth
raindrops lining up, moving
upward toward a marbled sky)
A pool of water, under the
albicant clouds next to
charcoal collections surrounded
by cardinals singing loudly
for power over the earth
Rain is everywhere, even
in front of the indigent sun
without remorse or forethought
Forty days and forty nights
produce such bright colors
of a world painted new
as the old one lands
amid debris and hope
honeysuckle grows brighter
next to the dark clouds.
Did you hear that?
I heard them speaking
in Tamarind whisper-songs-Cotton-topped-quiet, soft.
Their cautious approaching
a kind of prelude
to a mob convergence, alarms
sounding high, controlled,
vigilant, acoustic.
Shrill voices vanished
and what was left
were the conspiratorial
clicks of mouse-eared
bats echo locating
and the mating of songbirds.
The Loneliest Species of Whale in the World
From California to Alaska – Kansas to New York – the journey has been long and filled
with visions – dark-water fish and submerged mammals – leaving behind the familiar
space of family – searching for one or more signs of sameness –
I often linger in Grand Central Station – where he lingers I am uncertain – I search for
others like me in the crowd and remember family of long ago – non-existent now – he
has no family, only a familiar call, a little off – my call is silent and loud.
Wages of Sin
The hood of the Chevy warmed our bare
legs as we lay back to look at the stars;
cemeteries slept under our feet as we pushed
muddy heels through soft dirt; ranch houses
and backyards screamed our existence,
our dreams in rec rooms and doorways;
aunts and grandmothers canned tomatoes,
baked pies around us, watched wistfully
the changing world through scopes strained
to see a modern view of the rain barrel,
ominous at the corner of the house,
where we once stood amid the heady smells
of peaches and wet grass, remembering
long rides on straight highways vibrating
under us, cars flanked by fields of red
embers glowing in the humidity of August,
our skin penetrated as we watched funnel
clouds twist, furl, and jump into the sky.
At False Light
excerpt from the novel
C G Fewston
Based on true events that happened in 1966.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it
that in the process he does not become a monster.
 Nietzche
The first time I saw men executed the year was 1966 and I was five weeks shy of
turning twenty-seven. The late August morning had not dawned in Cairo when I leaned
from a rooftop’s ledge and looked down into a courtyard fitted with floodlights along the
walls. Around midnight it had stopped raining and the puddles lay across the ground in
large oily pools that reflected the gold sheen coming from the security lights. Among
the shadows I could see armed Egyptian guards facing the hangman’s platform that
had been erected the day before. Suspended from the main post were eight ropes tied
into slipknots that created eight loops and the construction reminded me of a giant
Newton’s Cradle. The only thing that sinister device lacked were the metallic spheres
that could strike one another in the endless law of motion where action is fueled by
reaction. And this same principle of a pendulum banging back and forth could be
applied to the frenzied politics in the Middle East.
From behind me an access door slammed shut and cracked open the silence
hovering throughout the compound. The guards flinched and brought their steady,
restless gaze up to meet mine. I crossed my arms over my chest to keep from
laughing and waited for my spy master to arrive.
Dr Otto Von Steele, my CIA mentor who had recruited me out of university,
approached and stood by my side. He waved to the guards below who lowered their
tired eyes down and back on the front gate that was now beginning to open.
Dr Steele casually dusted small amounts of lint off the coat of his tailored suit as he
said, ‘A nervous bunch, aren’t they, John?’
‘I’m missing the Beatles at Candlestick Park for this,’ I said. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘I want you to consider what you are about to witness,’ Dr Steele said, ‘as one more
lesson in your training. Call it a present from yours truly.’
‘A ticket to San Francisco,’ I said, ‘would’ve done me fine.’
Dr Steele had removed his wire-rimmed glasses and was now wiping a lens with a
purple silk hanky. He slipped the glasses back on and said, ‘I suppose we can’t always
get what we want, now can we?’
The detainees were marched in through the gate, and each man who had been
sent to die had their hands bound before them. A few of these men avoided the
rainwater puddled in their path as they were led up the stairs that ascended to the
platform. Of the last prisoner, two guards in starched white uniforms carried him into
position where his feeble legs shook on a temporary stand.
This one prisoner’s arms hung loose, his chin did not move from its place on the
man’s chest. The toothbrush mustache he had might have at one time appeared
dignified but now the thin strip of hair came across as pitiful and childish. Here was a
man who knew he was going to die. In this same man I could see all hope for one
more day had been drained long ago into a nothingness so empty his broken physical
composition now refused to participate in the illusion of tomorrow. The rope was
adjusted and the noose slipped tight around his neck.
Except for the broken man, the other condemned men prayed aloud to Allah, their
Islamic god, for safe passage after death and for the success of the Ikhwan, the
Muslim Brotherhood to which each belonged. The guards then tied on the blindfolds
for every prisoner.
The executioner had his hand ready on the lever. Next to him, a guard gripped a
thin rope feeding through a system of pulleys that would soon hoist a black flag high.
No one said a word. Not even Dr Steele.
Outside the compound a car screeched and came to a halt. Soon after I heard the
car doors bang shut. The guards inside the courtyard were called to attention.
Through the gate rushed a high-ranking official and before his second step landed
in one of the puddles he called out, ‘Stop! Stop the execution!’
The executioner jerked his hand from the lever. The flagman released the thin
rope. Three of the prisoners sang out praises to Allah. Two others hunched their
shoulders in what appeared to be relief in the escape from the certain doom they had
faced a few minutes prior.
‘Allah is greater,’ a prisoner shouted.
Dr Steele tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Now watch this.’ A splinter of light filled the
good doctor’s eyes. He clasped his hands in front of himself and we both waited for
the final verdict.
