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JULY!
The Tishman Review is a magazine of
literature published in January, April,
July, and October each year. We believe
in supporting the creative endeavors of
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possibilities of a work to take us beyond
the boundaries known today. We will
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they share with us, whether chosen for
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Review seek to publish work that reflects
these values, offers new insights into the
human condition, finds beauty in the
garish, and that when we read it, we
want to read it again and again. We want
to fold an issue closed and find ourselves
richer for knowing the words contained
within.
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Maura Snell
Submissions of short fiction, poetry,
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Copyright 2016 by The Tishman Review
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Published in the United States of America
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Table of Contents Jennifer Porter
Valerie Fioravanti
Lauren Nicole
8
10
12
20
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Simone Martel
Lois Marie Harrod
Andrew Collard
Ed Doerr
Lisbeth Davidow
Mercedes Lawry
Kurt Rasmussen
Robert D. Kirvel
Lauren Davis
21
23
24
35
36
38
40
48
50
52
61
Will Nixon
65
E. Kristin Anderson
Dana Boyer
Meaghan Quinn
66
67
69
Lisa Mecham
72
74
75
77
84
85
86
87
88
89
93
95
96
Dylan D. Debelis
Cecele Allen Kraus
Richard Jones
Caroline Plasket
H. R. Webster
Alexa Doran
Ben-David Seligman
J.W. Kash
Sheila Arndt
Janet Ruhe-Schoen
Foreword
The Tillie Olsen Short Story Award
Loud Love
because he will one day be stopped and
frisked, the things I tell my 14 year old
son to swallow
perfecting
Cuban-American Lexicon
Pinko Paula and the Preppy Plague
And how do you talk of the light
Vital Organs
Rumble
The Universal
Rest Assured
a night in ogden city cemetery
Sublime
An Interview with Julie Christine
Johnson
Career Advice from Your Uncle in
Canarsie
Send you a bouquet
How to Deal with a Miscarriage
From A to Z: An Interview with Josh
Medsker on His Encyclopedia-Inspired
Project
Forgetting Is Another Kind of Extinction
Trespassing
Larchwood, Iowa
Ground Cover
The Home Office
Incidental Offering
moss bank
In the Presence of Effervescent Wings
The Specific Ocean
One Lap Left
Twice on Tuesdays
Dueño de silencio /Lord of Silence
Canción del caballo verde /Song of the
Green Horse
5
Denise Tolan
Randall Brown
Robert Joe Stout
Thaïs Miller
Wendy Wisner
Tyler L. Erlendson
Adam Day
Richard Jones
Michael Blair
97
99
101
103
105
117
119
121
122
123
Contributors
Staff
Support
Advertisements
125
130
133
135
Snake Light
What a Beautiful Dream
Computer Work
Cocktail Party
Gates, Canals, and Veins
Postpartum
Prison Janitorial
The Birthday Party
Sherlock Holmes
Beach
Art Table of Contents Laura Kiselevach
Stanko
Adrienne Christian
Michelle Brooks
Michelle Brooks
L.M. Henke
Sarah Shields
JoWoSo
Falconhead
Stanko
Adrienne Christian
Anni Wilson
Meg Eden
Laura Kiselevach
7
11
19
22
34
39
49
51
60
68
73
76
83
102
104
116
124
Late Summer Dock
On the Street Where You Live
Happiness
Downtown
Packard
Spirals
Birthday Girl 5
Birthday Girl 4
Perfect Leaf and Tick
Milkweed Stages
Grief
The Parade 2
Reach
Dubois le Fou
Malvolio
Forbidden City
Untitled - Child Alone
6
Late Summer Dock by Laura Kiselevach
7
Foreword And I think the next generation has
no idea of what it was like just 30
years ago.
I had never heard of Tillie
Olsen until Alice Mattison both
lectured on the author and assigned to
my term reading list Olsen’s collection
Tell Me a Riddle. My favorite story of
Olsen’s is “I Stand Here Ironing.” Here
was an author who spoke of what it
was like to be a woman. Here is a
brilliant story and in it, a woman is
ironing. I realized that I too could
write a story in which a woman is
ironing (I did) and that I could write
about raising my children. I could be
through my fiction who I truly am.
There is enough space in literature for
all voices.
Olsen concerned herself with
the working class and women’s rights.
She devoted her life to fighting for the
causes she believed in. She didn’t hide
away in a room with a view of her own
and plug away at a typewriter (as I
do). She got out there and worked
hard to make the world a better place.
Of the many submissions that
came in for the Tillie Olsen Short
Story Award, our team of readers,
including myself, put through to the
final judge, Alice Mattison, a selection
of twenty. From those twenty, Alice
chose the winner, second place, and
honorable mention.
“Loud Love” by Valerie
Fioravanti was one of my favorites. I
was very happy to hear it had won the
contest. The story embodies, in my
opinion, not only the spirit of Olsen’s
writing but her heart for social
activism. And it is a great story.
One of the mysterious things
that goes on at The Tishman Review is
the unintentional development of
themes amongst the genres. We work
by Jennifer Porter
At my graduation residency at the
Bennington Writing Seminars a young
female author remarked to me that
she “wasn’t a feminist.” She equated
feminism with an intense dislike of
the human male. She liked men, she
was marrying one. I like men, too, I
said to her. Feminism isn’t about
whether someone likes a particular
gender, it’s about women being treated
the same as men. Equal opportunities.
Equal pay. Being judged for our
accomplishments and not our personal
appearance.
Usually at this point, when I
am talking with young women, I
launch into my “you should have been
a girl when I was a girl” rant. I
probably did this to her. I probably
told her, as I always do, that when I
was a girl in the 1970s I couldn’t play
hockey. I very much wanted to play
hockey. Girls didn’t play hockey. After
living in Brazil for three years as a
child, when I was back in the States I
wanted to play soccer. My parents
finally convinced the high school that I
could play soccer. What they didn’t tell
me was they’d gotten me a try-out on
the boys’ team. I tried out. But, as I
said to my parents, I don’t want to
play soccer with boys. I want to play
soccer with other girls. There’s
nowhere to go and play soccer with
other girls, my father said. That was
the end of soccer for me.
I won’t go into how boys of my
generation sometimes treated girls at
high school because Simone Martel
does this beautifully in her story
“Pinko Paula and the Preppy Plague.”
8
hard to honor our mission statement
of being open to what it is the author
wishes to express, and I think this
creates a magnetic draw. I have tried
to explain this along the lines of Carl
Jung’s collective unconscious. An idea,
a theme, is working its way through
our society’s writers and they express
it on the page. You will see in this
issue that much of the prose concerns
itself with social causes and causes of
the heart. The big important stuff
that goes on in life, that makes up
how we perceive the human condition.
I hope you enjoy The Tishman Review,
Volume Two, Issue Three,
Jennifer
9
The Tillie Olsen Short Story Award for economic justice. All of these works
have been newly gathered by the
University of Nebraska Press–Bison
Books.
For this prize, The Tishman
Review was looking for the best story that
captures the spirit of not only the writing
of Tillie Olsen but her work to make our
world a better place. Our judge, the
esteemed Alice Mattison, writes about the
winner, “I found “Loud Love” a great
pleasure to read every time I picked it up.
The narrator is a delight, flawed and
admirable at once, hilariously honest
about the person she finds herself to be.
The characters have complexity and depth.
The story is funny and meaningful. It’s
engaging and believable on every page.”
We hope you agree.
One of the more exciting things for a new
magazine is running their first contest in
a genre. Last year we held our first poetry
prize and were stunned by the amount of
entries we received and by the quality of
work that came in. With that behind us,
we decided to run our first fiction prize
this year. What a ride it’s been! We
received thousands of pages of fiction from
all over the world; stories that delighted,
thrilled, and challenged us, stories that
kept us thinking long after we’d finished
reading.
Tillie Olsen’s work is just like that.
She was the author of the short story
collection “Tell Me a Riddle,” the story
“Requa I” as seen in Best American Short
Stories 1971 and several journalistic
pieces from the 1930s about the struggle
CONGRATULATIONS to our Winner,
Valerie Fioravanti for her story “Loud Love.”
Ms. Fioravanti will receive a cash prize of $500, and her story
can be read beginning on page 12.
Congratulations also to our Second Place Winner,
Danielle Lea Buchanan for her story “Scut.”
Ms. Buchanan will receive a cash prize of $100
and to Honorable Mention, Sudha Balagopal
for her story, “Matter in Water”.
Ms. Balagopal will receive a cash prize of $50.
finalists our staff sent her way. We are
grateful to each writer who entered the
contest and to all those who passed the
word along. The Tishman Review would
not exist without the continued support of
our literary community.
The Tishman Review thanks the family of
Tillie Olsen for granting us permission to
name this contest in honor of Tillie Olsen.
We thank the final judge, Alice Mattison,
for selecting the Winner, Second Place,
and Honorable Mention from the twenty
10
On The Street Where You Live by Stanko
11
Loud Love fiction by Valerie Fioravanti
Winner of the 2016 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award
she’s got us so on edge that we’re terrified
the minute either kid utters a peep. We
can’t live with that level of tension
without blowing off a little steam
sometimes.
“Will you ask them to wrap this
shit up?” Bone says. He doesn’t speak to
the officers directly. Bone’s been carted off
to jail for stupid temper shit and learned
he’s not that tough. Can’t abide closed-in
spaces, and he’s muscly but not vicious.
My husband can be an asshole, but he’s
not a kill-shot kind of guy. We get mice
from the cemetery behind our house, and
he traps them in shoeboxes and lets them
go. I kill them suckers, so I think that
says a lot about Bone’s true self, even if
other people can’t see it.
Bone never looks at Trish straight
on. He grabs the handrail to our stoop and
breathes and thinks about his
responsibility as a man raised with no
father to do better by our two babies while
Trish drones on about how the city should
take our kids away before we really screw
them up. Bone holds onto that rail so
tight—reining himself in while she gets to
be an out-of-control witch—that we had to
have the cement at the bottom reinforced.
Money well spent, but I’d love to sue her
ass in small claims court for the bill. That
rail held true before Trish moved in.
Trish’s roommate Alice comes out,
looking dinner-date perfect in this crêpey
white nightgown that would probably look
cheap as hell on me. “Hello, gentleman.
Ma’am,” she says, nodding at all three
officers.
Officer Smartass says, “How you
doin’?” and gets an elbow in his ribs from
the officer in charge for being
Our neighbor Trish sicked the cops on us.
Again. My husband, Bone, and I have a
seven-month-old, Lisa, who’s teething,
and a two-year-old, Ozzy, who cries along
with her in sympathy sometimes, like he
did tonight. I get how shared walls can be
a bitch for everyone involved, but Trish
calls the police because she needs sleep,
like that’s her personal quirk and not a
basic human need I’m desperate for when
I’m standing outside in my bathrobe at 2
a.m.
“She called him a toxic,
motherfucking asshole,” Trish says,
thrusting a cow-shaped Post-it note at the
officer in charge. “I wrote it down for
evidence.”
His partner, a smartass I
remember from Queens Vocational H.S.,
asks, “Was the volume loudest on ‘toxic,’
‘motherfucking,’ or ‘asshole?’”
We’ve cycled through every police
unit in the precinct, and sometimes they
egg Trish on for kicks. She pulls a few
more Post-its from her pocket, and Officer
Smartass follows up with, “The two kids,
at approximately how many decibels each
did they cry tonight?”
All Trish can do is point at her
different Post-its because she’s all choked
up and outraged that nobody cares about
her beauty sleep. Six months ago I felt
sorry for her. I believe in the true Jesus,
who said be tolerant of others like the
gays or be kind even when a situation
turns nasty, but she’s given me whiplash
from turning the other cheek. Bone and I
can get bad-loud when we fight, and we’re
trying to do better—counseling with
Father Brian down at the church two
nights a week—for our kids. Trouble is,
12
bed, and croon in my ear until the world
fell away for a full eight hours.
Officer Smartass motions that
we’re free to go. To Trish, he says, “Go
three nights without calling us, and I’ll
bring you flowers and chocolate.”
Droopy Pants whispers, “Ain’t
what she needs from a man.”
Her whispers are too normalvoiced, just like Bone’s, and Alice says,
“Watch that talk. You’re here to make
peace.” I don’t think Alice has any
children, but she sure has the mom voice
down. She puts her arm around Trish and
walks her inside, rubbing her back. Bone
doesn’t let the front door slam, but I hear
his heavy tread inside and dear God I
hope he doesn’t wake the kids, but I can’t
get up because my body’s shaking so hard
it’s like I’m caught in the eye of my own
rage, wishing someone, somewhere, would
be that nice to me.
The next morning I tell my friend
Margot I’m too wrung out to meet her at
our usual spot, but I need my girl time.
We always go to this magic café in the old,
industrial part of Bushwick. I love sitting
in their overstuffed grandma chairs and
eating sandwiches named after street
signs, even though the neighborhood
scares me, especially with the kids along.
I don’t get how the hipster fleas (that’s
what Bone calls them) choose their
neighborhoods. How are they not afraid,
when it seems like they grew up in fancy
places I can’t imagine as anything more
than movie-set mirages?
When Margot presses, I say, “The
subway’s too hard with the kids.” I know
that’s something she’ll understand, even
though I’ve spent my whole life
navigating buses and trains. Bone has a
license and rents a convertible sometimes
for a splurge, but before I met him I’d
been in a car three times, tops. I’m from
the Queensbridge Projects in Long Island
City, which is a shitty place to grow up.
Probably shittier than Bushwick at its
worst, but the rathole you know is safer
disrespectful, I suppose. Alice isn’t young
like Trish, but she has something, like
retro movie-star polish. Her smile takes
up half her face, and I’ve never seen teeth
so perfect in real life. Even in the middle
of the night, you want that light she has
inside her to flash your way.
“Why are you always so nice to
her?” Trish whines, and she’s right. The
cops all hate us, but it seems like they
won’t ever leave until Alice comes out to
talk for a few minutes.
Alice puts her hand on Trish’s
shoulder, and she jerks away. The woman
officer—the chunky one with the droopy
pants and not the one with the rack Bone
ogles like he’s never seen breasts—snorts,
like snubbing Alice is the worst thing
Trish has done tonight. Maybe that’s why
Trish is in such a foul mood all the time,
because she’s got that fresh-as-dew skin
and her body’s all high and tight, yet
everyone around her wants to please
MILF-aged Alice.
At this point, I plop down on our
steps, and both knees protest with a pop.
Bone kicks our front door and shouts, “I
can’t take another minute of this shit!”
but otherwise huddles in the corner facing
the house, as far from the commotion as
he’s allowed to go.
All eyes turn toward me, the frogeyed schlep stuck between the hothead
husband and the squealing princess next
door. Droopy Pants whispers to Smartass,
“I bet that one pops one day.”
I’m tempted to nod and offer up my
wrists to be cuffed before it actually
happens. Love my family to bits, but right
now I’m so worn out I’m a freakin’ poster
mother for birth control. Or I would be, if
that whole you can’t get pregnant while
breastfeeding wasn’t bullshit. They say to
use condoms just in case, but Bone and I
were the tired kind of lazy, and like they
say, it only takes once, although it was
more like a few times we feel real stupid
about now. I’d hand over my Visa card to
anyone willing to lift me up, carry me to
13
baby, so my two are her surrogate
lovebugs. She’s got Ozzy in her lap and
Lisa is chilling in the car seat, so I’m
watching all these younglings pose and
flirt when my neighbor Alice walks in. I
never told Bone I come here with our kids
because he was zoned for Bushwick High
School on Irving and said those four years
were scary bad for him, but maybe I have
to come clean now, just in case he and
Alice have an actual conversation one day.
Alice walks over to Margot and me,
and she’s too polite to mention she’s
surprised to see me, but poker-faced she’s
not. I don’t belong. It’s like West Side
Story around here but with city people as
the rival gang, and Margot and I are only
friends, not lovers like Tony and Maria.
For me, Margot’s friendship has been as
life-changing as falling in love. She never
talks down to me, and she always listens
like what I say matters, which makes me
think that maybe other people ought to
listen the same way, too. I brought it up
in counseling with Bone, and Father
Brian said he was real proud of me for
speaking that thought out loud.
Alice keeps her distance from the
kids, and Ozzy, my oldest, is practically
climbing Margot he’s so happy. She’s more
loving than their grandmother, and I’m
thinking about making papers that say
Margot should raise my kids if anything
happens to Bone or me. I think she’d treat
them good even when she has her own
babies like I know she will someday.
Margot’s the only from-the-city woman
I’ve met who likes children and wants to
have at least one of her own. It’s like
someone told them babies carry the
plague and they ought to come out with
restraining orders when they’re born.
Ozzy recognizes Alice, because he
lunges her way and she backs up, her
arms raised as if he’s trying to rob her.
Margot nearly falls off the chair trying to
hold onto him, and I can’t believe Alice
would let my son fall rather than hold
him, even if he did knock over her laundry
because you have that insider road map
which tells you which block to rest easy
and when to book your ass straight home.
I wish I knew someone who could map
Bushwick like that for me. I’ve been
meeting Margot there since before Ozzy
was born, and I still feel like I need one. If
I grew up with big rooms and air
conditioning, I wouldn’t leave for the halfabandoned blocks around the Jefferson
Street subway stop, no matter how much I
loved to bar-hop.
Margot says, “Let me check
Zipcar,” and I should tell her not to
bother, but it thrills me that she wants to
make the effort. Margot may be from the
city originally, but she’s my best friend
and I’d probably lose my shit completely
without her.
“Found one with baby seats. Meet
you on your stoop in half an hour.” Margot
hangs up before I can refuse.
Margot makes a wrong turn when
I’m trying to get the kids settled in back,
and we take a detour along the cemeteries
for a while because it’s too twisty-windy
for a U-turn.
“I like how green it is around
here,” she says, and it makes me happy
because I think it’s pretty, too. Mostly
people see the gravestones and think it’s
creepy to live in this part of Queens,
where you’re basically surrounded by the
dead. I love our little no-man’s land,
blocked-off on three sides by cemeteries,
facing Brooklyn but not a part of it. Before
Trish and Alice moved in, I never thought
city people would find us. I guess our old
neighbor Falla’s at fault, because it’s her
house they’re renting. Falla met all kinds
of people when she went away to college,
but even if she’s to blame for Trish a little,
I still love her. She introduced me to
Margot.
We grab my favorite table near the
door and order right away because my
mouth is watering for the pulled pork
sandwich and Margot can’t go an hour
without caffeine. Margot is aching for a
14
asked me to have a baby with him on our
third date.”
“Why don’t these things ever
happen to me?” Margot has a hard time
dating because men from the city aren’t
looking for relationships. She slams her
hand against the table, so of course Ozzy
wants to do the same, and then baby Lisa
thrusts her fists in the air, her motor
skills not quite there yet but she mimics
everything Ozzy does. Since Lisa couldn’t
get her hands to make any noise, she
makes agh agh sounds to join with big
bro. Alice’s eyes scrunch tight as the
volume rises. That’s how I know to feel
sorry for the yoga guy. Poor man probably
just wanted to make sure she wasn’t a
baby-hater before he bought another
meal.
Lisa starts fussing and Margot
shakes the vitamin bottle we’ve been
using as a rattle. Margot says, “You never
took your pill,” and passes the bottle to
Alice. Her eyes practically bulge out of
their sockets when she reads what they
are. Oh, well, it’s not like I won’t be
showing soon.
“Congratulations,” Alice says, in
the least enthusiastic tone possible.
“Three kids, wow. Big family.”
“Three is pretty normal,” I say. I’m
not going to admit the one I’ve got cookin’
is a whoops baby, because even though
her words are polite enough, Alice is
looking at me like I’m something icky on
the sole of her shoe.
“How do you two know each
other?” Margot asks. She’s sitting real
straight now, and that’s how she gets
when she’s uncomfortable. She sits all
upright and proper, but you can tell it’s
hard work, like all that standing at
attention and saluting in the army.
“She lives in Falla’s house,” I say,
and Margot spits latte across the table.
Trish complains to Falla as often as she
calls the cops. Margot has had earfuls of
stories about her.
basket last week. I felt bad, because she
wears an awful lot of white. Alice doesn’t
have a car, so she probably took the
subway here, and there’s not a smudge or
a sloppy-looking crease on her, which
seems like magic. At least Ozzy showed
nice manners and said sorry and helped
her with her clothes. To be fair, Alice let
him, even though he was grimier than the
crumbly leaves on the ground. Toddler
boys attract filth like magnets. I don’t
know that any mother, however great, can
change that.
Alice taps her backpack and says,
“I have a translation to work on while I
eat,” and points at an empty table across
the café.
Margot’s head tilts, like she’s
thinking real hard. “Do you teach French
at the New School?”
“Oui,” Alice says, which means yes,
that much I know. Alice has one of those
lives you read about in magazines. She
travels a whole bunch because she’s a
linguist. I hear her sometimes on her cell
or talking to people with cameras on her
laptop and I always want to stop and
listen, even when I don’t have time. Some
languages sound like music and others
phlegm. She’s learning Farsi, which is a
Persian language. I had to Google where
Persia was after she told me, but it gave
me a thrill just to hear the word out loud.
It’s not really a place anymore, at least
not one listed on maps. Sometimes when
I’m alone I say the words out loud. Farsi.
Persia. Alice may be too city-ish for
friendship, but most days I don’t mind her
as a neighbor at all.
“I was in your class a while back,”
Margot says. “There was this guy who
used to come straight from hot yoga,
dripping in skin-tight clothes.” Margot
closes her eyes, and that today-is-brownieday look flashes across her face. Margot
loves chocolate almost as much as she
loves coffee.
“We went out,” Alice says, as she
claims the empty seat beside me. “He
15
house with a small family. I try to
remember that she doesn’t belong in the
city or any neighborhood in transition.”
“Will you watch the kids?” I ask
Margot. I don’t wait for her answer to
leave the table because my eyes are
watering and I hate myself for being so
weak. That word “transition” gets used a
lot, and it means Bone and I and our kids
are the problem, part of the change that
still has to happen to make everything
better for the new people moving in.
Maybe we aren’t the best neighbors, but I
try to be loving toward people and tolerate
their flaws. Has Trish ever thought about
me or Bone as a couple with young kids
going through a rough stretch, doing the
best we can as partners and parents?
Alice does, I know that. She’s told me that
she only ever thinks we’re too loud when
she’s in the kitchen where Falla couldn’t
soundproof. Bone and I will hustle the
screaming kids out of there and walk our
fights into the living room, no matter
where they start, so nobody can say we
aren’t trying to be more considerate, to
adjust to people who live their lives in
whispers and act like an argument’s the
end of the damn world.
Alice may be the most elegant
woman I’ve ever met, but when she uses
the word transition to defend Trish, it’s
like she’s saying my family should be
trapped in a shoebox and relocated, just
like Bone does with the mice.
Bone’s grandparents bought the
house we live in, and the walls may be too
thin and maybe it’s not a real house if it’s
attached to all the others on the block like
Trish claims, but it’s the only true home
I’ve ever had. His mother passed it on to
us, and it’s going to belong to Ozzy or Lisa
or their brother and sister—and maybe
we’ll have one more of each, because
there’s nothing wrong with having four
kids, so long as you can clothe and feed
them and give them enough love—when
Bone and I have passed, hopefully in our
Baby Lisa’s outraged when she
gets a face full of latte, but considering
how many times she’s spit up on me, I’m
in no rush to comfort her. Margot’s
another story, and Lisa is in her arms,
smothered with kisses and apologies
before I’ve got the table cleaned off with
baby wipes. I take a quick glance at Alice,
and not a drop spilled her way. Repelling
dirt is her superpower.
“I’m the other one,” Alice says,
when everything calms down.
“How do you stand it?” Margot
asks. “I mean, Falla and Jill are both so
easygoing, and they hate her.”
Falla was Margot’s college friend.
Falla grew up with Bone, but her husband
works on Breaking Bad, so they live in
New Mexico now. Mick was uptight about
noise, too—nowhere near like Trish—but
I think he’s got that whole sensitive artist
thing, because Falla and Margot love him
and that’s enough for me. Bone thought
he was a pussy and that Falla chose him
because he was easy to boss around, but
they didn’t seem that way. They talked
about things and made decisions together.
That’s the kind of couple I want Bone and
me to be. The problem is we can’t seem to
make any decisions as a team until one or
both of us goes berserk, but that’s exactly
why we’re in counseling down at the
church. Father Brian says our problems
have teachable solutions, and we can
learn how to communicate better. It was
Falla who gave me the idea to try, back
when Ozzy was still in my stomach. I will
love Falla until the day I die. Bone loves
her, too. He just doesn’t like to admit shit
like that.
“I know she’s been awful to you,”
Alice says, with a sigh. “Trish is just out
of her element.”
“Why are you so nice to her?” I ask.
“Why rub her back and comfort her when
she’s making my life Hell?”
Alice looks away, like the worst
thing I could do is make her
uncomfortable. “Trish grew up in a big
16
think she’s the problem. That’s why she
is.”
“Then Falla needs to boot them out
and rent to me.”
My heart freezes in my chest.
Falla’s from here, and even she wasn’t
always so forgiving. I can’t bear the
thought of losing Margot’s friendship, and
it shows because she says, “Stop that,”
and gives my shoulders a shake. “Your
house is loud with love.”
Her voice is so fierce that I believe
her, and I throw my free arm around her
and squeeze so tight, feeling like Margot
in my life is all the proof I need that God
is real and good.
“I was thinking that maybe if
you’re next door, I might have the courage
to have a baby or two on my own,” she
says, her voice so quiet, like she expects
me to talk her out of it or run away.
“I’ll help,” I say. “Be your birth
coach and babysitter and everything.” To
have a true friend and neighbor is maybe
what I want most in the world, after
health and happiness for Bone and our
kids.
I’m not thinking about Alice or
Trish anymore, or how afraid I get when I
think one day all our neighbors could be
like them. I know Margot is an outsider
too, but I see my children playing with
hers, forming second-generation
friendships.
A skinny-jeaned beanpole slices
between Margot and I on his way to the
bathroom, clipping my elbow and jostling
Lisa. “I’m holding a baby,” I shout at his
back, but there’s not even a ripple of
hesitation to suggest he cares.
