shows on homepage
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.
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.
PUSHCART NOMINEES
We’re proud to announce our 2017 Pushcart Prize nominees!
From Issue 9
This is why I Need a Goddess by Angela Penaredondo
Lambing by George Kalamaras
Mare Frigoris by Rachel Brownson
From Issue 10
Reprieve by Jenny George
Argument for Loving from a Distance by Katie Condon
Drinking Game by Marlin M. Jenkins
- Published in home, Uncategorized
CREATION by Gerardo Pacheco Matus
after Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Riding with Death
They made me with bones,
white, yellow, brown & dusty bones,
heavy & hollow, broken & shuttered,
they made me with bones
no one has ever claimed,
bones no one will ever bury,
they blew through my hollow bones,
they hummed the saddest song
as they snapped bones
to make them fit into my skeleton,
they tied my clavicles with deer sinew
& whittled tree limbs to fix my legs,
they nailed sea shells on my skull
with heavy & black maguey thorns,
they plastered my rib cage with black clay,
they unwrapped my vertebrae
from a bundle of banana leaves
they baked over a layer of charcoal,
they assembled my crumbling bones
with their long, sluggish hands
like one assembles marimba bars,
they mixed dirt & crushed charcoal
to paint my bones, they woke me up
when they poured handfuls of desert
sand into my empty mouth,
I tasted the dirt,
coarse & rough,
against my jade teeth,
I felt hungry & thirsty,
I learned to cry,
I didn’t stop until they gave me
a bowl of corn mash
to ease my thirst & hunger;
ARGUMENT FOR LOVING FROM A DISTANCE by Katie Condon
Raining this morning & the foothills are dusted
with the gray light that comes with bad weather.
Even through the water’s falling sound
the train makes itself heard across the city
like church bells at midnight. What beautiful moaning
loudness becomes when it’s forced to stretch itself
across a distance. Like the way my lover’s song greets me
from upstairs, where he’s singing in my shower—
even across our short reach, his voice sounds truer
than when he sings & I am near him. Listening
to him croon through the water’s heavy moving,
I’m certain Eurydice was pleased
when Orpheus looked back too soon.
How happy it is to die twice
when your reward is your lover’s real voice
reaching you across wind & water & time.
How relieving to realize he is more himself
without you than when you are spread out
naked below him, your hair tangled in his palms
& his song diluted from your sating his longing.
What is constant across all love
is the inevitability of its end.
One of us will grow bored
or one of us will die, & knowing this it seems
Eurydice was best to leave love early.
Wait too long & he’ll stop
singing even from a distance. Go
now! Run from your love! May your absent
touch be the bells he hears clanging out from the steeple
into the gray night that slows into morning,
where the train will try to out-moan the wind,
where he will liken this moaning to the way
you sounded beneath him. He will pick up his lust
like a lyre & sing your name trying to reach you
wherever you are. & wherever you are
you will hear his song haunting the air like mist.
Listen to how entirely he loves you, for the first time.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS HAN TO LEIA, ON HOTH by Amorak Huey
After Dean Rader & Robert Frost
Another planet battle-scored & near-exterminated: we crave this cave-chase & escape plan,
our evacuation inevitable. We have always been outnumbered & every system is remote
from somewhere. Our future pendulums away from us, our small stars extinguish each other
in the heart’s dark sky. You are not afraid. An empire grows in my chest. Pistol me open,
let my rebellious ribs steam into the frost, feed on the warmth of me. We cannot destroy
all that threatens us & ice will not slake your salted tongue. Given flame, we choose to burn.
TWO POEMS by Sally Wen Mao
MUTANT ODALISQUE
This is not an ode. February’s ice razor scalps
the gingko trees, their hair pulled skyward
like the ombre roots
of young women. March harrows
us mottled girls. Vernal equinox:
a hare harries the chicks, hurries
behind wet haystacks. Livestock.
Gnats. The glue-traps are gone.
March, ladies. March for your dignity.
March for your happiness. March, a muss
of lidless eyes. In the forest, a handsome man pisses,
puissant, luminary’s ink leaking on trees.
Penury I furl into the craven lens, in its mirror, a pulse:
webcam where I kiss my witnesses.
