Reverse - Many Mountains Moving

Print Annual
Vol. X, No. 1, 2010
(the twentieth issue)
Many
Mountains
Moving
A Literary Journal of
Diverse Contemporary Voices
Arts for a Sustainable Civilization
http://mmminc.org
The Day When Mountains Move
Akiko Asano
R
The day when mountains move has come.
Though I say this, nobody believes me.
Mountains sleep only for a little while
That once have been active in flames.
But even if you forgot it,
Just believe, people,
That all the women who slept
Now awake and move.
his poem was originally published in 1911 in Seitō
T
(“Blue Stocking”), a Japanese literary magazine. It was reprinted
from The Burning Heart: Women Poets of Japan (translated and
edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi, Seaberry Press, 1977).
Directors
Jeffrey Ethan Lee and
Erik Nilsen
Senior Poetry Editor
Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Poetry Editors
Debra Bokur, Erik Nilsen
and Patrick Lawler
Ecopoetry and
Drama Editor
Patrick Lawler
Fiction and Nonfiction
Editor
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Designer
Karen Sperry
Assistant Fiction Editors
T. M. DeVos, Joanna Gardner
and Deah Paulson
Assistant Editors
Brian Heston and
Martin Balgach
Editorial Assistant
Sarah Heady
Interns
Sam Corbo,
Brittany Corrigan and
Brooke Hoffman
Cover Art: “Lucifer”
is an oil painting on paper by William DeRaymond
http://williamderaymond.net/
Founding editor/publisher
Naomi Horii
Published annually by Many Mountains
Moving, Inc.
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
http://mmminc.org
© 2010 by Many Mountains Moving, Inc.
First North American Serial Rights
Submissions: Please visit http://mmminc.org
for detailed submission guidelines or to
submit work online.
Distribution: Ingram Book Group
(www.ingrambook.com) and Small Press
Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Also
available at http://mmminc.org.
Indexed by The American Humanities Index
(Albany, NY; Whitston Publishing Co.)
& The Index of American Periodical Verse
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press).
ISSN: 1080-6474
ISBN 13: 978-1-886976-25-2
The editors wish to thank our contributors, subscribers and other readers, who
welcome an exchange among, across and through many cultures of literature and
the arts. Thanks also to the many friends and supporters whose monetary gifts and
contributions and subscriptions make this print anthology possible.
We would be unable to achieve our goals as a literary arts organization without
countless (mostly) volunteer hours contributed by many individuals and organizations
who have helped us in many ways. Thanks to our poetry and flash fiction contest
judges: Thaddeus Rutkowski, Patricia Smith, and Anne-Marie Cusac. And thanks
to the judges of the recent MMM Press poetry book prize competitions: Steven
Huff and Martín Espada. Thanks to the Asian American Writers Workshop of NYC
and Cornelia Street Café for inviting MMM to do readings in recent years. Thanks
to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) for inviting us to do a
panel presentation at the AWP Conference in Denver.
Thanks to Maria Gillan of The SUNY Binghamton Center for Writers for inviting
Thaddeus Rutkowski and myself to give a talk about MMM. Thanks to Minter
Krotzer at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Philadelphia for hosting our biggest MMM
event of 2009. And special thanks to Petee Jung.
—Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Print Annual
Vol. X, No. 1, 2010 (the twentieth issue)
Many Mountains
Moving
A Literary Journal of
Diverse Contemporary Voices
Ecopoetry
Nin Andrews. . . . . 7 . . . M
y Mother Compares Miss America
to an Ayrshire Heifer
. . . . . 8 . . . Talking about Money
Laura-Gray Street. . . . . 9 . . . Hôang-Tsong
(The Yellow Bell)
Jules Gibbs. . . . 12 . . . Owled
. . . . 15 . . . Pearl
Alex Cigale. . . . 16 . . . Ablation Arenaceous Daughter Worry
Julia Fiedorczuk. . . . 17 . . . After
Elizabeth Bradfield. . . . 18 . . . Polar Explorer John Forbes Nash, Jr.,
Self-Declared Emperor of Antarctica
(1967)
Celie Katovitch. . . . 19 . . . Infernal Return
Will Lane. . . . 21 . . . The Axe
Katie Morris. . . . 22 . . . Stones
Luisa Villani. . . . 23 . . . Night, Month, August
Linda Pennisi. . . . 25 . . . Regret to the Tisza River
Ricardo Pau-Llosa. . . . 26 . . . The Snow Man and His Wife Tour
the Peninsula of Paraguaná
Catherine Anderson. . . . 27 . . . Photographs Arranged by the
Daughter of Diane Arbus
Ann Fisher-Wirth. . . . 29 . . . Ascending les Gorges du Chassezac
James Grabill. . . . 30 . . . Fire Season Is Over Two
Months Longer
E. Louise Beach. . . . 31 . . . Flame
Daniel Bourne. . . . 32 . . . The Life-List
Ranjani Neriya. . . . 33 . . . Circadian
Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens. . . 34 . . . Persimmons (II)
Annie Guthrie. . . .
Julie Lein. . . .
Kim Goldberg. . . .
J. D. Whitney. . . .
Jess Maggi. . . .
Amy Pence. . . .
36 . . .
37 . . .
38 . . .
39 . . .
40 . . .
41 . . .
t hirst in the news
The Shallows
Clearcut
Cousin Stone
We Were Sisters
Balloon Flower
Ecopiety Essay
Hwa Yol Jung. . . . 44 . . . The Dao of Ecopiety
Flash Fiction and Poetry 2008 & 2009
2008
flash fiction winner
Laura Loomis. . . .
flash fiction runner-up
Maureen O’Brien. . . .
poetry winner
Brian Brodeur. . . .
poetry finalists
Susan Deer Cloud. . . .
John Jeffire. . . .
. . . .
Mark Wagenaar. . . .
Sarah Zale. . . .
2009
flash fiction winner
Francisco Q. Delgado. . . .
flash fiction runner-up
Karin Lin-Greenberg. . . .
poetry winner
Margaret Walther. . . .
Poetry Finalists
Brian Brodeur. . . .
. . . .
Ellen LaFleche. . . .
Christa Setteducati. . . .
Kathryn Winograd. . . .
Fiction
Ron Block. . . . 91 . . .
Kathleen Crisci. . . . 94 . . .
Tammy Delatorre. . . 100 . . .
Sarah Domet. . . 103 . . .
Gila Green. . . 112 . . .
Brian Patrick Heston. . . 115 . . .
R.C. Ringer. . . 124 . . .
June Akers Seese. . . 130 . . .
Andrew Warren. . . 135 . . .
Body of Work
A
The Death of Mouse
The Drive Home
The Trial of Perry Honniwinkle
Reverse
The Carpet Layers
Storage
Whose Coffee Is It?
Brushes
Nonfiction
57 . . . The Sign
60 . . . Sequins and Holes
62 . . . The Clearing
65 . . .
64 . . .
69 . . .
71 . . .
72 . . .
ar Stealer
C
The East Enders
The Good Soldier
Unknowable Nocturne
Spring
75 . . . Back Seat
77 . . . Stills/ Steals
78 . . .
81 . . .
83 . . .
84 . . .
85 . . .
atie by the Sea
K
Natural Causes
Missing Child: Mystic, Connecticut
Nights with Neighbors
Saskia van Uilenburgh,
the Wife of the Artist. c. 1613
. . . . 86 . . . Of Daughters and Mothers
139 . . .
146 . . .
149 . . .
157 . . .
he Moon and Guatemala
T
A Dirty Love Story
Witness
That Was the Way the Only Thing
That Ever Really Mattered Began
Mixed Genre
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher. . .
. . .
. . .
Gábor G. Gyukics. . .
163 . . .
164 . . .
165 . . .
166 . . .
hadow
S
Echo
Release
Flying Trapeze Clubs
Poetry
73 . . . No Joke
Erik Ipsen. . .
Mindy Lewis. . .
Julia MacDonnell. . .
J.P. Monacell. . .
Dilruba Ahmed. . . 169 . . . T
he 18th Century Weavers of Muslin
Whose Thumbs Were Chopped
Maureen Alsop and
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller. . . 171 . . . Chiaroscuro body
James Arthur. . . 173 . . . Charms Against Lightning
Judy Bebelaar. . . 174 . . . April
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán. . . 176 . . . when i learned praying to be straight
was not useful
Karina Borowicz. . . 177 . . . Nocturnes
Richard Carr. . . 178 . . . Dead Wendy: The Boy’s Version
Kiley Cogis. . . 181 . . . Barn Party
Matthew Cooperman. . . 182 . . . spool 6
Dana Curtis. . . 186 . . . Problems with the Soundtrack
Dan Flore III. . . 187 . . . tap water
Becca Hensley. . .
. . .
. . .
Ed Higgins. . .
Elijah Imlay. . .
Ruth Moon Kempher. . .
. . .
. . .
Sandra Kohler. . .
Minter Krotzer. . .
Jenna Le. . .
Luljeta Lleshanaku translated
from the Albanian by
Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi. . .
. . .
. . .
Martin Ott. . .
188 . . .
190 . . .
192 . . .
193 . . .
194 . . .
195 . . .
197 . . .
199 . . .
200 . . .
201 . . .
202 . . .
aughter Notes
D
Giving Birth to Mother
Like an Alarm Clock
There is nearly always
What We Were Looking For
Data: For the Heirs, Whoever
Late Night, Cassandra’s Dreaming
Offshore Postcard: Aeolian Islands
Transit
Pontchartrain Beach
Circe’s Blues
203 . . .
204 . . .
205 . . .
206 . . .
207 . . .
208 . . .
209 . . .
211 . . .
212 . . .
214 . . .
215 . . .
216 . . .
217 . . .
219 . . .
220 . . .
221 . . .
itadine Hotel, Berlin
C
For Nights We Can Never Relive
The Television Owner
Air Force Academy Framed by
Mountains
In the Vast and Unmapped Empty
Kaltblütig: Snow White
Pan-fried Fish
A Log Cabin From Scratch
Leaving Greece
Dancing
Hunger
The Winemaker’s Daughter
Hardscrabble Prairie Triptych
Sunday
Combination, 1968
On Being Invited To Write My Last
Poem on Earth
Marc Paltrineri. . .
Donna Prinzmetal. . .
Kate Rogers. . .
Hal Sirowitz. . .
D. L. Stein. . .
Alison Stone. . .
. . .
Bryan Walpert. . .
Joe Wilkins. . .
. . .
John Willson. . .
. . .
Book Review
Review by Martin Balgach. . . 225 . . . O
n John Minczeski’s
A Letter to Serafin
Ecopoetry
Patrick Lawler, E d i t o r
Ecopoetry
b
7
Nin Andrews
R
My Mother Compares Miss America
to an Ayrshire Heifer
A model girl, my mother said, particularly a model from Northern European stock,
has blue eyes, clear skin, rosy cheeks, and blonde hair, tied back in a ribbon or a
headband to show off her pretty face. Just like this photo of Miss America. Miss
America, as you can see, is slender, but not too slender, tall but not too tall. She
might take ballet lessons to improve her posture so that she walks gracefully, with
her shoulders pressed back, her neck long, her young but promising chest pressed
forward and displayed in modest yet tastefully revealing clothing. In public she
is trained to smile and laugh easily, showing off her even white teeth when she
says, yes, please, and thank you so very much. Her fine manners and good health are
esteemed social values.
The model Ayrshire heifer, much like this girl, is a Scottish breed that has nice
coloring, ideally white with reddish or brown spots in a pleasing pattern, a robust
but not too robust frame with good symmetry, and a tail placed equidistant between
her hip bones and curry-combed to show that it is shiny and not coarse. She is
trained to walk calmly around the show ring, to stop when posed with her front legs
spread evenly apart and firmly planted, her head lifted to show off the smooth flow
from her shaved neck into her shoulders and ribs, and the even proportions from
her withers to her hip bones. Her hind legs are separated, one placed approximately
six inches forward in order to display the width, depth, and teat placement of her
well-shaped udders. She eats grass and grains and weighs approximately 1200
pounds. One day, the farmer hopes, she will produce an ample milk and calf crop.
The model bull, my mother then added airily, waving her hand in the air, is of little
use. All a dairy farmer really needs from a bull is best kept in cold storage.
8
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Nin Andrews
Laura-Gray Street
R
R
Talking about Money
Hôang-Tsong
(The Yellow Bell)
I think it would be easier to tell someone I had a disease, the woman said.
I think it would be easier to say I was having an affair.
I think it would be easier to say I was mentally ill.
Do you know what I’m talking about?
No, I said.
Money, she said. And the truth is I’m not like really wealthy.
Not like Bill Gates or Dick Cheney or someone. I mean I don’t even rate
when it comes to the really wealthy. It’s just a few million bucks.
Sixty or so. Depending on the market, of course.
I feel so guilty when I say that. Like you’ll hate me now.
Do you hate me?
No.
Good, I thought you’d be okay with it. Sometimes I have
to tell someone. I want to explain, like, what I think.
Because the way I see it, and I hope this doesn’t sound too nuts.
But the way I see it, the way I think about money?
I mean, you know how Americans think about money?
No.
Money is like a weapon. A nuclear weapon. It’s what keeps us safe.
Because no matter how many times we can buy everything we want
on this earth, or blow it up,
we worry there’s this other guy or country, like Russia or China
who can buy it a whole lot more times than us.
That’s what Kissinger and diplomacy are all about. Right?
In one version of the story, there are no birds,
only the man and his inventions. In another version,
the birds are phoenixes, dispensing heaven’s
supreme wisdom. Then there is a third version.
In the stories of a story, there is always a path
between two sides, a middle way that is often true.
*
North of the Kwen-lun Mountains, where the bamboo
grew to identical heights, Ling-lun cut a section
with his knife and blew. Nearby were two birds.
The first, wishing to imitate the singing bamboo, sang
six notes. The second bird, beginning from the last note,
sang six more. To imitate the birds, Ling-lun cut
eleven more bamboo shoots of different lengths. What
Ling-lun would take back to the emperor was new
and sturdy as a ladder. Together, birds and human
build the twelve semi-tones of the chromatic scale.
*
b
9
10
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Like most tales of how and why, this is a story
for children. What time of year? What kind of weather?
and you must imitate. You are bird-footed. Your hands
are useless as wings. The thicket isn’t large.
Do you remember hiding in the bamboo forest,
deep in the black labyrinth of paths,
It stretches as far as you can see. With a mouthful of clay
and two stones, you must find a song.
crouching among beer cans, used condoms,
and urine stink until the game was over
and everyone had gone? The hush then
at twilight, birds and leaves indistinguishable?
Day after day. All summer. Do you remember
what you sang to yourself to keep so still?
*
*
Whether the stories are true or not,
you want to believe the sound of everything.
What will you tell your children before you die?
You must practice playing scales. Thaw crack.
Rustle of leaves. Stirring of insects. Rain
and murmur of flowing waters. Clear light.
The tube of Ling-lun’s first note, the Yellow Bell,
is eighty-one inches. Divided into nine equal parts
Ears of corn and bearded wheat. Wind. Clouds.
Stars. Tangled green that wilts with cold snap.
of nine inches each, it established the musical foot
and the Chinese system of weights and measures.
The burrowed animals laying down to sleep.
Intricate hoarfrost. The forming of ice.
Hôang is the yellow of soil, and the imperial color.
Tsong is the sound of two stones struck together.
Snowfall, first a little, then a lot—
Together, Hôang-tsong is the fundamental tone of nature.
It guides the emperor, the stars, the twelve-toned years.
This we can all hear, if we know how to listen.
The pitch of a voice speaking without passion.
*
In this story, your children hide in a bamboo thicket.
It’s a game they like to play. They call,
b
11
12
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Jules Gibbs
R
Owled
Third is to carry out an ordinary life,
mother your own pressed corpse.
*
If this is a dream about ransom,
what do I owe myself?
She could be no less, the regurgitated self
reduced to the irreducible—
Always, I am the feminine hero
without male correlative
disgorged fur and chaff, the feminine plural
that can’t be further broken down.
giving herself—what? A child who dissolves
in the tub, the hypothetical other.
When I unlatch the gate, she cowers, resists
coercion. So unlike the owls
Maybe I have already been tested, torn
the live kill with my beak, been restored—
of other dreams, she portends no future,
supposes no power.
that’s one place to begin—as with a hymn,
sung low, tenuous.
We flail at each other—
blood in a skein across the plain.
*
If this is a dream about flight and contingency, I cradled
the limp shiver of her body in my shirt,
*
If this is a dream about hunting the self,
the demands are simple enough:
Get her out of the cage; make her live like an owl:
The first act is skin—
to ransom a body
that can fly, but won’t.
Second act, sacrifice
in a country fit for sacrifice—
flayed on rock and snow.
carried her across miles of empty land,
laid her in the pages, and closed the book.
I wanted her to be storied as much
as I wanted to outlive my remorse.
*
I learned to be owled
—noiseless flight, pair of talons,
a rasp and skirl.
*
b
13
14
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
When I opened the book, she was pressed
in a latticework of dried blood and feather,
and the rest is difficult to describe—
the progress of self is not so easily made
narrative or resolved,
no more than a flicker in the scrub,
an eye turned on the morsel.
*
But this is a waking dream
meant to dissolve and be dissolved,
as you were meant
to snag its remains in your claws,
fashion something useful from the residue:
In your trove of hunger,
be molten, molt.
Let the dark cavity of beak
be a tiny seat for the tiny Brahman.
Let the bird of prey
live like a bird of prey.
Jules Gibbs
R
Pearl
A troubled marriage is a garden gone
mineral underwater
to soothe
the tearless way he cries
all his nacre energy
calcifying her transgressions—
a jewel he fixes
in his mantle
around a gut-fish that shines.
What’s a bad wife to do?
Rub up against his shell and say
Remember the air? The sky?
Or go diving for that fairy tale,
the one he loved before she kissed
the young prince into a tattooed
toad, six feet tall and suicidal
threatening to slit
his amphibian wrists
on the hood of her car in the cold?
Oh, who’d buy any of this?
Night terrors of a man
turned mollusk, and a woman
who swims circles around brittle
sea beds, hoping something
might escape
his diligent encasements.
b
15
16
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Alex Cigale
Julia Fiedorczuk
R
translated by Bill Johnston
Ablation Arenaceous Daughter Worry
Ablation: the steady
slow erosion and
disappearance of
glacial ice and snow.
Aeolian forms:
dune transported by the wind
as encroaching sand.
Arenaceous soils:
having the appearance
and consistency of sand.
Darcy: unit used
to measure porosity
the rock’s resistance to flow
proportional to pressure
and permeability.
Daughter element:
product of radioactive
decay of mother atom.
Deranged: dramatic
uncoordinated pattern
of glaciation and drainage
with multiple basins and lakes.
Khamsin: the hot dry
southerly wind from
the Sahara that precedes
a tropical depression.
Worry: the act of hounds
who having flushed it out
tear apart the fox.
R
After
Smooth sea like the sliver of glass in a palm
that scatters a sand of throbbing stars.
Or no palm: the sun’s fierce breath, soft flesh of earth
at the feet of those who see no stars.
Earth’s soft flesh at the feet of birches,
icebound stars on a lake’s long lashes.
Smooth sea like an ice cube on the tongue
of one who dies in wintertime.
The sky clattering down upon a winter wood.
Think: seven riders like the rainbow’s seven colors.
Or no riders: your blood throbbing, deepening in color.
Think: a drop of your blood on the snow.
Shards of green glass in a child’s small warm hand.
b
17
18
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Elizabeth Bradfield
Celie Katovitch
R
R
Polar Explorer John Forbes Nash, Jr.,
Self-Declared Emperor of Antarctica (1967)
Infernal Return
He’s a genius mathematician and insane
which goes a long way to explain it.
But why hadn’t I thought of this
before? That someone might
want a throne there, ruler
of most of the world’s fresh water,
inaccessible. Penguins his uncomplicated subjects, little history
to surmount, and the ground’s own pure and endless
fractal variations—or permutations as it’s all
a rearranging of Hydrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen—of white.
A land to quiet his mind’s static, a slate
for his huge equations, numbers scrawled across
the faint sense of what was once expected there—tropics
at the pole, Eve’s descendants picnicking together, no apple
bit and abandoned on the ground, no snake, Adam not
fingering the soft arch of his lost rib—
logic overwriting myth.
Coastline unmappable. Falling and
rebuilding. Lost and unlost.
And the katabatic wind to howl out
any unwanted groan nag whine
mumble screech whimper.
To overwhelm the clamor
of his own dissonance.
But the heart of anything, at last,
is only conquerable as long
as supplies hold out.
Brief forays and then
open
wild
white
b
19
Day. I look at the kids perched high on a slant of bleachers
And think they are like birds who’ve alighted
on a breakwater between
Land and air. Their feet are sloshed by the thermals.
Above them, the stars powder themselves in the makeup
Of daylight. They hide their faces.
Their modesty seems cold (I want
To be
Spellbound.)
Aloof as they, my friend, my personal Nietzsche,
Turns within the blackness of his mind—where he lives,
Where sex replaces everything else
And shadows show off, kissing one another in anger
Through the eternity of seconds.
Each night, my friend looks up at the stars lighting
In the punctured sky, and ignores the gap
In what he thinks he understands.
Astronomers are so much like philosophers. For what I know about astronomy
Is next to
Nothing—but
Even I know the quip its practitioners delight in making,
The paradoxical, morose factoid they recite
To all the neophytes:
“Yes, you see
The light of the stars, but it only reaches you
Millions of years after the start of its journey; long past its prime.
By the time you see the light,
It’s practically an illusion.
It is old news, stale
As ancient wafers left in a sacristy.”
20
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Night. My friend’s hair, relentlessly dyed and showing vestiges
Of previous color attempts—a poorly layered canvas of
acrylic spray—
Glints in starlight. The wind stirs it only when he glances, fleetingly, skyward.
He seems to feel the light lean on him
As a senile old man does on a cane.
I see him shrink
From the anticipated scolding.
His skepticism rides the shoulders
Of hand-holding, interlaced humanity, a dwarf
Forever threatening
To fill out into a giant.
He has lived his destruction over many times—
So what is there to worry about? What the hell
Is so interesting about it anymore?—and yet he replays
the reel.
Soon,
Surely, a flame will begin at its edge, and from there devour the full length of his
thoughts
Leaving nothing to reflect in his painted face,
In the iridescent hair or the selfish eyes turned inward—nothing but the stars,
When they open, as they will, showing their beautiful constancy
To us again.
But the stars, after all, are very far away from us.
He mentions this, nonchalantly like the astronomers,
Although his face is whiter than the moon.
By the time we see their light, they’ve moved on to other things.
They don’t care.
Some of them, he says—terrified, for like all of us
He has known this for some time—
Some of them have already gone out.
Will Lane
R
The Axe
When the spirit crawls on all fours
And disappears like rain darkening gravel,
I split kindling, stand rooted
In the new mud near the slouching woodshed;
And tall splinters sing and sigh as they leave
The parent block, leaping sideways,
Spent like emotions under a turbulent, autumn sky.
Today, I’m a keen edge, an axe
Hard and clean, full of grief over strangers:
Mothers, children, the newly dead,
Leaking like sunlight from behind monstrous clouds,
Arriving from yesterday,
Warm on my open, ordinary hand.
b
21
22
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Katie Morris
Luisa Villani
R
R
Stones
Night, Month, August
The boys were off playing somewhere,
I could hear their whoops and hollers.
So we gathered our tools
and carried them round the stations.
The animals no longer understood us.
A flash of recognition when we said
their names, maybe. No more.
Heartbreaking as it was,
we couldn’t just take the things we wanted,
their hair, tusks, or skins.
We waited until they collapsed.
Maybe they were better off,
or out of it more easily.
August. Month of Lions. Last night
an unseasonable wind lifted the roof tiles,
scattered them in the side yard
like discarded playing cards.
Here, at the frayed end of North America,
Zinacantanoes walk the roof
telling stories of a water so wild
it begins as a singing ghost. Land
of the midnight river. Beneath the forest,
streams shuffle the earth
toward the ocean’s wide blue brim.
The boys refused to eat them,
but tilling the land was worse.
Raking this barren heap,
you’d only turn stones loose.
Land we sing to see. In these dark veins,
fish without pigment
And when the rains came,
only the stones were left.
One could say
dreamers dreaming
fan their spectral manes.
fill entire rooms with anemones
pulsing their bulbous hearts,
the music of muffled breathing
thrumming in the ears. One could say
b
23
24
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
what waits in the mind’s dark corners
is magic and not maniacal. After all,
in unlit rooms, mirrors still exist
with their candles and cowhide chairs—
velvet curtain of thought—
and what falls from the rented ceiling
could be rain or rhyme. Land
Linda Pennisi
R
Regrets to the Tisza River
I am sorry, Hungarian river, I allowed
the terrorists to interfere. That year
I stopped dreaming of the mayflies’
evening hatchings into June
of the unborn cloud. What falls
into the open book
clouds above you. I am sorry
I won’t be a passenger in one of the boats
could be song or sawdust
to those, who sleep
rowing through that brief ballet,
won’t witness the ethereal rise
in stories of water.
from riverbottom to write on the face
of your waters; won’t feel their
journey into air ruffle my hair or brush
a curve of cheek and shoulder;
that sex and death have become long,
wingless concepts involving beds,
the dying one pulling the sheet up
overhead, the mouth’s emptiness
visible and ghostly in its gasping.
I want you to know I still read about
your beauty; imagine ancestors
floating there among the nymphs;
the day’s far-laid eggs
coursing back to the place
their parents entered air;
settling on the riverbed
their parents,
after years
of burrowing,
had hatched from.
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26
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Catherine Anderson
R
R
The Snow Man And His Wife Tour
The Peninsula Of Paraguaná
Photographs Arranged by the
Daughter of Diane Arbus
The coastal desert translates blizzard into Tropic.
Wind that skewed the trees into accusing vanes
and finally toppled the roots into open tomes
will not let this desolation pass without its tropes.
Why suppress Medusa and Dalí, the ornate veins
of plumed labyrinths, the maps by which antique
intuition scored trade route and boundary?
Let the land and its bleak sounds find their tongue
in images; let driftwood not yet set adrift
present its homage to solar flares. Let the rift
of wave inculcate on crested sand its rogue
lesson on borrowed form. Mark how the wiry
naked branch stills lightning on the ground,
and how the bowled canopies cage a globe
in arteries ironed by the sun. We will traverse
this veil of land fronded on the surf where found
shells echo the peninsula’s fan, and witness
how love knows not the detritus it sows.
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.
—Diane Arbus
They rise up from the gloss—
the untitled ones her daughter didn’t know
how to save, four residents of an institution
for the mentally ill, draped
in striped bed covers,
their large, adult heads capped
by paper-bag doggy ears
and crayoned kitty-whiskers.
Dressed for a night as the misfits
they truly are, the irony noted
in all the Arbus literature, as if to say:
please stop, these people too odd
to tie any common bond,
the somersaulting girl-woman,
the dressed up cat man.
Yet doesn’t the self, that hung up
sophomore, love to gather its own
ripped sheets, its wayward scraps
of frivolity and disguise,
wrapping and wrapping until
we become just another stranger
dressed up among others?
Our lace mantillas blowing
in the sweep of the church door,
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Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
my mother and I bowed toward the cross
and its delicate wishbone line
of Lenten cloth, my convert
mother reciting the words
“and of the holy ghost,” as I
watched her wing-like fingers
flutter like the Paraclete.
They hover in strange transit—
Arbus’s lounging man in a platinum wig,
her pipe-thin boy with bath towel wings,
the woman in a house dress and bird mask,
Christs, holy ghosts, shadows carved in paper.
b
Ann Fisher-Wirth
R
Ascending les Gorges du Chassezac
Leaves’ shadows against the rock at river bottom
boulders
tumbling water
and paired butterflies
not quite yellow with not quite August
on the trail, limeade-colored lizards
a bottle-green dragonfly
black moss, dry in the cracks of boulders
smoky honey smell of beeboxes
halfway up at Albespeyres
mistral blowing
rain approaching
Mont Ventoux where Petrarch climbed
we see it from the trailhead
hazy blue on the horizon
My husband stands beside me
“Whatever is said is small, compared to silence”
29
30
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
James Grabill
E. Louise Beach
R
R
Fire Season Is Over
Two Months Longer
Flame
I.
Coastal storms will be further distorted by the naive
desire to be vulnerable to what must be heaven,
before it’s been able to harden enough people to stone.
II.
Immense waves keep taking shells back to the first
laws of oceanic dumping: nothing much pays
with fire season crackling dry earlier into blowtorches.
III.
Planetary kindling has swooned up as driftwood,
dry as a hay fire raked through by the colossal
beauty of wood, flames, grasses, and distant suns.
IV.
More than one man has lived in a massive state
but failed to read any infinitesimal hubris
promoted at the bottom of the dissolving scene.
V.
The future world will be large and small in keeping
with the rational and intuitive, lit by substance
as by subtle thought, and with fundamental scarcities.
VI.
A lightning of future mathematics will bolt across
the sky from persons suddenly most vulnerable
the moment we must act instantly to save their lives.
Begun one day early in March,
a prescription burn can
increase the wildlife habitat,
decreasing competing sweetgum, devil’s walking stick, and oak.
Back fire limits understory growth,
preparing a wholesome seedbed
for nascent walnut groves.
Prescribed fire is required,
as well, among coniferous stands,
guarding them from conflagrations,
destructive insects, and disease.
Controlled burning fuels
renewal through germination.
Long the sequoia seed lies sleeping
until a sudden ardor unshuts its heart.
b
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Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Daniel Bourne
Ranjani Neriya
R
R
The Life-List
Circadian
Beyond the next fenceline
the extinct may be watching.
Great Auk. Heath Hen. Akialoa.
Passenger Pigeon.
Bachman’s Warbler. Carolina Parakeet.
Labrador Duck.
They notice our small markings:
bronze rivet on denim, the small
cracks in the leather jacket,
the plush velour
of an untied housecoat. Each sighting
one more for their life-list—
though we are so plentiful
our flocks cover the sun, nests
clogging each lakeshore, the Great Plains diminished
to a rhizome of roads.
The flashy wing-bars
on a shoe, the colored beaks of our SUVs. Yes—
Great Auk—Heath Hen—Akialoa—
checking off your name and your name.
And mine.
warrens of space
lignin-dissolution
unheard sound-shape
flute among reeds
daughter-heart revisiting
earth mother’s home
the ocelot-drowse
glue glint off
a minivet’s nest
bee buzz alliteration
of the pollen tale,
nucleate fieldwork
shiva-dance of universe
a dervish in song-whirl
a kecan in prayer glade
circadian travelogue
the breathing ash-pile
seed’s recollection of growth.
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Many Mountains Moving
Ecopoetry
b
35
Rebecca Foust
R
Persimmons (II)
She sat at her desk; outside
the tree greened,
then glowed dull yellow
and let go
its leaves. Birds swooped
and dove
in a riot of ripe, rotting fruit
and sometimes
looked in at her. She closed
her eyes and when
she looked out again, it all was
gone.
illustration: Lorna Stevens
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Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Annie Guthrie
Julie Lein
R
R
*thirst in the news
The Shallows
Thanks to abundant water sources
thoughts are fragile fingerprints
37
shale-edged exposed kelpcupped heel
barnacle Mostly sunny and pleasant
a clinking glass the constant through you
b
rock dandelion froth shroud each
tide shadows hands closed-up cold
snow-clotted
reels
Arizona awakens to a touch
a bowl we begin to dust
slimefilmed fissure releases wicker creel cracked salt cheeks
limestone ledge
lambent sludge descant iridescence
lamentation oscillating canteen
fossils lantern concrete cistern sore
aurora borealis orchestral slue star orchid
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Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Kim Goldberg
J. D. Whitney
R
R
clearcut
Cousin Stone:
spew of powdered stars,
mouthful of locks with no
keys, boundless
herds of rocks—hobbled, slurping
dustbowls, grazing hardened
thought, wasted
as three-legged atoms, as frozen oceans, crashed
as wave, vacant
with stampede, with gone, with
done for
* * *
I hear you
speak
too
slowly for
my
ears.
b
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40
Ecopoetry
Many Mountains Moving
Jess Maggi
Amy Pence
R
R
We Were Sisters We were a shared bed, sweat and shared red bumps covering our bellies the first
morning we woke up together, shared expectations of spreading wings and soaring
across India, rising and growing in exotic colors, absorbing everything with the unbias of a cloud, leaving behind soft feathers of the effects we would have.
We were the shared oats and honey that we ate each morning, Durga, barefooted
and ankles jingling towards us, bringing microwaved milk and oh the bees died so
good in that honey.
We were the bees dying in ecstasy as we were Indira Gandhi Road, one street
shared by so many, rickshaws crushing over us as their drivers put hands on our
shared knee and squeezed, “American?? Why you come to India?” (we came as
students but that is not an answer) and beautiful, ringed toes traversing us as they
shined out from under hot hot burqas.
We were the only females in four cars—the number we traveled through, stepping
over beggars, to reach the shared squat toilet, feces flying onto the shared home of
man and train—as we journeyed to Rajasthan, the desert of woman’s rights, where
we were Princess Jasmine walking dusty streets, scrutinizing every crack in the
wall that surrounded the city to find what was missing in our shared princess lives,
throwing back the hood of our hollow disguise to reveal our accents and dollars and
become a shared bottle of Old Monk Rum clinking against forty ounce Kingfishers
in the plastic bag woven through our fingers as we clung to the back of a motorcycle,
zooming past the rows of blue tarp and cardboard tents, flying too fast to see the
humanity inside, leaving not feathers, but empty glass bottles.
And we were watching from our balcony as the moonlight and hands of little boys
sold our emptiness, turning it into dinner.
We were a million trash eating puppies and a million “use and throw” glass bangles;
we were wrapped in plastic until we tossed our skin aside, discarding it like people
and trash to build up and smolder on the street, scared to be the sweet peace of a
ladoo in the trunk of an elephant resting on our shared head … we were blessed.
We were rainbows of bangles shattering on our shared wrist, shattering what we
were before.
i. Balloon Flower
The pentas ache with air,
exhale our illusory life.
Don’t forget the bruisings.
Don’t forget what we’ve done:
Don’t forget—gasping open—
who we are—all five petals—
when we near it.
ii. The Day After
Jointed Asian lily
incremental, its becoming.
The danger of our being:
salty taste of your voice
left wounded on my lips.
iii. White Skull
So near the scent,
the aching
is nameable:
regret, its layers—.
Dawn, when I said
all I could say, resisted
your rough hands,
circulated
like an ant
in death’s
peony.
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Many Mountains Moving
iv. Hurry
Weeds—so satisfied—
demystify my garden
cut their teeth in soil
arch their ragged torsos
slide headlong—wanton
with ego—hold me hostage
until your return.
v. Saturnalia
Don’t be rough.
The twin-armed season
has its solstice in me
I can’t bear my soul,
the grief in my heart
That from the man after
he struck the three-year-old
running to his truck
for candy. Everywhere,
the plumage—
the very wind in these
incidentals. All our dark
anchors.
Ecopiety Essay
44
Ecopiety Essay
Many Mountains Moving
Hw a Yol Jung
R
The Dao of Ecopiety1
Dao was born before Heaven and Earth, and yet you cannot say it
has been there for long; it is earlier than the earliest time, and yet you
cannot call it old.
—Zhuangzi
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly
nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing
human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe
without effort and without artifice.
—Hannah Arendt
The problem of Nature is the problem of human life.
—Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
The universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection
of objects.
—Thomas Berry
I.
Now is the time for everybody to think the unthinkable: the death of humanity
and the end of nature as interconnected (t)issues. I used to say that geophilosophy
was my professional avocation. No longer. In light of the impending environmental
catastrophe of global warming and climatic change, it has now become my passionate
vocation. It has become my ultimate concern. I have only a single thread of thoughts.
The most recent warning for this impeding environmental catastrophe comes from
the American journalist Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times bestseller, Hot, Flat,
and Crowded (2008), which pleads for “a green revolution” on a global scale. Before
him, Al Gore warned us of the “inconvenient truth” of global warming and climatic
change in his acceptance speech of 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He passionately
appealed to us to act “boldly, decisively, and quickly” before it is too late to save the
earth, which has become an inhospitable, ruinous, and deadly place for all earthlings,
both human and nonhuman alike.
b
45
II.
The Limits to Growth, the inaugural volume of the Club of Rome series, was
published in 1972. It called for “a Copernican revolution of the mind.” Because it
warned of an environmental catastrophe in a short period of time based on five major
categories of accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread
malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources and a deteriorating environment,
many castigated it as a “doomsday” forecast. It turned out to be a book of prophecy.
In the same year, the momentous United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment was held in Stockholm, Sweden. Perhaps green revolutionaries were
trying “to repair a torn spider’s web with [their] fingers”—to borrow the trenchant
metaphor of the Austrian/British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (p. 62). As
Oswald Spengler, the famed and controversial German author of The Decline of
the West (1918-1922 in German), who observed the technological destruction of
nature including climatic change, remarked that “optimism is cowardice” (p. v et
passim). All in all, Gore’s expression inconvenient truth may not be forceful enough.
It should be called the “fatal truth” of humanity as a collectivity. We are become our
death. We are choreographers of the dance of our own life or our own death: to be
or not to be, indeed. I would echo the sentiment of Martin Heidegger’s testament
of his final thought published posthumously: “Only a god [Heaven in Chinese] can
save us” (p. vi).
Without question, Francis Bacon (1561-1625) is the high priest of Western
modernity, who embodies the intellectual underpinning of modern Western
civilization which is by and large responsible for the imminent “death of nature”—
to use the expression of Carolyn Merchant. He was the most eloquent voice of
Western modernity at the birth of the age of science, technology, and a quantitative
economy. Unlike the founder of modern Western philosophy René Descartes
(1596-1650), Bacon was a thorough-going empiricist. He propounded practical
and efficacious applications of science for the sake of what he called the “love
of humanity” (philanthropia), rather than scientific knowledge for its own sake or
Cartesian epistemocracy. If anywhere, it is here that the intellectual and practical
roots of the environmental crisis may be found.
Bacon master-minded and spearheaded an industrial civilization grounded firmly
on scientific and technological advancement, which is now global or world-wide. In
this he was an intellectual harbinger of the making of the modern world. He lauded
the modern experimental and inductive method of science, and he advocated the
convergence of theory and practice, the unity of knowledge and utility, and the
inseparability of knowing and making—all for the sake of philanthropia. To create
and apply technology, there must first be a knowledge of the world, obtained by
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Ecopiety Essay
Many Mountains Moving
what he called “the inquisition of nature.” Nature must be “tortured” to reveal her
secrets. Experiment is for him the essence of the natural sciences because it is the
only way of discovering the secrets of nature. Bacon laid the foundation of humans’
ability to “subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.” The
framework of modern technology is set forth and justified when he insists on the
meeting of human knowledge and power in discovering many secrets of excellent
use in the womb of nature. As Bacon himself emphasizes, the fruits of science do
not grow in books. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon scorns the idea
of studying words rather than matter, for “words are but the images of matters; and
except [that] they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is . . . to
fall in love with a picture” (p. 59). In regard to the “degenerate learning” of medieval
Scholastics, he felt that they had “sharp and strong wits” and “abundance of leisure”
in the cells of “monasteries and colleges,” but that they knew little history of nature
or “no great quantity of matter” (italics added for emphasis), and for that reason their
“cobwebs of learning” produced “no substance of profit”) (italics added for emphasis).
