MRI by Leila Chatti
I wear a gown that ties in the back; this is how
I am sure I am sick. The nurse can’t be more
than a few years older than I, smiling
as if we’re friends while I grip closed
the gape of my frock. Laying down
on the narrow carriage, I think
it’s a bit like a grotesque sleepover,
me in my nightdress and the nurse
telling jokes, fetching me a blanket
to throw over my knees. I think
these things because I am young
enough to have slumber parties,
still young enough to feel entitled
to ease. And the nurse waves
to a technician behind the glass—a boy,
I mean a man—who coolly asks
what I’d like to listen to, the way a boy does
on a date, scanning the car radio,
or at a party where he knows everyone
will sing along, but I say nothing
as I slide in, arms by my side
as if I were slipping into the sleeve of a sleeping bag
and it were simply my friends whispering
in the next room, trying not to disturb me.
SUMMER TRIANGLE by M.J. Bender
Deneb in the Swan; Altair in the Eagle; Vega in the Lyre—he brought home a woman
at three in the morning and told me to get out of bed and go sit on the front porch.
I listened to her having an orgasm—
a chord, a jazz chord: three thirds on top of the root.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not—it’s feeling.
Vega, in the Lyre of Orpheus, a double-double that looks like two stars but is four,
two and two. Diminished or augmented. The sheets were stained in the morning when I was
let back in the house. So I bought my own mattress and put it in another room. Lyric: one
strum over four strings vibrating simultaneously. One afternoon I took a walk
down the street to buy a half gallon of milk. When I came home I found him
with a new woman. Both were naked in my bed, on my mattress,
under my covers in my room that was separate from his. Of the first magnitude
or brighter or darker.
THE NATURE OF LOVE by Aaron Belz
I disagree with you about the nature of love
and by extension about art or rather
the role of form in art for while abstraction
can delight the senses it is not sustainable
or repeatable and what humans need is more
like a glass of water not only upon waking
but one at lunchtime and one later on
in the evening repeating like a clock
that doesn’t need winding but ticks along
uninspired unexploding with no mystery at all
that is simply there in its place so I suppose
I also disagree with you about life and its
purpose I mean can you imagine if breath
or pulse were to have an ecstatic epiphany no
there is no ecstasy no explosion no light
piercing darkness once and for all but just
this steady lighting of the lamps of progress
and of moving on and yes it’s predictable
and that’s not only its chief characteristic
but its crowning virtue so make your art
in form that iterates generally and gently
rather than in spasms that hate themselves
and in doing so you will find the love that
plods dully on and it will bear that weight
in you of course I say all this and want
to mean it but in fact I live in urgent sadness
BROWNING UP NICELY by S.M. Brodie
The 1970’s were full of firsts for many people. Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office. Raul Castro became the first Latino to hold the office of Governor in the great State of Arizona. My mother, Anita Ortiz, became the first in her proud, Hispanic family to marry an Anglo. Thomas Gordon, my father, became the first in his Anglo family to marry a divorced, single mother of non-European descent, although they were fond of describing her as “Spanish.” Thomas and Anita then went on to have me, their first child together, but not their first child. My half-brother, Luis, was my mother’s first.
Shortly after my birth, my mother returned to work and started attending college. While school was in session for my mom and brother, my dad’s mother watched me during the day. Until I started attending school myself, this is where I spent half of my life. My father’s family lived across the city and a world away.
My grandparent’s white ranch house sat on a little over an acre, nestled between old orange groves. Set far back from the street, the long drive stretched out lazily next to the neat rows and rows of trees that hid the neighbors’ houses. Out behind the drive and the garage was the back acreage, where my grandparents always kept a couple head of cattle and let the neighbors’ horses graze.
The little ranch had a rhythm as steady as a heartbeat. Every morning that I was there, my grandmother would give my grandfather a lunch packed in a shiny metal lunchbox, a thermos full of coffee, and a kiss. In the morning, he always smelled like a combination of mustache wax and aftershave, his wavy, grey hair neatly parted and combed. He would walk out the door, off to his job of designing jet and rocket fuel, with a pen and mechanical pencil in his front pocket, his keys, and a pack of Camel cigarettes in his hand. In this house, everyone spoke English without an accent or a brogue and the breeze carried with it the sweet smell orange of blossoms and fresh cut grass.
Summers in Arizona could give the Devil heat rash. My mom drove a 1973 AMC Hornet, which had a special setting on the air conditioner for “desert climates.” This did nothing to prevent crayons from melting into the floor mats, vinyl records from warping, or the big metal seat belt buckles from branding us while we waited for the air conditioning to kick in. My brother and I would threaten to report my folks for child abuse if they tried to drive us across town during the summer. So, if my parents ever needed a sitter in the evenings, on the weekends, or during the summertime, we stayed with someone from my mom’s large extended family, all of whom seemed to live within a five-mile radius of us. It was within this tight circle that I spend the other half of my childhood.
When I went to my grandparent’s house, the routine was always the same. My mother walked me up to the house. The adults exchanged pleasantries. My mother told my grandmother when she could expect her to return. My mother gave me a kiss and I waves goodbye from the back porch.
With my mother’s family, it was a crapshoot. We’d drive up to one of the aunts’ houses; my brother and I tumbled out of the car like excited puppies, tripping over ourselves to get to the house and out of the sun. We’d knock on the door and if someone answered, we’d turn, wave to our parent and go inside. As soon as we passed the threshold, they’d back out of the drive. There were no arrangements made, no pick up times discussed. If the door opened, we went inside. If not, we trudged back to the idling car, reluctantly got back in, drove a couple blocks in any direction, and repeated the process. The first house we usually hit was my Tia Gloria’s house.
Gloria was my mother’s oldest sister. She and my uncle Hector had five kids ranging in age from their early twenties to just a few years older than Luis. All seven of them lived in a little yellow house in the middle of the barrio. Their back yard was home to an old pickup that had wood running boards that creaked and moaned when you stepped on them, and a handful of wiry chickens that left their eggs all over the yard including in bed of the truck. Two mutts named Frito and Lay protected the chickens from cats and hawks and other poachers, but mostly they slept in the shade under the truck.