‘What do you expect me to learn?’ The inflection was absent and the words came
from my voice in the form of a flat statement.
‘Watch, and tell me who your enemy is.’
‘But why?’ To myself I sounded like a child standing before a grave asking a
rhetorical question. I was not ready for this kind of lesson.
‘I have decided to send you to the war in Vietnam,’ Dr Steele said. He loosened his
tie and checked his watch. The time was not yet past four in the morning. He told me
that even though I had training what I lacked was experience. ‘You have never killed a
man,’ he said. ‘And you still do not know the face of your enemy.’
I turned my attention back on the scene below. From the fracture found between
light and dark inside the courtyard the official’s rigorous and strict demeanor bothered
me. This turnkey of sorts remained sullen with each stride forward. In one hand he
held a small notebook by his side. The official climbed the steps to reach the platform
and did not hesitate to proceed to the man who wore, rather shamelessly, Hitler’s
mustache.
‘Sayyid,’ the official said. ‘President Nasser, out of his sincere pleasure and
patience, offers you your life and the lives of these men beside you. Our respected
president asks only one thing. He asks for you to write a simple note confessing that
you were wrong and you now apologize. And sign, of course. Then you and the others
are free to go.’
The prisoner Sayyid was blindfolded and could not see the official extending a pen
in one hand and the notebook in the other. One prisoner cried out, ‘Horiyya.’ He
wanted freedom. Another prisoner cried, ‘Shahadah.’ This man urged for a declaration
of faith to be made, for martyrdom.
Dr Steele asked me if the conversation was audible from where I was at on the
roof, just three floors high. I said that it was. The voices echoed out and up and were
clear to the naked ear. He asked if I had any trouble understanding the men. I said that
the language was not a problem but that there was some fool doctor whispering into
my ear and that made concentration difficult enough.
Down below, despite being blindfolded, Sayyid seemed to know to look over at the
notebook. His head turned slightly to the side before he forced his chin up and off his
chest.
‘Never,’ he said. ‘I will not forfeit that life which is never-ending with this temporary
one.’
‘Sayyid,’ the official said. A plea stuck to the bottom of the official’s throat as if
Sayyid were his true brother and he feared what followed. ‘This will mean your death.’
All I kept thinking was how nothing was eternal. How men and women live and die
and that was it; that was all. Nothing remained. Would I one day become a cannibal of
morals and men? I thought. There was a certain freedom, and also darkness, in not
wanting to know.
‘I welcome death on my path to Allah,’ Sayyid said. His head tilted back and he
faced the dark heavens growing gray with the coming dawn. ‘Allah is great,’ he said.
The official paused and studied Sayyid.
Dr Steele lit a cheroot cigar. The smell was sweet in the damp air. He gave a few
puffs of smoke shaped in neat, perfectly formed circles. ‘Do you have an answer for
me?’
‘My enemy,’ I said, ‘is the one person I must fear the most.’
‘And who is it you fear the most, John?’
‘Myself,’ I said. ‘I’m my worst enemy.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Perception is your enemy. This is the Middle East. If you cannot
comprehend that when someone says up they mean down, or they direct you left when
you’re supposed to go right, you are already lost. This is the World’s stage and the
American culture that was bred into you is dead out here. If a person cannot perceive
when it is best to live or die, that person is not of use to anyone, not even himself, and
he should be shot immediately.’
After another minute or so the official nodded to the executioner who placed his
hand back on the lever. The official’s hand came slowly up to the height of his shoulder
before he thrust his arm and hand down to his side. Dr Steele left the way he came
and I stood alone.
The lever had no design flaws. The eight prisoners dropped instantly. Several of
the men writhed and kicked and gagged. The black flag had been raised and it now
flapped inside a breeze.
I watched until the limbs stopped twisting and fighting and the silence returned to
hover over the living and the dead. I can assure you, there was no reverence in any of
it.
Review: Tales from the Eternal Café
by Janet Hamill
With an Introduction by Patti Smith
Three Rooms Press, New York, NY, 2014
With the publication of her new book, Tales from the Eternal Café, Janet Hamill achieves with a
straightforward prose style what she has previously accomplished in poetry: a challenge to the way we
habitually view reality. Her tales move along like conventional linear narratives until you realize you’re on a
staircase in an Escher painting; a trip to the Guggenheim Museum morphs into a compelling experience of
altered perception; a travelogue about Tangiers takes the reader on a magic carpet ride to the other side of logic.
In “Novalis” the lives of two men seem entangled across time and space. A magician in
Times Square buying props at a magic shop learns of the mysterious disappearance of
a friend, the illusionist Novalis of Coney Island who literally vanished during a
performance some months before. As the story progresses a series of
correspondences between Novalis of Coney Island and his namesake, the German
poet Novalis, create an echo-chamber effect not unlike the one in Forster’s A Passage
to India that so disorients Miss Quested that she cannot distinguish reality from
imagination. The two share a pseudonym and eerily similar life histories: both of their
first loves died before they were seventeen, causing both to enter a dark night of the
soul, and each man died around the age of 29; both wrote poems to the night in the
same style, expressing a yearning to die into the darkness and join their departed
loves. What’s the point?
Hamill’s art is one of implication. Unlike stories that establish their backgrounds and
resolve loose ends, her tales start in medias res and end enigmatically, leaving her
readers delightfully puzzled and, with a little thought, a bit enlightened. Like Salinger
and Hemingway among prose writers, she doesn’t tell all, but invites us to connect the
dots. Similar themes of doubling, disappearances, mysticism and magic run through
them, presented as deadpan reportage.
