Crab Orchard Review Vol 10 No 2 S/F 2005

Richard Lawson is a Professor Emeritus in English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

In 1995, he was the cover artist for the first issue of

Crab Orchard Review.

In this volume:

REVIEW

published by the Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

$8.00 ISSN 1083-5571

Documenting a Decade 1995 – 2005

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Ten Years After ~

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$8.00us Vol. 10 No. 2

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Deborah Moreno John Morgan John Moss Arlene Naganawa Lee Newton Sharon Olson Tanja Pajevic Ed Pavlić Candace Pearson Cynthia Reeves Cherene Sherrard Beth Simon Susan Sink Diana Spechler Maura Stanton Lois Taylor Jean Thompson Alison Townsend Brian Turner Ryan G. Van Cleave Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck Davi Walders Michael Waters Stefi Weisburd Gary J. Whitehead

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Sandra Kohler Aviya Kushner Melissa Kwasny Jacqueline Jones LaMon Jeanne Larsen Ed Bok Lee Stephanie Lenox Barbara Leon Brian Leung Timothy Liu Dawn Lonsinger Liliana Loofbourow Raymond Luczak Susan Ludvigson Margaret MacInnis Kelly Magee Peter Marcus Frank Matagrano Wendell Mayo Holloway McCandless Jeffrey McDaniel Shannon Marquez McGuire Erika Meitner Joseph Millar Jonathan Moody Carolyn Moore

Volume 10, Number 2 Summer/Fall 2005

Kelli Russell Agodon Liz Ahl Dilruba Ahmed Maggie Anderson Julianna Baggott Robin Behn Denise Bergman Eleanor Berry Remica L. Bingham S. Beth Bishop Fleda Brown Stacey Lynn Brown Anthony Butts Kevin Coval Melissa Frederick Nola Garrett Susan Grimm Cindy Williams Gutiérrez Karen Heuler Diane Holland Kevin Honold Sandy Huss Annemarie Kattan Jacir Roy Jacobstein Lesley Jenike

Crab Orchard Review

Crab Orchard Review

Cover: Six photographs

by Richard Lawson © 2005

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REVIEW

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REVIEW

A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 10 NO. 2

“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 Interns Matthew Brown Tracy Conerton Aron Efimenko Clay Held Kevin Kainulainen Jan LaPerle Linsey Maughan Ingrid Moody Chad Parmenter Jan Presley Elisabeth Randall Timothy Wagner

Assistant Editors Clint Cargile Joan Dy Michael Meyerhofer Renee Wells

Summer/Fall 2005 ISSN 1083-5571

Special Projects Assistant Josh Vinzant Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Address all correspondence to:

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 $15 for one year, $25 for two years, $35 for three years; foreign rates for individuals are, respectively, $20, $35, and $50. Subscription rates for institutions are $16 for one year, $32 for two years, and $48 for three years; foreign rates for institutions are, respectively, $21, $42, and $63. Single issues are $8 (please include an additional $3 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.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Faner Hall 2380 - Mail Code 4503, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale, Illinois 62901.

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Crab Orchard Review accepts no responsibility for unsolicited submissions and will not enter into correspondence about their loss or delay.

Copyright © 2005 Crab Orchard Review Permission to reprint materials from this journal remains the decision of the authors. We request Crab Orchard Review be credited with initial publication.

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.

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.

Crab Orchard Review is indexed in Index of American Periodical Verse.

Visit Crab Orchard Review’s website:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/>.

Crab Orchard Review and its staff wish to thank these supporters for their generous contributions, aid, expertise, and encouragement: Arthur M. “Lain” Adkins, Susan H. Wilson, Karl Kageff, Barb Martin, Carol Burns, Larry Townsend, Sarah Henry, Kathy Kageff, Bridget Brown, Mona Ross, Kyle Lake, and Rick Stetter of Southern Illinois University Press Division of Continuing Education SIU Alumni Association The Graduate School College of Liberal Arts The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost The Southern Illinois Writers Guild And the editors would also like to thank these current and former SIUC Department of English Faculty members for their help these past ten years: Mark Amos David Blakesley Mary Bogumil Clinton Brand William Brown Joel Brouwer Edward Brunner Jane Cogie K. K. Collins Ricardo Cortez Cruz Kevin Dettmar Ronda Dively David Evans Charles Fanning Robert Elliot Fox Kent Haruf Stephen Howie John Howell Michael Humphries Anna Jackson Rodney Jones

Judy Jordan Karen Kipp Elizabeth Klaver Lisa Knopp Mary Lamb Susan Lang Richard Lawson Beth Lordan Mike Magnuson Lisa McClure Michael McGregor Betty Mitchell Michael Molino A. J. Morey Gerald Nelms Lucia Perillo Lee Person Anita Riedinger Hans Rudnick Brady Udall Tim Westmoreland

Tony Williams Clarisse Zimra

And the Department of English Office Staff, who have helped us in so many ways: Robin Adams Paula Arnold Janet Bahr-Ferry Shelley Camden Sherri Garnett Eileen Glass Connie Liddell Ronda McWilliams Donna Schumaier Jody Spaniol Beth Syler Donna Vance Virginia Williams

Crab Orchard Review is supported, in part, by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.

Crab Orchard Review wishes to express its special thanks to our generous Charter Members, Patrons, Donors, and Supporting Subscribers listed on the following page whose contributions make the publication of this journal possible. We invite new Charter Members ($250 or more), Patrons ($100), Donors ($50), and Supporting Subscribers ($25) to join us. Supporting Subscribers receive a one-year subscription; Donors receive a two-year subscription; Patrons receive a three-year subscription; and Charter Members receive a lifetime subscription. Address all contributions to Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503.

CHARTER MEMBERS Edward Brunner & Jane Cogie Linda L. Casebeer Dwayne Dickerson Jack Dyer Joan Ferrell John Guyon John M. Howell

Richard Jurek Joseph A. Like Greg & Peggy Legan Beth L. Mohlenbrock Jane I. Montgomery Ruth E. Oleson Peggy Shumaker

PATRONS Alejandro Cáceres Siobhan Fallon Kent Haruf Jesse Lee Kercheval Lisa J. McClure

Lillian Peterson Eugenie & Roger Robinson Betty & Ray Tribble David & Laura Tribble Clarisse Zimra

DONORS Lorna Blake Tawanna R. Brown Charles Fanning Jewell A. Friend John & Nancy Jackson Reamy Jansen Rob & Melissa Jensen Jon Luther

Elisabeth Luther Jeremy Manier Lucia Perillo Anita Riedinger Angela Rubin Hans H. Rudnick William E. Simeone Lissa Winstanley

SUPPORTING SUBSCRIBERS Serge & Joan Alessio Erik C. Campbell Joanna Christopher K. K. Collins Jeremiah K. Durick Corrine Frisch John & Robin Haller Zdena Heller Karen Hunsaker

Chris Kelsey Lee Lever Jessica Maich Charlotte McLeod Peggy & Albert Melone Nadia Reimer Catherine Rudnick Peter Rutkoff Paul & Lisa Von Drasek

The editors wish to thank all of our editorial and production staff, who have made the first ten years of publishing the magazine possible with their hard work, intelligence, insight, and good humor. Thanks for everything, Allison Joseph Editor & Poetry Editor

Carolyn Alessio Prose Editor

Jon Tribble Managing Editor

And our special thanks to our Founding Editor, Richard Peterson.

Crab Orchard Review’s Editorial and Production Staff 1995 – 2005 Tabaré Alvarez Anne Arthurs Katy Balma Philip Balma Scott Beem Diana Bernhard David Bond Mark Borrelli Matthew Brown Timothy W. Bubenik Stephanie Buffman Allison Campbell Clint Cargile Sean Chapman Anne Clarkin Tracy Conerton Heather Crego Curtis Crisler Ruth Ann Daugherty Chris Dennis Melanie Dusseau Joan Dy Aron Efimenko Barbara Eidlin Mark Farnsworth Marc Finch Terri Fletcher Mike Fontana Sandy Fontana Jon Friedler Mackie Garrett Marji Gibbs Jim Gill Jennifer Gold Brett Griffiths Reagan Hanley Joey Hale Douglas Haynes Kelly Heideman Clay Held

B. Melinda Holmes Margaret Howard Michael Hughes Anton Janulis Melanie Jordan Deb Jurmu Kevin Kainulainen Martha Kallal Aaron Kellerstrass Chris Kelsey Chris Kennedy Vicky Kepple Kathryn Kerr Brenda King Teresa Kramer Amy Kucharik Jan LaPerle Steven Leek David Lott Samantha J. Lopez Cathy Lucas Tim Marsh Melanie Martin Adrian Matejka Linsey Maughan Kandace McCoy Keith McElmurry Kevin McKelvey Nancy McKinney Michael Meyerhofer Delaney Mitchell Ingrid Moody Lena Morsch Jen Neely Dave Neis Season Oesterle Terry Olsen Emily Ostendorf Lynanne Page Chad Parmenter

Benjamin Percy Patty Dickson Pieczka Jan Presley Emily Pruitt Josh Pugh Elisabeth Randall Cynthia Roth Steve Sawyer Crystal Schroeder Greg Schwipps Elise Shalda Maggie Shelledy Alberta Skaggs Anna Maria Soloff Sara Sowers Kristy Stevens Mary Stepp Melissa Stoltz Ira Sukrungruang Mariko Suzuki Ron Timmons Mark Vannier Jason Vaughan Josh Vinzant Krista Marie Vondras Fred Von Drasek Timothy Wagner Jamie Walczak John Wallace Renee Wells Elizabeth Whiteacre Jamie Wild Jenni Williams Lesa Williams Nikita Williams Courtney Wilson Danny Wilson Kari Wilson Sam Wilson Brad Younkin

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REVIEW

SUMMER/FALL 2005

VOLUME 10, NUMBER 2

FICTION & PROSE 1

Karen Heuler

Guest Appearance

Kelly Magee

As Human as You Are Standing Here

10

Wendell Mayo

Brezhnev’s Eyebrows

50

Holloway McCandless

Milk of the Muddy

63

John Moss

Asphyxiation

93

Tanja Pajevic

Diocletian’s Palace

103

Maura Stanton

My Life

145

Lois Taylor

Trust Me

155

Jean Thompson

Pie of the Month

158

Sandy Huss

Trading Spaces: The Intersection of 196 Reality TV, the WWW, the Meat and Brick & Mortar Casinos in the Late Age of Print

Brian Leung

Apologia…Anyone?

204

Liliana Loofbourow

A Pan-American Epistolary Record: Franco Valentini, Spencer Tunick, and the Nakeds

240

Margaret MacInnis

Swimming in the Gulf

249

Diana Spechler

Bethlehem After Arafat

259

Poetry Kelli Russell Agodon

Bitterroot Poem to an Unknown FireďŹ ghter

26 27

Liz Ahl

Inshallah Styx Concert

28 32

Dilruba Ahmed

Invitation

34

Maggie Anderson

March 2003 Waiting for Jane Austen in Walnut Creek, Ohio, at the End of the Twentieth Century

37 38

Julianna Baggott

Monica Lewinsky Thinks of Bill Clinton While Standing Naked in front of a Hotel Mirror

40

Robin Behn

Epistle to Unrelenting Days

42

Denise Bergman

Setting Up

44

Eleanor Berry

Front Pages: October 2002

45

Remica L. Bingham

After Hurricane Isabel, Residents of Public Housing Interpret Signs

46

S. Beth Bishop

A Clinic Technician Volunteers

48

Fleda Brown

Under the Eaves

72

Stacey Lynn Brown

Hello, I’m Johnny Cash

74

Anthony Butts

Heritage

75

Kevin Coval

The Day Jam Master Jay Died

76

Melissa Frederick

Mercy for the Ghost of Karla Faye Tucker

79

Nola Garrett

Elegy for Anthony Hecht

81

Susan Grimm

Careless at the Crematorium: Georgia, 2002

83

Cindy Williams Gutiérrez Sounding Restoration tourist-attraction.com

84 86

Diane Holland

First Morning on Another Planet Rain for Days

87 88

Kevin Honold

Citywide Curfew, April Riots, Cincinnati, 2001

89

Annemarie Kattan Jacir

landscape

90

Roy Jacobstein

The Word

92

Lesley Jenike

After the Concert Heart of the Awl

123 124

Sandra Kohler

Creation, 1996

126

Aviya Kushner

September 10, 2001

127

Melissa Kwasny

Laramie

128

Jacqueline Jones LaMon

Nine Days Before Kirby High’s Senior Prom Almost Thanksgiving

130 131

Jeanne Larsen

Rain in Two Hemispheres Snow in a Season of War-Talk and Drought

132 133

Ed Bok Lee

The Invisible Church

134

Stephanie Lenox

No One Gets Hurt

136

Barbara Leon

The Looting of the Vase Mahmud Al-Qayed, the Songbird Catcher

138 140

Timothy Liu

Holy Law Contemplating Disaster with the TV Off

141 142

Dawn Lonsinger

Matter-of-Fact

143

Raymond Luczak

E-Signature MP3

174 175

Susan Ludvigson

September 7, 2004, Rock Hill, SC October 25, 2004

176 177

Peter Marcus

S-21 Easter 1997

179 180

Frank Matagrano

Trying to Channel

181

Jeffrey McDaniel

Heavy Breather Zoo

183

Shannon Marquez McGuire

Amusing Ourselves to Death

184

Erika Meitner

Instructions for Vigilant Girls Electric Girls Campaign Speech

186 188 190

Joseph Millar

Georgia on My Mind

191

Jonathan Moody

In the Absence of Sleep

193

Carolyn Moore

Persephone and Demeter in Ethiopia

195

Deborah Moreno

Poetry’s Obituary

217

John Morgan

Feathered Monsters

219

Arlene Naganawa

Michael Jackson Dreams the Elephant Man

220

Lee Newton

Why We Make Love

221

Sharon Olson

Madrileño

223

Ed Pavlić

One Word for Rachel Corrie

224

Candace Pearson

To Dolly, Born 1997

229

Cynthia Reeves

Good Friday

231

Cherene Sherrard

The Dictator’s Wife, or Mildred Aristide Prepares to Address the Congressional Black Caucus

233

Beth Simon

Dawn at Dulles Int’l

235

Susan Sink

Meditation for a Century Barely Begun 236

Alison Townsend

The Words to Say It

238

Brian Turner

To Sand The Hurt Locker Caravan Katyusha Rockets Ashbah

264 265 266 268 269

Ryan G. Van Cleave

Hole

270

Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck

After Reading of Timothy McVeigh’s Last Hours

271

Davi Walders

Remembering Rabin

273

Michael Waters

Sonnet for Strummer

276

Stefi Weisburd

Where It Is Written

277

Gary J. Whitehead

These Last Ten Years

279

Contributors’ Notes Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005

280 292

A Note on Our Cover The six photographs on the cover of this issue are the work of Richard Lawson, a Professor Emeritus in English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In 1995, he was the cover artist for the first issue of Crab Orchard Review.

Announcements We would like to congratulate two of our recent contributors, Sapna Gupta and Rafael Torch. Both have been awarded 2005 IAC Literary Awards from the Illinois Arts Council.

Sapna Gupta’s story “Rajni Loves le Cancan” appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer/Fall 2004).

Rafael Torch’s personal essay “La Villita” appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 9, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2004).

Each author received $1000 in recognition of their work.

Ten Years After ~ Documenting a Decade 1995 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2005

Karen Heuler Guest Appearance Perry Geary had a shotgun apartment in Hell’s Kitchen: bathtub next to the stove, windows that only looked from one room into the next. He had a TV at each end of the apartment, and the TVs were always on. His head was filled with the voices of his TV friends; he remembered TV incidents as if he were part of them, as if he’d been there when it happened. So much of himself was fictional or at least tied to fiction, that the most interesting thing he’d ever done resulted from a few movies he saw on TV, the Indiana Jones films.

He felt he had the soul of Indy in the body of a clerk, and, as a result of some kind of inverted symbolism, he bought a snake because Indiana Jones was afraid of snakes. Thus he found his calling, because snakes appealed to him beyond measure. He didn’t know why he liked them; it was a hard thing to explain, but his happiness was increased when he bought one, brought it home, and watched it settle down.

At first he went for the pretty ones—tree snakes and vine snakes and the thin-necked lavender ones from Costa Rica, and he read about them with his mouth open, his breath whistling behind his tongue. He joined a club or two, went to meetings with other collectors, and began to correspond with dealers. He was never interested in constrictors (the tattooed guys were; or the boys who wanted the tattooed guys).

Gradually he grew to believe that the prettiest were also the deadliest, and the deadliest the prettiest. Their deadliness meant they were vulnerable, since they were detested by the outside world. He had to shelter them twice—protect them against their harm to him, and also the harm the world was itching to do to them. He felt an increased intimacy with the snakes because of all the necessary concealment and planning. No one outside the snake leagues knew about him and the snakes. Not the landlord, the neighbors, the occasional repairman—no one. When he was away from them he thought of them with the same illicit anticipation with which a guard might think of his prisoner, or the same tactile longing of a mother for her child.

The snakes’ coilings and writhings in their various tanks, the Crab Orchard Review

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Karen Heuler warmth generated by the lamps, the smell of their skin and their bedding, the blind movements of the pinkies before he placed them in the tanks for the snakes’ sudden sharp stings: these were endearing and commonplace. They were his fundament and life.

He learned their names—scientific and common—and created new categories for them based on his own observations: Little Sister, History Teacher, Torpedo. Then he went ahead and even created new species names: Pencil Snake, Ghost Snake, Snake-in-the-Grass. He loved to look at them up close and marvel at their individual scales: black next to yellow next to white. He knew their sense of smell was exquisite; they recognized him by his chemical composition. He was their feeder, their keeper, and a moving chemical mist.

He built two rows of shelves down the long walls of his apartment and placed the tanks on them. When he moved the tanks, it was like he repainted the walls. He loved them.

They were animals that swam in air; their sidelong stirrings and their fascinating rhythms were endlessly intriguing. Fish, birds, people, snakes: they all moved differently and it was interesting that he’d had dreams where he could fly, and he knew he could swim but not once had he ever thought he could move like a snake.

The snakes soothed him and provided him with company. He was not stupid; he knew it was a sad life, but the unarguable fact was: it was his sad life. He walked along Ninth Avenue and saw other lives—boisterous, crowded, overt—all of which he recognized and understood were not his, simply not his.

He had memories of failed hopes and lost dreams, but even these were weak: the hopes not high enough, the dreams underdone. He thought of Glory.

She’d been a small, slightly dirty-looking girl sitting alone in Port Authority. He was there because he had stopped for coffee at a concession stand where a neighbor said he worked. Perry hoped to encourage a friendship. He had waited three days so as not to seem eager (he would pretend it had slipped his mind, that he was thinking of a bus trip and stopped by for a schedule), but the neighbor wasn’t there. Perry had misunderstood, or waited until it was the neighbor’s day off; or the man had straight-out lied to him in the nonchalant way people had lied to him over the years, just to get rid of him.

He sat down in the plastic bucket seats, sipping the kind of awful coffee he always seemed to end up with, when he noticed her. She had a docile look. She sat there, staring at her shoes. A gate nearby had a 2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Karen Heuler line of customers; he waited until they all went through and the doors were closed, and she still sat there. Then he bought two donuts and two more coffees and sat in the row of bucket seats near her, with an empty seat between them, and placed a donut and a coffee on it.

“That’s for you,” he said, not looking at her. “If you don’t want them, throw them out. It’s okay if you do.”

To his delight, she took them.

Her name was Glory; she had steady dark eyes and limp hair and her fingernails were bitten and gray, but she spoke to him politely if briefly. It was cool in the station, though the air wasn’t fresh; he was grateful for the coolness because he had a fear of being damp. His mental image of himself included sweaty palms and pits and dank areas in his shiny-seated pants. He was grateful it was cool.

He was there so long that he had to excuse himself to use the men’s room, and that’s where the surprise happened, because she followed him in.

He was peeing when he became aware of her standing next to him and slightly behind.

He thought of her from time to time; he thought of running into her again, now much older of course and no longer fresh-faced, but still docile. She would say, “You were the only one who was kind to me,” or something like that to make him feel better, because he had stood there, excited and ashamed in the bathroom stall while she took his penis in her mouth. It was a day like no other; he thought his life had turned, until she wiped her lips and asked for money.

Not that he was naive; he knew when she followed him in that way that chances were good she wasn’t innocent. But he was surprised because it happened out of nowhere; he hadn’t asked for it or even wished for it.

Because of this he fancied that she had chosen him, and that freed him to think about her again and again, over the years, in various ways both lewd and kind. She merged in his memories with the plotlines of his TV shows.

He’d gone back to see her later that month but she wasn’t there; no doubt she’d given him a false lead, like the neighbor who lied about where he worked.

Or it might have been his own fault; he’d waited almost three weeks, not wanting to seem greedy. He lacked conviction. He was intelligent but aware of all his failings, and this caused him to doubt and to wait. Waiting always killed him.

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Karen Heuler In his mind, however, he could replay it. He could walk into a bar like the one in Cheers and see Glory sitting alone at a table. Sam would make a pass at her, but she wouldn’t look up until Perry sat down by her side. Or she’d work as a waitress at that coffee shop where all the Friends hung out, and he would invite her over, or Rachel would know her, or Phoebe, and they’d all laugh. He couldn’t see her with the Seinfeld crowd or Murphy Brown; she was too quiet, she needed to be drawn out under different conditions. But she could be a nurse with a terribly sad secret that she’d reveal to Dr. Carter in E.R., or a Good Samaritan promising to take care of a dying man’s dog.

He had a good imagination; he had a population in his head, which was why he was content. There were his TV friends, and the snakes.

When he looked at them he saw a bright green world all around him.

He was in paradise with the snakes, and that made him God; he was going to put a slightly different spin on the story. He suspected that the symbolism ascribed to snakes came from an unenlightened mind.

Cars could kill, and so could planes or subways, but they weren’t “evil,” they didn’t get anyone thrown out of Eden. It was a question of understanding their nature and allowing it. They were beautiful things to watch. They swam on the ground.

He could see himself being made a running joke of it on Cheers or maybe even Frasier. Snakes and penises—of course; it was easy to see the connection when they reared up. He was surrounded by penises—he wanted Niles to make a comment about that (not Frasier), or maybe Kramer would be the funniest. He ran smoothly through his friends, indulgently. He knew their faults—the Cranes’ pomposity, Felix’s pickiness, Ralph Kramden’s enormous self-centeredness—but he accepted them graciously, like you would your family or friends.

For instance, when the doctors told him (so coldly, so much unlike the TV doctors; Carter would never have done it that way—not Dr. Ross, either. Greene maybe; certainly Benton) about his problems, they’d been bald with their diagnosis. He got a sudden picture of Ralph, when he’d read the report saying he was dying from “arterial monochromia,” or something, when it was really the vet’s report on his mother-in-law’s dog.

Perry had asked the doctor: “Are you talking about Perry Geary?”

The doctor looked at his reports. “Yes.” “Born 8/12/52?”

Again the eyes looked down.

“Yes.” 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Karen Heuler It was then that he thought he would pull a Rockford. He would claim to be someone else—Jimmy Joe Meeker, oil millionaire, for instance. He lit up at the thought; he even opened his mouth; but Rockford always got found out, didn’t he? And Jimmy Joe Meeker was only an alias; the body was still pure Rockford.

It was just that it seemed so likely to be wrong.

Especially since life went on so normally among his friends, who seemed to go on without a worry. Surely someone would be upset for him? Of course, they never actually noticed him, that was simply in his head. It was not in their natures to need him, to observe him. It was not part of their character. It had made it so much easier, all along; he couldn’t complain now.

He’d always had the option to drop them, of course. He’d stopped watching NYPD Blue when he saw Bobby Simone’s heart give way, and he’d skipped past Murphy Brown during the cancer thing.

His friends’ familiar voices were in his head even as the doctor’s words crept in among them. Sometimes Phoebe said “Oh!” in that sudden way she had when she noticed things. He could feel her behind him during the doctor’s explanations. Surgery was a chance, just a chance, maybe even only a delay. “Oh!” Well, he could, of course, go home and die among his friends, which appealed to him at first. They would laugh and cheer him up. Of course, they sometimes got upset over things, but they found a way to go on. An injury in one episode was gone by the next and deaths lasted only an episode. Coach died on Cheers and was mourned forever for one episode, as was Colonel Blake, and Bill McNeal. He liked the brightness, the impermeability; they lifted him up and made him feel friendly. But now he felt a little different, day by day; he felt himself on the other side, the side that drops out. He was someone who would be left behind, one of those characters who disappeared between seasons, like Trapper John. Before this, he’d always known he was on the other side of the screen, but he’d felt included. Now he was beginning to feel not just lonely but alone, and alone objectively. He had a disquieting image of an impersonal eye peering down from on high as he watched TV with an eager smile turned to the screen. It was nasty to see himself that way.

In the meantime he had tests to go through and papers to fill out, and it was obvious that the real people in his world were neither friendly nor amused. His health plan was so bad that doctors failed to show up for his appointments; his test results sat in outboxes, then inboxes, and gradually, like a running joke that turned serious, he Crab Orchard Review

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Karen Heuler admitted that he had a bad kind of tumor that involved radical surgery followed by radiation.

When he came home from work, or more often from doctor’s visits, and turned on the TV, the bright screen faces seemed less comforting.

The TVs stared at each other from the ends of his apartment, and in between them were the rows and rows of snakes.

When, despite all his health plan’s efforts, it became obvious that the surgery was not far away, he looked at his snakes, stopping before each tank, placing his hand on the glass, looking at them with an anxious, memorizing eye.

On the screen, Colonel Blake was leaving the 4077, and things were getting sappy.

Father Mulcahy was saying, “Your work here will never be forgotten,” and Perry thought Mulcahy was talking to him. He felt a sadness spread through him, a nostalgia.

He tapped on the glass of the next tank. What to do with the snakes? The pet shop where Perry worked was very concerned when he told them about his problem and the surgery and the convalescence, but they wouldn’t agree to tend his snakes. They were barely making it now; and how many snakes did he say he had? And how much did it cost him to care for them? His boss looked away, stricken, and then back again. “I could handle a tank or two,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be back on your feet sooner than you think.”

Perry went to libraries and looked up his disease. He calculated his recovery time and the snakes’ survival rate in his absence. And then he decided to let them go. It was spring; they would make it through the summer, and if he made it, too, then he would try to trap them in the fall. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all he had.

Perry reminded himself that Ross had given Marcel to a zoo when the monkey became aggressive. He bet there were other situations.

Wasn’t that a recurring thing? Recognizing that the wild had to return to the wild, that it was not possible for all varieties of creatures to live the same way? The Yearling jumped into his head. They did let it go, didn’t they? He strained to recall the ending. He was worried because he couldn’t remember if they’d had to shoot the deer at the end—or had that been Old Yeller?

He began to list the lessons he’d learned from watching TV: Friendship was important. Lying was bad, except for a joke, except to protect someone. Kindness existed in small gestures, and small gestures were always discovered. Loyalty ruled the world, and yet 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Karen Heuler hatred could be funny (Drew and Mimi, Seinfeld and Newman).

You could sympathize with sufferers—cold, wet, hungry, whatever— without yourself being cold. In fact, the likelihood that anyone was really and truly cold was small; they only threw in this business about suffering when someone had to learn a lesson. He couldn’t figure out what his lesson was. In fact, it might not be his lesson at all; he might be no more than an expendable minor character, a device, just a turn in the plot when the ratings were low.

On the last day before the operation he loaded the poisonous snakes into shoeboxes and tied them in stacks. Others were put in groups into larger boxes; some into cloth bags or plastic containers with holes in the top. He went back and forth, moving the snakes down to the vestibule, then moving them into a stolen shopping cart he’d stashed outside, and tying the stacks to the metal bars. His cart looked like it belonged to a homeless person. He put on a dark-green knit ski cap. It was his belief that no New Yorker would ever mess with anyone wearing a knit ski cap. Not only would they never say anything, they would make it a point not to look, either.

He turned his pockets inside out, too, just to keep himself in character. He was a character now, he was a made-for-TV movie about the surprising secrets of a dying homeless man. He clucked to his snakes once or twice on the long, rattling walk to Central Park.

The snakes, he had to believe, were going on an adventure. The snakes were characters, too, a different population from his TV pals, but one just as committed to continuing without him. If he thought about it, they had the same ability to entertain him, involve him, and yet be uninvolved with him. It made him sigh and hang his head. He caught two people watching him and he felt like Klinger must have felt, acting insane.

The lessons in life and TV were the same, weren’t they? It was all about taking chances, wasn’t it? They were all going to try to live, the snakes and him. That’s what TV always said: you have to live, you have to try, you have to risk it. No matter that they all seemed, on some fundamental level, to be doing the same kind of trying—nothing truly remarkable. Although, maybe, the truly remarkable didn’t fit on screen (this brought him comfort: he wasn’t onscreen and maybe that meant his life was better).

He was at Columbus Circle, just across from that island with the big subway stop, when he saw a woman staring at him. She had a dirty baby on her hip and a whining toddler at her knee.

Crab Orchard Review

◆ 7

Karen Heuler He began to mutter and gesticulate—doing that made you almost invisible—but then he really noticed her. Something about her stopped him; something in the steady way she looked reminded him of Glory.

He crossed the street slowly. She moved the toddler slightly behind her knee, she hitched the baby up to a steadier position. Her eyes and her face aimed at him, unflinching, unbroken.

She’d gotten a little puffy, he thought. That, plus she’d obviously been pregnant a few times. His pulse leapt and he remembered all the plots where women resurfaced to present a man with his love child.

Sam Malone? Worf? Maybe she’d been waiting for him; maybe she’d planned it.

“Are they mine?” he asked in a cracked voice, licking his lips and wishing he’d left his cart across the street. One of the cloth bags was moving slightly. Glory’s eyes flicked to it quickly and then back to stare at Perry. “Could be,” she said. “They gotta be someone’s.”

Perry took his hat off and crushed it in his hands, gripping his hands together. It was a little like praying or pleading. “I’m dying,” he said, and he thought, now she would embrace him and cry, and the babies would hug him and she would say she’d waited too long but they still had time together, all the time in the world.

Instead she said, “They’re not yours. But they’re hungry,” and Perry went against his principles (don’t give out money) and gave her $20.

“I think I know you,” he said hesitantly.

“Get away,” she said neutrally. “I got to earn a living.”

He stepped back in surprise, knocking into his cart. She was moving her little family to the other side of the entrance. He saw her put a small box with loose change in it at her feet. He had been blocking her from potential alms-givers.

The two kids were obviously not his, and he felt the same mix of relief and disappointment that men falsely accused of paternity always felt: Nice not to have the responsibility; sad not to have the connection.

One bag was still moving around quite noticeably in his cart. He went back to his mission. He thought he knew why Glory was there: she was the woman who might sidetrack the hero, the siren at the gate.

He stuffed the knit cap back on his head and rushed across the street, making it safely to the park.

He rattled his cart down the paths, rounding the hillocks still sprouting daffodils, noting the ready supply of squirrels and lazy jaded pigeons. He came to a small field, fenced off for re-seeding. There were bushes around two sides, a stand of trees on the third, while the fourth 8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Karen Heuler side faced a crossroads of paths with different ecosystems of rocks and grassy slopes. There was a lot to choose from here.

He followed the line of bushes back to a break in the fence. The cart didn’t fit through, so he began to unload it, starting with the bag that moved, and then he took out the boxes and containers and carefully arranged them around him. When he was done he peeked inside each box and then he considered the variety of scenes around him.

He sorted the boxes into piles and when they were all arranged, he opened the lowest pile, prodding the snakes downhill with the tips of the lids. The ones to the side he shooed towards the bushes and the ones on the top he ran into the trees. He had divided them for the corners of the world—he was not just releasing them; he was sending them forth.

The last pile contained the pretty ones, the bright, special ones who were closest to his heart. These were the ones most dear to him, not necessarily the most exotic or fierce, just the ones that had personalities, the ones who could almost be on TV. He wanted to watch the others go first, to see them make their ways in the world, to watch them swim on grass, their movements finally unrestricted. He let those go quickly, so he could concentrate on the last ones, his favorites. He stood, looking all around his field of vision, to the sky, to the earth. And then he unfolded one, the grass snake from Panama, and he saw it flick its tongue out, tasting the heat in the air. He watched it go, and then he released the silky-eyed cobra, and then the two pencil snakes.

And as they reared their heads, wavering, testing free air and sun and the end of the glass cage, Perry stood still and watched them go, each sidle, each slide.

In his mind’s eye, he could see his friends standing around him, and they were clapping. In his ears, he heard applause, and more applause.

Crab Orchard Review

◆ 9

Kelly Magee As Human as You Are Standing Here The one time we slept together, I called my friend Leo an experiment. He’d just lost the last Mama Guava drag contest at El Goya, an abandoned cigar factory turned nightclub in Ybor City, and I was trying to console him. We were on a brick parking lot, no lights or cops, and both of us were wearing skirts which, physically anyway, made things easier. I straddled Leo’s hips, he held onto my knees.

Look, Leo said beneath me. I’m a lesbian.

He laughed, still thinking I was joking. A blonde wig slid back from his forehead. Behind us, El Goya shut down forever. Leo placed my hand like a corsage on his chest, and I pushed into him.

Gyp, he said. What are you doing?

Nothing, I said. Then I did it again.

Leo turned so he was looking at the tire of the car parked next to us. I noticed one of his false eyelashes had separated from the corner of his eye.

Okay, he said. But go slow. Go slow.

It’s just an experiment, I said before we both stopped talking.

A week later, he showed up at my apartment in a blue Chevy Cavalier I’d never seen, wearing a French push-up bra that I couldn’t stop staring at. He’d only been ’moning—using hormones—for a couple weeks, but in that bra he sure had some Mademoiselles. He went straight to my closet and pulled out two shirts, a low-cut number someone had bought for me and another with fringe. He told me he was taking them.

Taking them where? I said.

West, he said, shrugging, like it was just another club. He raised the shirts in his fist, proclamation-like.

I’m jetting, Gyp, he said. I just can’t live in a place where sodomy is still on the books.

Sodomy, I said, and I might’ve even laughed. Give me a break.

He glared at me. Huffed. Maybe not this one, he said, handing me back the shirt with fringe.

He did leave Florida, though, drove all the way to Colorado and 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee moved into the slums, sent me pictures through the mail like postcards: his skinny arm wrapped around boy after boy after boy. I guessed the boys were supposed to prove something, but I knew he’d be back. It was just a matter of waiting, of riding out his absence like a jail sentence. I sent quarter postcards to his return addresses, the gag tourist kind with obese people and alligators and bad puns. Send money, I wrote on the backs, as a joke. When you come home, bring flowers.

With Leo gone, I started working more hours at Sunflower Organics, ringing up rainforest-friendly shampoo and tempeh burgers, herbs for migraines and weight loss and incontinence. I put in so many hours the other clerks made jokes about where I must be spending the night. I didn’t mention Leo, except to refer casually to a friend I had out west. Sure, theoretically, being a twenty-first century queer meant you fucked who you pleased. Theoretically, banging a drag queen was cutting edge. But when it came down to the blow-by-blow of daily life, people in health food stores wanted to know where you stood. And while sleeping with him didn’t exactly make me straight, it put me somewhere closer to the middle. So, I let my coworkers set me up with their roommates and cousins and neighbors, a lot of nice-enough dykes who just weren’t Leo. And I spent a lot of time having imaginary confrontations with people who didn’t ask the right questions. Who said a lesbian and a drag queen couldn’t fall in love, shack up in a townhouse with white shutters, a couple of fish and a couple of incomes?

Who said?

And anyway, theory couldn’t erase the sound of Leo’s voice—Go slow, go slow—so when I wasn’t working, I skulked around bars where, if I was lucky, I could find political affirmation in some poor dyke’s crotch. And where I could ignore the fact that there was nothing political about the way I missed Leo. Then, a year after he’d traded me for the road, I got a letter with a Statue of Liberty stamp on it. It was written on wide-ruled paper that said, I’m in jail and all I want to do is shoot every one of these motherfuckers in the face, and I knew he was coming back.

He turned up on my doorstep with a ring through his bottom lip and an ugly patchwork of stitches across his right cheek. He grinned when I opened the door, all tongue because he’d lost his front teeth, wearing lipstick and a Buccaneers ball cap. The cap, in case he got pulled over by some fag-hating cop. The lipstick, like ointment on a wound.

I’m out, Gyp, he said, and I knew he meant Colorado, not jail. He’d Crab Orchard Review

◆ 11

Kelly Magee been busted for forging prescriptions, then for slugging the arresting officer. Leo wasn’t a large person, but he did have a long history of beating the shit out of people. It was one of the many things we had in common.

I mean, I’m home, Leo said. I hugged him. I could feel the flat edges of his shoulder blades through his shirt, the knots of his spine.

His hair was stiff and smelled like gasoline. He could’ve been a public service announcement for himself. I wanted to peel off his clothes and count the pieces of him to make sure he was all there.

Leo, I said finally. Holy shit.

Straight boys, he said. They’ll be the death of me.

They’ll be the death of us all, I said.

Except you, Leo said.

Why, I said. Because I sleep with queens?

Leo didn’t say anything.

You come back just to stick it to me? I said.

He stepped forward, closer to me, over the threshold of my door.

He said, I came back because I love you.

Which wasn’t true. I knew he came because he had nowhere else to go. Because straight boys in Florida or Colorado or anywhere else were never as nice as you hoped they’d be, and neither, for that matter, were gay ones. Because I’d been taking him in since tenth grade, when his parents kicked him out and I let him crash in my room until I got kicked out, too. Because I was the only person who knew that even when he was being mean and catty and predictable, he was still Leo, my Leo, and that counted for something. And because what else could I do when he batted his eyes and called me Gypsy—his pet name for me when we’d lived on the street—but step aside and let him in.

He collapsed on my couch for three days before getting up again. The first night, I asked him about the lip ring, and he said it was a Neptune figure that symbolized humanity’s alienation from itself. I asked about the stitches, and he winced. They were from when he’d gotten slow drunk in a straight bar, he said, in Evergreen. He’d driven his pickup over the side of Holy Shit Road, which ran in gravel switchbacks up the mountainside. He didn’t say what he’d been doing there all alone, or who had rescued him, or if he’d meant to go over the edge or not.

I told him about Sunflower Organics, and the bars, and the postcards I’d sent that he’d never gotten. I kept touching his knees, his elbows. The parts of him that seemed safe.

12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee By the third night, I’d cancelled all my dates and called in sick twice. Leo barely got up to eat. He slept a lot, but he wasn’t going through withdrawals so I didn’t think he’d been on anything but the hormones. The third day, my boss Steve called. Leo woke up enough to ask who it was, as if he’d been expecting a call himself.

Nobody, I said. Have you seen my keys?

I put on my orange Sunflower smock, and when he finally opened his eyes, Leo looked startled.

I’m going to work, I said. When he didn’t respond, I repeated, My keys?

I took them last night, Leo said. He reached between the couch cushions and pulled out the plastic keychain.

You went out? I said.

Leo grinned, flashing a new set of false teeth. They were too white, and a bit too long for his face.

Without me? I said.

You looked so cute, Leo said. I couldn’t wake you.

Where’d you get the teeth?

The Tooth Fairy, he said.

Leo. What? he said, dropping his eyes.

Leo insisted on coming with me to work, but refused to change out of his pajamas—my flannel pants, a sleeveless shirt, and flip flops.

At Sunflower, he headed straight for the herbal remedies and then set up a battalion of over-the-counter drugs at my register. Saw Palmetto, Black Cohosh, Mexican Yam, Tansy. Hops and Dong Quai. He ran his tongue over his new teeth, clicked his lip ring against them.

What are all these? I said.

Two for my titties, he said, lifting the bottles. Two for curves. One for a creamy complexion. And one—he sighed—to take away my sex drive. How do you stand it?

Baby, that’s a lot of meds, I said.

They’re not meds, he said. They’re vitamins.

He looked over his shoulder at the only other clerk, working in the free-range deli. He said, Are there cameras in here?

No, I said. Healthy people don’t steal.

Beautiful, he said. He reached across the scanner and grabbed a plastic bag. He loaded it with bottles.

Keep the receipt, he said. I’ll walk home.

Stealing’s a bad habit, I said. I watched the other clerk, behind Crab Orchard Review

◆ 13

Kelly Magee the meat counter, set out the happy carcasses of free-range rabbits.

The automatic doors slid open and a hippie couple walked in, openly stared at Leo. Pay for it, then, Leo said. Fix me.

He smiled like he might be joking, and the smile reminded me that Leo had lived for a long time without money. That he had a habit of stealing things he couldn’t buy, and offering things he couldn’t afford to give.

Pay with what? I said.

Leo put the back of his hand to his forehead, a mock-swoon. This proves it, he drawled. I cannot be fixed.

Then he strutted out the automatic door.

After he was gone, I found copies of all the bottles he’d walked out with. I rang them up and put money in the drawer.

Once he’d gotten out of bed, Leo stayed away more and more.

He returned long enough to tell me about the other trannies he’d met, DQ girls with implants, non-ops with shaved tracheas, genderfucks who refused to get cut. I answered calls for Leona, Leonora, and, once, Leontyne. One night he fell in the door, pumped full of silicone, and when I asked how he’d gotten it, he pulled down the waistband of his pants.

The usual way, he said. In the ass.

He peeled back a bandage, and the wound was purple and swollen.

There were several visible needle marks. Someone hadn’t known what they were doing.

I meant, how’d you pay for it, I said.

Oh, you know, Leo said, waving me away. Sugar and spice and everything nice.

I didn’t mind gore, and I’d broken enough skin to be immune to the sight of blood. But those little needle pricks bothered me. Leo had messed up his body so bad it didn’t want to heal: the wounds on his face had begun to weep. Now those holes suggested that the damage was working its way inside-out.

I said the only thing I thought would get to him. Leo, I said. It’s not pretty.

He replaced the bandage quickly. Patience, dear, he said. I’m still cooking. I’m not done yet.

I’m not buying you any more drugs, I said.

Leo pulled up his pants. I didn’t ask you to.

You could help out, I said. Do a dish, for god’s sake. Wash a sock.

14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee Your vein sticks out when you’re mad, Leo said, tapping his forehead. I have a friend who could take care of that.

That night, he didn’t come home.

When he did return, the next day, Leo brought me socks. A brand new pair. I laughed. From then on, he brought gifts every time he came home. Little things at first: a patchouli-scented candle, a mood toe ring, a collection of lesbian erotica I already owned.

I’ve read it, I said when he handed me the book.

Leo raised two perfectly plucked eyebrows. Gypsy, he said. Go girl.

After that the presents got bigger, more dangerous. He brought home two hits of speed that we took for old time’s sake. We spent the night giving each other peanut-butter-and-jelly facials, and I called everyone in my phone book to tell them they were mean drunks and then hang up. Leo left me writing furiously on my bathroom wall, and when he returned, it was with a small aquarium he set down in my living room. By the time I emerged from the bathroom, the tank was already lit and bubbling at the surface, a plastic treasure chest spilling gold coins on the bottom. Fake seaweed swayed with the current, and some sort of algae sprouted near the top. There were no fish, but that wasn’t surprising. I figured it was just like Leo to bring home an aquarium stocked with everything but the point. But just when I thought I’d pegged Leo, I noticed something moving on the bottom. I squinted, then got down on all fours and peered inside.

What the fuck is that? I said. What the fuck is that?

Settle down, Leo said calmly. I’m just babysitting.

That’s not a baby, I said. Is it alive?

Yes. And it is so a baby.

Leo got up, plunged a hand into the tank, and with two blood red fingernails, withdrew a miniature alligator. Only about ten inches long, the body lashed back and forth until Leo flipped it over and stroked the pale underside.

See, he said, she’s harmless. A pet, like a dog. My friend got her at a fruit stand in Louisiana.

I don’t like dogs, I said.

I waited for the gator to open its reptilian jaws and latch onto Leo’s finger. The black eyes didn’t move, and its tiny teeth curled over its snout. I shuddered.

How long?

Just for the weekend, Leo said. Want me to put her back?

Leo got up and slid the gator off his palm into the aquarium, where Crab Orchard Review

◆ 15

Kelly Magee it floated with feet splayed. Body submerged up to the eyes. Louisiana’s best. In my living room. In an aquarium with no lid.

Can’t it get out? I said.

Leo laughed. What, crawl up the glass? It’s not an insect. It’s like a fish, Gyp, a big fish with legs. Just for the weekend.

Fish don’t have legs, I said.

And as thanks—Leo went over to the counter and held up a syringe—I got this.

Heroin? I said.

Premarin, Leo said. The real stuff.

That night, while the alligator floated in fake seaweed, I shot Leo full of hormones. He hadn’t had any in a week, so I figured it would be okay. He wanted me to do it directly in the boob, but I refused—I knew enough about ’moning to know that you could O.D. by shooting up in the wrong place. I told Leo to give me his ass, and he did, and then I had to look at all his bruises. He’d been stuck so many times that the skin had dimpled. I chose the least marked place and pressed in the needle.

Leo exhaled. I half expected him to murmur, Go slow, go slow.

Afterward—after he’d pulled up his pants and hugged me with wet eyes: You’re my girl, he’d said—he wanted to take a bubble bath.

Even more, he wanted me to cut out his stitches.

What am I, your nurse? I said.

Come on, he said. Help me. I don’t trust anyone else.

So I did. I used nail scissors to strip away surgical thread and dried bits of old blood, while Leo snuggled under a blanket of raspberry bubbles and tried not to flinch. I felt good, like I was snipping away all the dead layers of the past two years. I rinsed the scissors in his bath water, letting my hand slip close to the space where his body lay. Leo didn’t open his eyes. When I was done, his cheek looked only a little less gory.

That’s the best I can do, I said.

Eyes still closed, chin resting in foam, Leo said, Thank you, baby.

He raised one hand out of the water, cutting a hole in the wall of bubbles, and felt the side of his face.

I told you I went over the side of Holy Shit Road, right? he said.

You told me, I said.

And you believed me, right? he said.

I don’t believe anything you tell me, Leo, I said. I sighed, because I knew what was coming. Leo held up his hand to quiet me.

I’m trying to confess, he said.

A boyfriend would’ve been a respectable way to get hit, he told me.

16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee All the trannies had stories about violent homophobes they’d taken shit from in the name of love; they all had thin scars they covered with foundation. Those were stories you told your girls over late-night tequila shots. But Leo’s mangled cheek was not because of a boyfriend.

It was over another girl. Like him. And that was the kind of story you didn’t tell anyone.

It was some chick who had the hots for me, he said. A total brick— five o’clock shadow and everything. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t— he paused, licking his lip ring—pretty. She came onto me in this bar, and I don’t know what happened. I was on some bad shit, I think. She made a move and I told her to fuck off, but she wouldn’t leave.

Leo looked up at me, took my hand and held it. He smiled, but he’d taken out his teeth, and without them the gesture seemed off.

I beat her up, he said. Bad. Some of the boys pulled me off and messed up my face outside. Then I drove up to Holy Shit Road and sat there for hours with the motor running. Bled all over the steering wheel.

I stroked his hair, which was thinning even though he was barely in his twenties. He looked like a little old lady in his tower of bubbles, two hairless, bony knees resting against the sides of the tub. He looked like he wanted to end the story there, but I knew that the key to keeping Leo was to keep him talking.

What was it that made you so mad? I said.

Her mouth, Leo said. And her hair. The way she smelled. She was just so sad. And she didn’t have to be that sad, you know? She could’ve tried harder.

He turned his head toward the wall. She was a disgrace to the profession, he said.

She didn’t deserve it, I said.

I know. But I got mine, didn’t I? I couldn’t disagree. It was hard to feel like he hadn’t made up for it—in pain, in humiliation. He’d spent his whole life making up for the things he was going to do later. His punishment preceded his crimes.

I woke up ten minutes and three days late for work.

Don’t go, Leo said as I splashed water from the kitchen sink on my face, splattering my Sunflower uniform.

I’ll get fired if I don’t, I said.

Then you could come out with us more, Leo said.

Truthfully, I thought I’d be fired anyway. Steve had already Crab Orchard Review

◆ 17

Kelly Magee warned me. He wasn’t going to overlook one more late arrival, one more no-show. Even hippies had their limits.

But when I showed up at Sunflower, no one even noticed. They were all in the back, crowded around a black-and-white TV Steve kept there for, he said, emergencies. I clocked in silently. When I joined the rest of them in the back, they barely noticed my presence.

Protest weekend, one of the workers, a pregnant woman named Lisa, murmured over her shoulder.

What protest? I said.

Some security system in Ybor. Visionics. It’s all over the news.

She paused to look at me meaningfully. The national news, she said.

Ybor City was fifteen minutes away from Tampa proper, the heavily hair-sprayed newscaster was saying, and bordered housing developments on one side and the Tampa tourist strip on the other.

That made for lots of crime, so to combat its bad reputation, the Ybor City Council had hired a company called Visionics to install scanners on public streets. Face scanners. Walk down the street, the newscaster pronounced, and a computer would compare your face to a database of America’s Most Wanted.

Innocent until scanned, Steve-the-free-range-butcher said. Screw that.

Legalized profiling, another worker said, shaking his head.

And now they’ve got technology on their side, Steve said. They don’t even need a real reason to arrest somebody.

It’s just wrong, Lisa said. Somebody should do something.

I knew what was coming before Steve said a word. In an organic food store, somebody should do something is as good as a call to action.

Steve agreed to close shop early so we could go to the protest.

Wear a disguise, he told us all. Don’t let them see your face.

I went home and told Leo, who nodded solemnly.

Ybor City, he said. You can’t trust anything there.

He was cycling, and this was his week off hormones. I’ll be moody like you, he’d told me earlier, and I’d said, What’s new? Leo agreed to come with me anyway, and together we went to the store for costume makeup—fake blood and face paint and latex bullet wounds you could stick to your skin. This last item was Leo’s choice.

By the way, I said on the way home. El Goya’s gone.

Good riddance.

It’s called the Pleasure Dome now. It’s only gay on Tuesdays.

What about drag shows? Leo said.

18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee It’s not the same, I said. It’s nothing like it used to be.

The truth was, the Pleasure Dome still had drag shows, but they were peopled by tourists now, middle-aged straight couples drinking Mai Tais and gaping at the ‘he-shes.’ At the old El Goya, Leo and I had drunk key lime martinis until the key lime ran out and we’d switched to straight vodka. I’d watched Leo belt out a version of “Mississippi Goddam” that would’ve done Nina Simone proud. I’d left him dancing with a glass propped against one thigh and a trailer-trash homo rubbing on the other. And one night, I’d consoled him on a brick parking lot, no lights or cops.

Shit, Leo said. It never used to be much.

Leo did my makeup for the evening protest: a Halloween-style drag, with green face paint, black circles around my eyes, fake blood at my temples and in the middle of my forehead. War veteran, he pronounced. For himself, he used latex. He layered himself in standard drag queen makeup—thick eyelashes, cherry red lipstick, rouge and shadow. Then he affixed the bullet holes to his neck and cleavage. He wore a white plastic mini and a halter.

Look at me, I said when I looked in the mirror. You made me look hideous.

You? Leo said. Look at my poor face.

He frowned at his cheek, which had scabbed over since I cut the stitches out, and he rubbed another dose of foundation into the red and pink slashes. Nothing to be done, he said. I’m scarred.

You can hardly tell, I told him. I think they’re shrinking.

I think they’re growing, Leo said. I think they’re breeding.

We decided to start the evening with a drag show at the old El Goya Showroom in the Pleasure Dome. I figured we’d spend half an hour laughing at the Cher knockoffs in stonewashed jeans before zipping over to meet the Sunflower gang, thereby saving my job and my ass. Sure, there was a little part of me that wanted to revisit the crime scene, relive the events that had made, one night, me and Leo think we had answers for each other. But more than that, after what Leo had confessed to me in the tub, I wanted him to remember that some chick in Colorado was not the only offense he needed to atone for.

Ybor City was always crowded, but that night it was packed.

Turned out all of Tampa was up in arms about the scanners, and everybody was talking about should we or shouldn’t we—surveil, that Crab Orchard Review

◆ 19

Kelly Magee is. People weren’t so much dressed in costume as they were disguising themselves. Nobody had a face: only bags, hats, and dark glasses. To the right of us, a Canadian Air Force gas mask; to the left, a Ronald Reagan pull-on. There were a couple of Lone Rangers, lots of ski masks.

Leo grabbed my hand, told me not to stare at the straight people.

On Twelfth Street, a guy wearing a sign that advertised free jello shots was handing out bandannas and yelling, Fuck Visionics.

Fuck who? Leo asked him.

You know, the guy said, gesturing vaguely at the buildings. The cameras.

Leo took a blue bandanna; I took a red. We tied them around our faces up to the eyes. With his face covered like that, Leo’s eyes looked enormous: the red glitter on his lids sparkled and made his pupils look deep as his gunshot wounds.

All we need’s a couple of pistols and holsters, Leo said. I even have holsters.

We edged our way up the street, jostling against people who smelled like leather and plastic, like makeup that was beginning to melt in the heat. We paid two bucks apiece to get bar codes drawn on our faces by a painter wearing a red bandanna and a T-shirt that said, Digitize This!

She normally drew caricatures at Busch Gardens, she said, but she’d come out tonight in support of free speech.

Free speech? I said, holding my head still while she drew on my cheek with a black crayon.

Our right to privacy, she said. To walk down the street without being part of a national line-up.

During Leo’s turn, she accidentally smeared the crayon across his forehead. Leo pushed her hand away.

Relax, I said to him. It’s fine.

Fix it, he demanded. I didn’t want any trouble that night, so I took the crayon from the woman and did it myself.

Leo held my hand even as the crowd thickened and we had to shove our way through. He skipped through the entrance of the Dome like it was nothing, paused only briefly to take in the name of the El Goya Showroom. Under the black lights, his white skirt eclipsed the rest of him, turned him into a walking, talking ass. On the stage, a big queen with implants was warming up the crowd in the kind of hot pants that made believers out of straight men. She had a good thirty-eight inches of leg plus platforms, stockings patterned with silhouettes: reclining nudes, men and women both.

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Kelly Magee Where do you put it? someone yelled.

The queen looked down at her crotch, back at the crowd. Honey, she said, I’ve been fucking my liver for five hours.

Leo shook his head as we entered. He waved away the performer— Old girls, old jokes, he said—and went to order a martini from the bare-chested bartender.

The first performer sang Madonna and the second—predictably— sang Cher. Leo rolled his eyes, whispered to me that drag shows were all top-forty medleys these days, watered-down hip hop and rap, maybe some R&B thrown in for diversity. Whatever overdeveloped pre-teens were singing on MTV, Leo said, these thirtysomething trannies were lipsynching at the Dome. Back at the El Goya, it’d been all Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin, and did I remember when he’d sung that Nina Simone song?

God help me if I ever start singing Cher, he said.

You were good, I said.

I still am.

Leo downed four martinis in half an hour, and then he started heckling the performers. Where are the real girls? he yelled. Where are all the pretty young things? When he ordered the fifth martini, the bartender looked at me. I told Leo we needed to talk. I dragged him into a stall in the women’s bathroom and locked the door. I’d had several martinis myself, and every time Leo looked at me with those gunshot eyes, I felt like I was falling. In the stall, we took off our bandannas with an urgency we might’ve, under other circumstances, removed our clothes. Leo slouched on the seat, eyes half-closed.

I love you, Gypsy, he said.

How long are you back for, Leo? Don’t call me Leo, he said. He opened his eyes. It’s not pretty.

How long?

Gypsy, he said. I want to go on stage.

