Crab Orchard Review Vol 19 No 1 W/S 2014

The photographs are of locations outside of Grafton, Illinois.

In this volume: Steven D. Schroeder

Andrew David King

Peggy Shumaker

Traci Brimhall

Leah Lax

Brian Simoneau

Brian Brodeur

Henry W. Leung

Adam Tavel

Catherine Champion

Michelle Lin

Naomi Telushkin

Nandi Comer

Brandi Nicole Martin

Christian Teresi

Chad Davidson

Beth Morgan

Daniel Nathan Terry

Erica Dawson

Steve Mueske

Qiana Towns

Katherine Dykstra

Jeff Newberry

Eric Tran

Troy D. Ehlers

Leah Nielsen

Abby Travis

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Matthew Olzmann

Allison Backous Troy

Rachel Heimowitz

Kevin Phan

Israel Wasserstein

Sara Henning

Sam Pierstorff

Phillip B. Williams

Suzanne Hodsden

Caroline Pittman

Corrie Williamson

Christopher Hornbacker

Jessica Plante

Susan R. Williamson

Amorak Huey

Brad Richard

Cecilia Woloch

Sara Eliza Johnson

Amanda Rutstein

William Wright

Dean Julius

Aaron Samuels

Amy Yee

C

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in print since 1995

ISSN 1083-5571

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Featuring the Winners of Our Annual Fiction, Poetry, & Literary Nonfiction Prizes & Our National Student Writing Awards

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published by the Department of English

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Vandana Khanna

Lauren K. Alleyne

Volume 19, Number 1 Winter/Spring 2014

Dan Albergotti

Crab Orchard Review

Crab Orchard Review

Cover: Four photographs

by Allison Joseph & Jon Tribble © 2014

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REVIEW

A B ORCH AR R C D •

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A Journal of Creative Works

Vol. 19 No. 1

“Hidden everywhere, a myriad

leather seed-cases lie in wait…”

—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October”

Thomas Kinsella Editor & Poetry Editor Allison Joseph

Founding Editor Richard Peterson

Prose Editor Carolyn Alessio

Managing Editor Jon Tribble

Editorial Intern Desiree Young

Assistant Editors Emily Rose Cole Loren Elise Foster M. Brett Gaffney Austin Kodra Zach Macholz Philip Martin Alyssha Nelson Staci R. Schoenfeld

SIU Press Interns Austin Kodra Philip Martin Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

Winter/Spring 2014 ISSN 1083-5571

Special Projects Assistant Cole Bucciaglia

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

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Crab Orchard Review

Department of English Faner Hall 2380 - Mail Code 4503 Southern Illinois University Carbondale 1000 Faner Drive Carbondale, Illinois 62901 Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States for individuals are $25 for one year, $40 for two years, $50 for three years; the foreign rate for individuals is $40 for one year. Subscription rates for institutions are $28 for one year, $56 for two years, and $84 for three years; the foreign rate for institutions is $48 for one year. Single issues are $12 (please include an additional $10 for international orders). Copies not received will be replaced without charge if notice of nonreceipt is given within four months of publication. Six weeks notice required for change of address.

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The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations.

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Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979) and appear by permission of the author.

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Crab Orchard Review and its staff wish to thank these supporters for their generous contributions, aid, expertise, and encouragement: Barb Martin, Karl Kageff, Amy J. Etcheson, Bridget Brown, Lynanne Page, Angela Moore-Swafford, Wayne Larsen, and Kristine Priddy of Southern Illinois University Press Heidi Estel, Patty Norris, Joyce Schemonia, and Kelly Spencer Abby Allen, Shaylin Carlton, Kevin Savoie, and Savannah Broadway Dr. K.K. Collins (chair), Pinckney Benedict, Beth Lordan, Judy Jordan, Scott Blackwood, and the rest of the faculty in the SIUC Department of English Division of Continuing Education SIU Alumni Association The Graduate School The College of Liberal Arts The OfďŹ ce of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost The Southern Illinois Writers Guild

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CHARTER MEMBERS*/BENEFACTORS Rodney Jones Richard Jurek Joseph A. Like Greg & Peggy Legan* Beth L. Mohlenbrock* Jane I. Montgomery* Ruth E. Oleson* Richard “Pete” Peterson Peggy Shumaker

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Winter/Spring 2014

Volume 19, Number 1

Fiction 1

Troy D. Ehlers

Suzanne Hodsden

Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh Dead Boy’s Wedding

28

Beth Morgan

Default Setting

58

Naomi Telushkin

Judah

71

Nonfiction Prose 99

Katherine Dykstra

Like Held Breath

Leah Lax

Water of Sleep

112

Henry W. Leung

Quitting the Box

143

Abby Travis

They Say

152

Allison Backous Troy

Inertia

186

Amy Yee

Deckyi’s Journey from After Tibet: Exile in India

193

Poetry Dan Albergotti

Holy Night

14

Lauren K. Alleyne

How to Watch Your Son Die Killed Boy, Beautiful World

16 18

Traci Brimhall

Brian Brodeur

Catherine Champion

In My Third Trimester, I Dream My Own Death

19

Blight

20

Caliban, After

22

Nandi Comer

The Warning Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City Losing Between Manholes and Myths

23 24 26

Chad Davidson

In Ravenna The Gothic Line

41 42

Erica Dawson

Midget Wrestling at the Dawg House, Portales, NM

44

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Evolution

45

Rachel Heimowitz

What the Light Reveals

46

Sara Henning

Christopher Hornbacker

Amorak Huey

Losing a Child

49

Birding

50

North of Dowagiac the Human Body Is 98 Percent Winter

52

Sara Eliza Johnson

Deer Rub

54

Dean Julius

Vandana Khanna

Augur 56 Parvati Rewrites Myth

57

Andrew David King

On Taking Down the Model Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling

86

Michelle Lin

Roundtrip

88

Brandi Nicole Martin

Steve Mueske

First Elegy for His Child I’ll Never Have 90 Poem That Forgets It’s a Poem

91

Jeff Newberry

How to Talk About the Dead Spring’s Return About Disappointment

93 94 95

Leah Nielsen

Tuscaloosa Poem

96

Matthew Olzmann

You Want to Hold Everything in Place, But

98

Kevin Phan

Night Bells in a Landscape

126

Sam Pierstorff

At the Hotel of Irrelevancy

128

Caroline Pittman

Easter Poem

130

Jessica Plante

Descendants

132

Brad Richard

Confederate Jasmine

133

Amanda Rutstein

Ruined

134

Aaron Samuels

Stakes is high

136

Steven D. Schroeder

Nuclear

138

Peggy Shumaker

Past Middle Age

140

Brian Simoneau

Sonnet for the Guy Who Told Me My Dad Was a Saint

141

Adam Tavel

Elegy for Phineas Gage Posing in a Daguerreotype Portrait

142

Christian Teresi

For the Kingdom to Be Well

165

Daniel Nathan Terry

There Is No Way The Boy and the Moth

166 167

Qiana Towns

Voyeurism

168

Eric Tran

Our Own Little Gods

170

Israel Wasserstein

Paleontology

171

Phillip B. Williams

Liner Notes to a Never-Composed Session for A Love Supreme Of Shadows and Mirrors

173

Corrie Williamson

Umbrage

176

Susan R. Williamson

Conjugal Fault

178

174

Cecilia Woloch Istanbul Teta Afterlife

179 180 182

William Wright

183

Triptych for the Days Before Her Passage

Contributors’ Notes

200

A Note on Our Cover The four photographs on the cover are by Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble. All of the photographs were taken at locations outside of Grafton, Illinois, near and in Pere Marquette State Park around the conf luence of the Mississippi River and the Illinois River.

Announcements There were significant awards and honors this Spring for four poets published in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Jake Adam York were honored as the 2014 Witter Bynner Fellows selected by the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey.

Denise Duhamel and Jeffrey Skinner are recipients of 2014 Fellowships in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

And we are very proud to congratulate former Crab Orchard Review intern and assistant editor and Southern Illinois University Carbondale MFA alumnus Adrian Matejka on his recent awards and honors, including being named a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry and being cited as a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group). The Big Smoke is also one of the winners of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which “recognize books that make important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.” And in addition to these honors, Adrian is also a recipient of a 2014 Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists for the 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize.

In poetry, the winning entry of three poems—“Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City,” “Losing Between Manholes and Myths” and “The Warning”—is by Nandi Comer of Bloomington, Indiana. The judge selected three finalists in poetry, and they are three poems by Lauren K. Alleyne of Dubuque, Iowa; three poems by Jeff Newberry of Tifton, Georgia; and three poems by Cecilia Woloch of Los Angeles, California. In fiction, the winning entry is “Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh” by Troy D. Ehlers of Wayzata, Minnesota. The judge selected two finalists in fiction, and they are “Dead Boy’s Wedding” by Suzanne Hodsden of Bowling Green, Ohio; and “Default Setting”

by Beth Morgan of Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In literary nonfiction, the winning entry is “Inertia” by Allison Backous Troy of Laramie, Wyoming. The judge selected three finalists in literary nonfiction, and they are “Like Held Breath” by Katherine Dykstra of Brooklyn, New York; “Water of Sleep” by Leah Lax of Houston, Texas; and “They Say” by Abby Travis of Somerville, Massachusetts.

The final judge for the poetry competition was Allison Joseph, Crab Orchard Review’s editor and poetry editor, and the final judge for the fiction and literary nonfiction competitions was Carolyn Alessio, Crab Orchard Review’s prose editor. All three winners received $2000.00 and their works are published in this issue.

Several of the finalists also chose to have their works published in this issue. Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks to all the entrants for their interest in Crab Orchard Review.

Crab Orchard Review’s website has information on subscriptions, calls for submissions and guidelines, contest information and results, and past, current, and future issues:

CrabOrchardReview.siu.edu

The Winners of the 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize

2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize Winner

Three Poems by Nandi Comer (Bloomington, Indiana)

2014 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize Winner

“Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh”

by Troy D. Ehlers (Wayzata, Minnesota)

2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize Winner

“Inertia”

by Allison Backous Troy (Laramie, Wyoming)

The 2013 COR Student Writing Awards in Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Nonfiction The COR Student Writing Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry honor the exceptional creative work of undergraduate and graduate students who are enrolled at least part-time in a U.S. college or university. Each winner receives $500.00 and publication in Crab Orchard Review.

The 2013 Allison Joseph Poetry Award winner is “On Taking Down the Model Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling” by Andrew David King (University of California, Berkeley). We would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013 award: “Bird Without a Feather” by P. J. Williams (University of Alabama); “Crawfish” by Tina Mozelle Harris (University of Oregon); “The Crickets Remember” by Maggie Graber (Southern Illinois University Carbondale); “Father and Son” by Tim Payne (University of West Georgia); “Painting Moreno Valley” by Joel Ferdon (McNeese State University); “Sex-Ed” by Anna Rose Welch (Bowling Green State University).

The 2013 Charles Johnson Fiction Award winner is “Judah” by Naomi Telushkin (Arizona State University). We would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013 award: “Bottled Chaos” by Lauren Sarazen (Chapman University) “Chasing a Leak” by Casey Pycior (University of Nebraska-Lincoln); “Homeland”

by Christopher Linforth (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)); “Nine Stories Tall and Hollow” by Lindsay D’Andrea (Iowa State University); and “What May or May Not Matter” by Linda Miller (Queens University of Charlotte).

The 2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award winner is “Quitting the Box” by Henry W. Leung (University of Michigan). We would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013 award: “1,000 Wednesdays” by Danielle Harms (George Mason University); “Amblyopia” by Lena Moses-Schmitt (Virginia Commonwealth University); “Cries for Life” by Kevin Davis (Northwestern University); “Crucifixion Style” by Joel Newsome (Western Michigan University); and “Who You Know” by Jessie Szalay (George Mason University).

For more information about the COR Student Writing Awards and the past winners, and about Allison Joseph, Charles Johnson, and Rafael Torch, visit:

CORStudentWritingAwards.siu.edu

The 2013 COR Student Writing Award Winners

2013 Allison Joseph Award Winner

“On Taking Down the Model Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling”

by Andrew David King University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, California)

2013 Charles Johnson Fiction Award Winner

“Judah”

by Naomi Telushkin Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona)

2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award Winner

“Quitting the Box”

by Henry W. Leung University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Troy D. Ehlers Five Deaths of Ellie Marsh The first time I see Ellie die, she is dancing around the living

room on the balls of her feet, singing at the top of her lungs and laughing whenever her voice squeaks or she messes up the words. Her brown eyes glisten and her body moves with the grace of tall grasses bending in the wind. Her arms move with the music, waving slowly up and down as though she imagines she will take flight. As though she can simply bypass the mundane banality of death: the dizziness; the cold and aching limbs; the painful stomach cramps; the brain muddled; the lungs heavy and sluggish, too weak to breathe. Ellie will have none of that. She will simply cast aside her earthly existence. She will slip free of her body like a butterfly from a cocoon.

This first death is one of denial.

I could not accept that Ellie was dead. I knew she had killed herself.

She was gone. But I could not bring myself to believe that all the beauty and joy she’d emanated had been extinguished. Even though she was deeply troubled and at times could be cruel and nearly violent, in the days after I learned of her suicide, I could not think of her suffering. I wanted to believe she had died with the same grace and beauty she’d had in life. This was the only way I could have imagined her death.

She is wearing the white dress with the red flowers. The one she’d worn when I’d seen her last, months ago at her home in Wisconsin.

She looked radiant then, too, happy and beautiful as she drank her wine and laughed at some joke Jan’s husband had told. Even then my heart broke a little each time she laughed—her cheeks dimpling, her tongue curling up to touch her lip. Her laughter always managed to seem both hardy and fragile at the same time.

I’d always expected she’d be laughing, even in the end.

She turns up her stereo and swallows the pills a half-dozen at a time, washing them down with a bottle of Australian shiraz. I don’t know what she’s taking, but it makes sense that she’s using pills because she is conscious of her beauty. She can be insecure and fish for compliments, for reassurance that she isn’t getting fat or old, but she knows she is Crab Orchard Review

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Troy D. Ehlers striking. Gorgeous, in fact. She’d won a beauty pageant as a teenager and modeled during college. So even as she plotted her own death, she must have thought ahead to the funeral; she wouldn’t want a closed casket, wouldn’t want some ghastly corsage strapped to her wrist to cover a razor’s slash. And perhaps this irony is what starts her laughing now. She has polished off the pills and a good portion of the wine. She is dancing around the living room, enjoying the burning friction of her toes on the carpet as she spins. The dress floats up around her waist. The mirror over the couch spins past and she laughs as she announces: “I’ll be lovely in my coffin! Even at my wake, they’ll be jealous!” She laughs at herself and feels dizzy and nauseous. She stops, kneels, and lies on the floor, careful with the wine. On her back, she looks up and remembers how she’d played with her sister as a child—she pretends the ceiling is really the floor and the floor is the ceiling. She swims along the carpet, imagining she is flying, imagining she has already grown her wings.

I received two calls that evening. The first was from Jan, the second Delinda. By nature women know how to handle such tragedies.

They know when you need a hug or soothing words or a bolstering compliment. They can be cruel and cut you to shreds with a word, but they are angels. Call it maternal instinct. Jan phoned first to break the news of Ellie’s suicide. Then I was given just enough time to get my mind around the horrible reality—but not so much time that I would be swallowed by grief or self-blame. When Jan had told me what happened, everything went gray. She kept talking, but her words didn’t register. She might have told me the details of the suicide, but I wasn’t able to hear them. By the time Delinda called, I’d forced myself to accept Ellie’s death, but I conceded nothing beyond a dancing, easy, laughing death. I nearly asked Delinda how Ellie had actually died, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.

Delinda lived just forty-five minutes away, south of Minneapolis.

She asked whether I wanted company and invited me to dinner with her husband and daughter. Pizza and hot fudge sundaes, she said.

Comfort food. When I declined, she worried about my being alone.

She tried to get me to reminisce with her about Ellie’s exploits in the Venezuelan village south of Caracas; that was where we’d all met, the dozen of us, and became friends on a volunteer mission to build an orphanage.

“Remember,” Delinda said, “when she did body shots off my stomach and danced on the bar while the bartender yelled at her?”

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“He wasn’t yelling at her,” I said. “He climbed up and danced with her.” I remembered because I’d been jealous.

“Oh that’s right! He kept slicking back his greasy hair and winking at her,” Delinda laughed. “And later she was dancing outside on that muddy path when she slipped.”

“She nearly slid down the mountain.”

Delinda’s laugh was loud—it verged on becoming a wild cackle— but I recognized the grief behind it.

“What I remember most was Ellie with the children,” Delinda said.

“She connected with them. Made them laugh. I always felt like a spectacle in a fishbowl whenever the kids watched us work. I’d try to talk, but it was hard enough to communicate, let alone entertain children.”

“She was one of them,” I said. “A kid at heart.” Delinda agreed, but I knew she didn’t fully understand. Ellie was known for her contagious laughter and scandalous behavior, but she could be wise, mature, and sometimes (albeit rarely), she could even be a good listener. But as I came to know her, I discovered she mimicked those around her. She said smart things to smart people. She listened well for good listeners.

She had learned how to act maturely, but deep down, for good or for bad, she was a child. And so when she took to playing with children from the orphanage and getting them to aid in the construction, the rest of us believed she was making profound use of psychology to reach them; she was instilling in them a sense of pride because they would live in a place they had built with their own hands. To the children she became La Presidente. Every couple days, she rewarded one of them with the rank of El Capitán. The new captain got to wear Ellie’s Chicago Cubs cap (bearing its ‘C’ for Capitán) and preside over the other children (her soldados, her soldiers). Two or three times a day, Ellie whistled and the children lined up for roll call, inspection, and to report their progress. In the evenings, Ellie and the children ran off into the trees to play tag, hide and seek, or war.

Once, while exploring a path through the trees, I stumbled across Ellie lying on her stomach, concealed beneath a canopy of daggershaped leaves. She shushed me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the dirt beside her. When I brushed at a stream of ants crawling up my arm, Ellie whispered, “Shhhh. I can hear him.”

I was about to ask who when I spotted her current capitán, stalking through the trees with a long stick held to the crook of his arm like an assault rifle. The boy scanned the trees and moved along in a crouch. He stopped at a suspicious plant and poked it with his Crab Orchard Review

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Troy D. Ehlers rifle before moving on. Gradually, as the boy vanished in the distance, a broad smile crept onto Ellie’s face. I was captivated by the delicate smile-lines feathered around her eyes, the sharp blade of her nose, the mischievous dimples of her cheeks. Her mahogany hair was tucked back behind her ear, which had three piercings but no jewelry. A bead of sweat trickled from her forehead. I leaned over and kissed her cheek.

When she turned to me, I was relieved by her smile, unfaded. I hadn’t expected to kiss her. I had found her attractive but thought her beyond reach. If there was a right move to make next, I had no idea what it was. I waited for her reaction. Her eyes opened wider and, ever so slowly, her mouth stretched from a smile into an ‘O.’ Then she glanced over my shoulder and yelled, “Aww, biscuits!” She scrambled to her feet, laughing. The capitán had doubled back behind us. I watched her run off, chased into the jungle. My kiss had meant nothing. I had only kissed her while she was being a child.

“Ellie was an angel,” Delinda said.

A painful knot formed in my throat. “Look, Delinda. Thanks for calling, but I’m not ready to talk about her. Not in the past tense. I’m not ready to.…To reminisce.”

“I know you loved her, Michael. And she loved you. There’s no shame in that.”

After I set down the phone, I wondered what she’d meant about shame. I’d felt only shock. Shame hadn’t even occurred to me. The word struck up in me a whirlwind of self-doubt. Was Delinda referring to the way my affair with Ellie had begun? Was she suggesting that I could have saved her? That I should have been there for her—not just in the end, but during the entire time since her divorce?

Ellie might have been vulnerable when we met. She was in the midst of a trial separation from her husband. Then again, she could have been at her strongest and most liberated. At times it seemed she was both. During our village orientation, she had been so withdrawn that I was barely aware of her—a shadow lurking at the back of a classroom. She sat with her head bowed low over her desk, disheveled hair draping her face as she scribbled in a pink notebook.

I was the first person to actually talk to her. At the end of our first day of labor, she came upon me, my hands ghostly white with plaster dust, reading poems by Pablo Neruda. She remarked that she liked his work and began sidling away shyly, but I stopped her, asking whether she had a favorite. Her face lit up and she seemed surprised that somebody would take an interest in her. El mar y las campanas 4 u Crab Orchard Review

Troy D. Ehlers was her favorite collection, The Sea and the Bells—Neruda’s last. She quoted the opening lines of the first poem, in well-practiced Spanish.

Time passes not hour by hour, but sorrow by sorrow.

We became inseparable, and during the following days, her attitude cycled through extremes. In the mornings, she was quiet and sullen, but her mood could shift unexpectedly (and often dramatically) and together we would be seized by fits of laughter. Eventually I realized that her capricious and transient nature was part of what I found attractive—she could be dark, mysterious, puzzling, and even childlike; perhaps I had remained a bachelor only because I needed such instability (she was anything but static—her legs were always moving, tattooing some unheard beat, even as her mood vacillated from dark to light). Ellie rarely slept—just an hour or two each night— and one night (after we’d grown much closer), I sensed her pretending to sleep, her breathing intentionally slow and regular, her body unnaturally stiff. When she thought I was asleep, she slipped from the bed, gathered her clothes, and tiptoed outside. I thought to follow her, but she returned and shook me. She led me out to the hillside. A full moon cast serpentine shadows in the mist-blanketed valley. Strange animal calls sounded from the trees. She pulled my head down and kissed me ferociously.

Ellie made a brave effort to hide her darker moods. She wandered off to cry in solitude or vent her rage by jogging narrow paths along the river. She’d always tried to put on a smile for me. I thought it was the separation, but she suffered from bipolar disorder. Occasionally she would start an argument or tell me how miserable she was, but I never had more than a glimpse of her true anguish. I wished she’d shared her darker emotions. I could have been a shoulder to cry on.

Maybe—somehow—I could have helped.

When the phone rang again, I was torturing myself with the image of her crying alone in a darkened bedroom.

“Michael, are you crying?” It was Cindy. She sounded angry.

I wiped my eyes and said nothing.

“You better not be crying. That bitch doesn’t deserve your tears.”

Cindy had joined us several days late in Venezuela. She was Ellie’s sister-in-law. The idea of a woman on a trial separation traveling with her sister-in-law probably seems bizarre, but Cindy was not bound by social mores. No one dictated who her friends should be and she saw no conflict between her allegiance to her brother and her friendship with Ellie. Perhaps even more remarkable, she befriended me despite Crab Orchard Review

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Troy D. Ehlers the affair I was having with her brother’s wife. As Cindy herself once put it: “I like who I like.”

She also said what she meant.

“She doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Cindy said.

I cleared my throat. I didn’t know what to say.

“She kept leaving little hints, little suggestions that she was suicidal. How dare she do that to me? Leave that hanging over me?”

“She told me, too. It wasn’t just you.”

“She fucking knew better! She knew we would feel guilty. She couldn’t pass up one last chance to manipulate us. To twist the knife in the wound.”

“She was just hurting inside,” I said. “Finalizing the divorce was the final straw for her.”

“Oh, don’t be naïve. It was all a big game for her, seeing how far she could bend people out of shape and suck them into her dramas.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” I shouted into the phone. “I miss her, dammit! Don’t you get that? I loved her. Think of my feelings!”

“Ellie’s the one who didn’t give a damn about your feelings,” Cindy said. “She’s the one who did this to you. She was incapable of love. And what about her son? Her mother? Her ex-husband, me, and all of her friends.…She sandbagged us all.”

“She just didn’t think she was good for us. She thought we’d be better off—” “Don’t give me that bullshit. Ellie was a bitch and I hate her for doing this! We’re all pissed at her, Michael. It’s not just me. Don’t cry over that heartless piece of crap!”

I slammed the phone down on the counter, picked it up and slammed it down again and again. I shook with rage. I bit my lip and tasted blood. I stood up, toppling my stool behind me. I kicked it away and punched the wall. The phone rang again, so I unplugged it. When the answering machine began spewing my inane greeting, I unplugged that, too, and hurled it across the room.

The rage burned in me, every muscle clenched and trembling.

I wanted to turn my fury on the world. I wanted to break things. I wanted to hurt somebody. I kept thinking of what Cindy had said about others hating Ellie. No wonder Ellie had felt so alone, with such fickle turncoat friends. I was the only person who’d loved her, and everybody thought it wrong of me to care. Ellie and I should have stood together, united against this selfish, uncaring world. I grabbed a couple bottles of beer and flipped channels on the TV. I wanted to see 6 u Crab Orchard Review

Troy D. Ehlers something violent. Nothing was violent enough. Every false, bleachtoothed grin deepened my isolation and anger. I drank and hurled the bottles against the fireplace. An hour later my world was spinning as I sank into unconsciousness. Shards of glass had landed on the couch, scratching me as I tossed about. I remembered Ellie’s foul moods and wicked temper. I remembered our fights. I remembered her shame and grief at having fought with her husband in front of her son.

Ellie is shouting but I cannot hear her voice. Spittle flies from her lips. Tendons protrude from her neck. Her face reddens. She chops her arms through the air as she confronts her ex-husband and the young woman in the blue halter top. The girl lunges toward her, but Ellie’s ex grabs the girl’s wrist—just above the rubber bracelets popular among teenagers. He yells for them to calm down. Ellie is furious. She was bringing her son Tommy home at the end of a weekend and found them making out on the couch. He’s done it on purpose, to make her jealous.

He’s always trying to hurt her. Ellie grabs a remote from the end table and hurls it at them. It bounces off his shoulder and he cringes. Between them, Tommy leans against the wall, crying and clutching his duffel bag to his chest like a life preserver. He sobs and begs his mommy and daddy to stop. Ellie grabs a black picture frame and sails it over the girl’s head to shatter against the wall. A piece of glass ricochets and strikes Tommy. A thin line of blood appears on his cheek. Startled, he stops crying and stares at her. A tear rolls from his eye and mixes with the blood. Ellie steps toward him. She wants to hug him and apologize.

She aches from having hurt him. Her ex stops her and points toward the door, ordering her to leave. The girl has already scooped Tommy up, and he’s clinging to her, crying on the girl’s shoulder. Ellie tries again to reach him, but she’s pushed out the door.

She’s never felt as alone and empty and sick inside as she does now, driving the highway that separates her old life from the void ahead. Her tears make the road shake and blur ahead of her, a watery mess of pavement and evergreens. She squeezes the wheel and pounds a fist into the ceiling with a series of unsatisfying thunks. She hates herself, hates being hostage to the tempest of her emotions. She swore she’d never fight in front of her son, never let him witness what a lousy bitch she was. She keeps picturing him, crying with the blood on his face. He’s afraid of her. She knows she’ll hurt him again and next time it will be worse. She can’t bear the thought. She wishes he could have another mother, somebody stable. The sky is growing dark and the cars have turned on their headlights—bright, accusing eyes coming at Crab Orchard Review

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Troy D. Ehlers her and blazing past. The lights are mesmerizing, haloed in her teary vision, and her fingers loosen on the wheel and her foot becomes heavy on the gas. She imagines how easy it would be to veer into the lights, meet them head on and force them to pass their final judgment on her.

But she won’t do it. She won’t hurt anybody else. Not ever again. She takes a breath and cranks the steering wheel. She flies over a narrow strip of grass and drives into a giant maple tree. A flash of violence and pain, shrieking steel and breaking glass, and it is over.

With a stiff neck and crushing hangover, I awoke on the couch.

It was the middle of the night. My back and stomach itched like a stiff wool sweater. I scratched my stomach and my fingers came away wet with blood. During my fitful dreams, I’d been rolling in the glass. On tiptoes, I made the bathroom without cutting my feet. The scratches were superficial, but blood splotched my skin and clothes. I looked like I’d been in a street fight.

I took some aspirin and considered cleaning up the glass.

Instead I wandered into the bedroom closet, retrieved the shoebox holding my recent photos and keepsakes, and spread them out on the kitchen table. During the peak of our relationship, Ellie had a camera strapped to her wrist at all times—as if she’d been desperate to preserve every moment together; as if she’d known anything that good couldn’t last forever.

Despite my grief, it was impossible not to smile. She loved goofing around for the camera. Without warning, she’d hold it off at arm’s length and snap a shot of herself sticking her tongue in my ear or, while I was smiling for the lens, she’d secretly be stretching her mouth into a look of horror or cross her eyes and stick her tongue out to the side.

Then I’d catch her and confiscate the camera. She’d clown around and model for me. Each time I snapped the shutter, there was another look on her face, a different expression, a different pose—always beautiful and ever-changing, never the frozen, meaningless smile most people wear on film. Flipping through the images was like reliving her myriad personalities: a mischievous grin, a brow-furrowed pout, a suggestive smile, an angry middle finger, a side-stitching laugh, a graceful (and somehow lonely) contemplation of the sky.

Her emotional instability frightened me. It thrilled me. This was a woman I would never grow bored with. I could still be breathless from laughing at her zaniness when she’d say something profound and thoughtful, or draw me into an argument, or be crying on my 8 u Crab Orchard Review

Troy D. Ehlers shoulder. I was enjoying things I hadn’t in years—biking, swimming, skating, skiing, going to rock concerts, food fights, games. It was like being a kid again. Ellie was my fountain of youth.

Not long after Venezuela, she got divorced; I made her promise I wasn’t the reason. I didn’t want to break up a family and wondered whether we should go on. We took turns visiting one another—a three hour drive separated us. At first it was weekends (she didn’t have custody yet), then extended visits, and eventually a vacation: in the dead cold of January we flew to Grand Cayman.

We rented a glass-bottom boat and picnicked in the harbor. Fish swam up beneath us and moved in their mysteriously synchronized schools, as if governed by a single mind. Ellie was silent for a time and then she said, “Why are you here?”

I swallowed my sandwich. “What do you mean?”

“You can’t really love me.”

I put a hand on her knee. “Of course I love you.”

She slapped my hand away. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I wasn’t, I just—”

“You don’t know me. Can’t you see what I am? I left my husband. I left my son. I have no friends. Nobody has any reason to feel anything toward me but hate. Tell me why you love me. Tell me.”

“I have fun when I’m with you,” I said. “You make me laugh.”

“Yeah, I’m funny.” Her face wrinkled in disgust.

I took a breath. I wanted to brush the hair back from her forehead, but it would only make her angry. “You’re beautiful, Ellie. And I’m a different person when I’m with you. I do things I would never do on my own.”

“I’ll bet you do.” She stared off across the water, her lip trembling.

“Nobody sees me for who I am. Nobody cares.”

“I care.”

“Take me back to the hotel, Michael. I need a drink.”

I began to realize the barrier between us. We could talk and laugh. We could argue and cry, play together and have sex. Ellie lived exclusively for me. Her life revolved around mine. The bond was constant and compelling. But it didn’t reach into the heart of us.

This was codependency. In Grand Cayman I finally accepted that. A significant piece of her soul seemed buried in a fathomless trench. No matter how much we shared, she remained just beyond my fingertips.

I fought like mad, straining against the currents to reach her, but we drifted apart.

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Troy D. Ehlers Sitting at my kitchen table, I picked up the photo of her on the beach, all but her laughing face buried in sand. A knot formed in my throat. The symbolism was too keen. It cut me. Had I given up too easily? Had she been there all along, buried beneath a mere dusting of sand? Maybe she only needed somebody to make an honest effort at digging her out. I needed another chance. I wanted to go back. If only I could return to that day, that month. I could have shown her I cared.

If I had a second chance, I would be relentless. I wouldn’t stop until she accepted my love. She wouldn’t need to die, if only she believed.

Ellie is tired. She feels aged beyond her years. Her arms are heavy and her joints swollen, decrepit. Her head is pressurized, throbbing from the inside as she lets it loll back on the top of her couch. The migraine has brought the auras again—yellow and red shadows glimmering about the room like ghosts. In a better mood, she’d talk to them. Tell them jokes laced with black humor. But she doesn’t have the energy. Today she will die. This is not an impulse.

This is not a rash decision made in anger or desperation. She has been gradually worn away, like a stone beneath a waterfall. Amazing she’s lasted this long. She has served her purpose in this life. There is nothing more for her. Only pain. Slowly she gets to her feet. The exertion causes her migraine to flare. She stands still and breathes deeply, slowly, until it abates. Delicately, she walks to her bedroom. Everything is ready for her.

She has tied a noose with her bed sheets. It hangs from her ceiling fan.

She thought of using bed sheets because of a conversation we’d had. She told me she’d attempted suicide and I admitted that I had once, too. As a child. “I tried to hang myself with a bed sheet,” I said, “but the knot slipped.” Without thinking, she replied, “That’s too bad.” We’d laughed madly until tears ran down our cheeks.

Ellie steps up onto her bed and looks through the noose. She has spent some time braiding the sheets. She’s reinforced them with rope.

This knot will hold. There is no other way for her to die. She will die as the man she loves had once nearly died. She wants to share this with him. She wants to feel what he felt and taste the death that managed to elude him. She knows he will hear about it. It might hurt him. It might anger him. It might make him wish he’d held on to her. Or maybe, remembering the moment they’d shared, it would make him laugh. Somehow this death will affect him. That is all that matters. She steadies herself on the edge of the bed and slips the noose around her neck, slides it tight and fast. She fastens her hands behind her back 10 u Crab Orchard Review

Troy D. Ehlers with handcuffs—handcuffs they’d used in lovemaking. She steps from the mattress and her body swings down. For a moment she worries her feet will graze the floor, but they don’t. Her throat is crushed and she cannot breathe. The last pulses surge harder into her brain and her migraine explodes, sending jets of light across her vision. She feels a horrible pressure in her skull and everything turns red. She thinks of the man she loves. She imagines the grief he’ll feel and she’s overcome with embarrassment and sorrow. She wants to stop this, undo it. She wants to spare him the pain. She kicks her feet toward the bed, tries to hook her toes on the edge of it. She tries to flex her neck, to hold herself up. The handcuffs are too tight. She kicks and struggles, but even despite the desperation, it seems she is falling asleep. She wants to wake up and free herself. She wants to wake up. She wants.

The rest of that night passed in a haze and at some point I fell asleep, hunched over the kitchen table. When morning came, I felt restless, desperate to do something, anything. I didn’t have the energy.

I sat on the floor in my guest bedroom and sorted through an old box of hockey cards I’d long forgotten. It was imperative I put them in numerical order. Things all over my house needed to be organized: books alphabetized, records categorized, videotapes labeled. I made a list of things that needed doing.

Early afternoon, the doorbell rang. I cracked the door and peeked outside. Delinda stood clutching her handbag to her chest. “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

“What?”

“Your phone isn’t working.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, opening the door. “Sorry.”

“Oh my god, what happened?” she yelled.

I’d forgotten I was still wearing the blood-stained clothes. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry.”

She stepped inside and lifted my shirt. “We need to get you cleaned up.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me up the stairs like a child. I followed her to the bathroom. “Do you have hydrogen peroxide?”

“They’re not going to get infected. It’s all scabbed over already.”

“Well, get in the shower at least. I’ll find some clean clothes.”

“I don’t need a shower. I’m fine.”

She stepped around me and turned on the shower. “I’ll set clothes on the counter. Get in. You’ll feel better.”

She left me to undress. She was wrong about it feeling better. The Crab Orchard Review

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Troy D. Ehlers soap and water stung on the cuts. Some of them started bleeding again. I felt sick watching the pink water spiral down the drain.

After the shower, I got dressed in the sweats Delinda had put out for me. I found her in the living room, putting glass in a garbage bag.

“I gotta hand it to you, Mike. You didn’t miss an inch. You were very thorough.” Slivers of glass sparkled in the fireplace mortar.

I was ashamed, watching her clean up after me. I dropped down on the step leading to the kitchen. Delinda sat down and squeezed me to her side. “We’re going to get through this.” She held me for a while.

It was comforting. Nevertheless, it became impossible not to cry.

She insisted on making lunch. She left me to rest in the kitchen while she finished cleaning up the glass with a vacuum. We talked until Delinda was convinced I’d be alright. She needed to bring her husband to the airport and watch her eighteen-month-old daughter, Callie. She wanted me to come with, told me I’d enjoy seeing Callie play—she was running around and getting into all kinds of mischief— but I was too tired. I promised to call later.

Once she left, I tried returning to organizing, but I lacked motivation. I felt feverish and empty. There was no sorrow, no anger, and no pain. I had no thoughts or memories of Ellie. I felt nothing at all. The closest thing I had to an impulse or clear thought was the vague desire to just lie there, and do nothing.

I turned on the stereo and closed my eyes. I remembered the pink water spiraling down the drain during my shower, the blood weeping up from the slashes in my skin. The horror and emptiness made me sick with vertigo.

I saw a vase of roses. The petals crumpled and dropped into the water, dying it crimson.

I saw wine, spilling over the lip of her glass, staining the carpet.

I saw Ellie’s arms, floating on the pink darkening water.

Her body is trembling from the cold. Water drips from the leaky faucet. The tiles are cold and hard against her neck. Sunlight grates through the Venetian blinds and illuminates the dust. A fly buzzes and thuds against the window. Outside, a truck rumbles past and children shout in the neighbor’s yard. She lies there feeling nothing from her floating body. The water has absorbed all sensation, even the pull of gravity. She is vaguely aware that this is her last chance to experience some emotion; she should feel anguish or sorrow, hatred or relief. She should be overwhelmed with loss. She feels nothing but emptiness.

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Troy D. Ehlers Nearly the entire Venezuelan group attended the funeral.

Delinda greeted me with a long hug and kissed my cheek. Her husband shook my hand and, from his other arm, Callie reached out for me. I held Callie for a few minutes and Delinda had her repeat my name: “Unca Mite.” I laughed and my eyes teared up.

When Cindy spotted me, she threw her arms around me, which was uncharacteristic. She whispered into my ear. She was sorry for saying those horrible things about Ellie. She was sorry for not thinking of my feelings. I told her there was nothing to apologize for. People shouldn’t be held accountable for what they do in grief.

Ellie’s son stood there in a tiny black suit, holding his father’s hand. They were surrounded by family. I was thankful for not having to speak to them. Nothing I could’ve said would have mattered. With dear friends surrounding me, I caught only glimpses of the open casket. Ellie looked beautiful, radiant with peace. The graceful ease of her face lifted a burden from my heart and my breath became lighter. uuu

Ellie steps outside and feels the warmth of sunlight on her skin. A light breeze moves the hair on her forehead as she walks down the driveway. She tucks her hair behind her ears and pauses near the flowerbed. She kneels on the lawn and rakes some dried leaves from between the daisies with her fingers. New buds are spearing up from the soil, late for the season. She bends to smell the flowers and the green scent of the junipers. Children laugh in the distance. She turns up her face, and beneath this brilliant sun, this pale blue sky, she marvels at how much, how overwhelmingly much there is to love.

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Dan Albergotti Holy Night My father said he wished the child were dead.

He didn’t say it in so many words, but he said it. And it was Christmas Eve. I breathed in silent tension next to him.

The news anchor said that of the seven born to a black couple three nights before the weakest child had gathered strength and would, the doctors said, most likely now survive.