They watch and watch and watch the butcher
cut, the surgeon mend, they watch the glade
of crushed femora, they watch my dorsal fin,
they watch my scales dart across the cutting
board. They watch the way I open, flinch, bent
against the wind that beheads the nimbuses.
Or April’s turning toward ecstatic sob—departure.
Networks freeze, all sloe, all ice. Transmitters
falter. The cicatrix soaped, cilia & pus
rubbed raw. No machine. I dare
my witnesses to stick their pencils on me.
Do they marvel at a conquest—
blue flesh & gills. Do they think of me as soiled
or new soil. Do they take notes in their medical
journals. Am I their inspiration O Vesalius god
of anatomy is that why they ask so softly for my name.
OCULUS
This morning I peruse the dead girl’s live
photo feed. Two days ago, she uploaded
her confessions: I can’t bear the sorrow
captions her black eyes, gaps across a face
luminescent as scum. I can’t bear Ithaca snow—
how it falls, swells over the bridges,
under my clothes, yet I can’t be held
or beheld here, in this barren warren,
this din of ruined objects, peepholes into boring
scandals. Stockings roll high past hems
as I watch the videos of her boyfriend, cooing:
behave, darling, so I can make you my wife.
How the dead girl fell, awaiting a hand to hold,
eyes to behold her as the lights clicked on
and she posed for her picture, long eyelashes
all wet, legs tapered, bright as thorns.
Her windows overlook Shanghai, curtains drawn
to cast a shadow over the Huangpu river,
frozen this year into a dry, bloodless
stalk. Why does the light in the night
promise so much? She wiped her lens
before she died. The smudge still lives.
I saw it singe the edge of her bed.
THE LUNGFISH by Michelle Gillett
grew legs and arms, sucked in air and named ourselves,
is who we are— bone and gut, God’s face before we invented it:
stone-like, wide mouth feeding on every element.
~Erin Gillett
FOUR POEMS by Tommye Blount
BAREBACK AUBADE WITH THE DOG
Thicker than its master’s thigh,
I saw that dog gnawing its leash—
and didn’t I know better? Knowing my fear
of dogs, I thought, “If I walk faster
and stay calm, then—”
That leash, thin as Yes, snapped. Of course
the dog snapped too and I
wasn’t fast enough—only two legs then
instead of four. I was afraid, yes,
but I didn’t run. With my eyes shut,
I braced for what comes to those afraid
of what they refuse to see. But
that time, the dog headed for the lake.
It passed me by and I watched
the water gulp it down—its paws and then
its legs and then its flanks and then gone
was the scruffy heart
of its head. Wasn’t I sure it would not resurface
when it did? What sunlight there was
caught in its mouth a small body—its
slim head bucked twice more
against the water’s vermillion ripple.
AND THE DOG COMES BACK
from the lake with nothing
but the bark
it left with—an unintelligible
agony. Isn’t that, me
being the two-legged kind,
assumption and projection? A bark
sounds like a bark. A call of danger is a call
of ecstasy. It sloughs
the lake off its flanks,
sniffs the spittle of its chewed leash—
dangling from a hand
which too doesn’t know any better.
Control yourself, the dog
is told. The impossible leash
stings its back. So this is restraint
—I think as the dog
feigns satisfaction
in the dull salt
of a featherless palm. No,
you’ve caught me. I’m not there. I’m the animal
still fucking in a stranger’s bed.
His tongue licks my mouth. I whistle,
but I do not listen.
THE RUNTS
It’s my hand—so close
it could be bitten
clean off. Tonight
he is the dog—this bedded stranger
not using his words,
not responding to any name.
He lets me keep my hand—
returning it back cleaner
than it left. I haven’t learned my lesson
so I give him the other one.
No, not could be bitten. He bites my hand
and I howl like something
that should not howl
down his throat. We are both dogs
now, mouthing the dark until
we are not mouthing the dark.
We are sinking in the hold
of whatever is willing to hold us.
LYCANTHROPY
As if I can’t understand
my body is more than surreptitious pact
between nerve
and the crime it loves,
they’ve cornered me. And in this light
my frame is haphazard and threatening,
but I can’t speak—their leather collar still cinched
around my neck, a silver
leash hook for each pair of eyes daring me
to attack. Each man armed
with a hot muzzle, a mouth
full of scripture and no to aim
onto my back—now bent
over a prayer they mistake
for a growl. In this place,
there is no common tongue,
I can’t understand them,
so I can’t follow the order
that follows each leash,
so they beat me
until skin becomes wound
then scab then hide.