A couple of weeks? I said. Longer? I shook his shoulders, like it mattered what he might say. Like if I shook him hard enough, he might say, I’m staying forever, Gyp, just for you. And what would that mean? The white townhouse? I couldn’t justify my attraction to him forever by saying he looked better in a dress than me. I couldn’t even justify Leo to my coworkers. Whenever they’d asked, I’d said Leo was a cousin. He’d fallen on hard times, I’d said. He needed a friend.

When I stopped shaking Leo’s shoulders, his head flopped forward onto his chest.

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Kelly Magee I could’ve never left you, I said.

His head snapped up so quickly I wondered how much of the drunkenness he’d been faking.

You’ve been waiting a long time to say that, he said. Feel better?

No, I said. Not at all.

I’m going up. On stage.

You want to go up, I said, then go up.

He clasped my hands. You’ll wait?

Twenty minutes, I said. Then I have to meet the people from my work.

Oh, the hippies, he said. The big, fat hippies. They’ll live.

He left the stall first, then me. I flushed the toilet, though we hadn’t used it. I washed my hands, held them under the hot air dryer long after they’d dried. I supposed I should start calling him Leona or Leonora. Or L, like some of his other friends did. I supposed I should start referring to him in the feminine.

I supposed I’d lost his respect because I hadn’t realized that earlier.

Leo took over during the finale. He walked onto the stage with his neck full of bullet holes, and one by one, he made fun of the other performers, swaying a little on his feet and pausing to sip from an empty martini glass. The Madonna look-alike tried to shoo him away, but he ridiculed her so thoroughly she seemed close to tears.

Now, Madonna, he said. There’s a fucking hard imitation. You learn to lip sync when you were sucking cock, honey?

When Madonna had gone, Leo began to sing. No introduction, no accompaniment. Just Leo, crooning, wooing, melting onto the stage.

His skirt was so bright it hurt my eyes.

Got a moon above me, he whispered, but no one to love me. Lover man, oh, where can you be?

When he walked off the stage, he was crying.

We left immediately. Leo, I think, suspected trouble. I just wanted to get to Steve and Lisa and the rest of the people who understood how not-crazy I was, to be in the dark, hidden, disguised as somebody else.

But the girls from the Dome were faster than us. And Leo had more coming to him than even I could’ve predicted.

Maybe they didn’t mean to hurt him. I couldn’t imagine why they cared about a skinny, battered kid who’d managed to humiliate himself much more than he’d shamed them. Maybe they just wanted to dissolve him a little, kill some of that cockiness with a couple of snide remarks. They didn’t realize that Leo was on a suicide mission 22 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kelly Magee that night. And this wasn’t going to be another Holy Shit Road—this time, he wasn’t going to let them let him get away.

There they were when we stepped outside, five of them, charcoaleyed and larger than life. Leo didn’t even try to run.

Nice face, the Madonna said pointing at Leo’s scars with her eyes.

You get that from your boyfriend?

Meaning me. I almost laughed. I would’ve, had these girls not been towering over Leo. He brushed his skirt, wiped his bottom lip.

He glanced at me, and I willed him to stay calm. I watched his hands.

The Madonna touched his cheek, and he smacked her hand away. She grinned, and the other girls circled.

Fuck off, I said. Leave him alone.

Leo blinked. I winced. The girls—every one—raised their penciled eyebrows, smiled at each other.

Him? a biker chick said to Leo. So what are you, honey? You a man?

You just a dick in a skirt? Aw, honey, she said, are you just confused?

Leo looked back at me, and I shook my head. The Pleasure Dome began thumping with late night disco music. On the street, a police car cruised by.

I’m sorry, Leo said to me. And still looking at me, he hauled off and punched the biker chick so hard that she fell backward. Her head hit the sidewalk with a loud crack.

Oh, Leo, I said. Then I leapt at Madonna, cut my knuckles on her teeth. I did my best to fend off four of them, while Leo kept hitting the one on the ground. He kneeled, and hit, and said with each punch, Human. I’m human, that’s what. As fucking human as you are standing here.

They broke open Leo’s stitches, pushed his nose closer to the right side of his face. Ripped his clothes. Leo just curled into a ball. I was raging, all over the place, bobbing and weaving through three at once, adrenaline pumping straight through to my fists. For every hit I took, I claimed a body part for Leo: a tooth, a rib, a tittie. They were decent fighters, but I had love on my side. At least, that was what I kept telling myself while Leo was curled into that ball. I had Leo on my side.

It all ended when one of the bouncers came outside for a smoke.

Hey, he yelled, and that startled me back into awareness. The bouncer ran to where the biker chick was lying on the ground, Leo still beside her. I had lacerations along my palms and wrists, scratches down my neck, and blood streaming from somewhere on my face, but I managed to drag Leo to standing. His lip was severed where the ring had been.

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Kelly Magee One of his breasts, small as a pre-teen girl’s, had flopped out of his shirt. Blood collected in the bullet holes on his neck and around his eyes. A few of his false teeth were stuck to his shirt.

Instinctively, I looked up. Wondering where the reflective circles were, the bluish eyes adjusting, focusing, fixing us in a computerized memory. I knew we were doomed, but I didn’t want to end up in the back of a patrol car just yet. Me and Leo, we still had stuff to talk about.

Gyp, he slurred, we’ve got to go.

I knew without asking why he needed to leave, just as the day he’d turned up on my doorstep, I hadn’t needed to see bruises to know where he was black and blue.

I helped Leo back to the Centro Ybor parking lot, and piled all the gangly legs of him into the car. I asked if he needed the hospital, but he said no, and since I couldn’t afford it anyway, we went home. I told him I’d fix him up at my place. I said everything would be okay.

Leo rolled his head onto my shoulder, wiped his nose on my jacket.

What about the hippies? he said.

I don’t know, I said. We’ll figure something out.

It’s all my fault.

I know.

Leo burbled a laugh. Bitch, he said.

He looked out the window, traced a slick finger against the glass.

You’d beat up everybody for me, wouldn’t you? he said. I think you’d even beat up me for me.

I’d never hit you, I said quickly.

Same difference, Leo said. Right? I saw you wailing on those girls.

I saw your face. You liked it.

I stared straight ahead, my eyes fixed on the wavering white lines in front of me. I was helping your ass out, I said. Then, after a moment, Maybe I liked that part a little.

Oh, Leo said. Then he shook his head and straightened up. No, he said. That’s weird. I mean, that’s just sad.

He wiggled around in his seat so he was facing me, all the bruised skin and torn clothes of him. He patted his chest with his fingers, delicate.

I know what am I, Leo said. I’m not the one who’s confused. But you—what are you, Gyp? You gay? Straight?

He threw his arm out, hit the window. I concentrated on steering, telling myself that to keep Leo was to keep him talking. And at that moment, I desperately wanted him to shut up.

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Kelly Magee You’re the one who’s confused, Leo said again. Not me. You’re the one too scared to admit you want dick.

I didn’t say anything, and eventually Leo slumped against the window and began to weep.

Not dick, Leo, I thought.

I had to carry him up the stairs. When I opened the door, everything seemed wrong, as if someone had broken in, though all my things were in place. The light was too big, and the walls were too tall, and the room was too wide to cross. I felt like there were eyes on me.

I knew it was only a matter of time before someone knocked on my door; it wouldn’t take long for Visionics to find a match for my face.

I hadn’t been in trouble in a long time, but I knew the past was there, waiting for some electronic memory to find it.

We shouldn’t be here, I said. We have to leave.

But Leo was frozen, ear cocked to the ceiling. I listened, too, and from somewhere deep inside my apartment, I heard a grunting.

Jesus, I said. That sounds like the gator.

The aquarium bubbled thirstily from the floor, reflecting light onto the wall. Lidless. Empty. For a moment, its hollow bubbling was the only sound. Then, again—a couple of prolonged grunts, like someone trying to start a car.

Leo limped across the room, a hand to his ear. When he turned, his delight showed so plainly through the grotesque wounds that to look at him made my skin hurt.

You need peroxide, I said. I had it, as well as all kinds of other pills and ointments and salves. But I didn’t move to get any of it.

She’s calling to us, he said. She’s lost. She thinks we’re other alligators.

When I didn’t follow him at first, he stamped his foot. Help me, he said.

It took us a few minutes to determine that the noise was coming from the bedroom. I stopped listening for police at the door, started listening for the baby gator. We put our ears next to the bed, in the closet, by the night stand. We shined a flashlight under the dresser, and Leo prodded shadows with a coat hanger. We closed our eyes and tried to think reptilian. Still the gator eluded us; its plaintive noises seemed to come directly from the walls.

When I left the room, Leo was tapping the wall with one finger— da dum, da dum, like a heartbeat. His cheek, when he leaned in to listen, left a blood print on the white paint.

Don’t leave yet, he said. We’re getting closer. I can feel it.

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Kelli Russell Agodon Bitterroot Montana, August 2000 We can forgive lightning, a god of fire reaching a pale arm into the trees, searching for something dropped in a carpet of green.

It’s not so easy to forgive the careless smoker flicking his cigarette behind him, the woman burning a love note in a candlelit hotel room. Somehow we want them to know better, to crush a cigarette until it falls apart, shut the blinds, hide their misery beneath a pillowcase or tucked inside a Gideon’s.

At night, when the woods glow orange, the elk believe they can be saved by wading into the river to let fire burn past them. But everything boils as firefighters wander dusty fields, there is never enough to drink, never enough talk about leaving, about winter when snow will cover the branches where flame once did.

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Kelli Russell Agodon

Poem to an Unknown Firefighter The Station Nightclub, West Warwick, Rhode Island The room was so smoky that he resembled a painting of what all men should look like.

This is when she became lightheaded, when she felt her way to the door and he told her to follow night as if it were a path unfolding.

He asked for nothing, but drew her a map from instinct, handed over the compass or compassion she was missing. I guess we know the ending, how many burned that night. The doors opened to darkness, the smell of smoke took days to wash from her hair and the story was lost somewhere between music, white fire and lungs too small to breathe. There were notes she kept returning to, the snow cooling her skin until she found her way home.

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Liz Ahl Inshallah November 17, 1999 “This longing you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.

—Rumi

I. I’ve driven out of town to where it’s dark enough to see a whole new range of stars dust the space between obvious constellations.

Light pollutes; leaks like a toxin into the vast ocean overhead.

Light travels: no telling which distant stars are dead already, their final light still reaching like a ghost or echo, like a plane on autopilot, no telling what’s really still up there…

I’ve driven out of town to where it’s quiet— maybe quiet enough that the meteors I seek will actually make a hot, audible hiss, though I hope only to see them, inshallah.

II. From the flight recorder, clues are shaken loose and gobbled up: the Egyptian co-pilot invoked God, the co-pilot prayed, inshallah, God willing, for reasons no one can pin down.

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Liz Ahl Still, suicidal terrorism is insinuated, hurriedly, on television, loose translation of a loose translation of prayer—immeasurable weight of the divine, panicky fumble for the unknown— Inshallah slick on the lips of news anchors and guest experts Inshallah pulsing from the pixels on millions of screens Inshallah flame of a prayer in the living rooms of America Inshallah smoke of a story we want and fear— Tonight, the silhouettes of two deer barely perceptible on a nearby rise. I tilt my head back, I’m alone in the dark, beneath the weight of the sky, willing the stars to start falling.

III. Last month, an empty plane flew across this sky, too high, off-course, empty of intention and pursued by military jets. It doggedly ferried its already-dead until the fuel ran out, then fell from the blue.

You were in the hospital, beaten, defeated, arrested for threatening suicide, for turning on the gas; anguished, angry, drunk, at the end of another good rope.

In the bare visitor’s lounge, with an orderly’s eye on us, I told you the story of the empty plane, how because the passengers were dead, the plane was empty.

For hundreds of miles it flew on automatic, the passengers and pilot done in from the start by lost cabin pressure. This is speculation, since no one really knows, no solid story could be sifted like gold from the splintered, inarticulate wreckage.

But it’s the story I want, looking up tonight, at the swath of space the jet once cut across— the cabin practically empty, full of bodies, quiet.

The plane still flying, inevitable, predestined.

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Liz Ahl

IV. After long minutes of waiting in the dark, of warm wind dragging its fingers through the dead fields on both sides of this gravel road, the first meteor scratches across the wide sky: surprise and relief.

Thank you universe, I murmur, to no one, and linger for another hour’s worth—at least a dozen silent swipes across the upper atmosphere.

Tomorrow, the cold will finally come though we’ll still be wanting rain, hungry and dusty for it after forty straight days without. Borne in on the late afternoon clouds, the cold will push down and sweep through, yanking and scattering the last of the leaves.

Borne on the peak of the Leonids, as if these white streaks were spears of ice, warheads of winter.

Tomorrow, on the phone, you will sound very happy.

You are headed to the hospital again, though I can’t see it.

I invited you to drive into the dark outside of town to see the show, but you couldn’t. Although I can’t know it, some part of you is already counting the fistful of pills, fashioning the cool, sober logic of the note.

V. Officials are confident that the recovery of the black box will provide many answers about this tragedy.

Black box, box of bees, voice box, box of answers, answer box, box of echoes, ghost box, box of dreams, black box, box of the dead— inshallah We search for the black box.

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Liz Ahl Black box, box of wishes, underwater box, box of agony, up-in-flames box, box of revelation, box of oxygen mask, black box.

Long lost black box, strong black box, box of story. Box of last words. Box of atmosphere, box of night fright, box of fire storm.

Wanted black box, hunted black box— the secret, the end of the story, the whole truth

VI. I want to wake my sleeping friends back in the lit city, want to step softly into rooms where they breathe inside their own vast darknesses want my hand on their rising-falling chests want to coax them from dreams into shoes and coats, into my waiting car want to drive them back to this road want to bring them into this even deeper darkness want to tilt their heads skyward, hold their hands, and wait.

Wanting is a difficult ache.

Waiting is a difficult ache.

The heart reaches from the body for what it wants.

Light reaches, though the invisible point it reaches from may already be snuffed. This could be prayer.

And then—inshallah—the jagged seam of joy quickly rips across the sky’s dark stillness— both prayer and answer.

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Liz Ahl

Styx Concert January 21, 2001 There are love dogs / no one knows the names of.

Give your life / to be one of them.

—Rumi On the lit stage, arms raised to the roaring crowd, Tommy Shaw yells “Lincoln, Nebraska!” and we all scream because he calls our name.

Four roadies perched in the light rigging cast spots on cue, following JY, who strides stage left, right, and back again, covering the crowd.

A woman in the front row slingshots her white underwire bra at the other guitarist, who hangs it on the neck of his guitar, laughing. Tommy Shaw puts extra punch in the line, “Is it any wonder I’m not the president?”

Earlier today, his last day on the job he loved, Clinton pardoned Patty Hearst and a list of others, those deserving and those undeserving.

Until the final moments, he reveled in his work, pathetic, aglow in the idea of his own good, flawed heart, shamelessly moved by those who voted for him, clapped for him, called his name.

At the end of their set, band members toss guitar picks and drumsticks into the crowd, who scramble for these relics, which seem holy splinters from the cross, chips of bone.

Even those of us old enough to know better want pieces of them, the plastic they touched, the set list they followed.

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Liz Ahl “Come Sail Away” still rings in my ears, and after hearing it live, I feel ready to grant everyone a pardon: whoever soaked my coat with beer, the woman in the front row lifting her shirt, Dennis DeYoung, who left the band under bad circumstances, the voters of Florida, the spelling bee judge who did me wrong, Clinton, Bush, Gore, all their beautiful daughters, all their corporate masters, all their pride and foolishness. Once more, Tommy shouts, “Goodnight, Lincoln!” and once more we imagine we hear our names on his lips, and we howl out in return, asking for pardon, receiving pardon, for our simple, canine love.

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Dilruba Ahmed Invitation Join me at the dresser where you sit in the dim photograph folding your smooth black hair into a bun, eyes darkened with kajal, sari draped (is it blue?) across one slim shoulder.

But surely the heat will kill us.

Our bodies won’t stand the water, the sun.

Walk stories with me on the dirt path to the midnight bazaar, where merchants keep stalls open for Eid, selling sparkly bangles and milky-sweet shondesh.

On asthma days, breath comes as though through a sieve.

The winter winds are full of dust.

We’ll paddle across the silvery pond where you swam daily as a child, to the bamboo mat where your mother sits in the photo, small arms in her white sari, toothless smile against my sister’s acid-wash jean jacket.

In every newspaper, the Dengue River virus.

And my mother, gone.

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Dilruba Ahmed Let’s wander the orange halls of your university, where you first began the exchange of furtive love letters, like the long cool drink from the jug outside the classroom, students squirming in the heat.

Now, an election year, mobs rise in a cyclone’s wave, so much political unrest.

I want to sit with you in the elegant symmetry of the verandah, the evening-cooled porch filled with cousins, the mango tree heavy with fruit.

The porch is boarded up now, the house, long since divided into smaller dwellings.

I thought you’d sail into that sea with me, into the water that hangs at the horizon like a pale slice of slate.

So long since I stopped sending crisp blue airmail.

And my mother, gone.

I knew so little of the distance between Bryn Mawr and Brahmanbaria, of Chillicothe and Chittagong. I know nothing of your hemisphere, of your heartache.

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Dilruba Ahmed How we climbed as children to gather green coconut, its sweet soft flesh.

Come: let’s drive. We’ll ride the swells along the road to the park, the slow bumps next to trees whose roots have been paved over and are still gently pushing.

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Maggie Anderson March 2003 This Reuters photograph of women in black chadors ballooning behind them in red air, “carrying nonpotable water” through a bright orange and yellow sandstorm is Mark Rothko’s Ochre and Red on Red, 1954, 90 by 69 inches.

In the lower right corner, a faint shadow of tank or donkey.

Matthew Brady stood behind a tripod at Antietam trying to take his slow plates while the light was good.

Black and white—trees, fog, the faces of the wounded in camp—the dead wrapped in blankets.

In Basra, everything is moving and nothing hurts, bleed of sky around the mosques and statuary.

Some of these photographs are rich Persian textiles, others, like backlit Dutch interiors with sinks and tables.

I would call it art, if there were more danger in it.

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Maggie Anderson

Waiting for Jane Austen in Walnut Creek, Ohio, at the End of the Twentieth Century If I am a wild Beast I cannot help it.

It is not my own fault.

—Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra She was late. Very late. Several hundred years to be exact and when she finally managed to locate a pay phone and some change to call, she said she was lost. Something about the SUV or the landau, outdated maps and a turn north instead of south at the I-77 interchange which had put her smack up against Lake Erie just short of the Canadian border.

I gave her new directions. Though I was annoyed, I held my temper.

She got back on the road again, aimed toward southern Ohio.

I was waiting. Waiting for Jane Austen in fog among the Amish of Ohio with their legendary helpfulness and patience, with their breads and warm pies. On the other side of the fence behind the motel, two horses at pasture, dark boulders in gray air.

Consider this: I was the one in the eighteenth century examining the racks of buttons in the General Store, the slates and chalks, the thighs of rope. Jane was tearing down the highway at 65 m.p.h., a wild beast in her worn leather covers and braid of bookmark.

I considered this fact with some disapprobation.

Emerging from mist, the bearded farmers were spectral, heard before seen, rattle and wheel of horse and cart, black rigs with black-clothed passengers in hats. The death wagon was driving by but I stayed in the shadows, waiting for Jane.

It was early December and unseasonably warm.

The clerk in the antique store took my money for a tiny replica of a leopard stiletto shoe, so camp as to be overly serious, a useless symptom of late capitalist iconography, 38 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Maggie Anderson collectible and valuable. I gave the clerk my cash and he wrapped my little shoe in brown paper.

His overall buttons looked like the whites of your eyes.

From deep in his haystack of whiskers he announced, It’s too warm for this time of year.

We just can’t tell what might be coming.

I was waiting for Jane and in the thick of things, blending with dark coats and well-behaved children lining up on the sidewalk for the live nativity: three wise men in bathrobes and towels, two shepherds and a woolly sheep, Mary and Joseph in blue muslin on a pony, everyone singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” Walnut Creek was all eager delight.

Jane grew later and later and still no one married.

“A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.” I kept what I knew close to my bosom.

I had to wait for a very long time. I had told no one of my intentions and I had no fortune of my own.

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Julianna Baggott

Monica Lewinsky Thinks of Bill Clinton While Standing Naked in front of a Hotel Mirror We will watch each other age in front of cameras, in newsprint, a public decay. It’s already started.

Look at my new sway; my body seems more ample among the miniature shampoos, the thin rectangles of wrapped soaps.

Look at the pale shifting of my skin under the red eye of the ticking heat lamp.

And I’ve noticed your hair’s gone white, your face loosening.

I’m shocked

how you can still appear— not televised, not some public memory of the two of us swimming valiantly— but the intimacy of teeth, breath and breathing.

And I carry you sometimes for a day or two, like a bird hidden in a pocket

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Julianna Baggott and I imagine that you know how I live.

And while the bird shifts and rustles and keeps one wet eye on my life, I am more purposeful.

I stride.

But today you see me here, naked, standing in front of this hotel mirror.

You are someone who knew me before I was the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collective joke about cigars, thongs, stained dresses, when I was a girl named Monica.

I miss her much more than I miss you.

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Robin Behn Epistle to Unrelenting Days To the sleek sides of missiles To air in its sickness To coming days To dazzle and dredge To turban of wind To mercy and the many To whine and gasp To those among us To anger that augurs To power collapsed upon To sins of a father

42 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

and rough intent of holy bent if there be days mirage and the age to presence of mind and to the far few simplistic and simplicity who dwell not among us to save us and, bless us, power, collapsed that blunder, blinder

Robin Behn To the brink To shawl To syllables shorn To cries in that language To you who would singe

to break bread and shroud of veil and vile to cry, in that language to ye who go down singing

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Denise Bergman Setting Up Eyes Wide Open, a traveling exhibit by the American Friends Service Committee, includes a pair of combat boots for each U.S. soldier killed in the Iraq war and hundreds of shoes to represent the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.

The least we can do let the empty boots breathe: tongues flat, leather molded to the nubs of ankle, cradles of heels, shells of toes and line them up serpentine by state Alabama to Wyoming, no break Boxes pulled across the room, untaped, emptied boot by boot— a garage band, a bowling league in a pair from Utah, shined like a lacquer vase, a carnation dry on its stem in a pair from Vermont, soft as a Sunday sock, keys on a Star Trek chain, postcards with daffodils sketched at the top A math teacher sitting crosslegged on the floor turns each nametag to read face up slides the soles into place— beads on an abacus, counting.

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Eleanor Berry Front Pages: October 2002 Bali Nightclub Bombing Washington Area Sniper Attacks Faces look out from every front page— faces captioned victim, terrorist, sniper-suspect, slain. No glare of rage in accused killers’ eyes, no set or twist of mouth to mark them. Handsome, young, earnest, they gaze straight at us. What strikes us is their age— how young they look, intelligent, brimmed with promise.

Faces look out from every front page— wanted, arrested—mug shots, sharp or blurred, ranged beneath the headlines. Names, perhaps assumed, in a list.

We can’t ignore, we’re helpless to assuage faces captioned victim, terrorist, both suddenly dead. The faces insist both were alive—the rest, mere reportage.

Facile, the legends of the journalist: sniper-suspect, slain. No glare of rage distinguishes the shooter. We cannot gauge animus from snapshot smiles, or wrest intent from poses struck. No warped courage in accused killers’ eyes, no set or twist to their shoulders. Killer and victim alike resist glib labels—evil, innocent. Only outrage at such deaths, such lives bent into hate, can persist in the living presence of each speechless image.

Faces look out.

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Remica L. Bingham

After Hurricane Isabel, Residents of Public Housing Interpret Signs for Obike, Jericho, and Percival The storm split eighty trees and, for weeks, their limbs cast shadows on walls of Parks: For three days tenants saw black Jesus— his night-lit face blessing Roberts Park; One homeless man—gagged by police—howled sullied warnings. Baptizing his tongue in corn liquor, he screamed fire—what he thought he saw—singeing Diggs Park; Four horses and riders, three sets of six lines and Lucifer’s torrid grin— five families fled the signs of the beast darkening homes in Bowling Park; A Yoruba priest came seeking gods and prayed for children captured in stone.

When he told mothers dead sons could return, hymns flooded Tidewater Park; They said, Come see Jesus, fires, the end, but I wouldn’t follow new prophets, plain men—wary of slick, fleeting phantoms gracing blocks in each Park; An autistic child became clairvoyant, offering midnight omens—clawed at her father’s ghostly face. Still, no one has seen him in Moton Park;

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Remica L. Bingham An old midwife saw ninety-eight births, then nothing on smoke-colored brick.

Days before she’d turn ninety-nine, her sluggish procession filled Young Park; Now, during tempests, I’m a baptized believer, seeking out light-ravaged walls.

Wait for shadows to whisper my name, as night falls, christening these Parks.

Note: In Norfolk, Virginia, most of the housing projects are named after local black leaders and end in the word “park.” The names of many of these housing areas are cited here.

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S. Beth Bishop A Clinic Technician Volunteers Erika, a 24-year-old tanker carrying crude oil, “cracked in two,” off France’s northwest coast. The 26 people on board were rescued by helicopter, as 10,000 tons of oil seeped from the wreck.

—from Life, February 2000 There’s been a spill. The sand is slaggy with it, heavy. Feathers at the tips of dying birds’ wings can only slide against each other, gripless fingers. The water is cold, unclean.

We must wear masks and latex gloves beneath our thick work gloves, plastic bags in our boots.

This isn’t bottled oil pooling up in the driveway.

It’s earth-spewed-out, un-see-through, unrefined, just raw, crude poison, a glutinous death-net, hauling bacterial mold and bugs that work through leathery folds of skin to chew the warm intestines of every breather. I have not asked where all the sandy sackfuls, the dirty weight I shovel, goes—whether beaks and hollow bones get treated for disposal like the warning-red bags stuffed full with cotton and needles I carry out each night. I have not seen the ones still fighting come clean. I cannot bear to imagine more revivals, the sharp-beaked creatures dry and flying again. They must stay here, unwilled, and floating, still, soft and swollen, just bodies, numbered parts I count and pour from metal pans into jars to be labeled and shelved for research. I can’t afford to ask for anything, I fear. When I hear they’re coming back, I think, and hope they know, how our scope is shrinking. I pray that, circling over, high-tossed and wind-combed clean, they’ll see us shiver, cowered down to dots below them, groveling 48 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

S. Beth Bishop our reasons, scratching, creeping, unbecoming, blown out, cracked-at-the-mast, and craving rest from spying over every shoulder, trying to guess how far our measured Heaven has sunk today, and just which dirty bags will want us, yes, what shining store of earthly wealth weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve built will capsize on us next.

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Wendell Mayo Brezhnev’s Eyebrows When Grigoryev arrived at the crumbling eighth-floor walkup on Žemaitijos Street, Asta was on the roof tugging laundry off the line. Out on the balcony he could see clothes snapping in the wind, their shadows undulating like those of migrating geese drifting over autumn hillsides, Asta’s shivering silhouette at their lead, torso and arms extended outward, strongest of her flock. Grigoryev loved thinking of his wife this way, imagining someday she would swoop down with great beating wings, snatch him off her laundry line, and press him tenderly to her face like a fresh shirt. He continued to daydream while he unwrapped a large portrait from a blanket and set it on the floor next to the old Soviet stove. He gently applied his knee to the frame until it slid between the stovetop and counter. Outside, a flock of pigeons suddenly carpeted the balcony, mulled all about Asta’s ankles, and began their caucusing, urder urder, ail ail—and he remembered when they—when Asta—hadn’t minded the love-cooing of pigeons on the sagging, moss-covered pantiles out their kitchen window, when Asta’d been as in love with him—as what?—as anything he might have felt for her—flocks and flocks of passion.

When Asta came in the door holding their damp clothes to her chest, she spied Grigoryev, his smile, reminiscence on his face. She nodded knowingly out the door to the small balcony, then at him.

“You love this pigeon-infested coop so much,” she said, glancing at a smudge of pigeon shit on her ankle, “you can have it all to yourself.”

She threw the stack of clothes onto the floor, and when she started back out the door, he reached for something, anything. He swung around, a little to the left, but saw only a black-purple pigeon eye staring at him outside the window, the bird grunting, urder urder, ail ail, urder, ail. So he swung the other way around, reached into the greasy crevice between the old Soviet stove and counter, slid out the old portrait, and held it up for Asta like a gigantic scapular, a full-torso job of the former General Secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

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Wendell Mayo “Asta, my love,” he shuddered like a cold puppy, “please don’t leave—but if you have to go, at least take this.”

She stopped and turned from the door, at which point Grigoryev lowered the portrait a little and peered at her over the top edge of the frame. She stood there. He soaked in her beauty, as if it were his last chance to soak, and waited in anticipation, not so much for her conciliatory response to the Brezhnev—though the portrait in its bygone glory held for him, and he hoped for her, many strong memories—but in the sheer accidental force of his gesture, the portrait just happening to be there, right at his elbow in the dirty seam of his ancient CCCP Model 1002.

He raised the Brezhnev a little more. He grinned sheepishly at Asta, for he knew the Brezhnev maneuver was bold, risky. Asta blew a lock of beach-sand colored hair from one eye. Her eyes blazed with blue fire, cold resplendent flames that he’d only seen once before, just after liberation from the Soviets, when they’d cut the gas off nation-wide, the heat off in their walkup. In those times, the cold in their walkup could be partly overcome by exercises of the mind, by remembering they were independent. According to the Central Authority, they were free to choose either heat or hot water every other week. Soviets? Who needed them? No bundle of wood, had there been any available, could have possibly produced as much heat as their bundling together under the purple swirls of those oversized and oversexed Russian blankets on two narrow state beds they managed to nail together, transforming all into a glorious bower of post-totalitarian bliss. Still, they’d resorted to burning everything in a waste can, including a set of wooden salad spoons Asta’s mother had grudgingly given them for their wedding. Ah! He had seen the same blue fire then, as her mother’s salad spoons combusted, as cold flames leapt past the brim of the waste can, all reflected in Asta’s eyes.

Now he waited. The blue flames vanished from Asta’s eyes and he searched her icy face for some sign of thawing, something signaling the end of their ice ages, like the passing away of all those Soviet years, the warming, cracking and calving of icebergs, the indescribable joy and lovemaking in their first year of independence. She glared at the Brezhnev a long while, long enough, thought Grigoryev, that perhaps memories of old Leonid had managed to charm her once more, his droning, senseless utterances, one he quickly remembered, a propos to his present standoff with Asta.

“Comrades!” Brezhnev’s voice boomed from the distant past, the darkest days of the Second World War. “There is no retreat. Kiev is behind us! The enemy shall not pass. Our duty is to stand to the last!”

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Wendell Mayo For these moments, this pause, Grigoryev had stopped her; he’d made his stand—and there she stood, beautiful, struck—or was it dumbstruck?—into a work of art! Grigoryev smiled a little to himself, and then removed the smile from his face before she might see it. He peered down at the portrait from the top edge of its frame, noticing at once the thick eyebrows and blue, hypnotic gaze from those orbs of Partystaying power. It seemed as if Brezhnev had been in the game forever, twenty-two years, that “handsome Moldavian,” as Stalin referred to him a year before he died, the blue suit covering acres of shoulders and chest from which no fewer than four red stars dangled—Hero of the Soviet Union, Hero of Soviet Labor, Order of Lenin, Order of Victory. What stamina the ‘Man Made of Strong Metal’ must have possessed to simply hold himself erect! All that titanic strength, all in counterpoint to that red tie; that thin red tie; and that little sliver of white shirt peering out from between his lapels, that ever-present possibility of hope in all those ice-age years. Perhaps, Grigoryev thought, perhaps the portrait’s obvious and ancient charms would work their magic on Asta, would now transform her from immortal to mortal, somehow arrest her heart, seize her imagination, and bring her back to him.

“Asta,” he said, “my love,” grappling for something to say, anything to break the silence. “Do you remember when Brezhnev said in that interview, ‘Who’s gonna believe I read Marx?’”

Perhaps a little humor. He waited. He hoped. And then he thought it might actually work. There were signs. She seemed ready to say something. Then he reasoned that even if the Brezhnev maneuver didn’t work, and she actually left him, he still might achieve a kind of latent effect with the humor and the portrait, enough that he could get her back in the future. Or, if the worst happened, and she left, and left the portrait with him, he could use the Brezhnev as an excuse to see her, to return it to her. After all, the portrait was hers. She had painted it, number by number, from a kit she’d gotten at an artist’s supply store on the other side of the river, off Kalvarijų Street, near the bridge, where four proletarian statues still stood, inextricably smelted with the anchor pilings, extending into the bedrock below the river. Yes, it was her painting, and for some reason, in the eyebrows, she’d gone beyond the numbers and lines, using the brush to make sharp upward strokes that curved outward like feathers, something Grigoryev had always believed was the result of the subtle influence of pigeons on Asta’s artistic talent, pigeons and pigeon feathers all around the eighth-floor walkup. But even in exaggeration, and with such outside influences, Asta had gotten 52 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Wendell Mayo the eyebrows right, part for the whole, the total effect. Brezhnev’s right swept upward, his left downward, giving both eyebrows, together, the odd aspect of a typhoon, twisting its way over his forehead, like some unstoppable force of nature that traveled to the top regions of his hairline where it stalled, leaving a timberline of bristling hair, like ragged black pines in a Russian forest. Yes, this moment, this very moment, with Asta poised at the door, ready to leave him for the first time in their marriage, Grigoryev desperately called on the mesmerizing power of the pigeon-feathered-fluttering eyebrows, their dark, seductive, paralyzing authority, their fabled ability to conjure sweeping changes over the globe, and perhaps over his Asta.

He waited, knowing the longer he waited and she paused, the more chance she would come away from the door and into his life again. He began to move toward her, slowly, holding the portrait a little higher.

“You see,” Grigoryev whispered with a deep, dire tone in his voice, “you can’t escape. You cannot flee from the overpowering eyebrows of Comrade Brezhnev.” He began to detect the slightest evidence of a smile breaking at one corner of her hard-set mouth. He came closer, lifted the portrait, ever so gently, a little higher. “He is still there,” he whispered, “lurking in your heart. He’s a smooth talker, Comrade Brezhnev. Do you remember, Asta? Do you? Do you remember the time he read a speech for seven minutes before his assistant realized it was the wrong speech and had to switch it? Do you see the source of Brezhnev’s mystery and power?”

Just a little more curving about her mouth and he’d have Asta back. He waited a little more, then added, “And do you remember the political stir it made for visiting American diplomats when, discussing the Vietnam conflict, Brezhnev boasted that his favorite game was ‘dominoes’?”

He had her; he was sure of it; he’d so carefully and skillfully enunciated ‘dominoes’ that he anticipated his angry wife to topple at any moment—but then a pigeon squeezed through the window overlooking the roof, cooed, waddled a couple seconds along the windowsill, then flopped itself onto the table amid Asta’s teacups.

“Oh,” Asta cried once.

Grigoryev’s heart sank a little, but then, miraculously, she began to smile all over again, until a second pigeon flopped itself onto the back of the first and the two columbidae began to copulate among the teacups, their fornicating amplified manifold by the sound of one cup tapping another tapping the next and so on and so on (Dominoes! he thought. Oh, God, let her see the humor in it!), so that amid the lascivious cacophony Asta put her hands to her ears and screamed.

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Wendell Mayo “You can keep the Brezhnev and these filthy pigeons, too! Maybe you can sell the damn thing with that other junk you set out on the street day after day!”

“My love,” he said. “My sweet,” he said. “My dove—” “Don’t call me your dove!” she cried, glancing again at the pair of pigeons pleasuring one another. “Oh!” And she left. He listened carefully as her footfalls faded, down eight flights, then went to the window and watched her walk off and vanish into a courtyard on Pranciškonų Street, just under an arch filled with the same sort of light he had recently mastered in his most ambitious painting, “Dachshund of the Götterdämmerung.”

Grigoryev denied he’d started anything, said it was only natural to bring the portrait of Brezhnev to a starving artist’s sidewalk sale just outside the double-spired, copper-topped Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker.

“If you are starving,” he said to his friend Darius, “and an artist,” he went on, “you need a miracle. So this Brezhnev is a desperate act of a desperate man. Besides,” he added, “it’s not mine. It’s my wife’s.”

“That is a lot of shit,” Darius said, standing with his hands on his hips, still feverishly indignant that Grigoryev had included the painting in the outdoor exhibit.

Grigoryev removed the painting from the canvas stand and set it on the wet brick street.

“There,” he said. “You see? I’ve removed it from the rack, where our more serious work sets, in all its glory, and sets and sets.…”

It began to drizzle. Grigoryev turned down the flap of a plastic sheet he kept to protect his work and Darius’s, and mist swept in like a cloud of insects. He watched Darius bat his eyelids as water particles coated Darius’s eyelashes, then run a palm over his bald spot and forehead, sweeping water to one side. Grigoryev slumped. He could feel his optimism about the Brezhnev pouring off his shoulders, pooling about his waist, overflowing and drowning at his feet. He lifted his feet—one, then the other—and went over to stand near Darius. He was about to concede the debate over the Brezhnev, when the drizzle stopped. A sign? Perhaps Grigoryev would not have to give up on the painting after all. He walked back to the racks, took the portrait up, and held it to show Darius.

“Look, it’s not that bad, is it?”

Darius stood back a little, then shouted. “It’s terrible! How could you bring that thing here? It’s embarrassing.”

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Wendell Mayo “I know,” Grigoryev agreed, “but look at the eyebrows, how they fan up and out, thick and defiant, almost like feathers of the great bird of the Old Republic.”

Darius grunted, then turned to his own canvases, several street scenes of Vilnius that reminded Grigoryev how much he loved what Darius could do with light, how he’d honored Darius’s light in his own work, often in blue-pink hues of a summer’s day ending, the same light he remembered in his boyhood days in Saint Petersburg. Grigoryev sighed loudly, shrugged his shoulders, and lifted the Brezhnev, its feathered eyebrows, blue suit, deep red tie, awe-inspiring pallor and jowls, all the old memories of Brezhnev-days when Asta and he were first married, when their smiles and snatches of laughter at the bearish boorish leader, not so loud as neighbors could hear, passed between them with only a little uneasiness, like the sound of pigeons fluttering between buildings.

“Grigoryev!” Darius turned and spoke sharply. “Either you do something with that thing or I’m moving down the street to the Church of Paraskovila Piatnickaya with the serious artists!”

“You’re really leaving?” he asked Darius, eyes wide open. “All because of this painting?”

“Yes,” Darius growled, and with the tips of his fingers began toppling his frames off the rack one by one and setting them on his cart.

“It’s only because of the painting—if you are so stupid to think so.”

Grigoryev shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

A frame slipped from Darius’s hand and clattered against the others in his cart. “Grigoryev,” Darius whispered, “you have a customer.” Then he fell silent.

Indeed, there was a customer, standing nearby, his neck extended like a duck’s, a middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-weight man with glasses, a gray sweater tied by its sleeves about his waist like a patternless tartan skirt. But precisely where the man was from puzzled Grigoryev.

The shoes were brown, part canvas, part leather, the sort that looked like tennis shoes but were really for dress. Well, that could be just about anyone from anywhere. His shirt was a plain, pinkish button-down, longsleeved, and he had a green umbrella open, cocked at an angle over his right shoulder. Ah, that angle of the umbrella was strange, lazy it seemed to him, but no matter, the man was looking at Grigoryev’s “Dachshund of the Götterdämmerung,” the piece after Darius, of course, but also after the famed Lithuanian master who’d studied in Paris, Čiurlionis.

Grigoryev had slaved at the painting for years: the boy, peering out from the loggia into the courtyard, bright pink and bluish light blazing through Crab Orchard Review

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Wendell Mayo alabaster arches, and just below one arch the tiniest most nondescript dachshund dog, nose up, indifferent to the profound, apocalyptic light.

It was Grigoryev’s most brilliant work, and now this man, who cocked his green umbrella at such a strange angle, was examining it. Who knew where his “Götterdämmerung” might end up, whose mansion or which prestigious collection. Perhaps he would be discovered, see his work going places, out, into the blue, unknown world after ice ages of anonymity!

He slowly sidled next to the man, who turned to Grigoryev and looked at him from behind his bifocals, his eyes cast a little down.

“This one’s really weird,” the man said, referring to Grigoryev’s masterpiece. “Hey, what’s that other one you got in your hand?”

The American—for Grigoryev was now sure he was an American— took hold of the Brezhnev by the frame with both hands, held it up to the uniform clouds muffling the sky, then instantly set it by his side in a gesture of absolute ownership.

“Ah,” he said to Grigoryev, “you tried to hide her from me. I’ll give you twenty for her.” The American handed Grigoryev a U.S. twentydollar bill.

Grigoryev was speechless. He kept staring at the “Dachshund of the Götterdämmerung” and began to mumble something about Hitler. Then the American handed him a second twenty-dollar bill for the Brezhnev.

“Will that do her?” the American said.

Grigoryev tried to swallow, but couldn’t. His throat hurt and was suddenly dry, parched, aching. Darius jabbed him in the ribs.

“I’m trying to swallow,” he said to Darius.

“So, swallow and say something,” Darius replied. “Time is running out.”

Grigoryev watched a flock of crows sweep over the right spire of the Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker; they landed and carpeted the roof. Amid their raucous and cantankerous cawing, crows comprising the black carpet leapt in waves each time one crow gained some miniscule height by flapping a little into the air. One crow’s little leap seemed to infuriate the flock, and with each perturbation a crude, raw-edged “No!” seemed to emerge audibly from the black birds.

“Yes!” Darius said at last, took the forty U.S. from Grigoryev’s hand, and shoved it into Grigoryev’s front pants pocket.

“Do you gift wrap and ship?” the American asked, but this time both Darius and Grigoryev were trying to swallow, so long in fact that 56 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Wendell Mayo the American added, “Well, I’ll just take her as she is,” and walked off with the Brezhnev under one arm, waving at them with the smooth white palm of one hand, muttering, “Cash and carry, I always say….”

Grigoryev swallowed. Darius swallowed.

“It’s the eyebrows,” Grigoryev muttered.

“It’s something,” Darius said.

“Why did he keep calling the Brezhnev ‘her?’”

“I don’t know,” Darius shrugged. “It’s an American custom? Like naming a warship?”

When the drizzle returned, it slicked the roof of the Wonderworker until pantiles could hold no more and rivulets formed, filling gutters and dripping in sheets from eaves of the old church. Both men covered their canvases, then leaned against the iron fence circumscribing the Wonderworker and stuck portions of an old edition of Lietuvos Rytas on the tops of their heads.

“I’ve had enough this morning,” Grigoryev said, one eye alongside a soggy gray column of newsprint. “I’ve got to go. Would you mind watching my work?”

Darius nodded resignedly at Grigoryev’s damp covered racks.

Grigoryev said goodbye, walked to the great arched wooden door of the Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, and went inside. He set his wet paper aside, then walked down the short nave to the black marble altar, where hundreds of candles in red and white goblets blazed. He knelt, carefully placing his knees on the railing.

“Oh, God,” he whispered and shut his eyes tightly. “Just give me my Asta back, and tell me what to do with this forty U.S. I got for the Brezhnev. Give me a sign. For once I want to know the right thing to do before I do it.”

Grigoryev waited. He kept his eyes shut. He pressed his eyelids together, tighter and tighter, as if the sheer force of the upper lids pressing against the lower might get God’s attention. Just then a pigeon waddled into the Church of the Wonderworker, slowly up the nave, clucking, then cooing, urder ail, urder urder. Taken by the sound growing closer and closer, Grigoryev opened his eyes. He looked down and saw the pigeon: the black-and-white sort, white, that is, with black spots, not large ones, rather specks, not natural at all, but tire splatter from the dirty streets. It approached awkwardly, head bobbing, yes, yes, yes, in an odd self-mockery of its hapless state. But this one had pretty eyes, one blue, one white, not the pinkish, sickly looking kind Crab Orchard Review

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Wendell Mayo some pigeons had, and besides, it had a present for him, perched on its beak, a black scrap, like a piece of filthy cloth.

Grigoryev removed the black scrap from its beak, a banana peel gone ripe, riper, well, ripest of all, almost hard, then he pressed it to the top of the prayer bench in front of him and closed his eyes.

“Thank you, God, for this sign. I thank you with all my heart.”

He threw the rotten peel at the pigeon, which strut-stepped out of the way and urder-urdered indignantly. He left the Wonderworker’s quickly, forgetting his soggy Lietuvos Rytas, and walked a long while in the rain, all the way to Gedimino Street, then to Goštauto, crossing the river at the Baltasis footbridge. He passed the Hotel Lietuva and went inside the Universal Store, exchanged the forty U.S. for litai, then headed to the grocers, to colorful bins of fruit piled high all around him. Some fruits he’d not seen before. It was like being in a garden and, step by step, his enchantment grew and grew. He bought a large plastic sack and loaded it with forty U.S. worth of apples, oranges, kiwi, bananas, tangerines, tangelos, mangoes, and a pale-green fruit called star fruit. It was hard for him to imagine that so many varieties of fruit had come so far to his country. He paid for the sack of fruit with every cent of the U.S. he’d gotten for the Brezhnev.

Outside the Universal Store, he realized the Brezhnev was making him pay more than he’d counted on. His harvest was heavy. But what kept him going over the Baltasis footbridge, carrying the enormous sack of fruit in both arms, was thinking of Brezhnev himself, the Man Made of Strong Metal, November 7, 1982, standing four hours in the bitter cold on Lenin’s Mausoleum to watch a state parade. What stamina! Grigoryev thought as he trudged on.

He crossed the bridge in driving rain, not stopping at his eighthfloor walkup on Žemaitijos to get his raincoat or hat, because he felt time was running out. In his bag of fruit, upon which the rain pattered ferociously, he felt he had something precious, something special, something that might right things with Asta—with everything.

The sack was heavy, but why not? Good things were heavy. Food was heavy. Love was heavy. Sex was heavy. Redemption was heavy.

All good things in life were heavy, not light and dry and airy and incomprehensible. But the sack grew heavier as rainwater entered it.

And then he remembered how, only three days after standing hours on Lenin’s tomb, Brezhnev died of heart failure and, like what Grigoryev feared might happen with his bag of fruit, Brezhnev’s enormous corpse, when lifted into its coffin to be placed on the catafalque for the 58 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Wendell Mayo lying-in-state on November 12, fell through the bottom. Later, within hours of replacing the coffin with a metal-plated one, the new coffin slipped out of the hands of one of the pallbearers and hit the bottom of the grave hole with an explosion. Grigoryev had seen it on television.

Asta saw it, too. Millions saw it! He was tied to Asta, tied to millions in the old times, tied even if it meant to be lashed like a dog to a stick in the rain, eyes popped out, waiting for his mistress’s return.

When the pain in his arms grew unbearable, Grigoryev set the sack of fruit down, turned around, knelt, reached back, and took it by the bottom with both hands. He hoisted it onto his back. By the time he made it to Rudninkų, then up the stairs to the second-floor flat of Asta’s mother, where he’d guessed Asta’d gone, the sack on his back had nearly bent him ninety degrees. He turned around, then bent his knees, slowly, carefully, and set the large sack in front of the door. He stood, ran his thumb a couple times across his eyelids to blot away the rainwater, then knocked.

When Asta opened the door, he was surprised. He’d guessed right.

Asta stood staring at him. She hadn’t even noticed the sack, so he pointed at it. “It’s for you, uh, and your mother.”

She glanced at the enormous sack, then turned back to Grigoryev and stared at him with her blue-fire eyes.

“So, swallow and say something,” he said.

“Alright,” she replied, put a hand on one hip, and nodded at the large sack of fruit. “Where did you steal that?”

“I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “I sold a painting.”

“Well, that’s nice for you,” she said, planting her other hand on her hip.

Grigoryev slumped back a little. He didn’t know what to do or say.

He wanted everything to be all right instantly. He didn’t want to wait.

He was tired of waiting, always waiting. Always thinking about what his mother had told him in Soviet times when she was most desperate to keep going.

“First you go through hell,” she’d whisper, “then the time comes to be happy.”

Okay, then it would not be so instantaneous, he told himself.

“Asta,” he said, gathering himself up for one more try. “I sold your painting. The Brezhnev, so…”

“So?” she interrupted, sarcastically.

“So, these fruits are yours.”

He waited a little more. He reasoned that if one apple had sufficed Crab Orchard Review

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Wendell Mayo for knowledge in Eden, then a whole sack of fruit would surely.…She must know how much he loved her!

“In that case,” she said, straddling the bag, hefting it between her legs, and waddling with it back into the flat, “I’ll take it.” She slammed the door. Then she opened the door. “I don’t know what in hell that is,” she said. She handed him the star fruit and slammed the door again.

Every day it seemed the same: what to do next; what next to do; what came next? No matter how people put it, however many ways, it all added up to the same thing: what next? Who could get used to such uncertainty? Grigoryev stood outside the flat of Asta’s mother a long while, long enough that the rain stopped. Okay, he told himself, things would take time. At least she took the sack of fruit and hadn’t made him lug it home. Then he began to worry more. What if it was too much? How could she possibly eat forty U.S. worth of fruit before it spoiled? No, it’d be all right. She’d surely give some to her relatives, all her relatives, whom he was sure would enjoy it immensely. While they munched on his fruit, nodding their heads, grunting in unison as the sweet liquids trickled into their throats, Asta would explain why she left the “Starving Artist,” as all her relatives called him. He could see it. He could see it all so clearly, but he could see nothing else.

He left the flat and made his way back out Rudninkų Street to Žemaitijos. The sun shone suddenly, warmed his face, but only seemed another way of asking: what next? He ducked into the narrow courtyard leading to his eighth-floor walkup. High above, a woman on the eighth level was hanging wash, seemed only a black object blocking the sun. The wash swung in the breeze, crisscrossing in front of the sun, switching light off and on as it filtered from above. Inside, he made his way up, stopping to check in the rusted slot for mail, and then proceeding to the second floor, where, on the landing, a blue pigeon hopped from the stairwell windowsill onto his shoulder. He paused briefly and thought about batting the bird away, but then, remembering the street-spattered pigeon coming into the Church of the Wonderworker, wondered if this bird might also give him some sort of sign—what now?

Unlike the other pigeons, the blue one on his shoulder made not a sound, was so silent that, as he ascended to the third and fourth floors, he found himself recalling sounds of other pigeons, their familiar, collective cooing and clucking, and by the sixth floor, he wondered how strange it was that when a familiar sound was no longer there, one might hear it all the stronger from memory.

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Wendell Mayo By the seventh floor he was tired, not that he was usually tired climbing the stairs, but he’d not often, in fact not ever, lugged a large sack of fruit across town. By the eighth floor he slowed considerably, in part because he didn’t want to jostle the pigeon, didn’t want it to fly off.

It was like a game, to go slowly, to balance himself, to make it all the way inside his flat with the bird intact on his shoulder. Strange, but his little balancing game suddenly seemed so important, as if history itself were perched upon his shoulder, feathered and tottering, fat, wobbly, its claws clenching, unclenching, piercing the fabric of his shirt as he shifted weight, one leg to another, and tried to move forward.

He entered the flat, tossed his key onto the counter, and sat at the table. With the blue pigeon still perched upon his shoulder, he took the star fruit out of his pocket, broke off one of the star-prongs and tasted it. It was only slightly sugary, relatively tasteless. He held the remaining star fruit up to the blue pigeon; it began to peck at the fruit, then lost interest.

Grigoryev tossed the star fruit into the corner, got up, went to the sink, and picked up a cup with cold coffee inside. Next, he kept wondering. He tipped the cup to his lips. Well, for sure he’d need to get back to Darius, to collect his paintings, his “Dachshund of the Götterdämmerung,” from his spot on the sidewalk in front of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker’s. But what after that? The cold coffee struck his tongue and he winced from the acidic taste. When the grounds hit his tongue and scraped his palate, he nearly gagged. He turned around and spat the grounds onto a piece of newspaper on the table. With the tip of one finger, he began to separate the coffee grounds in the thin brown liquid, his saliva, ground by ground, pushing each toward the edge of the newsprint, until the pattern there was unmistakable—those massive, bristling eyebrows, glistening through his wad of spit. Had he spent so much effort seducing Asta with those thick, unforgettable, Bolshevik bushes that he’d nearly seduced himself?

He rose from the table, went to the sink, hovered there awhile with his hands on the sides, then spat more coffee grounds into it.

There, in the brown mess at the bottom of his sink, it came to him.

He wouldn’t need numbers. He wouldn’t need Asta. And, had he been another sort of artist, he might have done it. No matter what came next, he might have started immediately, worked all winter, produced dozens of Brezhnevs, and one by one set them in front of the Wonderworker. He could have painted them all from memory. He wouldn’t even need the original. It staggered him to think how much Crab Orchard Review

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Wendell Mayo fruit it might buy. But now, Grigoryev, artist of “Dachshund of the Götterdämmerung,” gently batted the blue pigeon off his shoulder.

It flopped down, waddling on the floor in a tight circle about him, nodding, nuzzling its neck against his aching ankles. He noticed a patch of light on the countertop cast by the window over the sink, light confined by rhombical, clear, sharp edges, light switching as the woman’s wash outside fluttered in the breeze, partially impeding the late-day sun. He watched the patch of light until the switching slowed and he discovered the blue-pink light he loved contained there, glowing and undulant. He leaned over the sink again, hissing a little to get the last coffee ground out of his mouth, then hissing with more and more force, again and again, until the bitter particle was at last expelled.

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Holloway McCandless Milk of the Muddy It’s Sunday morning and I’ve come to hunt used condoms in the Back Bay Fens. The researchers have a budget for sample collection but I’m doing it for free, in memory of Finch. He would have been fortyfour today. Gathering data on the degree of HIV positivity in the men who have sex in this park won’t bring my brother back, but it’s better than moping. I’m too old to start medical school and work on a cure; I have too many cats to volunteer in Africa. Not many people want to go the Fens before six in the morning and poke around in a maze of giant reeds, searching for the spillage of gay sex. I don’t mind a bit. My apartment is only two blocks away, I’m a morning person, and I have energy to spare. You might think it’s gross, but condoms and semen have become abstractions in my life. I disown their origins—to me they’re pre-packaged, night-chilled specimens that should not go to waste.

If Finch were with me he’d make me stop to admire the dogwoods.

They’re blooming extra hard this year—they don’t remember Finch.

He’d finger their small blushing faces and compare their notched petals to the motif on one of his Secessionist ceramics. Without Finch I have no time for dogwoods or motifs, nor do I bother to exchange greetings with the nearly naked joggers who note my outfit and skitter to the far side of the path. At the beginning of a fine May morning I’m wearing a zipped and hooded windbreaker, thick sweatpants and two pairs of latex gloves, just in case. Over my chest hangs the rucksack Finch bought in Budapest when he was nineteen; its soft green canvas holds biohazard bags, indelible markers, charts, extra gloves, and an emergency splash kit. I carry my lunch separately, in a fanny pack.

I pause at the first stand of reeds and listen for interior footfalls.

Sometimes homeless people scavenge in here, but they don’t touch what I’m after. No human sounds, only a car passing behind me on Park Avenue. The reed stalks are as thick as a child’s fingers and their feathery purple tassels stroke the sky eight feet over my head, each seed head threatening future spawn. They, too, are interlopers. Olmsted never specified any Phragmites australis when he designed this emerald Crab Orchard Review

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Holloway McCandless wetland. Do-gooders introduced a few thickets of phrags in the sixties, thinking only of ducks and ducklings. Now the great greedy grasses suck up and sedge the banks of the Muddy River, ruining the view and dulling the color scheme. They shelter not only nesting birds but also the lust overflow from my neighborhood bars. Bars named Ramrod and Machine, places not meant for me, with their leather rooms and firefighter foam parties. Bars Finch couldn’t resist frequenting, in spite of his aesthetics, in spite of having Boris, a man both handsome and kind, waiting for him at home. I can’t look at these reeds without thinking that Finch was probably infected inside their rustling walls.

