Cq65 1 sneakpeak portions

FA L L 2015

POETRY

| FICTION | ART | ESSAYS | REVIEWS

IN THIS ISSUE

Missing persons and found objects, Ashcake and honeycombs, plus Bridges, boats, and extinctions

VOLUME 65.1

Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

Fall 2015 V O L U M E 6 5 . 1 E D I TO R- I N - C H I E F

Lindsay Starck M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

Catherine O’Neill F I C T I O N E DI TO RS

Moira Anne Marquis Rae Yan P O E T RY E DI TO RS

Sarah George-Waterfield Lee Norton N O N - F I C T I O N E D ITO R S

Sam Bednarchik Travis Alexander A RT E DI TO R

Chloe Accardi L AYO UT E DI TO R

Samantha Farley C OV E R DE SI G N

Philip McFee

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DANIELLE MUŽINA Biting my Tongue

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INDEXING The Carolina Quarterly is indexed in the Book Review Index, Poem Finder, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index, and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Member Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. ISSN 0008-6797.

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Contents

Fall 2015 | VOLUME 65 .1

FICTION LIZ BREAZEALE Ashcake 12 DEBORAH FORBES The List of Things Lost 30 KATHLEENE DONAHOO Helen’s Girls 74 ROSS WILCOX Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society 102

POETRY VICTORIA McARTOR A Certain Light 9

Hunting 10 JOHN MARVIN banaphora by the see 26

The Beehive Womb Flute 28 ARAN DONOVAN no good reason 46

ferry 47 priorities 48 classmates 49 if this is the little death 50 optimism 51 why some people disagree 52 the poet 53 JAYDN DeWALD Desire Lines 92

[guttering candle I see you duplicated...] 94 [which brings us to the surrounding holographic image...] 95 The Theory of the Poem 96 JOLENE BRINK The Tongue 97

St. John’s University 98 Crofters 99 Inventory: Belief System 100 HYEJUNG KOOK Invention No. 7 in e minor 118

NONFICTION GERI ULREY 13th & B 54

ART DANIELLE MUŽINA Introduction to the Artwork 64

Magical Thinking 65 Patina 66-67 Split Attention 68 Leftovers 69 Bury Me With It 70-71 Used To 72

REVIEWS BENJAMIN MURPHY on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Where the Bird Sings Best 120

Trans. Alfred MacAdam Restless Books, March 2015

CLAIRE RAVENSCROFT on Robert Repino’s Mort(e) 124

Soho Press, January 2015

VICTORIA McARTOR

A Certain Light I tangled in sand lost the way a bead of water feels its sanity slip until one day only the umbrella remained and then one day only the ocean and much later certain sca!ered pieces of sun

VICTORIA McARTOR

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VICTORIA McARTOR

Hunting we’re silly silhoue!es with bulbous heads blowing about the breeze we’re mostly ribcages mimicking the pruned palm trees South beach reminds me of prehistoric hunting pa!erns how the flat surface of land imitates how vision views the water sca!ering none of my friends like each other but a good body to pose on will do the sunrise comes from under us pushing the water open like champagne just like yesterday even though the horizon promises a new beginning and pains new skin around it we just get drunk and kiss and watch the pink people hunting for pre!y things

10

C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

He shakes his head. The coastline is a black snake slithering toward us, as though we can offer it protection. There are only a few gulls circling, squawking, hal#earted. The morning usually fills with seabirds catcalling the fishermen and tourist boats. Above it all, the volcano, the crater at the top smoothed into downtrodden horns.

“So? What’d they say?”

“I’m not a scientist, Dana.” His words hang hollow in the air, eruptive clouds. “I’m just their chauffer.”

My sides squeeze, pooling and gra$ing my breath. He’s never evasive. “What’d they say?”

“They’re worried. But you know that already.”