In this house, accents came and went, thicken and soften depending on the audience, the mood, or the weather. Some spoke Spanish heavily peppered with English, other English sprinkled with Spanish phrases and slang.
Here the air was heavy with the sticky, sweet smell of cooked citrus juice coming from the big brick processing plant that made the syrup for Squirt soda at the end of the street. Any noise coming from the plant was drown out by kids laughing, dogs barking, music playing, and people talking to each other over fences and through the open windows and screen doors. The only time the noise subsided was when everyone headed inside for dinner.
By the time the Ortega family settled in for a meal around their Formica and metal table, my Tia Gloria and my cousin Sofia had been cooking for forever. It was amazing to watch those two women gracefully glide and spin around each other in that tiny kitchen. Even the food seemed to be a part of the dance, somehow popping, bubbling, and sizzling in time to the Tito or Celia Cruz songs coming from the radio that sat on top of the fridge.
I so wanted to be a part of the culinary ballet, not knowing that I was witnessing was a finely choreographed performance, honed over years of practice. When I rushed in and begged to help, I did nothing but throw them off their steps. As a five year old, they banished me from the kitchen, ordering me to go play. But I didn’t. I perched on the arm of the couch, so I still had a clear view of their dance, and sulked.
Tio Hector came home from working at one of the farms that used to surround the Valley and found me pouting in his living room. Every day for the better part of a week, he walked in the door, kiss me on the top of my depressed little head, and ask “¿Que pasa, mijita?”
“Nada,” I responded, trying to look as dejected as possible.
“¿Por que?”
“I’m not allowed to help. I’m too little.”
“Then go play.”
“It’s too hot.”
Then he patted me on the shoulder as if he understood the troubles weighing down my soul, and he headed to the shower to wash off the bits and pieces of his day that stuck to him. But after a few days, he’d had enough.
“¿Quieres ayudarme?” he asked me.
I paused before I responded to his invitation to help. I hoped that it didn’t involve standing in the backyard, waiting to fetch tools or beer while he worked on that ancient truck. But, even that was better than doing nothing.
“Si, como no.” I finally answered.
Every day after he came home and showered, he worked with me so I could master my new responsibilities. The first day I watched.
“Mira, mijita,” he began. “Take one of the papeles and lay it like this.”
He laid the tiny rectangular sheet of paper on the coffee table in front of us. He sat on the sofa and I knelt on the floor between his bare feet, both of us facing the table. He hunched over me, so that the paper and his hands were directly in front of me. As I watched, I could smell the Ivory soap on his freshly scrubbed skin. He grabbed a pinch of what looked like pencil shavings from a pouch, and laid them in a neat little row on the edge of the paper.
“Mira, only this much. No mas or it falls out.” He put my index finger over the row.
“See, only as wide as your finger,” he instructed. Then he nimbly rolled it into a tight little tube with his leathered and calloused fingers. He picked it up and held it out at my eye level.
“Pick it up like this. Okay? With the edge of the paper facing up so you can lick it like an envelope.” I turned to watch him quickly swipe his tongue along the edge.
“Not too much vavas. You don’t want to make it wet.” He continued his lesson. “Okay, this is important. Gently run your finger over the edge to press it down. Remember, gently, just to get paper to stay down. Don’t pinch it or mush it.”
We practiced that way every evening for days. The first cigarette, I watched. The second, we did together, his sun baked farm hands guiding mine, still baby pink. The third, did on my own. By the end of the week, I graduated. From there on, it was my job to have three cigarettes waiting for Tio Hector. After he got home and showered, I went in the backyard with him and looked for any eggs the chickens may have hidden while he smoked the first cigarette. When he was done, we washed up for dinner. I never saw him smoke the other two. He saved them for just before bed and right after breakfast the next day.
One day my mom came earlier than usual to pick us up.
“Hola,” she called as she walked through the door. Tia Gloria and Sofia paused just long enough to stick their heads out from the kitchen, returned the greeting, and returned to cooking.
“Monica, go find Luis and tell him it’s time to go,” my mom ordered.
“Just a second,” I said as I brought a tightly rolled cigarette up to my lips and licked the edge.
She just stood there, dumbfounded, and watched me as I smoothed the paper down and set the cigarette next to the other one I had finished just before she walked in the door.
“What are you doing?” she finally asked.
“Making cigarettes for Tio Hector,” I proudly stated. “He taught me.”
“It’s true,” Tio Hector said, his voice coming from behind my mother, which made her jumped a little. He was beaming at me, his pride nearly matching my own. My mother’s face did not mirror ours.
“I don’t think she should be doing that, Hector.” She sounded worried. My heart sank. I didn’t know why she wasn’t happy too, but I knew enough that it worried me. However, my uncle didn’t stop smiling at me even for a second.
“Why?” he asked.
I watched her struggle for an answer. Then, after what seemed like an extremely long time, she finally offered something up.
“Well, it doesn’t seem right that she knows how to roll cigarettes but she can’t even tie her own shoes yet.” I watched both my mom and tio’s faces.
“Maybe she should learn how to do that first,” she offered.
“¡Aye, mija!” Tio Hector exclaimed dramatically putting his hands over his heart and rolling his eyes. “You don’t know how to tie your shoes?”
I shrugged my shoulders, not quite understanding why this was a big deal. The flip-flops and sandals that I wore during the summer didn’t have laces to tie. Tio Hector smiled down at me and put his hand out. I smiled back and handed him his three neatly rolled smokes.
“That’s fine,” my Tio Hector said to my mother. As I stood and started to follow her out the door, Tio Hector asked me, “Where’s my hug?” As I hugged him, he lifted me up, kissed me on the cheek, and softly said, “Gracias, muñeca.”
The next day, all of my family descended on our house for my brother’s birthday. Most of the houses in our neighborhood were older, filled with what my dad called “blue collar families”, and had tidy yards with a bike or skateboard strewn under a tree or on the sidewalk. And almost all of them had swimming pools.