“He’s so young we’re invisible,”
Margot says. “Out of phase with his
existence.” Margot points me toward the
table where our food is waiting, her hand
firm against my spine until my feet
follow. Then she tucks Ozzy in front of her
as we walk and rubs my shoulders and
back, like my comfort and well-being
matters. Her touch is like a holy relic,
old age with all our kids and grandkids
around us, making joyful noise.
The bathroom’s occupied, so I’m
the fool with tears streaming down her
cheeks, pretending to check out the
bulletin board. It’s full of rental and
roommate notices, advertisements for
yoga and life-coaches. The kind of stuff
people need when they don’t know who
they are yet. I know what my life is, and
maybe it’s high-pitched and messy, but I
chose it for myself and even when it’s so
hard like it is right now, I still want it.
Margot comes up behind me,
plants her chin on my shoulder, and gives
me a squeeze. “Yoga’s pretty good for
stress,” she says. “There’s a studio in
Ridgewood that specializes in couples
yoga.”
The image of Bone doing yoga
makes me choke, the laugh comes on so
hard. Margot doesn’t know Bone yet, but
she laughs with me. I squeeze her hand.
“She’s holding Lisa like she might
explode,“ Margot says with a smirk. I
know she’s thinking baby hater, like I am,
and just like that I don’t need to cry.
Alice must feel our eyes upon her,
because she heads our way, holding Lisa
correctly but not easily, Ozzy trailing
behind her keeping close watch on his
sister in a way that makes my eyes spritz
again. “I’m sorry if defending Trish upset
you. I always seem to see both sides. I
know she overreacts to small things and
makes your life difficult.”
I stare at her because she hasn’t
apologized for what upset me, and I don’t
know how to say this in a way Father
Brian would approve.
“I have to get back to work.” Alice
passes Lisa to me with obvious care.
“She seemed sincere,” Margot says,
when she’s out of earshot. “I kind of like
her.”
I know Margot wants me to agree
with her. I can hear it in the sound of her
voice. Margot and I need affirmation.
That’s how we’re alike. “Alice doesn’t
17
burning through all the tightness and
tension. I pray, with every scrap of energy
I can muster, that Bone and I, Ozzy, Lisa,
and the new baby aren’t too much family,
too much neighbor, for one friend to
handle.
18
Happiness by Adrienne Christian
19
because he will one day be stopped and frisked, the things I tell my 14 year old son to swallow poetry by Lauren Nicole
that really expensive brunch from that really expensive restaurant in grosse pointe
that you actually got dressed up for with the macaroon display at the counter where
we saw that tv lawyer with the congressman. your good articulation. the many
thousands of dollars of private school. your nights of reading books with a flashlight
under a blanket. reading. books. stolen bibles. your father’s book that he wrote with
black ink on black paper about a black moons. your grandmother’s afro. her art
collection of a thousand colors. your grandmother’s smile. your grandfather’s piano.
jazz. your mother’s mother’s father’s french toast that he made in the yellow house
he owned where he hosted pta meetings and prayer meetings and keno
tournaments. your father’s mother’s father’s uniform he wore for this country that
hated him even as he was fighting hitler in a nightmare. your good dreams. your
father’s father’s mother’s 8 pharmacies that she owned with her own good money no
credit. the play pen in her office she would put your grandfather in while she
worked. she would put your father in while she worked. she would put you in while
she worked. detroit. selma. montgomery. okra corn tomato. the front of the bus.
every water hose that aimed at brown skin. every brown hand that aimed back.
ruby. ellis island. the italian language. english. creole. motherfucking gullah. the
trail of tears. the pontchartrain. the creek uprising. the seminole swamp. the ones
who ran away. the ones who poisoned the gravy. the ones fought back. the ones who
jumped off the boats and turned into mermaids. the children who would speak to
each other across the currents to opposite shore. the gold. the diamonds. the sun.
moses. his tablets whole. his basket. the red sea. all of egypt.
jesus. his blood. the hem of his robe. all of galilee.
how you make people laugh.
your understanding of the magic that computers do. that robot you built with your
hands and programmed to move on its own without any type of sorcery.
your hook shot. your midrange jumper. your 3 pointer.
your homeruns.
that picture of you smiling on top of a mountain.
that picture of your feet in the ocean.
your loud music. your hoodies. your favorite nas verse.
the poems your parents write you that you pretend to not like.
your brother’s eyes when he looks at you.
your sister’s little fingers when she strokes your face.
your innate ability to simply be kind.
how I can’t get through this without crying.
the need I have for you to make it out alive.
being only a teenager.
being just a kid.
being my baby.
being innocent.
20
perfecting poetry by Lauren Nicole
I want you to remind me that jesus turns over
tables but I’m always reminding you that lot’s
wife doesn’t even have a name and his daughters find
comfort in caves. there is gospel in my disappointment. you
find control in the run in my stockings. the hem of my
skirt closer to my wrist than my fingertips. the toddler in
the pew next to us doesn’t understand why there is a stickiness to
the air when we sit down but the grandmother knows that we
just got finished fucking in the car and maybe even that you called
me the wrong name when you pulled my hair too tight and maybe
even that I don’t know the words to this song. I write your name on
empty tithing envelopes and put them in the offering basket. you
say don’t snap your fingers in church. clap your hands
21
Downtown by Michelle Brooks
22
Cuban-­‐American Lexicon poetry by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
The word
for girlfriend
in Español
is novia
(Hyphen)
sweetheart
fiancé
bride.
I was
trained
to be
neither girl
nor friend
to the boy
I chose
no fun
just duty
down
the aisle
toward
the altar
where
I went
from novia,
to wife
or esposa
(Hyphen)
shackle
manacle
handcuff.
23
Pinko Paula and the Preppy Plague hobos in long coats, scarves, and
battered hats. They sat at attention as
she approached their spot on the rough,
yellowing lawn.
“It’s Ms. Editor-Lady, finally,”
one guy said to the other three, then
raised his pale face to Paula and added:
“Are you imposing your liberal agenda
on the paper as planned?”
Paula sat on the grass, her bare
legs curled to the side, and tugged her
skirt over her knees, still thinking of
Tim. She smiled at her four scruffy
friends.
“We’re focusing on the suffering
caused by program cuts happening at
the same time as a massive military
buildup,” she said, eyebrows raised.
“Not that you guys care.”
These males were unconcerned
that their country had a nuclear arsenal
that could destroy the world twenty
times over. The second hand neared
midnight. Tick, tick, tick, then ka-boom!
At any moment, total annihilation.
“Politics!” One of them made a
sour face. “Why do you care? Only art
matters.”
“Art, yes,” another said. “Are you
coming over tonight, Paula? I got my
hands on a videotape of Jules et Jim.”
“Maybe. I need to go back to the
office after school to see Mr. Scott. I
want to write the editorial this week.”
She narrowed her eyes. “It’s time.”
“That damn newspaper. We
never see you anymore. You’re avoiding
us.”
“She’s distracted by politics.”
“But why don’t you guys care
about current events?” Paula asked.
“You could be drafted. Look at this
fiction by Simone Martel
From her scarred, wooden desk in the
journalism office, Paula flicked an XActo knife at the wall, piercing Chuck
Lawson’s kissing-poster of Ronald
Reagan in a cowboy hat.
One of the freshmen winced.
“Chuck’ll kick your ass,” he said.
“With his penny loafers? I’m so
scared.” Rolling back on her wheeled
chair, Paula pushed away from the
blocky typewriter and strode up to the
blackboard. On the board she chalked,
“Reaganomics hit home.”
“Okay, people,” she said. “Who
wants ‘Controversial Budget Cuts at
Children’s Hospital’?”
“This is a high school paper.
Stick to high school matters,” someone
yelled from the back of the room.
“Fine, I’ll do Children’s Hospital.
For you I’ve got ‘Counseling Services
Cut,’ ‘Yearbook Threatened’ or ‘Foreign
Language Slashed.’”
After class, Paula hurried down concrete
steps past graffiti: Stupid ho, Fat nigga,
Angie’s fine. Had Tim, the handsome but
despicable sports editor, looked at her
tits while she stood at the blackboard
parceling out assignments? If so, did she
mind? In the courtyard, she found her
misfit males lounging outside the
library, all four of them dressed in too
many clothes for such a balmy fall day—
24
“Hah, she can’t name a single
flier.” She snaked her fingers between
the books in her Kenyan straw basket
and drew out a mimeographed page.
Stop the Reagan War Machine!
Stop U.S. intervention in El Salvador
and Nicaragua. No draft registration!
One of the males wrinkled his
nose. “Ugh. Save it for your newspaper.”
“You like your damnable paper,
eh?”
“Mmm.” They had no idea how
much. “But they mess up my byline
every week. On purpose. News Editor:
Paul Marcus.”
“They make you into a guy. But
what do you care? You hate girls.”
“I don’t,” she said.
Across the path, a girl in a plaid
skirt and a boy in a pale blue sweater
seated themselves on the lawn. The
males stared. One of them wondered
aloud, “What do you think they’re
talking about?”
“Physics and calamari,” another
replied, picking at the sole of his
enormous sneaker.
“Look at us,” a third added, “on
our side of the path in black rags and
them in their pastels on the other.”
“The dark and light sides of the
path. That’s good. Like performance
art.”
Those males went through their
lives making little piles of things. The
fact that their friend the Devo Monster
glued black plastic and paper doilies to
his walls was a good thing. Brian Eno’s
new record album was a good thing. A
story by James Joyce was also a good
thing. All separate, all equal, all things.
Turning back to Paula, they
needled her.
“Name one female friend.”
They hated her for focusing on
not-them. So they hurt her back.
one.”
She knew how to make them
stop, though. Feeling to the bottom of
her straw basket, she brought up some
linty change. “One of you fetch me coffee
and a brownie, I’m starved.”
Falling over each other, they
tussled for the coins, so much did they
love to serve her. The winner stood,
brushing dead grass off his black pants.
“Milady, I shall return.”
They were full of shit, actually. She was
a feminist like Simone de Beauvoir and
she cared about women. That was why
in history class after lunch she had to
comment on the list of inventors the
teacher wrote on the blackboard.
Elias Howe sewing machine
Robert Fulton steamboat
Thomas A. Edison light bulb
Alexander Graham Bell
telephone
Cyrus McCormick reaper
Eli Whitney cotton gin
Orville and Wilbur Wright
airplane
The moment Paula copied the
last word into her notes, she raised her
hand, leaning forward in her front row
desk.
The history teacher, who wore a
white blouse (shoulder pads, pointy
collar, gold-buttoned cuffs) as armor
said, “Yes, Paula?”
“I read in Ms. magazine that
thousands of years ago women created
pottery for storing food and that this
single invention raised humankind
above subsistence level.”
“Interesting, Paula, but this is
U.S. history.”
25
plight of the masses. Known as Pinko
Paula, she donates everything her
parents buy her to third world
countries, including her clothes. Yes, the
Salvation Army’s good enough for Paula.
...”
Mr. Scott came into the office
behind her, his backpack slung over one
shoulder.
“Beam me up, Scotty!” several
boys bellowed.
His worn brown corduroys
whispered as he walked past the
blackboard, past the filing cabinets,
toward his office.
“Mr. Scott has a mind that works
like a record stuck at 16 speed.” Chuck
continued into his paintbrush. “Tell him
something brief and to the point and
he’ll be puzzling about it two days later.
He’s a forceful leader whose neverending enthusiasm is the inspiration
that spurs the lowliest reporter to
greatness.” Mr. Scott disappeared into
the back room, shaking his head, while
Chuck went on. “Let’s not forget our
advertising editor, Richard Whacker,
whose efficiency is the reason our
paper’s so wealthy. Why, our coffers so
overflow we can donate to the United
Way each year.”
Tim looked at Paula. “She’s
blushing.”
In that tight yellow polo shirt
Tim looked like a guy in a magazine,
handsome in a way her males could
never be.
“I knew Richard wasn’t real,” she
muttered.
“If you knew Richard Whacker
(Dick to his friends) wasn’t real, how
come you asked Chuck why he never
came to class?”
Chuck grinned, baring pointy
shark teeth.
The class tittered.
“So you’re saying women stopped
inventing?”
After history, Paula swung through the
door into the big, empty restroom filled
with milky light pouring through frosted
windows. She sat in the stall with her
head in her hands. When she came out,
she found three girls standing at the
sinks, shoulder to shoulder, absorbed by
their reflections in the mirrors. One girl
brushed her shiny blond hair, another
dipped her finger into a tin of lip gloss
and ran it over her lips, the third
arranged a scarf around her neck.
Had Tim looked at Paula’s tits
when she stood at the blackboard? She
left the bathroom without washing her
hands, not wanting to find herself in one
of the mirrors—also wincing internally
from the memory of the students in
history class fixing their bored, sleepy,
after-lunch gazes on her when she
raised her hand and spoke.
(“Why do you care?” The male’s
head had turned on his long, white neck,
eyes blinking insolently.)
After English, last period, Paula
returned to the journalism office,
skating her feet over the slippery hall
floor without lifting her shoes, scissoring
herself forward, then stalling. Through
the office door she heard the muffled
roar of afterschool work. Entering
always required effort. Her friends
would be surprised if they knew that.
Finally, she heaved open the door.
Inside, Editor-in-Chief Chuck stood by
his poster of Ronald Reagan, holding up
a paintbrush as a microphone.
“And heeere’s Paula. Paula
Marcus is enraged to tears daily by the
26
“Controversial Budget Cuts at
Children’s Hospital. Facing a $3.2
million shortfall this year due to
decreases in Medi-Cal reimbursements
...”
She stopped typing and stared at
her fingers on the keys, trying to inhabit
her legs from the inside out: bones,
blood and skin. They were her legs, not
his; she would take them back.
“What’s this crap?” Chuck, his
small, pointy teeth menacing, waved a
flier in her face. “Did you tack this on
the bulletin board? I’m no fan of Carter,
but he started draft registration after
the invasion of Afghanistan for a damn
good reason.”
“You want to go fight?” she
asked.
“We must be strong. Neutrality
equals death.”
“Why are you so afraid of Russia,
Chuck?”
She’d heard a speaker at a
disarmament meeting say that the
Empire of Evil was not so impressive,
with people crowded into tiny
apartments and standing in lines
though there was nothing to buy. The
army had old planes, she’d heard and
wondered what people were like on the
other side of the Iron Curtain. Did they
too worry about oblivion? She wished
she could take their point of view, but
that seemed impossible. They were too
far away, too different, too not-her.
“Why don’t you go live there, you
stupid bitch.” Chuck slammed shut the
metal filing cabinet drawer, surprising
the henchman looking into it.
A speckled acoustical tile flew
down from the ceiling and struck the
floor with an ear-stabbing crash. The
henchmen cheered because noise and
destruction excited and pleased them.
“Anyway,” she said. “I’m going to
write the editorial this week.”
“Bullshit,” Chuck said. “No chick
writes the editorial. Ever.”
Mindy, the features editor,
looked up from her typewriter.
“I am,” Paula told Chuck. “I’m
going to go talk to Mr. Scott now.”
When Mr. Scott saw Paula enter
his tiny office, a suggestion of a smile
lifted his handlebar mustache. “I found
that book I was telling you about ... if
you want it?”
He held the small book between
his hands as though in prayer, and
talked to her about existentialism in a
voice so soft she strained to hear. When
he’d finished, Paula appeared to think
as she put the small book into her
basket. “I could incorporate
existentialist ideas into my editorial, if
you let me write it.”
“What a nice thought, Paula.
Do.”
Paula returned to the chaotic
outer office smiling a little and leaned
over the underclassmen, her henchmen,
who were working on her news stories
at the long table in the center of the
room.
“Thanks to budget cuts and a
$13,000 debt the yearbook faces
abolishment ... For the past two years
the foreign language department has
been afflicted by severe financial ... Due
to revenue shortfall, the school district
has announced ...”
Paula sat at the news desk to
work on her own story about the
children’s hospital, while at the sports
desk a few yards away, Tim rubbed his
chin and stared at her calves and
ankles, seeming to trace their outline
with his eyes.
27
“Bien sûr. Women create in their
bodies. Men are the artists and
inventors.” The male put back his head
and exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
“Men have brainchildren to make up for
not having real babies.”
Then they’d argued Truffaut
versus Fellini, a battle they all wanted
to win. They never said, “I don’t know,”
never declared peace. Sitting on the
brown shag carpet with her legs sticking
out of her skirt, she’d imagined her
limbs carved of marble, heavy,
worshiped by men. Half an hour later,
those same legs followed her into bed.
And today she wore jeans and a long,
heavy jacket.
When she entered the office, her
henchmen were busy gluing columns of
type onto blue-lined graph paper and
rubbing scissor handles over plastic
sheets of sticky letters to form
headlines. Gaps on the graph paper
indicated space left for photographs.
“Where’s LaDawn?” she asked
one of the henchmen, glaring at his
IZOD shirt.
“What?” he asked, covering the
little crocodile on his shirt with his
freckled hand as he nodded toward
LaDawn and her boyfriend sprawled
together on a bench at the back of the
room.
“You decided to show up,” Paula
called to LaDawn. “About time.”
Chuck, at his desk under his
Reagan poster, raised a pair of scissors
to his mouth. “LaDawn White shoots the
occasional photograph. Mostly, though,
she lounges in the office, reclining in the
arms of her anonymous boyfriend. It’s
unclear whether or not her counterpart
is on the paper’s staff. We have
speculated considerably on the subject.
Sometimes LaDawn and her
“How’s it make you feel to know
that no one else agrees with your
politics?” Chuck asked Paula. Her eyes
flicked over his ugly face and away.
“That you are utterly, utterly alone.”
“Except for Mr. Scott,” one of the
henchmen pointed out.
Brought out of his office by the
crash, Mr. Scott stood across the room.
His mild brown eyes met Paula’s. She
felt such hopelessness when she looked
at him. Their cause dried up and blew
away.
Tim, broad shouldered in his polo
shirt, leered at Paula. Of course, getting
along with the enemy was impossible.
The next day she wore jeans and the top
half of her father’s old olive-colored suit,
a jacket that stiffly hung from jutting
shoulder pads to her knees, allowing her
to move around the school in freedom, a
brain in an isolation tank, almost.
Walking to the office, she passed the
restroom as the door swung out, giving
her a flash of girls before mirrors. As a
brain in an isolation tank, she had no
use for the restroom, so she walked on.
The night before, she and her
males had lolled on a brown shag carpet
in someone’s basement rec room,
smoking clove cigarettes while a black
and white movie flickered on the TV.
Jules et Jim was all about the girl, so
why wasn’t her name in the title? The
women in those films weren’t real
anyway, though Paula knew not to say
that because Nietzsche wrote that art is
a collection of lies, so why complain?
Complaining last night about
history class had been useless, too.
“All the inventors were men,”
she’d told them.
28
“Do you see Margo over by the
phone booth? In that skirt? I swear to
God, she looks like a slut.”
“Don’t tell her I said this, but
she’s gained weight.”
“You’re so skinny it makes me
sick. You look like Lady Di.”
“Oh, my God, thanks so much!”
A smile slipped around the table.
“I don’t hate girls,” Paula said.
And yet she longed not to be one,
to wear a trench coat and stand in the
rain like a Hemingway hero or a
Dashiell Hammett hero, with his gun
and his sneer, or even like Orson Wells
in The Third Man, fat and not goodlooking, but cool. He said cool things.
Valli was cool too, but silent.
Non Non Non she wrote on her
French folder.
One of the males, catching sight
of the small book in her basket,
snatched it out. “Camus? Journalism!
Propaganda!”
“Mr. Scott lent it to me.”
“That old hippie?”
“He says in these bad times
existentialism and pot are his two
comforts.”
“Couldn’t he give you a joint,
instead?”
“The Myth of Sisyphus is a
metaphor for the politics of our era,”
Paula explained. “Laws will be repealed,
programs axed, abortion rights taken
away, but we’ll push that rock back up
the hill. And if it rolls back down, ten or
twenty years from now, we’ll push it up
again.” In his office, Mr. Scott made
existentialism sound heroic. Now she
wasn’t sure.
“I’m not really political,” she
said, because a trench-coated hero in the
rain cared nothing for politics. “I just
think Reagan’s hurting people ...”
counterpart attack each other lustfully,
causing Paula to shield her eyes.”
LaDawn untangled her limbs,
reached for the portfolio leaning against
the bench, and slouched toward the long
table in the middle of the office. She
rubber-cemented her photographs in
place while reading aloud bits of Paula’s
editorial.
“‘500,000 children removed from
the school lunch program. 700,000
families about to lose their AFDC
benefits. 1.1 million families losing food
stamps. Medicaid cut by over $2 billion.
At the same time, a $1.64 trillion
buildup is scheduled for the military
budget.’ Gripping.”
Paula stood beside LaDawn,
looking down at her own typed words.
“Girl, why do you bother?”
“Dunno, really,” Paula answered.
“What’s with the penny loafers,
LaDawn? Preppiness is spreading like a
disease around here.”
Since heavy mist, almost drizzle, fell
that day, darkening the concrete paths
and silvering the shaggy grass, Paula
met her males in the smelly, noisy
cafeteria. She drew her French folder
out of her straw basket, while her
Styrofoam coffee cup steamed at her
elbow. Several jelly donuts seeped
grease onto a white paper bag in the
middle of the table, but she wouldn’t eat
one. Brains in isolation tanks needed no
food.
“Is it ‘J’ai besoin à toi’ or ‘de toi’?”
“De,” said one of the males.
“Duh.”
Paula erased “à” and wrote “de.”
Voices came from the next table.
29
they’d be hers again. However, Camus
wrote that liberty is the right not to lie,
and anything she said now would be a
lie, so she sat silently, choosing not to
speak, not to boss them or charm them,
choosing to believe that because she
liked Camus and Sartre, they weren’t
second-rate.
The conversation went on around
her. The males grew hot and threw off
their jackets, arguing, scowling, waving
their hands in the air. Sitting there,
Paula began to feel like a toad, and for a
minute she wished she’d stormed off
earlier. If she left now, they might not
notice. After a bit, though, her silence
worked in her, dulling her, taking her
away from them. In her remoteness, she
gained a certain independence.
Dreamily, she took the arm of the male
next to her, tracing the veins with her
finger, no longer bothering to listen. She
was tired of putting herself out, a target,
to have X-Acto knives thrown at her.
Better to withdraw, pull inward, hide.
She stopped. What did heroes in
the rain care about program cuts?
“You like reading this stuff?”
asked the male squinting into the small
book. “It’s not art. It’s not even
aesthetically pleasing.”
“Art for art’s sake,” another
asserted. “Don’t comfort yourself with
second-rate writing.”
Comfort herself? It was true. But
why weren’t they scared? Where was
their fear of the earth blowing up, of
death, meaninglessness, and the feeling
of always being alone?
“Mr. Scott’s wife had a baby last
month. Do you think it’s immoral to
bring a child into this world?” Paula
asked. “I’m not sure.”
“Only art matters.”
“But what’s the point?” Paula
asked.
“There is no point. It just is.”
“Art should bring ecstasy,”
another said.
“And after it’s over?” she asked.
“It’s over. But it was good.” This
time the table shared a lewd smile.
“Stick to your journalism and
politics, little Ms. Editor. You don’t
understand art.”
“That’s not fair,” Paula said.
They looked at her with the cold
eyes of teenage boys, suddenly more like
Tim than she’d thought possible. They
were on the other side of the Iron
Curtain, now. Of course, she knew how
to have them back groveling at her feet.
If she were to poke her finger into the
gooey center of a jelly donut, for
example, they’d yelp indignantly and
just like that, she’d have them back.
Then she could order one of them to
refill her coffee cup, though if she drank
more coffee her empty gut would ache
all afternoon. Still, she could do it and
She was a newspaper editor, however,
so she couldn’t hide for long. After
school, she returned to the office to put
the paper to bed. Opening the heavy
door, she looked in at the activity almost
fondly. Across the paper-strewn long
table and the disordered chairs, Mr.
Scott bobbed his head to catch her eye,
smiling when he succeeded. She smiled
too and joined the other editors with Mr.
Scott to look over the pages to be sent to
the printer that afternoon.
“You look terrible, Scotty,” Mindy
said to their teacher. “Worse than
usual.”
“Having a new baby is tough.
The two a.m. feedings ...”
30
corduroy vest pocket, a bent Polaroid of
a swarthy baby with a tuft of black hair.
“Don’t limit yourself to brainchildren.
Dare to dream. You can have it all.”
Paula stared up into his mild
eyes.
Mr. Scott smiled crookedly.
“Paula. Paula.”
Refusing complicity, she pushed
past him, though she had nowhere to go.
She sat at her desk.
While they waited for the driver
to come take the paper to the printer, a
languorous atmosphere settled over the
office as people pretended to work on
ideas for next week’s paper. They
napped, played hangman, or did
homework for other classes. Across the
room, Chuck talked to Tim out of the
side of his mouth, his glittering eyes
fixed on Paula. She began to type,
fighting the sleepy atmosphere, jabbing
away.
“Ronnie baby is going take all the
money from the schools so we can build
lots of nice big bombs so that if those
Ruskies try to push this country around
we can blow them off this earth. HA HA
HA HA HA.”
She pulled out the paper and
crumpled it, squeezing the balled-up
page between her two hands.
The hardest enemies to fight are
the ones with outposts in your mind.
Bullshit.
Paula drew the little book out of
her basket and stood up from her desk.
She knocked on the door of Mr. Scott’s
glorified closet.
“I’m returning this.” Paula set
down the Camus. “It’s second-rate.”
“Did you read the whole book?”
he asked slowly, raising his steady gaze
to hers.
“Who has time?”
“Nurse the wee thing yourself, do
you?” Tim asked.
Paula allowed herself to smile
sideways at Tim and when he winked at
her, her throat tightened with
constricted feeling.
“I’ll never have a baby,” Paula
said. “I’m going to have brainchildren,
like men do.”
Her words surprised her. Tim,
braced on muscular arms, turned his
attention to the paper, withdrawing
almost imperceptibly, while Mr. Scott
tilted his head. No one else had heard.
“What’s this crap editorial?”
Chuck waved his hand at the page on
the table. He’d been reading, not
listening. “You wrote this shit, Paula?