TWO POEMS by Patrick Rosal
TEN YEARS AFTER MY MOM DIES I DANCE
The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.
When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose. If you’re lucky,
time grants you a second chance,
as I was lucky
when I got to hold
the hand of my mother,
how I got to kiss that hand
before I sprawled out
on the tiles of the hallway
in the North Ward
so that the nurses
had to step over me
while I wept. Then again,
I have lived long enough
to turn on all the lights
in someone else’s kitchen
and move my hips in lovers’ time
to the same shameless
Amen sung throughout
the church our bodies
build in sway. And then
there were times all I could do
was point to the facts:
for one, we move
through the universe
at six hundred seventy
million miles per hour
even when we are lying
absolutely still.
Oh magic, I’ve got a broken
guitar and I’m a sucker
for ruin and every night
there’s a barback
who wants to go home
early to bachata
with his favorite girl.
I can’t blame him or the children
who use spoons for drums.
And by the way, that was me
at the Metropolitan stop
on the G. I was the one
who let loose half my anguish
with an old school toprock
despite the fifty-some
strangers all around me
on the platform
waiting for the train
about to trudge again
through the city’s winter
muck. Sure, I set it off
in my zipped up three-quarter
coat when that big girl
opened the thunder in her lungs
and let out her badass
banjo version of the Jackson Five,
all of which is to say, thank you
for making me the saddest man
on a planet teeming with sadness.
The night, for example,
I twirled a mostly deaf woman
in a late-night lounge
on the Lower East Side
and listened to her whisper
a melody she was making up
to a rhythm she told me
she could feel through her chest,
how we held each other there
on a crowded floor
until the lights came up
as if we were never dancing
to the same sorrows
or even singing
a different song.
UPTOWN ODE THAT ENDS ON AN ODE TO THE MACHETE
What happens when me and Willie
run into each other on a Wednesday night
in Brooklyn? He asks, “Where we going?”
And that’s not really a question.
That’s an ancestral imperative: to hail
any yellow or gypsy that’ll stop on Franklin
and Lincoln to fly us over the bridge then
zip up the East Side where the walls
are knocking to Esther Williams or Lavoe.
And you know Willie daps up Orlando
and I say What’s good! and it don’t take
three minutes for me and Will to jump
on the dance floor or post up at the bar
sipping on Barrilito or to tap on my glass
a corny cáscara with a butterknife
like I’m Tito Puente but I have no clue
I really sound like a ’78 Gremlin
dragging its tailpipe the length of 119th,
which is to say, it don’t take long
for Willie and me to be all in. And that’s when
out of nowhere in the middle of the room’s boom-
braddah macumba candombe bámbula
this Puerto Rican leans over and says to me
real slow, “Everybody is trying to get
home.” And I’m like, “Aw fuck.” because
I’m on 1st Ave between 115th and 116th
not even invested in the full swerve yet.
It’s not even five past midnight and Will
is dropping science like that. Allow me
to translate: There are neighborhoods in America
where a man says one simple sentence
and out flow the first seventeen discrete meanings
of home. If you haven’t been broken by the ocean,
if your own weeping doesn’t split you down
into equal weathers: monsoon, say, and gossip,
if you can’t stand at the front door
of an ancestral house and see a black saint
staring down at you, no name, no judgment,
if you haven’t listened to the town drunks
laughing underneath a tree they planted
so they wouldn’t forget your pain, then your story
must have a whole other set of secrets.
You must know what it’s like to expect
an invitation. You might not know what it’s like
to wonder if someone is even waiting
for you to return. Your idea of home
might not contain ways to call blood cousins
from another time zone or just shout
from the middle of the road. There are those of us
descended from peasants who never had to travel
too far to visit the smiths who craft knives
from hilt to tip, who cook blades
that split the wood or carve the rind
from flesh. I once went to visit the men
who make the machetes of the Philippines.