Our swimming pool was ancient and the plaster would peel layers of skin from your feet. But it was ours and in the summer, we practically lived in it. We were also the only ones in the family on either side with a pool. So everyone showed up any time there was an excuse to use it, like my brother’s birthday.
I loved it when my Grandpa Gordon would come over to swim. He taught me how to swim like a frog and side scissor kick. He’d throw coins into the deep end, and my brother and I would see how many we could grab before we had to come up for air. When we got tired, my grandpa and I would share an inner tube or raft, and just float around until it was time to eat.
After my grandfather had shared a second piece of cake with me, he was sitting on the pool deck, smoking a cigarette. I sat down next to him and picked up his pack of Camels.
“How many are in here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Let’s look on the package.”
I examined the box until I found the number.
“20!” I exclaimed. “Wow. It would take a long time to make all those.”
“They have machines that do it really fast,” my grandpa assured me as I handed him his pack.
My mom was walking around the patio and pool deck collecting plates and glasses. She called me over to help carry the stuff she’d gathered.
“Don’t talk to Grandma and Grandpa Gordon about cigarettes. Okay?” she said quietly. She had that same look on her face as before, as if we were going to get in trouble.
“Why?” I asked, all my concern punctuating my question.
“Well, it’s just not good manners, I guess.” She said, her eyes hopeful that I would either understand or just leave it there.
“Is it bad?” I asked and heard her let out an exacerbated sigh.
“No, not bad. It’s just not polite.”
The whole next week at the Ortega house, after Tio Hector came home, I learned to tie shoes. He taught me as patiently and methodically as he had before. He brought out every shoe his kids owned and set them out on the floor in front of the TV. I practiced, while he washed up. If I knotted up one shoe, which I inevitably did, I just moved on to the next one. By the end of the week, when our mother came to get us, I eagerly showed off my new skill.
After that, I went back to rolling cigarettes. It took a few days for my mom to catch on that I had started production again. But when she saw the three cigarettes waiting for my uncle on the coffee table, the look returned to her face.
“I don’t think Monica should make cigarettes anymore,” she announced as Tio Hector walked into the living room.
His thick black hair was still wet from his shower and he had slicked it back. He looked like Ricky Ricardo in cuffed blue jeans and a white t-shirt instead of a suit.
“¿Por que?” he asked. His voice sounded like he was tired of this conversation before it began.
“It’s just not right,” she began and looked up to see how even that much of the objection registered with him. He just looked at her and then at me, waiting to hear more.
“The tobacco is full of chemicals and nasty stuff,” she continued. “She shouldn’t be touching it. What if it turns her fingers brown?”
Tio Hector smirked at the idea. Then he looked her straight in the eye. “That’s not the problem,” he decided. “What’s wrong?”
My mom flushed, took a deep breath, and then blurted out, “White kids don’t roll cigarettes.” She took another deep breath. “What are the Gordons going to say when they find out their granddaughter is rolling cigarettes?”
Although she said everything very calmly and quietly, she looked embarrassed and guilty.
“I think they have machines that make cigarettes,” I offered, trying to help. However, this only made her more upset. Tio Hector went over to her, gently wrapped her in his arms, and hugged her for a minute.
“Calmate,” I heard him tell her. “Esta bien.”
He stepped back and swept her hair away from her face with his finger. “You can’t avoid it, Anita,” he said. “She’s going to brown up sooner or later, and not because of the tobacco. I promise you, they will love her either way.”
She sighed and the redness that showed up in big angry blotches on her cheeks and neck began to fade. Tio Hector pulled her close again until I heard her say, that he was right and she was sorry. As we drove home, Luis kept asking why no one was talking and what was wrong. I didn’t answer because I didn’t understand what happened or how to explain it. So, we were quiet.
The next time I went to the Ortega house, there was a little box wrapped in comics from the Sunday paper and tied with a bright piece of yarn sitting out on the coffee table.
“Mija, that’s for you,” Tia Gloria told me. “Pero, escuchame. Don’t open it until Hector comes home.”
All day I was drawn to the little, neat package. I ran my finger over the fuzzy yarn until I accidentally untied it. Luckily, I could tie it again, but I couldn’t remember if I needed to double knot it or not. I did anyway, just to be safe. I held it up to my ear and shook it, then quickly set it back down. Finally, Tia Gloria took it away and put it on the kitchen counter because I was driving her crazy. That day I drank a gallon and a half of water just so I had an excuse to go into the kitchen and see if it was still there.
After what seemed like ages, Tio Hector came home. I asked if I could open the gift as soon as he walked in the door.
“Just wait until I take my shower,” he instructed.
“Hector!” Tia Gloria yelled from the other room. “Don’t be mean. Let la niña open it!”
I ran to retrieve it from the counter and hustled back to sit next to Tio Hector on the couch. As I peeled away the paper, the glossy box underneath showed a picture of a toy I’d never seen before. In my experience, boxes were reused a lot, so you couldn’t trust the picture on the outside. I quickly opened it to find the same curious toy I had seen on the box. I looked up at my Tio Hector and said thanks but with a question mark hanging on the end.
“It’s a machine,” he took it in his hands and examined it. “A machine that rolls cigarettes for you, like you said.”
He handed it back to me and pulled the instructions out of the discarded box. For the next few days, we learned how to use my new rolling machine. It stayed at the Ortega’s house and I used it every day that I was there, although we never spoke of cigarettes again.
TWO POEMS by Marlin M. Jenkins
DRINKING GAME
I.
When the pastor spits
while sputtering any
variation of God’s name.
***
When the swing of preacher’s
head streams sweat into the pews.
(House rules:
capture both spit and sweat
in the elder mothers’ hats.
Use it either as holy water
or anointing oil.)
***
When you realize the song
on the organ has looped.
***
When someone says catch
the spirit, as if the altar
is lined with bear traps.
***
When the AC gives out
or
when you realize
it was never on.
***
When sister Bernice’s baby
cries to see mother shuffle
feet like stomping a snake.
***
When sister Ruth steps on
your new white Nikes.
***
When the youth minister
runs out the front door.
II.