I’m sorry to hear that, my father hissed.

That’s just what this country needs, seven more— of course he used the word. You know he did.

The television screen blurred to pastels.

I sat in silence next to him, the man whose blood was my blood, whose eyes looked like mine, and tried to breathe the thick air between us.

He was my father. This was Christmas Eve. Lord of this other world, what will you make of this? And reader, what will you accept?

That I stood up without a word and left the house, got into my car, and then drove to the pizza place as he expected me to, picked up our order, and drove back to that goddamned house to join my mother and sister, who’d been singing Christmas hymns

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Dan Albergotti by candlelight at the evening service while my father wished death upon a child?

Will you accept that I wept on that drive, listening to Radiohead’s “The Tourist,” wishing I could stop the world’s spinning cold, drive off its surface and take to the sky, break its gravitational hold, sever myself from it forever then and there?

Reader, I hear your silence now, hear it like I heard silence that night in the space between my father’s words and the night sky I could see through my windshield, one bright star— impossibly distant, already dead— pulsing its pure light through millennia of utter void to meet my aching eyes.

Maybe it’s better that you have no words, that I have no answer. Maybe better to just recall the peace of that short drive, its brief respite where music and silence were one blessing and the dark night holy.

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Lauren K. Alleyne How to Watch Your Son Die

for Miss Linda

When the grief comes, you monster through it.

—Rachel McKibbens Watch his skin become a coffin for his breath. Watch his bones rise like phantoms to haunt the twilight of his flesh.

Beneath the bedsheets of his lids, see his eyes twitch, blind and wandering; if opened, they are the most beautiful glass.

He will unremember time and laughter. His name will become a strange music in the foreign instrument of your voice.

Watch him lose each human border— his tongue forsaking language, his hands growing indifferent to reach or touch, his heart sputtering

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Lauren K. Alleyne its final messages to yours.

Watch as he breaks from himself and becomes a body so quietly your tears thunder against his cheek.

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Lauren K. Alleyne

Killed Boy, Beautiful World

for Aaron Campbell

How slender the tether between life and not-life, between the big-eyed boy of your childhood play, and the call that tells you he is lying beneath a sheet waiting to become ash.

How ruthless with beauty the world seems, clouds tumbling in streams of white, the sky dappled, then clear, then blotted with rain; the news of death and more death streaming—some familiar or foreign blood damning every wet curve of the globe.

Still, you want to hold on to it, this life that breaks you again and again. You want to know that poised as the world is to drive you to your knees with anguish or ecstasy, you are in it to stay as long as it will have you— as long as you have anything left to lose.

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Traci Brimhall In My Third Trimester, I Dream My Own Death In week twenty-seven, I dream a conquistador confronts me with unsigned Requerimientos.

I’d give up any god to save a life, so I sign them all with a narwhal tooth dipped in squid ink.

Oracular tremblings come in week thirty, waking in warm sweats after a holy fool who speaks only in vowels warns I will resort to prayer. A thief prophesies through week thirty-three—Resurrection is not ascendance, he cries. It is the spirit rejecting heaven for flesh. His body shines with the cruel radiance of a man who buried himself alive and returned to laugh, dance, pick cupuaçu.

Jubilate. Week forty I spy rogue angels, jealous of their god’s fertile will, impregnating virgin orchids in the rainforest. They promise to trade the ecstasies of the anther cap for my first-born daughter and, before I can say no, I wake to my water broken, my dreams crawling out of the river, maculate and toothed, insisting, Even before you imagined us, we knew you.

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Brian Brodeur Blight I was born in a city with a river running beneath it.

Summers, the chemical stink of textile dyes seeped up from viaducts under the streets.

Two bridges spanned a lake to the northeast that fed into the river underground.

We heard of those who walked the bridges at night and climbed guardrails, scaling the trestles to leap into the water, disappearing.

We heard a lot of things: the newborn boy dumped in a Papa Gino’s ladies room, the ServiceMaster van with painted windows parked by the playground woods, two teenage girls found naked in a ditch near Great Brook Valley where we were told never to go at night.

Bored, we’d steal fresh cemetery flowers, and pitch them at each other, shattering blooms with a bat that gave us special power because we’d heard Yastrzemski owned it once.

Sticky with strips of black electrical tape, it belonged to Joe Camuso down the street.

When Joe showed up one day without the bat, he said his dad had split it beating a man he’d caught that morning pissing on their stoop.

“Dad wasn’t even drunk,” Joe said, grinning.

Police tape fluttered there until it tattered.

The night Joe’s dad got off on self-defense, my own dad staggered home after the party at Stony’s Bar, waking my stepmother.

I heard the thud of boots dropped on the floor,

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Brian Brodeur voices murmuring through the drywall.

“I’m sick of all these Blacks,” he said. She shushed him: “Quiet, the kids will hear.” “Sorry,” he said, “I mean these African Americans.”

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Catherine Champion Caliban, After Call it inheritance, that currency of moon, my mother’s temper that was never quite my own.

And still I know nothing of what moves it all, what chicanery hides in the dive of fish, the tinny whir of beetles, and whether I remain my own, or subject to some chimerical constancy. I am tired of spells.

Spells of books, spells of whiskey, of winds.

But in solitude, I must atone for their phantoms, even though they are gone and not missed, because the night’s engulfment of sea is enough to make a child of anyone. I speak towards the aerial, asking for my mind, and what words the wind carries: Still, into the night the sky pulls the tide.

Still, a ship’s eye, and no stone is settled.

And in shatterable sleep you’ve unspun

what is known—the sod before sea, your shiftable home

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Nandi Comer The Warning for Ai So many beautifully bloodied sounds tucked under my chin, breaking under pressurized note. I’ve made it through night working lines into a damp thigh, a stalled truck, a woman humming into her husband’s ear. Without occasion or motive, I’ve buried voices. I’ve studied the slow motion of carving breast meat. I shadow the butcher’s cut. I feel my face’s open grin when I sharpen my shears.

The baritone of a bruised man’s chuckle rattles my lungs. A child’s star-like hand reaches across my belly. I have to yank them out. I had never heard wanting strapped to a boy’s wrists until I tied him down, made him sing.

I’m a borrower of voice boxes, a surgeon of tongues. I am warning you: you ought to stop loving me; you ought not lay your story on my counter; you ought be careful before I take you up by your throat, before you find yourself barefoot in my kitchen, mute and panting.

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Nandi Comer

Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City Another ripped night, another dank song, another bloated head of a headline child bobs in your river. Loaded barrel woman, pumped piston city, seven of your boys rushed a townhouse door for jewelry, for a cable box, for a game console, tossed over kitchen tables, turned another boy’s face to mush. And you? You’ve gone and gave up their ghosts. Singing a murderous sinfonietta you make another girl, another son dance on waves of your wails as if each bullet were a small celebration missile. I know this lost loveluck is not your fault. You do not mean to change a father’s body to canopy and shield, into a dead weight your daughter will tuck herself under until your singing is done, but I’ve watched you strained with moan and hymn. Your living room floor scattered with obituaried flaking faces.

I’ve seen your organ arms’ frantic wave. The length of your fingers curved around carnation stems.

Each night your skin twists mourn to mourn. Beating chest woman, yours is a solitary grief whose wailing provokes the next hand hooked

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Nandi Comer to an infant throat. Weeping woman, foolish mother. I’ve tried to sing your praise song, but each of your river-drowned children is a clanging cord in my throat. “Don’t stay,” you warn. You refuse to protect me.

Still, I drag myself to you, kneel and kiss your oily asphalt knees. No one knows your grieving songs, our love of graveyard strolls.

If only to fondle the fringes of small caskets, I come back. I retreat.

I come back. I retreat.

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Nandi Comer

Losing Between Manholes and Myths Here, girls keep ears tuned to heavy thunder, rippled sky, and cloudbursts—not to boys’ eyes following hemlines, nor catcalls from rooftops, nor a sweet shepherding palm at their waists.

It’s the rains that dump women curbside, wet and cored. It’s never an unmarked taxi or stumbling through our stone town’s dark dawn.

October is a constant downpour.

Sidewalks overflow. Water whirlpools at every corner. Red awnings sag and drip. The storms in this town have already drowned many women.

If a girl is not careful she gets pulled underground through an uncovered manhole.

She won’t fall into a ditch, or come back with one broken limb. It’s not the dragging that swells their thin arms, not mouthfuls of gravel, not their tongues snipped off and jammed in mailboxes. A drizzle turns to thrill then threat. Knuckles washed translucent can’t endure the pull. I know what your newspapers say, but our men don’t turn their steering wheels down a dead-end street, they don’t stop in front of a house she doesn’t know. She will not need to kick

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Nandi Comer or scratch or plead that her father is willing to pay ten times he asks if she just makes it home. I’m telling you every southwest corner does not lead to a knot she can’t loosen, or a stained cloth she can’t spit up. Lower your window. Breathe the heavy humid air. Fear the streams of gutter water rivering through the town. Flood rain takes girls with muck and waste. The sewers make them bloated. It’s the storms that send their bodies crawling through piping towards a lake where all bobbing heads spring up.

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Suzanne Hodsden Dead Boy’s Wedding The boy in the coffin was young, sixteen almost seventeen,

and wore a suit two sizes too big for him. A ring of pine boughs crowned his head and obstructed a clear view of his face. His family crowded at his feet, heads bowed and close together, leaning against one another for stability while a priest stood over his head and chanted the somber tenor notes of a funeral song that vibrated in the pre-dawn air. Everything else was quiet and still, and the scene’s only witness was Ruth Marfinescu, the American wife of Sorin Marfinescu, esteemed historian and archeologist. She was not wearing her glasses and thought the entire tableau some sort of great black beast with amoeba-like borders that undulated but never moved from its fixed space on the sidewalk beneath her apartment. It was an abomination sent from hell to terrorize her.

The song had woken her and sent her to the window to see the source of the noise, swear at it, shame it to silence, and return to her bed to sleep however long she could before the church bells began their daily routine. This bell song would signal the start of the day and blast through the block of flats with an ear-splitting cacophony of song that would mark every subsequent hour throughout the day. There are three churches in Braşov within a mile of each other, and none of them agree on the time. The first two minutes of every daylight hour are filled with the arrhythmic clanging of bells.

The Lutheran Church with its one large resonant bell started, and a few moments later, the atonal melody of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches joined in with their collection of smaller bells. After the last jarring chord, life would start. Old women would beat their rugs in the courtyard, and milkmen would push squeaky-wheeled carts past open windows, calling out and hoping to make a sale. The newly minted cellist next door liked to get an early start on his criminal ministrations to his instrument. The silence of the hours before the bells rang was a precious treasure that Ruth guarded with a religious fervor.

Her knowledge of Romanian vulgarities was limited, but not

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Suzanne Hodsden preclusive. She retrieved her glasses, bent in half over her bedroom windowsill, and warmed up one of her favorite phrases of damnation, something about making skis out of an enemy’s broken femurs. She was about to let loose with it when she saw the singer, dressed head to toe in black, was most likely a priest. She was raised Baptist, and though she’d long since stopped talking to God with any regularity, a healthy fear of hell stopped her short of swearing at a man of the cloth.

Then she saw the boy. She gripped the sides of the window and didn’t move until the bells began. Only then did she take a step back and slam the window shut, a primal instinct of self-preservation.

Even through glass, the bells shook her by the bundle of nerves tied tight around the top of her spine and shattered against the hard bone of her skull. They rattled the thin walls of the soviet bloc-style apartment she shared with her husband. The apartment was fourteen by twenty-two feet, and, in the airless summer heat, the stench of two humans could be overwhelming if not properly ventilated. The window was only shut for seconds before she began to stifle, and she sagged under the weight of Romanian hospitality. She and her husband had visited his mother the night before, and rules dictated she accept whatever food or drink was offered to her lest she cause offense. More often than not, it was drink.

Ruth couldn’t compete with people who’d been training their heads and livers for an entire lifetime, and Romanian social gatherings always addled her brains and good sense. So much so on that morning she’d been poised to scream at a funeral. She swallowed that ball of guilt whole, down into her gullet to mingle with the pickled contents of her stomach.

Sorin was up and rooting around in the kitchen, and she walked the five feet to the foyer, if it could be called that. A four-by-five foot space contained three doors to three rooms: the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. Each room was smaller than the previous. Sorin was leaning out the window, observing the scene with a toothbrush in his mouth, nothing in his expression to suggest anything he saw on the ground was out of the ordinary. More surprising, given the direction of his eyebrows, was the fact his wife was out of bed.

Her mother once told her anything she ever wanted to know about people could be worked out in the first hour of their day. Do they open a window? Wear slippers? When does coffee get involved?

How many cups? Do they dress before breakfast? What paper do they read? The first hour is crucial because it’s rare for people to lie. It just doesn’t occur to them, her mother said. Give them an hour, and they Crab Orchard Review

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Suzanne Hodsden are awake enough to know others are watching them. Sorin woke with the sun and was always well out of bed before Ruth opened her eyes.

After nearly six months of marriage, she barely knew him at all.

“There’s a dead person on the sidewalk,” she said.

“Yes.” “Why?”

“He must be buried.”

She stood transfixed by the sight of her husband in his jockey shorts, stretching out the cricks in his back. If not for the silver in his hair and beard, his awkwardly thin body could be mistaken for an adolescent’s.

They stood and stared at one another until the previous day’s argument woke up and put on its shoes; and when it did, his sigh of resignation sent the toothbrush swinging to the corner of his mouth. He pushed past her on a resolute path to the bathroom before she could speak.

She cut around him and shut the bathroom door behind her.

Usually Sorin respected his strange American wife’s insistence upon using the toilet in solitude, but he hesitated only a moment before he pushed the door open and scraped her knees in the process. He spit into the sink. The mix of toothpaste and silver in his hair made him look rabid. His head bent to rinse his mouth, and he met her glare for glare. If the yelling was to continue, he apparently wanted to do so without toothpaste in his mouth.

The tub was filled with pillows and thick wool blankets. On nights they went to bed without speaking, Sorin packed the bathtub full of pillows and slept with his head against the soap dish. He made a show out of stretching out his back, throwing a glance into the tub with his makeshift bed and then back at her while he dried his hands on the towel, one finger at a time.

“What is wrong?” he asked.

“I’d like to pee in peace, that’s what’s fucking wrong.”

“Hug my ass.”

“Kiss. Kiss your ass. That’s the phrase, Sorin.”

“You can do that, too, if you’d like.” He leaned against the sink and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Who died?”

His expression sobered. He left the bathroom and shut the door to let her finish. Through the crack, he told her their neighbors on the first floor had lost their oldest boy.

“Alex?” She’d given Alex one or two English lessons in exchange for his wealth of Romanian vulgarities. Sorin didn’t answer.

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Suzanne Hodsden

She walked out of the bathroom on knees that wobbled, made her way to the kitchen, and looked out the window. She could see him now and the abundance of greenery that pillowed and haloed his head.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her words were mostly air and barely achieved any sort of audible tone.

Sorin rummaged in the fridge and removed some milk and fresh cheese. Poking into the bread box, he seemed discouraged by the makings of his breakfast. He spoke without looking at her.

“You need anything from the store?”

“Answer me.”

She didn’t need an answer. She already knew why her husband hadn’t mentioned the death of a child. If he told her, she’d think about Jacob, and Sorin and Ruth did not discuss her son. Alex was not much older than Jacob had been when he died. She’d buried her son in a confirmation suit two sizes too small. The casket she’d bought him was too big, but her teacher’s salary hadn’t been able to afford a custom order. The coffin’s extra space was enough to accommodate Jacob’s soccer ball between his feet alongside a few contraband heavy metal CDs she’d found under his bed. She’d placed a worn copy of Trumpet of the Swan under his right arm. The book had been gathering dust on his bedside table, waiting for him to be through with the boy wizard.

Ruth looked down at the funeral gathering and searched faces for the mother but couldn’t distinguish her from the rest. All their faces were downturned and shrouded in clean white handkerchiefs.

She struggled to recall the woman’s facial features or hair color.

Though she’d passed her in the stairwell countless times, she couldn’t remember the woman’s face. She thought to herself that if God had any mercy in His heart, He’d have taken her, too.

A woman in the block opposite appeared in her window with a small rug. She shook it with so much vigor it snapped. She showed no concern for the display below her. It was a day like any other, and there was work to be done. Passersby were completely disinterested. The boy’s death was just a fact of existence amongst a swirl of life: clotheslines of wet underpants, the reluctant ignition of car engines, and small children racing to reach the school on time. The mountains that framed the small valley city of Brașov looked on from the distance unmoved. Ruth steadied herself against the window. She wanted to shout at them, to tell them to stop and pay attention, or to at least be quiet, for god’s sake.

“They should stop,” she said. “It’s like they don’t see him. Why don’t they see him?”

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Suzanne Hodsden Sorin put his hands on her shoulders, a light touch that asked permission. When she didn’t flinch or pull away, he let them rest there.

“Are you all right?”

She cleared her throat. “Why is there pine in the casket?”

“It’s for his wedding,” said Sorin, as if that explained it.

The flies outside began to buzz. The sun made them greedy, and she wasn’t sure she wanted breakfast at all. She went to the sink and poured herself a glass of water.

“Wedding?”

“It’s a Dacian thing, a pagan custom from before the Romans,” he said. He disappeared into the bedroom to dress. She followed him there, using both unreliable hands to hold her water glass. She waited for him to continue, but he was busy pulling on a pair of black pants and a T-shirt.

“Look,” he said when fully dressed. “If we had been married here, there would have been pine at our wedding. If I was not married, and I died tomorrow, I would marry the dead. They would put pine with me to take to my wedding.” He pushed his keys into his pocket and hooked his wallet onto a chain on his belt loop.

“Any one dead person in particular?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I do know that no one in Romania gets out of marriage.” This last bit he said mostly to himself.

Ruth finished her water and put the glass on the bedside coffee table. Sorin waved his arms about, dismissing her and any more questions she might ask.

“It’s tradition.” For all his status as a scholar of history, there were certain things Sorin believed should be accepted without questions.

He was halfway out of the apartment and called over his shoulder.

“You sure you don’t want anything?”

She nodded. When the door had shut behind him, she went into the kitchen to make coffee. She boiled enough water for two and sat at the chair closest to the window to observe the scene. One of the mourners wrapped his arms around the woman standing next to him.

The woman pushed him away.

Ruth had been in London for a conference, a year after sickness claimed her son and left her a childless single mother. Sorin had approached her sitting alone in a hotel bar. He asked why she was by herself, and she answered that she didn’t like being with people anymore. She warned him away. “I have a sad history,” she said.

He sat down anyway. “Everyone in my country has a sad history,” 32 u Crab Orchard Review

Suzanne Hodsden he said, in reference to dictators, secret police, and national starvation.

He reached out and pushed up one corner of her mouth. “But we smile anyway. When we can’t smile, we drink.” He said it so seriously that she laughed. “Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’ll fall in love with you.”

She married him not long after because she didn’t want to go home.

In a way, Ruth had fallen in love with Romania before Sorin. In America, her sadness infected everyone around her—her family, her students. In Romania, a bit more didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

Her husband appeared on the sidewalk below and negotiated past the people crowding his path to the corner shop. His phone rang and he answered it, speaking loud enough for her to hear that he spoke in English. He confirmed his plans to attend a party at the museum that night. He said he didn’t know if his wife would attend or not. She watched him disappear around the corner.

She dug through dressers and put on everything she had that was black. She tied her unruly hair up into the neatest knot she could manage and ran down the stairs of the building. She would stand sentinel even if no one else would, but looking down at Alex, she couldn’t see anything but Jacob. The priest covered the casket with a lid carved with roses, a cross, and concentric circles. The water she’d drunk welled up in the back of her throat.

In the courtyard, a large white conversion van backed its way down the sidewalk and stopped in front of the funeral. Two men jumped out, came around, and opened the back doors. One was smoking a cigarette, and she hissed at him.

“Put that out,” she said, and he returned her request with a blank stare. She rephrased her words into Romanian, saying something that amounted to “Extinguish your cigarette, man who has had sex with goats.”

The priest looked up at her and shook his head. The mourners shuffled their feet toward the van and ushered the coffin inside. She sat down on the steps against the steel railing and closed her eyes. The van started and drove away, leaving a cloud of exhaust. Though she knew the funeral had left, the smell of the pine clung to her nostrils.

The bells signaled the start of the next hour, and she cupped her hands over her ears to drown them out. When she opened her eyes again, Sorin stood in front of her, holding a plastic bag full of eggs.

He fried enough eggs for them to share and put some yogurt into the mix as a treat. He ate with a determined gusto and asked what she had planned for the day.

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Suzanne Hodsden

“Do you have Romanian lesson today?” he asked. “Do you teach?”

She’d picked up a few classes on American customs and traditions at the University of Transylvania located downtown. She wasn’t listening to him.

“Trumpet of the Swan,” she said. She was disappointed in her choice. Why not A Farewell to Arms, To Kill a Mockingbird, or maybe Catcher in the Rye? She’d chosen a child’s book instead of something that would teach him how to be a man.

“Trumpet of the what?”

She started at his voice. “Swan.” She held her hands out in an approximation of the bird’s size. “Large white bird. Long thin neck.”

“Ah,” he said. “lebădă. Da. I know this bird.”

“It’s a book,” she said. “About a swan that can’t make any noise so his father steals him a trumpet. It’s a book for children.” She shook her head and dismissed the topic.

“Have you a copy?” he asked. In order to improve his English, Sorin had been systematically reading every book she owned. In a way, he was reading her. Peeling back the layers of her, one page at a time.

“Not anymore,” she said, and returned to her breakfast.

“Do you want to talk about Jacob?” He waited. “Ruth?”

She looked up. “You have egg on your face,” she said. She was about to explain that she meant literally rather than figuratively and stopped herself. She reached across the table and brushed the food off the corner of his mouth. “You shouldn’t eat so fast.”

“What-eh-ver,” he said. He’d learned that particular American expression of the dismissive from her, and the way he said it—complete with requisite hand wave—sounded like a young girl from California.

She kept the information to herself and began to eat, a smile turning her mouth up at one corner.

Their neighbor drew his bow across his miserable stringed monster and started the first few chords of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, each note a grunt and a groan—a squeaky cry of despair from a beautiful instrument that deserved better.

“Oh, God,” she said. She clenched her teeth and dropped her fork.

Sorin got up and banged on the wall. He yelled something about the neighbor’s ass and lightning bolts that she didn’t fully understand.

The museum where Sorin worked was hosting a party in honor of its new exhibition of Roman artifacts, and the bells had rung sixteen more times before Sorin finally convinced his wife to attend. Patrick 34 u Crab Orchard Review

Suzanne Hodsden Deane, the architect of the event and the museum’s largest donor, was an unpleasant Irishman with the close-set eyes of a rodent. Ruth didn’t think much of him, but his Romanian wife, Monica, was her only friend outside Sorin’s family.

Monica greeted her at the door with a kiss on both cheeks and pulled her into the party. Sorin smiled at her and told her to have fun, and for a while, she did. Monica introduced her to foreign investors as the wife of their resident genius. The genius in question was cornered by a group of Belgian monks who sipped graciously at cups of quality Murfatlar wine and nibbled at the edges of enough food to feed the city.

Monica abandoned Ruth after a half hour or so and disappeared into the crowd to greet the ever-flowing stream of new guests. Ruth retreated to the open bar. Monica took the responsibility of being married to a rich and powerful English-speaking man seriously. She was a nice woman, a smart woman. Ruth valued her friendship—so much so that Ruth didn’t punch Patrick in the face when he grabbed a handful of her ass and told her he would’ve bought more food if he knew Americans were coming to the party.

Sorin was across the room and didn’t witness the scene, but Monica did. She motioned for Ruth to follow her into an adjoining room, and stashed away amongst Neolithic pottery shards, she told her what could and would happen to Ruth if she continued to pursue Patrick.

Ordinarily she avoided comments on Patrick’s rampant infidelity, but after three glasses of wine, her tongue was off the leash. “My ass coming within three feet of his hand does not make me an adulterer.”

“I don’t know why you feel you must destroy everything you touch.”

“What have I destroyed?”

“Look at your husband,” she said. She pointed at Sorin, so deep in conversation that he’d missed everything. “You’ve been fighting again.

He told me.”

Ruth’s mouth closed over the air she inhaled to use for a rebuttal and she walked away through the maze of stone legionnaires that were missing arms, legs, or the occasional head. She pulled Sorin out of his conversation and told him she was leaving. When he asked why, she told him. He rolled his eyes, dismissed Patrick as harmless, and kissed her forehead.

“Monica doesn’t realize that you’re a dog.” He smiled in a way that suggested this was her most prized quality.

The Belgian had the decency to disguise his laugh as a cough into his napkin. She took ahold of his hand and told him in creaky, collegeCrab Orchard Review

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Suzanne Hodsden classroom French to please excuse her husband for being an asshole.

The monk shrugged and answered her in English. “What do you expect?

He’s Romanian.”

Ruth stepped on Patrick’s foot on the way out, ensuring that he felt the full advantage of American weight. She was halfway down the street before Sorin caught up with her. The heels of her boots echoed on the cobblestone: staccato displeasure.

“You are mad at me now?” Sorin caught her arm, and she swung around inches from his face.

“You called me a dog.”

“Well?”

“Well, go to hell!”

“You like dogs.”

“Not the point, Sorin.”

Lights in the windows began to flicker into life. Sorin lowered his voice. “Dogs are loyal.” He tilted his head and looked at her. “They’re pretty.” He brushed a piece of her hair behind her ear. She batted him away.

“In America, you don’t call a woman a dog.”

The street was narrow, and houses on either side were within earshot of their conversation. Several curtains shifted, scattering the light inside into puddles on the pavement. Ruth knew who was on the other side.

The old women of Brașov were more accurate than newspapers and more widely circulated. Ruth—the American woman with the sad eyes, living in Romania of her own volition—was the stuff of gossip legend.

Who was she? Where was her family? She was the mother of a dead child, they knew, but no one knew the exact details for certain. Sorin, by what was assumed to be a strange genetic aberration, refused to share them.

“We’re not in America,” said Sorin. His marriage gave him an automatic U.S. visa. The fact that he hadn’t left yet made him Brașov’s biggest fool.

“English is not my first language,” he said. “Or my second.”

“Well, bravo for you.” She began clapping, and the sound echoed.

More lights came on in windows. “Yay! Everyone come out and join me in congratulating the man who knows three languages. Yay!” He grabbed her by the wrists.

“Ce pula mea!” When Sorin swore, he returned to his native language. Ruth was familiar with the phrase and knew its meaning approximated something like goddammit. Alex had instructed her not to use it because pula was the word for “penis” and Alex told her, 36 u Crab Orchard Review

Suzanne Hodsden with great solemnity, that it would give the wrong impression. The pair of them had laughed like loons.

Sorin took a deep breath. “Everything is a fight with you now. I do not understand. I do not remember this of you. You were peaceful before. What has happened to change you this way?”

“I was always this way. Before, I was just…”

“What?”

Numb, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She thought about the sidewalk again. She thought about Alex. “Romanians have wakes in their homes.”

“Wakes?” Sorin scratched his head.

“They keep the dead at home until burial?”

“Yes. What about that?”

“How long was he there?”

“Who? Alex? Three days.”

She calculated in her mind how many fights that added up to.

How many arguments, screaming matches, and sleepless nights had she taken part in while his mother was downstairs sitting next to her dead child?

“You should have told me.”

“Would it have made a difference?” The bells began again for the last time that evening and the proximity of the Lutheran Church made the ground vibrate.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“What?”

She bent over, fingers splayed over her stomach.

“Say it again,” he said. “I want to hear you.”

She raised her voice. “Fuck these fucking bells!”

She pulled away from her husband and started to walk home. An old woman in a kerchief and pajamas came out onto her front walk and began sweeping the steps. She stared into Ruth, straight through her, with eyes reduced to narrow slits. Ruth picked up her pace. Sorin followed her, a few paces behind the entire way home, and didn’t say another word. He pulled the blankets and pillows back into the bathtub, and though she told him he didn’t have to sleep there, he told her it was his preference.

Ruth woke the next morning to their cellist neighbor. He’d moved on from Bach and had set out to attack Beethoven with a cruel sort of musical vengeance. She rolled over and stretched her arms Crab Orchard Review

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Suzanne Hodsden into the empty space next to her and remembered that Sorin had slept elsewhere. She buried her face in the pillow and smelled the henna he used to try to hide the gray in his hair.

Sorin was in the kitchen speaking on the phone. “Buna, Mama.

Da, totul este bine acum. Calmează-te!” He raised his voice, no doubt to speak above his shrieking mother. “Pentru ca o iubesc si este a mea.”

She shifted the grammar around in her mind and translated the words.

Because she is mine, and I love her.

She got out of bed and put on a clean pair of pants and a fresh shirt. While Sorin sat at the table with his head buried in his arms and explained to his mother why he hadn’t the sense to marry a Romanian girl, his American wife slipped out the door, out of the building, and onto the street. Her stomach rumbled with its request for the breakfast she’d skipped.

Any farmer who was worth anything sold his wares on the edges of town at the marketplace, and the largest of these markets was three blocks from her apartment. People and about a half-million specimens of fresh fruit, vegetables, and flowers were crammed into an area the size of a sports arena. She made her way to it and disappeared into the noisy throng, determined to find the oldest seller there. The young ones, she’d been instructed by Sorin, were swindlers and only sold produce imported from other countries. If she bought from the young vendors, and she usually did because they spoke English, Sorin would know and admonish her for it.

The older ones pulled and picked their produce from the vines, the trees, and the dirt the morning of sale and had the freshest merchandise.

Farther down the rows, she saw old women in skirts and intricately colored head scarves loading all manner of things into metal basket scales. Old men were sitting on chairs with their feet kicked up onto their counters, smoking cigarettes and tapping ash onto broken concrete.

Their vegetables were smaller but more vividly colored and still warm from the sun. Nothing was more than a day old, and some others were only hours out of the ground. Ruth passed a large stack of carrots with dirt stuck to them, still black and moist.

She walked up to the oldest man she could see and asked him for two plums, Sorin’s favorite. The man wore a large leather hat and a sweater that was two sizes too small over his round belly. He smiled at her and began loading a bag full with handfuls of fruit.

“Nu,” she said and held up two fingers.

“Da, știu.” he said and continued to cram plums into the plastic sack.

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Suzanne Hodsden She didn’t want two kilos of plums, she just wanted two plums.

She held up her fingers again and then pointed to one plum and then another. “Un, Două,” she said.

The language barrier notwithstanding, they continued with a concise conversation using nothing but eyebrows and the universal language of the body. His brows knitted together: Who on earth wants to buy just two plums? She raised her upper lip to the left and raised one eyebrow: Who on earth wants to buy two kilos of plums?

His lips pursed and he looked her up and down: Normal, god-fearing Romanian women who care for their husbands by making copious amounts of jam. You are not one of them, obviously.

She rolled her eyes up and blew a bit of sweaty hair out of her face: Obviously. Now give me my fucking plums. With great and hostile ceremony, he dropped both into the plastic bag, and they landed with resounding thumps. She dropped too much money and turned: Ass. He lit a cigarette: Babylonian whore.

On her way out, she passed the flower stand and, on impulse, bought a pine bouquet from a gap-toothed gypsy child with bare feet.

The bouquet was tied with a red ribbon and was interspersed with roses and pine cones that were still fresh and closed. She inhaled its scent and wrapped her arms around it. She sat down at an available bench by the bus stop and bit into her plum. The juices ran down the side of her face, and she wiped it clean with her sleeve. The old man sitting next to her saw her do it and smiled. He held a plastic bottle of pàlinca brandy between his knees, and he poured two small Dixie cups full and offered one to her.

When she hesitated, he frowned. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy his pàlinca unless she shared with him. She took the cup and handed him the plum she was saving for Sorin. He thanked her for it and asked about the pine. Without looking at him, she told him that her son had gotten married.

“Felicitări!” he said. He smiled at her through brown, crooked teeth. He pulled her to him and kissed both of her cheeks. He bumped his cup against hers. “Noroc!”

“Noroc,” she said. She took the drink, and it burned her throat the way it always did.

The bus arrived and the man stood and offered to let her get on first. She waved him away and told him she was waiting for a different number. He kissed her cheeks again and jumped onto the bus. He said something to the bus driver, and the driver waved. “Felicitări!” She waved her thanks, and the bus rolled away.

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Suzanne Hodsden

She sat alone there and enjoyed the heat of the sun. She licked the stickiness from her fingers, the combination of plum juice and pine sap that was both sweet and sour. Everything was silent in that moment.

The world stopped and stood still the way it sometimes did, until the bells started ringing again and she realized she wasn’t breathing.

The taste of pine was strong on the tip of her tongue and there was a small pool of plum juice in her mouth. She held the bouquet close to her face and breathed deeply. The crowds of bustling Romanians around her were transformed from busy working people into wedding guests, laughing, dancing, and crying out. They told stories, remembered, and speculated about the future with wide emphatic hand gestures and booming voices. Bags of groceries became large white wedding gifts that anticipated the needs of a new couple. She searched the crowd and tried to identify bride and groom but couldn’t make a clear decision.

She rose from the bench and began the walk back to her apartment and her life. Though she was no longer in possession of plums, she carried the bouquet with both hands, planning to put it in water at home to keep it fresh and alive. As she walked, she wondered if Sorin had left the house and hoped he hadn’t. She wondered who her son had married. She wondered if the girl was treating him right.

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Chad Davidson In Ravenna Three boys, old enough to hurt someone, young enough to think it doesn’t matter, sat outside the small green plot I came to.

Dante’s grave. All of us pulled there, experiencing gravity, out of control for different reasons. I could not prepare, really, for facing this, just as these boys— smoking too deliberately, collars relieved like rose petals from the extravagant ceilings of basilicas—could not understand their own indifference, or why they huddled, stared when I walked by. They were a type of beauty, as far as beauty is ignorant of itself, disdainful of place: that casual square, Franciscan façade, that entire city turning under the swelter of an afternoon, June in the marshlands to the east. Sometimes, I stand in front of history and feel nothing.

Then, some wrecked mosaic, awkward in the transom of a secondary church, behaves just so, as if the artists thought of me and all my imperfections. Sometimes, people gather in the hearts of forgotten cities, and I hate them for their nonchalance, the terror in their boredom.

They have been dying here for millennia, these boys, and there is little I can do, on this casual trip in the heat, map in hand, to guide them out.

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Chad Davidson

The Gothic Line

That evening I must have crossed it, racketing out the cobbles in an orange city bus to Casalecchio, suburb of Bologna on the Reno’s banks, to dine with a family I hardly knew, traversing the boundaries of small talk, the awkward translation of need, with the owners of a café near the school where every day I filled blank lines with the proper noun, or conjugation in the remote past, for which, I later learned, modern Italian has little use.

What was I doing as I stamped my feet, then ticket, ascending the stairs at the bus stop, huddled in half literacy and the cheap coat I had to buy when a winter I never knew descended? I must have transgressed some imagined checkpoint between acquaintance and friend, some shoreline pocked with the unintelligible artifacts of embarrassment and xenophilia, as Mina buzzed me up to a linened table and the foreboding of their furniture. In Italian: mobili, the movable, the transient—like me on the long ride to Casalecchio, repeating my scant vocabulary to the cobble’s stutter.

And it’s not the tortellini served that night, handmade, curled in a silken broth, or the fizzy wine, which my host, Constantine— 42 u Crab Orchard Review

Chad Davidson from Costante, constant, forever—bottled himself.

Not even some idea of the exotic, which surely I still felt then, one season into my becoming, my beginning Italian like a wounded machine sputtering its declensions to the sound of their transnational sympathy.

That, after all, could be anyone’s. But the grandfather who arrived after dinner and spoke a broken dialect gauzed in bookish Italian—another kind of wound— whose eyes, when Mina introduced me as the American, glazed over then burned through me, or the version of me forever fixed in his past, in an Allied tank entering Bologna, and this man holed in the hills on the Gothic line, while his wife gave birth to a daughter in a shelter outside the city, the periodic sentence of bombardment imposed on Bologna concussing around them. And though I confess now my ignorance of that war, that I learned best the gothic cathedral of its history while in Bologna that winter, still I knew enough to understand what he didn’t say in an Italian that sounded like this: you who liberated the streets in your machines, who delivered my daughter from the fire hills, from the noise of our wrongness, still I see men like you, blue-eyed bringers of the marketplace, bend over your youth to hold my hand like you’re doing now, like you will continue to do, your calling, your curse— for you shall occupy forever one person to me, constant, immovable.

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Erica Dawson

Midget Wrestling at the Dawg House, Portales, NM And this is not the place that god forgot; it is the place he left alone. The allin-one. The bar. The liquor store. The squat of a pool player eyeing the pocket. Gall is what it is. This town that takes a spot of dirt and turns it to a storm, a squall, dust, blush. The only hope is rain will blot it. This, the rouge on the cheeks of a plastic doll, an old woman way too made up. But, rot has no place here, nor age, nor death, nor pallbearer. There is no soil inside a plot of stone. And yards are stone. The urban sprawl, the quote-unquote downtown construction’s wrought with gravel. Still, here is the poster’s scrawl.

Weekend hot ticket. Fight. And no, we ought not say midget. And no, we shouldn’t call Winner or Loser; but it’s goddamn hot and you pronounce Dawg raw as the crawl of cattle in its shit. The flies will swat at you. This, where god forgot to maul the surfaces, where brown and green lie taut as sunburned skin, where everything is tall compared to everything, and when you fought it, it loomed over you. It left you small.

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Rebecca Morgan Frank Evolution The wings return into the bird to nail him

—Paul Éluard The discounted self is housed in steel and screws, a you that’s forged and saved. The way you move is shaped by unheard clicks and pops, these small pieces of you floating in a pass of blood and tissue.

My hand on skin is also hand on hardware, the supple and scented cover now one part of a couple: the other half resists my gripping caress probing for your industrial edge, crafted for you before they sliced you through.

You are cyber, hollow, filled like a stranger and say it feels worse than a phantom limb, or a graft from the dead. What’s in you not human—you dream of steel cells drifting up into your heart and turning it into tin. Of hardened breasts and hands.

Wake and ask if I could love an industrial shape that your soul filled like a racket of birds, moving through the forged ribs, the hollow lips.

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Rachel Heimowitz What the Light Reveals Har Hazaytim Marble boxes cover this Jerusalem hill, graves crumbled and aged, the color of teeth, row after row facing east; buried here are you who will rise first, call back to the others, enter the world of endless life. Your names echo through generations, like the lamplighter who walks, torch in hand, moves slowly from one grave to the next, sending a glow into the darkening night. Or perhaps just a match set to a wick of pure olive oil, the light clean and clear as a summer day, sunlight so bright we hide our eyes, and fruit that ripens only in the long heat of the summer sun, fruit whose names define us: Tamar, Te’ena, Rimon, Zayit, whose shade shields us, whose pips and stems compost back into the soil on this eastern side of the hill, where lights come on slowly with the dusk—

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Rachel Heimowitz East Jerusalem with its cacophony of cars and marquees, the green lights of minarets kindled one after the other, dotting the way far into the folds of the desert.