There was a time, I didn’t care where
those knives came from, how the men and women
stoked the embers and dropped their mallets
with a millimeter’s precision. When I was young,
I thought hard was the mad-dog you could send
across a crowded bar. I thought hard
was how deep you roll or how nasty the steel
you bring. In some neighborhoods of America,
hard is turning down the fire just enough,
so you could kiss the knife and make it ring.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Reprise by Kathleen Hellen
THE INTENDED by Rebecca Berg
From:
Wendy Kochman
27 Wayfarer Circle
Lafayette, CO 80540
To:
Professor Benjamin Schneider
Comparative Literature Department
New York University
13-19 University Place
New York, NY 10003
March 2014
Dear Ben,
I wonder how your life is. Are you happy sometimes? Are you well? Do you have a companion, and in your work do you still try to articulate the impossibility of articulating outside the Law of the Father? Really, I don’t know the first thing about you—I was going to say “anymore,” but I’ve been thinking lately that I never did. Me, I continue to tilt at the impossibilities, which is why, I suppose, I write memoir-inflected literary criticism that only rarely gets into print and why I have been thwarted in nearly every material ambition.
Do you remember once, riding home from school in the carpool—must have been eighth or ninth grade?—we were talking about the evils of car culture, and someone said, Well, when you’re adults you’ll want to have a car.
I’m going to have a horse, I said. (I didn’t even like horses.)
You were silent until someone prodded: What’s Ben going to have? And you said, uncomfortably, I’d like to have a small car.
But none of that is why I’m writing. You’ve been figuring in my dreams, Ben, bad dreams that at long intervals over these twenty years have erupted, like some dormant virus, in rashes. Sometimes David will sense my mood and ask what’s wrong, and I’ll say: I had a Ben Schneider dream. It’s a known phenomenon, a Ben Schneider dream, a shorthand between us. Oh no, he’ll say, what did he do this time? David teases when he’s at a loss, and he can neither understand nor alleviate the black restlessness that seizes me in the wake of a Ben Schneider dream. For days I go about sick at what my life has not been, suffering more dreams, until I tell myself this can’t go on and zip myself up.
My conscious mind is in fact perennially naïve and forgetful—I wonder if you remember that about me?—and for a long time I couldn’t fathom why my dreams should cast you, rather than, say, my mother as my persecutor. My clearest memories of you dated from the best years of friendship, from our late teens and early twenties, from long talks on early summer evenings, and yes, you did most of the talking and I did most of the listening, but the air was soft and I thought I had the worst of my life behind me and a flowering before me, and if you sometimes flaunted a financial magic carpet I would never share, and if you talked compulsively of jet-setting with celebrity intellectuals I would never meet—the heart of your life always elsewhere—still, I thought you knew my worth.
__________
I wonder if you know how far I have wandered. I’m speaking of my professional life and of this parched town where I’ve now lived longer than anywhere else, although there have been other traumas. But maybe you don’t know. It seems likely that you don’t know. It seems likely that, having dispensed with Wendy Kochman, having jumped the hurdle that in some way she once represented, you forgot that such a person ever was.
And rightly. Of course such a person never was.
Nevertheless, something happened—not a vague drifting apart, but some thing. You did something to Wendy Kochman, which I am only now remembering, because nothing happened to me, because I was not really Wendy Kochman. Another way of saying this: You killed Wendy Kochman, but at the time you did me no harm. In retrospect, though, it burns; it burns because it is of a piece with exile.
Maybe I’m fooling myself, but it seems to me that the exile would not have been so total if my oldest friend had continued to know my worth.
__________
Now, I do recognize that Wendy Kochman—and I—played a role in what happened. Wendy Kochman’s role, I believe, predated mine. You came to me. Perhaps I should say: “Ben Schneider” came to me, because surely the person who accosted me no longer exists. I imagine you dispatched him too, the eleven-year-old with his black Jewfro, his baby-Buddha build, and his precocious gastrointestinal tract—ulcers being seen at the time as proof of genius—who stood up from his assembly seat on the first day of junior high to ask the principal an uninvited question of unprovoked hostility. Who soon began to bring me gifts. Seriously, Ben, you startled me. I sat across the aisle and several rows behind you; at the time we were in different carpools. Why did you pursue me, how could you even see me? He likes you, people suggested. Even then I knew that could not be. I was an unmothered, self-loathing adolescent girl who wanted with a passion to disappear: just leave me alone and let me numb out. I did not like you. Was it that you needed an ear and a mirror?—and you sensed I could be picked off the back of the pack? Was it that our grandparents had immigrated from the same bloody corner of Eastern Europe? Or that your father had heard that my father played in the Buffalo Philharmonic? Assistant concertmaster, not bad. Was it rivalry? Or was it fellowship—one untouchable to another? But it seemed you never noticed your pariah status. The tanned offspring of the Buffalo business class had no power to make you feel ugly. In this, your self-certainty, you were decades ahead of me. I believe, though, that you were spared the context in which pariah status was most intimately enforced, namely, gym class. See ulcers, above.