There are casualties in faith
If you become drunk
on the wine of sweat
and singing and prophecy
enough that the red
text of Gospels bleeds
indistinguishable from black,
from the white space,
from the thick air. Run
too.
Shout to the Lord.
Sing to Him a new song.
PSALM FOR GOING DOWN
Is this not praise? To relearn
speech with thighs
pressed to each ear, practice
the shapes of each soundless
letter against opening of flesh.
Is this how Adam formed
the first alphabet? Was this
the origin of speaking
in tongues? Jesus, I know you
too would open your mouth
and men would rise, would speak
into an opening and
a man would come
forth. I am resurrected
at each little death. I will not
deny the evidence of spirit,
a tongue of fire
descending onto head
from heaven.
FIVE STORIES by Karen Brennan
STILL LIFE
A man told me there was nothing he would rather keep noticing—and he pointed to the spaces between palm fronds, chinks of turquoise and a few clouds. Just now, into this recollection, wanders an egg on a green dish.
DISTANT NURSE
On library card stock I have written either Distant Noise or Distant Nurse. The former, with its taint of oxymoron, suggests the story of an enchanted chain-saw marooned on a desert island. The latter evokes the severe hair and pointed chin of a person from my past.
HOMELESS CAT
Into our lives comes a small cat, scratching at the screen door, its expression weary and disillusioned. Oh come in, we say, and we give it a little saucer of milk, which it laps up. Then it begins to talk to us in our own language. It is full of complaints concerning the economy, the world energy situation and life on this planet, the great mystery being that we weren’t consulted, we are helpless pawns of the universe, yadda-yadda. In other words, not only a smart cat, but a phenomenally bitter cat.
MOUSE CHOIR, AN OPERA
1. Today a mouse choir will perform for us Verdi’s la donna e mobile, which means woman is fickle.
2. The mice with their weak chins and strong noses have ferreted out our desires which are otherwise secret.
3. Kafka had a habit of incorporating mice into fiction.
4. Our desires are not so extraordinary, claims Rigoletto, a grotesque dwarf.
5. Adorable in bonnets and knee socks, they approach the stage like a band of 3 year olds, uncertain of what is required, bewildered…
6. Kafka had a habit of visiting prostitutes.
7. Verdi began an affair with a soprano “at the twilight of her career.”
8. They assemble in a pool of greyness.
9. There was, for example, one called Josephine, a soulful queen.
10. woman is fickle woman is fickle they will soon sing, but they know not what they sing.
11. We, on the other hand, with our hidden desires, our secret yearnings…
12. How we long to be placed in another era, among a new crop of mice!
13. Before singing, it is customary to squeak a little
14. as if pumping the air out of a room.
THE CORPSE AND ITS ADMIRERS
The coffin is grey with gold curlicues at the corners, at each of the four corners, although we only see two from where we are sitting with our mother. Each curlicue of a golden color has a shiny ring of silver around it and then some dots. The dots are very small.
The oak casket is very big. It is 10 feet. Maybe it is 20 feet. The feet of the corpse jut up from it since it is a shallow casket. Picture a pork chop in a crepe pan and that is how the body looks in the casket: jutting up, the nose pointed and white, the feet in their brown cordovans.
Our mother is crying. She is fishing around in her patent leather purse while crying and her face is very red and ugly. Picture a wadded up piece of cloth soaked in bloody nose damage and you will get the feeling of her face. In her patent leather purse are the following items: sunglasses, a movie ticket stub from The Paradine Case starring
Gregory Peck who falls in love with an imprisoned woman, Kleenex, lifesavers, both of which are in blue and white packages.
For a murderess, the Paradine woman is exceptionally well-dressed.
The purse of our mother has a gold clasp shaped like a fish.
Also there is some change at the bottom and some flakes of tobacco, given that our mother is trying to quit smoking cigarettes.
We are embarrassed at the noises our mother makes when she weeps. Picture a siren interrupted by a braying sheep and also a coughing giant and you will have some idea how she sounds.
I myself am sewing a sleeve on a blouse.
The corpse does nothing. This is its advantage. There is a fly on the casket, resting languidly on one of the blond oak lintels. In a bad mood.
Now, my sister whispers, he will have no more bad moods.
I myself nod wisely, the blouse which is of a silky and thus slippery material slithers around on my little lap.
Yes, I say. I have only 10 stitches to go. Maybe 20. Then I will sew a little something onto my sister’s head who has begged me for some time to do this.
The corpse’s nose is long and white-tipped. From here we can only imagine the soft flare of the nostrils. Or maybe it is a hard flare. We can vaguely recall the teeth, yellow from the smoking of Pall Malls.
My mother who has given up smoking now removes a black veil from her purse. 10 feet long. Or 20 feet. Very long, it unfolds and unfolds, it seems this unfolding will go on forever, my sister Razor whispers to me, and soon we are covered in it, like insects trapped in a spider’s web.
My mother is bald and so is my sister. Once, at her request, I stitched the words WEIRD ZONE onto my mother’s scalp.
My father, who is dead, is not a skinhead but a corpse.
My mother covers us with her veil, still weeping, still shuddering under the veil but now we are part of that shuddering since, beneath the spider web veil, my sister, my mother and I make one shape.
We are thus part of the shape of my mother.
My father is crying in his casket but his tears are the tears of corpses which go inward and keep the body from thawing and melting away.
The blouse is made of vinyl (I think) and has little rubber buttons. I am sewing the sleeve, I just realized, in the wrong place.
Inside the coffin my father is sneezing. My mother reaches into her purse. Once more she reaches into it and this time removes a half dozen tacos which she divides among us. Then salsa and little plates of rice. Then spoons.
My father, when alive, was not a stitcher. He was not an eater. He had his moods which hammered themselves into our tumbling home, into our mother’s makeshift spirit. He was not a weeper.
No thank you, I tell our mother. Even so, I cannot seem to work up an appetite. The corpse is still sneezing and weeping, more copiously now: picture a jackhammer drilling into a human brain and you will have some idea of the racket which is beginning to assert itself into the air surrounding the coffin.