Christ! Pinkos like you think you can
just throw money at a problem. You
can’t fix people that way. Some people
are fucked up. It’s innate. You can’t save
them with your programs.” Chuck spat
out the word.
“That’s stupid,” Paula said.
“There’s a reason why—”
“No, Paula, no reason. It just is.”
“Shut up!”
No meaning. The males smiled
around the table.
“You’re all wrong!”
“Easy now,” Mr. Scott said.
Thrusting her shaking hands
into the long jacket’s pockets, she went
to the bulletin board to find a
nonexistent bit of information. While
she stood there, Mr. Scott came up and
put his hand on her padded shoulder.
“I hate them,” she said through
her teeth.
“They’re not your real enemies.”
“They’re not?”
“The hardest enemies to fight are
the ones with outposts in your mind.”
He slipped something out of his
31
LaDawn. Mr. Scott didn’t smile and nod
when she came in, didn’t look at her at
all as she approached him.
“You let them switch editorials
after I left?”
Mr. Scott spoke to a spot six
inches above Paula’s head. “Chuck’s
Editor-in-Chief.”
The bright-eyed henchmen
looked at her.
“Right.” Paula started toward the
door. They wouldn’t see her cry.
LaDawn called after her: “Paula,
I swear I didn’t know.”
Paula started down the hall, fast.
“Paula! Paula!”
Voices clamored behind her.
Halfway down the graffiti-marked
stairwell, her males came up on each
side of her.
“Slow down.”
“Wait up.”
Paula hesitated long enough to
allow one of them to put his hand on her
arm and say to her almost gently, “We
saw the paper. You got well and truly
screwed.”
“To hell with them,” Paula said,
walking again. “To hell with journalism,
second-rate, first-rate, fucking brilliant,
who cares.”
As they crossed the courtyard,
one of them held up his hand, “Stop!
Look at that ivy turning into all kinds of
wiggly art.”
“It’s not art,” Paula said bitterly.
“Just aesthetically pleasing.”
“That’s right!” he said. “You’re
learning.”
Her face felt like a heavy mask,
with no expression whatsoever.
In the cafeteria, they tried to
cheer her up.
“We need an editor!”
“Paula, are you okay?”
Paula opened her mouth to
speak. As the color leached out of the
green wall behind his head, she caught
onto the desk and clung to it. Mr. Scott
came around the desk, standing close to
her, but not touching.
“Did you eat lunch? Breakfast?”
He picked up the book she’d
dropped and tried to give it back.
“Stay away from me. You smell
like pot. Stay away or I’ll tell.”
“Paula.”
“I’m not waiting here. I’m going
home.”
The next morning as soon as Paula
stepped onto the schoolyard, she
snatched a copy of the paper from a
rack. All around her, students she didn’t
know were reading copies. Many went
first to the sports page on the back, but
she opened the paper to the editorial.
“In these times of shrinking
budgets and financial disorder, it comes
as no surprise that our high school is
suffering. The question then arises as to
how the school district should deal with
these problems. One alternative is to
eliminate the library facilities at this
school. Students have an exceptional
information outlet not far away. It’s
called the ‘public library’ and it is open
to persons of all ages. The benefits of
closing the school library and thus
channeling high school students into the
‘information mainstream’ are manifest
...”
The byline read Charles “Chuck”
Lawson II.
When she opened the office door,
everyone stood still: the henchmen,
Chuck, Tim, Mindy, Mr. Scott, even
32
wished she could meet someone’s eyes,
share a giggle. She even put her hand
over her mouth to hide the laughter she
felt gathering in her throat. But the
ardent faces below her were serious.
Again Paula readjusted her
expectations, remembering that the
males were not her friends: they were
her audience and she was their muse, a
girl on a pedestal.
“I’m not in the mood for your
games,” she said.
“Don’t be cruel. You are our muse
and our conscience, that is to say—our
editor. Let’s play.” The male with the
pencil wrote a line on a piece of binder
paper and read it aloud. “‘The darkness
rages.’ Okay, start.”
Life was a joke to them. Alright,
why not?
“Wrong word choice there,” she
said. “Let me change that to ‘daffodil.’
‘The daffodil rages.’”
“Oh, Editor, you ruined my
poem,” he pouted.
“And change that period to an
exclamation point,” she went on. “The
daffodil rages!”
They covered her hands with
theirs. “We’re much nicer to you than
those bastards. You’re better off with
us.”
That night Paula walked with them
through a residential neighborhood,
following the white dashes down the
center of unfamiliar streets. Flitting
down the asphalt, she discovered a
smashed squirrel and poked it with a
stick. She crouched, smiling as she did
things with the stick that made the
males rub their noses and turn away.
This death game was new, pretending
not to eat or pee, playing with dead
animals.
Later, they blindfolded her. They
set her on a garbage can, lit incense at
her feet, offered sips of sweet sherry
pilfered from a liquor cabinet. Truth
was, she hadn’t become a brain in an
isolation tank. She’d become exactly
what she’d wanted to avoid, a girl on
display. She pulled off the blindfold and
33
Packard by Michelle Brooks
34
And how do you talk of the light poetry by Lois Marie Harrod
at the center of the yellow pine,
how at this time of evening
it reveals its tender colors,
those peachy barks, as if
the sun has just undressed the tree.
35
Vital Organs poetry by Andrew Collard
Explain breathing: the reason
that the sky is
blue is
boring. Explain the uneasy
silence after three days
of nothing
but fights, how the wall
seems suddenly
thin enough
to let the cold in. Like the way
the sun strobes
off a passing
building, and steering
turns to faith
in steering
or the way words increase in volume
when their mass
decreases,
making for the neighbors’
open ears. Explain how,
now, the outline of her ear
against his chest goes missing,
breath itself held
and pushing nothing to the vital organs,
no word to name
what’s lost. The space
heater can’t
reach the room’s furthest
corners, hollowed
like a child hollows out
a parent and disappears
36
without replacement,
warmth diffusing in the absence
of familiar bodies. We make our own
heat for awhile,
but the trick’s
to trap it, the way we almost-fall
our way around the streets,
and still recover
well enough each step
to call it walking.
37
Rumble poetry by Ed Doerr
Nothing used to promise me a sleepless night
like the thought of a troll stalking the dark.
Staring at the ceiling where xylophoned headlights ran,
I ducked behind drawn-up blankets:
grunts ruffling bamboo blinds,
seismic footsteps rattling windows.
Our photos trembled in their frames & fell—
catching moonlight in shattered glass—
as he left, rage-drunk,
slamming doors that shook teeth.
38
Spirals by L.M. Henke
39
The Universal nonfiction by Lisbeth Davidow
picked up, she was unsure what she was
getting herself into. She took the MTA to
Brookline, showered, changed into a red
and white checkered A-line dress, and
took the train back to Harvard Square.
He was standing in front of the
Coop, his notebook in one hand, wearing
the same clothes: a blue shirt, tan suede
vest, and corduroys. He looked like he
hadn't showered, but there was no time to
dwell on that because he began walking at
such a fast pace she practically had to run
to keep up. He talked quickly, too, looking
straight ahead, like he was reciting a
rehearsed address to the air in front of
him. His wide mouth moved expressively
as he talked, and his green eyes danced
above his high cheek bones. Was he
nervous or intense? Either way, he was
cute.
“I'm a New York Jew,” he said. “I
grew up in Queens, an only child. My
mom is sweet but anxious. My dad was a
piano player. Now he books acts in the
Borscht Belt.”
Working in the Borscht Belt
seemed more glamorous than selling
men's clothing or life insurance, which is
how her father had made a living.
“I went to a private high school in
Riverdale—commuted an hour and a half
each way. Then I went to the big H over
there. I wrote a book after I got out, kind
of a sociological study about man's
alienation in modern society. Harcourt
Brace published it last year.”
A published author? “What are you
writing now?”
“A novel based on my childhood.”
A Jewish novelist? Like Bellow or
Malamud? They were gods.
When they reached the Charles,
she sat and he lay on the grass, propped
his head on an elbow, and asked her to
tell him about herself as if he genuinely
wanted to know her story. Wishing her
1968
She was the only waitress at The Blue
Parrot café in Harvard Square. He was
the only customer, sitting at one of the
small, round tables in the dim interior
light, his fine brown hair falling forward
as he wrote in a 5 x 7 notebook. A couple
of days later, the owners transferred her
to The Idler, a busier, more light-filled
café around the corner. There he was
again, writing, pausing only when his
friends joined him. Then he’d tell stories,
his face and voice animated.
“Are you a dancer?” he asked once
when she brought him an espresso. “Your
calves look like a dancer's calves.”
“No,” she said. “I haven't danced
since I was a kid.” She walked away
wondering if he was flirting and if her
two-inch heeled sandals made her calves
appear more toned than they were.
At the end of the afternoon, he met
her at the register. He was trim and a few
inches taller than she. “Are you new in
town?”
“You could say that.” It was true:
She had graduated from Penn a month
before and had recently moved to
Brookline to live with her brother and
sister-in-law.
“Would you like to go to a party
tonight?”
She shrugged. “Okay. I have
nothing else to do.” Immediately, she
thought that sounded rude.
He didn't seem offended. “Alright,
then,” he said. “I'll meet you in front of
the Coop at eight.”
She finished work at six, excited
but apprehensive. Unaccustomed to being
40
sweeping the plates onto the floor and
making love to her on the kitchen table?
She didn't think so. She was sure they ate
mostly in silence, cleared the table, and
watched TV before retiring early. Still,
she wanted to learn whatever he knew
about life.
The next Saturday, he asked her if
she'd like to have dinner with him. She
said yes.
“Good. I'll steal us a steak.”
She accompanied him to the
market and watched with fascination and
terror as he slid a T-bone steak inside his
vest and paid for a small can of tomato
paste and some vegetables with food
stamps. The whole time she was at Penn,
where Wharton boys wore three piece
suits to class and only a handful of
students carried anti-war signs in front of
College Hall, she'd missed out on the
revolution or “movement” people were
talking about. Was this it? To be an artist,
or to be with one who shoplifted his food
and lived off the fat of the land? He was
giving her a private tour of the
counterculture. She didn't want to miss a
thing.
He cooked the steak, baked a
couple of potatoes and made a salad in the
galley kitchen attached to his room in a
rundown, yellow communal house that
smelled of cat piss. After dinner, he kissed
her like she was dessert. His eagerness
excited her. They made out on a mattress
on the floor. When she was down to her
bra, she separated herself from him and
confessed that she was still a virgin. He
exhaled like he'd suffered a blow. Then, as
though convincing both of them that he
was man enough to shoulder the burden
of being her first, he assured her that it
was okay, really, there was no rush.
With only his pants on, he sat on
the floor cross-legged beneath a window
and rolled a series of joints. Selling pot, he
told her, was how he made the little
money he had. He filled each paper, licked
the edge and rolled it as the waning
story was more remarkable, she told him
she'd been a cheerleader in high school,
an English major in college, a swimming
instructor at a summer camp, and was
going to graduate school in September to
get her master’s in education. “Mainly I've
done things to please my parents,” she
said. “I'm amorphous,” an adjective she'd
never used before, but which seemed
accurate if not embarrassing, like
admitting that she was a shapeless blob.
She straightened her spine as though that
might keep her from sinking into the
shores of the river.
“Do you want to go to grad school?”
“Not really, but I have to do
something, and my mother thinks
teaching English is a good idea.”
“Why don't you take a year off and
find out what you want to do?”
“I could never do that.” Her mother
would be horrified by such a lack of
purpose. Her father, if he could, would
raise his hands from the grave to shake
her shoulders.
When the sky darkened, they went
to a party on the rooftop of a triple-decker
and danced to Aretha Franklin and
Wilson Pickett. He had good rhythm and
rolled his shoulders. When they slow
danced, he brought her pelvis close to his.
He accompanied her home. They
stood facing each other on the crowded
MTA, holding on to separate straps as the
train jostled them. She looked out the
window at the Boston night whizzing past
and sensed his eyes on her.
“You know,” he said. “Life isn't
what you think it is. If you could look
inside the windows of the houses where
you grew up, you’d be surprised at what
really goes on.”
How did he know what she
thought life was like? Did he think it was
seamier or more sinister than she
believed? She imagined looking inside the
house next door in her home town. Would
she see her neighbor screaming at his wife
and throwing plates at the wall? Or
41
sunlight made spots and shadows on his
bare skin. She wanted to crawl onto his
lap and warm herself against his chest.
Aside from crushes, she hadn't been close
to a man since her high school boyfriend.
She hoped this one, this Harvard hippy,
would be her next love. Ever since her
father died two years earlier, she'd
wanted to tell a boyfriend about it,
someone who would listen and comfort
her.
One weekend when her brother
and sister-in-law were away, they took
advantage of the empty apartment and
made love in the master bedroom. He
seemed as nervous as she was. She
assured him he wasn't hurting her.
Afterwards, they lay on their sides facing
each other, his warm hands moving
smoothly down her back. She pulled her
head away to see his face. He looked back
at her with his deep-set green eyes, his
face open, smiling.
Other nights, she stayed with him
on his mattress on the floor. He put his
arms around her after she said her father
had gotten a bad headache one afternoon,
became paralyzed on one side the next
day, went to the hospital for four months,
and died there. He read passages from his
novel about his own childhood, one about
his father with his silly sense of humor
and skinny legs, who never taught him
how to defend himself against the
neighborhood bully; another about a
beautiful but remote aunt with whom he
was in love at age ten. His writing was
vivid, full of longing and wonder. As she
heard about the curious, precocious,
lonely only child he had been, a rush of
affection came over her. She rolled on top
of him. “You're my baby,” she said, as
though she was the experienced woman
and he the vulnerable boy.
Two friends of his invited them to
dinner. He told her before they arrived at
the airy Cambridge apartment that they
both had tried to commit suicide by
slitting their wrists, which they deemed a
symbol of their brilliance and sensitivity.
The male friend was tall, thin, dark, and
ironic. His girlfriend, who had a sharp
nose, long legs and, at nineteen, a degree
from Radcliffe and a poem published in
The New Yorker, dominated the
conversation. Intimidated by the
boyfriend's dark wit and the girlfriend's
self-assurance, she tried not to say
anything dumb.
The next day, he told her that he
was enraged at the “poetess” who'd said
she wasn't a “universal.”
“What's a universal?”
“She thinks you're a Shirley.” His
eyes narrowed in anger. “A suburban
Jewish girl.”
What a bitch. She may be Jewish
and provincial, but she wasn't suburban.
The poetess should meet the suburban
Jewish girls she knew at Penn with their
bobbed noses and Jackie Kennedy
haircuts. Trying to fit in, she had joined a
Jewish sorority but soon found their
rituals ridiculous and their friendliness
shallow. When she told them she was
dropping out, one member took her to
lunch and told her they needed her
because she was “deep.” She didn’t want
to be their token deep person.
She was relieved that the poetess
had angered him and that she was deep
enough for him. But there was another
problem: He could only see her once
during the week and on Friday nights. He
had to save Saturday nights for parties
where he could “hit on” other girls. He
assured her it had nothing to do with how
he felt about her, but with his “neuroses,”
his insecurity about his masculinity, an
affliction which seemed as important a
facet of his identity as the attempts at
suicide were to his friends.
Frustrated, hurt, hoping to
understand this too-close-to-theoverbearing-Jewish-mother thing, she
read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint.
She hated it. She had no sympathy for the
42
But then, on a Saturday in May,
while they sat together during her break
at The Idler, he told her that he’d had it
with Boston winters. He’d decided to move
to Berkeley the coming summer. He’d
wanted to live in California since he’d
spent the “summer of love” in San
Francisco in 1967.
She asked with thinly veiled
desperation, “What about me?”
He put his hand on hers and said
with the authority of an avuncular oracle,
“You will become a traditional woman.”
That sounded like a death knell,
worse than not being a “universal.” She
wanted to slide onto the floor, turn over
and press her cheek into the grimy carpet.
For the rest of spring, she dreaded
his move like it was a terminal disease.
After she graduated, she moved back
home and didn’t see him for weeks. The
Saturday before he left for Berkeley, she
drove her father’s dark blue Dodge into
Cambridge to see him for the last time.
In the early evening light, they sat
in the back yard on rusty aluminum lawn
chairs under a maple tree, surrounded by
flowers and weeds. As though he wanted
to deflect her sadness, he lit up a joint and
began a stoned rap: “Here we sit in the
garden with houses and cars and
driveways all around us, emblems of
private lives. And growing around and
through and over all that are the trees:
life.” He lifted his arms and moved his
fingers like they were leaves blowing in
the wind. Was he one of those people who
wanted to live a “normal” life? Someone
who preferred to ponder life rather than
live it?
Later, after they made love in his
room, he rolled onto his back and looked
at the ceiling. “I don’t know why,” he said.
“But I’m not really sad, just numb.” She
wished he had clung to her instead and
sobbed.
When she opened her eyes the next
morning, she covered her face with the
sheets. He pulled her close and rocked
main character or his obsession with his
hypersexual shiksa.
She told her own Jewish writer
that if he couldn't be faithful, she
wouldn't sleep with him anymore. He
agreed with her. It seemed to relieve him
of his guilt. She missed the physical
intimacy, but she couldn't bring herself to
break up with him. Lust for his body
wasn't the only pull. She was at least as
drawn to his mind, his worldview, his
unconventional life; how his best friend
was a woman her age, a fast-talking,
chain-smoking college dropout from South
Boston who wore granny glasses and a
beret; how he greeted his transvestite
friend Leroy when he entered The Idler in
full makeup and drag: “Leroy ... looking
good!
They went on that way, sexless
friends, throughout the fall and winter
while she was in graduate school and he
wrote his novel. She'd finish her shift at
The Idler on Saturdays, walk the mile or
so to her Cambridge apartment, the collar
of her pea coat turned up against the cold,
and spend the evening by herself, waiting
mournfully for a new week to begin.
1969 and 1970
One day in March, he called unexpectedly
to say, his voice choked with sadness,
“You matter to me.” She repeated the
words over and over to herself,
remembering his sorrowful tone. It was as
close as he’d come to telling her he loved
her. She rooted for him to become so
miserable that his need to seduce other
women would disappear.
In April, she and a girlfriend had a
party at her apartment. He stayed close to
her the whole time, held her hand and
stroked her hair. Afterwards, he asked if
he could stay and sleep with her. The gods
were rewarding her for standing up for
herself. She said yes.
43
house when he was out working. This is
your vacation, they said. This is his life.
They were right. After three months,
during which time she tried to quell her
restlessness and fulfill her long-standing
need for creativity by crocheting scarf
after scarf, she forced herself to leave the
Frenchman and Israel.
After months of thinking about her
ex-boyfriend, the writer, as though he was
dead, but not quite, she wrote to him
about what she’d seen: the Spanish Steps,
the Oracle at Delphi, the Wailing Wall. To
her surprise, she found a letter from him
soon after in an American Express office.
The letter began, “Dear Noops.” He’d
given up on getting his novel published
and had started writing poetry. He’d
included lines from a poem about her: “...
our tender, forlorn planet. You were the
earth, and I was the sky.” He signed it,
“Love, Poops.” Maybe, she thought,
whatever she had been mourning still had
breath.
She returned home in April, moved
to Cambridge for six months, and worked
for a publishing company on Beacon Hill.
Still desperate to find something creative
to do, she signed up for a photography
class and a dance class at the Boston
Center for Adult Education. When her
camera was stolen, she took it as a sign.
The dance class energized her, made her
think and move fast at the same time. I
can do this, she thought. I want to do this.
In December, along with two girls
from New York who had also answered an
ad from a drive-away place in Manhattan,
she piled all her stuff into a Cadillac
Eldorado and drove cross-country to
California. They were in Berkeley by the
end of the week. She stayed with her tall,
blonde friend and her even taller
boyfriend, a Black Panther who hinted
that he’d like to sleep with both of them
but didn’t push the point.
She called him the day after she
arrived. He was happy to hear from her.
her. Then he got up and brought her a
glass of orange juice. “You’ll always be
very special to me,” he said, placing his
hand over his navel, his voice thick.
“There’s something very special in you
that connects with something very special
in me.”
He walked her to her car. “I’m
gonna split,” he said in a hoarse whisper,
then kissed her heavily on the mouth and
eyes. She had trouble breathing. “You’ll be
alright, sweetie, you’ll be alright.” He
walked away. She got into the lumbering
dark car and drove off.
A month later, as if to defy or at
least postpone her fate of becoming
ordinary, she backpacked around Europe
for six weeks with her cousin, and then,
when her cousin headed back to New
York, with whoever would travel with her.
She kept a journal in a 5x7 notebook that
looked like his, in which she described the
places she saw and the people she met:
the cities, from London to Jerusalem,
where she was lonely and listless; the
countryside in Greece which transported
her; the American women she traveled
with; the English, French, Chilean men
who did or didn’t attract her. She wrote
about the world through his eyes. She
imagined him standing over her shoulder,
reading her words as she set them down.
On Corfu, she befriended a tall,
blonde girl from Berkeley who was as
smart and free-spirited as a Joni Mitchell
song, who talked about her lovers—old,
young, writers, motorcyclists—and said
that if she ever came to California, she’d
put her up. They travelled to Crete
together then settled on a kibbutz in
Israel, where she picked oranges and got
a crush on a soulful thirty-eight-year-old
French divorcé, a member of the kibbutz.
On New Year’s Eve, he proclaimed his
love for her and invited her to live with
him and his nine-year-old son.
The women members of the
kibbutz were furious with her. Two of
them showed up at the Frenchman’s
44
day. At night, she corrected papers and
planned lessons. He got stoned and read
books about the decline of western
civilization.
She was a balabusta to his yeshiva
bocher. She had a job and a car. He had
no job, a bike, and a lot of rituals. He
stimulated his gums with a thick pink
toothpick after every meal in order to
prevent them from becoming inflamed. He
performed isometric exercises every
morning to keep his torso and arms toned
but bemoaned the paltry muscles of his
thighs and calves. He ate no breakfast, a
little raw cabbage for lunch, cheap lean
protein for dinner, like chicken hearts.
Around nine at night, he stood sideways
in front of a mirror and examined his
belly before deciding how much pasta to
make, his one indulgence.
The pasta routine went like this:
He’d ask her how much pasta she wanted.
She’d answer, “I don’t know, not much.”
“Okay,” he’d say, holding up a fistful of
capellini. “I’m making only this much so
don’t change your mind.”
When it was ready, he’d stride over
to the table, his head cocked to one side to
avoid the steam rising from the bowl,
place it before her and encourage her to
take as much as she wanted. “But not too
much,” he’d add with a nervous laugh.
Once she finished her portion, he’d say,
“It’s okay—take as much as you want—
really. I shouldn’t eat all this.” So she
would, more for the taste of warm onions,
mushrooms, and dollops of cheese than
out of hunger—except for those times
when he finished the bowl, reminding
both of them that in the end, it was his
pasta.
The conflict between his generous
impulse and what his former roommate
had called “the tightest asshole in the
West” should have made her crazy. But it
didn’t. It was one more nutty thing about
him, which she accepted, like his habit
when they were lying around in bed of
bringing her arm close and bending it
1971
By February, the tall, blonde friend had
broken up with the Black Panther and
invited her to share a Craftsman-style
house rent-free while the owner, an
architect/carpenter friend, renovated it.
She worked mornings in the subscription
department at Ramparts, a left-wing
magazine, and took dance classes in the
afternoons. Two dance teachers asked her
to perform their choreography. One said
to the other, “That woman is a dancer.”
Maybe I am, she thought, flattered and
happy.
When the Black Panther told her
he was moving out of his apartment in the
flats of Berkeley, she and the writer
decided to sublet it. Before they moved in,
she went home in August to see her
mother who cried when she told her she
was planning to live with him. An
unemployed writer was not what her
mother wished for her, Harvard grad or
no.
When she returned to Berkeley, he
brought her to his room and said that he’d
been sleeping with one of the twin sisters
who had visited for a couple of weeks.
She’d met them before she left. They were
both beautiful, of northern Italian descent
with blue eyes, long, blonde curly hair,
and olive skin. People called them “the sin
twisters.” The image of him in bed with
one of them, not just having sex, but
talking intimately before and afterward
tortured her. He insisted the affair meant
nothing to either of them. And it was over.
The twins had gone home. He still wanted
to live with her. She convinced herself it
was his final fling.
In September, they moved into the
apartment. She quit Ramparts, having
gotten a teaching job in a neighboring
town, and took dance classes in the late
afternoon. He wrote poetry during the
45
trained as an architect at MIT before
dancing with Merce Cunningham, chose
her to dance in his piece. Between her
new infatuation and the concentration it
took to execute the former architect’s
complex choreography, there were whole
days when she didn’t think about him.
He came down from Berkeley to
watch the final dance performance. They
took a walk in the nearby woods
afterward. She told him about her
flirtation, even though nothing had come
of it, wanting to exact a small revenge for
the crab lady. He didn’t say much or even
slow his pace, but the look on his face
became irritated and sour.
When they got home, he had a
confession that trumped her
unconsummated crush. While she was
away, he had slept with their landlady, a
pretty fifty-two- year-old black woman
who lived in the upstairs apartment.
She’d been flirting with him for months,
he said. She told him that he looked
younger than his girlfriend, even though
he was thirty and she was twenty-six. It
was fascinating, he said, as though
already forming a poem in his mind. The
landlady was in great shape considering
her age. She took off her wig before they
made love. She howled during sex and
was so appreciative. She hoped he would
continue sleeping with her even after his
girlfriend came back. “You could be
slippin’ it to the both of us,” she’d said.
The door that had been closing
inside her slammed shut. He was never
going to change. He had no desire to. He
didn’t believe in psychotherapy. He had
read Freud as a teenager. He thought he
knew more than any shrink. “Therapy is
for whining middle-class babies,” he once
said. “I am who I am. I’ve chosen my life.
I’m going down with the ship.”
They both knew that she would
leave him one day, that they were playing
house, that in the end she wanted a
husband and children and he would never
marry, not her, not anyone. It wouldn’t be
then pressing his open palm into the point
of her elbow as though it were a breast
while he hummed in a low, satisfied,
grunt-like way. Revealing himself to her
like that, letting her see the eccentric
baby inside his authoritative, often
pompous, artist persona, was his way, she
thought, of letting her love him, and of
loving her.