Furthermore, the Bible, according to Bacon, mandates that nature, with “all her
children,” be bound and enslaved to serve humanity, to achieve “the fructifying and
begetting of good” for philanthropia. Philanthropia results from putting into action
Christian duty and charity derived from the worship of God. Bacon faults intellectuals
who are indifferent to “the plight of mankind” and calls them “unholy” and “unclean.”
He wages a holy polemic in the name of Biblical religion in “Jerusalem” against
allegedly wrong-headed philosophers in “Athens,” whom he believes to be unholy
“talkers” rather than doers. His Biblical call for philanthropia sacralizes humans at the
apex of God’s creation, while it desacralizes nature as a pile of inert and useful (use/
ful) matter. The ecopoet Loren Eiseley puts it judiciously: Bacon’s Christianity “took
God out of nature and elevated man above nature” (p. 60).
The Baconian conception of technology as instrumentum no longer tells the
real and whole truth about the essence of technology today because technology
has become an end itself rather than a means, the phenomenon of which is called
“autonomous technology.” Technology is no longer merely the application of the
mathematical and physical sciences to praxis but is rather a praxis in and of itself.
The idea that technology is applied knowledge and instrumentum is obsolescent.
In his Man and Technics (1931), Spengler was powerful and prophetic in
advancing the idea that technology is no longer instrumental, but the “spiritual”
essence of human praxis and the Geist of modern European civilization. Thus
he is the harbinger of such contemporary thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Herbert
Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul. Heidegger in particular, who thinks
of technology as the consummation of Western “metaphysics,” echoes Spengler.
b
47
To quote the poetic passage of Loren Eiseley that sums up the predicament of the
human as technologist:
it is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a
vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones,
soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the
atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony
of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is
loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no
longer planned—escaped, it may be—spewed out of nature, contending
in a final giant’s game against its master (p. 38).
We are living in the vast techno-metropolis where everything both human and
natural is manufactured and commercialized as prosthetic. We are living in the
world whose dominant prose is written in the language of technology. The modern
predicament of humanity is enframed by the hegemony of technology, including the
cybernation of knowledge and the computerization of society. We are fully wired to,
and have become hostages of, the network of technology from whose “channeled
existence” there seems to be no exit in sight. Ours is the epoch when technology
has become totalizing, one-dimensional, planetary, and terrifyingly normalizing and
thus banal. When the fundamental project of macro-technology threatens to create a
“nuclear winter” or a vast necropolis for the entire earth and to bring all humankind to
the brink of collective extinction, and when micro-technology claims to have invented
or cloned a second or “posthuman” self whose “soul” may soon become imprisoned
behind the invisible walls of a gigantic Panopticon. Indeed, our dilemma lies in the fact
that humans are human by virtue of the fact that they are technological in the most
basic sense of techne (craft). And yet, on the other hand, their very physical survival is in
jeopardy or hangs in the balance because of the overproduction and superabundance of
their own artifacts. Now the human has reached the crucial juncture of history where
technology has the potential of destroying the entire earth. He or she has potentially
become the victim of his/her own creation: as the Hindu scriptural saying goes, I am
my death. The human has finally succeeded in manufacturing his/her own death—the
most radical evil of all evils. We hear a grim echo of Daedalus’s voice in James Joyce’s
Ulysses concerning history as a nightmare from which there is no awakening.
III.
What, then, is to be done to green or re-green the entire earth? In this essay, I
wish to focus on Sinism—the term which is coined by the American sinologist H. G.
Creel in 1929. By it he means that cluster of characteristics which are uniquely or
peculiarly Chinese or the Chinese habitus of thinking and doing things. Despite its
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Many Mountains Moving
origin in China, Sinism is not confined to the territory of China alone. It encompasses
Korea and Japan as well as China, namely, the geographical region called East Asia
where sinograms have been and being used wholly or partly as its daily linguistic diet.
Sinism, whether it be Confucianism, Daoism, Chan/Zen Buddhism, is a species
of what I call relational ontology—the term which I have been using since mid-1980s.
It is the way of describing reality as social process. It is the principle that where
there is no social process, there is no reality. Reality as social process subscribes
to the notion that everything is connected to everything else in the universe or
nothing exists or can exist in isolation. It is the way of describing the universe both
holistically and synchronistically. The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh
uses one simple word to describe reality as social process: Interbeing. The principle
of synchronicity is the underlying fountainhead of the Chinese Book of Changes
(Yijing). In his popular book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974),
Robert M. Pirsig uses “Quality” holistically and synchronistically, whose synonyms
are Zen and Dao. The “ecosophy” or “deep ecology” of the Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess may also be characterized as a philosophy of “Quality.” Most recently
the French philosophers Gilles and Félix Guattari coined the term geophilosophy.
For them it is that philosophical discipline which embraces the earth as a whole.
The American eco-biologist Barry Commoner, with whom I had an opportunity to
work for the United Nations Conference for the Human Environment in 1972, calls
synchronicity the “first law” of ecology in opposition to “scientific reductionism,”
which is intellectually responsible for and promotes environmental degradation
and destruction. Long before Al Gore, Commoner ran for the 1980 Presidential
campaign as a third-party candidate primarily on an environmental platform.
In the tradition of Western modernity since Descartes, the body has been a
philosophical orphan. In constructing his epistemocracy, he dichotomizes the
mind (res cogitans) and the body (res extensa) in favor of the former over or at the
exclusion of the latter. We shall call it the cogito principle, which is disembodied
and thus monologic. The alleged dark grotto or continent of corporeality has almost
always been castigated and crucified as an ephemeral and perishable commodity
in favor of incorporeal immortality in the mainstream of Western thought—Greek
as well as Christian thought. Origen, the stern third-century Christian ascetic and
theologian who voluntarily castrated himself—for that matter, castration was not
an uncommon practice in his time—depicted corporeality or, more specifically,
sexuality as a passing phenomenon and hinted at the eschatological hope of
purifying the soul from the flesh. In the eloquent words of Peter Brown:
Human life [for Origen], lived in a body endowed with sexual
characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that
Ecopiety Essay
b
49
would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a
transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity
tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage,
procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a
sunbeam (The Body and Society, 1988, p. 168).
The eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico argues
against the cogito principle. The German Tantric philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
may be called a progeny of Vico. For Nietzsche, who was acquainted with
Buddhism, the human is entirely the body and the soul is merely another word for
the body. The cogito principle may be faulted because it scandalizes embodiment
that is the silent spring of sociality or reality as social process. To be social must first
and foremost be intercorporeal. Indeed, the body is the umbilical cord to the social.
Only because of the body are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves
first to other bodies and then to other minds. The body is our social placement in the
world. With the synergic interplay of its senses, the body attunes us to the world.
The world, as the existential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has it, is
made of the same stuff as the body presumably because we relate ourselves to the
world by the medium of the body, which is the lived field of perception. With the
phenomenologist Erwin W. Strauss, we can argue that the body is related to other
bodies, whereas the mind is related only to one body. The mind becomes a relatum
because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. It is necessary that
we exist as body, as flesh, in order to be social and thus ethical.
The body is the participatory locus of perception. To perceive natural things
in the world is to sense them as they are through embodied consciousness, to
sense the “wild” (sauvage) nakedness of nature. The act of perception as embodied
consciousness is then neither representation nor idea. Rather, perception
participates in or inhabits each reality it senses. It intertwines or interlaces the
flesh of the body and the flesh of the world: the body and the world form one
inseparable fleshfold. In each act of perception, the body participates in the world.
Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity, and it is enclosed
in the synergic work of the body. In other words, it is synchronistic in that the body
as the carnal field in which perception as a whole becomes localized as seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching this or that particular.
In the East there is the Sinic saying that the land and the body are not two,
but one: they are inseparable partners. This corporeal poetics of topophilia is the
celebration of the body in defense of the land, and vice versa. They mutually enhance
each other. The body is an “earthword” as much as the earth is a “bodyword.” But
for the body, it is impossible to have the spatial conception of the earth in the first
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Many Mountains Moving
place, or, as the Japanese expression has it, the “great land” (daiji). The body and
the earth inscribe each other in/as one fleshfold. Sinic eco-art called feng shui
(geomancy or sinographically spelled “wind”/“water”), which is widely practiced
as a conventional art of everyday living even in highly modernized, urbanized East
Asia, sanctifies and ritualizes the inseparability of humans from the land and the
energy (qi) of the cosmic “elements.” The eco-art of feng shui, whether it be used
in building their dwelling places and skyscrapers or in planning ancestral burials,
means to harmonize human activities with the land, with the cosmic “elements.”
Filial piety in Confucianism, which governs interhuman relationship, is also
connected to reverence for nature or “ten thousand things.” In the Book of Rites
(Liji), Confucius views that cutting down a tree out of season is a violation of filial
piety. The fifteenth-century neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming, who yielded
considerable influence inside and outside China (in Korea and Japan), declared that
“the great man [sage] regards Heaven, Earth, and myriad things as one body” (p. 222).
The sage’s feeling of commiseration for animals, his feeling of pity for destroyed plants
all show his “humanity” (ren) with all the sentients as they together form one body as
the sensible sentient. The feeling of “humanity” (ren) embraces the sage’s feeling of
regret even to shattered tiles and stones. Wang not only incorporates the body into
the mapping of his geophilosophical ideas but also extends the Confucian notion of
“humanity” (ren) to nonhuman things both animate and inanimate. Seven centuries
earlier, the Confucianist Zhang Zai envisioned the universe in an encompassing
way when he wrote the following reputed passage, which is couched in part in the
imageries of Confucian (filial) piety: “Heaven is my father, and earth is my mother,
and even such a small creature [i.e., earthling] as I find an intimate place in their
midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which
directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters,
and all things are my companions” (p. 223) (italics added for emphasis).
The beauty of nature and the nature of beauty are interconnected. The aesthetic
(aisthesis) is an embodied consciousness: it is a discourse of the body. The aesthetic
attitude is the way of overcoming the Baconian and Cartesian way of mastering,
exploiting and possessing nature for the sole purpose of human use, which is by
necessity anthropocentric. In his pioneering work The Meeting of East and West
(1946), F. S. C. Northrop makes a perceptive though oversimplified distinction
between the “aesthetic” culture of the East and the “scientific” culture of the West.
Sinism, whether it be Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan/Zen Buddhism, is
abundantly aesthetic. It appreciates rather than appropriates nature. Confucius,
for example, was an aficionado of music and regarded it as akin to humaneness or
benevolence (ren), which is the noblest virtue. In the modern West, it was Friedrich
Ecopiety Essay
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51
Nietzsche more than any other philosopher I know who, in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872 in German), valorizes music—perhaps in the ancient Greek sense of mousike
(performing arts) that includes oral poetry, dance, drama and music: “it is only as
an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” and
that “only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what it meant by
the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon” (p. 116). For Nietzsche,
in short, the world is “measured” (in the musical sense of metron) by the aesthetic
of music whose primary condition of being is to attune ourselves to or harmonize
ourselves with the world both human and nonhuman. As a matter of fact, harmony
is the aesthetic soul of the musical which, as the consummation of the aesthetic, all
other arts strive to emulate. In Sinism, it is at once both aesthetic and ethical. The
Sinic idea of morality or goodness is closely related to the idea of beauty. In Chinese
morality “virtue” that is harmonious means “beautiful conduct” on the one hand,
and “evil” or vice that is disharmonious is synonymous with “ugliness” on the other.
It may be said that the way of Daoism is equivalent to the way of homo ecologicus.
It is an exemplar of the relational ontology of our relationships with nature. To
borrow the exquisite words of the American philosopher Henry G. Bugbee, Jr. in
The Inward Morning (1958): “We all stand only together, not only all men, but all
things” (p. 223). It is an unqualified affirmation of the sacrament of embodied
coexistence among all beings and things. Daoism deflates rather than inflates or
magnifies the importance of both the self and humanity in conceptualizing the
earth or cosmos. It is, in brief, neither egocentric nor anthropocentric. According
to the Daodejing, there is a “circulation” of “four greatnesses” in the universe:
Humanity, Earth, Heaven, and Dao. Dao is the “mother” of Heaven and Earth:
In the universe we have four greatnesses, and man is but one.
Man is in accordance with earth.
Earth is in accordance with heaven.
Heaven is in accordance with Dao.
Dao is in accordance with that which is [i.e., ziran] (p. 123 et passim).
At the heart of the circulating wheel of the four greatnesses lies “that which is”
(ziran). “Being natural” or “thusness” refers to the sense of “thisness” or “thatness”
in depicting the singularity of a particular thing. As it is spelled with two sinograms,
it has a twofold meaning. One is physical in that it refers to myriads of beings and
things in nature or “ten-thousand things”—mountains, rivers, animals, trees, plants,
and so on. The other, more importantly, is ontological. As “thusness,” it signifies the
intrinsic and spontaneous (or uncontrolled) propensity of beings and things which
may be called “being natural.” It is a description of myriad things as they are, i.e., it
is autotelic, whose opposite is utilitarian. It may be likened to the natural flow of
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a river without human intervention that meanders unconcernedly or purposelessly
along the natural terrain of the landscape and to splitting of a bamboo with its natural
grain without forcing it. The Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven—who said that “I love
a tree more than a man”—brings the aesthetic and nature together. It is his animated
portrayal of nature and the life of the countryside: the fields, meadows, woods, and
streams; a chorus of the nightingale, quail, cuckoo, and yellowhammer; a storm; a
peasant’s festival (a village dance or fair); and a shepherd’s hymn of thanking at the
passing of the storm. Rachel Carson, who was in the forefront of banning the use
of DDT in her book with the poetic title Silent Spring (1962), conveys the same
aesthetic feeling of human fusion with nature when she writes:
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and
mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the
vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths
that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength
that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual
beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the
folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in
the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after
night, and spring after the winter (p. 46).
Japanese Zen must be singled out as the way of cultivating the sense of appreciation
and reverence for “that which is” (ziran) in myriads of living creatures and nonliving
things. Taking a cue from the first stanza of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence
(“To see the world in a grain of sand,/And a heaven in a wild flower; /Hold infinity in
the palm of your hand, /And eternity in an hour” (p. 116), I wish to dwell on Japanese
haiku, which mirrors the beauty of small things. Zen and writing haiku are often if
not always interconnected. The symbol of sound is echoed in the most famous and
metaphysical haiku that the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Basho, who studied
Zen and also revolutionized Japanese haiku in the 5-7-5 syllabic formula: Furu ike
ya/kawazu tobikomu/mizu no oto (“The old pond—/A frog jumps in,—/The sound of
the water”) (p. 119). It is a concordant continuum of the cosmic elements. So the
simplicity and wilderness of oto (sound) is the elemental, all-embracing soul of the
haiku. The Zenish splendor of the simple and wild in this Basho’s haiku airs and echoes
the sonorous mood of “serenity”—the seasonal serenade of Being or Nature (shi-zen
in Japanese). The aesthetic harmony of the elements is the great continuum of Being
where the reverberation of the water’s sound is perceived by the poet in the little
creature’s or earthling’s consonance with nature or the whole universe as the background
of tranquility, serenity, or “beatific response.” Indeed, small is simply beautiful.
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IV.
In closing, let me emphasize again that we have overlooked for too long
a configuration of the aesthetic paradigm that incorporates geophilosophy. It is
abundantly clear that as the aesthetic is an embodied consciousness, the aesthetic
paradigm where the body and the earth are each other’s soulmates is deeply
embedded in the ageless tradition of Sinism, particularly Daoism and Chan/Zen
Buddhism, which affirms the sacrament of embodied coexistence among all beings
and things. The aesthetic paradigm is capable of breaking loose the conventional
grip of given or established reality. It destroys a “real” world and thereafter to
construct a “possible” world. In the end, the injunction emerging from the alliance
of aesthetics and ethics to reinhabit the entropic earth for the next millennium and
beyond is simply the elegant and frugal catchphrase, “small is beautiful.” By the
same token, the human who is downsized as an “earthling,” too, is beautiful. If we
continue to speak the same language and behave in the same way without a radical,
continental shift to the aesthetic in our hearts and minds, we are surely doomed
and heading toward the death of humanity as well as the end of the earth.
NOTES
1. See the author’s book The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy
(New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2010). All the paginations cited in this
essay refer to this work unless indicated otherwise.
This collection of essays spans almost four decades. The first essay in
it was written to celebrate the coming of the first Earth Day in 1970. I have
repeatedly used the expression the ecological crisis in the manner of the influential
American social philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn, the French existential
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the founder of phenomenology
Edmund Husserl. The term crisis points to the period of tradition from an old
paradigm to a new one. The motive of using it lies in the hopes of transforming
radically—in the etymological and ontological sense of the term—our attitude
toward nature or the earth as a whole.
2. Discussing war as human inhumanity to humans in The Warriors: Reflections
on Men in Battle (1959, pp. 237-38), J. Glenn Gray makes an extremely important
point: “What is missing so often in modern men is a basic piety, the recognition of
dependence on the natural realm. . . . Man can sin only against man, it seems, or
possibly against God, not against nature” (italics added for emphasis). In this light,
Erazim Kohák makes eminent sense when he writes in The Embers and the Stars
(1984) that “To recover our moral sense of humanity, we would need to recover first
the moral sense of nature” (italics added for emphasis) (p. 171).
Contest Section
2008
Flash Fiction Winner: Laura Loomis, The Sign
Flash Fiction Runner-Up: Maureen O’Brien, Sequins and Holes
Thanks to our judge, Thaddeus Rutkowski!
Poetry Winner:Brian Brodeur, The Clearing
Poetry Finalists: Susan Deer Cloud, Car Stealer
John Jeffire, The East Enders and The Good Soldier
Mark Wagenaar, Unknowable Nocturne
Sarah Zale, Spring
Thanks to our judge, Anne-Marie Cusac!
2009
Flash Fiction Winner: Francisco Q. Delgado, No Joke
Flash Fiction Runner-Up: Karin Lin-Greenberg, Back Seat
Thanks to our judge, Thaddeus Rutkowski!
Poetry Winner:Margaret Walther, Stills/ Steals
Poetry Finalists: Brian Brodeur, Katie by the Sea and Natural Causes
Ellen LaFleche, Missing Child: Mystic Connecticut
Christa Setteducati, Nights with Neighbors
Kathryn Winograd, Of Daughters and Mothers and
Saskia van Uilenburgh, the Wife of the Artist. c. 1613
Thanks to our judge, Patricia Smith!
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2008 Flash Fiction Winner
Laura Loomis
R
The Sign
I said my name by drawing a “J” with my little finger next to my curls. I knew
the other important words, too, my first day of preschool. “Mother” was five fingers
spread under my chin; “Father” was the same gesture at my forehead.
I must have understood spoken words by then; my hearing relatives were at the
house all the time, and my mother could speak understandably when she needed
to. Like any deaf person’s home, ours was anything but quiet: the television was
always on, cabinets and doors banged constantly, Mom would stomp the floor to get
Dad’s attention with the vibration. But talking was done with the hands.
The teacher had thirty noisier children to entertain. Her only attempt at
communicating with my parents was a note suggesting that my hair was too long
for a boy. My mother read it with a puzzled squint, then signed to my father, Jesse
hair name sign give. Can’t cut. She sent a note back, probably in grammar closer to
English than American Sign Language, and the subject was dropped.
The other children didn’t find me interesting; I didn’t understand their games.
Their voices all seemed to blend together, an incomprehensible stream of noise. I
stayed in silence, where I was comfortable.
There was one boy, green-eyed and curious, who would come sit by me, pushing
a toy in my direction. He would show me things, talking the whole time in a voice
like a cat purring. Bunny. Car. Ball. Jesse. Gabe. Jesse. Gabe. Finally, I tried to wrap
my mouth around the sound. “Gabe.”
And so I started talking his language, and teaching him mine. Gabe took to
signing as if he’d always done it. I gave him a name sign: “G” next to his green
eyes. Throughout grammar school, all the way to high school, we’d sign behind the
teacher’s back. Gabe discovered what any deaf person could tell him: Words are
clumsy. It’s possible to say more with an eyebrow or a curve of the lip.
I got better at words when I figured out that they didn’t always match faces.
You can lie in sign language, just like any other, but you have to be good at it. Face,
posture, body language, they all have to match the sign. Talkers are careless about
that. When the teacher said she’d been out sick yesterday, the tightening in her
Many Mountains Moving
knuckles told me she’d been treating herself to a day off from playing drill sergeant
to a horde of twelve-year-olds.
Gabe thought I was a mind reader until I taught him. It’s just about being
observant. Most people would back down when I called them on lying. Not Gabe.
Catch him with both hands and his whole head in the cookie jar, and he’d swear he
didn’t know anything about any missing cookies.
Like the day in high school when we’d once again planned to meet up after
school and go to the arcade. I wasn’t that keen on Pac-man and Frogger, but Gabe
liked it, so we went once or twice a week. That day, I waited on the steps as usual,
but Gabe never showed. I went by the arcade, thinking perhaps he’d gone without
me for some reason. Banging pinball machines, blaring music, and the usual boys
slipping into the back alley for a smoke. No Gabe.
He caught up to me the next day at recess. “Where were you?” he demanded.
“I waited for you for half an hour, man.”
I had a moment of vertigo. Maybe I’d forgotten somehow, or missed him, or
something?
No. I was there. I know what I saw, or didn’t see.
It was a girl, of course. Gabe was with Stacia Collins in the back of her parents’
car, finding out how far she’d let him go. When I found out where he’d been, he
didn’t exactly act sorry.
“You ditched me for her?”
“Oh, like you wouldn’t dump your best buddy the first time a girl looked past
that poodle hair of yours.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You’d pass up a girl, just for me? Aw, how sweet. You a faggot or something?”
“No-o.” If we’d been signing, maybe I’d have just told the truth. But we were
talking, and I was carefully looking past him. Of course I loved Gabe. I loved him
so much that it was inconceivable to me that he could fail to love me the same way.
“You sure? Here, lemme check.” He grabbed my collar and pulled me closer,
as if to kiss me.
“Stop it!” The other kids were snickering, moving in for a better look.
“No really, it’s okay,” he taunted, giving me a look of mock lust.
“Gabe!” I shoved his chest, hard enough to free myself. “Quit being an asshole!”
I walked away, wiping my mouth even though we hadn’t kissed.
After all the guys I’ve kissed since then – the frightened boy in eleventh grade
who let me unzip his pants, the one-night lovers who exchanged fake phone
numbers, the married linguist who knew the word for kiss in every language—I’ve
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never quit wondering how that kiss would have felt. If I could have told him Yes
I’m a faggot, yes I want to kiss you, yes I love you more than that stupid girl ever could,
and even though I don’t really know how to kiss yet you could teach me like you taught
me to talk.
“Oh, chill. I was just kidding,” Gabe called after me, making it possible for us
both to pretend nothing had happened.
I looked over my shoulder, and he was making the sign for I love you. Eternally,
stupidly hopeful, I signed it back.
Many Mountains Moving
Flash Fiction Runner-Up
Maureen O’Brien
R
Sequins and Holes
I am not, like my cousins, going to make excuses for her. I can’t. Still, we are
related to a gangster so brutal and legendary, we mull it over all the time. We always
knew her details, but now with the Internet any Joe Blow can park himself in the
privacy of his own home and Google her, gawking at the details of her demolition.
There she is, bullet-filled, any time he desires. There is something especially
pornographic about the easy access of the coroner’s report.
My cousin Angel says, “Faith, this has been going on forever. Those country
people came from miles in their overalls just to view the carnage. No matter what,
people are gonna rubberneck.” I get stuck on the word “carnage.” What would be
the synonym? Bonnie would have wondered. She was a poet, and had she been
writing today, she would have carted a laptop, taken her finger-mouse and clicked
around between bloodbath, slaughter, butchery, massacre.
She was only 4’11”, 90 pounds. We are all petite like her: No women in my
family are over 5’2”. But in photos where she’s whole, her wide pleated skirt, cigar,
and weaponry created the illusion she was bigger. I’ll never know why—or how—
my great aunt did what she did. My cousins defend her. They swear that she had a
viciously violent childhood. That was over 80 years ago. Now, in 2008, everyone in
America is weary from the molested girls. You include that in a woman’s bio and it’s
like, oh, yawn. Back then, no one ever even confessed to having been molested. My
cousins tell any reporter who’s still interested that Bonnie’s own father (our greatgreat-grandfather) threatened her if she ever told what he did to her. Angel says it’s
a fact that he attempted to drown Bonnie in a fetid Texas ditch. And another time,
he threatened to bash her brains against the rocks.
It’s assumed Bonnie Parker deserved what she got. Certainly, she had no right
to kill, or be part of, killing twelve people. But those FBI men? So what if she
probably would have gotten the electric chair; those silver badges took justice into
their own hands. They were vigilantes. And then they picked her clean. You can see
her glasses on several Web sites, mostly notably www.gunmoll.com. They still have
blood on them. I wish I could take a chamois cloth, swipe them clear so she can go
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back to reading the magazine opened on her lap as she died. Let her have lightness;
let her lose herself in Hollywood tittle-tattle, admiring the styles of starlets.
Those townsfolk, once the news got out, were like crabs in a bucket, crawling
up onto each other to get a closer view of her. The fact that makes me weep, still,
was that when she was ambushed, she was wearing a small Catholic cross under
her red dress. The tiny Jesus was dried with her blood. It’s impossible that it wasn’t,
since bullets exploded in her breasts, knees, hands. I sit in my yard sometimes,
looking up at the sky, and when I hear sirens, or cars squealing, or even a hawk
crying out in a prehistoric voice, I see in my mind, replaying on an endless loop,
Bonnie’s last moments. I think of the interlocking links of her gold chain. I think of
her sequins and the holes in her hat.
After Bonnie died, her sister (our grandmother) went to jail for a year and a day
for having hidden Bonnie when she was alive. It’s an ominous place, even when
photographed now in color. West Virginia Women’s Prison looks like it’s still the 1930s
in black and white. Our grandmother, like Bonnie, like all us tiny Parker women,
loved fashion. It’s morbid, but my cousins and I inherited Bonnie’s jewelry from an
anonymous donor, and we kept it secret from our mothers. Bonnie had exquisite
taste, and freshly stolen bills with which to buy one-of-a-kind necklaces. Of course
the silver three-acorn pin she was wearing at the end—that was in the coroner’s
hands, that historic May day. Recently it surfaced and sold for $20,000 on eBay.
About our names: all the women in the family were terrified that Bonnie had
inherited some sort of evil Satan gene. Like a stain. That’s what it’s like, having her
for an aunt. Did something dark and permanent run in our blood? In an attempt
to counteract it, our mothers named us all superstitiously. I’m Faith, and I have
cousins Grace, Angel, Patience, and Hope.
Whether our names helped some of us, I don’t know. Perhaps. We’ve gone the
other way. None of us lusted for the men we married. Grace, Angel, Patience and I
all settled down with partners who were like brothers to us, roommates. We fear the
erotic so we live without sex. We fear rage so we live without anger. It was instilled
in us from a very early age. Don’t raise your voices. Whisper. Keep still. Be good girls.
Hope is gone, though. Strung out, she ran away with a crazy heroin addict two
years ago. She’s in the Badlands, last we heard, and that’s not a metaphor. That’s
where our Hope really is holed up.
From the time we were just little girls swinging in sun suits, we were
brainwashed. Do not ever go for the bad boys. Look what happened to Aunt Bonnie
when she drove off laughing with Clyde.
Many Mountains Moving
2008 Poetry Winner
Brian Brodeur
R
The Clearing
I’m thinking of Gidge Tomiolo, the Systems Operator
at the Upper Blackstone Treatment Plant
where I worked part-time the summer I turned sixteen
power-washing the tanks, helping technicians
superheat greywater into pellets
we sold to local farmers as fertilizer.
They’d pay whatever we asked, never haggling
Gidge, who’d curse the smoking tractor
as he pulled up to the dock with another pallet
an assembly line of us loaded on flatbeds, our bodies
forming one concordance in the stink.
I guess a part of me must miss that work,
sweating for minimum wage, scraping nightsoil sludge
from under my fingernails, even the afternoon
I got caught in a downpour doing rounds.
That day, walking out past the aureated basins,
I roamed the woods surrounding the property
and trudged up the gully to watch for deer.
That was when I saw them, two nude figures:
a woman and a man sprawled in the clearing,
lying together, their skin turning bright pink.
In the haze, the man looked like—no, was Gidge
closing his eyes as he fondled the ample flesh
of the woman straddling him: ten years younger
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Contest Winners
and (do I have to say it?) not his wife.
I ducked behind a trunk, all three of us
so engrossed no one noticed the rumbling above us
coming closer, the sky darkening
as the first few drops clicked against the leaves.
So when the clouds cracked open, the downpour
shocked me, sent me hauling-ass
through torrents down the hill, remembering
the utility shed I could use for shelter:
an old stone shack of granite and cement
poured between the gaps below slate shingles.
Shivering under the eaves, I watched the couple
stumble from the woods, still nude, carrying
their clothes and running straight toward me
as I tried kicking the padlock rusted shut.
Panting, Gidge grinned at me, “Nice day for a stroll!”
As he laughed and smacked the woman’s ass,
she dropped her clothes on the steps
and rang out her dripping hair. She looked at me
then looked at Gidge, rolling her eyes, picked up her things
and bunched her sopping blouse against her breasts.
We must’ve stood so close there out of fear.
I know I was scared when a north-west wind
thrashed the trees, the branches
clattering, and Gidge grabbed the woman’s arm
and pulled her closer, told her she’d be warmer
between us two, his arm around my shoulders
squeezing us together, winking at me, still
laughing his belly laugh, his erection
undeniable beside my thigh.
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Many Mountains Moving
As the woman pressed against me in the heat,
I could feel her trembling, smell the musk
of pine needles and strawberry shampoo
rising from her hair, her skin goose-pimpling
as thunder shook the floor and rattled the panes.
I stared at the rain—it was all I could think to do—
tried not to glance at either’s nakedness,
clenched my fists and kept them at my sides.
Surging across the sky, lightening revealed
backlit heaves of storm, the bigger gusts
splitting boughs and peeling leaves
from yellow poplars, showing no sign of stopping.
Then it was over. Rain slowed to a piddle.
As he struggled into his pants Gidge made some comment
that sent the woman stomping off into the woods
gathering both breasts in one hand, her clothes in the other.
We walked back to the Plant together, Gidge
and I, exchanging the odd grunt, but nothing more.
What was there to say? We both were cold, both
hoping to slip in through the loading dock
before the foreman started asking questions.
2008 Poetry Finalists
Susan Deer Cloud
R
Car Stealer
My mother told me to stay away from you,
the boy who stole cars. In our town
everyone called you Car Stealer.
Half century later I still don’t know
your first name. Your last name, yes –
Mohawk name a well known chief holds.
But for me, Car Stealer, it will always be
your name alone. It will be that boy
of twelve, fourteen, sixteen burning
rubber down School Street where I
watched from white pine I used to
climb. “Hey, Sexy Susie,” you laughed
through one of many rolled down windows,
“come on, Babe, go for a ride with me!”
I gazed down, hugging the pine
the way maybe you ached for me
to embrace you, but what did I know?
The silky pine needles teased
my face trying not to smile when
you blew me crazy kisses, roared
between my parents’ house
and brick school we both hated.
Car Stealer, did you suspect
I thought you beautiful – skin
color of Catskill clay, hair black
as manes of wild horses I cried for?
Oh, hair streaming past defiant shoulders
before the white boys made long hair
a fashion statement. My mother
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Many Mountains Moving
warned me, so I never learned the deeps
of your flesh, scent, touch except rough
bark, sap, sun-heated needles tattooing
your thefts into my virgin skin.
Car Stealer, one day you stopped
speeding down our narrow street.
My mother claimed they locked you
in a place for juvenile delinquents.
I stole out to the road, believing
she lied, waiting to hear “Sexy Susie”
sparkling off your tongue, ready to hitch
a ride in a red convertible, top down,
our long hair tearless trails in the wind.
2008 Poetry Finalist
John Jeffire
R
The East Enders
We were dumb about our stupidity,
broadcasting it, lime suspenders
Jacking up plaid polyester, calling
Card hucklebuck huckster dumbness.
We passed off flatulence for wit,
Bazooka Joe for wisdom,
Mastercard and VISA for security,
Lawn gnome for art,
Peroxide and mascara for beauty,
Crosswords for intellect,
Collection baskets for religion,
Light beer for discipline,
Mag wheels for status,
Stitches for respect,
Perfume for love,
T-bones for the good life.
We worked diligently at nothing
Anyone would remember or
Pay a decent wage for,
Proudly produced perishable goods,
Eagerly consumed generic or what
Could only be bought in bulk,
And openly mocked those fat-assed
Bigwigs who docked our pay and
Planned our daily obsolescence.
We wondered in earnest what dogs
Would say if they could talk,
Where doughnut holes went,
Who made God and the first catcher’s glove,
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Many Mountains Moving
If the Incredible Hulk could whip Godzilla,
When exactly leisure suits went out of style,
Whether tomatoes were fruit or vegetable,
Why there was no number eleventy-leven.
Reflection for us was a split second
Revelation next to a nightclub urinal.
If we harmed anyone, it was ourselves
And we never felt a goddamned thing.
2008 Poetry Finalist
John Jeffire
R
The Good Soldier
The answers of the captured
Double agent arrive too quickly,
Too easily, too well rehearsed.
The emergency room physician
Is not a skilled interrogator.
The swelling golfball bulging
From my forehead?
Damn kid never pays attention.
Walked right into a counter
At K-Mart, wham,
Never even saw it coming.
And the arm that dangles
From my left side,
Hanging like a stroke
Victim’s useless limb?
Hell, I tried to help him up
The stairs but, damn kid never
Pays attention, so I tried
To help him up the stairs,
But he pulls away
Just when I pull
To help him and, pop, bango,
Out come the arm.
After release at Dairy Queen,
He tells me I am tough.
You never cried, man.
You took it like a soldier.
Kept your mouth shut.
That’s a good man.
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Many Mountains Moving
I am five years old but
I’m a good man.
You woulda never got it put
Back into place if we didn’t
Notice how you couldn’t lift it up.
You’re damn lucky we care about you.
I am lucky. I am cared for.
My father says I’m tough.
I wear my sling proudly.
I will never leak a word
That betrays pain to the enemy.
Pain is our secret sign.
We keep it under wraps.
Name, rank, serial number.
I am a grown man now.
The cartilage in my chest
Never healed properly and
A mass of scartissue forms a
Permanent, disfigured wall
Over my purpled heart.
Here, run your hand over
The ripped terrain of my duty.
I am the veteran who doesn’t
Answer the reunion invitation.
Sorry, but I have nothing to say
Except what is in this poem.
The mass of scabbed memory
Clumped off my left breastbone
Is a private badge of honor.
2008 Poetry Finalist
Mark Wagenaar
R
Unknowable Nocturne
You return to find the front door
ajar, the aster’s white moonbursts
the only light in the foyer.
The sound
of their petals falling
will keep you awake again tonight,
or else you will fall asleep
in the hallway, between the room
of longing, a peacock feather nailed
to the lintel above its oak door,
& the room of melancholy, a sheen
on the wreath of crow feathers
hanging from its knob.
A few words
by lampblack, half-lives of half-lives,
their spittle & smudges blood-swiped
on a single page ghost-chewed
down to a spare wick. On the other side
the page catches fire, a glow
you catch sight of through the frost
trilliumed on the glass,
the windowpane now the bridge
spanning the canyon you crossed
the day you left him—
a smooth stone in your palm—
or the day after,
you cannot remember.
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2008 Poetry Finalist
2009 Flash Fiction Winner
Sarah Zale
Francisco Q. Delgado
R
R
Spring
No Joke
She stares into the space beside her,
drawing her hand across the unease
of his sleep. She sees tufts of sheet,
furrows of soil, a fallow wait
for yet another season.
The morning light settles at the table
like cream in coffee he sips cold
as icy dew drapes the garden.
He fingers a cup with rings that mark—
how many mornings like this?
He remembers
picking cilantro from the garden,
fanning it across his cheeks and
he could smell her, lifting
a butternut squash from its vine—
he could feel her,
his cheek upon hips
that would spread like wings
and they would fly.
He stands at the door where she lies,
sees the day cross her face
the way ice gives up gray
as it melts. He sees—
himself on the bed at her side—
two seeds
in a crease of spring soil.
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“Okay,” Brian said. “I got one.”
By this time, a transparent layer of smoke had settled upon us. It gathered
around our heads, at our feet and was slurped into our lungs each time we inhaled.
I had been staring at the Kickboxer poster on his wall: a flexing Van Damme at the
forefront, a grimacing Tong Po in the shadows.
“Don’t leave us in suspense,” I told him. “What is it?”
We were fresh off a debate of “Who would win in a fight between so-and-so
and such-and-such?” Before this, everyone but me discussed which of their parents
they preferred. It was too stupid and whiny a question for me to even think about,
let alone answer. And yes, by whiny and stupid, I mean white.
“Okay,” he said. Stopped. Puffed his blunt and passed it over. “If you could
remove any race from the world, what would it be?”
We sat back in silence. In outside company, I would’ve dismissed his question
with a wave of my hand or buried it by insulting him. But this company was
intimate: friends among friends, or at least friends of friends in the case of the girl
in the corner whose name I kept forgetting.
“Asians,” Eddie answered. “Because there’s so many of them.” He nudged my
shoulder. “I’d keep you, though, buddy. Oh! And I’d keep the girls, too, because
they’re hot.”
Everyone laughed. My smile was forced, but through the smoke no one realized.
In my attempt at a comeback, I replied, “Tong Po would cripple you if you tried to
kill him.”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “That actor’s not even Asian in real life. He was, like,
Brazilian or Algerian or some shit.”
“I’d get rid of Guidos,” the girl in the corner said. “Do Guidos count as a race?”
“Maybe a subspecies,” I responded.
“What about you, Joey?”
I took the blunt as it came and shrugged. Everyone pressed for input. Brian
cajoled, “Come on, J. Who first came to mind when I asked?”
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I blew smoke in their direction and smiled. “White people.”
A part of me meant it as a joke. All of me tried to deliver it like one.
I waited for the conversation to move along after that, but everyone in the
room—including the girl in the corner, who looked more Eurasian now that the
smoke was clearing—kept their eyes upon me, waiting for me to explain.
I could joke about growing up and watching Van Damme beat up my people in
movies, all the resentment I’ve shouldered through the years because of it.
Maybe I could play it straight for once and tell them about the time my sister
was followed home from school, peppered with chants of “Chinese slut! Chinese
slut!” How I was attacked five-on-one when I tried to defend her.
They’d be more taken with the unfairness of the five-on-one attack than
the harassment of my sister, though. And when I’d explain that we weren’t even
Chinese, they would probably nod and offer their condolences, saying “Ohhh” or
“That really sucks,” but they’d forget about it soon enough. Then none of it would
even matter.
I should just follow Eddie’s example and say, “Except you guys here.” Then
go on about how I’d spare the blondest girl I could find because white girls with
blonde hair are hot! And our kids, just as shaped by her white features as my own,
might pass for exotic.
Maybe even good-looking.
“Because there’s so many of you,” I said. “And most of you are assholes.”
Everyone in the room went silent. Some looked away, even when I went to pass
the blunt onward.
“Frickin’ Bobby Lee over here,” Eddie remarked.
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2009 Flash Fiction Runner-Up
Karin Lin-Greenberg
R
Back Seat
We all knew the back of the school bus was prime real estate. You couldn’t sit
there if you were in first grade or second or third or even fifth. The back seat was
for sixth graders, like those books in our school library labeled “Sixth Graders Only,”
the ones about death or marijuana or getting your first period. We all knew what
these books were about because we slipped them off the shelves, skimmed them
quickly before the librarians could tell us that we were not in sixth grade, that we
had to put them back. One day our turn would come.
