THIS WAY TO GREAT
LITERATURE AND ART
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Copyright2017byTheTishmanReview
Co-founder, Poetry & Art Editor
Maura Snell
Co-founder and Prose Editor
Jennifer Porter
Craft Talk Editor
Charlie Crossland Lewis
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Lauren Davis
Meaghan Quinn
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Friends
friend
/frend/
noun
1.
a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection,
typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.
Synonyms: companion, soul mate, intimate, confidante, confidant, familiar, alter ego,
second self, playmate, playfellow, classmate, schoolmate, workmate.
2.
Judith Ellison • Catherine Weber • Todd Snell • Jan & Jean Anthony • Jia Oak
Baker • Miriam Camitta • Mr. & Mrs. Chris Cowdin • April Darcy • Lee F.
Hancock • Lisa C. Krueger •Jennifer Miller • Gene Olson • Cara Anthony
Joseph Anthony • Julia Ballerini • Joe Baumann • Jacqueline Beecher
Shevaun Brannigan • Eli Burrell • Willa Carroll • Martin Ceisel • Reyna Clancy
Robynn Colwell • Jennifer Crooks • Patrice Didier • Joan Ellison • Falconhead
Megan Galbraith • Tanya Grae • James Gustafson • Deborah Guzzi •Jay Hodges
Laura Hogan • Frances John • Charles Jones • Maria Khotimsky
Lee L. Krecklow •Kathleen Lewis • Denton Loving • Tori Malcangio
Dave Marks • Suzanne Merritt • Frank Modica • Emily Mohn– Slate
Carreen O’Connor • Jane Fairbrother O’Neil • Susan Pagani • Bob Porter
Debra Porter • Joanne Proulx • Nicole Ravida • Lois Roma Deeley • Karen
Koza Ross • Victor David Sandiego • Jayne Guertin Schlott • Laura Jean
Schneider • Mel Toltz • Susan Vinocour • Bridget West • Gina Williams
Sally Zakariya ¨
If you’d like to become a Friend of The Tishman Review, visit our support page at
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TableofContents
Jennifer Porter and Meaghan Quinn
Emma Sloley
8
11
Foreword
All the Good People Are Dead
Judy Kaber
JoDean Nicolette
Aryn Marsh
Rebecca Aronson
K.S. Keeney
Jill Talbot
Julie Ann Stewart
Kyle Adamson
Sybil Ponnambalam
Caitlin Garvey
Joshua Jones
Emily Everett
George Guida
Lee Chilcote
Emari DiGiorgio
Richard Fenwick
18
19
20
27
28
29
30
34
40
42
44
57
60
70
78
79
80
Joshua McCuen
82
An Appetite for Sweetness
Death by Bread
Shake Like a Leaf
Sonnet Written on a Clean Slate
The Dress I Loved
Nobody, Body
How to Bruise
Show Me
Retrograde
The Things Mothers Lose
Yellow, Kid
Francine Francis
In an Emergency
The Meaning of Steps
City Winter
Dear Woman Who Haunts the Stairs
When the Fourteen-Year-Old Boy in Me
Emerges at Fifty-Five
Montréal
Ann Malaspina
Danielle Sellers
Marie Marandola
KS Lack
Karol Lagodzki
Renee Macalino Rutledge
Jonathan Glenn Travelstead
John Stupp
Andrea Christoff
Anastasia Stelse
Rick Hoffman
85
86
88
91
92
98
107
108
109
110
112
Starfish
Home
Late Harvest
Untitled
Berlin
The Cigarette Thieves
Mission Litany
Oh Elvis I Beseech Thee
Stick ‘em up kid
My Sister Is a Salamander
Biyanî
Craft Talk & Interviews
Elijah Burrell
121
Chila Woychik
127
Meaghan Quinn
129
Christy Stillwell 132
137
142
144
Throwing Light on the Dark: An Interview
with Greg Brownderville
Lyric Is a Sound We Hear Beyond the
Noise: On the Lyric Essay
From A to Z: An Interview with Josh
Medsker on His Encyclopedia-Inspired
Project, Medskerpedia Part II
Meet the Team
Contributors
Staff
Support & Advertising
ArtContents
Betsy Jenifer
L.M. Henke
Tim Johnson
Michael Hower
Michael Peterson
Ene Bissenbakker
Manit Chaotragoongit
L.M. Henke
Manit Chaotragoongit
Stephanie C. Trott
Kate LaDew
Kirby Michael Wright
7
10
17
26
33
43
56
59
69
77
84
89
90
97
106
111
120
136
Feed Me
Bedewed
Open Doors
Valley with Imaginary Structure
Black Thought
Basically, Basically
Beautification
The Theory of Aesthetics
train car perspective
GED2
GED3
Home
Scream
Melody Alive
Old Typewriter
Peeking In
Accordion
He’s Crazy for It
Feed Me by Betsy Jenifer
7
Foreword
This brings me no small pleasure. Lee L.
Krecklow’s short story “The Son of
Summer and Eli” won the 2016
storySouth Million Writers Award in
March 2017. Oscar Mancina’s brave flash
fiction “Tourista,” and Randall Brown’s
haunting flash “What a Beautiful
Dream,” will be included in the Best
Small Fictions 2017, guest edited by Amy
Hempel.
This brings me to the Tillie Olsen
Short Story Award 2017, now open for
submissions. Our final judge this year is
the phenomenal writer Linda LeGarde
Grover. If you have not read Grover’s
short story collection, The Dance Boots,
you should. Grover writes stories about
the Ojibwe people and the traumas and
hurts they’ve endured. The love her
characters have for each other lifts them
above the darkness of life. Grover creates
a fictional world to get truly lost in. You
simply want to stay there.
Tillie Olsen wrote short stories
that came straight from her heart and gut
and had something to say about our world
in all its glory and dismal inequalities.
These are the kinds of stories and essays
that we look for at The Tishman Review,
whether for the TOSSA contest or for an
issue. This is the kind of prose that our
world needs to read right now. I read
every submission, and I look forward to
reading yours. I hope you will become one
of my authors soon.
When Maura and I started The Tishman
Review in the fall of 2014, we felt a
conviction that there were important
words that needed space inside a journal
but couldn’t find that acceptance, for
whatever reason. We knew that each
journal has its unique mission and
aesthetic and we were just beginning to
develop ours. Our aesthetic was an
embryo then. That’s okay. The Tishman
Review will always be a work-in-progress,
as all art is, even as it’s shared with the
world.
What I have found on the prose
end of the journal is that we often give
space to pieces that have special
significance to the author. Sometimes
they have been trying to get it accepted
for months or longer. Rick Hoffman sent
“Biyanî” out for a year before it found its
way home at The Tishman Review. Rick
thinks the story will be the first piece on
the Yazidi people published in western
literature. Fareed Zakaria of CNN
recently interviewed Amal Clooney and a
young Yazidi woman on the plight of the
Yazidi people. Until Rick’s piece came to
us, I’d heard nothing of these people.
Other times, my authors confide
that their stories are deeply personal to
them. Or that they feel they’re saying
something others are afraid to say out
loud. They almost never need to tell me
this—though I’m glad they trust me
enough to do so. It is their willingness to
be vulnerable on the page that makes
their piece brilliant. I’m not sure when it
became passé to publish stories and
essays about the traumas and griefs we
endure, but when the author has done so
brilliantly, they will find a home at The
Tishman Review.
And sometimes the stories from
The Tishman Review are finding
validation in the larger literary world.
All My Best,
Jennifer
¨¨¨
Another weekend comes, and with it I
look forward to reading through the
bounty of poems that have been submitted
to The Tishman Review. My three-year
8
the advent of change. And so, I am
determined to be uplifted by the voices,
themes, and musicality which appear in
this issue’s body of poems. The poetry in
this issue is rich yet varied in terms of
image and sound. The words leave a
unique and lasting impression upon the
reader.
As poets of the twenty-first
century, especially in the month of April,
we have an obligation to write. To act. To
move with urgency. Whether that be on
the page or in everyday life, it does not
matter. My own “Virtual Poetry”
community recently shared writing goals
with one another, and it seems that the
stakes are higher for us in April. We take
to the ground running.
Recently-named Editor of the New
Yorker, Dean Young writes in his book
entitled The Art of RECKLESSN ESS:
Poetry as Assertive Force and
Contradiction, “Before we became
obligated only to our minds, we were
obligated to the world, its bodied
conception and celebration and morning”
and my favorite line: “our poems are what
the gods couldn't make without going
through us” (11). How gloriously true. The
poems we make are mystical. From other
realms. They confess. They rally. They
rant. They stammer. They praise. And
sigh.
To all of our readers and
contributors, I hope that you greatly enjoy
this issue. Its poems truly sing. And some
even wail. I hope that in this month
especially, you submit. And submit with
abandon.
involvement with Tishman, primarily
through my role as an Associate Poetry
Editor, has been extremely valuable and
important to me; in fact, the poetry team
at Tishman, primarily Maura Snell and
Lauren Davis, the contributors
themselves, as well as the actual founders
of Tishman, Jennifer Porter and Maura
Snell, reside at the very center of my
literary life.
Although the reading and selection
process can be expectedly onerous, it is
one that I take great pride in; so often,
reading these poems, combing through
them, discussing them with Maura and
Lauren helps to regain any hope I may
have momentarily lost in this vast and
changing yet stagnant world, and
especially, as of late, in America.
As our readers scattered far and
wide unthaw from March’s mercurial
patterns, poets everywhere honor the
month of April. But I have often
considered the question, why April? As
stated by the Academy of American Poets,
April was selected to serve as National
Poetry Month in 1996, and it was chosen
as it seemed to be “the best time within
the year to turn attention toward the art
of poetry - in an ultimate effort to
encourage poetry readership year-round.”
It is difficult for a poet to think of
the month of April and not be reminded of
T.S. Eliot’s signature poem “The Waste
Land” which begins:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Warmly,
As I sit here in my writing room in
Massachusetts, the remnants of last
night’s sleet-storm seem to verify Eliot’s
words. April is unpredictable. Perhaps
even cruel. Just when I was sure that
Spring had touched down, April swooped
in and took it away. Yet April universally
offers renewal, young blossoms that mark
Meaghan Quinn
9
Bedewed by Betsy Jenifer
10
AlltheGoodPeopleAreDead
“Oh good, you’re here already,” he
says with much brusqueness as he walks
in the door, this man who hasn’t seen
either of his sisters for several months,
not since the funeral. He approaches and
gives each of us a kiss on the cheek. His
lips on my skin are both dry and cold,
and I try to suppress a shiver.
“It would seem so,” I answer. “Hi,
Blanca,” I say coldly. “How are you,
Mom?”
Colleen and I move toward our
mother with brisk solicitousness, a filial
flanking move so practiced as to be
subconscious, helping her out of her coat
and relieving her of a handbag so large
she could have packed herself into it and
flown across the Pacific. Declan had
insisted on driving her up here, as if this
pathetic gesture makes up for decades of
ignoring her and Dad and leaving the
variously tedious and infuriating tasks of
eldercare to his sisters. We were visiting
Mom when Declan called to tell her he
would like to collect her and drive her to
the cabin, and the unmitigated joy on her
face was something to behold. Colleen
pretended to vomit behind Mom’s
shoulder.
Colleen pulls out some chairs
around the kitchen table and gestures for
Declan’s little troika to sit down, but our
brother shakes his big leonine head and
his two women cease their comic
fluttering hesitation between the acts of
standing and sitting.
“Where's Danny?”
Colleen explains that Danny is
running late, that he called several hours
ago to say he’ll try to make it in time for
dinner.
“Typical.” He sighs, checks his
Breitling Navitimer, a twenty-thousanddollar piece of mechanical artistry he
fiction by Emma Sloley
Here he comes, the beloved child, the
oldest son, Declan. We’ve been waiting for
him and have known him all our lives,
Colleen and me, but his arrivals still take
some getting used to. Even after all these
years. As he steps out of the jaundiced
yellow Volvo and walks toward the cabin,
the light is behind him—how is it possible
the light is always behind him; he can’t
possibly plan it that way, can he?—so that
he appears in silhouette, his body encased
in a nimbus of light.
Two small women hurry in his
wake, fussing over him and reaching out
compulsively every few seconds to touch
some part of his clothing. It is impossible
to witness this scene and not be put in
mind of a vainglorious emperor attended
by his flunkies. Colleen and I, who are
watching through the kitchen window,
nudge each other frantically and snort
with suppressed laughter but we know it’s
just bravado. It is important to reduce
him to a comical figure: In this way his
damage can be contained. The two women
are his mother—our mother too—and his
wife. He carries them along in his shadow.
Colleen and I had conspired to
arrive early. We got here last night,
opened the cabin, aired it out and perhaps
in some subtle unspoken way attempted
to put our mark on it as a tomcat would
spread his scent by scattering our
possessions, filling the kitchen shelves
with our favorite brands of coffee and sea
salt and the bathroom shelves with
aggressively feminine products. Somehow,
in spite of all this, Declan still manages to
seize the advantage.
11
lavender fashion favored by her
generation.
“Oh thank you, dear,” she says, but
without looking at Colleen. She pats the
immovable cotton-candy mass atop her
head nervously. When Declan is here all
else is eclipsed and she is always on her
best behavior. But today, she seems more
agitated than usual. Her eyes are rimmed
with red, as though she’s pulled an allnighter. She looks tired and peaky,
bruised fruit forgotten at the back of the
fridge. I don’t think to ask her if anything
is wrong, so I suppose that’s on me.
Later, I return to find Colleen at
the sink, scrubbing the cups and glasses
as if she has been charged with not just
cleaning them but making them brand
new. The others have dispersed—Declan
and Blanca to unpack and “inspect the
house,” and Mom to have a little lie-down.
“What do you think is going on?” I
hiss into Colleen’s ear. “He and Blanca
are even more hostile than usual.”
She shrugs unhappily. The
weekend was Declan’s idea, the first
gathering since Dad’s death, and while we
had originally assumed the invitation to
spend a weekend at the cabin en famille
was an attempt at reconciliation, a way to
heal as a family after Dad’s death which
had affected us all in deep and surprising
ways, that explanation now seems
woefully naive.
Earlier in the day I had taken half
an Ativan and swigged a few swallows
from the remains of the red wine we’d
opened last night. These handicaps might
explain why I’m not in the least prepared
when Colleen, who didn’t cry at the
funeral, suddenly turns maudlin. She
throws the wire scrubber into the full
sink, displacing a flotilla of bubbles which
dance around the room, and she bursts
into tears.
“He was such a good dad,” she
sobs, gripping the edge of the sink with
both hands. “All the good people are
dead.”
keeps on his wrist to tell the time when he
can’t be bothered getting his phone out of
its holster. It is indeed typical of Danny to
be late, but it still annoys me when
Declan criticizes him.
“Is there some hurry?” I ask
pleasantly. “We have the whole weekend.”
Blanca smiles at me and I’m struck
as always by her inability to communicate
genuine gestures. If she were a software
program designed to simulate human
responses the developers would have
abandoned it long ago. These are the kind
of uncharitable thoughts to which Blanca
gives rise.
“Oh, didn’t Decky mention? We’re
leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”
This is a curious development. My
armpits prickle. I wonder fleetingly and in
a mild panic whether I put deodorant on
this morning. Sometimes it’s so hard to
remember.
“Mother, why don’t you sit down,”
Declan booms. As if Colleen and I had
cruelly insisted on her standing. He really
does have an impressive voice.
Imperative. It flies out and fills every
corner, roosts in the rafters for full
minutes after he has left the room.
Resisting him is unthinkable.
“Decky darling, help me with the
bags will you?” pipes up Blanca. Her voice
is less impressive. Designed more for a
war of attrition than a single devastating
battle. Behind Declan’s back—he’s
already striding away—Colleen rolls her
eyes at me. See? she telegraphs silently.
Just like we said it would be.
I go into the kitchen and make tea
the way Mom likes it. I bring it to her and
she thanks me, placing a hand over mine
and patting it absently. Her skin is like a
bulletin from the future, warning what is
in store for me and Colleen, a desiccated
landscape so overrun with veins and
freckles and pale sunspots it could be a
topographical map. Colleen loudly
compliments Mom’s hair, which she
recently had done in the unearthly
12
I begin to suspect she’s taken a
little something herself. I make soothing
shushing sounds and stroke her back.
“I know,” I say, and wonder if it’s
true. Are all the good people dead? It’s an
alarming thought, even diluted in the
soothing waters of benzodiazepine.
Colleen wipes her eyes with a
grubby dish cloth. “Have you heard of that
German word, torschlusspanik?” She has
been learning German since last year, the
latest in an increasingly desperate series
of self-improvement programs. Still, her
accent is impeccable. I shake my head and
feel oddly afraid. I wish I could prevent
her from saying whatever comes next, but
I stand there stupidly watching a
hummingbird in the garden whir to face
the kitchen window as if admiring itself in
a mirror before it darts away to
investigate a clump of bougainvillea
growing on the fence. “Well, it basically
describes the fear of time running out. Of
things slipping out of your grasp forever.”
She gives a long, dignified sniff. “It
translates to ‘fear of the gate closing.’”
I sigh. “Colleen.”
“What?”
“It’s just. The gate isn’t closing.”
“Isn’t it?”
She turns to look right at me, her
pale blue eyes burning as if I were
personally responsible for failing to leave
the gate sufficiently open. I look away, out
the window. The hummingbird has gone
and all I see is the sad pale ovoid of my
own face reflected back at me.
I dry the dishes and go out to the
covered porch, which has already been
colonized by the oppressive coupledom of
Declan and Blanca. I have a sudden
recollection of how this was Declan’s
favorite place when we were kids, that he
would spend hours out here in the
threadbare hammock strung between two
rusted nails, one of the half-wild cats who
inexplicably loved only him always within
arm’s reach.
I mean to ask them some small
question about dinner—the purchasing,
preparation, serving, and cleaning-up of
which has fallen as usual to Colleen and
me, given that Declan claims to care not
at all for eating (sample infuriating line:
“If I was on my own I’d just throw
something together from whatever I could
find in the fridge, but if you want to
bother then go ahead.”), that Blanca is
forever on a restrictive diet and that Mom
can’t even boil water—but I’m distracted
by the fact that Blanca is feeding my
brother spoonfuls of some ice-creamy goop
from a bowl, and they are both laughing
like teenagers caught necking. The whole
thing is such an unpleasant tableau that I
have to look away. He is like an
overgrown baby, with his full red lips and
smooth cheeks and happy dependence on
other people to sate his bodily needs. He
wouldn’t normally allow himself such an
indulgence—a doctor once convinced him
that sugar was bad for his trachea and
might affect his precious tenor, so he
usually avoids it. Perhaps he’s on hiatus
from the company at the moment. I’m
sure Mother knows; she keeps an
encyclopedic record of his performances
and seasons as if she might be tested on it
someday.
They both look up at me and I
experience the curious sensation of having
sleepwalked into the wrong house. There
is an apology on my tongue when we all
turn at the sound of a car pulling into the
drive. It’s unusual for Danny’s arrival to
be greeted with relief, but that’s what I
feel as I wave gaily in his direction, only
realizing when it slaps the side of my
cheek that I still have the dish towel in
my hand. He peers inside, probably only
discerning us as vague shapes behind the
screen with the fading light.
“Hey, guys,” he calls out. Then he
turns to wave to whomever is behind the
wheel of the car that dropped him off. The
driver waves back and reverses slowly
down the driveway.
13
piece of synthetic clothing gathering lint.
His friends are of dubious quality and
sloughed off easily. Declan’s human
acquisitions are staunch loyalists. A
mother who dotes on him. A legion of fans
to whom his voice represents a rare and
transfiguring salvation. A wife who sees
his family as the singular threat to her
hegemony.
Dinner is a predictably
uncomfortable affair. Declan devours his
food with a robotic single-minded
intensity, Blanca insists on trying to clear
dishes while we’re still eating, and Danny
barely touches his meal but throws back
wine with an Olympic-level of avidity. It’s
almost a relief when Declan declares with
a tap of spoon on glass, seconds after
dessert has been variously inhaled,
ignored, and whisked away, that he has
an announcement to make.
We all look at him. Mom with some
dread I notice, which tips me off to the
notion that the announcement involves
her in some way. Sure enough.
“So. Blanca and I wanted to let you
know that Mother has decided to come
and live with us. We’re building her a
guest house down the back of the garden.
We’re planning to start a family soon and
she’s overjoyed at the idea of helping raise
her grandchildren.” It’s a testament to
Declan’s pomposity that in spite of the
astounding content of his words, I’m
mostly struck by the fact that he actually
talks like this. “Isn’t that right, Mother?”
Mom, who looks like a hostage
wondering which wrong answer is going
to get her throat slashed, nods.
“And there’s another thing. As I’m
sure you all recall from the reading of the
will, Dad left this cabin to Mother in its
entirety.”
“Yes?” says Colleen, and she’s got
her fighting face on, because in spite of
the fact that I secretly like to think I’m
the smarter one, she’s already gleaned
what I have not.
I hurry out to greet Danny and it’s
not even disappointment I feel when I
embrace him and absorb the clamminess
of his skin through his thin shirt and
smell the distinct sickly-sweet chemical
whiff of illicit pharmaceuticals slowly
metabolizing out through his pores. I dare
not look in his eyes at first: I’ll have to
work up to that. That my younger brother
is a middle-aged man arriving late to a
family reunion with the unhealthy pallor
of a junkie who has spent the night
snorting coke at a poker table is less a
novelty than a foregone conclusion.
“Are they here yet?” he whispers in
my ear, and I’m reminded that he’s even
more scared of Declan than Colleen and I
are. There’s miniscule comfort in this, like
sitting next to someone on a plane who’s
even more terrified of flying than you are.
I smile and nod and lift his
battered backpack from his shoulder.
“Come on, let’s get you settled in.”
Once inside and reunited with
Colleen and Mom—Declan and Blanca
have yet to reappear—Danny appears to
relax a little. The cabin has that effect on
him, as it does on all of us. It is a balm.
For him perhaps more than any of us. Our
little brother lives in the margins. He
burns sage in his nightmare crack-den
apartment in downtown Berlin to ward off
bad vibes and refuses to cease even when
the frau from whom he leases the crack
den threatens to evict him. He believes in
astrology and has his cards read often.
Sometimes he has to borrow money for
the readings, a habit of which Colleen and
I strenuously disapprove. And yet we
understand the impulse to hoard these
luxuries, however meager.
He has been staying with one of
his wacky friends in San Francisco since
the funeral. Danny has always
surrounded himself with eccentrics, his
evil-eyes against normativity. He and
Declan have that one thing in common:
They collect people. It’s just that in
Danny’s case the collecting is more like a
14
“And we’ve decided, she’s decided,
that the current arrangements aren’t
going to be satisfactory going forward.”
“Current arrangements?”
He waves his hand around like one
of the conductors for whom he professes
so much scorn.
“This. This whole communal
sharing of the cabin like it’s some sort of
spring break time-share condo. Coming
and going and bringing unsavory types
here whenever the mood strikes, that
kind of arrangement.” This last clearly
references Danny, who has been known to
use the cabin as a kind of hippie-rave
venue on occasion. “Mother’s sick of it and
frankly I don’t blame her. She’s simply
decided that the cabin is her sole domain.
She’s quite fine with visitors, provided
you give her plenty of notice of your
intended schedule.”
Momentarily rendered speechless,
I make the mistake of glancing at Blanca.
Her mouth is stretched into a triumphant
rictus.
“Is this some kind of joke?” asks
Colleen. “I mean, I’m having trouble
believing what I’m hearing here.”
Declan sighs. “It’s pretty simple,
Colleen. We’re saying that the cabin is no
longer communal family property. It
belongs to Mother, and she has final say
in who comes here, and when. And in
what capacity.”
“You talked her into this.”
He smiles his best supercilious
smile. “Not at all. In fact, the only thing I
tried to talk her out of was the
endowment she insists on giving away.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mother, do you want to tell
them?”
We all look at Mom, who shakes
her head vehemently, mouth trembling.
I’m fascinated to note that her hair
doesn’t move even an iota.
“No, darling,” she pleads, barely
above a whisper. “You tell them.”
He raps the table and nods, this
solution being satisfactory. “Well. Mother
has kindly offered to gift each of us a
monetary sum for our share of the cabin.
Obviously there’s some inconvenience
involved in not being able to vacation here
any longer. We’ve had the place
appraised. . . .”
Colleen snorts into her wine. “Of
course you have.” Blanca shoots her a
venomous look.
“And it’s worth around half a
million dollars on today’s market. Mostly
land value. This stand of redwoods is old
growth. Very desirable.” As if he’s telling
us about a place we’ve never visited.
“Mother has agreed to bestow one
hundred thousand dollars on each of us.
Very generous I consider. And as I have
no need of these funds, I will be donating
my share to be divided equally among the
rest of you.”
“So you’re basically buying us off to
not come here anymore?” Colleen says,
and she’s almost shouting. “To the cabin
that Dad built with his own hands when
he was twenty-five years old, as a . . . a
legacy for his children. Bribing us to fuck
off?”
“If you choose to see it that way.”
“We’ll get lawyers,” says Danny in
a small quavering voice, and Declan looks
at him, as if only just now noticing that he
is there.
“What good would that do? It’s
Mom’s property, to do with as she pleases.
There’s no other legal consideration.”
I open my mouth to say something,
to decline Declan and his rotten little
magnanimity, but I hazard a look at the
faces on Colleen and Danny. I can see
them already imagining how helpful that
money will be, a bigger windfall than
either of them could ever have hoped for
in this life, and I see that any argument I
make will put them in an awkward and
untenable position, so I just bite my
tongue and drain my wine.
15
“Stop it,” I say, but I can’t help
laughing.
“Well then.” Colleen casts around
for an amendment. “I hope their kids are
wonderful and grow up to absolutely hate
them and run away from home as soon as
they can.”
“That’s my girl.”
We stare out into the poetic
blankness of the new day.
“You know what?” I say, putting
my arm around her shoulders and pulling
her in for a little half-hug. “Not all the
good people are dead.”
“Are you kidding? Prince died this
year. Fucking Prince.”
“Sure. But there’s you.” She looks
dubious. “And me. And Danny,” I add
charitably, in case Danny is awake and
can hear us.
“I guess.”
“We’ll be okay. You’ll see.”
“Fucking prick,” Colleen says,
savagely wiping away a tear. “Did he have
to steal Mom away too?”
We finish our coffee in silence then
I throw the sludgy grounds at the bottom
into a nearby bush and offer my hand to
Colleen to haul her up, like I used to when
we were kids.
“Come on,” I say. “We’d better get
packed up and get going. Say goodbye to
the old place. We’re probably trespassing
even as we speak.”
We walk up the stairs and as I pull
open the front door, whose top left-hand
edge has been sticking in the slightly
warped door frame for years now, I’m
struck by the discombobulating sense that
we’re two banished ghosts, engaged in the
reverse process of coming home. ¨
The three of them leave early in the
morning, before we’ve even risen. I guess
when a power vacuum has been filled you
don’t stick around to comfort the losing
party. Colleen and I make coffee and take
it outside to the front steps. We sit there
in front of that never-properly-cherished
cabin with its fish-scale shingles and
salvaged stained glass windows and its
beams the color of dried blood, in our
pajamas and sweaters and thick socks
cradling our steaming mugs and hunching
into our turtlenecks, because it’s cold in
the Santa Cruz mountains, even in
summer, when the fog smothers the
redwoods and live oaks and disappears
the ocean entirely.
“Declan,” I say after a while,
shaking my head.
“Fucking prick. How long do you
think he’s been planning this little coup?”
“I don’t know. Probably since Dad
died.”
“I wish Dad was here. He’d know
how to handle this.”
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t have
happened if Dad were here,” I point out,
and Colleen has to concede this is true.
“You kind of have to hand it to
Declan,” I say, and I’m not being
sarcastic: In this moment I truly admire
him. “When he decides to fuck you over,
he does it thoroughly, with military
precision. You don’t even see it coming.”
“So do you think we’ll ever see
them again?”
“Probably not. Maybe Mom,
sometimes. If they let her off babysitting
duties.”
Colleen turns to me, freshly
outraged. “And what the fuck was that?
Starting a family. Isn’t Blanca like, fiftyeight years old?”
I laugh. “Nah. She just looks older.
Declan once told me she’s fifteen years
younger than him.”
“Christ. I hope she’s barren.”
16
Open Doors by L.M. Henke
17
AnAppetiteforSweetness
poetry by Judy Kaber
1.
I admire the strong sweet quality of foxgloves.
They stand behind the granite pile, impossible to see from the drive.
Was it an accident that we discovered them,
And then had no name for them, with their silent white tongues?
2.
The love of land is as irrevocable and clear as water.
The stonemason works in eighty-degree heat to build the wall.
The muscles of the young man’s arms are etched with tattooed lines.
You watch him sometimes, lifting and setting stone.
The shadows remain unnamed, shifting.
The birch leans precariously.
The pine in front of the house chokes the gutters with needles.
The wild apple drops fruit that I will gather.
Such is the story of our land.
3.
I knew the land before I knew the house.
This moment when I look out the window, these decided clumps of green—
These I can name: arrow arum, pickerel weed, green false hellebore.
They confront the stream, carry its voice.
They outlive me, outlive you, outlive the stonemason.
He creates the wall, stone by stone.
You watch.
18
DeathbyBread
poetry by Judy Kaber
Not with hands in dough, kneading beneath
beams and lights, but carrying bags of flour,
you fold hope in your pocket each week—hope
for a house bought with war benefits. White mountains
sift into metal cauldrons, mixed and ready
for coal-hot fires while grains enter every seam,
shift below the belt, weigh cuffs, grind between
tongue and lace. High windows throw
blocks of light on the floor. Work days carry you,
a conveyor belt that wraps around churning wheels.
Morning milkman and bread truck disappear. Factories
fracture into hulks, bricks riddled with black,
mortar crumbling under a million fingers. Long gone
the white churches, clomp of horses, family farms.
Empty swing sets corrode in backyards. Dust
drawn up into your lungs lurks for years
in coughs and hacks, finally snaking into a black circle
on x-rays, grim under ionizing waves. Leather slippers
crack, split. You need help to get them on, back
baked in pain, cased in tongues of heat. Your wife
brings food on a metal tray painted with roses—
milk, a square of buttered toast you will not eat.
19
ShakeLikeaLeaf
than afraid, terrified. As I experienced the
uncontrollable shaking, the sweat, the
dizziness and feeling of doom, I made an
immediate diagnosis: panic attack. With
each step on the dam’s cement walkway,
the panic hit harder, like an ever bigger
wave rolling at me, pushing me back to
the southern edge. For two days I tried to
cross Fontana Dam to continue my walk
north, but the panic thwarted me every
time. Eventually, I found myself sitting on
a curb next to the dam’s visitors’ center,
barely able to punch numbers into the pay
phone to arrange a ride to the hikers’
hostel. And then home.