1972
In June, she quit her teaching job and
planned to substitute teach part-time in
the fall so she could have more time for
dance classes and rehearsals. She was
performing in concerts in Berkeley and
San Francisco by then. She’d finally found
a sorority she wanted to be part of.
One night before bed, she was
soaking her muscles in the tub when a
tiny creature crawled across her lower
belly. When a second one emerged from
her pubic hair, she got out of the bath,
wrapped herself in a towel, and walked
into the bedroom where he was lying on
their bed reading.
“I think I have crabs.”
He put his book down and
grimaced. “I got ‘em, too, from Nancy.”
“Who the hell is Nancy?”
He opened his palms. “It was
nothing.”
“I don’t fucking believe it.” She
turned and left the room. How could she
have been so stupid to think that once
they were living together he would be
faithful? This time he’d not only betrayed
her, he’d infested their bodies and their
home. She had to boil all the sheets and
towels. She wanted to boil him, too.
She still hadn’t forgiven him when
she left in July to study dance at UC
Santa Cruz for six weeks. She developed a
crush on a male dancer who looked like
Bob Dylan. Her favorite, most inspiring
teacher, a tall, elegant black man who had
46
so hard now. She no longer believed that
he had an infinite amount to teach her.
She’d heard him tell the same stories too
many times.
She made a plan: She’d apply to
graduate programs in modern dance all
over the country. Once armed with an
MFA in dance, she would teach in college.
1973
In the spring, a dance department north
of New York City accepted her with a
scholarship. One of her dance teachers
told her that the chairwoman was a
famous composition teacher and that was
reason enough to attend. Another one said
she had to live in New York because it
was the center of dance.
He thought it was a great idea for
her to go. He wanted her to be happy, he
said, and he knew she couldn’t be happy
with him. They lived together until her
last day in Berkeley. He came with her to
the airport and got teary when they
hugged each other good-bye. She was
more numb than sad, as he’d been when
they’d split up that summer in
Cambridge. As the plane took off, she
looked down at the rolling, golden hills
and wondered what shape her life would
take now. She closed her eyes and leaned
back while the plane pulled her through a
bank of clouds into the sky.
47
Rest Assured micro-fiction by Mercedes Lawry
I’m not going against the grain. I’ve gone there before and what did it get me?
Heartache! I sprinkled my righteous indignation like seeds. I stood up to injustice
and perceived injustice and never once flirted with paranoia. I modeled my dreams
on the dreams of salmon. I spoke volumes but never too loudly, never hectoring.
Ghosts came to visit, and I did not turn them away. I listened to their concerns. I
opened cages. I lent a shoulder, for crying and for balance. I lent an ear, and a dollar
at the same time, and never asked for a receipt. Innocently, I turned my back and
there was hell to pay. And so I gave it all up and donned the appropriate wardrobe
and painted my house in approved colors and sat by the window, watching the
weather without complaint. I’m sitting there now, with no desire to draw attention
to myself, or any of the ideas I’ve buried in the backyard which must surely, by now,
have returned to the earth.
48
Birthday Girl 5 by Sarah Shields
49
a night in ogden city cemetery poetry by Kurt Rasmussen
What you want is a gravestone big enough
to hide your body from the street. My favorite
has a sleeping lamb carved into it and tells
of a girl who lived a dozen years, long before
I was born. I unroll my bed above the buried child
and think about her smiling down there, maybe,
as she senses my return. I lie down and feel
this derelict old city take me into its wounded heart.
I tell the one beneath me, It’s a tough world up here,
sweetie, you just sleep on, you ain’t missing much.
Which is wrong, of course, because she’s missing
everything there is. The summer night-winds lift the
sound of a siren up into the trees. Laughter from
apartments on the street is a welcome human sign.
A cop pulls up to stretch his legs and urinates
into a clump of bushes. It’s a friendly sound, to tell you
the truth, but if he finds me he’ll have to roust me.
I lie here so quiet I might as well be nothing.
50
Birthday Girl 4 by Sarah Shields
51
Sublime simply never considered an
operational definition for clean—or
dirty—prior to the bathroom sessions
with Lucy. Although for her part, Lucy
remained unfamiliar with the term
olfactory habituation, she knew what
it meant. Olafur smelled like Olafur,
but he didn’t smell himself and did not
know he did not, so she put it to him
directly.
“You can tell when people turn
away.”
Not with fingers, she insisted,
because fingers couldn’t scrub pores
where grime became embedded, and a
person ended up little better than
before. She showed how to wet the
washcloth before rubbing with soap to
work up lather then count rubs
against the skin, back and forth for a
dozen strokes under each arm. After
she had him do it for himself, his
underarms glowed pink, and, no, he
did not thank her, and, yes, his
mother had not told him much of
anything about anything.
fiction by Robert D. Kirvel
Bottomless wonder springs from
simple rules repeated without end.
—Benoit Mendelbrot
Hunched over a crate dead center in
an unfurnished room, he fished for
meat in the half-light. When living
had been primal, he’d damaged his
knees while clawing through
baseboards before poking into the wall
for what was living there. The
gnawing came in the small hours
when ears burned and the skin around
his joints flashed Technicolor distress.
It was better now, and worse, his life.
Olafur hoped Lucy had not
used the kielbasa for her favorite
game again. In any case, she didn’t
come around much after making her
suggestions. It was true, he’d not
known better until she had pointed
things out.
Some individuals would be
annoyed at people who chew with
mouth agape and lips a-smacking, but
Lucy was not of that persuasion.
Rather, she was emphatic about
hygiene and seemed distressed while
addressing Olafur’s lack of awareness.
“Didn’t your mother tell you
anything? Anything?”
He’d shaken his head in a
failure to comprehend rather than to
signal the negative, so she placed her
hand on his shoulder and piloted him
into the bathroom to demonstrate how
to apply a washcloth rather than
hands alone. It would not be fair to
characterize Olafur as unclean; he had
Mairzey dotes and
doesy dotes and
little ansy divies.
He’d decided at an early age
that words functioned much like
sounds in that odd song played
nostalgically on the radio from time to
time. Words were mostly nonsense
noises relayed from one person to
another, signifying little until
someone offered a translation through
actions.
Mares eat oats
and does eat oats
and little lambs
eat ivy.
52
would attempt. He signed up for dance
lessons, and to the shock of all who
observed him at the big studio, he
moved freely, more like a wild animal
than an adult human. After the first
few lessons ended and he was left
alone in the studio to pack his
belongings in a duffel bag, he found
himself moving to the music still
playing in his head, his body running
into partitions that split the hall into
smaller studios, some dividers nothing
more than bed sheets draped from
ropes to keep people from being
visually distracted by other dancers.
Yet when he stared at one of the big
sheets, the universe came free—his
personal universe—bringing into his
mind something distant in time that
urged him toward a precipice in space;
his spirit became energized, free to
grow hairy, horny for excellence, achy
in jaw and heart.
He bought his first can of house
paint and a brush. He stopped
shaving.
The whiskers came in thick
and black—an unexpected
development given his ancestry—but
even though hair everywhere else on
his body grew straight, the beard
developed its own disposition,
expressing itself through curls that
kinked with length. People gawked at
the growth on his face, and though he
did not recall being informed about
Muslim ancestry from either parent,
comments directed at him from
strangers suggested that lineage. To
an ethnic sneer when he waited for a
bus, Olafur’s expression admitted no
emotion, as if he did not hear people at
all or might be listening to internal
harmonies.
When the achy jaw did not
abate, the staff at a local dentist’s
office explained “the situation.” After
being poked and probed, he was told to
follow a woman into an office and to
As if that explained anything.
After thirty-five years of
misinterpreting much of what he
heard, before or after translation,
little evidence these days convinced
Olafur to revise his opinion. What else
had his mother neglected to explain?
Almost everything, but he couldn’t
keep the rules straight even when he
grasped them because they kept
shifting. He could not listen to the
words of a song and know what they
meant without assistance. For Olafur,
music was about melody, harmony,
just as an opera lover hears an aria in
a foreign tongue and is moved by the
progression of sounds more than any
message within the words. Spoken
words meant little to Olafur, and
worse still, human language was
usually about nothing at all.
Luck helped him turn a corner
after people no longer felt the need to
back away. The important thing was
that the interviewer had not shown
his back after Lucy’s washcloth
lessons. Instead, he explained in the
easygoing manner of one who has all
the time in the world about the job
opening and unusual work hours and
minimum wage and no health or
dental. He told Olafur he was
impressed even though the man later
jotted down “possible Asperger’s” on
the evaluation form.
Yet after Lucy helped him
complete the application and deliver
everything, he had the job. They
needed someone to restock shelves,
mostly dry goods shipped from Asia in
heavy boxes, and Olafur was strong,
was he not? Sturdy arms and legs
were what everyone noticed, as though
certain body parts had sapped
strength from weakened nerves and
bad teeth.
With a few coins in his pocket,
he did something he’d thought about
in childhood but never dreamed he
53
would heal—probably—but best not to
eat apples for a while, the physician
counseled. Then he repeated the
statement.
“Do you understand what I’m
saying?”
Medical bills arrived in the
mail several weeks later, four pages
with a total of $18,700.00 due in full at
the end of the month—thank you for
your prompt attention to this matter.
After Lucy made a hissing sound and
twin rivulets of sweat issued from
Olafur’s scrubbed armpits, the two
had as much fun together that evening
as a waiting room.
The shared atmosphere was
reminiscent of a time after Olafur’s
arrest for vagrancy when Lucy drove
downtown to bail him out. He’d been
sitting on a bench in the underground
station adjacent to the public library,
minding his business, and a policeman
noticed his appearance, including a
tennis shoe with a purple lace on one
foot and a bedroom slipper on the
other. A massive volume entitled,
Correlative Anatomy of the Central
Nervous System, Volume II, rested on
Olafur’s lap, open to page 1041, and
although he bothered no one, indeed,
he simply stared off into space with
his mouth hanging open, the officer
observed on a second walk-by that the
man’s posture and expression
remained frozen. The policeman did
what he usually did under such
circumstances.
“You okay, buddy?”
In response to more challenges,
Olafur repeated the same phrase that
sounded something like, “Man … del
… brought, man … del … brought.”
Down at the station, he was referred
for psychiatric evaluation.
“I was floating through space,
feeling wonderful when the walls
started closing in.”
“Your space had walls?”
sit in a vinyl chair in front of a desk.
He began to dread desks. The office
accountant entered and handed him a
multi-page summary entitled,
“Olafur’s Dental Plan.” She presented
a separate sheet showing the total
amount for required dental work,
which Lucy later huffed would take
three years of stacking dry goods to
pay. It was that or no teeth at all, take
your pick, the woman had shrugged
from behind the desk, so he signed the
agreement. Within a few weeks he
owed the dentist money for the first
phase of work, half a dozen teeth
extracted with roots still attached,
such as they were, but his underarms
no longer were the problem they had
once been according to Lucy, and he
still had half his own teeth in his
mouth.
During the small hours one
night, the wind outside ripped limbs
from trees and he could feel the pain
coursing through his jaw and
radiating down the neck, could taste
the rusty flakes flushed down gutters,
imagining it was the storm that had
awakened him with a bitter flavor in
his mouth, like blood, but a neighbor
saw what was happening and dialed
for paramedics. Olafur had stumbled
into the apartment hallway, still in his
pajamas, feverish before collapsing
from pain onto the tile floor, a ribbon
of red dribbling from one side of the
mouth, spilling over his beard and
running down the pajama top. People
dressed in green clothes in the
emergency room stanched the bleeding
and ordered diagnostics, and a man in
a white coat explained that a cyst in
Olafur’s jaw, located under a wisdom
tooth, had become infected. Tests
showed high blood pressure, hearing
loss, and joint disease according to the
doctor, and the growth itself had
almost eaten through Olafur’s jawbone
on the left side. Over time, the bone
54
before he could afford the price of an
overcoat or fork. That was the
situation before the subject of the tour
gave a thought to picking up a
paintbrush.
In responding to questions from
his audience, the guide drew upon
long-term memory stores to sift the
high-flown language favored by critics
of contemporary painting, comments
about the master’s reputation for
“nuanced post-modern ambivalence,”
how the artist had “advanced the
boundaries of found ornamentation to
reinvent a frenzied omnium
gatherum,” how the painter’s
hallucinatory seductions were in fact
“near-ecstatic meditations on the
turmoil of primordial cosmic forces.”
The tour guide avoided
overblown phrases unless his group
was exceptionally well informed.
Instead, he imparted to his audience
what he was most fond of saying:
“Truth is rarely a matter of yes or no.
Truth is complex, shifting.”
In this way, the expert
attempted to open the minds of his
audience—for we are all merely
human—but even as he spoke the
practiced words, the guide’s inner
voice insisted on being heard. There
was so much to say, yet wasn’t it
overreaching to offer even this much
information? Wasn’t there still a risk
of confusing the audience? Yet he
must take that risk.
He explained how Olafur had
managed to express with mere
household paint the subtleties of a
“universal dialogue” between heaven
and earth—as in the concepts of day
“breaking,” night “falling”—even
though when transplanted from his
native country as a child, the artist
was presumed to have suffered from
dyslexia along with vision
impairment. Considering the body of
work as a whole, and his pièce de
“Yes, but not mine. Space has
walls.”
“Hmm. And what did you feel?”
“I woke up.”
“And what were you thinking
about when the police arrested you?”
“Man … de … brought.”
The psychiatrist concluded his
write-up by noting that the forty-twoyear-old Caucasian male in question
appeared to be mildly delusional,
though likely harmless to himself or
others, basing his supposition on the
premise that emotionally and
intellectually well-adjusted adults do
not envision “open space” bounded by
“walls,” said boundaries in the present
case likely arising from a persistent
mother fixation developed at an early
age in reaction to an absent maleparent presence. The expert did not
elaborate on the idea of an “absent
presence.”
“Many of the inspirations for the
artist’s early work can be traced to
this very location.”
Each Wednesday’s morning
tour started much the same way, as a
middle-aged guide shepherded
admirers for a quick gander outside
the shabby apartment building Olafur
once occupied. The guide pointed out
what appeared to be a stump in the
front yard, all that remained now of
the well-known oak tree ravaged by
hurricane-force winds during a spring
storm so long ago and marked today
by a brass plaque affixed by the State
Historical Society. Inside the building,
tourists bent at 90 degrees to inspect
the “half-dozen ragged holes” torn
through baseboards, and filed in
silence past small items protected
under glass cover, including a safety
pin tied to a length of string used back
in the day to “fish” for dinner as the
luminary’s principal entertainment
55
She covered her eyes to blot out the
horrific images, but too late. Once
back home she knew she could neither
hide nor idle: Immediate action was
required. Terrified, she scurried
through the house, stripped bedding
from every mattress, and washed
everything in scalding water with
copious sodium hypochlorite bleach
added for good measure. Still, linens
were porous, so she coated the sheets
on little Olafur’s bed—the youngest
and most vulnerable member of the
family—with what was at hand, and
the boy never forgot the stiff and
scratchy texture that emitted a
chemical odor, not altogether
unpleasant, from the bedding that he
kneaded and nibbled and into which
he buried his nose the night through,
inhaling, inhaling vapors during an
era when asbestos was commonly
applied as insulating material and
vendors sold lead-based paint. Was
the stuff applied to Olafur’s sheets
lead-based or worse? Mom never read
the label on the can and would not
have appreciated the significance of
chemical formulations toxic to young
brains even had she bothered to
scrutinize the fine print.
It was perhaps ironic then, that
Olafur’s first painting had been
executed on a cotton sheet, and the
next and next, music of the cosmos
dancing in his head all the while.
Maybe the distinction between
household cotton fabric and plainweave canvas never occurred to the
artist, a man without formal education
who heard—or thought he heard—
things scurrying within the walls of an
apartment and who clawed through
baseboards to get at them, fished on a
crate for dinner with an unhooked
safety pin tied to a length of string,
but never fully grasped the need for
personal hygiene or the point of lyrics
to a tune, a dispassionate lover and
résistance in particular known to
every schoolchild and adult on the
planet, the celebrated Symphony of the
Spheres, undoubtedly here was that
once-in-a-millennium entity arisen as
something superhuman from the
corpus of Jove, the most highly
regarded painter living or dead.
The guide always concluded his
remarks on the bus ride to the
Metropolitan Gallery with a final bit
of advice. “Stand silently before his
masterworks, noting how suggestions
of time and space seem to travel
across the canvas surface, imparting
to the viewer an overpowering
impression of motion and emotion,
exponential and greater than any sum
of parts even if the elements of a given
painting sometimes resemble swarms
of tiny insects.”
Insects. The guide knew very
well that the effect he was attempting
to describe in later works had been
achieved through micro-batteries
affixed to paint chips, but such detail
was too technical for his audience,
irrelevant to appreciation, and there
was so much more to the story. Insects
suspiciously similar to dust mites, the
guide thought. The reality behind the
man and myth, underlying the very
notions of “paint” and “canvas” as
applied by the master? Had the artist
been as brilliant and inspired as most
claimed, or something altogether
different?
“Did your mother teach you
nothing? Nothing?”
The guide happened to be in a
better position than anyone else in the
world to know the facts. The real story
was that Olafur’s mother, the
curator’s grandmother, had convinced
herself that dust mites posed a deadly
heath hazard to her family after
seeing microscope-generated
photographs blown up hundreds of
times too big for her brain to absorb.
56
the essence of the artist’s work,
principally because the man himself
remained as unknowable and
insubstantial as a ghost inhabiting
tales the mother related to her
offspring.
Lucy’s and Olafur’s son, a
detail-oriented person, found
employment at a museum as curator
and once-a-week volunteer tour guide
when he wished to indulge an appetite
for human interaction, and his passion
for scholarly annotation would earn
unexpected accolades. Rummaging one
afternoon through his father’s trunks
stored in a closet for a decade after the
man’s death, Aldrik—the only child
and sole heir to Olafur’s estate—
discovered a notebook filled front to
back with sketches and other
markings in the margins. When he
pulled out a second binder of similar
nature, Aldrik realized he had
happened across his dead father’s
notebooks, four in all.
For a time, the curator thought
he might be looking at an illustrated
guide to a fantasy world written in an
imaginary language, reminiscent of
Codex Seraphinianus by the Italian
architect and designer, Luigi Serafini,
but that notion proved untenable.
Lacking the vocabulary to decipher
what others might have dismissed as
ravings, Aldrik spent months inside
the public library hunting technical
definitions then burning the midnight
oil at home poring over textbooks in
specialized areas of science,
probability theory, and philosophy.
Over time he decoded symbols and
meanings within his father’s arcane
texts, and what he began to
comprehend shook him to the core. In
an effort to link the language of
neurons to mathematics through
partial differential equations from the
calculus, the solitary artist had
proposed that excitatory and
disinterested father who had been
dubbed by his Australian-born dance
instructor “a bloody free spirit” as her
student twirled a rumba solo in the
manner of a feral pica, and who
ultimately found himself celebrated as
the most visionary artist to inhale the
mostly benign, if occasionally
neurotoxic, fumes of planet Earth.
Despite the disparity in
temperaments, Lucy would have
treasured the man’s affection back in
the days when they flirted with
affection, had she been able to secure
so evanescent a reward for herself,
and she did invite love once or twice in
the physical sense by allowing Olafur
to have his way, but never could she
manage to elicit or sustain a reliable
emotional interaction. Instead of
reciprocity or some living arrangement
of mutual benefit, she concluded that
emotional barrenness on his part was
not a temporary quirk of disposition
but an inherent aspect of character
unlikely to change. Olafur would
always be a person apart, Lucy told
herself, a child in the flesh of an adult,
oddly innocent yet profoundly flawed.
When at last she said her final
goodbye, Olafur did not turn his head
but remained standing on tiptoe atop
a weighty tome on astrophysics,
peering out a grimy window at what
appeared to be empty space.
After accepting the fact of her
pregnancy, Lucy welcomed the baby
but bid farewell to her friend for
sanity’s sake and the well-being of the
new life she carried. She reared the
boy herself, a bright child who took to
music and art from the start, who
loved to read and matured into a
thoughtful adult never knowing his
biological father and possibly for that
reason caring all the more about
gaining some intellectual
understanding of the man. Or if that
were not possible, then appreciating
57
first time. All this and more became
clear to Aldrik after weeks, months of
effort deciphering individual pages of
the first notebook, yet the child of the
man had tackled only a fraction of one
notebook’s content and had hardly
begun to relate his new insights to the
available catalog of paintings.
Aldrik agonized for two years
over what to do with the found
documents and his own conclusions.
Realizing he must share the
knowledge, he wrapped his father’s
yellowed pages together with his own
annotated translations in museumquality paper, tucked the packages
inside a leather briefcase, and handcarried the material across town to a
prestigious university press. After an
assistant editor expressed
astonishment edged with skepticism,
he alerted his supervisor for
consultation who, in turn, asked the
head of the publishing firm to join the
discussion. Following rigorous
verifications of authenticity, an offer
for publication was eventually
extended, and the curator’s translated
and annotated efforts along with his
father’s original manuscripts sold
more copies during the first year in
print than any other volume produced
by the publishing company in its
history.
For years to come, debates
among preeminent authorities in art,
art history, mathematics,
neurobiology, cosmology, and
philosophy would enliven the pages of
academic journals eager to advance
interpretations of the artist’s
revelations. As to whether any effort—
substantial though it might be—by a
mere artist to tackle the problem of
cosmic consciousness was to be taken
seriously, the principal arguments fell
into opposing camps. Many thought
the notion sophomoric on its face.
Others pointed to the obvious evidence
inhibitory presynaptic potentials
(EPSPs and IPSPs from
neurophysiology, short-hand for brainspeak) obeyed something akin to the
rules of fractals and the Fibonacci
series. The son was thunderstruck by
what could only be interpreted as a
father’s lifelong quest for some
physical representation of
“consciousness” by using the
“language of the universe,” that is,
mathematics. Here was a man with
essentially no formal education, one
who could scarcely relate to another
human being yet who dedicated the
second half of his life to developing an
ultimate representation of celestial
connectedness. A remark by Wilhelm
Furtwängler before the Bruckner
Society crossed the astonished heir’s
mind. Much like Bruckner, Aldrik’s
father “—did not work for the present;
in his art he thought only of eternity
and he created for eternity.” One man
wrote music; another attended to
music of the mind and painted what
he heard.
Buried in his father’s notes
were hypotheses about mathematical
visualization and how to render into
luminous images day “breaking,” night
“falling,” and the relation of each to
the other and to the subatomic fabric
of the universe together with complex
patterns driven by recursion and the
Mendelbrot set of values c in the
complex plane. Yes. Man … del … brot
had been much on the master’s mind.
In a quest for the nature of ultimate
truth, Olafur had privately proposed
the likelihood that truth, as he
visualized it, must be local and
changing over time, and that reality is
only interpretable as “mine” versus
“yours,” equivalent to the postulation
of an infinity of truths, which his most
mature paintings attempted to
illustrate. No, did illustrate, the
curator-son now recognized for the
58
at hand everywhere on the planet. The
local “cosmos,” which is to say the
human milieu, was already conscious
and aware, indeed self-aware,
apparent every time two human
beings communicated with one
another.
Some people write music;
others grow old and boring. One in a
billion opt to take on the universe.
Aldrik’s father had rendered a lifetime
of absorbed melodies into twodimensional space via latex house
paint slathered onto cotton bed sheets,
yielding insights so transcendent they
admitted of no modifier on which
experts—artistic or otherwise—might
agree.
There was no word in any
language adequate to the task of
describing what Olafur had
accomplished. “Profound” might do in
a pinch, yet in the end Aldrik adopted
another descriptor when asked by the
rare museum visitor or tour
participant to characterize his father’s
achievements. “Sublime” captured the
spirit of the matter and the man as
well as could be done.
59
Perfect Leaf by JoWoSo
Tick by JoWoSo
60
An Interview with Julie Christine Johnson by Lauren Davis
Lauren Davis: I am intrigued by your
transition from the corporate world
to the writing world. Did you have to
shed your identity almost to do that?
Julie Christine Johnson: The
transition coincided with a change of
place and a change of pace. I had started
writing In Another Life in Seattle while
working full-time as a wine buyer. But
moving to Port Townsend from Seattle,
slowing down, quieting down, made the
transition so organic. Initially, I was
afraid of the silence. I was afraid of being
alone all day. Would I have the discipline
to maintain a routine? Would the
loneliness take me down? Would I get
discouraged by working with no feedback
or validation?
A native to the Pacific Northwest, Julie
Christine Johnson transitioned from the
world of wine and food to writing full time
in 2013. In February 2016, her first novel
In Another Life hit the shelves, then went
into a second printing three days later.
Johnson holds undergraduate degrees in
French and Psychology and a Master’s
degree in International Affairs. Her
stories and essays can be found in various
journals such as Mud Season Review and
Cobalt.
I'd never not had a day job, never not
earned a paycheck since I was in college.
So I did go through a long period of doubt
and anxiety, feeling that I was wasting
my time because there wasn’t any
guarantee that I could support myself
writing. So I set a three year plan. If I
haven't found an agent or some kind of
solid indication that I could earn an
income doing this, then that would be it. I
would keep writing, of course, but I would
have to find other means to support
myself.
In a small coffee shop near the Port
Townsend Bay, over the loud clatter of
mugs and dishes, she shared with me the
journey of publishing her debut novel.
LD: So was it that plan that kept you
going?
JCJ: Absolutely. Home alone every
evening, as the day wound down and the
quiet set in, I would think, My God, what
61
am I doing? No one cares. No one is
waiting for my material. Who am I doing
this for? And the novel was still such a
mess at that point. I felt so isolated and
ridiculous. The imposter syndrome loomed
large. I just had to let the doubts filter
through and allow myself this planned
window of time to keep going. My choice
was to quit or just dig in and do it.
draft when I accepted I had a loosely
knitted together collection of scenes, but
no central narrative. So I stopped. I wrote
an ending scene and worked my ways
backward and then went to the beginning
and worked my way forward and just kept
carving away and knitting things together
until I recognized the story.
LD: Most of the novel centers around
religion. How were you raised?
LD: Was it the process of writing that
eventually allowed you to not feel
like an imposter?