Muezzins who call out, one leading to the next— voices, mournful, undulating—pleas so like the shofar cries that drift up these stone stairs, call us back to where we come from— this umbilicus that whispers a soul to a soul. Your names: Keila, Pessel, Shaindela, Ruchel: you, who loved to knead the dough: you, who danced the hem of her wedding dress to pieces: you, who died in the Grodno Ghetto, giving birth on a dirty floor, and though we never knew your stories our souls still told the truth, the death was not easy. This is why we can’t sleep.

And the wind that once blew cold in Belarus, now hot and dry over this eastern hill.

No more lamplighters: we are Nava, Odelyia, Yael, and electricity now scrambles the light between the words, whispers rise like mist, a simple wish that wherever we are

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Rachel Heimowitz we can hearken back to the sweet pink of a western sky, the last kiss of daylight as traffic fades, the stars unveil themselves, the muezzins now quiet. Wherever you are, tell us why we need any answers, tell us what any light will reveal.

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Sara Henning Losing a Child That summer suspended between highway and hard pedal, you couldn’t have known how nitrous turns on a body with dreaming—so in mine, I coax a rabbit from our cat’s incisors, because he smelled of burnt hyacinth, too sweet and feral to be swallowed, as desperate things are, by any directive but longing, though his chest was a crushed orchard, though blood was a song of entanglement soothing his lungs. So in mine, your Chrysler still idles on the highway’s shoulder because on the way to the clinic, you pushed my legs apart on the backseat’s cold-lush leather, so you could know how it felt to have me under you, so split open, when you were still a father. And after, the diner where we pretended we hadn’t made a body had walls stung by cigarette smoke, an anonymity that pooled around us like harsh light on linoleum, other lovers hidden inside intimacies that fooled them, and I thought of the rabbit whose body, too supple to call elegy, I drowned in sweeter water.

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Christopher Hornbacker Birding They burst from the brush line, a fragmenting cloud of bodies, each set of wings beating against gravity’s touch. The guide fumbles his binoculars, thinks he sees a certain plumage, red-rumped, in among the barn swallows as they wheel and turn away.

I called on you yesterday, I swore your mother answered, or perhaps her ghost smiling but barring admittance, my small finger still on the bell as she appeared in that doorway to send me off from a dream.

I could only turn, hands in pockets, hurry off with a memory— our first outing, you point out a nightjar darting from beneath the blue-tongues, swooping in bold claps intended to drive away a predator hungering after a clutch nested in the shrubs.

Now, just two paths of flight forever un-entwining. No, what you plan is not always a Kirtland’s warbler flying as on this spring day. I can’t see

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Christopher Hornbacker where it lights until I don’t bother looking.

A woman’s dress is too short for birding and far too red.

She never spoke and she might have come over from Oleana, I can’t imagine what her address could be, I’d like to, to someday hear this uncertain singing laid bare without the weight of watching empty-handed, to be called with music as if it were I who had long been awaited.

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Amorak Huey

North of Dowagiac the Human Body Is 98 Percent Winter And ninety-nine percent bottles of beer on the wall, lukewarm domestic buzz, wood paneling, neon horses trotting in endless circles. God forbid someone opens the door, brings outside in: blustery swirling reminder of the wife at home tucking my kids to bed so she can touch herself in front of Dancing with the Stars, couch springs eternally creaking, homemade hand job the best we can do when it gets dark so early: this particular point in history, the least interesting of times. Two stools down a woman I’ve known since high school offers a smile that’s half-hearted and even less promising: what passes for flirting in this weather. Her husband’s second-shifting at the plant and they’re both supposed to be glad for the hours: these hours: any hours. Because it could be worse though it’s not always clear how. Can’t even smoke in here anymore, all I’m asking is a little heat, spark and pull and breathe in the poison I choose.

Keno cards pile up in drifts, numbers freeze together: loser begets, well, you know. Time and a half’s long gone and my jokes aren’t so funny when the punchline’s always the same—

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Amorak Huey the bartender’s polite enough to laugh for a while, wise enough to know I cannot tip but only tip over. At least the fall from here isn’t far.

Below a certain temperature, flesh begins to fail.

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Sara Eliza Johnson Deer Rub Deep in the forest, where no one has gone, where rain bloats the black moss and mud, a deer is rubbing its forelock and antlers against a tree. The velvet that covers the antlers tears into strips, like bandages unwound.

The rain scratches at the deer’s coat as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones of a saint in the crypt beneath a church at the end of a century, when the people have begun to think of the bodies as truly dead and unraiseable, when children have begun to carry knives in their pockets. Once the last shred of velvet falls to the ground, the deer bends to eat it, nearly finished with ritual and altar, the tree’s side stripped of bark while someplace in the world a bomb strips away someone’s skin.

The deer’s mouth is stained with berries of its own blood. Then, the deer is gone and the tree left opened, the rain darkening 54 u Crab Orchard Review

Sara Eliza Johnson red against the hole in the sapwood.

The storm grows louder and louder like a fear. The deer will shed its velvet four more times before it dies of disease; the tree will grow its bark again. Each atom in each cell will remember the body it had made in this place, this time, long after the rain flushes the river to flood, long after this morning when the country wakes to another war, when two people wake in a house and do not touch each other.

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Dean Julius Augur Great River, Muddy Water, its coastline channels, troughs through

my memories like landscape—cross-stitching of glacial hands—

sallies over levee early in springtime, moseys out late in May. In June, we fished the cane-brakes—catfish taut on the trot—

my father tossed back the rubbery skin, shucked bone off

flesh like cob from a husk—took only a couple of strokes.

Midsummer, deep in drought—sun like a fever blister—

my father and I hunted the sandbar for arrowheads—Delta’s

humid desert—put sharp ones at the bottoms of our pockets.

Heat-drunk, we listened for tow boats, horns bleating in the distance

till they drew us to river like bugs to the zapper,

large-mouths toward spinners on a crank bait.

At the shoreline, where land’s edge steeped into river,

we found a whitetail dead on the bank, her skull brittle

like vellum, scattered ribs—an augur in the sand.

We took the chert-points from our pockets—still warm

in the palms of our hands—made an epitaph next to her body.

The channel-tide lapped in slowly. We watched it swaddle her in.

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Vandana Khanna Parvati Rewrites Myth I won’t miss the dirty hive of your hair, your slow drone of a chant that lasts all day.

In this version, I’m done with kindness, left it in my last life, with my cheap glass bangles and cotton sari. I am my own constellation of pathetic stars, built my loneliness twig by twig— lit it on fire to keep me warm. I can’t pretend to care even as the butter burns to clear, even as I never learned the names of trees. Spiteful in white, I’ve lost the bride’s red parting my hair, the gold at my ankles. Enough with all this jungle, with its shiny tongues, sloppy mouth. I’ll leave you to your cave, your brilliance, spit your name out like paan from my cheek—walk out of the tight cluster of trees, the sun’s hot tone on my head like a drum.

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Beth Morgan Default Setting “Fat people don’t go to heaven,” Christy said, licking her spoon.

“My teacher said that.”

I stared at my daughter across the white expanse of the kitchen island. “In Sunday School? Mrs. Paley?”

“Yeah. She says you can tell how godly someone is by how thin she is.”

I shook my head. “You don’t believe that, do you, honey? Do you really think God cares how much somebody weighs?”

Christy picked up her ice cream bowl and rinsed it in the sink. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Mrs. Paley says if a person is obedient to God, then she’ll want to be pleasing to his sight, so she’ll be thin.”

“But that doesn’t mean somebody who’s not slim won’t go to heaven, does it?”

Christy pulled out the top rack of the dishwasher. “Mrs. Paley says, ‘God sees greed and gluttony as sin worthy of death,’ so yeah, it’s like if you’re fat, you displease God, and he won’t let you go to heaven.

You won’t be saved.”

“Don’t you think what’s inside a person and how they act is more important than body size?” I handed her my bowl. “Don’t you think it’s better to worry about poor people or fighting injustice than how you look?”

Christy finished loading the dishwasher before she answered; she never lets me load it because I just pack the dishes in, dump soap in the door and turn it on. She always rinses everything first. Her friends’ mothers do it that way, she says, because then the dishwasher stays clean inside and nothing ever sticks to anything.

“It’s not about how you look. It’s that being obedient is really, really important.” She slouched against the granite countertop. “If you’re fat, you’re obviously not obeying God, or even listening to him. You’re putting the food god ahead of the real God. You can’t serve two masters.”

“I’ve never heard of the food god, Christy. Your Mrs. Paley pulled the food god from somewhere besides the Bible and twenty centuries of Christian theology. Is this part of your church’s teaching or is it just Mrs. Paley?”

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Beth Morgan

“Mrs. Paley lost a lot of weight at the Weigh Down Diet Workshop at church and they talk about the food god all the time. They help you see it’s really Satan that’s tempting you with food and when you see that, you can resist cake and stuff.”

Christy came back to the island and sat on the stool across from me. Immanuel, our cat, a Maine Coon who will certainly not get into cat heaven if weight is a criterion, jumped onto the stool next to her.

“It’s like Pastor Bob says,” she continued, stroking Manny’s head, “fit bodies serve as a witness to God. He said if other Americans—even other so-called Christians—see us as fat, we sabotage all our work— all the church’s work—in saving their souls.”

“So-called Christians? What is a so-called Christian?”

“You know, like Catholics or other people who go to church but aren’t born again.” Christy buried her face against the cat’s tawny body. “Do you think I’m fat?” Her voice was muffled by the fur.

“No!” I said. “Is that why you’re so worried about Mrs. Paley?

Because you think you’ll not go to heaven because of your weight?”

She leaned back and shrugged, but didn’t look at me. She’s a beautiful girl, my daughter, with dark, expressive eyes and smooth, unblemished skin. She’s not bone-thin: she’s what they used to call full-figured, but she’s certainly not fat.

“The Bible doesn’t give weight as a criterion for getting into heaven, Christy. In fact, it doesn’t give any physical criteria: weight, color, race, gender. Just faith. Isn’t faith enough for you?”

Christy splayed her hands against the surface of the island, dark nails gleaming under the fluorescent light. “Mrs. Paley says that when Jesus comes, it’s like a groom coming to claim his bride—and we’re the brides, so we have to lose weight, exercise and always look our best.”

She took a deep breath. “She said Latanya and I should go to the Weigh Down workshop to lose weight.”

“She said that in class?”

Christy nodded.

“That was awfully insensitive. What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Christy stared at her hands for a while, then squinted her eyes and started scraping the polish off one thumbnail. “But after class, she told us the church would probably even pay for it, if she asks.

Like a scholarship, except it’s not school.”

“Did you tell her we’re not living on welfare? What could it cost, fifty dollars? A hundred?” I banged down my coffee mug. Immanuel jumped down and ran upstairs.

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Beth Morgan

“Sixty-five. I didn’t know what to tell her. She’s trying to be nice, I guess.”

Nice was not the word I’d use. I hadn’t met Mrs. Paley but, even so, she had not impressed me with her theological background, her common sense or even her common decency. Why the church had chosen someone so uniquely unqualified to teach teenagers about the Protestant faith was beyond me. But then, Christy and I had done battle over this church before with little progress on either side. As much as I would have liked to, I could not forbid her to go: the divorce agreement stated she be allowed to attend the church of her choice.

“What did Latanya say? She’s a bright girl. Is she going to do it?”

“Yeah.” Christy finished off the thumbnail. She stared hard at the remaining colored tips.

“Christy, do you want to?”

She shrugged, then nodded.

“Are you really afraid you won’t go to heaven? Is that it?”

She squirmed in her seat. “It’s kind of complicated. Mrs. Paley says God doesn’t like it when we get fat, because we’re listening to Satan, so we won’t go to heaven. But everybody else says we should lose weight just so we look good.” She shoved a stack of magazines across the counter. “Look at these. Every one of them talks about losing weight, but they’re not Christian magazines. Mrs. Paley says these magazines—and all the celebrities and stuff on TV—are controlled by Satan too. And if we lose weight because we follow these magazines or some other non-Christian way, Jesus will know that we’re not losing weight for him but for our own selfish reasons. I have to go to the diet workshop at church, Daddy, so I know I’m losing weight the right way.”

“Christy! This is the biggest pile of crap I’ve heard yet from this so-called church!” I slammed my hand on the counter. “Mrs. Paley is wrong, completely, totally wrong. This is not in the Bible. And to imply that even if you do want to lose weight, you have to do it right under the eye of the church? Come on, Chris, you’re smarter than that!”

“But Daddy—”

“Christy, I studied this stuff. I grew up with this stuff. I know the Bible better, chapter and verse, than anybody at that church and I can tell you it does not include a single sentence on the godly way to lose weight vs. the sinful way. Weight control is never mentioned in the Bible, ever. If you want to lose weight—and I still see no reason why you should—we’ll cut back on dessert. We’ll eat salad. We’ll eat fish and chicken. Just stay out of that crazy workshop!”

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Beth Morgan

Christy launched herself off the stool and stormed out of the kitchen.

Damn. Every time I shout at Christy, I want to cut my tongue out. I took a swallow of cold coffee and dumped the rest into the sink. I wasn’t wrong about the workshop, I was just wrong in yelling at a naïve, fifteenyear-old girl. Christy wants to please her mother, she wants to please me; you can’t serve two masters, but it’s not the ones she thinks.

I stood outside her bedroom door. “Christy, I’m sorry for shouting at you.” I raised my voice to be heard over the loud music. There was no answer, but I hadn’t expected one. Like her mother, she was slow to forgive; unlike her mother these days, she would eventually forgive.

Christy had chosen to live with me; with her devotion to the church, I was afraid she would live with her born-again mother.

But the religious issues lie between us like the sorrows of Job. I ask questions that separate mindless obedience to the church from an understanding of how to live a good life. I even flatter myself we have a Socratic dialogue going on but most days we’re reduced to the narrow tenets of modern life and religion. I ask, “What is right?” and find that it means rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I ask, “What is truth?” and find that it means believing in Biblical inerrancy even in the face of rock-solid science. I ask, “What is a moral life?” and find that it means obeying the Mrs. Paleys of the world.

I looked down at Immanuel, who lay sprawled on the carpet.

Though Christy’s bed is his favorite place to nap, he flees when she puts on music. Like me, he hates all the rap, hip-hop and whatever else she listens to these days. “How did we come to this, Manny? How did a good Christian like me end up being tarred as an infidel?”

I grew up in the proud, liberal Protestant tradition. My father was an elder at Riverside Church in Manhattan where the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., presided over the nation’s clergy in their efforts toward nuclear disarmament, civil rights, and against the war in Vietnam. Coffin stood with Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan, and thousands of other courageous men of faith in the fight against the imperial America of the Sixties and Seventies. My parents spoke of Dr. Coffin with a respect bordering on worship.

Christy’s church, here in the hills of southern Ohio, is the new evangelical face of Protestantism. Christy tried First Presbyterian with its gothic towers and Bach preludes, and pronounced it “conservative, stuffy, boring;” to her, this New Promise Congregation is exciting and “fun.” However, in spite of a jeans-clad congregation of seven thousand, a rock band and the promise of no theology whatsoever, Crab Orchard Review

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Beth Morgan they are more conservative than the mainline Protestant churches.

They don’t care much about the traditional Christian concerns of poverty and injustice, but they do care about other people’s political views and sexual habits. And now, apparently, they care about weight.

“Funny thing happened after class today, Christy,” I said, setting up a chess game.

Christy sat across from me, fingering her white queen. “What?” she said.

“A girl came up to me and said she really looked forward to the class. She told me she reads those Chicken Soup for the Soul books— somebody gave you the one for teens, if you remember—and she thinks we just need to realize we’re all the same under the skin.”

Christy dropped the queen in her place and shrugged. “That was kind of dumb.”

“Yes, exactly. Then she said, ‘It’s hard to understand what you’re saying in class. Could you speak more clearly?’ I said, ‘I’ll try. I’m from New York City originally and people tell me I still have an accent. You’ll get used to it. As I’ll get used to yours.’ She jumped back about three feet and exclaimed, ‘But I don’t have an accent. I’m from Ohio!’ Can you believe that?”

Christy, who was born in this accent-free state, looked at me for a long moment. Then, finally, “I get it,” she said.

I teach college-level philosophy, but I teach it at a regional university better known for turning out local businessmen than scholars. The students who come to the introductory courses in philosophy are not prepared for reading and writing, much less philosophy. And yet…as cynical as I am, I admire these kids who come from homes where philosophy is synonymous with self-help, where a surprising number of students are the first in their family to attend college and whose determination to figure out something better in life compels them to try something so difficult and so financially unrewarding as philosophy. That being said, the girl who reads Chicken Soup books had done what I once thought impossible: she had reduced Plato to drivel.

“I signed up for the diet workshop at church,” Christy said, standing in the doorway of my study. “It starts Tuesday night.”

I raised my eyes from the stack of mid-term papers. With all the white meat we’d eaten lately, I’d dared to hope. “I can’t say I’m pleased to hear that. I thought we were doing pretty well on our own.”

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Beth Morgan

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Whatever.”

I bit back my usual classroom retort: I hate this “whatever” the kids use so provocatively. “What does your mother think?” I asked.

“Does she approve of Mrs. Paley?”

Christy nodded and slid into the leather chair beside the desk, dislodging Immanuel, who stretched, yawned and settled himself on her lap. “They’re friends, sort of. Her daughter works with Mom at the hospital. She’s the one who got us to switch from First Presbyterian.”

Christy and her mother never felt welcome at First Presbyterian.

Not, Dominica admitted, that anybody ever said they weren’t, but it wasn’t like our New York church where the congregation reflected the city’s diversity in their faces, clothes and lifestyles. Oakwood’s First Presbyterian Church was dominated by the kind of people who had, for generations, refused to even let Catholics live in their suburb, never mind Jews, Hispanics…or blacks. They’ve made their peace with that issue—more or less—but the First Presbyterian congregation still reflects Oakwood’s long history by being mostly white, mostly upper middle class and very restrained when dealing with new members.

New Promise, on the other hand, views anybody who walks through the door as a potential soldier in the army of the Lord and welcomes them accordingly.

“Did you tell your mother you signed up for the diet workshop?”

“Yeah, she went with me after church. I had to have her sign that it was OK.”

“Then she approves?”

“Yeah.” Christy fluffed Immanuel’s fur as he kneaded her thigh.

A long pause. “Christy?”

“She signed up too,” Christy said in a rush.

I hadn’t seen my ex-wife in months except behind the wheel of her car. Had she gained weight? Or, maybe she too believed she would not be raptured up unless she met the church’s stringent weight requirements. Or…maybe she was trying out the dating scene. God knows it’s hard to contemplate that at this age, even if your weight is normal. Dominica has a figure like Christy’s and comes from a family of large women; her size never bothered her before.

“I never thought your mother was overweight either,” I said. “Besides, doesn’t she work weeknights?”

Christy shrugged. “She’s back working days on the pediatric ward.”

“So you’ll be spending Tuesday nights with her?”

“Yeah. She said she’d call you to talk about it.”

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Beth Morgan “It’s OK if you spend Tuesday nights with her—I just don’t like what you’re doing.”

Christy kicked the footstool. “Now she’s working days, she wants to talk about me living with her.”

I didn’t say anything for a long moment. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and get that sudden clutch of fear that Christy might go live with her mother. As much as I’d reassure myself that I’d see her often, it didn’t do much to still the anxiety; it’s different than living with someone. Christy has always been the best reason to come home at night. And, in my worst three-in-the-morning fantasies, Dominica, who only reluctantly came to Ohio because of my career—and still doesn’t like it—moves back to New York and takes Christy with her.

“Is that what you want?” I asked sadly.

Christy shrugged. “I don’t know, Daddy. Mom says she’s lonely.”

The only sound in the room was Immanuel’s purr. He adores Christy and he mopes whenever she’s away. Dominica is afraid of cats— though she admits only to loathing them—but it would be mean to point out that Manny’d be left behind with me. I shout, but I’m not mean.

My own sorrow aside, I did not want Christy to be assaulted daily with the New Promise version of life. Bad enough she thinks she’ll go to hell for an extra ten pounds, but what if she doesn’t question the New Promise default setting of thin, white and Christian? What if she assumes those are the only people who matter in this country? Or in heaven? What if she chooses to go to a narrow-minded Bible college?

Not Wheaton, I could stand Wheaton, but somewhere like Bob Jones where they teach everybody to submit to their pastor and their God, and women to submit to their men.

“I wish you’d never gotten divorced!” Christy suddenly burst out.

“It’s so stupid. It’s not like either of you is going to get married again or anything.”

I spread my hands in supplication. “No, I suppose not, not soon anyway. But your mother and I are going on very different paths—” “Great, Daddy, you take a different path, and I pay the price! I don’t want to choose who to live with, I want to live with both of you!”

“I can’t join your church, Christy, and that was very important to your mother.”

Christy looked at me with the sullen teenage expression she rarely affects. “You’re selfish,” she said in a low voice.

“Would you have me lie and say I’d been born again? How can I lie about something as fundamental as faith? I can’t honestly do it, Christy.”

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Beth Morgan

“You could change your mind.”

“Not when everything I believe is treated with contempt. I’m an old-fashioned Christian—your Granddad and I marched under the banner of the—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—” “Don’t you sass me, young lady! What I believe is important enough to take a stand, important enough to risk losing what I love best in my daily life.”

She gave me another sullen look. “Like what? Your job?”

“You, my dear Christy. Living with you.”

At eight o’clock on a chilly night in November, I drove to the New Promise church to pick up Christy. Dominica had, in the nationwide shortage of nurses, been obligated to cover the local shortage on diet night. I was so relieved to see that her commitment to sick children had not been compromised by her commitment to salvation through thinness that I did not make my usual protest about setting foot on church property. I left the car in Jubilation, one of the distant sections of the lot. On the way to the main building, I passed Redemption and Salvation, both full of minivans and SUVs festooned with yellow “Support-the-Troops” magnets: with Wright-Patterson a mile down the highway, the military—the Air Force in particular— enjoys great support around here…and little criticism.

The story of the founding of New Promise seems apocryphal, but is apparently true: Pastor Bob heeded “the call,” drove up from Arkansas in a beat-up Pontiac, put on his jeans and Hawaiian shirt and started knocking on doors. Four new subdivisions of cheap housing, full of unchurched young families, were all ready for Pastor Bob’s message of come as you are, listen to rock music, enjoy free babysitting and fill up on Krispy Kremes after every service. The new church complex, with a sanctuary that seats six thousand, was completed three years ago. It has a gym, a pre-school, an elementary school and a café with a drivethrough latte window.

At Dominica’s insistence, I went to a couple of the services. The first sermon was on tough love—they’re in favor, but don’t spank children under a year old—and the second on voting for “family values” candidates. The sermons are short, upbeat and not at all rigorous, with most of the service given over to rock music. The songs, distilled from mainstream rock, are simple, repetitive pop tunes that wouldn’t be out of place at a prom, with everyone dancing cheek-toCrab Orchard Review

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Beth Morgan cheek with our Lord. The mighty God of the Old Testament has given way to a warm, fuzzy Jesus who held out his arms on the cross because he wanted to hug us this much. The church wasn’t the only thing that split up the marriage, but it certainly was the main one.

In the vast concrete lobby, I stopped short, startled by three new plasma-screen TVs high on the walls, each featuring gyrating young men, backed by guitars and drums. A mob of coffee-drinking evangelicals congregated at tables outside the café, the drone of conversation not quite masking the monotonous beat of Christian rock. New Promise claims to be a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church but you certainly couldn’t tell it from the music, the décor or the crowd in the café.

“Hi, Daddy!” Christy emerged from a side hallway. “Did you see the new TVs? Aren’t they cool?”

“Yes,” I said, “very cool.” I nodded at the tall, dark girl who had followed my daughter across the lobby. “Christy tells me you have one of these cool, plasma screen TVs, Latanya. She’s been agitating for one.”

“My dad bought the first one on the market, Dr. Robinson.”

Latanya smiled. “And he’s replaced it twice already—”

“There’s Mrs. Paley.” Christy pointed to a blond Christian soldier marching toward us.

Mrs. Paley, a ramrod in a white pantsuit, frowned as she took in my sweatpants and Yankees cap. You’d think picking up your daughter wouldn’t require a suit and tie, especially from a church where the pastor preaches in jeans.

“Nathaniel Robinson,” I said, holding out my hand. “Christy’s father.”

Mrs. Paley extended a thin hand. She barely touched my palm, pulling back as if afraid her hand wouldn’t be returned. Christy’s eyes darted between me and Mrs. Paley while Latanya scanned the room over Mrs. Paley’s head. She suddenly grabbed Christy and pointed.

“There’s Kate and Emma! I knew they’d be here!” With that, she dragged Christy across to the café where two blond girls leapt up and shrieked at their arrival.

I smiled at Mrs. Paley and gestured toward the TVs. “Your church certainly is up to date with technology. We don’t see that kind of thing over at First Presbyterian.”

She glanced up. “Yes. We find it brings in the young people. Nat, I need to talk to you about Christy. Dominica and I—and the church— are concerned about her living with you.”

I groaned inwardly; I was hoping to avoid a serious talk with Mrs. Paley. I said pleasantly, “Well, Christy is free to choose where she lives 66 u Crab Orchard Review

Beth Morgan and she has chosen to live with me. I understand that Dominica isn’t happy about it, but I’d like to keep discussions of it within the family.”

“As a church we have a responsibility to our members—and the community—to intervene when we see problems. Christy is a bright, beautiful girl, but she is putting on weight—”

“Mrs. Paley, Christy’s weight is well within the normal range—” “Weight is an indicator of bigger issues. Overeating is an indication of spiritual hunger, a void that cannot be filled by food, but only by God. Christy fills herself with junk food—”

“No, no, no! Christy eats a balanced diet—”

“And goes off to McDonald’s after school. She kept a food diary for two weeks so we know.”

“She…well…all teenagers eat junk food sometimes. In teens, it’s hardwired.” I tried to make light of it. “She doesn’t do it regularly.”

“The point is, Nat, she’s hurting. She seeks fulfillment and her body is paying the price.” Mrs. Paley leaned in. “What do we worry about, Nat? The safety of our children. Think of it this way: if Christy follows Jesus, she will be safe through these difficult years of adolescence and early adulthood. She will be in God’s arms, safe and sound. Without God, anything can happen—drugs, alcohol, sexual experimentation.

And by starting small—controlling her weight, trusting God, seeing that God is pleased with her for her discipline and obedience—she can go on to resist the temptations of the world. But it is crucial that she be in a Christian home environment and you are not providing—” “It is a Christian environment! I am a Christian! I go to church every Sunday. I teach a Sunday school class. What more can you ask?” I took a deep breath. I really needed to collect Christy and get out of there— “You do not provide an evangelical environment. For you, I suspect, it is an intellectual approach to religion, a scholarly approach.

That is not the way of being truly intimate with God. Christy needs to learn to pray, to listen to God and to obey—” “You think your church is the only way to God and it’s not just Christianity, but a subset of Christianity. How can you insult the majority of Christians by saying your way is the only way? Never mind the rest of the world’s people who don’t even follow Christianity!”

“But Christy is a born-again Christian and so is her mother. It’s you who deny Christ and leave your daughter frightened and confused.

She has a spiritual void and she’s seeking to fill the void with popular culture as well as food. In your care she listens to rap music that glorifies violence—especially against women—and watches movies Crab Orchard Review

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Beth Morgan laden with sex and violence.” Mrs. Paley fixed me with icy blue eyes.

“Have you heard the lyrics to the songs she listens to?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even stand the noise. And yes, I did know that some of the lyrics were pretty graphic, but I trusted Christy to have more sense— “Rape, beatings, knives, guns. And the singers? Arrested for beating up their wife or girlfriend. Arrested for drugs, gun possession and robbery. These are the role models your daughter is exposed—”

“Listen, Mrs. Paley, Christy’s mother and I are professionals—we provide excellent role models for our daughter—” “Nat, the most popular role models of color are rap singers and sports figures. And those role models promote the image that to be truly ‘black,’ you don’t succeed with your brains or by hard work. How can Christy escape from the pervasive images of violence and crime that your community offers as the norm except through Christ? How can you deny your daughter the safety of God when your community—” “As the norm? As the norm? Our community—my community— is this community! I live here and work here. I go to church here and Christy goes to school here. And where Christy lives is none of your business!” I grabbed Mrs. Paley’s arm. “You’re trying to make my daughter over into your idea of a good Christian—one who is thin, white and submissive. And who follows your version of ‘discipline’ and ‘obedience.’ I want her to think—”

“Is there a problem, Mrs. Paley? Can I be of assistance?” A smooth, blond man loomed up next to me and placed his hand on my outstretched arm.

I suddenly realized how we looked: I tower over Mrs. Paley and outweigh her by a hundred pounds. I am a white woman’s worst nightmare: a large, angry black man. Looking past Mrs. Paley, I could see we had the attention of everybody at the café tables, including Christy and Latanya, the only other members of the darker nation.

I shook off the man’s hand, unloosing my grip from Mrs. Paley.

She stepped back, rubbing the spot where my thumb had pressed.

“No,” I said, “she doesn’t require assistance. I’m leaving and taking my daughter with me.”

“Daddy,” Christy said, after we dropped Latanya off. “I don’t want you to be mad.”

“I can’t promise I won’t be, Christy.” I turned down our street.

“It’s been a trying evening.”

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“I told Mom I’d live with her.”

Even when you expect something—and I did—it can hit you like a truck. I suppose I could have smashed the car into something or my fist into something or gone back to take out Mrs. Paley and the whole damn New Promise church complex, but I did not. I punched the remote. The garage opened its maw as smoothly as ever and we slid into the gloom.

“Are you mad?”

“No,” I said. “Not at you, not at your mother. If that’s what you want.”

“I’ll still come over a lot.”

“Yes.” I stared out the windshield at the shelves I built along the back wall. “Tell me why, if you can. Just tell me why.”

“Mom and Mrs. Paley and the whole church are worried I can’t be a good Christian if I live with you. Like Pastor Bob tells everybody about relationships with friends, if one friend is a believer and one is not, the relationship is doomed.”

“I am a believer! And you’re not my friend, you’re my daughter!”

“It’s even more important because parents have so much influence.

Jesus says, ‘some seed fell among the weeds and the weeds grew up and choked the good plants.’ Pastor Bob says that a lot.”

“Am I choking you, Christy?”

“Not like that, Daddy! I mean, it’s hard when Mom is telling me one thing and you’re telling me something else. I guess I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

“And God and this church offer you safety?”

“Yeah. If I do what they say and be obedient, everything will turn out OK.”

“What will turn out OK?”

She shrugged. “Like my whole life. If I listen to God’s voice, he’ll tell me what to do.”

“And did God tell you to live with your mother?”

“No. I mean, he didn’t tell me, like I don’t really hear him yet, but Mrs. Paley says I will hear him if I’m quiet enough and it’s important.”

“So in the absence of God, you listened to Mrs. Paley?”

She didn’t answer.

I closed my eyes. Everything I stand for, everything I teach rages against mindless obedience to any one person or—even—one deity.

Thousands of years of study and thought reduced to securing your safety in this dangerous world by dieting. And yet. And yet…like most parents, I’d give my life to keep my daughter safe. Mrs. Paley struck Crab Orchard Review

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Beth Morgan a nerve: Christy is a child of her time and it is a dangerous time. I cannot be sure that Plato, Augustine or even my lodestar, Immanuel Kant, can keep her safe…even if she grasps the lessons they teach. Do all those ancient white men have anything to say to a black teenage girl facing options they never could have imagined? It is certainly less difficult to obey one hard-and-fast set of rules than to create your own path. Do I fight back? Do I keep up the dialogue that has brought her little but confusion? Does her God-backed safety net trump subjecting her to more harangues on behalf of what I believe is a good life, a moral life, a thoughtful life? How can I not fight back?

But…can I keep her safe?

“What, Daddy?” Christy was halfway out of the car.

“Nothing.” I opened the door. “Nothing.”

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Naomi Telushkin Judah

In East Jerusalem, the call to prayer begins at dawn. In West Jerusalem, where I sprawled in half-sleep, its remnants crept into my ears. I dreamt Judah was awake, the prayer his voice, crisscrossing over my skin. I grasped for his mouth, his neck; only air. The cascading Arabic was coming from the other end of the city.

Judah stood wrapping black leather straps around his left arm and right. I told him the call to prayer was in my dream. He put a finger over his mouth and gestured to the siddur in hand. He swayed. The Modeh Ani, an opening list of thank- yous. He thanked God for giving him the ability to distinguish between night and day. He thanked Him for not making him a slave, a gentile, or a woman, and he thanked God for returning his soul to his body after each long night. I watched from the celery-green blanket, the tan sheets. Judah blessed God for straightening the bent.

I was impatient to let the morning in. Judah had the luxurious home of an ambassador but it was not spared the Israeli method of blocking the raw desert sun—stripes of thick metal over each window. Light filtered in across Judah’s glasses, but the room was left dark and I could not distinguish night from day. I announced this to Judah. He said mild, mid-prayer, “That’s because you don’t thank God for it.” He blessed God for clothing the naked. I told him I was naked. He ignored me.

From first grade until twelfth, I davened every morning and afternoon. (Judah: “Or you were supposed to.”) Twelve years of diligent prayer, all extinguished my second weekend at Vassar when I handed a taxi driver a five-dollar bill on a Friday night. I told him I’d just spent money on Shabbat and he asked for a tip. It was that night, in a basement smelling of perfume and Natty Ice, that Christopher spilled gin on my shoes. He took me to dinner a week later and ordered us shrimp cocktail. Everything about Christopher was exotic. (“You were seduced by seafood.”) Christopher had a ski lodge in Vermont and a boat in Connecticut. His father shook his hand instead of hugging him.

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Naomi Telushkin At first I told Abba I had a close friend named Christine but by December break I was fed up. I told Abba I had summer plans to go to Argentina and Peru and that I’d be going with Christopher. Abba told me he would stop paying my college tuition. I called Abba heartless. I told him I loved Christopher before I said it to Christopher.

(Judah was sad about this, more than I expected—“My heart still breaks over things my sons said years ago.”)

Two months later, Abba told me he was sick. The summer after my sophomore year, I received a phone call during a weekend at Christopher’s beach home in North Carolina. Jewish law demands the body be buried within twenty-four hours.

Christopher’s parents booked me a flight out the next day. I told Christopher, lying beside him that night, that I wanted to read. He said, uncomfortable, “We’re not big readers,” and I said, “But you have a library.” We traipsed downstairs into the mahogany room and Christopher pulled out a copy of Adrienne Rich poems. I tugged at him and pulled him down on the carpet. He thought I wanted comforting.

I explained, lying on the auburn and navy carpet of the library, what I wanted instead—and Christopher raised a hand and obliged.

The first time I went out for dinner with Christopher’s parents, I wore a simple red dress without a back. Judah interrupted,“I hate that dress, you look so cold.” And then, “Naturally the WASP family would love the dress that makes you look cold.”

“How do I look cold?”

“When you wear that dress, you inhabit it. You walk into the restaurant, just waiting to glare at everybody.”

“I never glare.”

“You glare in that dress.”

Judah had a natural eloquence. Born in London and educated at Cambridge, he also spoke French and a passable Spanish. His Hebrew rolled from the back of his throat, as if he grew up wandering the shuks. Judah was the ambassador to India and this fine-tuned even the very edges of his speech, until everything he said rolled off the tongue carelessly and beautifully.

I told Judah I wore the dress again, to a French bistro the summer after graduation, where Christopher and I had a very civilized breakup, a very civilized end in a red dress without a back. (“The glaring now makes sense.”)

I arrived in Tel Aviv on a post-university program and stayed 72 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin on. Moved in with two Americans and a French girl. Our apartment is a renovated music studio, practice rooms and rehearsal spaces turned into bedrooms and bathrooms. We encounter students taking cigarette breaks outside throughout the day, trombones and flutes in their arms.

From my living-room window: two muscular men constantly make love. My bed thumps nightly from the vibrations of live music, beggars bellowing a broken Hebrew, the sound of hurtling glass. Street cats with bitten-off ears wail like children.

Judah davened for forty-five minutes. He removed the box from his forehead, wound the leather straps inside it and asked if I would pray as well.

“Of course not!”

Judah laughed. Our running joke—that one morning I will agree.

He told me he would be leaving for Berlin in two hours, Mordechai the driver would be coming to get him. I could go with him to Ben Gurion and then back to my apartment. My apartment is in Florentine, South Tel Aviv, a half hour from the airport and so I agreed, “Since it’s close by.”

Judah said, “You would have agreed no matter what—you’re going to miss me.”

I told him that I had big plans for his four days in Germany and wouldn’t even notice he was gone.

“What plans?”

I shrugged. “Someone took me to a play last weekend.”

Judah smiled and sat down and acted unthreatened. I told him that it was a terrible play.

“Of course it was.”

“It was political—” “You know how much I hate political art,” Judah said, and I imitated his accent. “It’s no brilliant West End of course,” when Judah interrupted. “Now, bullshit aside, who took you to this play?”

I was honest. “A Canadian—young—”

“The journalist?” I told him journalist was a stretch—the Canadian wrote restaurant reviews for an online expat site for Tel Aviv.

“What expat site?”

“GoGo Tel Aviv or something.” I looked at Judah. “He bought me a beer afterwards because he was reviewing the bar and got a free drink. That’s the kind of evening it was.”

At this Judah relaxed. He was an ambassador.

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Judah and I had breakfast downstairs in the garden. The wooden chairs had grown damp overnight. The sun warmed them, heated up the orange and fig trees, the pink and ivory flowers, the stacks of books underneath the table. Judah made espresso from his espresso maker and steamed milk so I could have a cappuccino. I told him it was brilliant, and he hit me—a playful hit, morning hit.

“I don’t sound like that,” and I crossed my legs.

“Bloody ’ell, no,” Judah said, “I’m going to be in Berlin in six hours at a meeting—and I need to review my notes.”

I asked what the meeting would be about, and Judah said, “It’s going to be full of apologies—apologies, apologies.”

When Judah gives me an answer like that—Subtext: Don’t ask me any more questions, I’m sick to fucking death of non-questions and non-answers—Have you any idea the sheer monotony of the life of an ambassador?

But I couldn’t resist and asked: “Oh? Apologies?”

Judah snapped and said, “Yes, apologies for your goddamned United States,” until he saw my smile and threw his notebook at me and said, “Satisfied?”

I let him know I was. I said, serious voice, remember-last-nightvoice, “I’m very satisfied.”

Judah blushed, he can’t disguise it, British pallor. He blushed and said, “I’ve got to review these notes because I don’t know anything about Germany and I don’t know anything about Syria,” and he disappeared inside the house.

I dangled my legs over the chair and thought about the Canadian, whose first name was a last name, Freeman, and who had ended the date by marching me up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. Who threw open the unlocked door, greeted the dark kitchen by yanking me in by my hair and who threw me into my bedroom and hit me across my face because I had asked him to. Because I had said, the first night we met, at a champagne bar off Rothchild, where he had bought three bottles of champagne, “Are we going to go home together?”

When Freeman said, “Yes,” I said, a tease, “But we barely know each other.”