Out of nowhere, you laid at the feet of Wendy Kochman your passion for Rachmaninoff, which she mocked, not kindly. Sometime later, you placed in her hands an LP of Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie, to which she said, not graciously, Yeah, it’s good music, but why are you giving me this? I barely know you. Next you gave her the Brahms double, and later, on returning from France, you brought her a poster of Impression, Sunrise that still hangs in my living room (silhouettes in a boat, orange light on blue-gray water). You evolved fast and on your own toward that quiet dawn. Your parents were not artists; you came from shrinks and MDs, a recipe, it seemed to me, for bombast. And yet you did not bring me Monet’s glittering lily pads. You brought me the subtle nostalgia of one random moment suspended, a phenomenon that I have often encountered since but at the time was new to me. I began to feel myself standing upon an unearned authority, which I nevertheless had no intention of relinquishing.
Outside of school and carpool, we never saw each other. So you startled me again by erupting when you learned I was going to graduate early. Your mother was driving the car that day, and you, sitting in the front seat, began to shout at her. I’m just as advanced as she is, you cried, more advanced. But Ben, I tried to say, you already skipped a grade. You were too stung to hear. I even tried to tell you that it was only because that old French teacher had told my parents: You need to get her out of here. He was trying to save me, Ben. I never even had a class with him. If he knew I was a good student, it was by reputation only. What he more likely had in mind was the epithets I’d been fielding in the hallways and the soccer fields for four years (dirty lezzie), the jocks shouldering me into walls, the head of student council—son of a state senator—accidentally on purpose grabbing my breasts. Maybe he suspected an unloving home, but that’s probably wishful thinking. I don’t know that he made the right call. If I’d had another year on the viola before venturing into Eastman, I might have stuck with the music. My life might look different now.
And so you hastened to get yourself early into Harvard. Mentally, I shrugged: rivalry after all. A little deeper down, I was flabbergasted: Really? You would rearrange your life because of me?
We did not stay in touch while we were away. My first semester, I had a peak experience playing late Beethoven in a hotshot quartet, and I fell in love with the cellist, a prodigy who was so at one with his instrument that it seemed to speak words and who slept with me once and told me I was “deep” and bowed out of the group. You were, frankly, the last thing on my mind. But again you startled me; you began calling me when we were home between semesters: Do you want to go for a walk? Do you want to come over? The first time, my family was finishing dinner, and they all looked at me: Why is he calling you? I joined you—warily, later willingly. It got me out of the house; I began, finally, to think of you as a friend. You were majoring in philosophy, and American philosophy departments, you told me, were disgustingly dominated by the Anglo-American school, which was an exercise in superficiality, complacently erecting syllogisms with no notion that language was an arbitrary system of signs; that one could appeal neither to personal experience nor to empirical evidence without committing a basic ontological error; that certainly one could not talk about negative capability, as I was wont to do, because that presupposed an opposition between interior and exterior that was always already collapsed; that, in fact, one could never say anything, because the notion that there was anywhere outside of language to speak from was retrograde romantic individualism. It was a series of infuriating can’ts, and we argued, and it was as if we were pushing a piece of clay back and forth. You never told me I was “deep.” In truth you came close to naming the way it felt to be me, which was that the world attenuated upon approach, always—that I was myself a soap bubble, aleatory and hollow, across whose surface the five senses chased in iridescent colors. I loved our play. (I still miss that heady play.) Even your self-absorption became attractive, because it was not my parents’ self-absorption and was therefore something of mine. The logic was not impeccable.
Did you notice that I never called you? You must have noticed. Here is what I vaguely noticed: During all those hours of walks and talks, you never tried to touch me, though something about me seemed to feed you. Maybe you liked my mind. I wanted to think that. Simultaneously, I told myself you just needed someone to occupy you when you were stuck in Buffalo. A witness, a Penelope.