JCJ: This may be surprising to those who
have read In Another Life, but I’m not
Catholic. I was raised in a variety of
Christian churches: Lutheran,
Pentecostal, Evangelical. I attended a
Baptist school until the 4th grade. I had
this full range of Christian religious
education and experience, with the
exception of Catholicism.
JCJ: That feeling still hasn’t gone away. I
still feel like an imposter. Do artists ever
lose that feeling? I think it's often what
pushes us on, never to take our work or
our creativity for granted. What saved me
was the work itself. The moment I sat
down and committed myself to that day’s
work, I lost myself in it. It's what I held
onto-–the bliss of writing, the discipline,
the routine. At last, I came to the point
where I was ready to pitch the novel. Not
pitch it out, mind you. But pitch it to
literary agents. A month later I had an
agent and a book deal with a publisher,
the offers coming in the same day. It was
that simple and that ridiculous and
complicated.
So there’s very much a theme of religion
in the novel but also a theme of faith--how
we develop our faith--and how much we
allow religion to steer what we believe
about the past. Which is certainly a role
that the church has played since the
advent of organized religion. Our
churches have steered our understanding
of the past, and have dictated our
approach to history, not just religious
history, but how we look at historical
record. I set out to challenge that, but
within a story of adventure and romance
that offers up an alternative to the
traditional historical narrative. The story
points out the holes and then fills them
in.
LD: You said that you felt like the
novel was a mess. What do you mean
by that?
JCJ: I didn’t write scenes for In Another
Life in chronological order. I didn’t have a
way forward because I didn’t know where
I was going or how the novel would end, I
hadn’t laid anything out in advance. I was
two-thirds of the way through the first
LD: Reincarnation is also an
important concept in your novel. Was
62
the writing process at all an
exploration of your beliefs about
reincarnation?
happen to it. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t
protect my work. There’s a certain sense
of surreality to it, to be standing with this
book that has my name on it, containing a
story that I created, yet it doesn’t belong
to me anymore. From the front cover
design to the back cover blurb, the novel
now fulfills someone else’s vision. That's
the thing when you publish. Your work
becomes a team project.
JCJ: You know, I still can't say that I
believe in reincarnation. It was
fascinating to explore how a religion like
Catharism could bypass the Resurrection
yet still believe in reincarnation, and the
theological distinction that they made.
I believe that we do
continue our lives after
we pass on in some
form or another,
whether it’s
reincarnation or an
afterlife. I take comfort
in that. But it occurred
to me as I got into this
exploration and
research of Cathar
theology that it simply
doesn’t matter what I
believe. The truth
exists regardless.
Even the writer I was
throughout this process,
who wrote the first words
of In Another Life four
years ago, who launched
the novel this February,
is not the same writer
she is today. I have to let
go and accept that this
work as the writer I was
at that time. And accept
that the work is finished.
I think it is true of every
writer, that to promote a
book you have to circle
back and reconnect with
the work. For most of us, it's been a yearslong process. You’ve gone on to other
things and your brain and heart are
engaged elsewhere, in other stories and
projects. That all has to be put in a
separate drawer to open up this novel's
drawer and return to the story and the
writer behind it.
LD: How does it feel
to have something outside yourself,
to have your book beside you? Does it
feel disembodied?
JCJ: I turned in the final proofs in late
October 2015 and I knew it was over. The
novel wasn’t mine anymore. I went
through a sort of strange, elated
mourning. I was so excited to be done
with it. I was so thrilled that it was going
to be published and this whole huge
adventure was about to begin. But there
was this part of me that was terrified for
the book, and afraid of what was going to
But the beauty of this process for me--and
something completely unexpected--has
been to fall in love again with Cathar
theology, Languedoc, and this era of
European history. I thought I had
63
finished with this world, that I was done
with this story. But in the process of
talking and writing about In Another Life
and the profound beauty and imagination
that are inherent in Cathar philosophy, I
know I’m not finished with their stories.
Perhaps not even with these characters.
Maybe this particular story, but not with
Languedoc or the Cathars.
LD: So another reincarnation?
JCJ: Unavoidable, if we're talking about
the Cathars.
LD: If there’s anything you want to
say to your readers, what would that
be?
JCJ: One of the themes I explore
throughout In Another Life is the
difference between history and the past. I
would love for readers to follow the
threads of their own doubts and question
the way history has been presented.
Consider the source and challenge it. The
past cannot always speak for itself.
64
Career Advice from Your Uncle in Canarsie poetry by Will Nixon
Don't sacrifice your dog's testicles or
give your life to selling cookies & tires.
Don't cook the coyote who sang for justice
& definitely don't wear a paste-on mustache
to an office party hosted by a boss who buys
his pants at Sears & drinks pink cocktails with
somebody's college-age daughter from Phoenix.
The Queen of Siam in your needle isn't a sermon.
You'd be surprised what they'll pay for a bucket
of worms if you catch the tides right at the pier.
There's always truth to be dragged from the bottom.
Work hard. Work often. Always collect on Fridays.
Otherwise, I'd offer advice, but I'm no example.
When the Episcopalian says, "I'll sell you another,"
just stand in Canarsie and let the tide roll out
to reveal the stink washed up from Tucson:
you wife wants a new Fuller Brush Man.
Remember, Lent never stopped suicides
& Valentines always wear fangs.
Batteries cost extra, but are required.
65
Send you a bouquet by E. Kristin Anderson
I hope I am very much a doll,
the flowers nearly gone
before I go to bed.
So many treasures of summer
know young ladies,
expect others.
In time, I remain the same,
everyone gone to bed
but me.
This is an erasure poem. Source material: Emily Dickinson’s letter to Abiah Root,
September 26, 1845. Pages 16-17 of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition of
Emily Dickinson: Letters.
66
How to Deal with a Miscarriage poetry by Dana Boyer
Leave the papers on the table.
The ER papers, the ones that say,
‘Spontaneous Miscarriage with Bleeding’ and
‘Return for Worsening Abdominal Pain and Bleeding’.
Think of the language of the Big Bang,
how they use ‘spontaneous’,
how they say somehow
the universe couldn’t hold itself together
one light second longer.
And think of that, within your body,
a sudden blooming in the darkness
that pushed itself beyond you.
Put the papers in the fruit bowl.
The baby would have fit in the fruit bowl.
The baby would have fit in the spoon inside the fruit bowl.
67
Milkweed Stages by JoWoSo
68
From A to Z: An Interview with Josh Medsker on His Encyclopedia-­‐Inspired Project nose, and the best part of all, a white
hamster sits perched atop his shoulder,
posing for the pic. Aside from being
wildly fearless to take on
Medskerpedia, Medsker is a dogloving, guitar-strumming bibliophile
who hails from the tundra of Alaska
and somehow ended up teaching
English lit in what he calls a “gritty
city” in Jersey City.
by Meaghan Quinn
Meaghan Quinn: Can you describe
the genesis of Medskerpedia?
Josh Medsker: Every day I read an
entry from the Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics, and afterwards
I write a poem that is in some way
related to that topic. Some have been
directly related and some have been
very abstractly related. For example,
the other day I had "Anglo-Saxon
Prosody" so I took a selection from
Beowulf and modeled my poem off of
that. It has taught me some pretty
interesting things about the writing
process in general and my own process
specifically. I’ll have about 1600 poems
when I’m done. It’s going to take me
until the summer of 2019. Whew.
Josh Medsker is an interesting guy. I
was virtually introduced to Medsker
through his anonymous chapbook
series called Twenty-Four Hours—a
short collection of three anonymous
chapbooks
(www.twentyfourhours.com).
He’s baptized his current project
Medskerpedia, a project that has
empowered him to write 1,600 poems
in a span of just two years.
I knew going into this interview that a
fascinating literary journey was ahead
of me.
MQ: For me, the writing process is
slow. Oh, so very slow. I am lucky
if I average a poem every three
weeks. And then I toy with it,
tinker and erase, switch forms
and swap images. For me, the
revision process is relentless, and
so as a writer, I most wanted to
know how you stay engaged and
move forward to the next prompt,
given that you simply have no
As I Facebook messaged him in the wee
hours of the night, it became clear that
Medsker is an average person with
heroic ambitions. He writes to the
rhythm of his own pen, a trait best
embodied by a recent selfie he posted,
in which he looks dead-pan into the
iPhone camera. His scrubby beard is
full of charmed secrets, black-rimmed
glasses slipping down the bridge of his
69
published on personal blogs and social
media, and consider it previously
published. After a few days I got bored
doing it by myself, so I decided to
create a secret Facebook group
instead, to make it more communityoriented. It’s really made all the
difference, in my mind. Sharing our
writing is wonderful, very encouraging
and useful. We critique each other’s
work as well.
time to fuss over the futility of a
period versus a semi-colon. What
is driving you, right now, to finish
this project?
JM: I guess fear is always driving me.
But after talking to some writer
friends of mine, they convinced me
that keeping going on the project, and
not some self-imposed deadline, was
the most important thing. I would like
to hit 300 poems by July 22nd though.
But to fully answer your question,
curiosity is driving me the most these
days. The sheer variety of these
encyclopedia entries is fascinating and
scary and keeps me from leaning back
on my pet obsessions.
MQ: Using the Facebook platform,
you post a topic or a form, and the
other members are encouraged to
write work based off of the given
topic. You are currently working
through the C’s: Chiasmus,
Chicano poetry, Chilean poetry,
Chinese ancient poetry. As the
variety of your writing prompts
continue to grow, so has the
readership and the contributors
to the project. At this very
moment, Medskerpedia has 109
members with more members
knocking at your virtual door
every week. What makes your
writing prompts and poem
sharing special? Why should
writers engage your project over
others?
MQ: The act of writing is solitary.
It is an interior process, sitting
with one’s thoughts, breaking
open the cocoons of memory,
engaging with the universal, and
all the while, the oppressive blank
page stares back, unyielding.
Upon writing your first entries for
your “encyclopedia,” you, too, felt
stifled by the silence of the screen
and chose to open up this idea to
others using a private Facebook
page. What is the Facebook group
and why did you want to create a
virtual writing group? Can you
share a mission statement or
overall purpose of the group?
JM: I would say that the sheer variety
of topics sets us apart. I’m a big fan of
teaching yourself to do something
through trial and error, and
Medskerpedia offers plenty of
opportunities. Another neat thing
about Medskerpedia is the length of
this project. And, as I was saying
before, the people involved are stellar
individuals, very supportive, and
smart as hell. We have a bunch of
risk-takers in the group, and I’m
always floored by the work they
produce. I think maybe the thing that
pleases me the most is that there will
JM: The Facebook group is where we
post our poems, and critiques of the
poems. We don’t have a defined
mission statement. Just to show up,
kick ass, and leave it all on the page.
It’s turned into a real tight core group
of ten or so, with others chiming in
now and again.
When I started Medskerpedia, I was
originally going to just post my work
on a secret website, so only I could see
it. A lot of publishers balk at work
70
and Medskerpedia as the project
evolves. The second of three interviews
will appear in the Spring 2017 issue of
the magazine, and all three interviews
will eventually be posted on our
website.
be a definite end to the project. That
gives it more value, I think.
Visit us at: thetishmanreview.com.
This is not a new concept, this idea of
writing under time constraints.
However, Medskerpedia is by far the
largest and perhaps, the boldest, of its
kind. Furthermore, most poets will not
write 1,600 poems in a lifetime, let
alone in a two-year window. What
Medsker is doing may sound
impossible to some, but at the same
time, no one can deny it is a noble feat.
In pursuit of my own poetry production
expectations, I recently signed up for
Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project for the
month of July. Although thirty poems
in thirty days sounds challenging and
overwhelming at times, I can look to
Medskerpedia as a guiding light to
seize the day, to find the poems all
around, and to write even when the
words are hard to discern among the
dissonance of daily life. For those of
you interested in cheering on or even
contributing to Medsker’s
encyclopedia-inspired prompts, you are
encouraged to find him on Facebook
and send him a message, so that he
can add you to the private group.
Also, stay tuned, as we at TTR
continue on this journey with Medsker
71
Forgetting Is Another Kind of Extinction poetry by Lisa Mecham
Where pavement slips into pines
even the universe has said, no rules.
Change is just a rearrangement
of the same facts. Your heart
swelling in its ribhouse, yearning
to trace the faultvein, settling
instead to pace the forest floor.
Let's dance the seed cemetery
with all this old grief. Nature itself
nothing but shameskin gathered at our wrists.
All these trees with outstretched arms
seem to give but it's need they want.
How can you say you remember nothing
good? Lay with me, let's watch the stars
unloose like stones tossed wingspans apart.
In this wild celestial afterbirth
I can learn to forgive myself again.
72
Grief by Falconhead
73
Trespassing poetry by Lisa Mecham
Teens, the street, night, nothing to do so they split
off in two’s, find an ark like Noah’s, unfinished.
A wooden-frame, all two-by-fours and exposed pipe
dreams, she won't go in but he takes her hand.
They wander, imagine walls, windows, become temporary
residents in a sketch of someone’s future disappointment.
A playhouse, rehearsal, with him as Man, her as
wife mother daughter, every living thing of all flesh.
Then on the plywood floor, it's just a boy pounding away
and a girl, her quiet cries turning stars into doves inside.
74
Larchwood, Iowa poetry by Dylan D. Debelis
You'll come back,
you always do.
To these flooded plains,
this Michigan drawl,
Fourth of July bottle
rocket fizzle
pop up
explode power lines,
stitches, guitar string
twitches, your brother
plucks
uneven time.
You'll come back
to the pastures, stale manure,
fingers calloused, twine wrapping hay bales
tight,
night cricket violin
making monsters out of cumulus
clouds so large they punch into your throat
stealing breath.
Down by the river
comparing your nakedness to hers,
wondering if the fireflies in your jar
will imprint this like a flashbulb,
her hand leading where your hand leads,
in the dark empty stomach of God,
your memory is a desperate crucible
banging an anvil
that used to spark so easy.
75
The Parade 2 by Stanko
76
Ground Cover nonfiction by Cecele Allen Kraus
told her or came out of hiding too
quickly. The trigger for my outburst
eludes me, but my words still echo:
“You’re an idiot!” Mother flew out the
front door, shouting: “Don’t ever say
that word again! Never say that!”
Special needs classrooms didn’t
exist in Richland’s schools at that
time. Kindergarten was the only
placement available for Anna. My
second grade class passed her
classroom on the way to recess. I
looked in. Barrettes clipped Anna’s
wispy hair. She wore her red gingham
dress. Children milled about, all taller
than Anna. She sat alone, eyes
darting, mouth open, as if about to
speak, but no words came out. Her
eyes cast about, as if flashing an
urgent message.
Her teacher stood by the door,
chatting with two women. I overheard,
“It’s very hard to have Anna in class!”
How strange to hear her discuss my
sister. Did my classmates hear her?
Did Anna? I told no one.
As we grew older, Anna’s small
features and spindly limbs made me
think of a little bird. Tenderness
twined with longing for a normal
sister, a coil that shadowed me and
rooted into a desire to understand our
lives. That coil—a tangle of tendrils—
reached into a troubled environment
and history.
My sister, Anna, was born in
Richland, Washington, a farm
community transformed into a
government-owned company town for
the workers at the rapidly constructed
Hanford Atomic Energy Plant. In the
desert of south central Washington,
Hanford processed uranium into
plutonium and shipped it by train to
Los Alamos to make the atom bomb.
Daddy accepted a recruiter’s offer to
work as a patrolman at the plant. He
left rural Alabama in 1943. My mother
followed a few months later by train,
with me in her arms.
Anna suffered brain damage
during birth in 1945, two months
before Hiroshima. Doctors diagnosed
her with blue baby syndrome, which
involves a reduction in the heart’s
ability to pump oxygen to the brain.
When I was a teenager, Mother
confided to me that Anna’s difficulties
resulted from the two times she
received anesthesia. Now I find that a
spike in births of babies with this
syndrome occurred between 1945 and
1948 in Richland, raising the question
of possible radiation contamination.
At first, my parents thought
Anna might be deaf. She didn’t
respond to voices or make eye contact.
Sitting, walking, and speech came
late. Though each year her limitations
became increasingly evident, we did
play together, spreading blankets over
the dining table to make tents. Hiding
in the tent, I read Dick and Jane to
her. One day we played hide and seek.
Maybe she didn’t do exactly what I
Knowing I had lived in Richland as a
child, a friend told me about an NPR
interview with Kate Brown, author of
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic
Cities, and the Great Soviet and
American Plutonium Disasters. I
rushed to buy the book, eager to read
accounts of Richland life and Hanford
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tumbleweeds. Dust whirled. I knew
memory rearranges personal history,
but this geography startled me. I said
to Jerry, “I thought I grew up in a
green environment!”
In the distance we could see Mt.
Rainier. Childhood trips to the
mountains had been magical.
Anticipation heightened as we entered
that green world. Animals might
emerge from the forest. Scanning the
trees and the spaces between them, I
exclaimed, “Oh look! I almost saw a
bear.”
As we continued, my mind shed
its green filter, revealing a stark
palette of brown, taupe, and sand.
Memory had painted my desert home
in the forest colors of Mt. Rainier and
carried a wish for hidden things to
show themselves. Now, twenty-five
years later, anticipation grew once
again. What hidden things would
come to life? What would this land and
town reveal about Anna and my
family?
history, bomb making and radiation
contamination, and to gather clues to
Anna’s damage.
Brown compared the
contaminated environments of
Hanford and Ozersk, Russia, the first
producers of plutonium. Two statistics
stood out. Between 1945 and 1952,
Richland’s parents-to-be were exposed
to clouds of iodine-131, xenon-125, and
strontium-90 from Hanford’s
unfiltered stacks and intentional
releases. In 1945, the year of Anna’s
birth, 345,000 curies of radioiodine
were released into the atmosphere and
blew downwind. Decades of radiation
illness followed. Did her brain damage
result from contamination?
Our son lived in Portland. A
trip to Richland involved a four-hour
drive east from his home. Telephone
poles nailed down the north side of
Oregon’s I-84; power lines staked the
south. Wind turbines plugged deep.
Irrigation pipes on tripods made me
think of narrow-nozzled dinosaur
heads. Discarded tractors and trailers
scattered over the sagebrush terrain.
Poplars grown for pulp split the sky. A
mosaic of attempts to tame the roiling
sands. I scanned the crevices and
bumps of the topography, and like a
nineteenth-century phrenologist,
moved my hands over the terrain of
Anna’s beginnings, hoping to decode
her mystery, fathom her brain
damage—find the sister she would
have been.
Blue sky and cold desert air. How
edifying to visit this little city in
winter. With trees bare, I could see
far. Richland’s alphabet houses,
quickly built in standard models
designated by letters, lined the
streets. Below my hotel, a walking
trail covered the former town pool
where Columbia River water, laced
with nuclear waste, swirled. Anna and
I swam there as children.
For forty miles, I passed only
service trucks entering the Hanford
Site, driving grounds prohibited for
decades. On my left, power lines
stretched as far as I could see. On the
right, the river curved beyond tractors,
machinery, and an aging nuclear
reactor. Tamed by dams built over the
Tumbleweeds evoked memories of my
first return to Richland since I was ten
years old. In 1985 my husband, Jerry,
and I drove the brown hills and
unrelenting desert on a family
vacation. I wanted to show Jerry and
our adolescent children, Janine and
Andrew, where I grew up. Winds spun
78
time of my mother’s loneliness. We
lived in a Yakima apartment miles
from Richland until housing became
available. Daddy visited on his days
off.
My family moved back to
Alabama when I was eleven years old.
Anna was nine. We lived in a small
house in Tuscaloosa for a year or so.
The desert we left behind had made
me a child who sought solitude as well
as friends. Alone in the house, I found
one large trunk my parents had
shipped ahead to Alabama. I opened
it to find lingerie, sheer nightgowns,
men’s pajamas, a couple of Bibles, and
letters bound in ribbon. Love letters
written during his time in Washington
before she joined him. Carefully, I
untied the ribbon. In slanting script,
black ink on thin paper, my father
wrote: I’m driving the desert tonight. I
feel my semen coursing your beautiful
long legs.
I never forgot that letter and
thought of his love of her legs as she
developed varicose veins, wore heavy
elastic stockings, and had vein surgery
in her middle years. Tall and slim,
she played high school basketball and
swam competitively. Though she had
a few dates along the way, he was her
first and only sweetheart. Chaste, she
married my father at eighteen.
Walking miles on country roads, she
taught in a one-room schoolhouse.
In their later years, I heard my
parents giggling in bed, telling each
other stories, recounting family lore.
past eighty years, its tranquility
contained a tragic tone.
My parents immigrated to the
atomic world. What did my father
know of such a universe? Raised on a
crude Alabama farm seventeen miles
from town, he paid room and board to
attend high school. When he left for
the University of Alabama, his cousins
thought him odd. Returning home in
1953 after eleven years of
employment, he spoke of Hanford with
awe—the night sky, tumbleweeds,
Chinook winds, cold river water,
cherry orchards. He did not mention
its WWII role.
Hanford offered my father an
alternative to military service and the
opportunity to remain with my
mother. My parents had suffered the
death of their first child, a three-yearold boy, and did not want to be apart.
As a child, I watched my father leave
the house to catch the company bus
dressed in a police uniform, with a
heavy black belt and holster. I never
saw the gun, but I had seen cowboy
movies and knew what a holster was
for. As I grew older, I realized he left
the gun at work.
Bars patrolled, arrests made,
gambling rings broken up, terrain
scanned for spies. I can only know his
days by reading oral histories.
Welders, carpenters, mechanics, and
other construction workers lived in
barracks, far from family. Beer halls
were popular, and drunkenness
common. A rough world, but not
totally foreign to my father who grew
up in a bootleg county, a fighting
culture. His father gave up
bootlegging to marry my grandmother.
She kept a shotgun at the door.
On my second day exploring Hanford,
I rose at sunrise eager to experience
the Hanford Reach that was declared
a national monument in 2000. I drove
the river’s east side, a vast stretch of
land taken from the Wanapum tribe
I thought of my parents as I drove the
desert, home of my father’s longing,
79
The Hanford Site has the dubious
distinction of being the world’s largest
nuclear cleanup center, the most
contaminated land in the Western
Hemisphere. My husband joined me
on this visit to Hanford. We applied
for a pass for a government-sponsored
bus tour of Reactor B and the
surrounding area. Nuclear waste
accumulated here from the middle of
World War II through the Cold War
until 1987 when the last reactor shut
down. From the bus, we watched
HAZMAT-uniformed workers remove
contaminated soil. The bus idled as
the guide stopped to give information
about the cleanup. Huge excavation
machines dug deep pits and loaded
contaminated earth onto trucks for
transport up a ramp to be processed
into containers.
The guide described the future
of Hanford’s waste treatment plant,
now under construction. When
completed, a process of vitrification
will mix nuclear and chemical waste
with glass-forming elements to
immobilize waste in glass cylinders;
the glass will be decanted into steel
canisters and sealed. Once sealed, the
waste may be shipped to undisclosed
locations. Currently, 177 underground
tanks store fifty million gallons of
liquid waste along with spent nuclear
fuel, plutonium in various forms, and
solid waste. Two hundred seventy
billion gallons of groundwater hold
contaminates above drinking water
standards. Already sixty underground
tanks have leaked. All are at risk.
That phrase undisclosed
locations haunts me. I think of the
undetermined cause of Anna’s brain
damage, the off-limits world of
Hanford, Daddy’s secret work life,
Mother’s private mourning, and my
early perceptions of Anna’s
disabilities.
and the farmers of White Bluffs and
Hanford. Pavement quickly turned to
gravel. Seized as a security buffer for
the Hanford Site in 1943, the fiftymile stretch has been untouched by
development, the only free-flowing
section of the river unhampered by
dams.
For two hours I passed no one. I
drove slowly, noting bluffs rising
above me. Hiking was permitted, but
no trails existed. I scanned for details.
The landscape unfolded. Bluffs. River.
Shrubs. What had this land looked
like seventy years ago? Who had lived
in that lone prairie house with its
windows blown out?
Hills became steeper. Ice
patches forced me to turn back.
Nuclear reactors—decommissioned
atomic-age relics—glowed in sunset
fire. The sunset dimmed. I didn’t want
to drive in darkness, but it was hard
to pull away.
The next morning, I searched
eagerly for my childhood haunts.
Clues eluded me. Where was the
carved-out canoe in front of Marcus
and Whitman Elementary? Or was it
Lewis and Clark? New buildings
obscured the town of my memory.
Recently constructed homes dotted
landscaped hills. As in old Richland,
each house resembled its neighbor,
but now two-car garages proliferated.
Downtown had evolved into a frayed
atomic-era relic. Flimsy houses needed
repair. Only a few original houses
seemed updated. Broken bikes,
machines, and chipped gnomes
cluttered yards. Just as the U.S.
government had reshaped this land to
accommodate war needs, real estate
development transformed the land to
house nuclear cleanup workers.
80
In recent years, Hanford has
reconfigured some of its contaminated
lands. Hanford Reach promotes itself
as the last stand of shrub-steppe
habitat in the Columbia Basin, but its
national monument designation
doesn’t stop rabbits from leaving
radioactive droppings on nearby
Richland lawns.
Richland carries the high price
of desert towns throughout the West.
Fungi released by blowing dust fill the
newly built houses and inhabitants’
lungs. Flu-like symptoms and lung
infections result. Termed “valley
fever,” the disease can cause
permanent impairment. Cases have
been reported in the Richland area.
Though endemic to Arizona and
California, epidemiologists have
determined that fungi released by
local soils cause the fever.
This could be the trailer for one
of the horror movies my teen friends
and I watched at 1950s drive-ins.
Mysteriously, a disease arrives, takes
over the town, maims and kills
citizens in horrendous ways. The
possibility of a valley fever epidemic
becomes real as pesticides, radiation,
and rampant construction endanger
the ground cover binding restless soil
to its natural habitat.
As a child, I ate tomatoes from
our yard, probably left from farms
displaced by land takeovers. Four
o’clocks blossomed by the front steps.
Asparagus grew wild until water pipes
were laid for new housing. Outside
town, the Umtanum Desert
buckwheat and the White Bluffs
bladderpod, naturally occurring
ground cover of the Wahluke Slope,
rise above the river. Buckwheat plants
cluster the river bluffs; bladderpods
burst to brilliant yellow when the
weather heats up. They grow on
scabland once selected by the
government as wasteland ugly enough
Side by side at the kitchen table,
Mother wrote numbers for Anna to
copy—three plus two, four plus one.
