62
CIRQUE
Emma Rae Lierley
Angry at the Task Amy Katz
Julie LeMay
The Anchorage Jail My son, young inmate, sprawls along the long table India ink blue tattoos accented by orange prison garb; chin juts forward looking for a fight jaw clenched denying or defying hard to tell which. So many scars up and down his arms and angry eyes hold, then hide so much pain.
We’ve spent hours out at the woodpile with the heavy maul to heat a few hungry rooms— our bedroom’s never warmed— cutting cords of firewood beneath the bowing cedar. We sucked our hope like a rock in the mouth our own thirsty saliva mistaken for water, swallowing a silent, unexplainable guilt like snatched handfuls of hoarded candies— the evidence of our theft left in our sweaty and small, vibrantly stained palms. We worked and this is how we learned what family was, what it was to mean for us to love, like splitting wood— the labor and order to things, the carefully parsed exertion, the necessary limit. Our father’s father built a stolen house and lived a bitter life, our grandmothers are scattered there among the rotting timber, buried on a hill above the Raging River, where it joins its waters to the Snoqualmie, at the sinking town below the Falls, but we, angry at the task of living each Sunday morning, know no one laying there.
We speak through battered black telephones, cords spiraled down with worn metal. We’re joined by shatterproof glass. He laughs, cries, swears he wants to change. Mothers trade in hope and time. The guard pats my shoulder, an unexpected kindness, but I find my way out the door alone across the long parking lot to my locked car. Brenda Roper