“Novalis” is a case in point: like a dropped pebble, the name generates ripples of
implication: Novalis of Germany was an early Romantic poet. He admired the
philosopher Schelling, who called the Protestant Reformation “unfortunate” for its
rejection of the numinous mysticism of the Eucharist in favor of a rational view of the
sacrament as a conceptual reminder of the Incarnation. For Schelling the Eucharist
was a mystical experience beyond logic and common sense, in which the body and
blood were literally present in the bread and wine.
Novalis carried Schelling’s agenda into literature with a style he called “Magical
Idealism,” dedicated to revealing the truth that remains invisible when perception is
corrupted by delusive beliefs. In his novel Heinrich von Offerdingen he used the image
of a blue flower as a Romantic symbol of ineffable reality in ordinary events. Is
transcendental Romantic philosophy a clue to meaning of this book’s enigmatic
characters, settings and situations, which often seem to defy logic?
The Romantics deplored the Enlightenment, which they saw as a catastrophic
disenchantment of the world. It dignified the cogito as the summum bonum of human
faculties, and denigrated the sacred. It’s not difficult to see modern literary styles like
Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism and Magic Realism as continuations of their attempt to
break through habits and beliefs that prevent numinous experience, especially after
Nietzsche, Marx and Freud rationalized the old gods out of existence. William Blake
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he
sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” It is precisely this attitude that
Hamill’s tales valorize, with narratives that jump the tracks, identities that exceed their
boundaries, locations that transcend geography, and time that defies the natural laws
we think are immutable. Neither cogito or ego will carry one to illumination.
The very first story in the book, “Baudelaire at the Prince of Wales,“ depicts the poet
known as the Father of Symbolism during his last years in Brussels, attended by his
faithful friend and publisher Coco Malassis, who narrates the tale. Baudelaire had
travelled there to seek an income as a lecturer and to find a publisher after Malassis
went bankrupt. Both endeavors failed. Malassis, in Brussels to escape his French
creditors, assumed caretaker status for Baudelaire, who was suffering dementia as a
result of advanced syphilis. In his addled state, Baudelaire in Hamill’s tale breaks free
of the normal constraints of space and time, simultaneously occupying the Prince of
Wales café and the paquebot that once took him to India, mistaking his friend for the
ship’s captain and the waitress for his Creole mistress Jeanne Duval in her youth.
“Captain Saliz,” he says to Malassis, “I find the rough seas no longer disturb me. Soon
it will be evening, and the stucco villas on the coast will pick up the glow of the moon.”
Baudelaire, called by Rimbaud “a genius and a visionary,” created the transcendental
symbols that German and English Romantics only described in theory. Despite his
reputation for drugged sensual and emotional excess, Baudelaire’s poetry combines
empiricism and rationalism in a state of consciousness that employs both ways of
knowing the world. Critics, scholars and translators often miss his poetry’s serious
epistemological challenges. Frequent references to clarity, lucidity and illumination in
the two poems that best manifest the ars poetica of his Symbolsim. “Elevation” and
“Correspondences,” establish Baudelaire’s noetic implications. Sounds, aromas and
tactile sensations become indistinguishable from each other and the ‘living symbols’ of
the natural landscape look back at him with a familiar gaze. Mystical experience
becomes possible when ego fades. The senses provide the medium through which the
sacred arrives. Baudelaire’s Symbolism actualizes the vision of Shelley who said
poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and
sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.”
Just as Baudelaire finds the sacred in the world of nature and sensations, Tales from
the Eternal Cafe re-sacrilizes the secular world. Like the so-called Magical Realist
writers Gabriel Maria Marquez, Juan Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Hamill’s writing in
this book and in her poetry encourages a disposition of openness to the impossible
becoming possible.
To appreciate the subtle cohesiveness of Tales from the Eternal Café, it’s important to
note the threads that run through the stories, connecting their meanings. One of these
is the conflation of identities. “In the Patio of the Orange Trees” contains narrators that
nestle within each other like Russian dolls. An anonymous third narrator explains:
“In 1963, shortly after the restoration of Cordoba’s Mezquita, Dr. Julio Gayangos, chief
of restoration, told this story to Emilio Garcia Gomez at the Café Horno de San Luis on
Calle del Corregidor.”
The tale, told third-hand, relates how a naïve stonecutter unknowingly inscribed a
poem in a temple written by an 11th Century Andalusian polymath and poet. In an act of
automatic writing, he channels the words of Ibn Hazm, who often took as his subject
the direct revelations of the divine granted to early Muslims. Coincidentally, the poet
often wrote in the patio the stonecutter visits daily.
Doubling also occurs in “Blue Corpus Christi,” which takes place in the Café Belmonte
in Grenada as Senorita Flores, an actress in Garcia Lorca’s La Barracca theater
troupe tries to persuade her brother, grief-stricken and enraged over the murder of his
lover, to come back with her to Madrid. Set in Andalusia during the Spanish Civil War,
the atmosphere is thick with the dark menace that resulted in the assasination there of
Garcia Lorca himself under circumstances never explained. Details surrounding the
deaths of both the lover and Lorca duplicate each other to such an extent that the
identities of the two men mirror each other.
A broad hint of the story’s meaning is its allusion to the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Corpus Christi is Latin for “body of Christ.” It is the only Christian holy day focused
solely on transubstantiation, the mystical presence in the bread and wine of the body
and blood of Christ. It was celebrated in medieval Spain with mystery plays re-enacting
the attendance at the birth of Jesus of the magi, wise men who were open to
miraculous signs and portents. What has become of this disposition in a world where
faith is denigrated as supersititon? It has been reduced to mere physical tokens of a
sacrament that once inspired divine revelation. Senorita Flores orders
“some of the Corpus Christi Carmelite crescents:
“Senorita is too late, they’re all gone. But there are other sweets.
“No. I had a craving for those little yellow crescents. I think of them when I think of the
festival.”