“You know the answer, Anna,”
Mother said. “We just did that
yesterday.”
“That’s good, Anna.”
“Oh, look, everybody, Anna got
an entire row right. Isn’t she smart?”
“No, I’m not,” Anna protested.
Mother wrote out words on
dotted and solid lines, as if one day
Anna would learn to spell, as if good
penmanship would undo Mother’s
screams for relief from labor pain, as if
she could refuse that second
anesthesia, make her baby pink
instead of blue—reverse the damage
to Anna’s brain.
She wrote, “Good,” on Anna’s
drawing of a never-changing
landscape—green yard covering the
bottom third of the page, square house
with a door, rectangular windows, a
small chimney puffing smoke, an oval
cloud hovering in a blue sky.
In an effort to control the dust, the
government gave families seeds to
plant grass and trees. Irrigation
systems containing radioactive agents
provided water. Trucks sprayed DDT.
Kids followed the trail, sniffing its
sweet scent. Daddy joined
neighborhood men in their front yards,
hose in one hand, a cigarette in the
other. Not banned until 1972, DDT is
known to cause birth defects, cancer,
nervous system disorders, and blue
baby syndrome. Cigarette smoke
added to this synergistic mix of
anesthesia, radiation, and DDT.
81
for a bombsite. Designated
endangered species in April of 2013,
they keep the shrub-steppe soil from
blowing.
Despite plutonium-polluted
groundwater, the plants break
through the soil and flourish. With a
life span of one hundred years,
bladderpods and buckwheat have
survived Hanford’s atomic history. I’m
wondering: can lowly plants
counteract radiation? Protect against
valley fever? Provide habitat for
insects? And can the willow coyote
trees planted in the Columbia River
Basin absorb enough strontium-90 to
remediate groundwater?
Clouds draw my eyes up the
cliffs. This beauty requires a change of
lens—an opening of the soul.
relatives from around the state
gathered for her funeral. Light
streamed through the clear glass
windows. Banks of flowers circled her
coffin. She lay in a rose-colored dress
with her hair combed loose to
compensate for thinness.
Three clergymen gave eulogies.
Brother Williams said, “She served as
light to another world.” Brother
Holmes, a fiery preacher, spoke last.
Reflecting on Anna’s friendships with
the other preachers, he chuckled. “And
I always thought I was Anna’s best
friend!”
In a long procession of cars, we
took her to Daddy’s homeplace in
Micaville, Alabama. Mother led us to
the cemetery across the road from the
Baptist church, singing, Some bright
morning when the day is o’er, I’ll fly
away, to that home on God’s celestial
shore, I’ll fly away.
Anna’s body, now far from the
desert of her birth, carried plutonium,
anesthesia, DDT, and Daddy’s
nicotine.
I thought, Dust to dust.
The earth shoveled over her was
red.
Mother stood at the kitchen sink.
Anna sat on a loveseat, her voice
stopped mid-sentence. My sister died
suddenly at the age of forty-five.
Anna’s Avon customers, friends from
the sheltered workshop where she did
piecework, Mother’s prayer group, and
Sources:
Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium
Disasters. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Gerber, Michele Stenehjem. On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Print.
Moyer, Donn, and Kelly Stowe. “Valley Fever Fingus Found in Washington Soil Samples.
“Washington State Department of Health. N.p., 22 May 2014. Web.
“Questions and Answers: Nitrates in Drinking Water.” (n.d.): n. pag. Washington State
Department of Health, May 2012. Web.
Sanger, S. L. Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford. Portland, OR: Continuing
Education Press, 1995. Print.
82
Reach by Adrienne Christian
83
The Home Office nonfiction by Richard Jones
First I couldn’t find my passport. Then I couldn’t find my birth certificate. My aged
mother, wishing to set her things in order, had given me the original from the
hospital in England, and I’d put it inside a book for safekeeping. That was a
mistake. My home is a library, the walls lined with thousands of books. In which
book could it be? My wife and children sacrificed a Saturday morning, the five of us
taking books from the shelves and flipping the pages in search of it. We found
drawings, postcards, theater tickets, photographs, but the birth certificate was lost. I
ended up writing the Home Office. I told everyone, “I’m writing the Home Office in
England to get a copy of my birth certificate.” The Home Office sent an official copy
of my birth certificate, and I went to the post office and applied for a new passport.
Then I flew to Paris and spent the spring in a tiny third-floor apartment between
the Seine and the Bastille. If I could live my life over, that’s where I’d live, in Paris
on Rue Saint-Paul, a happy expatriate. Of course I’d visit London often. I’d cross the
channel on the ferry. From the prow I’d look for the white cliffs of Dover—their
nobility, their dignity. Riding the train past rolling fields and ancient farms—“this
earth, this green”—I’d imagine myself in one of the cottages, weary from labor,
smoke from the chimney writing my name against the sky and the wind blowing it
away.
84
Incidental Offering poetry by Caroline Plasket
When he and I embrace, each day, each night on a forged promise of forever,
I have offered my body: almost as his own
but never even mine, really,
it is there in my bones, where the love settles.
We are the found bird nest that sat on the porch table to be admired
until the cats knocked it off to become a
pile of dirt, straw, and broken shell—jagged blue pieces of a puzzle undone,
to be swept back onto the earth beyond the porch:
home.
The same cats keep catching cicadas and bringing them to the front door.
An offering of broken wings. A death,
while thousands of cicadas in the trees around sing the song of living.
I glue a separated wing to a picture and cover it with shellac.
It is timeless there,
but, it can’t fly.
My children sit around the table each night
where we lay food in front of them,
our offering; a wing of love
ripped from somewhere.
It all becomes timeless in their bones.
One day the children can sprinkle this as ash over the world.
Not so much an offering, as a sweeping us back home.
We are timeless there, though we don’t breath,
we fly for a moment on the air, before that ends too,
and the settling in happens.
85
moss bank poetry by H. R. Webster
the slanted barrens of pines
and every night
the rain
purple over the river
the climbing water smoothes
over edges
after we left the mountain
my legs shook for 2 days
after we left the mountain
the cloud followed
me home
and the moss marked
me up
soft
when you rose
to meet me in the dark
86
In the Presence of Effervescent Wings poetry by Alexa Doran
It’s always early in the garden.
Something purple always pumping harder than the night.
In the eternal saffron shade, the massacre of a tulip.
Each wrecked petal curls across the bay.
Each one a plum burst, a soda bubble dream, each one furled from
the touch me, touch me of that violet skirt of sea.
Sighing in the flamingo light, everything fuchsia and useless,
the pollen scatters its thousand touches
at your throat. Its thousand yellow gloves muttering across your lips,
its thousand orange answers afloat. Every flower is an atlas,
garbled blues in the north, in the south a telltale pink—no, it’s not
paint without hope. It’s a world where there is no image
of man, just the fan of effervescent wings, the faceless earth
beating, rising rootless in the wind.
87
The Specific Ocean poetry by Ben-David Seligman
On Baker Beach this winter night
is not well lit. The distant glow
of living rooms does not
illuminate the sands. The moon
does not appear tonight, but
hides behind the drifting clouds.
Up the slope, the scrub grass anchors
firmer ground. Thick poles, waist high,
with braided wire strung from each
to each, jut out to mark the end
of firm terrain, and mark the start
of dunes and plains that form the beach.
And all askew, my bicycle
is leaned against a jutting pole,
locked in place by coiled cable,
each pedal’s edge reflecting in
my flashlight’s beam. I turn and leave
for water’s edge. My steps are soft.
The ocean roars and foams. Its waves
attack the shore. There is no peace.
The air is cold. A sudden rush
of water catches me off guard
and chills my feet.
There is no peace.
88
One Lap Left nonfiction by J.W. Kash
What is keeping you inside this
peripatetic coffin, choking and
gasping, burying yourself alive with
the unremitting movements of your
legs? You don’t know. But you’re here
in the middle of this battlefield with
shrapnel piercing your lungs and
napalm in your veins. And you suffer.
Yet your consciousness, in the
dire drama of the fleeting, competitive
moment, is often a poor storyteller.
Every seasoned athlete approaching
the last lap has awe-inspiring epics
beneath their floundering, little,
mewling thoughts. You hope these
long, lost, lonely expeditions and
fierce, raw, and brutal engagements
somehow find their way to the surface
to contain and direct the roiling,
grasping, mental anguish. You hope
your time spent in circular prisons,
the slashes on the walls marked by
the impacts of feet, outweighs the
guilt and shame of the times you sat
sated and still. You hope the early
morning exhaustion followed by heavy
thrusting through deep snow,
trembling collapses and bitter tears,
the freezing winds and numb
extremities, the harsh, gritty, scraping
inhales, are remembered over the time
you neglected your midnight push-up
routine and fell asleep face down on
the concrete basement floor. You hope
the glorious, vast views from
carnivorous, conquered hills, the cool
showers on scorching skin, the
restricted and tasteless diets, the sore
and sluggish days, the treadmill gas
chambers, the planks of prayer, and
the masochistic meditations will be
favored in your memory over the times
you gave in to the vacuous,
undemanding, cheap pleasures of the
comfortably-shuffling masses. You
hope the private obsessions—the
The pain is so intense during the last
lap of a track race that there is rarely
room for thinking. The master plans
and firm resolutions you’ve calmly
repeated to yourself over the weeks or
years are incinerated by the writhing
fire coursing through your limbs. The
intoxicating and ephemeral vanities of
medals, records, faster times, beating
this person or that person, recognition,
and pride are strangled and suffocated
out of your mind by your body’s
desperate plea for breath. The sly
demons of self-indulgent justification
and easy, endearing excuse claw at
your muscles and insinuate
themselves in your brain. You’re never
fully prepared. No amount of intensity
in training can emulate the horror and
the torture of the last lap. Never in
your life have you come closer to the
merciless void beneath all things.
Never in your life have you felt
yourself hurtling so violently down a
gaping abyss. You’re not the first to
admit suicidal yearnings before the
last lap begins or a devious desire for
a hooded man to jump on the track
and break your legs: anything to avoid
the encroaching agony.
The best part of you on the last
lap is nothing more than a frantic
beast fleeing a predator or a starving
barbarian hunting his prey. Any
intellectualizing or analysis of the last
lap will result in hopeless despair or
crushing absurdity. There is no good
reason for this pain. Why not step off
the track and end this madness? Why
not slow down and ease this torment?
89
But you tried. And you failed.
On the last lap your body crumbled,
crippled, and cracked. You finished
near last place when you planned to
finish first. Remember walking
wearily home: your constricting
throat, your shaking hands, your
smeared and stinging vision,
stumbling in a ditch, your universe
spinning and contracting at the
intolerable injustice.
In your bedroom you lock the
door. Sobs wrench themselves out of
your heaving chest. You rip the pages
out of your books. You smash the
plaques and awards against the wall.
You grip your head and dig your nails
into your scalp with a ruthless rage.
But you’re just an eighteen-year-old
who lost a race. Is this a tragedy?
Now you’re twenty-two years
old. Another four years of unwavering
dedication have passed. You have
labored and learned. You are smarter
and stronger. You are humbled and
hopeful. There is no doubt in your
mind that you would’ve become a
drunk or a drug addict if you had not
found running. Being fast has saved
your life. Your most inimitable
moments of happiness are the minutes
after you run. It is a drug you will
abuse until you can no longer move or
die. And championship racing is the
most stimulating and satisfying of
hits.
You approach the last lap of
your last indoor race. You crawl
through thirty seconds of catastrophe,
cross the finish line, and look up at the
scoreboard. You have missed a school
record by 1.3 seconds. Your college
career is over and you have failed in
what you set out to do. Of course it
does not matter. Of course the
difference of 1.3 seconds faster or
slower is, in the grand scheme of
things, meaningless. But emotions are
the unruly, rowdy, riotous cousins of
weeks of carrying a metronome on
runs to fix/quicken the stride, the
prostrate pouring over of professional
athlete biographies, the copying out of
elite training regiments, ignoring
school teachers while meticulously
calculating splits, walking on toes to
strengthen the calves, never using
elevators, shivering in bathtubs full of
ice, and closing your eyes and
pumping your arms and visualizing
success—were not in vain.
Never forget your injuries.
Remember it is better to fail miserably
on the track than to sit placid and
content on the sidelines. You’re here in
this interminable inferno, this
thrashing whirlwind, this consuming
conflagration of physical deterioration
because you refuse to sag or slump in
the stands. Racing is better than
counting the beads of sweat as they
steadily drip on the handlebars of a
stationary bike. Racing is better than
strapping a flotation device to your
waist and flailing around in a
lukewarm pool. Racing is better than
flexing your ankle for hours against
the resistance of a rubber cord. Racing
is better than stern and warning
doctors, sympathetic but
uncomprehending friends, and crying
beneath a pillow at night.
Never forget the shattering
cruelty of your unexplainable defeats.
You were eighteen years old. You had
been running for two years. Two years
is a long time for a fidgeting,
compulsive, immature adolescent to
focus on one thing. It is a long time to
have all decisions revolve around the
gradual improvement of a specific
task. It is a long time to disregard the
superfluous amusements of your peers
and stare stoically down a single trail.
It is a dangerous and disastrous plan
to stake all your hopes and dreams on
a fifteen to twenty-minute
performance.
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Sometimes, you crave the
blackness of oblivion. …
No.
There is something else you
decide to do. You must find a new
discipline among this discouraging
dirge of devastation.
You sign up for a race. Yes, my
friend, you sign up again. It is a
different kind of race, one you have
never run before, but the essentials
are the same.
Four years of training pass.
The fateful day arrives and you
step on the line. The gun goes off. The
race begins. Everything else fades
away.
Relax. Keep in control. You’ve
been here before. You know what to
do. The pain is rising. The struggle is
daunting. Your thoughts become
feverish. Your soul will soon be
devoured.
Endurance is something that
can’t be taught. It is the most difficult
thing to learn. The pain never gets
easier. Only the capacity to cope
becomes easier.
It is always the same: simple
exertion against your body’s desire for
rest and repose—a part of you saying
stop, the better part saying no.
You approach the last lap. The
bell rings. The crowd roars. Your
competitors jostle you on either side.
But you do not notice these things.
There is only an eternity of track
stretching ahead of you before the first
curve. You wish you could escape this
eternity. You wish you could
disappear. You wish you could die.
But in this horrifying hellfire,
this ludicrous lashing, this corporeal
chaos of self-inflicted suffering, the
slaughtered and stricken sinews, the
throes and the throbbing, your wicked
weaknesses and previous, despicable
defeats pulling you down, down, down,
the endless execrable excuses, the
prudish, serious, well-behaved reason.
They don’t care about your journey.
They don’t care what you have gained
along the way. They mock and ridicule
the straining hand which slipped on a
ledge as it attempted to lift your soul
to a self-imposed summit.
Inside you are falling. For
years you are falling. You are a
mature adult now and don’t have
temper tantrums in your room. You
have a mundane, monotonous, milling
job and sometimes eat out for dinner.
You float through your gray, dreary,
dropping life like a piece of driftwood
in a stagnant swamp or like a dismal,
dingy ghost. The flame inside of you is
faintly flickering. The flame is about
to extinguish.
Where have all the fanatical
frustrations and achievements gone?
What happened to your furious,
gnawing impatience? You tore your
tendons, lacerated your lungs, and
mangled your muscles to present the
gifts of guts and gore on the awesome
altar of putting one foot in front of the
other. What have you to show?
Instead of: 15.27 miles, two
mid-run shits, tibias still tender,
vomit post-run, you have: order nine
cases of X, alter Excel spreadsheet,
call Todd from I.T., need more staples.
Instead of turning the shower as cold
as it will go and timing how long you
can stand there to increase mental
resilience, you hastily scrub beneath a
scalding stream because you’re late for
a staff meeting, then you trip out of
the tub and glance in the mirror and
loathe the creeping creature you see.
Instead of audacious front running,
gratifying aches, sit-ups in a quiet
hotel room, you have a cramped office,
a creaky desk chair, worn-out
thoughts, desolate emotions,
demolished dreams, and a withering
life.
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inexorable insanity, the allencompassing absurdity of it all, you
must somehow make room for a
thought that will rise and soar above
the wailing wreckage, a thought that
defies all reason, a thought that defies
all doubt, a thought that has always
been there and will always be there. It
is the only thing that has ever
mattered.
Go, now, push …
Run until your heart explodes.
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Twice on Tuesdays electricity and fire. They gave themselves
orgasms for the first time, sweaty
revolutions finger-painting slippery
visions of past, present, and future.
Everything is seeded before it
blooms in green and lush seasons that
leave behind only husks, and hearts are
no different and run on the same whirring
cicada hum that fills the air as clouds of
insects float and feed on flowers then die,
leaving crisp black shells that turn to
powder underfoot.
This walking to the edge where
land ends and water begins made me
wonder if Edna Pontellier had a
destination in mind. Something besides
oblivion. Maybe it was like Galileo falling
in love with the sky. When I was little,
Mom would rent a shack on Grand Isle
and we’d drive down to swim and fish and
play and bake ourselves pink in the sun
over a three-day weekend. Each night
Mom mixed two Bombay martinis and
poured them into a thermos. I’d get to
help, dropping in two olives, licking my
fingers for the oily salt. A grape soda from
the fridge, twisting off the top all by
myself. We’d pull plastic chairs off the
porch and onto the beach, chair legs
sinking into sand that was finally cool
against my feet. We’d lean back, Mom
with her thermos, and me with my pop,
and she’d talk about astronomy. I’d wipe
the bottle against my forehead like I’d
seen her boyfriends do with Lone Stars
after mowing the lawn in the heat, the
bottle dampening my bangs.
“Shell, did you know Galileo fell so
perfectly in love with looking and distance
he figured out how the sun worked? And
the moon and the earth, too? All the
planets, really …” She leaned close, her
hair falling onto my forehead, and pointed
to a star just above the horizon. “So, that
one right there is Venus, named after the
goddess of love.”
fiction by Sheila Arndt
Falling in love is just a way of looking,
really. Bet you I could fall in love with a
daffodil given the right ray of sunshine.
Once, in the Cologne Cathedral, I fell in
love with the columns, running my hands
over cool, smooth stones, calculating the
weight they carried. I imagined all those
who had been there before me—the oil
and DNA their hands had left, and what
new slip of skin I was leaving in my wake.
It’s a kind of reading, this love
business: the magic of ticket stubs creased
and book-marked into pages and dogeared corners pointing to lines that need
revisiting and marginalia that winds way
down and back around to the top of the
next side until it unspools and dangles
like a thread or a stiletto about to slip off
a red-painted toe, all lust and sweat.
Summers on Grand Isle made me
that girl: the one who walked up to the
place where water meets shore and then
kept going, trying to touch something
cosmic. Gabriel García Márquez knew the
feeling when he wrote about desire and
said, “There is no God worth worrying
about.” Good sex could get me close, but
sex can become two bodies racing toward
separation and the bloom is quickly off.
The way a girl of thirteen grows
transparent and temporarily disappears
when a boy grows hard against her at a
school dance, calls her “Sally” even
though that’s not her name. He moves to
the next girl with the next song, calls her
“Sally.” And how that disappearing was
nothing like the way those same girls felt
in twin beds in the dark, their bodies
deliciously thick with neurons and nerves,
damp flesh lit from the inside by
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my goosebumps felt like sunburned
pinpricks. I walked along, eyes hard on
the ground, waltzing with waves while
salt stung my mosquito-bite-scratched
ankles. Something sharp pricked the
instep of my right foot and I pulled my leg
up under me like a flamingo. A small
black triangle protruded from my skin. It
was a shark tooth, black from absorbing
the minerals and salt from the water.
Mom wrapped it in wire and put it on a
chain for me. When I teared up, sad at
leaving without my penny, she shushed
me. “Venus sent you a shark’s tooth, hon!
Sharks can be lethal, but it’s because
they’re pure and driven and relentless.
They always keep swimming. That beats
shiny any day and twice on Tuesdays.”
She kissed me, wet, on the
forehead. I didn’t wipe it off.
I loved her forehead touching
mine, the little transfer of fluids, salty
sweat and heat. I’d wipe my forehead
after she leaned back, surreptitiously
licking my fingers, wanting to consume a
part of her.
“She came out of the ocean, fullgrown, wearing a dress made of sea-foam
and salt and pearls, looking like a cake
topper. They say she was love. You’d
think you can’t love something that you
can’t get next to, but it’s just not true.” I
stared at her, and she stared at the stars.
I wanted her to look at me. She finished
the last of the thermos, turned it over so
the olives plopped into her palm, and gave
me one before she ate the other. It was
briny and smooth.
The last time we went to Grand
Isle, the last night we spent on the beach,
she pulled me onto her lap before we went
inside and said, “If I were Galileo and you
were the sun I would sing the wondrous
workings of your system till the wind
blows and water flows.” She pressed her
cheek to mine. It was warm and sticky. I
peeked to see where she was looking then
set my eyes on the same sky. “My mom
used to say to me that’s the kind of love
you want. The kind that sings to the room
and all the way to the stars, and if you’re
really lucky, you’ll figure out how to do it
up close.” She pulled two pennies and her
penknife out of her pocket. She scratched
a little S on the tail’s side of one and
handed it to me. She scratched a J on
hers. “Okay. Backs to the ocean. Close
your eyes. Make a wish on Venus in your
mind and throw your penny. When you
find it again, your wish will come true.”
I screwed my eyes tight and
clenched my teeth and imagined myself
far away on a star talking with a
redheaded lady in a white dress made of
bubbles and tossed the coin over my
shoulder.
I got up before Mom early the next
morning and ran to the water. The sand
was wet and cold with morning dew and
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Dueño de silencio /Lord of Silence poetry by Janet Ruhe-Schoen
for Federico Garcia Lorca
Dueño de silencio
I walk beside the
inconsolable river
where you died.
From the six strings
of your guitar,
invisible at
the water’s edge,
I hear a chord. As in
a fairy-tale the prince’s
blood, spilled by a
satanic sword, will sing
from the ground, telling
truth to his bride,
so your blood, long dried,
sighs, awaiting
her loyal footstep.
Meanwhile, there’s this
glittering stream.
Dueño de silencio,
you are the pride
of the inconsolable
river where you died.
95
Canción del caballo verde/ Song of the Green Horse poetry by Janet Ruhe-Schoen
for Federico Garcia Lorca
Didn’t know I was walking toward the sea
until I looked to my right
and saw that the hill had turned green overnight.
Looked away,
went straight ahead,
thinking,
This unused hill between buildings
is not a place where I’ll see a horse running,
disappearing over the rim.
But then my mind said, and I saw it:
Over the green hill the riderless horse
went galloping, down
through the green valley, down
to the dark green sea.
Dark green was the horse
as the dark waves rocking,
green, green, as he went galloping
into the riderless sea.
96
Snake Light My father sent the snake to us while
he was stationed in Vietnam. A
surprise is coming your way, he’d said,
raising his voice so we could hear him
over the noisy cracks and pops coming
from his phone line in a war zone. It
didn’t seem like information that
needed to be yelled.
When the package arrived, my
mother set it on the dining room table
and waited for my brother and me to
come home from school. We watched
as she took her sharpest scissors from
the sewing machine cabinet and cut
across the top of the box, releasing the
tape that would soon release the
surprise. In previous boxes from our
father there had been dolls under
Plexiglas and Hot Wheels never seen
by our friends before. My brother and
I gleefully tossed the foreign-looking
newspaper out of the box and onto the
floor before we saw the content, and
gasped.
In the box, looking right at us,
lay a coiled snake carved in wood. He
had sharp little green glass eyes and
carefully detailed scales and a slightly
open mouth. There was a hiss. There
would always be a hiss when I
remembered the story.
My brother, who was only five,
jumped back, bumping his head on the
door frame. He began to cry and my
mother quickly closed up the box,
shoving the newspaper on top of the
snake. She put the box on the top shelf
of the closet in the spare bedroom.
“You know your father,” she
said to my brother. “He loves stupid
things like that.”
When my father returned to
our lives, he found the box. In the
kitchen, my mother whispered to him
about how the snake had made my
brother cry.
nonfiction by Denise Tolan
After they died, he first, she three
years later, we had an estate sale.
The estate sale lady told my
brother and me to take everything we
wanted out of our parents’ house so
she could price and sell what was left
behind. It seemed like there might be
some hard decisions to make, but
there weren’t.
Neither of us wanted the
grandfather clock my parents
purchased to commemorate their
fiftieth anniversary or any of the
furniture accumulated over the years.
We both passed on the Babe Ruth
collector plates my father had hoped
would double in value.
I wandered through the house
alone and found the wooden snake
hidden behind the water heater in the
laundry room.
“Look what I found,” I said,
carrying the snake by his coiled neck
into the living room. My brother
looked up and then away, as if I’d
found hidden porn. “Get it out of here,”
he said.
I laughed a little.
“I thought mom threw that
away,” he added. “She should have.”
Where there had been some
hesitation and discussion about the
plates and the clock and the furniture,
there was no question that the snake
would be sold. I took the snake into
the dining room and set it under the
table—thought better of that and
moved it on top of the table. No need
to startle the nice estate sale lady.
97
“I’m making it into a lamp,” my
father said. “Who’s going to cry about
a lamp?” He took the snake from the
box and twisted its three parts
together. Once finished, the generic
snake became a rising cobra, listening
for unheard music. Released from the
box, it was even more imposing.
My father tried to assure my
mother that placing the snake by the
front door would scare burglars. My
mother found a corner where the
snake could hide behind a rubber
plant. She claimed the snake would
look like it was in its natural
environment. She winked at us.
We never felt protected from
burglars or the snake or our father.
Sometimes at night, walking
from the kitchen to our rooms, the
light from a passing car would sneak
into the living room window and strike
the snake’s glass eyes causing us to
shudder, imagining what could be.
At the estate sale, we sold the
clock, and the plates, and the snake
that was never made into a lamp.
In the end, the snake became
just another object that had seemed
important until he was gone.
98
What a Beautiful Dream fiction by Randall Brown
ate her niçoise, too. Her personal chef
came out to remove the plates, patted my
head, Peach's too. Oh, Peach. Sad, silent
Peach.