On the bus, first graders sat in the worst seats, the ones right behind Allen, the
bus driver. You could get in trouble in the front seat if you turned around, if you let
your legs slip into the aisle. First graders sat facing forward, legs dangling off the
sticky green seats. Third graders were in the middle of the bus, halfway standing up,
one arm resting on the back of the seat in front of them, another arm slung over their
own seatback. Sixth graders were in the last few rows, the coolest four kids in the
very last row. They never faced forward. They kneeled on the seats, facing backwards.
By fourth or fifth grade, we’d had enough American History to know the
connotations of the back of the bus, but Rosa Parks felt unreal to us, a grainy
photograph in a social studies textbook, a small woman in a coat with sleeves that
looked too long, just sitting quietly. This was the Eighties, we were in the suburbs
of New Jersey. Rosa Parks seemed long ago and far away enough that on field trips,
when we didn’t have to contend with sixth graders for the back row, we would shout
out, “Back of the bus! It’s mine!” as if it were a right.
The sixth graders waved out of the back window at the drivers of the cars
behind the bus. Sometimes the drivers would ignore them, try to pretend that they
didn’t see all those hands flashing. When that happened, the sixth graders shouted,
“Salt! Salt!” as if it were a pejorative term. After the sixth graders sounded the call,
it would ripple through the bus, finally ending in “salt” from the first graders in the
front seats, tentative and soft.
When people waved back, we shouted, “Sugar!” No one knew why we started
using these words, but we all learned the meanings, fast. Salt was bad, sugar was
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good. When we heard a call of “Sugar,” we all twisted in our seats, started waving,
a bus full of hands up in the air. “Hey, turn around,” Allen would shout from the
driver’s seat. “It’s not safe to face backwards.” When we were in first or second
grade, we’d turn around quickly, try to be safe. By third grade, though, we’d learned
that we wouldn’t get in trouble if we didn’t turn back around.
Sometimes, we would see our own parents driving behind the bus, and on those
days we’d hold our breath and wish hard that they’d wave back. And when they did,
and when the call of “Sugar!” shot down the bus, we let our breath out.
Then, one day, we were reported. Someone called the principal, told him that
what we were doing was unsafe. Then word spread, somehow. At dinner, our parents
told us that proper bus behavior entailed sitting, rear end on seat, facing forward.
“What would happen if the bus skidded to a stop? What if your body was flung down
the aisle?” Then, someone from our town newspaper wrote an article with the title
“Unsafe Behavior on Township Buses.” Our mothers clipped this article and left it
on the kitchen table next to our after-school snacks. “Please be careful,” they told us.
And then the administration brought policemen into our school and called an
assembly. The policemen told us about vehicle safety. They showed us the proper
way to click a seatbelt into a buckle. No one mentioned that our buses did not have
seatbelts. They showed us footage of car wrecks. We learned the term “body bag”
as we watched a film strip showing the body of a crash victim get zipped up in a
black bag. By the time the police were done with us, we were scared of speeding,
of driving drunk, of staying up too late and then falling asleep at the wheel just at
the moment when a train was smashing through. We knew these were films that
were usually saved for the high school students who could actually drive, but the
administration must have wanted to start scaring us early.
After the newspaper article and the assembly and the warnings from our
parents, no one waved back. The drivers behind us would shake their heads. Some
would mouth, “Turn around,” and swirl a finger to indicate that we should reverse
our positions. “Salt! Salt!” we cried. “Salt!” Soon, though, it wasn’t fun anymore. No
one would ever wave back. We gave up and sat facing forward, silently. It wasn’t
worth waving anymore. Everything was calm and quiet on the buses for a few days.
Then the younger kids started waving out of the windows next to their seats.
After all, they’d never had the chance to wave out of the back windows, so this was
really a better situation for them. Most of the time, though, drivers wouldn’t look
up, wouldn’t notice the small hands waving. “Salt, salt,” said the first graders as they
waved, arms going back and forth like windshield wipers, but their voices were so
quiet they sounded like an echo.
2009 Poetry Winner
Margaret Walther
R
Stills/ Steals
Chrome green, shriek yellow, these pills, so appropriate. Bottled
sunshine, they’re called. I’m back to back with Prozac—wonder-woman
drug. So we have an agreement? No, I mumbled, but she hurtled
off the prescription anyway. Enjoy. The devil’s numbing
needles. I’ve been on this flimflam jaunt before—ends in
a cul-de-sac/ slash attic, poet tongue-tied, contemplating
noose. I’m not taking these anymore, I announce next session, and she
looks at me as if, unruly child. Psych-doctor drearie, I am sixty
and have now become no one’s child. She flappers on—
adjust the dosage, try another anti-d. I say, Exercise, meditation
and watch her lower lip curl. You need something—insert your own
word here—lovey, ducky, pumpkin, sweetie pie. I run from her office
to my car, roll down the windows, exhale. Let me feel—highs, lows
any blessed any of anything. Even that old cut loose trapeze/ slash trapeze
abyss. O unkempt clown heart—come back home. How I miss flambéred lipstick, black-kohled eyes, the whole shit-shebanging cabaret.
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Contest Winners
Many Mountains Moving
2009 Poetry Finalists
Brian Brodeur
R
Katie by the Sea
Her half-brother speaks.
1.
On her beach towel, two tie-dyed dolphins breech.
I tell her about the real dolphins I saw
on a deep-sea fishing trip with dad last year.
How they swam right up to the boat, made clicking noises
as we chucked hunks of grouper at their heads.
I got one once, I say, a female rough-tooth,
to eat straight from my hand. Its body glowed.
Its grainy tongue looked bigger than a cow’s.
She laughs. I like her laugh. Last night,
we watched two male dolphins on the Nature Channel
keep a female hostage, take turns with her
so no others could have her. (She wanted others.)
Each time she tried to escape, thrashing
free, they’d butt their bottle-noses into her.
The show was about cruelty in the animal kingdom.
Katie doesn’t like to see them hurt.
I told her violence is a part of nature.
She laughed and rolled her eyes. I like her laugh.
2.
Dad doesn’t think I know how it happened—
but I have ears. He says Katie’s mother’s
piece-of-shit boyfriend found Katie’s mom
hanging from an orange extension cord
tied to the basement rafters, took what cash
she kept around the house, panicked, and called dad.
Dad says she still looked pretty dangling there,
dressed in a tank top and cotton panties,
thick strands of black hair sticking to her face.
At first, dad wanted nothing to do with Katie.
I’d hear him some nights shouting to his buddies.
“I’m sorry,” he’d say, “but that girl’s mother
was a piece of shit. Her kid can’t be much better.”
He must’ve gotten used to her, his Kitty.
When she acted out at supper, he never hit her.
One summer he even paid for her gymnastics.
He’d smoke and watch her practice in his workroom.
Rewinding her cassettes, he’d make her dance
faster and faster. He’d yank on her ankles
when she tried to do the splits on the concrete floor,
holding her down until she got it right.
I think of the fun we had, us three together.
Last fall the school put on a haunted house.
Katie had just turned twelve. I was nineteen.
Strewn with torn bedsheets, the cafeteria
had been divided. One side became the Chamber
of Horrors, the other the Chamber of Death.
We blindfolded Katie—tied dad’s bandana
around her head—and led her down the hall.
Dad stuck one of her hands into bowls of cold pasta
and I pulled her other hand behind her back.
When Katie squirmed, I squeezed. “Feel that?” dad said.
“This is a bowl of brains, and this one’s eyes.”
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3.
She finds a dried ray in the surf tonight.
“It’s funny how they drown in air,” she says,
“how death makes them not scary anymore.”
“Turn your head one way,” I say to her,
“and you can hear the sea, turn the other way
and the wind keeps imitating the sound of the sea.”
She turns, she listens, but all she says she hears
is the sound of my voice echoing in her ears.
She talks about when she first lived with us,
that day she showed me where dad hid his rubbers
and we blew them up like balloons, two at a time,
sending them sputtering out of his bedroom window,
and we slipped them on a bunch of fresh bananas
she left on the countertop for dad to find.
At first she didn’t want to run away.
She’d get confused. I’d tell her she was too big
to climb in bed with me, that it wasn’t right.
She’d laugh at me and say, “This is my bed.”
The night I found her curled up in dad’s bathroom,
I told her we could drive where he wouldn’t find us.
“Promise?” she said. Next day, we were gone.
The tide’s gone oily now in the drowning sun.
It surges up the shore and bubbles back,
spewing froth all over our sandy feet.
She wears a ruffled skirt too short for her
all the girls her age are wearing this summer—
a string bikini top—which bothers me.
She rests her head on my chest. Her hair, tied back,
whips my shoulder, thick as a barber’s brush.
I don’t know how to save her, but I’ll try.
2009 Poetry Finalists
Brian Brodeur
R
Natural Causes
My first week on the job at Sunrise Acres
Miss Ahearn waved me into her room
to share a smuggled pint of apricot brandy.
We sipped from Dixie cups while she told stories:
how she’d never married, graduated
Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley
(she even called herself a “Wellesley Girl”),
how her great grandfather quit the farm at fifteen
and sailed from Belfast to escape the Famine.
I poured myself another, then another,
nodding as she spoke, half-listening,
until she leaned in close and whispered to me:
“How about a kiss?” I laughed
and took another sip. She placed her cup
on the nightstand by her bed. “Just one kiss?”
I pecked her cheek—figured I owed her
something for the booze—a little surprised
at how coarse her skin was there, how
delicate the bones felt underneath.
Reclining against the doily on her pillow,
she opened her eyes, thanked me, and said politely
if that was all I had then I could leave.
So I held my breath and pressed my lips to hers.
She squeezed my nape and slipped me the tongue.
Yanking my face away, I wiped my mouth
and thanked her for the drink. She grabbed my wrist
and grinned. “You won’t forget me now!”
Five days later, Miss Ahearn was dead.
The nurse on duty said she must’ve passed
while she watched her evening shows.
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On call that night, I visited her room
before her sister came—we’d been instructed
to leave the body for her next-of-kin.
Alone except for the army of stuffed monkeys
she kept close to her always, cloth baboons
and marmosets worn ragged with affection,
she slumped in her Laz-E-Boy with the macaque
she called Nixon (the one without a head).
Another orderly had closed her eyes.
Shy at first, I only glanced at her,
stood by her bed a while, as if waiting
for an invitation to sit. I felt embarrassed
to see her so sprawled out, no longer able
to repair herself in her hand-held mirror.
I kneeled beside her then, let myself stare
as I touched her hand, surprised it was still warm.
I didn’t last the month at Sunrise Acres,
left after a double and never came back,
not even to collect my final check.
It’s always seemed to me a kind of hell:
to be remembered, yes, but only in fragments
a stranger recollects, sparse episodes
that alter and erase until all that’s left
are rows of ragged monkeys missing eyes,
her cheeks smeared pink with rouge,
her last two teeth protruding from her mouth
still gaping as it had for her last breaths.
2009 Poetry Finalist
Ellen LaFleche
R
Missing Child, Mystic, Connecticut
Emily smells storm in the damp
shivering of her cedarwood shingles.
She brews oolong tea and waits.
Thunder comes. The ocean stands up,
each wave flaunting its lacy white under-foam.
Lightning sizzles down a telephone
pole. Emily feels the jolt
zinging down her sciatic nerve.
Blue static jumps through the eelgrass.
The sky is a dripping black
bruise. She sips her oolong,
waits for Mystic to cleanse itself.
*
Emily splits a wild apple
branch with her pocketknife.
The bough thrums with tree energy,
sweet juice running sure as blood
under warm green skin.
Emily walks through eelgrass, the divining rod
delicate in her hands as a wishbone.
The police tape ripples,
yellow plastic melting into fumes
under the sun’s yellow heat.
Emily walks and walks,
waits for the Y-shaped branch
to show her the bones.
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Many Mountains Moving
2009 Poetry Finalist
2009 Poetry Finalist
Christa Setteducati
Kathryn Winograd
R
R
Nights with Neighbors
Saskia van Uilenburgh, the Wife
of the Artist. c. 1633
When the bullfrog begins her throb
and Mom and Deb fix their gossip drinks,
your eyes are still hidden
behind tinted disco glasses.
I sit in your lap and sing for the ladies painted
on your arms (the ones I’m allowed to see)
and those blondes and brunettes shimmy
in their hot pants and heels as you flex
your muscles to my song.
I want to see your eyes, but you distract me
with your cigarette, flipping the lit end
into your mouth and back out again.
You’re so bad, smiling
black ashes on your tongue.
In time, you and Deb will move away.
All the things my fingers can do
I’ll discover, and think of you
on open windowed nights, your hidden
ladies undressed, the taste of them,
their hair curled through mine
while you lay back, crowded,
your mouth burning.
Rembrandt sold Saskia’s grave on October 27, 1662
in order to be able to pay for the burial of Hendrickje in a rented grave.
Harm wings down later, even here, the canvas black
and the wife’s beloved face a three-quarter moon
waxing toward us, its light like a thin sheen of dust,
a too soon mortality spackled across the underpainting’s
walnut stain, her husband already glad-handing
the color wheel’s descent into cool despair.
Did she foresee it, I wonder, here still
the artist’s muse for us to languish over,
despite history, despite the moment already
gathering outside this tethering frame
when the first shovel blade will break the earth,
spill out the boney underpinnings of a soul
we only half-glimpse in this, his ars perfect?
Almost mustang-like, her nostril flares over the pursed mouth—
no smile, no frown—just an incontinence of words
she holds back while the artist her husband seals the dark
eye circles, the gathering shadows at her throat,
turns fate’s one eye from us so we can barely see,
but do, love grown older, more shadowed, a monstrous
sorrow in the closing years, her body drawn so invisibly,
so swallowed into the not being, the tempered brush stroke,
the peaked oil where only his light rests eternal.
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2009 Poetry Finalist
Kathryn Winograd
R
Of Daughters and Mothers
I too dreamed that the heavy sky suddenly
rose ebony like the aged skin
of a reclining woman, half crazed
the earth under her ruminating
what I wondered. Crows sailed the high wind,
circled granite and those glory holes
of quartz where she secreted her long abandoned:
the broken refrigerator, her rusted bed springs,
the small domesticities she shed
like snake skin, her children leaving her.
I am not sad today, she thought.
Outside the shrill hiss of crickets
brings down the silence and somewhere
the May flower springs bulbous
from the dead grass, a cow a half year
dead sinking into the stained twilight.
The moon, broken off like glass,
dips down to hide in the chain
of each of our bones. Piece by piece,
it dangles downward,
past the small dark eclipsing places
where fear once ran: the coyote’s mad song
along the blind ridges of a valley—
or something more lovely, the green cud
of the world, sweet brine of spring water,
my own daughters’ eyes wavering back at me.
Once, as a child, I pulled fire flies from the air,
placed them in glass jars, and pulled the yellow lights
from them, wore them on my wrists
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until they crisscrossed my veins like story.
My mother once told me she had nothing then
with my leaving her, how the days passed
like the hide, sun warmed, droning
with the kind mouths of flies.
Soon the rising evening will carry us,
mothers, daughters, dreamers and all,
past canyon and the stark white trees,
their moon dust we will paint on face and hand, heart
in this hard quickening.
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Fiction
Thaddeus Rutkowski, E d i t o r
Fiction
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Ron Block
R
A Body of Work
He was visiting his parents when the sky opened up into a downpour, and so
they sat on the front porch and watched the streets boiling over as the rain crept up
the driveways and down the steps where a single drain bubbled in the basement,
unable to keep up. It rained all night, and in the morning the basement was flooded
with a foot of water. When he looked down the stairs, he saw what turned out to
be his birth certificate, floating in a willow basket. He waded through rooms, a
wake spreading behind him. He saw the carefully matted scrapbooks his mother
kept, his childhood dense and well‑documented, turning back into pulp. He found
what his mother called his whatnots, his knickknacks, his books and letters and his
unpublished manuscripts, a body of work in many loose-leaf pages fanning out in
the water. He saw nearly everything that mattered to him, all the treasures he had
stored in their basement for years, and yet when he saw these boxes resting beneath
the surface of the water like clams, like stones, like something that belonged there,
he felt oddly resigned—and so was his father.
His father was eighty‑two, without energy or time. He stood at the top of the
stairs and stared down at the water where the flood seemed to him to harbor a figure
of God’s purpose he was no longer young enough to factor out. Why had God saved
the worse flood for last? How would they ever recover? What made God feel they
would even try? While the outside waters subsided in a day, the basements, which
were quick to accept the flood, were slow to release it. Some boxes had taken on
weight with the water. Some remained dry, resting on the tops of the stacks. But
others, even above the water line, had wicked the water up with a kind of craving.
Later, after hauling boxes out into the open air, they would know that this was the
easiest part of the recovery, the part before they had to choose what to try to save
and what to let go. His father encouraged letting everything go, the clocks and chairs
and books, the coffee cans full of screws and nails. He no longer cared. Money and
memory no longer mattered. He wanted a dry place to rest, a pillow and a bed.
But his mother mourned with a youthful energy. She lost letters from lost
friends. She lost boxes of sheet music her fingers were no longer limber enough
to play. She lost photographs of ancestors, the world of the dead with their names
penciled in on the back, and now they were gone, and no one else would remember
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them. For days she came upon these photos, crying out whenever she found them,
rushing to pull their bodies from the mud, and she wept without consolation when
she found her son was there among them, peeking out of a christening bonnet
with eyes full of promise, giving her a sideways glance, the fathomless dare of his
adolescent eyes. That impossible boy she hardly remembered anymore was lost
now, among all the departed. He hardly even resembled the man who stood before
her, now empty and ready to accept her grief.
For her sake, he laid the photos of lost neighbors and cousins and uncles out
to dry before he turned to his own. He found a postcard from a desert, a postcard
from a mountain, a postcard from a body of water. He found a crumpled letter, now
wilted and blurred. It was all that was left of that childhood friend with her willow
hair, not even a memory, because he couldn’t read it. But it entered the dream of his
labor like a creature leaving a shell behind, a small mass of feeling in his thoughts
like a cicada grabbing on the anchor of a tree. He threw the note away and looked
for others like it.
There were some boxes of books and papers so drenched by the flood that
he didn’t care to glance at their contents. He threw them in the trash to recall
them later, one loss at a time, so he could stand it, so they wouldn’t come to him
all at once. There were other boxes, drenched or partly damp, that he picked
through carefully, pages he attached to clotheslines or spread out on the sidewalks,
weighing down each page with a rock or a shoe. And then there were the pages he
only glanced at once before resigning them to the trash.
He tried not to think about it. Not that he was unmindful of the flood. He was
almost too mindful. His mind was too full of the flood to consider its particulars.
But before the water subsided, he came to know the flood was generous. After
shedding what he could not salvage, he was finally free to consider what he found.
He discovered a poem he wrote when he was twelve, the words intending to
exorcise a kind of loneliness he couldn’t quite remember. He recovered another
forgotten letter from a lost friend, explaining why she was lost. He peeled the skin
of each page away so he could read the rest, finding meanings in her words he
hadn’t known were there before. He mourned for lost meaning. He discovered an
unfinished letter he tried to write back but the words faded and bled and finally fell
back into the water, which eventually receded and left the basement floor matted
with leaves and grass and mud and layers of pages.
As he worked three days to haul the heirlooms and photo albums and chairs
and clocks and finally the carpets out of the house, recovering his true age in a
body of pain, discarding and saving, he kept thinking: Later. This one word guarded
him. Later. You must think of this later. As long as he kept working, his words and
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his thoughts and even time seemed to float by, occasionally interrupted or grasped
by a snag and then let go, like tree limbs broken loose in the water. It was almost
a pleasure to be that empty, so for three days he worked almost without stopping
while his mother and father sat on the porch, watching for the sky to open once
again. When he finally had time to undress and bathe, he noticed how his wet
clothes clung to his body, holding the smell of the flood close to him. He peeled the
clothes off and meant to throw them away, but as he stood there, naked, ready to
step under the shower, he scooped his clothes up and held them to his face, where
they smelled of sewage and mildew and the flood’s other signatures, the smells he
hadn’t yet learned how to read.
for David Martinson
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Many Mountains Moving
Kathleen Crisci
R
The Death of Mouse
At the mouse’s funeral in the park this afternoon, I was the only mourner
present. It was a turbulent day, which matched my mood. Yet somehow, it seemed
the most fitting weather to return the mouse’s body to the earth, where I hoped he
would find the eternal peace and happiness he deserved.
Earlier this morning, after I’d recovered from the shock of finding him dead,
I had taken his tiny black-and-white corpse from his cage, musing for the last
time on how he looked more like a very small cow than a mouse. I laid him
on his side upon a bed of fresh, sweet-smelling timothy, which I had carefully
arranged inside his casket to highlight his good features and minimize his flaws.
This mouse casket, a festive, cushioned box I had bought in Chinatown ages
ago, and had utilized to store random buttons—never thinking it would one day
be used for such a tragic occasion—had a red-lotus pattern, and seemed the
perfect vessel to transport the mouse into rodent eternity. The wake lasted the
entire morning, during which I sat next to him and reflected on his short life.
I lit candles. I cried. I chanted the Dies Irae in Latin, just as I remembered it
from high school. After a brief eulogy, I placed the little coffin in a paper bag and
carried it out to the park, where I buried it in the heather garden. From time to
time I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being observed. I knew
that anyone casually witnessing the funeral might think it odd, especially if they
didn’t understand my attachment to the mouse and the history we had. Besides,
it would have been degrading if the funeral were to be interrupted and the poor
mouse’s body confiscated.
I’m older than I may seem and a lot older than I care to admit.
Earlier that afternoon I called my daughter Sarah, who attends college in Boston,
to tell her that the mouse had died.
“Oh, honey, I have some very bad news,” I said.
“What happened?” she shouted.
I heard the alarm in her voice and realized she must have thought I was about
to tell her something shocking about a human family member. So I just blurted it
out. “It’s the mouse. He died.”
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For a moment there was silence. Then intense laughter. I could imagine her
throwing her long brown hair back in abandon. “Mom. Get a grip. Please.”
It had been Sarah’s mouse. But ever since she brought it home during Christmas
break a year and a half ago, I had been caring for it. Not it. Him. It was a he. She
had named him Babe, but I never called him anything except Mouse or Mousey.
On the same day my daughter purchased Babe, she’d also bought another male
mouse, whose name she refused to divulge. She had decided on mice because she
missed her cat—also called Babe—back home, but wasn’t allowed to have cats or
dogs in her dorm. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t allowed to have any pets period, but
Sarah has always been notorious in finding ways to circumvent rules.
Caring for mice, though, was harder than she had anticipated, and didn’t carry
the rewards inherent with cats and dogs. You can’t cuddle with them, they’re not
quick with tricks and, with their little bodies twitching at several hundred miles
an hour, they’re not particularly responsive. Almost immediately after the adoption,
Babe’s partner was killed by Sarah’s roommate, who accidentally sat on him while
inebriated. Babe himself found his way out of the inadequate plastic hexagonal
home which Sarah had provided for the pair, and ran around free—and presumably
unfed—in the dorm for a week before being recaptured.
The first thing I did when Sarah brought the mouse home was to remove him
from his container and place him in a large hexagonal aquarium that had been
drained and just lying around since the last of the fish expired more than a year ago. I
gave him plenty of hay, a very natural-looking, hollow log that had also originally been
used for fish, and fresh fruits and vegetables, in addition to his standard mouse diet.
I watched him scamper about inside his new home, carrying the hay to the spaces
in the log, sealing up all the entrances, in the event there was danger lurking in his
miniature neighborhood. I picked him up regularly, taking pleasure in the sensation
of his little mouse heart in his little mouse body. He didn’t seem to mind being held
and once in a while became still enough for me to observe his tiny pink nose and
even pinker tongue.
All that winter I agonized over my daughter and her problems. Every time the
phone rang at an odd hour, I jumped up from wherever I was in the house and ran
to answer it, terrified it was Sarah reporting on some new catastrophe. Too often it
was. I received numerous drunken phone calls in the middle of the night, at which
time she invariably seemed to want to ruminate on her unhappy existence. She
hated school. She had no friends. The food was terrible; she was hungry. Once she
called me from the hospital where she had been admitted with alcohol poisoning. It
wasn’t always all bad—sometimes she called me at 3 a.m. to tell me about a guy she
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had met and thought she liked. Should she go back to his dorm with him, or not?
Sarah’s father was no help.
“What the hell is she doing in bars?” he’d yell, if he even woke up. “She’s in
college. She should be in her room studying.”
I tried to remind him that, when he was in college, he was stoned all the time,
but that was different, he said.
the wall, high up, close to the ceiling, passing through tunnels made specifically for
it, as it went along its way. That train system popped into my mind now, as I held
Mouse in my hand, considering a bride for him. Maybe I could rig up some sort
of plastic three-dimensional rectangular contraption that could potentially house
hundreds of mice—the children and grandchildren of Mouse and his wife—along
the wall, like the train. But who would clean it?
One morning the phone rang at five. I had been dreaming something pleasant,
and the sound of the phone was so jarring that when I put my hand out to grope
for it, I knocked it clear across the room. I jumped up, momentarily forgetting the
little stack of books that was on the floor next to the bed. My ankle turned, and
I collapsed on the floor, face down but arm straight out with fingers splayed in
pursuit of the receiver. I couldn’t quite reach it but, upon crawling a few inches,
finally managed to grasp it and bring it to my ear. Before I could even speak, I
heard sobbing—no, howling—on the other end, that could only be identified as
Sarah’s. In a perverse way the howls were comforting—they meant she was still
alive. Nevertheless, I began sobbing myself. Throughout all of this, my husband
remained asleep, his breathing as regular as if he were on a respirator.
“Mom,” Sarah finally managed to say.
“What happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”
It turned out that her latest boyfriend, whose name was Scrappy, had hit her
and knocked her down during a quarrel.
“He’s so mean, Mom. I hate him so much.”
My stomach lurched. She had spoken those very words about her father so
many times.
After she calmed down and we hung up—my husband still sleeping in
oblivion—I went into the living room to get the mouse. For the next forty-five
minutes, I held him in my hands, watching him scamper from one palm to the
other. From time to time he’d stand on his little hind legs—his whiskers twitching
in the air—and just sniff. His black eyes looked like two clear, smooth, very tiny bits
of coal. I loved this mouse. I wondered if he was lonely, if my companionship was
enough for him. Maybe I should get him a girlfriend. I knew the prolificacy of mice
made this an extremely poor idea. Then I remembered a party my older daughter,
Camille, had been invited to a long time ago, when she was in junior high school.
Parents had been invited, too, so I went. The party was to celebrate the birthday
of April, one of Camille’s classmates, and was held at the home of April’s father, a
very wealthy man. The thing that impressed me most about his huge house was the
miniature train that ran through it, from room to room, on a track that ran along
It didn’t come out until days later, when I kept insisting she press charges,
that Sarah had hit Scrappy first. She had slapped him across the face, knocking his
glasses to the floor. Although in my book it was as wrong for him to hit her back as
it was for her to hit him in the first place, I thought about how exasperating Sarah
could often be. Sarah now insisted that this altercation had happened because
she and the boy were both drunk, but so what? I’d been intoxicated in my life and
I never felt like hitting anybody, and no one ever hit me. Her father would never
lay a hand on anyone, either, although he was often verbally punitive. His method
was to belittle; then, if he received complaints, he’d stop talking to everyone. This
could last for days.
Needless to say, Sarah’s grades were suffering, but somehow she found a way
to shift the blame to her instructors. When she was sober, I’d call her and beg her
to seek professional help; she always laughed and said, “I’m in college, Mom. This
is what college kids do.”
The neuroses of my other daughter, Camille, freshly graduated and on her own,
took a different shape. She was an insomniac with so much anxiety she couldn’t even
think about going to bed before the sun came up. Then she couldn’t sleep because
it was too bright. Benadryl washed down by NyQuil was her prescription for relief.
Fortunately for her, she had a job where she could devise her own hours and so was
able to pay her bills. However, she was also a big spender who charged way too much
on her credit cards. Had my daughters been a pair of felines, Camille might have
been a reclusive, nocturnal leopard, while Sarah was most definitely a stalking lynx.
I wasn’t going to tell my husband about Sarah’s fight with Scrappy, but he
could see my despondence and badgered me constantly to reveal what was on my
mind. Finally, I broke down and told him. Immediately he insisted we pull her
out of school and bring her home. As much as I wanted to do that, too, part of me
thought, And then what? We couldn’t lock her up; what made us think she’d come
home and listen to either of us anymore? She was over eighteen. Legally, we no
longer had any control over her.
One thing I was certain of: as a mother I had failed. But why was that? Hadn’t I
read all the books on child development, putting a fast—some might say wayward—
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past behind me in order to learn to knit and bake brownies? Hadn’t I spent all my
free time combing the bookstores to find the funniest, scariest or otherwise most
stimulating books to read to my daughters at bedtime? Hadn’t I set good examples
for my children by opening our home to others in need, human or animal—like
the chicken we stumbled upon in the park that we kept in our apartment for a few
weeks before we found it a home on a vegetarian farm? Had I ever missed a parentteacher conference?
“She’ll be okay, Mom,” Camille said. But I wondered if she really believed
that or if she was just trying to keep me calm. I’d hold Mouse in the palm of my
hand, thinking I was much better at raising mice than children. Perhaps I should
have been a mouse mother. My talents as a nurturer seemed more suited to tiny
creatures with fewer needs.
Until today, that is. I had surmised Mouse’s health was declining—the last few
times I cleaned his cage, he hadn’t bothered to seal the holes in his log with hay
anymore. At first I thought he was becoming more trusting. When you know you’re
in a safe place, why bother locking the doors? But there were other signs, too, that
I chose to ignore. He wasn’t moving around so frenetically anymore. He wasn’t
eating the treats I left out for him. Peanut butter on a slice of apple went in; peanut
butter on a slice of apple came out. I knew that mice didn’t live long, maybe two
or three years; still, it was a shock to find his limp, lifeless body in a corner of his
habitat. Mouse was only a year and a half. Given the life expectancy of a mouse is
three years, and comparing it to the normal life-expectancy of a man at 72, then
Mouse was just 36 in human terms when he expired. Why did he die so young?
A few weeks after Mouse’s funeral, I get a call from Sarah. We’ve been calling
each other pretty regularly around this time—early evening—just to say hello, so
I’m not surprised. I am surprised that she’s crying. Usually the tear-filled calls come
at night, when she’s had way too much to drink. It occurs to me now that there
haven’t been very many of those middle-of-the-night calls for a while.
“Mom,” she says, in a sniveling voice. “I broke up with Scrappy.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t think he was good for me.”
“In what way?”
“He doesn’t bring me any joy.” She sighs.
“When did you realize that?”
“Well, my shrink made me see how my life was on a downward spiral and that
I needed to make some big changes.”
“Your shrink?”
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“Yeah, Ma, I told you.” She hadn’t, but I’m not about to argue.
“He also made me realize that if I flunk out of school I’ll have to go back home
and start from zero. I decided I needed to get rid of all the negatives in my life to
be able to focus better. Then I realized that Scrappy has been the number-one
negative for a very long time.”
“It sounds like you want to hang in there,” I tell her, not wanting to say too
much or too little.
“I do, Ma,” she says. “I don’t want to get kicked out and have to go home.
“By the way,” she adds. “I’m discovering in my family psych course that you and
Dad made a lot of mistakes. Don’t feel bad, though.”
I hang up the phone, make myself a cup of coffee and take it into the living room,
sit on the couch, and put my feet up. I wonder what happened to make my daughter
visit a therapist. I’m pretty sure things are still going on; she’s just not telling me
everything anymore. Still, I’m grateful for a small step in the right direction.
I glance at Mouse’s cage, which is still standing in the same place as it had
when it was occupied. I’ve been meaning to put some plants in there, but haven’t
even cleaned it out from Mouse yet. I should have gotten him a girlfriend, I decide.
He probably died of loneliness. Still, he’d had a bad start before life turned good.
I tried my best to give him a good life. But, who even knew how old he was when
Sarah bought him, anyway? Maybe he hadn’t been such a baby after all.
I’m not convinced that Sarah and Scrappy are through. I hope they are, because
this doesn’t seem like a good match, at all. But they live on the same campus,
maybe even in the same dorm. She’s strongly attracted to him. It might not be as
finished as Sarah is leading me to believe.
As a mother—of anything—you can only do so much. You do your best, and
then you let them out into the world. How many animal species just lay their eggs
and leave?
I’ll tell my husband, when he gets home, that Sarah broke up with Scrappy. I’ll
recount the conversation I had earlier with Sarah, just the way she told it to me.
But I won’t mention my fears. I’ll let him arrive at whatever conclusions he comes
to, without any prodding from me.
In the meantime I remind myself that there are many things to be joyous about:
(a) Sarah hasn’t quit school or run away or contracted an incurable disease, (b)
although I have a hard time hearing certain details about her life, she does confide
in me, and (c) until now, it has been a blast being Sarah’s mother. Actually, even now.
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Tammy Delatorre
R
The Drive Home
Mick is driving us home from Doug and Debbie’s tenth anniversary party. I watch
yellow stripes speed beneath the headlights and all I can think about is how cold
it had been, how cold, lying at the bottom of my trunk, the trunk of my new car.
“So cold,” I say.
Mick lights a cigarette. I watch the trail of smoke slowly rise and evaporate into
the darkness of the car. I wonder where it goes, the smoke so sly and devious, as it
slithers and snakes out of view. Mick looks down at the panel. “Got the heater on,
baby,” he says.
I glance out the passenger window: dim silhouettes of pines and bare aspen.
“You’re always a little chilly.” Mick puts his hand on my thigh, rubbing it back
and forth as if to warm me. “Next time it’s the BMW with the seats that heat up.”
I almost smile despite myself. It’s the kind of thing he says that makes me feel
our marriage works.
When I was in the trunk, there was just the thin layer of felt and a plastic
covering over the spare tire. I could feel something hard jutting against my lower
vertebrae, like a gun, threatening to take something from me. That was more than
an hour ago—I should have shaken off the cold by now.
“You enjoy the party?” Mick asks.
I don’t reply.
“In your own world tonight, aren’t you?” I turn to him and realize he’s staring at
me. A car passes on the other side of the road, illuminating his face in ghostly hues.
At the party, I had been cold as well. That’s why I went out to the car to get my
coat, the coat I always leave in the trunk. When I heard Mick and Angela laughing
and coming toward the car, I don’t know why, but I got in. It had to be something
in the way they laughed—deep and intimate.
“This the car you buy the Mrs?” Angela asked. Her husky voice grated on me.
“Just slip those panties off before someone comes out.” Mick’s voice was so close
as he climbed into the back seat that it seemed he was whispering in my ear, not hers.
There were grunts and yelps. The car began to sway side to side. My hand
reached out in the darkness to brace myself. I bent my knees to better fit the space.
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My left shoe fell off my foot. The thud masked by their groans. Angela’s perfume
invaded my hiding place. I covered my nose, held my breath. Luckily, I recognized
Mick’s quickening moans as he neared the end. His belt buckle jingled as he pulled
up his pants. The snow crunched beneath his patent leather shoes as he stepped
out. The snow on the ground, that’s what had made it so frigid in the small metallic
space. I put my coat on in the trunk, bumped my elbow in the process.
“Come on, come on, someone’s coming,” Mick said.
“Oh shit.” The soft ruffling of Angela’s clothes blew through me like a frosty
breeze. “Oops, haste makes waste.” Angela started to laugh, then the dark, earthy
smell of wine, closed like hand over my mouth and nose. Merlot, I thought.
“Never mind about that. I’ll get you another glass inside.” Mick rushed her.
Their steps snow-crunched in the direction of Doug and Debbie’s house, and
somewhere further off, a car started and drove away.
I didn’t move; there was something reassuring about the icy feeling in my thighs,
and my cheeks began to prickle, but Mick would be looking for me when he got
back to the house. I popped the trunk, felt like a vampire rising out of her coffin. “Where’d you disappear to during the party?” Mick cracks the window to throw
his cigarette out. With the new car, he never uses the ashtray.
“I was talking to Janine in the kitchen,” I say.
When I finally managed to clamber out of the trunk, the red wine immediately
caught my eye, like a violent slash through white skin. The snow bled. I must have
stood there several minutes staring at it before I went inside. By that time, I was
good and numb.
Mick is looking at me again. “I said, ‘Where were you when they brought the
cake out?’”
“I don’t know, Mick.” Then it dawns on me, the way he rushed Angela through
the whole thing that it had been going on for a while. “Where were you?” I ask and
watch his familiar profile go from playful to panic.
The next oncoming car has its headlights on high. “Damn it,” Mick shouts.
He shields his eyes and hugs the shoulder with the outside tires. A black shadow
crosses my line of sight, then a loud thud from beneath the car.
“Mick!” I scream.
He slams on the brakes. The car skids a few feet.
“You bastard!” I yell and strike him twice on the shoulder. “You killed it. I saw.
You ran over some poor, helpless animal.” I open my door and jump out ready
to find evidence—a crushed carcass, a bloodied body. I remember the wine in
the snow.
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“Honey, you couldn’t have seen anything.” He throws the door open and bends
over, looks beneath the car. We scan the road.
“Tell me you’re drunk.” My eyes begin to tear. “Tell me that’s how this happened!”
I was breathing hard. I could see my own breath
“What happened?” He spread his arms out to indicate a bare, lonely road. “It
was nothing.”
Our headlights illuminate a thin layer of black ice, but there’s nothing for as
far as my eyes can see. Nothing far into the cold, dark distance. My fingers sticky
with warm fluid and the smell of copper, a long furrow through the snow, all the
evidence I need to see the end.
• 103
Sarah Domet
R
The Trial of Perry Honniwinkle
In the end, it was the parrot that testified. Between hiccupped squawks and bird
treats handfed to it by the animal psychologist, the parrot had spoken the name in a
voice that sounded like that of the undead on helium: Perry Honniwinkle.
“Perry Honniwinkle. Perry Honniwinkle.” The parrot flapped its wings and shifted
on its perch placed high on the witness stand. A sigh, then a hush in the courtroom—
Perry sat stiffly in a court-appointed chair, next to a court-appointed attorney. All eyes
were on Perry Honniwinkle, who as a child thought he would grow up to be something
big but ended up a rather dainty thing—five foot four, size seven shoes—with a rather
large head that swelled out at his temples, his face the shape of a bicycle seat.
But in the beginning, it was Perry Honniwinkle, an inventor by trade, alone
on a bus to Detroit. He was thinking about his newest idea—fur coats made from
animals that had listened only to classical music. He thought there might be a
market for that—new age, organic, and expensive—and he would ask Brenda when
he got home, if he ever got home. Brenda seemed to know everything; sometimes
she dreamed things that really happened, like when she dreamt that she was in
prison, and the next day she was pulled over for speeding and issued a ticket.
“I must have been channeling my thought waves from the future,” she had said.
“I must have time traveled.” And if anyone could time travel, it would be Brenda,
who said her soul was aligned with the constellation Orion, which meant she was
a psychic feeler; she sensed things in her gut. That was why when she insisted that
he visit his mother, he thought he should go.
“It’s her birthday, Honniwinkle. It may be her last one,” Brenda told him, and
Perry never thought to question her. “You need to go. I feel it in my solar plexus. My
solar plexus says you need to go.”
The bus was chilly and sparsely populated. A young girl with brown pigtails
was staring at Perry from the seat in front of him. Maybe it had been her fault,
everything—the parrot, his mother’s death, his current predicament. Perhaps she
was the butterfly of the butterfly effect, the person who set a chain of events in
motion, the hand that flicked that first domino with its fated fat finger, causing
everything to fall in place. The girl was turned in his direction, elbows resting on
top of her seat back. She looked six, maybe five, or seven.