Or was it something darker? I have been forming a queasy theory about your father, which I cannot (or will not) articulate outside of narrative.
__________
So let’s cling for now to the easy insights. In graduate school, our away-from-Buffalo worlds began to overlap. You had migrated to Comp Lit at Yale; I had abandoned the viola and got myself into the English Department at Cornell, which I chose not because it was a battlefield in the theory wars, but because it provided every graduate student a full scholarship plus stipend. So. Was the problem that I was no longer a musician? Was it that we now shared a circle of acquaintance?—and Wendy Kochman was no star: at best of no use, at worst a liability. You see that I am getting stuck in a rather tedious pedestal story: You put Wendy Kochman on a pedestal, later you knocked her down. Seeing her roll at your feet, how could you not kick her?—though maybe I fell of my own accord. By the time I visited you in New Haven, the site of the kicking, I was impatient with the field of English. The price of admission seemed to be immersion in—surrender to—the not-interesting, the not-significant. Almost certainly, I dissented from too many things. What I could not see, though maybe you could, was that as a result academia was going to shed me and that I did not take myself seriously, I did not consider my life and future livelihood cause enough to fight for. Les non-dupes errent, indeed. I was having dreams then, too, dreams that I now consider premonitory, of shrouds, of flat black clouds, of stingrays settling over my face.
Your apartment in New Haven made me wistful. It had hardwood floors and white walls. I, to stay within my stipend, had settled in Ithaca for acoustic ceiling, wood paneling, and wine-stained carpet at the battered end of Farm Street. From the moment I set foot in your territory, I felt tentative, wrong-footed. You had asked me to come, and now, every time I opened my mouth you were impatient and contemptuous, as if I were an aspect of yourself, or a family member, that you were ashamed of. For my part, I was not equipped to defend myself. When I am attacked, guilt is my first reaction: I must have done something wrong to make Mommy so mad. That fogs, to say the least, my perception of the stimulus. The spears went in, and before I knew what they were, I had forgotten what they were. So I cannot enumerate the errors you charged me with. I only know that you seemed to be convincing yourself I was stupid. One occasion has stuck with me. Sitting on your futon in that bright apartment, I asked you what you thought of something you were reading, and instead of answering, you accused me of needing “pure voice.” It’s infantile, you said. Emotionally immature and politically retrograde. You had Wendy Kochman, of all people, longing to hitch herself to the authority of univocal truth.
My question frightened you, perhaps, because you had nothing to say?
Finally I did rouse to anger. I wasn’t going to stick around for this, I said, and I started whacking through the onionskin pages of the phone book, looking for the Greyhound number. That, I believe, is when you tried to hand me a pill: Here, take this.
What is it? I said.
Instead of answering, you told me I had a problem with oral receptivity. A reaction-formation, you said.
I felt bad for your roommate, who was witnessing this squabble. I felt bad—guilty, even—about the phone book in my lap: melodrama. But mostly I was squatting very still inside myself, watching myself lose, yet again, a love object. I had learned, belatedly, to love you, and post hoc ergo propter hoc, here you were, un-becoming. The person who would shove that pill on me was not a person I trusted. It was an ancient loss; I knew how to take care of it. I just needed to go away and tend to myself.
Greyhound never got called, because the phone rang first: your father. He asked you how the visit was going. I know this, because I heard you say, We’ve been fighting, but we’re working it out. Then he asked you to put me on the phone. What? What did he want to talk to me for?—as if I too were a child of his, when in truth I barely knew him. He asked me how I thought the visit was going, and I don’t know if you remember this about me either, but when I’m bewildered, words drain from me; I have to chase them down, and in the struggle I sometimes get them by a leg or foot—upside down or inside out. This time I grabbed hold of bang-up, which I meant literally but which he chose to take figuratively: Good, good, a tiff can bring people closer.
When I got off the phone, you pleaded, Don’t go, Wendy. Things will be better. Your voice was different—beaten. So I stayed.