More and more people have said goodbye with finality, with tiny explosions. Throwing out things like, you’ll grow up to be such a lovely young woman. Or, you’ll run this bakery just like your mama. In a way that suggests they won’t be here to witness these claims. Something seeps into everyone’s breath, hardening their eyes, whistling between cracks in their voices that have crept up overnight. Making their footfalls, their words, echo. “Evacuation?”

His face is an ocean covering a scar, ripples radiating unchecked over a collapse.

The waves course into the dock and the trees rustle.

“Are we leaving? Mom won’t. You know she won’t.”

Once, when we were floating by the volcano, where the slope meets the ocean and the rocks are always tumbling in, making plork plork sounds with their cavernous bodies, I asked him, why the ocean? We’d gone so he could teach me to dive, and we watched my mother turn around without waving us away. It was never a secret that my uncle was The Man With The Boat, the man with the escape plan, and it still causes her grief.

Why? People say you’re waiting for a reason to run away.

He checked his mask, breathed twice, his voice husked and dry. He he$ed himself onto the side of the boat, said, maybe they’re not wrong.

This is all I think about, watching him. Throwing himself into the belly of the ocean, searching for the depths of something. He says, LIZ BREAZEALE

15

“Just remember. Your mom and I share the same genes. That means you’ve got some of both of us.”

I tell him goodbye and my feet scuff the wood and I am le$ walking, holding this bomb of detritus.

III. Talus n. A slope formed by an accumulation of rock debris, as at the base of a cliff School is only a few dozen miles from the foot of the volcano.

Around us, the palm trees droop, succumbing to the heaviness of the air.

The air smells of compacted earth and stone, of crushing and tumbling, of avalanches.

A quarter of us have le$. We’re crammed into the Volcanology classroom, except Mrs. Maar is gone and we have no sub. Yesterday at the bakery, she and her new husband handed their money over the counter and said, Keep the change, Dana. You be smart now.

As a result, there’s nobody in here to make us watch this documentary, the same one we’ve watched since we were kids, about all the extinction events that have destroyed life on this planet. Not even the corny re-enactments help diffuse the pressure that has built over the past few weeks since people started leaving.

Nobody keeps their voices down.

“You feel it this morning?”

“Ugh. My stepmom woke me up. She was flipping shit. Crying in the corner. My dad couldn’t calm her down until he promised to take the day off and start packing.”

“You think that’s bad? My stepdad’s in the office right now, yelling at them to close the school.”

They turn to me, faces eroded and smooth. “What about your mom? Bet she was loving it.”

“What do you think? Just went right back to baking. I’m surprised she didn’t tell me some legend about how we all came from earthquakes.”

“Ha! My mom actually did that. She opened the door—” He stands, mimes throwing open a door.

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

“Bullshit.”

“No, for real. She steps out into the yard and just stands there, staring at it. Then she comes back in and starts going on about our ancestors.”

“Both my parents are dead sure it’s nothing.”

The ground shivers. Rumbles. I clench my chair until my fingers hurt. The quake continues for minutes and minutes and when it’s over the air fills with breaths and sharp, pained giggles. Everyone’s eyes shi$ to the volcano, whose top is now invisible behind plumes of smoke. The clouds scuff outward.

“Dana, what about your uncle?”

There is a sound, a shake, like the earth is mourning. There is an explosion from the volcano that makes the air pulse, makes it harden.

When I was born, Mom says they gave an evacuation order. Just a precaution, she tells me every year. And Obie will chime in and say, there were mudflows and avalanches, Edy. They told us for weeks to leave.

Your father ran away, she will tell me. Her hands over mine, rubble over sand.

My voice is wind over canyons. “Obie’s probably packing.” Nobody looks at me. We seize the mountain, clouds swirling, in our sight.

The lights flicker. Someone says, “They don’t know how to save themselves.”

There’s this legend Mom used to tell me whenever I was sick or scared, or when the earth would quake.