I always start with Phrags 1, because it’s less popular with the trysters and therefore more of a challenge. Already I can feel the sun through my hood. I must hurry before the heat spoils the samples but my feet don’t move. I have a map that shows each sex room labeled by compass points and numbers, I know I am doing a good deed, and yet I feel unwelcome at the ramparts of male desire. The reeds might as well be a clubhouse posted No Breeders Allowed, though Finch was never that kind of brother. Some stalks by the opening have been bent low by urgency, or by spring rain; I prefer to imagine the latter. I sense the assertive astringency of male cologne, the squeak of stretched leather, the hard meeting of need in the dark—the forces that took away my brother. This makes me angry enough to plunge in. The path does not care that I am female, but in the rattling of the reeds I hear a remonstrance from Finch. He would not approve of my presence—on aesthetic grounds if nothing else—but he is not here to stop me.

Fifteen feet in I spy two condoms lying next to a trio of deflated white balloons. The necks of the balloons are tied with cheap gold ribbon, the kind you rip into curls with a scissor blade. There is just enough air left in one balloon to plump up Happy Birthday!!! in puckered lavender letters. Finch hated lavender—he despised it for its proximity to mauve. He loved blues and greens, and indulged himself in an occasional enthusiasm for orange. Me, I’m clumsy with color.

I went through a maroon phase in my twenties—I thought it set off my brown hair and eyes. When Finch couldn’t stand it any more he arrived at my place with an armful of earthtone sweaters. They’re too small for me now, but I’m saving them for when I have a daughter, to make a connection between her and Finch. In February there was a tiny pink baby sweater with pearl buttons in the Lost and Found at work. I waited six weeks and then I brought it home—I couldn’t resist, even though the buttons are probably a choking hazard. I washed it by 64 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Holloway McCandless hand and put it with Finch’s sweaters in a cedar box under my bed.

The condoms next to the balloons are muddy, stepped on. The researchers want me to pick up every one, regardless of cleanliness, so I retrieve them with a latex pincer grip. I zip each one into its own specimen bag, label it with a location code, and then bag it again. The first weekend I found fifty percent more condoms than the researchers expected. As a child I was good at finding things—four-leaf clovers, frogs in watering cans, box turtles in the woods. Finch was good at finding things his whole life, particularly Art Nouveau pottery in the flea markets of Europe. Once I made the mistake of putting real flowers in a Zsolnay vase he gave me for Christmas. “Oh, Trace,” he said, pulling the tulips out by their throats, pursing his lips like the nun who caught me wearing shorts under my school jumper. “You mustn’t embarrass them by putting them next to that eosin glaze. It’s like seating Sandy Bullock next to Gwyneth. Horribly unfair.” His crusade against violations of taste was merciless. Moments of emotional unsightliness—getting dumped, losing faith, recurrent bridesmaid depression—he salved with kindness and spontaneous treats. Not just my heartaches, but Ma’s, too.

He was eternally patient with her need for attention, and he collaborated in her desire for gentility in ways I never could—the bijou gallery on Charles Street, invitations to Beacon Hill parties, orchestra seats at the Wang. After the shock of what she called Finch’s “private preference” abated, Ma was forced to put all her grandchildren eggs in my basket.

The basket remains empty, but I’ve found the perfect neighborhood for when the time comes. An area of Brookline with young families and a good school and a safe playground. After I drop my haul at the lab, I will take the T out there and watch the kids play while I eat my lunch. I work with handicapped kids all week and on the weekends I like to remind myself of how kids with normal muscle tone move. It’s the playground I had always imagined going to with Finch once I became a mom. In my fantasy the child was usually a girl, with light brown curls and green eyes. Sturdy but not chunky. Uncle Finch would push her too high on the swings—just the way he used to push me in Wareham, only we never had rubber safety mats—and chase her through the plastic tunnels. Now that Finch is gone, she, too, seems far away.

Ma thinks that because I work in pediatric PT I should be crawling in eligible doctors. It’s not like that. At the office it’s all women. I spend most of my hours providing home-based PT for Early Intervention.

Usually I meet mothers or grandmothers. There was a stay-at-home dad once—Peter, a carpenter type in Jamaica Plain. Gabe, his kid, was Crab Orchard Review

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Holloway McCandless a sweetheart with hypotonia and big, hollow eyes. Gabe struggled hard with his noodly limbs; he was the kind of patient you dream about treating twice a day to see if that would get him walking, even though the insurance would never pay for it. A lot of the moms take a break during the PT sessions but Peter got right down on the mat with us.

He made Gabe a beautiful scooter board with industrial casters that worked outside. You should have seen the way Gabe smiled at Peter when he first tried it, pulling himself around their small yard like a manic turtle, tearing up tufts of grass—it was like he was gulping down joy. Peter hugged me—I had told him how to make the board—and the hug almost turned into something else. Now Gabe receives his PT coverage at preschool. That’s the only cruelty in my job—once the kids turn three they have to leave the E.I. program. I worked with Gabe twice a week from when he was four months old and now I never see him.

When I called to see how he was doing, Pete said the school PT couldn’t motivate Gabe yet the way I could, but that it would come in time. He thanked me, and that was it.

I would never try and break up a family anyway, even in exchange for twice-daily PT. Not that I’m very seductive, regardless of scruple. When I was in my late twenties Finch set me up with one of his collectors, even took me shopping at Louis for the outfit and had Boris try to mousse up my hair for our double date. The guy seemed all right in a corporate sort of way, but I could tell, even if Finch couldn’t, that he was much more interested in his tuna tartare and the blonde at the next table than me in my new gauzy top. I hit him up for a donation to Children’s over dessert. Finch, bless his heart, didn’t get too mad, even though the collector didn’t buy anything from him for nine months afterward, explaining that he’d used up two quarters of his annual art budget on the blind date donation. Afterward, when I stopped by the shop, Finch pointed to a cream-glazed amphora. Its handles were formed by two slinky maidens, their arms entwined with roses and each other. “There’s my contribution to sick children,” he said. “Do you think they’d like to display it in the lobby?” I made a face, and Finch patted the back of my head. “Don’t worry, little sister, he didn’t deserve you. Someone else will buy the vase.”

No one did. Finch willed the amphora to me, but I let Boris sell it and donate the proceeds to HIV research. The only piece I kept was my Christmas Zsolnay, with its swamp-green tulips drooping over a blue field. It’s my memento of Finch—the boy who dropped out of RISD and went to Paris with $3,000 in traveler’s cheques and a secondhand 66 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Holloway McCandless book on lusterware and came back a dealer; the brother who took me to Europe for my thirtieth birthday, just the two of us; the man who put Boris through Sassoon in London, bought him his first salon chair, and loved him as best he could.

I miss him so much.

Now that I am deep inside the reeds, my body lifts off me, leaving me invisible, neither female nor male, neither celibate nor promiscuous.

I feel close to Finch, as if I could grasp his spirit somewhere between the brackish muck and the silky plumes. I run my fingers across the woody stems and startle a warbler. It flies straight up, yellow chest curved against the blue, silent. Look, I tell Finch. Look how beautiful, how beautiful and feathered and alive. Not like your cold hard glazes, your cheap boys iridescent with death.

Ma never got mad at Finch, never allowed a moment’s thought of how he got the virus. It was an immaculate infection. At the wake she hung onto Boris, her veil sucking in and puffing out of her wailing mouth. “My child, my child,” she cried. “My darling, darling boy.” She does nothing for the cause.

I leave Phrags 1 with twelve specimens and head for Phrags 2, over near the Victory Gardens. I’m determined to beat last week’s harvest, as a birthday tribute to Finch. Here the condoms lie openly on the marshy ground, easy prey. Some are clear, some candy-colored, a single black one. Each condom is like a discarded sigh—the rigid collar pillowed on rumpled latex, the pooled contents rich in human meaning. I hold my breath as I pick them up. A brief pendulousness at the tip, then they slop into the wide-mouthed specimen bags without a hitch. I’ve come to recognize the idiosyncrasies of the rooms. E-2 is well scattered, apparently random. N-5 has a concentration, almost a pile, underneath a tent of broken-backed reed stalks. SW-4 rarely has anything—the unsafe room?—but I search there every time. Today the churned mud yields nothing and I wonder if this is where Finch succumbed. There is no data, nothing to collect.

When I first started collecting I picked up garbage, too, wrappers and pill packets and butts. Once, astonishingly, a folded index card with a menu of stick figures—Pick Your Position. Now I leave the trash and gather only condoms. Forty weigh next to nothing on my chest— their combined fluid is lighter than my bottled water. I think about all the sperm that will never live beyond its usefulness on a slide, the nieces and nephews never conceived. Years ago, before Finch tested positive, he and Boris had been debating adoption and surrogates. If Crab Orchard Review

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Holloway McCandless they’d had a chance to ask me to carry the baby I was going to say yes, even if it meant postponing a pregnancy of my own.

In NE-1 I see one that’s so unlike the others I find myself staring at it instead of picking it up. He’s resheathed it in its torn packet and propped it up between two untrampled reeds. The collar protrudes milkily above the ripped foil edges, a stumpy moonflower. I think about who would have done such a thing. I decide he would be fastidious, not an unnecessary risk-taker. He would have steered clear of Room SW-4, clear of Finch and others like him. On nights when Finch dropped me off at my place on Queensberry after the theater, his sharp, pale features glowed with luminous appetite, and I knew he would not stay for a mug of tea, nor would he go right home to Boris. While I got into my pajamas he was on his way to the bars or, for all I know, heading straight to the reeds.

Only once did I ask him about the cruising. We were alone in his living room, in the brick building overlooking the Boston Common. Boris was at work on Newbury Street, painting the hair of Beacon Hill matrons ash-blonde. Ma had gone down to the Public Gardens to watch the Swan Boats and weep.

Even when he was sick Finch managed to arrange himself in a way that suggested indolence rather than convalescence. His languid form implied that the bustle outside was beneath his attention, and that the most desirable place to be in Boston was on this particular couch by these tall windows with their scattered panes of purple glass, wrapped in an antique paisley throw whose pattern was so exquisite it had been a crime to take it out of India. His best Zsolnay sat on the walnut table behind him, the ceramic throat rising like a fountain from a cluster of blunt orange drug containers, the blue-green glaze stealing all the color from his face. Gaunt and pallid, he was still beautiful. He seemed to consider whether or not to answer my question, which came out more accusatory than I intended.

“It wasn’t cheating in the way you might think of it.”

I took a step away from the mantelpiece, trying to wave the topic out of the space between us. “Finch—” “Physical fidelity was something I never promised to Boris.” I stopped waving in the air and Finch smiled. “Even after he moved in I still needed that part of my life.”

“Boris wasn’t enough for you?” I said. “I would have been happy with half a Boris.”

Finch pulled his head back and blinked, looking suddenly old. He pressed his lips together, containing something—surprise?

Had he never imagined me having even half a Boris?

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Holloway McCandless “Forget it,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“You started it, so now you have to listen,” Finch said. “When it happens you’re yourself and you’re him and you’re no one at the same time. The pull is irresistible.”

“But what pulls you? Novelty? Danger?”

“All of that. The trigger can be as subtle as an arm covered in crème brûlée skin. It can be the thrill of someone a little dangerous, finding out if he’s as tough as he seems. It can be as predictable as a span of shoulders in white linen, or as crude as an ass in cheap black leather.”

The silvery glint in Finch’s eyes as he listed these temptations made the backs of my arms tingle. Before, whenever we’d talked about his social life, he’d put it in my terms. The seductions he was describing now were as alien to me as eosin glaze.

“So you compromise your aesthetics for sex?”

“Every chance I get.” Finch laughed, then coughed.

“That’s hilarious.” I didn’t even try to laugh with him.

“No, no.” He shook his head. “It’s that the aesthetics sometimes invert themselves. The rush when he chooses you over everyone else in the room. What I liked was harder to get as I got older. But there were times, even in my thirties.…”

Finch closed his eyes and his face went slack, both his features and his breathing glutted with remembered ecstasy. I had never seen an expression like that on a man’s face, not even in the moments after orgasm. I know no man has seen it on mine. I had to turn my back to Finch. I looked at his view of the Common, at the file of slumped bronze soldiers on their emaciated steeds, and the dry frog pond, and the cottagelike entry to the parking garage. Had he cruised in this park, too?

I turned back and his reverie reminded me too much of death.

“But you should have been careful,” I said, almost whispering.

“All the same you should have protected yourself.”

Finch opened his eyes and they were pitiless. “I tried and it wasn’t the same,” he said. “It wrecked the sublime momentum.”

“And you call this—what happened to you—sublime?” I wanted to smack him.

Finch stared back at me, chin forward, his neck hollow. He drew the paisley throw tighter. “Being careful is a kind of death, too, you know.”

“You were careful with Boris,” I said. “Weren’t you?”

“Boris was careful with me,” Finch said. “Don’t worry. There will be someone else for Boris.”

“Lucky Boris,” I said. “While the rest of us…”

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Holloway McCandless His smile was sardonic yet sympathetic. “You, little sister, are going to be fine.”

“I can’t just pick up a new brother at the Ramrod.”

“Oh, Trace, don’t.” Finch patted the ottoman in front of him.

“Don’t you want to hear my prediction?”

I could never resist Finch’s predictions. I sat down, squeezing my hands between my knees, not looking at him.

He stroked my bangs back from my forehead. “You’re not going to waste any more time. You’re going to get a decent headshot of yourself and put it online. You’re going to go to the gym. After four duds you’ll meet someone sweet and wonderful and from you two lovebirds we will all go on.”

Because he was dying I didn’t argue. But I know what’s out there, and it’s not sweet and wonderful. It’s divorced and bitter or mid-life narcissistic. They all think they deserve someone hot; they want variety, not commitment. Ma’s not even trying to fix me up with her high school reunion buddies’ nephews any more. After Finch died she devoted herself to her “project”—resurrecting every snapshot that shows young Finch, even if all that’s captured is his lower leg or his shoulder blades or his thick black hair. I hate seeing them. I’m always grinning and round-tummied and complacent, completely unaware that although I have Finch by the hand, my Apollonian brother is not looking at me, but somewhere out of the frame, somewhere as bloodless as the sea. I have no connection to men of any preference. Each e-mail from Boris is shorter than the last. He sold the apartment in March and went to Prague, searching for Finch’s ghost or his reincarnation, I’m not sure which, but it’s clear that there’s not enough of Finch in me to interest him. I don’t go to bars, and even if I did no one would choose me over everyone else in the room. Straight men under the age of fifty don’t even see me, unless there’s some transaction involved—an oil change, a propane refill, a taxi to the airport—and once I’ve paid they look over me as fast as they can, seeking something juicier.

The summer I was five I liked to hide under the porch, hunting for salamanders and treasure. Finch was twelve. I could see him through the diamond lattice, riding his bike up and down our cul-de-sac, practicing tricks, spinning with one wheel in the air, his long legs straight above the pedals, his hair too long on the back of his neck. Nana’s sigh reached down through the floorboards. “Look at him. A prince he is.” A pause, then a squeak in the rivets of her aluminum chair. I could picture her above me, a heavy woman stretching her legs out and crossing them at the ankles, the ankles she was so vain about, even at sixty. Finch’s ankles.

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Holloway McCandless “And poor wee Tracy is so plain…” After a while Ma said, “Hmmm. But she’s a good girl.” Then my grandmother sighed again, as if being plain and good was the worst thing in the world. “There is one thing to hope for,” Nana said. I hunched in the chalky dirt next to the foundation, hugging my knees, staring up at the gappy boards and waiting to hear what my one hope was. “Maybe someday Finch’ll have a nice friend for her, someone steady-like and not too choosy.”

In Room NE-1 I squat next to the blossoming condom in its torn vase. It’s the right time of the month; I have a chance of being lucky, of loving a child who doesn’t get taken from me when she turns three. No one will ever know I took it, the data will be skewed only a hair. Before I pick up the condom I christen the donor Simon, a prudent sounding name. When I touch the foil a metallic chill runs through my gloves and up the skin under my sleeve. For a moment I want to fling it deeper into the reeds. But as I lift it higher the gold wrapper burns bright in the sun and I can hear Finch saying, Not that one, little sister, it’s not for you. Too flashy. No authentication. Wait for something more subdued. But I am out of his reach now and I keep moving before thinking or good taste can stop me. Simon’s seed feels heavier than the others and I can’t bear to drop it into a specimen bag—it might be too warm already. I nestle the packet in my palm and turn my top glove inside out from the wrist, careful not to spill, knotting the latex above the mouth of the condom.

I unzip my fanny pack and tuck my treasure between my sandwich and the freezer pack, picturing strong little legs and arms, bare feet toddling on the sand, Finch’s dark hair. I could be careful, and have the sperm washed, but I have decided to put my faith in Simon and his tidy habits.

I leave the Fens gloveless and giddy, my hood off, smiling at the joggers and the dog walkers and the old folks leaning against the cement wall. I cross Park Street to the Russian Orthodox Church, trimming my usual route. Twenty feet above the sidewalk the tall glass doors to the bellringers’ balcony flash open. Four men stride out. One has a long white beard and a black robe; all wear large green cups over their ears. Their lower bodies are obscured by a waist-high wall tiled in small squares of gold, its center decorated with a medallion of the Holy Family and flanked by two blood-red crosses that look more like plus signs than crucifixes.

Finch used to say the balcony was a travesty of iconic pastiche, though he coveted the bronze bells. The robed one issues a command and then all four men tug on the ropes, their bodies bending almost in half. The clappers smack the insides of the bells, releasing fat tones that throng out over the Fens. I flee for home, gravid with hope and the legacy of Finch.

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Fleda Brown Under the Eaves in memory of William Matthews Two cottage mice: one trapped, neck snapped, teeth bared in last surprise, one sprawled dead near my shoe.

Then the Jehovah’s Witnesses come by with a tract, “Who Will Save the Rainforests?” Not that Jehovah will, they say, but that our attention will lead to.…Definitely I am witness to saved mice, dead, but still soft after the long winter, to many saved things under the eaves: 80-year-old blankets cumulous with mouse-nests, a black lantern, a spread-wing toaster, a brown ceramic hot water bottle, graceful as a flower bud in its original flannel sack. I am crouching in the dark among the past’s carefully wrapped and labeled things. How skilled it is in particulars, in privacy, standing by like this lantern lacking its battery. And talk about care of construction! There’s an invisible opening you crawl through to get here, a shelf that drops down in front of it. Nice.

A good word that used to mean precise, delicate. To pay attention, to get the angles true. I start to meditate on losses, which only makes the present look worse, but then I remember William Matthews said heart and memory are pretty much the same. What to feel here? Take this hot water bottle. Ordinary business, warming the bed, holding

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Fleda Brown warmth against a temporary case of cramps. The past did all it could, then quit. What to do with these objects, past their time, run my hand over their smoothness, make a speech-balloon over them? Nothing can be fully felt until it’s said. I think that’s Matthews, too.

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Stacey Lynn Brown Hello, I’m Johnny Cash 1932–2003 No one has a deeper voice, no one can go so low, playing card spoked in the guitar fret for that rasping, twanging tremolo.

With the Tennessee Three chugchugging behind like a diesel train passing you by, a train you might just hop on and ride if not for the bars, the blues, and the black.

No one sings like you, your voice clacking like railroad slats milemarking those long-gone, lonesome towns, ghosts of women and the gallows pole.

And that song that took thirty years to write galvanizes like rain in an old tin pail, voiceover of the beast, come and see, and I saw, cat scratch pinings for Beulahland.

No one sings bass for Mother Maybelle’s hymns and baritones in the convicts’ choir.

No one draws such a match-head flare to a heart soaked in creosote.

No one but you.

One more round.

No one but you.

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Anthony Butts Heritage Clouds lie like spilled milk across the fringed blue sky. White moths make their way along gardenias blooming behind a picket fence.

No, this is not a conspiracy: just the way an easy day should go.

A woman, in a canary yellow sundress, fades into an inconsequential complacency as the pages blur, as she stops thinking about what each word might mean, her skin hinting at being pink in the sunlight waning near the horizon. Her children might be safe as houses as a black man walks along the periphery of the park. Her children might be like the children he wants but cannot have. His marriage would be a compromise, with children who at their best might not be light enough to pass. He knows his children would never be safe. Better to adopt white ones.

Across the street, a blonde is straining to be heard as she lip-synchs the words to her latest video playing on a 40-inch television. She seems almost life-sized, almost as realized as a poem. The black man might want to climb inside and be someone else, with her, with someone like her who might provide a better future. But the woman, with her children, is more than currency, more than the sundress wedding dress any dress blues.

We all know it’s true, that the ace of spades is a badass card—that the man who holds it is a motherfucker. Eastern European and Asian babies flood the market, while blacks lie in wait—growing old like money that doesn’t spend. As the woman on the bench lapses in and out of her dream, an elderly woman looks hard at the man: as if to say “I’ve got my eye on you, even if she doesn’t.”

It’s good to have friends, good to know people like you.

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Kevin Coval The Day Jam Master Jay Died When I was a kid, my mother never sang me lullabies. She sang me Run-DMC. —JaCmine Mitchell, 20, Nassau Community College student, Chicago Tribune, 11/01/02

1 woke unsure how to pay rent check hadn’t come in from county too many months living like artist with no net to break the fall went to my brother’s class at Kelvyn Park taught Luis Rodriguez in freshman honors two poems about neighborhood folk / one heroin-addicted guitar player and the other man angry in Humboldt Park killing a car gave a reading at Wright College theater full of aging teens and faculty after the set this skinny white kid comes over gives me props for a poem about graff writers i ask if he writes, ELOTES he says no shit i say i’ve been digging you for years over red and brown line tracks first seen you up on that truck at Chicago and Halsted / that’s me he said ate with Eboo downtown near Loyola he lectures to a class of grad students about discovery and inheritance / he is brilliant in describing our engagement with modernity we encounter the vastness of cultural practice and build bridges back home he says 76 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Kevin Coval i think of Isabel / young writer at Kelvyn Park Bindi between her eyebrows / picture of Lady Guadalupe in her notebook / she reads the Bhagavad Gita in Spanish with her Aunt who teaches Yoga at the Church and i tell this class my path back to Judaism was paved in breakbeats walk to the train get home / call my girl she lives in Brooklyn on my bed / she tells me Jam Master Jay was shot his head spilled onto the control panels of his studio in Queens it’s fucked up she said it’s fucked up i said said we’d talk tomorrow hung up and my apartment was silent like there was no music in my apartment my apartment was silent like my childhood memories silenced tonight like the music

2 Chuck D said John Lennon was killed today and i miss Pac and Big more than ever i am Holden Caulfield watching hope break in the stalls of public bathrooms i am Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth reminiscing over the fallen body of b-boy Trouble T-Roy and dying hip-hop birth sites falling wayside to the pounding beats of green-fisted real estate agents and the hard crack rock drug wars america wages on her children creating culture with turntables

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Kevin Coval we have been here before and i want Scott La Rock back to break up all this violence i want Big L to throw a peace sign up in the air and DREAM and Ramon and all the other graffiti artists killed in the line of their calling to come back and bomb the World Trade Center with the biggest streaked wildstyles the sky has ever seen: a mural for the forgotten spray painted on the clouds a gold chain cast across the sun a single shell-toe held up in the air it was Jam Master Jay who introduced me to the culture who soothed me over the bridge of whiteness and rock it was his cool lean arms wrapped around chest / head back in black fedora / no laces in his adidas / he stole electricity to light the block parties / reparations / for all the stars exploded before he could play the last song they requested / he’d send shine beams on vinyl / into the distant homes of the sun starved and let us bask in his light scratching scarce sounds / found digging the landfills / of america’s sonic consciousness

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Melissa Frederick Mercy for the Ghost of Karla Faye Tucker I love you all very much. I’m going to be face to face with Jesus now…I will see you all when you get there. I will wait for you.

—Karla Faye Tucker, from the last statement before her execution, February 3, 1998 To this day, in bridal finery, her spirit roams the brown fields of Texas, a gossamer train leaving trails like her hair: long, tangled filaments, cut deep in dust. Prettily, she frowns, wrings her hands. They are restless when not wielding a pickaxe. Locked in the burning Land of Plenty, she longs for her husband, her Jesus who was last seen in South Philadelphia, where, it’s said, he cleans streets for free with his sharp staff and super-powered hose. Unbelievable, what grime accumulates on grates and sidewalks, on beggars, gray and bundled like newspaper. After dark, each poor man gets his own good night from Jesus, while steam rises off sewer vents to keep the bodies warm. Jesus will not set foot in Texas, except on visiting day, Crab Orchard Review

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Melissa Frederick which he spends facing Karla across wire and glass, a prison phone propped against his shoulder, his lovely bride giggling at his jokes. Mercy! she cries, hollow brown eyes sparkling, Lord, have mercy!

Each time she speaks, Jesus wonders: Does she still haunt that mansion in Austin, where the governor hears her midnight pleas as stubborn knots in dreams?

Unlike some televangelists, Jesus does not think Karla a saint.

Patiently, he listens as she proclaims her love through the phone, as she tears her ethereal handkerchief to shreds.

Jesus knows Karla. She needs to do more time in Texas, where land is scorched and tainted like her heart.

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Nola Garrett Elegy for Anthony Hecht Who could have hoped for this eventual peace?

—Anthony Hecht, from “Green: An Epistle” There’s no facile way to console those of us mourning on this day, you, Dr. Hecht, have forever annexed rot and all of its possibilities. Your ivory bones slept in a mean tower fragile as the paper you wrote your poems upon, those paper lanterns of infinite folds, your ornamental consolations, cataloging Europe’s towering losses—The Hard Hours, small Yolek’s last day— now made into our grief, too. Yolek’s ivory smoke falls upon us. We smell his rot, because you encountered rot in exquisite places, confronted paper with your lance—an ivory iambic line. Such elegant consolation you gave for our insufficient days amid the towering snows of Rochester and the towering demands of the Dover bitch. Rot, after all, was your keynote, your day star enkindling your lines across paper.

I wonder what consolation you made of lymphoma, your fluids’ ivory

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Nola Garrett betrayal? May you be met by an ivory being, Noh Ting Wong, a vast leaning tower of an angel, an imperfect console, (misericord, if you will) your guide through the rot of Heaven. Isaiah will explicate his paper reeds by the brooks. Horace will lend you his day bed where he so often lays with divers nymphs upon an ivy counterpane and sips peppered wine. And, may the Powers of Babel spread before you the whole lot of a new, broken languageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;oh, glorious desolation!

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Susan Grimm Careless at the Crematorium: Georgia, 2002 The bodies change, begin to slide out like throw rugs, the wind thrumming against their aspic of liquids and meats. Can the dead be ashamed? Piled behind trees, in the shallow end of the lake, they are heaped. This is not what is meant by death throe— the body thrown for a loop behind the charnel house, the last vestige of spirit slipped out like the magic trick scarf. The body humps up as if for pleasure one last time. Does an eyeball roll to feature the tentative line of a deer’s throat? Does an ear remain curved to catch the notes of a robin’s song? It is difficult to relish eternity. A skull rolls into a dog’s path as if thrown. 339 bodies, untrammeled, unhoused, not reduced to their sifting of bone.

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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez Sounding Restoration Plumed orphans of the decimated Maypure refused to leave the Orinoco jungle speechless. Spoiling the spoils of war, these parrots mocked their conquerors, the Carib devils—Yasuri!—from their hellish perches.

They spoke the language of loss, carried Maypure ghosts like hosts on their tongues. These emerald angels returned to the wild the idiom condemned to ashes, repeated its singular tones to keep history from colliding with stone. Such restitution of genocide is too beautiful to believe: sonirri. Today an artist, linguist and bird behaviorist pollinate the present with the past, lure Papetta and Apekiva to the honey— mapa, mapa—of Maypure words. Soon the pair replenish time, yuvi, yuvi, soundly mimic two hundred-year-old ancestors in a dimly lit exhibit in Connecticut. I stand beside their penumbral aviary—more confessional than home— hear echoes of an ancient penance. One of them calls to me: nunaunari, friend. I look up, suddenly deafened by the citrus-stained sky two thousand miles southwest where tribes of lime parrots congregate, stalk the green house of childhood. Certain dialects should be obliterated— pain’s beauty defies translation. But birds restore

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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez the Spring and jade-dreamt parrots proffer seeds of reparation. They mourn their dead, their distant families in Hartford, London, Istanbul and squawk— phantoms of a translucent time no longer lost.

Note: The exhibit, May-por-é, created in 1997 by artist Rachel Berwick and bird behaviorist Sue Farlow, was first installed at RealArtWays in Hartford, Connecticut, and subsequently re-created in New York, London, Istanbul, and Porto Alegre, Brazil. The exhibit was inspired by the legend that German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—renowned for documenting the flora and fauna of Venezuela at the end of the 18th century—discovered that Carib parrots spoke Maypure, the language of a tribe annihilated by the Carib. Though this apocryphal story about parrots being the sole surviving speakers of Maypure cannot be historically corroborated, von Humboldt did phonetically document the Maypure language and, with the help of a linguist, his notes provided the basis for the language spoken by the parrots in the contemporary exhibits. For more information, see www.parrotchronicles. com/septoct2002/maypore2.htm.

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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

tourist-attraction.com Should you like what you see, do stop surfing and linger. Kindly touch your screen and we’ll arrange your roundtrip ticket, so you may seek comfort in the bodies you’ve been merely eyeing online. Gentle sir, not to worry: we offer the ultimate in discretion. And the boys so enjoy your accent as much as your hard currency. Never mind their bedroom eyes, sunken like your imperial Roman baths. You’ll soon lose yourself in their small round mouths, insatiably open with hunger. So come, come invest in Romania’s future. Leave your marks on this young democracy, prematurely coming of age like a streetwise adolescent—free to learn how to live hand to mouth.

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Diane Holland First Morning on Another Planet A small craft unfolds its petaled outer shell, a slow opening of metal leaves on horizons of rock, a reddish plain dusted with tracings of whirlwind and vanished water—not unfamiliar, not at all.

Once, hiking in rough volcanic back country, we met a small wheeled vehicle inching its way through a rocky swale, around it a bevy of keepers shouting at us to stand clear of the little machine controlled from half a world away, practicing for Mars. But too late, we were part of its scan, committed to memory as we sat down to watch, peeling oranges, wondering if it would find itself wandering a strange planet, carrying within its codes the small glitch of surprise, the hope of finding us again with our bright globes— perhaps best possible gift, though unintended.

Just as I remember the way you opened your eyes to me that first morning, the shells of what had been our separate lives, folded open around us— a field ablaze in orange light, the familiar horizon.

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Diane Holland

Rain for Days And the sky closed, but now the TV weather radar screen shows the few last showers, here and there pale green, red at the core with downpour. Suddenly the screen is awash in deep green, what appears a deluge, a flood. Pay no attention— it’s just the migrating birds! Just the birds?

How many must there be, streaming out of the north on their urgent, necessary way, revealed by an instant pulse of energy sent out where our eyes cannot go—as if a cleft appeared, opening the sky, or a life, to reveal a secret migration where what we choose to attend tells nothing at all about what’s really there.

Despite the weatherman’s best efforts, birds keep flooding the screen, confounding all the old, dependable formulas and devices. There is something insistent, almost furtive about it. The way the inner life wells up and cannot be quieted.

The way love comes down like a hammer.

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Kevin Honold Citywide Curfew, April Riots, Cincinnati, 2001 Streetlamps come on and flicker violet as they warm. An early star burns through the transformer drone. The old woman at the bus-stop waits in a cone of scant light and stares down the deserted street, tilts an ear toward the rumor of an engine.

A city bus shuttles out of the turn, filled with tube-light and empty blue seats.

The driver, bellied over the wheel, glances at her lifted hand as he passes and she turns a shoulder against the blast of wind and diesel exhaust. We watch the bus gun down the decline, bottom on a pothole, breach a traffic signal’s damp green spill. Powerlines hum. Is that the last bus? she asks. Could you walk me to a phone?

A cruiser—underpanels splattered gray with gutter-wash—slows along the curb beside us.

The cop peers through the passenger window, speeds off, and we walk down the littered sidewalk.

When she takes my arm, I feel ashamed somehow for both of us, the only people left on the wide empty street, listening to far-off sounds: a police helicopter flogging the air behind a house-studded hill, the faint jolts of trains shunting in the railhead down by the river.

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Annemarie Kattan Jacir landscape for Nicole the trees have been entered into a war unregistered civilians

resisting not with hands with roots

lemon, orange pine almond olive trees recalling stories from acca decades ago, they were younger storms blew from the coast the fate of the jaffa groves will be yours they wondered if they’d have the same end wind carried stories of stolen trees slain in stone and birth exploited and now growing in a tel aviv shopping mall war is feminine revolution is feminine dangling suffix 90 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Annemarie Kattan Jacir fruit hanging bitter ďŹ&#x201A;ags change languages change lovers carving names sucking citrus and trees the trees have changed war heroes lonely like men resistant as women

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Roy Jacobstein The Word What will be the modem of the future, that next newest word nonexistent millennia past, routine as rain today, in Amharic, Ibo, Quechua, Pashto— in all the world’s lacerated tongues, our blue globe booted up, humming like a giant hive, bits and bytes pulsing Earth in less than a nano, unconnected to spindrift, moonrise, pain. What word will be used a century hence when someone is asked have the empty belly and the bomb yet gone the way of the sundial, the slave?

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John Moss Asphyxiation On the day after thanksgiving, we went shopping for plastic

suits. Having previously never purchased plastic suits, been in the market for plastic suits, or been familiar with anyone who had, we predicted that if a plastic suit sale were to occur between July 4th and New Year’s Eve, the day after Thanksgiving would be a safe bet. Our fifth stop in the understandable—and at the time desirable—flesh nodes of bargain shopping produced the highly sought-after suits: large, cloudy, one-piece cuts of plastic with a valve for connecting the oxygen tank sold separately. And although the distributor normally specialized in sporting goods—and the suits were not on sale—we were pleased nonetheless as these were not times, at the end of the century, to fuss over particulars.

Should we have considered that invitation from Sara’s impractical friend to fire machine guns into a river in Indonesia when it happened? Yeah, probably, but the novelty of the event, and her friend’s hackneyed, juvenile, utterly incomprehensible approach served us both the stew of justification needed to assure our own plans. We left eight days in advance so we could avoid the kind of slapstick silliness that one presumes immediately precedes an annihilation, and arrive comfortably and not feel pressured for what was undoubtedly the defining moment of our generation. Traffic was airtight and I remember thinking how perfect it would be if all of our neighbors from Cleveland were heading to the desert as well. How perfect if everyone in the United States were heading to the desert. I envisioned our Woodstock, the fearless desert landscape representing absolutely nothing, a perfect symbol for our generation’s false might, self-aggrandizement, and particular love of the absurd. It would be comic and tragic, even heroic. But we didn’t want them there because this was our way of doing it, close to the bone, close to each other in case the heavy stuff really did go down. Before we left, Sara talked about how with everything we now had for the future, there would be no human contact, besides tollbooths, for five years at least. We Crab Orchard Review

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John Moss would belong entirely to ourselves, think entirely our own thoughts, and raise our soon-to-be-born child in the dream of complete control.

No societal flavor or celebrity hand waves serving as moral posturing, our enlightened views would project directly onto our child. The suffusion of cars and vans on the road snowed these possibilities until Sara reminded me it was Christmas Eve, and I was able to relax as we made our way slowly out of town knowing most of these people were probably headed to Toledo, Michigan, and Indiana for the holidays, not the desert. Or Indonesia.

With apartments gone, deposit money spent, van packed, jobs quit, we had our new home, a sober mystery machine that involved everything in our future and had room for nothing else. It felt fantastic planning five years ahead in the season before I expected most everyone else in the world to die.

I had recently bought a white Chevrolet G-Series; we needed it for survival and it was a good investment because of the oncoming child— and our reproductive duties would not stop there. It had cup holders (which are good for kids), power mirrors and windows, bucket seats, and a tape deck. A tape deck was once important, around the time this model was built, but as we neared the end of the century it seemed every recording artist in America and beyond was trying to get one last record out in case something really awful happened at midnight of 2000. Or else they were exploiting our paranoia by offering a frenzy of diversions, which meant there was always something good on the radio. The recording industry operates on seasonal patterns—anyone in or close to the industry knows that—and the time of a release, while not as important as the content, complements it to a degree so that releasing club music between November and March is profit-suicide compared to May-August. And years correlate to months; and 1999, well, to not get every last song, every last stored-up recorded piece of electronic noise out to that market before 0000 hit would have been stupid.

Our van shook in the cold, dry winds of the world and still the roads of Northwest Ohio never felt straighter. It was our second time in that part of the state and I couldn’t believe how flat it looked despite Ricky Martin’s furious beats rocking the van in an undulated hydraulic vacuum. Cleveland is not going to leave a cyclist breathless, but I know for a fact that in Northwest Ohio hiking boots and skis are on sale all year round. The petite, preening landscape said nothing for natural wonder and everything for geographical fitness. This dot in 94 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

John Moss the world had slimmed down to an implausible layer of thin crust, not unlike the shell on crème brûlée. And yet, crossing those trim plains with planes of asphalt carved into them I saw nearly everything in our country (nearly everything, as I still longed for the bloated mountains out west) that I needed to see if it were to indeed be our last week on earth: thin leafless trees that looked like witches’ fingers, rows of fallow land previously plucked to death by needy farmers, and the big, bulking beauty of country houses, isolated and charming. Beside the landscape, it was enough to be with my girlfriend, to see everything on a sheet spanning four hundred decades into the past, knowing our era may be responsible for a solar extinction of the senses. I rocked in that van with the wind and music, feeling an ambivalent peace from my fate and responsibility in all of this, and straighter than we could ever hope the van moved west to fat, unhealthy horizons.

But we were fat too, and with everything bought, the van so full my girlfriend sat with our fake plants on her lap resting against her healthy expanding belly, it surprised and scared us when we had to stop. In planning we purchased everything we would need for five years, and still we had to stop; for gas and toilets, in Iowa, at the Iowa 80 Truckstop—a place Sara and I agreed to be perhaps the only oasis in the United States, along with our van in the desert, untouchable by the catastrophes ahead.

We pulled into the Iowa 80 at about six forty-five Central time in Midwestern darkness. A sky the size of the Atlantic hung overhead and tender stars lay suspended, others sheathed by fragmented streams of charcoal winter clouds that looked particularly cheerful against the royal black. Here on earth, below the celestial trappings of infinite belief, we were surrounded by an adult amusement park.

Entertainment, shopping, dining, refueling, and truck weighing were all options here, spread over the grounds. Lights flashed, truckers honked, and the sound of a blue-collar bazaar made our faces light up at the industry and possibilities here before us. I parked the van, and we walked toward it all holding hands, a glum cloud of separation the final indicator, after the initial disappointment of stopping, that the trip could not be perfect. Our vows of purity from other humans in this final week disintegrated into the sensational, voyeuristic, and communal atmosphere of the Iowa 80 on Christmas Eve. At first we said only gas and toilets, but neither the quiet, beefy drone of the van and pop radio, nor the swelling geographical bellies of our future horizons could quite draw our return to the road as quickly and Crab Orchard Review

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John Moss impersonally as the innocent plans we made outside of the complex suggested.

And once back inside the van, ready to continue, now equipped with fuel cans and disposable diapers stuffed alongside everything else so there would absolutely be no more truck stops, I felt the prospect of flight, acceptance of departure, and consequences of both to be hopeful and grim, a spirit alive between us in addition to our unborn baby. I figured Sara and I would have it out here, really skin the problem to its bone-dry surface and just fight and fuck it out of our systems after what had happened in the Truckstop. Scream, howl, piss, scrape, snarl, spit, destroy, and recover, but my girlfriend said nothing, no thing discernible from my side of the van, and it became so quiet I turned to the radio, luckily finding Ricky Martin singing she bangs, she bangs.

Sara’s eyes, small, strange now, dropped what I imagined to be every shred of my body from sight and settled onto the crumbled bunch of plastic suits between us that she had just washed successfully. I tore at them as much to shock her as to loosen the tension. They were sturdy and withstood my cartoon destruction, to which she put her hand on the top of my wrist, as if not to say quit, but rather stop being yourself for just a second.

Close to three hours passed, I think, before my girlfriend and I spoke upon getting situated in the desert. My uncertainty is a result of the insufficient oxygen that passed through my valve during that time, and only once we decided it was wasting oxygen to sit in our suits six days preceding the supposed calamity did we disrobe, and discover to our delight that one tank was not nearly as long-lasting as advertised. False advertisement, but one we were proud of figuring out on our own. The desert brought upon realities and futures that were easily forgotten on the ride here, and once out of our suits I noticed Sara loosening all the grudges that had ruined the remaining thirteen hundred miles of the trip.

Our camp covered probably two square miles of desert and was the only one in sight. Flat, insipid, an egotistical beach with teases of water, I couldn’t help but think how curvy and lusty that stretch in Northwest Ohio seemed now. We saw the mountains I dreamed about too, though disguised as lumps and headaches in the forms of our embittered minds at the time, and now they were gone, behind us, a nice idea but a better lesson in the inevitability of moving on.

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John Moss more so of a desire to conscientiously be quiet and solitary if indeed there were people, to keep them from disturbing or befriending us, rather than to extend any amicable relations. In our version of the end, we remained the only two, our child brought into this untouched, solar-less world—our own to stay our own. This had been our plan: a non-stop, impersonal trip from Cleveland to here, where reliance on each other was our means of subsistence. Unfortunately our vision lacked fuel and bowel movements, and for these reasons we stopped at the Iowa 80 and now everything felt contaminated. My territorial desert wanderings lasted ten minutes when I had to return for some Ultimate Gum Solution purchased ad hoc at the Truckstop. My top right molar crippled my face in several different ways because of a toothache that I had noticed recurring only after being diagnosed with a cavity at the Truckstop.

At the Iowa 80, Sara took our plastic suits to the Laundromat. We thought it would be wise to wash them once to make sure they were not going to wither and dissolve in the event of atmospheric breakdown. It hadn’t occurred to us at home, and the salesman at the sporting goods store recommended nothing of the sort, but after driving six hundred miles with them stuffed between us on the floor, the contemplation of two years inside of one made the immediate assurance of durability that much more important. So while she washed the suits I decided to drop in to the Truckstop’s resident dentist (and barber and movie theater). All you needed to do was present a driver’s license and thirty dollars for a check up and cleaning. One last cleaning sounded excellent before the lights on earth went out because I didn’t want my teeth popping out while chewing on canned sardines for the next few years if I could help it. It turned out I had a cavity, and I am sure I never would have noticed had it not been pointed out.

As opposed to Sara who looked better every day after leaving the Iowa 80, my effects, hidden and negligible at first, began to conquer our desert barricade. It had been five days since the Iowa 80, or two thousand four hundred straight pop songs, and my mind now worked inside the Truckstop’s seedy complex of temporary communities and vagrant associations. If it were only my problem I could have worked it out, but there she was, right next to me in that flat, stretching desert. My problems were hers as our isolated agreement tacitly implied, and she never recovered, I imagine, from when she found me digging in the sand, four deep holes around me and my bald head sweating in the smearing sun.

“Are you burying more garbage? Is Sandscape already full?”

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John Moss “My hair. I can’t find my hair.” I looked at her now, and asked, “Have you seen it?”

“Seen it? Besides the fuzz on your head the rest of it is in some Iowa garbage or pillow…” And with natural and genuine disgust, she mumbled, “…at the Truckstop.” I resumed digging, her speech satisfying my mind without curtailing my actions, and recalled that haircut, impetuously desired after seeing a trailer for The Whole Nine Yards before Jurassic Park. I thought Bruce Willis looked like he was from the future.

“Why don’t you come back to Sandscape 2000 and listen to the radio with me?” It was December 30th, and the past days had been spent at Sandscape 2000, our camp, as we were already planning for the continent’s first community, listening to Madonna, Jewel, and Prince. It was relaxing, although hot, sitting in lawn chairs facing our terminal friend, absorbing all that we could as the blackout neared.

“I just finished painting the windows black and outlining the van with our solar comforter.” She had done everything while I had been digging, continued to dig. I am sure it began as a hole for our garbage, which we had taken to burying all around camp, but somehow I got mixed up into thinking my hair was lost, located somewhere below the sand. “Please, Ben, come to Sandscape in the meantime. Your hair will turn up in a few months, I’m positive.” That prediction, sadly enough, out of all of them that began in July and ended in January, turned out to be the only accurate one.

“I need to find my hair. It was here several minutes ago, I know it.” She walked back to Sandscape, ignoring me, so I dug faster and screamed, “Where the hell did my hair go?”

For everyone brought up on music, there is not only the immediate pleasure as the notes and chords play that very moment, but in years ahead the associations of each song that recreate the moment in your life when that particular song first played. It is for the schmaltz in us, not the aesthete, because while bands like the Counting Crows are not going to survive time, their significance to a handful of individuals who heard their song when it mattered will live until we live no longer.

Sara and I didn’t hear the Counting Crows that whole week on the radio, somehow, and by the evening of the 31st, with time running out, we had to hear it. I grabbed the tape single from the van, having to climb over a barricade of 1,000 packages of ramen noodles surrounding 98 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

John Moss the van as that was where we planned to transfer worlds. I returned to her with a copy of “Hangin’ Around,” and told her it was eight fortyfive Eastern and there was plenty of time to listen. I switched the stereo off (Jennifer Lopez for only the third time since we had been there), changed batteries to be sure these new ones would last us through the night, and put in the Counting Crows song. Sara stood up from her lawn chair, sticking to it I noticed as the chair and her back hugged for several seconds until separating, the chair falling back to the sand miserably, and began to dance. Her belly looked bigger than it ever had, and as she stumbled around the sand not quite gracefully, I knew this was good for the baby. I’ve been told play Cat Stevens and the child will be beautiful, cultured, and intelligent. Well, we were setting down rules our way and the thing to do now was play the Counting Crows. Her figure and form looked alive to me, and I could not move my eyes from her as I backed away from Sandscape to find a place in the sand for the old batteries where we had not yet buried any trash. It was getting full, but everything would change at midnight.

So we danced, and rewound “Hangin’ Around” close to fortyfive times, and then felt the approaching sensation of change. Europe, Asia, Australia, and Indonesia, they were already done with their Y2K, and apparently everything was fine. But not America, not yet, and this is what everyone was waiting for. We were ready. I grabbed Sara by the elbow and told her we had to go to the van. We changed the stereo back to the radio to hear the frightening calls, and climbed over the ramen noodle barricade after looking at that flat, blameless desert landscape once more. It would never look the same, we were prepared for that, and when we reappeared into the world it would be forever changed, but in what way we did not know.

Inside the van it was dark, hot as shit and still stuffed with things we thought we may need in the future: clothes hangers, Tupperware, Nerf footballs. We got in our plastic suits, hooked up the oxygen tanks, and waited. It was 8:27 local, 11:27 Eastern. Inside my suit I could not hear much; the radio was muffled. And then Sara, brave soul, got out of her plastic suit, and I called to her but realized she couldn’t hear me through my suit. She was turning off the stereo. Later, she apologized.

Leaving it on would have been dangerous and could have attracted unwanted electrical currents. Stupid.

It was quiet, too quiet, and even hotter, and now we just had to sit and wait. Talking proved impossible, and we tried screaming conversation but it sounded like hostages calling for help so that was no good either.

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John Moss Visual contact was even harder as the salty sweat stung my eyes, and the thick plastic sheath was what I would not hesitate to call opaque. I couldn’t see the time anymore, and knew the clock would not be telling us, but we would know. It would be obvious.

So it was obvious that things had changed. The outside had become relucent, a filmy yellow color, dish soap of the world leaking in around the black paint on the van’s windows. The galaxy must have caught fire as the sun seared toward the earth, though it could have been because of the plastic suit that everything looked off. Breathing was tricky in this alternate universe, hard and sloppy. Short, messy breaths. I moved around a bit, wobbling with sand legs, practically amazed at the calm I felt knowing the sun was about to explode as it hit the ozone. I tapped Sara. She did not move. Something had happened, so I shook her. She flinched and kept lying there. Something had happened, but it was not clear what. Coward I was, so preoccupied with my building fear, no regard for the one person along with me, I kept moving around the van.

I turned on the radio and nothing happened. No sounds, no muzzled static or voices coming from the speakers. Everything had been blown out, all power lost, everything gone. Something had happened. The sweat on my face really started leaking, and I tried to look out beyond the black windows to see what was happening out there. But I couldn’t— the thick black paint shield was too much—and out the sides all I could see was the dish soap galaxy. And breathing was getting harder, so hard I thought I might choke, each act of breathing felt like swallowing, and it got so tight in there that I had to do something, so I loosened the oxygen tank and threw my head out of the suit. I did something resembling an inverse cough, and this cleared my lungs surprisingly, and I touched the plastic gloves over my hands to my head to make sure everything was there. Everything but my hair. “Where the hell is my hair?” I shouted, scared now and hoping Sara would hear me. Still she did not move, so I shook her and this time she did not flinch, her skin faintly pasty and raw through her suit. Something had happened and I felt the end was here.

Maybe Sara, the baby, and I would meet the fate of everyone else—our dual contributions to a new species would be nothing at all, our van a tourist attraction for the society that was chosen instead to carry on. I felt weak and smashed by everything in the van and crawled towards the driver’s seat where I could die up front. I maneuvered my way there, leaving Sara behind, pasty and pregnant, and settled in, the dashboard clock staring me right in the face.

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John Moss We were quiet as we rode back to Cleveland. Sounds of Sara drinking bottled water and sport drinks to build the fluids back up in her body dominated the majority of our airspace. The radio stayed off, despite the silence’s hulking antagonism to the promise we thought Y2K held for two intelligent, informed prognosticators like ourselves.

She was starting to get color back in her face, and even said she felt the baby kicking, which was good. She said no radio until at least Illinois, and I could deal with it, but on top of that she didn’t want to talk either. It was silence mostly, some slurping sounds. I was looking for a rest stop, a place to dump all the shit in our van. I would have just thrown it out in the desert, but with all the garbage buried where we stayed, and the 1,000 packages of ramen noodles strewn and smashed as I drove the van straight through the barricade on my way out, we decided it would be best to put all of the other stuff at a rest stop, including twenty unused oxygen tanks which were so fucking useless the mere sight of them made me sick.

We fell asleep the night before inside our hot plastic suits. We didn’t see anything, the suffocating interior and unbelievably hot desert atmosphere put us both to sleep and we missed everything. Y2K and we were fucking asleep. I could’ve stayed in Cleveland to sleep through it. And nothing had happened. There was no disaster—not that I am disappointed there wasn’t, but I did feel a strange emptiness in my body that I had reserved for exactly just that. I finally understood the problem of my missing hair, but that just added to my gloom and emptiness. If Sara had any, which I couldn’t tell either way as all emotion had been drained inside her plastic suit, I’m sure her big fat stomach made those disappointments go away. Sara had almost died; her oxygen tank had become slightly disconnected as she got out of her suit to turn off the radio. It had suffocated her, supposedly puffing her lungs up to the size of soccer balls. She was so close to dying that if I hadn’t ripped her suit off after seeing she had been in there seven and a half hours, that would have been it. She said she owed me so much for saving her, but I didn’t feel like any reward. At the time I just wanted to be back in Cleveland.

We left a mess behind us and a mess ahead of us, not really sure what to do at this point. We didn’t have apartments to go back to and now her baby was due in less than three months. I could barely stand the sound of that slurping when I saw a rest stop and pulled in. Sara told me she had to use the bathroom first, probably because of all the liquids she had been drinking; the diaper idea had been thrown out since the desert. Once I stopped, she jumped out of her seat and began running, Crab Orchard Review

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John Moss yelling something about help when she got back. I had no desire to look at all that shit again, so I waved her off with my hand and said no hurry. I sat behind the wheel of the van, its five-year-old purr making my body jiggle, and I turned the radio on and found the station we had been listening to on our way to the desert. Carlos Santana’s sweaty, sultry guitar riffs and Rob Thomas’s raspy voice hit hard in the western winter air, thundering in the frosted van like wet snow balling up down a mountainside. In rhythm, I hit my palms hard on the steering wheel and my foot against the brake. I can only imagine how the van looked that night to the straight, level, passing cars—rocking with the brake lights flashing, me in the front seat wailing away as if Y2K had not been a sham—a goddamn hoax—and the first thing to do being one of two hundred and fifty million survivors in America following mankind’s half-assed attempt at Armageddon was to rock out. I know it wasn’t much, but it distracted me enough from what was really happening and how unprepared I was to deal with it. Man, those 1999 pop songs were like machine guns firing into an Indonesian river where most people won’t ever know if it happened or not, the bullets sinking beneath the soft bed never to erode but never to see another minute of daylight. I’ll bet the record companies feel fucked over too.

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Tanja Pajevic Diocletian’s Palace After the first couple of months in Sarajevo, Emily finally

got the hang of living with intermittent electricity, learned how to cook on propane burners, that she needed to wear her down coat with four layers of quilts to bed. But what she couldn’t get used to was the unpredictability, the way you never knew when the electricity would cut out, or how long it would last.

Her days at the UN were long, but at least the compound always had electricity and a phone line out. Generators backed up what the locals couldn’t, and through some intricate wiring Emily didn’t quite understand, she could call her friends and family for the price of a long-distance call originating in New York.

The job was temporary—nine months as a UN Volunteer—and the qualifications so basic (a master’s degree and the ability to drive manual) that Emily could hardly believe they’d taken her. She’d arrived three months after 9/11, right as the government was shipping six Algerians to Guantanamo Bay, then spent four months as a glorified office assistant before receiving her first real assignment: to find the women from the Srebrenica massacre. If she did a good enough job, her boss told her, he might just be able to move her into a more permanent position.

But Willem was so busy hitting on her Argentinean co-worker, Emily complained to her friends, that he was barely in the office, much less any help.

Her friends listened with sympathy; they had their own stories of UN affairs and sexual harassment. It came with the territory, Raj said, of working for an agency where spouses were left behind on a regular basis.

Amanda suggested Emily try her international women’s club. “I’d be surprised if a philanthropic organization hadn’t already established ties.”

But when Emily met with them the following week, she found the group to be almost as oppressive as the living room in which she sat.

Around her, women discussed vacation plans over cappuccinos and pastries served by the Austrian ambassador’s wife. Outside, the day sparkled; inside, Emily struggled to breathe against the cloying clash Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic of perfume. It wasn’t until she was getting ready to leave that someone said Yes, they’d heard the Srebrenica women were living in the area.

But like the UN, they had no way of finding them.

“What fools don’t know where the Srebrenica women are?”

Raj asked. Like most nights, it was the usual group: a handful of UNVs brought together by age and interest.

“Privileged fucks like us—is that your point?” Amanda glared at her boyfriend. They’d met last summer, during a trip to Thailand, and Emily often wondered if that wasn’t the only thing keeping them together.

“Look,” Emily said. “I’m tired of this goose-chase, too, but there has to be some way of finding these women.” She pushed greasy French fries around her plate, wishing she could find something else to pass for vegetarian.

“One of the worst atrocities of the century,” Raj said, “seven thousand men and boys killed, and you’re telling me nobody knows how to find them?”

“Sarajevo wasn’t exactly a fucking picnic,” Amanda said.

Raj flagged down the waiter for another Heineken. “Truth is,” he said, “the UN could have found those women a long time ago if they’d been willing to put up the goddamn cash.”