Come to think of it, your father had startled me once before. We’d been in your kitchen talking, and he appeared with a camera and wanted us to go outside for a picture. What? Well okay. We stood on the grass. Stood like manikins, side by side. Hold hands or something, he said. I remember thinking, Oh, he’s got the wrong end of the stick. As I write this, I wonder: what else didn’t come from you? Was calling me all those times even your idea? Once—this is coming back to me, now; I’d forgotten this episode—you invited me to spend the night with you. I was surprised: Really? With your parents in the house? They were cool with that? Well, okay, but I couldn’t stay all night; that wouldn’t be okay with my parents. Ugh, you said. Wendy, you’re so afraid of your parents. We went up to your room—the only time I saw it—and lay down and held each other. When you got an erection, I reached under your clothes and wrapped my hand around it, and you said: I can’t. We talked instead; I was nothing if not flexible. Pretty soon you said, Wendy, I’m fading, and then truly I did not want to be there anymore.
How could I not see? Well, naïveté. But honestly, I can count on one hand the times I saw your father, and those sometimes years apart. You of course said nothing—until finally, having come out to yourself and then to your family, you told me your father had accused your mother of failing to consummate their marriage since she had not given him a real son. I was appalled for you, Ben. If I remember correctly, that happened before I came to New Haven. How terrible that your father was still hoping to make a match between us.
These days I also feel for my younger self. The it in the middle.
__________
For all intents and purposes, our friendship ended during that weekend in New Haven. We had a couple of encounters in Ithaca. I don’t remember why you came. It wasn’t to see me, I don’t think, but you stopped by. Once you spent an hour or so on the window seat of my new apartment, a studio in a rambling Queen Anne on the corner of Titus and Albany. My boyfriend from Farm Street had broken up with me, and I had found this beautiful, tiny place for myself, hardwood floors and twelve-foot ceilings, oak woodwork and bay windows, and then my new boyfriend had moved in with me, not altogether in accordance with my preferences. You and I were almost strangers by now. So you sat politely while Keith and I discussed the enneagram. In a spirit of mischief and inclusion—I knew you didn’t know the enneagram, too middle brow—I pointed out the personality type I thought fit you and handed you the book. You said, But this is mostly positive. Your surprise betrayed your underlying contempt, as did your silence about the retrograde politics of typing people, as did your reference to a potpourri burner as “that thing in the bathroom” and your attempt to make conversation with Keith, who was black: “Are you religious?” Oh, Ben, if you had not been my friend, I would not have believed you were real.
I remember another incident from that visit. We were at an English Department function. You were my guest, but of course you were a Yale theory guy who knew Derrida personally, which meant that after all the room was more your room than mine, and you and I were standing together, and Julie Somebody—I seem to have permanently suppressed her last name, but she was one of those acolytes who had imbibed enough Lacan and Foucault to convince herself she could acquire an aura by committing ostentatious social cruelties and not enough to understand that her dutiful Peter Pan collars were always going to make people feel sorry for her—that person invited you and noticeably did not invite me to “a little party” at her place.
You hesitated. You wanted to go. You so wanted to go.
I said: Ben, if you go to that party, I will never speak to you again.
Well. You didn’t go. For a long time, I felt cynical about that. He might as well have gone since we never did speak again, not really. Now I’m less sure. I could have dismissed you outright, if you had gone. And then you never could have returned, you never could have haunted my dreams.
__________
I saw you once more, at the MLA. It was the last morning of the conference, my last year on the market, in every way an epilogue. I had finished my dissertation and had failed for more than a year to get any piece of it published, and I just had finished the one interview I’d landed, and I knew I was not going to get the job, and I was sitting on a couch in a hotel lobby with Keith, and you passed by. You didn’t so much speak to me as vaguely address yourself to two distant acquaintances: I’m not going to get anything, you said, and I had two reactions, the first of which I was ashamed of: schadenfreude. Next came skepticism. Really, Ben Schneider will get nothing? You did not think to ask about my situation.
Sometimes, in my dreams, you walk by me and fail to see me, and if I call out you fail to recognize me and then, looking guilty, you pretend to know who I am.
They’d asked me in the interview what I’d been doing since I’d finished my dissertation. Working, I said, at the reference desk in the graduate library at Cornell. Even as I said it, I knew I was self-sabotaging; I tried to recoup by adding: I consider it an extension of my education. The room froze, they in embarrassment, I in fury at myself. And in disgust. Why should my answer have sounded flip? In any reasonable interview, it would have been an honorable answer. Only in our profession did needing to work disqualify you from working.
__________
I was going to sketch a narrative of the dark years that followed, but I find that I can’t. It was the end of dignity. There’s no place to tell it from. I just can’t.