At first, I tried to blame it on the
trail. After all, fearful things do exist in
the Appalachian Mountains. Bears, for
example, and venomous snakes, both of
which I contemplated as I sat alone,
hugging my knees on the back porch at
the hostel. I tried not to think of myself as
a failure, listening to the voices and
laughter of the other hikers drifting out
the common room’s open window. They
would be walking on, across the dam, and
back into the green tunnel with confident,
easy strides. And I would be headed home
the next day, stalled at the Great Smoky
Mountains. The chill of the evening air
reached through my stained t-shirt as I
heard them sharing trail tales. Along with
exhaustion, hunger, insects, and
equipment failure, a few had encountered
bears and snakes along the way. And like
me, they found these animals either
disinterested or clearly terrified of
humans, scampering, or slithering away
as soon as they’d caught sight or scent.
The hikers’ voices faded as I stared out
into the maple trees, watching the
branches sway gently, hypnotically,
allowing my mind to reach for the source
of my fear. I knew I couldn’t blame my
panic on the mountains; it had come from
nonfiction by JoDean Nicolette
I pull the waistband of my backpack tight
and adjust my shoulder straps. Leaning
forward against my hiking poles, I let the
handles press into my belly, forcing out an
exhale. In front of me, the Appalachian
Trail crosses the Little Tennessee River
via the Fontana Dam then climbs into the
Great Smoky Mountains. The blue ridges
loom, towering above the tree-lined
slopes. Studying the ridgeline, I visualize
the beckoning mountains, calling me into
the healing embrace of nature. We call it
biophilia in medicine—the psychological
and physiological well-being that comes
from immersion in the natural world.
Right now, my pulse and blood pressure
should be dropping, my cognition
sharpening, and my anxiety dissipating.
At least that’s what the studies suggest.
But instead my heart races; I can feel it
pound in my chest, while the blood rushes
in my ears. I tightly grip my hiking poles,
trying to prevent the shaking I know will
start in my hands and work its way up to
my core.
Two years earlier I stood in the same
place, at the southern edge of Fontana
Dam, staring across the cement corridor
at the legendary, fog-shrouded peaks.
Fleeing my experience in medical school
and residency, I stumbled through the
first two hundred miles of the
Appalachian Trail, oblivious to my
circumstances—a young woman walking
alone in the mountains. Then suddenly,
as I started across the dam, fear struck.
After all those miles I had gone from
numb and indifferent to afraid . . . more
20
At the medical school, when panic
struck, I darted around corners or behind
bookshelves to wait for the fits to pass.
With each episode, I felt more detached
from the events and people around me.
Like a ghost, I watched my peers as they
studied and attended rounds. Fearless,
they strode the halls in their white coats,
laughing and celebrating, and preparing
to graduate.
The memory of commencement day
jolted me, and I set my water bottle onto
the hostel’s porch floor. I recalled sitting
tensely among my black-robed classmates
on folding chairs at the outdoor ceremony.
Several of the administration and faculty
members lined the stage in full regalia.
When the speaker called my name, I stood
and watched as one of the faculty leaned
over and whispered to another, and they
both stared as I approached the stage. I
imagined what had been said, how it was
my fault Dean Neeman had acted the way
he had. Sweat ran down my back and my
heart pounded. My vision blurred and the
ground spun as I staggered up to get my
diploma. I didn’t hear my list of awards or
the applause or any other sound but the
rush of blood in my head and clicking of
heels echoing like blows on the sidewalk. I
counted with my steps . . . eighteen,
nineteen, twenty, and focused all my
energy on a series of simple tasks: Walk
down the aisle. Walk to the stage. Shake
the man’s hand. Grab your diploma. Flee.
somewhere else. From inside me, I finally
admitted: My own thoughts and
experiences posed the real risk.
Before the last few months of medical
school, I had never experienced panic
attacks, but by the time I graduated they
had become a daily occurrence. My first
panic attack had seized me the afternoon
I fled Associate Dean Franklin Neeman’s
office. We were meeting to discuss our
research project when he leaned across
his desk and announced that we would be
attending a weekend meeting together to
present our work. He then sat back,
observing me with a crooked, closedlipped smile. The months of tension
exploded in my chest, all the loaded
encounters and innuendo crowding into
my thoughts. At the idea of traveling with
him, I finally crumpled and bolted from
the office. I stood with my back against
his heavy, dark door, the brass nameplate
poking into my back; my chest heaved and
sweat beaded on my upper lip and brow. I
felt as if I would collapse and die right in
the hallway. Recalling a recent psychiatry
lecture, I self-diagnosed. Shaking
violently, clutching my books and trailing
papers, I scuttled for the exit light at the
end of the corridor.
After that, the attacks plagued me.
They would strike as soon I left my
apartment in the morning, forcing me to
retreat back inside, and sometimes back
into bed. Some days I would manage to
stumble to the bottom stair, only to run
back up and sit shaking on the top, arms
wrapped around my knees. Unwilling to
miss classes, I learned to pause on the top
step, grasp the rail with my right hand,
and count to twenty. Then I would
struggle to the bottom, where I would
count again, reminding myself to breathe,
before heading to my bike, where I would
count one more time . . . eighteen,
nineteen, twenty, then ride to campus.
My first trip to the Appalachian Trail
concluded at the Fontana Dam hikers’
hostel. The following morning the owner
drove me to the Greyhound station, where
I would start my journey home. As I
stared out the Suburban’s window, the
events of my medical training mingled
with the blurred birch and maple flying
past: the pressure, the anxiety, and panic;
the buzz and bedlam of the hospital; peals
of the pager; relentless sleep deprivation.
21
I had fled to the trail bruised and
exhausted, hoping the simplicity of
backpacking would help me recover and
reconstruct myself. At the time, I had
never heard of biophilia. I merely sought
an unscheduled and peaceful experience,
away from the onslaught of medicine. The
sheltering nature of the trees and the
rhythm of the days had soothed me. I rose
with the sun, ate, walked, slept, and
walked again, meeting the occasional
hiker, but mostly accompanied by the
wind in the trees and the scent of damp
soil and sweet fern. The only assaults I
faced were the low branches that nicked
my forehead and the roots prodding into
my back at night as I drifted off to sleep.
Slowly, over the miles, as my mind
cleared, my defenses fell away. I felt
myself deconstruct, and the
deconstruction left me vulnerable. Events
from my training ambushed me,
wrenching open old wounds.
In my undefended emotional state,
Fontana Dam’s straight cement
walkway—so different from the uneven
and meandering forest path—had
reignited my panic attacks. It was called a
trigger, I’d learned during my training: an
event that set off the terror, even though
the situation was removed and harmless.
The dam had transformed into an aisle,
and I had flashed back to the
interminable commencement day walk.
The shimmering leaves blurred like faces,
and the cement writhed and moved. My
poles clicked along like my high heels,
amidst the roar of water and the wind in
the trees. It all closed in, catapulting me
back, not only to the dam’s southern edge,
but also into the past.
accomplished researchers, professional
musicians, children of diplomats. Surely,
medicine was a field too complex for me,
the product of public education in rural
New York.
I found my relief in study.
Hunched over textbooks and haunting the
anatomy lab, I soon realized that
obsession with blood vessels, nerves,
pathology, and pharmacology crowded out
my feelings of inadequacy. A few minutes
into each study session, chanting facts to
myself, almost rocking with each word, I
would experience a wash of relief,
expelling both breath and worry, relaxing
both mind and muscles. I began to look
forward to my cogitations with an addict’s
anticipation, scanning my notes during
class and highlighting sections that
looked promising for immersion: the
cranial nerves, the coagulation cascade,
classification of lymphomas, criteria for
diagnosis of obsessive compulsive
disorder.
When the associate dean noticed
me, I thought he was my chance for
success. I had discovered an area for
research during my intense study and had
begun to speak about my ideas. Dean
Neeman said that my work was
important, that I would need institutional
support to be successful, that he wanted
to mentor my project. I thought for the
first time that I might make it in
medicine after all. But my anxiety soon
returned when the smooth compliments
and the innuendo started. Comments
about my passion for my research project
turned into queries about passion in my
personal life. Discussions about the effects
of estrogen twisted into discussion of his
wife’s frigidity. Conversations about
scientific meetings warped into
conversations on his weekend retreats in
tantric practice. He stood too close,
brushed against me too often. The comeons became relentless, requiring constant
intellectual and emotional effort to
manage and redirect. Unable to focus, to
Panic disorder develops in people who
suffer generalized anxiety, and soon after
I arrived at medical school, my anxiety
bloomed. Looking around the crowded
lecture halls, I knew I was outclassed,
surrounded by Ivy Leaguers,
22
hypertrophy; name the eleven modified
criteria for systemic lupus erythematosis;
how do you diagnose nephrotic syndrome?
Despite my attempts to cope, an acute
patient situation like a “code blue,” or a
seizure—or even a harsh word from a
nurse or senior resident—would force me
to flee to a dark corner clutching an IV
bag, a portable urinal, or a chart to gain
control.
Eventually I persevered through
residency by living a connect-the-dots life,
creating a series of point A’s and point B’s
and reaching between them like buoys in
a storm. Just as I had navigated from the
top step to the bottom step when leaving
my apartment in medical school, and
down the aisle then across the stage to get
my diploma. I moved from patient to
patient, then day to day, and week to
week. And eventually year to year,
dodging anxiety and panic in the dim,
gray light of the hospital rooms and halls.
I trudged forward until my final month,
my final week, my final patient. And then
the final buoy: I instinctively reached for
the Appalachian Trail.
lose myself in my rigid study of lists and
facts, my mind became unoccupied and
spun with fear.
Those days, although I didn’t yet
understand why, I found solace in only
one place: a dirt track that climbed
through the trees to the Skyline Ridge.
Each day I looked forward to lacing up my
running shoes and escaping into the
woods, where the scents of eucalyptus and
sage calmed me like a drug and the
rhythm of my footfalls steadied my
breath. There my mind finally rested, and
my shaking ceased. But my relief was
short lived. Tension built again as I
completed my loop, slowly walking along
the flat stretch that approached the park
exit. Peace evaporated completely as I
stepped into the parking area, the sun
like a spotlight, where the smallest thing
could activate me again. A voice would
startle me. A flyer on my windshield
would make my stomach lurch, as I
imagined a note from the police, an
annoyed fellow parker, or perhaps the
Associate Dean himself, who had stalked
me to this secluded place.
After graduating from medical
school, I launched right into residency,
working hundred-hour weeks, sometimes
thirty-six hours straight. Each day I
rushed between floors seeing patients,
and between the hospital and the clinic. I
internalized the brutal schedule, as I had
my medical school trauma, stuffing it
deeper and deeper until it had no choice
but to bubble out. My scientist’s brain told
me that once the panic cycles had been set
up—the neurophysiologic pathways had
been established—the synapses fired
more easily, and I became susceptible in a
way that I never had been before. Similar
to the way that scars yield more easily
than intact skin. Swooshing along in my
blue scrubs, I would fend off the attacks
by rhythmically reciting medical facts to
myself between rooms and in the
stairwells: List the EKG findings
consistent with left ventricular
Now, as I face Fontana Dam for the
second time, I know my instincts are good.
Spring at the dam is bright and busy, and
the awakening inspires me. Robins and
blue jays swoop and dart. Goldfinches
call. The chipmunks and squirrels patrol
for crumbs left by hikers and tourists. I
sway a little with the trees, taking in the
complex scents in the wind, and finally I
look across the river at the Smoky
Mountains. When I first strode along the
dirt track, from Springer Mountain to
Fontana Dam, I hadn’t had a chance to
heal, coming straight from medical school
and residency. The unstructured and
peaceful days were a novelty and the
clutter of medicine fell away. My training
trailed behind me like debris: a
stethoscope draped over a tree limb, my
white coat on a log. Facts and worries
23
Abandoning my thoughts of biophilia, I
seek my old pathology. I fixate on my
goal: crossing the Smoky Mountains via
the Appalachian Trail. I want to succumb
to the obsessive thoughts, to allow
regimen to consume me, to propel me
forward. Obsession is a crutch; I have
grasped it in my weakest moments. I am
grasping it now.
I replay advice from the owner of
the hikers’ hostel about crossing the
Smokies. “On the first day, if you can
make the 3000-foot climb up and over
Little Shuckstack and cover the fourteen
miles to Russell Field Shelter, then you’ll
walk shelter to shelter and you’ll be set up
to walk out on day five.” That schedule
appeals to me; it is rigid, leaving little
room for indecision or worry. With closed
eyes, I run the daily miles and shelter
names through my head—fourteen to
Russell Field, make camp/rest, fourteen to
Silers Bald, make camp/rest, seventeen to
Icewater Spring, make camp/rest, thirteen
to TriCorner Knob, make camp/rest and
nod my head slightly with the chant,
imagining how I will feel as I reach
landmarks: Russell Field, Clingmans
Dome, Route 441 to Gatlinburg. I imagine
myself emerging from the park, seventyseven miles north of here, in Davenport
Gap. I will check a box in my guidebook:
Great Smoky Mountains—DONE! I
inhale, lift my chin, and open my eyes.
The sky hangs gray and leaden
like the hospital corridors. Instead of
relief, I feel a chill as the wind lifts my
bangs off my face, and my thoughts
evaporate with the light mist rising off
the river. Gray is the hardest kind of
weather on the trail. Sun is easy. Even
rain is easy, when I armor myself with a
rain jacket and rain pants and march. But
gray is indecisive. Uncommitted. And it
lends me its ambivalence. My thoughts
rattle aimlessly between my ears again.
There will be no shortcut to courage here.
Determined, I inhale, rock up on
my toes, and stride. If I can just get across
scattered like pebbles in the moss. My
mind, hushed by the breath of the trees
and the simple routine, and suddenly
cleared from crowded schedules, became a
vacuum. The pain I had tamped down
with facts, formulas, and regimented
thoughts found its way up to the surface. I
had heard about this from friends who
engaged in deep meditation. They often
faced profound grief and pain—the loss of
a childhood friend or reliving the tragedy
of an earthquake—as their stilled minds
allowed deeper thoughts and wounds to
emerge.
In the last two years, as an
independent physician, I had emerged
into my own spring. I enjoyed days off. I
slept every night. I had restarted trail
running, eager for my heels to hit the dirt
in the coastal mountains, and eager for
the fog and fresh air to cleanse me.
Pulling the cool air into my lungs and
exhaling, I expelled my stress. I found
that I loved to climb, lengthening my
stride as the track tilted and reveling in
the power that sprung from my quads.
When I reached the peak of Kings
Mountain or Wildcat Ridge, I would
pause, consumed with chest-beating
pride, and scan the view, gaining strength
and perspective. Eventually, racing a wild
turkey through the grass, I reclaimed joy
for the first time in years. One day, as I
hurried off to a mountain trail, a friend
called me a nemophiliac. Researching this
term, I found it to mean “one who finds
solace in the forest.” But I also stumbled
onto another term—biophilia—and I
immediately recognized the truth in its
definition as well. I suddenly understood
why the long hours among the trees had
allowed me to emerge from such a dark
place. I knew then that I needed to return
to the Appalachian Trail.
So, now, why isn’t it working? Why am I
facing the same struggle to get across this
dam? Desperate for calm, I switch tactics.
24
Fontana Dam and start the climb—if I
can climb—I will be unstoppable. My head
will clear; I will relax. Then I can beat my
chest at the top, like at Kings Mountain or
Wildcat Ridge at home. Consciously, I
breathe in and out with each step, using
the click of my hiking poles as a
metronome. As I move out onto the dam
and the land falls away, my anxiety rises.
It rears around me, threatening to toss
me head over heels back to the southern
edge. Sweat forms on my upper lip, and
my lip starts to quiver. I tighten my jaw,
swallow, and walk on. I will not fail again.
I rein in my thoughts. Make this a
small step, just point A to point B. First to
the dam’s midpoint. Get there, stop, count
to twenty. You can go back from there and
try later if you want. Midway, counting, I
look up and allow the sun, breaking
through the clouds, to warm my cheeks.
Watching a few wisps of fog burn away, I
realize that the panic resembles a trickle
more than a wave—a reminder of the
emotional scar that is still there. For the
first time, I feel hope that by moving from
point A to point B, I might finally leave
the pain of my formative years behind.
Next, make it to the far side; step off onto
the grass. Count. Once you’re across, and
you reach the count of twenty, you can go
back if you want. Then maybe, try again
tomorrow.
I step off the dam and walk further
without effort, gaining momentum along
narrow macadam. My breath falls into an
easy rhythm and my pulse slows. I find
the dirt track of the Appalachian Trail as
it branches away from civilization and
back into the mountains. A sign marks
the boundary of the national park. It says,
“Newfound Gap and Tennessee Route 441
cross the Appalachian Trail in 31.4 miles.”
I double up on determination. Route 441
is the only road crossing through the
Smokies and a little less than halfway—
and the only chance to get in or out in the
next seventy-seven miles. First step, get
there. No, wait, I’ve completed the first
step. I’ve crossed Fontana Dam.
Next step, today’s walk: climb
3,000 feet and cover fourteen miles to
Russell Field Shelter. If I want to, I can
turn around and walk back down from
there. Around me, the spruce and oak
saplings spring vibrant and green from
the earth. Inhaling the scent of new
leaves and fresh grass, I step onto the dirt
and march.
Cobwebs trail behind me as I move
through the mist. I start my climb up the
Little Shuckstack and into the Great
Smoky Mountains. ¨
25
Valley with Imaginary Structure by Tim Johnson
26
SonnetWrittenonaCleanSlate
poetry by Aryn Marsh
If somehow you were placed in a wholly
different body and I found you without
associating the pain of the past
with the burden of the present I am
quite certain we would rise in love (again).
We must put an end to this story. A
desperate crime of passion honored by a
funeral pyre made from laundry, dishes,
work, diapers burning bodies quickly to
the ground. Eager souls scampering above
dry ashes wanting to find each other
after getting comfortable in separate
homes. This time settling in nestled by the
hearth, the warm glow stoking flames of desire.
27
TheDressILoved
poetry by Rebecca Aronson
had a ribboned hem and vertical stripes
where light flowed through. Wearing it
I was a grove of shadowed birch, a waterfall’s scattered refraction,
a vine growing out of the hard wall of a mesa.
Explorers asking the way to the City of Gold
Casino believed I was pointing them
in the right direction. At parties the dress became guardian
of the names of secret lovers and unsayable desires;
I, the giver of the one true compliment.
When I walked the dress to work, the sidewalk sidled alongside
bumping my leg like a needful dog. If I allowed a hand to follow
the long spine of the zipper, my shoulders slid like lake stones,
blades blurring as if rain, as if a forest turning night. The dress was never tight
no matter how many particles I swallowed. When I wore it
my face became like the memory of a face, unfixed
but probably smiling. The dress was a year of seconds,
a hill made of spears of grass that slight breezes
keep undoing. The dress was a wish I made as a child,
the one my tongue held long after
the ripples around the splash subsided.
28
Nobody,Body
poetry K.S. Keeney
I have haloed myself
in kindling. My blood serves
as flame extinguished.
My knuckles have gone
bone on my gun and
my partner is long
away. There was a deer,
sweet with fat and summer.
I wonder if anyone will clean
it carefully like I wanted.
The man who finds me tilts,
looks like a saint,
from one of them
old paintings, don’t it?
29
HowtoBruise
out. Sometimes there were turkey
vultures fighting over dead seals. I poked
at a carcass with a stick, told Sister to
come look. She screamed all the way
home. I left the turkey vultures to finish
their meal then went to find the cat. I
watched him eat a mouse and leave only
what I thought must be the heart.
Looking back, it could have been any
organ. It could have been anything.
I collected whatever else the beach
brought in. Toy soldiers, pocketknives,
tweezers, and keys. There were stained
glass windows in the school that looked
like bits of glass I found at the beach. I
asked Father how to make a stained glass
window, but he only laughed and told me
to make something useful instead. He
made furniture that smelled like him:
tobacco and cedar.
Once the teacher took me aside
and said that my imagination was
something to be respected, but why
wouldn’t I share what really happened, if
only in my daily journal. People wanted to
get to know me, she said. She had that
concerned look adults got. I said that my
stories were more interesting, and people
should be interested in what is
interesting, not in what actually
happened.
I never told anyone much of
anything, except for Sister. I figured that
she was too dumb to remember. At some
point, the youngest sibling usually
realizes that the older sibling really isn’t
all that special. She was a bit delayed
when it came to these matters.
The mountains looked like they
were cutout shapes from construction
paper. We learned about Emily Carr in
school, but I preferred Frida Kahlo.
Father showed me paintings from a book.
I dressed up as her for Halloween, but no
one knew who I was, and kids made fun of
fiction by Jill Talbot
These moments of escape are not to
be despised. They come too seldom.
—Virginia Woolf
In July we had campfires unless the fire
warnings were too severe; even then, we
had them. Sometimes everything was so
dry we could hardly breathe, so we went
swimming. The water was warmer than
toast and better than a pool. We collected
little crabs and bits of the city discarded
by the beach. In January I liked the beach
even better because nobody was there.
The water was like ice; some people still
went swimming. I wanted to beat them at
everything so I tried. It didn’t leave a
mark so it was hardly worth it.
In January Father brought in
wood for the stove. I liked the sound and
smell of the fire; I loved the power
outages. I spent most days at the beach.
In July I found a message in a bottle.
Turned out the message was from
somebody down the street, and not nearly
as romantic as it is in the movies. Also
kind of littering, now that I think about it.
Mother listened to the CBC.
Father listened to Bob Dylan. He would
sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to
us at night. I’m sure that some people
thought we were bohemian, but I just
thought that we were free, which is, I
suppose, what all bohemians think. This
was BC.
After the winter and summer
school breaks, we had to tell our class
what we had done. I always invented
stories, usually involving bears or dying
relatives. “Save that imagination for art
class,” the teacher said. I shrugged.
The beach was a good place to hide
30
further out.
I liked to dress in sweatpants and
sweatshirts. I liked to pretend I was a
monster to Sister. Father told me about
SeaWorld in Florida, and how orcas were
getting so depressed that their fins
drooped. The idea of a depressed whale
amused me, though I knew that it
shouldn’t.
When a kid said he’d been to the
aquarium in Vancouver, I told him about
the depressed whales. “It takes one to
know one,” he said, and he may have been
right.
In July Father told me that my
bruises were something to be proud of. I
liked the purple bruises best, with bits of
yellow mixed in. I could beat kids at arm
wrestling, amongst other things. When I
was eight, I crashed my bike into an
abandoned, rusty car. In July we kept the
spiders because they got rid of the bugs.
“The circle of life,” Mother said.
“Everything gets rid of something.”
“Who gets rid of us?” Sister asked.
“Your Father seems set on it,”
Mother said.
In January I spilled hot water on
my legs. Father was impressed at how
little I screamed. The scar seemed to stay
there forever. I showed it off. The nurse at
school said Mother was wrong for putting
margarine on it; I needed antibiotic
ointment and a good bandage.
Mother said that pain is a lesson.
Father said that it’s a curse and a badge
of honour. Either way, I couldn’t lose. I
was cursed, honoured, and well-learned.
We made soap for Mother’s Day.
Mine didn’t turn out so I put my name on
somebody else’s. I don’t know if the
teacher knew it was me, but she seemed
very distraught that anyone would do
such a thing so I did not fess up. Looking
back, I just wanted Mother to be pleased.
In January Father hurt his back
chopping wood. He was ordered by Mother
to stop trying to be a man. I remember the
clock: 4:38. January and July could blend
my dress. Father said that a real man
could wear a dress.
One of our relatives had an Alpaca
farm so we got wool from her. I hated how
the wool made me feel itchy, but Mother
would rarely go shopping for new things.
We could barely stay the same size, she
said, and she was right.
Father wore whatever he could
find. Sometimes Mother said that he stole
his clothes off peoples’ backs. I wasn’t
sure what that meant, but sometimes I
was pretty sure that he left wearing one
thing and came home in another. Father
and Mother were never officially married.
Marriage was bourgeois, according to
Father.
Canada geese were always there in
July. I asked if they are Canada geese
when they leave and was never given a
proper answer. Father would take
Polaroid pictures. In one I had a stick in
my hand and had my tongue out. Sister
was in the background with an empty icecream bucket. Some of the mountains
looked bruised in places where there were
no trees. We washed our hair in the
water. The ocean already looked like it
was full of soap residue when the waves
came crashing. The geese would eat the
seaweed, so I almost convinced Sister to
try it.
Father tried to teach me the
directions, but they always confused me.
“Mountains are north,” he said, but I was
pretty sure that there were mountains
everywhere we looked. “The Canada geese
can tell south from north,” he said.
“They win,” I said.
“That’s no attitude,” he said,
locking his glare with the sun. He went
away sometimes like that. The geese
seemed to grow so quickly over the
months.
Sometimes trees fell into the ocean
and the branches sticking out looked like
the Loch Ness Monster. There were some
spots with enough sand for me to sink my
feet in, before the ocean took the seaweed
31
into one another this way. Infections and
birthdays and diapers. Sister didn’t
tolerate it the way I did. She said that it
was because I was a boy. I assumed that
this was a compliment; now I’m not so
sure.
Mother once said she’d burn the
house down; Father had been drinking
again, though he drank every month of
the year. Father smoked cigarettes;
Mother told him he should die of cancer,
though this was before hating smokers
was popular. He would have smoked
either way. In July there was a point
where it seemed that bruises were all that
mattered. They were their own message:
Father loves me.
In later years any kid with half a
brain wanted to escape, but that’s
probably true anywhere. Father said he’d
give me a million dollars if I could swim to
Vancouver.
In the city no one had practice
bruising. The clinics seemed full of runny
noses and indigestion. In the country
nothing in-between mattered, you either
lived or didn’t live. In the city more people
claimed to like Bob Dylan though less
listened to him. In the country everyone
drank. It was hard to smoke cigarettes
because everyone thought you’d start a
fire, when it was so dry we could hardly
breathe.
I suppose, at some point, you want
to know what actually happened.
Some Januarys were colder than
others and some Julys were hotter than
others. Back then nobody discussed it. It
just happened that way—if it was hot, it
was hot, and if it was cold, it was cold. ¨
32
Black Thought by Tim Johnson
33
ShowMe
“Julie,” my mother says again, her
arm drawing me to her like a shepherd’s
hook.
She pulls me in close. “Pull up your
skirt and show Aunt Ann your braces.”
My dad sits at the head of the
table. He is the only one not smoking. He
quit when his father died, one month after
I was born. He says not a day goes by that
he doesn’t crave a cigarette.
I look around at the other
grownups: my aunt (my mom’s sister) and
her husband, my grandfather, and his
two sisters visiting from the Sisters of
Providence motherhouse located in Saint
Mary-of-the-Woods, an unincorporated
community that is part of the Terre
Haute metropolitan area.
Vatican II has loosened the rules of
attire for nuns in the Catholic Church. My
great-aunts wear black polyester skirts
with white cotton blouses and soft
crocheted cardigans. Swirls of gray bangs
peek out from beneath their veils.
My mother nudges me. “Go on,
show her.”
I pick up two corners of the hem
and lift them as if to curtsy but keep my
knees locked. I raise my skirt enough for
Aunt Ann to see the gray, plastic-coated
metal rods that sprout out of my shoes
and run along the outside of my legs.
Mom reaches out her free hand
and pushes the fabric of my skirt up
higher, past my belly.
“They attach here, around her
waist.”
I want to cry; I refuse to cry.
I do not look up. I don’t want to see
their faces looking at me.
My grandfather, who lives with us
and bathes me when my parents are out,
says to my mother, “Carolyn, let her be.
We know what those things look like.”
“But Ann’s a nurse.”
nonfiction by Julie Ann Stewart
The cover has a black-and-white photo of
a naked girl and a naked boy. They look a
couple of years younger than me. Their
legs and hands cover their private parts.
Across the top in thick black letters are
the words SHOW ME!: A Picture Book of
Sex for Children and Parents.
It is Thanksgiving Day in 1976.
The Bicentennial. All is freedom
and love.
Dinner is over. The kids flee to the
living room to watch A Charlie Brown
Thanksgiving on TV. I am in the back
bedroom, playing Barbies with my cousin.
“Julie,” my mom calls from the
table. “Come in here.”
The adults are in the dining room,
drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
I pull a wedding dress over my
doll’s naked hips, push her stiff arms
through the lacy sleeves and Velcro the
fabric closed in back.
“Julie Ann.” She calls again, louder
but not mad.
I stand up and smooth my skirt
around my legs, adjust my white knee
socks. The other kids have kicked their
shoes into a pile by the door, but my blue
leather oxfords are still on. They are
attached to braces that run up the sides of
my legs, strapped in place by the same
sticky fabric that holds Barbie’s gown
together. I walk through the living room,
stepping over and between sprawled legs.
The boys lie on their bellies, chins in
hands, staring at the screen of our console
television. The older girls huddle together
on the couch.
34
with us, they say, and not keep secrets
about sex and our bodies like when they
were growing up. They don’t want us to be
ashamed.
She heard about SHOW ME! from
the other couples. She special orders it. It
costs $12.95 plus tax. The day the
bookstore calls, we drive to North Park
Shopping Center to pick it up. The
salesclerk places the plastic-wrapped book
into a brown paper sack before handing it
to my mother.
When we get home, Mom sits in
the middle of the couch. She tells us to sit.
The five of us stack ourselves on either
side of her.
Mom tears off the plastic wrapping
and sets the large white book in her lap.
The naked girl looks a couple of years
younger than me; the naked boy has long
bangs like my brother. Their folded legs
and hands cover their private parts. My
mother opens the book to the first page
and reads the letter from the authors.
She turns the page.
Here are the boy and girl from the
cover. Both of them have short hair, so I
cannot easily tell them apart until page
eleven, when the boy opens his legs to
show his penis.
So what, says the little girl.
My mother turns the page again.
The little girl leans back to reveal
her vagina.
Dad says, “All I know is not one
dime is covered by insurance. Not one
penny. She’s going to wear those damn
things every day for the next year.”
“Vince, that’s enough.” My mom
doesn’t like to talk about money in front of
her sister. Aunt Ann and her husband
built a new house with a swimming pool
and trampoline in the back yard and an
extra fridge in the garage for Cokes and
beer.
My parents only allow us to drink
Coke on Saturday night after church.
I am still holding up my skirt.
My aunt reaches out and runs her
hand along the fuzzy black band at my
waist. Her fingers are cool on my skin as
she runs them past my belly.
“Is this scratchy?”
She looks into my eyes, her fingers
still at my waist.
“Sometimes.”
“An undershirt might help.” She
moves her hand away to lift a cigarette
from the ashtray to her lips and inhales.
“I think I’ve got some that Kelly doesn’t
wear. I’ll bring them over tomorrow.”
The next day when she drops off a
grocery sack full of things, I go straight to
the back bedroom to sort through its
contents: cotton undershirts printed with
tiny rosebuds in yellow, pink, and blue,
several pairs of matching underpants. I
lift a pink camisole by its thin lacy straps.