And Freeman said, as we left the bar and he stretched out his arm for a taxi, “Then we can be whoever we feel like being.” The profound poet, Freeman.

And then, in the taxi: “What do you want me to do to you?”

And then my voice, a whisper—though perhaps louder than I 74 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin thought, given that we were three bottles in, “Whatever we do tonight, make me do it.”

Not every man can follow this request, it’s a system, a way of knowing—it’s not any of the expected things. Judah sat me down our third week together and, ambassador-style, syrup-voiced the method from me, but even then—I couldn’t explain what is all instinct, all one layer underneath eye contact—that sudden intake of breath, flash of understanding—Oh, you would play this game with me, this sordid little game—

“It’s not because he’s rude to the waitress or grabs your arm when he disagrees with you or anything forceful or obvious like that—” “Then what?” Judah asked, nervous he radiated the mysterious quality himself.

I struggled, fumbled, “It’s all—the public persona.”

It was the way Freeman took me to the play. The entire walk into Yaffo, Freeman was nervous. He spoke too quickly, rushed through his journey to Israeli citizenship—the business contacts, the ulpan classes to learn Hebrew. We passed ramshackle markets selling bright yellow spice bags and I registered little of what he said, only watched him move. Assessed the power of his body, his long torso. I tried to connect the two: nervous voice, powerful body.

We entered the theater lobby where an Indian man and a Danish man greeted us—professors from the University of Haifa, who knew Freeman, who told me they loved him, and suddenly Freeman was all booming voice, possessive hand on my shoulder, introducing me like an item, confident. I caught the eye contact between him and the Indian professor, and I realized, Oh, you’re a performer—you like a role.

In the taxi, when I made my proposition, Freeman was a performer and remained a performer, right up until the morning when we made instant coffee. Laura, my housemate, asked the topless Freeman in a bemused tone if he wanted some of her milk, and he smiled and said, “Thanks, that’s nice of you.”

I got up to toast bread and Laura said,“What happened to you?” A bruise on my arm, on my cheek, two blue circles on my upper thighs.

I said, “I crashed into two tables,” and Freeman laughed and told Laura, “She was kind of wasted,” and Laura laughed, “I’m sure.”

Judah was disappointed by this answer.

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Naomi Telushkin everyone likes to play that sort of role—it has to be someone who is secure and insecure at the same time.”

Judah said, “Everyone is secure and insecure at the same time,” and I said, “Are you going to tie me up or not?”

Judah said, “I still don’t understand,” and I said, “I just know— someone hands me a book from their bookshelf a certain way, and I just know.”

Judah gazed at his bookshelves. Elegant white wood, glass panels.

Titles in French, Russian, English, Hebrew. Judah said, “Have I ever given you a book?” and I said, “Christopher, Judah, I was referring to Christopher.”

Judah said, “And if you were referring to me?”

I said, “I really can’t say.”

“Did you—sense it the first time we met?”

“Yes—in the way you spoke about Ha’aretz.”

“I said Ha’aretz was an excellent publication.”

“But you said it so sarcastically that it was vicious.”

Judah said, “I’m not vicious.”

I added, “And then you insulted my apartment.”

“I never insulted your apartment.”

“You made comments about the heaps of garbage.”

“Is your sidewalk not littered with heaps of garbage?”

My apartment in Tel Aviv: camel-colored tiles on the floors.

My bathroom: a broken window, hot air on the sink. I can hear my neighbor gargling water. My room: drenched in sand from the constant forays to the beach. If I lift up my shoe, sand falls out. If I pull a shirt off the hanger, sand falls off. Sand seeps in between my toes. Sand covers our blue sofa in the living room. The living room windows are streaked—sand and pigeon shit. There is construction going on outside, has been for the last six months, and will be for the next six months. South Tel Aviv is such a dilapidated area that taxi drivers sometimes refuse to take me there, turning off their meters and warning me of the danger I’m putting them in. I pay triple and they drop me off, warning all the way about avoiding the shachor, shachor—the blacks, the blacks.

The immigrants fleeing Sudan come here, having been rejected from Egypt, and live in a limbo in Tel Aviv. They live in a park seven blocks and seven universes from my apartment, grass filled with heroin needles, and they sell DVDs and folding chairs, waiting for a visa or approval or money. When the taxi drivers speak this way about 76 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin the immigrants, I want to say, “Remember when we were strangers in a strange land,” a quote directly from the Torah, but of course I don’t: One, I sound like a jackass and, two, my Hebrew isn’t good enough to say that flawlessly, and three, they would pull away and say, Daati?

Daati? My standard answer: “No, but my family is religious,” to which they are incredulous. I know it’s my way of dressing—a religious girl in Israel has her knees, elbows, and collarbone covered—but I take it deeply, take it personally, and think—Is it radiating off of my skin? Not holy, not holy?

Judah came back with two manila folders, papers bursting from them, and said, harried, “Berlin, Berlin, Berlin.”

I kissed him.

“I can’t do this now,” he said. “Nuclear talks are failing.”

I said, “Iran, Iran, Iran.”

Judah said, “You think I’m obsessed darling? Let me introduce you to men who live and breathe Iran.”

I met Judah because I first met his son. A phone call from Ima that there was a boy in Israel that she wanted me to meet: a boy named Natan, whose father was the ambassador to India. Wasn’t I interested? I told Ima of course. In the seven years since Abba’s death, I went out with every boy she suggested. Judah asked me if I really did this, and I told him I would always go on at least one date. Ima said Abba would have been so pleased. Natan’s father had been his close friend from yeshiva.

I met Natan at midnight at a café on Dizengoff. He wore a military uniform, he was in Intelligence, he had a car at his disposal and he sounded very important. He recently returned from a business trip to Lebanon. I sat there, drinking hot coffee in the hot night, sweat gathering at the nape of my neck, hearing about Natan’s brilliant army career. He asked what I did. I told him I was a journalist. He said, “Left or right?” I said, “I do art reviews.” He didn’t ask me any more questions.

When Natan tried to kiss me at my garbage-ridden front door, I pulled away, told him I was religious.

“Really?”

Natan invited me to his home for Friday night dinner and in deference to Ima, I accepted. It was there I met his father and his brother Avi—a house full of men, his mother divorced his father when he was fifteen and moved to New York with another man.

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Judah recited Kiddush over an overflowing glass of Shiraz, “For an overflowing life,” and he sliced and salted Challah, we said a blessing over the bread and Judah asked me about myself.

I told him I was a journalist working for Ha’aretz. He said, “Oh, oh,” in that pitter-patter way I’ve come to associate with Judah. “Oh oh dear me”—a little tiptoeing mouse, but, underneath, he’s seething.

Natan said, “And what do you think about Ha’aretz?” and I said, “I don’t write anything political, I’m basically barred from writing anything political, they have too many political writers, I write for the English site, about art in Tel Aviv, and cinema and gallery openings,” and I kept going, in that rambling way, until Natan said, “All right, all right.”

Judah said, “It’s a very respected newspaper—”

Natan said, “It’s the only one people in other countries read—” Judah said, “Really, it’s hugely respected,” and I said, “Working there is a lot of fun.”

An unbelievably stupid response, as this is Israel and Israeli politics and Judah, and Natan expected words along the lines of riveting, challenging, fascinating, and devastating. Natan picked at his roast chicken in disgust and his brother Avi asked for more wine.

I asked Avi what he was up to and he said he’d just returned from two years abroad. The Israeli trajectory—three years army, three years wanderer—Avi had been wandering in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

I asked about Bangkok and he said, mouth full of Moroccan rice, “Bangkok is horrible.”

I don’t know why I said working for Ha’aretz was fun—I spent my days hidden behind a computer as journalists shook cups of NesCafé, yelling about West Bank settlements, the Sinai border, Gaza, nuclear arms in Iran, growing Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. My first week, Amira, the editor-in-chief peered over my computer, wild black hair spilling over my screen, to ask in strong cigarette breath if I knew, “Where the fuck Gary was,” and when I answered that I hadn’t seen him, she said, “Well if you do, tell him he’s a fucking prick,” and went back to her office, the door a resounding slam. Gary appeared moments later to ask where Amira was, and Amira shrieked from her office, “Gary, Istanbul!” and Gary vanished.

A short-haired journalist broke down sobbing the following week, her mother’s voice yelling on the other end of the cell phone, and Amira appeared in her usual huff and shoved her off the chair. “Come back when you’ve pulled yourself together.” The journalist insisted, 78 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin “I’ll stay, I’ll stay,” to which Amira gave her 200 shekels and said, “Get a nice lunch and come back tomorrow.”

Amira stomped off in her hot pink platforms, hair billowing off of her, a vicious British accent so different from Judah’s gentle cadence.

I thought, My God, I want to be like Amira. She’s what a snappy little column about art people would call a “powerhouse.”

I reflected on this: I want to be a powerhouse and I want to be powerless. A circle wider: Are they the same thing?

Judah said, “Remember, the masochist always becomes the sadist,” and expounded—“The sadist thinks they are in control, but the masochist is in control because the sadist is doing what the masochist wants, even knows the masochist pretends as though he’s doing what the sadist wants, and eventually, the illusion of power will vanish and the sadist will realize that the masochist has all of it.” To which I responded, “Are you saying you think I’ll change?” To which he responded, “I was talking about the pervasive victim mentality in Israeli diplomacy,” until I saw his smirk, and he said, “Don’t think I’ll always carry the ball and chain.”

Amira sent me to review an art gallery in Neve Tzedek. A brownstone, different installations on every floor, the windows wide open for the scents of the sea.

The first floor—a young artist, half-Israeli, half-Moroccan. A series of sculptures called Banana Beach. Judah and I toured: a room of staggering terracotta figures. Red-pink, camel-pink, clay people in desert colors, arising from piles and piles of sand. Sand dumped across the floor, people had to step on it, it seeped into my sandals, the flimsy leather straps. The figures—nine feet, twelve feet—wore bikinis, smoked cigarettes, held surfboards, held chopsticks, kissed. We stopped in front of a ten foot man holding his penis. His expression frozen in concentration, his stomach muscles clenched. Judah said, kicking a pile of sand, “Monumental.” I said, “Masturbation.”

Judah said, “A great work of art.”

“What should I write down?”

“That you found the gallery erotic.”

“I feel like erotic is too simple.”

He was sarcastic: “Too simple for an artist of this stature.”

We walked into the next room. A piece called Lebanon. A winding staircase in the center, white, leading nowhere, ending right before the ceiling. One light on the staircase. The rest of the room bare.

Judah asked, “What was your first fantasy?”

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“The usual. Slavery.”

The next room: All the lights off. Projected maps taking over the walls. Maps of Egypt, of the Judean desert, of the Red Sea, an ancient map of Mesopotamia. In red letters, handwritten, on the map of the Sinai: My Baby’s Gone.

In the dark, I said to Judah, “There is a scene. In Aida. She is first introduced to the man, the Egyptian man, who she will fall in love with.

When they first meet, he is the ship captain, she has been kidnapped.

He strips off his shirt, he asks her, “You know what happens now, don’t you?’ And there was a silence in the theater, this enormous Broadway theater, waiting for her to answer. And then he tells her, “You are going to wash my body, wash my feet.”

Judah said, “Continue.”

“She was the princess of Nubia. She was such a powerful woman.”

Judah asked me if I found it better or worse that she was such a powerful woman.

I instantly said “Better. He uses her power, he castrates it.”

“Castrates?” Judah was amused. Castrate was for the nebbish, the anxious Jew, the shrew wife.

“Controls, fine. He controls, not castrates.”

Castrate was the man I was told to be attracted to. The man so terrified of women he wouldn’t leave me, the man so insecure, he would do anything to please me, the unselfish lover, the un-Christopher.

Christopher’s mother would feel different. Castrate to her suggested only the castrati, the soprano men from centuries ago; the time she told me that the lead role in Wagner’s Julius Caesar was written for castrati. Freakish, perpetual boys.

Judah asked again, “Slavery?” and I confessed another—the Southern gentleman with his hands digging into me, my housemaid’s shoulders….

Amira called me into her office and asked me to review a play—a play at the Tel Aviv Opera House, a play called Drum, a play about two men who fall in love. I asked why it was called Drum and she said, “Ask the director, he fucking loves to prattle,” and gave me two tickets to go, and called the director, a gay man who spent three years in Amsterdam, to tell him that I would be interviewing him after the show. She warned me that his lover had written it, so I should phrase my questions carefully. “His lover is also the main actor.”

Who to take? Freeman was out—so impossible to be with, so 80 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin overbearing—the limitations in bed were exhausting in conversation— Keep me silent as we fuck against the wall; I don’t want to hear you talking in real life. In my mind, these rules were logical but in Freeman’s mind, the sadist dominated the entire outside world, not just the dark whimpering bed-corner. So Freeman, out. I thought of the British journalist who sat next to me in Ha’aretz, but really, it was all a game until I could accept that I wanted to ask Judah. But Judah— the religious ambassador at a play about gay lovers in mid-Tel Aviv?

Judah said, “I would absolutely love to go,” and when I said, “Your reputation,” he said, “I’m not an actor, nobody knows what the hell the ambassador to India looks like.”

The play was a love story between a Russian and an Israeli, the Russian having snuck into Israel with false Jewish papers. He wasn’t actually Jewish, something the Israeli discovered when they spent their first night together and the Israeli said, stunned, “I’ve never been with an uncircumcised man.” The Russian told the Israeli that his family was still stuck in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova. The Israeli said, “My family is only several miles away from me, but they too are stuck—they live in Hebron.” The Russian gasped. Hebron was where the most extreme, the most religious Jews resided. The Jews who woke up before dawn to push the fence a few inches more—to get three more inches of Jewish land. The Russian said, “Hebron?” and the Israeli said, “They could never accept me for who I really am, and now they want me to marry. They have a girl in mind.”

This kind of dialogue back and forth until a plan is hatched—to tell the Hebron family that he has met a woman, a Russian woman, and wants to marry her instead. “Won’t they want to meet her?” the Russian asked, and the Israeli declared, “They’ll never dare come to Tel Aviv.”

Judah checked his watch. I said, tongue close to his ear, “I bet the Hebron family will come to Tel Aviv,” and sure enough, they arrived in religious attire, the father in tzitzit, the mother’s hair covered in a scarf, the sister and her skinny husband. The Israeli paraded a friend around like she was his girlfriend and the Russian like she was his girlfriend’s brother until all hell broke loose, everything was discovered and the Israeli screamed, “This is what I want to fight for!

Not your fences, not your Arabs, but this!” and he kissed the Russian hard on the mouth, gripped his hips and shoved them into his body.

The kiss had ear-pulling and tongue. The Hebron family disowned him and the Russian said, “You are free!”

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Naomi Telushkin When the curtain rose, I said, “Not your fences but this!” and kissed Judah.

He squeezed my hand. “Don’t think you’re getting away with taking me to this.”

We met with the director at a bar next door afterwards, picked at slices of white cheese and olives. The director and his lover draped their arms across each other as the lover confessed that he actually had grown up in Hebron. His family still didn’t know.

The director smiled and said, “Still don’t know?” and fed him an olive.

I feigned surprise at the autobiographical confessions and said, “Oh?”

The director made fun of me.“Such a journalist. No questions, just ‘oh, oh.’” Judah said, “Let her beauty get the answers.” And the lover said, “So much beauty.”

The director looked at Judah. “You’re a lucky man, look at this beautiful woman,” and Judah said, “Uh huh.”

The lover said, “How did you meet?” and Judah said, without pause, “She was my student.”

“What did you teach?”

“A history of U.S.-Israel relations.”

The director winked. “Was she a good student?” I almost laughed out my wine—it was too close, too clichéd, too silly, the word “good,” the meek student, and I knew Judah agreed. He stroked my arm and said, his nail digging into my palm under the table, “No, a very bad student.”

We all laughed but I saw the director gaze at the ring of circles, blue on my upper arm and back at me. His eyes lingered on mine and without thinking, I nodded. The director nodded back and casually rolled up his shirtsleeve to reveal his own set of circles, and I saw, faint but perceptible, the trace of welts around his neck.

The lover ate another olive and said, “This is my second play, I’m writing another on Russians,” and the director said, “We want to celebrate tonight, want to join?”

Judah said hesitant, “Celebrate?” and the director said, “At a club, a special club.”

I stepped on Judah’s foot and said, “We can’t. We’re meeting my family tomorrow for breakfast.”

The director said, “A shame,” and reached for the wine bottle next to Judah’s hand. Judah reached for it at the same time and their hands touched. The director pulled away first. “So sorry!” Already in character.

The pleading voice, the grovel—I’m so sorry, so sorry. Judah played his 82 u Crab Orchard Review

Naomi Telushkin role as well, an abrupt “Please,” as he poured his third glass and I saw the hunger in the director’s eyes. I wanted to hiss, “Pull yourself together.”

Judah and I left and in the taxi. I imagined the director in a dog collar and it disgusted me.

Judah traced my thigh. “Now about that punishment.”

I said, “The director was interested.”

Judah said, “I’m very upset about tonight.”

I said again, “The director was interested.”

“Great.”

“Did he strike you as pathetic?” and Judah said, “No.”

“But a little right?”

“I suppose.”

“Wasn’t there something really depressing about him?”

“He was an artist, artists are depressing.”

“He was depressing!” I said. “We know he was depressing,” and I leaned against the window of the cab.

Judah said, “Is this a game?” and then he said, angry-voice, “Don’t you dare use that tone with me.” I gazed out the window, exhausted suddenly. I said, weary, “O.K., I’m very sorry.”

Judah went on a diplomatic mission to Geneva to discuss refugees and victims of torture. He returned solemn. We met at a café, a late night café, one of hundreds in Tel Aviv, one of those cafes that served everything, salads and sandwiches. I asked for a glass of wine. Judah asked if I was getting food. I said I wasn’t hungry.

“Forget it, let’s get out of here then.”

“Why?”

“Because there are too many people, I can’t hear anything.”

“Where do you want to go?”

Judah said, “Your apartment. I’ve never seen it.”

The sand castle.

In the apartment—I apologized for the heat, the layers of sand, the harsh glare of the kitchen.

Judah said, “Turn off all the lights, I don’t care.”

I turned off all the lights, I sat down next to him on the long blue sofa. Judah told me he’d met victims of torture and they shared their experiences. Judah told me that they all said the same thing: that torture is the expression of four emotions: pain, humiliation, fear and anger.

And that the operating assumption is that the one being tortured is allowed to express three of these emotions: pain, humiliation and fear.

But if they express anger, they will only receive more pain.

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Naomi Telushkin

Judah was very invested, his expression was twisted, his eyebrows in a diamond. He said he couldn’t get over how they spoke, these victims, they spoke with a great deal of calm. Though they said they had been filled with anger, filled with an anger they couldn’t express, Judah said he saw none of it. He said they were light-filled, peaceful, he said they were not ruined, ragged. He said they all had scars somewhere on their bodies, permanent remains of what had happened.

I asked him if this surprised him, if all he had expected of people with these scars and permanent remains was to be full of vengeance and rage.

“I hold on to grudges over nothing. Every day, I’m angry about something—” “Although if they chose them to speak, they probably chose the people who weren’t still angry, they probably chose the peaceful ones—”

“Probably, but even so, how is anyone peaceful?”

“Don’t you have to be, on some level, to keep on living?”

Judah said, “Look, I have to say this. I’m uncomfortable with the parallels.”

I said nothing.

Judah said, “Aren’t those our rules?”

I said, “No.” Judah said, “Are you allowed to be angry with me?”

“Yes.” Judah said, “You spoiled little bitch. People have been tortured and here you are, romanticizing it.”

I looked at him.

Judah said, “You spoiled little bitch. You’ve had everything and all you want is the whips and chains.”

“I haven’t had everything.”

“You’re like those upper-crust city children who think it’s fun to be impoverished, who think it’s artistic—”

I stood up, but not with urgency. I stood up, guessing the sequence of events: Judah grabbed my arm and shoved me back down in the chair. He was a tall, slim man, he had a narrow physique, and somehow, he was stronger then me and I enjoyed this about him.

Judah shoved me back into the chair: “You spoiled little bitch.”

He undid his belt. I waited. I watched. And in the silence that felt long, but might have been short, I walked over to Judah and took the belt from his hand. I might have hit him with it, he might have said nothing if I had. The belt dropped to the floor.

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Naomi Telushkin Judah kissed me and I kissed him back. We kissed quietly. We kissed very, very, gently. Like a religious couple; unsure, unknowing.

A religious couple with confines; with God encircling the kiss. An Orthodox man and woman, praying every morning for the ability to distinguish between night and day.

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Andrew David King

On Taking Down the Model Airplanes from Your Bedroom Ceiling This is the summer of our disbelief: flight, the chance thereof, the dogfight dangling over your bureau, drunken on G-force.

Below, sheet-wrapped, our heads so close I believe in telekinesis. But it’s all physics: a push one way, then the other, bone-clink— and there. Newton’s apple falls, the earth leans toward it. The A-10 Warthog darts at evil’s squinting bull’s-eye. Machines lassoed by yarn, straight lightning bolts of lint spun invisible with years: splotched green wings seek jungles, altitude; camo paint a giveaway in these suburbs.

From those stuccoed skies we must seem a damn sorry pair of opponents, no enemies to speak of, surrender our plan all along— tired of walking the fields beyond the gate, plank-arms teasing updrafts, waiting for fingers to snag. Wind passed us for crows and Cessnas, but now, I think, it helped us float through crosshairs of wheat, two wind-up toys who wound up worshipping speed, necessary ingredient for miracles: run fast enough atop the water and the pond hardens to stone.

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Andrew David King The Wrights, cocksure in the corner, can match the B-17. The spy plane should fear the biplane. Let eight scarred knuckles be steering enough. Let the plastic pilot stay molded in his mission: these deserters send salutes with scissor-filled hands and phantom-limb parachutes, weightless weight of the strings that let us safely down.

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Michelle Lin Roundtrip Beneath me, trees shrunk to moss, the Rockies, a tea-stained napkin, then New Mexico nothingness.

Buildings like miniatures in a museum my father took me to see. Or, like those at Mulligan’s mini golf my father and I loved. Both places, the same. Mirrors of foundations laid down long before. Houses no one can live in: a windmill with wings low enough for me to touch, a temple the size of a washtub, faith I could grasp in both hands.

My father used to hold my hand in airports, afraid to lose me in the crowd. I’d play a game, close my eyes and pretend I was blind. Let him lead me through a world of only sound.

But how does one remember without seeing? Nothing but ghosts that were maybe never there, the soft thuds of a golf ball knocking

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Michelle Lin in empty rooms. Even the sky is always changing. A cloud wisps into a face, into a palm, into air. As I speak, words die as breath. People in airports arrive and leave. As quickly as they came, they are gone. How many strangers come here every day? Each one, someone we will never see again.

And every man in a buzz cut, wearing a polo shirt and wristwatch, looks like my father. I search for myself in small stores.

In the spinning racks of roadmaps against the glass door. In all the snowglobes of places I have been.

And sometimes, in a golf glove stitched with my name that slips around my fingers perfectly, like someone’s hand.

I press my nose against the window and see, not how everything is so small, but how my breath shadows the glass for only so long. It’s only when I land I realize how fast I was going. The brakes screaming out the yards, the distance pealing up in dust. A small, shining ball returning through the green.

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Brandi Nicole Martin First Elegy for His Child I’ll Never Have Tinctures, they call them.

Herbs used primarily as pesticides.

Not to be taken recreationally.

Not for anyone with a history of stroke.

Not for those who value their organs or skin.

Not for the faint of heart, the shoddy-livered, the wide-eyed, the twitching, those who hemorrhage with the dawn. O red sun rising!

O stained sheets and murder techniques that leave a girl seizing and rug-burned on the floor! My body is a crack whore.

Let the uppers rush in. Waltz of the arteries.

Cobalt dissolved in alcohol.

Blue Cohosh is deadlier than Black.

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Steve Mueske Poem That Forgets It’s a Poem This is a poem in the form of an epistle.

A ripe weed, flowering thistle, this, My epistolary poem. It says Yes! Because all things are permissible.

Even this missive disguised as a poem.

Concealed, like a pistol. No a Pistil. Because language flowers.

Like “Eros” in the letters of “rose.”

Castile in the petals of Damascus.

Dear Reader: This is a poem about being Touched. A poem touching itself, Though not reaching Orgasm. It says, As above, so below, Like a flash of panties under fireworks; Platonic or Joycean depending on your view Of epiphany. It’s about seeing, or Not, or seeing then not, like the apostle Paul blinded on the road to Damascus.

Because of Paul, it includes an ass and An angel. It does not include, Although it could, Noah Driven mad in the arc of a wooden womb By ceaseless rain, laughing hyenas, The she-and-he thrum of a million insects

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Steve Mueske Driven by the imperative livelivelive!

This poem worships the dog Of our ancestors, a piebald little beast Draped in purple satin. It eats bran For breakfast. Has a guest appearance

By Christina Aguilera. A lisp. A box With a broken hasp. Your animating voice.

This poem, a torus, does not labor Under the illusion of Beginning And End, and asks you to annihilate The difference between you and I, even The meaning of words. It’s a humble boat  Cast into the water. An old man folding A thousand boats at the edge of Lethe, Each bearing a candle for the new world.

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Jeff Newberry How to Talk About the Dead Mention them by name only if you must. Give them death’s privacy.

Let them be no more than ghosted syllables, word-shapes.

Talk about their hands, the lined palms, a lifeline that branches to anabranch & disappears. Remember veined wrists, purple & thin as pine saplings. Resist the urge to turn those lines to words. Talk about the smell of a now-empty room: cinnamon & lilac or alcohol & sweat, the presence they left behind. Do not quote the dead. Their words will not resurrect them. Instead, remember only the timbre of a voice, how it brought you here, now. You grunt & gasp toward meaning, a traveler in some foreign land, each ached sentence a muted plea.

The natives could take you for dumb. They pity you instead.

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Jeff Newberry

Spring’s Return Think of frosted windows,

sleet mornings,

grayed-out afternoons— dawn’s edged blue silence.

Months after Christmas green & red

bleached to a memory, after the bright slant-light days

of mid-winter, the air like feathers blooming

in our mouths.

Now a cardinal on the back fence

(splintered, latticed),

brilliance of red, eyes like the rounds of tenpenny nails.

The head jerks once,

twice. Then, it wings into the rowed slash pines,

gone, as he’d arrived—

sudden, unbidden like a season.

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Jeff Newberry

About Disappointment Early spring afternoon—

pre-bloom, the dogwoods spider out like capillaries. Blackbirds scattershot in a peeled sky.

Their silhouettes dart like spent shells.

I’ve learned about disappointment by studying shadows, how they grow with my body’s tilt, break left or right, according to the sun’s charted angle. Don’t look at it my mother warned the year an eclipse darkened daylight to a dishwater dinge.

Believer I was, I stared at the sandy soil beneath my feet & wondered how something hidden could blind me.

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Leah Nielsen Tuscaloosa Poem Back when it didn’t cost too much to drive around in the big old Chevy pickup, listening to country music static its way through the speakers, back when good peaches were a drive away in any direction and hawked from roadside stands with watermelons and birdhouses made of gourds and painted red, white, and blue, back when I wore your old jeans cut off and flip-flops flung off, my feet with hot pink toenails propped up on the dash, the windows open because the Freon was out again, back when we lived in a place where women took handguns to garter snakes for fear of the snakes frightening them every time they got out of the car, and back when Miss Curry was alive and called from across the street, Ya’ll come over here and fix you a plate. That man’s been working in that yard all day and I know you didn’t cook, back then was when I first heard Seven Spanish Angels and wept at Willy and Ray’s voices together, all gravel, all lived lives. And say what you will about the South, I’ve been enough places to know racism hides about as well as a 3-year-old in every corner of this country.

Here I am, here I am. I can’t tell you how much of my heart is there or why. Tuscaloosa seven years gone from our lives, tornado gutted, and still complicated.

It took me seven years there to realize I needed to budget an hour or so to go to the post office, that the grocery store was always going to include some version of What you plannin’ on makin’ with that? That it was always too hot for Gs, so we dropped them, that you can never wear a turtleneck before November and even then you’ll be pretending it’s autumn, that there are a million stray dogs and feral cats and nothing to be done, 96 u Crab Orchard Review

Leah Nielsen that that clay cannot be garden soil no matter how you mulch it, that copperheads and cockroaches were just part of it, that the asylum cemetery—the one where the bodies were buried upright to conserve space, where the stones marked only col. had slipped from the hilltop down into a corner pile and the graduate students took some kind of ground x-rays in search of what they called anomalies—that cemetery stuck between the river road and the river itself could never, despite effort, be repaired.

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Matthew Olzmann You Want to Hold Everything in Place, But you can’t hold it all. You can’t keep time from crumbling, or everyone alive just by holding your breath. You can’t stop sleep from covering the faces of your friends. Cheap motels, blood in the sink, nail clippings and hair dye— you can’t hold it all. You can’t keep the continents from shifting, or the deep wells of memory from going dry.

Hold your breath. You can’t stop sleep from erasing another day. The cold sweep of moonlight. Photographs. Your lover’s thigh.

You can’t hold it all. You can’t keep your hair from the drainpipe, or the beep of the alarm clock from telling another lie.

Holding your breath can’t stop sleep from burying this year and the next beneath a heap of fresh earth. These sparrows. This white sky.

You can’t hold it all. You can’t keep holding your breath, but can’t stop until you sleep.

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Katherine Dykstra Like Held Breath I was eight when I watched my mother nearly drown. The

water slide had already spit me out, and I stood waiting for her beside the sloshing catch pool, my bare feet warming on the concrete. Eager to get back in line, go again, I watched for her pink and blue one-piece.

My mother’s slender body careened out of the tube sliding smoothly into the shallow wading pool. But instead of surfacing, she flipped and fought her way to the bottom. Facedown, her arms and legs thrashed under the water, her black hair searching. I stood by the pool, mouth open, silent.

A whistle pierced the din. Lifeguards charged through the pool.

When they reached her, they lifted my mother out, a feather in their hands. She emerged, wet hair in her face and gasping for air.

Once she caught her breath, she mixed apologies with thank yous, promising she was fine and needed no more help. But the lifeguards insisted she accompany them to the first aid station. This was three feet of water; she was in her 30s. I followed a few steps behind, embarrassed at the scene my mother had caused.

She checked out OK and the lifeguards let us go. The sun was still bright, but the afternoon was ruined. When my mother asked, we agreed just to go home.

My mother was the center of my world. From the time I was young, she told me stories of our special bond, formed, she said, when I was just a baby. Our own mythology. My birth had not been easy, she said. I was a month to the day overdue, and my mother labored all night to bring eight-pound me into the world. When the doctor placed me in her arms, I exuded a clear-eyed awareness. My mother propped me on her knees, and we looked at one another, both of us marveling. The nurses tittered about our instant connection. In all their years they’d never seen a newborn so calm and alert. I was, my mother said, the best baby.

I was born on the winter solstice. My parents brought me home on Christmas Eve. My father was studying for his PhD at Hartford Crab Orchard Review

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Katherine Dykstra Hospital, and my parents lived off campus in resident housing, a lowrise brick building wedged between a fire station and a police station. We were never wanting for sirens, she said. They swaddled me in a bassinet, which they placed under the ornamented tree in front of the picture window. I spent my first night at home under winking Christmas lights.

From the beginning, my mother said, she could take me anywhere: restaurants, the movies, dinner parties. She and one of the other residents’ wives both had newborns. They would bundle us up, strap us into strollers and trudge through the snow, around the park, downtown for hot cider. The other baby inevitably ending up in tears, bleating, my mother said, just like a goat. I’d look at him from where I was slumped, as if flummoxed by his anxiety. My mother would nurse me, and I’d fall asleep, oblivious to our fretting companion, napping the whole way home. I didn’t cry, my mother said, until I was two. The joke was that my brother, John, born four years after me, cried until he turned two.

My father finished his residency within the year, and we moved to Omaha where he’d been hired in the microbiology department at Creighton University Medical Center. While my father worked, my mother made me her shadow. If she was deadheading roses on her knees in the garden, I was playing on a blanket in the grass beside her. If she was bestowing a welcome gift on a new neighbor, I was on her hip. If she was laying out lasagna noodles in the kitchen, I was at the table in my high chair. And, once I could walk, I followed her. She narrated her actions, explaining how to pull a weed from its root, how to roll the dough for the cinnamon buns so they’d keep their shape.

My mother went back to work when I was two, taking third shift in the laboratory so she could be home with me during the day. She saw me off to preschool, then went to sleep, pulling herself from bed in time to pick me up. After dinner, she followed me upstairs and dressed for work as I put on my foot-in pajamas. When she came into my room in her squeaking rubber shoes and stark white lab coat, the smell of which reminded me of the sterile air and fluorescent light I’d encountered at her lab, I’d have the covers up to my neck. She’d sit on the edge of my bed, holding the book so I could see the pictures. I preferred closing my eyes, listening to her voice, low as a lullaby, and feeling the heat of her body through the covers. As if I focused on her closely enough I might still the moment and keep her from leaving.

After she said “The End,” she’d kiss me on the forehead and whisper, “Goodnight, my rose,” click off the lamp and close the door.

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Katherine Dykstra When I heard the garage door’s roar, I knew she was gone. The same roar let me know she was home again.

Each night her leaving was a new devastation. I’d cry until my father came into my bedroom, sat down beside me, shushed and rubbed my back. But it was little comfort.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like my father. He had sparkly blue eyes he kept behind tortoiseshell glasses, shaggy brown hair and beard, which reminded me of the Muppets I saw on TV. He let me crawl on him while he lay on the living room floor and read the paper. He lifted me onto his six-foot-two shoulders when we were in crowds so I could see more than the backs of knees. And once when standing in the driveway upon returning from the mall, when I opened my fist and watched as the iridescent ribbon attached to the helium balloon I’d just been given hurried out of my hand and sailed away, my father went all the way back to the mall to get another just to stop me from crying. I loved him; he just wasn’t my mother.

When his soothing didn’t stop my crying, he’d call my mother from the kitchen phone, “She won’t stop. She wants you.” He’d set the phone on the table, come into my room and scoop me up, all tears and anguish, bringing me into the kitchen and holding the receiver to my ear while my mother assured me that she would be coming back.

On my mother’s 35th birthday, two months after the episode at the water park, a PTA mom from down the street dropped off a card. Inside she’d written, “It only goes downhill from here.” They’d laughed in the entryway; my mother put the card on the refrigerator.

After school John and I sat in the living room with my father as dusk fell through the open screen door and in the kitchen my mother skinned the Italian sausages that would go into the spaghetti sauce.

I was on the floor at the oak coffee table, my legs, both asleep, folded frog-like at my sides. Inhaling the bitter lemon scent of the polish my mother had dusted with earlier that day, I peered up to the book open in front of me. There, I read a sentence and copied the first few words onto a sheet of lined paper. When I finished, I looked back up and read it again, this time remembering three or four more words, which I wrote carefully in round letters, taking pleasure in what I assumed it must feel like to write a book. After I finished the first paragraph, I stopped to rest my hand.

John was curled up on the love seat in front of the TV, turned up just loud enough for him to hear and my father and me to tune out.

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Katherine Dykstra My father sat on the sofa behind me, legs crossed, glasses on, reading a medical journal, highlighter in hand.

“Dad, where’s Nevada?”

“It’s in the southwest, right by California,” he said, highlighter in mid-air, glinting eyes watching me over tortoiseshell frames.

“How far is it?”

He looked up toward the ceiling, “Well, probably about twenty hours in the car.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“I’ve been to the city of Las Vegas, which is in Nevada. Why? You want to go?”

“Well, have you ever been to Death Valley?” I held out the book so he could see the photographs of the windswept desert, ripples like waves running through the sand. As he leaned in to answer, my mother yelped, a sound like she’d been burned.

“Susan, you OK?” my father asked.

I followed him into the kitchen and found my mother clutching her back.

“What happened?” My father put his hand on her shoulder, looked down at her hands, at the sauce simmering on the stove.

“I got a shock, in my back. It just startled me. I’m OK.” She smiled.

She looked afraid.

The shocks became frequent. With no warning, she’d go rigid, clutch her back and cry out, making me go tingly with fear. When I asked, she complained of pain that ran like electricity down her spine.

There were other strange behaviors too. Her knees would give and she would catch herself on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t open a jar of peanut butter. As she strained, I thought she was teasing; I had always brought jars to her. She had trouble seeing across a room. Or I’d find her leaning against the wall in the hallway, her olive skin drained of color, dark eyes fixed on nothing at all. Dizziness, she’d say and laugh, she’d stood up too fast. I didn’t laugh with her.

Mom told her doctor about the electricity in her back; he told her she had the flu. Rest, he said, would help. When it didn’t, she went to other doctors. Many of whom worked with my father. We moved to Kansas City after John was born, so he could take a job as the director of microbiology at Research Hospital. I recognized these doctors’ names from the annual Christmas parties we hosted at our house. She told them about her symptoms, and they began the tests.

I learned what an MRI was, an EMG, a spinal tap, a CAT scan. I 102 u Crab Orchard Review

Katherine Dykstra knew the MRI made my mother panic. My father had to hold her hand and talk to her over the knocking so she wouldn’t move and blur the pictures of her brain. I knew that for the spinal tap she had to lie on her side while a nurse slid a needle into her spine. I also knew that all the tests came back inconclusive.

I learned too of illness, what an autoimmune disease was, the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, Epstein-Barr, and brain tumor. I was nine and I could explain the purpose of the myelin sheath, the effects of its deterioration. Yet I didn’t know what any of it meant for us. Did my mother have a disease? If so, why did the tests come back negative?

If she wasn’t diagnosed, would she live on like this? Would she get sicker? Sicker faster? What would happen to her? To me? When I took my questions to my parents, they furrowed their brows, looked into their laps. “We’re still learning,” they told me. “Your mother is seeing the very best doctors. You shouldn’t be worrying. Everything will be fine.” As I entered fourth grade, it began to feel as if my mother spent more time in doctors’ offices than she did at home.

The mood in our house had shifted. We went from breezy and light, my mother weeding in the garden, my father flipping silver dollar pancakes on Sunday mornings to waxen and dark, my father and mother whispering over dirty dinner plates unaware that the sun had set on them and they were sitting in the shadows. I used to find them embracing in the middle of the kitchen, the foyer, by the laundry room, my father a head taller bent slightly over my mother. I’d squeeze in between their thighs, balance on my father’s feet and rest my head on my mother’s stomach relaxing into the rise and fall of her breath. Now, I’d find them on the stairs on the way up to the landing, heads bent together, or cross-legged on their bed in the middle of the afternoon, their faces wan. When I climbed onto the bed, asked what was happening, they told me they were just talking.

Even though, my parents explained to me that my mother was sick, and that this meant things would be different, though she complained of feeling weak, of being tired, her behavior didn’t fit with anything I knew of sick. When I was five, I caught pneumonia. I couldn’t sit up, could barely lift my head, everything my mother gave me to eat made me wretch. I wound up in the hospital where they fed me intravenously. Back home, I didn’t eat until a family friend brought me a root beer float. A black cow was what she called it. The drink stayed down and I subsisted on floats the entire time I was ill. My Crab Orchard Review

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Katherine Dykstra mom was sick, but she ate as she always had. She still went to work, vacuumed the house, tended her peonies bursting in the backyard.