Perhaps he has allergies, my sister whispers.
All the while I am stitching the sleeve on the blouse—and it is going much, much better now, thanks for asking, creating a neat little seam in the shape of scythe. I am trying to think of a prayer to say for my father’s soul and the effort to do so makes me recall several moments: jumping rope, my father at one end, laughing with his mouth full; or driving over the bridge, my father saying he was frightened and so could not look; or singing for him at a large party and his face beaming and beaming. Hard to believe a face so white and frozen could have beamed so warmly or that in the cave of his arm we had felt so protected. Nevertheless.
The Paradine woman, a master of duplicity, manages to destroy Gregory Peck who she hates for luring her lover (Louis Jordan) into suicide. His career over, his love unrequited and disdained, he returns to his nice wife (Ann Todd) who comforts him like a mother.
Not that our own mother is all that comforting. She distributes tacos from her voluminous purse and now she is chewing loudly. So many noises in this room! My mother chewing and swallowing, my father weeping and sneezing, my sister whispering, and I am making the sound of she who stitches a sleeve onto a blouse and who will soon stitch a little something onto the scalp of my sister.
The great moral lesson of The Paradine Case is that we should not trust attractive foreigners, no matter how beautifully dressed. Another way of saying this is that we must stay within our familiar realm and not venture forth. Don’t flirt with danger. Be safe. Or for me, a stitch in time saves nine.
Now that the father is dead, our lives will surely change. He who had been our armor, our jailer. He who stabbed us with his words and then caressed us. We who were stabbed, then caressed, defended and incarcerated. We may have murdered him, too.
At some point it occurs to me that we are all everything, that nothing separates us. Picture a parade of ants going toward a picnic arranged on a red-and-white checked tablecloth and then picture a foot coming down. We are all things. The ants, the picnic and the foot.
TWO POEMS by Tyree Daye
SAME OAKS, SAME YEAR
My cousin kept me and his little brother
saved me from our uncle’s
pit bull, then spent seven years
in prison for his set.
Every other word
he said was
blood.
***
Uncle Nagee showed us
how to make a BB rattle
inside a squirrel.
Two small holes,
enter and exit.
All summer I wondered
what leaves the body?
GIN RIVER
If the Neuse River was gin,
we would’ve drunk to its bottom,
its two-million-year-old currents,
shad, sunfish, redhorse, yellow lance.
All the blood from the Tuscarora War.
We would have drunk it all,
aunts and uncles would have led us in Big Bill Broonzy’s
“When I Been Drinking,”
until everything inside us began to dance
and we all joined in,
silt around our ankles,
everyone kicking sand.
HURT MUSIC by Melissa Cundieff-Pexa
The bell’s emptied space
has no name. I would like
to call it my never-born.
I’m there and the metal clapper
and bowl are asleep.
My never-born is awake,
very quiet.
I don’t want to reach
for him. I don’t want to fall
from the rope’s fray or draw
nothing from the naming. I call,
can you hear me? All parts
of the bell rouse differently.
The clapper,
in deepest dream, says,
breathe me back, breathe
me back. My matted lungs
search for air—the bowl
wakes dazed. Hush now,
it drones, your hurt music.
Dizzied
me, dark-circle-eyed in the curve’s
continuum and orbit.
My unborn speaks
from inside his name, his last
wish reverberating:
Carry me in the bell, betrayer.
In the apogee of your voice
to my voice.
RAINY RIVER by Eric Lloyd Blix
They park fifty feet from shore, Nichols and his daughter, despite her quiet protests.
“The river hasn’t changed,” he says, sipping Hamm’s, the last can of four he brought for the road. “It looks the god damn same.” He rolls the can between his thigh and palm, up and down, up and down. He clears his throat. “It empties into Rainy Lake, down at International Falls. That’s where the timber harvests went, I-Falls. I haven’t told you about all that, I guess.”
“I can’t believe you,” she whispers. “You’ve gone mad.” Her voice could be the wind, or the river’s steady murmur. The water glides west to east. He imagines something resisting it, a force or a disembodied will with a singular yearning to press forward against the current. His wife was buried last week. A suicide in the den. A body. A crumpled form slouched on the desk, head purged of all fluids and matter.
“Mad?” he says. “Of course I’m mad.”
He does not keep a gun in the house; he never has. He imagined, in the days after finding her, that his wife had peered through the bedroom window as he pulled out for work each morning, ignorant, complacent; that on one of these mornings she finally crept to the bathroom, where she must have applied makeup, curled her hair, and slid into her nicest suit, the brown one with shoulder pads and cinched waist. She must have called a cab and waited nervously in the foyer with her purse clutched tightly, checking too often through the curtain to see if her driver had arrived. Then, riding into town, examined her sadness, which she had kept from everyone, as if it were some freakish thing, a cow fetus embalmed in a jar of formaldehyde. What else could she have been thinking about? She had arrived at Anderson’s Sporting Supply Co. (a receipt he found in her purse said as much), strolling between racks of rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers, until she found the one, which she must have known immediately by how it felt in her hands, slightly heavy, though miraculously contoured as if to fit only her palm. Everything else must have disappeared: the driver waiting outside; her daughter, angry and alone, carrying books through the halls of South High School; her husband scratching senseless numbers into paper at the flour mill.
He has spent days wondering what it must feel like to stand in the world after it has ceased, or if he already knows, if the end feels the same as everything. He decided that he and his daughter could use an adventure.
“Stop pouting,” he says.
She kicks the Studebaker’s round fender. He pulls bundles of gear from the trunk, setting everything on the ground—the tent, fishing poles, tackle box, blankets, cookware, a tin cooler packed with thirty Hamm’s. He pops one and chugs it.
“This is despicable,” she says. “You’re a kidnapper. You know that, don’t you?”
“I told you to quit it.” He opens another. “There are difficulties in life,” he says. “You should know that.” He drinks. She is silent, arms crossed, face red. He points across the river. “See that? Over there? That’s Canada. Ontario. You should know that if you want to be—what is it?—a senator. A big shot.”
She grinds her toe into the rocks.