A red curl of Peach’s hair dropped
in front of her copper eyes. I moved it
back in place, stroked her carnation-pink
cheek. Her arms—permanently
outstretched, palms upward—made me
check the sky for rain. She wore a white tshirt, a black-stitched face over her heart,
Xs for eyes. Over it, to keep her from
getting a chill, her mother had chosen a
grey hoodie with purple stripes. I reached
behind Peach, wanting to straighten
things, felt instead the hole. My arm
snaked up her back, went inside, a
subterranean cavern, cold and empty. Her
head turned to me.
“Pick me up. Go ahead. Remember
my voice as we built a tower of cards to
the ceiling.”
Yes, deep like a frog's. One more,
she'd croak, and I—trembling—would
hand her the cards, and sometimes she'd
drop them before she could place them
and they'd flutter-by, flutter-by, never
hitting the tower, flutter-by.
“Remember,” Peach-puppet said,
“when my father came out of the kitchen
with a meat thermometer stabbed in his
shoulder. 'Do you see,' he said to us, 'what
she's done now?' Mother came running to
hear me say to Father, 'She must've been
very hungry.' The three of us collapsed in
laughter. You, too, Samuel! Another time
Father had strewn trash all over the
kitchen, saying, 'You'll see. Someone will
make it disappear.' You and I swam
through the garbage, coast to coast,
mother and father clapping.”
How often I’d dreamed of Peach’s
house—so much space, so much wild life,
so far away from my life in that tiny
trailer next to the tent revivals, all those
tongues speaking their own languages,
My aunt had a puppet made to look like
her dead daughter, Peach. When I stayed
with her that summer, the Peach-puppet
sat at the table by the pool with the two of
us, my uncle already gone. I'd come as
Peach's replacement, even though I was a
boy, someone to reanimate my aunt.
“They used to think the sun
orbited the earth.” My aunt picked at her
salad niçoise, separating each
ingredient—green beans, olives, lettuce,
tuna, potatoes, onions, egg, capers—into
its own space. “Did you hear that,
Samuel?”
I shook my head no, my mouth full
of mixed-up niçoise, the best thing I'd ever
eaten. Peach had died in a plane, a family
trip to Casa de Campo, an anaphylactic
reaction to something in the airline food;
they thought pesto. Imagine her drowning
in the air, unable to find breath after
breath, throat closing, that awful silence.
“I hear laughter.” She sipped her
whiskey. “I think it's coming from the
clouds.”
I checked. Not a cloud in sight.
Just an airplane, its exhaust an ash-trail
against the brilliant blue. It looked like a
sea. A sea in the sky. The exhaust now a
wake. Peach, the puppet, stared straight
ahead like my aunt. Imagine the rest of
the plane ride, their dead daughter in her
window seat, above clouds, staring into
the sun.
Peach had been sometimes quiet,
like now, contemplating, awaiting her
moment to bust out. I tried to be like her,
but my Peach impression did nothing for
my aunt. She remained half-present.
When she fell asleep in the lounge chair, I
99
like a TV getting all the channels at once
with no way to drown them out.
My aunt woke up. “So sly,” she
said.
“What do you mean?” said Peach in
that frog's croak.
“Waiting so long.”
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Computer Work poetry by Robert Joe Stout
At times I notice patches on the wall
where tape has pulled paint
off the plaster but only for a moment
then the wall gives way: The boy I was
(afraid of coyotes) faces
a malicious snarl, a motorboat careens
through rapids as I grip the rail
and yell, La Negra, naked in the studio,
Want what I can give? Fingers
on computer keys I see
my youngest curled asleep
beside our cat and feel
a touchdown pass I leaped for
trickle off my fingertips. Twitter
offers triteness, FaceBook even less
as images of Tamuìn, Paris,
Denver merge. Lost somewhere among them
I pry onions from wet furrows,
brush strands of auburn hair
from someone’s flushed and sweaty cheek,
lick the last of spilled orange sherbet
from my fingertips.
101
Duboissle fou by Anni Wilson
102
Cocktail Party poetry by Robert Joe Stout
People in the room
greeted me as though they knew me,
shook my hand, offered me
what they were eating, talked
of things I didn’t comprehend. A young man
asked me what I knew
of Texas, another about storms
in Mozambique. I answered though I didn’t know
what I was saying. A woman
I remembered seeing once before
spilled her drink. I sopped it off the cushions
with a hankie
while she went on describing
sailboats skimming maroon water
and trees whose leaves in winter
tinkled little bells. Asked my opinion
about feral porcupines
I shook my head
and told the changing faces
that I was someone else
and didn’t belong. The woman I’d once seen
explained that sometimes happened
but if I kept on talking I’d become
the someone that I was.
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Malvolio by Anni Wilson
104
Gates, Canals, and Veins Others continue their conversations,
turning toward the panels, as though
Filippo is invisible. They have not
removed their red hats and travel
capes, as though they expected him
not to make it in the first place. They
look like a flock of the red-headed
ducks that swim in the canals; some
seem ready to pounce on their prey.
Filippo’s closest friend, Rabbi
David Gabbai, is the only one who has
removed his cloak and red cap to
expose his kippah and tallit. The
fringes of his prayer shawl spill over
his breeches, which are wide at the
thigh and taper to the knee. “Per
favore,” David says to the men, “he is
here now.”
The men stop talking and stare
at the newcomer. Filippo feels like an
outcast and the Ten Days of Awe, the
days connecting Rosh Hashanah to
Yom Kippur, is a time of extra
scrutiny. Sins, even accidental, must
be acknowledged and rectified before
the final day of Yom Kippur, or Filippo
risks having his name erased from the
Book of Life and faces an even more
difficult year ahead. And this New
Year, 5385, or as the Venetians call it,
“the Year of Our Lord, 1624,” Filippo
has vowed to live up to all of his
promises. In return, his performance
in all tasks will be judged.
“Shall we begin?” David
motions for the crowd to put down
their belongings.
The congregants remove their
travel cloaks, placing them on the first
row of wooden desks on either side of
the sanctuary. Like other Italians,
most of their jackets have puffed
sleeves worn over doublets. But unlike
other Italians, they must wear red
caps to identify that they are Jewish.
The government has ordained this for
fiction by Thaïs Miller
Filippo Rosenthal has two major
duties during the Ten Days of Awe,
and he is late for the first. As he
sprints, two steps at a time, up the
stairs to the synagogue’s sanctuary,
the light from the windows dims. The
sky turns as pink as his cheeks. He
pants louder than the wood creaking
under his boots. Only one more flight
of stairs left. Men argue in Italian
upstairs:
“He hasn’t been here in
months!”
“What makes you think he’ll
show up now?”
Sweat drips down Filippo’s
temples, along the dark, curling hairs
of his beard, trimmed minutes ago by
a patient: a Jewish barber who
insisted that Filippo stay for a haircut,
because he could not afford to pay him
otherwise. Filippo’s cloth satchel
whips his back. Both of his duties, he
has learned, are burdens disguised as
honors.
When he enters the sanctuary,
his eyes adjust to the darkness.
Though the windows are shuttered at
the opposite end of the room, strips of
light break through the slats. Near the
ark, fifty male congregants face him.
They stand, leaning against the
cherrywood desks and walls of the
sanctuary. The youngest has just
become a bar mitzvah; the eldest is
propped up with two canes.
The old man beats one of his
canes on the ground. “Look who finally
decided to join us!”
Some men laugh, pushing away
from the ornately carved wall panels.
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“Watch it!”
“Cazzo!”
“Stop that!”
Filippo looks out the window.
Black gondolas in the canal surround
the synagogue. Their plush seats,
upholstered with ornate silk, are
covered in pieces of bread. The
gondoliers wave their fists in the air at
the congregants and yell, “Morta
Cristo!”
“Hey, doctor!” yells one of the
gondoliers, noticing Filippo’s black
cap. He takes out a knife, points it
toward the window, and stabs the air.
“I got a piece in my eye. You better
come down here and fix it!” The man
laughs and his peasecod makes him
look like a giant fish swimming in the
lagoon. The man paddles on.
Filippo feels David’s hand on
his back and turns around.
“This is nothing,” David says.
He lived with the Ottomans before
coming to Venice, and though he is
twenty-seven, the same age as Filippo,
the dark skin on his cheeks and hands
appears far more wrinkled from the
scars of cuts and lashes he received as
a child during an attack. “Are you
worried?”
Filippo shakes his head, trying
to appear braver than he is.
David smiles and gathers the
congregants together. “Have a nice
meal at home and please hurry back
so that we can begin our prayers for
Shabbat.”
A few men groan. Filippo’s
tardiness has left them little time.
over one hundred years. Only Filippo
wears a black cap to denote his
profession in medicine. As the men
remove their caps, they reveal their
diverse kippot: small and large, round
and square, leather and linen. No two
look alike.
Without removing his cloak or
black cap, Filippo walks directly to the
five shuttered windows of the
synagogue. He starts from the left,
pushing each window open and
propping it with a wooden stick until
the canal is visible far below and a
breeze flows into the room.
Senior Rabbi Simone Luzzatto
approaches Filippo. “So, this is David’s
friend. Thank you for assisting us with
this ceremony and opening the gates
to prayer.”
Filippo shakes his lined hand.
Rabbi Luzzatto has reached and
surpassed the holy age of forty. He can
study all the mystical texts. There is
something piercing about his
demeanor, as though he knows every
secret and false vow hidden away
during these Ten Days of Awe.
Filippo opens his satchel,
revealing three loaves of stale, round
challah that his mother baked earlier
in the week. Rabbi Luzzatto gives the
blessing for the Tashlich ceremony.
The congregants push forward, each
grabbing a fistful of bread until
Filippo’s hands are empty.
Rabbi Luzzatto puts his hand
on the shoulder of a teenager in the
crowd. “This bread,” he explains,
“symbolizes our sins over the past
year. By throwing this bread into the
water flowing through the canal, we
will dispel our sins and beg God’s
forgiveness.”
David throws the first piece of
challah into the canal. The other men
crowd around the windows, throwing
out the bread like confetti. From four
stories below, men howl:
On his way out of the synagogue,
Filippo fears that his second duty
sounds simpler than it will turn out to
be. During the Ten Days of Awe, he is
responsible for keeping Doge
Francesco Contarini alive. Paolo
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holding his youngest son, Raffaele.
Anna wears a white linen tunic
embroidered with gold silk. When she
passes the baby to Filippo, she looks
like a swan with wings extended.
He stares down at his son.
Raffaele’s small hands reach up,
clasping Filippo’s beard. The baby
laughs.
Anna strokes the short, dark
hairs on her grandson’s head. She was
younger than Raffaele when her
family came to the ghetto. A disease
had festered in their German village,
but miraculously all the Jews had
been spared. Filippo’s maternal
grandfather, Emanuel, had been a
doctor and he believed their survival
had to do with the mikvah, their ritual
baths, but couldn’t be sure because the
local government forbade him from
treating gentile patients. Emanuel
told Filippo that none of the gentiles
washed themselves. They walked
around in their own filth. The
townspeople who had lost their
relatives blamed the Jews for the
disease, claiming his family had
murdered the sick, stealing their blood
to make matzah. One night, the
townspeople burned down his
grandparents’ house. His grandmother
ran out of the building, cradling Anna
in her arms, only to be captured by a
local butcher. The butcher cut off his
grandmother’s finger to steal her
wedding ring.
Emanuel stitched and cared for
the wound. As they fled Germany,
Filippo’s grandparents met other
Jewish families, including the
Rosenthals, his father’s family, who
were heading to Venice. The ghetto
had earned a reputation as a haven.
Filippo feels the weight of his
son in his arms. He knows that the
ghetto’s locked gate aims both to
contain the Jews inside and prevent
attackers from entering the
Foscari, the doge’s primary physician
from a noble Catholic family, was
asked to accompany several members
of the Council of Ten to the restorative
hot springs of Valtellina. In Dr.
Foscari’s absence, Filippo will have to
report for an emergency, regardless of
his religious obligations.
Filippo dashes through the
courtyard where sprigs of grass stick
up between the cobblestones. He
passes another synagogue and a sign
for the “OLD JETTO,” the area of the
old metal workshop. When his
German grandparents came to this
neighborhood, they could not
pronounce the J like the locals,
naming it the “ghetto.” Filippo lives in
a seven-story building, the tallest
building in the New Ghetto.
When he arrives at the front
door of his building, he digs into his
satchel, searching for his key. Several
people brush past him, all of them
wearing red caps. A man shuffles past
with dark circles under his eyes, his
shoulders slumped. He must have
worked all day in the city, just
returning to the ghetto before
nightfall. The gate to the ghetto
squeaks. Ten feet away, a Catholic
night guard closes the gate, locking
the Jews inside the ghetto. The
guard’s keys and chains jingle. The
gate locks with a loud snap. The guard
walks away, whistling.
Filippo’s palms sweat. The doge
lives across the city. Not only are the
ghetto gates locked at night, but
during Shabbat, it takes longer for
news to travel as most of the
community is worshipping. If
something happens to the doge,
Filippo may not respond in time. If the
doge dies, he will die, along with many
of the people surrounding him.
He unlocks the door and rushes
up the stairs. His mother, Anna, is
waiting for him in the entryway,
107
yellow badges. With new privileges
and distinctions, he thinks, came
greater exposure and liability.
Anna pats her son’s hand. She
says to Filippo in Yiddish, “You look
pale. Are you feeling all right?”
He pushes his plate aside. He
cannot eat. If he fails at his second
task, what will happen to his family?
He looks out of their window and
notices that the sun has completely
set. The first stars are twinkling.
“I have to go back to the shul,”
he tells his family. He gets up and
puts on his cap and a thin cloak.
As he walks down the stairs, he
tries to cheer himself up. He has an
important position; he is paid well.
And, despite the doge’s sixty-seven
years, he is in relatively good health.
Filippo locks the door behind him and
walks into the street. A man without a
hood, a gentile, carries a torch just
outside the ghetto gate.
“Doctor?” the plump man asks.
“Doctor Filippo Rosenthal?”
“Si,” Filippo responds and
moves closer to the gate, unsure what
the man intends with the torch. Above
the flickering light, Filippo sees the
small bridge, the Ponte de Ghetto
Vecchio, which connects the ghetto
island to the rest of Venice. For a
moment, he thinks how strange it is,
that Catholics and Jews live in such
close quarters, separated by a locked
gate and connected by a small bridge.
The iron gate is cold. The
messenger’s red tunic and belt barely
fit around his rotund waist. He wears
the doge’s colors. Metal jingles and the
man takes out a series of brass keys.
He goes one-by-one attempting to
unlock the gate. “The doge needs you.
Please hurry.”
“Wait, wait!” Filippo throws his
hands in the air. “I have to tell my
family.” In the windows at the top of
his building, the dim lights from
neighborhood at night. But he often
questions the safety of separation.
The baby reaches his arms
toward Anna and cries.
“Oh, Raffaele.” Anna takes her
grandson from Filippo’s arms. “Come
inside.”
Filippo shows his mother the
empty satchel once filled with the
challah she had baked.
Anna smiles. “I’m so proud of
you, Doctor Filippo Rosenthal.”
The sound of his German
surname clashes with his Italian
name, the name Anna gave him in the
hopes of assimilating their family to
their new city.
In the kitchen, his wife Esther
greets him. Her hair is covered in a
simple, white scarf. His other children,
Susana and Abramo, jump out of their
chairs to greet him.
He leads his children back to
the table. Anna pours wine into three
glasses, including a silver Kiddush cup
her family brought from Germany.
Esther lights the Shabbat candles. She
covers her eyes and says the blessing.
Filippo says the prayer over the wine.
Then Abramo and Susana sing the
blessing over the freshly baked
challah.
Esther serves soup, rice, and
fish to everyone.
Abramo sticks out his tongue.
“Ew, fish.”
Filippo tells his son, “You
should thank your mama for cooking
for you.”
Abramo puts on a fake, deep
voice and shouts, “Grazie, Mama!”
Abramo and Susana laugh.
Filippo sighs and takes off his
black cap, uncovering his kippah. He
holds the cap in his hand on top of the
table. He feels the linen between his
fingertips. A century ago, all Jews,
even doctors, wore yellow caps, and
years before that, they had to wear
108
looking back at the others. He
scratches his face.
“Stop that,” Filippo says to
him. “That’s how they spread.”
The messenger digs his nails
into his cheek and flicks his fingers
toward the other men in the boat, who
quickly dodge him. He laughs. His
cheek is red but he has not punctured
his skin. “There’s no cure is there,
doctor?” He smirks.
Filippo shakes his head.
The thin man sheds his smile
and dips his hand into the water
surrounding the boat.
The gondola travels south in
the winding shape of a giant question
mark. Finally, the Canalasso sets
them on a straight course east, toward
the doge’s palace.
When the boat reaches the Rio
del Palazzo, Filippo sucks in his
breath. In the far distance, the Ponte
dei Sospiri connects the prison to the
doge’s palace.
“It will be faster to enter this
way,” the guard mumbles.
Filippo wonders if he has been
fooled after all, and he is being carted
off to prison for accidentally throwing
bread at gondoliers. He was the only
congregant who would have been
recognized by his black cap. But on the
palace river, the boat stops before it
reaches the Ponte dei Sospiri. It stops
at a bridge, the Ponte della Paglia,
much closer to the Canalasso.
The messengers help Filippo
out of the boat and lead him toward
the archways surrounding the doge’s
palace. At night with few torches, the
arches look like gaps between missing
teeth.
Along one of the corner pillars,
a sculpture of Noah, half naked and
drunk, appears. Is that what these
men think of him? Filippo walks down
the marble walkway to the entrance,
guarded on either side by men
Shabbat candles radiate and flicker. If
he does not succeed in preserving the
doge’s life, this is the last time his
family will ever see him.
The gate is open, and there are
now two messengers with torches
waiting.
“No time,” the plump man says.
He has been joined by a thin man
whose face is covered in warts. They
grab Filippo’s arms, perhaps worried
that he will not comply with their
request to travel back to the Palazzo
Ducale. Arm in arm, they run through
the open gate and across the bridge.
At the base of the bridge,
possibly realizing that Filippo is not
running away, they release his arms.
The men lead him through the
winding alleyways to the Canale di
Cannaregio, where a palace guard
meets them in a large gondola. The
guard wears a metal helmet. His hand
clasps the hilt of a sword in the shape
of a basket with a metal lattice.
“Hurry!” the guard in the boat
calls. He unties the boat from the
canal walls. Small, black insects
scatter along the stones.
Filippo and the two messengers
jump into the boat as quickly as
possible. Before Filippo has secured
his footing, the gondola lurches
forward. He falls over. His shoulder
smashes against the bench seat and
he groans.
The gondola travels south,
narrowly passing the boats tied to
posts along the canal walls. The guard
stands with a long paddle, which he
moves silently under the water. Only
torches and candles in the windowsills
of some waterfront homes light the
Canalasso. The water is as dark as
squid ink.
As they pass under the Ponte
di Rialto, the shopkeepers shutter
their windows. The messenger with
the warts sits at the front of the boat
109
bald man stands near the bed. He
wears a long, white robe, as though he
has just woken from sleep. He cries,
“Someone call a priest! It’s time to
administer the last rites.” When he
spots Filippo, he shouts, “He’s dying!
You’re too late!” He raises his hands in
the air.
“Nonsense!” Filippo laughs,
partially because he won’t believe
anything until he inspects the doge
himself and partially because he
refuses to believe it is true, that his
fate and his family’s fate was sealed
before he arrived.
“Look at him.” The bald man
puts his hands on his hips. “He is
barely breathing.”
Filippo dashes past the bald
man toward the bed.
The man scoffs. “What illness
could a Jew heal?”
Filippo turns. “I graduated at
the top of my class from the University
of Padua this past year.”
“Great. A university-educated
Morta Cristo.”
“A physician. A universityeducated physician.”
The bald man shouts down the
hall, “Call a priest!”
The two messengers, with
whom Filippo arrived, run to fulfill
this request.
The doge’s chest barely rises
and falls, as though his chest can no
longer take in air. His long, white
beard reaches down to his navel. The
skin on his cheeks is as pale as the
sheets. A trail of blood drips from the
doge’s forearm into a bowl by the other
side of the crowded bed.
“What happened? Who has
been treating him?” Filippo stares at
the advisers crowding the room.
An elderly man approaches
Filippo. He is so close that Filippo’s
chin nearly grazes the mole on his
forehead. “During supper, the doge
wearing metal helmets and leather
vests over red and white uniforms
with puffed sleeves.
“This is the physician,” the
plump messenger explains.
The guards stare at Filippo,
and then at each other. They move to
the side and usher the trio inside.
Filippo runs through the
central, open-air courtyard, barely
taking in the stars overlooking the
palace. He reaches a large marble
staircase and doubles his speed. The
messengers struggle to keep his pace.
When he reaches the second
floor, he becomes flustered. He has
been to the palace only once before,
shortly after the doge took office, to
assist with the doge’s first medical
exam.
Nearby, a wooden door is open,
revealing a large room. Gigantic
paintings cover nearly every inch of
the wooden walls. Even the ceiling is
covered in ornate paintings of a battle.
“C’mon!” shouts the plump
messenger leading the way.
After running up another
covered staircase to the third floor,
Filippo finally enters the Sala dello
Scudo, the doge’s private apartments,
only to discover a group of advisers
wearing scarlet robes. They crowd
around the door to the doge’s
bedchamber and do not move when
the doctor arrives. Filippo adjusts his
cap and gently pushes the older men
to the side as he enters the room. The
doge’s cape, robe, breaches, and
stockings hang from a nearby wooden
dressing curtain. The room is covered
in ornate tapestries. The only source of
light is a large mosaic-tiled fireplace
and a candle on a small end table by
the bed. Both the candle and the fire
burn low.
Doge Contarini lies motionless
in bed. A salty odor hits Filippo and
there are no windows to dispel it. A
110
As the crowd shuffles out of the
room, the surgeon leans against a wall
and crosses his arms. Filippo walks
back toward the bed to stop the doge’s
bleeding. He gathers up some of the
sheet. As the cloth rises, revealing the
doge’s feet, ankles, and calves, Filippo
notices that they are terribly swollen,
dark in color. Using the sheet, Filippo
patches up the wound, but he needs to
clean it. He will have to wait. The doge
is hardly conscious; he doesn’t seem to
register that Filippo is touching his
freezing forearm. He worries that the
advisers have killed their doge, and
that they will blame the doge’s death
on him. He takes out a small knife
from his pocket, cuts a piece of the bed
sheet, and then puts the knife away.
When the messenger arrives
with clean water, he says, “You’ve
ruined the sheets!”
Filippo ignores the young man.
He pours the fresh water on the doge’s
new wound, cleans it, and bandages it:
everything the surgeon should be
doing. This demotion is humiliating
and wasting time that Filippo could be
using to diagnose his patient. He is
glad that the advisers are not here to
witness it. He instructs the surgeon to
keep pressure on the wound. Tightlipped, the surgeon rolls his eyes and
does not move away from the wall.
“You think I’m the only one
who will be held responsible if the
doge dies tonight? Hurry up!” Filippo
takes the surgeon’s hands and places
them over the bandage to hold it
down.
The surgeon narrows his eyes
and glares at Filippo. When Filippo is
certain the surgeon will not release his
hands, Filippo lets go.
The teenager looks faint,
unseasoned with the wounded. At
least the bleeding has stopped. Filippo
grabs the doge’s wrist and tries to feel
his pulse. While the University of
told me that he felt a pressure on his
chest.” He touches his own chest,
below the collar bone, with his hand.
“He said he felt a great weight and
then the pain spread outward, from
his chest toward his arms. He became
very dizzy, so his servant brought him
to bed and called me in. When I
arrived, the doge was so exhausted.
He was sweating profusely.”
Filippo touches the doge’s
cheek. It is as cold and dry as a stone.
“He is not sweating now.”
“That is because we treated
him.” The bald man smirks.
The elderly adviser continues,
“I called the other chief advisers and
the palace surgeon.” He points to the
bald man. “The doge kept coughing
and produced this bile.”
“It was white and pink,” the
bald surgeon adds.
Filippo paces the room, looking
for any jars to collect fluid. “Do you
have a sample? Was there any
vomiting? Were feces or urine
collected?”
The surgeon shakes his head.
“So you bled him?” Filippo
asks.
Another adviser says, “But it’s
always been done this way. You
understand: it’s traditional. It’s what
Dr. Foscari would have prescribed.”
Filippo lowers his eyes and
walks toward the adviser. Before he
can speak, a young messenger runs
into the room carrying a jar full of
slugs. “From the lagoon!” the
adolescent shouts, out of breath.
“You are going to kill the doge.”
Filippo pushes the messenger away.
“Go get me some fresh, clean, drinking
water. I need you to boil it, and then
bring it here when it cools. Now! I
have to fix this damage before he dies.
The surgeon can stay. The rest of you:
out!”
111
Padua taught him much, it gave him
no hands-on training. His time was
spent studying theories, observing
symptoms from afar and writing
diagnoses, reading more than meeting
with patients. Most of the bodies he
touched were cadavers. This bald
surgeon, educated by apprenticeship
alone, has probably handled more
bodies than Filippo.
The doge’s pulse is too weak. If
Filippo were more experienced, more
confident, perhaps he could get a clear
reading by touch alone. He wishes he
had a pulsilogium to measure the
beats of the doge’s pulse. He
remembers testing it on himself in
class. It was recently invented by his
former professor, Santorio Santorio,
who believed in the importance of
measuring a patient's pulse using
numbers. The instrument looked like
Galileo Galilei’s pendulum, with a
dial and a small, lead ball dangling
from a silk string. But the
pulsilogium is too expensive and
heavy for Filippo to carry. Filippo
squeezes the doge’s wrist tighter and
waits. According to the pulsilogium, a
pulse rate of 70 is normal. The doge’s
pulse feels much slower. Filippo has
to bring it back to normal. He needs
heat.
He snaps at the messenger,
“Bring more firewood!”
The teenager seems happy to
escape. He runs out of the bedroom,
down the hall.