When the island was first formed, when it spouted from the sea, it was empty except for the volcano. And that volcano, it bubbled all the time. Day and night. Slick and orange against the ground, slipping to the ocean. And our ancestors, they were closer to it than we were.

They’d hike up to where the lava cools enough to get close, where it won’t set your skin on fire. And what they’d do is burn themselves.

See how near they could get, how intimate. See if they could touch it, could meld with it, could coat their bones and eyes until there was nothing but volcano.

We’re nothing more than what our parents couldn’t keep out of themselves. We’re debris, the remains of avalanches.

LIZ BREAZEALE

17

IV. Kipuka n. An island or tract of land, possibly of volcanic origin, that has been completely surrounded by later lava flows.

Thursday is usually our busiest day—Toba Thursday Special, Six For The Price Of Four! —But Mom is home, arguing on the phone about why they let us out of class early. “Roger, you cannot be serious.”

It feels like the day is already eroded. On the way home the air colored purple and thick with rumors, silence on the side streets. It grinds my bones, makes a paste of my lungs. The sky coated with anger.

“Roger, so help me, I am going to do my job and you are going to have the million le$over Pompeii Peaches and Caldera Crumbles leaking from every orifice—” Something passes I can’t quite grasp. Her eyes gli!er grey, disgusted. “Because I know they’re your favorite. A li!le something to take with you, since I can’t get in to bake anymore.

City council, my ass. Keeping all of us from earning a living over a li!le eruption.”

I start to wonder why they le$ and we haven’t, all of us who are here. If there was something they could feel, a certain shi$ in the earth or a scent in the soil that Mom just can’t get to. Like when I’d push my head too close to her chest when I was li!le, so my whole world was heartbeat. Which meant everything else dissolved.

V. Subduction n. At convergent boundaries, the process by which one tectonic plate moves under another, sinking into the mantle as the plates converge The sky peels flakes of ash and I hear Obie’s voice, taloned. “At least let me—” “How are we supposed to eat if I don’t work?”

“Who are you selling to? Where are your customers?”

Their footsteps hail into the floorboards. He grumbles something indistinguishable.

“You don’t care,” she says, slamming her glass down. “You don’t care that you’re from here, you don’t care where you go or how you live.”

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

She comes back wearing her volcano suit. The visor reflects grey.

She walks into the dark with a bucket and a shovel, and I can barely see her past the deck. A ghost in the ash, a figure I can picture myself as, digging and digging, creating something more catastrophic than a crater. An emptiness where something superheated and eternal, something incubated under the earth, has leaked away.

LIZ BREAZEALE

25

JOHN MARVIN

banaphora by the see 6, 000 feet beyond people and time ...

I went through the woods to the lake of Silvaplana; I stopped ... by a huge boulder.

That is where this thought came to me.

Nietzsche Ecce Homo Plato wrote that Socrates told Hermogenes and Cratylus that Heraclites supposedly said that all things are in motion and that you cannot go into the same river twice that impressed Stevens who referring to himself in the third person wrote “He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing” Many believe Heraclites’ fluxing phrases allegedly reported by Socrates according to Plato and referenced by many others since were so puzzling that they had to be wise but they are quantum mechanically banal all you have to do is laugh with joy standing in place like a great rock

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

from which gateway “Augenblick” that lane leads forever back and that lane leads forever beyond and besides the conversation was Platonic the characters even if not fictional are all dead not a monadnock reflected on that lake that very lake that is the source of that turbulent river always pouring forever under trees and gazes into that sea on the shores of which Plato and Nietzsche and Stevens each stand in silence each “Breathing his bronzen breath at the very azury center of time.”