Emily tried one of her Bosnian co-workers next. Hangover in full bloom, Emily navigated her way through Sena’s apartment building, past graffiti-filled elevators and hallways filled with the smell of cooking cabbage while her stomach twisted and turned, last night’s hostage.

The apartment block was like many others: small Socialist flats filled to overflowing with old, shabby furniture. Emily’s flat was similar, though it had been renovated with ’80s decor and a satellite TV that catered to internationals. The rest of the flat was the same: tiny rooms sectioned off by smoky glass doors. Even though Emily kept hers open, it didn’t make much of a difference, and she found her place depressing, not good for much more than sleeping.

Sena’s flat had been lived in. These rooms were heavy with years of spices and cigarette smoke, shelves crammed high with knick-knacks and handmade lace doilies. A small black and white TV balanced on top of the dorm-sized refrigerator, competing for attention with a radio careening wildly between local folk songs, contemporary pop and golden oldies.

On TV, soldiers were trying to smoke out Radovan Karadzic. Ever since The Hague had declared him Bosnia’s most wanted war criminal, 104 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic NATO troops were shown on the news every other day in search of him. Emily watched Sena prepare Turkish coffee while she tried to ignore the hum and clash of a neighbor’s television: Jerry Springer.

Most of these walls were paper-thin, and Emily couldn’t help but think what a nightmare it would be tonight, when most of Bosnia would be awake, waiting for 2 a.m. so they could watch the NBA playoffs.

“We used to have a flat in the Serbian side of town,” Sena said, offering her a cigarette. “It is difficult, of course, to see another family living in your home.”

Emily nodded. The cigarette was harsh in her lungs, but she smoked it anyway. The fallout was something she was still learning: how and where the Serbian Republic cut its gash through the country, what constituted the Bosnian and Serbian sections of Sarajevo. With its own laws, police and Cyrillic signs, the Serbian Republic was hated and ridiculed by the local Muslim population, many of whom still blamed the UN for complying with Serbs during the war. As Raj liked to say, it probably didn’t help that the UN compound sat right next to this invisible border, surrounded by enormous coils of razor wire.

A picture on top of the TV caught Emily’s attention. “Is that a Knicks jacket?”

Sena pulled the picture down. “My son, Admir.”

It was impossible to tell what the boy looked like with the angle of the sun, his face tucked beneath a baseball cap. What Emily did make out was his smile, the park behind him. She looked more closely. “Is that Central Park?”

“We lived there. ’92 to ’95.”

The sharp, slick way Sena always dressed suddenly made sense: quintessential New York. Emily took another pull from her cigarette, even though everything about it was making her sick. “When did you come back?”

“Ten years I am working as a doctor,” Sena said. “In your States I am nothing but a housekeeper. You see the insult?”

Emily had heard many such stories. “But wasn’t the siege still on when you came back?”

Sena deposited a precarious ash in the sink. “So I take the boy to Italy. You think I am going to bring him back while everyone is still disappearing.”

On her way home, Emily struggled to get Sena’s words out of her head. This year marked the tenth anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo— Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic those same years Emily had been in college, trying to figure out what to do with her life. Ten thousand killed; fifty thousand wounded. Since then, Sarajevo had fought its way back, become a city bustling with NATO soldiers and aid workers instead of artists and musicians.

In the center of the city, Emily passed what was left of the National Library. It was all boarded up now, so unstable that no one was allowed inside for fear of collapse. But even that didn’t come close to the burned-out maternity hospital, rubble from buildings that once formed Sarajevo’s front line. According to the stories she’d heard, it was the city’s cross-cultural tenet that had done them in—where East met West, and minarets and church spires still dotted the sky.

Today the mountains around the city were peaceful, but for four years, they had been filled with tanks and soldiers, forming a modernday prison. Ten years later, most of the buildings were still marred by sniper and mortar wounds. The countryside was even worse, with patches of rubble where homes once stood, villages. Bright yellow tape marked areas waiting to be de-mined, and something as simple as a spur-of-the-moment walk in the countryside was unheard of, a suicide wish. But what Emily found the most frightening were the fields from the 1984 Olympics, now filled with Muslim graves.

They haunted her at night. No matter how late she came home, the parking lot always seemed to be filled with men drinking and playing basketball. Eventually, an argument would erupt, and the sound of shattering glass would remind her of the mob that had risen up against the U.S. embassy in Macedonia three years ago, setting cars on fire and pelting the building with rocks. Even though nothing similar had happened in Sarajevo, Emily couldn’t get the image of those trapped American aid workers out of her head.

Every so often, she dreamt she was trapped inside that Macedonian embassy, unable to escape. But when she bent down to pick up the rocks raining down around her, she realized they were nothing more than tiny little flags.

Her friends insisted. Come on, Emily, they said. You’re such a pill lately; you never want to do anything.

She was tired from these nights out, she wanted to say, tired from the excuses and the drinking and the play-acting.

But this was something new, they promised. Exotic.

The disco was tacky, a broken-down emporium filled with stained furniture, black light and old Madonna. Emily stood by the bar while 106 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic her UN friends spread out across the dance floor, wondering why they’d have black light in a place like the Balkans, where everyone wore black.

But it was interesting watching Muslim women with scarves on their heads fill up the dance floor. If what she’d heard was correct, Saudis offered local families a stipend for each daughter who wore the hijaab, which would explain the recent explosion of covered heads in Bosnia, where the more traditional aspects of Islam never used to be enforced. From what she’d heard, the same held true for Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholics, with the current religious fervor a relatively new thing, ignited by Yugoslavia’s breakup and fanned by a decade’s worth of war.

There was a touch on her elbow—would Miss care to dance? Emily blanched, frozen, before she followed the man out onto the dance floor.

Thank god the song was a fast one; she never knew how to say no. So it was a surprise when she found herself striking up a conversation, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar.

He was a fisherman from Spain, and even though Emily wanted to ask what he was doing in this land-locked hellhole, she didn’t dare.

He was good-looking, though, with something sweet in his smile, and when he offered to buy her a drink, Emily took him up on it. So what if he was wearing a tight black shirt? At least he wasn’t French.

“Nice one,” Raj said when she finally made it back to the table.

“Picking up a soldier.”

Emily was shocked. “No way.”

“5 euros.”

Pablo confirmed it, slid an arm around Emily to tell her he recognized her from the cafés. “But it is just now my luck to meeting you.”

So that was why he looked so familiar. During daily coffee breaks in the town’s center, Emily often found herself staring at the soldiers, fascinated by the way their matching fatigues overtook the town, the flag of their various countries sewn onto their shoulders.

How differently each country wore their uniforms: the French with impossibly tight pants, Spanish with rolled-up sleeves, Italians with Alpine caps while the Americans were still outfitted in all the proper layers. In a moment of rebellion, she’d stared Pablo down, thinking how good-looking he was, how incredibly stupid it would be to become involved with a solider.

And here he was. From the distance she could hear the muezzin’s call to prayer. Emily straightened up and turned back to Pablo. But Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic she didn’t understand how unacceptable it was for a woman in the Balkans to buy a man a drink, and by the time Pablo finally relented, the exchange had filled her with power. It was a natural progression after that, and by early morning, they were back at her flat, an empty bottle of wine before them.

Her friends couldn’t get enough of it. How’s Pablo, they teased.

Picked up any soldiers lately?

“They keep at you because you show it, you know,” Sena said on their way to see the Srebrenica women. “If you acted differently, they’d stop.”

“I know.” Emily stared out the window while Sena drove, trying her best to forget her weekend indiscretion. She had all but pushed Pablo out of mind until he’d shown up at work, laughed when Emily suggested they not see each other again.

But Sena was already on to other topics. Talking about how typical it was that the UN hadn’t done anything about Srebrenica until Rwanda.

Emily pulled herself back to the present. “What?”

“This absurdly tardy outcry from the international community over Belgium’s failure to stop the Rwandan massacres.” She tapped a cigarette out of her pack. “Emily. Tell me you are not living in this cave.”

She’d read about it in The International Herald, of course, watched the news billow across BBC and International CNN. Protests had erupted at embassies all over the world, though things had been especially bad at the Dutch embassy in Sarajevo. Emily received a constant slew of warnings from her own embassy, most of which she ignored.

“Always the same,” Sena said. “Nobody cares about the actual massacre until it becomes such big news they can no longer ignore it.”

She snorted. “In our case, God knows how long that will take.”

Emily knew better than to argue politics with a local. “So why aren’t you still practicing medicine?”

“Working for the UN, I make three times what a doctor in my country earns today,” Sena said. “This, taking into consideration that we locals are paid only a percentage of your international salary, even though we do the same work.”

Emily had never heard this before.

“Of course you haven’t. Who’s going to tell you—your friends?”

“I don’t understand why they didn’t assign Srebrenica to a local,” Emily admitted. “At least someone who knows Bosnian.”

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Tanja Pajevic “But that is exactly my point,” Sena said. “Always, they are piling this shit on someone who doesn’t know better.” She gunned the truck over a shakily constructed bridge. “They offered you a promotion for this, yes?”

When she didn’t reply, Sena turned to the road. “By the time this carnival settles down, Emily, you’ll see. We’ll be grandmothers twice over.”

The Srebrenica women lived in a squadron of peach-colored flats lined with burgundy on the outskirts of Ilijas, a twenty-minute drive from Sarajevo. The compound looked foreign against the local landscape, but it wasn’t until a young girl pointed out a plaque embedded in the building’s façade that Emily realized why: “Built and donated by Holland and the United States.”

Sena shrugged. “What did you expect?”

The women ushered them into an empty, ordinary-looking apartment, filing in behind them. It wasn’t long before the tiny flat was packed, older women settling themselves onto the floor while the younger girls clustered around the kitchen, giggling. The contrast was startling: while the older women wore handkerchiefs tied around their heads, the girls sported tight jeans and flowery Italian tops.

One woman gestured with animation while the rest sat in silence, shifting and readjusting long skirts gathered around their feet.

Emily glanced around the room while Sena launched into Bosnian, explaining why they’d come. A few of the younger girls smiled back, but the rest didn’t bother, just looked her over openly. It wasn’t long before Emily found herself trying to hide the camera she’d brought to document the meeting. How useless it now seemed, inappropriate.

“The women want to know how we’re going to help them,” Sena said. “This one says they are constantly being reshuffled; another says they will have to move again soon. They ask to be allowed to stay, continue to live in one place.”

Emily blanched. She didn’t have that kind of power, and Sena knew it.

“They’ve been given nothing,” Sena continued, “barely enough to feed themselves, certainly not enough to buy furniture or bedding for the winter. And there are the children.”

That, too, Emily had already noticed. It was as if one part of her was busily cataloguing what was going on around them while the other part of her listened in horror.

“I am trying to tell them that we have simply come to establish Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic contact,” Sena continued to translate, “at this point, we have nothing to offer. They will not accept it.”

Emily started to panic. “Tell them we’ll be back with more. Food, maybe, some clothing.”

“But that’s exactly the problem,” Sena said. “Too many of us offering a quick fix. They’re looking for something more consistent: an income, some way to live.”

An idea was forming in her mind. “What about those lace doilies,” Emily said. Everywhere she went, she saw women knitting. At home, they would be considered master craftsmen. “Couldn’t they sell those for a living?”

“Who would buy them? Your soldier?”

As they were leaving, a young, English-speaking girl pulled Emily into her bedroom. Emily nodded, a smile frozen into place while the girls giggled, pointing out posters—nothing more than pictures ripped from magazines—covering the walls. Following such a conversation, they looked obscene, nothing more than empty-headed, made-up actors littering the walls.

After Sena dropped her off, Emily went in search of her friends.

No wonder they went out night after night, she thought. Nobody wanted to go home.

They were at the usual café, as chummy as she’d ever seen them.

But this time Pablo was with them.

Emily took a deep breath. Apparently, no one had heard about AlQaeda’s most recent round of threats. Then again, maybe they didn’t care.

From the look of the glasses on their table, they’d been here a while.

“Sasha’s been telling us about the war,” Pablo said. “He’s Croatian, you know?”

She knew everything about Sasha, she wanted to say: that he was from Australia, that his parents had immigrated, that he was sleeping with Betsie even though he wouldn’t admit it.

She shook her hair. “Adi Lukovac is playing at club Obala tonight.”

“We go later, after we catch up,” Pablo said.

Catch up?

“I am interesting to hear his thoughts on war. Australia, too, of course. I am sick for such water.”

Emily sunk into her seat. She’d already heard Sasha’s version of the war; they all had. Like most immigrant families, he’d grown up 110 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic with a skewed interpretation of events, his ethnic group the victim.

It didn’t seem to matter where your parents were from, she’d come to believe; just that they were right.

At least he was trying, though. Had come back to see for himself, learn. Sometimes, Emily wished she’d come for such a reason, that she hadn’t applied to the UN on a whim, to escape Ohio, the shitty office job with a boyfriend who’d just broken up with her. Like last month, when they’d closed the U.S. embassy. Or when she’d found out about the Algerians.

All hell had broken loose once Emily’s family read that the men had been aid workers at an Islamic charity. She’d had a hard time convincing them she was staying after that, and they still called her once a week, on Sundays, to make sure she was safe.

Emily stared into the darkness, watching headlights move across the wall. Just because she liked Pablo didn’t mean she wanted him in every part of her life. She rolled over to look at him, asleep on his half of the pushed-together beds. With four more months to go, she didn’t want to get too attached.

She curled back into her pillow. What was he doing out on a weeknight, anyway? Didn’t the Spanish Army have any sort of rules?

At least he’d been in uniform tonight—not that that was much better, she had to admit. Something about those damn fatigues gave Emily the willies, and she leaned over and kicked them out of her sight.

It was one thing to date a soldier, but to have to be reminded about it?

Her eyes were wide open now, awake. What if he had killed someone?

Emily knew how quickly these things could change, knew that Pablo’s work as a military driver took him through some of the country’s worst areas. Though Bosnia was relatively quiet these days, the mafia was still alive and well. Just the other day, she’d heard that trafficking of Romanian women was on the rise.

Emily got up and went into the living room. It was useless trying to go back to sleep now. With any luck, she’d be able to find one of the old episodes of Northern Exposure that kept her company on such nights. But like everything else in this country, Bosnian television seemed to follow its own rules, and the only program on in English was a rerun of last season’s Sex in the City. Which somehow just made everything worse.

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Tanja Pajevic Her days took on a predictable pattern: ten, twelve hours at the UN followed by the usual dinner out, a drink or two to take off the edge. As the months wore on, Emily found herself increasingly exhausted, plodding through the day in a funk, downing cup after cup of Turkish coffee that did nothing but keep her up even longer at night.

True to Sena’s prophecy, Willem had forgotten his promise of advancing Emily’s career. Though disappointed, some part of her was relieved. With Al-Qaeda’s increasing presence in the region, an additional nine months no longer seemed so appealing.

But at least she was finally making some headway with the Srebrenica women. Emily couldn’t believe how difficult it was finding aid for people who needed it, and some days she did nothing more than call people who transferred her deeper and deeper into an incongruous web of international aid.

So she switched her focus, cold-calling local agencies in search of the one or two people who seemed able to accomplish things. And she started networking: called up the woman she had spoken with last week, so-and-so’s cousin, the mayor of the next town over.

“How odd is it,” she said to Pablo one night in bed, “that the higher-ups will talk to me for hours about who should have done what, when, and still not lift a finger to help?”

“Robin,” Pablo muttered sleepily.

It took everything she had not to shake him. “What?”

“Of responsibility.”

“Meanwhile, it’s the locals—people who don’t have the resources and come down on the wrong side of the ethnic fence—who manage to scrape something together.” Emily leaned across the bed and helped herself to one of Pablo’s cigarettes. “Begin some sort of reconciliation.”

These were the things Emily didn’t bother to bring up with family and friends during transatlantic phone calls. She’d crack a joke instead, tell them how utterly and boringly safe she was. And busy. You know how that goes.

But at least she was making progress, even if the results weren’t always what she had hoped. And that made it easier to handle everything else, ignore her boss’s long, wine-filled lunches with the Argentinean, the octopus of paperwork that awaited her each morning and grew with every night.

So when Amanda’s philanthropic organization finally came through, offering bags of donated clothes and medical supplies, Emily tried not to criticize them. After all, their hearts were in the right place. But why 112 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic would the women need gauze and bandages now, years after the war?

One day, she couldn’t help it. “It’s kind of you to donate your husband’s used clothing,” she said. “But with the exception of one or two boys who were babies when everything happened, you do realize this group of women is entirely without men, don’t you?”

Everything. It was something she’d found herself doing, lately, using euphemisms for the words she was trying so hard to avoid: massacre, concentration camp, seven thousand missing.

Finally, the women themselves began to get on her nerves.

Despite a bitter series of complaints, Sena was still accompanying her, and the visits had begun to take on a life of their own: Turkish coffee, another round of war stories, one of the younger girls pulling Emily out into the bright afternoon sun to practice English as she chattered away about some boy, her plans next week.

At least the younger ones still thought about the future. Sometimes, Emily felt like she was the only one. Most of the others were so stuck in the comfortable circle of complaint that she could hardly listen to it anymore.

It was unthinkable what they’d been forced to endure, but at some point, Emily felt that they’d have to let go of the past and try to rebuild some sort of future.

Sena laughed. “Teach a woman to work instead of giving her a fish, yes?” She shook her head. “How very American of you.”

Well, that wasn’t it, exactly. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that.”

“It is simply not the way we live. Yugoslavia was Socialist, you must understand. These women have been taken care of by the government all their lives.”

But the government wasn’t helping them now, Emily challenged.

So why not try something new?

The argument quickly spiraled out of control, and it wasn’t long before Emily gave up. But whether she spoke her mind or kept silent, nothing stopped the women’s stories from invading her dreams at night. As soon as she closed her eyes, paramilitaries lined up outside her door. Lately, the nightmares were getting worse. Just the other night, Emily had been trapped in a series of explosions, trying to escape impending rape.

“What you need is to get the fuck away from those women,” Raj said. “They’re poisoning you.”

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Tanja Pajevic “Don’t listen to him,” Amanda said, “the work you’re doing is important.” She picked up her glass of wine. “Although you could probably use a break. ” Pablo agreed. “We visit spa for holiday.”

“Fuck that,” Emily said. Taking the spas in Europe was as good as admitting she was having a nervous breakdown.

“No, no,” Pablo said. “I should like to take May Day together.”

But she had so much work to do.

“Nothing will be open, my dear,” Pablo said. “What, you will sit in Sarajevo and wait for the week to pass?”

The women would still be here; she couldn’t desert them.

Her friends looked at one another. When had they begun to side with Pablo?

As the holiday approached, Emily settled into her work with renewed vigor. Pablo was constructing plans for the coast, and even though Emily felt a stab of jealousy every time he mentioned it, she refused to give in. So what if people were already starting to leave the city? Even the weather seemed to be plotting against her: spring had all but disappeared, settling into an unrepentantly early summer. Global warming, everyone grumbled; every year, getting earlier.

And yet, it would be a good time to catch up on work. Especially since Sena had asked and been taken off the Srebrenica assignment.

Losing her translator had been a serious blow, and Emily couldn’t help but take it personally. Maybe if they hadn’t argued so much, if she’d let her conduct the interviews on her own terms. But Emily knew that wasn’t the real reason Sena had left.

“This does not stop for me when I leave work, Emily,” Sena said once, after an especially draining session. “These stories live everywhere: friends I meet on the street, neighbors who repeat them over coffee, young children so shell-shocked there is nothing that no longer surprises them. You understand? This is my life.”

Behka hefted heavy bags of green coffee beans into the back seat of the jeep before swinging in beside them. Through sheer luck (and Gina, an American anthropology student she’d met at the women’s club), Emily had managed to hire the young Bosnian as her translator. They only had a day or two to introduce Behka to the project before she left for her own holiday, and Emily was determined to make the most of it.

Thank god Behka knew what she was doing. She’d grown up 114 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic here—or nearby, Emily could never pin her down—but had lived in Botswana and South Africa before moving to Canada. While they drove, Behka kept her in tears over stories of American missionaries she’d met in Africa.

But green coffee beans? “I’d think they’d be some sort of insult.”

“You roast them, of course,” Behka said. “With nothing else to occupy your time, you go crazy.”

Emily nodded while Behka dug into her Italian purse in search of cigarettes. Something seemed off; the compound, empty. Where was everyone?

“Holiday,” Behka said.

Emily was dumbfounded. “How? Where?”

“They visit relatives, bring their own food.”

It was hard to imagine such a thing happening back home, but here—a place where people didn’t have money and still managed to make do—it made perfect sense.

So why was she so worried? A piece from last night’s news popped into her head: two police officers from Texas, interviewed by the BBC about training local police. “Impossible,” one said, his face obscured in the shadow of an UNPROFOR vehicle, “when they’re already involved.

Trafficking of women, drugs.” He shook his head. “The Albanians are our main problem, but every ethnic group’s involved at some level.”

“One of the biggest drug rings in the world,” the stockier man said. “Four to six thousand kilos of heroin from Afghanistan coming through the Balkans every month.”

Careful, Emily whispered to the women. Watch your back.

But it wasn’t until the following week, when Emily visited the women by herself, that she realized the depth of her mistake.

Without Sena or Behka to translate, the visit disintegrated quickly, women drifting away after only a short greeting and a few gestures.

Even the girl who usually pulled Emily aside to speak English was gone, and after she had unloaded the car, Emily found herself pacing the compound with empty hands and nothing to do.

The day was hot, a precursor of what would be another scorcher of a summer, and Emily drove home with her windows open, wondering what to do next. As much as she hated to admit it, Pablo had been right. Any attempt to work this week would be futile.

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Tanja Pajevic profile, watch where she spoke English, with whom. This time, at least, they hadn’t said anything about travel.

Fuck it, she thought. I’m going.

She packed her bags in a flurry, envisioning Pablo’s itinerary across the Croatian islands, how easy it would be to catch up with him.

There was only one problem: a woman traveling alone in the Balkans would be problematic enough, but that jeep might really be asking for it. Even without its enormous UN lettering, the Toyota 4Runner identified her as a UN worker. For the first time, Emily wished she had one of those crazy Lada Nivas the NGOs used.

And with this latest warning came another problem: her American passport. When had everything become so complicated? If her American identity didn’t put her at risk with Muslim extremists, Emily’s association with the UN could draw the ire of ultranationalists still pocketing the country. A bus would be safer, she reasoned. Kids half her age traveled all over the Balkans by themselves. Besides, there was safety in numbers.

What she forgot to take into account were the logistics of public transportation: how hot and crowded the bus would be, her eventual thirst and hunger, the conspicuous absence of a toilet. But it was the heat that almost killed her. Even though it must have been at least ninety, the windows remained firmly shut. Finally, when she couldn’t take it anymore, Emily cracked her window. As soon as she sat down, the woman behind her slammed it shut.

As the day melted on, Emily dozed off and on, trying to ignore the rustling of plastic bags that signaled meals the other travelers had brought with them. Hot, hungry, tired and incensed about having to pay for toilet paper at the last stop, Emily almost didn’t notice when the bus creaked to a stop.

A woman with a violin case at her side leaned forward. “We must wait while they fix the bus,” she said. Emily nodded. It had never occurred to her the driver wouldn’t speak English.

Outside, she seated herself on a concrete ledge beneath a tiny speck of shade. Most of the others had settled into the café across the street, and Emily watched as they fanned themselves with newspaper, wondering how on earth they could drink Turkish coffee in this heat.

She watched the violinist walk around the edge of the lot. From a distance, the woman was beautiful, thin and stylish, with blond hair and blue eyes. Finally, she sat down.

“What’s going on?” Emily asked.

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Tanja Pajevic The woman shrugged. In the bright daylight, she was even younger than Emily had thought. And those eyes. “Flat tire. We could be here for days.”

As they watched, the driver shrugged his way into an old, greasecovered raincoat while the conductor hauled over a series of rocks. After a good thirty or so minutes, he turned them into a makeshift jack.

Emily watched in disbelief. Crazy fucking Balkans, she thought.

Just wait until I tell my friends.

The woman next to her was from Dubrovnik, a student at Sarajevo’s Faculty of Music. Although she did not like Sarajevo, she told Emily, it was necessary if she wished to advance her skills. If it were not for her professor-maestro, life would not even be palatable.

Bosnians were such a stupid people; she had never liked them. It was certainly no better to be living among them.

Emily responded with a stunned silence. She’d heard such sentiment before, but never from someone so young, so educated. If this woman represented even a fraction of the younger generation, what did it say about the region’s future?

No matter what Emily did, the curtain next to her head wouldn’t stay shut; hot sun seeped in from every angle. But at least they were moving again, and she decided to try to take a nap, forget about the unexpected delay as well as the shot the driver had downed once they’d finally fixed the tire. At least he’d followed it up with a Turkish coffee, she thought drowsily as the conductor bellowed out the name of their next stop in Bosnian—or Croatian, she couldn’t tell the difference—Mostar.

Emily pulled aside the curtain. Sarajevo looked like a holiday compared to what was before her, and as the bus wound its way along the Neretva River, she found it hard to reconcile the river’s brilliant blues and greens against the obscene history that stretched before her.

The horror of Sarajevo could be seen in the city’s façades, still rife with snipers’ bullets, but here, whole sections of town seemed to have been bombed or burned away. And not just on the outskirts, but in the city’s center.

After what seemed like forever, the bus finally rolled into a section of town that was being rebuilt. Thank God, she thought, glancing around at the other passengers. But nobody else seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention, and it took her a moment to understand why. This was something they’d lived with for the last decade, Emily Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic finally realized. She was the one who was a visitor here, a twenty-first century tourist struggling to find function beneath such destruction.

Emily struggled to push through a series of dream-images as the bus shuddered to a stop. Why had she thought the nightmares would stop once she crossed the border? She sat up for a moment. When had they crossed the Croatian border? A misty memory of a policeman hovered in the back of her mind—so much for problems with her passport.

Emily gathered up her bags and pushed aside the dingy curtain.

Brilliantine blue stretched out as far as the eye could see: Dubrovnik.

A burst of hot air greeted her as she stepped into the blinding sun, a throng of congested bodies. The violinist had disappeared, and it took Emily a moment to realize that the shouting and pushing was from people with private rooms to let, anxiously vying for customers.

Still raw from her nap, Emily fought her way through the crowd, then pulled out her Lonely Planet. Not too far away a man watched her, smiling. He seemed shifty, but not as shark-like as the rest. At the very least, he didn’t convey their panic.

Once Emily got closer, she saw he was holding a book filled with comments from people who had stayed in his home. “Best rooms in the city,” he said, “I am living across the street from Old Town.” He held up a laminated map to show her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’d love to stay, but I have to catch a ferry up the coast. Can you tell me how to get to the tourist office?”

His smile grew wider. “We are registered with tourism, as is law in Croatia. But I have best customers! People telling me, Ivo, you make my trip. I tell friends about you, stay when I come back.”

God, he was annoying. “But what about the ferries?”

“Not running until Wednesday.”

What? It was only Monday.

“No problem when you have such beautiful place to stay. Cheap for you, my friend.” He winked. “My favorite, room with balcony facing the sea.”

Goddamn fucking Balkans. What the hell was she going to do now?

“My home very pretty, especially for friend like you, tired from bus.” He nodded to a woman waiting by his car. “Allyson travel up coast.

Now, she stay with me again. Australians,” he leaned in conspiratorially, “they crazy.”

She couldn’t help it; she laughed. Was this guy for real?

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Tanja Pajevic a moment to talk with her and check out Ivo’s registration papers, Emily’s uneasiness began to subside. Such arrangements were common throughout Europe, she knew, even though this was her first time doing it. As a woman traveling alone, you could never be too safe.

So when Ally suggested they grab some dinner after settling in, Emily jumped at the chance. The Old Town was gorgeous, hidden within a fortress that opened to the Adriatic, surrounded by lowlying mountains and red roofs that stretched as far as the eye could see. The scene was idyllic, making Emily feel like she’d stepped out of a postcard, what life must have been like during simpler times.

Everything looked so perfect that she had a hard time remembering Dubrovnik had also been shelled during the war.

“Last time I was here, I took a tour along the fortress walls,” Ally said. “Unbelievable. But if you do it, go in the morning. By afternoon, the sun’s so strong it’ll eat you alive.”

It was cool now that dusk had fallen, and the streets were filled with people in search of a late dinner, sunburned tourists mixing with children wielding ice-cream cones. The outdoor cafés were beginning to come alive, musicians’ jangled notes floating through the fortress’s stone labyrinth passageways.

The women sat in one of the popular, people-watching cafés, a bottle of local wine before them. Everything seemed so cultured that Emily was having a hard time reconciling this place as Balkan.

Ally laughed. “Did you see the steamer that pulled in this afternoon?”

“Sure.” She’d watched boat after boat of tourists ferried to port, surprised to see a major cruise line docked in these waters.

“Dubrovnik’s a bit touristy for me,” Ally admitted. “Frankly, I wouldn’t have returned if I hadn’t planned to meet my sister.”

“It’s really a shock after Sarajevo,” Emily said. “I thought I’d be happy to be back in a place so Western, but now that I’m here, it just seems so crass.”

“You’d like Split. It’s more of a city than a resort—on the coast, but without all the tourists. And the architecture’s fantastic, with the Old Town literally built into Diocletian’s Palace.” Ally leaned over and emptied the last of the wine into her glass. “In any other city, it’d be a museum—walled-off at least—but in Split, they live in it.”

Emily flagged down the waiter while Ally tried to talk her into ordering another bottle. Which wasn’t so hard to do once she started asking Emily about 9/11. If there was one thing people always asked Crab Orchard Review

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Tanja Pajevic her about when they learned where she was from, that was it. But Emily didn’t know anyone in the World Trade Center, and she was tired of playing the representative American.

By the time they drained the second bottle of wine, Emily had all but given up on a two-day wait for the ferry. Maybe it was the wine speaking, but for once, she couldn’t handle any more of these rigid plans. Besides, Pablo was probably to Hvar by now, and if she timed it right, she’d hit Split right as he was sailing into Brac. From there, they were only a short distance apart. It was perfect.

Though she was up early the next day, the heat still hadn’t broken. Wishing she could get her hands on a nice, strong Turkish coffee, Emily packed her bags quickly, determined to catch an early bus up the coast, before the world set itself on fire.

For a small fee, Ivo offered her a ride to the bus station, but Emily turned it down, not wanting to give him any more of her cash. She’d figure it out herself.

He shrugged. “First bus at top of hill,” he said. “Heavy bags, hard to carry. No problem for me, my friend.”

Emily shook her head more forcefully while Ivo’s non-Englishspeaking wife freshened her lipstick in the mirror behind them. From what Emily had seen, they trolled the airport and bus station constantly in search of their next victim. For a moment, she was tempted to share this with Ally, who was in a back room somewhere, sleeping off last night’s wine. But she didn’t want to waste any more time, so she made her way down the winding stairwell, intent on leaving Ivo and his rented rooms behind.

It felt good to be out in the bright, clear morning, sharp ocean air sliding across her tired eyes. She’d tossed and turned all night, it seemed, waiting for a sliver of cool air to squeak through those slatted wooden balcony doors. Her skin felt papery and thin, as it always did when she didn’t sleep enough, and last night’s wine certainly wasn’t helping. Last time she stayed with Ivo, she thought. Her room had been almost twice the price of Ally’s, even though her ocean view had turned out to be nothing more than a tiny patch of blue visible through a jumble of roofs and trees. It felt good to have the Adriatic’s wide arc open to her now, unspoiled by the day’s longing.

The sun rose majestically across the water, and for a moment, she felt lost in a wave of melancholy. Despite the tourists, Dubrovnik was a beautiful town—a vacation destination that once upon a time Emily 120 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Tanja Pajevic would have killed to visit. But today she found it oppressive, a clear indicator of Capitalism and the West, institutions she fought on a daily basis in her quest to help the Srebrenica women. She hurried on.

The bus stop was further than she expected, and by the time Emily was halfway up the hill, her bags were so heavy that she had to flag down one of the taxis endlessly circling the city. Though short, the ride was ridiculously expensive, and by the time Emily arrived at the regional bus station, she was mad at herself for not taking Ivo up on his offer.

She wiped her face on her sleeve. It was already so hot at 9 a.m. that the thought of spending another six hours trapped inside a sweltering bus was almost more than Emily could handle. For a moment, she almost tossed everything aside for the beach, where the sting and song of cold water would surely shock her back to life.

But she couldn’t turn back now. Emily rearranged her bags into a makeshift stool and looked around. The parking lot thronged with life: men eating burek from greasy paper bags while peasants broke apart long loaves of bread, alternating cheese and sausage into gap-toothed mouths.

In between, mothers reined in children already dulled from the heat.

She glanced out across the water. Pablo would be out there, she knew.

It was one of the things he’d most looked forward to on this trip: getting back to the ocean. For him, water wasn’t just work, it was his god.

Someone was blocking her view, forcing Emily to squint against the bright, metallic sun. Was Madame in need of a ride up the coast?

The man was short and stocky, dark. He’d be happy to take her, he said, perhaps for the price of gas. He smiled. “Expensive for us, cheap for foreigners.”

She blinked. A taxi up the coast would be at least 60 euros, and this guy was only asking 10 or 15. What was in it for him?

He sat down, easily. “My sister having baby. Without work, petrol, she very expensive.”

And where was his sister?

His smile grew wider. “Few extra euro, we go as far as you like.”

Emily laughed. This was what she was used to: the Balkans, a place where everything was possible, and nothing too, all depending on who and how you asked.

She glanced out across the water. It’d take half the time to get to Split in a car, leaving the bulk of the day to explore Diocletian’s Palace, maybe even go swimming. But it was the thought of being able to open a window that really got her. Stopping for a bathroom whenever she wanted, the occasional roadside vendor in hopes of a cold soda. It was freedom.

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Tanja Pajevic Emily took stock of the guy quickly, though she’d already made up her mind: black DKNY T-shirt, spiked hair, thick gold chain and heavy cologne—a style she hated back home but here was worn by most of the young men.

He was standing off to the side while she made up her mind, finishing his cigarette. He was a little slick for her tastes, but so what?

She watched while he flicked his cigarette away in that experienced, world-weary gesture Emily had never liked. Typical Balkan machismo, she thought. Why did they have to try so hard?

Emily climbed into the shiny, black compact while he loaded her bags into the trunk. But it wasn’t until he’d swung into the driver’s seat and the locks clicked into place that something in her froze. Nobody had automated locks in the Balkans. Not these days.

For the first time, she took a good look around. The car wasn’t a Fiat, like she had assumed, but something much nicer. Where were the identifying symbols usually on the dashboard? It was a luxury car, that much was clear, but she hoped to God it wasn’t a Mercedes. A car like that only meant one thing.

They were moving now, gliding through the parking lot while Emily’s breath thickened, began to catch. Techno seeped in at an insidiously low level, making a detached part of her wonder why he wasn’t playing it open-windowed loud. Her eye stopped on the requisite half moon and star hanging from his rearview mirror.

He followed her glance. “Albania.”

What, she managed, swallowing wildly, was his sister doing in Croatia?

He looked at her and smiled.

She was feeling woozy now, a flash of adrenaline making it impossible to think, much less move. Even her throat had turned against her, become a dry, undulating mass of fear. Air conditioning streamed silently from vents before her, pixilated memories of better days.

Only her senses remained, so slow and permeable they seemed able to turn back and repair time. Outside, water winked silver against the light. They were picking up speed now, and as she turned around, Emily saw women weaving in and out of traffic, market bags heavy with the day’s offering. Around them, tourists taxied in from surrounding hotels, in search of the city’s heart.

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Lesley Jenike After the Concert Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams!

—Coleridge You said this is the new jazz & we’re living through it.

You said we’d make the “Year in Music, 2002.”

Later, watching a war documentary in bed, our bodies like thrown concert fliers, crumple together unread & we listen as if to music as an actor recites a soldier’s letter: Does God care for us individually or just for His larger plan— the overly-round alphabet more tender because we, ripe in our third decade, already know he’s dead.

But maybe God is the newest garage band & His plan is to tour the whole hip country & coast-to-coast in clubs we’ll bind ourselves to strangers, become the horde, become the thousands that toil & spin around His interminable, singing eye.

After the concert you said we’re in the middle of something big, maybe music or maybe tonight & tonight’s greater industry: Fog low over the city, headlights plentiful as sudden loaves, plentiful as fishes.

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Lesley Jenike

Heart of the Awl for Elliott Smith He stabbed himself in the heart West Coast time.

Now on my TV screen his face is the face of Lake Coeur d’Alene and suddenly I’m back in Idaho listening to hissing commentary in a red pontoon plane: “Look! The Reservation’s on your right.

There—a sailboat! Windsurfer on your left!

But all I see in any direction is Elliott Smith sprawled out like a lake on an L.A. floor. I’m hearing hulls slam their bodies against the dock, We lose, we lose, and there’s a gurgle in the pilot’s throat when he says the Coeur d’Alene had been halved on maps: disputed territory.

But I don’t see a line in water dark as the stoned heart of a plum left after flesh is pulled away. Flying over the little harbor town I hear a voice in static say, “Our baseball field— our swimming pool—Look at that shape!”

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Lesley Jenike as if, at this height, diamonds are absolute, their bodies contiguous to nothing, as if I’d been asleep and hadn’t seen the contour of an unbroken heart before.

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Sandra Kohler Creation, 1996 The future is in your hands —Presidential campaign slogan, Sierra Leone, 1996 Ask the President for new hands —The Revolutionary United Front My friend J. e-mails me to explain the rebels in Sierra Leone who are cutting off people’s hands with machetes.

He wants me to remember that the rebels come from the countryside, they’re poorly armed; they don’t have the tanks that government troops use to level cities, shells that blow off civilian limbs. He wants me not to condemn the rebels without understanding this context.

Perhaps it is more personal to have one’s hands chopped off by a poorly armed rebel, who ties you down, then hacks at your arms with his machete, without turning away from your screams, your eyes, than to be walking down a street on your way home from the marketplace, carrying a sack of oranges, a couple of yams, when the walls around you rise as if some god had sucked them up to use as dust for a new creation and you find yourself lying in the blood of your blown off legs, maimed by an enemy you never saw. The soldier who lobs the shell is taking a city; the rebel who wields the machete, maiming a life he doesn’t find worth taking. He inflicts this suffering to make a point, carve a world in flesh. The world he shapes this way will not escape the terror of its making.

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Aviya Kushner September 10, 2001 Isaiah 5:24 Just as straw is consumed by the tongue of fire, so the masked men want me to quake.

So they swagger the day before the disaster, while I walk higher and higher, until I can see their eyes, until the air around me is all blueness in the mountains of early September.

I stand at the mouth of the hills of Lebanon, hills festooned with posters of the dead, of young men stolen: men now dust and ire, their faces fluttering in the occasional wind, and the gun of a masked man follows me down the main street of Metullah, the northernmost point of Israel, the last stand.

But the mountains did not shake, or laugh, and God’s anger, that thing Isaiah calls wrath, that did not come either, and I left swearing to remain a girl, always, and not a gun-fearing woman— but the world does not always want a girl. It wants age, it wants fear, gray hair, sunburn, evidence of strain; a face that has stared into the open mouth of rage.

Note: Hizbollah members frequently stand on the hills of Lebanon at the border with Israel and were visible, fully armed, from Metullah, on September 10, 2001.

On that day, the posters on the hills were of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbollah. Two of the soldiers are Jewish, and the third is a Druze Arab officer.

The three have been declared dead.

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Melissa Kwasny Laramie for Matthew Shepard Winter: town of ghost-plants, frost. The house too big for me and, so, I keep it cold. The child hears from within—but what?

Every day the same wind, an awful place really, valley too wide, mountains far off. If we knew the world would end with our lives, we would have to say goodbye also to the stars, white-shouldered, and rabbits who crouch in barrow pits at night.

Death breaks our hearts most cleanly. A gloom on the house, as they say, a gloaming. Dry light unfiltered by trees.

I think of him often here, especially in winter, how alone he was, even close to town. Small boy, smaller than those who killed him.

Though I can feel them here, too, in the short-lived swirl of snow lightening the yellow lawns, desperately bored and worldly.

What kind of healing needs to happen in a place of great pain?

And yet it was a beautiful place, this earth. They could not see it.

The great wings of the blue spruce, poised before wind, like that bald eagle on the power pole, head down, clutching— but no one can outstare the wind. Not even the dirty little spirits of the people here. Who say: this is my home, this is where I live, it just happens to be where a crime occurred. So it could be said of any one of us. He was too much a girl, or his murderers were.

Open the door like an animal might: a giant ferociousness cowing me back, a domestic sound like the sharpening of knives.

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Melissa Kwasny Earlier, as I took my bath, I heard it wheezing. Under its breath.

Are us. An emergency out there, the ice glistening.

If I open the curtains, I am visible, bruised blue as the trees.

Why does the wind seem as if it were searching for something lost?

Rabbits, for instance, in hundreds, in the ditches. How gorgeous, dangerous is their world. Though few drive terriďŹ ed of hitting one.

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Jacqueline Jones LaMon Nine Days Before Kirby High’s Senior Prom Amos smokes heavy when he hangs with the boys, comes home stinking of Mad Dog, chili cheese fries deluxe. No two ways about it: he’s wedged between story and tall tale, the driver’s side and the right rear view, just the guy in the middle passing the joint from Bobby Dupree to Maserati Mike, switching his hum between John Mayer and Jimmy Eat World. Mike-Mike talks of women and kisses his fingers, then tells the guys about the Roadster in his garage, one day, soon: gonna have an engine that purrs for its papa, rims that spin out of control, woofers and tweeters to make a man want to shame his daddy, put out a call for uncle. Heavy-footed Bobby hugs the shoulder tight, flattens weeds and kicks up gravel back by the old Renwood place, nothing there to speak of, just a faded farm. Stables abandoned, tree split clean from electric storms in April. Old man Renwood long since gone, all those heads of cattle shipped out and willed to slaughter. Bobby breaks, parks the pickup where the creek used to be, before water found another way, an easier corner to turn. Brown bags rustle over longnecks, pocketed pints. Last one out’s the punk-face.

To scale the silo. To grab ahold. To melt the world to puddle.

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Jacqueline Jones LaMon

Almost Thanksgiving and that bad boy, Quentin, grabs ahold, shakes berries from the fledgling trees—lip bit, cowlick in bounce like rooster’s comb. No one dares to make him stop or calls his folks, his parents finally alone, every shouted word between them incendiary, ferocious, nasty—too good to quit mid-moan. Could be grace twisting life. That boy’s daddy came home, fight and make up on his mind, to find his Igloo chest stocked full of the good shit: six packs, bottles jammed in like mountains among the glaciers. And the mom?

Kentucky cutie’s wearing short-shorts, those jeweled up flip-flops, lavender blue dilly in the wane of evening light. The boom of bass, marrow, flies by from a pimped up Mini Cooper. It’s Linkin Park numbing the air with Jay-Z, doing the Brooklyn Boy thing only that mix ain’t genuine, couldn’t be. Streetlights flicker. Sometimes performance has its place: pretend it’s hot, you start to sweat.

Quentin holds another sapling hostage, bends branches beyond redemption, shows all shrub and bush who’s the daddy here.

Scrubs is on tonight, flurries in the forecast, sky looking all tornado-like. Sure, her man can kiss, pays the bills, just don’t understand her much or ever take her dancing, let her be his valentine for all the year’s long days. Just once, she wants whirl around dizzy, bedazzled just for him, her world all xylophones and ding-dong chimes. But no. Instead, Quentin yowls, socked hard by the neighbor girl, whops her butt good and runs zigzag from her clutches. It starts to hail, then drizzles all night long.

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Jeanne Larsen Rain in Two Hemispheres April 1995 Who can stand clean before April’s first rain?

My students write lightly of mice and vermin-pinched birds, as if intent were no issue and creaturely filth something chosen. The radio tells all, cascading, informing its casual listeners how refugees wash—the female, the liceridden young—from enclave to late winter enclave and wait, staring at history, only for bread.

Here, the generous drizzle continues, feeding my fanciful garden, while the new toaster glows infrared, like a body caught hot in a night-vision scope. I stand by it, blind.

No, willing blindness to sleet and disputes in distant sheer valleys where men murder men. Where no course is the right one. Where one will be taken. I turn off the news report. Look to the red thrust of peonies upward from roots shallowly buried and careless as mice or as soldiers—as young hungry humans—of questions of blame.

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Jeanne Larsen

Snow in a Season of War-Talk and Drought February 2003 The dry snow falls in darkness.

White grains slip down, small bombs.

The night air is a desert, and silent.

Thick clouds close in, acquiesce.

My hands are empty piles of snow.

The drifts, like black oilfields, burn.

The white yard becomes hungry sand.

The hunger equals a mother’s, a daughter’s, a boy’s.

The clouds are liars, bragging they cannot be stopped.

Their rage and their ice sear young men.

Those men in truth are only broken water stirred by wind.

The children, only ghosts of children.

The rich men stay home, building fires.

Joyful, they roar.

The fires and roaring make more clouds.

A burning hand could sweep away these lowering banks.

The bombs are made of words unspoken falling unstopped in the dark.

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Ed Bok Lee The Invisible Church A park in a country.

But which country?

If you ask the Somali men hovering over ancient chessboard tables and apple tea where they are, they’ll tell you a constant state of waiting.

And that all the broken glass on the sidewalk reminds how dangerous it is to pray on their knees in Arabic these days.

The Hmong man with military medals and a gray goatee bears a different story. He plays it on his kher, a two-string spidery bamboo violin he leans into, slicing open one ghost at a time with his bow.

If he set out a hat, or tin can, maybe all the shoes hating dead leaves wouldn’t sound so lonely.

A war and a Tuesday afternoon.

But which war? If you stop the glaucomic Polish Jew who hobbles past crackheads on picnic tables feeling their bones, or young do-rags dreaming new tags, that punctual spirit, he might tell you he escaped from a concentration camp by hand-washing yellow stains from SS pillowcases and bedsheets; propelled to safety through a laundry chute and survived the winter forest on roots and worms…

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Ed Bok Lee Or, this autumn, he might just say the crude tattoo numbered on the inside of his wrist is a postage stamp on a strange envelope lost in transit.

Actually, he’s probably heading to the thrift store to feel if any stained-glass lamps, board games, or good cutlery came in.

A country and a soul.

Among a hip-hop boom box and Russian card game on a one-board bench; an old drunk Mexicano in straw cowboy hat and white beard, belting a cappella harvest hymns of a woman with bad intentions and the scrawny mutt who pants in front of me, leash in mouth…

There is a small city park and fountain presided over by the Saint of Looted Expression.

Some days after work I’ll breach the dry basin and sit at the statue’s bare feet. Read a news page to assess the world’s ever-fading progress.

I’ll go until my eyes, the ink, and evening blend to a dangerous cocktail. Or a jittery spirit approaches from nowhere to ask in secret code for the church that burned down long before either of us was born.

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Stephanie Lenox No One Gets Hurt According to Guinness World Records, Dean Sheldon earned titles in 2002 for holding both the largest scorpion and the most scorpions in his mouth at one time.

I can’t say what I was thinking the first time I unhinged my jaw to see what I’d kept so quietly there.

What better way to know strength than to hold that carapace of space on the soft bed of the tongue.

We have an unspoken agreement.

Even the largest arachnid curls closer now to my patient breath.

I can open my mouth so wide that my fear escapes, wide enough it becomes a desert, and my teeth so many wind-shaped stones.

I can’t tell you what it’s like to feel those lives shifting inside me.

It’s not unlike the man who ate steel hotter than the surface of Venus and let it cool in his mouth.

To those who say I do it for a name, I say, So? Who isn’t prey to that hunger?

And to the man who spat a cricket—

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Stephanie Lenox dead—thirty feet, one question: Was it alive when it first went in?

The way I hold these creatures, venomous tails, four pairs of legs folded lightly as if in prayer, no one gets hurt. Can you say that?

Twenty is not nearly enough to show the dark distances great inside me.

Inside my mouth, I can hold anything.

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Barbara Leon The Looting of the Vase It’s the same [TV] picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases in Iraq?”

—Donald Rumsfeld, on the sacking of the Iraqi National Museum Perhaps the Warka vase— alabaster vessel of ancient Sumer.

At its base rivers flow, Tigris and Euphrates, and layered above, sweet date palms, ears of barley, a band of rams and goats.

Across the middle, a procession, barefoot priests with baskets brimming.

And, at the summit, Inanna, goddess of heaven and earth.

The vase is tall and slender, slightly flared, like the hint of smile on her face. 5,000 years ago, story and art picture her broad-hipped.

Surrounded by grazing sheep, she is bountiful like the culture that conceived her as it birthed the written word, irrigated the plain, codified law.

And so years pass, in their hundreds, each marked by the fruiting of the fig.

Then the march of invaders, metal-clad, flesh-piercing, for ages on end, masters of war and commerce who know nothing of cuneiform, care nothing for libraries, respect no one’s law.

The rivers change course, the fig tree gives up its deep-lobed leaves,

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Barbara Leon the besieged re-vision their goddess, vengeful.

Named Ishtar, she breathes fury, her beauty terrible on cold stone, and the vase tumbles, buried in ruins of war.

For millennia, preserved in hot desert sand, then unearthed with the turn of a handshovel. Perhaps Inanna showed herself for a moment in time to invoke memory, how deep we need dig, how much reconstruct.

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Barbara Leon

Mahmud Al-Qayed, the Songbird Catcher He was not the first songbird catcher to fall, only the youngest.

His father fell to his knees, buried his face in the nubby sweater, breathed in the damp of his small son’s blood.

In a grove where bird catchers and farmers are banned, songbirds nest in olive trees, the olives turn black, and fall, shriveled, yesterday’s hope in Gaza, where olive trees fall by thousands, their tough bark no match for settlers’ saws, their boughs for bulldozers, this ancient grove so far survives. Three song sparrows also survive, they hop about in wire cages Mahmud carried to market the first Friday of Ramadan, birds felled with net tied to string, the weapon he held, a suspicious character, shot dead by the fence shielding kibbutz Nahal Oz, in uprooted Gaza, where birds and small boys find no refuge in olive branches, soft bodies beat wings against wire, trilling freedom songs.

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Timothy Liu Holy Law Someone gets five years for plowing his car into a mosque. Perhaps he was on a suicide mission. Some call it a history written in sand and blood as the campaign shifts. Children foraging dust. Dead vines sold for wood on the outskirts of Kabul— the Shamali plain laid waste. Never mind Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or the whereabouts of Osama diverting our nation’s attention from a top-to-bottom review of ocean policy needed to keep the swordfish steaks coming to our tables—polluted runoff largely to blame for the fishless dead zone of the Gulf wherever border-crossing Chicanos quote Aztec law requiring all homosexuals to be disemboweled at once—

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Timothy Liu

Contemplating Disaster with the TV Off Should we turn the news back on? Most bridges and tunnels have reopened. Once again we can hear the sound of a jet passing overhead. We even went out for a gallon of water at a deli downstairs called US1. Our Middle Eastern clerk has taken to wearing a golden cross, American flags plastered on a business that seems to be doing okay as we give a nod and race back up five flights of stairs where the TV remains off. The cell phone’s ringing now (how else get through?) and it’s Jimmy, who informs us that his father’s part-Lebanese, Jimmy who passes for white, whose paranoid-schizophrenic father assures him not to worry about everything going on— a dad with some vets gathered round a TV in the mental ward.

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Dawn Lonsinger Matter-of-Fact Mind over matter, women are everywhere at war with their figures: 1 + 1 = 0 where the second 1 is really -1, integers wiping out integers with witch hazel, a sum of parts subtracted by addition: lipsticking, masques, Lidocaine.

Umbrellas open inside the body—can you hear the sad music from hand-painted furniture, the clamor of teeny apparatuses: tweezers, eyelash curler, razor, or further: scalpel, staples, stitches—the whir of shopping carts pushed through space into the echoing basement of the brain.

One woman encourages another to get in shape as if there is an answer to the body—rhombus? star? chandelier?

What word of mouth, paraphrase of ligaments, leaves us half-whole, entirely hole? The only channel coming in is a soirée of fragmentary debutantes, spread sheer across our skin like sweet&sour glaze—but in the dark of floodlights those beauties button up their monologues, wish away their cut&pastiness, cry truckload after truckload into Iowa, an ever more distant self. What fête, what adieu is there in throwing one’s body back into a black hole, light eaten by absence, leaving nothing but the sputum of light? This disappearing act has gone too far—into our DNA, which will eventually grow hips, parentheses that suggest the body irrelevant, and there is nothing left to do, but step out of the gauze, empty anesthesia into

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Dawn Lonsinger the streets, and watch the tarmac go numb—feel the skin tingle under the fat sun? the untidy rain? We don’t melt— and this is how we learn to love our other -worldly warehouses, our flesh so near it is the only clarity.

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Maura Stanton My Life The American supermarket is an astonishing place. Brilliant

but scentless flowers are heaped for sale just inside the entrance. You can buy daisies, chrysanthemums, tulips, plants with curious striped leaves, baby’s breath, red and white Mylar balloons, ribbons, cattails, pottery from Mexico, you name it. It’s all so lovely, but oh so cold. I’d love to linger, and check for some hidden scents down in the cup of a yellow rose, or at least stroke the velvety petals, but Susan, wearing a cardigan sweater with pockets, strides purposefully past the vases and sale bouquets to the produce department. She’s going to buy her own cabbages and dates like a serving woman. She still doesn’t know that a Moorish princess, an enchantment survivor, slipped into her body at the Alhambra when it was either that, or disappear on the next breeze.

I have to confess that she wouldn’t have been my first choice. I would have preferred to inhabit a French teenager, or that tall, willowy Spanish tour guide who passed by not five minutes after I’d made my fatal decision. But I had to move quickly in order to survive as a sentient being, so I zoomed in on Susan, a forty-year-old tourist from Minnesota, preferring a member of my own sex and species to a German businessman or a skinny rabbit.

And in some ways it’s been a good choice. Susan’s not alarmed by me. She thinks my memories are just something she’s made up, that I’m just part of the overly vivid imagination her grade school teachers always told her she had, warning looks in their stern eyes.

I’m able to influence her in many gentle ways. For example, as she was checking out of her hotel in Granada, I got her to buy that copy of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra that she’s reading in bed at night, propped up beside her sleeping husband. I’m enjoying the book immensely, because it reminds me of home. Oh, for that blooming wilderness of grove and garden and teeming orchard I used to view from my high window! I want Susan to go back there.

But no more of this nostalgia. I’ve decided to be pro-active, which is why I’m so interested in this supermarket this particular Saturday, when Crab Orchard Review

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Maura Stanton other days I’ve let Susan shop alone, hiding deep inside her and feeling sorry for myself, mixing my own memories of life in the Alhambra with some of Susan’s recollections of reading tales about Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights when she was a child. I was very depressed for the first few weeks when Susan returned to Minnesota. I couldn’t bear her rough cotton sheets, her hot shower, her orange juice from a carton, her granola cereal, her plain brown house slippers, CNN, the tedious freeway, her rolling office chair, her yogurt lunch, her computer screen, her exercise class, and the way she let herself be pushed around by her talented but selfish set of teenage twins, Lola and Jake. And even the outdoors disappointed me. During my enchantment, I acquired knowledge of the language of birds and beasts, and during those long centuries under a spell my only entertainment was listening to stories told by passing parrots or doves. But the chickadees and sparrows and blue jays of Minnesota fret over such trivialities. This is my wire! This is my bird feeder! My nest is better than your nest! Oh, where are the tales of great migrations? The magic rings carried in tired beaks for thousands of miles? And to make things worse, Prince Yusef, another enchantment survivor who was forced to inhabit Susan’s husband Paul on that fateful day at the Alhambra when all of us were released from our spells at the same time, and had to choose a living mammal before we disintegrated, has given me no sign of his existence since we arrived in Minnesota. I know he’s in there, and I was counting on his friendship, but he’s probably shocked and depressed, hiding deep in Paul’s unconscious, unable to bear what he sees on the news through Paul’s eyes.