“They used to drive timber on this river,” he says. “That work was brutal.” He means the Rainy Lake Lumber Company encampment, about sixty miles upstream, where he spent the spring of 1917 as a blacksmith’s apprentice. “Our bodies constantly hurt,” he says. “My hands, especially. I had knuckles like acorns.”
He now believes the short stint of hard labor is to blame for his creaky elbows and his stoic tolerance of unpleasant things.
She leans against the car, tucks a strand of red-blonde hair behind her ear, and folds her slender arms. Her dress is checkered blue and white. That hair, it blazes against the sky. He is astonished at how tall she has grown. The trait is from her mother. It is bewildering that the woman ever fell in love with him. Late one night, years ago, while splitting a liter of gin at the kitchen table, waiting for their infant daughter’s fever to break—the baby’s pained cries piercing their shared solitude intermittently—she told him why. She clasped his fingers between her own, which were much more slender and elegant than his, and explained that she could sense the pain he held inside as if it was a gene, and that it had drawn her to him, because she held it, too. We’re kindred this way, she had said. And we always will be. Then she let go, sipped, and tended to their child. Now, he feels an urge to carve notches in every tree, a whole forest documenting his daughter’s height. He damns himself for what he has given her.
“I don’t know,” he says. He uncoils a length of rope. “I just don’t know.”
Later, after he has caught two perch, sliced and gutted them, and eaten both with more Hamm’s (his daughter refused to eat; she went to bed before the sun was down), he sits alone on the rocky shore, drinking beer, for which he is grateful, because it tastes the same as when he was younger. The flavor—bitter and skunky, an invulnerable constant—has not changed since he first tasted it. That was thirty years ago, in the lumber camp. Tonight, the river burbles, the same sound the blacksmith made after his head was ravaged by an ox, the awful boiling in his throat, as if trying to speak, despite a brain of mush. Nichols stares at the river. Its waves break apart and mend, break apart and mend. . .
His wife left no note. Even in death, she had deprived them of herself. He rests his hand on the rocks. The current laps the shore, the same current that had once moved acres of fallen timber. The men in camp had built a raft after the blacksmith died. It carried his makeshift casket, riding the logs down the dark channel slicing through the green trees.
Soon, he decides it is bedtime. He drinks two more Hamm’s and ambles to the tent, stomping through mud, clearing evergreen branches with his arms, groaning like a primordial beast. He crawls inside and whimpers. He is a mouth devoid of phonemes. His language is the fluid garbles of suffering. She is curled there, possibly awake, pretending not to notice. He has grown used to this. At home, she does not speak. She goes from room to room as if he is not a person, but a portrait of some previous owner left for her to examine, wondering what he was like; the artist had screwed up some feature, a smear across the nose, or uneven eyes, and she sneers when she sees it, contemptuous of the person who would let such a thing into the world. He gets down on his knees, then his side, and cups his body around hers, startled by her warmth, by his own unambiguous coldness.
She stirs. Her cries are soft and terrible. He imagines how her life might go. She finishes high school then goes back east for college. A scholarship, some place he could never afford otherwise—Vassar or Smith, maybe Pembroke. She embeds herself in campus life, wears school colors, strolls the green spaces with boys she will never tell her father about, their hands clasped as if the flesh of one sustains the other—one of them like root, the other like earth. She comes home once a year at Christmas, and only for a couple days, because she cannot stand to see her father, who is heavier each time, dirtier and more disheveled, and slightly less coherent, drifting to sleep at odd times and snapping awake, eyes wide and watery, afraid of the empty space surrounding him.
It is her final year, and she already has a job lined up, something in an office, something respectful with responsibilities. This is the inevitable trip in which she arrives home to find him dead, face down in a bowl of canned tomato soup, a turkey sandwich on the table, half-eaten, the cabinet door left open. She does not know it yet, but this is the sight that undoes her. This is the trouble she bears like a creaky elbow—a source of pain she hardly notices until that part of her is forced to move: the gray stubble of a homeless man picking flattened bread scraps off the sidewalk; the brittle arm of an elderly patron struggling to hold her tray in a downtown cafeteria; the mighty curve of a raccoon’s back, dead on the side of the road. She works her office job. She draws a living wage. Eventually, she goes to a new city, where she moves up (someplace glamorous, New York or Los Angeles; wherever she goes, it is far from this river, this dumb, persistent current). Supervisor, then manager, then director. She dates men and discards them, finding that they are all, in some way, like him: insecure and petty, full of rage and regret with no room for love. She has friends, but prefers to be alone. She goes about her work. She bothers no one.
She lives this way until one morning, while rolling a nylon stocking past her knee, thinking of her afternoon meeting and the bread her mother used to bake, something in her brain pops, and she goes lightheaded, and blood drains from her nose, mouth, and ears, and everyone is surprised when they find out, frightened that something similar could happen to them, frightened that they cannot explain why.
He rolls onto his back.
“Wake up,” he says. “Wake up.” It is difficult to speak. His mouth is filled with spit, foaming at the corners. “Let me tell you about her,” he mumbles. “I got stories. Let me tell you. Big ones. I got a whopper. A big dead whopper. He was a good man, I think. Treated the horses kindly.” He pulls a Hamm’s from his pocket and fumbles with the can opener. He drops it. She pulls the blankets tight. She tells him to shut up. “God damn it,” he says. He lifts himself, straddles her curled body. She yelps and squirms and kicks him in the chest and runs outside, barefoot. “God damn it,” he says. He coughs. He swallows phlegm. He blubbers, spit frothing, a viscous lather. His tongue sticks to his lips. “This ain’t the worst,” he says. “You don’t know the worst.” He closes his eyes and wonders.
It is still dark when he wakes. The Studebaker is gone. He calls her name, his voice an empty echo.
What must a man do upon the discovery that his collapse has been years in the making? That his life has been a drawn-out ruse? That the passing moments do not lead him to peace or clarity?
In the tent, he digs through a bundle of supplies and withdraws his hatchet. The cooler holds eighteen beers. He plans to finish all of them before dawn.