I don’t care that they are secondhand. To
me, they are the most beautiful things I
own. They give me a new layer of
protection underneath my clothes.
I don’t go to PE class that year. The blackbottomed shoes attached to my braces
scuff the gym floor, so instead I stay in
the classroom. My teacher Ms.
Stephenson enlists my help to teach a
young Vietnamese refugee girl to read
English.
I cannot remember her name, only
her slick black hair, cropped short like my
own dark curls, to avoid tangles I
imagine.
We sit side by side with a special
tape recorder on the table. I feed plastic
The following summer, Mom orders a
book to teach her children about sex.
My parents belong to a church group
called Christian Family Marriage, which
the members have nicknamed Cereal,
Fruit, and Milk. Mom and Dad and the
other couples attend weekend marriage
retreats, leaving us in the care of my
grandfather. They want to be more open
35
A close-up of a vagina, spread
apart by a woman’s fingers.
We only glimpse this image before
my mom closes the book, which exhales a
soft whoosh of air in our faces. Mom
pushes herself up off the couch and walks
into her bedroom. We hear her open and
close the cabinet door above her closet,
the one where she keeps private things.
She never gets the book out again.
It’s not what she thought it would
be like, she tells us.
When my dad comes home from
work, she leads him into the bedroom and
we hear them talking in hushed tones.
strips containing pictures into the
machine and it reads the sentences to us.
The sun shines in the long bank of
windows and outside the other children
scream and play.
When I am fifteen, I run away and stay at
my friend Beth’s house for two days.
Beth’s mom comes to sit in the car, where
I am hiding, and tells me that I don’t
want to get in trouble and that going back
home will be better than having to go
before a judge as a runaway.
Mom and Dad invite Father
Temple to our house for a family
counseling session. He stands behind our
dining table that was turned like an altar.
We sit on the wooden chairs facing him.
Father Temple tells us that our job as
children is to do whatever the adults in
the house tell us to do.
I ask, “We should do whatever they
tell us to do?”
Father Temple answers, “Yes, the
adult is always right.”
“What if they tell us to do things
that are wrong?”
“It doesn’t matter. They are the
adults.”
At the end of the year, I am permitted to
remove my braces.
The doctor tells me to walk down
the hall and back. I am naked except for
the blue rosebud panties. Then he lifts me
up to stand on the exam table. A circle of
men surround me, point with their
pencils, take measurements of the spaces
between my ankles, at my knees, and
between my thighs. They write the
numbers down on their notepads.
Dr. Britt declares, “She should
continue to develop normally now.”
Mom takes me to buy a pair of
thong sandals.
At home, I paint my toenails pink.
I’ve outgrown the undershirts, and the
dresses I have worn every day are too
short. I replace them with my brother’s
hand-me-downs: Wranglers from the boys’
department at Sears, long-sleeved shirts
airbrushed with Mount Rushmore or the
American Flag.
Soon I add a bra under my t-shirts.
Still I refuse to wear dresses.
As if she has forgotten her children are
sitting on the couch with her, my mother
stops reading SHOW ME!. She doesn’t
turn the page. She inhales and lets out a
long breath.
She picks up several pages and
flips forward to a spread of two teenagers
lying on a bare floor. The girl holds his
penis between her thumb and forefinger
as if she is picking up a grasshopper she
found in the grass. Her breasts are like
small bowls suctioned to her chest.
My mother flips forward another
several pages. Here, two hands, man’s
hands, grasp his erect penis.
She flips again, very quickly.
After the birth of my son, I begin to
experience anxiety attacks. Once I throw
a sippy cup of grape juice against a wall.
The lid flies off and purple liquid runs
36
I pull the red kitchen stool up to my
parents’ closet doors. Standing on the top
seat, I can reach the upper cabinets. I
open the doors. I can see its white paper
jacket. I reach for the book and step down.
I sit on my parents’ bed and look through
the picture pages.
I see a mouth kissing the tip of a
penis.
I see a little boy smiling as he
watches the grownups.
I see a photo of the couple taken
from above them, the man’s body curled
about the woman, her legs cupping him,
so his butt looks like a heart.
I see his penis entering her vagina,
and then on the next page, again, from a
different angle, as if I have walked in on
two people in their bedroom. The woman’s
legs are pushed back by the man’s hips
and his penis is inside her. His testicles
dangle like dice from a rearview mirror.
The woman’s feet are high up. I can see
her soles.
On the next page, the camera
zooms in closer. I see the dimpled skin of
his scrotum, light filtering through his
pubic hairs. It looks like I’m seeing an
animal close-up instead of part of a
human body.
I don’t want to see anymore, but I
cannot stop looking. I flip page after page
until I come to the end of the book. I must
put it away before my parents come home.
I do not want to get caught in their
private things. I don’t want them to find
me like this.
down the white wall. I go to a therapist
once a week. We talk about why I feel the
urge to pull away any time a man in my
family touches me. I want to duck out
from under their hand on my shoulder. I
tense in their hugs. At a family wedding,
Uncle Ronnie tells me, you’re wound
tighter than a bedspring. I laugh it off,
but I can still hear those words.
When my grandfather dies, I drive
to Evansville for the funeral.
As we walk out of the church,
Father Temple says to me, “Well, look
who’s here. I didn’t think you believed in
stuff like this.” He has his hands clasped
around my shoulders and I cannot get
away. I smile and kind of laugh.
It’s not until I am in my late
thirties, with my second husband seated
next to me on the therapist’s couch, that
the memories begin to return. The
memories flash by like flipping through
old photographs that have been packed
away for a long time.
My grandfather and I sit close
together on a porch swing.
My grandfather and I share a cone
full of orange sherbet.
Me, at six, with the blankets
pushed to the foot of the bed.
Me, touching myself between my
legs.
My brother with his hand over my
mouth.
Me, in our neighbor Lindsey’s
garage.
My grandfather moves out of our house,
out of the bedroom next to mine, taking
with him the crucifix that hangs over his
bed. He marries a redheaded woman
named Rita, because he had to, my mom
tells me. She means that he had sex with
Rita and by Catholic law feels obligated to
marry her.
Now when my parents go to their
Cereal, Fruit, and Milk meeting, there is
no one to stay with us.
It is one week before my sister’s wedding.
I know that my brother will be there.
My husband and I go to see the movie 127
Hours.
Sitting in the dark theater, I begin
to have trouble breathing. I tell my
husband I have to step out to go to the
bathroom. In the lobby, I try to catch my
breath. I pace back and forth on the
carpet. I go back into the theater and
37
watch the movie. After a couple of
minutes, I lean over and tell Mark that
something is wrong, that I need to leave.
He doesn’t ask any questions. He
stands up and takes my hand and we
walk out.
In the car, he asks me where I
want to go. I say, “I don’t know, I don’t
know.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, I don’t feel safe there.”
“Should we go to a hospital?”
“No, I’ll be okay. Can we just drive
around for a while?”
“Of course.”
And we do.
He asks me, “Is there anything you
want to do?”
I begin to cry and I say, “I can’t go.
I can’t go to the wedding. I can’t see him.”
My husband knows who “he” is. He
is my brother.
“Then you don’t have to go.”
I look at him, shocked. “I don’t
have to go?”
I don’t have to go.
We drive to an immediate care
clinic, where a doctor gives me a
prescription for Xanax and tells me to
make an appointment with my therapist.
When home I curl up on the couch. Mark
grills me a steak and brings me a glass of
wine. We watch television until I fall
asleep.
I tell my mother over the phone, with my
therapist seated next to me, about the
returning memories of my grandfather
and my older brother. After the call, I am
so tired. Dr. Burt turns off the light and
lets me rest on her sofa while she sees her
next patient in the room next door.
My mother sends a couple of emails. In one, she recounts some of her
own memories of childhood, of boys
tearing at her clothes while the adults did
nothing to stop it. Another time, she tells
me that she’s glad I didn’t tell her about
this when I was a child.
“Your father probably would have
killed your grandfather and ended up in
jail, and then you would have grown up
without a father.”
Finally, after she reads a short
story I have written about a little girl
molested by her grandfather, she writes to
me and apologizes, saying that if she had
known she never would have let it go on.
We do not talk about why she
bought my grandfather’s beer for so many
years. We don’t talk about why she let
him move back in with us, when she knew
he was an alcoholic. Everything I know
has had to be pieced together from my
fragmented memories and reading about
sexual abuse.
My parents are preparing to sell their
house. I ask my mom about SHOW ME!.
Does she still have the book?
“Oh, it’s somewhere around here,”
she tells me over the phone.
I imagine that it’s in that same
cabinet over their closet. I could drive to
their house, three hours away, and pull
up the red stool and find the book, its
white cover yellowed with age.
But I don’t do that.
I go on the internet and search for
the book. I’m shocked to see it listed as a
collector’s item. But I buy a copy for $125.
When it arrives, I carry it into my office
and close the door. I sit at my worktable. I
open it and read the introduction. In the
form of a letter, the authors write that
they hope this book will open a dialogue
between parents and children, so that
kids can grow up in a loving family that
does not suppress sexuality.
I can smell the ink.
I turn the page.
Here are the boy and girl from the
cover again.
I sit in my office alone turning
page after page.
Since childhood, I have been told
38
pulling as the baby inside grew until it
opened her up and entered the world.
that my body is not something to be
ashamed of, so why do I feel a rush of heat
from my belly to the place where my legs
meet? I have taken my clothes off when
men told me to. Some of them I never saw
again. Others faced me every morning
across the breakfast table. I have been
stared at and touched and ignored. My
skin burns any time I feel vulnerable,
exposed: while skinny dipping, at doctor
appointments, after sex, when I
completely lose myself in the moment and
forget how I must look under the camera
lens of someone else’s eye. Will I ever stop
being the little girl whose grandfather
tells her to lift up her pajama top and pull
down her bottoms so he can look at her? I
want to curl up in a tiny ball, hide my
face, protect my most private parts from
view.
I close the book and hide it under a
stack of atlases on the top shelf.
I list SHOW ME! for sale and find
a buyer who pays fifty dollars more than I
did.
Myself, I am nearing fifty. My hair is gray
and curls wildly around my head. I have
weeded out the black and gray clothing
from my wardrobe, adopting instead what
I call my refugee outfit: an outrageous
mix of patterns and fabrics, bright shoes,
a blue bandana printed with flying birds.
I ride my bicycle to the farmer’s market
where a woman stops me to ask if she can
take my picture. ¨
Do you remember the photo of the
Vietnamese girl burned in a napalm
attack?
Naked, arms flung wide, running
toward the camera.
After the photographer snapped
the now famous shot, he gathered Kim
Phuc in his arms and took her to a
hospital where doctors treated her burns.
She survived and went on to speak on
behalf of other burn victims.
There is another photo of her that
most people have not seen. She is a grown
woman, a mother now, holding her infant
son. Her naked back is turned toward the
camera, and its ropy scars are there for all
to see.
I wonder how her skin endured the
stretching and molding of pregnancy. How
painful that must have been, a slow
39
Retrograde
poetry by Kyle Adamson
During the month-long transit to California
from the Al-Anbar Province, I spend
my days on an airbase in the inflatable blister
of a field tent trying to sleep off a fever,
which I call a tour. I roll to my left in a space
preserved for darkness. I’m staring at an archive
of men at the mercy of their dreams—
lined in two rows of cots against the skin of this enclosure.
As the hours pass, the idleness is what kills.
The air conditioner is a gale, but I need an ice age.
I need a thunderstorm to wash the gulleys clear
of the corpses that clog the few remaining fragments
of memories from the town where I was raised.
In the field tent, the orange plywood floor
is a crucible of flames, manifesting
as the body’s hunger for contrition.
It’s no wonder the Officers called this transit
a retrograde—like the fiery dance of Mercury
forever trapped in such awful gravity,
but it’s meant to suppress the nerves,
let the instincts run their course.
Without fail, there’s recoil that remains
in my shoulder from the bark of an M-16—
I roll to my right. I’m still in the ambush,
nestled into the ruins of hotel bombed by jets—
ripped apart at the seams, exposed
like an open wound.
40
I place my hand against the wall.
It disappears, absorbed
in the lunar-grey wreck. I try to wipe
the soot and ash from myself to no avail.
41
TheThingsMothersLose
poetry by Sybil Ponnambalam
My momma lips chase
your brown cheeks
like a galloping sprinter,
arms embracing the phantom victory,
eyes closed against the assault of defeat,
once, there was a world before words,
where you scattered giggles
at my feet like daisy petals
and offered those cheeks,
dainty peaches on endless summer days
and I nibbled like a foolish child
who thinks heaven owes her peaches.
42
Basically, Basically by Michael Hower
43
Yellow,Kid
nonfiction by Caitlin Garvey
44
It was right by Hatch Park when we found out you were colorblind. You dared us to
pick the violets from Old Mr. Newton’s garden, and when we said no, you huffed,
Watch how it’s done, and picked a handful yourself.
45
But behind you lurked Old Mr. Newton, and he frowned down at you as you looked
up at his long, white beard. Then he whispered hoarsely in your ear as his whiskers
touched your cheek, My flowers are yellow, kid.
You yelled, Run! at the top of your lungs, and when we stopped running you said
you’d never be like Old Mr. Newton and you’d never be like your parents, with all
their gardens and functions and overtime and casual Fridays and no dessert on
school nights, and from then on we'd have to go the long way to soccer practice.
46
I’m too young to die, I’m too young to die, you repeated during the tornado drill in the
school basement, both our heads shelled into our arms. I giggled because Mrs. Kufta
kept repeating that it was only a drill. Then we both got whacked with a newspaper
on the back of our heads for being too loud.
47
We got put on patrol duty for a whole month, and you told me, Don’t worry, we’ll be
the best patrol guards this school’s ever seen, and you skipped across the street as
you guided pedestrians. When it snowed, you took off your hat and put it to your
chest and bowed as you led the girls in our class across. I yelled, You have to watch
for cars, and you said, You take things too serious, and then you kissed me on the
cheek.
48
49
Did Atticus Finch smoke? you asked me as you looked at our junior high play script.
Of course not, I snapped, he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke. Did you
even read the book? You pursed your lips and flipped back your short, blond hair,
and mocked in a high-pitched British schoolgirl accent, Did you even read the book?
Then you double tapped my forehead with your index finger and said, Your brain
works overtime and mine only works part-time. You paused, then said, Do you think
we’ll be in the same classes in high school? I shrugged, and you said again in your
schoolgirl accent, Then shall I suggest that we continue to remain mates in the
future despite this, good lady?
50
I followed a Facebook reminder of your 25th birthday on your profile, which said you
were in a band, you worked for the Blue Man Group and still lived in Chicago, and
your favorite beer was Lagunitas IPA. You had a girlfriend who had been an exgirlfriend the previous week. You had a brain tumor and it was growing.
51
52
At your wake you had a dark brown mohawk, like at my pool party when you were
the first to dunk your head, and you came back to the surface with a mohawk that
you had styled underwater and said, Let’s have an ugly hair contest.
53
54
On the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, you said one day you’d fake your death and lie in
a coffin with your eyes shut, and old folks would kneel down before you. You’d hold
your breath and count until forty in your head, and then you’d pop up from your
casket. You’d cackle like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, and you’d
whisper to your mourners, Is everything all right, sirs?
55
And Old Mr. Newton, you’d try the joke on him first, and when you popped up—
Can you imagine? you’d said—he’d turn so pale that he’d have to sit down in the
coffin and trade places with you. Maybe he’d even die of a heart attack, and as he
clutched his chest you’d stand above him and say, It doesn’t matter what color your
flowers are now, sir.
You’d stay yellow, kid. ¨
Images are from The Yellow Kid, an American comic strip that ran from 1895-1898 and featured Mickey Dugan, a bald, buck-toothed Irish
rascal from Hogan’s Alley who wore an oversized yellow nightshirt. Bill Blackbeard called the kid the “first great newspaper comic
character in history.” San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.
Beautification by Michael Hower
56
FrancineFrancis
In November, I check them out to
other girls with Francine Francis over my
shoulder scrutinizing their signatures,
reminding them—shouting at them—
about the penalties for turning them in
late. She follows them across campus,
makes me write up demerits when she
senses an infraction: an improper look, a
hand on the arm, smoking. The girls
complain, and I tell them not to worry.
Francine Francis has more demerits than
anyone, though our RA is too afraid to log
them.
In January, Francine Francis tells
me I can have Lod (or Hod) because he’s
not a good kisser; she tells me Hod (or
Lod) is too stupid and won’t amount to
anything. We watch them skate on the
frozen lake, she and I. The only thing they
do truly well. We’re content to watch the
wind riffle their downy Scandinavian
hair. I hope they fall through the ice,
Nora, she whispers to me, but I know
she’s meanest to the ones she loves.
Spring approaches and Francine
Francis flings open our windows, says
she’s hot, says it reeks in here, stinks like
Hod and Lod, like pickled herring. I
huddle inside her sweater, cashmere and
monogrammed with two bold Fs, pile
blankets on top of myself, and smoke her
cigarettes. Don’t you smoke around me,
Nora, she yells and slaps me hard on the
face. Leaves a mark the color and texture
of a strawberry. I hope it never fades. She
can’t stand smoking now, has stopped
drinking. She drives to the lake without
me, without anyone.
After Spring Break, Francine
Francis disappears. I ask Hod and Lod if
they know where she is, and they both
look at each other with their cow-like eyes
and shrug. They only have weeks left
before they return to Sweden or Lapland.
They spend their days lazy and shirtless.
fiction by Joshua Jones
Francine Francis is not a nice person. She
takes my things. She wears my lipstick,
my dresses, my monogrammed sweaters.
She throws her underwear in my laundry
hamper and yells at me when I mismatch
her socks. Whenever she storms down our
floor, the other girls shut their doors and
pretend to study. A cascade of slamming
wood and clicking locks signals her
approach.
Nora, she shouts, check them out
to me. She’s referring, of course, to Hod
and Lod, the Scandinavian exchange
students we have on loan—from Norway
or Denmark, nobody really knows—and
all the girls want them.
I refuse to look up from my phone.
She can’t stand to be ignored.
It’s not your turn, Francine
Francis.
I don’t care. Put me to the top of
the list, she says and bounces onto my
bed, sending violent waves through the
mattress.
I look up. She hovers above me, a
sneaker in hand—my left Ked—cocked
back and aimed at my head.
I’ve waited long enough, she says,
then adds, I’ll share them with you.
I give her a pass to take them to
the library, but Francine Francis has me
drive them to the lake. She sits with Lod
(or Hod) in the back. When she catches
me watching her in the mirror, she
presses her tongue into his ear. I put
Hod’s (or Lod’s) hand on my thigh, just
below the hem of my skirt. When
Francine Francis puts Lod’s palm on her
bosom, I yank Hod’s hand higher.
57
I don’t care. It’s my turn, I tell her,
and I lift one of the babes into my arms.
His mouth makes small rooting motions.
I slip my shirt to the side and place him
to my swollen nipple, already wet with
milk.
I’ve waited long enough, I say,
then add, I’ll share them with you. ¨
I have to patrol the quad alone, writing up
girls for putting too much bronzer on the
twins’ bare chests.
By May, I’m forcing our RA to
drive me to the lake: she in the front with
Lod (or Hod) who sits impassively as ever,
staring out onto the horizon. Me in the
back with Hod (or Lod), who tries to
unclasp Francine Francis’s bra, the black
lace one she said I couldn’t wear, but his
fingers are too clumsy. I tell him to forget
it, he’s no good, and I yell at our RA to
turn the car around. This wouldn’t
happen with Francine Francis here, I
shout at the choppy water beyond.
It’s the night before finals when I
see her again. She’s in the middle of my
room—our room—throwing her things
into a garbage bag. She doesn’t look up.
Give that back, Francine Francis, I
tell her as my plaid skirt disappears into
her bag. Or maybe it’s hers. It won’t fit
her anyway. She’s huge. Two of me. Her
face round and moon-like. A strawberry
blotch glows on one side. Her swollen
belly fills the room.
That’s mine, Francine Francis, I
say, as her monogrammed scarf goes in
the bag, our pearl earrings, our bottles of
perfume. She empties all the drawers
until the garbage bag is as taut as her
belly.
Carry this, Nora, she commands,
and I do, all the way to her car. The lake
is mirror-still in the moonless night. We
drive in silence, me in the front, her
beside me, her hand beneath mine.
Of course they’re twins. Boys. Redfaced and far too tiny to have demanded
so much room.
Francine Francis, I whisper to her.
She has circles beneath her eyes, and her
face sags, deflated with the rest of her
body. She pretends to sleep, so I whisper
again: Francine Francis, give them to me.
She refuses to open her eyes. She
knows I hate to be ignored.
They’re not yours, Nora, she finally
says.
58
The Theory of Aesthetics by Michael Hower
59
InanEmergency
woman finally and saw immediately that
she was Latina, with dark, thickly curling
hair. Maybe mid-forties, only a little
younger than Mara herself. Her face was
dry but there were faint, gray tear tracks
stained in her makeup.
“Lana is a beautiful name,” Mara
said. “How old is she?”
“Nineteen, a freshman.” As she
spoke the three words, the woman closed
her eyes, and tears instantly appeared.
She exhaled forcibly. “So who are you
waiting for?”
Mara’s phone rang shrilly over the
waiting group and she reached gratefully
for it. The caller ID was a brief warning,
then her sister’s panicked voice echoed
loud enough for everyone to turn and look.
“Hello? Mara! Are you there? Are
you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m okay. I teach on the
other side of campus, Lisa. I was nowhere
near it.” She heard a ragged exhalation
flow into the mouthpiece.
“Did they evacuate the whole
college? Where are you?”
“I’m standing outside the Lewis
Building; the police have corralled some
of us here until they’re done sweeping the
area.”
“But I thought they just got the
shooter? He’s dead, the news said it.”
Worry lifted her voice half an octave
higher.
“He is,” Mara assured her. Threat
neutralized, the officers had told them
twenty minutes earlier. “I think now
they’re just sweeping for bodies and the
students who are still hiding.” Lana’s
mother cringed melodramatically. Mara
quickly finished, “I’m sure they’ll be out
soon. Everyone’s waiting here for them.”
“And Paul? You’ve heard from
him?”
fiction by Emily Everett
“Is your kid in there?”
The petite woman to Mara’s right
turned toward her, hands clamped on the
police sawhorse in front of her.
“I don’t have any children,” Mara
said reflexively.
“Mine is. Inside I mean. Lana.”
She turned back and nodded at the wide
brick building. “I named her after Lana
Turner. You know Lana Turner?” Mara
repeated the name in her head and it did
sound familiar. Maybe some singer or pop
star; she wasn’t very interested in
knowing at the moment.
The woman took in her silence and
talked on. “Lana Turner was a big star,
one of those old Hollywood ones, you
know? Like Marilyn Monroe but a little
before that, big blond hair and eyelashes
out to here.”
Mara didn’t know what to say
about that, so she said nothing. She knew
now why the name was familiar, it was
the first line—Lana Turner has
collapsed—from a perfect little Frank
O’Hara poem she had once loved to teach.
She didn’t tell the woman this. They stood
shoulder to shoulder, tipped toward the
police cars and the building. Oh Lana
Turner we love you get up, she thought.
“I wanted my daughter to have
class, you know, that’s why I named her
Lana. Lana had class, not a mess like
Marilyn, but she was just as pretty.
Prettier, maybe.” More silence.
“Does your daughter look like
Lana?” Mara asked, just to say
something.
“No,” the woman said shortly, “she
looks like me.” Mara turned to look at the
60
“Yeah, he’s safe,” she lied. Already
their conversation was the loudest thing
happening in the group of hushed
parents. Soon enough she would know if it
were true or not. Her phone toned a low
battery warning. “I have to go. I’ll call you
tonight, okay?”
“Okay,” Lisa said, “call me later.
I’m so glad you two are safe, I freaked
when I saw it on TV. They’re saying at
least a dozen fatalities.”
Mara ended the call and silenced
her phone. Lana’s mother had now turned
to the couple behind her, breaking the
tacit rule about facing the building. She
was telling them about Lana like a
rehearsal eulogy. They murmured oneword replies but were plainly too
distracted to think of children other than
their own.
The phone call left Mara feeling
jittery and sick in the back of her throat,
infused with anxiety like it had snaked
down the phone line from her sister. Her
mind mapped the History Department
inside, turning familiar corners and
ascending stairs. Where would Paul have
been when the shots began? At his desk
for office hours maybe, or at the front of a
freshmen lecture. Since they had stopped
eating lunch together, she didn’t even
know his course schedule anymore. They
just met back at the car in a distant
parking lot and drove home together at
the end of the day.
Mara had been sitting in a circle
with her advanced poetry class, reading
William Carlos Williams and discussing
how much really depends upon a red
wheelbarrow. First the emergency
warning system blared, then the phones
in pockets buzzed with a text message
from the college: Active shooter, shelter in
place.
She stood now at the far edge of
the parking lot where Paul had tried
every fall to get a parking permit,
apparently still too low in the pecking
order for a spot in the center of campus.
61
There were only a few cars remaining
that weren’t police SUVs or ambulances,
stretched across the distance between the
building and the line of sawhorses.
Mara wanted to shift her weight
from side to side or bob on the balls of her
feet, but the others around her were rigid,
motionless. Even the emergency
responders across the lot were still,
waiting for a command. She needed to be
as still as possible, take up as little room
as possible, and wait. She could wait. She
stretched for other thoughts to distract
her, any thoughts, like her to-do list at
home, full of mundane tasks that would
certainly not be done tonight. The annual
barbecue for their students was planned
for Saturday and some of the cooking she
needed to start now, the sides and
marinades. Paul needed to mow the lawn.
He talked so much about it, she knew he
was looking forward to the party as
always. She tried to find some of her old
excitement.
The barbecue was usually in late
April or early May, for their students of
that year. Just a few years ago, it had
been a high point for her in the latesemester lethargy—a chance to show off
her full home and handsome son, Max, at
that time glowing with the easy arrogance
of a late teen boyhood spent surfing and
diving. She hadn’t even minded the
heavy-lidded looks her female students
gave him, intently watching his tanned
form cross the back yard. He was
beautiful and languid then, a lazy calm
punctuated often with barking laughs
that only drew more eyes to him. The
boldest or the prettiest of her students
always rushed to sit next to him with
paper plates of barbecue chicken and corn
on the cob—smiling, laughing, and not
eating.
When had she stopped minding
those looks? In those years there had been
something animal and unearthly about
him, other, so instincts for maternal
protection seemed to her absurd or
mundane. Who were his faded professor
a corner of the lecture hall, frantic for his
comfort or reassurance. The invented
scene tightened her hands on the barrier.
Again she looked for some calming
distraction, but the parking lot was
unchanged and useless. Behind, she could
hear Lana’s mother turning to new
listeners, sometimes ignored and
occasionally rebuffed. The others were
largely silent, their minds in other busy
places, calculating odds and possibilities.
She understood that need. There was also
the low, sibilant hiss of whispers from
those who had someone to wait with—
couples intoning as quietly as possible. A
few bent their necks to look down at
phones. Mara would have liked to thumb
through news sites and know more even if
it was bad, but she might need that red
sliver of remaining battery to make calls,
depending on what happened when the
police came out.
With no helpful external
distractions, she examined and cataloged
her own physical uneasiness. Here was
the queasy pressure in her abdomen, the
ache in her lower back from standing so
long. There was the weight and dread in
each limb holding her in place with the
others, like a steady wife watching
seaward for her husband’s return. It was
a familiar image for her, useful to imitate:
a form she had seen in stone on the
harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
The two of them had honeymooned
in New England, college sweethearts in a
smooth rented Chevy Impala that drove
them around the sleepy towns. From
Boston they were advised to skip the
Cape, crowded with family vacations, and
drive instead up the North Shore. The
towns there were so much more functional
and lived-in than Cape towns, and Mara
liked that. People worked with the sea
and on it, had sturdy old houses and
newer bars. Nothing looked too postcardy
because there was plenty of rust.
For four days they stayed in
Gloucester, walking down to the harbor
parents to watch or judge, when vital
youth, his quick athletic grace, set him so
apart? She had smiled to think of her
smart, bookish students longing for a look
or nod from him.
There was a time when female
students would look through their lashes
at her husband, but it was long past. Had
he noticed? All aging men must feel when
their presence begins to fail in that
particular way, but for professors it could
be different, subtler. Paul had always
feigned oblivion to their crushes, though
Mara felt that each was weighed and
considered with characteristic inertia.
From the beginning of their marriage he
courted that attention, the adoring
reverence of his classroom audiences.
She was well aware that this
specifically was why he relished the endof-term barbecue. Every year she watched
as he held court like a lucky king,
surprised to look around and find himself
blessed with talented, young, pretty
subjects. It was embarrassing to
witness—Paul bounding from grill to pool
to patio, buoyed with frank, adolescent
energy.
But for the last two years she had
also watched him, and his students, with
some loose sense of envy for their easy,
intimate rapport. A vague yen was all she
could really begin to feel about it—a
dispassionate impulse for a thing she once
had, too. Envy, she’d read once, is the
desire for something another possesses;
jealousy is the fear of losing something
(usually someone) to a rival. Paul was not
her rival, and she’d already lost
everything she feared losing, but she did
begrudge him each year’s new surrogates.
They seemed like eager replacements,
damp fledglings gathered round him with
beaks upturned. Gaping to catch his
words, which might contain the next sign
(in a long line of treasured signs) proving
that they’re the rare ones, the gifted ones,
the chosen ones who will succeed. They
might even be circled around him now in
62
Still flustered, she turned down a
street she thought would take her toward
the beach. But instead it opened onto a
wide flag-lined esplanade between the
busy road and the ocean, twenty or thirty
feet below. A tall statue dominated the
promenade ahead: A towering fisherman
braced against the wheel of his phantom
ship, looking to the horizon. She paused to
read the inscription on the Fisherman’s
Memorial (“They that go down to the
sea in ships”), and then jogged briefly
along the pavement to stop at the next
oversized statue. The fisherman’s wife
gazed fixedly out to sea, one child on her
hip and another clinging at her knee.
The fisherman statue was finer—it
seemed active and in motion. In the man’s
lean you felt the sway of the ship, and the
shiny green bronze looked slick with sea
spray. But as a newlywed she was drawn
to the still wife, watching the harbor with
a rigid desperation in the face and eyes.
She couldn’t identify with the feeling but
imagined she could, her own abdomen
tight and tense at the illusory threat. The
fisherman’s wife felt the possibility that
her temporary aloneness would become
permanent, and Mara herself feared it.
She tugged up her socks and
jogged quickly back by Main Street, the
shorter route. Her stomach was still tight,
and she felt foolishly nervous to get back
and see that her husband was still in bed.
When she kicked off her sneakers and
looked in on Paul, he was propped up on
pillows reading The Boston Globe. Still
breathless and slightly panting, she
walked around the bed to kiss him.