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“Your forehead is big,” she said. She narrowed her eyes until they were crescents,
and suddenly Perry was whisked back to his childhood. He was on the playground
surrounded by the other children who would taunt him day after day, heckle him for
no good reason other than he was short and he was shy and he was awkward and he
sometimes cried uncontrollably, he didn’t know why—it just happened. The other kids
would throw things at him: tennis balls and banana peels; pencils and wet, wadded
napkins; cherry pits and rubber bands. Perry felt a light growl vibrating in his throat.
“Your mother doesn’t love you,” Perry said to the girl. Now his eyes were
squinted. Now his eyes were crescents, too.
“Yes she does,” the girl pouted. “That’s impossible.” Her lip curled up, making
her chubby cheeks seem chubbier.
“Nothing is impossible,” Perry said, stopping short of telling her that Santa
Claus didn’t exist or the tooth fairy was dreamed up by a pathetic adult—probably
a gay dentist. After all, he didn’t wish to be mean. He just wished people would be
nice to him first, without having to be asked. Was that too much to ask?
“Well, your mom doesn’t love you,” the girl countered. She stuck her tongue out
of her mouth; it looked like a pink slug.
Perry bared his teeth.
“Mom!” the girl yelled.
The girl’s mother turned from the seat diagonal her daughter. She was young—
younger than Perry, even.
“What is it?” the mother asked her daughter.
“This man is scaring me,” the girl said.
“Then turn around.”
“He said it’s impossible that you love me.”
If glances could have sound effects, the woman’s stare would have been the
high-pitched squeal of rockets launching, followed by two low, deep explosions.
“Of course I love you. Now let the little man to himself.”
Perry closed his eyes and pretended to be sleeping.
The truth was that Perry had been trying not to think about motherhood,
motherly love, or, particularly, his own mother, soon to be seventy-eight and holed
up in some old folks’ community in Detroit. And although he could not one way
or another attest to the girl’s mother or her degree of love, he could say with some
element of certainty that his own mother didn’t love him—not since she didn’t
recognize him, at least. She had been suffering from a dementia for years and now
hardly knew Perry at all. She’d yell for him to stay away; she’d ask him for her piano
lessons; she called him names like Grover and Pennysticks; she told him that she
wished he’d never been born.
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What this meant, Perry didn’t know. Someday, he hoped to invent automated
parents, robots that were programmed to generate warm, fuzzy love. They could cook
and clean, toss a ball in the yard. They could attend PTA meetings and help with
homework. The robots could sing lullabies and plan vacations to the beach. They could
be operated by battery or solar energy; they could give hugs. They would never grow old.
But for now, he had his real, his human mother, though he hesitated to even
call her that; she seemed more like a droid or an animal or a monstrous thing
that slurped green Jell-O with a straw. And though she barely recognized Perry,
Perry, for his part, hardly recognized her, either, with her hollow, gray eyes. Her
tube of oxygen was a plastic mustache that made her look both masculine and
otherworldly—a scuba diver out of water.
But she wasn’t always that way. Perry had mostly pleasant memories when he
was a child. On Sundays, they would attend church, then she would take him to get
ice cream. After school, she always had a snack ready for him at the kitchen table.
She smelled like roses and cinnamon and Pine Sol, in the best possible ways. And
she always made him feel good, better—even when he got poor marks or dropped
his dinner plate face-down on the carpet or was sent home from school for fighting
with the other kids who called him Perry Wanna-Tinkle from the time he wet his
pants in class because the teacher wouldn’t let him use the bathroom. In some
ways, his mother had been his only friend in the world.
Now, of course, he had Brenda.
“I’ll love you, someday, Honniwinkle. I’ll love you yet,” Brenda would say,
sometimes as Perry was on his tiptoes kissing her, his face turned upward as though
he were catching rain drops in his mouth. And this was good enough for Perry, the
promise of love—even though Brenda was, what some would say, ugly. But then
again Perry had always found beauty in imperfections; he was attracted to ugliness.
And certainly, there was no euphemism to describe Brenda. Her face was pearshaped. Her lips looked like ripe, thin bananas. Her eyes were greenish gray, the
color of grape guts. Even her hair, which she always wore short, was course and
matted like the covering of a coconut. It was a good thing Perry loved fruit.
In fact, he had once invented a clock, powered only by a single orange, the
rind pierced with nodes and wires like Frankenstein’s skull. Unfortunately oranges
had a tendency to mold, plus, after all of Perry’s research, he couldn’t figure out
the science. The product never made it to the market. None of his inventions had.
Perry’s other job—the one that paid—was at a dry cleaner’s, counting garments,
ringing up customers, checking for stains. He once concocted a stain remover
out of vinegar and toothpaste and water, and tested it on the customer’s clothing,
privately, in the back room, after his boss—a twenty-something college kid—had
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left for the night. He had never worked out the perfect balance of ingredients—the
old stains disappeared only to be replaced with new ones—but he was close. Perry
Honniwinkle was always close.
Back in the courtroom, a small crowd gathered to watch the trial. Perry
Honniwinkle’s aunts and cousins were lined in chairs with their hands folded as
though they were in a church service. Perry looked back at them to smile, but
turning his head caused his tweed jacket to scratch his neck. Plus, Aunt Bea kept
mouthing “murderer” over and over, to the point that it looked like her lips were
suffering spasms, giant twitches that caused her mouth to pucker and pout as
though her lips were possessed by unseen spirits.
The parrot was being led away from the stand. “Perry Honniwinkle. Perry
Honniwinkle,” it was still saying as it passed him, and Perry thought the bird looked
at him coldly as it did that day in his mother’s room, surrounded by her things, her
scent, her newly dead body. “Perry Honniwinkle, Perry Honniwinkle,” it had said
that night, too, as if cued, which would have been a good thing, a very good thing if
his mother had been alive to hear it. It might have reminded her of her son, Perry
Honniwinkle, the one who loved her most in the world. The one who would miss
her most in the world. Perry had walked to the cage placed on his mother’s dresser
and lifted out the bird. He had held the bird up at eye level, staring, and the bird
stared back until, inexplicably, it pecked at Perry’s forehead—two quick jabs that
punctured his skin like a snake bite, drawing tiny beads of blood.
After the bus ride to Detroit but before Perry sat in tweed in the courtroom in
front of a jury of his peers, there was the visit to his mother’s. And this was the part
of the story that Perry would have liked to edit out of his life, at least parts of it.
Sometimes Perry felt a bit like Da Vinci—his inventions were always ahead
of their times: He’d once drawn up a blueprint for a video chip that allowed you
to remember in reverse—nothing ever seemed as bad when you thought of it
backwards. Occasionally, he rented movies and watched the entire thing from end
to beginning on rewind, end to beginning, again and again. Bullets would be sucked
from the chests of mobsters, explosions would condense into a single flame, kisses
were given back, spit out with the passion of those who refused to be hurt. In the
beginning, there was never heartbreak.
In reverse order, then, the events happened as such: There was the parrot’s
glare, the dead body, the alive body, the holding of hands, his mother’s request to be
killed, the parrot, and then the bus ride to Detroit, on which a small girl reminded
him of the impossibility of a mother’s nonlove, the possibility that his mother did
love him, even though she didn’t always remember him, or like him.
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Perry’s mother lived in a separate apartment in the retirement community—all
the folks there did. They were sterile, geriatric apartments. Attendant buzzers were
affixed to every wall in every room; strobe lights flashed each time the doorbell
rang; everything was a tad lower than expected—the bed, the toilet, the faucets,
the counters. It was designed with old, withered people in mind. It was designed
with stiff legs and weak arms in mind. It was designed with death in mind.
At first sight of him, his mother screamed as though a five-foot spider was
crawling on her wall. She clamped her eyes shut tight—tight enough to smash her
eyeballs, blind her for good.
“I told you never to come back,” she said. “I’ll call the police.” She was shaking
her fist at Perry; flabby fins of skin hung heavily from her upper arm and made it
look as though her muscles had fallen off her bone or weights were sewn beneath
her flesh.
“Mama, it’s me,” Perry said. He was holding the cage with the parrot—her birthday
gift. It would be good for his mother to have company. And Perry wanted to visit more
often; he did. But he was so busy with his inventions, his work at the dry cleaner’s—
with Brenda, who sometimes let him sleep in her bed, but other times would not.
“Do I know you?” she asked, one eyebrow quizzically raised.
“It’s me, your son, Perry Honniwinkle. Mama, look, I got you something,” he said.
“A gift? Oh, how I love gifts,” she said, then added: “You look like someone …
someone in a movie.”
Perry felt his mouth watering, as though it were crying. This often happened
when he was upset, which was better than tearing up. Someday, he hoped to invent
a super-charged memory machine. When something was forgotten, it would send
messenger amoebas or little miniature space capsule-looking things into the rippled
folds of the brain to seek out the memories that might be lodged there like seeds.
One couldn’t forget love, of this Perry was certain. One couldn’t forget
fundamental human connections, bonds that were forged in blood, or the face that
for thirty years called you Mother. Perry refused to believe it. But he didn’t know
what else to believe. Here she was—his very own mother—staring at him with the
blank look of a wax statue.
Inside, Perry could hear Christmas carols, and his mother’s apartment was
decorated for the holiday. A green, plastic wreath was hanging from her door, and
candy canes were taped to her wall, hanging from her kitchen hooks, from the
branches of her aloe plant, draped over picture frames and lamp shades.
“Ma, Christmas isn’t for two more months,” Perry said, peeling a candy cane
off the wall, putting it in his mouth. “Didn’t the people here tell you that?” Perry
sometimes wondered about the people who ran this old folks’ community. For one,
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he had never seen them, and for two, he thought they shouldn’t let his mother live
in her delusional world. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t respectable.
“Tell me what?”
“It’s not Christmas, Mama,” Perry said, but his mother wasn’t listening. Instead
she was singing to the record that was playing in the background.
“Oh, don’t be an old sourpuss,” she said and sang louder: “And bring us some
figgy pudding, and bring us some figgy pudding…”
“Don’t you want to see the gift I brought you?”
His mother ignored him. Her eyes were closed, and she was marching in place
slowly, dramatically, as though she were walking through water.
“We won’t go until we get some, we won’t go until we get some …”
“Mama, stop. You’re acting like an idiot. Stop singing, please.” Now the parrot
was squawking, sharp and piercing like the garbage trucks he sometimes heard
from his bedroom window; Perry opened the door of the cage, and the parrot took
off across the room.
His mother’s voice rose and fell in waves as her singing continued. She was
reaching her hands toward the ceiling then pointing them to the floor as though
she was picking imaginary apples and placing them in basket. Or maybe she was
disco dancing.
“Stop!” Perry finally shouted, and he wished she would. More than anything
he’d ever wished, he wished she would. He hated his mother like this. He couldn’t
explain it, but it hurt him. Somewhere deep inside—maybe it was his solar plexus—
it hurt him.
Perry’s mother began to cry, a small peep, at first, that grew louder and louder.
She covered her face with her small, wrinkled hands. “I just wanted to do something
special for you,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Perry said. “Listen, Mama, I’m sorry.” And he meant it.
Later, Perry sat opening gifts with his mother, who had wrapped up her
silverware individually, in gift boxes with ornate bows. “Another spoon,” Perry
would say, feigning surprise. “Mother, you shouldn’t have.”
And as he sat beside the tinsel-tinted tree, topped with his old baby shoe in
place of a star or angel, he thought of how he would tell Brenda about this cutleryfilled holiday. She would probably laugh at his description of the decorations or
his mother’s sweatshirt that read “HO3” or the way she sang the dirty versions of
Christmas carols. What he would leave out would be how in her former life—before
the dementia set in—she was a respectable woman. She would have given Perry
a sweet, sentimental gift. She would have handwritten a note on the card in her
neat, tilted cursive. She would have told him how proud she was of him—though
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she had no reason to be—because that’s the job of mothers, to be needlessly proud.
Perry would not tell Brenda a lot of things about his visit, like how he was sad, very
sad, or how sometimes he looked at his mother and felt contempt coil itself like a
snake in his stomach. Or how other times he would look at her and feel nothing,
the nothingness of nothing, emptier than an empty room.
Someday, Perry hoped to invent a book filled with vocabulary that could give
meaning to the things he wished he could say but for which he couldn’t find the
words. That was the difficult part, finding the words. Until then, his thoughts, not fully
formed, would remain trapped in his mind like a fetus curled inside a jar, preserved.
Brenda had been waiting for him at the bus station when he arrived home
from Detroit.
“I’m leaving you, Perry Honniwinkle,” she said before he even stepped off the
bus. “You are not the one for me.”
“But Brenda,” Perry said. “I need you now more than ever, Brenda.” And he did.
The entire bus ride home from Detroit he was thinking about Brenda, how she
was the only person left in the world who knew he liked to drink warm milk with a
teaspoon of sugar before he went to bed or that he always liked to be the thimble in
Monopoly. She was the only one who took his inventions seriously or who took him
seriously. She was the only one except for his mother, and now his mother was gone.
“I met the one whose name was whispered to my soul in a dream,” she explained.
“It was not your name, Honniwinkle.”
“My mother. She’s dead,” Perry said. And the two stood there for a moment
staring at each other, their eyes locked in place like magnets. It was like a scene in
the movies, Perry couldn’t help but think; it had all the elements: the bus stop, the
star-crossed lovers, the dramatic tension, the moment of decision, the extras—who
now were hollering for him to move the hell out of the way so that others could get
off the bus.
“Oh, Honniwinkle,” Brenda said tenderly. She pulled him forward and
wrapped her arms around Perry’s head like a cocoon. Perry felt safe inside. “Oh,
Honniwinkle,” she said again. “Would it be better if I left you tomorrow?”
Still, in the beginning—not the very beginning, but still near it enough to be
called the beginning—Perry leaned his big forehead against the bus window. Had
he been happy, then, in the beginning? Had he been happy when he still had
Brenda, still had a thing called his mother, a living breathing thing? Could he pause
the scene here—before he got off that bus, now in Detroit—and vacuum seal the
moment so that it became solid as a brick?
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When the bus announced its arrival at the station in Detroit, Perry reached over
the seat in front of him and tapped the small girl on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Perry said. “For the way I acted.”
As a child, Perry’s mother always taught him to apologize.
“Always, always say you are sorry,” his mother would say.
But Brenda always told him that love means never having to say you’re sorry. She
said she knew this before seeing the movie Love Story, so her old self and her self of
the future must have met somewhere between time-space continuums. She said she
didn’t love Perry, but she did love the idea of the idea of love, and so she was in love
with the idea of the idea of loving him, which also meant never having to apologize.
“If you are so sorry, why’d you say it?” asked the girl before she got off the bus.
It seemed a serious question.
“I was upset. It’s my mother’s birthday; she’s sick.”
“What’d you get her?” the girl asked. “For her present?”
“Nothing yet,” Perry said. He hadn’t considered it until this very moment. Now
he was almost thankful for the little girl. “Any ideas?”
“I’d get her a pet. I’ve always wanted a parrot. They can really talk, you know.
I saw it on TV.”
And later, after the bus ride and after his mother sang Christmas carols and
after he screamed for his mother to stop and after he made her cry, he showed his
mother the parrot—the greenest, most cheerful-looking bird he could find in town
given the short notice.
“A parrot!” Perry had thought as soon as the little girl suggested it. “Of course!”
And at that moment, somewhere deep, deep down in the pockets of his soul—
the place where Brenda said all original thoughts were fertilized and harvested—
his newest, his last invention hatched. A feathered memo; a squawking memory
device; a living, breathing, avian reminder of his love! He’d spent six hours sitting
on the edge of his motel bed, nose to beak with the bird, saying it slowly: Perry
Honniwinkle. Over and over and over he said it, until his throat felt like he’d
swallowed handfuls of chalk.
“Want to hold it?” Perry asked his mother who was sitting next to him on the
couch after they had eaten dinner. The parrot’s feet tightly clasped onto Perry’s
fingers, its feet warm and soft like a baby’s grip. The three sat there—the room
illuminated by the soft glow of the blinking Christmas tree—huddled together like
a family, a real family. And for a moment Perry thought about inventing a contraption
that could stretch time like taffy. But he knew he couldn’t. Instead, he wrapped his
arm around his mother and rested his head on her thin shoulder.
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“Perry Honniwinkle. Perry Honniwinkle,” he heard. It was his mother, her voice
a deep whisper. “Perry, I have a favor to ask you.”
It was the first time she’d spoken his name in two years. “My sweet little boy,”
she added. Her eyes were as bright and clear and sad as Perry could ever remember;
she removed her oxygen tubes from her nose. “Perry,” she said, “I’m tired, Perry. I
need you to help me die.”
At that moment, as though in protest, the bird shrieked a string of jumbled
noises, a Pentecostal parrot, speaking in tongues. The apartment smelled like a
combination of urine and wood, and drops of bird shit were splattered like paint
on the coffee table.
“That’s crazy talk,” Perry said.
“You have no idea what you are saying,” Perry said.
“You need medicine,” Perry said
“It’s not crazy talk,” his mother said.
“I’m sick of medicine,” his mother said.
“I love you,” she said.
Then later: near the end. Not Perry’s end, but an ending that would seem more
finite. Perry sat on the corner of his mother’s bed, and there beside him was her
body, waxy and cold. Her oxygen tank was propped in the corner like a forgotten toy.
Like Tiny Tim’s cane in the false ending of A Christmas Carol. But this wasn’t a book
or a movie, and Perry’s story could not be changed, not by the Ghost of Christmas
Yet-To-Come, not by himself—no matter how much he willed it—not by anyone.
Looking down at her, her lips parted, Perry could think of only one thing: She was a
good mother. He imagined her dressed up for Sunday morning mass, in pearls and
gloves and her Sunday hat—her white one with a ribbon the color of her eyes.
And finally, the end end, the real end. Perry Honniwinkle, wearing tweed, sat in
the courtroom before a judge, a goliath of a judge that seemed a giant, black vulture
before him. Perry Honniwinkle, a man without a friend in the world, a man who felt
that even his shadow might have abandoned him had it not been bound to the laws
of science, was asked to rise before the court. Perry Honniwinkle was about to be
read the verdict, but what that verdict was or was not didn’t matter; what mattered
was this: His mother was gone, and Perry Honniwinkle was very, very sorry.
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Gila Green
R
Reverse
Elazar walked straight out of the heavy yeshiva doors without turning his head.
Once he reached the sidewalk he would be indistinguishable from the other males
in the neighborhood, in his crisp, white button-down shirt, black pants and black
hat. Evening prayers were over for him, but the sidewalks teemed with men on
their way to evening prayers. It was September, still warm enough to swim outdoors
in Jerusalem. Tonight was unusually hot; there was little chance of a reprieve from
the weather before the Fast of Yom Kippur.
With each step, Elazar noticed a different girl, not much older than himself,
praying or reciting Psalms on a bench, a passer-by dropping coins into charity boxes
appropriately placed in front of street musicians, or men debating the Talmud. He felt
as though all of the inhabitants of Jerusalem were intent on rewinding the last year
frame by frame, bent on examining each word and deed, like a king counting his gold.
Only a year ago he was a boy, boasting about how he was going to fast until
noon. He remembered crowing that a sip of water would not pass between his
lips until Yizkor, when only the orphaned were allowed to remain in synagogue.
Those whose parents were still living waited outside and tried to avoid eye contact;
gloating on a fast day was a risk.
This was Elazar’s first year past his bar mitzvah. Tomorrow evening he’d have
to go the full 25 hours without food or drink. He came to a clumsily constructed
stall on the corner of Cordovera and Rav Chaim Street. The mixed male and female
crowd spilled into the road, and Elazar could not resist the temptation to watch
the atonement ritual. Even in the dim light, Elazar could make out kippah-wearing
Israeli soldiers with guns slung over their shoulders, off-duty bus drivers in their
light-blue shirts, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, Ethiopian
mothers with babies on their backs in rainbow-colored pouches, and American
seminary girls in their wrist-length shirts and washed-out denim skirts that hid their
feet. For Elazar it was an assault of sound and color after weeks of sixteen-hour days
of study, the necessary amount required before the holiest day of the year.
Two Hasidim stood behind the counter, but there was no other discernable order.
Ten, sometimes fifteen Jews were performing the ancient penitence ritual at the same
time, each in his own accented Hebrew. Elazar thought it was a miracle the chickens
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113
didn’t clash in mid-air as the atoners whirled them clockwise over their heads. The
noisy crowd in combination with the clucking of the chickens gave Elazar energy.
“Squawk! Squawk!”
“I’ve sinned, forgive me. May all of my sins pass into this chicken and may it
die instead of me. ...”
The chant that only last year resembled an old popular nursery rhyme was at
once familiar and terrifying to him. He had not asked permission to leave the yeshiva.
He watched the green twenty-shekel bills pile up on the makeshift cash register.
This was the going rate for atonement in Israel’s most sacred city.
“Squawk!”
“I’ve sinned. Forgive me. May all of my sins ...”
Elazar’s gaze was drawn to an older lady. She was standing so close to the
chickens that she was practically on top of the black metal cages. Some of the
others had already asked her to step back, to wait her turn, but she did not budge.
Suddenly, she was racing through the ritual, with a chicken spinning on top of her
kerchief-covered head. Before the chicken landed back in its cage, the lady had
turned around and began to run up the cobblestoned, narrow sidewalk, as though
a plague of locusts were after her.
“Wait! You can’t steal the atonement. Twenty shekels, hey grandmother, twenty
shekels!” cried the two bearded Hasidim. The chickens belonged to them. Elazar’s
mouth dropped as the two men abandoned their stall and ran after the elderly
lady. He wondered if he had misjudged her age; his own grandmother had stopped
leaving her apartment in the end.
The teenager sprinted after the two panting Hasids. Elazar was half-worried
that the narrow sidewalk was so full of pedestrians that he’d be pushed into the
traffic by passers-by, or perhaps by an angel, sent to defend penniless atoners. The
local taxis and buses that possessed the roads felt dangerously close. He decided
that he had to find out what the two men would do to her on such a holy night and
pressed on. When he caught up to them, the Hasids had cornered the lady against
a stone wall, although they remained at arm’s length.
“Pay!” the Hasids demanded.
“I don’t have money,” she responded.
It was impossible for Elazar to tell if this was true or not. The elderly lady
looked like any religious woman in Jerusalem: mid-calf-length navy-blue skirt, and
matching crew cut top with several chains around her neck of varying lengths.
“Borrow, we’ll wait.”
The old lady’s head shook from side to side. She wiped the sweat from her
upper lip with a floral handkerchief that matched her head covering.
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“I don’t have any money,” she repeated.
“Go ask a friend or a neighbor to lend you some, then.”
“I don’t have any friends or neighbors,” she said.
Elazar saw that there were chicken feathers stuck to the bottoms of her running
shoes. He hadn’t noticed her running shoes before. Doubt crabbed across his mind.
Perhaps it was the Hasids who needed an angel to protect them against an evil
incarnation. Had she planned to run? He had never seen his own grandmother in
sneakers. She wore only shapeless, black slippers, except for the Sabbath and holidays
when she wore shapeless black, short pumps. It hurt to think of his grandmother.
This would be the first year his father would be staying in synagogue for Yizkor.
“Last chance, Savta. Pay up.”
The lady shook her head again.
“Squawk!” the chicken complained.
“Well then,” snarled the Hasid. “This chicken is reversing! May all of the sins of
this chicken go onto you and may you go to your death instead of ...”
Elazar’s eyes widened as the chicken spiraled counterclockwise high in the air.
He froze.
“No! No, please! Wait!” the grandmother screamed.
“Squawk!”
“... this chicken,” the Hasid intoned.
The teenager dug through his jacket pockets. He thought about the evil incarnation
disguised as doubt. He never used money at school. He knew he had none.
Before Elazar could check the pockets of his pants, the elderly lady had
reversed again and sprinted across the street, disappearing phantomlike into the
first diminutive house.
The chicken hung upside down in the night air, its legs in the grip of the Hasid.
From Elazar’s point of view the bird appeared to have only one eye. Now it was
blinking at the pavement, its beak opening and closing.
The Hasids nodded to each other as they pocketed the twenty-shekel bill
they’d received from the elderly lady’s veined, trembling hands. Elazar watched the
grandmother cross the street for the second time. He wished that she would break
into a run, her blush so red that she’d glow, a warning in the Old City night. But she
walked, like all of the woman he had ever known walk after synagogue on a Friday
night, nodding and wishing each other Gut Shabbos, as though she’d already been
judged favorably. Elazar remembered his own transgression and began to walk and
then to run back to his yeshiva.
•
115
Brian Patrick Heston
R
The Carpet Layers
The rich customers always looked at my brother with scared-shitless eyes.
Nothing in their pristine lives could have prepared them for what they were seeing.
I mean my brother was huge, about six-four, with wild auburn hair and a thick
unkempt beard filling his pale face. With his “youses” and “ain’ts,” he was a peasant
through and through, which is why he didn’t much care what they thought as long
as they pulled that green from their designer wallets and pocketbooks to peel away
what was owed him. That’s why he always referred to them as “jobs,” especially the
ones living in the big houses, instead of Montgomery, or whatever other highfalutin’
last name they happened to have. Our name was McConnell, as in Mick. If it were
a thousand years ago, we’d be facing each other across a battlefield, naked, painted
blue, and whooping, instead of in this doorway. I imagine the jobs didn’t care much
for it, either, having these strangers bring their sweat and needs into their wellmanicured living rooms.
They’d nod as my brother explained that we had to move their big expensive stuff
out of the way, so we could lay carpets on their shiny wood floors. This particular job
owned a five-story colonial in a neighborhood full of colonial houses with begonia
and rose gardens poking through iron fences. The houses were built back in the
mid-1700s, renovated to look brand-new. They pretty much did, too. With the
cobblestone streets, the carriages, and tour guides dressed up like Ben Franklin,
you would’ve thought that when you knocked on one of these doors, a short, stubby
shoemaker would answer. When you noticed the particulars, though, like the Benzes
and Lexuses parked out front, or the signs that warned not to get too close because
the alarm would go off, you knew you weren’t dealing with some cobbler’s house.
Mrs. Job moved aside to let us in. A crystal chandelier dangled over the openspaces living room. Wide windows let in lots of sunlight. The scent of flowers and
floor polish hung heavy in the room. It seemed like everything was an antique. A
vase sitting on the mantel of the fireplace drew most of my attention. It was Greek.
Blue pictures of olive trees and nymphs were painted all over it. This was the only
time I liked carpet laying, being able to see the old things inside these houses, and
this vase was the first thing I came across that was Greek. I had been saving for
some time to go to Greece. An anthropology teacher at the community college I
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was going to had this buddy running a dig on the outskirts of Athens. He told me
I’d be able to get a job easily with the excavation crew on his recommendation. All
I had to do was get there, which wasn’t an easy task, considering a ticket to Greece
would run me a G and two bills. There was also the passport and a little for food in
the beginning to consider.
I noticed Mr. Job looking at me. He was typical of the type who owned places like
this—late-forties, with a streak of silver in his hair. They all seemed to wear the same
uniform, too, a white shirt matched with shiny dress slacks. In his fist was a stubby
glass loaded with ice and yellow stuff. I guessed brandy. These cats loved their brandy.
“I see you have a good eye,” he said.
“Yo, Pat!” My brother said.
I ignored him and just kept looking at the vase.
“So do you know its era?” Mr. Job asked.
“Classical Greek,” I said.
“Good. How did you know?”
“Well, they had a thing for nymphs.”
“It’s a good twenty-five hundred years old.” He smiled. “Got it on a dig in Athens
a couple years back.”
“You an archeologist?”
“No. A banker. However, I’ve funded many digs. I am the gas that goes into the
engine.” He took a long sip from his glass. “A little present from The University of
Pennsylvania. Their way of keeping the gas flowing. Truth be told, I’d do it regardless.”
“Okay, Lionel,” Mrs. Job said. “I’m sure these boys have a lot of work ahead
of them.”
His wife was a long woman. That’s how my brother described these rich women
with their pencil-point necks and thin shoulders. I admired their fluid way of moving.
My brother, though, blamed the way they moved on constantly being faint with hunger.
“Come on,” my brother said.
Lionel smiled before taking another sip. “Wait until you get to the room you
have to carpet. I’m sure you’ll find it an interesting collection.”
His wife led us to the room, then left without saying anything. It was Lionel’s
study, and it was huge. He wasn’t kidding about the collection, either. There was
a mahogany desk from the Twenties, an oak bench from the Middle Ages, and a
Ming vase. There was also a glass mini-bar built into one of the walls. Across from
that was a goddamn piano—a black baby grand. My muscles ached just thinking
about it. I looked at the floor beneath us. It was lemon cedar. My brother gave
me a knowing look, as in, Be fucking careful. He always worried about this sort of
thing because once, when moving a piano, I let a leg stay on the floor as we inched
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it forward, scraping a long jagged line into the wood. Mr. Job was pissed, and my
brother went into grovel mode. It made me sick. Here was my brother with biceps
as big as my head pleading for forgiveness from this whiny little stockbroker.
“I heard you were the best,” the man kept repeating.
Finally, my brother bargained his forgiveness by charging him only a quarter of
what we would usually get. I was angry because I liked the scrape I made in the
guy’s floor. Guys like us would get paid for fixing it. Besides, the less we got, the
longer it would take me to scrape together the loot for Greece. My teacher’s offer
wouldn’t last forever. Eventually, there would be no more dig.
The first thing my brother did before laying a carpet was size up the room. It
was to give balance to his idea of the job. This was why he was the best. He spotted
the shape of the room, the bad angles and corners before he measured anything.
This is when I really admired him, watching his eyes move over a room, his mind
contemplating geometric equations, all for the sake of doing something perfect.
The second thing he did, the thing I hated most of all, was the moving part. We
had to move everything because keeping anything in the room would get in the way
of accurate measuring, which could mean ruining a carpet by cutting it the wrong
way, a mortal sin to my brother.
My brother always said that there’s an exact science to moving things, that
anything can be moved if you do it right. One night, to prove it, he made a bet
with his buddies, swearing he could lift the back tires of a 1983 Chevy Impala
off of the ground. No one believed him. They each bet twenty bucks, and my
brother positioned his thick legs, squatted close to his heels, placed his fingers and
forearms below the back end of the car then lifted. His face throbbed. His heavy
muscles shook beneath his T-shirt. Only his legs moved, up and up, until they were
straight—his back straight. His buddy Angel told me all this. Told me that when
he knelt down to look under the car, he called for the rest of them to see. The back
tires were a half a foot off the ground.
“Straight up,” he said. “Your bro made a hundred greenies that night, man.”
I picked up a desk lamp.
“Big things going to be around whether you like it or not, Kiddo,” my brother said.
I hated when he called me Kiddo. It made me want to throw the lamp at his big
grinning face. I didn’t because I knew he wouldn’t be down for long, and whenever
my brother got up, watch out! Instead, I said nothing as I passed him with the lamp,
placing it on the floor in the hallway.
“We should probably do that couch next,” I said.
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He shook his head, sizing up the piano, a glint in his eyes. It was the biggest
piano we had faced yet, and I could tell my brother loved it. He wanted to move
that piano—to feel its heaviness—to conquer the sheer size of it. Most pianos had
wheels, but this meant nothing to him. Wheels made scratches. The only safe way
was to have it off the ground.
“Where’s your weight belt?” My brother asked.
I shrugged.
He unhooked his belt and handed it to me.
“Christ,” I said. “I think it’ll be all right this one time.”
“Nineteen and know everything. Take the damn belt, genius.”
My brother had a way of making me feel like a kid. It didn’t matter what I talked
to him about, either: sex, drinking, or how Alexander the Great beat the crap out of
the Persians. As far as he was concerned, I was still in diapers.
Since baby grands have a space beneath where a couple people could fit, my
brother’s strategy was simple: climb under then face opposite directions.
“Remember, with your legs,” he said.
I had been laying carpet with him for a year and a half and “with your legs” was
something he repeated to me at least six times every job. I counted to three and on
three, we both pushed up, but I had to stop.
“See, you’re not lifting with your legs. One day you’re going to fuck your back up
and I’m going to have carry your dumb ass to the emergency room.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
I counted again, and this time I used my legs. I felt the piano’s weight pressing
down on my back. My body shook and blood rushed into my face.
“Now one step at a time,” my brother grunted. “You’re up front; call off the steps.”
My brother usually takes the front, but since one of us had to walk backwards,
he took the back.
“Right step,” I said.
My right foot stepped forward, his stepped back.
“Left step.”
We did this in unison, and with each step, the door seemed closer. When we made
it into the hallway, it took all of my will power to keep from dropping to my knees
immediately. We had to lower it slowly. When dealing with heavy furniture, quick is
never an option. Leaving the other mover in the lurch could result in really bad things.
“Down, on three,” I said.
We lowered the piano to the floor. I crawled from beneath it and sat with my
back against the wall, feeling hollow and rubbery inside. My brother was already
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119
standing. He was ready to continue, but he had to wait for me.
After we had moved the couch, the last thing in the room, my brother was
waiting for me again.
“You good?” He asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, let’s measure.”
Measuring was the easiest part. All I had to do was hold the tape. I was terrible
at math, which was probably why I didn’t get into any of the colleges I applied to
and had to go to a community college. I also bombed on the SAT. Can’t say it was
the test’s fault, either. I spent the night before drinking Mad Dog with buddies who
had as much interest in going to college as they had in getting real jobs. I remember
my senior year, listening to all the kids talk about the schools they got into. They
even had cracks about people who went to community colleges. My brother was
constantly telling me that if I had the sense God gave me, I’d just find myself a
trade and forget about this archeology jazz.
“What the hell kind of green can you pull in for doing a thing like that anyway?”
He’d ask.
“It ain’t about the money.”
“How can any job not be about money, bro?”
He never finished high school. I have to admit I felt proud that I did. This didn’t
mean much to our father. Whenever my brother came over, I would have to listen
to him get praised for all the work he had done to get his business going and for
taking me on. I always wanted to tell him to screw off. That spending the rest of my
days in a two-story on some nowhere strip in Philadelphia wasn’t my idea of a life.
After we finished measuring, we went to get the carpet. We didn’t bring it
up right away. It was mid-afternoon, and my brother took his shirt off in front
his truck, which meant it was lunchtime. I took off my shirt, too, letting the hot
sun heat my tired back and neck. Its light lit the colonial houses and cobblestone
streets, making a color like blood. The whole block smelled like a garden; but there
was also the smell of exhaust and old garbage coming in on the city wind. We had
ice water with us and hung our necks over the gutter as we poured it over our
heads. This was my favorite part of the day—outside—my body sweating out the
tiredness. As we ate ham and cheese sandwiches, we sat on the back bumper of
his truck. I looked at my shirtless body and then at my brother’s. He was bigger in
every conceivable way, but from running high school track, I had developed sleek,
solid muscles that my brother said made me look like a chicken.
“Cluck, cluck,” he said.
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Many Mountains Moving
“Fuck you.”
“Watch that beak of yours before I clip it.”
“You got to catch me first.”
We laughed. There was no one else on the street. This place was nothing like
the neighborhood I came from, where no matter what time of day it is in summer,
there’s kids screaming their lungs out and old people talking on stoops holding
sweaty cans of bud.
“Got enough yet?” My brother asked with a mouth full of ham sandwich.
“About eight hundred short.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Keep doing this shit until I get enough.”
My brother pushed back his damp hair then took a swig from his soda.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “Do you good to work hard for a while.”
We angled the gray carpet into the corners of the room. It was the same color
all of these jobs seemed to choose for their carpets—no thrills. The underarm
formaldehyde smell of these carpets always made me gag. It was a smell that my
brother referred to as clean, the smell of new money. Though my brother complained
about my attitude, he was no better when starting out. Before laying carpets, he
had many different jobs. After a month or two, he’d get fired because he couldn’t
handle being told how to do something. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he was
doing. It was because he had to do everything a certain way: if it was drywall, he’d
punch and kick most of the old drywall down instead of using a hammer; if it was
roofing, he’d splash tar directly from the buckets on whole sections of roof; and he’d
keep doing things a certain way until the boss finally came over and told him to do
it the right way. This is when my brother would tell the guy to go shit in his hat.
The carpet didn’t overlap much against the walls as we spread it out. This didn’t
surprise me because my brother never made mistakes. He’d probably be able to tell
you the exact circumference of the earth down to the millimeter if he had to carpet
it. This was the point when my brother would send me down to the jobs to get them
to boil water. The hot water was for pouring on the edges of the carpet in order to
shrink it, giving it a tighter fit from wall to wall. After telling them, I was supposed
to come right back and help my brother with cutting the carpet.
I got sidetracked when I went into the kitchen and saw Lionel sitting at the
table. He had a bottle of Jack and the same glass he had when I first saw him.
“A whiskey man, I see,” I said.
He grunted.
“I need to boil some water if that’s all right.”
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121
He looked up at me with foggy eyes. A silly twisted smile came to his face.
“For tea?”
I smiled back. “Nah, it’s for the carpet.”
He stood unsteadily then made his way to the cabinets above the sink. He
pulled a kettle down. After filling it with water, he set it on the stove to heat, then
stumbled his way back to the table.
“Do take a seat,” he said.
I took a seat across from him.
“A drink?”
I looked at the almost empty whisky bottle and shook my head. I never touched
the stuff. It always made me feel like running headlong into a concrete wall.
“So, everything going as planned?” He asked.
“Yeah, we should be done pretty soon.”
He turned away, staring off, tapping his fingers on the table.
“Did you happen to see the medieval bench?” He asked. “It once belonged to
Edward the First.”
“Old Long Shanks himself.”
He smiled. “Yes. Smart boy.”
A flash of gratitude filled me for this drunk rich guy. It made me want to spill
my guts to him, tell him all about why I’m laying carpets and not studying at a
university somewhere.
“I want to be an archeologist,” I said in a rush. “I’m at the community college
right now, but I’d like to go to Penn if I could swing it. I’m trying to go to Greece
now to work on a dig. It would be good for my transcript. But I don’t have the
money yet. That’s why I’m stuck in this gig.”
He squinted at me as though trying to see me through a haze. He took a sip from
his glass, then clanked the ice around a bit, then took another sip, emptying the glass.
“You know, when I was a child, I wanted to be a scientist.”
I leaned forward to hear him better.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, I begged my father every Christmas for a Junior Scientist’s
Laboratory set.”
He stopped and stared into his empty glass. He took the bottle and poured the
last of the whiskey into it.
“Well, what happened?” I asked.
“Well, dear old Dad wouldn’t allow it. No matter how much I begged. He made
sure to push me toward finance and business. So instead of ending up at MIT, I
ended up attending the Wharton School at Penn.”
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I waited for him to tell me to hang in there, that I could get what I wanted as
long as I did what I had to do. He went to Penn. Maybe he was going to promise to
recommend me when the time came. I started to imagine myself at Penn, arguing
with brilliant people.
Lionel drained his glass in one gulp then moved in close. His breath burned
my eyes. “I’ve come to realize that he was right, of course. I hadn’t yet understood
my limitations.”
The look he gave me when he said “limitations” was not a look I had noticed
from a job before, though I had noticed it many times when given to my brother. I
wanted to take him outside. Yet I couldn’t because it meant that my brother and I
wouldn’t get paid and that we would never get hired anywhere again. All of these
rich types seemed to know each other. That’s how my brother always got the best
jobs in the best neighborhoods. They recommended him to each other. So I had
to take it. Without saying anything, I grabbed the kettle from the stove and walked
out of the kitchen.