He gets to hacking. Every branch is thicker than his calf, longer than his arm. They pile at his feet. Like a lumberjack, he whistles a tune and chops. He drinks. A stack of wood on one side, a pile of cans on the other. The wood is soft. Poplar. The whacks are dull, as if pounding dough. Soon he has enough. He drinks some more. If the earth is a conveyor of all life, turning through space, then a raft is a means into the inner-mechanism.
In the tent, he finds a length of rope. Birds awaken. Their songs are cheery and bright. The trees are like a brain, a fully functioning brain. The songs connect the different parts, like impulses. He makes out tire tracks in the dirt where his daughter pulled away. He expels all feeling. He is an empty can of Hamm’s, a steel husk with a hole popped in it, air whistling across the chasm. He loops the rope around one branch and pulls it tight, then repeats with the next one, until every branch is connected, then he ties them all together, and does the same on the other end. On the water, the raft looks like a door. It is the thing shutting him out of the world that exists beneath the surface. He prefers this. He studies the emptiness inside himself. The open contours. The colorless gap.
There is a piece of driftwood by his feet.
“I know you,” he says. He picks it up, grips the hatchet by the head, and, on one side of the driftwood, carves the word, daughter, on the other, the word, wife.
“You are with me now,” he says. “We’re together again.” In the east, a growing yolk of orange. “Uh oh,” he says. He lugs the cooler to the raft. Plenty left. A dozen, at least. He sticks the piece of driftwood—his wife and daughter—in his back pocket. They board the raft. It is flimsy, weighed down. Fingers of water slip between the logs, as if to grab his ankle, to pull him under. He pushes off, steering with a long stick, a hand-held rudder. They ride, like the harvests once did, toward the place the blacksmith landed, past shifting scenes of evergreens and rocky inlets, hanging branches and green thickets. One by one, the stars disappear. The sky lightens. He drinks, pulls the driftwood from his pocket, and sets it between his legs.
“Daughter,” he says. He takes a long pull and tosses the can into the river, pops another. “Daughter, have I got a story for you. Listen to me, now. You’ll enjoy this one. You too, Wife. You’ll find it interesting. You’ll get it probably better than I do. It’s a whopper. A good old-fashioned yarn. Both of you, listen up.” The raft gains speed. He does not know what awaits. He tells his story:
“There was this guy we called Ox,” he says. “Ox was a big fellow from West Virginia.” (Nichols describes the man’s arms: thick as trees, hairy as a wolf. Normally, the foreman—Hugh, or Hughes; Nichols cannot remember the man’s name—normally Hughes would put at least two men to a saw, one pushing and the other pulling. Old Ox, though, was a one-man tree destroyer. He’d zip that blade right through a white pine as if it was cheese.) “My god,” Nichols says, “what a brute.” He pops another Hamm’s and gulps. “Ox’s voice was demonic,” he says. “When Ox spoke, it sounded like the world had caved in, and all the land in Creation was being sucked into a final, bottomless abyss.” (Ox always carried a rifle; he claimed to be a veteran, that he had acquired the gun in Cuba blasting Spaniards to bits under the command of Teddy Roosevelt himself.) “Damn it all,” Nichols says, “I wish I could remember the blacksmith’s name. You’d think I’d remember the name of my own boss. That was so long ago, and these beers sure haven’t helped me. You could argue—and some have—that I don’t owe him a damn thing, but you’d be wrong. Anyway,” he says, “as far as I know, Ox and the blacksmith didn’t fraternize.” (In fact, Ox had liked very much to have a good time. On his days off, he’d leave the camp, and he’d head to the nearest town. In those days, so long as you were inside the lumber industry’s wide footprint, it was easy to find some fun.) “One night,” he says, “Ox headed down to Baudette for some drinks and whores. He went and had himself a time on that spring-loaded dance floor and the squeaky brass bed upstairs, and when he got back to camp, the clod decided he wasn’t done. Ox still felt the motion of the evening,” he says, “and so he woke up the rest of us. Ox pulled that rifle—if I knew a damn about firearms I’d say what kind, but I haven’t touched one since that night—Ox pulled that rifle from beneath his mattress and steered us all outside. It was dark as a bear’s throat. No moon. No stars.” (All they could see of Ox was his hefty imprint on the darkness. He wanted them all to see the kind of carnage he had doled to Spaniard skulls, so he raised the rifle to his shoulder and swung it around. He pulled the trigger, lighting his beastly face in the orange muzzle flash, teeth gritted, eyes wide and bloodshot, and he blasted a hole in the side of the shack.) “For what purpose,” Nichols says, “I don’t know. That’s just how the man was.” (What Ox didn’t know is that the blacksmith was also up that night, in the barn, re-shoeing an ox—the animal, not the man. The ox had cracked a hoof pulling a sleigh of logs. He was leaned down close to its foot, tapping nails, and when the shot went off, it spooked the beast. It got scared and kicked back and started stomping the poor man’s skull as if it was a glass bowl.) “A couple minutes later,” Nichols says, popping open a Hamm’s, “after we’d gone back in and Ox had passed out, fully clothed, still holding the rifle, Hughes rushed in and found me, and he informed me of the awful details.” (The blacksmith lay on the workbench in his shop, and though he was unconscious, he was alive, and his breaths were shallow. Sweat beaded on his forehead, mixing with the blood and pulp where his skull caved in. Be calm, Hughes said, though he wasn’t calm himself. He paced, and his voice cracked like a nervous schoolboy’s. You know he ain’t himself anymore. You know that. He said it over and over—He ain’t himself anymore.) “I don’t know how it happened,” Nichols says, eyes watery, glistening in the sunlight, “but somehow Ox’s rifle ended up in my hands. There are gaps I can’t recall. I’ve tried, but my conscience won’t let me fill them in. There I was, holding onto that damn rifle. Hughes told me it was okay. There wasn’t a courier coming for almost a week, and the camp doctor had no way keeping this man alive. He ain’t himself anymore. Hughes dragged the blacksmith off the workbench and propped him in the corner. He placed an empty nail sack over his head and explained that it was my duty; I was the man’s apprentice. So I took aim,” he says, “as if at a sick dog. I was sixteen years old and from Rochester, New York. What a damn shame.” He crushes the can and tosses it in his wake. “Sometimes,” he says, “I liked to imagine the villages up in these parts. The blacksmith was from International Falls.” (Back then, Nichols had figured the place was built of spacious cabins, walls of hand-stripped pine. Maybe clear cut lawns in front and back with giants milling about—Swedes in linen shirts and dresses, Indians in feathers and bearskins, all of them lining the wooden walkways, trading walleye and beads.) He says, “It’s silly how much we get wrong. It’s god damn devastating. We built a box for the blacksmith and sent him home on a raft. A couple of river wanigans guided him downstream and the drivers came back shaking their heads. Long story short, I changed careers and my general outlook. No one ever heals from such a thing. The emptier you are, the better. I left that camp, and I remember seeing the jagged little village of shacks carved into the forest, the wooden walks connecting them, and I knew that when the ice came that winter, it would all be dismantled, and nothing would be left except what we could pull from memory. Daughter, Wife…
The river pulls him east, toward unknown points, and the sky brightens. Light fractures on the river in white shards, glinting on the trail of cans bobbing in his wake, and on the rocks ahead.