JOHN MARVIN

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JOHN MARVIN

The Beehive Womb Flute And he covetide to fille his wombe of the coddis that the hoggis eeten Luke, xv.16 In the Tomb of Agamemnon where bees dance in the belly uterus aulos “We were wombful of mischief […]

Haggis good, haggis strong, haggis never say die!” in old Mycenae we would fill the wax cell with nourishment fill the belly with nourishment fill the alveolus with nourishment fill the flute flare blow with nourishment and the air with song We piled cut stone we polished cut stone on the inside to look like a true vault to be prepared for digestion and metabolism like the magic play of the 18th century like Celtic beehive houses unhewn stone piled into a dome shape for the shelter of the life of a family the magic play depicting supernatural events in allegorical aspirations M 44 or NGC 2632 shines a puff of light a few hundred stars in the breast of Cancer Aratos’ “Li!le Mist” for more than 2,260 years

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

Fill the manger Praesepe with fodder for the Asses ridden into ba!le by Dionysos and Selinus as Eratosthenes sings in beautiful lies Hipparchus Ptolomy Galileo all sing Fill the womb with new life fill the world with artifacts stone fertility icons polished over centuries by hands and the currents of time to sustain the species La Ruche on the outskirts of the cafĂŠs and catacombs of Montparnasse Chagall Gleizes Apollinaire Die ZauberflĂśte Schikaneder Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart worthy of emotion chimes and flutes dancing like air like floating breath

JOHN MARVIN

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DEBORAH FORBES

The List of Things Lost An object knocks against the doorframe. The sound is light and uneven enough to be random—a branch being moved by the wind, except there’s no tree on that side of the house, and no wind. Beyond closed drapes a dove coos. Legend has it that the bird is urging, “Work harder. Work harder,” but, the locals laugh, no one does. The children at the preschool across the street sing God’s praises with shouting, joyless precision: “For thine is the keeengdom, the powa and the gloreee!”

A$er an interval of silence the rapping begins again, louder, more rhythmic. Usually Corinne’s day guard leaves her alone a$er the first try. The madam is busy, Sepiso will tell whoever’s at the gate—women selling hand brooms woven out of straw, men selling charcoal burnt from trees cut from the balding hills on the outskirts of the city. The madam is busy—perhaps he believes this. In truth she hasn’t been busy since she gave up her job in DC to follow her husband to this posting in Lusaka.

Sepiso begins to bang with a steady rhythm, not with his fist but something sharp and metallic. Corinne rises and jerks the door open, her body propelled by an old habit of rush and impatience. She has forgo!en to lock it; she’d never forget to lock their door in DC. But what ma!ers here isn’t the lock; it’s the gate at the mouth of their property, and Sepiso to watch it.

His brow furrows in surprise, as if he’s go!en so lost in the noise he’s making he forgot it was meant to summon another human being. His eyes are wide-set and almond-shaped, vaguely Asian in his African face.

“Good morning, Madam,” he says, making a bow.

“Good morning, Sepiso. How is your family?” She admonishes herself to slow down, follow the courtesies.

“We are very fine, Madam.”

Silence. She waits.

“Except…it is Grace, Madam.”

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

Grace is Sepiso’s new wife, Corinne’s new maid. “Does she need more clothespins? I think I gave her all of them, but I could check.”

“No, it is all right, Madam. It is enough.” Sepiso studies the shape his boot makes against the flagstone porch.

Corinne waits.

“Grace, she is feeling ill.”

“Is it her head? Stomach?” She’s go!en used to being called upon for snap diagnoses, usually followed by a request for painkillers.

They’ve already distributed half the ibuprofen they brought from the States.

Sepiso is quiet for so long that she almost turns to get the tablets without hearing any more.

Finally: “She is bleeding, Madam.”

“She’s cut herself? She needs a plaster?” (This word has cost Corinne several misunderstandings. Plaster, not Band Aids.)

Sepiso makes a sound halfway between a sigh and a word. “She will have a child, Madam. She is three-four months.”

Corinne opens her mouth, and then closes it. Pregnant, and so the wedding. “Congratulations,” she says, remembering a beat too late about the blood.

Sepiso raises his head to meet her eyes, but he doesn’t smile.