Every night images of American tanks are juxtaposed against images of angry men defending a great mosque. Bombs explode.

Pipelines burn. Children run through ruined streets. Old women weep and tear at their veils. Holy men raise their fists. This is not my familiar world of amulets and charms and talismans, of astrologers and melancholy kings, of enchanted Moors sitting with drawn swords, motionless as statues, maintaining a sleepless watch for ages, which Washington Irving writes about. This is not the chivalrous world of gentle-hearted warriors and caparisoned Arabian steeds, of unhappy princesses and far-famed minstrels. This is not what a Moorish prince and princess want to see when they are at long last released from centuries of enchantment. No wonder Prince Yusef stays hidden inside Paul. He must be horrified by this bedlam and confusion. All of us enchantment survivors at the Alhambra, as we drifted in sleep 146 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Maura Stanton through the ages, occasionally soothed or tormented by dreams or visited by genies or birds with tidings of this or that, and released once a year from our frozen postures to parade in a great troop through the shadowy halls of the Alhambra, expected to wake up—if we woke up at all—as ourselves in a world where we still mattered. Why else would we be released from our spells? But instead, on the same date, we were all forced to scramble into any mammal that happened to be passing by at the moment. And now we see that there’s nothing left of that sumptuous and glorious time when the kingdom we lived in taught benighted Europe the graces and refinements of civilization.

So I’ve decided to teach Susan how to eat. She’s always trying to lose weight, so she buys products with fewer calories that taste like cardboard. Then she’ll make something out of marshmallow cream and butterscotch pudding for dessert. Last night we had hamburger patties covered with pizza sauce and green beans that only Susan ate and brownies, and I simply couldn’t bear it anymore. I decided to take charge of the shopping.

The produce department dazzles me. It’s huge and colorful, full of green and orange and purple and red and yellow fruits and vegetables.

Susan steers a course straight toward the head lettuce, and I know she’ll pick up a large cucumber and a glossy green pepper and some pale gasinjected tomatoes plus a few grapefruit (she’s thinking diet again) so I rise up and mix my own desires into her short term memory. Together we choose the fruit I want to eat, some pomegranates, a few mangos, a papaya, kiwi fruit (I’ve never seen it before but it looks interesting), a box of divine sweet oranges from Spain, a few figs, a big, purple eggplant, a bunch of basil, apples from South Africa, blackberries, blueberries, two huge watermelons, grapes, nectarines, and a large bag of apricots. We also get some bags of dates, some almonds and walnuts, and several bottles of Rioja. Susan heads over to the imported cheeses, and yes, there it is, manchego cheese to go with the baguettes I see on that rack over there. We get them, too.

When Susan gets home with her bags, she takes each item out with a bemused look on her face, and has a little trouble finding a place to put all the produce, for her refrigerator is full of diet soda. But she finds a dusty bowl on a high shelf, and fills it with fruit, then stands back to admire it.

Eat it, Susan!

She pops a few purple grapes into her mouth. I shiver with delight, remembering the silver platter next to my divan when I slept in that Crab Orchard Review

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Maura Stanton high-ceilinged chamber with the arabesques and the balcony. That was back before my enchantment, when I’d listen to the mourning doves in the palm trees like an ordinary princess without understanding a single word of their fascinating chatter.

Susan begins to fix a heavenly dinner. Paul, who’s been out estimating the cost of landscaping a front yard near Lake Harriet, comes in grumbling because he’s been stung by a bee while measuring the length of a scraggly hedge that’s going to be replaced with hostas and red cedar chips. He glances at the dining room table, set with the best china and brightened with a bouquet of asters, then heads for the bathroom. Lola, who’s been taking playing soccer all afternoon, drifts in, tosses her duffle bag on the sofa, and throws herself into an armchair with a big, bored sigh, her long legs hanging over the arms.

She has lovely, thick dark hair, but she wants to cut it so she can look like all the other girls. Jake comes up from the basement family room where he’s been e-mailing his friends for hours.

“What’s that funny smell?” he asks his mother.

“Ratatouille,” she says proudly.

When the family is gathered at the table, Susan brings out the bubbling dish of tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant. She dishes the intoxicating concoction onto plates. She takes the lid off a casserole of rice pilaf and pine nuts delicately scented with saffron.

“What is this stuff?” Lola asks, digging around with her fork.

“Alien brains?”

“Take some of this, too,” Susan says, ignoring her remark and passing her a salad of sliced papaya sprinkled with lime juice.

“What about protein, Mom?” Jake whines. “I don’t want my muscles to wither.”

“Have some hummus,” Susan says, passing him a bowl.

He sniffs suspiciously. “This looks like liver from a baby food jar.”

Susan swallows a bite, and she can’t help smiling. “Chickpeas and tahini. It’s a complete protein. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Paul doesn’t say anything, but I’m disappointed that he’s only picking at his food. I was hoping Prince Yusef might enjoy the meal.

“Why are you feeding us this stuff, Mom?” Lola asks. “Is it because you and Dad went to Spain? Is this what they eat at the Alhambra?”

“Well, it’s the Mediterranean diet I guess,” Susan says. “It’s good for you. And it’s good, too.”

Lola raises her eyebrows. But she cleans her plate.

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Maura Stanton chocolate cupcakes with whipped cream centers or a thick slab of cheesecake covered with sticky strawberries to get the bad taste of vegetables out of his mouth.

Susan smiles. “I’ll be right back,” she says. And she returns from the kitchen with the wooden box of Spanish oranges. “Would anyone like mint tea?” she asks.

“I would,” I whisper back softly. I look closely into Paul’s face, hoping for a sign that Prince Yusef might have floated up from the depths of the spirit he’s now entangled inside, but there’s not even a glimmer in Paul’s flat brown eyes. He shakes his head, and pushes out his chair.

The others leave the table, ignoring the oranges, and Susan sits there, staring at the box, called Clementines. I long to taste one. I used to call them mandarins back when I was still a flesh-and-blood princess, for a famous sage had brought the tree to Granada from China, and it had flourished in the courtyard of the Alhambra just under my window.

But I hold myself back, and follow Susan’s own memory of eating little oranges like this when she lived in Spain for her semester abroad, that unforgettable year she fell in love with Juan. In fact, Juan had one in his pocket once when she met him in the olive grove across from the entrance to the Alhambra, and she recalls sitting in a ruined pavilion right on the edge of the cliff watching the lights of Granada twinkle on below. Juan had peeled an orange with one hand, and after he’d fed her half of it, and he’d eaten the other half, he’d kissed her, and begun to nibble her throat and breasts, and now she always associates the smell of sweet oranges with the smell of sex.

I wish she would peel the little gem, and put it in her mouth. But though she’s caressing it in her hand, she suddenly puts it back into the box, under the netting, and listens for a moment. TVs are on in the living room, Jake’s room, and Lola’s room. The coast is clear. She heads down to the basement family room. Oh, no!

Nothing puts me to sleep faster than the computer. Susan sits in front of one half the day at work, and whenever she gets a shot at the machine at home, she googles some new disease she read about in a woman’s magazine, or checks to make sure that Jake didn’t accidentally plagiarize a sentence in his book report, or scrolls through a news story about global warming on CNN. Today she types in a name, Juan Endriago, her old boyfriend in Spain.

Who is Juan Endriago? No one, it seems. Susan clicks on a few websites, but it’s hopeless. Oh, there are plenty of Juans out there, but Endriago might be a small planet in a computer game, or a dragon in Crab Orchard Review

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Maura Stanton Don Quixote, or a Cyclops in Basque mythology, or the pseudo-name of someone in a chat room. According to Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary, an Endriago is a fabulous monster. But Juan Endriago isn’t a person who can be contacted by e-mail. He belongs to that vanished world of airmail letters on thin blue paper.

Susan frowns. Then she types in the name of Roy Wilson. Lots of Roy Wilsons pop up at once, and by scrolling down, and checking here and there, Susan locates the Roy Wilson she once dated for a few months in high school after they met in biology class. I quickly bring myself up to date on this part of her past. It turns out that she’s never quite forgiven herself for giving into peer pressure and dumping Roy Wilson just because her little circle of girlfriends used to giggle about his plastic pocket penholder and mock his slow way of talking. For a whole month after she broke up with him, he used to stare at her longingly across the lunch room, and she felt pleasantly guilty and sad. Then he started going around with a pretty blond, president of the English club, and her guilt turned to chagrin and anger. How could he get over her that quickly! He’d said he loved her! Now Roy Wilson is a college professor in Indiana, and Susan quickly brings up a photo and a short biography. She stares at the photo, comparing it with the leaner face in her memory. He’s still good-looking, though grayish brown hair has receded a bit from his large forehead. There are interesting lines around his eyes now that make him look pensive and brooding.

And it turns out that he’s a poet.

Susan’s throat clenches, and her fingers falter on the computer mouse. Her life could have been so different. She could have stayed in Spain and even if she hadn’t married Juan Endriago she could have perfected her Spanish and become a UN translator, one of her childhood dreams. Or she could have joined the English club with Roy Wilson. She could have married a poet. Or even better, she could be a poet. But instead, she’s a print buyer for a health insurance company, the chauffeur for thirteen-year-old twins, and married to a landscape architect who doesn’t pay much attention to her anymore. She’s already experiencing the empty-nest syndrome even though both her kids still live at home.

She types in Roy Wilson’s e-mail address before I can stop her.

I’m starting to get upset, and I’m having a little trouble breathing in Susan’s body. I don’t want her to get involved with another man when Prince Yusef is trapped inside her own husband. He’ll smother inside Paul if I can’t find some way to reach him, and I’ll start to wither, too, 150 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Maura Stanton if I’m left in Minnesota all by myself. There has to be someone I can talk to, someone who remembers the tumult and agitation and beauty of those storied years in Granada.

“Hi,” Susan writes across the screen, “you probably don’t remember me but I used to go to Washburn High and I was thinking about Mr. Hammond the biology teacher the other day and I remembered that frog we dissected together and how we took one of the legs back to your house and rolled it in Shake and Bake and tried to fry it but the oil was too hot and it smoked and set off the fire alarm. Then you got out the ladder and tried to turn the alarm off, but you couldn’t, and your elbow hit the glass globe over the kitchen light and it shattered all over the floor so when your mom came home from work the alarm was screaming and the house was full of smoke and broken glass and she had a fit. I’m Susan Pottle Nolan—I used to be Susan Pottle but I’m married now and have two kids, twins, Lola and Jake. I was just wondering how things were with you? I think it’s great that you became an English teacher. Guess I’ll have to watch my grammar, ha, ha! Isn’t the Internet great? You don’t have to lose touch with anyone.

Well, I hope I’m not bothering you. Feel free to answer or not. Best wishes, Susan.”

Then she presses send. I feel extremely agitated, but I’m comforted by her ridiculous message. She has no idea how to write a love letter.

There are no honeyed phrases, no sweet suggestions, no delicate sentiments. Surely Roy Wilson will never answer her. He’ll read her words with a shudder and press delete.

But now I see I’ve got my job cut out for me. I’ve been leaving Paul alone, waiting passively for Prince Yusef to make some sign to me. But that’s not going to happen. I’m going to have to be more active if I want his companionship, just as I was when it came to getting something decent to eat.

“Hey, Mom,” Jake shouts from the stairs. “I need the computer. I gotta give a report on a famous 19th century American in my history class.” He bounds down in his stocking feet, and Susan quickly gets out of her program.

“Any ideas for me?” he asks, as she starts to get up from the swivel chair.

“Lincoln?”

“There’s too much stuff about him.”

“Who invented the cotton gin?” Susan asks.

Jake groans. “Boring.”

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Maura Stanton I decide to assert myself. “How about Washington Irving,” Susan blurts out.

“Who?’ “He wrote that book I brought back from the Alhambra, the one I showed you the other day. But I don’t know why I mentioned him. He’s only a writer. You want a president or something.”

“No, that’s OK. Washington Irving might work. Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, right? He was in our English class. He sounds like no one else would pick him. That’s half the trick with Ms. Jacobson.”

Susan goes upstairs and stands behind Paul’s chair. He’s deeply involved in some PBS news show, and Susan watches for a few minutes, feeling depressed. And no wonder. It’s hard to believe that people in this advanced century are still fighting such wars, that all the wisdom and learning and science in the world is for naught. Of course I heard rumors of various wars and atrocities while I was enchanted, and witnessed some terrible events close at hand—Napoleon’s army stored gunpowder in the Alhambra, and almost blew it to bits, and not many years ago a famous poet from Granada, who used to walk about the gardens below my tower, was shot in the Sierra Nevada by an evil dictator—but that day at the Alhambra three weeks ago, when all the spells came to an end, and I floated on the breeze in danger of disintegration, I was sure that the world I desired to live in must have become a paradise, for weren’t the genies always grumbling about being replaced by computers? I so much wanted to continue to exist in the new world that I was willing to share someone else’s physical body.

Susan groans, and turns away from the TV, upset by the story that’s just been broadcast about the execution of two truck drivers by an Islamic extremist group. She immediately tries to repress me, though I’m just as horrified as she is about what’s happening. She thinks I belong to a fairy tale that isn’t relevant anymore, and she feels guilty about having romantic thoughts about moonlight and Moorish sultanas and sparkling fountains and cedar ceilings when the real world is such a mess. She goes on up to the bedroom, puts on her nightgown and robe, and instead of picking up Tales of the Alhambra, sitting so invitingly on her bedside table, with a sketch of the Lion Fountain on the cover viewed through a Moorish arch, she reaches for the big, heavy copy of My Life by Bill Clinton.

So is it time for me to say farewell to Granada? To give up like Washington Irving one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams?

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Maura Stanton Bill Clinton’s words dance across Susan’s brain, blotting me out along with Washington Irving. She skips around, reading first about Bill’s childhood and his alcoholic father, then about Monica Lewinsky, then about his knee surgery. At first I resent his pleasant, cheerful voice, keeping Susan focused on the late twentieth century and the horrible bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I’m terrified that I’m going to be forgotten, stamped out as a romantic figment of Susan’s imagination, a bit of politically-incorrect orientalism in harem pants and jeweled slippers. But suddenly, as Bill Clinton talks about the night he told Hillary the truth, I realize that I’m listening with all that’s left of my being, that I’m caught up in the story, and all of a sudden it hits me. One way I can survive is to write my own My Life.

The thought cheers me so much that I miss what Bill is saying about his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. I let Susan read on. I’ve got so much adrenaline going through me now that Susan isn’t sleepy.

When Paul comes up to bed, first knocking on Lola’s door to tell her to keep the sound down, and shucks his jeans, and does his teeth, Susan keeps reading. He slides out of his boxers and gets under the covers, and Susan leans down and gives him a peck (no sign of Prince Yusef) and keeps on reading. I dive down into her oldest memories, and while Bill’s sentences pass in an orderly pattern across the surface of her brain, I search for some old dream of hers that will help me, for I’ll need Susan’s hands to type the story of my life.

There’s so much junk down here in these murky parts of her brain.

Spankings, tears, masturbation, dead pets, fragments of prayers, scary nightmares, a broken leg, rough boys snapping bras in grade school, binges on buttered popcorn, a fantasy of playing the drums naked.

But down in a quiet pool, almost extinct but still stirring amid the disappointments of getting a B in a creative writing class in her first year of college because her stories were too far-fetched, and being turned down for a staff position on the student newspaper because she wasn’t part of the clique of English majors who gathered for bagels every morning at a coffee house, I find an ancient longing to be an author.

The next morning is Sunday. Susan wakes early, full of excitement, and rushes down to the computer, knowing that Lola and Jake and Paul won’t be up for hours. She opens her e-mail, breathless, and at first I’m dismayed to find that she’s gotten an answer from Roy Wilson, the poet.

Then, as she reads his message, I realize that instead of distracting Susan from my project, his e-mail will be a great help to me.

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Maura Stanton “Hi Susan,” he writes. “Sure I remember you. You always were a great one for telling stories. I always thought you’d be a writer some day you had such a great imagination. Of course I remember that frog we cut up, because we were the only kids in biology class who couldn’t find the heart, and Mr. Hammond thought we must have cut it out and thrown it away, but we didn’t. We must have just destroyed it with our scalpels. Good thing we didn’t plan to become surgeons!

How are things going with you? That’s nice that you’ve got a couple of kids—twins, no less. I have to confess that I’m feeling a little low these days. My divorce just came through. Julie and I were married for twelve years. No kids, and she owns her own company, so financially things are cool. Maybe we could have coffee or a drink together and talk about old times? My mom still lives in the twin cities so I get back pretty regularly. Take care. Cheers, Roy.” Susan shivers with excitement that’s mixed with a little fear. Does she really want to upset the calmness of her current life by meeting an old boyfriend face to face? After all, she loves Paul. She’s never been unfaithful. She sits there holding her robe tight against her breasts.

And what if Roy’s disappointed in her? She’s gained weight—not too much, but a little. And she’s really accomplished nothing. She doesn’t own her own company. She’s not a UN translator. She isn’t even a writer. She hasn’t written anything creative since her science fiction story was severely criticized by both the teacher and the other students in her creative writing workshop.

“You always were a great one for telling stories,” she reads again.

Her hands clench and unclench. This is a message from a poet, and this is how he remembers her. She’s not just Lola and Jake’s mother.

She’s not just a print buyer. She’s not just the forty-year-old woman sleeping to the left of Paul.

Susan straightens her back. “Roy,” she types. “Yes, it would be fun to get together. I’m working as a print buyer but I also write stories. Let me know the next time you’re in town. Your old friend, Susan.”

She presses send, exits her e-mail, and then, feeling guilty, brings up a blank screen on Microsoft Word. She’s got to begin a story so that her words aren’t a lie. And I have just the story for her to write….

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Lois Taylor Trust Me Because you’re ordinary doesn’t mean extraordinary things

can’t happen. I’m driving to work when cat food pops into my head, so I pull into the Plaid Pantry lot.

And there they are: four monkeys on the roof of my neighborhood convenience store.

Ordinarily I don’t give this establishment my trade because the goods are dusty and overpriced. But the guys who run it wear turbans, and after 9/11, some moron broke two front windows. The least you can do is cut them some slack.

So anyway, I pull in with my jaw dropping, you can imagine.

The clerks can’t hear anything over that belly dancing music.

Store lit up like a jukebox. The monkeys have the morning sun behind them, which is why other drivers don’t see, not wanting to look into it.

Who got careless at the cages? Better yet, how did they cross Fiftieth in all that traffic?

I have a cell, but also the sense to see this is still unfolding, and I should wait before contacting loved ones. Then a VW bug pulls in, and I’m no longer alone in the lot. The girl driving looks cranky, like my kids used to this early, and probably still do. Here’s the thing: she doesn’t see them.

She doesn’t see me either. Her eyes glaze over while her brain registers, old guy. Trust me. This you never get over.

She’s all the way to the glass door with her pack before she stops dead and suddenly flings her head back to look up. Bingo.

She turns to me. We’re both grinning.

Pandemonium comes next. Clerks have to see for themselves.

Firefighters arrive in full regalia. Pretty soon twenty people mill the lot while the clerks schlep coffee, and the monkeys watch with shiny eyes as truckers and bike messengers and cops stand with their heads back and smiles on their faces.

The zoo van pulls in, and the whole fiesta mood changes, I think Crab Orchard Review

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Lois Taylor the word is, darkens. The girl joins me. Oh merde, she says. What are they going to do now? Oh—poor monkeys.

The firefighters set a ladder against the roof. The monkeys huddle like immigrants, beginning to look worried as the zoo people pull on big leather gloves. You could hear a pin drop. Someone whispers, Busted.

This is getting like, too intense, she says. She wears mittens with black snowflakes on them, but no coat.

Don’t you think everything’s like, crazier and crazier, like, spiraling? she frowns.

I reply that I do have that sensation.

Omigod—look. She points a mitten at the zoo people, now unloading cages. It’s always about cages with them, she says. What’s up with that? You know what? I’m outta here.

She gets into her car, starts the lawnmower engine, and moves out so fast she forgets the pack on her roof.

The monkeys are screaming. I run, waving my arms, calling Hey. Cars honk and swerve. Omigod, she takes the pack. Thank you so much, and she’s gone.

The zoo people climb into the van. The monkeys are in the back, their screams muffled now. We disperse to our cars, muttering, Can’t let them run wild, bite dogs, get run over, avoiding each other’s eyes.

As I pull out I’m thinking of the Sixties, how every thing is a correction of the thing before. And then I remember the day last spring when Infinite War began.

I’m bussing to work, all of us on our cells or Walkmans or newspapers and Starbucks, me thinking what a spoiled sorry lot, then wondering if this is what my wife calls projection. Pissed off because we’re in a war I can’t get the straight of, again.

We cross the bridge and that’s where it happens: the bus hangs a left and speeds up the hill like the little engine that could. We’re supposed to go straight ahead, down a long, depressed stretch called, no joke, the Denny Regrade.

Passengers pull the buzzer and call, Driver driver stop, wrong way, wrong way, wrong way. We sail by the park, the last of the camellias in bloom. People waiting for other buses gawk as we pass. We’re not stopping for anything. Full throttle, that’s us.

I’m sitting next to a woman I thought was old, then realized she’s maybe five years my senior. Two seahorse pins on her lapel, dressed up for going downtown.

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Lois Taylor Maybe he’s new on the route, I suggest. Another passenger sways down the aisle. He leans over the driver to talk him down.

Amazingly, no one seems to have used their cells to rat out the driver, and pretty soon the course has been righted, and applause breaks out as the passenger returns to his seat.

What d’you suppose was in the windmills of his mind? I ask my neighbor.

She leans in and whispers like we’re conspirators. Life’s a funny thing, she says. It’s a red-letter day. Perhaps he just wanted to give us a memory that had nothing to do with the dark dream of the generals.

She turns to look at me. Don’t you think? she says.

What I said then was, yes.

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Jean Thompson Pie of the Month So much of the world had changed and kept on changing.

But you could count on the pie list to remain the same. January was always custard, February chocolate, March lemon meringue. There were no substitutions. The absoluteness of this was comforting, since there were, in general, many rules now, which were often superseded without warning by new, contradictory rules. In the matter of coconut cream (April), it was true that Mrs. Colley had persuaded Mrs. Pulliam to allow, if not a substitution, at least a little flexibility. There were people who had really violent feelings about coconut. Mrs. Pulliam was not inclined to humor them. She was an artist. There were aesthetics involved in the choice of pies, the harmonies of taste and weather. The cycle of seasons gave rise to the cycle of cravings, for tart or smooth or juicy. Mrs. Colley had to frame it as a question of allergies, and only then did Mrs. Pulliam relent and offer (on occasion, and by special request) a banana cream alternative. But it always set her to brooding, and Mrs. Colley had learned to walk wide of her at such times.

The Pie of the Month Club’s motto was, Easy As Pie! With an exclamation point in the shape of a rolling pin. Pies were delivered to subscribers on the first or third Friday of the month. Although Hi Ho was not a large community, the reputation of the pies was such that the ladies had no lack of business. The crusts were perfect marriages of shortening and flour, so that each bite simultaneously resisted and gave way. The fillings were piled high and handsome. Of course only the best quality ingredients were used. Nowadays, when there was so much concern about contamination (air, water, crops), a pie hearkened back to simpler, more wholesome times. No one had yet cast any aspersions on pie. People in Hi Ho were sensible folks with their feet firmly on the ground, not inclined to sway with each new panic. Still, Mrs. Colley was afraid a day might come when even pie would turn up in one of those ominous newspaper articles, accused of causing some disease you never knew existed until then.

Mrs. Colley tried to avoid the news as much as possible. It was all 158 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jean Thompson so worrisome, and all so completely beyond your control. She much preferred the kind of magazines that had recipes instead of news, and television programs where people lived in nice houses and had glamorous problems. But sometimes the news seeped in anyway. She’d be settled her chair, her front still faintly damp from the evening’s dishes, her iced tea and Kleenex within reach, and instead of her program there would be a news bulletin you couldn’t avoid. Usually it was about something blowing up. And since whatever blew up was in a place you’d never been, or sometimes never even heard of, you first thought what a terrible thing it was, followed by relief that it had nothing to do with you, really, followed by a vague guilt at feeling relieved.

It was all the fault of the War, or Wars. One ran into the other nowadays. Mrs. Colley couldn’t keep them straight. Wars were different than they used to be. They were all fought in hot places, for one thing.

This current War had begun back in October (pecan), and they were trying to get it wrapped up before summer, when the great parade of fruit pies (cherry, blueberry, peach), began. Fruit pie season was not a good time to be fighting a War in a hot place. The War news was always about how we were winning, but the enemy was refusing to admit it and was fighting back in dirty, underhanded ways, such as blowing things up or poisoning (or threatening to poison) some vital resource. How were you supposed to deal reasonably with people like that?

When the phone rang at a certain time of evening, it was always Mrs. Pulliam. Mrs. Colley pressed the mute button on the television remote so she could still follow her program as she conversed. Mrs. Pulliam said, “Tell me this rhubarb was meant as a joke.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Aside from being so woody you can whittle it, nothing.”

When Mrs. Pulliam was in this particular mood, you had to let her run on for a time. Mrs. Colley murmured that people these days did not understand rhubarb as they used to. She thought this was true. Certain vegetables, peas for example, no longer got the respect they once had. Mrs. Pulliam sniffed in disdain. “The only thing to understand about rhubarb is you pick it before it gets old and tough. It’s not rocket science.”

Mrs. Colley’s program required her attention just then. Something was being explained, some important part of the story that you wouldn’t get if you couldn’t hear. She clicked the volume up to the first level and said, trying to sound more concerned than she was, “It’s what, just six pies tomorrow? Couldn’t you mix them three-quarters strawberry, one-quarter rhubarb instead of half and half?”

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Jean Thompson “It’s the rhubarb that gives it body,” said Mrs. Pulliam, not ready to stop being irritable. “Without enough rhubarb, it’s like jam.”

“Well Joyce, why not let me make them? Then if they don’t turn out, everybody can blame me.”

“Absolutely not,” said Mrs. Pulliam, just as Mrs. Colley meant her to. “You know very well I always do May. It’s my responsibility and I’ll see to it, thank you very much.”

After she put the phone down and got caught up with her program, Mrs. Colley thought, not for the first time, that Mrs. Pulliam made things more difficult than was necessary. She attributed this to Mrs. Pulliam’s divorce, and the fact that her only child, a boy, had a bad character and had gone off to live in Chicago. Mrs. Colley was a widow. Her daughter Margery lived right here in Hi Ho. Margery and her husband had two precious babies, well they were hardly babies anymore, four and six, but that was how she thought of them. Mrs. Colley’s son John and his wife lived in Des Moines, which was too far away for Mrs. Colley’s liking, but at least in the same state. John and his wife did not have any children yet, even though Mrs. Colley dropped hints from time to time about how much she would love to have more grandbabies.

The news said that before they went to the War, some soldiers had stored their sperm in freezers in case something chemical happened to them in battle. You were really better off not knowing a thing like that.

Mrs. Colley had grown accustomed to widowhood. It had been a terrible thing, of course, her husband’s heart attack, and the anxious tug of hope while he lingered, and then the press of large and small events necessary to accomplish a man’s death. Everything after that was slower. Slow march of hours and days, months and years. Nothing much changed, except she grew older and more settled into her leftover life.

She got by all right. Sometimes she turned on a football game so she would have a man’s voice in the house. And sometimes, if she was shopping at the SuperStuff and found herself in the automotive or hardware or electrical aisle, surrounded by all the mysterious items men used to keep the world running, she missed her husband terribly.

Then she would feel so down and blue, she would start thinking bad, crazy things, like, what if her grandson Ronnie grew up and went to a War and they did something to his sperm? That multitude of little unformed pearls inside him, all doomed. Or what if something in Hi Ho were to blow up? The grain elevator, for instance, or the American Legion. Hi Ho would be the last place you’d expect something like that to happen, and that was exactly why it would be targeted.

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Jean Thompson At such times Mrs. Colley turned to the Rainbow pills her doctor had prescribed. Of course the pills had a longer, medical name, but they were advertised on television with rainbows. The commercial began with a gray, drippy cartoon sky, which gradually gave way to arcs of violet, red, yellow, green. Cartoon flowers sprouted and cartoon birds sang. While you understood that this was a commercial and was not meant as a literal representation—when it came to advertising one both resisted and succumbed, like pie crust—it was true that the pills made Mrs. Colley feel more rainbow-like. Peaceful and sort of glowing. And what was the harm in that, as long as your side effects (headache, nausea, gas, bloating, diarrhea or menstrual pain) were the exact same ones the commercial reassured you were normal?

Mrs. Colley went to Mrs. Pulliam’s house in mid-afternoon, when the strawberry-rhubarb pies were scheduled to be done. Mrs. Pulliam had not disappointed. The six pies sat cooling on the kitchen table. The crusts were delicate brown with scroll-shaped cutouts that showed the deep jewel color of the filling. The pies smelled of May, of blossom and warm wind and sweetness. Mrs. Colley leaned over to drink in the smell. “Oh, heaven,” she murmured.

Mrs. Pulliam stood at the sink, washing up. “That rhubarb gave me fits.”

“Joyce, they turned out perfect.”

“Perfect,” said Mrs. Pulliam, angling the spray hose to scald a glass, “is a word cheapened by overuse. In the course of a normal lifetime, I very much doubt if anyone encounters perfection.”

Yet Mrs. Colley knew that her friend relied on her appreciation, even as she grudged and pushed it from her. Mrs. Pulliam’s tall figure bent over to scour a cookie sheet. She wore a hairnet while baking and with her hair skinned back her profile was severe. If you were uncharitable, you might even say it was witch-like. Fretting had kept her thin over the years. Mrs. Colley didn’t think that Mrs. Pulliam was unhappy, not in any active sense. More like she’d grown into the habit of mistrusting happiness and had to call it by other names.

A breeze ruffled Mrs. Pulliam’s blue curtains. Outside the window a bumblebee lumbered in the white flowers of the spirea. The new grass bent and tossed like a herd of green ponies at play. One of the Mexican families who lived in the trailers across the field had put out a line of wash, children’s small bright shirts and pants.

The Mexicans were something new. Hi Ho had been founded by industrious German and Swiss farmers, just the sort of people you Crab Orchard Review

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Jean Thompson would have chosen yourself to found a town, if you’d had any say in it. There were streets in Hi Ho named Hoffman and Schroeder. In the fall there was a Heritage Day when children were dressed up in dirndls and lederhosen and performed Tyrolean folk songs.

But in the last few years, a portion of town had come to more resemble Guadalajara. The Mexicans mostly worked in the meat packing plant two towns over. Although they were from a hot country, we were not at War with them. There was a new Catholic church to accommodate them, an addition to the many flavors of Protestant.

The Hi Ho Market now sold chilis and cans of hominy and packets of Mexican spices. Mrs. Colley did not know any Mexicans personally.

She thought they were all right as long as they kept to themselves and didn’t go jabbering Spanish at you when they knew you couldn’t understand it. She was not the sort to be prejudiced about people just because they came from a hot country.

Mrs. Pulliam looked out the window, where two of the Mexican children had come outside and were kicking a ball around, soccer-style.

“Those people won’t ever be subscribers. They don’t have a tradition of pie.”

“We could take some pies by the Catholic church sometime. A free, introductory offer.”

“I don’t see them going for it, in a business way.”

“It would be neighborly,” said Mrs. Colley, but they let that thought die. Being neighborly was a good thing, of course, except there was a sense in which the Mexicans were not real neighbors.

Mrs. Pulliam took off her apron and poured two cups of coffee. She set the cream jug in front of Mrs. Colley’s chair, although she herself continued to stand. “Maybe it’s just as well we don’t add subscribers.

Who knows how much longer I’ll want to keep on with the baking.”

Mrs. Colley tried not to show her alarm. In all of Mrs. Pulliam’s history of complaint, she had never mentioned quitting the pies outright.

“A long time, I hope. Otherwise people would be so disappointed.”

“Would they,” said Mrs. Pulliam. She reached up to pull the hairnet off, though her hair stayed in the same crimped, hairnet shape.

“Oh, I suppose. Yes, they would at first, sure. Then they’d adjust. It’s only pie. I keep thinking that. All the fuss and bother for something people gobble down in a day or two.”

Mrs. Colley knew better than to approach any issue with Mrs. Pulliam head on. She said, “I saw the most interesting recipe in one of my magazines. Rustic plum tart.”

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Jean Thompson “Gaaagh.”

“I’m just saying. Maybe something different once in a while. Perk you right up. They had another one, peanut butter pie with an Oreo crust.”

“If I’m going to start down that road, I might as well bake cupcakes.

I make pies the way they’re meant to be. I have to believe there’s still an audience for that. Now you’d better get this batch around to people.”

Mrs. Colley always handled the deliveries. She had certain people skills that Mrs. Pulliam, being an artist, lacked, and besides, she enjoyed getting out and about. She loaded the pies in their special baskets and set off in her old car, motoring carefully down the quiet streets. Tree shadow from the new leaves cast lace patterns on the pavement. There was a cloud at the edge of the beautiful day. For reasons of her own, or for no reason except temperament, Mrs. Pulliam might decide to end Pie of the Month. It no longer seemed to give her satisfaction to make pie for pie’s sake. Mrs. Colley wished she could get Mrs. Pulliam to see how sociable a pie really was, how it brought people together, gave them something to look forward to, talk about, share.

The first delivery stop was Jeffy Johnson. He was out watering his grass seed when Mrs. Colley pulled up. “Hi Jeffy, how are you today?”

“Wonderful and blessed, Mrs. C., wonderful and blessed.”

Jeffy always said that. There was a sense that you were meant to answer back, Hallelujah, but Mrs. Colley never could bring herself to do so. Jeffy was short and round-bottomed and cheerful. Like all the other black people in Hi Ho, he went to the A.M.E. church. He drove an Oldsmobile Cutlass with a license plate that read, PRAY MOR. He was a bachelor and the A.M.E. ladies were always trying to marry him off. Mrs. Colley thought that Jeffy enjoyed all the fuss and attention and would hold out as long as possible before he got himself a wife, and then he would say it was the Lord’s plan. Mrs. Colley attended the Lutheran church and would have called herself religious, although not to the point where she thought religion made any actual difference in the world.

Jeffy set the pie basket on the porch and said that strawberryrhubarb was his favorite pie. “Until you come along with next month’s, that is.” It was the joke he always made.

“Pray that there’s a next month, Jeffy, “ said Mrs. Colley, trying to make it come out humorous instead of small and quavering, as it did.

Jeffy clasped Mrs. Colley’s hands in his big brown ones and when he bowed his head she felt obliged to do likewise. When Jeffy raised up again and said Amen, Mrs. Colley felt embarrassed, as if she’d taken advantage.

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Jean Thompson The last stop on the pie route was always her daughter Margery’s, so that Mrs. Colley could visit with the grandbabies. Margery did not bake her own pies because she worked part-time, in addition to chasing after two kids whenever she was home and never having a minute to herself. Mrs. Colley tried not to pass judgment on any of this, or on the state of Margery’s house, which today as usual was at sixes and sevens. Cheerios floated in the kitchen sink. Every towel in the house seemed to have assembled on the bathroom floor. The television was on, although no one was watching it. The President was doing a commercial for the War. Ronnie and his little sister Crystal were playing chase. Ronnie had a potato peeler in his mouth and his arms spread out, airplane-style. He made rat-tat-tat noises as he tried to trap Crystal in a corner and dive bomb her. “Look, darlings, Grandma’s here! I brought you a strawberry-rhubarb pie!”

“I hate strawberry,” said Ronnie, talking around the potato peeler.

“I hate rhubarb,” Crystal chimed in, although she didn’t really and was just being cute.

Margery cleared a space for the pie on the kitchen counter, but didn’t go out of her way to act appreciative. Margery sometimes sneaked cigarettes. Mrs. Colley was not supposed to know about this but she did anyway. Margery still wore her red smock from work. She was a sales associate at SuperStuff. Margery said, “They cut back my hours again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ronnie, knock it off,” Margery called, but without energy. The thunder of feet kept shaking the house. “Yeah. I guess I should be glad, since it’s only the worst job in the world.”

Mrs. Colley watched as Margery took a number of items out of the freezer to start supper: a bag of Tater Tots, package of corn, fish filets stuck together in the shape of a brick. Mrs. Colley said, “I saw somewhere that fish can give you mercury poisoning.”

“Not if it’s frozen, I don’t think.”

They didn’t say anything else about the hours cutback, and after a while Mrs. Colley took herself home. It didn’t used to be that husband and wife both had to work to put food on the table. She and Mr. Colley had managed. But there had not been so many things to buy back then, and there hadn’t been a stock market, or there had been but it wasn’t full of crooks who sucked all the money out of the world overnight.

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Jean Thompson Mrs. Colley took a Rainbow pill and slept for nine and a half hours.

June was cherry pie month, one of Mrs. Colley’s favorites, even though cherry juice stained like the dickens. Mrs. Colley still got up on a stepladder and picked cherries from her own tree. There was nothing quite as pretty as a cherry tree, the sprays of red fruit against the green leaves. The birds were never happier than in cherry season. June was always good. June was fireflies and brides. Crops were planted and there had not yet been too much, or not enough, rain. School got out and children planned long campaigns of play.

Mrs. Colley and Mrs. Pulliam ran cherries through the handcranked cherry pitter, saving the juice to can later. Mrs. Colley used a plastic form to stamp out the lattice crusts, which was cheating, sort of, but couldn’t be helped. She knew her crust was not the equal of Mrs. Pulliam’s, although only a long-time subscriber might notice the difference. She flattered herself that she had a better flair for the fruit pies, a more generous hand with the fillings than Mrs. Pulliam. Her best cherry pies made you wish there was such a thing as a cherry pie tree.

The last few weeks she’d kept a close eye on Mrs. Pulliam, watching for signs of discontent. But Mrs. Pulliam pitted cherries and weighed out sugar and did her share of the chores without complaint. Just as Mrs. Colley was taking the last of the last batch of cherry pies out of the oven, Mrs. Pulliam said, out of nowhere, “Bobby called.”

Bobby was Mrs. Pulliam’s bad son in Chicago. He did not often call. Mrs. Colley, as she was meant to, kept her eyes on the pies as she asked, “Well, how’s Bobby?”

“He’s part of a group now.”

When Mrs. Pulliam didn’t say anything more helpful, Mrs. Colley was forced to ask what kind of group.

“It’s a No More War group.”

You might expect as much from long haired, pot-smoking Bobby, and Mrs. Colley was about to murmur something by way of consolation, when Mrs. Pulliam spoke again. “Bobby says we aren’t winning the War, we’re losing it.”

This was such an unexpected idea that Mrs. Colley had no response, only stood there with her hands in oven mitts. Mrs. Pulliam went on. “He says we keep having Wars just so everyone stays all stirred up and scared.”

“Now what possible reason would anyone have for wanting that?”

Mrs. Pulliam only shrugged and went back to balancing the month’s accounts.

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Jean Thompson The last week in June the meat packing plant fired all the Mexicans.

The government said it was not safe to have foreigners, people of unknown, undocumented backgrounds, motives and sympathies, at work in the sensitive area of food supply. Many of the Mexicans just disappeared. Overnight, it seemed, they were gone. They left behind cars, the children’s bicycles, food in kitchens, shoes in closets. It was hard to get new workers to replace them. The worst job in the world wasn’t at SuperStuff, in spite of what Margery said. Everyone knew the worst jobs were probably in the meat packing plant, in the slaughter room, or the hide room, or the rendering room. The Texas bank which had already bought up a lot of the farms took over the plant and cut back on the shifts.

Mrs. Colley found that she missed the Mexicans, the black-eyed babies, the snatches of Spanish radio on Main Street. Some people said they must have done something criminal, clearing out like that, but Mrs. Colley wondered if they weren’t just afraid. The Mexicans who remained behind were having a hard time making ends meet and the churches in Hi Ho organized a food drive for them. The Lutheran pastor, young Reverend Higgs, gave a sermon about charity and brotherhood and overcoming differences which made everybody feel better, since that was exactly what they’d done. Summer baseball leagues started up.

There was a bank robbery in Des Moines and Mrs. Colley was terribly worried about her son John, who worked in a bank, until she reached him on the phone and found out it was a different bank. The War was said to be winding down, although things still blew up now and then.

For whole days at a time you could almost forget there was a War going on; there was too much else to crowd it out. But the War was like a pie in the oven, something nagging you, a task left unfinished.

July was for blueberry pies. Blueberries were grown in cool places, and when you sifted through the fruit, washing and straining and picking out stems, you thought of pine trees, of gray, chill lakes and seagulls. Blueberry was the easiest of the fruit pies, nothing to pit or peel, and that was a mercy. July was always so blamed hot. The sun rode the sky all day long. There was no rain (the drought had been going on almost as long as the Wars), except for those times when a black storm swept in and sent forks of lightning and crop-shredding hail.

There was a Fourth of July parade, with the fire truck going five miles an hour and running its siren, the high school band, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (by which was meant, the old-fashioned Wars which were already in the history books), marching in formation, and some 166 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jean Thompson convertibles donated by a car dealership. Mrs. Pulliam got her hands on a quantity of nearly flawless blackberries and donated a dozen pies to the Freedom Celebration picnic. When you cut into the pies each blackberry was still perfectly shaped, glistening with grains of undissolved sugar.

No one had ever seen or tasted anything like them.

Mrs. Pulliam stood beneath the awning that covered the picnic tables, accepting compliments. Mrs. Colley was pleased to see her friend getting the recognition that she deserved, pleased also that Mrs. Pulliam seemed to be enjoying herself, after a fashion. She had even dressed up a little, for her, in a new red and white blouse that seemed more cheerful than Mrs. Pulliam herself. For there was a kind of formality, even aloofness, to Mrs. Pulliam as she acknowledged people’s thank-yous, and that was to be expected. There was for every artist the awful moment when they stepped out from behind their splendid creation and revealed the meager, human-sized self that was bound to disappoint by comparison. People filled their mouths with sweet corn and potato salad and fried chicken and pie, pie, pie. The excellence of the food was some consolation for the fireworks show, which everyone agreed was not as good as last year’s.

In mid-July it was announced the SuperStuff would be closing.

The national chains were all cutting their losses, tightening their belts.

The store hired a number of the Mexicans to stand on street corners with red, white, and blue signs that said, Everything Must Go! Prices were reduced by twenty, then thirty, then forty percent and more. For a time the SuperStuff’s parking lot was jam-packed and they did more business in a weekend than they might have in a month. Mrs. Colley stocked up on those items of apparel which a lady of her age and size required. People wandered the aisles. There was a pleasant sense that everything in the store was available for the taking, for free or very nearly free. Everyone in Hi Ho had new dish towels and sheet sets and garden hoses and CD players and fishing poles and generators, and then the store was shut for good.

Margery found work a few hours a week at the dry cleaners, running clothes through the machines that tumbled them and took out spots and gave them that dry cleaning smell. A while back there had been some kind of alarm about dry cleaning, about the chemicals used, but then it was determined that exposure was within acceptable limits. Mrs. Colley babysat Ronnie and Crystal to help out. Ronnie said he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up. Crystal said she wanted to be a television lady. There was a scare about eating beef, something that had Crab Orchard Review

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Jean Thompson nothing to do with the Mexicans, and just like that you couldn’t give beef away. Everyone knew the scare would wear off sooner or later but before it could, the Texas bank closed the meat packing plant and hauled all the equipment down to Texas or who knows where and padlocked the gates. Most of the local farmers had long since sold off their cattle because of the drought, but still it was a blow. For a time there was talk that the state might build one of its new prisons in the county and bring back some jobs, but nothing ever came of it.

You wanted so badly to believe that life was basically good, that people were basically good. And Mrs. Colley did believe it. She might not go around announcing that she was wonderful and blessed, but she reminded herself often that there were many terrible places she could have been born into but had not. Nothing abnormally bad had ever happened to her personally or was likely to happen except for, eventually, dying, oh well. But nowadays there was so little you could trust to stay good, as if there was a pinhole at the bottom of the world, and all the best things were leaking out of it.

In August, everyone’s water bills doubled. It came out that the water utility had been bought up by a company in Belgium, Belgium!

Most people in Hi Ho were unaware that you could do such a thing as sell the water, and it was unclear why anyone in Belgium should own a lot of the water in Iowa. It was some consolation that Belgium was not one of the hot countries; when people looked it up on maps, it was right up there with normal nations like France and Germany. The new Belgian water company said the increased bills reflected higher costs for security, that it was now necessary to guard against the possibility of the water supply being blown up or poisoned. That was odd, since the workers at the filtration plant still kept the side gate wide open in summer. That way they could leave their cars in the shade of the adjoining park, and take their lunch coolers out there at break time.

“Bobby says it isn’t really countries that fight Wars now. It’s corporations. The corporations are bigger than the countries.”

“I just can’t keep up with all of Bobby’s ideas,” said Mrs. Colley, which she hoped was a tactful way of saying she was tired of hearing about them. Bobby and Mrs. Pulliam talked a lot these days, and after every conversation Mrs. Pulliam offered up some new, outlandish opinion.

“Bobby says everything’s global now. Things that happen on the other side of the world, even small things, affect everyone else. He says we are a global village.”

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Jean Thompson “Well that sounds nice,” said Mrs. Colley, still trying to be agreeable. “I think I would like to live there.”

Mrs. Pulliam shook her head darkly. “The news we see these days isn’t the real news,” she began. Fortunately the oven timer went off just then.

They were in the middle of the August peach pies. Peach pies were murder. The fruit had to be perfect, firm enough to handle but ripe enough to juice up. The skins almost never came off easy, and by the time you dug the pits out, you threw away more than you saved. August was murder. Ponds turned green and stagnant, the ground dried and split into thirsty cracks. Only the air was humid, like breathing through blankets. When Mrs. Colley and Mrs. Pulliam baked peach pies they didn’t even try to run the a.c., just set up big fans to blow the heat away. It was a lot of effort, but a good peach pie was a triumph.

Mrs. Pulliam always cut smiling sun faces into the top crusts, because the pies had the sun in them, that was what you tasted, everything yellow and ripe.

When they’d finished the last of the pies and done the washing up and put everything away, they sat on Mrs. Colley’s screened-in porch to let the house cool down. It was nighttime. A haze of heat blurred the stars. The fireflies were mostly gone by August, but here and there one set up a faint, greenish spark. Cicadas and mosquitoes bumped against the screens. Mrs. Colley had put sprigs of mint in the iced tea and they let the ice melt a little so it was good and cold. If you raised your eyes beyond the lights of town you saw, or imagined you saw, the outline of the grass-covered hills that had been there, exactly the same, for a thousand thousand years.

“What’s got into you lately?” Mrs. Colley heard herself saying. It just popped out.

She held her breath.

Mrs. Pulliam was silent for a moment, then she said, “I think I may have gone about as far as it’s possible to go with pie.”

“I don’t understand. Going farther? Why do you have to go anywhere at all?”

“Maybe the world makes you restless. Maybe you just get older, and wonder if you should have lived a different life. A bigger life.”

Mrs. Colley thought that all the things she loved were small. They were all close by; she could practically reach out and touch them. She muddled her words trying to explain that this was not a bad thing.

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Jean Thompson somewhere, and this is as good a place as any for it. Besides, you talk like life was already over and done with.” Although even as she spoke she had a sense that so many things, if not over and done with, had long since been determined for her.

In the darkness Mrs. Pulliam turned towards her and gave her a look, although the look itself was invisible. “I expect you’re right. Now I’d best be getting home. This heat! You could wring out the air like a dishrag.”

At the end of August, the President said the War was over, and there was general public satisfaction at a job well done. But the very next week there was a new War, or rather, a return to one of the old Wars already won. It was breaking out again, like a rash, and once more there were flags and headlines and airships named after birds of prey. The following Sunday the Lutheran pastor, young Reverend Higgs, climbed up to the pulpit made of varnished blond oak and preached a sermon whose text was, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The Lutheran congregation sat as if they had been given orders not to flinch. Sunlight poured through the stained glass window depicting Jesus the Shepherd of His Flock. Oblongs and lozenges of red, violet, gold and green moved imperceptibly across the blond oak floorboards.

There was a vague sense that someone might come to arrest them all on the spot. When Reverend Higgs finished his sermon and the benediction and the organist played the first chords of the recessional, there were people who went out the exits without staying to greet and visit. There were others who filed out and shook hands with the pastor without knowing what to say.

Mrs. Colley was one of these. Reverend Higgs looked pale and exhausted and noble, like Jesus, “Oh Pastor,” she began. Foolish tears brimmed in her eyes. A great confusion of words was welling up in her, but she only said again, “Oh Pastor.” The crowd behind her inched reluctantly forward, as if in line for vaccinations. Reverend Higgs murmured a blessing, and Mrs. Colley let her hand drop.

That night she felt unwell. She slept fitfully, and had extraordinary and disturbing dreams. There was a rainbow in the sky that drifted closer and closer until you saw that it was really poison fumes in lurid, neon colors. Margery took packages of frozen sperm out of the freezer for supper. Mr. Colley appeared, dressed in the coveralls and straw hat he always wore for gardening, asking her where she put the. The. She couldn’t make out what he wanted because it was a small thing on the 170 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jean Thompson other side of the world. Mrs. Colley woke up with a fever and chills and a sore head and called Margery to take her to the doctor’s.

The doctor said there was a lot of this going around lately and gave Mrs. Colley some new prescriptions and told her to stay in bed.

Mrs. Colley dozed with her windowblinds closed against the heat and the air conditioner whispering to her. Margery fixed her meals of toast and fruit Jell-O, though she didn’t have much appetite and was content to sleep. The doctor said there was a lot of War sickness going around lately. Now wasn’t that silly. She knew she was dreaming. The cool sheets lulled her, the air conditioner whispered. By the time Mrs. Colley felt well enough to get out of bed and open her blinds, it was already September and the yellow heat had dropped out of the sky.

“I’m still weak as a kitten,” she fretted to Mrs. Pulliam over the phone. “I’ve never been so useless in all my days.”

“Then there’s no point in you even leaving the house. Make yourself sick all over again.”

“But the apple pies!”

September was apple. A for apple in the children’s schoolbooks.

Red apple barns and wagons, the promise of fall. Apple pie being what it was, there were people who doubled their September orders. Apple was the queen of pies. A baker’s reputation rose or fell on it.

“I’ll manage fine,” said Mrs. Pulliam. “The last thing I need is you getting your old germs all over the place.”

“I don’t have germs any more, don’t be rude.”

“Or falling face down into the flour bin. I’m not going to argue with you.”

“I’ve got the rest of the week to get my strength back,” said Mrs. Colley stubbornly.

But when baking day came around she wasn’t much better, still short of breath and unsteady on her feet. “I can still do the deliveries,” she told Mrs. Pulliam when she called. In the background she heard water running, pans clashing like cymbals.

“Get Margery to help you. I’ll leave some money for her trouble.”

“Leave? Where are you going to be?”

“I’m going to visit Bobby.” There was a whirring, grinding sound that Mrs. Colley knew was the device that took off apple peel in a long thin spiral, cored and cut the fruit into slices. “Don’t worry, the pies will be ready.”

“You’re going to Chicago?” The enormity of this was enough to make Mrs. Colley wonder if she was having another fever dream, as if Crab Orchard Review

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Jean Thompson her sickness had loosened the top of her head like a box lid and now strange things were always falling in and out. “For how long?”

“For a spell. If a grown woman can’t take herself on an occasional trip, then I don’t know what. Now shoo, I have work to do.”

“What is it you aren’t telling me? What don’t I know?”

The clatter in the background stopped. “You already know everything you need to. Now you just have to let yourself believe it,” said Mrs. Pulliam, and then she hung up.

Mrs. Colley woke early and drove herself to Mrs. Pulliam’s house.

It seemed like a long time since she had been outside, and the season had changed. There were dew-covered spiderwebs in the long grass.

She noted here and there an early tree, ash or elm, getting ready to turn. The sky was still pink from sunrise. Far overhead a plane pulled a line of silver from east to west. You knew these things because you saw them. Wasn’t seeing believing?

When she parked the car in Mrs. Pulliam’s driveway, a cinnamon wind enveloped her, wafting from every chink and window. The back door was open. Two pieces of knowledge registered with Mrs. Colley at the same time: that the house was full of pies, and that Mrs. Pulliam was gone, like the Mexicans.

Or not really like the Mexicans, since everything was scrubbed and ordered and cleared away. There were bags of clothes with labels directing them to the Goodwill, tags on furniture, boxes of household goods stacked in the laundry room. And everywhere there were pies.

On the kitchen table, lined up on the counters. The cupboard doors were open to make space for pies. The dining room table and every chair, the bookshelves and dressers. The mattress was covered in a thin, clean sheet, and two dozen pies were set out on it. There were even pies in the bathtub, wrapped up in plastic. And on every top crust words had been cut out, one hundred, two hundred times, pie after pie after pie: NO MORE WAR Mrs. Colley both knew and believed that if she counted, there would be a pie for every household in Hi Ho. On the kitchen table was an envelope filled with money, all the proceeds from this year’s subscriptions. The pies on the table were still warm. Mrs. Pulliam must have left only minutes before.

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Jean Thompson cradled the pie in her lap as if it were a living thing, a bird or a lamb or a child. In a little while she would call Margery and they would begin their chores. Mrs. Colley would take baskets of pie to the trailer court and ask the Mexicans how you said it in Spanish, NO MORE WAR. All over town, people would be eating apple pie, swallowing the words down, NO MORE WAR, and they would put it on the license plates of their cars, and pastors would spell it out on the brick-framed billboards in front of churches, it would deck the marquee of the old Cinema, NO MORE WAR. Farmers bringing in their crops would carve the words into the earth with tractors so that the President himself, aloft in the great sleek airship that signiďŹ ed the power and swiftness of eagles, could look down and read it in the green Iowa hills, NO MORE WAR. And in this way a small thing might become a big thing, easy as pie.

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Raymond Luczak E-Signature on Bill Clinton’s signing the Electronics Signatures Act on 30 June 2000 I have showered tonight. I am tingly dry.

Bedsheets have been changed. Pillows are fluffed.

All this fresh smell sighs forth a tender bomb of kisses ready to explode in a collapse the second I mouse my nakedness into the snug click of your arms never there.

I am an anonymous e-mail, forever unsent because you might trace my IP numbers.

I am a total failure in the forgery of love.

My emoticons have taken years to perfect.

Please highlight my blank face with a kiss from a definite address. For you I would travel miles from mailbox into your hands ready to print out the letter of my heart about to shred to a thousand torn pieces.

Your hands ignore me like badly-spelled spam.

The stiff bedsheets yield to my aching bones.

You will never know how sore my Ethernet is.

In my dreams I webcam what I cannot.

Nights alone have no reply-to address.

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Raymond Luczak

MP3 Apple introduces the first iPod on 23 October 2001 Stoke the fire of my words into a puff of smoke slithering into the dark unknowns beyond the cochleas into the polished canals deep into the halves of gray matter where spongy earbuds clap together like fingers snapping on automatic pilot to reverb a few decibels louder than bombs, DJ’ing from one twitchy turntable of doubt to the next kiss until the morning after filled with at least 5,000 choices of how to play awkwardness with a hapless smile.

Clichés become another menu option.

Who knew there could be so many?

My soul is compressed but I listen pure with my heart a quick scroll wheel away from skipping the song we never sang.