“What the hell took you so long?” My brother asked.
I didn’t say anything as I knelt down to pour the water on the edges of the carpet.
“You talking to that job again?”
I nodded once, wanting him to drop it.
My brother kicked the wet sides of the carpet into place, then stapled them
down. His right knee was in bad shape from using the “knee kicker” to press carpets
tight against walls, though he never complained about it.
“Well, what did ol’ money bags have to say?”
“Nothing.”
When I poured the hot water, it ran over my hands, turning the gray carpet dark.
My fingertips always seemed to get the worst of it. After a whole day on the job, they
looked bald, as though my fingerprints had been boiled off. My brother always teased
me about it, telling me that his friend Norman didn’t even have fingerprints anymore.
“Must’ve said something, being all pissy like you are.”
“I’m pissed because I’ve got to do this every fucking day of my life.”
My brother continued to kick the carpet into place. “Why don’t you put down
the cross already before you get splinters.”
“Fuck off.”
“You first.”
“Look, you want to waste your life doing this shit, that’s on you. But I got better
things to do. I actually graduated high school, remember?”
He just kept his eyes on the work. I had finally made him shut up, and I felt
good about it.
Fiction
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123
On the way home, I didn’t speak. I hated my dirty reflection staring back at
me in the windshield. I hated the way the clean, sparkling houses and streets
turned dirty and broken the further we drove. I hated my house most of all, my
parents’ house, with its water-rotted door and the piece of plywood covering its
front window. I looked up at the fat moon and wanted to tear it from the sky. When
home, I got out without saying anything.
“Yo!” My brother said.
I turned. He dug into his pocket and handed me a clammy wad of money. My
brother normally paid me once a month, which amounted to three hundred dollars.
A hundred of it always had to go to my parents to help with the bills, sometimes
even more than that. He had already paid me that month, though.
“Thirteen hundred there,” he said.
I stood staring at him. I knew I had his car payment in my hands, his wife’s
birthday present, and the new brakes for his truck. I was confused because I didn’t
know why he was doing it. He didn’t care about Greece, or archeology, or even
Penn. In fact, he hated colleges—told me so every time he got the chance. To him,
college was full of soft people who never had to lift a finger in their lives. I wanted
to give it back, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew, too, that he wanted me
to refuse it, not be in such a rush to get away.
“You think you’re better than us, don’t you?” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Well, you may be smarter, but at least we’re not shit, and that’s what you’ll be
when you take that money and forget you ever knew us.”
I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t true, that I wouldn’t forget how our father had
bad legs after forty years of standing at a factory assembly line, or that our mother
had strokes because of too many years sucking down coffee and cigarettes to keep
herself awake during night shift. Most of all, I wanted to tell him that I wouldn’t
forget how he was the toughest guy I ever knew, and that there wasn’t anything in
this whole goddamn world he couldn’t lift. But I didn’t. All I did was watch him
turn away, then drive off down that dark street.
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R.C. Ringer
R
Storage
The cemetery is in Woodbridge, south of Elizabeth, just off the Garden State.
You’d never notice it while driving along the parkway. It is not a landmark or a
milestone. It is nothing more than an old Jewish cemetery, established nearly a
hundred years ago by earlier generations of emigrants who settled in Newark and
Elizabeth. I must have driven past it hundreds of times and never noticed it. Not
noticing things, that is nothing new to me. I often spend too much time in my
own head. I am certain that I have never been here before. But of course I must
have been here before, when we buried Father. I was 8 when he died, more than
30 years ago. There are many things I remember about being 8, about third grade.
Still, I have no memory of his burial. It is just one of many things about him that
I have forgotten. I have forgotten the sound of his voice and I have forgotten the
look of his eyes. Sometimes I try hard to remember, to conjure up the memories.
They seem to linger just on the edge of my mind, like a flash of a light that you
see peripherally in the dark but by the time you turn your head in that direction it
is gone … if it existed at all. I am also a weak man and go to séances and fortune
tellers, playing along as if they were a joke, but underneath it all I am completely
serious. I have lost something and I don’t know how to get it back. Worse, I am not
entirely certain of what I’ve lost.
Sheldon is handling the details: hiring the rabbi; arranging for the hearse,
ordering the plain pine coffin, requesting the ritual bathing and burial shroud. I am
relieved to be relieved of the responsibilities. That is another of my failings.
We meet Rabbi Diamond at the cemetery office. He is a freelance rabbi, not
attached to any congregation, a thin man, maybe 30, 31, from a nearby rabbinical
school. He has a wispy beard, an overly large black hat and an appropriately
somber disposition. It is reassuring to notice that the rabbi’s shoes are worn but
well polished; a sign of care and respect and attention to detail, polishing shoes
that shuffle through the clay and mud of funerals and unveilings on a regular basis.
“My condolences to you both,” Rabbi Diamond says. He looks around and
cannot help commenting about the absence of other mourners. “And the rest of
the family?” he asks.
“In Florida or too young to come,” says Sheldon. “Or dead.”
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125
“The hearse brought your mother here about an hour ago. She’s over at the site.
Shall we head over there now?”
Together the three of us walk through the cemetery to where the gravediggers
have set up the hoist and a small tent. Some of the grounds are neat, orderly, well
tended. Other areas are overgrown, haphazard, unkempt. I look to the left and to
the right, trying to read the headstones we pass along the way. The family names on
the headstones seem familiar: Weinstein, Stein, Cahan, Asch, Kaufman, Schwartz,
Perleman, Fidelman, Singer, Roth, Elkin, Brodkey, Ginsberg, Kazin, Solotaroff,
Zuckerman. They were the neighborhood dead, those from Elizabeth who bought
plots in the 1930s and 1940s when estate planning meant securing enough plots
in the Jewish cemetery and prepaying for a pine box. The headstones are the gifts
of the living, an extravagance that the dead could ill afford in those depressionfilled, war-filled days. The burden of remembering is for the living; the dead have
only to concern themselves with forgetfulness and peace. There are inscriptions
on the headstones, many in Hebrew, or perhaps it is Yiddish, the language of the
dead. Some of the headstones have small stones placed on them, pebbles really,
deliberate acts of remembrance.
I don’t know why, but I am disturbed to see my father’s gravestone right next
to the opening where Mother is being buried. For some reason I had thought they
would be separated in death just as they were separated in life. The headstone
doesn’t look familiar, although I must have seen it before. His is a simple headstone,
nothing more than a name and dates. No Yiddish, no engraved poetry or “beloved
father of …” No clue to the turbulence of his life, the family he left behind, the
mechanics of his soul. As a hundred times before, I try to remember what Father
had looked like but I can only conjure up vague, faceless memories: a large man,
loud, powerful, with rough hands. My memories distorted by time and by Mother’s
tirades: Father as much a mystery, a faceless mystery, as before. Here she is being
buried next to the man she cursed every day. No concession to his living with
another woman while refusing to divorce, this at a time before it was the popular
thing to do. No hint of his years working in television as a continuity man, with
his Polaroid cameras around his neck, the sketch pad always at hand. I remember
going to work with him two or perhaps three times. We took the train in from
Elizabeth to the city, then the subway up to the television studios in Rockefeller
Center. He was the first on the set and the last off the set, making sure that every
fork was in the right place to match the last take from a different camera angle.
That’s what I remember of him, his large hands moving quickly on the sketch
pad, the pockets full of flash bulbs, the black-and-white Polaroid photos sitting
on a side table waiting for him to apply the fixer solution that would stop the
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Many Mountains Moving
photograph along its magical development from tabula rasa to a frozen moment of
time, sharpening and defining that moment.
All photographs of him disappeared when he died. Mother hung black cloth
over the mirrors and took down all of his photographs. In fact, I cannot remember
ever seeing a photograph of him hanging in the house while growing up: no framed
pictures on the piano, no wallet-sized snapshots tacked on the message board in the
kitchen, no gilded wedding photo on Mother’s night table. She had banished him.
The coffin has already been placed in the ground. A pile of healthy-looking soil
is next to the opening, a shovel sticking out, ready to push the dirt back in. Rabbi
Diamond quickly looks through the slips of paper marking passages in his small
black-bound prayer book, checks his watch, looks down at the coffin in the ground.
He looks up at Sheldon. Sheldon nods.
“Let’s begin,” Rabbi Diamond says, more to himself than us.
He quickly runs through the preparatory prayers in Hebrew. At one point he
pauses and asks, “Shall I read this in English, too?”
“Not necessary,” Sheldon says, although neither of us understands Hebrew.
A few prayers later, the rabbi pauses and asks, “Is there anything you would like
to say in your mother’s memory? This is the time for it.”
“No,” Sheldon says. I simply shrug my shoulders.
The rabbi indicates the shovel sticking out of the dirt pile. “It is customary for
you to put the first shovelful of dirt on the coffin.”
Sheldon carefully pulls out the shovel, digs up a small amount of dirt and pushes
it into the hole. The sound of dirt on wood is familiar from too many movies and
books. Even so, it is a sad sound. When he is done, Sheldon puts the shovel back
into the dirt. It is my turn. I try not to spill dirt onto my suit as I lift the shovel, turn
it over the grave. I put the shovel back into the dirt and wait.
A few moments later the rabbi closes his prayer book. The ceremony is over.
The three of us begin our walk down the narrow path toward the road where
Sheldon’s Mercedes is parked. When we reach the curb, we shake hands with the
rabbi. He turns away from us, making his way back to the graveside, waiting for the
gravediggers to finish refilling the hole.
We drive out of the cemetery in silence. About five minutes later I am the first to
speak. “Shel, I’ve been trying to remember Father, what Father looked like. I keep coming
up with nothing. Is it the same for you, have you forgotten everything about him?”
“You don’t remember anything about him? Nothing at all?”
“I have memories, although I am not sure which are mine and which are the
ones that you and Mother told me, stuff that happened before I was born. But I
can’t remember what he looked like.”
• 127
“I used to think Dad was a giant. He seemed old, not very interested in playing
baseball or other sports. He liked to play cards; he had a great mind for card games.
Never forgot what was dealt, never forgot what was bet. He taught me pinochle the
hard way by winning back my allowance each week. Once a week he had a poker
game. They went late. When he came home, the cigar smell permeated his clothes,
his skin. I think he may have been a little drunk, too, now that I think back on it. If
he was smiling, he had won; if he wasn’t, well … you had to watch out.”
“I don’t think he played cards with me.”
“No, no, you were too young. He didn’t have much patience for you. You were
always crying or spitting up. He used to take his suits off before he picked you up,
or put a dishtowel on his shoulder; he didn’t want stains.”
“Did he love me? Did he dote on me?”
“Love you? Sure, I mean, the way a parent loves a child.”
“I mean, was he crazy about me? Did he brag about me all the time?”
“No. You were a little kid, a baby. It’s funny, you never asked about Dad before.
Now that Mom is gone, you seem very curious about him.”
“I never really thought about Father until I decided that I want to be a father.
Everyone says that your own father is the first role model. But if he’s dead, then
what do I do?”
“You have other role models.”
“Yes, I know that. But I still need to know about him. How did he act
toward Mother?”
“Very polite, up to a point. You know, they would disagree on things without
fighting or shouting, very rational, very logical, putting forth the arguments for each
position. That is, up to a point. Then Dad became incandescent.”
Sheldon says no more. I know better than to ask again; I know better than to
push the issue: I know that Sheldon reveals nothing until he is ready.
***
Our last stop before returning to the city is Linden Secure Storage, where
Sheldon had stowed Mother’s belongings when we moved her into the nursing home.
Linden Secure Storage is across the highway from Newark International Airport.
It is large modern warehouse built on barren, hostile land between highways. To
the right are the cranes of Port Elizabeth, waiting for their ship to come in. To the
left is the hesitant, uncertain skyline of Newark. Stepping out of the Mercedes, we
notice that the air is filled with ambient noise from the steady stream of cars and
trucks on the turnpike. We are close to the sea but the smell is of jet fuel and damp
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earth. The ground shudders every three minutes from the roar of the accelerating
engines as Newark Airport fulfills its flight schedule, its destiny.
The entrance reminds me of the loading area at an Ikea store. The young man
behind the counter is desensitized; he is immune to the local smells and the airport
noise. He hardly glances at Sheldon’s identification, almost forgets to have us sign
the electronic ledger. … It is enough that we have our electronic pass to open the
door, our key to the storage room itself.
Linden Secure Storage is a sprawling complex of climate-controlled closets,
rooms, garages and full floors. On the ground level it is like a multi-car garage, row
after row of garage doors. Behind each I can imagine the boxes, cartons, plastic bags,
furniture, steamer trunks, wooden palettes resting on cinderblocks to protect the
storage containers from shallow floods, specially designed plastic storage containers
clearly marked and organized. An innocent place. It was in a storage center like this
that the World Trade Center bombers stored their fertilizer and explosives before
loading the rental truck they drove into the underground parking lot.
Our mother’s space is a small room, a cell 8 feet by 10 feet. It is half full of
old, collapsing boxes, two beaten‑up trunks and a metal armoire. Everything is
precariously stacked on top of plastic milk crates, real ones, not the decorator type.
“What are we going to do with all of this stuff?” I ask.
“We’ll sort through it to see if there’s anything you want to keep, anything I
want to keep. The rest we’ll trash. No sense in paying money to store it here if
nobody wants it.”
Sheldon removes his tie, takes off his suit jacket and gently puts it on top of a
box. He opens the box nearest him, rummaging through to see what is inside.
“Here, look,” he says. “Here’s that silver Pesach tray and Elijah’s cup that Mom
accused your wife of stealing. Here, you deserve it after all of the trouble it caused you.”
“It might be bad luck.”
“Elijah brings only good luck. If you don’t want it, donate it to your synagogue.”
“What’s in that box?” I ask but I already know. It is clearly marked “Photographs”
on the side. I pull it down and begin opening it.
In this box I will find the buried treasure, the banished photographs of Father.
In this box filled with photographs I will recover the past, I will construct a true
portrait of Father. Without photographic evidence, I am forced to consider Father
as being similar to many men, a singularly non-singular being. I randomly pull out a
stack of black-and-white photographs. The first photograph I pick up is mutilated,
a hole punched through the face of the man, just below his fedora hat. The next
photo is similarly defaced. And the next, as if a vengeful child had gone through the
pictures with a hole punch, eliminating only one person from all of the pictures.
Fiction
• 129
I dump the box out, spilling all of the curling, fading, yellowing photographs onto
the floor. In some pictures I recognize Mother as a young woman, and a child that
once was Sheldon, even a baby who must have been me years ago. And dozens of
the pictures are hole-punched through the face of some man. I have no doubt,
every one of the pictures is hole-punch-mutilated through the face of the man
who is unmistakably Father. The faceless man in my life is now destined to remain
faceless; faceless in my thoughts, memories and dreams.
I hold up a photograph and look through the hole, as if looking through a
telescope, squinting to see formations of light from the distant past. Some people
are forgotten in a generation or two. Some people are forgotten before they have
even died. The unknowableness of my father places him in a land of indeterminacy,
neither remembered nor forgotten. This is one more of those moments that never
cease to shake me, moments when it becomes clear that the answers do not exist.
Somewhere along the way I had not paid enough attention. I wasn’t observant
enough. I had missed something crucial and could no longer go back and discover
what it was. Now the past is lost to me forever. And yet I do not grieve for the past.
I do not grieve for Father. I do not grieve for Mother. I grieve only for myself, for
what I have lost and for what I may never become.
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Many Mountains Moving
June Akers Seese
R
Whose Coffee Is It?
They don’t see me coming. I’m a surprise. Not invisible. Bypassed. But not in
this shop drinking coffee from my monogrammed mug. There are hundreds of
us. Customers. And, unlike me, most of them are not here every morning. Being
overlooked is new to me. Until I was 70 it didn’t happen; but now, eight years later,
the inevitable must be faced or things get worse. A woman my age with bleached
hair and thick makeup is grotesque—besides, I’m too tired for masks.
The coffee shop is full of smells, from Santa Domingo to the House Blend. The
air conditioning works. Music plays. Everything but heavy metal and rap, so you
don’t get blasted off your stool. The clerks are all in college or law school and they
like their work. They will even split the O.J. and pour half in a thick glass with ice.
I pay attention to details, and I listen to strangers: the arrangement of their
words, their pauses, evasions and little movements. It’s an international place.
Spanish is in the air, but French, too, once in a while. Sometimes you learn more
than you want to know from a man in love with his cell phone. Truth is slippery. I
can only speculate, but I have time to do just that, for I am a customer too.
What is acceptable here? What passes for normal? I’m not sure, but some
people get too near the edge and have actually been barred. One man was cruel to
the clerks; he called it “teasing” and he tried to get a political rise out of the regulars,
but he was met with silence at every turn. After four months, he just stopped
coming. He drove a fancy car and liked to gloat over the erosion of Democratic
power after 9/ll. Maybe his wife got sick or he moved to Florida. Age brings change,
sooner or later. Life brought it later to me. My husband and my best friend died in
the same month. It’s been a year, and the heat hasn’t changed. It just rains more
this summer, and sometimes the power fails in the late afternoon. Atlanta is a city
of trees. Some fall.
This whole neighborhood hates change, not just the old folks. Protest groups
have formed to fight legal battles and to pester the zoning board about a new house
that looks like a poor man’s castle with a false fourth floor and a three-car garage.
Concrete monuments to bad taste have replaced ordinary colonials and split-levels.
It has become a community of tear-downs. Trees mean nothing to these builders;
down they come too, and a new house goes up. Sod is laid and a few shrubs added.
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It’s hard to tell who the owners are; they don’t have children who play on the front
lawn or hang out the windows.
In July, the power didn’t go out, but the heat increased, so I only traveled from
the swimming pool in my apartment complex back to my bedroom where the grab
bars above my tub make me feel safe. Sunbathing in a wide brim hat with bottled
water and sunscreen at the ready seemed a thing of the past. For a few weeks, I
took a nap before and after lunch. I fell asleep in my recliner absorbing a few pages
of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Then after my tuna sandwich, I crawled between the
sheets with the curtains drawn, my bedroom dark and cool. Sometimes I even used
a light quilt. I don’t pay the electric bill here.
The dog days of summer. Only nobody has one. A tenant once smuggled in
a kitten and got caught. She didn’t last long. There’s a waiting list, so they can
enforce the rules. 98 degrees, 95 degrees, 97 degrees. One day follows another and
the sidewalks steam up after the rain when it does come. Then I go out again and
sit by the pool after dark, and think about my husband. He liked air conditioning
on low, worried about the light bill, bought store brands, and cringed at the idea
of a T-bone steak until the day he died. I didn’t have to worry about money then.
I used to listen to his stories about sharing an unfinished basement with an aunt
and her wild son. Only a curtain separated the two families. He and his sister ate
kidney beans out of a can and too many pancake suppers; a far cry from the fresh
squeezed orange juice and granola that he came to expect from me every morning.
Sometimes the best way to be heard is to whisper; but I couldn’t whisper.
Recovering from laryngitis, I stayed in my new apartment at first. I moved in on
Memorial Day weekend, and if I took it seriously, I’d have the blues as well as a halo
of silence. So I played it safe and sat in front of CNN with a tall glass of lemonade.
Veterans passed before my eyes, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict,
Operation Desert Storm, and now the war in Iraq, yet to be given a new title. What
I didn’t see were coffins covered with stars and stripes or the newest veterans with
missing legs; young men who believed they were invulnerable who might have
survived motorcycle races or an impulsive dive from a cliff, had they not enlisted.
Once I moved beyond the confines of my apartment and the pool, it took me a
long time to settle into the rhythms of the coffee shop. It wasn’t just the laryngitis
I had during that first month. Or age. There were other older women who came
in; but none who stayed long. The first man I got to know is the one I like best, a
special ed teacher who graduated from law school but couldn’t pass the bar. I like
modesty and I don’t pry, so I didn’t ask how many times he tried.
John-John, the famous two-year-old who saluted his father’s coffin and who is
now somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean separated from his bones, tried three times
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before he passed. I once had a black friend who got in on the quota system back in
the Fifties, and I never asked him either; but he didn’t give up, and finally set up
practice in his father’s law office. We’ve lost touch. So you can see how little I know
about law school and the bar. I don’t even watch Law and Order. My husband did,
but he’s gone and I try not to think about him all the time. It’s hard not to.
The coffee shop brings relief. Everything distracts. The regulars come and
go. They move away or get too sick to make the effort. Some die. Last week I
went to a wake and it is all we talked about the next day; but nobody said a word
about the corpse looking natural. I imagine there are customers who think twice
before spending all that money for a Grande Latte when Folgers Instant waits at
home, but coffee has little to do with it. One man a few years shy of retirement
said, “All they need is a shower here and I’d have everything I want!” He’s getting
a divorce and sometimes his wife comes in with him. One morning a carefully
turned-out honey blonde in beige and chocolate brown came through the door.
“That’s our divorce attorney,” he said. “She’s retired and only works part-time.
Nothing’s cheap!”
Anyway, my friend who couldn’t pass the bar comes every day too, but never
at the same time, so we cross paths only three or four times a week. His name
is Saul Bachner, and he’s from New Jersey. His father was a cabbie, so he has a
repertoire of stories that has yet to run dry. All about stickball and kids he went to
grade school with, about last-minute tickets for Broadway musicals and the price
of property on the Jersey shore. He’s kept up with his friends and made new ones.
It’s easy to see why.
My friend is not a showboat, and his sense of humor cracks me up. He’s retired
too, from the DeKalb County School System. Tall with a head full of white hair,
he must have been an imposing figure behind a lectern. Now he’s careful with
his money and though he’s always going off on a cheap flight to Costa Rica or
Prague, he buys his clothes at Value City and drives a car that’s seen better days,
carefully. There are no dents in it. He often walks to the coffee shop. It’s not far.
He owns an apartment building up the road apiece, as they say here in the New
South. He lives in one of the apartments and keeps an eye on things. Something
is always breaking down, and he usually knows how to repair it. Eric Hoffer once
said, “Maintenance is everything.” And the longer I think about that quote, the
more it covers.
Before my husband died, we had a tree-trim party every Christmas. Everyone
brought an ornament or a bottle; and some brought both. Bachner brought a huge
pecan pie from Costco. He knows a bargain. People fought over it and they thought
I made it myself because I slipped it onto a crystal plate before the guests started
Fiction
•
133
arriving. For my birthday, he gave me a little eyeglasses holder, a pottery thing for
my bedside table, so my glasses wouldn’t fall on the floor. Bachner knows all about
old age too.
Today, there were bombs in London. Some exploded underground. One blew
the top off a bus. Time passed and there were more bombs. The police shot a
man who wore a heavy overcoat. It was hot in London too, and the man ran from
the police. Who knows why? He was an electrician going to work. There were
apologies and explanations and the days dragged on. This week a new version of
the story emerged, but one thing was sure—there were seven bullet holes in the
electrician’s body.
More than one customer at the coffee shop said, in so many words, “We’re next!
The Centers for Disease Control already has those big rocks between it and the
sidewalk.” Soon an argument started. “Big rocks? Don’t you mean boulders?” Would
it be New York, D.C. or us? They might speculate all day. I ordered a Russian tea
biscuit and a refill.
Soon, iced coffee replaced the usual, and the regulars switched from pottery
cups with their initials inked on the sides to tall plastic glasses. A few diehards drank
espresso. Headlines continued to focus on gas prices and the war. Atlanta’s homeless
are now forbidden to beg from tourists, and today, Coretta Scott King had a stroke.
One customer moved to Florence but came back to close on her former house:
“I’m writing a pamphlet on how to survive the boat over,” she said. She is a widow
too, almost 50. Radiant. Florence has a lot in common with Paris (all that art and
literary history) and I’ve never been to either place so I’m jealous. But that doesn’t
stop me from reading coffee table books in color at the library. I can barely pick one
up; they are so heavy with culture.
Everything is new here: the coffee shop, the whole shopping center, and my
apartment complex. But it wasn’t always that way. It’s hard to find words for what
was replaced. For years, a motel stood in back of the former strip mall. Men and
women rented rooms by the hour, and business was brisk. It took me a while to
catch on. Three afternoons in a row, a tall woman in stiletto heels with two-inch
platforms and a silver miniskirt sauntered by with her companions, a different one
each day, all bald in suits and conventional ties. No money was exchanged in public,
but I overheard plans for a tryst as I walked by on my way to Baskin-Robbins. By
then a police precinct had moved in, and the liquor store did more business than
the grocery. I stopped buying ice cream after dark and eventually the store moved
out, along with a branch of Kinko’s and a Laundromat. So imagine my surprise last
winter to return from a trip to the East Coast and find two bulldozers and a rock
pile where that strip mall had been!
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Many Mountains Moving
A group of hard hats stood surveying the ruins. They had already begun work
on the new apartment complex too. I’m not an optimistic woman, but these images
changed me, at least for a while. I was the fourth tenant to sign a lease, and even
then there were plans to expand the apartments up a hill, in back, where the motel
used to be. I like it here on level ground. The first floor seems a wise choice for
the future.
•
135
Andrew Warren
R
Brushes
“Dedushka, Dedushka,” cried out the little girl on seeing the head of the old man
slowly emerging from behind her bedroom door. The room was dark—it was past
her bedtime—but she was not asleep. She had heard the voices of her parents
greeting her grandfather. After work, the old man occasionally stopped by his
daughter’s apartment on the way to his SRO residence. He wore his grimy blue
coveralls and matching cap stamped with “MRE Maintenance” in big gold letters.
The little girl might not have recognized her grandfather—the bright light from the
outer room backwashed his silhouette—if not for the ever-present cocoon-like cap.
“I want a hug,” the little girl screamed out with urgency, seeing the head
slowly disappear.
“But it’s so late, Vnushkaya. I’ll give you two hugs tomorrow,” said the old man.
“No, now. I want my hug now,” insisted the girl. “I love you, Dedushka,” she
quickly chirped, sensing victory.
The old man walked into the room and slowly sat on the girl’s bed. “All
right, Vnushkaya.”
“Yes, yes, come, come,” squealed the child, scrunching her face with delight.
The old man bent over and gave the girl a kiss on the only spot on the forehead not
covered by her blond ringlets.
“Now you must sleep, Lubimishka. Tomorrow is a school day.”
“But I’m not sleepy, Dedushka. Tell me a story. You’re the best storyteller in the
world. I want a story from when you were young in Russia.”
“It was called the Soviet Union then,” the old man corrected his granddaughter.
“Oh, yes. Please tell me, tell me,” the girl screamed.
The old man tugged at his lower lip, gazed into space, and cleared his throat.
The little girl sank under her Winnie the Pooh blanket, leaving only her eyes to
betray her excitement.
“There were once two shaving brushes that had their bristles pushed together
so tightly that the tips of one brush’s bristles almost touched the other’s shiny ebony
handle. These two brushes were always covered with a thick coat of lather.
“This was a time when no one could be trusted. It was enough for some
mean brush to accuse an innocent brush of having done some bad thing and,
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without even bothering to check if it was true, the authorities would send the
innocent brush to Siberia.
“The two shaving brushes were nasty, troublemaking brushes, and no one
trusted them. They got a lot of satisfaction getting others in trouble and were
always trying to outdo each other, intertwined as they always were, in thinking of
cruel, deceitful things they could blame on those around them.
“One day, the two shaving brushes, just to amuse themselves, accused a poor
toothbrush, which happened to be standing next to them, of swiping some of their
lather and using it for brushing teeth. That was a complete lie, but since there
was a great shortage of toothpaste at the time and sometimes shaving cream was
used in place of toothpaste, they knew that the authorities would believe them. Of
course, the use of shaving cream in place of lather was strictly forbidden, and the
punishment was exile to Siberia.
“The authorities were immediately notified and soon a big exquisite-looking
hairbrush with a long glossy oak handle that was shielded inside a leather pouch
embroidered with a hammer and a sickle in red and gold thread came to investigate
the crime, but everyone knew that was just a formality. The toothbrush, despite its
innocence, knew it was going to be sent to Siberia. But as it turned out, the big
elegant hairbrush, even though of a very high rank within the Communist Party,
was quite unique in that it was a very fair brush. It inspected the lather covering the
two entwined shaving brushes and noticed that the wide swirling curves of lather
they were covered with were smooth and unbroken and showed no sign of ever
having been scraped or smeared.
“The big hairbrush was very angry at the entwined shaving brushes and
told them that their treacherous nature would not be tolerated, and if that ever
happened again, they would be separated and sent to different corners of the Soviet
Union never to see each other again. Of course that would have been terrible for
the two shaving brushes because they belonged together.
“The innocent toothbrush gave a big sigh of relief. Justice had been done, even
though no one expected it. That was very rare in the former Soviet Union, but they
all learned that even in the unlikeliest of places justice sometimes prevails.”
The old man looked lovingly at the sleeping child, got up slowly, and walked
gingerly towards the door. Once outside in the brightly lit living room, he touched
the beak of his cap and adjusted the large bundle of keys hanging from his canvas
belt, which he curiously kept inside a tattered leather pouch marked with a faded
hammer and sickle insignia.
Nonfiction
Thaddeus Rutkowski, E d i t o r
Nonfiction
• 139
Erik Ipsen
R
The Moon and Guatemala
Hector came for us early. In the pitch blackness we rode off with him to God knew
where, resigned to our fate. Barely eighty yards from our clinic’s hastily mended front
door at the old school, we reached the abrupt end of Morazán’s sole paved street, a
point beyond which we had never ventured. From there, we threaded our way slowly,
single-file along a shallowly rutted dirt path to what remained of the river at the height
of the dry season—a few large interconnected pools of brackish water thick with algae.
Warily our horses picked their way across the rocky bottom and up the far bank
as the first light of day began to lend vaguely verdant hues to the dark shapes of
the overarching cottonwood trees. By the time our modest caravan—three horses
and two mules—had gone another few hundred yards, we could clearly make out
a squat farmhouse. Filmy once-white curtains gently rippled in the early-morning
breeze in windowless openings in the adobe walls. The air was thick with the
smoke of the breakfast fire.
When we halted in front of the house, Hector signaled for us to dismount with
a low indecipherable grunt and a sharp nod toward the house. And then, showing
no further interest in Wade and me, he placed one small leathery hand on his
saddle horn, slapped the other against the butt of the massive revolver he wore low
on his right hip, and swung down to the dusty earth.
Squatting in front of the house, Wade and I ate our frijoles and drank our sweet
black coffee while Hector carried on an animated—if one-sided—conversation
inside with our server and chef, a thin-waisted girl who appeared, like Wade and
myself, to be a year or two shy of 20.
With our backs to the wall, we could see in the now almost full light a parched
landscape long ago stripped of trees to feed the cooking fires of Morazán. Off to the
right—the direction that our path seemed to be taking us—the ground rose. Far off
in the distance, brown gradually gave way to a rich green in the higher elevations.
After twenty minutes or so, Hector bid adiós to the girl as she gathered our tin
plates. With the heat rising fast and the flies already beginning to swarm around
us, we pushed off, Hector and Wade on horseback. I followed on foot, reckoning
my emaciated mount, barely a head taller than my outsized American self, would
be more hindrance than help.
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The trail tilted gradually upward for a couple of miles. After that, the fields of
parched grass abruptly gave way to a boulder-strewn hillside too steep to climb in
a straight line. Instead, we began to snake our way through a series of switchbacks
as the path quickly degenerated into a rain-ravaged wound—a narrow, rockybottomed affair snaking ever upward. By late morning, the temperature had soared
to well past 100, and Hector’s and Wade’s horses were straining for breath, their
nostrils flared and lathered sides heaving. I was lagging well behind and beginning
to lose hope of survival when I heard Wade cry out: “Tree!” Up ahead of me, he and
Hector had turned yet another switchback and had sighted an ancient live oak, its
massively gnarly limbs overhanging the path.
We rushed into the shade and stopped dead. It was too hot to eat the tortillas
we’d brought. The water in our canteens was almost too warm to drink. Instead we
took a few shallow swallows, filled a couple of buckets halfway full from the plastic
water jugs strapped to the wooden A-frame on the back of one of the mules, and
watered the animals. When we were done, we poured the dregs over our heads, or
at least Wade and I did. Of course, Wade, in his gray Duke University T-shirt and
jeans caked in red trail dust and sweat, and me, in similarly soiled denim work shirt
and jeans, had nothing to lose. Hector, on the other hand, had barely broken a sweat
and even if he had, he would never have dreamed of sullying his navy-blue uniform
with the silver badge on the chest. Besides, doing so might have required him to take
off his gold aviator glasses, something we had not seen him do since that morning
he had stepped out of the shadow of a hangar at the Zacapa airport ten days earlier.
It was there that a young army captain had introduced Hector as the official
minder of our three-man team, one of a dozen such made up of teenagers from across
the United States who were being dispatched that day to remote towns across eastern
Guatemala with a mission to improve health standards by administering tetanus
injections and providing other basic medical assistance. Staring into those mirrored
lenses as Wade and I stood in the shade of the tree, we had no clue as to what Hector
was thinking. Were his eyes even open? Did he care if we survived this expedition?
Did he want to pay us back for what had happened back in town? Was he reveling in
the new power the disaster there had given him over us? We had no clue.
It wasn’t until the western horizon had begun to show a hint of amber, and the
occasional tree had thickened to clusters of them and ultimately into a lush forest
that we reached a ridge line. Below us, we could see a narrow verdant valley, with
a stream meandering along its length and its banks lined with neatly cultivated
rectilinear plots. Down to our right stood a dozen or so wooden huts, each ringed
by a plot of well-trod earth—each harboring its own mini-ecosystem of children,
chickens, pigs and dogs.
Nonfiction
• 141
Amid a din put up by all of them, we halted in front of the only dwelling in town
with a porch—an open-framed affair with four armless chairs facing out toward the
path that had brought us. The house was made of deeply weathered wood that bore
no trace of paint and gave no sign it could survive the next stiff breeze.
At the edge of the porch, a squat middle-aged man with broad shoulders and
thickly-muscled limbs stood looking out at us. He was wearing a worn, shortsleeved shirt neatly tucked into heavy tan unbelted pants that ended a good three
inches above his chocolate-brown ankles and bare feet. His hair was thick, jet
black and worn long, more in the fashion of Guatemala’s Indians than the mixed,
so-called Ladino, townsfolk of places like Morazán. Oddly enough, in his open
gaze I saw no hint of surprise, no indication our arrival was anything other than
long anticipated. But how could that be? How could word have reached a place so
remote, a full day’s ride from Morazán, itself the last town on the road east from the
state capital of Zacapa. On the trail we had passed only a couple of people coming
down the mountain, their backs bent beneath massive weights of firewood. And no
one had passed us going up.
Similarly, our host betrayed no shock at the freakish dimensions—all six stocky
feet of Wade and six-and-a-half bony feet of me—and our unusual pallor. He
welcomed us to his home and village as I translated for Wade. Surrounded now by
what had to be the bulk of the valley’s population, Hector shook hands with our
host and loudly cleared his throat.
“I am Hector of the Guatemalan National Police and these two are médicos
who have come here from the United States,” he said in a loud clear voice I’d never
heard him use. “They bring medicines that can help you be healthy.”
The master of the porch listened respectfully. After a pause, he introduced
himself as Eduardo and ushered us up to the chairs as others unpacked our supplies
and walked our animals down to the creek. As we sat down, Eduardo began talking.
He told us about his village and the spring’s unusually plentiful rains, the evidence
of which we could see behind him in the fading light—the plots lushly furnished
with maize already taller than our four-foot-and-small-change host. After sharing
with us a dinner of frijoles, rice and—in honor of his distinguished guests—two
pieces each of pork jerky—Eduardo bid us goodnight and invited us to sleep on
his porch. Alone at last—Hector had again disappeared—Wade and I were too
exhausted to talk much, but our mood was the brightest it had been in days. In
this unspoiled place, we both knew we had outrun our notoriety. “I do believe we
got lucky here,” Wade said happily in his best Arkansas drawl. “They clearly haven’t
heard about us.” And with a grunt of agreement from me we slipped into our bags
and within moments were both asleep.
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It wasn’t until just after dawn the next morning that I got a proper appreciation
of the place. Standing in the half-light, facing away from the slope strewn with
shit and shreds of paper, the very place where moments earlier my meal had taken
violent issue with my digestive tract, I could see for miles. And yet I could make out
not a single telltale sign of humankind. Looking deeper into the Sierras de las Minas
Mountains, toward the peak called El Bijaqual, I could see no twinkling lights, no
ribbons of highway nor gossamer webs of power lines. Instead there was only a long
succession of forested slopes slowly warming from black to purple to green. The only
sounds were of the roosters, which had never stopped their intermittent bragging
since we arrived, and the faint, gentle gurglings of the stream from somewhere back
over my shoulder. We had been taken far back in time to a place where we still had
a few hours to do some good and perhaps to expunge a bit of our sin.
At breakfast that morning, a group of stern-faced town leaders joined Eduardo,
Wade and me on the porch. Hector had again disappeared. We sensed that this
was the formal part of our program. Eduardo began by thanking us for having
come from so very far. As he spoke, we were both handed two identical straightsided glasses, one with a couple inches of honey and the other with two raw eggs.
We were being honored with the best that they had, and I tried desperately to
summon up the courage to do the right thing. In the end it was all I could do to
slurp down much of the honey while Wade polished off both glasses with gusto,
barely stifling a belch.
With our glasses cleared, Wade and I started to stand. Gently, Eduardo
motioned us back to our seats.
“Momento,” he said as he brought his hand up shoulder high, palm forward. For
a moment no one seemed to know what would happen next. Several men—there
were no women—coughed and stared down at their bare feet on the rough wooden
planks. Then a couple of older men back by the door exchanged a few mumbled
words, followed by more coughing. Finally one of them stepped towards us, clearly
desperate to speak.
“We understand that this morning men from your home, los Estados Unidos, will
be on the moon.”
Both Wade and I were stunned. After just ten days in Guatemala, we had lost
all track of the outside world. Certainly we knew that such a thing was planned.
We just had no idea that it was taking place that very day; but yes, that would
be about right. After a long pause, I finally mustered an enthusiastic nod and a
perhaps too-loud “Sí.”
Instantly, another, younger man stepped forward and almost spat a question at
me in his eagerness.
Nonfiction
• 143
“Tell us then, what kind of things do they grow on the moon? What kind of
crops and what kind of animals do they have there?”
If only he’d asked another question, maybe something about how such a miracle
could possibly have come to pass. Given enough time, I could have made a vague
stab at explaining three-stage Saturn rockets to people who had never seen a car. I
could even have gone on at length about how terribly big and advanced this place
called the United States was, and about how many years of effort and how many
astronauts’ lives had gone into this hugely historic moment with Apollo 11. But
this question and the image it conjured up in my mind of space-suited Americans,
perhaps at that very moment bounding along tall rows of corn on the lunar surface,
struck me dumb.
Before thinking, I simply blurted out what I knew.
“No hay nada en la luna,” I said, and then elaborated, telling them there wasn’t
even any air or water. “Solamente piedras y polvo.” Only rocks and dust.
The impact was swift and dreadful. A stunned, slack-jawed state of disbelief
fell over the group that only seconds before had stood on the brink of some glorious
collective discovery. Slowly the men turned to each other and began talking in low
tones, some shaking their heads.
Finally, Eduardo himself asked what suddenly seemed like the obvious question:
“Why do your people go to the moon then if you know there is nothing there?”
My mind raced instantly to John F. Kennedy, and the space race—it was a
race after all—but that wouldn’t do. Ditto for the notion of a need for human
confirmation of what science had told us for decades. Before I even uttered the
words, I knew that they were lame.