“The blood,” she tries again. “It’s a lot or only a li!le?”

He looks at his hands, and she doesn’t know whether he doesn’t know or doesn’t understand the question, or if this isn’t information to be exchanged between a Zambian man and a white woman.

“You should take her to the clinic. I’ll get you some money for transport.”

She turns down the short corridor to the bedroom. A luggage lock secures the cupboard where they keep their money—only the hotels accept credit cards. The wood at the hinge of the latch has been eaten away by termites; anyone could pull the latch clean off the door, but none of the people who’ve worked in her home have. What ma!ers isn’t the intactness of the latch but her relationship to the people here, which follows no known rules. Encounter by encounter, she half-decodes, half-invents them.

DEBORAH FORBES

31

“Here,” she pushes rumpled bills into Sepiso’s hand. “Don’t worry about coming back. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sepiso doesn’t move. Corinne tries to guess what else he wants.

She remembers something her thrice-pregnant sister told her. “No more painkillers, Sepiso, okay? For Grace. It can make the bleeding worse. You didn’t give her the tablets I gave you last week, did you?”

“Madam?”

Corinne sighs. Her husband Grant specializes in stories of well-intentioned outsiders who make things worse by trying to make them be!er. “No more painkillers,” she repeats.

Sepiso makes a small bow. “Yes, Madam. Thank you.”

———— Corinne didn’t want a maid. She told Grant’s colleagues: “We’re American. We like our privacy.” What she meant was she was naked, stripped of her job and home, her urban routines, which turned out to be more central to her sense of self than she ever would’ve guessed.

She didn’t want a witness while she figured out how to cover herself.

It was the laundry that defeated her. In Lusaka the laundry is done by hand, so when they first arrived she knelt at the bathtub, pushing and tugging at the fibers of their clothes, not knowing when to stop. They dried on the line crisp as paper with the soap she’d failed to rinse out.

A$er a month Grant said, “This is ge!ing a li!le ridiculous.”

“I’m ge!ing be!er at it. I’m going to run two rinses this time.”

“Corinne, you have a college degree. People here need this job.”

She pushed the hair out of her hot face. “I can’t even call myself a housewife, if all the housework is done by someone else.”

She tried hiring the women who asked for work at her gate, but they seemed not to understand her proposition: an a$ernoon’s work, one a$ernoon a week, a part-time wage.

“The money is not enough.”

“But I’m offering you two days’ wages for a half-day’s work.”

“It is not enough for food, even rent.”

“You’d be free to work anywhere else the rest of the week.”

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

If she persuaded someone to accept these terms, the woman would say, “I come back tomorrow to do the pressing.”

“No, I only need you on Thursdays. The ironing can wait until next time.”

“But everything, Madam, it must be pressed. Even the underclothes.

Otherwise the putsi, he will come.”

Corinne called Sidney, the woman from the American and Canadian Women’s Club who’d brought a banana cake when they first arrived.

Sidney explained that the putsi flies lay their eggs in damp clothing.

You put on your clothes and their larvae burrow into your skin and make boils like pimples. The boils then have to be popped one by one—Sidney’s voice warmed with this information—the head of the worm squirting out, and then the burst of blood. Some say ironing kills the eggs, some say only an electric dryer will do the job. Who but the hotels owned an electric dryer?

Sidney’s own maid—“You have to picture her, ash black skin, ancient, totally deadpan”—told her, “Madam, if the putsi wants to come, he will come.” Corinne tried to echo Sidney’s knowing laugh. This is Africa; this is what you have to go on: rumor and fatalism.

If she persuaded someone to accept a part-time arrangement, things would begin to disappear: a tube of ointment, a cheese grater, a package of sugar, chocolate bars, macaroni and cheese mix from America, episodes of Seinfeld a friend back home had taped for her.