Nothing but sad love songs coos into the whiteness bleeding out of my ears.

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Susan Ludvigson September 7, 2004, Rock Hill, SC Dear Sharon, Frances is tossing so much rain on us this oddly bright and drifting day, if I had Stevens’s jar, ran out into the storm and placed it in the middle of our yard, it would disappear in silver falling like millions of stars, all the while filling, becoming the center of something, but itself invisible. It’s the way I feel, lying on the sofa, again a child, words pouring in, every surrounding thing become oblivion. I was the center, yes, and whatever had been wilderness withdrew.

While tornadoes taunt two towns nearby, the drum of my dryer turns, tumbling rugs, a kind of bass behind the soft dream roll of the rain. Even the tennis my husband watches across the hall and the dogs swirling around the room become part of a tuneful murmur.

What was I reading when I began this musing?

Albert’s essay in Planet on the Table, his talk of the irresistible need to take in everything, devour as much as we can, more than we’re able.

The way that hunger defines us, the bliss of books we stable in our houses until the houses overfill like jars of water, spill like every kind of desire.

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Susan Ludvigson

October 25, 2004 Dear Sharon, I’m happy to report I’m still here, where a cold wind today rearranges patterns of leaves on the terrace.

Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have taken bets, so sick I couldn’t get up from the bathroom floor.

A paramedic took my blood pressure as I lay against the tub, then stood me up, arms propped under mine like poles, and took it again.

Bottomed out, he said, and loaded me into the ambulance. Some hours later I came home, slept two days straight, slept most of the week, in fact.

Now Scott has a melanoma— not dangerous, the dermatologist and the plastic surgeon claim— but yes, a melanoma, the shape of a dark pond on his face.

After many basal cells he’s not surprised, though it’s the word he’s always feared. A surface kind, they say. Surgery next week.

For a couple of days he’ll have a hole in his cheek, until the report comes back, letting them know whether the perimeter needs to be wider.

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Susan Ludvigson on the interstate, beckons from the mirror. And yet, as we skate on the melting ice of the past, I still canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite believe in our total absence from the world, and so, despite the evidence, glide on, believing, for the moment, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re safe.

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Peter Marcus S-21 Inside every renovated cell: shackles, rusted bedsprings, an automotive battery to administer shock. I follow a tour group of young Scandinavians through the rooms of the former elementary school. Each teen is adorned with at least one piercing: eyebrow, chin, or tongue. One guy displays a bicep with a dragon spewing fire. His girlfriend has a tiny python slithering around her wrist. Needles and blood enjoyed by choice, but who can blame anyone for wanting to serve as a billboard for heroism and rebirth. Prisoners were often burnt with tips of lit Marlboros or drowned in a cauldron used to cook pho.

The horror felt by others isn’t easy to assess nor the hardships of backpack-laden youth who pride themselves on prudent travel.

Rows and rows of snapshots are taped onto the walls of those who perished. The Khmer Rouge kept excellent records.

Outside Tuol Sleng, along the dust-choked street, a vendor stands beneath his colorful umbrella with soft drinks, fruit, and bottled water.

One tourist haggles heatedly to save himself eleven cents.

History is written like this: tears attached to faces, tears attached to names, though market stalls not far from here are ripened green with life: spring onions, lettuce, bean sprouts, lacquered chilies, bok choy.

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Peter Marcus

Easter 1997 Aroma of warm tortillas outside Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Holy trinkets for sale at the kiosk: plastic Virgins and pewter crosses tying Christ to rearview mirrors.

Little girls in strollers, dressed as snow-white princesses, wheeled past mauve petunias in ground-floor window boxes.

Outside Port Authority, a teenage mother in carmine heels and skin-tight jeans pauses as her daughter waves to drowsy rows of silhouettes arriving here on Greyhound buses. Widening days, this lavish light. First Tupac, now Biggie—it makes no sense. All the hopeful hymns have finished while every prayer I never said is the image of a fragrant lily my mind sought to become. Chocolate rabbits wrapped in pretty tin, watches guaranteed for life strapped to vendors’ wrists from Abidjan and Port-au-Prince. Sunlight wedged in blockish shadows on worn façades on Washington where couples stroll with shopping bags and wistful sway of those in love. Though it’s Sunday and the meatpackers are shut, that faint, yet mortal scent of butchering.

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Frank Matagrano Trying to Channel Charles V spoke Spanish to the Lord, Italian to women, French to men, and, to his horses, German. I kind of speak English. I mean, I can tell you which words are in heavy rotation this month, which ones have been carried like pocket change for the last decade, and I can rattle through the few I learned from the Tribune, like obduracy, a ferocity that describes the fight between those who want war to stop and those who encourage the hunt, or arbusto, from the Spanish meaning “shrub,” name of the failed oil company that haunted a President before his re-election campaign, the greatest show on earth said a magazine I skimmed while waiting for the doctor to finish feeling my wife’s breasts for a lump. He found nothing, which didn’t stop me that winter from spreading salt on the drive, trying to shake the fear of my life changing, singing as if alone with a radio that played a cover of a song your father heard when he was your age.

There will be another forty-five minutes of non-stop rock after this commercial break.

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Frank Matagrano in gates, like the one that stopped my neighbor’s dog from going after meat in the shape of my wife, or the guard at O’Hare who asked her to step aside and take off her shoes. In a fit of merlot, she once swore that spirits send messages through television.

And I tried to channel the Spanish monarch during a special on Hugo Chavez, but couldn’t hear a single word over a thousand protesters marching through Caracas to demand a new election. A city crammed with people calling for the immediate return of democracy, and all I wanted to hear was how to make love in two languages: one to whisper sweet things, the other to moan God’s name.

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Jeffrey McDaniel Heavy Breather Zoo Whatever happened to the heavy breather?

Technology—*69, caller ID—rendered his kink obsolete. He is the 8-track of deviants. He tried the internet but in the naughty housewives chat room his obscene instant messages seemed perfectly normal, tame even, which was damn near a death blow.

Should we gather up the last few still out there, breathing all heavy in the wild? Before extinction, should we place a few in a special zoo, with special cages, complete with rotary phones, non-descript furniture, crumpled-up sandwich wrappers to re-create the natural habitat?

Perhaps a plaque that reads: here sits the heavy breather. He used to call unsuspecting housewives in the afternoon, turn his breath into a fog machine.

He lived for that first intake of air, the gasp that escaped her mouth like a weather balloon as his fog traveled through her.

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Shannon Marquez McGuire Amusing Ourselves to Death When in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

—Neil Postman Where are you this fall, Neil Postman?

How does it feel to be a prophet? Do you watch CNN? Oprah is this month’s hero; she gave away free cars.

Mudslides necessitate mass graves again, in Haiti.

Here, there are more billionaires this year.

A prostitute is being sued for spreading AIDS. In Fallujah: air strikes, car bombs, harried faces. No reports of buried babies. Genocide again: this time, Sudan.

Where are you this fall, Neil Postman?

Soft porn, soft Pravda. Do we seem amused?

Tear gas was used (note passive voice) to distribute mercy food. Two fraternity brothers who went to Yale say matching, vague, unpleasant words of one another.

In hurricanes, we are up to the letter “J.” It’s just September. Young reporters “even” let themselves be blown away to show off the latest Gore-tex rain gear.

Where are you this fall, Neil Postman?

How much does it hurt to say you always knew?

One city fights the Feds to access meds from Canada.

Yesterday, a full minute of CNN with perky expert went to planning theme parties for our beloved dogs.

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Shannon Marquez McGuire “Decapitate”: this week’s third-grade spelling demon.

Last week, a student said to me his generation had to be the best informed, for they grew up on CNN. Where are you now, Neil Postman? Bury us now, Neil Postman. Surely we’ve amused ourselves to death.

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Erika Meitner Instructions for Vigilant Girls Be the sleeping sister who sees no one.

Stay tucked in. Later, hand over a list of suspects: the handyman, the bachelor neighbor, the uncle who was never really your uncle.

When there are conversations, take notes in your secret diary: She said she saw him look at things.

Wear the key in your hair. No one will search there. Speak on behalf of the soon-to-be-missing, but if they play in the woods near your home, do not trail them to an encounter with the man in the conversion van who gently insists you hunt for his puppy and means you no harm through his pleated pockets ďŹ lled with stars and balloons, real pieces of the moon. Resist. Try not to lick anything.

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Erika Meitner you are found veiled in a strip-mall basement, throat unfurling with threats and questions.

Note: The line “she said she saw him look at things” was taken from an ABC News article entitled “A Cry in the Night” (published online, October 23, 2003) about the Elizabeth Smart abduction.

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Erika Meitner

Electric Girls Translucent letters scatter across the sky in an air show for tourists: ladies’ night with two-dollar drafts down the beach— a gluttonous ad for the stutter of summer lust or a general message from the deities?

Maybe Mithra, the god of light, tied to the sun; maybe Hathor, the Egyptian protector of everything feminine.

This is missing girl season. Two more disappear at gunpoint from cars in Quartz Hill, boyfriends left intact, bound with duct tape, still parked in lover’s lane.

After Amber Alerts flash on every California freeway, the girls are found by sheriff’s deputies, who shoot Roy Dean Ratliff on a desolate stretch of road where he had driven to kill and bury them.

Newscasters first reported the girls were abducted, but escaped unhurt. Papers nationwide printed their names until authorities discovered they were raped and their identities are immediately erased, changed to “two teenage girls” or “the victims.”

In the nineteenth century, girls in whose presence certain phenomena occurred—the movement of objects without contact, or at a brush from a petticoat: a compass needle’s tremor, the agitation of a cold wind— were called Electric Girls, could distinguish between the poles of a magnet at a touch.

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Erika Meitner The most famous was a Normandy peasant, Angèlique Cottin.

Taken to Paris, she was placed under the observation of doctors and others who testified to her authenticity.

Still a commission appointed by the Academy of Sciences observed nothing but violent movements of her chair, probably caused, they decided, by muscular force— a testament to her strength, these stories like the skywriter’s letters, forgotten, abstracting into loops and dots around the sun.

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Erika Meitner

Campaign Speech There are those who say we are up all night with the highway on. There are those who say we are peripatetic as every red planet in orbit.

But summer is always barefoot and adhesive, then wanders off in the most unattractive flip flops. Slip-slap. With something jammed between our toes like that, it’s hard to feel inviolate.

There are those who say the Good News Gospel must be spread in schools. There are those who say this country is in the autumn of its time. But each and every one of us already learned in early grades to wind our breath through mangled versions of pilgrims’ feet and Mary tunes on the recorder, no matter how many times we had to stop and suck our inhalers, yellow as caution tape.

There are those who say accidents like the Pinto are unavoidable. There are those who say we have lost our pride, and quality is no longer a way of life.

But after midnight, the radio plays a steady ocean of mariachi music and sad almost-cowboy songs.

After midnight our ministering angels do what they want, whisper Ticonderoga pencil, certain poppies, or summer squash to each head on the pillow of morning, each mouth slack with sleep. Nothing can travel faster than light.

What are we going to do about it?

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Joseph Millar Georgia on My Mind Like a low-rent version of Frank O’Hara I’m stranded here at the checkout stand when I see the headline “Ray Charles Is Dying” though I’m not buying French cigarettes or cigars or a bottle of Strega— whatever that is.

No flower stalls or Mediterranean kiosks line the streets of this dim neighborhood, only a twenty-four-hour Albertsons where I wait, more alone than before with my lunch meat and discount cereal, my peanuts and Diet Coke.

He looks wasted, yellow, eaten away, draped in a silver gabardine suit, the angel of death leaning over him: “Alien Trapped in a Kansas Silo” on the cover of the tabloid Globe, America’s nightbound genius musician, who kicked heroin in ’65 drinking coffee with sugar and Bols gin, who played organ, piano, alto sax and could write a complete orchestral arrangement

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Joseph Millar each tempo and chord change, each single note entirely in his head.

The world’s greatest male jazz singer (I’m sorry, Joe Williams, who collapsed on the street after walking away from a Vegas hospital, and Mel Torme with dimes on your eyes in a Los Angeles funeral home…)

Angel, my hands are dirty too, but I don’t want to die alone like this with my breath of old torch songs, forgotten blues: Cry Me a River, Losin’ Hand, other arms reach out to me in a hotel near the train station watching the rain come down.

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Jonathan Moody In the Absence of Sleep Scott parks an amphibious Caravan in the middle of the street, climbs toward the back near bean bags & used poetry books.

“Moody, I’ve got a surprise,” he says flipping through his notepad. “Remember that Larry Levis tape I told you about?

Hoagland has it stashed away at his old house.” We walk down Biddle; the shadow of my drunken swagger falls on nothing in particular. But this is okay because I don’t believe in omens. I believe in Larry Levis. And if he were alive he’d say something like, “No matter how hard I listen, the wind speaks one syllable.” The snow’s elegy showers over an audience of bare branches while Scott & I stand on the porch lifting the tops off Tupperware. Nothing but Magic Markers & sea lion skulls. “What the…”

“Moody, you’ve found the tape? Have you fuckin’ found the tape?” “No, but if I drilled a hole in this green flower vase I could use it for a bong.” A man inches out of the house next door holding his cordless phone like a glock. “So, what are you guys doing?”

“My teacher left me a poetry tape outside this building,” Scott says. “No teacher lives there anymore.” “I know, I know.

I’m sorry.” Scott’s not sorry. Neither am I. So badly do we want this stranger to run his fingers over the pages of Wrecking Crew like Braille. But there’s a wall of ice separating us from him. He doesn’t fathom Crab Orchard Review

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Jonathan Moody why we’re out here at three o’clock in the morning trying to climb on top of an abandoned house, risking our lives hoping to find at least a cracked cassette glinting somewhere in the gutter.

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Carolyn Moore Persephone and Demeter in Ethiopia Myth is instructed by history.

—Eavan Boland The caption says it’s spring along the banks of the Ogaden. Spring and drought. The photo shows us all along we’ve had it wrong: the daughter coaxed her mother out of hell, not the other way around. See how it’s the old one who hangs back? How she fights the girl’s insistent tug on her shawl? See how the mother’s sandaled foot harrows the dust?

How the shadow planted by her toe takes root to fix her there and all her muscles strain to resist the pull of a daughter bent on change and rain? The photograph forgives. Its female objects, stark with beauty, come to us in the dry spell before the dinner hour to pardon ice cubes bickering over refills, over who should shoulder this burden of thirst.

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Sandy Huss

Trading Spaces: The Intersection of Reality TV, the WWW, the Meat and Brick & Mortar Casinos in the Late Age of Print Like eighty million other Americans, you’ve become a poker

junkie. Thanks to almost nonstop airings and re-airings of World Poker Tour events on The Travel Channel, you’ve been a fly on the wall as legends like Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, T.J. Cloutier and Johnny Chan pretend to be strong when they’re weak, weak when they’re strong. You’ve been privy to the hole cards of the next generation: Howard Lederer (The Professor), Phil Ivey (The Tiger Woods of Poker), Phil Hellmuth (The Crybaby), and Gus Hansen (The Great Dane). You’ve cheered on the women—Annie Duke, Jennifer Harman, Clonie Gowen, and Evelyn Ng—as they’ve stuck it (sans benefit of snappy nicknames)—to the men.

And you’ve watched the upstarts in their early twenties, who’ve cut their poker teeth almost entirely online, unnerve all the rest. Two years ago, you might have been a bit foggy on the ranking of the hands, oblivious to the protocol of blinds large and small, but the review reiterated at the start of each televised broadcast, the analysis of every hand by Mike Sexton (European Poker Champion) and Vince Van Patten (King of Hollywood Home Games), the dozen poker books you’ve read and reread (purchased with an Amazon.com gift certificate from indulgent friends), and your own almost daily online play have seared the basics— and even some of the niceties—into your brain.

This table’s felt is still velvety plush; its leather bumper—as yet uncracked by years of leaning forearms and pounding fists—gleams.

In front of you, beneath a $500 tournament chip, rests a pair of jacks: you’re on the button, the flop has come J8A rainbow, you’ve modestly (seductively) raised, and the small blind replied by going all in. Since he’s the short stack, you’re feeling almost irrepressible glee: odds are, if he—to whom you’ve taken a dislike because of his kissing up to the local luminaries who love to school you on your play—had anything

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Sandy Huss but a naked ace, he’d have raised pre-flop. At best, he might be holding the dead man’s hand, but even if that’s true, for the moment you’ve got him soundly beat with your set. Everybody else has folded—one after a bit of dawdling (another of the aces, you hope, perhaps K10 or KQ)—so you call.

You’re no stranger to the casino, nor to tournament play. You and Gambling Buddy have been making the two-hour drive to The Silver Star in Philadelphia, Mississippi, once a month for nearly five years, long before No Limit Texas Hold’Em (The Cadillac of Poker) registered on your radar, and a couple of years before the free-standing casino was subsumed by The Pearl River Resort and became part of the newly incorporated town, Choctaw. Replete with a golf course, a Hard Rock Café on a virtual beach, a water park, a museum selling Native American handicrafts, concert venues, restaurants, two casinos, two hotels (with a total of 1100 rooms) and an ice-cream parlor, the resort is part of the growing Casino Archipelago—a term coined by David G. Schwartz in Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond—a phenomenon that is returning the once tidilyremoved and -confined temptations of Sin City to nearly everybody’s neighborhood. After a few months of these routine visits, it became clear that to offset Gambling Buddy’s slot machine losses—that is, to finance a potentially huge slot machine win!—you were going to have to narrow the gap on the house odds: blackjack became your game.

He leaps to his feet and slaps down his cards, revealing not quite the lonely ace you had bet on, but nothing as problematic as A8: a lousy A10o. You’re not out of the woods, but he’d have to catch what you hope is the case ace or a queen and a king to beat you. Already gold, your cards are potentially titanium! You, however, are the only one who, for just a few more seconds, knows what good shape you’re in. A ripple of smug satisfaction circles the table as the small blind’s friends prepare to see the outsider—a woman (and a gray-haired woman at that)—take one upside the head. Now they’re figuring you for the naked ace or a draw: their collective hardeeharharhar is palpable. But as Vince Van Patten would say, show tunes are going off in your head.

You let him—and them—continue to twitch. Not so long, a few seconds at most, but time in these situations seems to expand in direct proportion to the adrenaline dump. Which is considerable, a fact that surprises and amuses you still. Playing cards for money has brought you to your body in an entirely new way. Blackjack produces such moments at comparatively lightning speed, so even though you’re of Crab Orchard Review

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Sandy Huss an age that means your decorous girlhood was rarely spent mano a mano, you’ve made up for lost time. Your first blackjack tournament was one long reverb: you could barely see the cards or delineate one funky tourney chip from another, much less count your opponents’ stacks. Little kernels of wisdom—old saws, really, but news then to you—from a last-minute e-mail correspondence with your mentor, MidniteGambler, whom you’d met on the hitorstand.net message board, were all that kept you in the game. A chip and a chair—if you’ve got that, you can still win.

You’ve discovered that you need neither the chip—at least not a casino chip—nor the chair. Just as you’ve never met Midnite in the flesh, but nonetheless know that he’d mourn the passing of yours (at least briefly, were he ever to learn of it), you’ve found that the earringing rush of a big heads-up battle can be generated with a single click of your pointing device. As you write this, 6,731 of the five million Americans with Internet casino accounts are playing poker at your favorite site. Clicking through the rosters of tables, you see players—and playing styles—you go up against at your limit level every day. $2Me4Me$ (solid, predictable), Qwertyuiop (more imaginative than the handle suggests), poor old Capoh (hapless, an easy mark), and ImaPigon (if Ima’s still in a hand and there’s a possible flush on the board, watch out). At the lowest limit tables, you see that some of the staunch retainers you came to know as a newbie are still plying their trade: Miriam40 and Gladyis, each of them playing several tables at once, never contributing a word to the ubiquitous player chat of the lowest levels, methodically picking off the Gus Hansen wannabes with solid, by-the-book strategy. You take their names at face value (although that spelling of Gladyis is wonky enough to be a con), and imagine them housebound in their dotage—but multitasking with the best of them—knitting, scrapbooking, talking on the phone, simultaneously raking in enough cash to buy more yarn, more paste, more minutes—good anytime, anywhere.

Ironically, it crosses your mind that Small Blind with his A10o is a person of just as much dimension as Miriam40 or MidniteGambler.

And that he, here, in this brick and mortar casino, is theoretically much more at home than you. He’s been playing $3–$6 Texas Hold’Em at least once a week for the ten years The Silver Star’s been open, since the Poker Room was virtually a geriatric daycare center with four well-worn tables, free hotdogs and coffee, and enough open space to accommodate a heap of the regulars’ sweatshirts, battery-operated fans (to divert 198 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sandy Huss other players’ cigar and cigarette smoke), jugs of Tums, and cushions for their bony behinds. It’s a miracle, really, that the joint hasn’t long since been overwhelmed by the much-more-profitable-to-the-casino slot machines. But here come the likes of you, turned on to the game

by TV, skills honed by thousands of hands of Internet competition, and suddenly there are nine tables, smoking is permitted only on the perimeter, and the heap of community comforts is nowhere to be seen.

At least the hotdogs and coffee are still free. You see loser written all over him, from his button-down shirt with methodically folded cuffs, to his always slightly ducked head and lined brow. You see that his fawning obsequiousness to the local top guns is, pathetically, heartfelt. He is one of the Poker Room’s pets, someone the better players loot regularly, but for whom they hold long-standing affection, not just because he so dutifully gives them their “props” and swells their bankrolls: they went to school with him, or with his brother, or with his cousin Beau; his daddy sold their daddies their gas. You feel for the guy, but to stand any chance of beating them, you’re going to have to beat him right here and now. You turn over your jacks.

You have your own website, so you guess that makes you a netizen, but you subscribe to no listservs, lurk and/or participate only in the hitorstand.net message board, pay only occasional attention to the name-brand bloggers, and rarely read the WWW’s equivalent of the slicks. Unless there’s a cataclysmic event like a hurricane, sure to produce many handsome images of chaos, you only access your New York Times account to download the crossword puzzle. For your social and intellectual life, you still rely in largest part on your flesh and bone friends (academicians almost to a person), on books (via Amazon. com, sure), and the several hours each day you spend watching TV. Many of your colleagues, even less digitally-attuned, consider you a computer guru, but you are so far from being a wonk that when they present you with a computing-type question, you typically point them in the direction of a student and imply that they’re wasting their time with you. True, one of the reasons you’re looking forward to retirement is that your colleagues display such a cavalier attitude toward the significance of computers to the act of writing, to their discipline, to the academy, to the whole neo-gothic brick and mortar pile of mold and mildew that is, for the vast majority of them, a primary abode. Given the pay scale for a professor in the humanities—and the fact that women ever got their feet in the academy’s door—you were once wont to predict that state schools such as yours were destined to Crab Orchard Review

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Sandy Huss become pink-collar industries, and that your old age would be spent toddling about campus with other biddies in hairnets teaching openadmissions kiddoes to read. These days you’ve more or less given up on predicting, but you do see the term distance learning to be a fairly intelligible form of writing on the wall.

It doesn’t get any better than this! is what Mike Sexton would be yelping, were he a color commentator on this hand. You stand, joining Small Blind, who’s stayed on his feet since revealing his hole cards, and—whoa!—everyone but the dealer is up too, knuckles denting the pristine leather rail, leaning in. You wonder if this behavior, the breathless leap to the feet, is a new phenomenon borne of the televised tournaments, or if these guys got so hot and bothered back in the day.

As the dealer arranges the opposing hole cards like quotation marks slightly above and to either side of the flop, the guy on your right starts jabbering in a way you are certain was influenced by the tube: a pair of aces with a 10 kicker against a set of jacks, jacks in the lead! Small Blind needs another ace or two running cards for a straight or his tournament is over. The race is on! You try to read the face of the guy who was so slow to fold his hand just moments ago when Small Blind went all in: did he toss an ace? Is there but one more in the deck? But you can’t tell, can’t focus, the excitement of the group has infected you. This is the moment that true gamblers live for, the moment when a casual wash of the cards and the mere gesture at a shuffle has meaning.

What got you to see your computer as something other than a glorified typewriter was the concept of hypertext. Which you feel as if you invented, although official credit for both the phenomenon and the term lies elsewhere. Windows 3.0, launched in 1990, was the beginning of everything for you: your first apprehension of the GUI, your first glimpse of the potentially vast virtual space within the screen. It wasn’t that you had anything against continuous narrative (an 800-page novel was your idea of fun), but the intimation that there was something else kept dogging you. Only after you had sketched out plans for a clickand-go-to-a-new-space kind of fiction (which you had no idea how to actually produce) did you discover that others had been working with HyperCard stacks for years. The order in which one read crots of text or viewed images could be programmed to respond to mouse clicks or left to the fates via an RNG (a Random Number Generator—the same sort of program that determines whether one’s coin hits the jackpot in a slot machine). People were sharing these stacks of text and image via something called the Internet, wherein they were also interacting in 200 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sandy Huss MUDs and MOOs and on listservs and bulletin boards. Meanwhile, you and your colleagues were still handing out syllabi reeking of ditto fluid and your first e-mail was years away.

The dealer’s job is to be virtually invisible, to keep the game going, to assure that the flow of chips into the main pot is accurate (and to similarly manage any side pots), to have the final say, should such be necessary, about which hand wins. So dealers are hardly to be blamed for a little showboating at crucial moments, a little reminder of the whole civilizing apparatus that keeps folks from wielding guns at the poker table in the 21st century. (Will a game known as The Hummer of Poker yet emerge? Stay tuned.) Ours takes a moment’s breath before burning the top card on the deck, another moment before knocking the table (a let-the-fates-be-what-the-fates-will-be ritual you don’t really understand but have come to love, having seen it now a million times on TV), another moment before the turn is revealed. Previous tourney experience not withstanding, your face is undoubtedly leaking emotion, but even were you sure, you’d be unable to suppress it: you are so out-of-proportionto-the-significance-of-the-event-to-your-life-scared. A queen! Yikes!

Small Blind may yet draw out on you! The hyperanimated gonzo to your right overrides the commentary already boinging around in your brain: A queen! Small Blind has hope again! Now, either an Ace or a King will win him the hand and keep him in the tournament. And then he actually says it: It doesn’t get any better than this!

Just as blackjack has become—and will probably remain for some time—the bread and butter fueling your household’s gambling enterprises, hypertext and other hyperlinks are now the primary WWW interface, which even older farts than you navigate without a second thought. E-mail has made trips to the real world mailbox—once freighted with anticipation—lackluster non-events. Inevitably, there’s an armload of slippery catalogues—from the places you purchase goods online—to wrestle into the house and then dump straight into the recycling bin. Although when you do give them a second look, it’s clear that the companies’ computers have been tracking your purchases and tailored these particular catalogues to dear old you.

There, in the opening pages of one, is an array of turtlenecks (good in the casino during late-night air exchanges). In another, the newest line of modular shelving addresses your ongoing search for the perfect solution to a pesky storage problem (like millions of others, you’re hooked on the renovation shows served up by HGTV, where objects in space are rearranged until they make something new). Not that the Crab Orchard Review

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Sandy Huss computers send you only print come-ons, far from it: every day there’s the offer of a preferential look, a reduced price—c’mon, shuss@bama. ua.edu, click here, this is just for you, shuss@bama.ua.edu—in your e-mail inbox. At least in both venues you can count on receiving complimentary discounts from casinos all across the United States.

Again, the burn, the knock, and then the river card is revealed. You breathe. An 8. Your hand has improved—now it’s a full house—and poor Small Blind’s left holding, appropriately, that dead man’s hand after all. He knocks the table (a knock you do understand: you win, I’m beat), grabs his coat, says see ya later to his buddies, and skedaddles.

You’re still stacking your fat lot of chips when the next deal is complete.

They’re only your chips though as long as they sit in front of you: the minute you decide to play a hand, at least some of them will become part of the pot, something to be contested, something to be regained only by winning them all over again. Back and forth those chips will wash. You’re only an hour or so into the tournament: can you possibly tap into the combination of skill and luck that will assemble all the chips in the room in tidy stacks at your seat?

While you’ve never met MidniteGambler, you saw him once on TV. Just for a few seconds, in the audience of the final table of the Hilton Million Dollar Blackjack Tournament held in Las Vegas in the spring of 2003. He’d won a seat in the tournament via a satellite tourney at his “home” casino (four hours away). In an e-mail, he told you how to catch the glimpse: I am only on for a nanosecond. Hand 12, right after “Nicholas lays down a hefty $1,000 bet.” Look at the top right of your picture (third row up and second person over). That is me in the cowboy hat with the “diamond” horseshoe. You had the show TiVoed, so you and Gambling Buddy watched that nanosecond five or six times and froze several of the frames. Wow: what a good-looking guy. After months of his earnest practical advice, you wouldn’t have figured him for the bling. This fall, after you’ve retired, you and Gambling Buddy will hit the road on a tour of western casinos. Part of the plan is to meet up with Midnite for some blackjack at Tunica or Laughlin or Vegas—or who knows, maybe his home casino.

For your money, there’s nothing like e-mail to point up the most marvelous aspect of life in a digital age: the whole pretense of wholeness is long gone. An e-mail is virtually an oxymoron: when you hit send, what you’ve composed is broken to bits, tagged with notes about how to reassemble it, then sent via packet switching, each bit following potentially a different path, until it lands in the recipient’s mailbox and 202 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sandy Huss is, unlike Humpty Dumpty, put back together again. And your hard drive, while it’s a physical space, doesn’t treat your “documents” or “photographs” or “player notes” or “bankroll” as whole objects either, doesn’t write the bits of code that comprise them in one discrete sector, but instead sprays the data around the disk willynilly—anywhere there’s room. That feel for the bits and bytes—the pixels and dots per inch—that now inscribe nearly everything you do, the way the data on its substrate of silicon washes back and forth like sand on the beach—invisibly—has severed you from a group to which you once felt a strong allegiance, people who consider themselves writers. You don’t write anymore, you move pixels around—and that has changed everything.

It’s anticlimactic—if not surprising—to have to admit that you didn’t win that brick and mortar tournament. But poker—like so much else—is never really over. Since that night, you’ve won twenty-three mini-tourneys online (netting $19 each time), placed second in fifteen more ($9), and third ($4) in another dozen. You’ve failed to place at all in a couple dozen more, losing $6 each outing. You’ve assembled this brick and mortar essay, answered or ignored a couple thousand e-mails, watched hours of home-improvement TV and lost $135 at The Silver Star’s blackjack tables. You’ve reread some poker books with the word killer in their titles. Every day’s news brings stories about grade-schoolers setting up Hold’Em tables in the dining room: one of your colleagues’ kids was ecstatic to receive your old poker chips when you upgraded to a set of casino-grade beauties. Another of your colleagues—a writer—, having lived for years in a home where TV was forbidden, inherited a tube from somebody leaving town and has, in a few weeks, become smitten by Hold’Em. He’s gotten himself an online poker account, bought his own set of metal-lined chips and organized a game at his house: you’re thrilled to have been invited. Gambling’s found its way back to the neighborhood, not to that shady bar at the corner, not just to a pseudo-glam resort near you, but right inside your door, in that box you were once wont to treat as a typewriter.

New forms lie in wait, forms as compelling as the most indelible commercials on TV, juxtapositions of images with text, text with text, sound with image, on and on: can you hear the show tunes?

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Brian Leung Apologia…Anyone?

We survived the boy bands. Tempered our irrational exuber-

ance. Retreated from the dot-coms with their phantom possibilities, discovering that we still wanted a good old storefront window to throw a brick through. Arms crossed, one foot tapping, we waited impatiently for apologies, gifts for which we conveniently reversed fortune cookie wisdom. It is better to receive than to give. We closed out the last century and began this one thrust into a search for a new moral compass or at least one good metaphor to account for ourselves.

Here’s a start while I wait for an apology.

I have read and reported about the curious life of the bird-cage plant which lives among the dunes of the California desert. Its requirements, a little shade and a bit of dew, are minimal, but it thrives on them and sets down roots that hold it firm while conditions are good. Of course, sands shift. Today’s wind-striped mound is next month’s concave depression, and the bird-cage plant reacts. It dries, roots giving way, seed-tasseled stems bending toward its center until it’s a fist-sized ball that snaps off in a gust. The withered plant can travel for miles, dropping seeds along the way but clinging to most as it rolls into its unpredictable future.

Moral certainty is just so. At first, a thriving thing like a bird-cage plant, outstretched, roots deep set, at the whim of the suspect ground.

But then the climate changes and what we believe and value, our core principles, crisp and curl and break off into the archaic desert of history.

This transience of ideals is not a flaw of our nature, but rather evidence of the capacity of human thought to evolve exponentially faster than any of Darwin’s models from the physical world. The starved lion in the Roman Colosseum, for instance, found Christian martyrs quite nourishing. Put a lion in the Los Angeles Coliseum today and you’d discover a society that wouldn’t send anyone out on the field, though the lion would still gladly eat a Southern Baptist or whatever denomination you put in front of her. The flesh has not changed, but our minds have.

Less than two centuries ago it was a legal proposition and

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Brian Leung common to own slaves. Consider this. Someone knocking at your door right now, hauling you away from your reading, shackling your ankles, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll live long enough to work yourself into a shallow grave. Recently, authorities discovered a secret basement compound of indentured Vietnamese brought to the United States illegally and saddled with a permanent debt to repay the cost of their crossing. They were forced to work for pennies an hour.

The public outcry was immense.

What shift in moral bedrock is occurring now, just now, even in the time it takes us in this sentence to get from “What” to the question mark? Which values do we promote that seem so vital to our civilization that life can’t go on without them? And which of these will be among history’s quirky footnotes? Sometimes I wonder if we’ve evolved too far, if we’ve become so afraid of our ugly past and didacticism, that we’ve given up embracing any common principles. Often, it feels like we live in an anomaly of human time where there is no moral certainty at all. Inevitably, however, the most scrupulous of human cultures have ultimately been the most flawed. It’s likely, in fact, there have never been any good old days where our principles were right and sure. But even if this is the case, I’m embarrassed to admit, it seems like a notion to which we should still aspire, and we’ve spent the better part of the late 20th and early 21st centuries playing tug-of-war over which faction decides who’s in charge of where to draw the line in the sand.

This is the least of my sins. When I was five, my father took me to Griffith Park Observatory where a stately and largely blind telescope sits atop the Hollywood Hills. At the observatory’s inception, thirsty Los Angeles was a dust-covered city just beginning to theorize the sprawl that would promote an inevitable chain reaction—smog catches in the foothills, mixes with the overcast and reflects the city lights that render the telescope nearly impotent to all but the brightest heavenly bodies.

Still, a divorced man needs to take his son somewhere and the observatory was the kind of place where my Chinese father could feel he was contributing to my education. The telescope itself juts up and out from a narrow slit in the observatory dome (one wonders what form observatories might have taken had women first designed them).

We waited our turn and stepped up to the eyepiece to view part of the full Moon, its upper left third where the expansive craters Mare Fecunditatis and Mare Tranquillitatis reign. Though less defined than Crab Orchard Review

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Brian Leung their smaller neighbors, Mare Nectaris and Mare Crisium, their white plains are vast and ocean-like. The Moon up close is startlingly detailed and even at that young age I was impressed by the limited section I could see, the perfect curve of its slice into the black universe, the pocked surface that’s less like Swiss cheese and more like thousands of unblinking eyes. Even then I knew, in the uncertainty of my life, in the wake of moving several times after my parents’ divorce, my mother’s second marriage, and the birth of my first sister, that the Moon is.

After we climbed down from the telescope platform, my father took a moment to look around the dimly lit observatory chamber. I took the opportunity to explore the steel box in the center of the room.

It was just slightly taller than me, with a small green curtain covering a spot in its center. I pushed the curtain back, discovering a series of controls like light switches. I flipped one and an electronic groan immediately began. The observatory dome was moving. The telescope was not. A gray-haired man ran to the controls and switched off the power inches before the dome crashed into the side of the telescope.

My father scooped me up. “Apologize to the man,” he said. I was silent. “Apologize.” I said nothing. Dozens of people were staring at me. I knew I had done something wrong but I was too shocked by the sudden tension to respond. I’m sure I sensed that withholding an apology was my only avenue of self-determination. “Apologize,” my father said a third time to no avail.

“That’s okay,” the man said. “It’s all part of the exhibit.”

There have been worse things in my life, but it has always bothered me that my first impulse was not to apologize for my mistake. It was hardly a calculated act, but I knew it was wrong after the fact and it’s telling that I’m sorry did not naturally bubble up from inside me. This suggests, I think, that perhaps moral instincts are not primal, and if they are, intellectual instincts have the power to override them. These kinds of personal flaws at five years old are understandable. As an adult, you’d think they’d be intolerable.

In October of 1864, England’s the Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading published “Missionary Scenes and Adventures in China.” In it, the unnamed male author makes an attempt to discuss Chinese culture, including an unintentionally comical and self-revealing explanation of a ceremony designed to communicate with the spirit world:

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Brian Leung They invoke the demons by howls, and cries, and grimaces, by which they pretend to attract multitudes of spirits to the performer, who gives them his commands. They also worship the spirit of darkness. They drive a stake into the earth, accompanying every stroke with frightful gestures and cries; they then trace a circle and write certain characters as a charm. This being done, they take three animals—a hog, and a fish, and a bird—and sacrifice them to the spirit of darkness, and thus they worship him.

To be sure, the experience sounds exotic, but not altogether unfamiliar. Any of us who have ever prayed to our deity for a certain outcome, for a storm to pass quietly around our home, for a loved one to beat cancer, have attempted to rally the forces of the supernatural. For Catholics, transubstantiation means they believe they are consuming the actual body and blood of Christ during communion. Vatican-sponsored Cannibalism—the sacrifice of a few animals pales in comparison.

To be fair, the author’s intent is not to wholly portray the 19thcentury Chinese as an entirely backward people. His article extols their scientific and medical discoveries and examines the presence of religion. Toward this end, he mentions that “Intelligent readers cannot have failed to perceive that these three false religions in China, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taouism [sic], have some very striking relations to Christianity.” These are the words of a hopeful missionary, someone who has found his moral certainty and an agenda. He ends the article by asking “who can fail to see a special providence in thus preparing phraseology by which the most difficult and mysterious doctrines of our faith can be thrown into the Chinese mind?”

To be a missionary, to have the overt mission to convert non-believers to Christianity takes a great deal of moral certainty. That there’s social and personal value in following many Christian principles is not difficult to accept, but, I’ve found, there’s almost always something suspicious about the messenger, the person who acts as if they themselves are a piece of God. His dandruff, one might conclude, or one of His toenail clippings. God as the way and the Bible as the document of human salvation operates directly against Earth’s natural tendency toward diversity. The planet works because it does not allow monocultures.

Why have a bird-cage plant? Why have anything but?

When my father came to the United States from China, he decided against religion altogether. “How could I make a choice between God Crab Orchard Review

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Brian Leung and Buddha?” he once asked me. I never had that problem. My choices were made for me. For a few years, before my mother’s second divorce, we were Wesleyan Methodists, part of a morally sure community, people who, every Sunday, claimed to never drink, smoke, or lie.

Polyester was popular at the time, and, at church services, the people of Lakeside Wesleyan were a shining example of that fact. The men wore their affordable suits of avocado, muted tangerine, and bird’segg blue. The women had even more choices and took full advantage of lime-green and pink wide-belted dresses with huge plastic buckles keeping it all cinched in. Their daughters usually wore full-length, high-collared affairs that looked like they were cutting off oxygen or circulation or both. It’s no wonder that Veronica Cole, a sweet but ratty-haired girl, carried her one-eyed, half-bald babydoll at church until she was thirteen.

The people of our congregation were nice enough, as, it turns out, most people are. Try this. Go to the grocery store and ask, between the grapefruit and navel oranges for example, five random people to recommend a local restaurant. Chances are good you’ll get a friendly response. The thing about Lakeside Wesleyan is that it seemed to know the truth about a lot of things. In fact, we had a sign in front of our church right next to the road. Each week in large red letters it read something new: SUNDAY AT 7 P.M.!

THE TRUTH ABOUT SMOKERS!!

Of course, children generally didn’t go to these evening services. I guess we weren’t old enough to handle the truth. It’s just as well. My mother was a smoker.

But children did get a healthy helping of Sunday school. My mother taught Jimmy McCallister in the junior high class. Jimmy was deeply freckled, already tall and skinny, and wore clothes about a size and a half too small for him. His family was poor just like ours (in a single afternoon, I once caught [murdered?] eleven mice in one spot in our pantry with the same trap and the same piece of bacon). Jimmy’s brother, Raymond, was in my Sunday school class, which was taught by their mother Pat, and Raymond always looked like he was wearing something his brother had worn out and handed down.

Jimmy, and lots of the other junior high kids my mother and stepfather taught, often stopped by our house on the way home from 208 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Brian Leung school. On the day Jimmy ruined my birthday, he didn’t stop for long.

My mother and I were in the yard pulling weeds and Jimmy asked if he could watch television for a while. My mother said yes and we went back to our chore. I was excited because that day we were going to go buy a Lego set for my birthday. Within minutes, Jimmy came back out, leaped off our porch, and said goodbye as he trotted off.

After my mother and I finished outside, we got ready to leave, but there was one snag. She couldn’t find the ten dollars in her purse she had set aside for my Legos. It was gone; and though now I can even recall the sharky smile Jimmy wore as he leapt off our porch, at the time, I never had a concept of anyone stealing. I’m sure my mother suspected him, but she didn’t say anything. Unrealistic as it was, I think back in amazement at the pureness of that world I lived in—not a thief among humanity. I was like a chick in an egg, swaddled in embryonic innocence.

After a few days, my mother took me to Pastor Edwards’s office at Lakeside Wesleyan. He reminded us that it was Elvis’s and his birthday.

Pastor Edwards was well-fed, and his tie ran over his orange shirt and belly like a green ‘S.’ My mother told him the nature of our dilemma, the missing ten dollars, the Legos we couldn’t buy, the guidance we sought from the Lord. We closed our eyes and held hands and Pastor Edwards began to pray out loud. I opened my eyes. “Dear Lord,” he said, “we’re asking you for help. Life is full of so many hard lessons.

Please help Cathy and Brian find the missing money. And short of that, oh Lord, please give them the strength to go on.”

I was appropriately impressed, at that age, by the tight-eyed passion of the pastor’s prayer. But I think the fix was in. Shortly thereafter, Jimmy admitted he’d stolen the money. What didn’t happen was the return of it. His mother never even offered to repay us in installments.

It was just one of those things, and as Christians we were expected to forgive the transgressor. Jimmy wasn’t accountable. And I didn’t get my Legos. What I did get was an understanding, a true conscious realization at too young an age, that at least at Lakeside Wesleyan, a personal relationship with God was also an immunity agreement.

The human conscience is inconsistent. For some transgressions, our guilt is implacable; for others, it seems hardly a blip in our synapses and sometimes these lay one on top of the other. The Civil War and slavery, for example, linger in the national psyche like a long, slowhealing wound. If ever opposite sides of a moral certainty came together, it was then. But after the Civil War and Lincoln’s death, the nation Crab Orchard Review

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Brian Leung turned its attention toward reconstruction. The welfare of newly-freed blacks was subordinate to rebuilding a national economy, and the South was increasingly effective in casting itself as a victim. The line between forgiveness and expediency was then, as it is now, a tenuous filament.

In the June 5, 1866 edition of The Nation, among ads for pianofortes, steel pens (“of the old standard quality”), lock-stitch sewing machines and the like, a debate about the repatriation of Southern states was of a practical tone of conciliation. Notably, it agrees with one proposal which “permits all male citizens, being twenty-one years of age, to vote for and serve as delegates…” to Southern state conventions. Even after five years of war over the subordination of blacks, when the moral core of the nation was put under its gravest test, the editorial doesn’t bat an eye over the fact that, in the end, the war and its aftermath are really about the rights of men. Apparently, even the best of intentions, the most intellectual of considerations, can have dark implications.

But what interests me more about editions of The Nation in 1866 are not debates over the treatment of the South; nor much, really, to do with the Civil War. I’m more intrigued by its certainty that the United States, even after five years of a righteousness-driven war, is the center of the moral universe. In its January 11 issue, the magazine expresses concern that the Pope’s position, influence, and very safety in the European community are dangerously faltering and that he might be well-advised to find a new home: He can come to the United States, where he will be sure of protection and civil treatment. We can offer him the advantage of a country with no religion at all to perplex him as a city of refuge [New York]. Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Mohammedans, the worshippers of Fo and of Buddha, all stand on absolutely equal footing. He would be just as good as the Grand Lama of Taibet [sic], and no better.…What oceans of turtle-soup, and of what floods of champagne, would be the occasion!…We doubt whether the Japanese ambassadors or the Prince of Wales could boast of more.…We only fear that this new form of martyrdom might qualify him for the honors of canonization before his due time.…But whether any or all these things come to pass.…he will be, as he is indeed, a monument of the change which time works in the most inveterate ideas.

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Brian Leung Apparently, the promise of limitless turtle-soup wasn’t enough to lure Pope Pius IX to our shores, not to mention the utopia of a land free from religious and cultural persecution. And of course, we wouldn’t have a Catholic President for nearly a hundred years, and even then, it’s reported, a few people had to come back from the grave—Catholics or wavering Lutherans one presumes—to put him over the top. And out West, the Chinese who helped build the transcontinental railroad and stayed in California at what was then considered the end of the line—East to West, never the other way around—were already being marginalized, blamed for the hardships of white males. Statutes were passed in San Francisco that stated living space had to accommodate certain amounts of airspace per occupant, a regulation aimed at the traditionally close-quartered Chinese. Clearly, the United States was not the pinnacle of freedom it aspired to be. How could it have been?

Sometimes I think that our deepest human flaw is not our predilection for seeing ourselves through an unrealistic lens of moral aspiration— good intentions equal a good person—but that so often we fail to truly consider and rectify our weaknesses.

When I was in fifth grade we converted to Catholicism. But today I am described as a fallen away Catholic. When I hear that term, I think of Milton’s tragic Satan in Paradise Lost or a shot-down goose.

I’m either in Hell or on a dinner plate. The other term is “lapsed.” He is a lapsed Catholic. She is lapsed. For some reason, few people like to say “former Catholic,” maybe out of the odd suspicion that like alcoholism, Catholicism stays with you for life. But I would never say I’m a recovering Catholic because, in the end, I think there’s much to admire about that religion. My personal decision to stop attending mass is out of respect to Pope John Paul’s dictate that sexually-active homosexuals are committing sin. One is not supposed to take communion, the point of the Catholic service, with sin on the soul. I am an active sinner.

It’s possible, of course, to have one’s sins forgiven in the Catholic Church by attending confession each week. One of my primary moral dilemmas came with my First Confession. In the days leading up to the event, I wondered what I could possibly confess. We’d spent weeks in CCD learning the Act of Contrition. What was I “heartly sorry” for? I scrounged around in my mind for something that God might possibly be interested in, something grievous. And what there was seemed so mild I was embarrassed to even bring it up. I felt like a failure for not sinning more grandly. And then, of course, I had to make a decision Crab Orchard Review

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Brian Leung about whether to kneel behind the curtain or meet with the priest face to face. In the end, I thought the latter would be fine, since, like most of my fellow prepubescent converts, I opted to just say I lied twice and had said a cuss word or two.

Father Gil was my confessor. He was a squat, slick-haired man with a reputation for a smiling friendliness. When I stood in front of him for my confession, he looked at me as gravely as a happy, red-cheeked Irishman can. I went through the procedure as I’d been taught in class and I’m sure I sounded a bit robotic. “Lying is not a good thing, now, is it?” Father said. “And as for the cussing, well, the Lord doesn’t care much for that either.” He gave me a penance of nine “Our Fathers,” which I dutifully fulfilled in the praying position in one of the church pews. Even then, however, I wasn’t sure if I would truly be forgiven because I wasn’t really heartly sorry for anything I’d done.

From the outside, confession looks like an odd ritual, the process of asking God for forgiveness through an intermediary—or to even conceive that God is listening or that It exists. It’s true that Catholic confession has a checkered past. Jeremy Tambling points out the case of Emperor Henry IV, whose act of penance in 1077 was to stand barefoot in the snow for three days outside the walls of Canossa. And there was Clement VI’s doctrine of the Treasury of Merit, which asserted that the Papacy held an infinite bank of good works which could be bought toward satisfying a penance. But the older I get and the farther away from the Catholic process I become, I appreciate the sacrament even more. Not because I believe in absolution, but because I see myself as a boy wrestling with the idea of being heartly sorry for something. It’s one thing, I understand now, to be willing to want forgiveness for a transgression, but it’s quite another to genuinely feel the impact of that act.

Now I get it. Confession isn’t about the forgiveness of sins at all. It’s about the examination of conscience and asking the most difficult question: why am I not “heartly sorry” for what I have done? The available answers to this self-reflection offer the earnest questioner a harsh but important look in the mirror. For myself, in all honesty, it’s because I am selfish, and recognizing that impulse has helped me resist it.

There is a pond not far from my home where a golden willow grows near the muddy bank. Through the generosity of a landscape architect, the tree’s placement allows it to enjoy an almost unlimited supply of nourishment. Its roots sop up water leaching from the pond and the tree succeeds. In spring, it is a dangly-leafed mop of green and 212 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Brian Leung in its winter nakedness, it is spidery and yellow. But the most interesting thing to me is that among the spindly branches that hang over the water like fishing lines, the closest to the pond’s surface, a few thin strands unleash aerial roots. It already has much larger roots beneath the ground, pumping moisture from the earth. What does it need that extra fraction of water for? Greed? Necessity? Instinct? Whatever the answer, in the end, the tree is hostage to the environment. Should the pond level fall beyond the reach of the branches, aerial roots will do it no good. It is held in check by Earth’s long-term scheme of balance.

Human beings are not so lucky. We have mastered interior climate control and personal conveyance via the combustion engine. We can, if we care to, perform equally innocuous feats as the willow and its aerial roots, with no apparent consequence whatsoever. Any one of us could, if we cared to, drop a few coins in a newspaper stand and then take the whole stack. We can graze on grapes or cherries, or by-the-pound candy at the grocery store, and not pay for them. We can convince ourselves we deserve these things. There are countless ways all of us procure for ourselves at the expense, however minuscule, of our respective communities. There is nothing to stop us but our conscience.

The penis. Where to put it? It’s a question that’s turned our national face an angry red with blue cheeks. Look at any electoral map.

The kind of moral certainty I’m interested in has little, if nothing, to do with sexuality. Moral codes about such things are problematic and almost always fraught with abstract reasoning. Other people’s sexuality is the least of our problems, and not among the list of my own concerns.

In every era, someone is exercised about the prevailing morality.

In the preface to 1824’s Body and Soul, the editor says: It is an alarming truth, that every year witnesses some attempt to undermine the Establishment, which, however built upon the Rock of Ages, must crumble away unless duly and properly defended: for unless we wake from our lethargy, and resist firmly, temperately, and charitably these innovations, they will end, in the course of events, in the subversion of everything that is orthodox, venerable, and established.

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Brian Leung true path. In Body and Soul’s “The Sick Penitent,” the old man, lying in his deathbed, tells the doctor “that though I always kept myself from gross sins, I did not apply myself to the Fountain of all Good, to bless my endeavours. I now see the danger both of self-sufficiency, and the want of gratitude in not giving God the glory.”

I wonder, what if God were removed from this equation? What if we were able to examine our lives and find them morally suspect, not because of Christian guilt, but because, more simply, we recognize that our self-interests have harmfully interfered with a greater good? Moral certainty is not religious, but it is communal. The old man in “The Sick Penitent” receives a form of absolution from his clergyman, but how much more satisfying it would be to live a life aware of the world beyond one’s skin, rather than waiting for those final, gasping minutes to reconcile with a deity that may or may not be a pulse in the cosmos.

In my adult life I recognize I have failings. All of us do. I have a third of a century to look back on introspectively. Not all of it is lost in a mosh. I regret many things. And, ironically, it’s only without religion that I recognize the reality of my faults. I haven’t come to understand myself via words from the pulpit, but rather by mining from inside me that forgotten ore, that base in all of us that tells us that at our best, we are not on Earth to serve ourselves, and at our worst, that’s exactly what we do.

So, I’m not proud that I was a tyrannical babysitter for my sisters.

It’s true I was only ten, but I was awful, chasing them around the house with a belt, slapping right behind their feet as they ran, one time locking them in their bedroom so long one of them used the toy box to go to the bathroom. I’m not so sure their unsteady early adult lives didn’t grow out of their treatment from me.

And I still dream of my first-grade teacher, who once took me to a Little League game—for what I understand now was a test to see if she could handle adopting a son. We stayed in contact until my high school graduation night when she came to the party at my home. Two years later, after having never called her, I found out she died of cancer.

She had been a friend, and I let her slip away.

John McCormick too, my one-time best friend, died in a coma. I didn’t hear about his death or his funeral until a year later.

In tenth grade, over six months, I convinced Todd Bellman that I was clairvoyant, that I had supernatural powers and could move objects with mental energy, and that I could channel his guardian 214 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Brian Leung angel, Jonathan. At every hint of his skepticism, I offered sketchy but convincing proof. On one particular Saturday, he rode his bike to my house where we sat face to face in my room so he could talk to Jonathan. At the right moment, my head bobbed, relenting to Jonathan entering my body. I looked up blearily into Todd’s curious eyes. “Who are you?” Todd asked.

“Jonathan,” I said.

Todd cocked his head. He was a contradiction—captain of the JV football team and an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, grid-iron calculation vs. wizard-soaked fantasy. “Why are you here?” he asked.

“Because I want to help you.”

Todd had been torn about whether or not to have intercourse with his girlfriend. I was jealous, I understand now, and was doing everything I could do to prevent it. I anticipated Todd’s questions to Jonathan, all of them centering around Brenda. All of them answered in the negative from me, from Jonathan. “Stay away from her.” “Don’t have sex with her.” “Save yourself.” A month later when the scam broke up, when even I realized I’d duped myself, at the moment of reckoning, I couldn’t confess.

For doing this to Todd, for all these things and more, even and especially, for the least noticeable of them, I am heartly sorry.

Because, it turns out, everything we do is significant. I can see when I look back where I’ve made a range of mistakes. Understanding that history makes me a surer person and allows me to forgive as well.

Things I do, or choose not to do, affect other people; and, I’ve come to understand, that even the unintended consequences of my actions are still my responsibility. It’s this way for all of us whether by choice or circumstance.

In Hong Kong, some stores sell a British product called Gripe Water. The label is printed in English on one side and Chinese on the other. It is a clear liquid, the active ingredients of which are Terpeneless Dill Seed Oil and Sodium Bicarbonate, and it is promoted as an “infants preservative for the disorders of children, viz:—Gripes, Acidity, flatulence, and the distressing complaints incidental to infants at the period of cutting their teeth, allaying the pain, giving instant relief, and rendering the crisis perfectly mild and free from danger.” Its trademark is a naked baby strangling an angry snake in each of its hands.

Adults should be so lucky—one slug of alcohol-free tonic and all our problems are wiped away. But such is not the case. There are few Crab Orchard Review

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Brian Leung sure answers. We are stuck with ourselves and with each other. What to do? The path of least resistance, it seems, is to satisfy ourselves on our way. If we are happy, we must be making good choices. If we are well-liked, it must say something about our character. If we can choose a nice bottle of pinot noir, say, and gather a circle of friends for a few parlor games where a good time will be had by all, then certainly we are good people. Unfortunately, having a good time does not indicate that one is a good person.