Filippo grabs the doge’s cape
and robe from the dressing curtain
and covers the doge. As the body
becomes warmer, Filippo strains to
remember his classes. He desperately
searches his memory, trying to
connect his studies to the doge’s
symptoms, applying text to life. All
limbs of the body are connected by
blood. William Harvey, an English
physician, believed that venous and
112
arterial systems are connected, the
veins and arteries running like the
water in Venice’s canals from
fingertips to toes. All the canals feed
into the same source. The same water
travels between the segregated ghetto
and the doge’s palace.
Only when the flow is blocked
can damage be done. What if there is a
gate within? If one of the canals, one
of the veins or arteries, is obstructed,
the blood cannot flow normally. This
explains the swelling of the limbs and
the chest pain as the heart
desperately pushes and intakes blood
to no avail. The question now is how to
improve the circulation.
The pulse may have slowed to a
greater extent because of the loss of
blood. A deluge of blood has gathered
in the doge’s legs and feet, making
them swell.
Filippo instructs the surgeon to
pick up one of the doge’s legs.
The surgeon lets go of the doge’s
bandaged arm.
“Are you crazy?” Filippo takes
out his small knife. “Pick it up and
bend it.”
The surgeon picks up the
doge’s straight right leg and bends it
so that the knee hovers over the hip
then moves it in toward the doge’s
chest. Filippo hopes that by lifting and
moving the leg, the blood will rush
back to the doge’s heart, increasing
his pulse.
“Now the other leg,” Filippo
instructs.
The surgeon lifts the left leg
and bends it.
“Now switch,” Filippo says.
The surgeon goes back and
forth, lifting and bending each leg five
times, pushing them back and forth
like the pump for a well. Beads of
sweat form on the surgeon’s forehead.
The color of the doge’s skin slowly
changes, becoming lighter. Even the
surgeon seems to notice.
The teenage messenger walks
into the room and feeds the fire until
it burns brightly. He looks at the
surgeon’s actions curiously. “You make
the doge look the fool.”
“Shut up,” the surgeon says.
“Insolent boy. This Morta Cristo is the
doge’s physician tonight so you better
pray to Madonna that he doesn’t kill
anyone.”
Filippo’s heart pounds in his
chest as he walks toward the bed.
“Keep the legs elevated.” Confident
that the surgeon will obey, he puts his
knife back in his pocket. He grabs the
doge’s wrist and feels the pulse
throbbing in his fingertips. Filippo
imagines a pulsilogium. The lead ball
swings closer to 70. He sighs in relief.
Smoke floods into the room from the
fireplace.
The young messenger coughs.
“Did you open the chimney?”
Filippo asks.
“Merda! The wind must have
closed the top shut.” The messenger
scrabbles to adjust the chimney and
shouts for one of the guards down the
hall to assist him. Filippo takes off his
cloak and waves it in the air, pushing
away the smoke from the bed into the
hallway.
Doge Contarini begins to cough
and his eyes flutter open. He looks
horrified. Filippo whispers a prayer of
thanks then instructs the surgeon to
help the doge sit up. Filippo and the
surgeon lift the doge’s body, keeping
the bandage secure around the doge’s
arm. Together they carry Venice’s
leader down the hall. Smoke spills out
of the bedroom behind them. The
advisers gather around Filippo.
“Will someone please tell me
where there is a room with windows
and a better fireplace?” Filippo asks.
The advisers mutter to each
other then quickly lead him down the
hall.
For the remainder of the weekend,
Filippo stays by the doge’s side, barely
sleeping. He writes to Esther to assure
her that he is safe, that he has done
everything he can. He does not regret
his actions, but he worries how they
will be interpreted by others. While
the doge is conscious, his heart rate is
not stable. Filippo borrows a
pulsilogium from the university and
places it on a table beside the doge’s
new bed. Filippo spends hours fiddling
with it, so that the pendulum’s
movement matches the doge’s pulse
rate. It beats all day and into the
evening. The doge’s pulse fluctuates,
sometimes beating adagio, other times
allegro. As Yom Kippur approaches,
Filippo wonders how his work will be
judged, if he and the doge will be
written into the Book of Life.
When Dr. Paolo Foscari returns
from Valtellina, he demands that
Filippo meet him in the palace
courtyard. Filippo’s actions will be
appraised. He expects to be berated for
his treatments, perhaps even barred
from practicing medicine in Venice
ever again.
They sit together on a marble
bench and review medical procedures,
Paolo scribbling notes as Filippo
explains his actions.
“Wait,” Paolo interrupts. “Let’s
go back to the humors. The first
symptom, the coughing, did it produce
any phlegm?”
“The surgeon said that the
patient coughed up a red and white
substance, but there were no
samples.”
“Did you not think of
prescribing a diuretic?”
“No, it did not seem like the
patient had an excess of a humor—”
“It didn’t?”
113
A few guards walk along the
periphery of the courtyard. He
wonders when they will approach and
take him away to the Ponte dei
Sospiri. Who will tell Esther?
Paolo pats Filippo’s back. “I am
impressed. This is revolutionary.”
“Pardon?”
“You saved him.” Paolo folds
his notes and stands up. “I still don’t
understand how you did it, but you
kept the doge alive.”
Filippo rises from the bench.
He feels warmth radiate throughout
his entire body. He feels proud, not
just to have saved someone’s life, but
to be acknowledged for it. He wishes
that his grandfather had been given
the same courtesy in Germany. Every
muscle that had been clenched tightly
in fear seems to release. He has never
felt so calm.
“May I return home?” he asks.
“Today is Yom Kippur; it is one of the
holiest days of our year.”
“You may, though I wish you
would stay.” Paolo smiles. “Perhaps I
could learn from you.”
“Even though later blood had
pooled in the doge’s lower extremities,
I do not believe the blood was in
excess. It was misplaced, segregated.
Please let me explain.” His hair is
disheveled. His days-old clothing is
wrinkled and smells.
Paolo’s white beard has been
combed; the skin on his cheeks still
glows from the skin treatments at the
hot springs. “The red and white
substance appeared in the evening,
correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you said the weather was
cool, yet dry?”
Filippo nods. “Before the
patient started coughing, he reported
pain in his chest. That was the first
symptom.”
Paolo continues writing. When
Filippo mentions blood circulation and
William Harvey, Paolo stops writing
and rubs his eyes. “Honestly, I am
more familiar with Andrea Cesalpino’s
writings than this Englishman of
whom you speak.”
Filippo shares his new idea of
an internal gate, a blockage.
Paolo stares at him blankly.
“Signore, I am only familiar with
blockages in the digestive system, not
in the blood. This is too radical for my
taste.”
Filippo hesitates then finishes
his account. After he updates the
physician on the patient’s current
status, Paolo puts down his notes.
“I have to admit,” Paolo says,
playing with his ruby ring. “Because of
the swelling of the lower limbs, I
would have instructed the surgeon to
bleed the patient with venipuncture or
leeches to remove the excess blood.”
Filippo becomes still, expecting
the worst.
Paolo looks at him. “I certainly
would not have thought to move the
patient.”
Filippo arrives in the synagogue’s
sanctuary, halfway through Neilah,
the closing prayer. The male
congregants stand before the open ark,
gazing at the Torah scrolls.
David suddenly shouts, “Look!
There he is!”
The men turn. The ones near
Filippo shake his hand. The ones who
cannot reach him cry, “Yashir koach!”
and “Mazel tov!”
Unbeknownst to Filippo,
Esther shared his letter with David,
who told the entire congregation that
Filippo performed a miracle, saving
Doge Contarini’s life and preserving
their community. Rabbi Luzzatto calls
Filippo to stand before the ark, where
114
he is honored with holding the Torah
during the final prayers. The scrolls
feel as heavy as the doge in his
exhausted arms.
Every year for decades before
his death, Filippo will be honored by
being called to read the blessings
before and after the Torah during Yom
Kippur services. And two months from
now, when Filippo is not on call, Doge
Contarini will die.
115
Forbidden City by Meg Eden
116
Postpartum poetry by Wendy Wisner
This is it—
the sweaty breast, the goopy eyes, the walking around in the middle of the night
on the fourth day of spring, baby biting your shirt, your hair, the redbreasted robin screeching his first aria while both children lie on the floor screaming—
This is what you wanted:
the baby covered in hives, the sheets covered in blood, your blood boiling
and spilling over—
this is night
after sexless night, his hands cupping your back while the baby hangs off your breast
This
is both children tossing and turning in your bed, your body,
the earth quaking
in dreams, the city sliding off the peninsula as you grip your children and run—
This is the earth
in his hair, the sticks and leaves that he grabbed and bit, this is the dirt under his nails
his nails
his
This is everything
happens inside these sixhundred square feet where you birthed two babies,
made love,
split apart, split apart
This is a snapshot, no this is real life, this is what you’ll remember,
but you won’t remember the precise
angle of his wrist as he squeezed the toothpaste,
that beauty mark,
those soft, prickled hairs
The heat’s on too high, the bedroom smells of dirty diapers, spit-up, milk-breath, and dreams.
This is what we wanted—
oh yes, touch me like that please again
let’s make our bodies make miracles
This is what we wanted—
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holy children, love, loveless, my god, my hunger, my righteous
soft mommy, stiff mommy, lovely mommy, yelling mommy, mommy angel, mommy warrior,
mommy is tired
let’s sleep together always like this
118
Prison Janitorial poetry by Tyler L. Erlendson
These white walls make the blood bright
signs of life in an otherwise dead place
the red stuff doesn't just towel or mop up
it smears and sticks to the cement
a reminder of what has been spilled by me,
by the others that sink and swell in these cages.
One ought to be an expert with a strong stomach
to clean up this 7 by 12 like it never happened
germicides, suicides, the child in me hides
as I try to erase the metal in my mouth
there are no biohazard masks in here
just latex gloves that tear real easy.
I guess the warden figures we're all on death row
we make our own hooch
and prick tattoos into our bodies with dirty tools
most of us did drugs on the street
and had sex with twats that were only pay-to-play
why worry about a little infection from the crazy dude that just slit his wrists?
119
There is a part of me that understands this man––
once I broke my TV
and cut my throat with the shards
just to get a break from the shake down,
just to get the guys with the keys to touch me kindly.
120
The Birthday Party poetry by Adam Day
Morning ferry
after a night
of carnations,
a deserved toast.
Now, the rail station
burning—unanswered
telephone in the dark.
Too much wind
and cigarettes.
Green night
in my hair.
Eyes all over.
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Sherlock Holmes nonfiction by Richard Jones
At the antique bookseller’s, I opened The Complete Sherlock Holmes and saw it had
been published in 1953, the year of my birth. I purchased the book and began
reading that night. I had never read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and was as surprised
as Dr. Watson to learn about Holmes’s shortcomings and deficiencies: Holmes knows
nothing of literature or philosophy. Furthermore, Holmes is ignorant of the
composition of the solar system: Holmes does not know the earth travels around the
sun. “What the deuce is that to me?” Holmes says. Holmes says one must be careful
what he takes into his brain. The knowledge of chemistry is more profound, he
argues, than useless facts. I put the story down, took a sip of sherry, and
contemplated how unlike the hero I am. We both love magnifying glasses—I bought
mine in London in 1991—but I use mine to see the fine print of a footnote, not to
search for tobacco ash from a murderer’s pipe. Holmes’s occasional use of cocaine is a
protest against monotony, but his habits are otherwise simple, verging on austerity.
Holmes fasts; I always like to eat and drink. Holmes defends himself; I never
learned to box. Yet we both believe the mystery of this world can be unraveled. We
believe that “all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are
shown a single link of it.” Holmes’s violin helped him think through whatever
problem possessed him. When my nerves are worn thin and frayed, I sit at the
piano, after my wife and children have gone to bed, and to pull myself together play
long into the night.
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Beach poetry by Michael Blair
An evening waving
to the dog to run
back over,
and you're golden
before the light
decides to go along
with the afternoon.
With you this
is as easy
as picking up
my favorite shell from
the sand.
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Untitled - Child Alone by Laura Kiselevach
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Contributors Based in Austin, Texas, E. Kristin Anderson (poetry) has been published widely in
magazines. She’s also the author of seven chapbooks, including A Guide for the
Practical Abductee, Fire in the Sky, and Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in
the middle of the night. She’s on staff at Lucky Bastard Press and Found Poetry
Review and once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.
Sheila Arndt (fiction) is a reader, writer, and Ph.D. candidate currently living in the
Midwest. She cares about place, process, the modern and postmodern, critical theory,
Americana, New Orleans, garlic, roses, old blues, and new dreams. Her work has
appeared in Gravel, Black Heart Magazine, and Literary Orphans. Follow her
@ACokeWithYou or visit www.sheilamarndt.com.
Michael Blair (poetry) was born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina. He
graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a Bachelor of
Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2009 and from Vermont College of Fine Arts with
an MFA in 2013.
Dana Boyer (poetry) has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of
Nebraska and has lived in the Midwest, Japan, and now Hawaii. Her work has
appeared in the anthology The Lincoln Zoo, and the magazine A Clean Well-Lighted
Place .
Michelle Brooks (art) has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small,
(Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). A native
Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her favorite city.
Randall Brown (fiction) is on the faculty of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative
Writing Program. He has been published widely, both online and in print. He
earned his MFA at Vermont College.
Adrienne Christian (art) is a poet, writer, and fine art photographer. Her images
have appeared in Boston Accent Lit, Ripples, and other journals. Her areas of
expertise are nature photography and B&W street photography. See more of her
work at www.adriennechristianphotography.com.
Andrew Collard (poetry) lives in Kalamazoo, MI, and is an MFA candidate at
Western Michigan University. Recent poems can be found in Dunes Review, Posit,
and Tahoma Literary Review.
Lisbeth Davidow's (creative nonfiction) writing has appeared in a dozen literary
journals. A finalist in Alligator Juniper's National Creative Nonfiction Contest and
in The Southeast Review's Narrative Nonfiction Contest, she was nominated to be
included in Best of Creative Nonfiction, Volume II. She lives in Malibu, California
with her husband.
125
Adam Day (poetry) is the author of A Model City in Civil War (Sarabande Books,
2015), and he is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha,
and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. He directs The Baltic Writing Residency in
Latvia, Scotland, and Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.
Dylan D. Debelis, (poetry) a founding editor of Pelorus Press, is a publisher, poet,
performer, chaplain, and minister based out of New York City. Dylan has been
published in more than twenty literary magazines, including Buddhist Poetry
Review, [TAB] Literary Review, and Carbon Culture Review.
Ed Doerr (poetry) teaches middle school English in New Jersey, where he lives with
his wife and pursues a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson
University. His work appears or is forthcoming in Water~Stone Review, Tipton
Poetry Journal, Firewords Quarterly, and the New York Times bestselling collection
It All Changed in an Instant, among others.
Alexa Doran (poetry) graduated from the UNCW MFA Poetry program. Her works
have been featured or are forthcoming in So to Speak, Gertrude Press, The James
Franco Review, Cactus Heart, and CALYX. Her poems were finalists in the 2014
Third Coast Poetry Contest, the 2014 Puerto Del Sol Contest, the 2014 Fairy Tale
Review Contest, and for the 2015 Nancy Hargrove Editor’s Prize.
Meg Eden's (art) work has been published in various magazines, including Rattle,
Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and Gargoyle. She teaches at the University of Maryland.
She has four poetry chapbooks, and her novel Post-High School Reality Quest is
forthcoming from California Coldblood, an imprint of Rare Bird Lit. Check out her
work at: www.megedenbooks.com.
Tyler L. Erlendson (poetry) is the writer and director of a documentary film,
Straight White Male, which premiered in Hollywood, California (2011). An MFA
candidate at Pacific University in Forest Grove, his written work has appeared in
Cactus Heart Press, Rose Red Review, Poecology, and is forthcoming in Polychrome.
Falconhead (art) works in several Dark Arts including photography, painting,
music, theatre, playwriting, poetry, and fiction, and his art has been featured in The
Blueline Magazine, Skin to Skin, Lumina and others. You can follow Falconhead @
https://twitter.com/Falconheadpens.
Valerie Fioravanti (Tillie Olsen Short Story Award Winner) is the author of the
story collection Garbage Night at the Opera from BkMk Press, winner of the Chandra
Prize for Short Fiction. A New York City native, she lives in Sacramento, where she
teaches workshops and coaches writers privately. Tillie Olsen is one of her favorite
writers.
Lois Marie Harrod (poetry) is the author of six poetry books and ten poetry
chapbooks. She also writes short stories and teaches at The College of New Jersey.
Her work has appeared in journals and online e-zines from American Poetry Review
to Zone 3. Visit www.loismarieharrod.org for online links.
126
L.M.. Henke (art) is from another place and time.
Richard Jones (creative nonfiction) is the author of seven books from Copper Canyon
Press, including The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning. Editor of Poetry East and its
many anthologies, including Paris, Origins, and Bliss, he also edits the free worldwide
poetry app, "The Poet's Almanac."
J.W. Kash (creative nonfiction) was born in Syracuse, New York and attended St.
Lawrence University. After dropping out of a Ph.D. economics program at George
Mason University, he moved to New York City to pursue a writing career. Since then
he’s been working in restaurants. Visit www.jwkash.com for more stories and info.
Robert D. Kirvel (fiction) is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction and a 2015
ArtPrize winner for creative nonfiction. He has published stories or essays in the UK,
New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of U.S.
literary journals, such as Arts & Letters.
After twenty years of working as a visual consultant and photo stylist for such clients
as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, and The New York Times, Laura
Kiselevach (art) decided to pursue her passion for photography where she captures
both the grandeur and minutiae of her everyday life. Her work has been published in
Wilde Magazine, Quickest Flipest, The Casserole Muzzle Magazine, and has been
exhibited in New York City, Florida, and Los Angeles.
Cecele Allen Kraus (creative nonfiction) is the author of three poetry chapbooks:
Dreaming Barranquilla (Troy Book Makers 2009), Tuscaloosa Bypass (Finishing Line
Press 2012), and Harmonica (Liquid Light Press 2014). Her writing has appeared in
Naugatuck River Review, Up the River, Passager, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. A
retired psychotherapist, she lives in Copake, New York.
Mercedes Lawry (fiction) has published short fiction in several journals including
Gravel, Cleaver, Garbanzo, and Blotterature and was a semifinalist in The Best
Small Fictions 2016. She’s published poetry in journals such as Poetry, Nimrod, and
Prairie Schooner and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times.
Additionally, she's published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.
Simone Martel’s (fiction) debut novel, A Cat Came Back, will be published in
December by Harvard Square Editions. She’s also the author of a memoir, The
Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile’s Garden. After studying English
at U.C. Berkeley, Simone operated an organic tomato farm near Stockton. She’s
working on a new novel based on that experience.
Lisa Mecham (poetry) writes a little bit of everything and her work has appeared
in Mid-American Review, New South and BOAAT, among other publications. A
Midwesterner at heart, Lisa lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters.
127
Suzanne Merritt (cover art) is an artist and writer living in Solana Beach,
California. Her new series, Earth, Sea, Sky, reflects her love and reverence for
planet earth. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and is currently
working on her first novel and a collection of short stories. For more information, go
to suzannemerritt.com.
Thaïs Miller (fiction) is the author of the novel, Our Machinery (2008), and the
collection, The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009). She received her M.A.
in Creative Writing for Social Activism from New York University. She thanks Anita
Gilman Sherman, Ph.D., and Laura Ritchie Morgan, Ph.D., for sharing their
knowledge of the seventeenth century.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier (poetry) is the author of Visionware (Finishing Line
Press). Her work has appeared in The Notre Dame Review, Comstock Review, Crab
Orchard Review, MiPoesias, Lunch Ticket, and others. She is the recipient of an
Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Artist Poetry Fellowship. She
resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.
Lauren Nicole (poetry) is a Detroit mother with amazing hair and the best pie
crust recipe. Her writing has been featured in Hair Trigger, and Tinderbox Poetry
Journal. She is the recipient of the Alice Bruenton Award for Poetry and the
Tompkins Award for Fiction given by Wayne State University.
Will Nixon (poetry) is the author of Acrostic Woodstock, a town portrait in poems,
and the co-author of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America's
Most Famous Small Town and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock.
Caroline Plasket (poetry) is a lover of words who finds solace while roaming in the
woods. She lives in the Cincinnati area with her family.
Former vegan poser, adventure cyclist, dead armadillo noticer and poet, Kurt
Rasmussen (poetry) resides next door to a certain deity in the heart of Ogden, Utah
where he haunts the streets looking for homeless poems.
Janet Ruhe-Schoen (poetry) born in Allentown, Pa., in 1950, lived for some years
in Latin America where she worked as a journalist. She also wrote features, etc., for
U.S. newspapers. She’s the author of four books of biography. She currently resides
in Beacon, NY, and concentrates on poetry, fiction, and collage art
Ben-David Seligman (poetry) serves as an assistant city attorney for the City of
Paterson—the locale that inspired the eponymous book-length poem by Williams—
and lives nearby with his wife and children. After yeshiva studies in Israel, he
earned degrees from Columbia and Rutgers, followed by an MFA from Syracuse in
poetry. His poems have appeared in The Anthology of Magazine Verse, Jewish
Currents, Midstream, Philadelphia Stories and Surgam, with some available at
philadelphiastories.org, highbeam.com and thefreelibrary.com.
128
Jennifer Schimmrich (art), known as JoWoSo, has been an artist all her life.
Recently going public, her work has been in many galleries and shows around the
Hudson Valley in New York. Primarily working in pencil, she applies detailed
technical skill whether the subject is serious or whimsical.
Sarah Shields (art) is a mother, artist, and writer living Southern California. Her
artwork has appeared in Boston Accent Lit and Lockjaw Magazine. More of her
work may been seen in her gallery: http://905-15th-avenue.tumblr.com/.
Stanko (art) has been showing his unique and whimsical art for over 25 years. He
has designed various book covers in the U.S. and abroad and album covers for the
American folk artist Caroline Doctorow, daughter of author E.L. Doctorow. Stanko
is represented by The Ripe Art Gallery in Huntington, NY. See more of his work at
www.stankoart.com.
Robert Joe Stout (poetry) is a freelance journalist. His work has been published in
American Scholar and Conscience among many other journals and magazines. He
lives in Oaxaca, Mexico and has served on human rights delegations and the board of
directors of senior care facilities.
Denise Tolan (creative nonfiction) graduated from the Red Earth MFA in Creative
Writing Program at Oklahoma City University. She has been published in places
such as Reed, Apple Valley Review, The Great American Literary Magazine, and
Empty Sink Publishing. Denise also teaches the best students in the world at
Northwest Vista College in San Antonio.
H. R. Webster (poetry) is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at
the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Canary,
Devil’s Lake, and Five Quarterly, among other publications.
Anni Wilson (art) is a print maker working in linoleum. A classically-trained
cellist, she values formal elements of the arts over present-day conceptualism. Her
most recent set of linocuts illustrates Molière's The Misanthrope, and she is
currently working on Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. She resides at Twin Oaks
Intentional Community in Virginia.
Wendy Wisner (poetry) is the author of two books of poems and her writing has
appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, The Spoon
River Review, Brain, Child magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Full Grown People,
Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. She is a board certified lactation
consultant (IBCLC) and lives with her family in New York. For more, visit her
website. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
129
Staff Tina Garvin Curtis’s (Art Editor) paintings and photography have been
published at Empty Mirror Books, GRAVEL Magazine, Off the Coast Literary
Journal, The Portland Review, and The Tishman Review. In addition to her
painting and photography publications she is a published essayist, poet, and short
story writer. She does all creative things from her HQ in New York.
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.
Noor Hindi (Assistant Prose Editor) is a University of Akron student who is
majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing. After graduation, she
hopes to pursue her MFA in poetry. Aside from being a student, she works at the
library, and is also the literary arts editor for The Devil Strip Magazine.
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 pinkfinned ’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.
Michelle Oppenheimer (Tillie Olsen Short Story Award Reader) teaches English
at an independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA
from the Bennington Writing Seminars and an MA and is ABD in American
Studies, Brown University. Her work has appeared in the Bennington
Review, Enizagam, and Four Chambers.
Jennifer Porter (Co-Founder and Prose Editor) grew up in the Motor City as a
GM Brat and rock n’ roll enthusiast. Her work has appeared in over a dozen
fabulous literary journals, including Inside the Bell Jar, The Dos Passos Review,
Old Northwest Review, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. She likes to hide from the
effects of global warming with her cats and dogs in her imaginary conservatory.
130
Meaghan Quinn (Associate Poetry Editor) is a poet from Northampton,
Massachusetts. She teaches creative writing and literature at The MacDuffie
School. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets, and her poems have
been published in 2River, The Free State Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and
Adrienne.
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.
Laura Jean Schneider (Cover Designer) is an MFA in Writing candidate at
Vermont College of Fine Arts. She won the inaugural Big Snowy Prize in Fiction in
2014. Her essays about living on a remote working cattle ranch appear regularly in
Ranch Diaries, her ongoing web series for High Country News.
Hannah Snell (Social Media Coordinator) is a rising high school senior from
Massachusetts. She’s known for her quick wit, high jump, and musical prowess
with all things stringed. When she’s not volunteering her time at TTR, she can be
found working with the mentally and physically challenged, or studying for her
next exam.
Maura Snell (Co-Founder and Poetry Editor) has published poems in Inside the
Dome, Red Paint Hill Quarterly, The Bennington Review, Brain, Child Magazine,
and has work forthcoming in MomEgg Review and in The Golden Shovel Anthology
honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). She holds an
MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and when she is not reading or writing
poetry she works with incarcerated teen girls teaching poetry writing and critique.
She lives in rural Massachusetts with her husband, daughters and two rescue
mutts.
Tricia Theis (Assistant Prose Editor) has fallen unconditionally in love with
Baltimore where she lives with her family. She graduated from Marlboro College
and The New England School of Photography. She is an MFA candidate at The
University of Baltimore. She’s a sucker for a three-legged dog and a song with a
good narrative.
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.
131
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 central Massachusetts. She
holds a BA in Communications from Emerson College and an MA in Critical &
Creative Thinking from UMass, Boston. In 2006, she won first prize in the
Worcester Poetry Contest for her poem “Still Life Without Pear,” and shortly
thereafter won third prize in the Annual Clinton Artist’s Guild Juried show in
Clinton, Connecticut, for her painting by the same name. She regularly performs
poems and short stories at Wake Up and Smell the Poetry in Hopkinton, MA.
132
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