What street value could they possibly have in Lusaka? She wondered, too stumped to laugh. She’d spend an a$ernoon wandering the house, thinking, I’m sure I le$ that bracelet on my desk. But am I really sure?

Could I have le$ it next to the bathtub? Or did I remember to put it away in the cabinet? Maybe it fell behind the desk.

As the losses—random, intimate—accumulated, she began to feel that anything could vanish. To persuade herself she wasn’t going mad, she’d make a list of what was missing. When the list got long enough, she’d sit the woman down and read it to her.

The woman would look at her with a face so still it could’ve been carved out of stone and say, “No, Madam. I could not take these things, Madam.”

DEBORAH FORBES

33

And Corinne would almost believe her. She could almost believe that the woman occupied a reality so separate from her own that she was in fact telling the truth.

Sidney laughed when Corinne confessed her troubles. “Never hire from your gate; that’s the first rule. I thought you knew.”

But the women’s stories, Corinne protested, stories of evictions, of sickness and no money for medicine. She hated firing them. If they’d taken money from the cabinet she would’ve understood. If they’d admi!ed to taking the things on the list she would’ve been relieved, nearly grateful. What she couldn’t do was live in a house of unexplained disappearances.

“My dear, you have to ignore all the propaganda our husbands are cooking up about democracy in Africa. This is a feudal culture. Either you want a maid or you don’t, and if you do you earn her loyalty by making her dependent on you.”

So she asked Sepiso if Grace would work in her home. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t say no; she’s bad at measuring the extent of her power here. In any case Grace turned up the next day, and now Corinne knows like the shadows of the trees against the wall the light, steady pressure of her presence.

———— The morning a$er Grace and Sepiso go to the clinic, Corinne wakes to the sound of Grace’s hard-bristled brush working lavender wax into their parquet floors. The sound is soothing and arousing at once, like a cat being stroked until its fur crackles with electricity. The lavender is less a smell than a texture in the nostrils. Corinne rises to make herself a cup of tea, and when she returns to the kitchen to put her mug in the sink, Grace appears at her elbow, ready to wash it.

Corinne watches Grace grind the rough side of her sponge into the ceramic, working away another sedimentary layer of coffee stains.

She never lets a cup or plate sit in the sink, as if the ordinary waste of living were a moral offense. Corinne can’t tell if this is part of Grace’s personality or a role she feels she must play. She should be able to

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ARAN DONOVAN

no good reason a man asked me excuse me excuse me—twice he asked excuse me. where’s your husband at? he’s dead, I said flat as glass. and walking on I felt sad for my invented husband. the life we’d had. the man called a$er me sorry to hear that. and you lookin good though. and wearing my yellow sweater I did feel like a widow. that I had been walking around so. and why?

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ARAN DONOVAN

ferry the nature of back and forth. important posts covered in the white shit of pelicans.

ARAN DONOVAN

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ARAN DONOVAN

priorities what if your friend said you had wrong priorities: a baby pomeranian, hard candies, granny cares. she could be right. it is diďŹƒcult to say with certainty, being so close to the thing. right up against its hide. right by the thing.

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ARAN DONOVAN

classmates puritanical, they throng around the watering holes. talking antelope, college days, misgivings. they are grateful when the crocodile takes another’s head into its mouth, when those triangle teeth frame the dwarf face of another. she had it coming, would’ve eaten our summer.

ARAN DONOVAN

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ARAN DONOVAN

if this is the little death how to frame the argument: put your tongue in me and I will sing like that. one night across the table monica lee and I argued about the nature of to be. vociferous. it was easy to have opinions being youngish. when years later her sister contacted me, monica missing, I could not say where she was, definitively. how long is something gone before the tragedy becomes antique. amelia earhart or your grandma’s diamond ring. it was her sister called, or perhaps someone pretending.