She didn’t look sick either. She had always been thin, all angles like an exotic bird. She had large dark eyes, a long nose, and thick midnight hair that she swept back like curtains with tortoiseshell barrettes. So different from my friends’ mothers who wore their hair cropped and permed into little helmets. Just before we moved to Kansas, my mother cut her hair into curls that stopped at the nape of her neck. When she got home, she dissolved into tears by the grape trellis in our backyard. Cheeks flushed, her brown eyes distraught, my father had laughed, “Susan, you could be bald, and you’d still be beautiful.” But she never cut her hair short again. Now, sick, her hair was still long waves, her eyes as wide.

The disconnect between the way she looked and the way she acted frustrated me. I felt slighted when my mother promised to take me backto-school shopping then grew tired before we’d bought a thing. Or when she left me at the pool with a neighbor’s family because she needed to go home to lie down. I didn’t have many friends and could feel, in the sigh that came from the girl my age as I moved my towel and jellies over to their squat, my imposition solid as a thumb in the back. Or when we’d rent a movie, and halfway through, I’d look over and find her asleep.

From the couch I peered through the dim light at her bony body folded haphazardly on the love seat and imagined shaking her until she woke up: “You’re missing it.” Instead, I watched the movie alone.

My mother held her breath when she slept, its slow escape a guttural moan, a boat motor on idle. The sound was usually shortlived, Dad right there to nudge her awake. One night, while my father was away, my eyes snapped open to blackness and the droning noise.

This time it didn’t stop. As if conducted by darkness, it charged through the house and filled my room. I lay still under the covers, my ears sharp to the groaning, a monster at the end of the hall.

She’s dying. She’s dying. She’s dying.

Gathering up my courage, I slipped out of bed and crawled toward the noise, staying on hands and knees as if the sound were something I could evade by moving slow and low, something I could rescue my mother from. The hallway was miles, past John’s room, up a half flight of stairs, the guest room. Outside her bedroom, I was scared to enter.

I was scared to stay outside. The moaning seemed tangled in my own throat, making it difficult to breathe. It magnified when I opened the door, getting louder as I crept to the side of her bed. Unable to bear it, 104 u Crab Orchard Review

Katherine Dykstra I reached for her. Sudden silence. My mother lifted her head, her hair mussed. She squinted at the clock glowing red in the dark.

“What are you doing up?” she asked, pulling me off the floor, into her warm bed.

“I thought you were dying,” I said.

“Oh no sweetheart, I’m fine, mamma’s fine.”

When I was very small, I thought that when death came, it would come for all of us. I imagined Mom, Dad, John and I, huddled like monkeys on the couch in the living room, something angry and raging outside. This is how we would wait and this is how we would go, heads together, arms chain-linked around each others’ backs. I didn’t think it would hurt less, only that there would be less fear in our being together. Lying now in the cave of my mother’s curled body, I knew that that wasn’t how death happened, that we left the world alone and one-by-one. And that many times there was no warning.

Winter fell like an anvil, the cold night crushing much of the day. When I got home from school, the house was dark, no one having bothered to turn on any lights. The shades still up, the moonlight streamed in making long shadows. The only sound, the groaning heater. Upstairs it was quiet.

I shrugged my backpack off onto the couch knowing it was against the rules, but also that Mom couldn’t get mad if she couldn’t see it; once she came home from work and had climbed into bed, she didn’t come downstairs if she didn’t have to. Mom liked to see us after school, expected us to come up and check in. Instead, I rummaged through the chip drawer and found a bag of Cheetos. In the living room, I flipped on the TV, flopped onto the couch, aware that I was avoiding the inevitable.

On The Facts of Life, Mrs. Garrett introduced the new girl. Jo wore a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet.

Five minutes went by, ten, then, “Katie…?” my mother’s voice floated down the stairs. “Katie…?”

I watched Jo take off her helmet, shake out her long black hair, just like mine. Jo seemed tough, unruffled. I wanted to be Jo. I heard my name called again. I took a deep breath and forced myself to climb the stairs to my mother’s bedroom.

Her shades were drawn, making her room even darker than the rest of the house. It smelled of unwashed sheets and stale hand lotion.

By the light of the little black and white my father had hauled up from Crab Orchard Review

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Katherine Dykstra the basement, I saw my mother propped up on a cloud of pillows. She was wearing the same threadbare red plaid flannel pajamas she always did. They swam on her. Made her look like a hospital patient. Her dark wiry hair splayed like a sea anemone on the pillow, hollowing out her cheeks. When she saw me, she smiled.

“Hi!” she said, her voice a croak. She cleared her throat. “Hi.” “Yeah, hi.” John was snuggled under the covers beside her. His head rested on her shoulder; his arm flung over her stomach. John’s favorite stuffed animal, Baby Maurice, which he’d given to my mother to keep her company when he wasn’t there, was wedged between them.

My mother patted the covers beside her, her eyebrows lifted, but I didn’t move from the foot of the bed.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Anything exciting happen at school?”

“Not really.”

“Do you want to watch The Facts of Life with us?”

I knew I was supposed to say yes. To climb under the covers and snuggle up beside her like John. To give my mother a stuffed animal to comfort her. But I couldn’t. John was too young; he didn’t get it. Our mother might die; she might leave us alone. But if I hardened myself like Jo and chose not to see her deteriorating, if I pretended that she wasn’t sick at all, then I didn’t have to worry about what would happen to me if she was gone.

I twisted my hands together. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll just go downstairs and take a nap before dinner.”

“OK.”

“Can I go now?”

I heard her say, “Sure,” but I was already out the door.

The days were short and bitter, which meant that my father’s annual med-tech Christmas party was fast approaching. I groused about having to help with the preparation in the week leading up to the party, but in truth it was one of my favorite times of year. My mom spent whole days in the kitchen baking rumaki and truffling chocolate. She rolled soft cheese in crushed walnuts, folded spinach and scallions into cream cheese, spread it on tortillas and rolled it into pinwheels. She fashioned Christmas ornaments for each of the families—one year out of wood, another clay. I stayed at her side, watched her hands move.

John and I were encouraged to visit with the guests, but we also 106 u Crab Orchard Review

Katherine Dykstra had responsibilities. One was to take the guests’ heavy coats and pile them on my parents’ bed. The other was to circle the first floor with appetizer trays my mom filled in the kitchen.

As I walked around with my tray, one of my dad’s techs pulled me aside. She asked how I liked fifth grade, whom I had for a teacher, whether I had classes with my friends.

“So…have the doctors come up with anything yet?” she asked, leaning in.

I stood dumb for a second, the tray wobbling in my hand. “No, not really.”

“How did the last CAT go?”

I did my best to answer, using the same words I’d overheard my dad use: “They don’t know. They don’t understand. We’re still waiting.

We’re hoping.” But each question was a barb, its existence proof that it didn’t matter how I pretended, my mother’s illness was real.

“She sure looks great,” she said.

I looked over at my mother smiling and talking and laughing and holding onto the wall for support.

My father came home one Saturday afternoon and called us all outside to the front of the house. Stepping into the Spring day, my eyes adjusting to the sunlight, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

“What is that?” my mother said as the screen door clapped shut behind her.

Parked in the driveway, incongruous beside my mother’s woodpaneled mini-van, was a little red sports car, a watermelon Jolly Rancher catching and tossing off every ray of light that shone down on Cherokee Lane.

“I traded in the Subaru,” my father said with a shrug.

The Subaru was a hatchback the color and shape of a cardboard box.

It had been everywhere with us. We’d driven it from Omaha when we’d moved to Kansas. My parents had taken it to New Orleans, returning with the hatchback brimming with frozen shellfish—a sunset in the open trunk. And Mom had wrecked it one winter during an ice storm.

Coming down an ice-slicked hill Mom felt the tires let go of the road, and made the split decision to steer into an embankment rather than stay on the road and risk oncoming traffic.

“John,” my mother had said, “We’re going to run into that brick wall.”

“OK Mom,” John said stoically from the back seat. It was one of Mom’s favorite stories, illustrating John’s unshakeable trust in her.

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This new Subaru, an XT according to the silver scrawl on the back, looked like one of John’s matchbox cars. It had a long flat hood like the bill of a duck, racing stripes down its shiny red body and only two doors.

“How are the children going to fit back there?” my mother asked peering in at the two tiny bucket seats.

“Their legs are short,” my father reasoned. “They’ll be fine.”

“Mark, they won’t be short forever.”

“I like it,” I announced to my father who smiled, almost blushing, and nodded as if this were the only thing to say. I turned to look for my mother to agree but only caught her back, as it disappeared into the house, the garage door screaming shut behind her.

My mother’s opinion of the car turned out not to matter. My dad only had the car for a few weeks before he totaled it. Pulled into an intersection and was hit sidelong. The XT collapsed like a folding chair, a tin can to a forehead. The passenger side pushed so far into the car, its door left a gash that ran racing-stripe-like down my father’s right leg.

“What if Katie or John had been in the car?” my mother asked, her eyes flashing.

My father stopped sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. A couple of times, early in the morning, I saw him duck out of the guest room in his underwear, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. When I peered into the stark little room, I saw that the sheets on the guest bed were rumpled.

One afternoon while my mother and I were running errands, I asked her why. We were stopped at a light, the car quiet.

“Why’s Dad sleeping in the guest room?”

She gave me a sidelong glance. “Well, honey…the noises I make in my sleep keep your father awake. And…well…it’s just easier if he sleeps in the guest room.”

“Really?” I turned toward her, but she stared straight out the windshield.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Then she was in tears, head bent toward the steering wheel, her hands palm up in her lap. I put my hand in hers.

“What’s going on?” I asked, tears coming to my own eyes.

She didn’t answer. The light changed and cars honked and she looked up, wiped her face, smearing mascara under the soft part of her eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I’m fine.” She smiled as if to reassure me.

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Katherine Dykstra I didn’t feel comforted. “Maybe we can pick up some shish-kebabs for dinner on the way home. Would you like that?”

My parents had taken to talking quietly and cloistered away, which gave our house a charged feeling, as if at any moment it might ignite. One night, after we’d finished dinner, and cleaned the kitchen in silence, my parents walked directly upstairs into the master bedroom.

I stood in the kitchen in the glow of the fluorescent lights that got left on overnight, clinging like glowworms to the cabinets’ underside.

It dawned on me that maybe rather than talking, they were fighting. I listened hard for a raised voice, but heard nothing.

Desperate, I flung open the cabinet over the glowworms and grabbed a dinner plate. My heart pulsing in my ears, I held the plate in both hands, raised it over my head and then screamed and slammed it down onto the linoleum. It broke open like an egg, three large shards surrounded by a bunch of little pieces, and dust.

I heard footsteps clomp down the hall in my parents’ bedroom, the door swing open.

“Katie?” my father yelled.

I took shallow breaths. His heavy footfalls crossed the landing, came down the first set of carpeted steps to the second floor and down again to the entryway, over the marble foyer, past the living room, through the family room and finally into the kitchen. I stood with my back to him, waiting for him to see what I had done.

“What on earth?” he said.

He knelt down on the floor in front of me and picked up the larger shards, which he put in the trash. He used a broom to get the littler pieces.

When he was finished, he turned to look at me. His glasses catching the light, he picked up a tablespoon, held it like you would a tuning fork and then crashed it down onto the countertop. I flinched.

The cream tile cracked, a miniature spider web. The wood that edged the counter sunk where he struck.

He turned around and walked back upstairs.

My mother paged through Newsweek on the love seat, her long legs folded beneath her. An article about a newly discovered illness had made the cover, and her job demanded she stay current.

The magazine had an image of a tick magnified to the size of a grapefruit, hairy and menacing, splashed across it. The story was illustrated with a photo of a young boy who had a rash that looked like a Crab Orchard Review

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Katherine Dykstra bull’s-eye on his thigh. My mother’s knuckles grew white as she stared at the boy in the picture. Clutching the magazine, she ran into the kitchen.

“Oh my God, Mark,” she said breathless. “Look at this.”

The summer I was six, long before my mother nearly drowned at the water park, my family vacationed in a cabin by a lake deep in the Minnesota woods. Next door was a small cattle farm, where, behind a fence, cows shuddered and swatted flies in the shade. My family fished off the dock and sat in the sun, cooked on the grill and played into the sunset.

One morning as I emerged from the lake my mother stared at me in horror. She whisked me inside, yanked off my swimsuit and began peeling the leeches from my goose-fleshed body. She fussed and worried as I bled and bled and bled.

The leeches were the story we brought home with us, the thing that got talked about, not the reddish swelling ringed like Saturn that my mother found near her panty line. She did go to a doctor. He said it was a spider bite, treated it with Benadryl. It went away.

The caption in the Newsweek article said the boy, from Lyme, Connecticut, got the rash from the bite of a tick. After, he came down with an undiagnosable illness that had symptoms similar to a number of autoimmune diseases; it had the most in common with multiple sclerosis. Doctors speculated that he’d been bitten in a wooded area in the Northeast, where the ticks migrated by deer, though any large animal, such as a cow, could carry them. Infected ticks had been found all over that area, including in the Minnesota forest.

One Saturday morning the fall after my mother diagnosed herself with Lyme disease, she popped her head into my bedroom. I was reading Nancy Drew on the floor, my elbows embossed with the short shag of the carpet and stinging.

“Want to go on a walk with me?” she asked. The walking, which she did daily, arms pumping as she went around the neighborhood, was part of her plan to regain her strength. The aggressive course of Rocephin she’d begun that summer had killed in a matter of months the virus that she’d lived with for four years. The electricity that shot through her legs and spine had ebbed, her energy had returned and her balance. Her strength would take work, but it would come back, this unlike the way it was before she got sick.

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I had expected that after the diagnosis my family would snap back to a time before the water park like a rubber band. That my mother and I would rediscover our special bond, my father would hang out with us after work, the strange silences would stop. I expected laughter at the dinner table, John and I playing dress up in the evenings and performing for our parents who would sit on the couch, arms around one another, hands on thighs, and smiling.

Instead, my father and mother sat John and I down on the bed one August evening and told us that they would be getting a divorce. My father, having seen my mother through her illness, moved out.

“I don’t think so,” I said to my mother and looked back to my book.

“But it’s beautiful out.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the page before me until she sighed and walked away.

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Leah Lax Water of Sleep The old metal door to the mikvah at the back of Dallas’s

Tiferet Israel Synagogue shuts behind us with a clang. “The mikvah’s in there,” Seema tells me, giving a nod aimed at the dim interior. She switches on the lights.

Levi is waiting for me at Motel 8. His parents are expecting us—tomorrow, but we came in early for this.

“You think they’ll figure out we’re already in town?” I said, back at the motel, Levi lifting our suitcase onto the luggage rack.

“It’s our secret,” he said. He turned to me then, his eyes shining.

I picked up the car keys. “I have to pick up Seema,” I said, but he stepped toward me, close enough to feel his warmth.

“Soon…,” he said, looking down at me. I swallowed. He added, “I’ll be waiting.”

“Go on in,” Seema says, pointing inside to the small tiled pool and railing. A moth flaps against the dull yellow glow of the ceiling fixture. No one else is here. “You get ready in there,” she says, indicating a bathroom beside the pool. “Call when you’re done.”

I linger under the hot shower, rivers down my back, pelting wet heat, remembering the first time I sat down with Seema to study with her. I was still a Dallas high school girl in red overalls and saddle oxfords, smitten by my girlfriend. I had no idea that I would wind up studying at a Hassidic institute for women, or that within three years I would have an arranged marriage and find myself at a mikvah.

Oh, but it was fascinating the way Seema decoded the Bible’s Hebrew words and letters, ancient commentaries unfolding around the text like a mystical conversation across centuries.

“The Torah begins the story of Creation with the letter ‘bet’ which is also the number ‘two,’” Seema said, “because God made the world in twos, dark and light, good and evil, male and female. The pairs of opposites are all mixed up now,” she said, “but a life lived by Jewish

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Leah Lax Law reveals God’s original truth. Good and evil become clear, so we can then choose correctly. That’s what God wants.”

I squirmed at her binary world, good and evil, male and female, thinking of shades of gray and not understanding where I could fit myself into that picture. But before the open Hebrew Bible with its complex web of commentaries, I was the ignorant one. If Seema said Jewish Law was God’s Truth, who was I to question?

I began to need that Truth.

Shower over, I step over the edge of the pink tub into married life. Mikvah will be part of that life, every month. I look around. I take a pink flowered towel from a pink wicker shelf over the pink toilet and wrap myself, shivering. The place is a cliché of relentless femininity.

“I’m ready,” I call out.

We meet near the pool, at the rail, and Seema shuts the door behind us. The mikvah room is small and square, covered in pink tiles. The light over the pool is dim, the air warm and humid and laced with the smell of chlorine. Seema beams and holds out her arms.

“Well now!” she says, as if summing up how far I’ve come. I think, she’s treating me like a queen—the Hassidic metaphor for a new bride. The bride, an escorted queen. There’s a knot in my stomach. I tell myself, the mikvah will wash that away.

Seema inspects my back for stray hairs with a tap tap of her fingertips on my wet skin—I must be perfectly clean to go into the water. But I’m wet and naked before this admirable motherly woman who is touching my skin. I flinch at her touch. Worse, I understand yet don’t understand how her touch is a breech—there is something inappropriate about exposing myself like this to a woman, something I won’t identify, but it doubles my embarrassment until I almost can’t speak. Then I have to drop the towel altogether and descend the stairs into the water. I cover my breasts with my arms as I go down to the pool, but the water is still and clear to the pink tiles at the bottom. No place to hide. The awful sense of exposure washes away any welcome or blessing I had hoped to find in the water, erases awareness of my waiting husband, makes it difficult to pray in this holy moment.

Seema tosses me a washcloth—I must cover my hair before pronouncing God’s name. God is waiting for this immersion that will make the categories of opposites come clear again and set the world into proper order. As I spread the cloth over my head, falling drops from my hands make a watery echo in the room. I extend my Crab Orchard Review

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Leah Lax arms and lower my body until warm water touches my chin. I bend still deeper, bow my head as if in awe, sink beneath the surface, wait, then emerge.

“Repeat after me,” Seema says, and there’s pride and motherly fondness in her voice. “Blessed,” she says. Baruch.

“Blessed,” I say.

“are You, O Lord” atah adonoi eloheinu

“are You, O Lord” Three words at a time, she leads me through the prescribed blessing, al mitzvas tvila.

Then I sink again beneath the surface into an airless place far from the world and go into fetal float. Under the water, I expect the shadows of my past and of my parents to dissolve and wash away. That is my prayer, for the holy water to dissolve my past. I will emerge with a cleaned slate and create a new self. I focus on this fierce duty, on what I should be, will be, before God. I come up, get a breath, go under again, into the water of sleep, seven times under, up, down, like the seven circles I paced around Levi under the wedding canopy, Rabbi Frumen’s voice counting the circles, five, six, seven, for the seven heavens up to God. Then I stand on tiptoes, head above water. Another breath, and I go under into the water of blessing, into marriage. When I come up the last time, it’s supposed to be like a birth. Rebirth.

I am ready for my husband.

But as soon as I see Seema, holding out a bath towel like a curtain and looking away out of respect, the sense of terribly inappropriate exposure returns; I wish she’d just leave and let me get to the bathroom to get dressed. Head down, I take the towel from her and quickly wrap myself without breaking my stride. As I hurry away, I leave a trail of wet footprints behind on the marble floor. That trail of water, already evaporating, is my wedding train.

At Motel 8, blinking orange neon flashes through curtains and the roar of Loop 635 traffic through the walls. Sheet, blanket and bedspread cover my trembling body. The rumbling air conditioner is set on frigid. The wig is on a stand next to Levi’s hatbox, his black hat in it, our one suitcase open on the dresser. My long skirt is hanging over a chair, headscarf on the floor.

I know my unmoved body in this bed as a failing. I don’t know what it is to desire him. I know I should; I know I should long for him.

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Levi’s face is kind, his step eager. He is taller, older and wiser. He stands over me and gazes down, his mouth in a little smile.

There’s the little stab of fear at his sudden weight on the bed, my intake of breath, the smattering of black hairs on his chest. I reach for him reaching for hope, that Levi will pull me into a warm circle and protect me, hold me and keep me, that I can trust him to do that, love him for that. I can give myself to him for that, even with no flutter in me. He pulls the covers back to look for the first time, at his wife he still only knows as a hint of curves beneath layers of cloth. I don’t move, barely breathe. Shyly, in wonder, he touches my arm. “You are my first,” he says.

I jump the smallest of little jumps. “And mine,” I say. He moves his hand, slowly, reverently.

I stay very still. I don’t have to look—at the stray curled hairs on his chest or the dark line that descends to encircle his navel and broaden below. I don’t have to think how large and rough his hands, how I wish they were delicate and soft, how his body seems too hard and almost threatening when it would be so nice if it was gently, softly form-fit to mine. I tell myself, this is my husband. There is an intensity of focus in his face I’m coming to know. His nostrils flare.

He moves his hand over my hip, his movement uncertain and careful, the expression on his face one of wonder. Reverence. Sense memories, not images, flicker through my skin: someone holding me, crooning to my infant self. Lisa, she says. Easy, I tell myself, beginning to tumble into a swirl of past and present, dream and breath, trembling, some distant fear I don’t understand a receding pinpoint on the horizon. I am on a tall swing at a nearby park where I’d go alone, working, building toward soaring weightless freedom. I’m hungry, then voracious, and I pull Levi to me. I open my eyes to the enormous relief of pleasure washing everything away just as I launch from the swing, catapulted into air. It’s true, I think, I can will myself into this—just as I am pitched shouting through the air to a mountaintop beneath gasping stars.

His jaw hangs open above me, astonished, but then he is panting, driven, and I am trapped between his big hands and knees, flexed and powerful, as he forces his path. Grit my teeth. I near panic. Don’t move; it will be all right, but he continues and I am certain I can’t bear another moment, until his own trembling, his sigh.

The bride purchase sealed by the signed marriage contract is now complete, our intimacy blessed in advance by the mikvah water. Levi Crab Orchard Review

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Leah Lax tumbles down beside me, throws his head back on the pillow. “Wow,” he says. “Wow!”

He pulls me close and I sink into his arms. Forget the trapped moment, the aversion after he entered me—I am in his strong arms in a vulnerable naked moment. After the long loneliness, it is magical to fall back and be held like this, to trust someone enough for that. It seems incredible that this man has pledged his life to being my refuge. My unorthodox desires don’t seem to matter in the face of this security, this sanctum. In his arms, I say, “I didn’t know how alone I was. Until I wasn’t.”

“You’re not alone,” he says. He nuzzles my hair, tightens his arms.

“You have a healing touch,” I say around a lump in my throat. I lay my hand over his and settle in against his chest. Home, I think. This place near you is home. “I could love you for this,” I say. Just then, Levi pulls away.

“We have to separate right now,” he says.

“What??”

He gets out of bed.

“No!!” I say.

He looks apologetic. “Dam niddah,” he says. “Virginal blood. It’s the Law.”

Here it is, that ancient fear that has been drummed into both of us, the mystical threat of a woman’s blood that formed the Law on marriage and now rises up like a wall between us.

“And cover yourself,” Levi says.

I grab the sheet to my chest, find the scarf. “But I’m not bleeding,” I say.

The ghost of my father has climbed into this bed.

“No matter,” Levi says. “I’m still not allowed to see you after.” He shrugs. “There are plenty of women who don’t bleed the first time, I read that, but that’s the Law for the marriage night, just in case. We can’t touch for twelve more days.”

“I know the halacha,” I say. The Law. Why had I thought it wouldn’t apply to me?

Near the bathroom light, Levi takes a hand towel to wipe himself clean. Of me. He inspects the towel carefully for blood. Nothing. “Get dressed,” he says in a firmer tone. I grab my gown from the floor. Levi gets into pajamas and settles into the other bed, turns his back and falls quickly asleep.

Late into the night, I lie awake wondering why the sense of finding home was so fleeting. I tell myself it’s just twelve days until the next mikvah night when we will be free to sleep together again.

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Leah Lax My childhood home comes back to me, how I walked around clutter and unspoken betrayals, how I want us to repair that history. We will make a clean orderly home structured by the clean order of the Law. Our children will feel safe because our Hassidic God has rules that guarantee respect and good behavior—God’s safety net. Forget the pesky amorphous need looming up again. I tell myself, grow up. Have a woman’s patience. Levi’s warmth, his smell, linger in the sheets.

Slowly, I fall asleep thinking, this was our wedding night.

Austin. Levi and I develop a routine. We leave early in the morning for classes at the University of Texas, although not at the same time. I wear the requisite long clothing and covered hair. It’s a short walk down Manor Road to the campus, under the I–35 overpass and then between the football stadium and LBJ Library for daily cello practice in the music building, and then on to the rest of the sprawling campus. The campus is alive with forty thousand students, walking, laughing, talking, bicycling, lounging on grassy areas and on the old sculptures and fountains, visiting, studying, strumming guitars, trotting in and out of huge buildings. Sometimes I greet other students as I walk, and there are even a few with whom I awkwardly chat.

At home, we dip daily into Hassidic books for study, labor over Hebrew and Yiddish, share a vort of Hassidic thought over the Sabbath table, exhort one another with aphorisms—surround ourselves with holy words. We practice peppering our speech with expressions of faith and self-abnegation. Baruch hashem. Hakol bidei shamayim.

Bless God. It’s all in God’s hands.

When I need, I ask Levi for money. I’m careful to let him decide what time we will eat dinner, or what we will eat, pushing myself every day to use a respectful tone. He doesn’t demand this of me, but a growing guilty patter of Hassidic teaching in my head is easing me into my new role, like a rasp steadily applied to my rough edges. But I’m the one grinding myself down, pushing away feeling, demanding my own compliance.

Levi seems to have his own tools to bring himself into line. But there are times when I hand off the weight of a decision to him yet again, that he is hesitant, uncertain, perhaps burdened. Or lonely. Then he pulls himself up as if it’s a great effort and issues the final word.

I grow quieter, become indecisive. Already within these first weeks of our marriage ‘separate’ roles have become ‘separated.’ Our exquisitely choreographed roles leave us unspontaneous, heavy-footed, isolated. At Crab Orchard Review

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Leah Lax times I wake with a weight in my chest. Levi tosses and turns. Neither of us seems to understand why. Then each day I take my cello off to the music building. There I find space inside of myself that is only mine.

Somehow, in a stark little practice room, the cello sings.

At home, the choice of music, when we have any at all, is his.

Before I can get back to the mikvah, my cycle returns, causing another month to pass in which we aren’t allowed to touch. My days pulse with the counting rhythm the Law imposes on marriage, and with the memory of Levi’s arms.

To use the mikvah nearest our Austin home, we drive ninety miles on I–35 south to San Antonio where there is a little mikvah inside Rodfei Shalom, an old orthodox synagogue in a decaying part of town.

Mikvah attendants are supposed to be women, but when we called the synagogue rabbi about gaining entry, he ruled that Levi had to come with me because it is unsafe there at night. His wife, he chuckled, long ago announced she was no mikvah attendant, and there is little demand in San Antonio to hire one.

We aren’t supposed to tell anyone which night is mikvah night, out of modesty, but we had to tell the rabbi in order to arrange to pick up the key. We first meet Rabbi Kornbluth and his wife at their partially opened door, their faces like two moons. I stand half hidden behind Levi. “We just came for the key,” Levi says, to their discomfiting “Come in. Come in!” Soon we’re perched on their formal sofa, balancing delicate china cups of weak tea on gold-rimmed saucers.

The Kornbluths are old, in their fifties at least. Unlike Hassidic beards that have never been touched by a blade, Rabbi Kornbluth’s beard is trimmed close to his face. He and his wife only look at Levi, only address Levi.

“What are you studying?” she says.

“Accounting,” he says. “I’m working on an MBA.”

They nod approval.

In a way, I prefer it this way, no eyes on me, because beneath their tea conversation is the tacit understanding that we’re here so that I can go to the mikvah. I feel certain that fact creates an inevitable, shared image in the room, as if I’m standing nude right there on the Persian carpet.

“Sugar?” the rabbi’s wife asks Levi.

The old ornate synagogue is a hollow looming thing in shadow, too large, we’ve been told, for its aging dwindling congregation. It is 118 u Crab Orchard Review

Leah Lax well after dark, and the area around the building is unlit, as is the broad cracked veranda. Levi grimaces and jiggles the key in the lock.

“We’re gonna get mugged,” I whisper, glancing down the empty street.

Levi’s shoulders are high and tight. “Shluchei mitzvah,” he says.

“Don’t worry.” There is no danger for those engaged in a commandment.

Finally, we tiptoe through the empty lobby where prayer shawls hang on the wall like body sacks, through an echoing foyer to the door marked as the women’s bathroom. We look at each other, then Levi opens the door, and another on the right. “My God,” he says.

Someone must have been here earlier. The floor is wet and an electric heater is left on, weakly glowing coils and a frayed cord in a puddle. Levi yanks the cord from the socket.

The heater hasn’t done much. The room, just big enough for the little pool, is narrow and dank and cool, a humid sheen over the tiled walls. I crouch and touch the water, and wince. Then, I stand, resolute. “Turn away,” I tell Levi. The rabbi may have ruled that Levi has to be my attendant even though that means seeing me uncovered before immersion, but we can minimize Levi’s exposure. I turn my back to strip off my clothes, pull off the headscarf, run my fingers through my short hair.

The water isn’t cool. It’s cold. I force myself to go in and down, Levi watching at the rail.

Under the water, it’s too cold to think of symbolism or to try to make this act into a prayerful thing. The monthly rebirth, seventh heaven, emergence from holy water into purity, all starry ideas I was taught that floated through my first mikvah—become superfluous in the stark clarity of this cold immersion, no place in cold reality for dreams and ideas. What is left is God’s command. Swift obedience.

Why, I think, it’s the act, this cold dunk, that is the thing. Not some flowery effort at transcendence. Holy obedience. Up now, above the surface wet and shivering to gasp a breath and splutter shaking blessing words into damp air.

“Amen,” Levi says from above, like an affirmation of my epiphany.

He pronounces it awmeyn.

But, I think, he’s warm and dressed.

I force myself back under. The fierce shivering effort fills me with religious pride. Up again, teeth chattering, to brush water from my eyes and blurt out in fast Hebrew It should be Your Will O God that the Temple berebuiltspeedilyinourdays, and Levi responds with a quick automatic amen. We are machines. God’s machines. God working us.

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Leah Lax will be strong from this. I stand the last time, head just above water, shivering so that I can’t speak.

I am again purified for my husband. Levi holds up a towel just as Seema once did. I walk up the steps, drops yet again cascading off wet skin, numb this time, take the towel from him, get dressed, and we go out to the car. We slip the key into the Kornbluths’ mailbox, then rush home ninety miles over the night highway. We are aliens skimming across this sleeping Texas Hill Country, with its laconic people, its rivered lands.

Something happens during sex that night, our second time.

Even though I again respond to Levi’s gentle persistence, I am removed, dispassionate, stuck in passive obedient mode, in spite of my body’s response, and there’s a lump of loss in my throat throughout as if I’ve swallowed something. At least, I don’t panic or feel trapped when Levi’s form hovers above me, his knees and hands hemming me in, don’t feel much of anything. But late that night as I start to drift off to sleep next to him in his bed, he again wraps his arms around me. I nestle into the pillow we are once again allowed to share and heave a sigh. Loneliness abates once again. How I have waited to get back to this, I think, this safe place. Everything is worth this. Levi falls asleep then, wrapped around me, his chest in its slow rise and fall, and I thank God that the days of separation have passed. I think, is this love? I want this to be love. I tell myself I am home.

Slats of morning sunlight through yellowed blinds. I wake feeling caught in something, then I sit up in full blown panic. Levi’s mouth is open in his sleep, his night yarmalka fallen off his head. My heart is racing. I try to catch my breath. I can’t seem to get out of this box. What is this box? A swarm of everything I’ve stuffed down for months is rising, overtaking me. Awake now, I splutter, “Why didn’t I think?” I gasp and jump out of the bed, turn and grab Levi’s arm, shake his shoulder. “Wake up!” I say.

“Wh-what?!” he says, struggling, his voice rough from sleep.

“What is it?!”

“Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I know?” I say. “But I did know. Of course we knew.”

“What?” he says, raising up on one elbow. “What?”

I’m standing over him, still shaking him. “We had sex last night!”

“And?” he says.

“And we didn’t…we can’t use birth control!”

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Leah Lax “And?”

“What was I thinking? I can’t have a baby!”

“I don’t think,” he says, and, “But you knew perfectly well.”

“I was wrapped up in wedding stuff!” I say.

I’ve been floating on the wedding dream and the Rebbe’s blessing/ command, get married, be a good Hassidic girl, do the right thing.

No harm comes to those doing a mitzvah. The joy in the wedding air, misty picture of happy families, the family we plan to build that will be everything mine wasn’t. But all that is suddenly very different from the very real babies that will form inside nineteen-year-old university student me, maybe one already has, a baby that will overwhelm my life, derail school, that I won’t know how to care for—a baby we could hurt.

As I was. I’ll make all of my mother’s mistakes.

“I can’t do this!” I say. I’m shaking. “No!” I say. I sit down on the bed and sob. “I can’t get pregnant. What have we done?”

Levi sits up, gropes for his yarmalka. Then a little gasp and his eyes widen. He puts a hand on my arm and whispers, “Do you think you are pregnant? Already?”

“I don’t know!” I moan.

Then it’s as if I can hear my mother saying Lisa. Lisa! in my ear.

Lisa, Listen to me!

I’m not Lisa any more, I tell her. Don’t call me Lisa. So why do I feel stuck inside this “Leah” as if I don’t even know who that is, or where I am?

Lisa, my mother whispers.

I try to reason with myself. Being Leah means becoming a mother.

I knew that.

If you get pregnant, you can’t come home.

You don’t mean “home” to me any more. Besides, that can’t be true.

Levi’s my home.

But I’m no longer teetering between then and now, between Lisa and Leah. I finger my ring. I know who I am. So why am I in a panic?

(Come home!) When I even think of being pregnant, why do I see myself dashing this way and that through a maze of Jewish Law with no way out? (Lisa! Listen! Come!) Where is home? (I told you so, she whispers.)

But even away from my mother, with a baby I could become her. My children could get hurt. There has to be a way out.

“I had to study the laws about marriage before the wedding,” Levi says in a reasonable tone. “The Law’s not so rigid. Really. Sometimes birth control is allowed—if you’re sick and pregnancy would be harmful.”

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Leah Lax

“I’ll die if I get pregnant,” I say. “Inside.”

“If the Law gives a concession, that’s not breaking the Law. If you’re sick,” he offers again. “You know,” he says, “v’chai bahem.” He is conciliatory, and kind.

V’chai bahem is both a promise and a command—you will live within the laws, and the Law will let you live. That’s what we’re taught, that Jewish Law is both stern and loving, with built-in flexibility for human need. The Law is supposed to be a good parent.

It is clear that Levi is willing to look for a legal concession, and has faith that there is one for us within the Law. My panic ratchets down a notch. I think, he’s in this with me.

Levi doesn’t say whether or not he wants a baby. That would be irrelevant, even inappropriate: Babies aren’t chosen; they come from God. But, I think, maybe he’s also afraid. We have no money. His wife doesn’t seem ready to mother a child. Then—another tailspin. “The Law gives a concession for sick people??” I wail. “What good does a break for sick people do me? I’m not sick! I just can’t bear the idea.”

Levi gets up, in pajama bottoms and undershirt with his tzitzis undergarment on top, white strings hanging to his knees, a knitted sleep yarmalka on his head. I flash an image of his naked silhouette above me in the night.

“Wait. I’ve got a book,” he says. “I remember something I read.”

Our whole life in a book. He goes and takes a volume from the brickand-board bookcase in his office, with both Hebrew and English print on the front. Then he clears a space at his desk and sits down to read.

I go splash water on my face. Try to breathe. Brush my teeth. But the minutes are heavy.

Then he comes out, open book in his hand. “Look at this,” he says, and reads: “Conception involves a mystical relationship between the father, mother and God. To interfere with that relationship by stopping the natural process is to thwart God’s Will, a grave sin.”

“Oh boy,” I say.

“Wait,” Levi says. He flips to another page. “It seems there’ve been times when Rav Moshe has allowed birth control. Listen.” He reads, “Although a condom is forbidden, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein has ruled that other types of birth control that create a simple barrier and do not affect the natural process by killing sperm or preventing ovulation can be allowed if necessary for the mother’s health.” He looks up. “Like a diaphragm,” he says.

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Leah Lax health part of that?” Then, “Wait! Rav Moshe allows it?” I say. I just realize who Levi is quoting. Panic returns.

It had taken me a while to figure out the hierarchy. There are justplain-rabbis, like Rabbi Frumen, who lead individual congregations as spiritual shepherds. They are also kind of like lawyers, qualified to impart to their followers expert knowledge in the Law. But even they defer to a rav, a rabbi who is more like a judge. He can rule on new applications of the Law, or parse out thorny conflicts between people.

Or grant dispensations. A rav can do that.

The Rebbe is both rabbi and rav, but he chooses to stand above all that. He is our guide, our inspiration. But when people write him with problems that can be addressed within the Law, he writes back, “ask a rav.”

Rav Moshe Feinstein, who Levi quoted, is venerated among nonHassidic orthodox, but our group of Lubavitcher Hassidim do not speak well of Rav Moshe’s leniencies, even though the Rebbe himself has been known to send people to him who need his gentler rulings.

Only the Rebbe can bend like that. Otherwise, we should turn to our own.

Levi frowns. “Maybe we should ask a Lubavitcher rav first,” he says.

“Can we find one who will understand?” I say.

“We’ll go to the top,” Levi says. “We’ll ask the head Rav of Lubavitch. We’re Lubavitcher Hassidim. He’ll take care of us.”

It’s confident Levi, trusting the system and the privilege of membership within it, who calls and requests the conference. It’s Levi who tells the rav, after our breath-holding wait, that “My wife feels unable to bear a child.” It’s Levi who explains the problem. My problem.

I listen in modest silence on the extension for the rabbi’s decision about my body, my life.

“So what do you want?” the rav says.

“Could we use some sort of birth control?” Levi says.

“We don’t do that,” the rav says. His tone is dismissive, as is the silence that follows.

Levi falls dumb into that silence. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t defend me.

An awkward pause. I wait for rescue, heart pounding. No! Then I make myself speak. My voice comes out unnatural, untried, every word laced with the guilt of immodesty. But each word I get out is another step forward through an unfamiliar passage. “What if the woman could get hurt?” I say.

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Leah Lax

“That’s different,” the rabbi says. “But then I would need a letter from a doctor.”

A doctor. My word about my body isn’t enough. I swallow. “What if ‘the woman’ is physically healthy,” I say, “but she can’t bear the possibility of, of…?”

“Are you talking about psychological harm?” the rav says.

“I guess I am,” I say.

He laughs a cold laugh. “You want permission to break the Law because motherhood is difficult??”