The Carmelite nun who petitioned the Church for the addition of Corpus Christi to the
calendar had a mystical vision of the Eucharist under the moon. She believed in the
impossible presence of Christ in the sacrament, just as the Virgin Mary at the
Annunciation believed the stranger who said “What is impossible for man is possible
for God.”
The bible of course is full of possible impossibles. Sarah and Abraham, for example,
who impossibly have a child in old age. But after the Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, the slaughters of world wars, slavery, racism and the atrocities of the
Holocaust, the old Emperor of the World no longer seems all-powerful. Are we then
abandoned by meaning and grace? But of course the impossible does happen in
modern times: Gandhi, Mandela, Dr. King achieved it, because they were disposed to
its arrival.
Artists can also inspire us to broaden our beliefs about what is possible, and provide
new ways of beholding the sacred, not beyond the world but in the world. More than
philosophers and scholars, artists can open the doors of perception, because
discursive thought and the sequential syntax of language cannot lead us to
illumination. Art can transcend those limitations.
Magical correspondences proliferate in Hamill’s story “Tangiers Dojoun” when the
narrator, shaken by the earlier discovery of a hex figure placed among her things in her
hotel, is menaced by men in the Café Fuentes who call her a whore. Vulnerable and
endangered in a society that frowns on a woman alone in a café, she is rescued by a
dog who appears out of nowhere, like a shamanistic power animal who comes to her
aid when she has no earthly recourse. She calls him Sebsi, after the Moroccan kif
pipe, a hint that he is a facilitator of altered perceptions that may open the portals to a
new kind of knowledge. After all, didn’t Genet, Burroughs and Ginsberg visit Tangiers
for that very purpose? The protagonist of ‘Tangiers Dejoun” finds a city where belief in
the sympathetic magic of voodoo still hold sway, where pouches filled with feathers,
herbs, snakeskin and semi-precious gems are carried for protection and a piece of
clothing or strand of hair can be used to cast white or black magic spells on the owner.
The question implied by this and all the tales in Hammil’s book is “Can we let go of our
certainty that the impossible cannot happen?”
In this endeavor she is in good company. Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez
made bizarre events seem possible in everyday life, sometimes astoundingly, as when
a woman in One Hundred Years of Solitude disappears into the sky while folding
laundry, or in miracles that seem humdrum, like the bedraggled angel in “An Old Man
with Enormous Wings” blown to earth by a rainstorm. Marquez protested that our
ideas about reality are too limited, and proclaimed himself a realist.
Likewise, the writing of Jorge Luis Borges tries to capture often describes epiphanic
moments. In “The Aleph” he tries to capture with the inadequate net of language an
impossible vision given to a character in a cellar in Argentina:
In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful, not one of
them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space,
without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but
what I shall now write will be successive, because language is successive.” (A Borges
Reader, 160-61.)
Like Borges’ Ficciones, Hamill’s Tales from the Eternal Café is a compilation of stories
that are explicit as narratives but enigmatic at the thematic level. By following her
threads we can reach her meaning: epiphany is still possible beyond theology, and the
sacred is not absent from the ordinary speckled and dappled things of life. It can be
found if we are open to its presence.
JANET HAMILL is the author of five books of poetry, prose poetry and short fiction. Her
work had been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s
William Carlos Williams Prize. Tales from the Eternal Café is her first complete
collection of stories. In addition to her books, Janet has released two spoken word
CD’s with the band Lost Ceilings (previously Moving Star), featuring cameos by Lenny
Kaye, Patti Smith, David Amram and Bob Holman. After three decades in New York
City, Janet now resides in the Hudson Valley.
CONTRIBUTORS
Jason Price Everett was born in Orlando, Florida in 1972. He was educated at
Lafayette College, Cornell University and the University of Paris. He has held thirty
different positions of employment to date, one of the more recent being that of English
professor at a university in Xi'an, China. His first book, Unfictions, a collection of short
prose pieces, was released by 8th House Publishing in 2009. His collection
Hypodrome: Selected Poems 1990-2010 was released by 8th House in the spring of
2012. Xian Dyad, a poetic travelogue, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in the summer
of 2012. His work has appeared in numerous online and print literary publications,
including The Mad Hatters Review, Writers Notes Magazine, The Quarterly Review,
The Prague Literary Review, Underground Voices, BLATT, Brand, The Alchemy
Review, Carcinogenic Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Magazine, Ronin, Revue Mètropolitaine,
CV2, The neo:anthology Project, and Apiary. He currently lives in Philadelphia.
James Mullard is a twenty year old student and young writer living in Manchester. He
has recently been published in Black & Blue Magazine, Fade Poetry Journal and
Sonder Magazine.
Eileen Hennessy I began my professional writing career as a translator of books,
chiefly in art history, and now specialize in translating legal and commercial
documentation into English from several West European languages. I am an adjunct
associate professor in the Translation Studies program at NYU. In terms of creative
writing, apart from a few incursions into writing non-fiction articles and fiction, I am a
poet first and foremost. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary
magazines, including The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Prairie
Schooner, Whiskey Island Magazine, Columbia, Confrontation, The Alembic, The
Seventh Quarry, The Dirty Goat, The Citron Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Folio,
Inkwell Magazine, The Licking River Review, Rhino, Forge, Crack the Spine, Stickman
Review, Smartish Pace, Southern Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly, and Sonora
Review, and in several anthologies. My poetry collection titled, This Country of Galeforce Winds, was published by New York Quarterly Books in November 2011.