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Magical Thinking oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches, 2014 DANIELLE MUŽINA

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

Patina oil on panel, 24 x 48 inches, 2015 DANIELLE MUŽINA

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Split A"ention oil + ballpoint pen on panel, 16 x 16 in, 2014

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

Le#overs open acrylic and collage on panel, 25 x 35 in (hinge closed), 2015 DANIELLE MUŽINA

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JAYDN D eWALD

The Theory of the Poem It works by not (or barely) working: Our hero locked in the villain’s arms, titillated, In the shadow of an outspread hand Against a red adobe wall, and a perfect no one Watching the snow drop on her flatTopped hedges, poking at a few old memories. . . .

It works by not (or barely) working.

For the heck of it, one of them enters the other As, previously, a door banged open And before us ran a corridor of sha!ered glass In the shadow of an outspread hand And forward he marched, like a child popping Bubble wrap underfoot: each scene Must offer up a part, even a cock, for meaning; It works by not (or barely) working.

The snow drops through darkness, and the girl Who is no one flicks a sad memory Out her window, believing our hero will stoop In the shadow of an outspread hand To pick it up like a dull penny, propelling him Into still another ill-fated adventure— A li!le hole in the earth, and down he tumbles. . . .

In the shadow of an outspread hand He falls and stands, falls, but again is standing.

It works by not (or barely) working.

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JOLENE BRINK

The Tongue When you walked out of the whale the hem of your robe brushed his chalky tongue. He unfurled the limb like myth. Or you were thrown back into the prehistoric water where your thin arms paddled wildly towards shore. It was morning. You could see fruit hanging in the trees. When you live with prophecy, it dwells under your eyes, bright like the light along the wooden bucket rim emerging from a deep, cold well. It dwells inside vowels like their disbelief. Nobody trusts a man who smells like krill. When you walked onto land, your words belched like guts groaning with saltwater. The prophecies took shape in your curved body gripping the sand. An old man now, you confused dry shelters with bones. You gripped for the cold searching tongue catching instead, air sliced apart by human desire. A$er all, It was your prophecy they snatched up like hungry beasts. Your bones they passed between villages. What else washed up on shore? When you walked out of the whale, it dove deep.

JOLENE BRINK

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JOLENE BRINK

St. John’s University This is what I found underneath: the bleached bones of a bear, the outline of a cabin caved into limestone, a dozen lives wandering down the animal path. What are we looking for when we turn them over?

In one story the German monks arrived at dawn carrying manuscripts and cast iron pots. In one story they tamed the bear and penned him up outside the monastery, or buried his bones at the edge of the prairie.

If I take their buildings apart, stone by stone back to the quarry, the papers fling themselves into the sky and the monks stumble backwards searching for the road.

Nobody told me dreaming back the highway was a trespass, but I rolled it up each night.

It went like the road makers into the last century, backwards down the slick tar cu!ing open the grass.

I took away the train tracks too, with passengers waving like thin reeds in crimped moss hats.

The past a restless light crossing the prairie.

98

C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

JOLENE BRINK

Crofters — 1841 Your islands hung overcast. The forests pulled back, craggy earth bare from the wood removed to feed wars beyond the strip of each horizon. It lowered, fused together each night the line between water and sky. You turned your back on land beached without borders. Here the sea rushed the rocks. Your children gathered seaweed strips. You hung them from ra$ers. Whitefish bathed in brine. Lamb’s wool caught in thistles. Stone walls sloping towards water. You returned each fallen rock to the wall, until the earth rose up around it, inheriting the outline of your work.

Until the men beyond swept over and pushed you out to sea.

JOLENE BRINK

99

P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

More than the rest, Mom caresses the dough the way the earth punctuates its ages. In loving decimations.

LIZ BREAZEALE

F E AT U R I N G Jolene Brink

Deborah Forbes

Danielle Muzina

Jaydn DeWald

Hyejung Kook

Geri Ulrey

Kathleene Donahoo

John Marvin

Ross Wilcox

Aran Donovan

Victoria McArtor

and more

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