I lived with a man who drank. I left him. For a time I temped in Washington, DC. Once they sent me to an international law firm, to proofread lists of chemical names in Danish. No matter that I didn’t know Danish; this was letter-by-letter comparison proofing. Mindless, mechanical work that nevertheless required your full attention. They put me at a little table facing a wall in the office of a smug German lawyer who spent the afternoon calling his friends in Frankfurt to brag about his salary. He had no idea—never did learn—that I understood every word. That he was distracting me. Can’t afford a McMansion, he kept saying, but I’m not complaining. Ich beklage mich nicht.
__________
“When you are up,” Barbara Stanwyck is said to have said, “you are accepted; when you are down, it is as though you do not exist.” She was talking, of course, about Hollywood.
And let’s be honest: If you had looked for me I would have hidden. David I met at the National Academy of Sciences, where he was researching mercury pollution and I’d been hired to do some photocopying. Three months later he got invited to rescue fragile ecosystems in this land of magpies and tumbleweed—a dream of his: to work outdoors. To live in the shadow of a mountain. He brought me a Cracker Jack ring and held out an orange gazania, which, when I laughed, he stuck in his buttonhole, and he said, Um, um, um, would you marry me? I was six months pregnant with twins, not by him—by Keith, who didn’t know. That’s the kind of man David is: nothing like you.
When the kids were little, I pulled the viola out. I had not touched it in twenty years. Do you know what desert air does to wood? My poor old Czech viola. When I opened the case, the strings lay on the belly of the instrument, flabby as twine. The sound post clinked, and the bridge slid between the bouts. It was in the shop for months; in the interim they sold me two quarter-sized violins for my babies. Benjy—named after David’s father, in case you were wondering—prefers mountain biking, but Emily took to music. I taught her myself until she played with a grace I’d never had and I could teach her nothing more. When she was ten, I took her to the violin professor at the university. For the next seven years, I listened from the living room, often in tears, silent ones, so as not to unnerve her.
Last year they started college. This year David got cut to halftime, and I found myself some adjunct work at community colleges and night schools, literature and composition. I even have library privileges. So, following your latest eruption in my dreams, I have been catching up on your publications, all those articles in the nineties, culminating in a book whose title stabbed me in the solar plexus—Eruptions in the Future Perfect: The Return of Theory. Apparently it was widely reviewed when it came out. In Diacritics I found this, from one of my Cornell classmates: “Nobody does the uncanny better than Schneider.”
Well. How entirely true. But that was nine years ago. And silence since. I wonder what is happening in your life. I wonder how that silence feels.
__________
Last night you glided past, conversing with a beaky, bespectacled woman in a broomstick skirt. She was inviting you to co-edit an anthology on shadow selves. Hey, I tried to shout, but I could only croak, and you looked at me blankly, bleakly, and the woman turned on me, impatiently reiterating the ground rules: You are nothing, Wendy Kochman. Stop making trouble.
__________
The “good years” of our friendship seem in retrospect to have been a crossroads. I allowed myself to be pulled out of my own terrain; I was always the one who didn’t know. Often I vanished myself, telling myself I didn’t need to prove anything to you, making myself in my mind bigger than you. “Ben Schneider” became my name for everything I forbade myself to be: snobbish and grandiose, massively defended. Possibly that disrespect seeped through my gentle leading questions and silent dissents, though perhaps you didn’t see; I counted on you not to see.
I remember the first time you fell for a man who wouldn’t have you. You swallowed twenty of those pills of yours and promptly called 911.
Later you called me. You proffered the story like a gift.
Oh, the drama, I snorted, not kindly, not graciously.
But “Ben Schneider” is a gift, isn’t he? All these years, it’s been the same damn gift. Belatedly, I accept.
Take this letter, ten weeks in the writing. Mischief. Drama. I am trying to decide whether to send it. I would need to be clear in my mind that I need nothing from you—not affirmation, not any response at all; I do not even need you not to respond. If you receive these pages, it just means that I have chosen not to disappear—or rather, given the decades that have passed: I choose not to have disappeared. How this eruption might strike you, I’ll refrain from speculating. Time folded while I was writing. It seemed we were in the carpool just the other day, side by side and bickering, with our lives before us, unknown and impossible. Now you are receding.
Farewell, my basherter—
Wendy