“I thought you’d left me!” he
teased, smiling up at her.
“I tried, but I got a cramp at mile
three,” she said, reaching for his coffee
mug on the bedside table. But he pulled
her down laughing on top of him before
she could grab it, and his hands pressed
down on her damp back.
“I need a shower. I stink,” she said.
where fish and lobster were loaded onto
refrigerated trucks and dark boats slid in
and out between the docks. Most days
they sat reading on a pebbly beach, a
Howard Zinn paperback for him and a
recent biography of Frank O’Hara for her.
The biography was a good one, and
she had been sorry to reach the end on
their third afternoon. The rise and fall of
poets in her esteem was typically brief, a
few months, but Frank had been rushing
her around Manhattan for years. She was
fascinated to read his strange New York
Times obituary, reprinted fully in the
book, with its funny and sad headline:
“Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies—
Also a Poet.” His early death seemed
equal parts bizarre metaphor and freak
accident: hit by a pair of young lovers,
joyriding in a dune buggy at the beach on
Fire Island. Struck by a taxicab, the
Times had said.
When the book was done, she had
spent her time on the beach writing long,
drawn-out poems with no gravity or heft
in them. These became part of a slim
chapbook she was later mortified to even
think about.
The fourth morning she woke with
a headache and jogged down to the
waterfront, leaving Paul asleep in their
rental. Turning a bend in the road, she
saw the sidewalk ahead was crowded with
day laborers, obviously waiting in an
appointed spot for the chance to work.
The men turned toward her, and she saw
it was impossible to change her route and
avoid them. Her jogging shorts were so
short and her legs so exposed, and she felt
acutely the jolting rise and fall of her
breasts in stride—but the calls and
whistles didn’t come. The men parted in a
rush and scattered into the street and
onto the grass, murmuring polite excuses,
calling her miss. She smiled and thanked
them, turning her head to both sides, and
hurtled on with the downward momentum
of the road.
63
After he would always crash to the sand
next to her, sprawling wet, tired limbs
onto the blanket and waiting to be hugged
with a dry towel. He always seemed so
raw and proud, with quick, sharp
movements; the opposite of his still,
cerebral parents even in childhood.
But he was not unbreakable, and
her mind explored every appalling
possibility for their arrival, churning up
image after image in gruesome detail.
Only two outcomes really, but with a
hundred thousand possible variations to
examine. With effort she reeled in her
horrified thoughts and imagined him,
golden and smiling on the beach, willing
him to be there when they pulled up to
the parking lot. Eyes squeezed shut, she
pictured the faded towel and the sheen of
seawater on his arms as he waved up to
her from the sand. Sometimes she still
saw it as if it were real, in her mind, like
a true memory.
For months, she had been teased
by a feeling that if she just drove over
there he would be squinting up at her
from the beach—just waving, not
drowning. She even turned the car in that
direction a few times but never made it all
the way, telling herself she was too scared
to see the place. But it was really the
possibility that kept her away, the
knowledge that she would drive up and
see for certain that he was not maybe, not
possibly, not perhaps gone but gone with
a complete, total certainty that would root
her to the driver’s seat and the parking lot
forever. The feeling and the impulse had
faded, of course, but it had taught her
something that this crowd of sobbing,
staring people didn’t know yet. Waiting in
agony to know the outcome was a torture
she would prefer over any day or any
minute of knowing the truth.
It had only taken a month or two
for everyone to start pushing her back to
work after the funeral. It was clearly an
organized effort to get her in the
classroom again for the fall semester,
He rolled her over on top of the blankets
and inhaled loudly, taking mock sniffs of
her hair, neck, and chest, while unzipping
and tugging off her sweaty windbreaker.
She relaxed into him, the tension in her
stomach unwinding under the familiar
weight. They took hot new mugs of coffee
into the bathtub with them after.
Mara recognized that same tension
in her gut now—a tautness like being
coiled for action—and it was draining.
While the others around her seemed to
have moved from silence into full-blown
twitchy panic, she couldn’t summon such
a high-energy response. Mostly she was
tired from feeling raw and exposed, like
the skin had been peeled back from her
nerves.
Sudden, gasping sobs rushed from
lungs behind her, and Mara lurched
forward in surprise. Thrust against the
sawhorse, she curled reflexively away
from the sound. All this surrounding her
was a moment and a feeling she knew:
how awful the waiting and not knowing
was for them. She didn’t want to relive it
with this vigil of jumpy parents
prematurely mourning. Their panic was
too familiar. It felt like her own dread two
years ago, when Paul walked into her
study with the phone to say that Max was
missing at the beach. His friends were
scared that there might have been a
problem, that he might be in the water.
An ambulance was on its way. But Paul
was calm and tried to calm her; he was
sure that Max had just gone for a walk or
a soda. She was not sure, and every
minute she didn’t know her life leaked out
of her. Like Schrödinger’s cat, her son was
both alive and dead until she saw him and
knew, and till then she half died in
waiting.
As they drove to the favorite beach,
Paul talked on inanely, reassuringly, and
she thought of the times she had watched
Max there when he was young—paddling
seaward on the waves and leaping up to
stand in perfect balance on the surfboard.
64
He stepped closer. “I haven’t
‘moved on,’ Mara. I’m just trying to move
forward. The students—”
“Yes, the students, of course,” she
said. “You fill up your life with these kids,
and you don’t even see it, how wrong it
is.”
“You’re missing the point here
completely.” Exasperation cut at last
through his tired composure. “Being back
with your students will help. You’ll get
some perspective.”
She turned back to the sink. “I
don’t need perspective on this, I know
what happened and what it means.
Maybe more than you.”
He walked to the kitchen door,
pausing with his hands raised to push it
open. “Please think about what I’ve said.
Consider it. The college is holding the
classes for you, Mara. You can go back.”
Eventually she had yielded almost
in desperation, pretending that it would
help like they said. And in September her
classroom filled four times a day with
tanned beach kids who looked and talked
and barked laughter in Max’s familiar
way. She watched her students with six or
seven decades of life stretching ahead of
them, and all those years looked like
sheer gluttony. A hazardous excess.
Their glib indifference made her
feel pointlessly, illogically anxious for
them. She thought of adding Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts” to her syllabi,
hoping stupidly to make these students
understand how the splash of Icarus goes
unnoticed, the white legs disappearing
into green water. But they’d probably just
think it was funny. She knew Paul would
say she was worrying about nothing, so
she agreed that he had been right all
along, of course she was better off back at
work. She taught the same syllabus as the
year before.
After two or three weeks back,
Mara dreamed she was in a familiar
when the familiar routine would hurry
her along the prescribed grief stages
sooner. Paul had found his comfort in
busyness and work, and over the summer
he prodded the topic constantly.
“Mara, just listen. I really think
you’ll be glad you went back. It’s not
healthy to just stay here at home.” She
heard what he wanted to say: stay home
and mope, stay home and wallow.
“I can’t, not yet,” she said with her
back to him, making a spot for her wine
glass in the sink full of dishes.
He waited for her to turn around,
and she stretched it, running the faucet
over the sticky dishes. She turned finally,
hands twisted in a dishtowel.
“It’s only been a few months, Paul.
I’m not myself. Why can’t you let me do
this?”
“I’m just trying to look out for you.
You have to get moving now or you’ll be
stuck forever.” He waited but she said
nothing, so he tried again. “Don’t you
think it was hard for me to go back to
work? I didn’t want to either.” She was
surprised to hear the memory thicken and
constrict his voice. “But it helped me,
Mara—it helped me deal with all the
time.” Those first few weeks had stretched
time into centuries for both of them,
chimed out unevenly by the ringing phone
and garbled voices on the answering
machine. But then Paul had gone back to
his classes, and she had stayed.
“No, I don’t think it was hard for
you.” She meant her voice to be matter-offact but it came out viciously. “You were
glad to get back.”
“Of course not, of course it was
hard.” He was almost pleading, not rising
to her provocations. “It took me weeks to
get back into the routine and the classes.
But I’m glad I did it.”
“I’m glad you did, too. I’m happy
that you were able to move on so quickly.
But I can’t.”
65
bookstore, searching for something in the
shelves. The first book she handled felt
oddly heavy, and when she flipped it open
at random she read a line—those are
pearls that were his eyes—from The
Tempest. She threw the book back on the
shelf and tried another: a Stevie Smith
collection, Not Waving but Drowning,
with dog-eared pages. And on went the
frantic search—T. S. Eliot’s sea-girls
wreathed with seaweed, Ted Hughes’s
drowned whore, Emily Dickinson’s
sinking man. Each leaden book weighed
heavier in her hands. They were
waterlogged, dripping stinging seawater
into her palms, and when she dropped the
last it splashed into gray waves at her
feet.
This dream and others unsettled
her, but by then she was already learning
students’ names and beginning to
decipher their embryonic verses. In a few
months, she’d know more about them
than their parents did; not all writing
bares the bones of the writer, but student
poetry is almost always confessional.
With each week they resembled her son
less and less, and now, nearly four
semesters later, she could find no
similarities at all. Max was nothing like
her tentative, aspiring students.
And here she was, waiting again
for two possibilities—at a brick building
instead of a beach. But now she felt worn
out and resigned to the wait, like the
fisherman’s wife. No, even that stone
woman had the comfort of her children
while she waited. Mara knew that neither
outcome today would bring her any
comfort. She and Paul had once been two,
whole and lucky.
The dozen or so police officers were
starting to pace around their cars, not
looking anxious but maybe bored. Mara
watched as two moved purposefully in
front of the doors and stopped there,
standing stiffly erect. They muttered
down their chins into chirping black
radios clipped to vest pockets.
Mara told herself that this meant
the wait would soon be over, and it was a
hopeful and scary thing. There would
then be two groups in the crowd: the
hysterically elated and the hysterically
broken, and she would find out which one
was hers. She let herself focus on the
outcomes—the very real potential that
Paul might not come out with the police
when they finished their sweep. She
tested the possibility of that, a life
without him. Lonely, of course, and sad,
but past the surge of grief there was a
tempting completeness in that solitary
existence—everything about her closed
and shut up, nothing more to resolve or
talk over or rub raw. A pair of ragged
claws, she thought wryly, scuttling across
the floors of silent seas.
Silence. It was a teasingly pleasant
idea. She could move somewhere far away
and wholly different: a green New
England college town. Or maybe she
would try living in a cold city up north,
where craggy mountains rise up to frame
you all around. She might be able to teach
there, or quit teaching; no one would
know the difference. She could write
again, the old kind of poetry that felt true
to pick up and read the next day, instead
of trite and juvenile. There would not be
any more barbecues to plan.
Even though it seemed wrong,
Mara closed her eyes to picture these
possibilities, filling each with furniture,
curtains, friendly but unobtrusive
neighbors. The last scene was a writing
desk stacked with books, with gray-blue
mountains blurry through the iced
windowpane above it. It was exciting in
an odd, unfamiliar way, but nothing she
showed herself seemed like a real life for
anyone, let alone herself. She had learned
to be childless, and it didn’t seem possible
that she could learn to be entirely alone,
widowed, by tomorrow. But by tonight,
this afternoon even, she would know
either way. Had anything ever been
decided so suddenly? Or maybe these
66
shrieked and threw her arms forward,
leaning herself further over the sawhorse
in what Mara first thought was some
paroxysm of grief. But her fingers were
reaching in the direction of a teenage girl,
running toward them with two thick
braids slapping her shoulders.
Mara backed away—recoiling both
from their gasping reunion, and from her
own disgusting, resentful reaction to it.
For that one moment of realization, she
had bitterly hated Lana and her mother.
Now it seemed that both their lives would
continue on past this emergency, more or
less on the same trajectory, and hers
would not. Because no matter what
happened, she would have to live with the
knowledge of the toxic stuff inside her.
After a few steps back her heel
slipped and she stumbled, looking down
through tears to see what had made the
dull jangling sound. A loose pile of brassy
shell casings surrounded her shoe. She
stood frozen, blurred eyes to the ground,
breathing through her mouth in huffs.
When she had calmed herself, Mara
looked up at the building and its hectic
entrance. The glass doors swung in and
out constantly for stretchers and EMTs,
but no more students or teachers came
out on foot. It seemed like everyone who
could walk out of the building already
had.
She saw small groups of students,
parents, and a few teachers standing and
sitting on the grass to the right of the
doors, as police officers walked between
them handing out tan blankets. She
scanned the grass for Paul and didn’t see
him, but she was so far away it was hard
to tell teachers from parents. What had he
been wearing? She forced herself to move,
stepping carefully out of the shell casings
and toward the building to see better.
Mara stopped in the middle of the
parking lot, keeping deliberate distance
between herself and the others by the
entrance. After Lana and her mother, she
had no urge to go farther, near all those
things always were, a dune buggy
running you down at the beach on Fire
Island.
With her eyes still closed, Mara
heard first the doors of the building bang
open, and heard second the fierce
inhalation of breath all around her as the
parents reacted. When she opened her
eyes she saw EMTs and police officers
jolting to action, but no students. The
group around her was roiling with sudden
movements, jerking arms and legs, all the
pent-up anxiety instantly converted to
frantic motion.
Mara looked to her right, where
Lana’s mother had resumed her waiting
spot. The woman was now leaning
forcefully on the sawhorse in front, so it
looked like she was both straining against
it and using it for bodily support. Like the
others her eyes were fixed on the four
swinging doors and the people rushing in
and out of them. New tears slid onto her
cheeks, blurring the old gray tracks in her
makeup.
Another gasp rose abruptly from
the parents, followed quickly by shrieks
and shouted names. Mara heard and saw
Lana’s mother react as the others began
to part around them, surging by the
barrier and across the parking lot to their
kids. She tried to read an answer or
outcome on the woman’s face but it was
still ambiguous, mouth open and eyes
wide in what could be surprise, confusion,
or disbelief. Students had started to
emerge from the Lewis Building at last,
but Mara didn’t see Paul or Lana, or what
she imagined Lana looked like: a younger,
thinner, quieter version of her mother.
As the seconds stretched, it
occurred to her that the girl would not be
coming out. Why else would Lana’s
mother stay behind when the others
spotted their own children in the crush?
She had a visceral repulsion to the
thought of standing here, staying within
this locus of grief and empty motherhood.
She stepped back. Then Lana’s mother
67
“Everything was closed up when
the police took us out. After the all-clear.
But they want me to give a statement
before I go.”
“Did they say how many were . . .
hurt?” The word had been “killed,” but
she saw that this was getting difficult for
Paul, that his face was tired and drained.
Hurt would be enough.
Paul tipped his head from side to
side uncertainly, but as he began to
answer, a mother’s wailing sobs erupted
from a crumpled form on the lawn. Before
Mara could react, Paul grimaced and
pivoted suddenly away from the tortured
noise, turning his back to the sound and
the students on the grass. The jerky
movement brought him to face south
campus, the direction of the far-off
parking lot that held their car. Mara
looked at them over Paul’s shoulder, and
then she turned too. She matched her
stride to his uneven pace as as they
walked back across the parking lot, the
way she had come. ♦
parents hugging their children on the
grass. Or the parents squatting alone,
arms wrapped around their heads.
From her new location she quickly
spotted the back of Paul’s gray jacket, a
broad tweed flag rising above the students
bunched in a circle of tan blankets around
him. It surprised her, mainly, and she
refused to allow anything else apart from
relief and exhaustion to surface. Here was
an outcome, an ending to the emergency.
She breathed slowly and watched
Paul talking to the group intently and
gesturing, placing a heavy hand on the
shoulder nearest to him. He finished
shortly and turned to extricate himself
from the huddle then noticed Mara
standing in the center of the parking lot.
He lifted his arm to wave recognition, and
she waved once back at him.
She waited and watched Paul walk
toward her. He was halted at almost
every step by a pronounced limp. Was he
injured? Shot? She looked for blood but
saw none. A policeman stopped him first,
and then an EMT, but he shook his head
at their questions and continued on
slowly. When he was in earshot she raised
her voice.
“Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. “I’m okay,” he
shouted back.
“But you’re limping,” she said
when he finally stopped in front of her. He
pulled her against his chest, where the
buttons of his shirt pressed on her cheek.
She could feel that he was shaking a
little.
“It’s just stiff in the knee,” he
answered, voice muffled in her hair.
Stepping back, he lifted the leg and flexed
it slowly. “We had to hide for hours and I
couldn’t straighten it out much.”
“Are your students okay?”
“The ones in my room are all fine,
yes.” He hesitated. “The other rooms, I
don’t know what happened but it sounded
bad.” He was weighing how much to say.
“You didn’t see . . . ?”
68
train car perspective by Michael Peterson
69
TheMeaningofSteps
think he would have writhed. Instead, he
closed his eyes until the tribulations
ended then, somehow, as he’s done for
nearly fifty years, worried about my
comfort.
“The remote control’s right by my
head, Son. Look around. Put on what you
want.”
I didn’t, preoccupied as I was with
the idea that our time together, which I’d
come to value more and more with each
passing year, might be coming to an end.
My father has always been a busy
man, but a man eager to relax, especially
eager to escape the fast pace of life in
Greater New York. Since I could
remember, he’d wanted a place in the
country, preferably upstate, where he’d
spent the first twelve years of his life. The
year he turned sixty-seven, I bought a few
acres of property in the Finger Lakes
region: cleared land circled by woods and
equipped with a camper, an active well,
and an electrical power supply. Since then
the two of us have spent—through his
passage into old age and mine through
divorce, remarriage, and the adoption of a
child—weeks at a time there: mornings
drinking coffee on the deck we built,
afternoons walking the perimeter,
evenings sipping wine under the stars,
nights talking and sleeping in a twohundred-square-foot space, our beds just a
few feet apart. Many of those nights I
stayed up late as he dropped off, snored,
mumbled in his sleep, and tossed and
turned violently enough to pull muscles.
One night, a year or so back, at the
nearby vacation house that my wife and I
could finally afford to buy, he yelled so
loudly in his sleep, and for so long, that I
was sure a neighbor would call the police.
I imagined that soon enough I would have
to call an ambulance or rush him to the
hospital. I had to be prepared. But no
nonfiction by George Guida
The day after his surgery my father took
his first postoperative steps, down the
hallway of his floor at Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center. The doctor
insisted that he walk right away, “to wake
up his bowels.” This doctor had just
removed my father’s entire stomach. Still,
my father managed three walks that day,
with three different people: me; his
nephew, a resident at NYU Langone
Medical Center; and Kenny, his lifelong
friend. Maybe only his nephew expected
him to look as well as he did. His face was
full, rosy, tranquil. He looked so
surprisingly well that when the
uninhibited Kenny arrived at 7 a.m., he
woke my father, me, and the poor soul
sleeping in the room’s other bed with cries
of “Holy shit! Holy shit! Look at you. You
look great!”
Awake, my father spoke clearly,
joked, laughed, and hardly complained
about his lack of food and water. For a few
days after surgery, he wasn’t even allowed
to suck on ice cubes, only to swab his lips
with a moist sponge. Any substantial
amount of water could weaken the
adhesive holding his innards together. On
the fourth day, doctors tested the
connections for leaks. They had him
swallow gulps of contrast dye, insulting
his still-dormant digestive tubes with
sudden bursts of metallic liquid. The
effects were predictable. As I watched
from my cold leather hospital chair, he lay
in bed, grimacing, holding his belly,
moaning, enduring quick strikes of gas
pain and waves of nausea, fighting his
patchwork viscera’s impulse to vomit. If
he could have moved his torso at all, I
70
By the time my father got sick,
nearly two decades had passed since I’d
lived there, but in one week of visits I was
making up for lost time. If I didn’t exactly
count the steps, I made them count. Each
day of my father’s stay, I followed a
different route uptown from Penn Station.
Through Times Square and up Seventh
Avenue, into and across Central Park. Or
up Fifth Avenue and across Fifty-Seventh
Street with its shops still beyond my
budget. Or through Grand Central, up
Lexington and along Fifty-Eighth Street
as it sinks below the Fifty-Ninth Street
Bridge (I cling to the name of the upbeat
Simon and Garfunkel tune released the
year before I was born) and approaches
the East River just a few blocks from York
Avenue’s hospital row. Each route was a
chance to spot something I’d never noticed
in my thirty years of thinking I knew the
city. Nothing surprises quite like the
familiar seen through older eyes.
On the last of these walks a
memory overtook me: I was twenty-one,
out of college, working the summer as a
foot messenger. I carried a cheap canvas
backpack, inside of which was a thick
manila envelope addressed to a patient in
an East Side hospital. The hospital, I
recalled, was Sloan Kettering. The patient
turned out to be a guy named Terry
Southern, a writer, who, I would discover,
had written one of my father’s favorite
movies, Doctor Strangelove. I remember
the smile on Mr. Southern’s Papa
Hemingway face when I handed him the
package. I remember thinking how great
it was that someone so sick could look so
happy. Later I learned that Southern had
stomach cancer, but that he died of
something else.
number of passing years prepares you for
a parent’s agony.
Sitting in his hospital room on the
third day after surgery, how I wished I
could walk my father around his floor the
way I had just a couple of days earlier.
How I wished I could see him step
gingerly along Sixty-Eighth Street as he
had when my sisters and I took him to be
admitted, his arthritic hip and chemo
fatigue a double challenge. And, oh, what
joy to picture him stepping into a lively
upstate stream, in waders and fly-fishing
vest, snapping a long cast over a deep
pool.
That night I walked back to Penn
Station as I’d walked to the hospital that
morning, zigzagging my way across
Manhattan. Don’t ask me how many
steps. By the time I reached ThirtyFourth Street, my legs weighed a hundred
pounds each. But I liked feeling the
muscles’ catch and release with each
stride. I liked that I could still weave
through the crowd and pass the majority
of other walkers. The truth is I could have
walked all night, only because I could
have.
I moved to New York City when I was
seventeen and lived there for the better
part of the next twenty-five years. As a
young man, I’d taken for granted the
blessings of city walks, intimacy with the
streets and with my thoughts. I’d many
times walked a hundred blocks from some
café to one of my myriad apartments. In
the wake of a bad breakup, I might walk
the streets all night, talking to myself for
miles at a clip. In celebration of a good
breakup, I might walk the paths of
Central Park all day, greeting Belvedere
Castle, the Lake, the Great Lawn, and the
Sheep Meadow, and expressions of
possibility in the countless faces that
greeted me like new lovers. I was young,
able, free, and exercising my freedom.
Whenever my father took a nap, I’d leave
the hospital in search of the perfect diner
or coffee shop, sometimes carrying my
bounty in a paper bag to the heart of the
park, to Poets’ Walk or Bethesda Terrace.
71
movers and shakers stepping into
checkered cabs stopped at curbs, headed
to meetings, shows, concerts, parties that
birthed legends—images left to us only in
black-and-white photos of a postwar city
humming with the power of a nation at its
zenith. I imagine how his mind must have
responded with a thousand ideas that
drove him toward a future limitless as the
skyline.
“But I had no direction,” he also
admits.
Because my entire family has
heard his stories over and over, we know
the end result of that lack; of two-hour
subway commutes from southern
Brooklyn to Harlem as he tried to
concentrate on textbooks; of the callow
miscalculation of taking six college
courses at a time; of confusion over how
French could possibly relate to physics.
He must have spent entire days slumpshouldered, trudging the steps back to the
Broadway train. In the end he wore down
and dropped out.
Still, he was young and stepped to
an ambitious rhythm.
He went to work for his
grandfather’s construction company and
continued to live a few doors down from
my mother, four years his junior.
“I had my eye on her,” he tells us
over every elaborate Sunday dinner my
infirm mother can somehow still cook.
When he was twenty-one, right
before joining the Army, he asked her on a
date. After long days of basic training
exercises and marches at Fort Dix, he
wrote her letters pledging devotion and
fretting that other neighborhood boys
might steal her away. He pined and
persisted, and four years later he walked
his first love down the aisle of Regina
Pacis Church. A few years after that,
having worked a number of dead-end
jobs—including door-to-door salesman,
first of encyclopedias and then of
insurance—he walked into the New York
City Police Academy where he found
I was feeling alive, fit, younger than I’d
felt in years. I’d find a quiet bench, eat a
leisurely meal under the elms, trot up and
down the staircase between the terrace
and the lakeside plaza, and meander from
one spectacular cluster of blooming
azaleas to another. I stopped in the
subterranean mosaic arcade to use the
public restrooms, which, according to a
plaque near the entrance, hadn’t been
open for decades. It was my duty to
discover this constantly rebirthed world,
to share the smallest details of my
discoveries with a father who had spent
his adolescent and young adult years in
New York City.
We should plan destinations but
never plan ends.
My father took most of his city
steps on the streets of Brooklyn, where he
lived from the time his family left a town
on the Erie Canal to the time he moved to
the suburbs and became a father, twenty
years later.
He had been the fastest kid on his
Brooklyn block.
“I was always running,” he likes to
tell us.
He ran to the bakery and butcher
shop for his grandmother. He ran for
Spaldeen balls hit the distance of three
manhole covers by a swung broom handle.
He hustled to school and to the subway.
When he was a little older, he made sure
to hurry through strange neighborhoods,
to visit Prospect Park or the Sunset Park
Pool or Ebbets Field or Jahn’s Ice Cream
Parlor; or sometimes to go on a date with
a girl he’d met at one of these legendary
sites. After he graduated from New
Utrecht High School, he’d take the
subway to 135th Street and Broadway in
Manhattan and chug up the hill to City
College where he studied engineering. I
imagine the stream of images that flowed
by him—men and women in tailored suits
and skirts, hats bobbing along avenues
lined with architectural masterpieces lit
by sleek neon signs; a few anonymous
72
On newly intimate terms with
illness and frailty, I could easily give in to
fear, easily let every twinge, discoloration,
swelling, or atrophy of my own aging body
consume me. I could believe that
tomorrow I might no longer be able to
walk freely around the city, that I might
suddenly find myself trapped in an
antiseptic holding pen like my father’s, or
that even at home I might lack the
stamina for a simple stroll around the
block. But this new intimacy hasn’t scared
so much as enlightened me. Dwelling
among so many people with cancer hasn’t
demystified death or the prospect of an
afterlife, but it has demystified the illness
and its terrible mythology.
A little while into my father’s stay,
I began to recognize familiar faces:
patients who were fathers, mothers, sons,
daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends.
These people might ache and moan,
despair and panic, complain and cry, but
they also ate and talked, read and
watched movies, laughed and sang, and a
few times a day took steps toward their
futures. They smiled as they passed my
father’s door, or they didn’t. Some flew by
like runners on a track, some staggered
like wounded boxers back to their corners.
Witnessing struggle and survival like
theirs, knowing and engaging them, helps
those of us who can step without pain,
move without restriction, or start a day
without the thought that it’s likely
enough to be our last. Seeing them helps
us live without guarantee. We begin to
appreciate and then ignore the cosmic
paradox that from the moment we’re born,
death stalks us with slow, deliberate,
often quiet steps. I believe my father has
always understood this paradox, trying to
enjoy his steps as much as give them
purpose.
“Work hard and play hard,” he’s
said to me every year of my life, the way
his grandfather taught him.
And he’s done both: as a cop
walking his beat; as a bodyguard
steady work on the force that also
employed his two brothers, long-gone
victims of the same disease afflicting him
in his eightieth year. Months after joining
the force, my father found himself pacing
the corridors of Brooklyn’s Maimonides
Medical Center, waiting for me to enter
the world. He’d walked from his precinct
and waited as my mother suffered
through hours of labor. At some point a
doctor appeared, took one look at the
exhausted specimen of a cop before him
and sent him home, where he must have
wandered the rooms of our new suburban
house consumed with uncertainty,
fighting the urge to close his eyes.
Today I’m praying that the doctor sends
him home soon. So we walk his hospital
floor together, him with his IV cart and
me at his side, keeping pace, making sure
to maintain slack in the connecting tubes:
the IV to his wrist, the drain from his
abdomen, the epidural to his back. Each
step is part of a slow-motion ballet, a
family dance many of us have to learn:
the coda of youth and love and home and
children and years of work and worry.
Inside every room we pass lies
someone with cancer, someone who lives
with the knowledge that he or she has to
live with it. That kind of living takes
unusual strength. Maintaining that
strength depends on the peace both
patients and their loved ones can find in
the chaotic cancer universe. I am not used
to dealing with this much illness or this
much awareness of illness. When I think
about dying and death, I think about
them in the abstract, as a kind of fading
to black—not in the specific terms of a
single body’s dysfunction, of the muscles
no longer being able to obey the brain.
Unless you’re in that box, it’s hard to
imagine its confines and its terrors; hard
to imagine how fragile our vessels are,
how tenuous our hold on what we know as
normal days.
73
and lifted me to his shoulder. He’d carry
me around the house this way, pretending
we were on a march, patting my back
until I either threw up or settled down.
Whenever she tells the story, I recall the
sensation of comfort, of being carried in
his strong arms to the rhythm of a faux
military drill (complete with sound
effects: chick-a-chick-chick, boom-chick,
boom-chick-chick). At other times, like
mornings before he left for work, he’d
march me around this way just for fun,
until, I suppose, I was too big or too
independent to want anyone, even my
father, taking my steps for me.
On his next mission, he might
walk the five hundred steps to the corner
deli from the house my parents bought
nearly fifty years ago. He might stop in
for a nice cup of pudding or whatever
snack he can keep down, then make the
rounds of adjacent shops, talking clerks’
ears off, giving them hope for their own
old age. He is, after all, a man who has
run out his front door and across the
driveway in his stocking feet to greet new
neighbors; someone who lives to make
others feel at home on earth.
For now, as we walk, he is battling
his body. He belches every few minutes,
gags on reflux, and apologizes even as he
struggles to manage wrenching pain. But
on he goes. He wants to take a full turn
and visit the Rockefeller Pavillion, a kind
of patient rec room with a performance
space, crafts area, library, and outdoor
patio. He wants to show me what a
wonder it is, how welcoming. After his
last visit to the terrace, the hospital’s
music director (because a place like Sloan
Kettering, which treats many of New
York’s first citizens, has one) came to his
room to lend him an ukulele. I happened
to be there and marveled, as I always
have, at my father’s ability to treat each
person he meets like a member of the
family. He introduced me to the director
as though he’d known him for decades.
“David, this is my son.”
accompanying New York City politicos to
operas and banquets; as a foreman
overseeing construction sites; as a loyal
relative and friend tackling more home
improvement projects than there are
episodes of This Old House; and as a
father taking us on vacations to farms,
beaches, bungalow colonies, fishing holes,
and cities we hadn’t known. He’s danced
with my mother at 1960s galas, 1970s
resort discos, 1980s weddings, 1990s
graduations, on twenty-first-century
cruise ships, and most recently at their
fifty-fifth wedding anniversary,
surrounded by a hundred family members
and friends. He has lived well, my father,
and, until this latest bout, has enjoyed
good health. Now he finds himself at a
moment of neither work, nor play, but in
a limbo he’s hoping to escape for a little
while longer.