Lee Varon is a writer and clinical social worker. Her poetry and short stories have
been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in A & U AIDS Magazine, Artful
Dodge, Black River Review, Blue Mesa Review, Common Journeys, Euphony, Fox Cry
Review, Hawaii Review, High Plains Literary Review, Lumina, The Maverick Press
Journal, Milkweed Chronicle, The New Renaissance, Owen Wister Review, Oyez
Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, Pleiades, The Puckerbush Review,
RE:AL, Red Ochre Lit, River City, The Rockford Review, Sibyl-Child, Sliver of Stone,
Sojourner, So To Speak, Soundings East, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Review,
Words & Images, and Writers Forum.
Natalie Safir Since the late 70's, I have been teaching poetry writing workshops: an
ongoing private workshop for published poets now in its twenty-first year; a bi-weekly
workshop at the Dobbs Ferry Library, workshops and lectures on contemporary poetry
at the Scarsdale Library, and twice-yearly workshops at the Lenoir Nature Preserve. I
have appeared on Westchester Cable; was founder/director of a reading series, The
Pomegranate Series in Hastings for nine years and a reading series at the Hastings
Library, poetry editor of Inprint Magazine, and a founding editor of Gravida in the 70's.
In Tarrytown, NY, I taught private groups and at The Hudson Valley Writers' Center, in
Sleepy Hollow. Since 2001, I have been teaching Personal Memoir Writing at The
Neighborhood House, a local senior center, funded by Poets & Writers, and at the
Warner Library in Tarrytown. My program, Writing as Healing was presented in Fall
2007 at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and again in Summer, 2009. I have also
worked for the WorldPulse organization as a Mentor in their pilot Correspondents
program.
Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including The Dreaming Girl, a novel
republished in 2011 by Ellipsis Press and published in 2013 as an e-book by Dzanc
Books and Ellipsis. Her stories have most recently appeared in The Collagist. A visual
artist as well, she has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. She teaches private writing workshops in Manhattan.
www.robertaallen.com
Rae Uddin, MS, is a writer, editor, and business professional based in San Francisco
Lisa Olsson Writer, musician, visual artist, Lisa Olsson was born in Huntington, N.Y.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Wesleyan University and studied
Graphic Design at San Jose State University. She was an Art Director for advertising
agencies in California, and a Design Director for Pearson Education in New York. She
lives near New York City with her family. Her poetry and painting have been published
by Les Femmes Folles.
William L. Alton was born November 5, 1969 and started writing in the Eighties while
incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. Since then his work has appeared in Main
Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. In 2010, he
was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published one book titled Heroes of
Silence. He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in
Forest Grove, Oregon where he continues to live. You can find him at
williamlalton.com.
Chris Barker has worked as a teacher in high schools and universities for over
twenty-five years and currently teaches Cultural Studies at the University of
Wollongong, Australia. He has published widely in the domain of media and cultural
theory but in recent times has been writing fiction, including an as yet unpublished
novel. He has practiced meditation and mindfulness, mainly but not exclusively in the
Zen Buddhist tradition of Thich Nhah Hahn, for fifteen years."
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky My poem “Madelyn Dunham, Passing On” won first prize in
the Obama Millennium Contest. My work has been widely published and has appeared
or is forthcoming in Argestes, Backwards City Review, Barely South Review, Blue
Lake Review, Bogg, Cadillac Cicatrix, California Quarterly, The Cape Rock, The
Chaffin Journal, Compass Rose, Comstock Review, Darkling, decomP, Dogwood
Review, Earth’s Daughters, Eclipse, ellipsis>literature and art, Emprise Review,
Euphony, Fourth River, Freshwater, G.W. Review, Ibbetson Street Press, Into the Teeth
of the Wind, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Left Curve, Lindenwood Review,
Meridian Anthology Of Contemporary Poetry, Minetta Review, Monkeybicycle, Nassau
Review, The Pinch, Poem, Prick of the Spindle, Quiddity, Rattle, Reed Magazine,
Runes, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, Ship of Fools, Sierra Nevada
Review, Soundings East, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, The
Spoon River Poetry Review, Stand, Stickman Review, The Texas Review, Tightrope,
Verdad, Visions International, Weber Studies, Westview, Whistling Shade, Wild Violet,
Willow Review, and in the anthologies Child Of My Child, When the Muse Calls, and
The Book of Now. My fourth poetry collection is called The Faust Woman Poems.
I am a Jungian analyst in private practice in Berkeley, CA and the poetry and fiction
editor of Psychological Perspectives, which is published by the Los Angeles Jung
Institute.
Rose Mary Boehm A German-born UK national, lives and works in Lima, Peru.
Author of two novels and a poetry collection (TANGENTS), her poems have appeared
or are forthcoming in US poetry reviews: Toe Good Poetry, Poetry Breakfast, Burning
Word, Muddy River Review, Pale Horse Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Other Rooms,
Requiem Magazine, Full of Crow, Poetry Quarterly, Punchnel’s, Avatar, Verse
Wisconsin, Naugatuck River Review, Boston Literary, Red River Review, Ann Arbor,
Main Street Rag, Misfit Magazine and others.
Erren Geraud Kelly is a poet based in Burlington, Vermont, by way of Chicago, by
way of Louisiana, by way of Maine, by way of California, by way of New York City and
so on. He has been writing for 25 years and has over 100 publications in print and
online in such publications as Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine
(online), Ceremony, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg
and other publications. His most recent publication was in In Our Own Words, a
Generation X poetry anthology; he was also published in Fertile Ground, Beyond The
Frontier and other anthologies. His work can also been seen on YouTube under the
"Gallery Cabaret" links. He is also the author of the chapbook Disturbing The Peace on
Night Ballet Press. He received his B.A. in English–Creative Writing from Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge. He also loves to read and to travel, having visited 45
states and Canada and Europe. The themes in his writings vary, but he has always
had a soft spot for subjects and people who are not in the mainstream. But he never
limits himself to anything, he always tries to keep an open mind. Email:
[email protected]
Tammye Huf I earned my BA in English from Wellesley College with an honors in
creative writing. I am a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators, have attended Robert McKee’s Story and Genre seminars, and will be
attending the Winchester Writer’s Festival this June. My work has appeared in
Necessary Fiction. In the past I have worked as an English and ESL teacher, and as a
homeschooler. Originally from the United States, I am settled in England with my
husband and three children.