This silence is filled with my inadequacy as a wife, as a religious woman, as a future mother. Finally, I say, “But I read, we read, that Rav Moshe….”

“Well then,” the rabbi says, now clearly annoyed. “Call Rav Moshe.”

One night, two months later, I lock myself in the bathroom and position myself in the space between toilet and tub. Behind me, the nylon curtain is wet with droplets from morning showers.

We called Rav Moshe the next evening. We weren’t allowed to speak directly to him, but we spoke with his son, his representative, the great rav sitting in judgment nearby. “My father says you will bear Jewish children in joy,” the son said. “You may use a diaphragm for one year from this date.”

Now, two months later, I put the top down to the toilet, pull off my scarf and shake my growing hair back and off of my face. Levi is waiting in the other room.

Since receiving Rav Moshe’s permission, we have both been finding slivers of freedom. We allow one another that. Levi wears blue jeans, goes to the symphony, indulges in beloved old movies, even if such secular things are deemed soulless by the Hassidim. I’ve renewed interest in my university studies. One of my Art History professors has offered to mentor me in an independent project studying the architecture of Gaudi. I’ve even stopped wearing the wig on campus, learned intricate decorative ways to arrange scarves instead over my hair that now hangs audaciously long and free beneath the scarf.

But at home, even with my uncovered hair and his blue jeans, we still have our roles. Levi makes the decisions, controls the money.

I’m getting to know him. He has little need of casual touch and great concern about his obligations. At times, he surprises me with a gift or a kind word, but in general he’s awkward about my needs, often doesn’t seem aware of them. Our separate roles seem to reinforce his 124 u Crab Orchard Review

Leah Lax awkwardness, as if, with his job so clearly defined, it’s difficult for him to develop new empathy for mine. That would be crossing a line he doesn’t seem to know how to cross any more. Perhaps he never did.

But Rav Moshe has given me something. I pick up a yellow plastic case from the counter and take out a thin rubber cup stretched over a rounded spring. I’ve come to enjoy the sploosh of cream into the quivering rubber bowl, the way that I have to pinch and fold the spring in order to lodge it inside me just so against thinly sheathed bone. The diaphragm is teaching me my body’s inner folds and secret chambers, giving me time without babies to learn. I put my right foot on top of the closed toilet lid, left foot on the floor, pull the full skirt up to my thighs. This is Rav Moshe’s gift: a kosher brashness I’m gaining from this new body knowledge.

Now without consequence I can cross the line Levi can’t seem to cross—right into his bed. And I do. I approach him for sex again and again. Even though I have little physical desire, I do it anyway, always pleased with his happy response. I do it for connection, and for the aftermath in his warm arms. Sex seems the only way to get to that safe place. Besides, the alternative of always being near him yet apart, on my side of the Hassidic divide, is lonelier than being alone.

I’m trying with everything I have to make sure being in his arms still feels like coming home. Then, I test it again, and again, because, more and more, it…doesn’t.

I open the bathroom door and go to him.

Late that night, they begin—transporting dreams that I will not, cannot, acknowledge in the daytime. In my dream, my most passionate alluring lover is a woman with black curls and tapered, delicate hands.

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Kevin Phan Night Bells in a Landscape

Bees were stitching the ripped-up sky. Sky of torn bed sheets, needles on wings. Nothing mended. I launched clusters

of spit & grew cherry blossoms. The temple’s honey darkened. Seeds matured into wildflowers. I took long exposure

photos of azaleas brought into being by starlight. Trudging muddy grounds, my socks lapped the damp. It’s all I had:

dryer-melted raingear & a blue heart rinsed in a bowl of ocean.

Ralph scheduled my absence: each new moon ceremony

I worked the 8-ton German bell—a sacred feature whose note-pours fractured through the redwoods. I rocked

the tongue on the thick rope & thought of Neela, her sweet, Indian wings, our samosas from scratch &

pies in every oven. Pigs dismantled our garden, uprooting arugula. The moon clicked red on the downbeat. I opened

my heart to my main man Nathan, penguin tattoos on his forearms. He was always about to smoke, mindfully

rolling loose tobacco, cleaning statues dripping scented bargain thinner. Prayer wheels hummed in bearing butter

to generate the milk of loving-kindness. May all beings be happy. Half the world starved. Ringing the bell,

I dedicated merit, my heart open to crew leader Itaru, his pealing broken syntax was a reminder he lived

between countries. My roommate Orson spent all winter hang-glided low through depression.

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Kevin Phan

James Bond novels were his only lift & sense of flickering golden feathers. Look, it’s true: I often

rang the bell & felt taped open.

When it hurt to think of lean, punk-rocker Kara—

her tomato & blue cheese sandwiches, our love of Leonard Cohen— I knew I longed for a brink

& safety net to catch me as I fell right down through the ductwork of want. Yes, my alphabet

was too loose. My consonants dropped like tape measures to the ground. I knelt.

I picked them up again. Ringing the bell, I meditated on apple trees in dry soil, moss licks,

vineyards, prayer flags, prayer wheels, glacier melt, oxygen, pinched nerves, blood brothers,

reunion kestrels, reunion owls, laughing owls.

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Sam Pierstorff At the Hotel of Irrelevancy You check-in but no one checks you out anymore. You are that summer song from 20 years ago that melted ghetto blasters to bare shoulders as you traversed the neighborhood looking for a piece of cardboard wide enough to backspin upon—your legs, helicopter blades— your head, the tip of a carpenter’s drill.

At the Hotel of Irrelevancy, a typewriter is placed in every room for you to write letters to the wife you’ve never stopped loving, even for a second when you saw another woman’s smile.

A lava lamp illuminates a Bible on the desk next to a can of Tab soda. You open them both for the first time in decades, then dive into the queen-sized waterbed, rubber waves bubbling beneath you. This, you imagine, is what a rubber duck feels in the bathtub with a toddler.

Soon you become seasick, drowning in dreams of your own irrelevancy.

Suddenly, you’re Vanilla Ice. Axl Rose.

David Hasselhoff. You are Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. You are a singer who can actually sing, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

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Sam Pierstorff You are as irrelevant as truth in the 21st Century, as talent, as love before sex. You sir, are the broccoli in a kid’s Fraggle Rock lunch pail. You are as evil as a carbohydrate. No one wants you anymore.

You are poetry in the life of a high school football player.

You are morality on MTV. You don’t exist.

When you wake up, you realize that your bed sheets are made from the fleece corpses of used Snuggies.

The balcony window in your 13th floor suite at the Hotel of Irrelevancy is wide open so you take your first steps outside, over the ledge, and fall until you too become a distant memory that others will soon look down on.

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Caroline Pittman Easter Poem I don’t want to leave the red dust of the world, silt of a Georgia lane between pear trees, hot under the quick-rotating balls of my feet.

What I want to leave is the belt that unfurled here to strike my father. I want to keep the honeysuckle splayed through wire squares of farm fence, the drops of nectar slipped down each flute of petal by two gold hairs of stamen onto my tongue. I want to keep on running, keep the mud caked in my treads from pushing up a rocky Swazi hill, weeds caught shredded in my shoelaces from steep footpaths webbing the mountains. I long to keep the wind across my ears, the dustclouds following a bakkie across the lowveld, the hilarity of children chasing after it with yells. What I want to leave is the contaminated creek, kindly fetched, mixed in bottles that suckle agony.

The hoarseness a night of ululating gives.

Stay, please, voice and throat, heavy morning moon out the ward window, sleep and kiss.

Morphine, needle, blue sheen of emesis bag—go. I want to keep on throwing

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Caroline Pittman myself along the road, translating light with cones and rods. I want the simple cross of oxygen through my lung’s porous borders, to breathe in air glittering with motes.

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Jessica Plante Descendants Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

—Maggie Nelson Memories, tinged with purple, tinged with red—from periwinkle

to myrtle herb they swarm the cargo hold to be held. Like children

made of cloud, we do not trust their current, their pulse, though they fill each empty decibel in us, make the attic howl. Wind can never be trapped or it will die.

But jars of swirling wind, eons old.

No one knows how we watch, nor where.

Now the world is a jar full of wind we see through aging glass and aging eyes.

And, yes, we are birds laid on our backs so we do not fly. And bolts of blue cloth

we can never wear. But, patient sister, think of how we fell head first in a backwards dive, and trust we had no chute but safely have arrived.

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Brad Richard Confederate Jasmine (New World Elegy) Not true jasmine, love: star jasmine, woody liana, trader’s compass, soul’s wheel, five fingers of a merchant’s proverb: it shows the good man’s way, my love, to white stars massed in shaggy vines along our backyard fence, so many names chained beneath the sky, broken alphabets crawling like the blood of children through the streets of home, the blood of children in our streets— No, not true jasmine, truer, death in our mouths at morning, mouths blind as a ship’s hold, blind to the words borne in that slop and cess, words sold for their perfume— Love, so many truths along our backyard fence!

When we bought this place, I hacked the vines clear to their trunk’s thick shaft near the ground, and you said, jesus, how long has this been here?

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Amanda Rutstein Ruined I tell it as it is: parts of myself just beyond repair—a book left to the rain, the ink indistinct, pages dry-warped.

She does not want to hear this kind of truth.

Wants, rather, to see the me she thinks she’s known, searches for her in my eyes, kisses one cheek, and tells me I am good and whole.

I wish I could give in to this. I wish his weight weren’t tied to other love: his angry grip on the back of my neck to other gentle hands that want to tangle my hair, his insistent mouth to other softer lips that wish to find mine willing. Whole girls preen, arch their backs, offer their throats fragile. I know better. I shoulder fear like a heavy child, mine. We pass a house long abandoned but not unkempt. Thick drapes line the windows, sun-bleached and locked tight. On the porch, someone’s put a box

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Amanda Rutstein for the leftover cats. They pace the landing and side-eye our passing, as though to guard the place they can no longer enter and could never protect. It’s like this, I think.

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Aaron Samuels Stakes is high after Marcus Wicker Sometimes the police arrest black people for no good reason. They fill the air with mace, barricade all but one exit, watch the blind black faces pinball through a chemical funnel. I assume you have never experienced this; you would not know that the tear gas follows your held breath and closed eyes like a homing missile looking for an entrance, scratching at your nostrils, your opening pours.

It too wants an escape from the world it was brought into without choice.

But I assume blackness is not satisfactory justification for you. There must be a reason! If you were black, as I am black, you would have your reason, clear as mace fog against your eyes, but I assume, since you are not black, that I have once again returned to this dream where there is no beginning but I close my eyes and find myself—always— at a podium explaining to white people the world. In the dream, I have both eyes open, the room of white people listen carefully as I present charts and graphs that detail wage inequality, accounts of brutality, and they applaud loudly. I assume in the dream, I am a white man. I am not positive I am white; after all I can only see the audience through my own eyes.

But if I am not white, then why would they listen. Perhaps, I am a college professor. Perhaps I am CEO of a global nonprofit with a sustainable agenda. Perhaps I have a large weapon, or a large army surrounding the audience with bayonets, and light sabers, and bazookas. Perhaps I have forced these people through a tiny door

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Aaron Samuels and held their eyes open as they dragged into their seats.

Perhaps my face is not peeling on the concrete floor, my lungs not puffy and filled with pepper and blood.

Perhaps my mouth is smiling and offering the entire theater a bounty of forgiveness, instead of burrowing my front teeth into the salty meat of the officer’s ankle.

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Steven D. Schroeder Nuclear Our moms were bombshells, all steel and fuel and triggers.

Our dads were demagogues who said the bomb and meant it must be obeyed. They fit together better than military and haircut, we thought. We fought if they split war from head. We had sex dreams involving missile silos and mushroom clouds. Our sisters, their code silence, handcuffed briefcases failsafe on their wrists.

Our brothers launched by accident and moonlight. Woken by the hotline, we pushed the button designated retaliate and, when that dysfunctioned, one marked meltdown flashing red.

The same old argument was over who started fission chain reacting first.

The philosophical discussion What would you do with your last minute alive? devolved into a lecture on battery life. Our husbands balded due to radiation poisoning and lost most of their eyesight to the blast, they claimed. Our wives also got sick of canned beets and concrete bunkers and wanting to believe the claims.

Dogs gone, we trained pet grievances to carry water. We traveled desert waste, horizon close as closure, where other survivors 138 u Crab Orchard Review

Steven D. Schroeder told us colder. The fire in winter caves painted shadows on the bedrock, our shadows in the shape of broken.

Our sons and daughters were fallout that drifted deep in rifts but we called snowflakes, pure like in the stories.

Our sons and daughters were.

Our children.

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Peggy Shumaker Past Middle Age We have begun our bending, bending as before us our ancestors bent their gaze fierce and straight when young then curving toward earth as they aged.

In our shape we echo each wave past its crest breaking we echo the ridge of the dune fallen we echo stalks of fireweed bloomed out nodding as seedpods explode nodding as winds carry away what will rise to live another day, nodding as we return to nourish black soil.

As We Reflect wood and seeds

4x8x8 2004 Vivian Visser

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Sonnet for the Guy Who Told Me My Dad Was a Saint Saints don’t come from dumps like this. They come from towns untransected by train tracks or tainted rivers passing rows of molting tenements, from cities where every block’s a work of art and spires scrape clouds, every window stained in prayer. Sacred steps don’t tread these streets: even the blessed must feel the weight of brick, history’s consumptive grating in the chest.

But today—in the shade of a willow, water gracing over the dam, walls of a mill rising up to meet a ceiling of sistine sky—a saint’s not an impossible thing, and the dust slipping through sunlight’s almost beatific, almost beatific and almost beautiful.

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Elegy for Phineas Gage Posing in a Daguerreotype Portrait The tamping rod that burst the shell your skull stretches forty three inches long & wears your name spelled wrong. But Phineas, you bear it in both hands again for gullible us who lap the myths—you beat your wife & kids then drowned in booze until the seizures came.

All our horrors thrawn: a teacupful of brain spilled upon the floor as blood & vomit slid beneath your boots & still you begged for home, childless, unwed, a mother’s sparrow-hand to daub your mangled brow. What cerise foam she wipes away. Those eleven years you stand each migraine’s throb along your stagecoach ruts.

Each dusk the mustangs lick your good eye shut.

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Henry W. Leung Quitting the Box 1.

I’ve known ashy soft boxing rings near the best pizza in

Berkeley. I’ve known dank rings, spotlit in San Francisco while men in darkness spilled beer and sidled up to ring girls. I’ve known a coarse ring inside cold brick, at the edge of Oakland’s warehouse piers. I’ve known poor university rings—ring after ring like dormitory bunk beds—rings in dimly reflected light, rings in overexposed fluorescence.

I’ve stood alone and waited in rings, and I’ve ducked into rings where someone else waited. I’ve been knocked down in rings, then told to wipe the sweat-damp debris from my gloves when I stood again.

I left every boxing ring thinking, only: Never again. You couldn’t drag me back.

My boxing teacher was a woman called The Hurricane, who’s in the pros now with a record of 12-4-1 and two knockouts. She’s been called the female Manny Pacquiao, a hero of Filipino America, even though she doesn’t speak Tagalog. But this essay doesn’t have to be about race or authenticity. In boxing, in the martial arts, in any fight—in theory—it doesn’t matter who you are. It only matters that you keep moving.

The Hurricane was a fellow brown belt at my dojo, and I bowed to her just as I bowed to Sensei, my martial arts teacher. I was a teenager; they were beautiful, strong women. This essay is about the wax between gaze and body, about the stage of performed violence and unrequited love.

2.

The Hurricane embodied our school. Our priorities were, in order of importance: stability, mobility, defense, and clean punching.

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Henry W. Leung the earth. To advance meant to sink forward, as though ducking into a box. Punches were not punches; the goal was “berry-picking,” snatchpull, snatch-pull.

She once fought a fundraiser exhibition of fourteen rounds based on the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” fight, fourteen rounds she fought consecutively against a rotating tag team. It was part of the eternal project to improve endurance. Stamina, we were taught again and again, is how much your body can take. Endurance is how well your mind can suffer. The fundraiser was for her coach’s newborn son, who had tricuspid atresia and underwent several open-heart surgeries in his first week alive. It was the disease of an incomplete heart.

A week before the exhibition, I sparred with her. This was in the Alameda dojo, lined in green Zebra mats. Our threshold stood between a bus stop and a rock garden; our walls were covered with full-bodied mirrors in which we stared and struck at ourselves for hours every day.

By the end of our first round of sparring, my nose was gushing red on the sea-green mat. I’d look her in the eye, then I’d flinch and look away. The Hurricane’s coach plugged my nostrils with jelly, told her that headshots were off limits, and wrapped thick padding around me. The Hurricane kept punching. I was three inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier than her, and I still felt her knocking on my ribcage.

Later, when she unwrapped her fists, when she let her hair down, when she laughed, she became a different person. From Medusa to Odalisque. My secret admiration and my inability to look at her colluded with my fear of the ring.

While driving back and forth for errands one Sunday, I caught glimpses of The Hurricane’s training from early morning to late evening as she was egged on by her coach. Half the room was cordoned off for conditioning circuits: the obstacle course for swift short steps; the jump rope; the push-up platform; the inclined sit-up bench; the punching bag; the wrist weights. The drilling never stopped.

But she was smiling.

I know what it is to be pushed. I’ve trained the lightswitch rage inside me. But a smile—that was a new lesson. It was something like grace. It said, to me, the fight was more than just about surviving.

Then, weeks later when I mentioned it to her, she said: “The truth?

The smile’s just a lie, a ruse. When someone’s out to break you, just act happy and no matter what happens they’ll get no satisfaction. You don’t have to believe your own smile.”

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3.

We practiced a Japanese martial art, but boxing blew into town like a stranger from the city. Here is a map of that world: Martial arts is theory. You’re just kicking and punching the air.

The only real simulation of a fight—including gouged eyes and crushed tracheas—is a fight. Pick a madman on the street and hand him a knife.

Short of that, there is boxing.

We were not a dojo that taught the sixth sense of danger evasion.

We taught you to get hit, wake up, and fight back.

In the martial arts, if you don’t train as though your life depends on it, you might as well be dancing. How you fight is how you die is how you live.

Quitting was the only sin, the grand treason.

We boxed as martial artists. This meant a low, wide stance, eyes focused not on the gloves but the direction and weight of the opponent’s feet. This meant throwing jabs with an exhaled susurrus of shh-shh-shh through the mouthguard, and throwing power punches with a grunt, a yell, a guttural kiai.

This meant we were unconcerned with winning; more important was not losing. What mattered was integrity, honor, respect. We were often told this story of the Judo champion:

A reporter stayed for the end of a Judo tournament and interviewed each of the three winners about his strategy. The bronze medalist said, “I begin training when the sun rises, and do not rest until it sets.” The silver medalist said, “I challenge and fight the best men of every style.

When I conquer one, I go on to the next until I’ve mastered all styles.”

But the gold medalist was not to be found. The reporter tracked him down and found him at his home, with his daughter on his shoulders.

They played joyously. The reporter requested a moment with him, then asked how he’d prepared for the tournament.

He said, “I pay my debts. I visit my relatives and pray to my ancestors. I put my house in order, and I wash myself and my clothes so if I die my sensei will not be shamed.”

My own sensei, who was just a few years older than me, told me once that she would’ve been a kindergarten teacher had she not become a martial artist. She batted her eyes at nobody, and when men entered the dojo to hit on her, she deflated them by responding with respect.

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They would say, “Damn! You fine, girl.”

And Sensei would say, with her feet firmly planted, with the muscles in her legs and back holding her upright, no part of her body slouched or unaware of itself, “What can I help you with, sir?”

Or they would say, “Why don’t you give me a private lesson sometime, baby?”

And she would say, “Would you like a business card? Give us a call and we’ll set you up with an instructor. Thanks for your interest.

Excuse me, I’m going to continue teaching my student now.”

It was a kind farce of innocence. Always with a smile. She taught me that our only power is self-control. She taught me to possess every inch of myself: control your body, control your mind, control your life, then control your destiny. Each one just another costume, just another layer.

Sensei wanted me to box to prepare me for my black belt and to plough a new path behind hers, but I could never satisfy her. The Hurricane wanted me to box because she had chosen the art and owned it, but I was terrified of her.

I loved and hated boxing. I still do.

I love the presence, the impulsive clarity, that a fight demands.

The mind speeds up until no room is left for language. The sensation approaches the freefall of skydiving, that maximum velocity that feels like floating, that perilous peace.

Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel: “Far from always wanting to forget [their existence, men] suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to possess it completely enough, estranged citizens of the world, exiled from their own country. Except for vivid moments of fulfillment, all reality is for them incomplete.” He was writing about novels. But he was an amateur middleweight, too; he boxed. He understood that once you’re in that vivid moment, time loses its linear narrative, because presence doesn’t plod forward from plot point to plot point but, like a lyric, stays in one place and rises in intensity. All you see are gloves, cadences, openings.

The diet at its best was two slices of pizza an hour and a half before a fight or workout—for the carb rush. The cheese had to be chewed thoroughly or it would churn the stomach.

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Fruit was acceptable. Boiled vegetables were acceptable. No sauce, no oil, no salt, no bread, no rice. Weeks of this.

I hated trading blows with friends, and trading blows with strangers. There is no dignity in violence. I hated the entrapment, the dancing around with bound and padded hands, the fight I volunteered for, the fight that never resolves, the fight I wasn’t permitted to quit.

And I hated sucking spit from my mouthguard. Wearing someone else’s sweaty headgear and pressing that damp foam against my forehead, wearing old gloves that left a sandy residue on my fingers.

Getting hit in the eye and losing my place in the moment, getting phased out of it. I hated getting hit.

Once, I was called in to the dojo to spar with a woman in the martial arts track who had no interest in boxing, a woman with a toddler son. She was taking a belt exam and had to spend two minutes sparring in the ring. The bell clanged. I charged in and winded her with a shot to the solar plexus. Her hands came down and I recognized her terror, a shrinking in the eyes. I stood square with her and pounded away at her face, one-two, one-two, for thirty seconds as I’d been instructed. Then I backed off to let the judges, her friends, her family, see if she’d fight back.

This went against all my training. Never slow down, never drop your guard. Never think about the way your friends or family see you.

Keep the angry face on, but don’t get angry. If you don’t make it count on the mat, you won’t make it count on the street. Don’t talk in the ring. Leave your feelings outside.

But respect and honor in the ring are fictions, necessary lies. I presented my forehead to her with my guards down by my chin. She kept her eyes down. Her punches barely reached me. I couldn’t just stand there, so I jabbed at her body with slow, kneady punches, and it hurt me to see how much she flinched.

The judges awarded her the belt. I never saw her again.

I thought about my own mother, who’d brought me to this country and raised me alone with quiet ferocity. I thought about the lightswitch rage, how it has to be turned on for the fight to be real, Crab Orchard Review

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Otherwise you’re just throwing punches at yourself in a mirror in a beautiful, small room.

One night when I was eleven—barely a white belt—my mother stood at a bus stop in Oakland, where she’d just tucked my grandmother in to sleep, in the area where my aunts have been robbed and beaten more than once. Three teenagers surrounded her and demanded money. She had none, she tried to explain in her stilted, high-pitched English. She only had a bus pass and dinner’s leftovers in her grocery bag. They didn’t believe her. They grabbed the bag and started patting her down. One reached into her bra. She ran. She ran, screaming for help.

I’ve been angry since I was young, and my rage for those boys has no switch. I didn’t handle it as well as my mother when she told me what had happened. I didn’t carry away a lesson. I still replay that night in my memory and try to fill the blanks. Did they laugh? Which language did she scream in?

4.

It’s possible I joined the martial arts looking for some kind of father figure, and instead fell in love with strong women who understood the nature of power and violence more than I ever will, women for whom the lightswitch rage is a mysterious blues, an exaltation after loss.

I was nearing my black belt when I had a dream about Sensei. In it, she bowed and handed me her black belt. After I tied the belt around my waist she stepped forward to hug me twice: she wrapped her arms around me, almost let go, then pulled me closer. Then another of her students took me away. He walked me to a copse of trees and said, “Why does the monkey hide his loneliness?”

In high school, I sometimes ditched classes to practice at the dojo in its quieter hours. Sometimes I vacuumed the mat or cleaned the windows. I was asked more and more often to lead group classes or teach lessons when schedules were hectic. I repeated the language I’d learned—power equals speed plus lock—though nothing is retold without being reclaimed. Sensei’s sensei (before he became The Hurricane’s coach) had built his style on primal basics: saving one’s life by beating an attacker to death with a rock. Sensei was half his size, so she built her style on decisive basics instead: assassin-like precision, relaxation until the point of contact.

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And I built mine on the illusory conviction of speed. The trick is in the stancework: stay low, keep your feet moving, pretend to know exactly where you’re going. Spiritual basics: put your faith in stories, in lineage, in a fight larger than yourself.

But that was a box I built, another ring I’d ducked into and couldn’t leave. A closed religion. My image of Sensei slowly merged with my image of an ideal, until the person herself was completely displaced by myth. She became my Beatrice.

When I graduated from high school, she said she’d come to the ceremony, then didn’t. Because of the hierarchy to our relationship, I never could ask why. I went to Stanford for college, far enough to move out but close enough to return for training on weekends. Sometimes I’d come off my three-hour sequence of Caltrain, BART, and bus, to find that Sensei had forgotten I was coming back.

By my junior year in college, I was asked to teach whenever I came home, and I came home less and less. I developed tendonitis of the wrist from a number of mistakes, including bad push-ups and training with weapons heavier than I was ready for. Once, I dislocated my shoulder while practicing for a demonstration. When I told Sensei I couldn’t hold a broadsword in my right hand, she told me to relearn it in my left. The show must go on, the river keeps flowing.

Later that year, Sensei and I leaned against the fence of a restaurant near the dojo, both of us facing the street, our arms and ankles crossed. The Hurricane and her coach were inside, waiting to order. A policeman wrote a parking ticket for my car while I named my reasons for quitting, for burning a bridge. I’d been with Sensei ten years.

The violence was getting to me, I said. Stagnation, I said. Money, politics, neglect. Masks. Restlessness. Fear of success.

But no reason for quitting can absolve the quitting. It doesn’t matter why. What would bother me later was not knowing what I’d given up on. Myself? My training? My relationship with Sensei? These distinctions were more subtle than I’d thought. I would spend years unstitching myself and my martial art from her. I still don’t know if all I am is unpaid debt.

Sensei told me then that she had three options. One was to plead with me to stay, which she would never do. Another was to force me to stay, which would be unfruitful. The last was to let me go, to let me learn from my mistakes.

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We agreed she would always be my sensei, whatever that meant.

She told me not to come back begging to return, but with something to show for myself.

I nodded and tensed my jaw. She said she still trusted me.

It broke my heart.

5.

A couple years passed and I got older. I spent six months abroad in China and began to learn Tai Chi, a martial art without aggression in its execution. I took several trips to New York and spent more than one homeless night ghosting the subway lines. I studied in England, caroused in Dublin, was depressed in Italy.

What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, but I still have tendonitis and a bad shoulder. My right middle knuckle was flattened by a board I broke at a bad angle. Between my first two knuckles on the left I have a scar from sparring with handwraps but no gloves, which got out of hand and became a game of Bloody Knuckles. When I stub my toe on a desk, I get angry at the desk.

My last year at Stanford, I discovered Frost Amphitheater, a derelict outdoor stage at the edge of campus, surrounded densely by trees and a seven-foot fence. Way before my time, The Grateful Dead had performed there. So had Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and Ray Charles.

Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington…

But now it was used for conferences, once a year at the very most.

I usually snuck in at night, when the moon pulled tree shadows like dark bodies across the stage. The automated sprinklers, the wind through the brush, and the creatures stalking branches all added to the howl of nature’s chaos-noise. Raccoons and skunks kept their distance from me. One night early in the year, I brought a sleeping bag and camped out on the stage.

I brought girls out there, sometimes at midnight to spook them into romance, sometimes in the late afternoon when we could sit and watch the trees in the sunset. My roommates and I used the space when we learned to firebreathe, whistling lamp oil over torch flames.

On restless nights I went alone with a skateboard, the severe grind and clap of which never bothered the animals.

One afternoon I brought a classmate there to catch her up on Tai Chi lessons from the university club. I brought a broom and we began 150 u Crab Orchard Review

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I started going more often, alone, early in the morning or late at night, to practice Tai Chi and—before I knew it—my martial art, and then my boxing. No gloves, no mouthpiece, no sweaty headgear. No lineage, no duty. Just the pulse and impulse of the punch and the clear shh-shh of my breath.

That evening outside the restaurant, which afterward felt less like quitting and more like breaking up, Sensei had said that she not only had a strong relationship with herself, but she believed in her martial art.

She’d always told me, “The arts teach you how to live with yourself.”

Maybe I was never practicing self-defense. Just self-sufficiency, and a long look into someone else’s warm window. Maybe I was learning a way to be more alone, and this is really an essay about loneliness.

By the time security banned me with a fine for trespassing, the amphitheater had become my sacred space. My last day there, I went in the afternoon in broad daylight, climbing the fence with a cloth-bound Tai Chi sword strapped to my back. A peeping Samaritan called the police to report that someone had come with a rifle to shoot squirrels.

When the police came, they spread out and crept in, flanking my stage from the corner entrances, each one’s palm resting on a pistol grip. My unsharpened sword was on the ground. And me, I was shirtless and shadowboxing, in the zone, in a space of breath and movement, constant, untouchable, like the sun’s great eye rolling imperceptibly on.

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Abby Travis They Say They say that in the end she lost her mind completely. That

the pain became so extreme she wasn’t herself any longer. That she got mean. That she started attacking the people who were trying to save her—her owner Janet, the vet, the vet tech, and everyone else there at the barn that night who’d gathered around because they’d never seen a horse this sick before.

They say they first knew something was wrong when they saw her standing lethargically in the back of the pasture, and that, because she bit at her sides and kicked at her own stomach, they knew it was colic.

They say they knew it was worse than the mild upset stomach she got anytime the weather changed suddenly, because this time she shied away from their outstretched hands and ran when Janet went to see what was wrong. Tango never ran away from Janet.

They say that as soon as the vets arrived—after they cornered her in the pasture and after Janet wrestled a halter onto Tango’s head—they pumped her as full of drugs as they could without risking permanent damage to her stomach, kidneys, and liver. That, when the medication failed to ease Tango’s pain, they took her into the arena and got her walking, because walking was the only thing that would keep her from laying down and thrashing on the ground, which would only make the colic worse. That they tried tubing fluids and oil into her stomach to clear any obstructions in her digestive system—if that’s even what the problem was, because with colic, you just never know. That, when this did nothing, the only remaining option was surgery. But to have surgery, she would need to be calm enough to stand in a trailer for the almost hour-long drive to the nearest veterinary hospital.

They say that this is when she began kicking at them with her hind legs and rearing and striking at them with her front legs. And then came the biting—the kind of biting that draws blood. Biting first at them, and then at herself. That she was so crazed there was no way they could get her into a trailer, that even if they could, she would tear

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Abby Travis it apart, that she would kill herself struggling against the metal walls that held her. That, just before they made the final decision, she started throwing herself down onto the ground, that she refused to stand up on her legs any longer. That she rolled and moaned and contorted her body from the pain. They say that after whole minutes of uncontrollable thrashing, sometimes she would stop and just lie there, flat out on her side, and breathe. And then she’d groan, and start the rolling again.

That they resorted to the whip to get her to her feet again—striking her out of mercy, out of desperation. They say Tango had moments of clarity when she stopped fighting against herself and struggled to her feet, her legs splayed wide and shaking like a foal’s, only to throw herself down on the ground again a moment later and start the rolling all over again and again and again.

That, once she’d thrown her seizing body down for what they realized was the final time, she started slamming her head into the ground. That she beat her own face into the sand with such force that it bled.

I imagine she’d worked herself into such a frenzied sweat that the sand coated onto her sides and neck and clotted in the blood on her face, around her eyes, and in her nostrils. They say there was nothing anyone could do to make her stop. And that, in the end—less than an hour after they had found her sick—her owner, my friend Janet, stepped back and nodded, and the vets went running to their truck for the syringes.

Janet called to tell me what had happened immediately after the vets left. In the following weeks and months, I heard the story repeated by the vets and many others who were at the barn that night and now, every time I think about Tango, I cannot shake their voices from my head. My own voice joins the chorus too, trying to explain to friends and family how a stomachache can drive a horse into a frenzy.

Even though Tango had never officially been mine, even though I’d only seen her on brief visits home over the past several years, I was the first person Janet told, because we still thought of Tango as part my horse, too. I’d trained and ridden Tango through high school and college, and Janet’s urging and Tango’s personality were what kept me riding horses when all I wanted to do was give up on a sport I was only then beginning to question.

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Abby Travis down to her skin, and find the vein to first administer the sedatives, and then the final series of injections that would kill her as kindly as possible.

I contrast these images of Tango’s final moments with how I most vividly remember her, forever waiting at the fence line, the one knee crooked and swollen from early arthritis, her bay coat flecked with red paint as she strained against the clanging metal gate, bobbing her head up and down, whinnying for our attention. Hurry, hurry, she seemed to be saying. I’m ready, I’m waiting. Pick me, pick me, pick me. She would stand with one front leg curled up under her body, the joints folded tight as she rocked the raised leg forward and back, begging.

I remember how, when we walked down the long driveway to her pasture, Janet or I could call to Tango and, even when she was way out in the field, she’d always gallop to beat us to the gate. Or, if she saw me or Janet walking down the driveway while we were doing chores, she’d run to the gate and wait—just in case we were coming for her but hadn’t hollered her name yet.

Once the arthritis in Tango’s crooked knee got too bad and it even stopped looking like a knee, we chose to retire her. But she was only thirteen years old (which is, by average standards, at least seven years too early). I wonder sometimes if she didn’t understand why she’d been retired, or why we didn’t pick her as often as we used to once we stopped riding her. I can’t help but wonder if the stress and confusion of retirement was the reason Tango started to colic more and more frequently after she stopped working After Janet told me what had happened, she said the sentences that still make me stop still:

“She loved her job so much. You know she hated retirement.”

And, later in our conversation: “She loved you.”

No matter how much I want to believe that Tango was waiting for me during all those hours at the gate, those sentences—echoed too by the saying voices of friends and witnesses—nevertheless make me raise my eyebrows in skepticism and question my own beliefs about riding and training horses.

Bound up in those words are the assumptions that many horse owners make without even thinking: that a horse can understand it has a job, that a horse is capable of love—love not only toward a human, but also toward performing a task it has been trained and bred to do; that a horse has a memory capable of comprehending that it used to do one thing, and no longer does it; that a horse is capable of 154 u Crab Orchard Review

Abby Travis something like nostalgia. That a horse is capable of self-reflecting in the way humans do.

Can we say that horses emote love? Or merely express pleasure?

And what about the people-pleasers? Some horses are eager to work with people, while others are resistant. How much of this behavior is intrinsic, like evolution and breeding; and how much of this is trained, a learned response? Where does love come in? What do we assume, and what can we know?

I wonder why it matters to me whether or not Tango loved.

That word, love, is so human, and it concerns me because the language of human emotions dominates what we say about how animals can and cannot experience. I hesitate to use the word love because it carries so much weight. If a horse can love, what else can it feel? What is the feeling of love breaking?

In his essay “An Animal’s Place,” acclaimed cultural and environmental critic Michael Pollan attends to the most common discussion surrounding debates about our moral obligation toward animal treatment, evaluating their emotions based on an ability to feel and respond to pain. Paraphrasing Daniel C. Dennett, an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, Pollan says, “we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.”

Some say that the problem of describing animals in the language of humanness is how then human-centric that way of saying becomes.

That using words carrying specific human connotations skews our perceptions of animals and can actually prevent us from treating animals as beings in their own right. But at the same time, some say that it is important to determine whether an animal’s ability to feel emotion means an animal is also capable of self-reflection. That animals with a greater awareness (like dolphins and primates) should be treated differently from those less emotive (like chickens, cattle, and insects). Some require hard scientific evidence, and some say that looking in an animal’s eyes is all the evidence anyone should require.

Because of what Janet and the others have told me about that night, I can say that in the moments preceding her euthanasia, what Tango felt was very much real pain. That much is obvious. But was she suffering as Dennett defines it? Does it matter if Tango was humbled Crab Orchard Review

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Abby Travis before the worst pain she would ever experience? I wonder what was going on in her head when she started attacking Janet, the other person we all say Tango loved. I will forever wonder if she beat her head into the ground in an effort to beg her keepers that she just be allowed to die already.

I also wonder about the way Tango would run to the gate when I wanted to ride her, and like the voices, I cannot shake from my mind the image of Tango waiting at the gate during the four years after she was retired. What was she waiting for?

Consider this: Tango did not wait at the gate for hours when she was in regular work. She would come when she was called, but she didn’t stand alone at the gate staring at the barn or the driveway while the other horses ventured out onto the acres of rich pasture. When she was still being ridden—mostly by me and Janet, but occasionally by others—Tango would actually run away from certain riders. But once we all stopped riding her, she began her endless wait.

I want to believe that, left alone and given less attention because she was retired, Tango wanted to be ridden and didn’t understand why no one would ride her anymore. I have been riding and training horses for over half my life. To keep doing this, I have to believe that, on some level, horses enjoy being ridden. I want to, but hesitate to say that Tango loved and missed working and training and competing. I wonder if, in her retirement, could Tango have wondered and worried herself into that final colic?

Tango waiting at the gate wasn’t the picture of stereotypical depression, but her bobbing head, that front leg curled impossibly tight under her belly, the red paint on her chest—Janet and the others started calling her neurotic. I want to believe that Tango loved being ridden, but I also know that I taught her to expect it. Could taking that away from Tango have stressed her to the point of that final colic?

In these moments of guilt, I wonder if I can continue to ride horses at all.

If I am to continue riding, I must accept that part of me needs to believe that Tango loved her job.

Tango, we say, was a bit of an attention-hog. She loved having an audience. She was cheeky and playful. If I didn’t ask her to do something in the way she wanted to be asked (if I used too much pressure on the reins, or squeezed too tightly with my calves, or didn’t praise her often enough), she’d let me know by stopping dead in her 156 u Crab Orchard Review

Abby Travis tracks and would protest no by tossing her head straight up in the air.

But of all the horses I’ve ridden, none have been so focused, so driven to succeed and please her rider as Tango. When she was working and jumping, nothing could break her concentration. And she never let on if she was in pain. She showed signs of arthritis, but only superficially: no horse should have golf ball-sized pockets of fluid and calcification growing around the joint of a knee. Even the vets said that no horse with such extreme arthritis could possibly be pain-free. And yet, Tango rarely took a short or lame step in her life—not before retirement, and not after it, so we created the narrative that, at just thirteen years old when she was retired, she was still young beyond the limitations of her body. She did not fit the picture of an old, worn out animal ready to live the last of her days as a shaggy lawn ornament. Tango retired with the body and stamina and mind of an athlete—all except for her front knees. All I needed was to look into her eyes—bright, curious, and eager. The visual contradiction made projecting a human-based narrative onto Tango easier, one that we could use to explain why she seemed frustrated, stuck standing at the gate while we moved on, rode other horses, and moved away.