It is the fifth day after surgery,
and my father has lost ten pounds. I kid
him that he’ll be lighter on his feet than
he’s been in years. Then, more earnestly, I
remind him how much better his arthritic
hip will feel. I know that, absent a
recurrence, his body will recover, though
the shocking truth remains that he will
lose twenty percent of his body weight
permanently. He’ll have to battle pain and
exhaustion and stay as interested in other
people as he’s always been. He’ll have to
replace his love for food with other
passions. Walking will have to be one of
these. To live, he will have to walk.
When it comes to walking, my father has
never been a Wordsworth or a Thoreau,
never one to perambulate. His steps have
always been a means to an end. Like most
of us, he does best on a mission. Here’s an
example, a story Mother likes to tell:
When I was very young, maybe three of
four, I had a stomachache almost every
night. I would wake up in the wee hours,
go to my parents’ room and stand there
and whine until my father got out of bed
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breathing labored. He leans over, his gaze
still fixed on the improvised stage.
“These kids are really talented.”
In the past he would have had more to
say, but now his voice cracks and trails
off.
He’s clearly enjoying himself, but
he’s also uncomfortable. He’s already
grumbled about having forgotten to comb
his hair, about having to wear a hospital
robe in public. Then there’s the walker
and the IV cart and the need for his son’s
help, just to take a measly two hundred
steps. Only last winter we hiked the steep
snow-covered gravel driveway to our little
plot of upstate land. As I sit watching
him, I picture the selfie that captured the
moment. There we are: full-faced, woolcapped, tall pines at our backs, two
generations triumphant.
Now my father is smiling again as
the students perform a final piece. The
cello and clarinet accompany a hip hopinflected ballet, a combination strange to
my father, but one he appears to welcome.
He bobs his head. His eyes trace intricate
steps. The young dancer, all of twenty,
moves with confidence. His arms circle his
chest like airborne snakes. His torso
sways, then jerks, then sways. His legs
bend and glide, as his feet take flight. My
father is entranced, able to observe, enjoy,
admire what human beings can
accomplish.
I recall myself at twenty, the black,
prodigal sheep of a family solid and
permanent as the ground. I was a young
man seeking a writer’s life, needing to
break with my father’s safe and simpler
world. How could I have known that the
world is never safe and that life is always
simple as what we can do until we can’t?
When the performance ends, my
father claps like he’ll never stop. I think of
how he’s always loved music; how, as a
younger father, he stood in the middle of
our living room, conducting with a serving
spoon whatever symphony or opera
blasted from the stereo’s speakers. And I
David, an apparently worldly,
middle-aged Argentine man, was, like
most other people who have met my
father, charmed.
“Your father tells me you’re a
writer.”
“Yes,” I answered.
“He’s a great guy.”
“Yes.”
I wanted suddenly to explain the
source of my father’s greatness: always
having time for anyone who wants to talk.
He was, in this way, born for the roles
he’s played: cop, construction foreman,
father, social co-director (with my mother)
for dozens of relatives and friends. His
jobs, his home life, have always involved
walking around, finding out what people
need and what they need to hear—
keeping them safe and happy. He has
always asked people how they’re doing,
listened to their stories for hours, given
them a feeling that we’re on this journey
together. That generosity of spirit and
action has never failed him. He hasn’t
made the mistake of spending his life, as I
have, looking to leave conversations
quickly, to get back to a desk or a
computer screen to write something down
out of the thin hope that someone
somewhere might want or need to read it.
He lives the life in front of him. For this
reason, he is always in good company,
always loved. And as far as I can tell,
unlike the man who seeks solitude, he’s
never been lonely.
When we march together to the
Rockefeller Pavillion, a trio of Juilliard
students are performing Bach: one
playing clarinet; another, cello; a third
dancing. My father stops at the top of the
entrance ramp, surveying the scene
through black-rimmed glasses. I know he
wants to greet everyone he sees, but he’s
respecting the performers, loath to have
his steps interrupt the show. We navigate
our way to two seats near the back of the
space. I watch my father watching, his
glasses enormous on his thinning face, his
75
think of how he’s always enjoyed my
performances, my readings, no matter
how dingy the venue or dull my delivery
or meager the crowd. He’s always loved
art for the only reason that matters: our
desire to share moments.
As he rises slowly from his chair, I
know what my father’s thinking. He
needs to thank the three young men and
to tell them what gifts they have. He
wants to share with them, in words and
the touch of a hand, the joy of being alive.
He’s waiting for everyone else to offer
congratulations. When they’re done, he’ll
approach. But the students are moving
fast, the way young people do. I see my
father’s mouth curl downward, my cue.
Before he can give up, I step in front of
him and, as the trio heads for the door,
still crowded by admirers, I move as fast
as I can, hoping to reach them before they
disappear. ¨
76
GED2 by Ene Bissenbakker
77
CityWinter
poetry by Lee Chilcote
Sunshine thuds down,
falling from the sky in thin gray rations.
Even the dog walkers tug their leads after half a block
while the hatless runners try not to go insane.
After April snow slaughters the crocuses,
we wake to emerald lawns,
light streaming in like ripped-open corn.
Numbed by the crunch of salt and scraping of plows
we don’t believe it at first
but hearing the band tuning up in the trees
we hug each other on the street,
push the kids’ bedtimes past any reasonable hour
and parade our bare white legs in the sun.
78
DearWomanWhoHauntstheStairs
poetry by Emari DiGiorgio
No cross-breeze to cause curtains shift: a face
as pale as bone china, the stain on the hardwood
planks a lullaby. Where yellow ribbons go missing.
First wife, slippered, milk-drunk babe at your breast,
what kept you whole marooned in the old farmhouse?
Did it still feel like love, the way he’d wipe clean
a plate you’d just set down? He didn’t hit or yell,
just crawled into the Scotch Bonnet shell of himself.
Caught in the crosshairs of the time. What is happiness
anyway? Running through a greenhouse, air thick
with pollen and sweetness of blossom. The gibbous
moon your only witness. Ma’am he said, lighting up
the space between you. Had you stolen out
the back door, barefoot, in your half-buttoned
nightgown, frost veiling the unused packinghouse,
another secret would buzz over ambrosia in parlors
of aunties turned mothers. Did you notice the single,
black eye of the barrel before he pointed the gun
at you, and how did you leave your body before
the bullet left the chamber? How else to explain
the child unharmed, asleep in a pool of blood.
79
WhentheFourteen-Year-OldBoyinMeEmergesatFifty-Five
poetry by Richard Fenwick
It begins at dinner, with a soft light
casting past her cheek, like a sigh,
as piles of halibut bones rise up
from the bread plate by the candle.
I sip my wine, red with its promises,
listen to the laugh that escapes her
when she tells me of her hikes
to the top of Tumamoc Hill in Tucson,
where she opens her cage of burdens
and watches them fly away, like doves,
into the abyss of our collective wake,
and explains how it was she felt stranded
when her father left for Vietnam,
just as I felt when my father gave
a piece of himself to that war,
and how it is she’s decided that light
is not the opposite of heavy, that
coffee shop walls are filled
with the virtues of the living,
that grace can be as still as
a clownfish trapped in a tide pool.
That we are clouds and skies,
and that our voices spread, like salve,
across each other’s wounds.
That kindness is not a reciprocity.
And yet, having told you this,
I admit that mostly what I feel
in this dimly lit restaurant, where
the young couple next to us
scrolls through their digital lives,
is that well-worn calamity
80
that would rise in me when I was
fourteen as I tried to speak
to a girl, tongue tied and nervous,
wanting so much to explain
the beauty of the Imperial yo-yo,
and how it was I’d taught myself
the fine art of making it sleep as it
traveled around me in wide arcs,
that nothing could compare
to the Beatles, that skateboards
were the future, that I would share
a cube of Bazooka Joe with her.
No, what I’m doing this night,
in a nondescript restaurant
at the tender age of fifty-five,
is inspecting her gray-blue eyes
full of grace and low-tide scents,
seized with the desire to stop her,
mid-sentence, and remind her
from the echo of my boyhood self,
I’m certain I can hold my breath
for at least five minutes, then wait
for her to smile at me and say:
that’s something I would love to see.
81
Montréal
sat in the front window on a chair built by
a coffin maker, where she drank tea and
watched people hop over puddles, peer
into boutiques, roll cigarettes under the
café awning.
He saw Leonard Cohen sitting
across from the butcher’s one day, sipping
coffee and reading a slender book, pausing
here and there to stare into the ether. He
phoned her.
“It’s not him,” she replied.
“But the hat.”
“Everyone has that hat now. So he
doesn’t wear the hat.”
“Unless he wants us to think he’s a
fake Cohen,” he said.
She laughed. “I’m putting the
phone down to get a better look.” She sat
on the chair in the window, crossed her
leg with a fixed determination to look
regal, and studied the man reading
outside the café.
He cradled the phone on his
shoulder and watched Leonard Cohen
take out a pencil—much like the one used
on butcher paper—and write ephemera in
the book.
She noticed the way he went into
his breast pocket, how his hand cut
through the air. The waitress—Becca—
reached for his cup, but he stopped her by
saying a few words then tapped her palm
several times. Becca smiled and took back
her hand. They chatted. The waitress
looked up and down the street, and the
man closed his eyes and smiled as she
spoke. He smiled like the girl in the
reupholstering shop. She considered her
faint reflection in the window and knew it
was like the smile she had as the stolen
jewelry tapped against her chest. Like the
smile that night when they set off
fireworks near the lake.
Becca wrote up the man’s receipt
fiction by Joshua McCuen
They had stolen jewelry from his father in
Nova Scotia, old things of pewter and
gold, oxidized copper, and she wore them
on the bus west, chin raised high, smiling
more than necessary. He slept with his
head against the window, brushing
against his own reflection. They believed
the jewelry would cover coffee and a few
sandwiches at a Montréal lunch counter;
it ended up covering six months’ rent.
He found work in an old butcher’s
shop. White beards abounded, toothpicks
clenched between yellowed teeth. They
looked like rabbinical scholars reading
ancient texts, though they studied only
the cleaver and his hand behind the
counter, jointing meat and throwing
marbled gristle at the shop’s cat. A word
here and there, mostly grunts from the
men. When it went slow—that time of
morning when everyone wanted coffee—
he stared out across the street in solitude.
She worked a few doors down in a
reupholstering shop, close enough to see
almost the same things he saw. She began
at the front desk, writing up bills of sale,
copying them into the ledger, then
depositing the book on her boss’s
antiquated desk at closing. The
apprentice one day nicked a tendon in his
wrist. She couldn’t be sure it was an
accident, not with his amusement as she
delivered him to the hospital. She took his
place, slicing ratty couches in the back
room, finding an approximation of its
color, folding the fabric’s edges against
the support and hammering the nails into
the wood. A mute boy with funny ears
handled the books for her. On breaks, she
82
and placed it under his cup. The man
finished his notes in the book, deposited a
few coins on the table and walked away.
She returned to the phone.
“I don’t care if he’s a fake,” she
said. And waited for his reply. ¨
83
GED3 by Ene Bissenbakker
84
Starfish
poetry by Ann Malaspina
You walked into the sea,
toes grasping the smooth rocks,
waves lapping at your ankles.
All the while,
we sat with our backs to the water,
eating fish and tomatoes,
watching the donkey tied to the tree.
The gray taxi waited for tourists.
The mountain with its ruins
lent us its shade.
By the time we knew for sure,
it was too late to send the boats.
Too late to say we didn't care
you wouldn't wear black
or light the candle in the church.
Your hair had turned to froth.
Eyelids stung shut by salty sea
past the volcano and beyond Crete.
Your starfish arms grew like rays
in the bluest deep.
Our nets lay empty on the beach.
85
Home
poetry by Danielle Sellers
“There was a house, and then no house.”
Mark Strand, In the Afterlife
My mother lives now
in the house of her former
boyfriend, across the canal
from the home she owned
for the spell of my childhood.
When I visit, we sit in plastic
chairs on the concrete lanai,
and watch the new owner,
whom we’ve nicknamed Chiminea
for his desire to burn
anything that will catch a flame
in his fluted clay urn,
swim in what used to be
our pool, soak
his pale body in the gurgling
jacuzzi, where our favorite cat,
Shady Lady, drowned
after suffering a stroke
while taking a long drink.
We try not to glare,
but all I want to do is open
the windows, crawl into
my old squeaky bed, smell
the too-sweet Cuban bananas
my dead father planted
all those years ago.
My mother wants everything:
the tin kitty full of mad money,
my father’s garbage truck snore,
both her girls safe, the moon
through the skylight, blessing
our milk-sour mouths slack with sleep.
86
But they are gone and only
we are here now, and there is no
going back. There is only
now, and now, and now,
and tomorrow, until there isn’t.
87
LateHarvest
poetry by Marie Marandola
He told me he had never
eaten a peach before,
so I bought one for him—
its downy cheek just
the right shade of blushing.
In the summer sun warmth
of my kitchen, I sliced the ripe
fruit into sections, tasted
one first to make certain
that this peach was peach
represented. I carried
a slice to where he was waiting,
sprawled on the sofa, perhaps
uncertain. “Just try it,”
I gentled, sitting beside him,
then gave him the fruit,
our fingertips brushing.
I kept from him and did not show
the pit to which the fruit
once clung. Protected center
of proffered flesh, a secret
held in the peach’s chest.
A dark, dense life source,
now exposed—I didn’t tell him
how easy to splinter that stone.
88
Home by Manit Chaotragoongit
89
Scream by L.M. Henke
90
poetry by KS Lack
your weight
presses against me
like rain soaking the ground
embracing an oak’s blighted roots
91
Berlin
Claudia kept staring into space, and
Robert wondered if she was quite all
right. The cars ground to a halt almost
exactly eight hours out of Warsaw.
“This is the worst part,” said Arek
from the seat across from Robert.
Robert nodded. He had been duly
warned. When Arek talked him into
investing in the trip, he was nothing if not
clear: “The border crossing is all fucked
up.” Zajebista. The border between Poland
and East Germany took no more than a
couple of hours. No, Arek had meant the
crossing into West Berlin.
“My turn to sleep,” Arek said and
squinted against a German afternoon sun.
The sun felt no different from the Polish
one.
Between the hips on both sides,
radiating several kinds of heat—and a
headache, probably dehydration—Robert
couldn’t have napped if immortality were
the reward. He nodded, but Arek had
already closed his eyes.
Arek had pitched the idea two
months earlier, after cutting Robert’s hair
in front of his mother’s kitchen sink in
exchange for composition homework, and
Robert had given him a congratulatory
handshake. The Germans, those from the
West, were well known for their insatiable
appetite for carved Jesus figurines, Polish
lace and pottery, and Russian leather
boots. A duffel filled with pottery,
cookware, lace, leather, and other
precious wares rested above Robert’s
head, and now he set himself to guard it
while Arek took his rest.
Was Claudia a Tatar or a Gypsy?
No matter the effort, Robert didn’t think
he could force his body into the stillness
she’d so long assumed. She had risen
twice and walked out, probably to the
lavatory, only to freeze again as soon as
fiction by Karol Lagodzki
Robert sat between the curves. In
Warsaw, he had wedged himself between
the woman in the floral dress and the
woman in the brown dress, having prayed
away the prior six hours standing up in
the hallway of the first-leg train from
Augustów.
He named his companion to the
left Kielbasa—sausage. The train hadn’t
trundled an hour out of Warsaw when she
retrieved a bundle out of her canvas tote
bag. Robert smelled the pork grease
bleeding through the newspaper pulp
before he saw the stains. And garlic—it
was a top-quality smoked sausage.
Kielbasa deposited the meat and a chunk
of bread on the table by the window and
proceeded to carve a slice off every twenty
minutes, place it on a bit of bread, and
chew it until the time came for the next
bite.
Claudia, the woman to the right,
roughly in her mid-thirties and twice his
age owed her name to Robert’s greatest
crush, Ms. Claudia Cardinale. But it
wasn’t likely the lady pushing her hip into
his and conducting her heat well into his
midsection and groin was an actual
Tunisian-French-Italian sexpot movie
star. Probably a Tatar or a Gypsy, given
her olive complexion and thick, dark
brunette hair. Claudia sat quietly with
her eyes fixed somewhere beyond the
compartment wall.
By the time the train began to slow
down before the border, Kielbasa had long
run out of her snack and now busied
herself sucking her lower lip when she
didn’t stand in the corridor smoking.
92
the duffel down and bent to touch the
leather. He caressed it and judged it as
soft as Claudia’s boots must have been.
He raised his eyes to the woman in
the red scarf. Her bent knees indicated a
stool or a stack of bricks under her
bottom, but her bottom, the size of
Robert’s duffel, made deciding between
the stool and the bricks impossible. She
sniffed.
“How much?” Robert said.
“Forty dollars,” the woman said
with the East on her tongue.
Robert closed his eyes to perform
the exchange to the Polish złoty in his
head. It was twice as much money as he
had left. He did a bit more math.
“Thirty deutschmarks,” he
countered. The woman smirked.
“Forty dollars.” The smirk was
gone and the floating Russian sniffed
again.
Robert stood up and hoisted the
duffel back onto the bruise. He thanked
the woman—“Spasibo”—and decided to
start the trek home. He’d have to make do
without boots.
As he was about to clear the last of
the open-market throngs, Robert felt a tug
on his elbow and came to a stop as rapidly
as his bag’s inertia allowed. A boy of no
more than ten wiped his nose with the
hand which wasn’t holding a pair of
Claudia Cardinale’s boots.
“Thirty deutschmarks?” the boy
said.
Robert nodded and said, “In
złotych, at today’s exchange? Okay?” After
the boy had given his nod, Robert
deposited the rest of his money in the
snotty palm and wasn’t surprised to see
the kid dance away a couple of steps to
count. With another nod, the boy put the
boots on the ground and raced back into
the crowd.
Now, the boots rested safely in the
duffel riding above his head. Claudia’s
bag, made of red and white nylon, sat
next to it, hip to hip. Arek had long since
her bottom rested right next to his.
He wondered if she’d borrowed her
investment like he had. Or, if he were to
be entirely honest, his mother had.
“Mama,” he said as soon as he walked in
after his visit to Arek—his friend and
barber—with his split ends banished. “I
have an idea.”
Mama had listened, pursed her
lips, and began to shake her head, but
Robert pointed to the wicker basket
resting in its nook on the counter. It
always sat right by the fridge. On paydays
at the telephone station it overflowed with
broken-in banknotes like a wheelbarrow
full of autumn leaves fluffed up by
headwinds of hyperinflation. By the
nineteenth of each month, change jingled
on the bottom.
His mother borrowed or begged for
extra money, and a sunny July day two
weeks later found Robert browsing the
wares of the Belarussians, Russians, and
Lithuanians at Augustów’s open-air
market with the capital in his pocket. He
strolled with a duffel slung over his
shoulder while enjoying a homemade
lollypop.
In less than an hour, the duffel’s
strap began to cut into Robert’s shoulder,
weighed down by one-of-a-kind pieces of
Bolesławiec pottery, crucifixes, a couple
sets of enameled pots and pans, cutlery, a
dozen or so bootleg movies, and a few
other odds and ends which he thought
would bring a good margin from the rich
folks in West Berlin. The strap was going
to leave a bruise, but Robert continued to
walk and scan the wares laid out on
covered tables, benches, and blankets
spread on the concrete.
Robert wasn’t going to leave
without the one thing sure to send a
Berliner’s heart racing. He’d begun to lose
hope when he saw them. Brown, like
coffee whitened with vanilla ice cream,
the boots looked just like the knee-high
pair Claudia Cardinale wore in the set
photos from The Professionals. Robert set
93
photograph of a boy of no more than ten.
A son?
Claudia had frozen with fists by
her hips. Her chest rose with each breath
as if struggling to remind the body it was
alive. A guard pinched a pair of red lace
panties and lifted it up to the light. When
he let it go, the lingerie tumbled like a
broken parachute and covered the child in
the frame. The guard smirked. He
scratched his belly, threw Claudia’s
passport on top of the pile and walked out
leaving his partner to close the door
behind them.
With her eyes fixed on the bag,
Claudia took each item and put it back
like one might place a stitch on a wound.
Last, she tucked the framed photograph
into the middle, closed the zipper, and
hoisted the duffel up. She sat down. When
Robert sneaked a sideways glance, her
eyes were closed.
woken up and now looked out of the
window as if watching a passing
countryside. Nightfall made for the only
change in the past six hours: Neon bulbs
came on in the railyard outside and made
the Kalashnikovs of the strolling guards
glint like dirty ice sculptures. The garb
and the pacing of the border police
continued to be uniform.
The knock on the door came before
midnight, and two inspectors entered
without waiting for an answer.
“Passports,” one said in Polish and the
other followed in German. If Robert
hadn’t known they were still in the East,
the red and the stars on their uniforms
would have left no doubt about which of
the Germanies they guarded.
No one needed to dig, and eight
hands extended travel documents toward
the door. All of the passports, but
Claudia’s, reflected the neons and
flashlights in green. Hers was red and it
declared itself in block Cyrillic letters.
The guards left the compartment and
closed the door.
“It’s okay,” Arek said. “They’ll
check them and bring them back.”
“When?”
Arek shrugged and closed his eyes.
The door opened again an hour
later, and the guards shone the
flashlights on each of the faces before
returning the matching passport.
Claudia’s came last, and instead of letting
her have it, the guard waved it toward her
bag. He pointed.
The other guard motioned Robert
toward the window, and he obeyed.
Claudia rose, pulled her bag off the shelf
and let it plop down on the seat. She
unzipped it and stepped back.
One of the guards moved forward
while the beam of the other’s flashlight
plunged into the opening. The first of the
men gutted the bag like a pig after
slaughter—he brought out blouses, hose,
skirts, black and red panties and bras, a
solitary carton of cigarettes, and a framed
Arek and Robert got out at Zoo Station at
two in the morning.
Robert drank in the bright neon
lights shouting Xerox, Barclays, Deutsche
Bank, and dozens more brands. The late
night, or early morning, let thousands of
cars present their tail lights as if in
courtship. Steady foot traffic filled the
sidewalks.
“When do they sleep?” Robert
asked.
“Let’s get some coffee.” Arek
tugged at Robert’s sleeve and set off up
the illuminated street. He stopped two
blocks later and waited while holding the
glass door open. He motioned Robert
through.
A few tall tables with stools filled
the space presided over by a yawning
barista behind a counter. His tattooed
arms rested next to a machine branded
with a gold relief spelling, “Tchibo.”
“Zwei kaffee.” Arek dropped a few
coins and flicked one more into a glass jar
where banknotes cushioned its fall.
94
He marked his pottery and
kitchenware up two hundred percent. The
knickknacks—four hundred. The
movies—five. He paused at the boots.
Well-made, solid leather—he pursed his
lips—a hundred and ninety marks
sounded about right.
By mid-morning, the Bolesławiec
pottery had left for better homes with
little haggling, and one of the pots and
pans sets fetched close to an asking price.
The movies struggled until he knocked
them down by half. The crucifixes
garnered decent interest.
No one asked about Claudia
Cardinale’s boots.
“Got to piss. Don’t let anyone have
the boots for less than 150,” Robert
nodded to Arek, and crossed the street
into the red-light district. He sought a
nook where he could unzip unbothered.
An alley the width of two
wheelbarrows beckoned. Robert followed
and turned a sharp corner before he heard
the sound.
The man pumped with his bare
buttocks. He wore a tight, black longsleeved shirt and his narrow back couldn’t
obscure the woman whose one leg lent her
support while the other floated up in the
man’s grasp. Her arms clutched him for
support and her face rested on his
shoulder. Claudia’s patient eyes met
Robert’s and held his gaze as her dark
hair bobbed with each thrust and grunt.
Her eyes gripped him until she
covered them with black eyelashes.
Robert swallowed; the burn of bile fought
a stirring in his groin. Claudia’s hair
continued to keep the beat above her
crumpled eyelids. Robert’s soles anchored
him to the asphalt until a moan of climax
broke through the red-tinged fog of his
heartbeat and allowed him to flee.
When Robert returned to his
wares, he took a seat and told Arek to
take his break. A pair of legs startled him
and he followed the body up to the face
Robert dragged both of their bags
to a table and sat down. Arek joined him
with two steaming cups and said, “Either
we walk around and drink coffee all night
or find a staircase to sleep. Staying awake
is the better option.”
“What about Zygmunt’s place?”
Zygmunt, Arek’s cousin, had agreed to put
them up for the night.
“Too late. This is the longest I
remember this train taking. Don’t want to
wake him and burn any bridges.”
Robert had no answer and lifted
the coffee cup to his lips. Then he took
another sip. He tasted freedom with a side
of spice. Earthy, like land without
borders, the coffee propped up his eyelids
just as it fed his spirit. Robert smiled
when no tartness came at the end.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Arek smiled and sipped his coffee.
An underground train took them to the
open-air market soon after dawn. As they
approached it, the passengers in suits
gave way to men and women carrying
duffel bags. Robert and Arek got off and
navigated to the market by staying in the
middle of the crowd aimed toward its
destination like migrating salmon. When
the field opened in front of them, Arek
pulled at Robert’s sleeve and motioned for
him to follow.
They finally stopped almost all the
way across the field, no more than twenty
meters away from narrow streets leading
into a neighborhood carrying its business
signs like fangs. Neon lights pulsated in
the shadows and most radiated red, pink,
or purple.
“That’s where the thirty-mark
whores hang out,” Arek said. “If you need
to take a leak, nobody’s going to bother
you there.” He took a blanket out of his
bag and began spreading his wares on it.
Robert observed long enough to get the
idea and got to work.
95
framed in Aryan, blond curls.
“Wie viel?” the woman asked,
touching the boots. “Dreißig?” she offered
with a ghost of a hopeful smile.
“Thirty marks . . .” Robert clenched
his jaw and nodded.
He took the money and looked at
his watch. There was a train home in two
hours. ¨
96
Melody Alive by Manit Chaotragoongit
97
TheCigaretteThieves
they had exchanged every pattern and
variation, they continued to meet on
Wednesdays, each to play her solitary
game in the other woman’s company.
They had been doing this long enough
that the youngest children could not
remember a time when they didn’t.
It worked out that Bernadette was
a listener and Melita a talker. Melita
never ran out of gossip about the
Amerikanos with whom she interacted
daily at the base. Over fourteen square
miles in size, Clark had its own football
stadium, hospital, movie theaters, schools,
and shopping center. So while the war
had been over for two decades, the U.S.
military saw no reason to leave Luzon, not
when they still had the important work of
adding a hotel, zoo, and riding stable to
their microcosm.
“Another officer asked me about
Atoy today,” Melita said, turning three
cards at a time from her stockpile.
Bernadette knew that Atoy worked
as a janitor on the base but specialized in
buying and selling U.S. passports on the
black market. Dozens of officers had sold
their documents to him for cash, and he,
in turn, sold them to “the magician,”
someone who could make a name and
photo disappear so that a new one could
take its place.
“Easy enough for these
Amerikanos to get a replacement
passport,” Bernadette replied, connecting
a black two to a red three. “Meanwhile, a
Filipino Bob Jackson will be making his
way through SFO customs next week.”
Melita chuckled. She would never
tell Bernadette about her own dealings
with Atoy. They were on the same side
now, laughing at the low-life hustle of
those who relied on laws because breaking
them provided a livelihood. By now,
Bernadette was familiar with the cast of
fiction by Renee Macalino Rutledge
As she did every Wednesday, Melita went
straight from her job at the Clark Air
Base to Bernadette’s house for dinner and
cards. They didn’t play poker or blackjack
or any other interactive game. After
Bernadette’s older daughters had wiped
the table smooth, clearing off the white
rice that stuck to the wood after every
meal, the two women sat across from one
another, each hunched over a round of
solitaire.
When she was ten, Bernadette’s
parents began leaving her in charge of her
younger siblings for hours at a time. They
came home with pastillas and ginger
chews to reward her. One day, instead of
candy, they brought her a deck of cards.
Her brothers and sisters waited
expectantly for her to play with them.
Cards were for sharing and holding like
fans, something they’d seen their elders
do countless times on their gambling
nights. But Bernadette had decided that
the cards were for her alone. She learned
the game of solitaire, which became her
oasis, first as a child in a house full of
children, and now, as a woman with just
as many children of her own.
For Melita, solitaire was about
beating the odds. She was addicted to the
mechanics of repetition that eventually
led to a win, so that every day she was
guaranteed a few small triumphs. By the
time the two women discovered the
shared habit, Melita had memorized
thirty-one different versions of the game
and Bernadette nineteen. They taught
each other what they knew, playing in
concert at first, one of them pointing, the
other flipping and placing the cards. After
98
six additional cartons. Then, it wasn’t
hard to find officers who would buy
cigarettes on her behalf. Many lived with
their Filipina wives in the neighborhoods
of Caloocan; others traded pesos or favors
of their own. Before long, she had twenty
more cartons a week.
The second hurdle was getting the
cigarettes out of Clark. Goods sold at the
commissary were meant for the workers,
military personnel, and families who lived
there. Sure, they would let a harmless
Filipina worker take home a can of Spam
or two every now and then, but twentyeight cartons of cigarettes a week would
get her in trouble. This was where Atoy’s
expertise came in. He got the cigarettes
past the bag checks and security
checkpoints where Clark ended and the
Philippines began, and in exchange she
agreed to be a human calling card,
someone that the officers could go to when
they wanted to get in touch with Atoy. So
long as the U.S. steadily shipped their
containers and the officers reliably filled
their lungs with nicotine, Melita’s side gig
was neither interrupted nor suspected.
Years had gone by, and she now had a
veritable warehouse behind her brother’s
grocery store. It was full of Salems,
Marlboros, Winstons, and Chesterfields
that she sold at market price to a stable of
local grocers and vendors.
Bernadette’s youngest children
sprinted into the room. One chased
another who chased another beneath the
dining room table, all three brushing
roughly past the women’s legs. Though
Bernadette turned her cards slowly, she
sprang to motion when it came to her
brood. She caught the youngest boy, her
bunso, unawares, pinning him to her lap
as tiny arms and legs wriggled in the air
like a trapped bug’s. She blew a
succession of kisses on his tummy as he
squealed then wrenched his way to
freedom, running wildly to catch up with
his siblings.
people Melita interacted with regularly on
the job, like characters in a telenovela.
With Melita as narrator, that information
was filtered, never painting Melita as
more than a knowing bystander.
Bernadette would not understand how
she could spend years working her way up
from stock girl, only to bite the hand that
fed her. But Melita knew that that hand
was not extended in friendship, and she
didn’t consider what she did stealing.