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian is a widely published poet residing in Southern California.
She released the first volume of her poems Uncoil a Night in 2013. Some of the
publications featuring her poems are; Streetcake Magazine, Miracle-ezine , The
Literary Groong, Mad Swirl, The Galway Review, and The Artistic Muse (December
2013 issue.) Poet’s Basement at Counterpunch.org, The Oddity, Red Fez, Young
Men’s Perspective volume 3, Munyori Literary Journal, Ygdrasil, a journal of the Poetic
Arts, The Original Van Goghs Ear Anthology.
Her work has been published in anthologies, The Art of Being Human-An Anthology of
International Poetry, The Inspired Heart, The Blue Max Review and Songs for Julia.
She was invited to read and introduce her book at the Fermoy International Poetry
Festival in August 2013 and 2014.
Maureen Eppstein has two poetry collection: Rogue Wave at Glass Beach (2009) and
Quickening (2007), both from March Street Press. A new chapbook, Earthward, is
forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in numerous
anthologies and journals, including Poecology, Calyx, Basalt, Written River, Sand Hill
Review, and Aesthetica 2014, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally
from Aotearoa/New Zealand, she now lives and writes close to the earth on the
Mendocino Coast of California. Her website is www.maureen-eppstein.com.
Catherine Evleshin's fiction also appears in Agave Magazine, Canary Journal of
Environmental Crisis, Fiction Vortex, Gemini Literary Magazine, Mused - BellaOnline
Literary Review, and forthcoming in Middle Gray Magazine and Riding Light Review.
Sidney Thompson lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is the author of the short story
collection Sideshow. His fiction, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared
in Atticus Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Clapboard House, Cleaver Magazine, The
Cortland Review, Danse Macabre, Grey Sparrow Journal, Ostrich Review, Prick of the
Spindle, The Southern Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. He expects to complete his
first novel, Bass Reeves: A History, A Novel, A Crusade, this year. "The Coldirons" is a
chapter from this novel.
Cathy Rosoff has been published in Blue Lake Review, Unlikely 2.0, The
Write Room, The Stone Hobo and The Missing Slate. She was nominated for The
Pushcart Prize for an excerpt of her novel Feral Little Gods that was published in The
Stone Hobo. The novel also passed through the first round of the Amazon
Breakthrough Novel Award and is now available on Amazon. Her novel-in-progress,
Ravensbone, has been excerpted in The Missing Slate.
Her website is at www.cathyrosoff.com.
Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary
Review, Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East and
The South Carolina Review. His books include the collection While We’re Waiting
(Aldrich Press, 2013) and two chapbook collections: Night Watch (Finishing Line
Press, 2013), and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, 2012). For more information, please visit www.markbelair.com.
Sandra Kohler My third collection of poems, Improbable Music, appeared in May,
2011 from Word Press. My second collection, The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of
the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh
Press in November, 2003. An earlier volume, The Country of Women, was published in
1995 by Calyx Books. My poems have appeared over the past thirty-five years in
journals including Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, APR,
Natural Bridge, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review,
and The Colorado Review.
Ariel Dawn lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her children, Merlin and Angel.
Recent writing appears in Black & Blue, Vine Leaves, The Bohemyth, and Ambit. She
is working on her first novel.
David Glen Smith My writing influences range from early European folk-stories, the
Magic Realist movement, and the current Meta-Modernist movement. The verses in
the full collection contain changing rhythms and sporadic syllable counts. The full
manuscript displays the experience of a persona translating his personal experiences
into surreal, dream-logic. On occasion, the writing does resort to fragmented thoughts
and blurring of personality patterns.
My work has appeared in various magazines including most recently: Assaracus, The
Centrifugal Eye, ffrrfr, The Fertile Source, Houston Literary Review, Lady Jane
Miscellany, Louisville Review, Mid-America Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, Saltwater
Quarterly, Slant, The Steel-Toe Review, and The Write Room . In addition, a recent
print anthology titled Ganymede - Unfinished accepted two of my poems.
On a more personal note: I am currently residing in Cypress, Texas with my partner of
fourteen years. I teach English Literature at both Wharton County Junior College and
Lone Star College - CyFair. As of 2010 my partner and I adopted a baby boy, Brendan,
who turned three December 2013-- source of new material for poems! I likewise serve
as Editorial Assistant for the magazine The Centrifugal Eye. In the nineties I received
my MFA at Vermont College, and my MA at the University of MO at St. Louis. For more
information visit: http://davidglensmith.blogspot.com/.
KATHIE GIORGIO’S fourth book, a novel titled "Rise From The River", will be released
by the Main Street Rag Publishing Company in early 2015. Her first three books, two
novels, "The Home For Wayward Clocks" and “Learning To Tell (A Life)Time”, and a
short story collection, "Enlarged Hearts", were also released by MSR. “Clocks”
received the Outstanding Achievement award by the Wisconsin Library Association
Literary Awards Committee and was nominated for the Paterson Fiction Award.
"Lifetime", the sequel to "Clocks", debuted to a standing-room only audience of over
200 people at the SouthEast Wisconsin Festival of Books, where Kathie was the
welcoming Keynote.
Giorgio’s short stories and poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines and
in many anthologies. She’s been nominated twice for the Million Writer Award and
twice for the Best of the Net anthology. She is the director and founder of AllWriters’
Workplace & Workshop, an international studio offering online and on-site classes in
all genres and abilities of creative writing. She also teaches for Writers’ Digest and
serves on their advisory board.