But Tango was really a sort of glorified pet. A hobby. Nonessential, some might say, in comparison to necessary animals used for consumption or transportation or plowing fields. Like the overworked horses pulling overloaded omnibuses and street cars during Boston’s 1860s, necessary animals bred for the purposes of consumption are still—with few exceptions—often treated as objects or machines rather than living, feeling beings. Although Pollan uses the perhaps dated context of Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation to connect his discussion of animals and pain to the problematic treatment of the world’s remaining necessary animals, he does hit upon a central contradiction of the animal welfare discussion: that those who work with animals regularly for hobby or as pets see them in a different light from those who rely on using animals for production. Even those of us who eat meat are a long distance from the farm. Meat products are often packaged in such a way that makes it easy for us to ignore how our food reaches the table, and that our food was once living, breathing, and walking around. The way we encounter animals on a daily basis drastically affects the way we look upon them.

Referencing moral philosophies espoused by René Descartes, Pollan writes, “To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological Crab Orchard Review

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Abby Travis sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.” Out of our culturally instilled need and historical reliance on the less attractive uses of animals, many—workers and consumers alike— willingly participate in this glaringly obvious contradiction. Many of us do not want to see how our steak and chicken and pork arrive at our plates—we do not want to see the cages, and we certainly do not want to see the slaughterhouses because we will see pain, and we will see a degree of suffering.

Long before the 21st century, when animal personhood and animal rights debates began growing louder, those who actually worked with and trained animals for necessary purposes recognized the value of being sensitive to their animals’ emotions. In Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, British historian Keith Thomas cites an eighteenth-century writer as saying that “the conventional methods of training dogs and horses would have been absurd if the animals had been machines, lacking understanding.” Thomas describes how professional horse-breakers depicted the character of their charges, using anthropomorphic adjectives like “stubborn,” “stupid,” “bright,” and “willing,” as well as having “courage” and “generosity.” However, rather than viewing these emotions as a sort of intellectual construct, this anthropomorphism is described more as a tool for training purposes. A benefit, and not an obligation. In Elizabethan times, too, Thomas explains, animals and their keepers often slept under the same roof—because such an intimate relationship with each individual animal was said to benefit both the productivity of the animal and the owner: “Shepherds knew the faces of their sheep as well as those of their neighbors, and some farmers could trace stolen cattle by distinguishing their hoof prints.”

But, despite this seeming step toward the human approach, a suspension of disbelief still occurred when convenient: the same animals that were personified were still sometimes kept in quarters far worse than today’s confines, and were also fattened and bled and baited in methods long outlawed for their cruelty. It wasn’t even until the 1900s that necessary working animals were given a break, when organizations like the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals began establishing programs like Nevins Farm, 158 u Crab Orchard Review

Abby Travis where city horses used by rail companies could vacation for a month at a time when they needed rest.

In making sense out of these contradictions, Thomas says: “It was not these necessary animals, but the unnecessary ones, hounds and lapdogs in particular, which received the real affection and the highest status”—and, therefore, the kindest, most merciful treatment. Although Thomas refers specifically to dogs, these words ring startlingly true for horses as well. Today, few horses are used for truly necessary purposes—the few remaining working police horses could be easily replaced, and pleasure horses abound as pets. Some live at boarding facilities, as Tango did, and some live on hobby farms and in back yards. The glaring exception to all this is in how some competition and race horses (all unnecessary) are trained—their well being is often compromised for the sake of profit and short-term high levels of success. But to the trainers, these horses are the necessary means to their livelihood, just as cab horses were to their cabbies.

Sometimes the suspension of disbelief Pollan and Thomas mention occurs out of ignorance today, when we don’t know any better and follow the same method of training used by those who came before us.

But, sometimes it happens when the drive for success leads to tunnel vision, compromising the horse for the sake of profit, of success, or to keep a client satisfied. In that case, we ignore the truth, or deceive ourselves in saying that there is no other option, or we refuse to see what a horse is attempting to communicate.

Perhaps it is through human-based descriptions of personality that we can better understand horses, but this still doesn’t satisfy me.

I am all too aware of how anthropomorphism can go too far when characterizing the personality of horses. We called Express, the horse I owned and rode before Tango, when I was fifteen, a cantankerous red-headed girl. A fiery chestnut color with a mane that stood up like a mohawk and refused to lay flat, Express was—to put it gently— opinionated. At feeding time, she would beat her front legs against the stall door and would rattle her bucket in its holder. She would scrape her teeth against the metal grating of her stall partition until the wear on her teeth became noticeable to the unpracticed eye. When I rode her in the arena, Express would pin her ears and try to bite at other horses as they passed us. And as my then-instructor and I brought Express up the levels of training—our goal was to compete at the national level—we became accustomed to waiting out Express’s Crab Orchard Review

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Abby Travis phases of what we interpreted as crankiness. Whenever our training became more demanding, she’d do nothing but buck and rear and fight against me every ride. We said she had a bad work ethic, that she was lazy, that she just didn’t want to have to work harder. But the truth we eventually discovered was that she had a condition called Kissing Spine, with five overriding vertebrae in her back located just underneath where the back of the saddle sat. Any time the muscles of Express’s back tensed, any time her muscles got sore or fatigued from our trying to train her too quickly, any time she even rose her head too quickly, the vertebrae in her back would pinch.

Is it going too far to say that Express’s (mis)behavior when under saddle was actually her attempt to communicate very real pain, and her (mis)behavior in the stall an expression of stress and very real dread at being ridden yet again?

After we found out what was truly going on with Express, I fell apart. I didn’t trust my trainer, and I didn’t trust myself or my ability to read horses. I gave Express time off from work, tried to give her time to forget all the pain—suffering?—my bad riding had caused. But even after more than a year of rehabilitation and trying to teach her to relax with a person on her back, I realized I’d caused too much psychological damage. Even though Express trusted me more than anyone else, she didn’t trust me enough to let me ride her.

Horseback riding is, inevitably and irreconcilably, a self-serving act that will, no matter how good one’s intentions are, cause some degree of stress and wear-and-tear on the horse’s body. Express was the most naturally talented and athletic horse I’ve ever ridden. But all that was lost because I failed to see her behavior for what it was.

I didn’t set out to take advantage of Express, and I didn’t intend to hurt her. But intentions are beside the point, and I can’t ignore the unintended consequences of riding and training horses. The average working horse will eventually develop arthritis and will experience wear-and-tear on its body, sped by the repetitive nature of riding in circles in an arena and carrying the weight of a rider. I fear that, in our inadequacy, we bounce between extremes, and too few arrive at a happy medium. At the extremes—both damaging—we suspend disbelief and use animals to our heart’s content with little concern for ethics, or we anthropomorphize so much that we see only what we want to see. In When Elephant’s Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffry Moussaif Masson and Susan McCarthy relay American author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s words: “Our kind may be able to bully 160 u Crab Orchard Review

Abby Travis other species not because we are good at communication but because we aren’t.”

Anthropomorphism as a tool—at least as a tool of interpretation— is dangerous and unwieldy. After I realized what I had done to Express, I wanted to stop riding. I wanted to quit the sport that had made me so driven to win at competitions that I failed to understand what in retrospect seemed like very obvious signs.

I was at the barn late one night taking care of Express—just brushing her, just spending time with her, trying to find a way to connect to her again—when Janet approached me with a halter and lead rope in hand. “Go get Tango and ride her,” she said. “Someone needs to ride her. She spends all day in the pasture just getting fat.

That’s not good for her.”

Tango didn’t know much when I first started riding her. She knew the basics of go, stop, turn left, turn right, and not much else. I didn’t expect anything out of Tango, and I didn’t put any pressure on her to be the best at anything. But the more I worked with her, the better and better we got along. Before I tried doing any serious training with her in the arena, I took her swimming in the lake and rode her through the woods and in the fields behind the barn. Tango helped me remember how to ride a horse for the pure enjoyment of it. Once I started competing her, I learned that the best way to keep her mind fresh and happy was to ride her out on the trail or in one of the fields and just let her gallop. On the trail that led to the quarter-mile hill, the best place for a good run, Tango would transform from plodding with her head hanging low to the animated jigging of a horse coiled with endless energy. When I’d take her on these gallops bareback, with no saddle between me and her, I could feel her heart beating in anticipation. Because the trail wound sharply around ruts and fallen trees, I’d have to hold her back until we reached the very bottom of the hill. And then, I’d simply let a little slack into the reins, and she’d leap forward, stretching low to the ground and propelling herself with such force that clods of dirt would fly out behind us. The feel of galloping up that hill with Tango felt like nothing short of the freedom of flying.

Even though I believe it, I still feel as though I’m impressing my own views on Tango when I say that she loved being ridden. Whether or not Tango loved galloping and jumping and competing are things I will never know for certain, and I cannot assume what I cannot know.

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Abby Travis what she did, how many horses hate what we train them to do? And how many horses protest when they are unhappy, but aren’t heard?

I do agree with Pollan’s warning that “As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on them what the same experience would feel like to us”— that freedom of flying—but empathy enables me to say: as a rider and horse owner, it’s my responsibility to be sure that no horse I care for should have to endure any degree of pain—or suffering—if it can be avoided. Yes, Tango loved to gallop and jump. But, as her rider, isn’t it also my responsibility to look out for her future? When Express was no longer of use to me, I sold her. Even though I was only eighteen years old and didn’t know much better, I’m not at all proud of that decision.

Or with Tango, the knee was already misshapen at age eight, when Janet got her, a year before I started riding her. I wonder sometimes if I hadn’t trained and competed her so much for even the short couple of years, if we’d taken it easy and hadn’t jumped as big or galloped as fast, if the arthritis would have been slower to develop, and if she could have had a few more years of easy riding in her. We always knew the knee would be an issue, and we assumed we’d have to put her down when the arthritis made daily life too uncomfortable for her. But she didn’t last long in retirement, and it was the colic that got her. How could I have balanced riding Tango with looking out for her long-term physical and psychological health? The questions build and build, and the voices of every side of every facet of every argument build and echo and I cannot shake them from my conscience.

The first time I saw a horse euthanized, we walked Buddy, the aged gray gelding, out to the little grove of woods where the most special horses on the farm were buried. He was old—older than twenty—and no longer able to keep weight on, so his hips and ribs flagged out beneath his coat. He’d lost more and more weight, and the vets finally said it was time. His body was beginning to fail, and he was too weak to live comfortably from day to day. Even still, as we walked slowly down to the grove, Buddy stepping a little gingerly, he carried his head high. A hole had already been dug, and the only other eyesores were the tractor in the distance and the two parallel chains laid out on the ground before us. In total, there was one vet—Bruce— and one vet tech—Michelle—present, plus the horse’s owner, Heather, and four supporting friends, myself included. As the first heavy sedative took effect, Bruce wrapped his hands around the sides of 162 u Crab Orchard Review

Abby Travis Buddy’s halter and guided him down to the ground, making sure that he landed on the chains, which would be used to raise the body up and then lower it into the hole. Once Buddy was lying down, we were able to gather around. Buddy’s head rested in Heather and Jessica’s laps.

The rest of us took our places around him, patting and talking to him as Bruce administered the final injections. It was, by all accounts, the most peaceful, most carefully planned death we could have witnessed.

Near the end of our conversation on the day of Tango’s death, Janet—who has cared for horses for over twenty-five years and has seen many bloody and fatal accidents—said, “I never want to see a horse in that much pain again. If I had known she would die that way, I would have let her go a long, long time ago.”

As in, when Tango’s knee stopped looking like a knee, when we retired her? Or as soon as she was born, when they saw that crooked leg, and could imagine what kind of problems it might cause? Or after it became clear that Tango was a chronic colicker? Because if vets know one thing about colic, it’s that if a horse colicks once, it’s forever prone to colicking again and again. It’s a natural impulse to want to protect the beings we love from pain and suffering. Pollan writes, “The one allimportant interest we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.”

Just as no one can predict the fatal car crash, no one could have predicted Tango’s final colic. We often expect at least equally humane deaths for animals as we do for humans. In some cases, we’re actually swifter to choose death for our animals. We’re able to hold on to people through life support, and sometimes delay death for weeks or months or years. What I can be glad of is that the custodians of horses must be practical about which animals they attempt to save, even if for no other reasons than logistics and expense. Unlike a human, or even a dog or cat, horses will rarely tolerate a cast on a broken leg, and attempting to stabilize and contain a horse restricted from movement is not feasible for the average horse owner. Even the most basic colic surgery costs thousands of dollars, and recovery and life after colic surgery is not at all easy. And unlike a dog or cat, at the end of the day, we just can’t carry our horses up and down the stairs, no matter how badly we want to justify keeping them with us a little longer.

I’ve always hesitated at the word “use” when I talk about what I do with my horses. I don’t like the implications of that word—that I sacrifice the horse for my own enjoyment, that no matter what I do, I will in some way hurt the animal in ways I can only begin to fathom.

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Abby Travis I am the one saddling, bridling, and riding the domesticated horse.

These are the hard facts of my relationship with horses. But, I have to admit, that it’s the core truth of any horse-rider situation, any humananimal relationship.

Amongst the voices circling and theorizing, I stop once more. I look up and find myself caught in the realization of a fact as inevitable as death. A fact that is—for me—the largest, most irreconcilable contradiction of them all: The things we love are hurt by the way we love them.

It is from this place that we must begin again by asking: How, then, must we proceed?

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Christian Teresi For the Kingdom to Be Well Plaques around the zoo claim that during the siege the residents did not eat the animals.

After all the birds, rats, and pets were gone, there was warmth Over the gnawing sound the body makes when no longer Fooled by cakes of water, sawdust, and imagination. They looked Skyward at the useless creatures made of stars. Bright rockets Screamed, splintered bone, some escaped to somewhere still Cut too close, and closer still. There was where the saw caught, Goes tough, then continued writhing through the bone. There was What little drink and humor was left to share. The zookeeper gave, Butchered the wonderful mammals whose bellies ached more For unbound grasslands, and ached for the minutes between birth And walking when their mothers licked their slick bodies to get back Some nourishment they’d given. They devoured what they had Cared for sometimes. Joy was unworkable, so they consumed it With hours spent neglecting funerals. No longer was there use For the sunken spectacle of exposed ribs, and they laughed skyward At the creatures made of stars. Beasts ate other beasts, and flowers For occasions became dreamlike. The bricks and beams of rubble Were hymns. Out of the clicking sound of winter were hymns.

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Daniel Nathan Terry There Is No Way There is no way to un-see the dead doe, her body stretched out below the split rail fence of the long-abandoned gas station along the highway. She is beautiful in the way empty buildings caught in the right light can be. Beautiful with dandelions gone to seed between her folded, unbroken forelegs.

Beautiful, the cold sun rising, bright and bloodless behind each white gone-flower. For a moment, before the wind rises, grace returns to all fragile halos. There is no way to see these clouds of light and not see the pillow you once slept on beside me; each night its down receiving your wishes and dreads, each small vane and rachis billowing in the cotton sheath taking you in like black ink into paper as it lies beneath the pen.

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Daniel Nathan Terry

The Boy and the Moth Blue night and the hammer of the sphinx moth’s wings as it chisels through heavy air,

as it tunnels up and into the throat of the spine-white bloom of the angel’s trumpet. Or is this upward thrust and percussion of need closer to the snap shuffle of a deck of cards, hands of a gambler who is finally winning?

No. It is the remembered rhythmic flick of the red jack of hearts clipped to the swift spoke of a bike ridden by a boy who is ready to go farther than ever before, the dark man’s house only a few more hundred pumps of thigh and bone away, now. Whatever I’ve done, whatever I’ll do, though some find it beautiful and some will recoil, I’ve always done what I had to do.

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Qiana Towns Voyeurism Many […] live in a dream world of beautiful backgrounds.

It wouldn’t hurt them to get a taste of reality to wake them up.

—Weegee I speak forcefully to the image: If God is a woman of her word, let me look once and never again.

Here in the safety of the future, I stare at a woman’s broken body. Her ruby red nails and rouged lips hold my eyes until I begin to chuckle at her misfortune. It is a kind of laugh reserved for awful instances— broken falls, cries of desperation.

Were it not for her severed limb, snapped and pointed straight toward heaven, one might mistake her for an actress penned between a dream and paycheck.

The caption says she is Adela Legarretta Rivas, struck by a Datsun as she crossed Avenida Chapultepec. Even as she lay dying or dead on a sidewalk, her beauty transcends fortune. In the distance a small sea of gawkers pause to stare as if repulsion could save a life, then look past Adela’s body into oncoming history.

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Qiana Towns Whoever said the eye can see through to the soul of man must not have owned a camera. Whoever said man cannot claim to have seen a thing until it is photographed must have been a disciple of Weegee.

If you arrive at my sickbed, confused at the state of my body, remember this: if I look alive, I must be dead. The only way to keep me here is to look.

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Eric Tran Our Own Little Gods My wife and I, we prayed our own little gods into the world.

First came the gods of necessity. The god of cancer cells shrinking. The god of getting through the hurricane. We thanked them with altars of stargazer lilies. Tins of dimpled mooncakes. Jackfruit sliced down the center. As they became more numerous, we became more pious. Thank you, god of penicillin. Bless us, god of pensions. Altars spread eagle across our lawn, plates of persimmon spilled in the mulch.

Neighbors stared. But we prayed and birthed the god of selfesteem. Then came everyday gods. The gods of headaches (one of migraines, one of hangovers, one of brain freeze). The god of stubbed toes. Next day shipping. Soap scum. We had to get thrifty with offerings. Hotel matchbooks for the god of lottery scratchers. Lottery scratchers for the god of stoplights.

We became gods of finding new ways to make gods, to serve them. We became gods of neglect. To get our attention, our kids played gods. I’m the god of finishing my plate, they said.

The god of tying my shoelaces, you are the gods of nightlights.

We said, We’ve been the gods of being blind, of course, you are the gods of the commute home. All of us will become the gods of all of us and we will praise ourselves by setting free a flock of white balloons.

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Israel Wasserstein Paleontology These tracks are dinosaurs’— our guide, white teeth, a ten gallon hat and new boots—and these are human.

Note the toes. Peeking between the adults’ legs, I see two sets of prints, one inside the other, and four—I squint— no, five digits.

Four thousand two hundred ninety two years ago, give or take, the dinosaurs fled through here, as Noah’s flood drowned everything behind them. Humans, fleeing God’s wrath, ran with the dinosaurs. His face is smooth as a child’s, his hair salted.

I crouch over the prints. The great lizards were here once, and I need to believe.

I tell every adult who will listen someday I will be a paleontologist, will discover new dinosaurs. I imagine great Triceratops battling Tyrannosaurs, Apatosaurus shrieks heard by missionaries deep in African jungles.

In groups at the walls of the Texas riverbed, we cautiously chip away, dust, examine flaking rocks hoping for fossils, some ancient—perhaps six thousand years.

Sweat curls into my eyes.

The sky is wide, pale, featureless.

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Israel Wasserstein After lunch we gather in the tent.

The preacher reads to us: Genesis, Job, Revelation. We are in the last days, our gnostic truth recorded on gold leaf and ancient stone, if the World would open their ears. The crowd cries Amen, prays for this wicked generation.

Knowing the beginning, we know the end. At dusk, I stalk through the canyon: the earth is alive with the roars of monsters.

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Phillip B. Williams

Liner Notes to a Never-Composed Session for A Love Supreme Where a horn wailed loose the pericardium. Where a horn shook loose the lips around it.

Beauty in obsession: brass pulls the sound of bone from bone, the cries of bed springs from the living. Forgive the dead, moan over graves, unravel your tongues and toss them inside the casket.

Death is never-ending, ever-asking, is every place and therefore placeless, mindless phenomenon. Gowns and gowns of crows fashion the trees.

Broken moths litter the streets beneath sheer cloths of rain. Wings drop from their carcasses like a gown drops from the shoulders of a broken hanger. Lungs could outmatch a storm. Coltrane counted the moths he burned against his sax’s gleam. The hot suede of diminished wingspans.

My grandmother dead in her bedroom beneath my room. My footsteps map her death and that death moves with me, in me, a pulse hymning where remembering should be.

These sudden acquisitions more sudden than a high-stakes song. The score of a hungry murder preparing to fall.

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Phillip B. Williams

Of Shadows and Mirrors A ghost floats between my father’s ghost and me. Haunt me if you want, history, bough shadow looming through my living room window and across my neck where an umbilical cord had once claimed each yet-born breath. When I die I’ll die clutching final words on the final inhale.

If I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die, I think, as I avoid remembering the last time I saw my father yellowed and bejeweled with drug-rot and face craters where skin tried to hide in skin. The base of my family tree fumes of alcohol and smoke from still-hot circles of crack pipes. In that world between slumber and hunger I’m headless and holding two heads.

I hold both facing right, so that one’s looking away from me and the other’s looking at me. I hoist the one looking away to my shoulders. He must sense something beyond the blindness of a self that believes in trees with syringes and bones for roots. My mother’s Caesarean of me means she birthed tragedy hidden in bloody regalia, royalty scared of choking on bark broken from the husk of a decrepit man. I love him, still, despite his struggle for home-coming, to have a throne and not a grave that looks like lips folding in when rain weakens the muddy perimeter.

The darkness to fear is not the darkness earth makes of itself but what earth would tell us if it parted those lips, emptied its sweet, sweet house. My grandfather salted every threshold to keep evil from entering his house. I heard 174 u Crab Orchard Review

Phillip B. Williams that salt stinging an open wound means it’s cleaning out demons, but maybe its crystal mirrors are unwelcome, the body never wanting to see its own inner ugly, like a body inside another body strangled by its own life cord. Would that we could make any pair of eyes see us new. Musicians play for survival on every other corner in the Delmar Loop. One man leans deep into the chords, into the hollow where nylon stretches to capture his sweat, his salt, so nothing darker than the pit of the guitar can get inside or get out.

In the pit of addiction my father was almost ran over by my mother on the south side of Chicago, genetic near-blindness had him walking in the streets with only his ears and feet to tell if a bus would greet him before a Chevy’s grille. Was in a bevy of reeds by a filthy lake on the west side where I heard a whistle break from the stalks and imagined a bodiless head calling for its body.

Why leave behind a head unless it’s always led to danger or boredom, the advent of dark flirtation?

What else did my father hear in a speeding car’s screech and horn? My mother barely recognized the torn down man and he didn’t see her at all, squinting between high and death. It’s death that blinds with excess clarity, like seeing someone stripped to his essentials, a tree minus nest or leaf.

Beneath branches, hidden in sunset and a mesh of weeds, insects decipher a cat corpse as the copse goes black.

Exposed bones critique the dusk, sharp as a branch on a signless road: Where turn for the next hunger? How long until these small mouths fill?

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Corrie Williamson Umbrage for Deborah Digges Certain spring days I can conjure you hissing stone, lilac, hive. How the air must have cracked open when you died, your ready fists full of earth, and maybe it was more than the morning sun flushing the forsythia leaves that made me shiver. And maybe not. I would have been bent over a book of ruins: To build is to dwell, you said, though it’s never that simple. Lascaux, Chauvet, those caves your mind moved through like wind with their stacked beasts: horses, lions, stranger and lost things drawn atop each other, or a series of heads, webs of legs—whether herd, lineage, nightmare, you didn’t say.

Two ways to make a handprint— the prehistoric artist coats the palm and finger undersides with ochre or burnt bone, presses against stone: a positive image. For the negative, the hand is laid bare against the wall, pigment sprayed 176 u Crab Orchard Review

Corrie Williamson around it like music from a reed, the surrounding space flaring into portrait of absence. I can’t explain the wet bitterness socked in my chest that I didn’t know of you when you lived. What I would have done with the knowing doesn’t matter, but here’s news you missed: they’re saying the beasts with many painted limbs and heads would have changed by torchlight, would, cast alternately in flickering light and shadow, become sequence, become motion, could have raised and lowered a single strong neck, or heaved through stillness and raced along the wall.

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Susan R. Williamson Conjugal Fault Conjugate Faults: Patterns of conjugate faults—provided they formed together—can be related to the orientations of the principal stress axes.

It’s all in the rocks. Sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous: plutonic, volcanic.

What happens to them, happens to us.

Layer upon layer, fire, ice, pressure.

School, elementary, high, and after if you wish.

Fire can make the metamorphic rock, and hormones can make love happen. And then there are the people who fall into the traps. Sweet traps and axes of stress.

Why can I not do without you? Here’s where I live, axis of stress. The street name and house number are not clearly displayed, but the earthquakes, famine, tornado, and hurricanes, the twisters and tropical depressions show clearly on the Doppler. Bright colors red and green, yellow elemental and digital all at once.

Conjugate the verb said the French teacher in class.

Conjugal visit said the prison guard after the judge.

Conjugal fault—mine or yours. If anything, we will always find ourselves pressed against one another— until some force pries us apart.

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Cecilia Woloch Istanbul

By the roots of my hair, some god got hold of me —Sylvia Plath

It’s always this knife edge with you and sometimes I walk it as if I know how. In my flame-colored dress and my silver shoes; in my dying beauty, Istanbul. One smoky kiss and the tastes of anise and apple and honey fill my mouth. One sweaty dance and the sky turns to coin. Violins in the air above me, tambourines shimmering at my hips. The waiters are setting a fish on fire, having first doused it in indigo. And who is this woman, unveiled, in your arms? Who am I kidding that this is safe? Lifted and carried into the twilight, into the traffic of screeching gulls, into the gold-spiked, glittering breeze.

Istanbul, when do you ever sleep? You press my head against your chest and croon your mournful shepherd’s love song as if all desire is holy. It is. What to do with your heart like a pomegranate, then, but split it, eat? You keep spooning spices onto my plate. I insist that nothing’s too hot for me. I step over puddles of piss and soot, past men warming bread over coals in the street, on makeshift braziers on broken sidewalks in the shadows of sultans’ tombs. The dead in your dreams who still speak to you. I’ve come this far to hear my name unfurled through the final call to prayer. I’ve come this far to smell the sweet ash of my own life as it burns.

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Cecilia Woloch

Teta for my great-aunt Teta, it’s winter in Pittsburgh again —darkbrick city of smokestacks and soot— and we’re walking up Broadway Avenue, past billboards and vacant lots, through the slush of snow and cinders as the streetcars slur past—ghosts in our flowered babushkas and shabby coats, shopping bags weighing down our arms.

We’ve bought cans of beets, heads of cabbage, meat ground fresh that we’ll squeeze into fists, and we don’t flinch when the crew-cut kids hiss, D.P.’s, at our backs; we’re not ashamed anymore, at last, to have come from nowhere, nothing, dirt— the village you fled as a young girl, gone, the houses burned and the fields you worked into rows of green grown wild again.

Once you spooned honey into my mouth because my arms and legs were like sticks because I itched and wept and wanted, more than sweetness, to know who I was.

But you sighed, No one wants to remember that stuff— how you came to this new country, stinking of ship; how you sold bootleg hootch for cash, your own smooth flesh for a rich man’s song— the fat growing fat on the fat of the land while you buried one child in a pauper’s grave, raised two others on blood money, prayer; all your sins in a basket too heavy to lift.

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Cecilia Woloch the day you slipped in the alley and fell in the garden you’d made of ground bone, ash, under a slit of tin-washed sky.

And then you never stood up again.

I watched as you shrank in your narrow bed, blind, but you gripped my hand and sang the old song of the little bird in a tongue I still don’t understand—dark syllables fluttering just out of reach—until you were shadow, whisper, gone—your whole life a ragged story stitched into breath, unstitched again.

Teta, we’ve never been much in this world, although we were many, too many, once— the children’s children who circled your table, blowing out candles, eyes tilted like yours; our faces the same face all over again, the face of the stranger wherever we turned— my cousin the Cossack, the Gypsy, the Jew my cousin the dark Slav, my cousin the slave.

And we’ll never belong to this place where you came with your one suitcase tied with rope, with your shape like a shadow risen from earth—some mute root pulled from a meadow where wildflowers blazed in the summer and winter lay down.

This is America, Teta, you’re dead and our dying means nothing here.

Give me your bags.

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Cecilia Woloch

Afterlife I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I’m dead.

Spindly flowers and waist-high grass and the shadows of clouds across that brightness, shifting, like so many ships in the sky. I want to be all in one place, at last, but vast, a sea by the side of the road. I mean green, and I mean poppies and daisies, everything blooming at once. And I want to be, again, that hard-nosed girl who pushed face-first into the wind. Who stood up to the sun, big-mouthed and brave. I mean, if I’m going to die, let me live. Let me wade out into the darkest part of the night and name myself. Wild-haired bitch of the mongrel stars. Moon on her shoulders. Dirt-rich, proud.

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William Wright Triptych for the Days Before Her Passage 1.

We walked into the valley of dark, our sight

pinned to the ember of the single star the falcate moon could not douse. That was the dusk we learned the blue bowl of air

had tipped and littered the valley with grass, delicate as hair and changeable as water for the shuttered eye (changeable as stone, rhythmic as blood-crux in the salamander or goat, rhythmic as the green-core of moss or elm).

• For years my mother smelled of sour bread.

I’d carry her down the mountain in the blue dark on my back near the swale where we’d build a fire in the summer cold.

The bones behind her face had sunken, and I saw her pulse tick shallow in the shadow of her throat.

Her voice was no more than leaf-crackle, no more than kindling.

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William Wright

2.

What she remembers:

That in the summer of her seventh year, storms slanted in and engorged the rivers and creeks until all waters buckled high,

shattered the levies and bit to the quicks of berms: Houses that did not kneel and drift away moldered.

They moved the whole town eight miles north—

•

That in her ninth year she came back to the creek

then in drought and walked barefoot

the dry bed’s limb-trash and alabaster—

That something in the slim sun-spears made her look up into the unshackling of April and witness a horse skeleton, brown-white

as the soles of her feet and silty hands.

She looked long at how vines twined its brisket, at the strange philodendron head, drained

of flesh, brainless and almost comical in its stillness, staid and smiling long with gothic joy at the sheer oddness of how the Earth had reined it.

•

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That the winter of her thirteenth year in the frigid mineral-scent of dusk, the Harman boy breathed warmth on the small hairs of her neck,

the whiskey on his child’s breath, how they leaned into one another in the blindness and purity of the killed grass beside the creek, the water frozen

pure to the floor, where stunned curves of minnows flashed tinny and motionless under the stars’ arc-light.

That the thaw snapped and pocked the air like gunshots so that in the first hint of spring the Harman brother slew the boy she kissed and dragged his kin down into the gorge.

3.

What she cannot foresee:

That centuries the warped door of the moon will open, house roofs will crumble as the horse bones gripped in the long-fallen oak will fall themselves, then grind down with years, fold as dust and meld with the specks kept there of the murdered boy, millennia-old, both now in the earth proper, slack and slow as a laggard.

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Allison Backous Troy Inertia Once, when I was little, I watched one of the birds attack its own reflection in the side mirror of a truck. It hurled its body again and again against that unyielding image, until it pecked a crack in the glass, until the whole mirror was smeared with blood. It was as if the bird hated what it saw there, and discovered too late that all it was seeing was itself.

—Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin’

In the south suburbs of Chicago, where my parents met and where my mother and I were born and raised, both the roads and the past rise up in a convergence of purpose: to strip bare, to confuse, to root you and your loved ones to a land that vaguely remembers being promised something good, something that never came through.

But if you take Sauk Trail from the Indiana border through Sauk Village and Chicago Heights, you will spot single white stone markers lining the roadside. They mark the homes of settlers who hid runaway slaves on their journeys north and east, another leg of the Underground Railroad. You might believe that the south suburbs deserve a little more credit; you might imagine that the graves were proof that the south suburbs could lead to some kind of freedom, that we could lift up our heads and give ourselves to others without fear, without expectation.

That we could look behind us without turning into salt.

And if you grew up here, the way my mother and I did, that’s what you believe yourself to be: salt, stone, a woman suspended between trailers and wilting soybean fields, those white markers blurred by speed and forward motion, your heart pushing both forwards and backwards, an inertia that always keeps you still.

If you take my father through Chicago’s south suburbs, he will show you where mobsters ducked the feds in old Chicago Heights, and where John Cipriani ran a speakeasy in his family restaurant. At least, my father believes that there was a speakeasy there; as the factory delivery man, Dad got free meals between deliveries, and stories of the Cipriani saga between bites of fettucini. He brought the pasta and 186 u Crab Orchard Review

Allison Backous Troy the stories home, and at dinnertime, I would slurp the thick sauce and listen to Dad talk about the old Italian, his voice smoothed with a casual reverence. “That guy,” Dad would tell us, “is tied up.” He would swipe his nose with his thumb and look at us knowingly, his blue eyes clear and gleaming above his mustache. “If you get what I mean.”

Chicago gave the south suburbs the idea that they would prosper.

German and Scotch-Irish immigrants, after settling the curved wet face of Lake Michigan, built brick houses on the city’s near southern plains. Steel and lumber passed through here, and the runaway slaves, and miners who took Sauk Trail out west during the gold rush. Lincoln Highway, running parallel with Sauk Trail to the north, was the country’s first east-west transcontinental highway; this crossed Dixie Highway, the road connecting us to Miami. Chicago Heights, which sat at the Dixie-Lincoln intersection, named itself “The Crossroads of the Nation,” and so claimed itself, and the south suburbs, as America’s stopping point, as a place to pause and see the rise of commerce, the unfolding of industry in its decades of smoke and fire on the Cal-Sag Channel, the cornfields and their ripe green sways in the wind.

Cipriani’s family, following the Germans and the Scots, trickled down from Little Italy, a near south side neighborhood bordering Pilsen and Little Village, footed by the Chicago River. The city’s neighborhoods rode each other’s backbones, Polish legs thrashing against Mexican elbows, black jaws set against Dutch gazes. It was enough to drive the older immigrants, Cipriani’s family included, as far down Western Avenue as they could go, spreading east towards Indiana and westward on Lincoln Highway and Vollmer Road. They begat second and third generations, and the Crossroads of the Nation quickly filled with two-car garages and grocery store chains, which Cipriani’s family supplied with bags of vermicelli and jars of sauce.

White steeples dotted Lansing and South Holland, and the tiny brick bungalows of their congregants flanked either side of Torrence Avenue, Western Avenue’s eastern parallel. The suburbs became a boom town, and like all boom towns, believed they were an oasis, an empire; in Park Forest and Homewood, you could buy fine jewelry and Cadillacs, and the hills of the Olympia Fields Country Club, when hit with the morning light, pulsed with an almost Mediterranean green.

But this was not the story that my father knew. Dad told us stories about Albert Taco, one of Cipriani’s friends, who visited the factory while Dad loaded trucks and ate lunch. He was a mobster, and Crab Orchard Review

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Allison Backous Troy my father claimed that Taco had ordered some fairly nasty hits on his associates. “I took a look at this guy,” Dad told us, “and I thought, ‘Man, don’t hurt me!’” And Dad would laugh, and sip his beer, and sigh. “It’s not every day that you come across a guy like that. I’m pretty sure that he’s got a hideout in Phoenix to avoid the feds.”

Dad and his siblings, eight in all, bounced between the states of the Great Plains while my grandfather, a principal by trade, ran school districts in Wyoming, Nebraska, and finally Richton Park, where my parents, unbeknownst to each other, attended the same high school.

After a semester at the University of Wyoming, my father spent a few summers laying railroad track in Louisiana, where the slow overhangs of swamp air muddled his already muted ambitions. He moved to Park Forest to recoup his losses and save money on rent. He watched his parents’ dog and tended bar at the Front Row, a dive at the corner of Governor’s Highway and Sauk Trail. Walter James was a regular there, as was his daughter, Barbara James, a skinny girl whose flirtations always bordered on the sarcastic. Dad served her Heinekens and watched her dance in the bar’s florescent lowlight. Numbers were exchanged on napkins, or matchbooks. A few weeks later, my mother was pregnant with me. Dad didn’t answer his phone, and my mother sucked her teeth.

In the south suburbs, this wasn’t the most unexpected turn.

“Growing up, there was nothing here,” my mother would say, swinging her arm out the window as we drove down Lincoln Highway towards Matteson, the town where my grandfather raised her. We drove down Lincoln Highway at least once a week, making trips to the library, the mall, places where we could find something to do. On the way, Mom would tell us stories about the passing landscape, what she remembered. “You could ride your bike down the street with no fear of getting hit by a car. There were no cars. I would ride up to Dairy Queen, the only place to go, and then I would just ride up and down the roads, going nowhere.”

In the 1960s, when Mom was a child, Matteson was the farthest western reach of the suburbs, and Lincoln Highway was a scenic route, its trees and wide fields an inviting view for passing tourists. Grandpa James ran a motel at 4343 Lincoln Highway; vacationers and truckers packed the small gravel parking lot, and my mother spent her summers wiping down bed frames and folding dirty towels. Grandpa James, who survived the Depression without soap, who sailed a Navy boat around Finland without a good shower, saw cleanliness as a luxury.

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“It was enough to make you gag,” Mom would say as she clicked the cigarette lighter into place, pulling a smoke out of the pack with her teeth. “The walls were just coated in grime. Do you have any idea what people do in motels? All that place needed was a bottle of bleach and a wet rag.”

Their house sat right next to the motel, and my grandfather raised my mother and uncle there alone; my grandmother alive but divorced from my grandfather, who had taken from my grandfather as many punches as she gave, whose picture sat in my mother’s filing cabinet, her pearls and smooth skin a mystery beneath the dusty frame.

Grandpa James taught his children, and especially his daughter, that their mother was no good, that she was a drinker and a whore and a liar. And the fact that my grandmother, who left when my mother was ten, did not write or call after the divorce was sufficient proof.

“We were not allowed to talk about her in the house,” Mom told us as she flicked cigarette ash out the window. “She was bad, bad, bad, and there was no question about it. We just had to accept it, that she was gone.”

Grandpa James would sit his children down at the table while he made their dinner, exhorting their mother’s vices while he opened cans of lima beans and plucked feathers from pheasants. “Do you want to be like her?” he would ask, the raw birds speared with broken quills, my mother and uncle unmoving, spellbound, held by a grudging force. Grandpa James kept them at the table until their plates were empty, telling them over and over again that their mother did not miss them, that she was the worst kind of mother they could have had. That his daughter should do her best to stay clear of her mother, because she could be just like her, after all.

And my mother ate her father’s words and carried them with her, rode her bike along those nowhere roads. She watched I-57 being built, the interstate cutting clear across Lincoln Highway, bringing the motel chains that would force Grandpa James to sell his motel: Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Motel 6. She saw the neighborhoods fill with black people, stirring the old fears of the immigrant families, who flew to Indiana and found comfort in subdivisions whose only fences were high property taxes. She rode past the shopping centers, their windows smeared with grease-paint-lettered ads: Records Bought and Sold, Magic But True Diet Pills, All Gold and Bonds Accepted.

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Allison Backous Troy industrial confidence now a specter, the old freedom roads buried by interstates that drove you past the dying neighborhoods without having to go through them.