Still wearing her name tag with
the Clark Air Base logo, “Melita Cruz,” in
big letters, “Commissary Manager” in
small letters, she leaned forward in her
chair, legs angled sideways beneath the
table and white rubber shoes touching,
shoes she’d purchased at the wholesale
price with an additional fifty percent
clearance sale tacked on. Whenever she
had the opportunity, she bragged that she
practically got the shoes for free. It was
the kind of one-upping that she lived for,
the cunning to do more than just get by,
but get ahead. Even the Amerikanos had
theirs, whether they sold their own
passports or snuck off base to try for a
winning streak at the Manila gambling
halls. Melita used what she knew and
always had a side gig going. She patched
clothes for bachelors, sold makeup to
housewives, or taught the cha-cha-cha to
elderly couples at the senior center. But
that was before she considered the
potential of her employee discount, how
she paid less for American goods like
Colgate, Spam, sponges, lipstick. She
decided to specialize in one product; it
would keep operations simple,
streamlined. She chose a commodity with
faithful buyers, one that would not tempt
her to pilfer from her own stock:
cigarettes. After that, only two hurdles
remained.
The first was her buying quota at
the commissary: two cartons of cigarettes
a week. She needed much more to earn a
worthwhile profit. She tossed a few pesos
to three of her coworkers for their share:
99
even if Tonton’s uncle were to come out of
the store while Joselito’s legs dangled
from the warehouse window, they could
fire off an excuse and still get away with
cigarettes in their pants.
Today brought no such excitement.
Familiar with the bulk and shape of the
cartons, each boy tucked his share into his
waistband then covered it up with a loose
shirt. They didn’t linger.
“This weekend, same time?”
Joselito asked.
“Meet you at the Circle,” Tonton
replied.
Bonifacio Circle was where they
took the cigarettes to sell, where they
made the money and began to spend the
money that they made. The longest
expressways in Caloocan converged at the
Circle, changing shape from multiple
straight lines to a single loop from which
they would spin and spread outward
again in four directions, one toward the
ocean, the others to varying provinces and
eventually more ocean. Surrounded by a
maze of high-rises and shops, the Circle’s
inner perimeter was an island of grass
and concrete where pedestrians could
escape the commerce, or more likely,
engage in more bargaining among the
jeepney drivers looking for their next
passenger or sidewalk vendors hawking
everything from candy, guavas, and boiled
peanuts to sandals, feather dusters, and
car mats. At the center of the Circle, the
Bonifacio Monument loomed above it all,
a winged figure of armed victory perched
over images of wartime suffering
engraved in granite and bronze.
As soon as Tonton disappeared
into the back entrance of his uncle’s store
and Joselito down the alley, Marvel and
Ruben emerged from behind a bush and
walked tentatively toward the warehouse
window. They’d followed their older
brothers with goofball antics, laughing
and snorting all the while as if to invite
the older boys to catch them in their
foolishness. It was a game of spies on a
Melita repositioned her legs
beneath the table and remained
unruffled. While she was accustomed to
it, she did not envy the chaos beneath her
friend’s roof, between the two eldest
daughters, two middle sons, and three
little ones still in grade school. Bernadette
had had them in packs, becoming a new
mother again every handful of years. It
made Melita exhausted thinking about it.
She and her husband had been careful to
practice the rhythm method, even when
the sex became less frequent, her eggs
older, and the chances for conception
slimmer. Their only two children, Tonton
and Marvel, were fifteen and thirteen,
and to Melita’s relief, old enough to
occupy themselves. They were the same
age as Bernadette’s sons and often ran in
their pack.
“Where’d Joselito go off to?” Melita
asked, remembering her godson and
obvious favorite.
Joselito and Tonton met by the warehouse
every Wednesday at the same time: after
dinner, while their mothers were busy
playing cards. Joselito’s father would be
off at sea, where Joselito imagined him
cursing, shirtless, and eating fish for
dinner every night. Tonton’s papa would
be glued to the sofa watching TV and
nursing a bottle of San Miguel. Adults
were sadly predictable, they realized, and
this week was no different. Tonton
boosted Joselito up the cement wall to the
warehouse window, and the lighter,
leaner boy pulled himself onto the ledge
and disappeared into the darkness as his
accomplice kept watch. In seconds,
Joselito reappeared with cigarettes.
For the first three months, they
had stolen one carton to share—it was
almost too easy; on the fourth month,
they got bolder, snatching one carton for
each of them. They dared not get too
greedy, taking just enough to avoid
getting caught. Undetected for a full year
now, they were comfortable, cocky, so that
100
Joselito took her outstretched hand
and placed it on his forehead in a gesture
of respect.
“Where are you always
disappearing to after dinner?” she asked.
“He’s fifteen—the house is too
small for him to be cooped up in all day,”
Bernadette said. She didn’t look up from
her round of solitaire, which was
currently going in her favor.
“Oh, don’t tell me, I know,” Melita
replied. “Between my Tonton, and now,
Marvel, following in his kuya’s footsteps.
Boys will be boys, hah.”
“Here’s the money from this week’s
sales,” Joselito said, handing Melita the
seven pesos she was waiting for.
“Good,” Melita said, tucking the
money into the wallet she instantly
produced from under her chair. “That
leaves you with five pesos to spend for
yourself. I don’t earn any profit from you,
remember? Just pay me back what I paid,
the profit is your reward to spend as you
like. And now you’re learning how to do
well in business like your ninang.”
With every exchange of money, she
reminded Joselito of their arrangement,
rekindling his heart, or hers, to its good
fortune. With the bills safely filed, she
replaced the wallet in her giant, floral tote
and pulled out a familiar package.
“Here’s your new carton: Salems.
Menthol,” Melita said.
It had been Tonton’s idea to steal
from her. He knew his mother’s secret: a
vault of cigarettes from the American
base, way more than Joselito or his mom
had a clue about. Tonton could make sure
the warehouse window was unlocked at
the right time. The thefts would be a
small loss for his mother, Tonton had
reasoned, but a life-changing gain for
them. Joselito had not been convinced—at
first. He was already a beneficiary of that
gain, and of Melita’s trust. But Tonton
assured him Melita would never notice,
and there was no reason that the two of
them should ever get caught. He’d
mission, until they realized this was no
pretend mission. Crouched in the bushes
nearby, neither had moved nor spoken as
they’d watched the theft take place.
Now they looked up at the window
and Ruben laughed again, too nervous to
say or do anything else. Marvel was all
seriousness. “Give me a boost,” he said,
stopping the sound in Ruben’s throat.
Alone, Joselito walked the seven blocks
home through narrow streets that would
have been gloomy if not for the crumbling
walls and roofs painted bright hues of
pink, orange, and turquoise, the splashes
of green from overgrown trees and vines.
There was no breathing room between one
home and the next, save for the occasional
lot strung up with crowded laundry lines,
where children took advantage of the
extra space to play hide-and-seek or take
turns riding a rickety tricycle two at a
time—one on the seat, another on the
handlebars. Joselito found an empty soda
can and began kicking it along the way,
his thoughts returning to Nanang Melita
and how she would still be there when he
returned.
Once at home, Joselito kicked the
can off to the side of the street. Inside, he
was careful to hide the cigarette carton in
the bedroom he shared with his two
younger brothers. Three years his junior,
Ruben was getting nosier, always
interested in whatever Joselito was doing.
Mario was still too young to care. Their
room consisted of a bunkbed where the
younger boys slept, a twin mattress on the
floor for Joselito, and a single chest of
drawers that the three of them shared.
Joselito wrapped the cigarette carton in
an old blanket and stowed this under the
bunkbed frame. From the same hiding
place, he fished some money from an old
sneaker and headed to the dining room.
“There’s my inaanak!” Melita said,
claiming her godson when Joselito
appeared.
101
front of a stand that sold fresh coconut
juice, where the sidewalk was wide and
the foot traffic heavy.
He considered himself above the
other boys who sold imitation cigarettes
by the stick, knocking eagerly on windows
and waving their cigarettes at irritated
commuters. Joselito took the time to
smile, compliment pretty women, and
make small talk with the men. Knowing
his product was even better than what
could be purchased at many of the nearby
convenience stores, he had quickly found
regular buyers, like the lady from Samar
province who sold salted eggs, the oneeyed man who fried pork skins, and the
sweaty electronics salesman who worked
in the mall. Once, a flower vendor bought
a pack and refused to pay Joselito. “These
aren’t real cigarettes,” he’d said after
taking a long drag from one and slipping
the rest in his pocket. “I won’t pay for
sawdust.” The next day, Joselito’s friends
on the avenue turned every flower in his
inventory into an empty stem.
Joselito sold his cigarettes in less
than two hours and arrived at the Circle
with his pockets full of money. Each
carton contained twelve packs that he
sold for a total of twelve pesos. Nanang
Melita would take seven, which left him
with five from the first carton, plus twelve
from the carton he stole. This unlocked
the gates to luxuries and pleasures that
had never been accessible to him before:
twenty-cent jeepney rides to Metro
Manila, one-peso tickets to the latest
Hollywood movie, one-peso hamburgers
by the road stand. He spent the money
freely, treating a jeepney full of friends
every weekend. Tonton may have kept his
earnings to himself, but for Joselito, the
money was worthless if it could not be
shared.
Joselito was rarely alone at the
Circle for more than a few minutes. That
day, Arnel, Roberto, Candy, and two girls
Joselito didn’t know showed up as Joselito
smoked a cigarette from a pack he’d
insisted for three days straight. At first,
Joselito had been irritated, but by day
three he’d felt a little sorry for his friend
for being out of the loop. After all, Melita
was Tonton’s mom, not his, yet Melita had
chosen him to do business with. Not that
Tonton lacked the spending money.
Melita had seen how Joselito’s family
lived on those first few Wednesdays,
sharing too little food between too many
mouths; she’d probably left their house
still hungry after a watered-down pork
stew with extra servings of rice to make
their plates look full, because from then
on, she never came to their house emptyhanded. She’d been happy to see Joselito
eat a second and third helping from her
party-sized tray of store-bought pancit the
following Wednesday. “Eat more,” she’d
encouraged, comfortable in the role of
host, even in Bernadette’s kitchen. She
had probably wondered, then, how
Joselito ever got out to have fun the way
young boys do, the way her Tonton always
did.
He took the carton then kissed
Melita respectfully on the cheek, then his
mother. Upon leaving the room, he began
to tuck the carton into his pants then
remembered that these Salems could be
kept in the open.
That Saturday, the traffic on Rizal
Avenue was congested as usual, the heat
just bearable. The drivers with no airconditioning had their windows rolled all
the way down and cursed freely out of
them. His mouth and nose covered with a
bandanna against the smog, Joselito slid
by foot between the narrow spaces that
separated bumper to barely-moving
bumper. He peeked selectively into
passenger windows sealed shut, at
tourists who might be bored or curious
enough to sell to. With no luck making
eye contact and more than one driver
blasting a loud horn in his direction,
Joselito relocated to his favorite spot in
102
In the jeepney, Tonton sat next to
Flor, complimenting her on her mini skirt
as she inched her way closer to Joselito.
Joselito offered her a cigarette, lighting it
as she held it to her mouth. The jeepney
had picked up more passengers along the
way, the driver always looking to fill
every seat as well as the spaces for
standing. Bodies bounced and jiggled with
every pothole, and an improvised stereo
played a Beatles song. Joselito felt free of
every care. His friends were goofing
around as usual, Candy and Arnel
wrestling on the opposite bench, Roberto
belting out the lyrics off-key. Leticia
glanced at Joselito every few minutes and
Flor sat quiet and satisfied beside him,
the cigarette they passed between them
like a substitute for a dozen kisses.
It had only taken five minutes to
know which girl he was more attracted to.
Five minutes of being with the new girls,
hearing how they spoke and watching
their mannerisms, to know it was Leticia.
Flor was prettier, in an obvious sort of
way. But she was also pushy and spoiled,
which made him notice little
imperfections in her beauty—the way her
lower lip jutted, her over-plucked
eyebrows. Leticia’s looks just got better
and better. Still, Tonton would not stop
looking at Flor. Joselito put his arm
around her, even at the risk that Leticia
would be in his friend’s arm at the end of
the day.
bought from himself. Smoking was a
relatively new habit, and a bad one, he
knew. He leaned against the Bonifacio
Monument, camouflaged amongst the
bronze soldiers as he watched his friends
scan the courtyard in every direction.
When they couldn’t find him, he stepped
out of the shadows and onto the steps to
invite their attention, and within seconds
Candy spotted him.
After the three boys nodded their
greetings and exchanged something
between a handshake and a high five,
Candy introduced the two girls dressed in
miniskirts and matching headbands as
Flor and Leticia.
He wasn’t surprised to learn that,
like Candy and most of the girls from
their neighborhood, Flor and Leticia went
to St. James, an all-girls school near
Joselito’s house. Arnel, Roberto, and
Tonton went to St. Ignacio, the all-boys
school a block away from St. James, which
meant they were invited to the St. James
dances and socials. Because Joselito
attended a public school five miles away,
his friends snuck him into the decorated
auditoriums, where the girls stood on one
side, tapping their feet to the music, the
boys on the other side, working up the
courage to cross the invisible line in the
middle of the room. It typically took the
nuns at least an hour to catch Joselito and
kick him out, dubbing him a “street rat”
in the process.
Joselito was glad that he could
always rely on a pretty new face or two to
mix things up. He sprang for everyone’s
lunch then called over a jeepney driver he
knew by name, showing off to the latest
initiates of the group. The driver waited,
smiling good humoredly as the teens
decided where to go next. The boys only
shrugged, and Candy said she didn’t care.
By the time Tonton arrived, late once
again, they had settled on Leticia’s idea to
go bowling, followed by Flor’s idea to go to
the beach.
It was dark by the time Joselito got home,
his money gone, replaced by two phone
numbers hastily written, one on the back
of a matchbook, the other on a ripped
corner of a take-out menu. As soon as he
walked into the living room, he could tell
something was wrong. Nanang Melita,
who typically wasn’t over on Saturdays,
stood with his mother, his brother Ruben,
and Marvel, whose eyes looked red from
crying. Propped up on a kickstand in front
103
Still, when it came to loyalty, theirs was
fixed—Melita’s was permeable.
“What’s your excuse for stealing
from me, hah? After everything I’ve done
for you?” She seemed disappointed, but
hopeful, as though wishing for him to tell
her it was a mistake he had no
involvement in.
“I have none, ninang.”
“Did Tonton plan this? Sometimes
it seems like that boy of mine has no
sense. Tell me, was it Tonton?”
Joselito shook his head, and the
next minute Tonton himself was there to
proclaim his innocence. It was clear that
Marvel had filled him in during their
short walk to Joselito’s. Tonton stormed
in, red-faced, shouting the words “It’s not
my fault! It was all Joselito’s idea!”
He remembered taking the jeepney
from the Circle when the day was still
new. A Beatles song had been playing,
smoke swirling, girls smiling, beaches
waiting. But already the day felt like a
distant memory, the only place where
anything clean and perfect could last.
Joselito thought of his regular
customers—where would the electronic
salesman and the egg seller from Samar
province buy their next pack of cigarettes?
of the coffee table, a shiny silver bicycle
made everything else look dingy in
contrast. When Joselito noticed the
cigarette packs strewn across the table, he
began to calculate possibilities, all of them
bad.
“Do you know how these boys
bought this bicycle, Joselito?” his mother
asked, her mouth twisted with agitation.
Joselito shrugged and searched for
clues on the younger boys’ faces.
“That’s funny. Because they told
me they learned it from you and Tonton.”
He knew he was caught then, a
sparrow hopping between four walls.
Somehow, Marvel, Ruben, and now, their
mothers, had discovered the secret. One
had to be a magician to get away with
tricks, to make things look gone when
they were right under your nose, and
make other things seem the same, when
all along you pulled them with invisible
strings. Joselito knew a secret stood no
chance with these two, and this bicycle
was the proof.
“You’re lucky we don’t tell your
papas,” Melita said, her stare intent.
She waited to see what reaction this
would have, but Joselito remained quiet.
Marvel, however, looked ready to cry once
more.
“Go get your kuya,” Melita said to
Marvel, who wasted no time leaving to
fetch his older brother. “Is this how you
repay me, Joselito? Is this how you treat
your ninang?”
She referred to herself as his
ninang, still. It should have given him
comfort, but instead he thought how she
wasn’t really his godmother, was not even
in the church on the day he was baptized.
She had given herself the title when she
chose him to dole her favor and trust.
Melita had taken religion out of the
picture and replaced it with politics. Her
version had a more direct influence, he
realized—in comparison to his actual
godmothers, she had done more for him.
The following Wednesday, Melita went
straight to Bernadette’s house for dinner
and cards as usual, an extra-large tray of
dim sum in hand. She anticipated that
her friend would be embarrassed for her
backstabbing son, but she would play the
whole thing off as a minor intrusion on
her life that they could move on from.
After all, the younger boys had returned
the bicycle the next day, and her own
warehouse window now had bars.
Problem solved. She was surprised to see
Bernadette answer the door, rather than
one of the two dalagas.
“Go home, Melita. I’m surprised
you have the nerve to show up here.” In
104
hungry and knew he must be too. They
were quiet for the first few bites.
He had not brought up Tonton and
that was good. Her son had no part in this
conversation. In many ways, Joselito was
more like her. She had felt the kinship
from the start. Someone who just needed
a little bit of luck—a hustle—to get ahead,
and more importantly, who knew how to
work one.
“What about your mother?” she
asked.
“You mean, the person who just
kicked you out?”
“Hoy, I wasn’t invited. That’s not
the same as ‘kick out.’”
She took another bite and
swallowed.
“Okay, deal. Meet me on
Wednesday before you have dinner. I’ll be
at my house, playing solitaire, alone.”
Then she brushed herself off and went
inside to do just that, working with the
hand the cards had dealt her. ¨
her oversized housedress, Bernadette
blocked the entrance to the house.
“Me? Nerve? Whatever are you
talking about?” Melita could sense what
was happening, but did not quite
understand it yet.
“I found out you are a thief, and
now I can add hypocrite to the list.”
“But it was your son who stole
from me, Bernie. Have you gone crazy?”
“It takes a thief to know a thief.
You have enough loot to fill a warehouse!
Really, Melita, you’re a bad influence on
this family.”
From there, the short walk home
felt like an endless stretch, Melita not
seeing the familiar surroundings through
the cloud of humiliation and dejection
that enveloped her. Joselito, appearing
suddenly on the path, startled her from
distraction. He was the last person she
expected to see. Had he known this would
happen? His shoes were no longer
scratched and filled in with marker—how
long would they last, she wondered, now
that his “allowance” was dry? She told
him to go home, not unlike the way his
mother had done to her just moments
before. But Joselito had other ideas. He
told her that he wanted to continue
selling the cigarettes.
“Hah! After what you did—hah!” If
she were not feeling so dejected, Melita
would have laughed in earnest.
“Ninang, I have regular customers.
It’s too easy to throw away. Instead of
breaking even, why not make a profit? I
can give you part of my commission this
time. How many cartons of cigarettes go
stale in that warehouse? I made a
mistake; I’ve learned. It won’t happen
again.”
She found herself listening. By
now they were in front of her house.
“Sit down,” she said, planting
herself on the top step. She offered him a
pork bun from the dim sum tray, which
now smelled too good to resist. She was
105
Old Typewriter by Manit Chaotragoongit
106
MissionLitany
poetry by Jonathan Glenn Travelstead
Praise to the NOAA’s forecast of hospitable weather on planets
awaiting us in the habitable zone. Praise to LASIK performed on Hubble’s lens
& after, when we saw the first hydrogen oasis
where we awoke from deep sleep, took a swallow, then continued
our endeavor. Praise to our mission patches, embroidered with Greek gods
& monsters we’ve since outgrown. Praise to the ESA & to JAXA.
Praise to CNSA & ROSCOSMOS. Praise to NASA’s Mission Control,
JPL for breathing new life into the rover’s damaged wheels, teaching Curiosity
to moonwalk Gale Crater. Praise to the acronyms of nations
who finally decided to love us as they love themselves.
Praise, then, for their Research & Development so our ship’s skrim of skinas the skyscrapers–now glance bolides away, harmless as frisbees.
Each day hurtling further away is one we extend the bounds of home
in the only ark great enough for deliverance. And so I Praise system redundancy,
each put in place by at least one explorer’s death.
I give Praise for the last generation of stillborns whom we commemorate
with the seed vaults in Antarctica, & Svalbard. I give my Praise
for any bygone acceptable human loss
that we now send crisis gardens into the void because human loss
is no longer an acception. Stop me, someone, or let Praise continue, resounding,
a self-sustaining chemical reaction, blue-hot, a living word in my mouth
as I Praise again the golden ratio. I give my remaining Praise
to the act of giving Praise, which is all I’ve found equal to the value
of the mission’s pursuit.
107
OhElvisIBeseechThee
poetry by John Stupp
Oh Elvis
I beseech thee
come back
from the dead
open your eyes
grease your hair
prove you are divine
come rescue Pittsburgh
from Republicans
with your amplifier
and guitar
come meet us
after hours
between buildings
where the Ohio River
is doing its duck walk in the woods
and Elvis
when the kissing is done
let there be rock ‘n roll
with our pants down
our skirts up
crazy like a warm wind
from the South
from Memphis
from Mississippi
from Georgia
come when it’s time to pick peaches
or let them rot sweetly
one by one
on the trees
like us wanting
where you bloom
108
Stick‘emupkid
poetry by Andrea Christoff
Born in the Tongass under simple pine twisted
and splayed amongst caribou and cross. Left with
bears in the city who stand on paws with milk teeth
mirrored growth and glacial brows. Blubber and
turf carried me to Nome when you became tired.
A better place with room, you said, the place of
dirty soap and brown peonies. I blinked, so it would
wash away, but nothing happened. Our beds made of
moths, metal and must. I walked around town looking
at faces. Each night a whale came to me. I touched
palm to cold rubber nose. He promised to take me away,
but when I spread my arms in flight, he missed the sea.
109
MySisterIsaSalamander
poetry by Anastasia Stelse
pinkish-blue and cool in my arms.
I drop her on the riverbank.
She flops boneless without my weight
beside her, doesn’t look at all
like she’s warming herself in sun,
planning to slide down the shoreline,
escape into murky water.
I try to catch her breath so I
can put it back, find mine instead,
asthmatic, too small at seven
to raise her stilled chest. Her lips
are slimy. They taste of cold muck
like kissing toads. Seaweed cradles
her—tentacles that won’t let go.
110
Peeking In by Stephanie C. Trott
111
Biyanî
They took the women to detention
areas where they forced them to abandon
their religion before selling them. Buyers
with greater resources could own more
than one slave. The militant who took
Berzê was cruel, pitiless, and endowed
with a diminutive member, which, when
Berzê scoffed at it, had earned her a
beating.
Small as it was, she cut it off him
in his sleep before fleeing in the middle of
the night into the hills. She ran for two
days, nearly dying of dehydration. It was
only a stroke of luck that an American
drone spotted her, and they sent out a
patrol to bring her in. She spent a week in
a medical ward recovering with a tube in
her arm. What followed was a series of
questions, examinations, and paperwork
that seemed to last for weeks. Everyone
tried to be kind. They always asked her
name before prodding and poking her or
asking her to tell her story. “Berzê,” she
told them. They shuttled her to a refugee
distribution facility where she ended up
on a plane to São Paulo before she knew
what was happening. It had taken her a
while, but eventually she understood.
“Berzê,” she told them. It was all she
could tell them. They thought she was
saying “Brazil.”
So it was by sheer coincidence that
she found herself in this open-air market
in the first place, sitting on a folding
beach chair and dishing out portions of
marinated cucumbers and tomatoes to
Paulistanos. It was by the same
coincidence that she found herself again
in the midst of the chaos that follows an
explosion.
It was late morning, and the lunch
rush was beginning as the automobile
traffic in the surrounding streets crawled
fiction by Rick Hoffman
Berzê had been in São Paulo for just over
three months and was still very much an
alien in this sultry land. The moisture
hung in the air like a prison sentence, the
perspiration was indecent, and the city
stank of waste. It was especially bad near
the river, which festered in the steamy
haze, even though the temperature was
moderate. She kept herself detached from
the locals. Her detachment ran as deep as
blood, for she shared her blood with none
of her neighbors, not even in the tiny
Yazidi population that had taken her in.
Yet, for all of this, she still found
herself a place to work in the open-air
market, selling nan and zelete. They
seemed to her the most approachable of
her native foods to peddle, and the most
marketable. Besides, the available
produce was exceptional, business was
reasonable, and the locals were receptive.
The revenue from her stall paid the rent,
anyway, and that would have to do.
Living was expensive in São Paulo, and
Berzê largely had to fend for herself, but
there was nothing new about that. It had
only been a year since the militants had
taken her village, and from that day, she
had relied on no one but herself.
First had come the executions of
the men who refused to fight under the
black flag. She did not see them kill her
husband and her father, but she heard
the shots from the back of a transport
truck as it pulled out of the village. Two of
them must have been Reswan and Bav. It
was the first time she had ever thanked
God that she had no children.
112
foreigners. Japanese, she presumed, as
she had learned there were many Japonês
in São Paulo. They walked with the grace
and purpose of the people of that island
nation. The mother kept her hands tight
on the handles of her baby’s stroller, while
the father carried their parcels. They
pointed at one of the stalls ahead of them
and leaned into one another to speak. As
they did so, the mother looked at Berzê
and smiled shyly, giving a deferential nod
of her head. Berzê had known little
deference in the past year. The gesture
was as alien to her as the climate.
A Brazilian woman stepped up to
Berzê’s stall. She was wearing a skintight,
sleeveless top that squeezed her chest,
and her shorts were cut immodestly high.
Berzê disapproved, but the woman was a
customer. If she had money to pay, then
she could wear what she wanted.
“Um, por favor,” the woman said,
holding up the customary first finger. The
woman’s bracelet was made of gold rings
sewn onto a cloth band. To Berzê it looked
like the nishans that the Yazidi holy men
hung on the walls of their homes and
sometimes carried through villages for
blessings. Sometimes the murids, the
commoners of Berzê’s caste, would visit
the homes of the holy men for the healing
powers a nishan could possess. Partly
amused and partly annoyed by this
imitation of a holy item, Berzê masked
her disapproval of the Brazilian.
“I have been too long among these
people,” Berzê thought, “and not enough
among my own.” Like most Yazidis, Berzê
was generally tolerant of others, and
certainly the people of Brazil had been
welcoming to her, but too much
interaction with non-Yazidis was taboo in
her ancient culture, which did not even
permit Berzê to eat from the same bowls
she used to serve them. Now here was
this woman wearing a mockery of a
nishan for a decoration.
Pushing the nishan from her mind,
Berzê turned and tossed a disc of flat
from block to narrow block, and the
vendors called out from stalls under
vibrant awnings. Berzê finished with a
customer and sat back under her private
shade. She often watched the people move
about their business, haggling over goods
and carting off sacks of their necessities.
She marveled at their frenetic passion for
movement. That day they moved with
particular haste. Who could say why?
Perhaps, just as ants communicate
through pheromone receptors, they tuned
their brains to a common chemistry and
exchanged unuttered signals. Or perhaps,
like the traffic in the city itself, through
which one hiccup could send waves of
consequence across the interwoven blocks,
their movements were merely reactions to
one another, as dancers responding to
changes in rhythm. Whatever their
reasons, that day they scuttled about with
unusual fervor to their errands and
appointments, and Berzê found it
hypnotic.
Across the street a white van
pulled into a space in front of a
newsstand. Berzê watched the driver, a
well-groomed, young man in his thirties,
turn the wheel, check his mirror, and
back into the space. His choreography was
expert in its fluidity, yet the driver was
unimpressed with his own flawless
execution. He got out of the vehicle and
walked around to the rear where he
opened the doors and reached inside.
Berzê could not see what he was doing,
but she imagined he was making room for
the purchases he would inevitably make
after crossing the street into the market.
When he closed the van and walked up
the block away from the market, Berzê
supposed she must have read him wrong
and turned her attention to the other
market shoppers.
“Pão e salada,” she called out in
her accented Portuguese.
A family of three walked together
between the rows of stalls. Like Berzê,
they too were biyanî . . . estrangeiros . . .
113
her shoulder, lodging itself into the space
between the bones where her arm pivoted
in its socket. When she felt the pain, a
flash came across her field of vision, and
all went black.
bread into her oven to warm it through.
She opened the lid on a large bowl of
cucumbers and tomatoes marinating in
citrus juice and herbs. She spooned a
generous helping of zelete into a plastic
bowl and stuck a fork in it. Then she took
up a pair of tongs and grabbed the nowwarm nan from the oven, wrapped it in
wax paper, and laid it across the bowl of
zelete. Handing this over to her customer,
she took the money in the other hand.
“Obrigada,” the woman said and
turned away. As she reached the sidewalk
at the edge of the market, the white van
across the street erupted in a storm of
hellfire, smoke, and shrapnel, shocking
the air from Berzê’s lungs and throwing
her backward to the floor of her stall.
The Brazilian woman broke apart
into what might have been a hundred
pieces. Two hundred. A thousand would
have made no difference; half a second
before she had been whole. The
fragmentation came before the sound
could register, then the shockwave, the
sucking vacuum that followed, and the
ringing like a tuning fork struck upon a
nerve.
Berzê knew she should have seen
it sooner. She had seen it all before, but
no one ever sees except in hindsight what
should have been as painfully apparent as
a scar upon a child’s face, as obvious as a
car bomb. Lying on her back, her clothes
stained red with bloodspray, her stall in
ruins, zelete soaking through her skirt
where the container lay upturned against
her leg, she squeezed her eyes shut and
opened them wide again. She knew before
the smoke reached the top floors of the
surrounding buildings; knew before the
acrid reek of chemicals, burnt skin, and
hair; knew before the first wail of terror
or the first moan of agony. Certainly she
knew—indeed they all knew—before the
arrival of the sirens and the stretchers.
What she did not know was that a
jagged fragment of shrapnel had pierced
Zerya’s face shows dimly in the
candlelight as Berzê looks up from the
little teacups that sit between them. She
always looks the same in candlelight—just
as she had looked on the day of their
bonding ceremony. Spiritual sisters, they
are bonded now. They will guide each
other in matters of faith. One will find the
other in the afterlife and help her into her
garment of new life to be reborn. Zerya
looks into Berzê’s eyes as if to reaffirm her
resolute commitment to do as she pledged
to do during that secret ceremony. But no
matter what pledge they have made to one
another, the most they do when they share
tea is talk about boys.
“Reswan likes you,” Zerya says.
“He does not,” says Berzê.
“He does. My cousin said so.”
“What does your cousin know? He’s
a boy.”
With eyes squeezed shut, Berzê rolled
onto her side. The pain shot down her arm
into her fingers—an electric shock of
nerves and tissue. She screamed.
“Acalma-se,” a voice told her.
She screamed again. Someone
forced her to lie flat. She struggled
against the pressure of it, but weakened
as she was by the pain, she could not
resist. She lay back and tried to open her
eyes. They were crusted shut. More voices
swam into her head, shouting in their
accented, musical language that now
sounded terrible and broken.