Adam Tedesco’s work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Up The River,
Turk’s Head Review, The Merrimack Review, RiverLit, Fuck Art Let’s Dance and
Creative Nonfiction Monthly. He has shared the stage with poets such as Leah Noble
Davidson, Eirean Bradley, Sparrow and Jared Paul. Most recently, his unique poetic
voice has been utilized by conceptual artist Isabelle Pauwels as part of her upcoming
27 Across 25 Down project.
Maurice Emerson Decaul, a former Marine, is a poet, essayist, and playwright,
whose work has been featured in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Sierra
Magazine, Barely South Review, Epiphany, and forthcoming in Callaloo. His poems
have also been translated into French and Arabic and his plays have been produced
and performed in New York City, Washington DC and Paris. He is a graduate of
Columbia University and is currently working towards his MFA at New York University.
m.j. cleghorn was born in anchorage Alaska, Her Athabaskan and Eyak heritage gave
her a love of poetry. m.j. now lives and writes near the banks of the Matanuska river in
the Palmer Butte, Alaska, where the moose, wild dog~ roses and salmonberries
provide unending joy and inspiration.
Jenny Aileen: I am an anxious twenty-one year old from Texas who has been writing
creatively since I first learned how to. I like to talk about the meanings of things but I’ll
talk about the things part, too. I am zealous for abundant life and become depressed
at the sound of radio static. I am pursued by and in love with a beautiful God. My
passion is for the mountains, mornings and a meaningful life. Writing is everything that
happens in between.
Jonathan Doughty is a graduate of UNC-Charlotte and a Ph.D. candidate in the
Department of History at the University of Toronto. His work in historical studies and
literary criticism has appeared in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism and Asian
American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies. His poetry has appeared in
Contraposition and Haiku Journal.
Nate Duke studies English literature at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. You
can find his work in Black Heart Magazine, The Blue Hour Press, The Idle Class, and
elsewhere.
Sam Kolinski began writing in Glasgow, Scotland. He is massively indebted to Sam
Willetts’ debut collection New Light for the Old Dark and the fourth letter of the
alphabet. With poems recently appearing in a miscellany of journals, Sam is currently
developing the material for his first chapbook.
Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and
Palestine. He likes cinema, painting, and bullfighting, which might explain why this
Australian lives in Madrid. 114 of his stories have been accepted by 75 different
magazines.
Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Pivot,
City, Zone, and Crack the Spine. She attended the University of California, Berkeley,
as an undergraduate, where she was awarded the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for
Poetry, and completed an MA in creative writing at the City University of New York. She
is the author of produced plays and was a finalist in the National Ten-Minute Play
Contest with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. As part of a start-up company that turns
organic waste into energy through green technology, she divides her time between
New York and California, with occasional trips to Europe and the Middle East, her
bulging disc at L4-L5 permitting.
Timothy Caldwell had a career as a singer and teacher in higher education that would
last almost forty years. His articles have been published by major professional journals
and magazines, and his non-fiction book, Expressive Singing, was published by
Prentice Hall (1994). In 2009, his novel, The Chaplain’s Assistant: God, Country, and
Vietnam, was published by Glenn Street Press. His creative writing has been
published in Amarillo Bay, Blue Lake Review, Crab Creek Review, and The Storyteller.
He is a Vietnam veteran, and has appeared on many radio programs as a national
advocate for better mental health treatment for veterans and their families, and is
currently at work on his second novel and a collection of short stories. He lives in
Michigan with his life partner Barbara.
Claire Booker lives in London where she works as a medical herbalist. Her stage
plays have been produced in America, Australia, Europe and the UK and she has had
radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and LBC. She is a member of the 'Original
Poets' and regularly performs poetry at spoken word events. Her work has appeared in
Magma, the Morning Star, New Welsh Review, Prole and The Rialto among others.
More info at www.bookerplays.wordpress.com
Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The
Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013
Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are to be released in 2014. He won the 2012
Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award offered by Southern Indiana Review, and received the
2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in
Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Barely South
Review, Atlanta Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere.
John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in Slant, Southern California
Review and Skidrow Penthouse with work upcoming in Bryant Literary Magazine,
Natural Bridge and Soundings East.
Harry F. Rey is a poet and playwright originally from the UK now living in Israel. He is
mainly influenced by the Romantics, contemporary LGBTQ experiences and Jewish
mysticism. His first chapbook The Road Home: A Poet's Journey through AIDS is
available on Kindle.
Joanna Chen is a poet and literary translator. Her poetry, translations and essays
have been published most recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Cactus
Heart, Poet Lore and The Bakery. More is forthcoming in Word Riot and The Quarterly
Conversation. Read more about her at www.joannachen.com .
Marilyn Ringer Born in Oklahoma, I now reside in northern California. I received a BA
in Social Sciences and an MA in Experimental Psychology, both from Southern
Methodist University. I have been a chef and restauranteur, a poet-teacher with
California’s Poets In The Schools, and a teacher of adult creative writing workshops.