Grandpa James died from congestive heart failure; a bubble bloomed on one of his arteries, and Mom tended him at home, that same voice that held her spellbound at the dinner table high and hoarse with the sound of his dying. Afterwards, she let her brother Richard sell the house while she rented an apartment in Richton Park, a mile or two east of her father’s house. She and my father were married a year after I was born, and my younger brother and sister soon followed. We bought a house in Indiana and followed the white flight to the town of Lowell, where my parents planted apple trees and built a swing set in our backyard. It was paradise; Mom had finally escaped, had found promise elsewhere. There was a creek running behind our backyard, and Mom’s hollyhocks and petunias burst in tiny trumpets along the garden fence.

Dad drove over two hours a day back to Illinois to deliver Ciprianni’s pasta in the south suburbs. Sometimes he brought the delivery truck home and let me sit in it, the aluminum of the seats cool and bumpy on the back of my legs as I sat in the driver’s seat, running my hands along the steering wheel. I loved long drives, the stretch of time between places, staring out the window at the passing landscape. And I loved my father, who was gone most nights, taking courses on truck driving and computer science, trying to find a career that would cover the mortgage and keep him moving—he did not like to be bored, or to sit still, for long.

In a way, this was what brought my parents together: the desire to live a better life, a deliberate kind of amnesia. If they could recast their histories, my parents would be able to erase their mistakes, their memories of how things were. My father could drive a truck, see the country, discover new landscapes. And my mother could set up house, fold clean sheets, plant a garden. Be the mother she never had.

One muggy afternoon, my father plopped me in the front seat of his Lincoln Town Car. “We’re going for a ride, Red,” he told me, and I buckled my seatbelt with glee. I remember the excitement so well because what followed was a revisitation, an inevitable line of loss drawn with the bright orange ash of light down the white paper of my father’s cigarette, which he lit while we coasted past the apple trees, the wide-brimmed hollyhocks trumpeting in the wind. My father flicked his ash out the window. “We’re going to go see our new house.”

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Allison Backous Troy

We left the windows open as we drove, the expressway winding us around the concrete factories and large green hills, which did not exist in Lowell, Indiana. I did not notice the methane gas pumps jammed into the hills’ turfed sides, the sod an easy cover for landfill trash, but instead leaned against my dad’s arm, letting my hand wave outside the open window, slicing fast through the block of air.

We came into Sauk Village through the back, following Sauk Trail to Torrence Avenue. We pulled into the driveway of a small one-story house with a red door. The backyard here was smaller than ours. I would have to share a room with my sister. “It’ll be different here, Red,” Dad said, standing outside the window of my future room. “But this is where we’re going. Let me take you to 7-11 to get a Slurpee.”

We drove westward out of Sauk Village, heading back onto 394 and the Dan Ryan Expressway as the sunlight receded. A month later, we returned with a U-Haul. I asked for another Slurpee, but Mom, who was driving this time, drove straight down Torrence Avenue to 223rd Street, turned on Yates and then Strassburg Avenue, our new street. She kept one hand on the steering wheel, the other wiping tears from her face.

In Sauk Village, we huddled on the couch to avoid the streams of earwigs that the summer rains invited through the plumbing, and we ate American cheese on English muffins for days, waiting for my father’s paychecks from the siding company that folded a month after our move. Dad gave up Ciprianni’s for the job of assistant manager, which he took without much consultation with my mother, who took us on long, sullen drives down the roads of her childhood to keep us occupied, who kept us spellbound by what her memories conjured, looking for recompense for what she had lost.

And my father, after losing his job, became an immovable body at rest, wrapped in a bathrobe on the fraying loveseat that he bought, secondhand, from a furniture warehouse, another step in that series of failed attempts that brought us back to the suburbs. Our move converged many lines of history: the crumble of landfills and industry, the community college dropouts, the blank-faced liquor stores that sprouted between the infamous strip malls, the drywalled bars, the proofs of a history that we thought echoed Rome, even in its ruins. From the bar stools of Tui’s, the bar at the corner of Torrence and Sauk Trail, you could just see beneath the shades to the cornfields that lay across the street, dry and dead but, through the dark green window glass, vibrant, almost alive.

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Allison Backous Troy The Walgreens sign flashed red in the sky above, and beers were a quarter a draft after six. In the south suburbs, what you thought was promised and what you got as a deal were seen as two distinct things, the promise fading in the background while the deal, sweet and cold as ice, popped open instantly in your hand for a quarter, for a moment, for a lifetime.

In the car, my mother drove past 4343 Lincoln Highway. The house and motel were gone, replaced by an apartment complex with black glass windows. The apartment sat between a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a nursing home. My mother gazed over the site of her old house.

“I used to have a tree there, my tree,” she says, letting her hand drop outside the window. “I used to climb it, and my father built a swing on it for me. It is still there, I think.”

I roll my window down, trying to see if the tree is still there. Ash from my mother’s cigarette flies through my window and hits my eyes; Mom does not notice but keeps talking, the story rising with the smoke of her cigarette into my lungs. “I would just climb it and sit in it for hours,” she said. “It was a place I could hide in when things in the house got bad. I would just sit on my swing and go back and forth, waiting out my parents’ fights until I could go to bed. There’s not much else I remember.”

The ash blurs the tree into a black line, my eyes stinging. Is this what my parents thought, buying that Indiana house with the white picket fence? What did they remember, what did they believe, and what do I believe as I keep looking back years later, my life lifted from the circuit, my heart somehow afraid that it is too late to turn?

In the car, I blink back the ash and keep staring out the window, measuring the stretches of time between the stoplights, the time that I will spend in motion, not at rest but moving, which is freedom even if all the roads run parallel, even if the rotting scenery simply rotates the same front lawns with their cracked sod and straggling petunias.

I suck my teeth when my mother turns south, taking Cicero to Sauk Trail back east to Sauk Village, the freedom in which I hang cut from me by the return, the trip home. We pass the white markers and I watch them blur past us; I breathe in my mother’s smoke and drive with her through the grid, the roads to nowhere.

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Amy Yee Deckyi’s Journey from After Tibet: Exile in India D eckyi’s problem began with what seemed like a great opportunity. In March 2009, she heard from Tibetan friends that a multi-national call center in Delhi needed Mandarin speakers to make calls to China. When they heard about the job, Deckyi and her husband, Dhondup, had been living in India just a few months. They fled from Tibet in the fall of 2008, first to Nepal and then on to India.

By December they arrived in Dharamsala, the small hill town that is home to the Dalai Lama and 12,000 Tibetans. Deckyi and Dhondup couldn’t speak English or Hindi so they couldn’t find any work. For the first months of life as refugees in India, they were helpless, like a “new baby,” Dhondup lamented. They had brought their life savings with them to India but that wouldn’t last long, so they jumped at the chance to work. Their salary from the call center in Delhi would have been a much-needed lifeline—if only their boss had paid them.

Dhondup was a tall, thin man in his early 30s with a few wispy hairs on his upper lip that passed for a mustache. He had a gentle air and spoke slowly as though pondering his words. In contrast to Dhondup’s rangy frame, Deckyi had a plump face and a slight double chin. Deckyi’s ample bosom suggested a steady solidness and she always appeared calm, reserved, shyly serious. Although she could understand only a few words in English, her dark eyes had a knowing alertness. Many Tibetan women are named Deckyi, after the Dalai Lama’s mother, just as so many Tibetans (men and women) are named Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama’s given name. Before fleeing to India, Deckyi lived in Lhasa and attended Chinese schools while growing up so she spoke Mandarin fluently. In the absence of English on her end and Tibetan on mine, we relied on Mandarin to communicate.1 1

I was born in the U.S. to immigrants from Hong Kong and grew up in Boston. Who would have thought that the Mandarin I learned in college and during two years living in China in the 1990s would come in handy with talking to Tibetan refugees in India?

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More than a dozen Tibetans were already working at the call center and acquaintances encouraged Deckyi to join. Dhondup and Deckyi didn’t know anyone in India when they arrived, but in Dharamsala they met other Tibetans through an informal but broad network of refugees and exiles. Through word of mouth Deckyi ferreted out information about housing and job leads. After deciding to try working at the call center, Deckyi and Dhondup took a rickety overnight bus from Dharamsala to Delhi at the end of March. The bus rattled so loudly over the bumpy, twisting roads that it seemed like screws and metal would come flying off the vehicle. For the first part of the night, the bus wound its way down the curvy mountain roads lined with pine trees and around gut-clenching hairpin turns until the road spread thankfully flat and deposited them in Delhi’s teeming sprawl 12 hours later.

It was a big call center with hundreds of people chattering away inside a cavernous office about 30 minutes drive from Majna Ka Tilla, the Tibetan colony wedged on a slice of land in north Delhi near the sewage-choked Yamuna River. Most of the call center workers were Indians, but there were also some Africans, Chinese, and Tibetans. There were even Indians at the call center who made calls in halting Mandarin. Sometimes the Indians called Deckyi over to help them when they couldn’t understand the Chinese person on the other end of the line. Deckyi didn’t ask how the Indians had learned Chinese; it was another one of the mysteries of life in India. Looking for answers and explanations in the daunting crevasse between two languages and cultures was too much trouble.

The work was not hard: calling hospitals in China, asking them a list of questions that appeared on a computer screen and recording the answers. What kind of medical equipment are you using? Does your hospital plan to buy new equipment in the next few years? Deckyi repeated the questions over and over. She could actually read and write Mandarin better than her mother tongue since she hadn’t learned Tibetan in school and only spoke it at home. Fluency in Mandarin was actually to Deckyi’s advantage. It helped her find work in Lhasa and prosper; and at first it seemed to offer unexpected opportunities in India. Even Tibetans in exile in India knew the value of Mandarin. Deckyi had already begun teaching basic Chinese to neighbors and friends in Dharamsala: monks and a young Tibetan man who was taking a break from his studies in England to volunteer. Some Tibetans hoped to one day go home and they knew Mandarin would help them get a job or find better opportunities.

Others were unlikely to go back, but were learning because the Dalai Lama urged all Tibetans to learn Mandarin so they could communicate 194 u Crab Orchard Review

Amy Yee with their “Chinese brothers and sisters.” For years, the Dalai Lama encouraged contact and communication between Chinese and Tibetans in hope of fostering better relations. This grassroots effort had no impact on jumpstarting the stalled diplomatic talks between the Dalai Lama’s envoys and Beijing. Perhaps it was because there was no progress in breaking this impasse that the Dalai Lama hoped some headway could be made between ordinary Tibetan and Chinese people.

Many Tibetans took the Dalai Lama’s words to heart. In Dharamsala, Tibetan refugees crowded not only into free English classes offered by non-profit organizations but also into the few Chinese classes. I attended one of these classes held in a tiny room where Tibetans sat on the floor on blue, square cushions, eyes fixed on their Mandarinspeaking Tibetan teacher as they sounded out tones and words in sing-song unison. As a Chinese-American, I was the unexpected object of excited attention in the class, not as an adversary but as a potential teacher.

The work environment at the call center in Delhi was familiar to Deckyi, who once held a coveted office job in Lhasa working for an electronics company, while Dhondup managed an accounting firm.

Deckyi was surprised that she and Dhondup got the job in Delhi so easily. After they arrived in the city, they went to the call center for a brief interview in Mandarin and then were hired the next day. In contrast, getting an office job in Lhasa, at least for a Tibetan, was difficult and competitive and took years of perseverance or connections or both.

On March 22, Deckyi and Dhondup started work at the call center, as recorded in Deckyi’s diary—a flimsy school notebook where she documented her days with brief entries written in Chinese characters.

After that first day, she felt a pale glimmer of relief—one of those rare moments of brightness in a year darkened by turmoil. “We are actually happy here,” she wrote in her diary. Her happiness proved to be fleeting.

On workdays, Deckyi and Dhondup woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning to be ready when a company van picked up the Tibetan workers from Majna Ka Tilla at 5 o’clock each day. The cool respite of Delhi’s early spring faded with each passing day. Through April the heat grew oppressive and stirred mosquitoes, lice and red ants from their winter stupor. For 3,500 rupees a month, about $70, Deckyi rented a windowless box of a room across from Majna Ka Tilla that was entirely bare except for a single bed and a light bulb. Rent was an onerous expense. Eventually they added a small table to the contents of the room.

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Amy Yee

At night, when Deckyi lay in bed with mosquitoes whining in her ear, the bareness of the room and the tenuousness of their new lives were amplified by memories of what they had left behind in Tibet.

They owned an eight-room house in Lhasa that she and Dhondup had bought in 2006 for 280,000 yuan (about $35,000). It was a two-story house and they had two TVs. It seemed impossibly extravagant now as Deckyi mentally caressed those memories in the dark. When Dhondup described the house to me he mournfully sketched in his notebook a large structure with several rooms layered like cubes. They had never imagined that they would leave behind their hard-earned house and middle-class lives in Tibet to become refugees.

When Deckyi and Dhondop first arrived in Dharamsala they were stunned to see so many Tibetans walking the winding streets of the small hill town in the foothills of the Himalayas. There were old and young, people from the west and east, their origins recognizable from their chupa tunics and how they wore and tied them, spiky-haired urban youth from Lhasa, former nomads with weathered faces, teachers and journalists, shop owners and traders, monks and nuns from Tibetan monasteries and nunneries in India that were bigger than those in Tibet. Who were all these Tibetans and how did they get to this place? Deckyi and Dhondup wondered. The answers were as diverse as the Tibetan exiles themselves.

Some were born in India but most had fled their homeland under a variety of circumstances, some driven by pragmatism, some for better education or religious study, and some forced by terror and desperation.

The newest of these refugees were pushed across the border by the events that Chinese-speaking Tibetans refer to as “san shisi” in Mandarin, or “three fourteen.” China refers to significant events by their dates, for example, “liu si” or “six four” indicates the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4, 1989. San shisi refers to March 14, 2008, when protests and demonstrations rippling across Tibet erupted in violence.

Deckyi and Dhondup didn’t participate in the protests but they did do something seemingly inconsequential that would abruptly break the upward trajectory of their lives.

At first the Delhi call center seemed like an oasis. It was spacious, brightly lit and as soon as they stepped inside they were swathed in the decadent silk of air conditioning. Three shifts of employees worked around the clock so the room had the unblinking feel of a place suspended in time. A canteen served Indian food for lunch that even Deckyi conceded was not bad. They could take breaks from the computer 196 u Crab Orchard Review

Amy Yee monitors and phones, but apart from lunch, Deckyi and Dhondup worked non-stop to finish as many questionnaires as possible before their work day ended at 3:30 p.m. Each completed project fetched 500 rupees, about $10—no small sum for the average person in India. Deckyi worked quickly and in the first five weeks finished 33 projects. Between Deckyi and her husband, they earned 33,000 rupees, just shy of $700—more than a year’s rent for their room in Dharamsala.

The promise of their payment took tantalizing shape in Deckyi’s mind and it sustained her through pre-dawn wake-ups in the stifling dark; long hours under the fluorescent lights; and restless nights in their desolate room itching mosquito and lice bites. With the money, perhaps they could buy a plane ticket to another country if they could manage to get visas.

In Lhasa, Deckyi and her husband had solid jobs with good prospects for the future. Adjusting to India was difficult. She wasn’t used to Indian food, the slimy lentil dal and vegetables overcooked into unrecognizable lumps, and the dirty streets of Dharamsala where cows plodded alongside people and stray dogs disrupted her sleep with their frenzied barking. They felt helpless, even in Dharamsala where thousands of Tibetans lived alongside Indians, where snowcapped mountains like those at home were visible in the distance. She wasn’t used to asking people for help with mundane tasks like buying vegetables at the market where Indian vendors spoke Hindi and English. She felt like a child, Deckyi repeated.

In their first months in India, the enormity of the events that forced them to leave Tibet weighed heavily on Deckyi and Dhondup.

They had been fortunate enough to save money in Tibet, but they had paid hefty fees for permits and a guide who led them across the border from Tibet to Nepal. When they finally arrived in Dharamsala, the expenses added up: blankets, bedding, clothes for the cold winter, kitchenware for the small room they rented for 2,400 rupees ($54) a month, food and toiletries. What drove them out of Tibet seemed trivial, but had cost them so much. Was their journey worth it?

In October 2009, Deckyi and Dhondop had recently started English classes at one of the non-profits centers in Dharamsala where Tibetans could learn English. Nearly six months had passed since they had left the call center in Delhi and returned to Dharamsala with their hopes in tatters. The first time I went to their room to tutor them, Deckyi showed me her class textbook and looked at me without Crab Orchard Review

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Amy Yee comprehension when I asked in English: When did you come to India? Why did you come here? We switched back to Mandarin and my questions elicited sobering answers. Deckyi had a slick smart phone from China that had an electronic Chinese-English dictionary. With one fingernail coated in chipped red nail polish, she wrote a Chinese character on the touchpad screen. A word in English popped up and she tilted it toward me. Zhengzhifan. “State criminal.” I shook my head. They did not kill or harm anyone or damage property or divulge state secrets. I thumbed through Deckyi’s red Chinese-English dictionary and found the word naming. “Political refugee,” I wrote in English in her notebook.

Even in an English lesson you couldn’t avoid the weight of their misfortune. I learned new Chinese vocabulary when Deckyi told me about how she had come to India. Zhua, bianje, tongzinshen: catch, border, permit. I jotted down the words in pinyin in my notebook for future reference. At first Deckyi and her husband were shy and regarded me quietly like frightened cats until I took the lead and asked them something, anything, in English. I was surprised that Deckyi was only 30 because she looked older, even when wearing a teal-colored T-shirt emblazoned with a surfer and the words “Newport Beach, California.”

She had a small, pert nose in a chubby face, yet wrinkles pulled at the corner of her eyes.

One morning, after a few of our lessons, Deckyi took the lead.

She had prepared a list of questions and phrases. They were written in English in her notebook and she wanted me to verify them. The first one puzzled me. “Our life is very knotty.” I looked at the words blankly. “Where did you get that word?” I asked. Deckyi pointed at the smart phone. She explained in Mandarin what she meant and I unfurrowed my brow. “Here. This is better,” I said. I took her notebook and wrote a sentence. “Our life is very hard.” Deckyi repeated this in a soft voice and surprisingly good pronunciation.

Then she showed me another sentence she had copied into her book. “Can you help feed at the public trough?” Her phone was not so smart after all. After some back and forth I deciphered the proper translation. “Can you help us get our salary?” I wrote in her notebook.

Next she announced that she wanted to sell her calligraphy. “You know calligraphy?” I asked. “Where are you selling it?” Shufa—I did remember this word in Mandarin. Now was her turn to look puzzled.

What she really meant was jewelry, shoushi. The smart phone had given her the wrong word again. I pointed to a gold ring with a large square piece of jade on her finger. Jiezhe, ring. Shouzhua, bracelet. She 198 u Crab Orchard Review

Amy Yee nodded. That’s what Deckyi was doing that morning: trying to get a price from local shops for the few pieces of jewelry she had.

Deckyi and Dhondup lived near the main Buddhist temple in Dharamsala in a building surrounded by construction. All throughout Dharamsala, hillsides were being gutted and carved out, scaffolding erected. Precariously tall buildings sprouted from the earthquake-prone ground to accommodate the growing influx of tourists, students and residents. Several senior monks lived in their building too and sometimes the sound of chanting and murmuring prayers drifted down the dim, cement-floored corridor. Usually, the sound was drowned out by construction from the adjacent building.

Power tools shrieked and sparks flew. On the stairwell, I had to tread carefully to avoid puddles of wet cement.

In Deckyi and Dhondup’s room, two single beds formed an L along the walls. Quilts were piled on top, folded lengthwise like soft sausages so the beds could be used as sofas during the day. There was a television in a cluttered cupboard topped with small silver cups. On the wall above it were several silk thangka tapestries depicting sitting Buddhas, along with a large photo collage of the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa, the twenty-something head of another school of Tibetan Buddhism who had fled Tibet when he was a teenager, much to the embarrassment of China. In the photo the beefy-faced Karmapa peered knowingly over the top of his round sunglasses, as if monitoring the room. In one corner sat a table heavy with books and papers and an old desktop computer covered by a sheet. In order to use the computer someone would have to sit on the bed. The window looked out onto an overgrown patch of grass that hosted a rubbish heap littered with discards from the construction site—plastic bags, wood shavings. Two dark doorways in the room led to a small kitchenette and a bathroom.

One gray afternoon, the electricity winked off in the middle of one of our English lessons. We continued as though nothing had happened; power outages are common in India, as routine as clouds passing over the sun. In the hazy half-light, Dhondup repeated several English words over and over, almost to himself. Then, without thinking, he stretched out in repose on the bed where he had been sitting, as though lulling himself to sleep with the mantra of the new words from this new land.

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Contributors’ Notes Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions), and a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press). His collection, Millennial Teeth, will be published in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry from Southern Illinois University Press in Fall 2014.

He is an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University, where he teaches literature and writing courses and edits Waccamaw.

Lauren K. Alleyne is an assistant professor of English and the Poet-inResidence at the University of Dubuque. Her debut collection, Difficult Fruit, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014. She’s proud to be a Richard Peterson Poetry Prize Finalist for Crab Orchard Review.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry 2013. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Brian Brodeur is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes (Autumn House Press), Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press), and the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (White Eagle Coffee Store Press). New poems and interviews are forthcoming in the Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. He curates the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over one hundred and fifty interviews with poets. He is a George Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the PhD in English and Comparative Literature program at University of Cincinnati, where he serves as an assistant editor for Cincinnati Review.

Catherine Champion grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has her BA in English and Philosophy from Amherst College and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She currently lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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Contributors’ Notes Nandi Comer is the winner of the 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. She is currently the poetry editor of Indiana Review. She is pursuing a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Virginia Center for the Arts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and Third Coast.

Chad Davidson is the author of From the Fire Hills, The Last Predicta, and Consolation Miracle, all in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry from Southern Illinois University Press, as well as co-author with Gregory Fraser of Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches. Davidson has work appearing or forthcoming in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, and he teaches literature and creative writing at the University of West Georgia.

Erica Dawson is the author of Big-Eyed Afraid and The Small Blades Hurt. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2008, The Best American Poetry 2012, Birmingham Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English and writing at University of Tampa, teaching undergraduates and low-residency MFA students.

Katherine Dykstra is nonfiction editor at Guernica. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming from Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers and the anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. She won third place in the 2013 Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest. “Like Held Breath” is part of a memoir-inessays on which she is currently at work.

Troy D. Ehlers is the winner of the 2014 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review. He has published fiction in the Louisville Review, Quercus Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and the pulp fiction anthology Love Free or Die. His novel-in-progress was a finalist for Wilkes University’s James Jones Fellowship. He interned at Milkweed Editions, edited Minnetonka Review, and earned an MFA from Spalding University.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, Crazyhorse, and Blackbird. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Memorious.

Rachel Heimowitz is a poet living in Israel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, Prairie Schooner, Oberon Poetry, and Poetry Quarterly. Her chapbook, What the Light Reveals, is forthcoming from Tebot Bach. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University.

Sara Henning is the author of a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias, and a full-length volume of poetry, A Sweeter Water. Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse, So To Speak, American Letters & Commentary, and Willow Springs. She has poems anthologized in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence.

Suzanne Hodsden is native to the Midwest but has lived in the UK, Prague, and Braşov, Romania. She is currently living and working in Bowling Green, Ohio while she pursues her MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University. This is her first fiction publication.

Christopher Hornbacker is a PhD student at The University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Outside In, Synergy, and Contemporary American Voices. He is a member of the editorial staff of Memorious.

Amorak Huey teaches creative and professional writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is forthcoming in 2014 from Hyacinth Girl Press, and his poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2012, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Menacing Hedge, Rattle, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.

Sara Eliza Johnson’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Boston Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Memorious. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Winter Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her first book, Vessel, was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series and will be published by Milkweed Editions.

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Contributors’ Notes Dean Julius is an MFA student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and assistant poetry editor at the Greensboro Review. A native of the Mississippi Delta, he received his BA in English from the University of Mississippi and a Masters of Education in English from Delta State University. His poems and other work have appeared or are forthcoming in storySouth, Confidante, and Gently Read Literature.

Vandana Khanna’s debut collection, Train to Agra, was the inaugural winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, won the Miller Williams Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2014.

Andrew David King is the winner of the 2013 Allison Joseph Poetry Award from Crab Orchard Review. He studies philosophy and literature at the University of California Berkeley, where he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Poetry Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arroyo Literary Review, ZYZZYVA, and Spillway, and he regularly contributes to the blog of the Kenyon Review.

Leah Lax holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. She has published award-winning short fiction, prose poetry, essays in anthologies, a major opera (with NPR broadcast), and a world-wide traveling exhibit. “Water of Sleep” is an excerpt from her memoir manuscript, Uncovered. She is represented by Gail Hochman of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Henry W. Leung is the winner of the 2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award from Crab Orchard Review. He earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, and has served as a reviewer and columnist for the Lantern Review. He is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of the poetry chapbook Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe Press).

His prose and poetry have appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Cerise Press, and ZYZZYVA. Michelle Lin is a poet and artist from Torrance, California. Her latest work can be found in ZYZZYVA. She is an MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also teaches composition. Her website is michellelinpoet.wordpress.com.

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Contributors’ Notes Brandi Nicole Martin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the minnesota review, Salt Hill, Harpur Palate, and PANK magazine, among others. A Florida State University alumni, she is an MFA candidate in poetry at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Beth Morgan previously published short stories in the Kelsey Review and is the author of the novel, The Family Plot, which was published in 2013. She recently completed her second novel, The Con, which she hopes to publish in 2015. She is currently doing research for a historical novel based on the life of Nannette Streicher, a 19th century Viennese piano maker and friend of Beethoven.

Steve Mueske is a poet and electronic musician from Savage, Minnesota.

His books include Slower Than Stars (forthcoming) and A Mnemonic for Desire. His poems have been published in the Massachusetts Review, Court Green, Hotel Amerika, CURA, Fulcrum, Crazyhorse, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He can be found on Soundcloud and Facebook.

Jeff Newberry is the author of Brackish (Aldrich Press) and the chapbook A Visible Sign (Finishing Line Press). With Justin Evans, he is the co-editor of The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake Nation Press). His writing has appeared in print and electronic journals, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Waccamaw. He lives in Tifton, Georgia, with his wife and son. Find him online at http://www.jeffnewberry.com.

Leah Nielsen’s first collection of poetry, No Magic, was published by Word Press, and her chapbook Side Effects May Include is forthcoming in the journal The Chapbook. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, and Rattle. She teaches at Westfield State University in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books), selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize. Currently, he is a visiting professor of creative writing at Warren Wilson College and the coeditor of The Collagist.

Kevin Phan graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English Literature in 2005, and the University of Michigan with an MFA in creative writing in 2013. He was the recipient of two Hopwood 204 u Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes awards: the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize and Theodore Roethke Prize.

His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Fence, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Sentence, CutBank, Fiddlehead, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He is currently a Zell Fellow.

Sam Pierstorff received his MFA in poetry from California State University Long Beach and became the youngest Poet Laureate in California when he was selected to the position in 2004 by the city of Modesto, where he teaches English at Modesto Junior College. He is the editor of Quercus Review Press and creator of The Ill List Poetry Slam. His debut poetry collection, Growing Up in Someone Else’s Shoes, was published by World Parade Books. He is currently working on a new collection of epistolary poems, writing a YA novel, and training to be a ninja warrior.

Caroline Pittman lives with her husband and four children in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jessica Plante is former poetry editor at the Greensboro Review and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro MFA program and the MA program at University of North Texas. Her book reviews and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Journal, Birdfeast, The Collagist, storySouth, Tirage Monthly, North Texas Review, and Writer’s Bloc. She lives and writes in Tallahassee, Florida.

Brad Richard is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Motion Studies (The Word Works), winner of the 2010 Washington Prize and runner-up for the Publishing Triangle’s 2011 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press). He directs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Amanda Rutstein received her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2010, where she served as a poetry editor for the Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, as well as the 2013 anthology What Matters.

Aaron Samuels, raised in Providence, Rhode Island, by a Jewish mother and a Black father, is a Cave Canem Fellow and a nationally Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes acclaimed performer. His work has been featured on TV One’s Verses & Flow, and it has appeared in Tidal Basin Review and Muzzle Magazine.

His debut collection of poetry, Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps, was released

by Write Bloody Publishing in Fall 2013. More information can be found at: http://aaronsamuelspoetry.com/.

Steven D. Schroeder’s second collection of poems is The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), which won the 2014 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry. His poetry is available from New England Review, Barrow Street, and The Journal. He edits the online poetry journal Anti-, serves as co-curator for Observable Readings, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.

Peggy Shumaker’s most recent book of poems is Toucan Nest: Poems of Costa Rica. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She was Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2010–2012. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press and Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Both series showcase literature and fine art from Alaska. Visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com.

Brian Simoneau lives in Connecticut with his wife and two young daughters. A recipient of a work-study scholarship to the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Boulevard, Cave Wall, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. His collection River Bound won the 2013 De Novo Prize and will be published by C&R Press.

Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award and his chapbook Red Flag Up was recently published by Kattywompus Press. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming 2014), and his poems appear or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, West Branch, and Cream City Review, among others.

Naomi Telushkin is the winner of the 2013 Charles Johnson Fiction Award from Crab Orchard Review. She is an MFA student at Arizona State University. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in the Citron Review, Tablet, Emprise Review, Folio, Bare, Travel Belles, and the St. Petersburg Times Magazine.

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Contributors’ Notes Christian Teresi’s poems and interviews have appeared in literary journals, including the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, Revolver, and the Writer’s Chronicle. He is the Director of Conferences for AWP. Daniel Nathan Terry, a former landscaper and horticulturist, is the author of four books of poetry: City of Starlings (Sibling Rivalry Press, forthcoming 2015); Waxwings; Capturing the Dead, which won the 2007 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles. His poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, and New South. He serves on the advisory board of One Pause Poetry and teaches English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he lives with his husband, painter and printmaker, Benjamin Billingsley.

Qiana Towns earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University and an MA from Central Michigan University where she served as poetry editor for the online literary journal Temenos. Her work has appeared in Tidal Basin, Milk Money, and is currently featured at poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and assistant editor for Willow Books and Reverie: Midwest African American Literature.

Eric Tran received his MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is an MD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. His work appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Hobart, and the Star 82 Review.

Abby Travis is writing a book of combined memoir and literary journalism about the subculture of training competitive sport horses and the ethical and philosophical implications of miscommunication.

She is an editorial assistant at Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, on the Ploughshares blog, on Powell’s Books’ Review-a-Day, and elsewhere.

Allison Backous Troy is the winner of the 2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. Her work has Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes received a Notable Essay recognition in Best American Essays. She has been published in Image Journal and the St. Katherine’s Review.

Israel Wasserstein’s poetry collection This Ecstasy They Call Damnation was named a 2013 Kansas Notable Book. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, Scissors and Spackle, Blood Lotus, and Wilderness House Literary Review.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Art in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). The winner of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Southern Review, and others. He is currently a Chancellors Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry. His debut full-length collection, Thief in the Interior, will be published by Alice James Books in January 2016.

Corrie Williamson is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, where she was a Walton Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Shenandoah, which awarded her their 2013 James Boatwright Prize for Poetry. Her debut collection, Sweet Husk, is the winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and will be published in July 2014.

Susan R. Williamson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Poetry Congeries at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Sanskrit, Smartish Pace, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry East, storySouth, Streetlight, Virginia Quarterly Review, among others; and anthologized in Letters to the World and Poetry Daily. She holds an MFA from New England College and serves as the Assistant Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

Cecilia Woloch is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Carpathia, published by BOA Editions. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International, the California Arts Council, and others. A member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Southern California, she also conducts independent workshops for writers throughout the United States and around the world, most recently in Paris and Istanbul.

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Contributors’ Notes William Wright is author of seven collections of poetry, four of which are full-length books—Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press, forthcoming), Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press), Bledsoe (Texas Review Press), and Dark Orchard (Texas Review Press). He is series editor and volume co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multivolume series celebrating contemporary writing of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. He also serves as a contributing editor for Shenandoah and recently won the Porter Fleming Prize for Poetry.

Amy Yee is an American writer and journalist who has been based in New Delhi, India, from 2006–2013. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic.com, The Nation, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She writes frequently about Tibet issues. Her poetry has appeared in Salamander, J Journal, Bayou, and Aunt Chloe.

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2010 Editor’s Selection

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Heavenly Bodies Poems by Cynthia Huntington “This is a poetry of woundedness and defiance. Heavenly Bodies has a stark integrity in its refusals to beguile or comfort; no one could call it uplifting.

Yet there is something bracing, even encouraging, in the hungry survival of this sister of Sylvia Plath and in her self-insistence: I do not give up my strangeness for anyone.”

—Mark Halliday

“Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is the most searing and frightening book of poetry I have read in years. The poems arise from pain and illness, from the body’s rebellions and betrayals, and yet they are also curiously exhilarating, even redemptive: perhaps because they are utterly free of selfpity, and find the means—through the sustained ferocity and invention of their language—to transform suffering into a vision so bold it must be called prophetic. Heavenly Bodies is a remarkable collection, on every level.”

—David Wojahn, author of World Tree

2012 National Book Award Finalist!

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

88 pages, $15.95 paper, ISBN 0-8093-3063-6 978-0-8093-3063-8

Available at major retailers and independent bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press Orders & Inquiries • TEL 800-621-2736 • FAX 800-621-8476 www.siupress.com

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Series Editor, Jon Tribble

2013 Special Selection

Abide Poems by Jake Adam York “In his body of work, poems of sheer beauty, grace, precision of image, and technical skill, we find a profound intervention into our ongoing conversations about race and social justice, a bold and necessary challenge to our historical amnesia. Jake Adam York is one of our most indispensible American poets, and the presence of his work in the world—his vision, his enduring spirit—is for me, and I think for us all, a guiding light.”

—Natasha Trethewey,

United States Poet Laureate

2012–2014 “Jake Adam York was the finest elegist of his generation, and his ongoing project, an intricately layered threnody for the martyrs of the civil rights movement, also made him one of the most ambitious poets of that generation.… It is thus bittersweet to observe that this posthumous collection is his finest… Abide is, in short, a marvel.”

—David Wojahn Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 96 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3327-9 978-0-8093-3327-1

Available at major retailers and independent bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press Orders & Inquiries • TEL 800-621-2736 • FAX 800-621-8476 www.siupress.com

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2013 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Millennial Teeth Poems by Dan Albergotti “Albergotti’s poems are passionate and yet skeptical of the things they are passionate about. He writes of family, love, poetry, and the world around us from the perspective of history, even the perspective of the cosmos, and that knowledge imbues his poems with a cool understanding of the limitations and strengths of his warm heart. Millennial Teeth is a wonderfully ambitious collection of poems that soar while still remaining grounded in the world…”

—Andrew Hudgins,

author of A Clown at Midnight

“Albergotti… is by turns a religious poet, a formalist of great inventiveness, and a subtle wit.… Even heartbroken, even schooled by loss, Albergotti sings of love.

In an age of flash and chatter, this is a book of soulful, serious poems.”

—Patrick Phillips,

author of Boy

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 88 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3353-8 978-0-8093-3353-0

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Series Editor, Jon Tribble

2013 Open Competition Award

Zion Poems by TJ Jarrett “In Zion, TJ Jarrett maps a new language for reconciling racial and cultural tensions that few poets would have the courage to approach, much less subvert and transform into a conversation of equals. She has a compelling story, she has the ear to make the language sing, the alertness to metaphor to make it interesting, and the drama to make it stick.… TJ Jarrett is a name that we should remember.”

—Rodney Jones,

author of Imaginary Logic “One simply must relish the superb light and a captured sense of darkness as avenues of lyric survival, the exemplary wealth of both human suffering and wise knowing in these poems that make reading Zion as much a warding off of spirits as it is a celebration of language and remembrance.”

—Major Jackson,

author of Holding Company Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 88 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3356-2 978-0-8093-3356-1

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2012 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Glaciology Poems by Jeffrey Skinner “In Glaciology, Skinner’s perceptions often seem to balance on the very edge of unbeing. What is broken beckons to us, alive in the lens of his attention, constantly undone and remade in shifting, dazzling patterns. Funny, surprising, verbally sharp, and ruefully aware of danger at every turn, these poems shine with a fierce love of the world.”—Cynthia Huntington, author of Heavenly Bodies

“Few contemporary poets capture the severe lonelinesses of American manhood with such clarity and cold, honest wit as Jeffrey Skinner. ‘I have been hired by divine gangsters—’ he says, ‘Reason my work is invisible.’ I have admired his taut, strange work in book after book. He’s a pilgrim.”—Tony Hoagland Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3273-6 978-0-8093-3273-1

Available at major retailers and independent bookstores, or from

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Series Editor, Jon Tribble

2012 Open Competition Award

The Laughter of Adam and Eve Poems by Jason Sommer “The Chinese have a word for it: hsin, heart/mind—and Jason Sommer has it in abundance—a probing intelligence that feels for what it sees, the insight the more acute for its connectedness. Here is a beautifully modulated existential anguish, knowledge from the stunted tree that bears the fruit of exile, an unerring ear for the music of thought, ruefulness, the full monty of candor, an ironic awareness, and most movingly, the avowal of what is beyond irony.”

—Eleanor Wilner “Plainspoken, ferociously and tenderly energetic, enmeshed in history even while it yearns for the miraculous, this is a fabulous book by a fabulous poet who deserves what he has surely earned: a wide and enthusiastic audience.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Night of the Republic Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 96 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3278-7 978-0-8093-3278-6

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2012 Editor’s Selection

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

From The Fire Hills Poems by Chad Davidson “These lovely, complex poems are the notebooks of a cultural commuter, written during his journeys back and forth across the Gothic Lines that divide present from past, memory from experience, private from public. They are bravura performances, full of the nimbleness of mind and form that I have long admired in Davidson’s work.”

—Geoffrey Brock,

author of Weighing Light

“Italy is the origin of so much that we take for granted in our art, architecture, cuisine, literature, politics, religion, history, language. In From the Fire Hills— part pop-cultural Virgilian Guide Book, part twenty-first-century Grand Tour Baedeker—Davidson traverses this storied, incendiary terrain with what he has elsewhere called his signature ‘Bigfoot Poetics,’ as comfortable among the supper talk of cryptozoologists as it is among the pages of supermarket tabloids.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar,

author of Vanitas, Rough: Poems and

The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

88 pages, $15.95 paper, ISBN 0-8093-3323-6 978-0-8093-3323-3

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2012 First Book Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Seam

“How thin the seam between this fierce book and all the poet’s countrypeople who haven’t lived to read it. Faizullah has made a courageous and shaming book. I hope this book will be translated everywhere.”

—Jean Valentine,

author of Break the Glass

Poems by Tarfia Faizullah

“Seam reaffirms that imagination is the backbone of memory, the muscular fiber that enables us to re-grasp our humanity. Raised in West Texas, Faizullah examines the catastrophe that haunted her parents’ life in America and in turn haunted her: the sisters, aunts, and grandmothers raped in Bangladesh in the 1971 liberation war.… Faizullah twines a seam where the wounds are remembered, fingers quivering, spooling, and unspooling what we know of healing. This is a powerful debut…”

—Khaled Mattawa,

author of Tocqueville

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages, $15.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-3325-2 978-0-8093-3325-7

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southern illinois university press Orders & Inquiries • TEL 800-621-2736 • FAX 800-621-8476 www.siupress.com