“Because no one has ever done it before,” I replied, almost pleading for their
understanding.
That was that. The men drifted away, and Wade and I quickly set up shop
on the porch. In the course of that morning, we saw close to thirty people. We
gave tetanus injections, cleaned and bandaged a couple of minor wounds and
dutifully dispensed aspirin to anyone with a pain. By noon, it was time to pack
up. Going down the mountain we would, of course, make much better time, but
Hector told us that we would still have to be under way by 1 o’clock to make it
back before dusk.
As he had the animals rounded up and saddled, Wade and I shook hands with
Eduardo and some of the others, complimented them on the great beauty of their
valley and bid them goodbye. As we went away from that place, I wondered if I’d
blown it again. I could have told the men anything. I could have listed in great
detail the lunar crops and maybe even thrown in some phantasmagorical details
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about how fast and thick they grew and about the twelve-foot cattle and the twentypound hens that lay eggs the size of a man’s fist. When was the next time someone
from the same place as the man on the moon would pass through the village
with a different tale? My rendition could have endured for years, taking on new
embellishments at each retelling, as the crops grew to ever more fantastic heights
and the livestock ever fatter and more fertile. Gabriel García Márquez would never
have been so simple-minded and literal if he’d been asked such a question in such
a time and place. He never would have blown the moon’s cover.
Now, because of me, the moon had become a mess—worse, an object of
derision. With the best of intentions, again, I had done something terrible.
After a surprisingly easy and uneventful trip back down, we made our way into
town in the early evening. As we unlocked the door of the clinic and turned to unpack
the animals, David—the third member of our team, who must have heard the clatter
of horseshoes on cobblestones—rushed up the street from the Cantina Roja.
“You’re back. How was it?”
He clapped both of us on the shoulder and in his excitement raised his hand to
do the same to Hector before thinking better of it and dropping his hand limply to
his side. Inside, the clinic was exactly as we had left it, with one exception. There
was a dusty envelope on the floor just a few feet inside the door.
I stooped down and picked it up, noticing as I did that it was addressed to us, in
care of the mayor. Inside, on stationery that I instantly recognized, was a short note
from our program’s director. After perfunctory greetings, he quickly moved to the
point. We were to have a visitor. One of the program’s doctors, a real M.D., would
be spending two days in Morazán. We should expect him late Tuesday morning,
tomorrow as it turned out.
Wade and I stored our gear inside the door, shouted our thanks to Hector, who
was already a hundred feet down the street, and then joined David in the cantina
where our frijoles, rice and coffee were already waiting for us on our usual table.
David told us about what had been going on at the clinic over the last two days.
He told us that no one seemed to blame us for the one person and possibly two
people who had died and all the others who had been so sick after visiting the clinic
that day. On the other hand, he said that business was still terribly slow.
We then filled him in on our trip, trying hard not to make it sound too interesting
to David, who, despite our fears for the trip—and Hector—had clearly drawn the
short stick.
It was only as we settled into our cots that night that Wade, the only one of us
with any medical training, brought up the letter.
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“A doctor,” he said, “will be able to tell us exactly what we did wrong.”
Basically, we all agreed that it had to be our serums that had turned toxic, cooking
away in their vials in the full heat of a Guatemalan summer, or it was us. Somehow,
we had screwed up something else that we had done at our clinic that day.
Frankly, if it’s not the shots, I don’t think I want to know what it is,” said David.
Eventually it took Dr. Tragg, a low-key general surgeon from Moab, Utah, not
even a full day to debrief us on all that had happened. It wasn’t the serums as it
turned out. It was us. We had accidentally poisoned people in an effort to save them
from a hideous, often fatal condition—worms. Our manual had listed dosages for
worm medicine that we had carefully followed. What the manual had failed to
tell us was that those dosages were for a dilution made by taking the kilogram of
powdered worm medicine we had found in our clinic when we arrived and mixing
it with ten gallons of water. That meant that our totally undiluted treatments were
hundreds of times too strong.
We could not undo the harm we’d done. In the end we did all we could. The three
of us took the bag with the remaining worm medicine to the town dump after dinner
that night and poured out what was left. Dr. Tragg, meanwhile, promised to make
sure that all the manuals got corrected before the next group of students arrived.
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Mindy Lewis
R
A Dirty Love Story
I have a French boyfriend. Ooh la la! Lucky me! We French kiss (among other
things) in my rent stabilized, Upper West Side apartment where I’ve lived since
1971. In addition to being a writer, I’m also a graphic designer, a painter, and a pack
rat who saves every trace of evidence of emotional connection, intellectual pursuit,
and artistic endeavor. My apartment has, over the years, become a stratified piece
of urban archaeology, a record of my past lives. You can imagine the clutter and the
dust that it attracts. At a low point in the 1980s, I became allergic to my apartment.
When I sold my first book, the first thing I did with the advance money was to go
out and buy a Dust Buster and an air purifier.
Luckily, mon amour, Patrick (Patrique, or Pat for short), loves me. He loves my
cluttered apartment, he loves my eccentricities, he loves my fractured French (and I
love his fractured English), and he loves my long, abundant, wavy, 1960s-style hair.
“Miiin,” (Meen, he pronounces it), “I love your long hairs.” (The French term
for hair—les cheveux—is plural, yet singular—each hair an individual deserving of
liberté and fraternité, values I wholeheartedly share.) Patrick has even been known
to pluck strands of my hair off his clothing, fold them in a piece of tissue, and
stash them in his wallet. Once at the airport, one of my hairs escaped his grasp;
a moment later he saw it floating in front of him and retrieved it from the air,
delighted to carry a bit of my DNA back home with him.
Pat too has long hair, salt and pepper gone mostly gray, though when we first
met it was black and curled poetically around his intense, handsome face.
We had come together against great odds: distance, decades, and disappoint­
ments. We’d first met in Paris in 1990, thanks to the Gulf War, precursor to another,
even dirtier war. Back then, because of terrorist threats (who knew what was to
come?) the price of airfare had dropped and I was able to afford an inexpensive
round-trip ticket to Paris. There, through friends, I met Patrick: a tall, leatherjacketed, Vespa-riding artist. We spent four hours together at the Beaubourg, which
offered panoramic views of Paris from its external walkways, and when I ran out
of film (a pre-digital dilemma), Patrick offered to return with his camera and send
me the photo. When we said au revoir, I sent up a prayer for a leather-jacketed,
motorcycle-riding artist boyfriend like him.
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After I returned to New York, I received a letter from Patrick, and eventually, the
promised photo. I treasured Patrick’s letters, which were often illustrated with little
drawings: him as Mickey Mouse, and me, a bashful Minnie. Our letters became more
frequent, and we began to sign them Love. Twice I made plans to visit Patrick in Paris,
and twice life intervened. Our correspondence dwindled, then stopped. I stashed his
letters in a corner of my desk. As consolation, I signed up for French classes.
In September 2001, while the dust of the Twin Towers was settling over
Manhattan, I received a letter in Patrick’s familiar hand, in which he asked if I was
OK. I wrote back that I was fine, emerging like everyone else from the shock and
grief of 9/11. Patrick was by this time in a long relationship (he dropped clues that
he wasn’t entirely happy), while I was working my way through a series of ill-fated
boyfriends. I had never quite forgiven myself for failing to visit Patrick, and vowed
that if the opportunity ever came again, I’d take it.
In the summer of 2006, I was invited to teach a workshop in the south of France.
On my way there, I spent a few days in Paris. Patrick met me at the airport, and
within a few hours, it became clear that this lanky gray-haired stranger and I had a
lot to talk about. When we kissed good night, the touch of his warm hands made the
hairs on my bare arms stand at attention.
Before Patrick’s first visit to New York, I was relentless not only about cleaning
my apartment, but also my own body. In between bouts of dusting, sweeping, and
vacuuming (a rare event), I scrubbed, tweezed, shaved, buffed, oiled, and inspected my
body for imperfections. I washed rugs and tossed things out of closets. My body, like
my apartment, was a repository of past mistakes, disappointments, failed relationships.
Here was a chance to start over, fresh and new. I wanted to begin cleanly, purely,
hopefully, and not muck up this rare second chance with the detritus of the past. I
wondered how Patrick would see me in the cool light of New York, and whether our
passion could stand the strain of long distance, different cultures, and day-to-day reality.
I didn’t have to worry. Our love took root and thrived in my cluttered apartment,
and we continued to plumb the depths of romantic passion.
But with passion also came shyness. In those first days together, I was so selfconscious that I could only pee with the bathroom faucet running. And it wasn’t just
me. It soon became apparent that both of us were painfully clogged, not wanting to
stink up our new love with the gross sounds and odors of bodily functions. The sound of
the toilet flushing filled me with embarrassment. Even the fact of my embarrassment
was embarrassing. Here I was, 55 years old, and blushing like a child.
Luckily for me, Patrick loved this aspect of my personality. It was like my
apartment—out of fashion, homey, and more than a little bit quirky.
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The plumbing in a pre-war high rise can be temperamental. In my building
it is common for the water to be shut off several days in a row while old, leaky
valves are being replaced. It’s common for pipes to suddenly spring a leak, dripping
from one apartment through the ceiling of the one below, for toilets to back up or
flush unendingly, for pipes to clog. These inconveniences are the price one pays
for the charm of old-fashioned faucet fixtures labeled HOT and COLD, hexagonal
honeycomb ceramic floor tiles, and a large porcelain bathtub perfect for long
meditative bubble baths.
Over the years, my bathroom sink had become frequently and persistently
clogged. Doses of industrial strength Liquid Plummer and visits from the building’s
handyman, who’d appear at my door with his metal “snake,” took care of the
problem temporarily. But lately my sink had been slow.
Patrick peered down the drain, then asked me for a flashlight. “Hmm,” he said,
then went and rummaged around under the kitchen sink and returned with a coil
of metal wire, which he fashioned into a foot-long fishing hook, then slid it down
the hole, fished around for several seconds, and very slowly withdrew it.
I watched, horrified, as he began to pull out a glob of dark-brown, almost black,
slimy goo. I watched as it kept emerging—the dark brown slime was held together
by a mass of matted hair—my hair—coming out slowly in one long slimy, gooey
blackish brown turd that just kept emerging inch after inch—six inches, one foot,
two feet, three feet—until it was completely free, dangling in front of me, exactly like
a three-foot long piece of merde. It was unbelievably disgusting. I gagged, fighting
a sudden urge to throw up, yet I couldn’t look away. It was like something out of a
nightmare—this horrible, impossibly long, slimy thing emerging from a dark hole.
Playfully dangling the monstrous thing, Pat laughed, but I could tell he also
was revolted. I was mortified, as if I’d taken a crap right in front of him. This was
tangible evidence of my unconscious mind, of all the psychic content banished
to dark places—each individual strand of hair shed over the 37 years of my life in
this apartment, woven together and returning to haunt me like my own personal
golem. At the same time, I felt an incredible, almost physical, sense of relief to
see it dislodged from its hiding place into the light of day. Life was sending me a
direct message: Be conscious—don’t think you can just rinse your hairs down the
sink and get rid of them forever. We leave our trace in this life, and no matter how
diligently we clean or present ourselves to the world, our shed hairs and forgotten
pasts can return to incriminate us when we least expect it.
We bagged it, put it out with the trash, opened a bottle of red wine, and I did
my best to banish the disturbing image from my mind. But sometimes, as I gaze at
my beloved, the image of the thing in the sinkhole looms in my imagination.
• 149
Julia MacDonnell
R
Witness
My shopping list was short: yams and pearl onions for the next day’s Thanksgiving
dinner, napkins and candles, wine. My baby Suzanne, nine months old, had been
fussy all morning as I baby-sat for several other children in our building, near
the intersection of Valentine Avenue and 194th Street in the Bronx, a place we’d
homesteaded with a group of friends a couple of years before. The fresh air, I
figured, and stroller ride up to 197th Street would settle Suzanne down, get her
ready for a nap.
The day was sunlit, extraordinarily bright as it poured through the huge southfacing windows of my kitchen, but when we got downstairs, cold wind sucked away
my breath. I’d overdressed Suzanne, the way new mothers often do, in a sweat suit,
a sweater, a hooded jacket. I’d tucked a blanket all around her, but was, myself,
wearing just a hoodie, bright pink. On the slate sidewalk, I stood shivering for a
moment. I debated whether to go back upstairs for something warmer. If I did, I’d
have to schlep Suzanne, and the stroller, back up all four flights and down again.
No way. The produce store wasn’t far; the fresh air would do me good.
Valentine Avenue arcs like a Cupid’s bow through the central Bronx, more or less
parallel to the Grand Concourse, from E. 176th Street up to 201st, a neighborhood
beleaguered in those days by white flight, redlining, and the occasional arson fire.
Our building was atypical, one of ten identical attached five-story tenements, in
a neighborhood of big, double-winged buildings. These other buildings, in a style
characteristic of the Bronx, enclosed elaborate central courtyards—gargoyled tiers
of concrete, forever shadowed by the massive buildings hunched around them. By
comparison, our building was minimalist, unadorned. Its first-floor front windows
opened directly onto Valentine. Since the turn of the century, when they’d been
built, the buildings had been dubbed The Ten Commandments. We lived in Thou
Shalt Not Kill.
I walked north along Valentine Avenue, pushing Suzanne in her Maxi-Taxi,
familiar with every crack and upheaval in the wide slate slabs of sidewalk. We
headed to the Korean produce store and a bodega three blocks away, an area as
familiar to me as my own face. Walking into the wind, I thought about my mother
driving down from Boston to spend the holiday weekend with us. I hoped the
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corner liquor store stocked a wine other than Night Train. Not that we were fussy.
Something pink would do. Blush.
I heard a loud bang, loud enough to make me and my baby quake. Then another.
Firecrackers, I thought. Wrong holiday. After two they stopped. Some celebration.
I’d already turned toward the sound, to my right, into one of those elaborate
but now crumbling courtyards. A man was falling backward, his skull seemingly
in two pieces, a spray of blood, bright red, arcing upward as he fell. Another stood
beside him, his back to us. One man falling, another watching him fall. The falling
man landed, sprawled face-up in the courtyard, his arms flung outward, a hasty
crucifixion. The standing man looked down, his back to us. Looking at his victim?
Then he was shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. His hands. One of
them must hold a gun. A gun.
Eons passed. Just ahead of us a little boy, maybe six, had been riding a Big
Wheel, a Smurf Big Wheel. He had stopped at the sound of the gunshot, leaped
off the Big Wheel, his trusty steed, and rushed toward us. He rushed in slow
motion, his arms outstretched. In windows above and all around us, I noticed other
watchers, drawn by the sound or maybe already window gazing the outer-borough
way, leaning on pillows on the sills of open windows.
By now the gun was hidden. (Oh, to be sure, there was a gun. How else to
explain the condition of the man sprawled on the ground?) But the shooter stood
in plain sight, not quite within my arm’s reach, a few steps beyond it, not yet
knowing we were there. He was about to turn around, he would have to turn toward
us. I knew this as I stood there. I knew exactly what the shooter would do next.
He would turn around and see us. He would realize we were there, that we had
borne witness. A queer aura, shimmering but transparent, surrounded him, and I
watched him transfixed, as though all of us had fallen out of time.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No, we had no place to hide. I knew this as
surely as I knew that the shooter was about to turn toward us. We, my baby and
I, we were trapped, exposed there, on a vast plain of sidewalk, sunlight shining all
around us, beautifully, improbably, in that gray canyon of tenements,
I looked down at Suzanne, my baby, bundled in her fuzzy hooded jacket and
sweat suit, shrink-wrapped in her soft pink blanket. I saw her, my innocent, from
that particular perspective, mother pushing stroller. She was leaning forward,
holding onto the stroller’s handlebar with its bright attachments—rattles shaped
like keys, a steering wheel that honked. Suzanne had two sharp bottom teeth and
a third was pushing through. All morning, she’d been squalling. When I’d tried to
rub her gums with Orajel, she chomped down on my finger. She refused to take a
nap. Now I willed her not to cry; not to honk her horn. Maybe I touched her head,
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151
or murmured something to her. Don’t cry, baby, don’t make a peep. Then another
command, a lamentation, roiled up from somewhere deep inside me:
Pretend this is not happening, Pretend you are not here. Show no reaction, none
at all.
The voice brooked no opposition. I obeyed. I pretended I could not see the
body sprawled, twitching, a few yards to my right, blood splattered on the concrete
wall behind it, puddling around the skull. I pretended I could not see the little boy
running toward us in slo-mo, his arms outstretched. I pretended I could not see the
shooter, dressed all in black, coming toward us, hunched forward, his hands in the
pockets of his zippered jacket, moving quickly, not quite running, but moving fast,
focused, intent upon a course that would take him maybe two steps to my right.
The wild voice offered a final urgent command: Do not look at the gunman. Do
not make eye contact. Pretend he doesn’t have a face. Pretend you don’t either. If you
don’t look at the killer’s face, he won’t look at yours—and therefore you will not exist for
each other. And not existing for him is the one way you can save your baby and yourself.
Against my Catholic upbringing, not just the ten commandments, but also the
beatitudes, the corporal and spiritual acts of mercy, the entire Baltimore Catechism,
not to mention my punitive God-fearing father, and my own personal convictions,
my sense of right and wrong, honed to a glistening edge as I came of age during all
those movements, women’s, civil rights, anti-war, student, social justice.
Pretend this isn’t happening.
Pretend everything is fine. Yes, it’s all good. Yada yada.
Which is what I did.
And thus the killer passed us, so close we almost touched. He passed us, a
shadow, and then he disappeared.
This happened in 1982, my daughter’s entire lifetime ago. It must be what
shrinks call a flashbulb moment, one so harsh, so bright, it scorches a small place
in the brain. I know precisely where it is, a place of profound sorrow, vulnerability,
limitation. I can get back there in an instant, to that late November afternoon, on
the slate sidewalk near 197th, a new mother with her baby, heading to the store.
I can hear the loud bang, see the victim falling backward, the shooter pocketing
the gun—all browns and grays but for the red blood arcing upward. And I can feel,
even now, how painful it was to resist the urge to run, to scream. How painful to
push Suzanne’s stroller forward at the exact pace I’d been going—no faster and
no slower. How painful to pretend a little boy in a brown jacket wasn’t running
toward me with his arms outstretched. To pretend a young man wasn’t dying or
dead already, just steps away. A flashbulb moment.
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The killer walked past us, heading most likely to the nearby Kingsbridge Road
station on the D train. I kept walking, too, pushing Suzanne in her stroller, floating
out of time. A bubble seemed to surround us. At the next corner, I saw a pay phone,
dropped in a coin, dialed 911.
“I’ve just witnessed a murder,” I said. “Valentine Avenue and 197th Street.”
“How do you know it was a murder?” the dispatcher asked. Her question
burst the bubble, and released a vision: the shooter turning around, coming back,
opening fire upon us as I stood talking on the phone. I hung up, seized by a violent
palsy. I stumbled into the produce store and asked to use their phone. Seeing I’d
been somehow traumatized, they fussed over Suzanne, produced a wooden crate of
lettuce for me to sit on, offered me smelling salts. I held Suzanne on my lap, called
my neighbor to come get us. By the time she arrived, sirens were howling all around
us, echoing the mad voice in my head. That block of Valentine was now a crime
scene. We had to take a detour up to the Grand Concourse.
In the aftermath, the story loses clarity, and my journal sheds only the dimmest
light. Back home, at 2674 Valentine, while the sirens wailed outside, neighbors in
the building gathered to console me. Four years before, we’d purchased from the
city our tax abandoned building, the first abandoned building on that block. We’d
rehabbed it through sweat equity and a variety of state and federal programs, an
experience that forged intimate, familial relationships that continue to this day.
Many were housing and community organizers. All were veterans of the anti-war
movement, passionate street-smart pacifists. Their interest quickly focused not on
what had happened, but on my reaction to it.
“You mean you just left that guy dying on the sidewalk?” asked one, a longtime
organizer with the War Resisters League.
“You didn’t try to help that little boy?” asked another.
“I guess you had to be there,” someone said, but the truth is, I couldn’t explain
my reactions to anyone and I soon stopped trying. Already I was thinking, maybe,
just maybe, I hadn’t seen what I thought I’d seen, cold-blooded murder on the
sidewalk in broad daylight, words from a crime drama on TV.
Then the NYPD called. I must have given them my number during the 911 call,
though I did not remember. The victim, they told me, had died instantly of a single
shot to the head at point-blank range. The second shot was redundant. He was 24,
and had recently been discharged from the Navy. A drug deal gone bad, a detective
said. I’d seen exactly what I thought I’d seen. Maybe then I realized that the bullet
had somehow struck me, too. I hung up, sat alone in the rocker in my darkened
living room, nursing Suzanne, who soon fell asleep.
When my husband, Dennis, got home—no cell phones back then, no way to
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get in touch—I wailed that I’d seen a guy shot at point-blank range. That he died
in front of us, and the killer, pocketing the gun, had walked right past us. Dennis
showed little reaction to my story. I kept thinking I wasn’t making myself clear
to him. Or that I’d done something wrong, by being in the wrong place at the
wrong time, exposing our baby to that violence. Or maybe I was just overreacting.
We’d had an awful fight the night before, during which he’d accused me of being
absorbed in myself, our baby, my writing. That’s what my journal says, anyway, a
theme to be repeated through nearly two more decades, and two more kids, until
we finally gave up on each other and went our separate ways.
That night, we went to bed, all three of us together, but I couldn’t sleep,
couldn’t stop that bloody footage from replaying every time I closed my eyes. When
I opened them, I kept thinking about Thanksgiving dinner, my mother driving in
from Boston, and I still didn’t have yams, pearl onions, napkins, candles or wine.
Our buzzer sounded a little after 1 a.m. I nearly jumped out of skin. It was the
NYPD. Two detectives trudged up the four flights to ask if I’d be willing to look at
a line-up. How could I say no?
“Chang? You Mrs. Chang?” they kept asking as we drove to the 48th Precinct
in the central Bronx, running every red light along the way, stuck on the fact that
I’m white, blond, and was married to an Asian man. Yet they were grateful, really
grateful, they insisted, that I’d called about the murder and agreed to be a witness.
“Almost never happens around here,” one said.
“I’m the only one who called?” I kept seeing all those other faces in those
windows, the silent witnesses. Yeah, they assured me. The one and only.
I recall those two detectives, one of them named Bown, not Brown, as a tag
team sent by Central Casting: middle-aged, tough as Doc Marten soles despite
their ties and jackets, service revolvers bulging in shoulder holsters, a threat or
promise behind their every word or deed.
Bown said they already had somebody in custody they ‘liked’ for the crime. The
shooting, he said, was the result of “a couple of scum bags double-crossing each
other.” The victim had been selling drugs out of that apartment.
“No great loss to humanity,” Bown said, and his partner nodded agreement.
At the precinct, I waited for more than two hours for the assistant district
attorney to show up. I drank a Coke, showed them on a map where we’d been walking
in relationship to where the shooting had occurred. I watched indecipherable
comings and goings, and had plenty of time to think about the ramifications of
being a witness to murder should the case ever go to trial.
The detectives believed they had their shooter, which meant he had to be there,
somewhere in that same building. It would be my responsibility to identify him, the
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man I’d pretended not to see earlier that day. Was I ready for it? Could I handle it?
I didn’t think so, not without medication. For, although I’d never made eye contact,
and pretended as I passed him that he did not have a face, his face, its planes and
angles, its distinguishing characteristics, had taken up permanent residence in my
memory bank, bright and immutable. I’d know him anywhere. I figured he could
say the same for me. But when, at last, the a.d.a. showed up, he scrapped the lineup, saying it would be “too prejudicial,” that the look-alikes didn’t look anything like
the perp they had in custody.
“Too prejudicial,” Bown and his nameless partner kept repeating, a punch line
curdled with disgust and anger.
After that, they had me look at photographs, thick books of full of mug shots
of young men of color. Quickly, embarrassingly, they all began to look alike. None
seemed convincingly to be the shadowy shooter of that afternoon. Giving up, I said
that, though he’d been dressed entirely in black, “He didn’t look like a killer.”
“What does a killer look like?” Bown asked. I figured the question was rhetorical.
On the way back home, Bown mused that Suzanne and I were very lucky.
“Your tickets weren’t punched,” he said.
“Tickets?”
“You know, you dodged a bullet.”
“Literally and figuratively,” chimed in the nameless one, who was driving. “Guy
could’ve just as easily turned the gun on you.”
I climbed out in front of 2674. By then, the sky was streaked with pink and
yellow light. It was already Thanksgiving Day.
A few hours later, my mother arrived. No worries, she brought the wine, which
we immediately opened. She held and rocked Suzanne as I told her the story, and
she made all of the appropriate expressions of sympathy and horror in all of the
right places. My mother understood. After that, she, Dennis and I put together our
holiday dinner, an Oven Stuffer roaster and mashed potatoes with none of the other
fixin’s. Still, the way we saw it, we had plenty to be thankful for.
In the weeks that followed, I kept thinking the NYPD would get right back to
me. Every day I woke up, thinking this was the day they’d call. That’s how it worked
on TV, after all. Detectives followed their leads, picked up their clues, got their
man. Always. Especially when they had an eyewitness. Instead, months passed
while I obsessed about the shooter. Life was not the same. I imagined him lurking
in every alleyway and courtyard in the neighborhood. I cut my hair short and dyed
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it brown. I trashed my pink sweatshirt. I never again pushed Suzanne in her stroller
along that route. I never again used the Kingsbridge Road subway stop.
It was the end of January when Detective Bown finally called. He’d hit a
slow period in his caseload, and his CO had asked him to get a composite in the
Valentine Avenue killing. Early the next morning, he picked up Suzanne and me
and drove us downtown, all the way downtown, to One PP, in his brown Pinto.
During our long, crazy rush-hour trip from the middle of the Bronx to the bottom
of Manhattan, Bown told me, as if to reassure me, that the case “had no priority.”
It would be solved eventually, he predicted, when somebody else “snitched out the
killer.” But it would never come to trial. It would be pleaded out.
What about the guy you had in custody? I asked. He shrugged. Wrong guy,
he said. He offered nothing more. For most of the morning, workers in the
identification unit entertained Suzanne, or vice versa, while I sat in a big room filled
entirely with mug shots. I went through scores of photos, selecting similar “types.”
After that, I looked through books of noses, eyes, ears, chins. I pointed out, for the
police artist, those that were similar. Within a couple of hours, the artist had come
up with a likeness of the murderer lurking in my mind’s eye, the one whose face I
had tried so hard not to see, and never wanted to see again. It would be printed on
a wanted flyer and distributed throughout the city.
On the way back to the Bronx, Bown repeated that the victim’s demise had
been “no great loss to humanity.” I got out at 2674, Thou Shalt Not Kill, and carried
Suzanne upstairs.
That was it, the end of it. I never again heard from the NYPD. No arrest was
ever made. The case never made its way through the Bronx County criminal justice
system. Not a word about it was ever reported in the New York City newspapers.
Somebody got away with murder.
The killing made its way, instead, through my life, my heart and mind, leaving
a small, unhealing wound. For although we moved to the suburbs of New Jersey,
a decision shaped in part by what I’d seen, I’ve never escaped the knowledge of
my own raw fear. That I’ve carried with me, and it is with me still, there, in that
scorched place where the calm, efficient murderer abides.
Sifting through my memories, I recall how Suzanne used to bob up and down
in her stroller, kicking the footrest with her heels, and honking the horn on her play
steering wheel. How she hummed and gurgled, taking in the world with her big
brown eyes. I recall how, those first months of her life, we walked, with our friends
and neighbors and their babies, for hours around the Bronx: to Poe Park, over to
Mosholu Parkway, around Montefiore Hospital, through the Botanical Gardens,
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the zoo, Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. We’d scoped out every swing and slide, every
corner playground. We were happy homesteaders, living lives of voluntary poverty,
intent upon saving, if not the world, then at least our little corner of the Bronx.
That particular Wednesday before Thanksgiving everybody else was busy, so
Suz and I went out alone. It was extraordinarily bright, with a wind so brisk it
sucked away my breath. I’d overdressed Suzanne, swaddled her in a pink blanket
in her stroller, but was, myself, wearing just a sweatshirt. I shivered, but decided
against going back upstairs for a jacket. Instead, thinking about yams and pearl
onions, and about my mother’s visit for the weekend, I pushed Suzanne forward,
north along Valentine Avenue, into the brisk November wind.
• 157
J.P. Monacell
R
That Was the Way the Only Thing That
Ever Really Mattered Began
If you have seen a snake wriggle from its old skin, you have some idea of how
discomfiting change is. Many college freshmen drop out. Lost to uncertainty. Lack
of direction. Insomnia and homesickness. During my first year at William & Mary,
I felt all of that. It produced in my midsection an actual ache. The worst of it was
that I was separated from my only intimate friend. When my class routine wound
down in the evenings, alone in my room, I would run the tuning dial of my stereo
across the spectrum and find nothing to comfort me. I missed my radio station.
WKLS. Only they knew how cool I was, how clever and eclectic. I had
happened onto its narrow FM frequency late one night when scanning the dial in
the basement at home. The station barely wavered in, like the Voice of Freedom
transmitted across enemy lines to prisoners of war. It called itself the Flagship of
the FM Rock and Roll Network, and came all the way from Bethesda, apparently
some enclave of the truly hip. The offbeat mix of psychedelic rock, blues, recorded
comedy, and ironic takes on politics acknowledged that I was smart and cool enough
to appreciate it. My station alone understood that deep within me I was unique and
worthwhile, that I was not like my unexpressive family and the high school cliques
around me. I loved WKLS. With it, I could get by without the others.
I kept these thoughts to myself. We call a person with a rich inner life “shy.”
Where does this shyness come from? My parents held back any strong feelings.
When I was small, hives would break out all over my face and chest when I saw
them scold one of my brothers, so they were doubly careful about expressing anger
or any form of unpleasantness around me. For whatever reasons, I did not develop
that spontaneous connection between mind and tongue that we think of as normal,
and when overdeveloped, we regard as droll or even charismatic. When I saw
something happen or heard someone speak, rather than toss in a carefree response,
my mind would roll and tumble, weighing the consequences. “How many ways are
there to look at this?” “If I say this or that, how will they see me, what will they do?”
By the time I had formed some response, the conversation had moved on. I was out
of place and out of time.
158
Many Mountains Moving
I learned to put on a pleasant face and stay in the shadows. In my inner
narrative, I reassured myself that some day the right girl, someone intelligent and
true, would recognize the same qualities in me, and we would find instant intimacy.
But when I arrived at William & Mary and the leaves began to fall, I felt awkward
for my isolation. There was no family to buffer me, no routine into which to fade.
I longed for that someone I had imagined. Someone who would witness my worth
and receive the good that I believed was in me.
A friend from high school started with me at college, and he met a pretty blonde
the first week. Tad was energetic and scattered. He joined a fraternity but struggled
in his classes. His Tracy impressed me, though, a bright girl with something to say
on every subject. When Tad brought her around, she made me feel comfortable in
doing what I was worst at: talking. She would ask about me and my ideas, and act
as if my views were normal.
Their romance that first semester was tumultuous. Tad and Tracy would date
and break up and date again. I became a pivot point, since Tad lived off-campus
and Tracy in the girls’ dorm near mine. They would sometimes meet at my room.
Later, Tad would hang around and ask me for advice about Tracy. Tracy would catch
me at the dining hall or the post office and ask about Tad. After a while I got tired of
Tad’s conversation. I did not understand why he fretted rather than giving in to his
attraction to her. I began to enjoy Tracy’s conversation more, even to depend on it.
She would ask about Tad, about why he would act the way he did. I couldn’t help
much there. But she would stay and chat with me, something I had rarely done.
She listened. She laughed. She treated me like a guy with something to say.
I learned Tracy’s schedule so that I could run into her more often. Then, before
Christmas break, I was surprised when she brought me a small gift. I decided that I
should give her something too. But what? Home for the break, I rummaged through
my high school yearbook office until I found the negative of a picture Tracy had
commented on, a stiff shot of Tad, me and the rest of the chess team concentrating
on a chess board. I had the photo printed poster-sized, but considered chucking
it. The odd gift would make me conspicuous. And what would she think then? I
struggled over the considerations for days. They looped through my brain like socks
in a dryer. But then I knew. I presented the poster to her. She smiled broadly and
said “That’s amazing!” Later she decorated its border with the colorful psychedelic
shapes and symbols that were popular at the time, pasted a picture of a frog in the
center of the chess board and displayed the result in her room. In the picture Tad
sits at the board and considers his move; I stand to the side and look on.
Then came the big rift. Tracy began to call me in the evenings on the dormitory’s
hall phone to update me on her latest upsets with Tad, and seek my counsel. I was
Nonfiction
• 159
uncomfortable talking on the subject, unable to speak my feelings of disgust for
Tad, not wanting to be disloyal to a friend. But it felt good to speak with her, while
I sat on the cold tile floor and my dorm mates stepped over me. To speak of hurt
and love and commitment. We talked on and on.
When back in my room, I wondered what to do. Tell Tad he was a fool? Tell
Tracy to forget him—or not to call, for I was too tender to bear the weight they
placed on me? Withdraw and try to forget them both? I could do nothing.
Until Valentine’s Day. I opened my mailbox that morning and found a handmade
valentine from Tracy. What did it mean? I walked into town to see if I could find a
card for her, and scoured the racks for one with a message I myself could not form.
They said things like “Be mine” and “All my love.” There was nothing there for
“You are the best girlfriend for my friend, ever!” I chose one anyway, with a frog on
the cover. I put it in her mailbox and looked to run into her during the day, then at
dinner. She did not appear. Finally, Tracy phoned after dinner, telling me she had
been pleased to get my card. But I let the conversation die out. I was not in the
mood for chitchat.
I returned to my room, suffering from some red, taunting feeling akin to anger.
Before I could close my door, I knew I had made a mistake. I knew I had to act.
I strode to the phone and told Tracy we had to talk. She seemed surprised, but
said I should meet her in a few minutes outside of her dorm, even though it was
already dark and getting chilly. I had intended to tell her there that she needed to
stop teasing me, that it wasn’t fair, that it was too painful. But when I saw her, calm
and friendly, instead, we just began to walk. For some reason I took her hand. It
seemed natural enough to her and we went on in silence. When we came under a
streetlight I hesitated, wondering where we were going and what I would say. Tracy
looked into my eyes as if with a question. I leaned in and kissed her.
I broke out of nearly twenty years of isolation that night. Tracy and I went on
walking together and have ever since. She likes to tease me about why I would wait
until we were standing under a streetlight to kiss her. That I had about knocked her
over. That I was only one of a dozen friends who received her valentines that year.
It doesn’t matter. That was the way the only thing that ever really mattered began.
Mixed Genre
Mixed Genre
 163
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
R
Shadow
A hawk circles my mother’s home. Black-brown with two-foot wings. A gavilán,
the name of her street. It comes for the Mexican hen she carried from the roadside
bushes to a silver-wire cage. She’ll be watering her back yard fairy roses when a
shadow slices across the grass. Or resting her eyes in the den when a shriek cracks
the porcelain silence. Once, she parted her dining room curtains to a silhouette in
the opposing pine. No shout, or prayer, can bend the predator’s gaze.
She awakens one morning to a cry. Outside her window, dark feathers, black
talons, the silver cage rising inch by inch. Barefoot in the lawn, my mother swings a
kitchen broom five times, seven times, before the raptor arcs into the turquoise sky.
She never hears the hunter’s approach, but she senses it, feels it, sliding
across the sun.
164
Mixed Genre
Many Mountains Moving
 165
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
R
R
Echo
Release
We see the stones in a roadside arroyo, dozens, round and flat, embedded like
watermelon seeds in the pink New Mexico sand. Head out the car window, my
mother says stop.
My uncle brakes. We scramble into the sparkling glass and flowering weeds.
Shifting her weight, my mother weighs one saucer-sized stone in each hand, hot
wind tousling her chestnut hair. In the shiny black ovals of her Jackie O sunglasses,
I see myself.
We fill the trunk of our ‘67 Comet until the axle groans.
Back home near the Rio Grande, the stones clatter from our wheelbarrow onto
the grass as if we’ve emptied a chest of doubloons. A wishing well, my mother says,
reading my thoughts, stirring the pile with her sandal toe. Her grandparents had a
cistern on their rancho. Each morning, she stepped into the chill air, stars prickling
the blue-velvet sky, to lower a bucket into the bottomless hole, rope sliding through
her fingers, anticipating the splash, the icy water, the droplets dribbling away like
pearls. And when she called out to the depths, her voice always answered.
In her eyes, I see myself before our own well, leaning over our cool stone hollow,
pitching a dime inside, shouting my name, waiting for a reply.
My mother and uncle spend weeks mixing cement, laying stones tight as teeth,
sinking poles for a thatched Russian olive roof. I hold the garden hose to keep the
slurry moist.
And yet, the mortar never quite holds. The well remains unfinished. For years,
the stones lie in the tangled grass, scattered like change.
Cobwebs grow thick between the bare studs of my mother’s unfinished studio,
shrouding the skylight in dusty gauze. Shoulder strained from dragging a rain barrel,
she cannot raise a broom high enough to sweep the mesh away. In the evenings,
gray sheets drift like ghosts.
She opens her back door one morning to a flicker on the porch ceiling, a
hummingbird wrapped in the sticky threads. The size of her pinkie, with a bright
green face and a blood-red throat, the hatchling flaps, hops, and wriggles, but
becomes more entangled.
My mother lifts her hands, winces.
A day earlier, while weeding irises, she heard shrieks and whistles from the
trumpet vine covering her wishing well. Male hummingbirds were chasing their
offspring from the honey-scented blossoms. Frantic chicks circled the grove, but
could not enter the nests within.
Gritting her teeth, my mother drags out a kitchen chair among her rolled
canvases, broken frames and dried oil paints. Stepping up to the skylight, she scans
the skeleton beams for the teardrop body of a black widow spider. Seeing none, she
holds her breath, swallows the shoulder stab, and reaches through the webbed veil
as if passing her fingers through flame.
Wings buzz, buzz again. The needle beak opens without a sound.
From her housedress pocket, my mother removes a damp cloth, and passes
it over the downy feathers as if dabbing an open wound. The bird remains still,
soothed by the slow caress.
Head low, my mother shuffles through the grass to the well.
Gazing up, she opens her hands.
166
Many Mountains Moving
Gábor G. Gyukics
R
Flying Trapeze Clubs
A usual night on the New York subway. Almost the same crowd every time, yet
new faces show here and there. One emerges. A tall, lean, well-dressed black
man with whiskers on his chin. Obviously, he plans to throw himself under the
commuting spotlight. Everyone is waiting, staring at him. He takes his time,
smooths his trousers; then he goes off.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not the 10 o’clock A train, this is a moving
condominium where I’m hiding from my wife. She lives in South Carolina. She’s so
fat I walk around her and I can’t find my way back. It means I’m not homeless. I’m
lost. Man, I’m so broke I can’t pay attention.” It seems he timed it. The train stops; he gets off and disappears. Everyone’s teeth
hang out of their mouths. He got what he begged for and escaped with an encore.
Poetry
Jeffrey Ethan Lee, S e n i o r P o e t ry E d i t o r
Debra Bokur, Erik Nilsen and Patrick Lawler, P o e t ry E d i t o r s
Poetry
b 169
Dilruba Ahmed
R
The 18th Century Weavers of Muslin
Whose Thumbs Were Chopped
(after Agha Shahid Ali)
They became extraneous.
By some brutal magic
those who spoke ingrezi
fashioned rice into cotton, made
slaves of them all.