During the summer, I spend extended time on Monhegan Island in Maine where I write
with a group of women who are artists, teachers, Gestalt therapists, and gardeners as
well as writers.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge; Nimrod; Drumvoices
Revue; Eclipse; Left Curve; Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine; Hawai’i Pacific
Review; Sanskrit; Porcupine; Wisconsin Review; The Evansville Review; Cairn;
Bayou; decomP; The Cape Rock; ellipsis; The Hurricane Review; Limestone; The
MacGuffin; Mochila Review; Oregon East; Phantasmagoria; Poet Lore; Assissi; Reed
Magazine; poemmemoirstory (PMS); River Oak Review; Westview; Willard & Maple;
Folio; The Griffin; RiverSedge; Qwerty, Willow Review; The Binnacle; Diverse Voices
Quarterly; Chico News & Review; Slant; Studio One; Eclectica; Stickman Review;
Quiddity Literary Journal; Clackamas Literary Review; Xavier Review; Watershed;
Iodine Poetry Journal; ByLine; California Quarterly; Milk Money; Pisgah Review;
Schuylkill Valley Journal; Sierra Nevada College Review; Squaw Valley Review; Pearl;
Taproot Literary Review; Tar Wolf Review; Wild Violet; Crack the Spine; Poet’s Cove,
An Anthology: Monhegan in Poetry, 2000-2002 (New Monhegan Press, 2003); The Art
of Monhegan Island (Down East Press, 2004); Chico Poets, A Calendar for 2005 (Bear
Star Press, 2004); and my chapbook Island Aubade (Finishing Line Press, 2012).
Marina Manoukian, a recent Sarah Lawrence College graduate, My writing orbits
prose poetry, but what I aim to do is to shoot the arrow into the interdisciplinary waters
between literature/poetry and philosophy. I believe that a text doesn't fully exist without
a reader's participation, and so I try to create poetry that not only insists on the
reader's participation, but also insists upon the reader's awareness of said fact.
Meryl McQueen I am an American writer living in Sydney. Born in South Africa, I
grew up in Europe and the U.S. Before turning to writing full-time, I was a social
worker, counselor, college professor, researcher, and grant writer. I earned my
doctorate in linguistics from the University of Technology, Sydney, my master’s in
public administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and my bachelor of
science in education and social policy from Northwestern. I speak several languages
and have lived in seven countries. I love to play piano, sing, hike in the woods, and
cook.
My poetry has been published in Blue Lake Review, Clearfield Review, Crack the
Spine, The Critical Pass Review, Dunes Review, Ozone Park Journal, Phoebe,
RiverSedge, the Set Free Anthology, Tower Journal, Town Creek Review, Vanguard in
the Belly of the Beast, and Yellow Moon. My linguistics research has been published in
international journals, and my novella about Asperger’s, A Close Approximation of an
Ordinary Life, is currently being used in a college curriculum for special education
teachers in Pennsylvania. In 2007, I was a semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough
Novelist Award contest.
Terry Ann Thaxton I’ve published two full-length collections of poetry, both from Salt
Publishing: Getaway Girl (2011) and The Terrible Wife (2013), as well as a textbook,
Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide (Bloomsbury, 2014). My essay “Delusions
of Grandeur” won The Missouri Review 2012 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s prize. I’ve also
published essays and poetry in Connecticut Review, Defunct, Gulf Coast, Cimarron
Review, flyway, Sou’wester, Lullwater, Teaching Artist Journal, and other journals. I
hold an MFA from Vermont College. I teach creative writing at the University of Central
Florida, where I also direct the MFA program.
Anya Silver My second book of poetry, I Watched You Disappear, was just published
by the Louisiana State University Press, which also published my first book, The
Ninety-Third Name of God (2010). My work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s
“The Writer’s Almanac,” in Ted Kooser’s column, “American Life in Poetry,” and on the
websites of the Academy of American Poets and on Poetry Daily. I have published in
many literary magazines, including Image, The Christian Century, The Georgia
Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, and others.
Anne Graue writes poetry and teaches writing and literature online from her home in
New York's Hudson Valley. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Kansas State
University and an MA in Teaching English from Columbia Teachers College. Her
poems have appeared in Paradigm, Compass Rose, Sixfold Journal, VerseWrights,
New Verse News, and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly; she was a finalist in the Patricia
Dobler Poetry Award competition for 2013 and has written reviews of literary
magazines for NewPages.com.
C G Fewston I hold the post of Visiting Fellow in the English Department at City
University of Hong Kong. I have an MFA from Southern New Hampshire University,
where I worked with best-selling novelists Matt Bondurant and Wiley Cash. I also have
an MA in Literature and an MED in Higher Education Leadership and Administration. I
have had stories, essays and photographs have appeared in Bohemia, Tendril Literary
Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Writer's Drawer, Moonlit Road, Nature Writing, and
Travelmag: The Independent Spirit. You can read more about me and my writing at
www.cgfewston.me
Diana Manister writes literary criticism for The Modern Review; Forum, The College
English Association Journal; BigCityLit and About Contemporary Literature.com. She is
a member of the International Critics Association and the Association of Literary
Scholars, Critics and Writers. Her poetry has been published in Four and Twenty,
Maintenant, a Dada Journal Vols. 5-8; Big Bridge, The Ozone Park Journal, The
Sheepshead Review; The New Post-Literate; Ygdrasil and anthologies. Her poem
"Hubble" was set to music by composer John Raeger and premiered in Oakland and
San Francisco in 2013, performed by the Piedmont Choirs and conducted by Robert
Geary.
When God in all his fullness comes and fills our hearts,
he casts over all created things an annihilating shadow
which blots out all their differences and variety.
So these creatures lack all power to accomplish anything
and we feel no attraction to them,
for the majesty of God fills our hearts to overflowing.
Dwelling in God, we are dead to all things, and all things are dead to us.
It is the concern of God, who gives life to everything,
to restore our souls to life in regard to what he has created and then,
by his will, we can approach his creatures and our souls can accept them.
Without the action of his will,
we shall reject them and feel no interest in them.
This annihilation of all creatures,
and then their restoration to serve the designs of God,
ensures that each moment God is both himself and all things to us.
For at each moment our hearts are at peace in God
and completely abandoned to all creation.
Therefore each of these moments contains all things.
 Jean-Pierre De Caussade