Another sad example of abuse and waste, a case of misguided wandering ending in silent tragedy, the cycle of pain completing itself. Sometimes tourists believed too much in their own industriousness and primitive instincts, and they’d wash up on one of the beaches near the D.O.T. survey sites, like the one where a man named Floyd Knutson is calibrating his telescope. The lens comes into focus, and he notices, on the rocky shore beside the dirt road, which will soon be paved, a leg sticking out from some brambles among a few long splinters of wood and crushed cans. He curses, radios his boss, and, while waiting, ambles to the shore, where the water is calm. The body, bloated and purple, belongs to a man his age (too old for the war that had just ended, too young for the previous one. He will later learn the man’s name, Joseph Nichols, as well as a few basic facts: that this Nichols fellow was a widower with a sixteen-year-old daughter, Karen; that he’d been camping; that he’d been a drunk nearly his entire life, including on his final day, as evidenced by the empty cooler found a mile upstream from his body, wedged in the granite rapids. Sometimes, in the following years, Knutson would wonder about the girl—whom she’d stayed with afterward, if she’d been able to make anything of herself—and he accepted that he’d never know, that it wasn’t his right to know). The eyes: two cloudy marbles. Mouth open, fillings in every molar, frozen in a look of permanent shock. Ankles tangled in twine.
Soon, a D.O.T. vehicle pulls up, followed by a police officer and the county coroner. Knutson explains what he has found. The officer jots it down and shakes his head. Neither man can understand what infects someone’s mind to go and try such a ridiculous stunt. Neither can his boss that evening as the two men discuss the incident over cold beers in the Knutsons’ kitchen. Both men lean forward in their chairs, elbows on the table. Arrogance is the answer, they conclude. Arrogance or madness, although the line between them is tough to figure.
TWO POEMS by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams
LETTER IN EXCHANGE FOR
Painting all the spines of the books blue,
for example. Tasting me so absolutely
as to know the monsoon of my sickness.
Licking my lips clean of disturbance
while hunting for the trees I want
at every window, that wanton green.
What if, in reciprocation, you gave me
every song you wrote for other women?
Only, be correct, change their hair to dark.
Wrapping a belt around the waist of all
clouds floating in my chemistry. Being
beautiful. Being exquisitely beautiful.
For example, not being a cloud floating
in my chemistry. For example, not misting
away, a ghostly disturbance in the atmosphere.
APOLOGY TO THE NARROW MOMENT
But my body is a narrow hull
of birds regretting the sky. Inside
you is a chasm of thrown things.
But my secret is a pond drifted
over with leaves, winter-cold
and reflecting my hands only.
But my yearning is a spray of stars
arrowing out of my fingertips,
falling on the dark lawn by the party.
But my nights are a thousand faces
turning away, sipping their drinks,
looking at someone they’ve just recognized.
TWO POEMS by Leslie Harrison
[No. 118]
How snow and distance equal absence the page untouched
the page a white blankness the way ink recedes from these
cold vistas its absence a kind of reverence how the moon
is also an absence untouched as if he knew it was beyond
mere wood mere blade how burdened the humans are
in their boats their roads and towpaths how there is always
something happening in the middle distance how there are
always mountains always rivers how the birds are a trick of
perspective some with wingspan like a temple’s curved roof
some reduced to black nicks in the empty sky how I too
have seen foxes in a grove under moon under stars though
mine breathed but carried no fire how I’ve longed for that
dark blue winter evening the night a pendulum the night
a fulcrum the year tips then slides across while in the sky
the stars light up as hundreds of foxes coalesce in the field
make their way toward a tree how they’re gathered there
in the winter night like candles how he must have known
the name of this how in this language we call them a leash
we call them the earth
(This poem references New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, the 118th print of a series titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, by the 19th century woodblock printer Utagawa Hiroshige.)
[A PRAYER FOR OUR MORTALITY]
To begin think of wind river sand silk the various strands
currents how falling moving how leaving can be exactly
that benign a cessation of resistance a species of quiet
abnegation think then of a flame on its wick flickering
in the drift of air stubborn and still alight holding on
in the draft that sifts through a summer screen the leaves
greenly afire on their piers their waxy wicks the sleeve’s
small collapse against your arm in the breeze think
of the current of time how it too swirls eddies and then
abates as sticky afternoon slips into sticky dusk itself
slipping into moonrise into full dark think of the lit window
and you candled there you inside the moving the breaking
heart of this thing think of the glass doing its invisible best
the shell the egg of your dwelling the way it cradles you
how soft the body’s flesh how there are two of you
the unformed fetal you asleep innocent as weather and
the you that paces in all that yolk light the light that spills
thick and angular through screen and glass the light
that falls across the trimmed the orderly lawn the way
your shadow hushes the crickets afraid there in the sudden
dark the way it releases them as you vanish into song