*
Tonight
you’re bewitched by a market
full of visions. Lit candles
wink and warn as rickshaws
approach, revealing pyramids
of oranges, drums of green
coconut, a man with pale
cabbages piled on top
of his head.
*
What you’ve heard
of the weavers is no alchemy, it’s true:
they could have woven
you a cloth as fine as pure mist.
170
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
b 171
Maureen Alsop and Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Beyond silk. Beyond gossamer.
Twenty yards in a matchbox
like folded air. Or fifteen
through a golden band, diaphanous.
*
R
Chiaroscuro body
Wigwam Motel, Holbrook Arizona the Gateway to Big Surf
Later,
will their stories vanish, too?
No traveler, no trader will recall
their wizardry among jute
rugs on the street, silken saris,
notched sugar cane, earthy
tea leaves that crumble—while absence
pulses like the phantom
thumbs. Hush child, my eyes
are so tired.
*
Beyond the halfglow of the city, a pond stagnates
full of plastic bags where someone
bathes his feet and dreams of
braiding his lover’s hair.
A matchbook’s clean awakening of sage, my duty
of silence to remain silent
as she waters her thin writs—a little tattoo
stitch, insoluble lines, old choices
carry time as tree rings under gold bracelets
shimmer of violet veins. Her
tattoo, a mistranslation of flames, exploits
the truth of cigarette burns stubbing an inappropriate
memory. When a girl renames herself Paradise,
she’s begging for trouble. She is yet
the familiar equation,
\
like my old argument, ouroboros or
, a tattoo
I once thought of having,
her long bird heart, her frozen face
as something I might hold in my hand but floating
just beyond reach of my hand. Maybe
it was her question of the light
and the light going, her voodoo doll
of an arm trembling, so I wouldn’t need
the realness of her warmth when remembering
the night, the mind’s plain
order of stars, the far water an imprint
of how she might be with me
no longer
172
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
James Arthur
obscure as theory. Chiaroscuro
of naming. Eyes, distant suns, matching
tattoos as a conversation
She is a martyr without a
persecution. Not even sweet nothings. Just
nothings, and the girl
peeling her blouse slowly in the damp
fluorescence. Her movements
to be misread as both coy
and unremitting, some
butterfly burning into an embrace
some strange courage inking
a name, like layers of ash,
reincarnation of a name:
Lady Jane,
or that I might smolder
lowering into her touch, a kerosene
flutter over skin.
R
Charms Against Lightning
Against meningitis and poisoned milk,
flash floods and heartwreck, against daydreams
Against losing your fingers, drinking detergent,
earthquakes, baldness, divorce, against
falling in love with a child
Against lupus and lawsuits, lying stranded between nations,
against secrets and frostbite, the burring of trains
that never arrive
Against songlessness, your mother’s depression,
the death of the cedars, Siberian crane
Against these talismans against lightning;
the shutters swing, and clack their yellow teeth;
the deep sky welters and the windows quiver
b 173
174
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
Judy Bebelaar
R
April
Sometimes a November morning
is blue as cornflowers
still as a painted bird.
Irene’s skin is translucent.
She says If it weren’t for being sick,
I’d like this time of my life,
Things moving so slowly.
And the book is almost finished.
We look at some of the pages.
It will be simpler than this,
more space on the page,
a picture between each section.
In London, on the way to the Royal Shakespeare,
she didn’t want me to take her picture
in the back of the cab.
I wish I had.
She was wearing the red scarf I gave her.
She looked beautiful and happy,
sitting next to John.
Now we go to the kitchen,
share a fig, miso soup.
She tells me about Hawaii.
I couldn’t go out much, too sick.
But these wonderful small birds,
finches, we think,
built their nest of coconut fibers
right on the bedroom window sill,
just outside the screen.
It even had a roof,
and by the day we had to leave,
there were five tiny eggs.
We go to the computer;
she finds the birds for me.
The nest is a brown bower,
ragged and sweet.
Then she is tired.
We go back to her bedroom.
I open the window to blue sky, tree, breeze.
She doesn’t say she’s in pain.
I keep it way up here on the dresser
so the dog won’t find it.
The lollypop is methadone.
She climbs back into bed.
I say, I’m going to buy bulbs
at the nursery. Shall I buy you some too?
Then I bite my tongue.
Certain phrases, topics
must be approached with care:
next spring, or in the summer.
I count six months.
That’s what she said on the phone.
Six months. April.
Not tulips, they would bloom in May, maybe June.
Daffodils, or hyacinth?
I’ll get both of us paper white narcissus.
I say.
You can put them in a bowl indoors.
They’ll think it’s spring.
She is straddling two worlds.
What’s unsaid is palpable as dignity, as death.
Her eyes are open.
So are mine.
But there is a terrible looseness,
a slack in the soul
that has something to do with time unraveling.
In my mind’s eye, the birds in their bower nest,
the five tiny eggs.
She sees them too.
b 175
176
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
Karina Borowicz
R
R
when i learned praying to be straight
was not useful
Nocturnes
the first time i brought a man to sweat, taught him to
offer tobacco, i came full circle. it is here i first lit fire.
and almost a decade later i return, with man. a year later
i returned, after the prayers had betrayed me, after i had
betrayed myself. and i tried not to judge the man i brought
with me. perhaps we always judge those learning what
we are ourselves. perhaps that is what we offer the fire: to
burn and renew, Ancestors working though it for us in the
flames. a year prior, here, praying to be straight, praying
to be anything other than what i was: a lover of man. here
i returned, unalone, with family. i had not expected to be
the one teaching, guiding hand, voice, guiding body over
rock and stump, through kitchen, over stream by log, snow
flower, to a place where water falls, tumbling over rock
and cliff, into the first round, out the second, sometimes
all four, him still learning new lungs, through the heat and
dark new breath.
something healed in me there. who knew in the loving of
another man, gentle, from a distance, i’d partake of new
waters, smell pine anew, count lichens of trees, rejoice in
swarmings of ladybugs on an evening shirt. who knew i’d
offer words to someone who didn’t know them, but heard
them resonate in, quill, quiver, from before birth. who
knew i’d be teacher, and in the teaching, taught: a new
drum singing in my chest, rhythm playing through our
bodies, all the notes.
For seven nights I’ve traced
the moon’s slow fall,
a weightless petal
the embers of constellations
still sizzling:
crickets in the grass.
***
The way a fallen tree
blossoms fungi
I woke holding the ripening
mushroom of a dream.
***
Manmade star
growing smaller above the ocean
is there something besides a steady gaze
that holds you up?
And yet, how many lives packed
in rows behind the tiny light,
dozing, no doubt, with headphones on
a stewardess prowling the aisle
with a chilled pitcher
of water.
b 177
178
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
Richard Carr
R
Dead Wendy: The Boy’s Version
I
There are no nurses here—no pills, no machines.
The sickbed is all the comfort you will get,
useless as kind words: sleep well… sweet dreams…
For like the goldfish in the dark pond outside,
a thought moves clearly in your mind:
I must not sleep. I must remain cold.
Murmuring in a fever of decay,
you must give me your last words again.
Whatever doesn’t form a scar, I forget.
Your eyes were blue. Or if not blue, then mirrors
and dazzling like a whirlwind of pigeons by the fountain—
a tiny, furious scene… Let me cool your forehead.
I’ll visit again in the morning
after the rain soaks through to you, curled in your lair,
and the grackles rise from the lawn,
singing their rough song.
Are you listening?
I love you. I don’t know you anymore.
You watch the faces of tongueless visitors
swim past each other among floating coffee cups.
One might surprise you—it’s been so long—
if our old friend can climb the stairs.
You look toward him
as you look toward death.
III
The lilacs bloomed that May in continuous rain.
Limping under his black umbrella, the old man
pried at us with his eyes.
Time and age pried at us—but could not divide us
as we strolled by the mere in the park,
our magnificent smiles turned inward.
But love, you start to say, is just as helpful as...
or unreal as... These cold nights. No one visits
at midnight, or three, or at liquid dawn. Unreal...
You close your eyes to think, always thinking,
and fall asleep. You smile in your sleep, and ask for water.
And I know you, Wendy—I know you are drowning.
You had a plan, inexplicable Wendy.
At the last moment you would fill up life with riches,
mahogany and gold, yes, but also wild shrubs and unstoppable rain,
and in blossoming fulfillment of the dream
we traveled to England, your strange ancestral homeland,
to face death—or cure it—with civility and tea.
II
I can speak with the dead, subterranean Wendy,
just as I can talk to dirt and wood
in their own farfetched dialects.
Here are your bones, under the elm’s massive roots.
I brush away the soil and bark
and squeeze the skull by the cheeks.
The estate was grand. But the palace was odious.
The drugs were killers, the clinic a front
for a hospice infested with foregone conclusions.
We woke behind heavy curtains,
and as we drew them open, time rolled forward like thunder,
and we knew you had to die.
b 179
180
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
IV
We’ll go slowly. By jet
the transatlantic flight is too long for talk
but deep enough for tears,
if you want. Put your head on my shoulder.
Just this last difficult sleep
separates the garden of England
from tomorrow. From the doctor
we learned only how to take blood.
He doodled on a pad and said
obey. One word might have been love.
But I was looking at it upside down.
We had better go slowly.
We reach the pinewoods, in due time,
and you row to the old man’s cabin across the lake.
Crossing over, night heron, your clear dusk voice
reaches me from the far shore
long after you’ve stopped waving
and gone indoors.
Kiley Cogis
R
Barn Party
Men are being laid off
at the Frito Lay plant,
and John says
what a miserable existence.
The Milky Way’s visible,
and Mars has been out for days.
Through a telescope, it appears
as the size of a nickel,
an areola, a bottle-top.
Ladies jump up and down
to see if the hay loft floorboard
will hold their weight.
The hostess shakes her ass
as if it wasn’t attached.
I break the fancy fish bottle-opener.
John smokes beside the bonfire,
tossing beers into the flame
just to watch them explode.
b 181
182
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
Matthew Cooperman
R
spool 6
what habits solve
this weary thrush
life returns rewinds
with the bird
does not agree
with the need
my darling patience
to be daily
how we are
and aren’t and
how I am
this difficult man
me who wants
and wants avaricious
ideas and projects
the set design
the clear life
grows murky in
thirst more thirst
love actually solves
by being enough
capacious stillness dust
on stars on
the near hedge
put the luggage
down I yearn
a paradox true
enough for be
enough for you
§
how do we
enter by luck
or fate the
scroll making call
history let’s say
just today a
poem by accident
in this life
a thee you
are who came
riding a bike
by my garden
who said it
would be by
planting and watching
rewards are visible
make this page
glow my Hottentot
we all have
good and bad
inside ourselves a
self like a
locket of ginger
what we spring
in dreams or
noses a basic
impulse to look
up let’s hope
we are not
entombed some black
fly in white
ink formers ladders
climbing rights we
can be better
§
b 183
184
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
an absence makes
a “heart full
of chest” and
an absence takes
a political turn
prisoner of intimate
trillings the sky
here or in
Sudan a wide
mouth a planet
fragments and you
move away I
am southed and
missing anew arms
in a cell
in a tank
what lightening said
shantih shantih shantih
hunger comes only
after rain the
bright clear embellishment
a pure luxury
writing today desire
is time and
space not only
bodies a black
eye Susan she’s
hazel green finches
in every flower
on which to
sing sing all
prisoners want presence
eye a time
being binding thing
§
dearest rewinder these
times of alone
before bed please
pack a sack
and two epiphanies
for son a’thwart
tomorrow daughter also
doctor visit will
need to be
changed the couch
is aesthetically something
and so comfy
for dreaming it’s
late you’re gone
we’re so alone
b 185
186
Poetry
Many Mountains Moving
Dana Curtis
Dan Flore III
R
R
Problems with the Soundtrack
tap water
Subbasement: she puts together possibilities that aren’t
really possible—need to be rejected—completely
inappropriate: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” “I’m so Bored
with the USA,” and “My Wife and
My Dead Wife” just don’t cut it for
whatever might be in mind. She’ll keep
going down: no end to
the underground and she wishes
it was a revolutionary arm
holding a handful of violence, colored
like a film—so wrong.
She’s aware of the preference
for silence, for bright, garish
pigment washing down like
a Tilt-A-Whirl outside some used
car lot along with a couple of half
dead ponies offering rides to
children who know better and make
a point of being elsewhere. It’s a problem.
“She’s Like Heroin to Me,” “Only Happy
When It Rains,” “ This Year’s Girl:” she’s blasting,
ruining the speakers in a food
stench like a fine
restaurant open only to disease. “The French
Inhaler,” “Precious,” “Brutal,” “Lithium.”
The director doesn’t care, and this
really isn’t her job. Perhaps something
classical, something that requires a real live
orchestra in the pit: she’s off
to that pathetic cluster
of rides and games. She thought
she could save a horse and she’s sick of
being wrong.
I am only the dash
between years on the tombstone
a fear tumor
my mind seeping snippets of Johnny Cash
and her curled against the wall
who will consume me
little boy in the
onion grass
I drift into fortune and am
persuaded by hail storms
I need to know only the silence between
nuggets of ice
rooms are motionless, hazy
build me an altar
of cardinals and wet grass
open fields, a dog in the crest of a wave
I am a sparrow without white
only dried mud
my bearings at the foot of the cross
hear my gait
my stripped, bare mind
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Becca Hensley
R
Daughter Notes
I make momentous mornings
brushing hair,
my daughter’s burnt sienna
beach grass in a storm
head of furry string.
She vamps now,
nine years old,
posing with pouty
lips in the mirror,
kissing the glass
to leave a rosy mark
that impresses her,
makes fear thud me
like a door flung open.
But at night
she hugs her Nanababy
and sleeps beside me
too afraid to be alone
in her day room,
that place lined with pop
idol’s slick disingenuous grins
that she takes for reality.
They urge her toward adulthood in the afternoons,
whisper their lyrics
like lullabies.
I know that soon
she will sleep with them,
feel their flesh upon her,
bury her nose
in their hairless,
spice-scented chests.
On that day,
she will take the brush
from my hand,
bite her lips, and
style her own long hair.
b 189
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Becca Hensley
R
Giving Birth to Mother
The day my father died
I gave birth to my mother;
She slipped from me,
a flash flood of lifetimes
A torrent of primal cries
a gust of bitter yew—
And then handed me the towel
to mop up her bloody bundle
from the deep scratches
long carved on our kitchen floor.
I looked down at her,
She who always had been taller,
And noticed the gray
gone from her hair,
the light that shone through tears
the sinewy strength of her newborn being,
even, as she announced that now
she would be called Rose—
and, we were not to call her mother.
Colorful serpent,
she shed her skin,
grew limbs and lips that knew no limits,
until like an unsteady toddler
she walked in zigzags across the land,
all the while looking forward
with half blinded eyes,
not toward barren backward,
where the garden had been.
I wanted to tell my father the news,
Speak through the dirt to his ashes
reveal the wonders of her renaissance,
consult him on what he’d released.
But I felt I myself a hollow mother
with a child I didn’t know how
to herd or corral or fashion,
unless I just sat her at the table
with the others and wiped off her words.
b 191
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Poetry
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Becca Hensley
Ed Higgins
R
R
Like an Alarm Clock
There is nearly always
I have not forgotten how to play
But Lapland nudges me awake,
shows me the orchid fingers
of a sunrise suffused with orange light
and a pinkish hallelujah.
I stop to listen
And hear the rhythmic stillness
Of miles of mounded snow
And the tiny, but continuous squeak
of a lone bicycle traversing the snow.
b 193
an explanation for the silence:
of stars, embarrassed hope, time’s contumely.
Always too the questions beside themselves,
quicker than our nimble moves to unbutton
their too tight fitting constrictions.
After loss especially, feeling for your
own sad pulse you wish wasn’t there,
light too heavy to escape the event horizon.
We sometimes call that ecstatic void
our soul. Full of density licked to fury
by the winds of coming and going
to and fro in the lowering stellar air where
calm and chaos whisper advice both,
as we listen hard to inhabited contradictions.
Our houses slide off crumbling hillsides,
eaten by the sea. All this movement carrying us back
to lives of water where only yesterday we came
from, dripping God from our loins. Not to be confused
with our also rising in perfect starlight, steep-turning angels.
Or as in the glint of flying fish. Their impulse
for racing above calm or turbulent waters with
a message we only wish to understand, unravel
through thinking, breathing in salt-flecked wonder,
entering fleeing forms of being or becoming.
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Poetry
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Elijah Imlay
Ruth Moon Kempher
R
R
What We Were Looking For
Data: For the Heirs, Whoever
We pried the door of an empty
roadside chapel with windows
boarded up. I liked
how neglected it was, how simple,
an abandoned afterthought
like how I viewed myself,
not important enough to be
labeled a ruin. But they chose me
to lead us, perhaps because
I did yoga, even on guard duty,
getting high on breathing.
We lit candles and sat in a circle.
Lewis settled in, his eyes smiling.
Gaddy sang gospel to warm things up.
McKittrick prayed the way
he blew his trombone, cheeks
turning red. We sent
a field of energy in all directions,
like Bird did with his squad,
hoping they would never kill
or be killed. We pictured clouds
of light, sun-gold or roseate,
green for life, blue for the freedom
of sky, wrapped ourselves
and our loved ones, then those
we disliked. Also, the Vietnamese
who wanted us gone. Especially
them. Anyone could join.
Soldiers from either side.
Jesus and Buddha, of course.
Einstein, Martin Luther King.
Ho Chi Minh. We got lucky.
Five guys walking a dirt road
at Camp Eagle, Viet Nam.
But everything is mystery here. . . mystery of the blue
rays which blind us and your blue eyes which go through
my heart.
—Jean Cocteau, “The Secret of Blue”
Sunday morning mist, when I walked out for the paper—
an almost rain. There was a rabbit, by the bird bath
near the white azalea that’s about to bloom. At least
maybe I saw a rabbit. I was thinking, no one but me remembers
that big, ripe bush came from my mother, and O my Lord
it’s March again, twenty-eight years later.
Maybe it was a ghost rabbit. Two of my dogs—was it Jane
and Summer?—beagle and shepherd—killed a rabbit here
I was on my way somewhere. Late to the airport.
Poor rabbit deserved a better burial, a better fate, a ceremonial
out in the woods. The histories tangle. A black rooster
died under the house, when all the pipes froze
I bought the purple-pink azaleas first (they’re already blooming:
are always earlier) out at that place on Old Dixie Highway
where Pappy’s shrimp place fell in. Brought them
home, in big tin pails, and my mother in her hospital bed
asked me, did I buy a white one, pressing sweaty dollars
into my hand. She wasn’t able to visit often. My dogs
were always too much for her. But she insisted. A white one.
Rain is important for azaleas. Those first years, I watered
just to keep them all going. Tried hydrangeas, too, but
b 195
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they need too much. Camellias shriveled up. Twenty-eight years
this month, and there was no fence then. Jane was a pup
someone abandoned. Dirt road draws despicable folks.
Somehow she managed to get herself under the porch step.
One year it rained so much, our creek flooded. A back-hoe
driver, power company guy, gave me a lift, just over
the railroad tracks. They were paving the road then. But here now
it’s Sunday. Cars flash by; it’s a freeway. That rabbit
enjoys wet grass. I’ve been remiss about the forsythia—
nobody’d know it came with me from Georgia. Lola, part beagle
like Jane—thinking about the road that made the fence needed
reminds me—Lola didn’t come out with me for the paper.
(I’m writing this for Jane and Lola, probably, and that rabbit.
And my mother, and the forsythia, that’s being choked out
by palmetto.) I walked out for the paper, from working
on a paper about Jean Cocteau and the color blue, left Lola
inside, waiting for her breakfast—she still loves mornings
and breakfast. All this stuff that nobody knows
seemed all at once important. As rain is. Whatever happens
don’t cut down that tall crookedy pine tree right out front
by the bird bath and the white azalea. It grew up
from a tiny shoot, cracked its way up between concrete slabs
at the Georgia house. I pulled it up and put it in a pot
and hung small Christmas bells on it, took it with me
to a motel meeting, with yes, that blue eyed salesman
before I came here. It was a love gift, like the white
azalea. Let it stay there, long as possible, even if
you don’t remember that gentle man, whose eyes were blue.
This and the rest, the billion papers were because
I do.
b 197
Ruth Moon Kempher
R
Late Night, Cassandra’s Dreaming
Left in the ditch by the lurch of
circumstance, who wouldn’t bitch?
Those other daughters and mothers, even
the wives mellowing out their plush existences
weeping, always they cry out, “O alas, alas
I’m lost!” or “I’ve lost my innocence! my youth!
my beauty!” O, pish tush. It wasn’t
all that great to begin with
was it?
“O,” I’d answer them
“O gracious goodness. Just forget it.
Consider me. I’ve forgotten more
than most remember.”
Life in the Palace
with those occasional suppers on the terrace
overlooking tall tapering Tuscan cypress—
how could I have left that?
It was one of those
awkward weekends, over the pasta
all that Chianti, a dreamy ballad
violins and singers
he, O Lord, ever the realist
remarked on the overload of
carbohydrates bringing on dropsy
and there in my corner, like Cinderella
countless straw sprigs
stuck to my apron. . .
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I loved him smack dab into exile.
An olive tree in Greece is just like a Trojan
olive tree, he says, with a little wink, little
knowing, as I did, we walked straight
into terror.
(It’s the wine red blood
that haunts me, the rasp
of bloody breathing in that tub.) If I could
I’d staunch the memory, before it happened—
just how like many another, I was young
and loving, and lost. I could tell them.
But no one listens. I sit silent
peeling a pomegranate—
the knife’s a sliver in my heart.
b 199
Ruth Moon Kempher
R
Offshore Postcard: Aeolian Islands
Laid along the haze of shore are the usual Mediterranean houses
like building blocks, white with black (possibly obsidian) window—
spaces. At breakfast, a man named Schwartz was telling me
obsidian was mined here, and to look for artifacts, cheap. Ochre
archways hang there, higher on the hillside, where one church wall
catches sunlight in Moorish curves. Its steeple clanks, calling for
attention, tinny. A hydrofoil ferry, the Giovanni Bellini, glides by
pale blue, with a whirl of sonar blades—it’s from Palermo. It’s
altogether too peaceful. The Wind God, Resident, Inhabitant
(that’s the Guide’s description) lurks somewhere in a cavern—
thinking up new sport, new tricks. Someone whistles. The eye
of a serpent, unblinking, is seen obsidian, somewhere in a poem.
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Sandra Kohler
Minter Krotzer
R
R
Transit
Pontchartrain Beach
Departure day. Dulles, four pm, waiting
for seat assignments, permission to board.
Everyone’s bored, restless, fretful, stalled,
not knowing where or if they’ll move, arrive;
whether the trip will go as planned, reach a
destination anticipated, dreaded, longed for,
viewed only as the next thing to be endured.
The mind turns, stalls, returns: that sense
of having forgotten something leaving home
engenders: first banal, did you turn off lights, stop
the paper, lock the cellar door? But then something
you can’t name: essential to your life, forgotten not
in departure but years ago, ignored as it vanished
from consciousness: a job you’d promised to do
upon which someone’s fate hung; medication
you should have been taking for years to prevent
a life-threatening disease; an infant, a child,
a dependent, helpless but for you, from whom
you’d walked away, blind, oblivious. Now
it floods your mind, bursts on it too late, past
all consequence: agonized comprehension
of what you’ve abandoned, caused to be lost,
how you’ve betrayed your moral existence:
consciousness become hell.
b 201
We were not the kind of family who went to amusement parks.
We begged our parents to go just like we begged them for a puppy.
Finally they caved in. One summer evening we made the expedition out to
Pontchartrain Beach – an amusement park next to the lake in New Orleans.
We drove all the way down Elysian Fields instead of taking I-10.
In the distance you could see the lights at the end of the avenue:
the bright constellation of the rollercoaster, the word “Zephyr” following
its curve into the sky, the Ferris wheel, and the Ragin’ Cajun.
At the entrance palm trees welcomed you.
My parents didn’t know how these things went. They bought us each three tickets for
rides. Three tickets is that all? We asked. Three tickets my father confirmed.
It was so hard to decide which ride to take. There were so many:
the Ferris wheel, bumper cars, the haunted house and the Zephyr. My sisters and I stood
next to the children made of wood, with smiles painted on their faces,
to make sure we were tall enough for each ride. But we were not the right height for
the scary rides and so we resigned ourselves to Kiddieland and the Zephyr Junior. After
the rides, we begged for carnival food: cotton candy, peanuts and pretzels. My parents
refused, explaining we were going to dinner somewhere outside of the park, a grown-up
kind of place. We left just when the Friday night dates were arriving, teens with long
hair, holding hands and wearing tight jeans.
At Casa Carmella, a small Mexican restaurant on Elysian Fields, Papa ordered chicken
with mole sauce and explained that mole meant chocolate. My parents returned to
themselves at dinner, drinking margaritas on the rocks with salt, enjoying the unusual
food and the peace away from the amusement park. Later on, when they talk about
that night, our one trip to an amusement park, they only mention the restaurant with
the mole sauce and how it was the best they ever had. There’s no talk of Pontchartrain
Beach and all of the rides but that’s what you remember when you are a child: the
Zephyr and the wooden children. Not the mole sauce.
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Jenna Le
R
Circe’s Blues
He’s not man enough for me.
Not man enough to suck gold ore
out of an egg-shaped hunk of black basalt.
Not man enough to tickle the double reed
of the devil’s oboe with his tongue.
Not man enough to play his instrument loud and long,
till each glass goblet in my scullery
vibrates at the same holy frequency.
Not man enough to wrap his lips around the margin
of a red umbrella.
Not man enough to hum around a mouthful
of damp red taffeta.
Not man enough to forgo carrying the same
umbrella when it rains,
or to admit he fears rain,
or to overcome his fear of rain.
Man enough to eat venison, but not man enough
to play a harmonica made of deer-flesh.
Man enough to sail the seas, but not enough to let
himself drift to sleep in the boat.
Afraid of being drowned while asleep, but even more
fearful of sleeping where the Sirens
might hiss words of obsessive love into ears
he never knew he had.
b 203
Luljeta Lleshanaku
translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
R
Citadine Hotel, Berlin
Evening. Two or three taxis line up in a row
waiting for someone who’s lost.
The room, just as I left it this morning
only the sheets have been changed
by hands I have never known
only the rain taps lightly against the window
like a withered bouquet of flowers.
The message on the answering machine is still there
the voice of a man
looking for a woman who slept here months earlier
a woman who had wiped herself dry with these same towels
clean and perfumed.
I replay it several times
piece together their past
try to avoid the question: “What might have happened next?”
A telephone call from a phone booth
and then he arrives hurriedly and, perhaps, with great longing.
His lips wipe make-up off my face
carelessly and without pause
as the understudy does after the show.
Finally, I lie down on the bed
made by anonymous hands
stretching out among my lost words
(anxious, hurried questioning)
like a silk bookmark
between newly read pages of a book. 204
Poetry
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Luljeta Lleshanaku
Luljeta Lleshanaku
translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
R
R
For Nights We Can Never Relive
The Television Owner
All that has happened is
someone’s conscience
has gone haywire:
our past three years, collected
in the pages of a diary
lie scattered beneath cliffs.
Our silhouettes on the bed
look like a pair of scissors
left wide open
rusted bolt at its center.
Your breathing: thin, quiet.
Mine: dense, troubled.
Dispersed unevenly
we are like crumbs
cast off after a rushed meal.
b 205
His roof more red than others, and above it
the television antenna
vibrating like a shrub on the edge of a cliff—
the only one among fifty houses.
They called him “the orphan” when he was a child
and the nickname stuck
and grew like a scar along his body.
He built his house by himself and then bought a television;
wolves attack the throat
where prey is most vulnerable.
His gate stands wide open in the evenings,
an orgy of shoes in the corridor.
“Goal!” and “Ah!” crystallize in the air,
and his elbows tuck in during sad movies.
He never forgets a bone for his dog
and the coffee is always freshly brewed.
They call him “the television’s owner” now,
a nickname he likes. More than anyone he knows
his identity is not a question of a proper noun, but of a possessive.
He admires visitors
while they admire his blue tube.
Each envies the other. A chain.
A caravan drawn to an oasis
on the dunes.
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b 207
Martin Ott
Marc Paltrineri
R
R
Air Force Academy Framed By Mountains
In The Vast And Unmapped Empty
A giant bomber guards the gates
in a stand of shivering pines.
From the overpass, the entrance
to aerial superiority is clouded.
Killing from a great height requires
the confidence of a God raining
death, or no God. Idyllic beauty
brings solace to homesick men:
mountain streams, woodland belts,
wildlife exposed. Above the base,
white-capped sentinels hunch
over training flights. These monoliths
have survived shaking earth, raised
imperfection. A plane fin shimmies
like a pine bough in winter winds
or a man’s navigating life’s course.
Birds soar between the peaks,
the only survivors of dinosaurs
that crushed trees into stone.
Perspective is a moving target.
Great factories and silos suddenly turn to flames
sparked by dust in Nebraskan blue skies.
So fierce and full of gusto, the green lady
holds her New York lighter and her book of souls.
Waiting for the train, we notice the dead praying at the third rail
and then the dark of tunnels arrives on its nocturnal breath.
Through the platform and through the street,
it’s either raining or bats are singing like rusted shopping carts,
the dumpsters filling with expired food. Still, the race goes on.
The bars fill with politicians, journalists
are arrested in the streets and all the songs that have been sung about this
are blowing in a dust bowl somewhere in the wind
and the road to glory, littered with Coke cans and bank receipts,
does not lead to the better world. The structure has rotted
on the black molded stilts and the water deepens with the roofs of the poor.
Through forests and through suburbs the children go looking for meat
while the old hound dog sleeps like bourbon at his master’s boot.
It becomes summer too late in the season and some consider
moving to France. The fallout since the last one, still
dusting the countryside, settles in a vast field of corn. So sweet,
the wind still tastes of sugar and smoke.
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Donna Prinzmetal
R
Kaltblütig: Snow White
Having no effect on myself
a mirror erased me.
—Brenda Shauhnessy
The first time I died
I was only seven, thorn-tangled in
brambles, needle-squatting, bratwurst-red swollen
toes, ten fingers outstretched batting away phantoms
under the canopy of evergreens
that kept me prisoner from the light.
The raw wind stopped my blood there, turned
me sallow, my fingertips ash blue.
Kaltblütig. This is the only story
I ever tell; this story
is never old. I open the dark
diary of the one lost waif and I find myself,
her Liebchen, her shadow
left behind in the castle.
Did I invite my father into this catastrophe?
For a week she was eating truffles
under the speckled trellis while father made her
a nectar of kisses, forgot I was
her raving which she kept all to herself
with the moon and a cupboard of fruit. So I ran
the night hiding from wolves, reading the dustBraille with my feet, and now
knowing what I know, that death is a black swan
drinking the bile of lost girls, I wonder if
father shed one tear into that river where I washed
the blood from my face the next morning?
I remember
looking down at my thin-skinned knees
to beg the hunter for my life
because it was all I could do, all anyone would do
banished into
that hungry night, cold morning stew, the liver,
with shallots scrambled into her eggs,
she would eat, imagining it
mine.
b 209
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Kate Rogers
Hal Sirowitz
R
R
Pan-fried Fish
A Log Cabin From Scratch Scrumptious mahjong
clacks its ivory teeth
the sound a Sunday imperative
in Hong Kong. Decisive
as the pile driver
in the huge hole on the corner.
Pan-fried fish is never arbitrary, either,
pungent as sex and that ocean
we swam in my bed for five days.
No need to jog for exercise that week.
Though we did pause enmeshed
like the rogue orchid
colonizing the crack on my
concrete roof, sweating nectar.
I look down at my dog
and notice a small log
in her mouth. She soon
sees another log and
wants that one, too,
as though she had plans
to build a log cabin. She’s
now making the necessary
calculations and tests to see
whether she can carry both.
She can’t. She can only
carry one at a time. She’ll
never be the Abraham Lincoln
of dogs and live in a log cabin
built by her own paws.
b
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212
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D. L. Stein
R
Leaving Greece
Glad to be leaving, my dream of Greece
had gone on too long, I had come to Greece
too late. Sun beat on skin eyes head
Like a hammer, exhausting the quest
for one more temple
one more path between rocks
Oleander and cairns, the cemetery
of them in Samaria, the view gone
in a haze of heat shimmer, the Libyan Sea
After twelve miles a cold mercy. I could
smell Africa’s volcanoes, cocobolo,
and hear chains winding into anchors
Of the slave ships. But Greece would not let me go.
The taxi for the ferry at Spetses
never came, and the flight from Athens missed,
we had to drag our suitcases back for the night.
Had taken off by boat and left it, the next day
limped back and forth. I was glad
when the plane finally took off and I put
kali taxidi1, drachmas, and parakalo2 away,
Could forget the play by Aeschylus in the pine grove,
torches around the stage, and moonlight
on the Aegean like chips of gold.
At Vouliamegni waiting for you, I paced the cliffs
as mast hardware clanked ya soo 3. I was glad
not to be thinking about partisans
in the mountains of Crete
Picking off Germans, then each other, betrayals
remembered to this day, relieved not
to be pondering the mystery of life
at Delphi while a tortoise struggled uphill.
I was glad finally flying over the worn brown earth
that is Greece, the tiny box of the Parthenon
being repaired, and finally so glad at home
I dreamed I was at Sounion
Above clear water with each stone a size, a color,
staring at the route ships took
for Athens, one with black sails luffing.
I was glad to finally leave the island.
Who can stand so much white heat,
octopi drying in the old harbor, bats squeaking
from olive trees at dusk in the interior?
And boys we yelled at for throwing stones
at a pregnant cat waited a few beats
before aiming them at us; the collie
that trotted on the quay as if someone
kali taxidi: good journey
parakalo: please
3
ya soo: hi, or hello.
1
2
b 213
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Alison Stone
Alison Stone
R
R
Dancing
Hunger
This is our new dance,
my mother calls out, suddenly
unable to walk, as my father half drags,
half carries her down the hall.
Once she dressed for dancing in big earrings,
shimmery gowns. I watched her
twist her thick hair, then paint
her suddenly mysterious face.
My father watched the clock.
Fumbling with buttons, she tried
to soothe him, Soon, I promise.
He grumped out to wait in the car. I helped her
raise her zipper, clasp a strand of pearls. Her hands shook
when he honked the horn.
Days of couch to bathroom, chair to bed,
the living room and back. Despite bursitis
he does it, my mother wrapped
in a bathrobe, scarves and wig discarded,
apologizing, This is too much for you.
Step, pause, shuffle, shift of weight,
step, step, turn, my father
watching her, his movements slow and tender
as though they had all the time in the world.
They have to wait to bury my mother
until my daughter stops nursing.
She had slept in a padded basket
while I stood wooden between my husband and my father;
people droned my mother’s praises
and the coffin loomed.
Now she wakes and roots, all hunger.
A stranger takes us to the rabbi’s study. Amid clutter
of paper and books, I lift
my black shirt. Broken,
numb, I cannot image my body
will respond, but her latch draws milk down.
She sucks dreamily. So new to this world,
she knows nothing but a mother
who drips tears on her still-closing skull.
Her eyes flicker open and shut. Someone knocks,
politely rushing us. I rub her back.
Her eyes stay closed now
but the fierce gums clamp.
I wait. The knot in my throat
starts to soften. As long as she holds on,
nothing is final. The drive to the grave postponed,
my mother is still above ground, here
with her new grandchild and me.
b 215
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Bryan Walpert
R
The Winemaker’s Daughter
All autumn I have Father’s blood
on my hands, my arms and calves
and neck, these purple bruises,
and even when he does not
keep me here on the hills,
in the fields, as he does more
and more as I come into my fullness,
covered like shame by the leaves,
or shivering on the cold floor
of the factory, as the machine licks
and slaps the labels on the curved
bodies of the dark bottles,
there is no way to hide to whom
I belong, as I wish to do
when I see the boy in town.
I can tell he would prefer me
pale as a fresh cake of soap,
so I rinse in the irrigation spouts,
in the pond behind the house,
in the basin in my room,
while Father’s dog follows me,
follows me, his filthy paws
scratching against the wood floor
until I kick him away,
let the water trickle down
my face, my throat, over
the tendrils of hair that creep
down the back of my neck,
and for a moment I forget.
Each new grape is an ache,
a thought breaking into being.
I would let them die on the vine.
I would rather lie here on my bed,
imagining the boy as my lover;
it is he climbing the trellis,
slithering through the window,
he licking the ink
from even the arches of my feet,
his warm tongue that I can feel
even now slide its hunger up my calf.
That dog, that dog. Out,
out damn Spot.
b 217
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Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins
R
R
Hardscrabble Prairie Triptych
Sunday
——Follow Me
I know a place where barb-wire
wreathes the heaped bones of horse.
I know where we can shoulder our bright
rifles and bag a twine string
of rabbits. It’s out past the alkali basin,
right in the dark yawn of that sod-roof shack.
——It’ll Get You Every Time
See how gravel breathes the river?
How water slows and pools, now begins
to stink? I pull mussels from their nests of mud,
you work a quick knife clean
through each. There’s nothing to be done
about hope. See, no matter the stories there’s never
any pearls. We crack them open
anyway, shells bright as a boy’s eyes,
scoop out each stinking handful of meat.
——Back to the Land
Like the lovely drunk
at the Antlers we so admired,
with his blue suit and cloud bright hat,
the land here falls flat
on its back. Just dust and blue grass
and a wind bearing up dry rivers of sky.
On a two-lane highway,
somewhere south of Miles City, a boy drives
a blue diesel pickup. He’s sixteen and doesn’t
give a shit. His friends yell,
Faster. Faster. Fuck yes,
faster. They’ve peeled off their shirts. From silver cans
they gulp warm beer. It’s hot as hell,
(it’s Sunday,
fifteen years gone, but still I see them swerve and roll
over everything—
this house, my wife
in her garden, the tall grass by the fence giving
in the breeze)
so he drives faster. His friends climb
into the truck bed, shake and heave full cans of beer
to the highway, where they explode, and again
explode, those shook cans
(those stupid and lovely
boys). Now they’re at the S-curves above the river,
now no more highway but sky
(it’s Sunday—
I’m on my knees, trying to breathe this sudden
rattlesnake of wind in the trees).
b 219
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Many Mountains Moving
b 221
John Willson
John Willson
R
R
Combination, 1968
On Being Invited To Write My Last
Poem on Earth
Master® out of Milwaukee with a rusty
bolt, unearthed
while clearing the garage,
it hung on my wooden
locker, junior high.
What anchors this morning—what rests
in my palm—trembled
as I turned the knob right
to seven on the first
day back after my father died.
Turning left past seven to twenty-nine,
I wondered, of the kids
streaming behind me,
who knew, as though to lose
a father were a shame.
Right, on the way
to thirty-five, I saw
the locker as a standing coffin,
though he was cremated, wasn’t he,
and the locker door had a row of drilled
holes at the bottom.
My English binder, Más Practica,
The Count of Monte Cristo,
texts I had left
to go home and find him not there
awaited the tumblers’
release. Now the bolt slides open.
Not crying may have been like
snapping it shut, with a turn
to make sure it stayed locked.
Hello, Father—Aloha,
hail and farewell, as the radio
announcer opened Hawaii Calls,
evenings when I was growing up.
The strains of “Sweet Leilani” carried you
back to your own youth, here
in my hand, garlanded in black and white,
Lei Day, 1936.
Leis crowd the chin of your mother
standing beside you on deck.
If each meeting is the first
meeting and the last meeting,
as the saying goes,
then this poem, Father, is my first
poem and my last poem to you.