How exactly does a good person act and what does being good mean? We have come full circle. Where is that moral certainty, that elusive understanding detached from any institution that will show us the way? It is not, and never has been, at the bottom of a bottle of Gripe Water when we are young. It seems, paradoxically, the responsibility is left to the individual. We have to be aware of the self and wary of it at the same time, self-reflective but not self-indulgent. We slugged our way out of the last century, more tantalized by an intern in a blue dress than our collapsing ozone. And in this new century we have taken off the gloves, afraid of love—heterosexual couples drink from this fountain, homosexuals out of the one not connected to the water main. How smart are we then? The first culture with all the answers?

Why go on and risk finding out differently? I’ll mix the Kool-Aid now and we can all die with satisfied smirks. And what of our corpses? At last, a good use for acid rain.

We are not, any of us, merely responsible for our own welfare.

Our smallest actions reverberate. And despite an inconsistent and sometimes unfair world, the models of pure self-reliance and of the rugged individual have proven hollow. Human culture cannot sustain such philosophies. It turns out we need each other. Our twenty-fourhour news cycle reminds us we are a world of flawed people. We have spent the last decade being our own test case. There was no control group. There is no placebo. Now for the bitter pill. There is room, I am beginning to think, for a kind of shared moral certainty amongst disparate peoples, the simple proposition in which each of us recognizes our larger responsibility to one another, even to people we do not know and may never meet. It’s about sharing a sense of accountability to the self and one another.

We might begin the next decade by offering a few apologies.

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Deborah Moreno Poetry’s Obituary It is not so simple to kill off its body the way one would reel a fish to shore, slap the writhing thing to a cloudy dock, watch the pound for life.

Magazines report its demise, television bypasses the announcement altogether for lack of flesh and cartilage footage, but NPR—shame on them—aired discussion on its imminent death, and a friend telephones to ask, “Why not fiction?” But you see, poetry’s head is an ancient stone baking in Greek sun, its trilling voice that of Shir Ha Shirim, Song of Songs, lovers for all these years.

In the hollow of medieval stomach, monastery monks sucked the bones of poesy from manuscript to manuscript down their long table of silent soup. Just because radio stations have conducted interviews, built up the rack of sticks under Beowulf, flicked the match for blazing bonfire, does not mean he will burn.

The slave girl Phillis Wheatley used words to set herself free, root digging in plantation soil, unlocked my third-grade being in a library stack—never knew such archeology

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Deborah Moreno existed—a find held between fingers, tucked to my small pocket. Today, publishers’ hydraulic lifts lower a hundred boxes, thousands of copies —who ever imagined such a thing?—that new bard delivering news from New York, Albuquerque, the dark woods of mind.

Poetry’s folded hands wait patiently on virtually every living room shelf, yes, a long wait it may be until the day the house’s boy opens to map his road, discovers Mr. Frost there, too.

Or the man in his padded chair tires of the Wheel of Fortune, cracks the spine of Ezekiel, recognizes the bones —his—in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, hears: I will cause breath to enter you, counts the beats of his own iambic human pentameter.

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John Morgan Feathered Monsters Several lines of research have recently converged on a remarkable conclusion: the feather evolved in dinosaurs before the appearance of birds.

—from Scientific American, March 2003 The world is ever new though we grow old.

Shy particles resistant to decay— out of their sheaths the bristled barbs unfold.

Fierce theropods that shocked the ground, behold imprinted and preserved in China’s clay (the world is ever new though we grow old) not the leathery tails and forelimbs we’d been sold —a slow-lizard bill of goods—they swooped their prey.

Out of their sheaths the bristled barbs unfold into bright cockatoo plumes, so don’t be fooled.

You thought the rocks had little more to say?

The world is ever new. Though we grow old and brittle boned, when our death-note is tolled, we’ll circulate the earth by dark of day while from our sheaths the bristled barbs unfold.

A gene called “sonic hedgehog” sets the mold for quill-pens, then can wings be far away?

The world is ever new though we grow old.

Out of its sheath the bristled barbs unfold.

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Arlene Naganawa Michael Jackson Dreams the Elephant Man The thick bones float toward him, the great misshapen skull bathed in white.

Shyly, he touches the explosion of cranium, traces the cauliflower ossified at the back of the head.

Presses his fingers against the spine, feels pain locked in the vertebrae of twists and spirals, feels nights crouched in a hall beneath the crudelylettered sign: Half-Animal Half-Man. Feels the rising velvet curtain.

The head rises before him, luminous.

The dreamer feels the scalpel slicing tissue, gouging bone, chipping away imperfections, carving his soul into something more exquisite than God intended.

Weeping in white light, the monstrous skull whispers: I was not loved. Yet, I believed.

The dreamer echoes: Yes, to be beautiful, bleeding under the bandages.

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Lee Newton Why We Make Love It’s a Baby Boom, of sorts, this generation, the 200 born in one month at Fort Campbell, the 350 conceived at Fort Bragg when their mothers and fathers returned from deployment.

I include my twin sons born nine months after September 11, when I look at them and know, sadly, they weren’t planned, not even the faintest of considerations.

Maybe those are the best lives— those who fall into this world unexpectedly, some beautiful perennial, unannounced and staking its claim in the Spring garden—maybe.

Because of me and people like me, I worry, still, question what will occur decades from now. Wonder what happens one morning when they sit at their tables, ankles crossed, flipping through the Post or Times, their fingers painted, stained with speculative theory, academic conjecture.

What will become of us when they learn they were not created out of love, lust, even infatuation, when they discover so many of us fell into arms and cold beds

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Lee Newton out of some primal, instinctual necessity?

What, when they determine they are merely a product of our sorrow, guilt, and fear?

Maybe it is then we will find ourselves in a revolution—this angry generation forcing us to confront our inabilities to cope, to handle life. Or maybe they will just stop, stop on the porches, decks, stand there—newspapers rolled and under arms—finally understanding the frailty of our species, the clutter and confusion of their own lives.

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Sharon Olson Madrileño March 11, 2004 The man who had walked the streets, held a sign high in the Plaza Mayor: Paz en Irak, bring our soldiers home.

This man would do anything for a change to come, puts in an extra packet of cheese, some bread in his bag, something to share with the strangers he will meet along the way, in the same compartment, walks with a spring in his step past the Prado Museum on his way to Atocha, takes out the ticket he has purchased to validate it, a sharp, stabbing motion into the orange machine, looks up at the board to read the track number, smiles at the newspaper vendor. Could there be a socialist victory? Not a chance, he thinks, only a dream.

Another man with a backpack passes him on the way to the platform, a man who doesn’t smile, even as they almost collide.

He makes a mental note to find a more likely partner for the slight meal he had planned to share.

The train arrives, one that will offer a comfortable seat for him to dream in, arms to hold him, peace in this world and the next.

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Ed Pavlić One Word for Rachel Corrie after Gilad Atzmon I value words. You know me & you know I value words. Rocket launcher, two.

Manjoon, one.

Rafah, one.

I’ve learned to count here. I’ve seen words shaved down & lined up on their knees along the fence. Incursion, one, should be glossy, a lipstick sentence, in reverse, on our foreheads.

Words on dusty knees.

Sound grenade, two, a counter-linguistic device. It’s a language bomb. Why is this a word & there’s no word for what you might do with your tongue to get dust out of a stranger’s eye. Caterpillar, one.

* The sun lifts me thru this blasted wall, the wall & the rocket & the sun & a new ream of paper 224 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Ed Pavlić & the sound of the shuffle & lift & the fire-heat & the eye in the laser-sight & the slate-green shadow of YAMAM & the locked gate of a tele-commuter & a tiny handprint on an asphalt buckle in a gated Phoenix driveway & the eight-digit alumni club membership number & peroxide on Tuesday & the half-time sales rep in Bedford, TX, & a clear spot of sweat from the wrist of a D9 mechanic mopped from union-scale tile & the pulse of sun-heat stored in this scrub-oak overnight & the white enamel of this skyward tooth in one near-lipless smile. One word for that, yesterday.

Just that. Three nights of that word in the sun. Three days of sandalwood skin & sunshine & silent wind & the smooth-scarred taste of salt along the ski-jump slope of Fayid’s spine.

* I’ve studied this one thing. I have a precise list of the components of a piano player, two words.

An interval for that blasted wall & no single strand for an index finger to touch. A chord for the blind glare from a mirror Crab Orchard Review

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Ed Pavlić in a sniper’s eye. Sing other words over that chord. A comb for lasers tangled in your hair. Watch all the words turn into names. Bend your back & sing.

* Here, words blow past me like silent wind in a dream.

I miss the sounds of words. I remember hard rain on the window behind a soft song on the radio. I’m at home in my bed. I know it.

At night in Gaza, I can’t hear that sound. A word might name a sound known by an anonymous ear. One. I understand almost nothing. I hear almost everything. I listen & listen. Soft voices replace the rain.

Hard faces down a missing black pane. I listen for notes of a blindness deep enough to drown in. A dream-wind moves underwater lace in a word-swept dance. I can hear myself slip away & I’m prepared for the phantom fall. There’s talk here about people killed by falls in their dreams.

They say, “you’ll sleep.”

They say, “don’t forget to breathe, Rachel.” Most dreamers here suffocate before they hit the ground.

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Ed Pavlić

* On this burnt-down corner of Rafah, Gaza, a little boy sat down next to me. One word in my ear: “Ali.” “Ali.” “Ali.” His face & what I knew & the first cold lip of flame at dawn on the sea & fries with that & this bloodless drowning loose in me.

The rhythm of rain swept from a windshield.

His one word.

I say, “Bush manjoon.”

He says, “Ali.” I say, “Sharon manjoon.”

He says, “Ali.” My lips move. He says, “Ali,” & my lips move.

* I know he’s not five. I’ve seen the game.

An old man plays an oud, this boy sings & holds Ali in the yard.

I know his wide eyes hold Ali. I’ve seen twisted olive branches break in symmetry at the surface of the well. Orders. I’ve seen mounds of dirt cover wells. Locusts on Thursday, a bulldozer ate a thousand-year-old orchard.

By Friday, I know the whole family saw Ali explode.

He watched twenty people kick

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Ed Pavlić dust & ruined brick & uncover a black arm. He watched the torn leather shoe bake in the sun.

* At night, I shake like a branch tossed in a silent wind beyond the clear orders of my eyes. I know he’s not afraid of Ali. When he says his word, sound dives thru him without a splash. He’s afraid of death when branches shake in the wind.

In his dreams, no one he knows ever dies blind. In his dreams, no one he knows ever drowns in the rain. He knows I’m afraid of orders & depths & dust in Ali’s eye. He doesn’t have to fear to love Ali. I know this.

I’ve never been bloodless.

I know eyes closed is two words for us all & I know I have a name & my home has no sound for this name.

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Candace Pearson To Dolly, Born 1997 You must have sensed your own familiar, musty odors from the start— every gene, every cell the same the same the same —or did you feel made new?

It took 277 tries to construct you.

No rough sex, no burst of seed searching for contact. The union collegiate but no less passionate, the impatient needle of the scientist thrust into a petri dish. You somehow freed from a life of regret.

Every human’s dream: the chance to start over, get it right this time, yet be the same the same.

At that moment of twinning, no one knew you’d been born old, your genetic threads already frayed.

Each time a cell divided, chromosomal chains hobbled you.

When you met your model (A healthy specimen, scientists said), you could have been looking into a lake, except that slipping out of the birth canal, you weren’t allowed

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Candace Pearson to land on wind-whipped grass. Did you already understand how to hoist yourself up, how to take those ďŹ rst steps? Tell us.

We need to know. Was it easier the second time?

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Cynthia Reeves Good Friday The butcher’s got his bloody apron on.

The children know something will happen.

Lambs bleat as they are led down splintered planking from the caged flatbed that brought them from Lancaster to this Philly street.

Good Friday. The early heat of spring rises. Bright white lilies shudder, hold back in swollen buds.

One by one, each lamb’s taken to the shuttered room inside the butcher’s shop. Within all is silent. The children only imagine knife sawing through neck, the flesh opening up. The heart still pumps in its cage, transfiguring blood into air. How blessed to know so little of age—yet, the children hate the butcher, who hoses blood through an iron grate, piles severed heads on the concrete killing floor, hangs still-warm bodies on iron hooks in the plate-glass window.

When Roman soldiers crucified Spartacus and his disciples, dead bodies lined

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Cynthia Reeves the road all the way to Rome. Those were brutal times— these are brutal times—a priest, anointing a woman’s forehead with a cross, struck by a falling body, falling bodies, fallen bodies, the alchemy of flesh to dust.

Don’t be taken in. Children know what happens to the lilies.

They know because they know they’re waiting to be opened.

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Cherene Sherrard

The Dictator’s Wife, or Mildred Aristide Prepares to Address the Congressional Black Caucus Visionaries seldom find respite in safe harbors of flesh and bone.

One eye ever cracked on the dream.

Their right hand chokes Damocles’ sword.

You are the woman who sleeps beside— clever, plotting practice.

Learn to pack light, a small overnight case, practice abandoning all you cherish with one hour’s respite.

What Yankees call carpet bags suffice. Besides, you’ve learned to sleep in jewels welded with bone.

One can never be sure what time swords might cross in front of the Banque Nationale. Dream of Mussolini’s mistress—they hung her dream next to him. Execution requires no forethought, just practice.

Elections seldom cast the same bright aura of destiny’s sword.

And so, myths. For myths, one always needs a woman’s respite.

Even if American-born, she will save the last meat from the bone, will always add perishables to her valise. Besides, you can never be sure if your place of exile will be beside a resort or a prison. Some refuse escort, cling to their dream of benign oligarchy, literacy, water purification, tourism, bone china, a UN seat, immunizations and a newly quilted flag. Practice nationalism at Cabral’s heels, recite Che’s chants, remember respite: a feminine touch discourages the people from taking up swords.

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Cherene Sherrard myself, who would be a better hostess for affairs of state, and a respite for children, who are useful, but more often dangerous dreams.

After all, a child could inherit your carefully nurtured practice, hence ending a need for all elections. Some might have a bone to pick, but imagine the library portraits set in herring-bone frames, your descendants finding grandfather’s sword in the palace gardens where your personal militia practices.

Think how they will follow the heroic light beside your son, if you have a son. If you do not, prepare to dream another woman might steal your place as his respite.

For now, find respite in your bone temple, dream of Winnie’s words beside your own and above all, practice.

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Beth Simon Dawn at Dulles Int’l Now, my beaky owl-faced one, pearl-tongued bird of insurrection, the code name, the camo, the kissy au revoir, the taxi drop at the curb of departure add up to you warbling a karaoke of misdirection.

Munch, on this evaporating coast, forgo air comptrollers.

Abstain from complaint. Flight is all about exit, about twitchy tail Tiger, and his sister, Hyena, behind door number three. Don’t fall into line for rescue, redeem, lies intermit, boom follows bust.

Just raise arms to security and press through the bulletproof tunnel festooned with Javanese shadow puppets, derelict luggage scales, the abandoned armoire. Put mirrors behind you. Voilà!—new world, a rotunda where everything’s wasted and everyone waits squared off in glass cases, Fräulein und Übermensch covert in the costumes, the mannequin cortège.

(In sodium light, all libretti make sense.) It is time.

Let syntax resolve to the verb. Spurn hunger, Ptichka, but feed the enplaned. Remember. Each hop is nonstop.

Modality wins. In the country of phosphoresence, help the kenneled in their Midland. Mija, be brave.

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Susan Sink Meditation for a Century Barely Begun Bow down five times a day, or seven.

Sing the psalms in an unlit sanctuary.

Sit in any pose and stare at any wall.

Burn incense, burn a candle, burn a sacrifice.

The centuries are calling your name.

What language do you speak?

Translate the word of life into a tongue Unspeakable. How would you answer, then?

And if God said to you: leave your family, right now; And if God said to you: say what I will say And the world will listen; and if God said to you: Love this man, offer your son, do it for me; Would you argue? Would you take up arms?

Beat them into ploughshares, and sow seeds Altered to bear three times the normal yield?

Would you feed them or would you feed The Word of God in a strange land, one untouched Yet, and how would it sound in their ears?

How would it sound in their hunger?

What would you see there, your own wealth You never before considered, or something new, Humility you knew as an idea but which now Strikes you dumb? Would you meet the tank, Bulldozer or gun? Do something small Then something smaller and then The smallest thing, a gesture, a blink of the eye.

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Susan Sink Movements make an action, and if it helps You feel alive, or names you love, or opens Your heart, your ears, any window, any door— Don’t speak. Go to the beginning and listen hard.

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Alison Townsend The Words to Say It My students write about their bodies, each one lacking in some way—too fat, too thin, the wrong shape, imperfect as the Modigliani nudes they all want to be.

They pile dissatisfaction like kindling for a bonfire in the center of the room.

Then we sit around it, eyes stinging, until our words catch and the flames burn clean.

Tessa leans out from behind a veil of dark hair shiny as a blackbird’s wing, to describe stretch marks that run inside her thighs like little rivers, and how she sticks her finger down her own throat to make them go away, sometimes also cutting small doorways in her body to “let the toxins out.”

Sukie, her French braids the color of polished copper pots, writes about her hands—which flutter, white and deft as a magician’s— and how she uses them to puke, throwing up so often she’s burst capillaries above her eyes.

Kirsten, blonde as a young Finnish goddess, with perfect make-up, green eyes slanting in an Asiatic glance, whispers I never told anyone about this, before reading her “confession” about the starvation and the euphoria it brings.

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Alison Townsend “Do you ever wonder why I always wear long sleeves?,” rolling them back in her essay to reveal scars of cigarette burns pocked inside her arms.

It’s my job to talk about their writing, and that is what I do, praising the force behind a certain image, the way a careful line break suspends the reader inside the “speaker’s” pain, and how it is that words can change us, when written from an honest place.

But when I look around the classroom, at their faces so unlined and clear, I recall the finger down my own throat one year in high school, and the flood of words that made me stop— each poem or story a fire that also burns us from within, illuminating our perfect faces.

And our perfect pain, the words to say it sparking, small miracles amidst such an enormous conflagration.

Note: names and identities have been changed to protect privacy.

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Liliana Loofbourow

A Pan-American Epistolary Record: Franco Valentini, Spencer Tunick, and the Nakeds When I was very young, and international phone calls cost

fortunes, my mother and grandmother used to send each other cassettes, on which they’d record all the latest news. Copuchas, they’d call them, a word that means gossip in Chile, and which incidentally contains pucha, the two most plaintive vocables in the Chilean dialect. I had learned them from my cousins the last time we had been in Santiago, and had taken to them with the annoying zeal of a tourist newly introduced to the aloha! concept. “Puuucha,” I’d say, if torn away from my toys, “pucha,” if put to bed, and “pucha-OH!” when the story was over and my mother, exhausted, made it clear that no more were forthcoming.

I assumed, therefore, that the copuchas that my mother related to my grandmother on tape were simply puchas, only more so. CO-puchas, like RE-emphasis. The adult counterparts to childhood grievances, but bigger in kind and content, pregnant with meanings I was too young to understand. On the surface, the cassettes were cheerful enough. But my mother seemed less chirpy, sad, even, after making or receiving one.

Therefore I assumed the worst, and dredged everything my mother said into the speaker and everything my grandmother said out of it for its terrible coded message of bad news. Because they were externally pleasant, the copuchas inspired in me a special kind of horror. They were a distortion of the innocent, a defamiliarization of the good.

One day my mother walked into my room and handed me a labeled Maxell tape. I blanched.

“Your Lala sent you a letter,” she said. “Shall we listen to it?”

I nodded and held my breath.

What followed was my grandmother’s beloved voice telling a story about a little ant who found a coin, bought some makeup, and in her beauty quite captured the heart of a passing mouse, the mouse Perez.

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Liliana Loofbourow she realized she had forgotten an ingredient. “Stir the soup,” she said to her husband the mouse Perez, “but only with the little spoon. Not with the big spoon.” She left. Tragically, the mouse Perez decided it would be more efficient to stir with the big spoon, lost his balance, and fell in. The story ended with a memorable rhyme about the mouse Perez falling into the pot, and the little ant grieving and missing him.

To say that the story traumatized me would be wrong. Fascination would be a better word: at the illogic of it, the inexorable hand of Fate, leveled even against this unlikeliest of couples. I listened to it over and over, trying to picture the mouse and the ant, adjusting their relative sizes in my head. I tried to understand how the ant could hold a small spoon, tried to picture the weight of the big spoon and the circumstances that might lead to it tipping the mouse Perez into the pot. Perhaps he was perched on the rim and the handle slipped away from him? Perhaps, leaning forward to grab it back, he lost his balance?

I listened to that story more than “The Selfish Giant” or “Tom Thumb” or any of the others that followed, including “Sinbad the Mariner,” which came a close second. It persuaded me that the world was essentially an irrational, tragic place, and that the only thing to be done with so much tragedy was relish it. To that end, and with my nanny’s training, I became a soap opera junkie at the age of six. (And an Agatha Christie fanatic at ten, when the randomness of the universe and the soaps became too much, and I required a detective to impose some order.)

The mouse Perez also taught me, incidentally, something about the sadness intrinsic to a letter. I hadn’t been entirely wrong about the copuchas my mother and grandmother exchanged; though not sad in themselves, they carried a sadness with them, the weight of crossed time zones and intervening weeks, all to convey the illusion—and only the illusion—of my grandmother’s company.

These days, my grandmother is troubled by naked people. A tireless political activist in her youth, and one of the few women of her generation to earn a degree in law, Lala (like her brothers and sisters) remains an avid and easily incensed reader of newspapers. My mother shares her mother’s passionate political interest, but there the similarities between mother and daughter end. Lala is careless, even slovenly, about clothes. My mother dresses with impeccable taste.

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Liliana Loofbourow brings her new accessories every year. (Some friction results when Lala turns up, all smiles, her ears drooping with the weight of the same stripped metal stars. She forgets the new earrings, or has put them away for a special occasion that never materializes.)

They say insanity skips a generation. Predilections do too, and I have inherited my grandmother’s lack of taste and her habit of forming helpless attachments to old and ugly things. Travel has become cheaper and easier over the years, and I visit annually. We get along beautifully, partly because we are both relaxed and a little slothful, partly because we share, too, a love of contentious topics. No sooner had I walked through the door, exhausted after a fourteen-hour flight, when, preliminaries done, she asked me, voice throbbing with excitement, “Have you heard about the nakeds?”

I say “nakeds” because the word she uses for them, “las peloteces,” is one of her own invention that denies the participants true subjecthood—in her outrage she has transformed them into a plural noun that could be translated “the naked hijinks,” or “the affairs of nakedness,” or even “nakednesses,” but which I prefer to think of as the nakeds. The word peloteces derives from the slang word for the condition of being naked, “en pelota.” Pelota literally means ball, and I don’t think my grandmother, for all her spiteful intentions, quite understands the source of her neologism.

She is referring to the Chilean participants in American photographer Spencer Tunick’s 2002 art installation in Santiago. When he came to Chile in the dead of winter, Tunick expected approximately 200 naked people to turn up in front of the Museum of Contemporary Arts to be photographed. To his surprise, and the consternation of the Chilean public, the Museum was swamped by the massive nakedness of an incredible 4,000 bodies, shivering and packed together in the zero-degree weather. “They say they stank up the city for blocks in every direction,” my grandmother says.

The nakeds, in Lala’s view, are the latest in a long and insulting slide towards decadence. Chileans, historically circumspect and reserved, the British of South America, have never been sensualists, let alone exhibitionists. They haven’t much cared for mambo, salsa, or even merengue, judging these genres a touch exotic. My grandmother longs for a time when hazing meant boys daring each other to spray passing girls with perfume. But the explosion was bound to come, and the new millennium has brought with it an urgent and perhaps overeager uncorseting of the national stays.

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Liliana Loofbourow The first major experiment in exhibitionism took place in January of 2000, with the Girl in the Glass House. A 21-year-old model, Daniela Tobar, took up residence in a specially constructed glass house in the middle of downtown Santiago, where she lived publicly for a month.

Writers flooded newspapers with opinions about Daniela’s physical attributes. Families congregated to gawk. The consensus seemed to be that if she was beautiful, the experiment was art, and if not, it wasn’t. Daniela’s aesthetic beauty or lack thereof was, therefore, a matter of no small consequence. The argument ended abruptly because the piece, which had originally been slated to last two months, was cut short. The hordes of Chileans and tourists who crowded outside Daniela’s door chanting for her to get into the shower finally pushed her over the edge and out of the glass house. She packed her things and gave everybody concerned the finger, bringing the Great Experiment to a dismal end. (It was resumed, this time with a stout man, but was judged a failure. No one was much interested anymore and besides, according to one paper, he was paunchy and ugly.)

Among the writers weighing in vociferously on the Daniela debate was Lala’s brother, my great-uncle Simon, who participated enthusiastically also in the Tunick controversy. Lala and I are both legal-minded, she by training, I by instinct, and place inordinate faith in that which is written. Anxious to convince me of the wrongness of nakedhood, therefore, she marshaled Simon’s published editorials to her aid, citing his opinions on the Tunick phenomenon to support her position. This is a big step. To ally oneself with great-uncle Simon is a dangerous proposition, and my grandmother knows it.

It isn’t, by the way, that I disagree with everything my grandmother says. But the nakeds bring out the worst in her. When she asserts something stridently, citing values and virtues, perversity takes over and I am forced to adopt the opposite view. In one iteration of our ongoing debate I found myself rabidly proclaiming nudist colonies the way of the future, touting them as “invaluable,” “enriching,” and “fine.”

We are very much alike in this respect, Lala and I—we goad each other to extremes, and are by nature competitive. And when my grandmother showed me the letters of great-uncle Simon, the “finest pen in Chile,” I tasted blood. We sat down with them, Lala with one stack, I with another, and proceeded to sift for evidence.

Great-uncle Simon’s letters are testaments to another streak in our family. Simon’s reputation as “the finest pen” (or, to translate the Crab Orchard Review

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Liliana Loofbourow epithet even more literally, “the finest quill in Chile”) itself rests on a letter. It was written by a friend of his, and addressed to the editor of a small newspaper called The Star, who printed it more or less as a favor.

Simon uses this letter the way authors will use blurbs—incessantly, and with no regard for source.

It’s a rare person who will take the time and trouble to write a letter to the editor. Of the few who do, some will write when they feel strongly about a given subject, or think they can contribute usefully to the discussion. Reasons for writing abound—injury, offense, agreement, satire—but whatever their motivation, letter writers generally confine themselves to one, or maybe two, letters a year. Great-uncle Simon, weighing in at a massive 642 letters in the course of his epistolary career, is by any standard prolific, and by some, legendary.

Simon has never worked. After bankrupting a business or two thanks to an exuberant generosity that kept his friends rich and his family poor, he and his wife separated, and he took to raising fighting cocks in his backyard. One day, nursing a wound incurred while sharpening his star cock Dante’s talons, Simon decided to put his talents to the service of the world. The world, in Simon’s view, required his aid, because of a new and alarming trend he observed in the hairstyles of young men.

The long hair of the eighties spread like a rash through Santiago.

Being small and homogeneous, Chile tends to stumble onto its cultural epiphanies all at once. In the Bon Jovi years, this cultural synchrony produced a generation of long-haired boys practically overnight.

Though it would be inaccurate to say that shaggy boys singly provoked Simon’s outrage, they certainly jump-started his career as a letter-tothe-editorist, and helped him find his calling. Suddenly the papers were carrying one and sometimes two letters a day on Simon’s popular new theory of feismo, or uglism. The term caught on, and it is perhaps the only true legacy of the many great-uncle Simon has claimed for himself.

“Uglism,” Simon says, is defined in the dictionary as “the literary and artistic tendency to attribute aesthetic value to the ugly.” The cult of uglism celebrates androgyny and rejects the precious differences between the sexes. It permits piercings. It promotes oily hair. It fosters immorality. It encourages one-shouldered shirts, dresses and skirts that taper at an angle, and any other garment that violates the Fundamental Value of Symmetry.

The litany of crimes perpetrated in the name of uglism constitutes a virtual fashion desiderata: Scraggly beards. Pants on women. Anklets.

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Liliana Loofbourow way women, particularly models, walk. In a series of letters eviscerating Versace and Gucci for their failure to teach models how to walk on the runway (“they flail, hips and arms wagging from side to side”) he presented, for comparison, my Aunt Ines, a small, precise woman who walks heel-to-toe, with a back that never moves. When Claudia Schiffer came to visit Chile, he wrote her an open letter which was printed in all the national newspapers, offering his and Ines’ services to remedy her spastic walk. Ines was humiliated and Claudia didn’t reply, but the world was charmed. The finest quill in Chile had emerged from the feathery inferno of his backyard, ready to engage the world.

A part of that world—the old world, the pre-feismo world— remains extremely Catholic. As of this writing, divorce has been legal in Chile for two days. My grandmother scandalized society, therefore, when she became a gossip item, a copucha, by separating from my grandfather. She was excommunicated, and though there is no ceremony to mark that event, and no way for the Church to enforce it, she has never since taken Communion or attended Mass.

The marriage lasted two painful years, and amounted to a strange and tortured epilogue to an idyllic five-year courtship.

Gossip raged following their separation. People wanted to know why a young couple with two beautiful children came to hate each other and fly in the face of the Church after only two years of marriage.

A couple who, during their courtship, spent all their time together reciting Bécquer and studying law, and then, when forced to part, wrote ardent letters that touched on everything from philosophy to their shared future. The letters from their five years together sit in my grandmother’s closet, burning the paper they’re written on still, fifty years after the marriage curdled and died. But the reason Lala became a copucha is that one letter, one step in the arc of their history, never became a matter of public record. There was no death certificate, no autopsy and no specified cause of death for the marriage. And so, in the eyes of the world, it was never decently documented and laid to rest. It rankled. Marriage is an institution, and when any institution goes awry it becomes important that somebody know why. Women, impotence, abuse—there needed to be a name for what happened.

There needed to be a principle. There needed to be a lesson.

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Liliana Loofbourow in a shoebox in her closet next to a tin ostensibly filled with wool, underneath which lie her own letters, folded and brown. Going through Simon’s articles with her in search of naked references, I noticed that his clippings dwindled in later years. Apparently not all papers had the desire or the space to continue printing Simon indefinitely, and the stream of articles by Simon Silva C. fell to maybe one letter a week, and a heavily abridged one at that. Undaunted, Simon started sending his letters to smaller and smaller newspapers—La Estrella, Las Últimas Noticias, El Expreso. Meeting with only moderate success, he finally asked the editor of El Mercurio why they had stopped running him.

The editor told him his style was amateurish. Simon cursed the editor and all his staff for their ignorance, cited his nonexistent degree in Languages, and went straight to a bookstore, where he bought a thesaurus of arcane and difficult words. The thesaurus sits in front of his typewriter, lovingly smeared and ruffled, and is one of the few books great-uncle Simon has ever studied with any attention.

The thesaurus sparked a shift in focus, a move from fashion trivialities to global concerns, from the puchas to copuchas. Since its purchase, Simon has no longer been satisfied with newspapers alone.

As the ritual of hunting through twelve daily papers for a letter or a mention lost its thrill, he took on additional duties. He began writing letters to ambassadors, presidents, princes and kings. He continues to write to the papers, but now, having unearthed his unsuspected philosophical and moral qualities (cultivating a Socratic beard in the process), he has seen fit to devise a new identity. He now writes under the pseudonym Franco Valentini, gentleman philosopher.

Franco Valentini has written to the President of the United States concerning the site of the World Trade Center. “The only way for the United States to achieve world peace,” he states, after dismissing the Statue of Liberty as a French joke made at the expense of American identity, “is for the government to replace the twin towers with universal symbols of love and wisdom.” His solution to the whole messy issue of holy war and fundamentalism is succinct: “Since Socrates is the wisest man that ever lived in the history of humanity, and Jesus preached the unambiguous and universal doctrine of love, two monuments should be built on Ground Zero: one of Jesus, and one of Socrates.”

Most recently, Valentini has written the King of Spain, asking his permission to disseminate a great and hitherto overlooked Spanish work of art. The King replied within eight days. It was a gracious, noncommittal reply, congratulating Simon on his knowledge and interest. Simon is 246 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Liliana Loofbourow delighted. “Protocol demands that I reply to him within eight days,” he said to me over the phone. I had called to say I was visiting Chile and would he like to stop by. “That’s how you tell the difference between royalty and plebeians. I haven’t heard a word from the President of the United States, but the King of Sweden replied to my letter within fortyeight hours. Well, must go. I have one day before my letter has to go to post so it’ll get to Madrid in time.” He hung up, and I held the receiver in my hand, nonplussed at being blown off for the King of Spain.

I read the World Trade Center letter out loud to my grandmother (a version of it was printed in a tiny newspaper called El Expreso, and Simon had mailed her this clipping too). The naked debate came to an uncertain pause, verging on victory for me. Though it didn’t, strictly speaking, mention naked people, surely this was hard evidence of Simon’s uselessness as a source. My grandmother looked momentarily stricken. She sifted through the notes Simon had sent her, piles of clippings stapled to each. “I didn’t read that one. But I’m sure there are some others,” she said, flipping through. Finally she set them back in the shoebox. “Poor Simon.”

I had proven to our mutual satisfaction that Simon’s letters couldn’t be used to help Lala condemn the nakeds. The cost of that proof hovered in the air, looming over us, words like “crazy” or “stupid” waiting to descend on Simon. Or, worse still—the ugliest thing to stalk a brother and great-uncle—pity.

“The problem,” said my grandmother, saving us from teetering over the edge, “with the peloteces, and with young people, is that there is no more romance. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is sacred.”

I was in love. “That is not true,” I said. And I told her about Tosh.

I told her he was Indian (dot, not feather) but born in America, and that yes, I had seen the movie Not Without My Daughter starring Sally Field, and that no, he was not an Irani. I told her about our wild adoring e-mails, chock-full of time-honored vows and professions. I couldn’t have exaggerated their content if I had wanted to—we were gods, saints, the best things to have ever happened. Too young to come up with our own metaphors, we capitalized on the tried and true.

Competitive too. The compulsion to exceed, to find new numbers, new depths and volumes of love. It was a giddy, exhausting relationship, the kind that consumes every breath and ultimately throws you, offbalance, into the pot. I spewed tropes at my grandmother, sure I could restore her faith in humanity and prove that love worked now too.

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Liliana Loofbourow After listening to me rant for a good hour, Lala gets up and goes into the kitchen, returning with two small cups of yogurt. We aren’t rivals any more. The four thousand nakeds have drifted back to their newspaper selves, where they stand, frozen in time and zerodegree weather, grinning at the clothed and comfortable. It’s just us in the room, a lonely hibiscus tapping against the window, Simon’s shoebox between us. Sitting down at the table she observes that she thinks we are alike. And in her eyes is a meaning that I can’t quite read—it includes me and Tosh, and perhaps the danger of letting letters become legal contracts between this time and another.

Sometimes we are in need of rescuing. As I spoke to Simon this morning I couldn’t help thinking of his alter-ego, the great Franco Valentini—a wise man, a man of frankness and valor whose signature inspires confidence, whose name invokes truth, permanence and history. His is an undeniable presence: 642 letters in a shoebox, dozens more drifting among the embassies and palaces of the world, and greatuncle Simon himself, sitting in front of his typewriter, flipping through his thesaurus in search of a fancy word. Not to mention the thousands of newspapers bearing his name and all the other names that build a past. Franco Valentini gives me hope. I hope, for instance, that the King of Spain will come to call on great-uncle Simon. We will all be together.

My mother will melt her tapes, Lala will wear new earrings, and the little ant and the mouse Perez will stand in attendance, hand in hand.

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Margaret MacInnis Swimming in the Gulf When I think back to the year I lived in Kuwait, I think of swimming. I think of pools—outdoor, indoor, ground level, rooftop— filled with warm, sometimes hot, water in changing shades of blue, green, or gray. I remember how my skin cracked and peeled from the strength of the chlorine. I think of the gray water of the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf I would be corrected) water that appeared to be the dark color of slate one minute, and the light color of my then-husband’s eyes the next. In Kuwait I sensed danger in the undercurrent of the ocean and danger in the undercurrent of my two-year-old marriage. I see myself in a blue one-piece bathing suit, conservative by anyone’s standards, tight around the neck, covering my back, and all times, my bottom, doing laps the length of the pool, trying to lose myself in the rhythm of my stroke until I could have been anywhere else in the world.

At our interview in London, the headmaster of the Al-Bayan Bilingual School had promised us that in Kuwait we could bank our entire salaries and live on our private tutoring money. Moving to Kuwait meant leaving England, where my husband had just finished a graduate degree in Educational Management, and I had a poorly-paid teaching job that I loved. Our families, his in Canada and mine in the U.S., had been shocked at our decision, and I understood how they felt. Wavelets of shock, fear, and anxiety riffled through my own feelings about our decision to relocate to the Gulf. We would be so far from home, from friends and family, living on the edge of the threat of invasion and war.

Whenever I expressed my concerns to my husband, he told me not to worry, not to let my “overactive imagination” run away with me.

We landed in Kuwait on the night of September 1, 1997. Inside the airport terminal, our headmaster held up a sign that read Al-Bayan Bilingual School. The first thing the headmaster told us was that our apartment in the Al-Sultan complex, where many of the Western expatriate workers lived, was not ready, and that we, along with Crab Orchard Review

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Margaret MacInnis another new teaching couple, would be temporarily housed in another apartment complex. I was glad about the other couple. I’d have some company. The headmaster assured us that our apartments would be ready as soon as possible, and the minute they were we would be moved into them. “You’ve got a nice swimming pool,” he said to my husband, who stood with his jaw clenched, shoulders stiff, and his chest forward.

Suddenly light-headed and nauseated, I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead. Maybe twenty hours in transit from Calgary had gotten to me. I needed fresh air. My eyes fixed on the glass exit door. I left my bags on the floor at my husband’s feet and headed straight for the exit. When I pushed the door open, a gust of hot air slapped me hard in the face. It must have been over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the night.

Our temporary accommodations met our basic needs—kitchen, living room with a TV, bathroom, and bedroom. We had new sheets, new pots, pans, and dishes, compliments of Al-Bayan, and of course, there was the swimming pool located outside between the two buildings in the complex. My new friends, newlyweds from Ontario, who held hands in the car and couldn’t say one another’s name without smiling, did not want to use the pool, nor did my husband. If I wanted to swim, I was on my own.

I had to do something, I told my husband at the end of our first week, as I dug for my bathing suit in one of the suitcases I had dragged out from under the bed. It was too hot to go for a walk, my main form of exercise in England. The gym we had been promised in our interview was on the other side of town in the complex where we were supposed to be. I needed to work out, and swimming was my only option.

“Stop,” he said. “Get out of that suitcase. You’ll mess up everything.”

I should’ve known better than go digging on my own. He had packed up our cottage in England, while I stood in doorways. “Watch and learn,” he had said. From under the bed, he pulled a small duffle bag, unzipped it, and handed me my blue, bought-especially-for-Kuwait bathing suit.

Once I adjusted the wide shoulder straps and straightened the elastics around each thigh, I checked and double-checked myself in the mirror to make sure my bottom wasn’t hanging out. The bathing suit covered it, and my cleavage, binding my breasts so tightly that they looked flat and nipple-less. The look satisfied me. I didn’t want to upset my Muslim neighbors. There was nothing I could do, however, about my exposed legs and arms. I had been told that bare arms were considered as erotic as bare breasts. Relax, I told myself; I was going to the swimming pool, 250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret MacInnis not to the supermarket or the grocery store. For those trips I would put on long sleeves and a long skirt. With a large bath towel wrapped around my torso, I headed down to the pool.

After several afternoon swims in bath temperature water, and stares from children and their mothers who swam in their long, tent-like abayas and somehow managed not to drown in the soaked material, I decided to go for a nighttime dip. I reasoned that the evening cooking, eating, doing dishes and then homework would divert their attention from me. My husband didn’t want to swim or sit by the pool, so I went alone. Lights shone around the pool and from the apartments above me. When I looked up, I saw into the kitchens and living rooms of my neighbors. A man standing on his balcony with a cell phone attached to his ear watched me remove and fold my towel. I looked away, and he went inside. On another balcony, a little girl stared at me over the railing. I waved, and she turned her back to me.

Before entering the pool, I did what I had always done, made the small gesture I had watched my parents make before they went into a pool, a lake, or the ocean. They never told me I had to do it; I simply did as they had done, without questioning, and without noticing it had become a part of me. I reached down to touch the water with my right hand, brought my fingers to my forehead, then my chest, one shoulder and then the other. Now I was ready. Since I had never learned to dive, I walked down the steps into the warm water and continued what was becoming a ritual.

The rhythmic motion of my crawl was propelling me stroke by stroke into the trance-like state I desired. Soon I would feel transported, transformed. Peace would engulf me. Before I could achieve this state, however, giggles exploded above me. I turned to find an audience of men and children leaning over the balcony railing. I wished them away and resumed my crawl. The giggles subsided, and I was relaxing into my stroke when something fluttered in my hair. I raised my fingers to my head and felt a piece of paper. I took it in my hand, looked at it closely, and saw that it was play U.S. money. I lifted my eyes and watched a little boy dropping these dollar bills from his balcony into the pool water. To me this was not the harmless joke of a child. I knew the connotation: U.S. money for a half-dressed Western whore.

Shocked at the boy’s action, shocked that his father stood beside him, laughing into his cell phone, and shocked at the anger that surfaced in me quickly and fiercely, making my hands tremble, I swam to the ladder and climbed out of the pool. I moved toward my towel as fast as Crab Orchard Review

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Margaret MacInnis I could without running, wrapped it around me, and left the pool area without looking back.

At the end of October, my husband and I finally moved into the complex where the other expatriate workers lived. I found the pool on the roof, enclosed by four high green aluminum walls that prevented me from seeing across the street to the gray beach where my husband preferred to go to swim and sunbathe in his Speedo, a tight-fitting red and white bikini bottom that reminded me of his Russian (Ukraine under Soviet rule) upbringing. I knew that men in France and Italy, countries I considered highly cultured and civilized, wore the same bikini bottoms, but every time my husband wore his, all I could see were our staggering cultural differences.

Very few Westerners visited the narrow stretch of beach across from the complex the way my husband did, opting instead for the privacy and seclusion of the rooftop pool. It wasn’t really private, though. It was often crowded with British sunbathers, their fair skin as pink as cooked Gulf shrimp, women in bikinis and men wearing shorts that went half-way to their knees, closer to American-style suits than European. Between the crowd of expatriates and the small square pool that forced my laps shorter, I was feeling rather claustrophobic. My trance eluded me in the water that was the odd greenish-yellow color of a fading bruise. The smell of chlorine burned my nose. I developed a rash that began to crack and peel. The painted white floor of the pool was beginning to crack too, and the daily confrontation of such neglect saddened me.

One afternoon my husband convinced me to accompany him across the street to the beach. I pulled a long-sleeved ankle-length dress over my bathing suit and followed him down the stairs, across the cement parking lot, across the busy street and down the narrow path to the beach. I wanted to ask him to hold my hand so that the thin, hungry-looking Sri Lankan and Indian boys and men, who had been away from their countries and women too long working for slave wages in a country of dizzying wealth, would stop staring at me, but such public displays of affection between a man and a woman—even a married couple—were illegal. The men stood along the shore in slacks and white dress shirts, the same slacks and white dress shirts in which they swam. They stared at my husband and me in our bathing suits, starting at our feet, working their way up our calves, over our thighs and buttocks, our stomachs, arms, and chests. Equally as fascinating as my bound, nipple-less breasts were to them was my husband’s chest and his back, both covered in a coat of fine brown hair. He didn’t seem to notice 252 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret MacInnis the stares, but I was drowning in them, and after five minutes of sitting on the blanket he had spread on the sand, I told him I couldn’t bear it.

He told me I was being ridiculous, overreacting, but I didn’t care. Even I had my limits. I stood up, pulled my dress on, and moved as quickly as I could down the beach to the path, waited for a break in the traffic, and ran back to our building, back to the familiarity of the pool.

At night before I went to bed, even though my husband hated the smell and complained of my being greasy and messing up the sheets, I rubbed salve into the raw cracks that I could reach, cracks that never seemed fully to heal.

Abdul, a seventh-grade boy whose Egyptian driver picked the two of us up from school every Tuesday and Thursday, had an indoor swimming pool. Abdul, who needed help with his English homework, who often seemed distracted and unable to comprehend fully what was going on in class, was the politest, most sensitive child I encountered during my year in Kuwait. His mother, a gentle woman in a black headscarf, spoke perfect English and had given me a tour of her home, something no other mother of the four children I tutored had done.

In the other homes, I was greeted by one or two maids and led to the table where the servants ate. I would then sit and wait for my student to join me.

Her home was my home, Abdul’s mother had told me on the first day of tutoring as she led me through the house. She stopped in front of the sliding glass door to the swimming pool. Steam rose from the bluish-gray pool water and clouded the windows. Abdul ran his hand along the glass, leaving his fingerprints as the steam evaporated.

His mother opened the sliding glass door. Abdul called something in his guttural mother tongue, and I raised my hand to my throat.

His brother waved, and I waved back. Lucky boy, I thought, with his own indoor swimming pool. The boy swam to the edge of the pool and stopped, resting on his elbows. He had big dark eyes and a warm smile. “Hel-lo,” he said to me. “How…arrr…you?”

I smiled at him. “I’m fine, thank you. And you?”

“Fine, tank…you.”

Abdul said something else in Arabic, and slid the door closed. I waved goodbye to Abdul’s brother one last time. Their mother, still standing in front of the door, turned to me, and said, “My Bahadir cannot walk. Did Abdul tell you?”

I looked at my seventh grader, and then at Bahadir doing the Crab Orchard Review

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Margaret MacInnis backstroke. No, he hadn’t told me. I looked closer at the woman standing in front of me, with her hair hidden under the black scarf, and noticed the deep dark circles under her eyes.

“My son was born paralyzed from the waist down. He has had many operations in your country. My husband and I pray that he will walk, that one day he will be free from his affliction.”

She paused, looking into my eyes, and I remembered my early weeks in Kuwait, how I had covered myself in an invisible scarf, learning to monitor carefully my actions, words, facial expressions, and gestures, trying not to be so obviously Western, so obviously from a world where people, for better or worse, felt comfortable touching each other. I thought of my marriage, and how I wore the same invisible scarf for my husband, and how I had learned to monitor my behavior around him. I could be very stupid, my husband said. I could be too talkative, too emotional, too friendly, and too American. For months I had been trying to respect the world in which I lived, but in that instant, with that paralyzed child doing laps in the steaming pool as a backdrop, I acted on impulse. I couldn’t deny who I was or from where I had come.

I was talkative, emotional, friendly, and American. I took her hand and squeezed.

She sighed deeply, a tear rolled down her cheek, and I was still holding her hand. “Little sister,” she said, and squeezed back before she dropped my hand and led me to the dining room, where Abdul and I would do his homework.

Before each of our subsequent study sessions began, the three of us would go to the door of the pool, Abdul would slide it open, Bahadir would wave from the pool and ask me how I was. My answer was always the same: “I’m fine, thank you, and you?”

I wasn’t so fine. There in the dry heat of the desert, I felt the crack in the foundation of my marriage widening as each week passed.

Eventually I would slip through it, but when we traveled to Dubai in February to visit friends, like Bahadir at the edge of his pool, I was still resting on my elbows at the edge of my married life, ostensibly powerless.

Tamara and Phil, a couple we had met while living in England, were now living in Dubai. Phil worked for Barclays Bank, and Tamara, who had taught with me at the American Community School, spent her days at the pool reading, writing letters, and making friends with 254 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret MacInnis other ex-pat wives. I considered Tamara a dear friend, and I’d always enjoyed being in the company of Phil and Tamara together. They were a happy couple who obviously loved and respected each other. Phil didn’t roll his eyes when Tamara expressed an opinion. If he disagreed with her, he contradicted her in a way that did not demean her. He did not call her stupid.

“You’re very lucky,” I told Tamara as we knelt in the shallow end of the pool, wearing almost identical bathing suits. I nodded toward Phil, who stood on the diving board in short-length bathing trunks.

He waved. My gaze drifted to my husband who stood near him on the edge of the pool, his hands clenched into fists. “I know I am,” Tamara said. She looked at me as if waiting for me to say something else, and I lowered my head in silence.

In April the four of us drove across the United Arab Emirates into Oman, a country which seemed to me a virtual oasis in the desert.

Where Kuwait was gray upon gray upon gray—gray buildings, gray sand, still gray ocean water out my window, Oman was green, purple, fuchsia, white, and blue—green leaves on trees, purple and fuchsia flowers on white buildings, blue ocean waves. I felt alive for the first time in a long time.

We based ourselves in Muscat, at a hotel on a hill overlooking the ocean, and took day trips to castle upon castle, fort upon fort. Tamara, Phil, and I loved it. My husband was edgy and bored. “Where’s the bar?” he half-joked. In Muscat the hotels served alcohol, and one morning I suggested that he stay behind. He insisted on coming. That unforgettable morning we arrived at a fort, or was it a town? With its high walls surrounding shops, restaurants, museums, flower gardens and parks, and a mosque, it could have been both. I remember we parked outside the walls. I felt immediately uncomfortable when I opened the car door and saw a disheveled-looking, non-Arab, nonWestern man in black pants and a white shirt lurking close by. My skirt had ridden up during the car journey, exposing my thighs, and this small man with blood-shot eyes and a snot-crusted nose eyed me in a way that no Gulf Arab man would do in public.

My outraged glare did not divert his stare. I began to think that maybe he was soft in the head, unhinged as Phil would say. I turned to my husband. “Look at the way he’s looking at me. Do something.”

“Relax for chrissake. Is he hurting you?”

No, he wasn’t. Not really. He was simply staring at me in a way that made me feel uneasy. He was like the men on the beach in Kuwait, Crab Orchard Review

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Margaret MacInnis but there at the fort, I had no pool to escape to. When he looked at me with his red-rimmed eyes, I felt sick. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream, I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him over the head for the way he made me feel. Maybe I was overreacting.

The four of us walked to the information center to get a couple of maps. Because it was an Omani national holiday, the narrow streets were eerily deserted. After an hour or so, I needed to find a restroom. No one else had to go, and I wandered off alone without a map. By a small park, I recognized the man from the car. He sat on a bench and watched me walk by. The uncomfortable feeling I had experienced earlier came back as I realized he and I were the only two people around. I sped up and turned a corner, heading toward the WC sign, which indicated restroom.

I looked back over my shoulder to make sure he had not followed me.

I went into a stall, locking the door behind me. I lifted my skirt, pulled down my underwear, and did what I had come to do. My body relaxed, and I regained my composure as I pulled up my underwear. At the sink, I splashed cold water on my face and wiped the sweat from my neck.

I walked out of the WC and jumped back, startled. The man from the park stood a few feet away with his back to me. Without the map, I had to retrace my steps, which meant walking right past him, but before I could take a step, he turned to me, exposing his erection through his unzipped fly. Now I knew he was unhinged. A man could be imprisoned or even killed for this behavior if I were an Arab woman.

I screamed and ran. Behind me the man softly imitated my scream.

I was lost, wandering around, looking for someone—anyone—so that I wouldn’t feel so alone. Finally I came upon an Omani man in traditional colorful garb sitting in front of what was marked as the Prince’s Sitting Room. He pointed to a wooden chair with a big, soft cushion on the seat. Flustered and close to tears, I sat. My heart sank when he walked away, but he came back quickly carrying a glass of water and a cup of tea on a silver tray. My eyes filled as he set down the tray next to me and, in English, told me not to worry, that everything would be fine. I drank the cool water and sipped the hot mint tea, unable to ignore my agitation, which was more than my shock at an unhinged man exposing himself to me in a deserted park; it was the realization that if I did not stop, if I did not turn around then, nothing would be fine, and I myself might come unhinged.

Back at the hotel I sat on the edge of my bed, watching CNN in the nude, feeling both nauseated by the events of the morning and 256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Margaret MacInnis chilled by the constant blast of the air conditioning. My husband had already gone downstairs. Earlier, when he had found me at the fort close to tears and sipping mint tea, and I had recounted what had happened, he told me I was crazy. It was no big deal. “Did he touch you?” he had said. I shook my head no. “No harm done then,” he said, and out of shock and anger and months of frustration, I melted into tears. “You’re pathetic,” he said and walked away.

My bathing suit lay on the bed beside me, and I was reaching for it when I heard the news that Tammy Wynette had died. No, I said, dragging the word out so that it hit the air in two syllables rather than one. I couldn’t believe that Tammy was dead. She was only fifty-five years old. Granted, she had—as the country and western cliché goes— done some hard living, and when I had seen her in London three years prior, I had thought she looked beautiful, but hard, tired, and older than her years. The night of the concert I had traveled into London by rail alone (no one would go with me because this was a little too country, even for Tamara, who had accompanied me to see Kathy Mattea and Mary Chapin Carpenter) to see Tammy and her ex-husband George Jones reunited for a European concert tour. I had stood in line waiting for the doors to open, awed by the crowd, the “We Love You, Tammy” signs, and the official satin jackets of the Tammy Wynette fan club.

On the back of the jackets was a portrait of a much younger-looking Tammy, and I tried to remember her young and fresh-faced, with long blonde curls and eyes wide and alive, but by the time I was old enough to recognize her, she had cut her hair into cropped layers and was wearing dark sunglasses. When I was six or seven, I stood in the supermarket checkout aisle with my mother, and on the cover of a tabloid was a picture of young Tammy with two black eyes and a swollen cut lip. The headline read something about Tammy and George splitting up for good. When my mother saw me staring, trying to make sense of how the picture and the headline fit together, she turned the paper around and told me I didn’t need to be looking at such things, and maybe she was right. I would not forget the image, recalling it whenever I heard “Stand by Your Man,” the song that made her a controversial legend. I cried a little as I pulled on my bathing suit and said a silent prayer for Tammy, and her ex-husband George. Then I stood, wrapped my towel around me, and headed down to the pool.

My husband had disappeared for the time being, and I dragged a wooden lawn chair away from the pool, just a little bit, so that I was still close to the pool, but could also see the steep wooden stairs Crab Orchard Review

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Margaret MacInnis winding down to the sea. Tamara and Phil walked slowly up them hand in hand, and when they came toward me, I felt a pang of jealousy; I wanted what they had.

They wanted me to leave the comfort of my chair and join them in their snorkeling adventure. They listened to my stories of learning to snorkel six years ago, of how hard it had been, of how I felt panic and anxiety at the thought of sharks, stingrays, and the dreaded squid.

“You love calamari,” Phil reminded me, and I had to laugh. I didn’t tell them that I felt claustrophobic with my face underwater, because I hadn’t always felt that way. I had grown up on a lake, after all. My claustrophobia had snuck up on me slowly like the strange man in the fort, like unhappiness does. When I told them I preferred the pool, thank you, Phil said he would swim by my side, he would hold my hand. I shook my head. “No way,” I said.

“Come on, you can do it,” he said, and Tamara assured me she would stay by my side. I looked in her eyes, certain I saw compassion and love. I wanted to trust her. I wanted to trust Phil. I wanted to trust my instincts, and at that moment I saw that I had to make a change, a drastic change before it was too late. Tamara gave me her hand and helped me to my feet. I stood, dropped my towel, and let the scent of jasmine and salt water envelop me as I followed them down the steep wooden stairs to the open sea.

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Diana Spechler Bethlehem After Arafat As

she drives through the narrow streets of Bethlehem, window down, black hair whipping around in the breeze, my new friend Nabiha, a Christian Arab who has lived here her whole life, points out hotels, holy sites, restaurants, and stores; she describes what each used to be like, invariably concluding with, “But now, of course, it is closed.” My friend Josh, a photographer, hangs out the passengerside window and snaps pictures. From the back seat, I watch the olive trees whiz by, silently singing the alphabet in an attempt to get O Little Town Of Bethlehem out of my head.