Strong hands beneath her lifted up
and slipped her onto a stretcher. Vertigo
surged over her as they raised the
stretcher to its full height, and she felt
114
They wheeled her into the triage room.
Berzê tried to look around, but the
screaming of the florescent light forced
her eyes to close again. Shouts flew back
and forth among the trauma staff so fast
she could not follow them. Someone
readjusted the cuff on her arm. Someone
else peeled back the bandage on her
shoulder.
“Do you have any pain?” a different
woman’s voice asked. “Miss?”
Berzê tried to speak, but she could
not command her voice to form the
Portuguese. For all her rambling in
Kurmancî, she might as well have been
speaking gibberish. Her breath
stammered in her chest as she fought
against both the pain of her injury and
the frustration of her language deficit.
She tried to bring her mind into a state of
calm.
another surge of pain.
The wedding is still a long time coming,
but Berzê has grown to like the way
Reswan looks when she has occasion to see
him. Zerya knows her thoughts but never
teases her—not as her sisters at home have
done. She goes to Zerya’s house in the
afternoons when she has time. Since Zerya
is already married, she has a house to care
for. Berzê helps her when she visits. She
has learned to cook in her mother’s
kitchen, but being the youngest she has not
learned to care for children— her favorite
part about visiting Zerya.
Inside the ambulance, they cupped a
mask across her face and spoke more
calmly as they went about their work. She
reached up to wipe her eyes and picked
thick slabs of sticky blood from them. The
female paramedic was turned away, busy
with her instruments. Berzê eyed her for
a moment, thinking that she looked
familiar, but she knew that could not be.
The paramedic turned to Berzê who
winced again.
“Está tudo bem,” the woman said.
She rolled Berzê’s sleeve up high and
strapped a cuff on her arm, which
tightened like a death grip.
A wave of nausea overwhelmed
Berzê, who closed her eyes and groaned.
“Está tudo bem,” the woman said
again, but Berzê did not hear her.
Reswan bends low to lift the door he has
built. It will hang on the front of the
simple home he is constructing. It is a
good door, made of heavy wood, and will
keep out the night’s chill. Berzê watches as
Reswan’s back bends into a now familiar
muscle-packed arch to haul the door over
to the entryway. Berzê likes the way he
looks, his rippled back and young man’s
beard. He will make them a good home
and will make her a good husband. He
deserves a good wife.
Resting in a curtained corner of the
emergency room, Berzê watched the
needle pierce her arm. The thin, dark
curve spiraled through a tube into a vial
at the other end. After several repetitions
of this ritual, a nurse capped off the tube
and withdrew the needle. Gripping
Berzê’s arm, she pressed a gauze pad to
the puncture wound and bent the arm to
hold the pad in place.
The night before the wedding, Zerya tells
Berzê all the things her mother has left
out. Not what to do—she knows that.
Rather, she tells her how to make the
intimacy better, not only for her husband,
but also for herself. She knows also that it
can be difficult the first time. Zerya tells
her what to do about that as well.
115
deliberately, unintelligibly. But they
smiled, and their voices were kind, so
Berzê tried to smile back.
The woman spoke in Arabic, but
Berzê merely shook her head.
“Êzîdî,” Berzê said in Kurmancî.
The doctor in the hijab nodded and
turned to her colleague. “She is Yazidi,”
she told him in Portuguese. “I don’t speak
Kurdish.” Then she turned to Berzê and
smiled again. “Ma’a salama,” she said in
Arabic, and then she left the cubicle.
The male doctor did his best to
communicate with Berzê, pointing to the
wound on her shoulder, trying to explain
what procedures they would perform, but
Berzê tuned him out and listened only to
the gentle hiss and hum of the machines
around her, letting her mind wander once
again.
“Do you speak any Portuguese?”
the nurse asked, smiling.
Berzê shook her head. “A little.”
“That’s all right.”
The nurse continued to talk
throughout her work, but Berzê could not
follow. It did not matter. The tone was
soothing, and the nurse was kind as she
cleaned the blood from Berzê’s face and
arms. So much of it was not her own. She
closed her eyes and listened to the Babel
music of the foreign tongue dance about
the tiny cubicle. They must have given
her medicine, for she did not feel the pain
in her shoulder anymore. She might have
slept, but she could not be certain.
The trucks come thrashing through the
village. Berzê is cleaning up after the
morning meal. Reswan has left for the
day. When she hears the automatic
gunfire, she knows who it is, even before
she sees the black flags through her
window. The village has expected an
attack and even sent out a forward guard
to warn of an approach.
They come in Toyota pickups and
American Humvees, adorned with the
severed heads of the village scouts upon
the hoods, dragging the headless bodies
behind on chains. There is a brief
exchange of gunfire with the Yazidis, but
it is short lived, outnumbered and
outgunned as the villagers are. Berzê runs
outside, dashes toward Zerya’s house, but
as she crosses the narrow street, she is
struck in the back of the neck with a
truncheon as a pickup rounds the corner
past her. She wakes in a truck full of
women and girls being taken away. Then
the gunshots.
At the slave market they force her to
abandon a religion whose traditions are
older than the letters with which its stories
are written:
“Will you convert to Islam?”
“No.”
“It does not matter. It happens
when we rape you.”
Desperate to find her loved ones,
she searches for her sisters and for Zerya
in the crowded market. Reswan dead or
drafted. The militant who buys her—she
can smell his rancid breath and battle
stench—haggles over the price. He drags
her screaming from the market. She
retreats into her addled mind to escape the
nightly violations. She prays her
menstruation will come so he will not
want her.
They wheeled her into X-ray and took
their ghostly pictures. When they showed
them to her, she saw the foreign shape, at
once curved and jagged, illuminated
against the lurid bone behind it. She
understood that she had shrapnel in her
Two doctors, a woman and a man, stood in
the cubicle and talked over her chart.
When Berzê opened her eyes, they turned
to her and smiled. The woman wore a
pink hijab. They spoke to her slowly,
116
growing softer as the dirt clings to
coagulating blood. She sleeps in the
daytime under camouflage of brush and
dirt. Then up at nightfall to run again.
Gagging on her own parched throat. Dry
heaving with her head propped on a rock.
The distant hum of aircraft overhead. The
terror of the grind of trucks in the night.
Numb, even to the roots of her toenails, yet
limping ever forward. Lurching, lunging
onward into pain and blackness and
exhaustion.
arm and that it would have to be
removed.
They took her upstairs to prep her
for surgery. Because she could not listen
to them speaking, she let her mind roam
again, wondering what had pierced her
skin and lodged itself within her arm. It
could have been any of a thousand
things—wood, a bit of her stall, a
fragment of the bomb itself, jagged and
stabbing metal ripped from the body of
the van and hurled across the street.
The fragments of a life are like the
fragments of a bomb, she thought. All it
takes is one brief trigger to blast the
whole thing outward in a brutal calamity
of violence and death. It was not long ago
that she was a bride-to-be; not long ago
she was enjoying the excitement of trying
to start a family; not long ago she watched
her village razed; not long ago she was a
slave. If she had not come half a world
away to flee the terror, she might have
lived to be an old woman, never having
felt the shredding burn of shrapnel
beneath her skin. But what life would it
have been to be a traitor to her faith and a
slave to the enemy—a betrayer to her God
and culture? Given the choice, she’d take
the shrapnel.
Someone spoke to her and slipped
a mask over her mouth and nose. She
heard the instruments—the beeps, the
whirs—mechanical birds singing high in
sterile treetops. Her head cloudy and her
vision blurred, Berzê closed her eyes
against the disorientation. A nurse
stroked her brow and whispered
something beautiful. She flinched once
and then breathed deeply in the
darkening cold.
She awoke in recovery to more sounds of
beeps and hisses. It was not an immediate
awareness. First they found her—the
beeps and hisses—deep in the drunken
folds of anesthesia. Nagging, tugging, like
some mere suggestion of a sound, a cat
scratching at the back door, whining to
get in. Then slowly they pulled upon her
consciousness, urging her awake with
their persistent pleas, until she forced her
eyes to open against the dull gray light
that bled through the curtains.
Her first instinct was to cry. She
had not cried in months—refused to do
so—she would not give the animals the
satisfaction. But now the tears betrayed
her, and she fought them, clenching her
teeth and thrashing her beleaguered head
against the pillow. With that violent act
her arm seared with postsurgical pain,
and she let out a gasp that surprised even
her.
A voice told her to be still, breathe
slowly, and rest. It was a man’s voice, and
he spoke Kurmancî. She saw him sitting
in the corner browsing on his mobile
phone.
“Who are you?” she asked in her
native tongue.
“My name is Baran,” he said.
“They thought a translator might be of
help.”
“You speak Kurmancî?”
“I do.”
“Who are you?” she asked again.
Running blindly to the hills, her way lit
only by a sickly crescent moon, she flees.
Her broken, bleeding feet slap against the
ground, for in the panic of her flight she
has forgotten shoes. They strike against
the jagged stones, the sound of slapping
117
“Thank you, no,” she said. “Please
go now.”
Baran turned to go. Before he left,
he stopped and turned, looking back at
her. He took a card from his pocket.
“I’d like to leave my card,” he said.
“In case you change your mind, you might
call me.”
“Thank you, no,” she said again.
He stopped once more before he
left.
“It was gold,” he said.
“What?” she asked, not looking at
him.
“Gold. The shrapnel in your arm.
The piece of metal that they pulled from
you. I thought you’d like to know. The
doctor left it for you there.” Baran nodded
to a plastic jar upon a table, and then he
left the room, pulling the door shut gently
as he went.
Berzê took the jar and opened it.
Inside its opaque plastic hollow sat a
twisted yet otherwise unremarkable scrap
of curved gold. She remembered the
woman in the skintight shirt at her stall.
The bracelet that reminded her of a
nishan. Her disapproval of the woman’s
clothes and her mockery of the holy
charm. Out of all the hell that had been
cast from the epicenter of the blast, it had
been that bracelet that punctured Berzê’s
skin and lodged itself against her bones.
No doubt the woman’s blood was on it too.
Now her blood was mingled with Berzê’s
and would forever remain so. Like Zerya,
she was Berzê’s sister, and like Zerya she
was gone.
The world that had seemed so big
to her, so alien, the world that had cast
her out of her home and made her biyanî
in a foreign land, had now become much
smaller. It was a garment of diverse cloth
stitched together with a common thread of
violence and murder, and somehow Berzê
had become the dressmaker’s mannequin,
holding up the shape of the garment, yet
possessed of no will of her own to claim it.
Perhaps it was time to seize upon
“I told you,” he said. “My name is
Baran.”
“How did you—?”
“I work with an international aid
group for displaced refugees. I was born in
northern Iraq near Mosul. You might
know my village. It’s—”
“Are you Yazidi?”
“How do you feel?” he asked her.
“Tired. Sore.”
“They say it will pass.”
“Are you Yazidi?” she persisted.
“I was raised Muslim,” he said,
“but now I am apostate.”
“Why?”
“English university,” he said. “It
would make an atheist out of the pope.
They should have an exchange program
with the Caliphate. There might be much
less fighting.” He laughed a feeble and
pathetic laugh, but Berzê half turned
from him and sighed.
“You’re very lucky to be alive,” he
said.
“Am I?”
“Thirty-seven people died in the
market today. You were the only survivor
within ten meters of the blast.”
Berzê said nothing.
“I can help you,” Baran told her.
“How?”
“I can get you counseling.”
“For what?”
“For the trauma you have
endured.”
“It’s a minor wound,” she said. “It
will heal on its own.”
“I did not mean that trauma,” he
said.
“I know.”
Baran said nothing.
“Can your counseling take away
the memories?” Berzê continued.
“No,” he confessed.
She turned the rest of the way and
faced the window.
“Please leave,” she said.
“I’d like to help.”
118
something. She took Baran’s card from
the table near the bed and turned it over
in her hands, wondering about this man
who aided outcasts. She remembered then
the sacred texts, for Adam too had been
cast out: God said to the Peacock Angel,
“Go. Bring Adam out of Paradise.” It was
from that casting out that the Yazidis had
been born.
Berzê stood up from her bed.
Encumbered as she was by tubes and
instruments, she struggled over to the
window and opened the curtains. The sun
was setting over the city. It had burned
the haze off as it crested and was settling
down now for its evening rest. The lights
of São Paulo flickered on in windows
where eleven million souls subsisted
despite the odds against them. Surely
there was the hand of the divine in their
existence, as there was in that of the
Yazidis, and surely she should not look on
them with disdain, for they were not
immune to her people’s plight, nor was
she immune to theirs. They were one—
bonded in an obstinate refusal to be
victims despite all efforts to make them
so.
Berzê had refused conversion, yet
it took her anyway. She had resisted this
new country, yet it was hers through
violent baptism. She was Yazidi by God’s
banishment of Adam and Brazilian by her
own exile. It was a test that took ten
thousand miles and a hundred thousand
heartaches to accept. Like the nameless
generations of Yazidis and Brazilians
before her, Berzê would bear the will of
God upon her shoulders—pierced by
foreign baubles—forever. ¨
119
Accordion by Kate LaDew
120
ThrowingLightontheDark:AnInterviewwithGregBrownderville
when The Tishman Review
approached me to interview you they
thought this might be a chummy
affair. I want you to know I’m going
to Barbara Walters this thing. I’m not
going to be satisfied until the camera
holds your face under supple light,
tears streaming down your cheeks
(soft as snow). By the way, the beard
looks good on you, man. How does it
feel to have the book out in the
world? I know you’re traveling
around a bit in support of it. Can you
gauge the general reaction to the
book? What sayeth those who read
poetry?
craft talk by Elijah Burrell
Greg Brownderville
Greg Brownderville: Good to sit a spell
with you, bud. I very much appreciate
your take on A Horse with Holes in It.
So far, readers have responded favorably
to this book. Jen Hinst-White wrote a
beautiful review, and I tell you what: The
blurb from Abe Smith is good enough in
its own right to win an award for best
prose poem.
Elijah Burrell: First of all, Greg, I just
want to tell you congratulations on your
new book A Horse with Holes in It. Let me
share with you what I wrote about the
book on my Facebook wall back in
November:
A Horse with Holes in It shook me,
played tricks on me, haunted me, and
busted my gut. It’s the kind of book
that feels outrageously confessional in
ways one doesn’t anticipate. Though
Greg and I are the best of friends, it
always surprises me—and delights
me—when I read his work and realize
in so many ways we are also constant
strangers. Those of you who’ve had the
good fortune to read his work—or even
shared a conversation with him—
know how imaginative, funny, and
charming he can be. Those things are
all well and good, but I can say this:
No other poet on earth is like this one.
A wager: It will be a long time before
you read a book that affects you more
than this one will.
EB: Glad to hear it. About five years
ago in Gust, you wrote about Sharon
Weron spinning across the high hills
of South Dakota inside a tornado.
You wrote, “She can muster not a
solitary sentence of description.” You
said, “There’s something unsayable
there.” In the years since Gust, you
yourself have been shook up and
whirled around. The poems in A
Horse with Holes in It indicate
geographical movement (to a big
city) and emotional disrepair. The
unsettled speakers in these poems
find themselves detached from the
familiar. You grew up in the poorest
region of the country—the
Mississippi/Arkansas Delta—and over
So, good friend, constant stranger,
there’s the full disclosure. I think
121
Many a time I’ve wondered: How
did the writing happen? What was going
on with me?
the past few years have found
yourself existing bizarrely in
metropolitan Dallas: “In case you
wonder what’s become of me: / all of a
weird sudden, I’m city slicked / in
mega-world” (from “For Tess, From
the Blue Door Tavern, 2010”). A
Texan, Greg. It’s as if you’re the eye
of the twister, and all your
speakers—fragmented, detritus—
enclose around you.
Unlike Weron, though, the
speakers in your poems such as
“Honest Gospel Singing” and
“Welcome to the Old Cathedral,”
though confused, strive to tell what
their conditions feel like. Is this a
kind of bottomless anti-memesis
where a poet’s life and commentary
imitate the art he or she once made,
which imitated another’s life? Can
you talk a bit about how you thread
your own experiences into these
poems? Also, have you bought a belt
buckle in the shape of the Lone Star
State, or is it a shining razorback
hog?
EB: Let’s get to the bottom of that. I
want to explore some moments in the
new book that might be a little
uncomfortable. Your speakers find
themselves in different states of
existential crisis. They wonder, at
various times, if they are even
present in the world around them—
whether they’ve been absentees in
the relationships they’ve shared with
others. They wonder if these
bewitchments have snatched their
very freedom. We see this in poems
like “Easy.” Established in these
poems is the pattern of women
(bodily and spiritually) building up
then destroying the male speakers’
egos and senses of self. These women
act, in ways, as Sibyls—oracles and
priestesses, but the power they hold
on your speakers exceeds anything
we’ve seen from those Greek
mythologies.
This is clearest in
“Prosimetrum 1: Assorted Heads”
where Sister Law is “making a boy”
from driftwood and a scuffed
baseball. We see it later in
“Prosimetrum 2: Body Shots” where
Gladleen creates an uncanny version
of the speaker from mannequin parts
and photographs. In “Sweet Tooth
Homeless,” Gladleen, now the
speaker, masochistically builds up—
then destroys—the now frayed-andafraid man. But even as Gladleen
works her sexual demolition, there’s
a sense she’s rebuilding the spirit of
the lost man. You’ve presented each
of these moments as “art
experiments.” First, would you
express how your Pentecostal
upbringing (and the strange magic
that saturated moments from your
childhood) might lead these men to
GB: I’m very happy and lucky to be at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
Texas. Texas has been all kinds of kind to
me, and I’m all kinds of thankful. But let’s
face it: I’m no Texan. True Texans have a
feeling for their native state that nonTexans will never fully understand.
You asked how I thread personal
experience into A Horse with Holes in It.
Not to go all Aeolian harp here, but
serious business: There’s not a lot I can
say on the subject, reason being I wrote
the book in a blur. I barely remember
anything about it. (Which is fitting, I
guess, for a book that’s partly about spirit
possession.) What I do remember is like
flashes from a fistfight. Not just any
fistfight, but one of those childhood
enders. Dream-like and sinus-cracking
real, all in one brutal moon-gong of a
moment inside my head.
122
wonder if they’ve been cursed,
possessed, “commandeered” by
ominous spirits? Also, one of the real
triumphs of A Horse with Holes in It
is how you made the workings of the
spiritual realm (both dark and light)
so entirely accessible. How in the
world did you do that?
form of magic and mysticism seemingly
compounded of Haitian, West African,
Celtic, and Native American elements. In
the Mirror Saw, the spirits were called
lowers (sometimes spelled lores), which in
the non-rhotic accent of the Delta, is
pronounced low-uhs. Lowers were lower
than gods but higher than humans.
Lowers lowered themselves into our world
and set their feet down in our dirt.
Almost always the central event of a
Mirror Saw gathering was a possession.
Once a lower mounted a human body
(called the “horse”), the lower would walk
among the people, talk, eat, drink, crack
jokes. The spirit took flesh. That poem
“Easy,” in which I write about marrying a
lower named Easy Lee during early
adolescence, mentions that Easy likes
milk cake and mimosas because in my
experience she does. There aren’t too
many religions whose spirits are so
knowable.
All of this bodiliness is good for
poetry, I do believe.
GB: Your wording of the question put me
in mind of a passage from Bolaño’s
“Sensini” that describes a “feeling like jet
lag—an odd sensation of fragility, of being
there and not there, somehow distant
from my surroundings.”
The central women characters in A
Horse with Holes in It are based on people
I’ve known and admired. I was close
friends with the self-taught sculptor
Sister Ethel Leona Fitch Law. (I just got a
letter from her son the other day
reminding me that it was her birthday.
She died over a decade ago at the age of
101.) Sister Law—her wondrous
sculptures fill my office at SMU—was an
important artistic and spiritual mentor to
me. Gladleen is important too. Likewise
Tess.
You asked how I “made the
workings of the spiritual realm (both dark
and light) so entirely accessible.” I think it
has something to do with the particular
spiritual worlds I was writing about:
Pentecost and the Mirror Saw. Both are
quite bodily. In church, as little kids, we
had memory verses, and I remember one
that went, “Verily, verily, I say unto you,
‘Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,
and drink his blood, ye have no life in
you.’” Pentecostals don’t back away from
that one bit. Christ is body. Church is
body. Worship is body. You can’t worship
Pentecost-style if you’re a person of gelid
reserve. Don’t give me no Michal. You
gotta get out there like David and romp
half-naked with the handmaidens around
the ark.
The Mirror Saw, a multiracial
hush-harbor society in the Delta, did a
EB: Not every poem in A Horse with
Holes in It forages for a clean, welllighted place. Although the work
deals in big-city isolation and what it
feels like to range over the dark
mountains of age, the poems also
contain droves of humorous
moments.
One of my favorite lines in the
book happens during your long poem
“Welcome to the Old Cathedral”
when the speaker says, “One time,
when ‘Fields of Gold’ was playing, /
she looked up at the speakers / and
said, ‘O Sting, where is thy death?’”
It’s a great quip built around the
famous verse in 1 Corinthians (“O
death, where is thy sting?”). The first
time I heard that line you were
reading it in St. Louis to a crowded
room of people that—in the
moment—didn’t get it. I remember
my surprise at my solitary laughter
123
the reader’s laughing harder than if the
humor had arisen in a less grim context.
You are generous to say the humor
in this new book of mine makes you feel
smarter. In all sincerity, though, I want to
turn that compliment back on you. I’m
lucky to have friends, such as Eli Burrell,
who are magnificently witty. Y’all
sharpen me every day. As a result, I find
myself writing keener poems, comic and
otherwise.
and thinking the joke would slay on
the page. I think I was right in both
respects.
You wrote some funny poems
for Gust (most memorably “From a
Nationally Televised Press
Conference Starring the Poetic
Sheriff, Joseph Kilpatrick Conway,
After a Van Gogh Painting Is Stolen
from a Little Rock Exhibit and
Recovered in Monroe County”), but
the hilarious flourishes in A Horse
with Holes in It seem even funnier. Is
it that they’ve got more edge to them?
I’ve known so many writers with an
incredible sense of humor that
cannot, for the life of them, get it
onto the page. When you write it, I
don’t merely feel entertained, I feel
smarter. What’s your secret?
EB: You do a lot of research when
you write. In fact, sometimes I think
you might just be researching every
thing and person you encounter. In
the last poem of the book,
“Prosimetrum 3: The Fireworks,” a
poem I think should win every award
in 2017’s America, you present as
evidence research into your family’s
past (most notably your grandfather
Herbert Edward Brownderville). The
form of the prosimetrum works so
well in this particular instance, and
sets up your love song to art-making
and writing and friendship and the
idea of what it even means to be a
man in a 2017 America where at least
one other poet believes you should
win every award. Tell me why you
chose this form (which dates back to
antiquity) for some of the most
important poems in the book. Also,
can you talk about how research is as
important to poets as it is to prose
writers?
GB: Regarding the differences between
the ways I use humor in Gust and A Horse
with Holes in It, if the comic element of
the latter has more edge to it, the reason
might be that humor occurs in the newer
book mostly as momentary flickers within
dark poems. Sort of like accidental sparks
from the poems’ main frictions. Some of
the poems in Gust are comic from start to
finish, which might make the humor feel
less like chance moments of hilarity and
more like stand-up (maybe?). To my mind,
some of the most hilarious moments in life
and in art seem accidental, unstaged. No
one seems to have planned them or meant
them to be funny. “I Remember” by Stevie
Smith has that quality for me. “I do not
think it has ever happened, / Oh my bride,
my bride.”
Have you ever seen a weeping
human burst into strangely loud laughter
at something that isn’t even that funny?
Poetry can yield a similar phenomenon, I
think. If a poem has wakened huge sorrow
or terror, and suddenly a funny moment
happens, the autonomic arousal behind
the heavier emotions gets instantly
reinterpreted as comic feeling. Suddenly
GB: Many thanks for the good words on
“The Homemade Fireworks,” my friend.
I do love fieldwork. I like hearing
the raw, unedited stuff of poetry in real
human voices with their rasps and
murmurs and lilts and just-right rhythms.
Also, I like being a detective, or maybe an
anti-detective, tracking down the magic
clue. I say anti-detective because I’m here
to deepen the mystery, not to solve it. The
local mystery is always also the cosmic.
124
You asked why I chose to use the
prosimetrum. I had been reading
Shakespeare and thinking about the form
of the play, how it perfectly satisfies all of
his creative impulses. He gets to tell
stories, draw characters, and explore
ideas, but never at the expense of the
first, best thing: namely, the kind of
poetry that runs on pure word-bliss. How
does Shakespeare do it? How does he
manage to give us such great lyric poetry,
blazing and beautiful and free of
narrative responsibility, within stories as
complex and satisfying as the greatest
novels? One thing I kept noticing is that
Shakespeare rarely does his most difficult
narrative spadework within his most
lyrical soliloquies. That’s done by more
pedestrian, utilitarian lines elsewhere in
the plays. The stories are there, with all of
their drama, all of their implications,
underneath and all around the
soliloquies, imbuing them with meaning,
giving them extra lyrical launch.
The prose sections of a
prosimetrum allow me to set the stage, to
get my narrative work done, and then
break free into lyric. I can avoid the
narrative-lyric compromises that are right
for some poems but terribly stifling in
others.
was. And the blood was just shooting
out—I don’t know—fifteen or twenty
feet, it looked like, every time his heart
would beat. It was pitiful. And he had
so many holes in him that there was
no way to save the horse, but Daddy
couldn’t shoot him. Just couldn’t pull
the trigger. You get attached to
animals, especially when you make a
living with them and depend on them.
And looked like the old horse’s eyes
was, you know, ‘Do something to help
me.’ And there was nothing to do. It’s
funny how animals have a—I think
they have a sense that they’re hurt
really bad.
So this is the titular horse with holes
in it. Later, in the “The Song” portion
of the poem, you repeat the bit about
how animals have a sense they’re
hurt really badly. This hurt carries
through the entire book, Greg. It’s in
“Prayer to Isis” when you write, “The
lava scorched / my throat, and now—
/ to drop an old-time eggcorn— / I’ve
got me a horse in my voice.” We read
it in “Prosimetrum 1: Assorted
Heads” when “Mister Good Day used
my body as a horse for better than
three hours. Danced up on the
women and even on the men.” Mister
Good Day and the Mirror Saw divide
your speaker into different selves.
They possess him or “mount” him—
which seems to imply the inherent
component of sexuality of the
situation too. These equine
references occur throughout the
book. Please tell me just a little bit
about why you think this division of
self, this “mounting” of identities,
works so well when employed by a
poet unafraid to spread a myriad of
voices across his or her own work.
John told the world that Paul was
The Walrus, Greg. Can I tell them
that you’re The Horse?
EB: I think I’ll fold that anti-detective
answer up and stuff it into my pocket
so I never forget it. In “Prosimetrum
3: The Fireworks,” your father, Alton,
tells a story about his boyhood family
horse, Buck. Buck decides to eat from
the neighbor’s side of the fence, and
the neighbor open fires on him.
Either you or Alton then plays the
words nicely with the line, “Looked
like buckshot to me.” You write:
So the horse, out of panic, ran at a
full gait back up towards the house
and jumped the fence that separated
our backyard from our pasture, and
run into the front yard where Daddy
125
GB: The other day, after I gave a reading,
a woman in the audience—let’s call her
Kate—said something cool about one of
my prosimetra, the one called “Assorted
Heads,” which was first published by Roy
Giles and Chase Dearinger in Arcadia
(thanks, fellas). Kate said she had
recently read a review of A Horse with
Holes in It that presents “Assorted Heads”
as the heart of the collection. The review
in question, an insightful piece by Peter
Simek, says that “Assorted Heads” is
“about an old woman who makes a kind of
voodoo doll for a young boy, interchanging
the heads so often that the glue no longer
holds. It is a metaphor of a confused or
fragile sense of identity that sustains the
rest of the cycle.” Kate said that to her
way of thinking, the “interchanging [of]
the heads” is actually a metaphor for my
multiple possession experiences in the
Mirror Saw and Pentecost. The “confused
or fragile sense of identity” is a result of
those experiences. She pointed out that
while the speaker in “Assorted Heads”
does ask for prayer, his overall tone
suggests hopeful wandering, playful
experimentation and exploration. What
Kate found surprising is not that the
speaker’s sense of self is so unstable, but
rather that the poem, the poet, and the
speaker all seem to be okay with that—
actually not just okay but excited about
the accompanying sense of freedom,
possibility, and adventure. I liked the way
she put that. Might be something to it. ¨
Greg Brownderville is the author of A
Horse with Holes in It (LSU Press, 2016),
Deep Down in the Delta (Butler Center,
2012), and Gust (Northwestern University
Press, 2011). At Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, he serves as
Associate Professor of English, Director of
Creative Writing, and Editor-in-Chief of
the Southwest Review.
126
LyricIsaSoundWeHearBeyondtheNoise:OntheLyricEssay
craft talk by Chila Woychik
It’s always this way. We learn to think with an ear toward tuning. If I had listened to you
I’d never have invented that song. I hear your objections even when your mouth is sewn
shut.
Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape
mosaically. . . . (Deborah Tall)
How accessible is this? Because that becomes the question, never mind the eye to form, or
what the fissures whisper. A small yellow kernel shoots to eight feet tall with enough
sunlight and water (natural elements of a ready nature). Let it be known that no one came
along yesterday to test for pH and still we eat, still we sing the songs inside our bones while
the green stalks rise.
Like our fictitious “wild child,” a progeny of poetry and prose, the literary lyric essay
is often misunderstood, considered a self-indulgent, willy-nilly collection of disjointed
thoughts and sentences that lead nowhere. (Diana Wilson)
Trees grow creatively, outside a form or mold, unlike the bonsai which is nipped and
tucked, its original shape tractable beyond its will.
. . . a careful study of lyric essays will reveal a cornucopia of connectors and
structures rooted in both poetry and prose. . . . (Diana Wilson)
People create during periods of cultural turmoil. Frustration builds in tight spaces, and
when the volcano blows, new landforms emerge, creation happens. Maybe God longed for
something once, maybe solitude fomented desire in that divinity, and out of it a genesis
leapt leaping leaping, leapt leaping. Singing.
Braided through image, language, story, rhythm, and mimetic technique, the lyric
essay expands upon its forbearers [sic]. . . . (MacDowell syllabus)
Ryuji Suzuki assures us that “elements of language are seen in [humpback whale] songs.”
Some call this a simple type of nonhuman hierarchical syntax. And beyond that, us, we who
step up notes like so much genius.
A snippet of image here, a stray bit of dialog there, nested in the telling. . . . (Sarah
Menkedick)
The language must glide. This is, after all, a “poetic” essay. Do not, however, try to insert
lines of poems into a staid essay and attempt to call it a “lyric essay.” This will not play.