So I abandon my anger
at your heart for giving
out when I was thirteen.
You grin your grin of perfect
teeth, as ready to grin as your father—
here in the whites of a Navy Captain—
was not. Father, I would
tell you of Marmot Pass in summer,
six thousand feet in the Olympic Range.
I would speak not of mountains
that surrounded me—Warrior,
Constance, Mystery, Deception—
but of the ant
that hurried across those peaks
on the outspread topo map,
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Many Mountains Moving
or of bees without number
plying a drift of lupine.
We measure our lives by what passes
before us: a photograph. That line
above my garden—the trace
flown by a chickadee just now,
linking cherry branch and rain gutter—
measures a lifetime.
The study of the low,
as K’ung-fu Tzu said,
penetrates the high.
For the first and the last
time, I grin back at you, Father,
your ship departing Honolulu. Aloha,
Father. Hail and farewell.
Reviews
Reviews
•
225
Book Review
by Martin Balgach
—————
John Minczeski’s
A Letter to Serafin
R
ISBN 978-1-931968-68-3
$14.95 Paperback
The University of Akron Press
77 pgs.
John Minczeski’s fifth full-length collection of poems, A Letter to Serafin, explores
themes of family lineage and identity by vibrantly blending introspection with
observation. These poems examine how we understand ourselves in relation to our
genealogical and cultural pasts—and Minczeski’s writing specifically wants us to
consider how perceptions of history, memory, and possibility constantly shape the
individual and the collective consciousness.
With “Farm, 1962,” the first poem in the book, Mimczeski introduces his
paternal family’s Polish lineage. Here the poet’s perceptions evolve into a poignant
aesthetic amalgamation as he weaves historical knowledge with a projected historical
possibility. Mimczeski knows, through a synthesizing of fact and a more elusive
factual speculation, that the present is the most comprehensive vantage point for
not only understanding the past, but also for a further questioning of the future:
My grandfather’s Polish, fifty years out of date,
still works like an old Ford. They look
at the camera, my father snaps the shutter.
With their cigarettes and their smiles,
Hello, America. In three years, my grandfather
will be coughing up blood.
(19-21)
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Reviews
Many Mountains Moving
With this poem, as with many in the collection, the writer’s interpretive
manipulation of fact makes possible a genealogical inquiry that reaffirms and
unravels as Minczeski follows and chronicles, like a tracker or an archeologist, the
roots of his history. Other poems such as “October Primrose,” deviate from the
historical narrative to offer inventive tropes that evoke a more universal gravity from
no less acute observation and summation:
Let other leaves turn yellow
and scabby brown; let morning
glories go full-throttle until frost,
and yellow jackets with exit strategies
Weaving through his family’s history while defining a present that comprises
his being, Minczeski’s poetic is filtered through an intellect that understands how
the saddest and most beautiful things come from the same place. In “The Camps,”
Minczeski chronicles his perceptions of Auschwitz:
I. Auschwitz
Winter lasted forever
for those never heard from again,
their daily ratio of coal as meager
as a bowl of thin soup.
Similarly, in “Tree Lilac in Blossom,” Minczeski pays homage to the natural
world, a theme that is echoed throughout the book as if to say, perhaps, that nature
is the most reliable anchor amidst an infinite array of unanswerable possibilities—
and Minczeski gives us conceptions of the world that are relentlessly thorough,
driving, and profound as he conjures the lucid, observatory eloquence of an almost
Eastern mindset:
But this October, in the suburbs of Kraków,
the air crisp as celery, the sky
sparks over maples that do not turn red;
horse-drawn carts creak on the side of the road
(1-8)
Nearby, a bee’s motor stops and starts
like a tattooing needle from petal to petal,
O, not-so-tall-tree-of-the-ear.
I sit under as though wearing it,
not to hide from the sun,
but to feel its brief absence
through the leaves’ absorption,
in the minuscule blossoms floating in my coffee.
What is missing today? Not slugs,
those revelers of wet summers,
nor cumulus, always with us.
227
A peregrine drifts over, roving.
A million unhinged rotors float down,
smearing the world with pollen.
continue trading in the spot market
of the trash can.
(25-30)
Tree Lilac in Blossom
•
Minczeski’s poems are keenly varied in their lengths and ambitions. “November,”
the longest poem of the collection, with its own dedicated section, fearlessly
evolves from candid introspection to a comprehensive, existential manifesto.
With lines such as…we won’t hear under the creak / of our rigging, under the clock
of forgetting (51) and no matter how many times I traveled / into the past, / the
future, like passengers / / abandoned on the tarmac, had to look after itself (53)…
the underlying pathos of the book is reinforced as Minczeski reminds us of life’s
temporality amidst an array of seemingly sturdy details and descriptions.
Meanwhile, others poems such as “Tree Lilac: Dust,” dance with the implications
of Minczeski’s sternly unfolding brevity as the poet’s lense oscillates between
miniscule, everyday details and arching universal questions:
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Many Mountains Moving
Tree Lilac: Dust
The blossoms turn to dust
in cracks between patio bricks—
dust and mud and air.
The blooms keep dropping,
the mosquitoes rising
as I clean my varnish brush.
Steady as she goes. June 22.
Mars is a blazing push pin;
the tree lilac, magnet. Hummingbirds,
a brush dripping mineral spirits
from the branches, the ground
receiving it all: who are you
to think of resisting just now?
But every poem in the collection shares a common trait; Minczeski’s economical
cadence carries with it a tone of pure intentionality—he writes with the precision
of a sharpshooter, and this well-guided journey is a worthy and refreshing book for
any reader seeking poems that are in themselves seeking actual human knowledge.
Contributors
229
Contributors
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2010 Bakeless
Literary Prize for poetry, selected by Arthur Sze and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference. Ahmed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cream City Review,
New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, Pebble Lake Review and Indivisible:
Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Ahmed holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College
and lives near Philadelphia.
Maureen Alsop is the author of two full collections of poetry, Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag)
and The Diction of Moths (Ghost Road Press, pending). She is also the author of several chapbooks,
most recently Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the
dream you spoke (Spire Press) and Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line Press). She is the winner
of Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances
Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various
journals including Blackbird, New Delta Review, Tampa Review, Typo, 42 Opus, Drunken Boat and
AGNI. Her work can be found at www.apparitionwren.com.
Catherine Anderson is the author of The Work of Hands (Perugia Press) and In the Mother Tongue
(Alice James Books). Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Coal City Review
and others. She works assisting new immigrant and refugee communities in Kansas City, MO.
Nin Andrews is the author of several books of poetry and short fiction. Her next book, Southern
Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.
James Arthur’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The New Republic,
The Southern Review, Narrative, and Ploughshares. He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling
Poetry Scholarship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a Stegner Fellowship. His first book,
Charms Against Lightning, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Martin Balgach’s writing and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bitter
Oleander, Cream City Review, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Opium Magazine, Poetry
Miscellany, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Vermont College and he works for
a publishing company in Boulder, CO.
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Many Mountains Moving
E. Louise Beach is a critic, translator and poet. She is also the librettist of the following song
cycles: singjoy, Death of the Virgins, The White Princess and Ophelia’s Flowers. Louise lives in
Potomac, MD with her husband.
Judy Bebelaar (Berkeley, CA) taught English and creative writing in San Francisco public
high schools for thirty-seven years. Her work has been published widely, most recently in Pearl,
Westview, The Old Red Kimono, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Willard and Maple and The Griffin. She
recently won an honorable mention in the San Francisco PEN women’s poetry contest and was
a finalist in Flyway’s Writing the Wild chapbook contest. She hosts a reading series for the Bay
Area Writing Project at the Nomad Café in Oakland, CA.
Ron Block is the author of Dismal River (poetry) and The Dirty Shame Hotel and Other Stories.
An NEA Fellowship winner in fiction, he teaches creative writing at Rowan University in NJ,
where he is completing a novel and a second book of poems. His poetry has been published
in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, Iowa Review and other magazines
and anthologies.
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is the author of Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking. He is
the editor of an international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of
Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. An American Studies Ph.D. candidate at Michigan
State University, he is completing Yerbabuena/Mala yerba, All My Roots Need Rain: mixed-blood
poetry & prose and Heart of the Nation: Indigenous Womanisms, Queer People of Color and
Native Sovereignties.
Karina Borowicz has recent work in American Letters and Commentary, Cream City Review
and The Southern Review. Her translations have appeared in AGNI Online and Poetry Daily. Daniel Bourne is a former contributor to Many Mountains Moving. His books include The
Household Gods and Where No One Spoke the Language and his poems have appeared in
FIELD, American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Shenandoah and elsewhere. He teaches in the
English Department at the College of Wooster in northeast Ohio, where he edits the literary
magazine Artful Dodge and, a few years ago, served on the steering committee starting up the
school’s new environmental studies program, for which he currently teaches a class in nature and
environmental writing.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Approaching Ice (Persea, 2009) and Interpretive Work (Arktoi,
2008). A former Stegner Fellow, her work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and
elsewhere. She works as a naturalist and is the editor of Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org).
Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron
Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which
won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems have
appeared in Gettysburg Review, MARGIE, The Missouri Review, River Styx and online at Verse
Contributors
231
Daily. Please visit Brian’s blog, ‘How a Poem Happens,’ an online anthology of interviews with
poets: www.howapoemhappens.blogspot.com.
Richard Carr’s work has appeared in Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, The Comstock Review,
Painted Bride Quarterly and many other journals. His poetry collections are Mister Martini
(University of North Texas Press, 2008, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize), Honey (Gival Press,
2008, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award), Street Portraits (The Backwaters Press, 2008),
Ace (Word Works, 2009, winner of the Washington Prize), and One Sleeve (Evening Street
Press, 2010). His chapbooks include Letters from North Prospect (Frank Cat Press, 1997, winner
of the Frank Cat Press Poetry Chapbook Competition) and Butterfly and Nothingness (Mudlark,
2004). A former systems analyst, web designer and tavern manager, he currently teaches English
in Minneapolis.
Alex Cigale’s poems recently appeared in Colorado, North American, and St. Petersburg reviews,
Gargoyle, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, and 32 Poems, and online in Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n,
and McSweeney’s. His translations from Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New
Generation in Russian Poetry, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, St. Ann’s and Yellow Medicine reviews,
and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. A
monthly column of translations of Russian Silver Age poets and an anthology of Silver Age
miniature poems are on-line at Danse Macabre and OffCourse, respectively. He was born in
Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
Kiley Cogis received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University in 2004. She is the
recipient of the Joseph A. Lohman III Poetry Prize and the Virginia Downs poetry award. Her
poems have appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Cimarron Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, So To Speak: a
feminist journal of language and art and Tar Wolf Review. She lives and works in Fairfax, VA.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of DaZE (Salt Publishing, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc
(Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, as well as three chapbooks,
Still: (to be) Perpetual (dove | tail. 2007), Words About James (phylum press, 2005) and Surge
(Kent State, 1999). A founding editor of Quarter After Eight and co-poetry editor of Colorado
Review, he teaches at Colorado State University.
Kathleen Crisci holds an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her story Windows
appears in the anthology DIRT, published by Seal Press in 2009. She just completed a full-length
memoir, The Kaiser’s Daughter.
Dana Curtis’ second book of poetry, Camera Stellata, is forthcoming from CW Books. Her first,
The Body’s Response to Famine, won the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Prize. She
has published six chapbooks: Antiviolet (forthcoming from Pudding House Press), Pyromythology
(Finishing Line Press), Twilight Dogs (Pudding House Press), Incubus/Succubus (West Town
Press), Dissolve (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press) and Swingset Enthralled (Talent House Press).
Her work has appeared in such as Quarterly West, Indiana Review, Colorado Review and Prairie
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Many Mountains Moving
Schooner. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight
Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Elixir Press.
Susan Deer Cloud is an award-winning writer of Mohawk/Seneca/Blackfoot lineage. Her most
recent book is The Last Ceremony. She has edited two anthologies, Confluence and I Was Indian,
as well as Yellow Medicine Review’s 2008 Spring Issue. She has had poems, stories and creative
nonfiction published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Some of her special honors
include two First Prizes in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition, Prairie Schooner’s Reader’s
Choice Award, Native American Wordcraft Circle Editor’s Award, a New York State Foundation
for the Arts Fellowship, a Chenango County Council for the Arts Literature Grant and a National
Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.
Tammy Delatorre is originally from Hawaii and now lives in Stevenson Ranch, California. She was
the winner of the 2008 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, a finalist in the 2008 Lunch Hour Stories
Very Short Story Contest and has been recognized in various other literary writing contests. Tammy
obtained her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles and is currently working
on a novel and a collection of short stories. When she’s not writing, she pursues interests in fitness,
photography and culinary delights.
Francisco Q. Delgado is currently working toward his M.A. in English at Brooklyn College.
In 2005, he graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz, where he also
won the Vincent Tomaselli Short Story Award. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
Plain Spoke, Skive, Ghoti Magazine, Boston Literary Magazine and Underground Voices.
Sarah Domet earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, where she served
as associate editor of The Cincinnati Review. Her recent fiction is published or forthcoming in
New Delta Review, Harpur Palate, Potomac Review, Beloit Fiction Journal and Quarterly West. Her
book The 90-Day Novel (Writers Digest Books 2010) is due out this fall.
Julia Fiedorczuk (b. 1975), poet, fiction writer and translator, is an assistant professor at the
Institute of English Studies of Warsaw University in Poland. She has published four collections
of poems. Listopad nad Narwia (November on the River Narew, 2000) won an award for the
best first book of the year. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in
the USA, UK, Austria (where she received the Hubert Burda Preis, 2005), Slovenia, Sweden,
Norway and Croatia.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems, Carta Marina, was published by Wings Press in April
2009. Her chapbook Slide Shows placed second in the 2008 Finishing Line Press Chapbook
Competition. She is co-editing (with Laura-Gray Street) an anthology of contemporary
American ecopoetry, which Trinity University Press will publish in 2012. She teaches at the
University of Mississippi.
Contributors
233
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s essays have appeared in The Touchstone Anthology of
Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, New Letters, New Ohio Review, Fourth Genre, Cimarron
Review, Puerto del Sol and other journals. An essay finalist for the 2007 National Magazine
Award, he has received honors including a Pushcart Prize special mention and a New Letters
essay award.
Dan Flore III is thirty-one and has written poetry for several years. He has led poetry therapy
groups for Penn Foundation Behavioral Health Services. He has been published in an online
library called Phaze 2 and a journal called Ceremony. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Foust’s books include God, Seed (Tebot Bach Press 2010), environmental poetry
with art by Lorna Stevens and two chapbooks, Mom’s Canoe and Dark Card (Robert Phillips
Poetry Chapbook Prizes, 2007 and 2008). Foust received her MFA from Warren Wilson
College in 2010. She won the 2008 MMM Press Poetry Prize for her book All That Gorgeous
Pitiless Song.
Jules Gibbs’ poems currently appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Gulf Coast,
Salt Hill Journal, The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, MARGIE, and Barrow Street.
She’s been a fellow at the Ucross Foundation, and her first chapbook, The Bulk of the Mailable
Universe, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press (Chicago) this fall. She currently lives in
Syracuse, NY.
Kim Goldberg’s latest poetry collection is RED ZONE, a photo-illustrated verse map of
homelessness in Nanaimo, BC, where she lives. Her award-winning environmental writing on
deforestation and other topics has appeared in The Progressive, Canadian Geographic, BBC
Wildlife Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review. Visit www.pigsquashpress.com.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. He has had
fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the
Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
James Grabill’s books of poems include Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in
Someone and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House Press, 1994 and 2003). His recent work
has appeared or is about to appear in The Common Review, New York Quarterly, The Chariton
Review, Barnwood, The Hamilton Stone Review, ecopoetics and others. He lives in Oregon, where
he teaches writing and sustainability in Oregon City.
Gila Green’s short stories and feature articles have been published in anthologies and magazines
worldwide. Her first short story collection White Zion was nominated for the Doris Bakwin
Literary Award (Carolina Wren Press, 2008). Originally Canadian, she lives in Israel with her
husband and five children and works as an independent writer and editor. Please contact Gila
through her blog: www.gilagreenonline.com.
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Contributors
235
Annie Guthrie is a writer and jeweler living in Tucson. She has poems published in Fairy Tale
Review, Ploughshares, Tarpaulin Sky, and EOAGH. She is currently teaching “Oracular Writing”
at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and working on a novel.
at the MacDowell Colony. His poetry and translations have appeared in many journals,
including Grand Street, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Tin House, Fence, Verse. Henry Israeli
is also the founder of Saturnalia Books.
Gábor G. Gyukics is a poet and literary translator born in Budapest in 1958. He writes
in English and Hungarian and has published five books of original poetry and six books of
translation. His latest is A Transparent Lion: Selected Works of Attila József.
John Jeffire is the author of Motown Burning, a novel set during the 1967 Detroit Riot and
its aftermath. In 2005, the book was named Grand Prize Winner in the Mount Arrowsmith
Novel Competition and in 2007 it won a Gold Medal for Regional Fiction in the Independent
Publisher Awards. Jeffire’s stories, poems and essays have appeared in magazines and journals
such as Parenting, The English Journal, America, Into the Teeth of the Wind and The South Coast
Poetry Journal. Born in Detroit of Armenian descent, he was raised in the East End of Dearborn,
a Detroit suburb. He has taught at Northeastern, Heidelberg College, the University of Findlay
and for three years at the Allen Correctional Institute, a medium security prison. He currently
lives in Clinton Township, MI, with his wife, daughter, son and two hyperactive Jack Russells.
Please visit http://johnjeffire.com.
Becca Hensley is still dazzled by Carl Sandberg. An award-winning poet published in over
three-hundred journals, magazines and anthologies, she has appeared in places as diverse as New
York Quarterly, Maryland Poetry Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Karamu and Rattle. A native of
Boulder, she now resides in Austin with her family.
Brian Patrick Heston has an MFA in fiction from George Mason University and an M.A.
in English and poetry from the University of New Hampshire. His poetry has appeared in
such publications as West Branch, The Bitter Oleander, Many Mountains Moving, Slipstream,
Confrontation, Portland Review and Gargoyle. His fiction has appeared in OurStories and
Flash!Point Magazine. Presently, he teaches composition and creative writing at Rutgers
University in Camden, NJ.
Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in Pindeldyboz, Mannequin Envy, Word Riot,
The Hiss Quarterly, JMWW, Tattoo Highway and qarrtsiluni, among others online and in print.
He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR where they remain unrepentant holdovers
from the ‘70s “back-to-the-land” movement. They raise a menagerie of animals, including a Manx
barn cat named Velcro.
Elijah Imlay’s book, Monsoon Blues, is forthcoming from Tebot Bach Press. It recounts his
experiences as an army bandsman attached to the 101st Airborne in Viet Nam, 1971. Elijah’s
work appears in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace and in other anthologies and periodicals. He is
a member of California Poets in the Schools and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veteran Writers’ Group
and is the recipient of three literary artist fellowships from the City of Ventura where he works
as a psychotherapist, counseling emotionally troubled young adults. Elijah is also a mentor and
teacher for the Institute for Applied Meditation.
Erik Ipsen is a journalist and editor who lives just outside of New York City with his wife and
son. As a high school student in the summer of 1969 he went off to Guatemala to do some good
in a troubled world and ended up discovering that a little altruism can be a dangerous thing.
Henry Israeli’s books include New Messiahs (Four Way Books: 2002) and Praying to the Black
Cat (winner of the 2009 Del Sol Poetry Prize) as well as Fresco: the Selected Poetry of Luljeta
Lleshanaku (New Directions: 2002) and Child of Nature (New Directions: 2010)—both
of which he edited and co-translated. He has been awarded fellowship grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts and the Canada Council on the Arts, as well as a residency
Hwa Yol Jung is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA.
He just published The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy (2009). Jin Y. Park
edited for him a festschrift entitled Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy:
Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung (2009). In addition to environmental philosophy and ethics, he
is also interested in comparative literature, comparative culture and comparative philosophy. Celie Katovitch is originally from Syracuse, NY. This year she earned her B.A. in Philosophy
and Peace and Justice Studies from Gettysburg College, where she was also the winner of the
school’s branch of the Academy of American Poets prize. In September she will matriculate at
Harvard Divinity School to study for the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
Ruth Moon Kempher has owned and operated Kings Estate Press in St. Augustine, Florida
since 1993. The press’s latest publication is Kempher’s Chronicles of Madam X (2009). Visions of
Sister Hilda H will be published in mid-2010 by Kindred Spirit Press in Kansas. Now retired from
teaching and tavern-owning, she is still writing and traveling whenever the spirit and time allow.
Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, is forthcoming in 2011 from
Word Press. Her second book, The Ceremonies of Longing, won the 2002 AWP Award Series
in Poetry and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2003. The Country of Women
was published in 1995 by Calyx Books. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie
Schooner, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Flyway, The Missouri Review,
Many Mountains Moving, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review and The Colorado Review.
After living in Pennsylvania for most of her life, she has recently moved to Boston, MA.
Minter Krotzer has an MFA in Non-Fiction from the New School. Her prose has been
published in The Saint Ann’s Review, The Arkansas Review, Upstreet, Night Train, Many
Mountains Moving, Before and After: Stories from New York, Louisiana in Words and Hint Fiction,
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Contributors
237
an anthology forthcoming from Norton. Minter has received creative writing fellowships from
the New School, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Squaw Valley Writers
Conference. She teaches creative writing in Philadelphia.
Laura Loomis is a social worker in the San Francisco area. “The Sign” is part of a series that
will eventually become a novel-in-short-stories. Other pieces from the same series have been
published in FLASHQUAKE, ALALIT and ON THE PREMISES.
Ellen LaFleche has worked as a journalist and women’s health educator in western
Massachusetts. She has published in Alehouse, Alligator Juniper, New Millennium Writings,
Juked and Harpur Palate, among many others and is a guest editor for Naugatuck River Review.
Julia MacDonnell’s stories have appeared in Mangrove, Paper Street, American Literary Review
and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. She has recently completed her second novel, Mimi
Malloy by Herself and a story collection, Whistle Stop and Other Stories. Her first novel, A Year of
Favor, was published by William Morrow in 1994. A former newspaper reporter and currently a
tenured professor of writing at Rowan University, MacDonnell has received two prose fellowships
from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and many other
awards for her journalism and fiction. A passionate reader with an abiding love of story, she lives
in southern New Jersey with her children.
Will Lane teaches writing at Gettysburg College and has been an active community organizer
for many years. His most recent chapbook entitled In the Barn of the God was published by Mad
River Press of Richmond, MA.
Jenna Le was educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Her work has appeared
or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Modern Haiku, The New York Quarterly, Post Road, and
others. She won first place in the 2010 Alpha Omega Alpha Pharos Poetry Competition and
second place in the 2009 William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition.
Julie Lein is completing her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah,
where she also works as Poetry Co-Editor of Quarterly West and Editorial Assistant for Western
Humanities Review and the online poetry archive, Eclipse. She lives in the Salt Lake City area
with her husband, Bill, and their two dogs, Bella and Lily Bay.
Mindy Lewis is the author of Life Inside: A Memoir (Washington Square Press, 2003) and
the editor of Dirt: The Quirks, Habits and Passions of Keeping House (Seal Press, 2009). Her
essays have been published in Newsweek, Lilith, Body & Soul, Arts & Letters and Poets & Writers
magazines. She enjoys leaving her creatively cluttered apartment in Manhattan to teach creative
nonfiction workshops at Brooklyn College, The Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA and the
Hudson Valley Writers’ Center.
Jess Tibbals Maggi was named after the late Tibbals Ranch near Boulder, Wyoming.
Twenty-two years later, semis and pick-ups course over her name, flowing down highway 191
like tears. So she spends her time searching for the lost soul of that cattle ranch, of Granny
Tibbals, of every heartbeat, community and way of life buried first beneath manure and then
beneath pavement.
J.P. Monacell married the girl in the story and they reared three children in Atlanta, where he
is a practicing attorney. He has been a featured reader at the Callenwolde Fine Arts Center’s
program “Memoir: Stranger than Fiction,” and has memoirs published or pending in the Georgia
Bar Journal and Wilderness House Literary Review. This piece is a part of his work-in-progress,
Stuck Inside: Memoirs of a Shy Guy.
Katie L. Morris is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has previously appeared in Notre
Dame Review.
Karin Lin-Greenberg has published fiction in journals including Bellevue Literary Review,
Berkeley Fiction Review, Redivider, Cutthroat and Inkwell. She teaches creative writing at the
College of Wooster, where she also serves as the fiction editor for Artful Dodge.
Ranjani Neriya was born and educated in India and now lives in Michigan. Neriya has
published fiction, nonfiction and poetry in several journals in India. Poems have appeared in the
Beloit Poetry Journal, XCP (cross cultural poetics), Runes, Midwest Poetry Review, The Listening
Eye, Poetry Daily and are forthcoming in The MacGuffin. A poetry book, BATIK: 34 poems, was
published in India.
Luljeta Lleshanaku, born in Elbasan, Albania, began publishing her work in 1991 after the
overthrow of the Stalinist regime. Her critically acclaimed books of poetry are The Sleepwalker’s
Eyes (1993), Sunday Bells (1994), Half-Cubism (1996),Yellow Marrow: New and Selected
Poems (2001), for which she won the Albanian National Book Award, and Child of Nature
(2008). In 2002, New Directions published her first collection of translations in English: Fresco:
Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku and in 2010 they published her second, Child of Nature.
English translations of her work have appeared in Grand Street, New Letters, Pleiades, Fence,
Tin House, Pool and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her work has been translated into German,
French, Italian and other languages.
Maureen O’Brien is the author of the novel b-mother, published by Harcourt Trade in 2007
and translated into Italian and German. b-mother was selected by the New York Public Library as
a Best Teen Read for 2007 and the movie rights sold to Lifetime Original Movies. Her poems and
stories have appeared in such as The Louisville Review, The Lilliput Review and The Redrock
Review. She was the winner of the 2007 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award from Carlow University, a
prize that sent her to Ireland to study with Irish writers. She received an Honorable Mention in
the Robert Penn Warren Award, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa, and is included in the Anthology
of New England Writers.
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Many Mountains Moving
Martin Ott, a former U.S. Army interrogator, lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two
children and still finds himself asking a lot of questions. His over seventy-five poetry and fiction
publications include two Pushcart nominations. His manuscript, Children of Interrogation, has
been a finalist or semi-finalist for over a dozen poetry prizes. Find out more at www.martinott.org.
Marc Paltrineri is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire. In the past, his work
has appeared in journals such as Green Mountains Review, BlazeVOX, Ellipsis, and Main Street
Rag. He lives in New England.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s sixth book of poems, Parable Hunter (2008), is from Carnegie Mellon U
Press. His website is www.pau-llosa.com.
Amy Pence’s poetry is currently in Drunken Boat, New American Writing and Quarterly West.
Stories are online at Storyglossia and Sub-Lit. She’s contributed articles to Poets & Writers and
The Writer’s Chronicle. More links to her work are at www.amypence.com. She lives near
Atlanta with her husband and her daughter.
Linda Tomol Pennisi is the author of Seamless (Perugia Press, 2003) and Suddenly, Fruit
(Carolina Wren Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in journals such as Hunger Mountain,
Cimarron Review, Lyric Poetry Review, McSweeney’s and Natural Bridge. She teaches in the
Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY.
Contributors
239
Recipient of a 200l Yaddo writer’s fellowship, June Akers Seese is the author of two novels
published by Dalkey Archive Press, What Waiting Really Means and Is This What Other Women
Feel Too?, plus a collection of short fiction, James Mason and the Walk-In Closet. Some Things are
Better Left to Saxophones was published by iUniverse in 2007. The piece published here is the
first chapter of the forthcoming Whose Coffee Is It?
Christa Setteducati received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the editor
of the 2005 edition of Lumina. She also holds a MA in English from Seton Hall University and
teaches composition at Montclair State University. This is her first publication.
Hal Sirowitz is the author of four books of poems, Mother Said, My Therapist Said, Father Said
and Before, During & After. Sirowitz has appeared on MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS’s
Poetry Heaven, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Hal has been awarded
a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
and he is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He has poems in Garrison Keillor’s
anthology, Good Poems and in Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast (Norton). http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Hal_Sirowitz.
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Dona Stein’s poems about
Greece are inspired by travels in Greece and a wonderful workshop on the island of Spetses
through the Athens Center with the amazing poet, A.E. Stallings. Stein produces and hosts The
Poetry Show on KRFC in Fort Collins, CO. Visit http://krfcfm.org.
Donna Prinzmetal has taught creative writing to children and adults for over twenty years. She
is also a licensed psychotherapist and tutor in private practice. Her work has appeared in many
publications including The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Cider Press Review, MO/Writing from
the River, Sojourn, The Prose Poem, Yellowsilk, Poetry LA and others. She has won two Oregon
State Poetry Awards, a California Quarterly award and been nominated for a Pushcart. She had a
poem in Chance of a Ghost, a national anthology on ghosts.
Lorna Stevens received her MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University. She exhibits widely
in galleries and public spaces. Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The San
Francisco Chronicle, The Marin Independent Journal and Artweek and has been acquired by the
Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library and the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, CA. Shpresa Qatipi is a professor of English at Tirana University. In addition to the poems of
Luljeta Lleshanaku, she has also translated and published short stories, essays and articles for
the Eurolindja Publishing House in Albania and the Soros Foundation.
Alison Stone’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares and a variety of
other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York
Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. Her first book, They Sing at Midnight, won the 2003 Many
Mountains Moving Poetry Prize and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. Her
chapbook of poems about the tarot is forthcoming from Parallel Press. She is also a visual artist
and the creator of The Stone Tarot.
R.C. Ringer’s stories have been published in many journals, including Witness, The Quarterly,
Manoa and Quarter After Eight, and in the anthologies Shore Stories and The Bruce Springsteen
Reader (Penguin). In his spare time, R.C. Ringer is the co-founder and managing director of a
marketing and design firm.
Kathryn (Kate) Rogers has twice been short-listed for the Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem
Prize by Descant Magazine (Toronto), most recently in February 2009. She is co-editor of the
international women’s poetry anthology Not A Muse (Haven Books, Hong Kong); her poetry book,
Painting the Borrowed House, is available on Amazon.com and from Proverse, Hong Kong. She teaches
in the Division of Language Studies at the Community College of City University in Hong Kong.
Laura-Gray Street is co-editor of an ecopoetry anthology forthcoming from Trinity University
Press. Her work appears in/on Gargoyle, Isotope, ISLE, Blackbird, From the Fishouse, The
Human Genre Project and elsewhere. Poetry awards include a Virginia Commission for the Arts
fellowship, Isotope’s Editors’ Prize in Poetry, the Dana Award and The Greensboro Review’s Annual
Literary Award. Street holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and teaches
creative writing and environmental studies at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA.
240
Many Mountains Moving
Luisa Villani is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in poetry, an
AWP Intro Journals Award and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared
in The New England Review, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review and
others. Her book, Running Away from Russia, was chosen for the Bordighera Prize by W.S. Di
Piero, and selections from her forthcoming book, Highway of the Mayan Sky, recently appeared in
the Random House anthology Poetry 180; A Turning Back to Poetry, edited by Billy Collins. She
currently is a Wallis Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California.
Mark Wagenaar is the 2009 winner of the Yalobusha Review’s poetry prize. His poems have
been accepted or published by Poetry East, West Branch, Tar River Poetry, North American Review
and many others. He is an MFA student at the University of Virginia, where he sits at the feet of
Charles Wright, Greg Orr and Rita Dove.
Bryan Walpert is the author of a book of poems, Etymology (Cinnamon Press) and a book of
short stories, Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press). His work has appeared in such journals as
AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review and Tar River Poetry.
He teaches creative writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Margaret Walther is a retired librarian from the Denver metro area and a past president of
Columbine Poets, an organization to promote poetry in Colorado. She has taught workshops
and has been a guest editor for Buffalo Bones. She has published in many journals, including
Connecticut Review, anderbo.com, A cappella Zoo, Fugue and Quarterly West and has poems
forthcoming in Nimrod and Naugatuck River Review, where one of her poems has been chosen
as a semifinalist in the Narrative Poetry Contest.
Andrew Warren was born in Communist Romania and lived there through his teens. When he
came to America, he worked in a factory that made struts for aircraft wings and went to New York
University at night, where, years later, he earned an engineering degree. He is now retired, lives on
the Upper West Side and writes occasionally as a way of keeping his mind in good working order.
J.D. Whitney lives in Wausau, Wisconsin, with his wife Lisa and their dog Animosh, on the east
bank of the Wisconsin River. His latest book is GRANDMOTHER SAYS (Arctos Press).
Joe Wilkins, though born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana, lives now with his wife
and son in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. He is the author Killing the
Murnion Dogs (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and Ragged Point Road (Main Street Rag
2006). His work appears in the Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal,
the Sun, Slate and Orion. A National Magazine Award Finalist, he is the 2009 recipient of the
Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center, which goes to “a promising new journalist
or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice.”
John Willson is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Academy of American
Poets, the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference and the Artist Trust of Washington. Blue
Contributors
241
Begonia Press published a collection of his poems, The Son We Had. John’s poems have appeared
such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, California Quarterly, Cold Mountain Review, Crab
Orchard Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, Kyoto Journal, Louisiana Review,
Northwest Review, Poet Lore, Roanoke Review and Sycamore Review. Many Mountains Moving
poetry editor Debra Bokur wrote an essay on one of his poems, which appeared in Spreading
the Word: Editors on Poetry; his work was also included in Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast
Cancer. A two-time finalist in the National Poetry Series, John lives on Bainbridge Island,
Washington, where he is employed as poetry workshop instructor and as a bookseller at an
independent bookstore. John collects aloha shirts and rubber stamps. Kathryn Winograd, Colorado Book Award Winner in Poetry, has poems and essays recently
published or forthcoming in Calyx, Cutthroat, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Literary Mama
and River Teeth. She teaches full time for Arapahoe Community College and is core faculty for
Ashland University’s low residency MFA program in poetry and creative nonfiction.
Sarah Zale teaches poetry and writing in the Seattle area. Her poetry has appeared in such
journals as Comstock Review, Wind Publications, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Arabesques Review:
International Poetry & Literature and online at Blood Orange Review and Literary Salt. Her work
appears in the anthology Come Together, Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press). A book of poems,
The Art of Folding, will be published by Plain View Press in spring 2010.
242
Many Mountains Moving
Many Mountains Moving Press
Poetry Book Prize
Guidelines
Prize: $1,000 and publication by MMM Press.
Submission deadline: August 14, 2010 (postmark).
Entry fee: $25 (Entitles entrants to a free back issue and discounts on MMM subscriptions
and MMM Press Books*)
Final judge: TBA
Eligibility:
♦ Open to all poets and writers whose work is in English.
♦ Staff and their family members are not eligible to enter.
♦ Simultaneous submissions are allowed if the poet agrees to notify MMM Press of
acceptance elsewhere.
♦ Entries may not be previously published, but individual poems and chapbook-length
sections may have been if the previous publisher gives permission to reprint. (More
than half of the ms. may not have been published as a collection.)
Submission Checklist:
♦ A typed ms. of 50–100 pages of original poetry, single- or double-spaced.
The author’s name must NOT appear anywhere on the ms.
♦ A cover letter with the title of the collection, a brief bio, your name, address, phone
number, and e-mail address(es).
♦ Acknowledgments may be included in the ms. but are not required.
♦ A $25 check or money order payable to Many Mountains Moving Press.
♦ An SASE for the winner announcement. Ms. will not be returned.
Tiger Bark Press
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*Visit http://mmminc.org for details about the discounts.
Winner of the Fourth MMM Press Poetry Book Competition
Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ashes in Midair
(2008) ISBN 978-1-886976-22-1
$15.95
from the Preface by Yusef Komunyakaa:
“Susan Settlemyre Williams’s Ashes in Midair is a marvelous
book that seems almost epic. Though the poems often
excavate the otherworldly, this poignant collection also keeps
faithful to the business of this world. From first poem to last,
from basic hunger to the heightened fire located in earthy
desire, the moments of surrealism throughout this wonderful
body of work abide in leaps of faith. The accrued, urgent,
penetrating beauty in these poems is a gift.”
“Few debut collections can claim the confidence of Susan
Settlemyre Williams’s. With immense technical swagger and
a nerviness that never overpowers her considerable empathy
and elegiac tenderness, Williams investigates both the
domestic and the strange. She is above all a spiritual writer,
and—like the best such writers—understands that gnosis
arrives as much through desecration as through piety. Ashes in Midair is a stirring, engrossing, and haunted book.
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace:
New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004
“Her poems the stuff of ‘earth and nightmares,’ Susan Settlemyre Williams’s
greatest gift is in controlling myriad
disorientations, her renderings of even fear and
madness becoming darkly beautiful translations
of human experience. Ashes in Midair is a
splendid, wholly mesmerizing volume.”
—Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife,
winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Visit http://mmminc.org for sample poems, audio, reviews,
events & more. Also on sale at www.spdbooks.org.
Winner of the Third MMM Press Poetry Book Competition
Silkie
(2007) ISBN 978-1-886976-20-7
$14.95
“Anne-Marie Cusac captures a time when animals and humans share desires and
inhabit the same skins. This collection recounts the story of the Silkie (some­times
referred to elsewhere as Selkie), seals who are able to transform into ­human beings. In this ambitious collection, the poems are interconnected. The lyrical
evolves into story, and story evolves into voice, and the dramatic voices evolve
into mythic resonance. This is big poetry. Not shimmery self-­consciousness.
Not superficial playfulness. Not ineffable shrines to the quotidian.
This poetry is as fundamental as rocks.
It captures a terrible longing and a powerful want. Its themes are terrifyingly
powerful and disturbingly beautiful.”
—Patrick Lawler, author of Feeding the Fear of the Earth
MMM Press @ http://mmminc.org
Visit http://mmminc.org for sample poems, audio, reviews,
events & more. Also on sale at www.spdbooks.org.
Winner of the Second MMM Press Poetry Book Competition
Feeding the Fear of the Earth
(2006) ISBN 1-886976-18-X
$12.95
“Patrick Lawler’s Feeding the Fear of the Earth is an outrageously original
collection.” — Susan Terris
“Lawler gathers characters as diverse as Christopher Smart,
Ed McMahon, and Rosa Parks. Ecological and ethereal, political
and historical, philosophical and physical, this astonishing book is a place
where anyone who has walked the earth can rub up against anyone else.”
— Linda Pennisi, author of Suddenly, Fruit and Seamless
(2004) ISBN 1-886976-15-5
Past Contributors:
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Marge Piercy
“In these poems Jeffrey Ethan Lee comes to hold and know the whole
fragile, euphoric world. “I could’ve been anyone,” he writes, and with
gorgeous, insistent and astonishingly musical lines, he moves in and out
of selves and what is to be apprehended. This is no sotto voce debut, but a
full-voiced one.”
— A.V. Christie, National Poetry Series Winner
“The title poem [is] a tour de force of persona and plot as a brother watches
his sister careen out of control.... Lee’s careful line breaks and deft use
of white space and text, suggest a deliberate and thoughtful architecture.
There is much to be admired in all of Lee’s poetic personas and voices....”
— Denise Duhamel for American Book Review
Winner of the First MMM Press Poetry Book Competition
They Sing at Midnight
(2003) ISBN 1-886976-14-7
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event listings and other extra features. Visit http://mmminc.org
Allen Ginsberg
Finalist in the First MMM Press Poetry Book Competition
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“If you’re not careful, Alison Stone will devour you.... with a voice both
edgy and generous, and dozens of surprises that kept me interested and
eager for more. In poem after poem the heart-intelligent energy transference
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