Bethlehem is ghost-like, partly because Arafat died two days ago, partly because the Intifadah and subsequent security fence have slowed tourism to a trickle. All around us, faces of suicide bombers adorn the walls, some stenciled in black directly onto the Jerusalem stone, others printed on fliers—faded, torn, overlapping each other—reminding me of my old college town, where fliers for poetry readings and concerts covered the telephone poles. Many of the car antennas in Bethlehem fly black flags. Arafat is everywhere, larger than life, watching over his people from giant posters that flutter gently in the midday wind.

When I ask Nabiha how she feels about Arafat’s death, she says, “Sometimes I agreed with him. Sometimes I disagreed with him. But he is a symbol of the Palestinian people and he always will be. No one can deny this.” I ask her who she thinks will replace him. She smiles. “I hope it is me,” she says. “If I could rule, everyone would live and let live.”

Nabiha loves Bethlehem. Once, while vacationing in Greece, she and her friend kept marveling at how beautiful everything was, and at how much Greece resembled Bethlehem. “That is when I knew,” she says, “that this is the place I love.”

We park near the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was born 2,000-plus years ago. As we walk toward the church, a small boy points a toy gun at us and shoots. All of the children carry toy guns.

Today is Eid, the holiday following the fast of Ramadan; toy guns during Eid are comparable to firecrackers on the Fourth of July. They Crab Orchard Review

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Diana Spechler even make a sound like firecrackers. I know they aren’t real, but they make me uneasy. Many of the children are excited to see tourists. One approaches me and says, “Hello. What is your name?” I imagine that is all the English he knows. Coincidentally, those same words in Arabic are the only ones I know. He motions toward my camera, then sits on a railing, rests his gun in his lap, and poses. He has a beautiful, sweet smile, and eyes like melted chocolate. After I take his picture, I walk toward the plaza outside the Church of the Nativity.

The church’s second claim to fame was the siege in 2002, when Palestinian gunmen stormed the church and took monks and nuns as hostages. The siege lasted thirty-nine days. A tour guide outside the church shows me the bullet marks near the doorway. “From the Israelis,” he says, running his fingers over the dents in the stone. He has a tiny moustache, and wears a button-up sweater that reminds me of Mr. Rogers. “Look,” he says to me. “Look.”

“I see,” I say, touching the stone and nodding.

He introduces himself as Adel. Then he turns to Josh and says confidently, “You know, Israel created Hamaas. And America created Osama bin Laden.”

This starts a mildly heated discussion, which I opt to avoid. I turn to another worker and ask him what he remembers about the siege. He tells me about the curfew, how all of Bethlehem had to stay in their houses.

“Sixteen days!” he says. “Sixteen days we could not leave our homes, and then after that we could only leave sometimes.” He tells me about how the Israeli army searched his house three times in one day.

“Did they find anything interesting?” I ask.

“I am a photographer for the church!” he says. He reaches into a canvas bag he has strapped across his shoulder, and pulls out a portrait of a tour group. Everyone in the group wears matching T-shirts and matching smiles. “They want this?” he shrieks, shaking the picture.

“This?” He clucks his tongue and returns the picture to his bag.

To enter the Church of the Nativity, you have to duck to get through the low stone doorway, a tricky way of getting tourists to bow to Jesus. The room where Jesus was born is tiny. Within that room, Jesus appears to have been born in a fireplace. The inside of the fireplace is decorated with votive candles. Stained glass hangs from the ceiling in the room. We have only been in here a minute before priests begin filing in, wearing long brown or white robes, cinched at the waist with rope cord. They are singing in Latin, each holding a long 260 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Diana Spechler white candle. A European tour group follows them, also singing and holding candles and hymnals. Two priests light incense, and the room fills with a thick aromatic smoke. One by one, the priests approach the fireplace and bow. The smoke and the body heat make my head buzz, creating a whooshing sound like I’m holding a seashell to my ear. I zero in on a tourist who is scratching her forehead with the same hand she’s using to hold her candle. I worry that something—a loose strand of hair, the pages of a hymnal—might catch fire. I search out emergency exits and concentrate on not fainting.

When I slip out at the end of the ceremony, Nabiha and I stand in an open courtyard, and I breathe in the fresh fall air. I ask her if she attends this church. She tells me that she used to, until her mother died ten years ago. “I am still a believer,” she says, “but I want answers.” I ask her if she expects to get any, and she says no. “I will never know why my mother had to die young.” She shrugs her shoulders. “So I do not ask things of God anymore.”

Nabiha loves her family. You can tell by the pictures all over her house, the house she grew up in, where she now lives alone; she brings Josh and me there after we leave the church. From the mantel, she lifts a framed picture of a woman hugging her. “This is my mother,” she says, blowing dust from the glass. She points to several other pictures. “And that is my mother. And that is my mother. And that is also my mother.”

She shows us pictures of her father, who died more than twenty years ago, and of her brothers, who have been living in California since the 1970s. Nabiha seems to track time according to when (in her opinion) her brothers should have returned to Bethlehem, and when she is glad that they didn’t. 1999 and 2000, she says, would have been good times for her brothers to return. Tourism was thriving because of the upcoming millennium. Christians all over the world wanted to have Christmas in Bethlehem. “It was hopeful here,” she says. “Christmas in 2000 was beautiful. And then…” She turns her empty palms up.

“Everything went downhill.”

Once the Intifadah spread into Bethlehem in 2001, she had to stop hoping that her brothers would return. She says it pains her now when she talks to them and they ask her about people they knew, and places they used to go, and she has to tell them, “That person has passed away,” or “That place is closed now.” Her brothers try to convince her to move away from the Middle East, where the political climate makes for less than ideal living conditions, but Nabiha doesn’t want to leave.

“Maybe one day,” she says, “I will meet a man or something…from, I Crab Orchard Review

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Diana Spechler don’t know, Africa. And then I would move to Africa. But right now, why would I leave? I do not want to leave,” she says.

At the kitchen table, Nabiha serves us fresh pita, recently harvested green olives, mixed nuts, cubes of mozzarella, and cherry tomatoes. In one bowl, she pours olive oil, and in another bowl, crushed thyme with sesame seeds. She instructs us to dip the pita first in the oil, then in the thyme. Then she shakes toothpicks out of a jar and spears the cherry tomatoes. She pinches a toothpick between her fingertips and lifts a tomato from the plate. “So we can be civilized,” she says, popping it into her mouth.

After lunch, Nabiha leads us into the living room and serves mud coffee and Arabic chocolates. The three of us slip into a discussion about the Arab-Israeli conflict; around here, it’s hard not to. Josh and I are both Jewish. Josh grew up in Boston, like I did, but now he lives in Jerusalem. We both tend to sympathize with Israel. To Nabiha, Israel is merely the force that drove her brothers away, that erected the security fence to demoralize the Palestinian people, that holds up traffic at check points. She tells us about her friend who obtained a permit to spend a day visting Jerusalem with her child. “Her child did not know that Jerusalem is only a fifteen-minute drive from here. She had never been anywhere but Bethlehem, so she asked her mother, ‘Should we prepare our suitcase?’” Nabiha shakes her head and sips coffee from her glass. “That is sad,” she says. “It does not need to be that way.”

Josh tries to defend the other side: the security fence is the only way to control terrorism; what else can Israel do?

“The problem is with both sides,” Nabiha says firmly. “But Israel needs to fix the problem. They are the ones in control. They need to make the first step. Otherwise, there will be no solution.”

“What is the solution?” Josh asks.

“I will tell you,” Nabiha says, setting her glass on the coffee table, and tucking one leg under her. “I will tell you a story about my landlord. My landlord dislikes me, because he is not allowed to raise my rent. My family has been in this house for decades, and now he wants to get me out, and let someone else live here for, I don’t know, one thousand dollars a month. But I will not go, so he terrorizes me.

Every October, he comes to the house to harvest his olive trees. And every year, he tears up my garden. Every year! I could take him to court, but what would it do? I could fight back, but what would it do?

So every year, after he leaves, I replant my flowers. I do not get angry with him. When I stand next to him, I pretend that I am standing next 262 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Diana Spechler to nothing. When I ignore him, he gets more angry, of course. But I think that one day, my ignoring him will make him stop fighting me.

You cannot keep fighting with someone who does not fight back.”

“But isn’t that weak?” I ask. “To not fight back?”

“People see it that way,” says Nabiha, “but I do not see it that way.

Somebody has to stop the fighting.”

When Nabiha drives us back to the checkpoint, Josh gets out of the car to take pictures of the security fence. Someone has spraypainted a mural onto it: a ferocious lion mauling a dove. Beside the picture are the words, “Stop the wall!” On the lion’s body is the word “Money.” Small children approach us and try to sell us maps of Jerusalem for ten shekels. I buy one, only to discover later that the Jewish Quarter is missing from the Old City, and that the Jewish holy sites are referred to by their Arabic names. To our left, a shepherd herds sheep up a hill.

A donkey stands beneath an olive tree. The sun is setting. Before she leaves, Nabiha tells me another story about one of her brothers: The last time she had car trouble, she called him in California and asked him what to do. “My brother is a mechanic,” she says. “I told him the vent was blowing hot air, but the heat was not turned on. I asked him if it was dangerous. He laughed and laughed and would not stop laughing.” She smiles, as she gets back into her car, and puts her seat belt on. “You see?” she asks me through her open window. “What is dangerous about hot air in a car?” She starts her engine and slips her sunglasses on. “What is so dangerous about car trouble,” she says, motioning toward the security fence, “compared to this life we live every day?”

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Brian Turner To Sand To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.

To sand the green smoke goes.

Each finned mortar, spinning in light.

Each star cluster, bursting above.

To sand go the skeletons of war, year by year.

To sand go the reticles of the brain, the minarets and steeple bells, brackish sludge from the open sewers, trashfires, the silent cowbirds resting on the shoulders of a yak. To sand each head of cabbage unravels its leaves the way dreams burn in the oilfires of night.

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Brian Turner

The Hurt Locker Nothing but the hurt left here.

Nothing but bullets and pain and the bled-out slumping and all the fucks and goddamns and Jesus Christs of the wounded.

Nothing left here but the hurt.

Believe it when you see it.

Believe it when a 12-year-old rolls a grenade into the room.

Or when a sniper punches a hole deep into someone’s skull.

Believe it when four men step from a taxicab in Mosul to shower the street in brass and fire. Open the hurt locker and see what there is of knives and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls.

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Brian Turner

Caravan No matter the barking of the dogs, the caravan marches on.

—Old Iraqi proverb A long queue of container ships stand at anchor in the Persian Gulf.

They carry .50 caliber machine guns in packing grease, dunnage, ammo crates, millions of bullets laid side by side, toilet paper, insecticides, light bulbs.

The dockside floodlights hum with mosquitoes and malaria. Cranes hoist connexes onto flatbed trucks which line Highway 1 from Kuwait City to Dohuk in the north, just south of Turkey.

Try to imagine enough boxes of food for one hundred and thirty thousand meals, two to three times a day, for a year.

It is an army of commerce, a fleet of corporations with the Pacific as its highway.

It is around-the-clock, and it is every day.

These are the boxes we bring to Iraq.

And Iraq?

Today, in Baghdad, a bomb killed 47 and wounded over one hundred.

It left a crater 10 feet deep. The stunned gathered body parts from the roadway and collected them in cardboard boxes.

Imagine taping those boxes and shipping them home, to Washington, D.C., to the White House lawn, to bury them under the green sod thrown over, box by box emptied into that rich soil 266 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Brian Turner in silence, a Marine sentry standing guard as boxes are lowered into the ground nearby at the National Monument, Tomb of the Unknown, our own land given to these, to say if this is freedom, then we will share it.

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Brian Turner

Katyusha Rockets The 107s have a crackling sound of fire and electricity, of air-ruckled heat, and when they pinwheel over the rooftops of Hamman al Alil they just keep going, traveling for years over the horizon to land in the meridians of Divisadero Street, where I’m standing early one morning on a Memorial Day in Fresno, California, the veteran’s parade scattering at the impact, mothers shielding their children by instinct, old war vets crouching behind automobiles as police set up an outer cordon for the unexploded ordinance.

Rockets often fall in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues of the brain’s myelin sheathing, over synapses and the rough structures of thought, they fall into the hippocampus, into the seat of memory— where lovers and strangers and old friends entertain themselves, unaware of the dangers headed their way, or that I will need to search among them the way the bomb disposal tech walks tethered and alone down Divisadero Street, suited-up as if walking on the surface of the moon as the crowd watches just how determined he is to dismantle death, to take it apart piece by piece. The bravest thing I’ve ever seen.

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Brian Turner

Ashbah The ghosts of American soldiers wander the streets of Balad by night, unsure of their way home, exhausted, the desert wind blowing trash down the narrow alleys as a voice sounds from the minaret, a soulful call reminding them how alone they are, how lost. And the Iraqi dead, they watch in silence from the rooftops as date palms line the shore in silhouette, leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

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Ryan G. Van Cleave Hole For three days, my next-door neighbor has been digging up his backyard. “For a bombshelter,” he said, wiping his forehead with an old rag. “We’ll stock up on duct tape, plastic sheeting, flour, bottled water, batteries, radios, flashlights, everything we need.” I want to tell him that lowering oneself into a hole ostrich-like isn’t the answer. But I realize, too, that language is not the solution. I have become a CNN junkie who can’t leave his own fear behind in the morning mirror. Tomorrow I will get my own shovel and help him dig, letting the crunch of metal hitting earth be the protest we utter together.

The weatherman promises that we will be buffeted by wind, pure arctic cold, but at least there will be earth to move, dirt to lift—a lifetime of desperate preparation.

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Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck After Reading of Timothy McVeigh’s Last Hours Summer 2001 Before his execution: he napped, ate A final meal of ice cream (two pints of Mint chocolate chip), and watched the news on a Small black-and-white TV. Still later, he Apparently wrote out by hand a poem Two centuries old (I thank whatever gods May be / for my unconquerable soul); Received Last Rites from the chaplain; and then Was put to death. The dawn before all this Occurred, though, on his walk from death row to His final cell, it’s written that he saw The moon for the first time in years and for The last time in his life. The article Does not record the phase of moon he gazed Upon—if it was full, quarter, or half— Just that, strip-searched and shackled, he looked up.

To him, the moon in Terre Haute that dawn Perhaps seemed like a drowsy peer, remote And pale: the two, the brightest objects in Their skies for just a short time more. He stopped To contemplate its barren face, a face That revealed nothing but the cast-off shine Of prior days. In thirty hours, he would Be gone—the moon in only one—but now

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Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck They intersected, silent and serene, Fraternal on their unrepentant paths, Unconquered, cold: the next day to return In forms the article does not reveal.

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Davi Walders Remembering Rabin in memory of Yitzhak Rabin March 1, 1922–November 4, 1995

I. Shivah: November 6, 1955 I dreamed you light and close last night, then carried you with me as I flew to the vast state of my childhood. Texas, a city named for saints, I sit shivah beside a river. An old man joins me, his lips mumbling, too, before lifting his bottle.

The river curves sore with mourning.

Leaves fall into their reflections before the current takes them. I walk along the water’s edge until the sky streaks purple and millions stream into synagogues.

Beth El, its dome a refuge, curving above a community throbbing in sorrow.

I comfort myself among them.

Cameras hug rabbis and Hatikvah, cling for a moment to the mayor and Kaddish.

Invisible among the milling, I try to hear beyond the crowd, wanting to weave your voice into my losses. All that long, fall week, I wander like a thief through reliquaries: San Antonio, Odessa, Midland, deep in the desert, sifting my sorrows.

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Davi Walders

II. Shloshim: November 15, 1995 Tongues coiled in the white heat of rightness, necks raised against a thousand infidels, they stomp and celebrate, hurl rocks, spew rage.

Not one deranged loner or two, but so many screamers, wrapped in the glory of Torah writ in their crazed reflection.

One God wandering among a divided people. Candles and notes along the road to a grave cannot sustain a community heaving with fissures.

The world mourns and devours. Desperate as children whimpering for an ancestor to hold high, another David, another radiant chaver, we take you in.

But your cold grave whispers of older stories, other mountains, tales of warriors, violent vows, dooming their people.

You, too, they call ‘troubler,’ you, the great warrior seeking peace. We remain our own troublers, lost again in the night, locked in the glare of our own tragedy.

III. Kaddish: December 1, 1995 and always Let us honor the memory of each streaked cheek you kissed, each bloody mezuzah you removed, each hand you offered to shake. We watched the wrestling gentle you. We saw the modesty you learned to let settle around you like grains of sand, small perturbations of what our grief would do to us.

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Davi Walders at all. Suppose prudence rather than ‘security,’ that a wrong trajectory could turn back toward its own blue heart, consuming its own frozen fire. Suppose a power of prolepsis protecting you, us, against that instant of unearthly connection.

A leader deprived of leave-taking, a poet still at the end: Koev li, aval ze lo nora.

But it is terrible to bleed for breath. Koev li, aval ze lo nora.…It does hurt to strain for word slivers. Hunger on our tongues, we stare at one of our own no longer ours in his assassin’s mask. Let us be sobered rather than chosen, cherishing your song.

To dream you back, let us not pretend.

May we at least grant you that.

Notes: —Shivah: period of intense mourning for seven days after a loved one’s death.

—Shloshim: period of continued mourning for thirty days after a loved one’s death.

—Kaddish: prayer recited for eleven months after a loved one’s death.

—Hatikvah: (the hope) Israel’s national anthem.

—Chaver: friend.

—Mezuzah: parchment scroll with Shema (affirmation of one G-d) prayer written on it.

—Koev li, aval ze lo nora: ‘It hurts, but it isn’t terrible’ (Rabin’s last words after being shot).

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Michael Waters Sonnet for Strummer 1952–2002 Where ignorant armies clash by night —Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” One less spiked art school burnout on the dole, you let your name bestow occupation, then thrashed the racism of Thatcher’s nation, spunk and outrage trebling rock’n’roll that jabbed island reggae with safety pins, pricked politics with a fat spliff of soul.

Patois and curses

Vinegar and piss All her former colonies have spoken London’s burning Da No longer exists the King’s English or safe European home

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Stefi Weisburd Where It Is Written Do ten Jews in a chat room make a minyan?

Imagine words assigned to electrons: this one pixilates your uncle’s prayer and runs God across the frequencies like a banner flown from a biplane. Have you noticed math problems turned sideways are librettos of Farsi love songs? There’s no such thing as moral translation, not with all those French words flashing their genitals—even cows moo differently in Iran. You can’t know what Rumi really intended, what with Eskimos and their chameleon snow. I bet you’d conjure meaning from the alphabet of toenail clippings in a velvet box, from the season of wasps stinging roses without knowing their names. Some words are made to be cut out of parchment. Remember the freelance rabbi rushed off the plane, flight crew certain he was a terrorist, the commissioned Torah in his lap, incendiary?

I could have saved them the trouble by digging into the cereal box myself. Here, Crab Orchard Review

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Stefi Weisburd take the decoder ring. Try it on the footprints up there in the dust. You’ll discover the moon is practicing for the end of the world, but no one will believe it.

You’ll have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on the thorax of that angel, whispering hush, in our language there is no word for hallelujah.

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Gary J. Whitehead These Last Ten Years What would it look like—a decade’s desire— if you could count those thousand sorrows like a flock of birds? Risen out of fire, does want get what it deserves: burn quick, or tire of its parts until it no longer knows what it would look like whole? A life desires life, and more: gems, cars, ships and marble spires.

I recall those times when something in me rose like a flock of birds, rose out of the fires of my need to know. But curiosity conspires with time, and the egg of an idea is soon unhoused.

What would it look like—this decade’s desires?

Like throngs of bare women seen through briars?

Like a glass in dry grass? Like wires exposed?

Like the burnt flecks rising out of those fires?

From all the small shells I have composed there have taken wing these things which I suppose would look like crows, a whole decade of desire, or words, like a flock of birds, rising out of fire.

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Contributors’ Notes

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of Small Knots (Cherry Grove Collections) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She is the recipient of two Artist Trust GAP Awards.

She lives in a small seaside community outside of Seattle with her firefighter husband and daughter. Her website is www.agodon.com.

Liz Ahl’s poems have appeared in the Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, The Formalist, Slipstream, American Voice, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. She lives in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where she teaches writing and literature at Plymouth State University.

Dilruba Ahmed’s poems have appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Asian Pacific American Journal, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, 5 AM, The California State Poetry Quarterly, and Georgia State University Review. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Maggie Anderson is the author of four books of poems, most recently Windfall: New and Selected Poems. She is also the editor of the new and selected poems of Louise McNeill and co-editor of Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and A Gathering of Poets.

She is Professor of English at Kent State University, where she directs the Wick Poetry Center and edits the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press.

Julianna Baggott is the author of a book of poems, This Country of Mothers (Southern Illinois University Press), as well as three novels: Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, and The Madam. She also publishes novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.

Robin Behn’s most recent collection of poems is Horizon Note, winner of the Brittingham Prize. She teaches at the University of Alabama and Vermont College.

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Contributors’ Notes Denise Bergman’s poems have been published widely. She is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan (Cedar Hill Books), poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher, and editor of City River of Voices (West End Press), an anthology of urban poetry.

Eleanor Berry lives and writes in rural western Oregon. Poems of hers appear in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Comstock Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The MacGuffin, Mid-America Poetry Review, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and 13th Moon. Recent essays of hers appear in Herspace: Women, Writing, and Solitude (Haworth Press) and in Antioch Review.

Remica L. Bingham, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, earned her MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops and is a Cave Canem fellow. She has recently completed her first book of poetry and is conducting a series of interviews with African-American writers. Her work has appeared in New Letters, PMS and 5 AM. She currently resides in Norfolk, Virginia.

S. Beth Bishop teaches writing at the University of Memphis and Memphis College of Art. Her work has most recently appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, The Pedestal, and Exquisite Corpse. Her collection, Shouldering Zero (Custom Words/Word Tech), is scheduled for publication in Fall 2006.

Fleda Brown is the Poet Laureate of Delaware and the author of five books of poems, most recently The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press.

Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and received her MFA from the University of Oregon. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals, magazines, and anthologies.

Anthony Butts is the author of Little Low Heaven (New Issues), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 William Carlos Williams Award. He is a member of the creative writing faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. “Heritage” is taken from his latest manuscript, Male Hysteria.

Kevin Coval has performed on four continents in seven countries at Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes universities, high schools, and conferences, including: The Parliament of the World’s Religions in Capetown, South Africa, African Hip-Hop Festival; Battle Cry, Poetry Society of London, Yale, Stanford, St. Xavier’s in Bombay, India; and three seasons of Russell Simmons’s HBO Def Poetry Jam. A member of the 2002 and 2003 National Poetry Slam Team-Chicago, Coval’s writing has appeared in The Spoken Word Revolution (Source Books), Awakening The Spirit (Skylight Paths), XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reporter, Fly Paper and can be heard regularly on WBEZ’s “848” on Chicago Public Radio.

Melissa Frederick’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Niederngasse, Black Water Review, Nostalgia, Bathtub Gin, DIAGRAM and Timber Creek Review.

Nola Garrett’s poems and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Christian Century, The Formalist, Georgia Review, and Tampa Review.

Her chapbook, The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball, won the 1998 Wordart Prize. Currently, she is finishing a cycle of 39 variations on the sestina form.

Susan Grimm is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Rattapallax, The Journal, and other publications. In 1996, she was awarded an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her chapbook Almost Home was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1997. In 1999, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association.

Her new book of poems, Lake Erie Blue, was published by BkMk Press.

Cindy Williams Gutiérrez is an award-winning performance poet, director and producer of spoken-word productions, and literary arts facilitator. Her poems are currently being exhibited in “People, Places and Perceptions: A Look at Contemporary Northwest Latino Art” at Maryhill Museum in Goldendale, Washington. Her work has been published in the Grove Review, ZYZZYVA, Open Spaces, PoetsWest, Chiyo’s Corner, and hipfish and is forthcoming in Wandering Hermit Review.

Karen Heuler’s latest novel, Journey to Bom Goody, has just been published by Livingston Press. Her stories have appeared in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards, TriQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and many other publications. She lives in New York.

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Contributors’ Notes Diane Holland is an award-winning painter and printmaker who has completed an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Comstock Review, Red Rock Review, and Clackamas Literary Review.

Kevin Honold teaches at Northern Kentucky University. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast and Oberon.

Sandy Huss teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Since publishing Labor for Love, her short fiction collection, she has explored the juxtaposition of text with image.

Annemarie Kattan Jacir is a Palestinian-American poet and filmmaker living in Ramallah. Her poetry has been published in several magazines and anthologies, including Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, and The Poetry of Arab Women (Interlink Books).

Roy Jacobstein’s book of poetry, Ripe, was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and was awarded the University of Wisconsin Press’s Felix Pollak Prize. His work is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is a public health physician working internationally on women’s reproductive health.

Lesley Jenike is currently a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati and she has an MFA from The Ohio State University. She’s had poems published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beacon Street Review, Adirondack Review, and Crab Creek Review, and several of her one-act plays have been produced in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Boston.

Sandra Kohler’s second collection of poems, The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Women’s Review of Books, Diner, Elixir, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, New Republic, Inkwell, and other magazines. She lives with her husband in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.

Aviya Kushner’s poems have recently appeared in the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Passages North. She is a frequent contributor to the Jerusalem Post.

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Contributors’ Notes Melissa Kwasny is the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on Poetry 1800-1950 (Wesleyan University Press) and author of The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press), as well as two novels. She lives in western Montana.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. A Chancellor’s University Fellow, she is in the third year of her MFA studies in poetry at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a graduate fellow and former staff member of Cave Canem. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Fugue, and WarpLand. Her first novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me, was published by One World / Ballantine Books.

Jeanne Larsen’s second book of translations, Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China, will be published late in 2005

by BOA Editions. Other translations have appeared in Circumference, Faultline, Cold Mountain Review, New Delta Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Her recent poetry and creative nonfiction is out or forthcoming in Pleiades, Tusculum Review, The Literary Review, Tiferet, Florida Review, Cimarron Review, New Delta Review, Fourth Genre, Arts & Letters and online in Blackbird. The author of three novels and a book of poems, she had a short story this spring in the Sewanee Review.

Ed Bok Lee’s first book, Real Karaoke People: Poems & Prose, won the annual Many Voices Award from New Rivers Press and will be published in Fall 2005. After attending kindergarten in South Korea, he grew up in North Dakota (where he is a former state Grand Slam Poetry champion) and studied Russian Literature and Language at the Universities of Minnesota, California—Berkeley, Kazakh State—Almaty, Indiana and Brown, where he earned an MFA. Recent awards for his poems, stories and plays include grants from the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Stephanie Lenox’s poem comes from a series-in-progress based on record holders from the Guinness Book of World Records. Other poems from this collection are forthcoming in Sou’wester, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Willow Springs.

Barbara Leon, a writer and editor in the natural health field, lives in Aptos, California. Her poetry has been published in americas review, 284 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes ConversationPeace Santa Cruz, In Our Own Words, Porter Gulch Review (2004 Poet of the Year), and the Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets, and is forthcoming in Bathyspheric Review, BorderSenses literary magazine, and Calyx.

Brian Leung lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Story, Crazyhorse, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Gulf Stream, River City, Runes, Bellingham Review, Indiana Review and Connecticut Review. His short story collection, World Famous Love Acts, won the Mary McCarthy Award in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books.

Timothy Liu is an associate professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He has published poems in numerous journals and is the author of six collections of poetry. His most recent collections are Of Thee I Sing (University of Georgia Press) and For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press).

Dawn Lonsinger is currently an MFA student at Cornell University, and has been published in Blue Collar Review, HeART Quarterly, and Sex Party/Literary Review.

Liliana Loofbourow is an assistant editor of Alabama Heritage magazine and works part-time as a translator. She is pursuing an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in Tuscaloosa.

Raymond Luczak is the author of six books, including three poetry collections: St. Michael’s Fall (Deaf Life Press), This Way to the Acorns (Tactile Mind Press) and Sylvia Plath Made Me Do It (Immediate Sensations Books). A playwright and filmmaker, he has written twelve produced stageplays and directed three full-length films. His web site is www.raymondluczak.com.

Susan Ludvigson’s most recent collection is Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press). Forthcoming is Escaping the House of Certainty, also from Louisiana State University Press. She teaches at Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Margaret MacInnis has lived and worked in England, France, Kuwait, Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes Switzerland, and Turkey. Her work is forthcoming in Potomac Review and Caketrain, and has appeared in Brevity and Literary Mama. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.

Kelly Magee’ s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Folio, Cream City Review, and Marlboro Review. She is a graduate of The Ohio State University’s MFA Program, and her work has received prizes from the AWP Intro Journals Award, The Best of Ohio Writer’s Contest, Fishtrap Fellowships, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she is at work on her first novel.

Peter Marcus has poems published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry, New England Review, Iowa Review, Boulevard, Shenandoah, Witness, Antioch Review and Kestrel. A recipient of a Connecticut Commission of the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, he is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Borough of Manhattan Community College/City University of New York.

Frank Matagrano’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) and Gargoyle, among others. A collection of his poems entitled I Can Only Go As Fast As the Guy in Front of Me was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2005.

Wendell Mayo has been traveling, teaching, and writing in the Baltic States since 1993, particularly Lithuania. In 2001-2002, he lived in Vilnius on a Fulbright. He is author of three books of fiction: a story collection, Centaur of the North (Arte Público), winner of the Aztlán Prize; a novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood (White Pine Press), also published in Lithuanian translation by Mintis Press in Vilnius; and B. Horror and Other Stories (Livingston Press). His stories have appeared widely in many magazines and anthologies, including Yale Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Manoa, Threepenny Review, and others. He teaches at Bowling Green State University.

Holloway McCandless lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she is at work on a novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Mademoiselle.

Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Splinter Factory. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Contributors’ Notes Shannon Marquez McGuire grew up in New Orleans and Bayou Lacombe, Louisiana. She teaches poetry and writing at Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Louisiana Literature, Plainsong, Comstock Review, New Delta Review, Xavier Review, Blue Collar Review, Cape Rock, and Blue Monk Review.

Erika Meitner’s first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was published by Anhinga Press.

Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Slate, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia, where she also serves on the Poetry Board of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Joseph Millar is the author of Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He is also the recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and grants from the Marin Arts Council and Oregon Literary Arts.

Jonathan Moody is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and a Cave Canem Fellow. His poetry has appeared in Cave Canem’s 2004 Anthology, Xavier Review, and is forthcoming in Cave Canem’s 10th Year Anniversary Reader.

Carolyn Moore’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have garnered over fifty awards and honors, including the New Millennium Prize.

Currently revising the manuscript awarded the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship in Poetry, she writes from the last remnant of the family farm in Tigard, Oregon.

Deborah Moreno received degrees from Knox College and the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University. A former journalist, she now works as a freelance writer. Her poems have appeared in Exponent II. John Morgan has published three books of poetry and a number of chapbooks. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, among other journals.

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Contributors’ Notes John Moss is a graduate student at DePaul University. His fiction is forthcoming in The Banana King and on The Site of Big Shoulders.

Arlene Naganawa lives in Seattle, Washington. She is the recipient of two literary artist awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and has had poems in Spindrift, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, and Mid-American Review. Her work is forthcoming in Diner and New Delta Review.

Lee Newton is an Assistant Professor of English at Bradley University.

He has received a Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and an Editor’s Choice Award from Amaranth. His publications have appeared in the Lowell Review, Pleiades, Pheobe, Asian Pacific American Journal, Wisconsin Review, Center, and others.

Sharon Olson lives in Palo Alto, California, and is a librarian at the Palo Alto City Library. Her poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Kalliope, and Seattle Review. Her chapbook Clouds Brushed in Later won the Abby Niebauer Memorial Chapbook award. Her poetry manuscript, The Long Night of Flying, will be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in April 2006.

Tanja Pajevic was a 2001–2002 Fulbright Fellow to Slovenia. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, where she was a Hemingway Fellow.

She lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she is working on a memoir about her year traveling through post-war Yugoslavia.

Ed Pavlić won the The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for his book of poems, Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon Press). He’s also the author of Crossroads Modernism (University of Minnesota Press), a book of literary essays. He teaches in the English Department and directs the Africana Studies Program at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Recent poems have appeared in the Cortland Review, AGNI, Artful Dodge, Brilliant Corners, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Open City, and Smartish Pace.

Candace Pearson is preoccupied with issues of memory, accountability and the natural world. She has poems forthcoming in Ploughshares and the Anthology of California Poetry, among other venues. She lives in the Los Angeles hills.

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Contributors’ Notes Cynthia Reeves is a second-year student in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers and Meridian’s 2005 Editor’s Prize. She lives outside Philadelphia.

Cherene Sherrard was born in Los Angeles, California. She holds degrees from UCLA and Cornell University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A graduate of the Cave Canem workshops, her fiction and poetry have been published in 5AM, Slipstream, Rosebud, Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, and in the anthologies River Crossings: Voices of the Diaspora, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. In 2005, she was awarded a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship in poetry.

Beth Simon’s poems, fiction, and nonfiction appear in Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and TriQuarterly. She is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Susan Sink will be on leave from Fullerton College in Fullerton, California, to spend 2005-2006 as a Resident Scholar at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Studies at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, completing her memoir “Visions and Revisions.” Her book of poems, The Way of All the Earth, was published in 2002. This poem is part of a second manuscript-in-progress, titled “Bringing the Body Down.”

Diana Spechler is the writer-in-residence at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including Moment, Greensboro Review, and Lilith. She has been the recipient of a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, the Chris O’Malley Fiction Prize from the Madison Review, and the winner of Jerry Jazz Musician Short Story Contest. She is at work on her first novel.

Maura Stanton’s stories have appeared recently in Antioch Reivew, River Styx and Notre Dame Review. Her book of stories, Cities in the Sea, won the Michigan Literary Prize and was published by the University of Michigan Press. She teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington.

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Contributors’ Notes Lois Taylor’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Manhattan Literary Review, South Carolina Review, StoryQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train, and American Short Fiction.

Jean Thompson is the author of three short story collections, including Who Do You Love (Simon & Schuster), a National Book Award finalist, and four novels, most recently City Boy (Simon & Schuster).

Alison Townsend teaches English and Women’s Studies courses at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her collection, The Blue Dress, was published by White Pine Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Southern Review, North American Review, MARGIE, and Water-Stone.

Brian Turner currently lives in the Pacific Northwest after having served on active duty with the 2nd Infantry Division in Mosul, Iraq. His work has appeared in Georgia Review, North American Review, Atlanta Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Rattle. His collection of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and will be published

by Alice James Books.

Ryan G. Van Cleave’s most recent books include a poetry collection, Imagine the Dawn: The Civil War Sonnets (Turning Point Press) and a creative writing textbook, Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes (Allyn & Bacon/Longman). He teaches creative writing and literature at Clemson University.

Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck recently returned to live in her home state of Illinois after living for twenty-five years in New York City, and also for periods in Mexico City; San Francisco; South Bend, Indiana; Paris; and Bronxville, New York. She has come to poetry only in the last several years. This is her first published poem.

Davi Walders’s poetry and prose have appeared in more than one hundred and fifty journals and anthologies. Her awards include a Maryland State Artist’s Grant in Poetry, an Alden B. Dow Creativity Fellowship, and fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She developed and directs the Vital Signs Poetry Project at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Contributors’ Notes Michael Waters is a professor of English at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He has published six collections of poetry. Among his awards are a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and two Pushcart Prizes. He has been Visiting Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens, Greece, and Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland.

Stefi Weisburd’s poems have recently appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, and Gettysburg Review. In 2002, she was a recipient of a “Discovery”/The Nation prize.

Gary J. Whitehead’s collection of poems, The Velocity of Dust, was published by Salmon Publishing in Spring 2005. He was recently awarded the PEN Northwest’s Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, which offers seven months of uninterrupted solitude in the wilderness of southwestern Oregon.

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The editors wish to thank all of the talented poets, writers, translators, book reviewers, and photographers who have made the first ten years of publishing the magazine possible with their contributions to our pages and our covers.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to showcase your fine work, Allison Joseph Editor & Poetry Editor

Carolyn Alessio Prose Editor

Jon Tribble Managing Editor

Crab Orchard Review’s Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Jhoanna S. Aberia Gabriel A. Abudu Kim Addonizio Bayo Adebowale Faith Adiele Opal Palmer Adisa Deborah Ager Kelli Russell Agodon Delmira Agustini Liz Ahl Dilruba Ahmed Latifa Ahmed Funso Aiyejina Susan Aizenberg Usha Akella Elisa Albo Joan Aleshire Carolyn Curtin Alessio Elizabeth Alexander Meena Alexander Dick Allen Preston L. Allen William Allen Tabaré Alvarez Ameen Alwan Candice Amich Daniel Anderson Dargie Anderson Maggie Anderson A. Manette Ansay Nin Andrews Liviu Antonesei Francisco Aragón José Manuel Arango Joy Arbor William Archila Elsa Arnett Fred Santiago Arroyo Renée Ashley

Jennifer Atkinson Sefi Atta Chi-Wai Au Julianna Baggott Doreen Baingana Melissa Baird Margaret Baker Ned Balbo Shauna Singh Baldwin Kathleen Balma Pāramitā Banerjee Amiri Baraka Aliki Barnstone Tina Barr Dorothy Barresi Jackie Bartley Ellen Bass Jan Beatty Jedd Beaudoin Robin Becker Jack B. Bedell Lory Bedikian Paulette Beete Robin Behn Andrea Behrends Josh Bell Jenny Benjamin-Smith Rachel Berghash Denise Bergman Heather Brittain Bergstrom Eleanor Berry Remica L. Bingham S. Beth Bishop Wendy Bishop Lorna Knowles Blake Diann Blakely Elaine Bleakney Amy Bleser

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Don Bogen Michelle Boisseau Dermot Bolger Andrew Bomback Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani Bruce Bond David Bond Laure-Anne Bosselaar Marta Boswell Angela Bourke Daniel Bourne Catherine Bowman Jennifer Boydston Earl S. Braggs Tara Bray Gay Brewer Geoffrey Brock Brian Brodeur Ben Brooks Joel Brouwer Amy Knox Brown Danit Brown Eleanor M. Brown Fleda Brown Kurt Brown Stacey Lynn Brown Debra Bruce Joseph Bruchac Andrea Hollander Budy Derick Burleson Ralph Burns Darrell Burton Anthony Butts Kathryn Stripling Byer Edward Byrne Mairéad Byrne Nelinia Cabiles Alejandro Cáceres

Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Lanette Cadle Marcus Cafagña Liam Callanan Joseph Campana Siobhán Campbell Carlos Cañeque Nick Carbó Linda Casebeer Cyrus Cassells Shannon Castleton C.P. Cavafy Rhonda Lynn Cawthorn Richard Cecil Myriam J. A. Chancy G. S. Sharat Chandra Jennifer Chang Leonard Chang Tina Chang Victoria Chang Gītā Chaţţopādhyāy Ting Ting Cheng James E Cherry Richard Chess Susanna Childress Sandy Verónica Chinchilla Khaleda Edib Chowdhury Martha Christina Patty Velásquez Chumil Huan-Hua Chye David Citino Anne Clarkin Harry Clifton Judith Ortiz Cofer Garnett Kilberg Cohen Isabel Cole Wanda Coleman Billy Collins Craig Collins Martha Collins Geraldine Connolly Gillian Conoley Peter Cooley Jennifer C Cornell Melissa Cossey Leigh Anne Couch

Kevin Coval Stacy Gillett Coyle Kevin Craft Chauna Craig Karen Craigo Stephen Cramer Steven Cramer Curtis L. Crisler Mary Crow Melissa Crowe Ricardo Cortez Cruz Deborah Cummins Silvia Curbelo David Curry David Dabydeen Philip Dacey Jim Daniels Jason G. Daley Traci Dant Ruth Ann Daugherty Tracy Daugherty Chad Davidson Christopher Davis Jarita Davis Jennifer Davis Mella J. Davis Adam Day Debra Kang Dean John F. Deane Laura Ann Dearing Danusha Laméris de Garza Edward J. Delaney Oliver de la Paz Isabel De La Peña Christine Delea Brian Komei Dempster Deborah DeNicola Toi Derricotte Bianca Diaz Joanne Diaz Sharon Dilworth Elizabeth Dodd Ana Doina Margaret Dolan David Dominguez

Matt Donovan Sean Thomas Dougherty Qwo-Li Driskill Kevin Ducey Michelle M. Ducharme Denise Duhamel Camille Dungy Lan Duong Melanie Dusseau Stuart Dybek Cornelius Eady Hope Edelman Bethany Edstrom Quentin Eichbaum Barbara Eidlin Nancy Eimers Susan Elbe Eden Elieff Alfred Encarnacion Anita Endrezze Angie Estes Phebus Etienne Kathy Fagan Blas Falconer José Luis Falconí Karen Falkenstrom Siobhan Fallon Robin Farabaugh Patricia Fargnoli James T. Farrell Sascha Feinstein Beth Ann Fennelly Melanie Figg Annie Finch Susan Firer Diane Gilliam Fisher Eileen FitzGerald Mo Fleming Terri Fletcher Cherryl Floyd-Miller Calvin Forbes Charles Fort Robert Elliot Fox Ryan Fox Vievee Francis Jeffrey Franklin

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Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Steven Frattali Melissa Frederick Yahya Frederickson Judith Freeman Jeff Friedman Pete Fromm Allison Funk Teresa R. Funke Joshua Furst Juan Carlos Galeano Brendan Galvin Eric Gamalinda Sergey Gandlevsky Cristina Garcia Richard Garcia Julie Gard Geoffrey Gardner Nola Garrett Ana Garza Amina Lolita Gautier Cameron K. Gearen Margaret Gibson Christopher Gilbert James Gill Mary Jo Firth Gillett Nikki Giovanni Elton Glaser Lisa Glatt J. Eugene Gloria Valentina Gnup Albert Goldbarth Beckian Fritz Goldberg Lea Goldberg Yonason Goldson Naama Goldstein Sarah Hannah Goldstein Karen B. Golightly Iris Gomez Kevin A. González Ray González Rigoberto González Vince Gotera Rae Gouirand Michael Graber Andrew Grace Philip Graham

Matthew Graham Stephen Gray Jeffrey Greene Jeff Greer Linda Gregg Eamon Grennan Brett Griffiths Susan Grimm Kelle Groom Anthony Grooms Jennifer Grotz James Grove Robert Grunst Matt Guenette Bruce Guernsey Teline Guerra Carol Guess Paul Guest Sapna Gupta James Gurley Cindy Williams Gutiérrez Lee Gutkind John Guzlowski Marilyn Hacker Rachel Hadas Dilara Hafiz Joey Hale Rachel Hall Mark Halliday Forrest Hamer Jeffrey Hammond Nathalie Handal Twyla Hansen Kerry Hardie Jeff Hardin James Harms Duriel E. Harris Kent Haruf Elizabeth Harvell Yona Harvey Sharon Hashimoto David Hassler James Haug Dolores Hayden Aidan Hayes Terrance Hayes

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Ava Leavell Haymon Douglas Haynes Seamus Heaney M. Ayodele Heath Michael Heffernan Linda Lizut Helstern Donna Hemans Christopher Hennessy Julie Hensley Mimi Herman Daisy Hernández David Hernandez Leticia Hernández-Linares Karen Heuler William Heyen Kate Lynn Hibbard James Himelsbach Dennis Hinrichsen Edward Hirsch Ho Anh Thai James Hoch Elizabeth S. Hogan Diane Holland Jason Holland Anna Maria Hong Kevin Honold Jane Hoogestraat Matthew Howard Stephen S. Howie Jennifer Hubbard Andrew Hudgins Ann Hudson Gerry Hull Maria M. Hummel Ellen Hunnicutt Sandy Huss Doris Iarovici Holly Iglesias Luisa Igloria Syed Manzoorul Islam Ryan Iwanaga Annemarie Kattan Jacir Major Jackson Richard Jackson Gray Jacobik Mark Jacobs

Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Robin Leslie Jacobson Roy Jacobstein Anton P. Janulis Mark Jarman Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Lesley Jenike Rose Jenkins Ha Jin Antonio Jocson Don Johnson Jacqueline Johnson Jennifer Johnson Laura Johnson Nicole Johnson Alice Jones Ann T. Jones Patricia Spears Jones Tayari Jones A. Van Jordan Melanie Jordan Fady Joudah Judy Juanita Kasey Jueds Felix Jung Ayesha Kabir Margaret Kahn Adrianne Kalfopoulou Suzanne Kamata Veronika Kapustina Holly Karapetkova Wayne Karlin Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis Joy Katz Anne Keefe Chris Kelsey Dolores Kendrick Sarah Kennedy Bakhit Kenzheev Vicky Kepple Jesse Lee Kercheval Kathryn Kerr Sharon Kessler Irmgard Keun Vandana Khanna Sung Min Kim Yeungkwan Kim

Thomas Kinsella Terry Kirts Steve Kistulentz Jerry Klinkowitz William Kloefkorn Elizabeth Knapp Trevor West Knapp Ruth Ellen Kocher Sandra Kohler Yusef Komunyakaa Takamura Kōtarō Karen Kovacik Teresa Joy Kramer Mark Kraushaar Leonard Kress Anya Krugovoy Amy Kucharik Lynne Kuderko Aviya Kushner Melissa Kwasny Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong Gerry LaFemina Andrew Lam Jacqueline Jones LaMon Deborah Landau Steve Langan Quraysh Ali Lansana Jeanne Larsen Richard Lawson Anna Leahy Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Ed Bok Lee Gareth Lee Karen An-Hwei Lee Larry Lee Li-Young Lee Soo Young Lee Joseph O. Legaspi Amy Lemmon Stephanie Lenox Barbara Leon Nan Leslie Shara Lessley Brian Leung Jeffrey Levine Lisa Lewis

James Liddy Ada Limón Alice Lin Joan Lindgren Moira Linehan Amy Lingafelter Enrique Lihn Elline Lipkin Julia Lisella Timothy Liu David Lloyd Fern Logan Joel Long Sandy Longhorn Dawn Lonsinger Jeffrey Loo Liliana Loofbourow Lorraine M. López Beth Lordan James Lott Rebecca Loudon Bob Lucky Raymond Luczak Susan Ludvigson Charles H. Lynch Catherine Phil MacCarthy Linda Maceri Margaret MacInnis Ginny MacKenzie Patrick Madden Marjorie Maddox Edna Madera Rick Madigan Michael David Madonick Kelly Magee Al Maginnes Alana Merritt Mahaffey Gregory Mahrer Makuchi Mike Maniquiz Shahé Mankerian Jeff Mann Linda Mannheim Peter Marcus Debra Marquart

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Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Tim Marsh Lee Martin Melanie Martin Dionisio D. Martínez Michael Martone Frank Matagrano Adrian Matejka Khaled Mattawa William Matthews Sharon May Wendell Mayo Cris Mazza Janet McAdams Nancy McCabe Shara McCallum Holloway McCandless Shaun McCarthy Rebecca McClanahan Jeffrey McDaniel Terry Mc Donagh Judy Smith McDonough Colleen J. McElroy Ron McFarland Thomas McGonigle Michael McGregor Shannon Marquez McGuire Heather McHugh James McKean Kevin McKelvey Maria McLeod Lynne McMahon John McNally Gwyn McVay Kat Meads Michael Mee Anna Meek Erika Meitner Lydia Melvin Orlando Ricardo Menes Philip Metres Elisabeth Meyer Joseph Millar Áine Miller E. Ethelbert Miller Heather Ross Miller

Leslie Adrienne Miller John Minczeski Edward Minus Gabriela Mistral Ian Mitchell Anna Mitcov Sonya Chung Miyamura Eduardo Moncada Missy-Marie Montgomery Ingrid Moody Jonathan Moody David Moolten Carolyn Moore Lenard D. Moore Michele Morano Nancy Morejón Deborah Moreno John Morgan Kyoko Mori Donald Morrill Mihaela Moscaliuc John Moss Thylias Moss Marc Moxon Simone Muench Vijayā Mukhopādhyāy Mari Muki Maureen Mulhern David Mura Kristin Naca Mariko Nagai Arlene Naganawa Adela Najarro Paula Nangle Taslima Nasrin Marie Nasta Jen Neely Marilyn Nelson Susan Neville Richard Newman Lee Newton Aimee Nezhukumatathil Nguyen Quang Thieu Alejandro Nicotra Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill James Nolan

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Miho Nonaka Lalita Noronha William Notter Debra Nystrom Gina Ochsner Mary O’Donnell Dennis O’Driscoll Thomas B. O’Grady Soo Jin Oh Terry Olsen William Olsen Sharon Olson Thomas O’Malley Micheal O’Siadhail James P. Othmer Tanja Pajevic Aimee Parkison Chad Parmenter Tim Parrish Ricardo Pau-Llosa Ed Pavlić Nikól Payen Gloria Paz Candace Pearson Benjamin Percy Brenda Leticia Juárez Pérez Emmy Pérez Mike Perez Lucia Perillo John Peters Melissa Peters Richard Peterson Julia M. Petitfrere Audrey Petty Chris Pexa Carl Phillips Marilene Phipps Mary Pinard Jon Pineda Sara Pipher Matthew Pitt Donald Platt Delia M. Poey Elizabeth Poliner Katherine Poltorak

Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Pamela Porter Susan Azar Porterfield Rohan Preston Christina Pugh Mike Puican Mary Quade Leroy V. Quintana Lawrence Raab Emily Raabe Jennifer Rahim Joanna Smith Rakoff Anand Ranthidevan Sunīl B. Rāy Sally Read Cynthia Reeves Meredith Reiches Nicole Louise Reid Thomas Reiter Paisley Rekdal Otto Rene Christine Rhein Kathryn Rhett Susan Rich Jennifer Richter Jack Ridl Katherine Riegel Sara Quinn Rivara Roxana Rivera Carrie Lea Robb Helen Robertson Lee Robinson Juliet Rodeman Paulette Roeske Pattiann Rogers Bill Roorbach Lee Ann Roripaugh Clare Rossini Cynthia Roth Susanna Roxman Jeffrey Rubin Mark Rudman Gianna Russo Peter Rutkoff Vern Rutsala Jaime Sabines Diana Sabot

Ira Sadoff B. A. St. Andrews Sheryl St. Germain Natasha Sajé Nicholas Samaras Jorge Sánchez A. Sandosharaj Kaitano Sarah Jane Satterfield Mandy Sayer Maxine Scates Margot Schilpp Geoff Schmidt Nicola Schmidt Meg Schoerke E. M. Schorb Steven Schreiner Jason Daniel Schwartz Ruth L. Schwartz Greg Schwipps Andrea Scott Mark Scott J. D. Scrimgeour Maureen Seaton Tim Seibles Rebecca Seiferle Sean Serrell Patty Seyburn Jan Selving Paula Sergi Amar Gaurav Shah Purvi Shah Angela Shannon Kavita Sharma Reneé H. Shea Deema K. Shehabi Denise Shekerjian Neil Shepard Reginald Shepherd Cherene Sherrard Leslie Shiel Nancy Shih-Knodel Margaret Shipley Evie Shockley Betsy Sholl Enid Shomer

Peggy Shumaker Paula Redes Sidore Barry Silesky Taije Silverman Diane Simmons Beth Simon John Oliver Simon Maurya Simon Kabita Sinha Susan Sink Alberta Skaggs Jason Skipper Louie Skipper Floyd Skloot Ellen Slezak Arthur Smith Jonathan C. Smith Maggie Smith R. T. Smith Bill Smoot Bruce Snider Adam Sol Sharon Solwitz Indigo Som Cathy Song Gary Soto Lilvia Soto Renee Soto Cassie Sparkman Diana Spechler Carol Spindel Maura Stanton Vanessa Stauffer Liz Stefaniak Kevin Stein Melissa Stein Mary Stepp Susan Sterling Alison Stine Myrna Stone Blanca Strepponi Adrienne Su Virgil Suárez Ira Sukrungruang Jules Supervielle Patrick Sylvain

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Contributors and Cover Artists 1995 – 2005 Margaret C. Szumowski Eileen Tabios Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie James Tate Betsy Taylor Judith Taylor Lois Taylor Brian Teare Susan Tekulve Jorge Tellier Molly Tenenbaum Elaine Terranova Richard Terrill Maria Terrone Amber Flora Thomas Susan Thomas Jean Thompson Lynne Thompson Samantha Thornhill Judith Thurley Bradford Tice Elizabeth Solares Tinuar Daniel Tobin J. C. Todd Pappi Tomas Jennifer Tonge Rafael Torch Angela Narciso Torres J. L. Torres Alison Townsend Ann Townsend Barbara Tran William Trowbridge Lori Tsang Beverly Tsao Jennifer Tseng S. Brady Tucker Brian Turner Chase Twichell Alison Umminger Amy Uyematsu Ivón Gordon Vailakis Antonio Vallone Ryan G. Van Cleave Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon Alexandra van de Kamp

Mark Vannier Reetika Vazirani Martha Modena Vertreace Heather Villars Paulina Vinderman Latha Viswanathan Judith Vollmer Fred Von Drasek Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck Sophie Wadsworth Gale Renée Walden Davi Walders Eamonn Wall John Wallace Ronald Wallace Bryan Walpert José Watanabe Chris Waters Mary Yukari Waters Maureen Waters Michael Waters Miles Garett Watson Carole Boston Weatherford Gordon Weaver Charles Harper Webb J.E. Wei Shao Wei J. Weintraub Stefi Weisburd Braden Welborn Renee Wells Gabriel Welsch Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Timothy Westmoreland Elizabeth Wetmore Tony Whedon Lesley Wheeler Kelly Whiddon Katharine Whitcomb Gary J. Whitehead Vagner Whitehead Carolyn Beard Whitlow Dara Wier Regina Wilkins

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Crystal Williams Eran Williams Jenni Williams Lisa Williams Lynna Williams Greg Williamson Eleanor Wilner Danny Wilson Terence Winch Tina Wiseman S.L. Wisenberg Terri Witek Geoffrey D. Witham David Wojahn Terry Wolverton Baron Wormser Carolyne Wright Robert Wrigley Carson H. Wu Charles Wyatt Lyndane Yang Bro. Yao Melinda Yeomans Trina Kyounghui Yi Jake Adam York Kyoko Yoshida Chryss Yost Kevin Young Saadi Youssef Masha Zager Matt Zambito Jeanne-Marie Zeck Zhang Er Clarisse Zimra Agica Zivaljevic

Announcements Due to the length of this special issue, the book reviews planned for this issue will appear in our next general issue, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2006.

Crab Orchard Review will begin indexing our previous volume year in the first issue of the next volume year. The index of works published in Volume 10, Numbers 1 & 2 will appear in Volume 11, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2006.

Crab Orchard Review publishes a Winter/Spring general issue and a Summer/Fall special issue each year.

Please check the Crab Orchard Review website’s “General Guidelines for Submissions” for more information:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/guid2.html> For writers interested in submitting work in 2005/2006: Crab Orchard Review will continue reading for our 2006 Summer/Fall special issue, “Defining Family,” until the end of November 2005. We will not begin reading for our next general issue until February 2006, and we will not begin accepting work for that issue until after the submission period closes at the end of April 2006. Thank you.

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry 2005 OPEN COMPETITION AWARDS Announcement Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2005 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition selections.

Our final judge, Leslie Adrienne Miller, selected David Hernandez’s Always Danger as the first-prize winner. Ms. Miller selected Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s Roam as the second-prize winner. Both collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in March 2006.

We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts in our Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

Crab Orchard Review’s website has updated information on subscriptions, calls for submissions, contest information and results, and past, current and future issues. Visit us at:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/>.