127
The tension comes when such engagement is blended with a poetic, subjective
sensibility. (Laura Tetreault)
The lyric is not a line but limns a span, and thoughts, concepts. It “accretes by fragments,”
particle by portion. See the tame neutered horse we saddle easily, ride confidently; this is
not the lyric. But there’s the wild Brumby that must be roped, calmed, and corralled before
the slightest attempt at approach; damn thing keeps running off. Approachable? Of course.
With all the care needed to make a wary thing trust.
The language and images are the driving motivation of the piece. . . . (Sandra
Beasley)
Assuredly, there’s more to life than breathing: a melody that forms us from the blank
sheet up. ¨
128
FromAtoZ:AnInterviewwithJoshMedskeronHis
Encyclopedia-InspiredProject,Medskerpedia,PartII
craft talk by Meaghan Quinn
MQ: You seem to be doing more with
social media platforms to promote
this writing project. For example,
you now have an Instagram page,
“Medskerpedia.” What is your hope
in utilizing social media platforms?
Every day for his Medskerpedia Project,
poet Josh Medsker reads an entry from the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics; in turn, he writes a poem that is
thematically, formally, or structurally
inspired by a given entry. By the summer
of 2019, Medskerpedia will consist of a
compilation of roughly 1,600 poems!
JM: I wanted to bring in Instagram to
showcase the more visual work we’ve been
doing. A couple of us are doing erasures
and other found poetry, concrete poetry,
and work where the form of the poem is
crucial. Sometimes I will create a few
different versions of the same poem idea
. . . so I was hoping to post these
alternative versions of my own works on
Instagram. Hopefully, the other Mpedians
will come along!
[For the online version only: Click here for
Medskerpedia, Part I.
Link to:
http://www.thetishmanreview.com/wpcontent/uploads/2016/09/Medsker.pdf ]
Also, I finally figured out a way to get my
website into the mix. I’ve been posting
short little paragraphs every day, giving a
little insight to my writing process, and
announcing what the daily entry is
without giving away the actual poem.
That has been a lot of fun. I like giving
people a taste. I’ll post it on Twitter and it
automatically links to my Josh Medsker
Facebook page.
See The Tishman Review: Volume 2, Issue
3, July 2016 for Medskerpedia, Part I.
March 11, 2017
Meaghan Quinn: This morning,
2/17/17, you wrote poem #492. How do
you feel stamina-wise? Do you feel
your focus and drive depleting? Or
are you more motivated than ever?
MQ: I am fascinated by your writing
pace and check in to see the new
work you post. And I often see others
working alongside you. Does the
creative energy of the Facebook
group help or hinder you, as there
are eyes on you?
Josh Medsker: I feel pretty pumped. My
focus is as strong as ever, I think. I went
through an idea drought about a month
ago, but I think I’m coming out of it now. I
have sort of come to terms with the ebbs
and flows.
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JM: The creative energy of this group
totally spurs me on. I was just thinking
today about how physically exhausted I
am, and how nice it would be to take a
break . . . and then I saw a poem from a
regular Mpedia contributor and it just
made me say, “Damn, that’s incredible. I
gotta beat that.” Haha! I’m pretty
competitive. Little known fact.
writing. I started marking up the book so
that I could have a record of what I was
thinking. Helps me solidify connections.
For example, I’m currently reading John
Tytell’s biography of Ezra Pound (Ezra
Pound: The Solitary Volcano). I was
reading about Pound’s connections to
Italian Futurism, and as luck would have
it, Futurism was the entry for that day. I
marked up passages in the encyclopedia
and made weird marks only I understand
in the margins. Haha!
MQ: This is the second time I have
interviewed you on behalf of The
Tishman Review. What would you say
has been your favorite form since the
first time I interviewed you? What
new “letter” has been the most
liberating? The most challenging?
So my process is more or less the same,
but now there’s an extra layer. Another
thing that I like to do now is record myself
reading the poems. I have about an hour
recorded right now. It helps me figure out
which poems are worth fixing, and which
are just going to be experiments or
springboards to something else. Listening
to the lines helps me determine which
ones are interesting and valid.
JM: I really liked Fractal Poetry, once I
could figure it out. I also liked Fu. These
entries hinge on repetition and reperception of images, and that really
struck a chord with me. I have found that
my best poems deal with perception and
language. And all entries are challenging
for me. There’s still so much to learn! So
daunting, but so fun.
MQ: You are now annotating in the
margins of the encyclopedia you
draw inspiration from. Does this
mean you are studying the forms in a
more interactive way with the
various genres and forms? Can you
shed some light on your daily writing
process and how it has evolved?
JM: So my previous process was: I open
the encyclopedia, read the entry, and then
I go to Wikipedia or another source for
further clarification. And then begin
Pictured here is a shot of Medsker’s
encyclopedia complete with annotation.
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MQ: How, if at all, has the new
political climate affected the poems
you write for Medskerpedia? Do you
find the work to be a form of
escapism from politics?
willing to have a few of them be total
crap. ¨
Josh Medsker's journalism, poetry,
fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has
been featured in a variety of
publications, including: The Ekphrastic
Review, Haiku Journal, The Brooklyn
Rail, The Anchorage Press, The Review
Review, Penmen Review, Empty Mirror,
and Red Savina Review. For a complete
list of Medsker's publications, visit his
website: www.joshmedsker.com. He can
be reached at [email protected].
JM: 2017 is not the time to be bashful or
equivocating in writing. I don’t use the
poetry to escape from politics, absolutely
not. It’s the opposite. In my life and
writing, I’ve tried to stand up for the little
guy and tell his or her story in my own
way. Now, if the work is successful, that’s
another story. Hopefully, it is. It’s a tough
thing to do properly, mix political ideas
and poetry. I think my work focuses a lot
on societal concerns, but it’s subtle, and
that’s its strength. When I’ve pulled it off.
MQ: And lastly, any new tips for
writer's block? What do you eat,
listen to, watch, think about when
your mind or the pen simply refuse to
write another poem?
JM: I try to keep in mind that, in the
grand scheme, my life is irrelevant. Not
trying to be negative, just putting out a
true statement. I’m like a drop of rain in
the ocean, as they say, and so is my work.
But knowing that takes a lot of the
pressure off and helps me be less selfconscious. It lets me experiment and push
the boundaries a little further.
Nuts-and-bolts-wise, if I’m struggling
with a poem, I’ll set it aside for a day,
write the next day’s poem. I’ll usually just
dash one off and never look at it again.
Haha! Since there are hundreds of poems
I still have to write for Mpedia, I am
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MeettheTeam
craft talk by Christy Stillwell
Here’s a piece of wisdom: Nobody writes alone.
Twenty years ago, I thought I could. Didn’t need teachers, didn’t need school. Unlike
thousands of other people my age, I decided not to get an MFA. At the time the term
“program fiction” was getting a lot of press, referring to a perceived glut of formulaic fiction
produced by the proliferation of MFA programs. I wanted no part of that. All I needed was
books. If you want to write, write.
Fast forward twenty years: I was wrong. About a lot. I’ve also decided the whole
“thick skin” thing doesn’t work. I do not want, nor have I ever wanted, thick skin. I want
creamy, baby’s-butt skin. Plus there’s something about a writer’s thick skin that feels false.
When your work is rejected, you’re not supposed to care. March on. Buck up. Resist the
urge to feel uninvited to the literary party, and don’t even think about getting all down on
yourself about the talent you don’t have, the years that have slipped by, all the untold
stories kicking dust in the attic of your brain.
If it’s not thick skin, clearly some form of rejection resiliency is necessary.
Submissions will be declined. There are going to be misses. Criticism, competition, and
judgment are part of the writing life. The challenge of living it is to strive to make the work
better without letting the continual effort insinuate that you’re not good enough.
For me the key to staying with it has been admitting that I could not do it alone. I
need a team. Writers’ groups have helped, but they tend to come and go. Same with book
groups, classes, and degrees. But there’s another kind of team that can serve a writer her
entire life, if she’s willing to get a little far out. Due to the nature of the art, most writers
will recognize my support staff, because most of us engage in some form of bizarre but
useful personality split.
I’d like to introduce you to my team. They’ve been good company over the years,
helped me avoid bitterness and envy. Most importantly, they’ve been essential to my ability
to work, drawing out the stories and revising them, day after day.
Kitty’s is the first face you see. Tidy desk, snappy dresser. Her apartment would be
sleek and modern, with a closet full of airy skirts and print dresses. If I were in my twenties
with assets like Kitty’s, I’d be just like her. It’s her feet I envy most. Kitty was blessed with
feet that can stand three-inch heels. The world is her oyster.
She answers the phone, makes appointments, and stuffs envelopes. Due to online
submissions, stuffing envelopes is largely a thing of the past, along with pasting SASE
labels. But when necessary, she’s on it. Kitty is actually not that good on the phone, which
might be why I have so few appointments. Then again, she’s perfect for the job because the
phone doesn’t ring that often. Regardless, we love her and need her, the only one of us who
spends a lot of time on her appearance.
The big office with the view is Ed’s. Ed chews a cigar. His desktop is piled with papers and
books, the usual office detritus. His main job is to stuff the cigar in his mouth, slap his
hands on his desktop and shout, “Product! I need product!” Ed’s a cross between Ed Asner
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on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and James Caan in Elf. He’s one of those men you can’t
really imagine getting to know: what he goes home to at night, what he’d talk about with
his head on the pillow, what he thinks about as he blinks in the dark. With broad shoulders
like that, you’d think he was a sports fan, till you remember that he works in publishing.
Probably not. Clothes, appearances, even politeness are not things he cares about. He is
utterly immune to Kitty. He cares about product and contracts. He likes the deals. He can’t
make deals without product. The John Wayne line Quit yer’ bawlin’ is his go-to response.
Rejection of novels, poems, stories, tuition scholarships, residencies: Quit yer’ bawlin’ and
get me product! he shouts with a bang.
I kind of hate him. Life would be better without him. I mean, what a pain in the ass.
And that is precisely why he’s here.
The star of my team, my Assistant, doesn’t have a name, which I know is odd. I think it’s
because we work together so closely. In fact, half the time I am her. So yes, it can be hard to
separate us. She came to work here when she was twenty-eight, after graduate school,
when I got serious about writing and submitting. She ages more slowly than I do and will
probably stay about thirty-eight till the end of time. Another difference: like Kitty, she
knows how to dress. I wear soft pants, sturdy shoes, and a collection of T-shirts. She wears
pencil skirts and suit jackets, power clothing in prints. She’s no Barbie; her shoes are fab
but sensible. I don’t know where she finds this stuff. Her hair, her clothes, everything about
her reflects her mind. She’s on it. Part researcher, part marketer, she knows the industry
and she knows craft. She reads about both, can quote percentages and stats on readership
and publishing. She knows depressing facts about failing attention spans and the exciting
opportunities in electronic publishing. She surfs websites, reading editorial content to find
a home for my work. She once spent two hours finding the email addresses of editors at a
parenting glossy. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get actual addresses?
Best of all, she knows my work intimately. She’s not an emotional woman, doesn’t
gush, but she gets it. Immune to discouragement, she takes finished pieces and trots off
with them, excited to find them homes. I rest at night knowing that this woman is on my
team.
The least pleasant member of our team, the Shrew, has been here the longest—as long as I
have, in fact. When I first started to write fiction, I’d work daylight hours as a reporter then
come home and write at night. I was living in a geodesic dome at the intersection of two
highways on the outskirts of a Wyoming town. Time, wind and trucks, oil and gas rigs
Jake-braking to make the turn were my constant companions. Even then, way out there,
the Shrew was with me. I can’t figure out what her role is, how she helps the effort, but she
seems to be essential to the process.
Her favorite question is, Why? Why would the character say that? Why would he
stay with his wife? Why would she take that job? Her favorite phrase: Big deal. So their
mother is marrying a sex addict: Big deal. A kid finds out he’s adopted: Big deal. A writer
must consider a character’s motivation, sure, but I know there are nicer ways to do it.
She’s especially bad with feedback. To comments like, “I don’t think the final scene
is quite there yet” or “I’m not quite seeing this reaction from your protagonist,” her most
common response is: Yeah? Well, fuck you. Not helpful. Things get really ugly when she
turns on me, her employer and benefactor: What do you know about this? Why do you
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pretend you can do this? You’re from nowhere. You’re nobody, a suburban mother with
farmwife arms.
Yeah. And she’s getting worse with age. Several years ago, the others and I
unanimously decided to lock her in the closet with the vacuum and broom. On occasion
we’ve even unlocked the door and stuffed her face into a pillow. When even that doesn’t
silence her, she must be forcibly escorted from the building. We lead her down the stairs,
out the back door, across the lawn and into the garage, where we keep old wading pools,
training wheels, bikes—and my army of monsters. The creeps who ogled us when we were
thirteen. The horror of the band concert where we sweated and squeaked. Dances we didn’t
get asked to, boyfriends we never had, friends we tolerated who were never nice, shitty
bosses, crap paychecks, dickheads who quit calling. That’s where the Shrew goes. She
rarely resists, probably because she knows her home when she sees it. These are her
origins, after all, this dank swamp of the mind.
I used to think that without her, I wouldn’t write. She was the necessary torment
without which the impulse to create would shrivel. Hogwash. Creative work happens in
spite of her, not because of her. This was an important discovery. The Shrew is a toxic byproduct of the risk and fear essential to all creative endeavors. The writer, indeed any
artist, must not get attached to the Shrew. I keep my distance by imagining the depth and
breadth of my work if she were eliminated permanently. In the meantime, I rely on my
team.
I’m especially thrilled to introduce our newest hire: Julie. Her job title: Ideal Reader. I don’t
see how I worked without this position for so many years. She’s not a green lighter, doesn’t
love everything. But her critiques have been a revelation. Her words are positive, even
when she’s calling for major edits. She points to where she wants more, rather than less.
She’ll say, Stay here awhile, rather than, Cut all this crap. Julie understands the inherent
shame in the question, Why? She uses different framing: I’m curious about this character’s
motivations. What impulse sends her to the bowling alley?
To some, this will sound like cheap semantics. Gobbledygook. Quit-yer-bawlin’-Ed,
for example, can’t stand conversing with her. But I’ve learned that framing matters.
Inspiration does not reside in the negative. Balance is good.
Another thing about Julie is her actual voice; she’s soft spoken. Her face is gentle.
Her hair is curly and abundant; she piles it up on her head like Rapunzel. In her other life,
she teaches yoga. She isn’t afraid to go on and on about the strengths of a piece, admiring
the quiet, tightly controlled narrative voice masking the explosive inner turmoil. Each time
we discuss my work, I can feel those lonely shadows in the dusty attic lift their chins off
their chests and blink in the dark at this slightest glimmer of light. She is so sure of me!
How did the team ever function without her kindness?
What’s remarkable is Julie’s effect on the Shrew. I recently got paid for a creative
piece, a first. The Shrew exploded in her closet; we heard brooms falling over, the pails
crashing down as she wailed about shitty pay for years of work!
I sat at my desk trying to laugh it off, but a profound pause went through the office.
Ed looked up, cigar between his fingers. My Assistant, No-Name, blinked. Even Kitty
stopped with her nail file. They tried not to let me see it, but it flickered on their faces, a
shadow of doubt. I was supposed to step up with the rah-rah speech, but I didn’t have it in
me. I waited. Tapped my pen. We all pretended not to hear the mutterings until, just in
time, the office door opened. Julie arrived with lattes. Her soft expression, her kind smile,
and the smell of the coffee reminded us that this weird office runs on quiet toil. Routine and
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practice. Routine and practice. We’re not in it for the money. Years of toil, and we’ve finally
got this down. They clear the way to my desk and I give them product. They teach me to
hear and understand feedback. They are the source of my courage, inspiration, and
protection. Without them, I’d have quit long ago. ¨
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He's Crazy for It by Kirby Michael Wright
136
Contributors
Kyle Adamson (poetry) holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a BFA
from Hamline University. He is the winner of the AWP Intro to Journals Award in poetry, a
Pushcart nominee, and a finalist in the Consequence Poetry Prize. His work can be found in
the Water~Stone Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and others.
He served in the Marine Corps infantry and deployed twice to Iraq. Kyle lives in
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Rebecca Aronson’s (poetry) books are Creature, Creature and Ghost Child of the Atlanta
Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books prize (forthcoming). She lives in New Mexico where
she teaches writing and co-hosts "Bad Mouth," a series for words and music.
Ene Bissenbakker (art) is from Denmark and works mainly in art forms related to paper.
She is a trained anthropologist who specializes in visual culture.
Elijah Burrell (craft talk) is the author of the poetry collections The Skin of the River
(Aldrich Press, 2014) and Troubler (Aldrich Press, 2018). His writing has appeared or is
forthcoming in publications such as Agni, North American Review, The Rumpus, Sugar
House Review, and many others. He serves as Assistant Professor of English at Lincoln
University in Jefferson City, Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and literature.
Manit Chaotragoongit (art) was born September 30, 1983 in Bangkok, Thailand. He
is a street and conceptual photographer. He is recipient of photography awards from
GlobalHunt foundation, India and Berggruen Institute, USA. He is delighted to present his
“Living Existence” photo series. His photography translates ideas of time, change,
and existence with subject into black and white photography.
Lee Chilcote (poetry) is a poet, nonfiction writer and journalist. His articles have
appeared in Vanity Fair, Next City, Belt and others. His poems and essays have been
published by Pacific Review, Oyez Review, Great Lakes Review and in the books Rust Belt
Chic: The Cleveland Anthology and the Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook. He has
survived many Cleveland winters.
Andrea Christoff (poetry) writes poetry and fiction from Wisconsin. By day, she works at
a family-owned artisan cheese company. She is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work
recently appeared in GFT Press, Two Cities Review, Right Hand Pointing, Marquette
Literary Review, and others. She can be found on Twitter @aschristoff.
Emari DiGiorgio’s (poetry) debut collection The Things a Body Might Become is
forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2017. She’s the recipient of the 2016 Auburn Witness
Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York and has received residencies from the Vermont
Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches
at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts "World Above,"
a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.
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Emily Everett (fiction) studied literature, language, and music at Smith College, and
received her MA from Queen Mary University of London. Her work has appeared in the
Mechanics’ Institute Review and Take Magazine. She is managing editor of The Common in
Amherst, Massachusetts.
Richard Fenwick (poetry) is a Russian translator who works with Holocaust survivors
from the former Soviet Union. His poetry has been featured in quarterlies and journals
such as The Virginia Quarterly Review, Grey Sparrow Review, and Rattle, and his first
collection, Around the Sun Without a Sail, was published in 2012. A second collection will
be published later this year.
Caitlin Garvey (creative nonfiction) is a student in Northwestern University’s MFA
program. Her work has been published in the Baltimore Review, Post Road, JuxtaProse,
and others. She teaches English composition at a two-year college in the Chicago area.
George Guida (creative nonfiction) is the author of eight books, including The Pope Stories
and Other Tales of Troubled Times, two collections of essays, and four collections of poems.
He teaches at New York City College of Technology, and co-edits 2 Bridges Review.
L.M. Henke (art) is from another place and time.
Rick Hoffman (fiction) is the author of the novel The Devils That Haunt You. His work
has appeared previously in Driftwood Press, where he has also served as a guest editor, and
his play The Rocky Road to Dublin won the Huntington Village Theatre Company's contest
for Long Island playwrights in 2003.
Michael Hower (art) is a Central Pennsylvania photographer. He photographs
history by portraying human objects and structures in modified environments
now devoid of human activity. His artwork is part of a process that includes learning local
history and lore, consultation of maps, and place-seeking journeys.
Betsy Jenifer (art) is from south India. She is tall, lanky, and obsessive. Her work has
been published or is forthcoming in The Missing Slate, Page & Spine, After The Pause, Off
The Coast and Quail Bell, among others.
Tim Johnson (art) is a visual artist and writer living in the Pioneer Valley in western
Massachusetts. His work has previously been featured in the Adirondack Review and other
digital publications.
Joshua Jones (fiction) is a writer and animator residing in Maryland. His writing has
appeared or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Bartleby Snopes, Juked, and Cleaver
Magazine. Find him on Twitter @jnjoneswriter.
Judy Kaber (poetry) recently retired after 34 years teaching elementary school. Her poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Eclectica, Off the Coast,
The Comstock Review, and Crab Creek Review. Contest credits include the Maine Postmark
Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and, most recently, second
place in the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.
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K. S. Keeney (poetry) is a senior at Salisbury University, studying Creative Writing and
Film. Her work is upcoming in Germ Magazine and Roanoke Review. She’s also been the
editor of Amaranth literary magazine and is the current fiction editor of Scarab literary
magazine. Her time is usually split between writing, watching movies, or writing about
movies.
Leonard Kogan (art) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. The compositional structure in
his works represents fragmentary set-stages, painterly encounters of bodies and organisms.
Kogan’s works are synthesis of ubiquitous, trivial, marginal and dislocated. The paintings
are saturated with associative flashbacks, and emotional and social references.
KS Lack (poetry) is a writer and letterpress printer residing in New York. Her work has
appeared in galleries and publications such as Proteus Gowanus, the Art Directors Club,
the London Centre for Book Arts, and temenos. She has been living with disability and
chronic pain since the age of eleven.
Kate LaDew (art) is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with
a BA in Studio Art and resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis
Joplin.
Karol Lagodzki (fiction) left Poland at twenty and has called the United States home for
over two decades. He recently finished a novel about an errant prophet set in ancient
Canaan and Egypt. His short stories have appeared in Streetlight Magazine and The Ryder
Magazine. Karol can be found at http://klagodzki.com/.
Ann Malaspina (poetry) has written many books for children, including Yasmin’s Hammer
and Finding Lincoln. Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle, The New Verse News, Idiom,
and The Mad Poets Review. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Marie Marandola (poetry) is a badass feminist poet who received her MFA from Sarah
Lawrence College. She now lives in San Diego, where she remains in the habit of picking up
fallen bits of trees and giving them to people.
Aryn Marsh (poetry) is owner and operator of Live Juice, a restaurant and juice bar in
downtown Concord, NH. Her work has appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Journal and The
Timberline Review. Areas of personal interest include Eastern religious ritual, and ways
in which movement, sound, and language intersect.
Joshua McCuen (fiction) is a writing tutor at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, and an
Adjunct Professor at NJIT in Newark. He is currently working on a novel.
JoDean Nicolette (creative nonfiction) is a recovering physician. Her work has appeared
in The Sun Magazine, The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Sugared Water, The
Rappahannock Review, and The Maine Review. She is working on two books and lives in
northern California with her dogs and horses, and her extremely patient husband, Ben.
Michael Peterson (art) lives in the little town of Nephi, UT. He is a husband, and father
to four children. He works as a hospital doctor in a larger city one week then helps on his
family’s cattle ranch near his town the next. He loves art—especially printmaking and
photography with the Holga camera.
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Sybil Ponnambalam (poetry) is a mother, wife, daughter, poet, engineer, and AfricanAmerican trying to make sense of when to fight, when to write, when to love and when to
listen. She lives in New Jersey with her ever-supportive husband, Indrajit, and nine-yearold force of nature, Kate.
Renee Macalino Rutledge (fiction) is the author of the novel, The Hour of Daydreams.
You can also find her work in Literary Hub, Mutha Magazine, ColorLines, the 2017 Women
of Color Anthology, and others. She is currently writing a short story collection inspired by
family interviews, and is researching her second novel.
Originally from Key West, Danielle Sellers (poetry) holds an MA from The Writing
Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Her
poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish
Pace, and elsewhere. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School
in Fort Worth, Texas.
Emma Sloley (fiction) is a New York-based travel journalist who has written for many US
and international publications, including Travel + Leisure, New York, W, and Conde Nast
Traveler. Her short fiction has won awards and honorable mentions in Australia, the UK
and the US and has been published in Catapult and Headland Journal. She is a MacDowell
fellow and currently at work on her first novel.
Anastasia Stelse (poetry) is a native of southeastern Wisconsin, a graduate from
American University’s MFA program, and a current PhD student in creative writing at the
University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, New South, Sou’wester, and Hawai’i Pacific Review,
among others.
Julie Ann Stewart (creative nonfiction) lives in Indianapolis. She prefers sewing to
knitting, walking to running. Julie writes to give voice to those who have been silenced. She
is currently at work on a new collection of stories inspired by Sophia Tolstoy, who copied
Anna Karenina by hand more than seven times.
Christy Stillwell (craft talk) earned her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson
College in 2014. She holds an MA in literature from the University of Wyoming. Her work
has appeared in journals such as Pearl, River City, Sonora Review, Sou’wester, and The
Massachusetts Review. In November of 2008 her chapbook of poetry, Amnesia, was
published by Finishing Line Press. She and her team live in Montana.
John Stupp (poetry) is the author of Advice from the Bed of a Friend published by Main
Street Rag. His new book, Pawleys Island, will be published in 2017 by Finishing Line
Press. His book, Goat Island, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. He lives near
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jill Talbot (fiction) attended Simon Fraser University for psychology before pursuing her
passion for writing. Jill has appeared in Geist, Rattle, The Puritan, Matrix, and
subTerrain. She was also shortlisted for the Matrix Lit POP Award for fiction in 2015 and
the Malahat Far Horizons Award for poetry in 2016. Jill lives on Gabriola Island, BC.
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Jonathan Glenn Travelstead (poetry) served in the Air Force National Guard for six
years and is now a full-time firefighter in Murphysboro, Illinois. He is co-editor for Cobalt
Review and author of two collections of poetry, How We Bury Our Dead (Cobalt Press,
2015) and Conflict Tours (forthcoming, spring 2017). He finished his MFA at Southern
Illinois University of Carbondale and now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day
get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review, on
Poetrydaily.com, and has work forthcoming in The Crab Orchard Review, among others.
Stephanie C. Trott (art) is a writer and photographer living in North Carolina. She is an
MFA candidate in creative writing at UNC Wilmington and the poetry editor of Ecotone.
German-born Chila Woychik (craft talk) has bylines in journals such as Silk Road, Storm
Cellar, and Soundings East, and was awarded the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction
Award (Emrys Foundation). She craves the beautiful and lyrical, scours the pedestrian
Iowan countryside for such, all while editing the Eastern Iowa Review.
Kirby Michael Wright’s (art) third play, Rag of Man, opened at the Manhattan Repertory
Theater on February 22, 2017. His new book of poetry and flash is The Wounded Morning.
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Staff
Steven Matthew Constantine (Assistant Layout and Copy Editor) recently broke his leg
while practicing krav maga on his roof in a nor’easter.
Lauren Davis (Associate Poetry Editor) is a poet living on the Olympic Peninsula in a
Victorian seaport community. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars,
and her work can be found in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Spillway, and Split Lip
Magazine.
Aaron Graham (Assistant Poetry Editor) hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, population 1159,
and has served as the assistant editor for the Squaw Valley Review, is an alumnus of
Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and The Ashbury Home School (Hudson). Aaron is a
veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where he served an analyst and linguist.
Jesse Holth (Poetry Reader) is a freelance writer and editor, and avid poetry reader. She
has degrees in English and Anthropology, and her latest poems will be featured in a
forthcoming art exhibition. She lives on the inspiring West Coast, in beautiful Victoria,
British Columbia.
Sarah Key (Fiction Reader) is a ceramicist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in
Greensboro Review, Tricycle, Kudzu, NAILED Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the director
of the forthcoming fall reading series, "Two Writers Nashville."
Tatiana Morand (Fiction Reader) is currently studying English and Business at the
University of Waterloo, and hopes to pursue a degree in publishing once her undergrad is
complete. She has been published in several online journals and has previously worked at
TNQ as a Circulation Assistant and Fiction Reader.
Charlie Crossland Lewis (Craft Talk Editor) has been a business and technical writer
and editor for more years than she cares to admit. She holds an MFA from Bennington
College and is still in the long, slow process of putting together the pieces of her life lived in
the back seat of a series of Fords, Chevys, and a pink-finned ’62 Cadillac while following her
steel-guitar playing father around the West Coast.
Colleen Olle (Assistant Prose Editor) spent her childhood summers climbing trees and
reading books and sometimes reading books in trees. At the University of Michigan, she
won a Hopwood Award for essay writing. After eking out a living in France and Ireland, she
moved to Northern California where she resides with her husband. She earned an MFA in
fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars and works as a freelance editor.
Jennifer Porter (Co-Founder and Prose Editor) lives near East Lansing, Michigan. Her
writing has appeared in many fine literary journals and anthologies, including Fifth
Wednesday Journal, Old Northwest Review, The Dos Passos Review, Apeiron Review, and
drafthorse. Her novella “The World Beyond” is forthcoming in an anthology with Claren
Books. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
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Meaghan Quinn (Associate Poetry Editor) is the recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck
Prize in Poetry, and she was nominated for Best New Poets 2015 and a 2015 Pushcart
Prize. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Her poems have been published or are
forthcoming in Heartwood, 2River, Adrienne, Triggerfish, Free State Review and others.
Candace Robertson (Assistant Prose Editor) is a storyteller from New Orleans,
Louisiana. She is inspired by poetry, prose, theater, compassion, nature, news, and
rewrites. Her fiction has appeared in the former Flashquake online journal, and a flash
fiction collection will appear in the anthology Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a
Small Planet Vol II this fall.
Maura Snell (Co-Founder and Poetry Editor) holds an MFA in Writing from Bennington
College, teaches poetry writing and critique to incarcerated teen girls, and is currently the
Poet in Residence at Westborough High School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in several fine journals and anthologies, and her poem “Landing” won the September
Award from Wilda Morris, an international blogger. She is also a freelance editor, having
worked most recently on The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn
Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017).
Tricia Theis (Creative Nonfiction Reader) lives in Baltimore, MD, by way of New England,
with her husband, children, and dogs. She is a graduate of Marlboro College with a degree
in poetry, and The New England School of Photography where she studied documentary
photography. While she writes across genres, Tricia is currently focusing her energy on
Creative Nonfiction in the MFA program at The University of Baltimore.
Alison Turner (Associate Prose Editor) was born in the mountains of Colorado, where she
learned to spend large amounts of time outside. She has an MA in Comparative Literature
from the University of Alberta, and an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. She lives,
works, and plays in Denver.
Michelle Vardeman (Assistant Craft Talk Editor) earned a Master’s degree in English
literature from Southern Methodist University. There she specialized in creative writing
and medieval and gothic literature. She worked as a writer and editor in educational
publishing for more than a decade, developing print and digital textbooks in the
humanities. Michelle continues to write and edit on a freelance basis from her home in
Dallas, Texas where she lives with her husband Steve and six amazing dogs—Zoe, Buster,
Bella, Bear, Charlie, and Capri.
Catherine Weber (Website Design) is an award-winning poet and artist who works with
encaustic, photography, paper, and textiles. She was raised in upstate New York, Indiana,
and Connecticut and now lives in Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Communications from
Emerson College and an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from the University of
Massachusetts.
Tara Isabel Zambrano (Fiction Reader) lives in Texas and is an Electrical Engineer by
profession. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Moon
City Review, Parcel, Juked, and others. She moved to the United States from India two
decades ago.
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